Melinda Selmys has at various times lived in the woods as a hermit,
reformed the Ontario electoral system, dated a fallen angel, opened a
homeless shelter, home-schooled four children and made food fit for the
beatific vision. Her favorite Vatican document is Mulieris Dignitatem and
her favorite poisonous mushroom is Amanita Muscaria. She writes from
Etobicoke, Canada.

Masculine. A dangerous word because it could mean so many things, and isn't really allowed to mean any of them anymore. Sandra, who is a middle-of-the-road feminist, feels guilty for thinking of her boyfriend Ted as masculine because he likes to watch the fights and is good at fixing appliances. Greta, who has renounced feminism as a self-centered ideology of victimization that undermines the dignity of women, thinks of her husband as masculine because he looks like a Byzantine icon and thunders like an old-testament prophet. Kristine, who has changed her name to Illya in the belief that Troy was secretly a matriarchal paradise to which Helen had fled to escape Menelaus' crypto-homosexual misogynistic energies, is trying to redefine masculinity by dying her male cats pink and naming them “Dawnbeam” and “Young Hag.”

Troy: outside the walls, the classical age of Greece. The men are beautiful in motion, sculpted in a profusion of dynamic curves. The women are ponderous geometric constructs, breasts an inelegant intrusion in an otherwise linear form. Helen would not be beautiful to modern eyes. Masculinity reigns. Achilles stands weeping over the body of Patroclus, and there is no one standing by to accuse him of effeminacy. The Golden Age of Man. Masculinity whole and unthreatened. Or do we already hear Plato pontificating in the background, the waves of the Republic rising up the Trojan beach to wash away Achilles' tears?

Kristine nods as though she agrees with this, but one has the impression that she has not been listening. “It's so typical of Plato: all that oceanic grief chained in the dungeon of his subconscious being by an anti-corporeal philosophy. The repression of the feminine Socrates, the Sophia principle, which can only be glimpsed sidewise through the murky darkness of the Platonic cave.” She takes a sip her vanilla rooibos energizing herbal tea and smiles like a cheshire cat.

“Socrates was a man,” Greta points out. “A particularly masculine one, at that, who suffered from an excess of abstraction and a lack of anything that might be considered 'feminine' wisdom. Unless, of course, you want to join the school that imagines anything Socrates said that they don't like was just an accretion put into his mouth by Plato.”

“Wasn't there some famous essayist who said that Homer was really a woman?” Sandra suggests tentatively.

“You know, the Homeric mythos is such an androcentric construct that it really obscures the true Trojan womynspirit. So much gory phalo-glorification. If it weren't that Homer had called on the gentle feminine genius of the muse, we would probably never have been able to realize the real strength that proceeds from Helen and Calypso,” Kristine rhapsodizes.

“The Nymph,” says Greta, “is archetypally a villainess – even if every Sex and the City clone tries to pass off neurotic juvenile self-indulgence as a model of heroism.”

After a second of silence Sandra says, “Aren't we supposed to be talking about masculinity?”

“What would we have to say? We're all women. How could we start to define them, if we can't even define ourselves.”

“I don't see why we need to define anything at all. The real world is one of non-delineation where male and female are as darkness and light and therefore one.”

“Discrimination is the first act of God. Light from darkness. Day from night. Water from earth. Male from female. It's become a dirty word nowadays, but without discrimination, all is without form and void.”

“Kind of like nirvana?”

“More like Jean-Paul Sartre.”

“The ocean of the absolute where all dissolves in the flicker of Brahma's eye.”

“Zeus asleep while all dissolves to chaos.”

“That wasn't in the movie...”

“The true Iliad is a story of love, transcending gender, transcending rank, transcending monogamy, with the heart of Achilles aching at its center. His love for Briseis. His love for Patroclus.”

“And Hector, with his wife and family, slain and dragged around the walls of Troy? One is forced to wonder whether it isn't happening all over again.”

High on Mount Olympus, Greta conspires to lull old Zeus to sleep so that the Greek ships will not be burned. Homer does not know her reasons for protecting them. He does not see Aristotle in the future. He has never heard of Thomas Aquinas. On the battlefield below, Sandra stands in defiance of her father's divine decree, her famous shield raised to deflect spears and arrows from the flesh of her beloved Greeks. Her love for them is half-guilty, a sort of self-betrayal, but she can't help loving their shining ranks of bronze helmets, their muscles rippling in the Trojan sun. Kristine, opposite, with a wounded hand and a golden apple, does not realize that the beloved son she has protected will flee the burning Troy only to become grandsire to the Roman Empire, with its male Legions, its male Emperors, its male senate and citizens, and its bastard infants exposed on the roadside.

