Aristotle in New Zealand and in eating disorders

When Aristotle teaches his elite male Greek students that females lack souls, that they are deformed males, then how does that affect you?  How far through time and across nations has such teaching influenced us?

Well, in New Zealand, a girl who struggled with "anorexia for nearly twenty years" has grown up to find some answers.  She's a fledgling scholar now, looking at the teachings as the "foundation of a biased and therefore incorrect metaphysics which has caused in all girls a disruption of their normal processes of development."  She suspects that what's been caused in young women is "[n]ot just a sense of inner turmoil but a fragmentation and loss of whole selfhood as they learn to see the real sexual female body as defective, disgusting, bad and shameful."

She is "Waikato University doctoral student Jane Cook."  What might we someday learn (and then unlearn) from Ms. Cook?

bibliobloggers on Robert Crumb: few mentions of his sexism and racism

Bibliobloggers are talking up a storm about Robert Crumb's comic book of Genesis.  But none of them has mentioned Crumb's sexism or his rape portrayal or his anti-Semitism or his other racism.

(David Ker was the first, in September of 2008, to notice Crumb's book as Ker tried to help a friend laugh by reproducing "Keep on Truckin'."  And John Hobbins can't seem to get enough after reading the reviews by Paul Buhle and fellow biblioblogger Chris Brady.  Dr. Jim West reads his fellow biblioblogger Roland Boer's post and gets most offended by how God's portrayed before finding that Robert Alter is not upset with Crumb's portrayals in the least. Doug Chaplin notes too how Alter is just fine and adds the take of Nick Baines with the conclusion that "the graphic sex and violence was there long before anyone drew it." Joel Watts quotes Ben Leach on how Christians down under are taking offense at "biblical characters having intercourse and [at the] 'gratuitous' depictions of violence." Theophrastus says "It certainly looks better than that awful Manga Bible." Karyn Traphagen compares Crumb's work to "JT Waldman’s Megillat [Esther]." And Michael Carden muses how less homophobic Crumb seems than "Jack Chick's 1980s tract, Doom Town.")

So we should not forget Robert Crumb's infamous sexism

("I do this stuff, and then I'm horrified and embarrassed when I see it on the paper, and I say, 'Oh, my God,' but somehow I can't stop doing it," Crumb says. "I have this hostility toward women," Crumb admits on camera.)

or his gynophobic, misogynistic rape portrayals

(Crumb took perverse pleasure in scorning anyone who had ever rejected him before, which included hippies, commercialism, and especially women. Aside from a few acid-inspired flights of fancy, Crumb’s art became cynical and neurotically, painfully autobiographical. Crumb’s favorite character to draw was himself: a poor, geeky shlub with pimples and a slouch hat. His comix [which had never been particularly woman-friendly] became violently misogynistic, as he graphically poured what were essentially his masturbatory fantasies onto the printed page. Women were raped, dismembered, mutilated, and murdered, sometimes all at once.)

or his anti-Semitism

(don't click here if you don't want to see more male over female sex in the context of hate of Jews; or don't click here or here if you don't want to see more of his portrayals of his own anti-Semitism from "When the Goddamn Jews Take Over America" by R. Crumb)

or his other racism

(don't click here if you don't want to see this white guy's comics to denigrate African Americans from "When the Niggers Take Over America!" in Weirdo #28, 1993 and reprinted in Taken from America, published by Knockabout Comics, London, 1994).