User:CensoredScribe

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When we start to write, we’re under the assumption that everyone knows racism is bad. If you don’t know that, you’re a moron. ~ Hayden Schlossberg in "Mining Post-9/11 America for Laughs" by Dennis Lim, New York Times, (April 20, 2008)

If Astro Boy is the Japanese Superman, Black Jack is the Japanese Batman. Everyone knows him, even far outside the comics world, and when people think of him people think of his fierce critique of the medical world. ~ Ada Palmer in Cian O'Luanaigh, "Osamu Tezuka: Father of manga and scourge of the medical establishment", The Guardian, (21 July, 2010).

You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. [If he is unplugged from you now, he will die; but] in nine months he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you. - Judith Jarvis Thomson, A Defense of Abortion 1971: 48–49.

History is a form of memory. But what does it mean to remember? We think naturally of our own past, our lives day by day, and through them we see the events of our times. We are black and white, rich and poor, foreign-born and domestic. And yet, if our pasts are separate, then aren't our histories separate, too? Segregated? Ask yourself, who writes the books? Who chooses what we remember and what gets forgotten? ~ Noah Hawley, Fargo, "Storia Americana", (November 29, 2020)

The intellectual, the moral, the religious seem to me all naturally bound up and interlinked together in one great and harmonious whole. - Ada Lovelace, in a letter to Andrew Crosse, as quoted in Eugen Kölbing's Englische Studien, Volume 19 (1894), Leipzig; O.R. Reisland, "Byron's Daughter", p. 158.

Although it is impossible accidentally for the past not to have been, if one considers the past thing itself, as, for instance, the running of Socrates; nevertheless, if the past thing is considered as past, that it should not have been is impossible, not only in itself, but absolutely since it implies a contradiction. Thus, it is more impossible than the raising of the dead; in which there is nothing contradictory, because this is reckoned impossible in reference to some power, that is to say, some natural power; for such impossible things do come beneath the scope of divine power. - Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Question 25 Article 6.

Women have long been props for war-making. Invasions are often justified in part by pointing to the suffering of women in the countries targeted for attack. “Only the terrorists and the Taliban threaten to pull out women’s fingernails for wearing nail polish,” Laura Bush said when she took over her husband’s weekly radio address, in 2001, to urge Americans to support the war in Afghanistan. Like McMaster’s miniskirt photograph, Bush’s speech exemplifies the kind of pseudo-feminism sometimes used to justify invasion. The literary theorist and postcolonial feminist Gayatri Spivak calls it “white men saving brown women from brown men,” an imperial logic that ignores sexism at home to fight sexism abroad, and which disregards brown women’s agency and self-understanding. How women make sense of the situations in which they live—whether, for instance, they see the veil as oppressive or as a symbol of resistance or simply as an important religious practice—is irrelevant. Instead, imperialism is presented as a necessary act of deliverance. They don’t know how to treat their women; our job—really, our moral obligation—is liberation. ~ Sarah Sentilles, "Colonial Postcards and Women as Props for War-Making", The New Yorker, (October 5, 2017).

Yet this defence of unborn life is closely linked to the defence of each and every other human right. It involves the conviction that a human being is always sacred and inviolable, in any situation and at every stage of development. Human beings are ends in themselves and never a means of resolving other problems. Once this conviction disappears, so do solid and lasting foundations for the defence of human rights, which would always be subject to the passing whims of the powers that be. Reason alone is sufficient to recognize the inviolable value of each single human life, but if we also look at the issue from the standpoint of faith, “every violation of the personal dignity of the human being cries out in vengeance to God and is an offence against the creator of the individual”.
Precisely because this involves the internal consistency of our message about the value of the human person, the Church cannot be expected to change her position on this question. ~ Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium · The Joy of the Gospel, (November 24, 2013), sections 214-215.

The ownership of land is an odd thing when you come to think of it. How deep, after all, can it go? If a person owns a piece of land, does he own it all the way down, in ever narrowing dimensions, till it meets all other pieces at the center of the earth? Or does ownership consist only of a thin crust under which the friendly worms have never heard of trespassing? - Natalie Babbit, Tuck Everlasting

The word Nephilim is derived from the Hebrew word Naphal which literally means “fall or drop”. The commentators explain that these giants were called Nephilim since the hearts of those that saw them would “drop” as a result of seeing these awesome beings.
Of course, any mention of fallen angels who in essense became humans, begs a deeper understanding. Recall that these fallen angels are mentioned in the same context as the intense immorality which pervaded mankind. The actions of mankind have repercussions far beyond the physical world we find ourselves in. All our actions, whether positive or negative impact the spiritual worlds as well. ~ Rabbi Yoel Spotts

Feet, what do I need them for If I have wings to fly. - Frida Kahlo dated 1953, preceding a foot amputation in August of that year.

Among those nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them. - President Barack Obama’s Speech in Hiroshima, Japan

If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.
I would also want a God who would not allow a Hell. Infinite torture can only be a punishment for infinite evil, and I don't believe that infinite evil can be said to exist even in the case of Hitler. Besides, if most human governments are civilized enough to try to eliminate torture and outlaw cruel and unusual punishments, can we expect anything less of an all-merciful God?
I feel that if there were an afterlife, punishment for evil would be reasonable and of a fixed term. And I feel that the longest and worst punishment should be reserved for those who slandered God by inventing Hell. - Isaac Asimov, Asimov: A Memoir (1994).

As long as an heir is underage, he is no different from a slave, although he owns the whole estate. The heir is subject to guardians and trustees until the time set by his father. So also, when we were underage, we were in slavery under the elemental spiritual forces of the world. - Paul, Epistle to the Galatians 4:1-7 NIV

Narrated 'Aisha: I used to play with the dolls in the presence of the Prophet, and my girl friends also used to play with me. When Allah's Apostle used to enter (my dwelling place) they used to hide themselves, but the Prophet would call them to join and play with me. (The playing with the dolls and similar images is forbidden, but it was allowed for 'Aisha at that time, as she was a little girl, not yet reached the age of puberty.) ~ Aisha Sahih Bukhari 8:73:151 Sahih Bukhari.

Wealth converts a strange land into homeland and poverty turns a native place into a strange land. - Ali as quoted by Nahj al-Balagha, translations by Askari Jafri

In fact, the thickness of the Earth's atmosphere, compared with the size of the Earth, is in about the same ratio as the thickness of a coat of shellac on a schoolroom globe is to the diameter of the globe. That's the air that nurtures us and almost all other life on Earth, that protects us from deadly ultraviolet light from the sun, that through the greenhouse effect brings the surface temperature above the freezing point. (Without the greenhouse effect, the entire Earth would plunge below the freezing point of water and we'd all be dead.) Now that atmosphere, so thin and fragile, is under assault by our technology. We are pumping all kinds of stuff into it. You know about the concern that chlorofluorocarbons are depleting the ozone layer; and that carbon dioxide and methane and other greenhouse gases are producing global warming, a steady trend amidst fluctuations produced by volcanic eruptions and other sources. Who knows what other challenges we are posing to this vulnerable layer of air that we haven't been wise enough to foresee? - Carl Sagan in Wonder and Skepticism, Skeptical Inquirer (Jan-Feb 1995), 19, No. 1.

The surplus of basic knowledge of the atomic nucleus was largely used up during the war with the atomic bomb as the dividend. We must, without further delay restore this surplus in preparation for the important peacetime job for the nucleus - power production. ... Many of the proposed applications of atomic power - even for interplanetary rockets - seem to be within the realm of possibility provided the economic factor is ruled out completely, and the doubtful physical and chemical factors are weighted heavily on the optimistic side. ... The development of economic atomic power is not a simple extrapolation of knowledge gained during the bomb work. It is a new and difficult project to reach a satisfactory answer. Needless to say, it is vital that the atomic policy legislation now being considered by the congress recognizes the essential nature of this peacetime job, and that it not only permits but encourages the cooperative research-engineering effort of industrial, government and university laboratories for the task. ... We must learn how to generate the still higher energy particles of the cosmic rays - up to 1,000,000,000 volts, for they will unlock new domains in the nucleus. - Chauncey Guy Suits Addressing the American Institute of Electrical Engineering, in New York (24 Jan 1946). In Schenectady Gazette (25 Jan 1946)

Societies with a high incidence of rape . . . tolerate violence and encourage men and boys to be tough, aggressive, and competitive. Men in such cultures generally have special, politically important gathering spots off limits to women, whether they be the Mundurucu men's club or the corner tavern. Women take little or no part in public decision making or religious rituals: men mock or scorn women's practical judgment. They also demean what they consider women's work and remain aloof from childbearing and rearing. These groups usually trace their beginnings to a male supreme being. - B.L. Benderly, 1982, "Rape free or rape prone", Science 82, vol. 3, no. 8. p.42-43.

Last year, Vice President Biden said that with a new moonshot, America can cure cancer. Last month, he worked with this Congress to give scientists at the National Institutes of Health the strongest resources they’ve had in over a decade. Tonight, I’m announcing a new national effort to get it done. And because he’s gone to the mat for all of us, on so many issues over the past forty years, I’m putting Joe in charge of Mission Control. - Barrack Obama State of the Union (Jan 12th 1016) as quoted 8 Key Quotes Last Obama's State of the Union State of the Union (Jan 12th 1016)

When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money. - Alanis Obomsawin, Who is the Chairman of This Meeting?: A Collection of Essays (1972), edited by Ralph Osborne, as quoted in “Conversations with North American Indians” by Ted Poole, Page 43, Neewin Publishing Company, Toronto.

Our planet is bigger than the reed bundles that have carried us across the seas, and yet small enough to run the same risks unless those of us still alive open our eyes and minds to the desperate need of intelligent collaboration to save ourselves and our common civilization from what we are about to convert into a sinking ship. - Thor Heyderdahl Open Letter to the UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim

In ancient times writings and inscriptions were generally made on tablets of bamboo or on pieces of silk called chih. But silk being costly and bamboo heavy, they were not convenient to use. Tshai Lun Cai Lun then initiated the idea of making paper from the bark of trees, remnants of hemp, rags of cloth, and fishing nets. He submitted the process to the emperor in the first year of Yuan-Hsing [+105] and received praise for his ability. From this time, paper has been in use everywhere and is universally called 'the paper of Marquis Tshai'. - Tsien, Tsuen-Hsuin; Needham, Joseph (1985). Science and Civilization in China: Volume 5: Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 1: Paper and Printing.

A bewildering assortment of (mostly microscopic) life-forms has been found thriving in what were once thought to be uninhabitable regions of our planet. These hardy creatures have turned up in deep, hot underground rocks, around scalding volcanic vents at the bottom of the ocean, in the desiccated, super-cold Dry Valleys of Antarctica, in places of high acid, alkaline, and salt content, and below many meters of polar ice. ... Some deep-dwelling, heat-loving microbes, genetic studies suggest, are among the oldest species known, hinting that not only can life thrive indefinitely in what appear to us totally alien environments, it may actually originate in such places. - David Darling, In Life Everywhere: the Maverick Science of Astrobiology (2002), xi.

Each Party undertakes not to develop, test, or deploy: (...) (c) systems for placing into Earth orbit nuclear weapons or any other kind of weapons of mass destruction, including fractional orbital missiles. - SALT II treaty

The factors governing the actual pattern of global incidence for any particular extraterrestrial invasion could be complex. If bacteria or viruses are dispersed in a diffuse cloud of small particles, the incidence of disease may well be global. On the other hand, a smaller disintegrating aggregate of infective grain clumps falling over a limited area of the Earth's surface could provide a geographically more localized invasion….Our suggestion, if correct, would have profound biological, medical and sociological implications. A continual microbiological vigil of the stratosphere may well be necessary to eliminate the havoc which will ensue from extraterrestrial invasions in the future. - "Does Epidemic Disease Come From Space?," - N. Chandra Wickramasing, November 17, 1977 issue of New Scientist

It is also our view that there are no sound reasons for treating the early-stage human embryo or cloned human embryo as anything special, or as having moral status greater than human somatic cells in tissue culture. A blastocyst (cloned or not), because it lacks any trace of a nervous system, has no capacity for suffering or conscious experience in any form – the special properties that, in our view, spell the difference between biological tissue and a human life worthy of respect and rights. Additional biological facts suggest that a blastocyst should not be identified with a unique individual person, even if the argument that it lacks sentience is set aside. A single blastocyst may, until the primitive streak is formed at around fourteen days, split into twins; conversely, two blastocysts may fuse to form a single (chimeric) organism. Moreover, most early-stage embryos that are produced naturally (that is, through the union of egg and sperm resulting from sexual intercourse) fail to implant and are therefore wasted or destroyed. - The President's Council on Bioethics Washington, D.C. July 2002.

But if the same tests, the same foods are examined by an independent scientist, then it turns out that in almost every case there are quite serious harms done to the rats, the mice or the other poor unfortunate animals, particularly internal organs like liver and kidneys and things of that sort. - Jane Goodall, "Godall Says Animals Suffer From Genetically Modified Foods" (2015-04-28)

And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, Avenge the children of Israel of the Midianites ... And they warred against the Midianites, as the LORD commanded Moses; and they slew all the males ... And the children of Israel took all the women of Midian captives, and their little ones ... And Moses was wroth with the officers ... And Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the women alive? ... Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves. - Deuteronomy 20:10-14

Dans ses écrits, un sage Italien
Dit que le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.
(In his writings, a wise Italian
says that the better is the enemy of good.). ~ Voltaire, "Art Dramatique", 1770 edition of Dictionnaire philosophique

After a series of harmless punishments, each girl was led into a large room where all the Junior and Senior girls were assembled. There she was sentenced to go through various exhibitions, supposed to be especially suitable to punish each particular girls failure to submit to discipline imposed by the upper class girl. The sophomore girls carried long sticks with which to enforce, if necessary, the stunts which the freshmen were required to preform. While the programme did not call for a series of pre-arranged physical struggles between individual girls...frequent rebellion of the freshman against the commands of their captresses and guards furnished the most exciting portion of the entertainment according to the report of a majority of the class girls. Nearly all the sophomores reported excited pleasantness of captivation emotion throughout the party. - William Moulton Marston, as quoted in Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter comics, 1941-1948 pp. 64-65 by Noah Berlatsky.

What it really means is pro-human-life. Abortion clinic bombers are not known for their veganism, nor do Roman Catholics show any particular reluctance to have their suffering pets 'put to sleep'. In the minds of many confused people, a single-celled human zygote, which has no nerves and cannot suffer, is infinitely sacred, simply because it is 'human'. No other cells enjoy this exalted status. But such 'essentialism' is deeply un-evolutionary. If there were a heaven in which all the animals who ever lived could frolic, we would find an interbreeding continuum between every species and every other. For example I could interbreed with a female who could interbreed with a male who could ... fill in a few gaps, probably not very many in this case ... who could interbreed with a chimpanzee. We could construct longer, but still unbroken chains of interbreeding individuals to connect a human with a warthog, a kangaroo, a catfish. - Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins Chimpanzee Hybrid? The Guardian, Jan 2009.

They (Native Americans) didn't have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using. What was it that they were fighting for, when they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their 'right' to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or a few caves above it. Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent. - Ayn Rand, Q and A session following her address to the graduating class of The United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, March 6, 1974 - found in Endgame: Resistance, by Derrick Jensen, Seven Stories Press, 2006, pg 220.

We believed that the often ridiculed mass audience is sick of this world's petty nationalism and all it ís old ways and old hatreds, and that people are not only willing but anxious to think beyond most petty beliefs that have for so long kept mankind divided. So you see that the formula, the magic ingredient that many people keep seeking and many of them keep missing is really not in Star Trek. It is in the audience. There is an intelligent life form out on the other side of that television too. Star Trek was an attempt to say that humanity will reach maturity and wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate, but take a special delight in differences in ideas and differences in life forms. […] If we cannot learn to actually enjoy those small differences, to take a positive delight in those small differences between our own kind, here on this planet, then we do not deserve to go out into space and meet the diversity that is almost certainly out there. - Gene Roddenberry as quoted by Socialism in One Galaxy, Socialist Worker.org, [1].

The things we can do with life—have relationships, be creative, create knowledge—are what give life meaning. We don't need death to give time a purpose. We rationalize this great tragedy and convince ourselves that death is a blessing, but it's a tragedy. It's a profound loss of knowledge and skill and humanity and relationships. It is a loss of the things that give life significance. - Ray Kurzweil as quoted in "Google Engineer Ray Kurzweil Thinks We'll Cheat Death In This Lifetime. Here's Why.", Prevention.com.

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146

Kai: I killed mothers with their babies. I've killed great philosophers, proud young warriors, and revolutionaries. I've killed the evil, the good, the intelligent, the weak, and the beautiful. I have done this in the service of His Divine Shadow and his predecessors, and I have never once shown any mercy. ~ Lex Gigeroff, Lexx, I Worship His Shadow

Man in a state of society, more especially where there is an inequality of condition and rank, is very often the creature of leisure. He finds in himself, either from internal or external impulse, a certain activity. He finds himself at one time engaged in the accomplishment of his obvious and immediate desires, and at another in a state in which these desires have for the present been fulfilled, and he has no present occasion to repeat those exertions which led to their fulfilment. This is the period of contemplation. This is the state which most eminently distinguishes us from the brutes. Here it is that the history of man, in its exclusive sense, may be considered as taking its beginning. - William Godwin Lives of the Necromancers (1834)

I don’t want to ever say that anything that I’m doing with these fantasy pictures has anything to do with real heroics. I admire those men and women in the service and I know that they risk a lot for our country and for our freedom. They have my thanks and my admiration. These are simple comic book fantasy stories, but they have their importance, too. They’re much lower level. I’m very lucky to be an American and to be able to tell these stories and live in Los Angeles protected. But that having been said, I think the value of any story of a hero is that it reminds us of the good we can do in the world. And it reminds of what we’re capable of. Like myths, or stories of old. They have us identify with characters, they show them coming upon terrible conflicts and problems, and they show these characters, if they’re heroic stories, rising above those conflicts – exhibiting qualities that they probably didn’t even think that they had. Maybe it’s a growth of responsibility, like in this film. Or maybe it’s the ability to withstand more than they thought they could for the ones they love, or to risk something for an ideal they believe in, that’s greater than themselves. And when we see these stories, and when we see these characters overcome these conflicts and grow as human beings, we’re uplifted because we’re reminded – yes, we’re capable of that. I’m capable of that goodness too. And we feel touched and stirred when it works right. And that’s the value of these heroic stories. They show us the way and remind us what we should be. ~ Sam Raimi, "Interview: Director Sam Raimi on Spider-Man 2", SuperHeroHype, (Jun 23, 2004).

The Joker: So... I see you received the free ticket I sent you. I'm glad. I did so want you to be here. You see it doesn't matter if you catch me and send me back to the asylum... Gordon's been driven mad. I've proved my point. I've demonstrated there's no difference between me and everyone else! All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That's how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day. You had a bad day once, am I right? I know I am. I can tell. You had a bad day and everything changed. Why else would you dress up as a flying rat? You had a bad day, and it drove you as crazy as everybody else... Only you won't admit it! You have to keep pretending that life makes sense, that there's some point to all this struggling! God you make me want to puke. I mean, what is it with you? What made you what you are? Girlfriend killed by the mob, maybe? Brother carved up by some mugger? Something like that, I bet. Something like that... Something like that happened to me, you know. I... I'm not exactly sure what it was. Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another... If I'm going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice! Ha ha ha! But my point is... My point is, I went crazy. When I saw what a black, awful joke the world was, I went crazy as a coot! I admit it! Why can't you? I mean, you're not unintelligent! You must see the reality of the situation. Do you know how many times we've come close to World War Three over a flock of geese on a computer screen? Do you know what triggered the last World War? An argument over how many telegraph poles Germany owed its war debt creditors! Telegraph poles! Ha ha ha ha HA! It's all a joke! Everything anybody ever valued or struggled for... it's all a monstrous, demented gag! So why can't you see the funny side? Why aren't you laughing? ~ Alan Moore, Batman: The Killing Joke, (1988)

It's impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism. You can't have capitalism without racism. ~ Malcolm X, Speech, May 29, 1964, The Harlem Hate-Gang-Scare, p. 69 as quoted in Malcolm X Speaks (1965)

It is easy to kill someone with a slash of a sword. It is hard to be impossible for others to cut down. ~ Yagyū Munenori, as quoted in Behold the Second Horseman (2005), by Joseph Lumpkin, p. 53

Art is subjective; it’s in the eye of the beholder. I think video games can be fun. They can teach eye-hand coordination and strategy and they can introduce children to computer technology. And there is no doubt they are intricate and sophisticated technologically. I’m not in any way trying to do away with video games. I’m strictly concerned with a small subset of games that are harmful to children — those that are excessively violent and sexually explicit. I want to make sure children can’t obtain these games without their parents’ consent. ~ Hillary Clinton as quoted in Senator Clinton on Violent Video Games, CBS, (Aug 2, 2005)] Youtube.

We always think of the road not taken, of something in the past. 'Wow, what would have happened if I married so and so, or took that job in San Diego…' But you rarely think that each and every second that goes by is one of those moments. Like this second that just happened. And that one. And the one that's going to happen in a second." Potentially, each of these seconds could alter a game in a profound way. Just as they can in life. The easiest thing for us to imagine is that our lives, and the story we are playing, are pre-designed, solid. But neither gaming nor life has to be like that. In both, we can alter and decide in a way that is surprising, ultimately freeing. ~ Ken Levine, "Ken Levine Bioshok Interview", The Guardian, 14 January 2014

I think girls tend to like RPGs, like Final Fantasy. Girls who play games like that seem to get more of a desire to work in this field. I usually don't think to make games strictly for a female audience, myself, but I think my RPGs attract a larger female audience. Violent, war-themed titles seem to attract an overwhelmingly male audience. I think if companies want to get more girls to play their games, they should keep this in mind. ~ Reiko Kodama "Interview Reiko Kodama", The-nextlevel.com

Needless to say, adventure characters should be just one facet of videogaming. In the same way a painting allows us to gaze upon the faces and souls of people from another age, or a book permits us to linger on the thoughts of great figures from history and fiction, videogames can expand our awareness of the world as it is, was, or might be. ~ Adam West, "The Keyboard: Guest Editorials", Videogaming Illustrated July 1983, p. 6

J.D.: You probably wondered why I didn't show up before, huh? I know you wanted me to, even though you'd never admit it. Normally I would kill to get into this apartment, and you'd try and keep me out... I say "try", because at your Super-Bowl party, which I was not invited to, I was lucky enough to be able to watch the second half from right over there. I was the bearded Dominoe's employee you invited in because I said I was a fan of Jerome Bettis, whoever the hell that is. Anyway, I tried to convince myself the reason I didn't come earlier was because of you coming into work drunk; but that's not it. I was scared. I guess after all this time I still think of you as like this superhero that'll help me out of any situation I'm in. I needed that. But that's my problem, you know, and I'll deal with that. I guess I came over here to tell you... how proud of you I am. Not because you did the best you could for those patients; but because after twenty years of being a doctor, when things go badly, you still take it this hard. And I gotta tell you man, I mean... that's the kind of doctor I want to be. ~ Scrubs, My Fallen Idol, (May, 2006), Bill Lawrence (created by), Bill Callahan

Big Boss: The nightmares? They never go away, Snake. Once you've been on the battlefield, tasted the exhilaration, the tension... it all becomes part of you. Once you've awakened the warrior within... it never sleeps again. You crave ever bigger tensions, ever bigger thrills. As a mercenary, I'd think you would have realized that by now. You care nothing for power, or money, or even sex. The only thing that satisfies your cravings is war! All I've done is give you a place for it. I've given you a reason to live. ~ Hideo Kojima, Metal Gear II: Solid Snake, (July 20, 1990)

Every culture has such myths and theories about the creation of their worlds, and it can be beneficial and entertaining to examine them in detail, for they often affect the present day social structure. ~ “The Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past”, Kensuke Tanabe, Yoshiaki Koizumi, Nintendo, (1992), p.3

Dune was aimed at this whole idea of the infallible leader because my view of history says mistakes made by a leader (or made in a leader's name) are amplified by the numbers who follow without question. That's how 900 people wound up in Guyana drinking poison Kool-Aid. That's how the U.S. said "Yes, sir, Mister Charismatic John Kennedy!" and found itself embroiled in Vietnam. That's how Germany said "Sieg Heil!" and murdered more than six million of our fellow human beings. ~ Frank Herbert, Introduction to Eye, (1987)

I imagine that as population continues to increase—and as the available resources decrease—there will be less energy and food, so we'll all enter a stage of scrounging. The average person's only concerns will be where he or she can get the next meal, the next cigarette, the next means of transportation. In such a universal scramble, the Earth will be just plain desolated, because everyone will be striving merely to survive regardless of the cost to the environment. Put it this way: If I have to choose between saving myself and saving a tree, I'm going to choose me. Terrorism will also become a way of life in a world marked by severe shortages. Finally, some government will be bound to decide that the only way to get what its people need is to destroy another nation and take its goods ... by pushing the nuclear button. And this absolute chaos is going to develop—even if nobody wants nuclear war and even if everybody sincerely wants peace and social justice—if the number of mouths to feed continues to grow. Nothing will be able to stand up against the pressure of the whole of humankind simply trying to stay alive! ~ Isaac Asimov, "Science, Technology and Space: The Isaac Asimov Interview" Pat Stone, Mother Earth News (October 1980)

Jack Harkness: There you go! I can taste it! Oestrogen. Definitely oestrogen. You take the pill, flush it away, and it enters the water cycle. Feminizes the fish. Goes all the way up into the sky then falls all the way back down onto me. Contraceptives in the rain. Love this planet. Still, at least I won't get pregnant. Never doing that again. ~ Russell T Davies, "Everything Changes", Torchwood, (22 October 2006).

The Gothic tradition concerns things lurking in the beyond and monsters that often represent ourselves. It’s traditionally looked at how big institutions like the church and state are in fact fundamentally corrupt. That idea of the evil within is a very X-Files thing. Both Gothic literature and The X-Files are about taking that walk into the dark woods and facing what we can’t define. That’s essentially what Mulder does in the show. ~ Sharon R. Yang, "Can The X-Files exist in a post-9/11 world?", Andrew Harrison, New Statesmen, (29 December 2015).

You express amazement at my statement that 'civilized' men try to justify their looting, butchering and plundering by claiming that these things are done in the interests of art, progress and culture. That this simple statement of fact should cause surprize, amazes me in return. People claiming to possess superior civilization have always veneered their rapaciousness by such claims... Your friend Mussolini is a striking modern-day example. In that speech of his I heard translated he spoke feelingly of the expansion of civilization. From time to time he has announced; 'The sword and civilization go hand in hand!' 'Wherever the Italian flag waves it will be as a symbol of civilization!' 'Africa must be brought into civilization!' It is not, of course, because of any selfish motive that he has invaded a helpless country, bombing, burning and gassing both combatants and non-combatants by the thousands. Oh, no, according to his own assertions it is all in the interests of art, culture and progress, just as the German war-lords were determined to confer the advantages of Teutonic Kultur on a benighted world, by fire and lead and steel. Civilized nations never, never have selfish motives for butchering, raping and looting; only horrid barbarians have those. ~ Robert E. Howard from a letter to H. P. Lovecraft (5 December 1935)

I should regard them [the Elves interested in technical devices] as no more wicked or foolish (but in much the same peril) as Catholics engaged in certain kinds of physical research (e.g. those producing, if only as by-products, poisonous gases and explosives): things not necessarily evil, but which, things being as they are, and the nature and motives of the economic masters who provide all the means for their work being as they are, are pretty certain to serve evil ends. For which they will not necessarily be to blame, even if aware of them. ~ J. R. R. Tolkien; in a letter to Peter Hastings (Sep 1954); in Humphrey Carpenter (ed.) assisted by Christopher Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (1995, 2014), 190, Letter No. 153.

They were meant to emphasize the conflict between people who felt that we've got to all work together and find a way to get along, and people who feel, 'We're not treated well, therefore we're going to strike back with force!' ~ Stan Lee

Mutants are all around us. They could be your neighbors. They could be your co-workers. They could be related to you. ~ Chris Claremont

Games are all about mechanics. That’s what games are, at the heart. You can put a story on top of any mechanics, to string something together, but the game is about the mechanics. To me, one of the most powerful things about games is the story the player can put into the game. The more story you put into a game, the less ownership of the story you give to the player. The less story you put in a game, the more the player feels they can create their own story. ~ John Romero, "After 20 years, Doom co-creator John Romero looks back on the impact of a seminal (and Satanic) game (interview)" by Dean Takahashi, Venturebeat.com (December 11, 2013)

The trouble with animation today is that we’ve forgotten the basics. Every animator at Pixar can still draw. Good animation is driven by the craft not by the tools. ~ Steve Williams, "Steve "Spaz" Williams", Sheridancollege.ca

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. ~ Declaration of Independence

The Face of Boe: Everything has its time. You know that, old friend, better than most. ~ Russell T Davies, "Gridlock", Doctor Who, (14 April 2007).

Elizabeth Comstock: Some men dream of money, some men dream of love. My father dreamt of a flood of fire. We were given Eden, and we turned it into Sodom. ~ Ken Levine, BioShock Infinite, (March 26, 2013)

This was a period when we were experimenting with the atom bomb. People were wondering what the effects would be. Everybody worried ‘Would we all become mutants? We played around with this ‘mutation thing’ and I came up with the X-Men, who were associated with radiation and its effects on humanity. ~ Jack Kirby, “1993: Jack Kirby: The Hardest Working Man in Comics by Steve Pastis”, Happening Magazine, (1993) by Steve Pastin; as quoted by Rand Hoppe, The Kirby Effect The Journal of the Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center, (28 April 2018)

Naomi Hunter: The most we can say about DNA is that it governs a person's potential strengths... potential destiny. You mustn't allow yourself to be chained to fate... to be ruled by your genes. Humans can choose the type of life they want to live. ~ Hideo Kojima, Tomokazu Fukushima, Metal Gear Solid, (September 3, 1998)

As an adult, you may be more sensitive to some emotions than to others. What you learned about reading emotions in your own family might have great applicability to understanding others or relatively little, at least for some emotions. Through watching television, or movies, or a close friend, you may have improved upon and added to your knowledge of facial expressions. Although almost everyone correctly reads some facial expressions, few people realize when they make mistakes or why they make them.
The rules for translating a particular set of facial wrinkles into the judgement that a person is angry, afraid, etc. would be very hard for most people to describe. When you follow these rules you do so automatically, on the basis of habits established long so long ago that usually you don’t know how they operate, or even when they operate. In this sense, understanding facial expressions of emotion is like driving a car. You don’t think about what you are doing when you do it. Unlike driving a car, with facial expression there never was an earlier period in which you were specifically taught the skills. ~ Paul Ekman, Wallace V. Friesen, Unmasking the Face, Cambridge MA, (2003), p. 8.

Although nearly all fiction may provide a basis for simulated social experiences (Koopman & Hakemulder, 2015; Mar & Oatley, 2008), the present findings suggest that literary fiction is most likely to prompt readers to rely extensively on ToM, leading them to more fully recruit ToM-related processes, even beyond the immediate context of reading. This finding is consistent with prior research demonstrating short-term benefits to ToM performance caused by reading short works of literary fiction (Black & Barnes, 2015a; Kidd & Castano, 2013). We propose that these findings emerge because the implied (rather than explicit) sociocognitive complexity, or roundness of characters, in literary fiction prompts readers to make, adjust, and consider multiple interpretations of characters’ mental states (Zunshine, 2015). Though both prior experimental findings and the current results are consistent with this view, no direct evidence speaks to the precise mechanisms through which literary fiction affects ToM. Future research either focusing on the linguistic, syntactic, and other characteristics of literary texts, or that creates ad hoc texts that vary along specific dimensions, will provide valuable information about such mechanisms. ~ Kidd, D., & Castano, E., "Different Stories: How Levels of Familiarity With Literary and Genre Fiction Relate to Mentalizing", Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, (2016, August 8), p. 10.

You see all these white heroes, everybody is white, all the literature classes—your Shakespeare, your poetry — everybody’s white, and you start to feel less than. ~ John Leguizamo, "Broadway's John Leguizamo shares four favorite Latino heroes", Arturo Conde, NBC News, (Nov. 16, 2018).

All my heroes were either murdered by the government or… are registered sex offenders. ~ Dave Chappelle, The Bird Revelation, (November 2017)

Quotes

• Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane.
  • Martin Luther King, Jr. Speech to the Second National Convention of the Medical Committee for Human Rights – Chicago, (March 25, 1966).
• Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality. ... What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn't earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?
  • Martin Luther King, Jr., in The Radical King, p. 249.
• There is something wrong with our world, something fundamentally and basically wrong. I don't think we have to look too far to see that. I'm sure that most of you would agree with me in making that assertion. And when we stop to analyze the cause of our world's ills, many things come to mind. We begin to wonder if it is due to the fact that we don't know enough. But it can't be that. Because in terms of accumulated knowledge we know more today than men have known in any period of human history. We have the facts at our disposal. We know more about mathematics, about science, about social science, and philosophy than we've ever known in any period of the world's history. So it can't be because we don't know enough. And then we wonder if it is due to the fact that our scientific genius lags behind. That is, if we have not made enough progress scientifically. Well then, it can't be that. For our scientific progress over the past years has been amazing. Man through his scientific genius has been able to dwarf distance and place time in chains, so that today it's possible to eat breakfast in New York City and supper in London, England. Back in about 1753 it took a letter three days to go from New York City to Washington, and today you can go from here to China in less time than that. It can't be because man is stagnant in his scientific progress. Man's scientific genius has been amazing. I think we have to look much deeper than that if we are to find the real cause of man's problems and the real cause of the world's ills today. If we are to really find it I think we will have to look in the hearts and souls of men.
  • Martin Luther King Jr., Rediscovering Lost Values, Sermon delivered at Detroit's Second Baptist Church (28 February 1954)
• We have genuflected before the God of Science only to find that it has given us the atomic bomb, producing fears and anxieties that science can never mitigate.
  • Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love, (1963).
• The history books, which had almost completely ignored the contribution of the Negro in American history, only served to intensify the Negroes' sense of worthlessness and to augment the anachronistic doctrine of white supremacy. All too many Negroes and whites are unaware of the fact that the first American to shed blood in the revolution which freed this country from British oppression was a black seaman named Crispus Attucks. Negroes and whites are almost totally oblivious of the fact that it was a Negro physician, Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, who performed the first successful operation on the heart in America. Another Negro physician, Dr. Charles Drew, was largely responsible for developing the method of separating blood plasma and storing it on a large scale, a process that saved thousands of lives in World War II and has made possible many of the important advances in postwar medicine. History books have virtually overlooked the many Negro scientists and inventors who have enriched American life. Although a few refer to George Washington Carver, whose research in agricultural products helped to revive the economy of the South when the throne of King Cotton began to totter, they ignore the contribution of Norbert Rillieuz, whose invention of an evaporating pan revolutionized the process of sugar refining. How many people know that multimillion-dollar United Shoe Machinery Company developed from the shoe-lasting machine invented in the last century by a Negro from Dutch Guiana, Jan Matzelinger; or that Granville T. Woods, an expert in electric motors, whose many patents speeded the growth and improvement of the railroads at the beginning of this century, was a Negro?
  Even the Negroes' contribution to the music of America is sometimes overlooked in astonishing ways. In 1965 my oldest son and daughter entered an integrated school in Atlanta. A few months later my wife and I were invited to attend a program entitled "Music that has made America great." As the evening unfolded, we listened to the folk songs and melodies of the various immigrant groups. We were certain that the program would end with the most original of all American music, the Negro spiritual. But we were mistaken. Instead, all the students, including our children, ended the program by singing "Dixie".
  • Martin Luther King Jr., as quoted in Carson, Clayborne. 2001. The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., Grand Central Publishing. Cap: Black Power.
• The poor folk go forth to war, to fight, and die for the delights, riches, and super fluities of others, and they are falseley called lords and rulers of the habitable world in that land where they have not so much as a single inch that they may call their own.
• The preservation of their wealth became the chief care of the ruling classes, who nearly always made common cause with the foreign invaders. During the Peloponnesian war the populace took the part of the Athenians, the rich that of the Spartans. Likewise, during the MAcedonian invasion, the rich-the "optimates" - were in favour of Philip of Macedon. Finally, later on, when the Roman legions appeared, the aristocrats again made terms with the invaders.

• Plutarch, Parallel Lives, as quoted in From Serfdom to Socialism, James Keir Hardies, p. 115.

• It's simply a national acknowledgement that in any kind of priority, the needs of human beings must come first. Poverty is here and now. Hunger is here and now. Racial tension is here and now. Pollution is here and now. These are the things that scream for a response. And if we don't listen to that scream - and if we don't respond to it - we may well wind up sitting amidst our own rubble, looking for the truck that hit us - or the bomb that pulverized us. Get the license number of whatever it was that destroyed the dream. And I think we will find that the vehicle was registered in our own name.
  • Rod Serling, Commencement Address at the University of Southern California; (March 17, 1970).
• Nuclear weapons offer us nothing but a balance of terror, and a balance of terror is still terror.
  • George Wald from speech given at an anti-war teach-in at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, (4 Mar 1969) 'A Generation in Search of a Future', as edited by Ron Dorfman for Chicago Journalism Review, (May 1969).
• We speak erroneously of “artificial” materials, “synthetics”, and so forth. The basis for this erroneous terminology is the notion that Nature has made certain things which we call natural, and everything else is “man-made”, ergo artificial. But what one learns in chemistry is that Nature wrote all the rules of structuring; man does not invent chemical structuring rules; he only discovers the rules. All the chemist can do is find out what Nature permits, and any substances that are thus developed or discovered are inherently natural. It is very important to remember that.
  • Buckminster Fuller, "The Comprehensive Man", Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure (1963), 75-76.
• Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value. But if we got onto a planning planning basis, the government could trap pollutants in the stacks and spillages and get back more money than this would cost out of the stockpiled chemistries they'd be collecting.
  Margaret Mead gets cross with me when I talk like this because she says people are doing some very important things because they're worried and excited and I'm going to make them relax and stop doing those things. But we're dealing with something much bigger than we're accustomed to understanding, we're on a very large course indeed. You speak of racism, for example, and I tell you that there's no such thing as race. The point is that racism is the product of tribalism and ignorance and both are falling victim to communications and world-around literacy.
  • Buckminster Fuller as quoted in "The View from the Year 2000" by Barry Farrell in LIFE magazine, (26 February 1971).
• We have got to make sure that every qualified American in this country who wants to go to college can go to college -- regardless of income. Further, it is unacceptable that 40 million Americans are drowning in more than $1.2 trillion in student loan debt. It is unacceptable that millions of college graduates cannot afford to buy their first home or their first new car because of the high interest rates they are paying on student debt.
  • Bernie Sanders Statement by Senator Bernard Sanders on the College for All Act (May 19, 2015).
• The stronghold of the determinist argument is the antipathy to the idea of chance...This notion of alternative possibility, this admission that any one of several things may come to pass is, after all, only a roundabout name for chance.
  • William James The Dilemma of Determinism, (1884), p. 153.
• My dynamite will sooner lead to peace than a thousand world conventions. As soon as men will find that in one instant, whole armies can be utterly destroyed, they surely will abide by golden peace.
  • Alfred Nobel as quoted in The Military Quotation Book (2002) by James Charlton, p. 114.
• A heart can no more be forced to love than a stomach can be forced to digest food by persuasion.

• Alfred Nobel, "Aphorisms by Alfred Nobel". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014.

• "Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you" is the greatest phrase ever written. If everyone followed that creed, this world would be a paradise.

• "Unlikely Saints Stan Lee Soupy Sales and the Golden Rule" Huffington Post, Stan Lee, (08/10/2010)

• I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly tell our children that honesty is the best policy.
  • George Bernard Shaw, "Rungs of the Ladder", BBC Radio broadcast, 11 July 1932
• Imagine a room awash in gasoline, and there are two implacable enemies in that room. One of them has nine thousand matches. The other has seven thousand matches. Each of them is concerned about who's ahead, who's stronger. Well that's the kind of situation we are actually in. The amount of weapons that are available to the United States and the Soviet Union are so bloated, so grossly in excess of what's needed to dissuade the other, that if it weren't so tragic, it would be laughable. What is necessary is to reduce the matches and to clean up the gasoline.

• Carl Sagan, during a panel discussion in ABC News Viewpoint following the TV movie The Day After (20 Nov 1983). Misquoted as “The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five.”

• We have made a thing, a most terrible weapon, that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world. We have made a thing that, by all standards of the world we grew up in, is an evil thing. And by doing so, by our participation in making it possible to make these things, we have raised again the question of whether science is good for man, of whether it is good to learn about the world, to try to understand it, to try to control it, to help give to the world of men increased insight, increased power. Because we are scientists, we must say an unalterable yes to these questions; it is our faith and our commitment, seldom made explicit, even more seldom challenged, that knowledge is a good in itself, knowledge and such power as must come with it.
  • J. Robert Oppenheimer, Speech to the American Philosophical Society (Jan 1946). Atomic Weapons, printed in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 90(1), 7-10. In Deb Bennett-Woods, Nanotechnology: Ethics and Society (2008), 23. Identified as a speech to the society in Kai Bird, Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer‎ (2005), 323
• Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.
  • J. Robert Oppenheimer, last published words With Oppenheimer on an Autumn Day, Look, Vol. 30, No. 26 (19 December 1966)
• Well — yes. In modern times, of course.
  • J. Robert Oppenheimer, answer to a student at Rochester University who asked whether the bomb exploded at Alamogordo was the first one to be detonated, as quoted in Doomsday, 1999 A.D. (1982) by Charles Berlitz, p. 129
• The aim of life is inquiry into the Truth, and not the desire for enjoyment in heaven by performing religious rites, Those who possess the knowledge of the Truth, call the knowledge of non-duality as the Truth, It is called Brahman, the Highest Self, and Bhagavan.
  • Bhagavata Purana 1.2.10-11, translated by Daniel Sheridan 1986, p. 23
• That swarm of ants that I observed, each one following the one ahead, have every one been Indra in the world of the gods by virtue of their own past action. And now, by virtue of their deeds done in the past, they have gradually fallen to the state of ants.
  • Krsna, Indra and the Ants Indra and the Ants, Classical Hindu Mythology: A Reader in the Sanskrit Puranas, by Cornelia Dimmitt, p. 321
• I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother; you were very dear to me. Your love for me was wonderful, more wonderful than that of women.
  • 2 Samuel 1:26 (NIV)
• Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; where you lodge I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die — there will I be buried. May the Lord do thus and so to me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you!
  • (Ruth 1:16-17)
• Now behold, I have two daughters who have not had relations with man; please let me bring them out to you, and do to them whatever you like; only do nothing to these men, inasmuch as they have come under the shelter of my roof." But they said, "Stand aside." Furthermore, they said, "This one came in as an alien, and already he is acting like a judge; now we will treat you worse than them."
  • Genesis 19:9, New American Standard Bible
  • You are fifty years old and would worship a day old statue!
  • Abraham in Genesis Rabbah 38.13 R. Hiyya and the Idol Shop
• In the last heaven Moses saw two angels, each five hundred parasangs in height, forged out of chains of black fire and red fire, the angels Af, "Anger," and Hemah, "Wrath," whom God created at the beginning of the world, to execute His will. Moses was disquieted when he looked upon them, but Metatron embraced him, and said, "Moses, Moses, thou favorite of God, fear not, and be not terrified," and Moses became calm. There was another angel in the seventh heaven, different in appearance from all the others, and of frightful mien. His height was so great, it would have taken five hundred years to cover a distance equal to it, and from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet he was studded with glaring eyes. "This one," said Metatron, addressing Moses, "is Samael, who takes the soul away from man." "Whither goes he now?" asked Moses, and Metatron replied, "To fetch the soul of Job the pious." Thereupon Moses prayed to God in these words, "O may it be Thy will, my God and the God of my fathers, not to let me fall into the hands of this angel."
  • Louis Ginzberg, The Ascension of Moses, Chapter IV, "Aggadah: The Legend of the Jews"
• While God created Adam, who was alone, He said, 'It is not good for man to be alone. He also created a woman, from the earth, as He had created Adam himself, and called her Lilith. Adam and Lilith immediately began to fight. She said, 'I will not lie below,' and he said, 'I will not lie beneath you, but only on top. For you are fit only to be in the bottom position, while I am to be the superior one.' Lilith responded, 'We are equal to each other inasmuch as we were both created from the earth.' But they would not listen to one another. When Lilith saw this, she pronounced the Ineffable Name and flew away into the air.
  • Adam and Lilith in Alphabet of Sirach
• So ye shall not pollute the land wherein ye are: for blood it defileth the land: and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it.
  • Numbers 35:33.
• I have met people who have claimed to be satanists, who claimed to be involved with black magic...I warn all of you: never, never, never. You will not only lose your mind, you'll lose your soul.
  • Christopher Lee, University College Dublin interview, 2011.
• The more we learn of the true nature of non-human animals, especially those with complex brains and corresponding complex social behavior, the more ethical concerns are raised regarding their use in the service of man — whether this be in entertainment, as "pets," for food, in research laboratories, or any of the other uses to which we subject them.
  • Frans de Waal, Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe (2000), p. 245
• Economists are being indoctrinated into a cardboard version of human nature, which they hold true to such a degree that their own behavior has begun to resemble it. Psychological tests have shown that economics majors are more egoistic than the average college student. Exposure in class after class to the capitalist self-interest model apparently kills off whatever prosocial tendencies these students have to begin with. They give up trusting others, and conversely others give up trusting them.
  • Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are (2006), p. 243.
• Get it understood how dangerous these damaged, sick personalities are to ourselves - and above all, to our children, whose traits are taking form and we shall find ways to put an end to them.
  • Donald Ewen Cameron as quoted by Harvey Weinstein in Father, Son and CIA pg. 101
• That is the great thing about our movement--that these members are uniform not only in ideas, but even, the facial expression is almost the same!
  • Adolf Hitler, attributed by Jack Kirby in The Forever People #3, National Periodical Publications, (June-July 1971).
• Remember that time is money. He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labor, and goes abroad, or sits idle, one half of that day, though he spends but sixpence during his diversion or idleness, ought not to reckon that the only expense; he has really spent, rather thrown away, five shillings, besides.
  “Remember, that credit is money. If a man lets his money lie in my hands after it is due, he gives me interest, or so much as I can make of it during that time. This amounts to a considerable sum where a man has good and large credit, and makes good use of it.
  “Remember, that money is of the prolific, generating nature. Money can beget money, and its offspring can beget more, and so on. Five shillings turned is six, turned again it is seven and three pence, and so on, till it becomes a hundred pounds. The more there is of it, the more it produces every turning, so that the profits rise quicker and quicker. He that kills a breeding sow, destroys all her offspring to the thousandth generation. He that murders a crown, destroys all that it might have produced, even scores of pounds.”
  “Remember this saying, The good paymaster is lord of another man’s purse . He that is known to pay punctually and exactly to the time he promises, may at any time, and on any occasion, raise all the money his friends can spare. This is sometimes of great use. After industry and frugality, nothing contributes more to the raising of a young man in the world than punctuality and justice in all his dealings; therefore never keep borrowed money an hour beyond the time you promised, lest a disappointment shut up your friend’s purse for ever.
  “The most trifling actions that affect a man’s credit are to be regarded. The sound of your hammer at five in the morning, or eight at night, heard by a creditor, makes him easy six months longer; but if he sees you at a billiard table, or hears your voice at a tavern, when you should be at work, he sends for his money the next day; demands it, before he can receive it, in a lump. ‘It shows, besides, that you are mindful of what you owe; it makes you appear a careful as well as an honest man, and that still increases your credit.’
  “Beware of thinking all your own that you possess, and of living accordingly. It is a mistake that many people who have credit fall into. To prevent this, keep an exact account for some time both of your expenses and your income. If you take the pains at first to mention particulars, it will have this good effect: you will discover how wonderfully small, trifling expenses mount up to large sums, and will discern what might have been, and may for the future be saved, without occasioning any great inconvenience.
  “For six pounds a year you may have the use of one hundred pounds, provided you are a man of known prudence and honesty.
  “He that spends a groat a day idly, spends idly above six pounds a year, which is the price for the use of one hundred pounds.
  “He that wastes idly a groat’s worth of his time per day, one day with another, wastes the privilege of using one hundred pounds each day.
  “He that idly loses five shillings’ worth of time, loses five shillings, and might as prudently throw five shillings into the sea.
  “He that loses five shillings, not only loses that sum, but all the advantage that might be made by turning it in dealing, which by the time that a young man becomes old, will amount to a considerable sum of money.”

• Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One (1748), as quoted by Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Chapter II: The Spirit of Capitalism, 1905. [2][3], [4]

• German: Arbeit macht frei"
• English: "Work brings freedom" or "work shall set you free/will free you" or "work liberates" and, literally in English, "work makes (one) free".

• Lorenz Diefenbach, Arbeit macht frei: Erzählung von Lorenz Diefenbach (1873). The slogan is also known for being placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps.

• If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lectures, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.
  • Clarence Darrow, Scopes Trial, Dayton, Tennessee (13 July 1925).
• Mutual understanding would be immensely facilitated by the use of one universal tongue. But which shall it be, is the great question. At present it looks as if the English might be adopted as such, though it must be admitted that it is not the most suitable. Each language, of course, excels in some feature.... A practical answer to that momentous question must perforce be found in times to come, for it is manifest that by adopting one common language the onward march of man would be prodigiously quickened. I do not believe that an artificial concoction, like Volapuk, will ever find universal acceptance, however time-saving it might be. That would be contrary to human nature. Languages have grown into our hearts.
• Our senses enable us to perceive only a minute portion of the outside world. Our hearing extends to a small distance. Our sight is impeded by intervening bodies and shadows. To know each other we must reach beyond the sphere of our sense perceptions. We must transmit our intelligence, travel, transport the materials and transfer the energies necessary for our existence. Following this thought we now realize, forcibly enough to dispense with argument, that of all other conquests of man, without exception, that which is most desirable, which would be most helpful in the establishment of universal peaceful relations is — the complete ANNIHILATION OF DISTANCE.
  To achieve this wonder, electricity is the one and only means. Inestimable good has already been done by the use of this all powerful agent, the nature of which is still a mystery. Our astonishment at what has been accomplished would be uncontrollable were it not held in check by the expectation of greater miracles to come. That one, the greatest of all, can be viewed in three aspects: Dissemination of intelligence, transportation, and transmission of power.
• Within a few years a simple and inexpensive device, readily carried about, will enable one to receive on land or sea the principal news, to hear a speech, a lecture, a song or play of a musical instrument, conveyed from any other region of the globe. The invention will also meet the crying need for cheap transmission to great distances, more especially over the oceans. The small working capacity of the cables and the excessive cost of messages are now fatal impediments in the dissemination of intelligence which can only be removed by transmission without wires.

• Nikola Tesla, A Means for Furthering Peace (1905), "The Transmission of Electrical Energy Without Wires as a Means for Furthering Peace" in Electrical World and Engineer (7 January 1905)

• Just as the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say “thou shalt not” to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case of exclusion. Can we continue to stand by when food is thrown away while people are starving? This is a case of inequality. Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.

• Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium • The Joy of the Gospel, (November 24, 2013), section 53.

• By extending the working day, therefore, capitalist production . . . not only produces a deterioration of human labour-power by robbing it of its normal moral and physical conditions of development and activity, but also produces the premature exhaustion and death of this labour-power itself.
• Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.
  • Karl Marx Capital, Volume 1 The Political Economy of the Dead: Marx's Vampires by Mark Neocleous
• If I take the wages of everyone here, individually it means nothing, but collectively all of the earning power or wages that you earned in one week would make me wealthy. And if I could collect it for a year, I'd be rich beyond dreams. Now, when you see this, and then you stop and consider the wages that were kept back from millions of Black people, not for one year but for 310 years, you'll see how this country got so rich so fast. And what made the economy as strong as it is today. And all that slave labor that was amassed in unpaid wages, is due someone today. And you're not giving us anything when we say that it's time to collect.
  • Malcolm X, "Twenty million black people in prison," in Malcolm X: The Last Speeches, p. 51.
• Journalism is not a profession ... at its heart, it's just a craft. And that means that it can be practiced by anyone who is sensible and intelligent and thoughtful and curious ...
  • Sue Gardner, "Interview with Sue Gardner of the Wikimedia Foundation", Wikinews; (October 24, 2007).
• Everything about the games industry sends the signal: 'this is a space for men'. When players are repeatedly shown that women are sex symbols and damsels in distress, is it any surprise that players go on to treat women poorly in real life?. Gamergate feels like it owns the culture. Women and minorities are only welcomed if they keep their identity silent and don’t try to change the status quo. If I am a feminist, I am an outsider trying to steal their games – even if I am an avid gamer and a developer. I worry about becoming known to people outside the industry. As I gain experience in speaking, writing articles, publicising my game, I am increasing the risk of abuse. I stopped playing online games years ago. I couldn’t see why I was putting myself through the torrent of abuse, and sexual messages. Today, instead of them directing their abuse at a gamer tag, they will be contacting me directly, by email, Twitter, Facebook, and maybe anyone else that associates with me.
  • Briana Wu as quoted in James Batchelor, (November 10, 2014). "Games developers must fight internet abuse together". Develop. Archived from the original on November 10, 2014. Retrieved November 10, 2014.
• For each person there is a sentence — a series of words — which has the power to destroy him … another sentence exists, another series of words, which will heal the person. If you're lucky you will get the second; but you can be certain of getting the first: that is the way it works. On their own, without training, individuals know how to deal out the lethal sentence, but training is required to deal out the second.
  • Philip K. Dick, VALIS (1981).
• I remember some artists who said this world isn't worth anything, that it is a pigsty, that we are going nowhere, that God is dead, and all those things. Bad literature is this. To expose your navel, to tell how you drank your morning coffee amid general disgust, with everything around you rotting. While the world is dying, I drink my coffee. Or I perform my little sex acts. This is old-fashioned. One must cross this neurotic curtain.
  • Alejandro Jodorowsky, Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy, (2010).
• The framers of our Constitution firmly believed that a republican government could not endure without intelligence and education generally diffused among the people. The Father of his Country, in his Farewell Address, uses this language: Promote, then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.
  • Ulysses S. Grant, Message to the Senate and House of Representatives (1870)
• As the primary step, therefore, to our advancement in all that has marked our progress in the past century, I suggest for your earnest consideration, and most earnestly recommend it, that a constitutional amendment be submitted to the legislatures of the several States for ratification, making it the duty of each of the several States to establish and forever maintain free public schools adequate to the education of all the children in the rudimentary branches within their respective limits, irrespective of sex, color, birthplace, or religions; forbidding the teaching in said schools of religious, atheistic, or pagan tenets; and prohibiting the granting of any school funds or school taxes, or any part thereof, either by legislative, municipal, or other authority, for the benefit or in aid, directly or indirectly, of any religious sect or denomination, or in aid or for the benefit of any other object of any nature or kind whatever.
  • Ulysses S. Grant, Seventh State of the Union Address (1875)
• War is mankind's most tragic and stupid folly; to seek or advise its deliberate provocation is a black crime against all men. Though you follow the trade of the warrior, you do so in the spirit of Washington -- not of Genghis Khan. For Americans, only threat to our way of life justifies resort to conflict.
  • Dwight D. Eisenhower, Graduation Exercises at the United States Military Academy at West Pont, New York, USA at 3 June 1947
• Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
  • Dwight D. Eisenhower, 16 April 1953, Speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors
• How does America find its way in this new, global economy? What will our place in history be? Like so much of the American story, once again, we face a choice. Once again, there are those who believe that there isn’t much we can do about this as a nation. That the best idea is to give everyone one big refund on their government—divvy it up by individual portions, in the form of tax breaks, hand it out, and encourage everyone to use their share to go buy their own health care, their own retirement plan, their own child care, their own education, and so on. In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society. But in our past there has been another term for it—Social Darwinism—every man or woman for him or herself. It’s a tempting idea, because it doesn’t require much thought or ingenuity. It allows us to say that those whose health care or tuition may rise faster than they can afford—tough luck. It allows us to say to the Maytag workers who have lost their job—life isn’t fair. It let’s us say to the child who was born into poverty—pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And it is especially tempting because each of us believes we will always be the winner in life’s lottery, that we’re the one who will be the next Donald Trump, or at least we won’t be the chump who Donald Trump says: “You’re fired!” But there is a problem. It won’t work. It ignores our history. It ignores the fact that it’s been government research and investment that made the railways possible and the internet possible. It’s been the creation of a massive middle class, through decent wages and benefits and public schools that allowed us all to prosper. Our economic dependence depended on individual initiative. It depended on a belief in the free market; but it has also depended on our sense of mutual regard for each other, the idea that everybody has a stake in the country, that we’re all in it together and everybody’s got a shot at opportunity. That’s what’s produced our unrivaled political stability.
  • Barack Obama, Knox College Commencement Address (4 June 2005)
• Look at what happened in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast when Katrina hit. People ask me whether they thought race was the reason the response was so slow. I say, "well, no, this administration was colorblind in its incompetence." But, everyone here knows that the disaster and the poverty happened long before the hurricane hit.
• And so God is asking us today to remember the miracle of that baby and he's asking us, he says, "Take the bullet out!" If we have more black men in prison than in our colleges and universities, then it's time to take the bullet out. If we have millions of people goin' to the emergency room for treatable illnesses like asthma, it's time to take the bullet out. If too many of our kids don't have health insurance, it's time to take that bullet out. If we keep sending our kids to crumblin' school buildings, we keep fighting this war in Iraq, a war that should've never been authorized and should've never been waged, a war that costing us 20 cents — $275 million a day, that could have been invested in rebuilding communities all across this country, then it's time to take that bullet out!
• Now here's the thing, when 9-11 happened in New York City, they waived the Stafford Act — said, "This is too serious a problem. We can't expect New York City to rebuild on its own. Forget that dollar you gotta put in. Well, here's ten dollars." And that was the right thing to do. When Hurricane Andrew struck in Florida, people said, "Look at this devastation. We don't expect you to come up with y'own money, here. Here's the money to rebuild. We're not gonna wait for you to scratch it together — because you're part of the American family." What's happening down in New Orleans? "Where's your dollar? Where's your Stafford Act money?" Makes no sense! Tells me the bullet hasn't been taken out. Tells me that somehow, the people down in New Orleans they don't care about as much!
• We know that our faith sometimes has been used as a wedge to divide us, but we also know that with a big God, with a loving and forceful God, if we unite in his name, we can finish his work on Earth. In the face of impossible odds, people who love their country can change it. With a uniting faith, with a God powerful enough to empower us, we can take those bullets out.
• There was a team that took that bullet out of the baby, 15 years ago. She's got a scar on her arm, always will, but she will survive. Just like America will survive. Just like black folks will survive. We won't forget where we came from. We won't forget what happened 19 months ago, or 15 years ago, or 300 years ago. We know who the head surgeon is, we're on the case, we're going to pull bullet after bullet out.
  • Barack Obama, Hampton University, June 2007, referring to Jessica Evers, born with a bullet in her arm on 1992-04-30 during the Los Angeles riots
• The document they produced was eventually signed, but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.
  Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution - a Constitution that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.
  And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part - through protests and struggles, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience, and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.
• The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.
  And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.
  I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
  These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

• Barack Obama, A More Perfect Union (March 2008)

• People have a tendency to blame politicians when things don't work, but as I always tell people, you get the politicians you deserve. And if you don't vote and you don't pay attention, you'll get policies that don't reflect your interest.
  • Speaking at a summit on food innovation in Milan, Italy on May 9, 2017. Source: Conway, Madeline (9 May 2017). "Obama: 'You get the politicians you deserve'". Politico. Archived from the original on 13 May 2017. Retrieved 13 May 2017.
• Democracy cannot be imposed on any nation from the outside. Each society must search for its own path, and no path is perfect.
  • United Nations, General Debate of the 64th Session (2009), United States of America, H.E. Mr. Barack Obama, President p. 6, 23 September 2009
• If I become so convinced that ‘I’m always right,’ the logical conclusion of that often ends up being great cruelty and great violence.
  • Barack Obama, speaking during a discussion at "Kirchentag," a multi-day meeting sponsored by the Protestant church in Germany in Berlin, Germany on May 25, 2017. Source: Dovere, Edward-Isaac (25 May 2017). "Obama in Berlin: 'We can’t hide behind a wall'". Politico. Archived from the original on 2 June 2017. Retrieved 2 June 2017.
• Here's the advice I give everyone about marriage-is she someone you find interesting? You will spend more time with this person than anyone else for the rest of your life, and there is nothing more important than always wanting to hear what she has to say about things. Does she make you laugh? And I don’t know if you want kids, but if you do, do you think she will be a good mum? Life is long. These are the things that really matter over the long term.
  • Barack Obama, marriage advice to Dan Pfeiffer in Yes We Still Can, chapter 9, (June 19, 2018); as quoted in "Barack Obama says these are the three questions you must ask someone before you marry them", by Narjas Zatat, The Independent, (7/7/2018).
• When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche in: William Safire, Leonard Safir, Words of Wisdom, Simon and Schuster, 15-Apr-1990, p. 237
• I probably could've done this earlier, if I was more ambitious.
  • Michael Keaton, The New York Times (2008).

Additions

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• (+4000 bytes): Louis C.K., Martin Luther, William Jennings Bryan, Clarence Darrow, Jane Goodall, Isaac Asimov, Rod Serling, Walt Disney, Michael Badnarik, Chanakya, Martin Luther King, Pythagoras, Georges Bataille, Ishmael, Muhammad, Malcolm X, Abu Musab Zarqawi, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Osama bin Laden, Jesus, Edward Bernays, John C. Lily, Ali, Dan Savage, Albert Einstein, Adolf Hitler, Bernie Sanders (with Mdd), Thomas Jefferson, Jerusalem, Hollywood, Writing, Comics, Books, Science fiction, Internet, Video games, Film, Television, Graffiti, Fashion, Clothing, Language, Sculpture, Painting, Image, Copyright, Truth, Dreams, Reality, Fantasy, Lying, Insanity, Brain, Soul, Body, Medicine, Abortion, Birth, Babies, Mutant, Evolution, Learning, Intelligence, Memory, Education, Law, War, Prejudice, Forgiveness, Black people, Feminism, Masculinity, Weightlifting, Amazons, Women, Love, Marriage, Children, Animals, Animal rights, Arthopods, Feet, Pedophilia, Sadomasochism, Rape, Necromancy, Paranormal, Science, Chemistry, Organic chemistry, Genetics, Alien life, Space, Space Exploration, Sexuality, Prostitution, Sex, Sex offender, Heaven, Hell, God, Atheism, Anarchism, Buddhism, Buddha, Islamic law, Judaism, Christianity, Antichrist, Catholic Church, Free Masonry, Witch, Life, Death, Meaning of life, Lies, Censorship, Surveillance, Facial expression, Eating, Hunger, Darkness, Pain, Fear, Torture, Fighting, Power, Strength, Control, Mind control, Wisdom, Belief, Machine, Gun, War, Robot, Artificial Intelligence, Singularity, Freewill, Determinism, Future, Past, Small, World, Understanding, World view, World domination, World peace, Simian, Organic chemistry, Nuclear weapons, Nuclear power, Nuclear War, Botany, Wind, Volcano, Geology, Heavy metal music, Nikola Tesla, Filipino proverbs, Book of Leviticus, Eastern Orthodox Church, Misandry, Dungeons and Dragons, Benjamin Franklin, Protestantism, 14th Dalai Lama, Prayer, Moses, Homicide, Witnesses, Pornography, Envy, Theft, Sabbath, Capitalism, Vietnam War, Lyndon B. Johnson, History of Science, Technology, Mary Mother of Jesus, Sigmund Freud, John Calvin, Huldrych Zwingli, John Knox, Menno Simons, Thomas Cranmer, Destiny, Guns, Alexander Hamilton, Audience, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, Steve Jobs, Alan Moore, Unit cohesion, Trauma trigger, Morale, IBM, Nintendo, Hip hop, Marriage, Virginity, Batman, Drugs, Illusion, Heroes, Consent, Bullying, Companionship, Friendship, Romance, Pope Francis, Circumcision, Disability, Barack Obama, Abraham Lincoln, Education, Will Eisner, The Boondocks (comic strip), Human genome project, Pedophilia, Eleventh Doctor, Scientists, Consumerism, Globalism, Cloning, Michael Jackson, Horror, Torture, Mask, Memory, Medical malpractice.
• (+2000 bytes): Pope Alexander VI, Hakuin Ekaku, Ja'far al-Sadiq, Scheherazade, Homosexuality, Rumi, Ada Lovelace, Andrea Dwarkin, Richard Dawkins, Ayn Rand, Libertarianism, Masturbation, Dolphins, B. F. Skinner, William James, Relationship between religion and science, Intelligent Design, European colonization of the Americas (with Peter1c), Genetic engineering (with Y-S.Ko), Chemistry, Cancer, philosophy, Werner von Braun, Statue of Liberty, Hawaiian proverbs, Japan, Buckminster Fuller, Dragon, Common Place Book, Alexander the Great, Help, Talk, Sound, Weakness, Advertising, Screenwriting, White privilege, Heresy, Islam, Jihad, Black People, Apostasy, Al-Qaeda, Mankind, Richard Nixon, Antisemitism, Monuments, Greed, Vegetarianism, Fathers, Mothers, Parenting, Gene Roddenberry, Nazism, William Shatner, Astronomy, Machine, Civilization, Racism in the United States, Adam and Eve, David, Bigfoot, Acting, Schizoprehnia, Autism, LSD, Paranoia, Kawaii, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Depression, Anxiety, Alcoholism, Genetic engineering, Suicide, Obscenity, Blindness, Undead, Ulysses S. Grant, Duels, Sperm donation, Michael Moore, Universities, Terrorism, Journalism, Criminal justice, Robert E. Howard, Attention, Fascism, Hunting, Abraham, Social rejection, Economist.
• Pages Wonder Woman, William Moulton Marston, Regeneration, The Vision of Escaflowne, Animation, Young Sherlock Holmes, Crowdfunding, Iron Man (comics), Lilith, The Ark of the Covenant, Justice League Gods and Monsters, Charm, Grigori Rasputin, Moe Berg, Embryo, Zoophilia, Jack Kirby, Promethea, Noah, Experiment, Osamu Tezuka, Dead Man, Drones, Tibet, 6th Dalai Lama, Sodom and Gommorah, Democratic Republic of Congo, Voodoo, Andrew Vachss, Aisha, Botany, Heavy metal music, DC Comics, The Last House on the Left, Eastern Orthodox Church, Misandry, Dungeons and Dragons, Editorial cartoon, Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, Gabriel, Ex Machina, The Maxx, Will Eisner, The Spectacular Spider-Man, Melvil Dewey, Dungeon, Obsolescence, Corey Feldman, Sexism, Occam's Razor, True Cross, Metatron, Scientific literacy, Eratosthenes, Black Jesus (TV series), Choir, Huldrych Zwingli, Thomas Cranmer, Samantha Bee, Unit cohesion, Pregnancy, Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie comics), Fantastic Four (comics), Ethnicity, Teamwork, Sexual harassment.
• Categories: sci-fi fantasy and crime video games; Sci-fi, fantasy, crime, horror and war comics; and films with elves, dwarves, fairies, dragons, robots, cyborgs, genetic engineering, cloning, dinosaurs, ninja's, simulated reality, altered memories, transhumanism, airplane, hijackings, rape, juvenile sexuality, wish fulfillment, Gods, personifications of death, heaven and hell, after life, authors, acting and horses. For media in general it is reincarnation, robots, time travel, post apocalyptic, biological warfare, nuclear weapons, superhero, hostage dramas, marionette films. For professions it is soldier. I also made the Births category but stopped creating categories when I started to questioning whether the lesson Wikipedia wanted me to learn from my ban was to make better categories or to stop making them entirely, no one provided much direction regarding the reasons for my ban the numerous times I contacted the arbitration committee, making it difficult to give them what they wanted to see me do.
• Intros: Oddworld, Metal Gear, Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII, Final Fantasy IX, Spyro the Dragon, Frasier, Scrubs, Chrono Trigger, Crash Bandicoot 2:Cortex Strikes Back, Megaman, Halo, Jade Empire, Pokemon Red and Blue, Donkey Kong Country, Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog, The Legend of Zelda, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Earthworm Jim, Psychonauts, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, Chrono Cross, Tales of Symphonia, Doom, Castlevania, Portal, Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped, Spyro: Year of the Dragon‎, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year-Door, Mega Man Legends, Spider-Man 2 (video game), Enter the Matrix, Ultimate Spider-Man (video game), Soul Calibur II, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Spider-Man 2: Enter Electro, Spider-Man (2000 video game), The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Contra III: The Alien Wars, Super Metroid, Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko and Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex. I've played a bit of other video games we have pages for, like Diablo, Legacy of Kain, Legend of Dragoon and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, but have not actually finished them, that or the pages for them are for the entire series which I have not seen the first installment of; I haven't actually finished The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion or Super Metroid myself but have seen others. As such, there are no other games I'm familiar with for me summarize that don't already have them, contrary to what you may have heard from the incompetently conducted sock puppet investigations on Wikipedia which have ruined my username's credibility. Trust me, I'd be stealing more glory if I could, but I can't without spoiling the plots to a bunch of games I've never played.,I'm not very good at describing the premises of games I've played all of an hour of.
• Images: Noah, Weightlifting, Graffiti, Animation, Sculpture, Pornography, Dragons, Vampires, Lilith, Mary, mother of Jesus, Wishes, Gabriel, Aristotle, Small, Dungeon, Plants, Philip Moris, University of Phoenix, Bain Capital, Exxon mobile, American Apparel, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple Inc., Steve Jobs, Nintendo, IBM, Paranoia, Obscenity, Paranoia, Heroes, Soldier, Kawaii, Hip hop, Guns, Destiny, Chaos theory, Virginity, Marriage, Pregnancy, Amazons, Obscenity, Homicide, Undead, Poverty, Art, Ulysses S. Grant, Threat, Cultural appropriation, Ethnicity, Teamwork, Disability, Genetic engineering, Human Genome, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Batman villains, The Joker, Selena Kyle, Spider-Man, X-Men, Hulk, Thor, Teenage mutant Ninja Turtles, Iron Man (comics), New York City, Duels, Star Wars, Star Trek: The Original Series, Cloning, Alien (franchise), Neon Genesis Evangelion, Death Note, Fullmetal alchemist (anime), Michael Jackson, Escape from L.A., Weapon, Sadomasochism, Torture, Masks, Chernobyl disaster, September 11 attacks, Berlin Wall, Afghanistan, Pitch Black, Point Break, Cliffhanger, Kill Bill, The Matrix, Delicatessen, Chess, Metal Gear, Flowers of War, The Promise, Exodus: Gods and Kings, Memory, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, Nuclear power, Nanotechnology, Videogames, Man of Steel, Wonder Woman (2017 film), World War I, Indiana Jones, Godzilla, Prostitution, Pornography, Child Pornography, James Bond, Harry Potter, Alice in Wonderland, Lex Luthor, Darkseid, Silver Surfer, Fantastic Four, Captain America, Batman (TV series), Star Trek, Klingon Proverbs, Vulcan Proverbs, Green Lantern, Science-fiction, Colonialism, European Colonization of the Americas, Radio, Deafness, Nuclear weapons, Nuclear war, Blade Runner 2049, Alien 3, Alien Resurrection, Figure skating, Ice hockey, Moon, Tennis, Cricket, Golf, Sports, Force-feeding, Fascism, Soldiers, Rod Serling, Tales from the Crypt, The Daleks, Mutant, Sperm donation, Gulf War, War in Afghnistan, Fire, Cold, Clouds, Monument, Batman and Robin, Brave New World, Cancer, Fantasy, Horror, Forest, Vietnam War, Korean War, Doll, Ocean, Puritanism, Video.

About sections

• Live action films: 12 Monkeys, 2001: A Space Odyssey (film), 300 (film), Alien, Alien 3, Alien vs Predator, The Avengers (2012 film), Back to the Future, Batman, Batman Begins, Batman Returns, Batman & Robin (film), Batman Forever, Batman: Under the Red Hood, Battle Royale (film), Beetlejuice, Blade, Blade 2, Blade Runner, Captain America: The First Avenger, Cliffhanger, A Clockwork Orange (film), The Crow, Daredevil (film), Dark City (1998 film), The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, Dawn of the Dead (1978), Dawn of the Dead (2004), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951 film), Delicatessen, District 9, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Elektra (film), Escape from New York, Escape from L.A., Fantastic Four (2005 film), Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Fight Club, Flowers of War, Ghost Busters, Good Will Hunting, Gravity, Grindhouse (film), Green Lantern, Harold and Kumar, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, Her (film), The Hunger Games (film), The Incredible Hulk (film), Independence Day, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Interstellar, Iron Man (2008 film), Iron Man 2, E.L. James, Jurassic Park, Kill Bill, Kill Bill Volume 1, Kill Bill Volume 2, King Kong (2005 film) Man of Steel (film), Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Pitch Black, Planet of the Apes (1968 film), Point Break, Predator, The Promise, Red Dragon, RoboCop, The Silence of the Lambs, Sin City (film), Small Soldiers, Spider-Man (2002 film), Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man 3, The Spirit (film), Starship Troopers, Star Trek II, Star Trek V, Star Trek VI, Star Wars I-VI, Superman (1978 film), Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, Superman Returns, Superman vs. The Elite, Suzanne Collins, Team America: World Police, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1991 film), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze, Terminator, Terminator 2, Thor (film), Transformers, Tron Legacy, Twilight (film), The Twilight Saga: New Moon, War of the Worlds (2005 film), Watchmen (film), Willow, Wonder Woman (film), X-Men (2000 film), X2 (film), X Men: The Last Stand.
• Animated films: 9 (2009 film), Aladdin, Alpha and Omega, Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, Antz, Arthur Christmas, Brave, The Black Cauldron (film), Cinderella, Chicken Little, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Cool World, The Croods, Despicable Me, Despicable Me 2, Everyone's Hero, The Emperor's New Groove, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, Finding Nemo, Frozen, Garfield: The Movie, Garfield: The Tale of Two Kitties, The Good Dinosaur, Happy Feet, Horton Hears a Who, Inside Out, The Lion King, The Lorax (film), Meet the Robinsons, Megamind, Princess Mononoke, Monster House, Monsters University, Monsters vs. Aliens, Open Season, The Peanuts Movie, Rango, Ratatoullie, The Road to El Dorado, The Secret of Nimh, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Strange Magic, Stuart Little, Surfs Up, Titan AE, TMNT, Toy Story, Turbo, Valiant, WALL-E, The Wild (film).
• Live action television: Batman (TV series), Battle Star Galactica (1978), Battlestar Galactica (2003), Black Jesus (TV series), Doctor Who, Firefly, Fringe, Heroes (TV show), Lexx, Lost (TV show), Mad Men, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, The Prisoner, Quantum Leap, Scrubs, Star Gate SG-1, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Enterprise, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: Voyager, The Twilight Zone (1959 series), Xena: Warrior Princess, The X-Files.
• Animated television: Batman: The Animated Series, The Big O, Card Captor Sakura, Cowboy Bebop, Death Note, Dragon Ball, Full Metal Alchemist, Gargoyles, InuYasha, The Jetsons, Lupin III, Mobile Suit Gundam‎, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Sailor Moon, Samurai X, Star Trek: The Animated Series, Spiderman: The Animated Series, SpongeBob SquarePants, Trigun, X-Men (TV show), Yu-Gi-Oh!
• Video Games: Bioshock, Doom, Halo, Fallout, Metal Gear, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?
• Literature: Carrie, The Dark Tower, Book of Deuteronomy, Ender's Game, Book of Genesis, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Book of Leviticus, Mass (liturgy), The Wizard of Oz, World War Z.
• Fictional characters/disambiguation pages: Albus Dumbledore, Batman, Barbara Gordon, Captain America, Dalek, Darkseid, DC comics, Godzilla, Green Lantern, Harry Potter, Hulk, Indiana Jones, Iron Man, James Bond, Jason Todd, Kill Bill, Lex Luthor, Pokemon, Silver Surfer, Star Trek, Star Wars, Spider-Man, Thor, Wonder Woman, X-Men.
• Historical/mythological figures: Aisha, David, Noah, Ja'far al-Sadiq, Scheherazade, William Howard Taft, John Calvin

Work on other wikis

Wikipedia

• Censored Scribe
• Cassandra Truth
• Robopsychologist
• Amateur Encyclopedist
• Exiled Encyclopedist
• Bullets and Bracelets
• An Inconvenient Truth The edit history on this one seems slightly off. I don't deny it when I sockpuppet and someone realizes it, but they normally ban me without asking any questions so I don't get the opportunity. I turn myself in or I don't get caught, I'm actually very good at it even though I don't do it a lot and my success is why I'm a bad role model to other editors. I also don't ask what to do when my edits get reverted, the reverted good edits on my other accounts got restored because I do good work editing Wikis, and with the exception of some subjective categories that I argued about and reverted other editors over, my edits were all good. I might break the rules, but I do have a code. That's why other people are occasionally willing to help me by undoing an edit for me, because the easiest way to get blocked is to keep reverting a page; we can't agree on much as a community, but we all agree edit wars are annoying and those that fight them are to be punished as edit war criminals. (The term edit war is offensive to soldiers and civilians impacted by real wars, however it's the term still used by some admins rather than wheel revert, I believe the use of this term is an implied threat of violence against other editors and as a threat of violence should result in a block.) Discussions with other editors would be the easiest pages to alter the record of as they have fewer views compared to the main space pages. I don't think that kind of historical revisionism would even be a crime, so having evidence doesn't really matter. None of us have any legal recourse if someone changes our edit history.

Others

• Exiled Encyclopedist
• X-Factor
• Irritable of Contents

Reference desk questions archive

[5][6] [7]

Notable quote collections and public domain images

Todayinsci.com Quoteinvestigator.com Fakebuddhaquotes.com Realbuddhaquotes.com Skepticsannotatedbible.com Americanbookreview.org AFI.com Letterpile.com Forbes.com Inc.com lack orientationotery.com/lists/top-500-greatest-quotes-of-all-time/ Quotery.com Wikiproject free book covers Wikiproject philately Wikiproject culture Getty Search Gateway NASA.gov HoopoeQuotes.com The Top 100 Papers, Nature

WQ FAQs

Wikiquote:No personal attacks, Wikiquote:Limits on quotations, Wikiquote:Quotability, Wikiquote:Notability, Wikiquote:What Wikiquote is not, Wikiquote:Sourcing, Wikiquote:Citing sources, Wikiquote:Guide to layout Wikiquote:Copyrights, Wikiquote:Civility, Wikiquote:Please do not bite the newcomers. See also Village pump archive #37 "Bolding quotes" and Village pump archive #24 on bold text.

Curiosities

Science/Medicine/Economics/Environment

• It is a commonly held view that genetically homogenous host populations are more vulnerable to infection than genetically diverse populations. The underlying idea, known as the ‘monoculture effect,' is well documented in agricultural studies. Low genetic diversity in the wild can result from bottlenecks (that is, founder effects), biparental inbreeding or self-fertilization, any of which might increase the risk of epidemics. Host genetic diversity could buffer populations against epidemics in nature, but it is not clear how much diversity is required to prevent disease spread.
  • K C King and C M Lively, “Does genetic diversity limit disease spread in natural host populations?”, Heredity, (Edinb). 2012 Oct; 109(4): 199–203.

• Following bites, protective immune responses are induced, just like a conventional vaccination but with no pain and no cost. What's more, continuous exposure to bites will maintain high levels of protective immunity, through natural boosting, for a life time. So the insect shifts from being a pest to being beneficial.
  • Shigeto Yoshida in "Genetically modified mosquitos could be used to spread vaccine for malaria", Richard Alleyne, The Telegraph, (19 Mar 2010).

• Scientists have discovered that insects from cockroaches to caterpillars all emit the same stinky blend of fatty acids when they die, and this sinister stench sends bugs of all kinds running for their lives.
  • Hadley Leggett, "UNIVERSAL 'DEATH STENCH' REPELS BUGS OF ALL TYPES" WIRED, 2009/09.

• Miniaturization doesn't actually make sense unless you miniaturize the very atoms of which matter is composed. Otherwise a tiny brain in a man the size of an insect, composed of normal atoms, is composed of too few atoms for the miniaturized man to be any more intelligent than the ant. Also, miniaturizing atoms is impossible according to the rules of quantum mechanics.
  • Isaac Asimov Peary, D ed. (1984). Omni's Screen Flights, Screen Fantasies Doubleday

• You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.
  • J.B.S. Haldane, On Being the Right Size, (1923)

• With the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union was now high on the list of tyrannical enemies of democracy, and American nuclear weapons development and strategic theory were fashioned with that enemy foremost in mind. Oppenheimer’s sympathy for Communism, his enthusiasm for world government as the ultimate arbiter of nuclear technology, and his qualms about the proposed second generation of nuclear weapons, played a critical role in the history of the Cold War and in the precipitous course of his subsequent career. Already, in the fall of 1945, when Edward Teller was pressing for immediate development of the hydrogen bomb (the “Super,” as it was called), Oppenheimer responded coldly and tersely: “I neither can nor will do so.” Oppenheimer regarded the Super as a genocidal weapon: its only conceivable purpose would be the destruction of civilian populations by the millions — and ideally in the tens or hundreds of millions. The sole end of war with H-bombs would be annihilation. The peace that such a war would bring would be that of the mass grave; and if there were any survivors, they would likely prefer to have been among the dead. Civilization would have to be reconstituted from radioactive ash.
  And yet the undeniable perfidy of the Stalinist Soviet Union convinced even Oppenheimer that the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), created to oversee the use of atoms for peace, would be above all the instrument of war. In 1947, Oppenheimer declared that the agency’s main job was to “provide atomic weapons and good atomic weapons and many atomic weapons.” And Oppenheimer wanted to be the moving force in this work, despite his ever-deepening moral qualms.
  But Oppenheimer was never of one mind for long. The Soviets’ test of an atomic bomb in 1949 propelled him back to the internationalist position he had taken just after the war, believing that a single world organization should govern the nuclear policies of every individual nation. While Edward Teller insisted that the Super was needed now more than ever, Oppenheimer huffed, “Keep your shirt on.” He joined Enrico Fermi and other eminent physicists in lobbying Roosevelt’s former vice-president Henry Wallace to stop H-bomb development, “primarily because we should prefer defeat in war to victory obtained at the expense of the enormous human disaster that would be caused by its determined use.” To possess a weapon of incalculable potency — some theoreticians feared it could ignite the atmosphere in an explosive chain reaction and destroy the earth — would pose graver dangers than not to have one at all.
• While Oppenheimer was making the case for tactical nuclear weapons, useful on the battlefield, the Strategic Air Command’s war plan emphasized a massive and decisive nuclear first strike in the event of a conventional Soviet attack on Western Europe. According to Bird and Sherwin, the H-bomb advocates were so obsessed with the threat of Communism that they believed “Oppenheimer’s championing of tactical nuclear weapons was a ploy to block the Super Bomb.” Teller went so far as to spread the word that in trying to block the H-bomb Oppenheimer was acting on “direct orders from Moscow.” Teller may have been out of control, the Strategic Air Command may have been defending its turf, and Strauss may have been seeking personal revenge against Oppenheimer, but all the same, the gravest matters were at stake. The Soviet Union was a real threat that needed to be confronted with sobriety; seeing the defenders of the H-bomb as fanatics and conspiracy theorists foolishly belittles the existential challenge America was then just beginning to face.
• Machiavelli, so widely considered the founding father of modern political morality, or immorality, understood prudence, or the ability to choose among possible courses of action, as the sine qua non of the conqueror. But in the atomic age, the foremost aim of prudence among more or less decent nations is no longer to conquer but to avoid annihilation, while also avoiding the evil of annihilating the enemy — i.e., nuclear genocide. In October 1949, the General Advisory Committee to the AEC recommended that “a super bomb should never be produced” — that it “might become a weapon of genocide.” Oppenheimer was one of the signatories. To assume that the Soviet enemy would share this American scrupulousness was the committee’s fallacy; and to make such an assumption of Stalin was the depth of folly.

• Algis Valiunas, "The Agony of Atomic Genius", The New Atlantis, Number 14, Fall 2006, pp. 85-104.

• Allan Childers: Before you left the base, they gave you some codes that gave you access to the complex. You would read the code to the commander and then you would take a lighter, set the codes on fire and drop them down into a box so they would burn up and no one else could use those codes.
• Allan Childers: We never new what our specific targets were, becatuse you didn't really want to know who you were going to destroy.
• Allan Childers: You had to be prepared to destroy an entire civilization, and we were trained on that. As heartless as it sounds, I never had a problem with it, I was doing it for my country, I was doing it to protect my country.
• Eric Schlosser: At one point we only thought we needed 50 to 200 nuclear weapons to annihalate the Soviet Union, and by the 1960's we had 32,000.
• Eric Schlosser: One of the weapons in particular went through all of its arming steps to detonate, and when that weapon hit the ground, a firing signal was sent. And the only thing that prevented a full-scale detonation of a powerful hydrogen bomb in North Carolina was a single safety switch.
• Eric Schlosser: During a fire, solder might melt on a circuit board. It created all kinds of new electrical pathways that could completely circumvent a safety device.

• "Command and Control", American Experience, PBS, April 25, 2017

• 3,000: Tons of chemical weapons in the U.S. stockpile, mostly consisting of mustard gas and various nerve agents.

1,000: Tons of chemical weapons that Syria is believed to have.

• $500 million: Amount spent by the United States each year to assist other countries in destroying their stores of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.
• 2,150: Operational U.S. nuclear warheads assigned to land-based missiles, nuclear submarines, and bombs ready for deployment in military aircraft.

4,650: Operational nuclear warheads in Russia.

• "America's weapons of mass destruction: By the numbers", Keith Wagstaff, The Week, September 13, 2013

• Alan Turing was the first to make a careful analysis of the potential capabilities of machines, inventing his famous "Turing machines" for the purpose. He argued that if any machine could perform a computation, then some Turing machine could perform it. The argument focuses on the assertion that any machine's operations could be simulated, one step at a time, by certain simple operations, and that Turing machines were capable of those simple operations. Turing's first fame resulted from applying this analysis to a problem posed earlier by Hilbert, which concerned the possibility of mechanizing mathematics. Turing showed that in a certain sense, it is impossible to mechanize mathematics: We shall never be able to build an "oracle" machine that can correctly answer all mathematical questions presented to it with a "yes" or "no" answer. In another famous paper Turing went on to consider the somewhat different question, "Can machines think?." It is a different question, because perhaps machines can think, but they might not be any better at mathematics than humans are; or perhaps they might be better at mathematics than humans are, but not by thinking, just by brute-force calculation power. These two papers of Turing lie near the roots of the subjects today known as automated deduction and artificial intelligence.
  • Michael J. Beeson, "The Mechanization of Mathematics," in Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker (2004).

• Hannah Devlin: In your book you describe a nightmare you had involving Hitler wearing a pig mask, asking to learn more about your “amazing technology”. Do you still have anxiety dreams about where Crispr might leave the human race?

Jennifer Doudna: I had the Hitler dream and I’ve had a couple of other very scary dreams, almost like nightmares, which is quite unusual for an adult. Not so much lately, but in the first couple of years after I published my work, the field was moving so fast. I had this incredible feeling that the science was getting out way ahead of any considerations about ethics, societal implications and whether we should be worrying about random people in various parts of the world using this for nefarious purposes.

• Hannah Devlin: In 2015, you called for a moratorium on the clinical use of gene editing. Where do you stand on using Crispr to edit embryos these days?

Jennifer Doudna: It shouldn’t be used clinically today, but in the future possibly. That’s a big change for me. At first, I just thought why would you ever do it? Then I started to hear from people with genetic diseases in their family – this is now happening every day for me. A lot of them send me pictures of their children. There was one that I can’t stop thinking about, just sent to me in the last 10 days or so. A mother who told me that her infant son was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease, caused by a sporadic rare mutation. She sent me a picture of this little boy. He was this adorable little baby, he was bald, in his little carrier and so cute. I have a son and my heart just broke.

• Jennifer Doudna, "Jennifer Doudna: ‘I have to be true to who I am as a scientist’", Hannah Devlin, The Guardian, (July 2, 2017).

• If we combine the benefits of a human physiology maintained at the level of effectiveness possessed by our bodies when we were children (e.g., dechronification), along with the ability to deal with almost any form of severe trauma (via nanosurgery), then there are very few diseases or conditions that cannot be cured using nanomedicine. The only major class of incurable illness which nanorobots can’t handle is the case of brain damage in which portions of your brain have been physically destroyed. This condition might not be reversible if unique information has been irrevocably lost (say, because you neglected to make a backup copy of this information). There are several other minor “incurable” conditions, but all of these similarly relate to the loss of unique information.
• The key issue for enabling full-immersion reality is obtaining the necessary bandwidth inside the body, which should be available using the in vivo fiber network I first proposed in Nanomedicine, Vol. I (1999). Such a network can handle 1018 bits/sec of data traffic, capacious enough for real-time brain-state monitoring. The fiber network has a 30 cm3 volume and generates 4-6 watts waste heat, both small enough for safe installation in a 1400 cm3 25-watt human brain. Signals travel at most a few meters at nearly the speed of light, so transit time from signal origination at neuron sites inside the brain to the external computer system mediating the upload are ~0.00001 millisec which is considerably less than the minimum ~5 millisec neuron discharge cycle time. Neuron-monitoring chemical sensors located on average ~2 microns apart can capture relevant chemical events occurring within a ~5 millisec time window, since this is the approximate diffusion time for, say, a small neuropeptide across a 2-micron distance. Thus human brain state monitoring can probably be “instantaneous,” at least on the timescale of human neural response, in the sense of “nothing of significance was missed.
  • Robert Freitas, "Interview with Robert A. Freitas Jr. Part 2" Kurzweilai.net, (2 February 2006).

• Poverty is an important social determinant of health and contributes to child health disparities. Children who experience poverty, particularly during early life or for an extended period, are at risk of a host of adverse health and developmental outcomes through their life course. Poverty has a profound effect on specific circumstances, such as birth weight, infant mortality, language development, chronic illness, environmental exposure, nutrition, and injury. Child poverty also influences genomic function and brain development by exposure to toxic stress, a condition characterized by “excessive or prolonged activation of the physiologic stress response systems in the absence of the buffering protection afforded by stable, responsive relationships.” Children living in poverty are at increased risk of difficulties with self-regulation and executive function, such as inattention, impulsivity, defiance, and poor peer relationships. Poverty can make parenting difficult, especially in the context of concerns about inadequate food, energy, transportation, and housing.
• The economic cost of child poverty to society can be estimated by anticipating future lost productivity and increased social expenditure. A study compiled before 2008 projected a total cost of approximately $500 billion each year through decreased productivity and increased costs of crime and health care, nearly 4% of the gross domestic product.
• Demographics have a profound influence on the likelihood that a family or community will experience poverty or low income. For example, African American, Hispanic, and American Indian/Alaska Native children are 3 times more likely to live in poverty than are white and Asian children. Infants and toddlers more commonly live in poverty than do older children.
• During the recovery of the Great Recession, income inequality in the United States accelerated, with 91% of the gains going to the top 1% of families.
• In 1935, the US Congress passed the Social Security Act and in 1965 enacted Medicare. Together, these 2 pieces of legislation have greatly reduced and nearly eliminated poverty in the elderly. It is time to enact similar reforms to eliminate child poverty.

• “Poverty and Child Health in the United States”, James H. Duffee, Alice A. Kuo, Benjamin A. Gitterman, Pediatrics, March 2016, from the American Academy of Pediatrics Policy Statement.

• On average, 24,000 children under the age of five die every day, most from preventable causes, with undernutrition contributing to about one-third of these deaths. Millions of children are denied primary education, and hundreds of millions have no access to safe drinking water or decent sanitation facilities.
  • "The Convention on the Rights of a Child", Ernest C. Madu, UNICEF

• Two buckets of safe water a day – 20 litres – is the bare minimum a child needs to live. This is enough for drinking and eating, washing and basic sanitation. But some 4000 children die every day, because they simply don’t have access to an adequate supply of clean water.
  • "World Water Day 2005: 4,000 children die each day from a lack of safe water" March 20, 2005

• Among the multiple symptoms revealing the current system’s drawbacks, two are arguably amongst the most striking: our analysis indicates (i) that 95% of the value of plastic packaging material, worth $80-120 billion annually, is lost to the economy, and (ii) that, on the current track, there could be more plastics than fish in the ocean (by weight) by 2050.
  • "The New Plastics Economy: Rethinking the future of plastics, Background to key statistics from the report" , World Economic Forum, Ellen MacArthur Foundation and McKinsey & Company, (February 2016) as quoted in "Plastic Island: How our throwaway culture is turning paradise into a graveyard" Nick Paton Walsh, Ingrid Formanek, Jackson Loo and Mark Phillips, CNN (December, 2016)

• Are we going to let the ocean take a state-sized bite out of America? If we make extreme efforts to cut carbon, we can avoid that.
  • Benjamin Strauss, "Too late: 400 cities in America, including Miami and New Orleans, will likely be submerged by rising sea waters", Ruth Sherlock, The Telegraph, (Oct. 15, 2015, 8:32 AM)

• Earth's oceans and land cover are doing us a favor. As people burn fossil fuels and clear forests, only half of the carbon dioxide released stays in the atmosphere, warming and altering Earth's climate. The other half is removed from the air by the planet's vegetation ecosystems and oceans.
  As carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere continue their rapid, human-made rise past levels not seen for hundreds of thousands of years, NASA scientists and others are confronted with an important question for the future of our planet: How long can this balancing act continue? And if forests, other vegetation and the ocean cannot continue to absorb as much or more of our carbon emissions, what does that mean for the pace of climate change in the coming century?
• "Today and for the past 50 to 100 years, the oceans and land biosphere have consistently taken up about half of human emissions," said Dave Schimel of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. "If that were to change, the effect of fossil emissions on climate would also change. We don't understand that number, and we don't know how it will change in the future."

• Buis, Alan; Ramsayer, Kate; Rasmussen, Carol (12 November 2015). "A Breathing Planet, Off Balance". NASA. Retrieved 13 November 2015.

• The danger is that global warming may become self-sustaining, if it has not done so already. The melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps reduces the fraction of solar energy reflected back into space, and so increases the temperature further. Climate change may kill off the Amazon and other rain forests, and so eliminate once one of the main ways in which carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere. The rise in sea temperature may trigger the release of large quantities of carbon dioxide, trapped as hydrides on the ocean floor. Both these phenomena would increase the greenhouse effect, and so global warming further. We have to reverse global warming urgently, if we still can.
  • Stephen Hawking, ABC News interview "Changes in Our Solar System: Is Trouble Coming? " August 16, 2006

• This may surprise you, because it surprised me when I found out, but the single biggest thing that an individual can do to combat climate change is to stop eating animals. Because of the huge, huge carbon footprint of animal agriculture. I was shocked to find out that animal agriculture directly or indirectly accounts for 14.5% of all greenhouse gas emissions, compared to all transportation – every ship, car, truck, plane on the planet only accounts for 13%. Less than animal agriculture. So most people think that buying a Prius is the answer, and it’s certainly not wrong, but it’s not the biggest agent of climate change.
  • James Cameron, from an "Ask Me Anything" session on Reddit; as quoted in "Director James Cameron on Vegan Diet: Like I've Set the Clock Back 15 Years", in Ecorazzi (12 April 2014).

• To an outsider, the most significant innovation in the global warming controversy is the overt reliance that is being placed on models. Back in the days of nuclear winter, computer models were invoked to add weight to a conclusion: “These results are derived with the help of a computer model.” But now, large-scale computer models are seen as generating data in themselves. No longer are models judged by how well they reproduce data from the real world—increasingly, models provide the data. As if they were themselves a reality. And indeed they are, when we are projecting forward.
• This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well. Richard Feynmann called it a disease. I fear he is right.
• What is clear, however, is that on this issue [global warming], science and policy have become inextricably mixed to the point where it will be difficult, if not impossible, to separate them out.

• Michael Crichton, lecture at the California Institute of Technology, (January 17, 2003).

• Bitcoin uses about 32 terawatts of energy every year, enough to power about three million U.S. households, according to the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index published by Digiconomist, a website focused on digital currencies.
  By comparison, processing the billions of Visa (V) transactions that take place each year consumes the same amount of power as just 50,000 American homes, according to Digiconomist.
• Without a significant change in how transactions are processed, bitcoin could be consuming enough electricity to power the U.S. by the middle of 2019.
  Six months later, that demand could equal the world's power consumption.

• “Bitcoin boom may be a disaster for the environment”, Daniel Shane, CNN, December 7, 2017

• Kidney transplantation is the treatment of choice for patients with end-stage kidney disease (ESKD). Rising ESKD prevalence has substantially increased numbers of kidney transplants performed. Maintenance immunosuppression is long-term treatment to prevent acute rejection and deterioration of graft function. Although immunosuppressive treatment using drugs such as calcineurin inhibitors (CNIs, such as cyclosporin A (CsA) or tacrolimus) reduce acute rejection rates, long-term allograft survival rates are not significantly enhanced. CNI-related adverse effects contribute to reduced quality of life among kidney transplant recipients. Adjuvant immunosuppressive therapies that could offer a synergetic immunosuppressive effect, while minimising toxicity and reducing side effects, have been explored recently. Cordyceps sinensis, (Cordyceps) a traditional Chinese medicine, is used as an adjuvant immunosuppressive agent in maintenance treatment for kidney transplantation recipients in China, but there is no consensus about its use as an adjuvant immunosuppressive treatment for kidney transplantation recipients.
  • "Cordyceps sinensis (a traditional Chinese medicine) for kidney transplant recipients." Hong T1, Zhang M, Fan J.,Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2015 Oct 12;(10),

• The Porto Ricans (sic) are the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever to inhabit this sphere… I have done my best to further the process of extermination by killing off eight and transplanting cancer into several more… All physicians take delight in the abuse and torture of the unfortunate subjects.
  • Cornelius Rhoads as quoted by Truman R. Clark. 1975. Puerto Rico and the United States, 1917-1933, pp. 151-154

• A scorpion-venom concoction that makes tumors glow sounds almost too outlandish to be true. In fact, Olson explains, that’s what troubled the big grant-­making organizations when he came to them for funding. But when those organizations dismissed his ideas as too bizarre, Olson started accepting donations from individuals—particularly the families of current and former patients—quickly raising $5 million for his research. It was a bold and unprecedented tactic: Though patients and their families are often asked to donate to foundations with broad goals, Olson raised money for one specific, untested technology—a much riskier gamble. But thanks to his efforts, Olson’s fluorescent scorpion toxin is now in Phase I clinical trials, an impressive accomplishment for a compound with such a peculiar lineage. The University of Washington students are clearly awed by the work.
  • "One Doctor’s Quest to Save People by Injecting Them With Scorpion Venom", Brendan I. Koerner, WIRED, 06.24.14.

• Currently there is no good treatment for autoimmune disorders; the challenge has been suppressing inflammatory attacks by the immune system on body tissues without generally suppressing immune function (thereby increasing risk of infections). The main treatment is antibodies that neutralize cytokines, chemical messengers produced by T cells that regulate immune function and inflammatory responses. However, antibodies are expensive, must be given intravenously and don't address the root cause of disease, simply sopping up cytokines rather than stopping their production; patients must therefore receive frequent intravenous infusions to keep inflammation in check. Powerful immune-suppressing drugs are sometimes used as a last resort, but patients are left at risk for life-threatening infections and other serious side effects.
  Through a series of experiments, the researchers show that halofuginone prevents the development of Th17 cells in both mice and humans, halts the disease process they trigger, and is selective in its effects. It also has the potential to be taken orally. "This is really the first description of a small molecule that interferes with autoimmune pathology but is not a general immune suppressant," says Mark Sundrud, PhD, of the PCMM/IDI, the study's first author.
  • "New Lead For Autoimmune Disease From Chinese Medicine", Children's Hospital Boston, Science Daily, June 8, 2009

• The X-men are frequently referred to as the “next step” in human evolution (X-Men: First Class 2011; Gresh and Weinberg 2002, 133). According to Darwin, in order for evolution to occur, an individual must exhibit a variation that makes it better suited to its environment and then that variation must be selected for and passed down to future generations. When that variation has accumulated throughout the species, the species is considered to have evolved. Playing by Darwin’s rules, then, in order for the X-men to be the “next step” in human evolution, they must have a variation, that variation must prove useful in their environment, and that variation must be passed down to offspring. The genetic variation that the X-men have is called the x-gene; presumably the same gene, shared among the X-men but not among normal humans. There are huge problems with this, not the least of which is that an identical gene has appeared simultaneously in individuals who otherwise share very few genes. Furthermore, while Richard Dawkins, celebrated author of The Selfish Gene and authority on genetics, talks at length in about genes for various physical traits and sets of genes for various behaviors, he never once in his body of work mentions the possibility of a gene that has the same protein structure in each individual, but manifests itself in each individual in a radically different way. There is a gene for blue eyes and a gene for brown eyes, but the blue-eye gene will never produce brown eyes. Yet the x-gene is capable of producing invisibility, scales, telepathy, and wings, all with the same protein structure. Even epigenetics, which can account for different physiological manifestations of the same genetic code, cannot produce such a wide variety of traits.
  • Jocelyn D. Pickreign. “Science Fiction and the Myth of Trajectory Evolution”. The Macalester Review, Vol. 3 [2013], Iss. 2, Art. 1, (6-2-2013), pp. 8-9.

• For the reader who isn't convinced that writing a book (no matter how highly acclaimed) makes up for exterminating a race, Card offers an alternative, albeit rather contradictory, excuse for his genocide's actions -- genetic determinism. Although this "science" has been shown to represent such an oversimplification that it's a downright distortion, Card makes it the foundation of the biology of his universe. From the very beginning, authorities can breed geniuses more easily than you or I could establish a strain of purebred blue budgies, and never mind that breeding for color and size involves at most a few genes, while breeding for intelligence would require a total understanding of the complicated interactions between whole chromosomes. In Card's strange world, children can inherit advanced qualities like a talent for xenobiology -- a bizarre combination of genetic determinism and Lamarckianism since these characteristics were presumably artificially acquired at some point in the past. (Or does Card imagine that there is literally a gene for xenobiological talent that we can breed for? How could such a thing evolve? Surely our genes would have to be macroscopic to carry all the information he assumes they do.) In any case, his pseudo-science serves primarily as an excuse for ugly actions running the gamut from genocide to vivisection.
  • Elaine Radford. "Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman (20 Years Later)". (2007-03-26).

• I have watched the #metoo campaign as avidly as anyone. I have gone to bed each night wondering who will be outed as a sexual harasser in the morning, whether it will be another one of my political heroes or someone we all recognize from mainstream media or Hollywood. We’ve seen many of these perpetrators lose jobs, be forced to resign, and face economic difficulty because of their abhorrent behaviors.
  But I have not gone to bed a single night in all these months wondering what scientist would be sacked in the morning because of his transgressions—let alone be publicly outed—because scientist-harassers rarely lose their jobs.
• Are people who engage in sexual misconduct actually making scientific advances that would not be made without them? I’d say it’s more likely that swifter, greater advances would have occurred if there were fewer perpetrators limiting opportunities for their victims. When part of your brain has to be occupied with workplace stress—from unwanted sexual advances to witnessing abuse between colleagues—you have less to give to your science.
  If we punish these perpetrators, especially by taking away their funding, won’t their trainees suffer? I wonder how many grad students would be better off, relieved of the pressures of working for a predator. As federal funding agencies grapple with this problem, they have begun to figure out solutions, such as assigning a new principal investigator if the original one can’t continue. It doesn’t kill the project or leave students and staff out of their jobs. Removing the perpetrator from a project also saves the pedigree of the trainees; few want their published work tainted with the name of a known sexual harasser.
  The last concern is the trickiest: Why don’t we do anything when we know about the perpetrators in our midst? So far, consequences for scientist-harassers are few and far between. In academia it’s common to get sanctions like “no more female grad students” or “no more undergraduate teaching” or “please work at home for now.” These are mild punishments at best, but departments are unsure what other options they have—and universities don’t make it easy to fire professors. The institutions know that perpetrators generally have more resources than victims and are more likely to sue if they are fired. It is a good financial decision, then, to do nothing about a perpetrator, even if they are guilty.
  So this is where we find ourselves today: In many professions sexual misconduct is now cause for dismissal. In the sciences, not so much. What’s more, many science workplaces use legal definitions of sexual harassment to set the standard for workplace conduct. If that is the bar that has to be met for a disgusting behavior to be considered actionable by a university, research institute, or field station, it is a high one. An enormous range of disrespectful and even frightening behavior can slip under that bar, even though it damages the careers of victims and bystanders, holding back scientific advancement.

• Kathryn B. H. Clancy, "Have the Sciences Had a #MeToo Moment? Not So Much.", National Geographic, (05/2018).

• The drug war has nothing to do with making communities livable or creating a decent future for black kids. On the contrary, prohibition is directly responsible for the power of crack dealers to terrorize whole neighborhoods. And every cent spent on the cops, investigators, bureaucrats, courts, jails, weapons, and tests required to feed the drug-war machine is a cent not spent on reversing the social policies that have destroyed the cities, nourished racism, and laid the groundwork for crack culture.
  • Ellen Willis, "Hell No, I Won't Go: End the War on Drugs", The Village Voice (September 19, 1989).

• The centerpiece of the cultural counterrevolution is the snowballing campaign for a "drug-free workplace" — a euphemism for "drug-free workforce," since urine testing also picks up for off-duty indulgence. The purpose of this '80s version of the loyalty oath is less to deter drug use than to make people undergo a humiliating ritual of subordination: "When I say pee, you pee." The idea is to reinforce the principle that one must forfeit one's dignity and privacy to earn a living, and bring back the good old days when employers had the unquestioned right to demand that their workers' appearance and behavior, on or off the job, meet management's standards.
  • Ellen Willis, "Hell No, I Won't Go: End the War on Drugs," The Village Voice (September 19, 1989).

• Extended work shifts of twelve hours or longer are common and even popular with hospital staff nurses, but little is known about how such extended hours affect the care that patients receive or the well-being of nurses. Survey data from nurses in four states showed that more than 80 percent of the nurses were satisfied with scheduling practices at their hospital. However, as the proportion of hospital nurses working shifts of more than thirteen hours increased, patients’ dissatisfaction with care increased. Furthermore, nurses working shifts of ten hours or longer were up to two and a half times more likely than nurses working shorter shifts to experience burnout and job dissatisfaction and to intend to leave the job. Extended shifts undermine nurses’ well-being, may result in expensive job turnover, and can negatively affect patient care. Policies regulating work hours for nurses, similar to those set for resident physicians, may be warranted.
• Traditional eight-hour shifts for hospital nurses are becoming a thing of the past: Nurses increasingly work twelve-hour shifts. This schedule gives nurses a three-day work week, potentially providing better work-life balance and flexibility. However, actual shift lengths are often unpredictable because of fluctuations in patient needs and unanticipated staffing changes. As a result, nurses often must put in unplanned overtime beyond the scheduled shift length.
• When we examined the hospital characteristics by shift length category, we found that nurses working shifts of twelve hours or longer were more numerous in teaching and high-technology hospitals.
• The odds of burnout and job dissatisfaction were up to two and a half times higher for nurses who worked longer shifts than for nurses who worked shifts of 8–9 hours.
• Nurses working shifts that were twelve hours or longer were disproportionately male and nonwhite; their mean age was also lower than that of nurses in other categories of shift length.
• One possible explanation for the findings is that nurses underestimate the impact of working long shifts because the idea of working three days a week instead of five seems appealing. Working longer but fewer shifts may also attract nurses who work a second job. However, the strain of those three long work days and the rest and recovery time needed may offset any perceived benefit, if our survey results are any indication. When a three-day week turns into more days or additional, unplanned-for overtime, nurses’ satisfaction appears to decrease.

• “The Longer The Shifts For Hospital Nurses, The Higher The Levels Of Burnout And Patient Dissatisfaction”, Amy Witkoski Stimpfel, Douglas M. Sloane, and Linda H. Aiken, Health Aff (Millwood). 2012 Nov; 31(11): 2501–2509.

• A growing body of evidence suggests that long working hours adversely affect the health and wellbeing of workers. Studies have associated overtime and extended work schedules with an increased risk of hypertension, cardiovascular disease, fatigue, stress, depression, musculoskeletal disorders, chronic infections, diabetes, general health complaints, and all-cause mortality. Several reviews and meta-analyses have been published summarising these research findings. Systematic reviews generally have concluded that long working hours are potentially dangerous to workers’ health. However, existing research is sparse and inconsistent in many areas.
• This study of nationally representative data from the United States adds to the growing body of evidence indicating that work schedules involving long hours or overtime substantially increases the risk for occupational injuries and injuries. Unlike previous studies, our investigation had the advantage of covering a large variety of jobs, and controlling for the potential confounding affect of age, gender, occupation, industry, and region. We analysed nearly 100 000 job records extending over a 13 year period, and employed several statistical techniques for quantifying the extent of risk. The results of this study suggest that jobs with long working hours are not more risky merely because they are concentrated in inherently hazardous industries or occupations, or because of the demographic characteristics of employees working those schedules. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that long working hours indirectly precipitate workplace accidents through a causal process, for instance, by inducing fatigue or stress in affected workers.
• Our study found that overtime schedules had the greatest incremental risk of injury, with overtime workers having a 61% higher injury hazard rate compared to workers in jobs without overtime, after controlling for age, gender, occupation, industry, and region. This finding is consistent with other studies that have identified overtime work as particularly hazardous.
• In the USA, approximately 19–33% of overtime work is mandatory (also called “compulsory”, “forced”, or “involuntary”). Mandatory overtime is overtime work required by employers, often under the threat of job loss or other penalty if the worker fails to comply. Several studies have suggested that mandatory overtime is especially hazardous with respect to its affect on worker fatigue, stress, impaired performance, and the potential for accidents, especially in the nursing and healthcare professions.
• This analysis found that, after adjusting for those factors, jobs with extended hours per day have a 37% higher injury hazard rate compared to jobs without that exposure. Similarly, working in a job with extended hours per week was associated with a 23% higher injury hazard rate, working in a job with overtime was associated with a 61% higher injury hazard rate, and working in a job with any overtime or extended hours schedule was associated with a 38% higher injury hazard rate. No association was detected between working in a job with extended commute time and the injury hazard rate.

• “The impact of overtime and long work hours on occupational injuries and illnesses: new evidence from the United States”, A E Dembe, J B Erickson, R G Delbos, S M Banks, Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Volume 62, Issue 9.

• From next year, workers at many of Germany's top engineering firms -- such as Mercedes-Benz owner Daimler (DDAIF) -- can opt to work 28 hours a week for up to two years, before returning to the standard 35-hour week.
• IG Metall said the flexibility would help employees who want to care for children or relatives. Pay will be reduced to reflect the shorter working week. The deal also gives workers the option to work 40 hours to earn more.

• “German workers win right to 28-hour week”, Alanna Petroff, CNN, (February 7, 2018).

• World Game finds that 60 percent of all the jobs in the U.S.A. are not producing any real wealth—i.e., real life support. They are in fear-underwriting industries or are checking-on-other-checkers, etc.
  • R. Buckminster Fuller, "Critical Path", (1982), p. 223.

• "It's a hotly debated area, because there are still people who want to separate humans from other animals," said Marc Bekoff, professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and co-founder (with primatologist Jane Goodall) of Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. "So if you're doing fieldwork and you see something in the animal's communication system that looks like syntax, they're going to say it isn't."
  • "When Will We Learn To Speak Animal Languages?", Natalie Wolchover, (August 17, 2012).

• At the time, I was interested in reconciliation after fights, and I wanted to know how bonobos did it compared to chimpanzees. Very soon I discovered that they were much more sexual in everything they did, and that interested me—not so much for the sex part, even though that became a very hot topic, the peacemaking-through-sex thing—but much more how they have such a peaceful society, because they are much less violent than chimpanzees.
  • Jane Goodall, "The Bonobo in All of Us" NOVA, PBS, (1 January 2007).

Psychology/Psychiatry

• Whereas abandonment and personal identity trauma (e.g., sexual abuse) have direct negative effects, secondary trauma (e.g., parents' involvement in war or combat) has a positive effect on IQ. Collective identity trauma (e.g., oppression) did not have either negative or positive effects on IQ. The PTSD components re-experiencing and arousal generally mediated some of the negative effects of traumas on IQ; avoidance and emotional detachment/dissociation generally mediated positive effects. In conclusion, trauma type differentially impacts IQ.
  • "The effects of trauma types, cumulative trauma, and PTSD on IQ in two highly traumatized adolescent groups.", Kira, I., Lewandowski, L., Somers, C. L., Yoon, J. S., & Chiodo, L. (2012), Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 4(1), 128-139.

• War does not develop the virtues of peace. . .It is not a school that teaches respect for the person or property of others.
• When the rules of civilized society are suspended, when killing becomes a business and a sign of valor and heroism, when the wanton destruction of peaceable women and. children becomes an act of virtue, and is praised as a service to God and country, then it seems almost useless to talk about crime in the ordinary sense.
• [There is] an obliteration of all the religious, moral and legal habits which acted as a barrier against acts of murder or of aggression against personal inviolability.
• There was a marked increase in juvenile delinquency and it was found to be due to the disturbance of home conditions, the absence of the father and elder brother, the employment of the mother in other than domestic pursuits and the interruption of school attendance. There was an increase in the number of women offenders, both actually and, of course, tremendously more, proportionally. There was a marked decrease in adult male offending and a corresponding falling off in prison population, traceable, of course, to the fact that a large proportion of the male population was occupied in war.

• "Relationship Between War and Crime in the United States", Betty B. Rosenbaum, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Volume 30, Issue 5, January-February, 1940.

• In the fantasies they committed to paper, the men associated the women they despised with floods of liquid and slime, and with dirt – substances that would threaten to overwhelm the defences of their ill-formed psyches. The solider male felt that he could only guarantee “his own survival, his self-preservation and self-regeneration”, through acts of violence against such women. (Another way of maintaining their fragile sense of self is by slotting themselves into enveloping external structures like the armed forces or fascist youth organisations.)
  In the soldier males’ journals we see them taking great pleasure, and building fraternal camaraderie, by murdering women, pairs of lovers and leftists of all genders. We also see that many of them cannot reconcile acts of physical love with the nature of their own desires. When it came to these men, their murderous acts and their sexual problems were not coincidental, they were interrelated.
  In explaining how, Theweleit takes exception with the left’s then-dominant explanation of fascism – that it was a result of pure irrationality, or repressed homosexuality. Some said it could be countered by the left mounting a renewed defence of progress and reason, or by beefing up alternative institutions that mirrored those of the fascists.
  For Theweleit, this misses the central dynamic that propels the fascist male towards violence. Fascism derives its power from channelling the protean, potentially liberating force of human desire towards hatred, distorting it into a desire for death and blood. All of its institutions, its rituals, and the (male) bonds it promotes are bent to this purpose. We cannot beat fascists by aping their structures, any more than we can hope to rationally persuade them. The problem goes deeper.
  On this theme, he says that classical fascism was not as distinct as we might want it to be from the culture surrounding it. It is not a departure from European history, but an intensification of some of its more pervasive traits.
  At one point he asks, “Can we not draw a straight line from the witch to the sensuous Jewish woman? Is the persecution of the sensuous woman not a permanent reality, one that is not economic in origin, but which derives from the specific social organisation of gender relations in patriarchal Europe?”
  Later, more succinctly, he comments that his soldier males are “equivalent to the tip of the patriarchal iceberg, but it’s what lies beneath the surface that really makes the water cold”.
• Too many people have taken the incels’ explanation of their own virulent misogyny at face value, and repeated the comfortable line that these men stand apart from all others. Along with influential columnists, even economists have endorsed the idea of “sexual marketplace”, wherein women are figured as a commodity, and some men have inadequate buying power to procure. (Most have been too polite to mention many incels’ accompanying belief that the world, and women, are so corrupted that sex is beneath them.)
  • Jason Wilson, "What do incels, fascists and terrorists have in common? Violent misogyny", The Guardian, (4, May 2018)

• Other factors theorised to have contributed include the media and public fascination with serial murder creating a snowball effect; the development of an interstate highway system, which gave some killers a wider geography to roam and kill; and, related to the overall increase in crime, lead exposure from petrol.
  Vronsky has another hypothesis to add to the list: he believes the rise of the North American serial killer in the late 20th century can be traced to the ravages of World War Two, which lasted from 1939 to 1945, and the children of men returning from battlefields in Europe and the Pacific.
• He said there was a less pronounced but noticeable increase in serial killings from 1935 to 1950, following World War One, and hopes sociologists and criminologists look more closely at the war experiences of the fathers of these killers, and their paternal relationships.
  Vronsky also pointed to popular culture of the post-war era as a contributing factor, specifically the pulp fiction and true crime magazines that were widely sold across North America with covers that often depicted violent sexualised imagery.
• A report from the FBI's behavioural unit notes that "there is no single identifiable cause or factor that leads to the development of a serial killer. Rather, there are a multitude of factors that contribute to their development.
  "The most significant factor is the serial killer's personal decision in choosing to pursue their crimes".

• Jessica Murphy, "Why were there so many serial killers in the 1980s?", BBC News, (August 31, 2018).

• Claus Lamm summarizes the findings as follows: "Based on their neural responses, stressed participants had a stronger emotional reaction to the pictures. However, this implies that they also ignored complex information about the actual situation the shown person was in. Our results thus support the hypothesis that humans show more empathy and are more prone to helping others when they are under stress, but that their perspective taking skills might deteriorate. In some circumstances, the stronger emotional response might thus result in aid that is uncalled for or inappropriate, for example when one's first impression of another's mental state does not match their actual emotion -- e.g. when someone is crying out of joy. Hence, depending on the context and situation, stress can be either beneficial or detrimental in social situations."
  • "Stress can increase empathy", University of Vienna, ScienceDaily, April 11, 2017

• BYU School of Family Life professor Laura Padilla-Walker, in a longitudinal study she coauthored with a former student (Xinyuan Fu, Central University of Finance and Economics, China) in the Journal of Adolescence, found that adolescents who exhibited prosocial behavior -- such as helping, sharing and comforting -- toward strangers had higher self-esteem a year later. The same was not true for those in the study who exhibited prosocial behavior solely to friends and family.
  • "Teens who help strangers have more confidence: Get your kids involved in service to strangers in this season of giving, researchers suggest.", Brigham Young University, ScienceDaily, 18 December 2017

• The work was done by the late Dr. Yuin Cameron and involved extensive use of potentially dangerous drugs, excessive electric shock treatment, and endless tape recorded messages to sleeping patients. Some heard the same message a quarter-of-a-million times.
• The United States, the CIA, was doing what the Nuremberg laws say you can't do, take experiments on human beings when in fact they're not told that these are experiments. They thought they were getting treatment. They were paying for treatment.

• "Mind Experiments" NBC Nightly News, September 15, 1984

• MK-Ultra and its successor program, MK-SEARCH, were terminated in part because the drugs and other techniques proved "too unpredictable in their effect on human beings."
  • “Lawsuit Forces CIA confession On MK-ULTRA", Jack Anderson, Washington Post 28 August 1982.

• MK-Ultra wanted to know if the drug actually could induce loss of willpower and memory. Another documented case involves two suspected Russian CIA agents which the agency feared might have been compromised. Both agents were drugged, then hypnotized. They relived past incidents in their lives, the documents report. Interrogations were very successful.
  Among the MK-Ultra documents produced today was a 1949 letter outlining ways of killing a person without leaving evidence of murder.

• "CIA Revelations: Behavior Control", ABC Evening News, July 20, 1977

• It is one of those drugs with a rich backstory. It is said to be one of the first “truth serums”. In the early 20th century, it was administered by some doctors as a pain-relief drug – or rather a drug that led to the forgetting of pain – in childbirth until one obstetrician noticed how women who had been given it answered candidly to questions; he later wondered if it could be used when questioning people charged with crimes. It was used as evidence in some trials, but dubiously.
  Then there are stories of it being used in Nazi Germany as an interrogation tool, and also in the middle ages by witches. “The degree to which any of this stuff is true is unknown,” says Curran. “There’s a lot of myth.”
  • "Devil's Breath' Aka Scopolamine: Can It Really Zombify You?", Emine Saner, The Guardian, 2 September 2015

• What action does salamander brandy have on human consciousness? Ogorevc says it definitely has hallucinogenic effects which I would compare, according to his description, more to the reactions elicited by muscimole, ibogaine or strychnine than to the effects of classic psychedelics like LSD, mescaline and psilocybin. Under its influence visual reality starts to be illuminated by colourful flashes and is contorted in a specific way. Auditory phenomena may accompany visual changes, but the subject is not sure if they are real or not.
  Above all, it has been said that it has a strong effect on the sex drive. It purportedly produces a temporary sexual disorientation, but nonetheless the sexuality of the consumer can be promoted from the commonest banality into metaphysical play. It is said to be a powerful libidinous agent that can turn everything in the environment into an erotically charged being or object. If there is any symbolism that should be ascribed to the salamander, it is not ethereal chastity but fiery passion. It is no surprise then that some consumers take the brandy in order to enhance their sexual imagination and modify their reactions to sexual stimuli.
  The consumer can fall asleep from time to time and lose his or her sense for how much time has elapsed in between as well as from the beginning of the trip. It is possible to have partial amnesia. After-effects have not been reported, yet an adept in psychedelic movement avers that salamander brandy is a bad drug, because it contains, along with psychoactive substances, also spiritually negative emanation caused by the suffering of salamanders in mortal agony.
  • "Salamdander Brandy: A Psychadelic Drink Made In Slovenia", Ivan Valenčič

• It is not a case of awakening the dead, but a matter of the semblance of death induced by some drug known to a few: some secret probably brought from Africa and handed down from generation to generation. The bocors know the effect of the drug and the antidote. It is evident that it destroys that part of the brain which governs speech and willpower. The victim can move and act but cannot formulate thought.
  • Zora Hurston, as quoted by Wade Davis, in "The Pharmacology of Zombies" Harpers, (April 1984).

• APA has a long history of prohibiting torture. Since 1985, APA has issued numerous policies condemning torture, which have been reaffirmed and refined over the years. APA’s policies draw upon international human rights instruments and have expressly adopted the definitions of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment in the U.N. Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. APA’s policy prohibits psychologists from participating in national security interrogations at detention settings operating in violation of the U.S. Constitution or international law. Jessen was never a member of APA. Mitchell resigned his APA membership in 2006.

• American Psychological Association, "APA Reaction to Settlement of Torture Case Against Psychologists", (August 17, 2017)

• Particularly where it is associated with the more prosperous countries, or those that see themselves as bringers of civilization, torture may wear a humane, almost kindly face. It goes under euphemisms such as 'pressure', 'shock', 'stress' and 'duress'; and the perpetrators themselves will see a distinction between what they do and what they consider to be torture. However, this is as vicious a form of torture as any: it can leave people mentally and physically disabled—indeed, the practitioners acknowledge the potential to render people psychotic, in hours or days.
  The victim is typically subjected to physical punishments that do not leave obvious scars, and this means that, should the case ever come under legal scrutiny, physical evidence of torture may be lacking. However, many ways of causing extreme pain remain possible. The subject will be tightly handcuffed and restrained, often in a way that damages nerves and muscles; he may be suspended in painful postures, or forced to assume them himself, with damage to muscles and joints; he may be subjected to electric shocks. Typically, he will be kept in a small, dark, bedless cell, with inadequate food and variable toilet facilities, so that his own filth stains the floor and dampens his clothes. He may be exposed to extreme heat or cold, and perhaps forced to stare at the sun. Beatings with rifle butts and kicking with military boots can cause lasting damage; lashing on the soles of the feet can make walking painful for years. A doctor may well be present, persuading the prisoner that he is in the wrong and that all he must do is recant. The doctor may even provide medication—as a symbol of civilization, or to keep the patient alive (deaths in custody can be inconvenient), or to cause pain or disability.
• How can people do this to one another? In society, few people are actively sadistic or psychopathic. To impose one's will on another, particularly with brutality, is possible only if one views oneself as wiser or more valuable; and this notion is fostered by creeds that exalt certain groups and denigrate others. People torture in the name of ideals that, in their culture, would be held to be unassailable—democracy, freedom, Islam. What counts is the label, not the reality of these doctrines. Milgram demonstrated the power of labels when, in his experiment, men in white coats persuaded volunteers to deliver what they thought were lethal electric shocks to screaming individuals (who were acting the part). The quiet priestly authority of 'progress' outweighed the volunteers' own consciences.
• Human beings, regrettably, are easily conditioned to the notion that other sorts of people are different, inferior, intrinsically dangerous. Education is no protection against such conditioning—indeed, the leaders and propagators of political violence are commonly from among the well educated. But an intrinsic feeling of superiority, or necessity, is not enough: the torturer must be placed in an appropriate role. Zimbardo demonstrated the importance of this when he placed students in a mock jail, some as prisoners, others as guards. Within a few days the experiment had to be stopped, such was the treatment meted out to the prisoners by the guards. The torturer may see himself as a defender of humanity, when all the while his conduct is dominated by brutality and corruption. In areas where torture is well established, people are swept up off the streets on a suspicion or a word; bribery secures release, and maladministration results in detention or even execution of the innocent.

• "Healing in survivors of torture", Athar Yawar, J R Soc Med. 2004 Aug; 97(8): 366–370.

• Using a white-noise-aggression paradigm, we found that sadists, psychopaths, narcissists, and those low in empathy and perspective taking aggressed against an innocent person when aggression was easy. Of those with dark personalities, however, only sadists increased the intensity of their attack once they realized that the innocent person would not fight back. Sadists were also the only dark personalities willing to work (i.e., expend time and energy) to hurt an innocent person. Together, these results suggest that sadists possess an intrinsic appetitive motivation to inflict suffering on innocent others a motivation that is absent in other dark personalities. Inflicting suffering on the weak is so rewarding for sadists that they will aggress even at a personal cost.
  In the present research, we investigated whether every-day sadism is a viable personality construct. Two questionnaire measures of sadistic personality converged with two overtly sadistic behaviors. In Study 1, sadistic personality predicted a preference for killing bugs. In Study 2, sadistic personalities were willing to hurt innocent others, and, importantly, to incur personal costs for the opportunity. In both studies, sadism remained a unique predictor of sadistic choice when we controlled for over-lap with the Dark Triad.
  These findings support the call to incorporate sadism into a new Dark Tetrad of personality (Chabrol et al., 2009; Furnham et al., 2013). Our results advance the literature on sadism by show-ing that (a) it can be studied in a laboratory setting and (b) the Short Sadistic Impulse Scale and the Varieties of Sadistic Tendencies are valid measures of sadistic personality. To our knowledge, there is no prior behavioral evidence for the validity of these measures. Admittedly, the enjoyment of killing bugs may not extend to the enjoyment of hurting human beings. However, the same sadistic personalities went out of their way to hurt human victims in Study 2. By contrast, participants with low sadism scores would rather endure the pain of ice water than hurt another living entity.

• “Behavioral Confirmation of Everyday Sadism”, Erin E. Buckels, Daniel N. Jones, and Delroy L. Paulhus, Psychological Science, September 10, 2013

• In two online studies (total N = 1215), respondents completed personality inventories and a survey of their Internet commenting styles. Overall, strong positive associations emerged among online commenting frequency, trolling enjoyment, and troll identity, pointing to a common construct underlying the measures. Both studies revealed similar patterns of relations between trolling and the Dark Tetrad of personality: trolling correlated positively with sadism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, using both enjoyment ratings and identity scores. Of all personality measures, sadism showed the most robust associations with trolling and, importantly, the relationship was specific to trolling behavior. Enjoyment of other online activities, such as chatting and debating, was unrelated to sadism. Thus cyber-trolling appears to be an Internet manifestation of everyday sadism.
  • “Trolls just want to have fun”, Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 67, September 2014, Pages 97-102

• "Some players feel they can intimidate other players by getting into their heads," says Katz, who has worked with the New Jersey Nets and several college basketball teams. "But many athletes are putting time and energy into something that distracts them from playing their best. Playing well is the most intimidating factor."
  Still, sports history is filled with famous trash talkers. One well-known athlete, a young man named David, was able to use a verbal attack to his benefit in a battle with a heavily favored foe. "I will strike you down and cut off your head," David proclaims to his much larger enemy, Goliath, in the first chapter of the biblical book of Samuel. And the rest is trash-talking history.
  • "The Art of Trash Talk", Jason Silverman, Psychology Today, September 1, 1999

• Bullying at work is not only about aggressive behavior. The covert nature of workplace bullying behavior can destroy a target’s health, ability to work, emotional well-being, self-worth, and financial condition. This research is one of the first studies on workplace bullying in the United States. Workplace bullies have a serious negative impact upon the organizations for which they work (Namie & Namie, 2003; Prentice, 2005). Once the bullying atmosphere begins to pervade an organization, morale is destroyed and productivity is affected. The workplace often includes distorted personality types that seem to have just one purpose: to find somebody else to attack, to belittle, to criticize, and to destroy (Prentice). Bully behavior, whether committed by men 94 or women, should be further examined due to the long-term costs for both employees and the organizations for which they work. Many leaders and managers either fail to recognize the problem or are themselves the problem. Early studies on bullying focused on the behavior of the bully, the target, or the bully-target pairing (Olweus, 1999). Recent approaches have adopted an ecological perspective that examines the broader context in which bullying can occur and especially the many interrelated systems of the environment, such as the workplace and its leadership (Namie, 2003). This study presents methods of aggression employed by bullies that leaders must recognize and cease.
  • Fisher-Blando, Judith Lynn. "Workplace Bullying: Aggressive Behavior and its effect on Job Satisfaction and Productivity", Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-10-19. Retrieved 2013-04-18, p. 93-94

• Bullying bosses, studies find, differ in significant ways from the Blutos of childhood. In the schoolyard, particularly among elementary school boys, bullies tend to pick on smaller or weaker children, often to assert control in an uncertain social environment in which they feel uncomfortable. But adult bullies in positions of power are already dominant, and they are just as likely to pick on a strong subordinate as a weak one, said Dr. Gary Namie, director of the Workplace Bullying and Trauma Institute, an advocacy group based in Bellingham, Wash. Women, Dr. Namie said, are at least as likely as men to be the aggressors, and they are more likely to be targets. In leadership positions that require the exercise of sheer violent will- on the football field or the battlefield- this approach can be successful: consider Vince Lombardy or George Patton. But in an office or on a factory floor, different rules apply, and bullying usually has more to do with the boss's desires than with the employee's needs.
  • Benedict Carey, New York Times journalist, in the article "Fear in the Workplace: The Bullying Boss", published June 22, 2004.

• Definitions of bullying at work further emphasize two main features: repeated and enduring aggressive behaviours that are intended to be hostile and/or perceived as hostile by the recipient (Einarsen and Skogstad, 1996; Leymann, 1990b; Zapf et al., 1996). In other words, bullying is normally not about single and isolated events, but rather about behaviours that are repeatedly and persistently directed towards one or more employees. Leymann (1990b, 1996) suggested that to be called 'mobbing' or bullying, such events should occur at least once a week, which characterises bullying as a severe form of social stress. In many cases this criterion is difficult to apply because not all bullying behaviors are strictly episodic in nature. For example, a rumour can circulate that may be harmful or even threaten to destroy the victim's career or reputation. However, it does not have to be repeated every week. In cases we have been made aware of, victims had to work in basement rooms without windows and telephone. Here, bullying consists of a permanent state rather than a series of events. Hence, the main criterion is that the behaviours or their consequences are repeated on a regular as opposed to an occasional basis.
  • Stale Einarsen, Helge Hoel, Dieter Zapf, and Cary L. Cooper, "The Concept of Bullying at Work: The European Tradition"; in Bullying and Emotional Abuse in the Workplace: International Perspectives and Research, pp. 7-8.

• Parents who are intimidated by texting and social-networking sites view cyberbullying as a terrifying new form of bullying, but the truth is that cyberbullying is just a continuation of existing adolescent behavior, played out in a new arena. Approximately 20-25 percent of kids have been bullied online, and this is a conservative estimate. Bullies and victims can trade places at the click of a mouse, and things move so fast online that it is difficult to process information rationally before acting. For unfortunate kids who find themselves on the receiving end of massive cyberbullying attacks, the relentless barrage of cruelty can create a sensation of sinking into a black hole of pain.
  • Dr. Dorothy Espelage, in the Introduction for Bullied: What Every Parent, Teacher, and Kid Needs to Know About Ending the Cycle of Fear (2012) by Carrie Goldman, p. xiii

• How exactly does the pain of severe bullying affect the most vulnerable kids? Studies investigating the neuroscience of bullying have found that bullying victims experience anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress, difficulty concentrating, headaches, and stomach pain as a result of being bullied. Studies of early social deprivation show that human beings are hardwired to belong, and nowhere is this more evident than in kids jockeying for social position. And the old adage- sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me? Not true. Neuroimaging studies have shown that parts of the cortical brain network are also activated when a person is socially excluded. This goes not just for adults but for children as well. The brain of a child as young as thirteen has been shown to react to pain as if the child were being physically injured. Taunting and bullying hurts, and we have the brain scans to prove it. Even worse, repeatedly being victimized by peers- which is the very nature of bullying, the repetitiveness of it- actually alters brain functioning, which increases the victim's sensitivity to future attacks, even causing the person to perceive an ambiguous situation as threatening. Years after the bullying has ceased, victims are left picking up the wreckage.
  • Dr. Dorothy Espelage, in the Introduction for Bullied: What Every Parent, Teacher, and Kid Needs to Know About Ending the Cycle of Fear (2012) by Carrie Goldman, p. xiii

• Bullying is a learned behavior. Children are not born cruel. Babies in diapers do not assess each other as too fat, too poor, too dark-skinned, to nerdy, too conceited. Born innocent, they start learning stereotypes as soon as they understand language, and we see bullying behavior in children as young as toddlers. Since preschoolers who display marked aggressiveness have a higher likelihood of being bullies in older grades, the earlier intervention begins, the better the results. It is much easier to inculcate kindness and acceptance into a five-year-old who acts like a bully than a fifteen-year-old who acts like a bully.
  • Dr. Dorothy Espelage, in the Introduction for Bullied: What Every Parent, Teacher, and Kid Needs to Know About Ending the Cycle of Fear (2012) by Carrie Goldman, p. xiii-xiv

• The problem than arises of when to define operationally the duration of bullying behaviours. Leymann (1990b, 19960=) suggested exposure for more than six months as an operational definition of bullying at work. Others have used repeated exposure to negative behaviours within a six-month period as the proposed timeframe (Einarsen and Skogstad, 1996). Leymann's strict criterion has been argued to be somewhat arbitrary, as bullying seems to exist on a continuum from occasional exposure to negative behaviours to severe victimisation resulting from frequent and long-lasting exposure to negative behaviours at work (Mattiesen et al., 1989). Yet, the criterion of about six months has been used in many studies in order to differentiate between exposure to social stress at work and victimisation from bullying (e.g. Einarsen and Skogstad, 1996; Mikkelsen and Einarsen, 2001; Niedl, 1995; Varita, 1996; Zapf et al. 1996). The reason for this criterion for Leymann (1993, 1996) was to argue that mobbing leads to severe psychiatric and psychosomatic impairment, stress effects which would not be expected to occur as a result of the normal occupational stressors such as time-pressure, role-conflicts or everyday social stressors. Hence, the period of 6 months was chosen by Leymann because it is frequently used in the assessment of various psychiatric disorders.
  • Ibid, p. 8

• The duration of the bullying seems to be closely related to the frequency of bullying, with those bullied regularly reporting a longer duration of their experience than those bullied less frequently (Einarsen and Skogstad, 1996). This seems to be in line with a model of bullying highlighting the importance of conflict-escalation, with the conflict becoming more intense and more personalised over time (Zapf and Gross, 2001).
  The negative and unwanted nature of the behaviour involves is essential to the concept of bullying. Victims are exposed to persistent insults or offensive remarks, persistent criticism, personal or, even in some few cases, physical abuse (Einarsen, 200b). Others experience social exclusion and isolation; that is they are given the 'silent treatment' or 'sent to Coventry' (Williams, 1997). These behaviours are 'used with the aim or at least the effect of persistently humiliating, intimidating, frightening or punishing the victim' (Einarsen, 2000b, p. 8).
  • Ibid, p. 8-9

• Based on both empirical and theoretical evidence, Zapf (1999a) categorised five main types of bullying behaviour:
  
  1 work-related bullying which may include changing the victim's work tasks in some negative way or making them difficult to perform;
  2 social isolation by not communicating with somebody or excluding someone from social events;
  3 personal attacks or attacks on someone's private life by ridicule or insulting remarks or the like;
  4 verbal threats in which somebody is criticised, yelled at or humiliated in public;and
  5 spreading rumors.
  • Ibid, p.9

• Bullies are typically attempting to promote or assert an identity rather than defend one. Their behavior is typicvally predatory rather than dispute related. Bullies prey on vulnerable targets, usually in the presence of third parties, in order to show how tough they are (see Olweus, 1978). For the bully, dominating the victim is ana ccomplishment, a way of demonstrating power to himself and others.
  In case of jealousy, a person may intentionally harm another person who has not attacked or wronged them in any way. Both justice and self-image concerns can produce an aggressive response when someone is jealous. When people think that someone has recieved an unfair share of some reward, they may attempt to restore equity by harming the person, even when that person is not held responsible for the injustice. We have referred to this behaviour as "redistributive justice" (to distinguish it from "retributive justice"). Thus, an employee may blame the supervisor who gives a raise to someone else but attempt to produce unfavorable outcomes for the coworker who recieved a raise. Jealous people may also attempt to harm the object of jealousy for purposes of downward comparison (Wills, 1981). They may engage in aggressive behavior that lowers the standing of the target on some dimension, thereby providing a faborable comparison for the actor. They put themselves"up" by putting other "down." Wills (1981) suggested that downward comparison was an alternative explanation for the displacement effects obtained in experiments testing frustration-aggression theory. He noted that investigations of displaced aggression, scapegoating, and hostility generalization all involve some challenge to the participants' identities.
  • Ibid, pp. 20-21

• Adult bullying at work is a shocking, frightening, and at times shattering experience, both for those targeted and for onlookers. Workplace bullying, mobbing, and emotional abuse essentially synonymous phenomena*are persistent, verbal, and nonverbal aggression at work that include personal attacks, social ostracism, and a multitude of other painful messages and hostile interactions. Because this phenomenon is perpetrated by and through communication, and because workers’ principal responses are communicative in nature, it is vital that communication scholars join the academic dialogue about this damaging feature of worklife. The harm to workers runs the gamut of human misery including ‘‘anxiety, depression, burnout, frustration, helplessness, ... difficulty concentrating, alcohol abuse (Richman, Flaherty, & Rospenda, 1996), and posttraumatic stress disorder (Leymann & Gustafsson, 1996; Mikkelsen & Einarsen, 2002). Witnessing co-workers experience increased fear, emotional exhaustion, hypervigilance, stress, and intentions to leave (Jennifer, Cowie, & Anaiadou, 2003; Vartia, 2001, 2003). Bullying also hinders group communication, cohesion, and performance by creating hostile environments marked by apprehension, distrust, anger, and suspicion (Frost, 2003; Lockhart, 1997; Vartia, 2003). What makes this communicative phenomenon especially grave is its elevated prevalence in US workplaces. From 28% to 36% of US workers report persistent abuse at work (Keashly & Neuman, 2005; Lutgen-Sandvik, Tracy, & Alberts, 2005; Neuman, 2004), and nearly 25% of US companies report some degree of bullying (Blosser, 2004). Furthermore, over 80% of workers say they have witnessed bullying sometime during their work histories (Keashly & Neuman, 2005; Lutgen-Sandvik, 2003a; Namie, 2003b). Given its prevalence and negative consequences, bullying warrants the attention of communication scholars, particularly those studying power and oppression.
  • Pamela Lutgen-Sandvik , “Take This Job and ... : Quitting and Other Forms of Resistance to Workplace Bullying”, Communication Monographs Vol. 73, No. 4, December 2006, pp. 406-407

• On the other hand, witnesses were also deeply disturbed by their experiences. Similar to target-witnesses, they spoke of how the workplace experience took over their entire lives, they worried about it at and away from work, they talked about it continually to family and friends, they spent large segments of work time speaking with others or figuring out how to deal with or avoid being abused. Witnesses and targets reported that their experiences and failure of organizational authorities to stop abuse stripped away their beliefs that good prevails over evil.
  • Ibid, p. 421

• Resistance to abuse at work is a complex, dynamic process in which workers fight to have a voice and are often punished for their efforts. If and when organizational authorities finally intervene, many have already left the organization or suffered years of abuse. The human cost is staggering and workers’ stories heartbreaking. Neither is resistance straightforward; worker dissent is easily reframed as deviant behavior by those for whom the resistance is threatening. Nonetheless, workers faced with bullying at work say they have a moral imperative to act against the injustice and in some cases actually alter their situations. Furthermore, workers often collectively organize against abusers, even in the absence of formal unions. Organizations would be well-informed to heed these voices. Resistance and the emotional communication that springs from it are warning signs that "act as signaling devices when expected appropriate norms of communication are violated" (Waldron, 2000, p.72). These should not be ignored. Organizational authorities must learn to "read the traces" of resistance to bullying, diagnose the problem early, and construct effective interventions.
  • Ibid, p. 429

• More than 90% of adults experience workplace bullying—that is, psychological and emotional abuse—at some time during the span of their work careers (Hornstein, 1996). The supervisors who inflict psychological abuse on subordinates represent one of the most frequent and serious problems confronting employees in today’s workforce (Yamada, 2000). Although the television news is quick to report the rare but sensational incidents of disgruntled employees returning to their former workplaces seeking revenge (e.g., “Office Rampage,” 1999), rarely do we see stories of employee humiliation and psychological violence perpetrated by more powerful organizational members. Research indicates a link between workplace abuse and workplace violence as the aggressor becomes increasingly more threatening to targeted employees (Namie & Namie, 2000). In addition to increased threats of violence from abusers (Leymann, 1990), employees who feel unfairly treated may express their anger and outrage in subtle acts of retaliation against their employers, including work slowdown or covertly sabotaging the abuser (Skarlicki & Folger, 1997). As reported in a government study, “The cost to employers is untold hours and dollars in lost employee work time, increased health care costs, high turnover rates, and low productivity” (Bureau of National Affairs [BNA], 1990, p. 2). Employee emotional abuse (EEA) is a repetitive, targeted, and destructive form of communication directed by more powerful members at work at those less powerful.
  • Pamela Lutgen-Sandvik, "The Communicative cycle of Employee Emotional Abuse", Management Communication Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 4, May 2003, p. 472

• For the purposes of this article, EEA is defined as targeted, repetitive workplace communication that is unwelcome and unsolicited, violates standards of appropriate conduct, results in emotional harm, and occurs in relationships of unequal power (Keashly, 2001). EEA has also been labeled workplace mistreatment (Price Spatlen, 1995), workplace aggression (Baron & Neuman, 1998), workplace harassment (Bjorkqvist et al., 1994), verbal abuse (Cox et al., 1991), psychological abuse (Sheenan et al., 1990), and chological violence (Institute for Workplace Trauma and Bullying, 2002).
  • Ibid, pp. 474-5

• Emotional abusers appear to be particularly skilled at appearing to provide constructive feedback because the organization formally requires it. The extremes to which managers go to build a verbal and written case against the target suggest that this is done to “make . . . action appear justifiable and reasonable to all parties” (Fairhurst et al., 1986, p. 569). They are inclined to systematically distort these communicative processes if they want to get rid of an employee (author’s experience), and because the more powerful member creates the documenting language, they author the formal record of “what occurred.” Rather than improve performance, this form of chronic criticism more often unnerves targets (Lockhart, 1997) and results in further poor performance that substantiates the abuser’s initial claims of incompetence (Wyatt & Hare, 1997).
  • Ibid, p. 482

• "So what was the outcome with the student who found the bullet in his locker?" With the principal's permission, he called a school meeting in their auditorium, where he boldly shared with his classmates his thoughts and feelings about finding the bullet on his book, in his locker. This morphed into a student led conscientious pro peace and anti violence movement in the school community. For a while I continued to get on his case about not revealing who he believed the culprit to be, but then I realized that with the level of awareness he had helped spread amongst his peers, knowing who his antagonist might be didn't matter. Especially since the harassment had ended. My client had found a silver lining in a dark cloud and he was now more confident and accepting of who he was as a person, with more friends.
  In the aftermath of the tragedy that unfolded this weekend here in Tucson, I have heard all sorts of responses and suggestions, from banning guns, to regulation of ammunition magazine sizes, to encouraging or scaring every citizen to begin arming themselves in public. As a US. Army veteran and veteran of the war in Afghanistan, I can vouch that simply being armed, doesn't increase anyone's safety or make a threat (real or perceived) any less likely.
  • “Effective Behavioral Responses to Threats (Real or Perceived): The Best Way To Deal With A Threat Of Gun Violence”, Ugo Uche, Psychology Today, Jan 11, 2011

• Five years ago, while still a faculty member, I deliberately looked for provocative ways to engage students who, by age 18, seemed blasé (having already been exposed to all manner of sex, violence, and ‘depravities’ via news-stories and popular films). Not only did I regularly screen “A Clockwork Orange,” “The Rapture,” and “Girl, Interrupted,” I had been known to open my Social Problems course with “BumFights." The issues raised by each of these offerings always got my student’s attention—generating stunned silences and lively discussion—which was the intended outcome. The agenda of the protagonist in each of these offerings—and the circumstances of the ‘victims’—needs to be digested, questioned, probed, pushed, and responded to. Their content needs to be negotiated—especially if it triggers an emotional response. To my mind, it seemed irresponsible to let students come to these issues (or the films that showcase them) on their own, without the context of a classroom to support engagement with the topics.
  But today, showing such films might make me a bully—an insensitive faculty member abusing her power/authority over students. While I would hardly wish to re-traumatize a student, exempting everyone who 'self-identifies' from engaging difficult material—especially if it calls up shame—is troublesome.

