The third bad one is in.
When I heard of the Everard case in the UK, I asked myself if it were the fear of extinction common to all perverts, sexual or other that drove the man to randomly kill a woman on the streets of London, or if it were the side-effects of that very old canard about women not having a soul, a topic allegedly discussed at the notorious Council of Macon in 585 of the ''ere vulgaire'', of the common era. I found an excellent and very tongue-in-cheek article on the subject authored by Michael Nolan in churchhistory.org, in which Mr Nolan discusses the merits of ''a Synod of Brie or a Council of Camembert'', as well as the intellectual and moral integrity of a character called Leyser, a ''Feldprediger'', a field preacher, an army chaplain to Danish troopers who wrote a treatise called Polygamia Triumphatrix, ''a title that suggests paramilitary rather than military exertions''; in Nolan's delightful words, ''the opportunities afforded by soldiering seemed to have sharpened his zest [Leyser's] for feminine variety''. Hello, hello, his Lordship wouldn't have termed it better with his ''wifelets''.
By today's standards, it is not whether women have a soul the question, but rather whether they have brains. To a man (to all straight men?) who ''has everything'' as they say, a pensionable job, a wife, two kids, a house, a dog and a car, plus some status since Sarah Everard's murderer was a policeman, is woman just and only a body, a living thing, but not a sentient being he can kill the day it takes him to do so? The female he killed was covered up to the point you couldn't see her face or her hands, she kept regular contact with a known person, she walked along large, well-lit roads and streets (a number of persons are not so keen on public transport because of Covid). She followed safety rules. So did he initially, with his police job and his stable family life. Conclusion: it's not enough to be inconspicuous, whether you be male or female. You have to be ''sex on legs'' to earn some respect: had she been some stupid tart dressed to tease, he wouldn't have touched her, possibly for fear of having to pay up a fee or of catching one of those diseases. It's dirtying and degrading the still clean ones perverts are interested in, killing off the competition that tells them through their mere presence that they are inadequate, because they are too ordinary, too bland, dull and annoyingly boring. There's nothing a pervert - and I include mere bullies in that category - dislikes more than a clean-living, unassuming, discreet person who is the embodiment of their failure to come up to standards other than lower and easy. Tedium is not a comfortable panacea to life's challenges.
Are we civilised? A male got out one evening to kill a woman for sport/personal gratification, because he felt frustrated or the urge to take a life. That's in 2021, London, UK. As soon as news of his arrest emerged, social and conventional media were swamped by thousands of women from all walks of life reporting being constantly under threat, getting non-stop verbal and physical abuse from men. What does it say about our society, so busy loudly broadcasting its resolve to fight gender inequality, sexism, harassment, sexual abuse, etc.? Somehow something is still going clearly wrong in that great scheme of things. Did he do openly what many secretly dream of? Is there truth then in the feminist claims that all men are rapists, and that they all hate women? When a male has a problem, he takes it out on a female body. The end result may be a figurative artistic product or a dead woman, to me it amounts to the same, and I don't deem any of all that civilised. Abstractions such as philosophy, maths and religions, fictionalisations are. Not representations.
Civilised doesn't rhyme with urbanised as the etymology suggests; as I have said before, nomadic hunters-gatherers from prehistoric times and primitive agricultural settled societies would have known better. It can't even be argued that survival even in what is now almost post-Covid times be the issue. With all due respect to the admirable Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (the latter being the estate she is from, not some costly country pile), it is perhaps not so much a curfew for males after 6pm we need, although I am convinced most ladies would welcome the cool idea of a ladies' night, if it were only once a week, just like the weekly TV-free evening of yore decreed in Iceland under the then-female President Vignis Finnbogadottir. What we need is a definitive curfew of the straight male ego. They've had too much power for too long. From the self-respect of ''cogito, ergo sum'', ''I think, therefore I am'', human civilised societies have sunk to the level of a vain, unbridled egotism, the ''me-me-me'' reflex society, as a matter of fact, to the graphitic ''coito, ergo sum'' of an unelvoved homo erectus, the so-called modern man so well described and decried in Vaclav Havel's Thriller (Open Letters, 1991), he who watches Michael Jackson's famed video, and then proceeds to drink the still warm heart of a hoopoe from his thermos bottle without even thinking about it.
British citizens are supposed to clean up the mess their dogs leave on public paths, unless they are keen to pay a heavy fine. Males, be sports, pick up and bag the waste products of your ego, or you will be booked for your foul. Quos ego...
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