Why We March

We march because we're targets if we stand.

We march because our hearts are weaponized.

We march to draw a line in Hatred's sand

That says we won't be fooled or victimized.

We march because our saints end up like Joan

Or get called sinners by old men in Texas.

We march because the bodies that we own

Are sacrosanct, no matter what our sex is.

We march in hope because despair is cheap.

We march on fire because the dark has grown.

We march in love because our hearts won't sleep.

We march together. We are not alone.

We march to shine a light, guiding and clear,

Against the fog of ignorance and fear.

Copyright 2017 Matthew J Wells

written 1/21/17 on the B61 bus to the Women's March in Washington DC

Taming Of A Shrew

You speak and they say you don’t have the right to.

   You keep your silence, and you are ignored.

If there’s no planet you’re a satellite to,

   You cannot be a player on the board.

Smile and be pretty, like an ingénue.

   Learn how to sew and never drop a stitch.

When you act independent, you’re a shrew.

   When you say what you think, you are a bitch.

No matter how much you have in the bank,

   The currency is always counterfeit.
Spend it, and they will make you walk the plank.

   Times may have changed, but men can’t change for shit:

      Speak softly and they’ll always be engaged.

      They’ll woo the wild, but only wed the caged.

 

Copyright 2016 Matthew J Wells

 

A Map Of Her Own

                    for Coley Campany

Each morning over coffee she unrolls

   The great map of her life, and fills it in,

Marking last night’s path till there are no holes

   And she can see exactly where she’s been.

Then she regards that looming blank expanse

   That doesn’t have a signpost or a street:

Her future—into which she must advance

   Blind and scared that empty means incomplete.

Her mother’s map was dead ends and lost chances

   Written by husband’s and by children’s hands.

Her pen’s her own, and with it she advances

   Into the unknown—for she understands

      When all that emptiness gets mapped behind her,

      The destination in her soul will find her.

Copyright 2016 Matthew J Wells

 

Feminism

 

 

When something in you hurts or causes pain,

   You fight it with a dose of something strong—

Take medicine until disease is slain;

   Pop pills to counteract whatever’s wrong.

And that’s what Feminism is: a cure

   To stabilize the body politic—

Fighting an ill with medicine so pure,

   The fear of taking it makes some men sick.

Like casts are burdens once you heal the break

   And wheelchairs useless once you’re on your feet,

The point of Feminism is to make

   The need for Feminism obsolete.

      It’s not about enforced diversity—

      It’s about healing inequality.

 

Copyright 2014 Matthew J Wells



Great Women

 

 

For Jenna, Alyssa, Kelly, Tara, Brooke and Kendall 

Great women are all eloquent grenades—

   The ones you study are an education.

The ones who know their minds make lousy maids.

   The ones who speak their minds take bad dictation.

Women whose wings are clipped still fly like jets;

   Those who spend all their strength are never broke.

Women who dare will never have regrets;

   Women who laugh at men all get the joke.

And when those who have pride are an affront,

   And those with self-respect are all called shrew,

Bitch, dyke, whore, man-hater and rhymes-with-punt,

   The problem is not them—the problem’s you.

      All doors men lock open with this one key:

      Well-behaved women don’t make history.

 

Copyright 2014 Matthew J Wells

 

Coming Of Age Stories

 

For boys, it’s who they are when they’re alone,

   And what their lives will make them masters of

After they’ve journeyed, battled, learned and grown.

   For girls, it’s all about the boys they love.

For boys, it’s how they handle loss and fear,

   Whether they try to help or break each other,

And the importance of a good career.

   For girls, it’s whether they’re a wife and mother.

Boys are all future winners; girls all womb.

   Boys are congratulated; girls get blamed.

Boys get the road; girls only get the room

   To choose the man by whom they will be tamed.

      There are exceptions, but the law is firm:

      A boy’s a person and a girl’s a worm.

 

 

Copyright 2014 Matthew J Wells

 

Burwell v. Hobby Lobby

If you believe that God says it’s okay

That true believers should not have to pay

For what they think God might believe is wrong,

The Supreme Court is now playing your song.

They just declared that there is no restriction

On companies whose deeply-held conviction

Holds that some healthcare is a blasphemy

When it contributes to the infamy

Of birth control, effectual or shoddy,

As it pertains to any woman’s body.

 

Though SCOTUS must quote laws and precedents,

Companies have their faith as evidence,

Saying the source of all their legal grief

Is their unsourced but deeply-held belief

That if they do X, God will hold them liable,

Even if they can’t find it in the Bible.

As long as they declare they must obey

Whatever they say that their God will say,

Their wounded conscience can remain aloof

From anything resembling valid proof.
 

So if, for instance, I should make the claim

That the Creator (hallowed be His name)

Says every time girls fill a cavity

It also puts a stop to pregnancy,

My company can legally prevent your

Repayment for a filling, crown or denture—

And like a fervent Christian Scientist

I can be a medical atheist—

And righteously equate Hell’s deepest pit

With paying out a healthcare benefit

For anything with symptoms clear or vague—

The flu, the measles, chicken pox, the plague—

And say (while trying to suppress a grin)

“That’s why God put the sin in medicine.”
 

If this decision was religion-free,

And had no God in it, what would we see?

A legally illegal double-cross

That guarantees the right of some male boss

But not the rights of those that he oppresses—

Especially if they’re all wearing dresses.

