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The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.
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Sigmund Freud (Sexuality and the Psychology of Love)
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People do not see that the main question is not : "Am I loved?" which is to a large extent the question : "Am I approved of? Am I protected? Am I admired?" The main question is: "Can I love?
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Erich Fromm (Love, Sexuality and Matriarchy: About Gender)
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You’re too sensitive’ victims of sexual abuse are told over and over by those whose reality depends on being insensitive. Most adults who have been in the victim role cringe when anyone tells them they are sensitive. In fact, sensitivity is a lovely trait and one to be cherished in any human being.
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Renee Fredrickson (Repressed Memories: A Journey to Recovery from Sexual Abuse (Fireside Parkside Books))
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I think that the word bored does not get the attention it deserves. We speak of all sorts of terrible things that happen to people, but we rarely speak about one of the most terrible things of all : that is, being bored, being bored alone and, worse than that, being bored together.
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Erich Fromm (Love, Sexuality and Matriarchy: About Gender)
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…if you cannot hate you cannot love. If you cannot bite you can not kiss. If you cannot curse you cannot bless. Who cannot be a good hater will be a poor lover.
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Theodor Reik (Of love and lust; on the psychoanalysis of romantic and sexual emotions; from the works of Theodor Reik)
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The fear to love reaches sometimes the depth of a panic, resembles sometimes the fear to die.
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Theodor Reik (Of love and lust; on the psychoanalysis of romantic and sexual emotions; from the works of Theodor Reik)
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Of all the misconceptions about love the most powerful and pervasive is the belief that "falling in love" is love or at least one of the manifestations of love. It is a potent misconception, because falling in love is subjectively experienced in a very powerful fashion as an experience of love. When a person falls in love what he or she certainly feels is "I love him" or "I love her."
But two problems are immediately apparent. The first is that the experience of falling in love is specifically a sex-linked erotic experience. We do not fall in love with our children even though we may love them very deeply. We do not fall in love with our friends of the same sex-unless we are homosexually oriented-even though we may care for them greatly. We fall in love only when we are consciously or unconsciously sexually motivated. The second problem is that the experience of falling in love is invariably temporary. No matter whom we fall in love with, we sooner or later fall out of love if the relationship continues long enough. This is not to say that we invariably cease loving the person with whom we fell in love. But it is to say that the feeling of ecstatic lovingness that characterizes the experience of falling in love always passes. The honeymoon always ends. The bloom of romance always fades.
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M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth)
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He who licks his wounds cannot be affectionate
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Theodor Reik (Of love and lust; on the psychoanalysis of romantic and sexual emotions; from the works of Theodor Reik)
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The sexual act without love never bridges the gap between two human beings, except momentarily..
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Erich Fromm (The Art of Loving)
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It makes perfect sense that if human beings are raised in warm, loving households; if they are brought up to believe that the world is a secure and decent place, then they will grow up with a healthy relationship toward themselves and other people. - able to give love freely and receive it in return. Conversely, if a person is severely mistreated from his earliest years, subjected to constant psychological and physical abuse, he or she will grow up with a malignant view of life. To such a person, the world is a hateful place where all human relationships are based, not on love and respect, but on power, suffering, and humiliation.
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Harold Schechter (The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers)
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For me the real evil of masturbation would be that it takes an appetite which, in lawful use, leads the individual out of himself to complete (and correct) his own personality in that of another (and finally in children and even grandchildren) and turns it back: sends the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides. And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman. For the harem is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifices or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no real woman can rival. Among those shadowy brides he is always adored, always the perfect lover: no demand is made on his unselfishness, no mortification ever imposed on his vanity. In the end, they become merely the medium through which he increasingly adores himself . . . . And it is not only the faculty of love which is thus sterilized, forced back on itself, but also the faculty of imagination.
The true exercise of imagination, in my view, is (a) To help us to understand other people (b) To respond to, and, some of us, to produce, art. But it has also a bad use: to provide for us, in shadowy form, a substitute for virtues, successes, distinctions etc. which ought to be sought outside in the real world—e.g. picturing all I’d do if I were rich instead of earning and saving. Masturbation involves this abuse of imagination in erotic matters (which I think bad in itself) and thereby encourages a similar abuse of it in all spheres. After all, almost the main work of life is to come out of our selves, out of the little, dark prison we are all born in. Masturbation is to be avoided as all things are to be avoided which retard this process. The danger is that of coming to love the prison.
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C.S. Lewis
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Be generous, kind and compassionate. These are true characteristics of successful people.
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Archie Lee (That's the Way She Is: What Jack Needs To Know About Jill)
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Marriage is for the mature, not the infantile. The fusion of two different personalities requires emotional balance and control on the part of each person.
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Archie Lee
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If falling in love is not love, then what is it other than a temporary and partial collapse of ego boundaries? I do not know. But the sexual specificity of the phenomenon leads me to suspect that it is a genetically determined instinctual component of mating behavior. In other words, the temporary collapse of ego boundaries that constitutes falling in love is a stereotypic response of human beings to a configuration of internal sexual drives and external sexual stimuli, which serves to increase the probability of sexual pairing and bonding so as to enhance the survival of the species. Or to put it in another, rather crass way, falling in love is a trick that our genes pull on our otherwise perceptive mind to hoodwink or trap us into marriage. Frequently the trick goes awry one way or another, as when the sexual drives and stimuli are homosexual or when other forces-parental interference, mental illness, conflicting responsibilities or mature self-disciplinesupervene to prevent the bonding. On the other hand, without this trick, this illusory and inevitably temporary (it would not be practical were it not temporary) regression to infantile merging and omnipotence, many of us who are happily or unhappily married today would have retreated in whole- hearted terror from the realism of the marriage vows.
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M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth)
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Love is the great intangible. In our nightmares, we can create beasts out of pure emotion. Hate stalks the streets with dripping fangs, fear flies down narrow alleyways on leather wings, and jealousy spins sticky webs across the sky. In daydreams, we can maneuver with poise, foiling an opponent, scoring high on fields of glory while crowds cheer, cutting fast to the heart of an adventure. But what dream state is love? Frantic and serene, vigilant and calm, wrung-out and fortified, explosive and sedate –love commands a vast army of moods. Hoping for victory, limping from the latest skirmish, lovers enter the arena once again. Sitting still, we are as daring as gladiators.
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Diane Ackerman (A Natural History of Love)
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I found him very sexy because I love difference. An unbearably handsome face bores me unless something beneath it surface is crooked or askew: even a broken nose or one eye slightly higher than the other, or something psychological, something unfamiliar and maybe even suspect.
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David Wojnarowicz (Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration)
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The systems we will be exploring in order are:
● Breeding Targets: Arousal patterns tied to systems meant to get our ancestors to have sex with things that might bear offspring (e.g., arousal from things like penises, the female form, etc.).
● Inverse Systems: Arousal patterns that arise from a neural mix-up, causing something that disgusts the majority of the population to arouse a small portion of it (e.g., arousal from things like being farted on, dead bodies, having insects poured on one’s face, etc.).
● Emotional States and Concepts / Dominance and Submission: Arousal patterns that stem from either emotional concepts (such as betrayal, transformation, being eaten, etc.) or dominance and submission pathways.
● Emotional Connections to People: While emotional connections do not cause arousal in and of themselves, they do lower the threshold for arousal (i.e., you may become more aroused by a moderately attractive person you love than a very attractive stranger).
● Trope Attraction: Arousal patterns that are enhanced through a target’s adherence to a specific trope (a nurse, a goth person, a cheerleader, etc.).
● Novelty: Arousal patterns tied to the novelty of a particular stimulus.
● Pain and Asphyxiation: Arousal patterns associated with or enhanced by pain and oxygen deprivation.
● Basic Instincts: Remnants of our pre-cognitive mating instincts running off of a “deeper” autopilot-like neurological system (dry humping, etc.) that compel mating behavior without necessarily generating a traditional feeling of arousal.
● Physical Stimuli: Arousal patterns derived from physical interaction (kissing, touching an erogenous zone, etc.).
● Conditioned Responses: Arousal patterns resulting from conditioning (arousal from shoes, doorknobs, etc.).
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Simone Collins (The Pragmatist's Guide to Sexuality)
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A woman may not want a lover, but may yet want a child.
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H. Havelock Ellis (Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol 3: Analysis of the Sexual Impulse; Love and Pain; The Sexual Impulse in Women)
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the female is most easily won by the male who most strongly excites her sexual instincts.
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H. Havelock Ellis (Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol 3: Analysis of the Sexual Impulse; Love and Pain; The Sexual Impulse in Women)
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Like art, sex is fraught with symbols. Family romance (Freud) means that adult sex is always representation, ritualistic acting out of vanished realities.
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Camille Paglia (Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (Yale Nota Bene))
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The lessons of relationship that our primordial ancestors learned are deeply encoded in the genetics of our neurobiological circuits of love. They are present from the moment we are born and activated at puberty by the cocktail of neurochemicals. It’s an elegant synchronized system. At first our brain weighs a potential partner, and if the person fits our ancestral wish list, we get a spike in the release of sex chemicals that makes us dizzy with a rush of unavoidable infatuation. It’s the first step down the primeval path of pair-bonding.
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Abhijit Naskar (What is Mind?)
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At some level, all love is combat, a wrestling with ghosts. We are only for something by being against something else. People who believe they are having pleasant, casual, uncomplex sexual encounters, whether with friend, spouse, or stranger are blocking from consciousness the tangle of psychodynamics at work, just as they block the hostile clashings of their dream life.
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Camille Paglia (Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (Yale Nota Bene))
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It was strange to find that love does not spring from abundance and richness of the ego, but is a way out of inner distress and poverty. We were surprised to discover that our first love is not directed either to another person or to ourselves, but to an imaginary ideal ego, to an image of ourselves as we would like to be. There are stranger discoveries awaiting us the more deeply we grope in the dark and the further we intrude into the secret places of the human heart.
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Theodor Reik (Of love and lust; on the psychoanalysis of romantic and sexual emotions; from the works of Theodor Reik)
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Love begins with the stage of subconscious primitive lust and attraction. I’m saying primitive because at this very early stage there is really no difference between primitive man and modern man.
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Abhijit Naskar (Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost)
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Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings. If one could follow it to its psychological roots, one would, I believe, find that the main motive for "non-attachment" is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work.
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George Orwell (The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell 1903-1950)
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Nature programmed the neurobiological processes of early love to appear as something beyond the primitive sexual cravings of the genitals. So, from an evolutionary standpoint, it all leads to copulation and reproduction, but from the perspective of the individual who has recently fallen head over heels in love with someone, it is mostly about a sensation of warmth and delight, and rarely of sexual nature.
