There is a piece entitled "Letter to a Good Man" on a blog I follow written by SHD. In it, he lauds the efforts of the ideal man, should he still exist in this world, and laments his destruction at the hands of our current culture. The piece is exquisite and brings to light any number of factors that will come against a man attempting to live up to this expectation, which has quite likely surpassed realism and entered the realm of the imagined.
While the death of the good man is surely a great loss for which society should drip in remorse, I wonder what standards have been set and violated for the good woman. The image of the upstanding, generous, brave and faultless man has always been accompanied by that of the gracious, accommodating, dependent, and unmarred woman. Tradition dictates that she is a nurturer, supporter and the base of the home or any such establishment. She is faithful to a fault and stellar with a pot and needle. She may be intelligent or dim, but she is wise in the ways of the considerate.
Ultimately, she is property. The kaleidoscope of cultures we inhabit has varied in colour and intensity over time. I like to consider civilizations like the ancient Nubians, Romans, Egyptians and Hittites as deep, but vibrant tones, waging war and conquering their enemies. The ancient world was full of strong cultures and equally strong personalities. As such, a dominant woman was not such an unsightly image, whether as mother, queen or goddess. Queen Hatshepsut of the 18th dynasty of Ancient Egypt, for example, is considered one of the first great women of documented history, a remarkable pharaoh in her own right and buried in the Valley of the Kings. Though she was not the first queen to assume the role of pharaoh, she seems to have been the most successful. However, there is a reason she is known as "the Queen who would be King". She embodied the role and donned the attire of a pharaoh, distinctly not a simple queen who stood as the overwhelming beauty in the shadow of her husband. This is not to rob anything from Nefertiti or Nefertari, who were great women as well. The fact is, they were spouses, and the known world never forgot it. History is not completely certain of how Hatshepsut seized the throne or how she came to lose it, but what was certain for a long time was the soap opera that was her life. Of course, for a man this soap opera is a tale with which one regales the ears of the ages. For a woman, it is a stain. That is why Cleopatra is often considered a harlot who slept and pillow-talked her way to the top, rather than an intellectual of high standing who used cunning to maneouver an intricate and venomous political system.
I digress. This post is not a feminist rant about the fight for dominance of women. I often think, though, on how feminism has mangled Woman. Woman is no longer obligated to care for those around her as she once was. She no longer needs to be chef extraordinaire, as it is adequate to be an aficionado of the tin can. Woman needs no longer to be well spoken, rounded, groomed, or mannered in the sense that she once was. Instead, she can be as crass as a sailor and disheveled as a decrepit building. Woman now strives to not simply become Man, but usurp the authority with which history has bestowed him and beat him into sniveling submission.
I have no quarrel with Woman in her quest for equality, vindication and acknowledgement for the things she does. I have those same goals and am inclined to crave dominance myself. I, too, believe that the concept of a woman being more credible and stable if she is tied to a man is farcical. There are many single women who are stable, considerate people, and many attached women, whether to husband or Jesus, who should get a slap in the head for being as insufferable as they are. At some point, being a woman took a turn for the vicious and the world will suffer for it.
As SHD says of the good man in his piece, the good woman will also be maimed by those of us who believe that independence and vindication call for the garb of the caring woman to be shed (both figuratively and literally). She will also be emotionally assaulted by the men of today, who feel that she is a puppeteer. They will see her attempts to embrace and protect them in her heart as a sign that later she will wound them in their beds. They will smother her in the pus of the expectation that has festered in their souls from being discarded by real and imagined pin up girls. She will gain a pound here and a wrinkle there and these trophies of the full life she has lived will be the cues for society to strip her status as 'beauty' from her. Those of us who have hardened our own souls to the lace-lined frills of weakness will deal the final strike, and watch her as she leaks her last breath with furrowed brow and quivering lip.
We have already slaughtered much of the
good in this world. We will continue to believe that it is because the
face of good has somehow changed. Decency does not morph with time. It
is no different now than it was in the ancient world. The day that our
amnesia is lifted may be the day we regain a modicum of hope.
the woman who proved to me that you can still be a lady in a man's suit
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