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Greek translation Greek dictionaries No Sex Please, We're Brutish!  
  [ The exploits of a Greek student in Britain ]   by Spiros Doikas ©
   4. The One-Night-Stand Phenomenon
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The many faces of intimacy: the Victorians could experience it through correspondence, but not through cohabitation; contemporary men and women can experience it through fornication, but not through friendship.
Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin, “Social Relations”, 1973

The fact remains that England may be a copulating country but it is not an erotic country... Girls are being taken to bed, to be sure, but they are not courted; they are being made love to but they are not pursued. Women are quite willing to go to bed but they rarely flirt with men.
George Mikes, How to be a Brit, p.214

She is unable to sustain relationships and prizes her freedom above the colective good of the class. We encourage self-sufficiency, but your daughter [Britain] seeems totally self-absorbed.
Lesley White, Riot Acts, The Sunday Times Magazine, 21 July 1996, p. 44

we awake to meet the day
we say goodmorning
and I wish you five hundred miles away.
Roger McGough, after the merrymaking, love?

The most typical relationship a male and a female could have in Brutland is called in native terms one night stand or (abnormally) prolonged one night stand. And this applies to all sorts of conceivable relationship between the two sexes including matrimony. It is the law that others will be objectified and de-emotionalized in order to render the possibility of a sexual relationship feasible. Emotion is the curse of the feeling classes - long now defunct in Brutland.

An anthropologist from Mars would observe that the natives have an inbuilt aversion to any form of touching that is not intercourse or violence. And indeed, that is my observation as well. At times it occurs to me that if there were a way of having sex or procreating without touching, the inhabitants of Brutland would be the first to adopt it. It would strongly minimise any unnecessary risks of involvement and would further promote the paramount philosophical doctrine of keeping yourself to yourself.

I am sure that with the concomitant advances of science, cybersex (including the hitherto popular varieties of e-mail sex, IRC sex, ICQ sex and other forms of acronymic sex) will replace obsolete forms of intimacy; indeed, I consider the notion of sex from a distance ideal for the temperament of the natives. And perhaps one day, with the assistance of genetic engineering, Sir Browne’s dream might become a reality for every afflicted native:

I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar way of coition.
Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, pt. 2, sct. 9 (1643).

You see my darling girl, it isn’t quite done over here to parade one’s emotions so publicly. We as a race, on the whole, prefer to - understate. Do you understand my darling? - I was guilty of bad form, especially as, I thing I did, I cried a bit when I told them... Oh damn the English! Sometimes I think that their bad form doesn’t just lie in revealing their emotions, it’s in having any at all.
Do you like the English?
Terence Rattigan, The Collected Plays, Volume Four, In Praise of Love, act1, p.242

Our cloudy climate and our chilly women.
Byron, Beppo - Stanza 48

According to my Martian colleague, Doctor Silentiarius, certain patterns tend to repeat themselves in the way the male and female of the species interact. For example, notable he found the fact that they had both managed to do away with phatic communication, an achievement that even the most developed intergalactic spiritual civilizations had failed to approximate.

And he goes on with his personal experiences that illustrate this miraculous interpersonal breakthrough. I quote from his book, ‘Onanistan - an anthropological guide’ (‘Onanistan’ is the word for ‘Brutland’ in Martian):

For the entire length of my experimental relationship I noticed a complete absence of the phatic three-word particle how are you? (and synonyms) when I was confabulating with my onanist mistress - be it a live encounter or a mere telephone conversation. This admired economy in superfluous discursive behaviour was, much to my surprise, matched by a further economy in extra-discursive communication, be it gesticulation, sudden changes in the pitch, falsetto voice, meaningful nods etc. The apotheosis, however, was the way in which corporal interaction was restricted to the absolute essentials, thus avoiding time consuming behaviour like hugging, kissing lightly, holding hands in public, and further demonstrations of affectation (affectation is the onanist equivalent of the Martian word ‘affection’).

My experience has come to an accord with my Martian colleague. An addition to his observations would be the native euphemism PDA (Public Display of Affectation) which is used in its abbreviated, acronymic form in order not to cause shock or embarrassment. A further linguistic observation on this term is the fact that it is a negative polarity item, that is to say it is always used in a negative linguistic context such as ‘I am not in favour of PDA, how dare you, you pervert!’

Furthermore, an endemic sense of female machismo (according to Doctor Silentiarius the equivalent of the Martian ‘femininity’) is based exactly on this aversion towards PDA. A female which has developed a certain peer sex bonding would find it insulting and swear she would never be caught in flagrante delicto holding a male’s hand. However, this does not imply that a similar feeling would arise if the event was a mere four-legged beast simulation.

                                                 *

But even English diet seems to me to give the intellect heavy feet, in fact, Englishwoman’s feet...
Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Why I am so clever, p.30

What Englishwomen lack is the light-footed mobility of those Europeans...
Vogue, January 1997, p.89

In order to enhance a sense of female machismo, indigenous females favoured the adoption of military boots and military marching techniques. Is this because they believe that it makes them more attractive and leads them to a higher number of four-legged beast simulations than their non boot-shod and non military-marching co-native females. Or is it some form of female machismo?

                                                 *

I remember the very day, sometime during the first two weeks of my five-year amorous sojourn in Brutland, when I was made privy to one of the most obtuse of their utterings. The time was ripe for that major epiphany, for my initiation into the sacred knowledge -or should I say gnosis- of that all-important, quintessentially Brutish slang term, the word that endless hours of scholastic education by renowned mentors, years of scrupulous scrutiny into scrofulous texts, had disappointingly failed to impart to me, leaving me with that deep sense of emptiness begotten by hemimathy; the time was finally ripe so as to be transported by the velvety feel of the unvoiced-palato-alveolar fricative, the elan of the unpronounceable and masochistically hedonistic front-open-rounded vowel, and last but not least, the (admittedly short) ejaculatory quality of the voiced-velar-stop: all three of them combined together to form that miraculous lexical item, the word shag.


Copyright by
Spiros Doikas

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