• "Trigger Warnings, Micro-aggressions and Bullying: Where do we draw the line?", Laura Martocci, Psychology Today, Dec 18, 2015

• Indeed, a review of the psychiatric literature shows no studies that link trigger warnings to either short-term or long-term mental health outcomes. As such, trigger warnings are not an evidence-based intervention and are not supported by the scientific literature.
  On the contrary, related studies indicate that avoiding phobic experiences can be detrimental to individual mental health. Avoidance can increase sadness and worry, which in turn can constrain everyday behaviour and prevent personal growth.
  In fact, evidence suggests that the best way to tackle undue fear is through exposure, rather than avoidance. Hence this is the basis for many evidence-based interventions for phobia and anxiety.
• Associating the word "trigger" with mental health perpetuates damaging myths that people with mental illness are constantly on the verge of "snapping." Indeed a culture of trigger warnings can contribute to common misperceptions that people with mental illnesses such as PTSD are akin to Pavlovian dogs, lacking self-control and prone to emotional outbursts at the least provocation. This can contribute to the considerable stigma already experienced by people with mental illness.
  Trigger warnings can also contribute to patronizing stereotypes that emerging adults are part of a pampered "snowflake generation." They imply that young adults are overgrown fragile children who need protection from hard and cold reality. This could theoretically lead to discrimination in the job-market, with young people passed over in favor of (perceived) tougher older people.
• Instead of giving a trigger warning, I took a more old fashioned approach. I acknowledged to the class that the session may be disturbing. I told them that I had lost friends to suicide, using these tragedies as fuel to try and help address the problem. Finally, I stated that anyone who feels disturbed at the end of the class could join my assistant and I in a local café for chat, comfort and moral support. This approach may be more meaningful than a trite one-second trigger warning.

• "Trigger Warnings and Mental Health: Where Is the Evidence?: Examining whether trigger warnings protect mental health.", Psychology Today, Mar 23, 2017

• Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress.
• For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might “trigger” a recurrence of past trauma.
• These same children grew up in a culture that was (and still is) becoming more politically polarized. Republicans and Democrats have never particularly liked each other, but survey data going back to the 1970s show that on average, their mutual dislike used to be surprisingly mild. Negative feelings have grown steadily stronger, however, particularly since the early 2000s. Political scientists call this process “affective partisan polarization,” and it is a very serious problem for any democracy. As each side increasingly demonizes the other, compromise becomes more difficult. A recent study shows that implicit or unconscious biases are now at least as strong across political parties as they are across races.
• These first true “social-media natives” may be different from members of previous generations in how they go about sharing their moral judgments and supporting one another in moral campaigns and conflicts. We find much to like about these trends; young people today are engaged with one another, with news stories, and with prosocial endeavors to a greater degree than when the dominant technology was television. But social media has also fundamentally shifted the balance of power in relationships between students and faculty; the latter increasingly fear what students might do to their reputations and careers by stirring up online mobs against them.
  We do not mean to imply simple causation, but rates of mental illness in young adults have been rising, both on campus and off, in recent decades. Some portion of the increase is surely due to better diagnosis and greater willingness to seek help, but most experts seem to agree that some portion of the trend is real. Nearly all of the campus mental-health directors surveyed in 2013 by the American College Counseling Association reported that the number of students with severe psychological problems was rising at their schools. The rate of emotional distress reported by students themselves is also high, and rising. In a 2014 survey by the American College Health Association, 54 percent of college students surveyed said that they had “felt overwhelming anxiety” in the past 12 months, up from 49 percent in the same survey just five years earlier. Students seem to be reporting more emotional crises; many seem fragile, and this has surely changed the way university faculty and administrators interact with them. The question is whether some of those changes might be doing more harm than good.

• "The Coddling of the American Mind", Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt, The Atlantic, September 2016

• Individuals primarily seek social relationships to fulfill their need for belonging (Baumeister and Leary 1995; Lee and Robbins 1998). Human beings are social animals and because ‘no man (woman) is an island’ (Donne 1975), people are naturally inclined to make social connections to satisfy their need for belonging (Maslow 1954; Brewer 2005). Baumeister and Leary (1995) described belonging, the need to form and maintain interpersonal bonds, as one of the fundamental motivations behind human behavior. Most research indicates a common definition of what loneliness is – it is an aversive psychological state due to a person’s perception of lacking satisfactory social relationships. Quantity of social relationship is a contributing factor to lonely feeling: people will feel ‘lonely’ when there are too few people around them (Russell, Peplau and Cutrona 1980), as opposed to the ‘crowded’ feeling when individuals are surrounded by too many people. However, quality may be more important than quantity at times. As the sufficient number of relationships varies among individuals (Jones 1982), loneliness has also been understood as the perception that one’s existing interpersonal relationships do not meet one’s expectations (Weiss 1973; Gordon 1976; Peplau and Caldwell 1978; 4266 L.W. Lam and D.C. Lau Downloaded by [University of Macau Library] at 00:54 22 September 2012 Newcomb 1990; Green, Richardson, Lago and Schatten-Jones 2001). Other scholars describe loneliness as painful feelings and emotional distress due to insufficient or unsatisfactory social connections or relationships (Rook 1984; Cacioppo et al. 2006; Cacioppo and Patrick 2008; Rotenberg et al. 2010).
  • Lam, Long W.; Lau, Dora C. (2012-11-01). "Feeling lonely at work: investigating the consequences of unsatisfactory workplace relationships". The International Journal of Human Resource Management. 23 (200): p.4266-67

• The most widely-accepted theory regarding supervisor–subordinate relationship quality is Leader–Member Exchange (LMX) Theory (Graen & Scandura, 1987). According to LMX theory, supervisors form different types of relationships with their various employees and these relationships vary with respect to quality (Graen, Dansereau, & Minami, 1972; Graen & Schiemann, 1978). In general, higher quality supervisor–subordinate relationships (also known as “in-group” relationships) are characterized by higher levels of mutual trust, respect and obligation among the relationship partners. In such relationships, leaders and members learn they can count on one another for support and encouragement. As a result, higher quality relationships function more as “partnerships” where “members move beyond their own self-interests to focus on larger mutual interests” (Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995). Leader–member relationship quality is associated with a variety of important individual and organizational outcomes. For example, employees in higher quality relationships report higher levels of job satisfaction (Graen, Novak, & Sommerkamp 1982) and commitment to the organization (Nystrom, 1990) than do employees in lower quality relationships. In addition, research indicates leader–member relationship quality is negatively related to employee turnover (Graen, Liden, & Hoel, 1982). Focusing largely on such outcomes, LMX research has given only limited attention to the communication that occurs between leaders and members (e.g., Fairhurst, 1993). This work provides some direction for speculation regarding how leader–member relationship quality might be associated with employee information experiences. High quality LMX relationships tend to be characterized by high levels of trust and self-disclosure (Duchon, Green, & Taber, 1986). As a consequence, supervisors and subordinates may communicate more openly (i.e., more frequently and about more 378 P. M. Sias issues) in high quality relationships than in low quality relationships. Thus, employees in high quality relationships likely receive more information from their supervisors, than those in low quality relationships
  • Sias, Patricia M. (2005-01-01). "Workplace Relationship Quality and Employee Information Experiences". Communication Studies. 56 (4): pp.377-378.

• Peer relationships, also referred to as “equivalent status” relationships (Sias, Krone, & Jablin, 2002), are relationships between co-workers with no formal authority over one another. These relationships represent the bulk of workplace relationships, as employees typically have only one supervisor but several peer co-workers. Peer relationships perform a variety of important functions in the workplace. Peer co-workers are the most likely, and most important, source of emotional and instrumental support for employees, primarily because co-workers possess knowledge and understanding about the workplace experience that external sources do not (Ray, 1987). Moreover, peers act as a second “set of eyes and ears” for one another, sharing important organizational information and gossip that may otherwise be unobtainable (Rawlins, 1994). Kirby and Krone (2002) note the powerful influence peer co-workers have on one another with respect to workplace attitudes and behavior. Thus, peer relationships are of great consequence to organizational functioning. Peer relationships, like supervisor–subordinate relationships, vary with respect to quality. Kirby and Krone (2002), for instance, noted the ways in which peer co-workers cluster into sub-groups based upon the employees’ family status (e.g., married/unmarried; children/childless). They found that interaction among these groups of employees differed and had significant impact on the employees’ attitudes toward, and use of, the organization’s work–family policies. Sias and Cahill (1998) examined the ways employees form different types of relationships with their co-workers ranging from acquaintance, to friend, to very close or best friend. Interaction among these various relationship types differed in fundamental ways. Specifically, friends engaged in much more frequent, intimate, and open communication than did acquaintances. In addition, communication between co-workers became increasingly broad and intimate as their friendships grew closer.
  • Ibid, p. 379.

• When I hear the word “rape,” especially when it is used out of context, it makes me extremely uncomfortable. Often, it can be a trigger, causing fragments of my assaults to come flooding back. The stale cigarette breath, the smeared Halloween makeup, or the sickly sweet White Russians will become so visceral, I am transported back. It can make me feel unsafe — either physically or emotionally — in the company of the people who’ve said it. It is painful; it makes me feel ashamed, used, and violated all over again.
  Now, when I read stories about women who try to report their rape and get laughed at and forced to clean up the blood dripping from them because of said rape, I seethe with rage. It boils up from my gut and my face gets hot. I want to scream out for these women, for myself, and for everyone who has had to go through the experience of being violated.
  To feel solidarity, compassion, and rage for these fellow survivors so strongly and then hear the word “rape” thrown around in a casual, joking, or completely unrelated manner is just something I can no longer reconcile. It is not okay. Rape is not something you get to laugh about. Rape is not something that can describe any other thing but sexual violence. To continue to do so is to dishonor these women (and men) who have already had so much taken away from them. Their agency. Their innocence. Their natural sexual desire.
  Many people who say things like this don’t have bad intentions. I’m not here to shame these people and make them feel bad. I’m here to educate them. Misuse of this word comes from either ignorance or cruelty. Most people who use the word out of context are not cruel. I think ignorance is completely surmountable. So let’s move forward. Let’s elevate our language. Let’s stop minimizing the suffering of so many people.

• "Stop Saying ‘Rape’ Out of Context", Amelia Shroyer, Huffpost, 04/16/2014

• As long as you want to keep playing whack-a-mole from hell, it is my solemn promise that I will keep picking up the metaphorical hammer to slam you back down and remind you that you have not yet done anything to earn our forgiveness. So take your millions of dollars and pay a therapist to care about how tough it’s been to get caught being an abuser because honestly, I don’t give a shit.
  • Samantha Bee, Full Frontal, May 9, 2018, as quoted in "Samantha Bee Checks in With #MeToo, This Time With Zero F***s Left to Give for These Men", by Vivian Kane, The Mary Sue, May 10th, 2018

• Stop telling those fucking jokes! You’re a hack and everybody knows it. But here’s the good news: Lots of things are funny that aren’t rape!

• Terry Crews, Full Frontal, Aug 1, 2018, as quoted in "Samantha Bee and Terry Crews Share a Friendly Reminder: Your Prison-Rape Joke Isn’t Funny", by Megh Wright, The Mary Sue, Aug 2, 2018

• Another recent survey from Pew Research Center revealed that divisions along party lines have reached record levels since Trump became president (after already reaching all-time highs during the Obama years). “Across 10 measures that Pew Research Center has tracked on the same surveys since 1994,” the authors write, “the average partisan gap has increased from 15 percentage points to 36 points.” On issues like immigration, the environment and racial discrimination, partisan disagreement has only gotten sharper over the past 25 years, while antipathy between the two parties has grown even more intense. It is not surprising, then, that a record high 77 percent of Americans perceive the nation as divided, according to a Gallup survey taken shortly after last year’s election.
  Perhaps no issue captures our hyper-partisan age better than gun control, which was once again thrust into the national spotlight after last week’s mass shooting in Las Vegas. Shortly after the massacre, the polling company Survey Monkey published two maps based on 2016 exit polls that reveal just how much of a partisan issue guns have become in 2017. Gun ownership is now one of the best indicators of whether one will vote Democratic or Republican, and in 2016, gun-owning households voted overwhelmingly for Trump, while the majority of non-gun owning households voted for Hillary Clinton.

• “America may be more divided now than at any time since the Civil War”, Conor Lynch, 10.14.2017 Salon.

• “The analogy here is infectious disease,” says Barry Krisberg, a UC-Berkeley criminologist who has advised Boggan. For years, crime fighters had combated epidemics of violence by quarantining criminals in prison. Boggan took what he’d seen in other cities and adopted a new course of treatment: By inoculating the carriers of violence, perhaps you can protect an entire community.
  • "Did This City Bring Down Its Murder Rate by Paying People Not to Kill?", Mother Jones, Tim Murphy July/August, 2014

• You know, the interesting thing is the FBI did a very intensive study of 160 mass shootings over the period from 2000 to 2013. And what they found was that over that period, in the 160 cases, there was only one incidence of a private citizen who was not security personnel or a police officer who effectively intervened in the mass shooting, and that individual was an active duty Marine. On the other hand, 22 unarmed citizens intervened to stop those mass shootings, typically when the individual was reloading. And so it gives you a sense of the relative effectiveness of relying on someone with a gun to intervene in an active shooting scenario.
  • "Does Increased Gun Ownership Help Decrease Crime?" John Donohue, "All Things Considered", NPR, Nov 7, 2017.

• One area in which political beliefs do have an impact is the kinds of scientists that liberals and conservatives are likely to trust. A 2013 study of 798 participants found that conservatives put more faith in scientists involved in economic production – food scientists, industrial chemists and petroleum geologists, for instance – than in scientists involved in areas associated with regulation, such as public health and environmental science. The opposite was true for liberals. Again, this suggests that it’s not simply a matter of conservatives being skeptical of science in general; there’s a much more nuanced relationship between political leanings and trust in scientific expertise.
  • "Why do science issues seem to divide us along party lines?", October 16, 2016, Lauren Griffin, The Conversation

• Your class background shapes how you want to go about your daily life, and it does so in really systematic ways. Strangers who have never met yet who share a class background often have more in common with each other than spouses with whom they share their life if they came from different classes.
  • Jessi Streib in "If you grew up far richer than your spouse, it will likely change your marriage" Danielle Kurtzleben, Vox, Mar 23, 2015; as quoted in "The Truth About "Mixed-Collar" Dating — From the People Who Make These Relationships Work" by Kate Hakala, Mic, Mar 23, 2015.

• Isolate: Therapists spend a large portion of their day hidden under a legally mandated shroud of secrecy. The answer to a simple “How was your day?” must omit any detail from the hours you spent in session. The hard work you spend maintaining a functional relationship with clients, including all the challenges and victories, remains unknown. Unless you have supervision, a consultation group, or your own therapy, that is. Also, if all your friends and hobbies outside of work are therapy related, you will become a jargon-filled, myopic mess mumbling quotes from In Treatment to yourself.
  • "Seven Mistakes Therapists Makes", Ryan Howes, Psychology Today, Jul 30, 2012.

• "Some people have become so cynical that they don't believe in anything any more. In them, healthy scepticism has been replaced by a total breakdown in trust, the belief that everybody lies.
• Only the severe end was even considered. There was no sense of spectrum. Paranoia was very much seen as inexplicable, un-understandable, if anything some kind of biological system that had gone wrong. I remember thinking that seemed very reductionalist, that there must be some kind of psychology to it. Once I started looking at it as a spectrum, once you make the connection to things such as depression and anxiety, it really opens it up. People with depression have higher levels of paranoia because of a sense of vulnerability and low self-esteem.
  Anxiety is linked too. But whereas anxiety may lead to fearing harm from a spider, or of being humiliated in a social situation, it doesn't lead to a belief that the spider or others intend to humiliate or hurt us. It's the attribution of intent that distinguishes paranoia.
• This is another main reason why I believe paranoia is on the increase. Because we are constantly reminded, in the press, of threats from other people, we overestimate the chances of these events happening to us. There is a lot of research on this. It is what is known as the 'availability heuristic'. We make an estimate of the likelihood of a particular event simply by how easily we bring it to mind. Our children are getting fat because we aren't letting them out to play enough. We're scared they will be run over or abducted by strangers. In fact, the risks to the health from obesity are much higher than the risks of either of those events.

• David Freeman, "Suspicious minds" Sabine Durrant, The Guardian, (Mon 9, 2009).

• The London Sperm Bank recently came under public scrutiny for rejecting a prospective sperm donor because he’s dyslexic. Aside from dyslexia, this repository also screens out men seeking to donate sperm if they have ADHD, dyspraxia, Asperger’s and other neurological conditions, many of which have a demonstrated genetic link. On the company’s website, these traits were listed as “neurological diseases,” along with Cerebral Palsy, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Epilepsy, Tourette Syndrome and Multiple Sclerosis.
• Screening policies in the human gamete industry reflect larger cultural assumptions that pathologize difference. In my research on both sperm donation in the 1990s up to my current work on egg donation, I have discovered there are a number of reasons a prospective sperm or egg provider may be rejected: too short, too tall, overweight “socially inappropriate,” not having the “right motivations,” not attractive enough, a variety of “health reasons,” possibly even religion or ethnicity, and so on. The reasons for rejecting a potential donor are often unspoken.
• Are there genetic predispositions to coffee drinking? Highly unlikely.
  I referred to this kind of donor selection process as grass roots eugenics—where people select donors based upon fuzzy interpretations of genetics, imagining a prototype perfect donor whose desired traits will be passed down to their child. People choose donors with whom they feel they have a connection. If they plan to tell the child how they were conceived, they also want to be able to say good things about the donor who helped create them.

• "Designer Genes: ADHD, Dyslexia, and the Quest for Perfect Donors", Diane Tober, Psychology Today, January 21, 2016

• Everyday experience suggests that highly emotional events are often the most memorable, an observation supported by psychological and pharmacological studies in humans. Although studies in animals have shown that nondeclarative emotional memory (behaviors associated with emotional situations) may be impaired by lesions of the amygdala, little is known about the neural underpinnings of emotional memory in humans, especially in regard to declarative memory (memory for facts that can be assessed verbally). We investigated the declarative memory of two rare patients with selective bilateral amygdala damage. Both subjects showed impairments in long-term declarative memory for emotionally arousing material. The data support the hypothesis that the human amygdala normally enhances acquisition of declarative knowledge regarding emotionally arousing stimuli.
  • Adolphs R.; Cahill L.; Schul R.; Babinsky R. (1997). "Impaired declarative memory for emotional material following bilateral amygdala damage in humans". Learning & Memory. 4 (3): 291–300. doi:10.1101/lm.4.3.291.

• For more than a century, scientific investigators and clinicians have noted the potential for memory distortions associated with hypnosis. Moll, a noted nineteenth-century authority, commented that "Retroactive hallucinations are of great importance in law. They can be used to falsify testimony. People can be made to believe that they have witnessed certain scenes, or even crimes." (Moll 1889/1958, pp. 345-346). The pioneer hypnosis practitioner, Bernheim, observed, "I have shown how a false memory can cause false testimony given in good faith, and how examining magistrates can unwittingly cause false testimony by suggestion" (Bernheim, 1891/1980, p. 92). Similar findings have been observed by later legal commentators, as will be noted in the following discussion.
  • Deirdre Barrett, “Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy”, (2010), p.53.

• Historically, infants and very young children were thought incapable of explicit memory. As a result of changes in theoretical perspective and methodological developments, this assumption was challenged in the latter part of the 20th century. Substantial progress was made in describing age-related changes in explicit memory in the first two years of life. These developments permitted the first steps toward construction of a neuro-developmental account of the changes. By considering the timing and course of development of the neural substrate responsible for explicit memory we are able to bring greater specificity to the question “what develops?” Thus far, behavioral and electrophysiological methods (event-related potentials: ERPs) have revealed both individual and age-related variability in encoding and in consolidation and storage processes; the variability is systematically related to variability in long-term explicit memory. Suggestions are made for additional research to further our understanding of relations between brain and behavioral development in the first years of life.
  • Bauer P.J. (2004). "Getting explicit memory off the ground: Steps toward construction of a neuro-developmental account of changes in the first two years of life". Developmental Review. 24 (4): 347–373. doi:10.1016/j.dr.2004.08.003.

• "The horror of that moment," the King went on, "I shall never, never forget!"
  "You will, though," the Queen said, "if you don't make a memorandum of it."
  - Lewis Carroll, from Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1872/1982, p. 94, emphasis in original)
  In his brief dialogue between the King and the Queen - two of the chess piece sovereigns of the Looking Glass House - Lewis Carroll captured the complementary sides of the coin we term memory The King, having experienced a "horrifying" event (being set on a table by Alice, a relative giant whom the King could neither see nor hear), expresses absolute faith in the durability of memory. The Queen, in contrast, presents a less flattering view of the capacity: that without some intervention (a memorandum), even a salient event will be forgotten. In a rare instance, the reality experienced by the King and Queen on their side of the looking glass is reflected on the drawing room side as well. Memory is at times seemingly and at other times frustratingly fallible. What is at times seemingly indelible and at other times frustratingly fallible. What is more, in true looking glass fashion, the same past experience can at one moment impinge on consciousness unbidden and at another elude deliberate attempts to recollect it.
  • Bauer, Patricia J. (2007). Remembering the times of our lives: memory in infancy and beyond. Hillsdale, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. ISBN 0-8058-5733-8. OCLC 62089961., p. 3.

• One of the more consistent predictors of later recall of events is their uniqueness or distinctiveness. Specifically, events that are unique tend to be better remembered, relative to single episodes of events that occur more frequently (e.g., Brewer, 1988; Wagenaar, 1986). For example, in White's (1982, 1989, 2002) examinations of how own memories from the year 1979, the uniqueness of an event t the time it was experienced was strongly related to how well it was remembered: The less unique the event, the worse was White's recall of it. This pttern may be accounted for by interference schematization, or both. Interference from other, similar experiences makes it more difficult to retrieve the features of any specific experience. Similarly, schematization occurs as the features that are common across experiences are abstracted and the representation condensed to include only the common elements. The result is that, "...repeated encounters of similar kinds blend and the details of any single event may be forgotten..." (Barclay % DeCooke, 1988, p. 106).
• The affective intensity of an event is another predictor of later recall: Events that are "affectively charged," or have high levels of emotionality associated with them, either positive or negative, tend to be well recalled (e.g., Brewer, 1988; Thompson, 1998; Wagenaar, 1986; White, 2002).
  • Ibid, p.36

• The precise nature of the engram, the physical substrate of memory, remains uncertain. Here, it is reported that RNA extracted from the central nervous system of Aplysia given long-term sensitization training induced sensitization when injected into untrained animals; furthermore, the RNA-induced sensitization, like training-induced sensitization, required DNA methylation. In cellular experiments, treatment with RNA extracted from trained animals was found to increase excitability in sensory neurons, but not in motor neurons, dissociated from naïve animals. Thus, the behavioral, and a subset of the cellular, modifications characteristic of a form of nonassociative long-term memory in Aplysia can be transferred by RNA. These results indicate that RNA is sufficient to generate an engram for long-term sensitization in Aplysia and are consistent with the hypothesis that RNA-induced epigenetic changes underlie memory storage in Aplysia.
  • Alexis Bédécarrats, Shanping Chen, Kaycey Pearce, Diancai Cai and David L. Glanzman “RNA from Trained Aplysia Can Induce an Epigenetic Engram for Long-Term Sensitization in Untrained Aplysia”, eNeuro 14 May 2018, ENEURO.0038-18.2018; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0038-18.2018

• It is possible for one with a well-trained memory to compose clearly in an organized fashion on several different subjects. Once one has the all-important starting-place of the ordering scheme and the contents firmly in their places within it, it is quite possible to move back and forth from one distinct composition to another without losing one's place or becoming confused.
  • Mary Carruthers, (1990). The Book of Memory (first ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-38282-3. (limited preview on Google Books), p.7

• The ability to recall information about the past is thought to emerge in the 2nd half of the 1st year of life. Although there is evidence from both cognitive neuroscience and behavioral psychology to support this hypothesis, there is little longitudinal evidence with which the question can be addressed. Infants' memory abilities were tested between the ages of 9 and 16 months using elicited and deferred imitation. Infants' memory for events was tested after delays ranging from 1 to 6 months. The results suggest that at 9 months of age, infants are able to store and retrieve representations over delays of as many as 4 weeks but not over long delays. In contrast, 10-month-olds have at their disposal a system that allows encoding and retrieval of event representations over delays of up to 6 months. These results support the idea that the system that underlies long-term ordered recall emerges near the end of the 1st year of life.
  • Carver, L.J.; Bauer, P.J. (December 2001). "The dawning of a past: the emergence of long-term explicit memory in infancy". J Exp Psychol Gen. 130 (4): 726–45. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.130.4890. doi:10.1037/0096-3445.130.4.726. PMID 11757877.

• The purpose of this review is to evaluate the effects of chronic stress on hippocampal-dependent function, based primarily upon studies using young, adult male rodents and spatial navigation tasks. Despite this restriction, variability amongst the findings was evident and how or even whether chronic stress influenced spatial ability depended upon the type of task, the dependent variable measured and how the task was implemented, the type and duration of the stressors, housing conditions of the animals that include accessibility to food and cage mates, and duration from the end of the stress to the start of behavioral assessment. Nonetheless, patterns emerged as follows: For spatial memory, chronic stress impairs spatial reference memory and has transient effects on spatial working memory. For spatial learning, however, chronic stress effects appear to be task-specific: chronic stress impairs spatial learning on appetitively motivated tasks, such as the radial arm maze or holeboard, tasks that evoke relatively mild to low arousal components from fear. But under testing conditions that evoke moderate to strong arousal components from fear, such as during radial arm water maze testing, chronic stress appears to have minimal impairing effects or may even facilitate spatial learning. Chronic stress clearly impacts nearly every brain region and thus, how chronic stress alters hippocampal spatial ability likely depends upon the engagement of other brain structures during behavioral training and testing.
  • Conrad C.D. (2010). "A critical review of chronic stress effects on spatial learning and memory". Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology & Biological Psychiatry. 34 (5): 742–755. doi:10.1016/j.pnpbp.2009.11.003. PMID 19903505.

• Attentional focus on one coherent scene does not in itself explain how a complex sequence can be recalled. To understand that, one must take into account that the focus of attention can shift from one level of analysis to another. Cowan: The magical number 4 BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2001) 24:1 93 McLean and Gregg (1967, p. 459) described a hierarchical organization of memory in a serial recall task with long lists of consonants: “At the top level of the hierarchy are those cueing features that allow S to get from one chunk to another. At a lower level, within chunks, additional cues enable S to produce the integrated strings that become his overt verbal responses.”
  • Cowan, N (February 2001). "The magical number 4 in short-term memory: a reconsideration of mental storage capacity"(PDF). Behav Brain Sci. 24 (1): 87–114, discussion 114–85. doi:10.1017/S0140525X01003922. PMID 11515286 p.93

• Broadbent (1975) noted that the ability to recall items from an array grows with the visual field duration: “for the first fiftieth of a second or so the rate of increase in recall is extremely fast, and after that it becomes slower.” He cites Sperling’s (1967) argument that in the early period, items are read in parallel into some visual store; but that, after it fills up, additional items can be recalled only if some items are read (more slowly) into a different, perhaps articulatory store. Viewed in this way, the visual store would have a capacity of three to five items, given that the performance function rapidly increases for that number of items. However, the “visual store” could be a central capacity limit (assumed here to be the focus of attention) rather than visually specific as the terminology used by Sperling seems to imply.
  • Ibid, p.96

• The ability to apprehend a small number of items at one time in the conscious mind can be distinguished from the need to attend to items individually when a larger number of such items are presented. This point is one of the earliest to be noted in psychological commentaries on the limitations in capacity. Hamilton (1859) treated this topic at length and noted (vol. 1, p. 254) that two philosophers decided that six items could be apprehended at once, whereas at least one other (Abraham Tucker) decided that four items could be apprehended. He went on to comment: “The opinion [of six] appears to me correct. You can easily make the experiment for yourselves, but you must be aware of grouping the objects into classes. If you throw a handful of marbles on the floor, you will find it difficult to view at once more than six, or seven at most, without confusion; but if you group them into twos, or threes, or fives, you can comprehend as many groups as you can units; because the mind considers these groups only as units, – it views them as wholes, and throws their parts out of consideration. You may perform the experiment also by an act of imagination.” When the experiment actually was conducted, however, it showed that Hamilton’s estimate was a bit high. Many studies have shown that the time needed to count a cluster of dots or other such small items rises very slowly as the number of items increases from one to four, and rises at a much more rapid rate after that. Jevons (1871) was probably the first actual study, noting that Hamilton’s conjecture was “one of the very few points in psychology which can, as far as we yet see, be submitted to experiment.” He picked up handfuls of beans and threw them into a box, glancing at them briefly and estimating their number, which was then counted for comparison. After over a thousand trials, he found that numbers up to four could be estimated perfectly, and up to five with very few errors
  • Ibid, p.102.

• Other theorists (Hummel & Holyoak 1997; Shastri & Ajjanagadde 1993) have applied this neural synchronization principle in a way that is more abstract. It can serve as an alternative compatible with Halford et al.’s (1998) basic notion of a limit on the complexity of relations between concepts, though Halford et al. instead worked with a more symbolically based model in which “the amount of information that can be represented by a single vector is not significantly limited, but the number of vectors that can be bound in one representation of a relation is limited” (p. 821). Shastri and Ajjanagadde (1993) formulated a physiological theory of working memory very similar to Lisman and Idiart (1995), except that the theory was meant to explain “a limited-capacity dynamic working memory that temporarily holds information during an episode of reflexive reasoning” (p. 442), meaning reasoning that can be carried out “rapidly, spontaneously, and without conscious effort” (p. 418). The information was said to be held as concepts or predicates that were in the form of complex chunks; thus, it was cautioned, “note that the activation of an entity together with all its active superconcepts counts as only one entity” (p. 443). It was remarked that the bound on the number of entities in working memory, derived from facts of neural oscillation, falls in the 7 6 2 range; but the argument was not precise enough to distinguish that from the lower estimate offered in the present paper. Hummel and Holyoak (1997) brought up similar concepts in their theory of thinking with analogies. They defined “dynamic binding” (a term that Shastri & Ajjanagadde also relied upon to describe how entities came about) as a situation in which “units representing case roles are temporarily bound to units representing the fillers of those roles” (p. 433). They estimated the limit of dynamic binding links as “between four and six” (p. 434). In both the approaches of Shastri and Ajjanagadde (1993) and Hummel and Holyoak (1997), these small limits were supplemented with data structures in long term memory or “static bindings” that appear to operate in the same manner as the long-term working memory of Ericsson and Kintsch (1995), presumably providing the “active superconcepts” that Shastri and Ajjanagadde mentioned.
  • Ibid, pp. 109-110

• Infants devote more visual fixation to novel than to previously exposed targets, thereby indicating both discriminative ability and recognition memory. Since the earliest demonstrations of infants' preferences for novel visual stimulation (Fantz 1964; Saayman, Ames, & Moffett 1964), a number of explorations of infant recognition memory have been conducted. Variables studied have included age (Fagan, Fantz, & Miranda 1971; Wetherford & Cohen 1973), dcegree and type of stimulus variation (Cohen & caron 1968; Fagan 1970, 1971, 1973; Pancratz & Cohen 1970), sources of forgetting (Fagan 1973), and conceptual development (Caron, Caron, Caldwell, & Weiss 1973; Fagan 1972).
  • Fagan, J.F. (June 1974). "Infant recognition memory: the effects of length of familiarization and type of discrimination task". Child Dev. 45 (2): 351–356. PMID 4837713. 

• We ought, then, to set up images of a kind that can adhere longest in memory. And we shall do so if we establish similitudes as striking as possible; if we set up images that are not many or vague but active; if we assign to them exceptional beauty or singular ugliness; if we ornament some of them, as with crowns or purple cloaks, so that the similitude may be more distinct to us; or if we somehow disfigure them, as by introducing one stained with blood or soiled with mud and smeared with red paint, so that its form is more striking, or by assigning certain comic effects to our images, for that, too, will ensure our remembering them more readily.
  • Rhetorica Ad Herrenium, III, xxii (1st century BCE)

• Our memory changes every single time it's being 'recorded'. That's why we can incorporate new information into old memories and this is how a false memory can form without us realising it.
  • Xu Liu in "Scientists can implant false memories into mice", by Melissa Hogenboom, BBC News, (July 25, 2013).

• What happens when people witness an event, say, a crime or accident, and are later exposed to new information about the event? Two decades of research have been devoted to the influence of new information on the recollections of such witnesses. An all-too-common finding is that after receipt of new information that is misleading in some way, people make errors when they report what they saw. New, postevent information often becomes incorporated into a recollection, supplementing or altering it, sometimes in dramatic ways. New information invades us, like a Trojan horse, precisely because we do not detect its influence. Understanding how we become tricked by revised data about a witnessed event is a central goal of this research.
  Current research showing how memory can become skewed when people assimilate new data utilizes a simple paradigm. Participants first witness a complex event, such as a simulated violent crime or automobile accident. Subsequently, half the participants receive new, misleading information about the event. The other half do not get any misinformation. Finally, all participants attempt to recall the original event. In a typical example of a study using this paradigm, participants saw a simulated traffic accident. They then received written information about the accident, but some people were misled about what they saw. A stop sign, for instance, was referred to as a yield sign. When asked whether they originally saw a stop or a yield sign, participants given the phony information tended to adopt it as their memory; they said they saw a yield sign. In these and many other experiments, people who had not received the phony information had much more accurate memories. In some experiments, the deficits in memory performance following receipt of misinformation have been dramatic, with performance differences as large as 30% or 40%.
• A growing body of studies reveals the conditions that make people particularly susceptible to the influence of misinformation. For example, people are particularly prone to having their memories modified when the passage of time allows the original memory to fade. Put another way, with a long interval between the event and the misinformation, the injection of misinformation becomes relatively easy. In its weakened condition, memory - like the disease-ridden body-becomes especially vulnerable to repeated assaults on its very essence. This finding leads up to a principle, the discrepancy detection principle for determining when changes in recollection will occur:
  Recollections are more likely to change if a person does not immediately detect discrepancies between postevent information and memory for the original event.
  • Loftus GR (1992). "When a lie becomes memory's truth: Memory distortion after exposure to misinformation". Current Directions in Psychological Science. 1 (4): 121–123. doi:10.1111/1467-8721.ep10769035. p.121

• Counterfactual imaginings are known to have far-reaching implications. In the present experiment, we ask if imagining events from one's past can affect memory for childhood events. We draw on the social psychology literature showing that imagining a future event increases the subjective likelihood that the event will occur. The concepts of cognitive availability and the source-monitoring framework provide reasons to expect that imagination may inflate confidence that a childhood event occurred. However, people routinely produce myriad counterfactual imaginings (i.e., daydreams and fantasies) but usually do not confuse them with past experiences. To determine the effects of imagining a childhood event, we pretested subjects on how confident they were that a number of childhood events had happened, asked them to imagine some of those events, and then gathered new confidence measures. For each of the target items, imagination inflated confidence that the event had occurred in childhood. We discuss implications for situations in which imagination is used as an aid in searching for presumably lost memories.
  • Garry M, Manning CG, Loftus EF, Sherman SJ, "Imagination inflation: Imagining a childhood event inflates confidence that it occurred". Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. 3(2): 208–214. doi:10.3758/bf03212420. PMID 24213869. (1996).

• In two experiments, subjects heard simple action statements (e.g., “Break the toothpick”), and, in some conditions, they also performed the action or imagined performing the action. In a second session that occurred at a later point (10 min, 24 h, 1 week, or 2 weeks later), subjects imagined performing actions one, three, or five times. Some imagined actions represented statements heard, imagined, or performed in the first session, whereas other statements were new in the second session. During a third (test) phase, subjects were instructed to recognize statements only if they had occurred during the first session and, if recognized, to tell whether the action statement had been carried out, imagined, or merely heard. The primary finding was that increasing the number of imaginings during the second session caused subjects to remember later that they had performed an action during the first session when in fact they had not (imagination inflation). This outcome occurred both for statements that subjects had heard but not performed during the first session and for statements that had never been heard during the first session. The results are generally consistent with Johnson, Hashtroudi, and Lindsay’s (1993) source monitoring framework and reveal a powerful memory illusion: Imagining performance of an action can cause its recollection as actually having been carried out.
  • Goff LM, Roediger HL, "Imagination inflation for action events: Repeated imaginings lead to illusory recollections". Memory and Cognition. 26: 20–33. doi:10.3758/bf03211367, (1998).

• 'The method of loci', an imaginal technique known to the ancient Greeks and Romans and described by Yates (1966) in her book The Art of Memory as well as by Luria (1969). In this technique the subject memorizes the layout of some building, or the arrangement of shops on a street, or any geographical entity which is composed of a number of discrete loci. When desiring to remember a set of items the subject 'walks' through these loci in their imagination and commits an item to each one by forming an image between the item and any feature of that locus. Retrieval of items is achieved by 'walking' through the loci, allowing the latter to activate the desired items. The efficacy of this technique has been well established (Ross and Lawrence 1968, Crovitz 1969, 1971, Briggs, Hawkins and Crovitz 1970, Lea 1975), as is the minimal interference seen with its use.
  • O'Keefe, John; Nadel, Lynn (December 7, 1978). The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0198572060.

• Demonstrations of limitations in the way humans process and store information have generated much controversy among researchers in the cognitive sciences. A major theme concerns the capacity of working memory. Separate verbal, spatial, and visual object working memory systems can be distinguished (1-3), but similar estimates of their capacities have been established. These estimates have sometimes been made in terms of “magical numbers,” which have ranged from seven to about four words, numbers, or locations (4). In line with these results, recent studies suggest that it is possible to retain information of up to four objects in visual working memory (5-9).
  • Olsson Henrik, Poom Leo, Treisman Anne (2005). "Visual memory needs categories". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 102(24): 8776–8780. doi:10.1073/pnas.0500810102. PMC 1150822. PMID 15937119.

• Young and old participants were evaluated on tests of frontal lobe function, recognition memory, and memory for temporal and spatial information. Older participants showed significant impairments on memory for temporal order, and this impairment was found to correlate with deficits on frontal lobe tests measuring spontaneous flexibility but not reactive flexibility. However, spatial memory showed no evidence of an age effect. An interpretation of this latter finding based on the differential availability of contextual cues is ruled out because similar results were obtained when spatial memory was assessed in a different context to that used during learning. The researchers concluded that memory for temporal order and spatial memory are affected differentially by age. Theoretical interpretations of this difference are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
  • Parkin A.J.; Walter B.M.; Hunkin N.M. (1995). "Relationships between normal aging, frontal lobe function, and memory for temporal and spatial information". Neuropsychology. 9 (3): 304–312. doi:10.1037/0894-4105.9.3.304.

• All people have a natural curiosity about their own memory. This curiosity was tweaked severalyears ago by reports in the popular press of recoered memories from early childhood. These reports also renewed a long-standing debate bout whether infants can actually remember for any length of time. Some resedarchers argue that infants possess only a primitive memory system that cnanot encode specific events (Mandler, 1998), that early development is characterized by "infantile amnesia" (the absense of enduring memories; Pillemer & White, 1989), that children cannot remember events until they can rehearse them by talking about them (Nelson, 1990), and that children younger than 18 months are incapable of representation (Piaget, 1952); others argue that the behavior of older infants and children is shaped by their earlier experiences (Watson, 1930) and that adult personality is shaped by memories of events that occurred in infancy (Freud, 1935). Surprisingly, this debate has been waged in the absence of date from infants themselves.
  This article reviews new evidence that infants' memory processing does not fundamentally differ from that of older children and adults, not only can older children remember an event that occured before they could talk, but even very young infants can remember an event over the entire infantile-amnesia period if they are periodically reminded.
  • Rovee-Collier, Carolyn (1999). "The Development of Infant Memory". Current Directions in Psychological Science. 8 (3): 80–85. doi:10.1111/1467-8721.00019. ISSN 0963-7214. P.80

• Converging lines of evidence indicate that stress either before or after learning influences memory. Surprisingly little is known about how memory is affected when people learn while they are stressed. Here, we examined the impact of learning under stress in 48 healthy young men and women. Participants were exposed to stress (socially evaluated cold pressor test) or a control condition while they learned emotional words and neutral words that were either conceptually associated with or unrelated to the stressor. Memory was assessed in free recall and recognition tests 24h after learning. Learning under stress reduced both free recall and recognition performance, irrespective of the emotionality and the stress context relatedness of the words. While the effect of stress was comparable in men and women, women outperformed men in the free recall test. These findings show a memory impairing effect of learning under stress in humans and challenge some assumptions of current theories about the impact of stress around the time of learning on memory formation.
  • Schwabe, L.; Wolf, O.T. (2010). "Learning under stress impairs memory formation". Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. 93 (2): 183–188. doi:10.1016/j.nlm.2009.09.009. PMID 19796703.

• Stress before retention testing impairs memory, whereas memory performance is enhanced when the learning context is reinstated at retrieval. In the present study, we examined whether the negative impact of stress before memory retrieval can be attenuated when memory is tested in the same environmental context as that in which learning took place. Subjects learned a 2-D object location task in a room scented with vanilla. Twenty-four hours later, they were exposed to stress or a control condition before memory for the object location task was assessed in a cued-recall test, either in the learning context or in a different context (unfamiliar room without the odor). Stress impaired memory when assessed in the unfamiliar context, but not when assessed in the learning context. These results suggest that the detrimental effects of stress on memory retrieval can be abolished when a distinct learning context is reinstated at test.
  • Schwabe, L.; Wolf, O.T. (2009). "The context counts: Congruent learning and testing environments prevent memory retrieval impairment following stress". Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience. 9 (3): 229–236. doi:10.3758/CABN.9.3.229. PMID 19679758.

• To conclude, our results suggest that stress can interfere with our ability to integrate context information into a memory trace. These findings might improve our understanding of the pathogenesis of psychiatric disorders, such as the post-traumatic stress disorder in which the failure to connect the traumatic event with the appropriate (temporal and spatial) contextual information is a common pathological hallmark (Rauch et al. 2006).
  • Schwabe, L.; Bohringer, A.; Wolf, O.T. (2009). "Stress disrupts context-dependent memory". Learning and Memory. 16 (2): 110–113. doi:10.1101/lm.1257509. PMID 19181616.

• A model for visual recall tasks was presented in terms of visual information storage (VIS), scanning, rehearsal, and auditory information storage (AIS). It was shown first that brief visual stimuli are stored in VIS in a form similar to the sensory input. These visual “images” contain considerably more information than is transmitted later. They can be sampled by scanning for items at high rates of about 10 msec per letter. Recall is based on a verbal receding of the stimulus (rehearsal), which is remembered in AIS. The items retained in AIS are usually rehearsed again to prevent them from decaying. The human limits in immediate-memory (reproduction) tasks are inherent in the AIS-Rehearsal loop. The main implication of the model for human factors is the importance of the auditory coding in visual tasks.
  • Sperling, G (1963). "A Model for Visual Memory Tasks". hfs.sagepub.com. 5 (1): 19–31.

• Converging evidence and new research methodologies from across the neurosciences permit the neuroscientific study of the role of sleep in off-line memory reprocessing, as well as the nature and function of dreaming. Evidence supports a role for sleep in the consolidation of an array of learning and memory tasks. In addition, new methodologies allow the experimental manipulation of dream content at sleep onset, permitting an objective and scientific study of this dream formation and a renewed search for the possible functions of dreaming and the biological processes subserving it.
  • R. Stickgold, J.A. Hobson, R. Fosse, M. Fosse1 (November 2001). "Sleep, Learning, and Dreams: Off-line Memory Reprocessing". Science. 294 (5544): 1052–1057. doi:10.1126/science.1063530. PMID 11691983. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/294/5544/1052.long

• Some researchers have reported that high levels of stress are associated with improved memory in the laboratory (Goodman et al. 1991b; Warren & Swartwood, 1992), some have reported that high levels of stress are associated with poorer memory (Bugental et al., 1992; Merritt, Ornstein, & Spicker, 1994). For example, Howe, Courage, & Peterson (1994) found no relationship between the amount of stress (reported by the parents) and the amount of information recalled by their children either 3-5 days or 6 months after an emergency room procedure. By contrast, Goodman et al. (1991b) found that children who showed higher levels of arousal during a medical procedure reported the incident more accurately than children who simply had a washable tattoo applied.
  • Teti D.M. (2005). Handbook of research methods in developmental science: New developments in the study of infant memory. San Francisco: Blackwell Publishing., p.500

• Within what we might call “classical cognitive science” (Piattelli-Palmarini, 2001) it has always been understood that the mind/brain is to be considered a computational-representational system. Yet, not all cognitive scientists have ever (fully) agreed with this assessment (e.g., Rumelhart et al., 1986). Actually, as of today, large parts of the field have concluded, primarily drawing on work in neuroscience, that neither symbolism nor computationalism are tenable and, as a consequence, have turned elsewhere. In contrast, classical cognitive scientists have always been critical of connectionist or network approaches to cognitive architecture (e.g., Fodor and Pylyshyn, 1988), and recent work on memory (e.g., Gallistel and King, 2009; Gallistel and Matzel, 2013; Gallistel and Balsam, 2014) has been adding fuel to the fire. Recent work in neuroscience (Chen et al., 2014; Johansson et al., 2014; Ryan et al., 2015) has now provided first tentative neurobiological evidence for the cognitive scientists' doubts about the synapse as the locus of memory in the brain.
• If we believe that memories are made of patterns of synaptic connections sculpted by experience, and if we know, behaviorally, that motor memories last a lifetime, then how can we explain the fact that individual synaptic spines are constantly turning over and that aggregate synaptic strengths are constantly fluctuating? (Bizzi and Ajemian, 2015, p. 91)
  • Trettenbrein, P. C. (2016-01-01). "The Demise of the Synapse As the Locus of Memory: A Looming Paradigm Shift?",. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. 10 (88): 88. doi:10.3389/fnsys.2016.00088. PMC 5112247. PMID 27909400.

• …episodic memories are the only ones with direct reference to the past. As Tulving (1999, p.15) points out: “episodic memory is the only form of memory that, at the time of retrieval, is oriented toward the past: retrieval in episodic memory means ‘mental time travel’ through and to one’s past. All other forms of memory, including semantic, declarative and procedural memory, are, at retrieval oriented to the present”
  • Ofengenden Tzofit (2014). "Memory formation and belief" (PDF). Dialogues in Philosophy, Mental and Neuro Sciences. 7 (2): p.37-38

• “Not only is it impossible to compare our memories with the events of which they are the memories; but because the present is, as it were, always slipping away from us into the past we cannot even compare our memories with what purport to be the effects of the original events (or, more properly, with our inferences from those ‘effects’). For what I am comparing must always be, not the memory itself but my memory of that memory. Suppose that today I remember building, a short while ago, a castle in the sand. Tomorrow I go to the beach and there it is. I say ‘Yes just as I remembered it yesterday’. But how do I then know it is just as I remembered it yesterday? The sight of the sand castle itself may well influence my memory of my previous remembering” (Brian Smith, 1966, p.27, italics original)
  • Ofengenden Tzofit (2014). "Memory formation and belief" (PDF). Dialogues in Philosophy, Mental and Neuro Sciences. 7 (2): p.38

• Thomas Suddendorf and Michael Corballis (2007, p. 301-302) write: “The fact that episodic memory is fragmentary and fragile suggests that its adaptiveness may derive less from its role as an accurate record of personal history than from providing a “vocabulary” from which to construct planned future events (and perhaps to embellish events of the past). It may be part of a more general toolbox that allowed us to escape from the present and develop foresight, and perhaps create a sense of personal identity. Indeed, our ability to revisit the past may be only a design feature of our ability to conceive of the future”
  • Ibid, p.43

• Hypnotic dreams have long been a method by which hypnosis is utilized in psychotherapy;however, the research on their characteristics in comparison to nocturnal dreams is sparse.Physiological correlates of hypnotic dreams have been clearly established as resembling those of a relaxed waking state much more closely than they resemble any stage of sleep(Brady & Rosner, 1966; Tart, 1964), the one exception being the observation of rapid eyemovements (REM) during some hypnotic dreams (Brady & Rosner, 1966; Schiff, Bunney, & Freedman, 1961).
  The content of hypnotic dreams has been less methodically tested. Some psycho-therapists describe using hypnotic dreams inthe same manner they would nocturnal dreams and believe their content to be virtually identical (Fromm, 1965; Sacerdote, 1968;Schneck, 1953). Other authors describe havingobserved differences between two categories(Gill & Brenman, 1959; Tart, 1966). The most empirical articles to date have indicated some possible differences, such as hypnoticdreams being shorter, having fewer characters,having more " Alice-in-Wonderland" size dis-tortions (Hilgard & Nowlis, 1972), and beingless vivid, less fearful, and more plausible(Spanos & Ham, 1975). Tart (1966) found acorrelation between depth of trance andvividness of hypnotic dreams. Some authorssuch as Barber (1962) and Walker (1974)assert that hypnotic dream content is identicalto that of waking fantasy and quite differentfrom nocturnal dreams. Obviously there aremany contradictions in the literature of this area.
  • Barrett, D. L. (1979). "The Hypnotic Dream: Its Content in Comparison to Nocturnal Dreams and Waking Fantasy". Journal of Abnormal Psychology. 88: 584–591. doi:10.1037/0021-843x.88.5.584. p.584

• Freud also asserted that "a reference to the events of the day just past is to be discovered in every dream," but five detailed studies demonstrate that only about half of dreams contain even the slightest "day residue" that can be identified by the dreamer (Botman & Crovitz, 1989; Harlow & Roll, 1992; Hartmann, 1968; Marquardt, Bonato, & Hoffmann, 1996; Nielsen & Powell, 1992). As part of his emphasis on the large role of specific memories in shaping dream content, Freud believed that all significant speeches in dreams can be traced to memories of speeches heard or sentences read, but the analysis of hundreds of speech acts in dreams collected in sleep laboratories shows they are usually new constructions appropriate to the unfolding dream context, not reproductions (Meier, 1993). Indeed, speech acts are so appropriate to the dream context that bi-lingual participants in one sleep study reported that they spoke in the language understood by the dream character with whom they were talking(Foulkes, Meier, Strauch, & Kerr, 1993).
• Freud's most famous and important claim was that "wish-fulfillment is the meaning of each and every dream." Although this hypothesis was based on his work with adult patients, he began his argument with several simple wishful dreams that he overheard from his pre-school children or learned of through the parents of the dreamers. However, a five-year longitudinal study in the sleep laboratory of 14 children ages 3-5 reveals on the basis of dozens of awakenings that young children have static and bland dreams, not at all like Freud's anecdotal examples (Foulkes, 1982; Foulkes, 1999).
  • Domhoff, G. W. (2000). "Moving Dream Theory Beyond Freud and Jung". Paper presented to the symposium Beyond Freud and Jung?, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA, 9/23/2000.

• If dreaming was selected for because of its adaptive function, the general content of dreams should certainly reflect this, and consist of situations that allow the rehearsal of scenarios that ultimately lead toward increased fitness. This is exactly what is seen, with studies indicating that dream content is biased toward negative elements reflecting threat, as opposed to positive elements. Data collected from over 500 dream reports by Hall and Van de Castle (1966) indicate that about 80% contained negative emotions, while only about 20% contained positive emotions. These negative dreams are also disproportionably likely to contain threatening elements such as animals and male strangers in threatening encounters. The evidence points towards the overrepresentation of threatening events in dreams, which should not occur if dream content is random. Through appropriating and learning to deal with these threats in dreams, it is proposed here that an animal could increase its overall evolutionary fitness.
  • Franklin, M; Zyphur, M (2005). "The role of dreams in the evolution of the human mind" (PDF). Evolutionary Psychology. 3: Archived (PDF) from the original on 2011-08-11, p.66

• Another example of a skill that has arguably played a pivotal role in other functional aspects of the human intellect and could serve to be shaped by dreaming is that of interpretation. As discussed by Bogdan (1997, p.108), “…key advances in interpretation, such as the recognition of belief, were accelerated by increased opportunities to interact with or manipulate subjects and slowed down by a lack of such opportunities.” As such, via teasing, play, mental rehearsal/imagery, or dreaming, the individual is given the opportunity to utilize successful strategies in dealing with these situations and further develop interpretive skills. In fact, studies of children’s dream-reports indicate that their dreams more often contain family members and close friends than adults’ dreams (Hobson, 1988), possibly due to the fact that it is more important for younger children to be practicing close interpersonal skills than it is for adults.
  • Ibid, p.69-70

• The latent content of dreams consists of:
  1. Dynamically unconscious wishes (id impulses) prevented by the censorship (the defences of the ego) from reaching consciousness or even the system preconscious during waking life. Several wishes may be present in the same dream:
  'Dreams frequently seem to have more than one meaning. Not only, as our examples have shown, may they include several wishfulfilments one alongside the other; but a succession of meanings or wish-fulfilments may be superimposed on one another, the bottom one being the fulfilment of a wish dating from earliest childhood. And here again the question arises whether it might not be more correct to assert that this occurs "invariably" rather than "frequently".
  • (1900a) The Interpertation of Dreams, S.E., Vol. 4, p. 219; as quoted in Nagera, Humberto, ed. (2014) [1969]. "Latent dream-content (pp. 31ff.)". Basic Psychoanalytic Concepts on the Theory of Dreams. Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge. ISBN 1-31767048-5. ISBN 978-1-317-67048-3., p.31

• The majority of these impulses are sexual in nature, and most of them stem from the infantile period of life: 'a dream might be described as a substitute for an infantile scene modified by being trnsferred on to a recent experience. The infantile scene is unable to bring about its own revival and has to be content with returning as a dream.'
  • 1900a) The Interpertation of Dreams, S.E., Vol. 5, p. 546; as quoted in Nagera, Humberto, ed. (2014) [1969]. "Latent dream-content (pp. 31ff.)". Basic Psychoanalytic Concepts on the Theory of Dreams. Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge. ISBN 1-31767048-5. ISBN 978-1-317-67048-3., p.31

• Dreaming has fascinated and mystified humankind for ages: the bizarre and evanescent qualities of dreams have invited boundless speculation about their origin, meaning and purpose. For most of the twentieth century, scientific dream theories were mainly psychological. Since the discovery of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the neural underpinnings of dreaming have become increasingly well understood, and it is now possible to complement the details of these brain mechanisms with a theory of consciousness that is derived from the study of dreaming. The theory advanced here emphasizes data that suggest that REM sleep may constitute a protoconscious state, providing a virtual reality model of the world that is of functional use to the development and maintenance of waking consciousness.
  • Hobson, J.A. (2009). "REM sleep and dreaming: towards a theory of protoconsciousness". Nature Reviews Neuroscience. 10 (11): 803–813. doi:10.1038/nrn2716. PMID 19794431.

• We were able to reveal dream content from brain activity during sleep, which was consistent with the subjects' verbal reports.
• All of this would have to be done within individual subjects. So you would never be able build a general classifier that could read anybody's dreams. They will all be idiosyncratic to the individual, so the brain activity will never be general across subjects.
  • Yukiyasu Kamitani, in "Scientists 'read dreams' using brain scans – BBC News". BBC News. Archived from the original on 2016-04-27. Retrieved 2016-04-24.

• This research investigated laypeople's interpretation of their dreams. Participants from both Eastern and Western cultures believed that dreams contain hidden truths (Study 1) and considered dreams to provide more meaningful information about the world than similar waking thoughts (Studies 2 and 3). The meaningfulness attributed to specific dreams, however, was moderated by the extent to which the content of those dreams accorded with participants' preexisting beliefs--from the theories they endorsed to attitudes toward acquaintances, relationships with friends, and faith in God (Studies 3-6). Finally, dream content influenced judgment: Participants reported greater affection for a friend after considering a dream in which a friend protected rather than betrayed them (Study 5) and were equally reluctant to fly after dreaming or learning of a plane crash (Studies 2 and 3). Together, these results suggest that people engage in motivated interpretation of their dreams and that these interpretations impact their everyday lives. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
  • Morewedge, Carey K.; Norton, Michael I. "When dreaming is believing: The (motivated) interpretation of dreams". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 96(2): 249–264. doi:10.1037/a0013264. PMID 19159131.

• The dream censorship functions to preserve sleep by controlling the expression of unconscious wishes, and reventing the generation of unpleasant affect. The inhibition of affect...must be considered as the second consequence of the censorship of dreams, just as dream-distortion is its first consequence' It should be noted that while it is the censorship that necessitates dream distortion, the censorship itself does not actually carry out the distortion, This is done by the dream-work. The work of the censorship is merely to prevent unconscious wishes from entering the preconscious, or from linking up with preconscious wishes. Only if the unconscious wishes can be sufficiently disguised by the dream-work will the censorship permit the compromise formation to be experienced as part of the dream.
  • Nagera, Humberto, ed. "Manifest content" "Basic Psychoanalytic Concepts on the Theory of Dreams". Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge. ISBN 1-31767047-7. ISBN 978-1-317-67047-6. p.57, (2014) [1969]

• Several theories claim that dreaming is a random by-product of REM sleep physiology and that it does not serve any natural function. Phenomenal dream content, however, is not as disorganized as such views imply. The form and content of dreams is not random but organized and selective: during dreaming, the brain constructs a complex model of the world in which certain types of elements, when* compared to waking life, are underrepresented whereas others are over represented. Furthermore, dream content is consistently and powerfully modulated by certain types of waking experiences. On the basis of this evidence, I put forward the hypothesis that the biological function of dreaming is to simulate threatening events, and to rehearse threat perception and threat avoidance. To evaluate this hypothesis, we need to consider the original evolutionary context of dreaming and the possible traces it has left in the dream content of the present human population. In the ancestral environment human life was short and full of threats. Any behavioral advantage in dealing with highly dangerous events would have increased the probability of reproductive success. A dream-production mechanism that tends to select threatening waking events and simulate them over and over again in various combinations would have been valuable for the development and maintenance of threat-avoidance skills. Empirical evidence from normative dream content, children's dreams, recurrent dreams, nightmares, post traumatic dreams, and the dreams of hunter-gatherers indicates that our dream-production mechanisms are in fact specialized in the simulation of threatening events, and thus provides support to the threat simulation hypothesis of the function of dreaming.
  • Revonsuo, A. (2000). "The reinterpretation of dreams: an evolutionary hypothesis of the function of dreaming". Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 23 (6): 877–901. doi:10.1017/S0140525X00004015. PMID 11515147.

• Although the variability of dream content is large, typical dream themes that occur quite often and are reported by many people can be identified (e.g., being chased, falling, flying, failing an examination, being unable to find a toilet or restroom). The present study is an investigation of the stability of the rank order of the dream themes and of gender differences in the content of dreams. The authors administered A. L. Zadra and T. A. Nielsen's (1997) Typical Dream Questionnaire to 444 participants. The findings indicated that most of the 55 dream themes occurred at least once in most of the participants' lifetimes. In addition, the correlation coefficients for the rank order of the themes were very high; that is, the relative frequencies were stable. The gender differences in the present study were in line with content analytic findings; for example, men reported dreams about physical aggression more often than did women. Overall, previous research and the present data indicate that available research results of the measurement of typical dream themes are reliable and valid. The question of the meaning of these themes or the relationship between typical dream contents and waking life experiences, however, has not yet been answered and is open to future research.
  • Michael Schredl; Petra Ciric; Simon Götz; Lutz Wittmann (November 2004). "Typical Dreams: Stability and Gender Differences". The Journal of Psychology. 138 (6): 485–94. doi:10.3200/JRLP.138.6.485-494. PMID 15612605.

• In the past, daydreaming was often considered a failure of mental discipline, or worse. Freud labeled it infantile and neurotic. Psychology textbooks warned it could lead to psychosis. Neuroscientists complained that the rogue bursts of activity on brain scans kept interfering with their studies of more important mental functions.
  But now that researchers have been analyzing those stray thoughts, they’ve found daydreaming to be remarkably common — and often quite useful. A wandering mind can protect you from immediate perils and keep you on course toward long-term goals. Sometimes daydreaming is counterproductive, but sometimes it fosters creativity and helps you solve problems.
  • John Tierney, "Discovering the Virtues of a Wandering Mind". , The New York Times. (June 28, 2010).

• When the brain in not functioning properly during dreams of aggression, sleepwalkers have been able to commit murder. In several cases sleepwalkers did not recognize their victims. For example, one man drove 15 kilometers to his mother-in-law’s house, which means that his motor skills were intact. Then he stabbed her with a knife and did not respond to her screams. He acted as if he was under threat and initiated a fatal attack. This man had a genetic and personal history of awakening abruptly from the first cycle of sleep into a confused state and never entered REM sleep (Cartwright, 2000). The REM sleep is necessary to prevent waking hallucinations and mental illness (Siegel, 2001).
  Since aggression is prominent in most dreams, it is likely that our enemies cause this aggression. In a study by Hall and Van de Castle, animals and male strangers are the primary enemies in both male and female dreams. When a animal enters a dream it is almost always going to pose some threat or danger to the dreamer. The reason for this was thought to be because in ancestral times humans lived in an environment full of dangerous animals. There was also a constant threat from other humans. These ever-present dangers made behavioral strategies to avoid contact with these things and was of a high survival value. Dreaming simulates these strategies in order to maintain efficiency; otherwise, one failure to respond to these threats in waking life could mean death. Dreams are biased towards simulating threats that were common in our ancestral environment (Revonsuo, 2000).

• Tubo, J. "The evolution of dreaming". Archived from the original on 2011-09-28.

• Each day for 14 weeks, 193 college students indicated whether or not they remembered a dream from the previous evening; they also recorded their sleep schedules and noted whether they had (1) exercised and (2) consumed alcohol and caffeine. In addition, the students completed measures of dissociation, schizotypy, sleep-related experiences, and the five-factor model of personality (N=169). Analyses of these data indicated that individual differences in dream recall were strongly stable over a 2-month interval. Dream recall was specifically associated with openness and was unrelated to the other Big Five traits. Subsequent analyses indicated that individuals who are prone to absorption, imagination and fantasy are particularly likely to remember their dreams and to report other vivid nocturnal experiences. These results are consistent with a salience model of dream recall and a continuity model of human consciousness.
  • Watson, David (2003). "To dream, perchance to remember: Individual differences in dream recall". ‘’Personality and Individual Differences’’. 34 (7): 1271–1286. doi:10.1016/S0191-8869(02)00114-9.

• Our standards for beauty are not arbitrary. The presence of genes that impact health and viability makes itself known by impairing symmetry of face and figure. An extreme genetic impediment, such as those that cause mental retardation, may present with gross facial stigmata, such as eyes that are too close or too far apart, or skulls that are misshapen—pointy or enlarged, or too small. When such children are born, their features are not always diagnostic of a particular genetic syndrome. They are referred to sometimes in their medical charts, cruelly, as FLK—“funny looking kids”—in the way that doctors and other medical personnel are often inclined to make light of conditions that are otherwise too terrible to contemplate. It is not known what particular genetic defects cause the more familiar minor physical irregularities, such as a too-long nose, or protuberant ears, or a crooked smile; but it is thought that these too are an indication of a subtle deficiency of some sort.
• An interesting experiment has been conducted numerous times in which the faces of a number of women picked arbitrarily are averaged by means of a computer program. The resultant portrait is of a beautiful woman. She never appears as some sort of bland composite. She seems real and distinctive—and beautiful. So, in a very real sense, being physically attractive is to approach as closely as possible an average appearance: a nose that is straight and of average length, eyes and mouth that are not unusual in any particular way, and other features that are unobtrusive. This conflicts with our usual understanding of beauty—namely, an appearance that is special in some way. But the particular attractiveness of a movie star, for example—however, distinctive and extraordinary she may appear to be—is only a subtle variation of average.

• "The Elements of Beauty: Not entirely in the eye of the beholder", Fredric Neuman, Psychology Today, Sep 06, 2013

• It is difficult to overestimate the importance of determinism in the behavioral sciences. Discovering the determinants of socialization, learning, group dynamics, abnormality, and effective management is the goal in most behavioral science disciplines. What if, for example, the determinants of depression were discovered? Although some behavioral scientists might claim that they already know what determines depression, current knowledge is more an educated guess than an exact understanding. What if we knew precisely the determinants of depression? Knowledge of this sort would surely provide a clear-cut comprehension of the phenomenon as well as suggest a surefire treatment of its harmful effects. In other words, we would know the cause of depression.
  • Brent D. Slife & Richard N. Williams, (1995). What’s behind the research? Discovering hidden assumptions in the behavioral sciences, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, ch.4, p.94.

William Moulton Marston

• Not even the church is so powerfully equipped to serve the public psychologically as is the motion picture company.
  • William Moulton Marston, Henry W. Levy, "Professor to Cure Scenarios with Wrong Emotional Content: Dabbled in Movies While at Harvard; Now Sought By Hollywood with Offer of Favorable Contract", New York University News January 1929; in Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman (2014), p. 137.

• A motion picture must be true to life. If a picture portrays a false emotion a false emotion it trains people seeing it to react abnormally.
  • Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman (2014), p. 136.

• There are one or two rules of thumb which are useful in distinguishing sadism from exciting adventure in the comics. Threat of torture is harmless, but when the torture it’s self is shown it becomes sadism. When a lovely heroine is show bound to the stake, comics followers are sure that the rescue will arrive just in the nick of time. The readers wish is to save the girl, not to see her suffer. A bound or chained person does not suffer even embarrassment in the comics, and the reader, therefore is not being taught to enjoy suffering.
  • As quoted in Olive Richard Bryne's, "Don't laugh at the comics", Family Circle, (Oct 25, 1940).

• I have the good Sergeant’s letter in which he expresses his enthusiasm over chains for women—so what? Some day I’ll make you a list of all the items about women that different people have been known to get passionate over—women’s hair, boots, belts, silk worn by women, gloves, stockings, garters, panties, bare backs. You can’t have a real woman character in any form of fiction without touching off a great many readers’ erotic fancies. Which is swell, I say.

• As quoted in "The Surprising Origin Story of Wonder Woman", Jill Lepore, Smithsonian Magazine, (October 2014).

• The picture story fantasy cuts loose the hampering debris of art and artifice and touches the tender spots of universal human desires and aspirations. Comics speak, without qualm or sophistication to the innermost ears of the wishful self.
  • "Why 100,000,000 Americans Read Comics", The American Scholar, 13.1 (1943): pp 35-44. as quoted in The Ages of Wonder Woman: Essays on the Amazon Princess in Changing Times, edited by Joeph J Darowski, p.9; in the essay "William Marston's Feminist Agenda" by Michelle R. Finn

• If you conclude, as I do, that the only hope of a permanent peace and happiness for humanity on this planet is an increased expression of love, and that women are the primary carriers of this great force, one of the problems we face is to provide women with more opportunity for using their love powers. The last six thousand years have demonstrated quite conclusively, I believe, that woman under the domination of man can increase but meagerly the world's total love supply. Our obvious goal, than must be to devise social mechanisms whereby man is brought under the love domination of woman.
  • Women: Servants for Civilization, p.44, as quoted in The Ages of Wonder Woman: Essays on the Amazon Princess in Changing Times, edited by Joeph J Darowski, p.9; in the essay "William Marston's Feminist Agenda" by Michelle R. Finn,

• If children will read comics [...] isn't it advisable t o give them some constructive comics to read? [...] The wish to be super strong is a healthy wish, a vital compelling, power-producing desire. The more the Superman-Wonder Woman picture stories build this innner compulsion by stimulating the child's natural longing to battle and overcome obstacles, particularly evil ones, the better the better chance your child has for self-advancement in the world. Certainly there can be no arguement about the advisability of strengthening the fundamental human desire, too often buried beneath stultifying divertissments and disguises, to see god overcome evil.
  • "Why 100,000,000 Americans Read Comics", The American Scholar, 13.1 (1943): p 40, as quoted in The Ages of Wonder Woman: Essays on the Amazon Princess in Changing Times, edited by Joeph J Darowski, pp. 9-10; in the essay "William Marston's Feminist Agenda" by Michelle R. Finn, as quoted in The Ages of Wonder Woman: Essays on the Amazon Princess in Changing Times, edited by Joeph J Darowski, p.9; in the essay "William Marston's Feminist Agenda" by Michelle R. Finn.

• The creation of children is not justifiable in a majority of unions between the sexes; but when the creation responses are justifiably undertaken, there is sound psychological ground for advising the woman to provide, beforehand, sufficient funds of her own to carry both herself and the child through the period of her physical incapacity for appetitive work. There is sound psychological ground, also, for requiring the male to share equally at least, in the home work and the care of children.
  • The Emotions of Normal People, 395 as quoted in The Ages of Wonder Woman: Essays on the Amazon Princess in Changing Times, edited by Joeph J Darowski, p.18 in the essay "William Marston's Feminist Agenda" by Michelle R. Finn.

• Nearly all the sophomores reported excited pleasantness of captivation emotion throughout the party. The pleasantness of captivation response appeared to increase when they were obliged to overcome rebellious freshmen physically, or to preform the actions from which the captive girls strove to escape....

Female behavior also contains still more evidence than male behavior that captivation emotion is not limited to inter-sex relationships. The person of another girls seems to evoke from female subjects, under appropriate circumstances, filly as strong captivation response as does that of a male.

• The Emotions of Normal People as quoted in Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter comics, 1941-1948 pp. 64-65 by Noah Berlatsky.

• In the majority of cases which are brought to me as a consulting psychologist for love and marital adjustment, there are self-deceptions to be uncovered as well as attempts to deceive other people. Beneath such love conflicts there is almost always a festering psychological core of dishonesty.
  • Lie Detector Test, p. 119.

• The only hope for civilization is the greater freedom, development and equality of women in all fields of human activity.
  • "Noted Psychologist Revealed as Author of Best-Selling "Wonder Woman, Children's Comic," press release, typescript [June 1942], WW Letters, Smithsonian

• Give men an alluring woman stronger than themselves to submit to and they'll be proud to become her willing slaves.
  • Are Comics Fascist?, as quoted in The Ages of Wonder Woman: Essays on the Amazon Princess in Changing Times, edited by Joeph J Darowski, p.7 in the essay "William Marston's Feminist Agenda" by Michelle R. Finn, p.14.

• The next 100 years will see the beginning of an American matriarchy—a nation of amazons in the psychological rather than the physical sense. In 500 years there will be a serious sex battle. And in 1000 years women will definitely rule this country.
  • "Neglected Amazons to Rule Men in 1000 yrs., Says Psychologist"; Washington Post, November 11, 1937.

• Tolerant people are the happiest, so why not get rid of prejudices that hold you back?
  • Your Life What are your prejudices? (1939).

• This noted scientist is the most genuine human being I’ve met. He isn’t fat—that is, in the ordinary way. He’s just enormous all over. We walked through the garden and about the grounds. The doctor asked me about my work and myself, and I told him more in 15 minutes than I’d tell my most intimate friend in a week. He’s the kind of person to whom you confide things about yourself you scarcely realize.
  • Olive Richard Bryne, Family Circle 1935 as quoted in "Last Amazon" New Yorker, (09/22/2014).

• If, as psychologists, we follow the analogy of the other biological sciences, we must expect to find normalcy synonymous with maximal efficiency of function. Survival of the fittest means survival of those members of a species whose organisms most successfully resist the encroachments of environmental antagonists, and continue to function with the greatest internal harmony. In the field of emotions, then, why would we alter this expectation? Why should we seek the spectacularly disharmonious emotions, the feelings that reveal a crushing of ourselves by environment, and consider these affective responses as our normal emotions? If a jungle beast is torn and wounded during the course of an ultimately victorious battle, it would be a spurious logic indeed that attributed its victory to its wounds. If a human being be emotionally torn and mentally disorganized by fear or rage during a business battle from which, ultimately, he emerges victorious, it seems equally nonsensical to ascribe his conquering strength to those emotions symptomatic of his temporary weakness and defeat. Victory comes in proportion as fear is banished. Perhaps the battle may be won with some fear still handicapping the victor, but that only means that the winner's maximal strength was not required.
  • The Emotions of Normal People, (1928), p.2

• What does the average teacher of psychology mean when he glibly rattles the words "fear", "rage", "anger", and "sex-emotion"? Almost any literary light of the Victorian era, if asked to define these words, would have answered, readily enough : "They are names for emotions possessing distinctive conscious qualities, experienced by everybody, every day. These easily recognized, primitive emotions constitute the very backbone of literature." I submit that the backbone of literature has been transplanted intact into, psychology, where it has proved pitifully inadequate. The whole structure of our recently christened "science", in consequence, remains spineless in its attempted descriptions of human behaviour. Most teachers of psychology, it would seem, are still unable to define these time-worn emotional terms with greater exactness or scientific meaning than that employed by literary men of the last century.
  Nor can the average teacher be blamed. Theorists and researchers upon whom the teacher must depend for his scientific, concepts have written many hundreds of thousands of words on the subject of emotions, without attempting definite, psycho-neural descriptions of a single basic, or primary emotion. On the other hand, nearly all writers seem to accept the old, undefined literary names of various "emotions" without question ; each writer then giving these terms such connotation as they may happen to hold for him, individually.

• Ibid, pp. 3-4.

• But a person who calls himself a psychologist is in a peculiar position these days. Before he can write about the psychology of emotion, or intelligence, or, in fact, about the psychology of any human behaviour, he must define what he means by psychology. The introspectionistic psychologists, now considered unscientific, regarded any exposition as psychological which described its phenomena in subjective or introspective terms. Now the introspectionists are pushed into the background. In their place we find a great variety of teachers and researchers all naming their diverse methods and observations "psychology". We have, for instance, in the field of emotions, the physiologists the neurologists the physiological psychologists, the behaviorists, the endocrinologists, the mental-tester-statisticians, the psycho-analysts, and the psychiatrists. Each of these types of worker confesses himself to be a psychologist, and, moreover, each maintains that his are the only psychologically worth-while results. Psychology to-day, like Europe in the Middle Ages, is being fought over by feudal barons who have little in common save tacit acceptance of the rule that spoils shall be taken whenever and however possible.

• Ibid, pp. 5-6.

• Our problem is : What are the underlying desires or wishes, that lead some scientists to insist upon mechanistic conceptions, and others equally eminent, to espouse some form of scientific vitalism ? For in psychology, as in other sciences, a materialistic or vitalistic bias may be found at the root of nearly all factional schools, or contentious groups. Sometimes, of course, the underlying desire relates solely to the advancement of the personal fortunes of the workers concerned ; and such purely egoistic motives probably play a considerable part in the evolution of every scientific doctrine. In addition to this, however, originators and promulgators of conceptual systems of thought, nearly always possess hidden desires to push science in this direction or that, " for science's own sake ". The goal selected is the one that accords most closely with the basic emotional set of the scientific agitator. And the emotional sets of scientists may be classified, broadly, into two elementary groups, materialistic and vitalistic.

• William Moulton Marston, The Emotions of Normal People, (1928), p. 7.

Wilhelm Reich

• It is the mechanistic-mystical character of modern man that produces fascist parties, and not vice versa.
  The result of erroneous political thinking is that even today fascism is conceived as a specific national characteristic of the Germans or the Japanese.
  • Wilhelm Reich, in his Preface (August 1942), to the Third Edition of The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), p. xiii.

• If, by being revolutionary, one means rational rebellion against intolerable social conditions, if, by being radical, one means "going to the root of things," the rational will to improve them, then fascism is never revolutionary. True, it may have the aspect of revolutionary emotions. But one would not call that physician revolutionary who proceeds against a disease with violent cursing but the other who quietly, courageously and conscientiously studies and fights the causes of the disease. Fascist rebelliousness always occurs where fear of the truth turns a revolutionary emotion into illusion.
  In its pure form, fascism is the sum total of all irrational reactions of the average human character. To the narrow-minded sociologist who lacks the courage to recognize the enormous role played by the irrational in human history, the fascist race theory appears as nothing but an imperialistic interest or even a mere 'prejudice.' The violence and the ubiquity of these "race prejudices" show their origin from the irrational part of the human character. The race theory is not a creation of fascism. No: fascism is a creation of race hatred and its politically organized expression. Correspondingly, there is a German, Italian, Spanish, Anglo-Saxon, Jewish and Arabian fascism. Race ideology is a pure biopathic expression of the character structure of the orgastically impotent man.
  The sadistically perverse character of race ideology is also betrayed in its attitude towards religion. Fascism is supposed to be a reversion to paganism and an archenemy of religion. Far from it - fascism is the supreme expression of religious mysticism. As such, it comes into being in a peculiar social form. Fascism countenances that religiosity that stems from sexual perversion, and it transforms the masochistic character of the old patriarchal religion of suffering into a sadistic religion. In short, it transposes religion from the ‘other-worldliness’ of the philosophy of suffering to the ‘this worldliness’ of sadistic murder.
  • Wilhelm Reich, in his Preface (August 1942), to the Third Edition of The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), p. xiv.

• The structure of fascism is characterized by metaphysical thinking, unorthodox faith, obsession with abstract ethical ideals, and belief in the divine predestination of the fuhrer. These basic features are linked with a deeper layer, which is characterized by a strong authoritarian tie to the fuhrer-ideal or the nation. The belief in a ‘master race’ became the principal mainspring of the tie to the ‘fuhrer’ on the part of the National Socialist masses, as well as the foundation of their voluntary acceptance of slavish submission.
  • Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), p. 80.

• Fascism grew out of the conservatism of the Social Democrats on the one hand and the narrow-mindedness and senility of the capitalists on the other hand. It did not embody those ideals that had been advocated by its predecessors in a practical way, but solely in an ideological way (and this was the only thing that mattered to the masses of people whose psychic structures were ridden with illusions). It included the most brutal political reaction, the same political reaction that had devastated human life and property in the middle Ages. It paid tribute to so-called native tradition in a mystical and brutal way, which had nothing to do with a genuine feeling for one’s native country and attachment to the soil. By calling itself’ socialist’ and ‘revolutionary’, it took over the unfulfilled functions of the socialists. By dominating industrial magnates, it took over capitalism. From now on, the achievement of ‘socialism’ was entrusted to an all-powerful fuhrer who had been sent by God. The powerlessness and helplessness of the masses of people gave impetus to this fuhrer ideology, which had been implanted in man’s structure by the authoritarian school and nourished by the church and compulsive family. The ‘salvation of the nation’ by an all-powerful fuhrer who had been sent by God was in complete accord with the intense desire of the masses for salvation. Incapable of conceiving of themselves as having a different nature, their subservient structure eagerly imbibed the idea of man’s immutability and of the ‘natural division of humanity into the few who lead and the many who are led’. Now the responsibility rested in the hands of a strong man. In fascism or wherever else it is encountered, this fascist fuhrer ideology rests upon the mystical hereditary idea of man’s immutable nature, upon the helplessness, craving for authority, and incapacity for freedom of the masses of people. Admitted that the formula, ‘Man requires leadership and discipline’, ‘authority and order’, can be justified in terms of man’s present anti-social structure, the attempt to eternalize this structure and to hold it to be immutable is reactionary. The fascist ideology had the best of intentions. Those who did not recognize this subjective honesty failed altogether to comprehend fascism and its attraction for the masses. Since the problem of the human structure was never brought up or discussed, let alone mastered, the idea of a non authoritarian, self-regulatory society was looked upon as chimerical and Utopian.
  • Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), p. 234.

Disorders

• The study of human personality or ‘character’ (from the Greek charaktêr, the mark impressed upon a coin) dates back at least to antiquity. In his Characters, Tyrtamus (371-287 bc)—nicknamed Theophrastus or ‘divinely speaking’ by his contemporary Aristotle— divided the people of the Athens of the 4th century BC into thirty different personality types, including 'arrogance', 'irony', and 'boastfulness'. The Characters exerted a strong influence on subsequent studies of human personality such as those of Thomas Overbury (1581-1613) in England and Jean de la Bruyère (1645-1696) in France.
• While personality disorders may differ from mental disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, they do, by definition, lead to significant impairment. They are estimated to affect about 10 per cent of people, although this figure ultimately depends on where clinicians draw the line between a ‘normal’ personality and one that leads to significant impairment. Characterizing the ten personality disorders is difficult, but diagnosing them reliably is even more so. For instance, how far from the norm must personality traits deviate before they can be counted as disordered? How significant is ‘significant impairment’? And how is ‘impairment’ to be defined?

• "The 10 Personality Disorders: A short, sharp look into the 10 personality disorders.", Neel Burton, Psychology Today, May 29, 2012

• Patients who have been diagnosed with DID tend to possess extreme sensitivity to interpersonal trust and rejection issues, and this makes brief treatment in a managed care setting difficult.14 Therapists who commonly treat patients with DID see them as outpatients weekly or biweekly for years, with the goal of fusion of the personality states while retaining the entire range of experiences contained in all of the alters.
  Patients tend to switch personality states when there is a perceived psychosocial threat. This switching allows a distressed alter to retreat while an alter who is more competent to handle the situation emerges. The alter system may replicate the DID patient’s experience of the relationships and circumstances that prevailed in the family of origin.3 In Kluft’s view,3 alternate identities or personality states are the core phenomena of DID. Kluft does not view the alters as obstacles, distractions, or artifacts to be bypassed or suppressed. In fact, he argues that he has found no evidence of improvement if the therapist does not work with these alternate personality states.

• Paulette Marie Gillig, "Dissociative Identity Disorder A Controversial Diagnosis", Psychiatry (Edgmont). 2009 Mar; 6(3): 24–29.

• Although previously the monoamine systems were considered to be responsible for the development of major depressive disorder (MDD), the available evidence to date does not support a direct causal relationship with MDD. There is no simple direct correlation of serotonin or norepinephrine levels in the brain and mood. In other words, after a half-century of research, the chemical-imbalance hypothesis as promulgated by the drug companies that manufacture SSRIs and other antidepressants is not only without clear and consistent support, but has been disproved by experimental evidence.
  • Irving Kirsch (2010). The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth. p. 92.

• Three-phase drug studies with FDA approval will also have to be completed before these types of drugs can be removed from the list of substances with no medical purpose. Safety and quality control are always important and will also need much more research.
  The problem is that pharmaceutical companies are not interested in researching an inexpensive substance that has been around for a long time. There is no money to be made with a non-patentable drug that is given only once or twice in a lifetime.
  • "Can Psilocybin Mushrooms Help Cure Mental Illness?", Constance Scharff, Psychology Today, Jul 02, 2014

• Did you know that of the 14 states with the highest number of painkiller prescriptions per person, they all went for Trump?

• Bill Maher Real Time with Bill Maher, January 20th 2017

• Ibogaine is a psychoactive alkaloid naturally occurring in the West African shrub iboga. While ibogaine is a mild stimulant in small doses, in larger doses it induces a profound psychedelic state. Historically, it has been used in healing ceremonies and initiations by members of the Bwiti religion in various parts of West Africa. People with problem substance use have found that larger doses of ibogaine can significantly reduce withdrawal from opiates and temporarily eliminate substance-related cravings.
  • Multidisciplinary Association For Psychedelic Studies

• People with PTSD are afflicted with three primary types of symptoms.
  The first type of symptoms involves all manner of intrusive memories of the event that often come with startling clarity via flashbacks and nightmares. Along with anything else that reminds a person of the trauma, these intrusive memories produce profound psychological distress and physical symptoms, such as a pounding heart.
  The second type of symptoms revolves around avoidance and emotional numbing.
  Bedeviled as they are by unwanted memories, images, nightmares and flashbacks that keep the terrifying reality of their experience emotionally alive for them, people with PTSD often go to heroic lengths to avoid anything in the personal or physical environment that reminds them of the trauma.
  They often also report feeling emotionally deadened, unable to love and disinterested in things others find pleasurable. Often they feel like they will die young or have less of a future than other people.
  The third and final symptom domain of PTSD is known as hyperarousal. Hyperarousal symptoms include difficulty falling or staying asleep, irritability or outbursts of anger, difficulty concentrating, being hypervigilant and finally, demonstrating an exaggerated startle response.
  These PTSD symptoms usually don't travel alone, unfortunately, but are frequently accompanied by depression and difficulties with drugs and alcohol.
• There is another symptom of acute trauma that can be easily missed if you are not on the lookout for it that strongly predicts the development of later PTSD. In layman's parlance, we might call it "being spaced out." More technically, we call it dissociation.
  When people dissociate, things come apart in a variety of ways.
  Often they feel separated from themselves, as if they are watching themselves from some outside vantage point. Frequently they feel that there is some type of invisible wall between themselves and the rest of the world. Sometimes they will feel that everything in the world, including themselves, is somehow unreal.
  I've heard patients describe this experience as being like looking at the world through the wrong end of a telescope, so that everything seems smaller and distorted. In extreme instances, people so thoroughly lose track of things that they develop amnesia.

• Charles Raison, "PTSD: Know the symptoms and when to get help", CNN, (August 24, 2012).

• People with mood disorders, including those who are unresponsive to conventional therapies, might be able to ditch their antidepressants and antianxiety medications. Those with terminal illness could enjoy their remaining days without the fear of death looming over them, while people with PTSD could return to a normal life unobstructed by paralyzing flashbacks. And rehab centers for substance use and eating disorders could empty out as more people turn to psychedelics.
• In 2016, for instance, a Johns Hopkins study and a concurrent New York University study found that about 80 percent of cancer patients showed clinically significant decreases in depressed mood and anxiety even six months after receiving one to two psilocybin treatments.
  Psilocybin also appears to be an effective treatment for addiction. Echoing past research with LSD, scientists recently showed decreased cravings for and increased abstinence from alcohol after psilocybin treatment in a proof-of-concept study — and the benefits were still in evidence nine months later.
  Psilocybin seems especially promising as a tool for smoking cessation.
  In a preliminary study of smokers conducted in 2014, 80 percent of participants remained nicotine-free six months after receiving three psilocybin sessions. And 60 percent of the participants remained nicotine-free an average of 30 months after treatment.
• "Normally, when someone [with PTSD] would be instructed to relive the traumatic experience, they would be overwhelmed with fear, anxiety, and despair," Grob says. "But while under the influence of the MDMA, it's as if they can navigate the experience more safely."
  In recent clinical trials, 61 percent of 107 participants no longer had PTSD symptoms two months after MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. Sixty-eight percent were still PTSD-free a year later. In light of findings like these, the FDA recently deemed MDMA a "breakthrough therapy," putting it on the fast track for approval.

• “Will Psychedelic Therapy Transform Mental Health Care?”, Joseph Bennington-Castro , NBC News, Sep.28.2017

• As our experience with drug education has developed and been charted, it has become apparent that effective efforts need to be comprehensive. A classroom teacher's efforts must be reinforced by school wide drug abuse prevention activities, and these must in turn be supported by interventions in all aspects of community life. Furthermore, it is not enough merely to address the surface issue of drug use behavior; we must also address the environmental circumstances that contribute to such problems. This complex issue presents a great challenge to drug educators, but it also calls for a restructuring, sometimes called a paradigm shift, of many of our social institutions and the way they interact.
  For example, faith-based organizations are generally uninvolved in drug abuse prevention, except to condemn drug abuse. For them to have an organized and planned role in prevention will require a shift in their thinking about their goals and what type of programs they should sponsor. Establishing referral networks, service linkages, and collaborative relationships among community agencies and individuals is a difficult hurdle.
  Whether or not this is done, drug education professionals often do not know the long-term results of their work because the outcome occurs in the future, when educators no longer have contact with the objects of their efforts. Satisfaction may come from reviewing data trends as the years unfold, but this is not as gratifying as the immediate results that may come from participating in drug treatment of other kinds of human service work in which success is more immediately apparent. Of course, the flip side is that failure also is not recognized. Prevention efforts are repeated because they are well received or because of the inherent satisfaction of doing them. The fact that they have no impact may not be realized without careful evaluation.
  There has been a new push by the U.S. government to demand that state and local prevention programs, wen funded by state and federal dollars, be "science based." The expectation is that programs should show some evidence, prior to implementation, that they will actually affect youth drug use. The background to this effort is that enthusiasm and genuine concern for preventing adolescent drug abuse have often been translated into activities that are enjoyable but not carefully examined and tested. Schools have used funds to purchase t-shirts and ribbons, hire expensive motivational speakers, and to acquire videotapes and untested curriculum material without any assurance that such expenditures have led in the past, or will lead in the future, to decreases in youth drug use.
  • Richard W. Wilson; Cheryl A. Kolander. (2003). Drug abuse prevention: a school and community partnership, Sudbury, Mass.: Jones and Bartlett, p.5.

• In a release, Green commented that CBD could provide direct neurological support for a range of conditions affecting the brain, from schizophrenia to dementia. “From this review, we found that CBD will not improve learning and memory in healthy brains, but may improve aspects of learning and memory in illnesses associated with cognitive impairment, including Alzheimer’s disease, as well as neurological and neuro-inflammatory disorders," including hepatic encephalopathy, meningitis, sepsis, and cerebral malaria.
• “We found that CBD was able to restore recognition and working memory, as well as social behavior, to normal levels,” Osborne said in a release. "These findings are interesting because they suggest that CBD may be able to treat some of the symptoms of schizophrenia that are seemingly resistant to existing medications. In addition, CBD treatment did not alter body weight or food intake, which are common side effects of antipsychotic drug treatment.”
  Osborne also explained to ABC News Australia, "This is really important because current antipsychotic drugs don't address the cognitive deficits, which approximately 80% of patients with schizophrenia experience."
• A preliminary study published this year provided a retrospective evaluation of cannabis' effectiveness and tolerability in treating adults with Tourette Syndrome. Conducted by researchers at the University of Toronto with support from the Tourette Association of America, the study found that 18 of 19 participants were at least "much improved" after a regimen of inhaled cannabis, while tics scores for the whole group decreased by 60%.

• "Cannabis Shows Promise In Treating Schizophrenia And Tourette Syndrome", Janet Burns, Forbes, August 28, 2017.

• In a study 36 children in the 8-10 year age group were selected for a double blind, randomized trial. Nineteen were given 50 mg of Bacopa twice daily, 17 others received placebo. After 12 weeks of treatment, the children were subjected to a battery of specialized tests. The data revealed a significant improvement in the areas of sentence repetition, logical memory and pair associative learning (matching things that go together; e.g. “test” and “grade”) in all 19 ADHD children who took Bacopa.
  Also demonstrated a significant memory promoting effect in animal models of Alzheimer's disease.
• In a study, 61 subjects of both sex with an age range of 62-75 years were selected. Twenty-eight aged had cognitive deficits particularly the memory loss. Whereas 33 were normal aged. The subject of both group were treated with organic extract of BM in effective doses continuously for 6 months and evaluated on various neuropsychological parameters. The results obtained at the end of 6 months revealed beneficial effect in improving memory and attention span and also associated behavioral problems among demented elderly people. The neurochemical loss was checked and enhanced in senile dementia cases. The test drug has potentiality to improve memory and other cognitive deficits among the aged suffering from dementia and associated behavioral problems.
• In an experimental study, daily administration of Ashwagandha root extract (50,100 and 200 mg/kg orally) for 6 days significantly improved memory-consolidation in mice receiving chronic electroconvulsive shock (ECS) treatment. Ashwagandha administered on day 7, also attenuated the disruption of memory consolidation, produced by chronic treatment with ECS. On the elevated plus maze Ashwagandha reversed the scopolamine (0.3 mg/kg) induced delay in transfer latency on day 1. On the basis of these findings it is suggested that Ashwagandha exhibits a nootropic-like effect in naive and amnesic mice
• Drugs mentioned as Medhya (intellect promoting) and those indicated to improve cognitive functions can be used successfully in cases of dyslexia.
  The review indicates the Ayurvedic drugs like Brahmi, Mandookaparni, Shankhapushpi, Jyotishmati, Ashwagandha, Jatamansi, Madhuyashti and Guduchi have the potential to provide a significant improvement in children suffering from dyslexia. All these drugs improve the brain functions and also the sensory and motor systems as a result of their medhya properties and thereby can help in management of various areas of dyslexic child's malfunctioning.
  This is only a conceptual study, but the information provided can be utilized in clinical researches.

• "Dyslexia: A solution through Ayurveda evidences from Ayurveda for the management of dyslexia in children: A review", Anita Sharma, Vinod K. Gothecha, and Nisha K. Ojha, An International Quaterly Journal of Research in Ayuvedra, v.33(4);, Oct-Dec 2012

• “In the past 20 years, I’ve not seen anything like this,” says Dr. Cristina Cusin, a clinician and researcher who runs the ketamine clinic at Massachusetts General Hospital. Studies have shown that 60% to 70% of people with treatment-resistant depression respond to ketamine.
  • "New Hope for Depression" Mandy Oaklander, TIME, July 27, 2017

• Marital status was a consistently significant correlate of MDE. Being separated was associated with increased risk of MDE in twelve countries, with odds ratios varying from < 4.0 in five countries to > 8.0 in India (OR = 8.2), Japan (OR = 10.8) and Lebanon (OR = 19.3). Being divorced was associated with MDE in seven of the ten developed and four of the eight developing countries, with unusually high ORs in Japan (OR = 5.1), China (OR = 6.2) and Ukraine (OR = 4.2). Being widowed was less consistently and more modestly associated with MDE with the exception of Ukraine, where widows were eight times as likely as married men and women to have MDE. In the high-income countries, there was a significantly increased OR of MDE among the never married. However, India and South Africa were the only two low- to middle-income samples with significant ORs, and in these countries never being married was associated with low risk. Overall, the association between marital status and MDE differed significantly between high and low- to middle-income countries (χ2 3 = 124.4, P < 0.001), due to stronger associations of being separated and never married with depression in high-income countries, and stronger associations of being divorced and widowed with depression in low- to middle-income countries.
• The poorest respondents in France, Germany, New Zealand and the USA had an approximately twofold increased odds of MDE compared with those in the highest income group. In the low- to middle-income countries, in comparison, income was not significantly related to MDE. This stronger association between income and MDE in higher-income countries was significant overall (χ2 3 = 19.3, P < 0.001). Similarly, among the non-Asian countries, low education was significantly associated with MDE only in Israel, the USA, Mexico and Ukraine. The findings for the Asian countries were more complex. In India, respondents with the lowest education were 14 times as likely to have MDE as those with the highest education. In Japan and China, the reverse pattern was found, with the least educated having the lowest risk of MDE.
• On one level, it seems counterintuitive that people in high-income countries should experience more stress than those in low- to middle-income countries. However, it has been suggested that depression is to some extent an illness of affluence. A related argument is that income inequality, which is for the most part greater in high than low- to middle-income countries, promotes a wide variety of chronic conditions that includes depression.

• “Cross-national epidemiology of DSM-IV major depressive episode”, Evelyn Bromet, Laura Helena Andrade, Irving Hwang, Nancy A Sampson, Jordi Alonso,Giovanni de Girolamo, Ron de Graaf, Koen Demyttenaere, Chiyi Hu, Noboru Iwata, Aimee N Karam, Jagdish Kaur, Stanislav Kostyuchenko, Jean-Pierre Lépine, Daphna Levinson, Herbert Matschinger, Maria Elena Medina Mora, Mark Oakley Browne, Jose Posada-Villa, Maria Carmen Viana, David R Williams and Ronald C Kessler, BMC Medicine, June 2011

• Even suicidal behavior might serve a design function. A small minority of researchers believe that we may have evolved to, under the right conditions, try to kill ourselves. Edward Hagen, an anthropologist at Washington State University, is one of the most vocal supporters of this idea, and he presented fresh support for it in the May 2016 issue of Evolution and Human Behavior. He and two WSU collaborators, Kristen Syme and Zachary Garfield, set out to find evidence for two models of suicidal behavior, each of which cast suicide as a strategic behavior.
  The first model is called inclusive fitness, and it relies on the notion of the “selfish gene”: The most basic unit of reproduction in natural selection is not the individual organism but the gene. Your genes don’t care if you survive to reproduce, as long as they do, and they exist in more people than just you. So they might lead you, their host organism, to sacrifice yourself if it sufficiently benefits your family members, who share many of your genes. Hence, people seek to maximize not only their own fitness but, inclusively, that of their kin too. Most parents would decide in an instant to jump in front of a bus to save their children. And in studies of suicidal thinking, people frequently speak about not wanting to be a burden.
  The second strategic model of suicidality is the bargaining model, which relies on the notion of “costly signaling.”6 A colorful example of costly signaling is the peacock. Managing a big, eye-catching tail is costly, in that it wastes energy and draws predators. But the fitter a peacock, the less costly a big tail, and so big tails have evolved to signal genetic fitness to peahens. They are attractive not despite their costliness but because of it. In addition to communicating fitness, costly signals can also communicate need. Consider baby birds. They don’t need to chirp for food if their mother is right there, and chirping attracts predators, making it costly. But the more hungry or sickly a chick is, the less it has to lose by being eaten, and the more it has to gain by being fed. So chirping louder is an honest signal of greater need for food, and the mother responds. (Anthropologists and psychiatrists have long framed suicide attempts as cries for help, but considered them pathological forms of pleading rather than the results of context-sensitive and evolved cost-benefit analyses.) Whereas the goal of suicidality in the inclusive fitness model is death, the goal in the bargaining model is help. Crucially, the vast majority of suicide attempts are not fatal.
  • Matthew Hutson,"Does Depression Have an Evolutionary Purpose?", Nautilus, (February 9, 2017).

• So what could be so useful about depression? Depressed people often think intensely about their problems. These thoughts are called ruminations; they are persistent and depressed people have difficulty thinking about anything else. Numerous studies have also shown that this thinking style is often highly analytical. They dwell on a complex problem, breaking it down into smaller components, which are considered one at a time.
• Analysis requires a lot of uninterrupted thought, and depression coordinates many changes in the body to help people analyze their problems without getting distracted.
• But depression is nature’s way of telling you that you’ve got complex social problems that the mind is intent on solving. Therapies should try to encourage depressive rumination rather than try to stop it, and they should focus on trying to help people solve the problems that trigger their bouts of depression. (There are several effective therapies that focus on just this.) It is also essential, in instances where there is resistance to discussing ruminations, that the therapist try to identify and dismantle those barriers.
  • Paul W. Andrews, J. Anderson Thomson Jr., "Depression's Evolutionary Roots" Scientific American, (August 25, 2009).

• My profession of psychiatry still views depression purely as an illness. Insurance limitations have pushed many psychiatrists away from talk therapy and toward the more efficient prescription pad. So “there’s a lot of institutional and scientific investment in the exclusively disease model of depression. I’m basically telling colleagues they’re medicating people when they shouldn’t be. That’s not going to be welcome news.
  • J. Anderson Thomson, "Does Depression Have an Evolutionary Purpose?" Matthew Hutson, Nautilus, (February 9, 2017).

• The Centers for Disease Control first attempted to tally ADHD cases in 1997 and found that about 3 percent of American schoolchildren had received the diagnosis, a number that seemed roughly in line with past estimates. But after that year, the number of diagnosed cases began to increase by at least 3 percent every year. Then, between 2003 and 2007, cases increased at a rate of 5.5 percent each year. In 2013, the CDC released data revealing that 11 percent of American schoolchildren had been diagnosed with ADHD, which amounts to 6.4 million children between the ages of four and seventeen—a 16 percent increase since 2007 and a 42 percent increase since 2003. Boys are more than twice as likely to be diagnosed as girls—15.1 percent to 6.7 percent.
• The United States government first collected information on mental disorders in 1840, when the national census listed two generally accepted conditions: idiocy and insanity.
• One of the most shocking studies of the rise in ADHD diagnoses was published in 2012 in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. It was called "Influence of Relative Age on Diagnosis and Treatment of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder in Children." Nearly one million children between the ages of six and twelve took part, making it the largest study of its kind ever. The researchers found that "boys who were born in December"—typically the youngest students in their class—"were 30 percent more likely to receive a diagnosis of ADHD than boys born in January," who were a full year older. And "boys were 41 percent more likely to be given a prescription for a medication to treat ADHD if they were born in December than if they were born in January."
• Children with ADHD often get more time to take tests, and in some school districts, tests taken by ADHD kids do not even have to be included in the overall average.

• "The Drugging of the American Boy" Ryan D'Agostino, Esquire, Mar 27, 2014

• Researchers at the University of Heidelberg in Germany randomly assigned 19 children with ADHD either to yoga for children or traditional exercise. The researchers found that the yoga group had significant improvement in ADHD symptoms including attention problems, compared to the exercise group. Furthermore, yoga was effective for children undergoing drug treatment.
  • "Kids Yoga May Help Relieve ADHD" by Elaine Gavalas Huffington Post, 09/20/2013

• Women with eating disorders often report a lack of sexual interest during the course of their eating disorder. Several solid studies, including one, which assessed 242 women, found that issues with physical intimacy, libido, sexual anxiety, and difficulty in romantic relationships are present among this population.
  The results found that: Intercourse (55.3%), having a partner (52.7%), decreased sexual desire (66.9%), and increased sexual anxiety (59.2%) were common. Women with restricting and purging anorexia nervosa had a higher prevalence of loss of libido than women with bulimia nervosa and eating disorder not otherwise specified (75%, 74.6%, 39%, and 45.4%, respectively). Absence of sexual relationships was associated with lower minimum lifetime body mass index (BMI) and earlier age of onset; loss of libido with lower lifetime BMI, higher interoceptive awareness and trait anxiety; and sexual anxiety with lower lifetime BMI, higher harm avoidance and ineffectiveness. Sexual dysfunction in eating disorders was higher than in the normative sample.
• Only 25 percent of women are consistently orgasmic during vaginal intercourse. Orgasm for female patients with eating disorders is significantly reduced due to medical and psychological factors.
• Food, like sex, is a pleasure. Helping patients work toward emotional and physical intimacy in relationships is an important and life sustaining goal. Usually, when a patient is well on her way toward recovery and trust is deeply established and maintained with the therapist opportunities for frank conversations about sex can occur.

• Sexual Satisfaction and Eating Disorders, Judy Scheel, Psychology Today, Jun 19, 2014.

• Fifty percent of both our anorectic and bulimic patients reported a history of sexual abuse while only 28% of a non-anorexic, non-bulimic control population reported similar problems (p less than 0.01).
• Forty six percent of the bulimic women seen in our study exhibited some promiscuous behavior, using sex either as a gauge of their own self worth or as a means of punishing men. It is essential that sexual issues be addressed early in the treatment of patients with eating disorders.

• "Sexual abuse in patients with eating disorders.", Tice L, Hall RC, Beresford TP, Quinones J, Hall AK, Psychiatr Med., 1989; 7(4):257-67.

• A 2012 study published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics found that women suffering from eating disorders are four times more likely to be vegetarian than women without eating disorders. More than half (52 percent) of women with a history of eating disorders had been vegetarians at one point in their lives.
• In Project EAT, an ongoing study that assessed eating and weight-related behaviors in adolescents from 31 Minneapolis schools, about 6 percent of students reported being vegetarians. Of those, 35 percent did so to lose weight. Vegetarians also were more likely to be involved in unhealthy weight control behaviors, such as binge eating, vomiting, and using laxatives or diet pills.

• "Vegetarianism and Eating Disorders", Carolyn C. Ross, Psychology Today, Nov 1, 2012.

• Vegetarian adolescents in both Turkey and Australia show greater concern over their appearance and engage in more extreme eating behaviors than meat-eaters.
  Finnish vegetarian women have higher levels of depression and lower levels of self-esteem than non-vegetarians.
  College students who avoid meat are more obsessed with their weight and diet more often than meat eaters. They are also more inclined to agree with the statement, "If given the opportunity to eliminate all my nutritional needs safely and cheaply by taking a pill, I would."
• According to the Humane Research Council, there are twice as many female than male vegetarians. Several years ago, I reviewed the scientific literature on sex differences in the treatment of animals. You will not be surprised to find that, as a rule, women are more concerned about animal suffering than men. I am sure most female vegetarians give up meat out of concern for animals and the environment, not from a pathological desire to lose weight.
• However, there is no denying that meat-avoidance can be associated with eating problems, especially in women. (Rory and Kim even allude to the dangers of the Skinny Bitch diet, telling readers, "Don't be a fat pig anymore...But don't go anorexic on us, either.") The fact is that women are much more susceptible to eating disorders than men. Indeed, one recent study reported a female to male ratio of 9 to 1 for anorexia nervosa and 30 to 1 for bulimia nervosa.

• "Eating Disorders: The Dark Side of Vegetarianism", Hal Herzog, Psychology Today, Sep 07, 2010.

• These findings help to clarify the mechanisms through which hormone treatment might be able to improve eating disorder symptoms in this population. They suggest that hormones primarily improves body dissatisfaction, which in turn reduces levels of perfectionism and symptoms of anxiety, and increases self-esteem. In combination, these factors then appear to alleviate eating disorder symptoms.
  This is the first study with transgender people that has been able to indicate how cross-sex hormones alleviate eating disorder symptoms, although this finding needs to be replicated with more longitudinal research.
  • "Hormone therapy may reduce eating disorder symptoms in transgender people", Jon Arcelus, University of Nottingham, January 11, 2018

• For a long time, eating disorders were considered as culture-bound syndromes, specific to Western countries. This theory has been refuted for anorexia, but few transcultural studies have been carried out on bulimia nervosa. As a result, knowledge concerning this disorder is limited.
  • "Case Study of An Adopted Chinese Woman with Bulimia Nervosa: A Cultural and Transcultural Approach", Marion Vu-Augier de Mongremier, Liangliang Chen, Jue Chen, Marie Rose Moro; Shanghai Arch Psychiatry, 2017 Aug 25; 29(4): 243–246.

• In phase 2 clinical trials sponsored by MAPS, 61 percent of the 107 participants with chronic, treatment-resistant PTSD no longer had the disorder after two months of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy treatment. At a 12-month follow up, 68 percent no longer had PTSD.
  • "FDA designates MDMA as "breakthrough therapy" for PTSD", Ashley Welch, CBS News, August 31, 2017

• This group of boys showed considerable: and consistent effects from medication with UML or LSD daily for two to eleven months. Their behavior, ward management, school-room adjustment and progress at home changed favorably with less acting out and less disturbed behavior. They not only needed no other tranquilizing, sedative, or antidepressant medication, but furthermore, unlike the tranquilizers which made them sleepy and groggy, they were generally cheerful and alert. Personnel and families noted the difference. Repeated psychiatric inter-views revealed a change in fantasy material which was loss bizarre, personalized or disturbing. Depressive, anxious and paranoid attitudes were focused on real objective problems. Insight was impressive. Intellectual changes, as seen in psychometric tests, indicated improved maturity, better organization and motivation with a rise in IQ which was reflected in improved school work. The Rorschach and drawing tests also showed increased maturity and control with clearer thinking. Studies of the autonomic functions were not made.
• It was hoped that these drugs might prove effective in breaking through autistic defenses, improving autonomic nervous system functioning, and modifying distorted perceptual experiences.
  There were some differences in results in the various groups. In general, the younger autistic children became less anxious, less autistic and plastic, more aware and responsive, with some changes in verbalization and qualitative improvement, on the Vineland Social Maturity Scale. The girls and older autistic boys showed similar results, but much less marked and persistent. Verbal children showed improvement in general behavior, with marked changes in fantasy and bizarre ideation to more insightful, reality-oriented, though often anxious and depressive attitudes, and improved maturity and organization.
  There were no major side effects, though a few patients on UML had muscular spasms and vasomotor changes in the legs, generally of a temporary nature. It is significant to note that while most of these patients had required tranquilizing or, other medications, they could all now be maintained only on the LSD or UML. A few patients received reserpine to control excessive activity, aggression, or biting.
• We do not use it as a psychoanalytic tool. Our idea was to give it as a daily drug. It is our general experience that frequently the children respond to many drugs that affect the central nervous system differently than adults. This is common knowledge; at least, to those of us using drugs with children. So we were not surprised to find, in our early initial studies, that if the children were near puberty or in puberty they responded to the first dose with anxiety and disturbance, just as the adolescent boys did. But even these children could be maintained on high doses of the drug, just as the adolescent boys were, so that the drugs can be given to these children in continuing doses. What tolerance means, I don't know. Tolerance may be established in our patients. The chemical studies suggest this, and even our psychological studies indicate a slight change later on, a leveling off of response as compared to initial reaction, but the long-term reaction is still the most valuable reaction to the drug.

• "The Treatment of Childhood Schizophrenia with LSD and UML", L. Bender, L. Cobrinik, G. Faretra, D.V. Siva Sankar, Biological Treatment of Mental Illness, Proceedings II of the International Conference of the Manfred Sakel Foundation 10/31-11/3/1962, 1966; 2(4):463-91

• With regard to the purpose of these studies, all were to some extent exploring the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs rather than their psychotomimetic properties. This was least true of Freedman and his coworkers (1962) who viewed LSD primarily as a means of studying the schizophrenic process by "intensifying pre-existing symptomology." This orientation contrasted sharply with Bender's view. Noting that withdrawn children became more emotionally responsive while aggressive children became less so, she hypothesized that psychedelic drugs "tend to 'normalize' behavior rather than subdue or stimulate it." This basic difference in expectations seems at least partially responsible for Bender's extremely favorable outcomes and Freedman's rather poor results. Regarding all forms of psychotherapy, it has become a truism that " where there is no therapeutic intent, there is no therapeutic result" (Charles Savage in Abramson, 1960, p. 193).
• Consistent with their explicit therapeutic intent, Bender, Fisher, and Simmons each offer essentially the same hypothesis based on a psychological interpretation of childhood schizophrenia: " The working hypothesis of this study is that the psychosis is a massive defensive structure in the service of protecting and defending the patient against his feelings and affectual states" (Fisher & Castile, 1963). Psychedelic drugs were viewed as a powerful means of undermining an intractable defense system and thereby making the patient more receptive to contact and communication with others.
• Although Freedman was prompted to use LSD primarily as an experimental device to study psychosis, he did mention that he was influenced to some extent by the dramatic improvement in autistic children reported by Peck and Murphy (in Abramson, 1960) and by the apparent success of Cholden, Kurland, and Savage (1955) in their work with adult mute catatonic patients. As will become apparent in the discussion of results, a partial and often transient alleviation of mutism by LSD treatment has been one of the most consistent effects reported in the children studies.
• "...the vocabularies of several of the children increased after LSD or UML; several seemed to be attempting to form words or watched adults carefully as they spoke; many seemed to comprehend speech for the first time or were able to communicate their needs... Very few of these changes in communication had been noted previously in such a large number of children, and at such a relatively rapid rate" (1963, p. 91).
• "They appeared flushed, bright eyed, and unusually interested in the environment... They participated with increasing eagerness in motility play with adults and other children. . . They seek positive contacts with adults, approaching them with face uplifted and bright eyes, and responding to fondling, affection, etc." (1962, pp. 172- 3). "There is less stereotyped whirling and rhythmic behavior. . . They became gay, happy, laughing frequently... Some showed changes in facial expression in appropriate reactions to situations for the first time" (1963, pp. 90-91).

• The Use of Psychedelic Agents with Autistic Schizophrenic Children, Robert E. Mogar and Robert W. Aldrich, Behavioral Neuropsychiatry 1969 Nov; 1(8):44-50

• "Schizophrenic children receiving d-lysergic acid or a derivative in daily adequate doses are without toxicity, side effects or gross emotional reactions. They show alterations in mood, appearance of physical well being, responsiveness, habit patterning, soft neurological signs, sympathetic nervous system stability, integrated perception, reality testing, thought processes, fantasy content and intellectual and personality maturity.
  "There are concurrent biochemical changes in the binding of serotonin and freeing of epinephrine. Some of these alterations occur in the first few days, others in the first few weeks and tend to level off, others continue for many months and are integrated into a more healthy and mature level in the development of the child."
• Comparatively large doses of LSD-25 and Sansert may be safely administered to autistic schizophrenic children for extended periods of time. Brain damage was not observed. Rather, improvement is reported.

• The Use of LSD-25 in the Therapy of Children, Harold A. Abramson, M.D., Journal of Asthma Research, 5: 139-143 (1967)

• Compared with non psychiatric subjects and neurotic subjects, the psychopath is responsive to "fewer cues which have the capacity to elicit the autonomic components of fear and anxiety." In their sensory responsiveness, these individuals are found to evidence higher detection thresholds for stimuli in general, this is that is hyposensitivity to low intensity stimulation. In a subgroup of primary psychopaths this hyposensitivity was found to be correlated significantly with a minimal tolerance for pain stimulation; in secondary psycopaths the correlation was reversed.
• Kast has suggested several effects of LSD on the experience of pain: (1) it temporarily interferes with a patient's concentration on one specific sensory input; (2) minor sensations make a claim on the patient's attention: (3) it diminished cortical control of thoughts, concepts, or ideas and thus reduces their significance in relation to vegetative function; and (4) it diffuses body boundaries and this diffuses painful sensations in the body. In two large scale clinical studies of terminal patients, Kast reported significant reductions in their experienced intensity of pain for a ten-day period. Parallel to this change, sleep patterns improved for approximately 12 to 14 days and a definite lifting of mood also was noted during the same period.

• “Research With Psychedelics, Some Biopsychological Concepts and Possible Clinical Applications”, Julian Silverman, Arch Gen Psychiatry, Vol 25, Dec 25, 1971(6), pp. 506-507

• We then gave LSD in the same doses to non-autistic schizophrenic boys 6 to 12 years osocif age. They were intelligent and verbal and could be tested psychologically and in psychiatric interviews (Bender et al., 1963). They were selected because they had typical schizophrenic psychosis, with flying fantasies and identification and body image difficulties, loose ego boundaries, introjected objects and voices and bizarre ideologies. They had obvious anxiety and labile vaso-vegetative functions. After administering LSD to these children we found results contrary to those reported in adults. These children became more insightful, more objective, more realistic; and in a short time they became frankly depressed for reality reasons. They noted they were in the hospital, that they were away from their family, and that they had had "crazy" ideas before.
  • "Children's Reactions to Psychotomimetic Drugs", L. Bender, Psychotomimetic Drugs, 1970; pp. 265-273

• The adrenergic-cholinergic balance hypothesis of mania and depression suggests that depression may be due to an over-activity or a hypersensitivity to central acetylcholine. From this hypothesis, it is logical that scopolamine, a centrally acting antimuscarinic agent, would be useful as an antidepressant.
  • "Serendipity strikes again: scopolamine as an antidepressant agent in bipolar depressed patients", Janowsky DS, Curr Psychiatry Rep. 2011 Dec;13(6):443-5

• Treatment naïve and treatment resistant patients showed improved clinical symptoms following scopolamine, while those who were treatment naïve showed greater improvement. Scopolamine rapidly reduces symptoms in both treatment history groups, and demonstrates sustained improvement even in treatment resistant patients.
  • "Antidepressant treatment history as a predictor of response to scopolamine: clinical implications.", Ellis JS, Zarate CA Jr, Luckenbaugh DA, Furey ML, J Affect Disord. 2014 Jun; 162:39-42.

• Two double-blind randomized placebo-controlled crossover trials with intravenous scopolamine 4.0 μg/kg infusions showed a significant improvement in depressive symptoms seen as soon as 3 days after the first treatment. Further data analyses showed a greater antidepressant effect in women, significant improvements in bipolar depression, and 85% success rates predicting who will respond to treatment.
  • "Scopolamine as an antidepressant: a systematic review". Jaffe RJ1, Novakovic V, Peselow ED., Clin Neuropharmacol. 2013 Jan-Feb;36(1):24-6.

• Compulsions are defined as repetitive acts, behaviors, or thoughts that are designed to counteract the anxiety associated with an obsession. The key characteristic of a compulsion is that it reduces the anxiety associated with the obsession. Many compulsions are acts associated with specific obsessions, such as hand washing to counteract thoughts of contamination. Compulsions can also manifest as thoughts. Obsessions and compulsions must cause an individual marked distress, consume at least 1 hour/day of time, or interfere with functioning to be considered as OCD. During at least some point in the illness, adult patients must recognize symptoms of OCD as unreasonable, although there is great variability in the degree to which this is true, both across individuals and in a given individual over time. DSM-IV-TR recognizes a poor insight subtype of OCD in which individuals fail to recognize the irrational or unreasonable nature of their obsessions. OCD frequently co-occurs with other disorders such as major depression, panic disorder, phobias, attention –deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), eating disorders, and Tourette,s syndrome.
  ICD-10 emphasizes that a compulsive act must not be pleasurable. ICD-10 also stipulates that obsessions or compulsions must be present on most days for 2 weeks.
  Inflated responsibility is increasingly regarded a pathogenetic mechanism in obsessive– compulsive disorder. In seeming contrast, there is mounting evidence that latent aggression is also elevated in OCD. Building upon psychodynamic theories that an altruistic facade including exaggerated concerns for others is partly a defense against latent aggression. Evidence was recently obtained for high interpersonal ambivalence in (OCD) patients relative to psychiatric and healthy controls. Psychotic symptoms often lead to obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors.
• GAD is characterized by a pattern of frequent, persistent worry and anxiety that is disproportionate to the impact of the events or circumstances on which the worry focuses. These patients must be bothered by their degree of worry. This pattern must occur “more days than not” for at least 6 months. They find it difficult to control their worry and must report three or more of six somatic or cognitive symptoms, which include: feelings of restlessness, fatigue, muscle tension, or insomnia. Worry is a common characteristic of a variety of anxiety disorders: patients with panic disorder worry about panic attacks, patients with OCD worry about their obsessions. The worries in GAD must exceed in breath or scope the worries that characterize these other anxiety disorders. Children with marked and persistent worry can also be diagnosed with GAD; unlike adults, however, they must only meet one of the six somatic/ cognitive symptom criteria.
• Anti-anxiety medications including popular benzodiazepines such as alprazolam (Xanax) , clonazepam (klonopin), diazepam (Valium), and lorazepam (Ativan) are meant for shortterm use. However, many people take anti-anxiety drugs for long periods of time. This is risky because, when taken regularly, benzodiazepines quickly lead to physical dependence. Drug tolerance is also common, with increasingly larger doses needed to get the same anxiety relief as before. According to the American Academy of Family Physicians, benzodiazepines lose their therapeutic anti-anxiety effect after 4 to 6 months of regular use.

• "Anxiety Disorder and Its Types", M. Shiri, S. Akhavan and N. Geramian Vice-Chancellery for Health, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran.

• Sexual satisfaction can be jeopardized by dysfunction that occurs at any stage of the sexual response cycle: excitement (desire and arousal), plateau, orgasm, and resolution. Such problems occur in 43 percent of women and 31 percent of men. The most common dysfunction for women is sexual arousal disorder (10–20 percent), and for men it is premature ejaculation (about 30 percent).
• Interestingly, anxiety affects sexual arousal in different ways for different people. Researchers have found very different results between people with a history of sexual dysfunction and people with no history of sexual dysfunction. For those with no history of dysfunction, anxiety sometimes actually increases arousal. People with otherwise good autonomic nervous functioning can experience a sexual arousal response to threat. The study that tested this administered an electric shock to participants while they were viewing pornographic material. The researchers found that those who were threatened with or received the shock experienced greater physiological arousal than those who were left to watch pornography in peace.
• Having an anxiety disorder can cause people to develop sexual dysfunction. The reverse is also true that people with sexual disorders become more anxious. Men who experience premature ejaculation or inhibited sexual enjoyment are up to 2.5 times more likely to have an anxiety disorder that those who do not have these problems. Women with anxiety have an increased likelihood of arousal or orgasmic dysfunction up to 3.5 times more than non-anxious women. Looking at both men and women, anxiety is linked to a 2.6 times greater risk of orgasmic dysfunction, a 2.1 times greater risk for inhibited sexual excitement, and a 3.3 times greater risk of decreased sexual desire.

• "5 Effective Strategies to Help You Overcome Sexual Dysfunction", Christian Hahn, Anxiety.org, 08/16/2017.

• Carlo and his colleagues found that, on average, those individuals who carried the genotype associated with higher social anxiety were less likely to engage in prosocial behavior.
  "Previous research has shown that the brain's serotonin neurotransmitter system plays an important role in regulating emotions," said study co-author Scott Stoltenberg, an associate professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. "Our findings suggest that individual differences in social anxiety levels are influenced by this serotonin system gene and that these differences help to partially explain why some people are more likely than others to behave prosocially. Studies like this one show that biological factors are critical influences on how people interact with one another."
  • "Those genetically predisposed to anxiousness may be less likely to volunteer, help others", University of Missouri-Columbia, ScienceDaily, 15 October 2013.

• Three reports have surfaced in the literature of individuals with long-standing OCD who experienced significant alleviation of their disorder after what was initially a “recreational” use of LSD, peyote, or Psilocybe mushrooms. The most recent of these relates that a 34-year-old man who had suffered from OCD since the age of 6 found that both peyote and Psilocybe mushrooms moderated his symptoms (which included incapacitating and compulsive counting, showering, and ritualistic washing of his clothes, hands, and body). He began a 4-year course of daily Psilocybemushroom ingestion, which resulted in improvement of his OCD symptoms, unaccompanied by any hallucinogenic effects because of his acquired tolerance. During a subsequent 2-year period, his OCD remained in control without the need for him to ingest Psilocybe, but then the symptoms gradually returned to their initial levels.
  Some beginnings have been made in studying the effects of psychedelic drugs for alleviating OCD. The potential benefits of these drugs in anorexia nervosa, a devastating and not infrequently life-threatening disorder with few or no fully successful treatment options, should likewise be studied.

• "Letter to the Editor: Hallucinogens and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder", Daniel M. Perrine, American Journal of Psychiatry, Volume 156, Issue 7, July 1999, pp. 1123-1123.

• In a paper published this summer, Dr. Rafael dos Santos from the University of São Paulo in Brazil, along with his colleagues, sought to analyze and compile the research done on these drugs. Given the legal restrictions still placed on them, one difficulty in this area of research is identifying clinical trials conducted with the proper experimental methods and controls. Thus, of the 144 studies that the researcher found, only 6 made the cut for their analyses. Despite their small number, these studies reported consistent positive effects among their participants. For instance, psilocybin was found to improve symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression among terminally ill cancer patients, and decrease both alcohol and tobacco dependence among addicts. Likewise, LSD was reported to decrease anxiety symptoms associated with life-threatening diseases as well as help in the treatment of alcoholism. Crucially, the reported improvements lasted over the course of several days and, in some cases, months.
  • "Can Hallucinogens Treat Anxiety and Depression?", Samuel Hunley, Ph.D., Anxiety.org, 05/25/2017

• Scientific studies have looked at how individuals with autism spectrum disorder, childhood antisocial behaviors, schizophrenia, and other extreme social disorders affect how they perceive emotions. The failure to properly recognize and categorize emotions (i.e., recognize a smile as happy) is believed to be a root cause of many behaviors associated with these social disorders. When we discuss people not reading emotional facial expressions, we tend to assume that one of these social disorders is at work — most likely autism spectrum disorder. However, anxiety, anxiety disorders, and other mood disorders such as major depression also influence how we read emotional faces. Specifically, people who have high levels of anxiety or depression often categorize faces as fearful or angry.

• "High Levels of Anxiety Can Make You Misinterpret Facial Expressions", Arick Wang, M.A., Anxiety.org, 09/04/2017

• Women have a higher incidence of stress related disorders including depression and generalized anxiety disorder, and epigenetic mechanisms likely contribute to this sex difference. Evidence from preclinical research suggests that epigenetic mechanisms are responsible for both sexual dimorphism of brain regions and sensitivity of the stress response. Epigenetic modifications such as DNA methylation and histone modifications can occur transgenerationally, developmentally, or in response to environmental stimuli such as stress exposure.
• Stress-related disorders such as major depression and generalized anxiety affect over 20% of the American population within their lifetime, and have an annual prevalence approaching 10%. Currently available treatments for these disorders produce remission in only 40-60% of patients. Therefore, a clear need exists for novel therapeutic strategies that target the underlying biology involved with vulnerability to depression and anxiety. Within the clinical populations presenting for stress-related disorders, there is a higher incidence in women compared to men. One factor that may contribute to the low response to treatment has been the continued reliance on using male animals in preclinical research. A recent meta-analysis of publications indicated that 65% of studies in pharmacology and 55% of neuroscience papers used male subjects exclusively.

• "Sex, stress, and epigenetics: regulation of behavior in animal models of mood disorders", Georgia E Hodes, Biology of Sex Differences, 2013 4:1

• But what if you are constantly on the receiving end of threats like the ones above? Feelings of wanting to help soon turn to anger and resentment. Being constantly bombarded by comments from another person threatening to kill themselves is emotional blackmail. You never know what will come next, and as a result, feelings of anger, resentment, and fear all build up. It may feel like you have no choice but to do exactly what the person says in order to avoid a tragedy, but there are steps you can take to protect yourself and potentially save the other person’s life as well.
  • “Feeling Manipulated by Suicide Threats?”, Kate Thieda , Psych Central, (2011)

• The existence of alarm pheromones—chemosensory stress cues communicated between members of the same species—is well established in non-human mammals; when animals inhale odors secreted by acutely stressed conspecifics, they express neurobiological and behavioral changes consistent with heightened threat assessment ( Fanselow, 1985 ; Zalaquett and Thiessen, 1991 ; Dielenberg and McGregor, 2001 ; Dielenberg et al ., 2001 ; Kikusui et al ., 2001 ). In our fMRI experiment and its subsequent replication, we showed that humans also activate the amygdala during inhalation of sweat taken from an independent sample of emotionally stressed individuals, with exercise sweat as a control ( Mujica-Parodi et al ., 2009 ). Importantly, participants were unable to perceptually differentiate between the sweat odors, suggesting that the amygdala response was specific to emotional, rather than olfactory, discrimination. Psychophysiological and behavioral research have additionally demonstrated that inhalation of human stress sweat augments the defensive startle reflex ( Prehn et al ., 2006 ; Pause et al ., 2009 ) as well as enhancing perception and discrimination of fearful ( Zhou and Chen, 2009 ) and angry (Mujica-Parodi et al ., 2009 ) faces.
  • “Second-hand stress: inhalation of stress sweat enhances neural response to neutral faces”, Denis Rubin Yevgeny Botanov Greg Hajcak Lilianne R. Mujica-Parodi, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Volume 7, Issue 2, 1 February 2012, Pages 208–212

• Frequent fear of nuclear war in adolescents seems to be an indicator for an increased risk for common mental disorders and deserves serious attention.
• Risks of war and terrorism are threatening our health, both directly in actual life and also indirectly by the increasingly violent content of video games and other forms of entertainment. How does this affect mental health? Earlier during the cold war period, fear of war was found to be common among adolescents, and more prevalent among girls than boys. Little is known about the influence of fear of war on mental health of adolescents. On one hand, it has been argued that worrying about nuclear war is related to positive aspects of mental health. On the other, fear of nuclear war has been found to associate with several measures of psychological distress in cross-sectional studies. To our knowledge, no follow-up studies have been published.
• Of the 400 women, 27.5% reported having feared nuclear war once a week or more often in 1990. The respective figures for men were 226 and 13.7%.
• The degree of perceived threat of nuclear war may depend on several factors, such as (i) actual presence and size of the nuclear weapon arsenal, (ii) actual political tensions and threats, (iii) media coverage of the former, (iv) mental, conscious and unconscious processing of information, and (v) psychological developmental influences specific to adolescence.
  Part of the fear may be based on realistic evaluation of the threat. Our baseline examination was carried out within two months before the outbreak of the Persian Gulf War in January 1991 and before the reductions in nuclear weapon arsenals in the United States and in Russia started. A quote from a novel describing the life experience of one teen-age girl during the pre-detente period may be illustrative:
• Widespread media coverage on any potential danger may bring about considerable increase in perceived fear.

• Fear of nuclear war increases the risk of common mental disorders among young adults: a five-year follow-up study Kari Poikolainen, Terhi Aalto-Setälä, Annamari Tuulio-Henriksson, Mauri Marttunen and Jouko Lönnqvist, BMC Public Health, 2004, 4:42

• Anxiety was a philosophical concept before it taken up by psychology and psychiatry. The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard (1813-1855) argued that anxiety is part of human nature. Anxiety arises where possibility and actuality come into contact and the present touches the future. Anxiety is a product of having the freedom to make choices and act, and by doing so make a commitment to one’s identity, ways of being in the world, and standing in relation to other people. For Kierkegaard, anxiety can be an avenue to stand in relation to God. This is why he wrote, “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.”
  One can bracket out the God dimensions and still learn something valuable from Kierkegaard, namely that anxiety can cause inaction, which is, in its most basic sense, a loss of freedom. What is possible may never actualize and one may lose the present by tending to an imagined future. One becomes immobilized and unable to meet needs and realize goals and aspirations.
  • Peg O'Connor, "Anxiety Is a Part of Human Nature", Psychology Today, (Mar 24, 2017).

• The first time Faith-Ann Bishop cut herself, she was in eighth grade. It was 2 in the morning, and as her parents slept, she sat on the edge of the tub at her home outside Bangor, Maine, with a metal clip from a pen in her hand. Then she sliced into the soft skin near her ribs. There was blood–and a sense of deep relief. “It makes the world very quiet for a few seconds,” says Faith-Ann. “For a while I didn’t want to stop, because it was my only coping mechanism. I hadn’t learned any other way.”
  The pain of the superficial wound was a momentary escape from the anxiety she was fighting constantly, about grades, about her future, about relationships, about everything. Many days she felt ill before school. Sometimes she’d throw up, other times she’d stay home. “It was like asking me to climb Mount Everest in high heels,” she says.
• “The competitiveness, the lack of clarity about where things are going [economically] have all created a sense of real stress,” says Victor Schwartz of the Jed Foundation, a nonprofit that works with colleges and universities on mental-health programs and services. “Ten years ago, the most prominent thing kids talked about was feeling depressed. And now anxiety has overtaken that in the last couple of years.”
  • Susanna Schrobsdorff, "Teen Depression and Anxiety: Why the Kids Are Not Alright", Time, (Oct. 27, 2016).

• Male passersby were contacted either on a fear-arousing suspension bridge or a non-fear-arousing bridge by an attractive female interviewer who asked them to fill out questionnaires containing Thematic Apperception Test pictures. Sexual content of stories written by subjects on the fear-arousing bridge and tendency of these subjects to attempt post experimental contact with the interviewer were both significantly greater. No significant differences between bridges were obtained on either measure for subjects contacted by a male interviewer. A third study manipulated anticipated shock to male subjects and an attractive female confederate independently. Anticipation of own shock but not anticipation of shock to confederate increased sexual imagery scores on the Thematic Apperception Test and attraction to the confederate.
• Some evidence for the mechanics of the anxiety-sexual arousal link in the current research may be obtained from the fear ratings made by subjects in Experiment 3. When subjects anticipated receiving a strong shock and the female confederate was present during the anxiety manipulation, subjects re-ported significantly less fear than when no potential sexual object was present (t —2.17, d} = 19, p < .025). Since the questionnaires were filled out in private in both groups, it is unlikely that subjects' reporting merely reflects appropriate behavior in the presence of the opposite or same sex. One possible explanation for this result is that, having relabeled anxiety as sexual arousal, the subject is less likely to feel anxious. A more conclusive explanation of the mechanics of the anxiety-sexual arousal link must await the conclusion of present laboratory studies designed specifically to investigate this prob-lem. However, regardless of the interpretation of the mechanics of this link, the present re-search presents the clearest demonstration to date of its existence

• Donald G. Dutton, Arthur P. Aron, "Some Evidence For Heightened Sexual Attraction Under Conditions of High Anxiety", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1974, Vol. 30, No. 4, pp. (510-517).

Eating disorders

• For females, bulimic symptoms increased from age 14 to 16 and declined slowly thereafter. For males, the symptoms decreased between ages 14 and 16 and returned in the early 20s. Females had higher levels of symptoms than males at every age. Age-associated trends in body mass index, appearance satisfaction, and symptoms of anxiety and depression were associated with some of the trends for both genders. For females, changes in alcohol consumption and cohabitation status functioned as predictors as well.
  • Abebe, D; Lein, L; von Soest (2012). "The development of bulimic symptoms from adolescence to young adulthood in females and males: A population‐based longitudinal cohort study", International Journal of Eating Disorders, 45 (6): 737–745. doi:10.1002/eat.20950. PMID 22886952.

• Of the eating disorders, anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are the ones that have made adolescent patients-often females and aged younger and younger-seek for help. This help is provided through a multidisciplinary treatment involving psychiatrists, psychologists and dietists. Psychotherapy has shown to be an efficient component for these patients' improvement.
  • Abreu CN1, Cangelli Filho R1. "Anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa - a psychotherapeutic cognitive-constructivist approach", Int Rev Psychiatry. 2017 Jun;29(3):248-253. doi: 10.1080/09540261.2017.1285550. Epub 2017 Mar 2.

• Oxytocin is a peptide hormone important for social behavior and differences in psychological traits have been associated with variants of the oxytocin receptor gene in healthy people. We examined whether single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) correlated with clinical symptoms in women with anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and healthy comparison (HC) women. Subjects completed clinical assessments and provided DNA for analysis. Subjects were divided into four groups: HC, subjects currently with anorexia nervosa (AN-C), subjects with a history of anorexia nervosa but in long-term weight recovery (AN-WR), and subjects with bulimia nervosa (BN). Five SNPs of the oxytocin receptor were examined. Minor allele carriers showed greater severity in most of the psychiatric symptoms. Importantly, the combination of having had anorexia and carrying either of the A alleles for two SNPS in the OXTR gene (rs53576, rs2254298) was associated with increased severity specifically for ED symptoms including cognitions and behaviors associated both with eating and appearance. A review of psychosocial data related to the OXTR polymorphisms examined is included in the discussion. OXTR polymorphisms may be a useful intermediate endophenotype to consider in the treatment of patients with anorexia nervosa.
  • Acevedo SF1, Valencia C1, Lutter M2, McAdams CJ3, "Severity of eating disorder symptoms related to oxytocin receptor polymorphisms in anorexia nervosa", Psychiatry Res. 2015 Aug 30;228(3):641-8. doi: 10.1016/j.psychres.2015.05.040. Epub 2015 Jun 11.

• An 18-year-old white woman had nausea, vomiting, weight loss, and a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa. Copper-colored skin was noted on physical examination, and serum chemistry values were normal. Subsequent fever, disorientation, and confusion led to the discovery of Addison's disease, which responded well to corticosteroid replacement therapy. Addisonian and anorexic patients exhibit clinical similarities, including nausea, vomiting, weight loss, abdominal pain, cold intolerance, hypothermia, and orthostasis. Other commonalities include prolongation of electrocardiographic PR and QT intervals and generalized slowing on electroencephalogram. Important differences include a brown color to the skin in Addison's disease instead of a yellowish color in anorexia. Addisonian patients also display hypocortisolism, hypoglycemia, and hyperkalemia, in contrast to the hypercortisolism, hyperglycemia, and hypokalemia seen in anorexia.
  • Adams, R; Hinkebein, MK; McQuillen, M; Sutherland, S (1998). "Prompt differentiation of Addison's disease from anorexia nervosa during weight loss and vomiting". Southern Medical Journal. 91 (2): 208–11. doi:10.1097/00007611-199802000-00017. PMID 9496878.

• While cerebral atrophy has been shown in patients with anorexia nervosa, cerebellar atrophy has never been reported in these patients. We report a case of cerebral atrophy with marked cerebellar atrophy in a 20-year-old woman with anorexia nervosa admitted to our hospital for severe weight loss. Neuroradiological examinations of the patient showed morphological brain alteration without focal parenchymal lesions. Cranial computerized tomography (CCT) showed an enlargement of the external cerebrospinal fluid spaces, especially those close to the cerebellar cistern. A brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) study confirmed the results of the CCT and dynamic single-photon emission tomography (d-SPECT) showed a reduced perfusion of the left brain areas. The reported case shows that some forms of anorexia nervosa have a concomitant presence of cerebral and cerebellar morphological anomalies. At present, it is not possible to demonstrate the whole correlation between the imaging reports and the clinical or neurological symptomatology. Some forms of brain alteration could be secondary to undernutrition; on the other hand, cerebral and cerebellar atrophy and eating disorders are far from clear and may also be an expression of an unknown common denominator.
  • Addolorato, G; Taranto, C; Capristo, E; Gasbarrini, G (1998). "A case of marked cerebellar atrophy in a woman with anorexia nervosa and cerebral atrophy and a review of the literature". The International Journal of Eating Disorders. 24 (4): 443–7. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1098-108X(199812)24:4<443::AID-EAT13>3.0.CO;2-4. PMID 9813771.

• Because eating disorders (EDs) and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) co-occur at high rates and can have functionally similar clinical presentations, it has been suggested that both constructs might be part of a common spectrum of disorders. Identifying the relationship between EDs and OCD may lead to the discovery of important shared core disease processes and/or mechanisms for maintenance. The objective of this paper is to understand the relationship between EDs and OCD by systematically reviewing epidemiological, longitudinal and family studies guided by five models of comorbidity posited by Klein and Riso (1993) and others. Though this literature is relatively small, the preponderance of evidence from these studies largely suggests that OCD/ED co-occur because of a shared etiological relationship.
  • Altman SE1, Shankman SA, "What is the association between obsessive-compulsive disorder and eating disorders?", Clin Psychol Rev. 2009 Nov;29(7):638-46. doi: 10.1016/j.cpr.2009.08.001.

• It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that nutrition intervention, including nutritional counseling, by a registered dietitian (RD) is an essential component of the team treatment of patients with anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and other eating disorders during assessment and treatment across the continuum of care. Diagnostic criteria for eating disorders provide important guidelines for identification and treatment. However, it is thought that a continuum of disordered eating may exist that ranges from persistent dieting to subthreshold conditions and then to defined eating disorders, which include anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating disorder. Understanding the complexities of eating disorders, such as influencing factors, comorbid illness, medical and psychological complications, and boundary issues, is critical in the effective treatment of eating disorders. The nature of eating disorders requires a collaborative approach by an interdisciplinary team of psychological, nutritional, and medical specialists. The RD is an integral member of the treatment team and is uniquely qualified to provide medical nutrition therapy for the normalization of eating patterns and nutritional status. RDs provide nutritional counseling, recognize clinical signs related to eating disorders, and assist with medical monitoring while cognizant of psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy that are cornerstones of eating disorder treatment. Specialized resources are available for RDs to advance their level of expertise in the field of eating disorders. Further efforts with evidenced-based research must continue for improved treatment outcomes related to eating disorders along with identification of effective primary and secondary interventions.
  • American Dietetic Association (2006). "Position of the American Dietetic Association: Nutrition intervention in the treatment of anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and other eating disorders". Journal of the American Dietetic Association. 106 (12): 2073–82. doi:10.1016/j.jada.2006.09.007. PMID 17186637.

• There is a commonly held view that eating disorders are a lifestyle choice. Eating disorders are actually serious and often fatal illnesses that cause severe disturbances to a person’s eating behaviors. Obsessions with food, body weight, and shape may also signal an eating disorder.
• Eating disorders frequently appear during the teen years or young adulthood but may also develop during childhood or later in life. These disorders affect both genders, although rates among women are higher than among men. Like women who have eating disorders, men also have a distorted sense of body image. For example, men may have muscle dysmorphia, a type of disorder marked by an extreme concern with becoming more muscular.
  • American Psychiatry Association (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.). Arlington: American Psychiatric Publishing. pp. 329–354. ISBN 978-0-89042-555-8.

• Approximately two-thirds of the subjects with anorexia nervosa reported perfectionism and rigidity in childhood. This prevalence is consistent with that reported by Rastam (22) for premorbid obsessive-compulsive (or anankastic) personality disorder in anorexia nervosa. We are not aware of any similar studies conducted for patients with bulimia nervosa. However, previous findings that perfectionism, obsessionality, excessive concern about mistakes, and doubt about actions persist after recovery from both disorders suggest that they represent persistent traits (10, 13, 16).
• The findings suggest that childhood obsessive-compulsive personality traits are important risk factors for later development of eating disorders, particularly anorexia nervosa. Furthermore, the findings suggest that childhood perfectionism and rigidity may offer a more specific and homogenous phenotypic determination for genetic studies. Further studies are needed to determine whether these traits are specific for eating disorders or are also linked to other psychiatric disorders, such as depression or OCD. Personality traits may also act as maintaining factors and as such may have an important influence on the prognosis of the disorder. Studies of people who have recovered from an eating disorder would be needed to explore the influence of childhood obsessive-compulsive-personality traits on the length of illness and its severity. Female subjects were included in this study because the prevalence of eating disorders is approximately nine times higher in women than in men. However, further studies that include male subjects are needed to better understand the role of the assessed traits. To our knowledge, the interview scale described here is the first to measure these personality trait risk factors in a broad and comprehensive way. The finding that perfectionism and rigidity represent strong risk factors suggests that these items might also be also used to identify people at high risk for developing an eating disorder later in life. Prospective studies are needed to replicate these findings.
  • Anderluh, MB; Tchanturia, K; Rabe-Hesketh, S; Treasure, J (2003). "Childhood obsessive-compulsive personality traits in adult women with eating disorders: defining a broader eating disorder phenotype". The American Journal of Psychiatry. 160(2): 242–7. doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.160.2.242. PMID 12562569.

• Dancers, in general, had a higher risk of suffering from eating disorders in general, anorexia nervosa and EDNOS, but no higher risk of suffering from bulimia nervosa. The study concluded that as dancers had a three times higher risk of suffering from eating disorders, particularly anorexia nervosa and EDNOS, specifically designed services for this population should be considered
  • Arcelus, J; Witcomb, GL; Mitchell, A (March 2014). "Prevalence of eating disorders amongst dancers: a systemic review and meta-analysis". European Eating Disorders Review. 22 (2): 92–101. doi:10.1002/erv.2271. PMID 24277724.

• At follow-up in girls, 3.6% (15 of 422) in control schools compared with 1.2% (4 of 327) in intervention schools reported engaging in disordered weight-control behaviors (P = .04). Multivariate analyses indicated that the odds of these behaviors in girls in intervention schools were reduced by two thirds compared with girls in control schools (odds ratio, 0.33; 95% confidence interval, 0.11-0.97). No intervention effect was observed in boys.
• Results add compelling support for the effectiveness of an interdisciplinary, school-based obesity prevention intervention to prevent disordered weight-control behaviors in early adolescent girls.
  • Austin SB1, Kim J, Wiecha J, Troped PJ, Feldman HA, Peterson KE, “School-based overweight preventive intervention lowers incidence of disordered weight-control behaviors in early adolescent girls.“, Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2007 Sep;161(9):865-9.

