TrumpWorld's Sisterhood War

TrumpWorld's Sisterhood War

(FemPower and the Erotic Revolution)

Introduction

“There’s a special place in hell for women

who don’t help each other”

Madeline Albright, 2016

A bitter election exposes sisterhood war

Heather Brown went to a special place in hell. Her sin? She was guilty of being the "other" woman, complicit in a gross betrayal when she admitted to a reporter: “I simply prefer the leadership of a strong male”. History has recorded its fair share of bitter elections, but none come as bitter – or baffling - as the 2016 presidential election in the US. Scholars will rummage through exit polls and doubtless declare that the election was the ultimate battle of the sexes between the Working Man’s Great White Hope (Donald Trump), and the Great Feminist Hope (Hilary Clinton). The baffling bit for historians to fathom is that here was an extremely competent first-ever woman candidate with 30 years political experience up against a crude misogynist with zero experience who would happily roll back women’s rights (and anything else with a progressive bent), only to lose the female vote - and the presidency!

Pollsters, pundits, the media, even taxi-drivers, all predicted that the blustering billionaire ex-playboy who naively believed he could simply blunder into the corridors of power and redesign it all in his own image, had a snowflake’s chance in hell of victory let alone move the needle with female voters. Especially given Clinton’s promises to working women were far more generous than Trump’s. Yet, despite all the odds and vulgar belittlement of women, that Trump actually managed to garner more than half of the crucial white female vote* has got to have a hell of a story behind it. And much soul-searching about the true depth of inequality if such a momentous occasion of a woman finally on the precipice of ruling the world was overawed by more pressing issues. Where do you start with the questions? Like, were those votes really for Trump or were they essentially against an elite feminism out of touch with ordinary women? By all accounts, November 9, 2016 should have been an historic day of unification for women….but instead it exposed a great DIVIDE! In fact, a divide that had been brewing unresolved for decades - even to quietly spill over into a marriage/dating “war” that utterly baffled men no end – only to end ignominiously in feminism’s worst nightmare. And I mean worst given an odious poster-boy of the patriarchy had dubiously snatched the presidency from the fingertips of one of feminism’s finest.

Well, not only did things take a screeching right turn, but blood and tears dripped for months from the still-intact hardest and highest glass ceiling that was poised on the edge of history to be shattered. The groundswell of feminist fury had universal relevance given millions of women (and men) flared their nostrils at record-breaking Women’s Marches around the world in protest solidarity. But not everyone was feeling the Grrrr %&*#! There were tears amid the cheers spanning the country as an anxious world watched, anticipating a Trump-inspired populist wave crossing the Atlantic while conscious of their own sisterhood war rumblings. Women danced down Main Street and women kicked tyres along High Street. Women fist-pumped and women middle-fingered. While some were virtually jumping over the moon, others gazed mournfully into their G&Ts seemingly bereft of purpose in a world that just turned upside down. In fact, we get a measure of this stark polarization from a line of clothing specifically created for the white woman who did NOT vote for Trump and wanted the world to know: T-shirts emblazoned with the moniker ‘Not This White Woman’ (www.fastcocreate.com / if you arent one of the 53% of white women who voted for trump this shirt is for you).

So, who is “this white woman”? More intriguingly, who is the “other” white woman? If it sounds like an infidelity issue….well, it probably is as the sisterhood heads for a stinging divorce …..ahem, all over a man. The shock revelation that women caved to the smooth rhetoric of a ‘bad boy’ alpha male who “promised” (as they do) to make everything great again, has cut especially deep - a gross betrayal! As Trump supporter Heather Brown elaborated to an obviously impressed reporter: “I’m a throwback, which naturally lends itself to traditional femininity. I’ve always been attracted to alpha males. But then, after the popularity of 50 Shades of Grey, I’m hardly alone” (www.theguardian.com /2016/11/17 /feminist vote for Donald Trump). Fifty Shades of Grey, of course, was an erotic bestseller involving a domineering billionaire commanding a young maiden to submit to his every desire.

Now, if you close one eye, Heather’s “traditional femininity” admission is a handy metaphor of the “other” woman submitting to the desire of a domineering billionaire to vote against rising FemPower (progressive women’s rise in economic and political power). So, what is this tension that ultimately delivered the greatest bombshell ever recorded in woman’s history? And what will be the outcome under a Trump presidency (aka TrumpWorld)? Not surprisingly, men have become even more baffled than usual, so where will they fit in here? And where would historians begin to explain it all?

Actually the tension began in the early 1970s when FemPower’s fledgling movement for equal opportunity saw “traditional femininity” as frivolous and undermining their cause, the tension remaining unresolved until the 2016 election brought it to an acrimonious head. But of course historians will reflect on the declining status of the male breadwinner - and of masculinity itself - as the primary catalyst for Trump’s victory when it was essentially the sisterhood “war” that got the charismatic chauvinist over the line. Obviously they will be blindsided by the huge media coverage devoted to the global rise of populism (Trumpism in the US, Brexit in the UK), essentially a working man’s anger-fest against policies that for decades had favored elites but forgot everyone else. In the US, the forgotten class was primed to vote for anyone who would empathize with their anxieties. When an unpolished Donald Trump swaggered up to the podium, it absolutely didn’t matter that he was on the nose personally.

Meanwhile, millions of women facing equal opportunity barriers at the first hurdle (e.g. prohibitive cost of a decent education), felt they were not only forgotten but used by a well-educated ‘smug elite’ intent on smashing glass ceilings. So, what better time to bring to a head a long-running unresolved ideological and ultimately romantic issue: were men the problem “enemy” for regarding women more as sequels than equals, or were men the solution that could be managed with a little more…..well, “traditional femininity”, updated of course to 21st century erotic fare? If the solution, then patriarchy – or what was left of it - needed a buffer against the rise of the (elite) alpha female.

For the marginalized forgotten, FemPower was never going to cut it as much a solution as history’s most formidable power source. At least in today’s prurient culture with sexual imagery seared into the collective retina, an affordable femininity-enhancing industry facilitates a marriage pathway “solution” to upward mobility. In a topsy-turvy TrumpWorld conflicted between the past and the future, this is their story of bold encroachment upon the marital domain of latte-sipping elites who have their own, albeit unconventional, brazen response.

* Clinton’s voter support among Hispanic and women of color could not counter the much larger white electorate

Chapter One

Erotic Backlash in retro TrumpWorld

“Higher-status people choose spouses

with the highest erotic capital”

Sociologist Catherine Hakim, 2011

Reclaiming the erotized body

The days following the unexpected election of Donald J Trump as the 45th US President, I began throwing out newspapers that for months had been predicting another history-making American President. In amongst the throw-out, a bolder than usual headline caught my eye: Pole dancer wins $3.2 million divorce settlement in landmark legal case. According to the news article, the divorcing couple first met “at the adult entertainment venue where she worked” when he was married to someone else. He was a wealthy businessman and the 13 years younger woman “had no assets”. After a few clandestine years, the businessman finally divorced his then wife to marry his pole-dancing mistress, but not before signing a “pre-nuptial agreement that he would pay her $3.2 million if the marriage failed within four years. They separated less than two years later”.

