Sep 8, 2017 02:26 AM
(This post was last modified: Sep 9, 2017 04:29 AM by C C.)
Our trouble with sex
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/08/...ian-story/
EXCERPT: [...] This raises an important issue. If you believe that the religious views espoused by the early Christians were divinely inspired, that God set these notions forth, then there are no more questions to ask about them. If you think, however, that religious rules likely grew out of extra-religious concerns (such as the desire for racial purity), then you must try to understand what some of those concerns were and from whence they came.
One of the tortures described by the Chechen men who were detained earlier this year was that their tormentors, in addition to subjecting them to beating, starving, and electrical shocks, called them by women’s names. This in fact is another example of a way of thinking that is pervasive in the regulations described in Sex and the Constitution: nearly all—if not all—of them, in one way or another, implicate the status of women in society and give evidence of the recurrent misogyny in views about sex that has been present and powerful throughout history and across cultures.
Consider the swinging Greeks and Romans. They had no problem with same-sex activity, but the participants were not viewed equally. The receptive partner during anal or oral sex was cast in that most dreaded role: woman. That was fine for a boy before he reached manhood. It was not so great for an adult to have his manhood taken from him by being made to resemble the inferior female. Even during the most sexually open periods described in Stone’s book, women were judged by a different standard than men. They were given less freedom and suffered for their participation in sex even in cultures that were supposedly sexually progressive.
Many of the regulations described in Sex and the Constitution could be found in places and among people who had never heard of—or certainly can’t be said to have been affected by—the early Christians, Augustine, or Aquinas. This suggests that we may have to look beyond the influence of any one religion to understand how and why we have set the rules of sex by which we have lived. What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman? These are questions humans have struggled to answer, probably from the beginning of human history. Religion is only one way we have attempted to establish answers to them. Engaging with other possible influences more fully—specifically efforts throughout history to control women and perpetuate negative attitudes about womanhood—would have made Stone’s very important book longer, but it would have brought a needed perspective to his analysis.
MORE: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/08/...ian-story/
Victimhood: A traumatic history
http://www.spiked-online.com/spiked-revi...bBqwMiGM2x
EXCERPT: Bridging two academic worlds, Edgar Jones is ideally placed to understand the history of psychological trauma. He trained as an economic and social historian at Nuffield College, Oxford, but, as he explains in his office at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London, ‘I always wanted to be a psychotherapist’. This led him to work unpaid as a nursing auxiliary in the department of psychiatry at Guy’s Hospital in London, before using his earnings as a self-employed historian to pay his way through medical school (culminating in a doctorate in clinical pathology). And it was at Guy’s that he began to draw upon his undergraduate training to research the history of psychiatry, especially the growing understanding of the psychological effects of conflict. All of which gives Jones a unique insight, as a clinician and a historian, into the development of the idea of trauma.
[...]
review: You mention the role of the frame, of the context. Do you think the narrative of victimhood today does tend to bring with it the expectation that people almost ought to be traumatised by a bad event in their lives?
Jones: I agree. Over the course of the past century, there’s been a cultural switch. During the First and Second World War, you were expected to be resilient, you were expected to be well. And if you were traumatised, you were considered a bit unusual and potentially vulnerable. In wartime, it would be cast as being almost cowardly. Yet, today, we’ve almost gone full circle, and forgotten about the resilient side. Because, in actual fact, most people will not suffer from PTSD if exposed to a terrifying event. If you expose 100 people to the same event, PTSD rates tend to be anything from around three to 15 per cent. So that means 85 per cent of people may be frightened following a terrifying or bad experience, but they won’t get PTSD. They will have natural recovery mechanisms. And that alternative narrative, that awareness of our recovery mechanisms, has tended to be lost....
MORE: http://www.spiked-online.com/spiked-revi...bBqwMiGM2x
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/08/...ian-story/
EXCERPT: [...] This raises an important issue. If you believe that the religious views espoused by the early Christians were divinely inspired, that God set these notions forth, then there are no more questions to ask about them. If you think, however, that religious rules likely grew out of extra-religious concerns (such as the desire for racial purity), then you must try to understand what some of those concerns were and from whence they came.
One of the tortures described by the Chechen men who were detained earlier this year was that their tormentors, in addition to subjecting them to beating, starving, and electrical shocks, called them by women’s names. This in fact is another example of a way of thinking that is pervasive in the regulations described in Sex and the Constitution: nearly all—if not all—of them, in one way or another, implicate the status of women in society and give evidence of the recurrent misogyny in views about sex that has been present and powerful throughout history and across cultures.
Consider the swinging Greeks and Romans. They had no problem with same-sex activity, but the participants were not viewed equally. The receptive partner during anal or oral sex was cast in that most dreaded role: woman. That was fine for a boy before he reached manhood. It was not so great for an adult to have his manhood taken from him by being made to resemble the inferior female. Even during the most sexually open periods described in Stone’s book, women were judged by a different standard than men. They were given less freedom and suffered for their participation in sex even in cultures that were supposedly sexually progressive.
Many of the regulations described in Sex and the Constitution could be found in places and among people who had never heard of—or certainly can’t be said to have been affected by—the early Christians, Augustine, or Aquinas. This suggests that we may have to look beyond the influence of any one religion to understand how and why we have set the rules of sex by which we have lived. What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman? These are questions humans have struggled to answer, probably from the beginning of human history. Religion is only one way we have attempted to establish answers to them. Engaging with other possible influences more fully—specifically efforts throughout history to control women and perpetuate negative attitudes about womanhood—would have made Stone’s very important book longer, but it would have brought a needed perspective to his analysis.
MORE: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/08/...ian-story/
Victimhood: A traumatic history
http://www.spiked-online.com/spiked-revi...bBqwMiGM2x
EXCERPT: Bridging two academic worlds, Edgar Jones is ideally placed to understand the history of psychological trauma. He trained as an economic and social historian at Nuffield College, Oxford, but, as he explains in his office at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London, ‘I always wanted to be a psychotherapist’. This led him to work unpaid as a nursing auxiliary in the department of psychiatry at Guy’s Hospital in London, before using his earnings as a self-employed historian to pay his way through medical school (culminating in a doctorate in clinical pathology). And it was at Guy’s that he began to draw upon his undergraduate training to research the history of psychiatry, especially the growing understanding of the psychological effects of conflict. All of which gives Jones a unique insight, as a clinician and a historian, into the development of the idea of trauma.
[...]
review: You mention the role of the frame, of the context. Do you think the narrative of victimhood today does tend to bring with it the expectation that people almost ought to be traumatised by a bad event in their lives?
Jones: I agree. Over the course of the past century, there’s been a cultural switch. During the First and Second World War, you were expected to be resilient, you were expected to be well. And if you were traumatised, you were considered a bit unusual and potentially vulnerable. In wartime, it would be cast as being almost cowardly. Yet, today, we’ve almost gone full circle, and forgotten about the resilient side. Because, in actual fact, most people will not suffer from PTSD if exposed to a terrifying event. If you expose 100 people to the same event, PTSD rates tend to be anything from around three to 15 per cent. So that means 85 per cent of people may be frightened following a terrifying or bad experience, but they won’t get PTSD. They will have natural recovery mechanisms. And that alternative narrative, that awareness of our recovery mechanisms, has tended to be lost....
MORE: http://www.spiked-online.com/spiked-revi...bBqwMiGM2x