Free at last!
Jun. 1st, 2001 11:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
riot_nrrrdWoohoo! I finished my paper! I am done with school for the year! I am free!
I knew I could do it. Because I am a paper writing machine. I am a smacking paper-titty fucking machine...
Er... uh... yeah.
And it's a sexy paper too. It's all you can do to keep from licking it.
Well, that's not entirely true. I'm not entirely confident with the last couple of paragraphs.
But that's OK. Because I am a paper-writing machine.
All right... I know Tofani, at least, wanted to read it, so I'm attaching it to the end of this post. It's eight pages long, so if you want to, bypass it. I won't be hurt. But if you've got lots of time on your hands, curiosity, and much tolerance for stupidity, go on and read it. Here goes...
Adrienne
May 29, 2001
JAPN 250
In all of Banana Yoshimoto's novels and short stories, the characters express a growing discontent with traditional male and female gender roles. Each character has a unique way of expressing his or her discontent. The male characters, consciously or unconsciously blaming the women in their lives for their dissatisfaction, often either physically run away from their relationships with women or detach themselves emotionally from the women in their lives. Some, hating the limitations of the male gender role itself, employ various techniques in order to become women themselves. The female characters tend to cope with their unhappiness by plunging into relationships with men, either fighting from within the relationship to equalize the scale of male-female relations, or focusing on a million surface details within the relationship, evading its issues of gender inequality. Whereas the men in Yoshimoto's stories tend to, in extreme cases, blame their own roles for their sense of constraint, the women continue to view opposite sex relationships as the heart of the problem, and in extreme cases pursue relationships with other women. In the end, though, the characters' attempts at managing or escaping the gender roles assigned them rarely succeed. Yoshimoto argues, through her characters' struggles and eventual resolutions, that in order to free themselves from the constraints of gender roles, men and women must come to terms with their mutual dependence on one another. Men and women, she claims, must view themselves as inherently lonely individuals who can connect with and comfort one another, and in doing so meet each other on an equal playing field. Only then can they pursue happiness.
Kitchen, Yoshimoto's first work, opens with the premise that men and women need each other because they are inherently lonely. Mikage, the protagonist, begins the story lonely-her grandmother, the last of her family, has just died. Yuichi, a young man who worked at Mikage's grandmother's favorite workshop, regards Mikage's loneliness and her inability to pay the rent for her grandmother's apartment with compassion, and invites her to stay at his apartment until her life stabilizes enough for her to get a job and seek her own living quarters. While Yuichi helps Mikage begin her healing process by offering her a chance to remove herself from the painful memories of her grandmother's apartment and to live with other people, he also offers Mikage an unequal playing field. Mikage depends on Yuichi and his family, not only for physical living space, but also for emotional living space. She depends on them to help her heal from her grief. Yuichi, by contrast, does not open to Mikage in any way; as Mikage says, "Even after I got to know him a little I still had an impression of aloofness" (8). Both Mikage and Yuichi, in this way, are playing traditional gender roles: Mikage, who stays mostly in the apartment and cooks, has a financial and emotional dependency on Yuichi; Yuichi, the strong, unemotional one, does not. Because of this separateness, because of this lack of mutual dependence, there is no family. Both Yuichi and Mikage, even as she heals from her grief, are still lonely.
Mikage is able to heal in such an environment largely due to Eriko, the uniting force of the household. In the first part of the novel, Eriko serves as a symbol of liberation both from grief and from the constraints of gender. Originally Yuichi's father, Eriko realizes that he hates being a man when his wife dies, when he realizes that all the strength the male gender role attributes to him gives him no real power over the negative forces in his life. As he explains:
I realized that the world didn't exist for my benefit. It followed that the ratio of pleasant and unpleasant things around me would not change. It wasn't up to me. It was clear that the best thing to do was adopt a sort of muddled cheerfulness. So I became a woman, and here I am (81).
Eriko serves as an example to Mikage, showing her that while she cannot control the amount of grief in her life, she can transcend it by transcending the roles that dictate how she reacts to grief. Eriko is a bridge between genders, between the roles that Mikage and Yuichi play and the free lives they could live. It is Eriko that provides the egalitarian family atmosphere which allows Mikage to heal, and Eriko that encourages Mikage to move out of the house and pursue a more independent, freer lifestyle once her healing is complete.
