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I’ve smoked since I was about 15 years old. I’m now 32 years old. I never really thought about quitting until I was 28 or 29. My milestone 30th birthday was to be my deadline for quitting.  I’ve tried and failed to quit more than a half-dozen times in the last four years. And I’m trying again, and I’m taking all of you along for the ride.

The tricks I can only employ to help me quite are becoming limited. Zyban (Wellbutrin) made my heart race and mind go crazy. Nicotine patches worked well for as long as I kept wearing them (I do credit them with helping me realize how nice it is to not smoke). Of course I’ve also tried to stop cold-turkey,  and failed. So much for the well-advertised methods.

Of all my failed attempts to quit smoking, trying to stop cold-turkey was the most personally satisfying. I did it on two occasions – once I lasted about a week after throwing my pack away before a transatlantic flight home from London. The last time I just felt tired and sick of smoking and stopped for about the same amount of time. I shared this with my doctor during a recent visit where I was diagnosed as having bronchitis. He told me to read a book called the Easy Way to Stop Smoking before I tried to go cold turkey again, as I had told him was my plan.

So hear I am, day one, just having read the introduction to Carr’s book. No grand insights so far. Just a couple conditions for the program: you’re supposed to keep smoking while you read the book and you’re supposed to finish the book to guarantee success (and it does come with a money-back guarantee that I am guaranteed to be too lazy to utilize if the method fails). I’m a skeptic, and to me this sounds like hocus pocus, but what the hell, I’ve got nothing to lose but my chains.

After cleaning up my keyboard, I posted the following reply:

Dear Margaret,

If someone left of centre says black then you say white. Your predictability is only exceeded by your unoriginality. If only that were your greatest sin.

Worse, you present contradictions as logic, arming the hateful with nonsense stamped with the authority of a Globe and Mail columnist’s byline. In one breath you take exception to women in Canada being portrayed as victims and in the very next you take up the banner for victimized men. Please tell me: shall we pity their higher average salaries or the fact that they are almost never the victims of spousal abuse? Oh the dilemma!

What sickens me most however is how you have baited so many misogynists in to making guttural noises against women in this comment thread. “The day has been hijacked by feminists!” declares one such low life. Indeed, this day, a day on which 14 women were gunned down by a lunatic who believed a movement of women interested in equal treatment was plotting against him, has been “hijacked” by feminists. You have inspired a misogyny that equates feminism with terrorism.

Congratulations, Ms. Wente.

For the record I do have a penis, but I don’t hate myself for it and nor do I ignore that, statistically speaking, my anatomical make-up has conferred advantages to me that women do not enjoy. I don’t personally carry a burden of guilt because of these facts, but also recognize that I enjoy certain unfair advantages, and that despite the many steps we have taken towards equal treatment of people regardless of their sex, the playing field still needs to be leveled considerably more.