from neil:
Hi. At my web-site, http://imaginenine.com there are a
few bibliographies that list about a hundred books about rape or
related special violence, and surviving it, and twice that many
more on other related subjects. I've read pretty much all of them
and list in the bibliography, almost only the ones that I thought
were unequivocally helpful. Also, I should mention that I posted
a group of about six reviews like the ones below, under the subject
context and connection to this mailing list on January 3, 1996 (it
can be accessed in the archives).
But anyway, more specifically, I know of a few books in particular
that I think would be helpful to a friend of a rape survivor, but
whether they would be helpful for the rape survivor themself to
read, I can't tell exactly. Someone else who was closer to that
situation would have to determine that better than me.
I'll list them first, one line at a time, and give comments about
them below, along with full citations (ah, the Beach Boys).
Anyway . . . here are about a dozen books, all but one of which
I've read, and each of which I think, or hope, would be of some
relevance to the matter of helping someone else recover, and also
about recovery . . .
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
Ghosts in the Bedroom, by Ken Graber, M.A.
Date Rape, by Marcia Mobilia Boumil, J.D., LL.M.
Trauma and Recovery, by Judith Lewis Herman, M.D.
Fire in the Rain, Singer in the Storm, by Holly Near
Secret Survivors, by E. Sue Blume
Unchained Memories, by Lenore Terr, M.D.
Sex Crimes, by Alice Vachss
Paperdolls, by April Daniels and Carol Scott
Inside Scars, by Sheila L. Sisk and Charlotte Foster Hoffman
A Secure Base, by John Bowlby
Paradigm from California, by Neil Miller
And They Call It Help, by Louise Armstrong
Lucid Dreaming, by Stephen LaBerge, Ph.D.
Bridge of Courage, by Jennifer Harbury
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ghosts in the Bedroom: A Guide for Partners of Incest Survivors
by Ken Graber, M.A.
Health Communications Inc., 1991. 134 pages plus resources
This is the only one in the list that I haven't read yet, but I can see
that it's written in the short sections , "handbook-type" style and
looks fairly to the point. I presume it s helpful.
------------------------------
Date Rape: The Secret Epidemic.
What It Is, What It Isn t, What It Does To You, and What You
Can Do About It.
by Marcia Mobilia Boumil, J.D., LL.M., Joel Friedman, Ph.D.,
and Barbara Ewert Taylor, J.D.
Health Communications, Inc., 1993. 152 pages plus resources
and bibliography. (read in march, 96)
This is a very good wrap-up of all the different forms with an
emphasis on the legal definitions. Each section is illustrated with
a clear and highly illuminating anecdote, of which there are six.
This book covers a lot of ground - short but comprehensive;
handbook style, sort of a primer for people entering the legal
system. In reading this book, you find out what constitutes "date
rape", specifically, according to law that is. There is also an
excellent list of resources in the back - complete with addresses
and phone numbers. I would think that, given a day or two on the
phone with that list of resources, one could scoop up massive
current information on what s available nationally - publications,
services, whatever . . .
------------------------------
Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence
- From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
by Judith Lewis Herman, M.D.
Basic Books, 1992. 236 pages plus notes and
index (read this past month, jun 96)
This book is definitely one of the excellent books, probably the
best in the field right now. The focus, is a trauma tripartite - the
trauma of rape, the trauma of being a combat soldier, and the
trauma of incest - and the author also draws from her extensive
work with survivors of formal torture, from the world s most
brutal dungeons and death camps. I found this book to be
extremely enlightening, the 'state of the art' so to speak (I
presume) in the field of the internal effects of trauma and also
trauma recovery - what trauma does to a person and especially
especially, how a helper is to help the survivor cope with it.
One of the many new understandings for me is Judith's fervent
emphasis on the critical importance of creating a safe, nurturing,
life-environment, Before embarking on an organized recounting
of traumatic memories. I hadn't quite realized, and it matters very
much.
