Romantic Fiction - Why Are Otherwise Intelligent Women Reading Soppy Stories About Love?

Belinda Carter borrowed sappy, treacly, impossibly romantic novels from the library - along with books on Civil War history and the plains Indians as cover. If any of her friends - professors, lawyers, doctors, and social activists - had seen what she was reading, she would have been immediately and irrevocably thought of as soft, a girly girl romantic who couldn't be trusted with the truth. 

Belinda lived in University Park, a leafy corner of Washington DC, solidly progressive, unbending and unflinching in their hatred for Donald Trump and his right wing, MAGA cabal, and committed to the rise of the black man, the gender spectrum, and world peace.  Books like The Flowers for Antoinette had no place in the pantheon of right ideas.  They were inane, anti-feminist, idealistic fantasies unworthy of anyone embracing the fight for equality. 

Yet half the women of University Park were reading books like this, hidden among more serious non-fiction, kept under wraps, and read late at night. These women were hopeless romantics who had never gotten over their adolescent fantasies of marrying princes and living in castles.  Most were careful to choose only those novels which had a historical link.  Flowers was set in revolutionary France but had nothing to do with Robespierre or the guillotine but the torrid affair between the namesake of the queen and a British nobleman caught in France like Dickens' Charles Darnay. 

If called out for her girlish fantasies, she could always say that the book was not a romance but a historical novel; yet every night she sobbed and sniffled as she read of the loneliness and rejection of Antoinette, her poverty, and her misery.  Belinda knew that the story would turn out well - they all did - but she couldn't help empathizing with the young heroine, so much like herself, destitute in love. 

'Turn the light off, please, dear', said her husband rolling over to the dark side of the bed - the husband of many years who increasingly paid her no mind, had been unfaithful, and was mindless and unconcerned about her happiness. 

This was the fate of many women in University Park whose bright memories of young love persisted well into late middle age and drove them to fictional romance.  At least there was that, Belinda, thought, putting down The Chalice of Love. 

She smiled at the other patrons of the library looking for books in the 'Adult' section, a parceled off corner of the library for romantic fiction.  Adult fiction usually meant pornography, but the head librarian, herself an aficionado of romantic fiction, knew that what women wanted was cover.  No professional woman wanted to be seen interested in the treacly stuff usually reserved for housewives in trailers. 

The women perusing the Adult section were together in their desire for romance - they were all women who resided in boardrooms, management consulting, or superior court but who could not give up their hopelessly romantic interests. Smiling at each other as they roamed the shelves said, 'We're sisters' another cover for slightly misandrous women who would rather be in a Bavarian palace then next to their husbands. 

'Oh, he's gorgeous', said Betsy Farquhar to Belinda over sherry at the Russian Tea Room when a graceful, beautiful young man walked in and sat at the bar.  'I would roll over in a minute for him'. 

'No you wouldn't', said her companion.  'Someone always gets hurt'; but that circumspection carried no weight with Belinda whose eagerness for the real thing had built up to a crescendo after emptying the shelves of Little Falls library.  Maybe it was time for some romance of her own for a change. 

Easier said than done of course, so locked in was she to a high-toned version of Kinder, Kuche, Kirche. Woman was the keeper of the hearth, responsible for family, worth, and happiness.  Far be it from Belinda to wander when her children and husband needed her. 

The tea room incident only whet her appetite for more imagined romance.  If she couldn't find true love herself, she would enjoy reading the stories of women who did. 

Professor Hyman Isaacson dean of the psychiatric faculty of the medical school at the University of California, Berkeley had been fascinated by this persistent phenomenon.  How could otherwise intelligent women be so drawn into the greatest moneymaking mill ever? Millions of ghost written, predictable tales of impossible romance flew off the shelves and not just to the low end reader.  In 2022 he wrote a monograph on his findings:

The mature professional American woman is a rare bird, psychologically speaking.  She was brought up by a strong, loving father and had the usual and predictable Freudian sexual attraction to him.  The onset of feminism changed the calculus and concluded that these fathers were oppressors, deniers of female legitimacy.  The liberated woman must seek her own, independent, sexually confident way. 