The law, it seems, will always take offence

By women who exhibit common sense—

Who of their bodies claim sole ownership,

Declare their independence hip to hip,

And vow not to surrender their self-worth

But choose by whom and when they will give birth.

These simple choices still smack of sedition

To all the father figures of tradition—

They see their fragile social icecap breaking

When ovens want to take control of baking.

And since they can’t make women shake with awe,

They’ll make their bodies subject to the law.

If there’s a chance blondes, redheads or brunettes’ll,

Get pregnant, logic emulates a pretzel

And says that what their wombs will generate

Is a compelling interest of the state

And supercedes the owner of the womb

The way a silk dress supercedes the loom.

Forgive me if I hear these arguments

And think that their original intent’s

To limit women’s voices to lip-syncing.

Forgive me too for actually thinking

Male justices will never regulate

The male propensity to propagate

As long as all the female fields they’re seeding

Are never less than ripe for legal breeding.

It may not be sexual prejudice

But even if it ain’t, I bet you this:

Those kings who rule from their judicial palace,

They sure won’t pass a law against Cialis. 

The only thing supreme about these guys

Is their blind ignorance of all that lies

Beyond the bubble of their vanity—

What normal people call reality

And they call, with their voices full of terror,

Some pompous Latin synonym for error.

Their view of life’s as lifeless as that tongue:

It sees the coal but scoffs at the black lung.

The law to them’s no spirit and all letter,

And they’re so positive that they know better.

But what they know has sweet fuck all to do

With how this world’s lived in by me and you.

Their world’s a dictum written by a hack, 

Where real life’s just a footnote in the back.

Divorced from everything but the ideal,

They judge the menu but don’t taste the meal

And wash their hands of anything they sense

Might involve real hands-on experience.

There’s something frightened in them, I suspect,

That yearns to use the law to resurrect

That mythic era of the human race

When everyone shut up and kept their place.

It’s sad and yet kinda hilarious:

There’s nothing that defines cantankerous

Like five old coots yelling from dusk to dawn

“Get off my corporate-owned men-only lawn!” 

And when these judges talk abut the state

And how its interests must preponderate

All other interests and their rights curtail,

It’s clear the state is just another male

Who always wants to have it his own way;

And while he might let critics have their say,

He’ll never let a woman have a voice,

Never mind that odd thing she calls a choice,

Because to guarantee his own survival,

He must make sure that there’s a new arrival

Of citizens-to-be in great amount.

Thus giving birth is clearly paramount

And must supplant all rights social and sole

With one consummate governmental goal.

Which leads to this gigantic lunacy

Of twisted legal logic—QED:

A woman who lets no man impregnate her

Is worse than any terrorist or traitor.

That’s why the state always find feminism

A threat to sexual capitalism:

Since new consumers are compulsatory,

The state wants women pregnant.  End of story. 

What is it about women that scares men?

Why does testosterone fear estrogen?

Do some males think females were put on earth

To give them head while waiting to give birth?

To them, if you’ve been in a nail salon,

You’re secretly the Whore of Babylon.

I bet each time they father a girl child

They wish they could expose it in the wild

Instead of sharing money, name and home

With offspring who lack God’s Y chromosome.

And maybe that’s it—the whole male God thing—

That being male not only makes you king

But gets you droit du seigneur every day

On any pretty girl you want to lay. 

We’ve circled back to pure belief again—

This time beliefs particular to men,

Like “God made mankind with this one remit:

The female is what must and should submit.”

A major premise that unlocks the door

Which holds the answer that I’m looking for:

Like preachers fear the unrepented sin,

Like macho fears all things unmasculine,

Like misers fear the loss of all their dough,

What men fear most is women who say no. 

So now they’re passing law after dumb law

(Designed to stick in every female craw)

Which never take an axe, but only whittle

The tree of liberty, little by little,

Until they find the toothpick underneath

With which they’ll pick their smug paternal teeth.

It’s sad and galling and self-evident

People like this will never be content

Till women are just walking ovaries

Who cannot  legally do what they please.

This case, and cases like it, are the start

Of their Ahabian stab at the heart

Of all that’s threat’ning to the Great White Male

So all these Moby Dickheads can prevail

Against the foe of our great polity:

The devil of female equality. 

Yes, women are the devil—and this vision

Informs the whole Hobby Lobby decision.

If I say God says X will cause abortions,

The law now goes through hoops, if not contortions,

To make sure, if I chant a holy song,

My corporate civil rights are never wrong.

Or not as wrong as any woman’s are—

Their rights are like a fishless sushi bar:

So wrong they’re nonenexistent.  So you see,

If I’m a male, then SCOTUS favors me,

And will support me, when I say my soul
Can't stand the sacrilege of birth control,
And any law that puts The Pill in play
Is one that I do not have to obey—

Thus letting me commit a perfect crime

Which can be summed up by this simple rhyme: 

My right to say “God thinks this law’s insane!”

Trumps women’s rights the way penis trumps brain.

 

Copyright 2014 Matthew J Wells

"Forget it, Oz--it's China Town."

Remember Peter Jackson’s King Kong?  Y’know--the one that threw such a huge special effects budget at a beloved classic that it made you want to go home and re-watch the original?  Welcome to Sam Raimi’s Oz The Great and Powerful, which does the exact same thing to The Wizard of Oz.  Seriously -- the novelization of this film begins with the words "You don't know about me without you have seen a 1939 movie directed by Victor Fleming."
 

