Stephen Vizinczey
In Praise of Older Women : The amorous recollections of András Vajda
Penguins Classics, 2010
While telling the story of a young man's first sentimental journey, the author prompts us to reflect on relations between the sexes. Wouldn't young men be driven by female teenagers to hate them and to want to get a revenge? The way which they make fun of their desire, their incomprehension of male physiology, their ignorance of their own sexuality, make them too often act in a very wounding and humiliating way for man. Happiness would lie, for one who begins one's love life, in relationships with older women, more able to offer tenderness and softness, in an alleviated relation.
This is an essential book to teach young women how not to see in every boy a potential rapist, or a puppet to be manipulated; for older women, to forget the age of the whims and to use “the knowledge and the sensitivity” that their life brought them; for men, to remember that to aspire to humiliate women and to impose their laws to them will only result in the wronged women seeking revenge.
After all, why not to endorse the hero's motto: “did I never regard the women as my enemy, like territories to be conquered, but always like the allied ones and friends” ?
A very beautiful novel, which one can use as handbook of sexology.
"Sexuality is natural and will happen spontaneously"
Nothing is natural in the human actions. Thus to eat is natural, but what one eats, when, where, how it is done, all is cultural. To have a sexual activity is natural, but all the acts we have to do are to be be learnt. For a very long time nothing is automatic any more in the human life.