By the way, she never mentions it of course (Harvard, you know),
but in my mind, there are major direct political implications of
that, especially in this election year. But anyway, Judith s book is
really a formal psychiatry textbook from Harvard s medical center,
but all the same, even though, anyway, I found it to be extremely
readable; gripping even. Well, this book is totally on the mark.
(Maybe I should mention, I've been working on a review of
Trauma and Recovery for this mailing list for weeks now, but the book
runs so deep, and I've gotten my attempted review so enmeshed in
a personal psychiatric analysis of myself, and my own strongly-
self-perpetuating-but-not-completely-so troubles in interactions,
that it s all gotten way totally out of hand . . . well, anyway, for
better or worse - well, for better I think - but anyway, I've found
that that does happen sometimes with the best books . . .)
(By the way, I'm not sure why it suddenly comes to mind at this
moment, but it just occurs to me that Holly Near's "Fire in the
Rain, Singer in the Storm" (William Morrow, 1990) is another
book I liked a lot. Holly's not, as far as I can tell, an abuse survivor,
but what she chose to do in her life might be of some related interest.
Another one of those books where I cried and cried, but maybe that's
just personal, like I feel like I live in some sort of parallel universe . .
.)
------------------------------
Secret Survivors: Uncovering Incest and its Aftereffects in Women
by E. Sue Blume
John Wiley, 1990. 299 pages plus resources and index. (read in
1994)
This is written by a therapist, and is a very good compilation of all
the aspects of recovery from incest in particular. An excellent
review of the subject. Comprehensive, well-written, very keenly
tuned. Major national resources attached to every chapter.
------------------------------
Unchained Memories: True Stories of Traumatic Memories, Lost and Found
by Lenore Terr, M.D.
Basic Books, 1994. 247 pages plus notes and index
(read this past month, jun 96)
This is written by a high level official in the American Psychiatry
Establishment, but even so, it is a very good book. It is written in
the short story style - nine chapters; nine short stories, very
readable, very authoritative. They're all about remembering
traumatic memories in childhood, usually of sexual abuse, and
how people integrated those memories into adult daily life, to the
extent that they did. And, the author is clearly personally
involved in every tale, which is great. A lively book.
I read this right after reading Trauma and Recovery, and became
far more profoundly aware than I had previously been, of the
importance of bringing into consciousness, very accurate
memories of past events, and more important still, the emotions
that are connected to past events.
Lenore also salts lots of physiology science through the stories, all
of which is making me increasingly curious about the whole
matter of memory altogether. It is dawning on me that the
physiology of memory, and memory of trauma in particular, is
central to a lot of large-scale political issues.
Right now I'm reading another fascinating book, this one about
the Holocaust . . . "Ordinary Germans . . ." . . . whoops, oh gosh,
sorry, I get carried away . . . back to the subject at hand . . .
------------------------------
Sex Crimes
by Alice Vachss
Random House, 1993. 284 pages (read in 1993)
I'm including this in a list of books for survivors, although I'm not
sure if everyone would think that it fits the bill. It's by an
Assistant District Attorney for Special Violence in Queens
County, New York City during the 1980's. The reason I'm putting
it in, is because her attitude is so great, by my lights anyway. The
stories she tells are extremely gripping, and she is one profoundly
strong, very intelligent, extremely enraged person. Alice Yes!
Me not being a rape survivor myself (that I know of, anyway), I
can't tell how the book would effect someone in that situation, but
for me personally, the more enraged she, a public official is, the
more secure and confident I feel. That's me anyway. Well, what
can I say, in this book, Alice is totally great. As a result of reading
it a few years ago, she s become a major, long term attachment
figure for me. (By the way, I've never had any contact with her, or
any of these people for that matter, except reading their books.)
