"Patients who disagree with their doctor can be 'fired' or flagged with scarlet letters in the corners of their electronic medical charts."

"'Exaggerating.' 'Resistant.' 'Noncompliant.' 'Hysterical.' To be sure, there are problematic patients, even dangerous ones. But for the rest of us, the imbalance between our defenselessness and the doctor’s discretion can create an unhelpful dynamic, one that pushes us to stop advocating and start accommodating. The result is waiting rooms full of people pleasers and providers who never get the full picture. The pressure to be pleasant and pliant is especially strong for women. Just as 'bossy' women often don’t get promotions and 'uppity' women are more likely to be sexually harassed, women who are branded as difficult patients are at risk of not being taken seriously or losing access to care. This is one of the reasons women overapologize, even for their own pain. A simple disclaimer — 'I don’t mean to be difficult, but …' — can backfire as well...."

Writes Allison Sweet Grant, author of "Lump: A Memoir in Ineloquent Reflections," "This Is Why Women Are Scared to Tell Their Doctors the Truth" (NYT gift link).

A mere 30 years ago, this was a highlighted modern problem on "Seinfeld" (Season 8, Episode 5, "The Package"):

 

(Yes, I know this is my second "Seinfeld" post this morning. It was in looking for this Elaine-at-the-doctor material that I stumbled into the unfilmed episode stuff I blogged an hour ago, here.)

"In the 1800s, a secretary was part aide-de-camp, part executive-in-training — someone who handled the boss’s correspondence and bookkeeping, but also learned the business..."

"... and would eventually ascend to a senior job. With the rise of the modern corporation around the turn of the 20th century, however, the secretary became more like a noncommissioned officer — a worker with real responsibility but little upward mobility. It was at this point that the position became mostly female. Companies then broke up and degraded the job further over the decades, replacing the secretary with pools of typists, receptionists and data entry personnel, almost all of them women, too. The final step, amid pressure from the feminist movement in the 1970s, was to allow a small number of college-educated women to ascend from these clerical jobs to the ranks of middle management. But even this came with a loss of status, as managers would have to do more of their own grunt work. 'They’re now being promoted, but the clerical tasks are promoted with them,' said Jason Resnikoff, a labor historian. 'The middle manager would do more typing, correspondence, more of their own filing.' These days, almost no one has an assistant...."

From "In Trump’s Economy, Job Gains Go to Women. That’s Not an Entirely Good Thing. Despite the administration’s best attempts, the diminishing status of many American jobs is driving a spike in women’s employment" (NYT gift link).

"When we did... the Laestrygonians… there were these stuntmen who were all 7 feet and then they got stunt men who were under 5 feet. My double was a woman...."

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Devyn Dalton, the stunt double, is 4'6". Damon is said to be 5'10".

Equality? Ridiculous!

There's no way in the world that 7 of the top 14 novels here were written by women.

In fact, there's only one really great novel written by a woman in the past 200 years and that's Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchel.

I'd rate it as the greatest American novel of all time. https://t.co/6OJWFjTDk9

— Ted Joy (@TedJoy71) May 16, 2026

Here's the Guardian's explanation, "Who’s in, who’s out, and how many have you read? The story behind our 100 best novels list":

"And it is a vicious cycle: the more women and non-binary people do the overwhelming majority of resistance work..."

"... the more men take in the wrong-headed message that this work is not for them...."

Writes Saul Austerlitz, author of "How to Assemble an Activist," in "How do we get more men to join the anti-Trump resistance? My activist group is about 80% women. Where did all the men go – and how can we get them back?" (Guardian).

My first thought was: Don't push the "and non-binary people" talk. But anyway isn't it funny that you're so vitally interested in the male/female split and simultaneously hot to insert "and non-binary people"? 

"My unscientific conclusion is that the men who have already drifted away, whatever their reasons, are unlikely to come back. Instead, now is an ideal time to extend an invitation to the men in our circles who hover on the edges, shouting fruitlessly at their TV screen or social-media feed, not knowing yet how much good they can do – or how much better they will feel

"I’d never questioned my gender before I came to America; growing up in India, I’d always identified as a girl."

