Bram Dijkstra

There is a certain type of historian who loves to demonize the past. Dijkstra is one of them. He also suffers from the delusion that right now, this moment in history, is the apogee of all human endeavor and every other era suffers by comparison. I think these people represent a very specific type of narcissist who seem to believe that their personal presence improves the world to the point of perfection never before achieved in any other era.

This book is full of the type of academic bullshit produced by a human being whose relative worth is equal to nipples on a boar hog; trying to convince useful people that the writer's existence is justified. Well, I suppose that's true; shitty books full of misinterpreted social history won't write themselves.

My advice is to avoid the text, the illustrations alone are worthy of a five star review; unfortunately it was the information that dragged the overall rating down to one star. Hey Bram, make yourself useful and go rotate my tires, will ya?… (más)

At the turn of the century, an unprecedented attack on women erupted in virtually every aspect of culture: literary, artistic, scientific, and philosophic. Throughout Europe and America, artists and intellectuals banded together to portray women as static and unindividuated beings who functioned solely in a sexual and reproductive capacity, thus formulating many of the anti-feminine platitudes that today still constrain women's potential. Bram Dijkstra's Idols of Perversity explores the nature and development of turn-of-the-century misogyny in the works of hundreds of writers, artists, and scientists, including Zola, Strindberg, Wedekind, Henry James, Rossetti, Renoir, Moreau, Klimt, Darwin, and Spencer. Dijkstra demonstrates that the most prejudicial aspects of Evolutionary Theory helped to justify this wave of anti-feminine sentiment. The theory claimed that the female of the species could not participate in the great evolutionary process that would guide the intellectual male to his ultimate, predestined role as a disembodied spiritual essence. Darwinists argued that women hindered this process by their willingness to lure men back to a sham paradise of erotic materialism. To protect the male's continued evolution, artists and intellectuals produced a flood of pseudo-scientific tracts, novels, and paintings which warned the world's males of the evils lying beneath the surface elegance of woman's tempting skin. Reproducing hundreds of pictures from the period and including in-depth discussions of such key works as Dracula and Venus in Furs, this fascinating book not only exposes the crucial links between misogyny then and now, but also connects it to the racism and anti-semitism that led to catastrophic genocidal delusions in the first half of the twentieth century. Crossing the conventional boundaries of art history, sociology, the history of scientific theory, and literary analysis, Dijkstra unveils a startling view of a grim and largely one-sided war on women still being fought today.… (más)