Episode One from Stelzer’s Travels

Matilda was hopping angrily about on our blanket when I got back to it.  One look at her and I knew from experience that it would take some time for her to settle down and, for that matter, for her down to settle.  I was able to surmise from her agitated croaks that she had returned from her meeting with Greta and Eddie with doleful news, but before she could even begin to tell me about it, the second act had begun.

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As soon as the next intermission began, Matilda could hardly contain herself.  “You just can’t tell, can you?” she protested.

I gathered from the old bird’s body language that she had barely managed to restrain herself during the performance.  Obtaining my willing agreement “that you probably couldn’t,” she went on to relate-now in more con­fiden­tial tones-what poor Greta had confided to her when Eddie toddled off to buy more cones.

“She’s decided on a divorce and now she’s trying to work up the courage to tell him later on this evening.  She says she’s done her best to forgive him but the poor dear just can’t.  Not after what happened!”

“Infidelity?” I guessed, wondering at the same time who or what on Luxenben the hairy little beast could possibly have seduced.

“Indigestion, more likely!” Matty snorted.  “He ate their entire last litter.  The curator is going to be furi­ous.  You know how hard it is to breed Semis in captivity.”

As a matter of fact, I knew very well.  Indeed, I had reached the same conclusion independently some time before.  But before I could state my agreement in appropriately wry terms Matilda impatiently hurried on.

“Well, I wouldn’t put up with it, would you?”

By nature philosophic, as the reader is already aware, my first impression was that there were important implica­tions in Matilda’s simple query that deserved more consider­ation than some knee-jerk response that a right-to-lifer would give.  Granted that Eddie’s behavior sounded extreme at first hearing, it nevertheless raised question as to the extent to which a male may properly exert authority over his progeny.  Eddie’s exercise of that authority incited immedi­ate con­demnation by Matty less, I suspected, out of genuine sorrow for the dispatched litter than out of her ideological devotion to female liberation.

As a member of the male sex, I felt it my duty to consider the issue in an entirely unemotional and impartial frame of mind.  Militant members of the fair sex are forever reminding us of their right of sovereignty over their bodies including whatsoever might be planted therein, much as a landowner would claim title to all improvements thereon.  Should they choose not to nurture, then according to these feminists, they have a perfect right to plow things under, as it were, whatever might be the objections of the industrious sower.  On the other hand, should they choose to nurture, the female prerogative is again held to be absolute and the male help­less to prevent a child he may not want from being pushed up under his very nose.

I would grant that up to the point she has delivered, the female has good argument for her unilateral decision making in these matters on the grounds of her greater biological involvement.  But she does not stop there.  Should the she elect to bear fruit, as is commonly the case, she is near certain to return to the same male whom she had deprived of all authority and thrust upon him financial liability for her license.  This is, in my opinion, morally wrong and legally inconsistent.  Financial rape may not be as reprehensible as the physical sort, but it is inarguably longer lasting.

However she might prefer otherwise, the female, in my opinion, cannot have it both ways.  If the male is expected to maintain her offspring, he is clearly entitled to a voice in the process that produces them.  If he is denied such a voice, then it follows that he is likewise entitled to be relieved of its attendant financial burden.  Given our dispositions, the battle of the sexes is probably unavoidable, but it should be conducted on a level playing field and the combatants required to fight cleanly.

Returning to the case at hand, for all I knew Eddie had been the intended victim of the very kind of myopic female behav­ior just described and that his dining on Greta’s litter had simply been a matter of self-defense.  If my assumptions were correct, then what had first appeared to be a socially unacceptable act was, in fact, courageous.  Indeed, when all the facts were in, Eddie’s response to injustice might come to be seen as having raised eating to a form of civil protest hitherto identified only with fasting-a considerable ac­complishment in its own right.  In any case, I refused to rush to judgment until there had been a more thorough investigation.