6. Courtship: The Hunting of the Love-smitten Man

A man always chases a woman until she catches him.⁴¹41 F.P.A.'s Book of Quotations, New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1952, p.864.

The courtship scenario is reputedly as follows: boy sees girl, falls in love with her, courts her, wins her, weds her, and triumphantly carries her off to his home to be his housewife (or, in the eyes of some feminists, his domestic servant, resident sexpot, childbearer, child rearer, etc.). The reality is, however, rather more like this: girl sees boy and decides to make him her nest-slave. She contrives to attract his attention and to set his heart on fire with a coy glance, a come-hither smile, a painted face, an aloof elegance, the shimmering wriggle of a skirted waist, or a stylish walk that makes her buttocks throb.

When he has been lured to her, and smitten with love for her, the courtship starts in earnest. She puts him through an obstacle course where he must prove to her satisfaction that he will be a competent and loyal nest-slave. If he should pass her eligibility tests for economic ability, nest defence capability, emotional loyalty, sexual loyalty, etc.; and if she has no better candidate within reach, she accepts his application for the job of her nest-slave. She then stages a public display of his enslavement to her, packs into his home, turns it into her nest, and becomes its queen and his boss. In accomplishing all this, the woman is like a judo artist who uses the aggressiveness of the man to bring him down. That is why the perceptive say that a man always chases a woman till she catches him.

However decorous it may all seem, courtship is not bliss but battle — a battle to break the free male into a loyal slave. Courtship is a nest-making rite whose ground rules are dictated by the female interest. Its length, complexity and general structure are determined by her need to hunt a virile male, catch him, break his free spirit, and attach him to herself as provider for, and protector of her nest. If courtship were organized in the male interest, it would be a quick game of kidnap, rape and escape; but because it is organized in the female interest, it is an elaborate game of slave-breaking, with the woman as bronco-buster.

To see these matters clearly, we must look at courtship in its most revealing contexts. In a society where marriages are arranged, much of the eligibility testing is done by parents, or guardians, or other go-betweens, who have studied the families and the persons they intend to bring together. Furthermore, things like emotional loyalty and economic commitment do not have to be established before the wedding. There is a social structure which will hold the marriage together while these are slowly established after the wedding; and there are mediators to ensure that the expected duties are, in the meantime, carried out. Such supporting structures can hinder insight into the core of the courtship process.

In a society where marriages are not arranged (such as urban, middle-class America), it is easier to see the central dynamic of courtship. With minimum support from social structures, the woman endeavours, on her own, to find and hunt down the man, break his spirit, and train him for his nest-slave duties before the wedding day. This is why modern American courtship offers what may well be the best opportunities for grasping the basics of courtship.

Before the sexual and feminist revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s, the lone ranger American huntress was helped by the fact that her intended victim had been brought up to believe that the marriageable woman should be approached like a goddess perched on a lofty pedestal of chastity. She was to be seen, swooned over, worshipped, craved and laboriously wooed before she could be touched sexually.

While wooing her, the man submitted to an exhausting, frustrating, heart-aching obstacle course. He had to pace his effort, and win her consent in stages marked by gifts: so many roses for a peck on the cheek; so many dates (outings, picnics, dinners and movies) for a first hug; so many more for a lip kiss; then a pin to secure for him the privilege of light petting; then an engagement ring to bar her from being wooed by other men; and, at last, a wedding to publicly confer on him the privilege of making use of her womb.

To make the obstacle course seem worthwhile to the poor man, a rainbow of happiness-ever-after was painted at the end of it all. He would enter this paradise of eternal bliss at their honeymoon, from the moment he received the gift of her priceless virginity. He was made to believe that, as she wandered through a forest of marauding pricks, she valiantly preserved for him her vaunted virginity; she would, on their wedding night, present it to him as a unique gift to his victorious manliness.

