He Who Must Be Obeyed, or at least watched very closely
By LAURA MILLER
I don't know who He is, but He's terrorizing the women of America behind our backs. While the nation goes about its business -- following the Israeli elections, the Freemen stand-off, Wired's IPO -- hapless females cower in their rooms, trading whispered warnings and brief yelps of defiance, communicating in an elaborate, mysterious code on the pages of seemingly innocuous women's magazines. There's a kind of underground railroad of samizdat information being transmitted by routine headlines like "White and beige are natural bargains. But brights can also give you a big payoff." And what's issuing forth from this cultural hinterland, like distant smokesignals glimpsed over a hazy desert horizon, is a cry for help.I don't visit those parts much myself, but I rifled through a stack of recent Mademoiselle, Glamour and Cosmopolitan magazines, wondering what's occupying the minds of American women. The answer is simple: naked fear. A quick survey of the article headlines reveals that a mysterious and faceless tyrant has taken over their lives. Not only faceless, but nameless: He's referred to only by the singular masculine pronouns -- "What to Do When He Hates Your Family;" "What You Absolutely Can't Change About Him. . . So Don't Even Try;" "What He Hates." I suspect that He has forbidden them to ever speak (or write) His name, like the Hebrew god Yahweh, or somewhat after the fashion of English monarchs whose subjects had to back out of the room after an audience to avoid turning their backs on the king.
The regal comparison proves apt. Like the craven courtiers of the Spanish Empire, the inner circles of Mao and Stalin and the retinue of Nero, His vassals anxiously study Him for signs of favor or displeasure, reading every frown, every lifted eyebrow, with a concentration that befits the trembling servants of a capricious potentate. "His Body: Do You Know What's Up?" queries one headline. "One More Lipstick and. . . He'll Explode! Don't Push It," cautions another ominously. The famed Kremlinologists of the Cold War had nothing on Mademoiselle.
They are circumspect. They are discrete. But the closeness with which these magazines scrutinize His whims tells all. His sex life, in particularly, is cause for continual worry: "His Orgasm" provides the focus of one story. "He Loses His Erection When He Wears a Condom," frets another. (I shudder to think of the aftermath of that particular contretemps; if it had happened to General Pinochet, an entire convent of nuns would have been hurled from an airplane.)
Furthermore, it appears, He returns this acute attention. "Good News!" a caption announces ecstatically, "The Kind of Underwear You Like Most is Also the Kind He Likes to See You In." I can see Him storming in the door like Joan Crawford, rifling through His victim's lingerie drawer as she trembles in the corner, His wrath momentarily appeased when he discovers that she possesses the correct species of panties (white cotton with little pink flowers, perhaps?). The bastard.
He traffics in arranged marriages ("Help! He Wants Me to be The Little Wife!") and insists that His exacting requirements be fulfilled to a T ("How to Feed Him, Kiss Him, Talk to Him" one article promises to inform its desperate and bewildered readers). Like most despots, He's a coward at heart ("How You Can Help Him Overcome His Fear of Buying"). And, very occasionally, a murmur of resistance can be heard ("He's So Vain;" "Could He Be the Worst Mistake of Your Life?").
But for the most part His reign continues unquestioned. At times I have thought that He might not be a man at all, but rather a fickle and indifferent deity like Beckett's Godot. Like Vladimir and Estragon, we wait fervently for His arrival (or, more often, His phone call), but if He shows up at all, He usually does something awful. In fact, He resembles no one so much as the demanding, eponymous goddess of "She," H. Rider Haggard's classic adventure novel -- short for "She Who Must Be Obeyed." I eventually had to jettison this theory when I realized that God was unlikely to need condoms.
If this much-discussed autocrat is not quite omnipotent, however, then what precisely is the extent of His vast power? What are the dire consequences of His displeasure that so many should dread him so much? The magazines remain silent on that count. An image emerges of the average reader as frantically striving to avoid a punishment whose precise nature she cannot bear to contemplate. A Kafkaesque spectacle, to say the least -- or perhaps "Orwellian" would be a better term. In this disillusioned century we have learned that the blandest bureacratic language masks the vilest crimes. Dissenters are "disappeared," ethnicities are "cleansed," a "final solution" is achieved. If the penalties for flouting Him are not described at all, they can only be that much worse. In fact, they're unthinkable.