The Wild Tears Fall

This essay was born in September, where so many times in that month, I saw Father Krzysztof mount the steps to the altar in his samite fiddleback, embroidered with a lush depiction of the Immaculate Conception in swirling robes of white and blue. The Scriptural verses which speak of her and the hymns dedicated to her had resounded throughout St. Clement Church, as the congregation admired the intercessor for both the weak and the strong. And even as she intercedes for us, does she not also soften many who claim to hate God? And can we of the West ever deny that devotion to her moulded the chivalry to which the best of its people yet cling? 

However, has that chivalry (whether cultivated in men or expected by women) occasionally gone too far in elevating women in general for the sake of the Virgin Mother? So far that even men of good will have given up the practice? In the rather insipid (but otherwise inoffensive) hymn, 'Gentle Woman,' there is a verse which is apt to make any member of the male 'species' roll his eyes:

'So estrogen can make you holy?' one priest wrote on his blog concerning that very line. While I agree with him concerning the puffed-up, anti-masculine sentiment the song implies, I winced at his language. Was he reducing womanhood to the hormones and chemicals that govern the characteristics of what it is physically to be female? Whether it is fitting for men to speak of their manhood in such a way is a matter that men must settle, but civilized instinct indicates that just as the reproductive organs of a woman are veiled within her flesh, so should her womanhood be veiled in discourse.


However, the flesh is fallen, and is it not wrong to put a sinful creature on a pedestal? For whether purer than man or not, she is fallen, and eaten up with her peculiar tendencies towards vice. Perhaps attendance at church is mostly made up of women, but when women take control of the liturgy, does it not often give way to hysteria, irreverence, or even spiritual prostitution? Priestesses have always been either possessed virgins or temple harlots, and they had one unifying principle: they were vessels for either gods or demons, not promoters of morality or ethics. More importantly, they were not 'givers of sacred things' as the sacerdotal title would imply. The postmodern, ahistorical attempt to revive paganism only confirms that notion.


All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Therefore, it would seem that no human being in a yet unbeatified state is to be venerated.

Sed Contra, the Gospels do not encourage us to judge. Christian tradition is to esteem one's self as the lowest of the low, which is really the only logical thing to do, for true self-knowledge will always give us cause for improvement. A traditional Catholic justly possesses the lowest opinion of the practice of taking Holy Communion in the hand, but he may not regard the Catholic who even carelessly drops the Host as less virtuous than he. Blessed Teresa of Calcutta says that one learns humility through humiliation. Elevating others at one's own expense can be a very good practice for cultivating that virtue.

Even Aristotle, who could not have foreseen the paradoxical and supernatural demands of Christian ethics, observed that a man possessed of one vice, must sometimes adopt the practice of the opposite vice in order to rescue himself from his own disposition. Alcoholics must become teatotallers, and those who have too severly abused their sexuality may have to practice celibacy for the duration of their lives. Praxis often entails actions not directly following from our rational code in order to produce the proper balance in the soul. 



I was six years old when watching a film where the heroine was said to be able 'to tread on cobwebs without breaking them.' I was ten years old when I began reading books in which the fair maidens almost universally could laugh 'like a silvery peal of music.' 'Really?' I wondered in genuine puzzlement, 'and I thought one was doing well not to sound like a braying ass when laughing heartily.' At fourteen, I came across a novel where the lady had sweet breath even after eating fish. It was not difficult to find similar hyperbolæ regarding their lovely and irresistible characters. By the time one is a teenager though, such metaphors and descriptions are a bit ridiculuous.

One's feelings towards glorifying the feminine, as in the examples cited above, do serve to steer a girl down the path of either the lady or the feminist, and a boy, down that of the gentleman or just simply, the male. 

I turned abruptly about face from the path of feminism at age thirteen for two reasons: the horrific moral evils the movement promotes, (e.g. abortion) and the fact that the major tenet of feminism is that women ought not to be expected to behave better than men. Females would no longer be martyrs in the home, and they would certainly not provide men with the example of spiritual submission, as St. Paul instructed them to. A wife to act as her husband's gentle counsellor? His conscience? No, indeed! 

I will feel equality has arrived when we can elect to office women who are as incompetent as some of the men who are already there. _Maureen Reagan

Only the modern era could produce a movement that would proudly espouse practical and moral evils as the fruits of its labours. No, a woman often does better in the role of Pontius Pilate's wife than that of Pilate himself.

