We need to raise our sons more like our daughters. We need to relieve them of this burden of the idea that to be masculine they have to be superior, which is what they get addicted to, and why both racism and sexism are crimes that I call superiority crimes.

I haven't been in a job situation in which I was competing with other women. As a writer, you're more likely to be treated as an individual.

I'd like to be played as a child by Natalie Wood. I'd have some romantic scenes as Audrey Hepburn and have gritty black-and-white scenes as Patricia Neal.

When gender comes down upon us, male or female, it comes as a restriction.

For a man to say, "I have to leave work now because I need to do something with my kids," it's sometimes viewed as a career killer. He doesn't have the right drive. So when they depart from their gender roles, they face some of the same restrictions.

It still may take some explaining, but many more women are keeping their birth names (and not calling them maiden names, with all the sexual double standards that implies).

I'm still the same person who grew up mostly in a Midwestern, factory-working neighborhood where talk about "self-esteem" would have seemed like a luxury.