Woman by Richard Matheson Page B

her, he thought.
     
         "If women were
considered to be so dangerous back then, why did men have anything to do with
them?" Barbara asked.
     
         "Pussy maybe?" Val
said in a childlike voice. Barbara glared at him. Even Liz seemed less
receptive to her brother's attempts at humor.
     
         "Basically
correct," David told him.
     
         "See?" Val said to
Barbara.
     
         "If essentially
offensive," David said. Val made a noise as though an arrow was piercing
his heart.
     
         "Sex runs second only
to hunger need," David continued, not caring particularly now if they made
the show or not. "To compensate, men kept women in their places with
justifying rituals." He wondered how Liz felt about the awed expression on
Ganine's face as she listened to him. "The male-oriented church defined
witches as enemies. Religion lost its contact with nature and became a world
power, a form of government. God came to represent not love but vengeance, all
past ideas rejected. Including, naturally, female supremacy. Now the position
of woman was below man."
     
         "On top's not
bad," Val said, pretending not to understand.
     
         "In the Jewish,
Christian and classical traditions, evil came into the world through women.
David went on, '"From a woman, sin had it's beginning and because of her,
we all die'. Ecclesiasticus."
     
         Liz broke in. "How
about the serpent drawing Eve intotemptation?" she said. "Everybody
knows the snake is a phallic symbol."
     
         "She didn't have to pick that apple." Max's tone
was sly and goading.
     
         "Right," Val said,
maintaining the innocent, childlike voice. "She could have had a piece of
celery. Oh, no, that's phallic too."
     
         David continued as though
neither Max nor Val had spoken. "The so-called Original Sin is a male
concept of course. An excuse to set up a patriarchal system. Women confined to
rearing families, leaving men to roam the world at will, venting their
hostilities. Impaling animals for food—men for fun.
     
         "As Hays put it, 'while
women raised the children, men had time to put feathers in their hair, rattles
on their wrists and ankles, to paint their faces and shape their egos in anyway
that pleased them'."
     
         "Now that's right
on," Barbara said, nodding emphatically.
     
         "Or as Grace Paley put
it," David went on, '"Men used one foot to stand on women, the other
foot to kick each other to death with.'"
     
         "Undoubtedly," Liz
said. "Thank God it doesn't work that way any more."
     
         "I'm not so sure about
that," David countered. "Men don't wear suits of armor any more or
beat up women quite as freely. Generally speaking though—"
     
          "Candidly speaking, you mean, "Val corrected.
     
         "All right," David
nodded. "Candidly speaking, things haven't really changed that much. Male
attitudes remain pretty much the same.
     
         "Civilization has been
patriarchal for such a long time that the very definition of femininity is, as
it always was, prejudiced, i.e., Masculine: strong and superior. Feminine: weak
and inferior. In the standard dictionary, one of the definitions of the word
'female' is 'denoting simplicity, inferiority, weakness and the like'."
     
         "Dictionaries prepared
by men," Liz said.
     
         "Of course," David
agreed. "That's the point."
     
         "If women were
superior, they'd be our masters," Max said. "They're where they are
because—" He broke off, grimacing.
     
         "Because what?" Barbara challenged him.
     
         "Forget it," Max
said.
     
         "No, let's hear your
pearls of wisdom."
     
         "I said forget it," Max's voice was tight.
     
         "Look, why don't we
just wind this up and limo to the theatre?" David said. "Let's not
let this sour the entire evening. The bottom line is that we have, on our
hands, an irrational system in which