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Inherent Violations

David Price
3 min readSep 10, 2021

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And rape of the earth.

Bust of Medusa by Daniele Danko Angelozzi, 2020

′′ Women have been in darkness for centuries. They don’t know themselves, or they only know each other superficially. And when women write, they translate this darkness. Men on the other hand don’t translate. They start from a pre-existing theoretical platform, already elaborated. Women who write translate the unknown, inventing a new form of communication, instead of using already coded language “.

— Marguerite Duras

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“If one does not become the eccentric, unique, one-of-a-kind person he or she was meant to be, then a violation of some large purpose of the cosmos has occurred.

— James Hollis

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“Freud famously saw the ‘horror’ of Medusa’s head as a symbol of male castration, but the original trauma in the Medusa story is not castration but rape. Most scholars and historians dismiss Poseidon’s rape of Medusa as an insignificant detail, merely one among so many rapes of mortal, immortal and semi-divine women committed by male gods. However, myths which glorify rape as a strategy ‘to enact the principle of domination by means of sex’ are comparatively recent, becoming widespread in Attica around the 5th century BCE.

It is likely that myths celebrating rape reflect a devastating historical shift in cultural

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David Price
David Price

Written by David Price

I write about creativity, loving, language learning and psycho/spirituality. I’m a longtime painter and reader.

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