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Abhijit Naskar (Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost)
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People hate thinking systematically about how to optimize their relationships. It is normal to hear someone say: “I will just wait for something to happen naturally” when talking about one of the most important aspects of their life while genuinely believing that this approach has reasonable odds of success. Imagine if people said the same thing about their careers. It would sound truly bizarre for someone to expect a successful career to “just happen naturally” and yet it is entirely normalized to expect that good relationships will.
People pay tens of thousands of dollars to receive degrees in computer science, marketing, and neuroscience. They make tough sacrifices with the understanding that the skills and knowledge they build in these domains will dramatically affect their quality of life. Ironically, people spend very little time systematically examining mating strategies—despite the fact that a robust understanding of the subject can dramatically affect quality of life.
We will happily argue that your sexual and relationship skills matter more than your career skills. If you want to be wealthy, the fastest way to become so is to marry rich. Nothing makes happiness easier than a loving, supportive relationship, while one of the best ways to ensure you are never happy is to enter or fail to recognize and escape toxic relationships. If you want to change the world, a great partner can serve as a force multiplier. A draft horse can pull 8000 pounds, while two working together can pull 24,000 pounds. When you have a partner with whom you can synergize, you gain reach and speed that neither you nor your partner could muster individually.
Heck, even if you are the type of person to judge your self-worth by the number of people with whom you have slept, a solid grasp of mating strategies will help you more than a lifetime of hitting the gym (and we say this with full acknowledgment that hitting the gym absolutely helps). A great romantic relationship will even positively impact your health (a 2018 paper in Psychophysiology found that the presence of a partner in a room lowered participants’ blood pressure) and increase your lifespan (a 2019 paper in the journal Health Psychology showed individuals in happy marriages died young at a 20% lower rate).
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Malcolm Collins
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L. T. Woodward has also rightly brought to light a form of psychological sadism in those women of today who "make a great show of their bodies but apply a symbolic placard bearing the words 'Do not touch. "* Sexual tormentresses of this kind are found everywhere: in the girl who wears a minute bikini, the married woman with a provocatively low neckline, the young woman who walks along the street wiggling her hips in very tight pants or in a miniskirt that leaves more than half of her thighs exposed and who wants to be looked at but not touched — all of these types are capable of showing anger.
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Julius Evola (Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex)
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there is no evidence that we are genetically driven to find sexual love with the same person for our entire lives. Our genes want someone; they don’t care whom. This truth is evident in the high divorce rate and the almost equally high remarriage rate,
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William Glasser (Choice Theory: A New Psychology of Personal Freedom)
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I believe that a new philosophy will be created by those who were born after Hiroshima which will dramatically change the human condition. It will have these characteristics: (1) It will be scientific in essence and science-fiction in style. (2) It will be based on the expansion of consciousness, understanding and control of the nervous system, producing a quantum leap in intellectual efficiency and emotional equilibrium. (3) Politically it will stress individualism, decentralization of authority, a Iive-and-let-Iive tolerance of difference, local option and a mind-your-own-business libertarianism. (4) It will continue the trend towards open sexual expression and a more honest, realistic acceptance of both the equality of and the magnetic difference between the sexes. The mythic religious symbol will not be a man on a cross but a man-woman pair united in higher love communion. (5) It will seek revelation and Higher Intelligence not in formal rituals addressed to an anthropomorphic deity, but within natural processes, the nervous system, the genetic code, and without, in attempts to effect extra-planetary communication. (6) It will include practical, technical neurological psychological procedures for understanding and managing the intimations of union-immortality implicit in the dying process. (7) The emotional tone of the new philosophy will be hedonic, aesthetic, fearless, optimistic, humorous, practical, skeptical, hip. We are now experiencing a quiescent preparatory
waiting period. Everyone knows something is going to happen. The seeds of the Sixties have taken root underground. The blossoming is to come.
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Timothy Leary (Neuropolitique)
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A tramp, therefore, is a celibate from the moment when he takes to the road. He is absolutely without hope of getting a wife, a mistress, or any kind of woman except — very rarely, when he can raise a few shillings — a prostitute.
It is obvious what the results of this must be: homosexuality, for instance, and occasional rape cases. But deeper than these there is the degradation worked in a man who knows that he is not even considered fit for marriage. The sexual impulse, not to put it any higher, is a fundamental impulse, and starvation of it can be almost as demoralizing as physical hunger. The evil of poverty is not so much that it makes a man suffer as that it rots him physically and spiritually. And there can be no doubt that sexual starvation contributes to this rotting process. Cut off from the whole race of women, a tramp feels himself degraded to the rank of a cripple or a lunatic. No humiliation could do more damage to a man’s self-respect.
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George Orwell (Down and Out in Paris and London)
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Humans love sex. Both men and women are wired to be sexually responsive. Sex is the social glue of the human species. It takes heavy-handed training or trauma to kill a human's sex drive.
Religion has that power. Sexual training in guilt, shame, and fear begins virtually at birth by sexualizing nudity. The religious signal is that nudity is always sexual and the body must be covered for modesty. The Adam and Eve story is taught to young children even though they have no way to know what it means.
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Darrel Ray (Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality)
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Sex Games: What Men Really Think About Sex Partners (Sexuality, Cheating
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Raphael Schwartz (Your Love Life: Women's Guide to How and Why Men Cheat and Play Games For Sex (Relationships Guide Booklets Book 1))
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Luther, again, always compared the sexual to the excretory impulse, and said that marriage was just as necessary as the emission of urine.
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H. Havelock Ellis (Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol 3: Analysis of the Sexual Impulse; Love and Pain; The Sexual Impulse in Women)
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People act differently when they're in love with different people. We tend to match our expressed interests and preferences to those of a desired individual.
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Geoffrey Miller (The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature)
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Verbal courtship continues for months after people first meet, and it becomes the bedrock of human intimacy and love.
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Geoffrey Miller (The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature)
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There are so many dirty names for her that one rarely learns them all, even in one’s native language. There are dirty names for every female part of her body and for every way of touching her. There are dirty words, dirty laughs, dirty noises, dirty jokes, dirty movies, and dirty things to do to her in the dark. Fucking her is the dirtiest, though it may not be as dirty as she herself is. Her genitals are dirty in the literal meaning: stink and blood and urine and mucous and slime. Her genitals are also dirty in the metaphoric sense: obscene. She is reviled as filthy, obscene, in religion, pornography, philosophy, and in most literature and art and psychology. where she is not maligned she is magnificently condescended to, as in this diary entry by Somerset Maugham written when he was in medical school:
The Professor of Gynaecology: He began his course of lectures as follows: Gentlemen, woman is an animal that micturates once a day, defecates once a week, menstruates once a month, parturates once a year and copulates whenever she has the opportunity.
I thought it a prettily-balanced sentence.
Were she loved sufficiently, or even enough, she could not be despised so much. were she sexually loved, or even liked, she and what is done with or to her, in the dark or in the light, she would not, could not, exist rooted in the realm of dirt, the contempt for her apparently absolute and irrevocable; horrible; immovable; help us, Lord; unjust. She is not just less; she and the sex she incarnates are a species of filth. God will not help of course: "For a whore is a deep ditch; and a strange woman is a narrow pit.
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Andrea Dworkin (Intercourse)
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Ungratified sexuality is readily transformed into rage. "Prison explosions" are outbreaks of sadism resulting from the absence of sexual gratification. Hence, when 33,000 workers leave their employment site all at once precisely in spring, there can be no doubt that the unsatisfying sex-economic conditions in the Soviet Union are the cause. By "sex-economic conditions" we mean more than just the possibility of a regulated and satisfying love life; over and above this we mean everything that is related to pleasure and the joy of life in one's work.
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Wilhelm Reich (The Mass Psychology of Fascism)
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Generalized Stockholm Syndrome results from having one’s physical and/or psychological survival threatened by one or more individuals and then being shown kindness by other individuals who are perceived as similar to the threatening individuals in some ways. Generalized Stockholm Syndrome is explained in its simplest form by two psychological concepts: Graham’s Stockholm Syndrome theory and stimulus generalization. Graham’s theory predicts that, because the victim is suffering despair and needs nurturance as a result of terror created by the threat to survival, he or she bonds to the first person who provides emotional relief. The bond is particularly likely to develop if the person who provides emotional relief is the abuser, because kindness by the abuser creates hope that the abuse will stop.
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Dee L.R. Graham (Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives (Feminist Crosscurrents, 3))
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Because men and women in a relationship have many conflicting interests, evolutionary theory does not view love relationships as harmonious partnerships for childrearing; but a universal feature of human cultures is that men and women form relationships intended to last for years (marriage) that constrain their sexual behavior in some way and institutionalize their ties to children and to each other.
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Jonathan Haidt (The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom)
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When a person falls in love what he or she certainly feels is ‘I love him’ or ‘I love her.’ But two problems are immediately apparent. The first is that the experience of falling in love is specifically a sex-linked erotic experience. We do not fall in love with our children even though we may love them very deeply. We do not fall in love with our friends of the same sex – unless we are homosexually oriented – even though we may care for them greatly. We fall in love only when we are consciously or unconsciously sexually motivated. The second problem is that the experience of falling in love is invariably temporary. No matter whom we fall in love with, we sooner or later fall out of love if the relationship continues long enough. This is not to say that we invariably cease loving the person with whom we fell in love. But it is to say that the feeling of ecstatic lovingness that characterizes the experience of falling in love always passes. The honeymoon always ends. The bloom of romance always fades. To
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M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Travelled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth (Classic Edition))
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In theory, of course, abstinence is a foolproof method of preventing pregnancies and STDs and STIs (sexually transmitted diseases and sexually transmitted infections—you can have the latter without the former), just as starvation is a foolproof method of preventing obesity. But in reality the desires to love physically and to bond socially are fundamental to who we are as human beings; and the sex drive is so powerful, and the pleasures and psychological rewards so great, that recommending abstinence as a form of contraception and STI prevention is, in fact, to recommend pregnancy and infection by default.
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Michael Shermer (The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom)
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Steinach found that, when sexually mature white rats were castrated, though at first they remained as potent as ever, their potency gradually declined; sexual excitement, however, and sexual inclination always persisted.
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H. Havelock Ellis (Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol 3: Analysis of the Sexual Impulse; Love and Pain; The Sexual Impulse in Women)
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The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals. No double alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid. There is an obvious retort to this, but one should be wary about making it. In this yogi-ridden age, it is too readily assumed that "non-attachment" is not only better than a full acceptance of earthly life, but that the ordinary man only rejects it because it is too difficult: in other words, that the average human being is a failed saint. It is doubtful whether this is true. Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings. If one could follow it to its psychological roots, one would, I believe, find that the main motive for "non-attachment" is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work. But it is not necessary here to argue whether the otherworldly or the humanistic ideal is "higher." The point is that they are incompatible. One must choose between God and Man, and all "radicals" and "progressives," from the mildest Liberal to the most extreme Anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.
