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...
