Choosing A Man–A Crap Shoot, So What’s A Woman To Do?

Elizabeth Todd had had many lovers by the time she was thirty and began to think of settling down.  It wasn’t so much the idea of clipped wings that bothered her, but the seemingly likelihood of choosing the wrong partner.  Women were too complex for any man.  We want love, consideration, and respect, she said.   We have had enough of sexual deprivation and submission and slavish obedience to men; but we also want their strength, determination, and sexual confidence.

Most men, she thought, can’t deal with these essential feminine contradictions.  They are flummoxed by women who need to dominate and be dominated; who need hours of foreplay one day and who want to be taken the next; by women who want to rule the roost but who also like to cluck with the chickens in the barnyard.

Men understand pregnancy and childbirth in only limited ways.  Few men appreciate that childbearing is the fundamental difference between men and women, the great divide between those who do and those who do not have them, and the biological imperative that determines when and with whom a woman mates.

Men are diffident if not indifferent about having children when women are defined by the act.  Men expect change after a child is born, but never see the new and very disruptive mother-child dynamics that are to come. Men may support women’s sexual freedom and economic and social advancement; but cannot possibly appreciate how difficult it is for them to forget Daddy, generations of patriarchy, and emotional conflicts about work and home.

Choosing a man, thought Elizabeth, was a crap shoot, a shot in the dark, the blind leading the blind.  How to calibrate a man’s desire and measure his sincerity? How to rate his intelligence against his emotional sensitivity? His will versus his ability to compromise?

Given men’s simplicity and lack of nuance, what was the algorithm for judging marital potential?  As far as she knew, there was none; which was why she was hesitant at best to pick and choose.  Given a woman’s many needs, complex biological and emotional mechanisms, historical baggage, and often befuddling sexuality; and men’s seeming inability to get past the sexual act, it seemed better to go it alone.

The women in Elizabeth’s office were either ‘in a relationship’ and unhappy or uneasy about it or desperately searching for a man.   Online dating, speed-dating or old fashioned smiles and comments over Vermeer at the National Gallery never seemed to work.  Men were always on the prowl and were interested in a woman’s worth only after bed and then only maybe.  Many men had polished the art of seduction and knew enough stereotypical information about women to make a good impression, so particularly hungry women were easy prey and after a few weeks left a bad relationship, licked their wounds, and laid low.

So what was a woman to do? There was Tricia Barker, the staff attorney, who had become an old maid before she knew it.   Resentful, unhappy, and scrambling to put some kind of order in her life before it was too late and before she ended up alone and desperate, Tricia was a woman of tics, twitches, and a barking laugh who foundered as one adopted family after another became impatient with her need.

Jeannine Martin spent all her time with her niece and her young children.  She was a loving, solicitous Auntie who never realized how many times she stepped over the line, assumed her niece’s children were also hers, and alienated her niece’s husband who finally demanded that she back off and leave them alone.

Betsy Longworth tried one blind online date after another, misreading, misjudging, and badly assessing the profiles and propositions made by prospective dates.  She was groped in her hot tub so many times, spent so many wasted hours with men with bad teeth, receding hairlines, and  lounge chair paunches, and went to so many middle-age mixers, community walks on the Canal, and volunteer work in Anacostia with little to show for it, that she finally gave up and gave in.

Women were marrying their fathers, spiting their mothers, mimicking their sisters, operating on flawed assumptions about masculine value, and throwing down the gauntlet in battles of sexual will, so it was no wonder that they settled for the dregs or just plain gave up.

Even the best-seeming marriages fell apart; and although this was not at all surprising given the near impossibility of choosing a mate who responded to even a fraction of a woman’s needs, it was discouraging.  The whole world was based on coupling, marriage, children, and family.  The single woman was the outlier.  Men who remained single were easily forgiven.  Bachelorhood was a term that could be extended far into a man’s fifties or even early sixties if he cut a good figure; but an unmarried woman was always suspect – a dry, desiccated, supernumerary; and we all would be better off without them.

If a woman was still single after a certain age, she was unceremoniously pushed aside.  There had to be something wrong with her.  Despite the disillusionment that women feel in their marriages, most make a deal with themselves.

Hedda Gabler, the heroine of Henrik Ibsen’s play of the same name understood that the expression of individual will was the only validation of life.  She married for the usual social and economic reasons, and knew that she was not getting a man but a disposable, temporarily useful item.  Her real interest was the writer and intellectual Lovborg – a weak but talented genius she wanted to mold in her image.  When he failed shamefully and disgracefully, she urged his suicide as the only act which would atone for his weakness and shame.   When that failed, she killed herself – better dead than humiliated, subservient, and useless.

