WOMEN

What does a woman want?
-- Sigmund Freud

Women are the weaker sex. So tradition has it. Which would probably mean they are at a certain disadvantage in the war between the sexes. But the men don't seem to have won yet, even though they had the upper hand for centuries. Women were the heiresses of Eve, tempted and temptress, loose and lascivious, leading men into sin. Women were witches, bitches, agents of the devil and household tyrants; which was almost the same thing in the middle ages, enough to get them burned one way or the other.

Women are the weaker sex. Frailty, thy name is woman. Women have no willpower, they can be seduced at the drop of a hat, getting carried away by passions much weaker than those of man, because woman is weaker. Which is why the feminine virtues are rather shallow--as is woman, of course. Passivity and piety and purity were the main ingredients of a woman's nature a century ago, and the contradiction didn't seem to bother the Victorians that despite their natural purity, these paragons fell in droves, littering the streets with examples of tarnished virtue to be cleaned up by the likes of Jack the Ripper.

Women are the weaker sex. They aren't as single-minded as men, they lack the power, the drive of the male. Women come slowly--if they come at all. But when they do come, they come like a cement truck screeching downhill, which makes their arrival rather difficult to overlook. And when they don't quite make it, they sure are good at faking it.

So maybe women don't always finish what they set out to do, but they have fun trying. Sometimes getting something started is accomplishment enough.

It all started with a woman....


Portlandia