Female Supremacy Articles - Page 2
Woman as Goddess
Camille Paglia Tours Strip Clubs
Reported by Melanie Wells - from Penthouse Magazine
When Camille Paglia burst onto the scene three years ago, her iconoclastic views on art, literature, and sexuality were published in Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. Since then Paglia, 46, a professor of humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, has published a second book and become notorious for her controversial views on the roles of men, women, and sex in society. For example, Paglia rankled fellow feminists by asserting that "whenever sexual freedom is sought or achieved, sadomasochism will not be far behind"; "rape is male power fighting female power"; and pornography is art. Penthouse thought it would be interesting to take the professor, who admits she is bisexual, out on the town to sample New York's best-known strip clubs and comment on what they mean in the arena of sexual politics. A brash, fast-talking Paglia, who maintains that stripping is "a sacred dance of pagan origins," was bursting with enthusiasm and theories. In a tour of three Manhattan clubs, she surveyed scenes of writhing women and ogling men with candid observations that were entertaining and often startling.
Because most of my life I was openly lesbian, I totally understand men's passion for women. Women are beautiful and remote and unreachable. You feel desperate. There's nothing you can do to win their favor. The only thing men want is women's attention, and in nude dance clubs, they can get it for a moment.
The feminist line is, strippers and topless dancers are degraded, subordinated, and enslaved; they are victims, turned into objects by the display of their anatomy. But women are far from being victims -- women rule; they are in total control.
My whole life I've been gaga about beautiful women. That's why I have this angle on it -- I can see the way men see. White middle-class feminist rhetoric has been produced by professional women, lawyers, bookworms, and paper pushers who can't stand the fact -- it's unbearable to them -- that most men will still turn their heads and gasp when a beautiful women walks into the room and exposes a little tit and ass. It's a white, bourgeois prejudice to find the seductive wiggling of a butt degrading.
Even though I'm one of those supersmart white middle-class women, I don't have this jealousy. I'm strong enough as a woman to say that it's natural for a beautiful young girl walking into a room to capture the attention of all the men and women. That's an eternal human principle. It's not white male hetero-sexism. It's universal. All people admire youth and beauty. In the Greco-Roman tradition, youth and beauty are divine and worthy of worship. That's my theory. I'm saying that people go to strip clubs to see beauty and it's fucking elitist for people who go to museums to look at paintings and statues of beautiful bodies to denigrate strip clubs. These museum goers are staring at beautiful nude bodies for pleasure, and it's supposedly high art. The educated and rich get their kicks in museums. Most people who come to these mid-level or sleaze-level clubs are usually not highly educated literati. It's perfectly legitimate for them to want to look at beautiful female bodies.
I don't want a culture that says that a woman exposing her breasts is degrading. That's white middle-class bullshit. Men are fascinated and terrified by women's sexuality. That's why they pay prostitutes. The feminist analysis of prostitution says that men are using money as power over women. I'd say yes, that's all that men have. The money is a confession of weakness. They have to buy women's attention. It's not a sign of power; it's a sign of weakness.
At Flash Dancers, a middle-of-the-road topless bar, a blonde with slightly sagging breasts is onstage, acrobatically simulating sex against a fire pole. Her fluorescent yellow bikini top is draped over the head of one patron, a young man wearing a flannel shirt, who watches the dancer thrash against the pole, then clasp it between her legs. Simultaneously, several feet away, a dark-haired woman wearing a skimpy red bikini inches from the faces of two male customers. Smiling coquettishly, the dancer slides her bikini top aside, exposes her small breasts, and massages her nipples.
Look! The men don't know what to do! The money they're stuffing into the dancers' garters is a ritual offering, and the women are wearing their booty around their thighs. They're displaying dollars as trophies, just as the great women in history -- the great queens and courtesans -- have worn diamonds and emeralds.
The dancers are flirtatious but removed. Even when they approach the men, even when they're dancing at the men's tables, there is something removed or detached about them. The men know it. The men value it. The men all know they can never fully penetrate the dancers and their lives. This is a point I made in Sexual Personae: Feminists are wrong to think that when women expose their breasts -- or even their genitals in a beaver shot -- they are totally exposed. No woman is ever totally exposed; you can never fully penetrate her womb, the heart of her sexual nature. Every woman we're seeing tonight is still mysterious. No man ever thinks, even when he is putting money in her garter belt, that he has her secret.
But men are totally exposed sexually. Their penis and scrotum are externalized and vulnerable. Men have no secrets that they're hiding. Men in strip clubs are completely cowed. They are dazzled. The only time the men feel remotely superior is when they're young, 19 or 20 years old, and in a pack. They'll come in very giddy, drink a lot, and try to get their spirits up. Even then, if there are six of them, one woman coming over to them totally throws them off. My theory is that woman rules the universe; woman is the dominant sex. Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct was a great example of woman's power. Stone uncrosses her legs, shows a little pussy, and it turns the men to jelly.
