Being married is like having somebody permanently in your corner. It feels limitless, not limited.

Someone once asked me why women don't gamble as much as men do and I gave the commonsensical reply that we don't have as much money. That was a true but incomplete answer. In fact, women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.

A portable friend to all readers-especia lly but not only women-who need to learn that the Golden Rule works only if it's reversible: We must learn to treat ourselves as well as we wish to treat others.

The ends and means are a seamless web.

If we were going to address what involves the biggest number of women, reproductive freedom is a fundamental human right - like freedom of speech, the most basic right. Freedom from violence, since women worldwide are still like 70% at least of all victims of violence. Equality in the family, democracy in the family, since the family is the microcosm of everything else, so if you have inequality and violence in the family, it normalizes it in the street, for foreign policy, for every place else.

I don't like debates anyway. I have never debated anyone, I think they're a very masculine form - like an intellectual prizefight. They let you know who the better debater is but they don't really tell you about the issue. It's all heat, but no light.

For much of the female half of the world, food is the first signal of our inferiority. It lets us know that our own families may consider female bodies to be less deserving, less needy, less valuable.