Early emotional scars, and future sexual behaviour

Over at AEON there's an autobiographical essay by an English woman prompted by her strong reaction when a new friend says he is in a polyamorous relationship (she reacts strongly against the idea because she had a father who cheated on her mother on an apparently massive scale):  

My father was unfaithful, a philanderer, a serial shagger; there are many words for what he was when terms such as ‘consensual nonmonogamy’ or ‘polyamory’ were not yet in popular use. Adultery is a shameful word, a transgression from the sanctity of marriage; like ‘cheating’, ‘infidelity’ and ‘unfaithfulness’, it is not morally neutral. It derives from the Latin word adulteritas, meaning contamination. It’s no surprise that my father lied about his liaisons in his 12-year marriage to my mother, though he once boasted to his sister – true or false – that there had been 500 affairs. He took pride in being humorously subversive, doing nothing to hide his inappropriate comments to passing women when my brother and I, just children, watched wide-eyed from the back seat of his fancy car.

After he finally left his wife and 2 children, he made a return with a surprising proposal:

He went to India with his new girlfriend and was blessed by his guru, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who put a mala round his neck and gave him a new name. The cult encouraged sexual promiscuity and cast monogamy as merely a social construct. The words adultery and infidelity were not muttered in the dusty pathways between meditation and darshan, when disciples gathered to hear their guru speak. My father had found himself an affirmative culture. He had found his people.

On his return six months later, he told my brother and I that he had been reborn. He was cleansed of the past. He introduced my mother to his girlfriend – the three of them seated on the sofa in our living room – and asked if they could both move into the family home, she in the basement, my dad back in my mother’s bed. He wanted to pirouette like a happy prince between his two women. In pure polyamory style, my father asked for my mother’s consent. She stood up and passed him his green fedora hat. ‘You must be joking,’ she said.

 But the main reason I thought it worth posting about the  essay is this part of it:  

‘What if the affair had nothing to do with you?’ Perel asks her clients. In her work with couples who are dealing with the fallout of infidelity, one motivation that crops up a lot is self-discovery, a quest for a new or lost identity. In my father’s case, there was boarding school from the age of seven. From the intimate safety of his mother’s love, he was flung to a place where he had to abide by new rules along with hundreds of other little boys. No one looking out for you, no familial soil in which to grow.

In Boarding School Syndrome: The Psychological Trauma of the ‘Privileged Child’ (2015), the British psychoanalyst Joy Schaverein recognises a set of patterns of behaviour among people, such as my father, who have been sent away to prep school, including an inability to recognise emotions in one’s self and in others, to talk about feelings, and to form durable close relationships: all revolving around problems with intimacy. The boys are so young when they lose their primary attachment that they haven’t yet learned the right words to articulate their feelings. ‘There are no words to adequately express the feeling state and so a shell is formed to protect the vulnerable self from emotion that cannot be processed,’ writes Schaverein.

From the certainties of home life, my dad was thrown into an anarchy where the older boys bullied those who were younger or vulnerable. As an adult, my father confessed to his sister that he had been raped. He was certainly coerced into sex games between the boys, all of them abandoned and rudderless. He grew into puberty with very little privacy, and only limited outlets for his natural curiosity. Is this what distorted his relationship to sex? Sex as power, sex as escape? It was euphoric to win over beautiful strangers. In that moment, everything felt right.

I have always thought that boarding school from a young age would be emotionally harmful, but I have never felt sure whether I was just projecting from what I am sure would have been my own poor reaction if ever it had been proposed that I had to leave home for schooling.  I wonder if it has been more broadly studied, or if that book is the only one on the topic?
 

Most controversial comment about Parasite

Kevin Drum, at Mother Jones wrote:

First off, it’s hardly just Americans who don’t like subtitles. No one likes subtitles. They’re only common in markets where film revenues aren’t high enough for studios to recoup the cost of producing dubbed versions.

This sounds, of course, like he's saying that he prefers dubbing to subtitles.

And that is a controversial opinion, with this Tweet, which (shall we say) succinctly expressing disbelief that a writer (let alone one from a liberal publication) could say that, now having 9,000 retweets and 46,000 likes.

Even my teenage kids agree that dubbing is awful (in live action movies at least - it passes adequately in animation) and they always turn on subtitles for foreign content on Netflix, even if I am not watching it with them.

Kevin Drum needs re-education camp, or something...

Rule of Federal law optional in Trump's America

As someone down further in the thread says, with intended sarcasm I assume:

Revenge of the pangolin?

Pangolins only came to my attention back in 2014, although there has since been a David Attenborough narrated documentary which publicised their plight as victims of Chinese traditional medicine.

If the current coronovirus problem leads to Chinese not eating any, or as many, endangered wild animals for imaginary health benefits, that will at least be something good to come of it.  See this:

Did pangolins spread the China coronavirus to people?

Movie reviewed: Parasite

I missed Parasite at the cinema, where it was still on at some arthouse places only a few weeks ago, it seems; but found on the weekend (to my surprise) that it was already available as a $7 rental on Google Play.  Cool.  I feel a bit sorry for the cinema owners, though.   Mind you, it would cost at least $30 for just me and my son to go see it at a cinema.   But I digress.