------------------------------
Paperdolls: A True Story of Childhood Sexual Abuse in Mormon Neighborhoods
by April Daniels and Carol Scott
Recovery Publications, Inc. 1992. 227 pages plus bibliography
(read in 1994)
This is a story written in the personal 'counterpoint' style with
alternating sections by a therapist and a survivor. It is a highly-
charged, personal recounting of several families coming to grips
with discovering a perpetrator and a survivor in their midst. I
cried lots through this one. Hard to follow, maybe, sometimes,
but it cuts to the quick. (Also, there is another book along these
lines that someone might find interesting - "Inside Scars", by
Sheila L. Sisk and Charlotte Foster Hoffman - but it's the story of
one therapist working with one survivor, a narrower focus than
"Paperdolls", which brings in a larger community.)
------------------------------
A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development
by John Bowlby
Basic Books, 1988, 180 pages. bibliography, index (reread this
past month, Jun 96)
Although this one is not about rape trauma specifically, I am
including it here because it is Bowlby's final summary of his
"Attachment, Separation, and Loss" work, which I personally
consider to be the greatest book ever written in ANY field.
Bowlby defines health and harm in human relationships
altogether, and exactly how and why the human interactional
system evolved and develops in the way it did.
I guess you can tell, I think of Bowlby the way some people think
of Lenin, or Moses, or maybe something like that. "Intellectual
attachment figures" or something, anyway, for me personally, in
my mind, Bowlby is alongside the likes of Pete Seeger, Malcom X
and a very few others as high level attachment figures . . .
Anyway, I do think "A Secure Base" is bottom line stuff, formal
psychiatric theory par excellance, the highest level structure,
absolute science, and, by my lights, it is the definitive word on
what sort of interactive relationships makes us healthy, and what
sort harms us, and exactly why.
I thought Chapter One was especially to the point, especially
regarding the nature of a mother's (meaning the attachment
figure's) relating to an infant. Best I can tell, this is science, per
se, at its most excellent, and directly to the point, but also, like
everything Bowlby's written, it is the major, classic metaphor for
all intimate relationships throughout life . . .
This chapter, by the way, follows the next-to-last chapter - "Self
Reliance and Some Conditions That Promote It" - in the previous
summary he wrote back in the seventies ("The Making and
Breaking of Affectional Bonds", Tavistock, 1979). The two
chapters together, well, they say quite a lot.
If I had to reduce to just one word of recommendation, to all
researchers in all fields, that one word would be "Bowlby". And
the term "A Secure Base", really does sum it up beautifully.
Well, all that's me personally of course, 'where I'm coming from',
so to speak . . .
------------------------------
Paradigm from California, Vol. II
by Neil Miller
(unpub) excerpt: 1985. (see following post, jul 15 '96)
This is a short excerpt from the "Farming Society" chapter of a
paradigm that I wrote about ten years ago. It explains why it
evolved that a person, after gaining personal safety, needs to
remember their earlier traumatic experience and emotions, and, of
first importance, talk it deeply and profoundly into the larger
central nervous system chain of human beings.
I might add that in all the reading I've done on psychiatry and
trauma, I've never seen this formulated anywhere else. Please
attribute properly if referenced or quoted.
------------------------------
And They Call It Help: The Psychiatric Policing of America s Children
by Louise Armstrong Addison-Wesley, 1994. 279 pages plus
notes and index. (read 1994)
I'm including this one, because it too speaks to the aftermath of
incest, albeit on a bit larger scale. After Louise wrote "Kiss
Daddy Goodnight", which was one of the first 'clarion calls' in
the current period, or maybe the first, she then wondered what
happened to those survivors (hopefully) that she encouraged to
report their incest trauma.
Frighteningly, she found hundreds of thousands of them having
been incarcerated into Orwellian psychiatric institutions for their
trouble. So she wrote this excellent book about some of the
pitfalls that a person can fall into at the hands of the psychiatry
establishment. As a high school teacher ten years earlier, I had to
think about this subject a lot when wondering how to steer kids
who I knew had been harmed inside.
------------------------------
Lucid Dreaming: The Power of Being Awake and Aware in Your Dreams.
by Stephen LaBerge, Ph.D. Ballantine, 1985 282 pages plus notes
and index.
