Image via TalkingPointsMemo.

Part 1: Massachusetts Senate Candidate Elizabeth Warren stupidly declared that unlike her opponent, incumbent Sen. Scott Brown, she didn't pay for college by posing naked (for Cosmopolitan back when the magazine published monthly nude male pinups.)

Part 2: When asked by a talk-show host whether he had "officially responded to Elizabeth Warren’s comment about how she didn’t take her clothes off?" Brown stupidly laughed and said “Thank God!"

What. Ever.

A couple things here. First of all, if Elizabeth Warren used as many cosmetics as Scott Brown she'd be as conventionally attractive. This isn't a knock on Brown, but it's not a knock on Warren either. Cosmetics are a choice. They can have a profound effect on our appearance even though they make no difference in our abilities to function.* Brown has generally chosen one way, Warren another. Both are petty to have brought it up.

Second, fuck Warren for trying to slut-shame Brown!

Third, fuck Brown for slamming Warren's potential sex appeal!

Since both present entirely within generally-accepted parameters for life in contemporary culture it's none of one's businesses either how the other chooses to present nor is it anyone's business how the rest of the general public ought to interpret their choices.

Oh, and fourth, the role reversals -- Elizabeth Warren playing the "dismissive male" with her disapproval of frivolity and Scott Brown playing the "compromised but prideful ingénue" with his arch riposte is just too precious for words.

And finally? Fifthly? Good for Brown for posing naked for beefcake photos in a national magazine at a time when there was tremendous pressure on men to gaze rather than be gazed upon. And for similar reasons good for Warren for putting accomplishment ahead of appearance. Each played then, and to a certain extent could play now, an important role in breaking through centuries of gendered expectations... but by now fishtailing past each other like Boston drivers in snow they're not helping anybody.

Note: Image and all quotes taken from TalkingPointsMemo.com.

* Well, technically it can make a difference in terms our our ability to "psyche" ourselves. For instance an always-meticulous editor I used to work with (not as a writer) always wore a precisely tailored suit, tie, and polished shoes on the days he did his final edits. His argument was that dressing extra carefully helped him work extra carefully. But I digress...

I'm usually pretty sanguine about the sort of harmless verbal tics that drive people to file complaints with the grammar police. Autumn Whitefield-Madrano tackles one of the few that really sticks in my craw.

Inevitably, when I hear the word female repeatedly used as a noun in speech, it’s either from someone who isn’t used to talking about sex and gender issues (in which case I try to look past it, assuming the person is in good faith)—or, more frequently, from a card-carrying misogynist who, intentionally or not, manages to make every utterance of female sound like he’s spitting directly onto our collective ovaries.

Source: Feministe

"Man" and "Woman" are nouns. "Male" and "Female" are adjectives. Whitefield-Madrano makes a pretty good case for why it's not just a grammar issue, it's a respect/contempt issue.

She cites some pretty hard-to-blame-on-Gloria-Steinem sources to back it up.

“Why should a woman be degraded from her position as a rational being, and be expressed by a word which might belong to any animal tribe?” wrote critic Henry Alford in 1866. The Oxford English Dictionary is more succinct on the matter: “Now commonly avoided by good writers, exc. with contemptuous implication.”

What really grates is when someone says "men" and "females," as nouns, in the same sentence. Of course that gate swings both ways -- when you hear someone say "women" and "males" in the same sentence you can be pretty confident that the hate men every bit as much as those who say "females" hate women.

Whitefield-Madrano does make a mild attempt to "rehabilitate" the word "female," pointing out that etymologically speaking "female" is not a derivation of "male" the way "woman" is derived from "man." Furthermore, the earliest versions of "female," "femella" and "femelle" not only emerged separately (the corresponding word for "man" was "masculus") it originally designated human women and was extended to other species only much later.

Fun stuff. Anyway. Good guideline to follow: directly indicating men or women as "males" and "females" is a pretty good clue to your misogyny and/or misandry. Fine if you're not ashamed to advertise it. But if you do it you are advertising it.

Following up on Anders Behring Breivik's murderous "implementation" of conservative dogma Echidne says

I have written about the odd bargain the race-war conservatives offer women: You can submit to us or you can submit to the new Muslim overlords! In either case, your place in the society is to obey a man and to have many, many children if your lord and master so decrees.

Source: Echidne of the Snakes

Meanwhile, what percentage, exactly, of men are actually qualified as opposed to divinely ordained to have that kind of dominion over the average woman? And what's the assessment of those women who perforce (since all women must submit to somebody) are saddled with men who simply aren't qualified to "dominion" their own lives, let alone anyone elses? I mean, it it "inconthevable" as Vinzzini puts it? Cost of doing business? Them's the breaks? Look the other way? Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out? I mean, what?

Anyone care to guess just how repulsive I find the idea of either holding dominion or being held under it?

The thousands of years old principle defined most concretely by the English Common Law concept of coverture, which the legendary jurist William Blackstone defined thusly:

"By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing; and is therefore called in our law-French a feme-covert; is said to be covert-baron, or under the protection and influence of her husband, her baron, or lord; and her condition during her marriage is called her coverture. Upon this principle, of a union of person in husband and wife, depend almost all the legal rights, duties, and disabilities, that either of them acquire by the marriage. I speak not at present of the rights of property, but of such as are merely personal. For this reason, a man cannot grant any thing to his wife, or enter into covenant with her: for the grant would be to suppose her separate existence; and to covenant with her, would be only to covenant with himself: and therefore it is also generally true, that all compacts made between husband and wife, when single, are voided by the intermarriage."

