There’s an idea in this culture that a perfectly nice person can suddenly snap (if sufficiently traumatized) and then go on a random killing spree. There’s another idea that a perfectly nice man/boy who would never go around looking for someone to rape can be driven into a sort of temporary insanity by some woman [...]
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Psychology
Six people are dead and fourteen others injured by gunshot in Tuscon because of the actions of a man who may be mentally ill. Whenever something like this happens and the perpetrator is believed to be mentally ill, most of the general public accepts that as the full explanation. It’s really not, and there are [...]
One of my more controversial articles on Hathor has been How Not to Raise a Rapist. In it, I assert that the way to avoid raising a son or daughter who sexually assaults people is simply not to abuse your kids (the logic behind which is in the post). The comment thread brought up a [...]
It’s kind of amazing. I wrote a post a while back about how introverts are not privileged in the USA. I wrote about ways in which introverts are cool and don’t get as much credit as they should and why introverts might not be the USA’s idea of perfect citizens. But quite a few extroverts [...]
I recently searched online for the question of how an adult abuse survivor might go about suing his or her abusive parent. The results I got astounded me, but they shouldn’t have. I know my country wants parents abusing its kids. It makes this clear so many ways. This is just one more. First, the [...]
If you observe an abuse cycle in a family – e.g., “Mom abuses her kids because her dad abused her because his mom abused him” – you’re lucky if you can trace it back more than a few generations. Which always leaves me wondering: where did it begin? And how? Did this family have one [...]
The other day I got a fortune cookie which said: Your happiness is entertwined with your outlook on life. For the first time in my life, that sentiment did not piss me off. In the past, it always did because it blithely dismisses the fact that if you don’t have much power over your own [...]
While it shouldn’t be a privilege to escape abuse in this life, there are trappings of privilege for those who have been so lucky. I know it’s an odd thing to say, and it’s a realization I’ve been slowly moving toward since childhood, but it works like this: Once you survive abuse or violation, you [...]
“Won’t somebody please think of the children???” – The preacher’s wife on the Simpsons I recently made the mistake of engaging in a business transaction with a Christian who believes that, because s/he is a Christian everything s/he does is unquestionably the Lord’s work, s/he cannot possibly have done me wrong. It’s not the first [...]