• Several lines of evidence suggest that a disturbance of serotonin neuronal pathways may contribute to the pathogenesis of anorexia nervosa (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN). This study applied positron emission tomography (PET) to investigate the brain serotonin 2A (5-HT(2A)) receptor, which could contribute to disturbances of appetite and behavior in AN and BN. To avoid the confounding effects of malnutrition, we studied 10 women recovered from bulimia-type AN (REC AN-BN, > 1 year normal weight, regular menstrual cycles, no binging, or purging) compared with 16 healthy control women (CW) using PET imaging and a specific 5-HT(2A) receptor antagonist, [18F]altanserin. REC AN-BN women had significantly reduced [18F]altanserin binding potential relative to CW in the left subgenual cingulate, the left parietal cortex, and the right occipital cortex. [18F]altanserin binding potential was positively related to harm avoidance and negatively related to novelty seeking in cingulate and temporal regions only in REC AN-BN subjects. In addition, REC AN-BN had negative relationships between [18F]altanserin binding potential and drive for thinness in several cortical regions. In conclusion, this study extends research suggesting that altered 5-HT neuronal system activity persists after recovery from bulimia-type AN, particularly in subgenual cingulate regions. Altered 5-HT neurotransmission after recovery also supports the possibility that this may be a trait-related disturbance that contributes to the pathophysiology of eating disorders. It is possible that subgenual cingulate findings are not specific for AN-BN, but may be related to the high incidence of lifetime major depressive disorder diagnosis in these subjects.
  • Bailer, UF; Price, JC; Meltzer, CC; Mathis, CA; Frank, GK; Weissfeld, L; McConaha, CW; Henry, SE; Brooks-Achenbach, S; Barbarich, NC; Kaye, WH (2004). "Altered 5-HT(2A) receptor binding after recovery from bulimia-type anorexia nervosa: relationships to harm avoidance and drive for thinness". Neuropsychopharmacology. 29 (6): 1143–55. doi:10.1038/sj.npp.1300430. PMC 4301578. PMID 15054474.

• Because recent limitations in health care coverage have resulted in shorter lengths of inpatient stay, many patients with anorexia nervosa are discharged while still underweight. The authors' goal was to determine whether anorectic patients who were underweight when they were discharged had a worse outcome and a higher rate of rehospitalization than those who had achieved normal weight at discharge.
• Anorectic patients who were discharged while severely underweight reported significantly higher rates of rehospitalization and endorsed more symptoms than those who had achieved normal weight before discharge.
• These data suggest that brief hospitalization for severely underweight women with anorexia may not be cost effective because the majority are rehospitalized.
  • Baran, SA; Weltzin, TE; Kaye, WH (1995). "Low discharge weight and outcome in anorexia nervosa". The American Journal of Psychiatry. 152 (7): 1070–2. doi:10.1176/ajp.152.7.1070. PMID 7793445.

• The latest studies and practice guidelines for the treatment of adolescent patients with anorexia nervosa agree in pointing out the key role played by parents in determining the young patients’ therapeutic possibilities and outcomes. Still family functioning has usually been studied using only self-reported instruments. The aim of the present study is therefore to investigate the triadic interactions within the families of adolescents with anorexia nervosa using a semi-standardized observational tool based on a recorded play session, the Lausanne Trilogue Play (LTP). Parents and adolescent daughters, consecutively referred to adolescent neuropsychiatric services, participated in the study and underwent the observational procedure (LTP). The 20 families of adolescent girls with anorexia nervosa (restricting type) were compared with 20 families of patients with internalizing disorders (anxiety and depression). The results showed different interactive patterns in the families of adolescents with anorexia nervosa: they had greater difficulties in respecting roles during the play, maintaining the joint attention and in sharing positive affect, especially in the three-together phase (third phase).
  • Laura Balottin, Stefania Mannarini, Martina M. Mensi, Matteo Chiappedi, and Michela Gatta “Triadic Interactions in Families of Adolescents with Anorexia Nervosa and Families of Adolescents with Internalizing Disorders”, Front Psychol. 2016; 7: 2046. [10.3389/fpsyg.2016.02046]

• Anorexia nervosa often begins in adolescence, and there is a growing body of quantitative literature looking at the efficacy of treatment for adolescents. However, qualitative research has a valuable contribution to make to the understanding of treatment and recovery. This paper aims to review qualitative studies on the experience of treatment and recovery for adolescents with anorexia nervosa. Key themes from the 11 studies identified the role of family, peers and professionals, family therapy, the inpatient setting, emphasis on physical versus psychological and conceptualisation of recovery. Future studies would benefit from relating their findings to adolescent theory and considering reflexivity.
• This literature search revealed only six randomised controlled trials investigating the use of family therapy in the treatment of adolescents with anorexia nervosa, and these all had small sample sizes. Some, but not all, of these trials suggest that family therapy may be advantageous over individual psychotherapy in terms of physical improvement (weight gain and resumption of menstruation) and reduction of cognitive distortions, particularly in younger patients. Due to the small sample sizes and the significant risk of bias (particularly information bias) in some of the studies the evidence in favour of family therapy over individual therapy is weak. In the future, larger randomised controlled trials with long term follow-up are required to assess whether family therapy is the most effective treatment for anorexia nervosa in adolescence.
  • Bezance J1, Holliday J., "Adolescents with anorexia nervosa have their say: a review of qualitative studies on treatment and recovery from anorexia nervosa", Eur Eat Disord Rev. 2013 Sep;21(5):352-60. doi: 10.1002/erv.2239. Epub 2013 Jun 13.

• Evidence for the effectiveness of existing treatments of patients with eating disorders is weak. Here we describe and evaluate a method of treatment in a randomized controlled trial. Sixteen patients, randomly selected out of a group composed of 19 patients with anorexia nervosa and 13 with bulimia nervosa, were trained to eat and recognize satiety by using computer support. They rested in a warm room after eating, and their physical activity was restricted. The patients in the control group (n = 16) received no treatment. Remission was defined by normal body weight (anorexia), cessation of binge eating and purging (bulimia), a normal psychiatric profile, normal laboratory test values, normal eating behavior, and resumption of social activities. Fourteen patients went into remission after a median of 14.4 months (range 4.9-26.5) of treatment, but only one patient went into remission while waiting for treatment (P = 0.0057). Relapse is considered a major problem in patients who have been treated to remission. We therefore report results on a total of 168 patients who have entered our treatment program. The estimated rate of remission was 75%, and estimated time to remission was 14.7 months (quartile range 9.6 > or = 32). Six patients (7%) of 83 who were treated to remission relapsed, but the others (93%) have remained in remission for 12 months (quartile range 6-36). Because the risk of relapse is maximal in the first year after remission, we suggest that most patients treated with this method recover.
  • Bergh, C; Brodin, U; Lindberg, G; Södersten, P (2002). "Randomized controlled trial of a treatment for anorexia and bulimia nervosa". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 99 (14): 9486–91. Bibcode:2002PNAS...99.9486B. doi:10.1073/pnas.142284799. PMC 123167. PMID 12082182.

• The aim of the present study was to evaluate the effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) for treatment of anorexia nervosa (AN) using a case series methodology among participants with a history of prior treatment for AN. Three participants enrolled; all completed the study. All participants had a history of 1-20 years of intensive eating disorder treatment prior to enrollment. Participants were seen for 17-19 twice-weekly sessions of manualized ACT. Symptoms were assessed at baseline, post-treatment and 1-year follow-up. All participants experienced clinically significant improvement on at least some measures; no participants worsened or lost weight even at 1-year follow-up. Simulation modelling analysis (SMA) revealed for some participants an increase in weight gain and a decrease in eating disorder symptoms during the treatment phase as compared to a baseline assessment phase. These data, although preliminary, suggest that ACT could be a promising treatment for subthreshold or clinical cases of AN, even with chronic participants or those with medical complications.
  • Berman, MI; Boutelle, KN; Crow, SJ (2009). "A case series investigating acceptance and commitment therapy as a treatment for previously treated, unremitted patients with anorexia nervosa". European Eating Disorders Review. 17 (6): 426–34. doi:10.1002/erv.962. PMID 19760625.

• This review first identifies diseases with which eating disorders are often confused and then explores features in the history, physical examination, and laboratory studies, which can provide clues to the cause of the patient's symptoms. In addition, it discusses the recommended evaluation and treatments for the gastrointestinal diseases that most commonly mimic the presentation of eating disorders including Crohn disease (CrD), celiac disease, gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), and eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE).
• The ubiquitous nature of the gastrointestinal complaints requires the clinician to consider a broad differential diagnosis when evaluating a patient for an eating disorder.
  • Bern EM, O'Brien RF (Aug 2013). "Is it an eating disorder, gastrointestinal disorder, or both?". Curr Opin Pediatr (Review). 25 (4): 463–70. doi:10.1097/MOP.0b013e328362d1ad. PMID 23838835

• ADHD girls were 3.6 times more likely to meet criteria for an eating disorder throughout the follow-up period compared to control females. Girls with eating disorders had significantly higher rates of major depression, anxiety disorders, and disruptive behavior disorder compared to ADHD girls without eating disorders. Girls with ADHD and eating disorders had a significantly earlier mean age at menarche than other ADHD girls. No other differences in correlates of ADHD were detected between ADHD girls with and without eating disorders.
  • Biederman, J; Ball, SW; Monuteaux, MC; Surman, CB; Johnson, JL; Zeitlin, S (2007). "Are girls with ADHD at risk for eating disorders? Results from a controlled, five-year prospective study". Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics: JDBP. 28(4): 302–7. doi:10.1097/DBP.0b013e3180327917. PMID 17700082.

• A randomized controlled trial of zinc supplementation in anorexia nervosa (AN) reported a two-fold increase of the rate of increase of body mass index (BMI) in the zinc group. Zinc is inexpensive, readily available and free of significant side effects. However, oral zinc supplementation is infrequently prescribed as an adjunctive treatment for AN. Understanding the mechanism of action of zinc may increase its use.
• Low zinc intake, which is very common in AN, adversely affects neurotransmitters in various parts of the brain, including gamma-amino butyric acid (GABA) and the amygdala, which are abnormal in AN. Zinc supplementation corrects these abnormalities, resulting in clinical benefit in AN.
• Oral administration of 14 mg of elemental zinc daily for 2 months in all patients with AN should be routine.
  • Birmingham, CL; Gritzner, S (2006). "How does zinc supplementation benefit anorexia nervosa?". Eating and Weight Disorders : EWD. 11 (4): e109–11. PMID 17272939.

• Social cognitive theory would warn that the high prevalence of interaction opportunities in the pro–eating disorder community has the potential to be extremely harmful if viewers are learning dangerous behaviors from one another, particularly if they are similar in age and gender. Other studies suggest that discussing techniques and perceived benefits may also have contagious effects on those not yet committed to the behaviors.5 The disclaimers included on pro–eating disorder Web sites may warn unsuspecting readers away from distressing content but also may entice vulnerable individuals to read further. Although there is no evidence as to the impact of warnings or disclaimers on pro–eating disorder sites, research on other media such as movies and video games with adult ratings suggests that labels might entice young viewers to want to see media that are not appropriate for them.
  Behavioral and communication theories, such as the social cognitive and cultivation theories mentioned earlier,8,9 would also suggest that the most deleterious components of these sites are the evocative images depicted coupled with constant social support encouraging extreme behaviors. On these Web sites, striving to be underweight is deemed not only as normative but as a signal of success. Only 13% of site maintainers offered an overt statement indicating that their own eating disorder was a problem. In addition, the Internet's easy accessibility allows users to tap into a site's features at any time of day or night.
  Social interaction is the most common reason young people use the Internet. This may be particularly relevant to the eating disorder online community, as research shows that individuals suffering from eating disorders have difficulty relating with same-age peers, attempt to hide their eating disorder behaviors, and often experience shame and isolation. Online venues for interaction with friends or strangers may seem like a safer and even appropriate place to disclose personal information. Furthermore, the Internet allows one to not only maintain relative anonymity but also easily retreat from criticism or uncomfortable situations.
  • Borzekowski, D; Schenk, S; Wilson, J; Peebles, R (2010). "E-Ana and e-mia: A content analysis of pro-eating disorder web sites". American Journal of Public Health. 100 (8): 1526–1534. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2009.172700. PMC 2901299. PMID 20558807.

• The Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III-R (SCID and SCID II) was administered to 105 eating disorder in-patients in order to examine rates of comorbid psychiatric disorders and the chronological sequence in which these disorders developed. Eighty-six patients, 81.9% of the sample, had Axis I diagnoses in addition to their eating disorder. Depression, anxiety and substance dependence were the most common comorbid diagnoses. Anorexic restrictors were significantly more likely than bulimics (all subtypes) to develop their eating disorder before other Axis I comorbid conditions. Personality disorders were common among the subjects; 69% met criteria for at least one personality disorder diagnosis. Of the 72 patients with personality disorders, 93% also had Axis I comorbidity. Patients with at least one personality disorder were significantly more likely to have an affective disorder or substance dependence than those with no personality disorder.
  • Braun, DL; Sunday, SR; Halmi, KA (1994). "Psychiatric comorbidity in patients with eating disorders". Psychological Medicine. 24 (4): 859–67. doi:10.1017/S0033291700028956. PMID 7892354.

• Findings indicate that women with BN and co-morbid APD may be characterized by interpersonal submissiveness and avoidance, affective instability, self-harm, behavioural inhibition in response to threat and lower sensitivity to serotonergic activation. These findings may indicate common, serotonergic factors, associated with social submissiveness, behavioural inhibition to threat and BN.
  • Bruce KR1, Steiger H, Koerner NM, Israel M, Young SN, "Bulimia nervosa with co-morbid avoidant personality disorder: behavioural characteristics and serotonergic function". Psychological Medicine. 34 (1): 113–24. doi:10.1017/S003329170300864X. PMID 14971632.

• Alcohol use disorders were significantly more prevalent in women with ANBN and bulimia nervosa than in women with anorexia nervosa (p =.0001). The majority of individuals reported primary onset of the eating disorder, with only one third reporting the onset of the AUD first. After eating disorder subtype was controlled for, AUDs were associated with the presence of major depressive disorder, a range of anxiety disorders, and cluster B personality disorder symptoms. In addition, individuals with AUDs presented with personality profiles marked by impulsivity and perfectionism.
• Individuals with eating disorders and AUDs exhibit phenotypic profiles characterized by both anxious, perfectionistic traits and impulsive, dramatic dispositions. These traits mirror the pattern of control and dyscontrol seen in individuals with this comorbid profile and suggest that anxiety modulation may be related to alcohol use in this group.
  • Bulik, CM; Klump, KL; Thornton, L; Kaplan, AS; Devlin, B (2004). "Alcohol use disorder comorbidity in eating disorders: a multicenter study". The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. 65 (7): 1000–6. doi:10.4088/JCP.v65n0718. PMID 15291691.

• Eating disorders and alcohol use disorders (AUDs) commonly co-occur, although the patterns of comorbidity differ by eating disorder subtype. Our aim was to explore the nature of the co-morbid relation between AUDs and eating disorders in a large and phenotypically well-characterized group of individuals.
• Alcohol use disorders were significantly more prevalent in women with ANBN and bulimia nervosa than in women with anorexia nervosa (p =.0001). The majority of individuals reported primary onset of the eating disorder, with only one third reporting the onset of the AUD first. After eating disorder subtype was controlled for, AUDs were associated with the presence of major depressive disorder, a range of anxiety disorders, and cluster B personality disorder symptoms. In addition, individuals with AUDs presented with personality profiles marked by impulsivity and perfectionism.
• Individuals with eating disorders and AUDs exhibit phenotypic profiles characterized by both anxious, perfectionistic traits and impulsive, dramatic dispositions. These traits mirror the pattern of control and dyscontrol seen in individuals with this comorbid profile and suggest that anxiety modulation may be related to alcohol use in this group.
  • Bulik CM1, Klump KL, Thornton L, Kaplan AS, Devlin B, Fichter MM, Halmi KA, Strober M, Woodside DB, Crow S, Mitchell JE, Rotondo A, Mauri M, Cassano GB, Keel PK, Berrettini WH, Kaye WH, “Alcohol use disorder comorbidity in eating disorders: a multicenter study.”, J Clin Psychiatry. 2004 Jul;65(7):1000-6.

• In a large study of psychiatric outpatients, their eating disorders were mainly classed as "not otherwise specified" (NOS) — rather than as bulimia, anorexia, or binge eating — and most patients failed to meet the full diagnostic criteria set forth in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition ( DSM-IV).
  This suggests that DSM-IV diagnostic thresholds for eating disorders are too restrictive, the researchers, led by Mark Zimmerman, MD, from Brown University School of Medicine, in Providence, Rhode Island, write.
  Dr. Zimmerman told Medscape that their findings "strongly suggest that there are problems with the diagnostic criteria in the DSM category for eating disorders, because most individuals with an eating disorder don't meet the formal diagnostic criteria." He added that this contrasts with other categories of diagnosis — such as anxiety, personality, and depressive disorders — where "the overwhelming majority" of individuals meet the formal diagnostic criteria. "The conclusion is that there are significant problems with the eating-disorder diagnostic category in the DSM," he said.
  • Busko, Marlene. "DSM-IV Diagnostic Criteria for Eating Disorders May Be Too Stringent". Medscape. Archived from the original on 2012-05-13.

• Clinical signs of hypometabolism in anorexia nervosa may result from the "low triiodothyronine syndrome," in which thyroxine (T4) and thyroid stimulating hormone are usually normal, but triiodothyronine (T3) is in a range compatible with hypothyroidism. A case in which anorexia nervosa presented with unsuspected hyperthyroidism is reported.
  • Byerley, B; Black, DW; Grosser, BI (1983). "Anorexia nervosa with hyperthyroidism: case report". The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. 44 (8): 308–9. PMID 6874653.

• Studies comparing PSH with GSH found no significant differences between treatment groups at end of treatment or follow-up. Comparison between different types of PSH/GSH found significant differences on eating disorder symptoms but not on bingeing/purging abstinence rates.
• PSH/GSH may have some utility as a first step in treatment and may have potential as an alternative to formal therapist-delivered psychological therapy. Future research should focus on producing large well-conducted studies of self-help treatments in eating disorders including health economic evaluations, different types and modes of delivering self-help (e.g. computerised versus manual-based) and different populations and settings.
  • Carter, JC; Olmsted, MP; Kaplan, AS; McCabe, RE (2003). "Self-help for bulimia nervosa: a randomized controlled trial". The American Journal of Psychiatry. 160 (5): 973–8. doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.160.5.973. PMID 12727703.

• The eating disorders anorexia nervosa (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN) are multifactorial syndromes of unknown origin which occur typically in female adolescents or young women. Nowadays, AN and BN are most often triggered by dietary restriction. Both are treatable conditions. As in other psychiatric disorders, a lower comorbidity, a shorter duration of illness, less familial psychopathology, and, in AN, a higher minimal weight have been shown to be associated with a better outcome. So far, no abnormalities specific to AN or BN that would shed light on their etiology have been identified. Controlled and uncontrolled studies testing antipsychotic, antidepressant, weight-promoting, and prokinetic drugs have demonstrated that the core symptoms of AN are refractory to currently available psychotropic medication. For relapse prevention, however, antidepressant medication may be useful. Renutrition, psychotherapy, and family therapy remain the cornerstones of treatment for AN. Placebo-controlled studies with antidepressant drugs have been far more promising for treating BN in the short term. Recent studies have found that lasting symptomatic improvement and remission require the addition of psychological treatments in the form of cognitive and interpersonal psychotherapy. The steady stream of newly identified peptides and other molecules involved in appetite and body weight control may ultimately provide cues to better targeted treatments of eating disorders.
  • Casper, RC (2002). "How useful are pharmacological treatments in eating disorders?". Psychopharmacology Bulletin. 36 (2): 88–104. PMID 12397843.

• Personality traits have been implicated in the onset, symptomatic expression, and maintenance of eating disorders (EDs). The present article reviews literature examining the link between personality and EDs published within the past decade, and presents a meta-analysis evaluating the prevalence of personality disorders (PDs) in anorexia nervosa (AN), bulimia nervosa (BN), and binge eating disorder (BED) as assessed by self-report instruments versus diagnostic interviews. AN and BN are both consistently characterized by perfectionism, obsessive-compulsiveness, neuroticism, negative emotionality, harm avoidance, low self-directedness, low cooperativeness, and traits associated with avoidant PD. Consistent differences that emerge between ED groups are high constraint and persistence and low novelty seeking in AN and high impulsivity, sensation seeking, novelty seeking, and traits associated with borderline PD in BN. The meta-analysis, which found PD rates of 0 to 58% among individuals with AN and BN, documented that self-report instruments greatly overestimate the prevalence of every PD.
  • Cassin SE1, von Ranson KM, "Personality and eating disorders: a decade in review.", Clin Psychol Rev. 2005 Nov;25(7):895-916.

• BN and BED are associated with childhood abuse, whereas AN shows mixed results. Individuals with similar trauma should be monitored for early recognition of EDs.
  • Caslini, M; Bartoli, F; Crocamo, C; Dakanalis, A; Clerici, M; Carrà, G (January 2016). "Disentangling the Association Between Child Abuse and Eating Disorders: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis". Psychosomatic Medicine. 78 (1): 79–90. doi:10.1097/psy.0000000000000233. PMID 26461853.

• Both depressive disorders and eating disorders are multidimensional and heterogeneous disorders. This paper examines the nature of their relationship by reviewing clinical descriptive, family-genetic, treatment, and biological studies that relate to the issue. The studies confirm the prominence of depressive symptoms and depressive disorders in eating disorders. Other psychiatric syndromes which occur with less frequency, such as anxiety disorders and obsessive-compulsive disorders in anorexia nervosa, or personality disorders, anxiety disorders, and substance abuse in bulimia nervosa, also play an important role in the development and maintenance of eating disorders. Since few studies have controlled for starvation-induced physical, endocrine, or psychological changes which mimic the symptoms considered diagnostic for depression, further research will be needed. The evidence for a shared etiology is not compelling for anorexia nervosa and is at most suggestive for bulimia nervosa. Since in contemporary cases dieting-induced weight loss is the principal trigger, women with self-critical or depressive features will be disproportionately recruited into eating disorders. The model that fits the data best would accommodate a relationship between eating disorders and the full spectrum of depressive disorders from no depression to severe depression, with somewhat higher rates of depression in bulimic anorectic and bulimia nervosa patients than in restricting anorexia nervosa patients, but the model would admit a specific pathophysiology and psychopathology in each eating disorder.
  • Casper, Regina C (1998). "Depression and eating disorders". Depression and Anxiety. 8 (Suppl 1): 96–104. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1520-6394(1998)8:1+<96::AID-DA15>3.0.CO;2-4. PMID 9809221. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9809221

• We report the case of a 10-year-old girl with a mature teratoma in the hypothalamic region. The patient presented a 2-month history of anorexia, psychic disturbances and a 37% loss of body weight. These symptoms had led initially to a diagnosis of major depression and atypical anorexia nervosa. She also presented some signs and symptoms of diencephalic syndrome. This case illustrates the importance of considering a slow-growing mass as a rare but real possibility in the differential diagnosis of anorexia nervosa, mainly in atypical cases.
  • Chipkevitch, E; Fernandes, AC (1993). "Hypothalamic tumor associated with atypical forms of anorexia nervosa and diencephalic syndrome". Arquivos de Neuro-psiquiatria. 51 (2): 270–4. doi:10.1590/S0004-282X1993000200022. PMID 8274094..

• We suggest that our case and further literature provide evidence for an involvement of specific thalamic structures, such as the dorsomedial nucleus, in the development of anorexia nervosa. Furthermore, the treatment of the patient by a combined psychotherapeutic and pharmacotherapeutic approach is described. We focus on the beneficial effect of the atypical antipsychotic olanzapine, which can induce weight gain by an increase of leptin levels.
  • Conrad, R; Wegener, I; Geiser, F; Imbierowicz, K; Liedtke, R (2008). "Nature against nurture: calcification in the right thalamus in a young man with anorexia nervosa and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder". CNS Spectrums. 13 (10): 906–10. PMID 18955946.

• Obstetrical complications, based on parental recall, have been reported to be associated with development of anorexia nervosa. We used prospectively collected data about pregnancy and perinatal factors to examine the subsequent development of anorexia nervosa.
• Increased risk of anorexia nervosa was found for girls with a cephalhematoma (OR, 2.4; 95% CI, 1.4-4.1) and for very preterm birth (< or = 32 completed gestational weeks) (OR, 3.2; 95% CI, 1.6-6.2). In very preterm births, girls who were small for gestational age faced higher risks (OR, 5.7; 95% CI, 1.1-28.7) than girls with higher birth weight for gestational age (OR, 2.7; 95% CI, 1.2-5.8).
• Our results show that perinatal factors, possibly reflecting brain damage, had independent associations with anorexia nervosa. These risk factors may uncover the mechanisms underlying the development of the disorder, even if only a fraction of cases of anorexia nervosa may be attributable to perinatal factors.
  • Cnattingius, S; Hultman, CM; Dahl, M; Sparén, P (1999). "Very preterm birth, birth trauma, and the risk of anorexia nervosa among girls". Archives of General Psychiatry. 56 (7): 634–8. doi:10.1001/archpsyc.56.7.634. PMID 10401509

• CRT cognitive training was performed. Eating Attitudes Test 26 (EAT - 26), Beck Depression Inwentory (BDI), Child Yale - Brown Obsessive - Compulsive Scale (CY - BOCS), Eating Disorders Belief Questionnaire (EDBQ), Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) and also Child Heath Questionnaire (CHQ) - assessed by parents, were used before and after the programme.
  After CRT completion, an improvement on the level ofpsychopathological symptoms was observed (especially in the EAT- 26 and BDI scales), in WCST some improvement was noticed. In TCI, no significant changes were found. In comparison to the initial assessment, an increased level of dysfunctional beliefs was observed.

Cognitive Remediation Therapy can be used in adolescent patients with anorexia nervosa. This procedure may be related to cognitive and symptomatological improvement.

• • Cwojdzińska, A; Markowska-Regulska, K; Rybakowski, F (2009). "Cognitive remediation therapy in adolescent anorexia nervosa—case report". Psychiatria Polska. 43 (1): 115–24. PMID 19694406.

• The Stroop task has been adapted from cognitive psychology to be able to examine attentional biases in various forms of psychopathology, including the eating disorders. This paper reviews the research on the Stroop task in the eating disorders research area in both descriptive and meta-analytic fashions. Twenty-eight empirical studies are identified, which predominantly examine food and body/weight stimuli in bulimic, anorexic, or dieting/food-restricted samples. It is concluded that there is evidence of an attentional bias in bulimia for a range of stimuli but that the effect seems to be limited to body/weight stimuli in anorexia. The evidence to date is that there is no attentional bias in dieting samples.
  • Dobson KS1, Dozois DJ. "Attentional biases in eating disorders: a meta-analytic review of Stroop performance", Clin Psychol Rev. 2004 Jan;23(8):1001-22.

• Anorexia nervosa (AN), usually seen in young girls, is characterised by severe emaciation induced by self-imposed starvation. Enlargement of the ventricular system and sulci has been reported, as has high signal on T2-weighted images. We present a case with atrophic changes and high signal on T2-weighted images, which resolved completely following weight gain.
  • Drevelengas, A; Chourmouzi, D; Pitsavas, G; Charitandi, A; Boulogianni, G (2001). "Reversible brain atrophy and subcortical high signal on MRI in a patient with anorexia nervosa". Neuroradiology. 43 (10): 838–40. doi:10.1007/s002340100589. PMID 11688699.

• Bulimia nervosa and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) share several key features, including impulsivity and low self-esteem. Stimulant medications have been highly effective in the treatment of ADHD. However, medication management of bulimia with antidepressants has demonstrated only partial resolution of bulimic symptoms. To date, there are no published reports of controlled trials evaluating the efficacy of stimulants for bulimia.
• Data from these case reports suggest a possible benefit of screening for ADHD as part of the overall evaluation of bulimia. In addition, these cases suggest the potential role of psychostimulants in the management of bulimia because of the high rate of abstinence from bulimic symptoms and the low rate of adverse side effects. Clinical trials are needed to fully evaluate the efficacy and tolerability of psychostimulants in the treatment of bulimia nervosa.
  • Dukarm, CP (May 2005). "Bulimia nervosa and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: a possible role for stimulant medication". Journal of Women's Health. 14 (4): 345–50. doi:10.1089/jwh.2005.14.345. PMID 15916509.

• Anorexia nervosa, which primarily affects adolescent girls and young women, is characterized by distorted body image and excessive dieting that leads to severe weight loss with a pathological fear of becoming fat. The criteria have several minor but important changes: • Criterion A focuses on behaviors, like restricting calorie intake, and no longer includes the word “refusal” in terms of weight maintenance since that implies intention on the part of the patient and can be difficult to assess. The DSM-IV Criterion D requiring amenorrhea, or the absence of at least three menstrual cycles, will be deleted. This criterion cannot be applied to males, pre-menarchal females, females taking oral contraceptives and post-menopausal females. In some cases, individuals exhibit all other symptoms and signs of anorexia nervosa but still report some menstrual activity.
  • DSMV "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original(PDF) on 2015-05-01. Retrieved 2015-04-09. “Eating Disorders Fact Sheet”, p.2.

• Anorexia nervosa is originated from disturbances at various points of the cortico-hypothalamo-hypophyseal axis.
  • Ehle, G; Wahlstab, A; Ott, J (1982). "Psychodiagnostic findings in anorexia nervosa and post-pill amenorrhea". Psychiatrie, Neurologie, und Medizinische Psychologie. 34 (11): 647–56. PMID 7170321.

• Dieting is common among adolescent girls and may place them at risk of using unhealthy weight-control behaviors (UWCBs), such as self-induced vomiting, laxatives, diet pills, or fasting. Research has suggested that social factors, including friends and broader cultural norms, may be associated with UWCBs. The present study examines the relationship between the school-wide prevalence of current weight loss efforts among adolescent girls, friends' dieting behavior, and UWCBs, and investigates differences in these associations across weight categories. Survey data were collected in 31 middle and high schools in ethnically and socio-economically diverse communities in Minnesota, USA. The response rate was 81.5%. Rates of UWCBs were compared across the spectrum of prevalence of trying to lose weight and friends' involvement with dieting, using chi(2) analysis and multivariate logistic regression, controlling for demographic factors and clustering by school. Girls with higher body mass index (BMI) were more likely to engage in UWCBs than those of lower BMI. Multivariate models indicated that friends' dieting behavior was significantly associated with UWCBs for average weight girls (OR = 1.57, CI = 1.40-1.77) and moderately overweight girls (OR = 1.47, CI = 1.19-1.82). The school-wide prevalence of trying to lose weight was significantly, albeit modestly, related to UWCBs for average weight girls (15th-85th percentile; OR = 1.17, CI = 1.01-1.36), and marginally associated for modestly overweight girls (85th-95th percentile; OR = 1.21, CI = .97-1.50), even after controlling for friends' dieting behaviors. The social influences examined here were not associated with UWCBs among underweight ( < 15th percentile) or overweight ( > 95th percentile) girls. Findings suggest that social norms, particularly from within one's peer group, but also at the larger school level may influence UWCBs, particularly for average weight girls. Implications for school-based interventions to reduce UWCBs are discussed.
  • Eisenberg, ME; Neumark-Sztainer, D; Story, M; Perry, C (2005). "The role of social norms and friends' influences on unhealthy weight-control behaviors among adolescent girls". Social Science & Medicine. 60 (6): 1165–73. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2004.06.055. PMID 15626514.

• This paper reports the results of a randomised treatment trial of two forms of outpatient family intervention for anorexia nervosa. Forty adolescent patients with anorexia nervosa were randomly assigned to "conjoint family therapy" (CFT) or to "separated family therapy" (SFT) using a stratified design controlling for levels of critical comments using the Expressed Emotion index. The design required therapists to undertake both forms of treatment and the distinctiveness of the two therapies was ensured by separate supervisors conducting live supervision of the treatments. Measures were undertaken on admission to the study, at 3 months, at 6 months and at the end of treatment. Considerable improvement in nutritional and psychological state occurred across both treatment groups. On global measure of outcome, the two forms of therapy were associated with equivalent end of treatment results. However, for those patients with high levels of maternal criticism towards the patient, the SFT was shown to be superior to the CFT. When individual status measures were explored, there were further differences between the treatments. Symptomatic change was more marked in the SFT whereas there was considerably more psychological change in the CFT group. There were significant changes in family measures of Expressed Emotion. Critical comments between parents and patient were significantly reduced and that between parents was also diminished. Warmth between parents increased.
  • Eisler, I; Dare, C; Hodes, M; Russell, G (2000). "Family therapy for adolescent anorexia nervosa: the results of a controlled comparison of two family interventions". ‘’Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, and Allied Disciplines’’. 41 (6): 727–36. doi:10.1111/1469-7610.00660. PMID 11039685.

• The relationship between characteristics of self-soothing ability, the capacity for evocative memory, and aloneness was investigated in a clinical sample of 50 bulimia nervosa (BN) patients.
• Results suggest the need for a more comprehensive understanding of the role of affect regulation and the experience of aloneness in BN and the need to develop treatments to specifically address these features of the illness.
  • Esplen MJ1, Garfinkel P, Gallop R., “Relationship between self-soothing, aloneness, and evocative memory in bulimia nervosa”, Int J Eat Disord. 2000 Jan;27(1):96-100.

• The similarities between the mentalities of anorexia nervosa, bulimia, and sexual repression among young women are undeniable. Young women starve their bodies until they can no longer resist both physical and sexual hungers. But the guilt associated with indulging becomes overwhelming and purging and punishment ensues. Both biological and sexual hungers are natural. However the messages sent to young women by their culture are that neither of these hungers are normal and, in fact, are immoral and inexcusable.
  • Essick, Ellen (2006). "Eating Disorders and Sexuality". In Steinberg, Shirley R.; Parmar, Priya; Richard, Birgit. Contemporary Youth Culture: An International Encyclopedia. Greenwood. p.276

• Recent studies have hypothesized that perinatal complications might increase the risk of developing eating disorders. However, it is unclear which pathways might link obstetric complications and eating disorders. The present study aimed at exploring the relationship between obstetric complications and temperament in eating disordered subjects.
• The sample was selected among subjects who took part in a prevalence study carried out on a representative sample of the general population and from among people with anorexia and bulimia nervosa referred to an outpatient specialist unit. Subjects who were born in the two obstetric wards of Padua Hospital between 1971 and 1979 and who completed the Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire were included. A blind analysis of the obstetric records of the whole sample was performed. The final sample was composed of 66 anorexia nervosa, 44 bulimia nervosa, and 257 control subjects.
• Among the different groups of obstetric complications, only the group that included preterm birth and other signs of neonatal immaturity or dysmaturity displayed a significant relationship with harm avoidance. The use of a mediation path analytic model revealed a significant, but incomplete, mediation effect of harm avoidance in explaining the link between neonatal dysmaturity and the development of eating disorders. Maternal weight gain during pregnancy seemed to have a protective effect on harm avoidance.
• The presence of signs of neonatal dysmaturity at birth seems to influence the development of high levels of harm avoidance in eating disorders.
  • Favaro, A; Tenconi, E; Santonastaso, P (2006). "Perinatal factors and the risk of developing anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa". Archives of General Psychiatry. 63 (1): 82–8. doi:10.1001/archpsyc.63.1.82. PMID 16389201.

• Among the whole sample, the factor most strongly associated with suicide attempt or suicidal ideation was the diagnostic category, with the highest odds ratio for bulimia nervosa followed by anorexia nervosa of the binging/purging subtype. Among diagnostic subgroups, the strongest factors were drug use, alcohol use, and tobacco use.
  • Fedorowicz VJ1, Falissard B, Foulon C, Dardennes R, Divac SM, Guelfi JD, Rouillon F., "Factors associated with suicidal behaviors in a large French sample of inpatients with eating disorders." Int J Eat Disord. 2007 Nov;40(7):589-95.

• Serum leptin levels in three groups of patients affected by severe eating disorders are not related to the specific pathology but are correlated with the individual BMI. The analysis of leptin values may be a useful index of assessing the adipose tissue stores in the clinical setting, but will be of no help for diagnosis nor prognosis of severe eating disorders.
  • Ferron, F; Considine, R; Peino, R; Lado; I (1997). "Serum leptin concentrations in patients with anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and non-specific eating disorders correlate with the body mass index but are independent of the respective disease". Clinical Endocrinology. 46 (3): 289–293. doi:10.1046/j.1365-2265.1997.1260938.x. PMID 9156037.

• Previously, we identified that a majority of patients with anorexia nervosa (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN) as well as some control subjects display autoantibodies (autoAbs) reacting with alpha-melanocyte-stimulating hormone (alpha-MSH) or adrenocorticotropic hormone, melanocortin peptides involved in appetite control and the stress response. In this work, we studied the relevance of such autoAbs to AN and BN. In addition to previously identified neuropeptide autoAbs, the current study revealed the presence of autoAbs reacting with oxytocin (OT) or vasopressin (VP) in both patients and controls. Analysis of serum levels of identified autoAbs showed an increase of IgM autoAbs against alpha-MSH, OT, and VP as well as of IgG autoAbs against VP in AN patients when compared with BN patients and controls. Further, we investigated whether levels of these autoAbs correlated with psychological traits characteristic for eating disorders. We found significantly altered correlations between alpha-MSH autoAb levels and the total Eating Disorder Inventory-2 score, as well as most of its subscale dimensions in AN and BN patients vs. controls. Remarkably, these correlations were opposite in AN vs. BN patients. In contrast, levels of autoAbs reacting with adrenocorticotropic hormone, OT, or VP had only few altered correlations with the Eating Disorder Inventory-2 subscale dimensions in AN and BN patients. Thus, our data reveal that core psychobehavioral abnormalities characteristic for eating disorders correlate with the levels of autoAbs against alpha-MSH, suggesting that AN and BN may be associated with autoAb-mediated dysfunctions of primarily the melanocortin system.
  • Fetissov, SO; Harro, J; Jaanisk, M; Järv, A; Podar, I; Nilsson, I; Sakthivel, P; Lefvert, AK; et al. (2005). "Autoantibodies against neuropeptides are associated with psychological traits in eating disorders". ‘’Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America’’. 102 (41): 14865–70. Bibcode:2005PNAS..10214865F. doi:10.1073/pnas.0507204102. PMC 1253594. PMID 16195379.

• With the apparent increase in prevalence of anorexic and bulimic eating disorders, the search for effective treatments for these disorders has been intensified in recent years. In this review the results of psychopharmacological studies of patients with anorexia or bulimia nervosa are presented and analysed. The focus of this review is on controlled studies. Although a variety of psychopharmacological substances has been tested in patients with anorexia nervosa, the outcome of controlled studies has been generally disappointing. A possible differential therapy effect of cyproheptadine needs replication: in one study it enhanced body weight gain in non-bulimic anorexics, while it appeared to hinder weight gain in bulimic anorexics. The issue of prophylaxis of osteoporosis in chronic low-weight anorexics has received increasing attention in recent years, and pharmacological prophylaxis appears indicated in this patient group. The results of psychopharmacological treatment studies of patients with bulimia nervosa have overall been more favourable than those of anorexic patients. Statistically significant effects concerning the reduction of bulimic or depressive symptoms in bulimia nervosa has been demonstrated for tricyclic antidepressants (imipramine, desipramine), serotonergic agents (fluoxetine, d-fenfluramine), non-selective monoamine-oxydase-inhibitors (isocarboxazide, phenelzine) and trazodone. The antibulimic effect appears not to be associated with the antidepressant effect. Theoretical, methodological and practical issues concerning pharmacological treatment of anorexic and bulimic eating disorders are presented and discussed.
  • Fichter MM, “Drug treatment of anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. A review”, ‘’Nervenarzt’’.1993 Jan;64(1):21-35.

• Franko et al’s results are also very interesting as they found that suicide attempts were more frequent among people with anorexia than among people with bulimia. This finding may have implications for clinical practice, both for treatment and for seeking confirmation of this evidence. The generalisability of Franko et al’s results will depend on further longitudinal studies with similar features. One of the authors’ aims was to identify predictors of suicide and suicide attempts. This should also be the aim of all mental health professionals involved in the treatment of people with eating disorders. However, future studies would benefit from a careful consideration of the diagnostic tools used, the evaluation of suicide risk and the recognition of comorbid Axis I disorders or personality disorders that may increase suicide risk dramatically.
  • Franko, DL; Keel, PK; Dorer, DJ; Blais, MA; Delinsky, SS (2004). "What predicts suicide attempts in women with eating disorders?". Psychological Medicine. 34 (5): 843–53.

• Body dissatisfaction, disordered eating and depression differentially affect adolescent girls (compared to boys); however, these variables have not been examined in relation to ethnicity. A review of the literature finds that Black adolescent girls are more satisfied with their bodies than White adolescent girls and engage much less frequently in dieting or disordered eating than do White girls in the US. A central question raised by this review is whether body dissatisfaction and pubertal timing are as relevant to our understanding of the etiology of depression in Black girls as they appear to be in White girls. Based on the available data, it does not seem that a risk factor model supporting the role of early pubertal timing, weight increases and body dissatisfaction in the development of depression applies to Black adolescent girls. This review underscores the need for future research with a variety of ethnic minority groups to better understand the etiology of adolescent depression.
  • Franko DL1, Striegel-Moore RH, “The role of body dissatisfaction as a risk factor for depression in adolescent girls: are the differences Black and White?”, J Psychosom Res. 2002 Nov;53(5):975-83.

• Suicide is the third most frequent cause of death among teenagers and young adults. Reviews and meta-analyses have shown that suicidal behaviour is more frequent among people with eating disorders than in the general population. The course of illness and the follow up period is of great importance for the correct evaluation of suicidality in this class of patients.5 Suicide may occur not only in the late phases of the illness but in periods of symptomatic remission.
  Franko et al assessed suicidality every 6–12 months over 8.6 years. This is a most important and innovative contribution to the international literature. This approach should be implemented in everyday clinical practice, as it provides a greater opportunity to predict and prevent suicidal behaviour. However, such an approach may work only with certain resources and with increased staff motivation. We agree with the scales employed by the authors; however scales specifically designed for suicide risk assessment should be used in future studies. The evaluation of suicidality using tools that aim to recognise the possibility of committing suicide may contribute to the definition of a suicidal spectrum among people with eating disorders.
  Franko et al’s results are also very interesting as they found that suicide attempts were more frequent among people with anorexia than among people with bulimia. This finding may have implications for clinical practice, both for treatment and for seeking confirmation of this evidence. The generalisability of Franko et al’s results will depend on further longitudinal studies with similar features. One of the authors’ aims was to identify predictors of suicide and suicide attempts. This should also be the aim of all mental health professionals involved in the treatment of people with eating disorders. However, future studies would benefit from a careful consideration of the diagnostic tools used, the evaluation of suicide risk and the recognition of comorbid Axis I disorders or personality disorders that may increase suicide risk dramatically.
  • Franko, DL; Keel, PK; Dorer, DJ; Blais, MA; Delinsky, SS (2004). "What predicts suicide attempts in women with eating disorders?". Psychological Medicine. 34 (5): 843–53.

• Disturbances of volume-regulating mechanisms have already been implicated in the pathophysiology of eating disorders like anorexia or bulimia nervosa with the peptide hormones vasopressin and atrial natriuretic peptide (ANP) being of special interest. Aim of the present study was to investigate, whether the expression of the corresponding genes was altered and if so, if these changes could be explained by epigenetic mechanisms such as DNA methylation. We analyzed blood samples of 46 women suffering from anorexia (n=22) or bulimia nervosa (n=24) as well as of 30 healthy controls. Peripheral mRNA expression and DNA methylation of the vasopressin and the ANP precursor genes were assessed using real-time PCR. We found significantly lower levels of ANP mRNA in patients with eating disorders. This downregulation was accompanied by a hypermethylation of the ANP gene promoter in the bulimic subgroup. We did not find differences regarding expression or methylation of the vasopressin gene. ANP mRNA expression was inversely associated with impaired impulse regulation. We conclude that epigenetic mechanisms may contribute to the known alterations of ANP homeostasis in women with eating disorders.
  • Frieling H1, Bleich S, Otten J, Römer KD, Kornhuber J, de Zwaan M, Jacoby GE, Wilhelm J, Hillemacher T., “Epigenetic downregulation of atrial natriuretic peptide but not vasopressin mRNA expression in females with eating disorders is related to impulsivity.” Neuropsychopharmacology. 2008 Oct;33(11):2605-9. doi: 10.1038/sj.npp.1301662. Epub 2008 Jan 2.

• The pathophysiology of eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN) has been linked to an impaired dopaminergic neurotransmission, still the origin of this disturbance remains unknown. The aim of the present study was, therefore, to evaluate whether the expression of dopaminergic genes is altered in the blood of patients suffering from eating disorders and if these alterations can be explained by changes in the promoter specific DNA methylation of the genes.
• Our study shows a disturbed expression of dopaminergic genes that is accompanied by a dysregulation of the epigenetic DNA methylation. Further studies are necessary to provide more insight into the epigenetic dysregulation of the dopaminergic neurotransmission in the pathophysiology of eating disorders.
  • Frieling, H; Römer, KD; Scholz, S; Mittelbach, F; Wilhelm, J; De Zwaan, M; Jacoby, GE; Kornhuber, J; Hillemacher, T; Bleich, S (2010). "Epigenetic dysregulation of dopaminergic genes in eating disorders". The International Journal of Eating Disorders. 43 (7): 577–83. doi:10.1002/eat.20745. PMID 19728374.

• Parental influence has been shown to be an intrinsic component in the development of eating behaviors of children. This influence is manifested and shaped by a variety of diverse factors such as familial genetic predisposition, dietary choices as dictated by cultural or ethnic preferences, the parents' own body shape and eating patterns, the degree of involvement and expectations of their children's eating behavior as well as the interpersonal relationship of parent and child. This is in addition to the general psychosocial climate of the home and the presence or absence of a nurturing stable environment. It has been shown that maladaptive parental behavior has an important role in the development of eating disorders.
• Adams and Crane (1980), have shown that parents are influenced by stereotypes that influence their perception of their child's body. The conveyance of these negative stereotypes also affects the child's own body image and satisfaction. Hilde Bruch, a pioneer in the field of studying eating disorders, asserts that anorexia nervosa often occurs in girls who are high achievers, obedient, and always trying to please their parents. Their parents have a tendency to be over-controlling and fail to encourage the expression of emotions, inhibiting daughters from accepting their own feelings and desires. Adolescent females in these overbearing families lack the ability to be independent from their families, yet realize the need to, often resulting in rebellion. Controlling their food intake may make them feel better, as it provides them with a sense of control.
  • Fox, John (July 2009). "Eating Disorders and Emotions". Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy. 16 (237–239): 237–239. doi:10.1002/cpp.625. PMID 19639648.

• The media have been focusing on websites that are “pro-anorexic” to illustrate the pervasiveness of eating disorders in the US. This study focuses on the narratives of women who participate in “pro-ana” sites using Lyng’s (Am J Sociol 95:851–886, 1990) concept of edgework. Results indicate that women struggle with feelings of loss of control and through various skills are able to resume control. These data point to the intense emotive reactions fasting elicits, reactions which both reinforce and provide motivation to remain in the subculture. Findings contribute to the literature by focusing on women’s edgework and demonstrating the similarities between men and women edgeworkers.
  • Gailey, J (2009). "Starving is the most fun a girl can have: The Pro-Ana subculture as edgework". ‘’Critical Criminology’’. 17 (2): 93–108. doi:10.1007/s10612-009-9074-z.

• Anorexia nervosa is a mental health disorder characterised by deliberate weight loss (through restrictive eating, excessive exercise and/or purging), disordered body image, and intrusive overvalued fears of gaining weight. The National Institute for Clinical Excellence recommends that family interventions that directly address the eating disorder should be offered to children and adolescents with anorexia nervosa.
• This literature search revealed only six randomised controlled trials investigating the use of family therapy in the treatment of adolescents with anorexia nervosa, and these all had small sample sizes. Some, but not all, of these trials suggest that family therapy may be advantageous over individual psychotherapy in terms of physical improvement (weight gain and resumption of menstruation) and reduction of cognitive distortions, particularly in younger patients. Due to the small sample sizes and the significant risk of bias (particularly information bias) in some of the studies the evidence in favour of family therapy over individual therapy is weak. In the future, larger randomised controlled trials with long term follow-up are required to assess whether family therapy is the most effective treatment for anorexia nervosa in adolescence.
  • Gardner J1, Wilkinson P, “Is family therapy the most effective treatment for anorexia nervosa?”, ‘’Psychiatr Danub’’. 2011 Sep;23 Suppl 1:S175-7.

• A population of professional dance (N = 183) and modelling (N = 56) students, who by career choice must focus increased attention and control over their body shapes, was studied. Height and weight data were obtained on all subjects. In addition, a questionnaire that is useful in assessing the symptoms of anorexia nervosa, the Eating Attitudes Test (EAT), was administered. Results of these tests were compared with those of normal female university students (N = 59), patients with anorexia nervosa (N = 68), and music students (N = 35). Anorexia nervosa and excessive dieting concerns were overrepresented in the dance and modelling students. Twelve cases (6.5%) of primary anorexia nervosa were detected in the dance group. All but one case developed the disorder while studying dance. Within the dance group those from the most competitive environments had the greatest frequency of anorexia nervosa. These data suggest that both pressures to be slim and achievement expectations are risk factors in the development of anorexia nervosa. The influence of socio-cultural determinants are discussed within the context of anorexia nervosa as a multidetermined disorder.
  • Garner, DM; Garfinkel, PE (2009). "Socio-cultural factors in the development of anorexia nervosa". ‘’Psychological Medicine’’. 10 (4): 647–56. doi:10.1017/S0033291700054945. PMID 7208724.

• While abnormalities in central norepinephrine regulation may contribute to abnormal eating patterns in bulimia nervosa, alterations in function of the peripheral sympathetic nervous system could contribute to the decreased metabolic rate and increased anxiety responses previously reported in these patients. To assess beta-adrenergic receptor sensitivity in bulimic patients, we studied cardiovascular and hormonal responses to acute pharmacological challenge with intravenously administered isoproterenol. In comparison to healthy controls, binge-abstinent bulimic patients had significantly reduced mean baseline plasma norepinephrine level, pulse rate, and systolic blood pressure, and significantly increased chronotropic responses to isoproterenol infusion. Decreased sympathoneural activity may contribute to a tendency for bulimic patients to maintain body weight despite low caloric intake.
  • George, DT; Kaye, WH; Goldstein, DS; Brewerton, TD; Jimerson, DC (July 1990). "Altered norepinephrine regulation in bulimia: effects of pharmacological challenge with isoproterenol". Psychiatry Res. 33 (1): 1–10. doi:10.1016/0165-1781(90)90143-S. PMID 2171006.

• Eating disorders, such as anorexia nervosa (AN), bulimia nervosa (BN) and binge eating disorders (BED), are described as abnormal eating habits that usually involve insufficient or excessive food intake. Animal models have been developed that provide insight into certain aspects of eating disorders. Several drugs have been found efficacious in these animal models and some of them have eventually proven useful in the treatment of eating disorders. This review will cover the role of monoaminergic neurotransmitters in eating disorders and their pharmacological manipulations in animal models and humans. Dopamine, 5-HT (serotonin) and noradrenaline in hypothalamic and striatal regions regulate food intake by affecting hunger and satiety and by affecting rewarding and motivational aspects of feeding. Reduced neurotransmission by dopamine, 5-HT and noradrenaline and compensatory changes, at least in dopamine D2 and 5-HT(2C/2A) receptors, have been related to the pathophysiology of AN in humans and animal models. Also, in disorders and animal models of BN and BED, monoaminergic neurotransmission is down-regulated but receptor level changes are different from those seen in AN. A hypofunctional dopamine system or overactive α2-adrenoceptors may contribute to an attenuated response to (palatable) food and result in hedonic binge eating. Evidence for the efficacy of monoaminergic treatments for AN is limited, while more support exists for the treatment of BN or BED with monoaminergic drugs.
  • Ivan Gestel MA1, Kostrzewa E, Adan RA, Janhunen SK, “Pharmacological manipulations in animal models of anorexia and binge eating in relation to humans”, Br J Pharmacol. 2014 Oct;171(20):4767-84. doi: 10.1111/bph.12789. Epub 2014 Sep 5.

• In three hospitals 81 female patients satisfying rigorous diagnostic criteria for anorexia nervosa were randomly allocated to one of four treatment combinations of cyproheptadine and placebo with behaviour therapy and no behaviour therapy. Cyproheptadine was found to be effective in inducing weight gain in a subgroup of anorexia nervosa patients who (a) had a history of birth delivery complications, (b) had lost 41-52 per cent weight from norm and (c) had a history of prior outpatient treatment failure. This subgroup may represent a more severe form of anorexia nervosa.
  • Goldberg, SC; Halmi, KA; Eckert, ED; Casper, RC; Davis, JM (1979). "Cyproheptadine in anorexia nervosa". ‘’The British Journal of Psychiatry’’. 134: 67–70. doi:10.1192/bjp.134.1.67. PMID 367480.

• The prevalence of body dysmorphic disorder in patients with anorexia nervosa is unknown. We hypothesized that body dysmorphic disorder would be underdiagnosed in patients with anorexia nervosa and that comorbidity with body dysmorphic disorder would result in greater overall dysfunction.
• Sixteen (39%) of the 41 patients with anorexia nervosa were diagnosed with comorbid body dysmorphic disorder unrelated to weight concerns. The anorexia nervosa patients with body dysmorphic disorder had significantly lower overall functioning and higher levels of delusionality than the anorexic patients without body dysmorphic disorder.
• These preliminary results suggest that body dysmorphic disorder may be relatively common among patients with anorexia nervosa. The presence of comorbid body dysmorphic disorder may indicate a more severe form of illness.
  • Grant, JE; Kim, SW; Eckert, ED (November 2002). "Body dysmorphic disorder in patients with anorexia nervosa: prevalence, clinical features, and delusionality of body image". The International Journal of Eating Disorders. 32 (3): 291–300. doi:10.1002/eat.10091. PMID 12210643.

• Thirty-one women (averaging at least one binge/purge episode per week) were randomly assigned to 20 weeks of dialectical behavior therapy or 20 weeks of a waiting-list comparison condition. The manual-based dialectical behavior therapy focused on training in emotion regulation skills.
• An intent-to-treat analysis showed highly significant decreases in binge/purge behavior with dialectical behavior therapy compared to the waiting-list condition. No significant group differences were found on any of the secondary measures.
• The use of dialectical behavior therapy adapted for treatment of bulimia nervosa was associated with a promising decrease in binge/purge behaviors.

• Gray, JJ; Hoage, CM (1990). "Bulimia nervosa: group behavior therapy with exposure plus response prevention". Psychological Reports. 66 (2): 667–74. doi:10.2466/PR0.66.2.667-674. PMID 1971954.

• The aim of this study is to obtain CRF (Corticotropin Releasing Factor) stimulation at a suprahypothalamic level with a psychological stressor and to evaluate its response in anorexia nervosa. CRF plays a major role in the mechanisms underlying the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) system's response to stress. Animal studies clearly showed that CRF is involved both in the adaptation to a novel environment and the regulation of eating behaviour. CRF's staietogenic effect is mediated via the paraventricular nucleus. Three groups of age matched young women were studied: 8 patients meeting the DSM III-R criteria for anorexia nervosa, 8 underweight healthy volunteers and 10 normal weight volunteers. All subjects were submitted to an auditory stimulation test ("psychosocial stress test") consisting of an intellectual task in which maximal performance is impossible to achieve, the subjects being permanently disturbed by various meaningful noises. Subjects were asked to answer self-rating scales for anxiety and tension prior to and after the test. CRF reactivity was measured by salivary cortisol (RIA). After the test, anorexia nervosa patients exhibit a significantly higher salivary cortisol response compared to the normal weight volunteers. In most of cases, salivary cortisol response was not correlated with the psychological variables. The range of the response is very explosive in two anorectic patients. Our data are consistent with the hyperactivity of the corticotropic axis stress response in anorexia nervosa, but request further investigations to prove that.
  • Gross, MJ; Kahn, JP; Laxenaire, M; Nicolas, JP; Burlet, C (1994). "Corticotropin-releasing factor and anorexia nervosa: reactions of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis to neurotropic stress". Annales d'Endocrinologie. 55 (6): 221–8. PMID 7864577.

• There is no one sign of an eating disorder, however there are red flags. These can include excessive “fat, weight or calorie talk,” a pattern of eating a limited choice of low-calorie food or a pattern of occasional binge eating of calorie-dense foods. People with anorexia nervosa may excessively exercise or excessively stand, pace or fidget. Affected individuals may severely limit the amount of calories they consume or may avoid weight gain following meals by inducing vomiting or abusing laxative, diuretic and diet pills. Feeling self-conscious about one’s eating behavior is common. Affected individuals often avoid social eating settings and eat alone.
• There is no single cause of an eating disorder. We know that genetics play a large role, but genetic vulnerability is only part of the story. Environment plays a role too, especially in triggering onset, which often occurs in adolescence. Pressure to diet or weight loss related to a medical condition can be the gateway to anorexia nervosa or bulimia. For those who are genetically vulnerable to anorexia nervosa, once they lose the first five to 10 lbs, dieting becomes increasingly compelling and rewarding. Looked at another way, if eating disorders were the result solely of social pressure for thinness we would expect eating disorder rates to have increased as obesity has in the past few decades, yet anorexia nervosa and bulimia remain relatively rare and often cluster in families.
• Treatment for an eating disorder is challenging. It involves interrupting behaviors that have become driven and compelling. Recovery takes a team, which includes family, friends and other social supports, as well as medical and mental health professionals. Be empathic, but clear. List signs or behaviors you have noticed and are concerned about. Help locate a treatment provider and offer to go with your friend or relative to an evaluation. Be prepared that the affected individual may be uncertain about seeking treatment. Treatment is effective, many are able to achieve full recovery and the vast majority will improve with expert care. Treatment assists affected individuals to change what they do. It helps them normalize their eating and reframe the irrational thoughts that sustain eating disordered behaviors. Food is central to many social activities and the practice of eating meals with supportive friends and family is an important step in recovery.
• Eating disorders do not discriminate and can affect anyone. Although they are most common in young women, it is not unusual for older women to have an eating disorder. Some have had one all their life, others were only mildly affected until some life event triggers clinical worsening – a stressor, physical illness or a co-occurring psychiatric illness, such as depression or anxiety. Recent evidence strongly suggests that anxiety disorders, especially social anxiety disorder, and obsessive compulsive personality traits increase individual vulnerability to an eating disorder. Eating disorders occur in men too. An estimated 10 percent of people with anorexia nervosa and bulimia and a third or more of people with binge eating disorder are male. More
  • Angela Guarda, M.D. "Eating Disorders". American Psychiatric Association. Archived from the original on 21 December 2014. Retrieved 4 December 2014.

• Qigong is a mind-body intervention focusing on interoceptive awareness that appears to be a promising approach in anorexia nervosa (AN). In 2008, as part of our multidimensional treatment program for adolescent inpatients with AN, we began a weekly qigong workshop that turned out to be popular among our adolescent patients. Moreover psychiatrists perceived clinical benefits that deserved further exploration.
• A qualitative study therefore sought to obtain a deeper understanding of how young patients with severe AN experience qigong and to determine the incentives and barriers to adherence to qigong, to understanding its meaning, and to applying it in other contexts. Data were collected through 16 individual semi-structured face-to-face interviews and analyzed with the interpretative phenomenological analysis method. Eleven themes emerged from the analysis, categorized in 3 superordinate themes describing the incentives and barriers related to the patients themselves (individual dimension), to others (relational dimension), and to the setting (organizational dimension). Individual dimensions associated with AN (such as excessive exercise and mind-body cleavage) may curb adherence, whereas relational and organizational dimensions appear to provide incentives to join the activity in the first place but may also limit its post-discharge continuation. Once barriers are overcome, patients reported positive effects: satisfaction associated with relaxation and with the experience of mind-body integration.
• Qigong appears to be an interesting therapeutic tool that may potentiate psychotherapy and contribute to the recovery process of patients with AN. Further analysis of the best time window for initiating qigong and of its place in overall management might help to overcome some of the barriers, limit the risks, and maximize its benefits.

• Gueguen J1,2, Piot MA2,3, Orri M1,2, Gutierre A3, Le Moan J3, Berthoz S1,3, Falissard B1,2, Godart N1,3. “Group Qigong for Adolescent Inpatients with Anorexia Nervosa: Incentives and Barriers”, PLoS One. 2017 Feb 2;12(2):e0170885. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0170885. eCollection 2017.

• Eating disorders have morbidity and mortality rates that are among the highest of any mental disorders and are associated with significant functional impairment. This article provides an up-to-date review on recent developments and expanding knowledge in adolescent anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and related disorders. It covers diagnoses and assessment, recognition of typical symptoms, medical and psychiatric comorbidities, and current trends in epidemiology.
  • Herpertz-Dahlmann B, “Adolescent eating disorders: definitions, symptomatology, epidemiology and comorbidity”, Child Adolesc Psychiatr Clin N Am. 2009 Jan;18(1):31-47. doi: 10.1016/j.chc.2008.07.005.

• A prospective, naturalistic, longitudinal design was used to map the course of AN and BN in 246 women. Follow-up data are presented in terms of full and partial recovery, predictors of time to recovery, and rates and predictors of relapse.

The full recovery rate of women with BN was significantly higher than that of women with AN, with 74% of those with BN and 33% of those with AN achieving full recovery by a median of 90 months of follow-up. Intake diagnosis of AN was the strongest predictor of worse outcome. No predictors of recovery emerged among bulimic subjects. Eighty-three percent of women with AN and 99% of those with BN achieved partial recovery. Approximately one third of both women with AN and women with BN relapsed after full recovery. No predictors of relapse emerged.

• The findings suggest that the course of AN is characterized by high rates of partial recovery and low rates of full recovery, while the course of BN is characterized by higher rates of both partial and full recovery.
  • Herzog, DB; Dorer, DJ; Keel, PK; Selwyn, SE; Ekeblad, ER (1999). "Recovery and relapse in anorexia and bulimia nervosa: a 7.5-year follow-up study". Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. 38 (7): 829–37. doi:10.1097/00004583-199907000-00012. PMID 10405500.

• The purpose of this review is to evaluate the recent literature on the incidence and prevalence of and mortality associated with eating disorders.
• General-practice studies show that the overall incidence rates of anorexia nervosa remained stable during the 1990s, compared with the 1980s. Some evidence suggests that the occurrence of bulimia nervosa is decreasing. Anorexia nervosa is a common disorder among young white females, but is extremely rare among black females. Recent studies confirm previous findings of the high mortality rate within the anorexia nervosa population.
• The incidence of anorexia nervosa is around eight per 100,000 persons per year. An upward trend has been observed in the incidence of anorexia nervosa in the past century till the 1970s. The most substantial increase was among females aged 15-24 years, for whom a significant increase was observed from 1935 to 1999. The average prevalence rates for anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa among young females are 0.3 and 1%, respectively. Only a minority of people with eating disorders, especially with bulimia nervosa, are treated in mental healthcare.
  • Hoek HW, “Incidence, prevalence and mortality of anorexia nervosa and other eating disorders”, Curr Opin Psychiatry. 2006 Jul;19(4):389-94.

• The authors report the case of a female patient who developed anorexia nervosa. A cavernoma, located on the frontal side of the right sylvian, was discovered by chance after a seizure.
• Surgical treatment of the lesion resulted in complete remission of the eating disorder at two years follow-up.
• Evidence for organic brain contribution to anorexia nervosa is strong and can be illustrated by this case report of anorexia nervosa associated with cerebral tumour.
  • Houy, E; Debono, B; Dechelotte, P; Thibaut, F (2007). "Anorexia nervosa associated with right frontal brain lesion". The International Journal of Eating Disorders. 40 (8): 758–61. doi:10.1002/eat.20439. PMID 17683096.

• We examined the extent to which attachment insecurity was related to eating disorder (ED) symptoms, and predictive of treatment outcomes. Women diagnosed with anorexia nervosa (AN) restricting subtype (ANR), AN binge purge subtype (ANB), or bulimia nervosa (BN) completed an attachment scale pretreatment, and ED symptom scales pretreatment (N = 243) and post-treatment (N = 157). A comparison sample of 126 non-ED women completed attachment scales on 1 occasion. Those with EDs had significantly higher attachment insecurity than non-ED. ANB was associated with higher attachment avoidance compared with ANR and BN, and higher attachment anxiety compared with BN. Higher attachment anxiety was significantly related to greater ED symptom severity and poorer treatment outcome across all EDs even after controlling for ED diagnosis. Attachment dimensions substantially contribute to our understanding of ED symptoms and treatment outcome. Addressing attachment insecurity when treating those with EDs may improve treatment outcomes.
  • Illing Vanessa A.; Tasca Giorgio; Balfour Louise; Bissada Hany (2010). "Attachment Insecurity Predicts Eating Disorder Symptoms and Treatment Outcomes in a Clinical Sample of Women". The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. 198 (9): 653–59. doi:10.1097/nmd.0b013e3181ef34b2. PMID 20823727.

• The aim of the article was an attempt to present selected theoretical motifs and moreover self experience in the adaptation of elements of psychodrama by Moreno in psychodynamic psychotherapy (individual and group psychotherapy) in a group of people with anorexia and bulimia nervosa. Psychodrama through own creativity, spontaneity and taking action on the "here and now" stage helps to attain and intensify therapeutic aims which concern the consciousness of inner conflict of persons with anorexia and bulimia nervosa, which is translocated on their body.
  • Izydorczyk B, “Adaptation of psychodrama in psychotherapy of patients with anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa”, Psychiatr Pol. 2011 Mar-Apr;45(2):261-75.

• Ninety-four female-female twins underwent a transabdominal ultrasound examination to detect polycystic ovaries. The scans of 52 individuals showed normal ovaries and 42 had evidence of polycystic ovaries. All the subjects were sent a bulimia investigation test (Edinburgh) (BITE) questionnaire for abnormal eating behavior. A total of 74 responses was received (79%). Overall, 76% of women with polycystic ovaries had an abnormal BITE score and their mean BITE score showed a significant increase compared to those with normal ovaries. Also, model fitting analysis suggested a strong genetic effect for bulimia using the BITE scoring system, and it provided strong evidence of a significant influence of environmental factors in the severity score of bulimia.
  • Jahanfar, S; Eden, JA; Nguyent, TV (1995). "Bulimia nervosa and polycystic ovary syndrome". Gynecological Endocrinology. 9 (2): 113–7. doi:10.3109/09513599509160199. PMID 7502686.

• A wide range of childhood adversities were associated with elevated risk for eating disorders and problems with eating or weight during adolescence and early adulthood after the effects of age, childhood eating problems, difficult childhood temperament, parental psychopathology, and co-occurring childhood adversities were controlled statistically. Numerous unique associations were found between specific childhood adversities and specific types of problems with eating or weight, and different patterns of association were obtained among the male and female subjects. Maladaptive paternal behavior was uniquely associated with risk for eating disorders in offspring after the effects of maladaptive maternal behavior, childhood maltreatment, and other co-occurring childhood adversities were controlled statistically.
  Childhood adversities may contribute to greater risk for the development of eating disorders and problems with eating and weight that persist into early adulthood. Maladaptive paternal behavior may play a particularly important role in the development of eating disorders in offspring.
  • Johnson, JG; Cohen, P; Kasen, S; Brook, JS (2002). "Childhood adversities associated with risk for eating disorders or weight problems during adolescence or early adulthood", The American Journal of Psychiatry. 159 (3): 394–400. doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.159.3.394. PMID 11870002.

• Three core beliefs were found to moderate the relationship between paternal rejection and aspects of eating psychopathology. The predictive validity of paternal rejection on aspects of eating symptomatology was found to decrease as dysfunctional core beliefs increased.
  When levels of social isolation, vulnerability to harm, and self-sacrifice core beliefs were high, recalled parental relationships were no longer relevant to current eating psychopathology. The findings provide further evidence that core beliefs are important factors in eating disorder psychopathology and may be clinically useful in identifying targets for treatment.
  • Jones, C; Harris, G; Leung, N (2005). "Parental rearing behaviours and eating disorders: the moderating role of core beliefs". Eating Behaviors. 6 (4): 355–64. doi:10.1016/j.eatbeh.2005.05.002. PMID 16257809.

• Osteoporosis has been reported in anorexia nervosa (AN), but not in other eating disorders. Thirty-three patients, 8 AN, 17 bulimia nervosa (BN), and 8 eating disorder not otherwise specified (EDNOS), were evaluated by bone densitometry (radius, spine, femur) to determine the prevalence and distribution of osteoporosis and the role of physical parameters, exercise and estrogen. All three diagnostic subgroups had evidence of decreased bone density, worst in the EDNOS subgroup and least in the BN subgroup. The most affected site was the femur, least the spine; the radius was intermediate. Age, body surface area, age of onset, and length of illness weakly correlated with the femur and spine density in the BN and EDNOS subgroups. Exercise was related to bone density in the AN subgroup in the femur, moderate exercise having a protective effect and strenuous exercise being detrimental. No significant correlation of bone density measurements with estradiol levels and/or history of amenorrhea was identified. Eating disorder patients are at risk for osteoporosis, which has multiple contributing factors including physical parameters and exercise. Estrogen deficiency by itself may not be a major causative factor.
  • Joyce, JM; Warren, DL; Humphries, LL; Smith, AJ; Coon, JS (1990), "Osteoporosis in women with eating disorders: comparison of physical parameters, exercise, and menstrual status with SPA and DPA evaluation", Journal of Nuclear Medicine. 31 (3): p. 325.

• About 60% of eating disorder cases are attributable to biological and genetic components. Other cases are due to external reasons or developmental problems.
  • Kadison, Richard (2004). College of the Overwhelmed: The Campus Mental Health Crisis and What to Do About It. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. p. 132. ISBN 9780787981143.

• Anxiety disorders commonly had their onset in childhood before the onset of an eating disorder, supporting the possibility they are a vulnerability factor for developing anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa.
• Kaye, WH; Bulik, CM; Thornton, L; Barbarich, N; Masters, K (2004). "Comorbidity of anxiety disorders with anorexia and bulimia nervosa". The American Journal of Psychiatry. 161 (12): 2215–21. doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.161.12.2215. PMID 15569892.

• Although many women diet, relatively few develop the extreme weight loss and the clinical symptoms of anorexia nervosa. An underlying biological diathesis and temperament may place someone at risk for developing anorexia nervosa. Certain traits, such as negative affect, behavioral inhibition, compliance, high harm avoidance, and an obsessive concern with symmetry, exactness, and perfectionism, persist after recovery from anorexia nervosa. These persistent symptoms raise the possibility that such traits exist premorbidly and contribute to the pathogenesis of this disorder. Such traits could be associated with increased brain serotonin activity. After recovery, anorexics have increased levels of 5-HIAA, the major metabolite of serotonin, in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). Low CSF 5-HIAA levels have been associated with impulsive and aggressive behaviors, which are opposite to those typically found in anorexia nervosa. Increased serotonin activity could contribute to many behavioral symptoms, such as increased satiety. Moreover, recent data suggest that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI)-type medication improves outcome and prevents relapse in people with anorexia nervosa. These theoretical issues have important clinical implications in this era of diminished support for treatment of eating disorders. Anorexia nervosa, like other major psychiatric disorders, has contributory pathophysiology and can benefit from and deserves appropriate treatment resources.
  • Kaye, WH (1997). "Anorexia nervosa, obsessional behavior, and serotonin". Psychopharmacology Bulletin. 33 (3): 335–44. PMID 9550876.

• Individuals with anorexia nervosa have a relentless preoccupation with dieting and weight loss that results in severe emaciation and sometimes death. It is controversial whether such symptoms are secondary to psychosocial influences, are a consequence of obsessions and anxiety or reflect a primary disturbance of brain appetitive circuits. New brain imaging technology provides insights into ventral and dorsal neural circuit dysfunction - perhaps related to altered serotonin and dopamine metabolism - that contributes to the puzzling symptoms found in people with eating disorders. For example, altered insula activity could explain interoceptive dysfunction, and altered striatal activity might shed light on altered reward modulation in people with anorexia nervosa.
• Premorbid, childhood personality and temperament traits, which are thought to be genetically-determined, are thought to contribute to a vulnerability to develop AN. These include negative emotionality, harm avoidance, perfectionism, inhibition, a drive for thinness, altered interoceptive awareness and obsessive-compulsive personality traits.
  Individuals with AN seem to have a paradoxical response to eating; they engage in dietary restraint in order to reduce anxiety, because eating stimulates dysphoric mood. Several lines of evidence raise the possibility that altered serotonin (5-HT) function contributes to anxiety in subjects with AN, and starvation is a means of diminishing 5-HT functional activity.
  Individuals with AN might have a trait towards an imbalance between serotonin and dopamine pathways, which may have a role in an altered interaction between ventral (limbic) neurocircuits, which are important for identifying the emotional significance of stimuli and for generating an affective response to these stimuli, and dorsal (cognitive) neurocircuits that modulate selective attention, planning and effortful regulation of affective states.
  Recent functional MRI studies support the possibility that individuals with AN might be less able to precisely modulate affective responses to immediately salient stimuli but have increased activity in neurocircuits concerned with planning and consequences.
  Coding the awareness of pleasant sensation from the taste experience through the anterior insula might be altered in individuals with AN, tipping the balance of striatal processes away from normal, automatic reward responses mediated by the ventral striatum and towards a more 'strategic' approach mediated by the dorsal striatum.
  Perfectionism and obsessional personality traits could be related to exaggerated cognitive control by the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (which may have excessive inhibitory activity and thus dampen information processing through reward pathways) or to compensation for primary deficits in limbic function. When there are deficits in emotional regulation, overdependence upon cognitive rules is a reasonable strategy of self-management. <br. The temperament and personality traits that create a vulnerability to develop AN also persist after recovery. After recovery, these traits tend to have positive aspects, including attention to detail, concern about consequences and a drive to accomplish and succeed.

• Kaye WH1, Fudge JL, Paulus M, “New insights into symptoms and neurocircuit function of anorexia nervosa”, Nat Rev Neurosci. 2009 Aug;10(8):573-84. doi: 10.1038/nrn2682. Epub 2009 Jul 15.

• Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a severe, usually relapsing, psychiatric disorder. It has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder with an estimated adult mortality rate of 5% per decade. It is most predominant among girls and young women with the average age at onset being 15 years. Estimated lifetime prevalence is approximately 2% in females and 0.3% in males although studies have reported rates of up to 4% in females. It is characterized by excessive weight loss due to self-starvation, body image distortion, and immense fear of gaining weight or being fat. There are two subtypes: (1) restricting (AN-R), characterized by restricting food intake with or without compulsive exercise, and (2) binge-eating/purging (AN-BP), characterized by episodes of consuming large portions of food (binging) followed by purging (eg, ipecac- or self-induced vomiting, and/or excessive use of laxatives, enemas, or diuretics). Comorbid psychiatric illnesses (eg, major depression, anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder or behaviors) are common among individuals with AN.
• Anorexia nervosa can result in starvation status and nutritional deficiencies leading to reversible and irreversible medical complications of varying severity. These complications can affect nearly every body system and usually directly correlate to severity of the disease, degree of weight loss/starvation and/or purging.
• The use of antidepressants as the sole therapeutic intervention for AN is unsupported, and these agents should only be used as adjunctive treatment to nutritional restoration and psychotherapy. There is a general lack of evidence to support use of SSRIs or mirtazapine during the AN acute treatment phase in underweight individuals. As a result, clinicians should not use antidepressants during hospitalization while patients are undergoing initial weight and nutritional restoration. At this time, the data are inconclusive regarding the place of SSRIs and mirtazapine and for their benefits in individuals with AN during the maintenance treatment phase once the weight is at least partially restored. Health care professionals should use clinical judgment in recommending fluoxetine or possibly citalopram, sertraline, or mirtazapine as adjunctive treatment to psychotherapy for relapse prevention and/or improvement of symptoms of depression and anxiety and/or obsessive-compulsive behaviors that did not to resolve with nutritional rehabilitation and psychotherapy. A combination of psychotherapy and different pharmacologic modalities may be used under the rationale that the efficacy of these treatments might be additive or perhaps synergistic to increase treatment success in weight-restored anorexic patients.

• Kaye WH1, Fudge JL, Paulus M, “New insights into symptoms and neurocircuit function of anorexia nervosa”, Nat Rev Neurosci. 2009 Aug;10(8):573-84. doi: 10.1038/nrn2682. Epub 2009 Jul 15.

• The prevalence of anxiety disorders in general and OCD in particular was much higher in people with anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa than in a nonclinical group of women in the community. Anxiety disorders commonly had their onset in childhood before the onset of an eating disorder, supporting the possibility they are a vulnerability factor for developing anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa.
  • Kaye, WH; Bulik, CM; Thornton, L; Barbarich, N; Masters, K (2004). "Comorbidity of anxiety disorders with anorexia and bulimia nervosa". The American Journal of Psychiatry. 161 (12): 2215–21. doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.161.12.2215. PMID 15569892.

• Individuals with anorexia nervosa (AN) demonstrate a relentless engagement in behaviors aimed to reduce their weight, which leads to severe underweight status, and occasionally death. Neurobiological abnormalities, as a consequence of starvation are controversial: evidence, however, demonstrates abnormalities in the reward system of patients, and recovered individuals. Despite this, a unifying explanation for reward abnormalities observed in AN and their relevance to symptoms of the illness, remains incompletely understood. Theories explaining reward dysfunction have conventionally focused on anhedonia, describing that patients have an impaired ability to experience reward or pleasure. We review taste reward literature and propose that patients' reduced responses to conventional taste-reward tasks may reflect a fear of weight gain associated with the caloric nature of the tasks, rather than an impaired ability to experience reward. Consistent with this, we propose that patients are capable of 'liking' hedonic taste stimuli (e.g., identifying them), however, they do not 'want' or feel motivated for the stimuli in the same way that healthy controls report. Recent brain imaging data on more complex reward processing tasks provide insights into fronto-striatal neural circuit dysfunction related to altered reward processing in AN that challenges the relevance of anhedonia in explaining reward dysfunction in AN. In this way, altered activity of the anterior cingulate cortex and striatum could explain patients' pathological engagement in behaviors they consider rewarding (e.g., self-starvation) that are otherwise aversive or punishing, to those without the eating disorder. Such evidence for altered patterns of brain activity associated with reward processing tasks in patients and recovered individuals may provide important information about mechanisms underlying symptoms of AN, their future investigation, and the development of treatment approaches.
  • Keating C1, Tilbrook AJ, Rossell SL, Enticott PG, Fitzgerald PB, “Reward processing in anorexia nervosa” Neuropsychologia. 2012 Apr;50(5):567-75. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2012.01.036. Epub 2012 Feb 13.

• The authors explore the extent to which eating disorders, specifically anorexia nervosa (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN), represent culture-bound syndromes and discuss implications for conceptualizing the role genes play in their etiology. The examination is divided into 3 sections: a quantitative meta-analysis of changes in incidence rates since the formal recognition of AN and BN, a qualitative summary of historical evidence of eating disorders before their formal recognition, and an evaluation of the presence of these disorders in non-Western cultures. Findings suggest that BN is a culture-bound syndrome and AN is not. Thus, heritability estimates for BN may show greater variability cross-culturally than heritability estimates for AN, and the genetic bases of these disorders may be associated with differential pathoplasticity.
  • Keel, PK; Klump, KL (2003). "Are eating disorders culture-bound syndromes? Implications for conceptualizing their etiology". Psychological Bulletin. 129 (5): 747–69. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.524.4493. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.129.5.747. PMID 12956542.

• Epidemiological, cross-cultural, and longitudinal studies underscore the importance of the idealization of thinness and resulting weight concerns as psychosocial risk factors for eating disorders. Personality factors such as negative emotionality and perfectionism contribute to the development of eating disorders but may do so indirectly by increasing susceptibility to internalize the thin ideal or by influencing selection of peer environment. During adolescence, peers represent self-selected environments that influence risk.
• Peer context may represent a key opportunity for intervention, as peer groups represent the nexus in which individual differences in psychological risk factors shape the social environment and social environment shapes psychological risk factors. Thus, peer-based interventions that challenge internalization of the thin ideal can protect against the development of eating pathology.
  • Keel PK1, Forney KJ., “Psychosocial risk factors for eating disorders”, Int J Eat Disord. 2013 Jul;46(5):433-9. doi: 10.1002/eat.22094.

• There is evidence for altered processing of taste in anorexia nervosa, particularly in the areas of reward processing and hedonic sensitivity. However, research on whether people with anorexia nervosa identify taste stimuli accurately, known as taste sensitivity, has yielded mixed findings
• The review of the findings suggest that individuals with AN may experience reduced taste sensitivity that may improve following recovery. However, there was a significant variability in results across studies, potentially reflecting methodological problems including low sample sizes, experimental designs, and uncontrolled confounding variables.
• This review suggests that altered taste sensitivity could represent a component in the wider altered taste processing observed in anorexia nervosa. However, the heterogeneity of findings highlight the need for future research to consider methodological issues raised by this review.
  • Kinnaird E1, Stewart C1,2, Tchanturia K1,2,3. “Taste sensitivity in anorexia nervosa: A systematic review”, Int J Eat Disord. 2018 Aug;51(8):771-784. doi: 10.1002/eat.22886. Epub 2018 Jul 8.

• Data described earlier are clear in establishing a role for genes in the development of eating abnormalities. Estimates from the most rigorous studies suggest that more than 50% of the variance in eating disorders and disordered eating behaviors can be accounted for by genetic effects. These high estimates indicate a need for studies identifying the specific genes contributing to this large proportion of variance. Twin and family studies suggest that several heritable characteristics that are commonly comorbid with AN and BN may share genetic transmission with these disorders, including anxiety disorders or traits, body weight, and possibly major depression. Moreover, some developmental research suggests that the genes involved in ovarian hormones or the genes that these steroids affect also may be genetically linked to eating abnormalities. Molecular genetic research of these disorders is in its infant stages. However, promising areas for future research have already been identified (e.g., 5-HT2A receptor gene, UCP-2/UCP-3 gene, and estrogen receptor beta gene), and several large-scale linkage and association studies are underway. These studies likely will provide invaluable information regarding the appropriate phenotypes to be included in genetic studies and the genes with the most influence on the development of these disorders.
  • Klump, KL; Kaye, WH; Strober, M (2001). "The evolving genetic foundations of eating disorders". The Psychiatric Clinics of North America. 24 (2): 215–25. doi:10.1016/S0193-953X(05)70218-5. PMID 11416922.

• Anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder defined by a symptomatic triad, anorexia, emaciation and amenorrhoea. This disease mainly affects young women. Besides these three symptoms, hyperactivity is often associated with anorexia nervosa. Hyperactivity can be considered as a strategy to lose weight, but studies on animal models have shown that it could be explained by more complicated mechanisms. Hyperactivity is defined by an excess of physical activity, which can induce social, professional and family consequences. Hyperactivity can take different forms, most striking is the restless one. Patients with anorexia nervosa are not all hyperactive. Brewerton et al. have compared patients with anorexia nervosa and hyperactivity to patients without hyperactivity. Hyperactive patients are more dissatisfied by their body image, they use less means of purging (laxatives, vomiting), and they start starving earlier than patients without hyperactivity. Many factors can promote the emergence and maintenance of hyperactivity, especially social and cultural requirements, sports environment, family influences. Various models can explain the links between excessive exercise and anorexia nervosa. Epling and Pierce have exposed a behavioural model which shows how hyperactivity can lead to starvation, creating a self-maintained cycle. Eisler and Le Grande have described four models to explain the links between hyperactivity and anorexia nervosa. First, excessive exercise can be considered as a symptom of anorexia nervosa. It can also promote the development of eating disorders. Anorexia nervosa and hyperactivity can be a manifestation of an other psychiatric disorder. At least, hyperactivity can be a variant of anorexia nervosa, which has the same effects, as weight loss. Hyperactivity can also be considered as a kind of obsessive compulsive disorder. Hyperactivity and obsessive compulsive disorders actually share some clinical and neurochemical characteristics. An other model consists in comparing excessive exercise in anorexia nervosa to an addictive behaviour. Self-starvation exacerbated by hyperactivity can be considered as an addiction to endogenous opioid. Few studies are carried out in order to estimate the prevalence of high level exercise in the eating disorders. Davis et al. have achieved a prevalence study. The results indicate that a large majority of patients with anorexia nervosa (80,8%) were exercising excessively during an acute phase of the disorder. Research on animals, specially on rats, brings us an interesting model explaining interactions between anorexia nervosa and hyperactivity. With animal models, we have noticed that, when rats with access to a running wheel, are restricted in their food intake, they become excessively active, and paradoxically reduce food consumption. Many searchers have tried to explain this phenomenon. Morse et al. have pointed from animal models that the level of hyperactivity was linked to the severity of food restriction. This result can be explained by a failure of a part of the brain involved in rest and activity regulation. Animal research brings us explanations about the effects of starvation on the endocrine system and the neurotransmitters. Broocks et al. have shown that corticosterone concentration in plasma was synergistically increased by semi starvation and exercise, and the reduction of triiodothyronine by semi starvation was significantly greater in the running wheel group. An other study of Broocks et al. has revealed an increased hypothalamic serotonin metabolism with the combined effect of hyperactivity and food restriction. Tryptophan, an amid acid involved in serotonin synthesis, can also play a role in the maintenance of anorexia nervosa. In starvation conditions, opioid releasing caused by physical exercise would decrease food intake. Exner's study and Adan's one have shown that leptin would be involved in semi starvation induced hyperactivity mechanisms. In spite of animal models can not be entirely generalized to human, they are useful to try to explain biological supports of hyperactivity. Hyperactivity is not only a strategy to lose weight, but also a specific symptom which completes the clinical triad. Animal studies have led to promising results; we might use medicine, such as serotonin reuptake inhibitors or opioid antagonists in the treatment of hyperactivity in anorexia nervosa.
  • Kohl M1, Foulon C, Guelfi JD, “Hyperactivity and anorexia nervosa: behavioural and biological perspective”, Encephale. 2004 Sep-Oct;30(5):492-9.

• The aim of this study was to describe patterns of personality disorders (PDs) in women with chronic eating disorders (EDs). An index group of nineteen women who have had EDs for an average of 8.5 years was compared with a control group of same-aged women from the general population. At the time of the study the index group received treatment at a tertiary treatment center in Stockholm. The PDs were assessed using the DSM-IV part of the DSM-IV and ICD-10 Personality Questionnaire (DIP-Q). In the index group, eighteen of nineteen fulfilled the criteria for one or more PD. The number of PD diagnoses for each women ranged from zero (n = 1) to eight (n = 2) with a median of three. Among the controls, only one woman fulfilled the criteria for one or more PD. The most prevalent disorders in the index group were Borderline, Avoidant, and Obsessive-Compulsive. The index group had significantly higher DIP-Q dimensional scores than the controls in the Paranoid, Schizoid, Schizotypal, Borderline, Histrionic, Avoidant, and Dependent scales. Although the assessment of PD symptoms was limited to self-reports, the high prevalence of PD diagnoses and PD symptoms most probably reflects the severe psychiatric impairments in patients suffering from chronic ED.
  • Larsson, JO; Hellzén, M (2004). "Patterns of personality disorders in women with chronic eating disorders", Eating and Weight Disorders : EWD. 9 (3): 200–5. doi:10.1007/bf03325067. PMID 15656014.

• Exposure plus response prevention has been demonstrated to be effective in the treatment of bulimia nervosa. However, when done individually, it is labor intensive and cost-ineffective. In the present study exposure plus response prevention was used in the context of a 6-wk., 12-session behavioral group. In addition to the exposure plus response-prevention component, other techniques included self-monitoring, cognitive restructuring, eating-habit stabilization and problem-solving. Eight bulimic women, vomiting a minimum of five times per week for at least a year, participated in the group. At the end of treatment significant reductions in bingeing and vomiting behaviors were reported by all but one subject, substantiated by significantly lower depression scores (Beck Depression Inventory) and binge-eating scores (Binge Eating Scale). At 6 mo. and 1 yr. posttreatment, 6 of 8 subjects reported averaging less than one binge-purge episode per week, one subject continued unchanged, and one subject had relapsed. A group of wait-list control subjects reported essentially no change in binge-purge frequency over the treatment period. Exposure plus response prevention conducted in a behavioral group context appears to be a cost-effective alternative to individual treatment.
  • Latner, JD; Wilson, GT (2000). "Cognitive-behavioral therapy and nutritional counseling in the treatment of bulimia nervosa and binge eating" Eating Behaviors. 1 (1): 3–21. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.578.4563. doi:10.1016/S1471-0153(00)00008-8. PMID 15001063.

• Studies examining the function of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis in anorexia nervosa are reviewed. A principal finding is that of hypercortisolism, associated with increased central corticotropin-releasing hormone levels and normal circulating levels of adrenocorticotropic hormone. Similarities between neuroendocrine findings in anorexia nervosa and in affective disorder are reviewed. The contribution of circadian rhythm disturbances and malnutrition to observed HPA axis abnormalities in anorexia nervosa is also considered. Directions for future research are discussed.
  • Licinio, J; Wong, ML; Gold, PW (1996). "The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis in anorexia nervosa". Psychiatry Research. 62 (1): 75–83. doi:10.1016/0165-1781(96)02991-5. PMID 8739117.

• This case suggests that an intracranial tumor near the hypothalamus should be included in the differential diagnosis of AN. Any male adolescent with the clinical impression of AN should receive periodic re-evaluation, including neurological, endocrinological and, if necessary, neuroimaging study.
  • Lin, L; Liao, SC; Lee, YJ; Tseng, MC; Lee, MB (2003). "Brain tumor presenting as anorexia nervosa in a 19-year-old man". Journal of the Formosan Medical Association, Taiwan Yi Zhi. 102 (10): 737–40. PMID 14691602.

• After the conducted investigation and observation, the characteristics of the forming incorrect personality were observed in 80% of examined children. According to DSM IV classification, in 50%--from the cluster C, and in 30% cases--the cluster B. According to ICD-10 classification: 26.6% attributes of dependent personality, 16.6%--histrionic personality, 13.3% avoiding personality, 10%--anancastic personality, 6.7% borderline personality and 6.7% antisocial personality.
• There is predominating opinion in literature, connecting restrictive type of psychical anorexia, with disorders of personality of anxiety type--the cluster C, and the figure bulimic--with personality the cluster B. Those results were confirmed with statistical significance in the conducted examinations.
  • Lucka, I; Cebella, A (2004). "Characteristics of the forming personality in children suffering from anorexia nervosa". Psychiatria Polska. 38 (6): 1011–8. PMID 15779665.

• Bulimia and anorexia nervosa are the main diagnostic categories of eating disorders, affecting up to 1.5% of people in the USA at any one time. Both conditions are associated with physical (eg, reduced body mass index, percentage of body fat) and psychosocial (eg, depression, anxiety, quality of life) impairments, as well as high risk of death. Anorexia nervosa is specifically characterised by an excessive exercise engagement with fear of weight gain and aversion of fat, whereas people with bulimia nervosa present with binge eating and purging. These eating disorders are considered one of the most challenging psychiatric conditions to treat, and treatment usually comprises of cognitive–behavioural therapy and pharmacological management. Exercise is usually not recommended for patients with these conditions, mainly due to the belief that it might aggravate the progress of the disorder. However, there is evidence that exercise increases body mass index and reduce depression in people with binge eating. What is uncertain is whether physiotherapy interventions are effective in treating bulimia and anorexia nervosa.
  • Machado GC, Ferreira ML “Physiotherapy improves eating disorders and quality of life in bulimia and anorexia nervosa”, Br J Sports Med, 2014;48:1519-1520.

• The role and utility of antidepressants in AN were published in double-blind, placebo-controlled studies; open-label trials; and a retrospective study. Antidepressants should not be used as sole therapy for AN although their use for confounding symptomatology makes discerning efficacy difficult as they are given together with other therapies. Neurobiological changes due to starvation and AN itself complicate results interpretation. For safety, tricyclic antidepressants and monoamine oxidase inhibitors are not recommended, and bupropion is contraindicated. Use of SSRIs during acute treatment lacks efficacy. Use of SSRIs-primarily fluoxetine and to some extent citalopram, sertraline, or mirtazapine-may aid in relapse prevention and improvement of psychiatric symptomatology in weight-restored anorexic patients.
• Health care professionals should use clinical judgment regarding fluoxetine or possibly citalopram, sertraline or mirtazapine as adjunctive treatment to psychotherapy for relapse prevention, improvement of depressive and anxiety symptoms, and/or obsessive-compulsive behaviors unresolved with nutritional rehabilitation and psychotherapy.

• Marvanova M1, Gramith K2. “Role of antidepressants in the treatment of adults with anorexia nervosa”, Ment Health Clin. 2018 Apr 26;8(3):127-137. doi: 10.9740/mhc.2018.05.127. eCollection 2018 May.

• Although genetic research in eating disorders is frankly in its infancy, patients, families, and clinicians are aware of this research and face challenges in incorporating this knowledge into either their personal conceptions of their (or their family member’s) illness, or in the case of clinicians, helping patients and their families to understand the implications of this knowledge. Simplistic nature versus nurture dichotomies are easy to understand, yet rarely capture the complexity of reality, and definitely fail to do so in the case of eating disorders. Clinicians and researchers must become educated in the nuances of gene x environment interplay and avoid perpetuating purely environmental or purely genetic conceptualizations of eating disorder etiology.
• By definition, eating disorders are complex traits. That means that their inheritance pattern in families does not follow traditional Mendelian patterns, and that they are influenced by multiple genetic and environmental factors of small to moderate effect. There is not one gene for anorexia nervosa or one gene for bulimia nervosa. More likely there are a number of genes that code for proteins that influence traits that index vulnerability to these disorders. Complicating the risk picture even further, these genes exist in concert with other genetic factors that may confer protection against eating disorders, along with main effects of risk and protective environments, as well as gene x environment interplay as we discuss in the following section.
• For decades, parenting styles have been unrightfully blamed for causing eating disorders. Considerable care must be taken when discussing gene x environment interplay not to convey the message that somehow parenting is to blame for these pernicious illnesses. Conversely, a purely genetic explanation should not be taken to mean that parents need not examine their parenting style and the influence that might have on their children.
• In addition to having concerns about their own shape and weight, women with eating disorders may similarly be over-concerned about their children’s weight, even when it is well within normal limits. One study found that 15% of mothers with a history of bulimia nervosa had attempted to “slim down” their normal weight infants. Similarly, Waugh and Bulik found that 20% of the mothers with eating disorder histories in their sample tried to change their children’s appearance. Maternal restriction of children’s eating is a concern, as previous research suggests that maternal control of children’s eating interferes with the development of dietary self-regulation. These effects have been found among children as young as two years of age.
• The influence of maternal perceptions on daughters’ eating disordered behavior appears to continue into adolescence and young adulthood. For example, mothers whose daughters engaged in eating disordered behavior were more likely to view their daughters as overweight than were mothers of non-eating disordered daughters (controlling for weight differences between groups). Further, this appearance pressure is not necessarily limited to weight, as mothers of daughters with eating disorder symptomatology also rated their daughters as less attractive than the daughters rated themselves. These results are concerning, as they suggest that daughters who engage in eating disordered behaviors may not only lack a maternal role model of healthy eating, but also feel maternal pressure to lose weight and enhance their appearance. This of course could reflect several complex intergenerational processes. On one hand, mothers may harbor threshold or subthreshold eating disturbances themselves, and their comments or behaviors could reflect their underlying pathology. Alternatively or complementarily, the daughters’ pathology could render them more sensitive to maternal comments that in other situations may be perceived as culturally normative. These environmental experiences could facilitate the expression of an existing genetic predisposition for eating disorder symptomatology.
• One potential pitfall of genetic research on eating disorders is the misinterpretation that environmental factors such as the media do not matter. Western media’s idealization of an ultra-thin female body type has long been viewed as an important sociocultural risk factor for eating disorders. However, given the ubiquity of this influence in Western cultures, other factors must influence vulnerability to the thin cultural ideal. As Bulik suggests, genetically vulnerable individuals might seek out experiences, such as exposure to thin-ideal media images, which reinforce their negative body image. This hypothesis is supported by a longitudinal study which found that adolescent girls whose eating disorder symptomatology increased over a 16 month period also reported significantly greater fashion magazine reading at Time 2, compared with Time.
• Similarly, individuals genetically predisposed to eating disorder symptomatology such as thin-ideal internalization might also actively choose to affiliate with peers who place a similar high value on weight and appearance. One potential example of this form of active selection could be the decision to join a sorority (particularly for European-American women). European-American sorority members report high levels of eating disorder symptomatology, including weight preoccupation, drive for thinness, and body dissatisfaction. A longitudinal study found that sorority and non-sorority members did not differ on three measures of disordered eating (EDI Drive for Thinness, Body Dissatisfaction, and Bulimia) at Time 1 and Time 2 (first and second year of undergraduate, respectively). However, by Time 3 (third year of undergraduate), non-members’ drive for thinness scores had decreased, while members’ scores on this measure remained roughly the same, and this difference was statistically significant. Thus, the authors concluded that characteristics of the sorority environment could contribute to the persistence of a higher degree of drive for thinness. Although this study did not include a measure of actual or putative genetic vulnerability to eating disorders, it is plausible to speculate that an environment that promotes the maintenance of eating disordered characteristics would be particularly problematic for a genetically vulnerable individual.
• One fascinating and modifiable environmental factor that has emerged as a possible buffer against the development of eating disorders in adolescent girls is family meals. Likewise, breakfast eating may also play a role in preventing the development of eating problems. For example, Fernández-Aranda and colleagues found that women with eating disorders were less likely to have eaten breakfast regularly during childhood compared to non-eating disordered controls. Although retrospective, these findings are consistent with those of a large (n = 2216), longitudinal study which found that breakfast eating frequency was inversely associated with dieting and weight-control behaviors, and positively related to dietary quality and physical activity in adolescents. Overall, these studies offer preliminary insight into potential buffers against eating disorders; however, research in this area has not yet progressed to assess the differential effect of these protective factors in individuals at high-risk for eating disorders versus the general population.
• Another factor that offers promise as a potential buffer against the development of eating disorders is the enhancement of emotion regulation skills. As noted above, individuals with eating disorders experience relatively high levels of perceived stress and difficulties regulating emotion. Thus, interventions aimed at enhancing emotion regulation skills might be of particular benefit to high-risk groups. However, research incorporating mindfulness techniques has not specifically targeted high-risk groups. For example, a recent study investigated the effectiveness of a primary prevention program incorporating elements of mindfulness (e.g., yoga), targeting fifth-grade girls. This program integrated mindfulness into an empirically-based curriculum, which also included other elements, such as media literacy, and the promotion of dissonance regarding idealization of an ultra-slim body type. Compared to a control group, girls in the intervention reported lower body dissatisfaction and uncontrolled eating, and higher social self-concept at post-testing. However, there were no significant changes on other variables assessed including drive for thinness, perceived stress, physical self-concept and perceived competence. Nonetheless, these outcomes do provide some support for the inclusion of mindfulness-based activities in prevention. In contrast, a study with undergraduate women did not find any differences between participants in a yoga program and a control group on eating disorder symptoms at post-testing. Future studies should target high-risk groups, to evaluate the efficacy of mindfulness-based techniques within this specific sample.
• Results from focus groups and clinical case studies suggest that mothers with eating disorders are eager to learn about how best to care for their children, especially with respect to feeding. However, they report that the level of assistance they desire is not routinely offered by their health care providers. In one of the only published interventions conducted with this population, Stein et al. studied 80 mothers with eating disorders and their four to six month old infants to test whether a 13 session intervention of video-feedback treatment in conjunction with cognitive behavioral self-help was more effective than cognitive behavioral self-help alone in reducing mealtime conflict and other aspects of maternal-child interaction. Those mothers in the video-feedback group exhibited significantly less conflict than control mothers as well as significant improvements in infant autonomy and several other interaction measures. In addition, maternal eating psychopathology was reduced across both groups. Such interventions could help break the “cycle of risk” associated with eating disorders, by providing parents with useful buffering strategies.
• Patients read enormous amounts about their illness and are often aware of the genetic research on eating disorders yet they struggle to understand what the data mean for them and the challenges they face every day during recovery. Helping patients to understand the genetic literature is a first step. Although they might not initially see its relevance to their situation, helping them map how disordered eating and temperamental traits track in their families by using techniques such as labeling family trees can provide a useful context for understanding genetic and environmental contributions to their current situation. An understanding of genetic and environmental interplay can provide them with an explanatory model for not only their illness, but also for understanding their sensitivity to the environment. It can help provide them with the motivation to acquire skills that may help buffer them from the environment and combat their biology most effectively.
  • Mazzeo, SE; Bulik, CM (2009). "Environmental and genetic risk factors for eating disorders: What the clinician needs to know". Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America. 18 (1): 67–82. doi:10.1016/j.chc.2008.07.003. PMC 2719561. PMID 19014858.

• One hundred fifty-three patients classified as suffering from polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) and 109 patients who were suffering from a clear organic disorder or endocrinopathy received the bulimia investigation test (Edinburgh) (BITE) questionnaire for abnormal eating behaviors. Patients with PCOS showed a significant increase in their mean BITE score for approximately a third had abnormal eating patterns, and 6% have scores suggestive of clinical bulimia compared with only 1% of women in the group with organic endocrinopathies. The work suggests that women with PCOS should be screened for abnormal eating behaviors and raises the possibility that treatment by psychological means should be considered when abnormal eating behaviors are present.
  • McCluskey, S; Evans, C; Lacey, JH; Pearce, JM; Jacobs, H (1991). "Polycystic ovary syndrome and bulimia". Fertility and Sterility. 55 (2): 287–91. PMID 1991526.

• Etiological theories emphasize interpersonal and family dysfunction in the development of anorexia nervosa. Research supports the notion that families of individuals with anorexia nervosa have dysfunctional patterns of communication. The history of treatment for anorexia nervosa emphasizes the need for resolution of interpersonal dysfunction, within the traditions of psychodynamic, family therapy, and multidimensional therapies.
• Interpersonal psychotherapy is a time-limited psychotherapy based on the notion that regardless of etiology, interpersonal relationships are intertwined with symptomatology. The goals of the therapy are to improve interpersonal functioning and thereby decrease symptomatology. Factors identified as important in the development of anorexia nervosa are readily conceptualized within the interpersonal psychotherapy problem areas of grief, interpersonal disputes, interpersonal deficits, and role transitions.

• McIntosh, VV; Bulik, CM; McKenzie, JM; Luty, SE; Jordan, J (2000). "Interpersonal psychotherapy for anorexia nervosa", The International Journal of Eating Disorders. 27 (2): 125–39. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1098-108X(200003)27:2<125::AID-EAT1>3.0.CO;2-4. PMID 10657886.

• Thin body preoccupation and social pressure are important risk factors for the development of eating disorders in adolescents. Some Hispanic groups are at risk of developing eating disorders. Efforts to reduce peer, cultural, and other sources of thin body preoccupation may be necessary to prevent eating disorders.
  • McKnight, Investigators (2003). "Risk factors for the onset of eating disorders in adolescent girls: results of the McKnight longitudinal risk factor study". The American Journal of Psychiatry. 160 (2): 248–54. doi:10.1176/ajp.160.2.248. PMID 12562570.

• Childhood impulsivity, as opposed to hyperactivity or inattention, best predicted adolescent BN symptoms, particularly for girls. Among youth with ADHD, treatment received during the follow-up period was not associated with BN pathology.
  Both boys and girls with ADHD may be at risk for BN symptoms in adolescence because of the impulsivity central to both disorders.
  • Mikami, AY; Hinshaw, SP; Arnold, LE; Hoza, B; Hechtman, L (2010). “Bulimia nervosa symptoms in the multimodal treatment study of children with ADHD". The International Journal of Eating Disorders. 43 (3): 248–59. doi:10.1002/eat.20692. PMID 19378318.

• The spectrum of eating disorders varies widely, ranging from mildly abnormal eating habits to life-threatening chronic disease. Given the many different cultural food norms and individual preferences, along with the fact that dieting behavior is extremely common, it can be challenging to differentiate unusual eating behaviors from clinically significant eating disorders.
  • Miller CA1, Golden NH, “An introduction to eating disorders: clinical presentation, epidemiology, and prognosis”, Nutr Clin Pract. 2010 Apr;25(2):110-5. doi: 10.1177/0884533609357566.

• Approximately two-thirds of adolescent girls at any age are dissatisfied with their weight, the proportion increasing with actual weight. Slightly more than half of all girls are dissatisfied with the shape of their bodies, an attitude which also is positively correlated with body weight. Girls are most likely to be distressed about excess size of their thighs, hips, waist and buttocks, and inadequate size of their breasts. Those who are dissatisfied with their bodies are more likely to engage in potentially harmful weight control behaviors, such as dieting, fasting, self-induced vomiting, diuretic use, laxative use and diet pill use. Those who diet are more likely to begin in early adolescence, to be white than black, to be of higher socioeconomic status, to engage in other eating-related practices and to have a poor body image and self esteem. Boys who are underweight are most likely to be dissatisfied with their weight and many with normal weight wish to weigh more. Approximately one-third of boys are dissatisfied with their body shape, desiring larger upper arms, chest and shoulders. Dieting and purging are less likely than exercise to be chosen by boys as methods of weight control. Dieting among boys is more likely to be associated with increased body weight and some sports, such as wrestling. Body consciousness and altered body image are widespread among adolescents, and may be associated with potentially harmful eating practices in both sexes, but more so in girls.
  • Moore DC1., “Body image and eating behavior in adolescents”, J Am Coll Nutr. 1993 Oct;12(5):505-10.

• The UK Department of Health's National Service Framework for Mental Health has stressed the importance of managing such eating disorders as BN in primary care,2 noting that “antidepressants can reduce purging and bingeing whether or not the person is also depressed”. Although this statement is true in the short term, it would seem an optimistic reading of the literature. Prescription of antidepressants may appear to be the easiest route in a primary care setting, but the clinical implication of Bacaltchuk et al's review is that the easiest route may not be the most effective, cost effective, or acceptable for clinicians and their patients.
  However, in the busy world of primary care, the treatment of BN will continue to be driven by available resources. CBT for BN is generally preferred by the family doctor when specialists with such training are available. But the Royal College of Psychiatrists, in collaboration with the Consumers' Association, has recently reported the dearth of specialist eating disorder services beyond southeastern England.3 Thus, in the more likely scenario of limited eating disorder services, use of antidepressant medication may seem more attractive. These 2 reviews agree with that approach and suggest that antidepressant medication will produce positive short term results; however, BN is not a short term illness. Relapse prevention deserves greater scrutiny for patients with BN and anorexia nervosa, and longer term follow up studies should drive the next generation of treatment intervention studies.
  • John F Morgan, ''Cochrane Database Syst Rev. Bacaltchuk J, Hay P. “Review: Antidepressants versus placebo for people with bulimia nervosa”. ;(4):CD003931.

• This study clearly shows a strong association between resolution of bulimia and changes in ovarian morphology, suggesting that changes in the former mirror changes in the latter. It also demonstrates normalization of ovarian morphology in previously polycystic ovaries.
  • Morgan, JF; McCluskey, SE; Brunton, JN; Hubert Lacey, J (2002). "Polycystic ovarian morphology and bulimia nervosa: a 9-year follow-up study". Fertility and Sterility. 77 (5): 928–31. doi:10.1016/S0015-0282(02)03063-7. PMID 12009345.

• An association between bulimia nervosa and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) has been suggested but also questioned. Since there is still a controversy about this issue, we investigated clinical and biochemical symptoms of PCOS according to the new diagnostic criteria in a large group of bulimic women compared with controls. Seventy-seven women with bulimia and 59 matched healthy women were investigated with respect to menstrual status, polycystic ovaries, hirsutism, acne and sex hormone levels. We found increased occurrence of menstrual disturbances, hirsutism and PCOS in bulimic women, whereas ovarian variables and acne did not differ from controls. Hirsutism score and indices of biologically active testosterone were positively correlated in bulimics but not in controls, while there were no major differences in serum androgens. In conclusion, this study supports an increased frequency of PCOS in bulimic women and may also indicate increased androgen sensitivity in these women. PCOS may promote bulimic behavior since androgens have appetite-stimulating effects and could impair impulse control. Menstrual disturbances and clinical signs of hyperandrogenism should be evaluated in bulimics in order to provide adequate medical care and treatment.
  • Sabine Naessén, Kjell Carlström, Leena Garoff, Rolf Glant & Angelica Lindén Hirschberg; “Polycystic ovary syndrome in bulimic women – an evaluation based on the new diagnostic criteria”, Gynecological Endocrinology Volume 22, 2006 - Issue 7, pages 388-394.

• Gynecological problems are one of the most frequent somatic complications of eating disorders. The purpose of the present study was to assess the role of improper eating habits in the aetiology of menstrual disturbances, anovulation and hormonal related changes. Bulimia nervosa is the focus of attention since amenorrhea is considered a diagnostic criterium in anorexia nervosa. Subjects of the BITE (Bulimia Investigation Test, Edinburgh) test who were infertile were studied (n = 58) In the studied population there were 6 cases of clinical and 8 cases of subclinical bulimia nervosa. Symptoms and severity subscales of the BITE test significantly correlated with body mass index (p = 0.003). All 14 patients suffering from clinical and subclinical bulimia nervosa had pathologically low FSH and LH hormone levels. In those with clinical bulimia nervosa (n = 6) we diagnosed 4 cases of multicystic ovary (MCO) and in the eating disorder not otherwise specified (EDNOS) group (n = 22) there were 2 cases of MCO and 5 cases of polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). The results suggest that unsatisfactory nutrition (binges and "crash diet") in bulimia nervosa results in hormonal dysfunction, menstrual disturbances and infertility. The authors question the necessity for immediately estrogen replacement: they consider the reversibility of the hormonal status by early treatment of eating disorders is more appropriate. Excessive use of hormonal contraceptives in therapy has to be questioned.
  • Naessén, S; Carlström, K; Garoff, L; Glant, R; Hirschberg, AL (2006). "Polycystic ovary syndrome in bulimic women—an evaluation based on the new diagnostic criteria". Gynecological Endocrinology. 22 (7): 388–94.

• Purging can include self-induced vomiting, over-exercising, and the use of diuretics, enemas, and laxatives. Anorexia nervosa is characterized by extreme food restriction and excessive weight loss, accompanied by the fear of being fat.
  • "Anorexia Nervosa". Nationaleatingdisorders.org. Archived from the original on 2013-02-04. Retrieved 2013-02-13.

• In recent years, anorexia and bulimia nervosa, whether combined into a single clinical picture or considered as distinct syndromes, have reached epidemic proportions among adolescents. Professionals in the educational and physical and mental health care fields need to be aware of the influence of social pressures on teenagers' perceptions of body image and appearance. This article reviews the sociocultural, socioeconomic, and sex-related factors which contribute to the development of eating disorders. It is recommended that professionals help adolescents resist societal pressure to conform to unrealistic standards of appearance, and provide guidance on nutrition, realistic body ideals, and achievement of self-esteem, self-efficacy, interpersonal relations and coping skills.
  • Nagel KL1, Jones KH, “Sociological factors in the development of eating disorders”, Adolescence. 1992 Spring;27(105):107-13.

• Bulimia nervosa is a serious eating disorder. People with bulimia nervosa are overly concerned with their body’s shape and weight and engage in detrimental behaviors in an attempt to control their body image. Bulimia nervosa is often characterized by a destructive pattern of binging (eating too much unhealthy food) and inappropriate, reactionary behaviors to control one’s weight following these episodes.
  Binge eating is the rapid consumption of an unusually-large amount of food in a short period of time. Unlike simple overeating, people who binge feel “out of control” during these episodes. This means that one “cannot stop the urge to eat” once it has begun, even after their stomach is full. Binging may “feel good” initially, but it quickly becomes distressing for the person who is absorbed in this behavior. Food is often eaten secretly and quickly. A binge is usually ended only with abdominal discomfort, social interruption or running out of food. When the binge is over, the person with bulimia often feels guilty and will engage in inappropriate behaviors to rid their body of the excess calories that were eaten.
  Inappropriate behaviors to control one’s weight can include purging. Purging behaviors are potentially dangerous and can consist of a wide variety of actions “to get rid of everything I ate.” This can include self-induced vomiting, the abuse of laxatives, enemas or diuretics (e.g., caffeine). Other behaviors such as “fasting” or restrictive dieting following binge-eating episodes are also common, as well as excessive exercising.
• Bulimia nervosa is often under-diagnosed because many people who experience this illness may be of normal weight (or even overweight), as opposed to individuals with anorexia nervosa. The typical age of onset for bulimia nervosa is late adolescence or early adulthood, but onset can and does occur at any time throughout the lifespan. Like other eating disorders, bulimia nervosa mainly affects females, although at least one in 10 individuals with this condition is male. Bulimia nervosa is more common than anorexia nervosa and likely occurs in up to three percent of the population. Like all mental illnesses, Bulimia nervosa is found in all racial, religious, ethnic and socioeconomic groups.
• Constant obsession with food and weight is a primary sign of bulimia nervosa. Other important indicators are signs of binging (e.g., hidden candy wrappers under a bed or multiple empty cereal boxes stuffed in a closet) and purging (e.g., boxes of laxatives or enemas stored in one’s desk without a clear medical indication for these products).
  People with bulimia may also experience irregular menstrual periods or depressed mood. These symptoms may cause a person to go to their doctor. Similarly, doctors may also find they are examining their patients for unexplained stomach pain or sore throat before a diagnosis of bulimia nervosa is made.
  Doctors may see common signs of self-induced vomiting including unexplained damage to the teeth (due to the acidity of vomit) and scarring on the backs of the hands and fingers (due to repeatedly pushing fingers down the throat to induce vomiting). A number of people with bulimia will have swollen cheeks (due to damage of their parotid glands).
• People with bulimia nervosa—even if their weight remains “normal”—can severely damage their bodies by binging and purging. Self-induced vomiting can injure the various parting of the body involved in eating and digesting food: tooth decay, esophageal and stomach injury, and acid reflux are all common in people with bulimia nervosa. Excessive purging behaviors can cause dehydration and changes in the body’s electrolytes (e.g., low potassium). This can lead to multiple problems including cardiac arrhythmias, heart failure and even death.
• Although the precise causes of bulimia nervosa are unknown, scientists agree that it is caused by a combination of genetic and environmental factors. People with a family history of eating disorders or a personal history of mental illness, including depression, anxiety, substance abuse and other illnesses, are more likely to develop bulimia nervosa. Traumatic events (e.g., physical or sexual abuse) as well as life-stressors (including being bullied at school) can also increase the risk of developing bulimia nervosa. While no specific region of the brain has been directly connected with bulimia nervosa, certain chemicals in the brain (e.g., the neurotransmitter serotonin) have been shown to have a relationship with binging and purging behaviors.
• Many medications have been used to treat symptoms of bulimia nervosa, the specifics of which are beyond the scope of this review. The only FDA approved medication for bulimia nervosa is fluoxetine (Prozac). This medication helps by decreasing the symptoms of bulimia nervosa, but it does not cure the illness. As with any other mental illness, it is important to discuss any medication decisions with one’s psychiatrist and other members of the treatment team.
  With thorough treatment and the support of their loved ones, most people with bulimia nervosa can expect to see a significant decrease in their symptoms and to live healthy lives in absence of serious medical complications. Family members and friends can be most helpful in providing nonjudgmental support of their loved one and by encouraging their loved one to seek treatment for this serious mental illness.

• "NAMI National Alliance on Mental Illness", (8 January 2015).

• Prior research on non-clinical samples has lent support to the sexual competition hypothesis for eating disorders (SCH) where the drive for thinness can be seen as an originally adaptive strategy for women to preserve a nubile female shape, which, when driven to an extreme, may cause eating disorders. Restrictive versus impulsive eating behavior may also be relevant for individual differences in allocation of resources to either mating effort or somatic growth, reflected in an evolutionary concept called "Life History Theory" (LHT). In this study, we aimed to test the SCH and predictions from LHT in female patients with clinically manifest eating disorders. Accordingly, 20 women diagnosed with anorexia nervosa (AN), 20 with bulimia nervosa (BN), and 29 age-matched controls completed a package of questionnaires comprising measures for behavioral features and attitudes related to eating behavior, intrasexual competition, life history strategy, executive functioning and mating effort. In line with predictions, we found that relatively faster life history strategies were associated with poorer executive functioning, lower perceived own mate value, greater intrasexual competition for mates but not for status, and, in part, with greater disordered eating behavior. Comparisons between AN and BN revealed that individuals with BN tended to pursue a "fast" life history strategy, whereas people with AN were more similar to controls in pursuing a "slow" life history strategy. Moreover, intrasexual competition for mates was significantly predicted by the severity of disordered eating behavior. Together, our findings lend partial support to the SCH for eating disorders. We discuss the implications and limitations of our study findings.
  • Nettersheim J1, Gerlach G2, Herpertz S2, Abed R3, Figueredo AJ4, Brüne M1, “Evolutionary Psychology of Eating Disorders: An Explorative Study in Patients With Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia Nervosa.”, Front Psychol. 2018 Oct 31;9:2122. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02122. eCollection 2018.

• Interest in all forms of eating disorder in children, adolescents and adults continues to grow steadily across the world. The number of publications grows from day to day but, despite the increasing body of knowledge, the causes and origins of eating disorders are as baffling and obscure as ever.
  Death from anorexia nervosa (AN) was recorded by both Lasegue (1873a,b) and Gull (1874), who first described it. In 1895, both Stephens and Marshall published postmortem finding in the Lancet for a 16-year-old and an 11-year-old patient respectively. In the last five decades there have been several reports of cases of AN with fatal outcomes and subsequent ausopsies (Siebenmann, 1955; Martin, 1955, 1958; Hack, 1959; Mosli, 1967; Chikasue et al., 1988). Gradually work began to be published which covered long observation periods and produced yet more mortality figures. In 1988 in Britain, Patton presented a study of a group of 460 consecutive patients with eating disorders covering the years from 1971-1981. These were divided into two groups for AN and bulimia nervosa (BN) with resulting crude mortality rates of 3.3 percent for the former and 3.1 percent for tha latter. He also carried out a critical evaluation of the methodological problems and the results obtained from earlier studies. Hsu et al. (1979) reported that more than 2 percent had died during an average follow-up period of 5.9 years; Isafer et al. (1985) gave a crude mortality rate of 8.2 percent with an average follow-up period of 12.5 years; and Theander (1985) a crude morality rate of 18 percent over 33 years. Even allowing for the differences in these data, it is clear that AN has the highest mortality rate of all the psychiatric illnesses (Licht et al., 1993).
  However these differences in crude mortality rates are unsatisfactory from a methodological point of view for a number of reasons. These include the way cases were selected and the differing lengths of the observation periods.
  • Neumaker, K.J. (2000). "Morality rates and causes of death". European Eating Disorders Review. 8(2): 181–187. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1099-0968(200003)8:2<181::AID-ERV336>3.0.CO;2-#.

• Previous research demonstrates that the relationship between socio-economic status (SES) and eating disorders is not consistent. The present study compares SES and demographic factors among Swedish women, randomly drawn from the population register and female patients seen for treatment.
• ED's have a higher SES background and live in more privileged socio-demographic areas than CONT. ED's have lower social status, have more separations, and are more often single than CONT.
• These data demonstrate a connection between high socio-economic and demographic data, low social status and eating disorder patients compared to normal controls.

• Nevonen, L; Norring, C (2004). "Socio-economic variables and eating disorders: A comparison between patients and normal controls". Eating and Weight Disorders. 9 (4): 279–84. doi:10.1007/BF03325082. PMID 15844400.

• Annorexia can cause menstruation to stop, and often leads to bone loss, loss of skin integrity, etc. It greatly stresses the heart, increasing the risk of heart attacks and related heart problems. The risk of death is greatly increased in individuals with this disease.
  • Neumaker, K.J. (2000). "Morality rates and causes of death". European Eating Disorders Review. 8(2): 181–187. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1099-0968(200003)8:2<181::AID-ERV336>3.0.CO;2-#.

• The severity and type of eating disorder symptoms have been shown to affect comorbidity. The DSM-IV should not be used by laypersons to diagnose themselves even when used by professionals there has been considerable controversy over the diagnostic criteria used for various diagnoses, including eating disorders.
  • Nicholls D1, Bryant-Waugh R, “Eating disorders of infancy and childhood: definition, symptomatology, epidemiology, and comorbidity.”, Child Adolesc Psychiatr Clin N Am. 2009 Jan;18(1):17-30. doi: 10.1016/j.chc.2008.07.008.

• We document here the first case of bulimia nervosa associated with primary hyperparathyroidism. The binge eating and self-induced vomiting that occurred for more than 10 years disappeared completely after the surgical cure of primary hyperparathyroidism. Depressive and anxiety symptoms also improved dramatically. The possible influence of derangement in calcium metabolism on the neurobiochemical mechanism of bulimia nervosa is discussed.
  • Ozawa, Y; Koyano, H; Akama, T (1999). "Complete recovery from intractable bulimia nervosa by the surgical cure of primary hyperparathyroidism". The International Journal of Eating Disorders. 26 (1): 107–10. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1098-108X(199907)26:1<107::AID-EAT15>3.0.CO;2-U. PMID 10349592.

• The speculation about whether there may be a positive association between sexual abuse in childhood and the later development of clinical eating disorder has been widely considered over the past 15 years. It has sometimes been accepted uncritically as established truth. It is certainly plausible. After all, bulimia and anorexia nervosa differentially affect girls and seem to involve complex feelings about the body which might well have originated in adverse early sexual experience. Furthermore, many patients disclose such experiences in the clinic. The evidence from early research studies, however, does not consistently support all of the clinical speculation. More than one review reached broadly negative conclusions.1,2 The study by Wonderlich et al systematically re-examines publications up to the end of 1994. The authors of this review had to grapple with studies employing a wide variety of methods and samples. They used predetermined criteria of quality but not meta-analysis to sort out which studies could contribute to their conclusions. They were appropriately strict in applying their criteria.
  This review supports the position of clinicians who consider that a history of childhood sexual abuse is worth seeking and may be an important consideration in their patients with eating disorders, but no more important than in many other patients. It may be especially relevant for those who have bulimia nervosa with comorbidity. Patients with such complex problems require careful thought. Finding a background of sexual abuse may prove to be important but should not lead to the conclusion that “all is now explained”. Furthermore, most studies show that only a minority of patients with eating disorders report abuse and inferring past abuse from the fact of present eating disorder is unjustified.
  • Robert L Palmer, Aetiology, "Review: childhood sexual abuse is associated with bulimia nervosa especially when there is psychiatric comorbidity", vol. 1, issue 2; Wonderlich SA, Brewerton TD, Jocic Z , et al. "Relationship of childhood sexual abuse and eating disorders". J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry, 1997 Aug; 36 : 1107 –15 CrossRefPubMedWeb of Science

• There is good evidence that children of parents with psychological disorders are themselves at increased risk of disturbances in their development. Although there has been considerable research on a variety of disorders such as depression and alcohol, research on the children of parents with eating disorders has been relatively recent. This paper aims to review the evidence and covers a number of areas, including genetic factors, pregnancy, the perinatal and postpartum period, infancy, and the early years of life, focusing on feeding and mealtimes, general parenting functions, and growth. This is followed by a consideration of psychopathology in the children, parental attitudes to children's weight and shape, and adolescence. What is clear is that although there are numerous case reports and case series, the number of systematic controlled studies is relatively small, and almost nothing has been written about the children of fathers with eating disorders. What is evident from the available evidence is that children of mothers with eating disorders are at increased risk of disturbance, but that the risk depends on a variety of factors, and that difficulties in the children are far from invariable. The paper concludes by summarizing five broad categories of putative mechanisms, based on the evidence to date, by which eating disturbance in parents can influence child development.
  • Patel, P; Wheatcroft, R; Park, R; Stein, A (2002). "The Children of Mothers With Eating Disorders". Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review. 5 (1): 1–19. doi:10.1023/A:1014524207660. PMID 11993543.

• This study explored friendship variables in relation to body image, dietary restraint, extreme weight-loss behaviors (EWEBs), and binge eating in adolescent girls. From 523 girls, 79 friendship cliques were identified using social network analysis. Participants completed questionnaires that assessed body image concerns, eating, friendship relations, and psychological family, and media variables. Similarity was greater for within than for between friendship cliques for body image concerns, dietary restraint, and EWLBs, but not for binge eating. Cliques high in body image concerns and dieting manifested these concerns in ways consistent with a high weight/shape-preoccupied subculture. Friendship attitudes contributed significantly to the prediction of individual body image concern and eating behaviors. Use of EWLBs by friends predicted an individual's own level of use.
  • Paxton, SJ; Schutz, HK; Wertheim, EH; Muir, SL (1999).[ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10369035 "Friendship clique and peer influences on body image concerns, dietary restraint, extreme weight-loss behaviors, and binge eating in adolescent girls"]. Journal of Abnormal Psychology. 108 (2): 255–66. doi:10.1037/0021-843X.108.2.255. PMID 10369035.

• While historically, eating disorders were conceptualized as primarily afflicting Caucasian adolescent or young adult women within high-income, industrialized Western Europe and North America, eating disorders are increasingly documented in diverse countries and cultures worldwide. This study highlights recent trends that reflect the changing landscape of culture and eating disorders: stabilization of the incidence of anorexia nervosa and possibly lower incidence rates of bulimia nervosa in Caucasian North American and Northern European groups; increasing rates of eating disorders in Asia; increasing rates of eating disorders in the Arab region; and increasing rates of binge eating and bulimia nervosa in Hispanic and Black American minority groups in North America.
  • Pike, KM; Hoek, HW; Dunne, PE (November 2014). "Cultural trends and eating disorders". Current Opinion in Psychiatry. 27 (6): 436–42.

• The purpose of this study was to assess the relative contribution of personality and emotional experience to self-reported eating attitudes in a group of patients with clinically diagnosed eating disorders, a weight-reduction training group (Weight Watchers), and a control group without body weight problems. Participants in this study (N = 114) completed Estonian versions of the Eating Disorder Inventory-2 (EDI-2; Garner, 1991), NEO Personality Inventory (Costa & McCrae, 1989), and Positive Affect and Negative Affect Schedule, Expanded Form (Watson & Clark, 1994). Data demonstrated validity of the Estonian version of EDI-2 in its ability to identify problems on a continuum of disordered eating behavior. Among the Big Five personality dimensions, Neuroticism made the largest contribution to EDI-2 subscales. Two other dimensions, Openness to Experience and Conscientiousness, also predispose individuals to eating problems. Personality traits made a larger contribution to the self-reported eating pathology than the self-rated effects experienced during the last few weeks. It was argued that personality dispositions have a larger relevancy in the etiology of eating disorders than emotional state.
  • Podar, I; Hannus, A; Allik, J (1999). "Personality and affectivity characteristics associated with eating disorders: a comparison of eating disordered, weight-preoccupied, and normal samples". Journal of Personality Assessment. 73 (1): 133–47. doi:10.1207/S15327752JPA730109. PMID 10497805.

• Some contributory factors appear to be necessary for the appearance of eating disorders, but none is sufficient. Eating disorders may represent a way of coping with problems of identity and personal control.
  • Polivy, J; Herman, CP (2002). "Causes of eating disorders". Annual Review of Psychology. 53: 187–213. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.53.100901.135103. PMID 11752484.

• Suicide in anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa is a major cause of death. Risk factors for suicide and attempted suicide (which in many cases results in successful suicide) in anorexia nervosa include: purging type, chronic disease, and during treatment, obsessive symptoms and drug abuse, major depression, and for anorexia nervosa low body mass index (BMI) at presentation. In anorexia nervosa suicide has been considered the first cause of death and attempted suicide is a serious threat to these individuals. Data concerning suicide in bulimia nervosa has still scarce whereas attempted suicides are easily found in clinical histories of patients. No doubt suicidal behavior is underestimated amongst patients with anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. An effort to reconcile with subject of suicide and a better evaluation of these patients' psychopathology should improve suicide prevention strategies amongst these individuals.
  • Pompili, M; Mancinelli, I; Girardi, P; Accorrà, D; Ruberto, A; Tatarelli, R (2003). "Suicide and attempted suicide in anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa". Annali dell'Istituto Superiore di Sanità. 39 (2): 275–81. PMID 14587228.

• Although it remains unclear whether the prevalence of eating disorders is higher in those with DRCHCs compared with the general population, overall findings suggest that young people with DRCHCs may be at risk of endorsing disordered eating behaviors that may lead to diagnosis of an eating disorder and other health problems over the course of their treatment. Thus, health care providers should be aware that young people with DRCHCs may be at risk of eating disorders and carefully monitor psychological changes and the use of unhealthy weight control methods. It is also important to develop and evaluate theory-based interventions and disease-specific eating disorder risk screening tools that are effective in halting the progression of eating disorders and negative health outcomes in young people with chronic health conditions.
  • Quick VM, Byrd-Bredbenner C, Neumark-Sztainer D (May 1, 2013). "Chronic illness and disordered eating: a discussion of the literature". Adv Nutr (Review). 4 (3): 277–86. doi:10.3945/an.112.003608. PMC 3650496. PMID 23674793.

• To date, more than 1365 trials have been generated by searching and over 100 trials have been evaluated in detail. Because of a relatively high number of original exclusions (n=12) the trial inclusion criteria were broadened to include those with non-blinded outcome assessment, providing 34 trials for analyses. Because of incomplete published and available data, at best up to 12 studies had data available for any single analysis. The maximum number of total patients included in a single analysis was 602. The majority of studies evaluated patients with bulimia nervosa of a purging type. The review supported the efficacy of cognitive-behavioural psychotherapy (CBT) and particularly CBT-BN in the treatment of people with bulimia nervosa and also (but less strongly due to the small number of trials) like eating disorder syndromes. CBT had been used with efficacy in group settings. Other psychotherapies were also efficacious, particularly interpersonal psychotherapy in the longer-term. Self-help approaches that used highly structured CBT treatment manuals, were promising albeit with more modest results generally, and their evaluation in bulimia nervosa approach merits further research. Exposure and response prevention did not appear to enhance the efficacy of CBT. Psychotherapy alone is unlikely to reduce or change body weight in people with bulimia nervosa or similar eating disorders.
• There was a small body of evidence for the efficacy of cognitive-behaviour therapy in bulimia nervosa and similar syndromes, but the quality of trials was very variable (e.g. the majority were not blinded) and sample sizes were often small in comparison to pharmacotherapy trials. More trials are needed, particularly for binge eating disorder and other EDNOS syndromes, and trials evaluating other psychotherapies and less intensive psychotherapies.
  • M Resch,G Szendei &P Haász, “Bulimia from a gynecological view: hormonal changes”, Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, volume 24, 2004 - Issue 8 Pages 907-910.

• This article describes the qualitative analysis of a randomized control trial that explores the use of parent-to-parent consultations as an augmentation to the Maudsley model of family-based treatment for anorexia. Twenty families were randomized into two groups, 10 receiving standard treatment and 10 receiving an additional parent-to-parent consultation. Parents of all families were interviewed regarding their experience of treatment and transcripts were analyzed with the assistance of QSR N-Vivo. Parents described parent-to-parent consultations as an intense emotional experience that helped them to feel less alone, to feel empowered to progress, and to reflect on changes in family interactions. These results suggest that parent-to-parent consultations are seen as a useful augmentation to the Maudsley model of family-based treatment for anorexia nervosa.
  • Rhodes, P; Brown, J; Madden, S (2009). "The Maudsley model of family-based treatment for anorexia nervosa: a qualitative evaluation of parent-to-parent consultation". Journal of Marital and Family Therapy. 35 (2): 181–92. doi:10.1111/j.1752-0606.2009.00115.x. PMID 19302516.

• The development of eating disorders including anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder, and atypical eating disorders that affect many young women and even men in the productive period of their lives is complex and varied. While numbers of presumed risk factors contributing to the development of eating disorders are increasing, previous evidence for biological, psychological, developmental, and sociocultural effects on the development of eating disorders have not been conclusive. Despite the fact that a huge body of research has carefully examined the possible risk factors associated with the eating disorders, they have failed not only to uncover the exact etiology of eating disorders, but also to understand the interaction between different causes of eating disorders. This failure may be due complexities of eating disorders, limitations of the studies or combination of two factors. In this review, some risk factors including biological, psychological, developmental, and sociocultural are discussed.
• It has been hypothesized that eating disorders have multiple and often shared etiologies including biological, psychological, developmental, and sociocultural. A tightly woven network of causes, symptoms, and outcomes of eating disorders makes the study of etiology of these disorders very challenging. Some suggested risk factors for eating disorders require to be defined as either integral parts of eating disorders syndrome such as body dissatisfaction, and perfectionism or outcome of prolonged disordered eating such as functional alterations in serotonin, and some mood disturbances. Researchers should structure their thought processes around this concept that some of currently well-known risk factors for eating disorders are concurrent symptoms of eating disorders. Hence paying special attention to the new and evolved concepts is highly recommended while studying the etiology of eating disorders.

• Rikani, AA; Choudhry, Z; Choudhry, AM; Ikram, H; Asghar, MW; Kajal, D; Waheed, A; Mobassarah, NJ (October 2013). "A critique of the literature on etiology of eating disorders". Annals of Neurosciences. 20 (4): 157–61. doi:10.5214/ans.0972.7531.200409. PMC 4117136. PMID 25206042.

• The development of eating disorders including anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder, and atypical eating disorders that affect many young women and even men in the productive period of their lives is complex and varied. While numbers of presumed risk factors contributing to the development of eating disorders are increasing, previous evidence for biological, psychological, developmental, and sociocultural effects on the development of eating disorders have not been conclusive. Despite the fact that a huge body of research has carefully examined the possible risk factors associated with the eating disorders, they have failed not only to uncover the exact etiology of eating disorders, but also to understand the interaction between different causes of eating disorders. This failure may be due complexities of eating disorders, limitations of the studies or combination of two factors. In this review, some risk factors including biological, psychological, developmental, and sociocultural are discussed.
• Studies have reported that the oral health status is jeopardized in patients with eating disorders. The aim was to review the oro-facial manifestations in patients with eating disorders. The address the focused question was "What is the oro-dental health status in patients with eating disorders?" MEDLINE/PubMed and Google Scholar databases were searched from 1948 to March 2012 using the following terms in various combinations: "Anorexia nervosa", "bulimia nervosa", "eating disorders", "dental", "oral health status". Letters to the editor, unpublished data and articles published in languages other than English were excluded. Dry lips, burning tongue and parotid gland swelling are common manifestations in patients with eating disorders as compared to medically healthy controls. The association of dental caries and periodontal disease in patients with eating disorders remains debatable. Temporomandibular disorders have also been reported to be more prevalent in patients with eating disorders as compared to healthy controls. A critical oral-dental examination during routine dental check-ups may reveal valuable information regarding the presence or absence of eating disorders in routine dental patients. This may be important information, updating the medical history, supporting the role of the physician.
  • Romanos, GE; Javed, F; Romanos, EB; Williams, RC (October 2012). "Oro-facial manifestations in patients with eating disorders". Appetite. 59 (2): 499–504. doi:10.1016/j.appet.2012.06.016. PMID 22750232.

• Comorbid personality disorders in eating disordered patients may seriously affect the treatment and course of their illness. Several studies show such a comorbidity, though with inconsistent findings. Qualitative reviews attribute this to methodological shortcomings, but the qualitative method may itself create new shortcomings. To circumvent this, the present, more extensive review applies a meta-analytic approach. Using the databases MEDLINE and PSYCHLIT, the 28 articles published between 1983 and 1998 that presented empirical evidence for an eating disorder and personality disorder comorbidity suitable for meta-analysis were included. We found a higher proportion of eating disordered patients with any personality disorder (average proportion = 0.58) related to comparison groups (average proportion = 0.28). Compared with anorexia nervosa patients, a higher proportion of patients with bulimia nervosa had a concurrent cluster B personality (average proportion = 0.44) and a borderline personality disorder (average proportion = 0.31). However, no differences between anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa patients in proportions of cluster C were found (average proportion = 0.45 and 0.44 respectively). Patients with eating disorders and patients with bulimia nervosa in particular, should be routinely assessed for a concurrent personality disorder using structured clinical interviews. In future research, more stringent assessment procedures are highly recommended to address the question of causality between eating disorders and personality disorders, and how eating disorder symptoms and personality disorder symptoms are related to treatment effects.
  • Rosenvinge, JH; Martinussen, M; Ostensen, E (2000). "The comorbidity of eating disorders and personality disorders: a meta-analytic review of studies published between 1983 and 1998". Eating and Weight Disorders. 5 (2): 52–61. doi:10.1007/bf03327480. PMID 10941603.

• According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV), bulimia nervosa is characterized by recurrent episodes of binge eating followed by 1 or more compensatory behaviors to eliminate the calories (vomiting, laxatives, fasting, etc.) that take place on average a minimum of twice weekly for 3 or more months.5 Patients who do not meet the frequency or length criteria may be diagnosed with DSM-IV eating disorder not otherwise specified.
  Bulimia nervosa is also delineated into 2 distinct subtypes: purging and nonpurging. With the purging subtype, patients engage in some method to remove the binged food from their bodies. This is most often accomplished by self-induced vomiting but can include the misuse of laxatives, enemas, or diuretics. Nonpurging bulimics use fasting or excessive exercise as the primary compensation for binges but do not regularly purge. Regardless of subtype, bulimic patients have negative self-evaluations, placing inappropriate importance on weight and body image.
  • Jona M. Rushing, B.S., Laura E. Jones, M.S., and Caroline P. Carney, M.D., M.Sc. “Bulimia Nervosa: A Primary Care Review”, Prim Care Companion J Clin Psychiatry. 2003; 5(5): 217–224.

• The use of dialectical behavior therapy adapted for treatment of bulimia nervosa was associated with a promising decrease in binge/purge behaviors.
  • Safer, DL; Telch, CF; Agras, WS (2001). "Dialectical behavior therapy for bulimia nervosa". The American Journal of Psychiatry. 158 (4): 632–4. doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.158.4.632. PMID 11282700.

• To date no trial has focused on the treatment of adolescents with bulimia nervosa. The aim of this study was to compare the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of family therapy and cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) guided self-care in adolescents with bulimia nervosa or eating disorder not otherwise specified.
• Of the 85 study participants, 41 were assigned to family therapy and 44 to CBT guided self-care. At 6 months, bingeing had undergone a significantly greater reduction in the guided self-care group than in the family therapy group; however, this difference disappeared at 12 months. There were no other differences between groups in behavioral or attitudinal eating disorder symptoms. The direct cost of treatment was lower for guided self-care than for family therapy. The two treatments did not differ in other cost categories.
• Compared with family therapy, CBT guided self-care has the slight advantage of offering a more rapid reduction of bingeing, lower cost, and greater acceptability for adolescents with bulimia or eating disorder not otherwise specified.
  • Schmidt, U; Lee, S; Beecham, J; Perkins, S; Treasure, J (2007). "A randomized controlled trial of family therapy and cognitive behavior therapy guided self-care for adolescents with bulimia nervosa and related disorders". The American Journal of Psychiatry. 164 (4): 591–8. doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.164.4.591. PMID 17403972.

• This case describes the beneficial effect on the binge eating component of bulimia nervosa of methylphenidate, which was prescribed to treat comorbid attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Possible mechanisms of action are discussed.
  • Schweickert LA1, Strober M, Moskowitz A., “Efficacy of methylphenidate in bulimia nervosa comorbid with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder: a case report”, Int J Eat Disord. 1997 Apr;21(3):299-301.

• The cognitive model of eating disorders (EDs) states that the processing of external and internal stimuli might be biased in mental disorders. These biases, or cognitive errors, systematically distort the individual's experiences and, in that way, maintains the eating disorder. This chapter presents an updated literature review of experimental studies investigating these cognitive biases. Results indicate that ED patients show biases in attention, interpretation, and memory when it comes to the processing of food-, weight-, and body shape-related cues. Some recent studies show that they also demonstrate errors in general cognitive abilities such as set shifting, central coherence, and decision making. A future challenge is whether cognitive biases and processes can be manipulated. Few preliminary studies suggest that an attention retraining and training in the cognitive modulation of food reward processing might be effective strategies to change body satisfaction, food cravings, and eating behavior.
• An individual who is a first degree relative of someone who has had or currently has an eating disorder is seven to twelve times more likely to have an eating disorder themselves. Twin studies also show that at least a portion of the vulnerability to develop eating disorders can be inherited, and there is evidence to show that there is a genetic locus that shows susceptibility for developing anorexia nervosa.
  • Siep N1, Jansen A, Havermans R, Roefs A. “Cognitions and emotions in eating disorders.”, Curr Top Behav Neurosci. 2011;6:17-33. doi: 10.1007/7854_2010_82.

• Of the empirical studies undertaken, few investigated a cultural group's eating pathology in both its country of origin and a Western country using the same methodology. To date, the research findings are mixed and it is still unclear if the presentation of an eating disorder differs across cultures. Acculturation has not been consistently taken into consideration and psychological control has not been examined in relation to eating disturbances in non‐Western groups.
  • Soh, NL; Touyz, SW; Surgenor, LJ (2006). "Eating and body image disturbances across cultures: A review". European Eating Disorders Review. 14 (1): 54–65. doi:10.1002/erv.678.

• Patients with eating disorders (ED) frequently exhibit additional psychiatric disorders. This study aimed to examine whether psychiatric comorbidity in ED patients is associated with increased severity of ED symptoms in a sample of 277 women with a current ED (84 anorexia nervosa, 152 bulimia nervosa, 41 eating disorders not otherwise specified). Psychiatric comorbidity of Axes I and II was determined using the Structured Clinical Interview (SCID) for DSM-IV. Severity of ED-related symptoms was assessed using interviewer-rated scales from the Structured Interview for Anorexia and Bulimia Nervosa (SIAB). Affective and anxiety-related disorders of both axes were linked with increased intensity of weight- and appearance-related fears and concerns. Frequency of binge-eating and frequency of purging both were associated with Axis I anxiety disorders, substance-related disorders, and Cluster B personality disorders. Frequency of dieting was related to anxiety disorders on both axes. Multivariate analyses revealed that Axis I anxiety disorders were more closely linked with severity of ED symptoms than affective or substance-related disorders. The results showed that psychiatric comorbidity of both axes is linked with increased severity of ED symptoms and that there are associations between specific ED symptoms and specific forms of comorbidity.
  • Spindler, A; Milos, G (2007). "Links between eating disorder symptom severity and psychiatric comorbidity". Eating Behaviors. 8 (3): 364–73. doi:10.1016/j.eatbeh.2006.11.012. PMID 17606234.

• Eating disorders, such as anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating disorder, commonly involve a dysregulation of behavior (e.g., a lack or excess of inhibition and impulsive eating patterns) that is suggestive of prefrontal dysfunction. Functional neuro-imaging studies show that prefrontal-subcortical systems play a role in eating behavior and appetite in healthy individuals, and that people with eating disorders have altered activity in these systems. Eating behavior is often disturbed by illnesses and injuries that impinge upon prefrontal-subcortical systems. This study examined relationships between executive functioning and eating behavior in healthy individuals using validated behavioral rating scales (Frontal Systems Behavior Scale and Eating Inventory). Correlations demonstrated that increased dysexecutive traits were associated with disinhibited eating and greater food cravings. There was also a positive association with cognitive restraint of eating, suggesting that increased compensatory behaviors follow disinhibited eating. These psychometric findings reinforce those of other methodologies, supporting a role for prefrontal systems in eating.
  • Spinella, M; Lyke, J (2004). "Executive personality traits and eating behavior". The International Journal of Neuroscience. 114 (1): 83–93. doi:10.1080/00207450490249356. PMID 14660070.

• Recent research has modified both the conceptualization and treatment of eating disorders. New diagnostic criteria reducing the "not otherwise specified" category should facilitate the early recognition and treatment of anorexia nervosa (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN). Technology-based studies identify AN and BN as "brain circuit" disorders; epidemiologic studies reveal that the narrow racial, ethnic and income profile of individuals no longer holds true for AN. The major organs affected long term-the brain and skeletal system-both respond to improved nutrition, with maintenance of body weight the best predictor of recovery. Twin studies have revealed gene x environment interactions, including both the external (social) and internal (pubertal) environments of boys and of girls. Family-based treatment has the best evidence base for effectiveness for younger patients. Medication plays a limited role in AN, but a major role in BN. Across diagnoses, the most important medicine is food.
  • Starr TB1, Kreipe RE, “Anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa: brains, bones and breeding”, Curr Psychiatry Rep. 2014 May;16(5):441. doi: 10.1007/s11920-014-0441-4.

• There were large variations in the outcome parameters across studies. Mortality estimated on the basis of both crude and standardized rates was significantly high. Among the surviving patients, less than one-half recovered on average, whereas one-third improved, and 20% remained chronically ill. The normalization of the core symptoms, involving weight, menstruation, and eating behaviors, was slightly better when each symptom was analyzed in isolation. The presence of other psychiatric disorders at follow-up was very common. Longer duration of follow-up and, less strongly, younger age at onset of illness were associated with better outcome. There was no convincing evidence that the outcome of anorexia nervosa improved over the second half of the last century. Several prognostic features were isolated, but there is conflicting evidence. Most clearly, vomiting, bulimia, and purgative abuse, chronicity of illness, and obsessive-compulsive personality symptoms are unfavorable prognostic features.
• Anorexia nervosa did not lose its relatively poor prognosis in the 20th century. Advances in etiology and treatment may improve the course of patients with anorexia nervosa in the future.

