Sunday, August 19, 2012

Without Men There is No Civilization




In college I walked out of the back door of the house I was living in just in
time to see two women put a quart of oil in the engine of the VW convertible Bug one owned.

I dashed over, yelling, “STOP!!”

“Why?” one asked, confused.

“Because that’s the CARBURETOR!!” I yelled.

She and her friend had poured the entire quart of oil down the carburetor. I had to take the carburetor off and clean it out. It took a while, but I finally got the car running. After three days. I told them they should give the car to me before they destroyed it completely. They declined.

I also knew a woman who, when her car wouldn’t start, hit the battery posts with a hammer. She broke a post off. End of battery. She also thought the way to tell if a car needed oil was to wait until the red oil light came on. She also blew up an engine driving it when the thermostat was stuck closed. She didn’t believe it would blow up, even though I guaranteed her it would.

I’ve also gotten two women’s cars – both of whom were strangers – running by simply cleaning the battery posts. One was in a gas station and one at a bank. I also once changed a woman’s tire in a parking lot, staring at her in disbelief as she tried to change it by herself with the wrong tools. She couldn’t figure out how to loosen the first bolt.

The humorist P.J. O’Rourke has written that without men civilization would last until the next oil change. I’d have to agree with him.

The feminist Camille Paglia, though a lesbian, is surprisingly not a man-hater. In fact, she understands that men created civilization, and has famously written that if civilization was left in the hands of women, we’d be living in grass huts. I’d agree with her, too.

I am completely mystified how some women, maybe even most, have no sense when it comes to the simplest of mechanical things. I know a mechanic who won’t let his wife drive the car. I understand. For another example, again in college, I found a woman trying to take the front door off the hinges with a screwdriver.

When I asked her what she was doing, she said the door wouldn’t shut, so she was going to take the door off the hinges to find out why. I told her doors don’t come off using screwdrivers, especially using little toy plastic ones about three inches long, then spent five seconds diagnosing the problem, got my hammer and pounded down a finishing nail that popped up from the floor, preventing the door from closing.

Occasionally, let’s say when I’m outside, I’ll look around and subtract everything invented by men. What’s left? Almost nothing. Cars, houses, streets, heating, cooling, advanced technological society, advanced intellectual accomplishments, medicine, dentistry – gone. What’s left? Paglia’s grass huts.

There are no female Aristotles, Newtons, Eulers or Einsteins. I wish there were, but there aren’t. Women in general do two things: have babies and determine the comfort level of the home – otherwise most men would live in a pigsty.

I once worked at a place that employed mostly women. At the end of the shift they would all gather together and complain about men. Women may think men complain about women, but they don’t, not to the degree women complain about men. It’s not even one percent compared to what women do.

The difference is that when men complain about women, their complaints are almost always justified. Women, on the other hand, always seem to have vague complaints that consist mostly of blaming their problems on men. And it’s always about their relationships.

These women would complain and complain and do it in front of me as if I was invisible. The other men who worked there were never around when these whine-fests erupted…which was every night. Maybe that’s why they were never around.

I also know that when many wives get together they mostly complain about their husbands. Do they think they married down?

I thought, what do these women want? Men have created/discovered close to 100% of everything in the world, in fact created civilization, and apparently that isn’t enough for them?

I occasionally run across women who tell me, if women were in charge we wouldn’t have this or that bad thing. I ask them, so men created civilization and are supposed to hand the keys over to you because you think you can do a better job?

That problem is that they didn’t know what men have done, and if told, probably wouldn’t believe it. Some of them think there is a suppressed history of women geniuses who invented all kinds of wonderful things, or that they are as a sex “oppressed,” which is a close-to-meaningless phrase that’s supposed to explain everything.

It’s a bizarre situation…one sex that has created civilization, and the other one has created almost nothing and complains about the gifts given to them.

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