Open Writing

In the Broadway hit version of George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” “My Fair Lady,” Rex Harrison, as mentor Henry Higgins, talks his way musically through the soliloquy from which my title is taken. Eliza Doolittle, the subject of his query, has, without his yet knowing, captured his heart, but he is frustrated by her “feminine behavior,” something that his bachelor life has shielded him from until then.

After a lifetime of pondering, I have recently concluded, in a rare flash of mental clarity, that women are not the same as men. OK! OK! Stop the chortling and guffawing. I have known since I was an infant that there were some rather obvious differences. I’m embarrassed, but pleased to reveal that I was breast fed to a late age, probably into my second, or even third year.

But I’m not referring to those obvious anatomical features that make women look the way all we men, and some women, want them to look. What I’m referring to are radical differences that, in my opinion, together make women part of a different species. Homo Sapiens yes, but not just a gender shift, rather a branch, like Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals. Different brains, different internal organs, different ways of thinking and relating to others etc.

The concept of God creating woman from Adam’s rib is quaint myth, but perhaps not too far removed from a simplistic, but accurate attempt to record the branching process, at a time when terms describing evolution had not yet entered the lexicon.

There’s no logical reason for the existence of female man in the biblical sense. Many of the world’s flora and fauna are perfectly capable of reproducing themselves without a partner. It’s not even true that women needed men to protect them and provide for them. At the dawn of time, women were the providers, and began their multi-tasking lives by suckling a baby while foraging for food, as do women in some primitive tribes today.

There’s not even a logical reason for women to be beautiful; after all, they weren’t for millions of years. And they didn’t get to look the way they do today so they could attract mating partners, or because they thought men wanted them that way. I have a couple of fertility dolls, ostensibly carved by men, that represent a desirable female form far removed from the Barbie Doll anatomy many women crave today.

And therein lies the truth, as I see it – modern woman got the way they look today because they wanted it, not because it had anything to do with man’s desiring. In fact, as time passes, women care less and less about attracting men as sexual partners it seems. Of the half million or so same sex marriages in the USA, reportedly 66% are lesbian couples.

Many of these couples have, or will avail themselves of sperm banks to have a child. In the not too distant future it will theoretically be possible to create sperm, thus eliminating the need for male donors. The only question is whether governments will allow it.

Women have been striving to assert their difference for millennia. In the past 100 years, some 34 matriarchal or matrilineal societies have been identified around the world, but none really caught fire until the advent of women’s suffrage. Since then, the separation has markedly intensified, and nowhere more strongly than the USA.

The stated mission of the National Association of Women (NOW) is to promote equality for women—all women, they say. The human and civil rights of all women are included in this effort. For more than 30 years, NOW claims to have been a leader in the struggle for lesbian rights. In 1971, NOW issued its first policy statement recognizing lesbian rights as a feminist issue.

The statement acknowledged that a woman's right to independence and self-determination includes the right to define and express her own sexuality and to choose her own lifestyle.

So there! The only problem I have with their mission is that women and men will never be equal because they’re different. It’s like saying an apple is equal to a pear.

In the US, women have been gradually marginalizing men for generations, ever since Rosie got the smell of a hot rivet in the 40’s. In the 50’s and 60’s, when prosperity allowed women to stay home and raise the children, a time when men were characterized as being patronizing to their wives, women in thousands of suburban coffee klatches were comparing notes on the immaturity, laziness, and sexual ineptitude of their spouses,.

TV series now either minimize male roles e.g. Sex in the City,” “The Real Housewives of Washington,” or portray men as gay, goofy, or macho stereotypes. The same shift can be seen in TV commercials. If the commercial includes a man and a dog as the main characters, the dog is portrayed as the smart one. TV news is slowly replacing its male anchors and reporters with women.

Female medical doctors now outnumber male medics in the US, and so do female applicants to universities. In almost every field of endeavor in the USA, women are gaining the ascendancy, and men are letting it happen, perhaps because they, at long last, understand that women are an entity unto themselves.

So what are we going to call this entity – “women” is obviously not appropriate, and “wo” is kind of awkward. “Ladies” is also a no-no since it incorporates “lad,” and the same can be said of “female.” I guess we men will just have to leave it to them to decide, and I’m sure they will.

# # #