Lord, what fools these mortals be!

But the negative and distorted image of women deeply affects not only how men feel about women, but how men feel about everything that gets labeled ‘feminine’ in themselves. So what it’s expressing is not only contempt for women, but contempt for all things considered feminine. And human qualities, qualities that we all share, that we all need, that we all have the potential to develop, get polarized and labeled ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’. And then the ‘feminine’ is consistently devalued, which causes women to devalue ourselves and each other. And it causes men to devalue not only women, but also all those qualities that get labeled ‘feminine’ by the culture. And by that, I mean qualities like compassion, cooperation, empathy, intuition, sensitivity. We may give lip service to these qualities, but they have very low priority in our society. And men are still very rigidly socialized to repress these human qualities in themselves, at enormous cost to all of us.