1. Introduction

Maccoby & Jacklin, p. 355

"Is it a boy or a girl?"

Drew Barrymore, E.T.

"Male aggression and lust are the energizing forces of; culture, and if civilization had been left in female hands, we'd still be living in grass huts."

Camille Paglia, quoted in Playboy, p.67

"We can study aggression more clearly and objectively in other species, and the results gie many clues to the
basic causes of human fighting."

John P.Scott, Aggression, p.vii

"It is out of the question to believe that the natural history of aggression runs in a straight line directly
from the stickleback to man."

Norbert Elias, What is Sociology (Columbia 1978), p.178

"Dogs can talk, if you touch them in the right spot."

(Dennis Miller - `Live' 1.15.01)

1. Introduction:

A. Biology

 (Dennis Miller - `Live' 1.15.01)

2. Psychological Theories: Learning and Development

L.Tiefer, in Mary Gergen & SaraDavis (eds.), Toward a New Psychology of Gender (Routledge, 1996), p.366

"The generation of norms and the whole social imprinting of human aggressive behaviour in the course of people's relationships with each other, are extraordinarily variable."

Norbert Elias, What is Sociology (Columbia 1978), p.178

"What's important in this life? Ask the man who's lost his wife.
All the love in the world for you, girl, Thumbelina in a great big scary world."

Chrissie Hynde - `Thumbelina' from Learning to Crawl (1984)

`On the consequences of some anatomical differences between the sexes,' S.E.

Sigmund Freud

II. Violence"Among the delinquent boys who drew assaultive fantasies, 47% seemed to feel a need to justify the violence they expressed. For example, characters whoseemed to be self-images killed bad guys in order to protect innocent victims, or retaliated only after being hurt."

Rawley Silver - `Sex differences in the solitary and assaultive fantasies of delinquent and nondelinquent adolescents,' Adolescence, 1996, 31(123), 543-552, p.549.

(John Dollard et al., Frustration and Aggression (Yale, 1939), p.45)

(Winnicott, 1950-55, p. 217)

(Jung, The real and the surreal, 1933, in Collected Works, vol 8. Routledge 1960, p.384 of 382-384).

(Karen Horney - The Neurotic personality of Our Times, pp.54-55)

(Melanie Klein, 1933, p.251)

(Selma Fraiberg, `The building of a conscience' in The Magic Years. Scribner's, 1959, p.155)

(Langston Hughes, 'A Dream Deferred')

(Christopher Huvos - Violence and human existence, Review of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry, 1984-85, 19 (2-3), 274 of 267-281)

"Does death stabilise the relation of the subject to the object? Does the object in return stabilise the relation the subject has to death?"

(Michel Serres, 1987, Statues. Paris: Bourin, p. 43)

"I am pregnant with murder. The pains are coming faster now, and not all you anesthetics nor even my own screams can stop them."

(Robin Morgan 'Annunciation' 1969. In Demon Lover)

"Red rum."

(Stephen King - The Shining)

II. Gender

6. Agression and Gender

"You're just a fool in love ... Sometimes you're happy, sometimes you're sad ... You know you love him but you can't understand Why he treats you like he do if he's such a good man."

(Tina Turner - `Fool in Love')

"The bitch tried to gank me, So I had to kill 'er. Loaded up the .44 And smoked the ho."

(NWA - `One Less Bitch')

"Misogyny is an inescapable element in the development of masculinity."

(Catalog summary of book by Adam Jukes [1993])

"(M)en's overt public displays of masculine bravado, interpersonal dominance, misogyny, embodied strength, and so forth are often a sign of lack of institutional power and privilege, vis-a-vis other men."

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo & Michael Messner, `Gender displays and men's power' in Mary Gergen &
Sara Davis (eds.), Toward a New Psychology of Gender, pp.503-520 (Routledge, 1996), 514-515.

"(The) time of rupture and separation has the same role... as that played in the cycle of life by the rites intended to ensure the progressive virilization of the growing boy (initially a female being), beginning at birth and always involving fire or instruments made with fire."

Pierre Bourdieu - 'Thresholds and rites of passage,' in Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge 1977/1972), p131.

