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Файл:Speak and Write like The Economist говори и пиши как The Economist
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Love, marriage, family, sex, friendship, children
A common myth in Sudan is that an uncut clitoris will grow into a thirdleg.
If diamonds were to cease being a way to signal a man’s marriageability, what might take their place?
In Egypt and Palestine, over half of men and women say that if a woman
is raped, she should marry her rapist. In at least three of the countries,
more women than men say that women who dress provocatively deserve to be harassed.
In the 1920s even respectable ladies began painting their faces,
and the cosmetics industry exploded.
Children are said to have “six pockets”: two from their parents, and four
from their grandparents.
A lioness may mate up to 100 times a day with different lions during oestrus.
Dating is a treacherous business. There may be plenty of fi sh in the sea,
yet many are unhygienic, self-absorbed, disconcertingly attached to exfi sh, or fans of Donald Trump. In a sense, searching for a mate is not so
different from hunting for a job.
Family feuds are discouraged when no relative can dream of running off to Bahamas with all the loot. “There are no family fi ghts,”
says one Wallenberg. “No one understands how it works, but it
works well”.
If you can’t fi nd love change your appearance.
Peacocks strut; bowerbirds build lovenests; spiders gift-wrap
fl ies in silk. Such courtship rituals play an important role in
what Charles Darwin called sexual selection: when the female
of a species bears most of the costs of reproduction, males use
extravagant displays and gifts to demonstrate their “reproductive fi tness” and females choose between them. For human males,
shards of a crystalline form of carbon often feature. A diamond
engagement ring signals a man’s taste, wealth and commitment,
all to persuade a woman that he is a good bet.
De Beers can no longer control the market. Though it is the biggest
producer by value, it accounts for only a third of global sales, down
91
Часть I
from 45% in 2007. Meanwhile the source of the demand that drives
sales — the link between diamonds and love— looks weaker than it
used to. The ancient Greeks regarded diamonds as the tears of the
gods.
Saudi Arabia lavishes cash on suspected terrorists who cooperate with its deradicalisation programme, setting them up
with jobs, cars and even wives.
It is a status symbol, demonstrating that even as a man approaches the
expenses of married life, he can still splash out on a bauble.
Procter & Gamble roared into the disposable-nappy business
with Pampers in 1961.
The progenitor of Japan’s imperial line, supposedly 2,600 years ago, was
female: Amaterasu, goddess of the sun. But for most of the time since, all
emperors have been male.
Chopsticks come in pairs.
Divorce is still common— more than 800,000 marriages were annulled
in 2014 — and it is often costly and protracted. A survey by Nolo, a legal publisher, suggests the average American couple spends $15,000 and
10.7 months untying the knot.
A procedure called mitochondrial donation, which would result
in a child with DNA from three people: its mother, its father and
afemale donor sometimes dubbed a mitomum.
How a woman can love a daughter born of rape?
More than 10m Americans are estimated to date digitally, and
as an industry in 2013 it reached $2 billion in revenue with over
2,500 dating sites in the United States.
“The best countries”, Fourie wrote, “have always been those which
allowed women the most freedom.”
Love, it turns out, is not innocent hanky-panky, but something
noxious, corrosive — even deadly.
The menopause is a puzzle.
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Love, marriage, family, sex, friendship, children
A country’s GDP falls when a man marries his maid.
The most important career choice a woman makes is whom she marries.
A supportive spouse can help you excel; a jealous or lazy one may hold
you back.
In the mid-1800s, before the advent of negatives and half-tone
printing, a photo of a naked prostitute cost more than engaging her
for sex. Not until 1953, when Hugh Hefner launched Playboy with
a nude photograph of Marilyn Monroe, did porn go mass-market.
When men announce they are about to have a child, they are simply
congratulated; when women do, they are congratulated and then asked
what they plan to do about work.
50% of marriages end in divorce, the other 50% end in death.
Sotake your pick.
How do robots have sex? By swapping software “genotypes” via infrared
communications, ideally when facing each other 30cm apart. Not exactly a salty punchline.
