As everyone knows by now, poor old David Jones has died a somewhat untimely death thanks to that bastard thing called cancer. As has become de rigeur on such occasions, everyone has taken to social media to bemoan the passing of someone whose work they probably haven’t given a shit about in years. Hell, I would be willing to bet a lot of the younger attention seekers didn’t even know who Bowie was until the news hit, or simply thought of him as “Some old guy that my dad likes.” As usual, everyone loves you once you are dead…

I am not about to eulogize Bowie. I am not going to go on about how remarkable it is that he managed to turn out so many good songs over so many decades, or how big an influence he was on today’s rather inferior crop of singer-“song-writers.” Like most people, I didn’t even pay any real attention to his last album release – but unlike so many of those people I am not about to pretend I bought it soon as it hit the stores. Hell, I just looked it up and “Blackstar,” the single, peaked at only 129 in the UK! Yet, now that the poor bastard has kicked the bucket, everyone is acting like he was Jesus in order to horn in on the nigh-pornographic thrill of yet another celebrity death. Like I said, everyone loves you once you are dead…

What I will do is go on about how Bowie mattered as a human male. To me, and I am far from alone in this, Bowie was an icon of two things – male creativity and male rebellion against gender roles. In a world in which most of the creative people are male, yet in which, paradoxically, being creative is seen as not such a male thing to do, Bowie was one of the few male figures known primarily for his creativity. Not his popularity, or his good looks, or his ability to take a lot of drugs and then die young, but primarily for being one incredibly creative bastard. The willfully eccentric music; the wild costumes; the makeup; the use of different personas at a time when such things could still be called creativity rather than mere cheap ploys for attention; even the unexpectedly skillful acting, especially notable in pieces like The Man Who Fell To Earth, all these things labeled David Bowie as “an artist” and a male one at that. This then, is the first reason why Bowie mattered – his full-on commitment to creativity made it more okay for a man to be “artsy” in a world where most people would still prefer that we played football instead.

Then there’s that gender rebellion thing. Eccentric even for an Englishman, Bowie gave the impression that he didn’t care in the slightest if you thought he was some poofy weirdo. He dressed different, acted different, and he was even – Shock! Horror! – a bit on the effeminate and delicate side! Other than what appears to have been a very brief flirtation with bisexuality, Bowie seems to have been basically heterosexual – all those wives and kids, you know – and this made his somewhat delicate ways much more subversive than those of gay stars. For gay males to be rather…er…gay means little – for a man with a wife and kids to be acting a bit “fruity” is a real kick in the teeth of those who would prefer men to stay in their place. That is true even today, but even more so in the old days when a teenage Bowie set up the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men because he was sick of people calling him “darling”! Nowadays, nobody gives a shit if a man has long hair, in part because men like Bowie have made it a bit more acceptable for men to express themselves and their individuality in a variety of ways. The gender cage is still there, but thanks to Bowie and others like him, it is a bit bigger than it used to be.

And that folks, is why I think Bowie mattered – not because of his great music, but because he made the lives of men and boys a bit better, a bit freer, a bit happier, in a society that really couldn’t care less about the happiness of men and boys. For that, we owe old Dave a nod of respect and the wish that, if the religious people are right and there is life after death, he ends up in the right place!

More and more lately, we hear about how important it is to get women into this creative field or that scientific discipline, as if their mere femaleness will somehow improve said fields. More women in comics! More women in movies! More women in music! More women in STEM! More women in computer programming! These are calls screeched across the media by everyone from feminist bloggers to the Amerikan Emperor. The problem is, women just don’t have much of a record when it comes to being good at creating things. And that is putting it nicely…

Let’s face it – women aren’t much good at creating anything that doesn’t shit itself every five minutes. Pretty much all the achievements of civilization can be put down to men, patriarchy, call it what you will. From patriarchal Sumer’s decision that the wheel was good for something other than pottery, to some dudes figuring out how to put some other dudes on the moon, to social innovations such as welfare and public schools, just about everything that has dragged humanity out of the primordial slime has been the doing of some man or other.

Feminists and white knights will argue that this is due to lack of opportunity for women, but that’s a load of shit. First, women have been going to Uni for decades now, yet where is the wave of innovation from the First Sex? Where are the inventions? The new ideas that are supposed to result from Woman’s different point of view? Nowhere, that’s where they are. Hell, even feminism goes all the way back to some Greek bloke called Plato! And then there’s the fact that males belonging to oppressed groups – that’s real oppression, like slavery and lynchings, not faux oppression involving air conditioners and tiny cartoon wristies – have managed to create many worthwhile things. George Washington Carver came up with dozens of innovations in agriculture – thanks, no doubt, to the enormous privileges bestowed upon him by being born a poor, black slave! What did the rich white women who graduated from University the same year as Carver come up with? Butkus. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Not that we know of, anyway – it’s always possible that one of the poor dears invented the computer but had it stolen by the patriarchy! Then there are Carver’s musical equivalents. Poor black men trapped in ghettoes who somehow managed to come up with rock ‘n’ roll, the blues, rap, and – may god forgive them – jazz. What the hell did rich white women come up with during that time? Any musical genres cooked up by those over-privileged twats? Not that I know of, no. Hell, I’m pretty sure that it was poor white men, not rich white women, who came up with most folk music and Country and Western, though I see little reason to be thankful for either of those achievements.

And no, learning to ape the creations of men is not being creative. Sure, there are many women who can write a good song, a good novel, a good poem, but only in forms and genres set out by their male superiors. The basic formulas being followed, they were almost always created by men, and without those basics even the most “brilliant” of female artists or intellectuals is left floundering like the mediocrity that she is.

So, the next time someone goes on about how essential it is to get more women into the arts and sciences, just remind yourself that, despite plenty of opportunity, the only thing women have come up with has been plenty of nothing.