Not to throw an ad hominem spear in the direction of feminists, but it seems all too often that they never learned to gently laugh at some of those poetic exagerrations mentioned above or to appreciate their sisters to whom these sayings were applied. Bitterness that one has not been worshipped as those women were worshipped is not good ground for any kind of ideology. There is a much better route to take.

Charles Dickens noted that there is a moral beauty which 'only exists in woman': that she is capable of loving in another that which she herself has never possessed. Women who dote on their lovelier, more talented, or more virtuous friends and sisters are examples of this. That affectionate, selfless virtue contra the vice of misogynistic, female envy are the two forces that form the feminine dichotomy between those who love the old notions of exalted womanhood and those who hate it.


And what of men who refuse to put women on a pedestal? As with feminists, there is occasionally an element of anger, though it might just as often arise from indifference. 

Concerning anger, it is not seemly in a man to growl on hearing a woman being praised, and anyone bearing witness to this rancour would immediately assume one of two causes: disappointment in love or overbearing women in his family. Neither of these are worthy things on which to base one's conduct.

As to indifference in men? That is another thing, especially concerning Eros, when one accepts the tenet that only what is truly known is truly loved. Ergo, 'love is blind' is patently false. A lady professor of mine once made the case that Shakespeare's sonnet, 130, in which he rather degrades the form and demeanour of his mistress, was a beautiful expression of realistic love. 

Yet, there was not one female or male in the class bereft of an arched eyebrow. While indeed it would be folly for the Bard to have painted 'roses damask'd' in his lover's cheeks when there were none, the subjectivity of love should have moved him to like her face as it was. Have not men who had always loved sapphire eyes turned their preference to emerald orbs on falling in love with a green-eyed woman?


Leaving aside romance however, perhaps indifference is more justified on the rational scale? After all, one cannot and should not be as devoted to all people as one is to one's spouse. Why should a man rise from his chair, because a skirted creature entered the room or kiss a hand because the owner is female? Why should he curb his language or speak more delicately just because a woman is in earshot? Why is she due any of his particular homage simply because she is the daughter of that first one who was made from a rib?


The answer is that (as science has even proven and continues to prove) the differences between men and women are indeed as psychically entrenched as they are physically. Placing the two genders in the natural world, without the artificial constructions of the postmodern order, woman is still a remarkable thing. She may not be as strong as man, but she is built to endure more, both in stamina of labour and in pain. She is eminently practical and useful, and in beayty, she is the climax of the symphony of Creation. Woman is the last thing God made, and He made her from the best of matter--the flesh and bone of a rational creature. 

Moving the argument again into the civilized realm where her beauty initially inspires poetry of the giddiest (and perhaps silliest) order, woman must also take up the more mundane duties of the home: 

It takes a woman all powdered and pink 
To joyously clean out the drain in the sink 
And it takes an angel with long golden lashes 
And soft dresden fingers 
For dumping the ashes... (Hello Dolly)


There is another paradox in woman that while she may inspire abstract ideals, she is often more fond of what is concrete. At least until some modernist gets a hold of her, women are more realistic than men:

Women are the only realists; their whole object in life is to pit their realism against the extravagant, excessive, and occasionally drunken idealism of men. _G. K. Chesterton


To inspire idealism and to ground the world in realism. What better alloy could there be in the metal of any creature?


It is in such an attitude as Chesterton's, romantic rationality, that allows one to see things in truth. To see something 'in truth' is farther than the seeming 'reality' of how it is and nearer than the chimeric ideal of how it ought to be. Balancing on the slender thread of this paradox allows one to pass over the offenses of a coarse, shrewish woman and treat every female as if she were a lady--to see Dulcinea in even the coarsest concierge. 

When a man moulds his thoughts and acts in this way, he works for the defeat of extreme feminism. For he renders unto women the appreciation they are not allowed to seek. The trials and sufferings of womanhood can only find their glory in silence. Whereas men are allowed to exalt in their victories, and society pays public homage to their entrance into manhood, a girl who takes up the burdens of womanhood must discreetly pass over the details. The male sex must take the female rite of passage for granted. If it does not, the postmodern era has shown us that women who are indignant enough will degrade themselves and their sisters by dragging womanliness and all its secrets into the public eye.