So what can you say about a movie that can only stand on its own two feet by grabbing an 84-year-old crutch?

1.  If you don't like James Franco, you'll hate the movie.

2.  Even if you do like James Franco, he comments when he should commit.  So you’re probably going to be annoyed as hell whenever he opens his mouth.

3.  Speaking of which, the man’s facial hair goes back and forth between scruffy Ethan Hawke beardage to immaculately sculpted goatee, sometimes within the same scene. Hey Disney--next time you spend a couple of hundred million dollars on a special effects movie? Earmark ten grand for continuity, okay?

4.  And speaking of continuity, Franco’s character seems to have had a cardiectomy at birth, and only grew a heart because the script says he had to. 

5. Giving the good witch a father complex and making the bad witch go bad because she was jilted by a gigolo: take that, powerful women!

This was a big problem for me.  When I think of Oz, I think of spunky heroines, women who are much more powerful than men, and a huckster who’s pretty much venerated by Ozites the way Emperor Norton was venerated by San Francisco.  What I do not think of is women who are suckers for a con-man even when they have his number, or women with magic powers who are too dumb to recognize a gigolo when his every look says I AM A GIGOLO, and then go all Gossip Girl on his ass when they see the truth.  Seriously: what kind of woman says “Revenge on the whole world!” instead of “What an asshole!” when she finds out her Romeo is a roamer?

THE SCREENPLAY WRITERS: A Hollywood writer’s idea of a woman.

ME:  Oh right; silly me.

6.  Also--since the Wicked Witch of the West is the Oz version of Miss Gulch, isn’t she specific to Dorothy?  Making her the creation of the Wizard is yet another way this movie undermines its female characters by saying “She really wants a man in her life.”

7.  Thanks to the end of this movie, I now have to use a ton of mental floss to wipe away the image of Billie Burke and Frank Morgan bumping uglies.

8.  Thanks to the beginning of this movie, I now have to use a ton of mental floss to wipe away the possibility that the wizard’s sweetheart Annie is marrying John Gale because (thanks to the wizard) she’s pregnant with Judy Garland.

9.  The monkey in the bellhop uniform was supposed to have been given laugh lines, writers.  Try to remember that when you work on the sequel, okay?  Or else pay Zach Braff double for making you look good.

10. Not enough Rachel Weisz.  Although now we know who’s going to die under that Kansas farmhouse in about fifteen years.

Thought for the day

"Patriarchy is not men. Patriarchy is a system in which both women and men participate. It privileges, inter alia, the interests of boys and men over the bodily integrity, autonomy, and dignity of girls and women. It is subtle, insidious, and never more dangerous than when women passionately deny that they themselves are engaging in it."
 -- Ashley Judd, 4/9/12

Slutgate - The Aspirin Mentality

As much fun as it would be to lay into Rush Limbaugh for being a hypocrite who claims he’s a political commentator whenever he speaks and an entertainer whenever he has to apologize, I think it’s much more instructive to look at exactly what WAS said, and examine the premise behind each of these howling whoppers, because every one of them reflects a specific view of women.

We'll get to Rush's blathering in later posts, but for this one, let's start with the "Thank God for free speech because the assholes always say something assholey" quotation that began the whole mess:

QUOTE: “Back in my day, they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly." -- Foster Friess, financial backer of Rick Santorum.

PREMISE #1: Women are always the only ones who determine whether sex happens or not. If they say no, it doesn’t happen. If they keep their legs together, it doesn’t happen. And if they open their legs, it does happen. 

Which implies that

PREMISE #2: If sex happens, it’s because the woman opened her legs, so she wanted it to happen. This automatically means that, if a man has sex with a woman who says “No,” then what she was really saying was “Yes! Yes! Oh yes!” Why? Because sex occurred, silly! And since sex cannot occur without the woman’s say-so, she must have been saying so. See how simple it is when you know the rules?

But the real underlying premise here is the one nobody talks about, and it defines the entire worldview of women that lies behind that aspirin crack. It’s a three-fold notion that nobody ever contradicts, and everybody assumes is true. Including the legal system in most civilized countries.

PREMISE #3.1: Men not only always WANT sex to happen, they always EXPECT sex to happen. Always. It’s the given behind everything. And when you think of it as a call and response, it’s totally illogical. Normally, The Party of The First Part is the one who asks the Question, and The Party Of The Second Part is the one who is responsible for the Answer. But since all responsibility for the sexual act resides in the woman, that makes HER both The Party of The First Part AND The Party of The Second Part. In other words, the Question itself is embodied by the presence of the woman. Simply by walking into a room full of men, any woman, single or married, is required by unwritten law to declare “No I do not want to have sex with you!” as loudly as she can to every single man in the room. Otherwise, the same unwritten law declares that, since silence is universally recognized as giving assent, simply by being in that room, she is saying: “Do me. Do me now.” 

PREMISE #3.2: All women are sexually irresistible. This is the finger-pointing side of the responsibility angle. All a man has to do to defend himself from any form of sexual misconduct is prove that he had sex with a human being with a vagina, and a judge will slam down a hammer and say “Case closed.” Because men have no control over their actions whenever a woman is involved. It’s a given. Which is, sadly, why “The existence of a woman’s genitals” is a legally-recognized excuse for rape.

