Even when Ned was at his best, getting the full benefits of manhood, wearing a jacket and tie, strutting down office hallways, full of a sense of his own importance, even then I disliked his life. Even then the swagger was false, and not because I was a woman, but because the good feeling was coming from outside me. Even positive feedback was still feedback, still a cultural expectation purporting to make me who I was, to make me acceptable as a real man in a way that I had not been in the monastery.
