Snookered! - From Women's Rights To 'Men Only', A Liberal's Journey To Misogyny

Bob Muzelle had been a lifelong feminist long before bra-burning and squawking had become common.  His Great Aunt was a veteran of the suffrage wars of the Twenties, and the old bat never lost an opportunity to let the young boy know what she and her sisters had done for America.  

She still wore her armband, corset, and tight bun to demonstrate her lifelong commitment to the cause of women.  The vote was but the beginning of her journey through male swamps and redoubts - she had been a fierce, undaunted, and outraged defender of women's rights for decades. 

Such vehemence took its toll.  Abigail Collins had never married, for no man wanted to come within ten feet of this raging harridan.  Women were not the issue for her.  Their natural intelligence, social sophistication, insights, and courage were immanent, permanent, and unquestioned.  It was men that deserved every ounce of her vitriol.  They were the enemy, a dumb, scurrilous, untrustworthy lot, all of whom should be wrung, strung, and cut.  

She adapted to her life as an old maid, a spinster, a bitten, tough, wiry woman who lived on her own and was never tempted by the sensual amusement of her sisters. Sex was the ultimate bonding she was told, but the whole idea of it, all that licking and sucking with nothing between her legs but fingers was off-putting. 

She took a shine to young Bob who had shown signs of sexual contingency - a more than usual appreciation of women as women rather than sexual objects, rare for a young boy - and she took him under her wing, a socio-political internship which would hopefully lead him to social justice advocacy.

Bob's mother was cut from the same cloth, taught by her own mother the value of womanhood, its rightful, unique place in life, and the duty of all women to fight misogyny and male predation.

Not surprisingly Bob's father was a withering little fellow who had come under the thrall of the young Marybeth Collins, attracted by her determination, decisiveness, and drive, complements to his own shilly-shallying and indeterminate nature.  It was not a case of dominatrix and dominated exactly, but visitors were stuck by his complaisant fetching and scrubbing.  He might as well have put on leash, harness, and leather and be ball-whipped for all the virility he seemed to have lost or never had. 

Growing up in such circumstances had not been easy for the young Bob, but these women being his sexual role models, he not surprisingly found himself with the same type of intimidating, bullying, intolerably offensive young women who seemed to have been hatched and belonged to a special, separate brood. 

The good news was that sexual initiation by these devouring girls only hardened his resolve.  These classmates were the avant-garde of the sexual revolution, Nietzschean, willful, and punitive.  They kept Bob as a pet, a salamander on a string, a minor evolutionary bit, while they went about their marvelously canny unmanning.  Lady Macbeth, Goneril, and Regan had nothing on them. 

 

It was no surprise then, that Bob fell into line, and became a social justice warrior, at the barricades, on the pulpit, and in the streets for women's rights.  He had swallowed the feminist line of his mother, Great Aunt, and classmates hook, line, and sinker.  Men were the problem in American society today.  They had never lost their patriarchy, misogyny, and slave-owning mentality and must be deterred, marginalized, and exiled. 

It was bad enough that the women in The Feminist Coalition which he joined, the most forward and implacable feminist group in Washington, were a sour, raggedy, unshaved lot; but they rutted like goats the first chance they got. 'Servicing', they called it, regular tune-ups, a pop in the oven, a little brick work, and holy hell on Saturday nights.  

The law of diminishing returns did not apply to men who were indifferent to 'women as women'.  As long as the brothers could satisfy, they were given sexual visas.  As for the rest, including Bobby Muzelle, they were supernumerary and irrelevant no matter how much they pleaded solidarity. 

It was Samantha Liggett who turned his head - a normal girl from Chillicothe who had come to Washington to make her way in politics, a farm girl, flaxen haired and cornflower blue eyes, a delectable morsel who smiled at him on the Red Line to Bethesda.

Now, Bob had never dated a 'normal' girl before, so coopted had he been by the radical feminist consortium, so he wasn't sure what to do.  He was so stumbling and wretched in his overtures that it was amazing that the girl didn't get off a stop or two before hers; but she didn't and found something charming about his boyishness. 

Bob was smitten and overwhelmed.  Where had this sylph, this water nymph, this perfectly white, stainless, beautiful girl come from?  It was epiphanic, extraordinary, remarkable. For years he had looked at himself as the pathetic male version of his feminist sisters - a kind of saggy, unkempt mess unappealing to any woman except those around him - but he was not unattractive, big-eared perhaps but with a patrician symmetry; and here he was smiled at, enticed by this sweet young, unblemished thing. 

The affair went on for three months when out of the blue came a Dear John letter, handwritten, scented, and embossed.  No explanation, no excuses, just a steely goodbye.

That alone was bad enough but this tart had been fucking somebody else right under his nose.  She lived with him, lived off him, but lived entirely divorced from him.  He was a convenient way station, a bus stop on her way to internship or clerkship or a tryst with a Senator or someone big.  He had been blindsided, snookered, and left on the curb. 

An existential moment.  His first foray into the 'real' world, the whirl of ordinary women, unscarred and untroubled by feminist hatred and cant, and he was dumped like so much refuse.  What was he to make of it? Not quick to jump the gun and conclude something about women in general, he licked his wounds, stayed low and ventured less until some semblance of calm had returned. 

It was then that Desirable Normal Woman #2 came along, a much more patient, considerate woman than the first, and they settled down together in a small but accommodating walkup in Dupont Circle.  They seemed suited to each other.  It was a timely affair, an easy elision from work to home, prospects good, and opportunities limitless. 

However, perhaps sensing some weakness in Bob - something slightly unmanned about him, perhaps due to is association with radical feminists - she began to take liberties, use him more and more, and finally begin take her pound flesh in bits and pieces but substantial nonetheless.  At first she thought it was a good thing that he was so respectful and considerate; but she soon grew weary of his doggy complaisance, and wished he would...well, not exactly treat her roughly, but take her as though he meant it from behind, as horrendous as that thought might seem.

By and by her badgering turned nasty, her constant bitching and irritable fault-finding got boring and tedious, and she finally told him, Basta! out the door, greener pastures, and once again Bob was left on the curb. 

He never saw it coming, so easily and seamlessly had he become the submissive partner; so when the quit order was given, he was shocked.  Another woman in whom he had placed such trust and confidence down the drain; but this time he was spiteful, hateful and disgusted with women - all women - and in one fell swoop he became what his feminist sisters all railed against - a misogynistic, woman-hating man. 

It all piled up on him at once - the old, meanspirited, dry, and pinched Great Aunt; his badgering, manipulative mother, and the cabal of ugly, hysterical, bloodthirsty women at The Feminist Coalition. 

In his mind he hung up a 'Men Only' sign, and from that day forward eschewed any unnecessary commerce with women.  If any came along that piqued his interest, he would be the one to seduce and leave.  In fact, it would not be a one-off vengeful dalliance, it would be a purposeful program of humiliation and deviousness. 

Othello, arrested for the crime of murdering his wife, Desdemona, tells the magistrate that he had no remorse for his actions, and was only ridding the world of one more duplicitous woman.  You should thank me, not convict me he says. 

 

It felt good, finally, to out the closeted machismo within, a cathartic moment of pure joy.  Once and for all he not only left the crusade for women's rights in the rear view mirror but all the febrile, useless progressive cant and faux optimism he had endured for years.  Fuck 'em, he said, and eagerly awaited the sweet young things parading down Independence Avenue to join the Trump originalist cavalcade.  Easy pickin's.