The Evolution Of A Tomboy – The Beautiful Complexity Of A Woman

Letty Armour was a tomboy – a little girl who liked to climb trees, torture frogs, do daredevil tricks on her Schwinn and never, ever wear dresses.  ‘That’s for girls’, she said to her mother who tried to fit her with a pretty white organza dress she had bought at Lord & Taylor.

 

‘Why, Letty darling, you’re a girl’, to which Letty frowned, pursed her lips, and spat, ‘No, I’m not’, which of course upset Mrs. Armour who had always been the belle of the ball, a stunning Hedy Lamar raven-haired beauty who practiced her inviting smile for hours in the bathroom mirror and was always followed by a retinue of boys wherever she went.  

Prom queen, Snow Queen, Spring Queen, she had been the most desirable, alluring, tempting young woman that Chillicothe had ever seen; and now standing before her was this defiant butch girl only she could pick out in a crowd of roughneck boys.

‘She’s just a tomboy, darling.  She’ll grow out of it’, said Mr. Armour, a good looking man who fancied himself a boulevardier,  a Clark Gable.  A bit of a pompous ass, all dressed in English tweeds and Burberry, a man who thought he understood women but had no clue, so self-absorbed was he in his own persona that he was downright lucky to have reeled in a trophy fish like Betty Finch who for her part overlooked John Armour’s sexual obtuseness for the reputation of his family, Old English stock, Mayflower, John Davenport, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the works.

So when he gave his pronouncement, his wife gave that ‘What would you know about it’ snicker and turned to Dr. Spock, the mother’s childrearing guru of the age, for advice.  In the 1938 edition, Spock wrote,

Some girls exhibit a strong desire to be boys, but this is nothing to worry about.  Endowed with the natural femaleness that gives woman her natural litheness, inner beauty, and lovely complaisance, the tomboy will soon realize her genetic destiny and blossom into full-bodied woman

These comments ceased to appear in the post-war editions.  During the war women had been riveters, hod carriers, and bricklayers, hard hats and steel-toed shoes, all of which gave Spock and his editors pause; but in later Fifties editions when women went back to Kinder, Kirche, Kuchen and returned to frills, high heels and silk stockings, it was back in.  Don’t worry, said Spock, your little tomboy will turn out just fine.

 

In Letty’s case it was a long haul, for even as she began puberty she strapped and corseted herself up, wore baggy jeans and shaggy hair that could pass as sideburns.

‘She’s a lesbian’ said Mr. Armour whose scant knowledge of women certainly did not include any sexual variations, and his only passing acquaintance with lesbians came from a Reader’s Digest article, The Femmes Fatales of Bernal Heights, a short showpiece of lesbian life in San Francisco with a few pictures of young women in flannel shirts and jackboots holding hands.

But the tomboy phase did pass and pass quickly.  Spock had been proven right – once Letty’s hormones got cooking, and the XX chromosomes kicked in, Letty did a volte face.  She pulled off her corset, wore slim-fitting jeans, let her hair grow long, and added touches of lipstick and mascara to an already stunningly beautiful face.  If her mother was a Hedy Lamar lookalike, Letty was Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet.

 

Now it was she who had a retinue of desirable young men following her, but she eschewed the faux idolatry of high school beauty queens.  Part of her genetic inheritance was a keen and canny understanding of women’s power.  In their ability to seduce, attract, and hold men through sexual appeal and paternity (only women could know for sure the fathers of their children), women were more than the equal of men.  The war between the sexes, apparently one of parity, was nothing of the sort.

This is neither here nor there.  We all know Ibsen’s women well – Hedda Gabler, Hilde Wangel, and Rebekka West, all defiantly purposeful, strong women who put up with no man and controlled them like a dray horse.  Shakespeare’s Goneril, Regan, Tamora, Dionyza, and Volumnia and Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra were no different.  Letty was certainly one of their kind, but that story is predictable and of little relevance to this one. 

What is far more interesting is Letty’s sexual evolution, her maleness and femaleness and how that distinction was resolved. The Greeks were quite happy to accommodate hermaphrodites, those who were both male and female in a delectable combination.  They were prized lovers for Aristotle and Aeschylus who never had to admit homosexuality, and were able to dally with it comfortably. 

