Rachele FalchiOde to Patriarchal and Misogynistic Graffiti on City Walls.
City Wall. Daytime. Infamous whore.
whore /’trɔja/ noun
sow. slut, courtesan, prostitute, streetwalker, party girl, call girl, hooker, tart, cheap girl, escort, floozy, harlot, coquette, lady of the night, woman of the street, happy little lady, paramour, libertine, prostitute, hooker, bimbo, gold-digger, easy lay.
So far, unfortunately, we’re more than well-vaccinated. Among the luckier ones, we are born with an anti-patriarchy, anti-mediocrity injection shoved up our behinds.
But infamous? The perfect answer, in this case, was once spoken by a wise homosexual to the latest Italian homophobic insult slinger, with a somewhat crude tongue: “A fag yes, but ugly no!”
However, we must acknowledge one fact: we always blame too much on cultural poverty, intellectual mediocrity, poor education, and the emptiness of masculine thought born from caveman-like ancestry. Oh no, my dear ones, building and supporting a patriarchal society for centuries have been the work of distinguished thinkers, including – in the more recent 19th century – Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche.
The former made all women on earth pay the price for the conflicted relationship he built with his mother, Johanna, a remarkably free woman for her time, whom he accused of being the cause of Schopenhauer senior’s suicide and for “neglecting” little JR while squandering the family fortune. Naturally, women were the cause of all family troubles, responsible for the physical and mental decline of the first and the recklessness of the other. But above all, guilty of their own freedom.
Thus, Schopenhauer shaped his thinking, gifting us pearls – among the many – on the “foolish veneration of the female sex, the supreme flower of Christian-German stupidity, which has only served to make women arrogant and shameless.” Schopenhauer adored Eastern philosophy and naturally shared its practice of polygamy, although… although…
The Hindu custom of burning the widow on her husband’s funeral pyre, well, was more than understood by the illustrious Schopenhauer, who considered it the ultimate form of female devotion and sacrifice, also serving as a valuable deterrent – see that – to the typical female squandering of family possessions, of course earned through hard work solely by the man of the house.
It’s worth digging into his reading of The Art of Treating Women or Discourse on Women. We’re not that bad, even in Schopenhauer’s eyes: yes, we are inferior to men – obviously – but we also have virtues such as realism and the “conception of things,” meaning “we don’t see more in things than what is actually there,” and we tend to reach the closest goal quickly, while men are “blind to what is under their noses.” Well.
The great one also offers advice on how to choose the right woman (for fertilization, mind you) and on love (pretty controversial stuff).
Support also comes from him, the much-referenced, the inspiration of many great thinkers, Friedrich Nietzsche, who, in Beyond Good and Evil (1886), urges men to think about women “always and only in the Eastern way: he must view the woman as his property, as a property that can be locked away, as something destined for dependence.”
The good ol’ FN also wrote: “Women have, deep down in their personal vanity, still an impersonal contempt for women”; “In revenge and love, women are more barbaric than men”; “When a woman has learned tendencies, usually something is wrong with her sexuality.”
“When a woman has learned tendencies, usually something is wrong with her sexuality.”
We conclude – and there are many more wonderful gems – with another jewel: in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the renowned FN wrote: “Go to women? Don’t forget the whip!”
Admit it: you wanted him to be a distinguished literary figure. THIS IS NOT A GUARANTEE, I THINK IT’S CLEAR.
Not to throw everything into the trash bin of indifference – and there would be much more – remember that the misogynist Schopenhauer taught us that even for an insult, some finesse is still required: in The Art of Insulting – an anthology of sharp thoughts and aphorisms on intelligence, human stupidity, and the art of polemics, mainly from his Parerga and Paralipomena, where the German philosopher expresses with sarcasm and clarity his disdain for intellectual mediocrity – makes it clear that to expose the intellectual misery of certain interlocutors, one must be witty and ironic. The rest is mediocrity.
And to return to our city-wall insult slinger: the infamous whore is definitely a woman who has denied you possession, and you are just one of millions like you, mediocre, lacking in critical spirit, a slave to your insecurity, and dominated by the fear of what you cannot control.
Freedom.