Carla Makhlouf Obermeyer - `Reproductive choice in Islam: gender and state in Iran and Tunisia,' Radical America, 1992, 25(3), 23-36, p.34

"(W)hat prevails today is the masculine as fragility and the feminine as degree zero. ... We have in fact entered a new phase of sexual abuse and violence --a violence against the `sub-suicidal' masculine by unrestrained feminine pleasure. But this violence is not an inversion of the historical violence against women by the sexual prowess of men. The violence in question is the neutralisation, deflation, or collapse of the marked term before the irruption of the unmarked term. It is not full, generic violence, but the violence of deterrence, the violence of the neuter, the violence of the degree zero."

Jean Baudrillard - The Revenge of the Crystal, 145-6.

"I that am cruel am yet merciful; I would not have thee linger in thy pain."

(Othello, Act 5, Scene 2)

"(R)ape is universally acknowledged to be a crime, and it is seldom if ever openly acknowledged as among the forms of legal punishment legitimately prescribed by governmental authorities..., as an intrinsic and universal part of the punishments that our government metes out to those whom it labels as 'criminal'?"

James Gilligan - Violence (Vintage 1996), p. 165

P.J. Harvey, 'Man-size Sextext,' from Rid of M

Disneyana catalog, 1999, 31, p.36

III. Sexuality

"(re Henry Darger) The girls are constantly under attack by violent enemy forces and being saved and surviving storms and evil armies. I was fascinated by little girls when I was a little boy, and their clothes and their games and their dolls appealed to me much more than what little boys were doing. Therefore I was sort of ostracized."

John Ashbery - `A child in time: Interview by Melanie Rehak,' New York Times Magazine, 4.4.99, p.15

 "In daily life types of men and women are constantly met with who, while mainly hetereosexual in their development, plainly display features of the other sex. ... (W)omen who wish for masculinity may put on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution feared from men."

 Joan Riviere - `Womanliness as a masquerade' (1929), in Victor Burgin, Cora Kaplan & James Donald (eds.), Formations of Fantasy (Methuen 1986), 35-44, p.35

Kenneth Burke - Attitudes Toward History, 2nd edn., (Beacon, 1961/1959), p.61

"Men's glands program them to get up after sex and go right on to the next one."

 Jack Nicholson

"The police said Mr Gay, 54, told investigators that he committed the crime because he was tired of being teased about his last name. It was that teasing, coupled apparently with several personal crises including a recent divorce, that prompted Mr gay to open fire in a gay bar on Friday night, the police and Mr Gay's relatives say. A gay man was killed and six other people were wounded."

New York Times, 9.28.00

 "No-one sees you,
May not be you,
Not one like you
Likes you, sees you."

Kaia Wilson - `Gertrude and Stein' from The Butchies, Population 1975 (1999)

III. Sexuality

8. Heterosexism and Female Homosexuality

Mickey and Minnie -- the perfect pair. Mickey and Minnie have been together now for 71 years."

Disneyana catalog, 1999, 31, p.36 

"The purpose of a man is to love a woman. And the purpose of a woman is to love a man. So come on baby let's start today, Come on baby let's play the game of love. It started long ago, in the Garden of Eden When Adam said to Eve, `Baby you're for me.' "

 (Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders - `The Game of Love')

"The lesbians were more often hostile toward and afraid of their fathers than were the married women and they felt more often that their fathers were weak and incompetent."

(Bene, E., On the genesis of female homosexuality, British Journal of Psychiatry, 1965, 111, 815-821, p. 821)

 "I hate it that you can't get me pregnant."

 Ellen Degeneres to Sharon Stone, in If These Walls Had Ears 2

IV. Violations and Transgressions

"She showed me her room and she told me to sit anywhere.
But I look around and I noticed there wasn't a chair.
So I sat on the rug, biding my time, drinking her wine.
We talked until two, and then she said, 'It's time for bed.'
She said she worked in the morning and started to laugh,
I said that I didn't and crawled off to sleep in the bath.
And when I awoke, I was alone, this bird has flown.
So I lit a fire. 'Isn't it good? Norwegian wood.'"

(Lennon/McCartney - 'Norwegian Wood')

 

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"(H)eterosexuality is based on repressed homoerotic impulses."