The idea that exposure of nudity is degrading to women or anyone else is absolutely nonsense. It's one of the biggest lies of the feminist establishment. If they would just open their eyes and visit these strip clubs, they'll find the exact opposite of what they've been complaining about. The more a woman takes off her clothes, the more power she has.
The feminists who claim that woman are violated and diminished by this kind of format don't know what they're talking about. Current feminist rhetoric has gotten parched and bleached and sanitized and distorted. It doesn't allow for passion, for instinct, for lust, for beauty, for the awesomeness of nature. It's not sufficient to explain sex. So, bizarrely, the more antiporn that bourgeois feminist rhetoric gets, the more these clubs will arise, because they are fulfilling a deep need.
Strip clubs are pagan temples, pagan shrines. It goes all the way back to Babylon, which has a very bad reputation in the Bible, where it's a synonym for sin and decadence. Why? Because apparently there was ritual prostitution in the great temples. Women offered themselves to random strangers in honor of the great goddesses of the ancient Near East and Asia Minor -- modern Turkey.
In these pagan cults, the goddess was omnipotent. What we call striptease -- that is, erotic dancing -- was central. Contemporary strip dancing is in the mainline of this kind of ritual dancing. Belly dancing, where you clearly see the sexual undulations of the hips and pelvis, was designed to incite the lust of aging sultans. That's exactly the kind of dancing that was forbidden by Judeo-Christianity, which has always been opposed to dance. Christianity wants us to rise above nature, above our sexuality. All activation of the body is pagan -- it's never degrading. Instead, it's filling a hole, the vacuum in our religion. Judeo-Christianity is not enough. It cannot explain sexuality. It suppresses the organic rhythms of the body.
In other words, the more something is forced underground, the more intense it gets because it becomes taboo, forbidden. This makes it dangerous and very alluring. So you have these women letting us look at them. The areas of the body they're exposing are the ones we're not allowed to look at.
College women are being trained in women's studies courses to say that when men focus on a woman's breasts and buttocks, they are reducing women to dead parts. This is absolute bullshit. I'm radical on this. I'm militant. I know I'm really extreme, and most women probably can't feel what I feel. I say there is nothing degrading in the exhibit of any naked form, in whole or in part, male or female. In India you've got copulating nude bodies -- three- and foursomes -- depicted on the temples. In Hinduism the body is part of nature and the cosmos; sexuality is seen as the life force of the universe. In Judeo-Christianity we have a problem. We feel we always have to surmount nature, to contain and control it.
Our best women students are being taught that pornography and strip clubs lead directly to rape, that there is no space between men going to see this and then attacking women. This is absolute nonsense. The truth is, the minute you have a complex, advanced, urbanized society, throughout history, you get prostitution, stripping, and homosexuality. Immediately.
What does that mean? It means that as soon as people cluster together, the reality of sex erupts. What you see in pornography and prostitution is the reality of sex. It is not a patriarchal distortion. It is the ultimate physical reality. So a feminist who claims to understand sexuality but cannot deal with pornography or topless clubs is no expert. She is a censor. She is a prude.
Stripping is not about sexual freedom; it's about freedom of sexual imagination. Stripping, erotic dancing, is an art form, and the artistic level of the scene in American has increased enormously. It's obvious that it's a new vocation. Dance itself has gained in stature recently. I think Madonna, with her sensational dance routines, has helped bolster the pride and self-confidence of these women. They are professionals, and they know they are in control. They aren't apologetic or defensive. These girls know their power.
At the Paradise Club, the beer is cheap, but a private viewing of two women making love will set you back several hundred dollars. It's a hard-core strip joint in a quiet neighborhood off Broadway. Chairs rim a room-length platform on which two women stalk naked.
A curvaceous black woman stoops in front of patrons and allows them to peer between her heavy thighs. By regulation, they can't touch her, so she massages herself absentmindedly. Porno movies run on televisions suspended at both ends of the platform, but they are largely ignored. The main attraction tonight is a lithe, long-haired woman with one tattoo and a penchant for bending over in front of pairs of sheepish male patrons and exposing her hairless genitalia.
Look at those two young men! They don't know what the fuck to do. The girl is dancing right at their table. She's flirting with one of them, touching him, flaunting her rear end in his face. The men are desperately looking at each other for support. They're embarrassed. She is in total control. They're paying her a tribute. They're offering her money for her momentary attention. They are as abashed as they would be with their mothers.
There's nothing humiliating in this. Look, she's totally self-assured. He's nervous, insecure. She's helping him feel confident. That is part of her skill -- to make him feel relaxed. He is admiring her. She's lifting up her breasts for him to see. Now she's leaning over and shoving her tits within inches of his face. He loves it! He's purchased a close encounter with beautiful female breasts. And why shouldn't he? I think it's wonderful.
These women have great asses. Twenty-five years ago in America, only breasts mattered. Asses were not important. Now we've gotten much more sophisticated, in the European way.
