Jun 29, 2019 03:48 AM
https://aeon.co/ideas/why-is-psychedelic...-white-men
EXCERPT (Nigel Warburton): . . . All of its figureheads, from Aldous Huxley to Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna and Hamilton Morris have been drawn from this limited demographic. But as the use of psychedelics expands, evolves and becomes more diverse, its longstanding biases of gender and ethnicity are becoming more conspicuous. If these substances are a portal to ultimate reality, as their advocates claim, why do they appear to be the preserve of such a narrow segment of humanity? The straight-white-male psychedelic hegemony clearly has roots in the gender politics of the 1960s counterculture from which it emerged. Its early champions were of an era that was conventional in its gender bias and strictly normative in its assumptions about sexual orientation.
[...] The first subjective account of a peyote trip by a woman, the New York socialite Mabel Dodge Luhan in 1914, is narrated in a quite different voice. Luhan recalls in her memoirs a salon evening that spun wildly out of control when an anthropologist friend introduced a handful of peyote buttons to the mix. She includes vivid descriptions of her hallucinations, but is much more interested in the social tensions and power dynamics that the peyote reveals: who controls the ceremony, who obeys the rules and who rebels against them, who is transported and who is terrified. Her report isn’t science, but it’s a reminder of how much is ignored or excluded by the clinical gaze.
Ever since, trip reports by women have been exceptions to the norm. Within science [...] some of the most insightful descriptions of non-Western peyote use, for example, have come from female researchers such as Alice Marriott and Barbara Myerhoff in the 1970s. Within the mind sciences, the female first-person report is much rarer. There are examples among the first wave of LSD subjects – Adelle Davis, Anaïs Nin, Laura Huxley, Constance Newland – but they are rarely recalled in comparison with those of their male contemporaries, perhaps because their accounts tend to be more ambivalent than the grand claims of Leary and those who followed him in making psychedelics the centre of their personal narrative and professional career.
In recent years, the diversity of psychedelic users has become more visible. The largest international conference on psychedelics, Breaking Convention in London, has led the way in giving prominence to female voices, along with those of indigenous groups and nonwhite ethnicities. Similarly, a recent conference in San Francisco was dedicated to ‘Queering Psychedelics’ [...] it aimed ‘to decolonise knowledge, to invert the white, straight, biomedical narrative that is hegemonic in the field of psychedelic science’. (MORE - details)
RELATED: Coming out of the psychedelic closet -- The decades-long “War on Drugs” has created a situation in which the use of psychedelics is a social justice issue
EXCERPT (Nigel Warburton): . . . All of its figureheads, from Aldous Huxley to Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna and Hamilton Morris have been drawn from this limited demographic. But as the use of psychedelics expands, evolves and becomes more diverse, its longstanding biases of gender and ethnicity are becoming more conspicuous. If these substances are a portal to ultimate reality, as their advocates claim, why do they appear to be the preserve of such a narrow segment of humanity? The straight-white-male psychedelic hegemony clearly has roots in the gender politics of the 1960s counterculture from which it emerged. Its early champions were of an era that was conventional in its gender bias and strictly normative in its assumptions about sexual orientation.
[...] The first subjective account of a peyote trip by a woman, the New York socialite Mabel Dodge Luhan in 1914, is narrated in a quite different voice. Luhan recalls in her memoirs a salon evening that spun wildly out of control when an anthropologist friend introduced a handful of peyote buttons to the mix. She includes vivid descriptions of her hallucinations, but is much more interested in the social tensions and power dynamics that the peyote reveals: who controls the ceremony, who obeys the rules and who rebels against them, who is transported and who is terrified. Her report isn’t science, but it’s a reminder of how much is ignored or excluded by the clinical gaze.
Ever since, trip reports by women have been exceptions to the norm. Within science [...] some of the most insightful descriptions of non-Western peyote use, for example, have come from female researchers such as Alice Marriott and Barbara Myerhoff in the 1970s. Within the mind sciences, the female first-person report is much rarer. There are examples among the first wave of LSD subjects – Adelle Davis, Anaïs Nin, Laura Huxley, Constance Newland – but they are rarely recalled in comparison with those of their male contemporaries, perhaps because their accounts tend to be more ambivalent than the grand claims of Leary and those who followed him in making psychedelics the centre of their personal narrative and professional career.
In recent years, the diversity of psychedelic users has become more visible. The largest international conference on psychedelics, Breaking Convention in London, has led the way in giving prominence to female voices, along with those of indigenous groups and nonwhite ethnicities. Similarly, a recent conference in San Francisco was dedicated to ‘Queering Psychedelics’ [...] it aimed ‘to decolonise knowledge, to invert the white, straight, biomedical narrative that is hegemonic in the field of psychedelic science’. (MORE - details)
RELATED: Coming out of the psychedelic closet -- The decades-long “War on Drugs” has created a situation in which the use of psychedelics is a social justice issue