Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Marcia Marquez -- Review and Discussion
Memories of My Melancholy Whores
By Gabriel Garcia Márquez [2006, (2004)] Translated from the Spanish by Edith
Grossman. New York: Random House, Vintage International.
This is a story about a man in late age. It is his ninetieth birthday and he is
reflecting on his life, the passing of the years, the plight of getting older
and metamorphosing into an old man. He
has never married, has no children, has lived his entire life in the house
where he was born and grew up. He was a newspaper
editor and wrote a column for forty years.
His accomplishments are modest, but his life has not been uneventful or
dull by any means.
At eleven, when the edition
closed, my real life began. I slept in
the red-light district, the Barrio Chino, two or three times a week, and with
such a variety of companions that I was twice crowned client of the year. (p.
14-15)
I have never gone to bed with a
woman I didn't pay, and the few who weren't in the profession I persuaded, by
argument or by force, to take money even if they threw it in the trash. When I was twenty I began to keep a record
listing name, age, place, and a brief notation on the circumstances and style
of lovemaking. By the time I was fifty
there were 514 women with whom I had been at least once. (p. 12)
Otherwise he was very solitary.
I never had intimate friends,
and the few who came close are in New York.
By which I mean they're dead, because that's where I suppose condemned
souls go in order not to endure the truth of their past lives. (p. 15)
The story seems to have been inspired by Yasunari Kawabata's
story, House of the Sleeping Beauties
(1969),1 which is quoted in an epigraph, and which I have also
discussed on this blog. It is apparent
that this story could not have taken place in the United States or been written
by an American. I actually read it three
times, which I don't usually do, but I felt like I did not get a good fix on it
with the first read, so I went back through it informed by a first exposure,
and still again to compose this review. There
are many aspects of this story one could lift up and explicate. It is not too long, but it is rich in
substance. I am sure I will leave things
out of this discussion that some readers may feel I should have mentioned.
Our hero is a man of modest means who, turning ninety,
decides to spend a month's worth of his income on a night of wild passion with
a young virgin. He phones a brothel
madam, Rosa Cabarcas, with whom he has had dealings in the past, and within a
couple of hours she finds him a willing girl of fourteen who meets the
essential criterion of being a virgin.
She lives with her mother and younger siblings. She works long hours in a sweat shop sewing
buttons. She is poor and needs the
money.
This man is very limited in his capacity for human
connection. He is confused in his
sentiments toward women with an admixture of profound hostility. This hostility is manifest not through
antagonism and belligerence, although there is one violent outburst directed at
the brothel rather than the girl, but mostly through avoidance.
I was ignorant of the arts of
seduction and had always chosen my brides for a night at random, more for their
price than their charms, and we had made love without love, half-dressed most
of the time and always in the dark so we could imagine ourselves as better than
we were. (p. 29)
The indifference to the arts of seduction indicates a lack
of empathy as well as a lack of interest
in making contact with the girl on an emotional level. This kind of sex is very simple and
undemanding. One could almost call it
disengaged. The random choice of his bed
partners and having sex in the dark so that fantasy might predominate in the
encounter emphasizes the self absorbed quality of the experience. Marquez's narrator was not interested in the
women themselves, who they were and what they liked and what excited them. His was a self absorbed, narcissistic
experience, where the woman was needed as a participant, but not for who she
was, but rather in the imaginary role into which he had cast her. It is more cathartic than interactive. This is also the case with the young girl,
Delgadina, who is the object of his interest in this story. We don't really learn very much about
Delgadina as a person. She spends most
of the book supposedly asleep.
The opening of Chapter 2 recounts his youthful marriage engagement
to Ximena Ortiz, who pursued him quite aggressively. They crocheted little booties for the babies
they expected to have, but the engagement ended in a conflagration when he
stood her up at the church on the wedding day.
The tempestuous farewells to
bachelorhood that they gave me in the Barrio Chino were the opposite of the oppressive
evenings at the Social Club. A contrast
that helped me find out which of the two worlds in reality was mine. . . (p. 36)
Whenever someone asks I always
answer with the truth: whores left me no
time to be married. (p. 39)
This marriage fantasy, that is, of living predominantly, if
not exclusively, with a single woman with whom one has babies and raises
children was not in his repertoire.
