Scorn

by Parris, Matthew;

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  When God made man, she was only testing.

  Graffiti in ladies’ lavatory, London W11

  ‘O Grandson of Conn, O Cormac,’ said Carbre, ‘how do you distinguish women?’

  ‘Not hard to tell,’ said Cormac. ‘I distinguish them, but I make no difference among them.’

  They are crabbed as constant companions

  haughty when visited,

  lewd when neglected …

  stubborn in a quarrel,

  not to be trusted with a secret …

  boisterous in their jealousy …

  lustful in bed …

  Better to whip than to humour them …

  better to scourge than to gladden them …

  They are waves that drown you,

  they are fires that burn you …

  they are moths for sticking to one,

  they are serpents for cunning …

  The Instructions of King Cormac MacAirt

  To what purpose is it for women to make vows, when men have so many millions of ways to make them break them? And when sweet words, fair promises, tempting, flattering, swearing, lying will not serve to beguile the poor soul, then with rough handling, violence and plain strength of arms they are, or have been heretofore, rather made prisoners to lust’s thieves than wives and companions to faithful honest lovers.

  The Law’s Resolutions of Woman’s Rights, published 1632 but probably written in the 1580s

  God created Adam, lord of all living creatures, but Eve spoiled it all.

  Martin Luther

  All men are rapists and that’s all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws and their cocks.

  Marilyn French

  The male is by nature superior, and the female inferior: the one rules and the other is ruled.

  Aristotle, Politics, I.5

  A good part – and definitely the most fun part – of being a feminist is about frightening men … Of course, there’s a lot more to feminism … but scaring the shit out of the scumbags is an amusing and necessary part because, sadly, a good many men still respect nothing but strength.

  Julie Burchill, in Time Out

  Nature intended women to be our slaves … they are our property; we are not theirs. They belong to us, just as a tree that bears fruit belongs to a gardener. What a mad idea to demand equality for women! … Women are nothing but machines for producing children.

  Napoléon Bonaparte

  The male function is to produce sperm. We now have sperm banks.

  Valerie Solanas, in S.C.U.M. Manifesto

  Marie Stopes was living with him, an arrangement which I would have thought would satisfy any woman’s craving for birth control.

  Muriel Spark on Lord Douglas and the campaigner for contraception, Marie Stopes

  It’s a pity it was not her parents, rather than her, who thought of birth control.

  Muriel Spark on Marie Stopes

  Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.

  Marie Shear

  I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.

  Rebecca West

  When a woman inclines to learning there is usually something wrong with her sex apparatus.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Interviewer: People think you are very hostile to men.

  Andrea Dworkin: I am.

  Interviewer: Doesn’t that worry you?

  Andrea Dworkin: From what you said, it worries them.

  Men are rewarded for learning the practice of violence in virtually any sphere of activity by money, admiration, recognition, respect, and the genuflection of others honoring their sacred and proven masculinity.

  Andrea Dworkin

  I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

  Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

  A very little wit is valued in a woman; as we are pleased with a few words spoken plain by a parrot.

  Jonathan Swift, Thoughts on Various Subjects

  Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking upon his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.

  Samuel Johnson

  I have always been amazed that women are allowed to enter churches. What sort of conversations can they have with God?

  Charles Baudelaire

  We have no desire to say anything that might tend to encourage women to embark on accountancy, for although women might make excellent book-keepers, there is much in accountancy proper that is, we think, unsuitable for them.

  English Institute of Chartered Accountants, in the Accountant (1912)

  Do you know why God withheld the sense of humour from women? That we may love you instead of laugh at you.

  Mrs Patrick Campbell, an actress, to a man

  An ego like a raging tooth.

  W.B. Yeats on Mrs Patrick Campbell

  All women are little balls of fluff in the eyes of the Creator.

  Donald Pomerleau, Baltimore Police Commissioner, testifying in a sex discrimination case

  What a mighty man he turns out to be! He raped ten women – I would never have expected this from him. He surprised us all. We all envy him.

  Vladimir Putin, Russian President, to visiting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, on Israeli President Moshe Katsav

  A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.

  Samuel Johnson

  These are rare attainments for a damsel, but pray tell me, can she spin?

  James I, when introduced to a young girl proficient in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Attrib.

  That woman can speak eighteen languages and she can’t say ‘no’ in one of them.

  Dorothy Parker of a guest surrounded by men at one of her parties

  The only place men want depth in a woman is in her cleavage.

  Zsa Zsa Gabor

  Beneath this stone, a lump of clay

  Lies Arabella Young

  Who on the 21st of May

  Began to hold her tongue.

