Dante and Beatrice

A post to amuse and infuriate…

Somehow or other a combox critic has assumed that because I have asserted that men and women are different that I do not believe in equality for women. This is because in the past the superiority of men has been assumed and women have been downtrodden.

What troubles me is that the person making this statement gives the appearance of being intelligent and somewhat educated. He continues the assumption that because I am a Catholic and believe that hierarchy and patriarchy are an implicit and immutable part of Catholicism that I must therefore be an oppressor of women.

I should put the record straight and say quite clearly that I do not believe women are equal to men. That would be a great injustice to women as it is clear that women are far superior to men. How can I count the ways in which women are superior? First of all, they are better than men at communication. They not only know how to talk, but they know how to read body language, interpret silent signals and they do so with expert finesse and empathy. Women are naturally more compassionate and caring than men and are more in touch with their feelings. Women generally look and smell much nicer than men. Women care much more for children and family and will more often than men have the right priorities when it comes to the most important people in life. In my experience women are distrustful of technology and decide that it is only a tool and not a toy and therefore pay more attention to real concerns. I usually find that women are more mature than men and are quicker to step up and take responsibility and get a job done–especially if it is a job that does not necessarily have anything to do with making money or being the top dog.

Not only are women superior to men, but it is a total fallacy to pretend that other societies in an earlier time have thought otherwise. The Catholics have always held women in high esteem and treated a woman–the Blessed Virgin Mary–as the greatest and best of all created beings. The noble knights of the Middle Ages, like the poet Dante, have treated women as the paragons of beauty, virtue, goodness and eternal light. Women were the great prize to be sought, the reward for which one would lay down his life, the beauty one would die for and the romance one would kneel to supplicate. Women were thought to be the high and beautiful beings who might just tame the beastly man with patience, virtue, love and goodness.

The idea that a woman is inferior to a man is not an ancient idea, but a modern one. It is only when the man’s interests of making money became the most important sign of his significance and worth that the women started to feel inferior. It should be the man who is understood to be inferior because he has to do inferior things like go out to work in a brutal and filthy place like a coal mine or a slaughterhouse or even worse–the stock exchange. It was the man who was only able to do the brutish work of beasts by sweating to earn a living, going out to war or hunting innocent animals to feed his family. Somehow or other modern man turned the world upside down and began to imagine that it was the man who was most important and not the woman–who up til that time rose above it all by being the queen and mother reigning supreme in the center and powerhouse of civilization which we call the home.

It was the modern world who began to denigrate, oppress and abuse women by expecting them to put on overalls and work in factories. It was the modern world who began to treat women badly by telling them they had to lower themselves to be equal to men. It was the modern world who abused women and insulted them and treated them as men’s sex slaves by telling them to use birth control chemicals to turn off their natural instincts to conceive and bear new life. It was the modern world which abused and tortured women by expecting them to go to the abortionist to have the children they had conceived ripped out of their bodies for the convenience, economy and continued irresponsible sexual pleasure of the men in their lives.

Are women equal to men? I would not expect them to stoop so low.