Month: May 2011

>Planned C-sections Bring Greater Satisfaction Than Vaginal Births

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

>In spite of a recent trend to demonize C-section and prevent women from getting one if they want to, research demonstrates that those women who  still manage to get their planned C-sections are a lot happier and less likely to suffer from postpartum depression than women who undergo vaginal birth:

The doctors found that women who planned C-sections were much more satisfied with their experiences than those who planned vaginal births. . . The study polled 160 women planning vaginal delivery and 44 planning C-sections. The women were asked eight weeks afterdelivery about their fulfillment, distress and difficulty. They rated their satisfaction with the childbirth experience on a scale from one to 100 and how they felt right after birth using descriptors such as “disappointed,” “enthusiastic” and “cheated.” Those planning C-sections reported higher satisfaction, higher fulfillment and lower distress and difficulty, and a more favorable overall experience than those planning vaginal birth. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that about one-third of U.S. women giving birth had C-sections in 2008, the latest data available. The number crossed all races and ages.

The main reason for the anti-C-section propaganda that we have been inundated with in recent years is the firm belief many still possess that true femininity is only achieved through pain and suffering. Consequently, women who plan to avoid the so-called “natural” childbirth have been demonized as not womanly enough. As this study shows, however, ultimately such women come out winning because they don’t sacrifice their emotional and physical well-being to some medieval prejudices about what is and isn’t “natural.”
You can see how terrified our culture still is that some women might escape the horrors associated with vaginal birth in the language of the very article that quoted this important piece of research. In order to make up for the article’s brave defense of planned C-sections, its author immediately proceeds to quote some unintelligent quack who obviously despises women for a living:

“How much this figures into an individual’s psyche is nothing we can measure, because we can’t do randomized studies by making some women have C-sections and some vaginal births,” she said. “Instead, we absolutely should have more counseling. Labor is OK, and they’ll survive. Most births go very well; there’s no good evidence now to circumvent Mother Nature.”

There is no doubt in my mind that the jerk who said this atrocity doesn’t rely on “Mother Nature” when she, say, gets a toothache. I also don’t believe that a dentist who’d tell her that pain is OK and she’ll survive would not be her dentist for long. It will be especially funny if Nada Stotland, the woman-hater who made this statement, has ever used birth control, painkillers, reading glasses or tampons. The same goes for refrigerators, washing machines, computers, and all the other things that mother nature didn’t provide us with but which we still use to make our lives easier on a daily basis.

>Tess Gerritsen’s The Silent Girl: A Review

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

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Tess Gerritsen used to be a very unique mystery writer. Her Rizzolli and Isles series featured a police officer, Jane Rizzolli, and a medical examiner, Maura Isles, whose unconventional personal lives and intense personalities made the series especially interesting to follow. Gerritsen was a writer who did blood and gore especially well. If you are into the mystery novels filled with descriptions of human entrails glistening against the snow, torture and detailed autopsies, Gerritsen was the writer for you. She never shied away from explicit scenes and, as a result, managed to create some of the most memorable serial killer novels around.
And then television happened. A very stupid show started being filmed based on Gerritsen’s novels. The Silent Girl is the first novel by Gerritsen that came out since Rizzoli & Isles hit TNT. It isn’t a bad book at all, mind you. The mystery is good, the culprit is difficult to identify, the plot has quite a few twists and turns, the book reads very easily. The problem with The Silent Girl is that it isn’t a Gerritsen novel. It’s another installment of a very mediocre TV series. Rizzoli and Isles have been transformed into good girls whose personal lives are boring enough to be suitable for prime time. To give an example, Maura Isles isn’t engaged in her long-standing affair with a priest any more. She has now turned from a cold and harsh person into a weepy, miserable creature who is all of a sudden dedicated to wannabe mothering of a teenager more than to her career. Gory scenes have been substituted with descriptions that would look good on TV: Chinatown, martial artists, an obligatory scene with a mafioso, a grieving parent or two, mythical creatures leaping from roof to roof, etc. 
I used to look forward to Gerritsen’s new novels coming out. Now, however, she is no different than hundreds of other authors who produce sanitized, conventional mysteries that aim to be filmed rather than read. Until Rizzoli & Isles gets cancelled, it hardly makes any sense to read another Gerritsen mystery.
The Silent Girl will come out on July 5. 