In a perverse way, this divorce case seemed just a small victory for ordinary people left behind. In fact, the case reminded me of the words of HBO television producer in the US, Sheila Nevins, who fired back at those ranting about her peddling the raunch genre and its T&A objectification of women: “Not being able to feed your kids, that’s disgusting and degrading. Everyone has to bump and grind for what they want. Their bodies are their instruments and if I had that body I’d play it like Stradivarius. The women are beautiful and the men are fools!” (Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs, P.92). Well, that’s eroticism for you – and the power to affect upward mobility even if you are of the politically neglected. It is called romantic benefit – an exciting offer of physical and emotional nourishment in exchange for economic benefit. History is replete with tales of savvy mistresses, courtesans, concubines, models and pole-dancers eventually getting “what they want” from ego-tragics wanting to show off their symbol of success.

By way of contrast, the nervous corporate years following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (hereinafter GFC, which includes the Great Recession in the US), has been especially opportunistic for well-educated women in serious career pursuit (see chapter FemPower Rising, Male Empire Dying). So much so that Time magazine asserted that “women are poised to become the major breadwinners in a majority of families within the next generation….Men are just as willing as women to marry up, and life is now giving them the opportunity to do so” (www.idea.time.com / Why Men Are Attracted to High Earning Women / 2012/03/15). The translation, of course, is that the history of marriage - and its often frustrating antecedent the marriage market - is one of both continuity and change as a deeper understanding of the human condition evolves. In the 21st century, that deeper understanding is inclusive of men wanting to be more involved as fathers and women wanting to be more seriously involved in careers as well as motherhood. In this progressive New marriage format, both partners view their identities as parents as seriously as their identities as 2.0 dual-earners.

The rise of female power, or FemPower, underpins a dramatic turnaround in marriage dynamics and partner-selection norms, promising a tectonic shift in how we think about parenting, work, masculinity, dating, sex, even romantic attraction as well as serve up a curve ball to that most contentious of modern issues: marriage infidelity. This mating revolution reflects a shifting power dynamic from men to women, propelled by a post-industrial changing workworld more congenial to women. The notion of women becoming primary breadwinners overturns the very conventions that have anchored society for centuries. These are the facts; and these are revolutionary times.

But in every revolution there is resistance, particularly in the private mating world where there is no public policy to guide or effect change apart from who can legally marry. Certainly the New marriage style of integrated roles does not sit well with traditionalists. And who better to turbo-inspire the traditional male breadwinner marriage (hereinafter Old marriage) than President Donald J Trump, an avid ideologue of the old-fashioned wife. “I won’t do anything”, he told Howard Stern in 2005, to take care of the children, “I’ll supply funds and she’ll take care of the kids”. Melania Trump as the third trophy wife nodded: “We know our roles….I didn’t want him to change the diapers”. Donald Trump may change wives and has children with three different women, but he is obviously still a die-hard traditionalist that according to his lofty campaign promises he wants to return America to - the glorious past in “how it used to be”.

Ideologically, or by circumstance, New marriage conflicts with those who find the traditional separate roles of Old marriage - or as close enough to them - suits them better. This conflict is magnified by the retro housewife trend, evidenced by the popular rise of the educated stay-at-home-mother in recent years. As The Economist reported under the headline The return of the stay-at-home mother (April 19, 2014): “The increase in stay-at-home mothering sits oddly with a second big trend affecting women’s lives: their relative success in the labor market”. The report suggested an “element of choice” is involved given a quarter of homestayers “have college degrees” (see chapter Opt-Out Revolution Post-9/11). Further evidence suggest the opt-out trend is a backlash against a pantsuit elite in lockstep with exploitative capitalism (classic example is the career-feminist Hilary Clinton who once sat on the Wal-Mart board for six years while the union-busting company paid their largely female staff abysmal wages with few benefits).

Essentially it is disillusioned young women who are rebranding the 1950s domestic lifestyle with feminine zeal. Extreme feminine zeal - packaged as erotic capital - has usurped social capital per se as the new allure in marrying well. Much of this disillusionment stems from elite feminism’s focus on bourgeois careers in the bull-headed push to crack the glass-ceiling. Fine for some, but the reality for many is that liberation from the home turned out less about career fulfilment and more about enslavement to the corporate treadmill. Many Gen-Yers (the generation who stare into their mobile phones looking for a sign), gobsmacked at how Gen X-hausted became stuck with the “double burden” of work and home, yearn for a more blissful domestic life. In other words, for many of the college-educated, a successful ‘good man’ is seen as the “solution” (see chapter Generation new age Old Fashion). But competition is fierce given the marriage market has been decimated of successful men in a still-traumatized economy post-GFC at the same time the powerless forgotten have powered up with the sensual/erotic revolution seemingly engulfing the planet. You know….seek out the now-ubiquitous cosmetic surgeon and take up something like….well, pole-dancing, not so much to work in adult entertainment to supplement the lousy day-job pay, but to work for the bikini body in the “bump and grind” of the adult mating game.

Not surprisingly, the sensual revolution became every parent’s nightmare when young women took to the streets to reclaim the erotized body in SlutWalk liberation marches a few years back. These worldwide protests for the freedom to wear less rather than, say, more pay – or even equal pay - were a telling indictment that the spoils of mainstream feminism largely favored elites. If you take the world’s richest nation as a template, over half adult working women in the US are still rusted onto the minimum wage - an equal pay scheme sponsored by none other than government! It gets worse. The minimum wage globally has fallen in value in real terms; in the US, for instance, close to 20 per cent since 1981 (https://blog.dol.gov /2016/07/22/ 7-facts-about-the-minimum-wage). It was a glaring reflection that the so-called Equality Age had churned out winners and losers.

Without a costly degree plus supplement for the extra competitive edge, feminism’s equality gains hardly trickled-down to ordinary women. While glass-ceiling head-butters with their bourgeois double degrees were joining in matrimony with the cream of the dating pool (and driving up inflation), glass-slipper hopefuls were still relying on good old-fashion Prince Charming to come along. Therein lies a widening ideological schism. As pop icon Madonna succinctly put it in OUT magazine in 2015: “women are still the most marginalized group…..still just trading on their ass”.

Indeed, if you weren’t affluent enough to afford the gold standard in education you were on the worker losing end going nowhere. While the well-educated and pedigree-connected may reach venerable career goals with fewer sexist hurdles to leap, the less-privileged have to virtually shoot out of a cannon, hence many decide to revisit what worked best in an unequal past (aka “how it used to be”). Simply put, there was no nectar trickling down the stem if you were anywhere near the bottom catching the 6 am bus (and the 3pm to a second job) propping up the services economy from childcare to the barista so the professional class can keep riding the elevators to the top. While ‘having-it-all’ pantsuit hopefuls agitate for quotas in executive hiring, there just wasn’t the equivalent agitation for hopefuls having enough to get by.

In fact, the most forceful push against “starvation wages” and crippling student debt came from a gritty 74 year-old candidate in the 2016 US presidential race who was virtually knighted on the spot every time he shuffled up to a podium. Bernie Sanders’s rhetoric of hope - “we are going to make public colleges and universities tuition-free” - was so heartfelt that young women (and men) turned out in droves to support the self-avowed “socialist” in the primaries, rejecting the Great Feminist Hope, Hilary Clinton. It was a telling reflection that brand feminism had failed ordinary women. As Cosmopolitan magazine put it when a whopping 62 per cent of non-college (white) women voted for a “how it used to be” candidate in an article poignantly headlined: Feminism Couldn’t Win the 2016 Election – Why Feminism Remains a Privileged Space:

“….the Clinton brand of feminism – the pantsuit-wearer who leans in for a raise or for whom boardroom gender parity is of paramount importance – is alienating to large swaths of the population for whom those issues aren’t even on the table”.

