A woman uses marriage to gain power, and once she attains it, her husband is fated to a life of abuse. This is very expensive pussy. When a naturally polygamous male commits to his bride-to-be, not only does he forfeit control of his finances, but he is constrained to forsake all opportunities to mate with other females. Of course, this is in her best interest-she calls it "security"-but it is really a blasphemy against nature. As long as she can coerce him into spending more, more, more on her whims, and as long as he realizes that if he divorces her he will lose half of his assets, she has effectively padlocked him into a chastity belt. No one knows better than she that a woman has no use for an impoverished man. A husband enters into matrimony assuming that the wedding vows have granted his new wife societal approbation to revel in uninhibited sex, but in his naiveté he has not noticed the gleaming pair of castration shears hidden in her bridal bouquet. She has no real interest in him sexually-a workhorse should be out in the fields laboring, not wasting his energies on intercourse. He has dreamed of years of wild passion and pleasurable company; what he gets is a lifetime of mood swings and an infrequent and indifferent lay. A wedding is an orgy of female narcissism. This is her day, her starring role in her personal soap opera, the glorious denouement of all her childhood and cultural fantasies. It is "me" with a capital M. Dating has been a specious and unbridled quest for a man of means and courtship meant keeping her boyfriend hypnotized by the lure of her sexuality, numbing his senses to the trapdoor swinging wide open in front of him. Long before her wedding day she is avidly planning, binging on brides' magazines and being fawned over in dress shops, spending hours picking out the right invitations, wallowing in the presumption that the whole world is focusing on how special she is. She certainly won't forget to arrange for the novel-length lists of gift suggestions at various bridal registries (expensive stores only, of course), and she'll yelp like a pampered child when she rips open presents at her shower. It goes without saying that she is oblivious to the reality that someone must actually pay for her egoism-she is too busy daydreaming about herself, the virtuous, trembling bride, two-stepping down the aisle in a nave like a movie set, all eyes upon her. The wedding guests gasp, awestruck by her beauty and elegance, as if the cold marble of a perfect statue had suddenly come to life. Her husband-to-be, his mind unclouded by such reveries (there are no grooms' magazines for him), has pacted an uneasy truce with her self-worship. His participation in the nuptial preparations has been to log in more hours at work to pay for the first-class tropical honeymoon she has ordered, which is making him wince even at his salary. It's not for nothing that she forced him down on his knees in front of her to propose. He's not fantasizing about storybook castles or how handsome he'll look in his tuxedo (appropriately enough, a funereal black); instead, he's sweating out the credit- card bill on the two carat diamond' his "Fiancée" has pressured him into buying by skillfully rationing sex. While her mind is awash with abstractions of dizzying "love", he's still cringing from her recent assaults on his manhood-pouting that his house just isn't going to be big enough for her.