Whatever happened to those little girls Maurice Chevalier sang of in Gigi, who “grew up in the most delightful way”?
Indeed, as a friend of mine insinuated, by using the expression déjà vu, I am likely to be repeating myself on this subject, (although I do hope only partly), but having been in the company of two distinctly dysfunctional couples during the course of my recent summer holiday, I feel compelled to exorcise my mind of the somewhat discomfiting thoughts by which I once again find it possessed, even if it must be at your – my little audience’s – expense…
… Now perhaps I am being clumsy, or more precisely imprecise, in employing the word dysfunctional, since it appears to be perfectly routine for the operating system of a couple to malfunction after a certain number of years, the failure of which is so uncommon it might be seen as altogether aberrant, save for the fact that the type of malfunction I have observed is not quite the standard i.e. stained merely by boredom and/or indifference, but somewhat more ominous, for it pertains to a type of weaponized submissiveness by men, the undertones suggestive of what is formally diagnosed by mental health professionals as ‘passive aggressive’ behavior, which is not only undermining the natural, or rather conventional poise and equilibrium of women far more surgically than their (men’s) earlier dominance, but also eroding whatever little residue of femininity that remains from the pillaging by the tenets of an increasingly aggressive feminist ideology, which has quite tragically become an inescapable adjunct to the 21st century female DNA ….
… Moreover – and even if I am in danger of turning this discourse into some kind of amateur psychological thriller – I must stress that no amount of feminist artillery fire is any match for the assault tactics of passive aggression, one of its principal components, known as ‘gaslighting’, i.e., manipulating someone into questioning their own sanity or powers of reasoning, more powerful than the most well designed and meticulously deployed cluster munition.
Feminism appears to have travelled far beyond its original, and even noble purpose, as a movement designed to end women’s oppression and confer upon them equal rights and opportunities, to one that is altogether dismantling their gender identity, by which I refer to the aesthetic and behavioral traits that constitute femininity, in which subtlety, grace and benevolence were not only their most appealing but also valuable assets, all but completely dispensed with in their race to emulate men on the latter’s traditional playing fields.
In the bargain, men have gradually begun to enjoy being liberated of the burden of their erstwhile gender prescribed duties and responsibilities, easily conceding their place as sole provider on the symbolic pecking order whilst keeping the essence of their masculinity intact, for the manifestation of feminine traits – cited by Wikipedia as gracefulness, gentleness, empathy, humility and sensitivity – in the male species has a certain allure, while the opposite certainly doesn’t hold true.
As Germain Greer, 20th century Australian writer and one of the major voices of the second wave of feminism once wrote,
“If women understand by emancipation the adoption of the masculine role, then we are lost indeed. If women can supply no counterbalance to the blindness of male drive, the aggressive society will run to its lunatic extremes at ever-escalating speed. Who will safeguard the despised animal faculties of compassion, empathy, innocence and sensuality?”
A question that may well have been intended to serve as warning in 1970, but has become an unequivocally rhetorical one today, women having succumbed to the very same ‘blindness of male drive’ by way of not only exploiting the sympathy they once elicited, but also concessions made to them and turning them against the opposite sex, a prime example being the MeToo movement that went from being a perfectly legitimate call for justice to a blood-thirsty witch-hunt instead … but let us (women) make no mistake, for the male species has simply found a different and far more potent means to both nourish and sustain their supremacy, and that is by letting, if not getting us to sabotage ourselves.
As much as I do not, or rather cannot profess to being an exception to what is fast becoming the rule, my one defense is that I remain single for I would not wish me on any man, my involuntary ambivalence between the impulse for absolute autonomy and desire for a conventional relationship hierarchy in which the man takes unconditional precedence, a foolproof recipe for both conjugal disaster and my own feminine self-respect; as famous 20th century French writer and chronicler of the female experience, Colette, known for her indifference, even hostility to the feminist movement in the 1900’s, once said of the suffragettes, the only thing they deserve is “the whip and the harem”, for Colette was a woman who knew how to capitalize on her femininity and thus became both a literary and feminist icon instead.