And at the grassroots level, this sentiment from 34-year-old Anoa Changa in an interview for The Guardian: “I reject this brand of feminism…..I’m sure for a certain class of women [Hilary Clinton] is perfect. But there are a lot of issues that affect low-income women….that her brand of doing things is not going to address (www.theguardian.com /I’m not with her: why women are wary of Hilary Clinton /2016 /05/23).

Indeed, history has never waived from the fact that an army of cheap female labor supports the professional class. Evidence shows that inequality among women is rising faster than inequality among men. According to the Brookings Institute, this rise in inequality started around the time feminism first won equality gains: “After 1979 women in the top quintile saw their earnings climb more than 25 percent. For women at the bottom, annual earnings fell after 1979 (www.brookings.edu /worsening-american-income-inequality). And the agitation to get more women into the C-suite exacerbates the inequality given CEO pay is now 300 times average worker pay.

If it took a hissy fit from an old gruff with a hunger for socialist ideals to be the true light on the hill for the forgotten, it is doubtful whether feminism’s poster-girls cracking the glass-ceiling will suddenly become Mother Theresa. Well, not when company profit and personal bonus is the bottom line. Take the 2015 University of California study, Agents of Change or Cogs in the Machine? that examined the influence of female managers on the gender pay gap, and concluded: “Female managers... appeared to act in ways that amplified, rather than diminished, the gender wage gap” (www.journals.uchicago.edu). In other words, the patriachial corporate system only elevates those who follow its rules and isolates those who don’t. (Didn’t Marissa Mayer when at Goggle ban her employees from working remotely, impacting working mothers struggling with childcare? And why wouldn’t she when her base salary at the time was $1 million a year and annual target bonus $2 million? How many others would quietly slip out of the “feminist tent” and take up an offer too good to refuse to become a cog in the machine?)

That the ambitious woman is seen as the ‘cog in the machine’ can be traced back to 1976 when Ms Magazine published an essay titled ‘Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood’ by Jo Freeman, who wrote “to be recognized, to achieve, is to imply that one is ‘making it off other women’s oppression’”. The piece struck a chord receiving a deluge of letters, which remained relevant decades later when letters became Trump votes to throw a blinding spotlight on “the dark side of sisterhood”. For the oppressed whom feminism inadvertently ignored when it took up militant campaigns against objectification, the penny eventually dropped that the LOSS in the only power that history had ever consistently afforded the oppressed - erotic power – was more tangible than so-called equality gains. Certainly it was not a good look for career-minded elites if women as a collective were valued in society for their bodies and not their minds. As Wikipedia understood it: “Many feminists regard sexual objectification as deplorable and as playing an important role in gender inequality”. Shock-horror, the decorative hangover from days past had rendered women not serious enough to look beyond the end of a hairbrush let alone competent enough for the rigors of a career pursuit. The Hanover College of Psychology elucidates: “pictures of women who are depicted as sexual objects or dolls….can affect how people view women in leadership positions and perceive their abilities” (www.psych.hanover.edu /advertisements and women).

Obviously the sexual object tag had to go lest career-chasing women be forever up against the frivolous ornament stereotype. Hence hordes of “bra-burners” stormed the citadels that propagated sexual objectification, shutting down beauty pageants, Playboy clubs etc., around the world, and trashing copies of Cosmopolitan and accoutrements of what was perceived as male-enforced femininity. Hmmm, smells like Barbie-shaming; but for many, Barbie is increasingly seen as a more democratic pathway to better prospects given decades of what Bernie Sanders called “grotesque inequality”. As pioneer feminist Emily Faithfull put it: “Every woman should be free to support herself by the use of whatever faculties God has given her”. Well, that was back in the 19th century (1862) when women were so forgotten they didn’t even have the vote; absolutely powerless except for the body they stood up in. Since then, of course, women have had the vote, but there is a certain powerless déjà vu reflected in an OECD report in 2014 that found inequality had reached levels not seen since the 19th century!! Gulp.

However, given today’s erotizing culture, there has never been more opportunity to utilize “whatever faculties God has given” (or not given, and the scalpel maketh up the shortfall). Of course, I am talking about the new age sensual revolution driven by a prurient culture that socializes women to value themselves not only for their beauty but for their sexual desirability. Take First Lady Melania Trump, for example, who, according to her Slovenia teacher in analysing why she discontinued studies to pursue modelling, “she was very beautiful girl….I believe that she realized that she could gain more with that, than to have long studies”. And gain she did - on the arm of a rich and powerful man who became the US President.

But an even better example is vivacious Mary Anne Macleod who migrated to the US from Scotland in 1930 as a penniless domestic worker and in 1936 married businessman Fred Trump, the US President’s father. What is extraordinary here is that both women came from ordinary backgrounds, and obviously free from feminist influence, un-selfconsciously utilizing feminine charm to marry well so their FUTURE children could have better prospects - such as becoming a US President! If the State, or mainstream feminism, or assorted smug elites don’t care, perhaps a well-off suitor might. It is called marrying well (i.e. marrying across class boundaries – or better still, marrying rich). Given so-called trickle-down economics has consistently failed to trickle-down, there is no greater (unwritten) “policy” tool to eradicate child poverty than marriage from the bottom up. Historically, women have been key drivers of social mobility, lifting offspring into a higher stratum of income, networks and cultural sophistication.

So, is it any wonder that non-elites at the sharp end of income inequality are reclaiming “whatever faculties God has given” snatched from them by an elite feminism hellbent on the C-suite? For the forgotten, reclaiming control over one’s destiny via good old proven erotic power seemed a better option in a society that can’t get enough of sexual imagery seared into the collective retina, particularly the savvy fresh-faced in their lissom-body (erotic capital) fertile years.

Mad as hell

Not surprisingly, Slutwalk was soon followed by the ‘Women Against Feminism’ campaign on Tumblr advocating #‘don’t waste the pretty’, or words to that effect. Elite feminism’s ‘don’t waste hard-won opportunity’ seemed a far less viable ideology to embrace than ‘don’t waste the pretty’. The wagons were definitely circling and on edge for the slightest flashpoint to expose the sisterhood war was real and not imagined. That flashpoint arrived during the 2016 presidential race in the US. The sisterhood war surely became official when former US Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, ranted that cracking the glass ceiling was far from done and fired off this belter at young women for rejecting the first-ever woman nominee to vote for a man in the primaries: “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other!”

The response across the weblines cut to the chase and went something like this: ‘well, what do you expect Madam Uptight when decent education is only affordable to elites while the rest of us ride the 6 am bus?’ And the 3 pm to a second job given a costings report found that a student at a public university on a maximum Pell Grant would “have to work 37 hours a week, every week of the year, at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, to get by. Research shows that “people with higher student loans are less able to get married, buy houses and save for retirement (www.npr.org / 2017/07/16/ teachers with student debt…). Small wonder reports in 2016 found 70 per cent of loan borrowers were in default while student applications fell 40 per cent. As American author Joseph Stiglitz reported in his book The Price of Inequality, ordinary Americans are falling even further behind because of “the way higher education is financed. It is one of the reasons that only about 8 per cent of those in the bottom half get a college education”. Interestingly, Stiglitz’s analysis was reported in an Australian broadsheet headlined Inequality: good reasons to shun the US model (www.smh.com.au /07/07/2014).