PREMISE #3.3: Women are nothing but doorways to sex. What do you do to a door? You knock on it. If it opens, you get to go in. If it stays closed, you don’t go in. Simple, right? And the great thing about this analogy is that there is no legally-recognized precedent for breaking the door down. If a man takes a sledgehammer to that door or blows it up with C4, the fact that he can walk into the bedroom means that door was opened willingly. Which means he’s off the hook. (See Premise 3.2 above.)

And y'know? This kind of guy is even GRAMMATICALLY off the hook.  He doesn't think about having sex; he thinks about getting laid.  Which is passive, not active; which implies that it's something that happens to him, not something he does.  Getting laid; getting a blowjob--these things just happen, and if there's an active verb involved, then the subject of that verb is always somebody else.  Somebody conveniently third-person female.

I would lay cash money that Santorum's rich friend Friess talks about sex in the passive tense, because it totally fits what his type of male really thinks.  If, that is, he's capable of introspection.  Which I kind of doubt.  You can always count on two things with assholes: they're happier than everybody else, and they're barely capable of a first thought, never mind a second one.  Which puts them in the same league with blowhards who think that the purchase of female contraceptives means that the buyer is having sex all the time.  (I'm looking at you, Rush.)

LIMBAUGH: That was an exaggeration with humorous intent.

ME:  No, that was a solipsism.

LIMBAUGH: Big words for a feminist-loving playwright.

ME: Big logical error for an overweight prescription-drug-abusing male chauvinist.  Because a man only buys contraceptives when he thinks he's going to have sex, you think that the same thing is true for a woman.

LIMBAUGH: Contraceptives are always a sex issue.

ME:Contraceptives are sometimes a health issue.

LIMBAUGH: Health has nothing to do with it.

ME: Oh that has everything to do with it--as you've been finding out, and totally ignoring, for the last couple of weeks. 

Thought for the day: the glamorous on being glamorous

"Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid." -- Hedy Lamarr

Thought for the day

"Strong women don't have a problem with 
authority.  Strong women have a problem with 
stupidity."

  --MJ Wells

December 8, 2010: An Anniversary Worth Celebrating

The first recorded performance of a woman actor playing a female part on the British stage occurred on the afternoon of Saturday, December 8, 1660. Before a performance of Othello, an actor in Tom Killegrew’s King’s Company stepped onto the stage of the Vere Street theatre and delivered the following prologue, written by Thomas Jordan:

“I came unknown to any of the rest,
To tell the news; I saw the lady drest:
The woman plays to-day; mistake me not
No man in gown, or page in petticoat:
A woman to my knowledge, yet I can’t,
If I should die, make affidavit on’t.
Do you not twitter, gentlemen? I know
You will be censuring: do it fairly, though;
’Tis possible a virtuous woman may
Abhor all sorts of looseness, and yet play;
Play on the stage—where all eyes are upon her:
Shall we count that a crime France counts an honour?
. . . . .
But to the point:—in this reforming age
We have intents to civilise the stage.
Our women are defective, and so sized,
You’d think they were some of the guard disguised;
For to speak truth, men act, that are between
Forty and fifty, wenches of fifteen;
With bone so large, and nerve so incompliant,
When you call Desdemona, enter giant."

At the end of the performance, there was a brief epilogue which also celebrated the occasion. Who delivered these speeches? Nobody knows. I like to think it was Tom Killegrew himself. Makes sense, right? In any event, I said that this was the first “recorded” performance of a woman playing a woman because there are earlier instances--in 1656, for example, a woman known only as Mrs Coleman was paid to play the part of Ianthe in William Davenant’s The Siege of Rhodes. (That epithet “Mrs,” by the way, was pronounced “Mistress.”) And the actual directive from Charles II to henceforth have all female roles played by women was part of the August 21, 1660, charter issued to Tom Killegrew’s King’s Company and William Davenant’s Duke’s Company, so there’s a very good chance that as early as, oh, October or November, there were women treading the British boards, in compliance with that warrant’s demand that “plays might be esteemed not only harmless delights but useful and instructive representatives of human life.”

As for the name of the woman who played Desdemona, there are three candidates. Anne Marshall was Killigrew’s leading actress, and it’s known that she played the part later in her career. Margaret Hughes, Killegrew’s second female lead, gets the most scholarly votes, though she was quite probably the one playing Emilia. And Katharine Corey gets her own vote, thanks to a 1689 petition to the Lord Chamberlain in which she styled herself as “the first and the last of all the actresses that were constituted by King Charles II at His Restoration.” If the opinion of modern artists can be entered into this debate, Mrs Hughes wins in a landslide: she’s the female lead in Jeffrey Hatchers’s play Compleat Female Stage Beauty, which you may be familiar with in its filmic incarnation, Stage Beauty, known forever in the tabloids as That Movie Where Claire Danes Seduced Billy Crudup Away From A Pregnant Mary Louise Parker.

Margaret Hughes

Whoever the actress was, when Jordan writes in his prologue the words “I saw the lady drest,” he was speaking the literal truth. In 1660, the Vere Street theatre had its tiring room above and behind the stage proper. There were individual dressing rooms for the stars, an area for the men to change and gather, and what was called the women’s shift for the female actors. And this was not a private room; on the contrary, anybody was allowed to enter. You could actually walk backstage to the women’s shift at any time before or during a performance, and watch Ellen Gwynn bitch about how small the house was in the foulest terms possible while she threw a faux gold gown over her sweat-stained chemise. Off in the corner, you might see Samuel Pepys with Mrs Knepp in his lap, towsing away at the pretty little thing while she reviewed her lines for the next scene, or be brushed aside by the Earl of Oxford as he paid court to his Roxalana, Helen Davenport, while not six inches away Elizabeth Farley was using the chamber pot.

