I’ve been following the dustup over Caitlin Flanagan’s self-absorbed and whiny rant that nobody appreciates her for trying to turn back the clock on women’s rights. (Primo examples here, here, here.)

Contrary to her assertions, it’s not her lifestyle liberals object to. (Contrary to her delusions of grandeur, nobody really cares how she lives her life – they just wish she would stop telling them how to live theirs.) It’s her enthusiasm for “little-helpmeet” misogyny that drives them to consider her an enemy. See if you can tell why:

[P]ity the poor married man hoping to get a bit of comfort from the wife at day’s end. He must somehow seduce a woman who is economically independent of him, bone tired, philosophically disinclined to have sex unless she is jolly well in the mood, numbingly familiar with his every sexual maneuver, and still doing a slow burn over his failure to wipe down the countertops and fold the dish towel after cooking the kids’ dinner. He can hardly be blamed for opting instead to check his e-mail, catch a few minutes of SportsCenter, and call it a night.

Ahhhh . . . . So, if all that is what is wrong with women, what would it take for them to be right?

• Providing sexual ”comfort” to her husband at day’s end (no mention of reciprocation – or the idea that sex is something other than a service provided for others’ gratification).
• Being “the wife”. (Do people really still talk this way? Republican people do.)
• Being “seduced” (no having actual autonomous sex drives, now).
• Being economically dependent.
• Not being tired (working so hard that she is “bone tired” is a crime against her husband).
• Being “philosophically inclined” to have sex whether or not she wants to.
• Being unfamiliar with her husband’s sexual “maneuvers” (uh . . . I have no idea).
• Doing all the family-care work and not expecting “the husband” to participate in raising his own children, taking care of his own house, or clean up his own mess.

Aside from the familiar, dreary 50s drudgery of it and the cheerfully creepy rape-positivism (she can’t initiate sex, she can’t refuse it, and she must not have sexual desires of her own – but she is obligated to satisfy her man on his whim no matter what), what’s inescapable is that women of the Flanagan mold must not have any self-directed lives of any kind, nor any “philosophical inclinations” to think their own interests and values matter; they exist for the sexual gratification of, and personal service to, their husbands, and are judged (by Flanagan) on how well they perform those functions.

Where have I seen this before . . .?

Oh, yeah. Now I remember. (more…)