story - Constance Purdue

(A Darwinian Parable about Birds and Worms)

Constance Purdue was on the tail end of her soliloquy concerning the nature of men and women when I walked into the restaurant and joined her band of diners…

“…the female, as you see, is therefore the constant factor in nature, the male being the variable. The female is the progenerative force that is burdened not only with the task of bearing the full responsibility of procreation but also with that of justifying the existence of the male of the species; for ultimately, it’s the female who must choose her mate and it is the male who must be chosen. The world is structured in this way. Males invent a whole myriad of competitive systems to enhance their chance of being selected by an appropriate female, competition being the basic determining factor within those systems, and thus justifying those systems by inevitably ranking the participant men. Although, of course, the male seeks recognition from as many women (ideally, all) as possible, this is essentially sought so as to facilitate his selection by one ideal female, whether she in fact exists or not. Be it in the realm of politics, philosophy, professional pursuit, sports, sex or nocturnal disport, the male recreates these competitive systems which females realize are essentially ridiculous, yet which they nevertheless overlook, since they know full well the reason behind men’s innocuous and childish enthusiasm for those games. Their foolish pride in excelling at those games is no less significant, since they are in all actuality gratifying their need to stand out as being all the more attractive to the female – be it one particular female or their ideal conception of the female. The female ultimately selects the more successful and the potential alpha of her species; the stronger, faster, bigger, smarter, more self-confident, the better, all the while realizing the essential foolishness of those she is selecting, secure as she is in her far more significant biological function as Woman. No self-respecting female will ever settle for second-best in a male while being able to remain true to her own self. This is of course not to say that all females will go for the best possible choice. This is to say rather that females will always go for the best possibility open to them and in keeping with their own qualities as females. Thus men have found ways to create niches in which to excel while being able to forsake competing at levels and in fields in which they may have too great a handicap to overcome, be it physical, intellectual or pecuniary. Nature has seen to this because otherwise there would be a lot of lonely people and not much regeneration of the race – I mean, of course, fucking – going on. Thus some men will compete physically, others mentally, some academically, others socially, as all of them seek to find for themselves that optimum niche from which to crawl out of their little hole of mediocrity and be selected by a female. So, to sum up, the old analogy of the Birds and the Bees is misleading. Rather, nature and sex is about the Birds and the Worms. As the worms wriggle and writhe their way forth, the bird selects the tasty morsel brought forth and gobbles it up with relish. The bigger the worm, the tastier the morsel. The worm is sure in its function and is happy to be the worm, while the bird chooses the tastiest to satisfy her appetite. And that, my vermian friends, is my theory of the Birds and the Worms.”

Having made her point, she paused and smiled so sincerely that her eyes became little squinting slits that nevertheless lost none of their ominous intensity. She drew in the pensive looks that were vacantly cast her way, perched in her seat like an anachronistic sibyl. I imagined her to be some sort of metamorphosed female black widow or praying mantis, ready to sting and eat her potential “chosen” mate, or turn his little brain into mush before slurping it up with hungry relish. Despite these morbid flashes, I, like any other man present, relished the challenge offered by a feisty object of desire such as Constance Purdue. And besides her pugnacious, self-assured character, she was a bombshell of a girl, with classic Teutonic features, but with a waistline to boot (something so often denied by nature to that race), and a chest that poured proudly and profusely into her dress. Too bad my girlfriend was sitting right next to me.

Naturally, her speech raised some eyebrows along with some indignity from the table of men who had been summoned to join her. While women may often pass philosophy off with a flirtatious giggle or an absent nod, excusing it as the childish product of games boys play, boys, when confronted with such a proposition from a female, immediately feel threatened, like a foreigner has invaded their pitch and has proceeded to challenge them on their own turf. The territorial male cannot back away from such an affront to his dominion. He invariably zeroes in on the challenge. Thus Wallace bore down on the target of his indignity.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, how can you argue that when it’s always the guy who’s stereotypically cast as the hunter, while women are cast as the hunted, as prey, as the helpless object of aggressive male desire? Our ribald quotidian prejudices are aligned against your misandrism missy!”

Constance was in a feisty mood, and she let none past her alert gaze and her by now adrenalin-inundated psyche. Had she lacked even an ounce of grace, her nostrils would certainly be flaring.

“Ah!” she contested. “And yet our modern prejudices fall short of ancient wisdom which portrayed the great hunters not as men but as voluptuous busty women in whom the bloodlust foamed and bubbled in the same spirited, ideal domain as the libidinous nature of their rapacious femininity. Artemis, Atalanta, Athena, the Maenads, the Erinyes; they were the names of the huntresses, goddesses and warriors of old - luscious, deadly, omnipotent in their lusty potential, wielders of the bow, goddesses of the hunt, sensors of blood, voracious devourers of flesh, avengers of injustice. They are the ideals of the men that created their mythology – and rest assured that it was men who created mythology. Men are responsible for all the ridiculous idealisms and simulated discursive pantomimes that have fed the degeneration of our race over the millennia. The woman knows nothing of those, she only has the nose for blood, for flesh, she IS her essence, she has no need to seek it elsewhere, to philosophize over it. She carries her essence within her, always assured of her biological truth. And so, if it be men who have created these myths, then it be men themselves who are conscious of the nature of women and the nature of the relationship between the sexes.”

