Men have many faults, women only two: Everything they say, and everything they do.’
The fact is, men have abused women from the day Eve was born out of Adam’s rib. They have created myths about their being low in intelligence, poor in physique, devious in their ways and totally unreliable and repeated them ad nauseam so long that most women accepted them to be true and developed an inferiority complex. It was only in the last century that women began to question assumptions of male superiority, claimed equal rights and hit back with vigour at their denigrators as male chauvinist pigs. While men have conceded that women are every bit as good as they in all fields of activity, women have not forgiven them for the centuries of humiliation they had to suffer and constantly remind them of their past misdeeds.
I recall an exercise in female vendetta: In Her Master’s Voice: Five Thousand Years of Put-Downs and Pin-Ups a compilation made by Tama Stair, a journalist and director of numerous advertising agencies. She had no right to grieve against sexual discrimination but nevertheless thought it best to keep men reminded how nasty and brutish their male ancestors had been to women on her mother’s side. She quoted rustic proverbs, sacred texts, founders of religions like Zarathustra, the Buddha and Martin Luther, philosophers like Aristotle, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung down to oafs like Adolf Hitler to make men of the present generation squirm at their forefathers’ pronouncements against women.
There is a Punjabi proverb that women’s brains are located in the heels of their feet. A German parallel runs ‘a woman has the form of an angel, the heart of a serpent, and the mind of an ass.’ Till modern times a woman was regarded as her husband’s property to be treated or disposed of as he willed. Shakespeare in The Taming of the Shrew summed it up thus:
I will be the master of what is mine own:
She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house,
My household stuff, my field, my barn,
My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything.
Even Leo Tolstoy, the enlightened philosopher-writer, had a very low opinion of female morality: ‘So-called decent women are different from whores mainly on that whores are less dishonest.’ Hindu sages believed that ‘they who are full of sin beget daughters.’ Milton was not far away in subscribing to the same kind of belief:
… Oh! why did God,
Creator wise, that people’s highest Heaven
With Spirits Masculine, create at last
This noveltie on Earth this fair defect of Nature, (Woman)..?
Women were believed to have an insatiable appetite for sex. Shiekh Omar En-Nefzawi in his classic The Perfumed Garden has this episode:
Long ago there lived a woman named Moarbeda, a noted philosopher who was reputed to be the wisest person of her time. It is recorded that one day some questions were put to her, and these were some of her replies:
In what part of woman ‘s body does her mind reside? Between her thighs.
And in what place does she experience her greatest pleasure?
The same.
And what is a woman ‘s religion?
Her vulva.
And with what part of herself does she love and hate?
The same …We give our vulva to the man we love and refuse it to the man we hate.
Although we men at times talk of the chastity of women, deep down we fear their sexuality. There is a Sanskrit proverb which says: ‘In the absence of men all women are chaste.’ There are innumerable references in English literature to women never saying no to sex and even when they say ‘no’ they mean ‘yes’. A passage in the Ramayana asserts that even married women are not immune to sexual temptation:
Women that are of good family, beautiful and well married do not stay within the moral bounds. This is the failing in women … Even those women who are held in high esteem watched over and loved, they too, given the chance, will fasten even unto hunchbacks, the blind, simpletons, dwarfs, and cripples … And when women cannot come on to a man at all, they even fall lustfully on one another, for they will never be true to their husbands … …There is not a man they would not go to – be he old or young, handsome or ugly – for they think to themselves only: ‘He is a man, and I want to enjoy him …’
The fire has never too many logs, the great sea never too many rivers, death has never too many beings of all the kinds, and lovely-eyed woman has never too many men. This, O divine Rishi, is the secret of all women. So as soon as a woman sees a handsome man, her vulva becomes moist … Not the richest enjoyment of their wishes, not ornaments, nor protection and home do they hold in such esteem as satisfaction and pleasure in love.
The god of death, the wind, the underworld, the ever burning entrance to hell, the knife-edge, poison, serpent, and fire – women are all of these in one.
Ever since the five elements have been, and the worlds have been made, ever since men and women were made – ever since then, these faults have been in women.
Bharthruhari asserted that ‘women have one man in their hearts, another in their words and still another in their arms.’ A Polish proverb put it more bluntly: ‘Water, fire and women will never say “enough”.’ And a Chinese proverb held: ‘When a woman’s lips say “it is enough”, she looks at you with her eyes and they say “again”. Sheikh Omar of The Perfumed Garden waxes on the theme:
Men, hear my words about woman,
Her lust is writ between her eyes.