Shakespeare in Sonnet 20 wrote about sexual complexity – the poet loves a man whom God created with the body of a man and the soul of a woman and thus has cover while exploring the delights of both.

The transgender advocates of today have totally missed the point.  Remaking a woman into a man and vice-versa is a crude, obtuse, defiantly ignorant idea.  Hermaphrodites were perfect creations, the best of worlds, the lovely and the pursuant.  No man was shouting to get out, imprisoned in a woman’s body, but happy to be there, a unique highly evolved creation.  And here were the butchers of the modern day, cutting off and reconfiguring, reshaping, distorting and ruining a good thing.

So God only knows what beautiful sexuality made up the young Letty Armour; whether she had some of the hermaphrodite in her, whether she, seeing boys’ social advantages chose to imitate them, or whether her spirit was of the fugitive kind.  The point is, hers was a beautiful complexity, a natural born one, an innate, pure one in no need of change, only evolution, stopping only when the time and the moment were right.

‘I liked baseball’, was her only response when her mother asked her about her tomboy days, leaving the older woman as confused as she always had been, especially influenced as she was by the cant and fol-de-rol of sexuality - dyke, straight, or transgender, nothing in between, nothing sophisticated, no subtlety or grace - but Letty always knew, suspected that she was unique, formed specially; and although she never knew for what, she was a happy woman.

A Fool And His Money Are Soon Parted – Elon Musk And The Augean Cleansing Of The American Government

Progressives firmly and unquestionably believe that government should be a friend, a companion, a caretaker, and an adviser.  Without it the people would be an inchoate, soulless rabble.  They would be foundering, lost sheep prey to the wolves of Wall Street and capitalist America.  We, say progressives, are the only thing that stands between enlightened civil governance and anarchy.

Of course no one believes this except those who advocate for social interventionism and benefit from it - printing money, spending it as though it grows on trees, having little to do with it once it pours down the sluice, but taking credit for every penny.

Everyone who gives even a desultory look knows that the trillions of dollars Biden authorized for ‘infrastructure’ and ‘social welfare’ was little more than a scam, enriching everyone with his hand out down the line – governors of blue states who welcomed the generosity and caring counsel of Washington, aides and associates who decided where the fictitious bridges, rail lines, docks, and runways were to be built; county supervisors and municipal mayors whose stock went up for having brought home the promise of wealth, jobs, and development; and contractors whose cuts, emoluments, incentives, and cost overruns for work never done was money in the bank – their banks.

Everyone knows that ‘infrastructure’ means boondoggle, light loads, more sand than cement, and years of haggling over who gets what when.  Washington DC’s city council authorized millions in non-competitive awards to local contractors to rebuild perfectly good sidewalks when the streets of the city looked like bombed out, cratered Third World tracks. Many split-levels in Gaithersburg and Cadillac Escalades were bought thanks to that ‘investment’.

When the city said that the wheelchair-confined needed smooth, even surfaces to ride on, progressives for whom the word ‘disability’ alone all but guaranteed unaccountable millions, wrote a big check.

‘Social welfare’ is another progressive cash cow.  The black, the poor, the marginalized ipso facto need ‘our’ help, and little does it matter that job training, special education, welfare, aid to dependent children, and food stamps have cost-effectiveness ratios in minus figures.  

Most of USAID’s similar overseas programs have the same objectives and the same lack of accountability, thanks to the political nature of foreign aid.  If a country has oil, gas, or rare earth minerals; or if they are in a geopolitically good place for the United States, the money trough is filled, no questions asked.

 

Up and down Independence Avenue, in one government department after another, the same charade goes on and on.  Doing good, caretaking, stewardship, enlightened management – whatever progressives might like to call it – is one big, grand Ponzi scheme. From forests to the inner city, from COVID to whooping cough, from union bosses to creative investment instruments, from farm subsidies to immigration, money is being spent with inattention, inspired neglect, and downright political corruption.

