My late aunt would be labeled as one of these “old maids,” as they say.
And Lewis is right.
We have disdain for things we should not.
I am not pointing here to all of the politically correct vomit coming out of every news outlet and social media site.
(You are not anti-establishment if corporate America, academia, and half the politicians agree with you.)
Honestly, I would rather spend time with my aunt and other old maids (like Corrie Ten Boom) than half of the frauds out there calling themselves academics and intellectuals these days.
I have been warned not even to raise the question of animal immortality, lest I find myself ‘in company with all the old maids’. I have no objection to the company. I do not think either virginity or old age contemptible, and some of the shrewdest minds I have met inhabited the bodies of old maids. Nor am I greatly moved by jocular inquiries such as ‘Where will you put all the mosquitoes?’—a question to be answered on its own level by pointing out that, if the worst came to the worst, a heaven for mosquitoes and a hell for men could very conveniently be combined.
-C.S. Lewis, The Problem Of Pain (Amazon)