I really feel sorry for young girls today having been so badly educated on boy/girl relations. First let me provide this for context and then come back to what I wish to say: ‘Need to reflect on this’: Victorian schools respond to movement calling for better consent education.

Several Victorian schools have issued messages to parents in response to a deluge of sexual assault claims made by young women across the country who voiced their stories as part of a movement demanding better education around consent. Private schools Xavier College and Geelong Grammar School wrote to their school communities this week after a petition started by Sydney woman Chanel Contos called for sexual consent to be taught in schools from a young age. It saw hundreds of young women come forward with disturbing allegations of sexual assault and rape from their time as students or soon after, with many describing being forced to perform sex acts or being assaulted while intoxicated or passed out.

However, before reading another word, you should look at the 79 pages of disturbing allegations. We are dealing with what is potentially a lost generation, and of both young girls and young boys. These are basically high school girls and the best they can think to ask for is that “sexual consent to be taught in schools from a young age”.

I have no idea what the answer here is, but I imagine there are quite a large number of young women who buy into sexual relations at far to young an age and with no idea what their destination is. I know I am old (really ancient) but no one went out with someone else unless they were perhaps thinking this might be the preliminaries of love, children and a marriage unto death. And this from the age of around 13 or 14. No one was messing around, and if you were both as a male or female your dating life was almost certain to be brought to an end.

Consent in my day came with a set of commitments that no one would dare breach. I imagine happiness and fulfilment even today come with similar sets of commitments.

But we live in a post-Monica-Lewinski world, pornography is everywhere and available across the net, and we have, right now, the example of the American Vice-President having slept her way to the top.

At the moment, the supposed issue is in relation to camper/staff relations among the backroom people in Parliament House. Everything about the way the story has unfolded looks as if it is intended to influence how people vote. The two issues need to be separated, but that is very unlikely to happen when our news media make these stories the feature political issues of the day.

The people who run these stories are evil people whose political morals make me sick. They do it to get more people to vote for Labor and fewer to vote for the Coalition. How to get boys and girls to show greater respect and, dare I say it, more modesty and common sense in their first approaches to dealing with each other sexually, must be the aim. How to get there is completely beyond me, other than to keep these issues away from politics.

I really feel sorry for young girls today having been so badly educated on boy/girl relations. First let me provide this for context and then come back to what I wish to say: ‘Need to reflect on this’: Victorian schools respond to movement calling for better consent education.

Several Victorian schools have issued messages to parents in response to a deluge of sexual assault claims made by young women across the country who voiced their stories as part of a movement demanding better education around consent.

Private schools Xavier College and Geelong Grammar School wrote to their school communities this week after a petition started by Sydney woman Chanel Contos called for sexual consent to be taught in schools from a young age.

It saw hundreds of young women come forward with disturbing allegations of sexual assault and rape from their time as students or soon after, with many describing being forced to perform sex acts or being assaulted while intoxicated or passed out.

However, before reading another word, you should look at the 79 pages of these disturbing allegations. We are dealing with what is potentially a lost generation, and of both young girls and young boys. These are basically high school girls and the best they can think to ask for is that “sexual consent to be taught in schools from a young age”.

I have no idea what the answer here is, but I imagine there are quite a large number of young women who buy into sexual relations at far too young an age and with no idea what their destination is. I know I am old (really ancient) but no one went out with someone else unless they were perhaps thinking this might be the preliminaries of love, children and a marriage unto death. And this from the age of around 13 or 14. No one was messing around, and if you were, both as a male or female, your dating life was almost certain to be brought to an end. Reputation was all.

Consent in my day came with a set of commitments that no one would dare breach. I imagine happiness and fulfilment even today come with similar sets of commitments.

But we live in a post-Monica-Lewinski world, pornography is everywhere and available across the net, and we have, right now, the example of the American Vice-President having slept her way to the top. Beyond even that, there is now birth-control and failing that, abortion almost on demand.

