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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

Day of Male Penitence

6 March, 1999 - 00:00

By Serhiy VASYLIEV, The Day

Personally I cannot stand the women's holiday of March 8, not because the
newspapers once again will begin to Pharasaically wax grandiloquently about
some sort of specific "women's problems" and "women's priorities": how
she is satisfied, how she suffers, how she is a slave to the kitchen stove,
how she gets up in the morning and stands over the stove, getting the children
ready for day-care or school. Reading about this is always repugnant, but
in early spring, when nature itself has given you a chance to revive, it
is especially so.

I do not like the women's holiday because it always means terribly expensive
flowers selected from an impoverished range of choices. In fact, I always
hated it - in school, when we gave the girls in our classes souvenirs bought
from our modest allowances, in my teens, when in order not to demonstrate
"insensitivity" to my girlfriend I trudged with organic distaste through
empty stores and muddy bazaars in order to somehow have in her eyes the
status of a normal member of society.

It was a society in which men, studied at the time by the never to be
silenced Klara Tsetkin and deprived of even the hint of sexuality by the
Communist leaders, found themselves a dexterous escape from knighthood,
a day of mass love. They oppressed their wives by exhausting everyday life,
lovers by ten-ton complexes, mothers by the constant threat of arrest,
and daughters by that of mendicancy; they placed on women's shoulders the
hammers of railroad workers, disfiguring them with the hands of tractor
drivers, cutting their throats with the calumnies of schoolmarms, emphasizing
their second-rate status with the dust from papers shuffled in reception
rooms. And once a year (once a year!) they hear a great word of collective
thanks.

March 8 in essence is the most absurd and senseless Soviet holiday,
and still the holy of holies, for only on that day can our men deign to
sit at a meal made and adorned all the same by their fastidious and submissive
female companions at the table, making pedestrian toasts and compliments,
presenting the obligatory bouquets and presents, and feeling collective
shame for their gender, despite the fact that the flowers on that day are
the only ones of the year.

Perhaps it might not be such a bad idea to do such things on days when
it is not so obligatory?

 

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