In college, I dated a few women from up North, but the cultural chasm could not be bridged; not by love, or even the amazing thing that one girl did with the cherry stem and the handcuffs. And so today, after minor mistakes, major disasters, and one near-death experience, I have fulfilled my destiny as the husband of a true daughter of the Confederacy: my lovely bride, the Warden.
If you have to ask why I call her the Warden, you know nothing of the species of womanhood indigenous to the South. And the Warden is a Southerner, through and through. Born in Bennettsville, South Carolina (her mother was “Miss Bennettsville High School”, the Warden grew up an only child—taking piano, riding horses, and learning the biblical command that husbands should love their wives as Christ loved the church: He does all the suffering, while She builds lavish, ornate buildings, dresses in expensive clothes, and advocates celibacy.
The Warden grew up Catholic in South Carolina, a state where the term “papist plot” is still used at appropriate public gatherings. I met her at a Christian coffeehouse when we were both in high school, and we dated for a short time before she dumped me (of course). Nearly ten years later, we had a happenstance reunion. She was working as a newspaper reporter and driving a black Corvette with T-tops and a vanity plate that read “Blondi.”
I never had a chance.
I do not claim to be an expert on southern women. As a man, I can’t honestly claim to understand any woman, including my wife, my mother, or even my seven-year-old daughter. But I can report from my personal experience as a tireless observer of the local wildlife that there are just two kinds of southern women: the kind who will kick your ass and the kind who will get their Daddy to do it for them.
Either way, you lose.
My grandmother Graham is the strongest, most fearless woman I’ve ever known. Once, while picking butter beans, she killed a rattlesnake using just an empty grape Nehi bottle (something about the shape, I’m told; apparently it won’t work with a Dr Pepper). She was in her sixties at the time.
Her daughter, my aunt Lib, rid herself and her two daughters of a loser husband and father through the effective brandishing of a firearm. No shots were fired, no charges filed, and no appeals sought. He took the truck in the driveway and the clothes on his back and, at last report, considered himself well treated.
Lib’s sister, Celie, lived for many years in a cabin back in the dense woods of a thousand-acre hunting club. The waters were filled with snakes, the woods alive with carnivores of all shapes and sizes, and yet it was nothing for her husband to go and leave her and the three young boys for days at a time as he took care of business.
These are not weak women jumping up on the dining table at the first sign of danger and waiting for a man to come to the rescue. Maybe it’s a reflection on their low opinion of southern manhood, but southern women don’t seem to expect much from us in the first place.
As for the intellectual capacity of the typical southern woman, I cannot praise it as inordinately large because (a) she’s a Southerner and (b) worse, she’s an American. And I’m not going to pretend that there isn’t a political and social conservatism at her core that would discomfit the average feminist, liberal, progressive, or Victorian. But I cannot allow the denigration of the strength and independence of southern women to go unchallenged.
If you really want to find insecure women dependent upon men, you can skip Blanche DuBois and Melanie Wilkes. You won’t find her down South anymore. At least, not since she left Arkansas.
Aye, there’s the rub: Hillary Clinton (née Rodham)—the acme of American feminism, idolized by the establishment media as the fullness of self-realized womanhood itself—is seen by Southerners for what she truly is: pure redneck.
Hillary Rodham is the least empowered political woman since Marie Antoinette.
From her law firm partnership in Arkansas to her U.S. Senate seat in New York to the “Property of the White House” ashtrays on the unintentionally donated coffee table in her Georgetown apartment, Senator Rodham owes everything—everything—she has to her husband, to her man. Whenever she displayed her barely concealed contempt for women who “have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas,” southern women stood at a hot sink of dishes and rolled their eyes.
First of all, if Senator Rodham had been a true southern lady, she would have sat politely next to her husband on television that Super Bowl Sunday night and then filled the fireplace with the remains of his personal belongings on her way out the door Monday morning. I have personal knowledge of what it is like to wrong a southern woman, and it doesn’t involve loving pats on your arm while you humiliate her on national television. The only thing a real southern woman would be patting lovingly is the butt end of her Smith & Wesson.
