The title of Hillary Clinton’s post-deplorable book tells it all: What Happened.

Notice the lack of agency.

But wait! I thought that the whole point of feminism and women’s liberation was that finally, after the age-old oppression of the patriarchy, women were going to come out into the world and be free and responsible agents of their own destiny.

Hey girls! What Happened?

Okay. I admit it. I have not read Hillary Clinton’s post-election non mea culpa -- that’s Latin for Not My Fault -- and I don’t intend to. In fact, I have never read any of Hillary Clinton’s books and I hope I never will.  It is nothing personal. I just think, without a particle of evidence, that I could learn a lot more about life, the universe, and everything from plugging through Andrew Roberts’ 935-page doorstopper on the life of British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury than anything I might glean from the scintillating mind of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

But what I gather from what other people say about Hillary Clinton’s book is that Hillary blames her loss on just about everybody from President Obama to Matt Lauer to her campaign staff to the deplorables.

Years ago I had a male acquaintance who announced that whenever he does something that annoys his wife she recites The Catalog: everything mean that he had ever done to her since they first met 50 years ago. They shoulda called Hillary’s book The Catalog.

I am not surprised about Hillary’s book. I believe that there is something fundamental about the Nature of Woman that that makes it almost impossible for a human female to let go of anything, ever. She remembers What Happened to her as if it were yesterday, and never ceases to “share” with her friends that the other person is to blame and must apologize to her before normal relations can resume.

So what happened to women’s liberation, girls? What happened to that seminal Chapter XXV in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex titled “The Independent Woman”?

The answer is as simple as it is obvious. Women don’t want to be independent. That is what everything from What Happened to safe spaces to microaggressions to the rape crisis is all about. Women want to be able to blame everyone else for What Happened, and they don’t really want to be independent and responsible.

Now I do not hold this against women, not at all. I take it as a confirmation of the Nature of Woman, and a reminder that the Nature of Woman is profoundly different from the nature of men.

This profound difference between men and women is illustrated by the question of the Mistake. No woman can look down upon the little Mistake playing at her feet and blame herself for her stupidity in getting involved with that loser or charmer or beta male, and then finding out that he was a vile chancer. Because that Mistake cannot really be a mistake. It must all be somebody else’s fault.

You see this in the campus rape hysteria, just recapped by John Hawkins. When a man is falsely accused of rape it often seems to issue from the need of the woman in question to avoid admitting that she made a mistake.

Now, it is my belief that the essence of being a man is to get up every day and clear the decks of past mistakes and regrets. It is the nature of human life that the past is littered with mistakes. But unless you can get past the mistakes you will be immobilized by guilt and regret and unable to move forward and act. Just like Hillary Clinton.

In other words, you cannot advance to agency and responsibility unless you are able to deal with and move on from your mistakes. That is why the tech startup culture is overwhelmingly male. Most startups are failures, so you cannot survive for long unless you can slough off your mistakes as a snake sloughs off its skin.

Of course, none of this applies to our glorious conservative women who are as loving and brave and independent and responsible as any man in Illyria. I suspect that the reason for this is that many conservative women are Christians and Christianity has a curious culture of the Forgiveness of Sins. If you make a mistake, you confess it to God and pray for forgiveness and Absolution. Next morning you are up and at ‘em, just like a man.

But liberal women don’t have that culture, and so they marinate in their mistakes and their cats and wonder What Happened, and blame the patriarchy for everything.

They should try Christianity; they might get to experience the pleasure of having anti-religious bigots in the Senate asking them if they are now, or have ever been, a Christian.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also see his American Manifesto and get his Road to the Middle Class.