The Surge Of A Late Bloomer - From Daddy's Girl To Man-Hate And Back, A Freudian Tale

Allison Marks was a daddy's girl. She adored her father and he fawned on her in return.  The two were a couple from birth in a relationship that went far beyond father-and-daughter to something limitless and unique. 

 

Of course the phenomenon is nothing new. Not only is it common but the core of Freud's work.  The proto-sexual attraction of a young girl for her father forms the basis for a normal heterosexual life.  Freud wrote:

The young female, has both love and hate for her mother.  She is dependent upon her from birth, but increasingly jealous of her as she develops her own sexual maturity, first expressed in erotic desire for her father.  This triad - mother, father, daughter - is the Holy Trinity of sexuality, and cannot be dismissed or denied.  

Modern psychologists like Ambrose Beardsley of Duke have lamented the increasing number of fatherless homes.  Whether women choose single motherhood or have it imposed on them by abandoning husbands, daughters grow up without this masculine influence 'and fall prey to distorted notions of female sexual exclusivity'.  It is no surprise, says Prof. Beardsley, that the notion of a gender spectrum without the natural polarity of male-female or father-daughter, has become popular.  

'Nothing could be more aberrant'. he went on to write, 'suggesting that not only is sexuality fungible but the nuclear family is outdated and heretofore irrelevant'. 

Given the fact that Allison grew up in a normal home and had been raised in a traditional way; and moreover had formed a particularly intimate bond with her father, it was surprising that she became a radical feminist, i.e. not simply one who promoted the cause of women, but one who saw men as the predatory enemy of women.  Men were the oppressors, and today's men were no different from Saudi sheiks who locked their wives in windowless cells, and let them out for their sexual pleasure and nothing more. 

This particularly hostile feminism did not come quickly or early in her sexual journey.  In fact, all through college she looked for her father in every boy she dated.  She would settle for nothing less than a man who loved her implicitly, who treated her with kindness, and who would do anything for her. 

This was confounded by an unexpected raw sexuality - a desire that pushed aside notions of honor and fidelity and led her to the beds of bad boys. 

Whenever she found herself on the curb, left there by men who used her and tossed her aside when they were finished with her, she hated herself for abandoning her principles and most of all her love for her father.  Every time she howled and moaned under some predatory male, she felt she was betraying her  father and said a heartfelt act of contrition to appease her conscience. 

 

So, it is not hard to imagine her confusion - a loving, dutiful daddy's girl, the used woman of a hundred men, the Freudian image of sexual psychosis - and not be surprised at her turn to feminism. 

Freud of course never anticipated feminism, and while he had treated many women with lesbian tendencies in his practice, he never anticipated that it would become a cause celebre and a viable alternative to heterosexual sex; but he had intimations of such aberrance:

Any dynamic relationship conditioned by birth, upbringing, and sexual desire can go awry.  The daughter who admires and loves her father unquestionably can be challenged by his behavior.  A sexual adventurer, a 'man about town', displays his polyvalence.  His daughter is not the only girl for him, and when she realizes this, her love and trust may well turn to hate

As hard as Allison tried to find a man like her father to love, she could not, and in the meanwhile fell prey to the unscrupulous but infinitely desirable men who showed her interest.  Freud also understood this 'good girl-bad boy' phenomenon.  Although girls were brought up to be prim and proper, they were drawn to the most virile, aggressive, and dominant males.  These were the men who would give them children, male children who would thrive and prosper.  

The perfect storm could not be worse for her.  She was looking for a father who never really existed - a daughter's willing suspension of disbelief when it comes to father-love is classic - was born with a preternatural sexual desire, and was caught in the most studied sexual trap ever. 

Of course that academic perspective was irrelevant in real terms.  The here and now demanded some kind of reconciliation or at least compromise, or she would spend many years floundering between sexual excess and romantic idealism. 

Payback, that was the idea; and so it was that Allison turned her considerable charm on seducing vulnerable men, enticing them with sexual favors and romantic attention, and then leaving them high and dry - a dose of their own medicine.  Not only would this table-turning feel good, a blow in the name of female honor, but it would be a reversal of fortune for men. 

The movie In The Company Of Men the Aaron Eckhart character deliberately seduces a deaf girl in his office, and treats her with the love, attention, and kindness she has never known.  He knows that she will fall in love with him and when she does he plans to leave her cold - his misogynist payback for all the times women have been deceitful, dishonest, and disloyal. 