[The new evolution: institutions of learning to Educational Corporations. Taking the US as an example given it is one of the most expensive higher education systems in the world, in 2015 it cost an average $36,556 in tuition fees for a four-year degree at a public college or $124,924 at a private college (www.topuniversities.com/ student-info)]

Understandably, the forgotten were mad as hell at being forced onto a soup-cube diet given college fees were eating up hard-earned waiting tips. “A degree [is] no longer a ticket to higher social mobility for the poorest Americans” writes Rana Foroobar in Time magazine (The View, September 26, 2016), “many end up in second or third-tier colleges, going into debt for dubious degrees”. And it gets worse given TrumpWorld’s proposed $9-billion budget cuts in education and support for marginalized students, especially when on-going education is needed just to remain employable in a rapidly changing workplace. As Senator Elizabeth Warren put it: “Young people have been dealt a terrible hand. Those….who don’t make it through college have little chance of making it into the middle class. And those who do….are often so swamped with debt that they begin their adult lives in a deep financial hole” (www.lennyletter.com /elizabeth warren wants to make college affordable again/05/24/2017). And that financial hole is going to be even deeper if you didn’t graduate from an elite institution according to the book with the telling title Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs

It’s called the odds are stacked against you. The bottom line is no-brainer – it was simply more affordable to have cosmetic procedure enhance feminine allure and take your aspiration chances in the (pedigree) marriage marketplace. When the marginalized are restricted in maximizing their potential, the female brain’s algorithms switch to good old-fashion hypergamy as a better option (to reiterate, so one’s future children may maximize theirs). And not just to marry-up as in grandma’s day, but to marry well (ahem, as we see in later chapters, hypergamy is fast becoming an equal opportunity player as men begin to recognize the overall benefits – romantic and economic - of marrying up to successful women).

[According to the Hechinger Report released June 2017 and titled ‘Universities and colleges struggle to stem big drops in enrollment’, there are 2.4 million fewer college students than six years ago]

Huff if you must, but the marginalized in rich countries are catching the 6am workers’ bus just like their poorer 3rd World sisters – and doubtless many sing from the same songbook:

“I work all night, I work all day, to pay the bills I have to pay. Ain’t it sad…..In my dreams I have a plan, if I got me a wealthy man” (lyrics from ABBA’s song Money, Money, Money).

Perhaps better still is feminist icon Gloria Steinem’s admission on the Bill Maher Show following Madeline Albright’s “special place in hell” rant: “Young women are active, mad as hell about what’s happening to them, graduating in debt but averaging a million dollars less over their lifetimes to pay it back”.

Small wonder the pants-suit and shoulder pads that held so much career promise for so few was discarded into the short history trash-can, replaced with the revealing body-hugger. Less room to breathe perhaps, but more room for skin and shape in the seduction game - and feeling a million dollars to boot! For marginalized women, an obstacle-laden career ladder seemed a leap too far whereas one small step on the weight scales and into a surgeon’s waiting room seemed to offer a better pathway. What we can divine from this is that young women, doubtless emboldened in a prurient culture, have embraced a broader – and, indeed, bolder - brand of niche “feminism” better suited to their circumstances, desires, and Ideological Disposition (hereinafter ID, the value lens through which we view the world). While the new feminist waves are more nuanced, on many issues there are more positions than the KamaSutra, an appropriate analogy given the “feminism” most relevant to the erotic backlash is of the sex-positive kind. As Wikipedia put it, new feminist groups have taken “the objectification of women as an opportunity to use the female body as a mode of power” (https://en.wikipedia.org /sexual objectification). In other words, the beige old school complicit with capitalism’s serfdom ways can get off their lawn! (See chapter Is Feminism Dead? Choice).

[Traditional femininity enhanced: breast augmentation was the most common surgical procedure for American women up to age 34, accounting for 19.2 per cent of the total of procedures for all ages. In 2015, Americans spent more than $13.5 billion on combined surgical and nonsurgical cosmetic procedures, up 39 per cent since 2011. Source: American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery]

Retro TrumpWorld

From locker-room braggart to White House power broker, President Trump controls the cultural narrative to remake “America Great Again” in his own image (which could be a worry given his praise for despotic and rights-abusing leaders). He campaigned as the champion of the powerless, the little guy, even to spruik “I love the poorly educated” (Trump’s victory speech at the Nevada primary), yet he loaded his cabinet with big guys from Wall Street, the very institution responsible for the 2008 financial crisis that resulted in 5.6 million “poorly educated” workers losing their jobs. (N.B. White voters without a college degree were the biggest movers towards Donald Trump in the 2016 election). In a promise to Make America Great Again – a slogan suggesting a glorious past - Trump may well throw everything at ‘Great Again’ including the kitchen sink, but it is women who will likely be picking up the detergent. You only need to peruse the consistency of Trump’s retro sentiments in the many books he has written. In his 1997 book The Art of the Comeback, Trump wrote “Part of the problem I’ve had with women has been in having to compare them to my incredible mother”, whom he earlier described in his 1987 book The Art of the Deal as a “very traditional housewife”. It certainly does not bode well for FemPower when “traditional femininity” gets even more wood on the ball given the President’s sentiment in his book TrumpNation:

“I think that putting a wife to work is a very dangerous thing. There was a great softness to Ivana [but] she became an executive, not a wife….You know, I don’t want to sound too much like a chauvinist, but…when I come home and dinner’s not ready, I’ll go through the roof”

Trump may not want to sound too much like a chauvinist, but from the very get-go he appointed inner-circle people to do the sounding for him, such as chief strategist Steve Bannon, a staunch anti-feminist with links to the conservative Alt-Right, a movement renowned for its misogyny. Then there was the Hugh Hefner prototype initially chosen by Trump as Labor Secretary, a burger-chain executive who was found to be so much of a ‘sex sells’ kind of guy using near-naked women in racy ads that he was forced to withdraw, which compelled one relieved senator to remark: “There is some good news for women and workers in America”.

Even the evangelical Vice-President, Mike Pence, seemed incapable of seeing women as equals but as objects of temptation given his personal rule of never dining alone with a woman other than his wife. Hmmm, you’ve got to hand it to the conservatives; it’s the 21st century and they still can’t differentiate the femme fatale from the committed careerist for they still obviously see women only for their sexual power. While the sensual revolution may have swelled temptress ranks, unless the White House runs a swanky disco-bar or Playboy club, the marginalized “trading on their ass” have better opportunities elsewhere.

The Pence ‘rule’ essentially sucks the oxygen out of professional opportunities for women lest someone becomes consumed with wanton lust. Sigh. Even if Trump were to be impeached given his presidency is racked with ethical concerns, the ultra-conservative dye had already been cast and TrumpWorld would simply become PenceWorld. So, all up, when the highest office in the land resembles a Mad Men bromance given just four women were appointed out of 23 Cabinet positions, the backlash against FemPower is more than just a sisterhood war. Especially when policy makers in the smoky backrooms are old codgers who doubtless just never got over a “traditional femininity” glorious past. To give you a real-life glimpse of a “glorious” past cira Mad Men (early 1960s), airline policy at the time insisted that “measurement” checks for stewardesses was “essential for their business”, which compelled an indignant Rep Martha Griffiths to bellow at a Congress hearing: “What are you running, an airline or a whorehouse?!

