“You can’t? What the hell do you mean?”
“I’m impotent.”
“You weren’t impotent a minute ago!”
“It comes and goes!”
“You bastard!”
“Don’t curse at me, lady. It’s your fault. You acted like you were frigid.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“It excited me."
“My being frigid excited you?”
“Yeah.”
“Well what unexcited you?”
“You stopped being frigid.”
“Damn! I forgot! Because I was hot, you know. But look, I’ll be frigid again. Right now. See how frigid I am‘? Get your hands off me. I can't bear to be touched!”
“It’s no good,” Archer told her. “I don’t believe you anymore. And you don’t excite me.”
“Then get the hell out of here!”
“Why?”
“So I can masturbate, dammit!”
Archer left.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Woodrow Wilson was elected president on his campaign promise to keep America out of war. Subsequently he went before the Congress and asked for and received the Declaration of War which plunged the U.S. into the European holocaust. Adolf Hitler, publicly agreeing the German military strategists about the inadvisability of fighting on two fronts, signed a nonaggression pact with Stalin. Subsequently he reneged on the pact and the German Army was embroiled in the disaster of a two-front conflict. President Eisenhower decided that it was not in the American interest to fight a land war in Southeast Asia. Subsequently he backed up just such an involvement in Vietnam because it was in the national interest. Lyndon Johnson beat Barry Goldwater with the promise that American forces would not be committed in large numbers in Vietnam. Subsequently he committed over half a million troops to that fray at a cost of over 40,000 American lives.
Changing her mind, the saying has it, is a woman’s prerogative. The inference is that it’s a female characteristic. The evidence? Help a lady arrange furniture. Tag along when she selects a new hat. Count the numbers of lady drivers who signal left and turn right. When a lady changes her mind, the presumption is that she’s “doing her thing”--and the presumption has a built-in snicker. On the other hand, as the previous paragraph demonstrates, men also change their minds—-powerful men whose changes of mind affect the destinies of millions. But of course men don’t do it on frivolous impulse. Do they? Men weigh alternatives and consequences very carefully. Don’t they? You can’t really equate a decision to move the piano from one wall to another and back again with a decision to stay out of war followed by a decision to declare war. Can you? . . . Well, can you? . . .
In any case, women have few enough prerogatives all their own. Let’s leave them that one. Okay, fellas? Okay. Changing her mind is still a woman’s prerogative . . .
So Llona trotted out the prerogative and changed her mind. She changed her mind because she’d had a change of heart. Llona‘s change of heart followed a conversation with Neva Holdkumb which was preceded by a call from Iceberg to Neva in which Iceberg related her experience with Archer and threw in the towel on any future bouts with Llona’s husband. Neva passed on the details to Llona.
After Llona hung up the telephone, she sat down and made a conscious effort to think things through. It was true that Archer had cheated on her with at least one girl, and had attempted to break his marriage vows with another. It was true that such duplicity entitled Llona to revenge. The question was, did she really—deep down— feel that vegeance was a desirable end.
Llona sighed to herself. Her time was growing short. Was she really so sure she wanted to bequeath Archer a legacy of misery?
Llona was a sensitive girl. She could empathize with what Archer must be feeling after his latest sexual fiasco. She could see it in his face as he dragged around the house. He was a beaten man. As much as she could justify his punishment to herself, Llona nevertheless was forced to admit that it made her feel guilty.
Was Archer’s crime really so great that he deserved the penalty of lifelong suffering? Llona decided that it wasn't. In spite of everything, she loved him. And so she turned herself around and went back to her original resolution. She would still try to find a wife for Archer, a successor to herself, since he was so obviously incapable of taking care of himself. But she would no longer emphasize the punitive effects of the successor. With what time she had left, Llona decided to find someone for Archer who would make his life happy, someone who might even restore his manhood to him.
Having reached this decision, Llona felt better. But she had reckoned without that old basic law of physics and human relations: a force set in motion tends to stay in motion. Llona had told the complete truth about both her own doomed condition and Archer’s unfaithfulness. And Llona had asked Olivia to help her arrange Archer’s future to insure a maximum of suffering.
This had slipped Llona’s mind, but it hadn’t gone out of Olivia’s. It was just the kind of anti-husband situation Olivia took pleasure in getting her ersatz dentures into. So while Llona was reversing herself, Olivia was just geting up steam preparatory to charging full speed ahead, straight toward a metaphorical Archer tethered to the railroad tracks.
At first Olivia only had a vague desire to help Llona. But the vague desire took on the form of planned strategy a couple of weeks after she became aware of Llona’s situation. That was the night Olivia attended—as she did once every month—-the regular meeting of the Castrators’ Defense League and made the acquaintance of Senorita Marguerita Penibita.
Olivia’s membership in the Castrator’s Defense League was a natural extension of her marriage to Archer’s cousin Mortimer. Without going into too many of the details, Mortimer was a jerk. What’s more, he was a bigoted jerk. He hated blacks, Jews, Italians, Greeks, the Irish, Orientals of every ilk, Indians--both American and Asian —Poles, Germans, and Eskimos. But most of all he was prejudiced against women. Being married to one, he naturally zeroed in on Olivia as the target of this prejudice. Pushed to the wall by daily lectures on her inferiority, Olivia joined the Castrators’ Defense League for just that—defense—self-defense.
The Castrators’ Defense League was a splinter group which had broken off from WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), an ultramilitant group in the over-all Women’s Liberation Movement which evolved from the work of Betty Friedan. To understand the position of the Castrators’ Defense League, it’s necessary to take a look at some of the in-fighting which continues to fragment the Women's Liberation Movement. In 1963, following the publication of The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) dedicated to obtaining equal rights for females. In 1968, an organization calling itself Feminists broke off from NOW because they felt it wasn’t radical enough. From this initial fragmentation evolved such groups as the Redstockings, the Women’s Radical Action Project (WRAP), WITCH, and others.
WITCH is dedicated to an extremely hard line. The girls who join participate in karate classes, burn their bras, stage protests against such things as beauty contests and the Playboy philosophy, recruit topless dancers to press home their point that women have as much right to bare their chests as men do, distribute threatening handbills to men (i.e., “Watch out! You may meet a real castrating female!”) and generally take the tack that no oppressed woman can feel truly liberated until she has tasted the blood of at least one of her male oppressors. WITCH also takes an anti-sexual view, encouraging its members to eschew sexual relations with men on the grounds that the women are always-—inevitably in this male-dominated society — exploited in such erotic relationships. This has led some of WITCH’s critics to accuse the female members of Lesbianism. The charge is unfounded. They simply adopt an asexual stance until such time as they attain at least an equal degree of control (and some WITCHES insist on superior control) during the sex act.