5 ideas
468 | Musical performance can reveal a range of virtues [Damon of Ath.] |
Full Idea: In singing and playing the lyre, a boy will be likely to reveal not only courage and moderation, but also justice. | |
From: Damon (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE], B4), quoted by (who?) - where? |
19589 | The whole point of a monarch is that we accept them as a higher-born, ideal person [Novalis] |
Full Idea: The distinguishing character of the monarchy lies precisely in the fact of belief in a higher-born person, of voluntary acceptance of an ideal person. I cannot choose a leader from among my peers. | |
From: Novalis (Fath and Love, or the King and Queen [1798], 18) | |
A reaction: Novalis was passionately devoted to the new king and queen of Prussia, only a few years after the French Revolution. This attitude seems to me unchanged among monarchists in present day Britain. Genetics has undermined 'higher-born'. |
20887 | A rape disregards the status of being a person - but so does all assault [Foa] |
Full Idea: In a rape a person is used without proper regard for her personhood - but this is true of every kind of assault. | |
From: Pamela Foa (What's Wrong with Rape? [1977], 1) | |
A reaction: This is a good step towards her attempt to pin down what is specifically wrong with rape, which strikes me as an extremely important question, and not merely in order to justify punishments. |
20888 | Rape of children is dreadful, but no one thinks children should have a right of consent [Foa] |
Full Idea: Rape of children is at least as heinous as rape of adults, though few believe that children have or ought to have the same large domain of consent adults (male and female) ought to have. | |
From: Pamela Foa (What's Wrong with Rape? [1977], 1) | |
A reaction: A powerful point. She is not quite spelling out the crux, which is that no one thinks children should have a right to consent to sexual intercourse, which means that consent is irrelevant in such a case of rape. So it can't be the key to adult rape? |
20889 | If men should lust and women shouldn't, that makes rape the prevalent sexual model [Foa] |
Full Idea: We are taught that sexual desires are desires women ought not to have and men must have. This is the model which makes necessary an eternal battle of the sexes. It explains why rape is the prevalent model of sexuality. | |
From: Pamela Foa (What's Wrong with Rape? [1977], 3) | |
A reaction: A striking thought. See 'The Origins of Sex' by F.Dabhoiwala, which claims that women used to be seen as the sexual predators, and the balance shifted in the 18thC. Are women obliged to exhibit lust, in order to defuse rapacious desires? |