I had been used to thinking, since about 20 years ago, she had been Komsomol chief and in that quality stated "to have sex is like having a glass of water, to me" ...
Here is what wiki has to say:
First:
Born Alexandra Mikhailovna Domontovich
31 March 1872
Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire
OK, sounds like she was 45 when the Russian Revolution broke out. Not exactly young enough for Komsomol.
Next, the Komsomol and the glass of water aren't pure figments of someone's debrided imagination, they are actually someone (whom I read and trusted) taking her words in a story as autobiographical:
A common myth describes her as a proponent of the "glass of water" theory of sexuality.[57] The quote "...the satisfaction of one's sexual desires should be as simple as getting a glass of water"[58] is often mistakenly attributed to her.[59] This is likely a distortion of the moment in her short story "Three Generations" when a young female Komsomol member argues that sex "is as meaningless as drinking a glass of vodka [or water, depending on the translation] to quench one's thirst."[60] In number 18 of her Theses on Communist Morality in the Sphere of Marital Relations, Kollontai argued that "...sexuality is a human instinct as natural as hunger or thirst."
So, will this have any kind of impact on some society which I have a relation to? I'm not Russian ... well, yes. She was a diplomat in Norway and in Sweden, for the Soviet Union.
And while in Sweden she supported and influenced RFSU. And no, it's not so much "free love" in the sense of I Am Curious (Yellow), it's the rejection of marriage, Alexandra Kollontai being a pendant to Almqvist with Sara Videbeck and the Chapel, a rejection of marriage as lifelong and exclusive.
How did I get to think of and look up Alexandra Kollontai?
Well, it seems she had a somewhat parodic pendant in Sue Ellen Browder ... according to herself (Sue Ellen, not Alexandra), in her Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women's Movement. Whom Lois McLatchie-Miller evoked in her open letter to Lily Phillips.
Another bad influence of Alexandra Kollontai on Sweden:
The workers' state needs new relations between the sexes, just as the narrow and exclusive affection of the mother for her own children must expand until it extends to all the children of the great, proletarian family, the indissoluble marriage based on the servitude of women is replaced by a free union of two equal members of the workers' state who are united by love and mutual respect. In place of the individual and egoistic family, a great universal family of workers will develop, in which all the workers, men and women, will above all be comrades. – Alexandra Kollontai (1920), Communism and the Family
There are people who really think they are the mother not just of the own children, but of the neighbours' children all the way down the street and around two more corners. The Kollontai promoted them. Sweden has them. Alexander I did less damage to Finland or Sweden than Alexandra did to Norway* and Sweden.** I consider it especially grotesque when they are critical of the children's own mother and have more social leverage than she has.
A pendant to the non-exclusivity of wifehood is obviously the non-exclusivity of motherhood. When I left Sweden for Austria in 1977 (with voyages to US and UK, same and next year), I was not yet a Christian, had a long way to go before puberty, and these things didn't matter to me. Since I came back in 1980, being a Christian, having seen Austria, a country where at least you wouldn't speak of contraception and where abortion on demand had been illegal, and still remains rare to this day, I have never been reconciled to what Alexandra Kollontai did to my country. I left it in 2004.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Ember Friday
20.XII.2024
Alexandra Kollontai, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Kollontai
* 25 October 1927 to 20 July 1930 ** 20 July 1930 to 27 July 1945.
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