>Promoting Yourself on My Blog

~ Clarissa ~ 3 Comments

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To those who are new to Clarissa’s Blog: you can only promote your own blog here if I have given you express permission. Ending each comment with a link to your own blog will make your comments end up in a spam box. However, if I have told you it’s OK to place your link here once, the permission is good for all future occasions when you might want to do it. If I come to your blog and comment there, it means I like you, so you can place your links freely. If I really like your blog, I will do all I can to promote it on my own because I love sharing cool stuff with people.
I also don’t publish comments from people whose nicknames promote products and link to sites that sell stuff. If you want to buy advertising on my blog, contact me and we’ll see if something can be worked out. But I really hate it when people try to sneak one past me. Nothing annoys me more than when people baselessly assume that they are smarter than I am and will be able to dupe me with such cheap tricks.

>Communism As a Religion

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

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“Religion is the opium of the people,” Marx said in his Contribution to Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right published in 1843. (I looked this up on Wikipedia and I’m not ashamed of confessing it.) The Communist leaders of the Soviet Union took this statement to heart and invested the Soviet brand of Communism with very obvious religious overtones.* This made it a lot easier to convert a very backwards, ultra-religious country to a new Communist religion.
Just consider the following facts:
Just look at this picture that in the
USSR we saw on a regular basis. Does
it remind you of anything?
1. Communist ideologues were always presented as a kind of a Holy Trinity where, instead of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, you had Marx, Engels and Lenin. 
2. Holy remains of saints were always central to religious practices of the most backwards denominations. When Lenin died in 1924, his body was embalmed and preserved in a mausoleum so that people could visit his remains and pay their homage. It was considered a duty and a privilege of every Soviet citizen to walk by Lenin’s remains at least once. I’ve done it and I don’t know any other person who grew up in the Soviet Union who hasn’t. The Russian government still spends a significant amount on preserving Lenin’s remains because there are too many people who oppose interring the poor guy’s body (or whatever is left of it). Lenin’s remains still have pride of place on the Red Square. When Stalin died, his remains were also embalmed and added to Lenin’s in the Mausoleum.**
3. In a Russian Orthodox home, there was always a corner called “beautiful” (which carries the same meaning as the word “red”) where religious images were located. After the October Revolution, religious images were removed from these right-hand corners and substituted with images of the Communist Holy Trinity. Just like with the holy images, people would light candles in front of the triple image of Marx, Engels and Lenin (or Marx, Lenin and Stalin.)  The number of “inspirational stories” we have read about young Pioneers (you do know what it means in the context of the Soviet Union, right?) removing an old grandma’s religious images from the right-hand corner and placing Lenin’s portraits there was overwhelming. And, come to think of it, very Derridian****, too.
4. In a profoundly Pagan culture that was forcibly converted to Christianity (as all Slavic cultures that still preserve their Pagan customs and allegiances were), it was important to offer people Communist equivalents of their Pagan deities and traditions. This was done very successfully in the Soviet Union. As we all know, Pagan  sexuality is very happy and exuberant***, while Christianity was always very repressive sexually. The official Communist ideology would snag people with their “a sexual act should come as easily as having a glass of water” propaganda of the 20ies, only to collapse into an extremely Puritanical culture of the 60ies and the 70ies.
The main reason that the Communist ideology was so successful with the backwards and ultra-religious people of the Russian Empire is that it managed to inscribe itself so neatly into the all-important belief system  promoted by the Russian Orthodox Church. It isn’t for nothing that Stalin was so eager to turn the Church leaders into happy collaborators of the regime. For decades, the Russian Orthodox priests collaborated with the KGB and informed the authorities of whatever it was that people revealed in the confessional. Today, the Russian president and prime-minister flaunt their fake religiousness which is made easy for them because of their KGB credentials that they share with the top officials of the Russian Orthodox Church.
*If I somebody reminds me, I will one day blog about why this project failed so spectacularly in Cuba.
** I also want to write a separate post on how Stalin’s death was perceived as an enormous tragedy even by the most intellectual and refined Soviet people. It is especially curious to examine the case of Jews who weeped over the death of a guy who was in the process of exiling them all into Siberia. There are so many topics to blog about that one feels overwhelmed.
*** I’m also dying to blog about Slavic Paganism in the hopes that a Western Pagan (Pagan Topologist, maybe?) will point out similarities and differences.
**** If I need to write a separate post about it, just say so.