Letters to the Editor
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Yoo-hoo Pendragon3, you goodly wench...
Riiiight. It wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that the guy is an extremely well-known author writing in an extremely well-known publication.
The fact that Hitchens is smart, funny, and not exactly a reactionary is what explains the extent of the furor (yes! furor!). If Robert Novak wrote that women aren't funny in the Wall Street Journal, no one would give a shit. A year later, no one would remember. Think about it.
But sure, I'll take your word for it. The best thing to do when someone promotes an assholish generalization about an entire class of people in a national forum is to ignore it.
That would certainly be preferable to reinforcing Hitchens' thesis with a slew of unfunny, ad hominem, hysterical(!) letters.
That advice sure sounds like a win-win for assholes -- say something ridiculous and it will either go unanswered or you can claim that the fact that people bothered answering showed that it is true. (By the way, most of the responses here and elsewhere, except for mine, have been fairly temperate and/or humorous.)
Well, from a purely practical perspective, those "answering" Hitchens haven't done their side any favors. (The only humor I've been able to glean from the responses I've seen so far has been unintentional...like the dude who claimed *snort* that Roseanne Barr was *guffaw* attractive.)
Also, who gets to define what's funny? Yeah, I thought so.
Who gets to define anything? C'mon sister, don't resort to that. Funny is funny, and your funny isn't necessarily my funny, but I think we can all agree that Louis CK is funny.
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what you say?
"And because fear is the mother of superstition, and because they are partly ruled in any case by the moon and the tides, women also fall more heavily for dreams, for supposedly significant dates like birthdays and anniversaries, for romantic love, crystals and stones, lockets and relics, and other things that men know are fit mainly for mockery and limericks."
As a guy, I see a totally different interpretation of this paragraph than Le does.
Hitchens expresses an admiration for women's close connection to nature, outside of any procreative abilities.
While he does describe the lockets and crystals as examples of petty, frivolous things, it is because they are examples of things that almost universally only women appreciate.
So, women are closer to nature, their hormones and moods are more driven by outside factors, such as tides and astrological alignments, thus the emphasis on dreams and, by imputation of Hitchen's trajectory, on divination, coincidence, repeating events, and other mysterious factors tied to mind and nature. All a very respectful position really.
Where I differ with him is that men are also affected by tides and nature, but we express it differently. Our lack of interest in trinkets is more due to women's traditional role as the gatekeeper, the one required to quantify the devotion of a potential suitor. Trinkets are a convenient way, a token symbol of barter, to exchange that sentiment between the sexes.
Hitchens seems brave to attack these gender issues but I find his analyses to somewhat lack depth, particularly in his lack of self-awareness.
It is funny how quickly feminists bristle at ANY guy writing about ANYTHING related to women. Deeply disturbing. But this is no surprise, feminism has lost its way a long time ago and is now fashionably decadent, chopping into anything vulnerable with glee as compensation for it having no more purpose.
Men and their sentiments are deeply vulnerable but the attacks on the men are all too juicy fodder for the man haters who love to collapse any poetry and misinterpret everything through the most negative, damning lenses-- dark, cloudy, shaded lenses of evil that leave no room for men on this planet. No wonder men retreat and recoil from women. IT is a time honored tradition for women to rip into and destroy men's natural poeticism.
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This sentence is deeply distressing in what it implies
And more interestingly, why does choose to surround himself with such women?
and indicative of just how far feminism has fallen apparently.
Le Castor Oil thinks it should be the preference of a man to go for a woman who he primarily can carry on a platonic intellectual conversation.
Men are human too though. We adore those mysterious dank musky elements of life. The animal ummmph. We adore women for their natural sensuality and divine connection to nature. The motion of the spirit. The impulses of someone driven, consumed by ecstasy for life.
Intellectual is nice. REAL LIFE is far deeper than Le can imagine and certainly far more complex than Le would ever let any man become a part of.
I suppose in Le's mind, all men are but weird robots to defeat or train, but mostly to act as sounding boards for her hoary but false theories. I guess our role is to be little idle gnomes, to sit on a shelf and accept our inert little fate.
Sad, disturbing, depressing, and ultimately nihilistic. I am glad I have weaned myself away from feminists and their nasty, nasty completely, utterly self-serving and deeply mistaken ways, ways that have little to nothing to do with equality or rights or fairness between the sexes.
Certainly NOTHING to do with respect for men.
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@Pro-laugh
The fact that Hitchens is smart, funny, and not exactly a reactionary . . .
I would disagree with that characterization of Hitchens. I don't think he is dumb, but I never heard him to be considered funny. And as far as "not exactly a reactionary . . . " -- my god! Everything he writes about women seems extremely reactionary. He's like the definition of reactionary.
But be that as it may, you seem to be conceding my point. People aren't responding to Hitchens assertion because it is true, but because of who Hitchens is -- i.e. a national celebrity -- and where he published his piece.
That would certainly be preferable to reinforcing Hitchens' thesis with a slew of unfunny, ad hominem, hysterical(!) letters . . .
Well, that was EXACTLY what I was getting at in one of my earlier comments when I pointed out that women's alleged humorlessness is the ultimate sexist slur. Those who invoke the slur attempt to box women into a corner -- you can't answer it any kind of serious way without reinforcing the idea that women are humorless. At the same time, however, the slur reinforces a serious point about women being not-quite-human pains-in-the-ass. (Plenty of women have answered this idea in a humorous way, but personally, I don't care about trying to "prove" that I have a sense of humor.)