Jean Walton - `Psychoanalysis and the queer matrix of "Borderline",' from Fair Sex,
Savage Dreams: Race, Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference, 41-81 (Duke 2001), p.46

 

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"(S)uperstructural fluctuancy may promote not only the homosexual, but even the androgynous, beginning with Blake's discovery that, if the universe, a universe of promiscuous love, contains a male and a female principle, it is in its totality hermaphrodite -- and the thinking of one who 'identified himself' with such a universe would manifest a similar convergence of sexual opposites."

Kenneth Burke - Attitudes Toward History, 2nd edn., (Beacon, 1961/1959), 61

"Interchangeability of sex roles in now normative."

Marianna LaFrance - 'Review of Elizabeth Badinter, "The Unopposite Sex",' Psychology of Women Quarterly, 1990, 14 (3), 441-443, p.443

"Acting as a woman ... is not necessarily a tribute to the feminine."

Elaine Showalter, `Critical cross-dressing,' Raritan, 1983, 130-149, p.138

"Made it Ma! Top of the world!"

Cody Jarrett (James Cagney) in White Heat (1949)

"A man and a women
Are one.
A man and a women and a blackbird
Are one."

Wallice Stevens - '13 ways of looking at a blackbird'

 

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"You see ... it is a peculiar characteristic of many people, this love of torturing children. ... To all other types of humanity, these torturers behave mildly and benevolently, like cultivated and humane Europeans; but they are very fond of tormenting children, even fond of children themselves in that sense. It's just their defencelessness that tempts the tormentor."

Dostoevsky - The Brothers Karamazov

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"Murder is a detour on the way to suicide." (Nietzsche)

 

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"(M)asochism, or voluntary submission, always requires an other who remains in control. This kind of rational
violence, or more precisely violation, seems to reveal a pattern of establishing selfhood by being controlled."

Jessica Benjamin, `Rational violence and erotic domination,' p.155

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"Humanistic thought ... failed, among other reasons, because it did not get far enough in its analyses of
the paradox of desire, the power of unconscious pleasure, and the enormous force of its `transgressivity.' The
ethics of the real examines the movements beyond the pleasure barrier and the barrier of anxiety, towards
all types of morbidity."

Maire Jaanus - `The ethics of the real in Lacan's Seminar VII, Literature and Psychology.

 

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"I used to have nightmares about falling into holes in the backyard, but this particular one was about going
outside and opening my mouth until it broke and the bones came out. Hence (I'd give it) the name `Outbone Night'."

(Hispanic woman in late 20s)

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"Oh I am specific and I am cruel,
Unpredictable,
Your fool,
Yeah.
You treat me like chocolate --
Just unwrap it.
You treat me like chocolate --
Just have at it."

(Russell Crowe - `You Treat Me Like Chocolate,' recorded by 30 Odd Foot of Grunts)

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"Baby, hit me one more time!" (Britney Spears)

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"Fuck me 'til I bleed." (L'il Kim - `Call Me')

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"But is identification always restricted within the binary disjunction in which it has been framed so far? Clearly, within psychoanalytic theory, another set of possibilities emerges whereby identifications work not to consolidate identity but to condition the interplay and subversive recombinations of gender meanings."

Judith Butler, `Gender trouble, feminist theory and psychoanalytic discourse,' in Linda Nicholson (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism (Routledge, 1990), p.333. 

V. Cultural Violence

"(M)odern life, where sportsmen and criminals are indifferently idolized."

(Michael Hofmann, 'A never-ending story: review of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities' NYTBR, 1995 5/14, 1/27, p.27)

"In the advanced industrial society...social needs must become individual needs, instinctual needs...(which is) suggestive of the depth of society's ingression into the psyche. ... SUch a harmony between the individual and society...is highly destructive. ...(T)he healthy and normal individual is a human being equipped with all the qualities which enable him to get along with others in his society, and these very same qualities are the marks of repression, the marks of a mutilated human being, who collaborates in his own opression, in the containment of potential individual and social freedom, in release of aggression."

(Marcuse, 1968, pp.253-4)

"The crimes committed in the name of the state, unfortunately, have...been so great that we cannot shun the obligation to examine the grounds of its authority and subject them to rigorous critique."

(Robert Paul Wolff, quoted in R. Elias, p.106)

"The real offical secret, however, is the secret of the non-existence of the state."

