After the women had finished their light meal, they began talking about their husbands and children. It was generally agreed that although children could be disciplined and trained, husbands were hopeless. Sometime between their teenage years and the time they got married, men as a group regressed back through early childhood into quasi-infancy. Aside from going to work, most men had to be fed, dressed and watched over as if they were the merest of babes. The women agreed that men were too infantile and set in their ways to be changed by any method short of miraculous. Instead, they focused their attention on their babies; they were the hope of their mother’s and the world. There was a chance, although it was agreed that it was vanishingly small, that their little boys would turn out to be somewhat more mature than the fathers who sired them. Of their baby girls, the women said next to nothing. There was no concern about how they would turn out. They knew their daughters would work at their jobs while taking care of their husbands, homes and families without fail. Even if they were only infants, they would be women someday. They would shoulder the burdens of modern life and keep civilization going for another few years. A woman’s desire for an orderly home was coded into the very DNA of their cells in the same way that chaos and disruption were coded into a man’s DNA. Every woman knew instinctively that men were incapable of living an orderly life. It was obvious from history; women didn’t start wars, men did. They couldn’t help themselves from being irrationally aggressive any more than a two-year-old could be rationally expected to go potty by themselves.
Although most women were well aware of men’s faults, they were ignorant of the social pressures that had left men so incapable of taking care of themselves. Society had changed in the seven centuries since men did their work in the presence of their wives and families. Gone was the long house of the Dark ages where cattle, slaves, children, women and men shared food, fire, workplace and lodgings. Gone too was the workplace of the Middle Ages where apprentices lived in the home of their master craftsman with his wife and children. Men had segregated themselves into their offices to escape the incessant demands of their wives and their progeny. What men lost was their connection to the real world. They had built a egoistic world in which only their immediate needs and desires mattered. They dammed the rivers and made them run backwards to assuage their infantile egos. Stealthy aircraft were built at a cost of billions of dollars apiece while children went hungry and unclothed around them. Whole rain forests were cut down in the interest of immediate profit causing the thin subsoil to wash away and poison rivers for hundreds of miles. Japanese fleets staffed by the scions of Samurai sailors scoured the seas and oceans of the Earth sucking every form of aquatic animal life worth a yen into the vast maw of their enormous fish harvesting and processing vessels. Entire species vanished overnight and fishing resources dwindled as the harvests continued year after year unabated. Business empires worth billions were built on the ruins of people’s lives and then squandered on the ill planned imaginings of their CEOs. Nowhere in the world did common sense prevail when men came to power.
Human life had become a commodity to be traded like so much corn. Men’s historical sense of community had been abandoned for position, power and the quarterly statement. Like the pampered Emperors of the last Chinese dynasty or the Czars of Russia at the end of their power, they had become over-coddled children who were incapable of taking care of themselves or anyone else. Their history had been forgotten. The ever-sharp spear of the Saxon and Celt had been abandoned for imagined safety of large ill-paid staffs of security guards. Men willingly gave up their right and duty to care for themselves and their families to the government so well-armed police could watch over them like over-protective parents and shield them from their own folly. Men supported the surrender of their historical right to defend themselves from violence so that they wouldn’t be bothered by the seamier side of existence. Men lived serenely within the nursery of their neurotic dreams. As long as they had their fancy food, booze, toys and peaceful life, they were content. They didn’t have to make coffee or pick up after themselves. They could always hire someone to do it for them. If secretaries hadn’t been invented to babysit their male “superiors” in offices, men would have had to hire nannies to tend to their needs. They were overgrown children. There wasn’t a woman in the room who didn’t know that fact from both instinct and personal experience.
Once the discussion had started, the women began relating a veritable catalog of their husband’s faults. One brown haired woman with a baby on her lap complained, “My Henry is no better than a barely potty-trained toddler, he almost never wipes his butt completely after going to the bathroom and I end up having to wash underwear with brown streaks on the rear almost every day. He swears he wipes himself carefully every time, but I can’t see how he can be cleaning himself when he ends up with such dirty underwear. I’ve taken to washing his undies in Dreft with the baby’s cloth diapers. It’s the only detergent I’ve found that will get them clean.”
