Things of interest in the news media this weekend:
Cameron-backed report to protect children from commercialisation (The Guardian)
My feminist-ness has very mixed feelings about all this. Whilst I applaud proposals to sell 'lads magazines' in brown covers, and discourage shops from selling children's clothes with "suggestive or gender-specific slogans" (hopefully this will include the Playboy logo on kids' stationery!), the over-all project of "let children be children", "shielding" them from being sexualized "too young," makes me uncomfortable. Partly because of the puritanical, 'no gay kiss before the watershed,' 'abstinence-only education' that goes with that sort of thing. But also because the problem isn't sex, it's how we - all of us, adults - think about and portray sex, and ourselves as sexual people. Trying to build a barrier between the "wallpaper of children's lives", whilst not trying to change the way that we envision our own sexuality, is not just ineffective, it also exacerbates the dualism of our culture that makes sexual images so degrading in the first place.
Also, since when is a black bra (for pubescent girls) sexualising?! There's an example of looking through the (paedophilic) male gaze - black bras are sensible because they don't show the dirt or go grey in the wash!
Is religion just a matter of taste? (New Statesman)
This was tweeted as "Religion, disgust, and soft drinks - the connection between moral and physical aversion" - so I was expecting an article about Kristeva's idea of 'the abject' and Powers of Horror - something I could link to as a tongue-in-cheek comment on how my tomato ketchup phobia has psychoanalytic roots and is not all that different from the origin of religious purity laws. But no, instead the article is about a psychological study, whose findings suggest that the 'disgust' induced by copying passages from Richard Dawkins or the Qu'ran affects the taste buds, thus making an identical soft drink taste less pleasant than it did after reading the Bible - though this effect seemed to be counteracted by hand-washing. The article goes on to draw conclusions about religious identity being constituted by opposition to other identities/ideas, and this manifests in aversion. All very Kristevan (though she is talking about society at large, not just 'the religious' as something 'other' from 'rational' ways of thinking). I work in literature and theology, and am interested in the material, fleshly aspects of spirituality and writing - but still find this study a turn-off. It uses very polarised texts - Dawkins is deliberately inflammatory, and, post-9/11, Islam isn't just 'another religion' - I wonder what the results would have been if they'd used Bertrand Russell or the Bhagavad Gita. It's a shame that 'psychology of religion' research usually seems to have the theological subtlety of a sledgehammer.
Cameron-backed report to protect children from commercialisation (The Guardian)
My feminist-ness has very mixed feelings about all this. Whilst I applaud proposals to sell 'lads magazines' in brown covers, and discourage shops from selling children's clothes with "suggestive or gender-specific slogans" (hopefully this will include the Playboy logo on kids' stationery!), the over-all project of "let children be children", "shielding" them from being sexualized "too young," makes me uncomfortable. Partly because of the puritanical, 'no gay kiss before the watershed,' 'abstinence-only education' that goes with that sort of thing. But also because the problem isn't sex, it's how we - all of us, adults - think about and portray sex, and ourselves as sexual people. Trying to build a barrier between the "wallpaper of children's lives", whilst not trying to change the way that we envision our own sexuality, is not just ineffective, it also exacerbates the dualism of our culture that makes sexual images so degrading in the first place.
Also, since when is a black bra (for pubescent girls) sexualising?! There's an example of looking through the (paedophilic) male gaze - black bras are sensible because they don't show the dirt or go grey in the wash!
Is religion just a matter of taste? (New Statesman)
This was tweeted as "Religion, disgust, and soft drinks - the connection between moral and physical aversion" - so I was expecting an article about Kristeva's idea of 'the abject' and Powers of Horror - something I could link to as a tongue-in-cheek comment on how my tomato ketchup phobia has psychoanalytic roots and is not all that different from the origin of religious purity laws. But no, instead the article is about a psychological study, whose findings suggest that the 'disgust' induced by copying passages from Richard Dawkins or the Qu'ran affects the taste buds, thus making an identical soft drink taste less pleasant than it did after reading the Bible - though this effect seemed to be counteracted by hand-washing. The article goes on to draw conclusions about religious identity being constituted by opposition to other identities/ideas, and this manifests in aversion. All very Kristevan (though she is talking about society at large, not just 'the religious' as something 'other' from 'rational' ways of thinking). I work in literature and theology, and am interested in the material, fleshly aspects of spirituality and writing - but still find this study a turn-off. It uses very polarised texts - Dawkins is deliberately inflammatory, and, post-9/11, Islam isn't just 'another religion' - I wonder what the results would have been if they'd used Bertrand Russell or the Bhagavad Gita. It's a shame that 'psychology of religion' research usually seems to have the theological subtlety of a sledgehammer.
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