Fortunately, he had the self awareness and the fortitude to reject it
and stay clear of it. Many less adept
men get sucked into stifling marriages in which they are not emotionally
invested and which become the bane of their lives. One important factor that saved the
protagonist in Marquez's story from that dismal fate was the existence and
availability of a thriving brothel culture.
In the United States the brothel culture, which used to be
ubiquitous, has been outlawed, made illicit, and forced underground for over
one hundred years. Government policies
have actively promoted monogamous heterosexual marriage as the exclusive
foundation of social life in this country.
This has forced countless men into marriages that they might not
otherwise have entered into, with devastating effect on women, children, and
society. In the United States today
sexual violence and rape is a major public health problem.2 While you will not find a study on sexual
violence that mentions the absence of a legitimate commercial sex culture as a
contributor to the problem, I believe it is a major, ignored factor.
The absence of sanctioned, legitimate commercial sex,
creates a bad atmosphere between the sexes throughout society. Men, who are the ones who patronize
commercial sexual services and readily avail themselves of this kind of casual,
emotionally unencumbered sex when it is available, are given the message that
there is something wrong with their desires, and thus with them. With easy, straightforward sources of sexual
satisfaction shut off, they are forced to bring the myriad variants of their
desires home to girlfriends and wives, who are not equipped to deal with them
effectively, and who furthermore are conditioned to be rejecting and condemning
of such desires. The result is every
woman in a public or private space becomes a target of lust. American women feel besieged by male desire
as a condition of their daily lives. They
live in a perpetual state of wariness, mobilized at all times for defense, and
for the most part, simply bypassing or avoiding men as much as possible. People begin to feel a sense of detachment
and a lack of connection to other people and to society. The common official response is to blame men
and exhort them to greater self control.
And in lieu of that to apply increasingly heavy-handed coercive pressure
from the government and the police. But
it is not working and the situation is deteriorating.2 It has everything to do with the absence of safe,
easily accessible brothels.
The Latin culture understands and values the vital human
need to express one's essential self through particular forms of sexual
striving much better than the American. America's
narrow prejudices about the scope and form of propriety in human relations are
a major reason why American culture is so isolating and lonely. People from all over the world, and
especially from Latin America, notice this about America right away when they
come here for the first time.
Marquez's hero, has the luxury, at age ninety, of being able
to call Rosa Cabarcas after twenty years of silence, and ask for a girl who is
a virgin for a night of sex, and within a couple of hours she has one for
him. Of course, it will cost him a
month's pay, but for a man in the United States such a thing would be unimaginable. Not that it could never happen in the United
States. It certainly can and does, but
were an American man to seek out such an entertainment, it would have to be
clandestine in the utmost, he would most likely be dealing with organized
crime, it would likely be difficult and time consuming to achieve -- never mind
exorbitantly expensive -- and if discovered he would face draconian
punishment.
In Marquez's story the relationship is ostensibly illegal
also, but without the heavy handedness that exists in the United States. It is illegal with a wink and a nod. Only officially. But in practice there is toleration. The ease and speed with which Rosa Cabarcas
is able to find a young girl to willingly participate speaks to this. The support and encouragement of older women
in fulfilling it also evinces the atmosphere that exists in the Latin
society, that understands, accepts, and cooperates in satisfying such a desire. Nothing like that exists in the United
States. In the United States it is
sinister, sordid, and highly dangerous to pursue such an impulse. It is the easiness and straightforwardness
with which a man can pursue his desire and women who will do what they can to
accommodate it that creates an ambience that is less stressful and more
sympathetic between the sexes. This is
the most outstanding difference between the Latin and American sexual cultures
reflected in this book.
The girl's role, is simply to sleep in the nude while the
narrator stays beside her through the night, watching her, touching her,
kissing her, fondling her body, but having no real interaction with her. The girl becomes as passive and inert an
object as she can possibly be without being dead. It is a scenario Marquez lifted from Yasunari
Kawabata's House of the Sleeping Beauties,
which I also discussed in this blog. In
both stories the girl is drugged so that she remains deeply asleep, although in
Marquez's story the girl seems a little more sentient, and as it develops there
is an undercurrent of implication that the girl is actually participating much
more than Marquez is telling us. This is
due to the blurring of the boundary between fantasy and reality that pervades
the book.
Psychologically, I see it as a projection. The sleeping, inert girl, mirrors the deadness
the narrator's own inner self. It is an
attempt to get in touch with this deeply detached and lifeless part of himself
that is unable to respond and interact with other human beings. It ultimately began with the unresponsiveness
of his own mother long ago that set up this severe handicap, this inability to
interact emotionally and form deep attachments to other people. This whole quest is not about interacting
with the young girl. Not at all. It is about dealing with something inside
himself. One could see it as an attempt
to awaken that deadened aspect of his own inner self. It is not an accident that he would choose
his ninetieth birthday to embark on this quest.
He has lived his whole life limited and hampered by this very severe liability,
which he was able to assuage through his encounters in the brothels. The superficial stimulation constituted a
salve, but it did not heal the wound.
Now, at ninety, he resolves to confront the demon that has shaped his
entire life. He really needs this young
girl. And it works, up to a point. He is able to fall in love for the first
time at age ninety. It is a tribute to
the power of regeneration within the human spirit.
But why must it be such a young girl, and why must she be a
virgin? He did not ask Rosa for a
particular age, what he insisted on was virginity. Rosa offered him other possibilities, but who
were not virgins, which he rejected. The
need for virginity implied the young age of the girl. This need for virginity reflects a need for
specialness and emotional significance on the part of the male. This is a man who has a deep sense of his own
insignificance which he seeks to overcome through acquiring a significant place
in the life of a young girl. Every girl
will remember the man who deflowers her, whether she loved him or hated him,
whether it was a good experience or a bad experience. This is a man who at ninety feels he has no
significant legacy. He wants to live on
in the mind of this girl. Deflowering a
virgin is a way of creating a legacy for a man who feels he has none. This kind of significance is not the same
thing as love, and it will not necessarily have a great emotional impact on the
girl's life. In fact, the girl will
quite likely go on to much better and much more significant experiences in her
sexual and romantic life. But he has no
such ambitions. It is a rather minimal
objective of a man of mediocre capabilities in relating to women. It is a little better than buying a plaque
with your name on it to hang on a building or a sidewalk or a park bench. But that is the idea. The insistence on deflowering a virgin is a
quest for significance -- in lieu of actually playing a significant role in the
girl's life.
In Memoirs of a Geisha
there is a description of Dr. Crab's small wooden case with forty to fifty
glass vials that held blood samples of the virgins he had deflowered. (Golden,
p. 282) In the geisha culture of Japan
the right to be the slayer of the maturing geisha's virginity was highly prized
and quite expensive. It was the subject
of competitive bidding between wealthy men.
Dr. Crab kept these somewhat ghoulish mementos of his accomplishments,
each labeled with the girl's name.3
The virgin collector is a man who wants to feel some
importance. It is also an affirmation of
masculinity in a man who is very unsure of himself as a male. While the virgin collector retains the tokens
of the virgins he has taken, the deflowered virgins move on. The virgin collector temporarily assuages his
faltering sense of insignificance, but he must forever continue the quest as
the underlying psychic deficit is not repaired by these isolated, temporary
experiences. It is rather pathetic and
sad, this futile quest, but it is a common insecurity of males in many cultures
and is the main reason for the overvaluation of virginity and the excesses to
which men will go to defend it.4
Marquez's hero gives the young girl the name Delgadina. Although the story presents the relationship
as being chaste, where the man only touches, fondles, kisses and then sleeps
beside the nude girl, who has been heavily drugged into a deep sleep, I
interpret this as a gloss, a ruse, and in fact this evolved into an intense
sexual relationship with strong, reciprocated passion. There are incidents reported to have occurred
in his residence, as fantasies within his own mind. But I would say, they really did happen. Delgadina really was there in his apartment,
feeding his cat and helping him restore order after the hurricane. Marquez disguises the relationship with this fog
of unreality in order to preserve plausible denial.
In the beginning of the new
year we started to know each other as well as if we lived together awake, for I
had discovered a cautious tone of voice that she heard without waking, and she
would answer me with the natural language of her body. (p. 75)
I began to read her The Little
Prince by Saint-Exupéry, a French author whom the entire world admires more than
the French do. It was the first book to
entertain her without waking her, and in fact I had to go there two days in a
row to finish reading it to her. We
continued with Perrault's Tales, Sacred History, the Arabian Nights in a
version sanitized for children, and because of the differences among them I
realized that her sleep had various levels of profundity depending on her
interest in the readings. (p. 76)
She is not asleep.