The conflict arises when this woman seeks adult love.  She wants the attention, comfort, and security of men like her father, but has been told to be wary of them; and frustrated, denied, and humbled finds solace in romantic fiction

 

'Nonsense' was the expected rejoinder from feminist critics who argued that Isaacson was a perfect example of the controlling, misogynist male they had always warned about.  He was the immature one, looking for the ideal woman but trapped within his narrow academic carrel. 

Yet no matter how much angry women decried the observations of Isaacson and rejected any of the assumptions he made about romantic desire, the shelves of romantic fiction remained stacked, and over half of the borrowers were like Belinda Carter.  Businesswoman by day, sobbing, sniffling, vulnerable woman by night. 

It was not unusual, the Professor went on to note, that fact and fantasy become indistinguishable.  The romantic novel set within a distinct period of history with all its trappings becomes reality, a complete suspension of disbelief.  To Belinda the lovers of Antoinette were real French aristocrats who realized her inner worth and rescued her from the streets and loved her forever. 

As such Prof. Isaacson continued, romantic fiction for the mature professional woman becomes an addiction, something she cannot do without; and even when actual romance might be in the offing, she turns to fiction instead.

 

It is no surprise in the academic world that men look at pornography and women read romantic fiction; and if there were ever a cloture to the debate about the differences between men and women, this would be it.  Women are desperate for love and romance.  Men want only sex. Those crossovers - men who have subscribed to feminism and have been dutiful, responsible, respectful husbands and women who try every position of the Kama Sutra to achieve a Lawrentian epiphany - are few and far between.  The record is clear. 

Belinda's husband never got the picture and was as dismissive and indifferent as ever despite the growing pile of romance novels by his wife's bedside.  He grunted and rolled over on top of her once and a while, she put up with it, and both thought of someone else, she her Prince Charming, and he the busty blonde from Accounting. 

Reality bites to be sure, and Belinda eventually slackened off the romance novels and made the elision back to actual history.  That righted her ship, and her coordinates were much better aligned.  Her professionalism and her emotional interests were in harmony. 

However again predictably and common, as she got much older the regrets of a loveless life hit hard, and for comfort, solace, and refuge, she went back to the Adult shelves of the Little Falls library. 

Fourth Of July - Celebrate A Racist, Genocidal Country? The New Anti-Patriotism

Marlene Flint wanted no part of this year's Fourth.  Donald Trump had made it all about himself like he has done everything else - the ballroom, the Arch, the Field of Heroes, the makeover of the Kennedy Center - and this celebration of the republic's 250th year would be no different.  It would be the same posturing, arrogant travesty of American history that has characterized his presidency since the beginning. 

 

Besides, what was there to celebrate about a country which had enslaved the black man since 1619, had committed genocide of the Native Americans in its Manifest Destiny push to the Pacific, and had created the world's greatest threat to world peace with its exceptionalism and military adventurism. 

There would be no flag flying from her porch, nor would there be any flags and bunting in her neighborhood, solidly progressive, anti-Trump, and dedicated to a reversal of the current misfortune and the creation of a new, socially generous, verdant, and harmonious world. 

She was quick to call out the very hypocrisy of a country which encouraged the barbarism of enslavement, and went about its Gone with the Wind cavalier ways for centuries - mint juleps on the verandah, hoop skirts, and antebellum magnificence while African slaves toiled under the hot sun in Delta cotton fields.

 

She had no pride in American military victories - Jackson had sold out the Chickasaws and Choctaws in the War of 1812, using them as cannon fodder against the British and then exiling them west of the Mississippi after the war was over.  The victory over Japan in WWII was at the expense of hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese who were incinerated by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were ignoble affairs, carried out with some vague notion of democracy but were actually no more than pursuits of American hegemony. 

She felt no pride in American social history, for it had treated women as slaves until the early Twentieth century, and had closeted gay and lesbian Americans since the dawn of the Republic. 

What in fact, was there to celebrate?  What more arrogant, mind-numbing assumption of greatness could be imagined in the follies of the Fourth this year?

