The Harder A Wife Works, The Cuter She Looks - You've Come A Long Way, Baby...Or Have You?

The plays Ibsen and Strindberg set in late Nineteenth Century Scandinavia, are the tales of strong women who break free of the patriarchal tethers that bind.  Hedda Gabler, Rebekka West, Nora, Hilde Wangel, and Laura are all women who have suffered enough.  Each of them in their own way defy their husbands, manipulate men for their own ends, and represent the first outcries of feminism. 

 
Miss Julie of Strindberg's play of the same name begins in the same way.  She makes Jean, her valet, jump through hoops and behave like a trained dog.  Raised as a proto-feminist by a misandrous mother, Julie takes every hateful word to heart and treats Jean like an  animal 

The rub of it all is that she is sexually attracted to him.  Although he is a servant, there is something virile and exciting about him.  Like Lady Chatterley and her gamekeeper lover Mellors, Julie wants caricature - sexually confident males. 

Of course such attraction is not caricature at all, for women who despite feminism, the glass ceiling, boardrooms, and independent income seem to fall for the same, familiar, men.  The caricature comes from little girls who, despite the discouragement of their evolved mothers, insist on wearing princess outfits.  They read about Rapunzel, the beautiful princess locked in the tower, who lets down her hair so that her Prince Charming can climb up and ravish her. Even before they know what love, sex, and romance is all about, they begin the search.  That is the irony, the caricature, and the truth. 

These little princesses are not from the Fifties, a Petrarchan era of love and romance where women wait for men's advances, hoping for a handsome, wealthy, attentive, and supportive partner.  They are from today, and from the age of two are dressed in tutus and ribbons. They will be taught that women are now the equal of men in all things, and that their ideas of romance, being swept off their feet, falling deeply and romantically in love are outdated.  There are no Prince Charmings, just legitimate partners. 

This indoctrination never works, for once out of class these girls fall for bad boys - the very pursuers, sexually forward, confident, predatory males, the ones whose desire for them is evident.  For all the instruction about men who are sensitive to a woman's feelings and can love her for who she is, these young women want defiant, absolute, sexual confidence - not a toady.   

The 'sensitive New Age guy', parodied in the early days of women's rights as being some foppish hairdresser who likes women, but only as reflections in the shop mirror was never appealing.  For all women's claims to want a man with a distinctly feminine side, they wanted nothing of the sort.  Evolution had dismissed the sensitive, dutiful, uxorious male and favored his exact opposite - the male who took women, impregnated them, and went off to hunt. 

Comedian Bill Maher summed it all up:

The inversion of nature that we have experienced as a culture, and the subversive aspect of flipping traditional roles, with its subsequent destruction of society, serves as a signal that we live in a dying system.  It has led to a pussified, sissy, pathetic, lovey-dovey/touchy-feely country of wimps, who put emotion over logic, feeling over reason, in our nurture-heavy/nature-deprived, culture

Maher was really taking aim at ‘progressive’ men – the feminist wannabes  who attend women’s conferences, have made their careers in promoting female agendas, and who find feminism consistent with other liberal beliefs.  Concern about the environment has a feminine cast to it.  After all men like to chop things down, build things, and expand.  Who thinks that Manifest Destiny was Martha Jefferson’s idea? Or that knitting wives were behind the Civil War?  The Pentagon is no different from Wall Street.  Although there may be many women in the armed forces, the top brass are men who kill for a living.

Marfa Potter considered herself a 'second stage' feminist. She thanked her mother and her associates for breaking through the glass ceiling, rejected Victorianism, patriarchy, and unequal rights; but her world was different.  Women could do anything men could do, and in most cases better.  Her challenge was negotiating a world where men were still needed.  'The rooster's contribution'. 

'Now you have fulfilled your function as an unfortunately necessary father and breadwinner, you are not needed any longer and you must go', Laura tells the Captain, her husband in Strindberg's The Father; and this is the challenge today. 

Some lesbian women have decided to end-run men and get the rooster's contribution from a sperm bank. One of the two women will be the mother of the randomly selected child, the other will be the father surrogate.

Lesbian couples are awaiting the genetic recombination which will do away with men's DNA altogether and replace it with an enhanced variation of women's, enabling a lesbian couple to have their own child without any male interference but until that time Donor 352 will have to do. 