All up it points to a return to Old World values, perhaps even Edwardian values in galvanizing a backlash against the advancement of women. Trump’s eulogy promise to his ideological “other”, the late anti-feminist Phyllis Schafly, a longtime activist against anything that encouraged women to put shoes on and get out of the kitchen, is pause for concern: “….We will never, ever let you down”. Not surprisingly, many are nervous, as reflected in this headline in Fortune.com: 76% of Women Feel Worse About Their Career Prospects Under a Trump Presidency. And they have much to be worse about given Trump’s views that pregnancy is “wonderful [but] the fact is it is an inconvenience for a person that is running a business” (www.nbcnews.com / trump in 2004 pregnancy is an inconvenience).

So, when campaign Trump proposed a maternity leave plan at the 11th hour it had his daughter, Ivanka Trump, author of The Working Woman, written all over it to obviously woo wary female voters. But a token six weeks leave that didn’t include fathers had inconvenience and Phyllis Schafly’s ‘Mother Cares Best’ written all over it too. It underscored Trump’s Old marriage ideology of separate roles thus reinforcing the view that women are less tied to the workplace, even for those who don’t even plan to have children. And in keeping his promise to Schafly, Trump proposed an equivalent offer to Stay-At-Home Mothers (hereinafter SAHMs) who “will receive the same tax deduction as their working peers”. Hmmm, what better way to keep the election promise of “bringing jobs back” than to encourage mothers back into the home, and, to boot, revive the fraying male breadwinner status? In stark contrast, Hilary Clinton’s proposal recognized New marriage of integrated roles by including fathers in a 12-week parental leave provision, thus taking the heat off the inconvenient womb. But – horror of horrors - there was nothing in it for SAHMs!

Given Trump’s nostalgic mandate for “how it used to be”, it seems the ideological high ground in TrumpWorld’s Sisterhood War is a victory for the traditionalists. But will Ivanka Trump, posited in the West Wing as an “advisor” to her father, have any real influence as advocate for the modern working woman? Not likely given author Jill Filipovic believes women have been hoodwinked, and Ivanka “is putting a pretty face, and a palatable face on what’s a very, very ugly and very misogynist administration” (www.npr.org /2017/07/02/ ivanka trump isn’t just any white house staffer). And certainly not likely given Trump revoked a President Obama order that had ensured companies with federal contracts comply with anti-discrimination laws. Women now have to pay with their own tax dollars to keep companies in business that discriminate against them. Interestingly, one of those “companies” turns out to be none other than the Trump White House where the gender pay gap is ‘back to how it used to be’ in 1980 according to Pew Research, which, at 37 per cent, is more than double the current national 17 per cent gap (www.washingtonpost.com /wonk /2017/07/05/ white house gender pay gap more than….). Small wonder the National Organization for Women lamented that there was “no evidence, zero, that Donald Trump has anyone in his orbit to advocate for women and girls”.

So, is there a way to get under the radar of a misogynist and backward looking administration and retake the “hill” (the ideological high ground)? And what about the romantic high ground? As in all wars, there are nuanced twists and turns as well as surprising allies, as we shall see.

Retrosexuals Rejoice

Not surprisingly, the Family Research Center saw Trump’s SAHM subsidy proposal as an ideological green light for more women to stay at home, and the big family returneth as in the old days: “Trump’s plan…..encourages family formation which will, over time, help boost the economy”. Well, only because immigration is under pressure given Trump’s populist agenda has rolled up America’s welcome mat so it will be left to natural population growth to “help boost the economy” plus fill the worker-gap when millions of baby-boomers retire. As one pundit put it: “without immigration, the U.S. is Japan: it shrinks and gets old”. This online comment (hereinafter webcom) from “Phleeq” succinctly sums up the concern for Trump’s “bring back how it used to be” plan: “In trumpworld, women are baby factories, trophy wives” (www.rawstory.com /3 million pissed off women /2017/01/24).

Unsurprisingly, retrosexuals were tripping over the weblines in virtual celebration of Trump’s victory, portending as much a divide among the bro-hood as the sisterhood: “This is our moment. The door is opening for a renaissance of masculinity”. One website even released a video arguing that “it’s not necessary for women to get more than an 8th grade education”. Doubtless retrosexuals were a nervous lot in the pre-Trump liberal era, as exemplified in this graffiti scrawl - “diversity = less jobs for dudes”. Male advantage, of course, is the victim in the progressive efforts to redress gender imbalances in the workplace.

As an ex-playboy with an addictive eye for erotic capital, Trump is retro masculinity’s lightning-rod having thrice married models, the latest 24 years his junior. Meanwhile, Melania Trump as a committed SAHM from an ordinary background, who once boasted to Howard Stern how much sex she has with her husband, undoubtedly carries the torch for erotic capital as the slam-dunk pathway to marrying rich. Apparently last century’s machismo and goddess on the arm symbolized a golden past cultural narrative ‘where men know who men are, women know who women are’ that obviously galvanized what detractors call the Archie Bunker conservative voter, namely those on the fringes and glued to far-right talk radio and internet boards. Moreover, the greater spending power of dual-earner elites driving up inflation were putting a strain on marriages given traditional housewives were forced into paid work and still expected to vacuum in heels. It had been a source of anguish in the pleb-hood for years as male wages stagnated and income inequality widened given the price of labor suffers when the workforce doubles up. Hence the class-envy view of Career Woman on the nose that no amount of aerosol could budge…..but the ballot box might. God forbid, a Career Woman shattering the hardest and highest glass ceiling was simply a bridge too far in opening the floodgates for others to follow in kind.

Meanwhile, all manner of unhinged far-right elements around the world emerged from the shadows spruiking Trump’s election an epiphany to bring back the good old days lest civilization crumble. Apparently the disaffected withdrawing from the marriage market racking up credit card debt with online porn sites and video games signalled the end is nigh. Even the smug elites at the 2017 World Economic Forum were concerned the world was at a populist “tipping point” given the title of some of the debate topics: Under-Employed, Under-Inclusive, Under-Threat: the World in 2017 and the sceptical Can women have it all. All up it translated to “an understandable nostalgia to ‘turn back the clock’”. Berkeley historian, Nils Gilman, explains nostalgia in his article ‘Technoglobalism and its Discontents’: “nostalgia involves the dream of turning back the post-Fordist clock to the 1950s and early 1960s, before the changes of the 1970s, including changes associated with the new social liberation movements” (www.theamericaninterest.com /2016/09/12). We get a grass roots plea for nostalgia from this webcom posted by “no comment” to an article in The Atlantic on workplace sexism:

“All the sexism I have seen in the workplace has been AGAINST men, not in favor of them. It’s affirmative action or diversity….white males are the only ones it’s legal to discriminate against in this screwed up society. That [sic] why we elected Trump! Hopefully he will change this, permanently” (www.theatlantic.com / When-women-choose-children-over-a- career/2016/19/12).

