Day of Male Penitence

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?