Such is the necessity of chivalry in man. In woman, it cultivates the attitude that will not only lead her towards striving for sainthood, but to secure the same for the men about her. When she says, 'I must act in this way, because it is the proper sphere of my sex. I must do this humble thing, because it is not a man's province. I must bear this suffering quietly because of Eve's curse. I must bend, because I am woman, and the Lord has asked this of me,' she steps on the head of the serpent that lured our first mother from her throne.

'Why do you always have to go around in a skirt?'

'I like them. They're comfy, more aesthetic, and less revealing than jeans at the length I wear them.'

'It makes people think you are judgemental when you never wear shorts or jeans, you know.'

'Maggie, have you considered that maybe they're judgemental for pronouncing me a Pharisee without even knowing my motivations?'

Maggie's eyes narrowed, and she put on her most compelling 'oh, come on' face. 'Rachel,' she said, 'You know that you're the one who's acting weird.'

One of the greatest charges that can be made against a principle or plan is its impracticability or likelihood of failure. No matter how just the cause, a war itself cannot be just if there is no chance of success for the right side. So it is with the concrete and with the abstract. Philosophy may involve love and reason, yet all who engage in the affair must follow the principle that love is not blind, but bound. The attachment of a philosopher to ideals that are pretty rather than possible is like a man loving a brunette for her golden hair. Truth that involves being played out in human acts must be able to be actualized. If Communism has still not produced the Workers' Paradise after decades of nearly free reign, one should toss out the vague notion of that paradise and not (as Communist dictators have so often done) the workers.

So it must be with modesty. Whether one has strong faith or simply strong ethics, modesty must be something women can practice, if it is the ideal way for a lady to clothe herself. Obviously, a woman is physically capable of wearing concealing clothes, but she is also physically capable of whacking herself in the head with a frying pan. What one can do with one's hands is not necessarily possible psychologically. So can a woman suppress the vanity urging her to flaunt her assets or her physical instinct to arouse a man's concupiscence? Those of faith answer yes. If she could not, scripture and tradition would not require it. However, proponents of rationalism or of faith seeking understanding cannot settle for the authoritative Sed Contra.

First, one must admit where promulgation of modesty seems to go wrong. Some women are very sensitive to the rebuke of people they respect, a fact which can be both a virtue and a vice. I was stung for a full week when, as a teenager, an elderly man rudely found fault with a skirt I wore at church which my parents had judged to be just fine. The fact that my family and his had no real acquaintance only made it worse. A lady standing nearby took up my defence, but I was left speechless. Some girls can indeed be cowed in this way and never think to question it, but when out of sight of the over-demanding puritan, most will resent his lack of kindness and dress in anyway they please. The minority of women still under his control will then shun the majority. Thus, modesty may become a scandal.

To avoid the typical confusion caused by equivocation, which so plagues modern disputation, these are the definitions of scandal as used in this article:

• (theology) Religious discredit; an act or behaviour which brings a religion into discredit.
  
• (theology) Something which hinders acceptance of religious ideas or behaviour; a stumbling-block or offense.

Before the defense started, I had been an absolute nervous wreck. The whole idea of my pitiful attempt to write a work of disciplined truth after years of being humbled by giants of thought seemed absolutely absurd and presumptuous, and I was reckoning on being showed as much in a painful manner as I was to defend my thesis before three of the college's doctors.

However, my self-consciousness and butterflies shrivelled up within moments after the defense commenced. The affair became as my advisor had said it would be: a conversation with three other people, and what's more, a conversation about a topic that had interested me very much. I was having a lot of fun before I knew it, when of the doctors nailed me with this question: 'So you argue that the practice of heroism is different for men and women. Is there then such a thing as masculine virtue and feminine virtue?'