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George Orwell (Reflections on Gandhi)
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If we prove boring during the conversation after the film, our dates may say they had a lovely time, but let's just be friends. You can't buy love. You have to inspire it, partly through humor, the premier arena for advertising your creativity.
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Geoffrey Miller (The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature)
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There is a glimmer of metal that wavers between his thighs. He turns to face me. The balls of his large gauge nipple rings catch my eye as they glint in the light of the room. But, it is the tintinabular rings below that cause my eyes to descend to his shining metallic beacon of love. I feel my jaw slightly drop open and a small puff of air escapes over my lips. I am wildly transfixed. What is that? What will he do with it? I nervously wonder without a solution. He moves toward me with the sound of pockets full of change, and I know my life will never be the same.
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Anastasia
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One of the problems that people commonly have in their adult relationships if they have never received a firm commitment from their parents is the “I’ll desert you before you desert me” syndrome. This syndrome will take many forms or disguises. One form was Rachel’s frigidity. Although it was never on a conscious level, what Rachel’s frigidity was expressing to her husband and previous boyfriends was, “I’m not going to give myself to you when I know damn well that you’re going to dump me one of these days.” For Rachel, “letting go,” sexually or otherwise, represented
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M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth)
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In the Christian view, sex was an unclean act. Ask Christians, "Did Jesus have sex?" and watch their nonverbal response. Or ask, "Did Peter enjoy sex with his wife?" or "Did Mary and Martha, 'whom Jesus loved,' ever enjoy a good orgasm?" Such questions do not compute in the Christian mind. The Christian founders are seen as asexual.
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Darrel Ray (Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality)
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We can see happiness as the output of an ancient biological feedback system that tracks our progress in pursuing auspicious signs of fitness in a natural environment. We are happier, in general, when we are healthy, comfortable, safe, provisioned, socially connected, sexual, and loved. The function of happiness is to goad us into seeking the keys to fitness.
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Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
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Tengo had no particular desire for other women. What he wanted most of all was uninterrupted free time. If he could have sex on a regular basis, he had nothing more to ask of a woman. He did not welcome the unavoidable responsibility that came with dating a woman his own age, falling in love, and having a sexual relationship. The psychological stages through which one had to pass, the hints regarding various possibilities, the unavoidable collisions of expectations: Tengo hoped to get by without taking on such burdens.
The concept of duty always made Tengo cringe. He had lived his life thus far skillfully avoiding any position that entailed responsibility, and to do so, he was prepared to endure most forms of deprivation.
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Haruki Murakami (1Q84 Book 1 (1Q84, #1))
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While most people view physical violence as a more serious offense than psychological violence, both battered women and prisoners of war report that threat of physical violence is more psychologically debilitating than actual physical violence. Emotional abuse, such as the threat to maim or kill, is often perceived as a threat to physical survival. For these reasons, psychological violence may promote the development of the syndrome as much or more than physical violence. This makes sense. A person who threatens to shoot you may be the one knocking on your door, calling you on the phone, turning into your driveway, or waiting around the next corner. Every moment is filled with fear until you are finally shot. Once shot, you can relax because you now know where and how the shooting occurred, how seriously you were hurt, what you need to do to take care of the wound, etc.
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Dee L.R. Graham (Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives (Feminist Crosscurrents, 3))
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That these mandates exist is hardly news, but their cumulative effect on women’s lives tends to be examined through a fragmented lens, one-pathology-at-a-time, the eating disorder lit on the self-help shelves separated from the books on women’s troubled relationships with men, the books on compulsive shopping separated from the books on female sexuality, the books on culture and media separated from the books on female psychology. Take your pick, choose your demon: Women Who Love Too Much in one camp, Women Who Eat Too Much in another, Women Who Shop Too Much in a third. In fact, the camps are not so disparate, and the question of appetite—specifically the question of what happens to the female appetite when it’s submerged and rerouted—is the thread that binds them together. One woman’s tub of cottage cheese is another’s maxed-out MasterCard; one woman’s soul-murdering love affair is another’s frenzied eating binge.
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Caroline Knapp (Appetites: Why Women Want)
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The Archaeology of Desire The psychology of our desire often lies buried in the details of our childhood, and digging through the early history of our lives uncovers its archaeology. We can trace back to where we learned to love and how. Did we learn to experience pleasure or not, to trust others or not, to receive or be denied? Were our parents monitoring our needs or were we expected to monitor theirs? Did we turn to them for protection, or did we flee them to protect ourselves? Were we rejected? Humiliated? Abandoned? Were we held? Rocked? Soothed? Did we learn not to expect too much, to hide when we are upset, to make eye contact? In our family, we sense when it’s OK to thrive and when others might be hurt by our zest. We learn how to feel about our body, our gender, and our sexuality. And we learn a multitude of other lessons about who and how to be: to open up or to shut down, to sing or to whisper, to cry or to hide our tears, to dare or to be afraid.
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”
Esther Perel (Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence)
“
My vocation in life is to wonder about at the nature of the universe. This leads me into philosophy, psychology, religion, and mysticism, not only as subjects to be discussed but also as things to be experienced, and thus I make an at least tacit claim to be a philosopher and a mystic. Some people, therefore, expect me to be their guru or messiah or exemplar, and are extremely disconcerted when they discover my “wayward spirit” or element of irreducible rascality, and say to their friends, “How could he possibly be a genuine mystic and be so addicted to nicotine and alcohol?” Or have occasional shudders of anxiety? Or be sexually interested in women? Or lack enthusiasm for physical exercise? Or have any need for money? Such people have in mind an idealized vision of the mystic as a person wholly free from fear and attachment, who sees within and without, and on all sides, only the translucent forms of a single divine energy which is everlasting love and delight, as which and from which he effortlessly radiates peace, charity, and joy. What an enviable situation! We, too, would like to be one of those, but as we start to meditate and look into ourselves we find mostly a quaking and palpitating mess of anxiety which lusts and loathes, needs love and attention, and lives in terror of death putting an end to its misery. So we despise that mess, and look for ways of controlling it and putting “how the true mystic feels” in its place, not realizing that this ambition is simply one of the lusts of the quaking mess, and that this, in turn, is a natural form of the universe like rain and frost, slugs and snails, flies and disease. When the “true mystic” sees flies and disease as translucent forms of the divine, that does not abolish them. I—making no hard-and-fast distinction between inner and outer experience—see my quaking mess as a form of the divine, and that doesn’t abolish it either. But at least I can live with it.
”
”
Alan W. Watts (In My Own Way: An Autobiography)
“
He [Wilhelm Reich] challenged the puritanical ideas about sexuality in our culture. In laywoman terms, Reich believed humans store emotions in our muscles. During orgasm, muscles in the body contract, then relax, thus releasing emotions. Reich asserted that all aspects of healthy human psychology are dependent on one's sexual expression.
When you cry, laugh or feel free as a bird after coming, it is partly because you just released a bunch of yucky crap that's been building up inside your body for days, months, years, possibly your entire lifetime.
...When women function like the ocean, we live happy, healthy lives. Holding on to stuff that does not serve us in our present situation creates actual, physical blockages within our bodies...which on the individual level, manifest in bitterness, stifled creativity, sexual perversion and unwillingness to trust, love and/or touch.
Collectively-when an entire society is sexually repressed-phenomena such as war, rape, racism, greed and wholesale shitty behavior are considered acceptable.
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Inga Muscio (Cunt: A Declaration of Independence)
“
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid. There is an obvious retort to this, but one should be wary about making it. In this yogi-ridden age, it is too readily assumed that "non-attachment" is not only better than a full acceptance of earthly life, but that the ordinary man only rejects it because it is too difficult: in other words, that the average human being is a failed saint. It is doubtful whether this is true. Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings. If one could follow it to its psychological roots, one would, I believe, find that the main motive for "non-attachment" is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work. But it is not necessary here to argue whether the otherworldly or the humanistic ideal is "higher." The point is that they are incompatible. One must choose between God and Man, and all "radicals" and "progressives," from the mildest Liberal to the most extreme Anarchist, have in effect chosen Man
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George Orwell (Reflections on Gandhi)
“
Had she been able to listen to her body, the true Virginia would certainly have spoken up. In order to do so, however, she needed someone to say to her: “Open your eyes! They didn’t protect you when you were in danger of losing your health and your mind, and now they refuse to see what has been done to you. How can you love them so much after all that?” No one offered that kind of support. Nor can anyone stand up to that kind of abuse alone, not even Virginia Woolf. Malcolm Ingram, the noted lecturer in psychological medicine, believed that Woolf’s “mental illness” had nothing to do with her childhood experiences, and her illness was genetically inherited from her family. Here is his opinion as quoted on the Virginia Woolf Web site: As a child she was sexually abused, but the extent and duration is difficult to establish. At worst she may have been sexually harassed and abused from the age of twelve to twenty-one by her [half-]brother George Duckworth, [fourteen] years her senior, and sexually exploited as early as six by her other [half-] brother… It is unlikely that the sexual abuse and her manic-depressive illness are related. However tempting it may be to relate the two, it must be more likely that, whatever her upbringing, her family history and genetic makeup were the determining factors in her mood swings rather than her unhappy childhood [italics added]. More relevant in her childhood experience is the long history of bereavements that punctuated her adolescence and precipitated her first depressions.3 Ingram’s text goes against my own interpretation and ignores a large volume of literature that deals with trauma and the effects of childhood abuse. Here we see how people minimize the importance of information that might cause pain or discomfort—such as childhood abuse—and blame psychiatric disorders on family history instead. Woolf must have felt keen frustration when seemingly intelligent and well-educated people attributed her condition to her mental history, denying the effects of significant childhood experiences. In the eyes of many she remained a woman possessed by “madness.” Nevertheless, the key to her condition lay tantalizingly close to the surface, so easily attainable, and yet neglected. I think that Woolf’s suicide could have been prevented if she had had an enlightened witness with whom she could have shared her feelings about the horrors inflicted on her at such an early age. But there was no one to turn to, and she considered Freud to be the expert on psychic disorders. Here she made a tragic mistake. His writings cast her into a state of severe uncertainty, and she preferred to despair of her own self rather than doubt the great father figure Sigmund Freud, who represented, as did her family, the system of values upheld by society, especially at the time. UNFORTUNATELY,
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Alice Miller (The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting)
“
The stereotype that men have sex for pleasure and women have sex for love is unfounded," says Meston. But while the top 10 show significant overlap, distinctions emerge lower in the list. "Women don't have sex because they're IN love," says Meston, "But because they're protecting love, stealing love, trying to create love, or doing it out of duty."
One participant said, "My mother taught me to have sex with my man, or someone else will."