"Of course, India has a gender hegemony of its own — one I arguably benefitted from in many ways and suffered from in others. I am upper-caste, upper-class, Hindu, and also a Tamil woman who didn’t look like the models in the Fair & Lovely commercials. I was the only Tamilian in most rooms I was in, a fact my North Indian classmates consistently reminded me of. Still, the popular conception of what a woman or a man was felt more fluid. I grew up among Sikh women who didn’t tame their body hair, men who would hold hands platonically with their male friends, and children who cross-dressed for play (almost every boy had a photo of himself dressed up as a girl by his mother for fun).... [And there] is our third-gender community, or hijras, as they are commonly known...."

Writes Supriya Ganesh,  "My Strange Dysphoria/Growing up in India, I never questioned my gender. When I moved to the U.S. at 18, I began to feel disconnected from my body" (New York Magazine).

"There’s always two poles in any movement. There’s this pull toward being post-human, shinier, newer, cloned, etc., the sense that people have elevated the lacquered surface of the machine over the body."

"[And there's this pull toward] I’m real. I think we’re like old stone houses. We have the value of antiquity. If you haven’t tweaked yourself, it’s like you have a working fireplace that’s been going since 1680. We’re authentic.... For all women, there’s that line between choosing to be malleable and pleasing and to conform with the collective norms or refusing it.... No, I’m not playing that game."

Said the 77-year-old French Vogue editor Joan Juliet Buck, quoted in "Why Fashion Suddenly Loves Older Women/Representation of women of a certain age has never been higher. What’s going on?" (NYT).

The article is by Vanessa Friedman, who continues: "Authenticity is, of course, one of the current buzzwords not just in fashion, but in culture generally. It’s a reflection of the fear that individual style has been lost to the algorithm.... It’s not just influencers and celebrities who have become the vehicles for this version of ageless sameness. It’s political figures, too.... As many MAGA women have embraced the plumped and smoothed 'Mar-a-Lago face,' it has become an expression of a larger social swing toward exaggerated norms and old-fashioned patriarchal gender roles rather than simply a cosmetic fad."

"I can’t think of one person in a relationship that I would want for myself. I’ve done it before and prefer focusing on me and my own needs."

Says a 33-year-old Toronto woman, quoted at the beginning of a NYT article called "Why Marriage, for So Many, Is Less Appealing Than Ever/From Gen Z to Gen X, a pause in the march to the altar, or a decision to skip it altogether, is becoming more common."

There's also this from Shani Silver, 43, host of "A Single Serving Podcast": "[A]s millennials, we got to the age where we were promised all these things would happen, and they never did.... [We] worked on ourselves throughout our lives to become the desirable partners we were told to become... But the men didn’t rise along with us. They’ve stagnated. There are imbalances in domestic labor responsibilities, emotional labor responsibilities, in running a household... If you marry a man you’re settling for, I don’t see a lot of relationship longevity."

Hegseth succeeds in pressuring Scouting America — AKA the Boy Scouts of America — to rid itself of DEI.

"No more DEI. Zero."

The Department of War has officially put Scouting America on notice.

It’s time to get back to basics — and DoW is leading the charge. pic.twitter.com/EnY9mvaFLX

— Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) February 27, 2026

 

From the Department of War:

"Perhaps you’ve noticed.... Amid all the cars that are parked headfirst, a seemingly increasing number have instead been backed in."

"These dissenters face out, like getaway drivers in a bank robbery ready to make a clean escape. Some people, myself included, find the move annoying. William Van Tassel, the manager of driver training programs for AAA... said that perhaps it was because they were following AAA’s updated guidelines.... My own theory is that reversing into a space is a response to the ambient anxiety in our society, akin to privately noting the exits in a movie theater. In a nation of rampant gun violence, backing in so you can quickly get out provides a sense of security.... [Van Tassel] cited a 2020 study from the journal Transportation Research that found, among other things, that the pull-in, back-out maneuver had a higher crash risk. Since pedestrians are most likely to be found walking in the major lanes, not in a parking space, it’s safer to back into the area with fewer people.... But I can’t bring myself to join in, and I don’t fully accept the safety argument. Since 2018, new vehicles sold in the United States have been federally mandated to have backup cameras, which can assist in reversing out of a spot without plowing into someone...."