When Eriko dies in the second part of the novel, the family atmosphere disappears. Mikage and Yuichi must now come face to face with their loneliness, and forge a family of their own. Mikage, now living in an apartment of her own, does not know of Eriko's death; it is up to Yuichi to tell her, and in doing so to depend on her for emotional support. He does not come to this dependence easily, though. Struggling to behave "in a way befitting an eldest son" (50), he remains alone for a month, letting his feelings out only with alcohol as an intermediary. When he finally calls Mikage to tell her the news, he explains to her, "I didn't have the confidence, the courage, to explain all this to you so you could understand what was going on with me" (64). In an attempt to behave in a manner he believes suitable for a man, Yuichi compromises his physical and emotional health, and remains depressed and lonely.
Yuichi now confides in Mikage, but he has not yet learned the emotional dependence necessary to free him from the constraints of his gender role. While Mikage accepts an offer to travel around Japan with some of her colleagues to sample various types of cuisine, Yuichi goes off alone to live in an inn until his money runs out. He avoids Mikage, saying, "I don't want to get her mixed up in my problems. Now that she's doing so well and all, it wouldn't be right to drag her down" (84). It is up to Mikage, who recognizes Yuichi's escape as a danger to their budding relationship and their only chance to escape perpetual loneliness, to rescue him. With a bowl of katsudon in tow, she takes a taxi to Yuichi's inn and in a scene befitting an action movie, leaps up to the window of his hotel room to deliver it to him. Her act of hospitality warms Yuichi, and makes him realize that he can escape his feelings of loneliness by depending on Mikage emotionally. He tells Mikage, "Overall, I've been pretty cold, haven't I? It's just that I wanted you to see me when I'm feeling more manly, when I'm feeling strong" (101). When he realizes that emotional interdependence with Mikage can rid him of his grief and loneliness, he is able to shed the pressure to be strong and manly. Likewise, by depending on Yuichi as well as having Yuichi depend on her, Mikage is liberated from the traditionally subordinate role assigned to women.
Yoshimoto's short story "Newlywed" approaches the issue of gender roles from a different perspective: it explores what happens when gender roles are not eliminated and an emotional interdependence between men and women is not established. The narrator of the story is, as the title suggests, a newlywed; his wife, Atsuko, acts in the traditional role of housewife while he earns the family income. While Atsuko works her hardest to assure a happy home life, the narrator feels suffocated by her efforts. As he explains,
Sometimes I feel like we're in totally different worlds, especially when she goes on and on about the minutiae of our daily live, anything and everything, and a lot of it's meaningless to me. I mean, what's the big deal? Sometimes I feel like I'm living with the quintessential housewife (10).
Due to the constraints of the gender roles on their marriage, Atsuko and the narrator have a lonely, meaningless relationship. Atsuko buries herself in the small details of managing a household, striving to create a perfect marriage through creating a perfect home. The narrator, meanwhile, feels an urge to escape, and finds himself riding the train past his usual stop one night in an attempt to do so.
Just as in Kitchen, the person who mediates the conflict between the man and the woman is a person who is free from the limitations of gender: an apparently homeless man who, in order to better communicate with the narrator, transforms himself into a beautiful woman. However, this person does not achieve his ends with the same success as Eriko. Eriko achieves her gender change by her own initiative; she shows the other characters in Kitchen that one can bring about one's own freedom. The homeless man's transformation, by contrast, is a magical one; it is a transformation that occurs without natural explanation, for the express purpose of communication with the narrator, and the homeless man reverts back to his natural shape once the conversation is over. In this way, the homeless man serves as a reflection of the narrator's views concerning gender roles: that they are natural and permanent, and therefore insurmountable. In the end, the narrator concludes, "There's no point in me dwelling on it now. I'm still young. Thinking about it makes me nervous" (17). Because he feels that one cannot change one's gender role, he chooses to pretend that there is no incongruence in his marriage, and returns home feeling no more confident and no less alone than he did before his attempted escape.
The novel NP is an interesting work in that it inverts the message put forth in Kitchen and "Newlywed." Whereas the first two works portray men and women finding freedom from their gender roles through emotional dependence on one another, NP shows characters enjoying emotional dependence on one another through first rejecting their gender roles.