Another said, "I'd rather spend five minutes having sex with him than listen to him whine and complain about how horny he is for the next two days.
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Garth Sundem (Brain Trust: 93 Top Scientists Reveal Lab-Tested Secrets to Surfing, Dating, Dieting, Gambling, Growing Man-Eating Plants, and More!)
“
Homophobia and the closet are allies. Like an unhealthy co-dependent relationship they need each other to survive. One plays the victim living in fear and shame while the other plays the persecutor policing what is ‘normal’. The only way to dismantle homophobia is for every gay man and lesbian in the world to come out and live authentic lives. Once they realise how normal we are and see themselves in us….the controversy is over.
It is interesting to think what would happen though....on a particularly pre-determined day that every single gay man and lesbian came out. Imagine the impact when, on that day, people all around the world suddenly discovered their bosses, mums, dads, daughters, sons, aunts, uncles, cousins, teachers, doctors, neighbours, colleagues, politicians, their favourite actors, celebrities and sports heroes, the people they loved and respected......were indeed gay.
All stereotypes would immediately be broken.....just by the same single act of millions of people…..and at last there would no longer be need for secrecy. The closet would become the lounge room. How much healthier would we be emotionally and psychologically when we could all be ourselves doing life without the internal and societal negatives that have been attached to our sexual orientation.
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Anthony Venn-Brown OAM (A Life of Unlearning - a journey to find the truth)
“
Rather than being 'this not that' I am this *and* that... I've felt like a blossoming flower. As I become more fully me and as I'm more comfortable with each petal of my identity, I open myself up and look into the sun... As someone who identifies as bisexual and does see the world on a multitude of plains, my intellect and creativity, my head and my heart, are just further parallels of how I am able to find myself attracted to and love both men and women.
[Participant quote from the study 'The positive aspects of a bisexual self-identification' in Psychology and Sexuality 1 (2) by S. Scales Rostosky, D. E. Riggle, and D. Pascale-Hague pp.131-44]
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Julia Shaw (Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality)
“
Though social psychologist Elaine Hatfield is one of the nicest people you could ever meet, her life has been filled with controversy, mostly because of her independent streak. When she was a young professor at the University of Minnesota in 1963, there were two rules. Women were not allowed to hang their coats in the faculty cloak room. Women were not allowed to dine at the Faculty Club. One Monday evening, Hatfield decided to challenge the rules. She and fellow psychologist Ellen Berscheid approached the table where their male colleagues were sitting. When we walked into the Faculty Club and chorused: “May we sit down?” our six colleagues couldn’t have been more courtly. “Of course! Do sit down.” But, Colleague #1 glanced at his watch and declared, “Oh, do excuse me I have to run.” Colleague #2 shifted uneasily, then remembered that his wife was picking him up. Colleague #3 snatched up a dinner roll and said that he better walk out with his friend. The remaining men realized that they’d better be going, too. Within minutes Ellen and I were sitting alone at the elegant table, surrounded by six heaping plates. Shamed but undeterred, they kept returning to the Faculty Club until they finally obtained their own table. Eventually, Hatfield became a full professor at the University of Wisconsin, where she pioneered research into the psychology of falling in love. The
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Ogi Ogas (A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the Internet Tells Us About Sexual Relationships)
“
Men’s and women’s mating strategies differ profoundly. Women place a premium on commitment and all of the cues to commitment, most centrally emotional involvement and love. Men have evolved a greater desire for sexual variety, which produces tremendous conflict between the sexes, for it violates women’s desire for intimate involvement. Because youth and beauty are so strongly correlated with fertility in women, men have evolved a strong desire for women who embody these qualities. Finally, men value sexual fidelity in a partner, for any infidelity on a woman’s part puts her mate’s paternity at risk. Men’s and women’s sexual strategies provide the foundation for the psychological design of jealousy.
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David M. Buss (The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex)
“
In men, there is the familiar distinction between the Madonna on a pedestal and the lowlife whore, in the sense that they elevate the love object to unknown—and, above all, unattainable—heights. These are the super-conventional husbands who respect their wives. They often respect them so much that they become psychologically impotent. The shadow of the for-bidden mother covers the beloved in this cloak of respect, so that any sexual approach becomes impossible. However, this impotence wholly melts away, together with the respect, when such a man goes to a whore, either in his imagination or in reality. The pendulum swings the other way, because in this case the woman, in the figure of the whore, is humiliated just as much as the wife-mother is extolled. The dimension of lust appears here, inevitably accompanied by feelings of guilt. It is in this context that we come across the typical male fantasy, well known to every prostitute, of 'saving' a woman. A large number of her clients want to 'save' her from her ruin. They want to restore to her the status of being an object of love. In other words, they want her to become a wife-mother, which brings them back to respect, and completes the circle. Interestingly, in either case, whether he saves her or humiliates her, the power lies with the man. This in itself is a rewrite of the original mother-child scenario. His position has shifted from passive to active.
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Paul Verheage
“
Children in misogynistic households experience tremendous rage, tension, and frustration. When they see their mothers victimized either psychologically or physically, they become frightened and angry. Unfortunately, they have no more outlet for their anger than their mothers have for theirs. Typically, such children express their feelings in self-defeating ways: psychosomatic complaints, difficulties at school, and depressions. Bedwetting and nightmares are common reactions among younger children. The older child may express his feelings through fighting with his peers, indiscriminate sexual activity, substance abuse, or other forms of antisocial behavior. If a child is also a victim of physical and/or sexual abuse, the symptoms of distress will be much greater.
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Susan Forward (Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don't Know Why)
“
The lie [of compulsory female heterosexuality] is many-layered. In Western tradition, one layer—the romantic—asserts that women are inevitably, even if rashly and tragically, drawn to men; that even when that attraction is suicidal (e. g, Tristan and Isolde, Kate Chopin’s ‘The Awakening’) it is still an organic imperative. In the tradition of the social sciences it asserts that primary love between the sexes is ‘normal,’ that women need men as social and economic protectors, for adult sexuality, and for psychological completion; that the heterosexually constituted family is the basic social unit; that women who do not attach their primary intensity to men must be, in functional terms, condemned to an even more devastating outsiderhood than their outsiderhood as women.
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Adrienne Rich
“
In their book Warrior Lovers, an analysis of erotic fiction by women, the psychologist Catherine Salmon and the anthropologist Donald Symons wrote, "To encounter erotica designed to appeal to the other sex is to gaze into the psychological abyss that separates the sexes.... The contrasts between romance novels and porn videos are so numerous and profound that they can make one marvel that men and women ever get together at all, much less stay together and successfully rear children." Since the point of erotica is to offer the consumer sexual experiences without having to compromise with the demands of the other sex, it is a window into each sex's unalloyed desires. ... Men fantasize about copulating with bodies; women fantasize about making love to people.
Rape is not exactly a normal part of male sexuality, but it is made possible by the fact that male desire can be indiscriminate in its choice of a sexual partner and indifferent to the partner's inner life--indeed, "object" can be a more fitting term than "partner." The difference in the sexes' conception of sex translates into a difference in how they perceive the harm of sexual aggression. ... The sexual abyss offers a complementary explanation of the callous treatment of rape victims in traditional legal and moral codes. It may come from more than the ruthless exercise of power by males over females; it may also come from a parochial inability of men to conceive of a mind unlike theirs, a mind that finds the prospect of abrupt, unsolicited sex with a stranger to be repugnant rather than appealing. A society in which men work side by side with women, and are forced to take their interests into account while justifying their own, is a society in which this thick-headed incuriosity is less likely to remain intact.
The sexual abyss also helps to explain the politically correct ideology of rape. ... In the case of rape, the correct belief is that rape has nothing to do with sex and only to do with power. As (Susan) Brownmiller put it, "From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear." ... Brownmiller wrote that she adapted the theory from the ideas of an old communist professor of hers, and it does fit the Marxist conception that all human behavior is to be explained as a struggle for power between groups. But if I may be permitted an ad feminam suggestion, the theory that rape has nothing to do with sex may be more plausible to a gender to whom a desire for impersonal sex with an unwilling stranger is too bizarre to contemplate.
Common sense never gets in the way of a sacred custom that has accompanied a decline of violence, and today rape centers unanimously insist that "rape or sexual assault is not an act of sex or lust--it's about aggression, power, and humiliation, using sex as the weapon. The rapist's goal is domination." (To which the journalist Heather MacDonald replies: "The guys who push themselves on women at keggers are after one thing only, and it's not reinstatement of the patriarchy.")
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Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined)
“
One of the things necessary for healing to take place is recognizing the truth of the relationship and that person. You experienced so many covert lies; it is incredibly helpful to be able to see clearly. The truth is you were in love with an illusion, with the person they portrayed themselves to be. At first, this is an excruciating realization. You will doubt and wonder if you are overinflating this, if they really are innocent and you’re just scared to move on. You will have a ton of self-doubt. Eventually, with education and support, you will see that your hunch, your inner knowing, is on target. In time the truth that you were in love with an illusion will feel like a relief because truth does set you free. That full realization will validate years of confusion you felt, years of unexplained exhaustion and health issues, years of sexual confusion, years of feeling less than, and years of unhappiness, along with anxiety. You lived in an unsafe environment, were demeaned and devalued for years (decades for some of you; entire childhoods for many of you). You did not experience unconditional love; you did not live with someone who treated you with respect, who cherished you, treasured you, and felt so lucky to have you in their life. No, the truth is you experienced a counterfeit. If this was a spouse or romantic partner, this awakening to the truth is excruciating because you did love that person with all your heart. You were dedicated. You were in 100%. The truth is that you were the lifeforce in the relationship. When you’re really honest with yourself, when you look back with clear vision, that life, that love you gave and felt, was never fully reciprocated.
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Debbie Mirza (The Covert Passive Aggressive Narcissist: Recognizing the Traits and Finding Healing After Hidden Emotional and Psychological Abuse (The Narcissism Series Book 1))
“
Once the purging has taken place, the woman often dreams of a black goddess who becomes her bridge between spirit and body. As one aspect of Sophia, such an image can open her to the mystery of life being enacted in her own body. Her "mysterious and exotic darkness" inspires a particular depth of wonderment and love. For a woman without a positive mother, this "dark" side of the Virgin can bring freedom, the security of freedom, because she is a natural home for the rejected child. The child born from the rejected side of the mother can bring her own rebel to rest in the outcast state of Mary. In loving the abandoned child within herself, a woman becomes pregnant with herself. The child her mother did not nourish, she will now nourish, not as the pure white biblical Virgin who knew no Joseph, but as the dark Montserrat Virgin who presides over "marriage and sex, pregnancy and childbirth." The Black Madonna is nature impregnated by spirit, accepting the human body as the chalice of the spirit. She is the redemption of matter, the intersection of sexuality and spirituality.
