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POPS"Mad, Bad and Sad"
If male doctors conspired to define madness, responding to behaviors that flouted the social conventions of their culture, female patients, in the attempt to understand themselves and their context, and maybe even to create or bolster identity, colluded with those same doctors to satisfy the changing definitions of madness. “Often enough,” Appignanesi notes, “extreme expressions of the culture’s malaise, symptoms and disorders mirrored the time’s order.” While “Mad, Bad and Sad” echoes and enlarges upon Elaine Showalter’s book “The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980,” Showalter’s perspective is more exclusively feminist, arguing that psychiatry as practiced on women is a history of their subjugation and control by men. But as Appignanesi makes clear, women have had no little role in creating and fulfilling the definitions of their madness.<< "Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present" by Lisa Appignanesi.
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POPSThe story of Sartre and de Beauvoir as never told before If this couple expected their arrangement would spare them the trials and heartache of a conventional marriage, they were wrong.Their multiple affairs went on until World War II when Sartre was called up and their sex games had to be conducted through letters.Left behind in Paris, Simone continued to seduce both men and women, writing titillating descriptions of her activities to Sartre behind the Maginot Line, which reveal her heartlessness and the vulnerability of her conquests.Tragically, the lives of these girls, who were pathologically jealous of each other over their teacher's attentions, were permanently blighted.One took to self-harming, another committed suicide. Most remained pathetically unfulfilled and dependent on the childless Simone, who perversely referred to them as her 'family'. ... Sartre had always said the best way to learn about a country was to sleep with its women.
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POPSAnaïs Nin From being a cult figure of the early feminist movement, Anais later rose to international prominence with her writing. She is best known for her diaries but also produced a number of novels and a prose poem in surrealistic style as well as wonderful erotic short stories, published posthumously. Characterized by the use of powerful and, at times, disquieting imagery, her work reveals great sensitivity and perception. In 1973 she received an honorary doctorate from Philadelphia College of Art. She was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1974.<<
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