From John Gray's "Straw Dogs" (p28):
Man is like other animals, wants food and success and women.
Sentence of the day, sexist edition
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Now available from OR Books…
and beer and a 52″ plasma
Cats, yes, but our dog couldn’t care less about the TV.
Nah. Man is unlike other animals; he wants loose shoes, tight ***** and a warm place to s**t. Offhand, I can’t think of any other animals that want shoes of any sort.
Just to be clear, the point of all this was that the sentence starts off with “Man is like other animals” – so this is man as species, including male and female, gay and straight, adult and child. But it ends with “Man … wants women” which pretty much limits “Man” to heterosexual adult males. Philosophers are supposed to be careful with language, and this kind of sloppy thinking just pisses me off.
I wonder if the sentence didn’t originally use the term “sex” but it was later changed to “women” because the words success and sex sound weird when used together:
“Man is like other animals, wants food and success and sex.”
I’m skeptical of the claim that other animals “want success”. I’m not sure what other species “want success” and its unclear to me how you would design an experiment to test the claim.
Do cats really recognize TV images while dogs do not?
Stinkin’ sloppy sexist philosophers!!!