Connecting to this archetypal image may result in dreams of a huge serpent, mysterious, coldblooded, inaccessible to human feeling. Seen as an appendage of the negative mother, it is the phallus stolen from the father and used to guard inviolate purity. Yet this same snake, when seen in relation to the moon, symbolizes the dark, impersonal side of femininity and at the same time its capacity to renew itself. The daughter who can come out from under the skin of the negative mother will not perpetuate her but redeem her. The Black Madonna is the patron saint of abandoned daughters who rejoice in their outcast state and can use it to renew the world.
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Marion Woodman (The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation)
“
Emotional abuse can pose a threat to a person’s psychological survival, particularly if that person is a child and if the emotional abuse is chronic and severe. Threat of abandonment is experienced by some as a threat to physical and/or psychological survival. This is particularly so if the victim is dependent on the person threatening abandonment, as a child may be. Incest is a form of physical and emotional abuse that threatens a child’s psychological survival and sometimes even her or his physical survival. Extreme sexual or emotional abuse may produce fragmentation of identity, as in multiple personality, or psychic annihilation, as in psychosis. Threat to psychological survival can also occur, for example, when someone threatens to kill your children, when someone continues to sexually abuse your children and there is nothing you can do to stop it, or when someone prevents you from seeing your children.
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Dee L.R. Graham (Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives (Feminist Crosscurrents, 3))
“
Close friendships, Gandhi says, are dangerous, because “friends react on one another” and through loyalty to a friend one can be led into wrong-doing. This is unquestionably true. Moreover, if one is to love God, or to love humanity as a whole, one cannot give one's preference to any individual person. This again is true, and it marks the point at which the humanistic and the religious attitude cease to be reconcilable. To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others. The autobiography leaves it uncertain whether Gandhi behaved in an inconsiderate way to his wife and children, but at any rate it makes clear that on three occasions he was willing to let his wife or a child die rather than administer the animal food prescribed by the doctor. It is true that the threatened death never actually occurred, and also that Gandhi — with, one gathers, a good deal of moral pressure in the opposite direction — always gave the patient the choice of staying alive at the price of committing a sin: still, if the decision had been solely his own, he would have forbidden the animal food, whatever the risks might be. There must, he says, be some limit to what we will do in order to remain alive, and the limit is well on this side of chicken broth. This attitude is perhaps a noble one, but, in the sense which — I think — most people would give to the word, it is inhuman. The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid. There is an obvious retort to this, but one should be wary about making it. In this yogi-ridden age, it is too readily assumed that “non-attachment” is not only better than a full acceptance of earthly life, but that the ordinary man only rejects it because it is too difficult: in other words, that the average human being is a failed saint. It is doubtful whether this is true. Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings. If one could follow it to its psychological roots, one would, I believe, find that the main motive for “non-attachment” is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work. But it is not necessary here to argue whether the other-worldly or the humanistic ideal is “higher”. The point is that they are incompatible. One must choose between God and Man, and all “radicals” and “progressives”, from the mildest Liberal to the most extreme Anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.
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”
George Orwell
“
Because the family is our first and in many ways our most important social environment, quality of life depends to a large extent on how well a person succeeds in making the interaction with his or her relatives enjoyable. For no matter how strong the ties biology and culture have forged between family members, it is no secret that there is great variety in how people feel about their relatives. Some families are warm and supportive, some are challenging and demanding, others threaten the self of their members at every turn, still others are just insufferably boring. The frequency of murder is much higher among family members than among unrelated people. Child abuse and incestuous sexual molestation, once thought to be rare deviations from the norm, apparently occur much more often than anyone had previously suspected. In John Fletcher’s words, “Those have most power to hurt us that we love.” It is clear that the family can make one very happy, or be an unbearable burden. Which one it will be depends, to a great extent, on how much psychic energy family members invest in the mutual relationship, and especially in each other’s goals.
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Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience)
“
The communists believe that they have found the path to deliverance from our evils. According to them, man is wholly good and is well-disposed to his neighbour; but the institution of private property has corrupted his nature. The ownership of private wealth gives the individual power, and with it the temptation to ill-treat his neighbour; while the man who is excluded from possession is bound to rebel in hostility against his oppressor. If private property were abolished, all wealth held in common, and everyone allowed to share in the enjoyment of it, ill-will and hostility would disappear among men. Since everyone’s needs would be satisfied, no one would have any reason to regard another as his enemy; all would willingly undertake the work that was necessary.I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot enquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premisses on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments, certainly a strong one, though certainly not the strongest; but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness, nor have we altered anything in its nature. Aggressiveness was not created by property. It reigned almost without limit in primitive times, when property was still very scanty, and it already shows itself in the nursery almost before property has given up its primal, anal form; it forms the basis of every relation of affection and love among people (with the single exception, perhaps, of the mother’s relation to her male child). If we do away with personal rights over material wealth, there still remains prerogative in the field of sexual relationships, which is bound to become the source of the strongest dislike and the most violent hostility among men who in other respects are on an equal footing. If we were to remove this factor, too, by allowing complete freedom of sexual life and thus abolishing the family, the germ-cell of civilization, we cannot, it is true, easily foresee what new paths the development of civilization could take; but one thing we can expect, and that is that this indestructible feature of human nature, will follow it there.
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Sigmund Freud (Civilization and Its Discontents)
“
Males of all species are made for wooing females, and females typically choose among their suitors. If you take a closer look, you can observe such behavior all around you. The beautiful bird chirping outside your window. It’s a mating call. That pretty little bird is trying to attract a potential mate, so that it can propagate its genes. Why does the peacock have such beautiful feathers? It is to attract a healthy female. He as well is trying to propagate his genes. Even we humans, are not much different from the rest of the animal kingdom when it comes to attracting potential mates. When women dress up for their night out at the club, they are doing so to look attractive. This is a subconscious evolutionary desire to attract as many potential mates as possible.... While women tend to grab attention with their looks, men on the other hand, tend to attract as many potential females as possible, by showing off their resources. When a man shows off with his fancy car, expensive gold watch and suit, or flexes his muscles and brags about how many credit cards he owns, he’s doing so to make himself desirable by healthy women, in order to propagate his genes. It is all in the pursuit of reproduction.
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Abhijit Naskar (What is Mind?)
“
If one (inescapable) group threatens another group with violence but
also—as a group—shows the victimized group some kindness, an attachment between the groups will develop. This is what we refer to as Societal (or Cultural) Stockholm Syndrome) and it is expected to develop under Situation 3 Generalized Stockholm Syndrome conditions. That is, it is expected to develop in a culture in which it is socially mandated and socially predictable that members of the oppressor group will both victimize and be kind to members of the oppressed group. However, the identity of the particular member of the oppressor group who metes out the violence or shows kindness to any particular member of the oppressed group is random and may be determined by variables such as physical proximity.
Because the transactions between oppressor and oppressed group members are pervasive and the traumatizers are omnipresent, members of the victim group perceive that they cannot escape the abuse and therefore look to their traumatizers for nurturance and protection. A Stockholm Syndrome psychology is expected to generalize to any and all interactions with members of the violent group, even members of that group who are not themselves violent, or who are less violent, toward members of the victimized group.
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Dee L.R. Graham (Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives (Feminist Crosscurrents, 3))
“
the psychological
premisses on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing
private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its
instruments, certainly a strong one, though certainly not the strongest; but we
have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused
by aggressiveness, nor have we altered anything in its nature. Aggressiveness
was not created by property. It reigned almost without limit in primitive times,
when property was still very scanty, and it already shows itself in the nursery
almost before property has given up its primal, anal form; it forms the basis of
every relation of affection and love among people (with the single exception,
perhaps, of the mother’s relation to her male child). If we do away with personal
rights over material wealth, there still remains prerogative in the field of sexual
relationships, which is bound to become the source of the strongest dislike and
the most violent hostility among men who in other respects are on an equal
footing. If we were to remove this factor, too, by allowing complete freedom of
sexual life and thus abolishing the family, the germ-cell of civilization, we
cannot, it is true, easily foresee what new paths the development of civilization
could take; but one thing we can expect, and that is that this indestructible
feature of human nature, will follow it there.
”
”
Sigmund Freud
“
Presentism, neglect of the future (along with forgetfulness and contempt for the past) is the paradoxical characteristic of a society and elites who have nothing but the words progress, innovation, modernity on their lips in every domain, including the economic.
As soon as one is no longer ‘in love’ as depicted in television shows, as soon as sexual desire fades, one separates from one’s current partner. Marrying for superficial reasons, one separates for superficial reasons. Moreover, this compulsive and immature sort of behaviour is found not only in relationships but also in eroticism and sex in general, always under the sign of speed, immediacy, and instant gratification. Conjugal love and even sex are no longer savoured but consumed or indeed devoured, as if by fire.
Despite a form of pseudo-maturity demanded in all domains, especially sexual, and an ideology of liberation, Westerners since the 1960s (the baby boom generation to which I belong) have had difficulty proceeding to the psychological stage of adulthood, that of building for the long-term. This is true even in fields very different to those of sex and relationships, and include those of politics and economics. It is the generalised reign of immaturity and improvidence. Marriage is then conceived as a sort of game, and it ends as soon as one blows the final whistle. Unrestrained enjoyment, the slogan of May ‘68,[27] inspired by a cheap, boorish hedonism, has actually passed into our mores.
”
”
Guillaume Faye
“
A number of mechanisms make it difficult for the victim to separate psychologically from the abuser following prolonged captivity. Two such mechanisms are fear of losing the only positive relationship available to the victim during this prolonged period of isolation—marked by terrorization and the resultant craving for nurturance, protection, and safety—and fear of losing the only identity that remains, namely, her or his self as seen through the eyes of the abuser. These fears are expressed variously: fear of abandonment, of being lonely, of not being able to live without the abuser, and of not knowing who one is without the abuser, feeling empty, and so on. The greater the victim’s fears, the greater was her or his isolation from perspectives other than the abuser’s, and the greater the damage to the sense of self. In the case of child victims, this view of self may be the only sense of sell' they have ever experienced; in
the case of adult victims, this view of self may have replaced a previous sense of self. In any case, living without the abuser, and thus without a sense of self, is experienced by the victim as a threat to psychic survival. Loss of their only “friend” and of self as experienced through the abuser’s eyes requires victims to take a leap into a terrifying unknown, which is difficult even for people in healthy environments. It is considerably more difficult for someone whose survival depends on the fragile feelings of predictability and control produced by cognitive distortions and the whims of a terrorist.
