Controversially, psychologist and public intellectual Jordan Peterson advises “enforced monogamy” for societies with high percentages of “incels.” As Peterson’s proposal resonates in manosphere circles, this chapter reconstructs and briefly evaluates the argument for it. Premised on the moral importance of civilizational sustainability, advocates argue that both polygamous and socially monogamous but sexually liberal mating patterns result in unsustainable proportions of unattached young men. Given the premises, monogamous societies are probably justified in maintaining their anti-polygamist social and legal norms. The case (...) for imposing stricter sexual norms on socially monogamous but sexually liberal societies is weaker, however, as male involuntary celibacy in those places isn’t as directly caused by male intrasexual competition, and since less intrusive social interventions are more likely to ameliorate “the incel problem.”. (shrink)

In Virgin Mary and the Neutrino, first published in French in 2006 and appearing here in English for the first time, Isabelle Stengers experiments with the possibility of addressing modern practices not as a block but through the way they diverge from each other. Drawing on thinkers ranging from Dewey to Deleuze, she develops what she calls an "ecology of practices" into a capacious and heterogeneous perspective that is inclusive of cultural and political forces but not reducible to them. Stengers (...) first advocates for an approach to sciences that would emphasize the way each should be situated by the kind of relationship demanded by what it attempts to address. This approach turns away from the disabling scientific/nonscientific binary-like the opposition between the neutrino and Virgin Mary. An ecology of practices stimulates instead an appetite for thinking reality not as an arbiter but as what we can relate with through the generation of diverging concerns and obligations. (shrink)

The Turkish-language release of Hanne Blank's Virgin: The Untouched History is a politically engaged translation aimed at disrupting Turkey's heteropatriarchal virginity codes. In Virgin Crossing Borders, Emek Ergun maps how she crafted her rendering of the text and draws on her experience and the book's impact to investigate the interventionist power of feminist translation. Ergun's comparative framework reveals translation's potential to facilitate cross-border flows of feminist theories, empower feminist interventions, connect feminist activists across differences and divides, and forge transnational (...) feminist solidarities. As she considers hopeful and woeful pictures of border crossings, Ergun invites readers to revise their views of translation's role in transnational feminism and examine their own potential as ethically and politically responsible agents willing to search for new meanings. Sophisticated and compelling, Virgin Crossing Borders reveals translation's vital role in exchanges of feminist theories, stories, and knowledge. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: What Our Churches Confess Early Christian Communities The Heart of the Evidence: Matthew and Luke The Objection of Empiricism The Objection of the Absurd Authentic Christmas Magic The Consequences of the Virginal Conception.

Once widely spread in the Dinaric Mountains part of the Balkan Peninsula, swearing to virginity was a social and cultural custom recorded among all groups inhabiting the area. In the absence of a capable adult man in the household, a daughter would take over his social role by ‘becoming’ a man. The standard explanation is that the function of this practice is enabling the continuation of the household’s economic, social, and religious activities. We argue that this explanation fails. A (...) better explanation is that, because the lack of a particular kind of a man (competent and honourable) was perceived as a shame in these societies, the primary reason for swearing to virginity was saving family honour. (shrink)

Julian Le Grand's case for saying that it would be equitable if smokers and smokers alone were to pay the costs of smoking-related health care is considered and found to be deficient.

Virgin birth controversy enjoys a privileged status in the history of anthropology and reflects the exceptional interest anthropology takes in “biological facts” of human procreation. In the widest sense, this controversy centers around procreative beliefs, or more precisely, the “discovery” of people who were considered to be ignorant of the facts of physiological paternity and the causal relationship between copulation and pregnancy (in humans). This paper offers an overview of the main theoretical approaches and an insight into the variety of (...) empirical findings presented by the numerous participants in the virgin birth debate. It especially focuses on a critical assessment of the provided argumentation on the subject of procreative ignorance, as well as the matter of interpretation of ethnographical facts and an analysis of the meaning of “biological facts” from a cross-cultural perspective. (shrink)

Resumen El presente estudio investiga la opción cristiana por la virginidad en el pensamiento de Clemente de Alejandría. En nuestro autor no se encuentra una doctrina organizada sobre la virginidad cristiana, sin embargo, resulta sorprendente que si se estudian estos comentarios aislados de forma conjunta, se puede descubrir de forma clara y certera el pensamiento del maestro de Alejandría sobre la virginidad dentro del cristianismo. En este estudio, las citas textuales de las obras de Clemente de Alejandría servirán de referencia (...) y nos guiarán en el desarrollo de su visión sobre la virginidad cristiana.The present study investigates the Christian option for virginity in the thought of Clement of Alexandria. In our author there is no organized doctrine about Christian virginity, however, it is surprising that if these isolated comments are studied together, we can discover clearly and accurately the thought of the master of Alexandria about virginity within Christianity. In this study, the textual citations of the works of Clement of Alexandria will serve as reference and will guide us in the development of his vision of Christian virginity. (shrink)