Straight women don't have it so easy.  They need men but are behind the eight ball.  Their still Paleolithic sexuality wants bad boys, but their still Petrarchan sentimentality wants princes. Second stage feminism has created in Bill Maher's words, 'a nation of sissies' and virile, forwardly confident men are in retreat.  Last but not least women have been told to dress as provocatively as possible - lewd desire is men's problem not theirs - but cannot reap the benefits from overt sexual allure. 

So Marfa was on the lookout, but for what?  Without thinking she was attracted to the men who defied all woke censure and who paid attention to them as sexual objects; but when thinking she was trolling for 'a New Age sensitive guy'.  

However, she was put off by these deferent, cowed hesitating men - the 'may I, could I, would it be all right if I...' ones who had been safely corralled and penned in; and drawn by men who clearly found her attractive and told her so. 

She dressed in décolleté, high heels, and sashayed like a trollop, but it was all dry humping.  Men were not supposed to pay attention. 

What was a modern woman to do? 

A Hollywood ending would be nice - a strong, chisel-jawed, confident man of means who loves her both for her body and her mind, who will carry her off but give her free rein, who will provide but will respect her provision - but Hollywood is Hollywood after all, and we must settle for far less. 

Caught in this terrible bind, Marfa went through many affairs and two marriages, stayed unmarried after the second.  Sex, men, romance, and adventure were overrated, and she had all she needed in her condo overlooking Tampa Bay. 

As it happened, her next door neighbor was a lesbian couple with a nine-year old boy who apparently was an uncontrollable terror - the very spitting image of the unbridled male energy the two women were totally unprepared for.  They screened the rooster's contribution for as many genetic anomalies as the technology allowed and read the anonymous donor biography, but nothing prepared them for this rampant, uncontrolled, male energy.  They should have opted for a girl. 

The boy ran up and down the halls, knocking over planters, writing obscenities on the wall with indelible markers, screaming bloody murder and howling at all hours of the morning.

'No man to whack the daylights out of him', thought Marfa, childless but her balance sheet was what it was. She gave it all a good go, came up with positives and negatives, and was not unhappy drinking a sundowner overlooking the water. 

Sex Kitten - Why The Mature Man Does Not Pursue The Mature Woman

Ardmore Wright was reaching that age, that uncomfortable age betwixt and between.  No longer a young man, not yet old, but too old to be desirable and too young to stop looking. 

'Ah, the conundrum', his doctor told him when Ardmore confessed his sexual frustration.  The physician went on to suggest that mature women still are in the mood for love even if their ovaries are old and stale. 

 

Ardmore sat up in his seat at this.  A doctor was not supposed to speak in such catty, dismissive terms about women even if it was in confidence and with a male patient. 

'I see you're surprised', said the doctor, 'but I was only making a point'. 

But of course the idea of intimacy with Mrs. Blanchard in 4F, for example, recently widowed, clearly happy to be rid of her husband, and on the prowl was off-putting.  The old crone was sixty if she was a day, dry as a bone, tarted up with eyeshadow and rouge...Christ what did Dr. Sherman have in mind? Not her, certainly. 

A waft of Arpege as they crossed paths in the hallway, almost overpowering in the elevator.  She looked at him, smiled, and touched up her lipstick in the convex mirror. 'She could be had', Ardmore thought and shivered.  He was not ready to throw in the towel. 

He found petty excuses to consult with the company attorney only to meet Sally from Accounting in the office next door, a delicious young woman so nubile, unblemished, smooth, and fresh that she didn't need a drop of makeup.  She was perfect as is, sensual without trying, fertile, moist, desirous and oh, so desirable. 

'Hello, Mr. Wright', she said as he walked by.  The 'Mister' was deliberate he thought - a kind of reverse Miss Julie, a woman who desired an older man titling him, tempting him to go beyond the faux formality and speak to her.  Or a defense against yet another schlumpen old man who had come to the 7th floor to have a look at expensive merchandise.  Which?  Ardmore wished he could ask Dr. Sherman. 

'Here's a prescription in case you need a little boost', said the doctor.  'Older women do not necessarily excite with their clothes off.  Let me know how it works out'. 