”
”
Dee L.R. Graham (Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives (Feminist Crosscurrents, 3))
“
For a century after Darwin proposed the theory of sexual selection, it was vigorously resisted by male scientists, in part because they presumed that women were passive in the mating process. The proposal that women actively select their mates and that these selections constitute a powerful evolutionary force was thought to be science fiction rather than scientific fact. In the 1970s, scientists gradually came to accept the profound importance of female choice in the animal and insect world, and in the 1980s and 1990s scientists began to document within our own species the active strategies that women pursue in choosing and competing for mates. But in the early decades of the twenty-first century, some stubborn holdouts continue to insist that women have but a single mating strategy—the pursuit of a long-term mate.
Scientific evidence suggests otherwise. The fact that women who are engaged in casual sex as opposed to committed mating shift their mating desires to favor a man’s extravagant lifestyle, his physical attractiveness, his masculine body, and even his risk-taking, cocky “bad-boy” qualities tells us that women have specific psychological mechanisms designed for short-term mating. The fact that women who have extramarital affairs often choose men who are higher in status than their husbands and tend to fall in love with their affair partners reveals that women have adaptations for mate switching. The fact that women shift to brief liaisons under predictable circumstances, such as a scarcity of men capable of investing in them or an unfavorable ratio of women to men, tells us that women have specific adaptations designed for shifting from long-term to short-term mating strategies
”
”
David M. Buss (The Evolution Of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating)
“
...it is interesting to consider a book published in 1965, called The Significant Americans, written by John F. Cuber and Peggy B. Harroff. Their book is described as 'a study of sexual behavior among the affluent.' In this study, the authors contrast two types of marriage which they encountered: 'utilitarian marriage,' characterized by an absence of mutual involvement or passion, held together by social, financial, and family considerations, made tolerable by long separations, immersion in “community activities,' and sexual infidelity; and 'intrinsic marriage,' characterized by passionate emotional and sexual involvement, a policy of sharing life experiences to the fullest extent possible, and an attitude of regarding the relationship as more interesting, more exciting, more fulfilling than any other aspect of social existence (in other words, romantic love). Partners in an 'intrinsic marriage' tend, according to the authors, to be very selfish with their time, in that they are reluctant to engage in social, political, community, or other activities that would cause them to be separated unless they are convinced there are very good reasons for doing so; they are clearly not looking for excuses to escape from each other. While this type of relationship tends to provoke some degree of envy from those who exist in a 'utilitarian marriage,' according to the authors, it also provokes a good deal of resentment and hostility. The authors quote such hostile sentiments as 'these immature people' must somehow 'be brought into line.' They quote a man trained in psychology as declaring, 'Sooner or later you’ve just got to act your age. People who stay to themselves so much must have some psychological problems—if they don’t, they’ll soon develop them.
”
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Nathaniel Branden (The Psychology of Romantic Love)
“
I have chosen to use the terms lesbian existence and lesbian continuum because the word lesbianism has a clinical and limiting ring Lesbian existence suggests both the fact of the historical presence of lesbians and our continuing creation of the meaning of that existence I mean the term lesbian continuum to include a range—through each woman’s life and throughout history—of woman-identified experience; not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman. If we expand it to embrace many more forms of primary intensity between and among women, including the sharing of a rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, the giving and receiving of practical and political support; if we can also hear in it such associations as marriage resistance and the ‘haggard’ behavior identified by Mary Daly (obsolete meanings ‘intractable,’ ‘willful,’ ‘wanton,’ and ‘unchaste’ a woman reluctant to yield to wooing’)—we begin to grasp breadths of female history and psychology that have lain out of reach as a consequence of limited, mostly clinical, definitions of ‘lesbianism.’
Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life It is also a direct or indirect attack on male right of access to women But it is more than these, although we may first begin to perceive it as a form of nay-saying to patriarchy, an act or resistance It has of course included role playing, self-hatred, breakdown, alcoholism, suicide, and intrawoman violence; we romanticize at our peril what it means to love and act against the grain, and under heavy penalties; and lesbian existence has been lived (unlike, say, Jewish or Catholic existence) without access to any knowledge of a tradition, a continuity, a social underpinning The destruction of records and memorabilia and letters documenting the realities of lesbian existence must be taken very seriously as a means of keeping heterosexuality compulsory for women, since what has been kept from our knowledge is joy, sensuality, courage, and community, as well as guilt, self-betrayal, and pain.
”
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Adrienne Rich (Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence)
“
Ah! you cliques of the city!—don’t you know you had forebears with handlebar mustaches, who came down to the river in the morning bearing masts and booms on their shoulders? who killed their own bulls with a mighty club? who made their own clothes and tilled their own earth? For a million of your clever fashionable phrases, would you exchange one single such accomplishment? I know I would—and Oh God but I’m just as futile as you are, you city vermin; I too am vermin, vermin trying to struggle back to manhood, with small success. Here is our second illuminative nugget, with no emotions this time: that the fear of the family album is pursuant to the city’s general fear of time and particularly of the past (“Oh the stupid Victorian 19th Century!” they keep crying, as though Victorianism were the whole sum of that great century). Fear of the past is in the city, thus a love, a frantic need of the present—with all the hedonistic overtones involved, the psychological doctrines of “alertness” and the so-called liberation of sexuality: in other words, giving the moment over to the dictates of sexuality (divorce is such a dictate) and leaving time, the future—which is to them equivalent to the past, as a moral factor rather than a hedonistic factor of the “pulsing present”—leaving the future to the dogs, childless marriages, or one-child “families,” broken-up families, and thus leaving the future of mankind and the race to the dogs: to the destruction at the hands of a society’s inward atom bomb of organic-familial-societal disintegration: in short, the end of a race, as in Rome. This fear of reaching back into the past, into lineality and tradition, and of extending similarly forward into the future, is like a plant drying up, dying. Where I say this, they speak of the “reality of the moment” and the danger of suppressing the urges of the moment for any reason—but I find good reason if it is to spell the continuation of our own cultural mankind. Perhaps that’s what they don’t want, like children who resent all brothers and sisters burgeoning in their mother’s womb, resenting the future after them, feeling they should be the last, final men, that none must follow—a childish emotion. But to give oneself over to childish emotions is the aim of these city intellectuals, they abstrusely find much to “scientifically” substantiate this desire in the cult of psychoanalysis and its sub-cults, the Orgone “Institute” for one splendid example, and so they go ahead blithely, and I am not the one to oppose their concepts, their march off the ship’s plank—since I am marching to a plank of my own, since I do not wish to be reviled as a neurotic and an atavistic neo-fascist, since the other night, when mentioning these objections of mine, a city intellectual had apoplexy right before me. Oh
”
”
Jack Kerouac (The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings)
“
You are a thinker. I am a thinker. We think that all human beings are thinkers. The amazing fact is that we tend to think against artificial intelligence — that various kind of computers or artificial robots can think, but most of us never cast any doubt on human thinking potential in general. If during natural conservation with human any computer or artificial robot could generate human-like responses by using its own ‘brain’ but not ready-form programming language which is antecedently written and included in the brain design and which consequently determine its function and response, then that computer or artificial robot would unquestionably be acknowledged as a thinker as we are. But is it absolutely true that all humans are capable of using their own brain while interpreting various signals and responding them? Indeed, religion or any other ideology is some kind of such program which is written by others and which determines our vision, mind and behavior models, depriving us of a clear and logical thinking. It forces us to see the world with its eyes, to construct our mind as it says and control our behavior as it wants. There can be no freedom, no alternative possibilities. You don’t need to understand its claims, you need only believe them. Whatever is unthinkable and unimaginable for you, is said higher for your understanding, you cannot even criticise what seems to be illogical and absurd for you. The unwritten golden rule of religion and its Holy Scripture is that — whatever you think, you cannot contradict what is written there. You can reconcile what is illogical and absurd in religion with logic and common sense, if it is possible, if not, you should confine your thinking to that illogicality and absurdity, which in turn would make you more and more a muddled thinker. For instance, if it is written there that you should cut head or legs of anyone who dare criticize your religion and your prophet, you should unquestionably believe that it is just and right punishment for him. You can reason in favor of softening that cruel image of your religion by saying that that ‘just and right punishment’ is considered within religious community, but not secular society. However, the absurdity of your vision still remains, because as an advocate of your religion you dream of its spread all over the world, where the cruel and insane claims of your religion would be the norm and standard for everyone. If it is written there that you can sexually exploit any slave girl or woman, especially who doesn’t hold your religious faith or she is an atheist, you should support that sexual violence without any question. After all of them, you would like to be named as a thinker. In my mind, you are a thinker, but a thinker who has got a psychological disorder. It is logical to ask whether all those ‘thinkers’ represent a potential danger for the humanity. I think, yes. However, we are lucky that not all believers would like to penetrate into deeper ‘secrets’ of religion. Many of them believe in God, meditate and balance their spiritual state without getting familiar with what is written in holy scriptures or holding very vague ideas concerning their content. Many believers live a secular life by using their own brain for it. One should love anybody only if he thinks that he should love him/her; if he loves him/her because of God, or religious claims, he can easily kill him/her once because of God, or religious claims, too. I think the grave danger is the last motive which religion cause to arise.
”
”
Elmar Hussein
“
Our patients predict the culture by living out consciously what the masses of people are able to keep unconscious for the time being. The neurotic is cast by destiny into a Cassandra role. In vain does Cassandra, sitting on the steps of the palace at Mycenae when Agamemnon brings her back from Troy, cry, “Oh for the nightingale’s pure song and a fate like hers!” She knows, in her ill-starred life, that “the pain flooding the song of sorrow is [hers] alone,” and that she must predict the doom she sees will occur there. The Mycenaeans speak of her as mad, but they also believe she does speak the truth, and that she has a special power to anticipate events. Today, the person with psychological problems bears the burdens of the conflicts of the times in his blood, and is fated to predict in his actions and struggles the issues which will later erupt on all sides in the society.
The first and clearest demonstration of this thesis is seen in the sexual problems which Freud found in his Victorian patients in the two decades before World War I. These sexual topics‒even down to the words‒were entirely denied and repressed by the accepted society at the time. But the problems burst violently forth into endemic form two decades later after World War II. In the 1920's, everybody was preoccupied with sex and its functions. Not by the furthest stretch of the imagination can anyone argue that Freud "caused" this emergence. He rather reflected and interpreted, through the data revealed by his patients, the underlying conflicts of the society, which the “normal” members could and did succeed in repressing for the time being. Neurotic problems are the language of the unconscious emerging into social awareness.
A second, more minor example is seen in the great amount of hostility which was found in patients in the 1930's. This was written about by Horney, among others, and it emerged more broadly and openly as a conscious phenomenon in our society a decade later.