• Steinhausen HC, “The outcome of anorexia nervosa in the 20th century”, Am J Psychiatry. 2002 Aug;159(8):1284-93.

• Anorexia nervosa (AN) has the highest mortality rate between psychiatric disorders, and evidence for managing it is still very limited. So far, pharmacological treatment has focused on a narrow range of drugs and only a few controlled studies have been performed. Furthermore, the studies have been of short duration and included a limited number of subjects, often heterogenic with regard to stage and acute nutritive status. Thus, novel approaches are urgently needed. Body weight homeostasis is tightly regulated throughout life. With the discovery of orexigenic and anorectic signals, an array of new molecular targets to control eating behavior has emerged. This review focuses on recent advances in three important signal systems: leptin, ghrelin, and endocannabinoids toward the identification of potential therapeutical breakthroughs in AN. Our review of the current literature shows that leptin may have therapeutic potentials in promoting restoration of menstrual cycles in weight restored patients, reducing motor restlessness in severely hyperactive patients, and preventing osteoporosis in chronic patients. Ghrelin and endocannabinoids exert orexigenic effects which may facilitate nutritional restoration. Leptin and endocannabinoids may exert antidepressive and anxiolytic effects. Finally, monitoring serum concentration of leptin may be useful in order to prevent refeeding syndrome.
  Circulating concentrations of leptin are exceedingly low during the acute stage of anorexia nervosa. Which symptoms result from these diminished concentrations must be clarified. Furthermore, research is required to evaluate whether or not a too rapid weight gain might induce a physiological counter-regulation which would predispose to renewed loss of weight.
  • Støving RK1, Andries A, Brixen K, Flyvbjerg A, Hørder K, Frystyk J, “Leptin, ghrelin, and endocannabinoids: potential therapeutic targets in anorexia nervosa”, J Psychiatr Res. 2009 Apr;43(7):671-9. doi: 10.1016/j.jpsychires.2008.09.007. Epub 2008 Oct 15.

• Eating disorders are significant causes of morbidity and mortality in adolescent females and young women. They are associated with severe medical and psychological consequences, including death, osteoporosis, growth delay and developmental delay. Dermatologic symptoms are almost always detectable in patients with severe anorexia nervosa (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN), and awareness of these may help in the early diagnosis of hidden AN or BN.
  • Strumia, R (2005). "Dermatologic signs in patients with eating disorders". American Journal of Clinical Dermatology. 6 (3): 165–73. doi:10.2165/00128071-200506030-00003. PMID 15943493.

• Of the empirical studies undertaken, it is clear that anxiety disorders are significantly more frequent in subjects with eating disorders than the general community. Researchers have shown that often anxiety disorders pre-date eating disorders, leading to a suggestion that early onset anxiety may predispose individuals to developing an eating disorder. To date however, the research presents strikingly inconsistent findings, thus complicating our understanding of eating disorder and anxiety co-morbidity. Furthermore, despite indications that eating disorder prevalence amongst individuals presenting for anxiety treatment may be high, there is a distinct lack of research in this area.
  • Swinbourne, JM; Touyz, SW (2007). "The co-morbidity of eating disorders and anxiety disorders: a review". European Eating Disorders Review. 15 (4): 253–74. doi:10.1002/erv.784. PMID 17676696.

• Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a severe mental illness. Drug treatments are not effective and there is no established first choice psychological treatment for adults with AN. Neuropsychological studies have shown that patients with AN have difficulties in cognitive flexibility: these laboratory based findings have been used to develop a clinical intervention based on Cognitive Remediation Therapy (CRT) which aims to use cognitive exercises to strengthen thinking skills.
• This preliminary study suggests that CRT changed performance on flexibility tasks and may be beneficial for acute, treatment resistant patients with AN. Feedback gathered from this small case series has enabled modification of the intervention for a future larger study, for example, by linking exercises with real life behavioural tasks and including exercises that encourage global thinking.
• This exploratory study has produced encouraging data supporting the use of CRT in patients with AN: it has also provided insight into how the module should be tailored to maximise its effectiveness for people with acute AN.

• Tchanturia, K; Davies, H; Campbell, IC (2007). "Cognitive remediation therapy for patients with anorexia nervosa: preliminary findings". Annals of General Psychiatry. 6 (1): 14. doi:10.1186/1744-859X-6-14. PMC 1892017. PMID 17550611.

• This review summarises the results of psychopharmacological treatment studies on anorexia and, bulimia nervosa. Although several drugs have tested in patients with anorexia nervosa, the outcome of controlled studies has been disappointing. Trials of pharmacotherapy for bulimia nervosa have demonstrated that tricyclic antidepressants, monoamine oxidase inhibitors and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors significantly reduce the frequency of binge eating and purging. In some cases, psychotherapists should accept the necessity of psychopharmacological intervention, although this does not imply a known biological cause of the eating disorder. However, the significance of antidepressant medication in the overall treatment of anorexia and bulimia nervosa remains unclear.
  • Thiel A. “Are psychotropic drugs necessary for the treatment of anorexia and bulimia nervosa?”, Psychother Psychosom Med Psychol. 1997 Sep-Oct;47(9-10):332-45.

• The findings suggest that a subgroup of patients with bulimia nervosa may benefit from unguided self-help as a first step in their treatment. Cognitive behavior self-help and nonspecific self-help had equivalent effects.
  • Thiels, C; Schmidt, U; Treasure, J; Garthe, R (2003). "Four-year follow-up of guided self-change for bulimia nervosa". Eating and Weight Disorders : EWD. 8 (3): 212–7. doi:10.1007/bf03325016. PMID 14649785.

• Substance abuse has been shown to predict poor outcome in eating disorder (ED) samples, and prior cross-sectional data on personality subtypes of EDs suggest that substance abuse is associated with dysregulated and possibly avoidant-insecure subtypes.
  • Thompson-Brenner H1, Eddy KT, Franko DL, Dorer D, Vashchenko M, Herzog DB. "Personality pathology and substance abuse in eating disorders: a longitudinal study.", Int J Eat Disord. 2008 Apr;41(3):203-8.

• The present review focused on the personality profiles of patients with eating disorders. Studies using the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III-R Personality Disorder showed high rates of diagnostic co-occurrence between eating disorders and personality disorders. The most commonly observed were histrionic, obsessive-compulsive, avoidant, dependent and borderline personality disorders. Studies using the Cloninger's personality theory suggested that high Harm Avoidance might be relevant to the pathology of anorexia nervosa and high Novelty Seeking and Harm Avoidance to bulimia nervosa. Moreover, high Self-Directedness was suggested to be associated with favorable outcome in bulimia nervosa. The assessment of personality in a cross-sectional study, however, might be influenced by the various states of the illness. Therefore, a sophisticated longitudinal study will be required to advance this area of research.
  • Tomotake M1, Ohmori T, "Personality profiles in patients with eating disorders.", J Med Invest. 2002 Aug;49(3-4):87-96.

• The Ben-Tovim Walker Body Attitudes Questionnaire (BAQ) is a psychometrically sound self-report instrument for assessing women's attitudes towards their own bodies. The BAQ responses of a large sample of patients with eating disorders (ED) diagnosed in accordance with DSM-III-R criteria were compared with those from a normative population and from diverse groups of psychiatrically and physically ill patients. The ED group was distinct, and showed extreme responses in the area of weight and shape concerns. But a better discrimination between the ED and other populations was achieved using subscales that related to 'body disparagement' (an intense loathing of the body) and 'attractiveness', rather than to weight and shape concerns. ED patients may have a more pervasive disturbance in body-related attitudes than is currently widely accepted. Patients with anorexia and bulimia nervosa showed very similar attitudes despite the symptomatic differences between the groups.
  • Ben-Tovim, DI; Walker, MK (1992). "A quantitative study of body-related attitudes in patients with anorexia and bulimia nervosa". Psychological Medicine. 22 (4): 961–9. doi:10.1017/S0033291700038538. PMID 1488491.

• One out of four subjects showed a significant risk of an eating disorder and 6-7% probably already had one. No significant differences were found between the two samples. Significant differences were found in risk behaviors: more Spanish girls reported body dissatisfaction and binging; more Mexican girls had a history of psychiatric and psychological treatment, pressure from parents and friends to lose weight, dieting, physical activity and vomiting to lose weight, and a history of greater weight loss. In both the groups around 50% of subjects wanted to increase the size of their breasts. However, significantly more Mexican girls desired thinner arms and narrower shoulders and back, and more Spanish girls wanted thinner hips, buttocks, and legs, parts of the body that many Mexicans wanted to increase.
• Risk behaviors and the ideal body models of these Spanish and Mexican adolescent girls varied significantly, indicating major socio-cultural differences. However, the prevalence of ED was similar. Further research should aim to clarify whether the similarities found between this Spanish sample and a Mexican sample taken from an upper-middle class urban environment, a minority that is unrepresentative of the general population, are also observed in samples from other sectors of Mexican society.
  • Toro J1, Gomez-Peresmitré G, Sentis J, Vallés A, Casulà V, Castro J, Pineda G, Leon R, Platas S, Rodriguez R, “Eating disorders and body image in Spanish and Mexican female adolescents”, Soc Psychiatry Psychiatr Epidemiol. 2006 Jul;41(7):556-65. Epub 2006 May 9.

• This Seminar adds to the previous Lancet Seminar about eating disorders, published in 2003, with an emphasis on the biological contributions to illness onset and maintenance. The diagnostic criteria are in the process of review, and the probable four new categories are: anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder, and eating disorder not otherwise specified. These categories will also be broader than they were previously, which will affect the population prevalence; the present lifetime prevalence of all eating disorders is about 5%. Eating disorders can be associated with profound and protracted physical and psychosocial morbidity. The causal factors underpinning eating disorders have been clarified by understanding about the central control of appetite. Cultural, social, and interpersonal elements can trigger onset, and changes in neural networks can sustain the illness. Overall, apart from studies reporting pharmacological treatments for binge eating disorder, advances in treatment for adults have been scarce, other than interest in new forms of treatment delivery.
  • Treasure, J; Claudino, AM; Zucker, N (2010). "Eating disorders". The Lancet. 375 (9714): 583–93. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(09)61748-7. PMID 19931176.

• There are a number of differences in the aetiology of subtypes of eating disorder. The present results suggest that cognitive styles pertaining to the social arena in adolescence, and prior to the onset of any eating disorders, may play a causal role in the development of anorexia nervosa of the binge/purge subtype, but not anorexia nervosa of the restricting subtype.
  • Troop, NA; Bifulco, A (2002). "Childhood social arena and cognitive sets in eating disorders". The British Journal of Clinical Psychology. 41 (Pt 2): 205–11. doi:10.1348/014466502163976. PMID 12034006.

• Aetiology and pathogenesis of eating disorders is a matter of controversy. In some cases they can occur in association with tumours involving the temporal cortex, in temporal lobe epilepsy or in the advanced state of degenerative diseases involving temporal structures. We report about three patients with right frontal intracerebral lesions, one oligo-astrocytoma and two vascular malformations, associated with partial seizures and anorexia nervosa.
• Two patients underwent craniotomy with extirpation of the lesion. In one case histology revealed an oligo-astrocytoma, in the other haemorrhagic infarction due to a venous malformation. The patient with the arteriovenous malformation (AVM) was embolized with microparticles. The patients with the oligoastrocytoma and AVM totally recovered. They gained weight and stayed seizure free. The patient with the infarction remained in a vegetative state.
• Right frontal intracerebral lesions with their close relationship to the limbic system could be causative for eating disorders. We therefore recommend performing a cranial MRI in all patients with suspected eating disorders, especially if they occur in combination with focal seizures.

• Trummer, M; Eustacchio, S; Unger, F; Tillich, M; Flaschka, G (2002). "Right hemispheric frontal lesions as a cause for anorexia nervosa report of three cases". Acta Neurochirurgica. 144 (8): 797–801. doi:10.1007/s00701-002-0934-5. PMID 12181689.

• Eating disorders, including anorexia and bulimia nervosa, are characterised by abnormal eating behaviour and typical psychopathological features, including fear of fatness, drive for thinness, and body image disturbance. In most patients, there is no detectable focal brain abnormality. Nonetheless, associations of anorexia and bulimia nervosa with history of perinatal complications and head injuries suggest a role of cerebral pathology in some cases. A number of case studies describe eating disorders with intracranial tumours, injuries, or epileptogenic foci. However, many clinical descriptions are limited to changes in appetite and lack psychopathological features characteristic of eating disorders. A previous review of 21 anorexia cases associated with brain tumours found that only three of them fulfilled formal diagnostic criteria. In the present paper, we provide a systematic review of published case reports and highlight those relatively rare cases where typical eating disorders appear to be causally associated with localised brain damage.
• This review of published case reports challenges the traditional view that hypothalamic disturbance underlies eating disorders. Although hypothalamic lesions are the most commonly reported neural causes of anorexia-like syndrome, most of them lack the typical psychopathology. Of the eight cases with characteristic psychopathological presentation and suggestive evidence for a causal association, four had frontal and temporal cortical lesions, two brain stem tumours, one hypothalamic tumour, and one hydrocephalus. Implication of frontotemporal circuits is consistent with functional neuroimaging research in eating disorders and with benign changes in eating, such as the gourmand syndrome.49 Therefore, we conclude that evidence favours cortical mechanisms in the genesis of eating disorders over hypothalamic ones. An association of disordered eating with epilepsy was reported in 12 cases. In six of these, remission after a surgical removal of an epileptogenic focus or anticonvulsant treatment suggests that eating disorder may be actively maintained by an epileptogenic focus rather than being a deficit syndrome due to missing normal brain tissue. In five of the reviewed cases, disturbed eating occurred alongside obsessive compulsive psychopathology. This finding parallels the comorbidity and familial cooccurrence of eating disorders and obsessive compulsive disorder50 51 and suggests a common or overlapping neural substrate of the two.
  • Uher R1, Treasure J, "Brain lesions and eating disorders", J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry. 2005 Jun; 76(6):852-7.

• Eighteen female inpatients were included in a double-blind placebo-controlled cross-over study aimed at testing the hypothesis that dopamine blockade may enhance the effectiveness of behavior therapy in the short-term weight restoration of anorexia nervosa patients. The patients were given a uniform contingency management program and, after a baseline period, they alternatingly (3-week periods) received pimozide (4 to 6 mg) or a placebo. During the first two periods pimozide almost significantly enhanced the weight gain induced by the behavior therapy program and beneficially influenced the patients' attitude towards treatment.
• Vandereycken, W; Pierloot, R (1982). "Pimozide combined with behavior therapy in the short-term treatment of anorexia nervosa. A double-blind placebo-controlled cross-over study". Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica. 66 (6): 445–50. doi:10.1111/j.1600-0447.1982.tb04501.x. PMID 6758492.

• All dominant models of the eating disorders implicate personality variables in the emergence of weight concerns and the development of specific symptoms such as bingeing and purging. Standardized measures of personality traits and disorders generally confirm clinical descriptions of restricting anorexics as constricted, conforming, and obsessional individuals. A less consistent picture suggesting affective instability and impulsivity has emerged from the assessment of subjects with bulimia nervosa. Considerable heterogeneity exists within eating disorder subtypes, however, and a number of special problems complicate the interpretation of personality data in this population. These include young age at onset, the influence of state variables such as depression and starvation sequelae, denial and distortion in self-report, the instability of subtype diagnoses, and the persistence of residual problems following symptom control.
  • Vitousek, K; Manke, F (1994). "Personality variables and disorders in anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa". Journal of Abnormal Psychology. 103(1): 137–47. doi:10.1037/0021-843X.103.1.137. PMID 8040475.

• The Eating Disorder Service at the Children's Hospital at Westmead (CHW) in Sydney, provides comprehensive inpatient and outpatient treatment for children and adolescents with eating disorders. In 2003 the Maudsley Model of family based treatment for anorexia nervosa was introduced to support outpatient care. This has resulted in positive changes in the dynamics of the eating disorder team, a change in the philosophies that underpin the program and the experience of families that consult the service. There has also been a significant decrease in readmission rates. Our experience with the model has resulted in requests to provide training to other clinicians around Australia and a number of ongoing consultative relationships have followed. Implementation of the Maudsley model at CHW is described, followed by an overview of the theory and a summary of the key changes and challenges since moving in this new direction in 2003.
  • Wallis, A; Rhodes, P; Kohn, M; Madden, S (2007). "Five-years of family based treatment for anorexia nervosa: the Maudsley Model at the Children's Hospital at Westmead". International Journal of Adolescent Medicine and Health. 19 (3): 277–83. doi:10.1515/IJAMH.2007.19.3.277. PMID 17937144.

• Clinical observation has long suggested a link between personality and eating disorders. Research has consistently linked anorexia (particularly when the patient does not also have bulimic symptoms) to personality traits such as introversion, conformity, perfectionism, rigidity, and obsessive-compulsive features. The picture for bulimia is more mixed. Traits such as perfectionism, shyness, and compliance have consistently emerged in studies of individuals with bulimia or with anorexia, although research has often found bulimic patients to be extroverted, histrionic, and affectively unstable.
  Research on personality disorders has also examined the relation between eating disorders and personality and has documented considerable, but highly variable, rates of comorbidity, ranging from 21% to 97% for the presence of any personality disorder in patients with various eating disorder diagnoses. Conversely, patients with personality disorders have a higher than normal prevalence rate for eating disorders. The situation is similar for many axis I disorders, such as mood and anxiety disorders, for which comorbidity with axis II disorders hovers around 50%.
• The findings of this study raise questions about the concept of comorbidity as applied to eating disorders and suggest the likely utility for both research and clinical practice of considering eating-disordered symptoms in their characterological context (e.g., references 12, 34). The data from this study suggest that individuals who develop eating disorders who are constricted in most areas of their lives—e.g., who are passive and unassertive, emotionally constricted, and interpersonally avoidant—are likely to express this pattern with anorexic, rather than bulimic behavior. Clinically, these patients tend to be just as constricted in their sexual lives as they are with food, denying themselves pleasure, avoiding sexual relationships, feeling too ashamed or guilty to indicate to their partners what feels good, and so forth.
  Conversely, individuals with eating disorders whose ability to regulate their impulses and affects is tenuous—as expressed in spiraling emotions, tantrums, clinging to others for soothing, self-mutilation, and other impulsive acts—are likely to lose control over their eating in binges and to use self-destructive compensatory measures such as vomiting that momentarily help them regulate their affects. From this point of view, the question of whether bulimic symptoms should be regarded as impulsive behavior may be misplaced. The answer is probably that it depends on the personality configuration within which bulimic symptoms are contextualized. In low-functioning, emotionally dysregulated, type II bulimic patients, binge eating and purging may be functional equivalents of substance abuse, self-mutilation, and promiscuity. For these patients, bulimic symptoms may represent desperate efforts to regulate intense negative affects that call for immediate, and often maladaptive, responses. In contrast, high-functioning, perfectionistic, type I bulimic patients do not struggle with affects of the same intensity, and they have more adaptive coping strategies at their disposal for dealing with their distress. For these patients, binge eating is not equivalent to impulsive behaviors such as drinking or self-mutilation.
  More broadly, the data suggest that eating-disordered symptoms can be one expression, albeit a highly visible and sometimes life-threatening one, of a more general pattern of impulse and affect regulation. Thus, treating eating disorders primarily as disorders of food intake—and hence focusing primarily on altering the behavior, providing nutritional information (to patients who often know more about calories than the nutritionists who work with them), and so forth—may be taking the symptoms too literally. As in the treatment of trauma survivors, safety must be the clinician’s primary concern in treating patients with eating disorders when their symptoms are life-threatening or pose serious consequences for their current or future health. Particularly at those times, pharmacological and cognitive behavioral interventions can be essential components of a treatment plan, as they may be at various other points in the treatment.
• At the same time, however, symptom-focused treatment strategies may fail to address the personality structure that provides a context for understanding disordered eating. Patients whose personality profiles match the overcontrolled, constricted prototype, for example, rarely recognize their stance toward their own impulses and relationships as a problem. What brings them into treatment is typically someone else’s concern about their weight. If their attitudes toward their needs and feelings in general (and not just toward food) do not become the object of therapeutic attention, they are likely to change with treatment from being starving, unhappy, isolated, and emotionally constricted people to being relatively well fed, unhappy, isolated, and emotionally constricted people.
  The data also raise questions about the extent to which axis II is adequate for describing clinically meaningful patterns of personality pathology, at least for women with eating disorders. Patients in the high-functioning/perfectionistic cluster generally lacked diagnosable axis II pathology; indeed, in our study (as in the other studies that have isolated a similar cluster), they were defined by the absence of such pathology. These patients are articulate, conscientious, and empathic, and they tend to elicit liking in others. Yet they clearly have personality pathology—that is, enduring, problematic patterns of thought, feeling, motivation, and behavior. They are self-critical, perfectionistic, competitive, anxious, and guilt-ridden, and these aspects of their personality require clinical attention. The data reported here make sense in light of other findings that roughly 60% of patients treated for clinically significant personality pathology do not have problems severe enough to be diagnosable on axis II and that their personality problems (e.g., perfectionism and chronic feelings of guilt) generally are not reducible to any axis I syndrome (21, 22). Available data suggest that these patients represent the majority of patients treated in clinical practice and are not simply the “worried well.” Either axis II needs to be expanded from a personality disorderaxis to a personalityaxis that includes the range of functioning (from relatively healthy to relatively impaired), or subtypes such as those uncovered here need to be built into axis I.
  From a methodological standpoint, the results of this study suggest that we should routinely test for subtypes in our data sets rather than assuming homogeneity of categories. Group means may not be very meaningful when substantial intracategory heterogeneity exists, particularly if this heterogeneity is ordered, not random. The problem is particularly pronounced if pathology can be expressed in phenotypically opposite directions, leading to means that cancel out patterned within-group variability. Thus, although the etiological data on sexual abuse reported here are correlational and preliminary, they suggest that the same risk factor—sexual abuse—may manifest in opposite personality and behavioral styles—constriction and inhibition on the one hand, and dyscontrol and promiscuity on the other. Whether this is true of other etiologically significant psychosocial variables, such as harsh parental criticism (which, from a clinical point of view, appears sometimes to lead to self-criticism, sometimes to hostility and criticism toward others, and sometimes to both in adulthood), is an important question for future research.
  • Westen, D; Harnden-Fischer, J (2001). "Personality profiles in eating disorders: rethinking the distinction between axis I and axis II". The American Journal of Psychiatry. 158 (4): 547–62. doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.158.4.547. PMID 11282688.

• Circulating concentrations of leptin are exceedingly low during the acute stage of anorexia nervosa. Which symptoms result from these diminished concentrations must be clarified. Furthermore, research is required to evaluate whether or not a too rapid weight gain might induce a physiological counter-regulation which would predispose to renewed loss of weight.
  • Wewetzer C1, Mauer-Mucke K, Ballauff A, Remschmidt H, Hebebrand J., “Possible pathophysiologic, diagnostic and therapeutic implications of new findings on leptin secretion within the scope of anorexia nervosa” Z Kinder Jugendpsychiatr Psychother. 1998 Dec;26(4):244-52.

• Anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are serious psychiatric illnesses related to disordered eating and distorted body images. They both have significant medical complications associated with the weight loss and malnutrition of anorexia nervosa, as well as from the purging behaviors that characterize bulimia nervosa. No body system is spared from the adverse sequelae of these illnesses, especially as anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa become more severe and chronic.
  • Westmoreland P1, Krantz MJ2, Mehler PS3, “Medical Complications of Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia”, Am J Med. 2016 Jan;129(1):30-7. doi: 10.1016/j.amjmed.2015.06.031. Epub 2015 Jul 10.

• Published photographs of models that have been modified “in order to narrow or widen the silhouette” should be labelled as “photograph touched up”. Those who failed to comply could face a fine of up to €37,500 , or 30% of the value of the advert featuring the model.
  An earlier version of the bill also made it an offence punishable by up to a year’s imprisonment to encourage excessive thinness, a measure aimed at “pro-ana” websites that extol or promote anorexia or bulimia.
  Catherine Lemorton, president of the government’s social affairs committee, said many of those who ran such sites “suffered themselves with eating problems” and might be damaged further by the threat of prison.
  When the law was first introduced to the house in April this year, Marie-Rose Moro, a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, said the law would solve nothing. “It would be better to provide more resources to care for anorexic patients,” she said, adding that there should be “more awareness to eating disorders in society”.
  Modelling agencies also attacked the law. “It’s very serious to conflate anorexia with the thinness of models and it ignores the fact that anorexia is a psychogenic illness,” Isabelle Saint-Felix, secretary general of Synam, which represents around 40 modelling agencies in France, told AFP.
  In France, an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 people – almost all of them adolescents – suffer from anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder with a high mortality rate.
  • Kim Willsher, "Models in France must provide doctor's note to work”, The Guardian, 18 December.

• Tumors of the hypothalamic-pineal region may present with a wide variety of symptoms, including disturbed eating. We present a case where such a tumor was misdiagnosed as anorexia nervosa.
• We describe a case of pineal germinoma invading the hypothalamus, which was initially diagnosed as anorexia nervosa.
• Clinical features included weight loss, vomiting, pyrexia, hypernatraemia, and visual disturbance and the typical psychopathology of anorexia nervosa was absent.
• Organic disorder should always be considered before making a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa, particularly if the presentation is atypical.
  • Winston, AP; Barnard, D; D'souza, G; Shad, A; Sherlala, K (2006). "Pineal germinoma presenting as anorexia nervosa: Case report and review of the literature". The International Journal of Eating Disorders. 39 (7): 606–8. doi:10.1002/eat.20322. PMID 17041920.

• Social media have become a significant means for peer-related communication, self-presentation, and identity management. So-called eating disorder websites that propagate a drastic thin ideal and unhealthy eating behaviors have triggered a debate about the harmful facets of social Internet activity. Little research has addressed the language that is used by the authors of these websites. The present study focuses on personal weblogs, a popular form of mostly text-based, diary-like, online journals. We compared 31 pro–eating disorder blogs, 29 recovery blogs, and 27 control blogs by the means of computerized quantitative text analyses. The language of pro–eating disorder blogs featured lower cognitive processing, a more closed-minded writing style, was less emotionally expressive, contained fewer social references, and focused more on eating-related contents than recovery blogs. A subset of 12 language indicators correctly classified the blogs in 84% of the cases. The distinct language patterns appear to reflect the psychological conditions of the blog authors and provide insight into their various stages of coping.
  • Wolf, M; Theis, F; Kordy, H (2013). "Language Use in Eating Disorder Blogs: Psychological Implications of Social Online Activity". Journal of Language and Social Psychology. 32 (2): 212–226.

History

• It was initially assumed that Cheddar Man had pale skin and fair hair, but his DNA paints a different picture, strongly suggesting he had blue eyes, a very dark brown to black complexion and dark curly hair.
  The discovery shows that the genes for lighter skin became widespread in European populations far later than originally thought – and that skin colour was not always a proxy for geographic origin in the way it is often seen to be today.
  • "First modern Britons had 'dark to black' skin, Cheddar Man DNA analysis reveals" Hannah Devlin, The Guardian, 7 Feb 2018

• Lesbianism is not mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, in contrast to male homosexual behavior, which is expressly forbidden as a capital crime. The absence of discussion of lesbianism in this context has raised scholarly interest. Biblical critics have suggested that this difference exists because female homoerotic behavior would not have been considered sexual behavior, which in ancient times was understood to require the emission of semen. A related theory suggests that nothing women did without men would matter because women were not full persons by biblical standards.
  • Rebecca T. Alpert , Jewish Women's Archive, “Lesbianism”

• Women prostitutes who had intercourse with male worshipers were attached to the sanctuaries and temples of ancient Mesompotamia, Phoenicia, Cyprus, Corinth, Carthage, Sicily, Israel, Egypt, Libya, and West Africa, as well as ancient and modern India.
  • The Construction of Homosexuality, David F. Greenberg, p.93

• Male homosexual prostitution having religious significance was an institutionalized feature of the archaic civilizations of the Mediterranean. Most authorities think it was practiced in the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, as well as in the worship of neighboring peoples. Yet a few scholars have expressed skepticism.

• Ibid, p.94

• In Akkadian, qadishtum was a holy priestess (who may or may not have been a prostitute). Ugaritic temple personnel included qdshm. At Memphis, a monument to Qudshu, aSyrian goddess associated with love and fertility, refers to her as "the prostitute." A Phoenician inscription on Cryprus dating from the fourth century B.C., referring to a category of temple personnel who played a role in the sacred service of Astarte, identifies the kelev as a religious functionary of some kind. The Sumerogram for assinu a male-homosexual cult prostitute (see below), joins the symbols for "dog" and "woman." Revelation 22:15 excludes dogs along with sorcerers, whoremongers, and idolaters from the holy city; surely it is referencing not to canines, but to men who plaed a sexual-sacramental role in religion. Deuteronomy prohibits cult prostitution because the Hebrews were adopting the practice from their neighbors. It does not follow from the identification of qdeshim as male cult prostitutes that their partners were men: Patai points out that they could have served barren women who hoped to conceive by having intercourse with a holy man. In some Hindu cults, wives have intercourse with priests who represent the god. There is no direct evidence for this custom from the ancient Near East, though it has been reported in the recent past for Morocco, Egypt, and Syria. It does seem incompatible with the restrictions Hebrew men placed on female sexuality, but the story of Elisha and the barren widow could be a garbled version of it.

• Ibid, pp.95-96

• Some of the evidence for homosexual cult practices in surrounding cultures is ambiguous, but clearly rules out male heterosexual prostitution. For example, Hittite texts document the existence of male transvestite eunuch temple priests but do not state clearly that they has sexual relations with worshipers. Babylonian and Assyrian texts refer to asinu and kurgarru, religious functionaries particularly associated with the goddess Ishtar, who danced, played musical instruments, wore masks, and were considered effeminate. They were often depicted carrying a spindle for weaving - a symbol of women's work.
• Prayers and treaty curses attributed the power to turn men into women to the goddess Ishtar, and explained that she had turned the assinu and and kurgarru into women to demonstrate her awesome powers. They were clearly transvestites. References to them as "neither male nor female," "incomplete", "half-men," and as "lacking something" point to castration. Surely their responsibilities did not include fertilizing women.
  • Ibid, p.96

• Roman writers tell; of the Cybele cult practices. Every March, Cybeles followers mourned the death of her androgynous lover Attis (her son in some versions of the myth) by holding ecstatic dances and striking themselves with swords and whips. At the height of frenzy, initiates severed their genitals with a sharp stone or shard of broken pottery (metal instruments were forbidden) and assumed women's clothing.
  When the veneration of Cybele was first introduced to Rome during the Second Punic War, the Roman's disdained her emasculated priests, and forbade citizens from undergoing initiation. But the cult spread as the orientalization of the Empire progressed. Bands of Galli roamed the countryside dressed as women, scourging themselves, dancing and begging. IN the Metamorphoses, also known as The Golden Ass, Apuleius portrays the galli as passive homosexuals who seek out virile young peasant lads to satisfy their cravings; Lucian paints a similar picture in Lucius, or the ass. However, none of the Hellenistic sources mentions ritual homosexuality. In The Life of Constantine, the church historian Eusebius Pamphili, bishop of Caesarea (260?-340), implies, without being too explicit, that the effeminate priests of the goddess worshipped on Mount Lebanon still engaged in homosexual cult practices in his own time, however, as a Christian, Eusebius could have been trying to smear goddess worshipers by imputing to them practices long since abandoned. Without corroboration from contemporaneous pagan sources it is hard to be sure.
  • Ibid, p.98

• Taking all the sources together, - a procedure justified by the prolonged and extensive contacts among the various civilizations of the Mediterranean - it can be safely concluded that anal intercourse formed a part of goddess worship from very early times throughout the Near East, with the possible exception of pharonic Egypt. If Eusebius is to be believed, it was still going on Mount Lebanon until Constantine had the shrine of the moon goddess destroyed in the early fourth century..
  The Hebrews were part of this world. They interacted extensively with Cannanites, Phoenicians, and Mesopotamians, and adopted some of their religious practices. The evidence presented her points to homosexual intercourse with qdeshim, who "did according to all the abominations of the nations, which Yahweh drove out before the children of Israel," as one of the practices they adopted. There is no evidence for analogous lesbian cult prostitution, though female transvestism appears in Canaanite mythology, and the Roman writer Juvenal - not a particularly trustworthy source - contended that women participating in an annual ceremony in honor of the Bona Dea engaged in lesbian acts.
  Scholars have noted the resemblance of Sakti (goddess) worship on the Indian subcontinent to the West Asian cults. Until the practice became illegal in 1948, when India received independence, some of the Hindu temples in many parts of the country had women and boy prostitutes. Communities of hijraspre- and post operative transexual devotees of the Mother Goddess (Parvati, Bahuchara Mata), who dress as women, sing and dance, and beg for alms, can still be found in a number of cities, especially in the north. They perform when the male children are born, and reputedly kidnap and castrate young boys. Many engage in homosexual prostitution, though not in a cultic context.
  • Ibid, pp.99-100

• Goddess cults of South India and Sri Lanka also involve male transvestism (but not prostitution at present), ritualized gashing of the head (symbolic castration) impotence anxiety, and fear of heterosexual intercourse. The consort of the virginal Sri Lankan goddess Pattini is killed and castrated or disemboweled (symbolically castrated). Some of these cults may have been brought to Southern India by Syrian traders in the first few centuries A.D. and adopted by indigenous Buddhist and Jain merchants who married foreigners.
  Receptivity to the new cults can be explained by psychological predisposition (discussed below) and already existing goddess worship in Dravidian folk religion, which involved berdachelike male transvestism. This worship was almost certainly quite archaic. Archeological and linguistic evidence polints to goddess worship and the veneration of the generative organs as prominent features of the Indus Valley civilization that flourished in Western India c. 2700-1700 B.C. The figure of a naked dancing girl, possibly a temple prostitute, has been found in the ruins. Cultural dissemination of these institutions from Sumeria, which traded extensively with the Harrapan civilization, is quite likely. The indigenous tribes of Southern India are thought to be descendants of the pre-Aryan Harrapan civilization.
  Hindu religious and legal texts frown on homosexual cult practices. Male prostitution was probably not a aprt of early Indo-European religion. Hence later cult transvestism and homosexuality are unlikely to have originated with the Aryan invasions; most likely they were indigenous, and survived because the invaders co-opted local cults rather than destroy them.
  • Ibid, p.100

• The male cult prostitution of the ancient Near East bear more than a casual resemblance to the American Indian berdaches described in the previous chapter. Just as the Near East cults linked gender transformation to the service of a goddess, some berdaches took up cross-dressing at the command of a female spirit or goddess. The explorer W.H. Keating reported that the Winnebago considered the moon,
  to be inhabited by an adverse female deity, whose delight it is to cross men in all his pursuits. If during their sleep this deity should present herself to them in their dreams, the Indians consider it enjoined on them by duty to become Cinaedi [receptive homosexuals]; and they ever after assume female garb.
  On the other hand, there are differences. Although the dreams were sometimes taken as omens in the ancient Near East, there is no evidence that they figured in the decisions to undergo castration in the service of the goddess. Intercourse with berdaches does not seem to have had religious significance, adn the healing rituals of those who became shamans did not involve sex. Berdaches were not eunuchs; and they were not attached to temples, or part of a religious hierarchy.
  As I've already argued in the preceding chapter, the geographical distribution of the transvestite shaman role is too great to be due to cultural diffusion in historical times. More plausibly, the assinu and galli evolved from an indigenous berachelike shamanism in the prehistoric Near East. Their special features (affiliation with a temple, castration) developed in the transition from a kinship order to a class differentiated society.
  • Ibid, p.101

• We do not know the family histories of the galli or other transvestite priests, but what we know of the goddess cults favors the second of these two models. The goddess's destructive rage at mortal men who reject her overtures is readily interpreted as a reflection of the child's fear of incest and the threat of his ego boundaries that it represents. The castrated, effeminate, dying son-consort represents the male child who identifies with his mother, loves her, and is punished for it. Flagellation and castration not only administer this punishment to the mother-fixated son, but also induce bleeding, a simulation of menstruation. Whereas Stone Age goddesses are visibly pregnant, those of the archaic civilizations are virginal - a denial of the mother's threatening sexuality. It is consistent with the dynamics proposed that men of ancient Mesopotamia were troubled by impotence, and sought a magical cure for it.
  Spratt considers the family prrocess postulated in the second model to be typical of traditional Indian families, and links this process with the prevalence of male transvestism in village rituals for the goddess. Obeyeskere notes that a number of Indian family practices, some of them dating back at least 1500 years, would tend to produce mother fixation in male children. Fathers indulge their little girls, but then they marry them at a young age to men they may not know. Overnight they become subservient strangers in households dominated by in-laws. Husbands are often emotionally distant, sexually inhibited by Brahmanic traditions holding intercourse to be polluting and dangerous. Failing to find emotional gratification from their husbands, mothers become strongly attached to their infant sons, kiss their penises, and act seductively toward them. IN Sri Lanka, sons sleep next to their mothers until age four or five, sometimes almost until puberty. The father sleeps elsewhere, but comes in to have intercourse, in the child's presence, with his wife.
  • Ibid, p.103

• Slater thought that subordinated mothers were especially characteristic of classical Greece, and found much evidence in Greek mythology for the themes expected on the basis of the family dynamics postulated in our second model. Yet Greeks of the classical age were repelled by the ritual castration. The practice was found primarily in Asia Minor.
  The difference can be laid to the role of the father. If he isa salient figure in the family, he can provide a basis for male identification despite the child's intense attachment to his mother. His presence should instigate oedipal conflict and fear of castration by others - themes one finds in Greek, Indiana nd Sri Lankan mythology - but not self-castration, which will be greeted with horror. Where the father is absent, on the other hand, identification with the mother is potentially stronger and may lead to transvestism without castration anxiety, and self-castration to deny one's masculinity.
  Greek fathers were not ordinarily absent from home for long periods, nor are contemporary Indian fathers; hence the rarity of institutionalized transvestism and self-castration. However, merchants of West Asia engaged in long-distance commerce were probably away from home for months at a time, as were professional soldiers of the standing armies of the monarchies. By contrast, the citizen-soldiers of the Greek city-states were not professionals and lived at home. Terms of service in the Roman army, on the other hand, grew to great length: the general and political leader Marius (d. 86 B.C.) permitted plebes to enlist for as long as twenty years, just about the time that self-castration began to make inroads.
  • Ibid, p.104

• Slater thought that subordinated mothers were especially characteristic of classical Greece, and found much evidence in Greek mythology for the themes expected on the basis of the family dynamics postulated in our second model. Yet Greeks of the classical age were repelled by the ritual castration. The practice was found primarily in Asia Minor.
  The difference can be laid to the role of the father. If he isa salient figure in the family, he can provide a basis for male identification despite the child's intense attachment to his mother. His presence should instigate oedipal conflict and fear of castration by others - themes one finds in Greek, Indiana nd Sri Lankan mythology - but not self-castration, which will be greeted with horror. Where the father is absent, on the other hand, identification with the mother is potentially stronger and may lead to transvestism without castration anxiety, and self-castration to deny one's masculinity.
  Greek fathers were not ordinarily absent from home for long periods, nor are contemporary Indian fathers; hence the rarity of institutionalized transvestism and self-castration. However, merchants of West Asia engaged in long-distance commerce were probably away from home for months at a time, as were professional soldiers of the standing armies of the monarchies. By contrast, the citizen-soldiers of the Greek city-states were not professionals and lived at home. Terms of service in the Roman army, on the other hand, grew to great length: the general and political leader Marius (d. 86 B.C.) permitted plebes to enlist for as long as twenty years, just about the time that self-castration began to make inroads.
• Of course we have no direct proof that eunuch priests were children of absent soldiers or merchants. Moreover, it is probable that most male children raised in such families did not castrate themselves. Men of the matrilineal Mayars of the Malabar coast of South India did not traditionally live with their wives; often they were away from home for long periods serving in the armies of the rajahs. Yet most became neither transvestite nor transexual. In most families, other males would have been present, and mothers were no so seductive and hostile to their son's heterosexuality as to produce an outcome so extreme as self-mutilation. However, if the family configuration described here was common in antiquity, gender ambivalence would have been common enough to create awe and fascination with eunuchs on the part of the populace.
  This awe and fascination made it possible for individual acts of castration to evolve into an institutionalized part of priestly initiation. Perhaps an individual eunuch attracted veneration, founded a local cult and established a sanctuary or temple, or took up residence in a preexisting temple. Such an individual could certainly have been a berdache or a transvestite shaman. Alternately, castration could have evolved from tribal rituals involving mild cutting. 1 Kings 18:26-28 describes the prophets of Baal cutting themselves with swords and lances while dancing in a leaping manner around the altar of Mount Carmel. Lucian of Antioch, a Christian theologian of the third century, reports that gashing with knives was part of the Syrian ceremony of mourning for Adonis. The prophets of the goddess Kali also cut themselves with swords when performing an annual rite in Kerala, India. Paleolithic cave art showing dancers in animal skins leaping testifies to the antiquity of such rites.
  Worshipers of the goddess who castrated themselves would undoubtedly have invented the myths to explain their actions. These myths would inevitably embody residues of the psychological process that gave rise to the castration, while disguising them from the initiates themselves by attributing responsibility to the goddess. Being composed from the raw materials made available by the surrounding culture, these myths would necessarily incorporate prominent themes of that culture, such as the annual vegetation cycle. Provided there were enough young men who responded to their anxieties by amputating their genitals, it would not have taken long for self-castration to become established in the annual rituals. Evidently there were enough. Once established, the prestige of the role might have made it attractive even to young men not especially plagued by maternal separation anxiety.
  • Ibid, pp.105-106

• The attractiveness of intercourse with a euncuh priest remains to be explained. By castrating himself and putting on female garb, the priest was not becoming just any woman. Unconsciously, he may have been identifying with his mother, but in terms of his own culture, he identified himself with a goddess, and presumably acquired some of her powers. Anal intercourse was her method. Although Ishtar was the goddess of love and had many lovers, she was childless. The female hierodules who consecrated themselves to her were called naditu, barren, because their sexual practices could not result in pregnancy. It was in imitation of the goddess and her divine partners that and their male counterparts in the priesthood submitted to anal sex. The male worshipers who had intercourse with the priests and priestess were uniting with the goddess herself. As the cuneiform text quoted earlier indicates, this union was propitious: the goddess must have looked favorably on a gift of precious semen. It brought good fortune to the worshiper and his household, just as the sacred marriage of the king to the high priestess each spring did for the entire kingdom.
  • Ibid, p.106

• One would hardly expect to see instituionalized male transgenerational homosexuality of the Melanesian variety (described in chapter 2) in the archaic civilizations. The conditions that seem to give rise to it in Melanesia do not exist in the early civilizations. WIth the pacification of an extended territory, wives are no longer taken from enemy villages, and amrriage is not aranged through sister exchange between cross-cousings.
  Yet ritualized, transgenerational male homosexuality was a part of early Greek culture. Dominated from the time of the Dorian invasion (c. 1200 B.C.) by powerful, culturally conservative noble families, the eastern part of Crete kept up ancient customs well into historical times. One of these customs was an initation rite for aristocratic youths that bears remarkable resemblance to tribal rituals. Boys were taken from their mothers by kouretes (armed male dancers). Under the auspices of the pre-Olympian Mother Goddess cult of Rhea and Zeus, the boys were cleansed of maternal contamination and reborn as men. A men'shouse figured in the ceremonies, and bull roarers (devices widely used in tribal rituals to simulate the sound of bulls or thunder) were used to terrify the initiates.
  • Ibid, pp.106-107

• As described by Ephoros, a historian of the fourth century B.C., and repeated almost verbatim by Strabo, the initiation had a homosexual component. The boy, chosen for his character and manliness, was abducted in a prearranged mock kidnapping and taken to the country for several months of hunting, feasting, adn homosexual sex. When released he was given a military outfit, an ox for sacrifice to Zeus, and a drinking cup. It was considered shameful not to be chosen. Those who participated were honored throughout their lives.
  Sparta, too, institutionalized relations between mature men and adolescent boys, as well as between adult women and girls, and gave them a pedagogical focus. The few accounts we have, all written by foreigners, do not claim that the relationships were aprt of initiation rites, but the Spartans were secretive about their instiutions, and strangers would not necessarily have learned the details. However, many aspects of Spartan homosexuality and amrriage customs point to tribal origins. Participation was mandatory for all youths of good character. There were ordeals - a common feature of tribal initiation. At their conclusion, all boys in the same-age grade had to marry - as in many tribes. Even after marriage, men lived in men's houses, not with their wives. Wives and male lovers were shared with age-mates. Like Crete, from whom the Greeks believed Spartan instiutions were borrowed, Sparta preserved ancient customs that had disappeared in other city-states.
  • Ibid, p.107

• The notion that Greek homosexuality had its origin in Dorian tribal initiations goes back to Muller, who suggested - without knowing anything of Melanesian life - that its purpose was the mechanical implantation of character via the semen. Bethe and other scholars find support for this thesis in the graffiti with homosexual themes found near a temple of Apollo on the island of Thera, a Spartan colony; they interpret the inscriptions as a record of an initiation. Others, though, consider the graffiti to be nothing mroe than frivilous obscene scribbling.
  The early history of Greek tribal cults remains obscure, but mythology points to the existence of male initiatino rites with a homosexual component. In many myths, including the foundation myths of a number of the city-states, a young man performs heroic feats of hunting under the supervision of an older initiation master with whom he sometimes has a homosexual relationship. On completion of the ordeal he is recognized as an adult and amrries, sometimes to a wife provided by his master. Even though our sources for the myths are late, cultural details of the stories place them in the Dark Ages or earlier, when hunting was still important to the economy - not only as a source of food, but to protect crops and domestic animals from lions and wild boars. The names of some of the ehroes and gods in the stories appear in Mycenean linear B tablets, suggesting that the myths and associated rituals could date back to c. 1500 B.C., if not earlier. They were probably not Minoan, but rather Indo-European.
  • Ibid, p.108

• There are hints in the ethnographic literature suggesting that in the transition from an egalitarian to a stratified social order, pederastic relations come to be restricted to an elite. In Hawaii and the Caroline Island of Micronesia, male homosexual relations (probably transgenerational, definitely not transgenderal) were institutionalized among the aristocrats of the Areoi Society, but not among the population at large. THis restriction often has an economic as well as normative dimension. Mossi chiefs have their young male sorones, while the less affluent commoners do not. Big Namba chiefs of New Gunea have many boy lvoers, commoners only one.
  • Ibid, p.110

• Male homosexual relations in the archaic civilizations also occured in military settings. The early civilizations were often at war, and for muc longer stretches than in the materially impoverished primitive societies. Wars were fought almost exclusively by men, and boys education stressed the martial arts and virtues.
  As in many kinship-structured societies, soldiers were often barred from any contact with women, lest they lose their masculine strengths or be polluted. According to Gilbert Murray, the Archeans who fought at Troy were votaries who had sworn an oath to abstain from intercourse with women until they had captured the city. Extended periods of separation from women would have been conducive to homosexuality, especially under conditions of warfare, whose participants share the intense emotions associated with the risks of combat.
  Many of the early civilizations passed through a stage in which political leadership was monopolized by the military aristocracy. Warfare took the form of armed champions fighting at close quarters as individuals or in small clusters, accompanied by squires. Centralized cordination was virtually nonexistent and warriors were highly competitive. While a cultural emphasis on personal valor and bravery would have made a champion erotically attractive to other men, rivalry would also have stood in the way of an egalitarian relationship. Though some sexual relations could have developed among some aristocratic warriors who fought together as equals, most would have had to involve partners who could not be considered competitors.
  • Ibid, pp.110-111

• Aristocratic warrior societies do seem have had extensive male homosexuality, which was completely accepted. Archeological evidence shows that c. 500 B.C., when they were founding the La Tene culture in France and the northern part of Switzerland, large numbers of Celts were armed for military raids of looting. Their political organization took the form of decentralized chiefdoms, with patron-client relationships linking aristocrats and commoners. According to Artistotle, the Celts esteemed homosexuality. Writing in the first century B.C., Diodorus Siculus found Celtic women charming, and every indicator of their social status suggests that it was quite high. Nevertheless, he adder, Mbr? The men are much keener on their own sex; they lie around on animal skins and enjoy themselves, with a lover one each side. The extraordinary thing is they haven’t the smallest regard for their personal dignity or self-respect; they offer themselves to other men without the least compunction. Furthermore, this isn’t looked down on, or regarded as in any way disgraceful: on the contrary, if one of them is rejected by another to whom he has offered himself, he takes offence.
  Evidence that the Celtic love of warriors may have extended to the British Isles (which the Celts invaded c. 200 B.C.) can be found in the Irish saga Tain Bo Caulinge. The hero Cuchulain explains that he does not want to fight his foster0brother and former comrade in arms Ferdia:
  • Ibid, p.111

• The Babylonian ‘’Epic of Gilgamesh’’ describes an intimate relationship between Gigamesh, king of the city-state of Uruk and Enkidu, a totally uncivilized, virile wild man sent by the gods in response to complaints from the nobles that Gilgamesh was sexually exploiting their sons and daughters. After a belligerent confrontation in which Gilgamesh emerges victorious, the two become close friends and embarked ona series od dangerous adventures together.
  Explicit homosexual reference are lacking, but there are hints that the relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu was sexual.
  • Ibid, p.112

• The conditions of warfare, we may conclude, seem to have encouraged homosexual bonding between male warriors in some of the early civilizations. This was especially true when weak military organization left military leadership to individual heroes and their followers. The relationships that ensued typically involved males of discrepant ages or social statues. Where armies were organized more bureaucratically, relationships of this kind would have been less common.
• Lesbian relationships were rare among adult women in most kinship structures societies. The extent to which that was also true in the archaic civilizations probably varies somewhat. Early Greek civilization may have had ritualized lesbian initiations for young women – in the case of Sparta, continuing into the classical age – but if comparable rites were performed in early civilizations, evidence of them has been lost. The restriction of women’s religious and political roles that accompanies the rise of early civilizations may have entailed the suppression of female initiations and inattention to myths with lesbians themes.
  These restrictions encourages lesbian relations by depriving women of amle compansionship, and by fostering close relationships with other women. Prince and wealthy men of the Azande in southern Sudan have large numbers of wives, all of whom must necessarily do without their husband most of the time. The risk of death for adultery discourages extramarital heterosexual affairs. Instead, women turn to other women. The ease of disguising a lesbian affair as a simple friendship makes it difficult for husbands to interfere, even though most of them dislike lesbianism and fear that it could magically injure them.
  Most Athenian women of the classical age were confined to the home much of the time, and had little opportunity to meet women of their own social status. However, if they were at all affluent, they spent that time in the women’s section of the house, where men did not enter, alone with female slaves. What they did with one another is anyone’s guess; Greek men did not write about that sort of thing. In the case of Egypt, paintings show women being dressed or coiffed by female servants. The scenes are sensuous, but not sexual. Whether lesbian relationships commonly developed between mistresses and their servants us unknown.
  • Ibid, pp.116-117

• Wherever harems existed, as in India and the Near East, they became known for lesbianism. Harem women were deprived of men (except for eunuch guards) and spent most of their time with one another. Inevitably, their emotional and sexual involvements centered on co-wives. Jealous husbands might threaten severe punishments, but the seculusion of women must have made detection very difficult.
• Class-structured homosexuality appears with the dawn of economic stratification. Here the two partners are drawn from different economic strata or classes, the wealthier partner purchasing or commanding the sexual services of the poorer. The partners may differ in age, gender, or preference for particular types of contact, but these differences do not define the relationship. What does is the preference of the wealthier partner. Thus Captain Blight, visiting Tahiti in the late eighteenth century, observed a chief sucking the penis of his attendant. By the usual conventions linking rank and sex role, this transaction should not have occurred. The attendant should have been sucking the chief. However, the chief occupied a social position that enabled him to gratify his personal preference irrespective of conventions about homosexual roles. In societies were social relations are commercialized wealth bestows sexual power.
  ‘’’Two forms of homosexuality are particularly common in antiquity: prostitution and intercourse with slaves.’’’ After examining each we will turn to the related topic of castration in nonreligious contexts.
  • Ibid, p.117

• The demand for prostitutes in antiquity came from merchants and sailors far from home, and from men who had difficulty gaining sexual access to partners who did not have to be paid (because patriarchal restrictions made it difficult to obtain respectable women and boys). The supply developed in response to the growth of economic inequality. With the disintegration of the redistributive channels of clan society and the privatization of the means of production, the dispossessed sometimes turned to prostitution to support themselves. But not all prostitutes were poor. Tahitian and Rwandan chiefs used their wealth to attract men who were not impoverished to their court, and made them available to guests. In the absence of taboos or legal restrictions against homosexuality (see chapter 4), male homosexual prostitution developed alongside female heterosexual prostitution.
  Even when the kinship order is intact, economic inequality can lead to homosexual prostitution. Transgenerational male homosexuality was universal in the Big Namba chiefdoms of Malekula Island in the New Hebrides, the boy’s lover being his sister’s true or possibly classificatory sisters’ husband. Though he had exclusive sexual rights, he could sell these rights to other men. Since the boy worked in his partner’s garden, an element of economic exploitation entered the relationship. Similarly, in the Libyan oases of Siwah and El Garah fifty years ago, parents prostituted their sons to the wealthier men. No comparable pecuniary elements are mentioned in the ethnographies of the more egalitarian New Guinea cultures.
  With the emergence of well defined classes, prostitution became ubiquitous, and freed from it cultic trappings. It was a feature of everyday life in ancient Mesopotamia; there was even a guild for practitioners. A hint of exploitations appears in an Assyrian tablet dated at 716 B.C. that refers to them:
  When a male prostitute (sinnisanu = effeminate man) entered the brothel, as he raised his hands in prayer, he said, “My hire goes to the promoter. You [Ishtar] are wealth, I am half.
  • Ibid, pp.117-118

• Athens and other Greek harbor towns had male brothels from an early date, but it was considered shameful for a free citizen to prostitute himself for money. A law attributed to Solon, himself a pederast, provided that an Athenian citizen who did so was barred from certain religious functions and public affairs, and could not speak before of the Assembly or Council on pain of death. If a father or guardian prostituted his minor ward for money, the ward was absolved of traditional responsibilities toward elderly parents or guardians. It was contrary to the egalitarian ethos of citizenship for a free man to place himself at the service of someone else for money. ‘’’Someone who would sell his body, it was said, might as readily sell the interests of the state. The use of legislation to enforce this ethos reflects the recognition that economic pressures associated with the commercialization of the Greek economy were eroding the social basis of citizenship to a potentially dangerous degree. It was Salon who prohibited indebted Athenian citizen from being sold abroad into slavery.
  Foreigners were not covered by Solon’s legislation, and for this reason it is thought that many of Athen’s male prostitutes were aliens. While some may have become prostitutes from economic necessity, others were prisoners of war who had been sold into brothel slavery. Plato’s Phaedrus is named for a citizen of Elis who had been captured by the Spartans and sold to an Athenian house of prostitution.
  Although the Athenians stigmatized prostitutes, they did not deprive them of all legal rights; according to Aiskhines, prostitutes could go to court to collect from nonpaying customers. Patronizing prostitutes was considered perfectly acceptable, not shameful or illegal. Each year, the Athenian Council confirmed special tax on male prostitutes, suggesting that they were numerous enough to warrant attention as a source of revenue.
  By all accounts, prostitution flourished in Rome after the Second Punic War (218-201 B.C.), when wealth poured into the city, and the large-scale displacement of free farm laborers by slaves created massive unemployment. Brothels opened not only in Rome, but also in large and medium-sized towns throughout Italy. A reference in a public speech of the elder Cato to the high price of male prostitutes makes clear that only the affluent could indulge.
  Most male prostitutes were slaves owned by a procurer, however, some prostitutes were freedmen or even free. Under Augustus the government began taxing male prostitutes, and also granted them a legal holiday.
  • Ibid, pp.118-119

• The Douleq papyrus (c.1400 B.C.) suggests that female temple prostitutes may have served the cat goddess (Carlton, 1977:109), and Breasted (1906:4.74-75, 5.132) concludes from para. 128 of the Papyrus Harris (twelfth century B.C.) that women captured in war were made to serve as temple prostitutes, but the papyrus does not actually state the nature of their services. That is true of many of the references to female temple slaves or personnel mentioned by Hogarth (1914). The Egyptians seem to have regarded sexual intercourse as ritually defiling and prohibited it inside their temples (Quibell, 1907: 12-14; Manniche, 1977). By the Ptolemaic period the situation may have changed. The Greek geographer Strabo, who visited Egypt just after it had been conquered by Rome, reports that one of the most beautiful girls of an illustrious family was dedicated to Amun, became a prostitute, and had intercourse with men until she menstruated; then she was married (17.1 46). This practice may have been borrowed from Babylonia, where a similar custom was noticed by Herodotus some hundreds of years earlier (1.199).
  • Ibid, p.128

• Cult prostitution may have failed to take root in Egypt because of the way the kingdom was unified. Some scholars think unification was achieved when nomadic, sun-worshiping desert tribes from Upper Egypt (in the south) conquered the sedentary cultivators of the delta (lower Egypt). The defeated farmers may have engaged in ritual sex to promote fertility, but the victorious nomads almost certainly did not. Though the goddesses of the indigenous farming culture survived, their cults were presumably abolished or transformed by conquerors. ‘’’One suspects that once irrigation was established, ceremonial interest would have shifted from the promotion of crop growth to the control of the flooding of the Nile, for which sexual rites would not have provided a magical analogue.’’’ The absence of maternal destructiveness toward men in myth suggests that Egyptian family arrangements did not give rise to the psychodynamics associated with religious self-castration, as they seem to have done in Asia Minor.
  The coronation ceremony for a new king looks very much like it evolved from an earlier tribal ritual that transferred charismatic powers homosexually, but in the historical period the transmission was symbolic, not sexual. Unlike kinship-structured societies that ritually sodomize all male youths, or the aristocratic societies that do it only to young nobles, the Egyptian ceremony was performed for the king alone. His was a charisma not shared by ordinary mortals, even aristocrats.
  • Ibid, pp.128-129

• Even in the absence of ritual performance, Egyptian culture retained the belief that homosexual intercourse with a god was auspicious. In one coffin text, the deceased vows, “I will swallow for myself the phallus of Re…;” another, referring to the earth god Geb says, “his phallus is between the buttocks of his son and heir.”
  Two fragmentary manuscripts attest to the existence of homosexuality outside a cult context toward the end of the Sixth Dynasty (c. 2272-2178 B.C.). The texts begin by describing a conspiracy to obstruct a judicial hearing, but the outcome is unknown because part of the manuscript is missing. The narration resumes by telling of a commoner who discovers King Neferkare (pepe II) was making regular secret nocturnal visits to the home of General Sisene, a top royal administrator, who was unmarried or living without a wife. A homosexual relationship between Neferkare and his general is clearly implied. Because of a gap in the manuscript, the connection (if any) between the conspiracy and the affair is unclear.
  The published translation of the manuscript is neutral in tone and non judgemental in its treatment of the affair, but in a letter to me, the Egyptologist. Gwyn Griffiths insists that “the whole piece conveys an atmosphere of royal corruption.” Posener, the translator, points out that Neferkare’s ninety-year reign was a period of political decline in which the monarchy came under the sway of the nobility. Both episodes, he suggests, can be seen as manifestations of decay. ‘’’Yet this interpretation is speculative.’’’ Even if it is valid, it does not necessarily follow that Egyptians of the time viewed homosexuality negatively. Someone who had no prejudice against heterosexuality might nevertheless raise an eyebrow upon learning that the president of the United States was paying secret nocturnal visits to the home of a female cabinet officer. The Egyptians might have considered it undignified for the king, who was considered the incarnation of divinity, to have an affair with a mere mortal. Pharaoh was considered so sacred that most people were not even permitted to touch him.
  • Ibid, pp.129-130

• The existence of a tomb for two manicurists and hairdressers of King Niuserre of the Fifth Dynasty (c. 2600 B.C.) suggests that in this early period homosexuality may not have been stigmatized. Bas-reliefs on the walls of the tomb depict the two men in intimate poses, holding hands, embracing, noses touching. Egyptian art rarely depicts men and women embracing; scenes of two men doing so are virtually unknown. None of the drawings is sexually explicit, but Egyptian art rarely was. If the men were lovers, it would be reasonable to conclude that male homosexuality was fully accepted. Both men were wealthy, and their position at court prestigious. Their tomb was a gift from the king (as indeed all tombs theoretically were).
  An unusual degree of intimacy is also shown in depictions of King Ikhnaton (1379-1362 B.C.) and his son-in-law and probable co-regent Smenkhare. They are shown together nude – a convention quite rare in Egyptian representations of royalty. On a stele, Ikhnaton strokes Smenkhare under the chin. Smenkhare is given titles of endearment that had been used previously for Ikhnaton’s concubines and queen. Ikhnaton is depicted with a swollen belly, a generally feminine physique, and without genitals. <br? Several texts indicate that the Egyptians stigmatized the receptive role in anal intercourse between men just as the Mesopotamians did. Ina coffin text in the Heracleopolitan Period (Ninth and Tenth Dynasties), consisting of magical passages to be recited after death to gain immortality, the deceased boasts, “Atum [a god] has no power over me, for I copulate between his buttocks.” The formula equates interpersonal power with sexual role performances: he who can force a god to submit to him sexually has nothing to fear from him.
  • Ibid, p.130

• A connection between homosexual role differentiation and gender stereotyping is evident in the mythological conflict between two gods, Horus and Seth. The story of their enmity is very old, probably dating back to the predynastic conflict between Upper and Lower Egypt, which is represents metaphorically. Ina version of the myth dating from the reign of Rameses V in the Twentieth Dynasty, c. 1160 B.C., the gods held a trial to adjudicate the conflicting claims of Horus and his older brother to succeed Osiris as ruler of Egypt. When the trial recessed for the night,
  Seth made his penis erect, and put it between Horus’ buttocks, and Horus put his hands between his buttocks, and received Seth’s semen. Then Horus went to tell his mother Isis: “Help me, Isis my mother! Come, see what Seth has done to me.” And he opened his hand and let her see Seth’s semen. With a scream she took her weapon and cut off his hand and threw it in the water, and conjured for him a hand to make up for it.
  When the trial resumed, Seth pleaded:
  Give me the office of Ruler, L.P.H., because as for Horus here, I have played the male role with him.” Then the Ennead [the nine gods judging the trial] screamed aloud and belched and spay in Horus’ face.
  Isis’s reaction to the episode – cutting off Horus’s hand – suggests that Seth’s semen was so contaminating that it could not be washed or wiped off: it had to be cut off, along with the hand it had polluted. Westendorf points out that the Egyptians believed semen had the effect of poison when introduced into the body – presumably in the “wrong” spot. Given this ideological manifestation of antipathy to most forms of nonprocreative sex, Seth’s aggression was a particularly grave transgression. Since gender roles are defined only by contrast, Seth’s announcement that he played the “male role” implies Horus’s role was “female.” Although both Seth and Horus are morphologically male, the myth defines their gender not by their anatomy but by the roles they played. To penetrate is to be male, to be penetrated, female.
  • Ibid, pp.130-131

• It is often suggested that religious borrowing continued under the first monarchs, possibly to win the loyalty of the indigenous population; but the evidence for syncretism under Saul and David is not great. However, Solomon employed Phoenician architects in the construction of his temple, and they borrowed their design from that of the Syrian, Shechemite, and Hazorite temples. TO accommodate his many foreign wives, Solomon built temples to their gods and offered them sacrifices.
  Even in the premonarchical times, devout Yahwists may have been offended by the fertility cults’ use of “magical” techniques to control the gods. The Jewish view that humans cannot force God to do anything may have been present even at this early date. Later, sharpening gender stereotypes and restrictions on women would have intensified hostility to cult prostitution; under the monarchy, the prophets rallied against female promiscuity and prostitution. However, there is no evidence of conflict between the worshippers of Yahweh and the followers of other gods during the early monarchy.
  Open resistance to the fertility cults first appeared under Ahab, ruler of the northern kingdom of Israel (874-853 B.C.). Under the influence of Jezebel, a Phoenician princess, he sponsored the public worship of Baal, built him an altar and also built and Asherah. This marriage, like many of Solomon’s, was a device for cementing an alliance with a foreign power. Zeitlin argues that the cult had little popular support and aroused determined opposition from faithful Yahwists. However, Elijah complained to Yahweh that “the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword…” Wheb he asked the assembled Israelites to choose between Baal and Yahweh, they remained silent. To the extent that popular opposition did exist, it probably centered on the execution of Yahwist priests and the destruction of Yahweh’s altars.
  • Ibid, pp.138-139

• The later kings of Judaea continued to follow the political winds in their patronage of foreign cults. When Ahaz (died c. 720 B.C.) was besieged by the Aramean and Israelite armies, he asked the Assyrians for aid. When they responded favorably, he paid them tribute and also set up a copy of the Assyrian altar in the Temple of Yahweh. Later, when the Edomites and Philistines attacked, Ahaz shut the Temple and sacrificed to the Aramean gods, who HAd shown their greater power by defeating him some time before. A century later, Manasseh erected altars for Baal and Ashoreth in the Temple courtyards and introduced an image of Asherah into the Temple itself. Assyrian annals portray Manaasseh as a vassal-king, of Assyria. Undoubtedly, he was trying to accommodate the religious practices of his sponsors.
  A policy of accommodating foreign cults or synthesizing them with the worship of Yahweh was presumably favored by the priests of the various cults, as well as by foreign residents, court circles favorable to the neighboring powers, and farmers, for whom the fertility cults would have had great significance. ‘’’Women were especially devoted to the polytheistic cults, possibly because of their greater concern with fertility, possibly because they could identify more readily with a religion that featured goddesses and priestesses than with one that had neither. Yahweh was depicted largely in male terms and was served exclusively by male priests. Opposition would have come from the priests of Yahweh, whose jealousy they projected onto their god, and his adherents among the laity. This might have included herders, who had little reason to be interested in rites connected with agricultural fertility, and most certainly the prophets, who associated foreign worship with class inequalities and royal grandiosity that violated the ideals of egalitarianism associated with the tribal period.’’’
  Those Judean kings who sponsored campaigns against the foreign cults did so in a spirit of nationalistic self-assertion. As a destroyed the idols after winning a decisive military victory against an Ethiopian army. His successor Jehosephat, who continued Asa’s religious reforms, allied with Israel and won major victories, preserving Judeas political independence.
  • Ibid, pp.139-140

• Hezekiah, who destroyed the Asherim, purified the Temple, and restored the worship of Yahweh in its earlier form, did so in the context of his successful defiance of Assyrian rule. His attempt to centralize the observance of Passover in Jerusalem can be seen as a tactic to strengthen royal power and prepare for the political recovery of Israel. Josiah’s reforms, which involved burning the Asherah that had been placed in the Temple, destroying places of worship, and killing priests throughout the land, were undertaken at a time when Assyrian power had been seriously weakened by an Egyptian revolt. Indeed, the Assyrian Empire was overthrown by the Medes and Persians during Josiah’s reign.
  In each case, the repression of foreign cults entailed the suppression fo the homosexual prostitution that went with them. Asa “put away the qdeshim out of the land.” Jehosephat “put away out of the land…the remnantof the qdeshim that remained int eh days of his father Asa.” Josiah “broke down the houses of the qdeshim, that were in the house of Yahweh, where the women were weaving coverings for the Asherah.” ‘’’It was during his reign that a book of the Law, thought by most scholars to have been Deuteronomy, was conveniently discovered in th Temple.’’’ Although some of the manuscript may have been written earlier, many scholars think it was forged during Josiah’s reign in order to legitimate his reforms. It is in Deuteronomy that the prohibition of cult prostitution appears.
  The extend of popular support for these efforts is hard to gauge, but may not have been great. The worshipers whose religious sanctuaries and paraphernalia were destroyed could only have been antagonized. When Jeremiah prophesied to the Judaens in exile in Egypt, a “great assembly” of men and women gathered to complain:
  “But since we let off to offer to the Queen of Heaven, and to pour out drink-offerings unto her, we have wanted all things, and have been consumed by the sword and by the famine.”
  • Ibid, p.140

• Others may have reasoned that political and military contests showed how strong a nation’s gods were. If Judaea defied Assyria with impunity, if Yahweh worshipers were able to destroy their opponent’s temples and altars, it could only mean that Yahweh was stronger than Baal or Ashtoreth, and that his rituals, rather than theirs, should be performed.
  ‘’’It cannot be stressed too strongly that none of the campaigns against cult prostitution was directed at homosexuality in the population at large.’’’ The targets were religious cults associated with foreign powers. Nationalistic rulers suppressed these cults when they strove for independence from rival powers. In so doing, they tried to abolish the ritual practices associated with these cults, including homosexual prostitution.
  ‘’’None of the biblical passages we have examined thus far suggests that the Hebrews viewed homosexuality any different than the way other peoples of the ancient Near East viewed it. There are passages in Leviticus that might suggest a very different conclusion, but we defer a discussion of them to the next chapter, where it will be argued that they represent a fairly late development. Provisionally, we conclude that at least until the Babylonian exile in 586 B.C., the Hebrews had no prohibition against homosexuality.’’’ Some of them engaged in it as part of their polytheistic religious practices on and off from the time of the conquest of Canaan to the exile.
  • Ibid, p.141

• Contacts with the East beginning in the late Neolithic (end of the fourth millennium B.C. to 2800 B.C.) gave Crete its goddess worship. Minoan depictions of men wearing women’s clothing in cult scenes suggest that that worship included homosexual cult prostitution, as it did in West Asian goddess worship. Later Greek myths of gods changing men into women (e.g., Tiresias, Kaineus) may derive from garbled recollections of transvestism ion the pre-Olympian cults. By the time the Greeks emerged from the Dark Age and produced the writings that tell us of life in the classical age, they considered these cult practices to be alien.
  By that time, the homosexual component of tribal initiation rites had also disappeared in most of Greece.
  • Ibid, p.141

• Still later, Lucian, a satirist of the second century A.D., expressed this catholicity of taste in the short story “The Ship or the Wishes.” One of the characters Timolaus, wishes he owned a set of magic rings that would fulfill his desires. The ring he wants most will
  make the pretty boys and women and whole peoples fall in love with me – no one will fail to love me and think me desirable: I shall be on every tongue. Many women will hang themselves in despair, boys will be made for me and think themselves blessed if I but glance at one of them, and pine away for grief if I ignore them.
  This interchangeability of boys and women was taken for granted. Thus Xenophon remarks that when prisoners of war were ordered released, “the soldiers yielded in obedience, except where some smuggler, prompted by desire ofa good-looking boy or woman, managed to make off with his prinze.” Similarly, when Plato argues in the ‘’Laws’’ that it was possible for people top exercise sexual restraint, he recalls that the renowned athlete Ikkos of Taras “never had any connection with a woman or a youth during the whole time of his training.”
  To be sure, it was recognized that some men preferred women, and others, male partners. Atheneus, for example, remarked that Alexander the Great was indifferent to women but passionate for males. In Euripide’s play ‘’The Cyclops’’, Cyclops proclaims, “I prefer boys to girls.” Plato was never married. The philosopher Bion (third century B.C.) advised against marriage and restricted his attention to his (male) pupils. The Stoic philosopher Zeno (late fourth and early third centuries B.C.) was also known for his exclusive interest in boys.
  Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s ‘’Symposium’’ explains these preferences by fantasizing that the ancestors of the human race had two pairs of arms and legs, two heads, and two sets of sexual organs. Some were double males, some were double females and some half maale and half female. After the gods split the twins, their descendants sought, and continue to seek, reunion with the “missing half,” whether of the same or opposite sex. Since humans who preferred same-sex partners would still have had to reproduce heterosexually for the myth to explain same-sex preferences in the next generation, it is not so clear that Aristophanes’ explanation implies exclusive sexual choices. Still it does presume specialized preferences.
  • Ibid, pp.145-146

• Hellenistic writers even imagined debates about the relative merits of male and female partners. Some argues that is made little difference. One of the characters in Plutarch’s ‘’Erotikos’’, or ‘’Dialogue on Love’’, argues that “the noble lover of beauty engages in love whether he sees excellence and splendid natural endowment without regard for any difference in physiological detail.” He will be “fairly and equably disposed toward both sexes, instead of supposing that males and females are as different in the matter of love as they are in their clothes.” His interlocuters, however, have more definite tastes. So do the protagonists in ‘’Love’’, a sophistical treatise attributed to Lucian. Even here, though, the arguments in favor of boys or women largely concern the practical advantages of each. Moral considerations are never raised, and boy lovers win the debates as often as those who prefer women.
  In this sense, homosexuality and heterosexuality are treated as having equal status. Thus Athanaeus remarked that “Sophocles liked his young lads in the same way that Euripides liked his women.” As long as they were exercised in moderation, sexual preferences for boys or women did not become the basis for imputations of moral character or competence in other spheres of life.
  ‘’’Note that in most of these passages it is boys, not men, who are placed on an equal footing with women. This preference for youths stemmed from the intensely competitive individualism of Greek male culture.’’’ Male competitiveness developed as clan structures broke down and property became privatized. It dominated aristocratic life everywhere except Sparta, where kingship was hereditary, the senate of elders elected for life (minimizing rivalry for political office), and wealth distributed equally. Greek men were sensitive to status distinctions, and since status among the greeborn was not fixed, men view for position.
  • Ibid, p.146

• Preoccupation with status pervaded sexual culture to the point where the Greeks could not easily conceive of a relationship based on equality. Sex always involved superiority. Though ‘’The Interpretation of Dreams’’ by Artemidorus Daldianus dates from the second century A.D., it reflects earlier attitudes on this score quite accurately. The section on sexual dreams indicates that
  Having sexual intercourse with one’s servant, whether male or female, is good; for slaves are possessions of the dreamer, so that they signify, quite naturally, that the dreamer will derive pleasure from his possessions….If a man is possessed by a richer, older man, it is good. For it is usual to receive things from such people. But to be possessed by someone who is either younger than oneself or destitute is unlucky. For it is usual to give things to such people. The same also holds true if the possessor is older but a beggar…. Possessing a brother, whether he is older or younger is auspicious for the dreamer. For he will be on top of his brother and disdainful of him. And whoever possesses his friend will become his enemy, since he will have injured his friend without provocation.
  Submission was evidentially not dishonorable when it was to someone whose social status was clearly superior, e.g.,a rich older man. But when the aprtners were of similar social status (brother, friends), possession implied status derogation, and this was an insult. The Persian soldier who, on a red-figure vase painting, presents his behind to a sexually aroused Greek man as being humiliated by his captor.
  Most men accommodated these status considerations by choosingan status inferior (a slave or prostitute), or a free younger partner, whose youth made him ineligible for military service or political office-hence someone who was not a rival. The idealized homosexual relationship thus involved an adult lover, usually between the ages of twenty and thirty (‘’the erastes’’), and an ‘’eromenos’’ or ‘’paidika’’, a prepubescent adolescent who beard had not begun to grow. The relationship was ordinarily temporary, ending or becoming a nonsexual friendship when the youth reached maturity.
  Affairs between two adult men were less common, and were somewhat stigmatized, though not severely. Plato thought highly of those who
  love boys only when they begin to acquire some mind – a growth associated with that of down on their chins. For…those who begin to love them at this age are prepared to be always with them and share all with them as long as life shall last.
  • Ibid, p.147

• The relationships between Agathon and Euripides, Parmenides and Zeno, and Crates and Polemo all continued into adulthood, apparently without creating any serious problems for them.
  Ideally, the older partner in a pederastic relationship strove to win the admiration and love of the younger through exemplary conduct, while the younger sought to emulate the older. Sex thus served to prepare young men for adulthood. In Sparta this pedagogic function was heavily militarized, while in Athens it involved preparation for the more varied life of an Athenian adult. Its importance in the Hellenistic era may be inferred from Plutarchs remarks about boys’ upbringing:
  the nurse rules the infant, the teacher the schoolboy, the gymnasiarch, the athlete, his lover (‘’erastes’’) the youth, who, in the course of age is then ruled by law and his commanding general.
  He does not even mention the boys’ parents!
  Plato makes clear in the ‘’Symposium’’ that it was perfectly acceptable to court a lad, and admirable to win him. The youth, on the other hand, was not to appear too eager to be seduced, nor was he to initiate a courtship. On the contrary, he was supposed to be coy, to resist, to rest the sincerity and worthiness of his lover, Their reputations ahnfing in the balance, youths had to be careful not to cross the line between honorable and discriminatory acquiescence and shameful over eagerness or manipulability. Aristophanes’ defense of homosexually active youths in the ‘’Symposium’’:
  Some say they are shameless creatures, but falsely: for their behavior is due not to shamelessness but to daring, manliness, and virility, since they are quick to welcome their like. Sure evidence of this is the fact that on reaching maturity these alone prove in a public career to be men.
  Shows how thin and ambiguously placed that line was. It had significance for a young man’s later career, for to be able to say no to an enticing but inappropriate liaison was to demonstrate self-mastery and invulnerability to manipulation. These were important character traits in a political leader. With so much at stake, fathers tried to shield their sons from importunate suitors much the way Victorian fathers who themselves sought out young girls tried to safeguard their daugher’s virility.

• Ibid, p.148

• Because the subordination of the young is a seemingly natural, and for any individual temporary feature of a patriarchal social order (to some extent, of any social order), it was possible for an adolescent to allow himself to be seduced by an older man without opprobrium. His behavior reflected only temporary, not permanent submission and was therefore not stigmatizing, Despite this dispensation for youth, and even though most men preferred handsome, muscular youths as partners, youths could not entirely escape suspicion of effeminacy. Plato wonders in the ‘’Laws’’, “who will not blame the effeminacy of him who yields to pleasures and is unable to hold out against them? Will not all men censure as womanly him who imitates the woman?” Treating a lad like a woman could hardly be expected to masculinize him.
  To avoid the threatening gender implications of anal penetration, intercourse was often face-to face and intercrural – though inevitably there were exceptions. Ideally, the ‘’eromenos’’ was not supposed to consent to sex out of gratitude or admiration, not lust. Again we know that there were exceptions, possibly many. Nevertheless, suspicions that a boy enjoyed his experience or had playeda female role were often raised and not easily allayed, particularly if the relationship continued after the boy reached maturity.

• Ibid, p.150-151

• Attitudes toward prostitution also figured in the ambivalent response to the eromenos. Though it was not illegal, it was considered shameful for a citizen to become a prostitute. Ina relationship between an ‘’erastes’’ and an ‘’eromenos’’, both parties were ideally supposed to act from the loftiest of motives. But if an eromenos asked his lover for an expensive gift, was he prostituting himself? As with gender boundaries, distinctions between prostitution and romantic love proved to be difficult to draw in practice. As a result, boys’ motives were often suspect.
  It would be a gross error to suppose that the Athenians thought less of homosexuality because they belittled male effeminacy or sometimes suspected teenage lovers of unbecoming motives. Pederasty did not lurk in the shadows of Greek life; it was out in the open. The gods practices it, and it had its own patron god – Eros. In legend, it exemplified the noblest qualities of devotion and sacrifice. Lyric poets celebrated their youthful flames. In Plato’s ‘’Phaedrus’’, homosexual love inspired by male beauty had the potential to develop into the most exalted love for ideal beauty and truth. By comparison, the object of heterosexual love lacked the special qualities that could inspire a spiritual or philosophical quest. Even those who deplored some of its ramifications never questioned that all men were capable of powerful homosexual attraction.
  Nonetheless, as Focault rightly suggests, homosexuality was problematic to the Athenians. Their extreme democratic individualism and competitive status-seeking, channeled largely into political affairs, placed an enormous burden on personal character. Sexual comportmen was a field on which character was revealed. It was not only one – behavior in battle counted for much – but it was an important one; important because male supremacy was such an integral element of Athenian life. So integral that the culture of male supremacy colored all social relations.
  • Ibid, p.151

• The Etruscans were a people who lived in what is now Italy during the first millennium B.C. The precise extent to which Etruscan culture was influenced by contributions from Lydia in Asia Minor (where Herodotus said the Etruscans originated), Greek and Phoenician settlers (whose presence in Sicily and Sardinia is attested as early as the eighth century B.C.), and the indigenous Villanovans remains controversial; there is evidence for all three. From the Phoenicians they took their Astarte-worship; whether cult prostitution came with it is unknown but not unlikely.
  Leaving aside the question of sacral homosexuality, the Etruscans’ sybaritic way of life, and the liberties their women enjoyed shocked their less affluent neighbors and earned them a reputation for loose morals. According to Theopompus, a Greek historian of the mid-fourth century B.C., after a gathering of family or friends,
  the servants bring in sometimes courtesans sometimes handsome boys, sometimes their own wives. When they have taken their pleasure of the women or the men, they make strapping young fellows lie with the later….They certainly have commerce with women, but they always enjoy themselves much better with the boys and young men. The latter are in his country quite beautiful to behold, for they live lives of ease and their bodies are hairless.
  Parallel observations, all derived from Theopompus, can be found in the writings of Aristotle and other Greeks. Unfortunately, Theopompus is not considered a wholly reliable source. Still, there is no reason for thinking him wrong about the prevalence of pederasty among the Etruscans.
  The extent to which the less affluent Roman peasants shared Etruscan sexual mores is not known. Late Romans often idealized their past and consciously rewrote history to serve patriotic ends. While one would not expect Etryscan-style orgies from a community of poor farmers, male homosexuality is far from unknown in peasant societies. Romans took much from the Etruscans, including religion, art, and architecture.
  • Ibid, pp.152-153

• There are the barest of hints the Romans who shared with the Greeks a common Indo-European heritage, also shared their tribal homosexual initiation rites. Mars, the principal Roman god in ancient times was associated with Indo-European expansion. His sons, Romulus and Remus, nursed by a she-wolf, founded Rome. Wolves were sacred to Mars. Seemingly there sis nothing here to suggest homosexuality. However, drawings on a box discovered the ancient Latin city of Palestrina-Praeneste depict a naked Mars with several youths. This could have been an initation scene. According to Livy, Romulus led abachelors or ‘’iuvenes’’ in hunting, brigandage, warfare, and abduction of women. Some of these activities were associated with male initiation classes among other Indo-European peoples, including the Spartans. The she-wolf of the legend may actually have been a male initiator wearing a wolf skin. Norse and Teutonic warriors wore wolf and bear skins to absorb the ferocity of the carnivore, and the wolf and bear had special significance for initiates in Greece. When we recall that the Sambia of New Guinea, who prepare male youth for adulthood by sodomizing them, equate the penis with abreast, and semen with mother’s milk, it does not seem farfetched to suppose that the legend of Romulus and Remus derives from an almost-forgotten homosexual initiation ceremony.
  Those ceremonies could have been part of the Bacchic mysteries. We do not know just when the mysteries first entered Italy, but they may have done so at an early time. The worship of Dionysos-Bacchus was probably imported to Greece from West Asia, perhaps in Minoan or Mycenean times; it could have come to Italy directly from Asia Minor, or directly, via the Greeks. By the sixth century B.C., Bacchus was associated with the cthonian goddesses at Tarentum. The Greeks in Campania had a Bacchus cult of their own in the first half of the fifth century B.C., Bacchus cult of their own in the first half of these fifth century B.C. The wide extend of Bacchic worship in the second century B.C., when a scandal broke out in connection with its orgiastic worship, suggests that that the cult had never died outm despite its exclusion from the state religion. Perhaps it had survived in the Italian countryside all along unknown to city-dwellers. In Greek myth, Dionysus was the eromenes of Polumnos (and the ‘’erastes’’ of Adonis), and the Dionysian mysteries were connected with male-homosexual initiation rites at Megara and Argos.

• Ibid, pp.153-154

• Though he is considered an unreliable source, Valerius Maximus, a Roman historian of the first century A.D., reported an incident involving male homosexuality as early as the fourth century B.C., suggesting that it was known in very early times, but there is little to indicate that it was common. Romans of the early Repunblic seem to have been more prudish than the Greeks. They never felt comfortable with public nudity (statues of men, for example, are clothed, unlike those of the Greeks) and did not value sensuality or male beauty as highly. Roman institutions such as the family and educational system were not as favorable to an institutionalized male erotic interest in other males, and this seems to have been the Roman view of the matter as well. Cicero and Plutarch both traced the origin of Greek pederasty to the gymnasium. In fact, much of the Roman vocabulary of homosexuality consisted of Greek loan words.
  Though it may have been less institutionalized a feature of Roman life than of Greek, homosexuality was by no means uncommon. Polybius, a Greek historian who visited Rome in the second century B.C., reported that ‘’most’’ young men male lovers. Many of the leading figures in Roman literary life in the late Republic – Catullus, Tibullus, Vergil and Horace – wrote homophile poetry. From at least 160 B.C., eromenoi were a conspicuous feature of Roman life – as were ‘’hetaerai’’. Sextus Propertius, a poet of the first century B.C., prayed that his enemies would fall in love with women, and his friends with boys. Juvenal, a satirist of the first and second centuries A.D., wrote of young Armenian lads being corrupted when they came to Rome. Roman homosexual tasted were so taken for granted that when Anthony asked Herod to send his young brother-in-law Aristobulus to the Roman court, Herod refused, because
  he did not think it safe for him to send one so handsome as was Aristobulus, in the prime of life, for he was sixteen years of age, and of no noble a family; and particularly not to Anthony, the principal man of the Romans, and that would abuse him in his armours, and besides, one that freely indulged himself in such pleasures as his power allowed him without control.

• Ibid, pp.154-155

• Even after making allowances for malicious gossip, we can conclude that many of the Roman emperors had homosexual tastes, often not exclusive. Male prostitution flourished throughout northern Italy.
  As in Greece, sexual preferences were frequently not exclusive. The poet Martial, writing in the first century A.D., took ambisexuality for granted in one of his ‘’Satires’’:
  And when your lust is hot, surely
  if a maid or pageboy’s handy, to attack
  instanter, you won’t choose to grin and bear it?
  I won’t! I like a cheap and easy love!
  Indifference to the sex of a sexual partner is equally manifest in other literary sources, including Catullus, Philostratus, Horace, Platus, and Tibullus. The poet Meleager wrote love verses to women and men alike. The “rake’s progress” traced by Dio Chrysostom took him from women to male partners:
  Bored with harlots, he seduces well-bred girls and married women and when this becomes too tedious, because it is easy, he turn in his last state of degeneracy to seducing boys.

• Ibid, p.155

• According to Cato, Julius Caesar was “every woman’s husband and every man’s wife.”In speeches denouncing his opponents Verres and Gabinius, Cicero characterized both of them as bisexual. Pathic males were often accused of adulterous affairs with women.
  Lesbianism was also known to the Roman’s but it is difficult from the few references to it in literature to get a sense of its prevalence, the customs surrounding it, or the meanings it had and the responses it evoked.
  Historians have often asserted that the Romans must have had a negative view of male homosexuality because it was illegal under the Lex Scantina, in later centuries, often for political reasons, but it is uncertain that the charges had anything to do with homosexuality, and the penalties do not appear to have been serious. Even when Cicero mentions homosexuality in denouncing his opponents, he never suggests that is was illegal. Moreover, a trial is reported in which a man found in the bedroom of a married woman gained acquittal on adultery charges after testifying that he was there for an assignment with a male slave. This casts grave doubt on the illegality of homosexuality.
  To many Romans of the late Republic, oral sex and anal intercourse were highly aggressive acts. One of Catullus’s poems threatens his critics:
  I will bugger you and I will fuck your mouths
  Aurilus, you pathic, and you queer, Furius,
  who have thought me, from my little versus,
  because they are a little delicate, to be not quite straight.

• Ibid, pp.156-157

• Statues of the god Priapus stood erect in Roman gardens to threaten intruders with sexual assault, and according to Valerius Maximus, convicted adulterers were sometimes handed over to the servants or slaves of cuckolded husbands to be raped (or killed, fined, flogged, or mutilated.)
  The perception of homosexual acts as aggressive led to strenyous efforts to protect freeborn youths from seduction. Quintilian’s ‘’Institutes of Oratory’’ advised parents to have their children educated at home rather than at school, and then to make sure a trustworthy chaperone is present. To rape, seduce, or proposition a freeborn youth (or maiden), or for an official to pressure his subordinate to submit to him, was beyond the pale. The shame such acts incurred can be inferred from the suicide of Laetorius Mergus, a tribune of the early third century B.C., when summoned by the comitia on charges of trying to seduce an underling during the Third Samnite War. In later centuries, a charge of seducing a free youth could discredit the testimony of a witness in a court case.
  To some Roman, even sex with slaves or prostitutes was dishonorable, but that was not the prevalent view. For most Romans, it was the social status of the partner that made a homosexual act unacceptable. Male prostitution was lawful; it was taxed, and the prostitutes had a legal holiday of their own. Many a young man had a ‘’’concubinus’’’ – a male slave to use sexually before marriage. As possessions, slaves were expected to be passive and subordinate; they had no honor that could be compromised by their compliance. To Plautus, they were perfectly acceptable as sexual partners: “as long as you hold off from a bride, a single woman, a virgin, young men and free boys, love anybody you please.” In the ‘’Satyricon’’ of Pertonius, the slave Trimalchio confesses, “For fourteen years I pleasured him; it is no disgrave to do what a master commands. I also gave my mistress satisfaction.” Much of the homophile verse written in Latin may have been dedicated to slaves.

• Ibid, pp.157-158

• In a political system that relied heavily on patronage, the hierarchy of subordination included freedmen who remained dependent on their former masters. According to a lawyer quoted in Seneca the Elder, “sexual service is an offense for the free born, a necessity for the slave, and a duty for the freedman.” Even when it was considered socially inappropriate, homosexual desire was not considered abnormal as long as it took the active form. Lucretius thought erotic interest in “a lad with womanish limbs” to be entirely normal. Quintilian, who advices parents to guard their sons, added that much of the problem in raising children to a high moral standard is that they see our mistresses, our male objects of affection.” The Pompeiian graffiti referring to homosexuality, mostly written after the city was destroyed by a volcano in A.D. 62, treat it with good humor. As in Greece, the Romans tended to consider the passive or receptive role incompatible with the honor and dignity of a free citizen, especially when it continued into adulthood. Sexual submission to a powerful patron was, seemingly, a familiar way of building a career, but it left the client vulnerable potentially ruinous denunciations. A man’s failure to live up to the standard of masculinity expected of someone in his rank was especially disturbing in a society that was attempting the systematic subjugation of the entire known world.
  The growth of empire and long periods of peace intensified Roman concerns about effeminacy. As wealth from the conquered territories flowed into Rome, a life of conspicuous luxury became possible for a minority. Under Greek influence, the rich filled their days and nights with banquets, drinking, gambling, and theatergoing, wore perfumes and jewelry, and carried on extramarital affairs, both heterosexual and homosexual. Effeminacy was not as stigmatized in this circle as it had been among the yeoman farmers or soldiers. The homoerotic poetry of the late Republic reflects this devotion to the pursuit of carefree, self-indulgent pleasure.

• Ibid, pp.158-159

• Some considered this new life-style dissolute and debauched and feared that it would weaken the empire militarily. Flagrant effeminate homosexuality within this leisure class was seen as part of this life-style and was sometimes condemns in the name of rustic simplicity. Cassius Dio’s history of Rome imagines Queen Boudicca of Britain deprecating the Romans for bathing in warm water, eating dainties, and sleeping of soft couches with boys.
  The extra marital heterosexual r of this circle were no less a subject for complaint. Sallust, lamenting the moral decline that began with the plunderer of foreign wealth and culminated in the Catiline conspiracy, deplored
  the passion which arose for lewdness, gluttony, and other attendants of luxury…men played with the women, women offered their chastity for sale; and to gratify their palates they scoured land and sea; they slept before they needed sleep; they did not await the coming of hunger and thirst, or cold or of weariness, but all these things their self-indulgence anticipated. Such were the vices that incited the young men to crime, as soon as they had run through their property.
  Horace, too, linked the civil war with vice and immorality.
  It was in this atmosphere that the Emperor Augustus issued the Lex Julia, de adulteriis coercendis sometime between 18 and 16 B.C. Like so many later revolutionaries, Augustus worried that the new generation, which had not known the devastation of the war that brought him to the throne, took peace and prosperity for granted and lacked firm moral character. He wanted to ensure that enough boys were born to meet future military needs, but men were declining to marry to have children, so as not to tie themselves down with responsibilities that would interfere with having a good time.

• Ibid, pp.159-160

• The Lex Julia was Augustus’s response to these concerns. The punishment of adultery, formerly a totally private matter, became a state function. Incentives were provided for marriage and childbearing. Because very little of the text has survived, its details are not known. Jurists of the early third century held that it prohibited the statutory rape of a male minor, but it is not clear, whether this was part of the original statute or whether they were extending its scope by interpretation. In any event, since resources were not allocated to enforcement, the legislation, which was bitterly resented, had little impact, and homosexual relations continued during the first two centuries of the Empire, often by the emperors themselves. When accused of plotting against the Emperor Domitian toward the end of the first century A.D., Julius Calvaster claimed that he and his co-conspirator had met for homosexual purposes, suggesting that it was then neither illegal nor seriously stigmatized. Writing in the second half of the second century, Aulus Gellius, a judge, observed that the Augustinian laws on having children were an “ancient history” and hermaphrodites, “instruments of pleasure.”

• Ibid, p.160

• The earliest Chinese references to male homosexuality appear during the Han dynasty. Van Gulik concludes that male homosexuality was quite fashionable in this period, and it may have been - the first three emperors of the dynasty all kept "powdered and rogued boys" as well as wives. So did the later Han emperors. Han sources also mention that some princes kept young boys as catamites. These relationships appear to have been entirely secular; if there had been cult prostitution or ritualized homosexual initiation rites, no evidence of them has survived.
  Homosexuality is attested outside court circles only at later dates. The poet Li-Po (d. A.D. 762) wrote love poetry to his young male lover, and in the Five Dynasties Period (A.D. 907-960), transgenerational male-homosexual relationships were generally accepted. When the older ch'i hsung called at the home of the younger ch'i ti, he was welcomed by the entire family as i he had been a prospective bridegroom. If the ch'i later married, it was customary for the ch'i hsung to pay the expenses.
  Patriarchal power was too strong for a lesbian equivalent to emerge in ancient China; only when foreign trade and investment made it possible for women to subsist independently of fathers or husbands did lesbian marriages - not necessarily transgenerational - formalized by contracts and gifts emerge.

• Ibid, p.161

• Although a law against male prostitution called for heavy penalties during the brief Cheng-hoperiod (A.D. 111-17), it thrived during the Northern Sung and Southern Sung dynasties (1127 - 1279). The prostitutes had a guild of their own and appeared in public rouged and adorned as women. At some point, they acquired their own god, Tcheou-Wang. This was a period of economic expansion, the spread of a cash economy, and growing inequality. The larger cities brought together poor males who had to rent their bodies to support themselves and middle - and upper - income men with the money to pay for them. This conjunction persisted, and so did prostitution. When the Jesuit Matteo Ricci visited Peking in 1583 and again in 1609-10, he found male prostitution to be altogether lawful, and practiced openly: there are public streets full of boys got up like prostitutes. And there are people who buy these boys and teach them to play music, sing and dance. And then, gallantly dressed and made up with rogue like women these miserable men are initiated into this terrible vice. *Government officers appeared in public with their fourteen-to-eighteen-year-old pipe-bearers, and male brothels operated in Canton and other cities. * References to eunuchs appear in oracle bones of the Shang dynasty, c. 1300 B.C. Evidently the Shang castrated captured soldiers of the Chiang, a Tibetan people they conquered, presumably to prevent them from procreating, but it is not known what they did with them. Probably they were enslaved. The castration of Chinese men began early in the Chou dynasty as a punishment for crime. Some men were sentenced to execution, others had the option of choosing it to avoid execution. As in other ancient civilizations that castrated criminals, the Chou period was one of great social differences between lords and serfs.

• Ibid, p.162

• During the Chou dynasty, the imperial palace began to use eunuchs to guard the royal wives and concubines, and as domestic servants. The number allocated each member of the royal family came to be fixed by law; for the emperor it was 3,000.
  During the second half of the Chou dynasty they served as political advisers and heads of armies and figured prominently in government in the Han and alter dynasties. When the demand for palace eunuchs exceeded the supply of men castrated involuntarily, volunteers were sought. As officials were often in a position to extort bribes, some eunuchs became quite wealthy. To obtain these positions, men castrated themselves or were castrated by parents who hoped to achieve upward social mobility for the entire family.
  Although it is unlikely that all eunuchs were implicated in homosexual relationships, a number of them did become sexual partners and/or lovers of the emperors they served.

• Ibid, p.163

• At the time of the Spanish Conquest in the early sixteenth century, berdaches were present in many of the kinship-based Indian groups of Central and South America. There were also hereditary chieftainships, characterized by marked inequalities of wealth, in which chiefs kept transvestite men for their own sexual purposes.
  The more complex civilizations of the Yucatan, the Pacific Coast and the valley of Mexico were all based on agriculture, arts and crafts and state sponsored polytheistic religions administered by full-time priests.
  • Ibid, p.163

• One of the Spanish sources, Bartolome de las Casas, writing in 1542, reported that Mayan parents supplied their adolescent sons with boys to use as sexual outlets before marriage, but that if someone else sodomized them, the penalty was equal to that for rape. Since de las Casas denied the existence of homosexuality in some other Indian groups, his attribution of homosexuality to the Mayans cannot be attributed to a blanket prejudiceagainst Indians. Other missionaries also reported widespread male homosexuality among the Mayans. Young Mayan men lived in men's houses until they married at about age twenty.
• Father Pierre de Gand, also known as de Mura, found sodomy to be virtually universal among the Aztecs, involving even children as young as six. Cortez also found sodomy to be widespread among the Aztec's, and admonished them to give it up-along with human sacrifices and cannibalism.

• Ibid, p.164

• Some of the people who made up the Inca empire also had institutionalized homosexuality. This includes the Yauyos, who had "public houses filled with men who dressed as women and painted their faces," the Liysacas of Lake Chucuito, and Indians in the vicinity of Puerto Viejo in the north (now Ecuador) and on the island of Puna. In some parts of the empire, boys were dedicated to the temple, where they were raised as girls; chiefs and headmen had ritual intercourse with them on special holidays. The Inca princes themselves, however, did not engage in these practices.
  • Ibid, p.165

• That the harshness of Inca and Aztec legislation toward homosexuality involved more than a reaction to indigenous berdaches is suggested by the equally severe penalties imposed on other violations of morals legislation. The Incas punished pimps and prostitutes severely, by death if the offense was repeated. Incest and adultery were capital offenses in both empires. Drunkeness was illegal under the Incas and a capital offense under the Aztecs. Abortion was also a capital offense under the Aztecs. Aztec youths lost their rights to land if they did not marry by a certain age. Inca men were also forced to marry.
  • Ibid, p.167

• When Balboa came to Panama, he killed forty transvestites by feeding them to his dogs.
  • Ibid, p.168

• The Aryans entered India as pastoral warrior-nomads contemptuous of the sedentary cultivators they conquered. Female deities played a relatively modest role in their religion. Religious leaders were conventionally gendered priests (Brahmins), not transvestites or transexuals. They married women. Their authority, which rested on knowledge of written sculpture, formulaic prayer, and performance of the sacrifices, was incompatible with orgiastic worship. Like the Aztec, Hebrew, and Egyptian priests, they recoiled from indigenous fertility-cult practices associated with planting and prohibited them in the law books they prepared.
  Sustained by a very ancient tradition that sexual abstinence magically bestows power and immortality, the Brahmins defined a wide range of sexual practices as polluting. Homosexual acts were forbidden along with some heterosexual practices and solo performances.
  This rejection of homosexuality did not result in much repression. The Laws of Manu imposes only a mildpenance forhomosexual contact-ritual immersion with clothes on.
  • Ibid, p.169

• Custom was often far from ascetic or antihomosexual. Pre-Aryan sex worship was accommodated rather than suppressed. Though Siva was not a full-fledged god in the Vedic literature, he later became the focus of a phallus cult. Some eroticism appears in the Brahmanas written down c. 300 B.C. or later. In an atmosphere of extreme tolerance, Sakti worship and heterodox tantric cults based on sacramental intercourse persisted - unmolested by practitioners of extreme asceticism and self-denial. Notwithstanding the statement in the Mahabarata that oral sex is a crime, it is depicted in the erotic temple sculptures, as are lesbian scenes and bestiality.
  Nor does eroticism appear to have been confined to religious settings. The Silippadhikaram, a Tamil epic of the second century A.D., states that the city of Puhar reserved a seperate quarter for prostitutes. Eunuchs, some of them dressed as women, were part of court life and enriched its sexual opportunities as early as 400 B.C.; they remained a part of the royal households until Independence.

• Ibid, p.170

• It can be safely assumed that the deterioration in the status of Indian women which occurred in historical times led to a devaluation of male effeminacy, but not to the point where temple prostitution or eunichism was prohibited. They became illegal only after India gained Independence.

• Ibid, pp.170-171

• In Jainism, liberation from material existence is achieved through extreme bodily mortifications. Monks forswear all sexual contact; the laity may marry, but must remain fauthful to their spouses. This doctrine could hardly have favored homosexuality, but it was so unsympathetic toall kinds of sexual expression that it did not especially single out homosexuality for special repression. The severity of its demands has limited its appeal; there are only a couple millions Jains int eh entire world.
  Buddhism, founded a generation later, eschewed extremesof asceticism in favor of a "Middle Way" in which liberation is achieved by suppressing all desire. As in Jainism, this entailed chastity for monks and nuns. Buddhism, too, could hardly favor homosexuality. As it evolved, though, it developed heterodox tantric rituals that permitted intercourse, primarily heterosexual. In practice, homosexuality didn't do too badly in Buddhist lands.

• Ibid, p.171

• This condemnation must be placed in the broader context of a generally restrictive, though not ascetic, sexual morality in the Koran. The wine-driunking and pursuit of women of which the bedouins were enamored were frowned on by the town merchants of Mecca, who included Mohammed's own tribe, the Quraysh. Still, his placing eternally youthful male and female virgins in Paradise to serve believers suggests that this repudiation of hedonism was not unambivalent.
  Over time, Moslem religious writings becamemore punitive toward homosexuality. A number of hadith (sayings attributed to Homammed and collected or forged after his death) call for the death penalty. Converts from Judaism and Christianity ma have been responsible for this punitiveness. Most converts were members of the upper classes who had a classical Hellenistic education that exposed them to Roman, Jewish, and Sassanian law, as well as to the ecclesiastical law of the Eastern churches.
  These influences are quite apparent. Most of the hadith favor stoning sodomites to death. In one exception, Ali, Mohammed's son-in-law and the fourth caliph, wanted to burn them in imitation of the destruction of Sodom. Abu-Bakr, Mohammed's father-in-law and the first caliph, is reported to have had a man burned for passive anal homosexuality. Stoning was the traditional Jewish penalty; and though the matter is not certain, Byzantine law may have provided for burning since the end of the fourth century A.D., as we discuss in chapter 5.

• Ibid, p.173

• Within decades of Mohammed's death, Arab armies conquered Palestine and Syria, then Mesopotamia, Iran, Egypt, and North Africa. Soon after, Moslem armies captured Sicily and India. Male homosexuality was already common and accepted in some of these regions. Christianity and Zoroastrianism had probably not altogether eradicated this acceptance by the time of the Arab conquest. Nevertheless, literary conservatism stood in the way of any poetic treatment of homosexuality for a century. Only with the advent of the Abbasid caliphate in the middle of the eighth century do we find poets writing homoerotic verse to beautiful youths.

• Ibid, p.174

• Ever since the sixteenth century, Western visitors have commented on the pervasiveness of Turkish pederasty. Large numbers of boys were captured or purchased for personal use, placed in brothels, or resold; the demand for them struck all observers as remarkable.

• Ibid, p.179

• Burton found the cities of Afghan to be "saturated with the Persian vice" at the end of the ninteenth century. Afghan merchants were invariably, "accompanied by a number of boys and lads almost in woman's attire with kohl'd eyes and rouged cheeks, log tresses and henna's fingers and toes, riding luxuriously in Kajawas or camelpanniers. They are called Kuch-i safari or traveling wives, and the husbands tridge patiently by their sides.
  Male homosexuality remains common in Afghanistan, as does harem lesbianism.

• Ibid, p.180

• The Moslem rulers of India often maintained youthful male lovers, and male brothels flourished. Burton visited a number of them in 1845.
  At first glance, the early Mongols appear to have been an exception to the broad pattern. The Great Yassa, a law code issued by Ghenghiz Khan or at his death for the still-pagan Mongol tribes around 1219, to supplement Mongolian customary law, mandated the death penalty for both sodomites and adulterers. This is not what one would expect in a tribe of nomadic pastoralists with a shamanistic religion. It seems likely that this severe penalty reflects the influence of Christians, Jews, or Moslems, to whom Ghengiz extended hospitality. Ghenghiz was himself illiterate, and might well have called on a literate foreigner to prepare a code of laws.
  • Ibid, p.181

• Zoroastrianism, founded in Iran at an unknown date by the prophet Zoroaster (Zarathura) who reformed the old Aryan religion on, took a far harsher view of homosexuality. The subject is not mentioned in the Gathas (the earliest known Zoroastrian scriptures), which are attributed directly to Zoroaster. However, the later Vendidad, or Code Against the Devas, which contains much of the Zoroastrian moral teaching, places sodomites among the ranks of those who may be killed on the spot, along with brigands, burners of carrion in a fire, and criminals taken in the act. Later texts, from the ninth century A.D., continue to regard homosexuality as heinous.
  • Ibid, p.186

• Indeed, in the sixth and seventh centuries, when the penitentials were first issued, the church had great difficulty in persuading sinners to confess and submit to penance. Many waited until they were about to die to confess. Only in 1215 did the Fourth Lateran Council require confession at least once a year.
  • Ibid, p.264

• Perhaps more to the point, the severe penances for homosexual offenses are matched in a number of the penitentials by equally severe penances for heterosexual sins. Thus the Irish Penitential of Cummean calls for seven years' penance for men guilty of habitual homosexual practices (less for a first offense) and seven years' penance for heterosexual adultery. The book of ecclesiastical discipline issued by Region of Prum specifies a penalty of three years for anal intercourse whether the anus is that of a male or a female and also three years for heterosexual fornication. Similarly, the Book of David (c. 500-525) states that those who have committed fornication with a woman who hass been vowed to Christ or a husband, or with a beast or a male "for the remainder of their lived dead to the world shall live unto God" - presumably in perpetual encloisterment. The Penitential of Theodore requires three years' penance if a woman practices vice with another woman - or with herself and also demands equal maximum penalties of fifteen years in cases of heterosexual or homosexual fornication.
  • Ibid, p.264-265

• There are other penitentials in which harsher penances are imposed on those guilty of sodomitical fornication than on those who commit the conventional kind, but these references to sodomy do not necessarily concern homosexuality alone. In the eighth century, the Venerable Bede referred to anal intercourse with a wife as a sodomitical crime, and later church authorities also adopted thisusage. Many of the references to sodomy or to oral sex in the penitentials suggest that the authors had heterosexual contacts in mind. The penalties for these heterosexual offenses are no less severe than those for homosexual ones. For example, the Penitential of Theodore demands fifteen years of penance in the worse cases of unnatural intercourse with a wife ("si in ntergo nupersit"). As in the early church, homosexuality was not the primary category for distinguishing acceptable sex from unacceptable; the principal distinction had to do with the potential for conception.
• The attitudes of individual churchmen varied quite widely. Some were quite puntitive. We have already mentioned Benedict Levita, who in the mid-ninth century forged a Carolingian capitularly calling for "sodomites" to be incinerated. However, this was exceptional for its time.

• Ibid, p.265

• On the whole, though, less repressive views prevailed. Alcuin, an Anglo Saxon scholar at the court of Charlemagne (and later abbot of Tours) deplored adultery and incest in his writings, but said nothing about homosexuality. Although his silence may have reflected only his own romantic feelings towards his male students, Peter Lombard, the twelfth century Italian theologian and bishop of Paris, who is not similarly suspected, also said virtually nothing about homosexuality though he discusses other sexual sins in his writings. Saint Anslem, the twelfth century archbishop of Canterbury, urged that the ecclesiastical penances for homosexuality adopted at te Council of London in 1102 be moderated because "this sin has been so public that hardly anyone has blushed for it, and many, therefore, have plunged into it without realizing its gravity."
  The homophilic poetry of the tenth and eleventh centuries strongly suggests that the moderate position articulated by Anslem was the dominant one. Latin poets, many of them monks, wrote unselfconsciously of their romantic feelings toward men or boys. Two examples are particularly noteworthy because they were written by men who either were or were about to become bishops.

• Ibid, p.266

• Evidently, Baudri was being reproached for his youthful indiscretions; probably they were considered imappropriate for someone who had become an abbot. He does not even hint that his homosexual interests were considered more objectionable than his heterosexual ones. Neither potet shows fear of being punished for confessing to past homosexual interests or intimates that it was wrong to have had them. Some of the homophile poetry of their day circulated widely, and there is no evidence that its authors suffered from the publicity.

• Ibid, p. 267

• Beginning in the mid-thirteenth century, French secular legislation adopted stiff new measures against homosexual relations. Li livres de jostice et de Plet, probably written around 1260 in Orleans, called for the amputation of the testicles of first-time offenders, the removal of the penis for a second offense, and burning of third-time offenders. Women were to be mutilated for the first two offenses and burned for a third.
• In addition to this body of national legislation, starting in the mid-twelfth century, the self governing towns of northern Italy, northern France, Flanders, and the Rhine Valley began to enact municipal statutes dealing with sodomy. Many of the laws, such as that adopted in Perugia in 1342, provided fines for first and second offenses and execution by burning for third-timers. Amputation of hands or feet, exile and confiscation of goods were common provisions.
  With time, penalties began to escalate. In a law of 1250, the first statute known to deal with homosexuality, Bologna permitted men banished from the city because of a sodomy conviction to pay a fine and return, but in 1259, banishment was made permanent. Later that year, sodomy was made a capital offense.

• Ibid, p.272

• Court records show that no one was convicted, much less executed, for sodomy in the secular courts during the reigns of Louis IX (1226-70) and Philip IV (1285-1314).
  • Ibid p.274

• Contrary to Mugabe’s and other Afrocentrists’ assertions, analysis of the colonial court cases shows that the rate of prosecution for homosexual behaviors was highest among the more indigenous peoples (Shona, 17% and Ndebele, 16%), and least among the “industrialized migrants” from elsewhere (about 3% each for Xhosa, Basotho and Zulu). Presumably the latter had simply learned better how to avoid the white man’s justice.
• There were exceptions, of course, to the celebration of Two-Spirits, such as the Pimas of Arizona, but in most cases, Native American tribes, particularly the tribes of the Great Plains and the Southwest, were greatly admiring of their Two-Spirits. Among the Hopi and the Zuni of Arizona and New Mexico, these Two-Spirits held a special status. They were keepers of the ancient traditional stories of creation, healing and growth. But more than that, they were the keepers of the spiritual traditions, recognized for their special gift of being “between genders.”
• Cicero, one of the greatest of Roman jurists, speaks endlessly of Roman law, including in detail those statutes dealing with sexual relations, but nowhere does he mention homosexuality. Cicero ridicules many prominent citizens for having been male prostitutes during their youth, but nowhere does he indicate that it was illegal. In fact, in one case, in defending one Cnaeus Plancius from the charge that he had taken a male lover into the country to have sex with him, he states categorically that “this is not a crime.”
• In Augustinian Rome, not only was male prostitution allowed, it was even taxed. A Roman historian of the era, Martial, not only mentions many prominent citizens and their male lovers by name, but admits to having engaged in such activities himself, and comments on it without the least evidence of shame.
  While the general theory is that tolerance of homosexuality increased as Rome began its decline, the fact is that the opposite is true. During the period of the Roman republic, when Rome was genuinely governed by the Senate, there was far greater tolerance of homosexuality, with the result that it was generally ignored in official documents. Because persecution began under the empire, more and more official references to it began to appear in legal documents, hence the belief by some historians, that it became more common. When one examines civil, secular documents, however, one sees that the opposite trend is the case.
  The reality is that there is no evidence whatever during the republican era, up through the beginning of the empire, of any recognition in Roman law for any difference between homosexual or heterosexual sex, or for that matter, even marriage.
  That all began to change, however, with the “conversion” of the Emperor Constantine to Christianity.
• Thus began a campaign against homosexuality by certain church fathers, among them Augustine (a rather nasty piece of work himself, the first known zealous advocate of forced conversions), and Clement, a man who mistakenly associated homosexuality with a form of child slavery in which male children were often sold into slavery as prostitutes. These two men and others like them began to associate homosexuality not just with unsavory animal practices, but with other practices they didn’t happen to like, such as paganism, or pederastry, etc.
  The man who took this ball and ran with it was “Saint” John Chrysostom, who was the first church father who can clearly be shown to object to homosexuality based on the gender of its participants, not based just on procreative intent, or based on the ages of those involved, or whether the participants were pagans. Yet his theology was so thoroughly inconsistent that he did not have much direct influence on subsequent theology.
  While the theology of homosexuality of these men was insistent, it wasn’t to become influential for a long time. The reason is simple – homosexuality was so common in this period, and practiced so openly, that the public at large regarded these doctrines as a bit extreme, just like the call to celibacy outside of strictly procreative sex as was advocated by many of these same church fathers.
• Homosexuality continued to be practiced openly and without much restraint up through the 11th century. Throughout the middle ages, not only did the open practice of homosexuality continue, but it flourished in the monasteries of the time. Many of the priests and abbots not only left us literature celebrating their gay lovers, but some of the poetry they left us was baldy erotic. Consider this poem from Marbod, Bishop of Rennes (d. 1123 C.E.)
  The Unyielding Youth
  Horace composed an ode about a certain boy
  Whose face was so lovely he could easily have been a girl,
  Whose hair fell in waves against his ivory neck,
  Whose forehead was white as snow and his eyes black as pitch,
  Whose soft cheeks were full of delicious sweetness
  When they bloomed in the brightness of a blush of beauty,
  His nose was perfect, his lips flame red, lovely his teeth–
  An exterior formed in measure to match his mind.
  Of course, the good bishop was far from alone in his same-sex attractions. We have literally thousands of poems from this period, many of them from other monastics, who celebrated their love for their gay lovers.
  Among these monastics were St. Aelred, St. Anselm, St. Bernard and many others. Among these, the literature left us by St. Aelred offers the clearest and most detailed literature celebrating gay love in this period. That homosexual sex was condemned by Leviticus did not seem to matter to the clerics of this period. They considered the Levitical proscription to fall in the same category as the rest of the vast corpus of Levitical proscriptions: they were abolished, along with the requirement for animal sacrifice, by the atonement of Jesus.
  As for Paul’s references in Romans, it was felt that Paul had simply been a bit overboard in this regard the same as he was in telling women to not speak in church and in his proffering advice to not marry.
  As in most times, most of the records we have of this period are from either the clerics, the most commonly literate or from the upper classes, for whom they labored. We therefore have a good picture of homosexuality from this period among the clerics and upper classes, but less so from the poor and working classes.
• Peter Cantor (d. 1197) was the first to argue that Romans 1:26-27 referred specifically to gay people. The term “sodomy” came, for the first time and against all theological precedent, to refer exclusively to homosexual sex.
  At Cantor’s urging, the Lateran III Council of 1179 became the first to rule specifically on homosexual acts, along with moneylending, heresy, as well as the arch-heresies of Judaism and Islam. Even though the wording of the regulations on sex meant to punish all non-procreative sex, it was eventually construed, particularly in later centuries, as referring to homosexual sex specifically. It passed into the permanent collections of canon law in the following century, and became the basis of the Catholic ban on homosexuality.

• "The Surprising History Of Homosexuality And Homophobia."

• The debate about the theological validity of free will is very important. To say that man kind possesses no free will is to say that he cannot be liable for his actions as he is doing whatever has been determined for him by God. Hence it is Pre-determined. The confusion became about because the Quran contains verses in support of free will as well as predetermination. Therefore one source of the argument came from the dual traditions of the Quran itself. Another source of the argument is the political scenario of the time of the Umayyad dynasty. During their rule, these debates lead to the formation of two major sects, Qadariyyah and the Jabriyyah (Taib, MIM, 2000). The people following the Qadariyyah teachings believed in the free will aspect of the argument and the Jabriyyah people believed that God had determined their fate and nothing could be done to alter that fate. Umayyad dynasty supported and gave preference to predetermination side of the argument, which in affect absolved mankind of any wrongdoing as he had no control over his actions. They killed people who were their political rivals or held the beliefs other than their own. They even justified their actions by saying that God had determined these actions beforehand and nothing could be said and done to avert them (Taib, MIM, 2000). The predestination supporters draw no difference between God’s determinations of the physical events of the universe and within this world against the actions take mankind undertakes with his own choice. These theologists state everything is determined. A mans actions have been determined by God and not matter what he does, he cannot change the outcome. An evil man is so because God made him to be one. They symbiosis of the belief in God being the controller of al things in this world and this universe with the notion of predetermination is not a difficult feat. Both ideas reinforce each other. The Quran makes a lot of references in support of this theory and the scholars of the Umayyad dynasty used this to their benefit. The debate of free will and predestination also has its roots in the Christian beliefs as well. Saint Augustine is said to have pondered over the same debate.

• "Predestination" Essays, UK., 23rd March, 2015

• In article 48 of what is believed to be the world’s first constitution, Genghis Khan banned homosexuality. It stated that “men committing sodomy shall be put to death,” according to experts with Inner Mongolia’s research institute of ancient Mongolian laws.
• The code stipulated that the death penalty was applied to those found guilty of damaging grassland with unauthorized excavations or fire. It also prohibited hand washing or drowning people in rivers.

• "The Anti-Homosexuality Code Of Genghis Khan", Yuki Choe, August 31, 2007

• Both tribes (Korongo and Mesakin) feel strongly that marriage and sex life are inimical to physical strength. ... Young married men ... will spend four or five nights with their wives in the village and then return for a fortnight or month to the cattle camp.... They would tell you that they "dislike living in the village". I have even met men of forty and fifty who spent most of their nights with the young folk in the cattle camps rather that at home in the village. ... Behind this grudging submission to marital and adult life in general, behind the secondary sentiments of fondness of camp life and male company, we discover the primary, and quite open, fear of sex as the destroyer of virility. Not sex in the ephemeral, physical sense - the adolescent incontinence of these tribes precludes this - but sex transformed into a permanent fetter, spiritual (as love) and social (as marriage). We will not probe the psychological depth of this antagonism. Let me only point out two things: first, that it occurs in a matrilineal society, that is, a society in which the fruits of procreation are not the man's. And, secondly, that it is accompanied, not only on the strong emphasis on male companionship, but also, in the domain of the abnormal, by widespread homosexuality and transvesticism.
  • The Nuba: An Anthropological Study of the Hill Tribes in Kordofan, Siegfried Frederick Nadel, Oxford University Press, London, 1947, :pages: 299–300

• European participation in African enslavement can only be partially explained by the needs for labor, profit, and religious motives. At the end of the medieval period, slavery was not widespread in Europe. It was mostly isolated in the southern fringes of the Mediterranean. Iberian Christians mostly enslaved Muslims, Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs. When the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Africans began in 1441, most Africans were placed in a new and different category of enslaveable peoples in terms that flowed from an understanding in the European world view of Africans as inferior human beings (Gomes 1936 in Sweet 2003:5). The policies and ideas that flowed from understandings of the African as inferior served to crystallize racial hierarchies across Europe (Sweet 2003:6). The first transnational, institutional endorsement of African slavery occurred in 1452 when the Pope granted King Alphonso V of Portugal the right to reduce all the non-Christians in West Africa to perpetual slavery (Saunders 1982:37–38 in Sweet 2003:6). According to Sweet, by the second half of the 15th century, the term “Negro” had become essentially synonymous with “slave” across the Iberian Peninsula and had literally come to represent a race of people, most often associated with black Africans and considered to be inferior (Sweet 2003:7). Race-based ideas of European superiority and religious beliefs in the need to Christianize “heathen” peoples contributed to a culture in which enslavement of Africans could be rationalized and justified. However, these explanations do not answer the question of why some Africans were complicity in the enslavement of other Africans in the transatlantic slave trade?
• As a concomitant of the rise and fall of various African rulers and ruling parties, their political opponents, people of high social status, and their families were sold to promote internal political stability. Poor people were sold to reconcile debts owed by themselves or their families. Chiefs sold people as punishment for crimes. Gangs of Africans and a few marauding Europeans captured free Africans who were also sold into slavery. Domestic slaves were resold and prisoners of war were sold. However, Boahen, an African scholar, asserts, “The greatest sources to supply slaves were raids conducted for the sole purpose of catching men for sale and above all, inter-tribal and inter-state wars which produced thousands of war captives, most of whom found their way to the New World (Boahen 1966:110).”
  All of these African people were bartered for European trade goods. A slave purchased for 100 gallons of rum worth only £10 could be sold for £20 to £50 in 17th century America. England regarded the slave trade with such importance that as part of the 1713 peace of Utrecht, England insisted she be awarded thirty years exclusive rights to transport Africans to Spanish colonies in America. This was before the slave trade was fully developed in the 18th century (Brawley 1981:8–9).
  The slave trade was greatly encouraged by the low cost of slaves. Even though the price of slaves rose three- or four-fold during the 18th century, many Europeans were convinced that it was “cheaper to buy than to breed.” Between the 16th and mid-18th centuries, it was cheaper to import a slave from Africa than to raise a child to the age of 14. During the late 17th century, merchants in the Senegambia region of West Africa paid as little as one pound sterling for young males, which they sold to European traders for the equivalent of three-and-a-half pounds sterling, or 11 muskets, 31 gallons of brandy, or 93 pounds of wrought iron. Initially, many slaves were acquired from regions within fifty or a hundred miles of the West African coast. During the 18th century, however, rising prices led slavers to search for captives in interior regions, 500 to 1,000 miles inland (Mintz, Stephen 2003b).
• Winners and losers in the African wars came to rely upon European trade goods more and more. Eventually the European monetized system replaced cowrie shells as a medium of exchange. European trade goods supplanted former African reliance on indigenous material goods, natural resources and products as the economic basis of their society. At the same time Europeans increasingly required people in exchange for trade goods. Once this stage was reached an African society had little choice but to trade human lives for European goods and guns; guns that had become necessary to wage wars for further captives in order to trade for goods upon which an African society was now dependent (Birmingham 1981: 38).

• "African American Heritage and Ethnography" National Parks Service

• Such shrill rhetoric plunged Germany into an acute crisis in the 1520s. On the one hand, Luther had drawn too sharp a contrast between spiritual freedom and disciplined orthodoxy within the church. New Lutheran churches, clerics and congregants were treating their new freedom as licence for all manner of spiritual experimentation and laxness. Widespread confusion reigned over preaching, prayers, sacraments, funerals, holidays and pastoral duties. Church attendance, tithe payments and charitable offerings declined abruptly among many who took Luther’s new teachings of free grace literally.
  On the other hand, Luther had driven too deep a wedge between the laws of church and state. Many subjects traditionally governed by the church’s canon law now remained without effective governance. Local magistrates were quick to take over church properties and institutions, but they offered few new laws and services in place of them.
  Prostitution, concubinage, gambling, drunkenness and usury thus reached new heights. Crime, delinquency, truancy and vagabondage soared. Schools, charities, hospitals and other welfare institutions fell into massive disarray. Requirements for family life, inheritance, banking and commerce became hopelessly confused. The crisis was made worse by the Peasants’ War of 1524–26, which was fought in the name of Christian freedom but harshly repressed in the name of Christian order.
  In response, the Lutheran reformation of theology and the church quickly broadened into a reformation of law and the state as well. From the late 1520s, Lutheran theologians cast their theological doctrines into catechisms, confessions and creeds and paid much closer attention to their legal, political and social implications. Lutheran jurists, in turn, joined the theologians in crafting hundreds of ambitious new reformation ordinances for the German cities and territories. By 1570, every major Lutheran land had comprehensive new state laws in place, governing public and private matters spiritual and temporal life alike.
  • "The Legacy Of The Protestant Reformation In Modern Law" (John Witte, Jr.), “Luther – 95 Treasures, 95 People,” Stiftung Luthergedenkstätten in Sachsen-Anhalt, Lutherstadt, Wittenberg, Germany, October 2, 2017

• Anne Marie Jordan, for instance, has a fine chapter on slaves in the Lisbon court of Queen Catherine of Austria, where mainly women and children of different ethnic origins were used as musicians, cooks, pastry chefs, housekeepers, pages, or servants in royal apothecaries, kitchens, gardens, and stables. Jordan points out how white Moorish slaves were favoured because of skin colour prejudices, but black slaves were considered trustworthy for religious reasons. The black slaves were a sign of social prestige and distinction in a cosmopolitan court: this feature explains why Catherine spent so much money clothing and offering them as exotic gifts to her favourite ladies and relatives in other European courts. The representation of small black slaves in the portraits of Iberian princesses, as in the painting of Juana de Austria by Cristóvão de Morais, reinforced their image as symbols of empire building.
• Aurelia Marín Casares, who has written a very good book on slavery in Granada, presents here part of her enquiry into free and freed black Africans in the region. She has identified most of their occupations: men were stable workers, esparto workers, smelters and casters in foundries, carriers and vendors of water or firewood, bakers, butchers, hod carriers, builders, diggers, pavers; women were housewives, farmers, embroiders, maids, taverns and inns employees, sorceresses. The author details the confraternities created by blacks and mulattos in Granada. The notion of blackness and the different types of black people do not become clear in this article, however, since in many cases Moriscos were considered black by the Christian population.
• John Brakett suggests that Alessandro de’ Medici, the first duke of Florence (1529–1537) was of mixed race, an illegitimate son of Lorenzo de’ Medici, duke of Nemours and ruler of Urbino (and a direct descendent of Lorenzo ‘il Magnifico’ and Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’) and a peasant woman, a freed slave, generally considered as a ‘Moor’, but now depicted as a Black African. The argument is based not on new documents but on the analysis of the set of images of Alessandro de’ Medici. The problem lies in the final conclusion: the author considers that there was no intellectual racism in the sixteenth century, since the duke was murdered under the accusation of being a tyrant, but his racial status was not used in political debate or in denigration of his memory, which proves the supremacy of the innate quality of princes. This is an open issue: as the author mentions in his text, the duke was nicknamed ‘the Moor’ and ‘the mule’ of the Medici in his lifetime, which suggests a more complicated picture.

• "Professor Francisco Bethencourt, review of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe", Francisco Bethencourt, Reviews in History, July 2007

• Rediker says history has conveniently left out that there were many black pirates. His research of 15 pirate ships shows almost one-third of the pirates were, quote, "negroes or mulattoes." Some black pirates were runaway slaves. Some were sailors whose merchant ships were captured. And many blacks ended up on pirate ships when pirates grabbed slave ships as they traveled from West Africa through the middle passage. Rediker says pirates loved slave ships, and not necessarily for the human cargo.
  • “Historians Link Pirate Ships and Slave Vessels” Leoneda Inge, NPR, March 15, 2007

• Much of the credit for European military success in the New World can be handed to the superiority of their weapons, their literary heritage, even the fact they had unique load-bearing mammals, like horses. These factors combined, gave the conquistadors a massive advantage over the sophisticated civilisations of the Aztec and Inca empires.
  But weapons alone can't account for the breathtaking speed with which the indigenous population of the New World were completely wiped out.
  Within just a few generations, the continents of the Americas were virtually emptied of their native inhabitants – some academics estimate that approximately 20 million people may have died in the years following the European invasion – up to 95% of the population of the Americas.
  No medieval force, no matter how bloodthirsty, could have achieved such enormous levels of genocide. Instead, Europeans were aided by a deadly secret weapon they weren't even aware they were carrying: Smallpox.
• Yet the people of the New World had no history of prior exposure to these germs. They farmed only one large mammal – the llama – and even this was geographically isolated. The llama was never kept indoors, it wasn't milked and only occasionally eaten – so the people of the New World were not troubled by cross-species viral infection.
  When the Europeans arrived, carrying germs which thrived in dense, semi-urban populations, the indigenous people of the Americas were effectively doomed. They had never experienced smallpox, measles or flu before, and the viruses tore through the continent, killing an estimated 90% of Native Americans.
  Smallpox is believed to have arrived in the Americas in 1520 on a Spanish ship sailing from Cuba, carried by an infected African slave. As soon as the party landed in Mexico, the infection began its deadly voyage through the continent. Even before the arrival of Pizarro, smallpox had already devastated the Inca Empire, killing the Emperor Huayna Capac and unleashing a bitter civil war that distracted and weakened his successor, Atahuallpa.
  In the era of global conquest which followed, European colonizers were assisted around the world by the germs which they carried. A 1713 smallpox epidemic in the Cape of Good Hope decimated the South African Khoi San people, rendering them incapable of resisting the process of colonization. European germs also wreaked devastation on the aboriginal communities of Australia and New Zealand.

• The Story Of... Smallpox – and other Deadly Eurasian Germs "Guns Germs and Steel Variables. Smallpox ", PBS

• “When the Spaniards conquered the isthmus, they encountered indigenous Kuna people who didn’t share their prejudices against homosexuals. Now after more than 500 years of Hispanic influence the Kunas have efforted to keep to themselves and have continued a culture that not only tolerates gay men and lesbians, but considers them to have special sensitivities that are good for a society to have.”
  Kuna Yala is an autonomous territory included in the Comarca, mentioned above, that’s inhabited by the Kuna indigenous people. The name means “Kuna-land” or “Kuna mountain” in the Kuna language. The Kuna have four gender classifications: male, female, omekit (woman-like male), and macharetkit (man-like woman). Male gender-crossing among Kuna is characterized by a choice of productive labor and demeanor and only secondarily by sexual orientation.

• "Gay Panama Life", Richard Ammon, GlobalGayz.com, March 2010

• The first nails to enter Tahiti came with a shipwreck that washed up on the shores of a small, nearby island in 1722.^ Not until the late 1760s did Tahitians get a new supply, but they knew the value of the iron.
  • "Getting Nailed: Re Inventing The European Pacific Encounter In the Age Of Global Capitalism" Katherine A Hermes, p.372

• No one represented the imperial typology better than Captain Cook, whose men exchanged nails for sex with Tahitian women, but who never, as far as anyone knows, engaged in sexual relations with the Polynesian women he encountered.
  • Ibid, p.373

• In Tahiti, the story goes, women readily understood their roles as diplomats and cultural brokers through sex. In New Zealand, the more reserved Maori women (who were also less good looking), according to tradition, were prostituted by then male relatives.
  • Ibid, p.375

• Individuals of both sexes were expected to initiate and participate in coitus at puberty, although sexual activity, play, instruction, and so forth occurred much earlier. For instance, as part of exploratory play, the young investigated each other’s genitals, and young males and females might masturbate each other heterosexually or homosexually. This activity occurred without adult disapproval, and it was considered to be an introduction to adulthood. Casual intercourse before adolescence was not an uncommon experience both for males (Handy and Pukui, 1958, p.95) and females (Pukui, Haertig, and Lee, 1972, p. 78)
• The time considered “right” to start coitus was not so much based on chronological age as on ability or maturity (Pukui, Haertig, and Lee, 1972, p. 78). A male doing adult work or holding adult responsibilities was considered to be “old enough.” A young male who could grow taro or catch many fish was considered mature. A female’s first menses usually signaled she was ready for coitus if she had not already experienced it. Kamehameha the Great, who unified all the Hawai‘ian Islands, took his first “wife”, Ka‘ahu-manu, when she was 13 (Pukui, Haertig, and Lee, 1972, p. 78); he probably was several years older than she (Judd, 1976, p. 71). As physical signs of maturity appeared. the young Hawai‘ian received more formal sex education. Among commoners, this education was traditionally and usually the responsibility of the tūtū wahine for the females and the tūtū kane (“grandfather”) for the males. Suggs (1966) elaborated on the early sexual experiences of pubertal males with married females in their 30s and 40s in the Marquesas Islands, who “take special pains to be pleasing and patient with them ... a source of enjoyment for many Marquesan women” (p. 61). For young females of the Marquesas Islands, the first coital experience reportedly is earlier than it is for young males before menarche —and occurs unplanned with an adult male (Suggs, 1966, p. 63).
  Among ali‘i, an experienced chiefess, usually a blood “aunt,” instructed and trained the young males. Similarly, young females were trained by their “aunt,” by another experienced woman, or by a tutu kane. The training concerned not only what to expect and what to do but also how to increase or maximize pleasure. Less formal but similar training was afforded to commoners. There was practice as well as theory. A young male was taught “timing” and how to please a female in order to help her attain orgasm (Pukui, Haertig, and Lee, 1972, p. 79). A young female was taught how to touch and caress a male and move her body to please them both. She was taught how to constrict and rhythmically contract her vaginal muscles (Pukui, Haertig, and Lee, 1972, p. 79). Several of the informants who were interviewed remember being so instructed. One adult female told of being instructed on how to get her vagina to “wink.”.
  These adult/nonadult sexual interactions were socially approved behaviors. Kamehameha the Great, again can be used as an example. Before he aligned himself with Ka‘ahu-manu, he had an infant, while “still a beardless youth,” by Chiefess Kanekapoli, a wife of Kalaniopu‘u (Judd, 1976, p. 71). The infant was welcome and was accepted without stigma, as was any pregnancy resulting from such unions (Handy and Pukui, 1958, p. 110). For adults not to have given such practical education would have been unthinkable - a dereliction of duty.
• As long as the individuals involved were of the appropriate social class, just about any type of sexual behavior between them was sanctioned. If a pregnancy resulted, it was welcome. If a socially inferior male had sex with a female of royalty, however, her family might demand his death or exile, and if a baby was born, it might be killed immediately (Malo, 1951, p. 70). A higher class male’s having sex with a lower class female was seen as being good, on the other hand, in that it added to her status. However, if the two participants were too far apart in class, any offspring was killed or sent into exile (Handy and Pukui, 1958, p. 79).
• Peripubertal females, in many cultures of Oceania, were noted to often be publicly sexually active with adults (Oliver, 1974, p. 362). Cook (1773, Vol. 1, p. 128) reported copulation in public in Hawai‘i between an adult male and a female estimated to be 11 or 12 “without the least sense of it being indecent or improper.” The disapproval implicit in Cook’s report probably was caused as much by the public nature of the activity as by the age-related aspects. In Tahiti, one missionary noted in his diary that the High Priest Manimani, “though nearly blind with age, is as libidinous now as when thirty years younger; …[he] has frequently upwards of a dozen females with him, some of them apparently not above twelve or thirteen years of age” (cited in Danielsson, 1986, P. 57).Gauguin credited the inspiration for his famous painting “Manao tupapau” (“The Specter Watches Over Her”), completed in 1892, to his 13-year-old Tahitian “wife” Teha‘amana (Hobhouse, 1988).
  Suggs (1966, pp. 51-53) cited many cases of full heterosexual intercourse in public between adults and prepubertal individuals in Polynesia. The crews of the visiting ships showed no compunction against the activities, and the natives assisted in the efforts. Cunnilingus with young females was recorded without accompanying remarks that this kind of behavior was unusual or disapproved of for the participants. Occasions were recorded of elders assisting youngsters in having sex with other elders. Among the Marquesas Islanders in particular, Suggs (1966, p. 119) reported, extramarital relations were frequent and often involved older males with young virginal females and older females with young virginal males.
  Until fairly recently, the birth of an infant to an unmarried female in Hawai‘i, as elsewhere in Polynesia, was not a problem for her or society. Her fertility was proven, and the infant was wanted and taken care of by the extended ‘ohana (family). illegitimacy, in the Western sense, is inapplicable in regard to traditional Hawai‘i (Pukui, Haertig, and Lee, 1972, p. 96).
• A “pairing” ceremony among commoners was even more rare (Sahlins, 1985, P. 23). Couples that wanted to sleep and live together just did so (Sahlins, 1985, p. 23). Typically, no contract was expressed openly, although there probably was a vague set of expectations that linked the couple. Sahlins (1985, p. 23) expressed the situation thus: “For the people as for the chiefs, the effect of sex was society: a shifting set of liaisons that gradually became sorted out and weighted down by the practical considerations attached to them.”
  Monogamy, polygyny, and polyandry coexisted among ali‘i and among commoners. Often, polygamy involved siblings (Morgan, 1964, p. 361).10 Taking another sexual partner usually was acceptable if the first mate knew about the relationship and sanctioned it. Secret relationships were not approved of, however, although the discovery of such a relationship usually was disruptive only temporarily. Such sexual license greatly disturbed the early Christian missionaries. The “crimes” most commonly reported by the haole (foreigner, now refers to Caucasians) to occur among the Hawai‘ians, recorded as being 4-5times more common than theft or property crimes, were fornication and adultery (Sahlins, 1985, p. 24); these terms, of course, had no meaning to the Hawai‘ians.
• Invitations to or direct acceptance of sex from the right strangers. on the part of males and females, were seen by the Hawai‘ians as good fun, good politics, good “mana” and cross- fertilization, or just good socialization (Pukui, Haertig and Lee, 1972. p. 98). For a male or a female to be “propositioned” was considered a compliment, not an insult.
  To have sex at the request of another was seen more as being passion than compassion. To want sex with another was seen as being natural. As one respondent put it: Women didn’t say no because it would have been considered “bad form”, a rudeness. Also, they took the invitation as a compliment and often also wanted the sex themselves.
  Prostitution, as it now would be defined, was nonexistent in pre-Western contact Hawai‘i, because sexual partners were readily available for mutual enjoyment. After Western contact occurred, the females continued to want sex openly, now with the mana-loaded sailors and traders. These males advocated bartering for sex, and with no religious or social restrictions against prostitution, the natives had no hesitancy about profiting from the newcomers’ desires.
  Females in traditional Hawai‘i did experience intercourse that was imposed upon them. While Westerners would interpret the forcing of intercourse on an individual as being criminal rape, the Hawai‘ians supposedly saw a romantic abduction or passionate lust (Johnson. 1983). There also were practices known as “wife-capture” and “husband-capture” (Sahlins, 1985. p. 10). Abductions and imposed sex supposedly were more commonly practiced by the ali‘i. In one well-known instance, a chief who forced himself sexually upon an unwilling “married” female rewarded her by offering to make an ali‘i of any possible male offspring, and this arrangement, it was said, was satisfactory to her and her “husband” (Malo, 1951, pp. 25 8-259).
  There are tales of love that was unrequited for any number of reasons: because one individual was promised to another, because one partner was jealous, because of feuds, for example. Also, sex was rejected if the other was thought to be extremely unattractive, if one was promised to another. if it was solicited in an inappropriate place or with an inappropriate partner. Suicide because of unrequited love was known (Johnson, 1983).

• Milton Diamond, "Title: Sexual Behavior in Pre Contact Hawai‘i: A Sexological Ethnography", Revista Española del Pacifico. 2004. 16: 37-58; Pacific Center for Sex and Society.