I first became interested in topless dancing when I was teaching at Bennington College in the 1970's. Some of my students were moonlighting as topless dancers. They made a lot of money, but they and their coworkers always drew a very firm line between themselves and prostitutes. Many of the dancers are single or divorced mothers who rightly regard what they do as a profession. They know it's an art form, a craft with demanding skills.
Strip clubs today are far less squalid than the clubs I saw 20 years ago, before feminism improved the status of women. These women are very secure about themselves. I'm very happy with what I'm seeing here, because I think it's showing a kind of European cosmopolitanism. For more than a century in Paris, there have been all kinds of sophisticated displays of sexuality, such as the shows at the Moulin Rouge. In Europe it's accepted. European television has a tremendous amount of nudity. Men and straight women over there like to look at beautiful female bodies. In London, one of the most popular family newspapers has a topless "Page 3" girl every day.
I don't want a culture that says a woman exposing her breasts is degrading. That's just puritanism. We are so fucking parochial about this. The feminist establishment believes the stripclub scene is chaos, all debauchery and decadence. It's not It's as strictly organized as a faculty meeting at Princeton University.
At Stingfellows Pure Platinum, patrons wear Armani suits and can enjoy an expensive full-course dinner while watching gorgeous "entertainers" dance and drop the tops of their full-length gowns. During individual dance routines, the women shed everything but skimpy thong bikinis and invisible patches of latex covering their nipples. When they're not performing, the women mingle among their guests as if they were hosting an intimate cocktail party.
Twenty dollars buys you a provocative table dance, where a woman of your choosing sheds her dress and dances suggestively over your lap. Hard work? The best dancers take home from $700 to $1,000 a night.
Men Don't just want to see women taking their clothes off. They want to see beautiful women. Period. Some women here are in various stages of undress, but others are fully clothed, promenading around in fabulous glittering evening gowns. We are being treated to the full range of women's sexuality. This is theater, a mesmerizing sexual theater. There's an energetic, improvisatory quality. It's very sexy. It's almost as if the women sauntering around were creating their own plays, their own little dramas. There's a classy, high-fashion element that I think is a real step forward in American eroticism.
Strip clubs are an art form for the masses. It's the highest paternalistic condescension when people attack and dismiss them. We haven't seen a single man cross the line anywhere tonight. What we have seen is men understanding that women rule the world.
I issue a challenge to all those prudes and puritans who are carrying on from the oh-so-safe precincts of the Ivy League to come to one of these clubs and actually watch the men's behavior. The reality totally contradicts the bullshit feminist ideology. All sexual entertainment is pagan; that is, it's oriented around the supreme fact of woman as goddess.
You can sense the awe in men's attitudes to each of these women as an incarnation of the goddess figure. I'm radically pro-pornography. The dominance of woman's image in pornography is not about the subordination of woman -- it's the opposite. It's about male anxiety. It's about the male mind trying to confront and take control of this enormous, mysterious power of female sexuality.
Men are run ragged by female sexuality all their lives. From the beginning of his life to the end, no man ever fully commands any woman. It's an illusion. Men are pussy-whipped. And they know it.
Everything we've seen tonight shows women in control and trying to be patient and nurturing with the men. You see that so clearly with prostitutes and strippers. Very powerful sexual women always know that men need to be led and guided. Men need help.
The sex industry exists as a rebuke to the philosophical inadequacies of Judeo-Christianity. Our religious system is simply incomplete. Unlike Hinduism, it has never fully dealt with the power of woman's sexuality. Until our culture does, we'll continue to get it in these underground ways. That's what strip clubs are about: not women as victim ... not woman as slave ... but woman as goddess.
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WOMEN, SEX & POWER
Patricia Sellers Reporter - Associates Eryn Brown And Tim Carvell
If women are from Venus and men are from Mars, then Rebecca Mark is from another planet altogether. Six years ago she was a 35-year-old student at Harvard business school, nicknamed Mark the Shark for her ferocious ambition. Today the 5-foot 7-inch honey-blond is a CEO. As a builder of pipelines and power plants, Mark brings electricity to browned-out corners of the earth. From Bogota to Bombay, the lady knows riots. She's dodged bombs. When foreign governments collapse, she digs in her high heels. After Hindu nationalists and their allies canceled her companies power project in India--the subcontinent's largest-ever foreign investment--Mark reincarnated the deal. "I enjoy being a world-class problem solver," she says. "I'm constantly asking, 'How far can I go? How much can I do?' "
Welcome to the corporate orbit of super successful women: the ones who blast through glass ceilings, achieve otherworldly feats, and take astronomical risks to boldly go where no man has gone before. FORTUNE looked inside hundreds of companies in dozens of industries and found seven women who are the best--better than the men and all other women in their businesses. Charlotte Beers led the most impressive turnaround of an ad agency at Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide. Jill Barad made Barbie the world's most popular toy. Little-known Roberta Williams is the best-selling designer of computer games. Some of these women are chief executives. This is not, however, a gender-bending group of tomorrow's CEOs. Linda Marcelli will never head Merrill Lynch. But as director of Merrill's flagship New York City district, she made FORTUNE's cut because she oversees the top-performing branches in the top market at the top brokerage firm.