In the beginning of NP, the characters choose to adopt traditional gender roles in order to gain a sense of family, to end their loneliness. Kazami, the protagonist, lost her father at a young age when he left her mother for another woman. In a family where a member has left, Kazami explains, "The absent party takes on this enormous presence. My father wasn't there, but life revolved around him anyway" (17). After Kazami's father left, Kazami's family tried to compensate for his absence: Kazami, her sister, and her mother took turns playing varying roles as both parent and child. However, the father's absence looms large in the family, and soon, Kazami finds herself compensating for the loss of her father by having an affair with Shoji Toda, a writer seventeen years older than she.
Likewise, both the families of Otohiko and Saki and of Sui are marked by the absence of the same man: Sarao Takase, their father by different mothers. With no father and an emotionally distraught mother, Otohiko finds himself playing the role of "man of the house;" it is he who suggests that his family move to Yokohama. Meanwhile, Sui meets Takase and falls in love with him, trying through romance to gain the father she lost in childhood. When Takase takes his own life, Sui turns to Otohiko, now the only remaining father figure in the family, and attempts to capture in him what she lost in Takase both as a father and as a lover.
The main characters' interdependence on one another is established early on in the novel. Devastated by Shoji's suicide, Kazami depends on Sui, Saki, and Otohiko for insight into Takase's life and writing, in order to understand what about Takase's ninety-eighth story drove Shoji and so many other writers to suicide. Takase's children, trying to make sense of being abandoned by their father and of the strange relationships between Sui and the men to whom she is related, also depend on Kazami. As Otohiko says, "All three of us feel so trapped and all alone. We regard you as someone who can help us escape" (48). However, the characters find neither joy nor freedom in this interdependence because they experience it not as individuals, but as characters playing roles. Kazami and Sui, for all intents and purposes little girls looking for fathers, cannot support themselves, each other, or the other characters. Otohiko, taking his duties as "man of the house" far too seriously, cannot fully express his feelings to the women. The characters are, in a peculiar sense, a family, but due to their gender roles they do not function as one.
In the end of the novel, freedom comes with the choice to escape gender barriers-and with a sacrifice. Kazami, ever looking for a father figure, finds a common ground with Sui based on the absence of stable men in their family lives. Able to mutually understand one another, love develops between the two women. When Kazami finally acknowledges these feelings and kisses Sui, the gender barrier breaks, and Kazami begins her path to freedom. She realizes, in recognizing her love for Sui, that she does not need a strong, stable father figure to satisfy her emotionally; she can find joy in equality, in giving to a relationship as well as receiving support from it.
Sui, by contrast, does not free herself from her gender role, but rather buries herself in it. Pregnant and unable to reconcile the reality of her situation with her love either for Otohiko or for Kazami, she leaves the other characters behind to marry an older man, a customer at the bar where she works who is willing to take care of the baby. While Sui is unable to wean herself of her need for a father figure, her submission to gender roles is not without purpose. As Banana Yoshimoto explains in the afterword of NP, "Some readers will regard Sui as a fallen woman; while others will see her as a bodhisattva, a being who defers her own salvation in order to help others attain theirs" (193). In leaving the lives of the other characters and burying herself in another life, she frees Otohiko from his obligations as father and lover; he is now able to confide in Kazami about his own secret: that he wrote the ending of the ninety-eighth story to appease Sui. The breaking down of gender roles and the establishment of emotional interdependency is now complete; Otohiko, freed from his roles, is now able to let down his guard and confide in someone, while Kazami, able to relate to men on an equal footing and not in the context of a father-daughter relationship, is able to act as a confidant.
In all of Yoshimoto's novels and stories, the man must let down his guard and confide in the woman in order for gender equality to come about, but it is ultimately up to the woman to create an open atmosphere in which emotional interdependence can be achieved. The men in the stories always have an out: Yuichi can choose to hold on to his manliness and avoid a relationship with Mikage; the homeless man in "Newlywed" tells the narrator, "You never have to go back to the station again, if you don't want to. That's one option" (13). While this seems in some respects to be a form of misogyny, saddling the women with the responsibility of handling the men's emotional problems, Yoshimoto seems to regard it as a way to empower women, not to burden them. Women and their tendency to depend on interpersonal relationships have historically been marginalized by society, treated as a source of contempt. Yoshimoto argues that such tendencies are in fact the key to happiness. She argues that women are better endowed in this respect, that men can learn from women about emotional interdependency and in doing so gain fulfillment.
