DTD № 75: Intentional communities, Cosmetic Genital Surgery, Trad-Wives, Love Languages,Moral status of Digital Minds
I’m back with Dinner Table Digest № 75, which contains 4 recommended reads for my free subscribers, and an additional four recommended reads for paid subscribers.
Sections: Growing up in an Intentional community / Cosmetic genital procedures for women / Cosmetic genital procedures for men / The cognitive and social lives of livestock / VIDEO:A Massive Walrus Haulout /For Paid Subscribers: Rise and Fall of the Trad Wife / The Moral Status of Digital Minds / The Avian Flu in American Dairy Cattle / Medical Aid in Dying in Ontario
Before I get into this Digests’s links, I wanted to address something that I have noticed as a recovring stroke victim. I've noticed that a lot of the folks in my Stroke Recovery Support Groups are finding themselves feeling like a burden to their friends and family, many of whom don't seem to realize that a stroke is a brain injury and seem to expect their loved ones to snap back to 'the way they always were' was soon as they get out of the hospital or relearn how to do everyday tasks. They say things like "You don't even look like you've had a stroke!" which is especially weird, since there is not a particular way that a stroke victim looks. The popular image of an uncontrollable all body spasm is not at all how a stroke presents, nor is it hows someone usually acts after having had a stroke.
Fair my part, I am grateful for Shandi who has gone above and beyond to help me recover the best I can. She buys me the snack food that I am like, simply because she knows that it's important for me to get some food down. She also helps me remember to take my pills. This is one if those areas where a stroke victim can feel like a burden. You see, the reason you can remember to do things like take your medication is because your brain stores the information, and then surfaces it at the appropriate time. But when you have a brain injury, your brain can't necessarily always store basic information without prompting, and it may not be able to remember timely information in the way that it used to, it in a way that we generally expect from fully matured adults. We've been working towards independence in my medication regimen, but we both have to understand that the brain repairs damaged connections at a slower rate than our own desires for an immediate solution. So I can definitely empathize with fellow stroke survivors who feel like a burden to their loved ones.
My hope and wish, however, is that family and friends would treat the stroke victim?/chronically ill person in their life with as much grace as possible. Know that relying on your help is just as difficult for us as it is for you, it requires admitting that we're damaged in some way and incapable of doing basic self care. I remember the realization in the hospital that I could not take care of my own toileting needs. I was humiliated, angry, and embarrassed. I also lo remember struggling to relearn how to tie my shoes. My left hand still gives me touble with this from time to time, and if it happens in front of another person, I get pretty embarrassed... If can't make/hold the fucking bunny ears, what can I do?
I beg you, if there is someone in your life recovering from a serious brain injury or dealing with a chronic health condition, please treat them with respect - they almost certainly feel as awkward or more about the annoyance of their condition as you do.
On to the Links!
`For children like me, growing up in an utopian community, life was a bewildering chaos of freedom and indoctrination - Susanna Crossman - Aeon Magazine
I've known a few individuals who have lived as a part of an intentional community. In most cases, when done if the participants found themselves in New stages of life, the communities usually disintegrated naturally, with no hard feelings. Unfortunately that's not always the case, especially where children are concerned.
In the months prior to our arrival, the community-building group, mainly socialists and Marxists, meets in Liverpool. Most members contribute to purchasing the mansion, forming a housing Ico-operative. The young South African journalists, academics, London feminists, German filmmakers, Californian ballet dancers, Indian writers, American dropouts and drop-ins have rejected capitalism and the patriarchy. Armed with worn paperbacks on Karl Marx, kibbutzim, yoga, rebirthing, alternative education, ecology, and radical feminism, in each of them is a small page of world history. Most of them are postwar boomers, propelled here by global demonstrations for peace and women’s rights, by the anti-apartheid movement, May 1968 and constant strikes. In Britain, newspapers grumble about ‘the winter of discontent’. Drums beat for change, and we follow their beat.
When we move in, we are assigned a ‘unit’. Over the course of a neverending meeting, tea grows cold. Adults argue: ‘What do we do with this space?’ ‘The house,’ an Indian man insists, ‘is an egalitarian cake to be sliced into equal parts.’ A woman (called Deidre who has re-named herself Eagle) shouts above the rest: ‘The ground floor – kitchen, lounge, yoga room, dining room, store rooms and the rest – will be communal; the second and third floors, divided into private living spaces: “units”.’ Everyone agrees.