(read, 1994) (Also, Beyond Lucid Dreaming , which is a
continuation.)
This isn't really exactly on the subject, although maybe it is; I
can't tell. I read this a few years ago, decided that I would learn
to lucid dream, but never actually got around to it; it's still on my
agenda of things to do. Anyway, the part that may be relevant to
abuse survivors concerns dealing with nightmares.
LaBerge defines "lucid dreaming" as dreaming a regular night-
time dream, and, while in the dream, becoming fully, consciously
aware (while physically asleep, of course), that there is a
difference between regular awake life, and a dream, and fully
aware that one is now in a sleeping-dream, and then steering that
dream in any way desired. In your mind . . . go places, do things,
interact with people, stuff like that. He says that the first thing
most people do is have sex . . . and then they like to fly around in
the sky for a while . . . Only after that usually he says, do they go
off and converse with Curie or Einstein, play first fiddle at the
Philharmonic, or cuddle up in a Hawaiian sunset, or whatever
people do . . .
As best I can remember, there was a long section about visiting
nightmares in a sleep-dream, but while being lucid, that is,
conscious that one is dreaming in sleep, and in conscious control -
and then definitively arresting the nightmare situation. I'm not
sure exactly what the section said; I read it a long time ago, but
anyway, under certain conditions, it looks like it might be worth
looking into.
The thing I liked so much about LaBerge is, that although he likes
to talk about mystics, he is obviously a rock solid scientist, which
makes me sure that the whole thing, lucid dreaming, is probably
very easy to do and, it looks anyway, like it's apparently maybe
useful, well, maybe at least that . . . .
------------------------------
Bridge of Courage: Life Stories of the Guatemalan Companeros and Companeras
by Jennifer Harbury Common Courage Press, 1995. 251 pages
plus resources and bibliography. (read last week, July 96)
Not sure exactly why I put this in a list for survivors. Brilliant
Guatemalan Mayans and Ladinos . . . gorgeous people, through
and through, inside and out, coping with the most profound
trauma on this planet. Companeras and companeros, daily life,
operating magnificently in the face of unspeakable horror. As a
recovery plan . . . this is the big time . . . One very gorgeous book
. . . I cry thinking about it . . . the best of this genre that I can
remember right now since the 1960's . . . Jennifer, thank you so
much.
_____________________________________________
_____________________________________________
_____________________________________________
Welp, that's it from me for right this minute . . . well, except for
the appendix post that follows . . .
and always, please,
Best Wishes Everyone,
--- neil
__________________________________________
Neil R. Miller
neilrm@slip.net
Paradigm from California
http://imaginenine.com
The Environment for Cognitive Development
PO Box 31035, San Francisco, California 94131
July 15th, 1996
End Rape
_____________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________
from neil neilrm@slip.net June 20, 1996
Subject: Books - this one's about 'The Violence Initiative'
_____________________________________________________
Hi everyone,
Well, so anyway, here goes with a book . . . I read this one this
past January:
"The War Against Children"
by Peter R. Breggin, M.D. and Ginger Ross Breggin
St. Martin's Press, 1994. 204 pgs., plus notes, bibliography, index.
Actually, this one isn't about sex-related violence directly. Rather,
it's about the psychopharmaceutical assault on children, more
specifically, "The Violence Initiative", which is the general name
given to the idea of "curing" problems of violence, very much
including rape, by lobotomizing, electroshocking, or drugging
offending parties or, more to the point here, allegedly potentially
offending parties.
"The Violence Initiative" is the name of a project that the
pharmaceutical companies have bludgeoned the government into
taking on.
The main point of "The Violence Initiative" is not really "after the
fact" 'curing' of violent people. Rather, the stated purpose of the
project is the attempt to prevent violence in the future, by
drugging this entire generation of children into a permanent
intellectual and emotional coma. Especially the best and the
brightest . . . the real troublemakers. It's quite a major scandal -
and a multi-billion dollar scandal at that, funded primarily by the
psychiatric establishment - led by Eli Lilly and the other major
drug companies. The larger psychopharmaceutical consortium
includes, of course, Hoffman La Roche, of Rhoponol fame.