A third major example may be seen in the problem of anxiety. In the late 1930's and early 1940's, some therapists, including myself, were impressed by the fact that in many of our patients anxiety was appearing not merely as a symptom of repression or pathology, but as a generalized character state. My research on anxiety, and that of Hobart Mowrer and others, began in the early 1940's. In those days very little concern had been shown in this country for anxiety other than as a symptom of pathology. I recall arguing in the late 1940's, in my doctoral orals, for the concept of normal anxiety, and my professors heard me with respectful silence but with considerable frowning.
Predictive as the artists are, the poet W. H. Auden published his Age of Anxiety in 1947, and just after that Bernstein wrote his symphony on that theme. Camus was then writing (1947) about this “century of fear,” and Kafka already had created powerful vignettes of the coming age of anxiety in his novels, most of them as yet untranslated. The formulations of the scientific establishment, as is normal, lagged behind what our patients were trying to tell us. Thus, at the annual convention of the American Psychopathological Association in 1949 on the theme “Anxiety,” the concept of normal anxiety, presented in a paper by me, was still denied by most of the psychiatrists and psychologists present.
But in the 1950's a radical change became evident; everyone was talking about anxiety and there were conferences on the problem on every hand. Now the concept of "normal" anxiety gradually became accepted in the psychiatric literature. Everybody, normal as well as neurotic, seemed aware that he was living in the “age of anxiety.” What had been presented by the artists and had appeared in our patients in the late 30's and 40's was now endemic in the land.
”
”
Rollo May (Love and Will)
“
It follows that if you believe at fifty what you believed at fifteen, then you have not lived-or have denied the reality of your life.
To admit that there may be some psychological need informing your return to faith does not preclude or diminish the spiritual imperative, any more than acknowledging the chemical aspects of sexual attraction lessens the mystery of enduring human love. Faith cannot save you from the claims of reason, except insofar as it preserves and protects that wonderful, terrible time when reason, if only for a moment, lost its claim on you.
”
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Christian Wiman (My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer)
“
Human beings are biologically programmed with the following eight desires: 1. Survival, enjoyment of life, life extension. 2. Enjoyment of food and beverages. 3. Freedom from fear, pain, and danger. 4. Sexual companionship. 5. Comfortable living conditions. 6. To be superior, winning, keeping up with the Joneses. 7. Care and protection of loved ones. 8. Social approval.
”
”
Drew Eric Whitman (CA$HVERTISING: How to Use More than 100 Secrets of Ad-Agency Psychology to Make Big Money Selling Anything to Anyone)
“
Amor [romantic love] justifies any manner of emotional disasters in the impossible search for the one lover who satisfies a person’s unique psychological, emotional, and sexual needs. The search for the impossible creates a thrilling, visceral experience of being alive as long as the search continues, motivated by the lover’s amor. The myth of the one lover who properly activate the lover’s imagination promises an exciting future, but it does so based on the activation of latent memories and the creative stirring of them through the imagination, a faculty of humanity’s fallen mind.
”
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David Ford (Glory and Honor: Orthodox Christian Resources on Marriage)
“
Frozen fright develops as the hostage comes out of shock and begins to perceive the reality of the situation. In frozen fright, hostages are effectively paralyzed, enabling them to focus their cognitive and motor functions solely on survival, with concentration centered on the terrorist. In this state the hostage responds to the captor with cooperative, friendly behavior. As this state continues and the hostages are still not rescued, they will feel overwhelmed and develop traumatic psychological infantilism wherein they respond to the captor with appeasement, submission, ingratiation, cooperation, and empathy. As captivity continues and the hostages are still alive, they will begin to perceive the captor as giving their lives back to them. At this point a hostage develops a pathological transference to the terrorist, wherein the terrorist is seen as the "good guy" and authorities, police, and family, because they have not gotten the hostage out of the situation, are seen as the "bad guys". This transference will persist long after hostages are released because they fear that any expression of negativity toward the captors may invite retaliation.
”
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Dee L.R. Graham (Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives (Feminist Crosscurrents, 3))
“
Stimulus generalization accounts for a great deal of learning and is so reliably demonstrated in animals (including humans) that it is referred to as a scientific law in the field of psychology. Here an animal that has learned to give a certain response to a certain stimulus will also give that response to stimuli other than the original stimulus, as long as the other stimuli are sufficiently similar to the original one. To understand the importance of stimulus generalization to bonding, consider the following Stockholm Syndrome-conducive situation: An abuser behaves kindly after being abusive and threatening the victim’s survival. The abuser’s kindness creates hope in the victim that the abuser will discontinue the abuse and
let the victim live. This hope pushes the victim to try to get on the good side of the abuser, which requires the victim to see the world from the abuser’s perspective and to remain hypervigilant to the abuser’s wants and needs. In the efforts to keep the abuser happy (nonviolent), the victim bonds to the abuser.
”
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Dee L.R. Graham (Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives (Feminist Crosscurrents, 3))
“
The victims’ feeling that the abuser may return to “get” them another time, and that this time the abuser might not be so nice (i.e., might not let them live), serves to keep the victims loyal to the abuser long after the ordeal is over. Victims feel certain that the abuser will get them again—after all, he’s done it before, and that’s proof that he could do it again. They might live the rest of their lives fearful of showing any disloyalty, preparing for the time when the abuser might catch up with them again and thus being never fully separate from the abuser psychologically. If the abuser wants the victim close by, the victim will feel panic away from the abuser. This panic becomes understandable when we keep in mind the fact that the victim sees things from the abuser’s point of view. Thus, if the abuser wants the victim close by, the victim will see being apart from the abuser as a form of disloyalty. As a result, the released victim lives in fear of her or his physical survival, afraid that the abuser will return to punish any such disloyalty. The fears persist even if the abuser dies or is sent to prison. The extent and depth of such fears are revealed by the fact that the victim fears having even disloyal thoughts about the abuser.
”
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Dee L.R. Graham (Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives (Feminist Crosscurrents, 3))
“
Dear Readers,
Valentine's Day!
And to those who are single, I'd like to say something.
Society has misconstrued romantic love and has certainly misunderstood love in general. What we believe to be romantic love is actually attachment, lust, and fear (of loss). Society preaches passion as a function of romantic love, and passion CAN be a function of love, but it functions where one demonstrates heroism, selflessness and sacrifice to benefit the life of another. It has nothing to do with touch nor sexual desire.
Love is everything. Life teeters on the spectrum of love and fear. Love is multidimensional, beyond the experience of mere emotion. Love is a hand extended to the shoulder of a distressed stranger, the smile of a child, it's the gratitude towards something beyond ourselves when circumstance benefits us.
Anybody who has told you that you need another being to supplement your experience of love has misguided you. To live meaningfully is to celebrate love everyday.
”
”
Daniel V Chappell
“
Society has misconstrued romantic love and has certainly misunderstood love in general. What we believe to be romantic love is actually attachment, lust, and fear (of loss). Society preaches passion as a function of romantic love, and passion CAN be a function of love, but it functions where one demonstrates heroism, selflessness and sacrifice to benefit the life of another. It has nothing to do with touch nor sexual desire.
Love is everything. Life teeters on the spectrum of love and fear. Love is multidimensional, beyond the experience of mere emotion. Love is a hand extended to the shoulder of a distressed stranger, the smile of a child, it's the gratitude towards something beyond ourselves when circumstance benefits us.
Anybody who has told you that you need another being to supplement your experience of love has misguided you. To live meaningfully is to celebrate love everyday.
”
”
Daniel V Chappell
“
Why is sexual abuse so devastating to the developing psyche? Recurrent sexual trauma, especially at the hands of a parent or other trusted loved one, is emotional terrorism of the highest order—so psychologically annihilating it has been called "soul murder." The overwhelming fear, pain, and excitement it engenders can cause serious and lasting damage to the child's emotional, neurological, and physiological development. The child's immature brain and central nervous system simply cannot process such repeated overstimulation, so the body's whole emotional-response system gets thrown out of whack—which can lead to problems with impulse control and self-mutilation.
”
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Marilee Strong (A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain)
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Falling in love is partial love, an artifact. —he said.— What I feel is an infatuation with a penetrating desire to possess.
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Javier Enríquez Serralde
“
People who don’t read it, and even some of those who write it, like to assume or pretend that the ideas used in science fiction all rise from intimate familiarity with celestial mechanics and quantum theory, and are comprehensible only to readers who work for NASA and know how to program their VCR. This fantasy, while making the writers feel superior, gives the non-readers an excuse. I just don’t understand it, they whimper, taking refuge in the deep, comfortable, anaerobic caves of technophobia. It is of no use to tell them that very few science fiction writers understand “it” either. We, too, generally find we have twenty minutes of I Love Lucy and half a wrestling match on our videocassettes when we meant to record Masterpiece Theater.
Most of the scientific ideas in science fiction are totally accessible and indeed familiar to anybody who got through sixth grade, and in any case you aren’t going to be tested on them at the end of the book. The stuff isn’t disguised engineering lectures, after all. It isn’t that invention of a mathematical Satan, “story problems.” It’s stories. It’s fiction that plays with certain subjects for their inherent interest, beauty, relevance to the human condition. Even in its ungainly and inaccurate name, the “science” modifies, is in the service of, the “fiction.”
For example, the main “idea” in my book The Left Hand of Darkness isn’t scientific and has nothing to do with technology. It’s a bit of physiological imagination—a body change. For the people of the invented world Gethen, individual gender doesn’t exist. They’re sexually neuter most of the time, coming into heat once a month, sometimes as a male, sometimes as a female. A Getheian can both sire and bear children. Now, whether this invention strikes one as peculiar, or perverse, or fascinating, it certainly doesn’t require a great scientific intellect to grasp it, or to follow its implications as they’re played out in the novel.
Another element in the same book is the climate of the planet, which is deep in an ice age. A simple idea: It’s cold; it’s very cold; it’s always cold. Ramifications, complexities, and resonance come with the detail of imagining.
The Left Hand of Darkness differs from a realistic novel only in asking the reader to accept, pro tem, certain limited and specific changes in narrative reality. Instead of being on Earth during an interglacial period among two-sexed people, (as in, say, Pride and Prejudice, or any realistic novel you like), we’re on Gethen during a period of glaciation among androgynes. It’s useful to remember that both worlds are imaginary.
Science-fictional changes of parameter, though they may be both playful and decorative, are essential to the book’s nature and structure; whether they are pursued and explored chiefly for their own interest, or serve predominantly as metaphor or symbol, they’re worked out and embodied novelistically in terms of the society and the characters’ psychology, in description, action, emotion, implication, and imagery. The description in science fiction is likely to be somewhat “thicker,” to use Clifford Geertz’s term, than in realistic fiction, which calls on an assumed common experience. The description in science fiction is likely to be somewhat “thicker,” to use Clifford Geertz’s term, than in realistic fiction, which calls on an assumed common experience. All fiction offers us a world we can’t otherwise reach, whether because it’s in the past, or in far or imaginary places, or describes experiences we haven’t had, or leads us into minds different from our own. To some people this change of worlds, this unfamiliarity, is an insurmountable barrier; to others, an adventure and a pleasure.
