Why Don’t People Get That My Angry Diatribe Against Women Is Satire?
A Defense, with Citations
The first line of the first satire by the great Roman poet Juvenal says, “It is difficult not to write satire.” After having dealt with women my entire 29 years, I find I must concede to the wisdom of the ancients.
That’s why, when my audience bristled at my suggestion that I would rather let a squirrel chew off my nuts than date a feminist, I was dismayed that this seemingly erudite crowd totally missed the intertext with Juvenal, who said he preferred suicide to marriage (Juv. Sat. VI).
While some people might actually think that there are only two types of women in the world, I was only ventriloquizing those kinds of people when I produced ten rhyming couplets about the Bitch and the Whore.
And when I said that the best woman is a dead woman, I obviously meant that as a joke because I have a daughter and one day she will be woman and I won’t want her, specifically, to be dead. This is actually a rhetorical technique called hyperbole (from the Greek “hyperballein”).
In fact, satire is an ancient art form, actually, invented by the Romans (satura tota nostra est as Quintilian says (Quint. Inst. Or. X.93)) so when I said that every woman deserves either a black eye or to suck my giant veiny cock, I was participating ironically in one of the oldest, most respected forms of art.
At worst, my diatribe was merely the purgation and purification of emotion through art that Aristotle called catharsis (Ar. Poet. 1449b) so even if I did write an ode about “dead-zoning all the women who friend-zoned me,” that was only a healthy expression of my feelings and not an actual threat of murder against Tracy, Rebecca, Darlene, Monica, and Tammy. You know what will actually get women murdered? Censorship.
In fact, it was Aristotle himself who stated that the relationship between men and women is one of ruler versus ruled (Ar. Pol. 1254b13–14), so if you think that I was wrong to say that “a good woman knows how to make a sub and be a sub,” then you also have to prove that Aristotle was wrong about philosophy when he invented philosophy — good luck with that!
Honestly, I just feel really sorry for you, since you jumped straight to judgment when I suggested that any woman over 27 was “fundamentally un-fuckable,” when I actually just needed something to rhyme with “privations of a lovestruck fool!” You don’t seem to appreciate words for their aesthetic qualities.
“Some women are like pigs — hairy, sitting on a pile of shit, dirty — and fat!” — if you think that’s not art, then the joke’s on you because I didn’t write it. It’s a quote from the 7th c. BCE poet Semonides (Sem. fr. 7.1–5). 7th century before CE, folks — as in 700 years before Jesus Christ came along.
So what I’m saying is, Jesus gets that I’m just joking because he can see that I respect women and I know he knows that I have a good heart. Unlike your mind, which wants to ruin the historical art of ironically hating women …
… Bitch.
Sarah Scullin is a writer, editor, and classicist. Her titles include Managing Editor for Eidolon, Adjunct at USF, and Mama to her three homeschooled children. You can follow her on Medium (@SarahScullin) and Twitter (@ScullinSarah)
