False notions of love teach us that it is the place where we will feel no pain, where we will be in a state of constant bliss. We have to expose the falseness of these beliefs to see and accept the reality that suffering and pain do not end when we begin to love. In some cases when we are making the slow journey back from lovelessness to love, our suffering may become more intense. Acceptance of pain is part of loving practice. bell hooks, All About Love

As a society, we encourage girls and women to be emotionally accessible, and in touch with their feelings; we say that it’s an innately feminine trait. We say it, that is, until they have feelings that make us uncomfortable, at which point we recast them as melodramatic harpies, shrieking banshees, and basket cases.

Sady Doyle

For years, psychologists hypothesized that raising strong, confident boys had more to do with nurture than with nature, and that it was essential for parents--fathers, mainly--to instill in them a masculinity and sense of self. This masculinity was narrowly defined to exclude any interests or traits that could be considered girlish--things like sparkly dragons or painted nails. The underlying fear: Too much female, or mom, influence could sway a son's sexual orientation. The opposite has hardly been discussed--that too much male, or dad, influence will "make" a daughter gay. In fact, little girls who display what are thought of as typically male traits--such as playing sports, excelling in math and science, and wearing tomboyish clothing--are celebrated, and close relationships with their fathers are rarely questioned. It's one reason that schools hold father-daughter dances but tend to hold mother-son events that are sport-related, if they hold any at all.

Gender typing is believed to impede emotional development and account for anti social behavior in boys. In my work with families and parenting, I have observed that boys who are not trapped in gender roles grow up to be more independent, more open-minded, and more sexually tolerant than their peers. Their exposure to a greater repertoire of potential identities gave them a sense of parental acceptance that laid the groundwork for a natural assertiveness. These boys also more easily treated females with respect and openness.

"Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception."

-the inimitable Joan Didion, On Self Respect

As we have so recently and publicly discussed, girls and women have “anger issues” in that they are socialized to not demonstrate anger, but instead to sublimate it where it can sometimes then manifest itself as anxiety or depression. Girls are not born less angry and more anxious, they’re rewarded for being less angry and more anxious. So, it should come as no surprise to anyone that large groups of stressed out girls and women collectively facing the dissolution of a cohesive social structure might be more disposed to fall prey to mass psychosis. It is arguable that men and boys experience similarly jarring episodes of anger and anxiety-channelling mass psychosis, but we call it male aggression and fund military industrial complexes to deal with it.

Soraya L. Chemaly, Stop Telling Girls They’re Hysterical

It's not okay how so many men behave as though they have the right to aggressively address strangers on the street because we're women, and it's not okay that we are expected to take it with a smile.

I recently conducted an interview with Joan Didion. We spoke over the phone; she from her hotel in Washington. She was on tour for Blue Nights, a reminisence about the life and death of her daughter, Quintana, and Didion’s thoughts about her own mortality. Over the next few weeks, we will be posting highlights from this interview, then it will all be posted on The Believer website.

- Sheila Heti

THE BELIEVER: When you were a little girl you wanted to be an actress, not a writer?

JOAN DIDION: Right.

BLVR: But you said it’s okay, because writing is in some ways a performance. When you’re writing, are you performing a character?

JD: You’re not even a character. You’re doing a performance. Somehow writing has always seemed to me to have an element of performance.

BLVR: What is the nature of that performance? I mean, an actor performs a character—

JD: Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don’t think it’s performing a character, really, if the character you’re performing is yourself. I don’t see that as playing a role. It’s just appearing in public.

BLVR: Appearing in public and sort of saying lines—

JD: But not somebody else’s lines. Your lines. Look at me—this is me, is, I think, what you’re saying.

BLVR: And do you feel like that me is a pretty stable thing, or unstable? Is it consistent through one’s life as a writer?

JD: I think it develops into a fairly stable thing over time. I think it’s not at all stable at first. But then you kind of grow into the role you have made for yourself.

BLVR: How would you gauge the distance between the role you have made for yourself—

JD: —and the real person?

BLVR: Yeah.

JD: Well, I don’t know. The real person becomes the role you have made for yourself.

Men in fancy conference rooms in government capitals, the United Nations and think tanks around the world rarely focus on the civilians caught in the crossfire, trapped in a hell they had no role in creating. As rape becomes increasingly relied upon as a weapon to humiliate, destabilize and exercise power, women's bodies become the battlefield between two warring sides. Not only do they get no say in war, they must pay its price in excruciating detail. This trend has only become more apparent as the very nature of war has changed from state-on-state to intra-state conflict.

According to Michelle Bachelet, former president of Chile and now head of UN Women, "in actual budget terms, the U.N. allocates only about 5 percent of its post-conflict funds to addressing women's post-conflict needs."

In Milwaukee, in an effort to solve cold cases, specifically those in which the victim's identity is unknown, the Milwaukee County Medical Examiner's office has started a new program.

They have created composite sketches based on the remains, then created website that features the photo, as well as specific details about the remains... tattoos, etc. Some of the photos of the remains are also posted online. While other cities have similar sites (with composite sketches), Milwaukee and Las Vegas are currently the only 2 places that feature pictures of the actual bodies.

Personally, it makes me a little squeamish, but there have been some positive results.

A news release from the Clark County, Nevada, Office of the Coroner/Medical Examiner states that since 2003, when it launched its own website and designated a group of investigators to handle cold cases, it has identified the remains of 30 people. The site says 152 remain to be identified, the oldest case dating back to 1969.