let it suffice to say that if the writer was my son, I would disown him and then beat myself up wondering how I failed so badly raising him. He comes across as nothing more than a sniveling, whiny bitch. No one I know engages in unnecessary manual labor or any other form of physical activity out of some pathetic sense that this is required to make them masculine. No one I know prefaces discussing a serious problem with a close male friend by acknowledging that others have much worse problems than whatever they are about to reveal. I have personally been robbed at gunpoint by three scrawny teenage crackheads with a sawed off shotgun. At no time have I ever wondered "what did I think I was going to do to these poor, drug-addled latchkey children anyway." If I had been able to disarm them I would have happily beat the shit out of all three of them without a second thought.

I recently read a novel in which the protagonist was a woman of the Tonawanda branch of the New York State Seneca tribe. It was a good book, well written and suspenseful, but also full of interesting info about the Seneca culture and history. Something I learned - the most powerful and important person in each of the eight clans that comprised the tribe was not the chief. It was the clan mother. The eight clan mothers owned the longhouses where each clan lived and all the land it was on and surrounding it. She picked the chief and she could remove him. When the tribe went to war and returned with captives, it was the clan mothers who decided their fate - would they become part of the tribe to replace those lost in battle or be executed in reprisal for those lost? The clan mothers made that choice. Interestingly enough however, in this obviously matriarchal society, the men were the hunters and warriors while the women stayed home at the longhouse and raised the children and tended the vegetables. The point? In their wisdom they realized that, in general, certain tasks are performed better by one sex than the other. And no doubt, none of the women thought the men took up too much space and none of the men clumsily practiced swinging a war club in hope it would make him more manly.