The Case Against Woman

You may rightfully wonder what television's got to do with it. I'll tell you. It's the last hope. The TV western--from Wyatt Earp to Mike Paladin--is Custer's Last Stand for the American Male. It is one last fling at virility by a vanishing breed--the he-man.

Between Philip Wylie and Sigmund Freud, there's not much left of masculinity. Women have taken our jobs, our trousers, and our initiative. They've gone to war--from policewomen to WACs. Slide rules, monkey wrenches, automobiles, and the vote belong to them, not to mention high society and the supermarket. This is crisis.

The fault belongs to technology. It was technology that emancipated woman--with gadgetry, contraception, and soap operas. Electric mixers, washing-drying-and-ironing machines, self-regulating gas ranges, automatic defrosters, frozen foods, Pillsbury cake mixes, vacuum cleaners and Simonize floor wax. The American woman left the sink for the radio, women's magazines, matinees, and the Book-of-the-Month Club. And dissatisfaction.

Two wars put her in the factory; and her pay check led, inevitably, to the bar. (The pornographic murals have been replaced by flowered wall-paper.) Idealists and mothers' sons gave her the vote--and she sent Eisenhower to Korea. She invaded poetry and journalism, industry and politics, legal courts and graduate schools. She wrote advice to the love-lorn. Those twin sisters of feminine freedom--Adultery and Alimony--turned suburbia into Sodom and rendered Scollay Square passe.

But all the while--and you know it--that grey-haired, white-aproned, full-bodied, flat-footed American Mother, intrepid in her virtue and the iron-eyed apotheosis of "The Family Unit," bestrode the welcome mat, patrolled the hearth, and demanded homage.

We gave her homage--from chest tattoos to neon bow-ties. We turned America into a matriarchy and emasculated our infant culture. We accorded Motherhood the sanctity of Death.

America's men were reared with rubber nipples and talcum powder to an apron-strung neurosis. Homosexuality (8,000,000 in the U.S. at last estimate) went on the upswing--Dad had the only woman worth wanting. And Father became the fall-guy for every situation comedy and Sunday color comic--the benign, well - meaning, oft - stumbling, ever - bungling apex of the Oedipus triangle.

Women's colleges, luncheon clubs, waistlines, and bank accounts got bigger. Madison Avenue, in a Brooks Brothers and button-down salaam to the Little Woman and her big roller pin, committed the ultimate betrayal of privacy every TV evening: the advertising grab-bag of under-arm deodorants, living bras, toilet tissue, toe-nail paint, perfume, mouthwash, and the Potato Sack look. Sex was the province of the Ladies Home Journal. Dr. Spock replaced the Bible. Bohemia in pink panties was more organized nymphomania than Art. Greenwich Village was overrun with mop-headed, turtle-necked, tweed-wrapped, smudge-faced, and beer-reeking femmes fatale, with Wallace Stevens under one arm and Well of Loneliness under the other.

The question is, what can be done about it?

Men have become the flunkies for an empire of matrons, dowagers, career women, Vogue magazine, and church socials. Before we curl our tresses and attach the bustle, maybe there's time for a counter-revolution.

The TV western may be only wish-fulfillment and Saturday night projection. But hope sends up some of that smoke. There are cobwebs in the kitchen and stones in the stomach, and are we men or not? Down with Togetherness and remember the Alamo. A man, they say, can get lost in Texas.