There's a difference between obsession and passion. One form of emotional oppression of women is the cheap and automatic labeling of passionate emotion as obsession, something neurotic and wrong. If an artist like Aretha Franklin sings about love from the bottom of her gut, we call it genius. If an ordinary woman talks about love from the bottom of her gut, we call it co-dependent, obsessed, or over-wrought. This leads women to distrust our own instincts, to think of our own passions as delusional or, at the very least, unladylike.