But one can begin an essay any which way, and on any subject.

For instance, let us begin with this sentence and then see what happens: Women are the same as men – except in the shape of the sexual organs and the shape of the body. They think in the same way, feel in the same way, laugh in the same way, weep in the same way.

They sleep and dream in the same way, chatter and gossip in the same way.

They even hate or enjoy sex in the same way.

But here there is another difference: in one case the organ goes in, in the other it receives. This difference follows from the shape of the organs referred to above.

There are postures too, in the sexual act, which men can adopt and women can’t, or the other way about. Then there are postures which women resent, or rather a particular posture: they don’t like to bend on their knees with their hind-side lifted in front of the man. But this is true only of the most squeamish of women or those who are very shy: it violates their good sense. The wiser of them lose their shyness sooner rather than later or change their definition of good sense.

Some women think that this posture enacts a relation of power between the man and the woman: standing behind, the man looks powerful while the woman is at the receiving end. Crouching on her knees and the bends of her arms, with her buttocks suspended in the air, she appears to be a figure in total submission, ready to give pleasure to the man. But in a different perspective, this posture can be seen as a wanton act of freedom. The buttocks are projected and not suspended and are a challenge to the man. A prudish man – a man who himself is not free – can take fright from this scene. He wouldn’t know how to deal with this woman. He would be intrigued. At the very least, his curiosity would be provoked, and possibly soon he would be on the road to freedom. What a fortunate fate! The wanton woman has made him free! But not all men encounter such fate. Quite a few of them spend their sexual hours in ignorance, timidity or shame. Their woman herself is prudish!

But there are other women who don’t give a damn about the posture so long as they get their own pleasure. In my view, these are the best of the lot, but they are few.

Such women show that at times the politics of power in the sexual act is stretched too far.

Talking of politics, think of the man who is expected to perform day after day for an endless number of years with a woman he does not love, or a woman who does not love him but still has no compunctions about getting her pleasure. Or think of him if he is unemployed and she is not. He soon loses his charms. He turns into a layabout, a good for nothing, an idler. Think of him if he sympathizes with the liberated acts of his woman. He is then a ‘wimp’, a ‘wimpish man’, what a shame!

If you are a ‘man’, you are expected to ‘behave like one’ – even by women.

But what does it mean, behaving like a man? Is there a behavior specific to men? There is none. And what is ‘manhood’? There is no such thing. Men here are victims of an attitude that goes beyond the household, and beyond women.

This attitude is rooted in the fact that men are no different from women, except in their physical make up, but are seen to be so by both men and women. And they are seen to be so because both men and women have an ontological propensity to look at things in a similar fashion. This fashion is the result of a simple calculation: the thing being looked at must present a shape that suits their purposes. Inherent in this calculation is a desire to make use of everything around. Every object – and that includes every subject – is subjected to this desire. When things resist – because they have an unsubjected shape – every effort is made to change their behavior to bring it in tune with the calculation.

Looking at men as ‘men’ has very well suited women, and it still suits them, except that now they want their men to be liberated as well as ‘men’, and this wish, again, bears the same logic. The situation is this: so far as women are concerned it is not enough for a man to be liberated, he also must continue to be a ‘man’. I quite sympathize with women on this point but my sympathy baulks at the thought that such a man is likely to become a victim of a calculating woman. This calculation makes disappear all differences between men and women, making them, by doing so, ontologically the same.

And yet there is a politics between men and women. It has flowed from a singular fact: men are physically stronger. It is only because of their superior physical strength that men have dominated women throughout history. As a rule the other ways of dominating women are a result of this. There are, no doubt, exceptions to this rule. In a particular household or relation the man dominates because of his greater wealth or his better capacity to earn even when he is physically weaker. In another she lets him dominate because he gives her unusual sexual pleasure. (This is an important fact. Men who are sexually weak or clumsy lose the respect of their woman and in many cases the power of their physical strength.) But the general rule prevails. A woman can cling on to even the basest of men because he gives her a feeling of physical security, or she needs him to do sundry household work. As compensation she may let him dominate the relation.

