Adventures Under the Book's Cover: March 2008

This Gratitude Letter is part of a psychology of motivation portfolio I need to put together of a class of mine. The assignment was to write a letter to someone whom you are gratful to have in your life. I chose my father.

Dear Dad,

I know I tell you I love you everyday and I truly hope that you know I am sincere. What I may not tell you as often as I should is why I love you so much, and thank you, for everything that you are and do. Thank you daddy for being you.

Since the day I was born and you held me and sang, your voice has been home to me. When I am afraid and feeling all alone and lost in this great big world, I only have to remind myself that you love and think about me. When it feels as though every one and everything is against me and as though the world is crashing down upon me, I know I have you on my side. When things get too hard and I don’t have the motivation to get out of bed for myself, I know that someone out there cares, which gives me the strength to keep going.

You have always been a hand to hold, someone who shelters me from every storm you can, warms my hands when you think they may be cold. You have been my rock forever, my superman, my Mr. Mom. With every fire-breathing dragon put in our way, you have always ended the fight as my hero. No matter how uncontrollable I have been in my past or how rebellious I was, you never gave up on me.

When we lost the ability to communicate, when my teenage years of rebellion turned me into someone even I didn’t like very much, when I was consumed with my problems and issues, oblivious to what you were going through, you didn’t give up on me. You never lost faith in me. Without you, I truly don’t believe I would be here where I am. Thank you dad.

Life hasn’t been easy for you. The love of your life passed away leaving you with two small children. Two small children with medical problems that would never fully disappear. You held in, and I need you to know how incredibly appreciative I am of you. Not only did you always keep a roof over my head and food in my belly... even through at times I refused to eat it, you gave me love which I can never tell you how much I appreciate. You gave me life and everyday you have helped to sustain it. You are my hero daddy.

I Love You!

Love Always,

Your little girl

Naming: Truth and Medicalization

Since the beginning of recorded history, the human body has been a core cause of
curiosity. Determining what does what within ourselves could then possibly lead to the ability to fix ailments otherwise unable to be treated. This could also be used to justify the oppression of the female gender as a whole. By determining the differences between the genders and then deeming one inferior, hundreds of years of men with a superiority complex could develop. With time comes experience which develops into knowledge which is tested by generations. Over the course of history, a number of truths were found to be false upon further exploration..

By distributing names to more and more of the unknown, we were
acknowledging/identifying their being and thus beginning our quest to find their purpose. As humans are notorious for being afraid of the unknown, answers were in desperate need of being found. This unfortunately lead to jumping to false conclusions on a number of occasions. One such idea was that of the females sexual organs being that of a males only inverted. This idea was given justification by the trusted medical practitioners of the time through illustrations showing the internal workings of males and females, yet with over exaggerated emphasis on the
similarities between them. Any and all ideas to the contrary were explained away using unsubstantiated logic or simply ignored. Examples of such illustrations may be found in Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex, on pages 78-93 with figures 13-37.

“Renissaince doctors understood there to be only one sex. On the other hand, there were manifestly at least two social sexes with radically different rights and obligations, somehow corresponding to ranges or bands, higher or lower, on the corporeal scale of being. Neither sort of sex-social or bilogical- could be viewed as fundemental or primary, although gender divisions- the categories of social sex- were certainly construed as natural. More importantly, though, biological sex, which we generally take to serve as the basis of gender, was just as much in the domain of culture and meaning as was gender.” (Laqueur, p.134)

The illustrations presented show erotic depictions of cadavers, statues coming to life, people literally tearing themselves apart, internal reproductive organs removed from host and put on display next to that of the opposite gender’s. This shows the sincere curiosity of the time with our internal workings. It also shows the culture present at that time, as the illustrations were often set in a more romanticized fashion than factual. Another observation that can be made about these illustrations, is the fact that it is pretty obvious when knowing what we know
today, that those who came up with the inverted sexual organs theory, were trying to use these illustrations as a method to prove their theory correct. Truths have been stretched to better correspond with the ideas presented by those with authority in the medical field. With the public having no other option than to take the authority’s word for it and no reason to question their findings, this remained the “known truth” for some time.

