My conversion to the idea and practice of wife worship happened about a dozen years ago. I can remember vividly the rising arc of emotion, from the first suspicions that this could be special, then gathering and building until it culminated in one of those indelible “Aha!” moments. I don’t recall the search terms that led me to Fumika Misato’s “Real Women Don’t Do Housework” website, but they were certainly providential. As I scanned and scrolled my way down those female-savvy, pink-backgrounded paragraphs and pages, a lifetime of thoughts and yearnings and confusions converged in my mind and fell into a coherent structure--Lady Misato’s coherent structure, which I immediately adopted, then adapted to my own purposes.
Yes, I thought, this is how it was meant to be for me, all along. Why did I never realize this? Lady Misato was offering me a way not only to transform my marriage, but possibly to save it. For too many years I had stolen and siphoned off erotic energies from my wife and our marriage bed by secret masturbation. An indispensable activity, no doubt, for a monastic, a reclusive bachelor, but a dirty word for a married man, at least as applied to me. I had become addicted, like a teenage boy, to porn imagery, and, increasingly, courtesy of the Internet back room, femdom porn.
Lady Misato was offering me a way to take all my submissive yearnings, which even while pursuing I regarded as shameful, and redirect them back into my marriage, expressing them openly as the rituals of romantic courtship. It was praiseworthy, not shameful, she explained, for a man to get down his knees and worship the flesh and blood goddess he was already married to. She deserved no less of me, every day, every night.
And guess what? It worked, and it still does. In fact, I wrote a book about it, and then another one.
More recently, I have undergone an additional, but similar conversion experience, one which is, I believe, taking me a bit farther along the blessed path of wife worship. This latter-day conversion has been so incremental that I am unable to locate the precise moment when everything coalesced into “Eureka!” or “Aha!” But it has been in process, in percolation, for the dozen years or so that I have practicing and preaching wife worship.
The post title above gives it away, of course. Without really knowing when or how or why it happened, I have become a believer in female superiority.
Some of my conversion process has been public and actually chronicled in the Comments section of this blog, appended in particular to the two guest posts on “Wife Worship and Female Superiority” by “Beckie Sue” last fall. Until her posts, I had tiptoed oh so carefully around the term, and the concept, of Female Superiority, sensing that it might be inflammatory. (And was it ever!)
And yet, in the first wife-worship book, and even more in the several years of blog posts that became the sequel, the apotheosis of womanhood was certainly on almost every page. It’s not a big step from there, bowing before the idealization of the Divine Feminine, to open espousal of the idea of female superiority, starting with one’s obviously superior wife.
Certainly I was aware of all the research indicating that females are the prototypical gender, with males being an obvious chromosomal variant thereof, and the overwhelming statistics showing that young women are on the ascendant in secondary and higher and post-graduate education, and in any number of professions. In fact, I’ve made a practice of bookmarking these studies and articles and emailing them, or the URLs, to my wife, as if to say, “Okay, I concede the point, girls rule!”
A copy of Ashley Montague’s seminal work, The Natural Superiority of Women, a birthday gift from me to my wife, is prominently displayed on an end table in our family room, just beside me, in fact, as I write.
And yet, in some inner recess of my compartmentalized brain, I held fast to the illusion of masculine superiority. And publicly I never strayed from the orthodox and politically correct view that everything and everyone is absolutely equal in every aspect. Because… well, because that’s only fair, and certainly Mister Rogers and Thomas Jefferson and Barney the Dinosaur all agree that everybody is a very special person and nobody is allowed to be better than anybody else at anything!
But I could not apply that politically correct, 50-50 standard to marriage. The observable evidence, in my marriage and all the marriages I was able to observe, was that they prospered with the women in control, as they usually were, and foundered to the degree that the husbands began to assert their own inclinations and proclivities.
And it was, and is, absolutely true that, in my marriage and our family life, without my wife’s wise and loving leadership and superior judgment in every area, the kids and I would be utterly lost. I’m no dummy, but even on my best day, in our family, Mother Knows Best
So, like I say, I continued to be a stubborn holdout against any categorical assertion of female superiority. Sure, women were socially superior, but no way a WNBA all-star team could hold their own against the NBA slam-dunkers! Okay, so maybe girls and women are better at real life and in the classroom, but they can’t go one-on-one with guys when it comes time for recess and playground activities.
Then Beckie Sue sent me a lengthy email about her own slow and even reluctant conversion to the idea of female superiority, and her own gradual assumption of leadership in her marriage. My initial reading of her story is pretty close to my “Aha!” conversion moment. With her permission, I published that email and several additional ones as a two-part guest-blog:
Wife Worship and Female Superiority, Part 1
Wife Worship and Female Superiority, Part 2
Take a look, if you haven’t already, and we’ll discuss at the next class.
(End Part One)