Examples are easy enough to list. I ran cross-country for all four years of high school. I wasn’t good at it, I didn’t get along with my teammates, and I found almost every moment of every race or practice excruciating. (I was still a fundamentalist Baptist at that point and wondered, during races, whether the literal hell that awaited the unsaved might feel like this.) Yet I never thought of quitting. I had found the little niche where I could contribute my little tithe of unnecessary pain to the universe, and this, I somehow understood, could give me some sort of purchase on manhood that I was too small and uncoordinated to get by winning fights. I still remember the aggrieved scorn with which my cross-country teammates and I responded to the guy who did quit, after two years, for the perfectly sane and healthy reason that he preferred watching cartoons. He wasn’t on the varsity squad; his absence had no effect on our team’s standing in the state rankings. But we acted as though he’d cheated us in some way—as though he’d left us to do some terrible group project alone.

Why, from the top of a nasty gender hierarchy, should we feel so risible?