I think it's a good to very good movie, but perhaps didn't enjoy it as much as I thought I might.   I think it made me feel too anxious from too early in the movie as to how the whole scenario was going to unravel, as it was clear that it couldn't last.

I am also a little surprised as to how widely praised it has been, not because it deserves criticism as such, but because it seems so Korean-centric in its social commentary.   I mean, it is a very peculiar country - its susceptibility to cults; its torment at having a madman leader with brainwashed public support just to their north;  the crushing school system with students bearing a pressure like no other nation I know of.   (Yet, the movie indicated, overqualified university graduates abound.)   Even the enormously successful entertainment industry that is K Pop is notorious for its "dark and tragic underbelly".  Recently it was in the news that 75% of young Koreans would love to leave the country.   This article on the survey actually makes the case that things are not as bad in terms of inequality as the youth seem to think.   Maybe it's another Korean speciality - to complain that things are worse than they are?

The movie made me want to read up more on the social problems of the country, but I have had no time so far.   I also want to now read in detail reviews about the movie, as I resisted doing that because I didn't want too much in the way of spoilers to be accidentally revealed.

My son, by the way, said he loved it;  but then he, like many young people, thought Joker was great too.  (He went by himself - I have no interest in it.)   I am a little worried about what it says about the world when dark movies are so popular, but at least Parasite has a veneer of plausibility and isn't one that you have to worry about incels feeling endorsement.

I will probably update this later when I have read more about it...

Update:   did the movie remind anyone else of the Morlocks and Eloi from HG Wells' The Time Machine?

Update 2:  it has won best picture, best director and 2 other awards?   Seems a bit excessive, if you ask me.  Mind you, I haven't seen seen 1917 yet, so I don't know how it compares...  

Update 3:  I see that it's in fact the first foreign language film to win Best Picture.   Just occurred to me that I would have preferred Roma, which I found a mesmerising pleasure to watch, to be able to claim that title.   

The disinformation campaign

Oh look, another detailed, serious article on the appalling use of social media as the most effective propaganda/disinformation tool we've ever seen.

It's a good and important read.

As someone on Twitter said, in response to this article, and as a summary of how the Republicans got to where they are today:

The Republican Senators who said "he will have learnt a lesson" should be ridiculed until election day

When psychiatrists go nuts

Oh, so this is why "QAnon" is trending in Australia:

A Sydney psychiatrist who posted “bizarre” alt-right conspiracy theories he claimed were the directives of US President Donald Trump to his practice’s official website has been struck off the medical register.

The Dee Why doctor Russell Everard McGregor claimed Trump had taped evidence of a global Satanist paedophile network, that 9/11 was faked, and that the ABC was part of an international deep state network covering up the crimes of the elite.

Many of the 300-plus posts from 2018 onwards related to the debunked QAnon conspiracy that suggests Trump is leading a crusade against “deep state” forces who protect satanic paedophile rings.
“Fight with your keyboard, knowledge and pen,” McGregor wrote in one post in January 2018.

“Follow Q breadcrumbs on 8chan.

“The evil truth will be hard for most to bear. Be brave. Seek loved ones and offer compassion to friends and family.”

Minister completely uninterested in who invented figures in his office

It is basically ridiculous that Taylor will not admit that the evidence clearly points to an invention of figures by someone in his office.

Taylor has “unreservedly” apologised to Moore for relying on the falsified figures but has denied consistently that either he, or anyone in his office, altered the City of Sydney document to inflate travel expenditure. Taylor has said the document with the incorrect numbers was obtained from the council website.

But the council has produced evidence showing that its publicly available annual reports has only ever contained accurate figures. Metadata and screenshots from the council’s content management system showed the annual reports on its website had not been changed since they were originally uploaded.

As I said last week, Ministers used to be forced to resign for mere accidents that they were still held responsible for;  now, they think they can ride out actual fraudulent behaviour within their office if they say "sorry about that".

The Chaser has a funny tweet about this:

Killing animals not a great way to make a living

I had wondered about the psychological effects of working in an abattoir.  An article in The Conversation confirms a suspicion that it is not great for mental health:

The hazards are psychological as well as physical. One paper on the psychological harm suffered by slaughterhouse employees in the US noted that abattoir workers

view, on a daily basis, large-scale violence and death that most of the American population will never have to encounter.

There’s even a form of post-traumatic stress disorder linked to repetitive killing: Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress (PITS). Symptoms can include depression, paranoia, panic and dissociation.

Another study noted relatively high levels of anxiety, anger, hostility and psychoticism among slaughterhouse workers. Symptoms can also include violent dreams and some workers seek treatment similar to that used to help war veterans....

Surprisingly, Flinders University research has found female abattoir workers had higher propensities for aggression – particularly physical and verbal – than their male colleagues. The study had a small sample size, but pointed to the need for more nuanced research into meatworkers, including gender differences.

The work is monotonous and unrelenting. Author Timothy Pachirat, who wrote about his time working at a slaughterhouse in the US, notes

the reality that the work of the slaughterhouse centers around killing evaporates into a routinized, almost hallucinatory blur. By the end of the day […] it hardly matters what is being cut, shorn, sliced, shredded, hung, or washed: all that matters is that the day is once again, finally coming to a close.