The real surprise is how the women reached their pinnacles: They broke every rule imaginable and trashed the conventional wisdom of executive women's groups, career counselors, and other gurus of getting ahead. They didn't plan their careers. They didn't network and still don't--in fact, they despise the word. They don't blend into the corporate culture. They don't whine when the culture works against them, and they never cry, "Discrimination!" They don't play the man's game, literally or figuratively. They don't act like men or think like them. They never dress in androgynous suits and those homely bow ties. And they don't golf. Well, one of them does: Diana "Dede" Brooks, the unstuffy CEO of Sotheby's, one of the world's stuffiest companies. And wouldn't you know, she plays better than most guys, scoring in the mid-80s.
This new female elite is definitely not your parents' paradigm. Remember when executive women used to be overwhelmingly single and childless? All of the FORTUNE Seven have children. Five are married and two, Mark and Beers, used to be. Feminists in no standard way, they flaunt their femininity. As Rebecca Mark says, "It's startling to people when you're attractive and also really smart or extraordinarily good at what you do. You have greater impact. People want to meet you. They remember you." Beers, 61, is a flamboyant flirt who calls CEOs "honey" and "darlin'." She's been known to refer to IBM CEO Lou Gerstner, her largest client, as "that adorable little man." Says Beers: "One of the biggest mistakes women make in business is that they aren't friendly enough."
Which brings us to our title: "Women, Sex, and Power." By sex, we mean gender. Unlike so many women, these seven see their gender as a help, not a hindrance. (For some high-powered girl talk on this subject, read the box "Cocktails at Charlotte's.") We also mean sexuality, which these women skillfully exploit. Finally, by sex, we do mean sex. Women who are attractive and successful, particularly in male-dominated fields, sometimes have to fend off suspicions: How really did she reach the top?
Sexual innuendo dogs Mark, in part because several years ago she had an unusual relationship with John Wing, once her boss at Enron. People close to Mark and Wing say they had an affair; both were married to other people at the time. Mark declined to talk about their relationship, and Wing did not return repeated phone calls from FORTUNE. However, friends say that the mercurial and charismatic Wing began as a mentor to Mark, and later turned into a Svengali. After Wing left Enron, Mark assumed his duties of developing power plants. No surprise, rumors have circulated that Mark has had relationships with other Enron colleagues. "Of course they're not true," says Mark, "but it's terribly flattering that people think my life is so exciting. I think all I do is work, travel, and take care of my 11-year-old twins."
It's the Mary Cunningham curse. Sixteen years have passed since Cunningham, a young, blond MBA straight out of Harvard, arrived at Bendix, where she simultaneously became a top corporate strategist and a constant companion of CEO William Agee. Now married, the couple always denied having a sexual relationship at Bendix. But the Mary-and-Bill saga was the talk of the business world, and it remains so titillating that high-powered women to this day carry some burden of proving they did not sleep their way to the top. "There are still so few women in high-powered corporate jobs," says Kathleen Reardon, a professor at the University of Southern California business school and an expert on male-female relations. "When people see something unusual, like a woman who is No. 1, rumors provide a rationale." For women, the dilemma is how to fight them. "Defensiveness causes more rumors," Reardon says. "You know, 'the lady doth protest too much."
The FORTUNE Seven are complex, controversial women who have made long--and not always politically correct--marches to the top. Nonconformists to the core, they have unique styles but also share some similarities. Here are five ways they have acquired and kept their power.
THEY USE THEIR SEXUALITY
Most women in business downplay their sex appeal. They seem insistent on being judged like men, repressing a trait they could be using to persuade, win favor, gain power-- okay, manipulate their way to the top. Not these women. Says Barad, decked out in shocking pink from shoes to suit to lipstick: "We never gave up our femininity. We didn't become little men. I don't care to get on equal footing with men." Welcome to the boys' club anyway, Jill. Barad, 45, is expected to become Mattel's CEO next year, making her one of two female chief executives in the FORTUNE 500. (The other is Marion Sandler, CEO, along with her husband, of Golden West Financial, a California S&L.) Like Barad, Linda Marcelli greets colleagues and clients with hugs, sometimes kisses. "If one of my financial consultants is having a problem, I'll put my arm around him," says Marcelli, 53. "A male manager once asked me incredulously, 'You touch your financial consultants?' I said, 'Yeah. What's wrong with that?' " In fact, these women are taking advantage of an odd double standard: Men who touch women risk accusations of sexual harassment.
Charlotte Beers is known for sweeping theatrically into client meetings. Even before hellos are exchanged, she'll drawl to the group, "Now, you're gonna give us this business today, aren't you?" To most men, she's beguiling. Sears CEO Arthur Martinez, an Ogilvy client, says, "I think a lot of male-female business relationships get stilted. What I like so much about Charlotte is that you can have fun with her." Beers's former colleague BBDO International President Jean-Michel Goudard says, "Charlotte, more than anyone in this business, wants to seduce. There's something deep about Charlotte, and also frivolous. She is a woman, a woman, a woman."
