HISTSEX ARCHIVES: 21-29 FEB 2000
© Lesley Hall and list contributors
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 18:08:32 +1100
From: Hera Cook <hera.cook@history.usyd.edu.au>
Subject: Re: not being damaged by abuse
Anne Dietrich wrote:
> An adult touching a child in a sexual manner is exploiting that child's
> trust, whether the child knows it or not as a child, and whether or not the adult grows
> up to rationalize the abuse as acceptable (as in the quotes posted to this list earlier
> tonight).
> You seem to read these quotes as that these people have not been traumatized by it -- I am
> not so ready to accept that point of view. They may simply have introjected the beliefs of
> their abusers -- normalizing sexual abuse and not being cognizant of possible damage. They
> may be in denial. They may be utilizing posttraumatic avoidance and numbing. If they faced
> the actual harmfulness of the abuse, it may well be too painful for them to bear, and so
> they need to minimize and deny and rationalize.
>
Hi Anne,
I am sorry but I believe in allowing people to interpret their own experience. I have no
right to tell others they do not feel what they say they feel. This is challenging - there
are all kinds of situations in which an outsider might say people are being exploited but
those involved deny this. Also many people do routinely avoid their own feelings and live in
a state of denial. However Freudian concepts such as negation or denial are profoundly
authoritarian and this is the only stance I can defend. You use the term 'normalising' to
reject the possibility that an individual's own non-normal interpretation of their experience
might be correct. I can't accept that there is only one way of having this experience and
that we have the right to impose it
upon others. That is normalising as I would use the term - imposing societal definitions and
standards blanket fashion
on others. People don't fit into categories and sexual desire (all desire) is very
multi-faceted, ambivalent and complex and changing.
To understand when people are actually denying their own feelings and experience one has to
search the evidence in each case and look for contradictions, apparent evasions or absences.
And always, of course, question the assumptions we are bringing to our evidence. In the end
if these individuals say they were not damaged - then I would accept they were not. Just as I
would expect someone to accept my estimation of my sexual experience. Historically on the
'concept' - definitions of child abuse in western societies have changed enormously even in
the last century. One of the most challenging tasks for a historian is to understand how
concepts that may seem self-evident have changed radically.
Hera
Hera Cook
History Department
MacCallum Building A17
University of Sydney
NSW 2006
Australia
Phone 61 2 9351 2862, Fax 61 2 9351 3918
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 03:11:22 -0500
From: Julienne <julienne@ptd.net>
Subject: Re: not being damaged by abuse
At 06:08 PM 2/21/00 +1100, Hera Cook wrote:
>Hi Anne,
>I am sorry but I believe in allowing people to interpret their own
>experience. I have no
>right to tell others they do not feel what they say they feel. This is
>challenging - there
>are all kinds of situations in which an outsider might say people are
>being exploited but
>those involved deny this. Also many people do routinely avoid their own
>feelings and live in
>a state of denial. However Freudian concepts such as negation or denial
>are profoundly
>authoritarian and this is the only stance I can defend. You use the term
>'normalising' to
>reject the possibility that an individual's own non-normal interpretation
>of their experience
>might be correct. I can't accept that there is only one way of having this
>experience and
>that we have the right to impose it upon others. That is normalising as I
>would use the
>term - imposing societal definitions and standards blanket fashion on
>others. People don't
>fit into categories and sexual desire (all desire) is very multi-faceted,
>ambivalent and
>complex and changing.
>
>To understand when people are actually denying their own feelings and
>experience one has to
>search the evidence in each case and look for contradictions, apparent
>evasions or absences.
>And always, of course, question the assumptions we are bringing to our
>evidence. In the end
>if these individuals say they were not damaged - then I would accept they
>were not. Just as I
>would expect someone to accept my estimation of my sexual experience.
>Historically on the
>'concept' - definitions of child abuse in western societies have changed
>enormously even in
>the last century. One of the most challenging tasks for a historian is to
>understand how
>concepts that may seem self-evident have changed radically.
>Hera
And, Hera, would you also accept the statement of the physically abused
that s/he
wasn't abused? Most abused wives and children accept that they "deserved" it...
and that it did them no harm. Look at the guy busy hitting his child
because his own
Dad hit him, and "it did me no harm".
Maybe we need to ask the sexual partners of the sexually abused...maybe
they know more about what the real effects were.
Julienne
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 09:22:07 +0000
From: Paula <fa1912@wlv.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: child sexual abuse
Louise Jackson has a book out on child sexual abuse this year - it's a
Routledge publication.
Paula Bartley
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 09:59:43 -0500
From: David Nicholas Harley <David.N.Harley.4@nd.edu>
Subject: Hormones, genetic determinism, and history
Jim Miller wrote:
There is a world of difference between sexual situations
>involving pre-adolescents and sexual situations involving adolescents. The
>former do not have the hormones which drive many adolesents not only to
>accept sexual advances from adults, but to make them as well.
David Harley comments:
I think that as historians we need to beware of taking for granted the
popular science that is fed to us by science pundits and the media. The
idea that hormones "drive" people is a very odd one, since it would suggest
that all humans at all times have exactly the same range of desires,
fuelled by hormonal impulses. This is a very recent notion, and one that
many biologists would reject, as also its cousin genetic determinism (e.g.
the "gay gene"). See Anne Fausto-Sterling's recent book, Sexing the Body,
and Lenny Moss's forthcoming What Genes Can't Do. It makes more sense to
think in terms of a feedback system that operates between culture and
biology, so that current cultural norms become naturalized in the body
developmentally. How can we historicize the early twentieth-century notion
of sex hormones if we cannot stand back a little from yesterday's orthodoxy
or today's "common sense"?
David Harley,
Dept. of History,
University of Notre Dame,
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
tel.: 219-631-7789
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 07:04:21 -0800
From: Anne Dietrich <amdma@telus.net>
Subject: Re: not being damaged by abuse
Hera,
Are you saying that you are rejecting concepts such as repression and denial on the grounds that
they are authoritarian? Modern notions of traumatic amnesia and dissociation have nothing to do
with Freudian notions of repression, but rather are premised in Janetian notions of dissociation.
There is nothing authoritarian about this. In short, I retain the possibility as a hypothesis,
rather than automatically rejecting it out of hand. As much as I believe in equality, etc., I
have also seen firsthand the dissociation and avoidance and numbing that occurs with persons who
have been sexually abused. Of course, I would never presume to tell a client that they were
harmed if they insist that they were not, but I keep the possibility in the back of my mind as a
working hypothesis. Many adult survivors have aftereffects of abuse, for which they seek
treatment, without making a connection between their symptoms and the earlier abuse. Here's a
hypothetical example: Clients may present for treatment for substance abuse. During an assessment
interview, they reveal an adolescent rape, and report that they started abusing substances right
after the rape. They may say, "no the rape hasn't affected me," but they don't see the
connection between their substance abuse and rape. This kind of stuff happens more than some
people might want to believe.
Anne
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 07:08:41 -0800
From: Anne Dietrich <amdma@telus.net>
Subject: Re: child sexual abuse
Of course, Bob, language shapes identity and notions of reality. However, children
think and perceive differently than adults do. Their initial conceptions of
themselves, others, and the world are very different from adults. Read Jean
Piaget, for example.
Anne
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 10:21:42 -0600
From: Bob <suannschafer@earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: child sexuality
>In mutual, healthy, adult sexual relationships (whether heterosexual or
>homosexual), there is pleasure in giving and pleasure in receiving.
I neither doubt nor dispute the above.
>Sexual
>behavior between mutually consenting adults need not be selfish.
Yet I would insist there is a "selfish" component to "sexual behavior
between mutually consenting adults."
> It can be very
>loving and giving (and pleasurable for just that reason).
Indeed.
>
> > >Children
> > >need to be cuddled and caressed, but not abused and exploited for
> > >the adult's selfish
> > >sexual pleasure.
> >
> > All "sexual pleasure" is "selfish."
> >
> > >And
> > >yes, I believe children do, and should, have an independent sexuality ...
> >
> > Agreed.
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 10:28:21 -0600
From: Bob <suannschafer@earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: not being damaged by abuse
>At 06:08 PM 2/21/00 +1100, Hera Cook wrote:
>
>>Hi Anne,
>>I am sorry but I believe in allowing people to interpret their own
>>experience. I have no
>>right to tell others they do not feel what they say they feel. This
>>is challenging - there
>>are all kinds of situations in which an outsider might say people
>>are being exploited but
>>those involved deny this. Also many people do routinely avoid their
>>own feelings and live in
>>a state of denial. However Freudian concepts such as negation or
>>denial are profoundly
>>authoritarian and this is the only stance I can defend. You use the
>>term 'normalising' to
>>reject the possibility that an individual's own non-normal
>>interpretation of their experience
>>might be correct. I can't accept that there is only one way of
>>having this experience and
>>that we have the right to impose it upon others. That is
>>normalising as I would use the
>>term - imposing societal definitions and standards blanket fashion
>>on others. People don't
>>fit into categories and sexual desire (all desire) is very
>>multi-faceted, ambivalent and
>>complex and changing.
>>
>>To understand when people are actually denying their own feelings
>>and experience one has to
>>search the evidence in each case and look for contradictions,
>>apparent evasions or absences.
>>And always, of course, question the assumptions we are bringing to
>>our evidence. In the end
>>if these individuals say they were not damaged - then I would
>>accept they were not. Just as I
>>would expect someone to accept my estimation of my sexual
>>experience. Historically on the
>>'concept' - definitions of child abuse in western societies have
>>changed enormously even in
>>the last century. One of the most challenging tasks for a historian
>>is to understand how
>>concepts that may seem self-evident have changed radically.
>>Hera
>
>And, Hera, would you also accept the statement of the physically
>abused that s/he
>wasn't abused?
Doesn't such a statement implicitly accept a "norm" for abuse?
>Most abused wives and children accept that they "deserved" it...
If "most" accept, is this the "norm"?
>and that it did them no harm.
And if, in their opinion, "it did them no harm," is this the "norm"?
>Look at the guy busy hitting his child because his own
>Dad hit him, and "it did me no harm".
Such is the complexity of the issue.
>
>Maybe we need to ask the sexual partners of the sexually abused...maybe
>they know more about what the real effects were.
Point taken -- at least "the real effects" for them.
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 10:51:33 -0600
From: Bob <suannschafer@earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: child sexual abuse
>Of course, Bob, language shapes identity and notions of reality.
>However, children
>think and perceive differently than adults do.
Of course they do.
>Their initial conceptions of
>themselves, others, and the world are very different from adults.
Of course they are. But as you've alluded to elsewhere, the adult
comes from the child.
>Read Jean
>Piaget, for example.
Thanks for the bibliography. In the spirit of exchange, read Lacan,
for example.
I must note, however, that the notion of recording behavior without
interpretation hasn't been addressed, at least to my satisfaction.
> > >Not if the adult refrained from framing, editing, and
>re-interpreting, etc.,
> > >right? What about the idea of just recording the child's words verbatim?
> >
> > The moment the child enters into the (patriarchal) world of language,
> > there is a "frame," an "edit," an "interpretation."
> >
> > >Of
> > >course, if one wants to know what children thought about sexuality in a
> > >historical sense, then this would seem impossible. Another methodological
> > >approach is to observe children's play, and simple record the
> > >behaviors without
> > >adding anything to it (i.e., interpretations, etc).
> >
> > Is it so "simple" to record behavior WITHOUT interpretation?
> >
> > In short, it's all interpretation.
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 10:56:46 -0600
From: Bob <suannschafer@earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: "child sexual abuse"; child sexuality
Is the citation for this URL correct?
Http://www.mindspring.com/~rainbowchild/foucault.htm
I received a File Not Found message.
Thanks.
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 17:24:48 +0000
From: "Sam Pryke" <PRYKES@hope.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: Hormones, genetic determinism, and history
David Harvey --
Academic 180 degree correctives to popular beliefs may be a standard academic response. After
all, it proves that contrary to what most people assume, 'we' know better. Thus David Harvey
writes, 'The idea that hormones "drive" people is a very odd one, since it would suggest that all
humans at all times have exactly the same range of desires, fuelled by hormonal impulses.' Well,
first of all it -- the idea that hormones drive people -- doesn't suggest this, as I would have
thought that the dominant conception of hormonal desires is that they in themselves are
fluctuating. But more basic than that is the fact that it is the case that people frequently do feel
their sexuality to be driven by innate bodily desire. And they don't find this 'odd'. As David
himself suggests the reality is probably at the interface of culture and biology, hormones.
(Please, this in not intended as a prompt to open once again the by now thoroughly tedious and
quite insoluble 'nature/debate' over sexuality.)
Can I expand the methodological point here. I saw that there was some further debate about nude
sun bathing when I returned to work last week having been off with flue (certainly not contracted
by taking my clothes off in the great outdoors!). One of the correspondents was reprimanded for
suggesting that the origin of sexual conservatism in the Deep South of the USA was its original
settlement by European Christian minorities. The objection was that this conception of US
immigration history is mythical and the basis of sexual conservatism in the South lies in slavery
and other structures of social relations. Well yes, but in accounting for the social conservatism of
states like N & S Carolina -- that manifests itself in, amongst other things, strict bathing laws --
isn't it the case that the religious ideology of the original European settlers is at least 'a factor'?
These things are rarely mutually exclusive. One doesn't have to adopt a hazy, anything goes
approach to appreciate this.
SAM PRYKE
__________________________________________________________________
From: "Donna Larsen" <ladydonna85@hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: not being damaged by abuse
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 09:38:30 PST
Now here is where submissive partners of SM run into problems. People
believing that they could possibly consent to what others percieve as abuse,
when for them they are masochists who are experiencing pleasurable pain.
Just another view of this conversation.
>And, Hera, would you also accept the statement of the physically abused
>that s/he
>wasn't abused? Most abused wives and children accept that they "deserved"
>it...
>and that it did them no harm. Look at the guy busy hitting his child
>because his own
>Dad hit him, and "it did me no harm".
>
>Maybe we need to ask the sexual partners of the sexually abused...maybe
>they know more about what the real effects were.
>
>Julienne
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 10:22:10 -0800 (PST)
From: Lynn Romer <lynnromer@yahoo.com>
Subject: Fwd: An introduction
> A friend told me about this web
> site, and I'm glad he did. My academic background
> is
> in philosophy and religion, and I do some free-lance
> writing on gender issues.
>
> I'm very interested in the area of single women and
> the church. Does anyone know whether any studies
> have
> been conducted as to whether the women who act most
> seductive toward married pastors tend to be
> never-married, divorced, married, or widowed. My
> informal research has led me to believe they are
> most
> often married. However, the stereotype says that
> it's
> the never-marrieds and divorcees, which is probably
> unfair. It would seem that the security of marriage
> probably gives the married women more of a "roving
> eye."
>
> Also does anyone know whether seminary textbooks
> from
> the past (or present) contain warnings about single
> women in congregations? If anyone knows of any such
> passages, I would love to read them (current or
> historical). I think churches reflect society's
> fear
> of singles; there still seems to be something of a
> stigma.
>
> Any insights anyone can provide will be greatly
> appreciated. Thanks!
>
> Lynn Romer
> lynnromer@yahoo.com
>
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 14:04:07 -0500
From: Julienne <julienne@ptd.net>
Subject: Re: child sexual abuse
At 02:57 AM 2/21/00 +0000, Ianthe wrote:
>"One woman I know enjoyed sex with an uncle all through her
>childhood and never realized that anything was unusual until
>she went away to school. What disturbed her then was not what
>her uncle had done, but the attitude of her teachers and the
>school psychiatrist. They assumed that she must have been
>traumatized and disgusted and therefore in need of very special
>help."
A few things bother me about this.
First, how old was this girl when she went away to school?
Further, an adult doing something like this is going to be giving
off signals that something isn't right. How, "all through her
childhood", did she never pick up that the relationship needed
to be secret, that it only happened in private? How did she
never pick up that this isn't something one does? Kids usually
know that uncles aren't supposed to be sexual with them, unless
all information about sexuality is kept secret in the family.