Not surprisingly, “no comment” copped a troll-load along the lines he was still running around in a bearskin and a club, and given his reply it surely removed any doubt: “…It’s the age of Trump now, baby! Get ready to make America great again! Oh, and make me a sandwich while you’re at it, sugar”. But if you think 1950s domesticity is about as far as nostalgia’s sentiments could stretch, think again. Any political candidate who has been endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan underscores sentiments that go back to before women even got the vote! (Snigger if you must, but TrumpWorld’s agenda emboldens state lawmakers to introduce anti-abortion bills in which women could face felony charges and lose their right to vote!). Ouch. Perhaps it shouldn’t come as any surprise that voters in Europe were so appalled at how populism was turning out in Trump’s America, and the resulting loss of US prestige in the world, that they rejected the rising far-right at the ballot box and opted for the future rather than opt for some mythical glorious past.

Awkward: the future is female

Well, when you think about it, TrumpWorld’s retro narrative for brawny simpler times gets quite awkward because the future of work is not about the good old days when men pulled levers smelling of machine oil and hard sweat (and women of cooking oil), but about pink collar jobs called HEAL - Health, Education, Adminstration, and Literacy (skills in the interaction between technology and consumer needs). Not an M, T, or a C gets a mention! Despite Trump’s good intentions of bringing back jobs by reversing the offshoring of Manufacturing and building a massive wall to keep job-stealing illegal immigrants out, but how will he keep the robots out? Smart machines are set to take over predominately male jobs, including driverless Trucking and Construction machinery. Given robots are so cost-effective, Trump’s proposed company tax cuts to encourage investment portends companies investing in technologies that reduce staff!! Particularly given 88 per cent of job loss in manufacturing is due to gains in productivity, such as increased use of robots (www.hechingerreport.org / opinion/ trump promised manufacturing jobs, but high school grads…). As one robot-maker put it: “Our device isn’t meant to make employees more efficient; it’s meant to completely obviate them”.

The World Bank estimates that 57 per cent of jobs will be automated by 2037, which is not surprising given robots can be re-programmed for a variety of tasks. While both sexes will be affected, the low-skilled with few options for upskilling or hampered by education costs, will especially feel the cold steel of the bionic arm shoving them out the door. The populist anger that motivated Trump voters and UK’s Brexit will pale in comparison to what is coming next. However, robotic boffin Martin Ford, author of the book Rise of the Robots, claims HEAL is less affected: “what we see already is that many of the jobs that are more safe from technology tend to be jobs done by women…..women seem to have an advantage in terms of those kinds of interactive, caring roles and so forth over men”.

Hmmm, apparently technology cannot do the work of two X chromosomes.

So, rather than welcome a return to the ‘good-old-days’ patriarchal past, perhaps the disaffected might need to embrace a more feminine future where the jobs are (or become, as the argument goes, “indolent sperm donors” or angry misogynists on food stamps). Industry insiders claim that while millions of jobs in industry held mostly by men have disappeared, the economy has gained 9 million jobs in education and health services. As professor Betsey Stevenson of Michigan University put it: “By encouraging men to cling to work that isn’t coming back, Trump is doing them a disservice…..if Trump really wants to get more Americans working, he’ll have to do something out of his comfort zone: make girly jobs appeal to manly men” (www.blomberg.com /manly men need to do more girly jobs/2016-12-07). Doubtless in retro TrumpWorld it will be a high-wire act, but what better way to start than by becoming a more involved dad in the caring role. Not only will co-parenting move the needle on relationships but also sex life according to a study by the American Sociological Association with the heart-warming title: ‘Couples that split childcare duties have higher quality relationships and sex lives’ (www.eurekalert.org /2015-08).

Enter the third wheel: involved fatherhood

While the contentious concept of choice for women – opting out of career for the SAHM lifestyle or arrive at the office frazzled - is a modern powder-keg issue, intersecting in all of it is the fledgling trend of involved fatherhood. However it has come mostly at the expense of male power loss (the global recession following the 2008 financial crisis was dubbed “mancession” given its lopsided impact on men). Despite TrumpWorld’s best intentions to bring back jobs, the impending rise of the post-industrial workworld more congenial to women further exacerbates male power loss.

However, while feminism has fragmented and is now immersed in a bitter sisterhood war, an emerging new “feminist” on the left flank is shaping to be FemPower’s chief ally – men! Or to be specific, New Men, as masculinity itself begins to fragment (see chapter Masculinity Reorganized). While marry-up culture in Old marriage (women partnering up to a higher earner) is dependent on winners in an uncertain workworld, it is contrasted with the rise of women as breadwinners dependent on a masculinity being Right for their career (think arrive at the office less frazzled). In other words, the New Man (aka Mr Right), as the involved family man in New marriage is not only the “solution” to gender equality but also deemed affair-proof (see chapter Saving Monogamy: Old or New Marriage, Goddess or New Man?) Social theory has it that the more women earn and achieve FemPower, the more social norms change – and with it masculinity. Erotic theory, on the other hand, dictates that the more temptation women exhibit, the more masculinity finds itself in a quandary between two worlds – the Old and the New. Certainly rising FemPower threatens to turn any semblance of tradition on its head, hence a corresponding rise in the erotic backlash. And not only in the US, but across the new age* prurient world.

Like all wars, TrumpWorld’s Sisterhood War is fought over territory – in this case the romantic and ideological high-ground. And given the choice of marriage partner is one of the most important decisions in life, the marriage marketplace is an obvious “battleground site”. And a very large “site” you might say given today’s later marrying age has meant singles in advanced economies now outnumber the married. And a “battlefront” likely to be littered with broken-hearts as a discussion on how to raise kids and the rest of your life is usually not done on the first date. The penny may drop when you are already starry-eyed that your budding significant “other” is actually your ideological “enemy”. Doubtless this takes partner-search scrutiny to a more forensic form.

Moreover, a “battleground site” littered with economic refugees and the ego-wounded given a GFC-traumatized world combined with the robotic job-shedder has relegated a chunk of ‘good man’ eligible suitors to the bottom end of the dating pool (see chapter Good Man Down). Marry-up wannabes are kept awake at night wondering where all the worthy ‘good men’ are. However, many are done with wondering and instead working on amping up romantic benefit to an exciting new level in exchange for a more exciting economic benefit. But more importantly, to keep a step ahead of the competition. In other words, in a dwindling pool of worthy men in the required pay-grade, utilizing all the feminine allure one can muster, which, in today’s porn-soaked objectifying culture, has seriously upstaged quaint old seduction as bold new racy pathways evolve.

* New age symbolizes the erotic revolution with its emphasis on bold libertine mores and sensual posturing, created by the explosion in cosmetic procedure and raunch culture. The sexual revolution in the 1970s was about the freedom to engage in sex outside of marriage. Yawn. Let’s move onto something more exciting, say the new agers. So what was once regarded as the end of civilization in one era is often studied by bored high school students in another.

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Chapter One: Erotic backlash in retro TrumpWorld

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Chapter Two: Primal Forces

Chapter Two

Primal Forces

“I have seen women manipulate men

with just a twitch of their eye

– or perhaps another body part”.