….As time passes, influenced by the adults’ hodgepodge of textbook utopias, we undergo linguistic enculturation. Old things are re-named. New words dreamed up. Our mum must be called by her first name, ‘C’, freeing her from the patriarchy. … If the Kids overhear someone using the terms ‘Mum’ or ‘Dad’, the child is ridiculed. Needing a parent is weak. ‘We are all individuals. We are equal,’ we spout precociously.
Our language is classified, and Adults correct us when we get it wrong. Belief becomes dogma. On the bad list: ‘nuclear family’ (mother, father, 2.5 children), capitalism, femininity, pink Barbies, and any type of individual success. Good words include: group, feminism, working-class struggle, revolution, and poor. It is good to be poor, and no one has much money, despite most of the Adults coming from affluent, middle-class homes. In the community, the Adults live the adventure of chosen austerity, and so the Kids grow up in semi-poverty, with little heating, toilet water freezing over (I sleep wearing a woollen hat and gloves in winter), clothes shared between 20 children, no school trips, and free school dinners. ‘People bullied me every day at school,’ my sister tells me afterwards. ‘They said I didn’t wash, which was true, that I smelt, which was also true, and that we were poor. It was true as well.’ …
Decades on, I see myself, a little bookish girl, opening door after door, and often closing them again quickly, shocked by a weeping woman, a father slapping a son, a couple having sex. I am profoundly troubled, in the Freudian sense of the uncanny; the grotesque sensation of what is intimate being revealed anew. But, quickly, I adapt, and learn to shrug it off, normalise things. One day, a therapist will tell me it is like the pride felt by a child soldier given a gun – a defence mechanism.
I can imagine that being a child in this kind of community could be rather disorienting. Everything would be happening for reasons unknown, taken from concepts and ideas that remain a mystery to the children, not because they are uninteresting, but perhaps because Adults usually can’t be bothered about explaining difficult philosophical concepts to children, and the children’s just want to get back to playing.The labour of explaining the community and it’s rules, however, still falls on the shoulders of the children:
Months after we move into the community, journalists and visitors arrive at our door. We become efficient guides. Aged eight, chaperoning a couple of potential members, and wound up like a radical clockwork doll, I theorise on our three-floored home: ‘We are not income-sharing. People have jobs outside.’ ‘There is a weekly cooking rota.’ ‘One communal vehicle.’ I explain temporal organisation, how gongs announce meetings, meals, schedules for cleaning, garden work, renovating outbuildings, and milking cows. ‘We are not hippies,’ I say. This distinction is vital. The Adults insist: we are more serious. Equally, the word ‘commune’ is forbidden, we must always say ‘community’. Our image to the outside world is regulated, controlled
This piece is fascinating to me because I can honestly say that when I have thought about or consdered intentional communities (like the author, these imaginary communities are motivated strongly by an anti-capitalist, feminist desire for equality been the sexes, along with communal labour for the upkeep of the community), I have never once considered what life would look like for a child in such a living arrangement.
Designer Parts: Inside the Strange, Fascinating World of Vaginoplasty - Melanie Berliet - The Atlantic
The first of two articles on cosmetic procedures for the human genitals, this article explores the increasing number of women who are seeking out cosmetic “improvements” to their lady-parts. As a part of the research for the article Berliet allows herself a visit to the gynaecologist to see what procedures might be available to her. She notes, “statistics on these operations are difficult to come by since most are performed by OB/GYN's rather than plastic surgeons,” which surprised me. I assumed that the procedures would be done by plastic surgeons, not gynaecologists, who know very well that these procedures are superfluous and unnecessary. She writes,
Like a lot of girls, for a long time my vagina was the only one I knew. Inspired by the "straddle your mirrors" method of embracing femininity portrayed in Fried Green Tomatoes, I first checked myself out with mom's compact around age 10. But unlike boys, whose external genitalia make for brazen locker room comparisons, young girls are left to wonder whether our privates look like others'. By now, of course, I've seen my share of porn, so I know I'm not a carbon copy of Jenna Jameson or Sasha Grey down there. Maybe because I've been blessed with a series of kind boyfriends and a shortfall of "camel toe" exposing clothes, my vagina has never caused me much insecurity. Until today.
"One. Two," Blatt says. So far, his right pointer and middle fingers are inside me. "I'm going to press down now," he warns. And when my vaginal wall succumbs to the resistance, he adds his left index finger to the mix.
Medical degree or not, it's unnerving to expose oneself to a stranger -- especially one charged with evaluating your eligibility for vaginal plastic surgery. Mental math doesn't help. Within 26 years of practicing, I calculate that Blatt has amassed an index of thousands of vaginas against which he can measure mine. Why didn't I cram for this with daily Kegel exercises? How big or small are my labia and clitoral hood compared with my best friends'? Where do I fall on The Vaginal Spectrum? And does it matter?
Inside the Secretive World of Penile Enlargement - Ava Kaufman - Propublica
Not to be outdone, it turns out that there is a correspondingly large market for Male genital cosmetic enhancements as well. This should not be surprising, given pop culture’s weird obsession with having a large penis, despite scores of women saying that having a large penis does not bring to them the fount of pleasure that many men so often imagine it does
They wanted it because they’d just gone through a bad breakup and needed an edge in the volatile dating market; because porn had warped their sense of scale; because they’d been in a car accident, or were looking to fix a curve, or were hoping for a little “software upgrade”; because they were not having a midlife crisis; because they were, “and it was cheaper than a Bugatti Veyron”; because, after five kids, their wife couldn’t feel them anymore; because they’d been molested as a child and still remembered the laughter of the adults in the room; because they couldn’t forget a passing comment their spouse made in 1975; because, despite the objections of their couples therapist, they believed it would bring them closer to their “sex obsessed” husband (who then had an affair that precipitated their divorce); because they’d stopped changing in locker rooms, stopped peeing in urinals, stopped having sex; because who wouldn’t want it?
Mick (his middle name) wanted a bigger penis because he believed it would allow him to look in the mirror and feel satisfied. He had trouble imagining what shape the satisfaction would take, since it was something he’d never actually experienced. Small and dark haired, he’d found his adolescence to be a gantlet of humiliating comparisons: to classmates who were blond and blue-eyed; to his half brothers, who were older and taller and heterosexual; to the hirsute men in his stepfather’s Hasidic community, who wore big beards and billowing frock coats. After he reached puberty — late, in his estimation — he grew an impressive beard of his own, and his feelings of inadequacy concentrated on his genitals.
None of Mick’s romantic partners ever commented on his size, but his preoccupation had a way of short-circuiting the mood. He tried several kinds of self-acceptance therapy, without success; whenever he went to the bathroom, there it was, mocking him. “Like an evil root,” he said of the fixation. “It gets in there and grows like a tree. But I think everybody has that on some level about something.”
What Are Farm Animals Thinking? - David Grim - Science Magazine
This article explores some of the work being done by biologists and other scientists in understanding the social habits of livestock, a category of animals that has not received much attention from researchers, despite far outnumbering humans on earth.
The work is part of a small, but growing field that’s beginning to overturn the idea that livestock are dumb and unworthy of scientific attention. Over the past decade, researchers at FBN and elsewhere have shown that pigs show signs of empathy, goats rival dogs in some tests of social intelligence, and, in one of the field’s, um, splashiest recent finds, cows can be potty trained, suggesting a self-awareness behind the blank stares and cud chewing that has shocked even some experts.
“There’s a lot to be learned by studying the mental lives of these creatures,” says Christopher Krupenye, a Johns Hopkins University psychologist who explores cognition in humans and more traditional animal models such as chimpanzees and dogs. Ignoring livestock, he says, has been a “missed opportunity” by the scientific community.
Walking into a barn that I home to more than 700 hogs, the author watches as researchers try to herd 6 month old hogs one by one into a room with a treadmillI.
Instead of a conventional treadmill’s control panel, there’s a grapefruit-size glowing blue button at snout height that the animals can press to run the machine for a few seconds. Today, however, no one seems very interested in working out.
Like a person having second thoughts about their gym membership, most of the pigs step briefly onto the treadmill, then walk off, emitting squeals and deep, belchlike grunts as they exit through a door on the other side of the run.
“We have sports pigs, but also couch potato pigs,” Puppe laughs. Katharina Metzger and Annika Krause, the postdoc and technician, respectively, running the study, tell me I may be making the animals nervous. Last week, they say, one pushed the button seven times and kept coming back for more.
Why try to make pig run on a treadmill anyway? On the face of it, it seems like a silly, worthless experiment.
The goal is to train the pigs for an experiment that will test whether they’ll exercise just because it makes them feel good, a window into their emotions. “The idea comes from human sports physiology,” Puppe says. “That exercise can improve mood.”
What would you do if you looked out your window on morning to see 100,000 Walruses, as far as the eyes can see, nothing but Walruses
The Questionable Origin of Love Languages - Kelsey Elsen - Coveteur Magazine
Most of us have heard of the concept of Love Languages. It's a mental framing and set of ideas that is ubiquitous among straight couples across North America. What most folks don't realize is that there is nothing scientific about the concept of love languages. They’re not based on scientifically valid experimentation, but is instead based on a conservative Christian counselor’s personal observations and in service of the patriarchal relationship structure of fundamentalist Christians. Kelsey Elsen explains:
The five basic love languages are simple: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch. While these language concepts themselves are inherently problematic, let’s start with some background. The first thing I discovered about love languages is that they were not, as many believe, the result of some sociological or psychological study; they are indeed the brainchild of Baptist minister Dr. Gary Chapman. He is a “doctor” not because he’s a psychiatrist or a doctor of psychology, but because he has a Ph.D in adult education from the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. According to the school’s website, this degree appears primarily geared toward preparation for Christian ministry. True, in his role as a minister, Chapman has counseled couples experiencing marital issues, but he notably has no actual therapeutic or research background. This counseling is what inspired him to write his 1992 book “The Five Love Languages,” published by Christian publisher Moody Publishers under the designation of “Christian Literature.”
This doesn't mean, I don't think, that the concept is useless, but it does mean that folks should keep in mind why and how it was invented when they make use of it. In my view, it's in the same category as the many different personality tests that are often used by companies in order to best place new employees within the workplace. In University, my buddies and I were obsessed with the Myers Briggs personality types, which, seemed to us, at the time anyway, to be grounded in science, but which was not actually grounded in any experimental data whatsoever. Similarly, while Love Languages talkis not based in any valid experimental data whatsoever, the concepts may prove useful to some relationships.
That said, those who make use of the concepts should be aware of their origins and intentions. Elsen read the book so that we don't have to. She writes:
“The experience started off markedly unpromising, as one of the first pages is dedicated to clarifying which version of the bible is being used for scripture quotations, implying some heavy biblical quotation to come. The first chapter, titled “What Happens to Love After the Wedding?,” seemed equally inauspicious to me as someone who hates old-timey views about honeymoon phases and the “reality” of marriage immediately and inevitably changing your relationship (it’s 2023, and we should really know enough about each other before taking the plunge for that not to be the case). While Dr. Chapman’s ensuing views on marital difficulties do feel a bit influenced by some “men are from Mars, women are from Venus”-type ideology that seems more appropriate for the ‘60s than the ‘90s, he does in this first chapter identify the central problem of communication in many relationships, with the bonus acknowledgment of how different childhood and life experiences can lead to discrepancies in communication style. However, he then immediately claims that the truths of these macro observations can be addressed by learning the one simple hack of the five love languages–and thus begins our overly-simplistic journey into the heart of Chapman’s ideal heterosexual Christian marriage.
The book goes on in this vein: a constant whiplash of basic yet generally accurate observations about relationships, swiftly followed by particulate yet unsubstantiated advice relating to the very narrow “love language” framework–sometimes doing backflips to do so–with a sprinkling of downright horrible takes. A lot of it reads like the most basic advice regarding the absolute bare minimum guidelines for human interaction–i.e., “communication is good,” “don’t hit people.” However, a lot of people–let’s be real, mainly straight men–do seem to have made it pretty far in life without picking this stuff up, so you can hardly fault Chapman’s pessimism about humanity in including it.”
I’ll leave you to read the rest of the article, andd decide for yourself whether you think the concept has any use for you and for your relationships. Aperhaps not surprisingly, giveny our backgound, Shan
Di and I have found the concept to be useful for us. I know that my wife’s prefered way of receiving love is through acts of service Nd physical touch. Mine are Quality Time and Physical Touch.
While the concept hasa a less than stellar beginning,it is in my view, less damaging than other fundamentalist ideas about relationships and marriage, such as Emerson Eggerichs’s book Love and Respect, which claims, without valid evidence, that women need to feel loved, and men need to feel trrespected and that onfflict in a relationship ultimately boils down to conflict around those two specific frames.
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