It is the nature of public financing to be spent on political interest rather than cost-benefit or cost-effectiveness.  It is a business of syllogisms – doing good is good for America because doing good is good – and out of that intellectual chicanery everyone but the taxpayer benefits.

The only truly savvy place in America is the inner city, for decades the beneficiaries of government largesse.  Residents there know that for every dollar of entitlement money disbursed by federal and local authorities, little if any is seen after takes and cuts are made.  In DC preachers, community leaders, social activists, local non-profit directors all have their hands out for walkin’ around money. For the rest of Anacostia and Brentwood, ‘We ain’t seen jack shit’

 

So along come Elon Musk and DOGE ready to do battle.  The Emperor’s new clothes are seen for what they are.  For decades government officials from top to bottom of the public service food chain have looked the other way as bureaucratic institutions have authorized entitlements, non-accountable grants, and monies for bridges and highways never to be built.  Finally the naked, sublimely disingenuous bureaucrats have been collared and thrown out, money flow stanched, and some semblance of logical order instituted. 

The outcry has been loud and predictable.  For years bureaucrats and their contractors have had a free ride.  Few questioned the need for job training or welfare for the underprivileged because it was the right, good thing to do, and now the great Washington shibboleth was being attacked.  For the first time public servants were tossed on the curb no differently than private sector employees who work at will and at the mercy of private owners and managers.

It has been a juggernaut, Elon Musk a Genghis Khan taking no prisoners, leaving heads on spikes up and down Constitution Avenue sending a message to those who might defy him.

Why on earth would anyone want to stop the uprooting of a corrupt federal government and saving billions in taxpayer dollars?  Only those who enable big government are upset, for with each cleansing, the wasteful, fraudulent, venal political insides of the bureaucracy are exposed.  It is as bad for progressives as a Jeffrey Epstein client list.  Their names will be all over the inconsequential, unsupervised, carelessly self-interested programs funded with taxpayer money.

Progressives, already on the run after their humiliating defeat at the hands of Donald Trump, are now in even more hysterical disbelief.  Big government, the heart and soul of Democrat, liberal, progressive policy for ages, is coming down, turned to dust and rubble; and shocked and incredulous, they can only stand by and watch.

The rest of the country is delighted.  The United States will return to its origins, to federalism, small government, private enterprise, and individual freedom – the freedoms enshrined in the Constitution, but more so the freedom from government.

Big Government’s last hurrah, the end of bureaucratic days, the re-launching of a conservative, practical nation – not so much Making America Great Again, but returning it to its fundamental, Enlightenment, individualistic roots. 

Blessed Art Thou Among Women – A Nun’s Tale From Priory to Cat House

Delia Masterson had been a delightful, obedient, dutiful child – a sweetheart, a natural charmer, and her parents’ pride and joy.  She curtsied when meeting adults, said yes Ma’am and no Ma’am, did the dishes without complaint, went to bed without a fuss, and came down to breakfast all bright and cheery every morning.

The Mastersons were good Catholics and went to church regularly, but little Delia found something more than ritual and obligation in the Mass. From First Communion onwards, she became a prayerful, inspired girl.  Religion was not something to be acquired like a handbag or a pair of shoes, but something glorious and intimate.  From the first chords of the organ to the final processional, Delia was in another world where Jesus was her brother and God her father.  As she walked out of St. Maurice with her mother and father, she was always in tears, tears of joy for having been in the presence of the Lord.

 

While Mr. and Mrs. Masterson were outwardly pleased at the piety and devotion of their daughter, they were inwardly a bit concerned.  Religion was all well and good up to a point – a social center, a moral meeting place, but little more -and here was young Delia taking it seriously, and they feared the worst, a religious vocation, a nunnery, cloisters, and a dead end for a bright, talented girl.

The nuns of St. Maurice, trained to spot new talent, saw Delia’s potential immediately, and they did everything to encourage it. They were especially kind to her – most children remember nuns more as prison guards than kindly women – invited her to tea, and talked of the Holy Family and how she was one of Jesus’ little children.

 

Puberty would do it, the nuns knew.  If Delia stayed the course and maintained her spiritual fidelity and piety as she matured as a young woman, she might well have a vocation.  If she turned tarty and boy crazy, and love of God went down the drain, they could discontinue their outreach and fish in other ponds.