Donald Trump, 1997

The Art of the Comeback

The beautiful, the bold…..and the brazen

It used to be a truth universally acknowledged that beauty marries well. Now it is more often acknowledged that erotic capital marries better. In today’s hyper-sexualized culture, this bold socio-sensual package has upstaged beauty per se as the ultimate X-factor in a competitive marriage market. And it’s not that hard to see why. For a start, affordable cosmetic procedure has now deemed beauty no longer the domain of God’s genetic lottery but as common as a few month’s pay packet, or a loan from an understanding bank. As Brazillan beauty Andressa Urach put it in 2014: “If you have the money, you can be beautiful. This pretty face you see here, my dear, it costs some”. Hence the need for that extra seductive edge. And what an edge it is turning out to be, not only because our prurient culture keeps getting bolder in tapping into the erotic self, but the natural bold amongst us are setting the pace. Unlike social capital, what is unique about erotic capital is the bolder lower class ultimately holding the trump card over their more elite prim sisters. With a little refine tweaking, of course, courtesy of etiquette/lady bootcamp in which raw free-spirit is put through the charm-mill to emerge oozing grace, polish and poise, albeit with cheeky charisma (the popularity of such schools spawned the reality television series Ladette to Lady).

This modern egalitarian story of the bolder “lady” radiating head-turning sensuality - and nervous poise - has rattled the marriage market of old and new money….and, God forbid, dubious money. At least money that survived the GFC (or, given the economic carnage that followed in the US, the Great Recession). An influential case in point of the upwardly mobile bolder “lady” is reality television’s popular Real Housewives franchise (some wives were rumored to be ex-adult entertainers). So popular that this ever-expanding cult series that has been a hit around the world will soon audition in your city, county or hamlet, doubtless a reflection of the fascination with the burgeoning retro-housewife phenomenon post-feminism. Often called soccer moms, doctors’ wives, millennial housewives, or ‘ladies who lunch’ (think The Nanny Dairies), however the more erotic term with its obvious trophy wife-slash-sensual ring to it is domestic goddess; or, as the British would say, “yummy mummy”.

And given the explosion in erotic fiction after the publishing phenomenon of soft-porn novel turned skin-flick Fifty Shades of Grey by a suburban housewife (100 million copies sold plus movie rights), many are apparently tapping away in renovated kitchens hoping to write the next bestseller. And as we will see, there is much material to tap into because what is most unique about the erotic capitalized housewife is the fusion of history’s most polarizing female figures: the elegant good public wife and private exciting mistress. This multifaceted package not only boasts a different slant on ‘having it all’, but it is also deemed affair-proof!! Inherent in this bold, supposedly monogamy-saving package, is the exciting “mistress” part that is said to bunker a man down in blissful fidelity. As Melania Trump said of her ex-playboy flirtatious husband, “Donald is intensely loyal”. (Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the most faithful of us all? The chapter Saving Monogamy: Goddess or New Man? gets down and dirty for the truth).

So it comes as no surprise that the enviable end of the marriage market is in a state of crowded mayhem given lower class encroachment upon what was once the sole domain of elegnant elites. But the real intriguing bit is that when seductive power is seen to be winning out more for its cheeky charisma over formal femininity, the well-bred lady is apparently up for a little well-bred bold makeover. As a newly-formed “lady-ladette” website put it: “It’s truly a new era and the time of the lady-ladette is here” with claims that while bold ladettes display behavior similar to men including “an appetite for plenty of sexual activity……ladies may like to reveal their ladetteship in subtle ways”. Apparently prom queens taking up university placements (and driving up costs with their greater ability to pay) simply to meet the husband under the ivy tower, were seeing their matrimony placements snatched from right under their noses by bolder “sisters” at downtown bars. And even uptown bars. Didn’t it take a bold woman of ordinary means (bold enough to pose nude for racy magazine shoots) to meet a future president of the US at an uptown gig?

As we see in later chapters, erotic capital’s sweet spot is the balance between lady elegance on the outside and pliant plaything on the inside. Or to put it in more layman terms, if he is making a mint at the office he is not to be treated like a monk at home to fall asleep in the recliner watching the finance report. This seductive art form of wholesome femininity and wanton eroticism in a unique merger of feminine wiles renders men defenseless. Especially ego-tragics with a Playboy magazine view of success; and doubtless there are plenty of those re-energized since Donald Trump became President. And since the planet’s most powerful alpha male married a bold beauty of ordinary means, doubtless it encouraged the House of Ladydom to shed a little of the boring formality and seek the bold within. It is not the first time in history that the elite class has cock-a-snooted itself and looked wide-eyed to the class below: ‘we’ll have what they’re having’ (past examples include the appropriation of working-class blue denim and the free-spirited Lindy Hop dance to become the Jitterbug).

So, given this latest appropriation is unique in that it is about behavior, is it a case of who dares wins? Or is there a more brazen behavior emerging out of Left Field, not so much in snaring the good-catch husband as taking a chainsaw to his power in a risk-averse corporate world better suited to women? Let’s face it, the 'greed is good' ego-maniacs really did it this time and totally fallen on their risk-rattling swords. As The Wall Street Journal put it when the GFC bought capitalism to its knees: “The masters of the universe turned out to be masters of disaster. No matter which aspect of the crisis you consider, there is a man behind it”. Or as one female scribe ignominiously put it: “Testosterone has got the world into a terrible mess. The frisky, risky, coke-addled banker boys plunged us into financial meltdown”. Ironically, many of the “banker boys” and their ilk, who recklessly fritted away our savings with such self-delusional abandon (“I don’t need money, money needs me”), now sit brooding alongside us on half-price movie nights and going “Dutch” (splitting the bill) on dating nights.

Risky A-listers right across the corporate spectrum also fell on their self-delusional swords, but ultimately it was lackeys from B-list all the way down to tea-lady who felt the pitchfork at their rear-ends. The calamity in the US alone does not make for pretty reading with nine million jobs lost, five million homes foreclosed, billions of ordinary household savings shredded, and eight years later 43 million Americans were still on food stamps while the middle class shrunk. Small wonder people voted for an untried outsider with a nostalgic solution to bring back “how it used to be” and Make America Great Again. Meanwhile, a spooked corporate world grouped in a huddle in a major re-think for a solution in Making Capitalism Great Again. A re-think that ultimately recognized the value of gender diversity; how untried female talent injecting a broader perspective might actually save capitalism from itself. As the Harvard Business Review reported on “the growing need for soft power”, which women apparently possess in spades given the report’s concluding remarks that “many companies are recognizing the value of women leaders….the unique characteristics female executives possess” (https://hbr.org/women-and-soft-power-in-business /2011/01).

So, it has come to a unique moment in history where two untried entities poles apart have been anointed to clean up a horrible mess. While FemPower can thank the GFC for the corporate awakening that female ‘soft power’ is preferable to macho madness, so can macho madness thank the crisis for gaining residence into the White House. However, while there are still “dinosaur” companies roaming the planet upholding flat-earth traditions, the interesting thing about FemPower’s meteoric rise is the ensuring revolution in private life that ultimately paves the way for “dinosaur” extinction.

.

