The place having been rather hastily prepared for them they washed their hands in one basin. Clare touched hers under the water.
“Which are my fingers and which are yours?” he said, looking up. “They are very much mixed.”
“They are all yours,” said she, very prettily, and endeavoured to be gayer than she was.
It’s a miracle that once women could bear arms and drive cars that they didn’t just open fire indiscriminately and then get the hell out of Dodge. It’s surprising because subjected peoples have historically undertaken some pretty violent retributions for past injustices. Western women’s transition from chattel to equal partner occurred with virtually no bloodshed, and even now women’s rights focus exclusively on issues relevant today, whereas hand-wringing over America’s slave-owning past or Germany’s Nazi one is still a going concern. In sheer numbers over the centuries, surely females have suffered at the hands of males more than any ethnic group under any other.
Nobody in this country is happy about about the way countries like Saudi Arabia or Nigeria treat their women, but their abuses have never provoked the kind of mobilized outrage that, say, apartheid did. In the United States I could write some of that off as trickle-down from U.S. oil policy and an unhealthy reverence for religious beliefs of any stripe, but I don’t see regular marches in the streets of Toronto about it either. We seem to regard women’s subjugation as just an unfortunate but natural primitivism, like weather gods or royal families.
The thing is, I love men. Men are awesome. Not only are they appealingly hairy and bumpy in all the right places, they aren’t judging whether my fashions are up-to-the-minute current, they don’t ask me about how I feel, and they offer useful skills like soldering, math, and opening jars from tall shelves. I have lots of women friends too, but they require regular maintenance and their friendships don’t come as easily to me. I get along well with guys, I have interests in common with guys, and they like me because they like women who are as smart, funny and independent as they.
So I have a hard time understanding why so many other men, historically and presently, can be such total raging assholes.