Ask A Genius 747: Mencken Quote
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/05/16
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: “A man’s women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass” – H.L. Mencken.
Rick Rosner: Yeah I buy that. It reminds me of another quote, “No matter how famous or sexy the man, there’s somebody who’s tired of fucking him”
Jacobsen: This is from In Defense of Women by H.L. Mencken, in section, I. The Feminine Mind, section one; The Maternal Instinct. I’ll give you the whole paragraph which always just makes me laugh. He opens a book with this. “A man’s women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phrase makes it, feminine intuition. The mark of that so-called intuition is simply a sharp and accurate perception of reality, an habitual immunity to emotional enchantment, a relentless capacity for distinguishing clearly between the appearance and the substance. The appearance, in the normal family circle, is a hero, magnifico, a demigod. The substance is a poor mountebank.”
Rosner: Well there’s a shorter version of the saying which is familiarity breeds contempt. So I mean there’s a bunch of stuff going on. One is there’s the standard wisdom; I used to call it the Seven Year Itch. Among gay women there’s Lesbian Bed Death where only weirdos stay highly horny for each other year after decade. For a while, Mel Gibson was the sexiest man alive and it turns out he’s a lunatic and an anti-Semite and a mean drunk and was scary to his wife or girlfriend.
So, on the one hand you want a relationship to kind of grow as comfortable as an old shoe which means you’re extinguishing passion. So you want to be able to relax into a relationship but if you’re a dick, relaxing into a relationship means that the person you’re in a relationship with learns how fully you’re a dick though I’d say the difference between Menkin’s time and ours is there’s a much bigger debunking industry than there was when he was around. The ‘30s and ‘40s, there were scandal sheets and gossip rags but the big chunk of social media… nobody’s history is private anymore. If you tweeted something racist when you were a junior in high school, that will turn up 12 years later.
People share so much more information with each other that we kind of know when somebody’s a dick and then we also kind of know that everybody’s a dick to some extent. Humanity’s been kind of widely debunked and at the same time since everybody’s kind of a dick, then that raises the bar for how much of a dick you have to be to be a real dick. But his sentiments remain true that you can’t maintain the illusion of dignity or nobility indefinitely…
In the 20s or 30s, 50 years before the second wave… 40 Years of feminism, masculine privilege was huge. So, seeing that privilege from an unprivileged position of being a woman in a household with a big swing and dick, you’re going to see that privilege in action and it would be hard for most men of the era to not be dicks about it.
[Recording End]
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