Women as Property

One of my favorite cliché moments is when a feminist or similar lackey builds up a dramatic pause in her diatribe, as the Phantom of the Opera maniacally swells the pipe organ in the background, “Women used to be regarded as....property.”

A nice touch at this point is to do a sort of Goth pigeon release to really sell the audience on the sheer evil of the Patriarchy, by letting a mass of shrieking bats out of the belfry. “...as property.”

Consider a hypothetical example if you will. You have an ape living in your house, and although most of the time it is a perfectly acceptable companion, you must pay its food and medical expenses. On occasion it goes wild, wrecks the home, and you must pay to have things cleaned up, or pay damages when it wrecks the neighbors house and car. Suppose this ape runs off and is now living at the neighbor’s house, which it stubbornly refuses to leave. At this point you would say something on the order of, “Oh well, I cannot own another living being. Apparently it has made its choice and I must learn to live with it.”

But imagine that you have trained this ape to speak via sign language. Scientists pay to study it, the public pays to see it, there is a book and movie deal in the works that will make you millions. Now when the ape goes next door and won’t come back, how do you respond? “Hey, that’s my ape! I have invested a fortune in it and you have no right to it! You had better return the ape or this is war!”

The crux of my allegory is that you regard as property things that are valuable. Suppose someone starts to cart off a dogpile from your front yard. Do you yell, “Put that crap back! It’s my property, dammit!”? Of course not. The sad truth is that wives have gone from being an asset to becoming a liability. When women became worthless as wives, they were no longer regarded as property.

A wife used to cook, to sew, to care for children, and to do a hundred things necessary for the maintenance of a home, from tanning hides, skinning animals, making candles and clothing, etc. The wife was a valuable asset and indispensible to man’s ability to make a living.

But what does a wife do today that can’t be outsourced? Food can be microwaved or bought cheaply at restaurants. Clothing can be bought, child care can be outsourced, a maid or cleaning service can be hired, etc. Given a woman’s spending habits, she represents a net loss.

In essence, a wife is a contingent liability, a hidden sinkhole threatening to engulf the entire home at any moment. A wife is something like a cross between the singing sword and the sword of Damocles, only more prone to bitching than singing.