It's a guy thing

• The Guardian explores "the books that move men."

And the winner is... Albert Camus' The Stranger. (Apparently, across the pond it's known as The Outsider... po-tay-to, po-tah-to.)

Yeah... check. That one's been an all-time favorite ever since I read it in English class in 11th grade. But the Big 3, the books that really reshaped my conception of writing, were Richard Adams' Watership Down, George Orwell's 1984 and Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Orwell, of course, gets the mention in the Guardian piece, but then again, he's a homegrown hero over there.

We found a strong sense of nostalgia among male readers as they looked back to their formative years; many had tended to lose interest in fiction in favour of non-fiction on entering into adulthood. One consequence of this was that several men admitted that they were reluctant to reread a book which had been almost painfully important to them at puberty. "I'm afraid I might find it mawkish now", "It might not live up to my memories", "It might read as dated now" became familiar responses.

Men also recalled a kind of "mentoring" by authors encountered as a teenager - the same word was used by a surprising number of those we interviewed. Having found an author who "spoke" to them, a man would have trusted them as a literary guide, reading all of their works, and also works quoted from or cited by them. Orwell, in particular, was cited frequently as having guided our male reader in his choices of author. This idea of mentoring had never cropped up in our survey of women's reading, though word-of-mouth recommendation by other readers regularly had (men mentioned word-of-mouth much less often).

I admit, I haven't reread any of the above books in many, many years, but not necessarily because I'm afraid of finding them to be lacking; it's just that there are too damn many other books I haven't read yet.

As for authors who've become mentors by proxy, well, I've read just about everything Stephen King has ever written, but I wouldn't necessarily consider him to be a guiding light. (Despite the fact that many of his books feature as a central character a screwed-up writer type.) I have, though, discovered authors and gone through phases where I read everything by them I could get my hands on; writers including (but not limited to) Richard Russo, Arthur Koestler, Don DeLillo, John Barth and T. C. Boyle have always left me hungry for more.

Self-portrait of pot, with kettle

• Poor Maureen Dowd can’t get a date.

What’s to like about men, anyway? They’re pigs. I can’t stand them, myself. I really don’t even understand why women, in today’s day and age, even profess to need us, beyond the given biomechanical procreative function we serve. And I find it especially difficult to believe that a woman with her head screwed on straight couldn’t see through all the prick-waving theatrics and just buy some frozen sperm and a vibrator and call it a day.

Of course we’re not equal. We’re similar, but we’re not equal, and we never will be. Gender and sexuality are the only demarcation lines that truly exist between human beings on this planet. Every other dividing line -- race, politics, religion -- is cultural; they’re learned notions, and therefore malleable. But bitching about not being born with the same equipment doesn’t get you anywhere, because there’s nothing to be done about it, and good luck taking it up with the manufacturer.

Dowd gets no cigar for aiming her crosshairs at Cosmopolitan, a target so obvious it’s almost laughable. She also, tellingly, spends a mere fraction of the piece (one whole paragraph!) discussing the real scourge of feminism, which is cosmetic surgery; you don’t get much more backwards and barbaric than that crap, and Dowd’s own frozen, plasticized features when making her talk-show appearances don’t help her cause much. (In other news: somewhere a pot called a kettle “black.”)

This “feminist movement” of the 1970s, which Dowd is so taken with, seems now to be a bit of a misnomer. Thirty years down the road, it doesn’t seem to have added up to much other than women being able to walk down the street with armpit hair a-hanging. It seems to me that the greater accomplishment was the suffrage movement in the early 1900s, which eradicated an important political barrier for women; this had the effect of weakening archaic social barriers as well. But since history is nothing but the tug-of-war between ideals, men only found new ways to demean and marginalize women. See: Wife Swap. (I remain amazed that women have allowed that one to continue broadcasting.)

No movement’s progress can be fairly assessed from the ground level, anyway; actual progress moves a whole lot slower than it appears to us. Separate idealistic rhetoric from the real meat of the feminist argument from back in the 70s and pretty much the only result you come up with is a courtroom victory on abortion, which to me isn’t much of a victory. Women won the right to do what they want with their own bodies, yes, but at the cost of another (potential) life. I’m pro-choice, personally, but abortion’s a pretty horrific thing, any way you look at it. Winning the social and legal right to hack yourself up, in the name of either beauty or convenience, doesn’t exactly strike me as progress.

I once asked a close lesbian friend, “Of all the lesbians you know, how many would you say really conformed to the whole boot-wearing, man-hating thing?” She thought for a moment and answered, “About eighty percent.” I’ve never forgotten that; I have this theory that homosexuality is another attempt by nature to thin the ranks, and it seems perfectly reasonable that evolution would step into “men vs. women” debate at some point by screwing with our hardwiring a little.

That’s a roundabout way so suggest that these days, women don’t need men. At all. There’s no reason a woman can’t get by without one. I suppose they’re nice to have around, like pets or something, but, ladies, I have a news flash for you: you don’t need one the way you’re programmed to think you do. I can’t speak for the men who find the silicone-packed, Barbie-doll women that grace the pages of Maxim attractive; I find them nauseating, personally. (The women and the men who lust after them.) But it’s deliciously ironic to think that in a day and age where body parts can be replaced, upgraded and modified, just to please some idiot man, everyone seems to have forgotten that the novel Frankenstein was written by a woman.