Week 7- Gulliver's Travels

For all of Swift's political commentary, some of this strongest views seem to be on women and not in a positive light. Beginning with the Brobdingnagians, who upon close inspection are disgusting. Any feature that would have been seemed sexual by a man of a similar size was turned vile in the magnified state that Gulliver saw them in. And the women were overly sexual in nature, using Gulliver as little more than a play thing (and a rather graphic one at that). This seems odd because men are often thought of as more sexual than women in a general sense, but the only two major mentions of women by Swift include this quality. The wife an official was also unable to control herself, giving into an affair with another man. This depiction is even worse, because the man she chose is a horrible, abusive partner, leaving the reader to pity her husband for his wayward wife and think her a fool, deserving of her unfortunate circumstances because of her unfaithfulness. It makes me wonder if swift was wronged by a woman in his past, as these passages come off as increasingly bitter. Its also interesting to note that at the end, Gulliver is utterly repulsed by his wife, though not for her sexual appetite. Nevertheless  it still adds to the theme on women. As far as I can tell, Swift had a few paramours, relationships biographers view as ambiguous, leaving the door open for Swift to be scorned or passed over for another and thus inserting his personal feelings of women into his already commentary filled novel.