  Epitaph, Hatfield, Massachusetts

  A friend of mine, who is an excellent anatomist, had promised me the first opportunity to dissect a woman’s tongue, and to examine whether there may not be in it certain juices which render it so wonderfully voluble or flippant …

  Joseph Addison, in the Spectator, 1711

  [Men’s] slanderous tongues are so short, and the time wherein they have lavished out their words freely hath been so long, that they know we cannot catch hold of them to pull them out, and they think we will not write to reprove their lying lips.

  Jane Anger, Her Protection for Women, 1589

  A Preface.

  To all women in general,

  and gentle Reader whatsoever

  Fie on the falsehood of men, whose minds go oft a-madding and whose tongues cannot so soon be wagging, but straight they fall a-tattling! Was there ever any so abused, so slandered, so railed upon, or so wickedly handled undeservedly, as are we women?

  Jane Anger, Her Protection for Women, 1589

  The only difference between men is the colour of their neckties.

  Helen Broderick in Top Hat

  A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small parcel.

  John Ruskin

  He has the heart of a cucumber fried in snow.

  Ninon de l’Enclos, French courtesan, on the Marquis de Sévigné

  The more I see of men, the more I admire dogs.

  Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné

  You will find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has failed to inspire sympathy in men.

  Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson

  When a man’s best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem.

  Edward Abbey

  I have … observed, that
in all ages [women] have been more careful than the men to adorn that part of the head which we generally call the outside.

  Joseph Addison, in the Spectator, 1712

  She looked as if she had been poured into her clothes and had forgotten to say ‘when’.

  P.G. Wodehouse

  [She] appeared to have put on her lipstick during an earth tremor.

  Bill Bryson on an elderly guest in his hotel

  The only time I see a photograph of anybody who looks like me in a women’s magazine is under the word ‘Before’.

  Sarah Millican

  Take a close-up of a woman past sixty? You might as well use a picture of a relief map of Ireland!

  Nancy Astor, asked for a close-up photograph. Attrib.

  When I don’t look like a tragic muse, I look like the smoky relic of the great Boston Fire.

  Louisa May Alcott on herself

  I hate those short skirts, for women’s knees are like badly risen rock-cakes.

  Sir Norman Hartnell

  Sure, deck your lower limbs in pants;

  Yours are the limbs, my sweeting.

  You look divine as you advance –

  Have you seen yourself retreating?

  Ogden Nash

  I wonder why men can get serious at all. They have this delicate long thing hanging outside their bodies, which goes up and down by its own will. First of all, having it outside your body is terribly dangerous. If I were a man I would have a fantastic castration complex to the point that I wouldn’t be able to do a thing. Second, the inconsistency of it, like carrying a chance time alarm or something. If I were a man I would always be laughing at myself.

  Yoko Ono on Film No.4

  Viewed from the side, a woman presents an exaggerated S bisected by an imperfectly straight line, and so she inevitably suggests a drunken dollar-mark.

  H.L. Mencken

  Give a man a free hand and he’ll run it all over you.

  Mae West

  God created man with a penis and a brain, but only gave him enough blood to run one at a time.

  Stephen Ambrose

  For 50 years it was like being chained to an idiot.

  Kingsley Amis on finally losing his sex drive

  I feel as if I had escaped from a frantic and savage master.

  Sophocles on being asked in old age about love

  If, sir, I, possessed the power of conveying unlimited sexual attraction through the potency of my voice, I would not be reduced to accepting a miserable pittance from the BBC for interviewing a faded female in a damp basement.

  Gilbert Harding, urged to be more ‘sexy’ interviewing Mae West

  I used to be Snow White … but I drifted.

  Mae West

  She’s the original good time that was had by all.

  Bette Davis on a starlet of her day

  If I ever get hold of that hag, I’ll tear every hair out of her moustache.

  Tallulah Bankhead on Bette Davis

  Mme de Genlis, in order to avoid the scandal of coquetry, always yielded easily.

  Talleyrand

  He’s the kind of man who will end up dying in his own arms.

  Mamie Van Doren on Warren Beatty

  Madame, you must really be more careful. Suppose it had been someone else who found you like this.

  Armand-Emmanuel du Plessis, Duc de Richelieu, when he discovered his wife with her lover

  She’s like the old line about justice – not only must be done but must be seen to be done.

  John Osborne, Time Present

  You were born with your legs apart. They’ll send you to the grave in a Y-shaped coffin.

  Joe Orton, What the Butler Saw

  If the girls at a Yale weekend were laid end to end I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.

  Dorothy Parker

  Women might be able to fake orgasms, but men can fake whole relationships.

  Sharon Stone

  She is chaste whom nobody has asked.

  Ovid, Amores, I.8

  Ladies, just a little more virginity, if you don’t mind.

  Herbert Beerbohm Tree, directing a group of actresses

  Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite virginity.