Situated in a period that witnessed the genesis of institutions that have lasted to this day, this path-breaking study looks at how ancient Christian women, particularly in Asia Minor and Egypt, initiated ascetic ways of living, and how these practices were then institutionalized. Susanna Elm demonstrates that--in direct contrast to later conceptions--asceticism began primarly as an urban movement, in which women were significant protagonists. In the process, they completely transformed and expanded their roles as wife, mother, or widow: as Christian (...) ascetics, they became `virgin wives', `virgin mothers', and `virgin widows' - with all the legal and economic implications of such a dramatic shift. As importantly, though, Christian men and women ascetics lived together. As `virgins of God' they created new families `in Christ'. No longer determined by their human bonds or human sexuality, they were `neither male nor female'. Finally, the book demonstrates how ascetic bishops - today known as saints - eventually `reformed' these early models of communal, ascetic life by dividing the `virgins of God' into monks and nuns and thus laid the foundation for the monasticism we know today. (shrink)

The Children’s Act and its associated regulations allow for virginity tests to be performed on male and female children over the age of 16. This is subject to a number of legislated conditions, including that informed consent should be obtained. In this article I argue that, whilst it is important that the right to social and cultural practice be protected in South Africa, virginity testing is a practice that cannot be morally justified. Firstly, I defend the claim that (...) the practice is inherently unjust. At least some of those subjected to the tests will inevitably experience the undesirable consequences of a false test result. The practice is also discriminatory as it typically and unjustly targets girl children, since boys are far less commonly tested. I argue further that the practice perpetuates a harmful patriarchal social order. Finally, I contend that any attempts to justify this legislation are fatally flawed, because it is fundamentally irrational, since there is no reliable means of testing for virginity. (shrink)

The common theme in this collection is rejection of assimilation, an embrace of boundary living, and a commitment to women's invention of women at and beyond the limits of patriarchy.

Among Marian epithets one of the more obscure is the designation "the Egyptian." This article traces the term in modern Greek and Byzantine literature. The investigation centers on an icon reputedly painted by the Apostle Luke while he was living in Egypt. Our researches lead to the city of Attaleia where, according to legend, a Lukan icon had found its way. Textual evidence establishes that around this icon a healing cult of the Virgin Aigyptia flourished in the later 11th century. (...) The written record is confirmed by the seal of a certain bishop Theodosios of Atteleia. The obverse bears a representation of the Virgin accompanied by the epithet Aigyptia. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 341-362 [Access article in PDF] Virgin Father and Prodigal Son Stephen Brockmann I IN BOTH THE UNITED STATES and Germany—as well as in much of the rest of the Western world—the baby-boom generation now holds a controlling position in politics, economics, and culture. The election of Bill Clinton (born in 1946) to the Presidency signaled the generational shift in the United States as early (...) as 1992, and that shift was confirmed by the election campaign of 2000, in which both candidates, Al Gore (born in 1948) and George W. Bush (born in 1946), in spite of their differences, represented the same generation. In Germany the political shift in generations did not occur until 1998, when Gerhard Schröder (born slightly before the beginning of the German baby boom, in 1944) defeated Helmut Kohl (born in 1930).Significantly, Kohl is a member of the generation of Germans born during the 1930s and reared during the years of the Third Reich but too young to have played any significant role, either negative or positive, during the Nazi era. No member of this generation born in the 1930s ever became President in the United States, where the generation of World War Two veterans dominated national politics from Eisenhower to George Herbert Walker Bush. However what in America is a "silent generation" has been, in Germany, the generation most closely identified with the success of the Federal Republic of Germany: these were the so-called Flakhelfer (antiaircraft helpers) who had been children during the war. Kohl therefore famously referred to them as having the "grace of late birth," meaning that they, unlike the war veterans, were presumably untouched by any form of collective guilt for Nazi crimes against humanity. Whereas in the United States the Presidency was transferred directly from the World War Two veterans to [End Page 341] baby boomers—and in the case of the two Bush presidencies, literally, albeit indirectly, from father to son—in Germany the transition from the World War Two veterans (particularly former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt) to the baby boomers was interrupted by a long period of domination by the in-between generation of Flakhelfer.In both countries the baby-boom generation represents a significant shift in sensibilities and encompasses the generation involved in student protest and oppositional social movements in the 1960s and 1970s. In the United States these included the anti-Vietnam War movement, the feminist and gay-rights movements, the sexual revolution, the civil-rights movement, and the ecological movement, as well as, on the extreme fringes, terrorist groupings such as the Weather Underground and a great many religious sects and cults. In Germany the baby boomers formed many parallel groups and movements, including antiwar, feminist, ecological, and gay segments, as well as a proliferation of sectarian Marxist political groupings (so-called K-Gruppen, with the "K" meaning "Kommunist"). In the United States, Bill Clinton was an antiwar protester in the 1960s and 1970s, while both Gerhard Schröder and his Green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer (born in 1948) had participated in left-wing political movements during the same period.In both West Germany and the United States the heyday of protest movements in the 1960s and 1970s signaled a generational split, with younger people—the very generation that is now in power in the two countries—accusing their elders of Machiavellian cynicism, imperialism, patriarchy, and worse. Such accusations can be recalled by the formerly popular slogans "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" in the United States and "Unter den Talaren der Muff von tausend Jahren" ("under the academic regalia the stench of a thousand years") in Germany. The latter slogan was a reference not just to a generalized stodginess on the part of elderly German academics but to Hitler's invocation of a "Thousand-Year Reich;" German students were none-too-subtly suggesting that many of their professors had once been Nazis.The difference in these two slogans—one referring to past and the other to present sins—corresponds to a major distinction between the two baby... (shrink)