Her speech went down very successfully around the table - at least if the subdued collective demeanor of the men was anything to go by. But one also immediately picked up on a tension – on the part of the women, that is. While the men were threatened and annoyed that a pretty female was challenging their smug chauvinistic dominance by locking horns with them rather than just looking pretty and at least feigning a visage of being impressed by their self-importantly macho pseudo-intellectual chattering, the women were simply annoyed that a pretty girl was amidst them and drawing all the attention of the men from their own expensively-coifed heads and their freshly painted faces. Immediately (as is wont in such circumstances when an outsider female enters the circle of familiar males that insider women feel possessive over, and further makes such a strong imprint that she gains the complete and undivided attention of those very males) one sensed the brooding resentment Constance Purdue had conjured in the comportment of the other females at the table - not least of which in my own girlfriend. The mix of intelligence, charm and stunning good looks is already a strong point against the outsider female among the insider females, but what particularly exasperates the insider females is the inability of their insider males to be able to hone in on all the little qualities that make the outsider female so unpalatable, so hard to digest on the part of the insider females. In other words, the women are disgusted by the stupidity of men for not seeing all the little qualities that the insider girls themselves find odious in the outsider, and they don’t have any faith in the men as a result, so they take their spite into their own hands and conjure the means to make sure the outsider stays an outsider by trying to turn the insider men against the outsider woman as well as by making snide remarks, spiteful looks and carefully orchestrated shows of ridicule and contempt thrown brutally in the outsider girl’s direction, though always subtle enough no matter how brutal to escape the attention of the dimwitted insider males.

Now while Wallace was offering his retort to Constance (in almost symphonic unison with one or two other blaring, undignified, ape-like male voices), and going on about something to do with “tautology” and “gross generalizations,” I noticed my girlfriend (whom I tried not to omit from my sphere of attention despite my enraptured interest in Constance) whispering inaudibly to her friend in a way that nevertheless spoke volumes as to the subject of their conversation as well as to the general congruence of opinion concerning that very subject, which immediately led me to see that – to overstate an understatement – Constance Purdue was persona non grata in this particular sorority of spite. While Constance grappled with the host of male adversaries ranged before her, my girlfriend and her partner in crime gave fulminating glances Constance’s way, projected all the more abrasively by the snickering and teasing laughter that hurled it across the table with the most unambiguous of intentions. I tried to ignore what was going on, and it seems so did Constance, because I knew my girlfriend felt threatened, all the more so because she didn’t even try and influence my own opinions as to this unwanted outsider perched belligerently within our midst. That could only mean that my girlfriend was aware that I was attracted to Constance and so she was now on the defensive, giving a rather unseemly and ineloquent fight, yet no less effective for it. As much as I tried to mollify my girlfriend, she gave me clumsily feigned and careless brush-offs as if dismissing me as being in on this unpleasant scenario and in fact conspiring against her along with the outsider. Love may be blind, but jealousy is a bitch.

The many-sided battle went on, superficially with the men (“there is no other way with them,” Constance opined at one point) and surreptitiously with the women (there is no other way with them, thought I). The oafish brutes around the table continued panting and retorting under the spell of this outsider Artemis.

“…and that’s why women do not philosophize,” she continued, “philosophy is the result of alienation of man from nature, of the idealization of his own identity, of his sublime estrangement from the mysterious entanglement that is nature. Woman on the other hand IS nature, she bears its wrath, its responsibility, its beauty and its ferocity, all within her own body. She bleeds every month, she bears new life into the world, her whole body is a regenerative mechanism that feeds off the male half of the race in order to carry on with its fundamental and crucial task of regenerating the race. The female is thus not estranged from nature, she is one with it, she knows what the reason of her existence is, she bears it, she lives it, nothing else matters. She has no need for philosophy, the questions of philosophy have been answered bluntly, brutally, carnally in her own biological morphology.”

“And yet you philosophize!” interjected Wallace.

“No, I anti-philosophize,” retorted Constance playfully, offering her idiosyncratic squinty-eyed smile.

“Polemics my dear, mere polemics,” was his way of excusing her retort. “Besides, how can you anti-philosophize while using philosophical methodology? If your conclusions are anti-philosophical, that’s one thing, but anti-philosophizing in itself can only be the opposite of philosophy, which would mean that you’d either have to be quiet or base all your beliefs in a truism like god, or a holy book or something. Otherwise, you’re philosophizing - and you, missy, are PHILOSOPHIZING!”

Wallace displayed a proud grin on his mug. He looked like he could have pissed on the table leg and claimed his territory for good.

“But Wally,” said Constance sadistically, still brimming, “I DO believe in a truism, and it’s not god or a holy book. I believe in my femininity and I believe that femininity is anathema to philosophizing, it’s a contradiction of its own nature, thus I cannot philosophize because if I did then I would be contradicting my belief in that truism, and as you’ve already stated, Wallace, belief in a truism is anti-philosophical.”

