Word: taboos
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...long ago, any career-minded researcher would have hesitated to ask such questions. During the feminist revolution of the 1970s, talk of inborn differences in the behavior of men and women was distinctly unfashionable, even taboo. Men dominated fields like architecture and engineering, it was argued, because of social, not hormonal, pressures. Women did the vast majority of society's child rearing because few other options were available to them. Once sexism was abolished, so the argument ran, the world would become a perfectly equitable, androgynous place, aside from a few anatomical details...
...Wagner cannot be heard in Israel; the Symphony of Rishon Lezion, a Tel Aviv suburb, violated the taboo two years ago, to little or no outcry. And it is not as if the Nazis didn't turn the works of other composers, such as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Liszt's Les Preludes, into political totems as well. Yet Wagner's unique resonance continues to sound, louder and more forcefully than that of the others...
What I'm really trying to deal with is taboos. I think most writers try to approach taboos in their writing, but it's difficult because whether you're dealing with sex, death or politics, most taboos have been swept away now. So I'm still trying to come up with taboos that writers find difficult to approach, whether it's rediscovering [in The Poet's Bible] that there were writers of the Bible, which is a major taboo--the taboo that there really were men and women who wrote that...[it's the] same thing as trying to reclaim...
...think there's a taboo against really confronting those things because it forces a writer to realize that they don't have an easy answer or solution for it--it can only be part of a process. I think the best essays in the movie book show that--they're not incomplete. To me, some of them are like the beginnings of first chapters of books these authors might write...
...that Hudson's death sparked an intense national debate about AIDS would be a vast overstatement, if not a complete myth. In much of America, AIDS remained a taboo topic, and whatever vastly increased awareness the Hudson announcement had generated never translated into vastly increased understanding, despite vastly increased funding. Hudson himself never said a public word about the disease. And he wasn't the only one keeping mum. One actor friend of Hudson's refused to utter the word "AIDS" in public until 1987, seven years after the epidemic hit the United States. That person was named Ronald Reagan...