11. The Silly Souls of Men

Masculine woolly-mindedness has been a source of female power for a long way back.⁶⁹69 Robert Ardrey, op.cit., p.138.

The head of the average man is packed with silly beliefs about men and women. Like fumes of booze that boost the ego, these beliefs cloud up man’s perception, and leave him swaggering and staggering through life like a hopeless drunk, to be taken advantage of by any woman who wants to.

Among the most notorious of his beliefs are that women are weak and fragile; that men are cleverer than women; that women are fickle, passive, irrational, helpless and sentimental; that men are superior to women in the natural order of the universe; that women are mysterious. These beliefs are so palpably silly that any clear-eyed and fair-minded observer can only agree with Marie Corelli who spoke of the “silly souls of men”⁷⁰70 Judy Allen and Dyan Sheldon, op.cit., p.168. by which women entrap them.

A sober look at the actual world yields quite a different picture. It shows that women are far less fragile and weak than they pretend to be; that women are cleverer than men; that their fickleness, passivity, irrationality and helplessness are calculated instruments of power; that women are far less sentimental, but more down-to-earth, cynical and ruthless than men; that, in so far as a natural order exists, women are, within it, superior to men; and that women are not mysterious at all, but only appear so owing to male foolishness. Let us go through these popular male illusions and see how badly they accord with the realities, and how women use them to exploit and rule men.

Are women weak and fragile?

Are women weak and fragile? At any rate, are they as weak and fragile as male pride imagines them to be? As we could all verify for ourselves, some men are physically stronger than some women, and some women are stronger than some men. Even if it is true that, on average, and in specific aspects, men are stronger than women, the difference is routinely exaggerated, by men so as to boost their egos, and by women so as to get men to do things for them.

I was once helping a friend help his girlfriend move her belongings out of a New York apartment. After taking a heavy trunk down to the moving van, we were huffing and puffing our way back up the stairs. As soon as the woman and a girlfriend of hers saw us, they dropped a mattress they were carrying to the elevator, and began to complain that it was too heavy! Yet, before they saw us, they carried it with no visible difficulty!

The idea of the stronger male is often dramatized by the image of a weak, defenceless wife cowering before blows from her huge husband. Yet incidents of husbands who are battered by their much stronger wives abound. Much is not heard of these for two reasons: male pride would not advertise the fact, and women’s dissembling often gives the impression that the husband-battering wife is herself the battered wife. Here is a story of a dissembling bedroom terrorist, as it was reported in the Nigerian press by a woman columnist:

Just recently, a colleague recounted his experience with one of his neighbours. Cotenants used to look at the husband of this woman with distaste — what with her constant shrills of pain and cries that her husband was beating the life out of her. On the day in question, my colleague could no longer stand the woman’s heart-rending cries for help. He tried the couple’s door; it was locked as usual. Out of desperation, he climbed through to their balcony to try to appeal to the callous man through their bedroom window. He told me: ‘I was surprised to find the woman riding on the back of her husband and giving him a good pummelling, and at the same time screaming at the top of her voice that she was being beaten to death.‘⁷¹71 Bunmi Fadase, "Talk about 'Battered-Men'", The Punch (Lagos), July 11, 1983, p.4.

As in the matter of physical strength, the customary contrast between female fragility and male sturdiness enables women to push unto men as much as possible of the world’s tough and risky jobs. Because it helps them to exploit men, women have a vested interest in making themselves look more fragile than they really are. In fact, one of the perennial objectives of female fashion is to heighten the illusion of female fragility.

The devices used for this purpose have ranged from foot binding in old China; through tight corsets that produced on the women of Victorian England the illusion of an hourglass waist, just waiting to break; to the high-heeled shoes of the modern West. The Victorian illusion of female fragility was given both a physical and a psychological dimension, through a self-presentation which combined a thin waist, a pale skin which showed every blush, and fainting fits which called for smelling salts. Such a woman would appear so fragile in body and soul that any gallant man would feel obliged to reach out and support her.

In 20th century Western fashion, the high heel is the foundation for the elaborate disguising of female sturdiness. Consider a woman who has dieted herself down to twiggy thinness; who stuffs herself into a skirt that is tight about the knees or ankles, hindering her from taking long and vigorous strides; who then perches herself on stiletto heels, to produce an overall effect of a tall, thin, willowy masquerade walking on wobbly stilts. The impression she has carefully created is of an adult who cannot balance firmly on her own two feet. Like an invalid who can hardly stand up straight, her figure cries out for help, for a sturdy man to sweep her off her feet and carry her across a windy street, or up a hill path; or better yet, for some gallant who will pull up beside her in a Rolls Royce and save her the obvious difficulty of walking down the street. Given her self-created image of helplessness, what man would be so ill-mannered, so ungallant as to ask her to carry a heavy, bulky box and step across a gutter?

