Bittermuch (and De Sade) on Politics In the Bedroom

J.J. Bittermuch writes from hell:

I’m struck by how often Americans cannot seem to understand why anyone would hate us, nor fail to fall to their knees in gratitude when we tell them the live their lives and run their countries.

So, let me offer what, I hope, will be a clarifying anecdote.

Some time ago, now, I saw that a woman has written a relationship book that counsels women on how to deal with their men. The book has drawn endless fire from social critics because, the critics said, the book told women to submit to their husbands without a whimper.

I finally got around to looking at the text and discovered that, in fact, it said no such thing. Boiled down to elementals, what the author actually wrote was that if women cared to keep their husbands and boyfriends then they should not correct their every utterance, nor call them stupid and ineffectual in front of their friends or children, nor devalue their ideas or ambitions, nor otherwise treat them as annoying yet dimwitted anthropoids who haven’t quite learned how to count above ten without taking off their shoes to use their toes.

I love it.

What other culture on the planet would define basic civility toward your life-mate as the morbid symptom of pathological masochism?