Anarchists In Love (The Generation Quartet)

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Although restoring dignity and autonomy to women was considered necessary in the realms of sex and pleasure, Spain's anarchists nonetheless delineated clear circumstances in which sexual pleasure was morally and hygienically acceptable. Female sex workers, in particular, continued to be associated with dirtiness and disease, even though they were simultaneously pitied by the anarchists as the ultimate representatives of social victimhood and exploitation. Footnote 143 In La Revista Blanca's advice columns, the editorial team urged men not to visit sex workers. On multiple occasions male readers wrote in seeking advice about their sexual dilemmas: they struggled to find girlfriends, but also felt morally uncomfortable about visiting brothels. Footnote 144 The replies emphasised that visiting sex workers contributed to social injustice and reassured the men that they would find love eventually. Footnote 145 They believed that ‘resorting to prostitution is just as degrading to the man as it is to the woman’. Footnote 146 The association between sex work and indignity in the interwar period did not only pertain to venereal disease but also to spermatorrhea: a (now disproven) illness characterised by excessive loss of semen. Footnote 147 Seminal loss had been a key concern of doctors in Europe and the United States since the nineteenth century; some even invented special devices that they claimed would inhibit ‘nocturnal emissions’. Footnote 148 Men who engaged in sexual intercourse too often and with too many women, as well as those who masturbated, were thought likely to fall prey to this illness, which could apparently cause symptoms such as erectile dysfunction, infertility, and decline in intelligence. Footnote 149 Particularly worrying to many early twentieth century Spanish doctors was the seemingly ‘psychic’ nature of this illness, which connected it to a more fundamental loss of masculinity in the patient. Footnote 150 Many men sought medical advice from Doctor Klug through La Revista Blanca to treat their spermatorrhea. Footnote 151 They were told that by swearing off masturbation and visits to sex workers and seeking stable relationships, they could avoid this medical affliction. Footnote 152 The advice columns of La Revista Blanca evidently did not advocate for total sexual freedom, but for a specific model of sexual morality that aspired to safeguard the reproductive health of all anarchists. The advice columns did not berate sex workers for their loss of virginity because many of La Revista Blanca's writers saw ‘virginity’ as an oppressive, unnatural construct invented by the Catholic Church. Footnote 153 Indeed, the editorial team emphasised in one advice column response that former sex workers should be free to shake off that stigma once they walked away from the profession (contrary to prevailing social attitudes at the time). Footnote 154 However, reconception of sex work as a legitimate, dignified profession was never an option, because the apparent risk it posed to fertility via venereal disease or spermatorrhea was too great.

Spencer received many awards for his food writing, including the Guild of Food Writers Michael Smith Award, the André Simon Memorial Fund Special Award, the Gourmand World Cookbook Award for the Best Culinary History Book in the World, and the Glenfiddich Cookery Writer of the Year Award. Whether or not ACT UP strictly conformed to anarchist theory and practice was beside the point; AIDS activists took whatever opportunity they could to respond to an existential crisis. It may be useful to lay out an anarchist critique of state-centered AIDS activism, but to apply a “pure” anarchist standard to ACT UP verged on a dogmatic prioritization of anarchist politics over the lives of people with AIDS.His next play to be performed, Spitting Image, also first appeared at Hampstead in October 1968 before moving to The Duke of York's in the West End. The production was directed by James Roose-Evans and starred Derek Fowlds, Frank Middlemass and Lally Bowers. Further productions followed in 1969 off Broadway in New York, in Arnhem, The Netherlands, in Vienna and in Australia. The play concerns a homosexual couple who discover that they are expecting a baby, and society's reaction to this unconventional conception. John Russell Taylor in his book, The Second Wave: British Drama of the Sixties, remarks “for all the play’s cheery light fantastic [it] contains altogether more truth than is quite comfortable." [6] The play was revived in a performance at the Hampstead Theatre in 2009 as part of the celebrations of the theatre’s 50th anniversary.

in which Foucault says that ‘by Islamic government, nobody in Iran means a political regime in which the clerics would have a role of supervision or control.’ Foucault also seemed to believe that under such an Islamic government, ‘between men and women there will not be inequality with respect to rights.’ In its advice columns, Doctor Klug and the editorial team advocated for ‘free unions’ to replace marriages. These involved ceremonies akin to weddings except secular, not based on material wealth, and without any legal expectation to keep one's vows for life. Footnote 127 Although divorce was legalised in Spain in 1932, ‘free unions’ were presented as a means to avoid marriage in the first place. Footnote 128 This was ‘not only to dispense with the judge and the priest’, in line with their antiauthoritarian principles, but because they believed firmly that ‘one falls in love multiple times’ in life, and therefore committing to only one relationship was senseless. Footnote 129 The editorial team were aware that at present economic uncertainty – disproportionately felt by women – made living in such freedom difficult, but promised this issue would be resolved in the post-revolutionary anarchist society. Footnote 130 Men were often reminded of this gendered burden: when a man wrote that he regretted marrying his wife, he was urged to ‘bear in mind that poor women do not receive social assistance or sufficient economic means to be able to do the same things as men. It's not acceptable to take advantage of them!’ Footnote 131 Pluralidad amorosa (having more than one monogamous relationship in one's lifetime) was advocated in other anarchist periodicals too, by individuals like Frenchman Han Ryner and Brazilian María Lacerda de Moura. Footnote 132 Federica Montseny herself entered into a ‘free union’ in 1930 with the anarchist Germinal Esgleas, with whom she would raise three children. Footnote 133 ‘Free love’ in theory offered individuals the liberty to enjoy sexual partnerships with whomever they chose, for however long they saw fit. During his twenties numerous of Colin Spencer's drawings were published in The London Magazine, The Transatlantic Review and Encounter. A series of drawings of writers of our time was published in The Times Literary Supplement in 1959. Those he portrayed included John Betjeman, E.M. Forster, C.P.Snow and his wife Pamela Hansford Johnson, Graham Greene, Alan Ross, Iris Murdoch, Angus Wilson, Evelyn Waugh, John Lehmann, Stevie Smith, V.S.Naipaul, and John Osborne, among others. An oil portrait of E.M. Forster hung for many years in his rooms at King's College Cambridge. On his death Forster left it to Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears and it is now in the Britten-Pears Library in Aldeburgh.Pride in one's ‘natural’ male or female body was paramount in La Revista Blanca's consciousness-raising efforts. To this end, nudism was considered by its anarchist practitioners to challenge the revulsion towards unclothedness perpetuated by the Church, and to be an egalitarian form of expression because clothing – a visual indication of social stratification – was cast aside. Footnote 67 Nudists across Europe, anarchist and non-anarchist alike, saw connection to one's own body as something genuine in an increasingly artificial world. Footnote 68 Although the editorial team expressed confidence in nudism's social value when asked about it in the advice column, this did not prompt them to foment what we would now call ‘body-positivity’. Footnote 69 Rising public discussion of physical fitness and fashion at the turn of the century widened the gap between socially legitimate female bodies and real female bodies, leaving many women feeling ‘dis-embodied’ – unable to attain the corporeal perfection that society expected them to. Footnote 70 La Revista Blanca's exacerbation of this problem likely contributed to the limited take-up of nudist practices. Footnote 71 One advice column response discussing controversially short skirts concluded they were only recommendable to women with ‘well-toned’ legs, and when asked about whether hats were unhygienic the answer was that regardless of hygiene they were a good option for women who unattractively cut their hair short. Footnote 72 They also chose to print a submission which seemingly advocated that women undergo cosmetic procedures to please their partners: ‘I have a girlfriend – certainly very pretty – but made ugly by the hair on her face. What remedy is there to remove it?’ Footnote 73 Western thought traditionally established a binary between nakedness, associated with embarrassment, and nudity, connoting artistic beauty. Footnote 74 La Revista Blanca aspired to replace the former mentality with the latter, but was restrictively grounded in a eugenic worldview that subjectively considered some bodies to be closer to perfection than others. Three comedies: The Trial of St George, a satire on British justice when dealing with sexuality, inspired by the Oz Trial; Why Mrs Neustadter Always Loses, a wry monologue by an American divorcee exiled on a Greek island; and Keep It in the Family, a satire concerning a happy incestuous family (which Colin Spencer also directed) appeared between 1972 and 1978 at the Soho Poly. Interest in his work abroad led to performances of his play The Sphinx Mother, a modern Oedipus, at the Salzburg Festival in 1972, and Lilith, a comedy of surrealist images, at the Schauspielhaus, Vienna in 1979. Spencer authored several vegetarian cookbooks and a history of vegetarianism but was not a vegetarian in his personal life. [1] Fiction [ edit ] in which Ali recounts how he tried to convince Piotr Suida, a survivor of the 1962 Novocherkassk massacre, to join the Russian Communist Party. Ali dedicated his book to the Moscow Party leader, Boris Yeltsin, in the hope that the Party leadership would revive Soviet socialism.