19 Dec 2011

Women

2011? Jesus, how did you arrive here - on your dinosaur? Click here to go to hencewise.com, and stop a weirdo holding a candle in the dark, looking all dramatic and old-fashioned.





“The female of the species is more deadly than the male” – Rudyard Kipling, 1911.


Men are useless now. Years ago, back in monkey times, women needed us for a few things; we had to kill animals, and gather vegetables and sticks and carry them home without losing ourselves or dropping them, especially during pregnancy; we had to use our superior physical strength to fight or kill other poor idiot blokes like us when food was scarce; and finally, importantly, our ugly, shoddily-evolved genitals contained exactly half of the key formula for making more of us (along with all the evolutionary imperatives of grabby-gropey hormones.) Not any more.

While women still contain the all-important wombs and mammary glands, of course, whatever men were bringing to the baby-making equation – which was only ever a teaspoon of slop, anyway – they’ve had stored and refrigerated in sperm banks en masse and worldwide for years. If I was a paranoid man – and if anyone ever tells you that I am, don’t trust them – I would look at paid sperm donation as the beginning marker of a global conspiracy to further shuffle men to the cliff-edges of a well-deserved extinction. The majority of smart women now already regard guys as oafish, dense sort of muscles on legs – shaved up-right gorillas that couldn’t open a jar and answer a question without somehow exploding a shed – and who can blame them? It’s a reputation we actively encourage as we bloke around the pub competing for girls’ attention like dim puppies, constantly and subconsciously ranking our cocks against each others through sports, cars, beer and lifting. We’ve only ever had about two useful purposes throughout history anyway: sperm and strength; just about everything else we did involved getting in the way and murdering each other. Now women have access to incredible, industrial machinery, guns, sex toys, votes, and all the spunk, men are basically redundant, and it won’t be long before women start to realise this, and hopefully wonder why in the name of name of God’s ovaries they are still putting up with so much of our shit.

Because men, almost exclusively through the use or threat of aggression, have oppressed and subjugated women on-and-off, but mostly on, throughout history, with rape and violence, then religion and politics, then war and wages, then cultural and emotional control, and then porn and Lynx adverts.

But that tide, however slowly, is retreating.

Imagine a future where all men suddenly vanished from the planet – women, you can pretend we all simultaneously burst in a shower of glitter and compassion, if you’d like – the human race would surely not only survive with only the slight, lubricated aid of pipettes, but it’s not a difficult feat to imagine it would absolutely flourish; perhaps towards some kind of glorious war-and-worry-free utopia, with free-range flowers and fair-trade orgasms everywhere, and a future fresh generation of good boys that actually magically respected the women who birthed them. Reverse the occasion, though, getting rid of all the ladies – and men, you can imagine some terminal frantic orgy, if that helps – and not only would the complete extinction of humanity be looming within a lifespan, but that time would be spent in a violent one-handed rampant haze of reckless masturbatory abandon, rendering every continent uninhabitable to complex life by breakfast.

This photo teaches us something about something, probably


Men in their current form, then, are doomed, but fortunately for us (men, of which I am one) we still have some time to resist our fate -- a lucky and much needed head-start to improve ourselves -- because some of the silliest women now are still not quite over keeping themselves down. Ignoring the constant incredible cycle of make-up, plucking, shaving, bleaching, scrubbing, dying, waxing, cutting, trimming, poking, pulling, pushing, nipping, tucking, wearing of self-inflicted high-heeled torture devices, and whatever-else-society-encourages women to do in order to appear 'younger' or ‘prettier’ for us gnarled lumps, the worst culprits, in my opinion, are still the women who insist on being treated like a woman. “Chivalry is dead,” moans Nora Mongingbottom, a woman who is in no way fictional, whenever a man doesn’t hold the door for her, or pull out her chair first, or hit someone who insults her fat ankles. Brave women jumped in front of horses for that kind of equality, and every time some pie-footed dolt like Nora insists on preferential treatment purely because of their gender, they’re ignorantly menstruating all over those achievements, and giving some men exactly the excuse they need to keep oppressing women.