Now, Sherman, a lowly internist had more in common with brain surgeons or cardiac interventionists - arrogant pricks with life and death in their hands who could have any woman they wanted - than his GP colleagues. Sherman's dalliances in dark corners of the the Mayflower the Willard bars were well-known - the envy of medical professionals who had spent twenty years with bed pans, prostates, and menstrual blood and who had no time for flirtations. 

He was older than Ardmore and there he was in the Old Ebbitt Grill with interns from the Treasury Department across the street, charming them with his wit and generosity.  '

What's wrong with me?', Ardmore wondered, and why is he farming me out to old ladies when he is sitting there, fondling Maria from Treasury?'

Ardmore knew the drill - older women, stuck for so long in loveless marriages, plodding through days and rolling over at night, unhappy, desirous and dreaming of knights in shining armor would do anything to be taken seriously, to be loved for who they are, easy pickin's for older men like Ardmore. 

Yet it was that December-May affair that he was looking for, that early gift under the Christmas tree, that momentary but transformative sexual episode that few men experience.  

Of course rich men could have whatever women they wanted, everything has a price, and a weekend on a yacht in Barbados or a skiing week in Gstaad would do just as well as a few Franklins on the dresser.  Women are cheap when the high rollers step to the table, but the likes of him had to work for their rewards. 

Now, Edna Blanchard from 4F had her own fantasies. Yes, she was well beyond her sexual pull-date, headed into a resolute widowhood in Florida, but since Bullard had died, she demurred.  Maybe she was heading off to pasture too early.  There might be untold adventures awaiting her now that she was single again, unattached, and with the millions left to her in annuities, dividends, insurance policies, and off-shore bank accounts, footloose and fancy free. 

'What about the man in 4G', she wondered, remembering their elevator ride down to the lobby and for the first time in years felt a twinge 'down there'; and why not him?  Availability was a cheap commodity in the divorce/death years. Yet wouldn't she be exchanging one used car for another?  Why would he be any different than her deceased husband, attentive, kind, solicitous at the beginning then asleep on the couch within a month.  

While their stars were not exactly crossed, and only barely aligned, the affair with 4G was a fait accompli. It simply had to be; and so with many misgivings on both sides, it began.  First there were more elevator rides, then an after-work drink at the Russian Tea Room, then a dusky corner of the Mayflower bar where they shared intimacies, and finally a Saturday afternoon idyll at the Rodney, a small out of the way hotel in Dewey Beach. 

 

Ardmore needed the little blue pill - Sherman was right.  The sight of Mrs. Blanchard standing stark naked in the middle of the room like the world owed her a living, although it was the first woman he had seen without her clothes since his divorce and should have aroused him somewhat, left him unmoved.  Only after the Viagra kicked in did he move off the mark. 

It was more grappling than anything, both looking for the toe-holds they were used to from their previous marriages, and getting tangled in the sheets; but who said the first time was as easy as it was in the movies?  Two strangers - in in this case, two lumpy ones - had to quickly negotiate 'differences', somehow make do, just to make it to the next stage. 

Ardmore realized that Sherman didn't know what he was talking about - talking him into sex with an old  bag like Edna Blanchard when what he wanted - only what he wanted was Sally from Accounting, if only for an hour, for that one chance to feel that soft skin, taste that delicious mouth, entera the bower of bliss; and so the affair with Mrs. Blanchard ended as quickly as it had begun. 

Edna on the other hand, true to a woman's eternal perspective, was convinced that she was still an attractive, desirable woman and that the love she felt for a man who had opened up her inner rooms was that for a Roman god

She kept calling him waiting for his footfall on the 4th floor carpet, hoping to tell him how much she needed him; but he took the stairs, didn't answer her calls, and after a while he was content to moon after Sally from Accounting and Edna realized that her epiphany was short lived. 

Edna lived quite happily in Boca Raton in a condo overlooking the ocean, and Ardmore was successful wooing Sally - she, like many woman, had a father figure complex and she was indelibly attracted to older men. 

'How'd it go?', asked Dr. Sherman at Ardmore's next physical. 

'Which one? First or second?', Ardmore replied, and then went on to give him Edna Blanchard's phone number.  'She's expecting your call'.

Violence - Predictable, Persistent, Inevitable, And An Indelible Part Of Human Nature

Violence has been a theme of literature since Ancient Greece, and in the works of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles and others, violence is bloody, savage, and brutal. 