I'm reading "Do You Back Into a Parking Spot or Back Out? An exploration of what’s driving a change in America’s parking lots" (NYT).

Those who do back up — is it for safety? Do other people believe it's for safety? As the male author of the NYT article says: "My wife suspects they’re mostly men showing off." Ha ha. That's what I think too. And by the way, I've always been quick to suspect that people are just showing off. I was much worse about that when I was much younger. I can honestly say that when NASA put a man on the moon in 1969, I thought they were showing off. I looked away! The moon landing was a very big thing; backing into a parking space is a very little thing. In things big and small, I am ready to disrespect the achievement as a matter of showing off. A lateral thinker will therefore ask: What's bad about showing off? Where would we be without it?

"Watch out, girl dinners, the boys have found their own culinary niche, and it’s like dog food but worse."

"While the lady chow of internet fame consists of no-cook, low-effort meals (cheese, biscuits etc), TikTok has now revealed what men eat when on a diet: boy kibble. While I hate to ruin Brooklyn Beckham’s next cooking video, to make boy kibble you need an unseasoned batch of ground beef and very little else."

From "Men may call it a ‘protein-rich bowl’. I call it boy kibble/Meaty snacks are trending online for blokes. Please no, says Eilidh Dorgan" (London Times).

Here's the kind of thing she's talking about:

"A shooter described as a 'female in a dress' killed nine people in a remote part of Canada on Tuesday."

"Seven people died after being shot at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in British Columbia, while two more people were found dead at a nearby home. Another 27 people were hurt.... An alert was issued about an active shooter at the school.... The suspect was described in the alert as a 'female in a dress.' The local police superintendent later described the suspect as a 'gunperson' in a press briefing, without giving further details about their identity.... 'An individual believed to be the shooter was also found deceased with what appears to be a self-inflicted injury'.... Supt Ken Floyd, of the RCMP, later confirmed to reporters that the description of the subject in the police alert was accurate and that they had identified the suspect...."

From "'Female in dress' kills nine in school shooting/Suspect in Canada’s worst school massacre for 30 years described as 'gunperson'" (The Telegraph).

I'm seeing some commentary about the seeming oddity of saying "female in a dress" and "gunperson." Why not say "woman"? "Female in a dress" was the language of the alert, and it looks like typical police talk to say "male" or "female" instead of "man" or "woman." And police reports tend to have very brief factual statement about the suspect's clothing. That's enough to get you to "female in a dress." What about "gunperson"? Why not "gunwoman"? Who says "gunwoman"? It just doesn't feel colloquial. So let's not be too quick to put this terrible murder into the conventional mockery of wokesters who can't define "woman."

I'm not saying "gunwoman" isn't a word. It's in the OED. And here it is in a New York Times headline from 1923:

"There is an easy familiarity between the two men that allows Bannon to call Epstein a 'schmuck' and 'criminal' and even ask if he is 'the devil' fallen from paradise."

"At one point, Bannon comments: 'There’s something deeply fucked up with you.' The interview also becomes an exercise in intellectual peacocking as they invoke Socrates, Isaac Newton and quantum physics but pay little attention to Epstein’s crimes. Epstein reveals himself to be a living museum of racial prejudice...."

From "'Do you think you’re the devil himself?': highlights from the bizarre, newly released Bannon-Epstein interview/The interview,⁠ revealed in the latest tranche of Epstein files, was reportedly intended for a sympathetic documentary" (The Guardian).

Sample clip, with Epstein posing as thoughtful on the topic of gender difference:

Transcript:

Science doesn't describe romance. I don't know why I'm attracted to somebody. I don't know. People are attracted to each other, and everyone has felt the same thing at some point. They've seen someone walk into a room and thought, "Oh, that person gives me a creepy feeling."

He knows, I infer, that the females he is finding attractive are experiencing him as creepy.

"My 11-year-old nephew is a vivacious reader...."

So begins the first comment I see when I open up the comments section at "Why Boys Are Behind in Reading at Every Age/Boys’ reading struggles are not inevitable, research suggests, and addressing the deficit could improve outcomes in school and beyond" (NYT).