Heed not her words, though she be the
Sultan’ s daughter;
Her malice is infinite …
Men, beware and delay the love of woman,
Never say ‘I love you’
Or ‘This is my companion.’
She loves you only while you’re thrusting –
That kind of love can’t last.
Lying on her breast, you love her …
Fool! In the morning she’ll call you a pig.’
And this too is something nobody questions:
Wives entertain slaves in the husband’s bed.
Trust a woman and lose your head!
Women are not reliable, asserts Aby Nuwas (A.D.800):
Rely not on women, trust not in their hearts;
Their faith is found in their private parts.
The French existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, could be unbelievably crude in his references to female sexuality:
The obscenity of the feminine sex is that of everything which “gapes open”. It is an appeal to being as all holes are. In herself woman appeals to a strange flesh which is to transform her into a fullness of being by penetration and dissolution … beyond any doubt, her sex is a mouth and a voracious mouth which devours the penis – a fact which can easily lead to the idea of castration. The amorous act is the castration of the man: but this is above all because sex is a hole.
In short, no lady can ever be a gentleman because when she is bad she is unbelievably bad. Wrote James Barrie:
Oh the gladness of her gladness when she’s glad,
And the sadness of her sadness when she’s sad;
But the gladness of her gladness,
And the sadness of her sadness,
Are as nothing, Charles,
To the badness of her badness when she is bad.
That’s the sentiment behind Kipling’s oft-quoted line: ‘the female of the species is deadlier than the male.’
Are women more jealous and envious than males?
Freud believed they are. As the women’s lib movement gathered force, male resentment got stronger. In an interview Evel Knievel, an American, said: ‘Women’s libbers are a pain in the ass. I treat women the way I always did, except I treat women’s libbers different: if I catch one, I try and screw her a little harder.’
A logical consequence of the deeply ingrained suspicion against woman is the male outlook on the institution of marriage: women trap them into it. ‘If wives were good, God would have had one,’ says a Georgian proverb. ‘Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same,’ goes a British joke. ‘The sooner it is ended, the better’. ‘A woman gives a man but two happy days: the day he marries her, and the day he buries her,’ said Hipponax (6th century B.C.).
However, it was always conceded that women have fatal attraction for men. A Chinese anecdote narrates: ‘A young monk, who had been raised from early childhood in the monastery, went one day with his teacher to the city. Seeing women for the first time, he asked his teacher what these might be. ‘They are tigers,’ replied the teacher, ‘and they will eat you up.’ Returning to the monastery, the boy seemed lost in thought. Finally he spoke: ‘If those are tigers, reverend Sir, then I would prefer to be eaten’.
Most men remain convinced that women enjoy being raped. Many years ago, the Mayor of Missouri pronounced ‘the difference between rape and seduction is salesmanship’.
The birth of a daughter has always been regarded as a calamity. ‘People ask me how many children I have,’ said the champion boxer Mohammed Ali, ‘and I say I have one son and seven mistakes.’
Adolf Hitler, as one might have suspected, believed that the women’s movement was a Jewish conspiracy. He said: ‘The message of woman’s emancipation is a message discovered solely by the Jewish intellect and its content is stamped with the same spirit.’ He was not the only one to believe that women had no brains. ‘Brains are never a handicap to a girl if she hides them under a see-through blouse,’ wrote an American wit. ‘Educating a beautiful woman is like pouring honey into a fine Swiss watch; everything stops’ said Kurt Vonnegut.
The great wit of the British parliament, Sir Alan Patrick Herbert, wrote of his female preferences:
I like them fluffy – I know it’s bad taste –
With fluffy soft looks and a Bower at the waist,
With golden hair flying, like mist round the moon
And lips that seem sighing, ‘You must kiss me soon’,
No huffy & or stuffy & not tiny or tall
Butt fluffy, just fluffy, with no brains at all.
According to Leo Berg, women express the best through their breasts: ‘A woman’s breast is the organ with which she is able to express herself most intelligently. It is her language and poetry, her history and her music, her purity and her desire … The bosom is the central organ of all female ideas, wishes, and moods.’ A 17th century English proverb sums it all up: Men have many faults, women only two: ‘Everything they say, and everything they do.’