This is a very thin artifice Marquez is using to keep the book from
being labeled "child pornography" and having it banned. It is a clever technique, presenting the
story as occurring in the girl's sleep, so that her participation and physical
interaction with him is ostensibly denied.
But anyone can see through this. This
was a passionate relationship with strong sexual feeling and the girl's full
participation. On the last page Rosa
tells him that the girl is madly in love with him. How does one fall in love in one's
sleep?
In Chapter 4 an incident occurs in the brothel that disrupts
his relationship with Delgadina. An
important client, a prominent banker, is murdered inside the brothel in a decidedly
compromised position. It is suspected
(likely, I think) that the client's companion was another man. Rosa Cabarcas awakens the narrator in
Delgadina's room during the night and summons him to help her dress the
body. They worry about what to do with
Delgadina and Rosa recommends that the narrator take her with him. He refuses, to Rosa's contempt, and Delgadina
subsequently disappears, along with Rosa.
In her absence he becomes obsessed with her and realizes he is in love
with her. After a month Rosa calls him,
and that evening he is reunited with the girl.
But things have changed. She
seems older. She is made up with jewelry
and tawdry clothes and cheap perfume. He
accused the girl of being a whore, threw a tantrum, and trashed the place. It was the only violence he displayed in the
whole book and he did not harm the girl.
This furor illustrates the confusion and hypocrisy of
Marquez's hero, and perhaps it is a feature of the Latin culture. The girl is
a whore. First and foremost for
him. He is the one who started her down
this path. He had the chance to take her
home make her part of his life and he refused.
It might have turned into a very different story if he had. So this fit over her growing into the role
for which he has groomed her is the most brazen self deception and
disingenuousness. Rosa rightly despises
him. His behavior is akin to the
confusion many father's feel about their growing daughters' emerging sexuality
and their unwillingness to allow them to develop and grow up as sexual women. It is a deep seated fear of attachment and
abandonment being played out. It is part
of what has kept his relations with people to a minimal level of involvement
throughout his life. There is a
preconscious recognition that women like to be whores, they enjoy being
promiscuous, they enjoy selling themselves, or using sex to gain favors and
advantages from men. They enjoy
violating the rules that men make for them.
It is in their nature. Men who
resist this or try to suppress it have a hard, contentious life. They spend their lives either avoiding deep
involvements with women or trying to build fences around their women, and
forever battling the illusion that their efforts are being thwarted or
circumvented. I would also note in
passing that the murder of a man likely engaged in sex with another man is a
repudiation of homosexuality as an interpretation of Marquez's character as an
explanation for his need to have the girl asleep and non-interacting.
In the final chapter after this blow up and estrangement, he
meets by chance one of his former paramours from his younger days in the
brothels. She is an old woman now, but
they go back to her teen years. He
unburdens his saga with Delgadina to her, and it is through her that he is able
to achieve a reconciliation and a resolution of this contradiction in his
attitude toward women that has been limiting him all of his life. She listens sympathetically and tells him
Do whatever you want, but don't
lose that child. . . Find that poor creature right now even if what your
jealousy tells you is true, no matter what, nobody can take away the dances
you've already had. But one thing, no
grandfather's romanticism. Wake her,
fuck her brains out with that burro's cock the devil gave you as a reward for
cowardice and stinginess. I'm serious,
she concluded, speaking from the heart:
Don't let yourself die without knowing the wonder of fucking with love.
(p. 99-100)
He makes amends with Rosa and prevails upon her to find
Delgadina for him once again. There is a
long recitative before his reunion with her wherein he reviews his life and
comes to terms with his imminent mortality.
Chapter 5 is an almost triumphant resolution of the major issues in his
life. It ends with him leaving
Delgadina's bed in the morning joyful at the prospect of spending perhaps
another ten years with her happily and mutually in love. It is a very positive book that offers the
hope of reconciliation, regeneration and new love even at ninety in a man who
had lived within a very limited scope of emotional possibility in his relations
with people throughout his entire life.
This story rebukes many of the lies and delusions that grip
American society in regard to sexual relations.