Marlene had gritted her teeth every Fourth of July, smirked at the flags and parades and barbecues.  The floats from which ex-genocidaires waved, a pompous, ridiculous show of patriotism for dismally failed country; but this year, the 250th was the worst.  It would be the most garish, insipidly bourgeois, demeaning show of faux patriotism the country and the world had ever seen. 

'Goddamn him!', she shouted as the Navy jets roared overhead and down the Potomac, practicing their tight maneuvers for the flyover.  'Goddamn him', she yelled when she heard the high school band playing march music on the football field.  

It was too much, and she was at the end of her rope.  She had done all the could, devoted decades of her youth to progressivism, and what did she have to show for it.  A fool in the White House and the dismantling of every noble, humanitarian policy she and her fellow progressives had fought long and hard. 

'Calm down', said her neighbor, a fellow progressive but one more tempered by a study of history; a friend who worried about the disassembly of a good woman. 

 

When she heard Marlene's frantic cries, she rushed next door to comfort her friend and provide whatever solace she could. Politics are febrile, changeable, predictably absurd and never permanent. 

This time, however, was different, and what she saw was frightening.  Marlene had become a madwoman, her hair wild and unkempt; her dress torn and the hems, now black and stained, dragged the floor.  She trembled and then shook with violent paroxysms of hatred.  She spat, foamed, and cried, her voice hoarse and miserable. 

She was not alone.  Professor Harding Phillips, Professor of Social Psychiatry at Stanford had recently written about the surprising depth of emotional disturbance in those who opposed the President and his policies and had recently written about emotionally existential events which pushed many over the edge. 

The American progressive suffers more than any opposition in American history.  Not even in the antebellum period when the country was preparing for war was there so much political hysteria. Plantation owners were hateful and resentful of the sanctimonious North but channeled this hate into political and military action.  The abolitionists in Pennsylvania and New England were incensed over the persistence of slavery and the militant defense of it by plantation owners; but organized a political movement to effect policy change in Washington. 

Today's social activists have no such reasonability.  Temperance and practicality are tantamount to treason.  The venomous hatred with no objective outlet has turned malicious and viral, just waiting for a casus belli.  The virulent and malicious expressions of hatred for America which erupted as Washington celebrated 250 years of statehood were understandable.  Only madness, complete abandonment of social propriety and probity would suffice.  It was as though every insane asylum on the continent had emptied its inmates. 

In her agitated, untethered state nothing in America over the last 250 years seemed good, praiseworthy and noble. If the United States became a world industrial power during the Industrial Revolution, its successes were built on the backs of the poor.  The Robber Barons had robbed the worker of his dignity, amassed great personal fortunes and let the poor suffer in miserable, intolerable conditions. 

The famous 'democracy' of America was nothing less than a chimera - a fanciful political creation to favor the wealthy and the white male elite.  Its economy built on individual enterprise was nothing but cronyism and bald aggressiveness leaving the less fortunate in its wake. 

Of course not everyone had been so infected by this viral hatred so common in American progressives. Nothing was perfect and as Winston Churchill said, 'Democracy is the world's worst political system except for all the rest'.  Historically mediated culture could not be dismissed.  Each period of American history - Westward Expansion, Manifest Destiny, Robber Barons, slavery, and the oppression of women all had historical antecedents.  Political philosophies were neither good nor bad.  They just existed, came and went, were replace by others which fell just as precipitously. 

To hate was to ignore history, philosophy, culture and the laws of chance.  It made no sense, it isolated people within narrow, unpleasant confines, robbed them of any real purpose or satisfaction. Hating was a miserable affair. 

 Marlene couldn't seek psychiatric attention, for that would deny the legitimacy of her hate; and hate was the only legitimate response to the predatory, inhuman, malignant presence of Donald Trump.  The 250th Fourth of July was her defining moment, the one from which there was no return, and so she was committed rather than admit herself to St. Elizabeth's.  She went in a straight-jacket, held by two hefty matrons, and was carried off in a van, not even an ambulance. 

This could be her only end - and that of the thousands like her who have so completely lost social traction that a normal life was no longer possible.  St. Elizabeth's was the end of the road. 

