Detachment is a 2011 American drama about the high school education system
directed by Tony Kaye, starring Adrien Brody with an ensemble supporting cast.
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Monday, November 26, 2012
Saturday, November 24, 2012
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
the female counterpart to Freud’s concept of castration anxiety
Penis Envy:
Penis envy
is the female counterpart to Freud’s concept of castration anxiety. In his
theory of psychosexual development, Freud suggested that during the phallic stage (around ages 3-5) young girls distance
themselves from their mothers and instead devote their affections to their
fathers.
According
to Freud, this occurs when a girl realizes that she has no penis. "Girls
hold their mother responsible for their lack of a penis and do not forgive her
for their being thus put at a disadvantage," Freud suggested (1933).
Read more here
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Monday, November 19, 2012
THE SOCIOLOGY OF PROSTITUTION
We cannot, however,
define human prostitution simply
as the use of
sexual responses for an ulterior
purpose. This would include a great portion of
all social behavior,
especially that of
women. It would
include marriage, for example,
wherein women trade
their sexual favors
for an economic and social status supplied by men.9
It would include the employment of pretty girls
in stores, cafes,
charity drives, advertisements. It would
include all the feminine arts that women
use in pursuing ends that require
men as
intermediaries, arts that
permeate daily life,
and, while not generally involving actual intercourse, contain
and utilize erotic stimulation.
But looking at the subject in this way reveals one thing. The basic element
in what we actually call
prostitution the employment of sex for non-sexual ends within a competitive-authoritative system-characterizes not simply prostitution itself
but all of our institutions in which sex is involved, notably
courtship and wedlock. Prostitution
therefore resembles, from
one point of
view, behavior found in
our most respectable institutions. It is one
end of a long sequence or gradation of essentially
similar phenomena that stretches
at the other
end to such approved patterns as engagement and marriage. What, then, is the difference
between prostitution and these other
institutions involving sex?
The
difference rests at
bottom upon the
functional relation between society
and sexual institutions. It is through these institutions that
erotic gratification is made dependent
on, and subservient to, certain co-operative performances inherently necessary
to societal continuity.
The sexual institutions
are distinguished by the fact that
though they all provide gratification,
they do not all tie it to the same social functions. (…) This explains why they
are differently evaluated in
the eyes
of the mores.
The
institutional control of sex
follows three correlative lines. First,
it permits, encourages, or forces various degrees of sexual intimacy
within specific customary
relations, such as
courtship, concubinage, and
marriage. Second, to bolster this
positive control, it discourages sexual intimacy in all other situations, e.g., when the persons are not potential
mates or when they are already mated to
other persons." Finally, in what is really a
peculiar category of
the negative rules,
it absolutely prohibits
sexual relations in
certain specified situations.
This last form
of control refers almost exclusively to incest taboos, which
reinforce the first-named (positive)
control by banishing the disruptive forces of sexual competition from the
family group.
These lines of
control are present no
matter what the
specific kind of institutional system. There may be
monogram, polygyny, or concubinage; wife exchange or religious prostitution; premarital chastity or unchastity. The important point is not the particular kind
of concrete institution, but the
fact that without the positive
and negative norms there could be no institutions
at all. Since social
functions can be
performed only through institutional patterns, the controls are indispensable to the continuance of a
given social system.
In
THE SOCIOLOGY OF PROSTITUTION
Read
all the text here
Saturday, November 17, 2012
Khajuraho erotic sculptures
belonging to Khajuraho Group of Monuments in Khajuraho, a town in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, located in Chhatarpur District,
Thursday, November 15, 2012
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Rock Music in China
“Fuelled by the new sounds that
entered China's illegal doorways, and driven by a desire to move beyond the
stereotypical hard rock idiom, new bands started to experiment with different
sounds. Today, sounds ranging from hardcore punk to deep house can be heard
from Urumqi to Beijing. Let's get dakou'ed!
