E—:‘But it follows that the bigger the feminist, the more grateful and dependent she’s going to be after you’ve ridden in on your white charger and relieved her of responsibility.’
K—:‘What I disagree with is the so-called. I don’t believe that today’s feminists are being consciously insincere in all their talk about autonomy. Just as I don’t believe they’re strictly to blame for the terrible bind they’ve found themselves in. Though deep down I suppose I do have to agree that women are historically ill-equipped for taking genuine responsibility for themselves.’
Q.
E—:‘I don’t suppose either of you saw where the Little Wranglers’ room was in this place.’
K—:‘I don’t mean that in any kind of just-another-Neanderthal-male-grad-student-putting-down-women-because-he’s-too-insecure-to-countenance-their-sexual-subjectivity way. And I’d go to the wall to defend them against scorn or culpability for a situation that is clearly not their fault.’
E—:‘Because it’s getting to be time to answer nature’s page if you know what I mean.’
K—:‘I mean, even simply looking at the evolutionary aspect, you have to agree that a certain lack of autonomy-slash-responsibility was an obvious genetic advantage as far as primitive human females went, since a weak sense of autonomy would drive a primitive female toward a primitive male to provide food and protection.’
E—:‘While your more autonomous, butch-type female would be out hunting on her own, actually competing with the males for food.’
K—:‘But the point is that it was the less self-sufficient less autonomous females who found mates and bred.’
E—:‘And raised offspring.’
K—:‘And thus perpetuated the species.’
E—:‘Natural selection favored the ones who found mates instead of going out hunting. I mean, how many cave-paintings of female hunters do you ever see?’
K—:‘Historically, we should probably note that once the quote-unquote weak female has mated and bred, she shows an often spectacular sense of responsibility where her offspring are concerned. It’s not that females have no capacity for responsibility. That’s not what I’m talking about.’
E—:‘They do make great moms.’
K—:‘What we’re talking about here is single adult preprimipara females, their genetic-slash-historical capacity for autonomy, for as it were self-responsibility, in their dealings with males.’
E—:‘Evolution has bred it out of them. Look at the magazines. Look at romance novels.’
K—:‘What today’s woman wants, in short, is a male with both the passionate sensitivity and the deductive firepower to discern that all her pronouncements about autonomy are actually desperate cries in the wilderness of the double bind.’
E—:‘They all want it. They just can’t say it.’
K—:‘Putting you, today’s interested male, in the paradoxical role of almost their therapist or priest.’
E—:‘They want absolution.’
K—:‘When they say “I am my own person,” “I do not need a man,” “I am responsible for my own sexuality,” they are actually telling you just what they want you to make them forget.’
E—:‘They want to be rescued.’
K—:‘They want you on one level to wholeheartedly agree and respect what they’re saying and on another, deeper level to recognize that it’s total horseshit and to gallop in on your white charger and overwhelm them with passion, just as males have been doing since time immemorial.’
E—: ‘That’s why you can’t take what they say at face value or it’ll drive you nuts.’
K—:‘Basically it’s all still an elaborate semiotic code, with the new postmodern semions of autonomy and responsibility replacing the old premodern semions of chivalry and courtship.’
E—:‘I really do have to see a man about a prancing pony.’
K—:‘The only way not to get lost in the code is to approach the whole issue logically. What is she really saying?’
E—:‘No doesn’t mean yes, but it doesn’t mean no, either.’
K—:‘I mean, the capacity for logic is what distinguished us from animals to begin with.’
E—:‘Which, no offense, but logic’s not exactly a woman’s strong suit.’
K—:‘Although if the whole sexual situation is illogical, it hardly makes sense to blame today’s woman for being weak on logic or for giving off a constant barrage of paradoxical signals.’
E—:‘In other words, they’re not responsible for not being responsible, K—’s saying.’
K—:‘I’m saying it’s tricky and difficult but that if you use your head it’s not impossible.’
E—:‘Because think about it: if it was really impossible where would the whole species be?’
K—:‘Life always finds a way.’
TRI-STAN: I SOLD SISSEE NAR TO ECKO
The fuzzy Hensonian epiclete Ovid the Obtuse, syndicated chronicler of trans-human entertainment exchange in low-cost organs across the land, mythologizes the origins of the ghostly double that always shadows human figures on UHF broadcast bands thus:
There moved & shook, Before Cable, a wise & clever programming executive named Agon M. Nar. This Agon M. Nar was revered throughout medieval California’s fluorescent basin for the clever wisdom & cojones with which he presided over Recombinant Programming for the Telephemus Studios division of Tri-Stan Entertainment Unltd. Agon M. Nar’s programming archē was the metastasis of originality. He could shuffle & recombine proven entertainment formulae that allowed the muse of Familiarity to appear cross-dressed as Innovation. Agon M. Nar was also a devoted family man. & so it came to pass that, as his Brady Bunch & All in the Family flourished & begat Family Ties & Diff’rent Strokes & Gimme a Break & Who’s the Boss? from whose brows, hydra-like, sprang Webster & Mr. Belvedere & Growing Pains & Married…With Children & Life Goes On & the mythic Cosby, all with ads infinitum, Agon M. Nar in private family life did beget three semi-independent vehicles, daughters, maidens, Leigh & Coleptic & Sissee, who did then grow & thrive like kudzu among the fluorescent basin’s palms & malls & beaches & temples.
So favored was Agon M. Nar, industry legend had it, by company CEOs Stanley, Stanley & Stanley, as well as by Stasis, God of Passive Reception himself, & too so blest with savvy, that by the time his three lovely maidens — whom he now saw & adored every third weekend — had undergone their first Surgical Enhancements, Agon M. Nar had actually vanquished the esurient, heavy-hitting & high-profile Reggie Ecko of Venice as Recombinant Head of all Tri-Stan, R. Ecko of V. falling then gently back to the basin’s pastel earth, deposed & just royally pissed, under a parachute’s aegis of golden silk.
& Agon M. Nar administered Tri-Stan Entertainment’s affairs wisely & cleverly indeed; &, as is recorded, recombinations of derivations of ripoffs of spin-offs of pale imitations came to dominate & soothe the formerly chaotic MHz, Before Cable.
& while recombination as ēthos metastasized, soothed, & remunerated across the pink-orange landscape of medieval CA, Agon M. Nar’s unattested daughters blossomed into nymphetitude. Ever farsighted, Agon M. Nar wisely provided for monthly tribute to the fluorescent basin’s God of Surgical Enhancement, the spherically crispate & sartorially retrograde but plasticly facile Herm (‘Afro’) Deight MD, he of the plaid bellbottoms & lavender smock; & H.(‘A.’)D.MD, G. of S.E., well pleased at such tribute, fashioned Agon M. Nar’s daughters into nymphets far, far lovelier than the stony vicissitudes of Nature would have provided solo. Nature was a bit honked off over this, but she had more than enough on her plate in medieval CA already. Anyway, Leigh & Coleptic Nar eventually blossomed into USC cheerleaders, post-vestal attendants at the Saturday temple of the padded gods Ra & Sisboomba; on their subsequent careers Ovid the Obtuse is mute.