Thank you, Julie. You are brave and an inspiration. It is both frustrating and depressing that nearly 50 years after the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, you’re still having to write pieces like this. I would also add that our autonomous nervous system in life-threatening circumstances, causes us to “flight, fight, freeze or fawn” and these responses are beyond our conscious control. As regards the “50 Shades of Grey” issue, a woman’s sexual fantasies bear no relationship to how she chooses to conduct herself in a sexual encounter in the real world. Most straight women have tolerated unwelcome sexual activity for a myriad of cultural, “fawning” or safety reasons.
Excellent refutation of sexist attitudes and argument, Julie. I’ll subscribe as soon as I get to my computer. You deserve our support to continue your political for women’s liberation.
Regarding the idea that "women should fight their rapist": over the last 20 years or so, advances in neurosciences have definitively shown that our brains evolved with a basic set of survival options: fight, flight, freeze, or submit. It's not really accurate to say that some women choose to fight back. In fact, our survival mechanisms operate unconsciously as a product of millions of years of evolution. Our brains send chemical signals that we are wired to follow under threat. Whether the brain pushes a woman into fight, flight,freeze, or submit, an evolutionary survival mechanism is at work, not a choice made through reasoning.
Your biological determinism is a bit too,rigid, Elizabeth. Biology may well play a role but humans also have millenia of cultural conditioning that kick in, although I wouldn’t call it ’choice’, a liberal feminists favourite, just as rational choice is also a suspicious modernists concept of Man as machine valued over emotions and creativity, for example. What is rational for one woman or one situation may well be different for another.
I don't think my argument rests on biological determinism. Instead, I'm arguing that we cannot create a humanist culture -- and one that respects women's experience -- without honoring the biological reality of being human animals with sexed bodies. We are not creatures of "pure reason." Descartes and Voltaire were wrong. Our tech overlords are wrong. We are mortal, vulnerable social animals blessed and cursed with big cognitive capacity and symbolic communication.
We overvalue our capacity to reason at our peril. Many of the most precious aspects of our lives are primordial. They cannot be explained by the reasoning, talkative mind. A mother looking into her infant's eyes. The infant returning her gaze. (Infant, by the way, comes from Latin for "unable to speak"). Taking a walk in the fresh morning air and pausing to enjoy a rose's fragrance. Breaking down in tears of grief. Trauma. Often trauma victims are unable to speak. Like infants.
The humanists I cherish the most insist that we become enlightened only when we accept the limits of the reasoning mind. One of the greatest humanists, Lao Tzu, hints at the fundamental reality that reason obscures: "Can you coax your mind from its wandering/ and keep to the original oneness?... Can you step back from your own mind and thus understand all things?" (translation by Stephen Mitchell). The Buddha taught, "The effects of karma cannot be known by the rational mind alone." Neither can the effects of trauma. Honoring the limits of reason allows us to honor our vulnerability. Our vulnerability is what makes us lovable.
Emily Dickinson's poems often imagine the moment when consciousness dissolves into death. By citing the relevance of the "flight or fight" response, I want to honor the terror of death that overcomes a rape victim. A woman enduring the ordeal of rape cannot rationally choose how to respond to the attack because the fear of death overtakes her rational mind when survival is at stake. Nature has built that process into our nature. We are nature. We are not reason.
I appreciate how a specific branch of science has demonstrated this truth, and in doing so can help restore compassion for our helplessness. At the moment when we confront death, reason disappears. The life force controls us. We don't control it.
The life force, which we don't control, is also the source of love, joy, loss, and empathy.
Thank you, Julie. You are brave and an inspiration. It is both frustrating and depressing that nearly 50 years after the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, you’re still having to write pieces like this. I would also add that our autonomous nervous system in life-threatening circumstances, causes us to “flight, fight, freeze or fawn” and these responses are beyond our conscious control. As regards the “50 Shades of Grey” issue, a woman’s sexual fantasies bear no relationship to how she chooses to conduct herself in a sexual encounter in the real world. Most straight women have tolerated unwelcome sexual activity for a myriad of cultural, “fawning” or safety reasons.
Thanks for the reminder Julie. The idea that feminism has “won” is ludicrous.
Tell it!
Thank you.
What is the mechanism by which cultural conditioning supersedes the workings of the sympathetic nervous system?
Excellent refutation of sexist attitudes and argument, Julie. I’ll subscribe as soon as I get to my computer. You deserve our support to continue your political for women’s liberation.
Regarding the idea that "women should fight their rapist": over the last 20 years or so, advances in neurosciences have definitively shown that our brains evolved with a basic set of survival options: fight, flight, freeze, or submit. It's not really accurate to say that some women choose to fight back. In fact, our survival mechanisms operate unconsciously as a product of millions of years of evolution. Our brains send chemical signals that we are wired to follow under threat. Whether the brain pushes a woman into fight, flight,freeze, or submit, an evolutionary survival mechanism is at work, not a choice made through reasoning.
Your biological determinism is a bit too,rigid, Elizabeth. Biology may well play a role but humans also have millenia of cultural conditioning that kick in, although I wouldn’t call it ’choice’, a liberal feminists favourite, just as rational choice is also a suspicious modernists concept of Man as machine valued over emotions and creativity, for example. What is rational for one woman or one situation may well be different for another.
I don't think my argument rests on biological determinism. Instead, I'm arguing that we cannot create a humanist culture -- and one that respects women's experience -- without honoring the biological reality of being human animals with sexed bodies. We are not creatures of "pure reason." Descartes and Voltaire were wrong. Our tech overlords are wrong. We are mortal, vulnerable social animals blessed and cursed with big cognitive capacity and symbolic communication.
We overvalue our capacity to reason at our peril. Many of the most precious aspects of our lives are primordial. They cannot be explained by the reasoning, talkative mind. A mother looking into her infant's eyes. The infant returning her gaze. (Infant, by the way, comes from Latin for "unable to speak"). Taking a walk in the fresh morning air and pausing to enjoy a rose's fragrance. Breaking down in tears of grief. Trauma. Often trauma victims are unable to speak. Like infants.
The humanists I cherish the most insist that we become enlightened only when we accept the limits of the reasoning mind. One of the greatest humanists, Lao Tzu, hints at the fundamental reality that reason obscures: "Can you coax your mind from its wandering/ and keep to the original oneness?... Can you step back from your own mind and thus understand all things?" (translation by Stephen Mitchell). The Buddha taught, "The effects of karma cannot be known by the rational mind alone." Neither can the effects of trauma. Honoring the limits of reason allows us to honor our vulnerability. Our vulnerability is what makes us lovable.
Emily Dickinson's poems often imagine the moment when consciousness dissolves into death. By citing the relevance of the "flight or fight" response, I want to honor the terror of death that overcomes a rape victim. A woman enduring the ordeal of rape cannot rationally choose how to respond to the attack because the fear of death overtakes her rational mind when survival is at stake. Nature has built that process into our nature. We are nature. We are not reason.
I appreciate how a specific branch of science has demonstrated this truth, and in doing so can help restore compassion for our helplessness. At the moment when we confront death, reason disappears. The life force controls us. We don't control it.
The life force, which we don't control, is also the source of love, joy, loss, and empathy.
you rock. thank you.
We are. It even close to reaching our aims.