The idea is, that racism, sexism, poverty, war, and so forth have
nothing whatsoever to do with the problems of violence in society.
At basis, no connection whatsoever. No no. No sir. Rape, war,
and other anti-human social problems are all caused by some
fundamentally inexplicable, weird, dark, "chemical imbalances"
in the brain. It's based on the medieval-like Freudian superstition
that we each pop out of the womb complete with a full
complement of monstrous ideational and emotional formations,
not to mention a full complement of elaborate death fantasies . . .
it's sort of like a satanic religion that these psychopharmaceutical
guys have cooked up . . .
According to the obviously fraudulent pseudo-"scientists" who
work for the large psychopharmaceutical companies, we can leave
all that racism, sexism, poverty, war and so on, in place just
peachy keen - no problem - why waste time trying to correct those
things. The real solution, they claim, is to simply drug up the
entire population starting at about age four, and all our problems
will be solved.
They claim that this way, they can stop the violent ones, but in
fact, their actual plan is to create a situation wherein, when we get
raped, discriminated against, exploited, our loved ones maimed or
massacred, or whatever, why, we just won't care. That's the real
point of "The Violence Initiative" drug program. Hardly a matter
of stopping "the violent ones" among us; rather a matter of
stopping the rebellious ones among us from putting an end to
corporate-generated violence.
It's all pretty crazy stuff it seems to me, but then again, these
zillionaire drug company types are not particularly well known for
either their integrity nor their intelligence nor their sanity.
Among many other things in the book, the Breggins point out that
there has never been found to be a single iota of scientific
evidence that anti-human violence originates with any internal
mechanism. On the contrary, all the science points towards anti-
human violence originates with human-decision-driven corrupt
social structures, that are entirely correctable through the ordinary
process of human decisions, large-scale and local.
Still and all, the pharmaceutical companies, several large ivy
league universities, a couple of "foundations", and their
government hostage organization, "The National Institute of
Mental" (NIMH), continue to spend untold millions hoping to
prove some scientific connection between internal human
structure, and anti-human behavior. They haven't found it, and,
of course, they aren't going to find it. Because it isn't there to be
found. And, in my opinion, they know it as well as I do. Anti-
human behavior type problems stem entirely from external social
structures, which are in turn created, maintained, or changed
through conscious decisions. And, of course, it is those very
decision/responsibility processes in each human, that these
infamous drugs are specifically designed to suppress!
It seems to me that if these very rich and successful drug company
madmen had had their way over the last few generations, based
upon school performance, the likes of Albert Einstein, Pablo
Piccaso, Janis Joplin, John Lennon, obviously myself, and
probably an awful lot of people on this mailing list, would have
found ourselves living out our lives in a comatic stupor. Anyway,
crackpotism falsely parading as 'science', generally equals the
major, social destruction, high and low.
Well, the Breggins are apparently the leading activists in the
nation in this field, heroic folks, lonely folks, fighting, often
successfully, the huge psychopharmaceutical consortium, and
attempting to expose the anti-children, anti-human, anti-social,
anti-artistic, anti-intellectual, anti-rebellious,
psychopharmaceutical scandal nationwide. This book seems like
it might be the most important book currently available in the
field. I found it highly readable. It's sort of a companion piece for
Louise Armstrong's "And They Call It Help", which exposes the
incarceration aspect of the psychiatric war against our nation's
adolescents, and which I mentioned in an earlier post.
