मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… इ. स. 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Wednesday, January 04, 2023

Will 'Sex-Strike' Work in Future?

The Atlantic, November 13 2018:
"Both young people and adults are having less sex than ever before. In the space of a generation, sex has gone from something most high-school students have experienced to something most haven’t. The average adult used to have sex 62 times a year; now, that number is 54.
Research continues to show that a healthy sex life is linked to a happy life, and having a partner is a stronger predictor than ever of happiness. Why, then, in this modern era, is sex on the decline?"

David Masciotra:
"....Love and sexuality are the most exhilarating elements of life. But Fromm writes that to truly experience and exercise love, one must “begin by practicing discipline, concentration and patience throughout every phase of life.”
No wonder so many Americans find love boring."

LAWRENCE A. TRITLE, ‘A NEW HISTORY OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR‘, 1946/2010:
“...In the spring of 411, and amid the struggles of the Four Hundred and Five Thousand, Aristophanes produced one of the best - known comedies ever written, Lysistrata. Often regarded as his third ‘peace’ play, Lysistrata is dominated by women – in fact the women of Greece, who have come together to demand that their men end the war and make peace. To accomplish this goal, the women unite and swear to abstain from sex with their husbands until they agree to stop the violence and bring peace to Greece. This comic vehicle creates some hilarious scenes that were surely as amusing to Aristophanes’ audience as to modern readers...
...Aristophanes builds into it all kinds of jokes and situations to entertain and make the audience laugh; he is, after all, writing comedy and hoping to win the prize. So there are jokes about how women love to drink and how sex - crazed they are, views that many men in the audience pretty much shared. Early in the play, for example, Lysistrata raises the idea of a sex strike to stop the war, and one of her Athenian friends responds, ‘I couldn’t. No. Let the war go on’, a sentiment echoed quickly by another ( Lys . 129 – 30). Lampito’s support for the plan, however, overcomes initial resistance and Lysistrata proceeds with her plan. In doing all this, Aristophanes also mentions the long absences of the men fighting in various places and throws in jokes about how women responded to this with sex toys and drink ( Lys . 102 – 10). It should not be thought that masturbation is a modern invention, and in fact scenes on Greek pottery earlier in the fifth century depict women using the dildos that Aristophanes jokes about...”


Louisa Peacock wrote on March 26 2014 in The Telegraph, UK:
“A group of Ukrainian women have set up a Facebook page – currently with over 1,700 likes – and created T-shirts with the slogan 'не дай русскому', meaning 'don't give it to a Russian', as a means of protest.
The sex boycott echoes a larger embargo against Russian consumer goods, which encourages Ukrainians not to buy Russian products.
The concept of a sex strike is over 2,000 years old, when Greeks first performed Lysistrata, a comedy about Greek women withholding sex from their husbands and lovers unless they stopped the Peloponnesian War...”





A scene from Greek comedy Lysistrata, where the eponymous character rallies her fellow women to go on a sex strike from their husbands, until they agree to end the Peloponnesian War

But even if such a threat works today, it surely won't work tomorrow.

Clive Cookson wrote in FT on February 14 2016:
“...Scientists have warned that rapid strides in the development of artificial intelligence and robotics threatens the prospect of mass unemployment, affecting everyone from drivers to sex workers... Prof Vardi said it would be hard to think of any jobs that would not be vulnerable to robotics and AI — even sex workers. “Are you going to bet against sex robots?” he asked. “I’m not.”...”

Steven Spielberg's 'Minority Report', 2002
courtesy: DreamWorks Picture

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