Josef Škvorecký's text on a topic that is more topical today than ever. When you read it, you think: they would have driven him away today too, but where to? To Madagascar? Editor's note...
In the new ideology of lesbian feminism, coitus may very well be a crime even in marriage.
This description of sex play is already known from the oldest literature and from very contemporary practice, but before the advent of the new sexual ideology it was called "seduction", and from the point of view of that ideology it has the disadvantage that women have the initiative in that interesting sport as often, if not more often, than men: but according to feminist dogmatism this is never the case, and the initiator is always the man.
The key issue here is the semantic dispute over whether the partner's " No!" isn't really a "No..." if you understand me, which you probably do; that is, whether the famous "No..." doesn't actually mean "Yes!" .
To copulate in such difficult circumstances means, as Norman Podhoretz writes, " to request from the partner, regardless of previous copulations, each time again, a written consent bearing a notarized signature." This is not as far-fetched as it may seem to naive Czech readers/readers: it is the only tangible evidence that this was not rape.
It is very dangerous to live sexually in North America today, and not only because of the AIDS epidemic, so it is not surprising that more and more young men here in America are going out for beer rather than on dates, and that the male bonding known from classic American literature is flourishing (probably "male bonding": Pym and Dirk Peters in Poe, Ishmael and Queeqeg in Melville, Huck and Negro Jim in Twain, etc.). No wonder the sigh is heard more and more often among us girls, "Why is it that all the men I come in contact with are either wimps or wives or hosers?"
But at the same time, these same philosophers are demanding, for example, that in an army where women have traditionally served in the rear, not at the guns on the front lines, they should be allowed near those guns and on the front lines. Otherwise, they say, it is clear "employment discrimination". To ensure that no such thing was seen or heard of, the ideologues demanded - and recently achieved - that female soldiers would sleep with male soldiers in shared tents in the field, and that even latrines and washrooms would not discriminate against women in any way. This was practically done for the first time in the recent Persian Gulf War, where female soldiers did sleep with male soldiers; but only female soldiers became pregnant, unexpectedly, and in percentages much higher than was usual in the U.S. military before the introduction of battlefield unisex.
"Gender norming" is thus something like the female and male events in the Olympics, where female athletes, for example, throw the shot put lighter than male athletes, and female weightlifting hasn't even been introduced there yet. It is just that in the Persian Gulf it has been shown that war is not the Olympics. "In combat, soldiers are totally dependent on each other; their lives depend on the strength, stamina (stamina) and speed of all members of the unit," says Elaine Donnelly, executive director of the Coalition for Military Readiness. "In the brutal environment of battle, women don't have the same prospect of surviving or helping their comrades-in-arms survive. "Ideologically, this is probably the wrong conclusion for an unenlightened woman. The late President Novotny would probably tell her not to bow to facts. How the movement's spokesman reacted to this, I don't know.
And feminists infer that the family name gives the man a certain "immortality" because it is passed from father to son, whereas the loss of a maiden name in marriage signals a woman's "mortality." It also suggests, though it is not usually said aloud, that the woman seems to belong to the man, to be somewhat his property. But Czech female surnames, irritatingly sexualized by the "-ova" ending that American women lack, are also not pretty in terms of feminist linguistics. Nováková simply "belongs" to Novák, as Jan Neruda realized and wrote a feuilleton about a utopian dream. In it, Prague appeared to him as a city mysteriously defeated: shop signs announced the owners as: Josef Nováčin, Petr Sedláčin, etc. In the future of the dream, there was a new Girls' War in Bohemia, but this time the women won.
The problem - and other problems of male dominance in language - seems to me to be unsolvable in the foreseeable future. The University of Tennessee's Daily Beacon tried something similar experimentally, introducing "ter" instead of he/she, but gave up after three months because the students mostly didn't realize it wasn't a misprint.
Even the sexism of the Bible, which refers to God as Father but leaves out God-Mother, has come under attack. Blacks, in turn, protest that God is traditionally portrayed as white. Combining the two radical currents, the result is a theological anecdote about a man who returns to earth from heaven and, when asked if he has seen the Lord God and what he looks like, replies, "I've seen her and she's a black woman."
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