The Harder A Wife Works, The Cuter She Looks - You've Come A Long Way, Baby...Or Have You?

The plays Ibsen and Strindberg set in late Nineteenth Century Scandinavia, are the tales of strong women who break free of the patriarchal tethers that bind.  Hedda Gabler, Rebekka West, Nora, Hilde Wangel, and Laura are all women who have suffered enough.  Each of them in their own way defy their husbands, manipulate men for their own ends, and represent the first outcries of feminism. 

 
Miss Julie of Strindberg's play of the same name begins in the same way.  She makes Jean, her valet, jump through hoops and behave like a trained dog.  Raised as a proto-feminist by a misandrous mother, Julie takes every hateful word to heart and treats Jean like an  animal 

The rub of it all is that she is sexually attracted to him.  Although he is a servant, there is something virile and exciting about him.  Like Lady Chatterley and her gamekeeper lover Mellors, Julie wants caricature - sexually confident males. 

Of course such attraction is not caricature at all, for women who despite feminism, the glass ceiling, boardrooms, and independent income seem to fall for the same, familiar, men.  The caricature comes from little girls who, despite the discouragement of their evolved mothers, insist on wearing princess outfits.  They read about Rapunzel, the beautiful princess locked in the tower, who lets down her hair so that her Prince Charming can climb up and ravish her. Even before they know what love, sex, and romance is all about, they begin the search.  That is the irony, the caricature, and the truth. 

These little princesses are not from the Fifties, a Petrarchan era of love and romance where women wait for men's advances, hoping for a handsome, wealthy, attentive, and supportive partner.  They are from today, and from the age of two are dressed in tutus and ribbons. They will be taught that women are now the equal of men in all things, and that their ideas of romance, being swept off their feet, falling deeply and romantically in love are outdated.  There are no Prince Charmings, just legitimate partners. 

This indoctrination never works, for once out of class these girls fall for bad boys - the very pursuers, sexually forward, confident, predatory males, the ones whose desire for them is evident.  For all the instruction about men who are sensitive to a woman's feelings and can love her for who she is, these young women want defiant, absolute, sexual confidence - not a toady.   

The 'sensitive New Age guy', parodied in the early days of women's rights as being some foppish hairdresser who likes women, but only as reflections in the shop mirror was never appealing.  For all women's claims to want a man with a distinctly feminine side, they wanted nothing of the sort.  Evolution had dismissed the sensitive, dutiful, uxorious male and favored his exact opposite - the male who took women, impregnated them, and went off to hunt. 

Comedian Bill Maher summed it all up:

The inversion of nature that we have experienced as a culture, and the subversive aspect of flipping traditional roles, with its subsequent destruction of society, serves as a signal that we live in a dying system.  It has led to a pussified, sissy, pathetic, lovey-dovey/touchy-feely country of wimps, who put emotion over logic, feeling over reason, in our nurture-heavy/nature-deprived, culture

Maher was really taking aim at ‘progressive’ men – the feminist wannabes  who attend women’s conferences, have made their careers in promoting female agendas, and who find feminism consistent with other liberal beliefs.  Concern about the environment has a feminine cast to it.  After all men like to chop things down, build things, and expand.  Who thinks that Manifest Destiny was Martha Jefferson’s idea? Or that knitting wives were behind the Civil War?  The Pentagon is no different from Wall Street.  Although there may be many women in the armed forces, the top brass are men who kill for a living.

Marfa Potter considered herself a 'second stage' feminist. She thanked her mother and her associates for breaking through the glass ceiling, rejected Victorianism, patriarchy, and unequal rights; but her world was different.  Women could do anything men could do, and in most cases better.  Her challenge was negotiating a world where men were still needed.  'The rooster's contribution'. 

'Now you have fulfilled your function as an unfortunately necessary father and breadwinner, you are not needed any longer and you must go', Laura tells the Captain, her husband in Strindberg's The Father; and this is the challenge today. 

Some lesbian women have decided to end-run men and get the rooster's contribution from a sperm bank. One of the two women will be the mother of the randomly selected child, the other will be the father surrogate.

Lesbian couples are awaiting the genetic recombination which will do away with men's DNA altogether and replace it with an enhanced variation of women's, enabling a lesbian couple to have their own child without any male interference but until that time Donor 352 will have to do. 

Straight women don't have it so easy.  They need men but are behind the eight ball.  Their still Paleolithic sexuality wants bad boys, but their still Petrarchan sentimentality wants princes. Second stage feminism has created in Bill Maher's words, 'a nation of sissies' and virile, forwardly confident men are in retreat.  Last but not least women have been told to dress as provocatively as possible - lewd desire is men's problem not theirs - but cannot reap the benefits from overt sexual allure. 

So Marfa was on the lookout, but for what?  Without thinking she was attracted to the men who defied all woke censure and who paid attention to them as sexual objects; but when thinking she was trolling for 'a New Age sensitive guy'.  

However, she was put off by these deferent, cowed hesitating men - the 'may I, could I, would it be all right if I...' ones who had been safely corralled and penned in; and drawn by men who clearly found her attractive and told her so. 

She dressed in décolleté, high heels, and sashayed like a trollop, but it was all dry humping.  Men were not supposed to pay attention. 

What was a modern woman to do? 

A Hollywood ending would be nice - a strong, chisel-jawed, confident man of means who loves her both for her body and her mind, who will carry her off but give her free rein, who will provide but will respect her provision - but Hollywood is Hollywood after all, and we must settle for far less. 

Caught in this terrible bind, Marfa went through many affairs and two marriages, stayed unmarried after the second.  Sex, men, romance, and adventure were overrated, and she had all she needed in her condo overlooking Tampa Bay. 

As it happened, her next door neighbor was a lesbian couple with a nine-year old boy who apparently was an uncontrollable terror - the very spitting image of the unbridled male energy the two women were totally unprepared for.  They screened the rooster's contribution for as many genetic anomalies as the technology allowed and read the anonymous donor biography, but nothing prepared them for this rampant, uncontrolled, male energy.  They should have opted for a girl. 

The boy ran up and down the halls, knocking over planters, writing obscenities on the wall with indelible markers, screaming bloody murder and howling at all hours of the morning.

'No man to whack the daylights out of him', thought Marfa, childless but her balance sheet was what it was. She gave it all a good go, came up with positives and negatives, and was not unhappy drinking a sundowner overlooking the water.