I made Marce angry tonight. That’s a rare thing. We were talking about how irritating female BS is and debating why we should care. I was characteristically dismissive, but i wouldn’t go so far to say that i treat women as sub-human.

His point was that i couldn’t generalise about all women because of my experiences, and i replied by saying he was lucky to have a chick who is the exception to the rule that most men could identify with, and also couldn’t generalise just because of his experience with her. I love Marce regardless, especially because he hates being called Marce and i’m the only one who can get away with it. Barney invited us out to dinner at the amazing Fish In A Tie restaurant in Battersea and as always it was a cracking evening punctuated by furious debate and leering over beautiful women.

It is worth pointing out that he had his retaliation by gaying me up in public several times. I am convinced this is due to his PMT.

“I’m writing this because I was made very angry tonight by a good friend who was not only extremely misogynistic, but claimed to be proud of the fact. Perhaps every woman he’s met has fulfilled all the criteria of womanhood he mentioned, like untrustworthiness and one-up-manship, but then again perhaps his predilection for treating women as sub-human has made all his (ex-)girlfriends more likely to read his emails given half the chance.”

[email starts here]

Prejudice is a good thing. Prejudice is the facility of pre-judging something. Prejudice allows you to stop worrying about whether the sun will rise tomorrow because you know it will, to choose the lamb on the menu rather than the prawns you don’t like, to hire the person you know will be better educated than the next one in line.

Prejudice and categorisation are two sides of the same coin. When you are able to say that something is like another thing, and both of them are different to a third thing, you are exercising your skill of categorisation. This doesn’t make you special; our brains are hard- wired to do this from a very early age, which is how even babies can begin to know that an pear is a pear - and not a unique, once-for-ever collection of genetic material that will be combined, evolved and never appear again.

We as a species, and I strongly suspect that most animals, categorise everything. If your ancestors hadn’t categorised things properly, they would have eaten more of those poisonous red berries. Then they wouldn’t be your ancestors. So categorisation is part of what we do, day in day out. As soon as you use a non-proper noun, like ‘pear’, you have categorised a load of individual fruit as ‘pears’. Some of them are not like any other fruit you’ve ever seen, and may even be closer to apples (ever had a ‘Chinese Pear’?), but you are able to put the fruit in context and know what to expect. It’s ingrained in language.

Without it I would spend so long explaining the context of ‘fruit’, I wouldn’t be able to get my point across. If you’re even still reading this.

Once you’ve categorised something, you can use the information you have about the category and extend it to each individual, which allows you to learn from experience and move on in life, saving you from making the same mistakes again and again. This is prejudice. It is good.

The only problem is that it’s difficult for us to acknowledge that our categorisation is imperfect. We know that it’s ‘the exception that proves the rule’, but this is because in the real world, things aren’t so easily categorised. Some mutants are half apple and half pear, or mostly apple but a bit tomato. Everyone categorises the things on the edge of their experience as an extension of what seems to fit best, until they realise there are lots of things that are similar to each other, but different to exiting categorisations (which is how we discover a new species).

If you acknowledge that each fruit is genetically individual and won’t appear exactly the same again, then you know that it is possible to categorise it in several different ways, depending on the context of your categorisation, and that your categorisation is not a hard-and- fast rule (is a tomato a fruit?), but depends on your own experience of similar individuals.

And now to the crux of the story - this ability of ours to extend our knowledge of individuals that fit in a category to new things that also fit that category can get us into trouble. I’m writing this because I was made very angry tonight by a good friend who was not only extremely misogynistic, but claimed to be proud of the fact.

Perhaps every woman he’s met has fulfilled all the criteria of womanhood he mentioned, like untrustworthiness and one-up-manship, but then again perhaps his predilection for treating women as sub-human has made all his (ex-)girlfriends more likely to read his emails given half the chance.

My point is that while we can’t get rid of prejudice without sacrificing everything that allows us to deal with the world, it closes our minds to new possibilities. By classifying all women (or blacks, or old people, or fat people, or whatever) as stupid, simple, untrustworthy or whatever, you are exercising this skill on a person who can easily not fulfil this expectation, but can show you that they are an individual capable of amazing things you could never contemplate.

If you want to pre-judge a person, feel free; it’s only natural.

Just don’t tell me and expect me to think any more of you.

Keep well all you genetic mutants

Marcel