I knew I could do it. Because I am a paper writing machine. I am a smacking paper-titty fucking machine...
Er... uh... yeah.
And it's a sexy paper too. It's all you can do to keep from licking it.
Well, that's not entirely true. I'm not entirely confident with the last couple of paragraphs.
But that's OK. Because I am a paper-writing machine.
All right... I know Tofani, at least, wanted to read it, so I'm attaching it to the end of this post. It's eight pages long, so if you want to, bypass it. I won't be hurt. But if you've got lots of time on your hands, curiosity, and much tolerance for stupidity, go on and read it. Here goes...
Adrienne
May 29, 2001
JAPN 250
In all of Banana Yoshimoto's novels and short stories, the characters express a growing discontent with traditional male and female gender roles. Each character has a unique way of expressing his or her discontent. The male characters, consciously or unconsciously blaming the women in their lives for their dissatisfaction, often either physically run away from their relationships with women or detach themselves emotionally from the women in their lives. Some, hating the limitations of the male gender role itself, employ various techniques in order to become women themselves. The female characters tend to cope with their unhappiness by plunging into relationships with men, either fighting from within the relationship to equalize the scale of male-female relations, or focusing on a million surface details within the relationship, evading its issues of gender inequality. Whereas the men in Yoshimoto's stories tend to, in extreme cases, blame their own roles for their sense of constraint, the women continue to view opposite sex relationships as the heart of the problem, and in extreme cases pursue relationships with other women. In the end, though, the characters' attempts at managing or escaping the gender roles assigned them rarely succeed. Yoshimoto argues, through her characters' struggles and eventual resolutions, that in order to free themselves from the constraints of gender roles, men and women must come to terms with their mutual dependence on one another. Men and women, she claims, must view themselves as inherently lonely individuals who can connect with and comfort one another, and in doing so meet each other on an equal playing field. Only then can they pursue happiness.
Kitchen, Yoshimoto's first work, opens with the premise that men and women need each other because they are inherently lonely. Mikage, the protagonist, begins the story lonely-her grandmother, the last of her family, has just died. Yuichi, a young man who worked at Mikage's grandmother's favorite workshop, regards Mikage's loneliness and her inability to pay the rent for her grandmother's apartment with compassion, and invites her to stay at his apartment until her life stabilizes enough for her to get a job and seek her own living quarters. While Yuichi helps Mikage begin her healing process by offering her a chance to remove herself from the painful memories of her grandmother's apartment and to live with other people, he also offers Mikage an unequal playing field. Mikage depends on Yuichi and his family, not only for physical living space, but also for emotional living space. She depends on them to help her heal from her grief. Yuichi, by contrast, does not open to Mikage in any way; as Mikage says, "Even after I got to know him a little I still had an impression of aloofness" (8). Both Mikage and Yuichi, in this way, are playing traditional gender roles: Mikage, who stays mostly in the apartment and cooks, has a financial and emotional dependency on Yuichi; Yuichi, the strong, unemotional one, does not. Because of this separateness, because of this lack of mutual dependence, there is no family. Both Yuichi and Mikage, even as she heals from her grief, are still lonely.
Mikage is able to heal in such an environment largely due to Eriko, the uniting force of the household. In the first part of the novel, Eriko serves as a symbol of liberation both from grief and from the constraints of gender. Originally Yuichi's father, Eriko realizes that he hates being a man when his wife dies, when he realizes that all the strength the male gender role attributes to him gives him no real power over the negative forces in his life. As he explains:
I realized that the world didn't exist for my benefit. It followed that the ratio of pleasant and unpleasant things around me would not change. It wasn't up to me. It was clear that the best thing to do was adopt a sort of muddled cheerfulness. So I became a woman, and here I am (81).
Eriko serves as an example to Mikage, showing her that while she cannot control the amount of grief in her life, she can transcend it by transcending the roles that dictate how she reacts to grief. Eriko is a bridge between genders, between the roles that Mikage and Yuichi play and the free lives they could live. It is Eriko that provides the egalitarian family atmosphere which allows Mikage to heal, and Eriko that encourages Mikage to move out of the house and pursue a more independent, freer lifestyle once her healing is complete.