Allison knew that the duplicitous former lovers of the Eckhart character are not unique, and that their duplicity and self-interest was natural and unplanned.  She, Allison, would use the same seductive wiles and self-interest to deliberately unman, disown, and dismiss men. 

After many such turns she wondered what this had gotten her.  Such activism was unproductive.  She still felt that a partnership with a worthy male was possible, and that easing up on the gas might be called for - a little more give in the machinery. 

She hated herself for even thinking that such a Mr. Right existed.  Nothing in her pantheon of progressive ideas even suggested that this could be true, that he could be out there.  Romance, selection, compatibility, partnership were all fictitious elements of a pre-deconstructionist era.  Society with all its inbuilt historical prescriptions was responsible for sexual idealism, and that any good progressive should dismiss such notions out of hand. 

Yet, there it was.  She couldn't help herself.  She canvassed every social event, every casual apres-ski gathering, every gallery opening, every afternoon at the dog park for potential mates.  She vetted them by template - posture, attitude, voice, easy or forced smiles, stature and that indefinable quality, appeal - but nine times out of ten came up empty.  Either her algorithms were faulty or good men had disappeared. 

Artemis Jones, sensing her classmate's frustration wooed her to the lesbian life she had enjoyed since Vassar.  She had come out early and often, an insatiable Bernal Heights dyke, first to cruise, first in bed, first to head for next in line.  The lesbian life was one freed from expectation, upbringing, presumption.  Yes, she had grown up with penetration but that male-centered wish had been long marginalized, and easily satisfied if and when the urge became irresistible thanks to plastics and AI-facilitated fitting. 

Allison thanked her friend for her solicitude, but preferred to sow her own furrow. Despite her political man-hate and vicious calumny, she wanted to be laid and laid properly.  Not to say that Artemis and her bull dagger and femme friends didn't come brightly and completely; it was just that the old nostrums simply had staying power.  It had to be Daddy or no one. 

Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew had always been an apocryphal story.  Kate, a vixen, a harridan, a shrewish, frustrated women falls for Petruchio, a suitor who has been looking for such a determined, independent woman all his life, and the two consummate a love made in heaven.  She gives up her shrewishness and he his sexual wandering in Shakespeare's only true love story. 

A woman like Allison, feminist to the core, would give up every testy, nasty criticism of men if only the right one would come along; and thank her lucky stars, he did.  Out of the blue, unvetted, unanticipated, but there he was right out of a Julia Quinn novel.  He swept her off her feet, dazzled her with his charm and sincerity, excited her with his pursuit and confidence, persuaded her with his wit and intelligence. 

Could this be?, she wondered.  Was this possible?

Again she hated herself for such treacly, anti-progressive notions of romantic love; but the feelings welled up from an unadulterated place, and she had to, not just wanted to, give herself completely. 

Freud would have had a field day with Allison Marks - a woman who inevitably and predictably returned to her psycho-social roots.  No woman born with a natural, ineluctable father-love and a fierce love of men could persist in feminist circumspection indefinitely.   

And so it was that the nuptials were announced in the New York Times: 

Miss Allison Fielding Marks of Harpers Ferry, New York, and Palm Beach wedded Burleigh Cabot of the Boston Cabots, heir to his family's colonial and post-Revolutionary legacy and senior partner in Brandon, Burdon, and Loch, Wall Street investment bankers.  Miss Marks graduated from Miss Porter's School of Farmington and Vassar College and is Senior Vice President of Abelard Freres.  The couple will reside in Miami where both will take up their professional assignments

All is right in the world, reflected Allison on her honeymoon on St. Bart's.  A long journey not without pitfalls and errors, but ended properly, as it should be, without politics or strings.  True romance? Perhaps, depending on one's perspective.  Freud and his Austrian Jewish colleagues aside, what did anything matter but outcome, the bottom line?  

Toxic Femininity - Why Has This Universal Paradox Been So Ignored?

Much has been made these days of toxic masculinity and how men are congenitally predatory, abusive, and dismissive of women - ogres, troglodytes, prognathous throwbacks to grunting Neanderthals.  Combined with whiteness, toxic masculinity becomes a poisonous potion, a virulent viral plague.  Feminism is too weak to counter such ape-like grossness.  Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir only hinted at the ugly nature of men; and it took another generation to fully expose their innate, foul brutality.  Men were now the enemy. 

