Archive for the ‘The Copernican Revolution’ Category
A Great Lost Opportunity
Mel Gibson’s film What Women Want, from which I take the title of this Part, was a tragic waste of a good idea. To start with, it was depressing that the intrinsically intriguing device was used merely for a run-of-the-mill romcom set in an advertising agency; does Hollywood really not know of any professions other […]
In: WHAT WOMEN WANT, The Copernican Revolution
Let’s Not Even Listen
Evolutionary explanations of human sexual selection, otherwise known as female sexual choice, have concentrated on youth, fertility, status and parental commitment. It is complained that the evolutionists ignore the qualities stressed by respondent surveys such as intelligence, humour and creativity. But ignoring the survey data is precisely the right thing to do. For, when answering […]
In: WHAT WOMEN WANT, The Copernican Revolution
Towards A Sceptical Manifesto
If we want to know What Women Want, you say, we should ask them? Really? Would they take men’s word for what men wanted? No, so let us return the compliment. It will no doubt be accounted both strange and offensive that a mere (boo! hiss!) man should write a Part entitled What Women Want. […]
In: WHAT WOMEN WANT, The Copernican Revolution
Rule One
Men have traditionally been advised that, for the sake of peace with their womenfolk, they should always let them have the last word and invariably tell them, in total defiance of factuality, that they are right. The book about the corrosive effect of this on men – who might have been brought up to value […]
In: WHAT WOMEN WANT, The Copernican Revolution
Sorry, Guv, You Lost That One
The use of “Find the Lady” as a synonym for three-card monte or the walnut-shell game is wiser than it knows. For the reason why women have a reputation for being difficult to understand, or beyond the ken of such simple-minded creatures as males, is nothing to do with their actual nature or with men’s […]
In: WHAT WOMEN WANT, The Copernican Revolution
Finding The Lady in Fiction
It is a constant female refrain that male novelists are unable to portray a woman realistically, and ought not to try. Funnily enough, we never hear the corresponding complaint about female novelists’ portrayal of male characters, either because they already perform the portrayal perfectly, or because nobody cares, or else because nobody dares. Those who […]
In: WHAT WOMEN WANT, The Copernican Revolution
Chicklit As Scholarly Source
In their ideological and moralising mode, women are forever telling us how they can only enjoy sex with someone they love and trust and feel safe with. Alternatively, that they only wish to enjoy it with someone who gives them security, which makes it more of a tactical and economic mode. So is this what […]
In: WHAT WOMEN WANT, The Copernican Revolution
The Women’s Page
A novelist complains about male journalists “‘looking for the woman’s angle’ – as if there would be only one”. Indeed, what kind of idiot could possibly think that? But wait a moment: just precisely who is it that has spent decades training us to believe that there is in fact a single “woman’s angle”, which […]
In: WHAT WOMEN WANT, The Copernican Revolution
Women’s Magazines As Scholarly Source
If we decide we need to know how women really think, feel and act, as opposed to what they say, we have three options. First, we may listen to the nearest exemplar of that kind of feminist who begins all of her sentences with the word “Women”, followed by a verb and predicate, but is […]
In: WHAT WOMEN WANT, The Copernican Revolution
On Zadie Smith, Magazines and Lying
In one of her articles, Zadie Smith invokes a UK women’s magazine’s claim that only 2% of girls think that it is intelligence that a man looks for first in a girlfriend. Even granting, for the present, that the magazine is truthfully reporting the girls’ beliefs, this does not mean that they are correct in […]
In: WHAT WOMEN WANT, The Copernican Revolution