Cuttlefi sh are cross-dressers, the male argonaut (apelagic octopus) has a detachable, projectile penis, dolphins are in fl agrante
acrobats, and group sex erupts (where else?) on the California
coast twice a year when tens of thousands of grunions disport
themselves on the beach. Led by the moon and tides, the small
fi sh fl ing themselves ashore. The female digs a hole in the sand
with her tail, backs in, lays eggs, and waits while up to eight
males snuggle up and release their sperm.
Loneliness, conversely, can be deadly: one study found it did more damage to health than smoking.
Dogs, unlike people, are capable of pure love— at least according
to Freud.
Britain leads the rich world in indicators associated with solitary lifestyles: gym-going (asopposed to team sports), divorce, smartphone and
tablet adoption (replacing the family television set), self-employment,
online shopping, eating alone, meal-skipping and the declines of both
the pub and the nuclear family. Clubs of all sorts, from churches and
political parties to golf clubs and trade unions, are shrinking.
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Часть I
If backward time travel were possible, some fool would no doubt
try testing the grandfather paradox, another invention of timetravelling fi ction writers. In this, a visitor to the past kills his or
her grand-father before the conception of the protagonist’s own
parent, meaning the protagonist could never have been born, and
the murder could not have taken place.
In the old days if you wanted a promotion you wore a short skirt, now
it’s the other way round.
More than 90% of presidents and prime ministers are male, as are
nearly all big corporate bosses. Men dominate fi nance, technology, fi lms, sports, music and even stand-up comedy. In much of
the world they still enjoy social and legal privileges simply because they have a Y chromosome.
What is a “rampant homosexual”? What makes him rampant, and do
rampant heterosexuals exist as well?
Well-to-do parents fear two things: that their children will die in
a freak accident, and that they will not get into Harvard. The fi rst
fear is wildly exaggerated. The second is not, but staying awake
all night worrying about it will not help— and it will make you
miserable.
Michael Burgess, suggested that fetuses are already masturbating by
20weeks— although only male ones.
Some transgender people do not go to the loo all day because
they have been harassed, assaulted or kicked out of one. This
can result in dehydration, urinary-tract infections and kidney
problems.
Women are just men with less money.
In 1939, 10% of American brides received a diamond engagement
ring. By the end of the century 80% did. 26% of young American
brides say they dreamed about their future engagement rings
years before beginning a relationship.
A pun, like porn, is defi ned less by intention than by reception.
Tax reform is always the bridesmaid and never the bridem.
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Love, marriage, family, sex, friendship, children
The hijab helps women be treated for their minds, not their looks.
Over Sabbath meals, Israelis who are worried about growing intolerance discuss whether to put their children or their country fi rst.
It’s like a big house with only one bathroom, and daddy’s been in there
too long.
Each suburban housewife, wrote Betty Friedan in 1963, struggles
with a single question as she makes the beds, shops for groceries,
chauffeurs children about and lies beside her husband at night:
“Is this all?”
Confucious said that while a man’s parents were alive, he should not
travel far afi eld.
Will fatherhood make me happy?
A husband follows his wife and another man to a hotel room. Through
the keyhole he sees the pair embrace. As they fl ing off their clothes his
wife’s underwear catches on the doorknob, blocking his view of what
happens next— and leaving his faith in her fi delity intact.
Even in Mecca and Medina people have intercourse.
Armpits4August, a campaign, encourages women to grow underarm hair
for a month to challenge norms of beauty. Members of La Barbe, a shock
troop of French feminists set up in 2008, infi ltrate male-dominated meetings
wearing beards and derisively congratulate the men on their supremacy.
Immanuel Kant has the best insights into the gay-marriage debate— he argues that, once you have stripped away the nonsense,
marriage is nothing more than a contract for the mutual use of
the sex organs.
For those not naturally well endowed, breast implants may make economic sense: going from fl at-chested to a D-cup increases hourly rates
by approximately $40, meaning that at a typical price of $3,700, surgery
could pay for itself after around 90 hours.
It does seem that the little darlings really are good for your
health— something to remember next time your children’s behavior makes you want to scream.
95
Часть I
Plato described love as a serious mental disease. Aristotle saw it as a
single soul inhabiting two bodies. Tina Turner dismissed the feeling as
a second-hand emotion. The nature of love— how and when and why
and with whom humans fall for each other— has preoccupied thinkers
through the ages.
