Today I was finishing with my doctor’s visit when he asked me, “Is she out there?” After I responded in the affirmative, he said, “I’ll take care of that for you.” He then proceeded boldly out into the hen den, that is, the administrative and waiting area and addressed She. “He’s alive.” To which She responded, “Still?”

My doctor advocate then addressed She with her nursing instructions: “Take good care of him, cook him steak, get him his beer, keep the house clean, and make sure he is otherwise provided for. This is the chauvinistic therapy regimen.”

She said, “Don’t worry, I will—he takes advantage anyway, you know.”

And up rose the leader of the estrogen resistance, a top of the line BT-900, wearing a shawl and as lithe as a villainess in a Robert E. Howard yarn. Turning her attention to She, this woman pulled open a drawer at the base of her desk and said, “I’ve got the pistol right here, honey, to cure what ails him.”

We had a laugh, although the estrogen leadership was not smiling in the wake of her sardonic laughter, and as I waved goodbye to her leaving the door, she said to me, “Give me a call and let me know how that works out for you,” assured that her marching orders would be implemented by her acolyte.

The postmodern barbarian warlord must understand that his sweet little slave girl or worshipful priestess is but the flower that buds on the end of a branch of a vast, intertwined, ever-growing, feminist organism. Where the roots of this thorny, vining estrogen shrub sink into the earth is the trunk, the ineradicable root of the estrogen resistance, personified by that woman with the pistol in her desk drawer. Be careful, in dealing with management of your babe, to consider that this woman, the shrill voice, may act upon your babe in times of stress and transmogrify your lovely little property into thorny swampland.