THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG

‘If women go for freedom, men just take even more for themselves.’

In Part I, we saw that George Gilder was the main influence on Geoff Dench’s work, convincing him that ‘patriarchal exaggeration of men’s importance obscures the deeper power of women.’ For Dench, the fairy tale of The Frog Prince was an allegory of this. Reading the old fairy tales, he said, showed him

‘how much feminism has done to denigrate and drive further below the surface of consciousness…that whoever may look and think that he is playing the important part, it is women who exercise the underlying powers and who usually ensure that social purposes are achieved or moralities upheld.’

The story is one of the most famous European fairy tales. A prince is living as a frog in a forest because of an evil witch’s spell. Both the forest and the witch are symbolically resonant. The forest symbolises untamed nature in contrast to the palace, symbolising culture. Etymologically, ‘culture’ is from the Latin cultura — literally, ‘a cultivating, agriculture,’ and figuratively, ‘care, culture, an honoring.’ The world of the palace, Dench points out, ‘needs constant effort and vigilance to prevent it from crumbling or being destroyed,’ whereas ‘the forest is regenerating endlessly, and is poised to invade and recolonise the palace grounds should the opportunity arise’.

So what does the witch symbolise? Dench says she is ‘the moral and moralising majority incarnate,’ adding that ‘it is this group which men experience as having the power to define them as worthy of admission to the caring community, or as requiring exclusion. Crucially, the witch is ‘the prime mover for the whole sequence.’ Women can damn men.

But they can also redeem them. The prince is saved from the forest by a young princess after he promises to return the golden ball she loses in a pond if she agrees to befriend him. The frog symbolises how ‘eventually many boys can come to feel themselves to be a lesser species, too disgusting to be seen and tolerated in polite circles, and fit only for the wilderness’. The witch, not active within the story itself, is outside it, representing the judgement of the community. And the frog prince understands that only the princess can undo the witch’s spell. Since the community  is rejecting him ‘because he has no personal dependents, by the same token they cannot as a group reinstate him’. An individual woman must do it. As Dench explains, ’only personalised obligations are powerful enough magic to overcome his selfishness and transform him into a valuable member of the community.’

The princess does not need to do anything to be valued. By contrast, male rites of passage are universal.

Thus the princess needs the frog’s help to retrieve her ball: ‘civilisation depends on order and exchange’. By ‘using his initiative’, the frog shows the value of boys’ ‘being responsive to girls’ needs, and of not being shy in proferring gifts.’ In all societies, men have to do or bring something to women, and nuptial gifts are common in most species. And despite being embarrassed by the frog, the princess honours her word because the king makes her. As the leader of the community, ‘he possesses the formal authority to tell the princess what her moral duty is — that is, to keep her promise.’

By representing and enforcing the rules, men already established in society support the youths seeking admission.

As the frog participates in the civilising activities of the palace, his friendship with the princess grows. But Dench notes that although this friendship is a necessary condition of his transformation, it is not sufficient. ‘Men must do their best to be acceptable to women; but in the end it is a woman’s choice.’ Thus ‘the kiss which releases the prince stands for the female approval and acceptance of dependence which in real life brings and binds men into polite society.’ Although there is no guarantee of acceptance for men, the story ends by showing the frog prince becoming king in his own castle — a reminder that, as Dench puts it, ‘being responsible for a family gives every man the opportunity to be a king.’

If he rejects this responsibility, however, he becomes, as modern Jewish culture put it, a ‘toady’: the inverse and infernal aspect of the frog symbol.

For Dench, then, this short story shows ‘society is hostile and unexpectedly feminine’ to boys growing up. They have been told it’s a man’s world. But they are ‘seen as louts and brutes and judged by rules which seem to have been drawn up with someone else in mind’. They must ‘perform great deeds, and undergo high risks, in order to win respect and adult status.’ Some will fail. That is necessary ‘to maintain the credibility of the test and the value of the prizes.’ But ‘if they reject the patriarchal propaganda calling them out’ of the forest, they will ‘instead penetrate deeper’. And this is dangerous because it ‘implies rejection of community regulation’.

