Why one never tells all of the truth

I have gone incredibly easy on the patriarchy in my memoir. This is because most people — men and women — are patriarchal. It is not a good idea to suddenly shock them with too much of the truth. Rather, they have to be brought to examine their condition slowly — very gradually — or they could fall back into false optimism as a result of cognitive dissonance, or die of shock.

So, I have deliberately withheld much of the truth from them — truth which must some time see the light of day.

Here is a more straight-forward and less edited version of reality:

It has to do with my father’s sexism. I believe that when he first noticed my body start to develop into a more womanly look (actually whilst I was cantering on horse back), he lost his emotional equilibrium. It must have been difficult for someone as repressed as he is. Anyway, from that point on, he began to treat me as if I were emotional slosh, as if I had nothing to say, or nothing worth hearing. So, I learned to repeat myself a lot, judging that if I kept saying the same thing, it would eventually sink in somehow.

My father’s attitude towards life, to this day, seems to be that men cannot have emotions, only women can have them. At the same time he believes that women can have no intellect, only emotions. This seems to me to be a very strange way of thinking he has invented in order to get rid of his uncomfortable emotions.