A man once got a woman to take off her high heels and her knee-tight skirt. As she stood on her stockinged feet, as firm and stable on the ground as one of Degas’ dancers, he exclaimed:

Look at those ankles! Look at those calves! Where is the fragile, willowy woman who was staggering in the breeze a while ago? So that’s what those high heels are about? So that’s what tight-kneed skirts are about?

At which the lady picked up her handbag and struck him, drawing blood from his lip! Yes, women’s craftiness in hiding their sturdiness and strength is extraordinary.

Are men cleverer?

Women may not be as weak or fragile as they look; but aren’t men certainly cleverer? Now, now; men the cleverer sex? These creatures that women fool with a bit of face paint here, some finery there, and a smile under dimmed lights? These gulls who can be subdued with a trickle of actress’ tears, or confused with a sliver of thigh showing through a split in the skirt? These fools who, down through history, have been stuck with clearing the marshes, digging the coal, and getting bloodied in battle? They the cleverer sex? Ridiculous, simply ridiculous!

Lest we forget, cleverness is not demonstrated by getting stuck with the hardest, dirtiest, riskiest jobs in the world, but by dumping them on others. Even in the routine matter of winning a living, any woman who doesn’t want to be bothered with it manages to dump it on some man: either her father, or her lover, or her husband, or her sons and sons-in-law. Yet who are so stupid as to claim that they are cleverer than women? The very same men who serve women!

In the West, some of these men, especially the brawny robots who are so easily manipulated by women, will go so far as to speak of the “dumb blonde” as the ultimate in human stupidity. Yet, to look into the matter is to discover that the allegedly dumb blonde is no such thing! She lives rich by expending little more than the yellowness of her hair. She uses her yellow hair to rule the heart and pick the pocket of some blonde-obsessed macho with more money than sense. She laughs her way through an easy life and into a hefty inheritance. If anything, she is a great maximizer of returns, cleverly getting the best of life with the least effort. Frankly, the proverbial “dumb blonde” is probably the cleverest thing in the world.

And if a “dumb blonde” is actually stupid at things which need intellectual sophistication, well why not? In her world, all the mental calisthenics she needs is to say her wish and some blonde-struck macho would move mountains to satisfy it. Any wonder if she should fail to exercise, let alone build up her brainpower? Anyway, however dumb a “dumb blonde” actually is, she is still cleverer than any man she rules through his worship of her yellow hair; for how can one be cleverer than one’s ruler? In any case, the degree of a “dumb blonde’s” dumbness is a direct measure of just how little brains it takes a woman to rule even the cleverest of men.

It must be conceded that a beautiful woman does not need much brains to get what she wants in life. As the Igbo say, beauty is woman’s wealth. Stupid though a beautiful woman may be, when she presses the appropriate button on his ego, some big, clever robot will do her bidding. If she says: “I bet you aren’t man enough to lift that rock,” his taunted ego would respond: “Not man enough to lift that little pebble?” And to prove that he is indeed Superman, our Samson will sprain his spine and risk a hernia to lift a ten-ton rock all by himself.

Faced with the chore of doing the family accounts, she will slip out of it by saying: “Darling! You know I don’t have a head for numbers. Be an angel and give your brilliant attention to these bank statements.” And to live up to the flattery, he will work all night on the accounts while she gets her beauty sleep. Yet, all that notwithstanding, the robot actually believes that he is cleverer than his manipulator!

Women, alas, are not stupid. But being brilliant manipulators, they choose to appear stupid so as not to wound the male ego with the truth. As a result, men appear cleverer than women, but only in the dumb male’s eyes. And whenever a woman is sorely tempted to stop dissembling, and to show just how clever she is, the female superego, alias “The Angel in the House,” would whisper to her (as it reportedly did to Virginia Woolf):

Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own.⁷²72 Karen Payne, op.cit., p.3.

And why should she not obey? What does she lose by allowing her slave to believe whatever nonsense makes him work tirelessly for her?

Men do need to look with skeptical eyes at women’s show of stupidity. When men do, they will discover, probably to their shock, that it is a calculated stupidity in the service of cupidity. And they must concede that it takes great cleverness to feign such stupidity successfully.