It is the women, the women, the women who knock her style. Some say she sets feminism back years. "The criticism really ticks me off," says Beers, who comes across in an interview as intimate, incisive, tough, funny, and a decade younger than her 61 years. A cowboy's daughter from southeast Texas, she first learned to dazzle the crowd when she was in her 20s, teaching algebra to oil-patch engineers. Beers reckons that Southern charm is simply smart business. "Yes, I call CEOs 'honey,' but to me, that's wry Texas humor," she says. "I'm likely to say the most outrageous thing in the room--to liven things up."
Four years ago, Beers seemed an unlikely corporate revivalist. The longtime head of Tatham RSCG, a one-office ad firm in Chicago, she moved into a New York company with 270 offices around the world and famously inbred management. Ogilvy & Mather used to be the class act of Madison Avenue. Then in 1989 it was acquired in a hostile takeover by Britain's WPP Group. When Beers arrived, key Ogilvy veterans had quit. Clients were pulling major accounts. "A lot of people thought Charlotte should have her head examined for going to Ogilvy," says WPP chief executive Martin Sorrell. "And most people thought I was crazy to hire her."
Sorrell, who pays Beers $1.5 million a year plus stock options, acquired a CEO many thought was mercurial, flighty, and disorganized. Instead of talking profits, Beers preached "passion"--the essence, she said, of resurrecting Ogilvy & Mather. She had one big idea to sell to clients: "brand stewardship." Insiders considered it pretentious shtick about the emotional bond between a product and its consumer. Even David Ogilvy, the 85-year-old Scot who founded the agency in 1948, was a skeptic. "I had to shepherd the idea because our own people were unconvinced," says Beers, adding, "I think consensus is a poor substitute for leadership."
She globetrotted, mostly alone, visiting 50 clients in six months. "As a woman, I got in to see people quickly," says Beers. "they were curious about me." Before long she landed two important accounts: American Express, which had earlier yanked its $60 million business from Ogilvy, and Jaguar. During a pitch to Jaguar executives, Beers tossed her own car keys on the table, then rhapsodized about the relationship between an owner and her Jag. She didn't create Ogilvy's award-winning campaign, but it is quintessential Charlotte: a glamorous ode to the Jag, set to the 1961 Etta James recording, "At last my love has come along. My lonely days are over..." She tools around Manhattan in her ice-blue XJ6. Her buddy Martha Stewart drives the same Jaguar in gray.
It's supposed to be a secret, but Beers's No. 2, Shelly Lazarus, is likely to become Ogilvy's new CEO before the end of this year. Lazarus, 48, was the key to reeling in the worldwide IBM business two years ago--the largest account shift in the ad industry. IBM made Ogilvy hot again and helped attract global advertisers such as Kodak and Swatch. (Ogilvy, the sixth-largest ad agency, has billings of $7.6 billion, up from $5.5 billion when Beers arrived.) Beers will probably remain chairman for a while. Says WPP's Sorrell: "I hope Charlotte will work with WPP for life."
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The CYBELE Marriage
by Anthony Merchant
MARRIAGE, in the not-too-distant days of yore, was a financial transaction, not unlike glorified prostitution. A father would trade the hand of his Daughter for, say, a team of oxen and a dairy cow. Often, the groom was decades older and no dead ringer for Tom Cruise. The Bride, of course, would have no say in the matter. A ring would be placed on the fourth finger of Her right hand, so the world would understand that She belonged to someone. That She, like the oxen and the dairy cow, was someone's property.
Thanks to the work of Elizabeth Stanton, Victoria Woodhull, Margaret Sanger, Gloria Steinem, and other less heralded Feminists, much progress has been made in the last century or so. Women now get to choose not only whom they marry, but if they will marry at all. Dowries have gone the way of virgin brides and arranged marriages. Wives no longer vow to honor and obey their husbands. Many choose not to adopt the husband's surname.
Still, marriage, as currently constituted in the Western world, is a vestige of the aforementioned days of yore. The wearing of white, for example, represents virgin purity-quite outmoded in these enlightened times. And the vaunted diamond wedding ring, while big and shiny and expensive, remains a symbol of ownership.
Clearly, we still have a long way to go. In the next few chapters, we'll examine where that journey may take us.
POLYGAMY
The Mormons formally endorsed the practice of polygamy in 1844, in part to increase that sect's population. Church leaders hypothesized that more Wives meant more Mormons. It did. And it's been big in Utah ever since.
Here's how it often works: The husband drifts from Wife to Wife, house to house, like a hummingbird pollinating a garden of flowers. The Wives spend most of the time alone, on the brink of financial and sexual poverty, raising the children, doing the housework, living like slaves. The husband has sex every day and lives like a god.
This is all as it should be, with one major difference: it is the Woman, not the man, who should have multiple partners. Three, at minimum; optimally, five. Why? Because sex should be primarily for pleasure, not procreation, and one man is too often incapable of satisfying a Woman. Most men are good for about ten orgasms a week. Calculating the number of orgasms most Women can have per week requires an abacus.
