Beyond Rivalry - sexuality

Delusions, Illusions

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 05:12:00 -0500

Reading lots, between my inter-library loaned crime novels -- finished Tana French's The Likeness last week, am reading PD James' new Dalgleish novel, The Private Patient, now, and have Reginald Hill's The Price of Butcher's Meat to read afterwards -- and the arrival of the Wall Street Journal through the door slot almost every day, a little 6-month perk for having completed about 200 online surveys in the last few years ... I love the WSJ, its editorial board notwithstanding.

Here are a couple of recent gems from its pages:

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Destructive Delusions: How therapists and 'victims' seized on the idea of repressed memory, leveling false charges and ruining lives, by Theodore Dalrymple, a book review of Dr. Paul McHugh's Try to Remember: Psychiatry's Clash Over Meaning, Memory, and Mind. Best lines:

"One of the most extraordinary outbreaks of popular delusion in recent years was that which attached to the possibility of 'recovered memory' of sexual and satanic childhood abuse, and to an illness it supposedly caused, Multiple Personality Disorder. No medieval peasant praying to a household god for the recovery of his pig could have been more credulous than scores of psychiatrists, hosts of therapists and thousands of willing victims."…

RIP Del Martin (1921 - 2008)

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 10:45:00 -0400

Lesbian rights pioneer and longtime activist Del Martin died yesterday at age 87. She and her partner of 55 years, Phyllis Lyons, were married in the first legal gay union in California in June in San Francisco.

"While working for a construction trade journal in Seattle, Ms. Martin met Ms. Lyon, an employee at the same firm, and the two became romantically involved and entered into a permanent relationship in 1953."

Imagine what that was like, in 1953 ...

(Photo credit: Woman Vision Productions)

Girard's Influence on Anglican Speech

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 12:10:00 -0400

Austen Ivereigh writes at the Catholic weekly America's blog, In All Things, today about the influence of Rene Girard and Chiara Lubich on the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams' "unity" speech to the bishops gathered at the Lambeth Conference. If you don't follow Anglican or Episcopal politics, you may not know that there is a rift in the church on the issue of gay rights, including authorisation of same-sex marriage and ordination of gay bishops. That rift may be metonymous for the larger conflict between 'traditonalists' and 'liberalists' in the church.

Ivereigh masterfully summarises in a paragraph Girard's central idea about the mimetic mechanism and scapegoating, then looks at large chunks of Williams' speech for the influence both of Girard and of the Italian mystic Chiara Lubich, whom he identifies for her practice of kenosis, or self-empyting for the sake of other. (Girard and Girardians also speak of kenosis as essential to Christ and therefore something to imitate.)

I definitely take a 'side' in this debate, but reading the Archbishops' articulation of what the 'other side' hopes 'my side' will hear, I feel empathy for their pov.

The whole speech is at Ruth Gledhill's column.

Photo: Harriseye (Flickr)

Disgust, Boundaries and Mortality

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 19:28:48 -0400

A long article in Psychology Today ("Mystery of disgust" by Erik D'Amato, 1998), examining what makes something disgusting, and why, contains this interesting bit:

"[E]ach area of disgust is, in its own way, a jarring reminder of our animal nature. The things that most disgust us -- defecating, dying, giving birth, eating dubious or unclean foods -- are the very traits we most conspicuously share with other animals.

"Perhaps it's no coincidence that the only body product we generally don't find disgusting is tears -- the only one considered uniquely human.

"Social disgust operates much the same way, according to [Jonathan] Haidt: 'If physical disgust is about distinguishing ourselves from animals, then social disgust is about distinguishing ourselves from "demons." "Human being" is a charged category, and we want to keep its boundaries clearly defined. Someone who cheats on his taxes can be human; someone who eats human flesh cannot. Socially disgusting acts are those that reveal that you have inhuman motives.'"

"The reason such reminders of our 'animality' are so harrowing may be equally uncomplicated: any reminder of our animal nature is also a reminder of our own mortality. Certainly, we can coolly discuss death and even come to terms…

The Flaws are Erotic

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 11:30:25 -0400

Two ideas (one idea) from Book Group Buzz. The folks there find these quotes useful for starting a provocative conversation about a book. I think they would be, but even more so simply as a way to look at the world and relationships.