The cunning of it all is stunning! Imagine a hunt in which the huntress takes on the appearance of the prey; in which the true prey enjoys the illusion that he is the hunter; in which he is made to exert himself, alternately suffering pangs of disappointment and spells of exhilaration, while the huntress leads him, step by wily step, into her well-laid trap. And even after she has closed the trap over him, tied him up, and led him off to slave for her; she does not neglect to confirm him in his illusion that he has been the hunter. Still exploiting his hunter psychology, she lays herself out on his wedding bed, and acts the prey surrendering her irreplaceable hymen to his body spear. After plunging it into the prostrate “victim”, he glories in his bloodied spear, like a hunter would after slaying a mighty beast. Well, has a more exquisite game of cunning ever been invented?

The structure and dynamic of courtship is dictated by the fact that it is a selection, bargaining and taming process all rolled into one. As a selection process, the cardinal question that must be answered to the nesting woman’s satisfaction is this: Can this candidate husband my nest the way I want? That is why a courtship is conducted as a job interview in which he must demonstrate his suitability for the job she is offering.

The bargain she wants to strike with the selected candidate is this: he agrees to build, maintain and protect her nest, and to supply it with victuals; she, in return, permits him to contribute his sperm to the making of babies in her womb. Once it is understood that he is to pay with nest duties for the great privilege of inseminating her, the power position in courtship becomes clear: she, who holds the priceless womb, is the boss, and he is merely a suitor for a great favour.

In taming her suitor she aims to turn him into her loyal nest-slave. As women and all slave holders know, if a slave has just been captured from his original state of liberty, his free spirit has to be broken, and his loyalty has to be attached to his owner, otherwise he will not wear the yoke easily.

Courtship, therefore, is a combat zone where a woman seeks to establish power over her prospective husband. The point is not to decide whether the woman shall rule the man, but simply how; for if the woman should lose out in the power play, the courtship will be aborted, and fail to reach marriage.

The length of a courtship depends on how long it takes the boss to make up her mind about the candidate’s suitability, on how long it takes to tame and habituate him to her domination, and on how long it takes to conclude the bargain.

Let us first examine the job interview aspect of courtship. The principal job she needs done by her husband will be economic. He must supply the income to run her nest, especially if she herself is not wealthy; and even if she is wealthy, he will have to manage her wealth. Therefore, her first concern is to administer an economic eligibility test on the suitor.

If the man’s social standing is obvious, the test is not difficult to conduct. Where his social standing is not obvious, and she has to find things out for herself, she does so with professional thoroughness.

In urban, middle-class America, the preliminary economic interview is the stuff of cocktail encounters. The man is asked: “What do you do?” If he gives an easily interpreted answer (for example, if he says he is a doctor, lawyer, banker, stockbroker, or high executive in a major corporation), then that part of the interview is quickly concluded. If he says he is a welder, bus driver, factory foreman or something like that, that also settles the matter. Either way, the woman has a fair estimate of what she is really after: How much does he earn, and what assurance is there that he will continue to earn at least that much? Sparks may, however, fly if the woman cannot interpret the man’s economic standing from his answer, as in this true life exchange:

‘What’s your name?’

‘Jerry.’

‘Mine’s Sybil. What d’you do?’

‘I talk, I drink, I dance, I ogle girls. I have fun.’

‘How do you support yourself?’

‘Very well, thank you.’

‘I mean, on what?’

‘On my two feet, thank you.’

‘How do you pay your rent?’

‘That takes care of itself, thank you.’

‘Where d’you get your money?’

‘From the bank, thank you.’

‘Are you independently wealthy?’

‘As opposed to dependently poor?’

‘Really, are you independently wealthy?’

‘Wait a minute! What’s this? When did you earn the right to ask these questions? Look! I hardly know you. We’ve just met!’

‘Forget I asked.’

‘I will, thank you.’

‘Where did you go to school?’

‘Here, there and everywhere.’

‘Why are you so damn secretive? What do you have to hide?’

‘Why all these personal questions? Weren’t you ever taught the art of conversation? This is a party, for heaven’s sake, not an interrogation center.’