No one missed her, not even her progressive colleagues who had sympathized with her agony over the years.  They were sorry for her, but were glad that she was in a place where she regrettably belonged. Not good riddance exactly but she had given progressives an especially bad name. 

Diary Of A Scammer - The American Dream, A Sucker Born Every Minute

Mackintosh Peters was a snake oil salesmen in the Arizona Territory in the 1870s, and made a good living selling worthless gum Arabic and corn syrup mixtures to the Piute and Navajo.  'Works like a charm', Mack told the Indians, 'take a swig in the morning and one in the evening, and it'll cure what ails you'. 

Which was arthritis, impotence, scabies, catarrh, and suppuration and anything else he could conjure up.  He was long gone before the Indians knew they had been had, but the placebo effect has been around for centuries, so many of his customers told their friend and families how good they felt after only a day's dosage.  If for some reason he found himself back in the same village and was accosted by the Indians he had duped, he had a ready reply. 'Ahh, of course', he said.  'I said two swigs in the morning and two at night, not one.'

'What's a swig?' asked an elder of the tribe. 

'Why, like this', Mack said, swilling a half-bottle down in one gulp. 'Ya see, ya wasn't takin' nearly half as much', and with that, he lit out of town, his racks of phials and bottles clinking and rattling in the back seat of the wagon as he drove. 

'There's a sucker born every minute', said the circus impresario, P.T. Barnum, and with that under his belt, he made millions off the rubes who wandered into his tents.  His freak show was the most popular - two headed babies, bearded dwarves, and half-man, half-woman giants.  The gawkers always came back, sometimes the same day to see the unbelievable creatures assembled in Barnum's side show. 

Along the trail with Mack Peters were scores of shell game wizards and con artists of every kind, fleecing unsuspecting rural folk out of their money.  There were get-rich-quick schemes, virility potions, games of 'chance', temptingly easy card games, and more inventive scams you can imagine.  It seemed that the business of rural America in the early years was the scam. 

At the same time as the nation industrialized, there was plenty of room for bamboozling. Real estate agents, mortgage lenders, horse traders, and used car salesmen all made a bonanza.  It was remarkably easy to bilk money out of consumers in those days, and even at the highest level of finance, trickery and chicanery was rife. Property owners inflated prices, hid structural defects, paid off inspectors and politicians and ran off with thousands.  When the buildings sold collapsed or rotted, they were long gone. 

Scamming was in Alvin Bard's blood.  Mack Peters, the snake oil salesman who had made thousands in Ohio alone before the revenuers caught him in a silo in Chillicothe was his hero.  Conning, scamming, fraud, and snake oil sales had always been a booming business.  The products might have changed but the principle remained the same - a sucker is indeed born every minute. 

Before turning to cyber-fraud he worked for Bear Stearns before they were shut down by the SEC.  Alvin had been the designer of the most sophisticated, intricate, devilishly complex and therefore impossible to trace financial instruments ever. 

Alvin was a natural.  As a kid before the days of social media, electronic, cybernetic revolution, he loved the con.  He used the upstairs phone to call his father's friend, imitate a mafia boss from New Haven, and ask for 'Patsy'; or solicit donations for the homeless from a wealthy neighbor, posing, using a well-practiced patrician accent as the Director of Christian Charity United; or let the neighbor with the barking dog know that Fido's days were numbered. 

After Wall Street Alvin could have continued as a financial investment consultant. Jeffrey Skilling, convicted of Enron investor fraud, operated a legitimate consulting business from his jail cell, secured millions in offshore accounts, and when finally released from prison was hired as a consultant for those many Wall Street firms who narrowly escaped prosecution and who needed to jump start the alternate financial universe. 

 

Alvin had made millions, all as protected and secured as Skilling's, and so money was not the object of his 'retirement'.  He wanted the thrill of the chase - a popular hero like Billings Callum, Bonnie and Clyde or Junior Johnson and the white lightning North Carolina moonshiners. The days of creative financial instruments and Bernie Madoff's ingenious Ponzi schemes were over and done with. A new age had arrived, an electronic, cybernetic, AI world of sophisticated, untraceable scams. 

