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3 - Emasculated Men, Absent Fathers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 May 2021

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Summary

Men weren't really the enemy—they were fellow victims suffering from outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.

Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

Juliusz Michulski's cult movie Sex Mission (1984) has been characterized as dystopia, as sci-ficomedy, and as political allegory unveiling the totalitarian nature of the Communist regime, built upon a lie and using a wide range of manipulative and repressive methods to maintain the desirable status quo. The film tells the utopian story of two men, Max and Albert, who voluntarily take part in a cryonic experiment in 1981. They are revived not three but fifty-three years later (in 2044), only to find out that the world has been destroyed by a nuclear explosion and the male population has become extinct.

To escape the alleged radiation, the surviving women have built underground cities in the old mines and established a matriarchal society ruled by Her Excellency (who later turns out to be a transvestite). In this world, women procreate by parthenogenesis, without the aid of men. They eat synthetic food and take pills that transform their sexual energy into a careerist drive. In school, the younger generation is indoctrinated to believe that men were the source of all evil and the direct cause of the nuclear catastrophe.

The revival of the two cryogenically frozen men soon turns the smoothly functioning feminine society upside down. Max and Albert attempt to seduce their female guards and refuse to obey their orders. As a result, they are sentenced to “naturalization” (i.e., castration) for their misbehavior. The two men manage to escape the underground world (with one female guard helping them and another one chasing them) and discover that the earth is perfectly inhabitable. In a small cottage on the beach, they find privacy, normal food, and … Her Excellency taking off her wig and artificial breasts. The two angry men decide to put an end to the lie that has kept women underground for more than fifty years and to restore the natural heterosexual order. They dress as women and go back underground to sabotage the cloning laboratories by putting sperm in every tube. The film ends with the victorious birth of the first male baby.

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Coming of Age under Martial Law
The Initiation Novels of Poland's Last Communist Generation
, pp. 62 - 98
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2015

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