Right yet wrong

Arabs and Jews are lobbing ordinance at each other and frankly I’m bored with it all. I’ve been bored with this subject all my sentient life and I feel pretty safe in predicting it will continue to arouse nothing but ennui well into my dotage. So sod the lot of them; today I’m writing about dear old Richard Dawkins. I like old Dickie-D; he’s how I imagine I would be if I possessed a half-decent intellect… and I’m not quite clever enough to work out if that is an insult or not.

Anyway, he’s been getting it in the neck again for saying something which, on the face of it, is entirely reasonable but reasonable or not he has managed to upset those who seek to prevent free speech whenever it doesn’t suit them. The professor said that some rapes are worse than other rapes. He’s right; he really is. There is a world of difference between a regretted, tipsy, post-date penetration and a full-on, I-might-actually-die-here knifepoint assault, just as there is a world of difference between a verbal battering and a fist fight.

I’m not belittling rape; I wouldn’t dare. Besides I know this is a subject about which men are deemed incapable of holding a valid opinion, let alone debating, so I almost never get involved but the Dawkins slag-fest pissed me off a bit because of the double standards involved. Some women REALLY hate men poking their noses in where they are not wanted, yet feel they have some divinely-granted permission to wade straight into arguments that don’t concern them either. No wonder most men tend to avoid conversation with women altogether; it’s such unstable ground.

We get shrieked at for agreeing, shrieked at for disagreeing and shrieked at whenever we try to remain peacefully neutral… when we get called weak for allowing ourselves to be shrieked at. And while women may hold rigid, unassailable ‘correct’ and accurate opinions about ‘men’, men simply know nothing at all about woman and should keep their silence. It’s a paradigm which takes time to learn and many a man goes through the whole of life perplexed at always being wrong.

Should a woman ask a man, “A penny for your thoughts?” he should merely reply “Nothing; I was thinking of nothing at all.” If it isn’t the truth it is at least the safest version of the truth; they already think we are profoundly stupid anyway. All of this explains sheds, pubs, gardening clubs and why men die before their partners… Richard Dawkins was right; he just forgot that being a man and being right over an exclusively female issue is a hanging offence. Now, let's get back to safer ground and sort out about war, religion and the Middle East...