I was uncertain where to post this, since it could be considered feedback on Kae's story. On the other hand, it's likely to grow quite long and veer off topic.
During all my years as a comic book reader, it never occurred to me that Lois might possibly get it into her head to really marry Luthor. When I realized she had been close to doing that on the Lois and Clark show, I was taken aback. (I didn't see the LnC show from the beginning, since I didn't notice when the show began airing here in Sweden, and since I've never been much of a TV buff anyway.)
Anyway, "my" Lois, the one I grew up with, could never have married Luthor. But the LnC:TNAOS Lois might have, so clearly Kae's story is a most legitimate exploration of the LnC:TNAOS universe. The question is, what sort of woman is Lois if she actually, really married Luthor and then stayed married to him, too?
Traditionally, men are supposed to be drawn to young, feminine-looking women, whereas women are supposed to be drawn to powerful men. According to a science teacher at the school where I work, this is because young, feminine-looking women tend to be the most fertile, and such women can be expected to give men the greatest number of children. Powerful men, on the other hand, can do better than other men at protecting and providing for their children. According to this theory, attraction is an offspring-related thing: it has to do with how many children a woman can give a man, and how well a man can protect a woman's children. (Okay, okay, I know - of course there is more to attraction than just that....)
However, I think it's safe to say that society has almost always approved of the idea that men should marry younger women, and women should ideally marry men who are richer and more powerful than the woman's family. This creates a power imbalance within the marriage: a young, comparatively poor woman marries an older, richer, more powerful man.
Isn't it natural to expect that in such a marriage, the man will rule and the woman will obey? I think it is. And it's very clear that almost all societies and civilizations that we know of have decreed that the wife should obey her husband, defer to his will. This means that the husband's right to be the head of his family, to rule over his wife, has very rarely been seen as a problem.
Some fifteen years ago I saw a documentary about two young German priests working somewhere in South America, in a place where most people were devout Catholics who were sexually active without being married. Concentrating their efforts on the women, the priests tried, without success, to persuade the women to get married and to stop living in sin. Finally, one of the women explained why she refused to get married. Her boyfriend used to beat her up, she said, but as long as she had not married him she could walk away from him if he became intolerably violent. If she married him, on the other hand, her church and her society would never allow her to leave him.
Perhaps this woman only imagined that she would become more vulnerable and liable to get badly hurt if she married her boyfriend. The important thing, however, was that the two young priests were flabbergasted at her explanation. They knew, of course, that a Catholic marriage is, for all intents and purposes, indissoluble. But they had never heard that Catholic wives were ever beaten by their husbands. They had never imagined that a woman who wanted to be sexually active could have a remotely legitimate reason for staying unmarried. To the Catholic Church that had fostered these priests, wife battery (and oppression within the marriage in general) was a non-issue.
Conversely, society has never approved of men who obviously defer to their wives. According to Danish historians Bent Fausing, Steffen Kiselberg and Niels Senius Clausen, it was not uncommon for villagers in pre-industrial Europe to punish men who were regarded as hen-pecked husbands, by beating them up and publicly humiliating them.
So society has asked women to get married and to obey their husbands. The greater the power imbalance has been in the marriage, the more powerful the husband has been compared with the wife, the better and more appropriate the marriage has been seen as.
So, in this societal context where women have been asked to defer to their husbands anyway, a woman has been considered especially lucky if she has managed to "bag" a man whose ability to impose his will on her is almost unlimited. Masochism, anyone? Do women really want to be treated so badly?
No, the overwhelming majority of women don't want to be trampled on. Instead, women have been told they should use their female wiles to "tame" their husband, to charm him into giving her what she wants and treating her the way she wants to be treated. Women have been told, in other words, that while they have practically no legal rights at all - they have to obey and put up with being ill treated and perhaps even beaten - it's up to them to make sure that they get the marriage that they want to. Deprived of every legal right, they have to trick and cajole their husbands into treating them sweetly. And if they fail - if they are unhappy in their marriages and feel ill treated - it's their own fault, because it's up to them to make their marriages work.