Consider the possibilities:
If husband #1 ejaculates prematurely, no big deal; husband #2 is on call, ready to relieve him. She just leans back and enjoys the fruits of their labor. Multiple husbands, for Her, equals multiple orgasms. The husbands, all vying for the affections of the beloved Wife (and the right of sexual release), would always try to outdo each other-buying thoughtful gifts, preparing exotic meals, composing sonnets and serenades. The household income, meted out according to the Wife's whims, would afford Her a life of absolute luxury. Punishment and humiliation would be easy with the other men around. And how fine a Woman would look, drawn in a sedan by her five husbands, on the way to the mall.
CUCKOLDRY
Cuckoldry is a must to keep husbands in line, particularly if circumstances prevent a Woman from taking multiple spouses. The rules here are simple: the Wife is allowed-nay, encouraged-to pursue affairs, heterosexual and otherwise, outside of the marriage, while the husband must remain faithful exclusively to Her.
The Wife should not keep these extramarital encounters from the husband. Instead, She should disclose everything in painstaking detail. If he complains about being jealous, She should explain that only his subpar performance between the sheets necessitates Her affairs.
AGE DISPARITY
It has been done so often and for so long that it's perfectly accepted by our society: a man on the wrong side of 40 marries a Woman just out of college (or still in high school, depending on regional age of consent laws). They are a good couple only insofar as She likes to spend money and he has too much to spend himself. He's undergone treatment for congenital baldness, She for breast enhancement. Everyone knows he's not marrying Her for Her brains any more than She's marrying him for his looks, but because no laws were violated (other than that of good taste), no one objects. But when you strip away the tinsel, what you're left with is base prostitution. Except that prostitutes can leave after their half hour elapses.
The point here is not to criticize the Woman who so weds. For all we know, She's funnelling Her hubby's stock options into FemDom web sites and Her urine into his mouth. What concerns us is that the converse is so rarely seen. What makes a Clint Eastwood or a Sean Connery sexy at 75, when Sigourney Weaver and Sally Field are too old to get leading roles anymore? We don't even see famous older Women marring young strapping males, let alone obscurer ones. And when we do, it's Larry Fortensky, who is not exactly Playgirl material. But tabloids are littered with the odious likes of Jerry Seinfeld or Woody Allen or Dodi, arms draped round some teenage waif.
And it's not just the celebrities, and it's not just the extreme. More often than not, a husband is older than his Wife. By five, six--sometimes ten or fifteen years. This is so common it's not even noted most of the time. The idea stems, I suppose, from the axiom that Women mature faster than men (an absolute truth if ever there was one). But Women reach their sexual peak at 35+, men sometime in high school--not the other way around. When the Anna Nicole Smiths of the world hit their prime, their husbands will be down to fortnightly orgasms, with prostate cancer knocking on the door. Surely no amount of money is worth such a bathetic end.
Ideally, the Wife should be seven-ten years older than the eldest of her five husbands.
PULLING THE PURSE STRINGS
Money makes the world go round. If we have money, we have the power to do what we wish. If we are financially dependent on someone else, we are slave to that person, no matter how thoughtful and considerate that person might be.
The primary reason Women have been considered second-class citizens for so long is because they have lacked financial clout. A Housewife in the 1950's could not leave Her husband without sentencing Herself to a life of poverty. Nowadays, Women are able to bring home the bacon. And bring it home They should.
It is essential that all financial decisions--now matter how trivial--are made by the Wife. She then has in effect veto power over Her life and the lives of Her husbands, who are completely dependent upon Her generosity.
All husbands should have their finances arranged thus:
All paychecks, bonuses, dividends, and what have you are deposited directly into the Wife's bank account, to which the husbands are denied access.
All savings earned prior to the union are also transferred to the Wife's account or accounts.
Husbands are allowed one credit card with a $250 spending limit, which is to be used only in case of emergency. Husbands are not issued ATM cards.
The Wife is responsible for paying all household bills, including the cost of food shopping and basic clothes shopping for Her husbands. She keeps Her checkbook under lock and key.
Husbands are given a nominal allowance each week ($70, say) for spending money, lunch, etc., and for other leisurely items, such as books or CDs. Any pornography that demeans Women is strictly forbidden.
Money is power, locally and globally. To further the Gynosupremacist cause on the large scale, men should make business decisions that favor Women. To wit:
If a man and a Woman apply for the same job and are equally qualified--and even if the man is slightly more qualified--the Woman should get the job.
Whenever possible, Female-owned companies should be employed as vendors.
Any kind of traditional sexual harassment should be rooted out, with men informing on other men. (Note that lewd e-mail jokes and objectifying comments are forms of harassment).
HARNESSING POWER
The strap-on dildo is a quintessential element of the Gynosupremacist marriage. The dildo itself should be larger than his erect member-several inches longer and thicker, if possible. What is his malfunctioning nubber next to a larger apparatus that never softens?
