Some weeks ago I got an email from a stranger in England. Here goes:

“I work at a top UK school and was asked to give a lecture on a controversial topic for a course intended to provoke debate. I chose the patriarchy.

I quoted your comment in The Privileged Sex that, in a world without men,

‘Mining, oil extraction, heavy and chemical industry, long-distance transportation, most forms of construction, many kinds of agriculture, such as forestry and the herding of large domestic animals, would all but cease. So would deep-sea fishing. Under such conditions, over 90% of the world’s present-day population would die of starvation. The women that survived such a calamity would likely revert to a primitive life based on horticulture, dwelling in huts and suffering from a permanent shortage of animal protein. Judging by historical and pre-historical precedent, their life expectancy would be reduced to less than 40 years.’

My point was simply about the traditional division of labor. A lot of men die doing those jobs, and most societies have avoided risking women’s lives.”

Next thing I learnt that, for daring to quote me and defying political correctness in general, the teacher was accused of “gross misconduct” and fired.

Let readers decide two things. First, whether there is any truth in the lines I wrote; and second, whether anyone deserves to be fired for quoting them. Here I want to discuss some other books that have been banned by the authorities that be. Taking a look at history, it turns out that, starting long, long ago, there have been any number of such books. Either because they contradicted the dominant religion, or because they were considered politically subversive, or because they celebrated sex. Thinking of it, it seems to me that there has hardly been a literate civilization that did not have a list of them.

That is why, in the discussion that follows, I shall limit myself to one such list, i.e the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Not because it was by any means the first. And not because it was the worst of the lot. At any rate it banned books because of what the authors had to say, not because of the race to which they, the authors, belonged. But because many of the books it banned were, or later became, world famous. Already in 1559, the year its first edition was issued by Pope Paul IV, it contained the names of 550 authors whose works were considered heretical. Individual titles by many additional ones not included. Over the next four centuries the number grew and grew until it reached into the thousands.

Some books were banned in certain countries but not in others. Some were banned entirely, others only until certain changes were made in the text. As the intellectual ambience changed, others still were dropped from the list. Keeping it up to date provided generations of Catholic scholars—not the world’s most foolish or worst informed, by the way—with lifetime sinecures. All to no avail, of course. Neither the printing presses nor any number of curious readers could be stopped. The harder the Holy See fought, the more it turned itself into a laughing stock. Until, in 1966, Pope Paul VI took the long overdue step of doing away with the whole thing.

Whether the sperm donor should be known or unknown? It generic levitra 5mg is always advisable to go for unknown donor. Former is expensive and latter is affordable. buy generic sildenafil Both of prescription free cialis http://www.unica-web.com/archive/2012/baca.html these numbers are important. Causes of weak erection in men include reduced sildenafil 100mg hop over to these guys blood supply due to damaged nerves and tissues. A full history of the list, let alone even a short description of the books on it, would easily fill the shelves of a library (or, these days, a hard disk). Here, all I can do is to present you, my faithful readers, with a few examples, selected for no other reason than that, as I’ve just said, the authors in question ended up by becoming world famous.

Nicolas Copernicus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies). In the West, the idea that the sun and all other heavenly bodies revolved around the earth reigned supreme from the second century CE on. Enter Copernicus, a monk from Torun in Poland. In On the Revolutions, published in the year of his death (1543), he argued that the opposite was the case. In 1616 it was placed on the Index. Today there are statues of him all over Poland as well as one in Chicago.

Galileo Galilei Dialogue on the Two Systems of the World. Galileo was a widely known, widely respected, early seventeenth-century scientist with many discoveries to his name. Including sunspots, including the mountains on the face of the moon, and including the moons of Jupiter. In this work, published in 1632, he argued, as Copernicus had done, that the earth was not the center of the universe. The Church immediately had the publication suspended. Later it put the author on trial, the details of which are too well known to be retold here.

Thomas Hobbes. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) in Leviathan and other words tried to bridge the gap between biology and social life on one hand and the physics of his day on the other. On the way he invented the modern state as an “artificial man,” for which I personally consider him, along with Aristotle, as one of the two most important political scientists of all time. Also on the way. he came very close to denying the existence both of God and the human soul. If he personally escaped punishment, then only because he fled from his native England to the Netherlands.

Francois-Marie Arouet Voltaire. Voltaire’s (1694-1778) ability to combine serious philosophy with a light, almost flippant, touch has probably never been equaled. For advocating the rights of nonconformists of every kind, religious ones included, most of his books were put on the Index. Today many see him as the greatest of all Enlightenment writers.

Antonio Rosmini, On the Five Wounds of the Catholic Church (1883). A relatively obscure figure, Rosmini was an Italian priest and theologian. In this work, each of the crucified Christ’s wounds is made to stand for a serious defect of the Church. The one on the left hand represents the division between the people and the clergy in public worship. The one on the right hand does the same for the insufficient education of the clergy. And so on, wound by wound. In 1849 it was placed on the index, along with another one of Rosmini’s works. Why did I put him on this short list? Because, 158 years later, his concern for the poor and downtrodden caused him to be formally beatified.

Jean-Paul Sartre. Opera Omnia. Sartre (1905-80) was a French philosopher who clashed with the Church on almost every point. Many consider him the twentieth century’s most important atheist. Which did not prevent him from being awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize for literature.

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86). De Beauvoir was Sartre’s lifelong companion. Her books, The Second Sex (1949) and The Mandarins (1954) were among the last to be put on the Index and also among the fairly rare ones written by women. Her sin? As well as joining Sartre in his atheism, she was perhaps the twentieth century’s most important feminist writer. As such, she opposed patriarchy and accused the Church of having supported it for two thousand years.

Now I too have been put on the index. If not on that of the Holy See, which has finally woken up to the folly of trying to control thought, then at any rate on the much more odious, because much less well-defined, of feminism/political correctness. To which I can only say, hurray! Who knows, perhaps there is hope for me, The Privileged Sex, and The Gender Dialogues as well.

P.S A few years ago the BBC, “punishing” me for something in wrote on this blog concerning (nonexistent?) Kurdish female warriors, canceled an interview with me. So I was very happy to learn that 1,300,000,000 Chinese are now prevented from watching it or listening to it. Serves it right, I suppose.