• Wide range of intimate relationships. Socially acceptable intimate relationships included plural mating (and shared responsibility for children of these unions), aikane (same sex) relationships, kane o ka po and wahine o ka po spirit lovers, and the non-sexual but emotionally tender kane ho’okane and wahine ho’owahine (Pukui, 1999). The Kanaka Maoli even had a social framework for people who shared a mate or long-term lover - the punalua relationship - which created the emotional and practical equivalent of familial ties (Pukui, 1999).
  Pleasure skills. Children and youth observed and were taught sexual and interpersonal skills to prepare them for intimate relationships (Pukui, 1999). Skillful lovers were admired, and lazy or inconsiderate lovers were ridiculed (Jensen and Jensen, 2005). The ma’i (genitals) were considered sacred due to their role in creating new life, however other fragments of language, dance, chants, and legends also indicate possible evidence of a sophisticated tradition of sacred sexual practices (Marsh 2010, Jensen and Jensen, 2005). Such practices may have been reserved for the rulers (ali’i) and priesthood, or they may have been available to the common people (maka’ainana) as well. The existence of a sacred sexual tradition in Hawai’i is tantalizing, but speculative.
• Social sexual maturity and sexual maturity usually were in alignment. Adults would observe the development of young people, including their abilities to perform adult work. As young people were given plenty of instruction about sexual and sociosexual matters, they did not have to “wait” to become sexually active once their bodies and psyches seemed ready. A boy could take a mate as soon as he could work in an adult manner with other men (Pukui, Haertig and Lee, 1972).
  • "Le’ale’a O Na Poe Kahiko - Joy of the People of Old Hawai’i" Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality, Volume 14, Feb. 14, 2011

• American prostitution was rare and clandestine and practiced mostly on a casual basis through the mid-18th century. Occasionally, tavern owners were prosecuted for operating "disorderly houses," but such cases were rare, and the penalty was a small fine or a few lashes—a slap on the wrist by Colonial standards. In the early 1700s, Boston minister Cotton Mather attempted to form a group to oppose brothels but met widespread public indifference due to the relative invisibility of the problem in America.
  Sex workers multiplied dramatically by the mid-1700s. American cities began to grow along with maritime trade. That brought increasing numbers of sailors, and brothels opened to suit them.
  Colonial-era brothels did not hang out shingles or post flyers, but a would-be patron could learn about their services in a tavern or from his shipmates. Despite Mather's early efforts, there was no systematic attempt to close the urban brothels. Men were almost never prosecuted for soliciting a prostitute, and the prostitutes themselves were only occasionally brought before a judge. When government officials did order a raid, the police didn't always cooperate. Many police officers protected the brothels in exchange for money, food, or other payments. Working-class neighbors, irritated by official inaction, would periodically riot and burn down a brothel.
  • "Were There Sex Shops in the Time of George Washington?: No, but there were plenty of brothels." Brian Palmer, Slate, 03/2009

• Newspapers at the time were factionalized and expressed very distinct viewpoints. Editors were constantly being challenged and were known to carry sidearms at all times—even in the office—in case an irate reader should wish to dispute an editorial.
  By the time of the Broderick-Terry duel of 1859, slavery had become the new reason for dueling. Dueling had lost favor in the early 1800s in the North, but still remained the dispute-solving method of choice in the South, where social standing was a touchier subject.
  • "Politics And Pistols: Dueling In America", History Detectives, PBS

• The rape of slave women by their masters was primarily a weapon of terror that reinforced whites' domination over their human property. Rape was an act of physical violence designed to stifle Black women's will to resist and to remind them of their servile status … . Whites' sexual exploitation of their slaves, therefore, should not be viewed simply as either a method of slave-breeding or the fulfillment of slaveholders' sexual urges. (1997, 29-30)
  • Roberts, D., 1997, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty, New York: Vintage Books p.31; as quoted in "Feminist Perspectives on Rape", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, first published Wed May 13, 2009; substantive revision Wed Jun 21, 2017

• The rationale for choosing cultural rather than physical genocide was often economic. Carl Schurz concluded that it would cost a million dollars to kill an Indian in warfare, whereas it cost only $1,200 to school an Indian child for eight years. Likewise, the Secretary of the Interior, Henry Teller, argued that it would cost $22 million to wage war against Indians over a ten-year period, but would cost less than a quarter of that amount to educate 30,000 children for a year.14 Consequently, these schools were administered as inexpensively as possible. Children were given inadequate food and medical care, and conditions were overcrowded in these schools. According to the Boarding School Healing Project (BSHP) Native children in South Dakota schools were often fed only one sandwich for a whole day. As a result, children routinely died in mass numbers of starvation and disease. Other children died from common medical ailments because of medical neglect.15 In addition, children were often forced to do grueling work in order to raise monies for the schools and salaries for the teachers and administrators. Some Boarding School survivors have reported children being killed because they were forced to operate dangerous machinery. Children were never compensated for their labor.
  • "English Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues Eighth session New York, 18 - 29 May 2009 Indigenous Peoples and Boarding Schools: A Comparative Study", p.6

• Many survivors report being sexually abused by multiple perpetrators in these schools. However, boarding school officials refused to investigate, even when teachers were publicly accused by their students.
  • Ibid, p.7

• Full scale efforts to ‘civilize’ aboriginal peoples did not begin until British hegemony was established in 1812 because military alliances were often needed by competing European powers. In 1846, the government resolved at a meeting in Orilla, Ontario, to fully commit to Indian residential schools. The state and the churches collaborated in the efforts to ‘civilize’ Indians in order to solve the Indian problem. The major denominations began carving the country among themselves. In 1889, the Indian Affairs Department was created and Indian agents were dispatched to aboriginal communities. These agents would threaten to withhold money from aboriginal parents if they did not send their children to school. Parents were even imprisoned if they resisted schooling their children. Indian agents prepared lists of children to be taken from reserves and organized fall round ups (at the commencement of the school year).
  • Ibid p.8

• Because so little time was spent on academic preparation, the schools were not successful. According to the Indian Affairs own statistics, by 1938, 75 percent of aboriginal children were below grade three level, and only 3 in a 100 made it past grade six level. By comparison to other schools, half of the children in school were past grade three level, and one third were past grade six level.30 By 1986, nearly half of all aboriginal peoples on reserve had less than a grade nine education, and less than one quarter had obtained a high school diploma. Educational achievement is increasing for aboriginal peoples, but it is still substantially lower than the general population.
  Residential schooling reached its peak in 1931 with over eighty schools in Canada. From the mid-1800s to the 1970s, about one third of aboriginal children were confined to schools for the majority of their childhoods. The last school closed in 1984.
  • Ibid, p.10

• Mexico’s education policy in the 1800s and early 1900s focused on assimilation of indigenous peoples and teaching them to speak Spanish. However, some reformers advocated for bilingual education as a means to more effectively assimilate indigenous peoples. In the 1970s, calls for resistance to assimilation began to emerge, but Mexico’s education policy was still slanted towards assimilation.
  • Ibid, 12

• Until the 1970s, Colombia funded nine different Catholic orders to educate indigenous groups. These Catholic groups set up missions where they separated children from their families from the age of five.
  • Ibid, 13

• In New South Wales, Western Australia and the Northern Territory many children of mixed descent were totally separated from their families when young and placed in segregated ‘training’ institutions before being sent out to work. Between 1910-1970, between 1 in 3 to 1 in 10 indigenous children were removed from their families. By the mid 1930s, more than half of the so called “half-caste” children in the Northern Territory were housed in institutions administered by the state.44 Christian churches were at the forefront of this practice. In the late 1940s, some 50 missions operated throughout Australia. Similar patterns emerged: education focused on Christianization and manual labor rather than preparation for higher education. Abuse was prevalent, and schools were poorly maintained.45 Conditions were deplorable in these missions and settlements with death rates often exceeding birthrates. Disease, malnutrition and sexual violence were commonplace. Children were often forced to work in white homes where they were routinely sexually abused. In Victoria, between 1881-1925, one third of indigenous children died.
  • Ibid, p.15

• The purpose of the Maori denominational boarding schools was to take Maori students that seemed to have the highest potential for assimilation, inculcate European values and customs, and then send the ‘assimilated’ Maori students back home to uplift their communities. The goal was thus to create a class structure within Maori communities whereby the more ‘assimilated elite’ could manage those parts of the community deemed “savage” by Europeans. Maori girls received particular attention because, since they were seen as the primary caretakers of children, they were in the best position to inculcate European values to the next generation.
  Comparable to USA boarding schools, Maori girls were educated along the lines of an English middle-class Victorian girls’ school. They were to dress and behave like middleclass women. However, unlike their English counterparts, Maori girls were also subjected to hard labor, responsible for all the cleaning, meal preparation, laundry, and gardening of the school.
  • Ibid, 17

• In Norway, children were not allowed to speak the Sami language in the schools until 1959.
  • Ibid, 20

• In the 1920s, schools were established among the 26 indigenous peoples’ groups in the North that included indigenous languages. Thirteen alphabets were created using the Roman alphabet for indigenous languages. By 1926, eighteen residential schools were in place across Siberia, and five day-schools had been established. However, in 1937, Northern alphabets were outlawed. After World War II, the USSR began the process of Russification. Northern groups were forcibly settled into mix areas in order to assimilate and foster Russian unity. From the age of 2 years, Northern indigenous children were forced to attend boarding schools where they were prohibited from speaking their languages. By 1970, no indigenous languages were being taught in schools.
  • Ibid, p.22

• Many countries in Asia send indigenous children who live in remote areas to boarding schools. In 1996, the Department of Social, Home Affairs, Education and Culture of Indonesia, as well as the Religion Ministries decided to provide financial aid and transportation for children living in remote areas or so that they could attend boardingschools.65 In West Kalimantan, for instance, the majority of secondary school children attended boarding schools in the capital of Lanjak, and only returned home for weekends or holidays.66 Vietnam also utilizes boarding schools for indigenous children. The 1946 Constitution of Vietnam supports the instruction of indigenous children in their own languages. However, national educational policies mandate the use of Vietnamese as the language of instruction. In addition, over half of the teachers in indigenous areas, are not properly trained. As a result, illiteracy rates run as high as 93 percent among indigenous children in some areas.
  • Ibid, pp.22-23

• In the 1950s Xinjiang, Inner-Mongolia, Tibet, Ningxia, and Guangxi -- five provinces in China with large minority populations – were designated as autonomous minority nationality regions. They were granted increased local control over the administration of resources, taxes, birth planning, education, legal, jurisdiction and religious expression. Between 1949 - 1980s, schools in these regions were oriented towards assimilation rather than cultural preservation. D
  • Ibid, p. 23

• In India indigenous or tribal peoples generally did not have access to education for many reasons. Many tribal communities are geographically dispersed and did not have sufficient population density for the Indian government to build schools in their communities. Tribal communities also lacked the financial resources to send children to school. Before 1980, literacy rates were often around 8 percent in many communities. Within this context, residential schools or Ashram schools were developed for tribal children. The first experimental schools were developed by followers of Gandhi in Gujarat during pre-independence days. After Independence, various voluntary organizations began Ashram schools in Maharastra, Gujarat, and Orissa. These schools also shared some of the ‘civilization’ assumptions of other boarding schools in which it was assumed that these schools could provide an environment to develop a child’s personality better than its own community
  • Ibid, p.24

• In Malaysia, the Department of Aboriginal Affairs (JHEOA) became responsible for administering the affairs of indigenous peoples in 1961. In 1961, Government policy advocated the integration of indigenous peoples into the larger society, while also advocating the teaching of indigenous languages and public education designed to eradicate racism against indigenous peoples. These latter policies were not implemented. As part of the assimilation policies, JHEOA began working with Islam missionary societies to encourage the Islamization of indigenous peoples through various measures, including Islamic residential schools. In general, JHEOA provides education for indigenous children between grades 1-3 after which they must go to boarding school to receive further education.
  • Ibid, pp.24-25

• During the British Mandate, a Boarding school was set up for the Palestinian Bedouin boys. The school was attended by the sons of the elite for the purpose of providing skills for future tribal leaders to be able to negotiate with colonial officials. A girls’ school was opened in 1934. Many of the graduates of these schools became shaykhs and other prominent peoples. The boys at the school were encouraged to retain their traditional tribal dress and were permitted to visit their family encampments regularly.
• Similar types of makeshift boarding schools where children live by themselves and care for themselves exist among the Al Murrah peoples in Saudi Arabia. Students stay in a one room schoolhouse while their families leave with their herds after the summer harvest. They are taught by a Palestinian teacher sent by the Saudi Arabian government. In another school house, boys share a wooden shelter while their families travel with their herds. Other tribal groups are developing similar spontaneous settlements.
  • Ibid, p.25

• In Oman, the government, in conjunction with the United Nations, began to sponsor development programs for the Harasiis as oil companies began their operations. This development project included the establishment of a boarding school for boys (girls could attend on a day basis), as well as other service programs.
• Another issue is that the Oman government presumed that the Harasiis would not want their girls to board, and insisted on a gender segregation that the Harasiis do not particularly support. Hence, the community built its own makeshift dormitory for girls so that they could also attend boarding school.
  • Ibid, p.25-26

• In Iran, there are special boarding schools offered between grades 9 to 12 for children from tribal backgrounds who live far from the cities. Girls and boys attend different schools. These schools have strict entrance examinations and only admit exemplary students.
  • Ibid, p.26

• Several countries in East Africa have set up special boarding schools, some specifically targeting girls. In Kenya, the Christian denominations controlled 75 percent of schools as late as 1955.
  • Ibid, p.26

• There are also ten boarding schools in Djibouti, although only a few are operating. Generally, nomadic groups are reluctant to send their children to schools. In addition, they are often reluctant to send girls because of concerns for the girls’ safety.
• In Eritrea, during the post-liberation period, the Eritrean Liberation Front involved communities in decision-making processes, including education. In recent years, higher priority has been given to expanding the provision of education in nomadic areas, including the development of boarding schools. But while they help build skills and manage their operation, communities are not currently involved in curricula development.
  • Ibid, 27

• In Botswana, the San/Basarwa people are moved to schools with hostels. To address the problems of geographic isolation, the government transports children to these schools every school term. Thus, they do get basic schooling, but not in their languages. These Remote Area Dweller Hostels tend be very unsympathetic places for San students. The idea of separating parents and children are foreign to San culture and the pain and alienation that San students feel at boarding schools can be acute. In Botswana, in 1999, 120 primary school children walked several kilometers to run away from the abuse they were suffering at the hostel. One of the children, age 8, died from exhaustion.
  • Ibid, 27-28

• In Sierra Leone after the demise of legal slave trading, the London-based Church Missionary Society joined with the government to create separate villages where children could be trained in trades, farming and, for the most promising, teaching or mission work. Through separating children from their “uncivilized” parents, mission boarding schools were seen as a key strategy for inculcating European and Christian values into children ‘untainted’ by the influence of their parents.
  Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first president, introduced a policy of mass education and established dozens more secondary boarding schools throughout the country. In reports by the mainstream media, these schools are credited with helping to narrow ethnic cleavages that plague many other countries in the region. Others, however, have complained that this system is under funded, there are problems with sexual abuse of girls in these schools, parents cannot often afford school fees and education is based on the colonial model.
  In Africa, schools are often looked upon with suspicion as an attempt to sedentize nomadic groups, although there are some nomadic groups that may seek expanded economic opportunities and have a desire to become more integrated into the dominant society, particularly in North and Northeast Kenya. Some feel that schooling alienates children from their communities and does not allow them to learn the skills they need to function in their own context. A saying is “Children go to schools empty and come out empty.”
  • Ibid, p.28

• As the preceding section indicates, the experiences of indigenous children varies depending on their particular experiences. For some children, as seen in the cases particularly in Canada, Australia, and the United States, boarding school experiences are particularly brutal.
• In the Middle East, unlike many other regions, boarding schools were targeted towards exemplary students in order to provide professional opportunities for them. Nevertheless, in general these schools have not closed gaps in educational attainment between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. First, as demonstrated in the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, these schools prepared indigenous children for menial labor and domestic service rather than provide quality education. Thus children coming from these schools would be on the one hand, less culturally adept and hence less able to succeed in their home context, while on the other hand insufficiently skilled to be successful in the dominant society. At the same time, the trauma suffered from attending boarding schools often created a negative reaction towards education within these communities.
  • Ibid, p.30

• It is also clear that the major problem with these schools is that they were often mandatory and were established without the input of the impacted indigenous communities.
  • Ibid, p.32

• In the last twenty-five years, Latin American countries have also begun to move in a similar direction as regards to the right to use indigenous languages. In March 1975, Peru officially recognized Quechua as an official language of the country, allowing legal proceedings to be conducted in that language. The Ministry of Education was mandated to provide ‘all necessary support for institutions engaged in the teaching and promotion of the language in question’. The teaching of Quechua is declared to be compulsory at all levels of education. In 1992, Bolivia in began implementing a bilingual education program in Guarani, Aymara and Quechan communities. In the same year, Paraguay started mandating the teaching of Spanish and Guarani at the elementary, secondary and university levels. In Nicaragua, the Atlantic Coast Autonomy Law recognized the right of the Atlantic Coast communities to preserve their cultural identity and their languages. It dictates that members of these indigenous communities are entitled to be educated in their own languages, through programs which take into account their historical heritage, their traditions and the characteristics of their environment, all within the framework of the national education system.
  • Ibid, p.40-41

• American Catholic priests were shown to have a distinct pattern of sexual abuse, with 64 percent of all allegations of abuse made against a priest by a male only, according to a detailed report by the John Jay Institute investigating child abuse in the Catholic Church from 1950 to 2002. Those males were young: more than 85 percent of them were 8 to 10 years old.

• "By The Numbers: The Catholic Church’s Sex Abuse Scandals" Sarah Kaufman, Vocativ, Sep 27, 2015

• Some experts believe sexual abuse by nuns may be underreported as is sexual abuse by women in secular society - and unrecognized even by those children who are its victims. In fact, Kenneth Lanning, the FBI's expert on child sexual abuse, who attended Catholic schools as a child, wonders if some nuns' notorious penchant for physical discipline may betray a degree of sexual sadism. 'When somebody takes a ruler and bends you over the desk and whacks you with the ruler, is it discipline?" Lanning asks. "Is it physical abuse? Or is it sexual abuse? My opinion is it could be any of the three."
  • "A Brief Examination of Pedophilia and Sexual Abuse Committed by Nuns Within the Catholic Church", William & Mary Journal of Women and the Law, Volume 12, Issue 3 Article 10, Nicole Travers, p.769-770

• I would draw the following broad conclusion: at a fairly early stage of the Great Famine the government's abject failure to stop or even slow down the clearances (evictions) contributed in a major way to enshrining the idea of English state-sponsored genocide in Irish popular mind. Or perhaps one should say in the Irish mind, for this was a notion that appealed to many educated and discriminating men and women, and not only to the revolutionary minority ... And it is also my contention that while genocide was not in fact committed, what happened during and as a result of the clearances had the look of genocide to a great many Irish.
  • Donnelly, James S (2005), The Great Irish Potato Famine, Sutton Publishing, ISBN 0-7509-2632-5

• Although old laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882| and the Immigration Act of 1924 are no longer on the books, some commentators claim that the plenary power doctrine is still good law. If this is correct, then Congress may, without fear of judicial review, discriminate based on race, religion or any other ground that it deems appropriate when it determines who may, or may not, immigrate to, or become a citizen of, the United States.
  • "Why the 1920s U.S. Ban on Japanese Immigrants Matters Today" Shotaro Oshima, Huffington Post

In the fantasies they committed to paper, the men associated the women they despised with floods of liquid and slime, and with dirt – substances that would threaten to overwhelm the defences of their ill-formed psyches. The solider male felt that he could only guarantee “his own survival, his self-preservation and self-regeneration”, through acts of violence against such women. ~ Jason Wilson

Liquid Snake: I watched your face while you did it. It was filled with the joy of battle. There's a killer inside you. You don't have to deny it. ~ Hideo Kojima, Tomokazu Fukushima, Metal Gear Solid 2, (November 13, 2001)

• In 1977, Klaus Theweleit published a book in which he sought to understand the germination of fascism in interwar Germany. His method was to study the fantasy life of that era’s conservative revolutionaries, by reading the diaries, novels and letters of the men who joined the Freikorps Militias, and fought against insurgent communists during the early days of the Weimar Republic.
  • Jason Wilson, "What do incels, fascists and terrorists have in common? Violent misogyny", The Guardian, (4, May 2018).

• In the fantasies they committed to paper, the men associated the women they despised with floods of liquid and slime, and with dirt – substances that would threaten to overwhelm the defences of their ill-formed psyches. The solider male felt that he could only guarantee “his own survival, his self-preservation and self-regeneration”, through acts of violence against such women. (Another way of maintaining their fragile sense of self is by slotting themselves into enveloping external structures like the armed forces or fascist youth organisations.)
  In the soldier males’ journals we see them taking great pleasure, and building fraternal camaraderie, by murdering women, pairs of lovers and leftists of all genders. We also see that many of them cannot reconcile acts of physical love with the nature of their own desires. When it came to these men, their murderous acts and their sexual problems were not coincidental, they were interrelated.
  In explaining how, Theweleit takes exception with the left’s then-dominant explanation of fascism – that it was a result of pure irrationality, or repressed homosexuality. Some said it could be countered by the left mounting a renewed defence of progress and reason, or by beefing up alternative institutions that mirrored those of the fascists.
  For Theweleit, this misses the central dynamic that propels the fascist male towards violence. Fascism derives its power from channelling the protean, potentially liberating force of human desire towards hatred, distorting it into a desire for death and blood. All of its institutions, its rituals, and the (male) bonds it promotes are bent to this purpose. We cannot beat fascists by aping their structures, any more than we can hope to rationally persuade them. The problem goes deeper.
  On this theme, he says that classical fascism was not as distinct as we might want it to be from the culture surrounding it. It is not a departure from European history, but an intensification of some of its more pervasive traits.
  At one point he asks, “Can we not draw a straight line from the witch to the sensuous Jewish woman? Is the persecution of the sensuous woman not a permanent reality, one that is not economic in origin, but which derives from the specific social organisation of gender relations in patriarchal Europe?”
  Later, more succinctly, he comments that his soldier males are “equivalent to the tip of the patriarchal iceberg, but it’s what lies beneath the surface that really makes the water cold”.
  • Jason Wilson, "What do incels, fascists and terrorists have in common? Violent misogyny", The Guardian, (4, May 2018).

• This patchwork of largely fictional works makes the Protocols an incoherent text that easily reveals its fabricated origins. It is hardly credible, if not in a roman feuilleton or in a grand opera, that the “bad guys” should express their evil plans in such a frank and unashamed manner, that they should declare, as the Elders of Zion do, that they have “boundless ambition, a ravenous greed, a merciless desire for revenge and an intended hatred.” If at first the Protocols was taken seriously, it is because it was presented as a shocking revelation, and by sources all in all trustworthy. But what seems incredible is how this fake arose from its own ashes each time someone proved that it was, beyond all doubt, a fake. This is when the “novel of the Protocols” truly starts to sound like fiction. Following the article that appeared in 1921 in the Times of London revealing that the Protocols was plagiarized, as well as every other time some authoritative source confirmed the spurious nature of the Protocols, there was someone else who published it again claiming its authenticity. And the story continues unabated on the Internet today. It is as if, after Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler, one were to continue publishing textbooks claiming that the sun travels around the earth.
  How can one explain resilience against all evidence, and the perverse appeal that this book continues to exercise? The answer can be found in the works of Nesta Webster, an antisemetic author who spent her life supporting this account of the Jewish plot. In her Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, she seems well informed and knows the whole story as Eisner narrates it here, but this is her conclusion:
  The only opinion I have committed myself is that, whether genuine or not, the Protocols represent the programme of a world revolution, and that in view of their prophetic nature and of their extraordinary resemblance to the protocols of certain secret societies of the past, they were either the work of some such society or of someone profoundly versed in the lore of secret society who was able to reproduce their ideas and phraseology.
  Her reasoning is flawless: “since the Protocols say what I said in my story, they confirm it,” or: “the Protocols confirm the story that I derived from them, and are therefore authentic.” Better still: “the Protocols could be fake, but they say exactly what the Jews think, and must therefore be considered authentic.” In other words, it is not the Protocols that produce antisemetism, it is people’s profound need to single out an Enemy that leads them to believe in the Protocols.
  I believe that-in spite of this courageous, not comic but tragic book by Will Eisner- the story is hardly over. Yet is is a story very much worth telling, for one must fight the Big Lie and the hatred it spawns.
  • Umberto Eco, Milan Italy, (December 2004) translated by Allesandra Bastagli; in The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), p. vi-vii

• At first, the Nazis were just a terrorist group. Hitler assembled a large group of unemployed young men and former soldiers, known as the storm troopers (the SA), which attacked other political groups.
• Hitler had a huge army of storm troopers, but he knew he would lose control of them if he did not give them something to do.
  • "History: The Munich Putsch 1923", BBC

• Rape rates increased dramatically (more than 27 percent) in US civil society during World War II compared to prewar rates, even while rates of murder and non-negligent manslaughter decreased. A similar pattern of formidable increases in domestic violence, rape and sexual assault occurred in US civil society since the Iraq and Afghanistan wars began, while every other surveyed crime declined except for a small increase in simple assault.
  • "Why Do Soldiers Rape?" by H. Patricia Hynes, Truthout, January 18, 2012.

• Eva Fogelman, a New York City psychologist who has worked with survivors and children of survivors for more than 30 years, hopes for their own sake that survivors with secrets will open up. She contributed to Hedgepeth and Saidel's anthology and says the book -- as well as the events and discussions around it -- can help validate the feelings of those who were raped and offer them permission to voice their stories and seek professional help.
  "They need the validation for that particular pain and suffering ... to help them in their healing process," Fogelman says. And barring documentation, testimonies can provide "a more authentic sense of history."
  • Eva Fogelman in "Silence lifted: The untold stories of rape during the Holocaust" by Jessica Ravitz, CNN, (June 24, 2011).

• Saidel, Hedgepeth and others who share their passion know they face obstacles in bringing attention to sexual assaults during the Holocaust.
  They say some people believe that focusing on gender-specific experiences takes away from the overall human and Jewish experience. Others have suggested that sexual violence against Jews wasn't a real issue because racial purity laws prohibited intercourse between Germans and Jews. And then there are those, they say, who are uncomfortable accepting testimonies as proof of occurrences.
  But Saidel wants to know this: If historians are willing to look at how the Holocaust experience differed from country to country and camp to camp, why shouldn't they also examine how experiences differed between men and women?
  As for the argument that racial purity laws protected Jewish women, she says, "That's absurd. That's like saying there are laws against rape so people don't get raped."
  • Jessica Ravitz, "Silence lifted: The untold stories of rape during the Holocaust", CNN, (June 24, 2011).

• But is it necessary to talk about rape? Maybe women don't want it discussed. Maybe victims, no matter how rare or prevalent they were, haven't shared their stories for a reason.
  It isn't hard to imagine why a woman raped during the Holocaust might stay silent. Irrespective of circumstances, when it comes to sexual victimization, there's fear, shame and concern about being blamed or viewed as "damaged goods."
  In Yiddish, there's a word, "shanda" (pronounced shonda, like Honda) which means shame or pity -- the sort that, if revealed, might cast one's family or even the entire Jewish people in a bad light. Especially for older generations, it's considered a shanda to talk about certain things. Rape, molestation or sexual relations that kept women alive, whether they were forced or chosen, would be among the stories many might say would be better kept to oneself.
  Add to this, survivor guilt: the anguish many carried of having lived while millions perished. Still alive, some might wonder, what right would a raped survivor have to complain?
  • Jessica Ravitz, "Silence lifted: The untold stories of rape during the Holocaust", CNN, (June 24, 2011).

• Gail Horalek, the mother of a 7th-grade child in Michigan in the US, has made international headlines by complaining that the unabridged version of Anne Frank's diary is pornographic and should not be taught at her daughter's school. At issue for Horalek is a section detailing Anne's exploration of her own genitalia, material originally omitted by Anne's father, Otto Frank, when he prepared the manuscript for publication in the late 40s
  I had to look up what age kids are in the 7th grade. They're 12 to 13! They're only about a year younger than Anne was when she wrote of her vagina: "There are little folds of skin all over the place, you can hardly find it. The little hole underneath is so terribly small that I simply can't imagine how a man can get in there, let alone how a whole baby can get out!" There cannot be a 13-year-old girl on the planet who hasn't had a root around and arrived at this exact stage of bafflement.
• Horalek is, of course, wrong to call the passages pornographic. Pornography is material intended to arouse sexual excitement, and I very much doubt that was Anne's intention when she wrote to her imaginary confidant Kitty about her journeys of self-discovery.
• Anne is going through puberty, and she describes her changed vagina in honest detail, saying, "until I was 11 or 12, I didn't realise there was a second set of labia on the inside, since you couldn't see them. What's even funnier is that I thought urine came out of the clitoris." (Oh Anne, we've all been there.) She continues: "In the upper part, between the outer labia, there's a fold of skin that, on second thought, looks like a kind of blister. That's the clitoris." It's beautiful, visceral writing, and it's describing something that most young women experience.
  And yet I can understand that the junior Ms Horalek would have squirmed and wished herself elsewhere when this was read in class. We live in a society in which young women are taught to be ashamed of the changes that their bodies undergo at puberty – to be secretive about them, and even to pretend that they don't exist. Breasts, the minute they bud, are strapped into harnesses, and the nipples disguised from view. Period paraphernalia must be discreet, with advertisers routinely boasting that their tampons look enough like sweets to circumvent the social horror of discovery.
  For my generation, removal of post-pubescent hair on the legs and underarms was mandatory. For Ms Horalek's generation, it is mandatory for pubic hair too. Anne writes: "When you're standing up, all you see from the front is hair. Between your legs there are two soft, cushiony things, also covered with hair, which press together when you're standing, so you can't see what's inside." How must reading this feel for pubescent girls who've already internalised the message that they must spend the rest of their lives maintaining the illusion that their body hair doesn't exist.
• Dealing with this discomfort only involves censoring Anne Frank's diary if you're quite, quite odd. For the rest of us, the answer might be a little more free-flowing boob, some brazen Mooncup sterilisation, hairy legs sprinting through the summer grasses and, to use a pun that is intended as the highest compliment, Frankness about masturbation, sexuality and our bodies. Because it isn't just the Horaleks of this world who teach girls to be shameful rather than celebratory.

• “Anne Frank's diary isn't pornographic – it just reveals an uncomfortable truth”, Emer O'Toole, The Guardian, 2 May 2013

• R&R is an abbreviation for "rest and relaxation," a phrase first used by the military. English sailors in the 18th and 19th centuries under captains Benjamin Wallis, William Bligh, and James Cook in Polynesia and elsewhere, along with scientists and writers such as Scottish writer and poet Robert Louis Stevenson, enjoyed exotic and seemingly easily erotic stays among "other people" in lands of good climates. During World War II,iun Hawaii naive young servicemen paid $3 for three minutes of R&R, or morale uplift in the face of tedium and loengthy sea voyages.
• Tens of thousands of American servicemen enjoyed their first exotic port of call, too, this time at Olongapo City. The 20 or so R&R sites in the late 1950's had swelled to 1,567 in Olongapo and another 615 in Angeles city by the late 1980's.
  Hawaii and the Philippines were only two of the many places where military sexism found its logical expression. Soldiers viewed girls and women there through lenses of compliant Asian femininity but referred to them derogatorily as “slant eyes”. The “little brown sex machines” referred to T-shirts in Okinawa, Japan, morphed quickly into “little brown fucking machines powered by rice” in displays of militarized misogyny. Following six months of service, soldiers tired of drinking and playing billiards and video games could fly cheaply to Thailand, Hong Kong, Okinawa, or South Korea for more of the same, where structurally similar R&R venues had been set up for them. The 500,000 American soldiers in and near Saigon during the Vietnam war were matched in number by women and girls in prostitution, many in a kind of licensing system approved by the U.S. military.
  • Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work, Volume 2 edited by Melissa Hope Ditmore p.376

• At least four historical developments enabled the growth of R&R. By name and institution, it originated in the Mutual Defense Treaty signed in the late 1950s by U.S. and Korean authorities that granted American servicemen sexual access to Korean females at a 3-to-1 ratio. Second, the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, Korea, and Okinawa included the sexual enslavement, to the Japanese Imperial Army, of 200,000 women and girls (comfort women) in state-sponsored brothels known as Comfort Stations. Third, near the end of World War II, the Battle of Okinawa occurred, during which far more civilians died than soldiers. Surviving Okinawan women were given by retreating or surrendering Japanese soldiers to the American occupation forces. Fourth, sex tourism got a huge boost in Bangkok and Pattaya, Thailand, during the 1960s and 1970s because of the Vietnam War, when American participants were flown to R&R sites not formally attached to military bases. In 1966, the Thai government passed the Entertainment Places Act, which codified the practice of police tolrance of military prostitution. The following year, an agreement allowing American soldiers to travel to Pattaya for R&R was signed, and spending in Pattaya grew from US$5 million in 1967 to US$20 million in 1970. Venues created to cater to American GIs expanded and today accommodate international tourists.
  As in Hawaii, Okinawa, and Olongapo, Bangkok's central role in military prostitution promoted severe abuse of women, distortion of local economies, flaunting of traditional values, abandonment of biracial children, and penicillin-resistant strains of gonorrhea. At the end of the first Persian Guld War in Iraq, the U.S. military once again sent troops on sex vacations to Thailand.
  • Ibid, 376-377

• At midnight on August 13, all troops involved in the construction of the Wall are alerted. The action begins, it is supported in the hinterland by the Soviet armed forces stationed in the GDR. At 0.30 o'clock, tanks roll over the street Unter den Linden. Shortly after 1 o'clock the lights go out at the Brandenburg Gate. Armed GDR border police and members of the combat groups are positioning themselves at the demarcation border. Ghostly scenes take place: pavement is torn open in the spotlight of the military vehicles. Piles are rammed into the ground, barbed wire rolled out, tank barriers erected.
  The "Melodies for the Night" are running on Berliner Rundfunk. At 1:11, they are interrupted. The news anchor reads out a special message: "The Governments of the Warsaw Pact States are addressing the People's Chamber and the government of the GDR with the proposal to introduce such an order on the West Berlin border, which reliably shunts the activity of rioting against the countries of the socialist camp and around the whole area of West Berlin a reliable watch is ensured. " This informs the citizens of the GDR about what has already been going on for 71 minutes: the building of the Wall.
  • Banjo/mb, "Berlin is Shared", Welt, (13.08.2003).

• The 1968 My Lai massacre, during the Vietnam war, and its aftermath can be conceptualized as a struggle over outrage. Examination of the events reveals that the perpetrators and their commanders took various actions that inhibited outrage from the unprovoked killing of civilians. These actions can be classified into five methods: covering up evidence; devaluing the victims; reinterpreting the episode as a military victory; setting up superficial investigations that gave the appearance of justice; and intimidating those who might speak out. These are the same five methods regularly used by perpetrators to inhibit outrage from other types of injustices. This case gives guidance on the sorts of techniques needed to raise concern about human rights violations during wartime.
• The military's belated efforts to find out the truth about My Lai were internal, and did not alert the public to the seriousness of what had happened. Months later, Ridenhour, having had no feedback about the investigation, contacted a literary agent to promote the story, but major newspapers and television networks were not interested. Ridenhour himself approached the Arizona Star, but it also was not interested.
  The person who broke the story was Seymour Hersh, a young investigative journalist. Hearing a little about My Lai and the military investigations from various sources, Hersh dug deeper and soon had researched a major story. However, the mainstream media also were initially not interested. The magazines Life and Look declined Hersh's story, so he turned to a newly formed independent news agency, Dispatch News Service, whose general manager personally contacted 50 editors of newspapers around the country, many of which published Hersh's story on 13 November 1969.
  Nevertheless, more was needed to produce a truly major impact. One of the soldiers at My Lai, Ronald Haeberle, had taken black-and-white photos of the scene and the assault with his army camera; with his own camera, he had taken color photos of the massacre. After My Lai entered the news, Haeberle revealed to a reporter that he had photos, and before long, the Cleveland Plain Dealer published his photographs, subsequently seen across the world. Hersh contacted another soldier who had been at My Lai, Paul Meadlo, and convinced him to tell his story on CBS television, interviewed by Mike Wallace. Meadlo admitted his role in the executions. The interview had an enormous impact.
• The key processes in devaluation of the My Lai victims were racism and stereotyping. Racism was apparent in the language used by U.S. soldiers, who frequently referred to the Vietnamese as "gooks," "dinks," and "slopes." In this regard, reflecting on numerous interviews with soldiers during his inquiry, General Peers commented,
  "The most disturbing factor we encountered was the low regard in which some of the men held the Vietnamese, especially rural or farming people. This attitude appeared to have been particularly strong in Charlie Company, some of whose men viewed the Vietnamese with contempt, considering them subhuman, on the level of dogs."
• The first night we got back and were sitting in the bunker smoking dope. One of my buddies started shaking - it really freaked him out. He kept saying something like "What are we turning into?" It was truly the first time I ever thought about that - I can remember. But it didn't really matter that much; they were just gooks. The next day we were out flying again and killing again ...
  Although the Vietnamese were the primary targets of devaluation, attempts were also made to discredit those who exposed the massacre, in the familiar process of "shooting the messenger." President Richard Nixon asked his aides to undertake a secret investigation of Ridenhour in order to find dirt that could damage his credibility. One of the investigations of the massacre, by a Congressional subcommittee chaired by H. Edward Hébert, "seemed more interested in discrediting those who had exposed the war crimes committed at My Lai than in ensuring that those responsible for them were punished." The subcommittee criticized photographer Ronald Haeberle for not reporting the massacre and questioned him about how much money he had made from his photos. The subcommittee grilled helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson about ordering his crew to be prepared to shoot U.S. soldiers. Peers later commented that he could not understand the subcommittee's treatment of Thompson, which seemed to him "to be more of an inquisition than an investigation" and gave no recognition for Thompson's heroism.

• "My Lai: the struggle over outrage", Peace & Change, Vol. 33, Issue 1, January 2008, pp. 90-113.

• NARRATOR: In 1986, in what was the Soviet Republic of Ukraine, the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded, releasing 400 times more radioactive material than the Hiroshima Bomb. Thirty workers died; 50,000 people fled the nearest city, and the radioactive fallout spread over Europe. It was the world's worst nuclear accident.
  Thirty years later, its hastily built enclosure is crumbling. In a race against time, engineers are struggling to prevent another catastrophic release of deadly radioactive debris into the environment.
• NARRATOR: In the vicinity of the reactor, the radioactive fallout forced a third-of-a-million people to evacuate, never to return.
  It remains the world's worst-ever nuclear power plant disaster. It left the Soviet authorities with a monumental problem: around 200 tons of shattered uranium fuel rods and other radioactive debris remained inside the damaged reactor building. Left uncovered, it would continually release radioactive dust into the air, a poisonous cloud to threaten the surrounding area.
  Over the next six months, workers braved extreme radiation to seal the reactor inside a 300,000-ton shelter, made from steel and concrete. It came to be called the "sarcophagus."
  But it was flawed from the start. The extreme radiation prevented the workers from completing the welds needed to seal the prefabricated sections of the sarcophagus together.

• "Building Chernobyl's MegaTomb", NOVA, PBS, (April 26, 2017).

• The story of what happened in that room, and when, has never been fully told, but is arguably more important in terms of understanding America's military capabilities that day than anything happening simultaneously on Air Force One or in the Pentagon, the White House, or norad's impregnable headquarters, deep within Cheyenne Mountain, in Colorado. It's a story that was intentionally obscured, some members of the 9/11 commission believe, by military higher-ups and members of the Bush administration who spoke to the press, and later the commission itself, in order to downplay the extent of the confusion and miscommunication flying through the ranks of the government.
• For the neads crew, 9/11 was not a story of four hijacked airplanes, but one of a heated chase after more than a dozen potential hijackings—some real, some phantom—that emerged from the turbulence of misinformation that spiked in the first 100 minutes of the attack and continued well into the afternoon and evening. At one point, in the span of a single mad minute, one hears Nasypany struggling to parse reports of four separate hijackings at once. What emerges from the barrage of what Nasypany dubs "bad poop" flying at his troops from all directions is a picture of remarkable composure. Snap decisions more often than not turn out to be the right ones as commanders kick-start the dormant military machine. It is the fog and friction of war live—the authentic military history of 9/11.
• Powell's question—"Is this real-world or exercise?"—is heard nearly verbatim over and over on the tapes as troops funnel onto the ops floor and are briefed about the hijacking. Powell, like almost everyone in the room, first assumes the phone call is from the simulations team on hand to send "inputs"—simulated scenarios—into play for the day's training exercise.
  Boston's request for fighter jets is not as prescient as it might seem. Standard hijack protocol calls for fighters to be launched—"scrambled"—merely to establish a presence in the air. The pilots are trained to trail the hijacked plane at a distance of about five miles, out of sight, following it until, presumably, it lands. If necessary, they can show themselves, flying up close to establish visual contact, and, if the situation demands, maneuver to force the plane to land.
  At this point, certainly, the notion of actually firing anything at a passenger jet hasn't crossed anyone's mind.
• Incredibly, Marr has only four armed fighters at his disposal to defend about a quarter of the continental United States. Massive cutbacks at the close of the Cold War reduced norad's arsenal of fighters from some 60 battle-ready jets to just 14 across the entire country. (Under different commands, the military generally maintains several hundred unarmed fighter jets for training in the continental U.S.) Only four of norad's planes belong to neads and are thus anywhere close to Manhattan—the two from Otis, now circling above the ocean off Long Island, and the two in Virginia at Langley.
  Nasypany starts walking up and down the floor, asking all his section heads and weapons techs if they are prepared to shoot down a civilian airliner if need be, but he's jumping the gun: he doesn't have the authority to order a shootdown, nor does Marr or Arnold, or Vice President Cheney, for that matter. The order will need to come from President Bush, who has only just learned of the attack at a photo op in Florida.
• It was the Friday before Memorial Day weekend, 2003, and the hearing room in the Hart Senate Office Building, in Washington, was half empty as the group of mostly retired military brass arranged themselves at the witness table before the 9/11 commission. The story the norad officers had come to tell before the commission was a relatively humbling one, a point underscored by the questions commission chairman Thomas Kean introduced during his opening remarks: How did the hijackers defeat the system, and why couldn't we stop them? These were important questions. Nearly two years after the attack, the Internet was rife with questions and conspiracy theories about 9/11—in particular, where were the fighters? Could they have physically gotten to any of the hijacked planes? And did they shoot down the final flight, United 93, which ended up in a Pennsylvania field?
• A former senior executive at the F.A.A., speaking to me on the condition that I not identify him by name, tried to explain. "Our whole procedures prior to 9/11 were that you turned everything [regarding a hijacking] over to the F.B.I.," he said, reiterating that hijackers had never actually flown airplanes; it was expected that they'd land and make demands. "There were absolutely no shootdown protocols at all. The F.A.A. had nothing to do with whether they were going to shoot anybody down. We had no protocols or rules of engagement."
• Cheney echoed, "The significance of saying to a pilot that you are authorized to shoot down a plane full of Americans is, a, you know, it's an order that had never been given before." And it wasn't on 9/11, either.
  President Bush would finally grant commanders the authority to give that order at 10:18, which—though no one knew it at the time—was 15 minutes after the attack was over.
  • Michael Bronner, "9/11 LIVE: THE NORAD TAPES" Vanity Fair, (August 2006).

• Knowing that he was close to death at the age of 34, he asked that an autopsy be performed after his death to determine whether his pulmonary fibrosis was a result of his time at the World Trade Center site.
  Detective Zadroga’s autopsy revealed that his lungs were full of ground glass and noxious chemicals. The WTC dust that he breathed in contained asbestos, benzene, jet fuel and other carcinogens. Detective Zadroga’s death was the first to be officially linked to the toxins present at the World Trade Center.
  New York City firefighters and police officers who responded that day, and/or worked on the debris pile afterwards, lost an average of 12 year’s lung capacity. They were not the only ones breathing in that air. Residents, office workers, construction workers removing the debris, and students and teachers were all exposed to the same toxins.
• I fear that this is only the tip of the iceberg. There were approximately 400,000 students, teachers, residents, office workers, responders and volunteers in Lower Manhattan on 9/11, and during the eight months following the attacks, when the air was thick with carcinogens.
  Unfortunately, only 80,000 have registered with the WTC Health Program, which provides free annual medical screenings and health care to those certified with 9/11-related illnesses. Should these screenings detect cancers or other illnesses, survivors are eligible for compensation and long-term health care.
  • Michael Barasach, "Forgotten victims of 9/11 are developing cancer at alarming rates", The Hill, (10/07/17)

• To keep filling the ranks, the Army has had to keep lowering its expectations. Diluting educational, aptitude and medical standards has not been enough. Nor have larger enlistment bonuses plugged the gap. So the Army has found itself recklessly expanding the granting of “moral waivers,” which let people convicted of serious misdemeanors and even some felonies enlist in its ranks.
• Last year, such waivers were granted to 8,129 men and women — or more than one out of every 10 new Army recruits. That number is up 65 percent since 2003, the year President Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq. In the last three years, more than 125,000 moral waivers have been granted by America’s four military services.
• Most of last year’s Army waivers were for serious misdemeanors, like aggravated assault, robbery, burglary and vehicular homicide. But around 900 — double the number in 2003 — were for felonies. Worse, the Army does no systematic tracking of recruits with waivers once it signs them up, and it does not always pay enough attention to any adjustment problems. Without adequate monitoring and counseling, handing out guns to people who have already committed crimes poses a danger to the other soldiers they serve with and to the innocent civilians they are supposed to protect.
• The fastest way to drop the rate of moral waivers would be for the Army to rebuild its recently tarnished reputation among less problematic young Americans. That will require an end to involuntarily extended tours of duty and accelerated, multiple redeployments into combat. The military is America’s face to much of the world. It ought to present the best face of American youth.

• " Moral Waivers and the Military", NYTimes.com, Feb, 20, 2007

• The near constant cycle of violence produced by wars in the Middle East and beyond has had another disturbing effect on the embattled region’s population: an unmatched surge in murder, suicide and sexual assaults, according to a comprehensive public health study.
  • "Middle East Wars Spark Spike in Murder, Suicide and Rape as Violence Soar", Newsweek, by Tom O'connor on 8/8/17.

Diffusionist theories

• Freeman said the new study suggests the process of societies creating connections and becoming interdependent, known as globalization, also played out among human society millennia ago.
  "If every culture was unique, you would expect to see no synchrony, or harmony, across human records of energy consumption," Freeman said.
• "The more tightly connected and interdependent we become, the more vulnerable we are to a major social or ecological crisis in another country spreading to our country," he said. 'The more we are synced, the more we put all our eggs in one basket, the less adaptive to unforeseen changes we become."
  • Jacob Freeman, Jacopo A. Baggio, Erick Robinson, "International study suggests ancient globalization", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, (18-SEP-2018).

• The trapdoor spider, Moggridgea rainbow, is only found on Kangaroo Island off the coast of South Australia. All of the other species in the genus are located in South Africa.
• And yet, the research suggests they made the journey across an ocean a few thousand miles across.
• At first thought, this does seem incredible," Andrew Austin, a professor at the University of Adelaide, said in a news release. "But there are precedents of such ocean travel. Moggridgea are also found on the Comoros volcanic islands, 340 km from mainland Africa, however this is a relatively short distance compared with the 10,000 km from South Africa to Kangaroo Island."
  Scientists hypothesize that a colony of trapdoor spiders likely drifted across the ocean when a large chunk of land and vegetation broke away from the coast and drifted to sea.
  "The burrows they live in are quite stable and they would have been quite secure in their silk-lined tubes with their trapdoors closed -- it was probably quite a safe way to travel," said Sophie Harrison, PhD candidate at the University of Adelaide and lead author of the new study.

• “Trapdoor spiders sailed across Indian Ocean to get from Africa to Australia”, “Brooks Hays, Aug. 2, 2017.

• Spiders can't fly, but they can naturally paraglide. Their ability is known as ballooning, and scientists have now shown that it extends further than windy thermals. Electric fields are strong enough to trigger ballooning even when there's no wind.
• As noted scientist Richard Feynman once explained, "the earth is negative, and the potential in the air is positive." That tension is maintained by thunderstorms, which are happening at some point in the world at any given time. But that tension varies throughout the planet. On a day without a cloud in the sky, APG levels can get up tp 100 volts per meter, the metric used to measure the strength of an electric field. However, in a thunderstorm those levels can rise up to 10 kilovolts per meter, exponentially larger.
• Ballooning has fascinated scientists for years. Charles Darwin noted its occurrence aboard the HMS Beagle, filling the ship with more spiders than he would have cared for. Spiders have proven quite adept at riding the waves, electric or otherwise, even measuring out the wind strength and adjusting themselves accordingly.
  • David Grossman, Spiders Can Harness Electric Fields to Fly, Popular Mechanics, (Jul 5, 2018).

• After 101 days at sea the Kon-Tiki ran aground on a coral reef by the Raroia atoll in Polynesia. The expedition had been an unconditional success, and Thor Heyerdahl and his crew had demonstrated that South American peoples could in fact have journeyed to the islands of the South Pacific by balsa raft.
• "Kon-Tiki" The Kon-Tiki Museum

• We contend that primary cometary dust infection is the most lethal, and that secondary person-to-person transmissions have a progressively reduced virulence, so resulting in a declining incidence of the disease over a limited period. Primary infections of a human population could occur directly by contact with infected meteoritic dust, or indirectly by meteoritic infection passing to other creatures such as mosquitoes, rats and lice which act as intermediaries.

The factors governing the actual pattern of global incidence for any particular extraterrestrial invasion could be complex. If bacteria or viruses are dispersed in a diffuse cloud of small particles, the incidence of disease may well be global. On the other hand, a smaller disintegrating aggregate of infective grain clumps falling over a limited area of the Earth's surface could provide a geographically more localized invasion….Our suggestion, if correct, would have profound biological, medical and sociological implications. A continual microbiological vigil of the stratosphere may well be necessary to eliminate the havoc which will ensue from extraterrestrial invasions in the future.

• • Fred Hoyle N. Chandra Wickramasing "Does Epidemic Disease Come From Space?," appeared in the November 17, 1977 issue of New Scientist: ;as quoted in Mark Strauss, “The Craziest Scientific Theory About What Causes Flu Pandemics”, IO9, (6/23/14).

• Heyerdahl returned to the ocean element when he in 1969 led the first Ra expedition, whose objective was very similar to that of the Kon-Tiki. In the reed boat Ra, named after the Egyptian sun god, the expedition left Safi in Morocco in an attempt to cross the Atlantic, and thereby prove that the papyrus vessels of the ancient Egyptians had been capable of crossing the Atlantic.
  However, after a journey of 5,000 kilometres, the Ra started to break up due to faulty construction. The voyage had to be abandoned. The Ra II expedition, a repetition mounted one year later, was a success, reaching Barbados after a two-month voyage of 6,100 kilometres. The Ra II proved that boats such as the Ra could have sailed with the Canaries current across the Atlantic in prehistoric times.
  In 1977 Heyerdahl undertook yet another voyage with a reed boat, this time too to test theories concerning the ocean routes of antiquity. The purpose of the Tigris expedition was to throw light on ocean trade routes and cultural contacts from about 3000 BC between Sumer in Mesopotamia and a number of other cultural centres in the Middle East, northeast Africa and the present Pakistan.
• His hypothesis was coolly received, so Heyerdahl decided to demonstrate personally what he believed to be the truth of his contentions. The vessel he made for the voyage was a balsawood raft, an exact reproduction of the Indian rafts made in South America since prehistoric times. In 1947, Heyerdahl set off from Callao in Peru with a six-man crew, sailing to the Tuamotu islands of Polynesia on the now world-renowned voyage of the Kon-Tiki.
  The hazardous three-month voyage was not only a daring enterprise, it was also a scholarly achievement.

• "Voyages into History" Dec 21, 2008

• Heyderdahl believed that sun worshippers from the ancient Indus Balley arrived in the Maldives via India and Sri Lanka in the first century BC, based on the discovery of a Roman coin from about 90 BC. The Maldives are mentioned in written sources from the Roman era - which is proof that the islands were known to exist and had been visited by people from the ancient world. Heyderdahl's theory of contact with the Indus Valley civilizzation did not gain general acceptance.
  • "The Maldiives", The Kon-Tiki Museum

• In addition to the many beautiful objects that were found, the team also discovered some double-bladed ceremonial oars that were identical in shape to those known from Easter Island. This discovery, not to mention the temple wall of the birdmen, provided new evidence supporting Hererdahl's theory that Indians from South America had also visited this legendary island.
  • "Tucume", The Kon-Tiki Museum

• Back in Ecuador, Heyerdahl and his colleagues, conducted experiments on an Inca navigational instrument: the guara, a centerboard. Theyproved that the rafts using the guara could alter course and saila gainst the wind. For Heyerdahl, this confirmed his theory that Pre-Columbian peoples could not only sail across the Pacific ocean - they could also returjn home again.
  • "Galapagos", The Kon-Tiki Museum

• Heyerdahl and his research team ecavated the statues and found, under the heads, that colossal torsos existed.
  • "Easter Island", The Kon-Tiki Museum

• In 1971 and 2008 he collected blood samples from Easter Islanders whose ancestors had not interbred with Europeans and other visitors to the island.
  Prof Thorsby looked at the genes, which vary greatly from person to person.
  Most of the islanders' genes were Polynesian, but a few of them also carried genes only previously found in indigenous American populations.
  Prof Thorsby found that in some cases the Polynesian and American genes were shuffled together, the result of a process known "recombination".
  This means the American genes would need to be around for a certain amount of time for it to happen.
  Prof Thorsby can't put a precise date on it, but says it is likely that Americans reached Easter Island before it was "discovered" by Europeans in 1722.
  Prof Thorsby believes there may have been a Kon-Tiki-style voyage from South America to Polynesia.
  Alternatively, Polynesians may have travelled east to South America, and then returned.
  However, Prof Thorsby said that his new evidence does not confirm Heyerdahl's theory that the islanders were originally all from South America.
  The first settlers to Polynesia came from Asia, and they made the biggest contribution to the population, he said.
  Heyerdahl was wrong but not completely," he said.
  • "Kon-Tiki explorer was partly right – Polynesians had South American roots" Richard Alleyne, 17, June 2011.

• Abubakari II ruled what was arguably the richest and largest empire on earth - covering nearly all of West Africa.
  According to a Malian scholar, Gaoussou Diawara in his book, 'The Saga of Abubakari II...he left with 2000 boats', the emperor gave up all power and gold to pursue knowledge and discovery.
  Abubakari's ambition was to explore whether the Atlantic Ocean - like the great River Niger that swept through Mali - had another 'bank'.
  In 1311, he handed the throne over to his brother, Kankou Moussa, and set off on an expedition into the unknown.
• The researchers claim that Abubakari's fleet of pirogues, loaded with men and women, livestock, food and drinking water, departed from what is the coast of present-day Gambia.
  They are gathering evidence that in 1312 Abubakari II landed on the coast of Brazil in the place known today as Recife.

• "Africa's 'greatest explorer'" Joan Baxter, BBC, 13 December, 2000

• One may or may not agree with Gavin Menzies that the Chinese circumnavigated and discovered the world - including the Americas, Australia and the Antarctica - in the year 1421, seventy year before Columbus. One may or may not agree with some (Islamic) scholars who locate the "discovery if America" in, say, the claim of the Muslim historian and geographer Abul-Hassan Ali inb Al-Hussain al-Nassudi (871-957) that during the rule of Abdullah ibn Mumammad in Spain, a navigator, Khashkhash inb Saeed ibn Aswad of Cordoba, crossed the Atlantic and reached an unknown territory ("Ard Mahhoola"). One might or might not accept the evidence that Leo Weiner offers in Africa and the Discovery of America or Van Sertina in They Come Before Colombus to suggest that Africans had sailed - among others, via the Moorish connection - and settled on the continent long before Colombus "discovered" it.
  • "Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing", Tabish Khair, Martin Leer, Justin D. Edwards, p.12

• In 1808 the Portuguese Crown declared “Just War” (Bellum iustum) against all Indian tribes that did not accept European laws. The fierce Botocudo were targeted in such wars and, in consequence, became virtually extinct by the end of the 19th century (24).
• Another imaginable pre-Columbian scenario involves opportunities for more recent direct contact between Polynesia and South America before the European arrival. Such possibility of a direct movement from Oceania across the Pacific Ocean to the Americas was raised by Cann (43) on a discussion of the origin of the Amerindian B haplogroup. This finding prompted Bonatto et al. to evaluate the likelihood of a Polynesian-Amerindian contact having occurred and conclude against it, although they could rule out neither minor contact events nor nonmaternal genetic exchange. New evidence from human and nonhuman material has become available since then. For example, there were archeological findings of Polynesian chicken bones in the Arauco Peninsula, in Chile (45) and evidence has been found in Easter Island of pre-Columbian presence of sweet potato and bottle gourd, both typical of South America. Independent of the plausibility or implausibility of the pre-Columbian arrival of Polynesians to the South American Pacific coast, there still would remain the need to explain how these migrants crossed the Andes and ended up in Minas Gerais, Brazil. We feel that such a scenario is too unlikely to be seriously entertained.
• The last scenario that we wish to assess is the possible arrival of Polynesian haplogroups to Brazil in modern times through the African slave trade from Madagascar, where 20% of the mtDNA lineages belong to the B4a1a1a haplogroup (29). In 1807 Britain outlawed the Atlantic slave trade, making it illegal for British ships to transport slaves. The Royal Navy then began to patrol the waters off West Africa to enforce the so-called “Blockade of Africa.” British cruisers actually succeeded in capturing 169 Brazilian ships in that region in the period 1815–1850
• Another possibility would be that female slaves from Madagascar living in these regions might have been kidnapped by Botocudo Indians or had run away and find refuge among them, thus creating conditions for introgression of their mtDNA in the Amerindian population. In fact, the kidnapping of a female by Botocudo Indians (Aimores) is a central theme of an 1870 Brazilian opera (“Il Guarany,” composed by Carlos Gomes). Although fanciful, this is perhaps the most likely scenario among those that can be entertained.
  In conclusion, we found evidence of Polynesian mtDNA haplogroups in 2 of 14 Botocudo skulls that were studied , with independent confirmation of the findings in two separate laboratories. As indicated previously, these findings have bona fide scientific status. We have entertained several possible models to try to explain how these Polynesian sequences were found in individuals from an Amerindian population living in a region in the interior of Brazil. At present, our results do not allow us to accept or definitely reject any of these scenarios. We hope that further molecular studies will settle the question and will clarify the relevance of our findings for a more complete understanding of pre-Columbian migratory routes of people into the Americas.

• "Identification of Polynesian mtDNA haplogroups in remains of Botocudo Amerindians from Brazil" Vanessa Faria Gonçalves, Jesper Stenderup, Cláudia Rodrigues-Carvalho, Hilton P. Silva, Higgor Gonçalves-Dornelas, Andersen Líryo, Toomas Kivisild, Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas, Paula F. Campos, Morten Rasmussen, Eske Willerslev and Sergio Danilo J. Pena, PNAS, April 16, 2013. 110 (16) 6465-6469

• Genetic studies have consistently indicated a single common origin of Native American groups from Central and South America. However, some morphological studies have suggested a more complex picture, whereby the northeast Asian affinities of present-day Native Americans contrast with a distinctive morphology seen in some of the earliest American skeletons, which share traits with present-day Australasians (indigenous groups in Australia, Melanesia, and island Southeast Asia). Here we analyse genome-wide data to show that some Amazonian Native Americans descend partly from a Native American founding population that carried ancestry more closely related to indigenous Australians, New Guineans and Andaman Islanders than to any present-day Eurasians or Native Americans. This signature is not present to the same extent, or at all, in present-day Northern and Central Americans or in a ∼12,600-year-old Clovis-associated genome, suggesting a more diverse set of founding populations of the Americas than previously accepted.
  • Genetic evidence for two founding populations of the Americas, Pontus Skoglund, Swapan Mallick, Maria Cátira Bortolini, Niru Chennagiri, Tábita Hünemeier, Maria Luiza Petzl-Erler, Francisco Mauro Salzano, Nick Patterson & David Reich, Nature, volume 525, pages 104–108 (03 September 2015)

• “This is not a surprise based on oral history and other archaeological finds, and it was just a matter of time before we had a good example of Eurasian metal that had been traded,” said H. Kory Cooper, an associate professor of anthropology, who led the artifacts’ metallurgical analysis. “We believe these smelted alloys were made somewhere in Eurasia and traded to Siberia and then traded across the Bering Strait to ancestral Inuits people, also known as Thule culture, in Alaska. Locally available metal in parts of the Arctic, such as native metal, copper and meteoritic and telluric iron were used by ancient Inuit people for tools and to sometimes indicate status. Two of the Cape Espenberg items that were found – a bead and a buckle — are heavily leaded bronze artifacts. Both are from a house at the site dating to the Late Prehistoric Period, around 1100-1300 AD, which is before sustained European contact in the late 18th century.”
• “The belt buckle also is considered an industrial product and is an unprecedented find for this time,” Cooper said. “It resembles a buckle used as part of a horse harness that would have been used in north-central China during the first six centuries before the Common Era.”

• "Old World metals were traded on Alaska coast several hundred years before contact with Europeans" Purdue, June 8, 2016

• Hwui Shan’s voyage from China, five hundred years before Lei I Eric son and a thousand before Columbus, lias been almost totally ignored by modern American historians, yet a rather considerable number of learned papers, articles, and even books were once written about him by Western scholars who believed that he crossed the Pacific: and landed on the west coast of this continent—which he described as the wonderful Land of Fusang—in the year 458. The great Alexander von Humboldt called him the Leif Ericson of China, and the Land of Fusang the Vinland of the West. The French sinologues de Guignes and Paravey believed that he reached California. The German Karl Friedrich Neumann identified the Land of Fusang as Mexico. One American, Charles G. Leland, wrote a monograph called Fusang (London, 1875). Another, Edward P. Vining, compiled an 8oo-page encyclopaedic volume about the man he regarded as An Inglorious Columbus (New York, 1885). Dr. Charles E. Chapman, in his History of California: The Spanish Period (New York, 1921), devoted a chapter to him entitled “The Chinese Along the Pacific Coast in Ancient Times.”
  Hwui Shan, whose name (also written as “Hoei Shin”) means “very intelligent” in Chinese, was a cha-men , or mendicant Buddhist priest, from Afghanistan who first came to China as a very young missionary about the year 450. The period was one of great expansion for Buddhism, and extraordinary journeys made by cha-men on land and sea were not at all uncommon. This one seems to have left China almost immediately, in the company of four fellow priests, on a missionary journey to evangeli/e new lands. His report indicates that they sailed northeast of Japan to the Land of Ta-Han (the Kamchatka Peninsula in Siberia) and from there travelled 20,000 Ii (about 6,600 miles) east to the Land of Fusang. This distance and direction suggest that they went by a coasting, islandhopping route across the North Pacific, past the Aleutian Islands to Alaska, and down the west coast of America as far as Mexico. There, apparently, they remained for forty years, observing the country, its people, its customs, crafts, plants, and animals—and diffusing Buddhism among the inhabitants.
  At that period in Europe the Roman Empire was still in existence, and Fiance and Germany, still known as Gaul, were peopled by tribes of Goths. No one, as far as is known, had ever attempted—at least deliberately—to cross the mysterious ocean named for Atlantis, whose ancient civili/.ation and disappearance had been related by Egyptian priests. Old myths and legends have given rise, of course, to the idea that there were prehistoric or very early crossings of the Atlantic. The Greeks believed that there were Isles of the Blest far out in the Western Sea inhabited by men to whom the gods had given the gift of immortality. A strangely similar paradise was known in Welsh mythology as Avalon, the abode of deathless heroes like King Arthur. Seafaring tales of great antiquity, which may or may not have been true, intermixed with fables, also contribute to the speculation that the New World may have often been found. Diodorus of Sicily said that the Phoenicians (expert seamen 1,500 years before Christ) venturing out beyond the Pillars of Hercules on their circumnavigation of Africa were blown by a storm to a large, fertile, prosperous land in the west, whose citizens enjoyed much leisure time. The historian Plutarch also recorded the yarn of certain sailors who landed in Spain circa 60 u.c. after visiting, so they said, two large Atlantic islands 10,000 stadia (about 1,200 miles) west of the African coast. The Portuguese, too, had their Antilia (a name that was later applied to the West Indies), which appears as an island or a large land mass on many medieval charts and globes with cartographical exactitude midway between Lisbon and Japan. In addition there was Saint Brendan (484-577), an Irish monk believed by many writers to have discovered America. There seems no doubt that he and his crew of forty other religious seafarers in their specially constructed skin-covered kayak made it to Iceland; a colony of Irish monks was found there by the Vikings when they first arrived. But even if Saint Brendan did push on for forty clays and nights to the Land of the Gods, as his legend-encrusted narrative maintains, and even if it was America, Hwui Shan still preceded him by a century, for the Irishman’s alleged discovery did not occur until the year 545.
• It was by no means the first time the Emperor had heard of this wondrous country. Long before Hwui Slum’s time Fusang was already well known to the Chinese, in poetry and fairy tale, as a kind of earthly paradise across the Pacific: where everything grew to supernatural si/e: trees a mile high, silkworms seven feet long, birds with three legs, etcetera. In China “Fusang” is still synonymous (at least it was in preCommunist days) with “fabulous” or “super” or “colossal.” Hangchow merchants, for example, used to advertise “Fusang silk” or “Fusang porcelain,” meaning something out of this world.
• Behind the fiction may have been the fact of earlier discoveries and exploration. The Chinese are thought to be the first people to have developed the arts of boatbuilding and navigation. The tall trees of the fairy tale may have been, originally, California redwoods seen by some ancient mariner from the East. Although specific evidence of a conclusive kind is lacking and no dramatic, scientifically confirmed archaeological finds have yet been made on our Pacific coast, there have been some interesting amateur discoveries. In 1882 a cache of Chinese brass coins, said to have been dated 1200 B.C., was dug up by miners at a place called Cassiar in British Columbia, along with a bronze fan bearing Chinese characters. Strange implements, believed to be Oriental, have also been unearthed in the Northwest, while Indian legends all along that coast tell of men and ships that arrived there long before the Europeans. There is, moreover, a great deal of cultural evidence of a general kind supporting the probability of ancient human contacts between Asia and America. Many arts and customs and religious beliefs of the early civilizations in Middle and South America—pictographic: writing, pyramid architecture, massiveness and grotesquerie in sculpture, the belief in reincarnation, monasticism in Mexico—have definitely Oriental echoes. In an article entitled “Did Hindu Sailors Get There Before Columbus?” in The Asia Magazine of March 11, 1962, the modern Indian Buddhist priest Cha-men LaI presents an impressive illustrated summary of these similarities with special reference to Hinduism, the mother religion of Buddhism. “Deep in the forests of Copan in Honduras,” he writes, “one may see Indra, the god of paradise in Hindu mythology, riding an elephant. Triloknath, the Hindu ruler of the three worlds, was known to the Mexicans by the same name. In a temple in Guatemala there is a statue of an incarnation of Vishnu as Kurma, the tortoise. At Copán I found no fewer than three images of Hamiman, the monkeyfaced god celebrated in the Ramayana epic. How does one explain the undoubted affinity between Hinduism and the religions of South and Central America? I believe that the ancestors of the people who practised these forms of worship ventured across the Pacific Ocean as did the Malayans and the Polynesians in the fifth century, using boats much like the junks known to the Chinese.”
• There seems to be no doubt that Hwui Shan was a real person who was thought by his contemporaries to have made a most unusual voyage east of China. On his return to King-chow he was ordered by the Emperor to tell his tale to the courtier Prince Yu Kie, who entered it in the imperial archives as one of the noteworthy happenings of the year 499. It was later published, about the year 600, by the historian Li Yan Chu, whose Records of the Liang Dynasty form part of the great annals of ancient China known as The Twenty-two Historians . Additional passages, taken from the original court archives, were published in the thirteenth century by the reputable scholar Ma Twan Lin. The story also appears or is referred to in other works of Chinese scholarship—being everywhere treated as history, not as fable—including Volume 231 of the eighteenth-century encyclopaedia Tu-Shu-Tsi-Chin (the Chinese invented encyclopaedias and have had them since the tenth century, one famous example, compiled in the days of the Ming Dynasty, having remained in manuscript because it was too large to print: it consisted of 22,937 books).
• The second remarkable feature in Hwui Shan’s story is the almost incredible accuracy of the distance and direction he gave for a journey from Asia to America, and the plausibility of his route. “Fusang is located,” he said, “20,000 Ii east of the country of Ta Han.” If you take a pair of dividers and step off this distance on a globe, figuring the Chinese Ii at about one-third of a mile, and follow a course along the coasts and islands from Kamchatka (Ta Han) past the Komandorskies and the Aleutians, then along the coast of Canada and the United States, you will end with astonishing accuracy in the neighborhood of Acapidco, the principal western seaport of Mexico.
• Asia and North America are practically joined together at Hering Strait (the classic theory regarding the origin of the American Indians is that they migrated from Asia across the land bridge that actually existed there in prehistoric times), and the sea route along the Aleutian chain is such that even a small, slow, primitive type of vessel can follow it without ever being long out oi sight of land. At only one point—between the Komandorskies and the Aleutians—there is a stretch of some 200 miles of open ocean, and even there land can sometimes be seen: it has been reported that on exceptionally clear days Attu has been sighted from Siberia. At no other place in the entire archipelago are the numerous islands otit of sight of each other or as much as one hundred miles apart. Frequently stormy and’ with few convenient landing places, this route must yet have been irresistible to ancient Asiatic mariners. A strong warm current, known as the Japan Current, or Black Stream, (lows eastward along it all the way to Lower California. As it leaves Japan and passes the Kurile Islands toward Kamchatka the current reaches a speed of from seventy-five to a hundred miles a day, providing a very effective first-stage thrust for a trans-Pacific voyage. Many ships have been driven to America by the Japan Current; during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the first Europeans were starting to settle our west coast and write its history, records were made of sixty Oriental sailing vessels that h;id dossed the Pacific Ocean in this way. In 1774, for instance, the Spanish explorer Juan Bautista de Anza, marching overland from Arizona to what he called “the Philippine Ocean,” saw the wreck of an exotic-looking ship of non-European construction on the rocks near the Mission of Carmel. In 1815 a Japanese junk appeared oil Santa Karbara with fourteen dead and three survivors on board. She had started on a simple voyage from Osaka to Tokyo, had been blown oil course by a storm, and had drifted—solely by means of the current, without sail or mast or rudder—for over a year before reaching America.
• As pointed out by Ignacio Bernai in his recent Mexico Before Cortez , the period of Hwui Shan’s voyage—458-499 A.D.—coincided with a golden age in Mexico now called by archaeologists the Classic Period. The Mexicans of that age possessed a system of hieroglyphic writing undeciphered to this day; a calendar more accurate than our own; and a knowledge of mathematics that included a symbol for zero centuries before the concept was known in Europe. They also built great metropolitan cities, particularly one named Teotihuacân in the ruins of which, twentyfive miles from Mexico City, may be seen the gigantic Pyramid of the Sun. These extraordinary metropolises (not to be confused with the Aztec cities that were there at the time of the Spanish conquest) are unique in the history of ancient cultures, for they had no city walls or fortifications. Their inhabitants appear to have had no enemies—and hence no need to defend themselves—and to have known nothing about war. They worshipped peaceful gods like the sun and the moon and the rain and the gentle Quetzalcoatl, the winged serpent, to whom butterflies were offered in sacrifice. It was not until the Toltec period (and much later still, in the time of the relatively modern Aztecs) that bloodthirsty warriors who practiced human sacrifice conquered and ruled the country. Another unusual thing about the Mexicans of the Classic Period is that they cremated their dead, a practice unheard of at any other time in Mexican history and one pertinent to the question of Buddhist influence.
• Iron, of course, existed in Mexico but its use was unknown before the time of the Spaniards, who were the first to mine it. “Metals never had a great importance in American cultures,” writes Dr. Bernai. “Metals were for luxury rather than for their practical usefulness. Nevertheless, especially among the Tarascos, copper was abundantly used to make needles, pliers, awls, hatchets, and the cutting edges of farm tools.” The Tarascos, incidentally, were a tribe who lived in western Mexico, the region where Hwui Shan would have landed. His reference to the Mexicans’ indifference toward gold and silver is also borne out by eyewitness accounts of the Spaniards. Bernai Diaz, one of Cortes’ lieutenants, describing the market place of Mexico City (in his Discovery and Conquest of Mexico ), stated that gold and silver, far from being used as money, were bought and sold like other commodities and paid for with the regular currency of the country, which was cocoa.
• There are also some serious inconsistencies and problems in Hwui Shan’s story. The century plant does not bear reddish, pear-shaped fruit; moreover, objectors say that any convincing description of the plant should have included a reference to pulque , the well-known Mexican liquor made from its juice. A particularly difficult problem also appears in one excerpt which has been said to prove that the Land of Fusang was not in America: “They have large cattle horns which they use as containers, the biggest ones holding about five gallons. They have carts drawn by horses, cattle, and deer. The people of that country raise deer as the Chinese raise cattle and from their milk make a fermented liquor. …” It is well known, of course, that American Indians, in spite of the high degree of civilization they reached in Mexico and other places, never domesticated animals or, strange to say, discovered the use of the wheel, except as they used it in toys. Cattle and horses and carts—not to mention trained deer!—were unknown among them until the Spaniards introduced them.
  There is also another difficult problem involved in Hwui Shan’s account—his mention of a Land of Women. This, he said, was located 1,000 Ii beyond the Land of Fusang. Its female inhabitants were completely covered with hair, walked erect, and chattered a lot among themselves but were shy when they saw ordinary human beings. They gave birth to their young after six or seven months of pregnancy and nursed them on their backs. The babies were able to walk within 100 days and were fully grown in three or four years. “Believe it or not,” he concluded, “this is truel”
  Problems like these may cause some readers to dismiss the entire story of Hwui Shan as nothing more than a fifth-century addition to the old Chinese fairy tale of Fusang. It ought to be remembered, however, that very few ancient travellers who visited foreign countries for the first time were accurate in everything they reported, nor were their accounts lacking in fantastic touches. Take, for example, the Icelandic sagas that tell of the colony of Vinland. They not only mention monopeds—one-legged men—but recount such bloodcurdling Viking exploits as that of Freydis, Leif Ericson’s half sister, who on one expedition to the New World allegedly murdered all the other women in her party with a battle axe in order to retain supreme command. For centuries, such tall tales as these caused the sagas to be regarded as entirely fictitious. Marco Polo, the first Westerner to see the Far East, lived for twenty years at the court of Kubla Khan and travelled widely in Asia. He came back to Venice with Paul Bunyan-like tales of a bird that could lift an elephant (the roc of the Arabian Nights , which he had heard about and accepted as factual), oxen as large as elephants, dogs as big as donkeys, and men with tails. Christopher Columbus, besides being a superb navigator, was a geographer and a cartographer of distinction, one of the first mariners to use the compass, and the very first to note that the North Star moves around the celestial pole. Yet even this sophisticated man repeated, like Hwui Shan, the story of an Island of Amazons. As a matter of fact, the legend of a Land of Women plays a considerable role in American history. California was long believed by the Spaniards to be an island rich in pearls and gold, populated by black-skinned ladies “without a single man among them” and ruled by a beautiful queen “of majestic proportions” named Calaffa. Such was the description of our as-yet-undiscovered Golden State in Amadis of Gaul , that infamous five-volume, fifteenth-century best seller (with sequels) which, more than any other book, was responsible for the madness of Don Quixote. The legend inspired the equipping of expeditions and persisted as late as the seventeenth century. So, too, did the belief of brave, strong men in the Fountain of Youth, the Earthly Paradise, and the fabulous Golden Kingdom of Quivira.

• "Was America The Wonderful Land Of Fusang?" Robert Larson, American Heritage, April 1966, Volume 17, Issue 3

• Inasmuch as Menzies believes that he has collected a veritable mountain of evidence, he is not disheartened by skepticism about some of his astonishing assertions. As he told People Magazine (24 February 2003) after 1421 hit the New York Times bestseller list, "[t]here's not one chance in a hundred million that I'm wrong!" He regards his investigation as an ongoing project: a website (www.1421.tv) provides yet more evidence, further revelations will appear in the forthcoming paperback edition, and a team of researchers currently is assisting him in combing medieval Spanish and Portuguese documents for added proof of his contentions. 1421, he informs the reader, will be published in more than sixteen countries, a PBS series is in production, and television rights have been sold around the world.
  Menzies is contemptuous of professional historians who ignore evidence of Chinese influence in the Americas, "presumably because it contradicts the accepted wisdom on which not a few careers have been based" (p. 232). He explains that he has uncovered information that has eluded many eminent historians of China, even though it was right before their eyes, "only because I knew how to interpret the extraordinary maps and charts that reveal the course and the extent of the voyages of the great Chinese fleets between 1421 and 1423" (pp. n-12). A former submarine commander in the British Royal Navy, he has sailed in the wake of Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, and James Cook, hence he recognizes that those mariners, who navigated with copies of Chinese maps in hand, were themselves merely sailing in the backwash of Zheng He's fleets (pp. 9, 12).
  • "How Not to (Re)Write World History: Gavin Menzies and the Chinese Discovery of America", ROBERT FINLAY, JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, JUNE 2OO4 p.230

• The good news conveyed by 1421 is that there are big bucks in world history: Menzies received an advance of $500,000 ($825,000)from his British publisher, whose initial printing runs to 100,000 copies. The bad news is that reaping such largesse evidently requires producing a book as outrageous as 1421. Menzies flouts the basic rules of both historical study and elementary logic. He misrepresents the scholarship of others, and he frequently fails to cite those from whom he borrows. He misconstrues Chinese imperial policy, especially as seen in the expeditions of Zheng He, and his extensive discussion of Western cartography reads like a parody of scholarship. His allegations regard ing Nicol? di Conti (c. 1385-1469), the only figure in 1421 who links the Ming voyages with European events, are the stuff of historical fiction, the product of an obstinate misrepresentation of sources. The author's misunderstanding of the technology of Zheng He's ships impels him to depict voyages no captain would attempt and no mariner could survive, including a 4,000-mile excursion along the Arctic circle and circumnavigation of the Pacific after having already sailed more than 42,000 miles from China to West Africa, South America, Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines (pp. 199-209, 311).
  • Ibid p.231

• Portraying himself as an innocent abroad, forthrightly seeking truths the academic establishment has disregarded or suppressed, Menzies in fact is less an "unlettered Ishmael" than a Captain Ahab, gripped by a mania to bend everything to his purposes. His White Whale is Eurocentric historiography, which celebrates Columbus (a thief and fraud, pp. 382-383) and Vasco da Gama (a terrorist, p. 406) without realizing they merely aped the epic deeds of the Chinese. More gener ally, Menzies, in an unacknowledged echo of Joseph Needham, laments that China did not become "mistress of the world," with Confucian harmony and Buddhist benevolence uniting humankind. Instead, the cruel, barbaric West, secretly and fraudulently capitalizing on Chinese achievements, imposed its dominion around the globe (pp. 405-406).
  The wounded leviathan of Eurocentricism no doubt deservesanother harpoon, but 1421 is too leaky a vessel to deliver it. Exami nation of the book's central claims reveals they are uniformly without substance: first, that the 1421-1423 voyages Menzies describes could not have taken place; second, that Conti played no role in transmitting knowledge of Chinese exploration to European cartographers; and third, that all Menzies exploration to European cartographers; and third, that all Menzies's evidence for the presence of the Chinese fleetsabroad is baseless.
• 1421 concentrates on what Menzies terms "the missing years" of the sixth voyage of Zheng He, that is, the two and a half years between March 1421 and October 1423, during which the fleets of Zheng He supposedly roamed the globe. Menzies is not interested in the well known, much-studied voyages of Zheng He, and he ignores the extensive literature on them. He dispenses with six of the seven expeditions (between 1405 and 1433) in one page (pp. 54-55). He singles out the sixth voyage because it was the only one in which Zheng He returned to China early, leaving his subordinate eunuch-captains to carry out their mission of returning tribute envoys to their kingdoms. This circumstance offers Menzies a window of opportunity to imagine that the armada left the Indian Ocean to seek new lands in the Atlantic and Pacific. Since he claims that the mariners sailed about 40,000 miles in their world-girdling Odysseys, two and a half years is just barely enough time for them to journey such a vast distance while also charting coasts, mining ore, meeting alien peoples, and founding colonies.
• Throughout 1421, Menzies places great emphasis on imperial officials in 1477 destroying many of the documents regarding the Ming expeditions in order to prevent a renewal of the project.

• Ibid 231-233

• There are plentiful surviving documents on the expeditions, however, that prove there were no "missing years." The sources indicate that an imperial order for the sixth voyage was issuedin March 1421, although the flotilla did not leave China until the turn of the year. It reached Sumatra around July 1422, after many stops in Southeast Asia; Zheng He returned home to Nanjing by September 1422, leaving his subordinates to sail on to thirty-six ports in Ceylon, India (both Bengal and the Malabar coast), the Persian Gulf, and East Africa. The last of the squadrons returned to China on 8 October 1423, having completed their journey of some 11,000 miles in the expected time, about one year and three months after departing Sumatra.6 Thus there are no "missing years" for the Ming fleets, no time for even a portion of the extraordinary exploits narrated in 1421.
• Even taking Menzies's account at face value, however, it is farfetched. The author asserts that Zheng He arrived home in November 1421 and that his captains completed their errands in the Indian Ocean in July of the same year, a mere three months after departing Sumatra. After rendezvousing at Sofala (across from Mozambique on the East African coast), they doubled the Cape of Good Hope in August and headed north to the Cape Verde Islands, reaching them in late September; a month later, they made landfall off the Orinoco River in Brazil, and by November they were approaching Cape Horn in the South Atlantic (pp. 83, 99-100, 113-116). In other words, Menzies proposes that Zheng He's captains completed a voyage of some 17,000 miles in mainly unknown seas in seven months, including dozens of stops in the Indian Ocean, while Zheng He took the same amount of time to journey about 3,500 miles from Sumatra to Nanjing.
  • Ibid, 234

• The hazards involved in such voyages were never the less so great that it would be wrong to picture a flotilla of Bristol fishing doggers heading straight for Labrador and Newfoundland every year after 1481. Knowledge obtained up to that point had been gradual, and it must have come at untold cost in ships and human lives.
• It was only after John Cabot's successful 1497 voyage to the "Island of the Seven Cities" that the location of the teeming Newfoundland Banks became common knowledge. Cabot's mostly English crew said there was so much fish in the new land that Iceland would no longer be needed.
• Late in 1497 or early in 1498, the English merchant John Day (also known as Hugh say) wrote to Christopher Colombus about Cabot's discoveries. He told Columbus that the cape Cabot had found "was found and discovered in the past [en otros tiempos] by the men from Bristol who found 'Brasil' as your Lordship knows. It was called the Island of Brasil, and it is assumed believed to be the mainland that the men from Bristol found.

• The Frozen Echo: Greenland and the Exploration of North America, Ca. A.D 1000-1500 by Kirsten A. Seaver p. 222

• Scandanavian peoples had, in fact, experienced visits from the seal people at least as early as the thirteenth century, and were as puzzled as the Orcadians. In the 1420s the Danish cartographer Clavys Swart noted he had seen "the little oygmises...after they had been caught at sea in a skin boat which now hangs in [the] Cathedral [at Trondheim]. In the cathedral there is also a long boat of skin which was taken with the same kind of pygmies in it." On his maps, Swart placed a large island halfway between Norway and Greenland, which he thought must be the home of the owners of the skin boats. The Trondheim cathedral records indivate that a kayak and an umiak were indeed among its museum pieces in the fifteenth century, and the cathedrals inventory descriptions of the time make it clear they were Greenland-style boats.
• The "escaping-captive" theory gained considerable support and is still being championed. There is no question that while some arctic inhabitants were willing passengers to Europe, considerable numbers were taken forcibly from their homes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In addition tot he Labrador womana dn child kidnapped in 1566 by French fishermenfor exhibition in several German cities in 1567, and the four people taken from southeast Baffin Island by Martin Frobisher's 1576 and 1577 expeditions, at least thirty Greenlanders were kidnapped by Danish, Norwegian and Dutch ships, and taken to Europe between 1805 and 1660.

• "In Order to Live Untroubled: Inuit of the Central Arctic, 1550-1940", Renée Fossett, 2001, p.80

• Historians and archaeologists talk of immigrants moving north into the newly exposed rich northern Tundra both in Europe and North America. But it was not until Guthorm Gjessing, Norwegian archaeologist and ardent diffusionist, noticed a striking similarity between the cultural remains in Norway and the Maritime Archaic or red paint people of Maine and the Canadian Maritimes that the Atlantic rim connection was made. Style and technique of worked stone and the use of skin boats for deep-sea fishing and red ochre in burials were common. Impossible some say, but others–usually those with salt in their blood–think otherwise and see the fish-laden pack ice as a bridge not a barrier to traveling around the North Atlantic rim.
  • "North Atlantic Rim", New England Antiquities Research Association

• Betty Meggers found 6,000 year old Japenese Jomon pottery techniques replicated in Ecuador, Steve Jett, southeast Asian beaten bark cloth techniques. Carl Johannessen found America Maize carved on Stupa's of the Punjab, while George Carter demonstrated the Mexicans were betting blue eggs from Chinese Chickens. Nancy Yaw Davis found enimatic traits in the Zunis and proposed that they derived from 16th century Japan, once more demonstrating that the Pacific Ocean was a bridge not a barrier across the Pacific.
  • "Across the Pacific", New England Antiquities Research Association

• Few thought it likely that any people could have in­habited Iceland before the Irish in the eighth century, nor had they found man-made evidence or confirmation of earlier human contact. Throughout Europe and America, evidence has been found of Neolithic people in earlier cultural levels. Whether on islands or else­where, research certainly shows that savages had lived in Northern Europe, Iceland had, no doubt, been severed from the continent long before Northern Europe had been settled by human clans during the Stone Age and long after. Using small boats poorly suited for the open ocean, they were not able to endure heavy seas; they followed the coasts, and did not risk the open ocean. Later, even the Phoenicians were lost if they could not see land, and dared not venture far from the coast.
  • "The Classical World", New England Antiquities Research Association

• But it was 925 AD before Dicuil, an Irish monk records that his brethren had been visiting Thule for many years. He gives a description of that barren land that leaves little doubt that he is referring to Iceland.
• By 874 Iceland had been “discovered and the adventurous Norse ranges farther west to Greenland and the illusive Vinland around 1000 AD.
• The North Atlantic voyager who should be considered the discoverer of the New World was Gunbjorn, who fell afoul of Iceland and emerged from the fog on the rocky skerries off the east coast of Greenland sometime in the late ninth century. North American settlement, for Greenland is certainly geologically and geographically part of North America, began with the arrival of the outlawed Eric the red, with his band of settlers in 985 in the fjords of the west coast of Greenland. This settlement, known as the “Eastern Settlement” spawned another outpost three hundred miles to the north which was known as the “Western Settlement”. The two settlements struggled to survive until the Western Settlement was abandoned around 1340 and the “east” settlement disappeared during the little ice age of the mid-16th century. The fate of Vinland the Good is not so clearly documented.
  • "Irish Monks and Renegade Vikings", New England Antiquities Research Association

Art History/Art Criticism

• Popularly called "Venus figures," these tiny statues were crafted by human ancestors living in locations across Europe and Asia starting around 35,000 years ago. Most often, the pieces have been interpreted by academics and journalists as fertility figures that could be used ritually, or as what essentially amounts to hand-held pornography, produced by men for other men — the logic here being that sexual images supposedly arouse males more than females.
• Science-oriented media, in fact, according to Nowell and Chang, do often echo the academic, sexualized discourse. Do these figurines represent early pornography? Science asked. Nature dragged out phrases like "prehistoric pinup" in referring to the object's "almost aggressively sexual nature." In Discovery magazine in 2011, the more general claim was made that the objectification of women can be traced "deep into the mists of prehistory."
  Nowell and Chang report, though: that the figures of this time period are far too variable in form to be reduced female anatomy; that there's no evidence these small statues were made by men for men; and that, in any case, it's poor practice to assume that our ancestors would have responded to hyperfemale figurines in any certain way. "The assumption that Paleolithic people would have responded to images of female nudity in the same manner as modern people — or, rather, a sample of modern people drawn from a single Western culture group at a specific point in time — is untenable," they write. Response to art "is highly culturally mediated," they say, and thus likely to differ across time.
• AN: I guess the answer is both yes and no. Yes, it surprises because as an archaeologist when I look at the tremendous diversity represented by these figurines I can't believe we reduce them to a pair of breasts. Because most people, including archaeologists outside my field, normally see images of the same 3 or 4 figurines repeatedly, they are unaware of this variation in style, material and context.
  Some figurines are male, some are female; some are human, some are animals and some are fantastical creatures (i.e., they exist only in our imagination); some wear items of clothing, others do not; some are found in ritualized contexts while others are found in refuse heaps; some have perforations suggesting they were made to be worn while at least one figurine has a hollowed out back suggesting that it was perhaps mounted on a pole. So to interpret all of these figurines as sexual objects and in particular to use the term "pornographic" as some of the academic and non-academic writers do when that is such a culturally specific term and we are talking about a period of 25,000-35,000 years ago is not only surprising, it is disheartening.
• Olga Soffer's research with her colleagues James Adovasio and David Hyland has been instrumental in providing a more holistic understanding of the past by, as we say in archaeology, making the invisible visible. Their work has shed light on the existence of a complex textile technology thousands of years before we thought possible. By extension, their research on textiles, in conjunction with research on ceramic technology (also Olga's work!), and on the production of beads, flutes, sculptures and cave paintings all of which date back 25,000 to 35,0000 or even 40,000 years ago illuminate the lives of all Ice Age peoples.
  I always tell my students that life in Ice Age Europe would have been demanding and you couldn't have afforded to have 50% of the population not contributing to the economic, political and social well-being of their communities. This isn't a politically correct revisionist view of prehistory but rather an attempt to be more scientific.
• AN: It is important because when highly respected journals such as Nature use terms such as "Prehistoric Pin-up" and "35,000 year old sex object" and archaeologists from prestigious universities describe the figurine as "sexually exaggerated to the point of being pornographic" their voices carry weight and authority. This allows journalists and other researchers — particularly evolutionary psychologists — to use this interpretation of archaeological evidence to legitimize and naturalize contemporary western values and behaviors by tracing them back into the "mists of prehistory."
  In other words, we look at the way gender and gender relations are constructed today in our own (Western) society and we believe that good, bad or otherwise this is the way they have always been and will always be — that this particular way of organizing ourselves makes "evolutionary sense" and here is the scientific evidence to prove that — instead of allowing ourselves to imagine and to investigate whether there have been other ways of organizing ourselves as people and to recognize that the present is very much the result of particular historical and social circumstances.

• "Looking Beyond Notions Of Erotica In Prehistoric Art", Barbara J. King, NPR, 09/18/2014

• A considerable diversity of opinion exists in the archeological and paleoanthropological literature regarding the possible functions and significance of these objects. Some of the different theories put forward include: fertility symbols, self-portraits, Stone Age dolls, realistic depictions of actual women, ideal representations of female beauty, religious icons, representations of a mother goddess, or even the equivalent of pornographic imagery.
  According to Soffer, Adovasio, and Hyland (2000), the garments that many of the Venus figures have been found wearing, including basket hats, netted snoods, bandeaux, string skirts, and belts, were not typical Paleolithic day wear. The authors suggest that the garments are more likely ritual wear, real or imagined, which served as a signifier of distinct social categories. <br? Dixson and Dixson (2011) argue that it is unlikely that the figures were realistic representations of women. At the time the statuettes were made, Europe was in the grip of a severe ice age and it is unlikely that obesity was a common feature. Instead, the authors proposed that the figures may have symbolized abundance and hope for survival and longevity, and for well-nourished and reproductively successful communities, during the harshest period of the major glaciation in Europe.
  • The Venus Figurines of the European Paleolithic Era, HOLLOWAY. Ancient Origins, 11 APRIL, 2014

• Petroglyphs are found world-wide and usually are prehistoric; the term refers to a rock surface that is incised, carved or abraded. Picotgraphs are images drawn or painted on a rock face and both types fall into the category of rock art with many examples found in New England.
  • "Petroglyphs New England Antiquities Research Association

• The oldest known rock art in the world was discovered at the El Castillo cave in Spain, where hand stencils have been dated as more than 40,000 years old.
  Professor Barker says the Territory find is unequivocally the oldest dated rock art in Australia and also one of the earliest proven occupation sites
  He says the artwork documents the importance of animals as a food source for the people who made them.
  "They draw the picture of, say, a fish, and they include the internal organs ... the backbone and swim bladder and all those kinds of things," he said.
  "They are called X-ray figures because you can actually see the internal organs of the animals.
  
  • “Arnhem Land Find Proves to be Rock Art of Ages” Caroline Herbert, ABC News, 18 Jun 2012

• Dating back 11,000 years - with a coded message left by ancient man from the Mesolithic Age - the Shigir Idol is almost three times as old as the Egyptian pyramids.
  New scientific findings suggest that images and hieroglyphics on the wooden statue were carved with the jaw of a beaver, its teeth intact.
  Originally dug out of a peat bog by gold miners in the Ural Mountains in 1890, the remarkable seven-faced Idol is now on display in a glass sarcophagus in a museum in Yekaterinburg.
  • "Beaver's teeth 'used to carve the oldest wooden statue in the world", The Siberian Times in Ancient Origins, 17 JUNE, 2017

• As might be expected, tripping on ‘shrooms’ isn’t a recent phenomenon. For thousands of years they have been widely used in Central America for religious ceremonies. The Aztecs called them teonanacatl, or “flesh of the gods”. There is a theory that several Mesolithic rock paintings at Tassili n’Ajjer in Algeria depict the ritual use of mushrooms. Some of these pictures reportedly show mushrooms actually growing out of people, so presumably the painter had been vigorously engaging with the proceedings.
  Anthropologist John Rush thinks magic mushrooms gave us Father Christmas. Apparently, Siberian shamans would hand out the hallucinogenic mushroom Amanita muscaria to the region’s tribesmen every December. Often the snow was so heavy they couldn’t use the door, so would climb down the chimney. Where does that particular type of mushroom grow? In coniferous woodland (i.e. pines, firs etc…). It’s red with white spots. Father Christmas wears red and white. The spirit animal of these shamans? Reindeer… it all makes sense now.

• "Eight things you didn't know about magic mushrooms" Tom Mulvihill, The Telegraph, 2 June 2015

• R. Gordon Wasson observed, "Reindeer have a passion for mushrooms and specifically fly agaric..." When reindeer eat the red with white-flecked mushrooms or drink the urine of humans or other reindeer that have consumed the A. muscaria mushroom, they act unusual, at least for reindeer. It's suggested the story that reindeer pull Santa's sleigh comes from the reindeers’ fondness of browsing on these hallucinogenic mushrooms and their behavior after partaking of this hallucinogen. Indeed, reindeer dance, prance, "fly around" and act strange after eating the A. muscaria mushroom.
• Santa's eight reindeer may symbolize the pagan stag god and eight is the number for a new beginning. Thor, the Norse god, rode through the sky in a magic chariot pulled by reindeer. The names of the reindeer mirror reindeer behavior post mushroom eating, and suggest pagan gods and nature. That may just be coincidental, but then again ...
  Donner and Blitzen, are Dutch for thunder and lightning (actually Donner was changed from Dunder) and Cupid is a messenger of Eros, an ancient pagan god of love. This might reflect the use of the Shamanistic mushroom to enhance the ecstasy of sexual orgasm. Dance and Prance are what reindeer do after eating the mushroom. Comet is a celestial body in flight. Vixen may just be there for poetry or may represent witches' (a vixen) magic.
  This line of thinking traces the origin of our contemporary flying Santa Claus and his sleigh to the hallucination of flight caused when humans ingest the colorful red and white topped A. muscaria mushroom. Expositions of this thesis continue that the Santa flying myth relates to the experience of Koryak shamans of Siberia. To the Koryak people, A. muscaria was a spirit they called "wapaq." They believed these spirits would tell any person who ate them, even a layman, what ailed him if he was sick, explain a dream, foretell the future or show the person the upper or lower world.

• "Is Christmas All About a Magic Mushroom?" David Bearman, Alternet, December 14, 2015

• In Mesopotamia, sex was just another aspect of life and there was no shyness, or taboo involved in it. While sex was a part of one’s personal life there were also a couple of, what we would consider, odd customs observed. For example, there was the marriage market, where women were auctioned off as brides, and a particular form of sacred prostitution. Each woman had to perform this type of prostitution at least once in her life and it involved sitting outside the temple of Ishtar (Inanna) and agreeing to have sex with the person who chose her. Herodotus explains this particular custom was meant to ensure the fertility and continued prosperity of the community although his interpretation, and whether this practice even existed as he described it, have been challenged.

• “Erotic Images from Ancient Times” Jade Koekoe, Ancient History Et Cetera, January 21, 2016

• In ancient Israel, the temple prostitutes were called qedeshot, i.e., holy women. Originally, the Hebrew word 1-d-sh meant something like isolated- specifically from the profane sphere, and belonging to a sacral one.
  Orgiastic ceremonies often took place in the service of Ishtar. Herodotus reports that in Babylon every maiden had to give herself once in her life to a strange and sacrifice her virginity in return for a sum of money. However, this was in no way considered to be prostitution, because the stranger obviously represented the god. As the stranger slept with her, this consummation became a hieros gamos (sacred wedding), in which the maiden was symbolically consecrated as the god's wife. Another prostitute related to Ishtar is Aphrodite Parakyptusa, worshipped on Cyprus in particular, who whistles from her window in order to attract lovers. Such representations of the woman at the window are widespread throughout the entire Orient.
  • "Lilith the First Eve: Historical and Psychological Aspects of the Dark Feminine" Siegmund Hurwitz

• Humbling huge mountains as if they were piles of litter, she immobilises ....... She brings about the destruction of the mountain lands from east to west. Inana ...... wall ...... gulgul stones, she obtains victory. She ...... the kalaga stone ...... as if it were an earthenware bowl, she makes it like sheep's fat. The proud mistress holds a dagger in her hand, a radiance which covers the Land; her suspended net piles up fish in the deep, ....... As if she were a clever fowler no bird escapes the mesh of her suspended net. The place she has pulverised ......., ...... the divine plans of heaven and earth. The intention of her word does not ...... to An. The context of her confusing advice in the great gods' assembly is not known.

• The uniform darkness, fount of the gods,
  The place from which the birds come...
  Open to the Duat [Underworld] that is on her northern side
  With her rear in the east and her head in the west.
  • Inscription addressed to the goddess Nut under a representation on the ceiling of the temple of Seti; reported in Rose Hammond, Islands in the Sky: The Four-Dimensional Journey of Odysseus through Space and Time (2013), p. 118.

• In art, sex is not usually explicitly detailed, though since much artwork was either in tombs or temples it can be argued that their sexual acts were not depicted so as to avoid their desecration. That is not to say that the ancient Egyptians never drew graphic pictures; often, at least one party was drawn as an animal to censor the act as the Egyptians had a certain prudishness towards illustrations of sex between two humans. Beyond this, the Ancient Egyptians did not seem to be terribly shy about sex. Their mythology relies heavily on sexual themes, and there are many (possible) coded messages and euphemisms about sex riddled within the art itself. For example, King Tutankhamen is shown on a chest using a bow while his wife stands by his feet with an arrow at the ready; the verb “to shoot” in the Ancient Egyptian language also means “to ejaculate.” This is symbolic of the need to have sex in order to be reborn after death. Moreover, their religion itself was stepped in sexual themes, including the ithyphallic god Min.
• One creation myth details how the first god (Atum or Ra), who created himself, fathered the next generation of deities through masturbation. There was supposedly an event in which the Pharaoh would ceremoniously ejaculate into the Nile to mimic Atum/Ra’s creation of Shu and Tefnut; that is, it was to encourage the fertility of the Nile. (I say this in a skeptical manner as I cannot find a corroborating article, merely one’s that reference this claim.) On the Turin Erotic Papyrus one can see a woman seated on a vase to pleasure herself while it is believed that Cleopatra may have created a vibrator for herself using bees.
• The Ancient Egyptians have a history of using birth control; different methods can be found in the Kahun Gynecological Papyrus. One form of contraception included the use of acacia gum, about which it has since been learned that when compounded it essentially becomes spermicide. Various other substances were used inside of the vagina, including pessary made of crocodile dung.
• Seth and Horus have had a long history of one-upsmanship and some pretty awkward sexual tension. Seth, who has long wanted to be the chief god of the pantheon, tries to assert his dominance over Horus by having sex with him, planning to have penetrative or intercrural sex with Horus. By putting Horus in the “womanly” or passive position, Seth would have elicited the anger of the other gods towards Horus. This does not come to pass, however, thanks to aid of Isis who helps her son keep Seth’s semen off his body and plots to turn the tables around, making Seth appear to be the receptive partner by tricking him into eating Horus’s semen. (Though, some sources say that both men were equals in the sense that they were able to penetrate one another.) What can be gleaned from this story is that it was not homosexual relations themselves that were looked upon negatively but, like in Ancient Greece, the partner in the “passive” role who was disdained.
• In Egyptian mythology, Seth murdered and dismembered Osiris, necessitating Isis and Nephthys to collect the pieces. They were able to recover every part of Osiris except for his penis, so Isis created a new phallus for him. Restored, Isis has sex with her husband and thus conceives Horus. This helped to create the belief that even after death a person still had sexual power, which if unspent could wreak havoc. Herodotus wrote that some corpses would not be delivered to the embalmers for several days to prevent them from copulating with the deceased.

• "Ancient Egyptian Sexuality" Alissa Lyon, MSU, October 23, 2014

• The Turin Erotic Papyrus is obviously a satire on human manners and desires, as the animal vignettes on the first third of the papyrus suggest. Another papyrus from the Ramesside period, the so-called Satirical Papyrus, now in the British Museum, shows animals performing activities often represented in the "high" art of Egyptian tombs; a lion, for example, is shown mummifying a corpse. The Satirical Papyrus appears to be a parody of "high" themes in "low" style. The graphic, vulgar Turin papyrus probably also pokes fun at the upper classes. The erotic vignettes, I believe, were appreciated as ironic commentary on the love poetry enjoyed by the Ramesside elite. These poems use sensuously and erotically charged imagery to celebrate emotional and sexual relationships between beautiful young elite women and their handsome male peers.

• “Eros in Egypt” David O'Connor, David O'Connor: Archaeology Odyssey, September-October, 2001

• Forests and mountains compose a masculine landscape from which the woman/wife is radically absent so too, are excluded the socio-political values that define the proper use of the female body. In the space where social rules are silent, deviance is articulate, and transgressions come to pass,... As a result of its position between war and marriage, the hunter's terrain gains its capacity for becoming the privileged place in myth for marginal sexual behavior, whether it be masculine or feminine denial of marriage or, inversely, experimentation with censured sexual behavior. As a liminal place where socially dominant sexual relations are as if suspended, the land of the hunt is open to the subversion of amorous pursuits, whatever their process or modality.
  • “Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World”, David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, p.15

• And so Herakles attacks the breast of Hera, where another tradition tells us he was nursed. Although Homer never mentions this other story, many historians of religion have made the link between them. In order to do this, they emphasize a detail that I have not mentioned thus far: the baby Herakles, already in infancy excessively strong or energetic, seems to have pulled on the gosdess' breast so powerfully that she pushed him away in pain. The ancients, however, had already (though long after Homer) established the link between this agressive hunger and the arrow with three barbs that Herakles shot at Hera. For the poet Lykophron, the two episodes combine in the life of the hero by way of a significant recapitulation: Herakles is designated as the one "who struck in the breast with a painful arrow the goddess who has given him birth for the second time. the invulnerable one" (Alexandra 38-39)
  • Ibid 44-45

• Many religious practices were celebrated by citizens in their home and household shrine known as the Lararium. Larariums have been found and excavated all over Pompeii and Herculaneum, by modern archaeologists such as Guiseppe Fiorelli. Household Gods sought to save the family from any misfortune or negativity that may enter the door; a spiritual place of the home that needed to be protected by the guardian spirits (Lares) of the households, from incoming evils that may try and enter the home.
  A lararium excavated in the House of the Vetti, containing a wall painting of the lares (household Gods), a genius (the god of the male line of decent), the Mercury God of commerce and the Dionysus God of wine, depicts and reveals aspects and facts of such household Gods and their importance to an individual and their family. The lararium was found in the atrium, at the entrance of the house. This source is structured and built depicting the front of a temple with columns. This observation revealed to archaeologists that the source has a religious meaning. A wall painting within the infrastructure depicting a temple is an image of the spirit family of genius, Lares, household Gods and other deities. The figure on the furthest left of the image is the genius. The genius wears a toga, in purple symbolising its high ranking and importance, as it's the line of male decent to the paterfamilias of the household; prospering fertility for the families continuation. On either side, the Lares of the household are holding a drinking horn in one hand and a wine bucket in the other.
  The drinking horns and wine buckets symbolise the offerings of worship and praise towards the Mercury God of commerce (right) and the Dionysus God of Wine (centre).The depiction of drinking horns and wine buckets also symbolise the household prayers and worship that were led by and was a responsibility of the paterfamilias and the offerings of fruit, incense and special cakes were made at the shrine.
  Source four, a fresco found in Herculaneum depicts and reveals the ceremonies that took place for the cult of Isis. The fresco shows the high priest standing at the entrance of the temple, looking down on the ceremony beneath. One priest tends to the sacred fire and another priest leads the followers of worship in two rows. In the foreground of the source there are two ibises, sacred to Isis. This source also reveals that women in Pompeii were drawn to this cult, as most worshippers in the fresco appear to be women.

• "Religion In Pompeii And Herculaneum Religion Essay" Essays, UK., 23rd March, 2015

• In rebuilding the temples Augustus was also very careful and active. For instance, he reconstructed the temple of the Magna Mater. But in contrast with other temples built by him, this one was made not in marble but in the traditional coarse stone, rufa like most of the early Roman temples.
  Then, not far from this temple of the Magna Mater and at the same time not far from his own apartments the emperor Augustus erected the temple of Apollo. The land it was built on was administratively his own belonging. In 36 BC this place was struck by the lightening. It was successfully interpreted as a good sign of god's will for some sacral building. Augustus announced it the public property and dedicated to Apollo. The temple finally became one of the most impressive in the city. It was decorated plentifully by sculptures of Danaus and fifty Danaids, his daughters, placed between the columns in the front gallery of the temple. The door was carved with ivy and bared the picture of Diana and Apollo killing the Niobe's children. The other side was decorated with the scene of the Gauls expulsed from Delphi. The best sculptors from Greece made the figures of Apollo, Diana and their mother Latona for the interior. The place quickly received a very high religious status, and even the old Sibylline Books were taken here from the temple of Jupiter as Sibyl got her gift of prophesy directly from Apollo.

• "Religion in the Reign of Augustus" Essays, UK., 23rd March, 2015

• Cornelius Nepos, a writer of the first century BC, remarks that the main contrast between Greek and Roman women is that the former sit secluded in the interior parts of the house, while the latter accompany their husbands to dinner-parties. It is important tonote that these gathering, in spite of some heavy drinking, had now become dinner-parties rather than drinking-parties.
  • “Sex Or Symbol?: Erotic Images of Greece and Rome” , Catherine John, p.120

• On the contrary, a Roman dinner-party at which both sexes mixed and conversed, as they did at its Etruscan forerunner, may seem more civilised to many modern tastes than the male-club atmosphere of the Athenian symposium, however fine the intellectual level of the latter may have been at its very best. It is easy to see that the male-dominated culture of great Victorian Britain experienced in this, as in so many other things, a fellow-feeling with the Greeks and a certain discomfort in the presence of the Romans.
  • Ibid, p.121

• This paper challenges the simple dichotomy that sees women either as degraded sex objects (on everyday symposium cups) or as powerful threats to males (in mythological scenes) on Athenian vases of the classical period. A continuity of female desire connects these two categories of vase paintings when attention is drawn to the eye-to-eye contact between men and women.
  • “The Eyes Have It: Female Desire on Attic Greek Vases”, Margaret M. Toscano, Project Muse

• The lady, meanwhile, is turning sideways to face the viewer which also has the effect of fully exposing her breasts as well as her penetration process to the viewer, as well, which was uncommon on especially the first count as breasts were frequently covered in ancient Roman erotic art, even in scenes explicitly depicting penetration. Between the unusual aspects of both the lady being on top and in her comfortably expressing herself fully nude, this confident lady would have stood out as an unusually in-charge and potentially brazen figure in her day and the piece could reasonably have been interpreted as a femdom piece of its time.
• Typically, statues are nude and sometimes they have erections or reveal their vaginas, but they are usually stand alone pieces whereas explicit penetration scenes are typically limited to 2D depictions such as frescos.

• "History Erotic Art from Around the World", Oct 10, 2016

• With the exception of graffiti, the pottery may be one of the best windows remaining that crossed a wide social stratum. This stood in contrast to the literature that came from predominately the upper classes of Greek society. A small number of erotic images suggest that historians, when they use the pottery with erotic illustrations, are only speaking about an individual or sub-population’s mores and not the mores of the whole of ancient Athens.
  • "Sex and Pottery: Erotic Images on Athenian Cups 600-300 B.C., Michael Lee Banner, 12-2003, p.9

• While other pre-Columbian art collections also display sexual scenes, Moche erotic pottery is the world’s most renowned. The reason is simple. According to Northwestern professor of anthropology and sexuality studies Mary Weismantel, “Moche sex pottery is the largest and most graphic and explicit.”
  The scenes of intercourse, oral sex, and masturbation on the pots could be ripped from the pages of an erotica novel written today, but, instead, they’re depicted on traditional ceramics sculpted over 1,500 years ago—in Peru, now one of the most conservative Catholic places on the planet. The Moche, who lived from 100 to 800 AD—pre-dating the more celebrated Inca— sculpted tens of thousands of ceramics, an estimated 100,000 of which remain. Of those, at least 500 are pots depicting sexual acts.
  To the Spanish colonizers who uncovered Moche sex pots in indigenous spiritual temples and royal tombs scattered up and down Peru’s North Coast, the pieces were manifestations of something sinful. The Spanish were scandalized by the ceramics’ graphic detailing of sex between humans, skeletons, and animals—with infants also sometimes present as non-participants. Shaken to their Catholic core, they smashed the pottery to pieces and criminalized the premarital and non-reproductive sex acts depicted on their surfaces.
  • “Object of Intrigue: Moche Sex Pots” Ann Bbe, Atlas Obscura, MARCH 08, 2016

• The Moche were a mysterious civilization who ruled the northern coast of Peru beginning two thousand years ago. They built huge pyramids made of millions of mud bricks and created an extensive network of aqueducts. They were also pioneers of metal working techniques like gilding and soldering, which enabled them to created extraordinarily intricate jewellery and artifacts. Due to the lack of a written language, little was known about the Moche civilization until the 1980s when archaeologists began uncovering monuments and tombs containing detailed murals, and incredible ceramics that depicted detailed scenes of hunting, fighting, sacrifice, ceremonies, and explicit sexual encounters.
• Paul Mathieu, in his book ‘Sex Pots: Eroticism in Ceramics’ reports that “a wide variety of sexual acts are represented: female to male fellatio is quite common; kissing and fondling; male masturbation (but never female masturbation); intercourse between heterosexual couples, in various positions; birthing scenes; also, intercourse between animals (copulating frogs, mice, dogs, llamas, monkeys, at times on corn or other food crops); and intercourse between human females and mythical animals (such as the bat and the jaguar who both had special religious connotations in Moche culture).”
• According to Turner (2013) in his dissertation, Sex, Myth, and Metaphor in Moche Pottery, previous scholarly works have approached Moche erotic vessels as a representational catalog of the sexual practices of the Moche people, didactic objects intended to demonstrate methods of contraception, conveyors of moralizing content, reflections of Moche humor, or as portrayals of ritual or ceremonial acts.
  The latter theory has received the most support to date, particularly given that the sex pots have been found almost exclusively in high-status burials, irrespective of the age or gender of the deceased; are often accompanied by other religious artifacts; were found to be produced at huaca (temple) centers rather than in domestic contexts, and occasional depict sexual acts involving skeletons, deities, or religiously-significant animals.
  • “Sex Pottery of Peru: Moche Ceramics Shed Light on Ancient Sexuality”, APRILHOLLOWAY], 6 MAY, 2015

• A few blocks away, working in the huge native arts and crafts market, Nim Pot, Gonzalo Ticun (photo below) is a Mayan Guatemalan who has lived here all his life. An open and gregarious man in his forties he can be seen dressed in native clothes of bright colors and a straw bowler hat. We lunched at Ricky’s bar/cafe one afternoon as he responded to my questions about Mayan attitudes toward homosexual natives. “Historically, the Mayan shaman was often ‘gay’ but they didn’t call it that. He was considered a wise person of sexual ambiguity who interacted with his community emotionally and physically, as the occasion demanded.”
  If a couple were having a marriage problem they might consult with the shaman to sort out the issues. If a man were confused or insecure sexually the shaman might teach him and provide him with knowledge or have a sexual experience with him. “It was not a shameful thing to do then. −
• Same-sex activity certainly existed a long time before modern LGBT life in Guatemala. During our talk, Dahr mentioned archeological discoveries of ancient Mayan ‘gay’ cave drawings that depict tribal life, including evidence of child sacrifice, ritual bloodletting, social and sexual intercourse and sacred activities.
  Dahr recalled there were also depictions in the caves of two males apparently in a sexual act. A search of the internet found this website (http://connellodonovan.com/archaeo.html) where researcher and archeologist Connell O’Donovan presents Late Classic Mayan cave paintings and fragmentary hieroglyphs dating to the 700s from Naj Tunich caves, in Poptún southern Peten, Guatemala. These are the most extensive Mayan cave archeology sites in the country. Some anthropologists believe the sacred activities and sacrifices may have been accompanied by altered states of consciousness induced by alcoholic or hallucinogenic substances.
  The caves’ discovery in the 1970’s opened up deeper understanding–and mystery–about Mayan culture than had previously been known. The extensive wall sketches depict many aspects of life included the homosexual one Dahr mentioned. It is of an older man and a younger man in an erotic exchange, an embrace yet standing a little apart, but clearly touching each other with their erections. (photo: fragmentary hieroplyph dating to the 700s ce) Dr. Karen Olsen Bruhns of San Francisco State University’s Anthropology Dept. has commented that this is “the only genuine depiction known of male-male erotic interaction” in the Americas. Adding to the mystery and meaning, the younger man (on the right) is adorned with what seems to be a Lunar Goddess hair lock down his back.
  It is difficult to know what the meaning is; perhaps a fertility ritual, or intimate contact or a fantasy image. It could be supposed that since the younger man is wearing a feminine garment/headdress that he is acting (or seen) in a female demeanor or sexually ambivalent role that was part of a ritual now long forgotten. If we consider Gonzalo’s comments that Mayan shamans were of ambiguous sexual nature perhaps this cave drawing is an ancestor of that tradition, which would shift the ‘intercourse’ from carnal and sexual to emotional and spiritual, possibly offering the older man a rejuvenation of his potency or increase of fertility.

• Gay Antigua, Guatemala 2012 Richard Ammon

• From archeological findings in caves, it is surmised that the Maya were relatively tolerant of homosexuality. It is believed that group sex occurred among the Maya including homosexual sex although sodomy was forbidden. Mayan society considered homosexuality preferable to premarital heterosexual sex and there are suggestions that noble families had sexual slaves for their unmarried children.
  Social historian David Greenberg reports in his famous work ‘The Construction of Homosexuality’ (1988) about widespread male homosexuality among the Mayans in Central America: “A strong homosexual component pervades close friendships of young married Mayan men as well as bachelors in southern Mexico and among Guatemalan Indians.”
  But cultures change and thanks to major historical forces such as the Spanish invasion accompanied by their fervent Christian monks, nuns and priests, civil society came to scorn and burn homosexuals. That’s the short history of homophobia in Honduras.

• "Gay Honduras: Hidden, But Busy and Present 2010" Richard Ammon, Global Gayz

• All Chinese erotic art dates from the late Ming and Ch’ing dynasties; none has been preserved from ancient times. In contrast to Confucianism, the Taoist philosophy permeates the domain of erotic art.
  • "Studies in Human Sexuality: A Selected Guide" Suzanne G. Frayser, Thomas J. Whitby, 646

• In the spring of 1986, Thomas Laird stood before the secret tantric paintings in the Lukhang temple of Lhasa, Tibet. The American photographer was one of the first westerners ever to enter, and the first to shoot inside this secret space created by the fifth Dalai Lama in the 17th century – and reserved for the private meditation of his successors.
• The co-curator of the Tibet exhibition, Ruth Garde, hopes the murals will challenge western preconceptions about Buddhism. “You come to it thinking it’s quite serene, tranquil: deep breathing and that kind of thing,” she says. “Tantric Buddhism is very different – the more radical and advanced yoga techniques are quite dangerous.” She points out skulls, flaying knives and disembodied body parts. “And some of the iconography is quite terrifying, almost grotesque.”
• When they met, Dalai Lama reminded Laird that these murals weren’t just art – they were motivational tools. “One of the arguments I have always had with him about art is that he doesn’t care about the aesthetic,” says Laird. “For him, the purpose of art is to inspire you to achieve enlightenment. If a work of art gives you the motivation to do your practice – overcome greed, anger, ignorance, lust and pride – then it is a great success.”

• "Take me to the cosmic vagina: inside Tibet's secret tantric temple" Emine Saner, The Guardian, 10 Nov 2015

• In Vajrayana Buddhism, Dakini are represented as the form of spiritual energy and Dakini represents liberation. Dakini appeared in many legends of Buddhism, Tantrism, and Hinduism and so on. Dakini had appeared in the form of Kali in Hinduism and is considered as the Deity who feeds on human flesh. In Vajrayana, Dakini was represented in various forms in a Three Roots, popularly known as Vajrayana formulation of Three Jewels. Dakini had appeared as a vajra master who passed on the teachings of Vajrayana to the disciples. She also appeared as the meditational deity and as a protector who protects the transmissions of teachings to the disciples.
  • "Burmese-art.com"

• The overall purpose of the Hindu temple can be presented in such a way: like the Himalayas, the temple points to the heavens, the abode of the gods. The Hindu temple, "step by step, shape-by-shape" reverses this primeval descent and places man back on the path toward heaven.
  Temples were usually built in places marked by special holiness. The legends associated them with the acts of Vishnu, Shiva, Durga and other gods. In the 4-5 centuries, when Hinduism during the reign of Gupta dynasty, became the state religion, the main structural elements of the temples were plinth, sanctuary and superstructure. The stone base of a Hindu temple symbolized the altar, on which the temple itself was sacrificed to a deity. With the modular characteristics of the proportions of the temple measure cap not taken into account. The temple was conceived as a structural unit, resting on the altar. In some early temples the wall of the sanctuary served as main walls of the building, in others - the sanctuary was surrounded by a second ring of walls, which created a special gallery to circumvent. In any case, the churches were dark inside.
  Module for Hindu temples and their center was a sculpture of a deity - his idol. Temple priests were called "guardians of the idol and the servants of God, whose dwelling was in the temple.
• Style Nagara, which developed during the 5h century, is characterized by a tower-type hive (called "shikhara") made up of several words of architectural elements, such as kapotas and gavaksas, culminating in a large round cushion like element, named "amalaka", and parlance "Drum". The plan of the temple is based on the square, but the walls are often broken down decorative elements in creating the impression that the tower is round. In more recent temples the central mandapa was surrounded by several small temple buildings, creating a visual effect of a fountain.
  From the 7th century Dravida , or southern style, has formed a pyramidal tower consisting of progressively diminishing tiers, bottleneck, and the dome on top, also called shikhara (in the southern terminology). Repeated horizontal tiers visually impart the southern temples squat.
  Less obvious differences between the two main temple types Nagara and Dravida include the plan area, the selection and arrangement of stone, from which the cut shapes on the external walls and the interior, the range of decorative elements.
• Very significant in the temple is the sculptural treatment of its outer walls, which are covered with images of the god Shiva, to whom the monument is dedicated, with consorts, attendants and lesser divinities. Important among the images here are the aspect of the god, including those who subdues the blind demon, the cosmic dancer, and the destroyer of the triple demon cities. The sculptures are arranged in three tiers on the outside, amounting to no less than 646 figures in all, not counting the 226 figures of the interior.
  The temple is well known for its erotic groups which are placed on the juncture of the walls of the mandapa and the passageway surrounding the sanctuary, marking one of the most ritually vulnerable parts of the monument. Among the other images are those of female deities, such as the seven mothers, let alone the countless apsaras, or heavenly maidens that attend on the gods, and who are shown in alluring postures that reveal the mastery of the Khajuraho artists in rendering female contours with conscious sophistication and exuberant grace.
• As for the symbolism of the temple, Angkor Wat is an unsurpassed image of the Mount Meru, the abode of the Gods in the centre of the world. Corresponding to the five peaks of this mountain, at Angkor Wat five towers were visible from every cardinal direction. The enclosure wall symbolizes the mountains surrounding and hiding the Mount Meru; the moat symbolizes the cosmic ocean. The temple complex is a microcosm, an image of a perfect world, stable and in geometrical harmony.

• "The Hindu Temples Architecture And Style Theology Religion Essay", Essays, UK. , 23rd March, 2015

• In the Hindu tradition experiencing art is classified as a pleasure-giving encounter. This aesthetic pleasure known as Rasa ("flavour', sentiment'm or 'extract') resides neither in artist, nor in image, nor in onlooker. It only arises when the onlooker experiences the symbolic imagery in his innermost self. Similarly, a devotee of the goddess derives religious pleasure due to total devotion (Bhakti). The devotee's way is different from that of the onlooker but the ultimate pleasure in both cases is the same.
  When the onlooker perceives a goddess image, Rasa is experienced. In the process of perceiving, one of the following nine permanent emotions is invoked in the heart and mind of the onlooker: Erotic (Shringara), Heroic (Veera), Comic (Hasya) Terrible (Bhayanaka), Furious (Raudra), Grusedome (Bibhatsa), Pathetic (Karuna), Wonderous (Adbhuta), and Peaceful (Shanta). One of these emotions forms a master-motif to which all other expressions of ideas and feelings are subordinate.
  It is only in the heart and mind of an intellectually competent and emotionally sensitive spectator that the intuitive image can stimulate aesthetic pleasure (Rasa-svada) which is compared with religious bliss (Brahma-svada). The onlooker is required to be receptive to the symbolic imagery of an accomplished image in order to savour it fully. The rasikas's complete awareness of the art-object is heightened through entering into permanent mood (Rasa) of the sacred image and its contemplation.
  It does not matter which permanent mood is entered into because in art one detaches and transcends the mundane; even the terrible emotions becomes pleasurable. One can enjoy the terrific image of the goddess Kali or Durga, as intensely as the pacifistic images of Lakshmi or Sarasvati. Such an experience is valuable in itself because it arouses within the onlooker an inherent pleasure. The pleasure does not exist apart from the artist, goddess image, r the onlooker. The Rasa unites the three as one. The secret of the aesthetic experience is in transcendence of the mundane, in self-forgetfulness and detachment when the Rasa feeling unfolds. This psychological transference of feelings takes place when the image functions successfully. Otherwise the image is meaningless. Looking at sacred works of art therefore involves active participation on the part of the onlooker.
• Single-mindedness (Dhyana) and total dedication (Sadhana) are common to the artist, onlooker and devotee. What the artist creates and what the onlooker sees are the external manifestation of an inward vision. Similarly, a devotee contemplates an image, evokes the goddess's power and presence, and is completely unified with the divinity. This absorption leads the devotee to a religious experience and union with the divine. Thesimilarity between aesthetic delight and religious bliss is based on the transcendence of ego and desire. The detached state of mind experiences a sense of liberty which generates bliss. Mundane existence is characterized by ego and desire which lead to misery. In the process of aesthetic enjoyment the onlooker temporarily transcends his attachments and enjoys pure pleasure untainedby any sense of desire. It it this notion of detachment (Vairagya) or the freedom from desire which leads the aestheticians to relate aesthetic experience to mystical experience.
  Abhinavagupta holds that the onlooker (or Rasika) only captures temporarily what the mystic (or the arrived Bhakta) generates as a permanent dispostion. A clear distinction is made by the metaphysician between aesthetic and mystical experiences. He goes on to say that the Rasika's desire is not satiated, but she desires more. In other words, while the Rasika's pleasure is temporary, the Bhakta attains permanent bliss and is transformed permanently. The mystic's peace does not draw or incite further desires because she is in an unceasing state of 'desirelessness' or 'egolessness'. In summary, detachment, single-mindedness and total dedication are necessary prerequisites for aesthetic enjoyment as well as religious contemplation.
  • Images of Indian Goddesses: Myths, Meanings, and Models, Madhu Bazaz Wangu, pp.16-17

• Voluptuous Yakshinis and amorous Mithunas were incorporated into the Buddhist pantheon of deities because they were important on the popular level. Buddhism adopted and transformed them to welcome the devotees of several fertility folk cults, tribes and Brahmanic deities into their fold. These images were strictly depicted on the outer periphery, that is, railings and doorways of a Buddhist sacred mound. The inner space was reserved for the Buddhist images. The images of Yakshinis acted as mediators between the old beliefs and the new religion.
  • Ibid, p.57

• A yakshi is a female earth spirit, accepted as a symbol of fertility by the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain faiths. She is usually portrayed as a wide-hipped, voluptuous woman, who can cause a tree to bear fruit simply by touching it with her foot.
  • "Yakshi" The Art Institute of Chicago

• Examples of Asoka's contributes that are impacted by public worship of Buddhism is the stupas, temples and rock edicts which are everywhere in the kingdom and visible to the public as they have the Buddhist teachings on them.

• "Asoka Has Contributed Many Significant Contributions Religion Essay", Essays, UK., 23rd March, 2015

• Chinese Buddhists believe that Guanyin is the female aspect of Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of Compassion. It has been debated that Guanyin’s origins go back to Taoism, the indigenous religion of China. As Mahayana Buddhism began to filter into China from the 1st century CE, Taoist deities were co-opted into Buddhism – a deliberate tactic, perhaps, on the part of Buddhists to gradually phase out the older religion.
  Notwithstanding the debate over her history, the fact remains that Guanyin is greatly revered across Buddhist communities in Asia. She is known as Kannon in Japan, Gwan-eum in Korea, Kuan Eim in Thailand and Dewi Kwan Im in Indonesia. To Tibetan Buddhists she is Tara, born from a single tear shed by Avalokitesvara.
  Between the 10th and 13th centuries, Guanyin’s features in Chinese iconography were distinctly masculine. Over time, she acquired an androgynous form and eventually morphed into a goddess-like figure. In contemporary iconography, Guanyin is depicted as an ethereally lovely, white-robed goddess. A popular representation has her standing on a lotus petal. Her head, encircled by a halo, is slightly tilted, intent on catching the smallest plea for help. The material used to sculpt the statue symbolizes her many virtues – jade for virtue, marble for constancy and porcelain for innocence.
  • "Who is Kuan Yin?" Buddha Grove

• Religious icons such as Mary in Christianity and Guanyin in Buddhism had deep roots in European and Chinese traditions. When the Jesuit missionaries came to China in the late 16th century, they represented Christianity as a different yet compatible religion to the native Chinese beliefs, first Buddhism and then Confucianism. Mary, the virgin mother of Christ and the principal saint of Christian Church, was one of the most appealing icons in Jesuits’ paintings and narratives. Though some Chinese expressed suspicion and even rejected Mary, many others tended to equate her with Guanyin, a popular Buddhist goddess in late Ming culture, largely because they two shared similar qualities such as compassion, purification, and child-giving power. This article uses a set of visual and textual sources to analyze the complex adaptations and competitions between these two prominent religious icons, thus revealing an interesting aspect of China's historic encounter with the West in the 17th century.
  • "Between Bodhisattva and Christian Deity: Guanyin and the Virgin Mary in Late Ming China", The Constant and Changing Faces of the Goddess: Goddess Traditions of Asia, Chapter: Six, January 2008, pp 101-120

• Considered in ancient East Asia to be equivalent to the divine ambrosia of the Greek gods, hemp has long been named an "elixir of life". The goddess Magu's association with cannabis primarily lies in its use as a healing plant - as the majority of Magu's mythological stories revolve around the ways in which she aided the poor and the sick either as a goddess outright, or as a priestess of an unnamed healing deity. Magu takes on a more definitively divine role in the ancient literature of Korea, however the core of her person remains relatively the same.
  Throughout China, Japan, and Korea, Magu (or Ma Gu MaKu, Mako) is depicted as a beautiful young woman, no older than 18 or 19 (in human years). Her youth and beauty are symbols of the health and healing of the universe she is believed to protect. She is a guardian of vitality throughout East Asia, not only in the world of mortals but also the cycles of the earth. Magu is regularly considered to cast aside the winter in favor of flora and fauna. In Korea, Magu's role is elevated from goddess to Creator god, akin to the Japanese Shinto goddess Amaterasu , and her abilities extended to incorporate the creation of the world and humanity.
  • "Magu: The Hemp Goddess Who Healed Ancient Asia", Riley Winters, Ancient Origins, 31 August 2017.

• It is said that among the soldiers living in Britain, some were of Christian faith. St. Alban, the first English martyr, was killed in 209 CE and therefore the Christianity was certainly present by 200 CE. In 400, when the Romans left Britain and many invaders arrived, in the West and North the Celtic people maintained their faith and culture. A type of Christianity grew among these individuals which still influences our spirituality to this date. Celtic Christianity dated between 400 - 1000 CE. These stories and legends of the Celtic church are told by Saints such as: St. Ninian, St. Calumba and St. Brigit.Governed by chiefs or kings, Celtic society was organized on tribal lines. The Celtic church was controlled around monasteries ruled by abbots who ordained as priests celebrated the sacraments in the monasteries. The land for the monastery was often provided by the tribe or family unit. By 431, Ireland had received its first bishop. The government of the Irish church was controlled by the abbots however by the 1800's .The abbeys promoted learning, taught the children, and fabricated spectacular religious art in the manuscripts, metalwork and stone carvings. The Anglican spirituality had a lot of influence from the Celtic spirituality.

• "Henry VIII and Anglicanism Essay" Essays, UK., 23rd March, 2015

• According to one of the related hadiths to this matter, A'isha, the wife of the Prophet reported that on seeing a curtain embellished with pictures of animals, the Prophet was enraged and tore the cloth to pieces, declaring, "The makers of these pictures will be punished on the Day of Resurrection, and it will be said to them, 'Give life to what you have created.' "The Prophet added, "The Angels of (Mercy) do not enter a house in which there are pictures (of animals)." Bukhari, Volume 7, Book 62:110. [6] Another source presents additional response by Prophet on the same incident saying "Such people as paint these pictures will receive the severest punishment on the Day of Resurrection." [7] On another occasion Muhammad is supposed to have said, "Verily the most grievously tormented people on the Day of Resurrection would be the painters of pictures."
• As for Iconoclastic activities in early Islamic tradition, there are early accounts of the prophet Muhammad's iconoclastic activities, for instance in the ninth-century Book of Idols which narrates that "When on the day he conquered Mecca, the Apostle of God appeared before the Kabah, he found the idols arrayed around it. There upon he started to pierce their eyes with the point of his arrow, saying, "Truth is come and false-hood is vanished. Verily, falsehood is a thing that vanish-eth (Quran 17:81 as narrated in Faris, 1952, p. 27)." It was after having said this, that he ordered for the idols to be knocked down and burnt (Ibid.).
• 'When the Prophet saw pictures in the Ka'ba, he did not enter it till he ordered them to be erased. When he saw (the pictures of) Ibrahim and Ismail carrying the arrows of divination, he said, "May God curse them (i.e. the Quraysh)! By God, neither Ibrahim nor Ismail practiced divination by arrows." (Bukhari, Volume 4, Book 55:571, as quoted in Kheilen on Iconoclasm). [9] These hadith are however subject to various interpretations. It can be argued that this tradition prohibits figural representations in scared spaces, not just Kaaba but also in mosques as well, or it may be suggested that Prophet prohibited the specific 'cult' or set of beliefs that these idols presented, that is divination; a pre Islamic custom on Mecca.(Ibid. [10] )
  According to one Hadith, the Prophet is also reported to declare that "Angels do not enter the house in which there are portrayals or pictures." [11] . Per contra, one of the oldest chronicles, that of Al-Azraqi, narrates that when the Prophet returned to Mecca victoriously, he found the Kaaba covered with 'fresco paintings' and he ordered that 'they be effaced but made an exception for one the them, executed on a pillar, which represented Mary and Jesus. (Besancon, 2000, P. 78-79). The ambivalence to figuration in textual tradition is argued by many scholars. This is also reiterated in Rubin (1986, p. 97) and Van Reenen, (1990, p. 40) who reiterate the above tradition by arguing that after the conquest of Mecca the prophet ordered the destruction of the paintings of prophets, angels, as well as trees that had decorated the interior of the Kaaba, whilst sparing an image of Jesus and Mary.
• Albeit contested and varying in form and interpretation, generally the removal of Meccan Idols in Kaaba upon conquest is deemed very symbolic by Muslims and this event holds great historical importance. It is due to this that generally Muslim societies refrain from figural representations in sacred spaces such as Mosques and Prayer halls. However, this opposition to depiction of living things and figural representation is not based on Quranic references but rather on various traditions present within the Hadith (Flood, 2002, p. 643-44).

• [https://www.ukessays.com/essays/religion/iconoclasm-and-iconophilia-in-islam-religion-essay.php "Iconoclasm And Iconophilia In Islam Religion Essay" Essays, UK., 23rd March, 2015

• Amr the leader of the Luhayy, was an extremely generous man. He went out of his way to feed and clothe pilgrims, not hesitating to secrifice his own camels to provide meat for the visitors. But his real fame lies elsewhere: he is said to have been the first person to introduce paganism to Mecca, and bring idols into the Sanctuary. It began when he recieved a statue of Hubal, an oracular diety, with arrows marked on it for divining the future, as a gift. The statue, made of agate, was damaged. Amr, an exceptiionally wealthy man, had the hand of the idol recast in gold. He then placed it on top of the treasury well in the Kabaa. Other families then proceeded to palce their own idols in the courtyard of the Kabaa: Manaf, the sun son: Quzah, who held the rainbow; Nasr, the eagle-shaped god. The sculptures themselves were inspired by Greco-Roman art. Manaf, for example, showed clear aspects ofa Hellenized solar diety. Three, more active, divinities had a special place of honour in the Meccan pantheon, and were widely worshipped by the Arabs: al-Lat, the mother-goddess; Manat, the goddess of fate who represented the darkened moon; and al-Uzza, 'the she devil', the goddess of love, sex and beauty. These goddesses had supernatural influence ons tones and trees around the region. Al-Uzza was said to frequent three trees in the Valley of Nakhla. A rock in Taif was sacred to al-Lat.
  The pilgrimage to Mecca now became an entirely pagan affair. The Luhayy introduced a number of rites and rituals that had to be followed strictly. The underlying emphasis was on maximizing profit. The date of the pilgrimage would be computed each year by a seer and synchronized with a series of fairs held throughout the region. Pilgrims en route to Mecca would first attend these smaller fairs and festivals before arriving at the Sanctuary for the major ceremony. A poetry competition was held in Ukaz, near Taif, where people gathered to hear poets demonstrate their skills and oral dexterity. They were treated to short verses in a four-syllable metre (called rajaz) that emulated the pace of a camel, or to epic poems and long odes, the qasidahs, which paid homage to gods, great Arabs and enchanted mistresses, or related fables and desert adventures.
  Or again there might be caustic satires directed against real and imagined enemies. The seven best poems , selected by an oracle, would be written out by hand, and prepared for mounting on the walls of the Kaaba. After the contest, the poets would join the other pilgrims. The pilgrim processions, led by enchanters and sorcerers, were jolly and colorful affairs, a roving religious circus. There were camels loaded with gifts from all the leaders and rulers of the region, and consecrated camels, decorated with charms and magical jewellery, carrying the idols of various tribes.

• "Mecca: The Sacred City" by Ziauddin Sardar, Bloomsbury, 2014, p.17-18

• On the other hand, specialists point out that it is necessary to view the "Dome as a monument which used Biblical connotations and Christian-Byzantine forms to impose Islam's presence in the Holy City. The combination would imply that the new faith considered itself the continuation and the seal of the two preceding ones: Judaism and Christianity" (Rabbat, 12-13).
  • "The Umayyad Dome Of The Rock", Essays, UK. (November 2013), 23rd March, 2015

• It is worth pointing out that Shia Islam has a deep mystical tradition, and, according to Angel Millar, it "has developed a complex theory of transmission of initiatory knowledge ('ilm, i.e., the esoteric interpretation of the Qur'an) to the elite believers (khasa)." Shia Islam emphasized more the mystical, prophetic, and messianic aspects of the Islamic religion, whereas Sunni Islam focuses more on the legalist, moral and political aspects of the Islamic religion. Furthermore, several Sunni teachers have articulated a stunningly brutal Islamic hedonistic calculus. For instance, Al-Suyuti (known also as Jalaluddin), a fifteenth-century AD Egyptian religious scholar, juristic expert, and teacher, and one of the most prolific Sunni Arab writers of the Middle Ages, has described the Muslim's conception of Paraside as a state in which, each time a Muslim sleeps with a Houri (erotic companion), he finds her a virgin, and, additionally, as a state in which "the penis of the Elected never softens," and "the erection is eternal," each "chosen one" being married to seventy Houris.

• "Methexiology: Philosophical Theology and Theological Philosophy for the Deification of Humanity", Nicolas Laos

• The custom of wearing holy relics by way of devotion, or in order to be preserved against casualties, diseases, calamities, &c., is very ancient in the church ; since St. Gregory Nyssens takes particular notice of a small piece of wood of the true cross, which his sister wore on her finger in a ring.
  It is St. Helena, however, that relics owe the beginning of their high reputation; and yet the cross was at that time the only relic really in fashion. That devout princess, foreseeing that the finding of the cross would inflame the devotion of all Christians, took but a part of it away with her, and left the remainder in Jerusalem to be an object of the pilgrim's devotion. This sacred wood would, by degrees, have been all lost, on account of the constant distributions which were made of it to devotees; but St. Paulinus assures us, that in his time it remained in the same condition - that the faithful were taking away some of it without intermission, but yet they always found it whole and entire. In process of time, relics of all sort were worn, but more particularly about the neck and on the breast.
  St. Charles Borromeo wore about his neck a tooth of St. Satina. Gregory XII. wore one of St. Catherine of Sienna. Some ages before that, St. Dunstan, having broke his cane upon the devil, who appeared to him in the form of a bear, had another made much stronger, in which he set a tooth of the apostle St. Andrew.
  Relics were formerly carried in military expeditions, and this was an established custom in the time of Theodosius the Great. The knight-templars, and soldiers int eh crusades, carried them a long time after in their expeditions against the enemy of the Christian name. Christian kings, when they went to war, armed themselves with St. Martin's cope, and caused the shrines of saints to be carried at the head of their armies.
  • Religious ceremonies and customs by William Burder, p.241

• Before they received any specific iconographic attributes like wings, angels in paleochristian catacombs and early medieval art were simply designed as male human beings. At least until the end of the 4th century, they could not be identified easily as angels or distinguished from other depicted male figures, except through the narrative context of the scene represented (Bussagli, -44-50). Their male characteristics - both physiognomy and costume - follow the biblical tradition, but the gradual appearance of feminine traits, from the earliest examples in the 5th- and 6th-century illuminations of the Cotton Bible (London, British Library) to the late Middle Ages, reflects the philosophical tendency to associate the angelic essence with the soul and with feminine attributes. Beauty was supposed to reflect God's perfection, the epitome of moral righteousness, as human soul and body should tend toward divine perfection and transcendence. The angel combined medieval aesthetic standards of beauty - richness of color in shape and costume, light and radiance - with feminine ideals of grace and beauty. In the Baptism of Christ, painted in 1435 by Masolino da Panicale *Castiglione Olona, Collegiateal Giordi, 293), the central angel holding Christ's clothes shows a feminine profile, wearing its hair up, to be contrasted with the short-haired masculine angel to the left. The Wilton triptych displays around the Virgin a row of blue angels with delicate deminine faces, wearing flower coronets and golden necklaces (1397-1399, London, National Gallery; Giorgi, 330). Feminine attributes were nevertheless highly ambitious in popular imagery, always redolent of the temptation of Eve. Perhaps this accounts for the fact that female traits only occasionally modified the very anatomy of angels during the Middle Ages, so that only a few sensuous examples can be found of breasts emerging under the masculine dalmatia (Bussagli, 175). More significantly, angels came to be depicted with costumes previously reserved to young women of high lineage, like the 14th century Italian gonella - a long- sleeved, skin-tight robe with a long, flares, fluid skirt (Bussagli, 176). The influence of 15th century Italian scholasticism idealized women as angelic creatures, contributing to reinforce a limited typology of deminine angels in painting. A source of mroal perfection, endowed with mystic virtues, the beautiful angel woman (donna angelicata) became an intermediary between men and God, a point of intersection between the human and the divine, thus fusing feminine and angelic qualities. The visual heritage of the Greek Nike, along with the ancient values of proportion and harmony in Greek ideals of beauty, reappeared during the Renaissance, contributing to the emergence of more feminine, diaphanous robes in 16th-century paintings, best exemplified by Botticelli's paintings. Nineteenth-century cemeteries house some morbid yet gracious female sculptures of angels, while Edward Burne-Iones portrays a few melancholy feminine angels wearing their hair up in The Morning of the Resurrection (Private collection, Christie's images).

• "Face to Face with Angels: Images in Medieval Art and in Film, Sandra Gorgievski, pp. 113-114

• In the 8th and 9th centuries, Byzantine Iconoclasm outbreaks were recorded. The main issue of the dispute was use of images. The first period was recorded during 70-787. Increase of images overwhelmed during this period, resulting in break-up of iconoclasm (Cormack, 1985). This war was agitated between Justinian II and Caliph, Abd al Malik. Justinian II incorporated the image of Jesus on the gold coins in circulation during that period and this caused the Muslim counterpart, Caliph Abd al-Malik to stop adopting coin types and considered lettering on Islamic coinage. This took place in 695 and marked the beginning of Iconoclasm. During 726-730, The Isaurian Byzantine Emperor, Leo III began idol removal campaign of Jesus and replaced it with cross. This act led to severe agitations by many iconodules and pope also condemned this activity and referred iconoclasm to be heretical and against law (Mango, 1977).

• “A Look At What Idolatry Is Religion Essay" Essays, UK., 23rd March, 2015

• There are many other differences between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. There are differences in how faith is taught, the essence of God, the work of Christ, the Holy Canons, the mysteries, the nature of man, and the Virgin Mary. One more would be the icons of Orthodox worship, and the statues of Catholic worship.

• "Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Roman Catholicism", Essays, UK., 23rd March, 2015

• Chaucer's Canterbury Tales changed the way people viewed the Catholic Church. He chose to write a fictional story, yet his intentions are still clear. One cannot misconstrue a segment from The Canterbury Tales' prologue. Chaucer wrote, "For if a priest be foul in whom we trust / No wonder that a common man should rust; / And shame it is to see-let priests take stock-/ A soiled shepherd and a snowy flock. / The true example that a priest should give / Is one of cleanness, how the sheep should live," (511-515). Chaucer needed the common man to see the hypocrisy and double standards of the Roman Catholic Church in the thirteenth century. Conveniently, as history shows, reform was soon on its way (Collinson). Elton declared, "The Church was full of weaknesses and abuses; reforms had been talked about for a very long time," (105). The Canterbury Tales assisted in preparation for what is known as The Reformation of the fourteenth century. The Roman Catholic Church was put on the spot, revealing the need for reform.
  • "A Purposeless Pilgrimage: The Canterbury Tales", Essays, UK. (November 2013).

• Today’s piece of historic erotic art comes to us from 14th century France and is a detail from an illuminated manuscript copy of “Roman de la Rose” (“Romance of the Rose”), a widely popular medieval French poem intended to educate on the art of love. The first portion of the poem was written in 1230 by Guillaume de Lorris with the vast majority of what ultimately became the final and complete version of the work being written by Jean de Meun in 1275. The work entertained the public and outraged the moralists and became one of the most widely read works in France over the course of three hundred years.
  • "History Erotic Art from Around the World" Sep 21, 2016

• Medieval images of nude figures were nearly always connected with sin, especially in the case of Adam and Eve. Shown in the Garden, they were most commonly depicted after the temptation, when they showed shame at their nudity by trying to cover themselves. Among the most famous medieval nudes is the Romanesque lintel sculpture at the Cathedral of Saint-Lazare at Autun in which Eve reclines, reaching behind to grasp the forbidden fruit. Such highly stylised representations were typical of medieval art.
• Such attitudes began to change in the late Middle Ages, particularly following the example of Saint Francis in the thirteenth century. Francis taught that the entire world was God's divine creation, and out bodies were made in God's image and were thus divine.This began a moderation of Augustine's prudish teachings about human bodies that led to the more naturalistic imagery of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.
  • “1000 Erotic Works of Genius”, Hans-Jürgen Döpp, Joe A. Thomas, Victoria Charle, p.94

• In this period when Europe was rarely interested in sexual subjects, India saw erotic art on a scale never rivaled before or since. At a time when Hudeo-Christian taboo reigned over sexuality in European art and society, India, by contrast, took a radically unrestrained approach to sexuality, as evidenced by the free exploration of sexual positions in the Kama Sutra and the presence of erotic art ona s cale never rivalled before or since. Later, during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Chandela Dynasty of rulers in central India built dozens of temples at Khajuraho that prominently featured groups of figures in an enormous variety of sexual positions. While the specific purpose of these figures remains unclear, many varieties of Hinduism revered sexuality as sacred; some devotional acts ionvolved worship of the linga, a stylised penis. These Hindu sculptures are among the most famous and explicit examples of erotic art of any time.
  • Ibid, 95

• India has been a particularly conservative country for the last few hundred years, influenced by the puritanism of several groups, including Islamic dynasties, British overlords and the country’s own Brahmin priestly caste. But India was not always like this. Sexual norms were far more liberal before the 13th Century, giving equal importance to the secular and the spiritual. Sex was taught as a subject in formal education, and Kamasutra, the world’s first sex treatise, was written in ancient India between the 4th Century BCE and the 2nd Century.
• There are various theories about the existence of such graphic erotic motifs. One of the more exotic ones propounds that since Chandela kings were followers of Tantric principles, which dictate the balance between the male and female forces, they promoted their faith in the temples they created.
  Some believe the depiction of sexual activities was considered a good omen.
  Other theories have to do with the role of temples themselves in those times: they were considered places of learning as well as worship – especially of the finer arts, including the art of lovemaking. In addition, some believe that the depiction of sexual activities in temples was considered a good omen because it represented new beginnings and new life.
  • "India's temples of sex" Charukesi Ramadurai, BBC, 7 October 2015

• Today’s piece of gender non-conforming art is of a statue of a figure with mixed gender characteristics from 11th century AD India located in the Gangakonda Cholapuram temple. Ardhanarishvara is a depiction of Shiva joined with Parvati, split evenly down the middle and the name Ardhanarishvara literally means “the Lord who is half woman”. Shiva is typically depicted on the right side while Parvati is typically (but not always) depicted on the left and depictions in this style began in the 1st century CE. Ardhanarishvara statues are among the most popular depictions of Shiva and are present at most of his temples.
  • Erotic Art History From Around the World, Sep 22, 2016.

• Today’s piece of historic erotic art comes to us from the Seljuk Empire (a Turko-Persian Sunni Muslim empire that spanned much of the Middle East (2)) circa 1240 CE. The image is one of a collection of 96 well known illustrations by al-Wasiti from the popular collection of stories, “Al Maqamat”, which is one of the most well known texts in the Arabic language and was written by the famously clever linguist Al-Hariri of Basra. (3) The images cover a wide variety of subjects of daily life at the time (going to the library, suing in front of a judge) and are frequently used to illustrate books on Arabic and Islamic culture.
• “Al-Maqamat is the title of a book written by Abu Muhammad al Qasim ibn Ali al-Hariri (1054-1122) containing fifty relatively short stories (maquamat = “settings” or “sessions”), each one identified by the name of a city in the Muslim world of the time. The stories tell of actual adventures and especially the verbal pronouncements in verse or in prose of a roguish and peripatetic hero, Abu Zayd from Saruj, a town in northern Syria, as told by al-Harith, a sober and slightly gullible merchant travelling from place to place. Double and triple puns, unusual meanings of words and elaborate grammatical constructions are used to exhibit the astounding and sophisticated wealth of the Arabic language. The genre of the maqamat became an almost instant success because of the extraordinary quality of its writing.”
  In this scene, two men (Al-Harith and Abu-Zayd) are on camelback as they hold hands, embrace, and touch noses as they appear to be in the process of kissing goodbye. Though almost certainly unintentional, as the “heart shape” symbol signifying love did not develop until several centuries later and the gold embellishment on the blue sleeve appears to unintentionally contribute to the illusion of a heart, the two men’s halos come together to frame their heads in a heart shape which compliments their affection to the modern eye.
  • Erotic Art History From Around the World, Sep 16, 2016

• Today’s piece of historic erotic art comes to us from a 1824 version of a 14th century Persian manuscript called Lizzat Al-Nisa’ (“Pleasure of Women”) and appears to portray an interracial female-male couple.
  Less well known in America due to its own history, there was a slave trade from Africa to the Middle East through the 8th-19th centuries. (Europeans were also captured and enslaved in significant, though far smaller, numbers- for more information on all of this, see the Wikipedia article in the comments section.) However, slaves under Islamic law had far different rights than their counterparts in America and were paid wages and allowed to buy their own freedom which lead to a significant black population over time, much of it free, so it is not unlikely that there would be an interracial scene in Persian art in general, much less in a book that features such a great deal of sexual variety.
  Lizzat Al-Nisa is a well known erotic manuscript that was written by Ziya’ al-Din Nakhshabi who was a Persian physician living in India. His manuscript, in turn, is “derived” (I don’t know if that means translated or just used as a reference or general foundation of ideas) from the Sansktrit Ratirahasya (“Secrets of Love”). Lizzat Al-Nisa in general covers different types of sex and different types of aphrodisiacs, and the copy that I have seems to primarily focus on the sexual adventures of one lady who has sex in a different position and with a different person on every page.
  • Erotic Art History From Around the World, Jan 27, 2016

• In spite of the prevalence of sexual imagery in medieval art, both religious and secular, a misconception predominates, certainly in the general public and to some extent even among scholars, that Christian morality perhaps prudishly constrained medieval people. However, it is clear from even a cursory look through medieval writings as diverse as legal proceedings, penitentials, sermons, medical treatises, literature, fabliaux, and poetry, that medieval people themselves were very interested in the topic of sex.
  • “Was It Good For You, Too?” Medieval Erotic Art and Its Audiences", Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art, Issue 1, September 2008, p.1-2

• Some medieval images that are ostensibly religious show encounters that may appear suggestive, such as illustrations of the Sponsus and Sponsa from the Song of Songs. The erotic language of the biblical text informs images of these figures kissing or embracing, and the fact that the Bridegroom and the Bride are usually interpreted as Christ and the personified Church, and the Church further identified as the Virgin Mary, lends these images complicated and even incestuous overtones. The question of interpretation remains; are these to be seen solely as symbolic and exegetical, or are other meanings possible with such freighted imagery?
  The same question can be asked of the isolated and vertical side-wounds of Christ, which become popular in fourteenth-century Books of Hours. I have suggested elsewhere that these images might be multivalent and connote sexuality as well as religion, inspiring responses beyond the theological. Specifically, I argue that the wound of Christ might be a vaginal image, especially for a viewer encountering such a sight in the private space of a manuscript. Certainly the image of the wound of Christ is in fact deeply informed by religion as the site of Christ’s suffering and sacrifice, the source of Eucharistic blood, and the inspiration for mystical conflations of wound and breast, informed by medical beliefs about the interconnectedness of blood and milk. The shape of the wound can be seen as mandorla-like, but it is also visually identical to the way the vagina was depicted in places such as medical manuals, as well as the type of sculpture called the sheela-na-gig, to be discussed below. The wound is also an entrance into and exit from the body, the devotional contemplation of which led to a kind of swallowing and engulfing, allencompassing experience, the liminal zone from which the Church is literally born, the inversion of the Satanic hell mouth. A folio leaf from a fourteenth-century Flemish Book of Hours includes a phrase from the text of the Psalms, “I said in the midst of my days I shall go to the gates of Hell,” as well as an image in the bas-de-page of a man being led to bed by a woman; the “hell mouth” is both the entrance to the bedchamber and to the body of the woman herself, the woman as the gates of hell an analogy made by writers from Tertullian to Boccaccio. But here the gates of hell do not seem particularly threatening, the man seemingly a willing participant in his damnation.
  • Ibid p. 4-5

• Images of the Last Judgment often explicitly contrast the blessed, fully robed and resplendent in heaven, with the damned, writhing in their nakedness much as they did in the sexual sins that condemned them to hell. But virgin martyrs such as Agatha and Barbara were often represented partially or fully nude; especially in the later Middle Ages they are depicted as the visual embodiments of the ideal women described in love poetry and romances, with their long blonde hair, fair complexions, swelling bellies, and high, apple-like breasts. Such images may provoke both religious and erotic responses in viewers, both medieval and modern. The paradoxical nature of these images of virgin martyrs ostensibly created for religious contemplation, but depicted half or fully nude, often in the throes of their torture, means that a singular visual response to them is unlikely. Margaret R. Miles used the term “religious pornography” to refer to such images; Madeline Caviness has used the phrase “sadoerotic.”
  • Ibid p. 6

• Although the text of the Penitential Psalms obviously has to do with David’s later regret for his sinful actions, these images freeze Bathsheba, she of the white skin, round breasts, swelling belly, and veritable explosion of fertile foliage at her groin, freeze her at a time long before regret has set in, when David looks at her with desire and longing, as does, perhaps, the viewer outside the frame. In contrast to the biblical account, Bathsheba often gives a complicit look back.
  • Ibid p. 7

• Breasts, belly, and groin are on display again in the image of Saint Catherine in prison, from the Duke of Berry’s Belles Heures (Figure 8).28 According to the Golden Legend, the articulate and persuasive Catherine converts the followers of the Roman emperor Maxentius (including his wife) while in prison awaiting her final tortures and death. Yet the emphasis in the textual narrative on Catherine’s assertive powers of speech seems completely undone by the passive display of her undraped body, a display that is mentioned nowhere in the text.
  • Ibid p. 9

• Misericords, the carvings found underneath choir stall seats, are a major source for a wide variety of salacious themes - pairs of lovers; bare-breasted sirens and mermaids; men exposing their buttocks and genitals; naked women astride animals. genitals; naked women astride animals. What many of these images have in common is that they appear in the margins, outside the frame; in Camille’s words, “on the edge.”43 These spaces seem to be areas in which the proper order of things is reversed, the world is turned upside down, and the transgressive may be depicted, perhaps in order to render it powerless, perhaps to harness its power as protective, much like the numerous badges that have been found with disembodied, sometimes winged, male and female genitalia. Yet some of the most graphic marginal imagery may have other functions; Paula Gerson and Michael Camille have speculated that the image of a naked couple seeming either to copulate or engage in oral sex in the top margin of a late medieval Book of Hours to be [is] a reference to a biblical phrase on the same folio Gerson has argued that the artist must have been literate in order to create the resulting visual puns, and she also suggested that the patron/owner, very likely a woman, must have had some hand in the selection of the often-sexualized marginal imagery in the manuscript. This example of a blatantly sexual image in the margins of a sacred text is by no means unique, and many of them cannot be tied to the text in the same way.
  • Ibid p. 14-15

• Sheela-na-gigs, sculpted images of hag-like female figures squatting and pulling back the lips of their vaginas, inhabit the exterior of many Romanesque churches, especially in the British Isles. Their precise dating is uncertain, but they seem to begin to appear in the twelfth century.
  • Ibid p. 15

• A particularly popular theme in the iconography of courtly love is the storming of the Castle of Love (Figure 19). Knights fully equipped with armor, swords and horses attack a castle populated solely by women, who tepidly defend themselves and perhaps welcome their attackers by throwing roses, flowers with vaginal connotations.66 The castle itself becomes a metaphor for the female body, the castle gates an orifice waiting to be penetrated. The climactic scene in the Roman de la Rose, the most popular work of literature in the fourteenth century, where the protagonist Amant finally seduces/rapes the Rose, the object of his desire and pursuit, the text describes the ultimate scene of seduction as an attack and forced entrance upon a barricaded structure, with the body of the Rose described as an “ivory tower” and her legs as “fair pillars.” 68 Amant further uses his “staff” to break down the obstructed “little opening.” Some illustrations in Roman de la Rose manuscripts show Amant thrusting his sword into a window-like opening in the Rose, whose lower body appears as an architectural form. In spite of the similarities between the iconography of the castle of love, which can be found in manuscripts as well as ivories, and the scene of sexual consummation between Amant and the Rose, the connection between these two sources has never really been made; despite some attempts at more nuanced interpretation, much of the scholarship on medieval ivories tends toward the narrowly iconographic and curatorial, generally overlooking issues of gender and sexuality.
  • Ibid p. 21

• During the Early Middle Ages, Penitentials, books that set out church rules and the penance done for breaking them, were popular works. Amid the many different sins they noted were those that dealt with sexual practices. The seventh-century Irish penitential of Cummean, for example, banned oral, anal and inter-formal sex, as masturbation and bestiality. The Anglo-Saxon Canons of Theodore, meanwhile, includes these punishments:
  Whoever fornicates with an effeminate male or with another man or with an animal must fast for 10 years. Elsewhere it says that whoever fornicates with an animal must fast 15 years and sodomites must fast for 7 years….
  If he defiles himself (masturbates), he is to abstain from meat for four days. He who desires to fornicate (with) himself (i.e., to masturbate) and is not able to do so, he must fast for 40 days or 20 days. If he is a boy and does it often, either he is to fast 20 days or one is to whip him….
  Whoever ejaculates seed into the mouth, that is the worst evil. From someone it was judged that they repent this up to the end of their lives.
  While it was permitted to have sex with your spouse, only one type of position – the Missionary – was allowed, on the basis that this provided the least pleasure for the couple.
• Between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, tales known as fabliaux were popular in France. These were comic stories that frequently included wives and other women in sexual escapades with a variety of men. The stories include The Maiden Who Couldn’t Hear Fuck, The Knight who made cunts speak, The priest who peaked and Berangier of the Long Asshole.
  While prostitution was considered a sinful act, in urban areas throughout medieval Europe it was tolerated as a necessary evil. Some regulations of prostitution still survive, such as Regulations concerning Prostitutes Dwelling in Brothels, which was part of the Nuremberg city ordinances from about 1470. One section states:
  Also, the brothel keeper, man and woman, must provide the women living in their house with chambers, bed linens, and decent food, and they must feed them two meals a day and at every meal two decent dishes; and for such expenses each common woman living in the brothel must give the brothel keeper separately the sum of forty-two pence weekly, whether she uses the food or not. In addition the brothel keeper must make and hold a bath at least once a week in the house for the women living in the house, and this at his expense, not the women’.

• “Sex in the Middle Ages” February 14, 2013, Medievalists.net

• From the outset, any analysis of English knights' effigies must take into account the conventions of medieval portraiture, if indeed "portraiture" can be applied to this genre of sculpture. While numerous images of living (as opposed to sanctified) persons were produced during the Middle Ages, unlike modern portraiture the intention was not to capture particulars of an individual's face and body. The medieval conception of identitt, instead, was corporate in nature, with codes of representation being defined by the place of a sitter in the social hierarchy rather than by individual biography. Hence, medieval "portraits" including tomb effigies, offer idealized types which combine physical characteristics such as age and sex, with pose, costume and setting to situate the sitter within a (then) readily identifiable social category such as monarch, knight or cleric.
  
• As we shall see, this conventionality within medieval portraiture led to a rather uniform production of English millitary effigies during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, yet this correlates perfectly to a collective conception of identity during the period.

• "Of Armor and Men in Medieval England: The Chivalric Rhetoric of Three English Knights' Effigies", Rachel Ann Dressler, 2005

• In contrast to modern portraiture, which strives to capture the accurate likeness of a specific person, medieval portraiture was primarily valued for its ability to express an individual's social status, religious convictions, or political position. Medieval portrait painters, rather than reproducing the precise facial features of their subjects, often identified individuals by depicting their clothing, heraldry, or other objects related to them. The goal of medieval portraiture was to present a subject not at a particular moment in time, but as the person wished to be remembered through the ages.
• Like most medieval portraits, this image of Saint Blaise was created without even a written description of the subject's appearance. The artist concentrated his efforts on recording Blaise's forceful gaze and psychological intensity. The image may have been intended to inspire religious devotion, arresting the viewer's attention and bringing the subject to life.
• There are almost no physical descriptions of Christ or any of the other holy figures who appear so frequently in medieval books and paintings. Artists invented these portraits by necessity, cleverly using facial types, costumes, and objects to help identify each figure. Christ, for example, appears with a cross in his halo, and the well-dressed noblewoman Saint Catherine appears with the sword that beheaded her. Saints became so commonly associated with these objects, or "attributes," that they were instantly recognizable to medieval viewers.
• Author portraits are one of the oldest categories of portraiture. In the Middle Ages, the purpose of such portraits was to affirm that the author's work was trustworthy. Some author portraits featured the writer hard at work, while others portrayed the writer accompanied by an object recalling some important aspect of the text. Portraits of artists only became common toward the end of the Middle Ages, when the development of observational portraiture introduced a new subject: the artist painting from a live model.
• Saint Luke's profession as a portraitist is not mentioned in the Bible, but medieval legend credited him with painting a perfect likeness of the Virgin. Artists of the 1300s were the first to depict Luke as a painter, and many artists' guilds adopted him as their patron saint.
• In medieval manuscripts, most portraits of living people had a religious function, showing the subject—often the owner or donor of a book—in prayer before Christ or a saint. Such portraits collapsed time and space, enabling people to imagine themselves before their favorite saints, where they could ask directly for help or guidance. Such portraits heightened the devotional experience book owners felt while saying their prayers. These portraits were often conventional rather than realistic, so artists included coats of arms or other clues that helped identify the subject.

• Faces of Power and Piety: Medieval Portraiture, August 12–October 26, 2008, Getty Center

• These ugly babies were very intentional. Drawing a line between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is a useful tool when considering ugly babies and significantly more lovable ones. The two eras tend to show a difference in values.
• "Style is chosen," he continues. "We might look at medieval art and go, 'These people don't look right.' But if your goal is to look like Picasso and you make a realistic painting, they'd say you didn't do it right, either." Though there were artistic innovations that came with the Renaissance, they aren't the reason babies became better-looking.
• Medieval portraits of children were usually commissioned by churches. And that made the range of subjects limited to Jesus and a few other biblical babies. Medieval concepts of Jesus were deeply influenced by the homunculus, which literally means little man. "There's the idea that Jesus was perfectly formed and unchanged," Averett says, "and if you combine that with Byzantine painting, it became a standard way to depict Jesus. In some of these images, it looks like he had male pattern baldness."
  That homuncular, adult-looking Jesus became a convention for painting all children. Over time, it simply became the right way that people thought that they should paint babies.
  This unrealistic depiction of Jesus reflects a broader approach to medieval art: They were less interested in realism or idealized forms than Renaissance artists were.
  "The strangeness that we see in medieval art stems from a lack of interest in naturalism, and they veered more toward expressionistic conventions," Averett says.
• In the Middle Ages, "we see less art of the middle class or even the common people," Averett says.
  Once the Renaissance happened, that began to change as Florence's middle class flourished, and people were able to afford portraits of their own children. As portraiture expanded, people wanted their babies to look like cute babies instead of ugly adult homunculi. That changed the norms for a lot of art, including, eventually, portrayals of Jesus.
• Averett cautions against reading too much into the changing role of children in the Renaissance world — parents in the Middle Ages didn't love their kids any differently than Renaissance parents did. But during the Renaissance, a transformation of the idea of children was underway: from tiny adults to uniquely innocent creatures.
  "We later have this idea of children being innocent," Averett notes. "If children are born without sin, they can't know things."
  As adult attitudes toward children changed, so did adult portrayals of kids. Ugly babies (or beautiful ones) are a reflection of how a society thinks about their kids, about art, and about their goals as parents.

• "Why babies in medieval paintings look like ugly old men", Phil Edwards, VOX, 7/2015

Even if there was a gun in my hand and he was standing in front of me, I would not shoot him. This is the compassion I have learned from Mohamed, the prophet of mercy, Jesus Christ and Lord Buddha. This the legacy of change I have inherited from Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Mohammed Ali Jinnah. This is the philosophy of nonviolence that I have learned from Gandhi, Bacha Khan and Mother Teresa. And this is the forgiveness that I have learned from my father and from my mother. This is what my soul is telling me: be peaceful and love everyone. ~ Malala Yousafzai as quoted in Malala Yousafzai delivers defiant riposte to Taliban militants with speech to the UN General Assembly, The Independent, (12 July, 2013)

• Tapestries were ubiquitous in the castles and churches of the late medieval and Renaissance eras. At a practical level, they provided a form of insulation and decoration that could be easily transported. In addition, the process of tapestry weaving, where every stitch is placed by hand, enabled the creation of complex figurative images on an enormous scale. Many medieval tapestries measure as much as 5 x 10 yards and sets could include ten or more pieces. While much production was relatively coarse, intended for decorative purposes, wealthy patrons could commission designs whose subjects embodied celebratory or propagandistic themes. Enriched with silkand gilt metallic thread, such tapestries were a central component of the ostentatious magnificence used by powerful secular and religious rulers to broadcast their wealth and might.
  Workshops producing simple, small-scale figurative tapestries probably existed throughout early medieval Europe, much as they were to continue along the Rhine and in the Swiss cantons well into the sixteenth century (A Fabulous Beast, 1990.211). From the early fourteenth century, a more sizeable industry capable of producing a steady volume of large, high-quality tapestries took root in the towns of northern France and the southern Netherlands. This development was stimulated by the availability of skilled weavers and dyers associated with the cloth trade, by the existence of local guilds that supported and encouraged the development of this nascent industry, and by the commissions of local patrons. By the mid-fifteenth century, numerous tapestry workshops existed in the Low Countries in towns such as Arras, Tournai, Lille, and Brussels. From these centers, tapestries were exported throughout Europe.
  • "European Tapestry Production and Patronage, 1400–1600" MET Museum

• According to Tarot historian Tom Tadfor Little, traditional playing cards were first seen in Europe in 1375, having been brought over from the Islamic societies where they had been used for centuries before that. These cards were not, however, Tarot cards. At this point, he says, there is no evidence to show that Tarot cards had yet been created, which goes against many claims that ordinary playing cards evolved from the original Tarot deck.
  It wasn't until 1440 that the cards that were most likely the origin of Tarot cards were first mentioned. In a letter from the Duke of Milan, there was a request for several decks of "triumph" cards to be used at a special event. The letter differentiated triumph cards from regular "playing" cards.
  • How Tarot Cards Work Lee Ann Obringer, Science.Howstuffworks.com

• Playing cards were introduced to Europe through the Mameluke Empire in Egypt after originating in China. The Mameluke suits were goblets, gold coins, swords, and polo sticks. Italy and Spain transformed them into batons/staves, swords, cups, and coins. German card makers had acorns, leaves, hearts, and bells. The French were the ones to simplify the shapes and make them the clover, "pike-heads" (a type of weapon), hearts, and paving tiles.
  The English used the simplified French shapes, but called the pike-heads "spades" and the paving tiles "diamonds."
  • "The World’s Oldest Full Deck Of Playing Cards Was Almost Lost To History" Megan Willett, Business Insider, Jan. 26, 2015

• Appreciated today for its aesthetic qualities, color during the Middle Ages was also understood for its material, scientific, and medicinal properties. The manufacture of colored pigments and inks was part of the science of alchemy, the forerunner of modern chemistry. Concerned with the transformation of matter, alchemy was closely tied to artistic practice.
  • "The Alchemy of Color in Medieval Manuscripts" October 11, 2016–January 1, 2017, Getty Center

• Today’s pieces of historic erotic art comes to us from roughly 1437 CE Indonesia, both of which are from the Hindu temple of Candi Sukah* on the island of Java and with the first image being located at the entrance to the temple. According to Wikipedia, “Sukuh temple has…distinctive thematic reliefs from other candi where life before birth and sexual education are its main theme. Its main monument is a simple pyramid structure with reliefs and statues in front of it, including three tortoises with flattened shells and a male figure grasping his penis. A giant 1.82 m (6 ft) high of lingga (phallus) with four balls, representing penile incisions, was one of the statues that has been relocated to the National Museum of Indonesia.”
  Candi Sukuh was the last Buddhist temple built on Java before the island converted to Islam in the 16th century and was severely damaged by vandals at some point between when the island converted and when the temple was restored in the 19th century.
  • Erotic Art History From Around the World, Oct 13, 2016

• An explanation that people often given for the Michelangelo men-with-breasts phenomenon – which we should properly call the aesthetic of androgyny – is that they couldn’t get female nude models in the Renaissance, so artists just juxtaposed the head and breasts of women on men’s bodies. Because of stringent controls over female modesty, the idea goes, it was inappropriate for women to get undressed in front of men. In fact, this is the explanation given in Gill Saunders 1989 book, The Nude: A New Perspective– “female nudes in the painting and sculpture of the [renaissance] period were derived from male models … so they appear unconvincing”.
  Now, this is both right and wrong. It’s true of course that for many women, especially women from the upper classes, there was strict control over their dress and comportment in the Renaissance. It’s also true that many of the female figures in renaissance paintings were based on male models – this is common practice, and goes well beyond Michelangelo. There were more men available around a painter’s workshop after all. What’s not true is that it necessarily made for unconvincing women – Raphael’s St Catherine of Alexandria was based on a male model, and I don’t see her as particularly androgynous.
• There was also, however, women in this period who would take their clothes off in return for payment or other favours; it’s probably best not to make assumptions about women’s lives in the past based solely on the evidence from a social elite. Although there’s not very many drawings after the female nude still in existence, there’s plenty of evidence for renaissance artists having naked women models, especially after 1500 – there’ll be more about this in a chapter of my nudes book. As a matter of fact, one of the handful of extant renaissance drawings after the female nude is by Michelangelo (to the left, now in the Louvre). This image of a naked kneeling woman, her hair plaited around her head, is a study for Mary Magdalen in his unfinished Entombmentpanel, which was painted around 1500 for the church of Sant’Agostino in Rome (therein lies a tale about courtesan culture in Rome, but I’ll save that for another post)
  If Michelangelo, then, knew what women’s bodies looked like, and was clearly able to draw them (being quite handy at drawing), we have to assume that the appearance of his women was through deliberate choice rather than ignorance.

• “Men with Breasts (Or Why are Michelangelo’s Women so Muscular?) Part 1”, Jill Burke, Renresearch, February 11, 2011

• I don’t think it’s possible in this period that a person’s sexuality can be taken as a straightforward explanation for his or her artistic choices. Moreover, it certainly doesn’t explain why this type of image should be popular with a broader audience.
  There are two easier explanations:
  1) androgynous bodies were thought to be beautiful in the Renaissance,
  2) artistic nudes weren’t meant to be realistic.
  The boundaries between male and female were conceived differently in renaissance culture than they are today. Thomas Laqueur has argued in relation to renaissance anatomical practice that at this time there was “only one canonical body and that body was male”. Although people have objected to what Laqueur has called the “one-sex model”, it seems to have been a highly influential way of understanding sexual difference in the renaissance. The idea was that the normative human body was male, and that women’s bodies were simply imperfect versions of men’s. For this reason, in early anatomical books, the bodies used to demonstrate human physiology are always male unless the female reproductive system is specifically being studied.
• No wonder then, that for some in the renaissance, the most beautiful women were those who looked the most like that perfect original form. Like is attracted to like, Marsilio Ficino explained: “Women truly easily capture men, and even more those women who bear a masculine character. And even more easily, men catch men, as they are more like men than are women”. Ficino’s follower, Mario Equicola, claimed in 1525 that “the effeminate male and the manly female are graceful in almost every aspect”. This was shown to comic effect in Benvenuto Cellini’s Autobiography, where he tells a story of a dinner party where he brought his young and beautiful model, Diego, dressed up as a woman, and Diego was declared the most beautiful of all the ladies. There are plenty of images of feminine-looking young men in the Renaissance that show the interest in male androgyny too – many of Leonardo da Vinci’s male figures look feminine (hence the non-controversy about John the Evangelist “really” being Mary Magdalen that Dan Brown talked about in the Da Vinci code).
  There are good reasons, therefore, beyond convenience, why renaissance artists might study a male model as the basis for their female figures.

• "Men with Breasts – Michelangelo’s women”, Jill Burke, Renresearch, February 25, 2011

• Race isn’t something that most Italian Renaissance art historians consider much. Whether you can use the term “race” when talking about the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is problematic – it doesn’t neatly reflect any words used in the period. As Italy wasn’t involved to any great extent in the Atlantic slave trade, the relationship between the Italian renaissance and non European peoples has not been hugely explored (at least not by me… Paul Kaplan and others have done a great deal of work on this – and Joaneath Spicer is curating an upcoming exhibition about Africans in Renaissance art at the Walters Museum in Baltimore).
  Now, though, I’m wondering if increased contact with non-Europeans was one of the central factors in the fascination with finding the “perfect” body that underlies the explosion in nude imagery in central Italy in the later fifteenth century.

• "African slavery and Italian nudes" Jill Burke, Renresearch, February 8, 2011

• This week has been concerned a strange, but fun, mixture of finalising our renaissance make up recipes for the Making Up the Renaissance study day (finding red sandalwood, allum and vinegar to make lipstick and blusher, for example), and avid reading of Alvise Cadamosto’s account of his voyages to Africa in the 1450s.
• Cadamosto (or Ca’ da Mosto) was a Venetian adventurer, who sailed on the Portuguese voyages of discovery to Western Africa in 1455-6, going to present-day Senegal.
• In chapter 2 of the renaissance nudes book, I talk about how Cadamosto’s description of the naked natives he saw influenced the way people thought about nakedness, and thus how the nude was represented in painting and sculpture. Before the 1470s, nude figures do occur in the visual arts, but its normally for understandable reasons that have to do with telling a story. So, for example, Adam and Eve are naked because that’s what it says about them in the Bible; or you might get figures in bed for scenes of lovers, who are naked for obvious reasons – although they almost always wear a hat, as above! After the 1470s, though, you start to get nudes who have no obvious narrative purpose.
• Antonio del Pollaiuolo was a pioneer of the male-nude-in-action form, which was to become repeatedly revisited in Italian renaissance art. His most famous work is probably the incredibly influential Battle of Naked Men which – though obviously inspired by the heroic nudes of classical antiquity – show men who seem “primitive” (according to Joseph Manca), or “bestial” and “degraded” (Patricia Emison), or “undignified” and “vicious” (Alison Wright), which has been a bit of a mystery for art historians in terms of finding a convincing iconography.
• Cadamosto, elsewhere in his text, talks about how these Africans went around naked, about some tribes using poison arrows, and he emphasises the fertility of their land – perhaps reflected by the sorghum and vines in the back of the image.
  I’m not claiming to have found the magic iconographical bullet, but the mood of the passage, and, importantly, its attitude towards “bestial” African peoples, may have influenced Pollaiuolo and his Florentine patrons. I’m becoming more and more convinced that the voyages of discovery are fundamental to the development of the artistic nude.

• "Pollaiuolo’s Battle of Naked Africans?" Jill Burke, Renresearch, March 12, 2011

• Notoriously, on the wedding night of the celebrated art critic, John Ruskin and Effie Gray in 1848, Ruskin was so repelled by the sight of his bride’s body that he was unable to consummate the marriage. Effie Gray explained in a letter of five years later “he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person”. Although we’ll never get to the bottom, so to speak, of the reasons for Ruskin’s reaction, it’s been widely assumed that he was traumatised by Effie’s pubic hair.
  And, frankly, no wonder. For an English male art historian of the nineteenth century, steeped in the classical tradition and Italian Renaissance art, the expected female body would surely have been completely hairless.
• A recipe that constantly recurs is one based on creating a highly alkaline solution that melts the hair from the surface of the skin (just as hair-removers like Veet do today). There’s evidence of recipes for this paste – which is called “rhusma” being used in Ancient Turkey from about 3000 BC, and the Trotula – a very popular medieval book of recipes dating from the 12th century, but reproduced frequently since, also includes this.
• In fact, hairiness in women could be a visual representation of humoral imbalance. According to the humoral system, women were cold and wet in nature as opposed to their hot dry male counterparts, and it was heat and dryness that was the source of body hair. Thus the sixteenth-century Spanish physician Juan Huarte wrote that
  "Having a lot of body hair and a bit of beard is a clear indication of low levels of coldness and moisture… and if the hair is dark then even higher levels of heat and dryness are present. The opposite temperature creates a woman who is smooth, without beard or body hair. The woman of average levels of coldness and moisture has a little bit of hair on her body but it is light and blonde. Of course, the woman who has much body and facial hair (being of a more hot and dry nature) is also intelligent but disagreeable and argumentative, muscular, ugly, has a deep voice and frequent infertility problems."
• Removing the hair could be seen as merely a return to the proper balance of a female body, avoiding the dangerous specter of a masculinized woman. Medicine, hygiene and beauty were closely intertwined in the Renaissance (as they are today). But certainly aesthetics were an element of hair removal. For example, Francisco Delicado’s La Lozana Andaluza, was published in Venice in 1528. It tells the tale of an Andalucian prostitute, Lozana, in Rome who gets up to all sorts of sexual misadventures and also offers beauty treatments to female clients. Lozana declares that in a certain Roman brothel “You’ll see more than ten whores, some who pluck their eyebrows and others who shave their private parts“, and later recounts a story of how “By mistake we burned off all the hair from the private parts of a lady from Bologna, but we put butter on it and made her believe she was right in style“. Later some women come to Lozana for some cosmetics and ointments, and also ask Lozana to “teach me and my cousin here how to shave off female hair, since that’s the way our husbands like it.”
• Although there is no way to make a neat causal connection between the visual art of this period and female bodily identity, perhaps it’s time we asked these questions. The renaissance nude wasn’t simply a celebration of humanity, or a homage to a lost antique past, but popularised – even fetishised – quite narrow notions of attractiveness in a society where, for women, beauty was a cultural currency and could determine their future prospects. No wonder they sought to modify their bodies to meet this ideal.

• “Did renaissance women remove their body hair?”, Jill Burke, Renresearch, December 9, 2012

• There’s nothing really known about this drawing in the Uffizi by Rosso Fiorentino. It’s generally dated for stylistic reasons to the early 1520s. In red chalk, it portrays a woman – naked apart from a ring of pearls around her neck and the jewels in her unravelling hair – pointing with her right hand to something beyond the picture plain, whilst her left hand is placed on top of her head. Many commentators have found this woman’s body shape puzzling. In the words of the New York Times art critic, Holland Cotter, “is she pregnant or just out of shape”?
  For me, it doesn’t seem puzzling at all – the woman is neither pregnant, nor out of shape, but her body reveals its own history, a history of pregnancy. This woman’s rounded stomach is a reminder of past pregnancies, a stomach that is familiar to many women today too, but tends to be hidden or perceived as an anomaly to be “remedied” by stomach crunches or plastic surgery. Rosso, rather than making an idealised nude form that has no relationship to time, shows a body that, I think, is hauntingly beautiful, but built into time, particularised but also universal in showing the rounded but softened belly that is familiar to most women who have given birth. It’s telling that this shape is largely missing from our familiar visual vocabulary of femininity – where slenderness and pregnancy are both acceptable, expected, but an interim state is somehow shocking. Is the internet helping to remedy this?
• The other, more famous, example of a formerly pregnant belly in renaissance art is Michelangelo’s Night. The language used by art historians to describe this older woman is often startlingly hostile and casually misogynistic – with reference to her spent, flaccid abdomen, her “tired” breasts, or the distortion of her body (distorted from what perceived norm?). In the Renaissance, this sculpture was praised for its beauty. Why does modern western culture view the post-pregnancy female body with such distaste?

• ““Is she pregnant, or just out of shape?” Misogyny and description in art history”, Renresearch June 18, 2012

• As I briefly mentioned in a previous post, I’m interested in how innovations in mirror technology (particularly the advent of flat glass mirrors, as opposed to convex glass or polished metal) may have affected body image. This happened at the very beginning of the sixteenth century, the first flat glass mirror patent being taken out in Venice in 1507. Largescale flat mirrors meant, I think, that people would be able to observe their entire bodies in mirrors for the first time. I’m wondering what kind of emotional charge that might have had.
• Death and Vanity, to my knowledge, is much more common as a subject for prints in Northern Europe, particularly Germany, than in Italy. The same is true of images of witchcraft. There’s some fantastic German images of witches undertaking demonic rituals from the early sixteenth century by Dürer and Hans Baldung, but not many Italian images that are equivalent (if you want to read more about the German images, the relevant chapter in Joseph Koerner’s The Moment of Self-Portraiture might be a good start). Perhaps the nearest Italian equivalent to the frenzied German witches is an enigmatic print possibly by Agostino Veneziano called Lo Stregozzo.
  So I was happy, and surprised,when I noticed the print to the left. Definitely by Agostino Veneziano (his signature is on it), the BM had catalogued this as an image of St Margaret, Looking at her though, it’s not likely that this woman is a saint – she’s all together too lascivious. Although she’s alongside a demon-type creature (at the bottom right), which could be St Margaret’s dragon, St Margaret isn’t normally shown next to a cave, nor does she wear a flimsy see-through dress which she suggestively raises with her left hand. That demon-type creature also seems suspiciously phallic if you look closely. In her other hand she holds a convex mirror – perhaps intended to be a scrying glass (like a crystal-ball, convex mirrors were sometimes held to reveal the future and other occult secrets to people who knew how to use them). I have to say I don’t work on witchcraft, so I’m not going to do much with this image, but I’d love to hear from anyone who wants to do further research on it, or from those people who have already done some great research on witchcraft images in Italy. Anyhow, it seems to me that we can add this print to the small list of Italian images of witches.

• "That’s no saint! Mirrors, witches and seeing yourself naked", Jill Burke, Renresearch, March 25, 2011

• My own interest is through the work I’m doing on body image – in particular, I was trying to work out if pubic shaving was something that became more popular when images of hairless female nudes became more diffused in the early sixteenth century: did women try to make their bodies look like classical sculpture? Was the invention of the flat reflecting mirror towards the end of the fifteenth century responsible for people being more body conscious? One thing it did make possible was full body naked self-portraits, like the one by Pontormo to the left (this image taken from the fantastic British Museum collections database).
  • “Cosmetics, mirrors and pubic shaving” Jill Burke, Renresearch, 2/18/2011

• The ceiling of the chapel is perhaps the most famous. In the center the story of many and his relationship with God is shown. The famous finger to finger painting in the center is very well known and everywhere replicated in the world today. It looks like the ceiling is a portrait of biblical history from creation and then ending with the Last Judgment. The first scene which is the Drunkenness of Noah is consistent with Neo-Platonism. Neo-Platonism will often show the lowest state of a soul by drunkenness. The panels of the ceiling go on to show man in his low state to creation. In the panel the Creation of Adam, there are two under the arm of God. As De Tolnay states "One is a girl, who "represents the Platonic idea of Eve, preexisting in the divine intellect". The last panel, God Dividing the Light from Darkness, shows what a depiction of a complete pure being is. In the Creation of Eve, Michelangelo portrayed God as a human. If you start with at the beginning with the Drunkenness of Noah, the painted story goes through biblical history to where freedom finally and forever is achieved. The panels, because of this progression may then be interpreted as a Neo-Platonism manifesto (Vess, D. (1998).

• "Painting the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo" Essays, UK., 23rd March, 2015

For men know that throughout all the prior ages of history the bottom line in male-female relationships has always been woman's need for male protection. Women could not live alone for fear of predation by males. So they lived with a male protector and accepted his dictation of their role, either as a condition of receiving his protection, or because he would impose it upon them by physical force, or both. Access to firearms gives women, for the first time in history, the capacity to live independently and apart from men in safety and freedom. ~ Carol Ruth Silver, and Don B. Kates Jr. (1979) Self Defense Handgun Ownership and the Independence of Women in a Violent Sexist Society. Archived February 11, 2014, at the Wayback Machine. North River Press: Hawthorne, New York. Page 24.

• The battle shown here was fought in August 1499 off Zonchio, north of Navarino (Peloponnese). The combatants were a Turkish vessel commanded by Kemal Ali (shown standing on the deck of his ship), and two Venetian vessels commanded by Antonio Loredan and Albano d'Armer. The Turks were victorious; Loredan was killed when his ship was burnt, and Armer was taken as a prisoner to Istanbul, where he was sawn into pieces on the order of Bajazet II. This is possibly the first print of an actual naval battle.The woodcut became the most important medium for producing images of topical interest and they were coloured using stencils so that many impressions could be produced quickly. This is the only impression of this print that survives but many must have been made. It comes from a famous album of early woodcuts that once belonged to Rudolph II in Prague.
  • The Battle of Zonchio (Navarino), woodcut coloured using stencils, Google Culture, 1499/1500

• The Sanctae Peregrinationes, or the Peregrinatio in Terram Sanctam, was the first printed illustrated travel-book, and marked a leap forward for book illustration generally. It featured five large fold-out woodcuts, the first ever seen in the West, including a spectacular five-foot-long (1600 x 300 mm) woodcut panoramic view of Venice, where the pilgrims had stayed for three weeks. The book also contained a three-block map of Palestine and Egypt, centred on a large view of Jerusalem, and panoramas of five other cities: Iraklion, Modon, Rhodes, Corfu and Parenzo. There were also studies of Near Eastern costume, and an Arabic alphabet - also the first in print. Pictures of animals seen on the journey, including a crocodile, camel, and unicorn, were also included.
  The colophon of the book is a lively coat-of-arms of the current Archbishop of Mainz, which includes the first cross-hatching in woodcut.
  The book was a bestseller, reprinted thirteen times over the next three decades, including printings in France and Spain, for which the illustration blocks were shipped out to the local printers. The first edition in German was published within a year of the Latin one, and it was also translated into French, Dutch and Spanish before 1500. Additional text-only editions and various abridged editions were also published.
  • "Erhard Reuwich", History of Graphic Design.com

• By 1480 twenty-three Northern European towns, thirty-one Italian towns, seven French towns, six Iberian towns, and one English town had presses. By 1500 printing was practiced in over 140 towns. In 1450 Europe's monasteries and libraries had housed a mere fifty thousand volumes; during the incunabula period it is estimated that over thirty-five thousand editions total of nine million books-were printed. In addition, a vast array of ephemera, including religious tracts, pamphlets, and broadsides, was produced for free distribution or sale. Broadsides (single-leaf pages printed on one side) eventually evolved into printed posters, advertisements, and newspapers. Four years after printing came to Venice, a dismayed scribe complained that the city was "stuffed with books." The boom in the new craft led to overproduction and an overabundance of firms. Of the over one hundred printing firms established in Venice before 1490, only ten survived until the end of the century.
  • "The German Illustrated Book", History of Graphic Design.com

• The focus of the exhibition is on prints and drawings from the British Museum’s collection, alongside a few loans from the V&A, the Ashmolean, Tate Britain and the British Library. Witches fly on broomsticks or backwards on dragons or beasts, as in Albrecht Dürer’s Witch Riding backwards on a Goat of 1501, or Hans Baldung’s Witches’ Sabbath from 1510. They are often depicted within cave-like kitchens surrounded by demons, performing evil spells, or raising the dead within magic circles, as in the powerful work of Salvator Rosa, Jacques de Gheyn and Jan van der Velde.
  Francisco de Goya turned the subject of witches into an art form all of its own, whereby grotesque women conducting hideous activities on animals and children were represented in strikingly beautiful aquatint etchings. Goya used them as a way of satirising divisive social, political and religious issues of his day. Witches were also shown as bewitching seductresses intent on ensnaring their male victims, seen in the wonderful etching by Giovanni Battista Castiglione of Circe, who turned Odysseus’ companions into beasts.
  During the Romantic period, Henry Fuseli’s Weird Sisters from Macbethinfluenced generations of theatre-goers, and illustrations of Goethe’s Faust were popularised by Eugène Delacroix. By the end of the 19th century, hideous old hags with distended breasts and snakes for hair were mostly replaced by sexualised and mysteriously exotic sirens of feminine evil, seen in the exhibition in the work of Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Odilon Redon.

• ‘’Witches and wicked bodies’’, The British Museum, 25 September 2014 – 11 January 2015

• The Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola disapproved of the fashion for painted marriage furniture, complaining that 'heathen stories' from Greek and Roman mythology were perverting young women's minds, and that beds decorated with naked men and women would lead young people to dishonest acts. Well-known Old Testament heroines, however appear frequently in bedroom furniture decoration.

• Women in Italian Renaissance Art: Gender, Representation and Identity, Paola Tinagli, 1997 p. 31

• For the modern viewer, the nudes painted by Giorgione and Titian may seem more sensuous and erotic than the fifteenth-century nudes painted inside the lids of cassoni. We may respond to the way the artist imitates with oil paint the softness and texture of the skin and of the hair, to the way he has arranged the body on the canvas, to the devices he has used in order to invite the gaze of the viewer. We may find the pose of a fifteenth century nude painted inside a cassone lid awkward, and the conventions used in the representation of the body distancing and and less enticing, but out perceptions were not necessarily shared by contemporary viewers. The Dominican Girolamo Savonarola obviously found these images dangerous, and he condemned in his sermons those 'very dishonest figures, naked girls and men' which are kept in many houses and which decorated lettuci (day beds) and lettiere (beds), since he believed that such lasvicious pictures could corrupt those that saw them. Many of the paintings burnt in the bonfires of the vanities (bruciamenti delle vanita) during the Carnival of 1496 would have belonged to this type.

• Ibid, 121-122

• Girolamo Savonarola preaching in Florence in 1496 reproached painters who represented the Virgin Mary beautifully dressed because 'she went dressed as a poor woman, simply, and so covered that her face could hardly be seen, and likewise Saint Elizabeth went dressed simply'. Those ideals of femininity which we have already seen illustrated in the cassone and spalliere panels are proposed again to women through these omnipresent religious images. What is stressed is a behavior which is, above all, chaste and modest, but also industrious.

• Ibid, 158-159

• It was Raimondi who created the images for the first work of printed pornography, a book called "I Modi" (“The Positions” or “The Ways”), also known as "The Sixteen Pleasures" (or, if you’re into Latin, "De omnibus Veneris Schematibus"). As per the title, the book was built around engravings of 16 sexual positions, based on a lost series of paintings by Giulio Romano, Raphael’s pupil, which he had painted for Federico II Gonzaga, to decorate and provide inspiration at his Palazzo Te in Mantua (destroyed in 1630, during the War of Mantuan Succession). Raimondi first published the engravings in 1524. Pope Clement VII was unimpressed, and threw him into prison, ordering all copies of the engravings burned. Like Justice Potter Stewart, Pope Clement VII knew porn when he saw it, and he had seen it. But here’s the catch. Giulio Romano was not punished for his original paintings, because they were never intended for public viewing — only the private enjoyment of Duke Federico Gonzaga. Raimondi was quick to “borrow” the art of others, not only Dürer — it turned out that Romano had no idea about the engravings, and was only informed when visited by one of the great personalities of the Renaissance, and a man with a wonderfully naughty streak himself, Pietro Aretino.
• Aretino liked the cut of Raimondi’s jib, and decided to compose 16 sexually explicit sonnets to accompany Raimondi’s engravings. He negotiated Raimondi’s release from prison, and a second edition, now with Aretino’s text, was published in 1527. This was the first time that erotic text and images were combined in print, and the first time that pornographic images (which happened to be very beautiful and by a great artist) were mass-produced for the general public. Pope Clement was still unimpressed, and tried to destroy all copies of this edition, too (as far as scholars can tell, only a few fragments survive). A pirated, rather crudely copied edition was printed in Venice circa 1550 (with apt irony, given that Raimondi had engaged in copying someone else’s work in Venice, 44 years prior), showing that black-market porn was a thing, even in the 16th century. Something slipped through the papal dragnet (perhaps because, in that same year, the pope had other problems, like the Sack of Rome by the renegade army of Charles V). A 17th-century painter, Agostino Carracci, arranged for a reprinting of Aretino’s poems, and also seems to have copied the original engravings, some of which must have survived. A 17th-century Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford also oversaw a printing of an English edition at Oxford University Press, entitled "Aretino’s Postures" (the dean at the time confiscated the copper plates used for the engravings — recall that Oxford began as a largely theological institution).

• "The Renaissance origin of porn: Inside “I Modi,” the 16th-century sex manual masterpiece", Noah Charney, Salon, 02.12.2017

• Even more impressive was a “secret” bath-room in the Vatican called Stufetta del Bibbiena so named after Cardinal Bibbiena, a worldly Renaissance-era cleric who in 1516 commissioned Raphael to decorate his bathroom in the papal apartments with erotic frescoes emulating recently excavated Roman ruins. The cardinal and later various popes could soak in a hot tub while gazing at a still-life Satyricon featuring naked nymphs and satyrs, most notably randy old Pan himself, who could be seen leaping out of the bushes with an enormous erection.
  • "The Grand Spas of Central Europe: A History of Intrigue, Politics, Art, and Healing", David Clay Large, 2015, p.31

• Portrait sets of kings and queens and other groups of ‘worthies’ were increasingly found in long galleries and great halls throughout the Tudor period. The display of groups of portraits probably reached the height of their popularity in the 1590s and the first decade of the seventeenth century.
  • "Picturing History: A portrait set of early English kings and queens" National Portrait Gallery, NPR,

• Only beginning in the late 16th century do you begin to see some instances of portraits of known individuals, some slaves and some ex-slaves or diplomatic ambassadors. It is at around that time that huge distinctions in what is defined as "African" begin to sort out, especially in the distinctions in darker-skinned sub-Saharans versus lighter-skinned Maghreb populations on the North African coast. Often the latter are associated with Turks or Ottomans because of their Muslim affiliations and their control of Mediterranean trade.
  The Black Madonnas are tricky. In some cases it's pretty clear, based on pigment analysis and other examination during conservation, that the color was added later. That is fascinating in itself, because it means that at some point someone (often in the early modern era) thought it would add something to the image to give it dark skin. A young scholar who works on this, Elisa Foster, has suggested that this was often intended to suggest exoticism or venerability, which connects in an interesting way with images of the Queen of Sheba, whose dark skin also seems to have been read in this way. One might argue that in Latin America, the dark skin of such figures had an ethnic/racial role to play as well, but that's still much debated. In the end, skin color and other somatic differences mean so many different things at different times and places that it's hard to generalize about them.
  

• "Code Switch: Race and Identity Remixed Taking A Magnifying Glass To The Brown Faces In Medieval Art", Gene Demby, NPR, December 13, 2013,

• The Kunstkammer was regarded as a microcosm or theater of the world, and a memory theater. The Kunstkammer conveyed symbolically the patron's control of the world through its indoor, microscopic reproduction.
  • Francesaco Fiorani, reviewing Bredecamp 1995 in Renaissance Quarterly 51.1 (Spring 1998:268-270) p 268.

• Today’s piece of historic erotic art comes to us from circa 1594 France and is the well known oil on oak painting that has been titled in more modern times as “Gabrielle d'Estrées et une de ses sœurs“ though the identities of the women cannot be definitively confirmed.
  Gabrielle d’Éstrées was the beloved mistress and nearly the wife of Henry IV of France and was, by her own right, one of the most powerful people in the country and in much of Europe during her life.
• It is generally accepted that the lady on the right is Gabrielle d’Éstrée both due to her resemblance to other portraits and because of the ring she is holding which is believed to be the coronation ring Henry IV gave her as a gift shortly before her unexpected death. A commonly held interpretation is that the painting was a pregnancy announcement, with the lady in the back presumed to be sewing baby clothes and the pinched nipple referencing the nursing to come, but the erotic interpretations have been perceived throughout history, as well, including by an official who had the painting concealed behind a curtain where it hung in a Paris police station until it was acquired by the Louvre in 1937. In keeping with the common practice of museums omitting queer history, the Louvre’s article on the piece on their official website makes no mention of the commonly held erotic interpretation of the painting or its widely held iconic status as a queer female image and instead frames the nipple pinch by saying only that “the oddly affectionate way in which the sister is pinching Gabrielle d'Estrées’ right breast has often been taken as symbolizing the latter’s pregnancy with the illegitimate child of Henry IV”.

• "History Erotic Art from Around the World" Sep 12, 2016

• The council repudiated certain Protestant positions and affirmed the basic structure of the Catholic Church as it had existed in medieval times. It codified Catholic doctrines on salvation, the Seven Sacraments, and the Biblical canon. The Catholic Mass was standardized, thereby abolishing the pluralism of local variations. Church discipline and administration were reformed. So was the practice of the sale of indulgences. The role of the Pope as an absolute ecclesiastical authority was “firmly legitimized.” The Inquisition was revitalized to prevent the growth of heresy. In 1564, the year following the completion of the work at Trent, an index of prohibited books was issued. The visual arts were also addressed by the council. Cardinal Paleotti wrote a tract on what he termed decorum in painting, a detailed discussion of what was and wasn’t acceptable. In Paleotti’s decorum, “Nudity and eroticism were out…Anything faintly tinted with heretical incorrectness was anathema. Nothing from real life was to intrude that might diminish or distract from the improving and uplifting image. Dignity was essential. Humor was banned. So was fantasy. Anything new of any kind was banned.” By 1597, an index of prohibited images was issued.
  • "Baroque" California State University, 4-5

• I approached the task of destroying images by first tearing them out of the heart through God’s Word and making them worthless and despised. This indeed took place before Dr. Karlstadt ever dreamed of destroying images. For when they are no longer in the heart, they can do no harm when seen with the eyes. But Dr. Karlstadt, who pays no attention to matters of the heart, has reversed the order by removing them from sight and leaving them in the heart. For he does not preach faith, nor can he preach it; unfortunately, only now do I see that. Which of these two forms of destroying images is best, I will let each man judge for himself.
  • Martin Luther, Against the Heavenly Prophets in the Matter of Images and Sacraments (1525) pp.84-85; as quoted in Theological Aesthetics: A Reader edited by Gesa Elsbeth Thiessen

• For just as soon as a visible form has been fashioned for God, his power is also bound to it. Men are so stupid that they fasten God wherever they fashion him; and hence they cannot but adore. And there is no difference whether they simply worship an idol, or God in the idol. It is always idolatry when divine honors are bestowed on an idol, under whatever pretext this is done. And because it does not please God to be worshiped superstitiously, whatever is conferred upon the idol is snatched from him.
  • John Calvin, Institutes 1.11.9 as quoted in War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin by Carlos, M. N. Eire, p.217

• Trouble me not; such an idol is accursed, and therefore I will not touch it.' The patron and the arguesyn (i.e. sergeant who commanded the forcats) with two officers, having the chief charge of all such matters, said, 'Thou shalt handle it,' and so they violently thrust it to his face, and put it betwixt his hands, who seeing the extremity, taking the idol and advisedly looking about, he cast it into the river, and said, 'Let our lady now save herself; she is light enough; let her learn to swim.' After that was no Scotchman urged with that idolatry.
  • John Knox letter December 1559 as quoted in John Knox by William Mackergo Taylor, 1885, p.25-26

• It is clear that the images and other representations which we have in the houses of worship have caused the risk of idolatry. Therefore they should not be allowed to remain there, nor in your chambers, nor in the market-place, nor anywhere else where one does them honor. Chiefly they are not to be tolerated in the churches, for all that is in them should be worthy of our respect. If anyone desires t put historical representations on the outside of the churches that may be allowed, so long as they do not incite to their worship. But when one begins to bow before these images and to worship them, then they are not to be tolerated anywhere in the wide world; for that is the beginning of idolatry, nay, is idolatry itself.
  • Huldrych Zwingli, Letter, Nov 17 1523, Huldreich Zwingli, the Reformer of German Switzerland, 1484-1531 by Samuel Macauley Jackson, John Martin Vincent, Frank Hugh Foster, p.208

• It is not also taught you in Scripture, that you should desire St. Rock to preserve you from the pestilence, to pray to St. Barbarra to defend you from thunder or gun-shot, to offer St. Loy an horse of wax, a pig to St. Anthony, a candle to St, Sithine. But I should be too long, if I were to rehearse unto you all the superstitions that have grown out of the invocation and praying to saints departed, wherewith men have been seduced, and God's honour given to creatures.
  This was also no small abuse that we called the images by the names of the things, whom they did represent. For we were won't to say, "This is St. Ann's altar ;"-"My father is gone a pilgrimage to our Lady of Walsingham;"-" In our church St. James standeth on the right hand of the high altar." These speeches we were wont to use, although they be not to be commended. For St. Austin in the exposition of the 113th Psalm affirmeth, that they who do call such images, as the carpenter hath made, do change the truth of God into a lie. It is not also taught you in all Scripture.
  Thus, good children, I have declared how we were wont to abuse images, not that hereby I condemn your fathers, who were men of great devotion, and had an earnest love towards God, although their zeal in all points was not ruled and governed by true knowledge, but they were seduced and blinded partly by the common ignorance that reigned in their time, partly by the covetousness of their teachers, who abused the simplicity of the unlearned people to the maintenance of their own lucre and glory. But this be profitable, for if they had, either Christ would have taught it or the Holy Ghost would have revealed it unto the Apostles, which they did not. And if they did, the Apostles were very negligent that would not make some mention of it, and speak some good word for images, seeing that they speak so many against them. And by this means Anti-christ and his holy Papists had more knowledge or fervent zeal to give s godly things ad profitable for us, than had the very holy saints of Christ, yea more than Christ himself and the Holy Ghost. Now forasmuch, good children, as images be neither necessary nor profitable in our churches and temples, nor were not used at the beginning in Christ's nor the Apostles' time, nor many years after, and that at length they were brought in by bishops of Rome, maugre emperors' teeth; and seeing also, that they be very slanderous to Christ's religion, for by them the name of God is blasphemed among the infidels, Turks, and Jews, which because of our images do call Christian religion, idolatry and worshiping of images: and for as much also, as they have been so wonderfully abused within this realm to the high contumely and dishonor of God, and have been great cause of blindness and of much contention among the King's Majesty's loving subjects and are like so to be still, if they should remain: and chiefly seeing God's word speaketh so much against them, you may hereby right well consider what great causes and ground the King's Majesty had to take them away within his realm, following here in the example of the godly King Hezekias, who brake down the brazen serpent, when he saw it worshiped, and was therefore praised of God, notwithstanding at the first the same was made and set up by God's commandment, and was not only a remembrance of God's benefits, before received, but also a figure of Christ to come. And not only Hezekias, but also Manasses, and Jehosaphat, and Josias, the best kings that were of the Jews, did pull down images in the time of their reign.

• Thomas Cranmer, The Life, Martyrdom, and Selections from the Writings of Thomas Cranmer by Thomas Cranmer, p.139-142, (1809)

• Doctor Faustus is one of the tragedies of the time with such secular tendencies, the doctor rejecting the Heaven connects it to Luther's renewal of the mystery in afterlife, making death the more inscrutable in its cycles of despair and faith which is inherent in Christian experience. There is a set of formal technique stressing such affinity between the two with the play's ambivalence towards Calvinistic predestination and Faustus' recurrent mood-swings as a Lutheran response to inaccessibility of death. Lutheran's scepticism regards the possibility of containing philosophical speculation on afterlife in stable pieces of doctrine which for Faustus and Luther ends up in a restless ecstasy of mind.
  The Calvinist background makes Faustus' choice compelled in fear of God's punishment and yet being unable to repent and the inevitable otherness of the deity and the predestination of human action. Faustus has studied in Wittenberg where both Luther and Calvin taught and his tragic force stems from the destruction of an individual will by the arbitrary power of the Calvinist God.
  Presently the general view takes Faustus' motivation in a balance perspective of both voluntarist and determinist readings. The actual restlessness within the play dangles between the extremes. Faustus is a sceptic; his mind proceeds by the dialectic of doubt and desire to fill the void in his understanding through new dogmatic position while he establishes a balance between competing doctrines. His dissatisfaction with stasis is hardly adequate for his agonized unrepenance in God's face of wrath.
• Marlowe spent 3 years studying Protestant theology at Cambridge, and Faustus struggled with this uncertainty. His supernatural perspectives generate an awareness of a denied satisfaction attempting to deny the existence of this greater perspective. His final soliloquy is in the same dialectic pattern longing for the "perpetual day" and meanwhile his soul to be "dissolved in elements," desiring to make the afterlife and extension of his earthly perspective and also escaping it entirely. There are baffling reasons for Faustus to keep to his pact. He asks for a description of hell while the answer he receives is dissatisfying. So he shifts the subject to having a wife substituting his questions with a feminized spirit. Mephistopheles' explanation of astrology is "freshmen's supposition" and the book of spells seem incomplete to him and he takes a tour to Rome instead of Hell.

• "Doctor Faustus And The Lutheran Aesthetic Religion Essay", Essays, UK., 23rd March, 2015

• The Protestants had their Reformation and the Catholics had their Counter Reformation. While the Catholics needed to attract viewers with religious art that more significantly impacted onlookers, Protestants would respond with a lack of religious art. Instead they would concentrate, for example, on genre paintings that taught their viewers moral lessons. Compositions from both tended to have more open space. Objects and scenes were in a state of motion to create emotion. They either came out as the viewer or something could fall on the viewer. The motion of these pieces was created through circular or diagonal compositions. On going at this time was a general knowledge that the Earth was in motion, which was a giant conceptual leap to show this aspect of life in art. Some characteristics of baroque was an attention to exact, naturalistic details. Spatial values, such as deep space, fooling the eye and objects being pushed into the viewers space. An integration of architecture, sculpture and painting. Stories being portrayed would seem to happen in the space and time of the viewer
• One of the few northern Europe protestant artists to create religious paintings was Rembrandt. He was from protestant Holland and is well remember for creating about 60 self portraits. Biblical subjects accounted for one third of his entire production. This is quite rare for the Protestant North of the seventeenth century, for church patronage was nonexistent and religious art was not regarded as important. His famous painting, The Return of the Prodigal Son (tiu.edu), was finished shortly before his death in 1669. There is a sense of great tragedy as you gaze upon this work. The contrast between the light and the dark, the two mysterious figures that appear dimly in the background, the woman behind the father and the dishevelment of the younger brother, all contribute to this sense of tragedy.
  The Baroque styles of Protestant Northern Europe and predominantly Italian Catholic artists are stylistically similar. This comes as no surprise since the techniques originated in Italy. The most notable distinction between the two styles is not the artistic tendencies, but rather the motives or message being conveyed through the paintings. The Catholic Baroque style included vivid imagery that displayed vigorous emotion and incited emotion in those that viewed it. While the Protestant Baroque style used many similar, if not the same techniques; portrayed uniquely intrinsic emotion felt by the artist and brought about emotion not so much through dramatic stimulation, as through sympathetic understanding. The fundamental difference between Protestant Baroque and Catholic Baroque is that Protestant Baroque painters convey subjects in ways that portray the artist's personal emotion; while Catholic Baroque painters conveyed visually entertaining and captivating imagery in order to evoke emotions from the person viewing the image.

• "Catholic And Protestant Baroque Overview" Essays, UK., 23rd March, 2015

• During the Reformation, the Catholic Church saw the amount of parishioners within the Church dwindling. They felt the need to reform within themselves through theological clarification and through remarkable artwork. The Catholic Church was making changes in order to bring people back into the Church. The clarifications in the Theology of the Church were made at the Council of Trent. The Church hired artists to paint and depict historical happenings in the Church history.
  Michelangelo Merisida Caravaggio painted many pieces of artwork that are still famous to this day. He took a long time to finally find his own style that turned into the influential style that we see in many of his most famous paintings. "After five years of strenuous work he found his way to Venice, where he carefully studied the works of Giorgione, and received instruction from an unknown painter. Thence he went to Rome, and on account of his poverty engaged himself to Cesare d'Arpino, who employed him to execute the floral and ornamental parts of his pictures." (Williamson). He then became interested in developing his own style of paintings.
  The Calling of St. Matthew, painted between the years 1599-1602, is possibly the most famous of the paintings painted specifically for the Counter Reformation. This painting has immense amount of symbolism, yet it retains a sense of the true story of what actually happened in real life. Matthew is sitting at the end of the table hovering over his own money and his head hanging down, almost in shame. Jesus then calls him and says "Follow me." Matthew then, without question or hesitation, gets up and follows. This painting showed the ordinary people an event in the past, a biblical story, which was critical to the formation of the Catholic Church.
  The Martyrdom of St. Matthew was the second most famous painting during the Counter Reformation. The story goes that Matthew was sentenced to be killed while he was standing at the Altar. The king of Ethiopia sentenced him because Matthew voiced his opposite opinion on the fact that the king lusted over his niece, who was also a nun. It is said that the painting was already laid out as in what contents needed to be included in the painting. It again allowed the public to visualize the cruelty that the corrupt hierarchy. This was hoping to bring the people back to the church showing how the Church was getting criticized for standing up for what is right and morally just.

• "The Counter Reformation Of Catholicism Religion Essay" Essays, UK., 23rd March, 2015'

• After his return to Antwerp, Jan reached the culmination of his ability and of his fame. He then has a distinct style and regularly deals with a number of themes that are characteristic of his oeuvre and which are further elucidated in this study in chapters three and four. Striking is the important role played by eroticism in much of his work. Among the Old Testament figures, his preference is clearly Judith, Susanna, Batseba and the daughters of Lot. The only men he sets against that are Tobias and Elias.
• Secular topics that John preferred were the so-called 'unequal love' and the 'happy company'. Temptations of purchased love always seem to play the leading role in this. All these works are supposed to be moralizing, and Buijnsters-Smets places a heavy emphasis on this 'teaching through sense-making'.

• Our Inheritance, Lauran Toorians, Volume 39, (1996)

• Baroque means irregularly-shaped pearl, derived from barocco in Portuguese, first used during the mid-1700s.
  Baroque art does not have any relation to pearls but the word was used as an epithet for a style that did not meet the great artistic standards of the preceding Renaissance era.
• Next time you see a Baroque-style religious painting, remember that chances are it’s from Catholic Europe (e.g. Italy, France, Spain and Flanders), but if it’s non-religious (e.g. Still Lifes, landscapes and portraits) then it’s likely from Protestant Europe i.e. Holland and England. There are exceptions to this rule because some Dutch artists, such as Rembrandt, chose to paint religious paintings for prospective buyers.
• It’s no wonder that the free market replaced the Church as the main patron of art. This is the moment when for the first time in Western art history, art became commercially available for purchase and custom orders were on request to virtually anyone. It was the birth of market-driven art business. Although this art movement originated in Catholic Europe (e.g. Italy, France and Spain), it flourished in Protestant countries like Holland. Replace the Church and monarchy of Catholic Europe with the middle class in Protestant countries, you realize a much larger market for art. Unlike Catholic Italy or France, Holland’s rising art market stimulated Baroque painters, increased competition among them and the production of paintings boomed. Art as a business thrived, fierce competition forced prices down, there was no liking for bare walls, ownership of paintings for home décor turned into a fad, houses of the wealthy had up to 100 and sometimes 200 paintings. Art became so popular that it is said that almost every Dutch house had paintings decorating its walls. Historians call the 17th century in the Netherlands, in particular, the Dutch Golden Age for art, trade and science.
  The new class of self-made men (middle class) supplanting the aristocracy and the Church as the chief consumers and commissioners of art, weren’t looking for biblical or mythological themes, they wanted to see themselves. Daily life of the ordinary citizen became the main theme, the fashionable artistic topic.
• The rise of the absolute monarchy filled in the gap left behind with the waning influence of the Catholic Church and the declining feudal nobility. Among the absolute monarchies that appeared in Europe during the 1600s: France (Louis XIV) , Spain (Phillip II), Prussia, a former state in Germany (Frederick the Great) and Russia (Peter the Great followed by Catherine the Great).
• Renaissance art including the Mannerist style that preceded Baroque movement was symmetric and restrained, traditions that were rebelled against by Baroque artists. Some described the Baroque movement as art of the heart, an answer to the Renaissance-era art of the mind. Baroque art was dramatic and emotional, appealed to the public, attempted to get closer to the contemporary viewers, and identified with ordinary people. Taking a different path, unlike the Mannerist generation, Baroque painters portrayed realistic unidealized life in their paintings, stripped from heavenly imagery or mythology, just common people or even at times no people at all (landscapes and still lifes).
• Despite the deviation of the new artists from the older traditions, they still did not smash all conventions. There were boundaries to their art that they would not dare cross. For example, painting nude art in puritanical Spain meant you risk excommunication, fine and exile, enforced by the Spanish Inquisition, and any nude paintings were burnt. Italy was an exception as it had been influenced by pagan classical nude sculptures.

• Zaki, Fady. "Baroque Art Movement." IdentifyThisArt.com. Identify This Art, 16 May 2011.

• The work of Michelangelo da Caravaggio introduced the Baroque spirit into painting. His art inspired Baroque painters in northern and southern Europe by dramatically shifting the vanishing point toward the spectator. Renaissance artists like Leonardo had used the central vanishing point to create a stable, balanced image. Caravaggio shifted the vanishing point, the light source, and the main characters in the action away from the center of the painting. His paintings brought the viewer into the scene with some of the boldness that we now experience with the moving angle shots used by cameras in movie and television productions.
  • Ibid, 6

• Whether or not Caravaggio used technology to assist him, his images stand as some of the most powerful statements of European religious art. The iconic impact of his work was Chapter 4: Baroque 9 especially important at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Catholic art at this time sought to provide a greater sense of personal involvement for believers, similar to that offered by the Protestant approach of individual interpretation of the Bible. Catholic artists like Caravaggio and his followers sought ways to combine the long tradition of communal art in churches with the new need for a greater sense of the personal. Caravaggio’s followers spread his style throughout Catholic Europe as churches increasingly deployed art to convey their messages.
  • Ibid, 9

• Bernini’s charged blending of religious and erotic, however accomplished, was not totally unprecedented. The saint’s pose may have been derived from Caravaggio’s 1606 Mary Magdalen; the angel/cupid may have been inspired by Caravaggio’s 1602 Love the Winner. 20 Caravaggio, in turn, may have taken some of his poses from art works he saw in his childhood in Northern Italy. Robb writes, “Most of the images [Caravaggio] drew on came from Lombard and Venetian paintings he’d seen as a boy…They were a repertory of forms retrieved from deep in his young imagination’s memory, and acted out in life by the models in front of him…The haunting of [Caravaggio’s] paintings by forms drawn from the work of greater and lesser forerunners was a reminder that memory always played its part in the act of seeing and imitating.” However consciously or unconsciously, Bernini recalled Caravaggio’s paintings in Chapter 4: Baroque 14 his operatic sculpture ensemble. In a similar manner, today we “take in” media images—images from television, film, advertising—and they become a (largely unconscious) part of our behavioral repertory.
  • Ibid 13-14

• Louis adorned both palace and park with art. Although what remains are the monumental sculptures and paintings of Louis’ era, ephemeral works were every bit as important at the time. In addition to opera and other staged dramas, Louis also presented tableaux vivants (living pictures) as entertainments for the courtiers that flocked to Versailles to curry favor (up to 10,000 courtiers were at Versailles at one point).
  • Ibid, 19

• David’s Napoleonic image has had a long and varied life in the mass media. A popular television series of the 1950s—“The Lone Ranger”— ended each program with its title character rearing up on his white horse and yelling, “Hi-ho Silver and away!” As he did so, the Wild West hero repeated the pose in which David depicted the emperor crossing the Alps. Decades later, the pose was repeated in the opening scene of the film The Mask of Zorro (1998, Chapter 4: Baroque 31 US, Martin Campbell). A
  • Ibid, 30-31

• Goya took out an ad in the Madrid newspaper. “The author is convinced that it is as proper for painting to criticize human error and vice as for poetry and prose to do so, although criticism is usually taken to be exclusively the business of literature. He has selected from amongst the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilized society, and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance, or self-interest have made usual, those subjects which he feels to be the more suitable material for satire, and which, at the same time, stimulate the artist’s imagination…Painting (like poetry) chooses from universals what is most apposite. It brings together in a single imaginary being circumstances and characteristics which occur in nature in many different persons.”
  • Ibid, 34

• The Lacemaker is a masterpiece from this second phase of Vermeer’s work (4.41). A close examination shows the unmistakable trace of the camera obscura lens: sprinkled around the surface of this small painting are numerous pearl-like dots. These are the socalled circles of confusion-little unfocused beads of light produced by the imperfectly ground lenses of Vermeer’s day. They are not an aspect of normal vision. (You can also see the circles of confusion in Vermeer’s View of Delft, 4.42.) The interesting thing about these “circles of confusion” in Vermeer’s paintings is that there are more of them than would be caused by the lens itself. Vermeer, in other words, not only painted an effect that is not part of normal human vision, he liked it so much that he chose to manipulate it in his paintings as an extension of his personal perception.
  • Ibid, 42-43

• Vermeer was rediscovered after photography had given “objective” images a dramatically new importance and meaning. The impending mechanization of art suggested by the use of the camera obscura in seventeenth-century art was not an isolated or accidental development. It paralleled the broad impact of technology in all areas of Western culture. A decisive phase of acceleration began in the eighteenth century.
  • Ibid, 44

• Denis Diderot (1713-1784) directed the production of seventeen written volumes and eleven volumes of engraved illustrations for his Encyclopedia over a span of twenty years despite government harassment and delays (including three months of prison). The Encyclopedia was a revolutionary attempt to make knowledge of all the sciences and arts democratically Chapter 4: Baroque 46 available through printed words and printed images. It was the secular equivalent of Gutenberg printing of the Bible for the common people. The eleven volumes of engravings were absolutely essential to Diderot’s purpose (4.44). If accurate drawings of flowers are required for scientific understanding and communication, accurate drawings of machines are even more necessary. Imagine trying to fix a carburetor or even assemble a child’s toy without accurate pictures along with the instructions. Diderot’s engravings are the industrial and craft equivalent of Leonardo’s visualizations of the body.
  • Ibid, 45-46

• [The etchings] of Wenceslaus Hollar are not only of a remarkably high artistic standard, but also represent an important pictorial chronicle of seventeenth-century England. Numbering over 2700 they cover a vast range of subjects: cathedrals, ships, bird's-eye views of cities, scenes of the Thirty Years' War, butterflies, shells, women's costumes. Hollar drew portraits of his contemporaries, illustrated the Bible, Aesop's fables, Homer, and Virgil. Rembrandt apart, he was arguably the greatest, certainly the most skilful etcher of his day.
  • "A Descriptive Catalogue of the Etched Work of Wenceslaus Hollar 1607-1677", Cambridge University Press, Jul 25, 2002

• It is therefore no coincidence that one of the main ways in which obscenity emerged in early modern literature was through works by male authors impersonating sexually experienced women educating innocent younger ones. Key examples include L'École des filles; ou, La philosophie des dames (1655) and Nicolas Chorier's Satyra Sotadica de arcanis Amoris et Veneris (1658), both of which take inspiration from Aretino's Ragionamenti (1534), and which probably did more than any other works to cement France's reputation as a hotbed of obscenity. These books have rightly received considerable attention, above all in James Grantham Turner's Schooling Sex (2003) and also in Jean Mainil's Dans les règles du plaisir (1993), as well as in major sections of works by DeJean and Jeanneret mentioned above, which naturally consider them alongside the scandal surrounding L'École des femmes. The gendered nature of obscenity is also apparent in late sixteenth-century controversies provoked by medical works printed in the vernacular that deal with contemporary taboos surrounding female sexuality; for example, Laurent Joubert's Erreurs populaires (1578) addresses such issues as how to verify whether a woman was a virgin or not, leading the publisher, Simon Millanges, to signal that his author had been obliged to use terms ‘qui semblent estre un peu obscenes’, and to mark with asterisks passages best avoided by unmarried women. Similarly, the rediscovery of the clitoris by Renaissance anatomical science gave rise to the concern that this body part was ‘fort obscene’, as the royal surgeon Ambroise Paré states in his collected works of 1579, doubtless because it was linked to pleasure rather than to reproduction.
  The above examples from the late sixteenth century help nuance the argument, powerfully expressed by Joan DeJean, that the ‘reinvention’ of obscenity was both a modern and a literary phenomenon, beginning with the trial of Théophile de Viau in 1623–25, and culminating in the querelle de l'École des femmes.20 Théophile's trial, and the collections of obscene poetry known as the recueils satyriques that in part provoked it, did indeed have a major influence in reshaping French literary and linguistic standards.
• While it would plainly be wrong to think that the issue of obscenity did not pertain at all at the time, it was doubtless secondary to more overtly religious questions. Indeed, religious polemic itself provided a setting for scatology and obscenity, as Jeff Persels and Lise Wajeman have shown. Here, the obscenity of the ‘other’, be they Catholic or Protestant, legitimized the obscenity of the portrayal. Travel writing, by virtue of engaging with different sexual customs, is another important context in which discussions of obscenity emerge. The other can also be demonic, as seen in extraordinarily lurid descriptions of black sabbaths. In short, certain subjects and contexts allow for obscenity: the lewd poetry that circulated about Henri III and his mignons, which Pierre de L'Estoile collected in his Registre-Journal for 1583, despite noting that it was full of vilanies and doubtless deserved the flames like its authors, indicates that what was deemed obscene behaviour by the king was thought to warrant an obscene response.
  Such satirical uses of obscenity for religious and political purposes point to the possibility, as recognized by much recent scholarship on the topic, that in certain contexts in early modern France obscenity was not only justified but actively encouraged and valued. This is perhaps most obviously the case in neo-Latin writing, which drew on the extensive tradition of Roman obscenity, as well as being, by its very nature, somewhat more restricted to an elite made up mostly of men, thereby allowing for greater licence; indeed, a decree of the Council of Trent published in 1563 permitted obscene works by ancient authors, given their elegance of style, provided they were not shown to children.

• "Obscenity in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France", Hugh Roberts French Studies, Volume 67, Issue 4, 1 October 2013, Pages 535–542

• Today’s piece of gender non-conforming / erotic art history is a c. 1615 painting by the Dutch Golden Age painter, Frans Hals, the title of which is commonly translated as both “Shrovetide Revellers“ and “Merrymakers at Shrovetide”. Shrovetide, being another term for “Mardi Gras”, “Fat Tuesday”, and “Carnival”, was marked by lavish feasts, costumes, and celebrations marked by great excess.
  In this scene, a drunken teenage boy who appears to have been pronounced “queen for a day” lifts his hand in pronouncement while surrounded by Shrovetide revelers as they stand before a table a table loaded with food containing heavy sexual imagery of the day. The boy (potentially representing an actor at a time when female stage parts were typically performed by teenage males) is dressed in feminine clothing generally reserved for high nobility while flanked by two popular satirical theater characters of the time, being Pekelharing (Pickled Herring) on the left and Hans Worst (John Sausage) on the right.
  • “History Erotic Art From Around the World” Feb 13, 2018

• Sexual abuse of children is far from new. Historians of the family have discovered that adults in elite households in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe sometimes treated young children as sexual playthings. A striking example involves the future King of France, Louis XIII. According to a diary kept by the royal physician, members of the French royal court fondled his genitals and ladies in waiting played sexual games with his tiny fists.
  • “Placing childhood sexual abuse in historical perspective” Steven Mintz, July 13, 2012

• Rococo, from the French rocaille (meaning “rock and shell garden ornamentation”), was an eighteenth century movement in art that began in France. In 1699, the French king, Louis XIV, called for more youthful art to be produced by the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture and other artists commissioned for works in Versailles.
• At the Academy, the Rococo movement began as an artistic controversy on the importance of drawing versus the importance of color. The Poussinistes (named after Nicolas Poussin) believed that drawing was more important, and the Rubenistes (named after Peter Paul Rubens) maintained that color was more important than drawing. The new Rococo style included works of art reflecting this controversy. With bright colors, exquisite detail, and ornamentation, it is easy to see how Rococo art appealed to the wealthy and powerful of France.
• Like many other forms of art, Rococo played out in different ways in other parts of Europe, including Germany and Italy. In France, the salons of hotels and private homes featured Rococo painting and interior work for the upper class taste, including gilt and mirrors. In Germany, the Rococo style survives in beautiful church architecture and dome paintings, including the beautiful pilgrimage church, The Weiskirche, in Bavaria.
• In Italy, the Rococo style is best captured in ornate, heavy furniture. Each piece acquired by a wealthy Italian would cost a handsome sum. Rococo appealed to the upper class as far away as Russia where Empress Elizabeth had the Catherine Palace completely torn down and renovated in the Rococo fashion. As an art and architecture movement, Rococo is best observed by visiting buildings surviving from the eighteenth century in Europe and Russia.

• "Rococo" Art History.net

• One aspect of French court dress survives today. Red heels had been introduced by Louis XIV by 1673, probably to confirm the elevation of his court above the rest of humanity. Red heels, which were restricted to nobles with the right genealogical qualifications to be presented at court, demonstrated that the nobles did not dirty their shoes (although, in Le Costume francias of 1776, a more heroic explanation was advanced: red heels are described as 'the mark of their nobility and [show] that they are always ready to crush the enemies of the state at their feet'.

• Dressed to Rule: Royal and Court Costume from Louis XIV to Elizabeth II, Philip Mansel, p.15

• Rococo is a portmanteau word combining both “rocaille” (French for “shell”) and “barocco”, Italian for Baroque, the art style preceding the Rococo period. Rococo art extensively feature shell-shaped curves and wave-like motifs, particularly in its sumptuous furniture design and interior décor.
• However much of the Feudalistic legacy lived on through the social structure of three classes (estates). The First Estate was the Clergy (100,000 people). They represented 0.5% of the French population and owned 10 percent of the land. They paid minimal taxes or no taxes at all. The clergy themselves raised taxes on the land they owned and they led more than comfortable lifestyles, most of whom were originally from noble families (particularly the high clergy like Bishops and those in abbots), which was another distressing fact of life for the common folk. The Second Estate was the aristocracy (400,000 people). They made about 2% of the French population and owned 30 percent of the land. The monarchy always gave the aristocracy special favours and exempted them from taxes. Meanwhile, they could tax peasants in addition to collecting rent from those of them who lived on their farmland. The nobility had exclusive rights to hunting and fishing that others, such as the peasants, were never granted. They had many other special privileges passed down over the centuries that made them very unpopular people in France. The Third Estate was everybody else, i.e. the common folk who were mainly the peasants but also included the labourers, merchants and artisans (manual workers). They are the working class who paid most of the taxes in France. While just under 3% of the French were clergy and nobility, the commoners represented 97% of the population. 90% of whom were peasants who lived at or below subsistence levels, earning only enough to feed their families.
• The empowered mistress took unprecedented authority by meddling into France’s foreign policy. One of the first political failures that resulted from her acting as a behind-the-scenes politician was the ill-fated alliance that led to France’s defeat in the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763). The Seven Year’s War involved many nations, making it one of the largest pre-20th century worldwide wars, considered by many historians, and also by Winston Churchill, as the first world war. Through the territorial gains following that war, Britain became the leading colonial power. From that perspective, it’s not easy to miss the unintentional role a French mistress played in securing Britain’s path towards becoming a superpower.
• People’s relationship with extreme fashion has not changed, but in our modern time-starved society we do not have as much time available, as was the case for French aristocrats in the 1700s. If you are a modern wealthy woman, you can very quickly adorn yourself with high-end branded apparel like Louis Vuitton, Givenchy or Christian Dior; you effortlessly slap on a dress or jeans and slip into casual yet expensive shoes – a little makeup, a few accessories and call it an outfit. Even if today’s women are not comfortable, they can easily pretend to be comfortable in their own styles of choice. Back in the 1700s, fashion was a much more complicated process. French aristocrats did not work, and men and women equally took part in the absurd trends of the day. Fashion was not for everybody, only the wealthy.

• Zaki, Fady. “Rococo Art Movement”, IdentifyThisArt.com, Identify This Art

• Flash forward to the early seventeenth century, where the first records emerge indicating the existence of professional dominatrices running flagellation institutions within England. Using the tools of the trade we see today, these women made their living creating a fantasy in which they were paid greatly to dominate British aristocrats, politicians and even royalty. Not only were these men bound, punished and made to worship the woman before them, but they were also able to share their truest longings and desires in a safe space.
  Through the early nineteenth century, the demand for flagellation services grew and anyone from prostitutes to actresses became dominatrices to earn some extra cash. As their popularity grew, certain women became courtesans and wrote memoirs of their escapades.
  Later in the century, Theresa Berkley emerged from the fray to become what is known as a “governess,” a dominatrix whose specialty was flagellation, whipping, chastisement, etc. She invented a contraption called the Berkeley Horse, which is still seen in dom practices today.
  In the 20th century, we see the dominatrix morph into what we know her as today: covered in leather and lace, holding a whip or a riding crop, with high-heeled boots. This depiction became popular after the commercialization of fetish. Many of these women operate underground and are found through word of mouth references. They are portrayed in shows like Secret Diary of a Call Girl and American Horror Story. They have become popularized and almost normalized. An unnamed source said of Theresa that:
  Her instruments of torture were more numerous than those of any other governess. Her supply of birch was extensive, and kept in water, so that it was always green and pliant: she had shafts with a dozen whip thongs on each of them; a dozen different sizes of cat-o’-nine-tails, some with needle points worked into them; various kinds of thin bending canes; leather straps like coach traces; battledoors, made of thick sole-leather, with inch nails run through to docket, and currycomb tough hides rendered callous by many years flagellation. Holly brushes, furze brushes; a prickly evergreen, called butcher’s bush; and during the summer, a glass and China vases, filled with a constant supply of green nettles, with which she often restored the dead to life. Thus, at her shop, whoever went with plenty of money, could be birched, whipped, fustigated, scourged, needle-pricked, half-hung, holly-brushed, furze-brushed, butcher-brushed, stinging-nettled, curry-combed, phlebotomized, and tortured till he had a belly full.”
  But one thing is for certain: these women hold a particular power over men that might be deemed as dangerous. Because back in the ancient days of Mesopotamia, they ran the world.

• "Catherine Miller A Brief History of the Dominatrix", Cor Theatre, April 29, 2015

• "The high heel was worn for centuries throughout the near east as a form of riding footwear," says Elizabeth Semmelhack of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto.
  Good horsemanship was essential to the fighting styles of Persia - the historical name for modern-day Iran.
  "When the soldier stood up in his stirrups, the heel helped him to secure his stance so that he could shoot his bow and arrow more effectively," says Semmelhack.
  At the end of the 16th Century, Persia's Shah Abbas I had the largest cavalry in the world. He was keen to forge links with rulers in Western Europe to help him defeat his great enemy, the Ottoman Empire.
• "One of the best ways that status can be conveyed is through impracticality," says Semmelhack, adding that the upper classes have always used impractical, uncomfortable and luxurious clothing to announce their privileged status.
  "They aren't in the fields working and they don't have to walk far."
  When it comes to history's most notable shoe collectors, the Imelda Marcos of his day was arguably Louis XIV of France. For a great king, he was rather diminutively proportioned at only 5ft 4in (1.63m).
• He supplemented his stature by a further 4in (10cm) with heels, often elaborately decorated with depictions of battle scenes.
  The heels and soles were always red - the dye was expensive and carried a martial overtone. The fashion soon spread overseas - Charles II of England's coronation portrait of 1661 features him wearing a pair of enormous red, French style heels - although he was over 6ft (1.85m) to begin with.
• In the 1670s, Louis XIV issued an edict that only members of his court were allowed to wear red heels. In theory, all anyone in French society had to do to check whether someone was in favour with the king was to glance downwards. In practice, unauthorised, imitation heels were available.
  Although Europeans were first attracted to heels because the Persian connection gave them a macho air, a craze in women's fashion for adopting elements of men's dress meant their use soon spread to women and children.
• "In the 1630s you had women cutting their hair, adding epaulettes to their outfits," says Semmelhack.
  "They would smoke pipes, they would wear hats that were very masculine. And this is why women adopted the heel - it was in an effort to masculinise their outfits."
  From that time, Europe's upper classes followed a unisex shoe fashion until the end of the 17th Century, when things began to change again.

• “Why did men stop wearing high heels?”, William Kremer, BBC World Service, 25 January 2013

• In the visual arts, and especially within the realm of erotic and pornographic imagery, it also appears that the so-called Safavid "Golden Age" is equated with alcoholic debauchery and sexual libertinage. It is this broader picture of Safavid sexuality that Qajar painters of erotic themes seem to have wanted to reference and emulate in their modern products, which quite obviously appealed to Kellermann, Schneider-Kainer and other amassers of Persian erotica meandering through the bazaars of Iran.
  • “Eros and Sexuality in Islamic Art” edited by Francesca Leoni, Mika Natif, p.226

• Neoclassicism (meaning New Classicism) was born in the mid-1700s, originally in Rome but its popularity exploded in France, as a generation of French and other European art students finished their training and returned from Rome to their home countries with newly-rediscovered Greco-Roman (Classical) ideals. As a testimony of the significant influence the Greeks and Romans had on Western civilization, interestingly the term itself is a merger of words derived from both ancient languages spoken by them; neos (Greek for “new”), classicus (Latin for “first class”) and ismos (Greek for “doctrine” or “ideology”). Neoclassical art style was widely adopted and popularized by French artists, since France was the centre of culture and art in Europe at that time.
• Ever since the fall of the Roman Empire, thirteen centuries earlier, Europeans had been nostalgically fascinated by the grandeur and glory of ancient Rome. It was always in the intellectual background, hence several classical revivals emerged over the centuries, such as the one that materialized in Italian Renaissance art. However, it was powerfully reignited in the Age of Enlightenment of the 18th century, due to the philosophical return to classical thought, and renewed appreciation of Greek and Roman cultures. Being one of the leading advocates of Neoclassicism, German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann summed up the admiration of a new generation of artists behind such resurgence of classical tradition in his book History of Ancient Art (1764). His influential book gave the movement momentum in which he famously proposed that since the ancients had already attained perfection in their art, “the only way for modern artists to achieve greatness was to imitate the Greeks.” [Source: Antoine Watteau: Perspectives on the Artist And the Culture of His Time By Mary D. Sheriff].
• The revival was also inspired by the excavation of the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii. Both were Roman sites, buried under volcanic ash and mud in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Such archaeological discoveries were the biggest news of the day. Ancient lost cities, frozen in time, preserved for centuries and about to give an accurate picture of life in antiquity. The excavated artifacts sparked the interest of people and artists in particular.
• The advent of revolutionary movements in France and America, based on classical ideals such as the democracy of ancient Athens and Rome, made Neoclassical art even more appealing. Those ideals were a major force behind the American colonies’ Declaration of Independence from the British Empire (1776) and the overthrow of the French monarchy (1789). As they rejected and revolted against the contemporary unjust governments, they found values and inspiration in the Greco-Roman past. Concepts related to the republic and senate, of the ancient ruling system of Rome, provided the revolutionaries with a vision for the emerging American and French republics.
• Neoclassical painters rebelled against Rococo art because it epitomized what was wrong with a formerly great nation. Rococo art represented the aristocratic extravagances of the pre-revolutionary society under Louis XV. Its shallow subject matter showed flirty women and frolicsome men, cherubs and cupids, mythological scenes, and carefree people with a hedonistic attitude. It was almost sinful and certainly lustful. Neoclassical artists rejected the Rococo superficial beauty and aristocratic frivolity.

• "Identify This Art", Neoclassical

• The Romantic movement originated in Germany, then it spread to England, France and the rest of Europe. Across the Atlantic, America had its own version of Romanticism, the Hudson River School, which was the first truly American school of art
  The mid-1600s ushered in the Age of Enlightenment (or “Age of Reason”), which was a period that glorified rational thinking, secularism and scientific progress. The first operational steam engine, built in 1712, could be regarded as the beginning of the Industrial Revolution which later swept the Western hemisphere. Steam engines and cotton mills symbolized that Industrial Revolution. Industrialization transformed economies of Western Europe and North America, driving them from dependence on agriculture to manufacturing. However, at the turn of the 19th century, not everyone believed that science and reason could possibly explain everything. Their reaction against the ongoing industrialization became a comprehensive movement – Romanticism.
• The French poet Charles Baudelaire wrote, “Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling.” In light of feeling and individual experience, there was no place here for what tradtionally had influenced art; religion, reason, morality and civic virtues. Recurrent themes were human vulnerability and isolation; stunning landscapes and morbid subject matter. Romanticism was directed by the opposite of rationality – passion, intuition and the mysterious. The paintings showed strong emotions through facial expressions like anguish, intense pain, anger or fear.
• Until that moment in the history of Western art, most artwork was created with beauty at its heart. Fine art had been taught as a discipline. Romantic art, on the other hand, was there to fascinate and horrify. Some of the their paintings were the most horrific to be seen in the West at the time, for example Saturn Devours His Children by Francisco de Goya (see above).
• Romanticism was the anithesis of Neoclassicism. The Enlightenment and its revived ideals from Graeco-Roman cultures gave birth to the Neoclassical art, all of which were rejected by the Romantics. It was a matter of freedom from classical restraints -a matter of trusting the heart, rather than the mind. The Neoclassical style emphasized order and reason, while Romanticism focused on feelings. The stoic, statue-like faces in Neoclassic paintings were incapable of showing feelings that the Romantic artists conveyed in facial expressions in their paintings. You’ll find heroism in Neoclassical paintings, but in the Romantic ones, artists do not attempt to conceal human vulnerability, and proneness to violence or nature’s fury. Classical (Greek and Roman) mythology, the main influence on Neoclassical art, was still featured in Romantic paintings as in “Liberty Leading the People” by Eugène Delacroix (above), nevertheless artists favored local folklore. A common feature in Romantic art is visible brushstrokes, which would have been unacceptable in the Neoclassical tradition that pursues perfection. Beyond technique, the Romantics also rebelled against the political art of the Neoclassical period with a style that celebrates nature.

• Zaki, Fady, "Romanticism Art Movement", IdentifyThisArt.com, 26 June 2013.]

• In the Avesta, homosexuality is mentioned only a few times, but it is literally demonized. For example, in the Videvdad, both the active and passive partners in sodomy are described as demons, demon worshippers, and incubi and succubi of demons.
• Somewhat reminiscent of Dante's Divine Comedy, The Book of Arda Wiraz, written in the ninth century C.E., describes a journey into the afterlife by the soul of Arda Wiraz, who is shown the rewards and punishments of men and women in hell. The first sin he encounters in hell is that of passive sodomy; all other sins, including heterosexual sodomy, are further down--that is, considered more severe. This distinction between homosexual and heterosexual sodomy may owe something to Muslim culture.
• Homosexuality is a topic in the Qabusname (1083), a book of advice from a father to his son. The advice of the father is that one should exclude neither form of sexuality but try both. Sometimes one is better than the other. For instance, intercourse with women is deemed healthier in winter, with young men in summer. On the whole, intelligence is seen as a more important criterion than gender for choosing a lover.
• The most important Persian poet to explore the love of young men by men is Sa'di of Shiraz. He was born before 1189 and wrote his masterpieces, including the Golestan(Rose Garden), near the middle of the thirteenth century. Chapter 5 of the Golestan is wholly devoted to the love of youths, most of them male, some female, and some impossible to determine since Persian grammar is not gendered.
• Descriptions of lesbians and lesbian love are absent from Persian literature though the seclusion of women from men fostered female relationships, as frequently observed by Western travelers in the East.

• ”Middle Eastern Literature: Persian”

• When considering shunga, it is important to shed censorious attitudes towards sexuality that have been a fundamental part of western Christian culture for so long. Although printed shunga was officially illegal in Japan after 1722, it was widely tolerated – indeed, during the three centuries of its popularity many thousands of images were produced in a variety of formats: multi-volume books, bound albums sometimes exchanged as wedding gifts, painted handscrolls, and sets of small-format prints possibly sold in wrappers.
  Shunga could be sensuous and comic, but it was rarely violent or exploitative. Most shunga depicts vigorous heterosexual couples in mutual bliss – and these prints were likely cherished by men and women, both young and old, from different strata of society, including samurai lords as well as prosperous merchants and commoners. “The division between art and obscene pornography is a Western conception,” says Clark. “There was no sense in Japan that sex or sexual pleasure was sinful.”
  • "Sexually explicit Japanese art challenges Western ideas", Alastair Sooke, BBC, 10 October 2014

• Today’s piece of gender non-conforming erotic art history comes to us from 1750 Japan and was composed by Suzuki Harunobu. Kabuki theater was originally all female when it began in the 17th century, but in response to the actresses moonlighting as high end sex workers catering to the gentry in their audiences, the government banned female actresses. The male actors who replaced them, however, were just as in demand for paid sex (as male same sex relations were not taboo) (2) and rapidly became high end sex workers, themselves, leading to a long series of government bans on common theater modes of dress and presentation in an unsuccessful attempt to stamp out the practice.
  • "Today's Piece of Gender Non Conforming Erotic Art" Erotic Art History From Around the World, Nov 21, 2016

• And despite earlier work suggesting that these texts were only for solitary consumption – at home, alone, and behind closed doors – Skipp’s work throws up a surprising image of how these works were used. "They would be read in public – everywhere from London's rough-and-ready alehouses to the city’s thriving coffee houses, which weren't quite the focus of polite society in the way we sometimes think," she explained. "Some texts even came as questions and answers and were clearly intended for groups of men to read together, with one asking the questions and the others answering them."
  Much of the work is derogatory in its references to women. They are subordinates, courtesans, prostitutes, carriers of venereal disease and bearers of deformed children. "When men write this way, or read these texts, it gives them a context for asserting their authority over women," Skipp added. Yet some texts portray women altogether differently, discussing the nature of female sexuality or describing lascivious aristocratic females.
• It is very different to today's erotica," she said. "It is more humorous, more literary and more engaged with the wider issues of the life and politics of the times." Its metaphors mirror the passions of the age: "At a time when military power was equated with virility, armed conquest is often used as a metaphor for sex – in phrases such as 'unsheathing the weapon', 'storming the fort' and 'releasing the cannon'."
  By the 1770s, the transcripts of adultery trials became a new source of titillation. To secure a divorce, a man would first have to successfully sue a rival for 'violating his property', before petitioning Parliament to dissolve the marriage. "There is something rather voyeuristic about these trials," said Skipp. "Often servants would give evidence while innkeepers would testify about lovers taking rooms together."

• "Sex in the 1700s" Phys.org, March 23, 2007

• The French Revolution Digital Archive, launched on January 28th by a partnership between Stanford University and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, makes approximately 14,000 Revolution-related images available to the public. Mined from the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale, this trove of political cartoons, medals, and coins is history nerd porn. Many of these images are what you’d expect: portraits of white-wigged royalty, like Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette; bloody battle scenes; and glorification of the “National Razor,” as the guillotine was lovingly called.
• But other images seem straight out of a Monty Python movie. An angel farts through a trumpet over a Jacobin funeral procession in one satirical sketch. Catherine II of Russia kicks a French soldier in the butt with her little slipper. A hydra-headed beast wearing aristocratic hats on each of its heads attacks sword-wielding commoners. And countless cartoons depict Marie Antoinette as a grinning harpy licking her chops, devouring hogs.
  • “Marie Antoinette As A Hog-Chewing Harpy And More Freaky Pics From The French Revolution”, Fastcodesign.com, 02.07.14

• Pornography was a sharp tool in eighteenth century France. When wielded properly, it could be used to cut down larger than life figures, even kings and queens. Pornography was used against Marie Antoinette before the Revolution to lower public opinion of her and to blame her for the country's ails. It was a way to take the heat off of the more culpable individuals. Once the Revolution was underway, pornography against the queen was churned out in staggering amounts. It was used then to further smear her reputation, to maintain the low public sentiment about her, and to assure harsh punishment.
  • “The Royal Dildo” Titillating Tidbits About 18th Century France, July 08, 2010,

• Today’s piece of fully explicit historic erotic art is from 1790-1810 England and is by the talented and prolific erotic artist Thomas Rowlandson. Entitled “The Dairy Maid’s Delight”, in this scene a dairy maid has happy sex with a footman.
• This piece is noteworthy on two counts, the first being that it is a black/white interracial scene, and the second being the obvious amount of affection between the couple. Both figures are making direct eye contact as they smile at each other, and in particular, the manner with which the dairy maid regards her partner is so loaded with affection that it is clear that, whether they are spouses or lovers, they have an established relationship and share a deep bond.

• "History Erotic Art from Around the World" Feb 2, 2016

• Cut to World War II, when a very surprised group of Soviet soldiers managed to stumble on ole’ Cathy’s special room while exploring a palace. It was packed with explicit art, wooden phalluses and some insane furniture. Instead of looting or burning the lot, the soldiers took pictures, and aren’t we grateful they did? Looking at the kinky personal effects of the rich and powerful is even better than going through their medicine cabinets! This is only some of the collection, as most of the photos and furniture have been lost or destroyed, but man… girl loved her some porn.
  • “Catherine The Great's Dirty, Dirty Furniture Collection" Dangerous Minds’’, 10.17.2013

• Realist artists were not interested in the past, or in anything that they didn’t personally experience. That was summed up in a quote by the patriarch of the movement, Gustave Courbet: “I have never seen angels. Show me an angel and I will paint one.” Art that preceded them, in their view, was simply false. Nowhere will you find in Realist art biblical scenes as in Baroque art, mythological themes as in Rococo art, or mythical heroes and historical battles as in Neoclassical art. Unlike the Romantics, who painted mystical nature, the Realists saw only urban wasteland. Their focus was on the lower class and their dire conditions of work. That approach was ground-breaking because even when the poor were previously present in paintings, as in the Academic art style, they were glorified and shown living an idealized life. Devoid of history, literature, religion or mythology, the artist’s focus was on contemporary social issues. The heroic portrayal of the working class was seen as a political agenda and their art style was rightly regarded anti-authoritarian. The Realists were both artists and social activists.
  • Zaki, Fady. "Realism Art Movement." IdentifyThisArt.com. Identify This Art, 8 December 2013.

• The French aristocracy was always in control of the prestigious art academies and exhibitions. They survived the political turbulence of the French Revolution (1789), and although their privileges were never fully restored, they still dominated the cultural institutions into the 1800s. In order to demonstrate that art was a highly intellectual process, the Académie des Beaux- introduced stringent standards to be followed, which was meant to separate artists from craftsmen. From their perspective, gentlemen who create “great art” were welcome but the “riff-raff” who seem to treat it like manual labor were not. The Academy was not open to the masses. A semi-educated bohemian with a talent having a stab at painting couldn’t get enrolled. Only a few privileged students with the right connections, such as renowned art professors, could join. Academic art was criticized as bourgeois art for the bourgeois society.
  Salon de Paris had been the official art exhibition of the French academy since 1725, and also the greatest annual art event in the world. By the early nineteenth century, the French academy and its salon, unlike all other formal and informal salons, were extremely powerful. If you were a serious artist you couldn’t ignore them. Having one’s paintings displayed at the Paris Salon to a huge audience, in the world’s art capital, was a dream to most artists. It was like an opportunity for a struggling musician, dreaming of modest success in the music industry, to be finally signed by a top record label. Once your name is known through that art gallery, you gain significant fame and possibly a long profitable career. Most artists chose to be on the side of the Academy. Unfortunately that meant that artists would have to conform to officially-approved standards of the conservative academy, which in turn shaped the artistic norms and dictated everything from colors and composition, to subject matter.
  Academic art synthesized both Neoclassicism and Romanticism, adopting features from both, in addition to themes and characters from the Rococo era. Ironically, all the art movements behind its inspiration – Neoclassicism, Romanticism and Rococo – were all once rebellious and unconventional styles, but by then they has been incorporated into the traditional (i.e. academic) style. While industrialization was spreading across European cities and affecting the lives of millions of people, academic art ignored that and instead depicted mythical themes or idyllic rural life. Unlike Rococo paintings, you won’t find aristocrats being playful, the poor or lower classes were shown living in an idealized, exotic world. To its critics, the art style was disconnected from the real life, which sparked a debate whether there’s an obligation for artists to be interested in the hardships of common people. The debate sowed the seeds for the future rise of the Realist art movement, rejecting the idealism of academic art.
• Art schools around Europe, in cities such as Rome, Vienna and Berlin, copied the French model. The Royal Academy of London was among the most prominent academies. They played a positive role in educating students, but, as always the case, their dogma and conservatism resulted in restricted artistic freedom. No longer were the Church or governments moulding the public taste, it was the art schools. Progressive artists who didn’t submit to the rules of the “art authority” were excluded from their galleries, such as the Impressionist artists. Similarly, in London, the Pre-Raphaelite movement would later shun all art academies.

• Academic Art Movement." IdentifyThisArt.com. Identify This Art, 13 October 2013. Web.

• Raphael (1483-1520), long considered to be one of the greatest artists of all time, was viewed by a group of English painters and poets in 1848 as a negative influence on art. They rejected his Classical style that had been popular for almost four centuries. The Renaissance style propagated by art academies at that time, they believed, lacked true sentiment, and the corrupting art of the Italian master was to blame. Their own inspiration came from earlier Italian artists of the 14th and 15th-centuries who predated Raphael. In pure devotion to medieval and early Renaissance art, they formed a secret society and called it the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The three main artists were William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
  Speaking of great Renaissance artists, why go against Raphael in particular? Isn’t his contemporary master, Michelangelo, just as great, or perhaps as some scholars today believe, the greatest artist of all time? Surprisingly, for a long period during the 18th and 19th century, Raphael was the considered the uncontested master of Renaissance painting. It was later on, in the 20th century, that Michelangelo was re-appreciated and more focus was put on his works than ever. A simpler reason though they didn’t call themselves “Pre-Michelangelo-ite” might be due to the fact that, despite common perception, Michelangelo was first and foremost a sculptor, rather than a painter. How about the other two great Renaissance masters, Donatello and Leonardo Da Vinci? The first was a sculptor, and the second, though an unparalleled genius and inventor, never focused on one field, hence his painting output is relatively too small.

• Zaki, Fady. "Pre-Raphaelite Art Movement." IdentifyThisArt.com. Identify This Art, 7 June 2014. Web

• Bartholdi produced a series of drawings in which the proposed statue began as a gigantic female fellah, or Arab peasant, and gradually evolved into a colossal goddess that resembled the ones he had contemplated in the early and mid 1860's.
  • Edward Berensonas The Statue of Liberty: A Transatlantic Story, page 21 as quoted in The Statue of Liberty Was Originally a Muslim Woman by Erin Blakemore, Smithsonian.com, (November 24, 2015)

• While there has been relatively little serious analysis of colonial postcards, Malek Alloula’s influential book Le Harem colonial put forward a reading of such postcards from the early 1900s as perpetuating a harem fantasy through which French male colonists viewed North Africa. This article analyses a selection of postcards of women from France’s Indochinese colonies at the same period, and suggests that Alloula’s thesis does not fit them in a comparable way. The Indochinese postcards borrow frames of reference from pre-existing pictorial styles, taken sometimes from the harem but also from chinoiserie and contemporary European photographic portraiture; rather than portraying a single vision of the ‘Other’ they oscillate between showing the Indochinese woman as ‘same’ and ‘different’. And these images appear to have been addressed primarily to a female collector, suggesting an intended reading rather removed from Alloula’s vision of colonial postcards as pornography.
  • "Recycling the ‘Colonial Harem’? Women in Postcards from French Indochina", Jennifer Yee, French Cultural Studies, Volume: 15 issue: 1, page(s): 5-19, February 1, 2004

• Both men and women were frequently portrayed naked on colonial picture postcards, which was a degrading practice in itself. But when it came to the nude portrayal of colonised women, the story is especially complex.
  Although some postcards tried to pass as subjective photographs of native women as they “could be found in the colonies”, these images were typically saturated with the stereotype of women from African and Asian cultures as highly sexual and exotic.
  Many of these postcards are clearly pornographic, and quite a few are obviously posed to be explicitly sensual – and very similar to pin-up photos.
• The sexual stereotype of women in the colonies was also actively used in propaganda campaigns to lure European men to the colonies for work, or to make them enlist in the navy or colonial armies. Shocking in their degrading stereotypical imagery and accompanying messages, many of these postcards practically prostituted native women as a form of colonial propaganda.

• "Greetings from the Colonies: Postcards of a Shameful Past", Inge Oosterhoff, Messy Nessy Cabinet of Chic Curiosities, June 11, 2015

• While tame by today’s standards, the flirtatious images printed on thick cardstock shocked many at the time. Even in the Roaring '20s, many considered them pornographic and immoral. In an attempt to legislate morality, the U.S. government prohibited the sending of French postcards via the Postal Service
  The threat of fines - even imprisonment - gave models plenty reason to use false names and wigs in order to conceal their identity. Photographers, too, would typically use a false signature to prevent tarnishing their reputation.
  As a result, the identities of French postcard models -- as well those of the people who took them -- remain unknown to this day.
  As with alcohol prohibition, the decision to make French postcards illegal made their production into a very profitable business. The camera was still pretty new to the world, and few people possessed one. When--not if--people wanted one of these photos taken or printed, they had to head to an erotic photographer who could charge a high fee for their services. Those wanting the photographic contraband could also purchase them (discretely) in local stores and tobacco shops, or purchase them from street vendors.
  • "The French Postcard: The Early 20th Century Equivalent Of “Playboy”", Erin Kelly, Allthatsinteresting.com. May 8, 2017

• Today’s piece of non-gender conforming art history comes to us from Mali and is by a Dogon artist. Intersex figures such as this one are commonly depicted in Dogon art. In this scene, we see a figure with a beard, breasts, and what appears to be a penis hanging over labia and a vagina standing with puckered lips which, to Western eyes, would appear to be blowing a kiss or whistling a jaunty tune.
  • "History Erotic Art from Around the World" Nov 28, 2016

• Today’s piece of art is by a Baoulé artist from the Ivory Coast and depicts a figure with mixed gender characteristics. In this scene, a figure with breasts and a penis stands with their knees slightly bent and eyes shut and while wearing a headdress.
  • "History Erotic Art from Around the World", Aug 1, 2016

• Today’s piece of historic non-gender binary art comes to us from Zaire and is an ivory carving depicting an intersex figure. In this scene, the figure is sitting with their knees pulled up to their body and with their hands folded across their chest. The undercarriage view of the carving reveals an penis, no scrotum, and a fully formed vulva which has a clitoris distinct from their separate and fully erect phallus which differs from the more common intersex condition of having a single body part that blurs the line between penis and enlarged clitoris.
  • "History Erotic Art from Around the World", Sep 1, 2016

• Today’s piece of historic erotic art comes to us from India, and while undated, it is consistent with being from the 19th or early 20th century. In this scene, a female couple has fun on a sex swing hanging from a tree on the bank of a pond or gentle stream. (Sex swings were popular in Persian as well as Indian erotic art, and presumably in real life, as well, as the two countries shared a great degree of cultural overlap over the centuries).
  • Erotic Art History From Around the World Nov 20, 2016

• Today’s piece of historic erotic art comes to us from India. Though undated, the piece is stylistically consistent with other work from 19th century. In this scene, a fully nude but bejeweled female couple is in an ornate boat with a golden bird as the figurehead. The boat, exactly the right size for two people to lay down in, appears to have a lush carpet padding the interior in addition to an ornate cushion as it floats down a scenic river.
  • Erotic Art History From Around the World, Sep 7, 2016

• Today’s piece of historic erotic art comes to us from India. Though I cannot find a formal date for the piece, it is fairly definitely from between the 18th-20th century, with the 19th being my best guess. In this scene, a bejeweled but otherwise nude female couple has erotic fun on a pile of fancy pillows on an ornate rug on the floor of what appears to be a lavish estate.
  • Erotic Art History From Around the World, Aug 12, 2016.

• Today’s piece of historic erotic art comes to us from 1890 and is the loving family portrait of Gustav Sabac el Cher and Gertrud Perlig by German artist Emil Doerstling which is entitled “Prussian Happy Love”. Though most entries in this erotic art project are fully explicit, love is an aspect of sexuality, and all art that gets left out of the history books is of interest to this project.
• Gustav’s father, August Sabac el Cher, was an orphan given as a “gift” to a visiting Prussian prince at the age of 7 by the Egyptian viceroy. Despite being totally uprooted at such a young age, August (and eventually his son, pictured above, Gustav), went on to thrive as he was given access to the all of the benefits of Prussian nobility including education, contacts, money, and high social standing. August, and ultimately his son, Gustav, went on to join the military and rise through the ranks with Gustav (pictured) eventually becoming imperial bandmaster. Both enjoyed close ties with the court and married German women, with Gustav marrying Gertrud Perlig (pictured) and going on to have two children with her.

• Erotic Art History From Around the World, Nov 10, 2016

• The word “impressionism” owes its origin to a title that Monet gave to one of his paintings. It happened in a whimisical decision that took no more than a moment – a perfect naming ceremony for an art style that focuses on capturing fleeting moments. This is how Claude Monet recounted the story: “they asked me for a title” for a painting of the French harbour of Le Havre. His tentative response was: “Put Impression.” He picked that term in acknowledgement that his painting was not more than a mere impression of the real Le Havre. The painting would later acquire the full title Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant) before it went on display (view painting above). A conservative art critic, Louis Leroy, coined the word “impressionism” as an insult to Monet’s unconventional work in a satiric review. As in contemporary language where “geek” or “gay” are reclaimed by those the words are meant to abuse, Monet and similar artists embraced the label and became “Impressionists.”
  Pierre-Auguste Renoir once said “without tubes of paint, there would have been no Impressionism.” The new invention provided easy transport and long-term storage of paint.
• Hostility towards Impressionism culminated in one of the most famous court cases of the 19th century. At the center of the trial was a painting, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket(1875), by James Abbott McNeill Whistler (view above). The modern motto of “art for art’s sake” was exemplified in Whistler’s painting. His painting did not just foretell of the coming abstraction in art, but also its name “nocturne” (a musical arrangement) was a clear and unprecedented emphasis on the artist’s own experience. On the other side of the court was the leading and respected critic of the Victorian age, John Ruskin, known for his conservative views on art. The libel trial was instigated by Ruskin’s review of Whistler’s painting: “[I] never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Ouch! Ruskin would have been outraged if he knew that one day that kind of paintings would be worth well over 100 million dollars.

• Zaki, F. Impressionism Art Movement, IdentifyThisArt.com.

• Post-Impressionism is a lame name (Could you perhaps find a better one?). But before we blame the British art critic and historian, Roger Fry, who coined it in 1910, we have to understand the challenge he faced. He needed a name for his London exhibition through which he was to introduce to the public a new group of very distinct artists (Paul Cezanne, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin) among original Impressionist artists (e.g. Manet). He settled on “Manet and the Post-Impressionists.” The diversity of their styles and techniques made it hard to give them but a generic term that categorises them as those who arrived after the Impressionist generation
• A Sunday on La Grande Jatte is made up of millions of perfectly placed dots, taking two years of work by Georges Seurat. The same theories of optics and colour that inspired Impressionist artists before, also played a role in the development of the Pointillist branch of Post-Impressionism.
• Compare the spontaneous snapshots of Impressionist paintings (a woman on a stroll on a windy day, or a ballerina showing off her moves) to the rigid poses of Post-Impressionism and you’ll find that motion was replaced with stasis. Artists were either no longer interested in spontaneity or their new techniques were just incapable – painted dots are not ideal for showing motion.
• The London exhibition mentioned above was not well received. Post-Impressionism with its modern outlook was a shock to the conservative English public who were accustomed to Pre-Raphaelite art, a style which looked backwards to a medieval/Renaissance era that preceded, as the name implies, the Great Raphael. Art critics were just as harsh. In fact, the word “Pointillism” was originally coined by them to ridicule that particular style

• Zaki, Fady. "Post-Impressionism Art Movement." IdentifyThisArt.com, (29 May 2016).

• I am quite under the spell of this truly magnificent work. The idea is uplifting and the execution masterly. When I immerse myself in the contemplation of the picture I am filled with the feeling that all Europe must indeed answer the call of the beloved Kaiser to unite in peaceful harmony for the sake of the cross and the dearest goods, but then the uneasy feeling steals over me that the evil in those men who oppose as an enemy power the good which manifests itself in the Kaiser's being will now cause them to tear down and attack with their ingenious criticism that which has sprung from the high-mindedness and noble heart of the Kaiser"
  • Philipp, Prince of Eulenburg in Röhl, John Wilhelm II The Kaiser's Personal Monarchy, 1888-1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004 page 756.

• A fifth point is that Wilhelm's 'sense of humour' frequently took an offensive, sometimes even a sadistic turn. While his left arm was weak due to damage at birth, his right hand was strong in compensation, and he found amusement in turning his rings inwardsand then squeezing the hand of visiting dignitaries so hard that tears came to their eyes. Kind Ferdinand of Bulgaria left Berlin 'white-hot with hatred' after the Kaiser had slapped him hard on the behind in public. Grand Duke Bladimir of Russia was hit over the back by Wilhelm with a field-marshal's baton. The Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, another of Queen Victoria's grandsons, was pinched and pummeled by the Kaiser in the library to the extent 'that the poor little duke recieved a proper beating up', as the Court Marshal wrote in his diary.
  • “The Kaiser and His Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany”, John C. G. Röhl, p.15

• Finally, the Kaiser loved uniforms, historical costumes, jewellry and gems, most of all childish pranks in all-male company. One of his closest friends, Count 'Em' Gortz, who was on theplump side, could 'dance like a howling devish and do all kinds of nonsense' for rhe Kaiser. One of his favourite tricks was to roll backwards down the hillside 'like a hippopotamus that has gone berserk'. On another occasion Gortz and the future Foreign Secretary Alfred von Kinderlen-Wachter 'did the Siamese twins' for Wilhelm by tying themselves together with a large sausage. For the hunt at Leibenberg in 1892, Georg von Hulsen proposedto Gortz:
  You must be paraded by me as a circus poodle! - That will be a 'hit' like nothing else. HJust think: behind shaved (tights), in front long bangs out of black or white wool, at the back under a genuine poodle tail a marked rectal opening and, when you 'beg' , in front a fig-leaf. Just think how wonderful when you bark, howl to music, shoot off a pistol or do other tricks. It is simply splendid!!...In my mind's eye I can already see H.M. laughing with us ... I am applying myself with real relish to this 'work' in order to forget that my beloved sister - the dearest thing I ahve on earth 0 is at this moment dying in Breslau... I feel like the clown in Knaus's picture Behind the Scenes. No matter! - H.M. shall be satisfied!

• Ibid, p.16

• Symbolist paintings are dim, nightmarish scenes where artistic imagination is overtaken by the morbid and the macabre. The visions are otherworldly and mystical. You’ll find haunting, mysterious figures, evil women, supernatural monsters and demons, and imagery of sex and death. The atmosphere is always unsettling and gloomy.
• Symbolism had always been a feature of art in the West, especially since culture became Christianized in the middle of the first millenium. The dove, the lamb, candles, sacred heart and the cross were among many religious symbols found on church walls, ceilings, and later in paintings. During the 17th and 18th centuries, religion receded from the public sphere, pushed aside by Enlightenment ideals, hence religious art and its symbolism lost their appeal. Most art styles that followed were based on reality and mundane activities. Two such “reality-based” art styles in particular would prove highly popular: Realism (1840-1870) and Impressionism (1870-1900).
• At its core, Symbolism was an escapist art. What else gave them refuge from reality? Heavy consumption of booze and hashish and a few of them became known for destructive relationships. Their affinity for suffering harkens back to the period of the Romantics, who passed on to them – you probably have recognized – the familiar figure of the starving or tortured artist – an idea that has prevailed to this day.
• Like the Romantics, they did not share the prevalent sentiment of confidence in progress and science. What they emphasized in their work is the inner subjectivity of the artist who talks like a prophet in the language of esoteric ideas and dreamlike visions. The artworks betray their dark view that despite all progress of the era, natural forces are still beyond human control: love, lust, fear and death. Such mood of despair and loneliness fueled the drive to create some of the most grotesque art to encounter. Additionally they brought back themes of ancients myths and biblical tales in addition to the graphic representation of their fantasies, nightmares and anxieties.

• Zaki, Fady. "Symbolism Art Movement", IdentifyThisArt.com, Identify This Art.

• Les Fauves is French for The Wild Beasts. Their name goes back to a comment made by art critic Louis Vauxcelles (1870–1943) after visiting the Parisian Salon d’Automne in 1905. There he saw outrageously bold and bright paintings surrounding a Renaissance artwork, to which he sarcastically remarked “Donatello au milieu des fauves!” ( Donatello among the wild beasts!). Clearly, “fauves” was never meant as a word of praise for the artists, nevertheless the label stuck.
  “Les Fauves,” with Henri Matisse (1869-1954) as their main figure, believed that colors should be divorced from physical reality. Matisse summed it up in one line: When I put a green, it is not grass. When I put a blue, it is not the sky. To the Fauves, colors treated independently from their descriptive qualities meant artistic freedom. They believed colors should express the artist’s feelings. As colors lost their traditional purpose, they became the dominant force in the paintings, while shapes were simplified into two-dimensionality.
  • Zaki, Fady, "Fauvism Art Movement." IdentifyThisArt.com, 8 June 2017.

I know they’re weapons of war. However, there’s a beauty in unadorned functionality totally separate from that. Fighter planes and battleships have a simple, unadorned beauty I’m drawn to. But I don’t want to see them in action, killing people. ~ Hideaki Anno

My idea was to offend canons of art at the time. ~ Allen Jones

"X" IS THE FIRST OF A NEW GENERATION OF ROBOTS WHICH CONTAIN AN INNOVATIVE NEW FEATURE - THE ABILITY TO THINK, FEEL, AND MAKE THEIR OWN DECISIONS. HOWEVER, THIS ABILITY COULD BE VERY DANGEROUS. IF "X" WERE TO BREAK THE FIRST RULE OF ROBOTICS, "A ROBOT MUST NEVER HARM A HUMAN BEING", THE RESULTS WOULD BE DISASTROUS AND I FEAR THAT NO FORCE ON EARTH COULD STOP HIM.
APPROXIMATELY 30 YEARS WILL BE REQUIRED BEFORE WE CAN SAFELY CONFIRM HIS RELIABILITY. UNFORTUNATELY, I WILL NOT LIVE TO SEE THAT DAY, NOR DO I HAVE ANYONE TO CARRY ON MY WORK. THEREFORE, I HAVE DECIDED TO SEAL HIM IN THIS CAPSULE WHICH WILL TEST HIS INTERNAL SYSTEMS UNTIL HIS RELIABILITY HAS BEEN CONFIRMED. PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB THE CAPSULE UNTIL THAT TIME.
"X" POSSESSES GREAT RISKS AS WELL AS GREAT POSSIBILITIES. I CAN ONLY HOPE FOR THE BEST.
SEPTEMBER 18, 20XX
T. LIGHT ~ Keiji Inafune and Sho Tsuge, Megaman X, (December 17, 1993)

Magneto: Nazis? Do I look like a failed artist with a neurotic grudge against his father and the world? I am a force of nature, boy. I am Magneto. ~ X-Men # 149

It says something that some news channels trust their audience to interpret American history while Fox distrusts its audience and doesn't think it can do that. ~ Marshall Curry

[I]t's actually really rare that you get completely free rein. You know, normally any character you do, you know, it has its own constraints. Your character earns a certain salary, lives in a certain area, you know, maybe has kids, sends them to school, whatever. But, no, with something like the devil, I mean, really you can go completely berserk. ~ Elizabeth Hurley, "Elizabeth Hurley Talks About Playing the Devil in 'Bedazzled'; J.K. Rowling Discusses the Surprising Success of 'Harry Potter'", Cnn.com, (October 20, 2000)

The triforce, being an inanimate object, cannot judge between good and evil. Therefore, it could not know that Ganon's wishes were evil; it merely granted them. ~ Kensuke Tanabe, Yoshiaki Koizumi, Nintendo, “The Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past Instruction Booklet”, p.5, (November 21, 1991)

• By the turn of the century, cinematic depictions of sexuality began to augment literary productions and still images. According to Joseph Slade, a professor of communications turned porn historian, by the turn of the century, peep shows displayed films of nude women. Shortly thereafter hardcore films began to circulate, though it remains impossible to date the first one. The first might be Le Boyeur (1907); or A l'Ecu d'Or ou la Bonne Auberge (1908) though not living scholar admits to having seen either film. In Slade's estimation, the first surviving stag film is an Austrian film entitled Am Abend (c. 1910). Such silent films erected few linguistic barriers and became staple fare at brothels and other sites of male convivial pleasures, according to Slade's account. Such histories of film have not been done by historians.
  • The Routledge History of Sex and the Body: 1500 to the Present, edited by Sarah Toulalan, Kate Fisher, p.230

• In the heart of the Russian State Library, Marina Chestnykh takes the creaking elevator up to the ninth floor. She walks past stack after stack of books kept behind metal cages, the shelves barely visible in the dim light from the frosted-glass windows. This is the spetskhran, or old special storage collection — the restricted-access cemetery for material deemed “ideologically harmful” by the Soviet state.
  She arrives at a cage in the floor’s back corner. When she inserts a key in the padlock, the door swings open to reveal thousands of books, paintings, engravings, photographs and films – all, in one way or another, connected to sex.
  It was the kinkiest secret in the Soviet Union: across from the Kremlin, the country’s main library held a pornographic treasure trove. Founded by the Bolsheviks as a repository for aristocrats’ erotica, the collection eventually grew to house 12,000 items from around the world, ranging from 18th-century Japanese engravings to Nixon-era romance novels.
  Off limits to the general public, the collection was always open to top party brass – some of whom are said to have enjoyed visiting. Today, the collection is still something of a secret: there is no complete compendium of its contents and many of them are still not listed in the catalogue.
• The story begins in the 1920s, when the Bolsheviks turned what was once the Rumyantsev arts museum into the country’s national library. As the newly named Lenin Library began amassing new literature, it also opened a rare book department to house compromising materials acquired primarily from confiscated noble libraries.
  One of the most stunning items seized from an unknown owner is The Seven Deadly Sins, an oversized book of engravings self-published in 1918 by Vasily Masyutin, who also illustrated classics by Pushkin and Chekhov. Among its depictions of gluttony is a large woman masturbating with a ghoulish smile.
  Before the revolution, it was fashionable among the upper classes to assemble so-called knigi dlya dam (Ladies’ Books) – a kind of bawdy scrapbook. An ostentatious leather-bound album with Kniga Dlya Dam embossed in gold on the cover opens to reveal a Chinese silk drawing of an entwined couple. Further on, dozens of engravings show aristocratic duos fornicating in sumptuously upholstered settings. Erotica was also consumed by Russia’s masses, as evidenced by a set of pamphlets from the 1910s. A pamphlet labeled Pikantnaya Biblioteka (Naughty Library), containing a tale from the 14th century Italian classic Decameron and a story titled A Consultation, sold for 50 kopeks. On the cover, a satanic figure grips a silky-tressed damsel in distress.
  In the 1930s, increasing control over books led to hundreds of new additions. Items deemed inappropriate now extended to Soviet writings on sexuality from the previous decade, when abortion was legalised and Alexandra Kollontai, the most famous woman in the Bolshevik government, called for the destruction of the traditional family — a movement reversed under Stalin.
• After Skorodumov’s death, the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, raided his collection. According to a letter sent by library director Vasily Olishev to the Council of Ministers, a post-mortem search of his apartment revealed a staggering 40,000 items, 1,763 of which were “books of an erotic nature” while 5,000 were “pornographic or vulgar” brochures and magazines. The Soviet state snapped up the collection from Skorodumov’s widow for 14,000 rubles, then a considerable sum. However, Olishev was careful to note that the money did not extend to the erotica.
  “The library did not deem it appropriate to pay citizen Burovaya [Skorodumov widow] for the erotic literature, broadsheets and magazines, as this literature presents neither scientific nor historical value to the library’s readers, and is an especially harmful vestige of bourgeois ideology,” he wrote.
  For just this reason, however, it was necessary to hang on to it: “The Lenin Library did not deem it appropriate to return literature of such a harmful nature to citizen Burovaya, as its possession in the home of a private citizen presents considerable danger.”

• "Inside the Soviet Union's secret pornography collection" Joy Neumeyer for The Moscow Times, The Guardian, Wed 25 Jun 2014

• From the pictures sent in for exhibition it is clear that there really are men who on principle feel meadows to be blue, the heavens green, clouds sulphur yellow-or as they perhaps prefer to say "experience" them thus. I need not ask whether they really do see or feel things in this way, but in the name of the German people I have only to prevent these pitiable unfortunates who clearly suffer from defects of vision from attempting with violence to persuade contemporaries by their chatter that these faults of observation are indeed realities, or from presenting them as "art".
  • Adolf Hitler, House of German Art dedication speech, Munich, July 18 1937.

• Since the Egyptians had their chariots, the Vikings had their ships and the Zulu warriors had their shields, man has been decorating his instruments of war. War art traditionally served as a protection from evil, to receive supernatural powers from the gods and give a noble identity to each warrior. Come the twentieth century, the tradition continued, but things got a little less, well … noble.
• While nose art also took on other forms and had some notable cartoon art, graffiti and beautiful typography, the pin-up was their battle cry. The more imaginative, provocative and even offensive, the more it reflected the soldier’s wild abandon to intimidate and tease the enemy.

• "Flying Girls: A Compendium of WW2 Airplane Pin-Ups" Messy Nessy, Messy Nessy Cabinet of Chic Curiosities, August 28, 2015

• The People's Republic of China has banned porn since its establishment in 1949. Anyone who produces, distributes, or purchases lewd magazines, books, or videos can be penalized. Usually the punishment is just a fine and a warning, but in 2005 the creator of China's biggest porn site was sentenced to life in prison. Movie studios or filmmakers caught producing erotic films can lose permission to make movies altogether.
  It's unclear, however, what the government considers pornographic. The law itself is vague: Officials may target anything that "violat[es] public morality and harm[s] the physical and mental health of youth and young people." At universities, performance art that features nudity is rarely prohibited. (It's more likely to be banned if it involves pictures or video.) State-run bookstores will often sell books advertised as sexually explicit, but with the offending passages removed. The government makes an exception for sex education—which was taught in primary schools starting in 2002—although teaching materials often resort to euphemism rather than pictures of naked men and women.
  • They Know It When They See It: Is All Pornography Banned in China? Christopher Beam, "Slate" June 24, 2009

• “The story of ‘Colonel Schultz’ was about a Jewish woman captured by a Nazi officer who makes her his dog,” said Libsker. “Then she gets revenge and he becomes her dog,” he said.
  “This was the first and only time the hero was a Jew and a woman. The true story under all the Stalags was revealed for the first time,” said Libsker. Apparently, young Israelis could identify with captured British pilots as stand-in victims, but a Jewish woman in that role prompted a ban on all Stalags forever.
  After claims that Stalags were fueling street crime, a court ordered police to confiscate and destroy every copy of “Colonel Schultz.” The series was branded “literary filth,” and Stalags imploded without giving readers a final money-shot. “As some Israelis who were children and teenagers at the time testify, the Stalags provided sexual titillation in a society that repressed it, and also the illicit thrill of accessing a dark, secret recent past their European-born parents never discussed,” wrote commentator Andrew O’Hehir.
  Calling Stalags “a dream-world, midnight version of the Eichmann revelations,” O’Hehir said the series doled out “a Stockholm-syndrome equation of evil with eros, and a juvenile revenge fantasy, all rolled into one.”
  • "When Israel banned Nazi-inspired ‘Stalag’ porn", Matt Lebovic, The Times of Israel, 17 November 2016.

• “At the end of 1956, at the urging of a friend, Touko sent his secret artwork to a popular American muscle magazine…and signed them “Tom”. The editor loved them. The cover of the spring 1957 issue of “Physique Pictorial” features a laughing lumberjack, drawn by “Tom of Finland”. It was a sensation. Touko became Tom of Finland. The rest is history.”
• There is probably no other gay artist whose work is so broadly recognized across the globe.

• "Gay Finland: Inside Gay Relationships" Richard Ammon, Global Gayz

• Nudie-cuties, a sister genre to nudist films and popular around the same time period (early 1960s). Like nudist films, the nudie-cutie feature experienced a brief boom in popularity when societal standards allowed bare breasts and butts to be shown in film. And like the nudist film, the nudie-cutie suffered a fairly quick death as filmmakers were able to depict more explicit nudity and sexual situations.
  • "Nudie Cuties" Jason Coffman, LetterBoxD

• Hat Stand is a mannequin in radial leather knickers and thigh-high boots. Chair is the most famous of the three: a woman lies on her back, with her knees against her chest and a cushion on top of her. That’s the seat, her calves make the chair’s back. While all the clothes – black leather gloves, boots and a strap – reference bondage, she also looks dead, trussed up ready for some inept suburban disposal. Table, being topless, is more classically provocative. It would be pushing it to say the figure was adopting a more active shape, though: she’s on all fours, holding up a pane of glass with her back, her head looking down into a hand mirror. Yet the physics of the position make her look more like a doll than a corpse, and the effect is more intellectual challenge than 10 Rillington Place.
  “Fetish clothing doesn’t date,” Devaney says. Jones’s Secretary – three sets of crossed legs, disembodied pastel dominatrixes – could have been made yesterday. Or they could be a detail from a Victorian erotica show. Hat Stand could be an Agent Provocateur window display.
  Fetish wear is timeless for the same reason illegal drugs are always the same price. The black market doesn’t seem to understand inflation. But we’re also looking at a dense interplay of deliberate and accidental reference: Jones’s images have been so influential that almost no image of woman-as-object or woman-as-other-object can be created, even 40 years later, that doesn’t nod to them.

• "Is Allen Jones’s sculpture the most sexist art ever?", Zoe Williams, The Guardian, 10, Nov, 2014

• Since the Meiji period, the use of the term hentai has had a parallel history in both science and psychology, but the sense that hentai communicates of something being unusual or abnormal comes from the latter. It was first used in the middle of the Meiji period in the context of the developing science of psychology to describe disorders such as hysteria as well as to refer to paranormal abilities such as telepathy and hypnosis.[5] It had the connotation of something outside or beyond the normal. Although the term originally circulated only among medical specialists, by 1917 it was being popularized via such journals such as Hentai shinri [Abnormal psychology]. However it did not have any particular sexual connotations in this context. Hentai's sexual reference was to come not through its connection with hentai shinri but through its juxtaposition with another, related term, hentai seiyoku or 'abnormal sexual desires'.
  The technical term seiyoku or 'sexual desire' was introduced into Japanese via German sexology which began to be translated by medical doctors such as the army physician and novelist Mori Ōgai from the middle of the Meiji period.[6] The notion of hentai seiyoku or perverse or abnormal sexual desire was popularised via the translation of German sexologist Krafft-Ebing's text Psychopathia Sexualis which was given the Japanese title Hentai seiyoku shinrigaku [The psychology of perverse sexual desires]. Although the term seiyoku at first only circulated among medical specialists, its wider dissemination was accelerated by the use of the term in fiction by writers such as Ōgai, as well as others associated with the naturalist school; indeed, Ōgai's 1909 novel Vita Sexualis is clearly in debt to Krafft-Ebing for its title.
• This interest in perverse sexuality continued into the 1920s and is often summed up in the phrase ero-guro-nansensu or 'erotic, grotesque nonsense.' During the early Showa period (1926-89), Japan developed a significant publications' industry devoted to the discussion of perverse sexuality—in the 1920s at least ten journals were founded that focused, in particular,upon Hentai seiyoku. These included Hentai shiryō [Perverse Material, 1926], Kāma shasutora [Kāma shastra, 1927], Kisho [Strange Book, 1928] and Gurotesuku[Grotesque, 1928]
  The experts who wrote these articles and analysed the perverse desires of their correspondents did so in a popular medium that appealed to a readership far wider than the medical community. As Fruhstuck points out, by the middle of the Taisho period rising literacy rates and the proliferation of cheap newspapers and magazines meant that reading had become a favorite leisure activity of the working classes, allowing a 'low scientific culture' to develop.[8] The result was that hentai, signifying sexual interests that were understood to be 'queer' or 'perverse,' became a widely recognised term and popular culture was swept by what Matsuzawa describes as a 'hentai boom',[9]—the first of several explosions of interest in perverse sexuality that were to occur in the Japanese media over the next half-century.
  Yet, despite the fact that hentai [perverse] was often invoked as the opposite of jōtai[normal]—it was perversion, not normality, that was obsessively enumerated in popular sexology texts, thus giving 'the impression not only that "perversion" was ubiquitous, but that the connotations of the term were not entirely negative.'[11] Public interest in perversity fed demand for increasingly detailed and lurid descriptions, and 'what started out as prescriptive literature quickly lost the blessings of educators and police and thus descended into the underground culture.' Naturally, with the increase in censorship by the state as Japan geared up for war in the 1930s, this genre came under increased scrutiny and publication was largely suspended from about 1933 due to paper rationing.
• The immediate postwar years saw the development of a kasutori [low-grade, pulp culture]—kasutori is literally a poor-quality alcohol distilled from sake lees and drinkers were supposed to collapse after only three glasses just as these magazines tended to fold after their third issue. The Japanese press was now free to dispense with the 'wholesome' preoccupations of wartime literature and instead explore more 'decadent' themes, including a whole genre of 'carnal literature' [nikutai bungaku] in which the physicality of the body was emphasised over more ideological concerns. As Igarashi points out, for many survivors, their bodies were the only possession they had managed to preserve from the destruction of the war; Japan's burned-out cities became sites for celebration of the 'raw, erotic energy of Japanese bodies'. Indeed the sexualisation of the popular press and popular culture more widely was a conspicuous feature of Japan's first post-war decade.
  One had only to glance at the covers of the kasutori press to understand that there had been a radical break from the past. Women's bodies were prominently displayed in a manner that would have been inconceivable before the war. Public sexuality was suddenly visible and acceptable in a manner not seen prior to the war's end, and 'petting' [pettingu] couples were conspicuous features of parks and shrine precincts. The new postwar environment saw a greater emphasis placed on fulfilling the emotional and sexual needs of the couple, which resulted in a demand for information about sexual practice and pleasure—a market to which the kasutori magazines catered.

• “A Short History of 'Hentai '”, Mark McLelland, Issue 12 January 2006

• Now the book of Lolita was translated into Russian in 1967 and renamed The Lolita Complex by Russel Trainer. This is where Japanese individuals got a hold of this material and used it to influence many of there shojo works during the 1970's.
  The first example of this word being used in anime was in "Stumbling upon a Cabbage" an Alice and wonderland parody manga by Shinji Wada created in 1974. In comparison though the first lolita character is often considered to be Clarisse (16 years old) from Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro (1979). Miyazaki has even made a statement concerning Clarisse as being a loli...
  "It's difficult. [My female protagonists] immediately become the subjects of rorikon gokko (play toy for Lolita Complex males). In a sense, if we want to depict someone who is affirmative to us, we have no choice but to make them as lovely as possible. But now, there are too many people who shamelessly depict [such protagonists] as if they just want [such girls] as pets, and things are escalating more and more."
  —Hayao Miyazaki, 1988
  It wasn't till the 1980's the lolicon genre really took root and spread within anime industry. Through the use of shoujo or magical girl genre titles like Maho No Mako-chan (1970), Minky Momo (1982), and Majoko Megu-chan (1974) . Lolicon designs borrow many aspects of the shojo character designs of the time. These shoujo characters where created to look younger.
  The 80's was also the era where loli's entered the hentai or erotic doujinishi industry. This new buz led to the creation of Burusera shops which sell used panties and foster terekura (telephone clubs) with teenagers. The industry also helped create the Otaku Murder, Tsutomu Miyazaki who still to this day has caused many people to not look at otaku and its culture kindly.

• “Origin and Evolution of Lolicon”, bcfiscus, Amino, 06/22/16

• On and on, I subjected myself to innumerable scenes of ludicrous anime sex in search of something that was even kind of okay. I didn’t find it; all I found was reinforcements of the stereotypes.
  Look, you’re smart people, I know that the simple act of watching hentai won’t turn you into yet another cog in the misogyny engine. Like I said before, whatever turns you on is totally okay, and there are perfectly level-headed feminists out there who like to get it going to animated porn—especially since no real women are harmed in the process of creating hentai.
  • “The Search For Sex-Positive Hentai: Harder than you might think.”, David Ochart, The Mary Sue, February 26th, 2015

• Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.
  • "Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into the Met. Museum?" Guerilla Girls,Tate.org, 1989.

• This is the first museum exhibition ever devoted to representing extraordinarily muscular women. Both as reality and image, the phenomenon of the muscular woman is a key to a new understanding of the relation between contemporary women and power. Picturing the Modern Amazon presents the world of female bodybuilders as a distinct culture with its own history, as a dazzling transgression of mostly male-determined gender norms, and as a model for the future.
  History has many accounts of strong, even physically powerful women, but the most enduring is the ancient myth of the Amazon, because it struck the greatest fear in men. As the female embodiment of virile courage, the Amazons of myth were so independent that they did not need males in order to reproduce. Imaginary or real, Amazons were the objects of both lust and dread, which the ancient Greeks attempted to allay by depicting Amazons only as vanquished.
• Included are the well-known characters Wonder Woman and She-Hulk as well as underground comic book superheroines, who are often more exaggerated than their commercial counterparts. Comic books and original work by artists such as Robert Crumb and Alain Célerier present often outrageous and extremely sexualized fantasy images of almost unimaginably muscular female figures, who may be heroes and goddesses or simply victims of their own extreme brand of beauty.

• "Picturing the Modern Amazon" NewMuseum.org

• We want our stories to represent the full diversity of speculative fiction, and encourage submissions by writers from underrepresented populations. This includes but is not limited to writers of any race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, class and ability, as well as characters and settings that reflect these experiences.
• Class diversity also needs to be part of #DiversityinSFF. I want fewer kings and starship captains, more coach drivers and space waitresses.
  • "It's time for science fiction to face up to discrimination" David Barnett, The Guardian, 6 Sep 2013.

• Looking at almost 6,000 children's books published between 1900 and 2000, the study, led by Janice McCabe, a professor of sociology at Florida State University, found that males are central characters in 57% of children's books published each year, with just 31% having female central characters. Male animals are central characters in 23% of books per year, the study found, while female animals star in only 7.5%.
  • "Study finds huge gender imbalance in children's literature", Alison Flood, The Guardian, May 2011

• From Aesop to the Gruffalo via Winnie-the-Pooh, talking animals play a major part in children’s literature. A 2002 review of around 1,000 children’s titles found that “more than half of the books featured animals or their habitats, of which fewer than 2% depicted animals realistically”, the majority anthropomorphising them.
  • "Children's books with humans have greater moral impact than animals, study finds", Alison Flood, The Guardian, 1 Sep 2017

• As far as I can tell, not a single academic paper has been written about the boom in edutainment games in the 1980s and 1990s. Not one! While Mimi Ito's Engineering Play chronicles the rise of the genre, it focuses more on the educational philosophies embodied in the games more than the content transmitted within the form.
  Keep in mind that it's standard practice to look at primers and textbooks. These games serve the exact same function -- and may even be better at getting the information to stick -- and yet they've received no critical attention. We just don't know the geopolitics of Carmen Sandiego, and in some sense, it's really important to find out. What did the game include about history? More importantly, given the brevity of the information presented, what did it exclude? Were there outright falsehoods in these games or racial, ethnic, or gender biases? We don't know the answers to any of these questions.
  • "The Geopolitics of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?", Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic, Jan 27, 2011.

• Men are much more likely to be seen as attorneys and judges (13 to 1), academics (16 to 1), doctors and medical practitioners (5 to 1). Just three female characters were represented as political leaders with power. One didn’t speak. One was an elephant. The last was Margaret Thatcher.
  • "20 Facts Everyone Should Know About Gender Bias in Movies", Soraya Chemaly, Huffington Post, 09/24/2014.

• In-depth research into the behaviour of about 100 13- and 14-year-olds found over-exposure to violent games weakened empathy for others.
• Many teenagers could play these games without any evidence of a change in attitude. And non-violent games seemed to have no adverse effects on "moral reasoning", regardless of time spent.
  But the problems arose with teenagers who spent more than three hours every day in front of a screen, continuously playing these violent games without any other real-life interaction.
• For these screen-obsessed teenagers, the researchers say that parents should try to put them in social situations where they have to see other people's perspectives or needs, such as charity work.

• "Violent video games leave teens 'morally immature'", Sean Coughlan, BBC News, 6 February 2014

• Say, for instance, you’re shopping and see a woman leave her purse on the counter. You could easily take it without getting caught. If you're a member of the 1 percent of the population that Perkins says is psychopathic, you just might do it—and sleep like a baby afterward.
  "Psychopaths will do things without any compunction, any internal guilt," Perkins says. "It's a cognitive style that places little or no value on fair treatment of others."
  This isn't to say psychopaths are by definition more violent than the rest of us. Violence wouldn’t bother a psychopath, Perkins says, but they might have another incentive to avoid violence: the consequences of getting caught. Most psychopaths are logical people, he says, and understand that actions bring consequences. The threat of repercussions—say, for example, prison—might keep them from acting out.
• "One of the ways we keep ourselves moral is to imagine the terrible things we could do, but then don't do," Ronson says. "You stand on a train platform and think, 'I could push that person in front of the train.' That thought pops into your head, and it doesn't make you a lunatic. It makes you a good person, because what you're actually saying is, 'Oh my god, I'm capable of doing a terrible thing, but I would never actually do it.'"
  I find myself agreeing with Ronson. Any time I've put myself in a situation, real or imaginary, beyond my moral limits, it allows me to clearly see where those limits lie. It's therapeutic, and reassuring.
• I thought of the words of John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach, who once said that the true test of a man's character is what he does when no one is watching.

• "Why Online Games Make Players Act Like Sociopaths", Ryan Rigney, WIRED, 05/28/15

• For example, violent video games, television, films, and music have all been found to affect aggressive thoughts, feelings, and behavior (Anderson et al., 2003; 2010), while the introduction of television itself to a rural area of Nepal significantly affected residents' attitudes and behaviors regarding family issues (e.g., contraceptive use; Barber & Axinn, 2004). However, not all media are expected to have the same effects on beliefs and behavior. Intuitively, it seems to follow that media content should tend to influence beliefs that are relevant to that particular content. For example, watching television crime drama is related to oppositional attitudes toward gun control (Dowler, 2002). Similarly, viewing genres of film or television that focus on relationships (e.g., romantic comedies) is associated with idealistic relationship expectations (Segrin & Nabi, 2002). As a final example, watching shows with paranormal content is associated with paranormal beliefs (Tseng, Tsai, Hsieh, Hung, & Huang, 2014). Each of these examples illustrates how specific content is associated with specific attitudes in ways that are consistent with the content. Media may influence attitudes as disparate as our perception of aggression and paranormal beliefs, so there is reason to believe that media may also influence sexist attitudes.
• Sexism in media partly involves the portrayal of both men and women in ways that are consistent with prevailing stereotypes. Illustrating this sexism, men are more likely to appear in prime-time programing than women, and when women are shown, they are less likely to be shown working outside the home and more likely to be shown in a romantic relationship (Signorielli, 1989). Lauzen, Dozier, and Horan (2008) similarly found that women were underrepresented in prime-time shows and were more likely to be shown in interpersonal or social roles, while men were more likely to be portrayed in work roles. This underrepresentation of women even pervades television commercials, where women not only appear less, but are also more likely to be portrayed as secondary characters supporting a male character when they are present (Ganahl, Prinsen, & Netzley, 2003). The same trend holds true for video games, where female characters are less likely to be heroes or main characters and, when they are included, they tend to dress in a manner consistent with stereotypes (Dietz, 1998). Female (vs. male) video game characters are also more likely to be sexualized and scantily dressed, while male characters tend to be hypermasculine and violent (Dill & Thill, 2007). And, consistent with research on other media effects, sexist content does affect consumers in a content-consistent manner. For example, media consumption in general (Swami et al., 2010) and frequency of playing sexist video games specifically are both associated with greater benevolent sexism (Stermer & Burkley, 2015). In another study, greater video game playing over one's lifetime was found to correlate with hostile sexism (Fox & Potocki, 2016). Together, the research shows that the way gender roles are portrayed in media can influence consumers’ own attitudes.
• In summary, the present research tested the prevalence of sexist content in anime and the associations between consumption of anime, genre preferences, and ambivalent sexism. Study 1 found that popular anime contains elements of sexist, gender stereotyped portrayals of female characters, with little evidence that the same occurs for male characters. Study 2 found that although anime fans tend to show less ambivalent sexism than comparison samples, consumption of anime is nevertheless associated with greater endorsement of both hostile and benevolent sexism.