Fickleness, passivity, irrationality, helplessness and sentimentality

Men claim that women are fickle, passive, irrational, helpless and sentimental. To the extent that these claims are true, these characteristics are not the marks of weakness or inferiority which men presume them to be: rather, they are proof of women’s supremacy, and they also serve as tools of female power.

Isn’t fickleness a trait of arbitrary power? Any subordinate soon learns not to be fickle toward his superior; fickleness in a subordinate is called unreliability, and it is one luxury he cannot afford unless he wishes to be fired. Only male despots, like Stalin or Louis XIV, can be as fickle as the average woman.

And isn’t passivity a mark of enormous power and privilege? Note how the ceaseless activity of worker bees serves the passive queen bee!

And isn’t much of woman’s show of irrationality a part of her power play, a ruse to frustrate men into yielding to her whatever is at issue? She puts on an act so irrational that the exasperated man, in exchange for some peace and sanity around the house, grants her whatever it is she wants. When seen in their proper light, her fickleness, passivity and irrationality are not signs of weakness or inferiority, but rather testaments to woman’s superior powers. They are, indeed, not the traits of serfs, but the privileges of princesses.

The illusion of female helplessness is also a handy weapon against men. It ought to be pretty obvious, especially after the triumphs of women in previously male careers, that anything man can do woman can also do, except inseminate women. So woman is, intrinsically, no more helpless than man. But exaggerating her helplessness serves her well: it helps to get men to work for her, from opening doors to fighting wars that safeguard her interests. On the domestic front, she frequently takes the most outrageous advantage of her alleged helplessness. For instance, consider this case of a man who discovered his wife’s infidelity. Confronted with the evidence, she eventually confessed, but added: “I shan’t see him anymore; if you left me, I wouldn’t know what to do”. With his gallantry thus triggered by her alleged helplessness, he let her get away with her serious breach of their marital contract!

The male illusion that women are sentimental probably derives from the fact that women are given to such emotional displays as hugging and crying, indulge in baby-talk with babies, and are avid readers and prolific writers of romances. It is therefore presumed that they are not ruthless, tough-minded or cynical. As usual, the realities are rather different.

In a letter to Madame Mohl, an old family friend of hers, Florence Nightingale, the famous Lady with the Lamp, said:

You say women are more sympathetic than men. Now if I were to write a book out of my experience, I should begin, Women have no sympathy. Yours is the tradition — mine is the conviction of experience.⁷³73 Ibid., p.109.

One mother, writing to one of her daughters, said of another daughter:

Annie is a hard wee nut, don’t get taken in by her tears, she can turn them on at the touch of a button.⁷⁴74 Ibid., p.239.

That should make us wonder at any woman’s ever ready river of actress’ tears!

And in comparing her father, Pandit Nehru, with herself, Indira Gandhi said:

I am less romantic and emotional than he was. Women are more down to earth than men.⁷⁵75 Quoted in South magazine (London), December 1984, p.19.

These claims are borne out by a recent research on European and American women by Professor Donald Kanter. According to a press report:

Kanter, a psychologist at Boston University, conducted a survey of 2250 European women for an advertising firm. He uncovered layer upon layer of ‘staggering cynicism.’ Eight out of 10 women thought most people lie to get what they want, more than 80 per cent agreed that people inwardly dislike putting themselves out to help others, and that it’s harder and harder to make true friends. ‘I’d expect the gentler sex to be softer, more charitable,’ Kanter concluded. ‘The responses we got showed most European women think people are liars, reality is money, and an unselfish person is a pathetic figure. That’s why they despised Jimmy Carter.’ Kanter has now finished a new survey of middle class American wives and is dismayed by the results. About 50 per cent believe that most people are just out for themselves and nearly two-thirds agree with the European women that by and large human beings are selfish, mendacious and money mad. ‘The central tendencies are quite alarming,’ Kanter said. ‘I never expected to see numbers so large.‘⁷⁶76 "The Cynic in Mrs. America", in "Jeremy Campbell's Washington Letter", The Standard (London) March 10, 1982, p.7.

Poor Professor Kanter! One of his cherished illusions about women seems to have been shattered, and he seems quite shocked! One may well marvel at the sentimental education which blinded him to women’s basic cynicism. Anyway, if Florence Nightingale and Indira Gandhi are to be believed, Kanter’s finding is not outlandish, and the cynic in Mrs America is the cynic in every girl.

