Why Love Demands A Second Opinion - The Tethers That Bind The Modern, Liberated Woman

Betsy Bennett was at the top of her game, Senior Vice President of a well-known Washington international consulting group, first woman elected to the board of the Cosmos Club, Washington's most prestigious social club and previously a men-only enclave, touted as The New Woman on the cover of Forbes magazine, and not far from the pinnacle of success.  What that success was, Betsy was not sure, but she was confident that the clouds would part and the future would be made clear. 

She was still unmarried, although she had had her share of lovers, all of whom had left before she had had her fill. There was something simply too forward about the woman, too demanding, and too insatiably hungry for them to tolerate for too long. 

Even Roland, aide to the House Ways and Means Chairman, Lothario, and Washington's boulevardier, could put up with only so much of Betsy's offerings.  Yes, at first her clawing, hungry sexual appetites fueled his, but after a week of this, charged and recharged in antiseptic parlors of Washington, he wanted no more.  He felt used, handled, bought and sold by a woman who was motivated by nothing but a willful desire for 'expression'. 

'Let her find it elsewhere', said Roland for whom the complaisant, nubile, and impossibly willing young blonde women who had come to town on the Trump juggernaut were more than enough. 

Meanwhile Betsy kept camping out, roughing it in the wild with willing young men who at first thought she was a prize but soon, wilted by her excesses, and finding nothing post-coitum even marginally companionable, left. 

Betsy was at sexual sixes and sevens after Roland's abrupt departure.  She thought she had one, an equal, a Lawrentian epiphanic partner, if not a soulmate; and was bemused and troubled by his leaving.  Hadn't she given him every possible sexual delight?  Pleased him more than an Arab princess in the Arabian nights or the consort to the Sultan Suleiman the Great?

'Still working it out?', Abraham Katz, her psychiatrist asked at their next session, referring to the age-old, classic female conundrum of reverse Oedipus love.  Betsy had adored her father, wanted to be with him forever, loved by him, by his side; but was caught up in the fang-and-claw feminism of the day and had to dismiss father-worship as a pathetic throwback to the woman of yesteryear. 

'Not really', Betsy replied, pulling a tissue from the silver box placed  on the console next to the psychiatrist's couch for his best, most troubled patients.  

'Go ahead, have a good cry', said Dr. Katz, looking at his watch.  He had had quite enough of these coddled, privileged women who wanted sex and their fathers, and left men hanging on the possibility of more.  

He corrected himself, restored his professional propriety, and tried to listen patiently to Betsy's increasing despondency. 

There was no hope for these women, he knew, brought up in privilege, educated to be the best they could be, challenged to outdo men in every way, but tethered to an old arriere garde, persistently Victorian way of marriage, fidelity, and social eminence. 

 

He yawned and asked again how Betsy was doing; but by this time she was at loose ends, unraveled by conflict and compromise.  Here she was at the top of her game but still looking for Mr. Right?  How ridiculous, how demeaning, how discouraging.

There it was. After board meetings to decide hundreds of millions, after internal shuffles to increase productivity, and after Wall Street meetings to decide her future, here she was still looking for some romantic novel fantasy, her Prince Charming, the glorious young man who would joust and defeat all suitors, and take her to bed his prize and her marvel. 

She couldn't even bed Arnold from HR a lithesome, desirable young man from Ohio when her male colleagues daily reaped the harvest young women come to Washington for opportunity, fortune and love.  She was a tethered, cosseted, moored woman in a sea of undesirable mates. 

She was heir to a misogynist culture - the men around her wanted only sexual pleasure and ignored women's essence, and her innate, ineradicable worth - but now in her early forties she found herself willing to settle for less.  Apostasy, travesty, treachery, and a traitorous abandon of feminism as it was, she wanted to be loved. 

She read Victorian romances, dreamt of being taken away by a knight on a white charger, let herself be swept by an impossibly seductive vision of castles, handmaidens, and the love of her life. 

Imagine! Betsy Bennett in the romantic thrall of treacly Victorian novels? A strong, defiant, indomitable woman at the feet of a handsome suitor? God forbid, and yet in her heart of hearts and in the middle of the night, yes, that was what she wanted. 

Was this the final judgement?  Were women destined to be the playthings of man? Was there no finality to feminism? 

'Calm yourself', said Dr. Katz to a particularly agitated Betsy Bennett. He had seen this before and had counselled and cured many women who had come to him.  The answer was not to fight socio-biological destiny, but to accept it. 

Betsy had taken out her sexual frustration on her minions who railed at the thought of a one-on-one with 'The Harridan of K Street', but thanks to Dr. Katz she had come to a compromise  She needn't take out her sexual frustrations on her inferiors - they had enough on their minds - but try to live with contradictions and, if possible, give way to her femininity. 

Katz had been dunned within the profession for his Freudian sexual premises, but he was on solid ground,  Millennia of history had shown the way.

Betsy spent many nights tossing and turning.  Sexuality, especially in these halcyon days of gender recovery, was not an idle pursuit; nor was it the simple heterosexual algorithm it had been in her youth.  it mattered.  If she was still a daddy's girl, umbilically linked to an outdated, discredited sexual identity, then how could she hold her head up in feminist councils? How could she even pretend to be a liberated modern woman?

 

Nature-Nurture the old perennial conundrum - what was more important to your being, your life, your future? Were girls ineluctably tied sexually tied to their fathers? Or would mother-love right the balance?

A moot point Betsy concluded, what's done is done, what is to be will be; and however much she was sexually determined by Daddy, she had foundered, stumbled, but found her way to her own sexual identity. 

Be that as it may, and sexual epiphanies being the apertures to maturity as they also may be, one was stuck with the cards one was dealt; and for better or worse Betsy was a calculating, succubus for whom men were only targets on a proving ground.

She sought  second opinion - a young man of strong progressive instincts who was reported to blend Freudian origins with New Age dynamics who was able to look women in the face, listen to their psycho-social conflicts, delve into Freudian antecedents, but come out with an accommodating, practical solution.

In Betsy's case it was Dr. Cassius Barnum with whom she fell in love - a no-no in Freudian analysis, but encouraged in today's psychiatry.  Cass Barnum was a purveyor of good counselling, intimacy, friendship, ketamine, and professional fellowship; - and above all he was a canny, sharp entrepreneur who saw a bonanza in this demographic bubble of unhappy women. 

At first Betsy was wary of visiting him in his one-room office off Dupont Circle, but eventually gave in to the blandishments of well-meaning friends.  Dr. Barnum was a dreamboat, and he changed her life. 

They went on trips to Barbuda together, then St. Bart's, and finally Aruba where they decided that ying and yang belonged together, after which Betsy was no longer the boardroom matriarch of, Fletcher & Co., and New Age wanderer on Haight Street, no longer the nexus of hippiedom, but still counterculture enough for her to put down post-capitalist roots.

 

The doctor soon left her - her injured histrionics were fine and dandy on his couch but not in his bedroom; and with a wave over a carafe of Sonoma rose overlooking the Bay, he was gone. 

Once a cunt, always a cunt, goes to the English cockney adage, and after years of reform, rehabilitation, and social resetting Betsy had not changed an iota.  She might have some intimations into her distant past but she was still the partnerless, childless, spinster she had always been destined to be. 

A sad tale?  Far from it.  Betsy swallowed the bitter pill, kept intact, and was known as the Harridan of Stony Hill, her retirement home.