The commenter is female or so I surmise from the name Hannah. The malapropism — "vivacious" for "voracious" — amused me. I guess she got overly enthused that her boy — despite the burden of being a boy — was reading, really reading, reading a lot. It's hard to picture reading being done vivaciously, but I enjoyed trying. And "voracious reading" is trite. We ought to stop saying it. I'm tired of the eating metaphor for reading, and it's not as though I can picture people eating books. Vivacious reading is at least something new. 

And please don't try to tell me that "vivacious reader" isn't wrong because Ken Follett is quoted (somewhere) saying "Without books I would not have become a vivacious reader, and if you are not a reader you are not a writer." Follett originally used the old trite expression "voracious reader" and somebody else screwed up copying the quote. 

But let's read the article! Excerpt:

"I’ve been saying for a while that the gender-neutral 'they/them' was going to become even more widespread. As a linguist..."

"... who studies the ways language changes, I noted the rise in people resisting the gender binary and got caught up in — and perhaps even biased toward — what I processed as a pronominal revolution. But surveys show that the number of young people identifying as nonbinary has decreased considerably over the past two years. Binary genders are on the rise again, and therefore so are the pronouns most closely associated with them...."

Writes John McWhorter, designating "He and she" as item #7 of the "Words and Phrases" list in his section of "The Year in Lists."

And that happens to be my last gift link of the year from The New York Times, so enjoy reading all the items on all the lists.

Jennifer Weiner has "9 Retrograde Moments for Women." I guess there were only 9, because if you'd had a 10th, wouldn't you go for the cliché of a 10 item list? And yet Weiner made a single item out of Erika Kirk and Usha Vance. Was it "retrograde" to put them together? Yes, but it wasn't Weiner's doing. Some people on the internet did it: they talked about JD Vance divorcing Usha and marrying Erika Kirk. Was that important enough to repeat? Weiner only purports to give us "moments"....

"Looking out on a pool of less marriageable men, young women are turning their backs on the institution, bolstered by cultural messaging..."

"... from academia to Hollywood that remains critical of more conservative lifestyles. While the country rightfully spent recent decades boosting the educational and economic prospects of women, it deindustrialized, axing and outsourcing jobs in heavily male industries, and leaving men and women increasingly out of step with one another. Efforts to make the workforce and education system more friendly for girls have led to emphasizing literacy and verbal skills, a hemorrhaging of male teachers, and the decline of shop classes and vocational programs.... The trend line of women reporting a declining desire to marry may indeed reflect pessimism about their prospects rather than the institution itself — and not for ideological reasons so much as practical ones...."

Writes Emily Jashinsky, in "A marriage gap is growing — and it could spell disaster/The 'war on boys' could be resulting in some women shunning marriage" (WaPo).

Jashinsky, as a 7-year-old girl, was one of the kids portrayed in the Christina Hoff Sommers book “The War Against Boys,” which came out in 2000, and she also worked as an intern on the re-release of the book in 2012.

It seems that both men and women regard the members of the opposite sex as unworthy of marriage. 

"In 1969, at the age of 38, just as she was gaining attention for her brawny, abstract paintings, she abandoned the form and initiated her 'General Strike Piece'..."

"... which involved a gradual withdrawal over a period of several months from the art world’s openings and social events, the first step in a long process of distancing herself from her peers.... In August 1971... she undertook another, even more audacious project, 'Decide to Boycott Women,' stating her intention to stop speaking to other women. In her notes on the piece, she suggested it would be temporary.... But it ended up being a practice she continued throughout the rest of her life, mostly, though not entirely, avoiding women (even allegedly once refusing to be helped by a female clerk at a grocery store). The blunt hostility of this piece struck many of her friends and, later, art critics and historians as an act of self-destruction.... 'Lee was very moody, drinking a lot of cheap wine and smoking lots of dope. I was raising my young son and had to ask her to leave after a few days. I remember thinking that she was a kind of warning about what could happen if you mixed art and life too closely.'... A picture of her last decades emerges only in shards and anecdotes. For several years she lived with her parents, until her father filed a restraining order and she was forced to move into her own apartment in the same complex.... She’s like a character in a Kafka story, or Melville’s Bartleby, but funnier, more perverted, more playful and an invention not of another writer’s mind but of her own...."

