Vaginas and war (two more book reviews)
Sep. 21st, 2012 10:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aslant31. Wild Feminine, Tami Lynn Kent
This book is all about taking care of your lady parts in slightly unexpected ways! Holistic pelvic self-care, as practiced by Kent, is a pretty wide-ranging set of things you can do to take care of yourself, including but not limited to general awareness practices, guided meditations, sending ovarian energies, exploring gender identity, interacting with histories of trauma, and practicing vaginal self-massage. It is not particularly birth-focused, though her own experience is influenced by her birthing experiences, so there's that. I was interested in this for a variety of reasons, not least of which is, what the hell is going on with my scar tissue and hey, will it explode if I give birth again? I realized some time ago that I thought of my scar (from repairing a messy, deep 2nd degree tear) as a kind of locus of chaos, panic, distrust. But just like any other scar, it can benefit from massage and movement. Once I got through the super hippie woo-woo stuff, Kent's general message is that your vaginal muscles and tissues deserve (nonsexual) love just as much as any other part of the body. I'm simplifying this greatly, but even if you just pick this up for the pelvic mapping exercise, it's worth it. Also, Kent is a practitioner here in Portland, and has trained several people in pelvic care, so you can also have this done by actual gifted physical therapists. This is not some yoni cult stuff, it is holistic care based on real doctor stuff. But it also combines some pretty tuned-in energetic intuitive work as well, this is not just someone rubbing your bits and sending you on your way, since as a holistic art it is necessarily about everything. Yay vaginas!
32. Armies of Heaven: the first crusade and the quest for apocalypse, Jay Rubenstein
Rubenstein is a talented author, and this is a lot of confusing history to digest, but this book never came together as the fascinating story I wanted it to be. It was gory, bizarre, and funny by turns, while being a completely serious academic work, and it's definitely more readable than your average history tome, but I never turned to it with a "yay I can't wait to read more" feeling. Rubenstein's conceit is to stop ignoring all the millenarian/apocalyptic rhetoric around the first crusade, common for many historians -- Rubenstein talks about these crazy Christians didn't just think they were fighting for god, they genuinely believed that their actions were going to bring Jesus back to earth, and pitched their actions, words, histories, and choices of leaders based on medieval ideas of how the apocalypse was going to happen, from Biblical sources and popular interpretations. The "saracens" were literally the armies of Satan, to them, and furthermore they believed that they were becoming god's chosen people (ref. Deuteronomy, usually referring to the Jews) in this fight. They were also granted a confusing indulgence, prior to leaving, which said not that they could gain heaven instantly, but that after the crusade, if they were found to have participated with the correct motivations, they could be granted an indulgence. Others have argued that this is what led to the 12th century "rise of the individual," where suddenly the idea of what we would call psychological motivations became a part of the western dialogue; they had to try to understand why people committed horrible acts of war. Because they were not actually committing acts of war that were always familiar within western civ. Acts of war included mass rape, massacre of innocents (instead of taking prisoners), torture, cannibalism (definitely new), and things like catapulting enemies' heads over city walls, and many of these things were appropriated on the road from their enemies, or in the case of cannibalism, a necessity in periods of starvation that gradually became a tactic of deliberate intimidation for cities under siege. The descriptions of the crusading armies' mass starvation and death from plagues, constant finding of "miraculous" relics in conquered cities, various visions and dreams guiding them from one course of action to the next, these were the book's strength. You get a good sense of what the common peoples' experience was, too, because the first crusade was not just nobles on horses (especially as those were eaten for food frequently), it was a massive group of psychotic, religious, uneducated, barefoot peasants. And despite being outnumbered and not particularly cohesive as an army or smart or driven (they could have gotten to Jerusalem in maybe two years, instead of four, if they hadn't gotten greedy and/or bored along the way), they actually did conquer Jerusalem. Blood ran shin-deep, corpses were piled everywhere, all the biblical images like that, they did happen. To the severe detriment of western civilization, it has continued to inform Christian-Muslim (and Christian-Jewish) dialogues ever since. As a final note, although I don't enthusiastically recommend this to everyone, unless the subject matter is fascinating to you, I do recommend it as a bedside book, because I still enjoyed it even if I only read a half-chapter at a time, and never more than a few chapters together, because the progression is still interesting even if I didn't remember everyone's names exactly. (And PS, wow there are some weird parallels with our modern wars here, WMDs as manufactured holy relic, anyone?)
