Are you fucking kidding me

[cimorene]

In this Golden Age detective novel (Latter End by Patricia Wentworth), when the mystery is solved and it's time for the pasted-on heteronormativity parade to conclude with a proposal of marriage, the dude decides to lead into his proposal...

... with one of those long joke rants about how women 'trick' men into 'slavery' with marriage. (!!!)

And then the woman gets angry and starts to tell him where to get off and... he... chastises her for it.

She shouldn't have interrupted his misogynist joke because he was just about to propose apparently???? In fact he says he was just about to go down on one knee. Can you even imagine feeling the need to make a misogynist joke about the institution of marriage as a DIRECT precursor to going on one knee and begging a woman to marry you?!

Comments

Ick.

[dorothy1901]

Please tell me that she told him that he was mistaken if he supposed that the mode of his declaration affected her in any other way, than as it spared the concern which she might have felt in refusing him, had he behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner. Lie if you have to.

[twistedchick]

1930s, 1950s, whenever, any of the women I've known who were alive at the time that book was written would have shown the guy the door, and probably a boot in his butt as well.

[alafaye]

Ew. Seriously, though, why did the authoress think that was a good idea? A guy writing it would be bad, but didn't she...I mean would she want to be proposed to like that? Ugh.