One of the other women chuckled and said, “I can’t get mine to close the lid on the toilet and flush on a regular basis. It’s a funny thing, I just got finished potty training my four-year-old and didn’t have any problems getting him to flush every time he goes potty. If only I had a chance to train my husband the way I did my little boy, I could probably have him trained to flush and close the lid in a month.”
“How did you train your little boy to flush the potty?”, the women in the blue pants suit queried.
“Oh!”, the brown haired woman laughed, “I just told him that if he couldn’t flush, he couldn’t use the toilet like a big boy. Then I put him back in dydees for the day. Whenever I did that, I wouldn’t change him until after supper. A few afternoons in wet dydees and he was ready to flush every time.”
“Hmmm,” mused a woman across the room with a grin, “I wonder if that approach would work with our husbands. Can’t you just picture them standing in the kitchen with wet dydees waiting until bedtime for us to change them? I’d be willing to bet that they changed their ways quick!”
“Especially if they got diaper rash a couple of times!”, the woman in the blue pants suit added with a giggle.
Everyone laughed at the mental image of their husbands gingerly waddling around the house with bowed legs, trying to keep their wet diapers from rubbing their sore dydee rashes. They could easily imagine their husbands coming to them in the kitchen while they were making dinner and whining about how their tushes hurt. They would plead with their wives to change their dirty dydees, saying how sorry they were that they hadn’t flushed the john the night before.
Anita said, “My husband used to strip down to his skivies and throw his clothes around the house the minute he got home. I swear, it was like trailing around after a toddler who had just learned to undress himself. I’d find clothes all over the house. I’m glad that’s finally over!”
“How did you get him to stop?”, a blond women asked with interest.
“I didn’t!”, Anita said with a smirk, “He left me for another woman whose happy to pick up after him like she’s his mother.”
“Are there any husbands who pick up after themselves?”, asked the blonde woman rhetorically.
“Not mine!”, answered a brunette woman with her nine-month-old baby girl crawling on the couch beside her, “He leaves his tools everywhere! He acts just like my five-year-old does with his toys. If you move them or put them up, he throws a temper tantrum!”
“Which one throws the tantrum,” the blonde woman asked, “…your little boy or your husband?”
“Both of them!”, the brunette woman laughingly replied.
“Does yours drink directly from the water bottle in the refrigerator instead of pouring the water into a glass?”, asked the brunette woman, “Mine does! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked him to pour the water into glasses instead of drinking from the jug! He knows it annoys me, so he sneaks around and does it in private when he thinks I’m not looking. When I catch him at it, he denies everything just like a three-year-old with his hand caught in the cookie jar.”
“Mine does that!”, another woman answered in irritation, “And leaves towels on the floor after his bath, doesn’t rinse out the sink after he shaves, doesn’t flush or put down the seat, or pick up his tools or put away his dirty clothes! For that matter, he doesn’t wipe himself very well and doesn’t always wash his hands after going to the bathroom either! Every time I see him after work, he’s got his lips wrapped around the top of a forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor and holding the end in the air like some kind of huge baby bottle. When he gets hungry, he wants to be fed then and there as if I could produce a fully cooked meal for him by snapping my fingers.” She looked down at her twenty-three-month old boy playing peacefully beside her feet on the carpet and continued, “It’s just like having another two-year-old in the house! I swear to God, what my husband needs is a sound spanking, some clean dydees on his bottom and a giant playpen to keep him out of trouble!”
Howard was slightly embarrassed by what Anita had said about him, although in honesty, he had to admit that he hadn’t put his clothes away a time or two in the past. After hearing the women’s complaints about their husbands, he found himself in general agreement with their overall assessment of men as a group. Although he had been part of the structure that had damaged the eco-system and had felt the same way as the men they described, his position as a dependent infant had cast a new light on his previous life. He had been wrong to deny Anita a voice in running the household. Having vented their collective spleen, the women decided to turn their attention back to their children. The babies were gotten out of the playpen and allowed to creep or crawl around the rugs under their mother’s watchful eyes. Bri-Bri was loosed with the other infants to creep among the giant-sized shoes of the women. Occasionally, he would catch a peek up the dress of one of the mothers, but his heart wasn’t in it anymore. Without sexual cravings to drive him, his causal glimpses of women’s panties were merely the chance observations of an idle infant’s curiosity.