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 he went on to write, 'suggesting that not only is sexuality fungible but the nuclear family is outdated and heretofore irrelevant'.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?