Artemis Phelps was a hellishly difficult woman. As a child she was mean-spirited and nasty, an impossibly pissy, demanding girl. Her parents were nonplussed - where did this hateful, spiteful child come from? She belied all the common wisdom about the innocence of childhood, its natural purity, its unsullied, perfect, beautiful union. She howled her way through infancy, clawed and spat her way through toddlerhood, was reprimanded, scolded, and punished at school, and entered adulthood as an unreformed, unrepentant, bitch of a woman.
No one was comfortable in her company. Although she was stunningly beautiful, men kept their distance. Women recognized nothing female or feminine in her. There was not an ounce of caring, generosity, or compassion there; not one gentle instinct; no allure or coquettishness. She was the product of some weird twist of nature which jumbled her genetic codes, made her neither woman nor beast.
Feminists approached her, thinking she was one of them - defiant, dominant, brutally honest and dismissive of men. Yet she wanted none of their political cant, MeToo this, Glass Ceiling that, all chicanery, self-absorbed political nonsense of plain, dour, unappealing women. She was an Übermensch, a powerful, relentlessly harrowing woman of pure will.
Even the most fearsome and demanding feminist revolutionaries stood in awe of this guileless, brutal woman. They admired and envied her ferocity - an animal savagery that was more reminiscent of veldt and savannah than anything more evolved - and wanted to be like her, to put teeth and claw into their academically honed politics, but fell far short. Artemis kicked them aside like crippled puppies or gutted fish.
Even the most sexually confident, least intimidated, willful and emotionally indifferent men - an ideal match for her in principle - kept their distance.
Artemis needed no one, and so made her way in trial law, the profession most suited to her personality, unshakeable amoral code, and law of the jungle temperament. She was made partner in no time, but never once did she let up. Her will to conquer, to humiliate, and rout her opponents was crystalline and diamond pure.
She lived alone, but never once did she lose sight of her prize and not for a moment considered that 'there was more to life'. She was living it to the fullest, the expression of pure, unadulterated will the only validation of the individual. The courtroom was made for her, for the law is not about moral values of good, evil, right or wrong. Good attorneys do not know and do not care about guilt or innocence, and only want victory.
Life for her was never about accommodation, compromise, or unity; and her only thought of sexual engagement was Lawrentian dominance and submission - her dominance, their submission. On occasion, like the lionesses to which she was often compared, she went hunting for prey, used her grace, skill, and cunning to lure a man into her lair, then dismember, disembowel, and consume him.
Men had lost their pheromonal sense millennia ago and could no longer gauge sexual interest. They went into relationships as innocent and naive as babes, supremely ignorant, unaware of the harrowing consequences of pursuing the wrong woman; and those who attempted to do so with Artemis Phelps learned quickly and brutally.
Laura, the wife of the Captain in Strindberg's The Father is literature's best example of misandry. Dismissive of him, his male pettiness and assumptions of righteous control, she unmans him, turns him into a confused fool unsure of her fidelity, and incapable of the murder that such deception demands.
He is no Othello who tells his his judges that he did all men a favor by ridding the world of such a deceiving, vile, rutting woman. Instead he is addled by Laura's suggestions, believes them, and becomes mad with unrelenting doubt.
Strindberg - more than Ibsen or Shakespeare - understood the pitiless nature of sexual jealousy and the lock that women have on it. A woman may resent a man's wandering, but the consequences are nothing compared to the birth of a bastard. A man will never know for certain the paternity of his children, and women who understand the irreversible power of this knowledge, will rule.
Artemis understood this power and knew that despite the worries of feminism and the timorous MeToo generation, was a native terror. She was the Black Widow, the Preying Mantis who kills the male after mating.
It was this uncompromising Übermensch character that made her such a courtroom terror. She took every advantage of a legal system which allows punishing, psychologically devastating, unmanning attacks on men, and the brutal maiming of women. The facts were but addenda to her canny insights into weakness and her insatiable will for humiliating conquest.
The Hollywood ending is this: Artemis finds her man, Petruchio to her Kate, someone who tames her with love and understanding, returns her femininity to her, and gives her warmth, motherhood, and virtue, and they live happily ever after.
Men's version of the story is this: Artemis has her comeuppance, takes her misandry and Nietzschean presumptuousness one step too far. She loses in the courtroom, her once heralded invincibility nothing but a memory, her reputation eroded and then lost. She loses clients, colleagues, and supporters, and is left on the curb by all. She dies penniless, homeless, a ragged wretch of a woman begging for quarters on Dupont Circle.
Women's take is similar: the bitch gets fucked over and over again.
Yet such scripts won't play. As hateful, spiteful, and uncompromisingly brutal as this woman might be, she will neither settle down nor go away. Genghis Khan never said, 'Well, I've had enough', dismounted, sheathed his sword and went home. The trail of bloody, spiked heads was irreversible and ended only when there were no more lands to conquer, no more heads to lop off.
Artemis Phelps was not a bitch or a cunt. She was the finest, most perfectly honed, most well-attuned woman that K Street had ever seen. She was Laura, Hedda Gabler, Rebekka West, Miss Julie, Tamora, Goneril and Regan all rolled into one. She was one of a kind. All women had it in them to be Artemis Phelps but few dared. They carped and whined and whinged about glass ceilings, sexual abuse, and unwanted attention but were as timid and feckless as rabbits.
Colossi like Artemis do not retire or fade away. Suddenly they are gone, that's all, disappeared but sure to show up on some other K Street doing the same kind of castrating butchery that she did in Washington. The only shame of it all was that she had no brood - or perhaps she did, which was the meme on K Street, that she did breed and had girls just like her who in turn bred, and a whole phalanx of these harridans would be coming in the next generation.
The truth of the matter is....Sorry, but there is no truth, no fact, no paper trail. Artemis Phelps simply disappeared, but no one believed that she was dead and gone. No one.
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