”
”
Ursula K. Le Guin (A Fisherman of the Inland Sea)
“
prohibitions of the past were declared superfluous, unnecessary to steer society in the right direction. An increasingly loose morality would eventually reconcile man with carnal desires, formerly perceived as threatening. The crippling censorship of anything contrary to the religious discourse disappeared. Freedom of speech became a basic right, education became universally available, legal assistance became a right for all, love was stripped of its duty to marry and have children, sexuality was restored and its coupling with sin and corruption was undone.
”
”
Mattias Desmet (The Psychology of Totalitarianism)
“
What then do we mean by "virgin"? It may help us to examine those ways in which we use the word which are not directly concerned with sex. We speak of a "virgin forest" as being one in which the powers of nature are untrammelled and untouched by man. But we can think of this from two diametrically opposite points of view. We can think of it either from the view of the agricultural pioneer, who would regard it as something to be destroyed and uprooted as soon as possible; or else we can think of it from the point of view of a nature lover who would regard the virgin forest with awe as a supreme manifestation of pregnant nature, and who would oppose all the most enlightened efforts of the agriculturalist or town-builder to destroy its primitive beauty,—who would, in fact, treat it as inviolably holy. The one would represent "law and order" and the other ''nature". So that we have here two opposite principles, both valid, the law of man in apparently open conflict with the law of God. Yet it is the law of God, the untrammelled law of pregnant though as yet chaotic nature that we dub "virgin", and it is the reduction of that chaos which we call Law and Order.
Thus in this sense the word "virgin" does not mean chastity but the reverse, the pregnancy of nature, free and uncontrolled, corresponding on the human plane to unmarried love, in contrast to controlled nature corresponding to married love, despite the fact that from the legal point of view sexual intercourse within the marriage bond is the only kind which is regarded as "chaste".
”
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Marion Woodman (The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation)
“
[She Stoops to Conquer] seems to be a comedy of pure plot; yet there is also psychological acuity under the mathematical ingenuity. This is seen most clearly in the character of Marlow, who is painted as a palpable victim of the English class system. His dilemma is that he is a tongue-tied wreck amongst women of his own class but brimming with sexual bravura with a barmaid or college bedmaker. He himself expresses his dilemma with painful clarity:
MARLOW: My life has been chiefly spent in a college or an inn, in seclusion from that lovely part of the creation that chiefly teach men confidence. I don't know that I was ever familiarly acquainted with a single modest woman except my mother. But among females of another class, you know -
HASTINGS: Ay, among them you are impudent enough of all conscience.
Marlow himself rightly calls this 'the English malady': a paralysing fear, resulting from a monastic education, of women of his own class and an ability to be at ease only with social inferiors whom he can bully, dominate or treat as purchasable commodities. It took an observant Irishman to pin down the damage done to the English male psyche by a punitive educational system.
[...]
And there is further evidence of Marlow's split personality when Kate accosts him in the guise of a household drudge. Marlow the psychological wreck turns into a brazen lech who, within seconds, is asking to taste the nectar of Kate's lips. Not only that. He is soon bragging of his sexual exploits at a louche London club attended by the likes of Mrs Mantrap, Lady Betty Blackleg, the Countess of Sligo, Mrs Langhorns and old Miss Biddy Buckskin.
”
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Michael Billington (The 101 Greatest Plays: From Antiquity to the Present)
“
Lilly Samson, The Switch, Outtakes & Quotes, shameless manipulation of.
A one minute reading test
I am dog
--Dog, Marina Lewycka, Two Caravans, 2007
Allergies disclaimer:
One must stress that this book is not intended for the unwashed masses:
I delayed showering after the last switch. I’ve created a Pavlovian response: he must associate its floral sweetness with sexual fulfilment.
Adam has a “Pavlovian” reaction to Elena’s BO? Bribes her with cake to lessen the wrath when asking Elena to wash?
He frowns, seeing that I’m silent and trembling.
‘My perfume was weak; hers much stronger.’ I say, my temper flaring.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, the usual wasteman chatting up yours truly in Sarf London would probably assume that a big phat slice of Marks & Spencer’s Strawberry Pavlova will get him into the lady’s knickers.
Nope, she’s allergic to stupid.
A merengue dessert will hardly cause a rash, but a moron makes her skin crawl.
A female of the human species displayed an unconditioned response: shoved cream cake into the courting male’s face. Requested a substantial meal of Shchavel Borscht with hard boiled egg
--Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Russian Cookbook for Love, Romance, and mating behaviours: Humans, 1904
Ding-dong!
--Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, Neutral Triggers & Conditioned Responses: Canines1907
It is I! I make the best Byzantine shchi to entice a female.
--Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, Dead Souls, Notebook (1841-1844), The Nose and other short stories
Right! She turned her nose up at his advances. Idiot! I hate strawberries! The lady did not have a sweet tooth. Man didn’t do his research.
This is a cleverly written book.
So some of you, keen aspiring readers, please have your Oxford fictionary handy.
Just saying!
In the words of our hero:
Bloody pricey...But God, it is a nice smell. Don’t you like it?
And then he “squirts onto her wrist, playfully.”
Shhhh.. Doctors Pavlov & Chekhov are not amused.
Shall we shuffle the deck with these random quotes? One minute!
Plenty of time is a full minute for a skilled bullshit dealer to shuffle themselves out of a gloomy Russian medical clerical predicament.
Not tricky when Lily Samson gives treats:
All around us are dog walkers, their expensive breeds racing about, barking and sniffing each other’s genitals.
..thinking it all through those awful dog ornaments she hated... feisty feminist...she simply hates them.
Men are so stupid!
She took another whiff and yet another. She sniffed him up and down like a dog before realizing what it was: the aroma of a woman’s cunt
--Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
”
”
Morgen Mofó
“
Lilly Samson, The Switch, Outtakes & Quotes, shameless manipulation of.
A one minute reading test
I am dog
--Dog, Marina Lewycka, Two Caravans, 2007
Allergies disclaimer:
One must stress that this book is not intended for the unwashed masses:
I delayed showering after the last switch. I’ve created a Pavlovian response: he must associate its floral sweetness with sexual fulfilment.
Adam has a “Pavlovian” reaction to Elena’s BO? Bribes her with cake to lessen the wrath when asking Elena to wash?
He frowns, seeing that I’m silent and trembling.
‘My perfume was weak; hers much stronger.’ I say, my temper flaring.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, the usual wasteman chatting up yours truly in Sarf London would probably assume that a big phat slice of Marks & Spencer’s Strawberry Pavlova will get him into the lady’s knickers.
Nope, she’s allergic to stupid.
A merengue dessert will hardly cause a rash, but a moron makes her skin crawl.
A female of the human species displayed an unconditioned response: shoved cream cake into the courting male’s face. Requested a substantial meal of Shchavel Borscht with hard boiled egg
--Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Russian Cookbook for Love, Romance, and mating behaviours: Humans, 1904
Ding-dong!
--Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, Neutral Triggers & Conditioned Responses: Canines, 1907
It is I! I make the best Byzantine shchi to entice a female.
--Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, Dead Souls, Notebook (1841-1844), The Nose and other short stories
Right! She turned her nose up at his advances. Idiot! I hate strawberries! The lady did not have a sweet tooth. Man didn’t do his research.
This is a cleverly written book.
So some of you, keen aspiring readers, please have your Oxford fictionary handy.
Just saying!
In the words of our hero:
Bloody pricey...But God, it is a nice smell. Don’t you like it?
And then he “squirts onto her wrist, playfully.”
Shhhh.. Doctors Pavlov & Chekhov are not amused.
Shall we shuffle the deck with these random quotes? One minute!
Plenty of time is a full minute for a skilled bullshit dealer to shuffle themselves out of a gloomy Russian medical clerical predicament.
Not tricky when Lily Samson gives treats:
All around us are dog walkers, their expensive breeds racing about, barking and sniffing each other’s genitals.
..thinking it all through those awful dog ornaments she hated... feisty feminist...she simply hates them.
Men are so stupid!
And then..
She took another whiff and yet another. She sniffed him up and down like a dog before realizing what it was: the aroma of a woman’s cunt.
--Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
”
”
Morgen Mofó
“
Lilly Samson, The Switch, Outtakes & Quotes, shameless manipulation of.
A one minute reading test
I am dog
--Dog, Marina Lewycka, Two Caravans, 2007
Allergies disclaimer:
One must stress that this book is not intended for the unwashed masses:
I delayed showering after the last switch. I’ve created a Pavlovian response: he must associate its floral sweetness with sexual fulfilment.
Adam has a “Pavlovian” reaction to Elena’s BO? Bribes her with cake to lessen the wrath when asking Elena to wash?
He frowns, seeing that I’m silent and trembling.
‘My perfume was weak; hers much stronger.’ I say, my temper flaring.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, the usual wasteman chatting up yours truly in Sarf London would probably assume that a big phat slice of Marks & Spencer’s Strawberry Pavlova will get him into the lady’s knickers.
Nope, she’s allergic to stupid.
A merengue dessert will hardly cause a rash, but a moron makes her skin crawl.
A female of the human species displayed an unconditioned response: shoved cream cake into the courting male’s face. Requested a substantial meal of Shchavel Borscht with hard boiled egg
--Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Russian Cookbook for Love, Romance, and mating behaviours: Humans, 1904
Ding-dong!
--Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, Neutral Triggers & Conditioned Responses: Canines, 1907
It is I! I make the best Byzantine shchi to entice a female.
--Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, Dead Souls, Notebook (1841-1844), The Nose and other short stories
Right! She turned her nose up at his advances. Idiot! I hate strawberries! The lady did not have a sweet tooth. Man didn’t do his research.
This is a cleverly written book.
So some of you, keen aspiring readers, please have your Oxford fictionary handy.
Just saying!
In the words of our hero:
Bloody pricey...But God, it is a nice smell. Don’t you like it?
And then he “squirts onto her wrist, playfully.”
Shhhh.. Doctors Pavlov & Chekhov are not amused.
Shall we shuffle the deck with these random quotes? One minute!
Plenty of time is a full minute for a skilled bullshit dealer to shuffle themselves out of a gloomy Russian medical clerical predicament.
Not tricky when Lily Samson gives treats:
All around us are dog walkers, their expensive breeds racing about, barking and sniffing each other’s genitals.
..thinking it all through those awful dog ornaments she hated... feisty feminist...she simply hates them.
Men are so stupid!
And then..
She took another whiff and yet another. She sniffed him up and down like a dog before realizing what it was: the aroma of a woman’s cunt.
--Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
”
”
Morgen Mofó