Genuine Night Fury Of A Woman

The patriarchal bargain when simplified is woman submits/dedicates to man. Man protects woman and children. His power becomes both shield and weapon for her.

If you grew up as a girl in a culture, basically any culture, everything around you was propagandizing the patriarchal bargain. (The culture fog/smog did it, even if your specific nuclear family tried not to.) (all the members of your family grew up in worse smog/fog)

The bargain doesn’t work. It’s never worked. But like all fan fiction, lots of writers are in love with the characters and think they can tweak it just a bit to find a new and better story inside the framework. The woman is sassy, a firecracker, not like other girls. She gets respect. Real Respect from the patriarchal object. The man fulfills the role of patriarch, he has power to share and protection to give, and gives it generously…but only to special girl. That selective stinginess preserves his power and station within the patriarchy. If he wasn’t Like That, her reward for bargaining would be smaller. If a woman is depending on the patriarchal bargain, she needs a man that can navigate and win the patriarchal hierarchy between men. (That’s a different post)

And in older novels they are much more blunt about how, legally, picking a husband might be the only meaningful choice a woman ever gets to make. It is life and death. And every grade of misery and happiness in between.

And the thing is…picking a partner is still kind of life or death. I think every heterosexual woman feels the reality of that even if they haven’t carefully dissected the cultural forces. Maybe especially if they haven’t. So for as many women as there are currently, today, trying to escape the patriarchal bargain, I think there are just as many, probably more that are hypothesizing and fantasizing about making it work.

Essentially: “what if I take all the types of people I actually see around me, and the types of relationships I actually know, but make them WORK. With good sex that has no orgasm gap, and like real love and affection under all that other stuff. It HAS to be there, right? Under all that other stuff?”

Azure Tit (Cyanistes cyanus), family Paridae, order Passeriformes, Russia

Highlights include:

For your first two years (when you were small) you lived in a foster home with people who raised you into a very polite young man. Two is like you plus me, that's what two is.

Some people adopted you before me and they called you Timmy (which is a stupid name) and they returned your ass almost immediately because you were so annoying at that age.

Like think about how annoying you are right now at seven years old, but way worse.

I'm better than them though, I don't call you Timmy and I wore earplugs to bed for three years because you love to scream at bedtime. Earplugs are like when I roll over and go back to sleep even when you are yelling so so so loud.

I got you at a time in my life when I was really sick (being sick is like when I'm up late because I'm throwing up and you are a very handsome good boy who sits with me) and they had to put me asleep for a procedure. A procedure is like what happened to you when they put you asleep and took your balls away.