In the third and final part of our series on C.S. Lewis' The Four Loves we find Lewis sharing some scathing thoughts on the effect of women on male/male friendship. He's not writing of women in general, it must be emphasized, but of a certain kind of woman who is not interested in the things which interest the men in her ambit and who may sometimes begrudge them their friendships:
...[In societies where] it is the men who are civilized [educated] and the women not, and when all the women, and many of the men too, simply refuse to recognize the fact .... we get a kind, polite, laborious and pitiful pretence. The women are deemed (as lawyers say) to be full members of the male circle. The fact - in itself not important - that they now smoke and drink like the men seems to simple-minded people a proof that they really are.
No stag parties are allowed. Wherever the men meet, the women must come too. The men have learned to live among ideas. They know what discussion, proof and illustration mean. A woman who has had merely school lessons and has abandoned soon after marriage whatever tinge of "culture" they gave her - whose reading is the Women's Magazines and whose general conversation is almost wholly narrative - cannot really enter such a circle. She can be locally and physically present with it in the same room. What of that?
If the men are ruthless, she sits bored and silent through a conversation that means nothing to her. If they are better bred, of course, they try to bring her in. Things are explained to her: people try to sublimate her blundering and irrelevant observations into some kind of sense.
But the efforts soon fail and, for manners' sake, what might have been a real discussion is deliberately diluted and peters out in gossip, anecdotes and jokes. Her presence has thus destroyed the very thing she was brought to share. She can never really enter the circle because the circle ceases to be itself when she enters it - as the horizon ceases to be the horizon when you get there....She may be quite as clever as the men or cleverer. But she is not really interested in the same things, nor mistress of the same methods.
The presence of such women, thousands strong, helps to account for the modern disparagement of Friendship. They are often completely victorious. They banish male companionship, and therefore male Friendship, from whole neighborhoods. In the only world they know an endless prattling "Jolly" replaces the intercourse of minds. All the men they meet talk like women while women are present.
This victory over Friendship is often unconscious. There is, however a more militant type of woman who plans it. I have heard one say "Never let two men sit together or they'll get to talking about some subject and then there'll be no fun." Her point could not have been more accurately made. Talk, by all means; the more of it the better; unceasing cascades of the human voice; but not, please, a subject. The talk must not be about anything.
There are women who regard [their husband's friendships] with hatred, envy and fear as the enemy of Eros and perhaps even more, of Affection. A woman of that sort has a hundred arts to break up her husband's Friendships.
Lewis was writing in a time when there was often a much greater disparity between the education of men and women. Even so, he does have an eye for human nature. Men are much more likely to talk about things which women find boring, and vice-versa, and it's certainly true that the presence of people who are bored by a conversation is often fatal to it. This is especially so if the bored, uninformed party seeks to enter the conversation in order to change it or resents not being able to participate in it in the first place.
RLC