Radical feminism has critiqued heterosexuality both as a primary means through which people are constituted as women and as men, and as inherently oppressive for women. Two recent developments challenge this critique: the concept of “virgin” heterosexuality, a form of heterosexuality in which the performance of heterosexual sex, with or without sexual intercourse, is voluntarily chosen, and “queer” heterosexuality, a concept derived from postmodernist and queer theory, which does not only reinscribe, but also actively subverts and disrupts, oppressive categories of (...) gender and sexual orientation. This article analyzes the attempts made in “virgin” and “queer” theory to rehabilitate heterosexuality, and finds both fundamentally flawed from a radical feminist perspective. It ends by considering why such rehabilitatory attempts are currently being made, and what they reveal about heterosexuality. (shrink)

Various tribes deny that males have a role in causing pregnancy. Edmund Leach thinks members don’t actually believe tribal dogma. I propose that there is a practical value in denying our biological knowledge.

Les femmes communistes espagnoles reconstituèrent leur organisation en 1945, dans l’exil français, afin de mobiliser les réfugiées dans la résistance antifranquiste. Les figures d’héroïnes évoquées dans la revue Mujeres Antifascistas Españolas, tiennent une place importante dans la culture politique de ces femmes. Des récits, où réalité et fiction se mêlent, mettent en scène vierges guerrières et mères héroïques. Si l’héroïsation individuelle ou collective (les treize roses de Madrid) confine parfois au mythe, sans remettre en cause le système traditionnel de genre, (...) elle permet d’inscrire ces héroïnes dans l’histoire de l’Espagne et dans la mémoire collective des opposants au régime du général Franco. (shrink)

Charged with personal, societal and legal significance, the hymen, as a fold of flesh, has the power to rule the sexual identities of unmarried women in Turkey. This article examines the forms and associated meanings of contemporary challenges to virginity rules among educationally advantaged, upwardly mobile young women. The article demonstrates that in the process of negotiating often contradictory expectations of their sexual behavior, young women cultivate purposefully ambiguous identities related to their state of virginhood. The author calls these (...) identities ` virginal facades' and explores their complex and contradictory implications. The author highlights an important normative shift from a focus on the physical reality of virginity to a focus on the moral expression of virginity, and emphasizes the intricate connection between social class and women's sexuality experienced by some young women as sexual guilt. (shrink)

Various tribes deny that pregnancy is caused by sexual relations. Is this irrational? I present a puzzle involving testimony which some tribes might once have faced.

This article reexamines the evidence for the relationships between the Vestal virgins and their natal kin from the second century BC to the third century ad. It suggests that the bond between these priestesses and their families remained strong throughout this period and that, as a consequence, interpretations of the Vestals' position within Roman society that emphasize the severing of agnatic ties through their removal from patria potestas may be misguided. When placed in the broader social and legal context, the (...) ritual “capture” of these priestesses is shown to be a necessary feature of their priestly identity, which only marked the Vestals as extraordinary because of the unique intersection of religious and gender categories that characterized their office. Finally, the implications of these findings for the interpretation of Vestal virginity are discussed. (shrink)