I think all four of us smiled (as well as my one fellow student attending) at a question that was by now very sentimental. The Great Books program fittingly begins with Plato, and the first thing Thomas Aquinas College students read for philosophy was his dialogue, Meno. The person of Meno, serving as the omnipresent Lestrade/Watson to the Holmesian Socrates, stated that virtue was not only different for the two genders, but also the various walks of life in society:

Meno: There will be no difficulty, Socrates, in answering your question. Let us take first the virtue of a man - he should know how to administer the state, and in the administration of it to benefit his friends and harm his enemies... A woman's virtue...is to order her house, and keep what is indoors, and obey her husband. Every age, every condition of life, young or old, male or female, bond or free, has a different virtue: there are virtues numberless, and no lack of definitions of them; for virtue is relative to the actions and ages of each of us in all that we do. And the same may be said of vice, Socrates. (Plato, Meno, 71e, translated by Benjamin Jowett)

And so, along with the questions: 'What is a sign?' 'Is the wrath of Achilles justified?' et al., the idea of virtue being different for men and women is one of the first ideas TAC's pupils struggle with as freshmen, while the tutors preside reservedly over the debate. However, Socrates's opinion on the subject is unequivocal:

Meno: I am beginning to understand; but I do not as yet take hold of the question as I could wish.

Socrates: When you say, Meno, that there is one virtue of a man, another of a woman, another of a child, and so on, does this apply only to virtue, or would you say the same of health, and size, and strength? Or is the nature of health always the same, whether in man or woman?

Meno: I should say that health is the same, both in man and woman.....

....Socrates: Were you not saying that the virtue of a man was to order a state, and the virtue of a woman was to order a house?

Meno: I did say so.

Socrates: And can either house or state or anything be well ordered without temperance and without justice?....Then they who order a state or a house temperately or justly order them with temperance and justice?...Then both men and women, if they are to be good men and women, must have the same virtues of temperance and justice?.....
..... (ibid., 71e-73b)

Socrates then defines virtue/virtues differently from Meno, and he more explicity names the forms in the dialogue, Protagoras, giving us what we in the Western School call the cardinal virtues: justice, fortitude, temperance, and prudence. Since men and women both are virtuous in so far as they participate in these forms, there would be appear to be no such thing as masculine and feminine virtues, just as there is no difference between masculine and feminine health.

Yet, one is not 'wise, brave, sober, and just' by virtue of a single act, much less an abstract one, though it may correspond to the four pillars. A drunk who makes it home in a state of sobriety for but one night of the week is not temperant. Virtue, as Aristotle showed, must be a habit, and habits vary widely due to empirical realities. Type the term 'woman's health' into an internet search engine, and you will not receive the response, 'Silly fool! Health is the same for men and women!' Rather the results will literally number millions. While health, in the sense of 'the state of being free from illness or injury' (O.E.D.), is obviously the same for men and women, what defines that state positively--rather than negatively--may indeed vary.

Blood-pressure levels, susceptibility to alchohol (regardless of weight and size), immune system strength, nutritional needs, vulnerabilitiy to cancer and sexually-transmitted diseases all vary according to gender. Not only are different health habits necessary to maintain an ideal state, but the actual ratios determining the quality of health is different. Nature may be styled feminine, but she does not hear woman's roar.

My reply to the three tutors was far more meandering and fuzzy than the one I shall present, but in all honesty, I do not remember what I said five years ago: 'I think that there are two defininitions of virtue, the first being the form that we seek, and the second being the qualities in us that are disciplined to obtain it. For example, chastity is praised in both men and women by civlized societies. For men, the habit of this virtue indicates high-mindedness and self-mastery. For women, it indicates a constancy of the heart and a sense of modesty and self-worth.'


'Is it a requirement that men teach these habits to men and women teach them to women?' the same tutor asked.

I opened my mouth to agree, but closed it again (at least I hope I didn't leave it parted while I was thinking). I couldn't help but think of how modesty does not come to most girls naturally. A girl's first prerogative is to dress like her peers and in a way that makes her appear most beautiful and appealing. This is her instinct. While there is also a self-conscious instinct to veil her feminine shape as she buds into a woman, her inability to read the minds of males and the desire for masculine attention will erode this earlier bashfulness in time.

Even mothers naturally want their daughters to look pretty and to be successful in society. Only the wisest or the most pious, or saddest of all, the most experienced of women give serious thought to how males will react to their daughters' garb. Obviously, the women who envy their daughters' beauty and thus try to conceal it do not serve as examples of loving mothers who are trying to protect their children. The desire to cultivate true modesty comes from selfless virtue not selfish vice. However, two of the good qualities that make the mother fit to be a judge of appropriate clothing--barring ageless piety--are inaccessible to the young daughter.