(Philip Abrams, 'Notes on the difficulty of studying the state,' J.Hist.Sociol., 1988, 1(1), p.77)

"All politics is a struggle for power, and the ultimate kind of power is violence."

(C.Wright Mills, The Power Elite, Oxford, 1965, p.71)

"Power and violence are opposites. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance."

(Hannah Arendt - On Violence)

"The first colonists saw in America an opportunity to regenerate their fortunes, their spirits, and the power of their church and nation; but the means to that regeneration ultimately became the means of violence, and the myth of regeneration through violence became the structuring metaphor of the American experience."

(R. Slotkin, 1973, p.5)

"We do not assassinate dead people."

(Abdul Jabbar Muhsin, Saddam Hussein's press secretary, denying reports of failed Iraqi plot to kill George Bush Sr., Newsweek)

"In history the people are all dead. They are brought to life again by the vital interest put into them."

(Ella Sharpe, 'Sublimation and delusion' (1950) from Collected Papers on Psycho-Analysis. Brunner-Mazel, 1978, p.134)

"(P)sychoanalysis cannot keep the violence of the 'politcal outside' outside because it has always-already penetrated the interior of the institution."

(David Carroll, 'Institutional authority vs. critical power,' in Joseph Smith & William Kerrigan (eds.), Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis, and Literature (1984), p.109)

"In NY City, the value of people has sunk below that of objects, as the growing numbers of homeless people--- bodies without homes, dislocated to leave room fo real-estate speculation -- bear witness. The substitution of use for exchange value (sic) is seldom so blatant: families inhabit parks and streets while hundreds of habitable buildings stand by empty, awaiting the best market opportunity to be reopened. This bodily displacement is even more violent than a war, because homelessness is a condition of slow deterioration and hardly appreciated heroisms...(P)eople living on the street seem a natural extension of the urban scenario."

Celeste Olalquiago - 'Reach out and touch someone'
from Megalopolis (MN 1992)., 1-18, p.18

"The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.

(Blanchot, 1986, p.1)"

"Both in our foreign affairs and in our domestic life, we convey an image of violence... America, which only a few years ago seemed to the world to be a model of democracy and social justice, has become a symbol of violence and undisciplined power."

J.W. Fulbright - 'The great society is a sick society,' NYT Mag, 8.20.67, p. 30

"We cannot resolve this problem of this relationship between the tale and contemporary life unless we bear in mind the difference between artisitc realism and the presence of elements taken directly from life. Researchers often make the mistake of trying to make a realistic narrative correspond to real life. ...We cannot draw any conclusion with an immediate bearing on life from tales."

V. Propp, Transformations in fairy tales (1928), in T.Todorov, Theorie de la Literature (Seuil, 1965), p.237 of 234-262)

"History is written by assassins."

(Student, in The Official Story)

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

Yeats - `The Second Coming'

V. Cultural Violence

10. Gender and Violence in the Media

"To hell with Ice T. He should be smashed."

Protesters picketing Time Warner to protest "Cop Killer."

Chrissie Hynde - 'Thumbelina' from Learning to Crawl (1984)

V. Cultural Violence

11. Schools, Gender and Violence

"School is an institution for drilling children in cultural orientation. ...American classrooms, like educational institutions anywhere, express the values, preoccupations,and fears found in the culture as a whole. School has no choice; it must train the children to fit the culture as it is. ...Since education is always against some things and for others, it bears the burden of the cultural obessions. ...It thus comes about that most educational systems are imbued with anxiety and hostility, that they are against as many things as they are for. ... The function of education has never been to free the mind and the spirit of man, but to bind them...acquiescence, not originality. ...Schools are the central conserving force of the culture."

Jules Henry - Culture Against Man (Random House 1963), pp.283-287

Anna Freud & Dorothy Burlingham - War and Children, pp.23-124

"Miss Jones taught me English/But I think I just shot her son/Cause he owed me money/With a bullet in the chest you cannot run/Now he's bleeding in a vacant lot/The one in the summer where we used to smoke pot/I guess I didn't mean it/But man you should have seen it/His fresh explode."

Third Eye Blind, 'Slow Motion' originally of Blue (Elektra) then pulled and replaced with instrumental in US versions, but not abroad.