CB
>>> Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> 11/28/99 12:33PM >>>BTW, Engels, an optimistic lover man, wrote in _The Origin of the Family,
Private Property and the State_ (1884):
***** What we can now conjecture about the way in which sexual relations will be ordered after the impending overthrow of capitalist production is mainly of a negative character, limited for the most part to what will disappear. But what will there be new? That will be answered when a new generation has grown up: a generation of men who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a woman's surrender with money or any other social instrument of power; a generation of women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any other considerations than real love or to refuse to give themselves to their lover from fear of the economic consequences. When these people are in the world, they will care precious little what anybody today thinks they ought to do; they will make their own practice and their corresponding public opinion about the practice of each individual -- and that will be the end of it. *****
_The Origin of the Family..._ was published when Engels was not so "young" any more (biologically -- Engels was 64 years old then!), but look how _youthful_ his optimism announces itself! "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very Heaven!" Nowadays, even technically young men, on LBO and elsewhere, sound like crabby old men, turned off by the idea of a future of radically transformed sex and sexuality. As if they were suffering from "accelerated decrepitude," the disease that afflicts Sebastian in Ridley Scott's _Blade Runner_ (1982).
in the spirit of May,
Yoshie