It usually results that the father's word carries the most weight with his daughter about what she should wear, and his judgement is clearer and more focused than the mother's. He cares only for his child's dignity and safety, and provided that he holds the proper place as head of his home, he is the best teacher for his girl.

I said as much in my own clumsy way to the tutors at the defense. And I received this reply: 'So is modesty a masculine virtue then?' I felt like a Meno or one of the many Platonic strawmen at that moment, for I had not seen that bolt coming at all. Physical modesty seemed something so obviously belonging to the feminine (after all, when men wear revealing clothing, it repulses the onlooker). Yet, could it even exist if it did not concern men?

In the novel and film, Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim and Mike Newell respectively, there is a memorable scene at one of the exclusively female suppers:

Mrs. Fisher: That's a beautiful dress...
Caroline: No I've had it a hundred years.
Mrs. Fisher: ...but you must be very cold in it. Its easy to catch a chill here after dark. You look as if you had nothing on underneath.
Caroline: I haven't.

The matronly Mrs. Fisher is predictably horrified, while a third woman, Lottie observes that the fact can hardly be inappropriate as no men were about.

Perhaps those reading this post are rolling their eyes at this apparent conclusion, but in an age where many of us ladies resent or even bristle at the intrusion of male voices on feminine issues, it is important to note that modesty is a habit that cannot exclude male opinion. Men throughout the ages have been overly harsh, true, but it is often only because they credit women with telepathy. To a certain extent, we do have such an intuition and are aware of the reaction we engender in the opposite gender. Many women enjoy turning heads, but while they think they are provoking admiration or a light, flattering attraction, they may be arousing something much more ugly and even dangerous.

Therefore, when I come to the more practical application of modesty, I will not always be able to proceed rationally, as modesty is subjective to the reaction of men. Before someone thus objects: 'Wait, wait, wait! Some men will think dirty thoughts no matter what. Do we have to wear burkas?' don't be so hasty! As with all things, we must find the Golden Mean, and this will entail only considering the opinions of well-balanced, well-meaning people (e.g., not the tyrannical father or the prudish cleric), and one's own common sense and logic will definitely play a part.

However, a certain element of a woman's trust in a man's word is necessary for dressing with dignity. I once saw a skirt in a catalog I liked with a hemline stopping properly below the knee. At the bottom, there was a lovely pattern formed by holes cut out of the fabric in a lacy pattern. My mother said the skirt however was immodest, not because of actual exposure, but because of its 'peekaboo' appeal.

One of my sisters refused to accept the theory as having any weight in reality, so an argument ensued. It ended with 'wait until your father comes home,' and all agreed that his say would be the final verdict. He soon came in with bleach in one hand and laundry detergent in the other. Without giving him any background concerning the argument, my mother showed him the picture and asked him what he thought of the garment. 'Slut,' he said laconically and went back to the car to get the rest of the groceries.

What can be said? Sometimes experienced people are actually knowledgable, and men occasionally even know their own gender!

A Victorian lady once said that a woman who could not control her husband’s vote ought to be ashamed of herself. The reaction such a statement would elicit in a crowd of modern women is no mystery to anyone. The idea of feminine submission or even the use of subterfuge over force is so distasteful to women of the Left (and in parts of the Right) that they cannot tuck their abhorrence in for a moment on hearing it. This burst of emotion is very telling, and it reveals that what liberated women hate most intensely is not men per se, but the mystique of woman and the duties it entails.

It is worthwhile to look at feminine archetypes a moment, and gauge the reaction of womankind to such characters. One such type is the 'faërie princess,' a lovely ideal that adores her husband after being caught, is his intellectual inferior—yet cultivated enough to please him—and also inexplicably heroic in the face of suffering on his behalf and that of her children. Needless to say this image produces a great deal of sneering from both sexes for many reasons, but let us look at how one great female author viewed this archetype.

On perusing Middlemarch, the politically correct reader may find himself/herself bristling at Dr. Lydgate’s rather patronizing view of women. George Eliot probably did not expect such a reaction—or at least such a strong one—in her readers at the time. Even her friend and colleague, Anthony Trollope, espoused such views of women according to both his stories and his personal letters. In fact, looking at Eliot’s doctor through the lens of her period, he very aptly personifies (in a far more compelling way than Dorothea) the erstwhile great man doomed to unconsummated genius by the pettiness of the small people encompassing him.

