On Women

An important idea in this blog is the idea that two people working together are better than 1. However on second look how is it that a man and a women create more work together than each by themselves? Most obviously the creation of children is the exemplar of this observation. But it seems that women, in there very instinct, create work for men. It goes back to sex maybe.

A man is very different from a woman in the bed room. It seems to me that the work done in the bedroom is essentially the man's. Indeed women try to please men by doing very many things but what I mean is that for the woman to be satisfied requires work from the man. It is very much easier for a man to please himself! This leads to men being accused of being selfish in bed - but isn't this because women can't? This fundemental difference it seems extends to everything. Jane Austin it seems twisted the truth to get the premise of her famous book which opens: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." Only a woman could have written this because the truth, starkly prevalent in the actual substance of the book, is that all women want to be wife to a man in possession of a good fortune! That I believe is the actually acknowledged truth, but an interesting literary strategy never-the-less from Austin to declare the opposite of the truth upon which the book then ironically then proceeds to operate. I can't find the quote from hollywood actress that i found while researching the best man speech but it says roughly that marriage can't ever work because a man wants peace and a woman only ever wants to cause trouble. This it seems (in my limited experience) just seems to be true.

In the new BBC series Ancient Civilisations the narrator refers to a letter written by a wife Lamasi (need to check spellings) to her merchant husband who has moved away to trade her "textiles". She is complaining of him having taken all the household items with him and left her in poverty, which is a quite understandable thing to complain about. Her case isn't helped by her last point however that the neighbour Salima Huum has built a house twice the size since he left. This sounds very familar to me. The letter isn't really about her poverty it is about the age old preoccupation of women of setting up homes and showing off to other people their success. A house buying discussion board during the financial crisis was full of men admitting that it was their wives/girlfriends who drove them to buy a house against their better instincts.

Now I accept many men do the same in a different sphere of life namely building business empires and showing off to other men their success by what they wear, what they own and the women they have in tow. But I don't accept that it is the women who are the oppressed in this arrangement. Rather I suspect the Jane Austins are carefully plying their trade to capture wealthy men and exploit their territory and capital. The films Alien/Aliens is about femaleness, child-birth, sexuality and species identity and I think the predatory way in which aliens prey on human victims is a very realistic analogy to the way that babies prey upon their female hosts. But in turn women prey on male hosts to realise the demands of the child also. It is that parasitic seed of the unborn foetus planted in the mind of woman which seems more than anything to command the behaviour of women and therefore the lives of men who have anything to do with women.

OK that is a very one sided point of view. I have at least one male friend who wanted children while his wife didn't. So it seems that men have the seed also. But the balance does seem to be in the favour of women. My own mother it turns out was the force behind my existence, my father had little interest. It is women certainly in my experience who dominate the cogs of the world and drive it forward seeking especially a stable domestic realm and a "better" life. They are famously the ones capitivated by the bright lights of shop windows and easily suckered in by sales strategies. Men it seems are famously dominated by one weakness, that of women, which is enough to ensure that they are ensnared enough by genes to ensure genome transmission to a new generation.

I have dreamed this week of this quandary and in my dreams been left with the above analysis that while women are attractive and have many positive qualities that make life with them worthwhile they also represent an increase in the amount of work and trouble in ones life that as far as I can ascertain in my dreams comes out equal. If we marry we gain a certain type of peace and satisfaction but we have to let go of ever being allowed to be peaceful as our wife will always be driving us into action; like the dust she will toil her whole life to remove from mantle pieces and tables. On the other hand if we remain single we lose the happiness of domesticity but gain the solid repose of not being goaded by insatisable appetites and endless toil.