I’m not suggesting that Senator Rodham should have done anything to violate the Homeland Security Act, but if she truly is, as advertised, the incarnation of modern feminism, feminists are a particularly uninspiring lot. It’s undeniable that there are southern women who stand by their man though he’s hurt and humiliated them time and time again. And there is certainly a strain of insecure southern female that won’t walk away from a bad man or a worse beating.
Of course, these women exist down South: They’re called rednecks! It is highly significant that the woman who trudged through Gennifer and Kathleen and Monica and Juanita, and dragged her daughter along, is still regarded with pride by the contemporary feminist movement. She remained until the end of her husband’s term of office one of America’s most admired women, even as the Secret Service was stopping her at the White House door to search her for spoons.
Standin’ by her cheatin’ husband, throwing lamps within earshot of the neighbors, taking the towels at checkout, and then using her husband’s good-ol’-boy connections to get her a job—Senator Rodham does everything a redneck man would want except dip snuff and cook ‘shine. So how did she get to be an American feminist icon?
GONE WITH THE WIND
If the classic southern woman is sensitive, frail, and ever vulnerable to the waywardness of men, then the American feminist movement has migrated en masse onto the Tara plantation. Modern feminists are the most delicate flowers of our society, ever vulnerable to the slightest change in barometric pressure. Consider these examples:
• A professor of women’s studies at Penn State demands that a print of Goya’s The Naked Maja be removed from her classroom because it creates a hostile work environment, making it impossible for her to empower her female students. “Any nude picture of a female encourages males to make remarks about body parts,” she said.
• A law professor at Northwestern University urged the criminalization of catcalls and other harassing comments made toward women on public streets, asking that such speech be legally punishable as “assaultive behavior.” The goal, apparently, is to protect frail women from the destructive power of whistling.
• Years before Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered drapes to cover the topless statues of the Justice Department, female workers in the Vermont state office building complained that they were being sexually harassed by a mural of Christopher Columbus arriving in the New World. The painting, which showed topless native women greeting the white European males, had to be covered with a bedsheet for the protection of Vermont’s womanhood.
• When animal-rights activists at UC Santa Barbara announced that all pets should be referred to as “companion animals,” a professor wondered aloud whether that meant the centerfolds in Penthouse magazine would now be known as “Penthouse Companion Animals” instead of “pets.” Fifteen college-educated women filed sexual harassment charges against him for unauthorized use of humor.
• Professor Mary P. Koss of the University of Arizona authored “The Scope of Rape,” a survey of college-aged women which, she says, indicates that one in four has been the victim of rape or attempted rape. She includes in that number, however, women who consented to sex but had been drinking. These women, she believes, are the victims of rape. “The law punishes the d
runk driver who kills a pedestrian,” she argues. “And likewise, the law needs to be there to protect the drunk woman from the driver of the penis.”
Now, when it comes to sex, I’m certainly no Wilt Chamberlain, but I’ve driven around the block once or twice. And, as a product of the rural South, I find this last item the most confusing and offensive. Professor Koss considers herself a feminist. She’s struggling against the patriarchal attitudes of a society that considers women emotional, irrational, and unstable. And what is her argument regarding sexual harassment and rape?
That women can’t hold their liquor.
Obviously it is possible for a drunk woman to be raped. But that is not what the sexual harassment harpies terrorizing American society are talking about. They want men to protect women from themselves, to play daddy to their drunken dates and lovingly tuck them, unmussed, into their beds. And, men, if you don’t, if you treat your date like a rational human being who decides to drink, date, and do the nasty like a grown-up, your friendly, local feminists will throw you into jail.
Once again, I know women who believe men are just naturally stronger and more disciplined than the fairer sex. I know women who expect men to take care of them when they can’t take care of themselves. But I didn’t know these women were feminists. I thought they were Southern Baptists.
