Hombres necios que acusáis (Redondillas / "You Foolish Men")

Foolish men who accuse women without cause, she begins, and then, stanza by tightening stanza, she springs the trap: you court a woman and then despise her for yielding, you fog the mirror yourself and complain the glass is not clear, like a child who conjures a bogeyman and then lies awake in terror of it. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz wrote these redondillas from inside a convent in colonial Mexico, a self-taught nun the churchmen would spend years trying to silence. The famous question at its heart still has no honest answer: who sins more gravely, she who takes the payment or he who pays to make her sin? Nothing in the double standard has been bettered since, and no one has ever taken it apart more coolly, in rhyme so neat each stanza snaps shut like a verdict. Read it and feel the centuries fold into one contemptuous, perfectly reasoned shrug.