HORSES SWEAT, MEN PERSPIRE, LADIES GLOW: Or not. A highly interesting take on gender and the messier aspects of corporeal life, from Jim Henley. I fully agree with all of the following (and should probably note that I’m a huge fan of both Philip Larkin and Elvis Costello): “My guess is that most women, by the time they reach adulthood, have integrated the dualism of Spirit and ‘Filth’ more completely than most men. They have to. A young woman has experienced monthly vaginal bleeding for at least a decade and anticipates several decades more of it. She either has given birth or has a very good idea what it entails. Social customs being what they are, she’s probably cleaned more messes–done more laundry, more dishes, more toilets. Intimate with her mother’s life in ways a son is unlikely to be, she is long over any shock at the idea that we are permeable bags of perishable fluids. …

“I think men have the privilege of going through youth fairly ‘self-contained,’ anatomically. Sheltered. Desire drives them into engagement with ‘the place of excrement’ and it’s a shock. Suddenly we really want to ‘swap spit’ and probe orifices and ‘exchange fluids,’ but it represents a loss of control and a breach of male autonomy. I can think of two artists, often considered ‘misogynists,’ whose horror is not of women at all but of male desire: the poet Philip Larkin and the musician Elvis Costello. (Mind you, in lesser talents what starts as horror of male desire can get offloaded onto women and become misogyny proper.) Women seem to have varying attitudes toward intercourse during menses. Men seem to find it intimidating, at least the first time.”

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