‘I like you. I’d like to get to know you. You don’t see me taking an interest in others here, do you?’

‘Gee thanks! Thanks a million! I suppose I’m supposed to feel flattered.’

‘You make it sound like there’s something wrong for a woman to take an interest in a man.’

‘No! There’s nothing wrong in that. But I wish you didn’t take that kind of interest in me. It is like all you want is my financial report, my social pedigree! You might be better off, actually, talking to my accountant, or to my trust fund manager. Look, I came here to dance, to have a good time, to maybe get laid. I certainly didn’t come here to have my wallet sized up. You haven’t asked me what I like to do right here and now. There’s good music going, good food on the table, good wine flowing. But you haven’t asked me if I’m a good dancer, or a good fuck. You haven’t suggested anything one might do at a party to have fun. All you seem to be interested in is whether I’d make a good catch or something like that.’

‘Boy oh boy! All you men have a one track mind! All men ever want is to fuck, fuck, fuck! Screw every skirt you can lift up, and then scram! Wham, bam, thank you ma’am! That’s if you wait long enough to say that!’

‘Hey! Men have a one track mind? And women don’t? All you women ever seem to want is a catch. If you’ve got one already, you’re looking for a better catch. If you don’t have one, you’re hunting for one. If men have a one track mind, so do women: it is just that their minds are on different tracks. Anyway, I won’t allow you even a peek into my wallet. So there!’

‘Why are you so selfish?’

‘Selfish? Any more selfish than you? Tell me: if some stranger came up to you and, first thing, said: “Hi! Are you a good fuck?”, how would you feel?’

‘I’d say he was being rude. Extremely fresh. I’d say that was none of his business.’

‘Exactly. I’m saying to you that you are being extremely rude. My finances are none of your business. You haven’t earned the right to poke your nose into my wallet or checkbook.’

‘Excuse me! I was only trying to be friendly.’

‘Really? With friendliness like that, who would not cuddle a shark?‘⁴²42 Judy Allen and Dyan Sheldon, op.cit., p.140.

Encounters like that, in which the man spurns her test, are most rare. Usually, the man is so flattered by her attention, so keen to slip in between the thighs of an interested woman, that he eagerly submits to her “friendly” interrogation. He’s even likely to boastfully exaggerate his economic condition. But in the above encounter, the woman probably stumbled against a man who was tired of being hunted. As F. Scott Fitzgerald once noted, “Every young man with a large income leads the life of a hunted partridge.”⁴²42 Judy Allen and Dyan Sheldon, op.cit., p.140. One can understand how such a partridge might eventually rebel and refuse to cooperate with even the preliminary phase of being hunted.

Where a man passes the woman’s economic eligibility test (by his answers, or through such items of male status display as his clothes, car, house, etc.), she might then test his abilities as a nest-protector. Does he have military or paramilitary experience? Is he followed about by a retinue of musclebound bodyguards? If not, she may provoke a brawl and incite him to show whether, and how well, he would defend her nest (and her good self) from attack.

Women who go for brawlers, bouncers, soldiers, policemen, high officials of state, or tycoons are reflecting their need for a nest-protector. In unsettled times, this need may become paramount. For instance, during the unsettled 1960s and 1970s in the USA, quite a few high-placed women married their bodyguards. Lynda Bird Johnson, daughter of President Johnson, married Charles S. Robb, a US Marine Corps Captain, who had served as a White House aide. Susan Ford, daughter of President Ford, married Charles F. Vance, a secret service agent assigned to the unit protecting the Ford family. Perhaps the most prominent example from that era was the media heiress Patty Hearst, who ditched her fiancé, Steve Weed, after he had, like a weed, failed to protect her from being kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army. She went on to marry Bernard Shaw, a bodyguard hired to protect her following her traumatic experiences.