At the moment, the supposed issue is in relation to camper/staff relations among the backroom people in Parliament House. Everything about the way the story has unfolded looks as if it is intended to influence how people vote. The two issues need to be separated, but that is very unlikely to happen when our news media make these stories the feature political issues of the day.

The people who run these stories are evil people whose political morals make me sick. They do it to get more people to vote for Labor and fewer to vote for the Coalition. How to get boys and girls to show greater respect and, dare I say it, more modesty and common sense in their first approaches to dealing with each other sexually, must be the aim. How to get there is completely beyond me, other than to keep these issues away from politics.

Supposedly one person in a hundred is schizophrenic and if their experience is anything like that of Kate Richards as described in her incredible Madness: A Memoire it is amazing that so many people are able to make it through the day. There are also many different forms of madness so a fairly high proportion of people we meet all the time must be mad in one way or another. She herself says that she first entered into madness at around 15-16 but did not know she was in any way unusual until she was in her twenties.

Aside from her own personal experience, which is quite astonishing, is the array of medical and therapeutic facilities that are available in Australia to assist people such as her. I cannot recommend the book more. If these issues interest you, this is a book really worth your time.

Interesting in particular for me are her descriptions of the various psychiatrists she had to deal with who she found aloof and distant. And to tell the truth, it is the kind of work that you would need nerves of steel to undertake. You cannot reason anyone out of their psychoses nor can you be sure they will take their meds.

Here is an an excerpt from her book which gives you some sense of what this kind of madness is like and the kinds of frustrations that must come from trying to help such people. Aaron is her psychiatrist.

In the evening I visit my doctor, Aaron. ‘How are you?’ he asks, as usual. I stand in front of him with my hands on my hips, sticking my pelvis out and then I start giggling and I can’t stop, I keep giggling and now tears are seeping out from the sides of my eyes and smudging the mascara I put on this morning for the first time in years. I’m rocking back and forth on my feet, laughing and crying in equal measure. Aaron doesn’t say anything; he reaches over to the phone on his desk and rings the Mental Health Team at the local hospital.

‘Are you taking your medication?’ he asks, mid-conversation.

‘Of course,’ I say. I have no idea where the bottle of tablets is – somewhere in my bedroom, probably under the bed where the cats sometimes pee.

He hangs up the phone. ‘Are you sleeping?’

‘Thorough waste of time.’ I sit down. ‘I do miss dreaming though. You know Freud thought that dream-life was just as important as waking-life for the illumination of the psyche. I think I agree with him, well I do at this particular moment, God, your taste in art is awful, Aaron.’

‘Kate,’ says Aaron. ‘I would like you to take one of these – now.’ He pulls a blister pack of tablets out of his top desk drawer. His desk is old, made of some wood with lines and whorls and stained dark chestnut.

‘What’s this?’ I ask.

‘It’s an anti-psychotic. Also good for hypomania.’ He stands and says, ‘Just stay there a minute.’ I sway from side to side on the chair. Aaron gives me a glass of water and a round, white tablet.

‘How much?’ I ask.

‘200 milligrams,’ he says.

I stare at it. The tablet is changing shape in my palm. It’s circular, then oval, then it expels a part of itself and becomes two tablets.

I stare at Aaron. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m trying to stabilise your mood.’

He waits, leaning on his desk with his arms crossed. The creases in his shirt catch the light and shine. I smile.

‘Take the medication, please.’

The tablet is furry round the edges where it has mixed with my sweat. I put it in my mouth and take a swig of water and swallow down its bitterness.

‘Happy?’

‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘The Mental Health Team are going to visit you later tonight.’

‘Excellent,’ I say and stand up and bow so that my forearms touch the ground. ‘It has been a pleasure doing business with you, Sir.’

Aaron almost smiles.

Madness is like being captured by terrorists, only worse. And the patient is often their own worst enemy.

This is Bettina Arndt’s Monthly Newsletter which may be unique in the world as putting up posts about men that is actually fair to both men and women. You should subscribe yourself. This is the email address and her various links.

