Lady Julia’s Entranced Realm

It sounds like a TV movie of the week.   Four women – an adulterer’s wife, his two girlfriends, and one of their friends – meet and over the course of months discuss a plot to teach Romeo (Davis) a lesson.   Eventually one of the ladies lures him to a motel where the four women tie him up, blindfold him, and verbally ridicule him.  Then.. one of the ladies (Ziemann) is struck with the bright idea of gluing his penis to his stomach with nail glue (similar to Super-glue).

All four were originally charged with felony false-imprisonment but their charges were reduced to disorderly conduct as a result of plea bargains.  Ziemann was also convicted of battery.  Each received one year probation and community service.

Fair?  Did the fella have it coming?  Too lenient?

If the situation were reversed and the victim had been a female who was blindfolded, tied up, ridiculed, and well -I’m sure you follow.  Would your answer remain the same?

Would the following information change your mind?

“Ziemann said after court that she behaved badly and the sentence was fair. She said she didn’t participate in the attack because Davis was cheating, but rather because her young daughter’s phone number was found in his telephone. Davis was acquitted this year of sexually assaulting a child after a mistrial in 2008.” – Postcrescent.com

According to an article on Cnews.Canoe.ca:

Texas Tech University’s study, which will be published in March in the Social Science Journal, says that people with two or more piercings or tattoos are more prone to deviant behaviour, which includes excess drinking, smoking pot, being promiscuous and being willing to cheat.

To draw such conclusions, researchers must have studied a diverse group of people.

Researchers asked 1,753 students from four American colleges — two state-supported public schools and two highly selective religious institutions — and found 37% reported at least one piercing and 14% were tattooed.

So instead of studying all ages, they focused on college kids.  Are adults 25 and older conspicuously free of piercings and tattoos?

What they found was “sharp differences in the levels of deviant behaviour among those with just one tattoo versus those with four or more, and among those with just one to three piercings versus those with seven or more,” reports sociologist Jerome Koch, the paper’s lead author.

“Results indicate that respondents with four or more tattoos, seven or more body piercings, or piercings located in their nipples or genitals were substantially and significantly more likely to report regular marijuana use, occasional use of other drugs, and a history of being arrested for a crime.”

Perhaps the willingness to “report” these behaviors is the most important aspect to consider when interpreting these “scientific” findings?  Is it possible college students in more conservative areas of the country*, especially those attending religious universities, are less likely to admit doing anything “deviant”?  I drank quite a lot in my early 20s, but I wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone other than the people I drank with.   At that age I was more concerned with what people think than I am now :)

Also, am I alone in my intense dislike for their use of the word “deviant”?  I am aware of the technical meaning, but most people use that word as a way to make others sound terrible instead of different.   Isn’t the occurrence of these acts in college age kids more about curiosity coupled with new-found freedom to explore?

What about you?  Do you think there is any real link to tattoos and deviance in people of any age?

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Thanks to John, Manet, and Bill for sharing their observations about this study.  It’s great to be surrounded by super smart people :)

*Another article I read indicated these colleges were in the South and the Midwest

According to CBC News,  a parent’s complaint regarding “sexually explicit content” recently led to the removal of  “Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary” from schoolrooms teaching fourth and fifth grade children.*  The offensive content?

Oral sex – “oral stimulation of the genitals”

After review by a panel comprised of parents, teachers, and school administrators, the dictionaries have been returned to the classroom and students may access them only if their parents have signed a permission slip.

Does anyone else remember looking up the meaning of “dirty words” when you heard them?  I remember giggling with my friends during library time when we tried to find as many as possible in the time we were allotted (or before the teacher caught us).  I understand the urge to protect children, but by the time a child is in public school a few years, they’ve heard most “dirty words” countless times.  Because of this, wouldn’t it be prudent to allow children to learn the correct meaning of terms they are already hearing (and probably using), should they wish to know?

In other book banning news, FOX News reports this week a middle school in Virginia removed, “The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition” by Anne Frank, after a complaint by a parent that the book contains “sexual references”.  The county’s Director of Instruction “didn’t want to make a big deal” out of the situation so he acted on the complaint by removing the book and replacing it with the originally published version, one censored by Anne’s father to remove the sexual content (among other things).

“The Diary of a Young Girl” has long been a reading assignment for many seventh or eighth grade students.**  It’s written by a 13-15 year old girl who endured the horrors of hiding for two years from the Nazis in a confined attic and who later died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

I read the censored version of Anne’s diary when I was in school (although I didn’t know at the time it was censored).  It was powerful, it was frightening, it was real.  It’s true I didn’t suffer from the removal of Anne Frank’s innocent description of her vagina.  (She describes it without being crass and remarks she doesn’t see how a man fits in that little hole and she certainly doesn’t understand how a baby comes out.)   That said, I do not believe I would have been harmed by it either.  In fact, I know I wouldn’t have.

The same year I read “The Diary of a Young Girl”, we (most of the girls in my class) were passing around copies of “smut” books some had either bought or swiped from their mothers, books like “Sweet Savage Love” by Rosemary Rogers.  I assure you nothing an innocent girl could have written in her journal would have compared to the things described in books that fell open to all the naughty bits because the books had been opened to those pages so many times.

I will only add that I was a sheltered child.  Seriously sheltered.  My parental sex education consisted of  a set of books from Time Life that addressed the biology of sex and sexual maturation, and one sentence from my father.   “Yeah sex is good or everyone wouldn’t be doing it, but if you do it before you get married I’ll kill you.”   Sheltering didn’t help me, it only led me to alternative sources to satisfy my curiosity.

I understand and respect the opinions of people who are concerned about protecting their children, but quite often I think they must not remember what they or their friends were like when they are children.  Wouldn’t talking to your children be a much better way to address things we must all eventually learn?

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* Approximately ages 10-11

** Approximately ages 12-14