“Nothing could be more obvious, implied the most influential anatomist in the western tradition, than to imagine women as men. For the dullard who could not grasp the point immediately, Galen offers a step by step thought experiment.” (Laqueur, p.24)

“Believing is seeing. The new anatomy displayed, at many levels and with unprecedented vigor, the “fact” that the vagina really is a penis, and the uterus a scrotum. Berengario makes absolutely sure that his readers do not miss or doubt the point: the neck of the uterus is like the penis, and its receptacle with testicles and vessels is like the scrotum.” (Laqueur, p.79)

When looking at the vast amount of similarities presented at this time between the
reproductive organs, women were still deemed to be the inferior and the weaker of the sexes. This phenomenon is difficult to explain as one may think today that the person with the genitals more openly exposed would be the one thought of as the most vulnerable, but since men ruled the world, this did not end up being the case. Theories were rampant at this time in history. These theories often incorporated religious beliefs, folk tales, exaggerated observations and a touch of imagination.

“Only women have a womb, Rondibilis says, with no hint of literary shiftiness. But the womb is “an animal”, he continues, a move to metaphor and an allusion to Timaeus (91b-d), where Plato refers to both the male and female genital organs as animals prone to wander unless satisfied. And then, in the usual Renaissance manner of piling on similes, the organ, the womb, which is said not to exist in man, becomes “un membre,” a term that can of course mean simply an organ but that referred more specifically in the sixteenth century to an appendage - an arm or leg- or when used alone, as in “his member”, to the penis. There was no sense in which membre ever referred to “her member”. The point here is not that Rondibilis is making a controversial claim in saying that only women have a womb; no one denied this. It is rather that once again a female organ is attracted into the metaphorical orbit of the male, not in order a claim about likeness but to assert that all difference is figured on the vertical scale of man” (Laqueur, p.110)

“Language marks this view of sexual difference. For two millenia the ovary, an organ that by the early nineteenth century had become a synecdoche for women, had not even a name of it’s own. Galen refers to it by the same word he uses for the male testes, orcheis, allowing context to make clear which sex he is concerned with. Herophilus had called the ovaries didymoi (twins), another standard Greek word for testicles...” (Laqueur, pgs. 4-5)

Religion and men were the rulers of all at this time. They were held as the highest of authority figures. What they said was then to be undisputed law. It was unequivocal truth. It was not to be questioned by the uneducated, the poor, the female of our species. The Church had a say in nearly all that was being questioned and discovered. It also made a significant impact onnaming as well as language in general. This is seen when we consider the evolution of sacrament of penance and Catholic pastoral after the Council of Trent in the Middle Ages. Here people were discouraged from elaborating on sexual experiences when in confession. Impure thoughts and actions were described vaguely. Some men did not believe this was truly the correct way to receive forgiveness for these sins in confession. Authors by the name of Sanchez and Tamburini, for example believed that the description of the details were, “indispensable for the confession to be complete: description of the respective positions of the partners, the postures assumed, gestures, places touched, caresses, the precise moment of pleasure-an entire painstaking review
of the sexual act in it’s unfolding.” (Foucault, p.19)

“After centuries of hesitation about the acceptability of sex even in holy matrimony, the Catholic church settled for tightening the bonds of marriage, requiring yearly confessions of the faithful in order to be certain that sexual activity-of the right kind-was restricted to wedded couples, and punishing individuals who committed fornication (sexual relations out of wedlock)” (Nye, p. 51)

Speaking about sex, making reference to sex, alluding to the act of sex has been an issue of great controversy. It has, in North American culture (as well as in a number of other cultures around the world) been somewhat pushed into the shadows and thought of as somewhat of a secret.

“The objection will doubtless be raised that if so many stimulations and constraining mechanisms were necessary in order to speak of sex, this was because there reigned over everyone a certain fundamental prohibition; only definite necessities-economic pressures, political requirements-were able to lift this prohibition and open a few approaches to the discourse on sex, but these were limited and carefully coded; so much talk about sex, so many insistent devices contrived for causing it to be talked about-but under strict conditions: does this not prove that it was an object of secrecy, and more important, that there is still an attempt to keep it that way?” (Foucault, p.34)

“We must not forget that by making sex into that which, above all else, had to be confessed, the Christian pastoral always presented it as the disquieting enigma: not a thing which stubbornly shows itself, but one which always hides, the insidious presence that speaks in a voice so muted often disguised that one risks remaining deaf to it. Doubtless the secret does not reside in that basic reality in relation to which all the incitements to speak of sex are situated-whether they try to force the secret, or wether in some obscure way they reinforce it by the manner in which they speak of it.” (Foucault, p.35)

As sex was by far, not included an acceptable part of everyday conversation, the plethora of knowledge about sex and sexuality had not yet been collected and categorized to the extent in which it has been today. As time went on the power of names in collaboration with definitions of these names sparked a proliferation of names which has been powerful in it’s importance since the 17th century.