E: bettina@bettinaarndt.com.au
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The rest is entirely from Bettina who says things found nowhere else anywhere.

I have  just run across this experiment in the psychology of mother love and it is fascinating. This is from Harlow’s Classic Studies Revealed the Importance of Maternal Contact. What amazes me is the criticism he endured for his supposed cruelty to animals.

Infant rhesus monkeys were taken away from their mothers and raised in a laboratory setting, with some infants placed in separate cages away from peers. In social isolation, the monkeys showed disturbed behavior, staring blankly, circling their cages, and engaging in self-mutilation. When the isolated infants were re-introduced to the group, they were unsure of how to interact — many stayed separate from the group, and some even died after refusing to eat.

Even without complete isolation, the infant monkeys raised without mothers developed social deficits, showing reclusive tendencies and clinging to their cloth diapers. Harlow was interested in the infants’ attachment to the cloth diapers, speculating that the soft material may simulate the comfort provided by a mother’s touch. Based on this observation, Harlow designed his now-famous surrogate mother experiment.

In this study, Harlow took infant monkeys from their biological mothers and gave them two inanimate surrogate mothers: one was a simple construction of wire and wood, and the second was covered in foam rubber and soft terry cloth. The infants were assigned to one of two conditions. In the first, the wire mother had a milk bottle and the cloth mother did not; in the second, the cloth mother had the food while the wire mother had none.

In both conditions, Harlow found that the infant monkeys spent significantly more time with the terry cloth mother than they did with the wire mother. When only the wire mother had food, the babies came to the wire mother to feed and immediately returned to cling to the cloth surrogate.

This is what he said in reply to his critics:

Remember, for every mistreated monkey, there are a million mistreated children. If my work will point this out, and save only one million human children then I can’t get overly concerned about ten monkeys.

At least his colleagues seemed to understand the nature and importance of his work.

In 1958, Harlow was elected president of the American Psychological Association. At the APA’s annual meeting on August 31 of that year, he delivered a seminal paper titled “The Nature of Love,” cited in Love at Goon Park (public library) — Deborah Blum’s masterful chronicle of how Harlow pioneered the science of affection.

But no sooner to I come across that, I came across this: 30 Years Ago, Romania Deprived Thousands of Babies of Human Contact. And there, in the midst of the story there was this:

Neuroscientists tended to view “attachment theory” as suggestive and thought-provoking work within the “soft science” of psychology. It largely relied on case studies or correlational evidence or animal research. In the psychologist Harry Harlow’s infamous “maternal deprivation” experiments, he caged baby rhesus monkeys alone, offering them only maternal facsimiles made of wire and wood, or foam and terry cloth.

Why use monkeys when you can use real children.

By design, 68 of the children would continue to receive “care as usual,” while the other 68 would be placed with foster families recruited and trained by BEIP. (Romania didn’t have a tradition of foster care; officials believed orphanages were safer for children.) Local kids whose parents volunteered to participate made up a third group. The BEIP study would become the first-ever randomized controlled trial to measure the impact of early institutionalization on brain and behavioral development and to examine high-quality foster care as an alternative.

And then they were assessed and then re-assessed again.

When the children were reassessed in a “strange situation” playroom at age 3.5, the portion who displayed secure attachments climbed from the baseline of 3 percent to nearly 50 percent among the foster-care kids, but to only 18 percent among those who remained institutionalized—and, again, the children moved before their second birthday did best. “Timing is critical,” the researchers wrote. Brain plasticity wasn’t “unlimited,” they warned. “Earlier is better.”

The benefits for children who’d achieved secure attachments accrued as time went on. At age 4.5, they had significantly lower rates of depression and anxiety and fewer “callous unemotional traits” (limited empathy, lack of guilt, shallow affect) than their peers still in institutions. About 40 percent of teenagers in the study who’d ever been in orphanages, in fact, were eventually diagnosed with a major psychiatric condition. Their growth was stunted, and their motor skills and language development stalled. MRI studies revealed that the brain volume of the still-institutionalized children was below that of the never institutionalized, and EEGs showed profoundly less brain activity. “If you think of the brain as a light bulb,” Charles Nelson has said, “it’s as though there was a dimmer that had reduced them from a 100-watt bulb to 30 watts.”

