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She turned away, her eyes stinging. “And if you’re just going to raise our daughter, when she’s with you, as if there’s nothing in her way—”
“Why wouldn’t I? Why wouldn’t I tell her she can do anything she wants? Why do you people have to keep acting like there are insurmountable obstacles? How does that make you feel anything good at all?”
She groaned. “You don’t get it.”
“You know what I think?” he said. “I think you just want an excuse. I think you just want to tell yourself that there’s some reason why you didn’t get whatever it is you wanted. You don’t want to blame yourself.”
She lifted her chin. “That’s what you think of me?”
“Not you personally, but people like you.”
She laughed softly. “What if I had cancer, and I was dying? Would you say to me, ‘This is your own fault, that you have cancer.’”
“Well, how did you get the cancer?”
“For fuck’s sake,” she groaned.
“I’m just saying, if you smoked cigarettes for ten years or something—”
“I was in a car accident and I lost my leg,” she said. “Is that my fault?”
“No?” he said, furrowing his brow.
“So, there are some things that are not your own fault, some things that are outside of us, sometimes we reallyarevictims.” She was sarcastic.
“Look, so maybe you don’t have a leg,” he said. “You could look at yourself like a victim, or you could—”
“The patriarchy is real,” she said.
“I actually agree with you,” he said. “I mean, you pointed it out to me, and there are a lot of things where men of certain species who have certain advantages get ahead when other sorts of men—”
“But all men,allmen, have it easier than women,” she said. “And you won’t admit that. Why?”
“BecauseIhave not had it easy,” he said with a little laugh. “And if you think… I know for afactthere are women with an easier life than me.”
She sank back into her couch. She could not even think of anything to say to him. She yawned again.
“And look, I think there are roles,” he said. “And maybe traditionally, it made more sense to divide them along gender lines, but now, we don’t have to do that, so if you want me to do some of the female roles of things, like cooking and laundry and shit—”
“Those are not female roles!”
“Well, I just mean—”
“And they’re definitely not natural. It’s not like, in the hunter and gatherer societies of our ancestors, there were washing machines.”
“You don’t think women washed the clothes back then?”
“If so,” she said, “then women have been doingall the worksince the dawn of time.”
“Well, men had to hunt—”
“Here it is,” she said. “Men have to kill the spiders. Men had to hunt. Men like glory and they like big, splashy dangerous jobs that involve killing things, and meanwhile, women are over here, doing all the unglamorous things and men are taking advantage of us.”
“You have a huge chip on your shoulder,” he said. “Maybe your ex-husband—”
“How many times do I have to explain that he was a feminist?” She got off the couch. “This is not a personal vendetta for me, okay? This is aboutsociety.”
“So, you admit that you haven’t experienced all this awful disadvantaged stuff,” he said. “Or that men can be good sometimes.”
