… and obscene is not a word I use often or lightly, but I am horrified at the story which is circulating of a New York doctor who is reducing the clitorises of young girls in the belief that they are abnormally large. In deference to my blood pressure I shall say no more here but refer you to the story over on The F-Word. If this is even half true the man (yes, a man, of course) is in my view a paedophile and child abuser.
Hat-tip: jillysheep.
I went past a building today. When I was a kid it would have been called St Bloggs’ Junior School. Today it is called St Bloggs Children’s Centre. Hmmm ….
To infinity and beyond
[Buzz Lightyear in Toystory]
This is for all my former colleagues … As usual Scott Adams’s Dilbert cartoon strip gets it in one in the last two days …
I feel for you guys still having to suffer this nonsense!
“Religion** is bad for your sex life”, at least according to Dr Emily Nagoski. And she should know as she’s a college health (and sex) educator in Massachusetts, with a doctorate in Health Behaviour and Human Sexuality and other degrees in counselling and psychology. What I like is that she holds very firm and forthright views and isn’t afraid to air them. In what she calls “my most offensive post yet” she says why she believes religion is bad for your sex life and how it is that she cannot choose to believe and have any faith. Here are a few snippets:
Religion** is bad for your sex life. I don’t mean it doesn’t help, I mean it’s actively destructive […]
[…] religion is bad both at the individual level and at the cultural level. Individually, it results in inhibitions, shame, fear, guilt, bias against others, and acceptance of gender-based stereotypes. Culturally it results in the oppression of women and sexual minorities […] and the obstruction of the scientific study of sexuality.
But the worst thing about religion is that it makes it okay to just believe shit because you want to. No religion, no matter how liberal, escapes that.
[…] I think faith/religiosity is an innate part of human psychology. I think human belief in an invisible family in the sky is either product or byproduct of evolution. However, it is, for no apparent reason, NOT an innate part of MY psychology […]
I know that the experience of faith is both real and important for lots of people, and I know it offends them when I discuss faith as a form of self-delusion, but I genuinely don’t understand, plain old don’t understand […] how a person can CHOOSE to believe in something.
They choose to believe it because it makes them feel good. And I think this characterizes MOST people. I think MOST people are able to believe more or less anything they like the sound of. Indeed we’ve made a virtue of it. Just BELIEVE. It’s The Secret, ya know. […]
[…] most of the work I do related to religion involves trying to untangle the knots religion has knit into a person’s sexuality. In my experience, in 90% or more cases religion has caused some form of damage to a person’s sexuality […]
Which is sort of interesting in that it says what I have wondered for many years. Mind I wouldn’t go so far as Emily, I think — at least not a stridently. And just because I don’t believe any any form of overarching deity(s) (I just don’t need them, or anyone, to decide my morals for me) doesn’t mean I would deny such a crutch to anyone else.
No, what was interesting for me was that someone who should know, and should be in a position to see, has the courage to say that religion has an adverse effect on sexuality and thus by implication on other taboo areas of health.
But do go and read the original post in full for yourselves. It’s interesting even if you don’t/can’t agree with it. And there is a (surprising good natured) discussion in the comments too.
** By religion Emily means ANY and ALL religions.
The eponymous author of the Scott Adams Blog (yes, that Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert) a couple of days ago wrote a prescient piece about complexity. It’s worth reading the piece, including the comments, in their entirity. But here’s a taster:
The Adams Complexity Threshold is the point at which something is so complicated it no longer works.
The Gulf oil spill is probably a case of complexity reaching the threshold. It was literally impossible for anyone to know if the oil rig was safe or not. The engineering was too complex. I’m sure management thought it was safe, or hoped it was safe, or hallucinated that it was safe. It wasn’t possible to know for sure …
It’s our nature to blame a specific person for a specific screw-up, but complexity is what guarantees mistakes will happen and won’t be caught …
Complexity is often a natural outgrowth of success. Man-made complexity is simply a combination of things that we figured out how to do right, one layered on top of the other, until failure is achieved.
And from the comments:
I think government has a lot to do with adding complexity. Some failure happens and those in charge feel they have to earn their constituents votes by “doing something.” This usually results in regulations that work as well as the Maginot Line stopped Hitler …
Humans just can’t leave well enough alone. When (insert anything here) works perfectly the human race will re-refine it into incompetence. Why? Because eventually, no matter how incredibly efficient something is there’s always some Wag out there insisting it could be better. Even though there’s no rational reason to tinker with it, eventually people buy into the need for “continuous improvement” until the entire thing collapses …
“In simplicity is power.”
Why is it that so few can see this? Oh, sorry, Emperor’s New Clothes Syndrome.
I’ve just finished reading My Natural History by Simon Barnes. Barnes is the award-winning Chief Sports Writer for the Times as well as a great wildlife enthusiast and ornithologist who has travelled the world in search of both sport and wildlife. He is erudite, as befits one who is so hugely well read, and a fan of Anthony Powell’s Dance, often working Powellian references into his sports writing.
My Natural History is written in Barnes’s light, forthright and eminently readable style. In 23 short chapters it tells the stories of significant moments in Barnes’s fifty-odd years in all of which he finds a wildlife connexion – many indeed being centred around wildlife. The tales vary from great achievements (mostly of the wildwood; always understated), through great loves to the occasional disturbing poignancy. It is short, light, bedtime reading, and no worse for that for it could easily be sub-titled “How to be a Success without any Effort while Remaining Interesting and Human”.
