Five Spice Street

I have an audacious idea. I thought of it after the most recent meeting in the dark room: I suggest mobilizing a campaign among our Five Spice Street men to promote manliness. There are various things we can do. For example, photography can be a significant part of the movement. We can take some group pictures just of men with meaningful facial expressions. At present, we lack such photos. Those hanging in people’s homes are all too feminine-looking. Where has our masculinity gone? When did we change into womanly types, losing our gender’s superiority to prostrate ourselves in worshipping an imaginary woman? How far we have gone in degrading ourselves! I propose that, beginning tomorrow, our Five Spice Street men go every day to the mountain to train their voices. We want to roar incessantly, show our power, and revive our latent masculine consciousness. We’ve sunk much too low. We’ve been sleeping in the swamp, creating a myth of a woman, thinking that with this we would control the spread of impotence. The result was just the opposite. More and more, we became thin-voiced men with wanton, feminized eyes. It was a painful experience. Revenge isn’t at all impossible. If we continue being inert, we will be rotten from our very roots and punishment will surely ensue. When that day comes, female demons will emerge on earth. They will roar at the dark heavens, and men’s trunks will snap and fall to the ground. Soft fibers will grow in their bodies. It is precisely this that is revenge! This shocking vision has never left my mind. Wake up, men! The tricks that a woman like X deploys naturally don’t work with me. If every man were like me, women like X wouldn’t exist. The despicable thing is that, unluckily, here we have the soil for her to exist and develop. This kind of poisonous thing grows and flourishes and becomes a menace. Everyone unwittingly talks about it. As it is talked about, the fantasy becomes reality and shackles our brains.

This morning, my wife glared at me with a strange expression. She lifted her chin in a weird way, too. I’m a sensitive man: I immediately felt this change was significant. This was an unprecedented challenge. Compared with this, every fight that had come before-even having the chamber pot smashed on my head-was trivial. Society’s pestilence has infected our family life. Marital sex life is about to be wrecked or to change in essence. The man is no longer a man, the woman no longer a woman: they are unimaginable apparitions. I suspect that the day when we men are forced to fight for our very existence is upon us. It isn’t a fight with weapons, and the enemy doesn’t come from outside. Our enemy is simply ourselves. This unwieldy, indolent body, this rusty brain, our four frozen limbs, these inanimate eyes that indulge in fantasy: let’s rebound! Let’s preserve our moral integrity! Let’s go to the mountain and train our voices! When we’re walking, let’s lift our feet high! Let’s hang our fully masculine photos on our four walls!

Ms. B: Who says women don’t have any initiative? This is a colossal misunderstanding. I can assert that more than ninety percent of all women possess initiative. Their libido is much stronger than men’s. Their behavior and actions are also much more straightforward. You need only open your eyes and look all around, and you will notice that in nearly all husband-wife relationships, it’s the woman who dominates. What are men? Stone, that’s all. You have to place this stone on your chest and warm it up and bring it to life. This is the melancholy of women at night. Men are destroyed by their careers: they can never again see how coquettish and charming women are. The world is full of vivacious women and decrepit men. Not only are women superior in sex, but they determine society’s historical development!

What does Madam X count for? She took the offensive against one good-for-nothing inside a certain granary. This certainly isn’t her invention: everyone can do this; she merely followed convention. Is it possible to imagine that a vivacious woman can squat in a dark corner and simply wait forever, hoping that the stone will become a tiger and at a certain moment pounce on her? Why did she work her way into such a dark place? Because she couldn’t control her lust any longer. Could she turn suddenly bashful and wait for the good-for-nothing man to take the initiative? In the dark, no one could see anything. It would have been strange only if she hadn’t pounced and bitten that blockhead, and rebuked him: ‘‘You son-of-a-bitch-you made me wait so long.’’ Not until the sun rises in the west will a woman wait for the man to take the initiative.