Women

The Hard Part

It’s mainly women who consult doctors. Woman is very troubled,
because clearly she has every kind of known weakness.
She needs… she wants to stay young. She has her menopause,
 her periods, the whole genital business, which is very delicate;
it makes a martyr out of her, doesn’t it?
 So this martyr lives anyway, she bleeds, she doesn’t bleed,
 she goes and gets the doctor, she has operations,
she doesn’t have operations, she gets re-operated,
then in between she gives birth, she loses her shape,
all that’s important. She wants to stay young, keep, her figure ….
It’s an immense problem …. It supports the beauty parlors, the quacks
and the druggists. But it doesn’t present an interesting medical problem, 
woman’s decline.

It’s obviously a fading rose. You can’t say it’s a medical problem,
 or an agricultural problem. In a garden, when you see a rose fade,
 you accept it. Another one will bloom. Whereas in woman, 
she doesn’t want to die. That’s the hard part.
– Louis-Ferdinand Céline, The Paris Review, No. 31, 1964

Don’t get me wrong. I love women. I just thank my lucky stars that I wasn’t born female. Being born is bad enough, but being born a woman takes the cake.

Céline got shot in the head in World War I, and he certainly was an odd bird. He was a medical doctor who helped the poor in Parisian slums, as well as being an anti-Semite and Nazi collaborator. He wrote non-fiction novels in which he used the French argot of the time, integrating it into language and transposing it into literature, which was a great innovation.
What he writes about women is not a put-down – but a tract in compassion.

Céline didn’t mention the high hells and the underclothes and outer clothes that women wear and all the things that women do in order to appeal to men. A man just puts his skivvies on and a shirt, trousers and a jacket, and he’s set to go. There’s a certain underground toilet in the city that I stop in. When I have to wait for my turn, it is anything but pleasant. I have to close my eyes in order to avoid noticing how the urinators jerk and fiddle with their precious members, before tucking them in, flushing and leaving.

God, I think, how very unfortunate woman are for having to deal men and their members, as well having to go through all the tribulations described by Céline.
Well in this liberated day and age with all the aspects of feminism, women are finally getting their own back at men. I may not always like that, but I can’t really hold that against them. Is it any wonder, after all that has happened and is still happening?

Don’t get me wrong. I love women. I just thank my lucky stars that I wasn’t born female. Being born is bad enough, but being born a woman takes the cake.
© by Herbert Kuhner