Shakespeare mused that “it is beyond the power of man to bring
love and wisdom to an union.”
A newly-discovered scrap of one of holy texts which seems to quote Jesus speaking of “my wife.” Karen King of Harvard University presented
a translation at a conference in Rome on September 18th. Churches that
believe their priests must be celibate in order to be like Jesus are not
about to change their rules, though. Assuming the fragment is genuine, it
shows only that others talked about Jesus using that word. The defi nition
of “wife” is open to question too: Gnostic writing also features terms such
as “bridal chamber”, used without any connotation of sexual intimacy.
The vagina is not nearly as free today in the West as we are led
to believe.
The problem with penises, as Richard Rudgley, a British anthropologist,
admitted on a television programme some years ago, is that once you
start noticing them, you “tend to see willies pretty much everywhere”.
The euro was supposed to be the manifestation of a grand political project. It feels more like a loveless marriage, in which the cost
of breaking up is the only thing keeping the partners together.
When he reads obituaries he looks not for the age of the deceased but
the length of their marriages, and envies those who had more time than
he did.
After all, whose spam fi lter does not groan with ads for suspiciously cheap “Viagra”?
One Chinese billionaire has particular requirements for a matchmaking
agency: suitable candidates should be aged 20–26, weigh less than 50kg
(110lb) and have no sexual experience. So far more than 5,000 young
women have applied.
“Customer 360” is due to be tested in the new London store next
spring. It will mean that Burberry keeps a detailed database on
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Love, marriage, family, sex, friendship, children
each customer’s spending habits. That could cause embarrassment, for example if a customer who has bought racy gifts for his
mistress enters a Burberry store with his wife and is enthusiastically ushered to the skimpy bikinis.
Are there no American children who have broken a leg at camp, suffered
psychological trauma by coming last in a race, or been discriminated
against by competing against stronger boys?
Finding a nice Jewish girl in Mississippi isn’t easy.
Beautiful fl owers — like beautiful women— can separate the most sensible men from their money. In the 17th century Holland, tulips grew so
expensive that people exchanged them for houses.
In early imperial Rome, when the emperor Augustus put a tax on
celibacy in response to anaemic marriage rates, he faced a spate
of betrothals to underage women, an open revolt from his senators— and a decline in his citizens’ conjugal appetites.
Are you cheating on your spouse? If so, please stand up and declare it.
Total silence? What virtuous readers The Economist has.
The latest survey of time use in America suggests women still
shoulder most of the housework, spending on average an hour a
day scrubbing, hoovering and shopping, compared with barely
20 minutes for the unfairer sex.
Performing a Mozart quartet takes just as long in 2012 as it did in the late
18th century.
Defi ning rape, or trying to, is a sure-fi re way to start a row. Does
age matter? (Insome countries, sex with minors is automatically
rape; in others, it is not.) Must it involve violence? What kind of sex
is involved? Is the victim by defi nition a woman and the perpetrator a man? Do time, location or the parties’ sexual histories play
any role?
I don’t know any successful women who haven’t had a powerful sponsor
in their organisation to give them their fi rst big break.
Marriage is a surprisingly good predictor of management style,
reckon Nikolai Roussanov and Pavel Savor of Wharton Business
97
Часть I
School. The average unmarried boss invests 69% more than his
married counterpart, they fi nd.
Lillian Hellman was a hypocritical “bitch with balls”, in the words of Elia
Kazan.
When Theits, Achilles’s mother, dipped her baby in the river Styx
to give him her gift of invulnerability, she had to hold him somewhere.
The upper-middle-class members of the Beggar’s Benison club in Scotland, founded in 1732, apparently thought nothing of arranging meetings
where they could drink, sing and fondle naked women. Such evenings
were brought to a fi tting climax, as it were, when they would communally ejaculate into a ceremonial pewter platter.
Americans need to vote to kick the state out of the bedroom, or
the boardroom, but not both.
Medically, it was possible to make a woman speak, but there was no
medical way of making one silent.
