Word: soft
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...fellow wise men believe that since the Industrial Revolution, when fathers left the home to work in offices and factories, boys have been raised by women and co-opted by a female view of masculinity. Later, the women's movement came along, creating an epidemic of what Bly calls "soft males," men who lacked fierceness, decisiveness and a clear sense of what being a man means. The requiem of the movement is that modern man feels an inexpressible sense of loss, but its battle cry is that boys will be boys, and that's a damn good thing...
With the help of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Dr. James Kemp and Dr. Bradley Thach obtained information about 25 infants who died face down. All of the babies had been sleeping on soft cushions, filled with polystyrene beads, intended for infants. The two colleagues began their investigation with a simple test. Each held one of the suspect pillows to his own face and tried to breathe through it. "If you breathe into it for a minute or two, you're O.K.," says Kemp, an expert in the physiology of infant airways. "But after that you really feel...
...What is the safest position in which to put a newborn down to sleep? Pediatricians in some European countries recommend placing infants on their side, while most American doctors still opt for the abdomen. Kemp's advice to parents: "Don't put your baby in a position where something soft can cover its face...
...wonder we enjoy seeing the human body being shredded, quartered, flayed, filleted and dissolved in vats of acid. It let us down. No wonder we love heroes and mega-villians like RoboCop and the Terminator, in whom all soft, unreliable tissue has been replaced by metal alloys. Or that we like reading (even in articles deeply critical of the violence they manage to summarize) about diabolical new uses for human flesh. It's been, let's face it, a big disappointment. May as well feed it to the rats or to any cannibalistically inclined killer still reckless enough to indulge...
...time for a truce with the soft and wayward flesh. Maybe violent imagery feeds the obsessions of real-life sickos. Or maybe, as some argue, it drains their sickness off into harmless fantasy. But surely it cheapens our sense of ourselves to think that others, even fictional others, could see us as little more than meat. And it's hard to believe all this carnage doesn't dull our response to the global wastage of human flesh in famine, flood...