Gynxcolatry
REFLECTIONS ON WOMAN. By Richard Curie. (Watts, 15s.) THE GIRL-WATCHERS' GUIDE. By Don Sauers and Nicolas Bentley. (Deutsch, 6s.)
IT is one of the saddest ironies of life that men are unable to turn their schizophrenic daze about the opposite sex to good account. Hyde reviles women, ridicules them, regards them with stern arrogance interspersed with bouts of masterful passion; Jekyll panders to their pretensions by sending them expensive chocolates and trying to plumb the depths of their inscrutable sweetness. To what purpose? Neither gentleman can resist the fatal tempta* tion of admitting his fascination and writing a book about it.
Here is Mr. Cutle, for instance, a man obviously ripe in years and experience, uttering the following pronouncement : 'She has had her say and there is an end of it, and with her native clever- ness she can make a man feel foolish even when he knows he Is right' or, even worse, 'In a discussion of dangerous women one is apt to forget that there are various types who, not particularlY dangerous in themselves, can become so either through an adopted attitude or through a sense of vocation.' He ought by this time to know better than to mention them like this. Any woman not particularly dangerous in herself (if such exists) can become so 0 she knows she is attracting attention. Logically, of course, I ought not myself to be drawing attention to this dangerous work by mentioning it at all, and I am further' more committing just the error made by every sexologist from Ovid to Mr. Curie—I am talking about this mysterious Leviathan, this male brainchild 'woman' which bears no more resemblance to individual women than the State does to its members. The results of this mistake are all in favour of women. The 'Abiding Riddle of Womanhood' has led as many would-be solvers to their doom as the questions asked of the princess's suitors in the fairy' tale and for identical reasons—the challenge of being the first to solve them was irresistible and the princess was puffed by beckon: ing references to 'half the kingdom.' The difference in this case that the answer is not only difficult to find, it does not exist"' the princess is a fiction. Messrs. Sauers and Bentley take two steps in the right direction' The first is to categorise their opponents in an Aristotelian fashion' i the second to make them so uniformly repulsive that no intelligell reader will ever again think it worth while to join battle. My only criticism is that they are not exhaustive enough. I know at leas three varieties of the Rosy-cheeked Courthopper and about fifteen of the Sweatersweet. All the same it is a useful ready reckoner which I heartily recommend. And the next suitor, please.. • DAVID WA'.
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