If, instead of allowing with a smile that “women prefer cavemen,” he felt the unrelenting pressure of a whole social structure forcing him to order all his goings in conformity with that pronouncement.Īs with previous remarks I’ve made on Sayers’ polemical writing, there seems to be a lot packed into this passage.

If he were vexed by continual advice how to add a rough male touch to his typing, how to be learned without losing his masculine appeal, how to combine chemical research with seduction, how to play bridge without incurring the suspicion of impotence.

If from school and lecture-room, Press and pulpit, he heard the persistent outpouring of a shrill and scolding voice, bidding him remember his biological function. If the centre of his dress-consciousness were the cod-piece, his education directed to making him a spirited lover and meek paterfamilias his interests were held to be natural only in so far as they were sexual. Probably no man has ever troubled to imagine how strange his life would appear to himself if it were unrelentingly assessed in terms of his maleness if everything he wore, said, or did had to be justified by reference to female approval if he were compelled to regard himself, day in and day out, not as a member of society, but merely (salva reverentia) a virile member of society. There is also a dramatic climax in which she lambasts the Church for ignoring what she perceives as Jesus’ teachings on gender equality (you don’t have agree with her exact handling of the texts to be blown away by the rhetoric and rightness…) But for these posts I’d like to concentrate on the remarkable section where she sketches a world in which men were subject to the same kinds of pressures as women. The piece contains some other telling moments, such as her pointing out that “ Vir is male and Femina is female… Homo is both male and female”, but that “Man is always dealt with as both Homo and Vir, but woman only as Femina.” In other words, humanity is treated as if it is male by default, and women are an unusual subvariant an idea which will be picked up in the passages I quote below.

Sayer’s article “The Human-Not-Quite-Human”, part of her argument involves asking men to imagine what life would be like if society treated them in the way it treated women.

Dorothy sayers are women human