Anal intrusion with the strap-on is the device's obvious function. Sex of this kind at first will humiliate and hurt the husband, but in time, he will come to enjoy the penetration. What began as punishment will become reward.
Better to make the husband wear the strap-on. His member should be secured between his legs with a leather chastity belt to prevent erection and keep it out of the way. The use of the strap-on should be instinctive for the man, who, without having to worry about premature ejaculation or impotence, can work for hours pleasuring the Wife. He himself will only experience vicarious pleasure. Furthermore, after being accustomed to a larger phallus, if he ever tries to have intercourse with his actual penis, he will feel even smaller than he actually is.
CHASTITY REINFORCEMENT
The longer a man goes without orgasm, the greater lengths he will go to in order to achieve one. In other words, a teased man will do whatever his Woman wishes. Conversely, once a man climaxes, he is not thinking about sex any longer. The needs of his Woman are ignored.
Thus, the orgasm must be harnessed -- figuratively and literally. Denial of orgasm should be used as punishment, fulfillment of orgasm as reward. There are many methods to doing this, some more extreme than others, but here are some inviolable ground rules:
The husband should never under any circumstances masturbate, unless instructed to do so by his Wife.
The husband should never be permitted to release unless the Wife has already done so.
The Wife should never perform oral sex on the husband. If the husband desires fellatio, he should be made to find a man to sate this base desire.
Sexual intercourse implies by its very nature equity--the putting together of complementary parts. Because the husband should never be made to feel equal to the Wife, intercourse should be eschewed for cunnilingus and strap-on sex. Should the Wife nevertheless desire intercourse, the husband should never be permitted to orgasm.
On those rare occasions when a husband is allowed sexual release, he should do so by one of three means: 1) rubbing against a hard surface, such as the bed; 2) manual masturbation by his own hands; 3) through some undesired act of homosexuality.
Sexual release should be used as a reward, but should also be a punishable offense.
Semen should be disposed of in a way that humiliates the husband (i.e., oral consumption).
The Wife should not touch the husband below the belt if at all possible.
There are many methods to keeping the husband in line. The most extreme way to control the husband's orgasm is through the use of chastity control devices--chastity belts, piercings, and the like.
CYBELE marriage endorses the use of chastity belts and the rationing of male orgasms. Limiting the husband to one release per week is a good way to start. Ideally, he should be kept confined for two-three weeks at a time, with longer periods to punish bad behavior.
OWNERSHIP RITES
This means exerting your control over the man in some indelible way. Ownership rites can be extreme (scarification, branding, disfigurement). They can also be simple.
Here are some rites endorsed by CYBELE marriage:
A discreet tattoo--a heart with the Wife's name on his left pectoral,
Piercings of the nipples, penis, and scrotum
Shaving of the genital area
Cock rings
Toe-nail polish
The husband's taking of the Wife's last name.
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Look Who's Bringing Home More Bacon
Business Week
JANUARY 27, 2003
WORKING LIFE
By Michelle Conlin
A mere month into his relationship with Betsy Morgan, Chad Gifford found himself sitting nervously in her parents' dining room in Suffield, Conn., where the clan had gathered for Easter lunch. "So tell me, Chad," Betsy's banker father began, lowering the boom before the roast was served. "How much does an archaeologist earn?"
Gee, Mr. Morgan, not much. Today, 10 years later, Betsy, 34, and Chad, 36, are a happily married Manhattan couple. Betsy is a CBS executive who makes fat cash. Chad is an archaeologist who jaunts all over the world for digs that barely pay. She buys Prada shoes. He still owns clothes from high school. She burns water. He learned how to wash lettuce from a family friend--Julia Child. "We joke that I should make Chad a nonprofit," says Betsy.
The American family has something new going for it: the femmes who finance. After only three decades as members of the mainstream workforce, one in three wives now outearns her husband, up from one in five in 1980. Women with MBAs are doing even better: Nearly 60% have direct deposits bigger than their grooms'. Look for the ranks of the Ms. Breadwinners to rise even more, with 20% more women than men graduating from college and more women swelling the managerial ranks every year. Francine M. Deutsch, a psychology professor who studies gender roles and parenting at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass., believes the trend will help erode the mommy tax--the heavy penalties women pay for having children--and help ease female poverty in old age.
The shift puts a twist on the term "purse strings." Researchers say the phenomenon is helping restructure marriage by creating mergers of complementary strengths, in which power is shared and spouses act as flexible allies who easily switch back and forth between roles. In essence, the family now has co-CEOs. "I expected to find these women lording it over their husbands," says Barbara Stanny, author of Secrets of Six-Figure Women. Stanny studied 150 women earning $100,000 or more. Nearly 70% earned more than their partners. But even though they raked in more cash--and often managed the family finances--Stanny found that most wanted interdependent relationships. "They all talked about how crucial their husbands were to success," says Stanny.
