Word: instincts
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...wrenching. There's something wrong, and your instinct is to jump in there and fix it," says the 48-year-old Maryland native, who has been in Shanghai since 1996. "But you've got to let the system work, got to let the team you have trained solve the problem...
...Instinct," in its human applications, can be a fighting word. Prefaced with "maternal," it's often deployed as a warm-up for the old "barefoot and pregnant" prescription for feminine fulfillment. In fact, if motherhood is a mindlessly instinct-driven occupation, why bother with feet at all? In their zeal to reduce women to reproductive devices, the ancient Chinese eliminated the female foot, at least as a means of locomotion. More recently, in 1981, a male biologist implied in the esteemed journal Science that human females evolved to stand upright long after males did because what did females have...
...celebrator of the alleged maternal instinct, "modern woman"--with her contraception, abortion rights, career and nanny--can only be a pitiful freak. Mid-20th century Freudians urged women to put aside ambition and masochistically (their word) submit to the maternal instinct. In the 19th century, gynecologists warned that any use of the female intellect--from novel reading to higher education--could foreclose motherhood by causing the uterus to, quite literally, wither away. Happiness was a full womb and a vacant mind...
...When I was writing, I was very determined to prove something," she says, "and that's a shame because that's a bad instinct." What did she have to prove? Perhaps that a young, half-Jamaican, half-white female could write a novel that transcends her personal demographics. "A lot of black writing is this love-in, and I definitely don't write love-ins," she says, adding, "What did people think I was going to write? Some kind of searing slave drama or single-girl-in-London tale...
...There just are not too many takers,” says one club member, who asked not to be named, “but it’s understandable. If you were black, you wouldn’t want to stick out like a sore thumb. My instinct is that the Somerset would be delighted to have more, but my guess is that [minorities] would not be too interested.” A Taverner, gave another explanation: “These clubs are slow to reach out, but they’ve gone a long way in that direction...