Last note: My own idea about the relation between drug use and
the suppression of positive, progressive social movements, is
contained about halfway through a paper - Schema - that appears
at my web site. For those without access to the world wide web,
I've posted it in several Internet newsgroups. Check under the
subject "Psychosomatic Medicine" in talk.medicine.politics (6/20
or 21), or "Classical Communism" in talk.politics.soviet (6/18), or
"Democrats Yes" in alt.dear.whitehouse (6/12), or "The
Never!!!BOMB!!!er Manifesto" in alt.journalism (6/20). It's in
"Part Two b: Schema (b). Search for "Alcohol Informs A Person",
which is where the section about drugs starts.
--- and, as always, best wishes to all,
--- neil
_________________
Neil R. Miller
neilrm@slip.net
Paradigm from California
http://imaginenine.com
Schema
http://imaginenine.com/pdm96mb.htm
June 20, 1996
____________________________________________________
from neil neilrm@slip.net Sept. 3rd
Hi everyone,
Book Review:
---------------------
Reviving Ophelia; Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls
by Mary Pipher, Ph.D.
Ballantine Books, 1994; 293 pages plus a short bibliography and
index; paper, $12.50 (read by the reviewer, August/September,
1996)
---------------------
Reviving Ophelia
by Mary Pipher
As best I can tell, this book is really about rape, but I should also
mention that the author seems only dimly aware of that. At any
rate, it's a very good collection of analysis and stories about the
horrific pressures facing young teenage girls in 1990's America.
Well, actually, to be frank, I go back and fourth about how much I
like the book, really. I'm really only two thirds the way through it
right now; and reading it slowly, as I do all such books, and
haven't quite yet made up my mind.
Mary Pipher, the author of this book, is a therapist in a Nebraska
town, and her expertise and practice focuses on junior high school
(and high school) age girls who are in very deep trouble. It is the
first full and readable book that I've seen that gives such a
comprehensive rendition of the wide variety of pitfalls and snares
that 1980's/1990's society specifically, currently sets for young
teenagers in this group and how terribly, miserably really, they,
and all of us, suffer from it. For myself, I see rape per se, and the
fear of rape, as by far the number one cause of the psychological
ailments she describes, but in fact, she sees that as only one of a
wide variety of stressors. First of all, I should mention that the
author does say in the beginning (in fine print in the front matter)
that the many many anecdotes she relates are actually composites
- not necessarily literal stories from her therapy practice (no doubt
a necessity when you're publishing case histories from a small
town). Thus, it's not quite the same as reading stories from real
life. That's important to me, as I take my major clues from totally
non-fiction materials, and I'm always relieved when an author
makes the "fiction/non-fiction" distinction quite clear at the outset
(not all authors do). But anyway, I can tell that the stories are
close to real life tales . . . mostly anyway . . . with, I noticed, some
exceptions . . .
I should mention though, that one distortion along those lines is
that all the stories she tells (except one so far) have (relatively)
happy endings - one would think from reading the book that a few
simple therapy sessions cure all, so to speak - which substantially
decreases her credibility, in my eyes anyway.
But, on the other hand, one great advantage of her writing
approach is that the reader does get the sense that these problems
are NOT hopeless - not by any means, and that there ARE ways of
arresting, one at a time, the difficulties that these girls face. For
that truism I greatly applaud and appreciate her. It certainly is
true, in my opinion anyway, that honest, sensitive, intelligent,
committed, and insightful talk has enormous curative properties -
no argument there from me at all. With all my monumental and
vociferous criticism of therapy and psychiatry as currently
practiced in America, I remain absolutely certain that GOOD
therapy (as very very different from MOST therapy) is the greatest
and most health-giving service that one human being can provide
another.