If the man’s abilities as economic provider and nest-protector satisfy the woman, she may start to tame him by securing three essential commitments from him: sexual commitment, emotional commitment and economic commitment. Of these, economic commitment is central. The applicant must be taught to habitually devote his earnings to maintaining her nest and herself. All other feeders at his trough must be banished; those not banishable (like his parents, siblings, relatives and close friends), will have their access to his income minimized. If he is the generous type, his impulse must be curbed, and he must be trained, if need be, to hand his pay packet directly to her each payday. As part of his economic training, a not-so-rich man might be required to give up smoking, drinking and gambling, and any other “vice” through which he might “fritter away” his income. But where the man is suitably rich, she may be content simply to train him to spend most of his income on her good and lovely self.

She also makes a point of training him to be sexually loyal to herself. This is partly to minimize the risk of losing his economic commitment to her. As she well knows, male-female attachments are notoriously vulnerable to better sex. Should she fail to fix his roving eye on herself, or fail to tie down his wandering lust, he might become sexually addicted to another woman after some chance encounter. A woman who grabs his balls away from her could then grab his purse away too.

For securing a man’s sexual loyalty, a woman’s main ruse is to get him sexually addicted to herself, whether by heavy petting that doesn’t go all the way, or by full and abundant sex. Once hooked, he is never let out of her sight, except when he goes off to work, lest some chance encounter with another woman should break her spell on him. The man-minder part of this ruse has been perfected by American women under the guise of an insistent and loving “togetherness”. In the name of “togetherness”, she encourages him to come directly home from work, to stop going out with “the boys”, and to go with her wherever he has to go outside working hours. In effect, she makes herself his chaperone, ostensibly because of her great love which could not bear any separation! In fact, of course, it is so that, arm in arm together everywhere, she can keep a jailer’s eye on his genitalia. Ah, togetherness, lovely togetherness!

To secure his emotional commitment, a woman will train a man to attach his feelings inseverably to herself. His jealousy and her cantankerousness are great instruments for this task. The more jealous she makes him, the more strongly the heat of his own jealousy bonds his heart to her. In inciting his jealousy to incandescence, a woman’s ways can be quite bizarre. She might deliberately encourage the attentions of rival suitors. If he gets jealous enough to fight them off, all is well; if he doesn’t, his emotional attachment to her is judged insufficiently strong, and further inciting is required. But should he, in a fit of high jealousy, beat her up after chasing off the rivals she encouraged, she has excellent proof that he could not bear to lose her.

Similarly, by her cantankerousness, she aims to test if he will stomach anything rather than leave her. She will play hard to get; she will insult and humiliate him; she will require him to flatter her to the point of irrationality. If he abandons his courtship in frustration or annoyance, she might tell herself that “faint heart never won fair lady”. Translation: his passion is not strong enough to weather the harassments and disappointments of nest-service; therefore, good riddance!

A fine demonstration of this situation occurs in Jorge Amado’s novel Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands:

The trifler’s interest must have been very slight to grow discouraged at the first stumbling block. Dona Flor had done much worse things to Pedro Borges when she was single. The student from Pará had savoured the bitterness of letters returned, gifts rejected, real insults, and he with an engagement ring in his pocket. That was a true passion, not this one⁴³43 Jorge Amado, Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, tr. by Harriet de Onís, New York: Bantam, 1971, p.236. which evaporated with the mere slamming of a window.

Thus it is that, if a woman’s behaviour during courtship seems mad, seems arbitrary to the point of tyranny, there is a simple purpose to it all: to establish and test her power over him. The suitor must be reduced to unquestioning obedience to her, otherwise her hold on him, on which the security of his nest services will depend, might prove tenuous. After all, a slave master must break his slave thoroughly if he is to expect loyal and unquestioning service during the slave’s lifetime.

If the suitor’s commitment to her has been found satisfactory in the vital areas, she then has to get him to propose, thereby signalling his eagerness to begin slaving for her. If he is not already on his knees, blabbering with impatience, he must be reduced to that position, and then hauled off to the altar where he shall publicly accept the standard contract between nest-queen and nest-slave.

For getting him to propose, a woman has many weapons at her disposal — lust, love, romance and motherly care. She can addict the suitor to her body (lust); or afflict his heart with deep tenderness toward her (love); or make him lose his head over her (romance); or accustom him to the comforts of a well-ordered home (motherly care). Each weapon is aimed at some suitably vulnerable part of his being. Romance aims at his head, to befuddle it and disarm his common sense; lust aims at his nerves, to train them to rush to her body for calming dips; love aims at his feelings, to make her the preferred object over which to discharge his tender feelings; motherly care aims at his enjoyment of physical comforts, such as he once enjoyed in his mother’s nest. For each of these weapons, a book of tactics could be written by observing the behaviour of women. However, let us consider here only some of the tactics of lust and motherly care.

To soften up a man to the point where he proposes, a woman can either withhold sex from him or lavish it on him. In the sex-lavishing tactic, the woman gives him sex, quite readily and freely, till he is addicted and can no longer do without his regular dose. Then, like an expert drug dealer, she can make him pay any price for what she supplies. And her asking price? A trip to the marriage altar. A woman who uses this tactic tends to lose all interest in sexually servicing her husband soon after the wedding. This phenomenon gave rise to the following joke in San Francisco: “How do you make an Irish woman frigid? Marry her!”

The sex-withholding tactic was much favoured before contraceptives became commonly available. It is probably as old as the missionary position, if not older. It is still favoured by diehard puritans who regard sex-before-the-wedding as a mortal sin. The aim is to frustrate the man to the point where he becomes obsessed with having sex with the woman. Claiming that she is not a cheap woman, she proves her costliness by not yielding her alleged virtue for anything less expensive than marriage. At its most bizarre, the hapless fellow gets conned into her way of seeing things, into her way of defining virtue, and joins her in regarding readily available sex as “cheap”, as devalued by the very ease with which it could be had. When converted to her frustration theory of value, he values her even more for her very refusal to have sex with him. He can become so obsessed with her that, in terminal frustration, he capitulates and accepts her terms for sleeping with him, namely, a wedding! The pop band, Meatloaf, has expertly parodied this tactic in the song “Paradise by the Dashboard Lights”.

This tactic was much helped by the cult of virginity which venerated the virgin bride. She held out, it was claimed, in order to give him the honour and pleasure of receiving her with her hymen intact! In practical terms, the poor sod was sex-starved into buying unsampled goods. If the sex turned out lousy, or if her frigidity ruined the honeymoon, or if her vaunted virginity proved to be fake, tough luck for the hapless chap. The woman would by then have filed her title to his labours at the court registry or the church altar. There being no refund clause in the marriage contract, he could not ask for release from his sworn obligations to his new boss, no matter how lousy she proved in bed, no matter if she proved incapable of bearing children.

The motherly care tactic is based on the christly notion that she who would be your queen, let her be your house servant. Accordingly, the woman maneuvers to take over her suitor’s cooking, house cleaning and housekeeping. Her opening gambit is to relieve him of the chore of cooking for himself. She will tell him that he will feed better on her cooking than on his, and will march into his kitchen to prove it. If the bachelor has no kitchen of his own, and depends on eating out, she is not daunted. She will offer to cook for him at her own kitchen. Should he try to resist, excuses will spring readily to her honeyed tongue. Ah, the cost of eating out! Or she will complain that there are no places to go for a decent bite after midnight, or after whatever hour the local eateries shut down. She will persist until she has him feeding off dishes she herself has prepared.