And this is the crux of Dench’s message:  men have ‘always been a problem’, and patriarchy was the solution. But now ‘princes are passé and the frog is now inheriting the world.’ Consequently, ’Western society is sliding away from patriarchy and from the control of men which it gave.’ There are no large, stable non-monogamous societies because you can’t control frogs. But as Dench warns,

‘Youthful rebelliousness, interacting with fear and awareness of not being needed or wanted, may be hardening in western cultures into something more disruptive and violent than hitherto. Young males may objectively be becoming repulsive to other people, and genuinely spurned or condemned by the wider community. The metaphor of the frog as a slimy, selfish, amoral, lazy and libidinous creature, capable of blithely devouring its own offspring, has become flesh in the contemporary yob. Many now belong body and soul to the atomistic, individualistic jungle, where most typically male experiences are to be found; the crucible of egoistic masculinity. The curse is upon them.’

In its final form, the forest is the autonomous abandon of the gay bathhouse, bodies knotting and writhing in the steam.

So why aren’t women attracted to the forest? Dench says it’s because motherhood in particular means they know they need the support of others. ‘The imperatives of his own flesh’ rule the lone frog. But women have gained self-respect from serving children. By demeaning this role, feminism — the result of kings, the leaders of communities, not enforcing the high bar for frogs gaining access to sex — can seduce women into the forest. But their stronger connection to children means women eventually find the forest and frogs repulsive. Children need the palace. So whereas women can be lured into the forest, men have to be coaxed out. Thus ‘men are “talked up” by religion, and by patriarchy generally, in order to compensate for the fact that their general dispositions are usually less social — and of course to justify their privileges in the public domain.’

Dench writes movingly of how men remain less social despite this. ‘A lot of what men appear to do together is really done alone’, he notes. ‘The crowds who assemble each week to follow the fortunes of a football team do not know each other.’ Whereas ‘female groupings tend to be built around personalised relationships’, men respond ‘to the calls of solidarity of honour in an impersonal group’. Do large groups of middle-aged women don lycra to cycle miles mostly in silence at the weekend? Even Christ was alone in the wilderness and in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Thus the archetypal male hero is the knight, the samurai or the lone ranger of the western. The knight’s quest never ends, and he competes only for honour. Dench points to the final scene in Terminator II, in which the protective terminator, ‘the latest in a very long line of altruistic knights’, sinks into industrial acid after completing his task of protecting a woman and her son. This is also the attraction of the military to men: it provides the opportunity to serve the community.

Unlike Jesus, he won’t be back.

Self-sacrifice is the apex of masculinity because it is the culmination of the protector role. That is why Christ is the masculine ideal.   

But sex is the best way to motivate most men to leave the forest. ‘Women are the source of men’s immediate motivation, both as individuals who arouse and then respond to men’s sexual desire, and also collectively, through their role in determining the rules for access.’ By dignifying men as providers, patriarchy brings them into society’s web. ‘Men are continuously being drawn into social groupings basically regulated by and organised around women.’ And since men do this ‘in return for some flattery and sex’, although ‘it is men who are given status and hold the highest office, the potent forces governing society’ are ‘more in the hands’ of women.

But feminism and the welfare state disrupt this. The male provider is displaced. Following Gilder, Dench sees the black man as the canary in the coal mine. In the ghetto, ‘the erosion of responsible male roles, and the virtual institutionalisation of the female independence, has proceeded alongside a massive collapse in community integrity and morale.’ It is a microcosm of modern culture. Warren Farrell, Dench argues, is wrong in arguing men are neglected by the community itself. ‘Men who are locked into caring families fare better than men who are not’. Not the community itself but failing to integrate into it is the problem. Traditionally, ‘men are expected to help women mainly by providing for them, while women support men mainly by giving them a home and meaning.’ The welfare state provides for women while leaving men bereft of both.

Not for honour. Not for country. For his wife and child.