Anyway, Mary starts off talking about the profound change that
she sees in so many (most I would say) girls in their first years in
Junior High. So many go from being bright, vivacious, confident,
interested, outgoing, inquisitive, and eminently reasonable human
beings, to sullen, withdrawn, reactive, 'low-self-image', self
hating, secretive, disillusioned, and disinterested persons,
practically overnight; the change often coming these days, at the
age of twelve, thirteen, fourteen . . . The thing that got to me was
that that was exactly the change that I saw in my years teaching
high school, and that so thoroughly horrified me in those years; it
became the formative experience of my teaching career. (Back
then, the 70's and early 80's, it took place at fourteen, fifteen,
sixteen, but even then, I saw that the age was dropping fast.) In
fact, it was that change that virtually defined all the research I've
done in the past twenty years, and has been the primary focus of
the paradigm I wrote and almost all of the reading and writing
I've done since. Some people would characterize this change in
girls as "growing pains", "growing up", the result of
"physiological changes", "youthful rebellion", "interest in boys",
"maturity", and the like. That characterization thoroughly
outrages me. According to me, it's NONE of those things - I see it
as sheer unnecessary human destruction. It is a massive relief to
see an author - Mary Pipher - who articulates it in the same sort of
'unnecessary destruction' terms that I do. I think of it as "the
destruction of the 'girlhood paradigm'"; which is, to my mind, the
paradigm that we're all supposed to be living by. Also, again, in
my opinion, the primary agent of that destruction is rape, per se.
Mary doesn't go that far (after all, she's managed to get published
and I don't) but essentially, on these general principles, we
basically see eye to eye.
Anyway, Mary's basic analysis begins with the mass media, and I
was so pleased to learn that she focuses some of her therapy
sessions on asking clients to bring in slick advertisements from
popular magazines and asking the girls to analyze exactly what
those ads were telling them about themselves. It's essentially a
matter of making the covert influences overt, and, once you
overtly understand what you're being covertly told, you're in a
position to evaluate those messages, one way or the other, and
control the influences you're accepting (or rejecting), something
you can't do when you don't even realize what you're being
(unconsciously) fed. In fact, I used to make an "ad-analysis"
procedure a centerpiece of my high school classes and it was one
of the liveliest and most revealing portions of the term -
something I became known for. It's great to learn that someone is
doing it as part of formal therapy! albeit twenty years later . . .(I
must say, in doing it in formal public high school classes all those
years ago, I came under massive attack from many quarters for
"making the kids paranoid" about their favorite magazines and
media shows, and attacks on me for those lectures specifically was
one of the things that led to the Reagan-era demise of my
program. But apparently, Mary can get away with it from behind
the closed doors of a doctor's office (or maybe she can do it
because, with Clinton and Rodham-Clinton in the White House,
things are a bit more liberal now).
(Anyway, I might also mention that a few weeks ago, I attended
an excellent slide-show/lecture, shown at the local Women's
Building under the auspices of NOW, that focused on the
increasingly vicious mass-media imagery regarding women
currently being spewed about in magazines, billboards and
elsewhere, although in the case of that slide/show, the focus and
audience was mostly older women - well, older than teenagers
anyway. Anyway, I understand it's a traveling slide-show and you
might look for it in your town. Or maybe even put one together
yourself. Look out though; making covert messages overt,
especially if you tie it to larger political/ideological issues, can
bring about an incredibly vicious, even life-threatening reaction . .
. including from unexpected quarters . . .)
Well, anyway, one of the problems that I found in my own work
regarding teenagers not understanding the imagery that was
(unconsciously) being pounded into their heads, was the
phenomenon of what I thought of as high school 'gang rape' - both
the drunken and (I suspect) rhyponol varieties. That sort of
activity was often "understood" as a 'normal' part of "growing up".
It was almost never openly discussed back then, and it was a
couple of years before I even became aware of the phenomenon.
Most of the time, it was not even identified by the survivor as rape
at all - or even identified at all; sometimes the experience was
disassociated entirely, and I would only learn about it long after
the fact, often from boys who themselves became very unsure of
themselves as a result of their awareness of such events.