Buy what about women?  For centuries throughout world literature, women have been portrayed as duplicitous, untrustworthy, libidinous, and ruinous.  Desdemona was not the weak, innocent victim of Othello's jealousy. She was at least complicit in the case.  She was an independent woman, unique for the times, a woman who defied her aristocratic family and married the black Moor, Othello, no shrinking violet and certainly inquisitive about the sexual nature of the virile, heroic field general. 

Goneril, Regan, Tamora, Volumnia, Lady Macbeth, and Dionyza were defiantly strong women who thought nothing about plotting the murder of those who threatened them. Lady Macbeth told her weak, dilatory husband to man up, show her what he was made of and get to the business of killing the king.  

Tamora, Queen of the Goths, in a vile moment of vendetta and wronged woman pique sends her sons to rape and mutilate the daughter of King Titus Andronicus.  Dionyza, watching Pericles' daughter left in her charge grow up to be more beautiful, charming, and graceful than her own daughter, and over the feeble objections of her weak, uxorious husband, plots to have her murdered. 

Hedda Gabler, in Ibsen's play of the same name, attempts to destroy two men simply because she can in an expression of pure Nietzschean will.  Hilde Wangel encourages The Master Builder to climb the steeple and fall to his death.  

Laura, the wife of The Captain in Strindberg's The Father, drives him literally mad with jealousy and suspicion about the paternity of their daughter, has him committed to an insane asylum, and takes over control of their daughter and the family finances. 

Miss Julie in Strindberg's play treats her male servant Jean like a dog.  Raised by a proto-feminist, man-hating mother, Julie demeans and humiliates Jean while at the same seducing him as an expression of her power. 

The literary list is endless. A bibliography of books written by misogynist men? A reflection of the times when women were legally and socially owned by their husbands and would use any wiles or means to destroy them?  Or something innately insidious - a natural instinctive mistrust of men because of the servitude of pregnancy?

The characterization of women in the past has been harsh indeed; but why have modern women, presumably free from all traces of male chattel, been so insistent on taking their pound of flesh, hectoring the disappointing  men they have married?  Why have they stayed married despite all signs that point to dissolution and preferred to nag, irritate, and badger instead?

The image of the hag, the badgering, incessantly critical, unhappily married, resentful, unpleasant woman should have been long ago relegated to the archives.  Successful modern day women have either acquired enough financial capital to leave a bad marriage; or have, like Shakespeare’s heroines, figured out how to get the best out of their husbands and their marriages to satisfy their needs; but the unsuccessful women, the majority, still have not sorted out their independence nor learned from the Strindberg playbook.  Only women know whose child they are carrying, and there is no more poisoned arrow in their quiver.

Instead, women go toxic with their bickering, bitching innuendoes and never confront men on the battlefield, equal in strength, open and martial in their intentions, courageous and honest.  They are still confused, caught between their patriarchal upbringing and modern 'Be All You Can Be' propaganda. 

A confounding factor in all this is feminism itself.  On the one hand feminist jihadists are asserting their absolute strength, authority, ability, and independence; but on the other are demanding safe spaces, neutered men, congenial and protective institutional environments, limited free speech and civil rights.  What is a woman to do?  Which is she?  Strong, competent, and independent; able to negotiate the world of men easily and quickly? Or dependent, still needing shelter and accommodation?

In addition women are taught as part of the ‘male toxicity’ canon that men’s natural, biological, sexual drives – aggressive, demanding, persistent, simple, and undeniable – are wrong, retrograde, and destructive.   There is something wrong and suspicious about male pursuit.  Casanova is dead. 

Yet millennia of human history demonstrate just the opposite.  Human evolution has depended on male aggression, competitiveness, and pursuit.  While there is no doubt that such masculinity can have its excesses – the bell curve describes all human activity and ability – there is no reason to deny its reality or its legitimate place in modern society.

Therefore most women are caught betwixt and between.  They settle for bad marriages, bad jobs, and bad children and instead of doing something, complain, rage, nag, and harp and become as toxic in their own way as their wandering, dismissive, wandering husbands.  In being taught that the system itself is the enemy and that only by destroying it and remaking it in women’s image can women ever find reward, women have been sold a bill of goods.  

Women need no institutional support, no self-interested twisting of legal codes, and no patrons.  True equality can only be achieved by asserting one’s moral authority, intelligence, and individual will.  In being taught that evolutionary biology is wrong, women have been further deceived.  Rather than dealing with biological difference – as Shakespeare’s daunting heroines did – women are instructed to deny it.  Certainly no good can come of that.