The Lois Lane we meet in Kae's story is, I think, possibly a woman who has swallowed these oppressive ideas about marriage hook, line and sinker. Why is she willing to marry Lex at all, even though she is not in love with him? The way I see it, it can only be because she likes the idea of marrying a powerful man. In a sexist society, a woman simply can't do better than that. Lois must know that Lex is powerful enough to force his will upon her, and yet she marries him without having tried to find out much about him as all. For all of her investigative reporting skills, she has not bothered to try to find out if Lex has a dark side to him at all. Why not?
Possibly because she knows that he does indeed have a dark side. Men like him almost always do. Marrying a man like that is, per definition, risky. A woman could easily drown, lose herself, if she marries him. But I think this Lois believes in that siren song of society: you want to marry the Prince, the one with the stateliest palaces and the most overflowing treasury. Because you are woman enough to tame him, and if your are not, it's your own fault.
And what will she do if Lex turns out to be a devil in disguise? What can she do? According to sexist lore about marriage, there is nothing she can do but obey her husband and hope for the best. In any case: Resistance is futile.
There is a Norwegian sociologist, Eva Lundgren, who managed to get hold of and interview ten wife batterers in Norway. All of these men were Christan. Interestingly, while all of them admitted to having beaten up their wives, only one expressed any regrets about it. Wouldn't you know that he was the only one who had been condemned by his own congregation? All of the others had remained respectable members of their own churches, even though they had in some cases beaten and tortured their wives quite severely.
Anyway, this is my point. One out of ten wife batterers was ostracized by his own community because of the way he had treated his wife. Of the ten wives, she was the one that got out of her abusive marriage most quickly and easily. Oppression of women is a collective thing - it can happen only if society allows it to happen.
So what will happen to Lois (and Clark) in Kae's story? Obviously, only Kae herself knows that, and the rest of us will have to wait and see. But I can imagine several possibilities:
1) Clark might respect the estate of marriage so much that he feels he can't do anything to meddle with Lois's matrimony. In that case, he will just be looking on helplessly as Lois sinks deeper and deeper into the hell-hole of her marriage and loses more and more of herself in the process.
2) Clark might decide that a marriage shouldn't be considered honourable if it treats one of its parties as a slave, and he might find the courage to defy society in order to help Lois get away from Luthor.
3) Lois might find the courage and the strength to fight for her own humanity and oppose Lex. Her memories of her happiness with Clark, as well as her hopes for a future with him, might indeed help her and fortify her. However, the more oppressed she becomes, the harder it will be to fight back.
4) Lois might become pregnant with Lex's baby, in which case she may lose every shred of her will to fight back. Because if she does, Lex might use his great power to declare her unfit as a mother and take her baby away from her.
5) Lois might think she has become pregnant with Lex's baby, but it might turn out, perhaps after many years, that the child is Clark's. In that case, she might find the strength to fight back, for her child's sake. (Kae, don't tell me that Lois was "responsible" enough to use protection when she slept with Clark, but not when she was with Luthor!)
Okay, these are a few of the possible roads that Kae could choose to follow in her story. What I think is obvious from Kae's story is that her Lois is conventional in many ways, indeed to the point of self-destruction. Kae's Lois is prepared to let her society-bred dreams of happiness with the Prince cloud her judgement and her belief in herself. This take on Lois's character clearly isn't wholly off. Why would Lois fall like a ton of bricks for Superman before she knew almost anything about him, if she didn't have that streak of reckless worship of male power within her? For once I think it's a good thing that Clark fooled Lois into thinking he was "just Clark", so that she could fall in love with a man who seemed to have no power to speak of.
It will be very interesting to see how Kae's story unfolds, although I can't appreciate or really comment much on Lois's grovelling for Luthor. So I may not say much or anything on the FDK threads, but I will still be reading.
Ann
