One Recoils, of course, with Indignation and Disgust

from the social construction assigned by women and pussy-men to the masculine character of normal men.  Yet one can appreciate that for themselves the concept seems to work.   They seem in fact to be, as they claim to be, licked into the shapes they wear, by their mothers and the powers they worship.   And perhaps, as they seem about to insist, their amorphous pliancy is as deserving of respect as the normally constituted male's sense of himself-entire.  For the sake of argument, let it be granted.   It might then also be that their mischaracterization of men is less malicious than simply mistaken; less willfully defamatory than merely an attempt to explain the unaccountably and uncannily alien by familiar analogy--in the same way that women's fiction, "clit lit" (if men could but restrain their distaste for it long enough to view it objectively), may be seen to consist in one long, erroneous, but hopeful disquisition on the nature of men.  It may be that the truth, however salutary, cannot be borne:  "Mother, why did Johnny punch me in the stomach?"--"It's because of your Fatal Beauty, my child, etc.," for example, is an answer that soothes and satisfies. While Johnny's explanation, "To keep her from sitting next to me," though brutally factual, exceeds a girl's (and her mother's) capacity to understand; seems in fact, to the female mind, to raise more questions than it answers.