The honesty of Shakespeare and his successors is absent in today's culture of identity, diversity, and inclusivity. One cannot call a spade a spade - women in this apogee of women's place can do no wrong, deserve every advantage over men, and must be respected as society's true generals - or saints.   The only spade called is male toxicity, that spreading, infectious, viral swarm of bad intention, ugliness, and hormone-fueled ignorance. 

'The Bitch Set Me Up' - The Genius Of A Political Pimp And White Reverence For His Tribal Machismo

Marion Barry, Washington DC’s Mayor for Life, is long out of office and no longer with us but always remembered by his community, the people for whom he was the man who stuck it to white folks.  

A few of those white folks who so paid the bills for the Mayor's ward politics, walkin' around money, cash-back contracting, and bald political nepotism, saw the genius of the man, the pure, unadulterated canniness of a man who played racial politics like a violin - he never missed a note.  He played on white guilt, white resentment, and white anger - that bolus of contradictions not surprisingly found in a majority black city with wealthy whites clustered in two Northwest wards, and investors who played whatever game necessary to turn a profit. 

“Get over it”, he said to white voters who considered him a corrupt, morally bankrupt racial politician, who cheered when he was accused and convicted of all kinds of behavior unbecoming for a Mayor, Councilman, or American, and were disappointed when majority black DC voted him back in office despite everything.

Barry was the hero of the city beyond the Anacostia River, the man with pockets full of walkin’ around money, the politician of the people, his people, black people. 

Most white people in DC remember Barry for the sting which caught him doing crack, and sent him packing, the only time in decades of political life that anything every stuck to the Black Teflon Man.  White people don’t remember the details of the sting, where or when it happened, but repeat what became an iconic meme of his tenure – ‘The Bitch Set Me Up’.  Which of course could have been true, a federal plant to get rid of this thorn in the side of good, responsible government, the politician who gave The Nation’s Capital a bad name.  

In addition to being the murder capital of the country, a city rife with crime, civil unrest and disobedience, Jamaican drug crews, street gangs, violent crime, and corrupt governance, it had in Marion Barry an arrogant, shameless ward politician reminiscent of Chicago’s Bathhouse John, a flamboyant politician who symbolized the naked patronage and rank corruption of ward politics.  Barry was in the face of white reformers, conservatives, federal law enforcement, and Congress.  He ran the city as his fiefdom, his turf, his streets, and his entitlement.

'The bitch set me up' was the classic way Barry expressed a street-borne sentiment of betrayal, a break in the ‘hood code of honor, a black omertà, a sell out.  Of course the code of honor applied only to those with the cash, the guns, and the power; or to up-and-coming street bosses, high-end pimps who would sell out anyone to anyone on their way up; and Barry knew that he hadn’t been looking, hadn’t watched his back, had hired changelings instead of loyalists to watch it for him.  

So there was no contrition, no conciliatory language, no hiding the fact that street justice had been done, that he had indeed been set up, not a bad thing in and of itself, bad only because it happened to him, supposedly the most agile and deft politician to ever come to Washington

Barry had infuriated white Washington when after a major snowstorm which shut the city down and during which no snowplows were deployed to the wealthy, white Northwest neighborhoods, he said, “It’ll melt”. 

Barry had been a frontline civil rights leader in the Sixties when a multi-racial movement against Southern segregation had mounted sit-ins, marches, and demonstrations.  He was in the moderate camp of Dr. King and Ralph Abernathy who preached racial tolerance and forgiveness within a hardened message of civil rights; but he was tempted by the more incendiary, radical movement of the Black Panthers, Elijah Muhammed, and Malcolm X, knew that white racism was endemic, and that the participation of white liberals was no more than a reverse Uncle Tom black wannabee guilt trip. There was no way that he would welcome or even tolerate white supremacy and white plans to keep the black man in his place.

Of course he never went public about his conversion, and was neither politically nor emotionally fit for violent radicalism. These West Coast firebrands would die in a hail of white bullets and would do more harm than good.  No, Barry would play the white game to rise to power and then stick it to them.  And stick it to them he did for many years until the bitch set him up.