• "Examination of Anime Content and Associations between Anime Consumption, Genre Preferences, and Ambivalent Sexism", Stephen Reysen, Iva Katzarska-Miller, Courtney N. Plante, Sharon E. Roberts, Kathleen C. Gerbasi, The Phoenix Papers, Vol. 3, No. 1, August 2017

• The hypothesis that media violence increases aggressive behavior has been widely studied in experimental research looking at the short-term effects of exposure to violent media stimuli, as well as in cross-sectional and longitudinal studies relating habitual media violence exposure to individual differences in the readiness to show aggressive behavior. Although there is disagreement among some researchers as to whether or not the evidence currently available supports the view that media violence exposure is a risk factor for aggression (Huesmann & Taylor, 2003), most meta-analyses and reviews have reported substantial effect sizes across different media, methodologies, and outcome variables, suggesting that exposure to violent media contents increases the likelihood of aggressive behavior in the short term as well as over time (e.g., Anderson et al., 2003; Bushman & Huesmann, 2006; Huesmann, 1982; Huesmann & Kirwil, 2007; Murray, 2008; Paik & Comstock, 1994). Other authors have questioned both the strength of the evidence and its implications (e.g., Ferguson, 2007; Savage & Yancey, 2008). Ferguson and Kilburn (2009, 2010) concluded from their meta-analysis that there was no support for the claim that media violence increases aggressive behavior. However, they acknowledged that experimental studies using proxy measures of aggression did produce substantive effect sizes and were relatively unaffected by publication bias, and their conclusions have been vigorously disputed by others (Anderson et al., 2010; Bushman, Rothstein, & Anderson, 2010; Huesmann, 2010).
• Several studies have shown that in the long run, habitual exposure to media violence may reduce anxious arousal in response to depictions of violence. Research has found that the more time individuals spent watching violent media depictions, the less emotionally responsive they became to violent stimuli (e.g., Averill, Malstrom, Koriat, & Lazarus, 1972) and the less sympathy they showed for victims of violence in the real world (e.g., Mullin & Linz, 1995). Bartholow, Bushman, and Sestir (2006) used event-related brain potential data (ERPs) to compare responses by violent and nonviolent video game users to violent stimuli and relate them to subsequent aggressive responses in a laboratory task. Bartholow et al. found that the more violent games participants played habitually, the less brain activity they showed in response to violent pictures and the more aggressively they behaved in the subsequent task. In a series of studies with children age 5 to 12, Funk and colleagues demonstrated that habitual usage of violent video games was associated with reduced empathy with others in need of help (Funk, Baldacci, Pasold, & Baumgardner, 2004; Funk, Buchman, Jenks, & Bechtoldt, 2003).
• An alternative perspective on the relationship between anxious and pleasant arousal may be derived from the general aggression model extended by Carnagey et al. (2007), to include desensitization. They argued that because repeated exposure to media violence reduces the anxiety reaction to violence, new presentations of violence “instigate different cognitive and affective reactions than would have occurred in the absence of desensitization” (p. 491). One such affective reaction may be a positive response to violence that would otherwise have been inhibited by anxious arousal. Huesmann and Kirwil (2007) have called this process sensitization. They argued that, for some individuals, watching violence is enjoyable, and, whereas it may provoke anger, it does not produce anxious arousal. On the contrary, the more such individuals watch violence, the more they like watching it. They are experiencing a “sensitization” of positive feelings. Because finding violence pleasant is incompatible with experiencing anxious arousal, increased pleasant arousal to depictions of violence in individuals with a high exposure to media violence would constitute indirect evidence of desensitization of “negative feelings” about violence. On the basis of this line of reasoning, we propose that anxious arousal by violent media stimuli is negatively related to pleasant arousal and that habitual exposure to media violence should both decrease negative emotional reactions and increase positive emotional reactions to violence, though the increase in positive emotions may occur for only a subset of individuals. For example, in a recent study of young adults in Poland, Kirwil (2008) found that proactively aggressive individuals tended to respond to violent media stimuli with a reduction in anxious arousal, whereas reactively aggressive individuals tended to respond with an increase in enjoyment.
• In support of our hypotheses and in line with previous research, reviewed in the introduction, the findings provide some support for the desensitization hypotheses. Our findings suggest that the more individuals habitually used violent media contents, the less physiological reactivity they showed to a violent film clip presented to them in a laboratory setting. For women there was also a significant link between greater habitual media violence exposure and greater pleasant arousal in response to the violent film. For men, the correlation was in the same direction but was only marginally significant. For men there was a significant correlation between greater habitual media violence exposure and more rapid accessibility of aggressive cognitions after viewing the violent film clip. For women, the correlation was in the same direction but was only marginally significant.
• Research on psychopathy points to a link between habitual electrodermal hyporeactivity and higher aggression (Scarpa & Raine, 2007) as well as low anxiety combined with higher information processing deficits (for a review see Fowles, 2000).
• Lower anxious arousal and higher pleasant arousal to violent clips but not to sad or funny clips predicted faster recognition of aggressive words. Lower anxious arousal to violent but not to sad or funny clips predicted higher unprovoked aggression, as did higher pleasant arousal to violent but not to sad films. One exception was the finding that habitual media violence exposure was not only correlated with reduced physiological arousal to the violent film clips but also correlated with reduced arousal to the sad clips. The latter finding can be attributed to the conceptual overlap between the themes of violence and death in the violent and sad clips. Violent media stimuli are closely related to the theme of death, and the two sad film clips used in our study centered on the death of a beloved person, so the finding that reduced responsiveness at the physiological level was also found for the sad clips is compatible with the desensitization hypothesis. Another unexpected result was that higher pleasant arousal to funny films predicted reduced aggression. However, this result is consistent with the theory that when emotions incompatible with aggression are stimulated, aggression becomes less likely (Tyson, 1998).

• Barbara Krahé, Ingrid Möller, L. Rowell Huesmann, Lucyna Kirwil, Juliane Felber, and Anja Berger, “Desensitization to Media Violence: Links With Habitual Media Violence Exposure, Aggressive Cognitions, and Aggressive Behavior”, J Pers Soc Psychol. 2011 Apr; 100(4): 630–646.

• "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" was immediately hailed as a masterpiece.  (The Russian director Sergei Eisenstein called it the greatest movie ever made.)  It remains the jewel in Disney's crown, and although inflated modern grosses have allowed other titles to pass it in dollar totals, it is likely that more people have seen it than any other animated feature.  The word genius is easily used and has been cheapened, but when it is used to describe Walt Disney, reflect that he conceived of this film, in all of its length, revolutionary style and invention, when there was no other like it—and that to one degree or another, every animated feature made since owes it something.
  • Roger Ebert, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," RogerEbert.com (14 October 2001).

• They don't exactly give you a course in acting in a science fiction movie, At one point I'm supposed to react to seeing my planet blow up. You know, there go my parents, my record collection, everything. What do I see? A hand waving to tell me where to look.
  • Carrie Fisher, Time Magazine, (May 30, 1977.)

• My main reason for making it was to give young people an honest, wholesome fantasy life, the kind my generation had. We had westerns, pirate movies, all kinds of great things. Now they have The Six Million Dollar Man and Kojak. Where are the romance, the adventure, and the fun that used to be in practically every movie made?
  • George Lucas, in Time Magazine, (May 30, 1977)

• A film critic at the New York Times walked out of "Dawn of the Dead" (1979) after the first 15 minutes, complaining of a pet peeve" against zombies.
  A film critic at the Dallas Times Herald described the film as "without any doubt the most horrific, brutal, nightmarish descent into Hell ever put on the screen."
  A film critic at the Village Voice thinks it's one of the most important films of the year.
  They all have a point. "Dawn of the Dead," which opens here Friday, is an ultimate horror film, one that takes traditional images of zombies and ghouls, makes them uncomfortably real, and treats them with a certain poignant humor.

• Roger Ebert, "Interview With George Romero", by Roger Ebert, (April 29, 1979).

• Despite Romero’s avowal that he’s just making “comic books,” I reminded him, he gets very close to a message when he talks about “human sellouts” and “operatives” versus the “alternate society.”
• “The sellouts,” he finally continued, “the scientific community is saying, ‘Let’s feed ’em. They’re wasteful. They eat only five percent of a body and then the body’s intact enough to revive and it comes back as a zombie. The government says we should feed them and control that pattern – which seems probably what those cats would do. So if someone has died in your family, cut them into meal-size bits.”
  He was roaring with laughter and the businessmen at breakfast around us began throwing odd looks toward our table. George wiped tears of laughter from his eyes and went on: “That’s probably the way it would go. My idea to take it further is to actually have human operatives that are trying to preserve their own kind of operative situation and in fact using the zombies initially, training them to serve their own needs. There are beginnings of that in Dawn. I show a few flashes of intelligence or at least a learning capability in the zombies. If there are human sellouts that first start teaching them to do things so that they become really operative, then it’s over. But that is also what’s happening to us, those kinds of monsters, our corporate monsters that prey on us more as we fear them less. I mean, that’s this whole false security concept of the mall, being funneled into it, the temple to consumerism, the mall. And being perfectly happy, you know, absolutely lulled by it and yet eaten by it like that.”

• Chet Flippo, "When There’s No Room in Hell: The Dead Will Walk the Earth", Rolling Stone, (March 23, 1978).

• Clennon: We wasted hours and hours of rehearsal time discussing fucking metaphysics! Some of the actors were obsessed with this question: When you become the Thing — when the alien takes over your mind and body — do you know that you've become the Thing? Or do you just go on thinking that you are your old self? I couldn't see the point of solving that silly riddle. What difference was it going to make in anybody's performance? The story's point was that every creature looked, sounded and smelled exactly the way it did before the alien took it over.
• Carpenter: I'm always concerned about safety, so any time you set somebody on fire … jeez. We also held our breath every time the actors used [flamethrowers]. [Laughs] These things shoot gasoline and are on fire! And these are actors. You just don't know. They might turn around to ask you a question and burn you up. We trained the actors to put out the fire during the scene in the dog kennel. They ran in and put it out. They actually put out the fire too quickly. But I didn't worry about it then … and I usually worry about everything.

• Simon Abrams, Matt Zoller Seitz, "The Men Who Were The Thing Look Back on a Modern Horror Classic", L.A. Weekly, (October 13, 2016).

• I think the critics felt that they were going to see an extension of Star Wars. In other words, they wanted another Star Wars. I decided that the potential was much greater than a rerun of Star Wars. When I finally accepted the assignment, I knew that it was going to be a dark film, with more depth to the characters than in the first film. It took a few years for the critics to catch up with the film and to see it as a fairy tale rather than a comic book.
  • Irvin Kershner, "In Hindsight, Empire Strikes Back Director Irvin Kershner Would’ve Helmed One of the Prequels", Mike Ryan, October 18, 2010.

• “I could see where things were headed. The toy business began to drive the [Lucasfilm] empire. It’s a shame. They make three times as much on toys as they do on films. It’s natural to make decisions that protect the toy business, but that’s not the best thing for making quality films.
  • Gary Kurtz "Did ‘Star Wars’ become a toy story? Producer Gary Kurtz looks back", Hero Complex: LA Times, Aug. 12, 2010.

• Visually, Alien 3 may be the most distinctive entry in the franchise. Cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth, whose work on Blade Runner defined a certain decaying urban sci-fi aesthetic, had to quit after a short time on the job. But the final work by British photographer Alex Thomson is stunning in its own way. Backgrounds are textured with steam columns, damp surfaces, and sharp beams of light that give the sets a textured physicality. For much of the film, the camera lingers close to the floor, pointed up, as if to emphasize the close confines of the prison space and the impossibility of escape.
• Beyond the visuals, Alien 3 also excels as an exercise in imaginative world building. Its lonely prison planet is as richly detailed and lived-in an environment as the industrial corridors of Alien or the abandoned mining colony of Aliens. Its sequestered society, in which a religious contingent effectively runs the prison while a small group of overseers struggles to maintain a facade of control, is as nuanced a cinematic sociology as the corporate power structures that drove the first film, or the military conventions that powered the second. Like its predecessors, Alien 3 is an exploration of human power dynamics in a confined setting and the limits of institutional control.

• Peter Suderland, "Alien 3 is far from the worst Alien movie. In fact, it’s pretty great.", Vox, (May 22, 2017).

• SPJ: Ripley tries to extinguish the species a second time in Alien 3, throwing herself into the cauldron to kill the alien incubating inside her. Is this action as morally repugnant as nuking all the aliens from afar? Is it worse?

JE: I would say it depends on your ethical framework! From a strict utilitarian standpoint, focused on maximizing some positive state like happiness, your calculus could hypothetically be that the existence of xenomorphs threatens life throughout the universe, and therefore killing more xenomorphs is an ethically superior action! On the other hand, one may have a deontological ethic (judging the rightness or wrongness of an action independently from its consequences) that does or does not include xenomorph life as valuable, and therefore either option could be thought of as morally wrong. These are, of course, just examples—but, in short, it’s a complicated question!
In this context, I don’t think we can be fully confident that xenomorph destruction is the right thing to do. But I do think Ripley is right to not want her body to have this parasitic and deadly entity growing inside her! So I would say it’s a solidly ethical choice, whereas mass-xenomorph destruction is more problematic.

• Jeffrey A. Ewing in "The Philosophy of the Alien Films: Interview with Jeffrey A. Ewing" by Ray Blank, Sci Phi Journal, (30 August 2017).

• Can we find, in "The City of Lost Children," a parable on the desperation of modern man, who is progressively losing the ability to dream?

Caro: We never have "messages" of that sort, merely the desire to tell a simple story.

Jeunet: I think of men incapable of dreaming...There have always been men to put on fantasy festivals, or to make films, to make others dream; and there are others who have never dreamed.

Caro: Dreaming is also having the ability to preserve the spirit of childhood. It's true that it's a little metaphorical in the framework of the film, but there's no message.

• Jeunet: When working on a film of such scope, answering journalists' questions is impossible. There are already so many more pressing questions: where am I going to put the camera, what do I say to the actor, how it's going to be done, etc. And there are a million of these questions daily! [Laughs.] Also, we didn't want to spoil the surprises, so as not to wear the public out.

• Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro in, "Excerpts from a conversation with Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro" by Alain Schlockoff and Cathy Karani, Sony Classics.

• Indie Wire: I was thinking about “Delcatessen” and “The City of Lost Children.” While they are dark, they also have happy endings for the characters who deserve them. So, in that sense, maybe you’ve been sentimental and optimistic all along?

Jeunet: For us, “The City of Lost Children” wasn’t dark. It was like a fairytale, and in a fairytale everything is dark: the little children, the dark forest, they are lost. But it is so good to be afraid when you are a kid. And when I saw it again last year, I thought, “Oh yes, it is dark.” For the first time I felt it was dark.

• Jean-Pierre Jeunet, "INTERVIEW: The Fabulous Destiny of Jean-Pierre Jeunet", Indiewire, (Nov 2, 2001).

• John Carpenter's “Escape From L.A.” is a go-for-broke action extravaganza that satirizes the genre at the same time it's exploiting it. It's a dark vision of a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles--leveled by a massive earthquake, cut off from the mainland by a flooded San Fernando Valley, and converted into a prison camp for the nation's undesirables.
• Against this backdrop Carpenter launches a special-effects fantasy that reaches heights so absurd that there's a giddy delight in the outrage. He generates heedlessness and joy in scenes such as the one where the hero surfs on a tsunami wave down Wilshire Boulevard and leaps onto the back of a speeding convertible. It's as if he gave himself license to dream up anything--to play without a net. This is the kind of movie “Independence Day” could have been if it hadn't played it safe.
• Movies like this depend on special effects, costumes and set design to create their worlds out of scratch, and “Escape From L.A.” is wall-to-wall with the landmarks of a post-earthquake L.A. We see the Chinese theater, the Hollywood Bowl and a beached ocean liner, and the showdown takes place in an amusement park intended, I think, to suggest Disneyland's Main Street USA. Snake finds his way through the deadly wilderness with a series of guides, including Pipeline (Peter Fonda), a has-been surfer; Taslima (Valeria Golino), a beautiful but doomed street person; Map-to-the-Stars Eddie (Steve Buscemi), who is the “guy to see” about anything, and the exotic Hershe (Pam Grier), a transsexual who once befriended Snake back in Cleveland, where he/she was known as Carjack.
• Futuristic Los Angeles fantasies have uneven histories at the box office; neither “Blade Runner” nor “Strange Days” did all that well in their initial theatrical releases. But “Escape From L.A.” has such manic energy, such a weird, cockeyed vision, that it may work on some moviegoers as satire and on others as the real thing. That could lead to some interesting audience reactions. John Carpenter as a filmmaker has been all over the map, from the superb (“Halloween”) to the weirdly offbeat (“Christine,” “Starman”) to the dreary (“Village of the Damned”). This time he simply tears the map up; the implications of his final scene are breathtaking. Good for him.

• Roger Ebert, "Escape From L.A.", Rogerebert.com, (August 9, 1996).

• Ryder: When we were doing the underwater stuff, I was having complete anxiety attacks. We'd go underwater, and I was so scared. You reminded me to act. We'd go down with scuba stuff, but then they'd take it away from you.

Weaver: You'd take off your mask, take off your respirator and swim under this ceiling for about 30 feet, and you could not come up. And you couldn't see a thing. You basically had to keep going till you ran out of air and hope that your safety diver would come and get you. Float you down and in and out and then up.

Q: So relief wasn't immediate.

Weaver: No. If it had been, if you have in the back of your mind "If I get in trouble, I can just come up for air," which Kevin Costner had [in "Waterworld"] but we didn't have because we're women. . . .

Ryder: Also you're wearing these weight belts to keep you down. I remember swimming up to one little opening and my weight belt was, like, I couldn't do it, and then I released the belt and I floated up, and right as I came up I was about to grab this thing and this grip goes, "You probably don't want to touch that. You're going to get electrocuted." So it was this choice between drowning and getting electrocuted.

Weaver: If you were to grab something where we did finally come up, the set was covered with these needle-sharp protrusions, thousands of them everywhere. And I said, "Why are we in this place where all these exposed needles are?" and this guy says, "I don't know. It's for the set design."

• Sigourney Weaver and Winona Ryder in "All Things 'Alien'" by John Clark, L.A. Times, (November 09, 1997).

• What’s still jarring about Alien: Resurrection is its tone, which departs entirely from the other movies in the series. Perhaps meant as a reaction to the unremitting gloom of Alien 3, Resurrection is shot and acted like a black comedy. Dan Hedaya offers up one of the most scenery chewing performances in any Alien movie as General Perez, and when he’s finally silenced by an alien’s extending inner jaws, he expires with crossed eyes.
• The result is a brisk action comedy that functions like a sci-fi reworking of The Poseidon Adventure, as the film’s survivors make their way across the damaged Auriga to the safety of the mercenaries’ ship. There are several set-pieces that are high on visual impact, but low on tension, including an underwater scene with swimming aliens, and sequence involving two characters dangling from a ladder.

• Ryan Lambie, "Looking back at Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection", Den of Geek, (Oct 28, 2010).

• Of course, "Fight Club" itself does not advocate Durden's philosophy. It is a warning against it, I guess; one critic I like says it makes "a telling point about the bestial nature of man and what can happen when the numbing effects of day-to-day drudgery cause people to go a little crazy." I think it's the numbing effects of movies like this that cause people go to a little crazy. Although sophisticates will be able to rationalize the movie as an argument against the behavior it shows, my guess is that audience will like the behavior but not the argument. Certainly they'll buy tickets because they can see Pitt and Norton pounding on each other; a lot more people will leave this movie and get in fights than will leave it discussing Tyler Durden's moral philosophy. The images in movies like this argue for themselves, and it takes a lot of narration (or Narration) to argue against them.
  • Roger Ebert, "Fight Club", Rogerebert.com, (October 15, 1999).

• Things were dictated by the times, by it being post-9/11, but I wanted us to hopefully get back to having a little bit more fun on the show and to get out of that whole Xindi thing. That would have been fun. I think we were pointing in that direction. I think the group was ready to go. The cast was ready to get there, and I think we could have had a blast. But we just didn’t get to go there. And I wanted Archer to kind of grow up and lighten up a little bit.
  • Scott Bakula, "Interview with Scott Bakula", StarTrek.com, August 30, 2010.

• I don't like realistic violence. In fact, I don't really like violence full stop. The violence is Quentin's thing. I don't groove with him on it. But I think the way he executes his violence is comic, creative, dramatic and playful, and not titillating in that horrifically realistic way. It's clearly a creative expression. If you look at the House of Blue Leaves sequence in Kill Bill Volume 1, the reason he wanted it to be so operatic and absurdist was because, if it had been less ridiculous, it would be more upsetting.
  • Uma Thurman, "Uma Thurman: Pulp friction", The Independent, (16 April 2004).

• For three months, Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, Daryl Hannah, David Carradine, and I spent eight hours a day studying martial arts at a gym they put together in Culver City. It was nine to five, Monday through Friday. If you didn’t walk in the door between 8:55 and 8:59, you were in trouble at 9:01. I thought I was in the damn Olympics or something.
  • Vivica Fox in "Vivica A. Fox Remembers How Uma Thurman Helped Her Survive Tarantino’s Grueling ‘Kill Bill’ Training" by Zack Sharf, Indiewire, (Mar 20, 2018).

• Q: Kill Bill is an eclectic movie, stitched together from samurai movies, Yakuza movies, spaghetti westerns...

A: I just grew up watching a lot of movies. I'm attracted to this genre and that genre, this type of story, and that type of story. As I watch movies I make some version of it in my head that isn't quite what I'm seeing - taking the things I like and mixing them with stuff I've never seen before.

Q: You describe Kill Bill as your "grindhouse epic". Aren't you worried that Western audiences won't get what you're doing?

A: I'm a little hesitant about saying this out loud - I'm not trying to crow - but I'm influenced by movies from all different countries. I don't really consider myself an American filmmaker like, say, Ron Howard might be considered an American filmmaker.
If I'm doing something and it seems to me to be reminiscent of an Italian giallo, I'm gonna to do it like an Italian giallo. And if I'm gonna do something that begs to be done in the vein of a Japanese Yakuza movie, or Hong Kong Triad movie, I'm gonna do it like that. I understand a lot of audiences from a lot of different countries and, to me, America is just another market.

• Quentin Tarantino, "Kill Bill: Volume 1", by Michaela Latham, BBC, (10/06/2003).

• The movie is all storytelling and no story. The motivations have no psychological depth or resonance, but are simply plot markers. The characters consist of their characteristics. Lurking beneath everything, as it did with "Pulp Fiction," is the suggestion of a parallel universe in which all of this makes sense in the same way that a superhero's origin story makes sense. There is a sequence here (well, it's more like a third of the movie) where The Bride single-handedly wipes out O-Ren and her entire team, including the Crazy 88 Fighters, and we are reminded of Neo fighting the clones of Agent Smith in "The Matrix Reloaded," except the Crazy 88 Fighters are individual human beings, I think. Do they get their name from the Crazy 88 blackjack games on the Web, or from Episode 88 of the action anime "Tokyo Crazy Paradise," or should I seek help? The Bride defeats the 88 superb fighters (plus various bodyguards and specialists) despite her weakened state and recently paralyzed legs because she is a better fighter than all of the others put together. Is that because of the level of her skill, the power of her focus, or the depth of her need for vengeance? Skill, focus and need have nothing to do with it: She wins because she kills everybody without getting killed herself. You can sense Tarantino grinning a little as each fresh victim, filled with foolish bravado, steps forward to be slaughtered. Someone has to win in a fight to the finish, and as far as the martial arts genre is concerned, it might as well be the heroine. (All of the major characters except Bill are women, the men having been emasculated right out of the picture.) "Kill Bill, Volume 1" is not the kind of movie that inspires discussion of the acting, but what Thurman, Fox and Liu accomplish here is arguably more difficult than playing the nuanced heroine of a Sundance thumb-sucker. There must be presence, physical grace, strength, personality and the ability to look serious while doing ridiculous things. The tone is set in an opening scene, where The Bride lies near death and a hand rubs at the blood on her cheek, which will not come off because it is clearly congealed makeup. This scene further benefits from being shot in black and white; for QT, all shots in a sense are references to other shots -- not particular shots from other movies, but archetypal shots in our collective moviegoing memories.
• There's B&W in the movie, and slo-mo, and a name that's bleeped entirely for effect, and even an extended sequence in anime. The animated sequence, which gets us to Tokyo and supplies the backstory of O-Ren, is sneaky in the way it allows Tarantino to deal with material that might, in live action, seem too real for his stylized universe. It deals with a Mafia kingpin's pedophilia. The scene works in animated long shot; in live action closeup, it would get the movie an NC-17.
• To see O-Ren's God-slicer and Go-Go's mace clashing in a field of dead and dying men is to understand how women have taken over for men in action movies. Strange, since women are not nearly as good at killing as men are. Maybe they're cast because the liberal media wants to see them succeed. The movie's women warriors reminds me of Ruby Rich's defense of Russ Meyer as a feminist filmmaker (his women initiate all the sex and do all the killing).

• Roger Ebert, “Kill Bill, Volume 1”, (October 10, 2003).

• It's hardly fortunate that producers David Eick and Ron Moore found themselves developing the remake in the wake of September 11, but the story's broad premise - the human (read: American) military's struggles in the wake of a massive terrorist attack - suddenly gained resonance. In making the humans look, talk, shag, smoke and govern themselves so closely to how we do ourselves the show went way beyond sci-fi. Placing the action in space removed it sufficiently enough to hold a mirror to the one part of society that's normally off-limits: the way we fight right now.
  Giving the murderous Cylons human form - anybody could be one and probably is - meant the show could plough a chilling allegory on civil liberties crackdowns and western paranoia about sleeper cells. Painting them as religious fundamentalists who justified the genocide as a means of carrying out God's will in the face of human corruption forged a fierce parable on the war on terror that good taste would never allow so called "proper" drama to go near. "Our antagonists are not villainous necessarily," says Eick. "Yes they're out to kill us, but they've got an awfully sympathetic point of view in many respects. They're much more like the audience in terms of their being monotheistic. They're not moustache-twiddling villains and that's a strength of the show."
  • Dan Martin, "The Final Frontier" The Guardian, (Jan 13, 2007).

• The Walking Dead, Gencarella asserts, “is part of another shift, post-9/11, in which the ghouls fill in for presumed ‘outsiders’ to the nation — but a nation that is limited only to a worthy few.” 9/11 imagery cropped up unintentionally, and largely incidentally, in Danny Boyle’s innovative fast-zombie film 28 Days Later, made before the attacks; its sequel, 28 Weeks Later, was in essence a critique of America’s militaristic overreach in the attacks’ wake. But the opening credits of Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake wed the terror of its depiction of the zombie apocalypse’s first harrowing hours with pointed stock imagery and mockumentary footage of Muslims and Arabs, setting a precedent for the rightward swing of the subgenre’s “us against them” political undertones.

• Sean T. Collins, "The Fascism of The Walking Dead", Vulture, (Dec. 13, 2016).

• When we do get to the Predators and Aliens, the film starts to look pretty promising. The Aliens look great, the Predators look great and, at first, their battles are fun to watch. Unfortunately, over-stylized herky jerky camerawork makes the action very hard to follow. It gives one the feeling of watching a fight with a crowd of large people in front of you. It's like you're always trying to jump up to see over someone's head or look around someone, but you keep missing the action.
  • Jeff Otto, "ALIEN VS. PREDATOR", IGN, (08/13/2004).

• It was the worst time of my entire life - I never want to see a puppet again. It ruined all the serious relationships in my life. You just become a different person, get completely stressed out and don't pay attention to anything else.
  You work 20 hours a day, take sleeping pills to go to bed and drink coffee to stay up. You feel like a piece of s**t, none of your friends like you, your parents don't like you, but you have a movie at the end.
  • Matt Stone in "Stone says Team America was 'lowest point'", Staff and agencies, The Guardian, (Fri 31 Dec 2004).

• 300 opens on a scene that literally glorifies fascism. The first thing we see is a chasm full of baby skulls, the remains of the infants who were deemed unfit. Leonidas has no visible disabilities, so he gets to live. Then, as a kid, he’s indoctrinated into the warrior society, taught to fight or die, then sent off to survive on his own. He goes into the snow and kills an enormous CGI wolf; a real trained wolf, apparently, would not have looked badass enough. Snyder presents all this as badass shit. And later, he implies that the Spartans were right to kill off all their disabled children, since it’s a hunchbacked troll escapee who ultimately betrays Leonidas.
• The Persian side, on the other hand, looks like a lot more fun; the orgy pit, which we’re apparently supposed to see as some sort of appalling gender-fluid hell, looks like a more pleasant place than anywhere in Sparta. We see the emperor Xerxes as a 9-foot dandy with a seductive foghorn for a voice and a face full of jangling piercings. And the way Miller and Snyder depict them is just fascinatingly weird. A couple of early messengers are inky in their exaggerated blackness, and the Immortals, Xerxes’ regiment of elite fighters, are mutant ninjas who, when they get their masks knocked off, look like Jabba The Hutt’s palace guards. There’s also an executioner with crab-claw blades for arms and a massive warty ogre who looks like Sloth from The Goonies and who was played by the former WWF giant Kurrgan (Robert Maillet). The bad guys are so othered that they don’t even seem human.

• Tom Breihan, "Zack Snyder’s 300 presaged the howling fascism of the alt-right", Avclub.com, (8/11/17).

• Snyder and co-writer Steve Shibuya have lots of opinions about feminism, but they repeatedly contradict, muddle, or undermine them with their slavish devotion to the aesthetic of adolescent badassery. Sucker Punch is, essentially, the cinematic equivalent of a high-schooler taking the stage during a public-speaking class for an oration about feminism, but getting distracted by his own erection.
  • Charles Bramesco, "With ‘Sucker Punch’ Zack Snyder Began Struggling With Ideas He Couldn’t Quite Control", Uproxx, (03.28.16); as quoted in "Why Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice director Zack Snyder keeps ruining comic book movies" by Todd VanDerWerff, Vox, (Mar 30, 2016).

• Quentin Tarantino: The whole idea of it is that you’ve got this total momentum going. Point one is to get really realistic about what happens to people in a crash – you kind of get ripped apart. So the thing is to set up this sequence where the two cars are going to hit each other. We know what’s going to go on. After being in the dark throughout the whole movie, now we’re actually ahead of the characters. The girls are oblivious until the second before it happens, but with the music I’ve got playing… I’m making the audience complicit in this crash. They want the crash to happen. It’s exciting, the girls are driving, and the audience is waiting for it, and they’re waiting for it, and… it’s like a come shot when it happens. And the audience has to admit that they wanted it to crash. If, at the last second, the girls had braked and missed it, they would be pissed off. They’d be totally mad…
  That’s the thing: to get them complicit, get them wanting it and waiting for it. Then – BANG! – it happens, it’s so much more horrible than you ever could have imagined. But… too late! You wanted it to happen. You willed it into being. You are complicit in it. Now take your medicine! And you should feel a little ashamed, feel a little bad, but feel like you came. Now light the cigarettes! We didn’t pull any punches at all.

• Quentin Tarantino, “Death Proof Quentin Tarantino Interview”, Indie London.

• If Death Proof is Tarantino’s fantasy of what women talk about when they get together, it’s a pretty great one. Those “long, long, long” conversations take on a loping, aimless rhythm that mirrors the pulse of the film itself. Perhaps they make Bradshaw uneasy in part because these lengthy girl-on-girl chats are not something we see too often in movies. It feels like watching an actual group of women talk about their lives: How far they’re willing to take things with the men they’re dating, their plans for the evening, how they’re going to score pot. (Not through any men: “We don’t score ourselves, we’re gonna be stuck with them all fucking night.”) With the exception of Rose McGowan and Rosario Dawson, Tarantino cast relatively underexposed actresses to play the lead women. It’s hard to place them in the context of other films, which makes their intrepid characters feel both true to life and super-human. They’re tough, quick-witted women who are simultaneously powerful, unapologetic, sexy, fun, angry, and reckless. They do whatever they feel like doing. And they look so cool doing it.
  The stuntwomen characters in Death Proof aren’t just stand-ins for actresses on a film shoot; they’re surrogates for the female viewer who perform feats of strength and tenacity that ordinary women can only daydream of. This is why it’s so upsetting that people mistook the film for a fetishistic, misogynist screed. That it was mostly women who protested the film is particularly disappointing. After all, art, as Steiner argues, can do things reality can’t.
  A decade after its release, Death Proof demonstrates that when it comes to gender violence, 2007, or even 2017, can still feel a lot like the 1970s — and in its cartoonish depiction of evil men, it gives those ordinary women license to get angry about the everlasting problem of brutality against women. Watching Death Proof, or any revenge fantasy, is a powerful act of vengeance-by-proxy — one in which everyone gets to keep their limbs.

• Lara Zarum, “It’s Wild West, Motherfuckers!”: Ten Years Later, ‘Death Proof’ Remains Quentin Tarantino’s Most Powerful Revenge Flick, Flavor Wire], (December 28, 2017).

• Robert Rodriguez: No, I still needed to figure out what my central marketing was. Because these movies all had great posters and great trailers. I’d just written the Machete trailer, which was great: I had Danny Trejo opening his jacket, full of machetes, and with a machine gun on his motorcycle, jumping, then in some water with two girls. Every shot was a money shot and possible poster image.
  I thought: "What would my poster for Planet Terror be? It can’t just be zombies, everybody’s seen that. We have some cool tough guys in the movie but everyone’s seen that too..."
  I thought: "The only person I really have that I can capitalise on Cherry, the girl with the stump."
  I think at that time I had a scene where El Wray puts a stick in her leg, and I thought: "Man, that’s gonna just look pathetic on a poster." So I kept thinking: "There’s gotta be something, I need something. I’ve gotta start thinking less about the movie and more about the trailer, and then I’ll be able to finish the movie."
  I was stuck in traffic and then it popped into my head: "My God, she has a machine gun for a leg!!!" Awesome! She’d be like, Brrrrr!!! Brrrr!!! Brrrr!!! Roundhouse! One gun pointed at one guy, another gun pointed at another guy, and her leg twisted back, pointed at another guy’s face. She could be the most badass person.
  And because it’s Grindhouse, it’s gonna be even weirder, because it’ll be a real high-tech process - we’ll have to remove Rose’s leg and add it with a computer - but it’ll look very, very low-tech, like it was done back in the day.

• In one of the memoir’s most gripping chapters, she recounts her affair with director Robert Rodriguez (“Spy Kids,” “From Dusk till Dawn”), a smooth-talking, sensitive-seeming guy who turned out to be a Svengali. He and Quentin Tarantino were planning a double feature—”Planet Terror” and “Death Proof”—based on pulp movies of the 1970s, and he wanted McGowan to star. McGowan fell hard and fast, trusting Rodriguez enough to tell him about her experience with Weinstein. He proceeded to use the knowledge against her, she claims, as a tool for mind games, starting with a scene in which Tarantino, playing a character in his movie, attacks McGowan’s character. “I was in a backward world,” she writes. “I was losing my grip on sanity.” In what McGowan interpreted as the ultimate act of cruelty, Rodriguez “sold our film to my monster.”

• Zack Sharf “Rose McGowan: Robert Rodriguez Filmed ‘Planet Terror’ Abuse Scene After She Told Him About Harvey Weinstein Rape”, Indiewire, (Jan 3, 2018).

• Consumers spent $23.5 billion on the gaming industry in 2015. $16.5 billion was spent on gaming content alone.
  • "Take a look at the average American gamer in new survey findings" Allegra Frank, Polygon, Apr 29, 2016

• Thus, given the realities of what it takes to power cellular networks, together with the reported data consumption per Pokémon GO user, we can calculate that it takes the energy equivalent of about one-fifth of a gallon of gasoline a year to connect an average Pokémon player. (For a deeper dive into iPhone energy use see my earlier essay here.) At the expected growth rate, this means Pokémon’s virtual characters will collectively create an energy demand this year roughly equivalent to 20,000 cars suddenly added to the roads.
  • "Pokémon's Big Carbon Footprint Illustrates Energy Reality", Mark P. Mills, Forbes, Jul 25, 2016.

• Past video game play in excess of 3 h/wk correlated with 37% fewer errors (P<.02) and 27% faster completion (P<.03). Overall Top Gun score (time and errors) was 33% better (P<.005) for video game players and 42% better (P<.01) if they played more than 3 h/wk. Current video game players made 32% fewer errors (P=.04), performed 24% faster (P<.04), and scored 26% better overall (time and errors) (P<.005) than their nonplaying colleagues. When comparing demonstrated video gaming skills, those in the top tertile made 47% fewer errors, performed 39% faster, and scored 41% better (P<.001 for all) on the overall Top Gun score. Regression analysis also indicated that video game skill and past video game experience are significant predictors of demonstrated laparoscopic skills.
  • "The impact of video games on training surgeons in the 21st century.", Rosser JC Jr1, Lynch PJ, Cuddihy L, Gentile DA, Klonsky J, Merrell R., Arch Surg. 2007 Feb;142(2):181-6; discusssion 186.

• I think one of the most important attributes a designer can have is…not only the ability, but almost the unconscious constant experience of putting yourself in other people’s heads and watching them as they have an experience. Building an experience through the eyes of someone else is incredibly challenging. I think that’s what makes great designers. A bunch of my meta-points that I’ve drawn out over the last 20 years are about that, how you put yourself in other people’s shoes.

• Jason Jones, "BUNGIE CO-FOUNDER, HALO AND DESTINY CREATOR JASON JONES BREAKS 11-YEAR SILENCE" by Ryan McCaffrey, IGN, (8 July, 2013).

• GamesBeat: What do you think of the first-person shooter genre today?

Romero: Well, it looks better than ever. [Laughs] I don’t like the linearity of gameplay that we’ve come to. There’s a balance between how much you spend on art production versus how much you spend on level design and QA. The more you have to explore, the more you have to draw and model, and the more you have to test.
Someone at EA or Activision did some analysis – when a space gets this big, the costs go up by this many millions, so it’s a lot easier if you have a corridor with some big collision brushes that the player just goes down. It’s much easier for QA to worry about the look of those areas that you can’t get into. The economics of how much shooters cost is what’s dictated the linearity of design. Then everyone’s trying to figure out how to make it so the player feels like they have agency and exploration ability, even though they really don’t.

• GamesBeat: Do you like an open world better than a more story-based game? What do you think of those different directions?

Romero: Games are all about mechanics. That’s what games are, at the heart. You can put a story on top of any mechanics, to string something together, but the game is about the mechanics. To me, one of the most powerful things about games is the story the player can put into the game. The more story you put into a game, the less ownership of the story you give to the player. The less story you put in a game, the more the player feels they can create their own story.
When you play deathmatch, you’re creating a whole story that you can talk about when you’re done, as opposed to something like—You play The Last of Us and you’re told the whole thing through the scripting. You know the outcome because you can go to the next segment of the game when you’ve finished the interactive portion. I’m not a fan of games that are really just stories with some limited interactive sequences in them. I’m about pure mechanics with a story stringing it together. That’s the essence of the medium.

• John Romero, "After 20 years, Doom co-creator John Romero looks back on the impact of a seminal (and Satanic) game (interview)" by Dean Takahashi, Venturebeat.com (December 11, 2013)

• We find in the story of the Sand-Man the other theme on which Jentsch lays stress, of a doll which appears to be alive. Jentsch believes that a particularly favourable condition for awakening uncanny feelings is created when there is intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive or not, and when an inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one. Now, dolls are of course rather closely connected with childhood life. We remember that in their early games children do not distinguish at all sharply between living and inanimate objects, and that they are especially fond of treating their dolls like live people. In fact, I have occasionally heard a woman patient declare that even at the age of eight she had still been convinced that her dolls would be certain to come to life if she were to look at them in a particular, extremely concentrated, way. So that here, too, it is not difficult to discover a factor from childhood. But, curiously enough, while the Sand-Man story deals with the arousing of an early childhood fear, the idea of a ‘living doll’ excites no fear at all; children have no fear of their dolls coming to life, they may even desire it. The source of uncanny feelings would not, therefore, be an infantile fear in this case, but rather an infantile wish or even merely an infantile belief. There seems to be a contradiction here; but perhaps it is only a complication, which may be helpful to us later on.
  • Sigmund Freud, "Das Unheimliche", (1919)

• In Shinto, everything has a soul. Even if you don't want the dolls anymore, you can’t abandon them. There is a special ceremony that is performed for them at a shrine. It’s like a ceremony for a dead person. Since dolls have a human form, they must be treated as such.
• It is a common belief in Japan that dolls are mirrors. The dolls show their owner’s true self.

• Shin Takagi, "Can Child Dolls Keep Pedophiles from Offending?", Roc Morin, The Atlantic Jan 11, 2016

• On April 8, 2000, Mark Hogancamp was attacked outside a bar in Kingston, New York, by five men who beat him literally to death. Revived by paramedics, Mark had suffered brain damage and physical injuries so severe even his own mother didn't recognize him. After nine days in a coma and 40 days in the hospital, Mark was discharged with little memory of his previous life.
  Unable to afford therapy, Mark decided to create his own. In his backyard, he built Marwencol, a 1/6th scale World War II-era town that he populated with dolls representing his friends, family, and even his attackers. He used the small dolls and props to redevelop his hand-eye coordination, while he dealt with the psychological trauma from his attack through the town's many battles and dramas.
  Mark started documenting his miniature dramas with his camera. Through Mark's lens, these were no longer dolls — they were living, breathing characters in an epic WWII story full of violence, jealousy, longing, and revenge. And he (or rather his alter ego, Captain Hogancamp) was the hero.
  When Mark's stunningly realistic photos are discovered and published in an art magazine, his homemade therapy suddenly becomes "art," forcing Mark to make a choice between the safety of his fictional town and the real world he's avoided since his attack.

• Marwencol, PBS.

• In this series of relics, body and flesh are there to be sold as artwork, in order to overcome the taboo of selling one's own body.
  The body of text, the bodies of letters: flesh is hereto be given to DNA analysis, taking the risk of being used in the future, and that a body, a replicant, a clone can be constructed.
  • Orlan, ORLAN: A Hybrid Body of Artworks, edited by Simon Donger, Simon Shepherd p.47

• I think the most interesting thing that’s coming are the robots. We’ve had a sex toy revolution—really well-designed, well-made, well-crafted, safe sex toys are now available. What’s coming down the line, though, is an age where even unrealizable fantasies can be realized. There are people out there who’ve always had giantess fetishes or centaur fetishes. There are no centaurs or 30-foot women out there right now. There will be.
  • Dan Savage, "Dan Savage Discusses the good and the bad sides of sex" Newsweek 05/16/15--08:51:

• Now you have a child bot that’s indicating pleasure to these sexual activities? That could be very detrimental to the individual’s cognitive understanding.
  • Katie Gotch, Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers Child Sex Robots are a Terrible Idea

• In this series, titled DOG, beautiful naked girls in dog collars and chains stand on limbs that have been amputated and bandaged at the wrists and knees to reduce them to the likeness of pet puppy dogs with stumpy legs.
  • Makoto Aida Schoolgirls, Money and Rebellion in Japan by Sharon Kinsella p.162

• "Sexism implies inequality, If you want to read any form of sexism in here than [sic] it has to be towards the men they obviously do not have the upper hand here.”
  • Fokke de Jong, "A Suit Company Says These New Ads Are Sexist Towards Men Not Women", Rossalyn Warren, Buzz Feed, February, 12, 2016

• The new campaign sends a mixture of both misogynistic and misandrist messages. Not only do the ads feature a mini-gentleman spraying a hose pipe into a naked woman's mouth and another slapping a giantess's butt, but the men are presented as inferior beings. At least that's what the brand wants you to think.
  • Lydia Moorish, "These Sexist Ads Feature Men As 'Micro Jerks' On Giant Women", Konbini, 201

• There are huge advertising budgets only when there's no difference between the products. If the products really were different, people would buy the one that's better. Advertising teaches people not to trust their judgment. Advertising teaches people to be stupid.
  • Carl Sagan, Contact as quoted in The Seven Deadly Skills of Competing

• Propaganda is of no use to the politician unless he has something to say which the public, consciously or unconsciously, wants to hear.
  • Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928), page 123

• Jason Lynch: What did the advertising industry think of the show?

Matthew Weiner: I would hear two things. Number one: "You're making our job very hard because every client is coming in and is expecting an emotional sales pitch, which is not what we do anymore. "And then I was hearing, "He's so good and it's so short!" And I would say, "It's rigged! I'm writing the clients as well." (laughs) I'm deciding if he's successful. If you go in and try that domineering attitude he takes in the episode where he's like, "Do you believe in Jesus or not?" If you try that in real life, I'm pretty sure you will lose the client, and get fired!

• Creator of Mad Men Matthew Weiner, "Mad Men Creator Matthew Weiner Looks Back on His Show and What It Taught Him About Advertising" Jason Lynch, Ad Week, December 20, 2016.

• There is always a point at which the terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt. A point at which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is innately media-related.
  • William Gibson, Official blog at williamgibsonbooks.com (31 October 2004).

• I stopped reading the comics page a long time ago. It seems that whoever is in charge of what to put on that page is given an edict that states: “For God’s sake, try to be as bland as possible and by no means offend any one!” Thus, whenever something like Doonesbury would come along, it would be continually censored and, if lucky, eventually banished to the editorial pages. The message was clear: Keep it simple, keep it cute, and don’t be challenging, outrageous or political.
  And keep it white!
  It’s odd that considering all the black ink that goes into making the comics section (and color on Sundays) that you rarely see any black faces on that page. Well, maybe it’s not so odd after all, considering the makeup of most newsrooms in our country. It is even more stunning when you consider that in many of our large cities like New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago where the white population is barely a third of the overall citizenry, the comics pages seem to be one of the last vestiges of the belief that white faces are just…well, you know…so much more happy and friendly and funny!
  Of course, the real funnies are on the front pages of most papers these days. That’s where you can see a lot of black faces. The media loves to cover black people on the front page. After all, when you live in a society that will lock up 30 percent of all black men at some time in their lives and send more of them to prison than to college, chances are a fair number of those black faces will end up in the newspaper.
  • Michael Moore, foreword to "The Boondocks Treasury: a Right to be Hostile" by Aaron McGruder, (2003).

• It has been assumed that journalists are not permanently impacted by the events they cover. Exposure to the traumatic events they report on has been viewed as within their job description and a standard hazard of the profession, similar to an emergency room doctor or a firefighter. Many have viewed the journalists who cover death and destruction as unusually tough, somehow immune to the reverberating impact of the human suffering they witness. Until recently, journalists felt that if they publicly acknowledged that reporting experiences might affect them long-term, the journalist would be thought of as weak and less capable than his or her colleagues.
  • Elisa E. Bolton, “Traumatic events encountered by journalists“, National Center for PTSD, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

• Animation offers a medium of story telling and visual entertainment which can bring pleasure and information to people of all ages everywhere in the world.
  • Walt Disney as quoted in "COSI exhibit explores world of cartoons" by Jeffrey Zupanic in The Review (2 August 2007)

• With animation because you can draw anything and do anything and have the characters do whatever you want the tendency is to be very loose with the boundaries and the rules. But what's great about all these different [cartoon] shows that are on now is they all have their own rules and they stick to them. And in my opinion the ones that don't make it, the ones that fall by the wayside, are the ones that aren't aware of that idea, that you have to have your own rules and boundaries. If anything is possible then I think the audience doesn't care.
  • Matt Groening, 'Futurama' ends: The Matt Groening interview, Part 2, Robert Lloyd, Los Anegles Times, (24 July 2013).

• It's computer animation. It's a new industry. It has limitations: It doesn't do skin, hair and clothing real well. ``Take away skin, hair and clothing and you have crabs and insects.
  • Tim Johnson, Of Ants, Bugs, and Rug Rats: The Story of Dueling Bug Movies, Michael Fleeman, laprensa-sandiego, 2 October 1998

• You have to make all the same decisions that a live action director would have to make. Everything from where to put the camera to what the emotional tone of the scene is going to be, in addition to answering all the questions about costume design and weather and color and all the numerous elements that go into making the scene. We're there every step of the way from the very first crude character designs and early storyboards to how loud the footsteps of the Beast should be as he's walking across the marble floor. We shepherd the process from beginning to end.
  • Kirk Wise, "Interview: 'Beauty and the Beast' Director Kirk Wise", Big Movies Zones, February 2002

• Work hard. That’s the thing that most people who love games and animation may not realize about what they’re seeing. It requires an ugly amount of work. You have to dedicate your life to it, but I believe almost anyone can learn how to make games and animate at a competent level. I don’t believe in following your dreams and going into too much fairy dust about the arts. Sure, it’s fun, but there are many times it’s not fun and you still have to do it.
  • Doug TenNapel, "A Conversation with ‘Armikrog’/‘Earthworm Jim’ creator Doug TenNapel", Ben Mitchell, Skwigly: Online Animation Magazine, 30 September 2015

• In Shrek, we had to animate an ogre, a gigantic dragon, a talking donkey, a very human like princess, a gingerbread man, a puppet and so on... In ANTZ, most of the characters were ants. The big challenge was to jump from different characters and still be able to make them all performe together. Sometimes it could be hard when you're animating a human character and then the next day you might have to work on a dragon. For each character, it took us few months of testing and practice until we felt totally comfortable with the character. The fun part was when we all felt like we knew the characters and we could look at an animation test and said "That's not Shrek. Shrek would never do that." or "Yes, that's definitely Shrek."
• I also think the very fundamental elements like drawing and sketching are still very important. One thing that I found very helpful is to appreciate things around me more often. You can be in a bus looking around, you see this child talking to her mother. If you think about animating a character to move like that child, you will realize life is amazing. You have all these natural, spontaneous character movements in front of you everyday. To capture that is a lot of hard work when you animate. Remember that plastic bag in American Beauty? We sometimes look at people around us and studied the movements and charateristics. Please try, you'll realize it's amazing.
  • Raman Hui in "Raman Hui (ANTZ, Shrek) Interview" by Joe Tracy, Digital Media FX.

• Do you watch The Simpsons? Did you see the episode about Poochie the Dog? There's every network executive in there. You have creative people sitting in a meeting, and then you got some network executive come in. The executive will say, "Let's have the character be a little more with-it, a little more hip, a little more today, a little more contemporary, a little like "Hey dude, hey wow!'" [These are] executives at other networks, like the Big Three networks, and to a smaller degree, Fox. This is the thing that plagued animation writing when I started, which was the early '80s. You had all this shit on TV -- it was like Smurfs, He-Man, She-Ra. I actually worked on some of those [shows], and it was just all these life-draining, soul-numbing meetings with these executives who come in, and they just say, "We want this character more fun, more appealing to girls, more this, more that." In their way of thinking, animation is supposed to be something that's not interesting or fun to look at, or God forbid, you should laugh at. They want it to be comforting for kids, so a kid will watch, smile, and stare happily like a little drone, in between Fruit Roll-Up commercials. That's basically what they look for, for shows like that.

• Paul Dini, "Batman: The Animated Series", Animation Arena, (2015).

• Why should murder be so over-represented in our popular fiction, and crimes of a sexual nature so under-represented? Surely it cannot be because rape is worse than murder, and is thus deserving of a special unmentionable status. Surely, the last people to suggest that rape was worse than murder were the sensitively reared classes of the Victorian era … And yet, while it is perfectly acceptable (not to say almost mandatory) to depict violent and lethal incidents in lurid and gloating high-definition detail, this is somehow regarded as healthy and perfectly normal, and it is the considered depiction of sexual crimes that will inevitably attract uproars of the current variety.
  • Alan Moore, in "Superhero's cultural catastrophy", Alison Flood, The Guardian, (21 January 2014).

• I saw no reason why you couldn't create a work of pornography that adhered to all the same standards as the best art or literature. The big difference between art and pornography is that art, at its best, makes you feel less alone. You see a painting or read a piece of writing that expresses a thought that you had but didn't express, and you suddenly feel less alone. Pornography, on the other hand, tends to engender feelings of self-disgust, isolation and wretchedness. I wanted to change that.
• If I write a crappy comic book, it doesn't cost the budget of an emergent Third World nation. When you've got these kinds of sums involved in creating another two hours of entertainment for Western teenagers, I feel it crosses the line from being merely distasteful to being wrong. To paint comic books as childish and illiterate is lazy. A lot of comic books are very literate — unlike most films.

• Alan Moore "Alan Moore: The reluctant hero", Independent, Monday 15 March 2004.

• The origin myths of many superheroes lie in life-altering accidents or bodily mutations. Fans of the genre emphasize that disability, largely unrepresented in other forms of fiction, is part of these characters’ stories. But those stories then go on to wish disability away, via bionic implants and armored suits. “ ‘Disabled’ superheroes aren’t disabled at all,” says Chris Gavaler, author of “On the Origin of Superheroes.”
• The absence of characters living with permanent disabilities affects the way viewers and readers see themselves, argues Rachel Kolb, an Emory University graduate student who is deaf and writes widely about disability in literature. “If we don’t see ourselves within the cultural representations that surround us,” she says in an interview, “it becomes more difficult to imagine ourselves in various kinds of situations, various ways of exercising agency and justice and power and goodness. And all the other themes that tend to be a part of superhero movies.”
• ACCORDING TO LAWRENCE Carter-Long, spokesman for the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund , about 20 percent of Americans identify as disabled, while only about 2 percent of characters on television and in film have disabilities.
• Advocates are also wary of plots that go out of their way to portray disabilities as inconsequential, in a way that minimizes the genuine challenges they pose. When Netflix launched a show based on Marvel’s Daredevil character, a New York Times reviewer wrote that the central superhero “is sightless but not blind to crime.” In fact, he doesn’t seem blind to much of anything, including women or agile villains.
• Fundamentally, what Carter-Long and others want are more complex representations of people with disabilities — and not just in superhero blockbusters. “If there are few disabled characters being created or shown for disabled people to identify with, we then have fewer opportunities to be a meaningful part of what a huge number of non-disabled people simply take for granted,” Carter-Long said.

• Pasquale Toscano, "Where are all the superheroes with disabilities?", Boston Globe, (06/01/2018).

• I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it.
  • J. R. R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories, (originally given as an Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of St. Andrews on 8 March 1939, and published in Essays presented to Charles Williams in 1947 (1939).)

• At a later stage, Dr. Who would be metamorphosed into a woman. Don’t you agree that this is considerably more worthy of the BBC than Doctor Who’s presently largely socially valueless, escapist schlock? This requires some considerable thought – mainly because I want to avoid a flashy Hollywood ‘Wonder Woman’ because this kind of hero(ine) has no flaws – and a character with no flaws is a bore.

• Sydney Newman "Doctor Who Creator Sydney Newman Wanted a Female Doctor", Barry Rice, DoctorWhoWatch.com, 2015.

• I think you can say more obviously in the framework of an honest-to-Christ contemporary piece so that you don't have to talk in parables, in symbolisms and the rest of it, but this is not to say that you can't make a point of social criticism using science fiction or fantasy as your backdrop. We did that on Twilight Zone a lot, but there's no room for that kind of subtlety anymore. The problems are so much with us that they have to be attacked directly.
  • Rod Serling, "Rod Serling: The Facts of Life", Linda Breville, Writers' Digest Magazine, (March 4, 1975).

• It’s easy to overlook the sheer genius of The Twilight Zone’s plot twists because many of us grew up already knowing the endings. After all, some of the best ones have grown so famous as to seep into pop culture and become the subject of countless parodies. But throughout the series, Rod Serling so perfectly illustrates how to gobsmack viewers with a huge surprise: throw them off the scent by making them ask the wrong question.
• Modern horror relies heavily on music and sound effects, and while these are certainly valuable tools, the power of silence should never be forgotten. The Twilight Zone boasts a phenomenal score, which is usually composed by the legendary Bernard Hermann, yet many of the most iconic scenes resonate because they are so unsettlingly quiet.
• Every successful piece of horror should have a little something to say beyond what’s on the surface, and that was certainly the case with The Twilight Zone. Even the scariest episodes still have more going on than just a bunch of aliens or haunted inanimate objects; they work both as thrill-machines and as legitimately interesting pieces of storytelling.
• Even the most fantastical Twilight Zone episodes don’t seem too unrealistic because they are told from the perspective of an average person. Similarly, horror films with outlandish plots have the potential to alienate viewers, but even the most bizarre premise will work if we believe the actions of the human characters.
• The Twilight Zone is like the Seinfeld of horror. Just as Jerry Seinfeld’s comedy takes the simplest aspects of life and makes them hilarious, The Twilight Zone takes the simplest aspects of life and makes them terrifying.

• Brendan Morrow, "What Modern Horror Filmmakers Can Learn From “The Twilight Zone”", Bloody Disgusting, (April 14, 2016).

• That is real horror and blood. When the Second World War finished I was 23 and already I had seen enough horror to last me a lifetime. I’d seen dreadful, dreadful things, without saying a word. So seeing horror depicted on film doesn't affect me much.
  • Christopher Lee, Sir Christopher Lee interview: 'I’m softer than people think' (2011).

• What is almost universally true of horror is that it’s been used as a tool to express social and political discontent for the marginalized since its creation. It’s a kind of popcorn propaganda that’s allowed writers and filmmakers to voice their anxieties while couching them in titillating narratives that would fly below any political censors.
• As far back as 1794, for instance, women like Ann Radcliffe were writing the original Final Girls, like the character of Emily in the Mysteries of Udolpho, who escapes vengeful, domineering men in a creepy old castle to become an autonomous woman. Radcliffe paved the way for Edgar Allan Poe (“The Tell-Tale Heart"), Robert Louis Stevenson (Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray) and, of course, Mary Shelley (Frankenstein). These authors were popular in their time, but they’ve remained a collective compass for much of the horror to follow, and what they all have in common are concerns with ethics. Horror stories are, at their hearts, morality tales.
• Horror is barely ever on the side of the powerful or the mean. The good writers and filmmakers of the genre can tap into our very real fears and follow them to their logical conclusions.

• April Wolfe, "Why We Need Horror Movies Now More Than Ever", L.A. Weekly, (May 12, 2017).

• ...skull masks (or balaclavas, which is actually what Ghost is wearing) are incredibly common in armed forces across the world, especially the US. American soldiers have been wearing them, and have been having their pictures taken in them, for years. This isn't one guy acting alone, it's an established "fashion" amongst soldiers worldwide.
  Which leads us to perhaps the more important point: the mask was not invented by Call of Duty, or its developers Infinity Ward. Indeed, its presence in the game was inspired by the mask's use by soldiers in real life, as it's been worn by US troops—who first took to it as a fashionable alternative from regular gear (it began life as a designer ski mask) at the beginning of the Iraq War—for almost a decade now, long before development ever began on the Modern Warfare series.

• Luke Plunkett, "The Silly Outrage Over A Soldier Wearing A "Call Of Duty" Mask", Kotaku, (1/22/13); as quoted in "Why Soldiers Wear Call of Duty-style Masks" by Tina Amini, Kotaku, (5/01/13).

• Fire is to represent truth because it destroys all sophistry and lies; and the mask is for lying and falsehood which conceal truth.
  • Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), X Studies and Sketches for Pictures and Decorations, as translated by Edward MacCurdy.

• Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
  • Conor aka Santa Claus in Oscar Wilde's, The Critic as Artist (1891).

• I have turned roles down because they are rapists. It's something I don't even want to watch. If I even click on it on TV, I have to click it off or I'll put my foot through the screen... What you see on that screen is just my terror at having to do that scene.
  • James Marsters "James Marsters on Life After Buffy", (Mar 7, 2017).

• The best depictions don’t just leave it at the dramatic device of the rape itself. They use it to tell a deeper story about recovery and what effect it has on that person.
  • Scott Berkowitz, qtd. in Dave Itzkoff, "For ‘Game of Thrones,’ Rising Unease Over Rape’s Recurring Role", New York Times, (May 2, 2014).

• I don’t know how high up the chain that power goes, but I know that it probably is outside of the film industry too. It’s probably in government; it’s probably throughout the world in different dark aspects.
  • Corey Feldman, "Corey Feldman on Abuse Allegations: “It’s All Connected to a Bigger, Darker Power”" Yohana Destam, Vanity Fair, November 10, 2017

• I always tell myself that when you’re playing a character, pretend like they’re on trial and you’re giving the best witness of their life. You really need to think about every element of the character and represent them properly, as if they were a real person. You want to give 100 percent of what they’re worth and what they deserve as people.
  • Pauley Perrette, "Superman vs. The Elite: Pauley Perrette Lois Lane Interview", by Ed Gross, Comic Book Movie, (6/6/2012).

• "When couples spend what little time they have to hang out together in separate rooms watching their own programs, they often lose their sense of intimacy and connection," said John Sovec, a psychotherapist in Pasadena, Calif.
  • Jessica Reynolds, "How to deal when you hate each other's tastes in TV", Chicago Tribune, (Dec 30, 2015).

• Film is not the art of scholars, but illiterates.
  • Werner Herzog, Herzog on Herzog.

• As you see [filmmaking] makes me into a clown. And that happens to everyone – just look at Orson Welles or look at even people like Truffaut. They have become clowns.
  • Werner Herzog Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, (1980).

• If you want to do a film, steal a camera, steal raw stock, sneak into a lab and do it!
  • Werner Herzog, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980).

• Well, nobody looks to Hollywood for social commentary, do they? They only recently discovered that there were black people in the world.
• Hollywood has mistreated women in every possible way throughout its history. Gay men don’t exist.

• Ian McKellen, "Ian McKellen: half of Hollywood is gay, yet in movies gay men don't exist", Catherine Shoard, The Guardian, (23, May 2018).

• Most often people think of idols as man-created statues that are worshiped as though they were G-d. This is a very narrow perspective of idolatry. The real meaning of idol worship is stated in the Book of Psalms, and it is the worship of maaseh bnai adam, objects and ideas that are of our own creation. When we create an object or an idea and endow it with transcendental qualities, we become idol worshipers.
  • "Worship of Guns is Worship of Idols", Eugen Schoenfeld, Atlanta Jewish Times, July 20, 2016

Pornography

Dave Chappelle: I don’t understand all the choices people make, but I do understand that life is hard, and that those types of choices do not disqualify you from a life with dignity and happiness and safety.

All the things you've been thinking about, Peter, make me sad.

• Fast-forwarding through history, the ancient Greeks and Romans created public sculptures and frescos depicting homosexuality, threesomes, fellatio and cunnilingus. In India during the second century, the Kama Sutra was half sex-manual, half relationship-handbook. The Moche people of ancient Peru painted sexual scenes on ceramic pottery, while the aristocracy in 16th century Japan was fond of erotic woodblock prints.
  In the West, many early explicit materials were political, rather than exclusively pornographic, said Joseph Slade, a professor of media arts at Ohio University. French revolutionaries, in particular, satirized the aristocracy with sexually charged pamphlets. Even the Marquis de Sade's famously brutal and erotic works were part philosophical.
  "They were political invectives disguised as pornography," Slade said.
• In the 1800s, the idea of porn for porn's sake began to spread. Erotic novels had been in print since at least the mid-1600s in France (though being identified as the author of one meant a sure trip to jail), but the first full-length English-language pornographic novel, "Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure," also known as "Fanny Hill" (Oxford University Press) wasn't published until 1748.
• The shift from publically viewed stag films to privately viewed rentals and internet downloads drove changes in the types of acts shown on-screen. Privacy, Slade said, made men more willing to watch fetish films depicting specific, sometimes odd, sexual behavior. A 1994 Carnegie Mellon study of early porn on computer Bulletin Board Systems (a precursor to the World Wide Web), found that 48 percent of downloads were far outside the sexual mainstream, depicting bestiality, incest and pedophilia. Less than 5 percent of downloads depicted vaginal sex. This could have been because magazines and pornographic films had traditional sex covered, and people went to their computers for images they couldn't find elsewhere, Slade suggested.

• "The History of Pornography No More Prudish Than the Present", Stephanie Pappas, Live Science, October 11, 2010

• In any case, one thing is clear: There isn’t solid evidence that supports the claims, in the Utah resolution and elsewhere, that pornography has perpetuated a “sexually toxic environment” that degrades the family unit and leads to infidelity. Until existing research has been re-examined, extended, and updated, and the textbooks changed to match, fears of widespread harm ought to be on hold.
  • "The Replication Crisis Meets Pornography", Slate.com

• Perhaps the biggest question of all isn’t whether pornography causes crime, but, rather, have our schools got the balls to tackle porn before we see more young lives wasted?
  • "Does Watching Porn really Turn People Into Violent Criminals?

• The idea that pornography is “like making hate to women” appears to be the exception rather than the rule. Some types of adult entertainment may reinforce misogynist beliefs in men who already hold them; on a broader level, however, watching porn is actually linked to greater support for gender equality and lower rates of sexual violence.
  • “Does Pornography Cause Men to Hate Women?”, Huffington Post

• This is something that ping-pongs back and forth—one study says one thing, another study says another thing. This is a debate that's gone on for decades, and it's going to continue going on for decades.
  • Does Porn Make Your More Aggressive? Vocativ.com

• I am still trying to wrap my head around this information. Clearly, individuals who consume porn daily are dealing with more than just porn. They are apt to be experiencing depression. I am wondering if depressed people are more prone to view porn to combat the depression or if daily use of porn triggers individuals into a depression? Either way, my research with more than 400 people who voluntarily took my assessment indicates that people who regularly view pornography are experiencing more depression than the general population.
  • "Can Pornography Trigger Depression?" Kevin B Skinner, Psychology Today, Nov 03, 2011

• It’s difficult to make a legitimate argument one way or the other, though, because the fact is, there are tons of studies about pornography and a lot of them contradict each other. The one thing they all have in common? The results are all really interesting and definitely worth reading.
  • The Science Behind Pornography: 10 Studies About Watching Porn, Gurl.com

• “We started our research seeking men in their 20s who had never consumed pornography,” said Professor Simon Louis Lajeunesse. “We couldn't find any.”
  • "All men watch porn, scientists find", Jonathan Liew, The Telegraph, 02 Dec 2009.

• Nevertheless, consistent findings have emerged linking adolescent use of pornography that depicts violence with increased degrees of sexually aggressive behavior.
  • Eri W. Owens, Richard J. Behun, Jill C. Manning, Robby C. Reid; "The Impact of Internet Pornography on Adolescents: A Review of the Research", Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity, 19:99–122, 2012

• The study also found that those who did and those who did not indulge in pornography “did not differ significantly in their attitudes toward the traditional family and in their self-identification as feminist.”

• "A feminist for pornography: Get past the pile-on; it can be good for women", Batya Ungar Sargon, New York Daily News, February 19, 2018.

• There is little evidence to back the claim that giving men sexual “outlets” reduces violence. The research that exists is focused on whether a legalised sex industry can reduce sexual assault.
• However, just as the research fails to find a causal link between access to the sex industry and reducing violence, there is no research proving a causal link between violent pornography and gender-based violence.
  • “A rape-able sex robot makes the world more dangerous for women, not less”, Sian Norris, New Statesmen, 21, July, 2017

• What research does tell us is that there is a clear link between violence and the perpetrator’s ability to dehumanise their victims. That, and a setting designed to eroticise a woman’s lack of consent, suggest that Frigid Farrah will have no impact on reducing sexual assault.

• “The Trouble With Sex Robots” by Laura Bates, New York Times, July 17, 2017

• A: I started off in this industry in my early 20s as a webcam model. That was 13 years ago. I kind of grew my following that way, and then I started performing in porn, and about eight years ago, I started directing.

Q: Do you remember how much people paid back then?

A: I was charging $5.99 a minute, and I think my cut was 30 percent. At the time that was a lot of money to me, I was probably making $1,000, $1,200 a week. So it’s always been lucrative, but it’s also hard work. People think it’s just getting in front of the camera and smiling, but it’s not. You have to be a businessperson. You need to know how to market yourself. You need to know how to brand yourself. You need to know how to read people. The trick is to try to find out what their fetishes are as quickly as possible. Now I run the three websites for Kink: Hardcore Gangbang, TS Seduction, and Divine Bitches. I went to film school and was concentrating just on directing — and performing in a lot of the films that I directed for Kink.

• I basically hadn’t done a cam show since 2009. When I talk about performers finding different revenue streams — I presented this to my boss as, “There’s so much more money to grab from these submissive men.” They want more than just a monthly membership at Divine Bitches. They want personal interaction with dominatrices, and with the internet that is possible. They want to buy used clothing off of you. They want to buy your garbage. I’ve had someone buy the contents of my garbage for $500 — literally just the garbage in my bedroom. And they want exclusive cam shows with famous performers and dominatrices. And I said, “We need to build a platform through Divine Bitches that offers these extra items.” Because the sky’s the limit.
  We built a very simple infrastructure and promoted bidding for three weeks. A key part of the infrastructure is that customers can see their screen names and the amount everyone bids, in real time. They love the competition. Every one of these guys wants to prove that they have the bigger wad, so to speak. To see who is willing to spend the most money to have a private conversation with me.
  We started it at $500. That was lowest, $500 for an hour. Not bad, right? Over a three-week period, it got past $30,000. On the last day, some guy swooped in and put down $42,000. He had not put any other bids in. He came in with $42,000 and then the auction ended.
  It was such a large amount that we had to get in touch and have him wire-transfer the money. When the transfer came through, I sent him an email that said, “Let’s set up your show. Tell me a little bit about yourself, what you would like to do, what you would you like to see, would you like me to wear anything in particular?” And thanking him for being a part of this. And he says, “Yeah, you know, I’m really busy with work right now. But I think you’re an amazing performer and that you’re very beautiful. I’ll get back to you when I have time to do the show.” And that’s the last I heard from him!

Q: Wait, he never claimed his show? Do you think he got off on just giving you money?

A: I also do financial domination, and there are clients where pressing that button — and transferring that money — is what’s getting them off. Giving money to their dom. Quite possibly that wire transfer was all he needed.

• Maîtresse Madeline Marlowe, "The World’s Most Expensive Webcam Girl on How to Get Rich From Porn", by Maureen O'Connor, New York Magazine, June 29, 2017.

• "Chaku Ero", which means "erotically clothed" is a kind of soft porn - it doesn’t involve nudity, but it can get very, very close and is often overtly sexual.
  Stacey asks a Chaku Ero producer (who wanted to remain anonymous) how young the girls in his shoots are.
  “My youngest was six years old,” he says. “We filmed her in her bathing costume playing with some toys. Her mum was standing behind the camera holding her favourite toy so she would face the camera.”
  He makes much more money filming children than older girls. The DVD of the six-year-old made him “four million (£28,500) or five million yen (£35,500),” he says. “The senior high school girls will make about one million (£7000)”.
• As long as Chaku Ero photos don’t show the child’s naked genitals, buttocks or chest, it isn’t categorised as child pornography.
  But, according to Kazuko Ito, a Human Rights Lawyer who is trying to challenge this definition, “Chaku Ero is child pornography. That’s the reality.”

• Stacey Dooley, "Is Japan turning a blind eye to paedophilia?", BBC, (7 March 2018).

• Every day of my life I live in constant fear that someone will see my pictures and recognize me and that I will be humiliated all over again. It hurts me to know someone is looking at them -- at me -- when I was just a little girl being abused for the camera. I did not choose to be there, but now I am there forever in pictures that people are using to do sick things. I want it all erased. I want it all stopped. But I am powerless to stop it just like I was powerless to stop my uncle...I am horrified by the thought that other children will probably be abused because of my pictures. Will someone show my pictures to other kids, like my uncle did to me, then tell them what to do? Will they see me and think it's okay for them to do the same thing? Will some sick person see my picture and then get the idea to do the same thing to another little girl?
  • Amy, "Document: Victim impact statement of girl in Misty Series", The Virginian Pilot, (Oct 25, 2009).

• It’s very easy, especially on YouTube, to fall into comparing yourself and your numbers with other people, which is something I’ve not really found in other parts of the entertainment industry. At YouTube events it can get a bit numbers-y; there’s a lot of egos in it and you’re only valued on your numbers and your views. You can work the algorithms as much as you please, you can have a professional production value and tick every box, and still not make it unless you’re a celebrity in the first place. If you get rid of expectations then you’re going to have a much better time. You’ve got to take a step back and just enjoy it for what it is and what it originally was for all of us, which was just a really fun hobby.
• In the idol industry there is a fixation on youthful girls, as young as nine or ten. When you’re that age, you can't make an informed decision about the kind of life you want to lead, you can’t know for sure (if) you want to live that life. But at the same time, I was 14, and maybe I wasn’t fully aware of the scale of things – but I’m still so happy that I got to pursue my dreams, so there are two sides to it. Even though there are a lot of older male idol fans who are coming from an innocent place, there are also ones who aren’t, and that’s something I’m wary about. That can take a toll on the girls who aren’t fully aware of the extent of things. There’s also a possessiveness that comes with that industry which is quite scary to encounter. The girls are basically banned from having relationships. I think it’s getting better as the world gets more progressive, but it should start and end with them being performers. Their personal lives shouldn’t be dictated.

• Beckii Cruel, "Meet the British girl who grew up as a Japanese idol", (July 27th, 2016)

• In this study, we examined the unique contribution of pornography consumption to the longitudinal prediction of criminal recidivism in a sample of 341 child molesters. We specifically tested the hypothesis, based on predictions informed by the confluence model of sexual aggression that pornography will be a risk factor for recidivism only for those individuals classified as relatively high risk for re-offending. Pornography use (frequency and type) was assessed through self-report and recidivism was measured using data from a national database from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Indices of recidivism, which were assessed up to 15 years after release, included an overall criminal recidivism index, as well as subcategories focusing on violent (including sexual) recidivism and sexual recidivism alone. Results for both frequency and type of pornography use were generally consistent with our predictions. Most importantly, after controlling for general and specific risk factors for sexual aggression, pornography added significantly to the prediction of recidivism. Statistical interactions indicated that frequency of pornography use was primarily a risk factor for higher-risk offenders, when compared with lower-risk offenders, and that content of pornography (i.e., pornography containing deviant content) was a risk factor for all groups. The importance of conceptualizing particular risk factors (e.g., pornography), within the context of other individual characteristics is discussed.
  • Kingston DA1, Fedoroff P, Firestone P, Curry S, Bradford JM, "Pornography use and sexual aggression: the impact of frequency and type of pornography use on recidivism among sexual offenders.", Aggress Behav. 2008 Jul-Aug;34(4):341-51. doi: 10.1002/ab.20250.

• If you make virtual child pornography under strict government control with some kind of label explaining that no child was abused, you can give paedophiles a way of regulating their sexual urges.
• I think that repressing your fantasies can lead to frustration and, ultimately, for some types of paedophile, to a greater likelihood of doing something wrong.
  • Erik Van Beek "‘Virtual’ Child Pornography ‘Could Quell Paedophiles’ Sexual Urges’, Claim Dutch Sex Therapists", Huffington Post, (20 November 2012).

• The goal of the state is to find some practice that is universally reviled and pose as the one and only way of expunging it from society. The best example today is child pornography, a grim and ghastly industry that every decent person would like to see eradicated from the earth. But in the name of doing so, the state invades everyone's privacy, controls speech, interferes with families, and otherwise uses the issue as a wedge to eliminate every freedom.
  • Lew Rockwell. But What About the Children?, Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., (04/30/2008).

• “It gets in your head,” Q. said. “If this girl wants it, then maybe the majority of girls want it.” He’d heard about the importance of consent in sex, but it felt pretty abstract, and it didn’t seem as if it would always be realistic in the heat of the moment. Out of nowhere was he supposed to say: Can I pull your hair? Or could he try something and see how a girl responded? He knew that there were certain things — “big things, like sex toys or anal” — that he would not try without asking.
• On average, boys are around 13, and girls are around 14, when they first see pornography, says Bryant Paul, an associate professor at Indiana University’s Media School and the author of studies on porn content and adolescent and adult viewing habits. In a 2008 University of New Hampshire survey, 93 percent of male college students and 62 percent of female students said they saw online porn before they were 18. Many females, in particular, weren’t seeking it out. Thirty-five percent of males said they had watched it 10 or more times during adolescence.
• Preliminary analysis of data from a 2016 Indiana University survey of more than 600 pairs of children and their parents reveals a parental naïveté gap: Half as many parents thought their 14- and 18-year-olds had seen porn as had in fact watched it. And depending on the sex act, parents underestimated what their kids saw by as much as 10 times.
• Of the roughly half who had seen pornography, 53 percent of boys and 39 percent of girls said it was “realistic.” And in the recent Indiana University national survey, only one in six boys and one in four girls believed that women in online porn were not actually experiencing pleasure: As one suburban high school senior boy told me recently, “I’ve never seen a girl in porn who doesn’t look like she’s having a good time.”
• “There’s nowhere else to learn about sex,” the suburban boy told me. “And porn stars know what they are doing.” His words reflect a paradox about sex and pornography in this country. Even as smartphones have made it easier for teenagers to watch porn, sex education in the United States — where abstinence-based sex education remains the norm — is meager.
• Daley went on to detail a 2010 study that coded incidents of aggression in best-selling 2004 and 2005 porn videos. She noted that 88 percent of scenes showed verbal or physical aggression, mostly spanking, slapping and gagging. (A more recent content analysis of more than 6,000 mainstream online heterosexual porn scenes by Bryant Paul and his colleagues defined aggression specifically as any purposeful action appearing to cause physical or psychological harm to another person and found that 33 percent of scenes met that criteria. In each study, women were on the receiving end of the aggression more than 90 percent of the time.)
• In the survey, of 130 heterosexual teenagers age 16 to 18, teenagers often said they believed porn was a motivating factor for why males wanted anal sex. And among the guys who reported trying it, many said friends encouraged them, or they felt competitive with other guys to do it. At the same time, a majority of girls who had tried anal sex said they didn’t actually want to; their partners persuaded or coerced them. Some males took a “try it and see” approach, as researchers called it, attempting to put their finger or penis in a girl’s anus and hoping she didn’t stop them. Sometimes, one teenager reported, you “just keep going till they just get fed up and let you do it anyway.” Both boys and girls blamed the girls for pain they felt during anal sex and some told researchers the girls needed to “relax” more or “get used to it.” Only one girl said she enjoyed it, and only a few boys did. Teenagers may not know that even while porn makes it seem commonplace, in the 2009 national survey of American sex habits, most men and women who tried anal sex didn’t make it a regular part of their sex lives. And in another study, by Indiana University’s Debby Herbenick and others in 2015, about 70 percent of women who had anal sex said they experienced pain.
• A., the young woman who said she had never seen an image of a penis until she watched porn, resisted the idea that porn was uniformly bad for teenagers. “At least kids are watching porn and not going out and getting pregnant,” she said. But recently, she told me that she’d given up watching it altogether. She disliked looking at women’s expressions now, believing that they probably weren’t experiencing pleasure and might be in pain. When Drew watched porn, he found himself wondering if women were having sex against their will. As another student said with a sigh: “Nicole and Jess ruined porn for us.”

• What Teenagers Are Learning From Online Porn, Maggie Jones, New York Times, Feb. 7, 2018

• The Amazon sites led me to other woman-killing outlets. None of the little movies has much plot. They're just five- or ten-minute scenes of attractive young women, usually undressed, dying violently. Overwhelmingly, the imagery displays young women as sexual objects for male entertainment — not as individuals with personalities. Obviously, there's a commercial market for this material, presumably among men who derive pleasure from watching females die (or pretend to die).
  One producer of these films has been the center of Canada's longest-running obscenity trial. Donald Smith, who calls himself "Dr. Don," created death movies of his wife. Then he advertised for models in Winnipeg newspapers. He made many quickie films and posted them for sale on a Web site which said its purpose was "to show beautiful women getting killed."Canadian police investigated in 2000. Smith and his wife were charged with obscenity. When the case came to trial in 2002, counts against the wife were dropped. The defense contended that the movies didn't fit the legal definition of obscenity because no sex occurred in them.
  The defense presented an expert witness, film professor Barry Grant of Brock University, who declared that Dr. Don's videos were little different from horror scenes in modern "slasher" movies shown in theaters and sold in video stores. Dr. Grant testified that grotesque killing has been part of cinema since silent days.
  Despite the professor's testimony, a jury convicted Smith. He was sentenced to probation, banned from the Internet, and fined $100,000.
  The sentencing judge, Helen Pierce of Ontario Superior Court of Justice, wrote that Dr. Don's videos had "the potential to change attitudes toward women, cause psychological harm to anyone who had previously been a victim of sexual violence, and could do serious psychological harm to adolescents." She said his films imply that an attacker "can silence women with his violence, leave them on sexual display, and walk away without consequence."
  • Helen Pierce in “The Horrifying World Of Internet Snuff Sites” by Jim Haught, Jezebel, (12/01/11).

• You'll find the duality exists all throughout the Giantess fetish, it is what makes the fetish so incredibly hot to those who have it. The girl receives pleasure and enjoyment while those below are crushed, eaten, and violated sexually by her, helpless to her whim and careless desires. It's the extreme contrast between pleasure, enjoyment, and light-heartedness of the female and the terror and horror of her victims that makes the fetish so powerful. It's almost as if the girl is so incredibly powerful and so physically dominate that she can destroy entire worlds with little care except her own. This duality of light and dark, power and helplessness, big and small, pleasure and terror, amplifies the POWER she has and displays- which is what this fetish is all about. Women with extreme amounts of power.
• I am strongly against hard crush. Crushing kittens and rabbits is just fucking sick. I do however crush bugs for pleasure (known as "soft crush") and have since I was a little girl. This consists of ants, crickets, and mealworms. These are bugs people consider pests and exterminate on a daily basis, feed to pets, or put a hook through and use for fishing. Often times I eat these bugs too! But that's as far as I feel comfortable with. Considering what people do to animals on a daily basis, (hunting shows, sport fishing, factory farming, yard extermination), I don't think mashing a few ants between my toes to get my panties wet is a huge deal. And often times those who do think it is a big deal don't see the hypocrisy in eating meat for pleasure when they could be eating vegetable alternatives.
• I've had a sexual fascination with vore ever since I was little. I'd often pretend I was a cat-girl hunting down a little mouse. Once I'd caught the mouse I'd often pretend to swallow him alive - just like in cartoons. This really, really pleased me for some reason. As I became older, I started fantasizing about people, swallowing classmates or entire buses full of kids. I'd imagine sprinkles to be people and I often eat ants when no one was looking. To be eaten is the ultimate sacrifice a tiny creature can make. Vore is about giving your life, your essence to feed another being. It's very sexual and very romantic as strange as that may sound. When I swallow a tiny person, I know their life is now mine. That as my shrunken prey is digested, their body will serve and nourish my life. They are helpless to the desires, whims, and biological needs of my body. It's about giving or having your life taken away to serve something far more powerful and beautiful. Mouths, lips, and tongues are sexual organs in themselves!
• The bottom-line that everyone with this fantasy is extremely conflicted inside, due to how their instincts are wired. When they are horny, they want nothing more than for this fantasy to be real, but once the fantasy becomes too real their survival instincts kick in and the fantasy is ruined. Ultimately, it comes down to that this is a fantasy and that it should stay that way. But there's no harm in exploring and indulging the fantasy in safe ways, like through art or technology. If I had been born 400 years from now I'd probably be writing holonovels and shrinking my fans with a transporter and keeping them safe.

• Giantess Katelyn "Chatting with a Giantess", Kristina Mahler, Vice, Jun 29 2010.

Gender Studies/Sexology

Shinji Ikari: I... I'm scared of both Misato and Ayanami... Help me... Help me, Asuka. Hey... Wake up! Come on... Wake up! Come on... Hey... Asuka... Asuka... ASUKA!! ~ End of Evangelion

Ra's al Ghul: Do you think this matters? You are but seconds in my life! Only I know humanity for what it truly is! Only I can see the grand movements of generations! Only I, undying, can live within this world and protect it from itself!" ~ The Shadow/Batman Vol 1 #6

• The panelists each threw out their theories for the decline of college dating:
  Christakis thinks it's because college students these days are too focused on resume-building and career preparation. They're indoctrinated into the cult of extracurricular activities in middle and high school, and the involvement obsession continues throughout college almost as if by inertia. "It's 'I'm secretary of this' and 'I'm director of that,'" she said. "And even they admit that a lot of it is kind of bogus."
  Rachel Greenwald, an author and dating coach, thinks it's because most college "relationships" now occur within the context of a brief sexual encounter, or "hookup," as the youth say. "Romance," she said, "has gone the way of cursive handwriting."
  A recent study by the American Psychological Association found that between 60 and 80 percent of North American college students have had a hookup, even though 63 percent of college men and 83 percent of college women said they would prefer a traditional relationship.
  "In gearing themselves up for sex, they're draining themselves emotionally," Greenwald said. "They are in training to ... discard, to ignore, to swallow their emotions so they can participate in the anxiety-provoking but common dynamic which is the hookup culture."
  Lori Gottlieb, an Atlantic contributor, author, and psychologist, thinks it's because Millenials have been so coddled by their parents and teachers that they are now unable to accept others' opinions and realities. Which makes it hard when, in a relationship, your reality is that you will go to the farmer's market and make a healthy salad together, and your partner's reality is Starcraft.

• Olga Khazan, “Why College Students Need a Class in Dating”, The Atlantic, (Jul 2, 2014).

• On too many campuses, a new attitude about due process—and the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty—has taken hold, one that echoes the infamous logic of Edwin Meese, who served in Ronald Reagan’s administration as attorney general, in his argument against the Miranda warning. “The thing is,” Meese said, “you don’t have many suspects who are innocent of a crime. That’s contradictory. If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect.”
  There is no doubt that until recently, many women’s claims of sexual assault were reflexively and widely disregarded—or that many still are in some quarters. (One need look no further than the many derogatory responses received by the women who came forward last year to accuse then-candidate Donald Trump of sexual violations.) Action to redress that problem was—and is—fully warranted. But many of the remedies that have been pushed on campus in recent years are unjust to men, infantilize women, and ultimately undermine the legitimacy of the fight against sexual violence.
  Severe restrictions were placed on the ability of the accused to question the account of the accuser, in order to prevent intimidation or trauma. Eventually the administration praised a “single investigator” model, whereby the school appoints a staff member to act as detective, prosecutor, judge, and jury. The letter defined sexual violence requiring university investigation broadly to include “rape, sexual assault, sexual battery, and sexual coercion,” with no definitions provided. It also characterized sexually harassing behavior as “any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature,” including remarks. Schools were told to investigate any reports of possible sexual misconduct, including those that came from a third party and those in which the alleged victim refused to cooperate. (Paradoxically, they were also told to defer to alleged victims’ wishes, creating no small amount of confusion among administrators.)
• As Jeannie Suk Gersen and her husband and Harvard Law School colleague, Jacob Gersen, wrote last year in a California Law Review article, “The Sex Bureaucracy,” the “conduct classified as illegal” on college campuses “has grown substantially, and indeed, it plausibly covers almost all sex students are having today.”
• GEOFFREY STONE, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, and its former dean, told me he believes that the integrity of the legal system requires rules designed to prevent innocent people from being punished, and that these same principles should apply on campus. But he is concerned that severe sanctions are being imposed without the necessary protections for the accused. As he wrote in HuffPost, “For a college or university to expel a student for sexual assault is a matter of grave consequence both for the institution and for the student. Such an expulsion will haunt the student for the rest of his days, especially in the world of the Internet. Indeed, it may well destroy his chosen career prospects.”
• Some schools recommend or require that for consent to be valid, it must be given while sober, and others rule that consent cannot be given when a student is “under the influence,” vague standards that could cover any amount of alcohol consumption. Some embrace “affirmative consent,” which, at its limit, requires that each touch, each time, be preceded by the explicit, verbal granting of permission. At times, the directives given to students about sex veer squarely into the absurd: A training video on sexual consent for incoming students at Brown University, for instance, included this stipulation, among many others: “Consent is knowing that my partner wants me just as much as I want them.”
• Sometimes, of course, there is no ambiguity, as when a woman says no, or sends visible, consistent physical signals that she is not consenting to a sexual act. But many schools no longer require women to say or signal no in order for an encounter to be considered nonconsensual. Affirmative-consent rules, particularly when written or interpreted expansively, do that directly; in California, Connecticut, and New York, affirmative-consent codes for college students have been signed into law. So do policies that treat women who have been drinking—but who are not by any objective standard incapacitated—as unable to give consent.
  The problem with both types of policies is that they are intrusive and impractical. Couples are especially unlikely to adhere to contract-negotiation-style bedroom interactions (and it is no small intrusion on privacy to require them to do so). The proscription on drinking before sex is certain to be widely ignored; sexually inexperienced students (and even experienced ones) often drink in order to lower their inhibitions. And yet ignoring these rules puts men in great jeopardy should their partner later reconsider what seemed to have been a consensual encounter.
  In the world outside campus, people who are merely intoxicated, not incapacitated, can legally consent to sex, even if they make poor or regrettable decisions. In many states, sex with an incapacitated partner is a crime when the accused knows, or reasonably should know, about the incapacity and intends to act without consent. Recently, some schools have adopted clearer standards for incapacitation, including the requirement that the accused should reasonably know about the incapacity in order for consent to be invalidated. But on many campuses, no such knowledge or intent is required for an adjudication to determine that a violation has occurred.
• A troubling paradox within the activist community, and increasingly among administrators, is the belief that while women who make a complaint should be given the strong benefit of the doubt, women who deny they were assaulted should not necessarily be believed. The rules at many schools, created in response to federal directives, require employees (except those covered by confidentiality protections, such as health-care providers) to report to the Title IX office any instance of possible sexual assault or harassment of which they become aware. One result is that offhand remarks, rumors, and the inferences drawn by observers of ambiguous interactions can trigger investigations; sometimes these are not halted even when the alleged victim denies that an assault occurred.
• There are no national data that let us know the prevalence of third-party reports, but they appear to be a significant source of allegations. The University of Michigan’s most recent “Student Sexual Misconduct Annual Report” says that the school’s Office for Institutional Equity “often receives complaints about incidents from third parties.” Yale releases a semiannual report of all possible sexual-assault and harassment complaints. Its report for the latter half of 2015 included a new category: third-party reports in which the alleged victim, after being contacted by the Title IX office, refused to cooperate. These cases made up more than 30 percent of all undergraduate assault allegations.
• And while some college administrators express concern about due process, that concern does not always appear to be top of mind, even though lawsuits are piling up. Some 170 suits about unfair treatment have been filed by accused students over the past several years. As K. C. Johnson, the co-author, with Stuart Taylor Jr., of the recent book The Campus Rape Frenzy, notes, at least 60 have so far resulted in findings favorable to them. The National Center for Higher Education Risk Management, one of the country’s largest higher-education law firms and consulting practices specializing in Title IX, recently released a white paper, “Due Process and the Sex Police.” It noted that higher-education institutions are “losing case after case in federal court on what should be very basic due process protections. Never before have colleges been losing more cases than they are winning, but that is the trend as we write this.” The paper warned that at some colleges, “overzealousness to impose sexual correctness”—including the idea that anything less than “utopian” sex is punishable—“is causing a backlash that is going to set back the entire consent movement.”

• Emily Yoffe, “The Uncomfortable Truth About Campus Rape Policy”, The Atlantic, (Sep 6, 2017).

• Biological determinism works as a phenomenon that normalizes same-sex desire while leaving heterosexism in place and disenfranchising certain queer people from fully participating in an accurate articulation of their experiences in political and popular discourse.
  • Shannon Weber "What's Wrong With Becoming Queer Biological Determinism as Discursive Queer Hegemony"; as quoted in Ages of the X-Men: Essays on the Children of the Atom in Changing Times, p.170.

• Do you really believe ... that everything historians tell us about men – or about women – is actually true? You ought to consider the fact that these histories have been written by men, who never tell the truth except by accident.”
  • Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men, p.76

• "Oh, come now!" Helena spoke up at this point. "Surely you're not trying to deny that women too have their a part in sin, despite what you've been saying about men being the instigators and causes of all evil and it always being men who put us up to it? For the most part, that's nonsense. To take their part for a moment (for, after all, we are alone here and they can't hear us), what about all those shameless and corrupt women who dishonor our sex publicly, soliciting men openly and selling off their honor to the first bidder? Such women destroy men, stripping them of all their money and often bringing them to the point of death. And men certainly aren't going to let us forget they exist-especially since many of them are upright and virtuous, like Scipio, Xenocrates, Alexander, and the others we read about in history."
  "Well that last point is true as far as it goes," replied Cornelia. "But you aren't going to find men like that often: they are like patterns of virtue that God sends into the world for others to imitate (though few manage to get anywhere near the mark), and that's the reason why historians pick them out for special mention, as something remarkable, outlandish, and memorable, like those amazing comets that appear once in the course of many years. By contrast, there have been endless good and virtuous women. But where shameless women are concerned-and I am not trying to deny that such women exist (would that they didn't!)-I repeat what I said earlier, that the source and the true cause of this terrible evil lies in the men who trapped, tempted, solicited, and lured on these women while they still had their honor, leading the naive and easygoing of them to fall head-over-heels to their ruin. But for all that, these women, wretched as they are, preserve a little more dignity than the men they consort with, because at least they aren't the ones the men; whereas men fall into their traps like animals and pay for them, however corrupt, vile, and wretched they are. Which is something that wouldn't happen if they kept their heads and showed some of that modesty and virtue we find in women. Just tell me: have you ever come across the case of a young girl, a virgin, so bold and shameless as to tempt a man into vice? It cannot be doubted that whena virgin loses her honor, it can be blamed entirely on a man who has shamelessly flattered and solicited her in all the ways he can find: eventually, as I say, he takes advantage of her naivete and gradually strips her of all her natural femine dignity and power until she is finally reduced to prostitution, either because he ahs abandoned her, as often happens, or because some other hardship forces her into it. And once the wretched creatures are reduced to this state, knowing as they do that men, with their tricks and relentless pestering, have been responsible for their downfall, they decide to get something back for the great harm they have suffered and resolve never to love a man again, since they have been so deceived by them, but rather to give thema taste of their own medicine and, just as men once preyed on their honor, they prey on men's purses; they pretend to love them and if, by some chance, a man falls in love with one of them (for it does happen sometimes that men get more involved with these women than with decent women, because these women have become like men and share their propensity to vice)-if that happens, I can tell you, he's had it, because they will drain him to the last penny, just as he deserves.
  "And besides all this, those poor women have only one sin (and that one caused by men, as I have said), whereas most men have endless vices. So why should so much blame be heaped on our sex? I'm not denying that it is a most shocking and shameful thing, but it is unfair that all women should be blames for the transgressions of a few, or that their vice should reflect on women in general. Though even those few do not deserve to get all the blame while men stand by smugly congratulating themselves, because I have not come across any divine law that absolves men of this sin and punishes women alone.
  • Ibid, p.88-89

• Eaten up with guilt, shame, fears and insecurities and obtaining, if he's lucky, a barely perceptible physical feeling, the male is, nonetheless, obsessed with screwing; he'll swim a river of snot, wade nostril-deep through a mile of vomit, if he thinks there'll be a friendly pussy awaiting him. He'll screw a woman he despises, any snaggle-toothed hag, and, further, pay for the opportunity. Why? Relieving physical tension isn't the answer, as masturbation suffices for that. It's not ego satisfaction; that doesn't explain screwing corpses and babies.
  • Valerie Solanas, SCUM manifesto, pp. [1]–2 (page break between "pay for" & "the opportunity") (commas in "he despises, any snaggle-toothed hag, and, further, pay for" presumed despite horizontal line truncation in source, due to consistency with copy of same edition from The Andy Warhol Museum (Jansen, Sharon L., Reading Women's Worlds from Christine de Pizan to Doris Lessing: A Guide to Six Centuries of Women Writers Imagining Rooms of Their Own (N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 1st ed. Apr., 2011 ISBN 978-0-230-11066-3, p. 143 (author a teacher)).

• Completely egocentric, unable to relate, empathize or identify and consisting of a vast, pervasive, diffuse sexuality, the male is psychically passive. He hates his passivity, so he projects it onto women, defines the male as active, then sets out to prove that he is ("prove he's a Man"). His main means of attempting to prove it is screwing (Big Man with a Big Dick tearing off a Big Piece). Since he's attempting to prove an error, he must "prove" it again and again. Screwing, then, is a desperate, compulsive attempt to prove he's not passive, not a woman; but he is passive and does want to be a woman.
  • Ibid, p. 2.

• Being an incomplete female, the male spends his life attempting to complete himself, become female. He attempts to do this by constantly seeking out, fraternizing with and trying to live through and fuse with the female and by claiming as his own all female characteristics - emotional strength and independence, forcefulness, dynamism, decisiveness, coolness, objectivity, assertiveness, courage, integrity, vitality, intensity, depth of character, grooviness, etc. - and projecting onto women all male traits - vanity, frivolity, triviality, weakness, etc. It should be said, though, that the male has one glaring area of superiority over the female - public relations. He has done a brilliant job of convincing millions of women that men are women and women are men.
  • Ibid, p. 2.

• The male is just a bundle of conditioned reflexes, is incapable of a mentally free response, is tied to his early conditioning, is determined completely by his past experiences. His earliest experiences are with his mother, and he is throughout his life tied to her. It never becomes completely clear to the male that he is not part of his mother, that he is him and she is her.
  • Ibid, p. 5.

• His greatest need is to be guided, sheltered, protected and admired by Mama (Men expect women to adore what men shrink from in horror - themselves), and, being completely physical, he yearns to spend his time - that's not spent "out in the world" grimly defending against his passivity - in wallowing in basic animal activities - eating, sleeping, shitting, relaxing and being soothed by Mama. Passive, rattle-headed Daddy's Girl, ever eager for approval, for a pat on the head, for the "respect" of any passing piece of garbage, is easily reduced to Mama, mindless administrator to physical needs, soother of the weary, apey brow, booster of the puny ego, appreciator of the contemptible, a hot water bottle with tits.
  • Ibid, pp. 5–6

• Our "society" is not a community, but merely a collection of isolated family units. Desperately insecure, fearing his woman will leave him if she's exposed to other men or to anything remotely resembling life, the male seeks to isolate her from other men and from what little civilization there is, so he moves her out to the suburbs, a collection of self-absorbed couples and their kids. Isolation, further, enables him to try to maintain his pretense of being an individual by being a "rugged individualist", a loner, equating non-co-operation and solitariness with individuality.
  • Ibid, p. 7.

• Although wanting to be an individual, the male is scared of anything about him that's the slightest bit different from other men; it causes him to suspect he's not really a "Man," that he's passive and totally sexual, a highly upsetting suspicion. If other men are A and he's not, he must be not a man; he must be a fag. So he tries to affirm his "Manhood" by being like all the other men. Differentness in other men, as well as in himself, threatens him; it means they're fags, who he must, at all costs, avoid, so he tries to ensure that all other men conform.
  • Ibid, p. 8.

• The male dares to be different to the degree that he accepts his passivity and his desire to be female, his fagginess. The farthest out male is the dragqueen, but he, although different from most men, is exactly like all other dragqueens; like the functionalist, he has an identity - a female; he tries to define all his troubles away - but still no individuality. Not completely convinced that he's a woman, highly insecure about being sufficiently female, he conforms compulsively to the man-made feminine stereotype, ending up as nothing but a bundle of stilted mannerisms.
  • Ibid, p. 8.

• For me, a one-night stand meant the fantasy was never destroyed. So exciting! Mini-fantasies I would live out, dominating them. They hated it! They genuinely hated it. They would get angry . . . but excited. Really excited. I didn’t love anyone I was with. Never.
• My fantasy since I was a small child was to dominate a dominating man. That turns me on more than anything, a man who does not want to be dominated—like Sean Connery, a really macho man. The kind of man who has no desire for submission. It’s truly perverse. It’s the power play: who has it, how long you have it for, and what you do with it.
• I was fascinated when the queen [the wicked fairy] chained up the prince when he came to find Sleeping Beauty. I saw myself as that woman. I found the idea of chaining a man up so exciting.
  • Catherine Robbe-Grillet in "The Thin End of the Whip", Toni Bentley, Vanity Fair, February 2014.

• Over the past decade, anti-women communities on the internet — ranging from “Men's rights movement” forums and incels to “pickup artists” — have grown exponentially. While these movements differ in small ways, what they have in common is an organized hatred of women; the animus is so pronounced that the hate-watch group Southern Poverty Law Center tracks their actions.
  The other dangerous idea that connects these men is their shared belief that women — good-looking women, in particular — owe them sexual attention. The incel community that Mr. Minassian paid homage to, for example, was banned from Reddit last year because, among other issues, some adherents advocated rape as a means to end their celibacy.
• Feminists have been warning against these online hate groups and their propensity for real-life violence for over a decade. I know because I’m one of the people who has been issuing increasingly dire warnings. After I started a feminist blog in 2004, I became a target of men’s-rights groups who were angry with women about everything from custody battles to the false notion that most women lie about rape. In 2011, I had to flee my house with my young daughter on the advice of law enforcement, because one of these groups put me on a “registry” of women to target.
• Not every attack is preventable, but the misogyny that drives them is. To stop all of this, we must trust women when they point out that receiving streams of death threats on Twitter is not normal and that online communities strategizing about how to rape women are much more than just idle chatter. There is no reason another massacre should happen.

• Jessica Valenti, "When Misogynists Become Terrorists", The New York Times, (April 26, 2018).

• Yet genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must have existed among the working classes. Now and again an Emily Bronte or a Robert Burns blazes out and proves its presence. But certainly it never got itself on to paper. When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without singing them, was often a woman.
  • Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, (24 October 1929).

• The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
  • Ibid, p.55

• If I had such a memory as Benwick, I could bring you fifty quotations in a moment on my side of the argument, and I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say these were all written by men.
  • Jane Austin, Persuasion, (1899), pp. 303-304.

• When women talk about any kind of misogynistic abuse, three things happen. We are told that we should stop making a fuss. We are told that it could be worse. We are told that other issues are more serious.
  • Laura Bates, "Germaine Greer’s comments on rape are dangerous and damaging", The Guardian, (31, May 2018).

• Rubenfeld is right that most instances in which one of the parties having sex (or both) have failed to give consent to the act, the act is morally wrong. Immoral sex need not be rape (or sexual assault), however. For example, if both sex partners are minors, they are not legally in a position to give content. If they have sex, they have not given legal content. But it doesn't follow that one person raped or assaulted the other. 'Rape’ is better understood as follows:
  A’s sexual encounter with B counts as A's rape of B, just in case (i) A is in a position to give informed consent to have penetrative sex, (ii) A knows or ought to have known that B is not in a position to consent to have penetrative sex or is not verbally or physically agreeing to have penetrative sex, and (iii) A is proceeding to have penetrative sex with B, despite (ii).
  • Berit Brogaard, "Why Agreement to Sex Is Not Consent", Psychology Today, (March 31, 2018).

• In medieval times, opportunities to rape and loot were among the few advantages open to...soldiers, who were paid with great irregularity by their leaders...When the city of Constantinople was sacked in 1204, rape and plunder went hand in hand, as in the sack of almost every ancient city....Down through the ages, triumph over women by rape became a way to measure victory, part of a soldier's proof of masculinity and success, a tangible reward for services rendered...[and] an actual reward of war.
  • Brownmiller, ibid, supra note 3; as quoted in Kelly Dawn Askin, (1997). War Crimes Against Women: Prosecution in International War Crimes Tribunals. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. ISBN 978-90-411-0486-1., p.35.

• [R]ape by a conqueror is compelling evidence of the conquered's status of masculine impotence. Defense of women has long been a hallmark of masculine success. Rape by a conquering soldier destroys all remaining illusions of power and property for men of the defeated side. The body of a raped woman becomes a ceremonial battlefield, a parade ground for the victor's trooping of the colors. The act that is played out upon her is a message passed between men - vivid proof of victory for one and loss and defeat for the other.
  • Brownmiller, ibid, supra note 3, p. 38. as quoted in Kelly Dawn Askin, (1997). War Crimes Against Women: Prosecution in International War Crimes Tribunals. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. ISBN 978-90-411-0486-1., p.50.

• A product of a living organism (the rapist) is used to attack a biological system (the reproductive system) in members of the enemy population. Although this attack need not produce illness, it is designed to produce social chaos … . Sperm so used becomes a social and psychological toxin, poisoning the futures of victims and their communities by producing children who, if they survive, will remind whoever raised them of their traumatic origins in torture. … Unlike bacteria and viruses, sperm is easily containable, storable, preservable, and deliverable by means of men's bodies.
  • Card, C., 1991, “Rape as a Terrorist Institution”, in Violence, Terrorism, and Justice, R. Frey and C. Morris (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press p.187; as quoted in "Feminist Perspectives on Rape", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, first published Wed May 13, 2009; substantive revision Wed Jun 21, 2017

• It’s in the Ten Commandments to not take the Lord’s name in vain. Rape isn’t up there, by the way. Rape is not a Ten Commandment. But don’t say the dude’s name with a shitty attitude.
  • Louis C.K., "God", Louie (2010).

• A victim of rape every minute somewhere in the world. Why? No one to blame but herself. She displayed her beauty to the entire world, strapless, backless, sleeveless, nothing but satanic skirts, slit skirts, translucent blouses, miniskirts, tight jeans: all this to tease man and appeal to his carnal nature. Would you put this sheep that you adore in the middle of hungry wolves? No... It would be devoured. It's the same situation here. You're putting this precious girl in front of lustful, satanic eyes of hungry wolves. What is the consequence? Catastrophic devastation, sexual harassment, perversion, promiscuity.
  • Fiez Muhammad as quoted by Miranda Devine. Liverpool Muslim Cleric Hate. The Sun-Herald. 2005 April 24.

• Is it not lawful to do this wrong [rape], even if it is sometimes lawful to kill women....If a woman fights, why should she not allow war to be made upon her? ...But there is no reason why she should suffer so signal an insult [as rape].
  • Alberico Gentili, IURE BELLI LIBRI TRES, supra note 59, pp. 258-59; as quoted in Kelly Dawn Askin, (1997). War Crimes Against Women: Prosecution in International War Crimes Tribunals. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. ISBN 978-90-411-0486-1.

• We have to keep saying that this was still not the norm. This was not the Holocaust. It was the murder of Jews that was the Holocaust," she says. "But to assume the subject is untouchable is wrong. Women were tortured and raped. Breasts were cut off. How do you not talk about that? How do you not acknowledge that?"
  • Myrna Goldenberg in "Silence lifted: The untold stories of rape during the Holocaust" by Jessica Ravitz, CNN, (June 24, 2011).

• In 1997, we told [the New Zealand] government we needed people in the health system to be trained on how to deal with victims of male rape, but it fell on deaf ears.
  • Ken Clearwater, Grace Natabaalo. "Male rape survivors fight stigma in Uganda – Features". Al Jazeera English. Retrieved 2014-04-30.

• Both perpetrator and victim enter a conspiracy of silence and why male survivors often find, once their story is discovered, that they lose the support and comfort of those around them. In the patriarchal societies found in many developing countries, gender roles are strictly defined. […] Often, […] wives who discover their husbands have been raped decide to leave them. They ask me: 'So now how am I going to live with him? As what? Is this still a husband? Is it a wife?' They ask, 'If he can be raped, who is protecting me?.
  • Will Storr, (17 July 2011). "The rape of men". ‘’The Guardian’’. London. Retrieved 2011-07-17.

• Man should be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior.
  • As quoted by Joseph Goebbels as reported by Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will, Men Women and Rape, (1975) note 3, at 48. the original statement was attributed to Nietzsche.; as quoted in War Crimes Against Women: Prosecution in International War Crimes Tribunals, Kelly Dawn Askin, (1997), p.49.

• It is vital... to establish facilities for providing sexual comfort [to the soldiers] as soon as possible.
  • Okabe Naosaburo as reported by Karen Parker & Jennifer F. Chew, Compensation for Japan's World War II War-Rape Victims, 17 HASTINGS INT'L & COMP. L REV. 497, 503 (1994), citing "Order of June 27, 1938 by Okabe Naosaburo, Chief of Staff, Japanese Expeditionary Force in north China," reprinted in Rapes Sparked call for facilities, JAPAN TIMES, Aug. 5, 1992, p.3; as quoted in War Crimes Against Women: Prosecution in International War Crimes Tribunals, Kelly Dawn Askin, (1997), p.49.

• Does Djilas, who is himself a writer, not know what human suffering and the human heart are? Can't he understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a wench or takes some trifle?
  • Joseph Stalin in response to complaints about the rapes and looting committed by the Red Army during the Second World War, as quoted in Conversations with Stalin (1963) by Milovan Djilas, p. 95; and in Cornelius Ryan, The Last Battle, 493n (1966); as quoted in War Crimes Against Women: Prosecution in International War Crimes Tribunals, Kelly Dawn Askin, (1997), p.49.

• This study examined the credibility implications of employees who date at work. A 2 (status dynamic of the romance) × 2 (sex of the peer) design was used to examine effects of workplace romance on perceptions of credibility. One hundred and forty full-time working adults assessed the credibility of a hypothetical coworker who was involved in a workplace romance. Results indicate that peers who date superiors are viewed as less caring and less trustworthy than are peers who date equal status employees. Sex and status interacted such that women dating superiors versus peers were perceived as less caring and less trustworthy, whereas perceptions of men did not differ based on the status of their relational partners
  • Horan, S., & Chory, R. (2011). "Understanding Work/Life Blending: Credibility Implications for Those Who Date at Work", Communication Studies, 62(5), 563-580.

• Engaging in romantic relationships at work, especially with one’s superiors (i.e., hierarchical workplace romance; [HWR]), has generally been shown to negatively impact the participants involved. However, less attention has focused on its impact on the career advancement of lower status romance participants and when such an impact is exacerbated. Two experiments show that third-party evaluators were less likely to promote (Study 1) and select lower status HWR participants for training opportunities (Study 2) than their counterparts not in an HWR. Moreover, the negative career ramification of an HWR was stronger for men romantically involved with their female superiors than women with their male superiors (Study 2). This research highlights the need for organizational members to be aware of biases associated with HWR and gender role–based status expectations because past achievements may be discounted for lower status HWR participants, especially men.
  • Suzanne Chan-Serafin, Lydia Teo, Amirali Minbashian, David Cheng, Lu Wang, "The perils of dating your boss: The role of hierarchical workplace romance and sex on evaluators’ career advancement decisions for lower status romance participants", Volume: 34 issue: 3, page(s): 309-333, (March 3, 2016).

• Some 60 percent of workers say they've taken a shot at some kind of workplace romance, according to a survey by the career management and job-search site Vault.com. But managers today are much more sensitive to employee decision-making that could suggest a worker is distracted—that is, not 100 percent focused on the company's goals, Goldfarb says. No question, an employee whose actions polarize a work group or cause it to lose effectiveness, or threaten to embarrass the company, is at risk. "If you're having a relationship and you think anybody in the place might be jealous of that, might be resentful of that, might see it as distracting or potentially risky to the organization, you're better off not having that relationship," Goldfarb says.
  • Liz Wolgemuth, "Be Wary About Chancing a Workplace Romance: Managers have dwindling patience for distractions", U.S.News, (Nov. 22, 2010).

• The Internet is the one social arena that is unambiguously gaining in importance over time as a place heterosexual couples meet.4 For couples who met in 1990 and before, the percentage who met online was essentially zero.5 Between 1995 and 2005, there was exponential growth in the proportion of respondents who met their partners online, reaching what appears to be a plateau at approximately 22%. For heterosexual couples who met in 2009, the Internet was the third most likely way of meeting,6 after the intermediation of friends, and approximately tied with the bars, restaurants and other public places.
  • Rosenfeld, Michael J.; Reuben J. Thomas (2012). "Searching for a Mate: The Rise of the Internet as a Social Intermediary", American Sociological Review. 77 (4): 523–547. doi:10.1177/0003122412448050. Retrieved 6 December 2013., p.15

• The right panel in Figure 1 shows the changing way same-sex couples have met in the U.S., from 1985 to present. Whereas the left panel of Figure 1 (for heterosexual couples) extends back to 1940, the figure for same-sex couples extends only back to 1985 because there are only one fifth as many same-sex couples as heterosexual couples in the dataset, and therefore we know less about the past of how same-sex couples met. If we extended the figure for same-sex couples further into the past, where the data is admittedly sparse, we would find that bars and restaurants seemed to be the leading way same-sex couples met in the early 1970s and before. Meeting in bars, restaurants and other public places was always significantly more common for gay men than for lesbians; 26.7% of the gay men in HCMST met their male partner at a bar or restaurant, compared to only 11.4% of lesbians who met their partner in a bar or restaurant.
  • Ibid, p.17

• In addition to being dramatically more likely to meet online, same-sex couples have always been dramatically less likely than heterosexual couples to meet through family, or to find their partners in primary or secondary school. The number of same-sex couples who meet through family or through primary or secondary school has never been as high as 5%, whereas 17% of heterosexual couples met through family in 1985, and as many as 25% of heterosexual couples met through family in the 1940s. Social and geographic distance from the family of origin has long been theorized as one of the fundamental factors in same-sex couple formation (Bérubé 1990; Weston 1991).
  • Ibid, p.18
• As the literature and Hypothesis 3 predicted, interracial and interreligious couples are also both less likely to have met through family intermediation, though family suppresses interracial and interreligious unions less dramatically than family suppresses same-sex unions. For interracial couples, the odds of having met through family were 0.56 times as high as for same-race couples, and for interreligious couples (most of whom are unions of persons raised as Protestants with partners raised as Catholics) the odds of meeting through family were 0.77 times as high as for couples in which both partners were raised in the same religion. The family’s negative effect on interreligious and interracial couple formation remains significant after respondent age and couple longevity are controlled for. Meeting through family connections is associated with a particularly traditional type of couple formation, specifically couples that are heterosexual, and couples that are uniform by race and religion, but Table 5 shows that meeting through family is not significantly associated with class homophily for romantic couples.
  • Ibid, p.23

• According to Table 5, interracial couples are slightly less likely than same-race couples to have met online (16% compared to 19%), but the difference is not statistically significant. The fact that online meeting is not more common for interracial couples is somewhat surprising, and is contrary to our Hypothesis 4. One reason that early and more utopian scholarship on the effects of the Internet argued that online participation might undermine the importance of race or other ascriptive characteristics (Barlow 1996; Katz and Rice 2002 p.12) was that early Internet social networking was text rather than browser based (Kendall 2002). In text-only interactions, the race, gender, and background characteristics of interlocutors are difficult to discern, but in a web dating environment wherein users are expected to post photographs of themselves, race and gender (though not necessarily religion) are highly visible. Of the 280 HCMST respondents who met their partners online, only 18 met their partner through online gaming, where the race of participants is obscured. The majority of HCMST couples who met online met through online dating websites, where the race of participants is either stated or can be inferred from their portrait photograph.
  • Ibid, p.24

• In large part because of the Internet, the proportion of American couples who introduce themselves, that is who meet without the active brokerage of any third person, has risen sharply. Seventy four percent of couples who met online had previously been perfect strangers. The Internet flattens the social world (Friedman 2005) and allows people to search for, to find each other, and to meet entirely without the intervention of friends, family, neighbors or coworkers.
  • Ibid, p.32

• Whether or not porn "addiction" literally damages the brain, even brief viewing of pornographic images does interfere with people’s “working memory”—the ability to mentally juggle and pay attention to multiple items. A study published last October in the Journal of Sex Research tested the working memory of 28 healthy individuals when they were asked to keep track of neutral, negative, positive, or pornographic stimuli. “Results revealed worse working memory performance in the pornographic picture condition,” concluded Matthias Brand, head of the cognitive psychology department at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany.
• One myth about sex—or perhaps it’s just a joke?—is that “testosterone poisoning” makes young men stupid. Actually, a 2007 study in the journal Neuropsychologia measured the level of testosterone in the saliva of prepubertal boys, including some who were intellectually gifted, with an IQ above 130, some who were average, and some who were mentally challenged, with an IQ less than 70. They concluded that “boys of average intelligence had significantly higher testosterone levels than both mentally challenged and intellectually gifted boys, with the latter two groups showing no significant difference between each other.”
• But if having sex can make people smarter, the converse is not true: being smarter does not mean you’ll have more sex. Smarter teens, in fact, tend to delay their initiation of coital activities. A 2012 study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that high working memory decreases the likelihood of early adolescent sexual debut. Some researchers have attributed the delay to greater overall “competence” among smarter teens. But a 2010 study found that adolescents at both the upper and lower ends of the intelligence distribution were less likely to have sex.

• "How Sex Affects Intelligence, and Vice Versa", Dan Hurley, The Atlantic, Jan 13, 2014

• I also think that it's a little deeper than that. There's this long history of viewing women as prone to hysteria. At this point, the most common term in the medical literature is “medically unexplained symptoms.” That is a deceptively neutral term, but in medicine, it’s often used to imply a psychogenic cause. Medicine's retained this idea that it can blame any symptoms it can’t attribute to a physical disease on a patient’s mind, and it’s persistently insisted that women are especially prone to such symptoms. Hysteria is not something that disappeared.
• It's also rooted in this history of hysteria. Before Freud, it was understood as a physical disease that was sort of inherent in women. That idea was retained in some ways, but I think it's clearly another way of [medical professionals] letting [themselves] off the hook for not actually doing the scientific research to understand what's going on: “Women are just sickly” or “it’s normal for them to have pain.” Menstruation is this normal biological process. There’s no reason it should cause pain. That doesn’t make any real evolutionary sense. It speaks to the fact that it hasn't been a priority to figure out the many reasons why it might bring pain for some women.
  When I was getting feedback, people were like, “Yeah, but periods are painful.” But I'm saying, should they be? Why do we think that's acceptable?
• Being told that your own knowledge of what's happening in your body is wrong or to not be trusted is a really deeply invalidating thing. It’s this really core part of our experience of the world—our experience of our own bodies—so I think it's just a really audacious form of gaslighting for doctors to tell women that their symptoms are all in their heads. Women understandably find that so invalidating that they might question their own sanity.
  • "How Doctors Gaslight Women into Doubting Their Own Pain", VICE, Suzannah Weiss, Mar 6 2018

• In the developing world, menstrual regulation is still a crucial strategy to circumvent anti-abortion laws.
  • National Abortion Federation, Plan Parent Chall, International Planned Parenthood Newsletter (1): 30–1

• If our stereotype about women today is that women are the moral center of the home, they are the beacon of light that keeps men and women in line ... that idea is actually of relatively recent vintage, that stereotype about women's morality, that actually comes from the late 19th century ... the stereotype about women in the 1600s and 1700s was just the opposite — it held that we were naturally lustful and wanton, we are in need of male guidance ... in order to protect ourselves from our natural inclination and temptation into sin.
  • "The Serious History Of Hocus Pocus In 'Penguin Book Of Witches'" NPR, October 26, 2014

• Though their numbers are growing, only 27 percent of all students taking the AP Computer Science exam in the United States are female. The gender gap only grows worse from there: Just 18 percent of American computer-science college degrees go to women. This is in the United States, where many college men proudly describe themselves as “male feminists” and girls are taught they can be anything they want to be.
  Meanwhile, in Algeria, 41 percent of college graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math—or “stem,” as it’s known—are female. There, employment discrimination against women is rife and women are often pressured to make amends with their abusive husbands.
• But when it comes to their relative strengths, in almost all the countries—all except Romania and Lebanon—boys’ best subject was science, and girls’ was reading. (That is, even if an average girl was as good as an average boy at science, she was still likely to be even better at reading.) Across all countries, 24 percent of girls had science as their best subject, 25 percent of girls’ strength was math, and 51 percent excelled in reading. For boys, the percentages were 38 for science, 42 for math, and 20 for reading. And the more gender-equal the country, as measured by the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, the larger this gap between boys and girls in having science as their best subject.
  • "The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM", Olga Khazan, The Atlantic, Feb 18, 2018.

• After high-profile scares like thalidomide in the 1960s, where pregnant women taking the drug had children with serious birth defects, drug researchers were hesitant to include women in drug trials because of the possibility that they might get pregnant, said Dr. Cara Tannenbaum, scientific director of the Institute of Gender and Health at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Also, women’s menstrual cycles were seen as a complicating factor in drug trials. Generally, researchers want to keep as many variables as they can the same, to get a clearer picture of what effect a drug is having. Fluctuating hormone levels can affect how drugs are absorbed by the liver, said Tannenbaum, so it was simpler to just test on men, who didn’t have this issue.
  • "Drugs aren’t tested on women like they are on men, and it could have deadly consequences" Leslie Young, Global News, November 2, 2016.

• Wikipedia is suffering from a cyclical kind of sexism: A lack of female editors means that its content can be hostile to women, which in turn drives away potential female editors. In 2011, Sue Gardner, then the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, compiled examples from women about why they don’t edit Wikipedia, culled from message boards around the Internet. One woman pointed out that in pages for movies, rape scenes are often called “sex scenes” or sometimes even, “making love.” “When people try to change it, editors change it back and note that unlike ‘sex,’ the word ‘rape’ is not neutral, so it should be left out,” she wrote. “Discovering that feature was really jarring and made me feel unwelcome there.”
  But challenging the status quo on Wikipedia is no easy task. All the Wikipedia contributors interviewed said that if a woman wants to last as an editor on the site, there are certain fights she just doesn’t pick.
  “When you put ‘feminism’ in anything on Wikipedia, all hell breaks loose,” said Stierch. “I’ve been called a Feminazi more times than I can count.”
  • "Wikipedia's Hostility to Women" Emma Paling, The Atlantic, Oct 21, 2015.

• Not only were females who were having sex without condoms less depressed, but depressive symptoms and suicide attempts among females who used condoms were proportional to the consistency of condom use. For females who did not use condoms, depression scores went up as the amount of time since their last sexual encounter increased.
  • Gallup GG Jr1, Burch RL, Platek SM. "Does semen have antidepressant properties?", Arch Sex Behav. 2002 Jun;31(3):289-93.

• Pamela Connolly (2006) compared BDSM practitioners to published norms on 10 psychological disorders. Compared to the normative samples, BDSM practitioners had lower levels of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), psychological sadism, psychological masochism, borderline pathology, and paranoia. (They showed equal levels of obsessive-compulsive disorder and higher levels of dissociation and narcissism.)
  Similarly, Andreas Wismeijer and Marcel van Assen (2013) compared BDSM practitioners to non-BDSM-practitioners on major personality traits. Their results showed that in comparison to non-practitioners, BDSM practitioners exhibited higher levels of extraversion, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and subjective well-being. Practitioners also showed lower levels of neuroticism and rejection sensitivity. The one negative trait that emerged? BDSM practitioners showed lower levels of agreeableness than non-practitioners.
• Both bottoms and tops reported increases in relationship closeness and decreases in psychological stress from before to after their scenes (Ambler et al., under review; Sagarin, Cutler, Cutler, Lawler-Sagarin, & Matuszewich, 2009), but bottoms also showed increases in physiological stress as measured by the hormone cortisol (Sagarin et al., 2009). We found this disconnect between psychological stress and physiological stress to be very interesting, and we wondered whether it might indicate that bottoms have entered an altered state of consciousness.
  To test this theory, we ran a study in which we randomly assigned switches (BDSM practitioners who sometimes take on the top role and sometimes take on the bottom role) to be the top or the bottom in a scene (Ambler et al., under review). The results revealed that both bottoms and tops entered altered states of consciousness, but they entered different altered states. Bottoms entered an altered state called “transient hypofrontality” (Dietrich, 2003), which is associated with reductions in pain, feelings of floating, feelings of peacefulness, feelings of living in the here and now and time distortions. Tops, in contrast, entered the altered state known as “flow” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1991), which is associated with focused attention, a loss of self-consciousness and optimal performance of a task. We believe that these pleasurable altered states of consciousness might be one of the motivations that people have for engaging in BDSM activities.

• "The Surprising Psychology of BDSM", Joe Magliano, Psychology Today, Feb 05 2015

• The first experiment of 365 Chinese adults found female subs showed decreased empathic ability compared with a control group of non-practitioners. But there was no difference between female “switches” — meaning women who switch between dominant and submissive roles — and the control group. Likewise, there was no difference in empathic ability between male practitioners and the control group.
  Both male and female practitioners, however, reported diminished feelings of subjective pain intensity when viewing facial expressions indicating pain.
  “These findings are consistent with previous findings suggesting that the reduction in empathic responses to others’ suffering was associated with frequent exposure to pain-inflicting situations,” the researchers explained.
  • "Female submissives have reduced empathy to others’ suffering, study on BDSM finds", Psypost, Eric W. Dolan, February 27, 2017

• "There's really no hard evidence in support of the notion that abstaining from sexual activity or from ejaculation has any demonstrative benefits," Wise says. "On the other hand, there's evidence that having fairly frequent ejaculations has health benefits in terms of lower levels of prostate cancer.
• Orgasm is fantastic for your brain. A lot of different regions are activated, which means they're getting a lot of blood flow. It's kind of a workout for your brain."
• "There are major gaps in the literature, in particular with female sexuality," she says. "And unless a drug company can make money, there's very little funding." This lack of hard data allows misconceptions and quackery to take root. "It's so sad. We're so uncomfortable in this culture with dealing with our sexuality in a healthy way."

• "What Swearing Off Sex Does to Your Brain", Hanson O'Haver, VICE, Feb 13 2017

• The idea of putting something small in the uterus to prevent pregnancy goes way back. When nomadic traders needed to keep a female camel from getting pregnant during long treks across the desert, they put stones into the animal’s uterus. Or so the story goes.
  • Valerie Tarico, "Intrauterine Bling: 2,000 Years of IUDs, From Camel Contraceptives to Body Mod" Huffington Post(10/29/2013)

• Women excrete estrogen naturally, and women on birth control pills also secrete the synthetic estrogen in those pills. And these estrogens, depending on the level of wastewater treatment, may not be completely broken down during sewage treatment, so they get discharged into rivers and streams. It doesn't take a lot of estrogen to feminize male fish and, based on the results of our experiment, to impact fish populations.
  • Karen Kidd, University of New Brunswick, "Sex-Changing Chemicals Can Wipe Out Fish, Study Shows", John Roach National Geographic News May 21, 2007

• The female body needs to navigate a tricky dilemma. In order to protect itself, the body needs to defend against foreign invaders. But if it applies that logic to sperm or a fetus, then pregnancy can't occur. The shifts in immunity that women experience may be a response to this problem.
  • "Sexual activity causes immune system changes that increase chances of conception", Tierney Lorenz, ScienceDaily.com, October 5, 2015

• Our results show that sexual activity during a migraine attack might relieve or even stop an attack in some cases, and that sexual activity in the presence of headache is not an unusual behaviour.
  • Sex may be a natural way to treat migraines, cluster headaches", University of Munster, Michelle Castillo, CBS news, March 6, 2013

• A one-year discrepancy in a couple’s ages, the study found, makes them 3 percent more likely to divorce (when compared to their same-aged counterparts); a 5-year difference, however, makes them 18 percent more likely to split up. And a 10-year difference makes them 39 percent more likely. Once you enter large-gap territory, the 20-year difference and the 30-year difference, the odds of divorce are huge.
  • "The Link Between Age Compatibility And Relationship Success", Renee Fisher, Huffpost, 01/05/2015

• We find that men who are married to younger wives are the most satisfied, and men who are married to older wives are the least satisfied. Women are also particularly dissatisfied when they're married to older husbands and particularly satisfied if they're married to younger husbands. Over time, the people who are married to a much older or younger spouse tend to have larger declines in marital satisfaction over time compared to those who are married to spouses who are similar in age.
  • "Spousal age gap affects marriage satisfaction over time: study", Terra McKinnish, Phys.org, August 3, 2017

• Children who willingly participate in sexual acts have the right to make that decision as well, even if it's distasteful to us personally. Some children will make poor choices just as some adults do in smoking and drinking to excess; this is part of life. When we outlaw child pornography, the prices paid for child performers rise, increasing the incentives for parents to use children against their will.
  • Mary Ruwart, Short answers to the tough questions, ISBN 978-0963233653, 1998. As quoted at Can the Libertarians Go Mainstream?

• Lewd conduct by teachers is causing growing concern. As this column reported last month, citing Shukan Post, education ministry figures show 205 public elementary and junior high school teachers nationwide – more than ever before – being disciplined for obscene behavior inside or outside the classroom.
• The goal is clear: to get pedophiles out of schools – those already there, and those among young graduates applying for teaching jobs. The means exist – at least some means do, notably stricter psychological testing of applicants. The Rorschach ink blot test is an old favorite – show the testee a splash of ink and ask what it represents, the answer being indicative, presumably, of the state of the testee’s psychological health. An alternative, increasingly popular in Japan, is a test developed in the 1940s at the University of Minnesota. It’s known as MMPI – the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory.
• “We’ve been using MMPI for the past five years,” Shukan Bunshun hears from an unnamed school board executive in an unnamed prefecture. “It’s possible, certainly, that Lolicons or people with other questionable sexual tendencies will find ways to hide that. On the other hand, we have noticed that, compared with prefectures that don’t use MMPI, our episodes of obscene behavior have decreased – to zero, in fact, over the past couple of years.”
  From another school board official in another prefecture Shukan Bunshun hears this story: A young applicant came across to examiners as very impressive. His written test results were tops. In interviews he conveyed fluently and convincingly his ideas concerning education. And yet there was something ever so slightly odd about him. He seemed, at times, to be looking about him furtively and uneasily. Perhaps it meant nothing.
  On the other hand, you can’t be too careful where children are concerned. The board sent the applicant’s MMPI to a qualified counselor for expert scrutiny. Sure enough, the expert detected Lolicon tendencies. The man was not hired.
  Score one victory for children and one defeat for sexual predation – right? But was the man really Lolicon? Tests are indicative, not infallible. What if he wasn’t? Whose victory is it then?

• Kuchikomi, "'Lolicon' teachers a growing concern", Japan Today, (July 22, 2015).

• In response to the availability of a growing literature on the psychological correlates of child sexual abuse (CSA), numerous researchers have conducted literature reviews of these correlates. These reviewers have generally reported that CSA is associated with a wide variety of adjustment problems, and many have additionally implied or concluded that, in the population of persons with CSA experiences, (a) CSA causes psychological harm, (b) this harm is pervasive, (c) this harm is intense, and (d) boys and girls experience CSA equivalently. However, with few exceptions, these reviewers have included in their reviews mostly studies using clinical and legal samples; these samples cannot be assumed to be representative of the general population. To evaluate the implications and conclusions of these reviewers, we conducted a literature review of seven studies using national probability samples, which are more appropriate for making population inferences. We found that, contrary to the implications and conclusions contained in previous literature reviews that were focused on biased samples, in the general population, CSA is not associated with pervasive harm and that harm, when it occurs, is not typically intense. Further, CSA experiences for males and females are not equivalent; a substantially lower proportion of males reports negative effects. Finally, we found that conclusions about a causal link between CSA and later psychological maladjustment in the general population cannot safely be made because of the reliable presence of confounding variables. We concluded by cautioning that analysis at the population level does not characterize individual cases: When CSA is accompanied by factors such as force or close familial ties, it has the potential to produce significant harm.
  • Bruce Rind & Philip Tromovitch, "A meta‐analytic review of findings from national samples on psychological correlates of child sexual abuse", pages 237-255 (14 Oct 1996)

• B. Rind, P. Tromovitch, and R. Bauserman (1998) examined the long-term effects of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) by meta-analyzing studies of college students. The authors reported that effects "were neither pervasive nor typically intense" and that "men reacted much less negatively than women" (p. 22) and recommended value-neutral reconceptualization of the CSA construct. The current analysis revealed numerous problems in that study that minimized CSA-adjustment relations, including use of a healthy sample, an inclusive definition of CSA, failure to correct for statistical attenuation, and misreporting of original data. Rind et al.'s study's main conclusions were not supported by the original data. As such, attempts to use their study to argue that an individual has not been harmed by sexual abuse constitute a serious misapplication of its findings.
  • Dallam SJ1, Gleaves DH, Cepeda-Benito A, Silberg JL, Kraemer HC, Spiegel D, "The effects of child sexual abuse: Comment on Rind, Tromovitch, and Bauserman (1998)",, Psychol Bull. 2001 Nov;127(6):715-33.

• I was asked by the editors of this special edition of Crime Science to set out a ‘where to from here’ research agenda for child sexual abuse. I might have written about the need for more studies on non-treatment offender samples in order to redress the current sampling bias in the literature; or the need to keep a focus on intrafamilial abuse, often overlooked but still overwhelming the most pressing child sexual abuse problem; or the need for evaluation studies to examine the effectiveness of proposed prevention strategies; or, in the case of online child sexual exploitation, the need to bring social scientists and computer scientists together in order to develop truly multidisciplinary responses to the problem. However, rather than compile a list of research topics, I have chosen instead to focus on a more fundamental challenge facing those interested in taking forward a scientific examination of child sexual abuse. As the Rind case demonstrates, there is often a clash between scientific evidence and popular knowledge and it is easy for well-meaning and useful research to be misconstrued. With care and sensitivity, researchers must have the courage to challenge some sacred cows concerning the sexual victimisation of children, not because they do not care passionately about the plight of victims but because they do.
  • "Science and child sexual abuse: navigating the pathway between emotion and objectivity", Richard K Wortley, Crime Science: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 4:18, 11 August 2015

• A study published last year in the Journal of Sexual Medicine reported on eight men who in mid-life showed evidence of "acquired pedophilic behavior from brain disease." Because some of these men also showed other forms of sexually abusive behavior, the authors of this report noted that certain brain injuries can result in "broader disinhibition deficit or hypersexuality . . . not just focused on children." Indeed, a general association between brain injury and poor sexual impulse control has now been well established.
  Let's be clear: suffering brain injuries doesn't mean you'll become a pedophile, and a link between pedophilia and brain injuries doesn't mean we should "excuse" or condone pedophilic behaviors. But all this does leave me wondering whether we need to consider the possibility that sports head injuries can cause a much wider range of life-altering effects than is now being openly discussed. (And whether seminaries are rougher places than I've given them credit for.)

• "Football and the Sexual Side Effects of Head Trauma", Alice Dreger, The Atlantic, Jul 24, 2012

• Similarly wobbly views on sex and adolescents—or rather sex with adolescents—are on profligate historical display elsewhere. It goes in the opposite direction, too. The age of consent in 1920s Chile was 20, but now it's 16. A century ago in Italy, it was 16, too. But today it's 14 there. Overall, studying the numbers in even the most contemporary international age-of-consent table will give you the impression that you're looking at a flurry of seemingly random digits between 12 and 21 (a sizable range): It's 13 in Argentina, 18 in Turkey, 16 in Canada, 12 in Mexico, 20 in Tunisia, 16 in Western Australia, 15 in Sweden, and so on. "More than 800 years after the first recorded age of consent laws," writes the historian Stephen Robertson, "the one constant is the lack of consistency."
  Just as when we're assessing religions with conflicting theologies, we can draw only two possible conclusions from Robertson's observation: Either some societies have the one true age of consent and every other has therefore got it wrong, or any given society's age of consent is based on what its citizens have simply chosen to believe about human sexuality and psychological development. And similar to what any objective analysis of competing religious beliefs would force us to conclude, there's no evidence that the former is the case for cultural variations in age of consent laws (that there is "one true age") and every reason for us to conclude the latter is in fact what we're dealing with.
  • Jesse Bering, “Age of Consent”, The Stranger, (Sep 11, 2013).

• “There’s a threat out there, and you don’t know when it might hit,” said Dr. Katherine Hertlein, a psychologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas who specializes in technology and relationships. “In a case where security is breached or you experience a threat that’s ambiguous — so you don’t really know if or when it’s going to hit you — you spend a lot of your time being hyper-vigilant.”
• Public humiliation is another concern for well-known figures. Social media has created an aggressive culture of public shaming in which individuals take it upon themselves to inflict psychological damage on others, and sometimes this damage can persist for years. More often than not — as we saw recently in the case of the American dentist who killed Cecil the lion — the punishment goes beyond the scope of the crime.
  “We might see these people’s livelihoods being threatened because there might be some damaging effects that involve their career,” Hertlein said. “There would be in some ways a threat to survival or a threat to their identity of who they are as people.”

• “Ashley Madison Hack Could Have A Devastating Psychological Fallout”, Carolyn Gregoire, Huffington Post, 08/20/2015

• Some of these men have issued statements attempting to apologize and take responsibility. Weinstein checked into rehab, and reportedly was hoping for a second chance in Hollywood. And after the dust settles and these men spend a few months or a years out of the spotlight, some of them will undoubtedly attempt returns to their previous positions.
  Before they do, we must reckon with the questions of forgiveness, rehabilitation and redemption. Can these men be redeemed? And what does redemption — or just forgiveness — look like?
  For those of us who care about social justice (and legal justice), these are crucial concepts. While the American criminal justice system is largely punitive, liberals are always pushing to make it more focused on rehabilitation and to help offenders successfully re-enter society — and for society to welcome them back. We criticize the prison system, the industrialization of prisons and the financial incentives they create to increase incarceration rates. We oppose the disenfranchisement of felons. We want to “ban the box,” so that people who have served their time do not need to disclose on college or job applications that they’ve been incarcerated. Some of us (myself included) oppose post-release punishments, including overly broad sex offender registries and laws barring certain categories of sex offenders from living in many places. The result of these laws is that many of these offenders end up unemployed and homeless.

• Jill Filipovic, "How to Find Room for Forgiveness in the #MeToo Movement", TIME, (February 26, 2018).

• The problem with using reported rape rates alone has created a great deal of confusion for researchers. Reported rape data, for example, are often used to deny any connection between pornography and rape. However, the reported rape rate is extremely low in Sweden, not because rape is rare but because the level of conviction is so low: in 1990 only 12.3 per cent of charged rapists were convicted. Not surprisingly, Swedish women are reluctant to pursue charges in the face of such a low likelihood of gaining a conviction. The statistical yearbook of Sweden for 1992 (325) reports a 34.9 per cent increase in rape from 1986 to 1990 (during a period when the population grew by 0.4 per cent).
  • Sexual Offenders and Pornography: A Causal Connection?; cited in Perspectives on Human Sexuality, by Anne Bolin and Patricia Whelehan, State University of New York Press Albany, (1999)

• Most of the genital injuries described in this study were minor, consisting of tears, bruises, scratches and grazes. If forced anal intercourse had also occurred, injury was much more likely. Recent studies, 21 of larger series of premenopausal women examined physically only agree that the minority of rape victims sustain genital injury, the frequency being < 30%. In our study the incidence was 27%; we included anal and vulval/vaginal injuries. Postmenopausal women are more likely to suffer genital injury after rape; even then, more than half will have no demonstrable injury.
• There is anecdotal evidence that consenting intercourse (the favoured legal term is ‘vigorous consenting intercourse’) can lead to the same genital injuries as rape.
• The presence of genital injury is thought to carry more weight in obtaining convictions in court, but only Lloyd and Walmsley from the home office provide evidence of this: in 1973, of cases leading to conviction 45% had genital injury, and 32% in 1985. These figures are slightly higher than those quoted in the studies above, indicating that genital injury may be seen as an important factor by the courts.
• Gynaecologists will usually find no genital injuries when they examine women reporting that they have been raped, but this should not influence their opinion in their legal statement regarding the allegation, nor in their treatment of the woman. The absence of genital injury should not be used as pivotal evidence by the jury, police or the Crown Prosecution Service.

• "Female victims of rape and their genital injuries" Lucy Bowyer, Maureen E. Dalton, British Journal of Gynaecology, 19 August 2005, Volume 104, Issue5, May 1997, pages 617-620

• The DSM-IV-TR definition of sexual sadism requires prolonged, recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, urges, or behaviors in which the psychological or physical suffering and humiliation of the victim is sexually exciting to the person.
• Most coercive sex does not follow this pattern and should not be diagnosed as sexual sadism. Instead, rape is almost always a manifestation of common criminality of one sort or another: opportunistic rape, rape under the disinhibiting influence of substances, rape as part of a general antisocial personality pattern, rape due to poor judgment, rape for dominance, gang rape, rape for gain, date rape, and rape influenced by other mental disorders.
• While rapists and sadists are both cruel, unempathic, and lack concern for the victim, they again have different motivations. For the sadist, the sexual excitement is enhanced by (or may exclusively reside in) being cruel in a way that elicits pain. For the rapist, the pain inflicted is instrumental.
• Of course, there will be the occasional rapist who does also meet the criteria for sexual sadism and therefore could appropriately be so diagnosed and committed in SVP proceedings. But most rapists are criminals, not mental patients. Their proper placement is prison not hospital.

• "Most Rapists Are Not Sadists: How To Tell The Difference and Why It Is So Important", Allen Frances, Psychiatric Times, May 02, 2011

• Extensive research over the past 3 decades (and more) suggests that several mental health issues underlie sexual violence and offending, particularly rape. Much of this research comes from the west and the lack of meaningful research on rapists in India highlights a serious lacunae in knowledge and skills required to manage mental health factors that underlie criminal activities, a role that forensic psychiatrists generally play.
• Cognitive distortions or CD are errors in cognitions that allow the offender to rationalize and minimize the perceptions and judgements used by the sex offender to justify his molestation behavior. It is said that men hold implicit theories about the nature of the world which underlie their distorted beliefs which often drive and justify their rape behavior.
• It is highly unlikely, well-nigh impossible, that a man will voluntarily admit to rape and subject himself to a psychiatric evaluation as he runs the risk of being apprehended and prosecuted. He is, therefore, different from most other individuals who seek assessment.
• Rapists are well-known to be very defensive about their actions and engage in denial that range from slight minimization to outright denial. It is important to accept this as part of the assessment and to ignore answers that you know to be untruthful, at least in the early stages of the interview, in order to maintain rapport and to facilitate disclosure of sensitive material. It is thought denial is the only means a person has to cope with the shame they may feel by their behavior. It is known that anxiety and guilt increase shame and, hence, the interviewer should take every sensible step to minimize and moderate the amount of anxiety that the person experiences during the interview.
• Phallometry or measurements involving the phallus is used in the assessment and monitoring of sex offenders as it deals with some of difficulties associated with psychometric measures. These difficulties include limited discriminate or predictive validity, self-report bias, and limitation of deception scales. One of the most common methods is penile plethysmography (PPG), which determines sexual arousal by measuring increases in penile tumescence (volume or circumference) or blood flow in response to visual (still or moving), auditory (scripted stories) imaginal and olfactory stimuli. As sexual arousal cannot be directly observed, PPG offers a direct physiological, albeit intrusive method of assessing what causes sexual arousal in rapists. It is not without criticism as some argue that the stimuli used to generate arousal amounts of showing pornographic material to offenders. Other concerns relate to lack of standardization of methodology, limited control data for normal populations, and the ability of people taking the test to fake non-arousal by various means.

• "Mental health assessment of rape offenders", Jaydip Sarkar, Indian J Psychiatry. 2013 Jul-Sep; 55(3): 235–243

• Anger, deep and dark, is a common thread among rapists. Something has invariably gone wrong with their lives, often from almost the very beginning. A 1982 study of rapists in Oregon found that as many as 80 percent were abused children, and their own victimization results in a kind of emotional death. They grow up feeling martyred, self justifying--unwilling or unable to extend compassion to the people they in turn abuse. Many depersonalize their victims. "The offender views rape the same as kicking a tire," says William Pithers, director of the Vermont Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Sexual Abuse. Yet others are so shamed by their acts they grow suicidal. William Samek, a Miami-based clinical psychologist, remembers one extreme instance in which the rapist handed his gun to his woman victim, exclaiming: "I can't stand it anymore, please blow me away."
• One of the most consistent elements in rape of all kinds is the absence of empathy; attackers are able to persuade themselves that the victim wanted or deserved to be raped. Dr. Gene Abel, a professor of psychiatry at Emory University who has studied hundreds of rapists over the past 20 years, believes that rapists suffer from a form of cognitive distortion that allows them to justify their actions in the face of stark evidence to the contrary. Abel recently saw a patient who claimed he had never raped a woman, despite an arrest record showing repeated rape charges. When he asked the I i patient how he would know a woman wanted to have sex with him, he replied that she was obviously willing if she spoke to him or invited him up to her apartment. How would he know if she weren't willing, Abel asked. The patient responded, seeing nothing askew in his answer: "If she fought me the whole time we were having sex."
• Probably these distortions set in early, as a child protects himself from unbearable reality. Only 10 percent of rapists appear to have a history of psychiatric illness. But by the time they are ordered into treatment, their careers may be well advanced; some list hundreds of victims as they pour out their stories. Few rapists ever seek treatment on their own, says Theoharis Seghorn, a clinical psychologist at New England Forensic Associates: "Rapists don't reach out because they don't trust."
• Pithers shows them films like "To Kill a Mockingbird" or "A Christmas Story," a simple '40s tale about a boy who wants a rifle for Christmas, and has the offenders try to identify the emotions of all the characters, noting those that weren't acceptable in their own families. He has them read victims' recollections or watch videotapes of their victims' testimony, and jot down when they recognize how one of the victims might have felt. For most people who can feel for others almost as naturally as they breathe, it may be hard to imagine not feeling. But many young offenders are "numbed out," says Lynn Reynolds, clinical director of the Institute Against Social Violence, in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y. "I had one boy who saw his father pull his mother down the steps by her hair and stab her," says Reynolds. "That's not an excuse, but it does explain his desensitization to violence." Adds Eugene Porter, an Oakland, Calif., psychologist: "I haven't seen a rapist who didn't have a childhood horror story."
• Radecki cites statistics showing one out of eight Hollywood movies depicts a rape theme; and by age 18, the average American will have seen 250,000 acts of violence and 40,000 attempted murders on television.

• "The Mind of the Rapist" by Newsweek Staff, Newsweek, 7/22/90.

• Still, of the 6.7 million pregnancies in the United States every year, about half are unintended, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
• In the study, Holmes and her colleagues, followed more than 4,000 American adults over a three-year period. Nationally, they found rape-related pregnancy rate was 5 percent among women of reproductive age, 12 to 45, meaning about 32,000 pregnancies result from rape each year, they concluded. Among 34 cases of rape-related pregnancy that they looked at closely, 32 percent of women maintained the pregnancy and kept the infant, 50 percent underwent an abortion, nearly 6 percent placed the baby up for adoption and nearly 12 percent had a miscarriage.

