Questions I’ve asked nobody has answered

 

Where’s your William Blake?

Twice in my life I have looked at women unblinkingly. When I went through a painful divorce in the 1990s and now when I am old and losing testosterone to the point that I agree with Samuel Johnson that sex is just a ridiculous position offering fleeting pleasure. All the ads for testosterone boosters we see on teevee strike me as sad. Graduating from sex is the male opportunity for wisdom. Why are we so desperately anxious to forgo the opportunity?

I have questions I have posed no one has ever attempted to answer. Women are mad about the patriarchy. Why was there ever a patriarchy? Men in recorded history have always protected women to the point that female life spans were longer than male life spans. Women were the mothers of children. The future of the family and the species. It didn’t matter that they were otherwise less. Fairer but weaker, and somewhat dumber. As befitted their role. They cared about the children while men cared about everything else.

What no woman has ever answered when questioned. Where’s your William Blake? Uneducated, poor as dirt, and still one of the shining geniuses of all time. 

Just one of a long long list of questions. Where’s your Shakespeare? Your Newton? Your Mozart? Your Jesus Christ? Your Buddha and Confucius? Your Einstein and Tesla? Your Socrates, Plato, Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Keats, Shelley, Dickens, Eliot, even Fitzgerald and Hemingway? You’ve had the time in the last hundred years to compete. Only one female genius in all that time. Virginia Woolf. Which is to say that women are capable of genius on occasion. Just not like what men do.

What men do. Mont St. Michelle. The pyramid at Gizeh. The Eiffel Tower. The Chrysler Building. The cathedral at Chartres. DNA. Muhammed Ali and Michael Jordan, Sandy Koufax, Abraham Lincoln.

Where’s your Sistene Chapel?

Women’s literature. Right. The Brontës. Margaret Mitchell. Erica Jong. Little known but true. Dickens did the Brontë’s down in a single late great novel called ‘Our Mutual Friend.’ Superior by far to the Gothic fantasies of ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Wuthering Heights,’ he almost casually brushed aside all the clichéed archetypes of a minor thingy in the literature of the time. 

Of course, we’ve had a dozen movie versions of ‘Jane Eyre.’ Doesn’t make women good writers. Any more than all the other women writers are good. Willa Cather. Pearl Buck. Susan Sontag. Sylvia Plath. Sappho (a few dozen lines of Lesbian poetry, yawn…),  and the wholesale destruction of the historical novel genre beginning with ‘Gone With the Wind,’ once remembered by a real critic as the best piece of writing that is not literature. Me. I’m still getting over Jong’s “zipless fuck.”

So they’ve had 100 years of the vote. What have they contributed? Almost nothing. Answer my questions. Until then, I will stand by my rants in ‘The Naked Woman.’ Still available at Amazon.com. 

Just like my comments on the Hive…