It is almost exactly these kinds of women, too, that are often the ones expecting men to buy them drinks at the bar in exchange for their company, or the potential chance of some future fucking, and reinforcing, always, the idea that they are sex objects – slightly subtle prostitutes that need only be paid with a dozen vodka-cokes and a casual compliment. Indeed, the withholding of sex, at all, by less liberated women is perhaps part of this same sad power struggle, even though this party-pooping peskiness relies at some level on the puritan notion that women don't need or enjoy sex as much as men, which if you are a woman, or have ever had sex with one in the correct hole, is clearly wacky. All the orgasms and the bouncing and the cuddling and such, it’s equally good fun for everyone, but once again some oppressive or self-censoring force seem to make it more difficult for women to indulge in the same entertaining, common and condomy exploits as men without earning some evil, oppressive label (far too often from their own camp) like 'slag,' 'slut,' or 'cock-slappy vagina wind-flaps whore-trousers.'

Regardless, it is the strongest women who do not seek sex for emotional validation, or withhold it for the same reason.

Agreed.


Yet it’s hard to find these positive role-models for young women in the Media today, led as they are in Music by sellotape-dressed twats covered scalp-to-toe-ring in a four-inch armour of make-up, slutting around on rooftops in front of on-fire helicopters, singing about lip-gloss and systematically exposing as much nipple and vagina as is currently legal to televise to teenagers; and in Literature and Cinema by Bella, the cooking, cleaning, can’t-smile, coma-dump, kill-yourself psycho-bint heroine of Twilight, a franchise that grossed enough money to reconstruct a Caribbean island in orbit entirely out of jaffa cakes, but has done about as much for the empowerment of women as 2 Girls 1 Cup. Indeed, even the young free-market economist and social activist Beyoncé Knowles, also the main one in popular arse-wobble unit Destiny’s Child and Jay-Z’s 100th problem, once praised “all the mommas who profit dollas,” [Child, D., “Independent Women,” 2000] but then later conceded in a radical reversal of her post-feminist stance (while thrusting and spanking herself in a swimsuit and heels) that “if you like it then you should have put a ring on it” [Knowles, B., “Singles Ladies (Put a Ring On It),” 2008].

"All I want is to be respected as a human and an artist. (Please untangle me.)"


Either way, while it is clear that more control is, and should be, shifting back towards women,  men have still obviously got a bit of time left to get their shit together, and develop at least some small reasons that women might want to keep us around if we want to have any part of a future rightfully belonging to peace-loving lesbians. I don’t know exactly how, but I’m guessing a good start would be to get over our runaway macho-macho bullshit, commit to the thinking of fairness, stop lying to get into girls’ pants, satisfy them when we do, give up words like ‘slut’ as nasty useless weapons, insist against our egos on sharing the bill and the drinks and the door-opening, stop calling women ‘crazy’ without the slightest acknowledgement that we may have helped, and learn that expressing a ‘girly’ emotion once in a while does in no way lessen our manly ability to punch to death a charging elephant.

SHE'S WATCHING YOU, MALE.
Then, and only then, may the future play out this common, heterosexual scenario:

A first date ends, and a ‘good’ first date it was too – there was some touching of the knee and elbow, not enough food because neither party wanted to be caught chewing, two bottles of whatever the fuck was 3 lines under the House wine (because nobody in their right mind knows anything about wine apart from what to order when they’re pretending they do), a bit of giggling and some eyebrows, one conversation about a mutually interesting topic like Paris or trombones, some lip-bitey business, then even a walk home that involved further cackling and some of those cheeky sentences with two possible meanings about "coming up" or "going down" or whatever. The increasingly convincing-looking pair eventually meander themselves intact all the way to the Man’s front door, and the Woman goes enthusiastically for The Kiss, maybe even a little penis, but the Man quickly pulls back. “I’ve had a lovely evening,” he says, “Good night.” He pecks her lightly on the cheek, and then jogs up the stairs, closing the door behind him. As the lady lingers on the step for a second, he leans back against the door and melts into a delirious dopey grin... before she finally turns away with a melancholy smile, hands deep in her pockets, the Man still on her mind, and walks away in to the long and lonesome night.

In conclusion, then, I'm not buying you a drink.

2011? Jesus, how did you arrive here - on your dinosaur? Click here to go to hencewise.com, and stop a weirdo holding a candle in the dark, looking all dramatic and old-fashioned.