The issue which faced the jury was this: was Sutcliffe a clever criminal, aware of what he was doing and determined to avoid capture?. . In a sense, it was the wrong question. The battle that was fought out in court - the mad/bad dichotomy - both substitutes for and obscures the real dilemma raised by the Yorkshire Ripper case: is Sutcliffe a one-off, su generis as I have heard one psychiatrist describe him, someone who stands outside our culture and has no relation to it? Those who assert that Sutcliffe is mad are in essence saying yes to this question; madness is a closed category, one over which we have no control and for which we bear no responsibility. The deranged stand apart from us; we cannot be blamed for their insanity. Thus the urge to characterize Sutcliffe as mad has powerful emotional origins; it has as much to do with how we see ourselves and the society in which we live.. It is a distancing mechanism, a way of establishing a comforting gulf between ourselves and a particularly unacceptable criminal. Joan Smith
I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.
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Martha Gellhorn
I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men."" Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes,...
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Jane Austen
There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
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Audre Lorde
The word ‘sin’ is derived from the Indo-European root ‘es-, ’ meaning ‘to be.’ When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a [person] trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, ‘to be’ in the fullest sense is ‘to...
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Mary Daly
Men are from Earth, women are from Earth. Deal with it.
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George Carlin
More Quotes By Joan Smith
The issue which faced the jury was this: was Sutcliffe a clever criminal, aware of what he was doing and determined to avoid capture?. . In a sense, it was the wrong question. The battle that was fought out in court - the mad/bad dichotomy...
One of the chief paradoxes of our culture [is] that the welfare of its children, its _future_, is placed almost exclusively in the hands of people of low status, a class it holds in contempt.
Roache's statement after his acquittal was dignified but his supporters were angry. They demanded to know why the case was ever brought, claiming that the actor was a victim of the "hysteria" created by revelations about Jimmy Savile. It's a curious conclusion to draw from...
Talk of "witch-hunts" conceals an inconvenient fact: men charged with rape stand a better chance of walking free than other defendants. The conviction rate in rape trials — 63 per cent in 2012/13 — is quite a lot lower. Prosecutors are taking a bigger risk...
