A general underlying distaste for the opposite sex is one of the sentiments shared by writers Virginia Woolf and TS Eliot. Although both authors have similar perspectives on the two genders, both viewing men as the inferior sex, the means by which Woolf and Eliot arrive at this conclusion are very different. Likewise, the emotions that arise from their beliefs are quite different. Writing in the aftermath of the First World War, both authors felt strong emotions about the society that emerged from the rubble. Woolf, in "A Room of One's Own", takes a defiant look at the societal implication that men are superior to women, and concludes by working her way through a jumble of thoughts: that men are afflicted with 'an inferiority complex that can only be fed by women and that it is society that perpetuates these circumstances. Eliot, on the other hand, believes that women are superior because they hold power over men; men need women, no matter how disgusted they are with the female gender, because of the innate need to procreate and because society dictates that a man must have a mate. These ideas are described in Eliot's poems "The 'Wasteland' and 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'. Say no to plagiarism. Get a custom essay on 'Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned' ?Get the original essayBoth authors see men in an almost identical way: they see men as inferior, bordering on pitiful. This is illustrated by the way the men in their works interact with Woolf's women. asserts that men only emphasize the inferiority of women so that they can feel superior. She cites Napoleon and Mussolini as prime examples, stating that if "[women] were not inferior, they would stop being inferior." enlarge" (36). glass, men would die, "like the drug addict deprived of his cocaine" (36) Woolf considers that women were, "until the time of Jane Austen... seen only in relation to the 'other sex' (82) his assertion that before Austen, the majority of writers were men and viewed women only in relation to men, not as individuals. Eliot views the way men treat women slightly differently, but with the same pathetic ends. The first-person narrator is the perfect example of how men feel about women: Eliot seems to hate women because of the power they hold over men, and to hate men because of the power that women hold on to them. In "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", the speaker suffers from an acute fear of failure in love and is even afraid to start a conversation with a woman, lest she respond: "That n 'is not at all what I meant' (6.97). The speaker, having managed to survive trivial societal circumstances such as tea drinking, idle chatter, and reading novels, questions whether it is even worth trying to appear worldly. He is disgusted by the fact that he is attracted to women and resents being held to a heterosexual bond that he so dislikes. He reveals his distaste for women when he speaks of their arms: "arms in bracelets and white and bare / (But in the light of a lamp covered with light brown hair!)" (5.63). Both Woolf and Eliot argue that men are inferior to women, although it seems that general opinion at the time disagreed. When these authors examine how women treat men, their views become different. Woolf considers women..