: Professional engineers are bound by their code of ethics to place paramount the health, safety, and welfare of the public. If the "public" includes future people, then the engineer is also morally responsible for not destroying the supporting environment that will make future generations possible. In this essay I suggest that the present engineering codes of ethics are inadequate in addressing the problem of maintaining environmental quality. Engineers can, while staying well within the bounds of the present codes of (...) ethics, destroy or modify the environments that support the global ecosystem and in such manner kill future humans on a grand scale. The moral responsibilities of engineers must therefore include the commitment to provide a high quality and sustainable environment for future generations and this requires that the engineering codes of ethics be modified to encourage engineers to make decisions that promote environmental stability and sustainability. (shrink)

in 1612, lodovico cigoli completed a fresco in the pauline chapel of the basilica of santa maria maggiore in rome depicting apocalypse 12: “a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet.” he showed the crescent moon with spots, as his friend galileo had observed with the newly invented telescope. considerations of the orthodox view of the perfect moon as held by philosophers have led historians to ask why this clearly imperfect moon in a religious painting raised (...) no eyebrows. we argue that when considered in the context of biblical interpretation and the rhetoric of the counter-reformation, the imperfect moon under the woman's feet was entirely consistent with traditional interpretations of apocalypse 12. (shrink)

Fisher, David Religious belief will maintain doctrines even when there is evidence that those doctrines can be shown to be untenable. That's one trouble with religions that contain dogmas. A dogma may require belief in a deity. Since the existence of deity can neither be proven nor disproven, such a dogma is irrefutable and therefore one can maintain such a dogma.

The essays in this collection attempt to frame a broad humanist context for various current and historical scientific topics. Subjects range from an astronomical interpretation of Van Gogh's Starry Night to popular misconceptions about Neanderthal humans to the risk factors that are inherent in the development of any new technology.--Editorial review.

In this article, issues of carnal knowledge, gender and agency as evident in selected texts from the Judeo-Christian tradition and the African context in South Africa are interrogated. Do the ideologies embedded in religious texts endorse unequal power relations between male and female human beings? Of particular interest for the present investigation is the issue of carnal knowledge as it is understood in African contexts and the Hebrew Bible context. Informed by the insights from both the African and the ancient (...) Israelite contexts, the key questions that this essay seeks to engage are: when the notion of carnal knowledge is engaged with, in the context of daughters in both African and biblical contexts, which insights may emerge? Can such insights contribute to the affirmation of daughters as persons with agency?Contribution: Dealing with a scarcely researched upon topic within the circles of South African Old Testament scholarship, that is, the OT text uality and the agency of younger women, through the knowledge produced herein, the HTS will be enabled to make a needed impact in patriarchal African and global contexts. (shrink)

This article proposes a philological and historic analysis of the Talmudic name Ben Pantera. It is suggested that this ancient expression has to be understood as corresponding to a period in which the Jews wished to think of Christianity, choosing the person of Jesus as an emblematic figure of this reality. The expression Ben Pantera expresses mockery and even scorn towards Jesus. It must be placed back in a period in which, on account of the doctrinal controversies between Jews and (...) Christians, the two religions had consummated a Parting of the Ways and acknowledged each other as rivals. Thus, Ben Pantera appears to be the oldest mention of Jesus in the Talmudic literature. Cet article se propose d’étudier les conceptions talmudiques relatives à la croyance chrétienne en la conception et en la naissance virginale de Jésus. L’approche consiste principalement en une étude philologique et historique du cognomen ben Pantera affilié à Jésus dans de nombreux textes talmudiques principalement tannaïtiques. On propose de voir dans le nom ben Pantera une raillerie à l’encontre de la croyance chrétienne en la conception et en la naissance virginale de Jésus. L’accusation d’union illégitime énoncée et véhiculée en monde juif ainsi qu’en monde païen se retrouve dans la littérature talmudique. Le christianisme y est souvent assimilé à la séduction exercée par la prostitution. Ainsi, c’est à un même univers conceptuel qu’il convient de se référer dans l’étude de cette question : la relation dialectique entre l’attirance exercée par le christianisme et celle exercée par la prostituée, dans le processus historique de séparation entre juifs et chrétiens. (shrink)

This paper examines the accounts of limit decision advanced by Hervaeus Natalis and Durand of St. Pourçain in their respective discussions of the sanctification of the Blessed Virgin. Hervaeus and Durand argue, against Aristotle, that the temporal limits of certain changes, including Mary’s sanctification, should be assigned in discrete rather than continuous time. The paper first considers Hervaeus’ discussion of limit decision and argues that, for Hervaeus, a solution of temporal limits in terms of discrete time can coexist with an (...) Aristotelian continuous time solution because Hervaeus takes continuous and discrete time to be two non-intersecting, but correlated time-series. The paper next examines Durand’s account of limit decision and argues that Durand rejects Hervaeus’ correlation assumption as well as Aristotle’s continuous time solution. (shrink)