Marriage & Drink & Power

[Terrance]

More utter nonsense from the classical world. 

 
> "A woman's time of opportunity is short, and if she doesn't seize it, no
> one wants to marry her, and she sits watching for omens."
> 
>         --Aristophanes,  Lysistrata


>From  "Who was saved?" Families, Snitches, And Recuperation In Pynchon's
Vineland"

By N. Katherine Hayles 

Losing ones virginity signifies inscription into a system of
representations that structure relations, interpret responses, delineate
oppositions. The expression paradoxically constructs refusing to do
something as a presence, while making sexuality an absence or loss.
Seeming to impart value to virginity, it also defines power relations
between gendered partners that reveal how vulnerable women are in a
patriarchal society. The male is the seducer; he wins if he can pop the
cherry. The female is the seduced; symmetry requires that she win if she
can keep her virginity intact. In fact her virginity is useful only as
bargaining chip, for if she hangs on to it for too long it becomes
useless, a sign of a spinster that no one desires. Virginity is thus
valuable only as long as it is imperiled. Let the pressure diminish and
it loses its currency. Like money and information it needs to circulate
within a system of exchanges to exercise its value. Unlike them it is a
coin that can stand only one transaction before disappearing. Properly
speaking, it signals an initiation into the exchange of money and
information that follows.