And then later in the article we come to this.

As early as 2003, it was evident to the BEIP scientists and their Romanian research partners that the foster-care children were making progress. Glimmering through the data was a sensitive period of 24 months during which it was crucial for a child to establish an attachment relationship with a caregiver, Zeanah says. Children taken out of orphanages before their second birthday were benefiting from being with families far more than those who stayed longer. “When you’re doing a trial and your preliminary evidence is that the intervention is effective, you have to ask, ‘Do we stop now and make the drug available to everyone?’ ” he told me. “For us, the ‘effective drug’ happened to be foster care, and we weren’t capable of creating a national foster-care system.” Instead, the researchers announced their results publicly, and the next year, the Romanian government banned the institutionalization of children under the age of 2. Since then, it has raised the minimum age to 7, and government-sponsored foster care has expanded dramatically.

But in the end, both sets of children ended up damaged. This is a passage towards the end of the article.

The neuropsychologist Ron Federici was another of the first wave of child-development experts to visit the institutions for the “unsalvageables,” and he has become one of the world’s top specialists caring for post-institutionalized children adopted into Western homes. “In the early years, everybody had starry eyes,” Federici says. “They thought loving, caring families could heal these kids. I warned them: These kids are going to push you to the breaking point. Get trained to work with special-needs children. Keep their bedrooms spare and simple. Instead of ‘I love you,’ just tell them, ‘You are safe.’ ” But most new or prospective parents couldn’t bear to hear it, and the adoption agencies that set up shop overnight in Romania weren’t in the business of delivering such dire messages. “I got a lot of hate mail,” says Federici, who is fast-talking and blunt, with a long face and a thatch of shiny black hair. “ ‘You’re cold! They need love! They’ve got to be hugged.’ ” But the former marine, once widely accused of being too pessimistic about the kids’ futures, is now considered prescient.

Federici and his wife adopted eight children from brutal institutions themselves: three from Russia and five from Romania, including a trio of brothers, ages 8, 10, and 12. The two oldest weighed 30 pounds each and were dying from untreated hemophilia and hepatitis C when he carried them out the front door of their orphanage; it took the couple two years to locate the boys’ younger brother in another institution. Since then, in his clinical practice in Northern Virginia, Federici has seen 9,000 young people, close to a third of them from Romania. Tracking his patients across the decades, he has found that 25 percent require round-the-clock care, another 55 percent have “significant” challenges that can be managed with adult-support services, and about 20 percent are able to live independently.

Harry Harlow was not just right, he was more right than he would ever know. It is common sense and indeed obvious; it is very hard to provide warmth outside a family relationship.

The page above is taken from The Perpetual Almanack of Folklore for February 17 which shows, if you can read the print:

During the week which ended on this day in 1719, the following diseases and conditions proved fatal to the inhabitants of London.

Not all of them died, of course, but only some. And none of them died of Covid-19, unless it was Covid-1719. Meanwhile, back in the real world of modern life as we live it today, we have this: The cult of Dan — coming soon to a garbage bag on you.

This is where we have progressed to today. I will end with a quote from John Stuart Mill which seems especially apposite:

“The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of [their] own health, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.”

We do not deserve the freedom we have been bequeathed and will soon lose it if we do not mend our ways assuming it has not been lost already.

I hope the death of Rush Limbaugh today is not a metaphor for much else that is going on.

AND NOW TO ADD TO EVERYTHING ELSE THERE IS THIS: From Tony Thomas: Daniel Andrews’ Bad Case of China Envy. Read it through and see if our freedoms are not actually on the line. The accompanying picture really does say something worth thinking about.