By the end of the twentieth
century a new generation emerged in urban China, named after the cut CDs
available at illegal markets in Chinese cities. The cut on the margin of these
‘dakou’ CDs, as they are called in Chinese, has brought this young generation
to the centre of global music culture. One of its followers writes on a
website: ‘When Americans fiercely give themselves a cut, they also give the
world a possibility of communism and unity. Our government doesn’t encourage
1.3 billion people to listen to rock and roll. “Dakou” products usher a million
Chinese youth into a new wave, a new listening sensibility, a new awareness, a
new mind and a new set of values.’ ‘Dakou’ stands for far more than just CDs
that infringe copyright legislation; it stands for a lifestyle very much in
vogue among China’s urban youth.”
Read all about it here
Saturday, November 10, 2012
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Marquis de Sade' s Justine
Excerpt from Justine by Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade
They were given twenty-four hours to leave the convent; into their hands, together with their five score crowns, was thrown the responsibility to provide for themselves as they saw fit. Delighted to be her own mistress, Juliette spent a minute, perhaps two, wiping away Justine's tears, then, observing it was in vain, she fell to scolding instead of comforting her;she rebuked Justine for her sensitiveness; she told her, with a philosophic acuity far beyond her years, that in this world one must not be afflicted save by what affects one personally; that it was possible to find in oneself physical sensations of a sufficiently voluptuous piquancy to extinguish all the moral affections whose shock could be painful; that it was all the more essential so to proceed, since true wisdom consists infinitely more in doubling the sum of one's pleasures than in increasing the sum of one's pains; that, in a word, there was nothing one ought not do in order to deaden in oneself that perfidious sensibility from which none but others profit while to us it brings naught but troubles. But it is difficult to harden a gentle good heart, it resists the arguments of a toughened bad mind, and its solemn satisfactions console it for the loss of the bel-esprit's false splendors.
Juliette, employing other resources, then said to her sister, that with the age and the figure they both of them had, they could not die of hunger .She cited the example of one of their neighbors' daughters who, having escaped from her father's house, was presently very royally maintained and far happier, doubtless, than if she had remained at home with her family; one must, said Juliette, take good care to avoid believing it is marriage that renders a girl happy;that, a captive under the hymeneal laws, she has, with much ill-humor to suffer, a very slight measure of joys to expect; instead of which, were she to surrender herself to libertinage, she might always be able to protect herself against her lovers' moods, or be comforted by their number.
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
Thailand today
News from Thailand
Yingluck Shinawatra
"Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra exchanged views on economic and financial issues with other leaders of Asia and Europe at the ninth Asia-Europe Meeting, or ASEM 9.
The meeting, held in Vientiane, Lao PDR, on 5-6 November 2012, Prime Minister Yingluck cited a “New Silk Route” as an example of connectivity between Asia and Europe, in addition to the existing maritime and air transport. She urged the two regions to support land transport networks between them, as well.
The Prime Minister said that another long-term project is a high-speed train system linking Thailand with China and connecting further with Russia and Europe through the Trans-Siberian Railway. The complementary networks would be an option for goods transportation from Southeast Asia to Europe. This connectivity, supported by similar regulations on cross-border transport, would promote better flows for trade and investment."
Read all about it here.
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Monday, November 5, 2012
Thursday, November 1, 2012
Jack London
Excerpt from The Call of the Wild by Jack London,
This man had saved his life, which was something; but, further, he was the ideal master. Other men saw to the welfare of their dogs from a sense of duty and business expediency; he saw to the welfare of his as if they were his own children, because he could not help it. And he saw further. He never forgot a kindly greeting or a cheering word, and to sit down for a long talk with them (“gas” he called it) was as much his delight as theirs. He had a way of taking Buck’s head roughly between his hands, and resting his own head upon Buck’s, of shaking him back and forth, the while calling him ill names that to Buck were love names. Buck knew no greater joy than that rough embrace and the sound of murmured oaths, and at each jerk back and forth it seemed that his heart would be shaken out of his body, so great was its ecstasy. And when, released, he sprang to his feet, his mouth laughing, his eyes eloquent, his throat vibrant with unuttered sound, and in that fashion remained without movement, John Thornton would reverently exclaim, “God! you can all but speak!”
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