I ignored the normalcy question because I didn’t see any connection between your question, my comments, nor the original essay. Normalcy” means something different to everyone. Lets look at your cheating husband example. If you are so upset at his actions that you kill him, he is not responsible for your actions. If you get angry and tearfully speed away in your car an run over someone, he is not accountable for your actions. If he withheld his hiv status and infected you, it may be a criminal act and he could face civil or criminal charges, but he would face those charges for the act, not how he made you feel.

Frankly I don’t believe a discussion over a woman’s response to a cheating husband infecting her with HIV and a discussion about how woman respond to a socially inept man conning her into dinner or a drink belong in the same conversation.

I made my initial comment because I was puzzled at the responses I was reading. One thing I’ve learned in a fairly long life is that no one but me has any control over how I feel nor how I respond to compliments, slights, or even grave injustices. That those women were more emotional than I expected wasn’t as great a concern as the impression I had that those feelings arose from a sense of powerlessness. I’ve certainly never thought of intelligent educated professional women as powerless, and I still don’t understand how any woman with those attributes could possibly believe themselves powerless. Many of my responses in this thread have specifically addressed that subject. I assert that whether a woman chooses to see themselves as a powerless victim is (barring criminal violence), entirely under her control. That I’m getting a lot of flak for that assertion doesn’t make it false.