> I don't know what to suggest for the puritans except to ask: what are they
> afraid of? Maybe they just don't like raw emotion. Find some passages on
> ecstatic food eating or something, or childbirth, and see how they
compare it
> to writing on sex.
>
I don't know either -- I was very surprised at this attitude. I wondered
if it was a cloaked reaction to the lesbian sex (they probably read my
politics clearly enough to know that they might offend me with that
reaction). My impulse is just to discuss sexuality as it occurs in the
books, as issues of culture, politics and indentity, without letting them
hide behind puritan lowered eyes.>>>>>
I had a number of thoughts regarding this specifically and a number of
other things that came up in this very interesting thread.
As for the issue of puritanism - remember your Weber, in that capitalism
and thus the society we live in is built on the protestant ethic and the
fear and hatred of the body and of death that is at the center of
puritanism.
I would also like to point out that Puritanism and Political Correctness
are still being pushed as meta-narratives. One one hand - anything goes
and we are seeing a new acceptance of homosexuality or alternative
lifestyles being constructed. On the other hand think of the scare
tactics of the AIDS commercials and the reaction to teenage pregnancy
that is as financially retributory in our day of conspicuous consumption
as a Scarlet A was in colonial times. Homosexuality is still being
villified on one hand and marketed on the other. It puts me in mind of
Orwell and his brilliant concept of doublethink.
I suspect that your students wouldn't comment n the concept of
lesbian sex or the way in which it was portrayed/utilized in Slow River
because they were experiencing doublethink. They are holding
conflicting beliefs, their prejudices about homosexuality are no doubt
still privately, firmly in place in many cases, their prejudices about
the Mormon student are firmly in place and the idea that they need to
"respect" the ideas, races, creeds and practices of others as codified
by a model of political correctness were all at war within them. Me, I
would shut up too were I them.
I will agree that things are getting better for women in this
country materially, but I do not think that underlying attitudes about
women have changed dramatically. I (cynically ) think that we have been
given a certain amount of freedom of movement and freedom of ideas and
finances for purely economic reasons. Were we to be too restricted, the
larger society could not benefit from our labor.
But all in all, our bodies are still alternately exploited and
denigraded, our sexuality monitored, our reproduction permitted only
within very narrow social circumstances and closely controlled and
criticized within ANY circumstance.
I think that this change is in many ways an illusion.
Anastasia
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:06:18 PDT