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 Brownes 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 isnt quite done over here
to parade ones 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 doesnt just
lie in revealing their emotions, its
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 males 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, Englishwomans 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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