Annals Of Misogyny - The Tale Of A Man Who Loved Women

Misogyny like racism is thrown around so much these days and so often used in so many circumstances that it has lost its bite.  As a morphed catch-all phrase, it includes just about any circumstance in which a woman is not given privilege, entitlement, place, or status. Kamala Harris lost the election not because she was a ditz, an airy, vaporous woman with no excuse for running for President except that it was there, but because so many men out there couldn't possibly stand the idea of a woman in the Oval Office. 

 

Those days are long gone, of course, and men have become used to women in the boardroom.  Not entirely happily perhaps, since many such women still feel they have a lot to prove and can be total bitches when it comes to keeping men in their place, but it is what it is. 

There are those men like Bob Muzelle who had been a tireless advocate for women's rights, attending all conferences on sexual abuse, the glass ceiling, equal pay for equal work, and all the rest, until he was given the boot by women for whom men were at worst the enemy and at best unwanted interlopers. 

Bob was surprised at this sneering dismissal.  After all, he had been in the front lines of feminism, bra-burning, and the early woman's movement willing to take his knocks for the fair sex, and now look - tossed out and left on the curb unwanted and forgotten. 

He shouldn't have been surprised because he had the same rude comeuppance at the hands of black people who were tired of white wannabes who had never gotten over Selma, Birmingham, and Ralph Abernathy. 

'Old fuckers who don't understand jack shit about the black man' said one Black Lives Matter potentate caught with a crate full of Armani and Arpege 'borrowed' from the old Jew on Madison in protest of Jewish conspiracy and white oppression; but Bob paid these screeds no mind, and felt that he was well within his rights to protest white racism and systemic oppression. 

So when it came to women, he was unprepared for the letdown, the summary dismissal from the ranks, the absolute indifference to his commitment and continued engagement.  Worse, his wife, Corinne Headley Muzelle, Dean of Women's Studies at a well-known Eastern university, was removed from office by the very black women she had promoted.  

'Ain't no mo' use fo' you, bitch' said the leader of the insurrectionist faction that did her in, leaving her short of breath, nonplussed, and stunned.  These women, these sanctified black women dumping her in the street ('Airmailing', she thought nastily, of the heaps of trash tossed out of the windows of public housing by black women in a disgusting show of dysfunction and arrogance).  How could they? 

So Corinne turned misogynist of the worst sort, for after decades of putting up with bitchy innuendo, girl talk, cattiness, and vixenish competition, she had had it with these cunts. 

A daisy chain pair, the two Muzelles, both gobsmacked by the very people they had tried to help since the halcyon days of The Movement; and they still had juice in the veins, shots in the magazine, energy and righteous anger galore, ready to serve; and here they both were on the curb, bits of racial and gender detritus. 

 

This story, however, is not about lost causes - the Muzelles - but Lance Ravenholt, a Hollywood idol in a tailored suit, a boulevardier, an impossibly irresistible man who loved women.  Not only did women flock to him, come to him in droves without his asking, he was universally loving and accepting,  These women could not help themselves, so who was he to distinguish, to choose, to separate and rank?

If they got clingy or demanding, they were cashiered and let go without ceremony. Even in his impatience and irritability, he was convinced that he had nothing against these women as women, but as daft little bunnies who had misjudged him. 

Of course he was as misogynist as can be, a man who said he loved women but really loved himself; and his ridding himself of one woman after the other like dust balls under the bed was a perfect example of this unfortunate sentiment.  He himself said that women couldn't help themselves falling for him, so why should they whine and whinge when he tossed them out, and moreover why should he have any remorse for so doing? 

Bob Muzelle was appalled at his behavior but never had the balls to confront him.  In fact Bob envied Lance and wanted to be him.  What he would give for that wavy blonde hair, those blue eyes, that macho confidence, stuck as he was in a homely body running to fat, mishappen face, jowls, and a growing wattle. 

 

The gall of the man, thought Bob, having the allure to attract women like hummingbirds to a feeder, and then scattering them to the four winds without a second thought.  He doesn't love women, he hates them! but in his inner rooms Bob was no different.  Women were nothing but man-hunters who when the succeeded in bedding an unsuspecting prey, proceeded to castrate then eviscerate him, goddam them!

So, that's three people in recent memory who were most definitely misogynist; but every wrong turn has its antecedents, context, and enabling factors.  If women had not been pushed up the ladder by progressive rant and faux idealism, the playing field would be equal, no hard feelings, no jealousy or animosity. 

What about trailer trash? Did Georgia crackers really beat their wives in drunken fits every night, screw them mercilessly, then belching and scratching their balls choke down another Bud and collapse on the Barcalounger? 

 

Yes indeed, but that misogyny also bears some looking at for enabling factors.  What kind of a life is it to sweep factory floors, work a second job at Walmart, and come home to a fat slob of a wife and three bawling brats?  He hated his life, not his wife, and not women necessarily, but conflation was bound to happen at the straggly low end. 

The only misogynist who made out was Lance Ravenholt, because who could blame a man whom women desperately loved?  To assume that they were dummies who didn't know any better than to fall for a prick like him was anti-feminist, demoting women when all women were supposed to be superior.  So these flannel, jackbooted Bernal Heights critics of Lance and the women who loved him were just as misogynist as all the rest, jealously picking on their sisters for being easy lays and wondering what it would be like to be fucked by the best. 

This is not to say that there is some misogyny in all of us.  I am told that particularly in the Midwest there are still families of balance and equanimity - comfortable in their skin and with each other. Perhaps the division of responsibilities - milking, tending to the chickens, plowing the fields, baking corn bread, and chopping wood - removes sex, gender, and sexual ambition from the social equation; but few would exchange the occasional sexual misstep for a life of routine dullness. 

So, we're all in the same boat.  If you don't hate women even just a little bit, then you must be out on a farm somewhere shoveling pig shit. 

'I love women', said Lance Ravenholt yet again as his latest young thing kissed him, said a longing goodbye, and went out the door.  A charmed life, he thought, with nary a concern for 'the inner woman' unless it surprised him and added luster to the affair.  A bit of misogyny never hurt anyone, he laughed.