Intro Comments for Part 2: The Unfairer Sex

Part Two- The Unfairer Sex
“Fairness is a concept that holds only in limited situations. Yet we want that concept to apply to everything, in and out of phase. From snails to hardware stores to married life. Maybe no one finds it, or even misses it, but fairness is like love. What is given has nothing to do with what we seek.”
-Haruki Murakami, from “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World”

“The rules of fair play do not apply in love and war.”
-John Lyly, from “Euphues”

Let’s perform an exercise in flawed (but experientially true) logic:

Begin with the statement: “All is Fair in Love and War.” This is nothing more than a justification for Machiavellian tactics, the carte blanche of the compulsive cheater.
If it is true, then its opposite, that “Nothing is Fair in Love and War,” must also be true. It’s just a difference in perspective. The “Nothing” version’s what the law-abiding loser mutters dejectedly as he watches his true love depart on the arm of a “playah,” minutes before a bunker buster drops right on his bowed head.

Now, to abuse a logical syllogism, we can further say that “Love IS War,” insofar as they both share this arbitrary quality of being “Fair.” This, admittedly, is a gross oversimplification, a premature collapsing of terms. However, this statement may be verified by popular experience, particularly by those who have lost on “love’s battlefield”; those who have had to amputate, if not limbs, then perhaps whole chambers of experience, whole seasons of heartbeats; those who still suffer from PTSD (post traumatic Separation disorder), doomed to replay the fatal and fated words and wounds that shot them down from the heady skies of love.

So, although John Gray may say that “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” (Mars being the God of War, and Venus, the Goddess of Love), the truth of the matter is that it hardly matters which God you are, or which “planet” you come from. They’re both the same, down at the rotten core.

In love, as in war, it is never the fair player who wins.

The victor is always, always, always the unfairer sex.

[The stories in this section are loosely united in their expression of the theme of the impossibility of fair relationship between members of the opposite sex. The poems in this section, meanwhile, are less reflections of this theme, and may simply be seen as being inspired by some of the images that arise within the stories.]