Author Gail Eisnitz, who researched the industry for a book, quoted a slaughterhouse worker as saying:

Down in the blood pit they say that the smell of blood makes you aggressive. And it does. You get an attitude that if that hog kicks at me, I’m going to get even. You’re already going to kill the hog, but that’s not enough. It has to suffer.

If you ask me...

....political commentators who are centrists (or outright sympathetic to Democrats) are hyperventilating way too much about how much of a "disaster" the intra party tabulation of votes in one State really is.

It is very reminiscent of the media's intense concentration on how much of a political problem Hillary's emails were going to be.   Don't they realise their role in making these things self-fulfilling prophecies?

Yay Mitt

A few key paragraphs in Mitt Romney's speech:

With regards to Hunter Biden, taking excessive advantage of his father’s name is unsavory but also not a crime. Given that in neither the case of the father nor the son was any evidence presented by the president’s counsel that a crime had been committed, the president’s insistence that they be investigated by the Ukrainians is hard to explain other than as a political pursuit. There is no question in my mind that were their names not Biden, the president would never have done what he did....

The grave question the Constitution tasks senators to answer is whether the president committed an act so extreme and egregious that it rises to the level of a “high crime and misdemeanor.”

Yes, he did.

The president asked a foreign government to investigate his political rival.

The president withheld vital military funds from that government to press it to do so.

The president delayed funds for an American ally at war with Russian invaders.

The president’s purpose was personal and political.

Accordingly, the president is guilty of an appalling abuse of the public trust.

What he did was not “perfect." No, it was a flagrant assault on our electoral rights, our national security interests, and our fundamental values.

Rush Limbaugh and the rise of the ugly conservative

The fact that he has lung cancer should be no excuse for not observing that Rush Limbaugh has been a pig of a broadcaster for decades, and a major player in corroding the tone of mainstream conservatism in its American (and to some extent, Australian) incarnation to one which is every bit as obnoxious as any extremism in language and tone to be found on the Left.   It's worse for the Right, though, as it is meant to be part of a Christian landscape where they are supposedly taught to be better than their political enemy. 

It should be an embarrassment to the Republicans that he was endorsed so early on (I had forgotten that his fandom goes right back to Ronald Reagan), and nothing he did - no name calling, no factually wrong claims, no false rumour endorsed, no racist or misogynistic "jokes", ever caused serious estrangement from their circle. 

Should he be cut some slack for some rhetorical hyperbole if he is an "entertainer"?   No - you can only hide before the clowning for a limited time:  everyone knows there is genuine sentiment behind (say) racist tinged jokes if they are repeated often enough.

I see that he has been married four times and has no kids.   (Why are so many prominent American conservatives so bad at keeping spouses, I wonder as a half rhetorical question.)   He should be swimming in money, though - the internet says a net worth of half a billion dollars.     I hope he leaves a lot of it to charities, and not just political ones.   

But overall, politics will only benefit from the ending of his continued corrosive influence.  

The 18th century rabbit hoax

Can't say I knew of this (rather unpleasant) 18th century hoax, as explained in a book review at Literary Review:

In October 1726 some ‘strange, but well attested’ news emerged from Godalming near Guildford. An ‘eminent’ surgeon, a male midwife, had delivered a poor woman called Mary Toft not of a child but of rabbits – a number of them, over a period of several weeks. None of the rabbits, not even a ‘perfect’ one, survived their birth, but the surgeon bottled them up and declared his intention to present them as specimens to the Royal Society. A report in the British Gazeteer furnished readers with the woman’s explanation. Some months earlier she and other women working in a field had chased a rabbit and failed to catch it. She was pregnant at the time and suffered a miscarriage. Thereafter, she pined to eat rabbit and had been unable to avoid thinking of rabbits.

The story was a sensation. It was not only the poor who believed a pregnant woman’s thoughts could affect the workings of her body – hence the arrival of the eminent surgeon at Toft’s bedside (the truly strange news would have been that an agricultural labourer had such care at all). More serious scientific men followed. Local people came in droves to stare. Excitement grew. King George I himself took an interest in the case. Could it be that something marvellous was about to be revealed? Toft was moved to London to be closer to the king and his doctors. Once lodged in a bagnio in Leicester Square, Toft found the delivery of rabbits – for, spoiler alert, the whole thing was a hoax – more problematic. The bagnio porter eventually admitted he had been told to go out and buy rabbits. Cut, skinned, only occasionally whole, rabbits had been introduced into Toft via her vagina in order to be found. Local women – a knife grinder’s wife, her own mother-in-law – seem to have masterminded the hoax, with the collusion of her husband. They promised her that she would ‘get so good a living’ from it that ‘I should never want as long as I lived’.

By December, a justice of the peace had been called in and Toft was arrested. She spent four months imprisoned in the Bridewell, doing hard labour. But no crime could be fastened on her and she was released.

The State of the Union is on...

Supermarket announcement voice:  "Box of tissues to Catallaxy.  Box of tissues to Catallaxy." 

Update:   True: