Decades before Kinsey, Stanford professor Clelia Mosher polled Victorian-era women on their bedroom behavior—then kept the startling results under wraps. By Kara Platoni
Losing my religion for equality
The Elders are an independent group of eminent global leaders, brought together by former South African president Nelson Mandela, who offer their influence and experience to support peace building, help address major causes of human suffering and promote the shared interests of humanity.
~ Jimmy Carter theage.com, July 15, 2009
“Nothing that happened to me as a kid, none of the changes I went through, none of the self-loathing I absorbed, none of the teasing I tolerated, none of it would have taken place if I were fat in a vacuum. None of it happened exclusively as a result of my fatness. It happened because of the culture in which I was living, a culture we all share to one degree or another. It happened because I received, processed, assimilated and internalized the negative messages about what fat people can and cannot do, and what fat people are and cannot be. …. My fat was never the problem; the problem was living in a world that targeted fat people as defective, unintelligent, ill, repulsive. If I hadn’t felt singled out, if I hadn’t been utterly convinced that no one in the world aside from my parents would like me, let alone love me, until I stopped being fat… my childhood and teenage years probably would have been very different.”
~ Fatshionista, 3/24/2010
Lives Ruined by Novels, esp. Jane Eyre
“In general, we do not like modern novels, though our duty as reviewers requires us to read not a few. The bulk of our recent novels or popular works of fiction compels us to form the acquaintance of very disagreeable people, with whom one cannot be intimate without losing something of the chastity and delicacy of the soul.
In addition to the faults of novels in general, novels written by women have the grave fault of tending almost uniformly to degrade woman. … women - who must be presumed to know…their own sex - depict women in their novels such as no honorable or high-minded man can love or esteem. … Women’s novels are very damaging to our respect for women by the recklessness with which they reveal the mysteries of the sex…rend from her the last shred of mystery, and expose her unveiled and unrobed to the gaze of the profane world… There are passages in Jane Eyre, for instance, which show that woman can enter into and describe with minute accuracy the grossest passions of man’s nature…To every young man…there is something mystic, almost divine, in womanhood … [t]his awe is both his protection and hers. Your feminine novels dispel the illusion, and prove to him that there is nothing more mystic in woman’s nature than in man’s, that her supposed divinity is only the projection of his chivalric imagination, and that, after all, she is only ordinary flesh and blood, kneaded of no finer clay than himself.”
New Catholic World, vol. 12, pages 547-548; 1871
You Don’t Have to Be Pretty
You Don’t Have to Be Pretty. You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked “female”.
via A Dress A Day
