It sounds from the now-tiny amount I know know about your sister-in-law, that she'd have made her big mistake whether inspired by Gloria Steinem or Doctor Phil. Starting in the seventies and continuing to the present day, the pressure on Americans to have meaningful and self-realizing lives has been relentless. And professional feminists were only one strain among many in the quest to make our lives deeper, richer and more spiritually resonant, which somehow, for an awful lot of people, didn't work out.

It's tempting to blame the spiritual poverty pimps of the human potential movement. It's also tempting to blame the drinkers, philanderers and suburban bohemians of the previous, "greatest" generation, who stumbled through the Great Depression and the War, and ended up flabby and confused, rich and secure, but not happy, so's you'd notice. And one of the things they dumped along the way was the politics that got them through the thirties in the first place: the ability to say the words "working class" without smirking.

We all come in for some blame: Mom, Dad, Dick and Jane. We surrendered in the class war so we could win the cold war, and for most of us it was a pretty good deal, but you can see where the rest of this is going, can't you? Capitalism's atomising of any institution that doesn't serve it is like a fact of nature in this country. In the end, we're all consumers, which means we are alone with our appetites and fantasies: our identities.

The identity feminists are no more or less inimical to the general well-being than any of the other social operators prefixed with "identity." Life without them is easier than with. Hillary Clinton is saddled with them, and for the first time, like, ever, I find myself feeling something for her, like sympathy or pity. I still won't vote for her, but at least now i think she's human.