In addition, she "enjoyed" it? How old was she? Her vagina
would have been not yet matured, and the sex is likely to
have been painful...how did she get around that?
I think this story is full of major holes...
Julienne
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 12:57:07 -0700
Subject: Re: child sexual abuse
From: "David Robinson" <dmrobins@U.Arizona.EDU>
I don't know if anyone has mentioned the following:
There are some very good writings on the issue of intergenerational sex
(which is not necessarily child sexual abuse -- at least, that's one of the
issues debated) in a collection of pieces called: _Flaunting It_.
It's a collection from a former gay and lesbian Canadian newspaper called
_The Body Politic_.
The piece by Jane Rule is particularly smart.
David Robinson
Univ. of Arizona
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 14:57:37 -0800
From: Anne Dietrich <amdma@telus.net>
Subject: Re: not being damaged by abuse
On the other hand, there is a difference between battered women and persons who
willfully engage in masochistic sexual practices.
Anne
Donna Larsen wrote:
> Histsex:For historians of sexuality - http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
>
> Now here is where submissive partners of SM run into problems. People
> believing that they could possibly consent to what others percieve as abuse,
> when for them they are masochists who are experiencing pleasurable pain.
> Just another view of this conversation.
>
> >And, Hera, would you also accept the statement of the physically abused
> >that s/he
> >wasn't abused? Most abused wives and children accept that they "deserved"
> >it...
> >and that it did them no harm. Look at the guy busy hitting his child
> >because his own
> >Dad hit him, and "it did me no harm".
> >
> >Maybe we need to ask the sexual partners of the sexually abused...maybe
> >they know more about what the real effects were.
> >
> >Julienne
__________________________________________________________________
From: Mal123nash@aol.com
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 19:17:03 EST
Subject: Re: not being damaged by abuse
Dear Historians,
One website is tooting that as a 14-year-old, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs was
molested. In my 23 years of studying Ulrichs, I never read that this was so.
Ulrichs did write that a friend of his in Vienna had had "sex" with a
military riding master at age 14. Ulrichs wrote that he had wished something
like that had happened to him.
This website, an anti-Gay, Christian ministry focused on scholarship, is
using Ulrichs and molestation hysteria to further its agenda.
The URL for the site is:
~ (63K) Homosexuality and the Nazi Party
http://egosurf.com/f/www.clm.org/jhs/lively.html
NET: ... The "grandfather of gay rights" was a homosexual German
lawyer named >>Karl Heinrich Ulrichs<<. Ulrichs had been
molested at age 14 by his male riding instructor. ...
... Press, 1989. Kennedy, Hubert. "Man/Boy Love in the Writings
of >>Karl Heinrich Ulrichs<<." In Pascal, Mark (Ed.). Varieties
of Man/Boy Love. New York, ...
With best wishes,
Michael Lombardi-Nash, Ph.D.
__________________________________________________________________
From: "docx2" <docx2@ix.netcom.com>
Subject: Re: Masochism
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 14:57:29 -0800
Dear folks,
I have written extensively on S/M (and was incorrectly referenced in the
_Psychology Today_ article). I have included a link to my CV below. Do you
have a reference for your conservative/liberal observation below?
Take care,
Charles Moser
http://pweb.netcom.com/~docx2/CV.html
----- Original Message -----
From: Lynn Romer <lynnromer@yahoo.com>
To: <histsex@listbot.com>
Sent: Monday, February 21, 2000 2:43 PM
Subject: Masochism
> Histsex:For historians of sexuality -
http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
>
> Another research interest is masochism and feminism.
> Can anyone recommend any books containing positive
> commentaries on masochism. The magazine PSYCHOLOGY
> TODAY recently ran a positive piece that was
> interesting.
>
> I've read that religious conservatives tend to like
> masochism, whereas religious liberals are more into
> being "talked dirty to." It seems to divide down
> political lines, as well, conservative vs. liberal,
> regarding attitudes toward language.
>
> Any reading recommendations will be valued.
>
> Lynn
>
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 15:04:51 -0800 (PST)
From: Lynn Romer <lynnromer@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Masochism
I believe I read about the conservative/liberal
breakdown in THE JANUS REPORT.
__________________________________________________________________
From: "Donna Larsen" <ladydonna85@hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: not being damaged by abuse
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 15:48:37 PST
Yes, but one of the major problems is when someone calls the authorities on
a couple because they mistake a consentual SM scene for a domestic violence
scene. The cops have no real way of telling which they are walking into, or
they won't make a distinction between the two. In fact in some places Subs
are told that it is illegal to consent to assault. There are also Therapists
who refuse to allow there clients to distinguish between the difference,
because they can't or will not themselves.
Consider the Spanner case in England. A gay male SM play party was raided by
Scotland Yard. The men were convicted of assault and in some cases the
submissives were charged with aiding and abetting in there own assult.(if
someone here sees places where I am not describing this case correctly
please feel free to fill in the holes)
What I am doing here is pointing to one place where I see problems in not
letting the person themselves distinquish between a healthy happy
consentually situation and an abusive one. I do not really have any answers
on what to do with this conflict, but it is one that is prevelent. As an
SMer myself this is one of the problems with getting civil rights such as
not loosing jobs, homes, and children due to being involved in SM.
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 12:11:27 +1100
From: Hera Cook <hera.cook@history.usyd.edu.au>
Subject: Re: child sexuality
Hi Anne and Bob -
Sorry, pleasure in giving is the gateway to sexual abuse as far as I am concerned.
Selfish physical pleasure is the only reason we should engage in sexual activity.
There is a long history of women being required to be available for sex with their
husbands -
conjugal rights. In the 1950s this was developed into an argument that women should
find pleasure in giving
- I quote from 'The power of sexual surrender', Marie N.Robinson, 1961.
[The wife's] eternal acquiescence, her ever-readiness, never lets her in for a
painful sexual experience however. She knows that ninety-nine times out of one
hundred even negative sexual feelings in herself will soon turn to eagerness, and
eagerness to desire. And even if that one in a hundred times occurs, she will still
get a profound satisfaction from the pleasure she is able to give her husband, the
very obvious pleasure. Once more that deep altruism. p.45
Women (and children) need to be taught that sex is about mutual physical sexual
desire not that it is about giving.
The only reason to engage in sexual activity with another is physical desire -
tenderness and nurturing
can be expressed in other ways. Encouraging adult men to believe that it is
acceptable to have sex with
a partner who does not have their own physical desire is a major contribution to an
abusive sexual culture.
Seduction or arousing a partner's sexual desire is of course part of this but
masturbation is a perfectly
good means of sexual relief if a partner still does not feel desire.
I know I am coming perilously close to suggesting there is one right way here - but
this notion of sex and giving is
a cultural norm that has had and still has very different meanings for male and
female in heterosexual relationships and it seems worth overstating it.
This issue of sex as giving and not as desire is also present in relationships
between women but I would be curious to know what gay men feel about this. Other
aspects of male heterosexual practice mirror gay male sexuality - does this do so?
In the context of abuse, Anne's comments on sex and giving seem to imply that she
accepts the solution to an abusive sexual
culture lies in a revivified loving heterosexual monogamous marriage. This is a
leap and Anne would be entitled to feel I have read more into her posts than is
there. But rejection of sexual selfishness is a very loaded topic and I wondered
where it led to?
Regards,
Hera
Hera Cook
History Department
MacCallum Building A17
University of Sydney
NSW 2006
Australia
Phone 61 2 9351 2862, Fax 61 2 9351 3918
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 17:21:52 -0600
From: Bob <suannschafer@earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: Masochism
>Another research interest is masochism and feminism.
>Can anyone recommend any books containing positive
>commentaries on masochism. The magazine PSYCHOLOGY
>TODAY recently ran a positive piece that was
>interesting.
Is it possible for you to provide a more complete citation? I'm
interested in looking at this. Thanks.
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 17:31:38 -0600
From: Bob <suannschafer@earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: Masochism
And the specific citation would be (for those of us unfamiliar with
THE JANUS REPORT)?
>I believe I read about the conservative/liberal
>breakdown in THE JANUS REPORT.
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 12:23:59 +1100
From: Hera Cook <hera.cook@history.usyd.edu.au>
Subject: Re: Child abuse,dissociation and battered women
Anne,
Thank you for your extended description of your position. However, I think this description of your
stance is not entirely honest. If I understand your position correctly from your previous posts, (see
below) you do not believe in the possibility that a person can have these experiences and not be
damaged. Therefore you are not just entertaining the possibility but waiting for what you see as the
only response to emerge.
I don't disagree at all about dissociation - but if you believe in only one outcome then you are
imposing your beliefs and that is why I would label what you say as fundamentally authoritarian. (in
passing to those who think 'normalising' - I find that a waffly concept) As a therapist or a
researcher you are saying you believe you know what people have experienced even if they tell you
otherwise. There is a right answer and you help them to provide it. If you are a therapist you see a
selected population - people who are unhappy and believe themselves to be in need of help - they are
seeking guidance and unsurprisingly will often accept your answers as correct.
The women whom Ianthe quoted are a very different group - confident, articulate and engaged in
thinking about this experience outside a therapeutic encounter. You open yourself to serious
accusations of bias if you simply reject what they say as impossible.
Obviously many people do not associate their problems with causes that others see as obvious. Just
talking to people who have been abused makes this clear. That does not mean others are always correct
- though they may be. There is a long history of psych/iatry/ology/analysis imposing normative
beliefs on people - women and gay people are pertinent examples.
To respond to the comment about battered women. I can't find the post but first of all the notion
women blame themselves is as much an urban myth as a reflection of reality in my experience and
reading. In the context of the 1970s and a very young assertive feminism which (quite rightly) wanted
such women to reject the men - a picture of women simply blaming themselves emerged. In fact
testimony from battered women is a perfect example of looking for contradictions, ambivalence,
pragmatic acceptance because there is no choice rather than actual acceptance, and so on. Most
battered women do not accept being hit in any easy or simple way if at all. As I understand it, what
they do often want is to continue the relationship - which is a different issue though hard for those
outside to comprehend.
Hera
Anne Dietrich wrote:
> but rather are premised in Janetian notions of
> There is nothing authoritarian about this. In short, I retain the possibility as a hypothesis,
> rather than automatically rejecting it out of hand.
> As much as I believe in equality, etc., I
> have also seen firsthand the dissociation and avoidance and numbing that occurs with persons who
> have been sexually abused. Of course, I would never presume to tell a client that they were
> harmed if they insist that they were not, but I keep the possibility in the back of my mind as a
> working hypothesis.
> >
> > Anne Dietrich wrote:
> >
> > > An adult touching a child in a sexual manner is exploiting that child's
> > > trust, whether the child knows it or not as a child, and whether or not the adult grows
> > > up to rationalize the abuse as acceptable (as in the quotes posted to this list earlier
> > > tonight).
> >
> > > You seem to read these quotes as that these people have not been traumatized by it -- I am
> > > not so ready to accept that point of view. They may simply have introjected the beliefs of
> > > their abusers -- normalizing sexual abuse and not being cognizant of possible damage. They
> > > may be in denial. They may be utilizing posttraumatic avoidance and numbing. If they faced
> > > the actual harmfulness of the abuse, it may well be too painful for them to bear, and so
> > > they need to minimize and deny and rationalize.
> > >
> >
> > Hi Anne,
> > I am sorry but I believe in allowing people to interpret their own experience. I have no
> > right to tell others they do not feel what they say they feel. This is challenging - there
> > are all kinds of situations in which an outsider might say people are being exploited but
> > those involved deny this. Also many people do routinely avoid their own feelings and live in
> > a state of denial. However Freudian concepts such as negation or denial are profoundly
> > authoritarian and this is the only stance I can defend. You use the term 'normalising' to
> > reject the possibility that an individual's own non-normal interpretation of their experience
> > might be correct. I can't accept that there is only one way of having this experience and
> > that we have the right to impose it
> > upon others. That is normalising as I would use the term - imposing societal definitions and
> > standards blanket fashion
> > on others. People don't fit into categories and sexual desire (all desire) is very
> > multi-faceted, ambivalent and complex and changing.
> >
> > To understand when people are actually denying their own feelings and experience one has to
> > search the evidence in each case and look for contradictions, apparent evasions or absences.
> > And always, of course, question the assumptions we are bringing to our evidence. In the end
> > if these individuals say they were not damaged - then I would accept they were not. Just as I
> > would expect someone to accept my estimation of my sexual experience. Historically on the
> > 'concept' - definitions of child abuse in western societies have changed enormously even in
> > the last century. One of the most challenging tasks for a historian is to understand how
> > concepts that may seem self-evident have changed radically.
> > Hera
> >
> > > >
> > > > --
> > > > Hera Cook
--
Hera Cook
History Department
MacCallum Building A17
University of Sydney
NSW 2006
Australia
Phone 61 2 9351 2862, Fax 61 2 9351 3918
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 15:33:11 -0800 (PST)
From: Lynn Romer <lynnromer@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Masochism
Don't know. Just checked it out of a local library
several months ago. I believe it's in a chapter on
sex and religion. There's a chapter on sex and
politics, too. I believe the authors are husband and
wife (Janus is the last name).
--- Bob <suannschafer@earthlink.net> wrote:
> Histsex:For historians of sexuality -
> http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
>
> And the specific citation would be (for those of us
> unfamiliar with
> THE JANUS REPORT)?
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 18:10:26 -0500
From: liz crain <elcrain@vassar.edu>
Subject: Re: Masochism
i'm taking a class right now called the decadent imagination--centering
around music and literature--or the combo of both in opera--during the fin
de siecle. last class we read some sacher-masoch tales (where the term
masochism is derived). he "collected" many tales and the ones we were
reading were titled simply "jewish tales." I would recommend those which I
read "madame leopard" and "shimmel knofelles." and as far as present day
goes--eva norvivnd is a life of masochism and monica treut's film about
norvind--"didn't do it for love" is filled to the brim with what your
looking for....so hope that helps.
liz crain
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 14:43:14 -0800 (PST)
From: Lynn Romer <lynnromer@yahoo.com>
Subject: Masochism
Another research interest is masochism and feminism.
Can anyone recommend any books containing positive
commentaries on masochism. The magazine PSYCHOLOGY
TODAY recently ran a positive piece that was
interesting.
I've read that religious conservatives tend to like
masochism, whereas religious liberals are more into
being "talked dirty to." It seems to divide down
political lines, as well, conservative vs. liberal,
regarding attitudes toward language.
Any reading recommendations will be valued.
Lynn
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 14:51:01 -0800
From: chris dummitt <cdummitt@sfu.ca>
Subject: Re: child sexual abuse
Robinson wrote:
>There are some very good writings on the issue of intergenerational sex
>(which is not necessarily child sexual abuse -- at least, that's one of the
>issues debated) in a collection of pieces called: _Flaunting It_.
I would additionally suggest a particuarly perceptive piece on
inter-generational sex (especially if we want to consider issues such as
change over time and class relations) by Steven Maynard:
Steven Maynard, " 'Horrible Temptations': Sex, Men and Working-Class Male
Youth in Urban Ontario, 1890-1935," _Canadian HIstorical Review_ 78:2 (June
1997): 191-235.
_______________________
Chris Dummitt
Doctoral Candidate
Department of History
Simon Fraser University
_______________________
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 21:04:58 -0500
From: David Nicholas Harley <David.N.Harley.4@nd.edu>
Subject: Re: Hormones, genetic determinism, and history
Sam Pryke wrote:
>Academic 180 degree correctives to popular beliefs may be a standard
academic response. After all, it proves that contrary to what most people
assume, 'we' know better. Thus David Harvey writes, 'The idea that
hormones "drive" people is a very odd one, since it would suggest that all
humans at all times have exactly the same range of desires, fuelled by
hormonal impulses.' Well, first of all it -- the idea that hormones drive
people -- doesn't suggest this, as I would have thought that the dominant
conception of hormonal desires is that they in themselves are fluctuating.
