Glass of water theory
물 한 잔 이론
The view that in a communist society satisfying sexual desire would be as simple and unimportant as drinking a glass of water. Reducing love and marriage to the satisfaction of an instinctive need free of “bourgeois conventions”, it spread widely among Soviet youth after the revolution. Often attributed to Kollontai, it was never her claim. Lenin and Lunacharsky criticised it, and it faded by the end of the 1920s.
In depth
The image first appears in Liszt’s biography of Chopin (1852), in words attributed to George Sand: “Love, like a glass of water, is given to whoever asks for it.” The idea that socialism would abolish the bourgeois family goes back to Marx and Engels; in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State Engels treated the family as part of the superstructure on the economic base and monogamy as a means of passing wealth to one’s own children, and held that under socialism housework and child-rearing would become social labour and the bourgeois family would wither away. In early Soviet society, amid decrees allowing no-grounds divorce and recognising only civil marriage and experiments such as the Down with Shame society, the likening of sex to any other physiological act such as quenching thirst peaked in the 1920s and became a subject for the press and Komsomol debates. The theory is commonly attributed to Alexandra Kollontai or Clara Zetkin without foundation.
Kollontai advocated free love, but held that casual encounters under continuing inequality between the sexes would leave women exploited and raising children alone. The attribution probably distorts a scene in her story “Three Generations” (1923), in which a young Komsomol woman calls sex as meaningless as drinking a glass of vodka, or water, to quench one’s thirst; in her Theses on Communist Morality she wrote that sexuality is “a human instinct as natural as hunger or thirst”. The same year she published “Make Way for Winged Eros!” in Molodaya Gvardiya. According to Zetkin’s memoir, Lenin called the theory “completely un-Marxist and, moreover, anti-social”, asking whether a normal person would lie down in the gutter to drink from a puddle, or from a glass whose rim had been touched by dozens of lips.
Lunacharsky, in “Youth and the ‘Glass of Water’ Theory”, based on a lecture in Leningrad in December 1926, called for serious, restrained love in place of bourgeois debauchery and a “nihilistic” view of bare sexual need. Aron Zalkind’s Twelve Sexual Commandments of the Revolutionary Proletariat (1924) took its place, and in 1926–1929 the theory came under heavy attack. 1929 is considered the end of the Bolshevik sexual revolution and of the glass of water theory, though some researchers date its formal end to the law against pornography of 1935. The ideal Soviet woman of the 1930s was expected to carry the duties of both work and family.