And while we’re on the subject of sexual entanglements, ladies, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS DATE RAPE! Stop saying it! You sound like some loopy cast member from an uncensored performance of The Vagina Monologues.
There is rape—sex by force and against your will. And then there is sex—either explicitly consensual or with no demonstrated objections. What else is there? What category is missing?
Ladies, if you’re on a date with a good friend you’ve known for years, and the guy uses physical force to overcome your objections and violate you, it’s rape. Period. And if you meet a total stranger in a parking lot and, overcome with passion, allow him to explore your nether regions without complaint, it wasn’t rape, it was sex. That’s it.
What is the scenario for “date rape”? It’s either rape or not rape. You know what date rape is? Date rape is the mournful cry of a woman who suddenly realizes she just slept with a loser.
In an attempt to prevent this confusion, some northern colleges have begun to quantify the art of romance. One such school, Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, has made a name for itself through its sexual contact policies. At Antioch, students who are seeking intimacy (for the most part, men) must get explicit, stated permission from their partners (for the most part, women) before they take any actions. Want to neck? Ask first: “May I please slide my tongue down your throat?”
Want to cop a feel? “May I please check the freshness of your fulsome loaves?”
Want to, well, you know… “May I please mount you like a stallion and cry, ‘On, Thunder King, on!’?”
How romantic it must be on a warm, moonlit night to stroll the campus of Antioch and hear the sounds of spring: the evening breeze, the rustling leaves, and the extended contract negotiations as a young man (hereafter known as the Party of the First Part) pitches woo to his lady love (a.k.a. the Plantiff).
Some liberal feminists even label consensual sex “rape” if the man pressures the woman verbally. Verbal pressuring is when a guy seeks sex by, say, threatening to break off the relationship or (my usual dating strategy) falling to his knees and begging for it. This is psychological coercion and is no different from a knife to the throat or a gun to the head, feminists argue. Men engaged in this coercion should be punished appropriately.
So let me get this straight: Women can do anything men can do, except say no? Are modern, postfeminist women truly so weak, so defenseless, so utterly dependent upon the kindness of lovers? Then they have all turned into Daddy’s Girls, those petite flowers of my southern youth whose chastity was ever guarded by their proper upbringing, their commitment to Christ, and the certain justice of their father’s twelve-gauge. Only this feminist incarnation of the southern belle relies, not on Big Daddy, but on Uncle Sam. They have loaded up the legal system with layer upon layer of gender-specific protections, court-supported petticoats to cover their inbred feminine frailty.
How else to explain why simple speech and innocuous images are seen as predatory members of some sexual harassment conspiracy? The Goya and the Columbus mural mentioned earlier are hardly exceptions. In Dayton, Ohio, it was Titian’s Venus of Urbino that was vandalized and eventually removed because feminists “felt they were being sexually harassed by the painting.” At the University of Nebraska, a graduate student was forced to remove a photo of his own wife from his desk because she was wearing a bikini and some of his coworkers felt harassed.
The same women who roll their eyes at the affectations of our grandmothers—like using euphemisms for “breast” and “leg” in the presence of fried chicken—find the works of Michelangelo too offensive to be viewed in mixed company.
Are the new American feminists puritans, prudes, or just pathetic examples of powerlessness? These women remind me of the Oral Roberts University students I traveled to Europe with my senior year. I was the student conductor of the concert choir and we toured the continent, performing at Notre Dame, and St. Peter’s in Rome. In Florence, the must-see location was the Galleria dell’ Accademia and Michelangelo’s David.
My previous exposure to visual arts had been largely limited to black velvet paintings featuring canine card players, but the David absolutely mesmerized me. To see it, you must work your way through long halls at the gallery filled with lesser works by Michelangelo, works that prepare you, step by step, to see his ultimate masterpiece.
Then you enter the main hall and there it is: the fulfillment of all human potential realized before your eyes in carved stone. Michelangelo’s David is the reason I don’t believe in angels. It is visual proof that humans may achieve the divine.
