Venus Plus X

by Theodore Sturgeon

“It’s a team, that’s what I mean. There’s a lot of yammering going on about the women taking over. They’re not taking over. They’re moving in.”

“And if you did not come from a culture which so exhaustively concentrated on differences which were in themselves not drastic, you would be able to see how small the differences actually were.”

Is it men’s disgust of women that makes so many of them treat women with such contempt? Is it that which makes it so easy to point out that the Don Juans and the Lotharios, for all their hunger for women, are often merely trying to see how many women they can punish?

If you can’t be really good at anything, then the only way to be able to prove you are superior is to make someone else inferior. It is this rampaging need in humanity which has, since pre-history, driven a man to stand on the neck of his neighbor, a nation to enslave another, a race to tread on a race. But it is also what men have always done to women.