Thursday, August 28, 2014

Men Who Loved Women

Men have loved women for all sorts of things.

The true women lovers like Casanova and Don Giovanni loved women simply because they were women. Both believed in quantity rather than quality; did not differentiate between the blonde and the brunette, the small and the tall, the slim or the statuesque. As long as she was a woman, they fell in love with her at the drop of a pin.

If one is to believe Don Giovanni, over his life-span he had met and loved 640 women and girls in Italy, 231 in Germany, 100 in France, 91 in Turkey, and 1,003 in Spain.

The more picky lovers are different.

Did you know, for example that the famous American author of ‘The Great Gatsby’ loved women’s feet? He literally wanted to throw himself at the feet of a woman who had beautiful feet - no matter who she was and where she came from.

Byron, apparently, was a collector of women’s hair, so presumably that cut out women who lacked hair, or didn’t have any to spare.

But, here’s a shock. That mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes, at one stage, appears to have had a thing for cross-eyed women, This has resulted in that joke, ‘Gentlemen prefer blondes, philosophers prefer cross-eyed women’.

However, this peculiarity, in the long run, led Descartes to formulate his monumental theory of free will. How did he get from crossed-eyes to free will? I guess you need to be a philosopher to work that one out.

Sunday, August 24, 2014

Even Death doth not Part

Funerals, like weddings, have their customs and traditions. One of these - no longer practiced one would hope - is that of a widow being burned alive with her husband's corpse.

Because she is still very much alive when placed on the pyre, the experience is far from painless. Widows, suddenly feeling the lick of fire on their skin or on their hair, might try to save themselves - to the disgusted boos of the grieving relatives.

They might shove her back to the pyre with sticks or anything else handy. Unsuccessful, they might have to disable her ability to move by breaking her legs and tossing her back to the side of her husband's corpse.

The interesting fact about this custom is that this action on the part of the widow is voluntary - after being indoctrinated all her life what a glorious thing it is to remain so loving and fathful to her husband that she even chooses to die once he dies.

There are - or have been - a lot of customs which haven't exactly been kind to women. Those who uphold them always point out that women themselves choose to uphold these customs. And, of course, they do.

How can they choose an alternative, when they only know the custom the land allows them. It's a choice, with no choice.