Mr. Mencken has been a tremendous influence on me since I was a wee-lil-lad.
My Grandfather steeped me in the ways of HL Mencken as part of an agreement my Grandfather had made with me, I was only allowed to stay over on the weekends if I had read a Mencken passage. As I got older, my self realizations coupled with gaining wisdom (albeit in small increments) in the world around me I could finally, really appreciate HL Mencken for his candor and honesty.
I decided to share some of his train of thought with you folks on the subject of the sexes, and allow you dear reader, to partake in that forbidden act…thinking for yourself.
May the scales fall from your eyes.
The Life of Man
(from Prejudices: Third Series, 1922, pp 120-32. First printed in the Smart Set, Oct. 1918, pp 80-81)
The old anthropomorphic notion that the life of the whole universe centers in the life of man - that human existence is the supreme expression of the cosmic process - this notion seems to be happily on its way toward the Sheol of exploded delusions. The fact that the life of man, as it is more and more studied in the light of general biology, appears to be more and more empty of significance. Once apparently the chief concern and masterpiece of the gods, the human race now begins to bear the aspect of an accidental by-product of their vast, inscrutable and probably nonsensical operations. A Blacksmith making a horse-shoe produces something almost as brilliant and mysterious - the shower of sparks. But his eye and thought, as we know, are not on the sparks, but on the horse-shoe. The sparks, indeed, constitute a sort of disease of the horse-shoe; their existence depends upon the wasting of its tissue. In the same way, perhaps, man is a local disease of the cosmos - a kind of pestiferous eczema or urethritis. There are, of course, different grades of eczema, and so are there different grades of men. No doubt a cosmos afflicted with nothing worse than an infection of Beethovens would think it worth while to send for the doctor. But a cosmos infested by Socialists, Scotsmen and stockbrokers must suffer damnably. No wonder the sun is so hot and the moon is so diabetically green.
Women as Outlaws
(from Prejudices: Third Series, 1922, pp. 51-54. First printed, in part, in the Smart Set, Dec., 1921, pp. 28-29)
Perhaps one of the chief charms of women, as figures in human society, lies in the fact they are relatively uncivilized. In the midst of all the puerile repressions and inhibitions that hedge them round, they continue to show gipsy and outlaw spirit. No normal woman ever gives a hoot for law if the law happens to stand in the way of her private interest. The boons of civilization are so noisily cried up by sentimentalists that we are apt to overlook its disadvantages. Intrinsically, it is a mere device for regimenting men. Its perfect symbol is the goose-step. The most civilized men, in the conventional sense, is simply a man who has been most successful at caging and harnessing his honest and natural instincts - that is, the man who has done the most cruel violence to his own ego in the interest of the Commonweal. The value of his commonweal is always overestimated. What is its purpose at bottom? Simply the greatest good to the greatest numbers - of petty rogues, ignoramuses and chicken-hearts.
The capacity for submitting to and prospering comfortably under this cheese-monger’s civilization is far more marked in men than in women, and far more in inferior men than in men in higher categories. It must be obvious to even so pathetic an ass as a college professor of history that very few of the genuinely first-rate men of the race have been wholly civilized, in the meaning given to the term in newspapers. Think of Caesar, Bonaparte, Luther, Fredrick the Great, Cromwell, Barbarossa, Innocent III, Bolivar, Hannibal, Alexander and to come down to our own time, Grant, Stonewall Jackson, Bismark, Wagner and Cecil Rhodes.
The fact that women have a greater capacity than men for controlling and concealing their emotions is not an indication that that they are more civilized, but a proof that they are less civilized. This capacity is a characteristic of savages, not of civilized men, and its loss is one of the penalties that the race has paid for the tawdry boon of civilization. Your true savage, reserved, dignified, and courteous, knows how to mask his feelings, even in the face of the most desperate assault upon them; your civilized man is forever yielding to them. Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical, and especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes. The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
Wars are no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of them. They are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has been spent its ferine fury. Here the effect of civilization has been to reduce an art that was once the best men of the race, to the level of a raid on a fancy-house or a fight in a waterfront saloon. All wars of Christendom are now disgusting and degrading; the conduct of them has passed out of the hands of nobles and knights and into the hands of demagogues, money-lenders and atrocity-mongers. To recreate one’s self with war in the grand manner, as Prince Eugene, Marlborough and the Old Dessauer knew it, one must now go among barbarian peoples.