Beyond the planet of the crazygirls Tom Smith

I too was struck by Dr. Slater's essay in the New York Times about her overall pretty sad sexual history.  My first reaction, like Professor Rappaport's, was one of outrage. However, upon reflection, my reaction is more, well, geometrical.  Imagine the entire human universe is like the surface of a sphere.  So all its dimensions, social, economic, cultural, sexual and so on, are represented as points on the surface of this sphere.  Yes, it's a simplification.  On this sphere somewhere, perhaps where we might put Uzbekistan, is the land of the crazygirls.  It is fairly populous.  Here live the ladies who fall in love with someone else the moment they get engaged to you and have mad everything-but-actual-sex with him (because that would be wrong) and then write all about it years later in the New York Times.  Here live the young women who canoodle with you all summer long but don't have sex because they say (falsely) they were raped, but when they finally do sort of have sex with you, they hate you because you made them feel such a strong emotion.  And this, I assure you, is just the beginning.  Down the road lie the hours, the years of ultimately fruitless therapy, the crazykids fluttering like frightened bats against the windows, the absolutely, no kidding, forget about due process and just get her out of her, certifiable lunatic mother in law.  The father in law who packs the wooden sailboat his uncle left him with 20 pounds of TNT, sails out into the sound and is never heard of again, save once.  The person with whom sex is good or bad, but always deeply, deeply confusing.  Anyway, that's where they dwell.  What you want to do is draw a line from the land of the crazygirls through the center of the earth and then out to the other side of the world.  That is maximum distance from the land of the crazygirls and that's where you want to dwell.  This is nothing to fool around with, not even as a tourist.  

One could go on at some length about all the ways in which Dr. Slater and her marriage are messed up and all the ways it is wrong that she is "sharing" all of it with the readership of the Times and the world beyond.  As Tolstoy famously remarked, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way (though I think he underestimated the variety of happinesses).  I think what is clear from reading Slater's piece, which you have to admit is morbidly fascinating, is that what you have here is a person with some fairly serious mental illness going on, not least of which is some fairly serious depression.  Depression and libido famously avoid each other.  It would be a complete mistake for anybody to think she is casting light on marriage, or relationships or anything of the sort.  She is justing giving one a view inside the mind of somebody who is seriously depressed.  I feel sorry for her and  I am glad I am not married to her.  I am so glad.  Go into any English or comp lit or psychology class at any of America's elite universities and throw a stick and you will hit a half dozen of these young ladies.  Get to the other side of the globe and get there now.

But as the father of sons the main thing I feel is, God, I hope none of my boys ever marries a woman like Dr. Slater.  Heaven forefend.  It makes you think the cultures where the parents choose the kids' spouses really have something to be said for them.  You can at least give your boys some clues:  Favorite book The Bell Jar?  Out.  Ambition is to be a poet/novelist/performance artist/other vague art-thing?  Out.  Weird friends?  Out.  One could go on.  Somebody told me of a group of brothers who entered a pact that any one of them could veto the wife-choice of any other.  Someone was in fact vetoed to the later gratitude of the intended victim.  Not a bad idea.  Sometimes the kindest, best, most useful six words one man can say to another, whether brother, father, friend or wharever are, she's crazy, get rid of her.