Welcome to the Restoration, ladies and gents: the age when England got sick and tired of its shotgun marriage to Puritanism and started openly taking mistresses; the age when gallants would lie in bed devising impromptus before they rose for their daily ablutions, and women wore dresses and blouses with necklines that exposed everything from nape to navel, but God forbid they ever showed their ankles. It was an age which created plays in which everybody is always hiding in closets, or delivering the wrong documents, or disguising themselves as maids and servants, or loudly revealing secrets to people eavesdropping in closets. These plays created a self-contained theatrical world in which, to quote James Branch Cabell, “monetary competence and happiness and all-important documents, as well as a sudden turn for heroic verse, were regularly accorded to everybody toward eleven o’clock in the evening.” An age in which was born the woeful custom of cutting and rewriting the tragedies of Shakespeare to fit a much more comforting definition of the word “tragic.” Which is why, if you attended that famous December performance of Othello at Vere Street, there’s a better than even chance that you would have seen Desdemona survive the play to marry Cassio.

Ellen Gwynn, aka Nell, looking like a young Elsa Lanchester.

An odd age, at one and the same time instantly recognizable and totally foreign. Take the word “towsing” which I used above. Towsing is a slang term which is found all over Restoration plays and stage directions, a word whose meaning corresponds to the modern expression “Russian hands and Roman fingers.” To be blunt, it means playing with a woman’s breasts, an enterprise which was totally encouraged by the age’s fashion for upper-body denudation. (Breasts? No problem. Just don’t ever, ever reveal an ankle.) There’s always the question of how much a contemporary play reflects or reveals contemporary life, but the frequency of stage directions like “(Towses her)” or “(Feeling ‘em and sneering)” makes you think that, if public groping wasn’t happening all the time, it sure was something those randy playwrights wanted to see happening. What makes it more probable that it was a reflection and not wish fulfillment? The two plays from which I took those stage directions, The Town-Foppe and The Round Heads, were written by a woman, Aphra Behn. So add to your view of the Restoration the picture of a woman forced by the current fashion to wear the kind of seductive attire that guarantees she will be submitting to or fighting off the groping advances of every man who comes within arm’s length of her. And then multiply those advances by five if she’s an actor.

Who taught these groper-plagued women their theatrical craft? No one knows. Men, probably, at least in the beginning. Did the leading women of the King’s and the Duke’s take on apprentices, the way the leading men did? No one knows. Elizabeth Barry is said to have been tutored by the infamous John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester. If so, at least one of them was a genius, for Mrs Barry was acknowledged during her lifetime to be the Judi Dench of her generation. Personally, I’d give the nod to Barry over Rochester. It may be the hands of Michelangelo which reveal it, but it is the hunk of marble that contains the statue.

And statues, alas, are the one of the many things these women did not leave behind. Even the greatest of theatre lovers would be hard pressed to name six of these pioneers, which is why I am listing below the names of more than two dozen women who performed on a London stage between 1660 and 1690. They are the (mothers? godmothers? stage mothers?) of every English-speaking girl who has ever played or dreamed of playing Desdemona, or Rosalinde, or Beatrice, or Viola. All of them made a living out of acting on the stage. Many of them had a hard time of it. Some of them are only names. But none of them should ever be forgotten.

Maria Allison
Elizabeth Barry
Mary Saunderson Betterton
Elizabeth Boutell
Anne Bracegirdle
Charlotte Butler
Katherine Corey
Elizabeth Currer
Hester Davenport
Moll Davis
Elizabeth Farley
Ellen Gwynn
Margaret Hughes
Mary Knepp
Frances Maria Knight
Mary Aldridge Lee, Lady Slingsby
Elinore Leigh
Jane Long
Anne Marshall Quin
Rebecca Marshall
Mrs Norris (first name unknown, like so many others)
Susanna Perceval Mountfort Verbruggen
Anne Reeves
Margaret Rutter
Elizabeth Slade
Mrs Twyford (first name unknown)

Guide to Guys: Suckers Suckers Everywhere (and none of them want to drink)

As Twilight fever once again infects the Vaginal Hive Mind with the unreal idea that the perfect boyfriend is an undead bloodsucker who believes in bibisanguinary abstinence, I have to ask: what is it with women and vampires?

ALL WOMEN EVERYWHERE: Isn’t it obvious? It’s about comfort. It’s about danger.
ME: Danger?!? They’re not even real vampires!
ALL WOMEN EVERYWHERE: That’s the comfort part.
ME: AAAUUGH!! Vampires are not comforting! Vampires are soulless devourers of innocence who exist to feed on the living or turn the living into one of them. These perfect-boyfriend life-challenged brooding emo unsuckers you love so much are like walking chastity testimonials -- they never try to bite you, they feed on blood substitutes, and even though they've been around for over a hundred years, they still only manage to have the IQ of a middle-school slacker.
ALL WOMEN EVERYWHERE: Hey -- we like 'em dead and stupid.
ME: Well obviously. These guys are vampires the way tofu cooked to taste like chicken is real chicken. Or computer game football players are real football players. They’re Playstation vampires!
WISEASS MATTHEW: So does that mean the women who love them are all X-Boxes?
ME: Get back in your hole.

