Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis by Richard Webster
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Rarely have I read a book where the author tries so hard to impress upon his readers the breadth of his study and knowledge of his subject. It's hard to believe that Webster would have intended to make his readers feel small and ignorant. But if he truly intended to write for a lay audience, surely he should have fleshed out some of his vast generalisations and explained the background and context for people who haven't already read everything by and about Freud, as he seems to have done.

Examples:
“The resemblances which Brown and Erikson found between Lutheran Protestantism and classical psychoanalysis can scarcely be disputed.” (Introduction, page 5: why )
“Sulloway’s book, like Roazen's, is a curious mixture of sceptical historicism and irrational piety.” (Prologue, page 21)

I gave up at Chapter One, entitled “Caul and cocaine”, where Webster writes: “[Freud] had been born in a caul …” In a 500-page book, where “caul” is in the title of a chapter, Webster does not deign to explain what it is. A phrase like “the amniotic sack in which a baby is held in the womb” would have been helpful. But no, the implied message (in my humble opinion) seems to be that if you are that ignorant you shouldn’t be reading this book.

I wish Webster could have explained in his Intro and Prologue why he thought Freud was wrong. What I got was mainly ‘Why Freud was Big-headed’ and ‘Why other people agreed with his high opinion of himself’.

Webster was recommended to me by a good friend and the book has a gushing endorsement from Dervla Murphy on the cover, so I had high expectations of this book, but they were not fulfilled. I look forward to hearing about a book that explains why Freud was wrong!

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The End of the World is Flat by Simon Edge

The End of the World is Flat by Simon Edge
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A great read. My favourite scene is on p321, where Mel advises Ginny how to write up the story so as to avoid the risk of her wealthy adversaries taking her down with questionable libel claims: "Fictionalise it. Dress it up as something else ... Find some other subject where a bunch of fanatics take incontrovertible truths and rip them up for some crazy ideology." Mel's suggestion is to have the fanatics "argue that biological sex is a false concept imposed on the world by racist imperialists. Or is that too far-fetched?"
I wasn't expecting it to be such a romping adventure with twists and turns of character. I found many characters credible and believable.
(Slight spoiler alert: stop reading here if you haven't read TEOTWIF yet). Shane was an exception, maybe, due to the way he turned into more and more of a callous, unprincipled villain. But still, he was the Love-To-Hate character and deserved what he got!

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Drag Queen Story Time

Drag Story Hour and Cultural Appropriation by Robert Jensen. Great essay at juliebindel.substack.com/p/drag-story-hour-and-cultural-appropriation

this never happens

 Just the link: grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/this-never-happens

See also: transcrimeuk.com

Letter to The Friend about Mermaids

NB. The Friend is a Quaker weekly magazine. 

Congratulations to BYM staff for removing Mermaids from their list of ​'​useful organisations​' ​​"​supporting the families of children and young people who are experiencing gender identity issues​".

Tatchell on children and consent

Here is Peter Tatchell again in The Guardian, Thu 24 Sep 2009, advocating for an age of consent of 14. He does not mention 9 to 13 year-olds, as he did in 1997.

Don't criminalise young sex - www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/sep/24/sex-under-16-underage

 

transgender conversion therapy ban

The Government consultation on its proposal to "ban conversion therapy" ends on 4 Feb 2022. While it may sound like good sense to ban “conversion therapy", in this case the danger is that the ban will criminalise parents, teachers and therapists who may wish to tell children that they are not “born in the wrong body”. Consider this thought experiment by Naomi Cunningham from her speech, Conversion therapy: the path to good law, on 17 Nov 2021:

Say you’re a therapist. You see an unhappy 10-year-old girl. She wears baggy clothes, and has short hair. She says she’s sure she’s a boy really. She hates her developing breasts, and dreads the onset of periods. She despises all things “girly.”

Sex by deception - Gayle Newland

Gayle Newland was convicted in 2017 for sexual assault using a prosthetic penis without her victim's consent. The case is referred to on page 256 of Material Girls. The BBC report states that she tricked her blindfolded friend into sex. See also Guardian report: the strange case of Gayle Newland.

The Vaccine Moment by Paul Kingsnorth

The Vaccine Moment by Paul Kingsnorth, published January 2022, is a great essay on the narratives and stories about Covid-19 over the last two years. He expresses concern about the Austrian lockdown of the ‘unvaxxed’ and the Australian quarantine camps. He writes about conspiracy theory and  The Great Reset. Here are two extracts.

All men are rapists

“All men are rapists, and that's all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, their codes.” So says Val, a militant radical feminist character in The Women's Room (1977) by Marilyn French. I had to put up with this discourse in the 1980s while living in the Camdens and Islingtons of right-on johns and trendy wendys. It was, after all, the decade of the so-called New Man: where did he go?

the price of oil

A barrel of Brent crude oil is about 159 litres and costs about $86.50, or £62.85. It sells for about £227. Roughly, then, it costs 39p a litre and sells for 143p a litre, 3.6 times (that is, nearly quadruple) the cost.