Vixens, Harridans, And Toxic Femininity - The Sequelae Of Women's Liberation

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. 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. 

However, Edward Albee turned the tables in  Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf .  Martha is drama's harridan - a brutal, man-hating, vixen - and his George is the weak, sorry victim of her fury.  

There is some hope at the end of the story - they have so flayed each other to the marrow that perhaps there can be a new beginning; but real life's episodes, certainly as brutal and venomous as Albee's will turn out badly. There is no way that a couple with such profound psychological drivers and pitiful weaknesses can possibly go on from such an emotional holocaust. 

Tennessee Williams, whose characters are often timid, shy women looking for love - Alma of Eccentricities of a Nightingale is perhaps the most telling - has also created characters of the very opposite disposition.  Maggie the Cat is a duplicitous, treacherous woman who wants only money, reputation, and dominance but he can't hold back his admiration of this beautiful, stunning example of feminine will. 

Ibsen and Strindberg created strong willful women who despite the strictures of a socially conservative Victorian society bested men at an every turn.  Hedda Gabler, Rebekka West, Hilde Wangel, and Laura in The Father are consummate manipulators understanding men's weaknesses and foibles and taking every advantage of them. 

Shakespeare's heroines are cut from the same cloth.  Rosalind, Viola, Portia, the other women of The Comedies tolerate their inferior suitors, make fun of them, and then, as society demands, marries the best they can.

So given this social, emotional, and political ebb and flow why are women still a protected species? The American Left in classic doublespeak has championed women as the superior sex, but demanded protection from naturally predatory, abusive men. Yet Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Strindberg have shown that women need no protection and with intelligence, savvy, will, and ambition can get what they want from men. 

 

So why have modern women been so insistent on taking their pound of flesh, hectoring the disappointing men they marry? 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 most women still have neither sorted out their independence nor learned from the Strindberg playbook.  

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.  They are examples of toxic femininity - the unspoken sequelae of sexual liberation. 

Belinda Potter was one of these women.  Not unintelligent or clueless and a woman with a perfectly good career, social position, and family, and certainly a woman who did not need to resort to the shrewishness of the put-upon wife, Belinda took her daily pound of flesh. 

She, despite her publicly calm, confident demeanor, was petty, nasty, and unpleasant at home.  There was something innately twisted about her, some unavoidable detritus from a patriarchal past, some dutiful warnings from a very harried mother, that made her avoid the usual quid-pro-quo contractual dialogue with her husband - something she was very good at in the office - and go after him with extreme grievance 

Women cannot simply leave men alone - there is some unstated, but hardwired rule - giving an inch means capitulation, losing a hard-won foothold, taking a step back to patriarchy, nominal respect, and demission to second-class citizenship. 

Marriage is no longer the limiting, No Exit prison it used to be; but most women still treat it that way.  Confined within its arbitrary borders because of psycho-social imperatives set down in childhood, women are betwixt and between and cannot help flailing away at the men they have agreed to wed.  They may not be Albee's Martha, but a close approximation. 

Belinda had loving but somewhat imperious father who ruled his mother with draconian efficiency but treated his daughter like the princess in the castle; so from her earliest years she was conflicted - princess or dutiful, obedient consort.  She loved her father but as society began to feminize, she doubted his integrity, and adopted the then-current meme - men were no good. 

She treated her male suitors with diffidence and with an unbendingly critical judgement found none of them suitable.  She was wary of the virile, confident men and dismissive of the demurring and patient.  She was a role model for uncertain women, and a harridan to the men who gave her wide berth. 

Motherhood complicated the issue - men were necessary, and that meant some kind of arrangement. Of course she could opt for single motherhood - picking a genetically suitable lover and having his child whether he agreed to it or not - but that option too had been compromised by her upbringing.  As overweening as her father had been and as complaisant as her mother was, it was still a proper nuclear family, an ideal at the time. 

So Belinda took the middle road and got married to a decent, passably attractive, promising father and acceptable housemate; but it wasn't long after marriage that she resorted to her old ways; but within the confines of marriage her diffidence and judgmentalism became a pound-of-flesh affair. The nitpicking, and low resolution but continuous hectoring began. 

Belinda, however, never counted on this man's reaction.  She erred in her judgment and picked one with more gumption and male prerogative than she thought; and in short time he was in bed with any number of willing, desirous women. 

Now what? she wondered.  This was not in the program, outside the design.  Men were supposed to heel, not jump and run.  

Her first instinct - again thanks to her mother - was to let it ride.  This disruption was only the result of an imbalance,  a temporary maladjustment of ying and yang.  He would come back like all men, and the marriage would return to normal. 

Her second instinct was of course to take him to task, confront him, give him his orders and rechain him to the doghouse.  

When he did return - that is, ceased his tomcatting and resumed normal, expected husbandly duties - she didn't confront him but upped the vixenish pressure, and made life miserable for him, sending an unmistakable signal which only forced him to leave once again.

One might be tempted to feel sorry for Belinda, caught as she was between the Scylla of background and traditional upbringing and the Charybdis of feminism; and overlook the pound-of-flesh syndrome unfortunately common among women in similar circumstances; but generosity is hard to come by.  This nasty transitionary period has simply widened the sexual divide.  Men, emerging from the penumbra of feminism and progressive cant have become more assertive.  Marriage is a porous affair, a permeable arrangement.  Mistresses, lovers, and paramours - always men's privilege - are back, exposed, and out in the open. 

Hard as it might be, women will have to put up or shut up - a harsh, and previously unconscionable idea, but the new algorithm. 

Belinda stuck with it.  Divorce was so tiresome.  Gradually she became like Vita Sackville-West wife of Harold Nicholson in the famous open marriage of the early Twentieth Century.  The hectoring, whingeing, nitpicking, and badgering stopped.  She had fewer lovers than her husband - again a reversion to her early life - but it wasn't quantity that mattered.  It was the paradigm - and no one was happier than her husband who had it all - beautiful young lovers and a wife and children to come home to.