David Harley comments:
This is a curious criticism. I suspect that Dr Pryke does not take for
granted whatever "most people assume" about nationalism, be they academics,
or politicians, or merely having a chat on the 14C bus to Croxteth. Ideas
that "everybody knows" are always problematic because they are unexamined.
We need to ask where these ideas come from, how have they been propagated
and sustained, and what interests have they served at various points in
their career. A hundred years ago, no one attributed anything at all to
hormones, so their rising status as the cause of each and every gender
characteristic can be traced quite easily.
This is not an attack on non-academic knowledge, even though biologists
and endocrinologists currently try to avoid such talk, at least in print.
Nor is it an attack on scientists. The ideas that historians or
sociologists or any other academics think they know are no different in
their tendency to rest on very insecure foundations.
"the dominant conception": who is dominating whom?
"hormonal desires": are desires hormonal? in what sense?
Sam Pryke wrote:
But more basic than that is the fact that it is the case that people
frequently do feel their sexuality to be driven by innate bodily desire.
And they don't find this 'odd'.
David Harley comments:
People "feel" all sorts of things. They do not find this odd. But what
has this to do with attributing causation to hormones, let alone
characterizing them as "sex hormones"? People feel fear and experience a
"rush" which we attribute to adrenaline. Does the adrenaline determine
what they should fear, or does some combination of culture and experience?
The adrenal response is surely a learned one.
Sam Pryke wrote:
One of the correspondents was reprimanded for suggesting that the origin of
sexual conservatism in the Deep South of the USA was its original
settlement by European Christian minorities. The objection was that this
conception of US immigration history is mythical and the basis of sexual
conservatism in the South lies in slavery and other structures of social
relations. Well yes, but in accounting for the social conservatism of
states like N & S Carolina -- that manifests itself in, amongst other
things, strict bathing laws -- isn't it the case that the religious
ideology of the original European settlers is at least 'a factor'? These
things are rarely mutually exclusive. One doesn't have to adopt a hazy,
anything goes approach to appreciate this.
David Harley comments:
The point was not some "hazy, anything goes approach", but that the
religious beliefs of North and South Carolina, for example, were not those
of the settlers. The religious beliefs of the Bible Belt were imported
from the North during the early nineteenth century, not brought by
immigrants from Europe. Southerners had to be converted from their
previous lack of interest in strict morals. In the process, Northern
religious positions had to make compromises with the patriarchalism of the
slave states. It is the notion that fundamentalism in the South descends
from seventeenth-century Puritanism that is hazy.
David Harley,
Dept. of History,
University of Notre Dame,
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
tel.: 219-631-7789
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 18:24:59 -0800
From: Anne Dietrich <amdma@telus.net>
Subject: Re: child sexuality
Hera,
There is a difference, from my experience, between acquiescence and feeling pleasure in
giving pleasure. I have done both and I guarantee you, there is a difference.
Anne
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 18:31:53 -0800
From: Anne Dietrich <amdma@telus.net>
Subject: Re: Child abuse,dissociation and battered women
Hera,
You are assuming that I impose my beliefs on my clients -- that is not at all so. I may believe
something, but I do not impose my beliefs on my clients. If they go to their death beds believing they
were not harmed, I do NOT try to change that. What makes you assume that I do? It is a jump from my
saying that I do not accept (privately, to myself) at face value denials at harm to your conclusion that
I therefore must impose my beliefs.
Anne
that they were
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 14:13:25 +1100
From: Hera Cook <hera.cook@history.usyd.edu.au>
Subject: Re:pleasure in giving
Anne,
You too have been socialised as a female in this culture - are you so certain that your own
behaviour is the standard by which you should measure what does or does not contribute
towards the sexual culture that has made widespread abuse possible? So certain that all
that is questionable in our sexual culture is outside of your particular boundaries?
In fact Marie Robinson whom I quoted would have felt that what you describe feeling was
exactly what an 'ideal' woman should feel. Read the quote again:
'[The wife will] get a profound satisfaction from the pleasure she is able to give her
husband, the very obvious pleasure. Once more that deep altruism.'
Isn't this exactly what you are talking about? The fact that this feels right to you is no
different to the person to whom what you label abuse felt right or the battered woman who
believed she was to blame.
Hera
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 19:23:47 -0800
From: Anne Dietrich <amdma@telus.net>
Subject: Re: pleasure in giving
Dear Hera,
I ask this respectfully: Are you imposing your beliefs on me, perchance?
Anne
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 04:41:05 +0000
From: Ianthe <ianthe@duende.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Homosexuality & The Nazi Party
In message <67.1c0ff37.25e32f7f@aol.com>, Mal123nash@aol.com writes
>Histsex:For historians of sexuality - http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
> This website, an anti-Gay, Christian ministry focused
>on scholarship, is using Ulrichs and molestation hysteria
>to further its agenda.
>
> The URL for the site is: (63K) Homosexuality and the Nazi Party
> http://egosurf.com/f/www.clm.org/jhs/lively.html
It's part of a history-twisting anti-gay pseudo-history -
paralleling that around 'Holocaust-denial' literature -
which seeks to "prove" that the Nazi's were gay. Their
main text is called _The Pink Swastika_:
http://www.geocities.com/WestHollywood/Village/1360/
Refutations here:
http://www.bway.net/~halsall/lgbh/lgbh-gaysnazis.txt
http://library.willamette.edu/home/publications/movtyp/spring1996/douglass.html
NARTH (a front for Exodus International) is one of the
Evangelical "gay-saving" groups who endorse the Pink Swastika
rubbish (they were offering it on their site until a few
months ago), along with other minor Ministries & fruitcake
Evangelicals all across the dark heart of Amerika.
--
Ianthe Duende
__________________________________________________________________
From: "Matthew Johnson" <trekdrop78@hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: Masochism biblio
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 20:50:21 PST
Better yet: see Sacher-Masoch's most famous work, Venus in Furs.
In a more contemporary and less literary vein, I would highly recommend
David Halperin's Saint Foucault, which I am currently reading. It contains
extensive commentary on Michel Foucault's discussions of s/m as spiritually
and socially liberative sexual practice. Admittedly, this book is largely
concerned with male homosexuality, but Halperin sees liberative potential in
s/m for all of its practitioners, regardless of gender, orientation or role.
Below please find a brief biblio sent to me several months ago by a
professor of mine. Enjoy and always play safe.
- matt johnson
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Masochism
Gilles Deleuze, Présentation de Sacher-Masoch (Paris: Minuit, 1967)
Ian Gibson, The English Vice. Beating, Sex and Shame in Victorian England
and After (London: Duckworth, 1978)
Lynda Hart, Between the Body and the Flesh. Performing Sadomasochism (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1998)
John K. Noyes, The Mastery of Submission. Inventions of Masochism (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1998)
Ken Plummer, Telling Sexual Stories. Power, change and social worlds
(London: Routledge, 1995)
Samois, Coming to Power. Writings and Graphics on Lesbian S/M (Boston:
Alyson, 1981)
Bill Thompson, Sadomasochism. Painful Perversion or Pleasurable Play?
(London: Cassell, 1994)
Thomas Weinberg and G.W. Levi Kamel (eds), S and M. Studies in
Sadomasochism (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1983, 1995)
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 16:28:36 +1100
From: Hera Cook <hera.cook@history.usyd.edu.au>
Subject: Re: pleasure in giving
Anne,
No - I am asking you a series of questions. It is true that I end with a statement and you are
correct in thinking that I feel these questions do lead to a particular answer. (And your reply
evades dealing with what I asked you.)
I am chasing you to an extent because you appear to have two lists of sexual behaviours - one lot
that are completely acceptable and another completely separate list of behaviours that are
totally unacceptable. I don't think sex and desire is like that - even or perhaps especially for
those who are able to regard their sexual practice as totally 'normal'. After all those who are
most 'normal' are those who are most totally of the culture that has produced this abuse. The
connection I was making between giving sexually and permitting abusive behaviour is an example of
this.
To make that personal as I have asked you to do so - I don't feel that all that is sexually
questionable in our culture is outside my sexual boundaries. But the solution is not to project
the rejected elements on to others. The challenge is to integrate this complex cultural sexual
melange within ourselves in a way that creates pleasure and enhances our lives and those of the
people of all ages around us.
Regards,
Hera
Hera Cook
History Department
MacCallum Building A17
University of Sydney
NSW 2006
Australia
Phone 61 2 9351 2862, Fax 61 2 9351 3918
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 21:51:20 -0800
From: Anne Dietrich <amdma@telus.net>
Subject: Re: pleasure in giving
Dear Hera,
Yes, I do have two views: (1) If the sexual activity is between consenting adults, that is perfectly
fine; (2) If the sexual activity is between an adult and a child/teen unable to consent, that that is
not okay.
Anne
__________________________________________________________________
From: MillerJimE@aol.com
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 20:44:21 EST
Subject: Re: Pedophilic haven?
In a message dated 02/20/2000 11:24:32 PM Central Standard Time,
MillerJimE@aol.com writes:
<< I would like to make a few distinctions. It seems
to me that we have been using the terms "child" and "pedophilia"
indiscriminately. There is a world of difference between sexual situations
involving pre-adolescents and sexual situations involving adolescents. The
former do not have the hormones which drive many adolesents not only to
accept sexual advances from adults, but to make them as well. Also there is
a world of difference if the "child" is a 12-year-old adolescent or a
17-year-old adolescent (legal age here being 18). With every passing year
the adolescent usually becomes more confident in dealing with adults as a
near equal.
Should we wish to discuss sex with or among minors it is important to
state what age group is the topic of discussion.
Jim Miller >>
Now for a couple of clarifications.
First, I did not say that the presence of hormonal drives made sexual
contact
with adults less damaging. The presence of hormonal drives do make the
contacts significantly different -- and sometimes more damaging. Also, the
presence of the hormones do cause some adolescents to flirt seriously with
adults or otherwise encourage adults. The adolescent may not want actual
sexual contact, but merely to be seen as sexual. Adults should refrain from
crossing that boundary, however much the adolescent seems to be inviting
(sorry to get moralistic here).
There are a variety of ways in which the presence of the sex drive in
adolescents makes pedophilia with adolescents quite different than pedophilia
with pre-adolescents. Some posts seemed to be reference adolescent
pedophilia, and others to reference pre-adolescent pedophilia. I wanted some
specificity here.
Secondly, age of consent does not overnight turn an immature person into
a mature person. Maturation continues throughout the life span, and becomes
a significant factor in older adolescents as they near the age of consent.
There is an entire cultural context which comes into play as an adolescent
approaches the age of consent.
Oh, yes. For those who question my statement, "hormones which drive many
adolescents", may I suggest that it has been too long since you were
adolescents.
Jim Miller
__________________________________________________________________
From: Kazetnik@aol.com
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 05:01:29 EST
Subject: Re: Masochism biblio
For a masochism-positive argument, Anita Philips _A Defence of Masochism_
(Faber 1999) is pretty good, if somewhat restricted to a hetero monogamous
model.
Chris White
__________________________________________________________________
From: "Dionne Stephens" <dionne@arches.uga.edu>
Subject: Sarah Bartman
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 08:02:51 -0500
I am looking for some scholarly texts on Sarah Bartman also known as the
Hottentotten Venus. She was taken from the Hottentotten tribe of Africa, put
on display throughout Europe and remains are still help in Paris' Museum of
Natural History. I have the section from Patricia Hill Collins "Black
Feminist Thought" some opinion pieces. Unfortunately, I have been having
difficulty trying to locate any information specifically focusing on her, or
images of women of African descent either before slavery or outside an
American context before the 1850's.
Dionne
____________________________________________________________________________
_______________
Dionne Stephens, Doctoral Student
University of Georgia
Department of Child and Family
Email: dionne@arches.uga.edu
Internet: www.arches.uga.edu/~dionne (under construction)
__________________________________________________________________From: Kazetnik@aol.com
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 08:06:11 EST
Subject: Selfish Pleasure
Hera wrote
<< Sorry, pleasure in giving is the gateway to sexual abuse as far as I am
concerned.
Selfish physical pleasure is the only reason we should engage in sexual
activity.
>>
This makes me feel as tho' I've entered Looking Glass land. How big a gap is
there between selfish sexual pleasure and abuse or rape? A much smaller one
than there is between pleasure in giving and abuse. Giving does not preclude
taking. Giving is not synonymous with acquiescence, which is a sight closer
to passivity (endurance, degradation) than it is to active giving. Hera, I
find your assertion very very scary.
Chris White
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 08:55:33 -0500
From: Heather Lee Miller <miller.1438@osu.edu>
Subject: Re: Sarah Bartman
See Anne Fausto-Sterling's essay on Sarah Bartmann in Jennifer Terry and
Jacqueline Urla,eds., <i>Deviant Bodies<br>
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 09:14:49 -0600
From: Bob <suannschafer@earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: pleasure in giving
Dear Anne,
To invert your second question, how indeed is a child/teen ABLE to consent?
Best,
Bob
>Dear Hera,
>
>Yes, I do have two views: (1) If the sexual activity is between
>consenting adults, that is perfectly
>fine; (2) If the sexual activity is between an adult and a
>child/teen unable to consent, that that is
>not okay.
>
>Anne
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 09:19:36 -0600
From: Bob <suannschafer@earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: Selfish Pleasure
Shouldn't we be questioning the assumptions underlying such concepts as:
acquiescence
passivity
endurance
degradation
????
These seem to lay along some continuum of "giving," one that is hardly stable.
Bob
>Hera wrote
><< Sorry, pleasure in giving is the gateway to sexual abuse as far as I am
>concerned.
> Selfish physical pleasure is the only reason we should engage in sexual
>activity.
> >>
>
>This makes me feel as tho' I've entered Looking Glass land. How big a gap is
>there between selfish sexual pleasure and abuse or rape? A much smaller one
>than there is between pleasure in giving and abuse. Giving does not preclude
>taking. Giving is not synonymous with acquiescence, which is a sight closer
>to passivity (endurance, degradation) than it is to active giving. Hera, I
>find your assertion very very scary.
>
>Chris White
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 11:02:37 -0500
From: Cristina Nelson <crn@alum.mit.edu>
Subject: Sara Baartman
There is a well-reviewed film out there which may be of interest to Dionne
Stevens. _The Life and TIme of Sara Baartman_ Film by Zola Maseko 1998. IT
won Best Documentary at the 1999 PAn African Film Festival. I don't know
where to get it, but I read a review of it by Dr Miriam Ma'at-Ka-Re Monges
<mmonges@csuchico.edu> in the Dept of Sociology/Social Work. She may have
some leads if your library can't find it.
Cristina Nelson
__________________________________________________________________
From: Kazetnik@aol.com
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 11:06:07 EST
Subject: Re: Selfish Pleasure
Questioning assumptions? I thought that was what I was doing ;) One person's
degradation is another's major turn-on. I'm tempted at the moment to argue
that there are no absolutes (even in paedophilia -- at the risk of putting my
head in the lion's whatnot...) other than arguably consent and non-consent
(the former of which can be engineered or extracted out of the latter in an
unequal relationship/contract) but (non) consent is always part of a cultural
process and a social construction of acceptable/viable identity and not an a
priori 'ethic'.
CW
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 08:23:44 -0800
From: Anne Dietrich <amdma@telus.net>
Subject: Re: pleasure in giving
Hi,
They aren't able to consent. That is my point. Thanks.
Anne
Bob wrote:
> Histsex:For historians of sexuality - http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
>
> Dear Anne,
>
> To invert your second question, how indeed is a child/teen ABLE to consent?
>
> Best,
> Bob
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 11:32:58 -0500
From: Cristina Nelson <crn@alum.mit.edu>
Subject: Black/White female bodies and sexuality
The recent post by Dionne Stephens (sorry, I misspelled your name in my
last post) reminded me that I have a lecture to write for undergraduates
and am skirting panic mode...I need some references and ideas from those of
you with experience in presenting complex issues to undergrads. I am a
doctoral candidate in US History. B/c my dissertation deals with the female
body (US, 1940-70) I was asked by a professor to lecture in his Race
Relations (formerly known as Af-Am history, Jamestown to the present) class
on the black and white female body/notions of sexuality and gender. I will
be lecturing a few days after the class discusses Gone WIth the Wind.
Part of my panic results from having given two lectures recently to
undergrads - one on the New Woman and one on Progressivism, and both were
far too complex for undergrads, I later realized. And these were, relative
to sexuality, gener and race, simpler topics!
If anyone remembers the comic strip Bloom County, and its resident crazy
feline, Bill the Cat...well, I am having a Bill "AACHKKK" moment (bulging
eyes, mask-of-death grin, tilted head). How do I scrunch themes of race,
sex, gender into something these undergrads can grasp? I hardly know where
to start. I'm thinking of starting with notions of gender roles in slave
society (the debate about the presence of egalitarianism); then moving into
the Jim Crow era, and the notions of African American female propriety,
than...? Does anyone have a reference for sexual propriety and sexuality
vis-a-vis the African AMerican female body 1865 - 1900? I think that Sara
Baartman will figure in this, to illustrate European/American fascination
with the sexuality of Africans. Any primary sources?
And what about theory? How does one present Foucauld, for instance, or
Butler, to undergrads in such a way that there won't be a rush to the exits?
Also, any ideas on visuals? I have an overhead of Mammy tightening
Scarlett's corset in GWTW, but any other ideas on visuals would be
appreciated.
I appreciate any and all suggestions. I will be posting this query to the
general and women's history list as well, so I apogize in advance for
repetition.
Cristina Nelson
<crn@alum.mit.edu>
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 10:51:51 -0600
From: Bob <suannschafer@earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: Selfish Pleasure
>Questioning assumptions? I thought that was what I was doing ;) One person's
>degradation is another's major turn-on.
PRECISELY
>I'm tempted at the moment to argue
that there are no absolutes
Of course there ARE "absolutes" -- my absolutes ;)
>(even in paedophilia -- at the risk of putting my
>head in the lion's whatnot...) other than arguably consent and non-consent
>(the former of which can be engineered or extracted out of the latter in an
>unequal relationship/contract)
Precisely
>but (non) consent is always part of a cultural
>process and a social construction of acceptable/viable identity and not an a
>priori 'ethic'.
Indeed.
Bob
__________________________________________________________________ Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 10:55:45 -0600
From: Bob <suannschafer@earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: pleasure in giving
Hi,
OIC
I took your prose to suggest the possibility that a child/teen could
indeed be able to consent.
Bob
>Hi,
>They aren't able to consent. That is my point. Thanks.
>Anne
>
>Bob wrote:
>
> > Histsex:For historians of sexuality -
>http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
> >
> > Dear Anne,
> >
> > To invert your second question, how indeed is a child/teen ABLE to consent?
> >
> > Best,
> > Bob
> >
> > >Dear Hera,
> > >
> > >Yes, I do have two views: (1) If the sexual activity is between
> > >consenting adults, that is perfectly
> > >fine; (2) If the sexual activity is between an adult and a
> > >child/teen unable to consent, that that is
> > >not okay.
> > >
> > >Anne
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 11:04:33 -0600
From: Bob <suannschafer@earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: Black/White female bodies and sexuality
>Does anyone have a reference for sexual propriety and sexuality
>vis-a-vis the African AMerican female body 1865 - 1900? I think that Sara
>Baartman will figure in this, to illustrate European/American fascination
>with the sexuality of Africans. Any primary sources?
Undoubtedly past your time constraint, but what about Spike Lee's
_Jungle Fever_? By bringing in something contemporary, you'll make
the talk "hip" & "cool" & "bad" & indeed possibly relevant to today's
undergrads?
>
>And what about theory? How does one present Foucauld, for instance, or
>Butler, to undergrads in such a way that there won't be a rush to the exits?
Summarize in little bitty words ("hip" & "cool" & "bad") the major
relevant points of these thinkers.
>
>
>Also, any ideas on visuals? I have an overhead of Mammy tightening
>Scarlett's corset in GWTW, but any other ideas on visuals would be
>appreciated.
There are visuals (prints) of Baartman.
And of course ALL of GWTW is a construct, a point that should not be
neglected to be made to undergrads. It is not a transcription of
"reality," in the format of the "reality" medium, but the fantasy
(and I'm ready to duck here) of one southern, antebellum, white
woman, magnified by the apparatus of "Hollywood." One classic
example where the reality apparatus fails in this flic is the absence
of cast shadows in the procession of the carriages to Tara for the
bbq.
Perhaps more relevant to your time period is the Disney feature
cartoon _Tarzan_, set in an Africa curiously absent of black folk.
Bob
__________________________________________________________________
From: Dionne Stephens <dionne@arches.uga.edu>
Subject: Re: Black/White female bodies and sexuality
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 12:13:28 -0500 (est)
Patricia Hill Collins has a fabulous chapter on four sexualized images
of Black women- the mammy, Jezebel, matriarch and welfare mother. The
book is titled Black Feminist Thought; the chapter is Mammies,
Matriarchs and other Controlling images. She links it to economic,
political and social contexts throughout American history to the
present day. It is based on a feminist perspective.
As well, there is a good piece on the sexualization of women during
colonization in the Caribbean and Philippines, called "Making the
Empire Respectable" by Ann Stoler. I can't remember the exact volume or
number, but it was printed in the American Ethnologist in the early
1990's.
****************************************************************************
Dionne Stephens, Doctoral Student
Department of Child & Family Development
University of Georgia
Athens, Georgia 30602
E-Mail: dionne@arches.uga.edu
****************************************************************************
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 11:28:31 -0800
From: Anne Herbert <satya@bradley.edu>
Subject: Re: Sarah Bartman
Try the new book by T.D. Sharpley-Whiting, _Black Venus : Sexualized
Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French_.
A. Herbert
Bradley University
Dept. of English
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 13:38:52 -0700
Subject: Re: pleasure in giving
From: "David Robinson" <dmrobins@U.Arizona.EDU>
I haven't wanted to enter this debate, because I don't really have the time.
But I can't help it.
No, Hera is not imposing her beliefs on Anne. Hera has pointed out that Anne
claims to be able to correctly interpret all instances of sex between adults
and non-adults: according to Anne, it is all abuse, even if the child or
adolescent involved does not recognize it as such.
Hera has then gone on to point out that Anne seems to have a double
standard: Anne has remarked that certain people (some non-adults in
intergenerational sexual relationships, as well as some battered women) are
socialized not to recognize their experiences as abuse, and are socialized
even to derive pleasure or meaning from their role in the abusive
relationships. Hera has simply pointed out that Anne does not apply the same
critical lens to her own description of the pleasure she, Anne, derives from
giving in a sexual relationship. Hera, however, would have us remember that
women are socialized in our patriarchal society to experience precisely this
sort of pleasure.
In other words, Hera (if I have understood her correctly) is pointing out
that Anne gives credence to her own experience, but not to other people's
experience (at least when their experience conflicts with Anne's beliefs
about sexual relations between adults and non-adults).
I agree wholeheartedly with Hera. I take the issue of sexual abuse very
seriously. But I also take the issue of coercive and authoritarian
imposition of one's interpretation of the world on others very seriously as
well. To decide, ahead of time, that all sexual relations between adults and
non-adults is abusive is a dangerous, harmful, and authoritarian thing to
do, even if one's intentions are good (i.e. protecting children), as I
believe Anne's are.
David
Univ. of Arizona
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 13:50:27 -0700
Subject: Re: pleasure in giving
From: "David Robinson" <dmrobins@U.Arizona.EDU>
>From: Anne Dietrich <amdma@telus.net>
>To: Histsex:For historians of sexuality <histsex@listbot.com>
>Subject: Re: pleasure in giving
>Date: Tue, Feb 22, 2000, 9:23 AM
>
> Hi,
> They aren't able to consent. That is my point. Thanks.
> Anne
I am astounded at this blithe assertion.
If only the issue of consent were as simple as easy. If only the world were
as simple and easy.
David
__________________________________________________________________
From: Kazetnik@aol.com
Message-ID: <33.1a2c2c6.25e45100@aol.com>
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 15:52:16 EST
Subject: Re: teen sexuality
To: histsex@listbot.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Mailer: AOL 4.0.i for Windows 95 sub 137
Histsex:For historians of sexuality - http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
Couldn't agree more with Sheila about teen sexuality. But. The endemic
cultural notion that children (which I use to mean pre-pubescent people) are
asexual innocents prevents anything from really being done to stop abuse (as
opposed to consensual exploration) because it traps children in a binary of
innocent/corrupt with all the resultant guilt-baggage and the inability to
distinguish between 'good' (wanted, accepted) sexual-type things and 'bad'
(abusive) sexual-type things. This in a context in which parents attach
possessive pronouns to their offspring and in which the theft/abuse/crime is
not perceived to be against the knowing and knowledgeable ones, the adults,
but is often represented as such. Children are not permitted to own their own
experiences, let alone their own bodies. And consent for children is thus a
moot point.
Chris White
__________________________________________________________________
From: ScarletMagazine@aol.com
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 15:58:04 EST
Subject: Re: teen sexuality
As note in this discussion, for anyone really interesting in contributing to
this sort of work, Hanne Blank and myself are just starting work on two books
based on our teen sex resource sites (scarleteen.com). We're scoping out
sidebar text and accompanying articles and resources over the next six
months. Give a shout if you're at all interested in adding to the discussion
in print.
Consent is a huge issue, some of it determined legally, and some on an active
and individual level, but the simple truth is that no one, regardless of
their age, can give informed consent... if they aren't informed.
Heather Corinna
H E A T H E R C O R I N N A
E d i t r i x S e x p e r t D i v a
******************************************
Scarlet Letters: A Journal of Femmerotica
Scarlet Teen: Pink Slip and Boyfriend!
ICQ#: 47165499 email:hcorinna@aol.com
http://scarletletters.com/heather
Post Office Box 4723, Saint Paul, MN 55104
******************************************
"Three be the things I shall have till I die:
Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye."
- Dorothy Parker
__________________________________________________________________
From: "Lesley Hall" <lesleyah@primex.co.uk>
Subject: The Janus Report
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 22:07:32 -0000
I find that I have this on my shelves! (unread or certainly only picked =
at) Samuel S amd Cynthia L Janus, The Janus Report on Sexual Behavior - =
the First Broad-scale scientific national survey since Kinsey ,John =
Wiley and Sons Inc, New York (etc) 1993. Cover puffs from among others, =
William Masters, Lloyd deMause, John Money, so presumably a fairly =
respectable source, as these things go...
Lesley Hall
lesleyah@primex.co.uk
website http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 13:18:38 +1100
From: Hera Cook <hera.cook@history.usyd.edu.au>
Subject: Re: pleasure in giving
Thanks David - those are the points I was trying to make.
Regards,
Hera
Hera Cook
History Department
MacCallum Building A17
University of Sydney
NSW 2006
Australia
Phone 61 2 9351 2862, Fax 61 2 9351 3918
__________________________________________________________________
From: alison shea bateman <asb4a@cms.mail.virginia.edu>
Subject: Re: Sarah Bartman
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 22:04:20 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time)
Dionne,
The following comes from footnote 42 of Chapter 1 of
_Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood_
by Cynthia Eagle Russett (Harvard UP:1989) Despite the
differences in name, I believe the subject is Sarah Bartman.
"Sartzee (more properly Saartjie), the Hottentot Venus, was
a Bushwoman who earned her small niche in the annals of
nineteenth-century anthropology primarily on the basis of
two arresting physical characteristics: her steatopygous
(extraordinarily large) buttocks and her tablier, or
vaginal veil. On a less sensational note, scientists were
also interested in the appearance of her brain, which they
adjudged strikingly small and simple. Preserved in the
Musee de l'Homme, it showed itself to be "palpably inferior
to that of a normally developed white woman, and could only
be compared with the brain of a white idiotic from arrest of
cerebral development." Henry Maudsley, Body and Mind (New
York: D. Appleton, 1874), 52. In the early 1980s Stephen
Jay Gould visited the Musee de l'Homme and spotted
Sartzee's genitalia pickled in a jar on the shelf above
Broca's brain - a monument to the prurient racism of
nineteenth-century anthropology. Stephen Jay Gould, "The
Hottentot Venus," in The Flamingo's Smile (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1985), 291-301."
Could you please post the results of your search if more
information comes in off-list?
Alison
Alison Bateman
Biomedical Ethics Program
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22903
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 21:54:03 -0600
From: Dar Weyenberg <dweyenbe@students.wisc.edu>
Subject: Re: "child sexual abuse"; child sexuality
hi folks
Yes, except add an l (as in low) to the end of URL. I just got in-its still
there.
I just cut and pasted this URL:
http://www.mindspring.com/~rainbowchild/foucault.html
("The danger of child sexuality")
dar
At 10:56 AM 2/21/00 -0600, you wrote:
>Histsex:For historians of sexuality - http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
>
>Is the citation for this URL correct?
>
>Http://www.mindspring.com/~rainbowchild/foucault.htm
>
>I received a File Not Found message.
>
>Thanks.
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 22:08:23 -0600
From: Bob <suannschafer@earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: teen sexuality
>This in a context in which parents attach
>possessive pronouns .... Children are not permitted to own their own
>experiences, let alone their own bodies. And consent for children is thus a
moot point.
Well, in the grand scheme of things -- like the entire history of the
world -- until quite recently -- like the last century or so --
children were regarded to be little more than chattel. Indeed one of
my favorite scholars, Leo Steinberg, once made the claim in a class
that until quite recently (18th century I think -- damn that
Enlightenment!) children were considered to be not quite human, or
not fully formed humans, or some such Steinbergism.
Bob
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 22:10:21 -0600
From: Bob <suannschafer@earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: The Janus Report
Leslie, mucho thanks for the cite!
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 20:21:18 -0800 (PST)
From: Lynn Romer <lynnromer@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Masochism biblio
Thanks so much for all these great reading
recommendations!
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 18:39:57 +1000 (GMT+1000)
From: Reuben Ham <s366959@student.uq.edu.au>
Subject: Sade, Bataille and the Limits of Imagination and Reality
Greetings, all..
I am currently preparing a paper centred around the notion of bending the
limits of the 'real' or the possible through writing.. -- my argument
rests on my belief that the act of writing (imaginatively) may be a
gateway to more intense and indeed more 'real' experiences than the five
commonly-recognised senses ordinarily allow to be accessed.. I am
focussing chiefly on erotica, the literature of "shock", and the brand of
poetry which the French Symbolists embraced.. I will be giving particular
prominence to Sade ('120 Days'), Bataille('Story of the Eye'), Rimbaud and
Mallarme..
Are any of you aware of any related critical material?
I would greatly appreciate any response..
Thanks..
-R.
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 12:01:54 +0000 (GMT)
From: RM CLEMINSON <R.M.Cleminson@Bradford.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: Prostitution in Europe and England, 1400-1700
For Spain, but in Spanish language, the studies of Francisco Vazquez
Garcia are very useful. Jean-Louis Guerena has also written about Spain in
both Spanish & French.
******************************
Dr.Richard M. Cleminson
Lecturer in Spanish Studies
Department of Modern Languages
University of Bradford
Bradford, West Yorkshire
BD7 1DP
http://www.expert.brad.ac.uk/r_m_cleminson/
tel: +1274 234595
fax: +1274 235590
__________________________________________________________________
From: "LJ Hall, Historical Studies" <Lisa.J.Hall@bristol.ac.uk>
Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 13:05:26 +0000
Subject: Re: teen sexuality
In almost complete contradiction to the below my present research
into children and 'sexuality' in the 19th century suggests that
children are LOSING their 'voices' throughout this period and thus
their ability to 'consent' in concert with their status as a
wage-earning and thus to a certain degree autonomous member of the
'family unit'.(Yes, a very simplistic representation of the issue, I
know!)I'm not saying life was rosy for kids prior to this but I am
unsure as to the extent that they were perceived as qualitatively
different to 'adults' particularly with regard to questions of 'sexual
activity'.It is surely no coincidence that the late 19th century also
represents the 'high point' for the cultural eroticisation of the
'child' through notions of innocence and dependence.
Sorry to jump into the debate rather late - but I have only just
caught up with it!
Lisa.
LJ Hall, Historical Studies
Lisa.J.Hall@bristol.ac.uk
__________________________________________________________________
From: "Dionne Stephens" <dionne@arches.uga.edu>
Subject: Sarah Bartman/Saartjie/ Hottentotten Venus
Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 09:00:31 -0500
In less than 24 hours I received the following re. my request for info =
on
Sarah Bartman/Saartjie/ Hottentotten Venus....
Heather Lee Miller sent: See Anne Fausto-Sterling's essay on Sarah =
Bartmann
in Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla,eds., Deviant Bodies
Another person let me know about the invaluable book- Black Venus:
Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears and Primitive Narratives by T. Denean
Sharpley-Whiting. Unfortunately, I can't find the sender's message to =
give
him the credit he deserves.
Christina Nelson sent: There is a well-reviewed film out there which may =
be
of interest. _The Life and Time of Sara Baartman_ Film by Zola Maseko =
1998.
IT won Best Documentary at the 1999 Pan African Film Festival
Christina also put me in touch with Dr. Miriam Ma'at-Ka-Re Monges who
reviewed this film. Dr. Miriam Ma'at-Ka-Re Monges provided me with the
picture of Sarah Bartman/Saartjie/ Hottentotten Venus and her review of =
the
film. If you would like a picture of either, contact me directly since =
it is a large file.
I really appreciate everyone's help with this- I've taught on this topic =
in
the past, but this wealth of information will take the course to another
level.
_________________________________________________________________________=
__________________
Dionne Stephens, Doctoral Student
University of Georgia
Department of Child and Family
113 Dawson Hall
Athens Georgia 30602 =20
Phone: (706) 524-4840
Email: dionne@arches.uga.edu
Internet: www.arches.uga.edu/~dionne (under construction)
Everybody is looking for the answer;=20
How a story starts and just how it will end.
What's the use in half a story, half of a dream?
You have to climb all the steps between.
The Ladder
Prince (Around the =
World in a Day)
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 16:12:48 +0100
From: Gert Hekma <hekma@pscw.uva.nl>
Subject: Re: "madame arthur"
Dear friends,
a Dutch translator asked me the following question. She is working on
Daudet's "Dame aux camelias" where is a sentence "All Arthurs are the same"
(Tous les Arthurs sont les memes). Because of a French song, and several
bars with the name of Madame Arthur (in the fifties in Paris and Amsterdam,
both with drag shows) she thought the word "Arthur" might refer to a
(perhaps) feminine homosexual. The word is however not to be found in the
gay dictionaries such as Rodgers for the US, Courouve for France, Skinner
for German or Joustra for Dutch.
Who has an idea on the meaning and background of this (Madame) Arthur?
Greetings,
Gert Hekma
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 07:28:52 -0800 (PST)
From: technotoy <technotoy@yahoo.com>
Subject: Emancipated women and the third sex
I've started working on a popular German novel from
1899 by Ernst von Wolzogen entitled "The Third Sex"
("Das dritte Geschlecht"). Interestingly, the third
sex is *not* a reference to homosexuality (although
that usage was in existence at the time in the
German-speaking world), but rather emancipated women.
Were the suffragettes frequently given this
apellation?
Karl Heinrich Ulrichs does compare his "urnings" (men
who love men) with emancipated women, which sounds
progressive. However, he links the two because in both
cases an essential feminine being has been falsely
socialized--or to use his word "virilized"--into being
a man, which doesn't sound quite so progressive. Has
anyone else run into this comparison, especially in
the late nineteenth/early twentieth century?
And if anyone knows anything about Wolzogen, I would
be interested to hear that as well, although it might
not belong on the list. Thanks!
=====
Robert Tobin
Conrad-Blenkle-Str. 58
10407 Berlin Germany
(030) 4280 3109
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 05:15:05 -0600
From: Dar Weyenberg <dweyenbe@students.wisc.edu>
Subject: "child sexual abuse"; child sexuality
Hi
I have been following this thread with much interest and am posting a
conference interview below because I think it is pertinent to many of the
comments/issues that this tread that brought up in the course of discussion.
While at first glance it may seem somewhat dated and local to France, I
think it also raises some guestions or asks us to rethink how questions can
be framed about these very pertinent issues. Perhaps one of the more
important questions for me -in following this tread-is the discursive
construction of the child, child sexuality, the criminal, the "victim" and
so on. How have we come to think about "child sexual abuse" as we do? What
are our assumptions about child sexuality? etc.
Dar
Http://www.mindspring.com/~rainbowchild/foucault.htm, 2/17/2000. 08:45
The Danger of Child Sexuality - an interview with Michel Foucault
"The Danger of Child Sexuality", Foucault's dialogue with Guy Hocquenghem and
Jean Danet, was produced by Roger Pillaudin and broadcast by France Culture
on April 4, 1978. It was
published as "La Loi de la pudeur" in RECHERCHES, 37, April 1979.
First published in English in Semiotext(e) Magazine, (New York):
Semiotext(e) Special Intervention
Series 2: Loving Boys / Loving Children (Summer 1980), in a translation by
Daniel Moshenberg.
This is the full version, published in: Michel Foucault: politics,
philosophy, culture: interviews and
other writings. ( Ed.) by Lawrence D. Kritzman. (New York: Routledge,
1988). Translated
by Alan Sheridan, with the title "Sexuality Morality and the Law."
"THE DANGER OF CHILD SEXUALITY"
MICHEL FOUCAULT: All three of us agreed to take part in this
broadcast (it was agreed in principle several months ago) for the following
reason.
Things had evolved on such a wide front, in such an overwhelming and at
first sight apparently irreversible way, that many of us began to hope
that the legal regime imposed on the sexual practices of our contemporaries
would at last be relaxed and broken up. This regime is not as old as all
that, since the penal code of 1810 (1) said very little about sexuality, as if
sexuality was not the business of the law; and it was only during the
19th century and above all in the 20th, at the time of Petain or of the
Mirguet amendment (1960) (2), that legislation on sexuality increasingly became
oppressive. But, over the last ten years or so, a movement in public
opinion and sexual morals has been discernible in favor of reconsidering this
legal regime. A Commission for the Reform of Penal Law was even set up, whose
task it was to revise a number of fundamental articles in the penal code.
And this commission has actually admitted, I must say with great
seriousness, not only the possibility, but the need to change most of the
articles
in our present legislation concerning sexual behavior. This commission, which
has now been sitting for several months, considered this reform of the
sexual legislation last May and June. I believe that the proposals it expected
to make were what may be called liberal. However, it would seem that for
several months now, a movement in the opposite direction has begun to
emerge. It is a disturbing movement - firstly, because it is not only
occuring in France. Take, for example, what is happening in the United
States, with Anita Bryant's campaign against homosexuals, which has
almost gone so far as to call for murder. It's a phenomenon observable in
France.
But in France we see it through a number of particular, specific facts,
which we shall talk about later (Jean Danet and Guy Hocquenghem will
certainly provide examples), but ones that seem to show that in both
police and legal practice we are returning to tougher and stricter positions.
And this movement, observable in police and legal practice, is
unfortunately very often supported by press campaigns, or by a system of
information
carried out in the press. It is therefore in this situation, that of an
overall movement tending to liberalism, followed by a phenomenon of
reaction, of slowing down, perhaps even the beginning of a reverse
process, that we are holding our discussion this evening.
GUY HOCQUENGHEM: Six months ago we launched a petition demanding
the abrogation of a number of articles in the law, in particular those
concerning relations between and decriminalization of relations between
adults and minors below the age of fifteen. A lot of people signed
it, people belonging to a wide range of political positions, from the Communist
Party to Mme. Dolto (3). So it's a petition that has been signed by a lot
of people who are suspect neither of being particularly pedophiles
themselves nor
even of entertaining extravagant political views. We felt that a certain
movement was beginning to emerge, and this movement was confirmed by the
evidence
submitted to the commission reforming the penal code. What we can now
see, then, is not only that this kind of movement is something of a liberal
illusion, but that in fact it does not amount to a profound
transformation in the legal system, either in the way in which a case is
investigated
or in the way it is judged in court. Furthermore, at the level of public
opinion, at the level of the mass media, the newspapers, radio, television,
etc., it is rather the opposite that is beginning to take place, with new
arguments being used. These new arguments are essentially about childhood, that
is to say, about the exploitation of popular sentiment and its spontaneous
horror of anything that links sex with the child. Thus in an article in the
"Nouvel
Observeateur" begins with a few remarks to the effect that "pornography
involving children is the ultimate American nightmare and no doubt the
most terrible in a country fertile in scandals." When someone says that
child pornography is the most terrible of present scandals, one cannot but be
struck by the disproportion between this - child pornography, which is
not even prostitution - and everything that is happening in the world today-
what the black population has to put up with in the United States, for
instance. This whole campaign about pornography, about prostitution, about all
those social phenomena - which are in any case controversial - only leads to one
fundamental presupposition: 'it's worse when children are consenting and
worse still if it
is neither pornographic nor paid for', etc. In other words, the entire
criminalizing context serves only to bring out the kernel of the
accusation: you want to make love with consenting children. It serves only to
stress the traditional prohibition and to stress in a new way, with new
arguments,
the traditional prohibition against sexual relations without violence, without
money, without any form of prostitution, that may take place between adults
and minors.
JEAN DANET: We already know that some psychiatrists consider that sexual
relations
between children and adults are always traumatizing.
And that if a child doesn't remember them, it is because they remain in his
subconscious, but in any case the child is marked forever, the child
will become emotionally disturbed. So what takes place with the intervention
of psychiatrists in court is a manipulation of the children's consent, a
manipulation of their words. Then there is another use - a fairly recent
one, I think - of repressive legislation, which should be noted because it
may be used by the legal system as a temporary tactic to fill in the gaps.
Indeed in the traditional disciplinary institutions - prisons, schools, and
asylums - the nurses, teachers, and so on, followed a very strict regimen.
Their
superiors kept as close a watch on them as on the inmates. On the other
hand, in the new agencies of social control, control through hierarchy
is much more difficult. Indeed we may well wonder whether we are not
witnessing a use of common-law legislation; incitement of a minor to commit an
immoral act, for example, can be used against social workers and teachers. And
I would point out in passing that Villerot is a teacher, that Gallien was
a doctor even if the acts did not take place at a time when he was
practicing his profession; that in 1976, in Nantes, a teacher was tried for
inciting minors to immoral acts, when in fact what he had done was to supply
contaceptives to the boys and girls in his charge. So the common-law
appears to have been used this time to repress teachers and social workers who
were not carrying out their task of social control as their respective
hierarchies wished. Between 1830 and 1860, there already were laws directed
specifically
at teachers: certain judgements stated this explicitly. Article 334 of
the Penal Code - which applied to certain persons, teachers, for example,
and concerned the incitement of minors to commit immoral acts - was invoked
in a case that did not involve a teacher. So we can see the extent to which
such legislation is ultimately looking for places where 'perverts likely to
corrupt young people' might slip in. The judges were obsessed with this.
They were unable to come up with a definition of the perversions. Medicine
and psychiatry were to do it for them. In the mid-19th century they had one
obsession: if the pervert was everywhere, then they must start tracking him
down in the most dangerous institutions, the institutions at risk,
among the populations at risk, though the term had not yet been invented. If
it has been possible to believe for a time that there was to be a
withdrawal of legislation, it was not because we thought that we were living
in a
liberal period but because we knew that more subtle forms of sexual supervision
would be set up - and perhaps the apparent freedom that camouflaged
these more subtle, more diffuse social controls was going to extend beyond
the field of the juridical and the penal. This is not always necessarily
the case, and it is quite possible to believe that traditional repressive
laws will function side-by-side with much more subtle form of control, a
hitherto
unknown form of sexology that would invade all institutions, including
educational ones.
MICHEL FOUCAULT: Indeed it seem to me that we have reached an important
point. It is true that we are witnessing a real change: it is probably not
true that this change will be favorable to any real alleviation of the
legislation on sexuality. As Jean Danet has shown, a very large body of
legislation was gradually promulgated, though not without difficulty,
throughout the 19th century. But this legislation was characterized by the
odd fact that it was never capable of saying exactly what it was punishing.
Harassments were punished, but were never defined. Outrageous acts
were punished; nobody ever said what an outrage was. The law was intended to
defend decency (pudeur); nobody ever knew what pudeur was. In practice,
whenever a legislative intervention into the sphere of sexuality had to
be justified, the law on pudeur was always invoked. And it may be said
that all the legislation on sexuality introduced since the 19th century in
France is a set of laws on pudeur. It is certainly a fact that this legislative
apparatus, aimed at an undefined object, was never used except in cases
when it was considered to be tactically useful. Indeed, there has been a
whole campaign against teachers. There was a time when it was used against
the clergy. This legislation was used to regulate the phenomenon of child
prostitution, so important throughout the 19th century between 1830 and
1880. We are now aware that this instrument, which possessed the
advantage of flexibility, since its object was undefined, could no longer
survive
when these notions of pudeur, outrage, and harrassment were seen as
belonging to a particular system of value, culture, and discourse; in the
pornographic explosion and the profits that it involves, in this new
atmosphere, it is no
longer possible to use these words and to make the law function on this basis.
But what is emerging - and indeed why I believe it was important
to speak about the problem of children - what is emerging is a new penal
system,
a new legislative system, whose function is not so much to punish
offenses against these general laws concerning decency, as to protect
populations and parts of populations regarded as particularly vulnerable.
In other
words, the legislator will not justify the measures that he is proposing by
saying: the universal decency of mankind must be defended. What he will
say is: there are people for whom others' sexuality may become a permanent
danger. In this catagory, of course, are children, who may find
themselves at the mercy of an adult sexuality that is alien to them and may
well
be harmful to them. Hence there is a legislation that appeals to this
notion of a vulnerable population, a "high-risk population,"as they say,
and to a
whole body of psychiatric and psychological knowledge imbibed from
psychoanalysis - it doesn't really matter whether the psychoanalysis is
good or bad - and this will give the psychiatrists the right to intervene
twice. Firstly, in general terms, to say: yes, of course, children do have a
sexuality, we can't go back to those old notions about children being pure
and not knowing
what sexuality is. But we psychologists or psychoanalysts or psychiatrists,
or teachers, we know perfectly well that
children's sexuality is a specific sexuality, with its own forms, its own
periods of maturation, its own highpoints, its specific
drives, and its own latency periods, too. This sexuality of the child is a
territory with its own geography that
the adult must not enter. It is virgin territory, sexual territory, of
course, but territory that must preserve its virginity.
The adult will therefore intervene as guarantor of that specificity of child
sexuality in order to protect it.
And, on the other hand, in each particular case, he will say:
this is an instance of an adult bringing his own sexuality into the
child's sexuality. It could be that the child, with his own sexuality, may have
desired that adult, he may even have consented, he may even have made
the first moves. We may even agree that it was he who seduced the adult;
but we specialists with our psychological knowledge know perfectly well that
even the seducing child runs a risk, in every case, of being damaged and
traumatized by the fact that he or she has had sexual dealings with an
adult. Consequently, the child must be 'protected from his own desires',
even when his desires turn him towards an adult. The psychiatrist is the one
who will be able to say: I can predict that a trauma of this importance
will occured as a result of this or that type of sexual relation. It is
therefore
within the new legislative framework - basically intended to protect certain
vulnerable sections of the population with the establishment of a new
medical power - that a conception of sexuality and above all of the relations
between child and adult sexuality will be based; and it is one that is
extremely questionable.
HOCQUENGHEM: There is a whole mixture of notions that makes it possible to
fabricate this notion of crime or offence against decency, a highly
complex mixture, which we do not have time here to discuss at length, but
which comprises both the religious prohibitions concerning sodomy and
the completely new notions, to which Michel Foucault has just referred, about
what people think they know of the total difference between the world of
the child and the world of the adult. But todays overall tendency is
indisputably not only to fabricate a type of crime that is quite simply
the erotic or sensual relationship between a child and an adult, but also,
since this may be isolated in the form of a crime, to create a certain category
of the population defined by the fact that it tends to indulge in those
pleasures. There exists then a particular category of the pervert, in the
strict sense, of monsters whose aim in life is to practice sex with
children. Indeed they become perverts and intolerable monsters since the
crime as such is recognized and constituted, and now strengthened by the
whole psychoanalytical and sociological arsenal. What we are doing is
constructing an entirely new type of criminal, a criminal so
inconceivably horrible that his crime goes beyond any explanation, any
victim. It is
rather like that kind legal monster, the term "attentat sans violence": an
attack without violence that is unprovable in any case and leaves no trace,
since even the anuscope is unable to find the slightest lesion that might
legitimate in some way or other the notion of violence. Thus, in a way,
public outrage to decency also realizes this, insofar as the offence in
question does not require a public in order to be committed. In the case of
"attenat sans violence", the offence in which the police have been unable to
find anything, nothing at all, in that case, the criminal is simply a
criminal because he is a criminal, because he has those tastes. It is what
used to be called a crime of opinion. Take the case of Parajanov. When a
delegation arrived in Paris to see the representative of the Soviet
embassy to hand in a protest, the Soviet representative replied: in fact you
don't really know why he was condemned; he was condemned for raping a child.
This representative read the press: he knew very well that this term inspired
more fear that any other. The constitution of this type of criminal, the
constitution of this individual perverse enough to do a thing that hitherto
had always been done without anybody thinking it right to stick his nose
into it, is an extremely grave step from a political point of view. Even if
it has not reached the same dimensions as the campaigns against the
terrorists, there are nevertheless several hundred cases going before the
courts each year. And this campaign suggests that a certain section of
the population must henceforth be regarded a priori as criminals, may be
pursued in operations of the "help the police" type, and this is what
happened in
the case of Villerot. The police report noted with interest that the
population took part in the search, that people used their cars to look
for the pervert. In a way the movement feeds upon itself. The crime vanishes,
nobody is concerned any longer to know wether in fact a crime was
committed or not, wether someone has been hurt or not. No one is even
concerned any
more wether there actually was a victim. The crime feeds totally upon
itself in a man-hunt, by the identification, the isolation of the category of
individuals regarded as pedophiles. It culminates in that sort of call for
a lynching sent out nowadays by the gutter press.
DANET: It is true that lawyers defending these cases have a lot of
problems. But I should like to say something specifically about such
problems. In cases like the Croissant affair, the terrorists' lawyers were
regarded immediately as dangerous accomplices of the terrorists (4.) Anyone
who came into contact with the affair became implicated. Similarly, the
defense of someone found guilty of an indecent act with a minor, especially
in the provinces, has extremely serious problems, because many lawyers
simply cannot take on such a defense, avoid doing so, and prefer being
appointed by the court. For, in a way, anyone who defends a pedophile may be
suspected of having some sympathy for that cause. Even judges think to
themselves: if he defends them, it's because he isn't really as much against
it himself. It's a serious matter, though it's almost laughable really, it's
a fact known to anyone who has had to deal with such cases wether in
th provinces or in Paris: it is extremely difficult both for the lawyer to
defend such a case and even sometimes to find a lawyer willing to do
so. A lawyer will be quite happy to defend someone accused of ten old ladies.
That doesn't bother him in the least. But to defend someone who has touched
some kid's cock for a second, that's a real problem. That is part of the
whole set up around this new sort of criminal, the adult who has erotic
relations with children.
I apologize for referring to history once again, but I think in this
matter one can usefully refer to what happened in the 19th and early
20th centuries. When an open letter to the commision for the reform of the
penal
code was published and signatures placed at the bottom of this letter, it
was remarked that a number of psychologists, sexologists, and
psychiatrists had signed. What they were demanding, then, was the
decriminalization
of immoral acts with minors over the age of fifteen, a different regime
for immoral acts with minors between fifteen and eighteen, abolition of the
offense of public outrage etc., etc. The fact that psychiatrists and
psychologists demanded that the law be brought up to date on this point
did not mean that they were on the side of those who were subjected to such
repression. What I mean is, just because one is involved in a struggle
against some authority, in this instance, the legal authorities, this
does not mean one is on the side of those who are subjected to it. This is
proved by the example of Germany, where from the 19th century onwards, from
1870, a whole movement protested against a law that was aimed at homosexuals,
paragraph 175 of the German penal code. It was not even a habitual crime.
There was no need to be an acknowledged homosexual; a single homosexual
act was enough, whatever it may be. So a whole movement developed, made up
of homosexuals, but also of doctors and psychiatrists, to demand the
abolition of this law. But if one reads the literature published by these
doctors
and psychiatrists it becomes absolutely clear that they expected only one
thing
from the abolition of this law, namely, to be able to take over the
perverts for themselves and to treat them with all the knowledge that they
claimed to have aquired since around 1860. With Morel's "Treatise On Degeneracy"
what we have is the setting up of a whole nosography of the perversions; and
these psychiatrists were demanding in fact that the perverts be handed
over to them, that the law should give up any dealings it may have with
sexuality, which it speaks of so badly, in so unscientific a way, and
that they should be able to treat cases in a perhaps less aggressive, less
systematic, less blind way than the law; they alone could say in each
case who was guilty, who was sick, and calmly decide what measures were to
be taken (5). I'm not saying that thing were reproduced in the same way, but
it is interesting to see how the two authorities could be in competition
to get hold of that 'population of perverts'.
MICHEL FOUCAULT: I'm certainly not going to sum up everything that has
been said. I think Hocquenghem has shown very clearly what was developing in
relation to the strata of the population that had to be "protected." On
the other hand, there is childhood, which by its very nature is in danger
and must be protected against every possible danger, and therefore any
possible act or attack. Then, on the other hand, there are dangerous
individuals, who are generally adults of course, so that sexuality, in the
new system
that is being set up, will take on quite a different appearance from the one it
used to have. In the past, laws prohibited a number of acts, indeed acts so
numerous one was never quite sure what they were, but, nevertheless, it
was acts that the law concerned itself with. Certain forms of behavior were
condemned. Now what we are defining and, therefore, what will be found
by the intervention of the law, the judge, and the doctor, are dangerous
individuals. We're going to have a society of dangers, with, on the one
side, those who are in danger, and on the other, those who are
dangerous. And sexuality will no longer be a kind of behavior hedged in by
precise
prohibitions, but a kind of roaming danger, a sort of omnipresent phantom,
a phantom that will be played out between men and women, children and adults,
and possibly between adults themselves, etc. Sexuality will become a threat
in all social relations, in all relations between members of different age
groups, in all relations between individuals. It is on this shadow this
phantom, this fear that the authorities would try to get a grip through an
apparently generous and, at least general, legislation and through a series
of particular interventions that would probably be made by the legal
institutions, with the support of the medical institutions. And what we
will have there is a new regime for the supervision of sexuality; in the second
half of the 20th century it may well be decriminalized, but only to
appear in the form of a danger, a universal danger, and this represents a
considerable change. I would say that the danger lay there.
DISCUSSION
PIERRE HAHN: I simply would like to mention a work that appeared
about ten years ago, but which seems to me to be rather important in the
present context. It is a work on the personality of exhibitionists. On the one
hand, then, there is this classification that leads to excluding a certain
type of
exhibitionist from what I would call the system of psychoanalytic
reeducation and,
on the other hand, it actually consists in returning, but in rather
different ways, apparently
to the notion of the born criminal. I just would like to quote this
sentence from the book,
because it seems to me significant and then I shall say why: "The
exhibitionist perversion is a
category of exhibitionistic perverts - exhibitionistic perversion
corresponds here to a phenomenon of radical amputation from part of the
instincts,
and this amputation takes place at a stage that is neither genital nor
non-genital in sexual development, but in that still mysterious area where
personality and instinct seem to me to be potential."
Yes, we are back to Lombroso's notion of the born criminal, which
the author himself had just quoted (6). It really is something present
before birth, something that appears to be in the embryo; and if I mention the
embryo it is because at the present time we are seeing a strong return
of old methods, though perhaps wrapped up in new forms: methods such as
psycho-surgery, in which, for example, homosexuals, pedophiles, and
rapists might be operated on in the brain. On the other hand, certain genetic
manipulations are being carried out: we had proof of this quite
recently, especially in East Germany. All this seems to me very disturbing. Of
course, it is pure repression. But, on the other hand, it is also evidence
of a
certain use of the critique of psychoanalysis that is in a sense quite
reactionary, I would say, in inverted commas. The expert referred to in
the text I have quoted is called Jacqes
Stephani, a psychiatrist in Bordeaux who has contributed to the study or
the exhibitionist personality. The expert
actually says that the judge must act as one element in a process of
therapeutic reeducation, except in the
extreme case where the subject is regarded as beyond rehabilitation.
This is the moral madman, Lombroso's born criminal. Indeed this idea that
legislation, the legal system, the penal system, even medicine must
concern themselves
essentially with dangers, with dangerous individuals rather than acts, dates
more or less from Lombroso and so it
is not at all surprising if one finds Lombroso's ideas comming back into
fashion. Society has to
defend itself against dangerous individuals. There are dangerous individuals
by nature, by heredity, by genetic code, etc.
Q: I would just like to ask Guy Hocquenghem, who gave us an
outline of some examples of the repression associated today with this type
of act,
how can we create strategic alliances to fight in that area? The natural
allies of this type of movement - which are, lets say, the progressive groups-
are somewhat reticent about getting mixed up in this sort of business.
Movements such as the women's movement are focusing their activities on such
problems as rape and are succeeding in increasing the penalization of such acts.
HOCQUENGHEM: We were very careful in the text of the Open Letter
to the Penal Code. We took great care to speak exclusively of an indecent act
not involving violence and incitement of a minor to commit an indecent act.
We were extremely careful not to touch, in any way, on the problem of
rape, which is totally different. Now I agree with you on one thing, and that
is that we have all seen the television program on rape and were all
shocked by the reactions it aroused in France, some of which even went so far as
telephone calls requesting the chemical castration of the rapists.
There are two problems here. There is the problem of rape in the strict
sense, on
which the women's movement and women in general have expressed themselves
perfectly clearly, but there is
the other problem of the reactions at the level of public opinion. One
triggers off secondary effects of
man-hunting, lynching, or moral mobilization.
DANET: I should like to add something in reply to the same question.
When we say that the problem of consent is quite central in matters
concerned with pedophilia, we are not, of course, saying that consent
I always there. But - and this is where one may separate the attitude of
the law with regard to rape and with regard to pedophilia - in the case of
rape,
judges consider that there is a presumption of consent on the part of
the woman and that the opposite has to be demonstrated. Whereas where pedophilia
is concerned, it's the opposite. It's considered that there is a
presumption of non-consent, a presumption of violence, even in a case where no
charge --of an indecent act with violence has been made, that is, in a case in
which the charge used is that of indecent act without violence, that is, with
consenting pleasure - because it has to be said that this act without
violence is the repressive, legal translation of consenting pleasure.
It's pretty clear how the system of proof is manipulated in opposite ways in
the case of rape of women and in the case of indecent assault on a minor.
Q: Public opinion, including enlightened opinion such as that of
the doctors of the Institute of Sexology, asked at what age there can be
said to be definite consent. It's a big problem.
MICHEL FOUCAULT: Yes, it is difficult to lay down barriers. Consent is
one thing; it is a quite different thing when we are dealing with the
likelihood
of a child being believed when, speaking of his sexual relations, his
affections, his tender feelings, or his contacts (the sexual adjective
is often an embarrassment here, because it does not correspond to
reality), a child's ability to explain what his feelings are, what actually
happened, how far he is believed, these are quite different things. now, where
children are concerned, they are supposed to have a sexuality that can never
be directed towards an adult, and that's that. Secondly, it is supposed that
they are not capable of talking about themselves, of being sufficiently
lucid about themselves. They are unable to express their feelings about the
whole thing. Therefore they are not believed. They are thought to be
incapable of sexuality and they are not thought to be capable o speaking
about it. But, after all, listening to a child, hearing him speak, hearing
him explain what his relations actually were with someone, adult or not,
provided one listens with enough
sympathy, must allow one to establish more or less what degree of violence
if any was used or what degree of
consent was given. And to assume that a child is incapable of explaining
what happened and was incapable of
giving his consent are two abuses that are intolerable, quite unacceptable.
Q: If you were a legislator, you would fix no limit and you would leave it
to the judges to decide wether or not
an indecent act was committed with or without consent? Is that your position?
MICHEL FOUCAULT: In any case, an age barrier laid down
by law does not have much sense.
Again, the child may be trusted to say wether or not he was
subjected to violence. An examining magistrate, a liberal, told me once
when we were discussing this question: after all, there are eighteen-year-old
girls who are practically forced to make love with their fathers or
their stepfathers; they may be eighteen, but it's an intolerable system of
constraint. And one, moreover, that they feel is intolerable, if only people
are willing to listen to them and put them in conditions which they can say
what they feel.
HOCQUENGHEM: On the one hand, we didn't put any age limit in our text.
In any case, we don't regard ourselves as legislators, but simply as a
movement of opinion that demands the abolition of certain pieces of
legislation. Our role isn't to make up new ones. As far as this
question of consent is concerned, I prefer the terms used by Michel Foucault:
listen to what the child says and give it a certain credence. This notion
of consent
is a trap, in any case. What is sure is that the legal form of an
intersexual consent is nonsense. No one signs a contract before making love.
MICHEL FOUCAULT: Consent is a contractual notion.
HOCQUENGHEM: It's a purely contractual notion. When we say that
children are "consenting" in these cases, all we intend to say is this: in
any case, there was no violence, or organized manipulation in order to
wrench out of them affective or erotic relations. It's an important point,
all the more important for the children because it's an ambiguous victory
in that to get a judge to organize a ceremony in which the children come
and say that they were actually consenting is an ambiguous victory. The public
affirmation of consent to such acts is extremely difficult, as we know.
Everybody - judges, doctors, the defendant - knows that the child was
consenting - but nobody says anything, because, apart from anything else,
there's no way it can be introduced. It's not simply the effect of a
prohibition by law: it's really impossible to express a very complete
relationship between a child and an adult - a relation that is progressive,
long, goes through all kinds of stages, which are not all exclusively
sexual, through all kinds of affective contacts. To express this in
terms of legal consent is an absurdity. In any case, if one listens to what
a child
says and if he says" I didn't mind," that doesn't have the legal value of
"I consent." But I'm also
very mistrustful of that formal recognition of consent on the part of a
minor, because I know it
will never be obtained and is meaningless in any case.
Translated by Alan Sheridan
Notes:
(1) Penal Code of 1810: Part of the Napoleonic Code. This group of 485
articles defines crimes, offenses, and misdemeanors as well as the
resulting punishments. Promulgated February 12, 1810.
(2) Mirguet amendment: Promulgated July 18, 1960 as amendment to article 38
of the 1958 French constitution (October 4, 1958). It declared the necessity
to fight against all threats to public hygiene and specifically names
tuberculosis, cancer, alcoholism, prostitution, and homosexuality as
objects of attack.
(3) Francoise Dolto. French clinical psychoanalyst whose research on
children focuses particularly on the theoretical aspects of early
maladjustment [Lawrence D. Kritzman].
(4) Klaus Croissant. The lawyer of the Red Army Fraction. He sought
asylum in France but was the victim of extradition to Germany in 1978. Foucault
took on the cause of Croissant and wrote many articles on his behalf in the
NOUVEL OBSERVATEUR.
(5) Benedict-Auguste Morel (1809-1873). He studied the institution of the
insane asylum in Europe and
reformulated the coercive procedures used against the mentally ill.
(6) Cesar Lombroso (1836-1909). Italian founder of the science of
criminology. Postulated a theory that distinguishes "normal" individuals
from criminal types".
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 17:34:26 +0000
From: "Sam Pryke" <PRYKES@hope.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: Hormones, genetic determinism, and history
Dave Harvey --
Well, for fear of creating a tedious little local spat I wasn't going to reply to David Harley, but as
I have a few minutes as a student hasn't turned up to see me I will. Besides some of the issues
are interesting. I'll make the points numerically:
1. I am all for robust debate but exchanges of any kind are not helped by repeatedly referring to
assertions you don't agree with as odd, curious and so on. It may make one feel that one has the
intellectual high ground, but it generally only irritates others. This is as true of academic
discussions on the internet to those on the 14C to Croxteth -- though admittedly the
consequences of sneering on the later are likely to be more 'corporeal' than those on the former
(la!).
2. Of course not all popular assumptions, beliefs are valid. I think it would be possible to draw
up some sort of a typology between, amongst others, propagandist assertions that are entirely
erroneous, e.g. the Southern white racist myth that Black men desire above all else to rape white
women and, if left uncontrolled, will do so. And stereotypes that are gross distortions but
contain an element of truth, e.g. Scoutmasters are homosexuals who seek to surround themselves
with young boys, pace Tim Jeal's Woody Allen-Freudien thesis that Baden Powell created the
Scouts as a giant homo-erotic adventure playground. And popular conventions. They can be
wholly wrong -- for instance, the sun circles the sun -- and are generally, no doubt, somewhat
crude but are not necessarily wrong by virtue of the fact that they have widespread acceptance.
Of course, one has to enquire into their origin, maintenance and the interests they serve, but that
it is a question of power and ideology which can, I submit, be separated from that of veracity.
3. Even if one is going to start from the assumption that a popular assumption is wrong because it
is a popular assumption, it is still necessary to examine it on its merits. The popular view that
sexuality is driven by hormones -- in so far of course that this is a general view and in so far as it
is given to us by media scientific pundits as Dave Harley suggests -- is in itself rather more
sophisticated than he indicates. He suggests that to conceive of sex in this way is to see it as of
uniform impetus. Surely individual experiential knowledge, combined with that from school
biology and perhaps media scientific pundits, combines to produce the view that the ebbs and
flows of somebody's sex drive -- from 'feeling as horny as hell' to being almost totally
uninterested in sex of any sort for certain periods -- is attributable to the bodily fluctuations of
hormones. Moreover, such a conception of sex surely takes account, admittedly rather
haphazardly, of individual and collective differences in sexuality. I have heard people attribute
their particular sexuality to their particular parental genetic inheritance, whilst the sexuality of an
ethnic, national group is often conceived as being innate, an assumption that entails a conception
of a hormonal difference.
4. The feeling of certain states -- I am talking here of the raw sensation not the response -- do not
depend a learnt response, any accurate knowledge of their cause or even their articulation.
Hunger is the most obvious example. The fact that a hundred years ago people did not conceive
of a hormonal sex drive as such does not mean that it did not exist. (Actually, I would be
prepared to bet money that somebody on this list knows about an Ancient Greek thinker or two
who did conceptualise hormones with more or less accuracy.) How people act upon hormonal
impulse varies enormously of course, both historically and within and between cultures, but that
doesn't mean that what is felt is any the less compelling for the individual.
5. What this -- Dave Harely's line of argument -- illustrates to me is that social constructivism is
not only obliged but actually thinks that it is somehow useful and clever to, by turn, challenge
and discount every assumption within the understanding of human sexuality because they are
assumptions. But does he really want to suggest that there is no qualitative difference between
the sex drive of a pre and post puberty child? To do so he would have to attempt to attempt
disembark upon the rockier shaws of this line of argument which I don't think he wants to do --
as opposed to disembarking upon the open if grossly overdeveloped beaches of the Carolinas
where well fastened swimming costumes apparently owe nothing to the C18 settlement of,
amongst others, straight laced C18 Welsh Presbytirans.
SAM PRYKE
David Harley comments:
This is a curious criticism. I suspect that Dr Pryke does not take for
granted whatever "most people assume" about nationalism, be they academics,
or politicians, or merely having a chat on the 14C bus to Croxteth. Ideas
that "everybody knows" are always problematic because they are unexamined.
We need to ask where these ideas come from, how have they been propagated
and sustained, and what interests have they served at various points in
their career. A hundred years ago, no one attributed anything at all to
hormones, so their rising status as the cause of each and every gender
characteristic can be traced quite easily.
This is not an attack on non-academic knowledge, even though biologists
and endocrinologists currently try to avoid such talk, at least in print.
Nor is it an attack on scientists. The ideas that historians or
sociologists or any other academics think they know are no different in
their tendency to rest on very insecure foundations.
"the dominant conception": who is dominating whom?
"hormonal desires": are desires hormonal? in what sense?
Sam Pryke wrote:
But more basic than that is the fact that it is the case that people
frequently do feel their sexuality to be driven by innate bodily desire.
And they don't find this 'odd'.
David Harley comments:
People "feel" all sorts of things. They do not find this odd. But what
has this to do with attributing causation to hormones, let alone
characterizing them as "sex hormones"? People feel fear and experience a
"rush" which we attribute to adrenaline. Does the adrenaline determine
what they should fear, or does some combination of culture and experience?
The adrenal response is surely a learned one.
Sam Pryke wrote:
One of the correspondents was reprimanded for suggesting that the origin of
sexual conservatism in the Deep South of the USA was its original
settlement by European Christian minorities. The objection was that this
conception of US immigration history is mythical and the basis of sexual
conservatism in the South lies in slavery and other structures of social
relations. Well yes, but in accounting for the social conservatism of
states like N & S Carolina -- that manifests itself in, amongst other
things, strict bathing laws -- isn't it the case that the religious
ideology of the original European settlers is at least 'a factor'? These
things are rarely mutually exclusive. One doesn't have to adopt a hazy,
anything goes approach to appreciate this.
David Harley comments:
The point was not some "hazy, anything goes approach", but that the
religious beliefs of North and South Carolina, for example, were not those
of the settlers. The religious beliefs of the Bible Belt were imported
from the North during the early nineteenth century, not brought by
immigrants from Europe. Southerners had to be converted from their
previous lack of interest in strict morals. In the process, Northern
religious positions had to make compromises with the patriarchalism of the
slave states. It is the notion that fundamentalism in the South descends
from seventeenth-century Puritanism that is hazy.
David Harley,
Dept. of History,
University of Notre Dame,
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
tel.: 219-631-7789
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 19:04:19 -0500
From: David Nicholas Harley <David.N.Harley.4@nd.edu>
Subject: Re: Hormones, genetic determinism, and history
Sam Pryke wrote:
I am all for robust debate but exchanges of any kind are not helped by
repeatedly referring to assertions you don't agree with as odd, curious and
so on. It may make one feel that one has the intellectual high ground, but
it generally only irritates others. This is as true of academic
discussions on the internet to those on the 14C to Croxteth -- though
admittedly the consequences of sneering on the later are likely to be more
'corporeal' than those on the former (la!).
David Harley replies:
I'm sorry to have committed this offence. It's difficult to convey tones
of voice in this medium. As for the Croxteth bus, or the pub, or whatever,
I have generally found debates in such circumstances to be robust but
amiable, unlike many academic situations, where viciousness is masked by a
show of affability.
Sam Pryke wrote:
Of course not all popular assumptions, beliefs are valid...Of course, one
has to enquire into their origin, maintenance and the interests they serve,
but that it is a question of power and ideology which can, I submit, be
separated from that of veracity.
David Harley comments:
>From the viewpoint of historiography, one might suggest that the accepted
veracity of some beliefs makes the task of discovering the interests
involved in their creation and maintenance all the more urgent. It is easy
to identify the factors that led to the creation of beliefs that we now
consider false. Moreover, we have no way of knowing which of our present
beliefs will be considered false one hundred years hence. In considering
scientific beliefs, or their popular derivations, the truth or falsity of
the beliefs is surely not the historian's concern.
Sam Pryke wrote:
Surely individual experiential knowledge, combined with that from school
biology and perhaps media scientific pundits, combines to produce the view
that the ebbs and flows of somebody's sex drive -- from 'feeling as horny
as hell' to being almost totally uninterested in sex of any sort for
certain periods -- is attributable to the bodily fluctuations of hormones.
David Harley comments:
"Individual experiential knowledge" is never totally naive. It always
requires conceptual systems to be turned into categories and causal chains.
Sam Pryke wrote:
Moreover, such a conception of sex surely takes account, admittedly rather
haphazardly, of individual and collective differences in sexuality. I have
heard people attribute their particular sexuality to their particular
parental genetic inheritance, whilst the sexuality of an ethnic, national
group is often conceived as being innate, an assumption that entails a
conception of a hormonal difference.
David Harley comments:
In other times, other views have been taken of "innate sexuality". The
Greeks adduced environmental causes acting on ethnic groups. Later
Galenists focussed on the individual balance of the humours, stressing the
innately greater sexual voraciousness of most women, but occasionally
seeing whole groups as affected by local climate. In the eighteenth
century, nervous sensibility would have been deployed to explain such
matters. Hormonal difference was not required.
Sam Pryke wrote:
The feeling of certain states -- I am talking here of the raw sensation not
the response -- do not depend a learnt response, any accurate knowledge of
their cause or even their articulation. Hunger is the most obvious example.
David Harley comments:
It is very hard indeed to locate examples of a "raw sensation" that has not
been learned. Does the neonate really know what "hunger" is, or how to
rectify it? Surely not. The adults offer food to the incomprehending babe
until he or she has learned to associate food with the cessation of
discomfort, of whatever kind. This, however, is a very low-level
sensation, much like pain, although one might note the wide cultural
variation in the experience of pain, which suggests a strong learned
component. I hardly think that sexuality is such a relatively
uncontaminated sensation, given how late in life it seems to achieve
cognitive status, pace some Freudians.
Sam Pryke wrote:
The fact that a hundred years ago people did not conceive of a hormonal sex
drive as such does not mean that it did not exist.
David Harley comments:
Perhaps not, but it does mean that the concept did not form part of
anybody's personality formation or explanatory system. As historians of
sexuality, we are more concerned with how people conceived of themselves
than with some currently postulated primal urges. (Not that biologists do
any longer conceive of the action of hormones in the way that is being
suggested here.)
Sam Pryke wrote:
...Dave Harely's line of argument illustrates to me...that social
constructivism is not only obliged but actually thinks that it is somehow
useful and clever to, by turn, challenge and discount every assumption
within the understanding of human sexuality because they are assumptions.
But does he really want to suggest that there is no qualitative difference
between the sex drive of a pre and post puberty child?
David Harley comments:
"clever"? Now who's calling names? I don't recall saying anything about
puberty. I am simply questioning the use of hormones, sex drives, and for
that matter puberty to explain historical phenomena, even though people in
the UK or the US currently use them to explain their own experiences. (I
have, for example, heard aggressive football fans and City stock traders
explain their behaviour in terms of testosterone.) Humans learn what their
sexuality is and means within specific local circumstances, just as
orang-utans learn how to swing through trees, not being born with that
knowledge. As has been discussed on this list, many children begin to
exhibit sexual attraction in present societies well before puberty. Where
do hormones stand in this process, relative to the influence of peers,
family and the mass media? What is the causal status that we would have to
assign to hormones if we were to deploy them as explanatory tools in the
understanding of past societies? Would this even tally with their present
status in biological developmental systems, as opposed to popular science
writing?
David Harley,
Dept. of History,
University of Notre Dame,
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
tel.: 219-631-7789
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 16:14:52 +0000
From: "Sam Pryke" <PRYKES@hope.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: Emancipated women and the third sex
I don't think the comparison is exact but it might be interesting useful to take a look at George
Gissing's novel The Odd Women (1893).
SAM PRYKE
__________________________________________________________________
From: Mal123nash@aol.com
Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 15:54:02 EST
Subject: Re: Ulrichs in French
Dear Historians of Sexuality,
Hello to all. The Ulrichs' webpage (Celebration 2000) has been translated
into French. I wouldn't mention it at all except that one of the first
questions I was asked is whether the page was only in English. Now, it has
been translated not only into Spanish, but also into French.
With best wishes,
Michael Lombardi-Nash, Ph.D.
http://www.angelfire.com./fl3/celebration2000/french.html
http://www.angelfire.com/fl3/uraniamanuscripts (more on Ulrichs)
__________________________________________________________________
From: kallberg@sas.upenn.edu (Jeffrey Kallberg)
Subject: Re: Emancipated women and the third sex
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 13:01:02 -0500 (EST)
>
> And if anyone knows anything about Wolzogen, I would
> be interested to hear that as well, although it might
> not belong on the list. Thanks!
>
I presume Ernst von Wolzogen is somehow related to Hans von Wolzogen, the
person responsible for the application of the term "leitmotiv" to actual
musical gestures found in Wagner's operas. And in any event, Ernst von
W. plainly would have been familiar with the Wagner operas, in which
notions of androgyny (another sort of "dritte Geschlecht") feature
prominently. Jean-Jacques Nattiez's *Wagner Androgyne* is a useful
source on this subject.
More to the point, perhaps, Ernst von Wolzogen was also the librettist
for Richard Strauss's opera *Feuersnot*, whose plot can be read as a
satire of "liberated women" rather generally.
--
Jeffrey Kallberg
Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
Department of Music
University of Pennsylvania
201 S. 34th St.
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6313
215-898-7545 (office)
215-573-2106 (fax)
kallberg@sas.upenn.edu
__________________________________________________________________
From: "Lesley Hall" <lesleyah@primex.co.uk>
Subject: Fw: call for papers
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 19:45:03 -0000
For info
Lesley Hall
lesleyah@primex.co.uk
website http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
-----Original Message-----
From: Journal of the History of Sexuality <jhs@sfsu.edu>
To: jhs@sfsu.edu <jhs@sfsu.edu>
Date: 24 February 2000 19:24
Subject: call for papers
>
> CALL FOR PAPERS for a special issue of the Journal of the History of
> Sexuality on "Sexuality and German Fascism."
>
> Deadline for submission of complete articles is February 1, 2001. Earlier
> submissions are encouraged.
>
> Topics may include (but are not limited to): abortion, reproduction,
> sterilization, birth control; homosexuality, heterosexuality; sexual
> violence; sex and sexual violence in the Holocaust; prostitution; "race
> defilement"; relations with and among forced laborers; sex and class
issues;
> sex and medicine, sexology; sex and religion; sex and the military; sexual
> representations during the Third Reich; the evolution of sexual
> representations of fascism and/or Holocaust in memoirs, fiction and/or
film
> within various national traditions. Essays contributing to theoretical or
> methodological discussions in the history of sexuality are especially
> welcome.
>
> Direct inquiries or papers to herzog@msu.edu; D. Herzog, History Dept.,
> Michigan State Univ., East Lansing MI 48824 USA.
>
>
__________________________________________________________________
From: "Lesley Hall" <lesleyah@primex.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Emancipated women and the third sex
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 18:29:07 -0000
I suspect Otto Weininger's theories in _Sex and Character_ (which I don't
have immediately to hand) might support this idea, with his concept of the
blend of M (male) and W (female) characters in all individuals, supported by
extensive reading in contemporary science and literature.
The idea does sound plausible... it's just I can't immediately bring to
mind any specific citation - though Edward Carpenter's characterisation of
the uranian female comes quite close.
Lesley Hall
lesleyah@primex.co.uk
website http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 20:02:16 -0500
From: David Nicholas Harley <David.N.Harley.4@nd.edu>
Subject: Re: Never-Marrieds & the Church
Lynn wrote:
>I'm especially interested in research on how the
>church views never-married women.