First and foremost is the idea that sex harms children or exploits
children, or some variant thereon. That
sexual relations between children and adults are inherently abusive or damaging
to the young person is a silly idea on its face, but one that has been promoted
in this country with great success mainly by Christians.
The laws excluding children from sex are so
broadly written and so severe that they have created an atmosphere of extreme
anxiety surrounding the care of children.
People who deal with children in their daily lives feel intimidated and
uneasy, including parents. Men who
supervise or care for young children are automatically suspect and subject to
surveillance. Making sex with children
illegal harms them much more than any amount of sex. It deprives them of close emotional and
physical relationships with adults and creates an atmosphere of anxiety and
mistrust and hostility that pervades relations between children and
adults. It estranges men from children
and discourages them from developing close relationships with them. It casts women in the role of being the
"defenders" of children against the desires of males creating
antagonism and suspicion between adult men and women. The whole society becomes mobilized to defend
children from sex -- something they are naturally interested in and respond to
quite readily. Every way you look at it,
these laws are destructive of children's interests and of constructive,
positive relations between the sexes.
The undesirability of a long age difference between lovers is
another common prejudice of American society that Marquez repudiates as well as
the tendency to dismiss old people as sexually disinterested or incapable. Ninety and fourteen is about as wide an age
gap as one is likely to see, and it seems to have been mutually beneficial. Marquez is to be congratulated for presenting
a sympathetic, beautifully written story that highlights the ambiguities and
conflicts and deep seated emotional needs that are pursued and struggled with
and fulfilled in the world of commercial sex.
The Latin culture recognizes, understands, values and such personal
pursuits much more than the American. In
fact, I would say, American culture devalues the personal and individual, and
instead, stresses conformity even in one's personal needs and desires for
connection to other people. American
society has become very intolerant over the last century or so and the trend is
growing and becoming increasingly heavy handed.
This book that provides a strong rebuttal to many of the righteous
prejudices that American society thoughtlessly takes for granted and is
unfortunately promoting around the world.
Notes
1. Kawabata, Yasunari
(1969) House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories. Translated by Edward Seidensticker. Tokyo and New York: Kodansha International.
2. Prevalence and
Characteristics of Sexual Violence, Stalking, and Intimate Partner Violence
Victimization -- National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, United
States, 2011. Center for Disease
Control and Prevention, Morbidity
and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) September 5, 2014.
Spousal abuse is also credited as a leading cause of
homelessness in women in the United States.
Spousal Abuse: The
'Silent Illness' Driving Women into Homelessness. By Lisa De Bode. Al Jazeera English August 14, 2015.
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/8/14/female-homelessness-intimate-partner-violence.html
The CDC's recommendations in regard to sexual violence in
the United States are as follows.
Promoting respectful,
nonviolent relationships is key to preventing intimate partner violence. CDC’s
prevention strategy is focused on principles such as: • Identifying ways to
interrupt IPV perpetration. • Better understanding the factors that contribute
to respectful relationships and protect against IPV. • Creating and evaluating
new approaches to IPV prevention. • Building community capacity to implement
strategies that are based on the best available evidence. Primary prevention of
IPV must begin early. Opportunities for prevention include: • Promoting healthy
relationship behaviors among young people, with the goal of reaching
adolescents prior to their first relationships in order to develop healthy
relationship behaviors and patterns for life. • Building positive and healthy
parent-child relationships through parenting skills programs, including efforts
to support relationships between fathers and children. (Overview)
CDC (2010)
National Intimate Partner and
Sexual Violence Survey.
The CDC recommends promoting
healthy sexual relationships between young people, but in the United States healthy
sexual relationships are illegal for young people. If the government finds out about a healthy
sexual relationship involving a young person it will destroy the relationship
and everyone connected to it. How can
parents have a positive, healthy relationship with their children, if all sex
must be excluded? Only the most sterile,
superficial, emotionally shallow relationships are possible. The children will never feel close to their
parents and never feel like the parents understand them. They must be exposed to their parents'
sexuality from an early age to really know and feel close to their parents.
Consider the following recent
example from the news media.
Mark Joseph West, 25, was
arrested July 16 by San Jose police after the girl's legal guardian found
several sexually explicit images on the teen's phone, according to the police
report. West, who has been charged with
two felony counts of sending harmful matter to a minor and four counts of
misdemeanor annoying or molesting a minor, is scheduled to appear in court
Thursday morning for a plea hearing.