When Eriko dies in the second part of the novel, the family atmosphere disappears. Mikage and Yuichi must now come face to face with their loneliness, and forge a family of their own. Mikage, now living in an apartment of her own, does not know of Eriko's death; it is up to Yuichi to tell her, and in doing so to depend on her for emotional support. He does not come to this dependence easily, though. Struggling to behave "in a way befitting an eldest son" (50), he remains alone for a month, letting his feelings out only with alcohol as an intermediary. When he finally calls Mikage to tell her the news, he explains to her, "I didn't have the confidence, the courage, to explain all this to you so you could understand what was going on with me" (64). In an attempt to behave in a manner he believes suitable for a man, Yuichi compromises his physical and emotional health, and remains depressed and lonely.
Yuichi now confides in Mikage, but he has not yet learned the emotional dependence necessary to free him from the constraints of his gender role. While Mikage accepts an offer to travel around Japan with some of her colleagues to sample various types of cuisine, Yuichi goes off alone to live in an inn until his money runs out. He avoids Mikage, saying, "I don't want to get her mixed up in my problems. Now that she's doing so well and all, it wouldn't be right to drag her down" (84). It is up to Mikage, who recognizes Yuichi's escape as a danger to their budding relationship and their only chance to escape perpetual loneliness, to rescue him. With a bowl of katsudon in tow, she takes a taxi to Yuichi's inn and in a scene befitting an action movie, leaps up to the window of his hotel room to deliver it to him. Her act of hospitality warms Yuichi, and makes him realize that he can escape his feelings of loneliness by depending on Mikage emotionally. He tells Mikage, "Overall, I've been pretty cold, haven't I? It's just that I wanted you to see me when I'm feeling more manly, when I'm feeling strong" (101). When he realizes that emotional interdependence with Mikage can rid him of his grief and loneliness, he is able to shed the pressure to be strong and manly. Likewise, by depending on Yuichi as well as having Yuichi depend on her, Mikage is liberated from the traditionally subordinate role assigned to women.
Yoshimoto's short story "Newlywed" approaches the issue of gender roles from a different perspective: it explores what happens when gender roles are not eliminated and an emotional interdependence between men and women is not established. The narrator of the story is, as the title suggests, a newlywed; his wife, Atsuko, acts in the traditional role of housewife while he earns the family income. While Atsuko works her hardest to assure a happy home life, the narrator feels suffocated by her efforts. As he explains,
Sometimes I feel like we're in totally different worlds, especially when she goes on and on about the minutiae of our daily live, anything and everything, and a lot of it's meaningless to me. I mean, what's the big deal? Sometimes I feel like I'm living with the quintessential housewife (10).
Due to the constraints of the gender roles on their marriage, Atsuko and the narrator have a lonely, meaningless relationship. Atsuko buries herself in the small details of managing a household, striving to create a perfect marriage through creating a perfect home. The narrator, meanwhile, feels an urge to escape, and finds himself riding the train past his usual stop one night in an attempt to do so.
Just as in Kitchen, the person who mediates the conflict between the man and the woman is a person who is free from the limitations of gender: an apparently homeless man who, in order to better communicate with the narrator, transforms himself into a beautiful woman. However, this person does not achieve his ends with the same success as Eriko. Eriko achieves her gender change by her own initiative; she shows the other characters in Kitchen that one can bring about one's own freedom. The homeless man's transformation, by contrast, is a magical one; it is a transformation that occurs without natural explanation, for the express purpose of communication with the narrator, and the homeless man reverts back to his natural shape once the conversation is over. In this way, the homeless man serves as a reflection of the narrator's views concerning gender roles: that they are natural and permanent, and therefore insurmountable. In the end, the narrator concludes, "There's no point in me dwelling on it now. I'm still young. Thinking about it makes me nervous" (17). Because he feels that one cannot change one's gender role, he chooses to pretend that there is no incongruence in his marriage, and returns home feeling no more confident and no less alone than he did before his attempted escape.
The novel NP is an interesting work in that it inverts the message put forth in Kitchen and "Newlywed." Whereas the first two works portray men and women finding freedom from their gender roles through emotional dependence on one another, NP shows characters enjoying emotional dependence on one another through first rejecting their gender roles.
