Who's the Mack?
Posted by Jew from Jersey
29 August 2021There’s a joke in the movie “The Verdict” in which a man is told of a bar where you go in, you drink as much as you want for free, and then get taken to the back room to get laid. The man asks: “And have you been to this bar, Jimmy?” Jimmy answers: “No... But my sister has!”
Men have a hard time understanding that women do not enjoy getting paid for sex. To men it would seem like a dream come true. Of course, men understand that prostitutes are fallen women, that they live in shame, etc. They wouldn’t wish such a life for their sister... But they assume this is the price that must be paid for choosing a life of ease and abandon. Like in the joke about the brewery worker who is found dead in a vat of beer: “Poor Stash,” cries his widow, “He never had a chance...” The brewery foreman retorts: “Lady, he got out twice to pee.”
Sex with someone you find repulsive is not fun. Few men appreciate this since they find most women at least somewhat attractive. But a woman only considers a very small number of men desirable. The others are almost invisible to her in the course of normal life, and if considered in a sexual light they must appear to her akin to giant cockroaches. But even if a prostitute’s clients were restricted to men she found attractive at first, she would probably come to hate them anyway. There is something about payment for sex that is in itself repugnant to women. It’s not clear if men ever experience this repugnance although it’s a moot point since so few men will ever be paid for sex.
But prostitutes need love too, and they typically give their money to the men they love. It’s like the flip side of hating the men who give them money. When you think about this, it makes you wonder how monogamy was ever supposed to work. Monogamous men are conditioned to believe they are supposed to support their wives financially. And they believe without even having to be conditioned that if they do everything they are supposed to, they will receive sex from their wives. If men didn’t believe this, they would never get married. And yet this is precisely the scenario which makes a woman hate a man.
Maybe in an earlier era, when individuals were not so atomized and the relations between them not so overwhelmingly cash based, monogamy might have been more feasible. A farmer and his wife, no matter how poor, might see themselves as lord and lady of their small estate, both invested in its success. A merchant and his wife who kept the accounts or a craftsman whose wife maintained some aspect of the craft, Tevye’s wife who milked the cows for his small dairy delivery business, a fisherman whose fishwife cleaned and sold the fish, might have a chance. But a wage earner who works for someone else and brings his paycheck home to his wife? How could she not come to see herself as a prostitute? Maybe a man with a high-prestige job that brought his home life into his career, a politician or high-level manager whose wife entertained and maneuvered socially on her husband’s behalf... But a simple wage earner whose profession was completely divorced from his home? A coal miner’s wife was probably heavily emotionally invested in her husband’s work, even if she never set foot near a mine shaft. A factory worker’s wife was probably less so, and an office worker’s wife not at all. In a way it’s a byproduct of people becoming alienated from their work so that their money becomes alien to themselves and payment of it to their wives commodifies the relationship between them.
And it’s all so much worse when men are told, as they are so often told today, that they must prove their manhood by supporting their wives. I don’t know who thought that one up. I don’t think this is how people thought of monogamy back in the days when it had a better success rate. Men didn’t work for their wives, they worked for themselves. A bachelor farmer might hire a housekeeper. A bachelor fisherman might sell his catch on consignment. A bachelor miner boarded or roomed. A woman who married such a man would help him expand his enterprise and saw her own interests aligned with his. The English verb “to husband” did not mean to give money to someone else, it meant to be a farmer or manager of resources.
“Off to work he goes, what he does nobody knows, but he’s sure to bring home money every week.” This lyric by the late 1960s band The United States of America puts it quite well. A woman in this position is bound to feel that she is being paid to take care of the children and the house. If her husband expects sex in addition to all that, then he is a sleazy boss. And if her husband earns enough that she doesn’t have to cook, clean, and rear the children herself, the situation is even worse. That means she is being given money purely in exchange for sex. And prostitutes hate their customers.
The end result is, as put by Led Zeppelin: “Went to sleep last night, worked as hard as I can. Bring home my money, you take my money give it to another man.” Women don’t love men who give them money. They express love by giving everything they have to the man they love, and partaking in his riches. If a man gives a woman money and gifts, she is bound to see them as dirty and will attempt to “launder” them by giving them to another man whom she chooses freely, even if it is only to have those things recycled back to her later. They will then have become “clean” in her eyes. Think of that Shirley Brown song: “He's mine from the top of his head, to the bottom of his feet. The clothes on his back, I buy them. The car he drives, I pay the note every month.” A man is better off expressing his love by inviting a woman along to enjoy his ride through life. If this ride proves enjoyable to a great extent because of her contributions to it, she will not feel used. She will feel proud.
Whores don’t give pimps their money in exchange for management services. They give it in order to be a part of the pimp’s shiny brand. It is an extreme case of a woman contributing to the enterprise of a man she loves only in that the pimp’s “enterprise” consists solely of such contributions by women.
Monogamy failed in the 20th century largely because too many men became wage earners. At the same time as they assumed career paths that denied their wives the chance to materially participate in their enterprise, the wives themselves became ever more connected to social, political, and pop culture which pitched entertainment and advertising to them directly, feeding their dreams independently of their husbands’ thoughts and plans. The death of monogamy is often ascribed to the availability of birth-control and abortion. Those may have been the murder weapons, but the incentive to commit the murder was planted by changes in the means of production and the rise of pop culture and mass marketing at least half a century before. These uncoupled a wife’s dreams from those of her husband and gave her something better to dream of.
Consider also a legal regime which allows a wife to initiate no-fault divorce, retain custody of the children by default, take half of the household wealth, and receive court-mandated future cash-flows from the ejected husband. Of course, no one thinks about all this in a calculated way when getting married. But it can’t help but make it even harder for a wife to ever see herself as part of her husband’s world, or to see the children as his children. If it’s all really hers whenever she wills it so, none of it was ever really his to begin with. Wage capitalism makes the husband into an annuity. And divorce law puts the option to annuitize into his wife’s hands.
Husbands who attempt to find their way to their wives’ hearts by becoming co-equal partners risk appearing to be participants in the wives’ enterprise, instead of the other way around. Few prospective husbands today would dream of insisting on financial control of all martial assets, including their wife-to-be’s future income, as a condition for marriage. Too few men today insist on any conditions at all. Expecting any degree of femininity, courtesy, loyalty, respect, cooperation, propriety, modesty, even fidelity, is too often seen as “controlling” behavior. Yet all these expectations were considered standard back when marriages had a track record of actually working out. How could a wife today not see her husband as her bitch?