I'm reading "She Didn’t Speak to Other Women for 28 Years. What Did It Cost Her?/ When it came to using her life in her work, the artist Lee Lozano went about as far as a person can go" (NYT).

Back in the 1970s, one would often read about things like this. I'd thought the culture had lost interest in this sort of thing. I wonder what prompted the revival of interest — wanting to forefront a woman artist? But this woman made a lifelong project out of boycotting women. Are we supposed to believe she sacrificed something she wanted to be able to do?

Here's the comment NYT readers rate highest: "Refusing to speak to other woman is sexist and borderline sociopathic. It is most definitely not art, it's merely an eccentric and fairly selfish personality trait...." That's consistent with my observation that the culture has moved away from seeing weird acting out as art. It's a mental disorder... unless it has the honor of counting as an expression of "identity."

Best bad headline from the Hegsethathon.

The award goes to The New Republic: "Hegseth Summoned Military Leaders to Say 'FAFO' in Disturbing Speech."

I think it's ludicrous for a journalistic article to call it a "disturbing speech."  Who is disturbed? The headline writer? Were the military leaders disturbed? All of them? Some of them? Don't create fake objectivity. Someone needs to have been disturbed. I want to know who and why.

From the article:

“To our enemies: FAFO,” Hegseth said, using an acronym that translates to “Fuck around and find out.”

Hegseth ordered hundreds of U.S. military officials around the globe to meet him at a spontaneous assembly in Virginia.... The message shocked members of the U.S. military, who could not recall another instance in which a defense secretary summoned so many commanders for a sudden in-person meeting—especially without a clear rationale.

Was it a "disturbing speech" because of what Hegseth said or was a "disturbing speech" because it was disturbing to have to travel and sit in the audience to hear?

"After all, if your employer allowed you to wear open-toe shoes, it would have to allow everyone to wear open-toe shoes, and when it comes to toes, our ideas of what is acceptable tend to vary according to gender."

"'Culturally we’re more accepting of women showing a bit of skin, whether cleavage on top or at the toes,' [said Susan Scafidi, the founder of the Fashion Law Institute at Fordham University]. 'And "mandals" have never read as business attire in the U.S.' Put another way: Your peep-toe pumps may be a casualty of his fisherman sandal."

I'm reading "What Is a ‘Work-Appropriate’ Shoe? Workplace dress codes can be frustratingly vague. Our critic has some guidance on navigating different interpretations and on picking your footwear" (NYT).

Is that really the law? Can't you require men to wear jackets and ties without requiring women to wear jackets and ties? 

I am reminded of my post from August 2010, "Can lady lawyers wear peep-toe shoes?" 

"One of the reasons women are generally more reluctant to use new technologies is that they’ve been socially conditioned to be more risk-averse...."

"[N]ew technology invariably involves risks: What happens if it doesn’t work and ruins a project? What happens if I use it and am then accused of cheating or being dishonest? Women may not consciously be thinking about these scenarios, but centuries of double standards and glass ceilings mean that we’ve grown accustomed to playing it safe. The only real way forward is to ensure that using AI does not feel like taking a risk. It has to feel like an unremarkable way of working: not unnerving, not intimidating, not sketchy, just necessary and obvious...."

Writes Josie Cox, in "The most radical act of feminism? Using AI/Women are far less likely to use AI tools like ChatGPT than men. But the tech is here to stay — and the disparity risks widening workplace inequalities" (London Times).

If women are risk averse, then the world should be made less risky? Or should women be incited somehow to take more risks? It's just the way we've been "socially conditioned," we're told. It's all those "centuries of double standards and glass ceilings." Can't we just be socially conditioned out of our unfortunate risk aversion? No, we're told the risks need to be removed. I'm skeptical. I think the author really suspects that women are risk averse by nature. Why not come out and say that? Risk aversion?!

ADDED: So I boldly approached AI and asked "If you had to argue that women are risk averse by nature, what would you say?"