"14 - Fighting Slave of Gor v2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norman John)

"I don't like that sort of thing," she said.

"I'm sorry," I said.

I was irritated. But I was now more puzzled than ever.

"Do not try to be masculine with me," she said. "I am a woman."

"Did that come out right?" I asked, smiling.

"I mean 'I am a person'," she said. "I have a mind. I am not a sex object, not a thing, a toy, a bauble."

"I'm sure you have a mind," I said. "If you didn't, you would be in a very serious condition."

"Men do not value women except for their bodies."

"I did not know that," I said. "That sounds like something that would be said only by a woman whom it would be very difficult to value for her body."

"I do not like men," she said. "And I do not even like my self."

"I do not understand the purport of this conversation," I said.

In so brief a compass it seemed to me that she had touched on two of the major ambiguities afflicting the politics she espoused. First there was the insistence on womanhood coupled simultaneously with the suppression of womanhood, exalting the neuteristic, sexless ideal of the person. One must be insistent on being a woman, rhetorically, and yet the last thing one must be is honest to one's womanhood. The ideal of the person was the antithesis to honest sexuality, a device to inhibit and reduce, if not destroy, it.

It was, of course, a useful instrumentality to certain types of women in the pursuit of their political ambitions. In a sense I thought this wise on their part. They had the good sense to recognize that the sexuality of human beings, and love, was the major obstacle to the success of their programs. The desire of women to find love might yet prove fatal to their designs.

The second major ambiguity in the politics involved was the paradoxical combination of hostility toward men coupled with envy of men. Most briefly put, on the level of primitive simplicity, such women hated men and yet wished to be men. They hated men because they were not men. A natural consequence of this, of course, was that they, unhappy with themselves, felt hostility toward themselves as well. The answer to this latter difficulty might be a simple one, namely to accept what one is, in its fullness and depth, for the man to accept manhood, and the woman womanhood, whatever it might involve.

"The sexes are identical," she said.

"I did not know that," I said.

"I am just the same as you," she said.

"I see no point in entering into an argument on this issue," I said. "What would you accept as counter-evidence?"

"Some unimportant, minor differences in anatomical details are all that divide us," she said.

"What of ten thousand generations of animal ancestry and evolution, of the genetic dispositions in billions of cells, not one of which is the same in your body as in mine?"

"Are you a sexist?" she asked.

"Perhaps," I said. "I do not know. What is a sexist?"

"A sexist is a sexist," she said.

"That is a logical truth," I said. "An apple is an apple. The argument is not much advanced."

"The concept is vague," she said.