It was just what they were, these fake conservative, fake Christian men, and they used the Bible to justify it, albeit almost invariably, the wrong Testament. It’s simply how they thought about everyone—What service do you perform for me—and it’s why they, generally, had to be forced to provide for their own children when their spouses, who had knowingly subjected themselves to these narcissistic louts, finally decided enough was enough. It was an inherently abusive mindset, the silent, raging tantrum of adult infants, though, truth be told, the women who coddled them were usually no more mature emotionally. 

She knew it. She’d been through it herself, more than once. But the illness that was “tradition” caused psychological damage that could rarely, if ever, be undone and only when there was a concerted, conscious effort to make it so. She had not wrested herself away from the last one. He had ditched her, for some unspoken transgression. Otherwise, she would have ridden the torrent of selfishness and childishness until death. Her ex would not have murdered her body, but he would have killed her soul, which was already damaged by men like himself, and she would have allowed it for the sake of the illusion of security, for the social status it lent her. And, though she, and her children, had been tossed away by the inferiority-complexed nepo-baby, she had never connected the person to the mindset, to the ideologies that bred the cancer, telling herself that it was just him. And that was her greatest mistake, because it led her to dismiss sincere feelings and interest from better men as weakness, preferring, instead, the same crass, self-involved attention from men of unearned means and false piety that would lead to the exact same paradigm, inescapable. 

It was a never-ending cycle of sadism and masochism, all undertaken for nothing more than the allure of gold and status. It was self-abuse, but she had been taught that it was all she was worth, and she, not being very mature herself, obsessed with the shallow and material shown to her as a child, believed that was her fate.