As a example of his insight be writes this apropos his (no, anyone’s) adolescence:
Does that [an idealistic, youthful vision] sound frightfully adolescent? Well, so it bloody well should. We were bloody adolescents. Why do we sneer at adolescence? Why, when we look back in maturity at the wild notions and the demented hopes and the illogical beliefs and the ephemeral soul-deep passions of our adolescence, do we feel it our duty to sneer? Or apologise? Why do we not instead believe that adolescence is not a cursed but a blessed period of life: a white-water ride down the river of time. These rapids are not a place to spend a lifetime, but they are an essential transitional process if you wish to be an adult with any kind of life, any kind of passion, any kind of meaning. True, the stuff we came up with was half-baked: but then neither it nor we had been in the oven for terribly long. We were celebrating our newness, our rawness, celebrating the irrefragable fact that life was all before us: for us to change, for us to be changed irretrievably by.
I like small furry animals – as long as they’re tasty
[Lisa Jardine]
Martin Gardner, scientific skeptic and maths puzzler has died at the age of 95. Although maybe best known, at least in scientific circles, for his “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American, for me he will be remembered for his The Annotated Alice which has gone through several editions and numerous reprints; it remains one of my all-time favourite books.
There are short obits here and here.
And you can find all his books available on Amazon.
This question is posed by Vanessa Woods in her blog Your Inner Bonobo. As an anthropologist Woods, an Australian living in America, clearly doesn’t understand the default American assumption that the answer to the question is “Yes”.
This is something about America that puzzles me. What do children stare at for the first year of their life? I think it’s a female breast. Did [male student] think at the sight of naked breasts, every child under 5 would be lining up for a feed, like at an ice cream truck? What is it, exactly, about breasts, that would be so terrifying to children?
[…] at no time have I seen a woman in public pull down her top and breast feed her child – which is totally common place in oz. And my friends here have told me it’s not socially acceptable.
Can someone explain it to me? Why is a wardrobe malfunction [as per Janet Jackson] a threat
to moral authority?
I fear that the explanation for America and the UK lies in the puritanism of the religious right. And of course as I’ve blogged before (for instance here) this seems to me and many others to be the root cause of the high rate of teenage pregnancy etc. in these two countries.
But what is the real answer to the question? Are children really traumatised by nudity?
No, of course they’re not! Isn’t it daft just to suggest that they are?
In a recent-ish article in British Naturism’s magazine (BN, issue 182, Winter 2009; I’ve naughtily put a copy of the article online as it isn’t otherwise freely accessible to non-members) Roni Fine
explores the issues that surround the presumption from the outside world that simply being nude means a lot of saucy goings-on.
Yes a large part of the article is about the erroneous perception that the naturist movement is, by its very nature, merely a cover for “adult” activity. It isn’t, and there’s the problem. Roni Fine goes on …
Too many people […] just cannot differentiate nudity from sex. If only they would visit a typical naturist club […]
The times I have heard people say it is “disgusting” to be undressed in front of children. They use [children] to warrant their own outrage […]
Outrage, I might add, which the same people cannot articulate when asked. Fine continues …
Children are not associating what they see with anything remotely sexual; they just see bodies. They grow up with a realistic attitude to the human form. I envy their upbringing.
And further on here’s the crux of the whole problem at an individual level: basically people don’t think things through:
[…] something is only “rude” if you perceive it to be so. How can the natural body be deemed as rude? We all have one, it is how we are made and it isn’t “rude” until someone tells us it is … so who are they to decide? And why let them dictate their own hang ups onto other people?
As BN’s researched briefing paper Children and Nudity says:
Young children are completely oblivious to their own nudity. Consider the archetypal nude toddler in the supermarket with a trail of discarded clothing behind them.
As they get older they are taught that clothing must be worn but until about age 10 or 11 it doesn’t really take hold. They will quite happily go naked when the circumstances are appropriate.
As children enter their teens they become more body conscious and unless they have prior experience of naturism they are usually nervous about participating.
Many naturist children become more reticent as they enter their teens but then teenagers are notorious for not wanting to do the things that their parents do. They do usually continue to participate, at least for activities such as swimming, and many return to naturism when they become more mature […]
There is no evidence that children are any more at risk at naturists events than at equivalent textile events. Indeed in some ways they are safer.
Let me end on a personal note …
I admit I had a somewhat bohemian upbringing, back in the 1950s and 60s. So it should be no surprise that when I was about 9 or 10 my parents were foresighted enough to organise a couple of summer holidays at a nudist club in Essex. I was totally not bothered by this; indeed I enjoyed the nudity and running round in the sun all day. Yes I realised that little girls were constructed differently to me; just as there was a difference between my parents’ anatomies. Beyond that I couldn’t care less; if anything I was more amused by the size and shape of peoples’ bums (typical small boy!). And that was the point; it was all part of my education to make me aware that people were all different and to be comfortable with nudity. It succeeded. I have retained that comfort ever since, even (as I recall) through the embarrassed teenage years.
So there we seem to have an answer. Are children traumatised by nudity? Absolutely not – unless the adults they’re with tell them they are.
Adults … get a life!