As unpalatable a politician as Barry might have been to white Washington, he was reluctantly admired.  He did it the white way, for who ever said that white power was as lily white and pure as claimed? Barry played by white rules although not the ones most white people imagined – honesty, fair-dealing, respect for law, justice, and Christian values – but the real white values of amorality, power, deception, and mistrust. White K Street lawyers, lobbyists, Congressional aides, and interns understood that Barry’s game was their game, but he played it better.

So, ‘The Bitch Set Me Up’ was part and parcel of the Barry character – there was no caution, no political correctness, no concern about offence or political vulnerability.   In fact political correctness – the  woke, righteous movement to eliminate contrary opinions and to enforce a progressive state – is unknown across the Anacostia River in the ghetto, a rough place where crude, offensive, provocative remarks are small arms alongside big guns.  

There is no such thing as civil discourse, tolerance, rational disquisition across the River.  It is standup, macho, serious intimidation.  No censure of free speech there.  Every man and woman speaks their mind to whomever, uses free speech as a weapon, a signifier, and an outrage.

In this regard, every white is a black wannabee; and all but the most reverentially neutered progressive would like to call the bitch out for setting them up, call uppity women ho’s, and be pimps and cadgers.  The suits and cordovans are just prison outfits.

And so it is for every woke issue imposed and enforced by the progressive thought police.  In the middle of the night straight people wonder about gay men, the San Francisco holes in the wall bathhouse scene, transvestitism, transgenderism and the gender spectrum; but by day they hum the tune and sing the righteous song, 

Dutiful white men talk about marital fidelity, the sanctity of women, and the respect and honor owed them, but wish they could be black where machismo is king, no man is complete without a string of lovers and baby mommas, fidelity is a medieval concept, and where men are men.  Mayor Barry, the crack-smoking, intimidating Lothario from the 8th Ward, a strutting, posturing local hero; a man without a trace of white rectitude, guilt, or shame is the man they want to be but can never love. 

Eddie Murphy in his early one-man standup comedy film, Raw, was the last of the uncensored, politically incorrect, outrageously funny comedians of the modern era.   He said what most people were thinking in the middle of the night.  He was the champion of free speech because he said exactly what you are not supposed to say; and that is at the very center of free speech.  It is speech that many find offensive but whose opinions should not rule others. He was called crude, misogynist, and homophobic, but once again, in the peace and quiet of the middle of the night, he was a white man's dream. 

Larry Flynt, former publisher of Hustler magazine, won his free speech case before the Supreme Court on these very grounds. Offensive speech or expression, no matter how distasteful to some, cannot be prohibited.  Flynt made the point that his hilarious although brutal satire of Jerry Falwell, a pompous, self-righteous televangelist – suggesting that he had sex with his mother – was important because its wild exaggeration exposed Falwell’s own exaggerated, sanctimonious claims.

Somehow white Americans have become timorous, thin-skinned, self-described victims of ‘offensive’ speech.  Protected identity groups can never more be subjected to the taunts, ridicule, and opprobrium.  Men have been intimidated by feminists, convinced of their toxic masculinity and vowed to reform.  They have willingly ceded sexual power to women and granted them universal authority. Only black men have refused to buckle under to women's censorious, abusive, psycho-sexual castration. 

There was never a more outrageously offensive period of American history than the free-for-all of the early Twentieth Century.  Freedom, whether of speech, assembly, press, or religion was as unbridled as the actions of the capitalists who ruled it.  It was a period of exuberance, a heady period of individualism, raw enterprise, and success.  The so-called Robber Barons were the black men of the day - a macho, fiercely competitive, aggressive, amoral cabal of pimps and drug runner who brooked no opposition and met it with guns blazing. 

White men look back to that period of history as their halcyon years when their masculinity was unchallenged and where every hormone-fueled expression of dominance, control, and authority was accepted as part of their male, human nature. 

Kurtz, the principal character in Conrad's novella, The Heart of Darkness realizes the tribal primitivism in all human beings, and shocked and horrified by the discovery, his dying words are 'the horror...the horror'; yet the evolved white man - the descendant of Kurtz - has tribal envy.  The unbridled passion, vitality, brutality, and primal sexuality are not horrors, but valuable things lost in social evolution. 

Which is why, in the secrecy of their own minds, white men have black envy.  The ghetto, despite more than a hundred years of integration and liberal attention, still remains fundamentally tribal - the closest thing to the untethered masculinity of the jungle there is or could be.  White men at first sense 'the horror' but soon detest their mild-mannered, complaisant, dutifully feminist cowardice.