How to Keep Your Man at Home

By J.S. Porter

“I hate you, I want to kill you, let's have sex!”^* A very Freudian thought, if not in the letter of Freud, then certainly in his spirit. Men in the earliest times fought for fire or tried to steal it. That’s what the myth of Prometheus fundamentally recognizes: the war for fire. What once was the sole property of the godhead becomes, through theft, a human commodity. Men also fought over and stole women.

The man starts with an impulse. Why is she here? What good is she? She eats food, food that would otherwise be mine, so why not kill her? The woman starts from a survival instinct. He wants to kill me. What do I do? She opens her legs and gives herself. She uses sex to distract the man from murder.

There are other forms of distraction. Story, for instance. Later in time, when language enters the market place, the woman tells stories to distract the man from murder. She now has two ways of staying alive: one by sex, the other by story. This is the deep wisdom of The Arabian Nights. Scheherazade stays alive for a 1001 nights by telling stories to the murderous Sultan. She, like every other storyteller, sleeps under a death threat: tell a good story or die.

For some women—or, for most women sometimes—stories are the preferred method of distracting men. Stories, like sex, ward off murder and keep men at home.

^*A line from John B. Lee’s “A Meditation on a Fly in Church”.

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Photo: J.S. Porter by Frances Ward