I would venture to say that the unifying factor when refering to women is not that we find them all beautiful or
desire them all, but that we lament and pity them and their treatment by our dominator culture. They
encompass all our sighs and aches. When we're young we mourn just one, later women in general.

No wonder men and women can't make relationships work. We're busy pitying each other.

"Monica grasped at another straw: perhaps what he felt for Amanda was pity? She hoped so, pity being, in her experience, a bar to love." (copyright me, 1995 or 1996, forget which, from a never-published short story)