Exhilarated to find that my vigorous and thorny rose Mermaid has come into bloom after the gardening service erroneously chopped it out seven years ago, sparing only a feeble shoot at one corner of the stump. It is a beauty with its ivory and pale yellow blooms, single-petalled and prolific, throwing out canes several metres long with hooked thorns.
Every now and again I hear from people who don’t believe their decades of drinking affected them other than making them drunk on numerous occasions. This makes no sense at all when we consider how habits shape us and the ways in which we come to think and how our minds are formed. Voluntary service influences how we interact with others; our eating habits are closely related to our levels of fitness; our reading changes the way we see the world and how we communicate; protecting an addiction leads to secretiveness, duplicity and the gradual manufacturing of an ‘as if’ personality, blunted and divided by the desire to drink and the fear of doing so.
So when I read yesterday that Vincent Tabak, the killer of Jo Yeates, spent a great deal of time before and distressingly after her death watching violent pornography, my feeling is that many of his interactions with women may have been blunted and twisted by fantasies of women being degraded or abused. Pornography as a behavioural addiction or fetish is another habit that impacts on personality. Julie Bindel looks at pornography and gender hatred in the Guardian:
There is no simple solution. Eliminating violent pornography will not prevent sexual violence and pornography does not, in and of itself, create men like Tabak. But the normalisation of sadistically violent imagery and the merging of pain, torture, degradation and sexual pleasure reinforces the view held by some men that women are subhuman playthings, and there to be abused.
Enough of that darkness — sometimes I read news reports (the criminality, greed, inhumanity) and feel a need to get out into the garden to breathe clean air and look at a rose with its golden stamens lifted to the sun.
protecting an addiction leads to secretiveness, duplicity and the gradual manufacturing of an ‘as if’ personality, blunted and divided by the desire to drink and the fear of doing so.
This was definitely true of the last 2 or so years of my drinking. Also — an interesting approach to the idea of habits; one I don’t think I’ve tried before. It’s one thing to practice something for 21 or more days, trying to ingrain the habit — and then beating yourself up for being weak when persistence only takes you so far. Maybe looking at habits in this backward way — acknowledging how they hurt or help us — is something new to try. Thanks for posting.
I’ve thought at different times about how we establish daily routines or habits that strengthen and enhance our sober choices. But it isn’t as simple as it sounds — many of us resist change quite fiercely or can’t tolerate boredom for long. We need novelty and improvisation as well or our lives can be stuck in monotony and rigidity.
Something that I find disturbing is the comments posted on Julie Bindel’s article and the comments posted on Anna Arrowsmirth’s article on the same story, but from the opposite point of view.
I went back and looked — disturbing I agree. Comments do need to be moderated even on the most public forums.
I often find myself needing fresh air after reading the news.
Lou what we call ‘news’ is just a history of crime and we need some balance — to be able to think about what does work well, what is heroic, the goodness of many people.
I prefer to read news rather than listen to the ravings of a newscaster.
Dee I don’t have TV so usually do read the news — but also look at editorial comment and various interpretations of what is happening elsewhere.
The easy availability of pornography is a huge problem that I don’t think anyone wants to face – there are no easy solutions. But it is an insidious evil that worms its way into a soul and destroys it.
I’m not a prude at all and find certain artworks erotic and beautiful. Sexuality if a gift of intimacy. But as you say, pornography is ubiquitous and shapes so many demeaning or violent tendencies.
I find it difficult to understand that some think of other humans as being less than. The pornography trade is a strong example. There are those who really look on women as being sexual objects–without feelings. I wonder where and how they learned this.
It is a complex question isn’t it? Centuries of looking at others as being ‘Other’, less than, believing ourselves to be better than or more human or more spiritual (the great theologian Augustine did not believe women had souls, for example) — but there are all kinds of other dynamics at work too, our being so cut- off from our bodies, the hatred and fear of sexuality, the fetishization of children as sex objects, the sadism inherent in so much greed and entitlement …When we look at the evils of anti-Semitism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, slavery etc, we look back to the beginning of human societies