Rudy Kurniawan was a young Indonesian wine fraudster, and before he was caught he had bilked millions out of credulous, arrogantly presumptuous connoisseurs.  He bought surplus French wine, bottled, corked, and labeled it as the most sought-after French vintages, convinced investors that there was no top to the fine wine market, and made a fortune. 

The 'connoisseurs' never drank the wine but traded it as a commodity, so the fake wine passed from hand to hand without ever being opened.  Every aspect of the scam had been carefully planned and executed - he learned how to 'age' labels and corks, and find bottles that defied provenance - all this helped by buyers who had been snookered by Rudy's exquisite palate and business acumen. 

Alvin knew that even such marvelously ingenious schemes were old hat.  The New Age had had no 'things', no physical traces, no safe deposit boxes, nothing of the kind. It was all in the cloud, in the rich air of cyberspace, subject only to the laws of quantum physics where velocity and position were relative and the bosons of the universe went circling and colliding leaving nary a trace. 

The Nigerians had started the whole enterprise.  Tens, hundreds of thousands of appeals went out at the click of a mouse and if only a fraction of one percent bore fruit, the Nigerian scammer would be set up for life.  After the genie was out of the bottle and the whole scamming landscape had quickly evolved into a barely recognizable, untraceable universe, there was no limit to the money that could be made. 

In the early pre-AI period of big data, researchers found out that if you crowdsourced a problem, that is open-sourced it and bypassed experts, the results were not only equivalent to what a stable of professionals could achieve but went far beyond.   When AI arrived and the cyber universe became even more vastly unimaginable and subject to equations that only a handful of scientists understood, scamming became the wizardry of the ages; and Alvin wanted to be the first trillionaire. 

P.T. Barnum made a fortune off the credulous and the gullible, and the old adage 'You can fool most of the people most of the time' or some permutation thereof was still universally true; so there was no stopping the new generation of scammers. 

'Let the buyer beware' was the meme of the times, and beware the consumer certainly had to be in an environment of endemic corruption, fraud, and larceny.  It was a free-for-all where if you were canny and deftly underhanded, you could become wealthy. Government watchdog agencies have made such chicanery a bit more difficult, but they have simply raised the bar.  It takes more than a silver tongue to fool millions. 

There were occasional throwbacks.  Somali immigrants bilked the state of Minnesota and the city of Minneapolis out of millions simply by creating shells - fake Learning Centers for pre-school children with not one enrollee nor one legitimate teacher.  It was all smoke and mirrors and the state and municipal government bought the scheme hook, line, and sinker.  Diversity ruled, and who was to doubt the integrity of black African refugees from one of the world's most pestilential places?

Alvin had no interest in such schemes.  They amounted to chicken feed compared to major cyber fraud. Both were based on the assumption of credibility, the complicity of buyer and seller and the complex almost indecipherable networks underlying the schemes, but one made immeasurable profits while the other bought a few Mercedes. 

The die was cast, and Alvin Bard launched himself into the heady world of fraud-in-the-cloud. He had gotten a late start - high tech never sits still and the few years that had passed since Madoff, Skilling, and the Nigerians were filled with accelerating means to fraudulent ends.  With every new remarkable innovation in cyber technology AI and virtual reality - innovations bound to help the blind see and the deaf hear among other things - someone was figuring out how to harness this explosive new technology to bilk, scam, fool and con. 

Alvin understood consumer dynamics, American culture, and the fundamentals of AI, cybersecurity, the ins and outs of both and most importantly how not to get caught.  Below board entrepreneurs had always outfoxed the revenuers, stayed one step ahead; and now, no matter how many resources were invested in public and private security, scammers always found a loophole.

The inner workings of the cyber-fraud that made him billions were never deciphered for Alvin was no longer around to to the decoding.  He had disappeared from the face of the earth and was reported to be living in as far flung places as Ndjamena or Port Moresby.  What was there to spend his billions on in these godforsaken places? Nothing, but that was not the point.  The thrill of the chase, victory under the noses of the best and the brightest, suckers taken for a ride without even knowing it.  

America, what a great country!

