The Power(106)
Much love, Naomi
Dearest Naomi, Thank you, first of all, for taking the time and trouble to read the manuscript. I was afraid it was practically incoherent – I’m afraid I’ve lost all sense of it.
I have to say I … don’t think much of evolutionary psychology, at least as it relates to gender. As to whether men are naturally more peaceful and nurturing than women … that will be up to the reader to decide, I suppose. But consider this: are patriarchies peaceful because men are peaceful? Or do more peaceful societies tend to allow men to rise to the top because they place less value on the capacity for violence? Just asking the question.
Let’s see, what else did you ask? Oh, the male warriors. I mean, I can send you images of hundreds of partial or full statues of male soldiers – they’ve been unearthed around the world. And we know how many movements have been devoted to completely obliterating all traces of the time before – I mean, just the ones we know about number in the thousands. We find so many smashed statues and carvings, so many obliterated marking stones. If they hadn’t been destroyed, imagine how many male soldier statues there’d be. We can interpret them however we like, but it’s actually pretty clear that around five thousand years ago there were a lot of male warriors. People don’t believe it because it doesn’t fit with what they already think.
As to whether you find it believable that men could be soldiers, or what your sexual fantasies are about battalions of uniformed men … I can’t be held responsible for that, N! I mean, I take your point, some people will just treat it as cheap porn. That’s always the tawdry inevitability if you write a rape scene. But surely serious people will see through that.
Oh yes, OK, you ask, ‘Does the history really support the idea women didn’t have skeins much before the Cataclysm?’ The answer is: yes. It does. At least, you have to ignore a huge raft of archaeological evidence to believe otherwise. This is what I’ve tried to communicate in my previous history books but, as you know, I don’t think anyone wanted to hear it.
I know you probably didn’t mean it to come across as patronizing, but it’s not just ‘a fun idea’ to me. The way we think about our past informs what we think is possible today. If we keep on repeating the same old lines about the past when there’s clear evidence that not all civilizations had the same ideas as us … we’re denying that anything can change.
Oh God, I don’t know. Now I’ve written that, I feel more uncertain than I did before. Were there particular things that you’ve read elsewhere that made you feel uncertain about this book? I might be able to work them in somewhere.
Much love. And thanks again for reading it. I really do appreciate it. When yours is done – another masterpiece, I’m sure! – I owe you a practical criticism essay on every chapter!
Love,
Neil
Dear Neil, Yes, of course I didn’t mean ‘fun’ in the sense of ‘trivial’ or stupid. I hope you know I’d never think that about your work. I have a lot of respect for you. I always have had.
But all right, as you’ve asked … there’s an obvious question for me. What you’ve written here contradicts so many of the history books we all read as children; and they’re based on traditional accounts going back hundreds, if not thousands, of years. What is it that you think happened? Are you really suggesting that everyone lied on a monumental scale about the past?
All love, Naomi
Dear Naomi, Thanks for getting back so quickly! So, in answer to your question: I don’t know if I have to be suggesting that everyone lied.
For one thing, of course, we don’t have original manuscripts dating back more than a thousand years. All the books we have from before the Cataclysm have been re-copied hundreds of times. That’s a lot of occasions for errors to be introduced. And not just errors. All of the copyists would have had their own agendas. For more than two thousand years, the only people re-copying were nuns in convents. I don’t think it’s at all a stretch to suggest that they picked works to copy that supported their viewpoint and just let the rest moulder into flakes of parchment. I mean, why would they re-copy works that said that men used to be stronger and women weaker? That would be heresy, and they’d be damned for it.
This is the trouble with history. You can’t see what’s not there. You can look at an empty space and see that something’s missing, but there’s no way to know what it was. I’m just … drawing in the blank spaces. It’s not an attack.
Love,
Neil
Dearest Neil, I don’t think it’s an attack. It’s hard for me to see women portrayed as they are at times in this book. We’ve talked about this often. How much ‘what it means to be a woman’ is bound up with strength and not feeling fear or pain. I’ve been grateful for our honest conversations. I know you’ve sometimes found it difficult to form relationships with women; and I understand why. I’m so grateful that we’ve preserved a friendship out of what we had, though. It was so important to me that you listened when I said things that I’d never have been able to tell Selim or the children. The scene of the skein-removal was very hard to read.
Love,
Naomi
Dear Naomi, Thank you for that. I know you’re trying. You’re one of the good ones.
I really want this book to make something better, N. I think we can be better than this. This thing isn’t ‘natural’ to us, you know? Some of the worst excesses against men were never – in my opinion anyway – perpetrated against women in the time before the Cataclysm. Three or four thousand years ago, it was considered normal to cull nine in ten boy babies. Fuck, there are still places today where boy babies are routinely aborted, or have their dicks ‘curbed’. This can’t have happened to women in the time before the Cataclysm. We talked about evolutionary psychology before – it would have made no evolutionary sense for cultures to abort female babies on a large scale or to fuck about with their reproductive organs! So it’s not ‘natural’ to us to live like this. It can’t be. I can’t believe it is. We can choose differently.