I’m fascinated by Sarma Melngailis’s memoir (the one with the abortion story I quoted yesterday). It’s identical to the novels of neoliberal femininity that I discuss in my new book. Their heroines can have every economic advantage, fantastic careers, connections, achievements, riches – and they’ll throw it all away to pursue the dream of being enslaved by a low-quality dude. They all either reject the possibility of having children or dump the children they already have in order to be free to get bossed around and humiliated by some random guy. And not by some very manly, alpha type but a hyena-like degraded loser. I’m not talking Shades of Gray. This isn’t women prostituting themselves in inventive ways. That wouldn’t be an interesting development because that always existed.
I’ve been observing this phenomenon for as long as I have been a literary critic. There’s no medieval or Victorian heroine that would dream of being as slavishly and abjectly subservient to a man as the modern liberated woman. And look at Melngailis who is not writing fiction but narrating her life. It’s still the exact same thing. Total self-abasement for some utterly worthless dude. Or a bunch of dudes. In these stories, a successful, serious man who offers respect, equality and parity gets rejected in favor of some antisocial, emasculated loser gigolo. Melngailis discarded a wonderful husband who gave her everything to pursue feminized (in her own description), much younger men who sucked her dry and spat her out.
Nobody is talking about this because we are stuck on the idea that female liberation in real life should result in literature that celebrates said liberation. But what actually exists in accounts of women’s lives (be they fictional or not) is a wasteland of such horror that no 19th-century female character upset with the expectations of being the Angel in the House could even imagine.
Melngailis is completely liberated of all societal expectations. Highly successful in very masculine jobs (she worked for Bear Stearns and Bain Capital and made a packet, then founded a successful restaurant in NYC). Not burdened by family and children. Free from any form of morality. Sexually promiscuous with zero societal stigma. The dream has been fulfilled! Yet read her memoir and you’ll see what abject misery this dream brought her. This isn’t my interpretation. Melngailis doesn’t claim that how her life unfolded is anything short of catastrophic.
Clarissa's Blog 
I don’t know how the exact trajectory compares, but the heroine of Gene Stratton-Porter’s *A Daughter of the Land* inexplicably does this. But since it was published in 1918, a large part of the plot is forcing circumstances to extricate her stubborn arse from this terrible situation. (shrugs)
LikeLike
That was me, methylethyl. WP has done something weird again, so I can log into my personal page, but somehow when I visit yours, I’m anonymous (???)
LikeLiked by 1 person
LOL, kinda wondered who else would use the term “stubborn arse” ;-D
It had to be somewhat with at least some concept of the difficulty, misery approaching impossibility, of working a horse powered farm by a single man, let alone a woman.
LikeLike
Clarissa
“In these stories, a successful, serious man who offers respect, equality and parity…”
Parity! You don’t suppose that she had become so masculinized that she was actually looking for a wife ;-D
LikeLike
She ended up finding one “wife” after another, picking up younger, vain, mooching men. She describes them as feminized. “Couldn’t grow a beard”, “looked pretty.” It’s fascinating.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Well, I was just trying to say something about that behavior without being brutallly blunt. What you are describing is a fool attempting to ignore many hundreds of thousands of years of human development, not just physically, but psychologically. our very thinking and feelings. But on a positive side, I have been informed that I am invited to make a cabbage roll cassorole ;-D
LikeLike
I agree. This is a perverted response to a perverted situation. People think they can thwart biology and history, and they get bit hard by reality.
LikeLike
I promise not to do this regularly. But:
This phenomenon of modern women making destructive relationship choices… Like true crime, I know it’s happening out there in the real world, but it’s not something that I’m personally familiar with, or have read about in any detail. I could attribute it to the women wanting excitement, and then pursuing it irresponsibly or with romantic unrealism, but that’s just a guess.
I was interested by these posts of yours about Melngailis (who I had never heard of), but I had no independent knowledge to test them against. So I did what every contemporary person does, and run them past an AI!
https://chatgpt.com/share/686ee4fd-b368-8001-95fa-81b9dee18f5d
The AI seems to think you’re too hard on her. I don’t find that surprising since that would be a mainstream view and the AI is thereby just being a mirror of its makers’ culture, but I do find it funny to have an AI expressing firm opinions on yet another sphere of life, so far outside its own “experience”.
LikeLike
I like her, I wish her the best. I very much hope her memoir is a success and she manages to pay off her debts.
But the abortion story wasn’t something I expected, and it did strain my capacity for compassion to a paper-thin state.
LikeLike
mitchellporter
As a retired scientist too old to have been blessed with even a single “Studies” course, would you mind translating this into English:
Biology as destiny. Invoking “hundreds of thousands of years of human development” to explain a 2020s restaurateur’s downfall skirts the empirical findings on how culture, law and power relations mediate attraction and abuse.
LikeLike
Behold the woman, the pinnacle of evolution!
That paragraph can form a good basis for an argument against the theory of evolution.
LikeLike
Actually, such behavior is basically selecting against its continued existence. And no, I did not downvote, that contributes nothing to the conversation.
LikeLike
I was being sarcastic, actually, as I thought that sentence was quite silly. In any case, I am not offended by random down votes from people I have never met before, but is kind of you to not down vote.
It is curious though that there are so many people nowadays self-destructing in this particular way. Shouldn’t evolution have selected against this kind of behavior already? There is an argument to be made that despite all our technological progress we, human beings in general, are getting dumber not smarter.
LikeLike
People like to bitch n’ moan about Boomers, but the rot of feminism is at least as old as Marx and Engels’ utopian wetdream back in the 1840’s. Patriarchy is just a synonym for civilisation, a means of identifying the male to be held responsible for females and offspring. And coverture, and its failing modifications, are simply rules for determining how that responsibility will be administered.
But cultural change, alteration of behaviors and habits, may well be slower than physical evolution. Three generations ago we faced ugly second wave feminism, effective contraception, and no-fault divorce. And we still do not fully understand the consequences of any of them.
LikeLike