sawyl | Oh! You mean copulation...

In honour of the late, great Joanna Russ, here's a delightful quote from The Female Man.

It's a report, courtesy of Joanna (who is also responsible for the parenthetical asides), of a television interview between Janet Evason (an interloper from a world 900 years in the future were there are no men) and a rather condescending male interviewer (who is probably just as representative of modern mores as those of the 1970s, if the Prime Minister's tendency to quote Michael Winner is anything to go by). Needless to say, Janet makes mincemeat of her interlocutor:

MC:	I — Miss Evason — we — well, we know you form what you call marriages, Miss Evason, that you reckon the decent of of your children through both partners and that you even have "tribes" — I'm calling them what Sir —— calls them; I know the translation isn't perfect — and we know that these marriages or tribes form very good institutions for the economic support of the children and for some sort of genetic mixing, though I confess you're way beyond us in the biological sciences. But, Miss Evason, I am not talking about economic institutions or even affectionate ones. Of course the mothers of Whileaway love their children; nobody doubts that, either. But there is more, much, much more — I am talking about sexual love.
JE:	(enlightened): Oh! You mean copulation.
MC:	Yes
JE:	And you say we don't have that?
MC:	Yes
JE:	How foolish of you. Of course we do.
MC:	Ah? (He wants to say, 'Don't tell me.')
JE:	With each other. Allow me to explain.

She was cut off instantly by a commercial poetically describing the joys of unsliced bread. They shrugged (out of camera range). It wouldn't have got that far if Janet had not insisted on attaching a touch-me-not to the replay system. It was a live broadcast, four seconds' lag. I began to like her more and more. She said, 'If you expect me to observe your taboos, I think you will have to be more precise as too exactly what they are.'

I, too, began to like her more and more.