Many women have at least some Hedda Gabler in them, and Elizabeth Todd had more than most.  If she could find a man who was attractive, intelligent, and complaisant – i.e. who loved her far more than she loved him – she could be the dominant partner in the relationship and have her cake and eat it too.  It was only a matter of sexual politics, she reasoned, no different from the power politics of the marketplace, the bar, Wall Street, or Washington.  Partnerships between companies or political parties like between men and women had nothing to do with mutual attraction or even respect, but a calculation of risk and reward.  The right takeover or political sleeping arrangement was to everyone’s benefit.

Albert Tillich should have known better.  Elizabeth hid nothing and if her character was intimidating, her personality was honest.  He fell for her beauty, her brains, her  humor, and sexual mastery.  He, Elizabeth thought, was an ideal mate – good family, good genes, accommodating, and willingly under her sexual spell.   With a little care, she could have whatever she wanted.  She knew that Albert would follow her to the ends of the earth.

Only the idealistic or myopic believe that marriage is an equal partnership.  It is always a matter of parity, contractual obligations rules and regulations, risk and reward, negotiation and intimidation.  Why should that be a surprise? Marx was right, if only in one thing, when he said that man is an economic animal.  In other words all human behavior can and should be viewed and assessed through the lens of economics.   The personal dynamics that one associates with marriage – dominance, submission, fidelity, honesty, wealth, influence, etc. – are equally in play in the marketplace.

Elizabeth Todd understood this; and knew like any good investment banker that there are no perfect contracts, only advantageous ones.   Since love was a Petrarchan illusion; since human behavior operated according to universal economic laws, then she was quite right to choose dispassionately and objectively.

Indians had the right idea – arranged marriages based on caste, wealth, economic potential, status, and family recognition.  For millennia Hindus understood marriage as part of the Householder Phase, one of the four on the path to spiritual enlightenment.  One was obliged to perform one’s mundane, practical, and biologically necessary functions; but only within the context of a more important goal.   Given this functional if not mechanistic understanding of marriage, then love played no part.

Yet Elizabeth also knew that that such constructed marriages were only partly possible in America today.  There were no standards, no obvious boxes to check, no easy markers.   One would have to rely more on wits, savvy, and native intelligence to suss out potential partners.  Even more difficult was the job of judging a partner’s will and character.  She, in other words, would have to arrange her marriage based on her own unique criteria.

Her marriage to Albert turned out to be a good one.  She took charge and led the way; but Albert was more than happy to let her do so.  She was sexually dominant, but to him that was as excited as the obverse.  He willingly followed her lead because he had no particular social, professional, or economic ambition.  His brains, simple charm, and character would always be enough; and for the rest, he championed his wife’s causes.

Theirs was a complex contractual arrangement, one with clauses and codicils, not without openings and penalties, emotionally satisfying when the scales were in balance, and imperfect but tolerable when not. An ordinary marriage.  Not run of the mill because of its unique Marxian premise, but passable and admirable because of its longevity. 

Bitchy Transition–Who Said The Gender Revolution Would Be A Piece Of Cake?

Lorena Bobbin had come out many years before her gender reassignment.  She – or rather he, a football player named Larry, had realized that he was gay when, sitting by the pool at his parents’ Larchmont house, noticed Dr. Hendricks’ erection, and rather than turn away, he couldn’t take his eyes off it.  It was clearly meant for him.  Hendricks was a dentist who, bucking the implant trend, specialized in dentures, the kind that didn’t slip. His specially-made, state-of-the-art teeth were the talk of the retirement homes for miles around..  The broad smiles of his patients dispelled any old-fashioned images of moldy sets of teeth steeping in an overnight jelly jar; and there were enough of them to make him a moderately wealthy man.

All that flashed through the mind of Larry Bobbin as he and Dr. Hendricks lounged by the pool sipping his father’s famous pina coladas.  What did he care about teeth and dentures, when the man clearly wanted him?  In an instant all pretense of prom dates, corsages, and necking in the back seat of his family’s Oldsmobile disappeared.  Erection matched erection and the affair was arranged. 

Larry came out not long after his fling with Dr. Hendricks.  It was about time that he danced with wolves, and he moved to Cedar Rapids which, surprisingly for a conservative Midwestern town, had a hot gay scene.  He was in his element and the belle of the ball – which, not coincidentally started him thinking about gender transformation.  It was not enough to be belle of a gay ball, he thought.  Why not be the belle, the sexy, sinuous, irresistible woman that he knew he could be?  

