Andrea Dworkin was a genius. She had this to say about her male readers: Of course, men have read and do read Intercourse. Many like it and understand it. Some few have been thrilled by it–it suggests to them a new possibility of freedom, a new sexual ethic: and they do not want to be…
This is the last installment of a review of Bettelheim’s The Empty Fortress. The series starts here. Marcia’s case study is where I actually started to feel dirty. Literally the first thing we learn about her is that she’s pubescent (!). Marcia did not come to the Orthogenic School until she was almost 11 years…
This is the third in a series of posts on Bettelheim’s The Empty Fortress. See the earlier posts here and here. They were about the first section of the book, where Bettelheim explains his theory that autism is like giving up in a concentration camp. Now I’ll be turning to the case studies he used…
This post picks up where the last one left off, in a reading of Bettelheim’s The Empty Fortress. After 60 pages, he really starts to develop the concentration camp analogy, starting with our terror: Despite the incredible variety of symptoms among the several hundred schizophrenic children we have worked with over the years, they all…
There are some books everyone agrees are bad, which few people read because they’re supposed to be bad. The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self is one such book. It’s agreed to be bad for ending up on the wrong side of the nature/nurture debate: it turns out autism is mostly…
I love to quote this passage from MLK’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail: First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s…
Masochism is a painful topic. To really start thinking about it, I needed to be in therapy. Once I was, I realized mass therapy for sadomasochism is our only political hope. Whether you start with race or gender, the conclusion is the same. History is usually told by winners, but I’ve found an interesting account…
I loved this passage in Catharine MacKinnon’s Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Nowadays, I think most white writers would hesitate to state such bold (and true!) opinions about “black culture”: At risk of further complicating the issues, perhaps it would help to think of women’s sexuality as women’s like black culture is blacks’:…
My exposure to gender studies ideas happened in the following order: First, second wave feminism was implicit in my dad’s job as a social worker for the Navy. From a young age, I knew the categories of abuse (physical, sexual, verbal, neglect). I remember seeing posters or pamphlets about marital rape. I was a skateboarder,…
Today in Slate, an Irish American asked why they got a negative reaction from their “POC friends” for getting real interested in their Irish heritage: Q. Accidental racist: I’m a third-generation American. All four of my grandparents were born in Ireland and moved here as young kids. According to my parents, when my great-grandparents moved…