“Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College, has written about what he calls “the tyranny of freedom,” arguing that the sheer volume of choices in American life has come to feel oppressive and overwhelming: the proliferation ratchets up expectations and anxieties (there’s always something better around the corner) and overloads the psyche..
…The mathematics of desire mitigates precisely that anxiety. A woman-particularly a woman who feels fundamentally disempowered and uncertain-makes up new rules, replaces external constraints with internal ones, installs systems of mastery that operate from the inside out, the tyranny of freedom reconfigured as the tyranny of self.”

… I was struck by the use, by all three, of the word it.  Suzanne is “entitled to have it.”  Janet is compelled to “get rid of it.”  Kathleen needs to “get it out.”  It is no doubt shorthand; the word may refer generally to the galaxy of feeling that surrounds female appetite, to the blend of longing and constraint that underlies it, but I suspect it also refers to that ocean of sorrow, to a woman's awereness of its depth and her horror at the volume of need it inspires.