THE LAST MAN STANDING
Jerry Harkins
The problem with men is they are rapidly becoming
obsolete. Already it is possible to run
a cattle ranch of 10,000 units[1] without the services of an
actual bull. Already scientists have
created mice using sperm manufactured from stem cells harvested from female
mice. No males needed, thank you. Within ten years they’ll be making the stem
cells from recycled motor oil and within another generation women will be able
to order bespoke artificial sperm from Amazon.
Maybe they’ll keep a few male specimens in zoos to remind them of the
bad old days when men ruled the world and the roost which they had done ever
since our ancestors came down out of the trees some twenty million years ago. As John F. Kennedy said, life isn’t fair. But it used to be that it was mainly unfair
to women.
At the moment, it seems that things may be changing and not
a moment too soon. Take, for example, one
of the most ancient forms of discrimination, the taking of young girls by older
men as wives or mistresses or, in many cases, just taking them. According to
some authorities, Peter Abelard was 36 in 1115 A.D. when he met Heloise d'Argenteuil
who was 14. There ensued love at
first sight and one of history’s great romances. Their age disparity was not so unusual in the
twelfth century and even Heloise’s youth was not a serious concern. It is true that Peter was castrated but not
for marrying her and not even for statutory rape. Rather, thinking to protect her, he sent her
to the convent. Thinking to protect
herself, she denied being married to him.
But that infuriated her uncle who took it to mean she had been living
with him in sin. Both had guessed wrong
about the uncle’s moral priorities.
Important men have always and everywhere preferred much
younger wives and mistresses.[2] Helen of Sparta (later Helen of Troy) is the mythical
archetype. She was in the first blush of
youth when she married King Menelaus who was already famous for his military
exploits when he and four other kings drew straws for her. There is,
of course, nothing strange about May-December romances unless you think it
strange that in 99% of them it is the woman who plays May to the man’s
December. In living memory, we have Charlie
Chaplin who was 36 years older than Oona O’Neill. Leopold Stokowski was 42 years older than his
third wife, Gloria Vanderbilt. Woody
Allen is 35 years older than his third wife Soon-Yi Previn and Hugh Hefner was
60 years older than Crystal Harris.
Melania Knauss was 28 when she
met Donald Trump in 1998. He was
52. She was his third wife. Callista Bisek was 27 when she and Newt
Gingrich began their adulterous affair in 1993.
He was 50. He made her his third
wife seven years later after she insisted he convert to Roman Catholicism.
It is important to
note that these were probably not forced marriages.
In each, the men and the women got pretty much what they set out to get. It is likely that all involved love of one
kind or another. In addition, the men
got youth, beauty and fecundity while the women got security, power and
prestige. Chaplin and O’Neill are prime
examples. There is no doubt theirs was a
love match. They adored each other in
spite of having to live in exile from the United States where he was caught up
in the red-baiting hysteria fomented by the House Committee on Un-American
Activities. He got a beautiful and
talented woman who gave him peace and love and eight children. Having survived the dysfunctional family of
Eugene O’Neill, she got pretty much the same things.
But. There’s always a but and in this case it is the fact that, throughout the ages,
society has been simultaneously titillated and irritated by such alliances. The women are often thought of “gold diggers”
or “trophy wives” and the men are said to be “cradle robbers.” There is always the suspicion that the men
are exercising a sense of entitlement akin to the alleged medieval practice of droit
de seigneur. And there is the stark reality that such alliances
reflect and reinforce the inferior status of women in general. Whether they wind up happily or unhappily, more
often than not they become fodder for the scandal media and late night
comics. Again, the pattern was set by
Helen and Paris. You will recall that
she was awarded to him by Aphrodite and he was later mortally wounded in
battle. He or Helen (accounts differ)
begged his first wife, the nymph Oenone, to save him
but she, the spurned woman, refused and he died. It seems Helen was then returned to Menelaus
and they lived more or less happily together ever after. Or perhaps only until Mephistophilis gave her
to Doctor Faustus who sold his soul for her.
“Was this,” he gasped, “the face that launched a thousand ships / And
burnt the topless towers of Illium?”
Well, it was complicated, even more so than Romeo and Juliet or Tristan and Isolde. As Lysander tells his beloved Hermia, "The course of true love never did run smooth." Which is true even when a great playwright
turns the turbulence into a comic farce.
As Darwin
explained. “…individuals having any advantage,
however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and of
procreating their kind.” The Alpha males
– the biggest, fastest, smartest and most aggressive members of the troop – could
and did mate with any females that attracted their attention. It was natural for them to focus on the
youngest, the most attractive and the most fecund. The biological morality of the system was impeccable. Like Caesar boasting to the Roman Senate, Mr.
Alpha could say, “I came, I saw, I conquered.”[3] It may seem unfair to females in retrospect
but the truth is most of them accepted the inequity as their natural condition.[4] The title of the 1966 best seller seems to
fit: Been
Down So Long, It Seems Like Up To Me.
But it had always been unfair because
it both reflected and projected the attitude that the differences between the
sexes rendered the female inferior.
Thus, male supremacy was necessary and natural and a whole range of female distinctions
and disabilities was justified. This is,
of course, a logical fallacy but men needed it to cope with the tensions
implicit in the knowledge that women were in a position to judge the central
element of their self-image, their sexual prowess. They wanted to think of her as the “little
woman,” soft, weak, emotional, flighty and all the rest. To a large extent, she was lovable
specifically because she was so vulnerable.
