Make love, not war

The article Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence ran in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1975. Dig the first sentence:

A neuropsychologist contends that the greatest threat to world peace comes from those nations which have the most depriving environments for their children and which are most repressive of sexual affection and female sexuality.

I suspect I’ve hooked a lot of my readers right there, but let me add that author James W. Prescott marshalls an astonishing array of anthropolgical studies and other data to say that cuddling with small children and openness about adult sexuality reduce societal violence. Though Prescott slips into a polemical tone in places, this long article is a very compelling read.

Updates

The Life of the Skin-Hungry: Can You Go Crazy from a Lack Of Touch?

Kupers is allowed to shake prisoners’ hands when examining them in the state of Mississippi, where he often testifies. “When I touch a prisoner at the Mississippi isolation unit, they tell me, ‘You’re the first person I’ve touched except for officers putting handcuffs on me. Aside from that, nobody has touched me in all the years I've been in solitary confinement.’”

He describes the psychiatric literature showing that solitary confinement causes lasting mental health problems as “voluminous.” As the mental health issues that plague prisoners in solitary confinement are so vast, it’s difficult to isolate an absence of touch as a major contributing factor, but neuroscientist Huda Akil identifies a lack of touch — alongside other factors — as potential factors that might lead the brain to rewire itself and cause psychological problems. The testimony of prisoners such Peter Collins and Wikileaks whistleblower Chelsea Manning highlights how an absence of touch exacerbates the experience of solitary confinement: Writing in the Guardian, Chelsea Manning describes it as “‘no-touch’ torture.”

Special Journey to Our Bottom Line: On hazing and counterinsurgency

About a lot of things.

We had staggered through hell, and came out to look at the world with the jaded, contemptuous eyes of the combat veteran. Some people might think it’s hyperbolic to describe a frat initiation as a hell akin to combat. Those people don’t know much about frat initiations.

A Surplus of Men, A Deficit of Peace: Security and Sex Ratios in Asia’s Largest State

If violence against women within a society bears any relationship to violence within and between societies, then it should be possible to see that relationship at work in societies where violence against women is exaggerated — that is, where offspring sex selection is prevalent. Specifically, internal instability is heightened in nations displaying exaggerated gender inequality, leading to altered security calculus for the state. Possibilities of meaningful democracy and peaceful foreign policy are diminished as a result.