If they were real vampires? She'd be dinner -- not a dinner date.

ME: So let me get this straight. Brooding emo unsuckers are terminally pretty, terminally 19, and terminally tortured about sex sucking blood.
ALL WOMEN EVERYWHERE: And that’s why we love them.
ME: Really?
ALL WOMEN EVERYWHERE: Look. Are you agelessly pretty?
ME: I used to be.
ALL WOMEN EVERYWHERE: But you got old. Who wants old? Strike one. Are you always going to be 19?
ME: In my own head? Sure.
ALL WOMEN EVERYWHERE: But not in real life. Strike two. And what are you tortured about?
ME: Working a day job when I should be writing more.
ALL WOMEN EVERYWHERE: How romantic. Let us put it this way. Do you ever think twice when you’re sexually attracted to someone?
ME: Are you kidding? I’m a guy -- I don’t even think once.
ALL WOMEN EVERYWHERE: Strike three, pal.
ME: So, what –- looks, youth and unsex? Is that what women really want from a guy?
ALL WOMEN EVERYWHERE: Quiet; we’re watching the movie.

ALL WOMEN EVERYWHERE: Oooo! New unblood!

Go ahead; you watch. Meanwhile I'll start making a list of what's really going on with y'all by employing false logic, invalid comparisons, and gross generalities. First up:

Not just bloodless, but lifeless. It's not just women and vampires; it's lively women and lifeless men, and it's been going on since Charlotte Bronte hit puberty. And you have to ask: do these spiritual zombies display recognizable signs of life while they’re single and on the prowl the way peacocks display their plumage during mating season? Or is it the old opposites-attract you-complete-me light-shines-best-when-it’s-next-to-total-darkness dynamic that, back when it was Manichean theology, got you a one-way trip to the stake courtesy of the Spanish Inquisition? Nowadays you’re lucky to get a free steak dinner from these brooding black holes. Because that’s what they are, and that’s what they always have been, ever since the perfect example of this species of male made his first appearance in a famous Gothic romance, a sullen, moody male who embodied the two primal female responses to his character in the words of his name –- anyone who loves him will either get lost on the Heath or jump over a Cliff.

Separated at unbirth.

In this view of the Perfect Man, Dracula's not evil; he's the guy who wrote suicidal poetry in high school -- the guy who composed suicidal love songs in college -- the guy who can wilt lettuce, bruise peaches, and suck the air conditioning out of a supermarket produce section just by walking past it on his way to the coffee aisle. And meanwhile every female within twenty feet of him suddenly gets the urge to take home a can of Maxwell House. Why? Because to the female mind, you can only be depressed because you’re grappling with deep emotional and spiritual issues -- you can only brood when you’re contemplating the meaning of existence -- you can only be dark and uncommunicative because what you feel is too big to put into words. To the female mind, if a guy is moody and depressing, then he's grappling with something deep and eternal, like whether or not to slake his thirst for blood by biting your neck. To the male mind? Moody and depressing is just how you are until you slake your thirst for caffeine by drinking that second cup of coffee. Which brings us to:

The shallowness of unsuspected depth. There is something about guys with unsuspected depth which causes even the smartest, least susceptible female heart to flutter like Scarlett O’Hara’s hand fan. Just like men fall head over heels for women they meet in laundromats, women fall like a ton of bricks through greased air for guys who read deep. Mind you, guys with actual depth? Forget it. Imaginary depth beats actual depth every time, because imaginary depth is all about potential, and potential is sexy. Actuality is not sexy. Actuality is like a spreadsheet. Which is why men with actual depth usually wind up with women who can’t fill out the job line on their income tax return without asking if lap dancer is one word or two.

GUY WITH ACTUAL DEPTH: How about sticking a hyphen between them?
GIRLFRIEND: Hey --nobody does anything to my hyphen until I see an extra hundred bucks.

It never fails. Put a man with a company credit card in a line-up with three tattooed ex-cons who can’t hold a job for more than five minutes, and the average female will sit there asking herself, “Tough choice. Do I want Sing Sing or Alcatraz?” Because it’s not just about deep or shallow or imaginary or real. It’s about heart. Heart with an extra T.

It’s about threat. All women are secret lion tamers. There is no stopping the female urge to stick her head into the jaws of a man-eating beast, and when bystanders cry out “No! Don’t do it! He’ll kill you!” smile and say, “Oh no. He does that to everyone else, but not to me. Because he cares.” This is why cheerleaders hang on the words of bikers, prison psychologists run off with mass murderers, and Wendy Hillers wind up on the arms of Bugsy Siegels. (True story.) Personally, I don’t see the thrill of falling in love with someone who, if he treated you like everyone else in his life, would probably beat the crap out of you with the butt of a Smith and Wesson, or drain the blood out of your body like someone who’s just been given a slurpy after spending three weeks in the desert.

And he'll also try to rape you. But you'll forgive him.

Because he has a SO-O-O-O-O-O-OUL!!!

Mind you, I totally get the underlying truth of the words “He’s different with me.” What I don’t get is that “different” means “real and true,” as opposed to “not normal.” Just the use of the word different implies that it’s the exception, not the rule. And to try to make it the rule? Well, we all know what that’s about, don’t we?

