Tommy’s Misogyny

Tommy suspected it was all a lie, and he wrongly associated the lie with women. That was because the only one who could have spoken truth, the only one he was close enough to for him to attach truth or falsity to what was said, was his mother. Because his father had died, maybe, in that war. His father drifted or popped in from time to time, but he was too ambiguous a figure to depend on for truth or falsity, not real enough for foundation.

Tommy had two sisters, several years older than him and aligned as a unit of which he wasn’t a part, so they only enhanced his sense that females were unreliable and alien. Males, like him and his father, were reduced to phantom status because they were ambiguously killed, and it seemed to Tommy that females were what ambiguously killed them. That was a secret, because what he saw on TV was that men killed men in war. But he suspected it was females who somehow orchestrated it. Men were too tenuous to have meaning, and women were actively malevolent.

But they were still alluring, females were. Good or bad, friend or foe, they existed unambiguously, so if one wanted to exist, it was imperative to align with them. They alone offered the possibility of leaving ambiguity and achieving a sense of solidity, reality, life possessed and not just sought.

But how his mother and sisters skewed the odds and blurred the prospects of such achievement! They were lifeline. All females potentially were. Boys and men lived at their whim, died at their whim. Or got suspended between life and death at their whim, maybe the worst fate of all. Suspended between animation and inanimation.

They were lifeline, but untrustworthy wielders of the line. Fully as capable of dangling and snatching away the vital wire as of dangling it and permitting a grasp. So he grasped often at proffered cords, radiant with hope of reliability, but ever skeptical they would be pulled away with mocking laughter. When he caught one, he immediately sensed trap and trick. It had to be ruse, so it had to be tested. But testing itself was rigged by him to prove ruse, because that was preferable to being victim of ruse again.

Women were salvific, but treacherously so. Most were impostor saviors. Tommy overread that to mean all were. The more freely and fully the line was extended, the more likely its fakery. That made Tommy himself a line-snatcher, unaware the girls and women were not playing the trick he imagined or were trapped in their own sad seeking for salvation, themselves full of suspicion that males were malevolent and untrue.

His mother was like Tommy, her trust and hope betrayed, but young Tommy didn’t realize that. She was likely far more betrayed than Tommy, in the sense she started from an even more trusting nature and was disappointed even more frequently. But her disappointers were male, mirror malefactors to Tommy’s female ones, and she was ambiguously dead because her brothers never regarded her as fully alive. They aligned as unit of which she wasn’t part, couldn’t be part, because they were beings and she was thing. Thing that appeared salvific to others, thing that was useful and satisfied them, but thing. To one young man, she was not thing, but completer, fulfiller, because his vision was less clouded by suspicion and doubt. Until that war. But Tommy knew none of this.

The world had little regard for either Tommy or his mother, just as it has little regard for everyone. The world deals in generalities, not specifics. The world’s frame of reference is different from and indifferent to any individual being’s needs and wants. It traffics only in systems and domains and kingdoms and never troubles itself with family or species, much less individual organism. So the world would have no regard as to whether the young man, Tommy’s father, was ambiguously or actually killed, or whether his mother was ambiguously dead. The world noticed Tommy because he clamored and protested about the whole situation. Noticed but paid no heed, because it felt no need to pay heed to the concerns of its minor constituents.

But most of us minor constituents are so constituted that we refuse to acknowledge we are minor. We think, even believe, that we matter, even to the world. Tommy may have had an abundance of this illusion. He, like many, constructed fantasies in which he was pre-eminent, a ruler and mind and soul of a world that dismissed him as easily as it made his father ambiguously dead and his mother a thing and made Tommy unable to trust his own matrix. It’s a cluster of misunderstanding. The misunderstanding is trivialized because the need for understanding exists only in the constituents and not in the world. Thingness and ambiguity exist only in the minor constituents and not in the world. The trust of males and females is an artifact of minor constituents and not even a constituent of the world.

Tommy’s misogyny is just misanthropy with gender confusion. He’ll marry, have kids, and do as well as can be expected of a component part.

Written January 1, 2023
©2023 Lawrence Helms