Source: Wikipedia and myriad others.

Yikes! The rest of this post is a rumination of the consequences of that.

Fun story: Almost 25 years ago now one friend in a long-term committed relationship broke up with her absolutely marvelous-in-almost-all-ways partner.

Why says we, he's almost perfect? True says she, but I just have a feeling this isn't it. But he's devilishly handsome says we. True, says she. He has that sailboat and that vintage Triumph motorcycle says we. True again, says she, but he's still not it. But he's smart, funny, extraordinarily considerate! He's finishing his engineering degree and firms are falling all over themselves to hire him. You've been together for years and still seem incredibly compatible. And he's still crazy about you! I know, I know, and I love him too but none the less, said she, I just don't feel like this is "it."

And so on she moved. And the only reason he wasn't immediately in one, or two, or a dozen new relationships with any of the 31,000 presentable but unpartnered women in Seattle is that he was completely devastated and preferred to quietly mourn rather than move on.

Though move on of course he eventually did. And met a marvelous woman for whom he was "it," and the two have been fast, faithful friends, lovers, partners, and parents together ever since.

Meanwhile our friend who left him actively rattled around the date-o-sphere, plunged into her advanced degree program, ran through a succession of not all that fulfilling relationships (including one rising star who turned out to be a closet domestic abuser) and maybe five years later met a marvelous man who was "it" for her and the two have been fast, faithful friends, lovers, partners, and parents together ever since.

From the outside, anyway, I really couldn't tell you why one wasn't "it" but the other was. Why she would have felt she was "settling" for one but not the other.

I mention this for a couple of reasons. First, because of my friend's seemingly daft feeling that her partner wasn't "it" because she thought there should be "something more." Second, because of my other friend's equally daft feeling that having lost true love he could never love, or be loved, again.

---

Two of the most dangerous stereotypes in relationships are

• true love waits and I shall never love again. They both really distract from and otherwise interfere with our actual relationships.

"Is this it?" Where "it" is something like that one truest, most fulfilling, most completing love thing. Asking yourself "is this it" also disrupts actual relationships.

"I shall never love again" is extraordinarily common for both men and women -- so common, in fact, that both the radio stations and book stores would seem like empty stadiums if all the songs and stories about true love lost were to disappear.

Then again, while both men and women experience "this isn't it" moments there's been a traditional gender imbalance to it that still needs to be uncovered and explored. So I'm going to explore it here.

Back when a) women were expected to be utterly financially and socially dependent on men and b) the only way out of a marriage was "till death do you part" women were basically in a position where accepting an offer of marriage was by far the biggest gamble anyone, male or female, commonly made in their life. Because if your husband developed consumption, or turned out not to be able to make a living, or drank, or beat you, the die was cast and that became your lot in life.

Under English Common Law, which formed the foundation of both English and American... um... common law, from a legal perspective a woman literally disappeared! The legal doctrine was called Coverture, and under coverture women could literally not own property, she obviously couldn't vote, she couldn't enter into contracts, she couldn't seek education (without her husband's permission), any and all money she earned, won, or inherited became legally and irrevocably her husbands, any children she gave birth to became his sole legal property, and so on.

In the late 19th Century the pressure became such that a lot of women (many of them early or proto-feminists) declined to risk marriage at all!

Because back then, if for any reason "this" turned out not to be "it" for women that was it!

That anxiety over such an uncertain but irrevocable decision, I think, is the source of the "hypergamy" meme that so haunts MRAs and Evolutionary Psychologists. And so baffles and occasionally outrages the rest of us.

I'm also going to propose that this might be the origin of the idea of women as judges, gatekeepers, and the whole male anxiety about "worthiness." Because if your odds of marriage depend entirely on someone else's assessment not so much of gold-diggery success but simply not having enough income or stability to safely support a wife and children, that's going to stress the shit out of you as well. And really generate huge loads of resentment as well as anxiety. Even as you possibly benefit from having to compete with only half the potential workforce for any given job.

Anyway, you can see how the whole "this is it" and "true love waits" business, plus "I shall never be loved," plus all those songs about murdering one's true love ("Banks of the Ohio") and suicide ("Irene Good Night") aren't just dangerous bullshit but dangerously gendered bullshit.

But also, if I'm right (I think I am) and if we can just wrap our heads around it, about it's somewhere between 99% and 100% obsolete bullshit. Because these days we don't have to make those kinds of perilous decisions, or risk just perilous judgments. Because half the population no longer needs to rely 100% on the other half for social and financial well-being.

And so questions of lifelong worthiness, like (I'm guessing) similar questions about lifelong beauty no longer have to distract and interfere with a) the formation of, b) the end of, and most important, c) current appreciation of our relationships.

Anyway, my intuition says that you pretty much can't understand "hypergamy" without first understanding coverture. And this is why I think it's foolish to claim to understand biological "truths" about relationships without first understanding sociology, history, and law.

Hmm... I've still gotta think more about this.