"Give me, woman, thy little truth!"
"Thou goest to women? Do not forget thy whip!"
I can picture at least 6 faces in Indian media who regularly come and talk on the talk shows talking a lot more at the usage of the above lines, that come from a 19th century classic (
"Thus Spake Zarathustra", by Fakir W Nietzsche). Yes, Nietzsche (hereafter referred to as
N)
was known to be a misogynist. Its nothing surprising, though, his perspective has been a recurrent one through history and cultures. There's always the
occasional ruffle in media over incubation-chamber analogy of the female specia. My (narrow) anthropological finds, though, make me believe that the modern society (American?) seems a little better - see how Maroon 5 and James Blunt can change the world for the good!
Some other great anti-pickup lines from the same chapter:
: Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in woman hath one solution—it is called pregnancy.
: Two different things wanteth the true man: danger and diversion. Therefore wanteth he woman, as the most dangerous plaything.
: Man shall be trained for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly.
I pretty much LOLd at every
line word up there.
What makes me even more fascinated with this perspective of N is its resonance with that of holy men across the holy Himalayan circuit (as much of it that i've seen i.e. Hardwar, Rishikesh, Kedarnath). Nothing better to start with drawing parallels than how the book starts:
When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and the lake of his home, and went into the mountains. There he enjoyed his spirit and solitude, and for ten years did not weary of it.
That makes N your average Baba Damdama (Baba = holy man) that you find sprawling all over the lower Himalayan tract. They (holy men) have little veneration for anything but their own philosophy, much like Zarathustra. They are filled to the cup with misogynistic takes on anything concerning the...uh...gyne. They make the male species seem like some divine mutation, out-of-line with regular evolution.
But those folks and my old roomie aside, we have good faith that the leading generations will not think likewise.
That is because soon after independence, Jawaharlal Nehru commissioned a scientific study to put an end to this woman-vs-man debate once and for all...
The average woman was found to have an IQ of 3 pigeons. The average man was comparably smarter, about 5 pigeons.* Don't be surprised - pigeons are smart and were considered appropriate benchmark at that time.
This performance - which makes 'venerate' a synonym to 'torture' - is no reason to make any gender generalisation.
* In marital union, however, their (man-woman's) combined IQ surprisingly reflected a huge drop, to an average of 1/2 a pigeon. This fact of an average Indian pigeon outsmarting an average Indian couple, is why pigeon was denied the status of national bird. The Peacock was chosen (though later studies proved that even the Peacock outsmarted the average Indian couple, it was too late to retract the Peacock, as our handicraft industry had already put this bird on over 1,80,000 export items - as the reader should know, that handicrafts lobby is very strong here in India, only next to the mixing-blood-in-ketchup lobby).
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