Envy, propelled by fear, can be even more toxic than anger, because it involves the thought that other people enjoy the good things of life which the envier can't hope to attain through hard work and emulation.
Martha NussbaumRead
Disgust for the female body is always tinged with anxiety, since the body symbolizes mortality.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that disdain for women's bodies is rooted in a deeper fear of mortality and the human condition.
Martha Nussbaum's quote highlights the complex relationship society has with the female body, indicating that disgust or negative feelings towards it often stem from an underlying anxiety about death and the transient nature of life. The female body, as a symbol of life and reproduction, paradoxically evokes discomfort because it reminds individuals of their mortality and the inevitability of aging and loss.
In practice
In a discussion about body positivity and societal standards during a women's rights seminar.
Envy, propelled by fear, can be even more toxic than anger, because it involves the thought that other people enjoy the good things of life which the envier can't hope to attain through hard work and emulation.
This is true across every single society; we project grossness onto a racial or gender subgroup or caste. A big part of social subordination and discrimination is to ascribe hyper-animality to other groups and use that as an excuse for subordinating them further.
Often, we feel helpless in lots of situations in our lives. The way anger gets a grip on us is it seems to be a way to extricate ourselves from helplessness.
Courses in the humanities, in particular, often seem impractical, but they are vital, because they stretch your imagination and challenge your mind to become more responsive, more critical, bigger.
I find so often, you know, just on a very mundane level; you've got a meeting and your child's acting in a school play. You can't do both things. And it's not simply that you can't do both, but whatever you do, you're going to be neglecting something that's really important.
Look at the great tradition of Western political philosophy. Those people were all immersed in revolutionary movements. Most weren't career academics - often, they were too radical to be accepted in the academy. Rousseau's books were banned. Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill couldn't hold academic positions because they were atheists.
There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.
What has been cut apart cannot be glued back together. Abandon all hope of totality, future as well as past, you who enter the world of fluid modernity.
If we were to wake up some morning and find that everyone was the same race, creed and color, we would find some other causes for prejudice by noon.
Let us remember that we can do these things not just because of wealth or power, but because of who we are: one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.
We want to know not how we should pray if we were perfect but how we should pray being as we now are ... It is no use to ask God with factitious earnestness for A when our whole mind is in reality filled with the desire for B. We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.
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