Month: October 2020
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How much do warnings help?
Is my skin becoming too thick? Too insensitive to those things I want to feel? Need to feel? Or has it merely developed callus over areas too frequently assailed? These are questions that I’m beginning to ask as I notice the burgeoning warnings on virtually every television channel that whatever follows may not be suitable […]
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Like madness, is the glory of this life
My grandmother was old when she died -very old, in fact: she died on the morning after her 100th birthday party. Her congratulatory letter from the Queen -or at least someone official claiming to speak for her highness- came the day before. I’m not so sure it was congratulations, really -more a recognition that a […]
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More sinned against than sinning
I’ve already written about the problem of creepiness and fear in another essay, citing the 2016 study from Knox College in Illinois by the psychologists Francis McAndrew and Sara Koehnke (Can We Forget the Taste of Fear?) but there is another form of creepy that is less -what?- entertaining: when we judge people (usually men) […]
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Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here.
‘Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?’ was what Henry II of England reputedly said of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket back in the 12th century. It could be said with equal conviction in the 21st, but this time referring to a different problem, an unusual priest: gender. Okay, perhaps I’m stretching […]
musings on women's health 