Masculinity & Fatherhood in Vekllei

This article is archived, and is no longer part of Vekllei canon.

Just a few notes on what it means to be a man in Vekllei.

Vekllei is a country at odds with itself. On one hand, it is universal in its politics and fundamentally internationalist; on the other it is a deeply traditional country that values bloodlines and heritage. It is a secular democracy that regularly alludes to monarchy in its rituals and symbolism. It is a culture that is so casual it offends foreign visitors while retaining strict codes of conduct.

Vekllei is unique in that it is one of few Western countries with strong matriarchal tendencies. As part of petticoat feminism, it explicitly states as such: the default disposition of the human race is ‘female’. That is not to say that men are robbed of masculinity or women are stripped of their femininity — both roles in Vekllei society have pervasive roles and stereotypes, and are lived out every day by millions of people. Instead, it means that over the course of hundreds of years, and the inevitable triumph of Vekllei over whatever those years will bring, ‘man’ as a concept will cease to exist. After all, femininity has nearly absorbed all masculine traits in Vekllei already — warrior culture, casual mateship, profanity and drinking, etc. Petticoat feminism, and by some extent petticoat socialism, understand masculine figures as an economic and social product of a previous age, and consequently, to co-opt some business newspaper slogan, “the future is female”. As the economy is revolutionised, and the country is rebuilt over and over again, so too will it leave behind the economic products of “old society”, a phrase that in Vekllei has very specific connotations (namely, the years of monarchy followed by authoritarianism).

Tzipora’s father is a man’s man. He is a product of a dying generation. He wears his pants too high, the fit of his suits are loose, and he has spent his life in authority, surrounded by critical decisions that require his attention. Yet even he carries in his heart petticoat culture — he has raised two daughters, and they have ‘feminised’ him, in a sense — not in a way that makes him ‘weak’ or ‘emasculate’, but in his ability to interact with wider petticoat society.

I’ll close with a letter from his oldest daughter, on the subject of Tzipora and her relationship with her dad:

He’s a good father, and a good man — an excellent man, in his later years. He’s a hard worker and radiates masculine authority, like many of his generation, but he was also forced into progressivism by the fact that his entire family at the end of his life were women. A man like that can’t choose to be picky about what he does and doesn’t hear concerning the personal and biological intricacies of womanhood. And this girl, this little Montre chickette he is telephoning, was the worst of them all! Thank God he was an affectionate father to her, even more so than he was to me, because the things she would tell him about! Her suspected lesbianism, her flirtations with bolshevism, and that’s not to mention the difficulty she had making friends at school, a wound that she scarcely hid from him. Yes, this man was all she had! Girls like me, good blood daughters, we have our women. Zelda, bless her, had him. I ask my girlfriends to brush my hair to get the knots out — Zelda puts her hairbrush on his desk and waits patiently until he can’t ignore her anymore.

Please let me know if you have any questions.