Dalma Heyn

He was too busy checking out and checking in, making and breaking plans, buying and losing cell phones, playing computer games and pool, looking at stock quotes, and living the chaotic life that effectively took up all his energy and time.

How else to make a dent in an object as immovable as patriarchy itself...?

[Women's magazines]ignore older women or pretend that they don__ exist; magazines try to avoid photographs of older women, and when they feature celebrities who are over sixty, __etouching artists_ conspire to __elp_ beautiful women look more beautiful, ie less than their age...By now readers have no idea what a real woman__ 60 year old face looks like in print because it__ made to look 45. Worse, 60 year old readers look in the mirror and think they are too old, because they__e comparing themselves to some retouched face smiling back at them from a magazine.

Women have been brought up with the false sense that they have all the options in the world. We don__ understand that the culture really isn__ offering us all of these options _ there still are very strong pressures to conform. We have to step outside the culture to be able to make choices that will really give us what we want. But we lack the psychic mechanisms to do this, to really choose.

For the first time in history, middle-class women do not need men in the traditional ways - for safety, for money, for a life. So they__e demanding instead what they always wanted but couldn__ ask for: emotional connection, presence, intimacy. Sex with enough foreplay, enough seduction, enough closeness to please them. Men are baffled not only because the needs they are being asked to fill differ so from what their fathers and grandfathers understood to be their jobs but also because full-fledged intimacy requires strengths and skills they__e never learned. Moreover_ they__e strengths and skills that were once left solely to women: Men didn__ have to develop them. This maturational mismatch may be contributing to distrust among lovers of all ages.

Married women are far more depressed than married men -- in unhappy marriages, three times more; and -- interestingly -- in happy marriages, five times more. In truth, it is men who are thriving in marriage, now as always, and who show symptoms of psychological and physical distress outside it. Not only their emotional well-being but their very lives, some studies say, depend on being married!