"L. Timmel Duchamp - De Secretis Mulierum" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duchamp L Timmel)

showed the real truth. And what if, moreover, we were to discover through
additional past-scans that other 'towering intellects' were also women
masquerading as men. We know already that a number of women disguised
themselves
as men throughout the middle ages, early modern period and into the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. Some of them were even soldiers." I threw him a grin
over my shoulder. "In the earlier period, we know of instances from the very
few
that were unmasked and punished -- sometimes with death and banishment, since
those were typical penalties for women caught wearing male clothing. And in
the
later period, when death and banishment weren't the penalties, we know of
particular instances because women sometimes revealed it when it wouldn't harm
them to do so. But suppose the people who washed Thomas's body for burial were
so horrified to discover his true sex that they decided to keep it secret,
since
the very idea of a woman being so brilliant was too threatening to allow out?
And ditto for Leonardo and anyone else who may have come down to us as men but
were really women?" I poked the strands of linguine apart with my wooden fork.
"Just ask yourself: What if?"

"Preposterous!" he said. "Absolutely preposterous!"

I smiled at him as sweetly as I knew how. "But we're playing 'what if,' Teddy.
Granted, it's preposterous. But stretch your imagination: what if it were all
true?"

The long and the short of it was that he wouldn't play that particular "what
if." The very idea of it exasperated him beyond bearing. In fact, only the
chirp
of Teddy's personal phone (which he carried with him everywhere) saved us from
one of our increasingly frequent gender tissue quarrels. So while he took the
call in the living room, I poured myself a glass of Chianti and rushed through
the final stages of the carbonara -- contemplating how unlikely it would be
for
Teddy and me to be still "seeing" one another if he weren't my advisor and I
his
student.

I can hardly think of a single area of our lives m which Teddy Warner and I
agreed. He wanted a disciple, not a maverick for a student; I wanted an
advisor,
not a guru. I loved wine; he eschewed any substance or activity (other than
sex)
likely to threaten his control. He loved goopy-crusted pies with sickeningly
sweet fruit fillings; I thought red pepper was the neatest thing since sliced
bread. He grooved on Wagner and all three Strausses; I was a Beethoven, Mozart
and Bach freak. But all these things were simply a difference in personal
taste,
you say? All right, then, let's get down to fundamentals: Teddy Warner thought