"I did what any sensible man would have done under the circumstances. I got down on my knees and said, 'Please, please don't shoot me.

CONTINUED

nance was interfering with her work.

She was not alone. A nursery school teacher (!) told Miss Dudar, "I've been absolutely overwhelmed by feelings of hostility that scare the hell out of me." This woman went on to explain that some of the "victim's rage" she felt was being drained off by her women's lib work and steering clear of men.

In an article in Esquire Sally Kempton wrote that she had joined the movement for ambivalent reasons. "I became a feminist as an alternative to becoming a masochist. Actually I was a masochist; I became a feminist because to be a masochist is intolerable."

AMBIVALENT FEELINGS

She tells of her violent rages against her husband. "I used to lie in bed beside my husband after those fights and wish I had the courage to bash in his head with a frying pan. ... I would mutter to myself through clenched teeth, pushing back the realization that I didn't dare, not because I was afraid of seriously hurting him-1 would have loved to do that-but because ... I was afraid that he would leave me."

But other ladies do not stop short of their fantasies. "I just grabbed the knife off the floor and shoved it into his chest," a blonde

wife and mother of four told Los Angeles police.

She related how her husband had mistreated her, but she shed sincere tears over killing him. "I want him back . I wish I hadn't done it. He wanted me to come to him after I cut him, but I didn't. He can't be dead... He didn't deserve what I did to him

had lots of arguments but I loved him."

The love-hate Ambivalenz, as Freud called it. Victim's rage, as a feminist might retort; gut reaction to a real situation. She might even quote Frantz Fanon: "An oppressed individual cannot feel liberated until he kills one of the oppressors."

Peter Fabiano was shot to death at his front door one Halloween by a masked caller. Arrested for the murder were Goldyne Pizer and Joan Rabel.

"We decided to kill Fabiano because Joan told me Fabiano had been mistreating his wife," Miss Pizer told police. "I didn't know Fabiano until Joan pointed him out to me that night."

Women's lib activists have said, "In almost any woman you can unearth an incredible fury."

This anti-male virulence shows up again and again in history. Julie d'Aubigny, a 17th century French girl, killed 18 men before she was 21. She was a female d'Artagnan.

She deliberately provoked men into facing her lethal dueling sword on the field of honor for the pleasure of running them through the heart.

The example of Mlle. d'Aubigny may be called into question because, as a lesbian, she had a builtin bias. But then there is the case of Princess Margaret of Burgundy, whose murders of men, including her own father, are said to have totaled a thousand. The princess dispatched her ladies to lure young men to her castle, called the Tower of Nails, where she had them disposed of. Margaret did not wage this awesome campagn of extermination out of a need for violent protest against the maledominated world of the Middle Ages. The men had been her lovers, and dead lovers don't go about smearing a girl's reputation. Or so the story goes.

HATCHET LADY

Nearer our own time is the case of Bianca Segura, the fiery intellectual anarchist known in dictator Primo de Rivera's Spain as La Hacha, which means the torch and also the hatchet. La Hacha, in a fierce quest of the perfect human society, chose a genetically superior mate for a night of procreation and out of her own body produced the perfect woman, her daughter Ginebra, who came to be known as The Red Virgin of Madrid. The Red Virgin, whom her mother intended eventually to mate with a male counterpart in order to found a line of super beings, leaped to the forefront of the revolutionary movement that toppled de Rivera from power and even threatened the Spanish throne. And then the girl fell in love with a middle-aged army officer of "rotten"-that is nobleblood, lost all interest in politics, and gave herself to him.

La Hacha took her perfidious daughter on a picnic in the country, plied her with wine until the girl fell asleep under a tree and, with the ax she had used to cut the picnic firewood, chopped her Red ex-Virgin daughter into little pieces and fed them to the fire.

That's rage.

There is no denying the almost convulsive response among many women to the rallying cries of today's ultra-feminists. Will it all wind up in pogroms and Buchenwalds? Or perhaps the male minority will be saved from extinction by the world's more numerous Auntie Toms, who find no cause for homicide-except for an occasional individual case—in the existing order.

By the way, for the record, some of my best friends are females.

1971 by Field Enterprises, Inc.