I'm reading The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. I'd read excerpts of it before, but never the whole book.
In the book, he describes the circumstance leading to him getting "married" - though I believe the marriage was a common-law one.
"But this affair having turned my thoughts to marriage, I look'd round me and made overtures of acquaintance in other places; but soon found that, the business of a printer being generally thought a poor one, I was not to expect money with a wife, unless with such a one as I should not otherwise think agreeable. In the mean time, that hard-to-be-governed passion of youth hurried me frequently into intrigues with low women that fell in my way, which were attended with some expense and great inconvenience, besides a continual risque to my health by a distemper which of all things I dreaded, though by great good luck I escaped it."
"Intrigues with low women" at the "risqué" to his health by a "distemper" - venereal disease?
He called them low women. But if he engaged in acts with them, why should he escape a similar title - a "low man."
This passage suggested to me the old sexism. If women engage in such acts, they are "low," but men are just subject to the "hard-to-be-governed passion of youth"?
Indeed, he apparently had an illegitimate son by one of these "low women," and he and his "wife" took the child in.
At least he was honorable in his actions in doing so.
In the book he also expresses some questionable views about religion. If he were around today would he claim to be "spiritual, not religious"?
Ah well, it's still a good read.
But Ben was apparently a naughty boy.
Pax et bonum
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