“Where the Greeks bisexual, then? Yes, if we mean by this that a Greek could, simultaneously or in turn, be enamored of a boy or a girl; that a married man could have paidika; that it was common for a male to change to a preference for women after “boy-loving” inclinations in his youth. But if we wish to turn our attention to the way in which they conceived of this duel practice, we need to take note of the fact that they did not recognize two kinds of “desire”, two different or competing “drives”, each claiming a share of men’s hearts or appetites. We can talk about their “bisexuality”, thinking of the free choice they allowed themselves between the two sexes, but for them this option was not referred to as a duel, ambivalent, and “bisexual” structure of desires.” (Nye, p. 28)

“We must not forget that the psychological, psychiatric, medical categories of homosexuality was constituted from the moment it was characterized-Westphal’s famous article of 1870 on “contrary sexual sensations” can stand as it’s date of birth- less by a type of sexual relations than by a certain quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and the feminine in oneself. Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.” (Foucault, p.43)

Putting names to sexual behaviors, as it also did in the case of putting names to the sexual anatomy, gave people a chance to judge these newly named behaviors and parts. A lot of these judgements lead to unjustifiable fears, stereotypes and misplaced superiority complexes. People were assigned labels. Suddenly something that was not a mental disorder, became one. Something that had no legal ramifications suddenly became a crime against the people. Sodomy is an example of this. Even when both parties are in agreement with the act, it was against the law.

“Between 1682-1684 four sodimites were executed in Rotterdam, and at least one in the Hague. Several others were sentenced in abstentia. In the next few decades, especially in Rotterdam, such trials become recurrent affairs. In 1702 two men were put to death there because they had perpetrated sodomy...” (Nye, p. 65)

“In the early colonies, the term and concept “sodomy” had connotations that they do not generally have for present-day Americans.” (Nye, p. 64)

“The early colonists found themselves at the mercy of natural, life-threatening forces which, personified as “God”, seemed angry, vengeful and punishing. The biblical Sodom and Gomorrah story likewise reflected an era of social development in which natural disasters were seen as God’s punishment for human moral error. Inhibited by a vindictive God , the early Puritan universe also included an active, malicious Devil, an often-evoked hell, and occasional malevolent witches. Early colonial lists of capital crimes included both sodomy and witchcraft.” (Nye, p. 64)

Naming led to the proliferation of names which was intermingled with the medicalization of mainly women’s bodies. Women’s reproductive organs which deemed them the weaker sex also became a cause of concern for the medical field. Medical illustrations found on page 87 (Figures 28-29) of Laqueur’s Making Sex show that as names were assigned to the many different internal organs, it began to give the medical field a better understanding of it’s workings. This is not to say that misunderstandings were not also rampant at this time.

Not all of the medical practitioners were satisfied with simply naming the different components of the sexual anatomy of men and women. From the one sex model came the two sex which we have to this day. The numerous different parts of the male and female reproductive systems were named and studied to figure out their particular functions. Theories were presented and tested. Over time truths were found and misconceptions were weeded out. Medical practices were brought forth, used, tested and either found to be beneficial or not by mainly the use of trial and error. All and all, the progression from the 17th century has been immense and the documentation paints a rich picture of all that has brought up to this day.

“We are often reminded of the countless procedures which Christianity once employed to make us detest the body; but let us ponder all the ruses that were employed for centuries to make us love sex, to make , to make the knowledge of it desirable and everything said about it precious. Let us consider the stratagems by which we were introduced to apply all our skills to discovering its secrets, by which we were attached to the obligation to draw out its truth, and made guilty for having failed to recognize it for so long. These devices are what ought to make us wonder today. Moreover, we need to consider the possibility that one day, perhaps, in a different economy of bodies and pleasures, people will no longer quite understand how the ruses of sexuality, and the power that sustains its organization, were able to subject us to that austere monarchy of sex, so that we became dedicated to the endless task of forcing its secret, of exacting the truest of confessions from a shadow.” (Foucault, p.159)

References

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vintage Books. New York. 1990.

Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Massachusettes, and London, England. 1990.

Nye, Robert, ed. Sexuality. Oxford University Press. New York. 1999.

Adventures Under the Book's Cover

Friday, March 14, 2008

Gratitude Letter

Thursday, March 13, 2008

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Psychology Experiment for my PSY of Motivation class

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

A paper about the sexual anatomy

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Welcome to my life

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