Male superiority

Man’s belief that he is naturally superior to woman is perhaps the greatest tribute ever paid to male conceit by wilful blindness: evidence to the contrary is everywhere. Just consider this. All that a woman has to do for sex, whether for pleasure or procreation, is signal her availability and, unless she is unspeakably ugly and stinking, there will be a stampede of men competing for the chance to service her. The poor devils must show their credentials, and must pass whatever test she sets, or she will deny them access to herself. Yet it is these very males — who have to fight and claw at one another; who have to woo, cajole, beg or even resort to rape to gain access to her — it is these very pitiful males who proudly declare themselves superior to her! They conveniently forget (for their own ego’s sake) to ask: What would they themselves say of candidates who claimed to be superior to those who interviewed, judged, selected and admitted them to positions for which they went down on their knees to beg?

The notion of male superiority is a noisy myth, a compensatory boast, born of men’s acute consciousness of inferiority. Rather than being inferior to man, woman’s superiority is incontestable, and is based on the womb. After all, the achievements of even a Caesar are but credentials which he tenders before a woman when he competes with rival suitors for the use of her womb.

Woman’s mysteriousness

Man’s sense of woman’s mysteriousness was there at the dawn of history, and persists till this day. Ancient Pharaonic Egyptians recorded it in the saying: “One does not ever discover the heart of a woman anymore than one knows the sky.”⁷⁷77 Miriam Lichtheim, op.cit., p.195. A 19th century Britisher, Coventry Patmore, echoed them:

A woman is a foreign land, Of which, though there he settle young, A man will ne’er quite understand The customs, politics, and tongue.⁷⁸78 Judy Allen and Dyan Sheldon, op.cit., p.90.

And even Sigmund Freud, the great explorer of the human psyche, confessed:

The great question… which I have not been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?‘⁷⁹79 Who Said What When?, London: Bloomsbury, 1988, p.271.

And on any day, you will find some man somewhere baffled into asking the same perennial question: “What does a woman want?”

Why do men find women so baffling? The answer, as a German woman, Eva Figes, put it, is that “man’s vision of woman is not objective, but an uneasy combination of what he wishes her to be.”⁸⁰80 Judy Allen and Dyan Sheldon, op.cit., p.92. Of course, this lack of an objective view is precisely why woman, who he does not allow himself to see as she is, baffles man. If he ever took the trouble to observe and study woman, instead of projecting his fantasies and wishes onto her, he would find her much less of a mystery.

In my view, men would understand women much better by avoiding one subjective error. Because men’s chief interest in women is sexual, men are prone to think that women’s chief interest in men is also sexual. In so doing, they overlook the point that men and women are biologically complementary rather than identical; and that, therefore, their main interest in each other would be complementary rather than identical. This elementary error is the key to men’s historic inability to understand women. When women’s behaviour is analyzed from the standpoint of men’s interests and needs, it becomes incomprehensible, and quite rightly too.

Women, of course, do not make a similar mistake; they do not confuse men’s key interest in women with their own in men. Having grasped men’s key interest in women, they use it to analyse men’s behaviour, and that is why they find men so transparent that one woman, Jackie Robb, could say: “You can tell all you need to know about a man by the way he peels an orange.”⁸¹81 Ibid., p.171. By the way, that women so easily understand men, and that men find women so baffling, is additional evidence that women are cleverer than men.

However, it should not be too difficult for those who have understood the mysteries of the universe, including evolution and quantum physics, to understand women, provided they look and see and think. If men start from the complementarity of the sexes; if they accept that men pursue wealth, fame, honour and power for the love of women (i.e. in order to trade these for access to a womb); if they heed the Igbo saying that beauty is woman’s wealth and wealth man’s beauty, then they would realise how natural it is for women’s aim to be the trading of their womb and beauty for a share of men’s wealth, fame, honour, power, and status. By focussing on women’s key interest, women’s behaviour becomes readily understandable and far from mysterious. In brief, woman’s mysteriousness is projected unto her by the muddled male mind.

On the whole, contrary to men’s ego-boosting illusions, man may be the brawnier and brainier sex; woman is not the weaker but the wilier sex. However helpless and sentimental women may appear to be, in those things which matter to them they are less sentimental, less naive, more cynical, more ruthless, and more tenacious than men. If men could be even half as fickle, passive or irrational as women are, wouldn’t their lot be easier? As for the dogma that women are a sex inferior to men, it is simply stupid. Nobody who knows the ways of the world would accept it. Ask Chaucer, ask Boccaccio, ask the Chagga Elders. And as for the mysteriousness of women, it is a shadow cast upon them by male fuzzymindedness. All these silly male illusions enable women to manipulate and rule men; and that is why mothers, and all other women, would rather encourage than dispel them.