In the beginning of NP, the characters choose to adopt traditional gender roles in order to gain a sense of family, to end their loneliness. Kazami, the protagonist, lost her father at a young age when he left her mother for another woman. In a family where a member has left, Kazami explains, "The absent party takes on this enormous presence. My father wasn't there, but life revolved around him anyway" (17). After Kazami's father left, Kazami's family tried to compensate for his absence: Kazami, her sister, and her mother took turns playing varying roles as both parent and child. However, the father's absence looms large in the family, and soon, Kazami finds herself compensating for the loss of her father by having an affair with Shoji Toda, a writer seventeen years older than she.
Likewise, both the families of Otohiko and Saki and of Sui are marked by the absence of the same man: Sarao Takase, their father by different mothers. With no father and an emotionally distraught mother, Otohiko finds himself playing the role of "man of the house;" it is he who suggests that his family move to Yokohama. Meanwhile, Sui meets Takase and falls in love with him, trying through romance to gain the father she lost in childhood. When Takase takes his own life, Sui turns to Otohiko, now the only remaining father figure in the family, and attempts to capture in him what she lost in Takase both as a father and as a lover.
The main characters' interdependence on one another is established early on in the novel. Devastated by Shoji's suicide, Kazami depends on Sui, Saki, and Otohiko for insight into Takase's life and writing, in order to understand what about Takase's ninety-eighth story drove Shoji and so many other writers to suicide. Takase's children, trying to make sense of being abandoned by their father and of the strange relationships between Sui and the men to whom she is related, also depend on Kazami. As Otohiko says, "All three of us feel so trapped and all alone. We regard you as someone who can help us escape" (48). However, the characters find neither joy nor freedom in this interdependence because they experience it not as individuals, but as characters playing roles. Kazami and Sui, for all intents and purposes little girls looking for fathers, cannot support themselves, each other, or the other characters. Otohiko, taking his duties as "man of the house" far too seriously, cannot fully express his feelings to the women. The characters are, in a peculiar sense, a family, but due to their gender roles they do not function as one.
In the end of the novel, freedom comes with the choice to escape gender barriers-and with a sacrifice. Kazami, ever looking for a father figure, finds a common ground with Sui based on the absence of stable men in their family lives. Able to mutually understand one another, love develops between the two women. When Kazami finally acknowledges these feelings and kisses Sui, the gender barrier breaks, and Kazami begins her path to freedom. She realizes, in recognizing her love for Sui, that she does not need a strong, stable father figure to satisfy her emotionally; she can find joy in equality, in giving to a relationship as well as receiving support from it.
Sui, by contrast, does not free herself from her gender role, but rather buries herself in it. Pregnant and unable to reconcile the reality of her situation with her love either for Otohiko or for Kazami, she leaves the other characters behind to marry an older man, a customer at the bar where she works who is willing to take care of the baby. While Sui is unable to wean herself of her need for a father figure, her submission to gender roles is not without purpose. As Banana Yoshimoto explains in the afterword of NP, "Some readers will regard Sui as a fallen woman; while others will see her as a bodhisattva, a being who defers her own salvation in order to help others attain theirs" (193). In leaving the lives of the other characters and burying herself in another life, she frees Otohiko from his obligations as father and lover; he is now able to confide in Kazami about his own secret: that he wrote the ending of the ninety-eighth story to appease Sui. The breaking down of gender roles and the establishment of emotional interdependency is now complete; Otohiko, freed from his roles, is now able to let down his guard and confide in someone, while Kazami, able to relate to men on an equal footing and not in the context of a father-daughter relationship, is able to act as a confidant.
In all of Yoshimoto's novels and stories, the man must let down his guard and confide in the woman in order for gender equality to come about, but it is ultimately up to the woman to create an open atmosphere in which emotional interdependence can be achieved. The men in the stories always have an out: Yuichi can choose to hold on to his manliness and avoid a relationship with Mikage; the homeless man in "Newlywed" tells the narrator, "You never have to go back to the station again, if you don't want to. That's one option" (13). While this seems in some respects to be a form of misogyny, saddling the women with the responsibility of handling the men's emotional problems, Yoshimoto seems to regard it as a way to empower women, not to burden them. Women and their tendency to depend on interpersonal relationships have historically been marginalized by society, treated as a source of contempt. Yoshimoto argues that such tendencies are in fact the key to happiness. She argues that women are better endowed in this respect, that men can learn from women about emotional interdependency and in doing so gain fulfillment.
