“Nu trebuie sa permitem fricilor noastre si nici asteptarilor nutrite de ceilalti sa ne influenteze destinul”. Martin Heidegger.

Vrem nu vrem suntem contemporanii unei inclestari titanice. Indivizii incearca sa se puna cat mai bine in valoare iar ‘sistemul’ incearca, in disperare, sa stavileasca – in orb, de fapt – aceasta efervescenta.

Revenind la subiect putem pune iesirea la rampa a subiectului pe seama cresterii numarului de acte de agresiune, pe seama faptului ca femeile nu mai accepta sa stea rusinate cu capul in jos ci aduc intr-o proportie mai mare aceste orori la cunostinta autoritatilor sau chiar pe seama ambelor cauze simultan.
Si ar mai fi o posibilitate. Presa, mereu in cautare de senzational si in oarecare pana de subiecte pe timpul verii, sa se fi aplecat cu mai multa atentie asupra subiectului.

Din fata monitorului este mai greu de determinat care dintre aceste cauze este mai importanta asa ca voi aborda problema din alt unghi.

Cu o suta si ceva de ani in urma Emile Durkheim a pus bazele sociologiei demonstrand ca sinuciderea, o decizie prin excelenta individuala, este puternic influentata de circumstantele sociale carora trebuie sa le faca fata individul care alege, sau refuza, aceasta alternativa.

Voi incerca sa folosesc aceasta abordare si in cazul violului.

Am sugerat intr-o postare anterioara ca violul are mai degraba o natura ‘coercitiva’ decat sexuala, cel putin pentru indivizii care mai au o umbra de discernamant.
Aratam acolo ca violurile pot fi impartite in ‘intamplatoare’ si ‘pradalnice’.
In cazul celor ‘pradalnice’ – cele in grup sau cele planuite cu grija – lucrurile sunt oarecum clare. Cei care organizeaza violuri in grup sau cei care le premediteaza resimt mai degraba satisfactia de a aduce victima in stare de completa neajutorare decat vreo satisfactie de natura cu adevarat sexuala – altfel ar proceda in mod normal, ar incerca sa seduca in loc sa violeze.
Si in cazul violurilor ‘intamplatoare’, cele in care agresorul isi motiveaza actul prin ‘la inceput ea a fost de acord si dupa aceea nu am mai putut sa ma opresc’, chiar daca lucrurile incep firesc ele ajung tot in zona ‘care pe care’ in momentul in care ea spune nu. Indiferent daca la inceput ea chiar a fost de acord sau pur si simplu el a interpretat gresit semnalele ei, in momentul in care victima spune ‘nu’ agresorului i se pune pata: ‘Asta isi bate joc de mine. Las’ ca-i arat eu!’

Bine, bine, dar de ce se face mai multa vorbire acum despre viol?

Parerea mea este ca la suprafata avem de a face cu toate cele trei motive pe care le-am mentionat la inceput. Agresorii isi permit mai multe, victimele nu mai accepta statutul de ‘prada neajutorata’ iar presa macina subiectul pentru ca publicul a devenit, dintr-o data, sensibil la aceasta problema.

Aplicand abordarea lui Durkheim lucrurile devin dintr-odata foarte simple. Totul poate fi redus la lupta dintre individualismul acerb care pare sa domine societatea contemporana si greutatea, aparent sufocanta, cu care societatea, in ansamblul ei, apasa pe gatul individului.
Individul, bombardat din toate partile cu mesajul ‘daca nu esti primul nu contezi’, ajunge sa-si puna la indoiala propria valoare si locul pe care il ocupa in societate. Iar asta este valabil si pentru femei, nu doar pentru barbati. Toate frustrarile din viata zilnica, de la frecusurile cu seful pana la dezamagirea ca nu-si permit aproape nimic din minunatiile la care se face tot timpul reclama, cuplate cu mantra ‘esti singurul responsabil de destinul tau’ duc la o stare psihica in care el refuza sa accepte ca ea se poate razgandi (isi poate permite sa-si bata joc de el) iar ea refuza sa mai joace rolul mioarei jertfita in tacere.

Si amandoi, atat el cat si ea, – cei normali – nu mai intorc capul atunci cand aud de astfel de abominatii tocmai pentru ca au inceput sa inteleaga ca asa nu mai merge. Ca daca te complaci in rolul de victima acolo vei ramane intreaga viata.

PS. Chiar si asa numitii baieti de bani gata sunt tot frustrati de nemultumire. Oricat de multe resurse ar avea la dispozitie pe undeva tot exista cate ceva la care nu pot ajunge. Iar dezamagirea e mult mai mare dupa ce ti-ai satisfacut foarte multe pofte dacat atunci cand nu ti-ai facut niciodata iluzii.

ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape Claiming the Quran’s support, the Islamic State codifies sex slavery in conquered regions of Iraq and Syria and uses the practice as a recruiting tool. Written by RUKMINI CALLIMACHI; Photographs by MAURICIO LIMAAUG. 13, 2015

This is not as much about a particular religion as it is about the dominant religion of a certain place loosing its ability to fulfill its mission.
By ‘religion’ I understand the set of ties that transforms a certain population into a community, the rest is ritual.
When those ties no longer do what they are meant to do – make the individual feel that he belongs and therefore impart a certain sense of safety – many members of that erstwhile community start to loose their marbles.
Some kill themselves, pretending to be martyrs who die for a sacred cause, some others rape the innocents that happen to cross their paths.
The fact that some ‘religious leaders’ use the teachings of a particular religion to encourage these abominations only proves that the so called leaders are nothing but fraudsters that feed on other peoples’ misery.
More than a hundred years ago Emile Durkheim, one of the founding fathers of sociology, had wrote ‘Le Suicide’ and fully explained all this. Maybe what we need is to re-read it. All you have to do is follow the link.

black driver pulled from job

The Root reports that a customer “asked that no black delivery driver be sent to her home” and that a manager decided to “honor” that request.

As most of you already know Maslow’s five leveled pyramid can be simplified into a three three tiered one: Physiological needs, Relational needs (safety, emotion and esteem) and Self Actualization. Maslow said that you cannot skip any one of this levels, for instance you can not deal with your emotional needs on an empty stomach. And who cares about self actualization if he doesn’t know where he’s going to sleep tonight?

Well…intuitively we have to admit that Maslow’s words do make some sense…

Studying this example we can draw some interesting conclusions on this subject.

For instance simply climbing to a certain level doesn’t mean one is mature enough for it.

The customer had certainly satisfied her basic needs yet she has some deep emotional problems.
OK, I can imagine that a person can be so ‘dense’ as to be able to make such a demand but no second thoughts after you produced such a frack-ass?
“”I got a right to have whatever I want and that’s it,” the woman said. “No, I don’t feel bad about nothing.””

But the most interesting examples here are the manager and the driver.

Lowe’s is not at all a small operation. Rising to management level is not a simple thing and should provide some security and self esteem to an individual. Enough for that individual to start thinking with his own head. After all that’s what managers are supposed to do, right? That would also help that individual bring himself up to date – ‘self actualization’, that is…
Was that particular manager capable of fulfilling his duty? Lowe’s didn’t think so… Me neither, on different grounds though.

Let’s see what the driver has to say:
“”To me, it just ain’t right for a business that we work at to go on with the woman’s wishes,” Brooks told the news station.
“It was one of those things like, ‘These guys will get over it, they’re tough guys, they’re delivery guys,’ ” Brooks said. “And that’s kind of where I just had to put my foot down and say I couldn’t do it with them.””
So a “mere” driver has more guts than a manager…
No matter if the manager shared the customer’s racist feelings. He had to have the wisdom to understand that catering for such kind of wishes – specially in this manner,  is extremely bad for the company. And for himself as an employee of that company.
So he should have solved that situation properly, not botchedly – he was a manager, remember?

“Despite the letdown, Bradley added that he won’t be missing any time at work.
“I mean, I gotta work,” he said. “I’m going to keep going to work like I’ve always done. But I would think Lowe’s would take it into consideration to think about what they’re doing next time.””

So the driver has a clearer view of the situation – including his own standing – than the manager…

What’s going on here? Did Maslow got his pyramid upside down or the whole world has turned over and is now standing on its head?

Maybe that is the whole ‘self-actualization’ thing. Being able to use wisely the amount of autonomy one happens to have at his disposal.

We are very proud of our ability to make ‘rational decisions’.

So proud as to delude ourselves into believing that if we have enough information about something and enough time to consider it our opinion/decision about that subject will be “true”.

Take as much time as you wish.

“Alex prays on his own now, studying the Koran to work out what it really seems to say about gender and sexuality.

Yet he fantasizes about attending Eid festivities in Oakland next year where his mother celebrates. “She can’t deny me when I’m right there in front of her friends,” he says.

But it now feels like the hardest fight is in the past, not the future.

“When your mother hurts you, no one can hurt you as much as that,” he says. “My strength comes from that.” ”

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/how-a-transgender-muslim-man-brings-his-worlds-together/ar-BBlgNNU?ocid=iehp

People starting to trust each-other instead of blindly following the rule of the land was what transformed feudalism into ‘capitalism’/free market/democracy.
That came to be when populations happening to inhabit a certain area morphed into nations = people developed enough understanding about their fellow countryman as to trust them.
Nowadays capital no longer signifies trust but a mere pile of money and democracy has devolved into a mere ritual.
This is why nationalism has degenerated from ‘I know/trust you so let’s do business together’ into ‘I’m afraid of everybody else so I need you to guard my back’.

