Hanging Fire

Been considering my own response to that. I haven't read the book yet, but I have some thoughts about his operating assumptions vis a vis men and women that I haven't formulated well enough to write a blog post yet.

He has an interesting theory, but I think the human relation to "filth" is much more nuanced than he makes it out to be, and much less tied to gender than he seems to believe.

There are a lot of kinds of "filth" in the world, and perfectly fastidious types who won't have a speck of dust in their physical surroundings are perfectly content to wallow in their own emotional filth, just as someone who lives like an absolute slob might prove to be too squeamish for anything but missionary with the lights off in bed.

And I believe all this has more to do with nurture than any kind of nature, be it the presence/absence of Y chromosomes or some other factor.

I think his argument is ultimately flawed because whatever special kinds of filth nature dishes out to females, we all have to deal with a hundred other varieties of it in the process of growing up. Just consider: are not some of your most vivid memories of childhood related to the time you or someone else threw up in the hall at school, or you or someone else peed their pants at recess? How much of what you learned growing up has to do with order and hygiene--potty training, cleaning your room, covering your mouth when you sneeze, not wiping your nose on your hand, etc?

As for "society being what it is," I can assure you that even when my grandmother was growing up in the south, the girls might have always cleared the table and washed the dishes, but the boys were just as surely shovelling out the stables every day and slopping the hogs.

Gender roles don't excuse anyone from the scatological aspect of maturation. Filth is a formative part of all of us. Some of us get over it, some remain fascinated, and some hover in the middle, repulsed but curious.

Ain't no "guy thing" about it.

Hi Karin: Thanks for picking this item up. My regrettable, if, I think, delimited, essentialism aside, what did you think of the book's female characters? That's an aspect of my item that hasn't been touched on in the discussion so far.