THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES

Might things have been different had societies been more feminine?

In the beginning, it was once written, there was a deity who called everything into being. Let there be light, and there was light (though he didn’t mention what the light source might be because, well, his words weren’t so much written as carved in the form of one or other kind of cuneiform etched letters because writing hadn’t been properly invented due to a shortage of pens. And keyboards. There weren’t any of them, either.) So just hack away at the stone and write your story down in hard to write and harder to read cuneiform/primitive text.

But the very fact that it was inscribed at all gave it a monumental sort of power. It was inscribed on one day and when the stone it was hacked out of was examined the next it was still there! The writer/hacker/carver had achieved something wonderful. He had set his thoughts into stone and his words would live on, even after his own death.

Actually, they still live on. I’ve heard them intoned with sepulchral conviction in churches during my life: words that describe the indescribable because nobody could have been there to witness either a bearded bloke with a magician’s voice, or, if the egg-heads are right, the big bang. Oh please let the egg-heads be right!

What I’m really saying is that recording our ideas so that they can be examined after we’re dust is rather special, and it’s as common as muck these days. I’m going to post this somewhere on line and don’t know where it will end up. Maybe (and here’s me showing the egotistic maniac that I am) someone will read these same words a century hence and nod sagely to himself (or herself, I’m a great believer in the superiority of the Fair sex, of which more later) and murmur to a future that somebody in the past knew how to think after all.

My point is, it must have been a bloke who did that initial carving. Can you picture him? Gnarled and unshaven and with hair in knots hanging past his shoulders, maybe spots and acne, a bent back because carting all that dead meat back to the home cave isn’t good for the posture, and maybe with a scrap of leather grimily covering his more vital parts, grinning like a loon and carving Let There be Light. And he was a bloke because he insisted that the deity from his head who was doing all that commanding was a he. Not a she.

And that set the pattern for life on Earth ever since. Everything written (hacked/inscribed/carved) was done by a bloke with a bent back and trouble with his bladder, though I’m not so sure about that last bit. Maybe it’s endemic for us males to miss the toilet when we’re urinating. The thing is, while they were doing that the ladies in their lives were busy doing other things. Like having babies.

Think about it. He’s squirted his drop of love-juice in her direction and, being a skilled fem she’s caught it and treasured it and its started to do its thing, leaving him carting a dead something or other for dinner then nothing to do while she gets fatter. Except inscribe, that is. He can do that.

This can only mean one possible thing, to his mind. He’s the one with time on his hands so he’s the best one. This baby thing, this giving birth, that’s nothing compared to the mighty universe he can create inside his head, the great folds of time open for his inspection (though maybe his knowledge of history is somewhat limited because of a lack of it), and all the nonsense that fertile minds are heir to when there’s not much else around to do.

He inscribes a bit more. He creates the first man. Then, because he’s got sex on his brain he creates a woman for his man to enjoy. Maybe out of the man’s rib. That would be funny! Sort of make playing with himself almost respectable!

All this, of course, takes a lot of carving and takes days. Days during which his female is becoming bigger and fatter and shouts a lot more. She complains about everything, damn her! No wonder. If she had any sense she’d get a sharp piece of flint and a hammer, and join him at his rocky wall, putting in something about what’s going on in her mind. But she doesn’t. Instead, a baby plops out and she has to feed it.

And that leaves him with even less to do because now she even pushes him away when he feels motivated to cuddle her/join with her/ have fun with her.

Right then. Let’s invent a serpent, an apple, and make the b***h suffer throughout history because she invented original sin! What a story!

And to make absolutely sure that everyone knows who’s who, when it comes to giving the new scrap of living flesh a name it can have his name, can’t it? And pass that name in into the future. He needs a bit of a return on that tiny drop of love juice he spilled her way…

Maybe we need a flood and great big ship, and elephants and all the creatures in twos, and loads of death… all her fault, of course…

ps. I wonder .. had things turned out differently and females dominated the world, might there have been fewer wars, hardship, Hitlers, Boris Johnsons,..? Maybe a goddess creating light?

Just asking.

© Peter Rogerson 15.07.21

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