Police say West met the teen on social media in January after playing
online video games with the girl's teen boyfriend, according to the
report. West and the girl became friends
and communicated online for several months.
Sometime in May, the relationship and discussions turned sexual in nature,
according to the report. West and the
girl met several times during which he touched her inappropriately, police
say. San
Jose Mercury News August 26, 2015.
Since when does a man need permission from the police to
touch a girl's body, who voluntarily meets him on her own initiative in a
relationship that has been going on for months?
How did we ever get to this crazy place?
The complaint wasn't made by the girl herself. It was made by her "legal
guardian," whoever that is, who snooped on her cell phone and then ratted
on her to the police for what? Having a
sexually explicit picture. The legal
guardian is the one who should be charged with a felony, for gross disrespect
and invasion of the girl's privacy. Why
do the police need to be involved in this at all? They should have laughed the legal guardian
out of the police station.
This incident appeared in the San Jose Mercury News just within the last couple of days. But this kind of harassment by the police of
perfectly benign personal relationships is happening on a daily basis all over
the United States. Hundreds, if not
thousands of men, are being arrested, charged with crimes, and jailed for
nothing more than having or sending "sexually explicit pictures" or
"inappropriately touching" young girls. It's insanity.
Sexual violence cannot be
understood without thinking about sex.
The economy, poverty, and the stresses of modern life may all make a
contribution, but sexual violence has everything to do with sex, gender roles,
and power. In the United States, the
pervasiveness of sexual violence is caused by government policies that foment
antagonism between the sexes throughout society. There will always be a certain amount of
misunderstanding, conflict, and resentment between the sexes, but it only
devolves into the kind of unrelenting animosity and violence that we have in
the United States under special conditions.
In the United States we have institutionalized and exalted those
conditions with the result that the fractious relations between the sexes are
deteriorating and intensifying.
There are probably people
within the CDC who know what needs to be done, but they cannot speak
forthrightly for fear of losing their jobs.
The problems with America's sexual culture are not difficult to
analyze. It is rather simple and straightforward: we need to decriminalize sex across the board
and absolve the government of the role of defining what sexual relationships
are "appropriate" and "inappropriate." The terms "rape" and "sexual
assault," which have been expanded in recent years to include all sorts of
perfectly benign activities and relationships, need to be restored to credible
definitions.
The difficulty will be in the
implementation because there is a hairball of nefarious interests implacably
opposed to any reform. First and
foremost is the Christian religion, which opposes all progressive changes that
would foster a more tolerant, congenial sexual culture; the victim culture,
which is an outgrowth of the Christian mentality that worships a victim and
turns him into a god; and the sex abuse industry, which has learned how to use
the perverseness of our legal system and the victim culture to make money. These interests are a formidable propaganda
machine, but the forward strides made by gay people over the last half century
illustrate what is possible and how much things can change. America is not hopeless by any means, but the
challenges ahead of us are daunting. One
thing in our favor is that the way forward is clear. We have to get the Christian influence out of
our sexual culture and especially out of our legal system governing sex.
3. Golden, Arthur (1999 [1997]) Memoirs of a Geisha. New
York: Vintage/Random House.
4. According to the CDC Report Violence by Intimate Partners. July 2008.
In many places, notions of male honour and
female chastity put women at risk (see also Chapter 6). For example, in parts
of the Eastern Mediterranean, a man’s honour is often linked to the perceived
sexual ‘‘purity’’ of the women in his family. If a woman is ‘‘defiled’’
sexually – either through rape or by engaging voluntarily in sex outside
marriage – she is thought to disgrace the family honour. In some societies, the
only way to cleanse the family honour is by killing the ‘‘offending’’ woman or
girl. A study of female deaths by murder in Alexandria, Egypt, found that 47%
of the women were killed by a relative after they had been raped. (p. 93)
This
linkage of male self esteem with women's sexual "purity," that is,
virginity, is a dangerous cultural feature for women. It seems to be the norm in the Middle East,
parts of Asia, and also in Latin America, perhaps to a lesser extent. This has to do with the cultural
understanding of masculinity. I think
that uncoupling male identity and female chastity will be difficult in cultures
where it is entrenched, but it will depend on a general elevation in the educational
level of the population and a declining influence of religion in the culture. This
is a topic for another time and place.