Sexual Entitlement - Reparations, Retribution, And A Pound Of Flesh, A Woman's Right

Alicia Mill married at a time when everyone did. There were the outliers, the math whizzes who took jobs at IBM, the few who thanks to family connections went on to Wall Street, the odd lesbians, and the simply unmarriageable - those at the end of the bell curve who as desperately as they might want a Yale marriage, were left alone. There's someone for everyone, goes the old adsge, but some women are simply beyond the pale. 

Not so Alicia who was attractive, intelligent, and with all the social graces a Boston Brahmin background could afford.  She was la creme de la creme of New England society, sure to marry well to someone of her class, live a prosperous and generously endowed life in New York, Palm Springs, and St. Bart's. 

Which she did, to Barrington Pierce Alling, direct descendent of President Franklin Pierce, heir to the Barrington family of Northumberland and first colonial settlers of northern New England, and relative of Fielding Alling, financier, confident of J.P. Morgan, and one of New York's first families. An arranged marriage could not have matched a more perfect couple. 

Yet for every perfect algorithm, there are dropped stitches, imperfections, and flaws overlooked in the suspension of disbelief.  

Alicia was perfect as far as checking the boxes of perfection were concerned, but she had some nasty, overlooked, but seminal traits that were so inbred and familial that they were overlooked, cloaked as they were with the mantel of breeding, education and social ease. 

These 'imperfections' were nothing serious - no horrendous reserves of anger, hostility and frustration - and were only what was taken for granted in women.  A kind of Don't Tread On Me uber-feminism bred of privilege, the suffrage of great aunts, and naturally occurring defiant pride. 

Alicia's forbears had had to put up with patriarchy, male privilege, Victorian mores, and second-class citizenship, and the canniness, calculated chicanery, and downright castrating ambitions of women in her family were to be expected. 

Of course no prospective mate in a love culture bothers with deep inquiry, and is happy to be romantically taken with a beautiful, charming, complaisant lover.  In Third World countries like India and Turkey where arranged marriages are still common, delving into these matters is de rigeur. No woman or man wants to be surprised. 

Caste, skin tone, and breeding may be important and decent markers for compatibility, but the real meat and potatoes of a marriage lies within. 

America being a love marriage culture, this inner world of psycho-social dynamics is overlooked. 

And so it was that Alicia, more endowed with the family traits of a certain stubborn righteousness, turned on her clueless husband soon after their wedding, a fabulous affair, one of many days, held on the lawns of Barrington Alling's family estate overlooking Long Island Sound. A wedding reported in the New York Times and even in the Wall Street Journal usually not given to social reportage. 

Alicia was a 'tweener' a woman caught between prim Victorian rectitude, pre-Sixties pride, and the first loud, insistent demands of feminism.  She was a product of all three when she signed the marriage contract, had nothing but love in her heart when she did, but proceeded to exact her due from day one. 

Living with a man was something new, untried, and unexpected.  True, she was the daughter of a marital union, but her mother and father, both independently wealthy, went about their own business, sat at the opposite ends of the formally-set dining room table, and retired to separate bedrooms.  Tooth-by-jowl arrangements had never been discussed; and yet there she was, seeking some cold comfort under the duvet with a a snoring, restless man. 

'Can't you do something about the snoring, darling?' she said one morning not long after the honeymoon.

The dutiful husband tried nasal separators, sleeping posture aligners, a variety of over-the-counter and organic alternative remedies, but no dice.  Not only did his snoring continue, but increased in volume and depth as the weeks wore on. 

'I love you, sweetheart, and I am always there for you and will come when you ask...' but she decamped in the spare room which she made her own - dolls from her childhood, balms, creams, and lotions, an Edwardian full-length mirror, and peace and quiet. 

As far as the promised visitations, they became few and far between. Sex wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and there was plenty to be had in other quarters if she so desired. 

After that - the tethers that bind having been loosened and the emergence of her own private life encouraged - it was a quick step to de-masculinizing the rest of her marital life.  

He - dear Barrington - was either to be home on time for dinner or to give a good accounting of his whereabouts.  Toilet seats were to be permanently and irreversibly down.  Hairs in the sink - an affair for the upstairs maid - couldn't be overlooked in the interregnum, and she called her husband to task at each and every errancy. 

Nor was it long before Alicia took a lover - a surprising liaison given her pedigree since Arnold Bates was not of her kind.  Not quite the Connie Chatterley-Mellors epiphanic union, but satisfying in ways that poor Barrington would never understand.  

Rutting was what it was all about, and more delighted she could not be until Arnold and turned out to be not unlike every other man she had come across. Except for a rather wolf-like sexual attention, he was her uxorious husband with a big, overly-responsive dick. 

Barrington, as considerate and sensitized as he was to female needs, had soon had enough of his wife's hectoring, noodging, and incessant harping.  He settled for Amanda from Accounting for his first extra-marital affair, but quickly moved upscale until he was in Turkish pasha territory, an idyll and promised land from which he did not want to return. 

'Where have you been?', Alicia asked  having been up half the night waiting for his key in the lock. 'Working at the office' no longer held water, and the two had it out at two in the morning, both contrite and promising to mend their ways. 

But before long of course, Alicia, as much as she hated herself for such bourgeois inanities, was after her husband for pee on the floor, pots left on the stove, leaves caught in the downspouts, and shirts on her side of the closet. 

She simply could not help herself. No matter how she tried, the umbrage remained. The toilet seats, the hairs in the sinks, the leaves in the drain, the diffidence, the excuses, the indifference were not just incidental, bothersome, usual interruptions of marital accord, but symbolic of a growing disregard for her feelings, her being, and her self. 

She upped the ante and found surprising ways to take her husband to task, to bring him around, to tame and domesticate him. 

She was owed that much at least. She had not signed on for such penance. 

It got worse.  While never descending to the bathos of George and Martha in Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf where the characters 'flay each other to the marrow', it was pretty bad.  Marriage was bound to have its ups and downs, but never this - this complete regard for female integrity, the essential value of woman. 

It got even more worse.  The Michael Douglass film, The War of the Roses, was only a milder version of the affair between the Allings.  No physical violence, no broken furniture, no racks and bastinadoes, just pounds of flesh taken in very small pieces, Mao's 'death by a thousand cuts'. 

'This is my right', said Alicia as she enjoined her husband in this war of wills. I am fighting patriarchy, male privilege, and machismo.  I am the castrating goddess Kali.  I am the Destroyer, the Enabler - or words to that effect as she planned her next assault. 

In modern, less mythological terms, she was simply bringing the fight to the enemy in a campaign of reparation and retribution.

She failed of course.  Barrington simply gave notice and left, and Alicia was left with the empty house, the mortgage, and a mess to clean up. 

Be careful what you wish for is the old Chinese proverb, but Alicia standing amidst the detritus couldn't even remember first principles - why she had bothered to get married in the first place. 

But what's done is done.  Barrington is living in Tampa Bay with his young wife, and she, Alicia, is making do.