Eliot probably intended Lydgate’s dismissal of women as the one flaw Aristotle requires in his definition of a tragedy. This 'flaw' is a blemish that may ruin a man, but must be forgivable, otherwise his downfall obviously will not be sorrowful, but celebrated. One may argue whether that theory covers all possibilities of tragedy, but Eliot undoubtedly believed it did, as she carried out the principle’s requirements to the letter in her The Mill on the Floss. She did so much so that many have said the ending was quite forced.

Lydgate certainly reaps every imaginable woes sewn by his condescension, as Oedipus reaped those of his rage, and both fell due to their wives. The spouse Eliot gives the idealistic doctor drives him towards professional misery and financial ruin with more tenacity than all three of the Greek Furies combined.

...how far he had travelled from his old dreamland, in which Rosamond Vincy appeared to be that perfect piece of womanhood who would reverence her husband's mind after the fashion of an accomplished mermaid, using her comb and looking-glass and singing her song for the relaxation of his adored wisdom alone….There was gathering within him an amazed sense of his powerlessness over Rosamond. His superior knowledge and mental force, instead of being, as he had imagined, a shrine to consult on all occasions, was simply set aside on every practical question. _George Eliot, Middlemarch

Lydgate had found his ideal woman in Rosamond Vincy. Beautiful, mild-tempered, accomplished, and charming. The only flaw in her adorable person is that she has no soul whatsoever. She is wholly materialistic, manipulative, and sinfully reckless of the health and wellbeing of others.

How delightful to make captives from the throne of marriage with a husband as crown-prince by your side - himself in fact a subject - while the captives look up forever hopeless, losing their rest probably, and if their appetite too, so much the better! _ibid.

Though Lydgate in the end bears all the suffering for his marital folly (his self-seeking wife breaks him and his dreams to conform to her wishes); which of the two as a literary character is condemned to fictional perdition by the omniscient reader?

Rosamond is most certainly the object of Eliot’s scorn, not Lydgate with whom she herself seems to be in love. Miss Vincy is mocked unceasingly in the tale by the likable, sensible Mary Garth, who never has a good word for her. Mary never once recollects some moment where Rosamond did something sweet for her, or shared something with her, or sided with her. One cannot live as sisters or cousins in one unmitigated round of scorn and rivalry, but in their case, this seems to be so.

The masculine world Eliot is so apt to satirize is of course infatuated with Miss Vincy. Her brother Fred, being a man who cannot have any romantic interest in her, is the only male character that sees through her from beginning to end. Will Ladislaw, who discovers what Rosamond truly is later, is also disgusted with her character.

As the omniscient one, Eliot herself certainly spares no pains in taking sides in her narrative. When it appears that Lydgate may have slipped her nets, and that she is not to marry him after all, the author likens her to Ariadne. For the briefest moment, Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne comes to mind. The sickened, chilled feeling of the abandoned woman, deserted by the man whom she herself had rescued from the labyrinth, gasping in horror at the sight of the disembarking ship, her clothes in disarray from sleep, grip the heart with sympathy. But it is not Titian’s Ariadne Eliot refers to, but a ‘charming stage Ariadne left behind with all her boxes.’

H. L. Mencken defined a misogynist as: 'A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.' Apparently he never encountered real sisters. Of course this opinion is to be discounted—the reasoning behind all broad sweeping statements are suspect—but there is some truth in the pithy witticism. Female rivalry does occasionally exist, and most bitterly where it concerns men.

George Eliot betrays herself in The Mill on the Floss in a conversation between the lovely, brunette heroine, Maggie, and her informal tutor, Philip:

I'm determined to read no more books where the blond haired women carry away all the happiness. I should begin to have a prejudice against them - If you could give me some story, now, where the dark woman triumphs, it would restore the balance - I want to avenge Rebecca and Flora Mac-Ivor, and Minna and all the rest of the dark unhappy ones. _Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

Maggie most certainly, albeit unintentionally, accomplishes this vengeance and to the ruin of all, in accordance with the tragedy that Eliot stated she wished to write.

