When did you stop beating your wife? is the classic – and supremely nasty – loaded question.
Back in the day the accused target – the brute – had a tiny chance to recover his soiled reputation by claiming Who, me? She’s not my wife. But in our post-rationalist, post-existentialist, post-binary, post-modernist, post-truth era, facts don’t matter anymore. Fewer men have wives nowadays. More than a few women have wives. Yet the fix between wives and their beaters endures. Almost all wives insist they are beaten regardless.
As a humanitarian gesture a book of instructions on how to stop beating your wife is overdue. Fine. But that’s not what we have here.
Consider the book How To Stop Beating Your Wife a prequel. Powerful societal forces are already in place to end the shameful scourge of wife beating. The book will wake people up to what is already happening: the evolving right side of history. And why it is already too late for any opposing movements, laws or forces to change this progressive trajectory.

She felt the whip, Emile Bayard, 19th century
In a mere two hundred years from the book’s publishing date society will routinely acknowledge that Ecclesiastes is dead. The joys of rationalism, existentialism, binary sexuality, post-modernism, and the obsession with truth will be buried like an archeological fossil. As the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) could have predicted, the thesis of beating one’s wife will clash with the antithesis of marriage-and-breeding to produce the longed-for synthesis: a new, equalitarian family. Set your clock by this prediction. Ready or not, within the next two centuries everyone will be swept into better lives.
Continue reading “Preliminary Expectoration”