Conversations with my friend on the male and the female

1

  “A woman can only become a friend to a man when she is fully equal to him in rights, when she is equal to him in education and work.” Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, 1869!  And my friend didn’t even know that masochism was invented by Sacher-Masoch.  I gave him “Venus in Furs”, and he, reading, was amazed – how can it even come to someone’s head, to become a woman’s “slave”?

2

«Two different things wanteth the true man: danger and diversion. Therefore wanteth he woman, as the most dangerous plaything”, my friend quotes with a smile.  And even “Thou goest to women? Do not forget thy whip!”  “You know what”, I say to him,  “your  Nietzsche was in love with Lou Salome, and  embodied HER in Zarathustra”. That lady, “Liolia” in her Russian childhood, broke the hearts of many well-known and unknown men, and abandoned poor Nietzsche as well . And about the whip, they say she laughed: “Yes, when you go to a woman, take the whip with you, so that the woman can whip you!

3

My friend repeats after a popular man of letters that the Lord created a woman from a single brainless bone, a rib. And I quote Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh: “Bible translations often say that God took Adam’s rib.  The Hebrew text allows other translations, and the rabbinic translation into French instead of the rib, côte, speaks of côté, a side.  God did not separate the rib, but separated the two sides, female and male.”  Adam, when he meets Eve, exclaims: she is Isha, because I am Ish.  It’s the same word in Hebrew.  We, too, look alike: “brother and sister,” “he and she.”

4

What you say tête-a-tête is so different from your sexist remarks in public . “Sex is just communication, different people, different approaches.” “There’s this girl in my sport club, she doesn’t go swimming, just walks around, her small waist and her round bum you know, and she walks wiggling her hips!.. The club probably pays  her for this walking around, to stimulate men’s appetite for sports .”  Here, look at what a great Russian XX century cultural historian has to say.  Yuri Lotman comments on a XIX century conversation: “Mr D. once invited Mr R. to a brothel.  “I’m married,” said Mr R. “So,” Mr D. asked, “can’t you have lunch in restaurants because you have a kitchen at home?”   “Mr R. is a “man of serious behaviour”, and such people  do not know how to enjoy a playful conversation where ethical truths are alluded to.  Exact opposite to them are “people of playful behaviour, they are only interested in the sharpness of the phrase, the “word,” the game.  That’s you, you are a “man of playful behaviour”.  And that’s why I laugh at your alpha male jokes.

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