A woman, if she hates her husband (and many of them do), can make life so sour and obnoxious to him that even death upon the gallows seems sweet by comparison. This hatred, of course, is often, and perhaps almost invariably, quite justified. To be the wife of an ordinary man, indeed, is an experience that must be very hard to bear.

The hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness and stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air of a cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and summonings of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in amour—all these things must revolt any woman above the lowest

36. The Origin of a Delusion

The origin of the delusion that the average man is a Leopold II or
Augustus the Strong, with the amorous experience of a guinea pig, is not far to seek. It lies in three factors, the which I rehearse briefly:

1. The idiotic vanity of men, leading to their eternal boasting, either
by open lying or sinister hints.

2. The notions of vice crusaders, nonconformist divines, Y. M. C. A.
secretaries, and other such libidinous poltroons as to what they would
do themselves if they had the courage.

3. The ditto of certain suffragettes as to ditto.

Here you have the genesis of a generalization that gives the less
critical sort of women a great deal of needless uneasiness and vastly
augments the natural conceit of men

She may envy her husband, true enough,
certain of his more soothing prerogatives and sentimentalities. She
may envy him his masculine liberty of movement and occupation, his
impenetrable complacency, his peasant-like delight in petty vices,
his capacity for hiding the harsh face of reality behind the cloak
of romanticism, his general innocence and childishness. But she
never envies him his puerile ego; she never envies him his shoddy and
preposterous soul.

This shrewd perception of masculine bombast and make-believe, this acute understanding of man as the eternal tragic comedian, is at the bottom of that compassionate irony which paces under the name of the maternal instinct. A woman wishes to mother a man simply because she sees into his helplessness, his need of an amiable environment, his touching self delusion.

Perhaps one of the chief charms of woman lies precisely in the fact that they are dishonorable, i.e., that they are relatively uncivilized. In the midst of all the puerile repressions and inhibitions that hedge them round, they continue to show a gipsy spirit. No genuine woman ever gives a hoot for law if law happens to stand in the way of her private interest.

If the work of the average man required half the
mental agility and readiness of resource of the work of the average
prostitute, the average man would be constantly on the verge of
starvation.

Mencken's cup runneth over with real-talk: written 96 years ago yet sounds fresher than anything being made today

littlegreenpills posted:

not me i'm an alpha

'yes dear'

palafox posted:

anyone know anything dealing with de facto racial categorization in france in the 30s?

Well i'm not an expert but i'm assumed if you has somewhat 'French' features, people would sort of subconciously recognize that and make assumptions about your shared culture.

If you looked say, English, then their minds would associate you with a different set of mores and tastes, most often centered around the english language and perhaps that nation's literature and empire.

To use an extreme example, the French citizen of the 1930s who laid gaze upon a man with dark brown skin and black hair would typically come to the conclusion that the man was either born in Africa or to parents who had themselves come from Africa.

palafox posted:

anyone know anything dealing with de facto racial categorization in france in the 30s?

well george fredrickson wrote about it.