Women

Women

C

ertain cultures (e.g. Japan) seem to produce charming, attractive women as naturally as a rose bush produces roses. Others (e.g. Hong Kong) produce mainly stinging nettles. A particularly dangerous plant is found in the Philippines. Though its flowers are often gorgeous, its thorns are poisonous and can inflict fatal wounds.

            It is a current truism that men are reticent and tongue-tied (does no one read poetry these days?) while women freely express their emotions. I have not found this to be so.

            Beautiful women are notoriously high-handed towards men. It is surprising how much more tolerant of them they become as they grow older.

            A woman who feels herself intellectually inferior to the man she is involved with – though not many do – generally resents him bitterly. Sooner or later, she will strike hard at him. This is so even if she has no pretensions to intellectuality herself and he is recognized as outstanding. Many women prefer stupid men, for then they can both manipulate and despise them – an irresistible combination. Men, of course, have always preferred to marry good-looking bimbos. Luckily there is more than enough stupidity to go round for all of us.

            Men seldom marry women cleverer than themselves, for they are frightened of them. If they do, they are either quite unaware of it or else almost childishly proud of their wives.

            “Women love men for their defects,’ said Wilde. They do so for two reasons. Firstly, they hope to reform them; secondly, they feel superior to the poor idiots.

            David once stupidly asked his first wife why she had never told him she loved him. Surprised, she replied that it had never occurred to her to do so. Indeed, she could not see the point of it. He learnt later that she reserved such confessions for her lovers. She had a view of marriage reminiscent of Restoration comedy. “Husband! Odious word! Pray, never mention it.”

            Many women prefer men younger than themselves. It helps them to regain the illusion of youth. This is true even of women in their twenties.

            A brilliant medical scientist in his late thirties hates his mother because she neglected him shamefully when young, even consigning him to an orphanage. He treats his numerous girl friends brutally, especially those who try to mother him. The only women he respects are those who treat him even more brutally than he treats them. He is thus unconsciously honouring his mother.

            Some men dwell constantly on their former lovers, like an oyster turning grit into a pearl. Women almost never do so, for they are more practical and less sentimental than men, knowing there is no point in crying over split milk, especially if they have split it themselves. No woman could ever have written A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. The nearest feminine counterpart to this is Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, a comparatively minor work. (The night after writing this, I saw Lessing on TV mentioning this very book! She said it was a historical statement, misinterpreted as a feminist tract.)

            A young man does not realize that often, if he wants to keep his girlfriend, he should be charmingly attentive to her mother. Sometimes, however, he does so because, subconsciously, it is the mother he wants and not her daughter. He then marries the wrong woman – and his mother-in-law, subconsciously, never forgives him for it.

            A young man of my acquaintance was judged and found wanting by his first loves’ steely-eyed mother. The daughter therefore rejected him, only to inflict disgrace upon her strait-laced family a year later by bearing an illegitimate child to a plausible Lothario whom the mother had approved of. This was, perhaps, the daughter’s unconscious revenge upon her mother. The daughter died young, as though to apologize to her mother – or to punish her further. The mother buried her daughter alongside her own three husbands and lived well into her nineties. This is not a world for the sensitive or the faint-hearted.

            Some men are compelled to transfer their entire libido from their mother to their first love. This is fatal, because not only will they turn against their mothers, but when their first love rejects them – as she is almost certain to do, given the Oedipal intensity of their passion – they will spend the rest of their lives hating her, often without realizing it. Like a piece of iron placed next to a compass, this Oedipal derangement will send them off course irrevocably.

            Some men are so obtuse and conceited that they frequently believe that a woman is fond of them or even in love with them, when actually she dislikes or despises them. Women never make such a mistake about men.

            The rarest of women is the spiritually intellectual. At one time, this species was confided almost entirely to the Continent, especially to France and Italy. One thinks of Maria Ardinghelli, Emilie du Chatelet, Laura Bassi, Maria Agnesi and others. Even rarer is the beautiful, multi-talented, spiritually intellectual.

While I was still in my early fifties, one of my wife’s friends used to enquire with false solicitude about my mental health. “Is he senile yet?” she would ask my wife, hopefully. She herself was only six years younger than I. This woman could never conceal her contempt for, and dislike of, men. Her own husband, not surprisingly, died in his fifties, perhaps because he was tired of hearing her make the same enquiry about him. She is still flourishing, though slightly senile.

            An elderly divorcee of my acquaintance used to exclaim “Men!” whenever anyone of that sex did anything to displease her – and she was easily displeased. She had, she implied, through a lifetime of diligent research, single-handedly uncovered the cause of all the evils in the world.

            Women are supposed to be sensitive, gentle and caring. On the whole, I have not found them so, though there are some rare exceptions. My mother was highly intelligent and sadistic, with a vinegarish disposition and a tongue like a serpent’s. This should have prepared me for my later relationships with women. My very first girlfriend spent her time putting me down, often publicly. A devout Catholic, she informed me at least once a week that I was destined for hell-fire, which, oddly, did nothing to cool my ardour. Built like a pocket battle-ship, she was an ardent sportswoman. Once, when I was not playing singles tennis to a standard high enough for her satisfaction, she simply walked off the court, leaving me red-faced and discomfited before my amused friends. At fifteen, this can scar. Why did I associate with such an athletic virago? Presumably, because she exuded an effortless superiority, founded on the flimsiest of foundations, which I must have somehow admired, mistaking it for genuine worth. Why did she associate with a bookish boy like me, a year her junior? I can see now that it was because (a) I did most of her homework and (b) she enjoyed humiliating me. I heard she eventually married someone who did not play tennis at all. I occasionally wonder how her husband is faring, only to remind myself that he has by now almost certainly run away, divorced her, or died.

            David had a teenage girlfriend, Barbara, who always called him ‘Stupe’, though she herself, expensively schooled, was near the bottom of her class, while he had topped his State in his HSC and was doing brilliantly at Cambridge. She came up to Cambridge to see him and was sulky about his being there, for she disliked being outdone in anything. One the eve of his twenty-first birthday, she sent him a pencilled note written on a torn-off page – the sort of thing one might leave for the milkman – saying, “I’m ending this relationship. Goodbye!” The fact that she had scrawled such a missive (and in pencil!) angered him, for it implied that he was not even worth a letter. Though he did not realise it at the time, he was lucky to escape from such an accomplished young sadist. David told me ruefully that he had richly deserved the nickname that Barbara had bestowed on him, for he should have dumped her the moment she began calling him a fool. Relationships cannot thrive without intellectual parity and mutual respect, yet few of us when young are interested in the former, which sooner or later lead inevitably to the loss of the latter.

             

           

COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM