Last night my editor called me up to speak about the haka dance video, which is a severely masculine war dance. She said, "Thanks for posting that. I'm going to leave a comment. Seeing something that masculine, from our American perspective helped me realize that we are blended oatmeal. Our gender differences are being erased, and as a woman, I don't think it's a good thing. It got me imagining what it must have been like to be a woman in a warrior society, about how much more grounded such women must have felt. Yet here we are, men trying to be half-assed women and women trying to be half-assed men, with all of our half-assed efforts being measured on only half the human scale—the feminine. I don't want the men in my life measuring themselves against me, but against men. Maybe—with the types of things that your readers are engaged in—we are—some of us—headed back down that two-gender road. I just don't see why it ever made sense to try and join two identical types when it's so much more fulfilling and makes so much more sense to join opposites."

Miss Ezz called me this morning with the first day of welfare insanity report from the largest ghetto grocer in town. The results of our discussion about future looting patterns will go up in Purge?. She then related a funny story about her next door neighbor, who is a masculine female, a fitness instructor who is a mud shark, and rides a full-sized motorcycle. She told me, "This girl comes up to me whining about her experience on I-eighty-three in which she puled over on the shoulder to rest her legs. While she was stretching her bike fell over. Try as she might she could not lift the thing. She was really upset—shocked even, which shocked me, that she was shocked—that no man would pull over and help her lift it. She had to wait there for over an hour, with thousands of motorists passing her, before a police officer helped her."

"She asked me what I thought about that and I said, 'We did it to ourselves, sister. Chivalry is dead because women killed it. Doors are no longer held, help is no longer offered, and it is all our fault, collectively, as women, because we worked so hard to be treated like men and got what we asked for. We are reaping what we have sown. Get used to it. It's going to be harder to get that back than it was to kill it."