Two lines from Rumi:

Keep looking at the bandaged place.
That's where the light enters you.

And a comment made by a sex addict:

"After the first hundred beautiful bodies, it's the flaws that are erotic."

Reminds me of May Sarton's question (in Recovering), "Is there anyone, I sometimes wonder, who is not wounded and in the process of healing?" Or perhaps not healing ...

BergmanFest!: Cries & Whispers

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 21:00:00 -0400

I've uploaded another PDF file for anyone to use, a backgrounder for Cries & Whispers (1972), the last in the BergmanFest! series I'm hosting now.

Measure for Measure and Eliot Spitzer

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 16:20:00 -0400

The first thing I thought of when I heard about New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's implication in a prostitution ring, after his years of hard-line rectitude, was the Shakespeare play, Measure for Measure, rather fresh in my mind since I saw it last summer. Even the title of the play, taken from Matthew 7:2 -- "For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again" -- makes the connection pretty obvious, but Spitzer's similarity (as portrayed in the media, anyway) to the Duke's puritanical-seeming deputy, Angelo, brings the point home. Angelo is known first and foremost as a strict and merciless enforcer of the laws, a zealous man, a disciplined man, a man who resists temptation; as the Duke says, Angelo "scarce confesses that his blood flows, or that his appetite is more to bread than stone."

Spitzer's critics and observers paint him with much the same brush: "I've never known anyone who was more self-righteous and unforgiving than Eliot Spitzer," said U.S. Rep. Peter King (R) of Long Island. Daniel Gross, at Slate, says that one thing is clear: "Spitzer has been hoisted by his own petard,…

Glenn Gould

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 20:40:00 -0400

If you have an interest in Glenn Gould, I recommend this article from the Toronto Star to you: "The Secret Life of Glenn Gould: Nearly 25 years after the death of perhaps the greatest piano virtuoso of the 20th century, the Star reveals a dramatically fresh portrait of the Canadian icon." Describes his relationship with a married woman (and quite a bit about her apart from him), his unusual sense of humour, his paranoid episodes, and his phobias, addictions and obsessions.

Current Reading

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 16:20:00 -0400

A smattering of online ideas, opinions, images that are intriquing, amusing, perplexing, and inspiring me right now:

1. America Assimilates Terrorists. Source: Onion: "After 5 Years In U.S., Terrorist Cell Too Complacent To Carry Out Attack." TV addiction, weight gain, and debt has done 'em in.

2. Sorted Books Project. (via Blog on a Toothpick.) Fabulous. Books and journals shelved to tell a story. Example: A Day at the Beach. The Bathers. Shark 1. Shark 2. Shark 3. Sudden Violence. Silence. Also: Genealogy of the Supermarket.

3. Eye contact and shame as invitation to violence at Preaching Peace: "Using shame to keep order will ultimately result in violent chaos and death as the citizens and community become each others' police. While there are laws and agencies to prevent this, the fact that the leadership has resorted to invoking shame suggests that they're not working..."

4. Sex and death, reminders of mortality, from Experimental Theology: "[I]t appears that there are good theoretical, observational, and scientific reasons to believe that religious faith is operating as an existential buffer, as a defense-mechanism to repress death anxiety. This will not prove to be the final story about faith. But it is the beginning of all…

Self-Restraint and Instinct

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 11:05:23 -0400

Dave Pollard's post on The M Word (as he calls it) is insightful and illuminating, especially his analysis of why masturbation is so frowned upon. (I have to think more about the prescriptions that follows his analysis, though.)

After comparing and contrasting the activity of masturbation with the activity of playing video games, he asks why the stigma against masturbation exists. His answer is that there are two reasons, which we have confused.

The first is instinctual, Darwinian: "Social activities are best done with other people, not alone." Eating, sleeping, working (hunting), talking and having sex with others helps the species succeed more than doing these things alone. (He explains each of those.)

The second is cultural and derives from 7 billion of us living together on a crowded planet in which power is maintained by hierarchy and a manufactured sense of scarcity: "Self-restraint is a virtue."

Pollard says, "When it comes to things we 'must' do -- eat, sleep, have sex -- self-restraint dictates that these things be done with decorum or (as with sleeping and sex) when this is impossible, in private. Self-restraint also dictates that these things be done as rarely as absolutely necessary, and hence overeating and…