This was such a thought-provoking and mind-opening read. Dovetails nicely with the Cass review in the UK being lauded by some in very similar terms — we know better than the patient as to what is good for them, for their use to society, and their agency doesn’t enter into it.
When someone is mentally ill, he shouldn't be allowed to mutilate or sterilize himself. Nobody allows anorexics to demand liposuction if they weigh 80 pounds and are trying to starve to death.
So, yes, mentally ill patients do not have the right to demand that society conform to their delusions. They should not have "agency" because delusion means that they're not rational. The same applies to schizophrenics or bi polar. That is what mental hospitals are for.
"Yet all parties agreed that the mind, though inseparable from the body, is no good judge of its own deterioration. That a patient’s willfulness to destroy their 'material' body is itself disqualifying of her ability to consent to the very thing she knows she needs to avoid subjecting that same body to a violent, visceral experience. It is an effort by the state to build an impossible wall between the empirical and experienced, the objective and the subjective, the political and the personal, using a woman’s own blood and guts as the mortar between the bricks." Yes, the erasure of agency and pathologizing of personhood. Thank you, Gillian.
Sidney Bolter’s quote comes creepily close to Martin Luther’s, when he said about women whose health fails and who die from frequent childbearing: “And even if they bear themselves weary – or ultimately bear themselves out – that does not hurt. Let them bear themselves out. This is the purpose for which they exist. It is better to have a brief life with good health than a long life in ill health.” We owe much of the religious woman-hate that informs our law today to that paragon of Protestantism.
This was such a thought-provoking and mind-opening read. Dovetails nicely with the Cass review in the UK being lauded by some in very similar terms — we know better than the patient as to what is good for them, for their use to society, and their agency doesn’t enter into it.
When someone is mentally ill, he shouldn't be allowed to mutilate or sterilize himself. Nobody allows anorexics to demand liposuction if they weigh 80 pounds and are trying to starve to death.
So, yes, mentally ill patients do not have the right to demand that society conform to their delusions. They should not have "agency" because delusion means that they're not rational. The same applies to schizophrenics or bi polar. That is what mental hospitals are for.
"Yet all parties agreed that the mind, though inseparable from the body, is no good judge of its own deterioration. That a patient’s willfulness to destroy their 'material' body is itself disqualifying of her ability to consent to the very thing she knows she needs to avoid subjecting that same body to a violent, visceral experience. It is an effort by the state to build an impossible wall between the empirical and experienced, the objective and the subjective, the political and the personal, using a woman’s own blood and guts as the mortar between the bricks." Yes, the erasure of agency and pathologizing of personhood. Thank you, Gillian.
They hate women. We're just incubators.
What's a woman? You use the word, so you should know what it means.
Provide a definition for "woman."
🤣🤡🤣
Why can't you answer the question?
Sidney Bolter’s quote comes creepily close to Martin Luther’s, when he said about women whose health fails and who die from frequent childbearing: “And even if they bear themselves weary – or ultimately bear themselves out – that does not hurt. Let them bear themselves out. This is the purpose for which they exist. It is better to have a brief life with good health than a long life in ill health.” We owe much of the religious woman-hate that informs our law today to that paragon of Protestantism.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1287k2q.7?seq=13