How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
That was why she was ashamed. He was the one who smelled […] Treating her like another animal and both of them must have looked just like it in that room. One dog sniffing at the hindquarters of another, and the female, her back to him, not moving. (4.345)
After Son grabs her and smells her hair, Jade feels ashamed. She thinks that smell is something that is attached to animals, not civilized people like herself. But when Son reminds her that she has a smell just like everything else, she feels for a second that she might still be nothing more than a female animal.
Quote #2
The face in the peaches compelled him to dismiss Margaret's screaming entrance as the tantrum of a spoiled child, the deliberate creation of a scene, which both father and son understood as feminine dementia. (5.63)
Whenever Margaret gets upset about something, Valerian tends to blame it on the fact that she's a woman. In fact, Valerian uses gender a lot in order to avoid having to take women's opinions seriously.
Quote #3
It was easy not to believe in Margaret's hysteria; he had seen examples of it many times before and thought she was up to her old combo of masochism plus narcissism that he believed common to exceptionally beautiful women. (5.64)
Again, Valerian will think whatever he has to in order to avoid taking his wife seriously. His most common way of neglecting her is to blame all of her outbursts of negative emotions on the fact that she's an irrational woman. More specifically, Valerian thinks that women who have spent their lives being pretty are even more prone to being drama queens because they're used to getting what they want.