Sex And Savvy, The Currency Of Washington - Trading Up From Hogs And Corn, The Saga Of An Ambitious Farm Girl

Ada Louise Burnham was from Parker's Corner, Ohio, a small town not far from Chillicothe where people went after church to the Fireman's all-you-can-eat buffet held on the fairgrounds. Billy Graham had led revivals there which the Chillicothe Sun Times reported had brought one hundred souls to Jesus, a record for the county. 

Jemima Flanders, however, thrice widowed and grandmother of twenty-four, insisted that back in 1904 her mother and grandmother were both saved by Billy Sunday, America's most famous preacher of the day.  He, Jemima went on, had chosen their little rural community because the Bible had pointed the way. In 1 Peter:24-26 it was written:

All people are like grass, and their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord endures forever

'Parker's Corner', he had said, 'was the place Peter had in mind when he reflected on the Lord's bounty and that of the Creator, a place of faith, spiritual prosperity, and homespun goodness'. 

Parker's Corner had always felt itself important - forgotten, overlooked, dismissed by those living far from its pristine beauty, peace, and harmony; but never by its families who had farmed the land since the first great Westward expansion. Parker's Corner was indeed God's country. 

It was, of course, no stranger to lies, jealousies, innuendoes, and false accusations.  The townspeople would rather forget the brutal murder of Hiram Walker, disemboweled and hung by the heels from the rafter of his barn.

Finding the murderer was not difficult, for the dispute between Walker and Frenchy LaMotte had gone on for years, a real Hatfield-McCoy feud. The knife that had sliced Hiram up was found in the corn crib and it didn't take much to trace it back to LaMotte who was so stupid he left his tracks in the mud from the barn directly to his farmhouse a quarter mile down the road.  

That and the famous 'Well Water Scandal', so called because Philomena Roberts was caught by the well with her lover in flagrante delicto, undressed to the waist, petticoats above her head, her hand on the handle as though ready to haul up a bucket of water.  

 

In any case Ada Louise, as proud as she was of the Midwestern idyll where she grew up, had big ambitions - Washington, the Nation's Capital, Congress, the White House, the corridors of power and home to the best and the brightest. Although the Congressman from her district was a saggy, lumpen man far from the JFK charm that had seduced Marilyn Monroe, the other younger members of the political elite had a macho charisma which appealed to the young girl; and knowing little but hogs and soybeans, she was easily wooed. 

 

Flyover country.  When she first heard it on the Baltimore & Ohio from Columbus, she was surprised but the man who casually said this to his travelling companion was the kind of man she had always hoped to meet - the stranger on the train who would take her to places unknown. 

This, like everything else in the Midwest, was nothing new.  The very first scenes of Sinclair Lewis' novel, Sister Carrie was exactly like this.  Carrie, on her way East to make her way, is approached by an impressive young man who charms her with his savoir faire, snappy dress, and presence, and he becomes her patron and lover. Carrie is no dupe, however, no ingenue, no naive girl, but a savvy, calculating, and intelligent young woman.  She takes up the traveler's offer, the first of many on her way to success and stardom.

 

Lewis understood, respected, and admired the Midwest, and his heroine in the novel Main Street is both from that simple, unadorned middle American community that was to be the heartland of the new republic, and critical of it.  She goes to a small rural community not unlike Parker's Corner, Ohio, and finds herself irritable, dissatisfied, and emotionally lost; but instead of giving in to depression and the vision of insular life she has consigned herself to, she commits herself to changing the way things are, to bring art, theatre, and a lively intellectual life to this horribly removed place. 

She is unsuccessful, of course. Old habits are hard to change, and the very qualities that give the Midwest its simple appeal are the cause for its characteristic intolerance and unwillingness to change. 

Ada Louise was far more like Carrie than Carol.  Without knowing it, she had the same willful ambition, the same unconcern with received wisdom and morality as Carrie Underwood.  'Flyover country' simply hardened her resolve. She would nevermore be thought of as a rube, a hick, a backcountry calicoed milkmaid. 