Since women can’t physically dominate men, they find other ways of escaping their dominance or even to dominate them in turn. Many of them use their intelligence, others their body or emotions; still others dominate the man because of their greater wealth. These are well known facts, but such cases only prove the rule: women resort to such stratagems because they are physically weaker. Had they been physically stronger than men, they would have ruled the world, and oppressed men in the same way as men have oppressed them.

When they are in a position to do so both men and women can oppress in the same fashion; they can also take oppression in the same way. In households or relations where women have a stronger voice, men have to bend and bow. Usually this happens to men who are gentle, and it happens also because they are gentle.

A gentle man with an unscrupulous woman has the most wretched existence.

Women can be as exploitative of gentle men as men of gentle women.

A woman can abandon a man as brutally and selfishly as a man can abandon a woman. Or she will not abandon him but fall in love, as well, with another man or other men.

Men, of course, have been doing such things for a long time.

The feminine element is a humbug, a whitewash. Men and women are made of exactly the same material. This material is fine as well as coarse, clean as well as dirty. Neither men nor women represent the best quality. They are a mixed bag. This bag is too heavy to carry. Yet people have been carrying it. Some out of compulsion, a few out of love. The rest of them have carried it because it suited their calculations.

Love.

Men as well as women have abused that word, that emotion.

They have talked too much about it, written too much about it, and practiced it too little.

Their survival needs overcome this gentlest of notions.

Finally, they want to live; loving comes later.

Both men and women love money, power, fame, goods and comfort. Diseases assault them, kill them: they die in the same way or ways. They rebel and resist oppression when they choose to do so, which is quite rare. Most of the times they are too stupid to realize that they are being oppressed, or feel too powerless to resist it. Stupidity and powerlessness are common to men and women. The human species is hugely stupid but it does not think that this is so. This shows that both men and women are arrogant and egoistic in the same way.

Some of the stupidest of men and women are to be found in the academic sphere. They churn out books year after year in the belief that they are furthering knowledge. Whereas the books that have furthered knowledge since ancient times can be counted on one’s fingers. What the academics have been doing is little more than this: plunder ideas, tinker with them and regurgitate them in unreadable forms. But such is the arrogance of the men and women in this sphere that they believe themselves to be the fount and repository of all knowledge.

This is really a moot question: Why do we need so many books? If a person has something original to say, one book or maybe two in a lifetime should suffice.

But this would require patience to work for an original idea or for a body of ideas to strike. Neither men nor women have that patience. They share the ambition to write an endless number of books in the shortest possible time.

Time does unimaginable things to books and not more than a couple of books of an author survive even in the short run. Every idea that was not a product of his own mind is thrown by the wayside, and every book that carries such ideas. Yet men and women have the temerity to go on writing books throughout their lives! What they should do instead is to put their ideas to paper only when they have been cut down to make not more than a couple of books. Or they should write them down but should cut and chop them for a very long time till a book worthy of its name finally emerges.

Writing a book worthy of its name or worthy of its subject. Neither men nor women seem to be interested in this: they wish somehow to produce a book. Books have become a trade. Greed has overtaken wisdom and prudence. Hunger has become the norm even in the relation between men and women. They are both hungry – not for love but for something else that remains covered over by that word and is not allowed to emerge to the surface. The focus of investigation is the other, not the self. How much can the other give, how much can I take. The other can be a man or a woman, a bird, a tree or a stone. Only, it must give. I must take. My mouth is enormous. So is my appetite. I am a man, a woman. A man-woman. One and the same.

Men and women eat in the same way, digest in the same way, shit in the same way. Both of them ooze out all kinds of dirt. They are an equal burden upon the earth.

And on each other.

They groan under this burden in the same way, stumble as they carry it. (They carry it even when they have given it up.) Stumbling, they swear. Curse their fate. But their curses reach nowhere. No one, other than themselves, listens to what they say. A blind date awaits them. A blind date follows them. With wide-open eyes both men and women fail to find their way. Because there is no way. No way that they can come together. Even though the two are ‘one and the same’.