How well a couple fares depends on how successfully they share childrearing and what their pact was upon marriage. Resentment can flare if the breadwinner role was unexpectedly foisted on the wife by a layoff or sudden failure, says Breadwinner Wives and the Men They Marry author Randi Minetor. One PR executive financed her husband's new restaurant and ended up pleading her case in bankruptcy court with $960,000 of debt attached to her name. She lost the 2,200-square-foot house with the pool and her Audi A6. "I thought supporting his dream would get me to my dream--to be a stay-at-home mom," she says. Instead, she wound up a Saturn-driving single parent living in a condo with no credit.
Some husbands balk, threatened by their wives' new power. One recent Penn State University study found that men tend to become gloomier and more prone to headaches when their wives begin earning more. Still, the positives can be considerable if men have strong self-images, feel no need to compete with their wives, and don't have in-laws shaming them for their role. Men with breadwinner wives are often relieved to share the onus, especially given the enormous resources required to raise a family in an era of slippery job security. The role swap allows men to spend more time with their children and pursue passions that a megacareer would prohibit.
Indeed, the more economic power the wife has, the more men help out at home. Minetor found that 51% of men with breadwinner wives are the major housekeepers. Finally, more career women are getting the one thing they say they need most: a wife.
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Why women are better bosses than men
Jennifer Morrison
The Ottawa Citizen
Friday, January 17, 2003
Women make better bosses than men. And it's not just women rallying behind this claim -- men think so too.
This conclusion was reached by University of Leeds management professor Beverley Alimo-Metcalfe and researcher John Alban-Metcalfe, who surveyed 2,000 British men and women in middle to senior management positions.
Respondents were asked to anonymously rate their boss on 14 dimensions of leadership. The topics included: leading individuals, showing genuine concern, being accessible, encouraging change, focusing effort and inspiring others.
The researchers discovered at the middle management level, on almost all of the 14 dimensions, female bosses were rated significantly higher than their male counterparts. The study found women bosses not only inspire others and resolve complex problems better than men, they're also more accessible. "And the surprising thing is, even men prefer women managers," Ms. Alimo-Metcalfe said in an interview yesterday."This is undoubtedly saying that women are much better managers than men."
Such findings are supported by University of Connecticut management professor Laura Graves who has researched gender and management extensively. Although hard evidence does not necessarily suggest a difference in management effectiveness on the basis of sex, she said this is changing.
In today's less hierarchical work environments where teamwork and interpersonal relations are becoming increasingly important, women exhibit qualities that make them better leaders than men. "Women are better at individual consideration, they're better at working with their subordinates, assessing his or her needs and helping them develop," she said. "We know that in these flat, non-hierarchical, team-oriented organizations of today, these are the type of behaviors that are important for effectiveness."
Still, being better bosses isn't translating into more success for women, as they are still largely under represented in management positions. For the past several years Catalyst Canada, a research and advisory organization, has been tracking women in management positions.
As part of their 2001 census, Catalyst looked at women as board members of the Financial Post 500 companies in Canada. "Last year (2001), women made up 9.8 per cent -- which is not a great number," explained vice-president Susan Black. "But the good news is that it's up from 1998 when it was 6.7 per cent. The movement is in the right direction, but there's still a lot of room for improvement."
It's the same story in the United Kingdom, where men comprise 90 per cent of management positions, Ms. Alimo-Metcalfe said. "We've got to somehow crack this. It's not a glass ceiling, it's nuclear or concrete,"she said.
That can't be done, however, until attitudes are changed at senior management levels and more
transformational leadership styles are adopted.
Not everyone agrees that sex makes a difference in a manager's effectiveness. John Challenger, a U.S. executive at an international outplacement consulting firm, said the best managers can be women or men and one sex in not necessarily better than the other.
"Good managers have to create a good group of people who are committed to their work, who support each other, achieve the objectives and create great results for the company," he said.
Catherine Lemire, a manager at Bain & Company in Toronto disagrees."I am convinced there is a significant gap in management capabilities between men and women," she said. "What is key to being a good manager in business includes the ability to prioritize work, taking an objective and logical approach to solving issues or problems, facilitating teamwork and using leadership
skills to get the very best out of the people in your organization."
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In the Brutal World of 'Oz,' A Rare Place for Women
Excerpt from NY Times
Sunday Arts and Leisure Section
January 5, 2003, Page 35
It is about the acclaimed HBO program about prison life.
The article is principally about women viewers who identify with the women guards and the power they exercise over the male inmates. It also makes reference to the many male inmates who are
submissives, both to the stronger male prisoners and especially vis-a-vis the female guards.
The article notes that, in the age 35-to-49 age group, the show has more women than men who are fans, and that the "relationship of predator and prey" is at the heart of the series. The article describes the character of Officer Claire Howell, a guard who bullies the male inmates and forces them to strip and perform sexual favors.
The actress who plays her states that women constantly approach her on the street or wherever to tell her how they love her character. The actress, Kristin Rohde, tells her fans, "But she's so bad." And the fans invariably reply, "No, no, I love her -- the power." Ms. Rohde is quoted as saying, "I hear it from businesswomen and women from all walks of life."
