The creation myth

This was not what I had intended to write. I started musing on women as "other" a notion created by man, and expounded by Simone de Beauvoir (as an aside, why do the Marxists have all the best stuff?) who in so doing made a rod for their own back, given that having narrowly defined women in past attempts to control them, they still do not understand them. Though the broader theme I was arriving at was one of atonement. How do we as men atone for such a thing, is it even possible?

There however I got stuck, somewhere between narrative and outcome, and through a series of events, (I always loved the phrase "through luck and craft" that I first heard in Pirates! long ago :) I ended up looking at a video clip of a young Chinese woman. Truth to tell, even though my wife is Asian, I don't find Asian women particularly attractive, at least not in the conventional sense. I remember being told by my wife that a woman on Singapore TV, (though in an advert in the paper at the time) was thought of as being very attractive locally, what was my opinion? I thought she looked quite plain. She found that puzzling, indeed I think she still finds me puzzling, but I digress :)

No, what captivated me about the video was not her looks, but her mannerisms. That vaguely pouty & demure thing that women do that curls men's toes, and makes us want to inhabit such moments. The small intimate gestures that only we see, and want to possess. It is entirely an animal and emotional experience which I have only ever seen expressed in poetry, e.g: e.e.Cummings and Audre Lorde (that's probably as good a layout for poetry on that first link as I've ever seen, lovely font.)

Reading as I did, all of my mothers sociology, psychology & feminism books as a young man, and pace James Altucher's recent blog post, (he's really very good.) I remember finding it odd that Andrea Dworkin, author of Woman Hating and Mercy was herself married to a man, and wondered then as now, what it is about men that women find attractive. Or is it all just illusion and programming?

I doubt that there are answers to these questions, just another part of the mystery, when I quizzed my mother about this earlier she was also of the opinion that it "doesn't make sense" by which I meant that her books made for a very fractured narrative. In many ways, long before Tech & finance women were the first "complex system" that I grew interested in.