These are the facts you don’t want to know. This is the hard data that can make you cringe, that can despoil the soul and make you wonder at the sad state of the modern world, and gender politics, and the tragically deceived hearts of (ahem) men.

All that progress! All that supposed enlightenment! All that push and desire, that evolution and that open-hearted possibility! And for what? For naught! For shame!

Maybe I was just blocking it out. Maybe I just didn’t want to recall just how wide, how gnarled, how ugly was the gender gap in the last presidential election, when fully half of American men for some godforsaken reason clung to McCain while a huge majority of women understandably wanted Obama, and it was all tied to an antiquated idea that the modern male still hadn’t evolved much beyond his own chauvinistic posturing and the hollow, old-school, might-makes-right machismo McCain so wobblingly represented.