The man on the train was a whistle-stop salesman - an old school samples-in-the-briefcase hawker.  He was an anachronism in an age of Amazon and social media but as he explained he was schooled in the art of Barnum & Bailey where salesmanship is an art - not of deception but conviction - and if the young lady would be willing to have dinner with him at his next stop in Pittsburgh, he would be delighted. 

A first step, she later reflected, for what did she know except Billy Baxter behind the silo on a cold, snow-flaky winter day - but even that was a dose of reality. It didn't feel exactly good but not bad either, but that was beside the point.  It was something that had to be gotten out of the way before too much time passed. 

 

Some women, Ada Louise among them have a well-defined, well-articulated, irresistible sexuality - men are drawn to them like bees to flowers - and as she went along her path she knew that this was not only an endowment, the Creator's gift, but the key to her future. Her intelligence, her savvy, and her canny understanding of human dynamics, social, political, or economic, were only ancillary to this ineluctable sexuality. 

Women have slept their way to the top since time immemorial.  Cleopatra bedded both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony - two of the most powerful men in the Empire - certainly not for love but for advantage. Hollywood starlets have seen bedding the producer nothing more than paying dues.  Morality, self-esteem, respect had nothing to do with it. 

As her train pulled into Washington's Union Station, she felt confident of her abilities, her ambition and above all her willful control of men.  How was she able to deduce such an innate trait from one man in a seedy Pittsburgh hotel?  That was her genius, her talent, her greatest piece of art.  

Child prodigies are able to play Bach at five years old, solve complex mathematical problems at ten, graduate from MIT at twelve. Why did such innate talent have to be confined to that?  Her ability to navigate her way in sexually chaotic waters and always, inevitably come out on top was no different. 

D.H. Lawrence understood this and placed sexual satisfaction at the heart of human enterprise.  Few would have the ability to reach the untold heights of sexual epiphany, but those who did were physical and emotional geniuses.  

Too much ambition, will, and desire - as Shakespeare well knew - was always and inevitably women's downfall.  Goneril, Regan, Tamora, Dionyza, Lady Macbeth and many others fell to ambition and greedy hunger for power and dominance.  All the emotional sentience in the world is no good unless parlayed properly. 

 

The train traveler had his Washington connections, and as basic and old-world as they were, they were fine indeed; and savvy as she was, she was able to parlay them into much better, much more promising opportunities.  With this natural savvy, indomitable will, and natural, irresistible sexuality, Washington was an open door. 

Did she sleep her way to the top? Yes and no, for sex is a commonly exchanged currency in Hollywood, Washington, or the streets of New York; but the laws of supply and demand apply in all situations.  Ada Louise knew her Milton Friedman and Adam Smith and did quite well.  Before long the had a sinecure with one of the most powerful men in the Senate and a promising political career if she so chose. 

In America the days of patrician, old-money, aristocratic governance is a thing of the past, and anyone can be President, so the political and sexual ambitions of those around her who saw advantage and satisfaction were not unfounded and misdirected. 

Washington is not so venal and self-absorbed a place that the tale of Ada Louise suggests, but politics is a graspy affair.  It takes ambition, will, and a certain moral diffidence to be elected, a few years to enjoy the perks of office, and then back out on the hustings to flaunt success.  By the time the cycle is completed, the politician is convinced of his righteousness, entitlement, and appeal.  He is on the lookout for cash contribution and sexual trophies like Ada Louise. 

It didn't take a cycle for Ada Louise to learn what's what.  Such an innately savvy and perceptive young woman knew exactly how things worked - the predictability of the male ego, his quick and easy abandonment of propriety, and his sexual gullibility.  Plums were there for the taking. 

The whole political shebang however was just a game for Ada Louise.  She could have become a politician - there were a number of vacant safe seats out there and she was courted by members on both sides of the aisle, but she demurred.  The fun was in the getting, the manipulation, and the control. She was Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, a woman for whom the exercise of pure will was the only validation she needed.  To subject a man completely to it was an exhilarating exercise, worth every moment. 

Ada Louise worked her way through the men of Washington, young and old with such dexterity, agility, and sexual savvy that she could have anything she wanted from them; but, like Hedda, just brining them to heel was enough. 

So much for flyover country.