The Ballad of Clark Kent

When Lois Lane met Superman he was fighting crime, could bend steel in his bare hands, stop locomotives, leap over tall buildings in a single bound; shit, Superman could fly! Then one day he met Lois and swept her away, rocked her world in the sack and fell in love with her because thats what Super-Men do. After a year of this whirlwind Lois starts to feel her relationship with Superman was lacking something, “Why does he have to always be out there fighting crime, huh? Why does he always have to prove he’s so Macho? Does it threaten his Ego? He really needs to get in touch with his feminine side. What about MY needs and why can’t he just grow up and get a real job? I’m not getting any younger you know, he’s got some responsibilities to live up to. When am I gonna see a ring?”

So eventually this wears down on Superman and he submits to Lois’ requests (demands?). After all he ‘should’ really ‘grow up’ anyway, right? It’s the right thing to do. So Superman changes his name to Clark Kent (Super-‘MAN’ was so male self-aggrandizing anyway) and lands a job as a reporter at a great metropolitan newspaper. Clark begins wearing glasses – even though he can see X-Rays, and shoot lasers out his eyes, he wears them because Lois says it makes him look distinguished, intellectual and SHE likes them.

Time goes on and Lois and Clark marry. 5 years into the marriage Lois gets bored. Same old, same old. Clark is so mundane and unassuming. She longs for the days he would fly and do that funny steel bending trick he used to do when they were dating. He hasn’t done any of that for so long; not because he can’t, but because he’s afraid she’ll get upset with him and not put out that evening if he gets ‘cocky’ with her. In fact she’s not putting out even half as much as she used to these days. Clark just doesn’t arouse her as much as he once did and she just can’t seem to put her finger on the reason for it.

Then one night Lois ran into a wealthy fellow named Bruce Wayne at a charity mixer. Bruce was dark, mysterious and in great shape! He couldn’t fly, but he made up for that in so many other ways. He fought crime! He wore a mask and spoke in short, purposeful sentences, never mincing words. He didn’t wear glasses (that was so retro!) and he came and went at the time of his pleasing, not hers. He sent tingles down Lois’ spine (and other places that hadn’t felt tingles in a while) when he began seeing her.

The weeks went by until, after a 60 hour work week at the Daily Planet (swanky apartments don’t rent cheap), Clark made his way home on the subway (since flying had been out of the question for a while now) and picked up a dozen roses to surprise Lois with (he thought she tended to put out when he showed his ‘feminine side’) when he got back to the apartment. However it was poor Clark who got the surprise upon discovering Bruce Wayne bending Lois over the kitchen table when he opened the door. Bruce propmptly toweled off while Clark, slack-jawed with horror, watched speechless.

“How could you? After all we’ve meant to each other!” Clark began to cry as Bruce excused himself from the now estranged couple. Clark was used to crying a lot now to show his sensitivity.

“What could you have possibly seen in a guy like that?!” He shrieked like a school girl.

“Well,..I couldn’t help myself” Lois said indifferently, “Batman is a Superhero.”

And that’s the danger, where do you end and she begins? The reason I wrote Identity Crisis (almost 5 years ago) was exactly this: Men tend to adopt a position of constantly qualifying for a woman’s intimacy, and understandably women reinforce this because to puts them in control of the frame and aids in their sexual selection. Most guys willingly make fundamental changes if they believe it will increase their chances of qualifying for a woman’s intimacy. Are they genuinely inspired, or are they deductively reasoned changes meant to qualify for her acceptance – A+B= sex?

The real insidious part is that the more deprived a man is of that intimacy, the more he’s likely to convince himself that the change is genuine. Whenever I hear a guy or a woman say “we’re working on our relationship” or “relationships are a lot of work and compromise”, it translates to the man changing or compromising to better fit the woman’s ideal. He’s being ‘fixed’, he’s broken and he needs to change. It often gets to the point where the guy will believe that there IS something genuinely wrong with him – it’s her reality he must conform to because the feminine reality is the ‘proper’ reality. The rude awakening comes when she discovers that the man she’s fixed her husband to be is the polar opposite of the Man she was attracted to at the start.