Learning to Submit

The following excerpt is taken from the middle of my memoir in progress, Learning to Submit: How Feminism Stole My Womanhood, and the Traditional Cowboy Who Helped Me Find It.

I’ll be turning in the manuscript March 1. The book will be released from Gotham Books early next year.

Later that night, over dinner, I shared my misgivings.

“We are so different from one another,” I said. I told him that I pitied the cows. That it hurt me to watch them get so scared when the dogs went after them. That I didn’t know whether I could handle the heartbreak of seeing him kill things, even sickly things like that poor bull calf. That I hated that he’d accidentally hurt his dog with the snake shot.

“It’s like a b.b.,” he said. “She’s not even limping anymore. Barely nicked her.”

He reiterated that he had to fire shots at the dogs to get them off the sick calf because they weren’t listening and would have savaged the poor creature.  Out here, he reminded me, you had to be firm with your working dogs because it was often a matter of life or death — their own, or another animal’s — whether they listened or not.

“I know. But still. I hate it.”

“People in the city are so sheltered,” he mused. “Life and death are all around us, all the time. It’s how the world works, darlin’. You guys just like to sanitize it.”

“I know.”

“You don’t even think about where meat comes from.”

“I know.”

“And just because we raise animals to eat them doesn’t give us the right to torture or mistreat them.”

“I know.”

“When you see life and death every day, like I do, you understand it. That doesn’t mean I like it any more than you do. I’m not desensitized to it. I just accept it. You learn to appreciate life more. You understand the cycles, that death is just part of the whole thing.”

I started to cry. “I get it. I just – it’s hard. Those poor cows. They were so scared.”

“Oh, baby,” he said in mild annoyance. “Trust me, there’s nothing going on in their heads. Cows think about two things and two things only, ass and grass.”

“Still,” I said. “Even if that’s true, is being stupid a good reason to eat something? I mean, if that were the case, then we’d be justified in eating mentally retarded people, too. But we don’t. We have compassion for them. We think of it as our duty to protect them.”

The cowboy shook his head, having heard this type of argument before. “Darlin’,” he said. “If we didn’t eat them, these cows you feel so sorry for right now wouldn’t even be here. The whole reason they exist, the whole reason they’re alive in the first place, is because we breed them to eat them.”

I considered this. There was truth in what he said. But there was truth in what I said, too.

We were both right, even though our views completely contradicted one another. A philosophy that worked in one environment, I realized, might not work in another.

“Wouldn’t you be happier with someone more like you?” I asked him. “A cowgirl?”

The cowboy laughed. “I don’t need a clone. I like you. I like the way you are. I don’t always have to agree with you to like you and respect you.”

“Poor cows,” I said, frowning.

He looked at me with compassion in his eyes. “This is why I always tell my friends, you know, they always ask me how I can stand to date a liberal, and I tell them that I like liberals. You guys are like the conscience of society. You keep us from getting too hard, too cold. We need liberals to keep us human, just like you guys need conservatives.”

“We do?”

He smiled. “We’re the ones who make the hard decisions that you guys are too empathetic to make. Like going to war. Or raising food. I don’t ever want to see liberals disappear off the face of the earth, because we need the balance. We need you, you need us.”

“I need you,” I said. “I know that much.”

The cowboy took the napkin out of his lap then, and put it on his plate. Then he stood up, and came to where I sat. He held his hand out.

“What?” I asked.

“Come with me,” he said.

I put my hand in his, and he helped me up out of my chair. Then he began to lead me across the kitchen, toward the hall.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

He led me down the hall, toward his bedroom.

“I just got this urge to show you how much I like liberals,” he said with a mischievous grin. “Well, one liberal in particular.”

He led me into the bedroom, closed the door behinds us, and then engaged me in one of the most extraordinarily selfless acts of diplomacy ever committed across party lines.