I went to see the David with thirty or so other ORU students, among them three classically southern, nonfeminist females who entered the main hall about the same time I did. As I gazed, openmouthed and moist-eyed at what I believe to be the greatest work of visual art ever crafted by human hands, I couldn’t help noticing these girls, clumped together and giggling uncomfortably.
“What’s their problem?” my mind wondered. Why weren’t they stunned, stammering, and amazed? Then I realized: David is nude. Nakkie. Here is the towering image of the majesty of humankind, but these tender Christian girls with their mega-church delicacy cannot look upon it because you can see his pee-pee.
I tried to ignore them, to reenter the internal mists of euphoria the David inspires, but I couldn’t. I had let them ruin the moment.
Finally I stomped over to them and in a whispered shout asked, “Okay, so if I hang a hat on it… then can you look?” They scampered red-faced to the gift shop, never to return.
There is no difference between these cowering college girls intimidated by the marble manhood of David and the doctor of gender studies screeching from under her desk that somebody better get the latest Hooter’s Girls calendar out of the janitor’s closet before she calls the cops. I take it back—there is a difference. The feminists have a self-righteous sense that they’re stronger and more independent than my ORU friends. But in fact, they’re just another bunch of rednecks. They just have better résumés.
THE OTHER WOMAN
What the new feminist woman lacks in courage, however, she makes up in libido. That is my conclusion after watching a few episodes of HBO’s Sex and the City.
The first time I watched the show, I experienced a vague feeling of déjà vu. The show celebrates the total, uninhibited balls-to-the-wall pursuit of sex by four women in New York. The most popular character is Samantha Jones, played by Kim Cattrall, on whom I’ve had a low-grade crush since her star turn as Lassie in Porky’s.
Samantha is the most talked-about character on this very popular show because her sexuality has no limits. Every episode features a �
��What fetish will she flirt with this week?” subplot for Samantha. Straight sex, lesbian sex, machine-operated sex, multiple-partner sex, there was even some talk of cross-species interaction, but, as of this writing, HBO has yet to figure out how to get it past the folks at PETA.
Enlightened, urbane American women absolutely love this show. They are obsessed with these women, who, in turn, are obsessed in each episode with men: getting them, pleasing them, and, most important, being pleased by them in ever more exotic ways. If these four women think about anything other than their naughty bits, they do so only off camera.
What was it about these women that struck me as familiar? I have never knowingly been in the presence of a nymphomaniac, and I have never known anyone, male or female, in such desperate need of a fashion rescue as Sarah Jessica Parker. Still, I kept thinking, I know these women from somewhere…
Of course! The mobile home ho’s I knew in high school! How did Jim Carville put it? “Drag a hundred dollars through a trailer park and there’s no telling what you’ll find.” What you’ll find is the cast of Sex and the City!
Their escapades are ripped from the diaries of dirt-road, white-trash women who lurked along the edges of my social circles back in South Carolina. They weren’t as affluent, attractive, or educated as Samantha and Carrie, but they operated on the same phallocentric principles as their city cousins. I would see them blowing past me on Harleys, their arms (almost) around the waists of their biker escorts; at roadhouse bars in West Columbia, South Carolina, migrating around the pool tables from man to man—all the moves lateral ones. Where Samantha Jones might have a tag team with three lawyers in a Midtown hotel, she could be found wrasslin’ the Shealy Brothers in the bunk of a big rig in the Flyin’ C parking lot.
When asked about her character on Sex and the City, Cattrall says, “I don’t consider her a slut, no. Slut has a negative connotation, and I don’t think of anything that Samantha does as uninformed, not a joyous celebratory way of living.” As a man of only modest morals, I say “Viva la celebracion!” But a woman whose self-image is grounded in frequent sex with random partners in ever more contrived and uncomfortable positions is clearly a slut, whatever her other attributes. And it is just as clearly the case that if you took these same four women, stuck Confederate flag ball caps on their heads, and dropped them in a West Texas truck stop, they would be indistinguishable from the hardworking local gals.
Redneck Nation Page 16