In today’s happy-go-lucky, come what may climate of sexual ease and tolerance, there would be no sneaking around.  And so he began transition therapy and scheduled himself for the final cut in June.

However, he kept that part of it quiet.  Both men and women were a bit squeamish about the final solution; but not Laurence, now Lorena, who welcomed the knife.  He never asked to be a man after all. Larry had taken to it all very, very well; and because of his original fine features, lustrous eyes, and very pretty demeanor he became an enviable woman.  He had been photoshopped as it were – his best features accentuated and his few bad ones airbrushed so that he in his new incarnation was a femme fatale, runway model, and gorgeous Hollywood starlet all in one go. 

Which, not surprisingly, made him the object of catty bitchiness in every trans woman he met.  Gender reassignment meant getting the whole package.  There were spontaneous tears, feelings of insecurity, and hard-bitten, inconsolable feelings of envy.  Larry had become a woman in all her frailty, submissiveness, and jealousies like every other trans woman on the block.

And so she entered, kicking and screaming, into the new world of transgender jealousy.  Top dog was one thing for men – he had been a social climber, a super-achiever, and a step-over-dead bodies executive – but little did he know that a woman’s world was far more bloody and unforgiving.  

As a man, he simply fought dirty.  There were winners who simply took victory for granted and losers who lost and moved on.  Not so for women.  Since there were no pools of blood in women’s combat, only flesh wounds and scratches, the real damage done was internal. Women belittled, humiliated, demeaned, and dismissed.   Their attacks were never out in the open.  A pound of flesh, death by a thousand cuts was their modus operandi. 

Imagine the carnage at the White House when the President began his search for transgender aides.  It was not enough to hire gay men and women, nor even to expand the gene pool to people of color.  Only transgenders would do. 

As a nod to his progressive aides, he agreed to interview all applicants, usually the job of the Chief of Staff or at best the Director of Diversity.  But truth be told the President had a prurient interest in the task.  “What could they be like?”, he wondered.  “Like my Aunt Millie or my Uncle Bob?”  Neither as it turned out for the likes of Lorena, LaShonda, Belle, Hyperia, and Blaze did everything in their power to disparage, spread rumors, and suggest improprieties about each other.  The dossiers of the Chief of Staff were little more than rap sheets – allegations of every wrong doing from slander to shoplifting.  “Not a real woman”, was one entry about Lorena.  

The senior aide asked the President if he could demur, or at least use another form of vetting.  Was it all really worth the bitching he had to put up with?

“Yes”, said the President.  “We must select the best and the brightest”; but nothing of that caliber every came through the doors.  

Lorena got the job because she was a hot ticket, pure and simple.  What would have been gross misconduct, misogyny, and patriarchal abuse if a straight man had used such criteria when hiring a straight woman, was perfectly acceptable when vetting transgender women.  In fact, the degree to which they looked and acted like women was exactly the criterion for selection.  The transition had been perfectly arranged.

So Lorena Bobbin became an aide to the White House Director of Diversity and Inclusivity.  Her only job was to come out on stage and stand behind the President whenever he addressed the public or the press.  A token woman/man in the picture window, the storefront glass, the Bank window. 

The bitchiness and catty innuendoes stopped once Lorena was selected.  Her competitors were now her suitors, sucking up for consideration and appointment.  

The moral of the story? None in particular.  Women behaving like women, God bless ‘em, and what would we do without them?

Diversity And Dumbing Down–Lowest Common Denominator Education In America

Sylvia Patten always knew that she was the smartest girl in the class and way beyond the limited reach of the gnarly boys in Mrs. Linder’s third grade.  “They’re stupid”, she said to no one in particular after she had to wait what seemed like days before Christmas until Johnny Looper got the correct answer.  Coaxed, encouraged, and persuaded, little Johnny still couldn’t get it, and yet there he was holding up traffic while Sylvia drew stars and rainbows on her composition paper. 

“You can do it, Johnny”, said Mrs. Linder who knew she was treading a fine line between self-esteem and arithmetic.  The longer Johnny wandered about in the weeds, perplexed about the value of things and wading in a current far too strong for his very limited brain, the more damage would be done to his self-esteem; yet this boy who would never get beyond one-plus-one had to be given a chance to measure up. When to give him the hook was the question.

Johnny flubbered on, trying one plausible answer after the other until she stepped in.  “The answer is seven”, said Mrs. Linder kindly. 