It seems that people have finally started to understand what rape really means and to care about the victims.

But why rape in the first place?

When considering this subject we need to clearly define the concepts if we really what to understand what all it’s about.
Sometimes people get carried away. Maybe under some ‘influence’, she (half) willingly agrees at first and gets cold feet at some point but he doesn’t stop. That is indeed rape and should be punished as such but that is not the kind of rape I’m concerned about now.
What I had in mind when starting this is the ‘predatory’ rape. That kind of rape that is planned before hand by the perpetrator and cannot, under any circumstances, be treated with any degree of understanding. For instance gang or serial rape.

At this moment I feel the need to draw your attention to some less obvious kinds of predatory rape. For example the kind of ‘big game hunting’ that is going on now in Africa. Regardless of who does it. Law abiding citizens who pay for their permits and then bend the rules or poachers who act in a completely callous manner.

Another kind of predatory rape that is less discussed about is prostitution. Some of you will tell me that whatever takes place between consenting adults (two or even more) is nobody’s business. True enough but have you considered the role played by the pimp? You know, that guy who under the pretext of taking care of the ‘sexual worker’ exploits her savagely? Have you noticed that most of the prostitutes come from someplace else and have usually been lured under some false pretexts? That so many of them are very young and not so bright?
I can’t stop wondering what kind of satisfaction can be had during or after such an encounter… Specially today when there are so many single’s bars and internet dating services… But there one has to pass a certain exam, the partner has to agree, has to find you at least acceptable. There is a certain risk that you might be found wanting. While when hiring a prostitute there is no such risk. She has no say about her ‘clients’. And that’s why this IS rape.

So could it be that rape, predatory rape, is an action through which the rapist proves to himself that he is in ‘total control’?
And in the case of gang rapes – which are usually initiated and led by one of the gang members, very seldom this kind of things happen ‘spontaneously’ – the initiator does it to prove not only to himself but also to the rest of the gang who is the ‘top dog’.

To be continued.

dolce-gabbana-gang-bang

Some 30 years ago I stumbled upon a book by Desmond Morris.

The Naked Ape.

I read it overnight because next day it had to be returned to its owner. Books published in their original languages were hard to come by in communist Romania…
Little did I know at that time that my interests will slowly shift from Mechanical Engineering to Sociology and then on to decision making… Anyway…
In that book Morris tries to convince us that women have so many periods because in this way they are a lot readier to receive their mates, thus ensuring a tighter bond inside the couple. In turn this is beneficial in an evolutionary sense because a tightly knit couple is better suited for raising the kind of slow growing children that is characteristic for the human species.
In short Morris proposes that monogamy was a step forward in human evolution.
I tend to agree with him and I even have a further argument. Imagine what would happen if a small number of alpha males would ‘corral’ – one way or another – most of the available nubile women, as it’s the case with the chimps or the gorillas. Do you think the rest of the males would be able to cooperate in any way towards the survival of the community they belong to or they’d be constantly obsessing about how to get laid?

Which brings me to my subject.

Emile Durkheim used suicide as a pretext to introduce us to his theory about social solidarity and the social function played by what we consider to be a crime.
Durkheim’s research had led him to see suicide as an individual decision but one which is heavily influenced by the cultural medium to which the decision maker belongs. More over, the same line of thinking produced his conclusion that a society must keep a fine balance between ‘solidarity/intolerance’ and ‘laisez-faire’. One that is too intolerant drastically reduces its own ability to adapt to changes that occur in its ‘environment’ while those that do not care about the fate of their members will eventually auto-dissolve.

What if incidence of rape was to be studied in the same light?

Bill Cosby – a man who, let’s face it, could have had legions of willing women – is accused  to have drugged and raped some 40 women in more than 30 years before anything came to public notice.
Jimmy Savile, a British “larger-than-life character”, used “his celebrity status and fund-raising activity to gain uncontrolled access to vulnerable people across six decades” and to unabashedly rape them.
Rape not only occurs randomly in war time but has also been used as a weapon:
Sexual violence is also used to destabilize communities and sow terror”.
Meanwhile France – Durkheim’s own Motherland – has become the stage for some 7000 ‘tournantes’ every year. The English term for ‘tournant’ being gang rape.

As Durkheim said more than a hundred years ago suicide is indeed an individual act/decision but it’s incidence is heavily influenced by what happens around that person.
Same thing is valid for rape. A rape appears at the intersection between the history/experience/upbringing of the rapist, the social/cultural milieu in which he lives and his ‘on the spot’ decision.

