Archive for the ‘Breeders And Thinkers’ Category
Tant Pis For The “Smart”
That nice guys finish last is an old complaint of men. A variant is that smart guys can’t get dates. Depending on what is meant by ‘smart’, this is downright absurd, or not. There is a kind of intelligence that is wholly devoted to getting women into bed, so the complainants must be thinking of […]
In: AGAINST NATURE, Breeders And Thinkers
The Judgments Of Tony And Gore
In one of Tony Hancock’s half-hour radio shows, he gave his character the choice between three women, representing “beauty, brains and breeding”. This was not quite like the Judgment of Paris from which the idea was taken, as none of the Greek goddesses represented purity of bloodline. Unless, perhaps, Hancock1s upper-class girl represented political power, […]
In: AGAINST NATURE, Breeders And Thinkers
The Nerd’s Room
In her novel The Women’s Room, Marilyn French lamented how her heroine’s intellectual curiosity was killed stone-dead at puberty, as her horizon abruptly contracted to Boys and the absurd contortions to which she needed to subject herself in order to attract them. French contrived to imply both that such a development applied solely to the […]
In: AGAINST NATURE, Breeders And Thinkers
24 Hours And 20%
It is by no means the case that people who are driven to think and who enjoy thinking stand entirely outside the business of scrabbling up the monkey hierarchy and getting laid. But there are only 24 hours in everyone’s day, and the brain lays claim to at least 20% of our energy intake (to […]
In: AGAINST NATURE, Breeders And Thinkers
The Marching Monks
It has been suggested that early medieval Europe, a society in which anyone who showed interest in literacy was shoved into the Church and supposed to be celibate, was in danger of breeding intelligence out of the population. There are some nits to be picked with this, for example that celibacy and chastity are not […]
In: AGAINST NATURE, Breeders And Thinkers
Overflow Error
Life imitates art, and “dumb blondes” undoubtedly exist. Received wisdom is that their dumbness is a rational adaptation to the environment: that is, such women are merely pretending to be dumb, out of a belief (true or false) that men like them that way. An alternative explanation, however, is that they have accidentally made themselves […]
In: AGAINST NATURE, Breeders And Thinkers
The Sexual Dynamics Of Mental Labour
It has often been observed how male homosexuals are, relative to their numbers, wildly over-represented in the arts. Whether or not there is a genetic link between artistic ability and interest on the one side and homosexuality on the other – assuming the orientation is genetically coded at all, as opposed to being caused by […]
In: AGAINST NATURE, Breeders And Thinkers
The Great Divorce
Someone once said that “man’s real life is in a world where the love of woman means nothing”. Indeed, it has been suggested that great periods in art and literature are created by homosexuals and/or misogynists, since most women are simply too hostile to the male need for an asexual Life’s Work – that is, […]
In: AGAINST NATURE, Breeders And Thinkers
Creation And The Adolescent Ego
Someone once wrote: “Full submission to the processes of life presents itself to the adolescent ego as a form of subjective death.” By “the processes of life” is surely meant having children. This, however, entails that such girls as desire their own babies at the age of 14 have attained mature adulthood, which is not […]
In: AGAINST NATURE, Breeders And Thinkers
Aspies And Wrinklies
Our culture has now organised itself so thoroughly around age cohorts that it is very rare for a young person even to recognise the existence of a senior citizen, other than for purposes of financial advantage or sadistic merriment. Older people cannot possibly be “cool”, and therefore ought not to exist, period. The exception here […]
In: AGAINST NATURE, Breeders And Thinkers