• "Todd Akin & Pregnancy: Yes, It Can Happen to Rape Victims", Jeanna Bryner, Live Science, August 20, 2012

• The daughter, who had no friends of her own age, later told investigators she was "shocked, pretty shocked" when her mother first asked her but also thought, "if I do this … maybe she will love me more". In agreeing, she said "feelings of gratitude for my adoption influenced how I behaved".
  • "Girl, 14, forced to become pregnant with donor sperm bought by mother" Caroline Davies, The Guardian, 28 April 2013

• The American Medical Association and the Red Cross both condemn [[w:force-feeding as a form of torture. And yet, the U.S. government and the United Nations have both force-fed hunger-striking prisoners. The real problem? Most people probably don’t realize how complicated force-feeding is, and how much can go wrong.
  • "Here's What Really Happens When You Force-Feed Someone", Esther Inglis-Arkell, IO9, 4/21/15

• Minor females have a constitutional right to make their own decisions on reproductive choices. The constitution gives women the right to choose whether they want an abortion and this also applies to women minors. The decision is hers alone and no parent can force the teen to have an abortion. The decision to have an abortion must be voluntary and independent. A parent who tries to coerce a daughter to have an abortion may also face legal charges for child abuse or battery.
  Parents of pregnant teenagers cannot force them into placing a child up for adoption. The only exception to this rule is if the pregnant teen's life is in danger due to a medical emergency. In such a case, the teen's parents have the right to permit an abortion against the teenager's wishes.
  • "Abortion Rights of Minors" Kourosh Akhbari, Legal Match, Last Modified: 12-20-2017

• Isabel Grant, a law professor at the University of British Columbia, agreed that the way the Supreme Court rules could open a Pandora’s Box for women with any kind of mental disability that compromises their ability to consent to sex.
  “And in the context of elderly individuals, if you have someone with advanced dementia, the issue might be what has she said beforehand to her sexual partner, that when she became incapable it was OK to have sex with her.”
  In a sense, she argued, that turns women into sexual objects once they become incapable: “You can sort of do whatever you want to me then because I’m not going to be able to change my mind.”
  “Are we going to treat that as consent in law?” asked Grant, adding that such a decision could effectively reverse many of the legal gains women have made in the last decade regarding sexual assault.
• “Consent is ‘Do you want to have sex this time with this person?’ And we can’t imply that from the fact that you’ve had sex with him before. … So I think it’s a really dangerous precedent.”
  • Isabel Grant; in “Supreme Court Ruling On Sexual Pre-Consent Could Affect Seniors With Dementia”, Toronto City News, (Nov 22, 2010).

• "What they’re looking at is can you say when I become unconscious, as in this case, could I have pre-consented to sex?” said Jane Meadus, a lawyer at the Advocacy Centre for the Elderly in Toronto.
  “But the broader implications are that I could consent today and say if I became incapable — I got dementia or I got in a coma or something — it’s OK for my spouse to come and have sex with me. And is that pre-consent really a pre-consent and what are the implications for the people who are, for example, in long-term care?”
• “She may be somewhat fearful. She may no longer have the capacity to withdraw consent. She may just go along, but that doesn’t mean that she is happy about it.”
  • Jane Meadus; in “Supreme Court Ruling On Sexual Pre-Consent Could Affect Seniors With Dementia”, Toronto City News, (Nov 22, 2010).

• It is respect, it is decency, it is empathy and it is the cornerstone of a good, healthy sexual encounter.
• Likewise, having consented to sex with someone once or even several times in the past doesn’t mean you’ve consented to sex with that person indefinitely. Consent is not like a physical permit that, once issued, we can save for use at a future date. The person who willingly and enthusiastically had sex with us last night might not want to have sex with us this morning and that’s their right and prerogative.
  The law is also very clear that a person can give their consent to one kind of sexual activity but not another in a single situation. For example, someone might consent to vaginal but not anal penetration, or they might consent to sex with a condom but not without one. Again, this is common sense.
  • Katie Russell “Rape and consent: What you need to know before you have sex”, The Independent, (Tuesday 3 November 2015).

• For most men, hearing a description of an encounter where the man is forcing the woman to have sex, and the woman is in distress or pain, dampens the arousal by about 50 percent compared to arousal levels during a scene of consenting lovemaking. Ordinarily violence inhibits sexual arousal in men. A blood flow loss of 50 percent means a man would not be able to penetrate a woman.
• Rapists often recall being intensely angry, depressed or feeling worthless for days or even months leading up to the rape. Very often the rapists say that the trigger for the rape was when a woman made them angry, usually by rebuffing a sexual overture. The men experienced the rebuff as an insult to their manhood that intensified their emotional misery.
  • Howard Barbaree in "New Studies Map the Mind of the Rapist", Daniel Goleman, New York Times, (Dec 10, 1991).

• Canadian law says that a person cannot consent to sex while unconscious.
  But it does not directly define how drunk is too drunk to consent to sex.
  The law does say an extremely drunk person can be conscious but too drunk to consent.
  A person must be sober enough to understand the sexual nature of the act, and to realise they can choose not to participate.
  "Where is the line between capacity and incapacity when it comes to consent?" asked Elizabeth Sheehy, a law professor at the University of Ottawa.

• "Canada judge's 'a drunk can consent' ruling stirs debate", BBC News, 6 March 2017

• But students are confused about how alcohol and intoxication affect consent, which perhaps speaks to increasing progressive activism around the idea that drunk people can't give consent. Only about three-quarters of respondents said they feel confident in their own ability to judge whether someone is too intoxicated to consent to sex. And more than half agreed that "rape and sexual assault can happen unintentionally, especially if alcohol is involved."
  I just want to repeat that one more time: Half of the MIT students surveyed think it's possible to "accidently" rape someone. When you consider undergraduates alone, this rises to 67 percent.
  This is what we get when people push an idea that rape is really often a matter of consent confusion or a drunken misunderstanding and not something that one person (the rapist) intentionally does to another. This is exactly what those of us opposed to affirmative consent standards mean when we worry about it muddying the waters of consent and confusing the definition of rape. About a fifth of female undergraduates and a quarter of male undergraduates surveyed agreed that "when someone is raped or sexually assaulted, it’s often because the way they said 'no' was unclear or there was some miscommunication."
  • “Half of MIT Students Think It's Possible to "Accidently" Rape Someone (Thanks, Affirmative Consent!)” Reason.org

• “People who are rapidly sexually traumatized sort of leave their bodies, and their mind is somewhere else to deal with it,” says Dr. Tina J. Walch, director of ambulatory services at Zucker Hillside Hospital in New Hyde Park, New York. That kind of escapist strategy is a good one in the moment, but over time, it can do terrible harm. “They may be suffering depression and anxiety or some PTSD and dissociative disorder depending on if there was severe sexual trauma.”
  • "The Mind of the Kidnap Victim: How They Endure and Recover" Jeffrey Kluger, TIME, May 08, 2013

• The suppression of natural sexual gratification leads to various kinds of substitute gratifications. Natural aggression, for example, becomes brutal sadism which then is an essential mass-psychological factor in imperialistic wars.
  • Wilhelm Reich in The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) Ch. 1 : Ideology As Material Power, Section 4 : The Social Function of Sexual Suppression quoted in: R. Claire Snyder Citizen-soldiers and Manly Warriors: Military Service and Gender in the Civic Republican Tradition, Rowman & Littlefield, 1999, p. 152.

• In the strictly Marxist sense, there is not even in Soviet Russia a state socialism but a state capitalism. According to Marx, the social condition "capitalism" does not consist in the existence of individual capitalists, but in the existence of the specific "capitalist mode of production", that is, in the production of exchange values instead of use values, in wage work of the masses and in the production of surplus value, which is appropriated by the state or the private owners, and not by the society of working people. In this strictly Marxist sense, the capitalistic system continues to exist in Russia. And it will continue to exist as long as the masses of people continue to lack responsibility and to crave authority.
  • Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism; preface to the Third Edition (August 1942)

• In its pure form, fascism is the sum total of all irrational reactions of the average human character. To the narrow-minded sociologist who lacks the courage to recognize the enormous role played by the irrational in human history, the fascist race theory appears as nothing but an imperialistic interest or even a mere "prejudice." The violence and the ubiquity of these "race prejudices" show their origin from the irrational part of the human character. The race theory is not a creation of fascism. No: fascism is a creation of race hatred and its politically organized expression. Correspondingly, there is a German, Italian, Spanish, Anglo-Saxon, Jewish and Arabian fascism.
  • Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism; preface to the Third Edition (August 1942); John P. Conger, Jung & Reich: the body as shadow, North Atlantic Books, 2005, page 110; Christian Borch, The Politics of Crowds: An Alternative History of Sociology, Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 194.

Fiction/Entertainment

And we did certainly create man out of clay from an altered black mud. And the jinn We created before from scorching fire. ~ Quran 15:26-27, Sahih International

Whether we are based on carbon or silicon makes no fundamental difference. We should each be treated with appropriate respect. ~ Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two (1982)

The so-called Muslim women’s movement is predicated on the idea that Muslim men, not Islam, have been responsible for the suppression of women’s rights. For this reason, Muslim feminists throughout the world are advocating a return to the society Muhammad originally envisioned for his followers. Despite differences in culture, nationalities, and beliefs, these women believe that the lesson to be learned from Muhammad in Medina is that Islam is above all an egalitarian religion. Their Medina is a society in which Muhammad designated women like Umm Waraqa as spiritual guides for the Ummah; in which the Prophet himself was sometimes publicly rebuked by his wives; in which women prayed and fought alongside the men; in which women like Aisha and Umm Salamah acted not only as religious but also as political—and on at least one occasion military—leaders; and in which the call to gather for prayer, bellowed from the rooftop of Muhammad’s house, brought men and women together to kneel side by side and be blessed as a single undivided community. ~ Aslan, Reza (2005). No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam., p.136

He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind and the fool shall be servant to the wise in heart. ~ Proverbs 11:29, King James Version

Certainly this is a duty, not a sin. "Cleanliness is indeed next to godliness." ~ John Wesley

File:Viracocha.jpg

Oompa loompa doompadee dah.
If you're not greedy, you will go far.
You will live in happiness too,
Like the oompa loompa doompadee do!
Doompadee doo! ~ Roald Dahl, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, (1971)

Booker DeWitt is a bad, bad man. A veteran of Wounded Knee turned Pinkerton thug and private detective, he is as classic a noir antihero as has ever existed. He's a drunk and a gambler with a terrible debt hanging over his head; comes complete with half a ton of baggage, a pistol and one last chance to get right with those he owes. All he has to do is go to a flying city in the clouds, fight robots, murder his way across multiple dimensions and rescue a literal princess from a literal tower, all while shooting lightning and murderous crows from his hands. ~ Jason Sheehan, "Reading The Game: Bioshock Infinite", NPR, (April 9, 2017).

Rust Cole: I'd just apply a couple of pounds of pressure. Snap your wrists. You're senior detective, think I'm lying? ~ Nic Pizzolatto, True Detective, "Seeing Things", (January 19, 2014).

Stop right where you are! You know the score, pal! If you're not cop, you're little people. ~ Hampton Fancher & David Peoples

That gibberish he talked was city speak, gutter talk. A mishmash of Japanese, Spanish, German, what have you. I didn't really need a translator, I knew the lingo, every good cop did. But I wasn't going to make it easier for him. ~ Hampton Fancher & David Peoples

They don't advertise for killers in the newspaper. That was my profession. Ex-cop. Ex-blade runner. Ex-killer. ~ Hampton Fancher & David Peoples

• Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
  Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
  More than cool reason ever comprehends.
  The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
  Are of imagination all compact:
  One sees more devils than vast hell can hold —
  That is the madman;
  The lover, all as frantic,
  Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.
  The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
  Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
  And, as imagination bodies forth
  The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
  Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
  A local habitation and a name.
  Such tricks hath strong imagination,
  That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
  It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
  Or, in the night, imagining some fear,
  How easy is a bush suppos'd a bear.
  • A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act V, Theseus, scene i. (1595)

• If we shadows have offended,
  Think but this, and all is mended,
  That you have but slumber'd here
  While these visions did appear.
  And this weak and idle theme,
  No more yielding, but a dream,
  Gentles, do not reprehend;
  If you pardon, we will mend.
  And, as I am an honest Puck,
  If we have unearned luck,
  Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue,
  We will make amends ere long:
  Else the Puck a liar call.
  So good night unto you all.
  Give me your hands, if we be friends,
  And Robin shall restore amends.
  • A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act V, Puck, scene i. (1595)

• "Nothing exists; all is a dream. God - man - the world - the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars - a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space - and you!"
• "Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane - like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell - mouths mercy and invented hell - mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!"
• "It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream - a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought - a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!"

• The Mysterious Stranger, Mark Twain, (1916)

• Narrator: At last, in a world torn by the hatred and wars of men, appears a woman to whom the problems and feats of men are mere child's play. A woman whose identity is known to none, but whose sensational feats are outstanding in a fast-moving world. With a hundred times the agility and strength of our best male athletes and strongest wrestlers, she appears as though from nowhere to avenge an injustice or right a wrong! As lovely as Aphrodite- as wise as Athena- with the speed of Mercury and the strength of Hercules - She is known only as Wonder Woman!
  • William Moulton Marston, All Star Comics #8 (Introducing Wonder Woman), (October 1941)

• Wonder Woman: Your leg--it's broken!

Steve Trevor: My leg does seem bent a bit--but I'm glad of it. At least it shows you care.

• William Moulton Marston, Sensation Comics #1, (January 1942).

• Wonder Woman: I'm not weak - I'm too strong. The bracelets bound my strength to good purposes - Now I'm completely uncontrolled! I'm free to destroy like a man!
  • William Moulton Marston, Sensation Comics #19 (The Unbound Amazon) (July 1943).

• Wonder Woman: Bonds of love never make the wearer weaker - they give him greater strength!
  • William Moulton Marston, Sensation Comics #35 (The Saga of Girls Under the Sea) (November 1944).

• Clark Kent: Remember, boys and girls. Your school, like our country, is made up of Americans of many different races, religions, and national origins. So, if YOU hear anybody talk against a schoolmate or anyone else because of his religion, race, or national origin, don't wait. TELL HIM THAT KIND OF TALK IS UN-AMERICAN. HELP KEEP YOUR SCHOOL ALL AMERICAN!
  • "Help Keep Your School All-American", as quoted in "The American Way", Dan Evan Snopes, Nov 23rd, 2015. (1949), National Comics Publishing, Incorporated.

• Klaatu: I am leaving soon, and you will forgive me if I speak bluntly. The universe grows smaller every day, and the threat of aggression by any group, anywhere, can no longer be tolerated. There must be security for all or no one is secure. Now, this does not mean giving up any freedom except the freedom to act irresponsibly. Your ancestors knew this when they made laws to govern themselves and hired policemen to enforce them. We of the other planets have long accepted this principle. We have an organization for the mutual protection of all planets and for the complete elimination of aggression. The test of any such higher authority is, of course, the police force that supports it. For our policemen, we created a race of robots. Their function is to patrol the planets—in space ships like this one—and preserve the peace. In matters of aggression, we have given them absolute power over us; this power can not be revoked. At the first sign of violence, they act automatically against the aggressor. The penalty for provoking their action is too terrible to risk. The result is that we live in peace, without arms or armies, secure in the knowledge that we are free from aggression and war—free to pursue more profitable enterprises. Now, we do not pretend to have achieved perfection, but we do have a system, and it works. I came here to give you these facts. It is no concern of ours how you run your own planet. But if you threaten to extend your violence, this Earth of yours will be reduced to a burned-out cinder. Your choice is simple: Join us and live in peace, or pursue your present course and face obliteration. We shall be waiting for your answer; the decision rests with you.
  • Edmund H. North, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951 film)|, (1951)

• Rod Serling: Up there, up there in the vastness of space, in the void that is sky, up there is an enemy known as isolation. It sits there in the stars waiting, waiting with the patience of eons, forever waiting... in the Twilight Zone.
  • Rod Serling, Where is Everybody?, The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series), (October 2, 1959).

• Rod Serling: The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices...to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill...and suspicion can destroy...and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own -- for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is...that these things cannot be confined...to the Twilight Zone.
  • Rod Serling, "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street", The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series), CBS, (March 4, 1960).

• Romney Wordsworth: I am a librarian, sir. That is my occupation, and my profession. If you people choose to call that obsolete.....

Secretary: Request clarification of the term.

Chancellor: Yes, Mister Wordsworth, the term "You People," do you make reference to The State?

Wordsworth: I make reference to The State.

Chancellor: And you persist in declaring your occupation as that of a librarian. Is that correct?

Wordsworth: Yes, sir, that is correct.

Chancellor: (his voice sneering) A librarian! Having to do with books!

Wordsworth: Yes sir, books.

Chancellor: And since there are no more books, there are no more libraries. Therefore, it follows there would be little use for the services of a librarian. Case in point: a minister would say his profession is preaching the word of God. And, since the State has proven that there is no God, that would make the function of a minister somewhat academic as well.

Wordsworth: There is a God!

(The Chancellor is starting to show annoyance at Wordsworth)

Chancellor: You are in error, Mr. Wordsworth. There is no God. [grabbing loudspeaker] The State has proven that there is no God!

Wordsworth: You cannot erase God with an edict!

Chancellor: You are Obsolete, Mr. Wordsworth.

Wordsworth: A lie. No man is Obsolete.

Chancellor: You have no function, Mr. Wordsworth. You're an anachronism, like a ghost from another time.

Wordsworth: I am nothing more than a reminder to you that you cannot destroy truth by burning pages.

Chancellor: You're a bug, Mr. Wordsworth. A crawling insect. An ugly misformed little creature who has no purpose here, no meaning.

Wordsworth: I am a human being!

Chancellor: You're a Librarian, Mr. Wordsworth. A dealer in books and two-cent fines and pamphlets and closed stacks and the musty insides of a language factory that spews out meaningless words on an assembly line. Words, Mr. Wordsworth, that have no substance and no dimension. Like air, like the wind, like a vacuum that you make believe has an existence by scribbling index numbers on little cards!

Wordsworth: I don't care! I am a human being! And if I speak one thought aloud, that thought lives, even after I've been shoveled into my grave!

Chancellor: Delusions, Mr. Wordsworth. Delusions that you inject into your veins with printer's ink. The narcotics that you call literature. The Bible, poetry, essays of all kind an opiate to make you think you have strength when you have no strength at all! You have nothing but spindly limbs and a spindly dream. The State has no use for your kind!

• Rod Serling, The Obsolete Man, The Twilight Zone, (June 2, 1961).

• James Howard "Fats" Brown: You know something, Jesse? There's more to life than this pool hall. It isn't right, your being all cooped up in here. You ought to get out a little see what's going on.

Jesse Cardiff: You didn't get to be the best sitting on a park bench. You spent a lot of time with that cue in your hands.

James Howard "Fats" Brown: Of course I did. But I took time out to live, too. I've been places where they never heard of billiards. I may not look the part, Jesse, but I made love, walked uphill, swam in the ocean. When I think of the wonderful things there are to see and to do, it hurts me- yeah- to see you rotting your life away in this miserable, dark hall.

Jesse Cardiff: You're lying. You're trying to distract me. That's a lousy thing to do. You made me do that! You made me miss!

James Howard "Fats" Brown: Aw, come on, a little gamesmanship, a little fun and you come apart. Kid stuff to make you break your concentration and you get wild.

• James Howard "Fats" Brown: You wouldn't believe this, Jesse, but personally, I'd like to see you win.

Jesse Cardiff: Yeah.

James Howard "Fats" Brown: Believe me, I've only been doing my job. Someone has to keep the flame. Someone has to weed out those who haven't got what it takes. You see, the champions, the legends, they serve as a purpose, a challenge, an incentive.

Jesse Cardiff: I don't need a challenge.

James Howard "Fats" Brown: Everyone needs a challenge, Jesse- someone great out of the past to say, "match what I've done, boy, and make it better. That's true in all walks of life- music, politics, sports, you name it.

• James Howard "Fats" Brown: Wait a minute, Jesse. Before you shoot, think of this- shoot that ball, and you may win more than you bargained for.

Jesse Cardiff: There's nothing you can say that will stop me. Nothing.

James Howard "Fats" Brown: I'm sorry. I was required to say that.

• George Clayton Johnson, "A Game of Pool", The Twilight Zone, (October 13, 1961).

• Burke: Look, those two specimens are worth millions to the bio-weapons division. Now, if you're smart, we can both come out of it as heroes, and we will be set up for life.

Ripley: [beat] You're crazy, Burke, you know that? You really think you can get a dangerous organism like that past ICC quarantine?

Burke: How can they impound it if they don't know about it?

Ripley: Oh, but they will know about it, Burke. From me. Just like they'll know that you were responsible for the deaths of 157 colonists!

Burke: Wait a second—

Ripley: You sent them to that ship!

Burke: You're wrong!

Ripley: I just checked the colony log. Directive dated 6/12/79, signed Burke, Carter J. You sent them out there and you didn't even warn them! Why didn't you warn them, Burke?

Burke: Okay, look. What if that ship didn't even exist? Did you ever think about that? I didn't know! So now, if I went and made a major security situation out of it, everybody steps in. Administration steps in, and there are no exclusive rights for anybody; nobody wins. So I made a decision, and it was wrong. It was a bad call, Ripley. It was a bad call.

Ripley: Bad call? [grabs Burke by the collar and presses him to the window] These people are dead, Burke! Don't you have any idea what you've done here? Well, I'm gonna make sure that they nail you right to the wall for this! You're not gonna sleaze your way out of this one! Right to the wall! [lets him go and starts to walk away]

Burke: Ripley... [Ripley stops and turns around] You know, I... I expected more from you. I thought you'd be smarter than this.

Ripley: [takes a breath] I'm happy to disappoint you.

• Aliens, James Cameron, David Giler & Walter Hill, (July 18, 1986)

Batman: Let me repeat myself: either we find some way to release the Cable woman, or we begin evacuation right away.
There are no other options. That thing out there is very nearly a god. It can crush us.

Mayor: B-but you don't understand. That woman has had a relationship with something that isn't human. We can't make exceptions to the law...

Batman: No exceptions. I see.
In that case you should start rounding up other non human beings who may be having relationships outside their species.

Mayor: What? What do you mean?

Batman: I mean, if you want to take this all the way, non-humanity doesn't end with the Swamp Thing. Let me see...
You'll possibly have to arrest Hawkman and Metamorpho...

• Batman: …and there's also Starfire, from the Teen Titans. Her race evolved from cats, I believe...
  The Martian Manhunter, obviously, Captain Atom..and then of course there's what's-his-name...
  The one who lives in Metropolis.

Mayor: Oh god. I hadn't thought. I didn't realize...

• Alan Moore, Swamp Thing, #53, (Oct. 1986). p.29-30.

• Superman: Once more, we have survived the threat of war and found a fragile peace. I thought I could give you all the gift of the freedom from war, but I was wrong. It's not mine to give. We're still a young planet. There are galaxies out there. Other civilizations for us to meet and to learn from. What a brilliant future we could have. And there will be peace – there will be peace when the people of this world want it so badly that their governments will have no choice but to give it to them. I just wish you could all see the Earth the way that I see it. Because when you really look at it, it's just one world.
  • Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, (July 24, 1987).

• Doc: What's wrong, Marty? You look like you've seen a ghost.

Marty: You're not far off, Doc.

• Doc: [mildly intoxicated] In the future, we don't need horses. We have motorized carriages called "automobiles." [barflies laugh]

Barfly 3: If everybody's got one of these auto-whats-its, does anybody walk or run any more?

Doc: Of course we run, but for recreation. Fun.

Barfly 3: Run for fun? What the hell kinda fun is that?! [barflies keep laughing]

• Doc: It means your future hasn't been written yet. No one's has. Your future is whatever you make it, so make it a good one. Both of you.
  • Back to the Future Part III, written by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, (1990).

• Goku: Stop! Don't do it.

Krillin: Goku, is that you? We have got to stop this guy while we have the chance. He's...he's pure evil.

Goku: No, listen. Just let him go Krillin. Show him what it means to be merciful.

Krillin: Merciful!? But Goku, he's-

Goku: I know what you must be thinking, but believe me, I know what I'm doing.

Krillin: This is the guy that threatened all the people here on Earth. Surely, he'll try to come back and destroy us again. I just don't think it's a good idea to let him escape now that we have a chance to stop him for good.

Goku: By doing this, we're showing him that there is another way, a better way.

Krillin: Goku, I don't think this is the kind o' guy that can learn a lesson like that. He'll just think we're weak. It won't change him at all.

Goku: Don't be so sure about that Krillin. It wouldn't be the first time something like that happened. Think about it. When Piccolo first came to us, he was just as evil as his father had been. He nearly destroyed not only me, but the entire planet. And now...

Krillin: And now he's one of us.

Goku: Right. And if someone as evil as Piccolo can change, I think anyone can. Vegeta deserves to have that same chance. And by showing him that the people of this planet have compassion and can show mercy, maybe he can learn to show some of his own. Piccolo learned. And now he's not only a powerful ally, he's also a good friend. He even took care of Gohan while I was gone and traded his own life to protect him. Who know, Vegeta might do the same thing for one of us someday.

Krillin: Grrr....

Goku: Krillin, please. I know this is the right thing to do. You've got to trust me.

Krillin: But the Saiyans killed Yamcha...and Tien. Chiaotzu! I can't let him get away.

Goku: Don't do it Krillin. I know it seems like justice, but it's not right. If you strike him down, it will only show that we aren't any better than he is. It means that they've won, no matter what. He's strong....don't forget Krillin, I am a Saiyan, just like he is. (Krillin drops the sword) Thanks Krillin, that took a lot of strength and courage. I'm proud of you.

Krillin: Goku, I sure hope you're right about all of this. I'd hate to think of what might happen if he comes back to try this again. But if he does, we'll be ready for 'im and we'll stop 'im again.

Goku: You bet.

King Kai: (to himself, from afar) I hope Goku knows what he's doing. I sure wouldn't want for Earth to have to face that evil again.

Krillin: Uh?

Vegeta: (to Krillin) When I come back to this planet, you're all going to suffer. And when you beg me for mercy, I'll stare into your eyes as I crush the life out of you!’’’

• Akira Toriyama, Dragon Ball Z, "Cause a Miracle! Son Gohan, the Super Saiyan" / "The Battle Ends" [Mercy], (February 7, 1990).

• Red Skull: We are much alike, you and I, Magneto, both of us wish to see our master race inherit the earth. You call my fuhrer Barbaic? Am I mistaken or did you yourself not kill hundreds of men by sinking a submarine a few years back? To help realize your minority group's destiny would you balk at the imprisonment of inferiors? The extermination of the unfit? Come, come Magneto, do not expect me to be impressed by your sanctimonious posturings of moral superiority!
  • Mark Gruenwald, Captain America #367, (Feb 10, 1990).

• Sarah Connor: Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The Terminator would never stop. It would never leave him. It would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there. And it would die to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine was the only one that measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice.
  • James Cameron and William Wisher Jr., Terminator 2: Judgement Day, (July 3, 1991).

• With their magic infused blood, the Hylian people were endowed with psychic powers and skill in wizardry. It was also said that their long, pointed ears enabled them to hear special messages from the gods, so they were held in high esteem by many people in Hyrule. Their descendants settled in various parts of the world and passed on their knowledge and magical lore to all people. But in its passing, the lore was often distorted or lost altogether…
  • “The Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past Instruction Booklet” Nintendo, (November 21, 1991), p. 4.

• Keiko's Friend 1: Aren't you just terrified of what he might do to you? Or even worse, what people might say of it?

Keiko: "Not really. He just wants you to think he's dangerous. On the inside he's more like a lamb.

Keiko's Friend 2: Yeah, but you haven't heard the latest news about him, Keiko. He's super tough, and he kills for fun!

Keiko's Friend 1: Yeah, and if you cross him, he'll whistle for 2,000 bad guys...with guns!

Keiko: "C'mon, Yusuke doesn't even know how to whistle.

Keiko's Friend 2: What?

Keiko: Besides, Yusuke couldn't order around two people, let alone 2,000. He doesn't have many friends.

Keiko's Friend 1: Not what I heard.

Keiko's Friend 2: Yeah, I think we would know.

• Botan: It's funny, Yusuke...none of us were expecting you to die today; you've thrown us all for a loop. Run someone with your credentials through that scenario a thousand times and they never would've saved a kid like that. No one saw it coming and quite frankly, we haven't prepared a place for you yet.

Yusuke: Oh, gimme a freakin' break! Are you telling me you guys were expecting that little boy to die?

Botan: Well, I wasn't going to tell you this because I knew it would make you even more irritable, but without the confusion caused by you running into the street, that boy would've actually missed the car and escaped with one less scrape on his right shoulder.

Yusuke: What? But he was headed right for him!"

Botan: Yes...well, the driver would have veered to the left. In other words, your death was a complete and utter waste!"

• Yusuke: [attending his own wake] "Whoa, all my classmates are here. Just like I thought, look at 'em laughing! They probably just came over here 'cause they were getting extra credit!"
• Komada: "Come on, let's go back! This isn't right!"

Kuwabara: "Shut up! Let go of me, wouldja?"

Yusuke: "What? Kuwabara?!"

Kuwabara: [entering Yusuke's apartment while being restrained by his friends and screaming at his picture]"Damn you! You think you can just back out 'cause you're scared!"

Okubo: "Kuwabara, this place is for mourning!"

Kuwabara: "I'm not gonna leave! Not until he comes out here and lets me fight him!"

Okubo: "He can't do that!"

Kuwabara: "I'm gonna beat you down, you punk! You hear me?" [his voice breaks as he tries to hit the picture] "Who do you think you are, huh? Dirty punk! Who am I gonna fight now? Who am I gonna fight?"

Okubo: "He's gone!"

Kuwabara: No! [throws a punch at the picture, but stops inches before he hits it, sobbing] You're supposed to be here...for me.

• Takenaka': "At first I was so surprised, Yusuke...to hear you'd saved a kid at the cost of your own life. You've always acted more selfishly than that. Darn. Yusuke, I don't know why I don't feel like speaking well of you." [begins to cry] "Why didn't you stay? You could have made something great out of yourself!"
• Little Boy: Mommy, do you think it'd be okay if I played with that boy tomorrow, if I'm good?"

Mother: No, son.

Little Boy: I know some people sounded angry at him, but he's really nice. He made really funny faces at me too, and he got me my ball! I don't know why those people were crying like that. It was probably because they wanted to play with him, too.

• Yoshihiro Togashi, Yu Yu Hakusho, (October 10, 1992).

• Stern: Now if you'll excuse me, I've given you all the time I can spare.

Selina Kyle: You'll find more time for me, Mr. Stern. Before I'm through, I'll have every environmental group and animal rights activist breathing down your neck. They'll be looking at you and your project so closely, you'll feel like a bug in a bell-jar.

• Sean Catherine Derek and Laren Bright, Batman: The Animated Series, "The Cat and the Claw: Part 1", (September 5, 1992).

• Piccolo: Vegeta could've beaten Cell ten-times over by now! He's toying with him, leaving him an opportunity to fuse with Android 18! He's putting us all at risk to satisfy his own selfish pride! AAAAHHHH!!!! VEGETA!!!!!

Vegeta: So, tell me Cell. Is this your true power that I'm sensing? (snickers) You do take a punch well, I'll give you that. Otherwise, I'm afraid I'm really not impressed.

• Akira Toriyama, Dragon Ball Z, "On Your Knees, Cell! I Am Super Vegeta!!" / "Bow to the Prince", (September 9, 1992).

• Batman: Red Claw? A woman?

Red Claw: Do you have a problem with that, Batman?

Batman: Not at all. I'm an equal opportunity crime fighter!

• Story by Sean Catherine Derek and Laren Bright, teleplay by Jules Dennis and Richard Mueller, Batman: The Animated Series, The Cat and the Claw: Part 2", (September 12, 1992).

• Cell: Vegeta, allow me to achieve my final perfect form. As a Saiyan, you can appreciate the challenge.

Trunks: (to himself) Father, no. He's deceiving you.

Cell: What do ya say Vegeta?

Vegeta: You still sound like a baby who is trying to get his way.

• Akira Toriyama, Dragon Ball Z, "Dangerous Pride!! A Challenge to Cell's Perfect Form" / "Hour of Temptation", (September 16, 1992).

• Trunks: You're wrong father! You can't let him reach his final form! There's a good chance that he'll become stronger than both of us!

Vegeta: Heh heh. But that's the thrill! Don't you wanna see this power he keeps talking about?

Trunks: No. I've seen it all my life.

• Akira Toriyama, Dragon Ball Z, "A Shock to the Entire Universe!! Cell's Spectacular Evolution Toward His Perfect Form" / "The Last Defense", (September 30, 1992).

• Vegeta: (to himself) Yes, Cell's final transformation is at last at hand. Soon, he will be the greatest adversary I have ever faced.
• Gohan: I think Piccolo was right about you, Dad. You're way too gentle with me to train me right. You've got to push! (Gohan tries to fight his father) Fight me, Dad! You're holding back!

Goku: Gohan!

Gohan: I said, "Fight!" (continues to fight and charges an energy blast) Listen, you can't go easy on me just because I'm your son!!! (Goku grabs Gohan's energy blast and throws it back) No, Dad! That's not good enough! Not even if you want to become a Super Saiyan!

Goku: Huh?

Gohan: You have to combat me with everything you've got! Even if it kills me! Grr... Don't you get it?! It's the only way! It's all or nothing! There is no in-between! Grr... Look, Dad, I know you love me and you don't want to hurt me, but unless I become a Super Saiyan, all the time we spent in here will be for nothing! Don't you see?!

• Akira Toriyama, Dragon Ball Z, "Battle Power Infinity!! Birth of the God of Destruction Named Cell" / "Cell is Complete", (October 14, 1992).

• Krillin: Come on Trunks. What are you waiting for? If you take any more time, Vegeta is gonna be fish food. It's now or never bro, Vegeta may get mad, but at least he'll stay alive.

Trunks: Wait. I can't do anything to help him until the moment he loses consciousness, that way he won't find out that I've become even stronger than he is.

Krillin: Forget his pride!

Trunks: But I can't!

Krillin: Huh!?

Trunks: I don't think you realize how much honor means to my father. It's the only thing that keeps him going. It's what makes him a warrior. Oh sure, some might see it as arrogance, but I think down at the core, it's much more noble than that. I believe that's what my mother saw in him. And it's what I see too.

Krillin: I didn't know.

Trunks: How could you...?

• Akira Toriyama, Dragon Ball Z, "Breaking Through the Boundaries of the Super Saiyan!! Trunks Summons a Storm" / "Trunks Ascends", (October 21, 1992).

• Trunks: Wait. Tell me. What is the real purpose of this tournament? What are you really going to do? Cell, I know what you androids are like. I'm sure this is some sort of a trick. Just a trap to get us all in one place, right?

Cell: Oh, must you always treat everything like it's the end of the world? There is no secret purpose. I simply want to get as much out of this planet as I can before I destroy it. I have proven that I am unstoppable. Neither you or your friends are any threat to me now. However, there is one that I want to test my complete power against. I want you to bring me Goku. This tournament is sure to be a guaranteed hit. Everyone will be watching me. I just can't wait to see that look of panic and fear.

• Akira Toriyama, Dragon Ball Z, "Super Trunks Has a Weakness!! Cell's Shocking Bombshell Declaration" / "The Cell Games", (November 18, 1992)

• Lenina Huxley: No, John Spartan, you do not accuse the savior of our city of being in league with a multi-murder-death-killer like Simon Phoenix! It's... rude!

John Spartan: I'll be subtle. I'm good at subtle.

• Daniel Waters, Robert Reneau, and Peter M. Lenkov; Demolition Man, (October 8, 1993).

• Riffraff, street rat
  I don't buy that
  If only they'd look closer
  Would they see a poor boy? No, siree
  They'd find out
  There's so much more to me.
• Aladdin: A whole new world
  a new fantastic point of view
  no one to tell us no
  or where to go
  or say we're only dreaming
  

Jasmine: A whole new world
a dazzling place I never knew
but when I'm way up here
it's crystal clear
that now I'm in a whole new world with you

• Tim Rice, Aladdin, A Whole New World, (November 25, 1992).

• Dr. Thomas Light (hologram): So you've come...X, I gave you the ability to choose your own path in life, and I hoped the world would allow you to choose a peaceful one. But now it seems that you are destined to fight. Because I thought the world might need a new champion, I have hidden capsules like this one. If you find and use them you will be able to increase your powers beyond anything the world has ever known. Good luck, X!

• Megaman X written by Keiji Inafune and Sho Tsuge, (December 17, 1993).

• Believe in angels.
• Erik: Victims; aren't we all...?
• Top Dollar: [after he stabs Eric through his back with a sword] You know, my daddy used to say, "Every man's got a devil, and you can't rest til you find him." What happened back there with you and your girlfriend... I cleared that buildin'. Hell, nothin' in this town happens without my say-so. So I'm sorry if I spoiled your weddin' plans there, friend. But if it's any consolation to ya, you have put a smile on my face. You got a lot of spirit, son. [unsheathes his knife] I am gonna miss you.]

Erik: I have something to give you; I don't want it anymore. [grabs Top Dollar's head] Thirty hours of pain: [puts his other hand on Top Dollar's head] All at once... [Top Dollar groans] ...all for you.

• David J. Schow, The Crow (1994 film), (May 13, 1994).

• Pokey: “Well, it is a gazillion years too early for you to oppose Giygas!”
  • A variant of the Japanese proverb It’s a hundred years too early for you to…
• Pokey: Call for help you pathetically weak heroes of so-called justice!
• Paula: Please, God, if you’re real…
  • Shigesato Itoi, EarthBound, (August 1994).

• Demona: Aside from Xanatos, we have no human friends, nor should we. Humanity is our enemy, Goliath. I thought you learned that a millennium ago.

Goliath: I cannot make war upon an entire world. Doesn't Xanatos prove that there are good humans as well as [bad]]?

Demona: Can you forgive the humans for what they did to our kind?

Goliath: The ones responsible for that have been dead for a thousand years.

Demona: Then their descendants shall pay! I will have blood for blood!

Goliath: You said the centuries have changed me. They've changed you, too. You've become hard, unforgiving. You're not as I remember you. I'm going to see my friend now.

• Gargoyles (TV series) Awakening Part 5, written by Michael Reaves, story by: Michael Reaves & Eric Luke, (Jan 1, 1995).

• Dave Nelson: Um how can I explain this? Um Mike was many things to many people. But to the people of this office he was he was a way of escaping the horrors they report on every day.

Mr. James: Uh-huh.

Dave Nelson: Mike, to these people was a means of maintaining their humanity, their emotional dignity.

Mr. James: Who's Mike?

Dave Nelson: The rat.

Mr. James: Oh! Right. So, what you're saying is that I've got to be more sensitive to my employees.

Dave Nelson: They are human beings.

Mr. James: Oh, I see. You're pretending that you really care about these people.

• Paul Simms & Lewis Morton, NewsRadio, "Rat Funeral", (October 10, 1995).

• Misato Katsuragi: Why did you ignore my orders!?

Shinji Ikari: I apologize.

Misato Katsuragi: I’m the one who’s in charge of your operations aren’t I?

Shinji Ikari: Yes.

Misato Katsuragi: You do know you’re supposed to obey my orders, understand?

Shinji Ikari: Yes.

Misato Katsuragi: I’m warning you! Do not do it again!

Shinji Ikari: Yes.

Misato Katsuragi: Hey! Are you even listening to anything I’m even saying?!

Shinji Ikari: Yes.

Misato Katsuragi: Oh no you don’t! You’re not gunna get out of this by just saying “yes” to everything I say!

Shinji Ikari: I know Ms. Misato. We won didn’t we? Isn’t that enough?

Misato Katsuragi: Urgh! You know it may seem easy going along with whatever anyone else wants, but if you get into an Eva with that attitude it’ll kill you!

Shinji Ikari: You know I just don’t care anymore.

Misato Katsuragi: It’d be nice if I could say you’ve got the right attitude. But if you think you’re going to get any praise out of me, you’re wrong Shinji!

Shinji Ikari: Ugh, that’s not the point. Anyway I’m the only one who could pilot it. I’ll just have to do.

• Akio Satsukawa, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Hedgehog's Dilemma, (October 25, 1995).

• Dr. Frank: What's on your mind? I'm not here for therapy, okay? Sorry, sorry.

Dave Nelson: I want to tell you I really resent the hell out of the fact that you just waltz in here, and start giving these people the same advice I give them, and then they treat you like you're some kind of guru.

• Dr. Frank: I see, but--

Dave Nelson: I have to be here every day, listening to all their problems and complaints.

Dr. Frank: Seems to me-- I guess the very fact that they keep coming back to me shows they at least respect my opinion and trust me enough to confide in me.

Dr. Faank: Well, that's true.

Dave Nelson: Yeah. That is true.

Dr. Frank: Thank God, we didn't do any therapy.

• Andrew Gordon & Eileen Conn, NewsRadio, "The Shrink", (Nov 7, 1995)

• Richter Belmont: Die, monster! You don't belong in this world!

Dracula: It was not by my hand that I'm once again given flesh. I was called here by humans who wish to pay me tribute.

Richter: "Tribute"?! You steal men's souls, and make them your slaves!

Dracula: Perhaps the same could be said of all religions.

Richter: Your words are as empty as your soul! Mankind ill needs a savior such as you!

Dracula: What is a man? [flings his wine glass aside] A miserable little pile of secrets! But enough talk! Have at you!

• Koji Igarashi, Toshiharu Furukawa, Castlevania Symphony of the Night, (March 20, 1997).

• Misato: Shinji, listen to me. From now on you’re on your own. You’ll have to make your own decisions; no one can do it for you.

Shinji: I... I can’t. I’m no good. I can’t pilot Eva if all I do is hurt and kill people. I thought I had no choice but to pilot Eva, but I was just lying to myself. I’m not worthy of piloting an Eva because I don’t understand anything! I’m incapable of doing anything good for anybody else. I did something terrible to Asuka. I killed Kaworu. I’m a horrible person. I'm dishonest and a coward. All I ever do is hurt other people, so I’d rather do nothing at all!

Misato: I’m not going to feel sorry for you. If you don’t like feeling pain, then you can just sit here and let them kill you!

[Shinji begins to cry]

Misato: Crying isn’t going to solve anything, either! [pauses] You hate yourself, don’t you? That’s why you hurt others. Deep down you know that you suffer more when you cause someone else pain, than if you just let yourself get hurt. But, Shinji, that was your decision, so that makes it a valid choice. That was what you wanted, so that makes it worthwhile. Stop lying to yourself, and realize that you do have options. Then accept the choices you’ve made.

Shinji: But you're not me. You don’t know what I have to go through. You don’t understand!

Misato: So fucking what if I’m not you?! That doesn’t mean its okay for you to give up! If you do, I’ll never forgive you as long as I live. God knows I’m not perfect either. I’ve made tons of stupid mistakes and later I regretted them. And I’ve done it over and over again, thousands of times. A cycle of hollow joy and vicious self-hatred. But even so, every time I learned something about myself. Please, Shinji. You’ve got to pilot Eva and settle this once and for all. For your own sake. Find out why you came here. Why you exist at all. Answer your own questions. And when you’ve found your answers, come back to me. I’ll be waiting for you. Promise me.

• Shinji: Nobody understands me.

Rei: You never understood anything.

Shinji: I thought this was supposed to be a world without pain, and without uncertainty.

Rei: That's because you thought that everyone else felt the same as you do.

Shinji: You betrayed me! You betrayed my feelings!

Rei: You misunderstood from the very beginning. You just believed what you wanted to believe.

Shinji: Nobody wants me, so they can all just die.

Rei: Then what is your hand for?

Shinji: Nobody cares whether or not I exist. Nothing ever changes, so they can all just die.

Rei: Then tell me, what is your heart for?

Shinji: It would be better if I never existed. I should just die, too.

Rei: Then why are you here?

• Hideaki Anno, The End of Evangelion (July 19, 1997).

• Why shouldn't I work for the N.S.A.? That's a tough one, but I'll take a shot. Say I'm workin' at the N.S.A. and somebody puts a code on my desk, somethin' no one else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it, maybe I break it. And I'm real happy with myself, 'cause I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. And once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels are hidin'. Fifteen hundred people that I never met, I never had no problem with, get killed. Now the politicians are sayin', 'Oh, send in the Marines to secure the area,' 'cause they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there gettin' shot. Just like it wasn't them when their number got called 'cause they were out pullin' a tour in the National Guard. It'll be some kid from Southie over there takin' shrapnel in the ass. He comes back to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, 'cause he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks.
  Meanwhile he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so that we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And of course the oil companies used the little skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices. A cute little ancillary benefit for them but it ain't helpin' my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. They're takin' their sweet time bringin' the oil back, of course, maybe they even took the liberty of hirin' an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and fuckin' play slalom with the icebergs. It ain't too long 'til he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So now my buddy's out of work. He can't afford to drive, so he's walkin' to the fuckin' job interviews, which sucks because the shrapnel in his ass is givin' him chronic hemorroids. And meanwhile he's starvin' 'cause every time he tries to get a bite to eat, the only blue plate special they're servin' is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State.
  So what did I think? I'm holdin' out for somethin' better. I figure, fuck it, while I'm at it, why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected president.
  • Good Will Hunting, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, (December 5, 1997).

• Campbell: Snake, there's enough dirt in your file from your days as an agent to keep you in the stockade until you're a very old man.

Snake: Oh I see. Blackmail.

Campbell: No Snake. I prefer to look at it as helping you to come to a decision more easily. But anyway, I know you better than that. You'd take this assignment even without the threat.

Snake: Why do you say that?

Campbell: You're a natural born soldier. You're not the grow old gracefully type. Same for all of us who've seen real action. The only place we can feel truly alive is on the battlefield.

• Snake: Colonel, you're retired. Why are you involved in this?

Campbell: Because there aren't many people who know FOX-HOUND as well as I do.

Snake: Is that really the only reason?

Campbell: I've been soldiering for a long time, I don't know anything else. I guess even though I'm getting a little old, I still love to be in the field.

Snake: Colonel, you're a lousy liar. Tell me the real reason.

Campbell : Okay Snake. Sorry. I'll be frank. A person very dear to me is being held hostage.

• • Hideo Kojima, Tomokazu Fukushima, Metal Gear Solid, (September 3, 1998).

• Bruce Wayne: [answers ringing phone] Yes?

James Gordon: Wayne.

Bruce Wayne: Commissioner. What can I do for you?

Gordon: Drop the act. Ten minutes on Barbara's computer told me everything. Like a fool I allowed you to run wild on your private crusade. A psychotic misfit playing masked hero. Now I've paid for it with Barbara's life.

Bruce Wayne: Jim, believe me, I know how you feel.

Gordon: You can't.

Wayne: You know how I lost my parents. The only way I could hold onto my own sanity was to take matters into my own hands.

Gordon: That makes us even.

• Paul Dini, "Over the Edge", The New Batman Adventures, (May 23, 1998).

• Dick Grayson: Batman, not like this. Not in front of his family.

Batman: The sooner he talks the sooner we leave!

Dick Grayson: (sees child starting to cry) I'm outta here now!

• Rich Fogel, "Old Wounds", The New Batman Adventures, (October 3, 1998).

• Kai: Theater is a medium for communal story telling Stanley. For exploring myth, it is a place of cultural and intellectual enrichment.
• Master: The Brunnen-G were a race of romantic warriors, forever famous for leading humankind to victory, in the great insect wars. Mankind survived, but the Brunnen-G planet was dying, so in time they abandoned it, for a new home in the light universe. But by then the insect wars had faded into a hazy past, and man was once again fighting against man. The Brunnen-G turned inward, building a great defensive shield around their planet, safe inside their sphere of silence, they directed their fertile minds against the oldest enemy of them all...death. By manipulating their bodies innermost cell structure, they unlocked the secret of never-ending life. No Brunnen-G Would ever grow old again, they thought by freeing their bodies of aging, that they would become immortal gods at play, but humans are not designed to live forever, their bodies did not age, but they became a feared of everything and anything, for partaking in any activity at all could threaten their precious and ageless bodies.
• Time Prophet: Time begins, and then time ends,
  and then time begins once again
  It is happening now, it has happened before,
  it will surely happen again.
  

• Lex Gigeroff, Paul Donovan, "Brigadoom"; Lexx, (April 9, 1999).

• Hiko Seijuro: Murder is the only art a swordsman may practice. No ornamental words can change that. You want to protect people with murder? You’ll slaughter legions so that a few may live. Many years, long before you were born, my sword was tearing asunder the lives of men. Yes, all of those men were evil, but they were human beings first and foremost, Kenshin. The world you ardently desire to enter will not know what to do with you. It will deceive you into believing that you are saving lives even as you destroy them. You will accept these lies all the while, your hands will be stained with the worst of offenses.
  • Masashi Sogo, Samurai X: Trust & Betrayal, (February 20, 1999 – November 22, 1999).

• Magneto: Are you a God-fearing man, Senator? It's such a strange phrase. I've always thought of God as a teacher. As a bringer of light, wisdom and understanding. You see, l think what you really are afraid of is me. Me and my kind. The brotherhood of mutants. It's not so surprising, really. Mankind has always feared what it doesn't understand. Well, don't fear God, Senator, and certainly don't fear me. Not any more.
  • David Hayter, Tom DeSanto and Bryan Singer; X-Men (film), (July 12, 2000).

• Naraku: Because the priestess Kikyo was so powerless, the region teamed with demons. Her strength had diminished because she had fallen in love with a certain half-demon. She submitted to her childish desires and had attempted to use the Shikon Jewel for her own purposes. For that, she was punished. And, Inuyasha, you suffered the punishment as well.

Inuyasha: You bastard!! You are to blame for everything that happened!! You deceived Kikyo and I!! You tricked us into trying to kill one another!!

Naraku: Then tell me. How was it that the trust you two held in each other was so easily destroyed?

Inuyasha: What are you saying!?

Naraku: It was anger and bitter anger that set you against one another. Even Kikyo could comprehend it. She should have chosen to live and used the power of the Sacred Jewel to save herself. Instead she chose death. Had she pleaded for her life, her pathetic, wretched wish would have been easily granted. Then she would have understood the ultimate truth of darkness. Foolish woman. It is claimed that the sacred Shikon Jewel grows more beautiful when it is tainted with malice.

Inuyasha: Kagome, look inside him!! How many fragments are there!!?

Kagome: I know there are lots. Ten! No, twenty! Wait, there's even more than I can count!

Inuyasha: Hey, Naraku, wanna see something really scary!? I'll slit you from head to toe to show you what malice means!!

• Rumiko Takahashi, "Naraku's True Identity Unveiled", InuYasha, (April 9, 2001).

• If it means interfering in an ensconced, outdated system, to help just one woman, man or child…I’m willing to accept the consequences.
• If the prospect of living in a world where trying to respect the basic rights of those around you and valuing each other simply because we exist are such daunting, impossible tasks that only a superhero born of royalty can address them, then what sort of world are we left with? And what sort of world do you want to live in?
  • Joe Kelly, Phil Jiminez, Wonder Woman vol. 2, #170 (She's a Wonder), (July 2001).

• Gandalf: Don't... tempt me, Frodo! I dare not take it. Not even to keep it safe. Understand, Frodo, I would use this Ring from the desire to do good. But through me, it would wield a power too great and terrible to imagine.
  • Frances Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Peter Jackson; The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, (10, December 2001).

• Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
  Through passion, I gain strength.
  Through strength, I gain power.
  Through power, I gain victory.
  Through victory, my chains are broken.
  The Force shall free me.
  • David Gaider, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, (July 15, 2003)

• Lord Batman: Think about it - a world where there's no crimes. No victims. No pain.

Batman: And no choice! Who elected you, anyway?

Lord Batman: Who elected you? The problem with democracy is, it doesn't keep you very safe.

Batman: It has other virtues. But you seem to have forgotten that.

Lord Batman: I didn't forget! I just chose peace and security instead.

Batman: You grabbed power!

Lord Batman: And with that power, we've made a world where no eight-year-old boy will ever lose his parents...because of some punk with a gun!

Batman: [pauses, then drops his Batarang] You win.

• Stan Berkowitz, Justice League (TV series), "A Better World", (November 1, 2003).

• Rise and shine, Adam. You're probably wondering where you are. I'll tell you where you might be. You might be in the room you die in. Up until now you simply sat in the shadows watching others live out their lives. But what do voyeurs see when they look into the mirror? Now, I see you as a strange mix of someone angry, yet apathetic. But mostly just pathetic. So are you going to watch yourself die today, Adam, or do something about it?
• Dr. Gordon, this is your wake-up call. Every day of your working life you have given people the news that they're going to die soon. Now, you will be the cause of death. Your aim in this game is to kill Adam. You have until six on the clock to do it. There's a man in the room with you. When there's that much poison in your blood, the only thing left to do -- is shoot yourself. There are ways to win this hidden all around you. Just remember, X marks the spot for the treasure. If you do not kill Adam by six, then Alison and Diana will die, Dr. Gordon... and I'll leave you in this room to rot. Let the game begin. [whispers] Follow your heart.
• Hello, Paul. You are a perfectly healthy, sane and middle-class male. Yet last month you ran a straight razor across your wrist. Did you cut yourself because you truly wanted to die, or did you just want some attention? Tonight, you'll show me. The irony is that if you want to die you just have to stay where you are, but if you want to live, you'll have to cut yourself again. Find the path through the razor-wire to the door. But hurry. At three o'clock that door will lock, and then, this room becomes your tomb. How much blood will you shed to stay alive, Paul?
• Hello, Mark. If you are so sick, then why do I have so many photos of you up and about? Let's put your so-called "illness" to the test. Right now, there's a slow acting poison in your veins. The antidote is inside the safe; the combination to the safe is written on the wall. Hurry up and program it in, but watch your step. By the way, that's a flammable substance smeared on your body, so I would be careful with that candle if I were you... or all the people you've burned with your act just might have their revenge.
• Hello, Amanda. You don't know me, but I know you. I want to play a game. Here's what happens if you lose. The device you are wearing is hooked into your upper and lower jaw. When the timer in the back goes off, your mouth will be permanently ripped open. Think of it like a reverse bear trap. Here, I'll show you. [on videotape, a mannequin's head is destroyed by the device] There is only one key to open the device. It's in the stomach of your dead cell mate. Look around, Amanda. Know that I'm not lying. You better hurry up. Live or die. Make your choice.
• Congratulations. You are still alive. Most people are so ungrateful to be alive. But not you. Not anymore.
• Hello Mr. Hindle. Or as they called you around the hospital: Zepp. I want you to make a choice. There's a slow-acting poison coursing through your system, which only I have the antidote for. Will you murder a mother and her child to save yourself? Listen carefully, if you will. There are rules.

• Leigh Whannel, Saw (2004 film), (October 29, 2004)

• Colette: What is it, Lloyd?

Lloyd: I thought it’d be nice for us to talk just by ourselves.

Colette: ...Sure.

Lloyd: (giving Colette one of the mugs) Here, it's hot coffee.

Colette: Thanks.

Lloyd: Hot isn't it?

Colette: Yeah... really hot.

Lloyd: (with concern) It's actually iced coffee.

Colette: What?

Lloyd: I had Genis make it cold.

Colette: (nervously) Oh...yeah, of course it's cold.

Lloyd: I lied. It's actually hot.

[Colette drops the mug in shock of his realization.]

Lloyd: ...I knew it. How long have you been like this?! You can’t feel anything at all, can you?!

Colette: Th-that’s not true.

Lloyd: (getting angrier) You’re lying! When you fell earlier, you already couldn’t feel anything, could you?!

Colette: (nervously fumbling) W-well, uh...but...uh...

Lloyd: You were bleeding like crazy, but you didn’t even flinch when I squeezed your hand!

Colette: ...I guess the secret’s out.

Lloyd: You haven’t been eating lately either.

Colette: I eat! Hehe...

Lloyd: Barely. You even started eating things you don’t like. And that’s not all. Have you been sleeping?

Colette: Of course. Hehe...see; my eyes aren’t red or anything.

Lloyd: Stop lying to me! You always do that fake giggle when you lie.

Colette: Th-that’s not true...

Lloyd: (calming down) Is it that hard for you to trust me?

Colette: (resigned) No! It’s not like that! I just...I just didn’t want anyone to worry.

Lloyd: What’s happening to you?

• Takumi Miyajima, Tales of Symphonia, (October 29, 2004)

Mithos Yggdrasill: By using the Exspheres to eliminate the different bloods that flow within elves and humans, everyone will become the same lifeless beings. Discrimination will vanish. That is the grand age I strive for.

Mithos Yggdrasill: People fear and hate what is not normal. They are scared of those that are different. Then the solution is for everyone to become the same.

Mithos Yggdrasill: Is it a sin to be weak hearted? Not everyone's strong. Not everyone can stand being despised.

Mithos Yggdrasill: Farewell, my shadow, you who stand at the end of the path I chose not to follow. I wanted my own world, so I don't regret my choice. I would make the same choice all over again. I will continue to choose this path!

• Takumi Miyajima, Tales of Symphonia, (October 29, 2004)

Light: I'll make this a world inhabited only by people I decide are good!

Ryuk: You do something like that, the only one left with a bad personality will be you...

Light: What are you talking about, Ryuk? I'm a serious, straight-A student... a model teenager. And I... will reign over a new world.

Ryuk: [to himself] I was right. Humans... are fun!!

• Tsugumi Obha, Death Note, ch.1, "Boredom", (April 2, 2004).

[In Peter's mind sitting in Ben’s car]

Ben Parker: All the things you've been thinking about, Peter, make me sad.

Peter: Can’t you understand? I’m in love with Mary Jane.

Ben': Peter all the times we talked about honesty, fairness, justice all those times I counted on you to have the courage to take those dreams out into the world.

Peter: I can’t live your dreams anymore. I want a life of my own.

Ben: You’ve been given a gift Peter, with great power comes great responsibility. Take my hand son.

Peter: No, Uncle Ben. I’m just Peter Parker. I’m Spider-Man no more. No more.

• Alvin Sargent, Spider-Man 2, (July 2, 2004).

• Superman: Each of you brings something different to the table. Strength. Speed. Stealth. Whatever. But we're all equal in at least one way: Each of us is willing to make the sacrifices a hero needs to make, even the ultimate one. Since there are so many of us, we have a chance to do more than just put out fires, both literal and figurative. We can be proactive. We can do some real good in the world. But we're going to have to be organized. J'onn'll be up here keeping an eye on everything. He'll be the one to decide whose going where and when. I know a lot of you are used to making those decisions for yourself, but from now on we have to be more coordinated than that. We can't be cowboys any more... or cowgirls.

• Stan Berkowitz, Justice League Unlimited, "Initiation", (July 31, 2004).

• Van-El: Dad! [The ground shakes] Dad? You've gotta look at thi- [Sees Kal-El's troubled expression] What's...what's the matter? Why are you -

Kal-El: Van, when you were born, it was the happiest day of my life. When I first saw your beautiful little face, your tiny fingers squeezed my hand so tight, like you never wanted to let go. I've watched every step, every struggle...I-I've... but, Van...[eyes begin to water] oh, Rao help me... but I don't think you're real. I don't think any of this is-is real..

Van-El: Don't say that, Daddy...please, you're scaring me... [hugs his father]

Kal-El: No, no, I don't want to scare you, Van. You are everything I ever wanted in a son. This...this is everything I ever wanted in a life. But I've got responsibilities, Van, and I...have to...go now...

[Hugs his son as Krypton begins to tear itself apart, and kisses him on the forehead]

Van-El: [Tearful] Daddy...

Kal-El: I promise you... I'll never forget.

[Krypton explodes]

• Superman: Do you have any idea what you did to me?!

Mongul: I fashioned a prison that you couldn't leave without sacrificing your heart's desire. It must have been like tearing off your own arm.

• J. M. DeMatteis, Justice League Unlimited, For the Man Who Has Everything", (August 7, 2004).

• Edard Elric: State Alchemists are military and get thrown into service whenever war breaks out. You have to do what they say, even hurt people, for some good you don't understand. It means you're a dog of the state, with a leash around your neck...
  • Hiromu Arakawa, Fullmetal Alchemist, "The Alchemy Exam", (December 11, 2004)

[As he intercepts her on her bath]

Batman: Amanda Waller. Born in St. Louis, road scholar, PhD in Political Science. Served in Intelligence, under three administrations. Disappeared from public life, four years ago.

Amanda Waller: (deadpan) Am I supposed to be impressed? Maybe I should rattle off your resume now? Y'know, I could blow the whistle on you any time I want...

Batman: Fine, why don't WE step into the light together? I'm sure the American people would be just as interested in YOUR activities as mine - Secret weapons, illegal cloning experiments, bypassing Congress...

Amanda Waller: What do you want!?

Batman: I want to know what you think you're doing.

Amanda Waller: Did Superman ever mention that to get Luthor's pardon, he had to tell us about your parallel universe adventure? All about it? We started to wonder what would if you took the same action that the Justice Lords did. So I had my people run some computer simulations: If the Justice League ever went rogue, what do you think would occur?

Batman: That's moot...

Amanda Waller: (Dryly) Humor me. In every single scenario, you beat us. Badly. But that was before CADMUS Now we have the technology to defend ourselves.

Batman: (Threatening) Whatever you think you're doing, if you present a threat to the world, the Justice League will take you down...

Amanda Waller: (Angry) If we present a threat!? You got a SPACESHIP floating over our heads with a laser cannon pointing down! In another dimension, seven of you overthrew the government and assassinated the President! WE are the good guys, protecting our country from a very real threat: you.

• Robert Goodman, Justice League Unlimited, "Doomsday Sanction", (February 19, 2005).

• Man: Are you so desperate to fight criminals that you lock yourself in to take them on one at a time?

Bruce: Actually, there were seven of them.

Man: I counted six, Mr. Wayne.

Bruce: How do you know my name?

Man: The world is too small a place for someone like Bruce Wayne to disappear no matter how low he chooses to sink.

Bruce: Who are you?

Man: My name is merely Ducard, but I speak for Ra’s Al Ghul, a man greatly feared by the criminal underworld. A man who can offer you a path.

Bruce: What makes you think I need a path?

Ducard: Someone like you is only here by choice. You have been exploring the criminal fraternity, but whatever your original intentions, you have become truly lost.

Bruce: And what path can Ra’s Al Ghul offer?

Ducard: The path of a man who shares his hatred of evil and wished to serve true justice. The path of the League of Shadows.

Bruce: You’re vigilantes.

Ducard: No, no, no. A vigilante is just a man lost in the scramble for his own gratification. He can be destroyed or locked up. But if you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, and if they can’t stop you, then you become something else entirely.

• Ducard: Amusing, but pointless. None of these people have long to live. Your antics at the asylum have forced my hand.

Bruce Wayne: So Crane was working for you.

Ducard: His toxin is derived from the organic compound found in our blue flowers. He was able to weaponize it.

Wayne: He's not a member of the League of Shadows?

Ducard: Of course not. He thought our plan was to hold the city to ransom.

Wayne: But really, you are going to release Crane's poison on the entire city.

Ducard: Then watch Gotham tear itself apart through fear.

Wayne: You're going to destroy millions of lives.

Ducard: Only a cynical man would call what these people have "lives," Wayne. Crime. Despair. This was not how man was supposed to live. The League of Shadows has been a check against human corruption for thousands of years. We sacked Rome, loaded trade ships with plague rats. Burned London to the ground. Every time a civilization reaches the pinnacle of its decadence, we return to restore the balance.

Wayne: Gotham isn't beyond saving. Give me more time. There are good people here.

Ducard: You are defending a city so corrupt, we have infiltrated every level of its infrastructure. When I found you in that jail, you were lost. But I believed in you. I took away your fear, and showed you a path. You were my greatest student. It should be you standing by my side, saving the world.

Wayne: I'll be standing where I belong: between you, and the people of Gotham.

Ducard: No one can save Gotham. [nods to henchmen, who begin vandalizing the house and set it on fire] When a forest grows too wild, a purging fire is inevitable and natural. Tomorrow, the world will watch in horror as its greatest city destroys itself. The movement back to harmony will be unstoppable this time.

Wayne: You've attacked Gotham before?

Ducard: Of course. Over the ages, our weapons have grown more sophisticated. With Gotham, we tried a new one - economics. But, we underestimated certain of Gotham's citizens. Such as your parents. Gunned down by one of the very people they were trying to help. Create enough hunger and everyone becomes a criminal. Their deaths galvanized the city unto saving itself and Gotham has limped on ever since. We are back to finish the job. And this time, no misguided idealists will get in the way. Like your father, you lack the courage to do all that is necessary. If someone stands in the way of true justice, you simply walk up behind them, and stab them in the heart.

• Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer, Batman Begins, (June 15, 2005).

• Adam: Your skills have given birth to many lives which never should have been.
• Adam: Nature mandates that mankind will eventually succumb to its poison. However, humans created their own poison, called medicine. It's delusional to believe you can poison Nature to avoid your fate.

Dr. Stiles: No... It's delusional to dismiss people's deaths as "fate."

• Adam: Mankind's greed has no ending...You continue to consume everything until even your host is laid waste. Is your survival that important?...So important you would trade it for the earth's destruction?
• Dr. Stiles: If people as a whole are consuming too much, then maybe that's another disease we have to cure!

• Shogo Isogai, Trauma Center: Under the Knife, (June 30, 2005).

• Superman: Give me one good reason not to go down there and take them out.

Martian Manhunter: If you didn't know the answer, you wouldn't have bothered to ask.

Superman: Don't handle me, J'onn! I'm serious!

Martian Manhunter: We don't have hard evidence that they've committed any crimes.

Superman: Oh, come on! You know they're dirty!

Green Arrow: Then maybe we should put more energy into proving it, and less into acting like a bunch of hyperthyroid stormtroopers.

Superman: I don't remember asking you for your opinion!

Green Arrow: No? How about when you guys hijacked me up here against my will and made me join this team? Batman said I was supposed to keep you guys honest.

Superman: Do I look like Batman to you?

Flash: Actually, you kind of do. Especially when you're all scowly like that.

Superman: We can't let Cadmus get away with it!

Martian Manhunter: No one's saying we should, but we have to keep a cool head.

Supergirl: Do you know what they did to me?!

Green Arrow: Look, kid. Hamilton's a piece of garbage, and Luthor is worse, but this isn't the way to stop them.

Martian Manhunter: We must also consider the possibility that CADMUS is right to be afraid of us...

Supergirl: [outraged] WHAT?!

Martian Manhunter: ...and there is strong evidence of CADMUS having legitimate connections to the government.

Superman: Maybe, to some rogue black ops group! The real government wouldn't get involved in anything like this!

Green Arrow: Hey, I'm the only guy in the room who doesn't have superpowers, and let me tell you: you guys scare me. What if you do decide to go down there, taking care of whoever you think is guilty? Who could stop you? Me?

Supergirl: So you want the government to have a bunch of superhuman weapons just to keep us in check?!

Green Arrow: No!... I don't know... Yeah! [regaining composure] Look, I'm an old lefty. The government must do for people what people can't do for themselves. The people sure can't protect themselves from the likes of us.

Superman: We're not talking about the government. We're talking about a shadow cabinet that's taken it upon themselves to eliminate us! They came after us, we have to hit them back hard.

Flash: Grammy Flash always used to say the trouble with "an eye for an eye", is that everybody ends up blind.

• Dwayne McDuffie, Justice League Unlimited, "Flashpoint", (July 2, 2005).

• Superman: This is the hardest thing I've ever had to say... I'm guilty. We're guilty. Of the sin of hubris. We had the best of intentions, to be Earth's guardians, to keep you safe, but we failed you. We looked down on the world from our tower in the sky, and let our power and responsibility separate us from the very people we were supposed to protect. No one should ever be afraid of us. For that reason, we're decommissioning the Watchtower. The energy weapon up there is already gone; we're taking down the station as well. There's more. We want to thank the members of the Justice League for your courageous service, but in the future, you'll all have to act as independent agents. We're not going to be an army anymore. As of right now, we're disbanding the Justice League. This is the end.

[The founding members begin to walk off the stage, but are stopped when Green Arrow speaks]

Green Arrow: Says who? You remember what we did yesterday? We saved the world, again. You don't think that has any value? Well, think again, pal! The Justice League goes on, with or without you. Look, nobody can question your service or commitment to making things better. If you're quitting because you think you've already done your fair share, fine. We'll throw you a parade. But if you're quitting because it's easier than continuing the fight, then you're not the heroes we all thought you were. The world needs the Justice League, and the Justice League needs you, Superman!

[Crowd cheers]

• Dwayne McDuffie, Justice League Unlimited, "Divided We Fall", (July 16, 2005).

• Terry McGinnis: How could you do it to me, Bruce?!

Bruce Wayne: The only thing that matters is the mission. You know that.

Terry McGinnis: What about people, Bruce? Dick, Barbara, Tim, Selina - they all loved you, but eventually every single one of them left you! Ever wonder why?

Bruce Wayne: Not for an instant. They quit because when it came down to it, they didn't have the heart for the mission. Are you about to quit too? It doesn't really surprise me.

• Bruce Timm, Dwayne McDuffie, Justice League Unlimited, "Epilogue", (July 23, 2005).

• John: Well, that's an interesting approach to police work, isn't it? Aren't you supposed to be convincing me that I'm your friend, lulling me into a false sense of security so that I'll confide in you?

Eric Matthews: It's a little hard to follow the manual when you've got my son, John.

John: The manual? What do you really want to do to me right now, huh? What would you have done five years ago? Would you have followed the manual then? Would you have broken my jaw with a flashlight?

• Leigh Whannell and Darren Lynn Bousman, Saw II, (October 28, 2005).

• The Doctor: Don't challenge me, Harriet Jones! 'Cos I'm a completely new man! I could bring down your government with a single word!

Harriet Jones: You're the most remarkable man I've ever met. But I don't think you're quite capable of that.

The Doctor: No, you're right. Not a single word; just six.

Harriet Jones: I don't think so.

The Doctor: Six words.

Harriet Jones: Stop it!

The Doctor: Six. [walks over to Alex and whispers to him] Don't you think she looks tired?

• Russell T Davies, "The Christmas Invasion", Doctor Who, (25 December 2005)

• Father Angelo: We will take the house.

Steward: Would you like my wife while you're at it?

Father Angelo: If you won't stand aside then we'll take it by force.

Steward: By what power? The hand of God?

Father Angelo: No. The fist of man. [He whips the steward into submission with his cane. At the wave of his hand, his fellow monks take off their robes, and, demonstrating incredible martial skills, they make short work of the rest of the men.]

• Russell T Davies, Tooth and Claw, Doctor Who, (22 April 2006).

• The Doctor: Rose, if you've ever trusted me, then listen to me now. Stop looking at it. Your father's dead. He died when you were six months old. That is not your Pete. That is a Pete. For all we know, he's got his own Jackie, his own Rose. His own daughter who is someone else, but not you. You can't see him. Not ever.
• The Doctor: You lot, you're obsessed. You'd do anything for the latest upgrade.

Rose: Oi, not my lot. Different world, remember.

The Doctor: It's not so far off your world. This place is only parallel.

• Tom Macrae, "Rise of the Cybermen", Doctor Who, (13 May 2006).

• Superboy-Prime: [battling Superman]] I'm the only one who can rescue this messed-up universe. I'm the only one who knows how to make it right. I will be its greatest [[hero! When you're gone... I will be Superman!

Superman: Superman? [rips the S-Shield off Superboy-Prime's costume] You'll never be Superman. Because you have no idea what it means to be Superman.

Superboy-Prime: Yes I do. I'm from Krypton! A better Krypton than yours ever was!

Superman: It's not about where you were born. Or what powers you have. Or what you wear on your chest.

Superboy-Prime: Shut up! [the two continue fighting]

Superman: [after defeating Superboy-Prime] It's about what you do... It's about action.

• Geoff Johns, Infinite Crisis #7, (June 2006).

• Light Yagami: Kill me? Is that really the right thing to do? Since Kira's appearance 6 years ago wars have stopped and global crime rates have been reduced by over 70 percent: but its not enough, this world is still rotten. With too many rotten people. Somebody has to do this, and when I first got that notebook all those years ago I knew I had to do it. No, I was the only one who could. I understood that killing people was a crime. There was no other way the world had to be fixed, a purpose given to me. Only I could do it. Who else could have done it, and come this far? Would they have kept going? The only one who could create a new world - is me.
• Near: No, you're just a murderer Light Yagami. And this notebook is the deadliest weapon in the history of mankind.
  • Tsugumi Ohba, Death Note #108, (July 4, 2006).

• Andrew Ryan: The assassin has overcome my final defense, and now, he's come to murder me. In the end, what separates a man from a slave? Money? Power? No. A man chooses; a slave obeys. You think you have memories: a farm, a family, an airplane, a crash, and then this place. Was there really a family? Did that airplane crash, or was it hijacked? Forced down by something less than a man, something bred to sleepwalk through life until activated by a simple phrase from their kindly master? Was a man sent to kill, or a slave? A man chooses; a slave obeys. Enter. [Ryan's office door opens; Jack approaches] Stop, would you kindly? [Jack obeys] Would you kindly? Powerful phrase. Familiar phrase? [Jack recalls all the times Atlas said "Would you kindly"] Sit, would you kindly? [Jack sits] Stand, would you kindly? [Jack stands, Ryan motioning him up with his club] Run. [Jack runs] Stop. [Jack stops] Turn. [Jack turns to face Ryan] A man chooses; a slave obeys. [hands Jack his golf club] Kill! [Jack strikes Ryan in the head] A man chooses! [Jack strikes again] A slave obeys! [Jack strikes again] OBEY!! [Jack lodges the golf club in Ryan's skull; Ryan falls over dead]
  • Ken Levine, Bioshock, (August 2007).

• Cartman: What the hell do you think you're doing declaring leprechauns aren't real?!
  General: What?
  Cartman: You just can't declare that imaginary things aren't real! Who are you to say what's real?! Think about it: is blue real? Is love really real?
  Lab Tech: Imaginary things are things made up by people, like Santa and Rudolph,
  Tom: Yeah, and they detract from real things, like Jesus.
  Tech 1: Maybe Jesus is imaginary too.
  Tom: Ooooh, you'd better not say that! You'll go to hell!
  Tech 7: It's possible that hell is also imaginary.
  
• Kyle: It's all real. Think about it. Haven't Luke Skywalker and Santa Claus affected your lives more than most real people in this room? I mean, whether Jesus is real or not, he...he's had a bigger impact on the world than any of us have. And the same could be said of Bugs Bunny and Superman and Harry Potter. They've changed my life, changed the way I act on the Earth. Doesn't that make them kind of "real." They might be imaginary, but they're more important than most of us here. And they're all gonna be around long after we're dead. So in a way, those things are more realer than any of us.
  • Trey Parker, "Imaginationland Episode III", South Park, (October 31, 2007).

• L: There are many types of monsters that scare me: Monsters who cause trouble without showing themselves, monsters who abduct children, monsters who devour dreams, monsters who suck blood... and then, monsters who tell nothing but lies. Lying monsters are a real nuisance: They are much more cunning than others. They pose as humans even though they have no understanding of the human heart; they eat even though they've never experienced hunger; they study even though they have no interest in academics; they seek friendship even though they do not know how to love. If I were to encounter such monsters, I would likely be eaten by them... because in truth, I am that monster.

• DEATH NOTE ディレクターズカット完全決着版 〜リライト2 Lを継ぐ者〜, (English: Death Note Relight 2: L's Successors), (August 22, 2008).

• Adelaide: [Pointing her gun at the Doctor] State your name, rank, and intention!

The Doctor: The Doctor. Doctor. Fun.

Tarak: What the hell? It's a man. A man on Mars! How?

Steffi: He was wearing this thing. (His orange spacesuit) I have never seen anything like it.

Tarak: What did Mission Control say?

Steffi: They're out of range for ten hours with the solar flares.

Adelaide: If we could cut the chat, everyone.

The Doctor: Actually, chat's second on my list, the first being gun pointed at my head. Which then puts my head second and chat third, I think. Gun, head, chat, yeah. I hate lists. But you could hurt someone with that thing. Just put it down.

Adelaide: Oh, you'd like that.

The Doctor: Can you find me someone who wouldn't?

• The Doctor: Adelaide, I've done this sort of thing before. In small ways, save some little people, but never anyone as important as you-oh, I'm good!

Adelaide: "Little people"!? What, like Mia and Yuri? Who decides they're so unimportant!? You!?

• Adelaide: No one should have that much power!

The Doctor: Tough.

• Russell T. Davies and Phil Ford, Doctor Who, The Waters of Mars [4.16], (19 December 2009)

• Jason Todd: Ignoring what he's done in the past. Blindly, stupidly disregarding the entire graveyards he's filled, the thousands who have suffered, the friends he's crippled. You know, I thought... I thought I'd be the last person you'd ever let him hurt. If it had been you that he beat to a bloody pulp, if he had taken you from this world, I would've done nothing but search the planet for this pathetic pile of evil, death-worshiping garbage and then send him off to hell!

Batman: You don't understand. I don't think you've ever understood.

Jason Todd: What? What, your moral code just won't allow for that? It's too hard to cross that line?

Batman: No! God Almighty, no! It'd be too damned easy. All I've ever wanted to do is kill him. A day doesn't go by when I don't think about subjecting him to every horrendous torture he's dealt out to others and then... end him.

• Judd Winnick, Batman: Under the Red Hood, (July 27, 2010)

• Idie: It's because we're monsters.

Wolverine: What?

Idie: That's why they want to kill us. You can't blame them. They have every right to be afraid.

Wolverine: Look at me, Idie....you are not a monster, you hear me?

Idie: It's okay. It doesn't bother me anymore. I've made my peace with what I am.

• Jason Aaron (w), Frank Cho (a),X-Men Schism #2, Marvel Comics, (September, 2011).

Cyclops: You think this is noble, what you're doing here? I assure you, it's not. Even if you manage to blow up this one sentinel, there are still thousands more out there. And you'll be casting us right into their midst. Tell me...how is that helping those children?

Wolverine We went off track, Scott. Somewhere along the way. Whenever we started expecting kids to be our combat troops.

Cyclops: I never imagined you of all people could be so naive, Logan.

Wolverine: I'm pushing this button. Walk away, Scott.

Cyclops: She never loved you, you know. You always frightened her.

Wolverine: And if she was here right now...who do you think she'd be more frightened of?

• Jason Aaron (w), Alan Davis (p), Mark Farmer (I), Jason Keith (c); “X-Men Schism” #4, Marvel Comics, (September, 2011), p. 19-20.

• Superman: I finally get it. Thank you... I made the mistake of treating you people like, people. Now, I understand better... I understand now what the world wants, what it NEEDS. The world needs people in charge, willing to put the animals DOWN! [raises a whirlwind on the Elite]
• Superman: They saw the ugliness of violence as a solution and it frightened them. It frightened me too when I decided to cross that line and do what you do. It's so easy. Anger, vengeance. Luckily, I'm not you. And I never will be.

• Joe Kelly, Superman vs. The Elite, (June 12, 2012).

• Rust Cohle: I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, this accretion of sensory experience and feelings, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody's nobody. I think the honorable thing for our species to do is to deny our programming. Stop reproducing. Walk hand in hand into extinction. One last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

Marty Hart: So what's the point of getting out of bed in the morning?

Rust Cohle: I tell myself I bear witness, but the real answer is that it's obviously my programming. And I lack the constitution for suicide.

• Nic Pizzolatto, True Detective, "The Long Bright Dark", (January 12, 2014).

• Marty Hart: I mean, can you imagine if people didn't believe, what things they'd get up to?

Rust Cohle: Exact same thing they do now. Just out in the open.

Marty Hart: Bullshit. It'd be a fucking freak show of murder and debauchery and you know it.

Rust Cohle: If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward, then brother that person is a piece of shit; and I'd like to get as many of them out in the open as possible.

Marty Hart: Well, I guess your judgment is infallible, piece-of-shit-wise. You think that notebook is a stone tablet?

Rust Cohle: What's it say about life, hmm? You gotta get together, tell yourself stories that violate every law of the universe just to get through the goddamn day. Nah. What's that say about your reality, Marty?

• Nic Pizzolatto, True Detective, "The Locked Room", (January 26, 2014).

• Rust Cohle: In eternity, where there is no time, nothing can grow. Nothing can become. Nothing changes. So Death created time to grow the things that it would kill. And you are reborn, but into the same life that you've always been born into. I mean, how many times have we had this conversation, detectives? Well, who knows? When you can't remember your lives, you can't change your lives, and that is the terrible and the secret fate of all life. You're trapped by that nightmare you keep waking up into.

• Nic Pizzolatto, True Detective, "The Secret Fate of All Life", (February 16, 2014).

• Rust Cohle: The newspapers are gonna be tough on you. And prison is very, very hard on people who hurt kids. If you get the opportunity, you should kill yourself.

• Nic Pizzolatto, True Detective, "Haunted Houses", (February 23, 2014).

• Rust Cohle: Life's barely long enough to get good at one thing. So be careful what you get good at.

• Nic Pizzolatto, True Detective, "After You're Gone", (March 2, 2014).

• Rust Cohle: Once there was only dark. If you ask me, the light's winning.

• Nic Pizzolatto, True Detective, "Form and Void", (March 9, 2014).

• Ares: Look at her, and tell me I'm wrong. She is the perfect example of these humans, and unworthy of your sympathy in every way! Destroy her, Diana. You know that she deserves it, they all do!
• Steve Trevor: It's... it's not about "deserve". Maybe-maybe we don't. But it's not about that, it's about what you believe. You don't think I get it after what I've seen out there? You don't think I wish I could tell you that it was one bad guy to blame? It's not! We're all to blame.
• Wonder Woman: It's not about "deserve". It's about what you believe. And I believe in Love.
• Wonder Woman: Where I come from, generals don't hide in their offices like cowards. They fight alongside their soldiers. They die with them on the battlefield!
• Wonder Woman: I used to want to save the world. To end war and bring peace to mankind; but then I glimpsed the darkness that lives within their light. I learnt that inside every one of them there will always be both. The choice each must make for themselves – something no hero will ever defeat. And now I know... that only Love can truly save the world. So now I stay, I fight, and I give – for the world I know can be. This is my mission now. Forever.
  • Allan Heinberg, Wonder Woman, (May 15, 2017).

The Boondocks (comic strip)

by Aaron McGruder

There is no emotion, there is peace.
There is no ignorance, there is knowledge.
There is no passion, there is serenity.
There is no chaos, there is harmony.
There is no death, there is the Force. ~ Jedi Oath

If you strike me down I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. ~ Obi-Wan Kenobi

In their interviews with members of the Army, Navy, and Marines regarding the integration of women in units, Harrell and Miller (1997) argue that their respondents seemed to recognize the distinction between task and social cohesion: Only when both social and task cohesion were low did people rate overall cohesion as low. The negative effects of too much social bonding were mentioned as well. . . . even those who longed for the “good old days” of high social cohesion admitted that some now-abandoned types of social bonding between men were actually unprofessional and detracted from the work environment. [pp. 58–59] . . . That task cohesion was strong and took precedence over social cohesion was expressed in a number of different ways: . . . “We all have our own thing going but when we need to get together for a goal the ship works together well.” “When an actual casualty occurs everyone joins together for the common good.” . . . “Although we don’t get along we are all ready for a fight.” [p. 60] ~ Harrell and Miller (1997) pp.58-60 as quoted in, Robert J. MacCoun & William M. Hix, Unit Cohesion and Military Performance, in Sexual Orientation and U.S. Military Personnel Policy: An Update of RAND's 1993 Study, Santa Monica: RAND, 2010, ch.5 p.146.

In the theater of operations . . . the presence of the enemy, and his capacity to injure and kill, give the dominant emotional tone to the combat outfit. . . . The impersonal threat of injury from the enemy, affecting all alike, produces a high degree of cohesion so that personal attachments throughout the unit become intensified. Friendships are easily made by those who might never have been compatible at home, and are cemented under fire. Out of the mutually shared hardships and dangers are born an altruism and generosity that transcend ordinary individual selfish interests. So sweeping is this trend that the usual prejudices and divergences of background and outlook, which produce social distinction and dissension in civil life, have little meaning to the group in combat. Religious, racial, class, schooling or sectional differences lose their power to divide the men. What effect they have is rather to lend spice to a relationship which is now based principally on the need for mutual aid in the presence of enemy action. Such powerful forces as antisemitism, anticatholicism or differences between Northerners and Southerners are not likely to disturb interpersonal relationships in a combat crew. . . . Their association is not limited to working hours but includes their social activities. . . . The most vital relationship is not the purely social. It is the feeling that the men have for each other as members of combat teams and toward the leaders of those teams, that constitutes the essence of their relationship. ~ Ibid, p.147

Elsewhere, Moskos, as cited in Marlowe (1979), referred to this social compact as “instrumental and self-serving.” But a less cynical framing is provided by the growing literature on the importance of “swift trust” in high-stakes settings (Kramer, 1999; Majchrzak, Jarvenpaa, and Hollingshead, 2007; Meyerson, Weick, and Kramer, 1996). Trust that is based on strong interpersonal bonds can take a long time to develop (McAllister, 1995; Webber, 2008). But Meyerson, Weick, and Kramer (1996) note that professional teams often “have a finite life span, form around a shared and relatively clear goal or purpose, and their success depends on a tight and coordinated coupling of activity.” Majchrzak, Jarvenpaa, and Hollingshead (2007) examined various case studies in the development of swift trust among complete strangers in response to natural disasters.
Kramer (1999) reviewed evidence for several different ways in which this kind of swift trust develops, including category-based trust (based on knowledge of the other person’s membership in trusted groups), role-based trust (e.g., using high rank as a measure of one’s past experience and performance), and rule-based trust (based on “shared understandings regarding the system of rules regarding appropriate behavior,” p. 579). These mechanisms may work through either task cohesion or social cohesion, depending on the setting. Thus, when people rely on someone’s professional certification (e.g., as a surgeon, engineer, or musician), there may be a rapidly established task cohesion. If, however, one were to rely on credentials from a fraternal organization, the swift trust might rapidly create social cohesion. Similarly, rule-based trust might promote task cohesion in professional settings but social cohesion in social organizations.Of course, these routes are not mutually exclusive; professional conferences organize social outings, and fraternal groups organize charitable works. ~ Ibid, p.148

Joshi and Roh note that their analysis helps to pinpoint “the specific conditions under which diversity can have beneficial or detrimental effects on performance outcomes” (p. 618)—specifically, sociodemographic diversity is most likely to be deleterious when it is unbalanced (large majority, small minority) in highly task-interdependent teams. But it is important to bear in mind that these negative effects are quite small. Thus, Joshi and Roh note that “our findings challenge the assumption, born from social categorization theory, that some aspects of diversity necessarily have detrimental effects on team performance.” Similarly, King, Hebl, and Beal (2009) suggest that “although social categorization theory (the primary model that would apply to cooperative behaviors) would typically suggest that similarity fosters cooperation, there is substantial evidence that this is not always the case.” ~ Ibid, p.153

What do you think this is, the Army where you shoot 'em a mile away? You've gotta get up close like this and bada-bing! ~ Satino "Sonny" Corleone in The Godfather, (1972); written by Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo, based on Puzo's novel.

They're saps! Because they risk their lives for strangers. ~ Santino 'Sonny' Corleone in The Godfather Part II; (1974); screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo

[I]t occurred to me, the soldiers are paid to fight. The rebels aren't. ~ Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II, (1974) screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo

• Huey: Riley, from now on I’m taking personal responsibility for your actions. Here is a list of unacceptable behavior. Commit it to memory.

Riley: What? Negro, please…
“No disrespecting authority.” Man, last year you attacked the principal with three different styles of kung-fu!

Huey: Um. That was different. He was unjust authority.

Riley: “No graffiti.” So you’re tryin’ to stifle my cultural expression?

Huey: No. Uh, that should read “no graffiti without artistic merit.

Riley: “No stealing”? Don’t you always say theft in America is justified because the whole country is stolen land?

Huey: Yeah, I sure do.
Well. I quit. Can you at least try to stay out of jail?

Riley: I’m not makin’ any promises…

• (5/16/1999)

• Jar Jar Binks: Good morning, brothers and sisters, I am the Gungan formerly known as Jar Jar Binks.
  Welcome to a new and very different “Wacky Fun With Jar Jar Binks.”I ain’t shufflin’ no more. It’s revolution time!
  Oh yeah! Back when I was blind, deaf and dumb, I used to speak ignorantly for the man. Act like a buffoon for the man and degrade myself and my people for the man. Why I remember when George Lucasmade me and Ahmed Best shine the shoes of the entire cast and crew of “The Phantom Menace” Well, those days are long gone, brothers and sisters!
  I’ve been reading “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”, “The Wretched of the Earth” by Frantz Fanon, and that new comic strip “The Boondocks,” and I’ve gained a true knowledge of self.
  From now on, I shall be called Jabari Jabari Binko!!
  Come back next week, kids, when I’ll be discussing the forced redistribution of George Lucas’ wealth and the joys of socialism.
  Stay strong, brothers and sisters. All power to the people!
• …um, this may not have been the best idea. – Editor

• (9/26/1999)

• Thomas Dubois: Here!!! Are you happy?!! My wife and daughter made this shirt, so now I’m doomed to wear it. Congratulations, Huey, you have officially ruined my Christmas. For the past three hours I have listened to endless talk about political prisoners and the world’s injustice. Thank you very much!!!

Huey: I didn’t mean to –

Thomas Dubois: I often wonder – is there anyplace or anything that has been left unscarred by the cynics and the purveyors of bitterness, anger and despair? Does there exist, anywhere, an unadulterated land of childhood fantasy and imagination? Is there no innocence left in the world??!!

Huey: How about the funnies?

Thomas Dubois: Please…

• (12/23/1999)

• Huey: I know…I know you’re not serious.

Riley: Did I stutter? I said the N-R-A.

Huey: You idiot!! You’re not even nine years old and you don’t own a gun!!

Riley: And much like myself, my boys at the NRA were very upset at this fact!!

• (6/3/2000)

• Huey: Hip-hop is no longer an effective tool to bring knowledge to the black masses. The revolution must turn to the more traditional print media.
  I’m going to start a newsletter or newspaper that will bring the light of truth to the diaspora! Unadulterated by capitalist blood money, it will be a new weapon in the fight against the system that mentally enslaves our people!

Caesar: Kind of like “The Final Calll”?

Huey: Sorta, without the religious affiliation or high journalistic standards.

• (9/6/2000)

• Huey: Ok, now thisguy is Ralph Nader. If he wins, he’ll decriminalize drugs.

Riley: Are you serious?!!
You mean, I could be a drug kingpin like Scarface, but I won’t ever have to worry about going to jail?!! He’s the man!!

Huey: of course, you realize government regulation and distribution of narcotics would instantly destroy their monetary value. There would be no more drug kingpins.

Riley: Aw man…he’s hatin’ on the game? Get him out of here!!

• (10/20/2000)

• Huey: I don’t get this whole thing with video games.

Riley: What, you mean why you keep losing?

Huey: No, everyone is worried about kids and violence, right? And kids using guns – so why don’t they go after the gun manufacturers and gun dealers instead of people who make video games, it doesn’t make sense.

Riley: Sure it does, pretend your some stupid parents activist person…
Who would you rather start a beef with – some nerd who makes video games, or some dude with a warehouse full of AK-47s?

Huey: You know – I’m actually much more impressed by that point than I care to admit.

Riley: Of course, I’m deep, just don’t tell nobody.

• (11/19/2000)

• Riley: See, Huey, I don’t need any dirt on Santa to blackmail him. I just need to be vague enough to make him think I’ve got some dirt. Check this out.
• Dear Santa, I know all about the reindeer, the money and the “elf incident.”
  I’ve got pictures.
  A Playstation 2 or I tell Mrs. Claus.

’Huey: Brilliant. Can’t believe I didn’t think of it first.

Riley: How does it feel not to be the smart one anymore?

• (12/23/2000)

• Thomas Dubois: Y’know, I think part of the problem with Kwanzaa is it kinda perpetuates this fallacy of a monolithic “African Culture”

Huey: Hmm…expound…

Thomas Dubois: The intent is good, but the holiday ignores the variety and diversity of African cultures in favor of something oversimplified…even…generic.

Huey: Interesting, I think I can consider that a fair critique.

Thomas Dubois: And what’s with the candles? What is this, some kinda low-budget Hanukkah?

Huey: All right, all right! I get the point!

• (1/2/2001)

• Huey: Still researching an alias?

Riley: Yep.

Huey: I imagine you’ve read about every single third-world dictator, mob boss, drug lord and terrorist who ever lived?

Riley: Yep

Huey: Isn’t it ironic that you have to do research even as you strive for the depths of ignorance?

Riley: Ironic, that you’re talking but I’m not actually listening to you.

(1/12/2000)

• Thomas Dubois: Oh, Sarah, I’m so glad we had this talk.

Sarah Dubois: Me too.

Thomas Dubois: I totally overreacted to this whole thing. I thought you had become one of these lunatic, socialist, vegetarian, militant – psychopaths.

Huey: Hello?! I’m still here, you know!!

Thomas Dubois: Ooops! Sorry, Huey.

• (2/14/2000)

• Censored
  This comic contains numerous references to the DeCSS code used to bypass the Content Scrambling System of DVD’s, which, by order of Judge Lewis Kapalan, is illegal to reproduce in any way. We apologize for the inconvenience, but speech that damages the profits of our corporate friends is NOT protected by the first Amendment. Thank you.

• (3/2/2000)

• Huey: Mr. Petto, I have a question.

Mr. Petto: Yes.

Huey: Why is it perfectly legal to post a diagram of how to build a bomb on the net, but you can’t post a code that descrambles DVDs?

• Censored
  We just didn’t like where he’s going with this.

• (3/5/2001)

• Caesar: You’re insane’’’!!! Toboganning is not an extreme sports!

Huey: It most certainly is.
and like skydiving and bungee jumping, it’s strictly for crazy, white suburbanites whose lives are so comfortable they have to make up new ways to kill themselves just to get an adrenaline rush – no thank you. Reckless suicides are counterrevolutionary.

Caesar: This has nothing to do with the revolution – you’re just scared!!!

Huey: Uh-huh … I bet the Bush regime would just love for me to bust my head against that tree right there – but it ain’t gonna happen!!

• (2/11/2001)

Granddad: If you’re still not feeling well tomorrow, we’ll go see a doctor.

Huey: I’d rather not.
Western medicine is too corrupted by capitalism. The goal of making money supersedes the goal of wellness – most doctors and pharmaceutical companies do not have our best interests at heart. I’d prefer a more reliable source of information.

Granddad: Like what, the internet?

Huey: I’m starting with everythingwillkillyou.com

• (5/23/2001)

TV News: Senator Trent Lott reiterated the critical need for genetically enhanced super-commandos with multiple heads and appendages, saying "I'm confident the president will do right by America's armed forces." Meanwhile, the Japanese government announced that it was already well on its way to creating a three-headed soldier with wings and cybernetically implanted machine guns. They are promising to pour millions into further human cloning projects with the hope of "Making real life more like our really, really cool cartoons."

• (8/23/2001)

• Huey squeals to the Feds’ terrorism hotline -

Huey: Why do you keep hanging up on me? I’m telling you the truth!
The CIA trained Osama Bin Laden in using terrorism against the soviets during the Reagan-Bush administration they gave the Afghanistan rebels countless amounts of covert funding!

FBI: Don’t you have better things to be doing?

Huey: Better than fighting terrorism? Heck no! We’re at war!!

• (10/5/2001)

• Huey: Hello, Jeb? I’m sorry to bother you at home, but I had a nightmare last night that someone who looked kinda like your daughter broke into my house and stole our television so she could feed her crack addiction.
  But then I remembered that you had the courage to speak out against an initiative to provide treatment instead of incarceration for addicts arrested on drug possession charges. <br? I just wanted you to know how glad I am that someone has the courage to stop making excuses for the criminals and make things safe for decent law-abiding –
  Hello?

• (10/6/2001)

• Huey helps the FBI wage war on terrorism

Huey: Wait, before you hang up. I have one more important tip!
G.W. Bush gave the Taliban government $4.3 million this May! This May!! How much of that money will be spent on weaponry that will be used against U.S. soldiers?

FBI: Wow – I didn’t know that …

Huey: He lives at 1600 Pennsylvania – hey, are you writing this down? And I suggest bringing really tight handcuffs.

• (10/8/2001)

Granddad: How you feelin’ this morning boy?

Huey’: Not bad.

News: The FBI would like to remind the public, yet again that massive death and destruction are imminent at an unknown time and place.
Have a great day.

Granddad: It’s not too late to change your answer.

Huey: That’s good…

• (11/13/2001)

Huey: I as thinkin’ let’s say – hypothetically – Santa can actually go to every house on the planet in one night…
He uses that power to give kids a bunch of junk they don’t need! He could deliver food every day to starving kids! Drop off medicine to underdeveloped countries!

Caesar: I never thought of it like that.

Huey: Santa just made the hate book!!

• (12/14/2001)

Huey: …and what I’m saying is that America’s whole Mideast policy is –

Granddad: Boy?

Huey: yes?

Granddad: It’s Christmas.

Huey: So?

Granddad: So please get in the spirit of the holiday and give the anti-war stuff a rest, sheesh …

• (12/23/2001)

• Attention Concerned parents:
  Today’s episode features Granddad demonstrating responsible parenting, playing the controversial video game “Grand Theft Auto 3” to answer any questions he may have and to reinforce the difference between appropriate and inappropriate behavior. We suggest all those with young children take note.
  Thank you.

Granddad: Good aim boy! But remember that in real life, it’s very, very wrong to throw a grenade at an ambulance.

Riley: Yes, Grandad.

• (1/18/2002)

• FBI: FBI terrorism tip line.

Huey: It’s Huey again. Got another hot lead on a terrorist.

FBI: Lord…Huey, we don’t have time for this. I’m hanging up.

Huey: Wait! I got a good one this time!

FBI: (sigh) .. (Uh-huh…

Huey: Kissinger, Henry, Former secretary of state under Nixon, allegedly responsible for the deaths of about 950,000 civilians in Laos and Cambodia in the early 1970s.
if you’re having trouble finding him, ask the guys who gave him the Nobel peace prize.
Hello?

• (1/22/2002)

• Riley: Why do you spend all day working on that book when you don’t get paid for it?

Huey: So that I leave something for the world that will outlast my short time here.

Riley: Why don’t I ever understand anything you say?

Huey: Because I don’t have a platinum chain around my neck. Now shoo…

• (1/24/2002)

Caesar: Huey, why are you worried about dying young? It doesn’t make any sense.

Huey: Sure it does…
We have an underground newspaper and a web site that puts out the truth that the powers that be don’t want the people to hear. We must be prepared for the worst!

Caesar: We have eleven readers!!

Huey: That’s eleven more than they want us to have…

• (4/12/2002)

• Huey: I’m telling you – free speech is a myth! A fantasy! All of the ugly truths in this society are hidden from the public.

Caesar: But you speak out against the government all the time.

Huey: That’s nothing – acceptable dissent is not considered a threat to the power structure, besides, it’s not just the government that suppresses information – it’s the media conglomerates – the monopolies who control nearly everything we see, hear and read in mass media…
And here’s how they do it. Bribes to government officials, illegal business dealing. I’ve researched the evidence to prove how less than a dozen men have acquired a stranglehold on communication and information, and nothing can stop me from telling the world. Wanna hear?

Caesar: Absolutely!

• Hey Caesar – that George W. Bush sure is stupid!

Caesar: Fascinating…

• (5/26/2002)

• Huey: So colonel, you guys aren’t dropping food anymore? What happened to all that concern about the starving Afghan people?

Pentagon:Yeah, well…they’re not, uh, starving anymore.

Huey: Is that right?

Pentagon: Yep. Hey told us they’re all full now. Couldn’t eat another bite.

Huey: Amazing, I wonder what was in those food packets.

Pentagon: Well, that’s classified but…let’s just say a snickers really satisfies…

• (9/20/2002)

• Huey:: They always say I'm against the troops. I'm completely for the troops. Why, just last week I sent the president a 50 page "support our troops" resolution giving U.S. Soldiers or their families perpetual revenues from Iraqi Oil.

Caeser:: I'm going to miss you when they pass "Patriot Act 2"

Star Trek: The Original Series

The sword is the key of heaven and hell; a drop of blood shed in the cause of Allah, a night spent in arms, is of more avail than two months of fasting or prayer: whosoever falls in battle, his sins are forgiven, and at the day of judgment his limbs shall be supplied by the wings of angels and cherubim." ~ Muhammad as quoted by Philip Schaff, in History of the Christian Church (1997), Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc.

I think these things (firearms) were invented by Satan himself, for they can’t be defended against with (ordinary) weapons and fists. All human strength vanishes when confronted with firearms. A man is dead before he sees what's coming. ~ Martin Luther

If survival calls for the bearing of arms, bear them you must. But the most important part of the challenge is for you to find another means that does not come with the killing of your fellow man. ~ Rod Serling Speech at Binghamton Community High School (1968)

• Vina: When dreams become more important than reality, you give up travel, building, creating; you even forget how to repair the machines left behind by your ancestors. You just sit living and reliving other lives left behind in the thought records.
  • The Menagerie part 1, November 17, 1966 (Part I), Gene Roddenberry

• Romulan Commander: Another war... must it always be so? How many comrades have we lost in this way?... Obedience. Duty. Death, and more death...
• Romulan Commander: A message was dispatched. You've broken the Rule of Silence!

Decius: Only in code, Commander. To inform our Praetor of this glorious mission.

Romulan Commander: Your carelessness might have ended this "glorious mission"! You are reduced two steps in rank! Return to post!

Centurion: [after Decius leaves] Take care, Commander. He has friends, and friends of his kind mean power, and power is often dangerous.

Romulan Commander: Danger and I are old companions.

Centurion: We've seen a hundred campaigns together, and still I do not understand you!

Romulan Commander: I think you do. No need to tell you what will happen. The Earthman will follow; he must. And when he attacks we will destroy him. Our gift to the homeland: another war.

• Balance of Terror, Paul Schneider, December 15, 1966

• Khan: Where am I?

McCoy: You're in bed, holding a knife at your doctor's throat.

Khan: Answer my question!

McCoy: It would be most effective if you would cut the carotid artery, just under the left ear.

Khan: [releasing McCoy] I like a brave man.

McCoy: [taking knife from Khan] I was just trying to prevent an argument.

• Space Seed, Story by Carey Wilber Teleplay by Gene L. Coon Carey Wilber, February 16, 1967

• Kirk: [War] is instinctive. But the instinct can be fought. We're human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands! But we can stop it. We can admit that we're killers... but we're not going to kill today. That's all it takes! Knowing that we're not going to kill - today!
  • A Taste of Armageddon, Story by Robert Hamner Teleplay by Gene L. Coon Robert Hamner, February 23, 1967

• Edith Keeler: I think that one day they're going to take all the money that they spend now on war and death...

James T. Kirk: And make them spend it on life.

• City on the Edge of Forever, Harlan Ellison, April 6, 1967

• James T. Kirk: I am the Kirk, the creator?

Nomad: You are the creator.

James T. Kirk: You're WRONG! Jackson Roykirk, your creator, is DEAD, you have mistaken me for him! You are in error!... You did not discover your mistake, you have made TWO errors. You are flawed and IMPERFECT. And you have not corrected by sterilization, you have made THREE errors!

Nomad: Error... Error... Error... Examine...

• John Meredyth Lucas, The Changeling’’, John Meredyth Lucas, September 29, 1967

• Mirror Spock: One man cannot summon the future.

James T. Kirk: But one man can change the present.

• Mirror Mirror, Jerome Bixby, October 6, 1967

• Spock: Computers make excellent and efficient servants, but I have no wish to serve under them. Captain, a starship also runs on loyalty to one man, and nothing can replace it or him.
  • The Ultimate Computer, D.C. Fortana, March 8, 1968

• Spock: Captain. May I ask a question? You needn't answer if it seems too personal.

Kirk: I'm sure I'll be able to give you an answer, Mister Spock

Spock: This afternoon, you wanted to kill, didn't you?

McCoy: But he didn't kill, Mister Spock.

Spock: But he wanted to, Doctor.

Kirk: Is that the way it seemed to you?

Spock: Yes, sir.

Kirk: Mister Spock... you're absolutely right. That's exactly the way it was.

Spock: Mankind. Ready to kill.

Kirk: That's the way it was in 1881.

Spock: I wonder how humanity managed to survive.

Kirk: ... We overcame our instinct for violence.

• Spectre of the Gun, Lee Cronin (Gene L. Coon), October 25, 1968

• Sulu: Their planet is dead. Does it matter now which of them was right?

Spock: Not to Lokai and Bele. All that matters to them... is their hate.

Uhura: Do you suppose that's all they had, sir?

Kirk: No. But it's all they have left.

• Let This Be Your Last Battlefield, Oliver Crawford, January 10, 1969

• Abraham Lincoln: There's no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There is nothing good in war except its ending.

• The Savage Curtain, Gene Roddenberry, Arthur Heinemann, January 10, 1969

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

The last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what's coming now. The party's over, folks. … "Winston Churchill said "The first casualty of War is always Truth." Churchill also said "In wartime, the Truth is so precious that it should always be surrounded by a bodyguard of Lies." That wisdom will not be much comfort to babies born last week. The first news they get in this world will be News subjected to Military Censorship. That is a given in wartime, along with massive campaigns of deliberately-planted "Dis-information." That is routine behavior in Wartime — for all countries and all combatants — and it makes life difficult for people who value real news. Count on it. ~ Hunter S. Thompson, "When War Drums Roll" (17 September 2001)

Reflective apologists for war at the present day all take it religiously. It is a sort of sacrament. It's profits are to the vanquished as well as to the victor; and quite apart from any question of profit, it is an absolute good, we are told, for it is human nature at its highest dynamic. ~ William James, in The Moral Equivalent of War (1906)

In three years, Cyberdyne will become the largest supplier of military computer systems. All stealth bombers are upgraded with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards, they fly with a perfect operational record. The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes online on August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. ~ Terminator 2: Judgment Day James Cameron and William Wisher Jr.

I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth — rocks! ~ Albert Einstein, as quoted in an interview with Alfred Werner, published in Liberal Judaism 16 (April-May 1949), 12.

The voice of Hollywood has grown beyond the border of the United States. It's everywhere. ~ Max Beauvoir, "A U.S.-Trained Entrepreneur Becomes Voodoo’s Pope", (2008)

• Lt Saavik: [to Kirk] On the test, sir. Will you tell me what you did? I would really like to know.

Dr Leonard McCoy: Lieutenant, you are looking at the only Star Fleet cadet who ever beat the "No-Win" scenario.

Saavik: How?

James Kirk: I reprogrammed the simulation so that it was possible to save the ship.

Saavik: What?!

David: [chuckles] He cheated!

Kirk: Changed the conditions of the test... got a commendation for original thinking. I don't like to lose.

Saavik: Then you've never faced that situation, faced death.

Kirk: I don't believe in a "no-win" scenario. [pulls out his communicator] Kirk to Spock.

• David: Lieutenant Saavik was right: You never have faced death.

Kirk: No, not like this. I haven't faced death. I've cheated death. I've tricked my way out of death and - patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. I know nothing... [But he cannot bring himself to complete his complaint, "I know nothing of death."]

David: You knew enough to tell Saavik that how we face death is at least as important as how we face life.

Kirk: Just words.

David: But good words! That's where ideas begin. Maybe you should listen to them. [hesitant] I was wrong about you...and I'm sorry.

• Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Jack B. Sowards, 1982

Star Trek: The Next Generation

• Q: But you can't deny that you're still a dangerous, savage child race.
• Q: ...and 400 years before that, you were murdering each other in quarrels over tribal god images. Since then, there are no indications that humans will ever change.

Jean-Luc Picard: If we're going to be damned, let's be damned for what we really are.

• Encounter at Farpoint, written by D. C. Fontana and Gene Roddenberry, September 28, 1987.

• Tasha Yar: What of Justice to Wesley? Does he deserve to die?

Jean-Luc Picard: I'm truly sorry, Liator, but I must have justice for my people, too. Transporter Room, energize. Transporter Room, come in.

Transporter Officer: We can't energize the beam, sir. Everything checks out, but we're getting no results.

First Mediator: God has prevented your escape.

Beverly Crusher: Then your God is unfair. My son had no warning that his act was criminal.

Second Mediator: We cannot allow ignorance of the law to become a defense.

Jean-Luc Picard: I don't know how to communicate this, or even if it is possible, but the question of justice has concerned me greatly of late and I say to any creature who may be listening, there can be no justice so long as laws are absolute. Even life itself is an exercise in exceptions.

William Riker: When has justice ever been as simple as a rule book?

• Justice, story by Worley Thorne, Ralph Wills, teleplay by Worley Thorne, November 9, 1987

• Jean-Luc Picard: Oh, I know "Hamlet." And what he might say with irony I say with conviction. "What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason. How infinite in faculty. In form, in moving, how express and admirable. In action, how like an angel. In apprehension, how like a god."

Q: Surely you don't see your species like that, do you?

Jean-Luc Picard: I see us becoming that, Q. Is it that which concerns you?

• Hide and Q, story by C.J. Holland, teleplay by C.J. Holland, Gene Roddenberry, November 23, 1987

• Jean-Luc Picard: The Prime Directive is not just a set of rules; it is a philosophy... and a very correct one. History has proven again and again that whenever mankind interferes with a less developed civilization, no matter how well intentioned that interference may be, the results are invariably disastrous.

• Symbiosis, story by Robert Lewin, teleplay by Robert Lewin, Richard Manning, Hans Beimler, April 18, 1988

• Picard: Au revoir, Natasha. The gathering is concluded.

(Everyone but Picard and Data leave, sniffing a bit)

Data: Sir, the purpose of this gathering...confuses me.

Picard: Oh? How so?

Data: My thoughts are not for Tasha, but for myself. I keep thinking how empty it will feel without her presence. Did I miss the point?

Picard: No, you didn't, Data. You got it.

• Skin of Evil, Joseph Stefano, Hannah Louise Shearer

• Dr. Pulaski: Dah-ta, look at this.

Data: [looking slightly confused] 'Day-ta'.

Dr. Pulaski: What?

Data: My name. It is pronounced 'Day-ta'.

Dr. Pulaski: Oh?

Data: You called me 'Dah-ta'.

Dr. Pulaski: [laughing] What's the difference?

Data: One is my name. The other is not.

• The Child, Jaron Summers, Jon Povill, Maurice Hurley, (November 21, 1988).

• Alien (as Data): What is death?

Jean-Luc Picard: Oh, is that all. Data, you're asking probably the most difficult of all questions. Some see it as a changing into an indestructible form, forever unchanging. They believe that the purpose of the entire universe is to then maintain that form in an Earth-like garden which will give delight and pleasure through all eternity. On the other hand there are those who hold to the idea of our blinking into nothingness with all of our experiences and hopes and dreams merely a delusion.

Alien (as Data): Which do you believe sir?

Jean-Luc Picard: Considering the marvelous complexity of the universe, its clockwork perfection, its balances of this against that... matter, energy, gravitation, time, dimension, I believe that our existence must be more than either of these philosophies. That what we are goes beyond euclidean or other 'practical' measuring systems... and that our existence is part of a reality beyond what we understand now as reality.

• Where Silence Has Lease, Jack B. Sowards, (November 28, 1988)

• Guinan: Consider that in the history of many worlds there have always been disposable creatures. They do the dirty work. They do the work that no one else wants to do, because it's too difficult and too hazardous. With an army of Datas, all disposable, you don't have to think about their welfare, or you don't think about how they feel. Whole generations of disposable people.

Jean-Luc Picard: You're talking about slavery.

Guinan: I think that's a little harsh.

Jean-Luc Picard: I don't think that's a little harsh, I think that's the truth. That's the truth that we have obscured behind...a comfortable, easy euphemism. 'Property.' But that's not the issue at all, is it?

• The Measure of a Man, Melinda M. Snodgrass, (February 13, 1989)

• Q: You judge yourselves against the pitiful adversaries you've encountered so far: the Romulans, the Klingons... They're nothing compared to what's waiting. Picard, you are about to move into areas of the galaxy containing wonders more incredible than you can possibly imagine... and terrors to freeze your soul. I offer myself as a guide -- only to be rejected out of hand.

• Q Who, Maurice Hurley, (May 5, 1989).

• Crusher: It's just a science project.

Guinan: You know, a doctor friend once said the same thing to me. Frankenstein was his name.

• Evolution, Michael Piller, Michael Wagner, (September 25, 1989).

• Riker: Maybe if we felt any human loss as keenly as we feel one of those close to us, human

• The Bonding, Ronald D. Moore, (October 23, 1989).

• Prime Minister Nayrok: Do not relax your security for an instant, Captain. He is extremely violent, and very cunning, as you already know.

Jean-Luc Picard: A matter of internal security: the age-old cry of the oppressor.

• The Hunted, Robin Bernheim, January 8, 1990

• Alexana Devos: In a world where children blow up children, everyone's a threat.

Data: I have been reviewing the history of armed rebellion and it appears that terrorism is an effective way to promote political change.

Jean-Luc Picard: Yes, it can be, but I have never subscribed to the theory that political power flows from the barrel of a gun.

• The High Ground, Melinda M. Snodgrass, January 29, 1990

• Q: All right, everyone, this is what we're going to be doing.

LaForge: Q, everybody already knows what they're going to do, except for you, Now here's what I need.

Q: La Forge, obviously my knowledge and experience far exceed yours by about a billion times. So, if you'll just step aside gracefully.

LaForge: Q, your experience will be most valuable to me if you can manually control the field integrity.

Q: Don't be foolish. That would be a waste of my talents.

LaForge: Q, get to the controls or get the hell out of here! Data, you're my liaison to the Bridge. I'll need you with me.

Q: Who does he think he is, giving me orders?

Data: Geordi thinks he is in command here...and he is correct.

• Déjà Q, Richard Danus, Feb 5, 1990

Proverbs

That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die. ~ H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

Time is on my side, yes it is
Time is on my side, yes it is
Now you always say
That you want to be free
But you'll come running back (said you would baby)
You'll come running back (I said so many times before)
You'll come running back to me
Oh, time is on my side, yes it is. ~ Time is On My Side Jerry Ragovoy First (1963)

There's no earthly way of knowing
which direction we are going.
There's no knowing where we're rowing,
or which way the river's flowing.
Is it raining? Is it snowing?
Is a hurricane a-blowing?
Not a speck of light is showing,
so the danger must be growing.
Are the fires of hell a-glowing?
Is the grisly reaper mowing?!
Yes! The danger must be growing,
for the rowers keep on rowing.
And they're certainly not showing...
any signs that they are slowing! ~ Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964)

Through early morning fog I see
visions of the things to be
the pains that are withheld for me
I realize and I can see...
that suicide is painless
It brings on many changes
and I can take or leave it if I please. ~ Mike Altman, Suicide Is Painless, (1970)

Evil power disappears
Demons worry when the wizard is near
He turns tears into joy
Everyone's happy when the wizard walks by.
w:Black Sabbath, Black Sabbath, (1970)

"Now just hold on,"
Said the little bomb,
"If you were just to hold my hands
Then time would stop
The plot would flop
And jumbo would be safe to land" ~ Lol Creme, Kevin Godley, 10cc, Sheet Music (album), (1974)

Little by little, ooh
Little by little, bit by bit

Sssh, not too loud, don't tell everybody
Don't give away the game
Oh, I ain't quite ready to reveal my campaign
This is not the time

My hero's are alive and well in a cave
I'm keeping them on ice in suspended animation
Till the very right occasion comes along.

To our rally come along
Come along to our rally
Come along to our rally come along. ~ 10cc, "I Wanna Rule the World" How Dare You! (album) (1976)

Night creatures call.
The dead start to walk in their masquerade.
There's no escapin' the jaws of the alien this time (they're open wide).
This is the end of your life. ~ Michael Jackson, Thriller, Thriller, (Nov 8, 1982).

Beat it, beat it,
No-one wants to be defeated,
Showin' how funky and strong is your fight,
It doesn't matter who's wrong or right.
Just beat it. ~ Michael Jackson, Beat It, Thriller (Nov 8, 1982)

Red rain-
Putting the pressure on much harder now
To return again and again.
Just let the red rain splash you,
Let the rain fall on your skin.
I come to you defenses down,
With the trust of a child. ~ Peter Gabriel, Red Rain, So (1986)

If none of us believe in war
Then can you tell me what the weapon's for?
Listen to me everyone
If the button is pushed there'll be nowhere to run. ~ "Killer of Giants", The Ultimate Sin (1986), written by Robert John Daisley, Ozzy Osbourne, John Osbourne, Jake Williams, Robert Daisley

As he came into the window
It was the sound of a crescendo
He came in her apartment
He left the blood stains on the carpet
She ran underneath the table
He could see she was unable
So she ran into the bedroom
She was struck down, it was her doom. ~ Michael Jackson, Smooth Criminal, Bad (1987)

Did you ever stop to notice
All the children dead from war?
Did you ever stop to notice
This crying earth, these weeping shores? ~ Michael Jackson, HIStory: Past, Present & Future, Book I (1995)

It ain't nothin' but a mothafuckin' gangster party. ~ 2Pac, "Gangster Party", All Eyez on Me, (February 13, 1996)

A scrub is a guy that thinks he's fly
And is also known as a buster
Always talkin' about what he wants
And just sits on his broke ass
So (no)
I don't want your number (no)
I don't want to give you mine and (no)
I don't want to meet you nowhere (no)
I don't want none of your time and (no)
I don't want no scrub
A scrub is a guy that can't get no love from me. ~ "No Scrubs", TLC, FanMail, (1999).

Nathan Explosion: But beware
For when you quench your blood thirst
Others will seek their vengeance on you
And they won't rest
Until you're dead. ~ Brendon Small, Dethklok, Mermaider, The Dethalbum, (September 25, 2007)

Nathan Explosion: Wait now, what did they say
about the human body and proportions of things?
Blood is an energy conductor.
I am full of that all I need is an outlet. ~ Brendon Small, Dethklok, Bloodtrocuted, The Dethalbum, (September 25, 2007)

• He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.
  • Ecclesiastes. I. 18. Cited in: Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 419-23.

• He that loveth correction, loveth knowledge: but he that hateth reproof is foolish.
  • 12:1, Douay Rheims Bible

• A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast: but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.
  • 12:10, King James Version

• The teaching of the wise is a fountain of life, turning men away from the nets of death.
  • 13:14, Bible in Basic English

• The simple believes everything, But the prudent man carefully considers his ways.
  • 14:15, World English Bible

• The wise man, fearing, keeps himself from evil; but the foolish man goes on in his pride, with no thought of danger.
  • 14:16, Bible in Basic English

• A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.
  • 15:1, New International Version

• Plans fail when there is no consultation,
  But there is accomplishment through many advisers.
  • 15:22, New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures

• Better is a dry morsel, and quietness therewith, Than a house full of feasting with strife.
  • 17:1, American Standard Version

• Even a fool is thought wise if he keeps silent, and discerning if he holds his tongue.
  • 17:28, New International Version

• It is better to be poor and walk in integrity than to be stupid and speak lies.
  • Proverbs 19:1

• It is better to dwell in the wilderness, than with a contentious and an angry woman.
  • 21:19, King James Version

• Thorns and snares are in the way of the perverse: He that keepeth his soul shall be far from them.
  • 22:5, American Standard Version

• Be not among winebibbers; among riotous eaters of flesh: For the drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty: and drowsiness shall clothe a man with rags.
  • 23:20-21, King James Version

• Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein; and he that rolleth a stone, it shall return upon him.
  • 26:27, Darby's English Translation

• Where there is much talk there will be no end to sin, but he who keeps his mouth shut does wisely.
  • 10:19, Bible in Basic English

• He that hasteth to be rich hath an evil eye, And considereth not that poverty shall come upon him.
  • 28:22, King James Version

• It is not for kings, O Lemuel-- not for kings to drink wine, not for rulers to crave beer, lest they drink and forget what the law decrees, and deprive all the oppressed of their rights. Give beer to those who are perishing, wine to those who are in anguish; let them drink and forget their poverty and remember their misery no more.
  • Book of proverbs 31:4-7, New International Version

• Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy.
  • 31:8-9, New International Version

• Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise:
  Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler,
  Provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.
  • 6:6-8, King James Version

• Wisdom is supreme; therefore get wisdom. Though it cost all you have, get understanding.
  • 4:7, New International Version

• Blessed is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding. For the gain thereof is better than the gain of silver, and her revenue than fine gold.
  • 3:13-14, Darby's English Translation]]

• Habang may buhay, may pag-asa.
  • Meaning: As long as there is still life, there still lies hope.
  • نجم (2005). كلامجرايد. كتبعربية. p. 178. 

• Uray kukuá a tawíden, no addá la ket naimbág a nákem.
  • One need not inherit wealth if he inherits good manners.
  • "PHILIPPINE PROVERBS", Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Northern Illinois University.

• Ti kukuá masapúlan ngem ti pintas saán.
  • Wealth can be acquired but beauty cannot.
  • Ibid

• Ti napudpudno a gayyémmo, am-ammontó no addáka ití pelígro.
  • A true friend is known in time of need.
  • Ibid.

• Tay áso nga taol nga taol saán a makakagát ken makadunor.
  • Barking dogs seldom bite.
  • Ibid.

• Awán kas iti sursúro a sanikuá, ta daytá awán makatákaw kenká.
  • Knowledge is wealth that can't be stolen.
  • Ibid.

• No trabáho, gulpién, no kanén, in-inúten.
  • If it's work, do it fast. If it's food, eat it little by little.
  • Ibid.

• Ti táo a manákem, dína makíta ti panagdissó ti sakána ití dagá. Kitáenna ketdi ti sumarunó a baddekánna.
  • A wise man doesn't see his foot on the ground, he watches his next step.
  • Ibid.

• Ti nalaká ti pannakasápulna, nalaká met ti pannakapúkawna.
  • What is easily acquired is easily lost.
  • Ibid

• Saánmo a mapadára ti awán dárana.
  • You cannot squeeze blood out if there's none left. (said by a debtor)
  • Ibid.

• No awán ti ánus, awán ti lámot.
• If there is no patience, there will be no food.
  • Ibid.

• Matáy ti agur-úray, mabiág ti paur-úray.
  • He who waits dies, he who makes others wait lives.
  • Ibid.

• No sáan nga makaammó nga nangtaliáw ti naggapuánna, saán a makadánon ti papanánna.
  • He who does not look back to his origins will not reach his destination.
  • Ibid.

• Ti ubing nga matungpal amin a kayatna, awan ti nasayaat a banagna.
  • A child that is given everything will rarely succeed in life.
  • Ibid.

• Awan lalaki nga natured wenno nabaneg no ti babai ti sanguanan agsainnek.
  • No man is brave in the presence of a crying woman.
  • Ibid

• Ti ubing nga matungpal amin a kayatna, awan ti nasayaat a banagna.
  • A child that is given everything will rarely succeed in life.
  • Ibid.

• A'ohe pu'u ki'eki'e ke ho'a'o 'ia e pi'i.
  • No cliff is so tall it cannot be climbed.
  • "Hawaiin Proverbs Travel Quotes".

• A ohe lokomaika'i i nele i ke pana'i
  • No kind deed has ever lacked its reward.
  • "Hawaiin Proverbs Travel Quotes".

• E noho iho i ke opu weuweu, mai ho ` oki`eki`e.
  • Translation: Remain among the clumps of grass and do not elevate yourself.
  • English equivalent: The meek shall inherit the earth.
  • Meaning: "Humility will ultimately be rewarded."

• I hooluu hoohualei ia e ka makani,
  • The wind will stir up all the loose dust.
  • An allusion to the fact that angry people will tell what they had better keep concealed.
  • Hawaiian Almanac and Annual (1883) pp 52-58, H. L. SHELDON and C.M. Hyde

• Ke lino a nei ke kehau o Waiopua.
  • He glistens with the fine dew of Waimea.
  • Applied to a man once poor, but subsequently wealthy.
  • Hawaiian Almanac and Annual (1883) pp 52-58, H. L. SHELDON and C.M. Hyde

• Oni kalalea ke ku a ka laau loa
  • The top of the tall tree waves proudly
  • Said in praise of good scholarship.
  • Hawaiian Almanac and Annual (1883) pp 52-58, H. L. SHELDON and C.M. Hyde

• Ukuli'i ka pua, onaona i ka mau'u.
  • "Tiny is the flower, yet it scents the grasses around it."
  • Small things can still effect that which is around them.
  • Huna.org, "Hawaiin Proverbs Travel Quotes".

• إلى كثروا الرعيان ضاعت الغنم
  • If the herders are a lot the sheep will get lost.
  • English equivalent: Too many cooks spoiled the broth.
  • "There may not be that natural connection and unity so essential to any production of merit."
  • Porter, William Henry (1845). Proverbs: Arranged in Alphabetical Order .... Munroe and Company. p. 173. 

• لا تقول بـُر ليـن توكيــه
  • Translation: Don't say its wheat until you harvest it
  • English equivalent: Sell not the bear's skin before you have caught him.
  • Meaning: "Do not plan too far ahead and do not be too optimistic. One cannot be sure of the success of a job until it is completed. Unforeseen unfavourable developments can never be excluded."
  • Source for meaning of English equivalent: Paczolay, Gyula (1997). "X". European proverbs: in 55 languages, with equivalents in Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Chinese and Japanese. Veszprémi Nyomda. p. 217. ISBN 1-875943-44-7. 

• دو تربوز به یک دست گرفته نمی‏شود
  • Transliteration:Doo tarbuz ba yak dast gerefta na-mey-shawad.
  • Translation: You can't hold two watermelons in one hand.
  • English equivalent: You must not run after two hares at the same time.
  • Meaning: "Concentrate on one thing at a time or you will achieve nothing. - Trying to do two or more things at a time, when even one on its own needs full effort, means that none of them will be accomplished properly."
  • Source for meaning of English equivalent: Paczolay, Gyula (1997). "X". European proverbs: in 55 languages, with equivalents in Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Chinese and Japanese. Veszprémi Nyomda. p. X. ISBN 1-875943-44-7. 
  • Zellem (2012). Zarbul Masalha: 151 Afghan Dari Proverbs and Afghan Proverbs Illustrated. Zarbul Masalha (Proverbs). www.afghanproverbs.com. Retrieved on 16 February 2013.

• خواستن توانستن است
  • Transliteration: Khastan tawanistan ast.
  • Translation: Where there is a will, there is a way.
  • Parsi (2012). Limped. H\&S Media. 

• شنیدن کی بود مانند دیدن
  • Translation: Hearing is never as good as seeing.
  • Saint (2002). Alexander's Riddle: An Afghan Mystery. Trafford on Demand Pub. p. 237. ISBN 1553952073. 

• Алты́нного во́ра ве́шают, а полти́нного че́ствуют.
  • Transliteration: Altynnogo vora veshayut, a poltinnogo chestvuyut.
  • English equivalent: Laws catch flies but let hornets go free.
  • Владимир Иванович Даль; Анатолий Николаевич Филиппов (1 January 2010). 1000 русских пословиц и поговорок. MintRight Inc. p. 107. ISBN 978-5-4250-2657-6.

• Ба́бушка (гада́ла, да) на́двое сказа́ла ( — то ли до́ждик, то ли снег, то ли бу́дет, то ли нет).
  • Transliteraion: Babushka (gadala, da) nadvoye skazala ( — to li dozhdik, to li sneg, to li budet, to li net).
  • Translation: Granny (told fortunes and) said two things (— it will either rain or snow; it either will or will not).
  • English equivalent: We'll see what we'll see; maybe rain or maybe snow, maybe yes or maybe no.
  • Meaning: The outcome is still unknown (despite all that's been said.) — Also: You seem uncertain.

• Бери́сь дру́жно, не бу́дет гру́зно.
  • Transliteration: Beris' druzhno, ne budet gruzno.
  • Translation: [If all of us] take hold of [it] together, it won't feel heavy.
  • English equivalent: Many hands make light work

• Лучше пройти мимо опасности, чем быть всегда в страхе.
  • Transliteration: Bodlivoy korove bog rog ne dayot.
  • English equivalent: Tomorrow comes never.

• Болту́н — нахо́дка для шпио́на.
  • Transliteration: Boltun — nakhodka dlya shpiona.
  • Translation: A chatterbox is a treasure for a spy.
  • English equivalent: Loose lips sink ships.

• В нога́х правды не́т.
  • Transliteration: V nogakh pravdy net.
  • Translation: There is no truth in feet.
  • Meaning: Take a seat, please.

• Волко́в боя́ться — в лес не ходи́ть.
  • Transliteration: Volkov boyat'sa — v les ne khodit.
  • Literally: To fear the wolves — not to go into the woods.
  • Translation: [Just] because one fears wolves, is one not to go into the woods?
  • Translation note: Although the original proverb has the structure of a declarative sentence it is commonly understood and used in context as a rhetorical question.
  • Meaning: "Fear is no excuse from [possibly risky but] necessary undertakings."
  • English equivalent: (You need to) face your fears.

• 良薬口に苦し
  • Ryooyaku Kuchi ni Nigashi.
  • Translation: Good medicine is bitter to the mouth.
  • Chinese equivalent: 良藥苦口
  • Maynard (1993). Listen and Learn: 101 Japanese Idioms. McGraw-Hill. p. 123. ISBN 1.

• 井の中の蛙大海を知らず
  • I no naka no kaeru taikai-o shirazu.
  • A frog in a well does not know the great ocean
  • Chinese equivalent: 井底之蛙。

• 毒食わば皿まで
  • Doku kuwaba sara made.
  • Translation: When poisoned, one might as well swallow the plate.
  • Yiddish equivalent: "If you're going to eat pork, eat it till your mouth drips"
  • 喜多見淳 (25 January 1999). 淳樹物語: 続・天草に蜩は鳴かない. 文芸社. p. 232. ISBN 978-4-88737-200-9.

• 一寸先は闇
  • Issun saki wa yami.
  • Translation: It is dark one inch ahead of you.
  • English equivalent 1: Who can see in the future?
  • English equivalent 2: Expect the unexpected.
  • 関洸念 (15 December 1999). 諺にみる運・根・鈍: 日本人の魂の故郷を温ねて. 文芸社. p. 35. ISBN 978-4-88737-686-1.

• 艱難にあって初めて真友を知る
  • Kannan ni atte hajimete shinyū-o shiru.
  • Translation: Friends are known first in hardships.
  • English equivalent: A friend in need is a friend indeed.
  • Chinese equivalent: 患難見真情。
  • Paczolay, Gyula (1997). European Proverbs in 55 languages. DeProverbio.com. p. 159. ISBN 1-875943-44-7.

• 七転び八起き
  • Nana korobi ya oki.
  • Translation: Fall down seven times, get up eight
  • English equivalent: If at first you don't succeed try, try again.
  • McDermott, Patrick (2007). Mind Body Spirit: The Triangle of Life. iUniverse. p. 84. ISBN 0595420761.

• 能ある鷹は爪を隠す
  • Nou aru taka wa tsume-o kakusu.
  • Translation: The talented hawk hides its claws.
  • Meaning: One should hide his best abilities until time comes to show them.
  • Closest English equivalent: "Still water runs deep."
  • 関洸念 (1999). 諺にみる運・根・鈍: 日本人の魂の故郷を温ねて. 文芸社. p. 399. ISBN 4887376863.

• 立つ鳥跡を濁さず
  • Tatsu tori ato-o nigosazu.
  • Translation: A leaving bird does not leave a mess.
  • English equivalent: It is an ill bird that fouls its own nest; Don't wash your dirty linen in public.
  • Meaning: "Why wantonly proclaim one's own disgrace, or expose the faults or weaknesses of one's kindred or people?"
  • Meaning 2: "It is considered contemptible to defy the rule of solidarity by revealing facts harmful to the group one belongs to."
  • Proverbs of All Nations. W. Kent & Company (late D. Bogue). 1859. p. 109.
  • Paczolay, Gyula (1997). "106". European proverbs: in 55 languages, with equivalents in Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Chinese and Japanese. Veszprémi Nyomda. p. 466. ISBN 1-875943-44-7.

• 酒は本心を表す
  • Sake-wa honshin-o arawasu.
  • Translation: Sake [in other words alcohol], reveals the true heart.
  • English equivalent: In wine there is truth; In vino veritas.
  • Chinese equivalent: 酒後吐真言。
  • Meaning: "Alcohol consumed removes the inhibition against telling the truth that occasionally one would like to keep secret."
  • Paczolay, Gyula (1997). European Proverbs in 55 languages. DeProverbio.com. p. 272. ISBN 1-875943-44-7.

• If you steal from a thief, you also have a taste of it.
  • Just because someone steals, you have no right to rob them.
  • Talmud Bavli, Berakoth, 5b

• Learn good conduct at all times and in love of it you will grow ever stronger.
  • Targum on Proverbs 5:19.

• Let him who is honoured be meek.
  • Targum on Proverbs 15:33.

• Four thousand throats may be cut in one night by a running man.
  • Klingon (CSUR):         
  • tlhIngan Hol: qaStaHvIS wa' ram loSSaD Hugh SIjlaH qetbogh loD
  • Literal translation: One man can cut four thousand throats in a single night, if he is continually running.
  • Klingon soldier, Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Day of the Dove"
  • Klingon language source: The Klingon Dictionary, Marc Okrand

• Only a fool fights in a burning house.
  • Klingon (CSUR):     
  • tlhIngan Hol: meQtaHbogh qachDaq Suv qoH neH
  • Literal translation: Only a fool fights in a house that continues to burn.
  • Kang, Star Trek: The Original Series, "Day of the Dove"
  • Klingon language source: The Klingon Way, Marc Okrand

• Death is an experience best shared.
  • Klingon (CSUR):     
  • tlhIngan Hol: Heghlu'DI' mobbe'lu'chugh QaQpu' Hegh wanI'
  • Literal translation: When someone dies not alone the death event is good.
  • Klingon Honor Guard manual, page 29
  • Klingon language source: The Klingon Way, Marc Okrand

• Pity the warrior who slays all his foes.
  • Klingon (CSUR):     
  • tlhIngan Hol: Hoch jaghpu'Daj HoHbogh SuvwI' yIvup
  • Literal translation: Pity the warrior that kills all his enemies!
  • Klingon Honor Guard manual, page 39

• A sharp knife is nothing without a sharp eye.
  • Klingon (CSUR):     
  • tlhIngan Hol: leghlaHchu'be'chugh mIn lo'laHbe' taj jej
  • Literal translation: A sharp knife is useless if the eye is unable to clearly see.
  • Klingon Honor Guard manual, page 47
  • Klingon language source: The Klingon Way, Marc Okrand

• Your mind to my mind... your thoughts to my thoughts...
  • Gene Roddenberry, Chant used during Vulcan mind melds; a similar expression was used in The X-Men # 3 (January 1964) by Professor Charles Francis Xavier. Xavier said, "My thoughts are YOUR thoughts, Blob! My will is YOUR will." (pg. 24)

• The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one.
  • Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

• A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
• A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
• A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
  • Isaac Asimov, "Runaround" in Astounding Science Fiction (March 1942); later published in I, Robot (1950)

• A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
  • Isaac Asimov, Robots and Empire (1985); a variant of this first occurred in The Evitable Conflict (1950) as: No robot may harm humanity, or through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

• For Want of a Nail
  For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
  For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
  For want of a horse the rider was lost.
  For want of a rider the message was lost.
  For want of a message the battle was lost.
  For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
  And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
  • Diz ſagent uns die wîſen, ein nagel behalt ein îſen, ein îſen ein ros, ein ros ein man, ein man ein burc, der ſtrîten kan.
  • ("The wise tell us that a nail keeps a shoe, a shoe a horse, a horse a man, a man a castle, that can fight.")
  • Middle High German, c. 1230 Freidank Bescheidenheit

• Whoever destroys a single life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed the whole world, and whoever saves a single life is considered by Scripture to have saved the whole world.
  • Parma Italy, mid-13th century codex; as cited in "The Origins of the Precept "Whoever Saves a Life Saves the World"", Philologos, Mosaic Magazine, Oct, 21 2016.

Tales and Maxims from the Midrash by Rev. Samuel Rapaport, (1907)

Obi-Wan Kenobi: Luke! Don't give in to hate. That leads to the dark side. ~ Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan, The Empire Strikes Back, (1980).

It is customary to list indigo as a color lying between blue and violet, but it has never seemed to me that indigo is worth the dignity of being considered a separate color. To my eyes it seems merely deep blue. ~ Isaac Asimov

Talitha koum! (Arise little girl) ~ Mark 5:41

• When iron was found, the trees began to tremble, but the iron reassured them: 'Let no handle made from you enter into anything made from me, and I shall be powerless to injure you.'
  • Genesis Rabbah 5, Tales and Maxims from the Midrash by Rev. Samuel Rapaport, (1907), p. 61

• Adam was created with two bodies, one of which was cut away from him and formed Eve.
  • Genesis Rabbah 8, Tales and Maxims from the Midrash by Rev. Samuel Rapaport, (1907), p. 63

• Sleepiness and laziness in a man are the beginning of his misfortune.
  • Genesis Rabbah 17, Tales and Maxims from the Midrash by Rev. Samuel Rapaport, (1907), p. 69

• Dreams, something like prophecy, are the offspring of imaginations and comparisons which we may form whilst awake.
  • Genesis Rabbah 17, (1907), p. 69, Tales and Maxims from the Midrash by Rev. Samuel Rapaport.

• Terah, the father of Abraham and Haran, was a dealer in images as well as a worshipper of them. Once when he was away he gave Abraham his stock of graven images to sell in his absence. In the course of the day an elderly man came to make a purchase. Abraham asked him his age, and the man gave it as between fifty and sixty years. Abraham taunted him with want of sound sense in calling the work of another man's hand, produced perhaps in a few hours, his god; the man laid the words of Abraham to heart and gave up idol worship. Again a woman came with a handful of fine flour to offer to Terah's idols, which were now in charge of Abraham. He took a stick and broke all the images except the largest one, in the hand of which he placed the stick which had worked this wholesale destruction. When his father returned and saw the havoc committed on his 'gods' and property he demanded an explanation from his son whom he had left in charge. Abraham mockingly explained that when an offering of fine flour was brought to these divinities they quarrelled with each other as to who should be the recipient, when at last the biggest of them, being angry at the altercation, took up a stick to chastise the offenders, and in so doing broke them all up. Terah, so far from being satisfied with this explanation, understood it as a piece of mockery, and when he learnt also of the customers whom Abraham had lost him during his management he became very incensed, and drove Abraham out of his house and handed him over to Nimrod. Nimrod suggested to Abraham that since he had refused to worship his father's idols because of their want of power, he should worship fire, which is very powerful: Abraham pointed out that water has power over fire. 'Well,' said Nimrod, 'let us declare water god.' 'But,' replied Abraham,' the clouds absorb the water and even they are dispersed by the wind.' 'Then let us declare the wind our god.' 'Bear in mind,' continued Abraham, 'that man is stronger than wind, and can resist it and stand against it.'
  Nimrod, becoming weary of arguing with Abraham, decided to cast him before his god--fire--and challenged Abraham's deliverance by the God of Abraham, but God saved him out of the fiery furnace. Haran too was challenged to declare his god, but halted between two opinions, and delayed his answer until he saw the result of Abraham's fate. When he saw the latter saved he declared himself on the side of Abraham's God, thinking that he too, having now become an adherent of that God, would be saved by the same miracle. But since his faith was not real, but depended on a miracle, he perished in the fire, into which like Abraham he was cast by Nimrod. This is hinted in the words (Gen. 11. 28): 'And Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his nativity, in Ur of the Chaldees.'
  • Genesis Rabbah 38. Tales and Maxims from the Midrash by Rev. Samuel Rapaport, Genesis Rabbah, (1907), p. 77-78

• Dreams neither injure nor benefit: they are vain.
  • Genesis Rabbah 68, Tales and Maxims from the Midrash by Rev. Samuel Rapaport., p. 83

• Just as two knives are both sharpened by being rubbed one against the other, so scholars improve and increase in knowledge when in touch with one another.
  • ''Genesis Rabbah 69, Tales and Maxims from the Midrash by Rev. Samuel Rapaport, (1907), p. 83

• He who lifts up his hand in a threatening manner against a fellow-man, though he may not actually strike him, is designated a wicked man.
  • Exodus Rabbah 1, Tales and Maxims from the Midrash by Rev. Samuel Rapaport, (1907), p. 88

• Honour the physician so long as you do not require his skill.
• Prayers should be said in common, master and man mistress and maid, rich and poor together, for all are equal before God.
  • Exodus Rabbah 21, Tales and Maxims from the Midrash by Rev. Samuel Rapaport, (1907), p. 99

• If your hands are stained by dishonesty, your prayers will be polluted and impure, and an offence to Him to whom you direct them. Do not pray at all before you have your hands purified from every dishonest act.
  • Exodus Rabbah 22, Tales and Maxims from the Midrash by Rev. Samuel Rapaport, (1907), p. 100

• Riches, might, and worldly wisdom are not only not always a blessing to their possessors, but may be the very causes of their destruction. Korah and Haman had their fall brought about by their riches. Goliath paid with his life the penalty of his might, and Balaam's wisdom was his destruction-Exod. Rabba 31.
• Repentance makes virtues almost of the very vices of the penitent sinner.
  • Exodus Rabbah 31, Tales and Maxims from the Midrash by Rev. Samuel Rapaport, (1907), p. 104

• The poor amongst Israel plead before the Lord, saying, 'If one of our rich transgresses, he can bring a sacrifice for his accidental sin and it is atoned (Levit. 4. 22); but what are we, who have no means to purchase sacrifices, to do in order to expiate our sins?' In reply they are told to have regard to the words of the Psalmist and the prophets.
  The Psalmist says (Ps. 26. 6, 7), 'I will wash my hands in innocency,' and lest you should think that he alludes to the bringing of bullocks and goats he hastens to add, 'So will I encompass thine altar, that I may cause to be heard the voice of thanksgiving and tell all thy wondrous work.'
  And the prophet Hosea tells you (Hosea 14. 3), 'Take with you words and return to the Lord.' Words, words of earnest prayer and not sacrifice, do I require.
  • Exodus Rabbah 38, Tales and Maxims from the Midrash by Rev. Samuel Rapaport, (1907), p. 106

The Book of Giants

[ . . . ] they defiled [ . . . ] 2[ . . . they begot] giants and monsters [ . . . ] 3[ . . . ] they begot, and, behold, all [the earth was corrupted . . . ] 4[ . . . ] with its blood and by the hand of [ . . . ] 5[giant's] which did not suffice for them and [ . . . ] 6[ . . . ] and they were seeking to devour many [ . . . ] 7[ . . . ] 8[ . . . ] the monsters attacked it.

2[ . . . ] flesh [ . . . ] 3al[l . . . ] monsters [ . . . ] will be [ . . . ] 4[ . . . ] they would arise [ . . . ] lacking in true knowledge [ . . . ] because [ . . . ] 5[ . . . ] the earth [grew corrupt . . . ] mighty [ . . . ] 6[ . . . ] they were considering [ . . . ] 7[ . . . ] from the angels upon [ . . . ] 8[ . . . ] in the end it will perish and die [ . . . ] 9[ . . . ] they caused great corruption in the [earth . . . ] [ . . . this did not] suffice to [ . . . ] "they will be [ . . . ]

• [ . . . ] they defiled [ . . . ] 2[ . . . they begot] giants and monsters [ . . . ] 3[ . . . ] they begot, and, behold, all [the earth was corrupted . . . ] 4[ . . . ] with its blood and by the hand of [ . . . ] 5[giant's] which did not suffice for them and [ . . . ] 6[ . . . ] and they were seeking to devour many [ . . . ] 7[ . . . ] 8[ . . . ] the monsters attacked it.
  • Book of Giants Dead Sea Scrolls 4Q531 Frag. 2 [8]

• 2[ . . . ] flesh [ . . . ] 3al[l . . . ] monsters [ . . . ] will be [ . . . ] 4[ . . . ] they would arise [ . . . ] lacking in true knowledge [ . . . ] because [ . . . ] 5[ . . . ] the earth [grew corrupt . . . ] mighty [ . . . ] 6[ . . . ] they were considering [ . . . ] 7[ . . . ] from the angels upon [ . . . ] 8[ . . . ] in the end it will perish and die [ . . . ] 9[ . . . ] they caused great corruption in the [earth . . . ] [ . . . this did not] suffice to [ . . . ] "they will be [ . . . ]
  • Book of Giants Dead Sea Scrolls 4Q532 Col. 2 Frags. 1 - 6

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