It was never true that little boys were
made of frogs and snails and puppy-dog tails while little girls were made of
sugar and spice and everything nice. Nor
was it ever true that women are merely imperfect men. Thomas Aquinas believed “… woman is defective
and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production
of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of woman comes
from a defect in the active force or from some material indisposition, or even
from some external influence.” Tom
seemed to miss the obvious conclusion
from his analysis that God was stupid. Either
that or God himself was misbegotten. For
as Genesis insists, “So God created mankind in his own image, in
the image of God he created them; male and female he created
them.” Sigmund Freud was no smarter when
he famously wrote, “Women oppose change, receive passively, and add nothing of
their own.” His psychology was as vacuous
as Aquinas’s physiology. In fact, like
Aquinas, Freud was a classical misogynist but change was already in the air.
Like all social movements, women’s
rights had antecedents but the flood gates began to open when Elizabeth Cady
Stanton and others convened the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. The Nineteenth Amendment giving women the
right to vote was introduced in 1878, passed in 1919 and ratified by the states
in 1920. The struggle for contraception
rights was ignited by the arrest of Margaret Sanger in 1916 and was finally
settled by the Supreme Court in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965. Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique
in 1963. Title IX giving women equal
treatment in higher education became law in 1972 and Roe v. Wade affirmed the
right to abortion in 1973. These and
other milestones rectified practices and traditions that were at least obsolete
and often outright evil. But the most
important force that changed history was the introduction of Enovid in 1960.
Enovid, known as The Pill, was the
first contraceptive that was simple, virtually certain and reasonably
safe. Moreover it was something that a
woman could control herself. Although at
$10 a month it seemed expensive at the time, given its benefits, it was
actually a bargain. What it did was to
separate sex from reproduction by removing the risk of unwanted pregnancy. Relations between the sexes would never be
the same even if a lot of men have not yet gotten the memo. Freed of the risk of unexpected or unwanted
pregnancies, women could now aspire to as much independence as they wanted and
demand equality in every aspect of their lives.
Freud, ever
the fabulist, said, "The great question that has never
been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty
years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’” The answer is and was obvious to anyone who
listened to what women were saying. The
vast majority of them want equality:
equal pay for equal work, equal opportunity in the workplace, equal
protection of the law, equal access to health care and, prominently at the
moment, equal respect and dignity. To
one degree or another, they have made gains in these and other areas with the
striking exception of respect and dignity.
Some churches, politicians and businesses have learned to say the right
things but we still seem surprised at the intensity of the resentment women
express at being groped or denigrated or made the object of lewd remarks. When a powerful man is outed for harassment,
abuse or even rape, other men may know it’s ugly but are ready to move on in
the interest of more important things like electoral success. When an antediluvian politician boasts about
his sexual conquests, we brush it off as “locker room talk” and elect him to
the office of his choice. The President of the United States recently
implied that a female member of the United States Senate would prostitute
herself for campaign contributions. His
spokeswoman said this was not sexist because he had used the same locution
referring to other politicians of both sexes.
Women who object to this sort of thing are labeled “feminazis.” It’s as though the progress made in other
areas has had two unintended consequences:
an effort on the part of men to assert and protect at least their sexual
dominance and an increased willingness of women to protest such treatment
publicly. Thus there is more abuse and
we read about abuse more often.
Increased awareness of a growing
problem may portend real change even in the face of the entrenched misogyny of
powerful institutions including many religious denominations. It may be that the legal system will find a
way to balance the antithetical claims of equality before the law and due
process of law in situations that almost always arise in deep privacy and
involve significant power imbalances. On
that great come and get it day there will be no more glass ceilings, no more
gauntlets in front of Planned Parenthood clinics, no more casting couches. It is a consummation devoutly to be wished. It is however not necessarily something to
bet the farm on in the short term. Longer
term it seems inevitable that women will achieve equality unless they don’t
need it anymore because men have become extinct. As Victor Hugo wrote, “Nothing is as powerful
as an idea whose time has come.”
[1]
A “unit” is a cow and her calf. All the
calves will be female, there being no further need for males. And just so you know, today the cow still
gets pregnant using real bull-provided sperm.
However, she never actually encounters the gentleman. The bull is induced to mount an artificial
vagina which has been infused with the scent of a real cow in heat. Like many human males, the bulls are not
especially smart and tend to be indifferent as to where their sperm is
deposited. Same thing is true of
pigs. All kinds of pigs.
[2]
Well, not every important man. Benjamin
Franklin advised a young man to seek an older woman as his mistress for eight
reasons. The second was, “Because when Women cease to be
handsome, they study to be good. To maintain their Influence over Men, they
supply the Diminution of Beauty by an Augmentation of Utility. They learn to do
a thousand Services small and great, and are the most tender and useful of all
Friends when you are sick. Thus they continue amiable. And hence there is
hardly such a thing to be found as an old Woman who is not a good Woman.” And the last reason was because “They are so
grateful!!” [Emphasis and exclamation points in the
original.] Franklin did not follow his
own advice. He met Deborah Read in 1723 when
he was 17 and she was 15. They undertook
a common law marriage in 1730 which lasted until her death in 1774. She was a shrewd business person and a
faithful spouse which is more than can be said for Ben who maintained stables
of mistresses in Paris and London for years.
[3]
Caesar had three wives and numerous mistresses including Cleopatra who was 31
years his junior. As a teenager, he
married Cornelia who was 13 at the time.
His third wife was Calpurnia whom he married when he was 41 and she was
16. His second marriage, to Pompeia, was a political deal that lasted less than
five years.
[4]
One exception was Heloise who disdained marriage and the subordinate role of
women in general. She wrote, “…whomever
concupiscence leads into marriage deserves payment rather than affection for it
is evident that she seeks not the man but his wealth and is willing to
prostitute herself for it.” Again accounts differ and some writers claim he forced her to marry him somehow. But reading the letters, there can be no doubt she had loved Abelard and admired him even when she disputed philosophical issues with him.
