Life & Wisdom Quote by Andrew Cohen

Cohen is doing something quietly radical here: he treats gender not as an identity badge but as a psychological weather system. The line doesn’t flatter anyone with liberation-by-slogan; it points to the gritty interior costs of gender scripts. “Almost all the ideas” is a sweeping claim, but it’s also a diagnostic move: he’s less interested in exceptions than in the default setting most people inherit. Gender, in this framing, arrives preloaded with penalties.

The intent is to reframe the cultural argument away from who gets to define “man” or “woman” and toward what those definitions do to a nervous system. Pain, anxiety, fear, self-doubt: he stacks the words like a stress test, suggesting that masculinity and femininity function as performance standards, constantly audited. The subtext is that a lot of what passes for confidence in gender roles is actually fear management: fear of being found out, fear of not measuring up, fear of rejection.

“For many of us” is the tell. Cohen widens the aperture beyond any one community, but he’s also signaling a shared vulnerability that readers may resist admitting. The “confusion” isn’t framed as a personal failing; it’s evidence of contradictory cultural demands. Excruciating is an unusually bodily word for a topic often treated as abstract, and that’s the point: this isn’t a debate to be won, it’s a condition to be endured.

Contextually, it sits neatly inside a modern moment where older gender certainties have eroded, but their emotional consequences remain. Cohen’s wager is that naming the agony is the first step toward loosening the grip of the roles themselves.