Can Xue - 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.

Men sometimes make the first move, but this doesn’t mean they take the initiative. They are capricious and nonchalant about what they do. Halfway there, they might suddenly start whistling, or get up for a drink and forget what they’re doing. If the woman isn’t patient, or if she indulges in wishful thinking, she might go to pieces. You mustn’t count on men: what are they good for? Let’s just talk of my man. Everyone knows that he’s dignified in appearance. He always initiates our ‘‘spare-time recreation.’’ When he pounces, he sometimes gives the impression that he’s full of energy, but I swear that nine times out of ten he falls asleep on top of me before we actually start doing it. Even if he succeeds once, it’s halfhearted. He always complains that there’s someone peeping outside the door, so both of us lose interest. It’s left unfinished, and yet he seems relieved. Who makes the first move? Men. To whom? Definitely not their women, but a certain illusion. After their fantasy is over, they fall asleep, while women are ignored. They grieve and sigh all night. Decades of experience have made me understand. I haven’t counted on men for a long time. I use them and tease them, confuse and disorient them, so they hang around me all day. Yet, I don’t give a shit for them. They’re all just big-time illusionists. They don’t give their wives the time of day. They hate their wives. They call all of us ‘‘stumbling blocks,’’ ‘‘disasters,’’ and ‘‘monsters.’’ In order to cover up their nighttime inability, they whine that they feel bored because we’re ‘‘frigid.’’ Their sexual energy regresses more by the day. They complain that we can’t arouse them and if the situation doesn’t change, they’ll become impotent. With such nonsensical excuses, they go philandering. They purposely assume a dejected look and refuse to do their work. They sit under the eaves all day and gawk with lusting eyes at the women passing by. They leer and ogle and even make some moves. Naturally, the women welcome this, although at first they pretend to be shy. Then suddenly with quick eye contact, they dodge into a certain dark room to have some fun. But doesn’t the quality of the thing change a little? After one or two bouts of illicit sex, does the man become imposing and gallant? Just look around and you’ll find the answer.

For example, from these dark-room encounters, men attain a certain kind of ‘‘unexpected stimulation,’’ ‘‘fresh sentiments,’’ and so forth. Do they then become vigorous? They seem to, making some women think they have become a little too much for them. But they relapse. They’re absent-minded, drowsy, and muddled. Just when you’re about to come, he suddenly gets up to close the door, sings incessantly, curses people, and so forth. In any case, he relapses and makes a bad showing. A record of men’s sexual failures would make an extremely amusing book! There are also those serious men whose facial muscles are strained in the whole process as if it were torture. They’re sweaty as though about to faint. You can’t help but feel great sympathy, and so you forget about getting pleasure and just hope he feels at peace. You act like this, and yet you get nothing in return. As he is about to leave, he stands there heroically (this kind of man sometimes is very athletic), flings a scornful glance at you, and utters a ‘‘hunh’’ through his nose. He decides that you’re dysfunctional, while he is a defeated hero. Other men can’t hold up for even a couple of minutes before they’re paralyzed like a dead dog, but they don’t acknowledge defeat and keep pestering you. They want you to confirm that their couple of minutes were wonderful. In this pestering, they seem to have fabulous stamina. If they had the same in real action, that would be wonderful. Exhausted by hours of this, you have no choice but to tell him ‘‘you’re wonderful,’’ ‘‘it’s so great,’’ ‘‘you are every inch a man,’’ blah, blah, blah. Only then is he satisfied: he stands up and scampers out happily, leaving you alone and furious in the dark room. This is pretty much the same for all women. The upshot is that women get a raw deal and have to clear away the mess. They are tortured by hunger, too, and are uneasy both day and night. They are left with a good many illnesses that last a lifetime, as well as eternal regret. All serious, pure women die young. Yet, those men who are innately undeveloped can live a very long time. Women create everything and with difficulty sustain all of society. Men reap what they haven’t sown and still complain all day long. They say we hamper their careers and don’t let them achieve any satisfaction (as if they had big appetites). They’ve become so weak because of women. They claim we drag them down.