David Harley comments:
You might find it interesting to compare attitudes towards bachelors, in
order to separate out gender issues from attitudes towards the single state
and its undesirability. With male singletons, there are also concerns
among church groups about philandering, homosexuality and/or paedophilia.
David Harley,
Dept. of History,
University of Notre Dame,
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
tel.: 219-631-7789
__________________________________________________________________
From: "Hall ,Dr Lesley" <l.hall@wellcome.ac.uk>
Subject: BP Wiesner and British B-C movement
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 15:30:16 -0000
He is indexed as a correspondence of CP Blacker, and the reference pertains
to Blacker's files relating to the Birth Control Investigation Committee,
involvement in May 1932 Conference. There is also a passing reference in the
FPA archives: report by him on 'Hormonic Interference as a method of
controlling fertility', 1931. I'd be inclined to check out the contexts of
BCIC files now in the FPA archive also (not indexed to
contents/correspondent level).
(Both collections in the CMAC at the Wellcome Library London)
I have a very distant recollection that Naomi Pfeffer may have been trying
to find out more about him when writing The Stork and the Syringe
Lesley
lesleyah@primex.co.uk
homepage: http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 12:02:57 -0500
From: Cathy Moran Hajo <cathy.hajo@nyu.edu>
Subject: Anyone know of Bertold Paul Wiesner
A colleague who is not on this list is seeking biographical information on
Dr. Bertold Paul Wiesner (1901-?) an Austrian sex-physiologist who went to
University of Edinburgh in 1928 to head the Animal Breeding Research
Department. She is trying to find his connection with the Birth Control
movement in the U.K.? We know that he came to the U.S. briefly in 1928 and
that Margaret Sanger sought to raise funds to support his research. He
wrote Maternal Behavior in the Rat (1933) and other books on animal
breeding, sex physiology.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
--
Cathy Moran Hajo
Assistant Editor/Assistant Director
The Margaret Sanger Papers Project
Department of History
New York University
53 Washington Square South, #501
New York, NY 10012-1098
cathy.hajo@nyu.edu
(212) 998-8666
(212) 995-4017 (fax)
Visit our web site at: http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger
__________________________________________________________________
From: "Lesley Hall"<lesleyah@primex.co.uk>
Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 12:05:23 gmt
Subject: Re: Wolzogen-Weininger
>Thanks for the tip. I *definitely* need to sit down
>and read Weininger soon.
You, and other members of list, may be interested to know that a book-length
study of Weininger by Chandak Sengoopta, Otto Weininger: Sex, Science, and Self
in Imperial Vienna, will be out shortly from University of Chicago Press
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 20:20:42 -0800 (PST)
From: Lynn Romer <lynnromer@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Never-Marrieds & the Church
Good idea, David! Thanks for the suggestion.
Lynn
__________________________________________________________________
From: "Matthew Johnson" <trekdrop78@hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: Spanking as a Sexual Preference
Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 21:37:39 PST
not much of an otk person myself, but i would recommend Jean-Jacques
Rousseau's Confessions. The early portion of the book contains a detailed
account of his spanking fetish and his speculations as to its origin
(namely, an attractive housemaid who disciplined him thus in childhood).
not much, but it's a start.
- matt johnson
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 16:56:07 -0800 (PST)
From: Lynn Romer <lynnromer@yahoo.com>
Subject: Spanking as a Sexual Preference
Does anyone know of any web sites or literary
materials that deal specifically with spanking as sex
play, that aren't smutty or r-rated but more academic
in nature? I'm sure there's some stuff on this in the
resources on masochism folks have recommended, but I
wondered if there are an in-depth works specifically
on spanking. For example, what triggers such a
preference? Does it tend to be related to having
received childhood spankings and been turned on by
them, or is it more a need to feel one is "bad" in
order to feel "good"?
Lynn
__________________________________________________________________
From: alison shea bateman <asb4a@cms.mail.virginia.edu>
Subject: teenage pregnancy
Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 00:49:57 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time)
Dear list members,
In just a short while I need to lead a discussion
addressing whether certain ethnic, racial, religious (or
other) groups have cultural or historical incentives for
early pregnancy (i.e., teenage). This is a new topic for
me, so hopefully someone can refer a good secondary source
(conference paper/journal article)? Simplistically
speaking, is there universal disfavor of teenage pregnancy
throughout the various communities constituting the United
States?
Thanks for any assistance.
Allie Bateman
(I know this is a slight stretch from sexuality per se, but
I thought posting to this list may turn up interesting
replies.)
__________________________________________________________________
From: "Lesley Hall" <lesleyah@primex.co.uk>
Subject: Re: teenage pregnancy
Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 15:17:04 -0000
Andrew Blaikie has done some interesting work on illegitimacy in C19th
Scotland and certain areas where for local economic/social/cultural reasons
this was relatively acceptable within the community. Also see Franz Eder's
article on the German-speaking countries in Eder, Hall and Hekma, Sexual
Cultures in Europe: National Histories, for some references to a period when
massive economic changes in these countries meant a large no of what were
called 'Carinthian marriages' e.g. unauthorised unions (I suspect that many
of the relevant citations are to studies in German, however).
Lesley Hall
lesleyah@primex.co.uk
website http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
__________________________________________________________________
From: "Dionne Stephens" <dionne@arches.uga.edu>
Subject: Re: teenage pregnancy
Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 10:08:45 -0500
"In just a short while I need to lead a discussion addressing whether
certain ethnic, racial, religious (or other) groups have cultural or
historical incentives for early pregnancy (i.e., teenage). "
There is a really good book by Rickie Solinger called "Wake Up Little Susie:
Single Pregnancy and Race before Roe v. Wade. She traces the historical
realities of adolescent and unwed pregnancies in the United States. Through
a comparison of white and black women's experiences the cultural
expectations and options of each group are explored.
I really like it because she does a good job explaining that adolescent or
unwed pregnancies in the Black communities were not necessarily considered
acceptable, but were dealt with within the context of the available
resources and social realities. It's a scholarly text, but an easy read.
Dionne Stephens
University of Georgia
__________________________________________________________________
From: Mal123nash@aol.com
Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 17:36:31 EST
Subject: Spanking
Hi,
Someone was asking about a serious approach to spanking. I would have
sent this to the person, except I deleted the email.
There is a questionnaire about spanking at:
www.spankingdigest.com
Maybe it can help your research.
Michael Lombardi-Nash, Ph.D.
__________________________________________________________________
From: "docx2" <docx2@ix.netcom.com>
Subject: Re: Masochism
Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 21:55:55 -0800
Dear folks,
Sorry it has take me so long to resurrect this reference.
Apostolides, M. "The pleasure of the pain: Why some people need S&M."
_Psychology Today_, September/October, 1999, p.60-65.
Take care,
Charles Moser
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 00:13:04 -0600
From: Bob <suannschafer@earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: Masochism
Thanks, Charles. I appreciate it. Bob
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 12:31:30 -0800 (PST)
From: Lynn Romer <lynnromer@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Spanking
Thanks for this info. However, I don't own a
computer, so I go to the public and campus libraries
to access my e-mail. Is this a sort of site I could
get in trouble for looking at there? When I typed in
the URL a warning message came up saying you had to be
over 18 to go into it. Would it be possible for
someone to publish the survey only on this news group?
Also, can anyone recommend any academic books about
religion and sexuality? I'm especially interested in
how religious teachings can cause some folks to grow
up thinking sex is bad or a punishment, especially for
women? How negative sex messages can play out in the
bedroom, that sort of thing.
I've heard that fundamental Christian couples tend to
have great sex. I'm interested in anything on the
connections between religion and sex.
Thanks.
__________________________________________________________________
From: "Dionne Stephens" <dionne@arches.uga.edu>
Subject: Religion and Sex
Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 17:08:31 -0500
> Also, can anyone recommend any academic books about
> religion and sexuality? I'm especially interested in
> how religious teachings can cause some folks to grow
> up thinking sex is bad or a punishment, especially for
> women? How negative sex messages can play out in the
> bedroom, that sort of thing.
Check out The Mythology of Sex: An Illustration Exploration of Sexual
Customs and Practices from Ancient Times to Present. By Sarah Dening it
overviews religions link to sexuality cross culturally. Also Kelly Brown
Douglas wrote Sexuality and the Black Church. While she does introduce
historical issues, it is put into a 20th century context; issues like AIDS,
sexual diversity and the Tyson Rape trial as they relate to Black women and
the church are explored.
Dionne Stephens
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 11:22:46 +1100
From: Ivan Crozier <i.crozier@scifac.usyd.edu.au>
Subject: Re: Spanking as a Sexual Preference
Dear Lynn Romer,
William Acton's _Functions and Disorders_ recommends against spanking
children (or "flogging on the nates"), as it wil sexually excite them, thus
leading them down the path towards masturbation. He also refers to the
prev. mentioned Rousseau section on this matter. Further, he discusses the
kinds of things which old men with "flagging powers" do to arouse
themselves, which from memory includes spanking.
I hope this helps.
Cheerio, Ivan
Ivan Crozier,
HPS Unit,
Sydnmey University,
Sydney, 2006,
Australia
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 09:24:56 +0100
From: Gert Hekma <hekma@pscw.uva.nl>
Subject: Re: Spanking as a Sexual Preference
Dear Lynn,
a good book on spanking from a historical angle is Ian Gibson (biographer
of Lorca), The English Vice, that was published in the late 70's. Rousseau
may be a critical reference, but more relevant are both the life and work
of the Marquis de Sade who was addicted to sodomy and being beaten. Read
f.e. his "120 days of sodom", or the recent biographies by Maurice Lever,
Laurence Bongie or Francine Duplessix.
Gert Hekma
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 22:41:52 -0600
From: Bob <suannschafer@earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: Spanking as a Sexual Preference
Ivan, before I flog :) on down to my nearest library to check out the
Acton title, can you provide a little more
information/context/background on him?
__________________________________________________________________
From: "LJ Hall, Historical Studies" <Lisa.J.Hall@bristol.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 13:43:03 +0000
Subject: Internet access
Lynn and others,
Are you aware of exactly what policy your
educational establishment holds in regard to access to the internet,
particularly sites which seem to be classified as 'containing material
of an adult nature'? - I have heard rumours that my own university is
contemplating introducing a filter to their public computers, and
would be very interested in hearing from others operating under this
type of censorship, especially anyone engaged in opposition? Thanks.
On Sun, 27 Feb 2000 12:31:30 -0800 (PST) Lynn Romer
----------------------
LJ Hall, Historical Studies
Lisa.J.Hall@bristol.ac.uk
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 10:05:47 +0000
From: "Sam Pryke" <PRYKES@hope.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: Internet access
Yes, the place I work at, Liverpool Hope University College, is extremely sensitive about the
issue as it has an ecunemical background that is now a key part of its strategy to maintain
independence, obtain funds in the current HE climate. About a 2 years ago all members of staff
had to sign a contract pledging that they would not seek porn on the net, and warning that web
sites visited would be logged. All networked computers at the college, moreover, are subject to a
list of banned search words.
However, as everyone knows it is extremely difficult to monitor and control the web -- with both
positive and negative results -- and requiries considerable resources which the college doesn't
really have available. The other day I heard of a little incident that sums things up: some local
dignatories were visiting the college with the director. When they entered the main buidling they
were perturbed to see on the two computers that should display the college's own web site, a 'UK
fisting site'. Somebody who works in admin tells me that the word was not on the proscribed list
of search terms that had been drawn up a little time ago. Some student, clerical worker with
either a desire to shock or simply just bored had obviously keyed it in.
SAM PRYKE
From: nesta_f@spcvxa.spc.edu
To: "Histsex:For historians of sexuality" <histsex@listbot.com>
Subject: Re: Internet access
In the US the American Library Association is strongly opposed to filtering at
any level and certainly not in academic institutions and I doubt that filtering
would be tolerated at any university in the US, unless it were of "bible
college" variety, not that there aren't any number of people who wouldn't love
to go after any state institution at which a professor or graduate student was
found doing research on child porn on the internet. The Library Association in
the UK doesn't seem to have any particular position, but it is a while since
have been a member there, so I may just be missing the information. Having
been responsible for computer systems in both the UK and US, I do know that it
can be a serious problem, especially in multi-ethnic institutions with a large
number of students from diverse backgrounds. At my present position at an
academic institution the policy we developed says:
"What is displayed on a screen in a public area may be offensive to others and
users are expected to be sensitive to that fact. If an image or text is
purposely displayed for the purpose of harassment, a user could be disciplined
under the College's code of conduct."
By and large we don't have a problem. I've only seen history files that
track "porn" sites on computers that are located in out-of-the way corners and
I've only had one instance of possible harassment reported to me.
Just doing a quick search, it is interesting to see how little controversy
there seems be to in the UK about this and how much there is in the US.
Fred Nesta
Fred
Nesta
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 17:36:42 +0100
From: Gert Hekma <hekma@pscw.uva.nl>
Subject: Re: Internet access
Dear all,
the University of Amsterdam has no filters for porn, and neither do we have
to sign contracts to promise not to use porn websites. There are filters
however for chat boxes, as they say, because it would prove to be too big a
technical burden for them to operate them. I can however request to get
access to certain of such places if I might need them for research, the
IT-boys promised me.
Sincerely yours,
Gert Hekma
__________________________________________________________________
From: "Donna Larsen" <ladydonna85@hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: Internet access
Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 13:07:34 PST
I know that at Seattle Central Community College that for the student Body
there is no restrictions. I have never had trouble going to a site, and I
took a library class last quarter and know that there are no filters. I am
not sure if it is the same for the faculty computers. I also know that the
librarians are opposed to any restrictions. I wonder if it is different in
the US for Community colleges than it is for Universitys. I understand that
Community colleges tend to be more liberal.
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 14:34:53 -0700
From: wolfew <wolfew@mail.nwc.whecn.edu>
Subject: Re: Internet access
I am fortunate enough to work at a school that has rejected
filtering. I would recommend a visit to the American Library
Association web site were there is an extensive survey of what's
lost when filters are used. (About 35% fewer hits on any given
search, if my memory serves.) They also identify the political
aspects of some of the filter systems, many of which filter out
such groups as the National Organization of Women, the ACLU,
Planned Parenthood, etc.
wally
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 22:25:38 +0100 (MET)
From: Rochus Wolff <rochus.wolff@gmx.net>
Subject: Menstruation in advertisments
Hello...
I'm researching the depiction of menstruation in adverts for tampons and
the like... I have not, however, come across any recent studies (say, from
the last ten years or so) on the subject.
Does anyone know whether there have been studies on this I might have
missed? Thanks for your help.
Yours,
Rochus
PS: Sorry for crossposting, this is going to two lists.
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__________________________________________________________________
From: "Lesley Hall" <lesleyah@primex.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Menstruation in advertisments
Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 22:12:24 -0000
There was an article in Women's History Review (a year or so ago) by Barbara
Brookes and someone else, on advertising of menstrual products in New
Zealand versus women's oral reminiscences of their experiences. There was
also someone doing a MA dissertation in Art and Design at the Royal College
of Art on the marketing of Tampax a couple of years ago - I don't think she
has published anything yet though she intends to. I have her address if you
would like to get in touch.
Lesley Hall
lesleyah@primex.co.uk
website http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
__________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 21:02:59 -0500
From: Cristina Nelson <crn@alum.mit.edu>
Subject: menstrual products
Joan Jacobs Brumberg is the historian who wrote a history of adolescent
girls (the name esacapes me, but it is a real well known book - where's the
ginko biloba now that I need it?) In any case she has a chapter on the
early marketing of such products. In addition, her most recent book _The
Body Project_ may have something on menstrual products. SHe is at Cornell
and her email is <jjb10@cornell.edu> - I would think she would know of more
recent studies on the topic.
Cristina Nelson
UNC Chapel Hill
History Dept.
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