“Oh, my God”, sighed Sylvia.  “What a dummy”.  Now, she had been told by her mother and warned by her teachers never to call anyone dumb.  “No one is dumb”, explained the principal, to whom ‘a very uppity, socially inept third-grader’, Sylvia Patten was called in for special attention.  “Each student has special abilities, special talents, and a unique intelligence.  Johnny Looper, for example….” Here the principal stopped, for he couldn’t think of anything that Johnny was good at.  

He was a a dunce at arithmetic, a hopeless cipher at reading, a duffer on the playground, a sloppy dresser, and totally charmless. “Johnny can sing beautifully”, he ventured, but Sylvia knew how he had been given a solo part just because he couldn’t do anything else right and would be applauded for his pluck. He remembered only the first line of the song, bobbled the next, and  gave up before the third while Miss Prentice the music teacher quickly pounded out a melody on the piano until he sat down.

Cooperative learning was an essential part of learning at Bryce Elementary, and the school administration, municipal school board, and the teachers’ union were all proud of it.  Cooperative learning was an educational method by which the less able children were helped by the more able. Peer education would kill two birds with one stone – it would make learning a friendly, social education for all students; and learning without the punitive atmosphere of the traditional classroom would accelerate knowledge.

Of course nothing could have been farther from the truth.  The smart kids berated, dismissed, and blew off the dumb ones in their charge. Neither group learned anything. The smart ones languished in the bottom of the gene pool, and the dumb ones were too dumb to learn anything.  Yet, it was the principle of the thing that counted.  The means were more important than the ends, and there was nothing wrong with the system that a little tweaking wouldn’t fix.  Learning the three R’s was secondary to learning life’s lessons of compassion, generosity, and patience.

Bryce Elementary, with guidance from progressive educators, did away with scaled classes.  No more reading or math groups to which students of varying abilities were assigned.  Such a system was inherently prejudicial and racist, and all students should be classed together.  No more manors or slave quarters; no upstairs, downstairs; no big house and tarpaper shacks.  Everyone is as equal as slices of a pizza pie, said the principal, approving the new reform.

Which meant that Sylvia had to put in overtime with cooperative learning.  The bell curve – smart, dumb, and most in the middle - had been skewed in her neighborhood thanks to affirmative action.  ‘Out-of-bounds’ children, slow learners all, far outnumbered the best and the brightest.

The educational program at Bryce Elementary would have been bad enough, affirmative action and cooperative learning being what they are, but the progressive powers that be didn’t stop there. Elementary school was none too soon to begin courses in gender education, curricula designed to expose young children to the diversity of sexual experience.  

While these early learners knew little about sex, they were already becoming little heterosexuals – trained in today’s regressive society to reject and dismiss the other-gendered, the queer, the sexually different.  In like manner, these third-graders had already incorporated systemic racist, white supremacist views of the world.  Such infiltration of negativity, hostility, and bald racial hatred had to be nipped in the bud.

The new curriculum at Bryce was not designed to teach tolerance of the other, but to promote alternative sexual life styles and to raise the black man to his rightful place at the top of the human pyramid. Whiteness and straightness were to be confronted with extreme prejudice.  Not one scintilla of retrograde sexual or racial commentary would be permitted at Bryce and all children who graduated would be model young citizens of diversity and inclusivity.

All of which added insult to injury to Sylvia Patten who only wanted to learn.  She had a precocious sense of numbers and number theory, was already bilingual and on her way to learning her grandmother’s arcane Uzbek Turkic tongue. She could differentiate a toccata from a fugue, Art Nouveau from Art Deco, and Slovakia from Slovenia.  What on earth was she doing languishing in the backwash of Bryce Elementary?  Her parents, both of modest means, had not the resources for any of the city’s premier private schools, nor money for tutors.  For the time being at least, Sylvia would be stuck at Bryce.

Then, by a stroke of luck, a new conservative governor was elected in her state, and within the first few weeks of his inauguration he did away with all ‘damaging, destructive, demeaning, insane’ educational policies.  No more gender-bending, LGBTQ+ advocacy, no black racial superiority, and the state would go back to basics, reality, and objectivity.  

No longer would bright children have to founder on the shoals.  They would sail on four-masters, captains and officers of their ships; and so it was that the principal, all teachers and teachers aides at Bryce Elementary were let go and a new stable of conservative-minded nuts-and-bolts, hearty educators took their places.  

Taxpayer monies would no longer be spent on irrelevancies.  Students would graduate from the state’s public schools able to vote intelligently, get decent paying jobs, and have the advantage of a world-oriented education.  “Things are going to change around here”, the governor said, and so they did.