As someone who has studied Mandarin for years, Ican tell you
that the most diffi cult aspect of any language to master is neither
tone, grammar, nor spelling, but rather how to use it to communicate with a woman.
A golden wedding is a terrible time for a marital crisis.
The happy life seems to be lived in accordance with goodness,
and such a life implies seriousness and doesn’t consist in amusing oneself.
The judges decided that a child who has been brutalised becomes freer to
make sexual choices. So a child prostitute is somehow no longer a child.
People inherit mitochondria only from their mothers, which is
why only the female line of descent can be tracked using them.
Being liked is not the same as doing shit.
Being gay-friendly can attract gay customers, too. Witeck-Combs
Communications, a consultancy, estimates that gay Americans
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Love, marriage, family, sex, friendship, children
spend $835billion a year. But But homosexuality is still illegal
in 76 countries— including such vibrant business hubs as Dubai
and Singapore— and is punishable by death in Saudi Arabia, Iran
and parts of Nigeria. 29 US states still allow discrimination on the
basis of sexual preference.
“As part of their daily lives, children across Europe and the world continue to be spanked, slapped, hit, smacked, shaken, kicked, pinched,
punched, caned, fl ogged, belted, beaten and battered in the name of discipline, mainly by adults whom they depend on.”
Ali Hili, head of a group called Iraqi LGBT, (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) says that since the 2003 invasion
more than 700 people have been killed because of their sexuality. Lesbians in Muslim countries tend to have an easier
time: in Iran they are sentenced to death only on the fourth
conviction.
Why, though, allow yourself to be ambushed if you are a female? Why
mate with a second-class beau who cannot be bothered to bring you
the fi shy equivalent of roses and diamonds? No matter how hard males
compete, they will always be outwitted by the wiliest, most subversive
competitors of all: females.
With their talk of placing stability and growth above individual
rights, Communist offi cials sometimes make human rights sound
like air conditioning, or colour television: a luxury you can afford
once you acquire a certain level of wealth.
Women can be required to lift their veils “if necessary”— would that be
before or after a veiled suicide-bomber detonates her (orhis) device?
It is particularly striking in a Stockholm playground fi lled with
Somali toddlers, squeaking as they queue for sledge-rides.
When most people talk about “broken Britain” they mean whether someone stands for a pregnant woman on a train or fears being stabbed for
asking kids to throw their litter in a bin.
In 1849 George Bancroft, an American historian and diplomat,
said that for a man to have two countries was as intolerable as
for him to have two wives.
99
Часть I
It is thought that about 10m Asian women sell sex to 75m men, who in
turn have a further 50m regular partners.
Sharing a womb is not an ideal start to life.
To Mr Santorum the Supreme Court’s ruling in 2003 that anti-sodomy
laws were unconstitutional was a bad mistake: this was a slippery slope
that would establish a right to bigamy, polygamy, incest, adultery — “anything”.
When Iranians say “Death to America” they sometimes mean
“Please America, show me more love”.
“Pre-salt oil is like a pretty woman on a dance fl oor full of men,” Luiz
Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president, put it bluntly. “Everybody wants
a go.”
Relatives, friends, children and dogs are du, everyone else is Sie.
“Bin Laden”, he said, “is the illegitimate child of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher”.
To Edward Weston Charis Wilson was a landscape— in the repeated curve of her thigh and calf he saw shapes like sea shells,
with the luminescence and faint muscular rays of the great
chambered nautilus. Her torso, outlined in light, was like the
trunk of a cypress tree just entering the soil. Her skin, every follicle and fl aw in focus in the ground glass of his lens, had the
same sun- and sea-wind weathering, but fainter, of the stones of
the Californian desert, and her hips had the convolutions of the
naked mountains.
Any Mohawk who marries a non-native must leave. “Everyone knows
the law: if you marry out, you stay out”.
Mr Ahmadinejad compared Hillary Clinton, the American secretary of state, who has asked Syria to distance itself from Iran, to
“the daughter-in-law’s mother”, in the Iranian family a symbol of
easily ignored powerlessness.
Greater promiscuity in females does, indeed, lead to bigger testes, presumably because a male needs to make more sperm to have a fi ghting chance of fathering offspring, if those sperm are competing with
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