Literary critic Bret Saunders suggests that the Iliad is the most violent, bloody, and savage work of the Greek classical period:

The Prologue announces the action of the poem to be Achilles’ “wrath” and its repercussions, which include myriad d’algea—a “myriad of pains”—heaped on the heroes. “You can be eviscerated, brained, decapitated, or crushed. You can get stabbed, sliced, shot, or rock-pounded from any angle. Your eyeball may be torn out and hoisted on a spear, your spine cleft from your back, and your hacked-off head may fall to the dust with mouth still speaking.

In Homer’s Odyssey violence is endemic – it is the way human beings act as an expression of will, determination, and defiance of fate.  In Book Nine where Odysseus and his men are facing the Cyclops, Homer writes in language very similar to Cormac McCarthy, “His hands reached out, seized two of them, and smashed them into the ground like puppies.  Their brains spattered out and oozed into the dirt.  He tore them limb from limb…”

In his description of the death of the disloyal serving women, Homer presents another simile to describe the scene:

Then, as doves or thrushes beating their spread wings against some snare rigged up in thickets – flying in for a cozy nest but a grisly bed receives them –so the women’s heads were trapped in a line, nooses yanking their necks up one by one so that all might die a pitiful, ghastly death…

In Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex violence is central, expressive of human nature, and metaphorically representing the innate, absolute self-defining power of vengeful acts; and his language is not unlike McCarthy’s. When the Second Messenger tells of how Oedipus has blinded himself, he says, “And bleeding eyeballs gushed and stained his beard – no sluggish oozing drops, but a black rain and bloody hail poured down.”

Josef Conrad was fascinated by the primitive savagery in human nature, and in telling the story of Kurtz in The Heart of Darkness he describes it.  Kurtz, who goes out to Africa as part of a civilizing mission – not only would he manage an important mining operation  but he would bring Western, enlightened civilization to the primitive tribes of Central Africa. 

The longer he lives in the jungle, the more he is attracted by the savagery of its inhabitants who participate in strange, powerful, bloody human sacrifice.  This potent religious offering, he sees, is not simply barbarity – an inchoate, violent expression of an untamed human nature – but a purposeful, spiritual act.   Savagery is not the worst part of the human soul, he concludes, but only an expression of its desire to please, honor, and respect the gods of the jungle.

At first Kurtz is in awe of the sacrifices and of the received power they conferred on the priest who performed them.  Over time he not only subscribed to the primitivism of the rituals, but saw how using and manipulating them, he could be accorded the same respect, obedience, and emotional slavery as the priests.

His vision of an ennobling, inordinately powerful, and politically conferring act goes wrong.  His Western reason, judgment, respect for process, order, and justice cannot be removed or even conveniently put aside.  The rituals he has observed in the jungle and has approved, adopted, and made his own are no more than savagery, expressions of a primitive, unschooled, superstitious existence.  

Because he has fallen so completely for this ethos, taken it as an instrument of power without reflection, he realizes that all human beings are capable of such falls from Christian rectitude and are as savage as the natives of the jungle.

“The horror, the horror’, whispered by Kurtz just before his death, was his final acceptance of his untamed, primitive soul and the inescapable barbarity of it.   The wilderness was not just an environment, but something alive, a complete, integral organism both prehistoric and terrifying in which men who, equally primeval  and uncivilized, were reminders of humanity’s savage beginnings.

As C. S. Lewis put it, there is no such thing as an ordinary person. Each person you sit next to on the bus is capable of extraordinary horrors. 

Cormac McCarthy’s vision is no different, no less gory or violent:

They found the lost scouts hanging head downward from the limbs of a fire blacked paloverde tree. They were skewered through the cords of their heels with sharpened shuttles of green wood and they hung gray and naked above the dead ashes of the coals where they'd been roasted until their heads had charred and the brains bubbled in the skulls and steam sang from their nose holes. Their tongues were drawn out and held with sharpened sticks thrust through them and they had been docked of their ears and their torsos were sliced open with flints until the entrails hung down on their chests

Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange and Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of it are both extremely violent; but both claim a philosophical perspective.  In A Clockwork Orange, Burgess reflects on human nature, morality and human freedom. Alex, the protagonist of the novel, shows the darkest side of mankind and society.