"I can be the one to change him." Three words: No. You. Can’t. You can’t change “different” into “normal.” You can’t domesticate wild animals without neutering them or draining away the wildness that attracted you to them in the first place. Or making them so crazy they’ll bite your head off. And you can’t turn a wading pool into an ocean, no matter how much water you pour into it. None of which advice will ever stop a woman from looking at a sullen loner smoking a Camel and thinking to herself, “I wonder what he’ll look like pushing a baby stroller.”

Bottom line: all changes in male behavior are possible, which is why they are all doomed to failure. Only the impossible never fails. Only the impossible gives a woman the satisfaction of knowing that success is just one right word away, one right move away, one perfect night away. Only the impossible -- like bringing the dead back to life -- like making a lifeless heart beat for you and you alone. Which is why all women are suckers for vampires. Because it’s impossible to change them, even if they want to change, without either killing them or making them mortal. They’re always out of reach. They’re always not quite there. They’ll always give you almost what you want. And there is nothing more seductive than that.

Except maybe chocolate.

A Calming Little FAQ on the Current Pandemic Panic

We've all seen the headlines:

W.H.O. Raises Alert Level as Flu Spreads to 74 Countries

More City Schools Closed by Flu

Everybody in Japan Ordered to Wear Stupid White Medical Masks

We're All Going To Fucking Die

And what is everybody so worked up about? Is it a plague transmitted by rats, like the Black Death? Is it a virus that can chew your skin off, like Ebola? Is it a disease that can actually kill you, like Swine Flu? Hell no. It's a sickness that, tragically, has the potential of infecting 100% of the marriageable female population of the planet. You know what I'm talking about, ladies. I'm talking about Swain Flu. The dirty little secret of the double-X chromosome. (And you guys reading this? Double-X is not a size, so take a cold shower, okay?)

So what is Swain Flu? Here, for the willfully ignorant, is a brief FAQ:

QUESTION: So what is Swain Flu?

ANSWER: Swain Flu is a recurring virus which makes it impossible for women to live without a boyfriend in their lives. Women infected with Swain Flu are sometimes referred to as Serial Daters, Clinging Vines, Chain Locas (because they're so crazy they date guys the way chain smokers light their next cigarette: from the butt of the one they're just about to stub out), and the incredibly uncomplimentary Chick Ticks, because of their habit of hopping from lover to lover like a carnal flea.

QUESTION: How big is the current Swain Flu outbreak?

ANSWER: Swain Flu was declared a global pandemic on June 11, 2009, in the first designation by the World Honeymoon Organization of a worldwide romantic pandemic since the death of Barbara Cartland. Although the virus is now widespread in the United States and continues to spread from one woman to another through texting and Facebook updates, the W.H.O. has recommended against attempts to contain it, arguing that it would piss off all the men who are currently getting a lot of frantic sex because of it.

QUESTION: So what are the signs and symptoms of Swain Flu in women?

ANSWER: The symptoms of swain flu are: the inability to sleep without someone next to you in bed, dizziness when more than arm's length away from anything with a Y chromosome, fainting spells when faced with the prospect of seeing a movie alone, and advanced malnutrition due to lack of spooning. And, for that matter, forking. Also low self-esteem and an unbridled passion for shorter and more revealing LBD's*, and higher and more painfully constricting FMP’s**, which is reflected in the old jump rope rhyme:

One is my LBD
Two are my FMP’s
Three are the G & T’s
He has to drink till he’s on his knees.
Pepper pepper pepper pepper Vodka!

QUESTION: Is Swain Flu some kind of new disease?

ANSWER: God no. It's been around since the invention of courtly love by Marie de Champagne in 1099. Troubadours sang of it, Provençal poets rhymed about it, jongleurs made fun of it, and (like everything else in the Middle Ages) the Jews were blamed for it. Outbreaks of Swain Flu have been happening for centuries: there was the Amoroso Ague affliction in Italy during the reign of the Borgias, the Caballero Cholera complaint in El Cid’s Andalusia, the Gigolo Grippe which went up and down the East Coast of America during the first Grover Cleveland Administration, the famous Beau Brummell Bronchitis blight in Regency England, and the well-documented 1939 outbreak of Sugar Daddy Shingles in Hollywood. Social historians are in agreement that these recurring appearances of Swain Flu in the human female population always occur during hard economic times, and point out that the most recent pandemic took place during The First Great Depression, an event which was immortalized in Edna St. Vincent Malaysia's famous poem, What Lips My Lips Aren't Kissing Now, And Why The Hell Not, Huh?:

I cannot walk without a crutch
Or reach without an arm to touch
Or sleep without a second crotch
Beside me in the bed.

If I'm alone for half a sec,
I turn into a nervous wreck.
Without a man to (rhymes with duck)
I might as well be dead.

QUESTION: So can women contract Swain Flu, or can guys get it as well?

ANSWER: There are strains of Swain Flu which do intermittently infect the heterosexual male population; these are usually referred to as Jane Flu. But since current research has proven that most straight males go through their lives with a near-total 24/7 inability to be alone for more than five minutes at a time, unless there's a TV on in front of them, the toxins at the root of the Swain Flu virus appear to be already inherent in the straight male biological makeup. (Which, unfortunately, is the only kind of makeup ever associated with straight males.) This is probably why the accepted scientific term to describe a heterosexual male who cannot exist without a woman in his life is "Being Awake."

QUESTION: Are there medicines to treat Swain Flu?

ANSWER: You’re kidding, right?