This book is all about taking care of your lady parts in slightly unexpected ways! Holistic pelvic self-care, as practiced by Kent, is a pretty wide-ranging set of things you can do to take care of yourself, including but not limited to general awareness practices, guided meditations, sending ovarian energies, exploring gender identity, interacting with histories of trauma, and practicing vaginal self-massage. It is not particularly birth-focused, though her own experience is influenced by her birthing experiences, so there's that. I was interested in this for a variety of reasons, not least of which is, what the hell is going on with my scar tissue and hey, will it explode if I give birth again? I realized some time ago that I thought of my scar (from repairing a messy, deep 2nd degree tear) as a kind of locus of chaos, panic, distrust. But just like any other scar, it can benefit from massage and movement. Once I got through the super hippie woo-woo stuff, Kent's general message is that your vaginal muscles and tissues deserve (nonsexual) love just as much as any other part of the body. I'm simplifying this greatly, but even if you just pick this up for the pelvic mapping exercise, it's worth it. Also, Kent is a practitioner here in Portland, and has trained several people in pelvic care, so you can also have this done by actual gifted physical therapists. This is not some yoni cult stuff, it is holistic care based on real doctor stuff. But it also combines some pretty tuned-in energetic intuitive work as well, this is not just someone rubbing your bits and sending you on your way, since as a holistic art it is necessarily about everything. Yay vaginas!
32. Armies of Heaven: the first crusade and the quest for apocalypse, Jay Rubenstein
Rubenstein is a talented author, and this is a lot of confusing history to digest, but this book never came together as the fascinating story I wanted it to be. It was gory, bizarre, and funny by turns, while being a completely serious academic work, and it's definitely more readable than your average history tome, but I never turned to it with a "yay I can't wait to read more" feeling. Rubenstein's conceit is to stop ignoring all the millenarian/apocalyptic rhetoric around the first crusade, common for many historians -- Rubenstein talks about these crazy Christians didn't just think they were fighting for god, they genuinely believed that their actions were going to bring Jesus back to earth, and pitched their actions, words, histories, and choices of leaders based on medieval ideas of how the apocalypse was going to happen, from Biblical sources and popular interpretations. The "saracens" were literally the armies of Satan, to them, and furthermore they believed that they were becoming god's chosen people (ref. Deuteronomy, usually referring to the Jews) in this fight. They were also granted a confusing indulgence, prior to leaving, which said not that they could gain heaven instantly, but that after the crusade, if they were found to have participated with the correct motivations, they could be granted an indulgence. Others have argued that this is what led to the 12th century "rise of the individual," where suddenly the idea of what we would call psychological motivations became a part of the western dialogue; they had to try to understand why people committed horrible acts of war. Because they were not actually committing acts of war that were always familiar within western civ. Acts of war included mass rape, massacre of innocents (instead of taking prisoners), torture, cannibalism (definitely new), and things like catapulting enemies' heads over city walls, and many of these things were appropriated on the road from their enemies, or in the case of cannibalism, a necessity in periods of starvation that gradually became a tactic of deliberate intimidation for cities under siege. The descriptions of the crusading armies' mass starvation and death from plagues, constant finding of "miraculous" relics in conquered cities, various visions and dreams guiding them from one course of action to the next, these were the book's strength. You get a good sense of what the common peoples' experience was, too, because the first crusade was not just nobles on horses (especially as those were eaten for food frequently), it was a massive group of psychotic, religious, uneducated, barefoot peasants. And despite being outnumbered and not particularly cohesive as an army or smart or driven (they could have gotten to Jerusalem in maybe two years, instead of four, if they hadn't gotten greedy and/or bored along the way), they actually did conquer Jerusalem. Blood ran shin-deep, corpses were piled everywhere, all the biblical images like that, they did happen. To the severe detriment of western civilization, it has continued to inform Christian-Muslim (and Christian-Jewish) dialogues ever since. As a final note, although I don't enthusiastically recommend this to everyone, unless the subject matter is fascinating to you, I do recommend it as a bedside book, because I still enjoyed it even if I only read a half-chapter at a time, and never more than a few chapters together, because the progression is still interesting even if I didn't remember everyone's names exactly. (And PS, wow there are some weird parallels with our modern wars here, WMDs as manufactured holy relic, anyone?)
