The Week In Review

Notable O.E.P. Stories for the Week Ending in August 24th, 2012

Alex Prager, “Deborah”

Two of our reported successes this week deal with Missouri Representative/Senate candidate Todd Akin’s indefensible (though even this is contested), “folkloric” comments regarding the biological processes informing rape, pregnancy, and female physiology. The remaining two address similarly hot-button topics – men with eating disorders and the United States’ aging prison population, and just what to do with them – in a studied and cool manner that we’ve happily come to expect from our prolific alumni. All timely and utterly necessary appraisals of the various truths of our “now.”

	While a definite stigma persists as to the so-called truths and lived reality of eating disorders, a good portion of the conversation centers upon young girls and women – keeping with many medi- cal, psychoanalytic, and societal “tradi- tions,” it seems. Men have only recently been more fully conceptualized as hav- ing eating disorders; Abby Ellin‘s NYT article testifies on their behalf.
	In her own words: “Little Margaret found her voice this week.” Indeed, and it’s one of subtle irony and insight: PVF Fellow Margaret Martonosi writes candidly about MO Rep. Todd Akin, all the while maintaining a rhetorical/ideo- logical distance indicative of a thinker who’s spent time sitting with her mind, crafting her voice, and enacting close readings. She asks questions – how, why? – and is unafraid to highlight the hypocrisies of Akin’s social proclivities.
	“When Representative Todd Akin said that cases of ‘legitimate rape’ do not result in pregnancy,” muses Susan Celia Greenfield, “he was simply artic- ulating a widely-held medical belief. In second-century Rome that is.” This is an opinion worthy of PBS’s “Need to Know” designation and one, we might all agree, so deserving of attention.
	Can such a thing as “compassionate release” for aging prisoners exist? Perhaps the most notable aspect of Tina Maschi‘s HuffPo article persists as its understated ability to incite inquiry in readers (including myself), doing so by proffering points-of-view that some might consider inconsequential or even inflammatory. But what progress can be made without the willingness to talk, to question, to offer insight? We comm- end Tina for having the tenacity to approach, and critique, this subject.

Because I can’t seem to help myself, and in celebration of his one-hundred-and-ninth birthday this year, I’ll include an excerpt of a clipping from George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Why I Write” (found on Brain Pickings, one of those places online in which I easily and freely become lost, as if in a vortex of ideas). This is also another of those “But I promise you, it relates!”-type moments:

“And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a POLITICAL purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.” (emphasis mine)

- J. J. Morr

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