Wifebear

She Who Must Be Obeyed has taken up the blogging cudgel, here.

I am reminded of my father's old joke, one of many. It seems a couple were celebrating their 50th anniversary, and the husband was asked the secret of his success.

"Well," he wheezed, "I make the big decisions, and my wife makes the small decisions."

When asked for examples, he went on, "She decides where to send the kids to school, whether to sell the house, what job I should take, and so on."

What were the big decisions, then? "Whether Red China should be admitted to the UN." (This was a while ago, before we started sticking them with all our dubious paper in exchange for electronic devices.)

Our blogs are like that. She writes about dogs, cats, adolsecents, stupid drivers, checkout line psychics, and insomnia, a lot of what Deborah Tannen calls "trouble talk," a penchant of American women but not men. I write about constitutional law, the place of religion in society, foreign policy, and prevailing idiocies.

Here's a Tannen riff on "trouble talk":

For example, women often enact a routine I call “trouble talk”: One woman tells a trouble, and the other offers a matching one. A woman from Massachusetts complained that a woman friend from New York was always putting her down. It turned out that when she mentioned a problem, her friend often said, “That’s not a problem for me.” This violates the rules of troubles talk, which require that if you can’t say, “I’m the same way,” you should at least say, “I know how you feel.” Refusing to admit to being the same seems to imply thinking you’re better.

Wifebear has managed to create a network of groupies, from Canada to Lisbon to Singapore. More power to her. Remember, "Patriarchy is nothing but repressed matriarchy."