Luciano Pavarotti: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xCFEk6Y8TmM

Lyrics Italian & English:

La donna è mobile, qual piuma al vento, muta d'accento, e di pensiero. Sempre un amabile, leggiadro viso, in pianto o in riso, è menzognero. La donna è mobil'. Qual piuma al vento, muta d'accento e di pensier'.

È sempre misero, chi a lei s'affida; chi le confida, mal cauto il cuore! Pur mai non sentesi, felice appieno; chi su quel seno, non liba amore! La donna è mobil', qual piuma al vento, muta d'accento e di pensier'!

Woman is flighty, like a feather in the wind; she changes in voice and in thought. Always a lovely, pretty face, in tears or in laughter; it's untrue. Woman is flighty, like a feather in the wind; she changes in voice and in thought.

Always miserable is he who trusts her, he who confides in her his unwary heart. Yet one never feels fully happy, who from that bosom does not drink love. Woman is flighty; like a feather in the wind, she changes her words and her thoughts.

TLDR AWALT.

An anecdote is told, of an elder colleague of mine, a professor of philosophy at a small liberal arts college, who was a teacher of mine back in the day, that one afternoon, when he was at home with his wife and at the time something like six children screaming and massaging honey into their hair or vomiting strained carrots over themselves or climbing the bookcases like Spiderman, he stood in their midst, turned to his wife and said, "None of this would have happened, if you weren't so beautiful".

The allure of Woman is nearly irresistible. And it has gotten us into a lot of trouble (cf. Genesis chapter 3). It makes good men destroy themselves. Popular musicians make millions crooning about men's tragc flaw, their susceptibilty to a woman's charms.

It's a mystery to me - and I'm not affecting dramatic irony in admitting this - why a man can build an empire, or judge the stability of a bridge just from the virtual model on his laptop, or correctly predict that an interviewee would become a liability to the company if hired, but throw away his happiness at the first IOI lobbed in his general direction.

Different voices in the rp community or rp tradition say that women are irrational or simply nonrational, or just emotional. To be fair to human nature in its various forms, I ought to aver that being a woman is a perfectly valid instance of being human. But my religious catechism says that Man - male or female - is made in the image and likeness of God, and that this likeness is chiefly in the soul, not in the body. The philosophers whom I trust say that the specific distinction among animals that makes Man what he is, is rationality. But far from quieting my mind, this raises for me the question, "In what sense is a woman rational?"

Obviously a woman can do math, or carry out an orderly set of procedures, requiring foresight, planning, deliberation and judgement-calls contingent upon circumstances, that ends in dinner being served. On a negative note, however, women display fearsome powers of of contrivance when engaging in various forms of social manipulation, like getting guys to fight over them or finagling their way into perpetual material security through divorce-rape. It's clear to me that women are rational.

Eleanor Roosevelt supposedly said, "Great minds talk about ideas; mediocre minds talk about things; small minds talk about people." Oh yeah, women talk about people. I've never had a discussion with a woman about anything else. The closest I came to having a conversation about an idea was when a pro-abortion feminist tried to tell me that even if a fetus is a human being with a right to life, some killings of human beings are justifiable. (I mean no offense to anyone here who differs with me - or her - on that issue; I'm just giving an example.)

It seems to me that a woman's rationality is rationality - but directed to an end different from the rationality of a man. A saying goes, "Men build, women decorate". Meaning, a man will build the house, but the woman will make it a home. Could it be that the fundamental distinction between men's and women's rationalities lies in their objective ends? That men aim to make, and women aim to mold?

If so, then I think I know where Verdi is coming from. If a man thinks that a woman is a fickle, lying, manipulative, narcissistic gold-digging cunt, isn't he just saying to himself that there is a fundamental incompatibility in the diversity of ends in the rational objectivities of men and women?

In a nutshell, that they simply don't think like us?

If so, then why the hell do we keep fraternizing with them?

If only they weren't so ... beautiful.