Even without an angry woman authoring it, it is often very difficult at times to enjoy the fae beauties in other stories and through other media. 'New women' so often eviscerate the heroines, especially in opera. Again, let us narrow the field and take the example of the popular Tosca, who is dismissed as ‘a 19th-century male construct, a fantasy of the perfect female artist, as free and exciting in bed as she is on the stage’ (http://www.ylle.com/sites/sfopera/html/tosca_-_article.htm)

Some feminist critics take a fiendish delight that Mario’s macho enjoyment of a woman pathologically obsessed with him is what de facto accomplishes his death, while others such as the author of the above quotation, more magnanimously observe:

One hundred years ago, a beautiful hysteric may have been an acceptable sex object; today, not even the most entrenched chauvinist would want to date a dame who carries on as Tosca sometimes does. _Stephanie Von Buchau

Now why does it not occur to Ms. Von Buchau that Tosca, whom the author is aware is very religious, is tormented by the guilt of an extramarital liaison? ‘She hides nothing from her confessor’ so it is obvious that her confessor, unless he is a complete heterodox, has been telling her to give Mario up. Being the sort of passionate creature that seizes every opportunity to delight others, she would hide this misgiving from an atheist who, being also a devotee of Rousseau, thinks their affair is natural and perhaps even preferable to a Church witnessed union.

Then of course the fact that Mario is not bound to his dark Floria by any religious, social, or philosophical, principle renders the woman (and so many women sharing her circumstances) insecure to a fateful extreme. If Tosca’s hysteria is the reason for the opera’s tragic outcome, all who provoked it should have a share in the blame, but feminists only blame the woman for acting on her feminist instincts. In literature, film, and song, the same pattern repeats itself--scorn is poured on the woman that dares to have succeeded in feminine mystique.

Flitting from the Left to the Right, Laura Schlessinger is unambiguously anti-woman in her stance against the feminine. Instead of taking a balanced view of the good and bad in both sexes and their qualities, she essentially sides with the male. She agrees with feminists concerning what the best things in life are (careers, ambitions, etc.), but she thinks women are to blame for not dominating in them as men do. Henry Higgins monologue from the musical My Fair Lady, ‘Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?’ is her anthem. Many other women cut from her cloth also disdain feminine fluff and intone that women deserve to be subjected to man, as if as a punishment for their emotional irrationality.

When participating in the annual March for Life in San Francisco, I found that the middle-aged women who came to chide, insult, and occasionally scream at us, focused on the females in the group the most. Pro-life women are traitors after all, choosing sexual imprisonment over the extinction of another being’s life. Were the issue not so grave, it would have been comically ironic the way some brushed their right index finger over their left and schoolmarmishly said, ‘Shame on you!’ No doubt Maureen Dowd wears an expression of matronly disappointment every time she sees a woman wearing a shirt with ‘MRS.’ girlishly sequined across it.

In spite of all the ill feeling liberated women express against men and masculinity, one really ought not to take it seriously. As soon as men give these women what they want, they are more than forgiven for their gender. As a former Times contributor, Nina Burleigh said of Bill Clinton:

‘I would be happy to give him a b------ just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs.’

This from a member of the same party that applauds itself on ending sexual exploitation of women!

It is not man that the new woman abominates, but woman. When the pyschiatrist, Karl Stern, wrote his epic work, The Flight from Woman, he naturally centred on men who despised the womanly, but he also spoke of women who abominated anything traditionally or 'stereotypically' feminine:

The female counterpart to all this (i.e., the uber masculine male) is frequently encountered today in the woman who finds it difficult to accept her womanly role. This is quite independent of the injustices imposed on women in many societies: it is rather an over-evaluation of masculine achievement and a debasement of values which one commonly associates with the womanly...an aping of man. (Karl Stern, The Flight From Woman: Introduction, paranthetical note and emphasis is mine)

That abhorrence of the womanly much the same feeling the independent, pragmatic Laura Cheveley bears for Gertrude Chiltern in Wilde’s An Ideal Husband. For it is not Robert Chiltern, but his wife and her old schoolmate that Mrs. Cheveley actually despises: ‘I hate her. I hate her now more than ever.’ (Act III) Yet, even Lady Chiltern is not the real object of scorn, but the morality the woman represents. It is not so much the women of the past and the ‘young fogeys’ of today that feminists dislike, but the duties that imitating them entails. And what exactly are those duties?