To Kidnap, to Abduct, to Seize, to Carry Away, to Despoil, to Rob, to Capture

"she had an idea of love as a state of worship and service on the part of the man and of condescension on the part of the woman. There was nothing "horrid" about it in any fiction she had read. The man gave presents, did services, sought in every way to be delightful. The woman "went out" with him, smiled at him, was kissed by him in decorous secrecy, and if he chanced to offend, denied her countenance and presence. Usually she did something "for his good" to him, made him go to church, made him give up smoking or gambling, smartened him up. Quite at the end of the story came a marriage, and after that the interest ceased."

H.G. Wells - Tono-Bungay
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"My two favorite things are commitment and changing myself."

women's favorite dummy, from Futurama episode Love and Rocket

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"I'm not some rom-com douchebag who dumps his girlfriend for wanting him to make something of himself, christ!"

Marten, in Questionable Content strip #4151

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Hahaha! Yeah, douchebags! How dare you complain about your woman running your life! Don't you know you're a worthless piece of trash who should thank your lucky stars she even condescended to enslave you? You total douchebag!

But, ummm, hey, y'know, just for the sake of her-gument, let's reverse the polarity on that. Would Jeph Jacques' audience have swallowed a female character saying "hey, I'm not some total cunt who'd dump her boyfriend just for wanting her to make something of herself, Hera!" D'awww... it's adorable because she's subordinating her life to his expectations. Tee-hee!
Oooohhh... little bit socially awkward there? Are we feeling a slight twinge of politically correct superego; do we find ourselves looking over our shoulders for fear the female members of our tribe might've espied us reading that second version?

On a completely unrelated topic, once upon a time I was loitering in a university hallway between classes when a professor down the hall started shouting at one of his female students. She'd been having her boyfriend doing the physical labor for what (from context) sounded like her Master's thesis. Now, because the methodology of a scientific study is supposed to be strictly controlled, consistent and precise, this was tantamount to falsifying data and her browbeating more than deserved regardless of sexual context. It is, however, hilarious to conceive of the reverse: a male student getting his girlfriend to run out every day and do his data-gathering grunt-work for him. C'mon babe, make something of yourself...

On another completely unrelated topic, TVTropes' page on averted romances in fiction lists under "films - animation" three Disney movies. I can't remember much of Big Hero 6, but in both Moana and Zootopia all the usual Disney princess and romantic comedy tropes apply. The female is still an intrinsically good ingenue whose innate moral perfection shines a light on the evil world around her; the male is still a blowhard puffing himself up only to fail for our ridicule, having his flaws exposed by the female. He's still somehow morally compromised from the start, guilty of some original sin, so he still needs to prove his worth to, and be somehow redeemed by the female's approval. Really, 95% of the rom-com angle's still there... minus the implied consummation of their relationship via a chaste little G-rated peck on the lips at the end. This is the female gaze at work. Romance consists of females condescending to accept the servitude of males... and after that, the interest ceased.

Questionable Content did in fact provide its own counterpoint. As part of the lengthy process by which the author eliminated heterosexual relationships* and gradually excised all males except the initial (now minimized) protagonist from the comic, the character Faye's boyfriend Angus got a new job in the big city... and asked her to move away with him. She dumped him. Of course. And, every one of the dozens of pages of the grueling process focused on making us sympathize with her, with how unfair it was for her to be asked to leave the little rut she'd dug for herself, her small-town barista job and her hobby welding novelty dinosaur statuettes. Marten, in contrast, gets four pages' worth of self-doubt and condemns himself as a douchebag, complete with his best friend showing up out of nowhere to call him "a loser forever" if he'd wanted to keep his life his own.

What wonderful, egalitarian times we live in.

For the record, that little bitch I overheard getting her boyfriend to do her dirty work for her was raping him. Yes, yes, I know, that's not how we define it. It's not how the scores of campus-wide rape paranoia e-mails define it, or the workplace harassment indoctrination, or any other part of our culture. We consider ourselves so much more civilized nowadays for condemning sexual transgressions, but our very definition of transgression is designed to exclude any guilt for feminine excess. Our sexual relations are defined by a woman's entitlement to a man's labor for her own benefit or whims, by the presumed right of women to control men.

There is no ethical basis for women to dictate the terms of relationships. It should be a given for any civilized society that women deserve no favors or other compensation either for the sexual act itself or for so magnanimously bestowing their countenance and presence upon men, that the mammalian exercise of reproductive contest and courtship rituals is every bit as primitive as caveman Grog dragging a reluctant mate back to his cave by her hair. A female's instinct to monopolize and control a male's life deserves no more glamor or poetry than any other facet of rutting, and quite a few men have woken up in their forties and fifties to realize, belatedly, that the whole previous decades of their lives have been raped away by their mate to serve as foundation for her own self-aggrandizement, that for all a man struggles and debases himself, he is allowed nothing of his own. He builds and lives in her house (lucky if he's permitted even a "man cave" in the garage or basement to suit his own tastes, and will be endlessly ridiculed even for that) he raises her children (and if you suspect your wife's brood might not be your own, you have about a 30% chance of being right) he maintains the friendships she considers socially appropriate, he buys the car she wants, he maintains the hobbies she approves of, he accepts her abuse both for not making enough money and for not spending enough time at home, he goes to church with her and gives up whatever vices she decides to condemn.

All this is instinct, primitive, old news, old hat, old habits. It was never a good deal, surrendering one's life to a raptor in return for her potentially, occasionally condescending to spread her legs. But, luckily, feminists came along and fixed all that.

No self-respecting modern Disney princess would even do that much any more.







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* Even Marten's "girl"friend isn't actually female, but a male with body modifications, a.k.a. transsexual... but as he fills the narrative role of a female for the narrator's purposes, he does so for this post as well.