Wallace laughed heartily at this tongue-in-cheek retort and shook his head, leaving it at that.

On that playful note, we ordered the bill. The topics and anti-topics of philosophy and anti-philosophy had all but been exhausted by this hour and a postprandial vow was made to spare the whole company from any more of this childish pride-mongering and devote more time to simply having a good time. Our next destination was a friend’s house where we could carry on the aforementioned task.

I was by now quite drunk and also quite enraptured with this girl and her playful (anti-) philosophical flirting. She was well aware of my girlfriend and of everything that was going on, and yet instead of backing down or giving up any territory, she rose to the challenge of this generally tense social climate by adding her own mischief into the whole cocktail of conflict that had reared its head that night. The mischief was augmented in the form of a wink thrown effortlessly yet very calculatingly my way – and, needless to say, I was smitten. By the time we were at the friend’s house carrying on with the festivities, the whole scene had gotten out of hand. On one hand all of the men were vying for the attention of this fine outsider femme fatale, myself included, to the extent that my girlfriend had by now not only ceased to talk to me but had actually chose to ignore me and furthermore had got it into her mind to try and make me jealous by using all her body language to convey a sense of flirtation with another man, not a friend of mine but a friend of a friend. Her legs were crossed and the top leg waved nervously and playfully back and forth as the knee pointed straight in the direction of this guy’s crotch. As she spoke to him she played with her hair, threw her head back with laughter and her hand intermittently touched parts of his body – most notably his thigh, his arm, his hand, and even once brushed across his chest. Her smile was as if forcefully glued to her face which turned to glance over at me at almost equidistantly regular intervals.

I was now in a tight situation. Meanwhile, I, along with the other of the male company that was gathered at the house, was fixated on Constance. There was a lustful aura that hung about the room. The men carried on their light conversation talking about everything yet really only wanting to say one thing; i.e. that they wanted Constance. Glances and smiles were thrown about carelessly, topics wavered, jokes flew back and forth, and all the while everyone in the room – every single person – anticipated and exaggerated every single little glance and gesture that was flung about the room, especially by Constance. Within a second I received another of her titillating glances, given in the form of another wink and a smile and a lingering look across the table that shut a few yapping ape mouths while giving extra wind to even less tactful others. Nothing of course got past my girlfriend, for when a man is involved, the woman’s extra-sensory intuition misses nothing, picking up on every little vibe as if they had a radar fixed in their womb.

I could feel the situation was now forcing itself to a climax. Eyes were shooting back and forth in a thousand directions, body language blared so loud it looked as if people were talking through their flesh and bones. The alcohol was having the customary effect of amplifying the emotions that fed the subtle communications that had all of a sudden become not-so-subtle. The cocaine only exacerbated the needy, libidinous egos it fed, and the cigarette smoke danced and twirled in the air as it escaped from the nervous hand-to-mouth habit that sucked it into our lungs with stubborn indifference. Constance winked as she passed by me to make her way to the bathroom. My girlfriend looked at her and then threw a flaming glance my way, her hand now suddenly, strategically, on the crotch of her own prey. I felt drawn beyond my reason, beyond my own volition, to the gaze of Constance, a gaze that had since carved out a dizzying eddy that sucked me behind her and into the bathroom where she had laid her web out for me. Eyes whirled around my head, voices beckoned for and against my momentary lapse of reason, I thought of my girlfriend, I thought I heard my girlfriend, she had by then ensnared her own prey, but it was soon all over. Constance Purdue had ensnared her own prey as well. I had been selected to make a point, as if I were just mere words extracted and from her “anti-philosophical” exposition at the restaurant earlier that night. When the tempestuous and sordid affair was over in the bathroom, she gave me the same squinting smile that declared her triumph and my downfall – and the downfall of all men – all in the same gesture. Upon emerging from the bathroom, the same triumphant gaze fixed upon my girlfriend, who was by now past anger and about ready to grab her female friend and storm off, which she wasted no time in doing, leaving her own doe-eyed male prey in the throes of confusion.

Constance Purdue lit up another cigarette and cast a very satisfied glance around the party. The mixture of jealousy and frustration along with the last embers of hope on the faces of the men, and that of jealousy and sincere hatred on that of the women, fittingly concluded what turned out to be a very contented night for Constance. And from that little sparkle that shone from the corner of her eye, teetering above the crest of a delicate, Mona Lisa-esque smile, one could tell that it had less to do with that one conquest of prey than that all-encompassing pleasure in having verified her anti-philosophy in such a poetic, non-discursive, pro-active manner, while at the same time having bettered woman and man alike in so complete a rout.

As for myself, the guilt I felt vis-à-vis my girlfriend and the weakness I felt in having been made such an obvious and easy prey of the huntress, all of this made me indeed feel like the worm, helpless and squirming, yet, paradoxically, happy in the function I served that night in the quarry. I was in fact proud to have been the one chosen to be gobbled up by the voracious bird that morning.