Sex sells.
“It’s been said that as human beings, we have a lizard or reptilian brain that responds to certain primal urges. Food is one. Sex and reproduction is definitely another. This underlying, pre-programmed disposition to respond to sexual imagery is so strong, it has been used for over 100 years in advertising. And the industry, while abusing it more and more, would be foolish to ignore the draw of sexual and erotic messaging.”

How far are we willing to go in order to make a sale? As far as Dolce and Gabbana went when they published the picture above?

Morris said that our first step towards humanity was to change our very physiology in order to promote (at least an apparent) monogamy. It seems that we are now altering our culture in order to sell more…

Gang Rape taken to the next level… Manipulation went wild…

There are a lot of definitions available for these concepts. I’ve found out that Google offers the blandest ones so I’ll use those. You’ll understand why.

a. “An experience involving the apparent perception of something not present
b. “An extraordinary and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore attributed to a divine agency.”
c. “An optical illusion caused by atmospheric conditions, especially the appearance of a sheet of water in a desert or on a hot road caused by the refraction of light from the sky by heated air.

If we follow the ‘dispassionate’ line used by Google we’ll notice that the ‘real’ problem is us, not a. b. or c.

We are the ones who are not able to figure out the source of the perception in a, the explanation for what happens in b and to reconcile what we know with what we see in c.

More than 35 years ago, while in college, I had to study ‘Marxism’. It was considered a science by the communists and all students had to take that class.
Marxism is a reaction against the idealist thesis that reality consists entirely of minds or spirits and of their experiences or ideas. The materialist conception of history, Marx and Engels contend, postulates the existence of an objective, concrete reality that is independent of human consciousness and is also its determinant“.

For a future engineer, and one that wasn’t particularly concerned with religion, the concept seemed appealing.
Something was nagging me though. In time I understood that Marx was making a huge mistake when conflating ‘objective’ with ‘real’ and individual consciousness with the collective one.
Also what he termed ‘reality’ is not that independent from consciousness as he would liked it to be.

I’ll start with the second idea.

We coined the term/concept of reality.
How’s that for ‘real’ independence?

Is there anything outside my individual knowledge/consciousness?
A lot.
Do I care?
Sometimes yes but most of it is both absolutely inconsequential for me and way out of my grasp. So my accepting its very existence depends decisively on ‘hearsay’ and faith…

Is there anything outside our collective knowledge/consciousness?
Probably yes. Hard to believe that we already know everything, right? Particularly since we discover something new each moment…
‘We discover’?!?
So it’s us who are ‘conquering’ more and more ‘reality’?!?
Wasn’t it supposed to be independent from us?

OK, you probably got it, I won’t bother you anymore with this.

Let me go back to ‘objective’ versus ‘real’.

Not influenced by personal feelings or opinions.
Actually existing as a thing or occurring in fact; not imagined or supposed.”

If we gather five children who haven’t yet seen a tarmac road scorched by the July Sun and take them to Arizona they’ll tell us, excitedly but objectively, that the road is boiling out there near the horizon.
We, the grown ups, know that’s a mirage. For them, it’s a miracle.
For a single child – one that knows the concept, of course – it might seem a hallucination, specially if he doesn’t have another person to speak to about what he sees.

Some independence… But wait, there’s more.

You are reading this on a computer. (If you call it a smartphone you are deluding yourself. It’s a computer that you can also use as a phone). Is it ‘really’ real?
According to Marx, I mean.
If your consciousness hasn’t yet digested effectively its ‘user manual’ that computer is little more than an useless  piece of junk… Not to mention the fact that its processor would still be a little pile of sand if not for an entire string of consciousnesses – from INTEL’s CEO to the driver who delivered it to the assembly plant and they are only a few of those involved in the process.

The fact is that we change the reality around us. We build cities, roads to connect them and power plants so we can cool our homes in summer.

And then we pretend reality is independent from us.
Who’s delusional now?

“i wish i could talk to someone. i wish i could talk to my parents about all the things ive seen. theres so much i dont understand and so much that hurts to have seen. its like my eyes are directly related to my heart and my heart has been the heart of an old man for a long time.”

tenyearoldkevin's avatartenyearoldkevin

kevins keyboardmy name is kevin. im 10 today. i had to lie, of course, when i went to get my email address and when i went to start this blog, and when i went to open my first facebook account. i had to pretend i was 20.  why? so i could be a ‘person’.

you see, 10 year olds aren’t real people yet. we can’t write what we want. we cant say what we want. we can’t have facebook. we can’t do fuck all. and yet, believe me, ive SEEN it all when my parents were out of the room. and when my teachers were out of the room.

parent, teachers, all of them are so so sadly messed up. they say they want to ‘protect’ us from things by blocking websites at school and by our parents putting computers in the kitchen so they can peek over our shoulders when…

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