‘A new motto: What have they done to you, poor child? But now enough of my filthy stories.’   (Sigmund Freud writing to Wilhelm Fliess on 22 December 1897).       Peter Whitehead and Niki de Saint Phalle’s 1973 film Daddy is an angry retort to oppressive regimes, particularly that most destructive one of childhood sexual abuse. But its power lies equally in its ambivalence and, in the end, its profound negativity. While Whitehead and de Saint Phalle resolutely sought to free

Merle Thornton speaking about the protest in 1965. I am sad to hear of the death of Merle Thornton, Queensland feminist activist and academic, who died last year, aged 93. I never met her, but she appears in a book I am currently writing on wine and women. She achieved so many things in her life, but she came to my attention as one of the ‘bar suffragettes’.   In March 1965, Thornton (a philosophy postgraduate at the University of Queensland) and Rosalie ‘Ro’ Bognor (who was

Ishiuchi Miyako, ‘ ひろしま/hiroshima ’, #71, 2007.     ‘The photograph gives off mixed signals. Stop this [the violence], it urges. But it...

In 1929, the Men’s Dress Reform Party was established in response to what its founders regarded as the heinous modern age. One of them, John Carl Flugel (a psychologist from University College London), contended that, since the end of the eighteenth-century men had been progressively ignoring brighter, more elaborate, and more varied forms of masculine ornamentation by ‘making their own tailoring the more austere and ascetic of the arts’. He called this event ‘The Great Mascu

Audre Lorde changed the way generations of feminists throughout the world think about intersectional identities, social justice, and the...

On the 29 June 1864, a military surgeon in the 21st Kentucky Infantry wrote to his wife. ‘It has been almost one continued stream of...

Tragedy struck Edith Cecil-Porch Maturin four times between 1900 and 1917. First, her twelve-year-old son died in 1900, followed five...

Sleep is necessary to life. However, it remains shrouded in mystery, despite the fact that most people spend one third of their lives...

In August 1812, eminent novelist Frances Burney described with alarming precision her mounting sense of terror as she prepared to undergo...

Pain is a phantom, a spectre that haunts clinical encounters. Physical suffering is the chief symptom impelling people to seek medical...

Cicero (106-43 B.C.): ‘Nature has given us eyes to declare our internal emotions’. Paulo Coelho (1947-): ‘The eyes are the mirror of the...

Punch divided the stomach into four ‘Faculties’. It called the first the ‘Sustaining Faculty’, which dealt with foods that were...

In June 2015, Rachel Dolezal was exposed for having lied about being of African American heritage. Dolezal was head of her local branch...

The foot. Where will feet take us today? In the middle of a pandemic [I first wrote this blog during lock-down!], most of us will be...

This blog comes with a warning: it is not for those delicate of hearing or squeamish of stomach because today I am writing about two sex...

On 21 June 1986, nine American women removed their shirts in a park in Rochester, New York. They were protesting against a law which...

In September 1971, Ebony magazine published an article that broke a major taboo: a survivor of breast cancer wrote candidly about her...

Between 25 and 40 million people worldwide have died as a result of opportunistic infections arising from AIDS or Acquired...

What does tuberculosis look like? If we are thinking about the early-nineteenth century, we might imagine an emaciated, white, male...

In April 1973, cinemas throughout America began screening a tearjerking love story, the plot of which revolved around sickle cell...