Battle-lines drawn on marry-up culture

Not long after going “Dutch” crept into the dating scene then FemPower subtley began to fire broadsides at marry-up culture. Facebook COO Sherly Sandberg’s book Lean-in, for instance, implored women to lean-in to their careers and lean-out from thinking a man is a financial plan. In essence, we are talking a “war” on the centuries-old chestnut that owning a womb is a rationale to marry-up to a higher, or potentially higher, earner – even to marry tall! (and often to marry well-UP in age). This brazen “war” of liberation from the happily-ever-after playbook ushers in the freedom to see men in a more fluid and less stereotypical way. And, of course, a much broader pool to choose from across age, class, race, even height, but perhaps more narrowed in the kind of man amenable to supporting a woman’s career. But, of course, it’s early days, and despite the decades-long entry of women into paid work, marry-up culture has resolutely survived, insidiously creating its own “glass ceiling” to hold equality back from being a better deal.

“Codswallop@#^!” is the predictable bellowing from fire-breathing critics out of Right Field, the ‘keepers-of-the-flame’ of marry-up culture. Despite hard-won equality gains for women, the world obviously doesn’t flip overnight for everyone. At best in a post-feminist epoch it hinges on a pivotal point called CHOICE and can flip either way, with help, of course, from one’s circumstances or Ideological Disposition (aka ID). However, there is no prize for guessing most favored choice when Mother Cares Best at home is still solidly anchored in the societal mindset despite Father Knows Best going down with the outdated ship Patriarchy.

Even in peer marriages when couples started out earning the same in starter-careers, the ‘good mother’ narrative dictated her career be buried in the guilt-free sandpit. Hence peer marriages are deemed in the marry-up default zone courtesy of female smarts in assessing ambition (processing good-earner potential is more of a dating art than a perfect science, as a later chapter shows). But given the corporate nod to female talent post-GFC, the male partner may well be the one essentially marrying-up as the wife’s upstart career surges ahead of his. And? And men might eventually crack the glass ceiling AT HOME, held firmly in place by the ‘good mother’ overarch that imply women are still measured by their ability to mother and fathers are just not cut out for intensive parenting (think Trump’s maternity leave proposal that excluded fathers). That is, if many do actually become fathers in the first place.

Indeed, many men are in danger on missing out on fatherhood altogether given the financial security decline of much of the male working class given technology and globalization – not to mention the GFC – has hollowed out blue-collar work (see ‘The Vanishing Male Worker’ in chapter FemPower Rising). But in a somewhat unkind twist, the sticky point here is that technology has been kind to female cohorts who are now more likely than ever before to marry-up into a higher class, their numbers ballooning courtesy of affordable cosmetic surgery (at least more affordable than rising educational costs). Apparently they are marrying-up to besotted ego-tragics fearing emasculation by the rise of the female high-earner (see ‘Ego, Power and Sex: Playmate and the WASP’ in the chapter Goddess Enforcer).That is, if you can tell who these brooding ego-tragics are in the era of fragmenting masculinity (see chapter Masculinity Reorganized)

So, given the above connubial conundrum, not since the Jane Austen era has marriage – and the societal mindset – been subjected to such a revolutionary and conflicted makeover: Marrying-up versus Team Couple; Domestic Goddess versus Career Woman; Good Mother versus Good Parent; Bold versus Brazen*; Erotic versus Erotica (the end-letter ‘a’ signifying female autonomy), are all points on today’s mating compass that reflect confusion over the impact of rising FemPower. However, redefining long-held mating expectations is not without some tricky navigation in a prurient culture fixated with the much clichéd the bold and the beautiful.

Indeed, while bold has primal punch, beauty has social implications. Beauty is underpinned by a multi-billion dollar industry that keeps raising the bar courtesy of the revolution in cosmetic procedure, now expandable to all parts of the erotized body. Much of the pressure to conform to unattainable standards of beauty can be reasonably sheeted home to marry-up culture in the beauty/economic exchange. Bold, of course, is a product of a trillion dollar popular culture and media industry that keeps raising the bar courtesy of porn-creep into mainstream. All up the product sold in today’s overall erotic revolution is a promise of happiness – of excitement – a precious romantic benefit bundled up and packaged off as.....well, romantic attraction. A romantic attraction that is the consequence of wanton commercialism and the loosening of moral standards.

However, despite this modern incentive to love thy neighbor, or thy secretary, or thy thigh to be noticed by the ‘good man’ higher up the career ladder, the reality is stark: romantic attraction has not stood up too well against the realities of modern life. Well, not when global divorce is nudging past 40 per cent (or hovering around 50 per cent in the US). According to psychologist Ty Tashiro, author of the 2014 book The Science of Happily Ever After, just three in ten marriages are considered happy, healthy marriages. Certainly it is no secret that economic stress is a main precipitator of divorce. Yet there is a toxic perception that the Equality Age is to blame for rising divorce; that the workplace is a magnet for affairs since we spend so much time there where professional and social lives now blur. Not surprisingly, the workplace is also deemed marry-up central (see ‘Water-cooler aisle to altar’ in chapter Opt Out revolution post 9/11).

So, the question is intriguing: will the exciting homestay wife a la erotic capital neutralize temptation in the workplace? Will meeting him at the door in lingerie and a G&T make short work of batting eyelashes at the watercooler? Or is the answer to runaway divorce to be found in dumping the Old gender construct that the sexes come from vastly different vantage perspectives. Logic has it that the ideology underpinning iTeam Couple (iTC –‘i’ symbolizes integrated roles in New marriage) also underpins iTeam Erotica, rolling out yet another powder-keg in the Sisterhood War: who gets the most bedroom fun?

According to sociologist Anthony Giddens in his book The Transformation Of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies, the revolution in private life of intimate relations is a female project just as the revolution in public life was a male endeavor. The intriguing question is who could claim the mantle of the true revolutionary: the erotic housewife or the lipstick breadwinner? As this book shows, the private life of intimacy is at the cusp of profound change as FemPower propels marriage – and gender - into a new era, driven by women’s higher education rates, better labor prospects, and history’s second worst financial crisis in which men have come out the brooding biggest losers. So much so that research shows the uncertainty that began with the GFC has taken its toll and turning out to be more the Great Forced Change that many men apparently needed – hence a poignant interface in the Sisterhood War and intimacy revolution.

* In the context of the female gender (and this book), to be bold is to be conspicuous in the exhibition of feminine charm in breaking through the sensual ceiling – flamboyant flirting while flaunting physical beauty. While Real Housewives springs to mind, a far better example of a bold sensual persona marrying well is Melania Trump, wife of billionaire President Donald Trump (posing nude in racy photo shoots for a magazine is considered bold; www.nypost.com /melania-trump-like-you’ve-never-seen-her-before/2016 /07/30).

Unlike bold, brazen is essentially to break with the female stereotype, unrestrained by convention in breaking through the glass ceiling or dating norms. The most celebrated example is Hilary Clinton, who as a young woman in 1971 approached a young Bill Clinton while studying at Yale University and reputedly said: “if you keep looking at me, and I’m going to keep looking back, we might as well be introduced. I’m Hilary Rodham”. A brazen go-getter crossing the floor, so to speak, cutting to the chase into the male paradigm (i.e. taking the initiative) to break with convention for a female – in 1971!

While bold and brazen are intrinsically linked and often overlap, the true differentiation is essentially found in one’s Ideological Disposition (aka ID). And while bold demands attention, underscoring the mating strategy that a man chases a woman until she catches him, brazen simply cuts to the chase. Brazen is durable given the word is derived from the alloy brass, exactly the kind of trait Career Woman needs to overcome gender and social barriers in the serious career pursuit.