To their surprise and absolute delight, the girl became only more prayerful as she grew older. A stunningly beautiful girl whose sexual maturity had turned her into a National Velvet Elizabeth Taylor, she could have made her way with ease in secular society; but she eschewed male attention, made the stations of the cross, received holy communion each and every Sunday and asked to see the convent where the nuns lived.

 

To make a long story short, Delia Masterson opted for the religious life and at eighteen was taken in as a novice to the Rosicrucian Order Of The Virgin Mary. It was there, ironically, that the banked fires of an ardent sexuality burned hot, and the heady mix of love for Jesus and Mary Sue Bartlett, sweet cornflower from Chillicothe was overwhelmingly beautiful. She never had a scintilla of doubt that this double life was what Jesus meant when he talked of love for all mankind; and since her passion for Mary Sue only doubled as they knelt next to each other at the communion rail, she knew that the priory was for her.

Yet only God knows for sure what he created, and Delia was indeed a complex confection, so when she found herself in the arms of Devon Price, technician, sometimes sculptor, deliciously male attendant upon her beauty, she was at first surprised, then delighted.  She knew that in traditional, canonical terms, she had overstepped her bounds, but she had this firm belief in the wholesomeness and universality of Jesus’ love and felt she had done no wrong. 

Her passion burned at both ends, and slowly but surely her vocation became an afterthought.  The priory was little more than a hothouse for sexual passion and desire.  As she walked out the door, asked to leave by Mother Superior, but still in love with Jesus, she faced the world with some misgivings.  What now?

 

She had been trained only for the religious life and had no practical skills, no credentials, and no job future and if she was honest with herself, was good at only only one thing – sex.  She knew that both men and women found her irresistibly desirable, and she was able to rouse the most hidden and repressed sexual desires in both.  Did this not suggest a career?

Once again she turned to Jesus for advice and counsel.  She knew what the Church would say, but Jesus the all-loving, the compassionate; the infinitely understanding would not turn away.

Mrs. Lambert Rivers was a patrician lady from Beacon Hill who understood the sexual preferences of the well-to-do, and had had many affairs with them.  She knew that there were just as many elegant hostesses of Boston who wanted a discreet but passionate affair with younger women as there were those who preferred young men; and so Mrs. Rivers facilitated introductions, and over tea and biscuits arranged many informal affairs.

 

It was particularly satisfying to meet the needs of her people, the well-born, the sophisticated, and wealthy women of Boston; and to do it with women.  Men had always been assumed to be the natural clients for such services; but Mrs. Rivers knew otherwise, and her ‘social club’ was the sought after place on the Charles.  She was discreet, charming, and welcoming to the women who came to her, and outside of her clients, few knew of the real inner workings of her establishment.

Delia met Mrs. Rivers at a Catholic convocation in Framingham.  Despite the quite unusual paths they had trod, both women had remained devout Catholics, although their reasons were quite different. While Jesus was Delia’s companion, her soul mate, her loving partner, he was a principal in Mrs. Rivers’ spiritual firm – the CEO of her secular enterprise which gave her context and a certain security.  Dealing with such intimacy and personal uniqueness was a responsibility.

And so it was that the two women came to a felicitous agreement.  Delia would work for Mrs. Rivers, be paid well, be invited to the Islands by the most congenial of clients, and have her pick of any of the young men who satisfied these women’s ‘other’ demands.

Sex is a marvelous, multi-layered, multi-faceted, unexplainable phenomenon; and in any city one can find entrepreneurs who satisfy the demand.  From ghetto pimps and ho’s to the tony, exclusive, bi-sexual arrangements of Mrs. Rivers Social Club, there are hundreds if not thousands of way stations for the sexually ambitious.

For some reason many of the matrons of Beacon Hill, Park Avenue, and Georgetown who came to the Club were as devoutly Catholic as Mrs. Rivers and Delia Masterson and in the same uniquely passionate way.  Jesus actually meant something to them, and without him life would have a distinctly missing piece.  He was as much a part of their sexual enterprise as anyone.