I'm asleep on a pile of paper
Well, I guess Tuesday was spring. It was so sunny and mild and so blooming that I walked around my neighborhood taking pictures of flowers and and I looked forward to visiting the Arboretum in the next week or so. And then yesterday, on top of the computer-related emotional roller coaster, the temperature spiked past eighty degrees and the cats melted onto the hardwood and we needed two fans in the windows of the bedroom for me to get to sleep after dark, which made so little difference to the heat that ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch and I both had trouble believing it was one in the morning when it was. Today it is sticky and hazy and distinguishable from August only in that the trees are still in flower instead of that late dry green leaf. I am not looking forward to trying to sleep tonight. I hope our air conditioner is up to it.
Bertie Owen and his twenty-year-old external keyboard are still hanging in there. I am pleased that I was able to finish my interrupted review. I am now trying to decide if I really want to watch Four Daughters (1938) for John Garfield and Jeffrey Lynn now that it's handily on TCM or if it's going to be like that time Seven Sweethearts (1942) happened to me.
spatch found me this excellent Talmudic commentary on incels.
It is too hot.
spatch and I both had trouble believing it was one in the morning when it was. Today it is sticky and hazy and distinguishable from August only in that the trees are still in flower instead of that late dry green leaf. I am not looking forward to trying to sleep tonight. I hope our air conditioner is up to it.Bertie Owen and his twenty-year-old external keyboard are still hanging in there. I am pleased that I was able to finish my interrupted review. I am now trying to decide if I really want to watch Four Daughters (1938) for John Garfield and Jeffrey Lynn now that it's handily on TCM or if it's going to be like that time Seven Sweethearts (1942) happened to me.
spatch found me this excellent Talmudic commentary on incels.It is too hot.
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And yes, I think the commentary absolutely does deny the woman agency, probably for the simple reason that women in ancient times seem to have been somewhere between cattle and male humans in the views of men. Nothing in the text seemed to suggest that the *woman's* feelings/suffering/desire/personhood are of any consequence. It's all a matter of how family/husband/horny dude's various rights and needs line up.
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I don't think it's quite that monolithic—the ketubah, for example, the traditional Jewish marriage contract, which was codified about two thousand years ago and therefore predates the scholars being quoted in this passage, exists specifically to protect the woman's rights, not the honor of her family or the man she's married to—but I would prefer someone with more Talmudic knowledge than me to make the argument. I linked a further tweet from the thread to
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I'm just trying to be fair to the parts of the past that deserve it. Other parts of the past are on their own.
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I think the repeated "she may not" is less about curtailing the woman's behavior and more in the sense of "she has no obligation to". @drnelk addresses the wording in a later tweet:
"This translation makes it sound like she wants to, but that's not an accurate read of text. The rabbis are refusing the doctors' demands to use her as his treatment. I think of JJ Thompson's violinist."
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This one I know! It's a reference to Judith Jarvis Thompson's "A Defense of Abortion" (1971), in which she famously argued that the right of a fetus to life—granted for the sake of argument—does not outweight the right of a woman to her own body, using the memorably absurd thought experiment of a woman who wakes up one day to find herself sharing a circulatory system with a famous violinist:
"He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, 'Look, we're sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you—we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it's only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.' Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it? What if it were not nine months, but nine years? Or longer still? What if the director of the hospital says, 'Tough luck. I agree. but now you've got to stay in bed, with the violinist plugged into you, for the rest of your life. Because remember this. All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons. Granted you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person's right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body. So you cannot ever be unplugged from him.' I imagine you would regard this as outrageous, which suggests that something really is wrong with that plausible-sounding argument I mentioned a moment ago."
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But anyway, thank you for explaining the violinist (and sharing the source material)--I appreciate it.