The character of Burgess’ novel, Alex, is reminiscent of Graham Greene’s Pinky (Brighton Rock) who, reflecting on his life of violence says, ‘Credo in unum Satanu’.  Sin had not only freed from any trace of guilt and remorse, but had given him license to ‘join the other side’.  He was unstoppable, defiant, remorseless, and hopelessly cruel.  He realized his Nietzschean will and the glory of his Miltonian defiance of God – a defiance which was legitimate because of its injustice. 

The most violent of Shakespeare’s plays is Titus Andronicus.  Tamora, the Amazon Queen, hates Titus so much that she encourages her sons to rape his daughter, Lavinia, and has them cut out her tongue and cut off her hands so that she will be unable to tell who did it.  Titus exacts his revenge by cutting up and baking her sons in a pie and serving it to her.  Shakespeare may have been trying to finally shed the influence of his contemporary, Marlowe whose plays, such as Tamburlaine were as violent as they come. 

In this play Shakespeare was again dealing with the nature of evil, and could only come to the conclusion that gratuitous, heinous violence was part of human nature.

Such barbaric savagery was common in early America.  Jonathan Foreman, writing in The Daily Mail, writing about the Comanches, said:

No tribe in the history of the Spanish, French, Mexican, Texan, and American occupations of this land had ever caused so much havoc and death. None was even a close second.  There was a ‘demonic immorality’ of Comanche attacks on white settlers, the way in which torture, killings and gang-rapes were routine. ‘The logic of Comanche raids was straightforward.  All the men were killed, and any men who were captured alive were tortured; the captive women were gang raped. Babies were invariably killed.

One by one, the children and young women were pegged out naked beside the camp fire, according to a contemporary account. They were skinned, sliced, and horribly mutilated, and finally burned alive by vengeful women determined to wring the last shriek and convulsion from their agonized bodies. Children died screaming under the high plains moon.’ 

Gore Vidal, writing in his memoir, Palimpsest, found amusing “the frightful fates that had to befall Williams’ protagonists…whose heroes, when not castrated, are eaten alive by small boys in my town of Amalfi”.

Literature, of course, is drawn from reality; and violence, often brutal and savage, has been perhaps the most common and typical expression of human nature and human society since the Paleolithic.  It is not so much that wars have been continually fought for petty and geopolitical conditions since societies were formed; but that pitiless violence, slaughter, rape, decapitations, and disembowelments have been common throughout history.  Authors, playwrights, and artists have sought to make sense out of such mayhem and to suggest what this says about the human condition and human nature.

Perhaps the greatest spectacle of collective and individual savagery the world has ever seen was the bloody civilian slaughter of civilian populations  by the mounted armies of Genghis Khan which burst out of the Asian steppes and conquered lands from Europe to the Far East.  

They did it through brutality and intimidation, unmitigated savagery, and universal violence.  Populations cowered at his arrival, decapitated heads of resisters were impaled on spikes, and blood and carnage fouled the streets as his armies advanced.  There was no temperance, no moral reflection, no hesitancy – just unrestrained mercilessness.

So, what then of those who claim the opposite? Territorialism, war, civil conflict, ethnic rivalry and 10,000 years of violent human history, they say, have nothing to do with a hardwired, questionable nature, but all to do with circumstance and the precarious nature of existence. 

Nothing whatsoever in human history even suggests the viability of this claim.  If anything, the Twentieth Century was one of the most violent, bloody, brutal, and unprogressive of any; and the 21st will undoubtedly follow suit. 

If the history of violence has never altered; if civil and military conflict is as much a part of human society as collaboration; and if there is a glorious and valorous aspect to war, it will never disappear.  Conrad, Shakespeare, Burgess, Williams, and Greene were as right as rain.

The unanswered question is why does random, brutal, savage, violence – unnecessary for survival – exist?  What is it in human nature that allows men to go off the evolutionary rails and to choose violence as a personal expression? These authors only tell of its immutability and its permanence, or resort to a tautology – Human violence exists because human beings are violent.

McCarthy, Burgess, and Williams conclude only confirm the innate, hardwired tendency to violence and barbarity exist in man and will always exist. The Stanley Kowalskis of the world will always exist because human nature – violent, aggressive, territorial, and self-interested – will always exist.  There is no ‘horror’ in Stanley’s sexually aggressive nature.