Only ‘the domestication of men and conquest over male negativism…lifts humans above a state of nature’, so ‘the princess who dutifully finds a prince also saves a kingdom’. Dench reminds us that 'many of those anti-social tendencies of men which feminists eagerly fasten on to justify withdrawal of trust from them are in part the consequences of male displacement which has already started.’ If the ‘princess refuses to accept the loathsome frog as a partner’, then the witch’s spell ‘remains unchecked and grows in strength’. Worse still is when ‘even the king abdicates’ because then ‘the forest of individual desire starts to enrich upon the formerly meticulous and orderly palace gardens’. Thus ‘feminists are drawing us a long way from the old palace before it is clear that there is anywhere else to go. And it is starting to get dark.’

Ultimately, ‘where girls no longer want to be dependent…boys are losing hope of being transformed into princes.’

But that doesn’t mean men should see themselves as victims and blame women. Adam emasculated himself twice: first by following Eve’s lead and second by blaming her. Dench reminds us that, during the sexual revolution, ‘women reacted to the male stampede from responsibility by throwing their lot in with the welfare state’ (my emphasis). And this has only worsened since because ‘if women go for freedom, men just take even more for themselves.’ Thus men remain frogs and ‘women become little better than men’. Feminism fails everyone.

Children are the crux:

No children, no dependency chain. They are the main subjects the prince is supposed to rule over, and without them the princess has much less call on his loyalty. The dependency of a woman who does not produce children is much harder for both parties to bear, and feminists know the surest way to avoid dependency on a man is not to have any kids.

But men, too, realise this. And it hits them hardest if they try to exploit it because ‘in most societies a barren woman can still fulfil part of her destiny by helping to care for the children of others’, whereas a barren man remains a frog. ‘It is the responsibility for dependants that best incites men to give up their frog-like state.’ Some men even feel the pull of the forest after their children grow up and become less dependent on them: Dench notes that the male mid-life crisis is ‘aptly likened by Dante to a journey through a deep wood.’ So ‘any moves to reduce men’s responsibility for children’, Dench says, ‘constitutes a serious attack on the essential ingredient of self-sacrifice which goes into making up a viable community.’ And thus women are the foundation because ‘the woman who submits to marriage is the one whose sacrifice unleashes the latent altruism in men and integrates the community.  The independent woman undermines and challenges this.’

In the centre of The Temptation of St. Anthony, Bosch places a frog, with the head of a very aged human being, poised upon a platter.

For Dench, then, ‘men are never more than lords of ways and means, while it is women who set the goals for them to pursue.’

So why, then, is the king the leader? Since ‘the sector of the community which most needs persuading to accept the rules is male, then symbolically it is much more valuable if the formal officiation is vested in men’. That is why ‘when it comes to publicly upholding the law then it is good to have a man to do it.’ And this is true most of all in the realm religion because men need it most. ‘The most important areas of church regulation are precisely those dealing with the place of men in the moral community, where their behaviour is unreliable.’ Thus ‘a church without a male senior priesthood loses its social relevance and is doomed to speedy decline.’ The Anglican Church shows Dench was right.

Much of Dench’s diagnosis is accurate. He was right that ‘there is a pervasive atmosphere in the West at the moment of things falling apart, of modern society rotting into a spiritual wilderness.’ And he was right that it’s due to ‘a weakening inside us all of the knowledge of interdependence within community, between individuals, generations and above all between sexes.’

But ultimately he fails to provide a cure. Flailing in his last chapters due to being unable to ground patriarchy and male authority philosophically in natural law or spiritually in revelation, he makes two fatal mistakes. The first is being open to polygamy, reducing fatherhood to mere material provisioning. It is telling that at no point in Transforming Men does he refer to Unwin’s work. The second and more serious mistake is that he argues that ‘giving men a place in society by making them responsible for women and children is to some extent bound to limit the freedom of women to develop and express themselves’. But if Dench sees motherhood — the supreme creative act and the fullest development and expression of womanhood — as limiting women, then he is a feminist after all.

Dench’s work, like Gilder’s, was neglected during his life. But it’s only become more important since his death. If you found this helpful, please share it.