A QUIBBLE: Diotima says:
"This sounds like a type I am quite familiar with - the woman who got the idea that femininity means acting like a sorority girl, emoting rather than thinking, being passive-aggressive rather than open and honest." [emphasis mine]
Maybe it's just my experience with more than a few sorority girls who make for wonderful interlocutors (including my sister) on topics both serious and not, but this has been one of those stereotypes that has always really bugged me. I understand that they're probably exceptions to the rule, but it still bothers me a little.
"I will admit I've had my temptations in this direction, sitting in class after class listening to young women begin every single comment with "Well, I just feel..." and dealing with passive-aggressive roommates who won't just come out and ask me to turn off my music. "
I'll have to check with Our Girl on Mary Street about this one (she being my resident linguistic anthropologist), but I'm pretty sure that this is a classically 'female' use of deintensifiers and qualifiers (though it is not exclusively female, as I tend to qualify many of the statements I make, this one being a case in point).
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
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