"Abbott, Edwin A - Flatland" - читать интересную книгу автора (Abbott Edwin A)

In some of the States there is an additional Law forbidding
Females, under penalty of death, from walking or standing in any
public place without moving their backs constantly from right to left
so as to indicate their presence to those behind them; other oblige a
Woman, when travelling, to be followed by one of her sons, or
servants, or by her husband; others confine Women altogether in their
houses except during the religious festivals. But it has bbeen found
by the wisest of our Circles or Statesmen that the multiplication of
restrictions on Females tends not only to the debilitation and
diminution of the race, but also to the increase of domestic murders
to such an extent that a State loses more than it gains by a too
prohibitive Code.
For whenever the temper of the Women is thus exasperated by
confinement at home or hampering regulations abroad, they are apt to
vent their spleen upon their husbands and children; and in the less
temperate climates the whole male population of a village has been
sometimes destroyed in one or two hours of a simultaneous female
outbreak. Hence the Three Laws, mentioned above, suffice for the
better regulated States, and may be accepted as a rough
exemplification of our Female Code.
After all, our principal safeguard is found, not in Legislature,
but in the interests of the Women themselves. For, although they can
inflict instantaneous death by a retrograde movement, yet unless they
can at once disengage their stinging extremity from the struggling
body of their vectim, their own frail bodies are liable to be
shattered.
The power of Fashion is also on our side. I pointed out that in
some less civilized States no female is suffered to stand in any
public place without swaying her back from right to left. This
practice has been universal among ladies of any pretensions to
breeding in all well-governed States, as far back as the memory of
Figures can reach. It is considered a disgrace to any state that
legislation should have to enforce what ought to be, and is in every
respectable female, a natural instinct. The rhythmical and, if I may
so say, well-modulated undulation of the back in our ladies of
Circular rank is envied and imitated by the wife of a common
Equilateral, who can achieve nothing beyond a mere monotonous swing,
like the ticking of a pendulum; and the regular tick of the
Equilateral is no less advmired and copied by the wife of the
progressive and aspiring Isosceles, in the females of whose famil no
"back-motion" of any kind has become as yet a necessity of life.
Hence, in every family of position and consideration, "back motion" is
as prevalent as time itself; and the husbands and sons in these
households enjoy immunity at least from invisible attacks.
Not that it must be for a moment supposed that our Women are
destitute of affection. But unfortunately the passion of the moment
predominates, in the Frail Sex, over every other consideration. This
is, of course, a necessity arising from their unfortunate
conformation. For as they have no pretensions to an angle, being
inferior in this respect to the very lowest of the Isosceles, they are