I concluded then that one of the functions of media imagery aimed
at young teenagers is to blur the distinction between consentual
sex and a kind of "unconscious coercion" - a subject we discussed
a little on this mailing list some months ago. It used to astound
me that a fourteen year old girl could wake up, hung-over,
bleeding from inside, barely knowing what had happened to her,
and with a massive personality change that she had no clues about
(but that I, her teacher, could clearly see as a cognitive matter),
while she's insisting, encouraged by her 'friends', that the
experience that she'd had, 'whatever it was', was "what was
supposed to be". I understood (and understand) the mass-media
as a big time, specific, instigator of that, with, as far as I'm
concerned, some highly unprincipled encouragement from some
academic and professional quarters. Well anyway, back to
Pipher's "Reviving Ophelia". Anyway, beyond discussing some
general societal pressures that get kids - girls in particular - into
serious psychological trouble, the Mary Pipher goes on to tell
some pretty perceptive tales of the family pressures that these kids
have to bear, and tells some very realistic stories regarding
"mothers", "fathers", "divorce", and so on. I do disagree with her
regarding her chapter title "Families - the Root Systems". In my
opinion, moms and dads are caught up in exactly the same
pressures - employers, peers, 'professional experts', finances, the
media, and so forth - that the kids are caught in, the main
difference being that parents are in a (slightly) better position to
counteract those pressures (maybe). Anyway, again, in my
opinion, families are NOT the "root" system in this context, not by
any stretch of the imagination. I should mention here that,
although Pipher clearly understands some of the important family
pressures, so far in the book, she focuses mainly on kids-in-trouble
in families that are actually loving and nurturing families; much
to her credit she is looking to the larger society as the source of
the problem. I respect her for that a lot.
Another factor that she mentions over and over is that she has
learned that the current situation that teenagers find themselves
in, bears little relation to the circumstances of a generation ago.
She doesn't compare what it was like for her growing up in that
same Nebraska town with what it's like for kids now - she
recognizes that it's now a much more devastating situation and
doesn't pretend that typical experiences of even twenty years ago
matches that of the current day. To my mind, that's a good
perception which I think is tragically lost on many would-be
helpers. As Carol Leigh once mentioned on this list in a remark
that was then criticized but which I've thought of before and
which I would back up - there's a kind of intellectual and
emotional holocaust going on out there, since the start of the
Reagan era in particular, a circumstance which few seem to
realize.
I should mention again that I haven't finished this book yet. Still
to come are several intriguing chapter titles, including one called
"Sex and Violence". Don't know what's in it, but I presume
there's something more about rape in particular. I've read several
books on this particular subject generally (I wrote a couple myself
- unpublished of course) and I must say that it is a big relief to me
to read someone who notices these problems generally as
something other than "normal" "growing pains" - who
understands them as a major national tragedy. It's my feeling that
these sorts of cognition-destroying disorders that Mary describes
in this book are a major factor in the whole matter of the
deterioration of public secondary education, and it is my great
hope that, if the Democrats can win back majorities in Congress
and on School Boards generally this fall, the whole business of the
destruction of girlhood and it's horrific effects on academic
performance can become a major focus of national attention in
1997.
Generally speaking, I guess I'm going to conclude that this is a
pretty good book, and for anyone dealing with girls of this age -
either as parent, teacher, friend, relative, counselor, companion,
or in any other helpful capacity, it might be a very helpful eye-
opener.
(Maybe I should mention that there's another book I recall reading
some time ago on this general subject - "The Girl Within" by
Emily Hancock (Fawcett Columbine, 1989) - but that's a
retrospective study, older women from mostly more protected
backgrounds, talking about their junior high school changes of
twenty and thirty years earlier, from a different era. But I guess
I'll leave that to another review.)Anyway, sorry to write this
review before I'd finished the book, but I don't know when I'll
have access to a computer again; I'm sitting in front of one now,
and I thought I'd take the opportunity . . .
as always . . .
best wishes to all . . .
--- neil
_____________________
Neil R. Miller
neilrm@slip.net
Paradigm from California
http://imaginenine.com
Democrats Yes
http://imaginenine.com/pdm96mo.htm
Environment for Cognitive Development
P.O. Box 31035, San Francisco, California 94131
September 3, 1996
End Rape
_____________________