  Daniel Webster on hearing of an exchange of views about his friend Peggy Eaton’s scandalous reputation

  … Your virginity, your old virginity, is like one of our French wither’d pears: it looks ill, it eats drily …

  William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well

  Sara could commit adultery at one end and weep for her sins at the other, and enjoy both operations at once.

  Joyce Cary, The Horse’s Mouth

  You can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her think.

  Dorothy Parker, in a speech to the American Horticultural Society

  Masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable.

  H.L. Mencken, In Defence of Women

  A woman is only a woman,

  But a good cigar is a smoke.

  Rudyard Kipling; later used by Groucho Marx

  There she goes, not with a wimp but a banker.

  Paul Desmond on seeing a former girlfriend with a suited man in the street

  A woman’s place is in the wrong.

  James Thurber

  Men are nicotine-stained, beer-besmirched, whisky-greased, red-eyed devils.

  Carry Nation

  Men’s men: be they gentle or simple, they’re very much of a muchness.

  George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

  Macho isn’t mucho.

  Zsa Zsa Gabor

  I’ve never found brawn appealing. If I went out with Macho Man I think I’d have a permanent headache. Kind of ‘You Tarzan – Mi-graine’.

  Overheard on a bus

  Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.

  Charlotte Whitton

  The five worst infirmities that afflict the female are indocility, discontent, slander, jealously, and silliness.

  Confucian Marriage Manual

  Women want mediocre men, and men are working to be as mediocre as possible.

  Margaret Mead

  Men are stupid, and they like big tits.

  Marilyn Monroe’s advice to Joan Rivers

  Some people think having large breasts makes a woman stupid. Actually, it’s the opposite. A woman having large breasts makes a man stupid.

  Rita Rudner

  If there is anything more boring to me than the problems of big-busted women, it is the problems of beautiful women.

  Nora Ephron

  Twenty million young women rose to their feet with the cry ‘we will not be dictated to’ – and promptly became stenographers.

  G.K. Chesterton

  Why are women … so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

  Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

  Some pale, hueless flicker of sensitivity is in me. God, must I lose it in cooking scrambled eggs for a man?

  Sylvia Plath

  Once you know what women are like, men get kind of boring. I’m not trying to put them down, I mean I like some of them sometimes as people, but sexually they’re dull.

  Rita Mae Brown

  Why did God create men? Because vibrators can’t mow the lawn.

  Madonna

  The male is a biological accident: the Y (male) chromosome is an incomplete X (female) chromosome, that is, has an incomplete set of genes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the chromosome stage.

  Valerie Solanas, in S.C.U.M. Manifesto

  Man … is an afterthought of creation; he is simply a modification of the female.

  Deborah Moggach

  If they can put one man on the Moon, why not all of them?

  Feminist T-shirt

  Militant feminists. I take my hat off to them. They don’t like that.

  Milton Jones

  Nobody will ever win the
battle of the sexes. There’s too much fraternising with the enemy.

  Henry Kissinger

  I will rather trust a Fleming with my butter, Parson Hugh the Welshman with my cheese, an Irishman with my aqua-vitae bottle, or a thief to walk my ambling gelding, than my wife with herself.

  William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor

  Bachelors begin at thirty-six. Up till this time they are regarded as single men. Most of them are very tidy, smell of mothballs, and have an obsessional old maid’s fix about one of their ashtrays being moved an inch to the right.

  Jilly Cooper, Men and Super Men

  Because women can do nothing except love, they’ve given it a ridiculous importance.

  W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

  Just the exchange of two momentary desires and the contact of two skins.

  Nicolas Chamfort on love, 1805

  By the time you swear you’re his,

  Shivering and sighing,

  And he vows his passion is Infinite, undying –

  Lady, make a note of this:

  One of you is lying.

  Dorothy Parker, Enough Rope, ‘Unfortunate Coincidence’

  How alike are the groans of love to those of the dying.

  Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

  Love may arise from a generous sentiment – namely, the liking for prostitution; but it soon becomes corrupted by the liking for ownership.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.

  George Bernard Shaw

  The cure for love is to be loved back.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Girls bored me – they still do. I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I’ve ever known.

  Walt Disney

  Madame: I was told that you took the trouble to come here to see me three times last evening. I was not in. And, fearing lest persistence expose you to humiliation, I am bound by the rules of politeness to warn you that I shall never be in.

  Gustave Flaubert in a letter to Louise Colet, his former mistress. Colet scribbled on the note ‘lâche, couard et canaille’ (‘poltroon, coward and cur’).

  There is no such thing as an ugly woman, but there is such a thing as too little vodka.

  Russian saying

  Ugliness is superior to beauty because it lasts longer.

  Serge Gainsbourg

  Now I know the meaning of grotesque.

  Sydney Smith on seeing the wife of Dr Grote, Regius Professor of Greek, wearing a turban

  You know that look that women get when they want to have sex? Me neither.