Ten Million Women For Kissinger
I wish I could have seen the look on Kissinger’s face when Mao Zedong offered him ten million women during trade discussions in 1973:
“You know, China is a very poor country,” Mao said, according to a document released by the State Department’s historian office.
“We don’t have much. What we have in excess is women. So if you want them we can give a few of those to you, some tens of thousands.”
A few minutes later, Mao circled back to the offer. “Do you want our Chinese women?” he asked. “We can give you 10 million.”
After Kissinger noted Mao was “improving his offer,” the chairman said, “We have too many women. … They give birth to children and our children are too many.”
“It is such a novel proposition,” Kissinger replied in his discussion with Mao in Beijing. “We will have to study it.”
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so, he’s not such a great negotiator after all
That makes Osama’s 72 virgins offer sound a bit lame….
You know that I usually I see the funny in these things (and maybe it’s just that I’ve imbibed some things this evening and had a fight with my boyfriend – not that that last fact makes me bitter towards all men or anything) but I don’t see the funny in this particular thing. It just reminds me of the suffering of so many women under successive regimes in China, their so-called “one child policy” and the rampant sexism which still exists in the Chinese culture.
Or maybe I’m just not seeing the funny. It is something about Kissinger? I’m not terribly well-acquainted with him or his standing in the common consciousness, so perhaps there’s an element I’m missing.
SydneyGal, I won’t claim to have posted this because it’s funny, though I did try to funny it up a bit.
I thought it was interesting and on topic for a sex blog because the idea of treating a country’s women as an exportable assent on such a grand scale has resonances with issues of modern concern, such as sex worker migration, the “mail order bride” phenomenon, and the ugly patterns of modern pimpery that entangle a subset of the migrant sex worker population.
The only thing that strikes me as funny about this is Kissenger’s famously phlegmetic disposition — if his face showed any sort of surprise, it would have been a miracle of the age, and yet, this might have gotten under his defenses. We’ll never know.
My only contribution to the humor of it — obviously pretty lame — was the headline, designed to suggest that the women were offered to Kissenger personally, as some sort of enormous harem. Now, if that had happened, it would be funny.
Yes, it’s because its Henry “Power is the Ultimate Aphrodisiac” Kissinger, who was rather famous in the “being ‘seen’ with women you wouldn’t expect a weird dumpy guy with glasses like that, would get the time of day from” department way back in ancient times (such as 1973), and is still quite infamous for being Ruthless Mr. Realpolitik and a Nobel Peace Prize Winning alleged war criminal.
The anecdote would only be disturbing and macabre if it just involved Mao rather than both funny *and* if anything even more disturbing and macabre with both of them in it.
Also his quite distinctive central european accent is I suspect something you’re really supposed to be mentally applying to the “We will have to study it” line to get the full blackly comic effect.
It a deeply dark variety of absurdist funny certainly. Think Dr. Strangelove and the closing ‘mineshaft gap’ scene.
The explanation re Kissinger’s accent, phlegmatic nature and unlikely studliness does give it a wry element indeed. Thanks.