That opening move accomplished, she will contrive to have them live together in his house or hers. The ostensible objective is to see if things will work out, if they can share each other’s company for long without suffering cabin fever. Or it is simply to save the inconvenience of commuting from one dwelling to the other. Once they move in together, she gives him the VIP treatment. She showers him with smiles at every opportunity; she covers herself in glamour from waking up in the morning to bedtime at night; she offers him meals when he wants them, where he wants them, even serving him breakfast in bed, and even spooning the delicacies into his watering mouth, should he as much as hint at wanting that pleasure. She will darn his socks, sew on his missing buttons, mend his shirts, wash and iron his clothes, fetch his slippers, and even give him a nightly bath if he as much as hints that he did enjoy such treatment from his mother. She will do all the shopping and bar him firmly from the kitchen. She will pamper him even more than he ever was pampered when he was his mother’s precious brat. She will persevere with this plan till she gets him used to not cooking for himself, to not cleaning his house, to not taking care of himself. She will persevere till the fool begins to imagine how wonderful it would be if this could go on for ever; till the mad fool begins to believe that this cosy life would continue for ever if only he married her!

If he does not get down on his knees fast enough to suit her schedule, she will start giving him hints, subtle at first, then more loudly later on. If he still is slow, she might suddenly take off to visit some aunt she’s never visited in her life, some aunt she had never talked of before, but who conveniently lives on the far face of the moon. The man, by now helpless, cannot stand the prospect of doing without her, for even an afternoon, let alone for the weeks she would need to travel to see her most cherished aunt. What is the now dependent fellow going to do? Crisis! He begs her not to go. But she goes off anyway. And the moment she returns (following periodic phone calls to hear how inadequately he is coping without her), it would be a miracle if even a court injunction, or an order from his employer, would keep him from falling on his knees and proposing to marry her at once.

Of course, these weapons, and the tactics for using them, are usually wielded in combination, depending on the skill of the man-hunting woman. They are normally adequate to bring even the wildest, freedom-loving bronco of a man to his obedient knees. Sometimes they do fail, and the woman has to resort to rough tactics.

Before the sexual revolution undermined it, one of the most popular of rough tactics was the shotgun wedding. This worked best, of course, if the woman had lavished sex on the suitor. All it then took was to surreptitiously get herself pregnant. If he did not then capitulate, if he didn’t offer to slave for the nest to which he had already contributed his genes, her father and brothers would arrive with their shotguns and march “the prisoner” to the altar. In these times, when there is no premium on unbroken hymens, shotgun weddings have declined in frequency. Without the cult of the virgin bride, shotgun weddings lose their rationale: it was that, having damaged their daughter’s or sister’s worth by breaking her hymen, the fellow had to hold on to the goods he had damaged.

Other tactics, a bit less rough, are still available to the woman who wants to hurry her suitor to propose. She can end his reluctance by hinting at, or even producing, rivals to whom his ego would be loathe to lose her. When such a woman seems determined to flirt with other men in her suitor’s presence, her game is clear. A particular white American variant of this is for the girl to show keen interest in some black male in the presence of her dithering suitor. This triggers her suitor’s racism into action, and he moves to save white womanhood from the defiling embraces of nigger erotomania. And he saves it by promptly marrying her!

From such examples, the dispassionate observer cannot but be impressed by the woman’s superior position in courtship, and by the cleverness with which she uses her weapons. While the fool man imagines himself the aggressive, powerful hunter tracking some weak prey, she hunts him down and carts him off.

It might be wondered why men do not usually tell the truth about courtship. Why don’t fathers, and perhaps grandfathers, warn young men about it? Well, male pride for one. The hunting code requires a man to crow from the rooftops about his victories, not his defeats. This means that no husband will be eager to admit that he was tricked, and defeated, and enslaved by his little wife. Secondly, those men who have an interest in declaring the truth, the successful career bachelors, are very few. And even if they bothered to tell the truth, how many men would believe them? The reputation which women have woven for them (as inadequate, undesirable failures whom no woman would marry) would prevent them from being believed. To those conditioned to believe that being a husband is the natural, god-ordained, and happy destiny of every man, a bachelor’s account of the perils of courtship would sound like sour grapes.

Thirdly, a sense of futility contributes to men’s silence on the topic. When they consider all the men who fell into women’s traps all through the ages, those who might be tempted to warn others are driven to despair. What’s the use? Driven by his craving for progeny, the average man, forewarned or not, would still fall where his betters fell.