When Troy lies in ruins, it is Sandra who emerges victorious: she is Odysseus' patron, and she is craftier than she looks.

“Motherhood,” Kristine, with her empty womb, says lovingly, “is such a beautiful expression of the feminine self, the life-giving matrix of all creation.”

“Are you pro-abortion?” Greta asks pointedly.

“I believe that all women have the right to choose whether and when to share their bodies with another spirit...”

“Mmm. Now isn't that always how goddess worship turns out...”

“What are you talking about?”

“Did you know the Aztec Earth-Mother demanded that one in every four of her beloved children be sacrificed to her in ritual murder? They used to have wars by exchanging prisoners and sprinkling red flower-petals on the battlefield to symbolize blood – no actual fighting. No phalo-glorifying gore. A nice civilized exchange between civilized people. And then they'd strip the prisoners of their weapons and cart them home to be slaughtered on the altar instead. A very feminine form of violence.”

There is a long period of brittle silence. At last Sandra says, “This is such a touchy subject. Can't we talk about something else?”

Sandra isn't sure how she got stuck in the middle of all of this. Somewhere, back at home, she was her own woman, she felt powerful and secure, and then the fighting started. She's not really sure how it is that she was taken prisoner, how she became a slave, and she is ashamed one morning when she wakes up and realizes that she has fallen in love with her master. There he lies sleeping, Achilles without his amour, his feet protruding from under the covers. She walks over and leans down to kiss his heel. She hasn't heard Agamemnon's footsteps marching towards the tent.

Looking down from the walls over the battlefield, Kristine can see that something is going on in the Greek camp. She never meant to start this war – all she wanted was to be free, to run away and float like a feather on the breeze, and Paris was so beautiful, with his long hair and his slender features. It has never occurred to her that her lover is a coward. Even now her heart can't accept that all this dying is for her.

It is because of this that Greta hates her. She clutches Astayanax to her breast and prays for her husband's safe return, but in her heart she already knows that Hector will not come back at the end of the war. She looks up towards the heavens, where the music of the spheres sounds silently amidst the eternal perambulations of the gods, and then down, to where the men of Troy are dancing out to meet their predetermined deaths.

“We were talking about masculinity. What makes a man 'masculine'. You claim that there's some sort of deep and significant difference between the sexes, but what is it? I mean, apart from the obvious biological attractions of the other half of the species...”

Greta toys with a piece of sushi and stares out the window. What she said of Socrates is true of her as well: an excess of abstraction, a lack of feminine wisdom.

“At the fountain of our being,” says Kristine, “I really believe that we're all the same. We're all fundamentally androgynous.”

“Sidestepping the problem,” the gears of Greta's mind are turning, like Neptune rolling into Aquarius. “An androgyne is a combination of two principles: of the masculine 'andro' and the feminine 'gyne.' It doesn't get rid of masculinity and femininity. It just muddies the waters.”

“No one doubts that there is a feminine principle. A loving, nurturing, healing, life-giving energy that pervades all things --”

“You're doing the opposite of what you accuse the patriarchal establishment of having done. You're taking all the good parts of human nature and lumping them together as 'feminine.' Leaving the dung heap to the men.”

“Maybe,” Sandra rallies her courage, “maybe it's something too simple to be broken down. Like the color red. Everyone who can see, can see that its different from blue. But you can't really tell a blind person how its different. You just know that it is.”

Achilles is dead, but Odysseus has not forgotten how to weep for the fallen hero.

Kristine never met the demi-god with the fatal heel, and in ten years she never learned who Odysseus was either. He never became anything more to her than a plaything in her mind, an amusement that she mistook for love. Now that he is gone she sits weaving alone on the shores of an island, looking out to sea. Neptune has quelled his fury. She looks into the waves where her lover has gone, and she sees her own reflection.

A world and a hundred adventures away, Greta sits before a different loom, unwinding the threads that she spun the day before. She has been waiting for Odysseus for twenty years, and now that her son Telemachus has boarded a ship and sailed out to find him, she too is lonely and frightened. The endless process of weaving and unweaving, constructing and tearing down, has taken its toll on her fingers. She knows what she is waiting for, and in twenty years she has not forgotten his face. She hates the new men, the mewling, self-important infants clamoring for her hand. But she is starting to lose hope, and she doesn't recognize the aged, rag-clad stranger waiting in the hall below.

It is Sandra who brings the stranger up and bathes him. She rolls back his rags and she sees the old scar – not a battle wound, received in all the far-off campaigns of Troy, but a childhood injury. Something that he carried out with him from the beginning. She too is old, now, and she recognizes the boy that she once nursed. With a stab of grief and joy she realizes that she had given up on him. Had begun to weigh in the silence of her heart the faces and bodies of the suitors thronging in the hall below. She had not really expected him to return.