QUESTION: Well, there’s got to be something I can do if I get it.

ANSWER: Look -- it’s like heroin withdrawal. The only way to clean yourself out is to go cold turkey. Sleep alone. Stay home and eat ice cream. When you meet new guys, tell them you're seeing someone. Tell them you're married. (No--wait--that only encourages them.) You have to flush this insidious crippler of women out of your system completely. And while you are, you'll be feeling all the symptoms of drug withdrawal, which are coincidentally the exact same symptoms of Swain Flu: fever, chills, shortness of breath, increased heart rate, fatigue, giddiness, sadness, the shakes, the giggles, the shing-a-ling, the skate, the boogaloo, the philly, and the ability to read Ernest Hemingway without laughing. You may also notice the inability to wake up, lack of desire to interact socially, mental confusion, fatigue, and constant irritability as well, but these symptoms are harder to trace to Swain Flu, since they are common to everyone who works a day job.

QUESTION: And what if I don't want to be cured? What if I like swimming in a constant stream of meaningless hookups just so I won't feel lonely?

ANSWER: Then I have only one thing to say to you.

QUESTION: Yes?

ANSWER: What are you doing tomorrow night?


________________________________
*LBD: Little Black Dress.

**FMP's: Fuck-Me Pumps. Immortalized in Edna St Vincent Malaysia's famous poem, I Didn't Wear This Dress So You Could Look At My Face, Romeo:

I'm wearing shiny FMP's.
They make my calves as hard as trees.
Say something complimentary, please --
Your silence kind of rankles.

I'm not a slouch -- I came to play.
I'm wearing sexy lingerie.
It's even sexier, they say,
When it's around my ankles.

What Is It About Hillary?

When I see stuff like this, and read articles like this and this, I don't know whether to laugh or cry over the way women are objectified in our culture.

Never mind that the joke of having a Hillary nutcracker depends on the fact that “strong woman = ballbuster” never needs to be spoken out loud –- it’s a given, like “strong man = role model” and “weak man = pussy.” What strikes me as interesting is that the joke is based on two separate premises: the generic premise based on a sexual stereotype and the specific premise that Hillary Clinton is one nutcracking bee-yatch.

The generic premise says that any woman who attempts to compete as an equal on a male playing field must be competing primarily to stick it to men. As a penalty, the criticism she gets is half-nitpicky, half-gotcha, and the bar for her achievements is always set a little higher than it is for her male co-players, which means that in order to be equal to those men, she has to be superior to them. If she fails at this, her entire sex fails; if she succeeds at this, it only proves that her entire sex will do anything to stick it to men. And if she makes the slightest mistake, especially the kind of mistake that’s excused in one of her male co-players? She gets the book thrown at her. (Hi, Martha Stewart!)

The specific premise says that Hillary Clinton wears the pants in the Clinton marriage -- which means it’s only a matter of time before somebody starts marketing a doll of Bill Clinton in a dress. (You’d think, right? But interestingly enough, the logical corollary to ballbuster Hill –- “Bill has no balls” –- doesn’t seem to have the same currency in the Penile Hive Mind. Unless I’m missing something. My God -- could it be that the Penile Hive Mind is only equipped to dish it out and not take it?)

So we’ve got a joke based on a generic sexual stereotype (woman = nutcracker, and vice versa), as well as a specific swipe against an individual woman who embodies the unspoken male fear of the powerful (and therefore castrating) woman. And I wish I knew what it was about Hillary’s embodiment of this cliché that pushes the Rant Button in people. There’s definitely something about her personally which drives some folks gleefully bazoo. They so totally delight in trashing this woman. I mean me, I think Barbara Bush has it all over Hillary as a vengeful, grudge-keeping termagant (oops -- another stereotype), but you don’t see Barbara Bush nutcrackers on E-Bay. And not just because you never saw her in pants. (Although if you ask me, that has a lot to do with it. Barbara Bush could be an axe murderer, but as long as she wears a granny dress, the PHM gives her a pass as a man-hater.)

So chalk up the Hillary Nutcracker as another in a long line of misogynist jokes, and remember -- that sound you hear in the background is a lot of people with two X chromosomes grinding their teeth like Marge Simpson. Will Homer ever change? Nope. Will stereotypes ever change? Sure. (Two words: Stepin Fetchit.) But the double-standard operates here as well. If a woman doesn't agitate for change? Change never happens. If a woman does agitate for change? She's out to stick it to men, which means she becomes the problem, and change never happens. It's a Red Queen's Race and it always has been: women have to run as fast as they can just to stay in the same place, and if they let up for even a second, they're back where they started. (Insert picture of Bugs Bunny holding up a sign that reads DEPRESSING, AIN'T IT?)

As for me, I have my doubts about Hillary as a politician, but they have nothing to do with her sex, any more than my doubts about Obama have to do with his race. And I suggest that if another company came out with an equivalent Obama toy -- say, the Obama Lawn Jockey? -- there would be such a chorus of pundits using the words "vile" and "disgusting" that those two words would quickly become meaningless.

Just as meaningless –- if you stop to think about it-- as a criticism based on a sexual stereotype. If I can quote myself, from an unfinished project about women in the workplace:

WOMAN #1: He called me a bitch in front of the entire meeting!
WOMAN #2: Good for you.
WOMAN #1: Good for me?
WOMAN #2: Calling a woman a bitch is what a man does when he can’t think of anything else to criticize you for.