New books--and those sick Victorians
January 31, 2003 (10:37 PM) ( link )

After a fascinating dinner conversation, I've added several new books to the Books I Plan to Read page, including Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring, Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Nick Hornby's About a Boy, Martha Beck's Expecting Adam, and some others.

I just started reading Michael Crichton's The Great Train Robbery, which, I'm happy to note, is much better than The Andromeda Strain. Its most interesting bits by far are the little details about Victorian England that Crichton throws in. So far the sickest detail is the belief of Victorian English gentlemen that venereal disease, supposedly brought on by "over-activity," could be cured by having sex with a virgin. Combine this with the fact that the age of consent in Victorian England was something like 12 or 13 years old, and what you basically have are a lot of upper-class English men raping children and thus infecting them with whatever disease (besides moral degeneracy) they're afflicted with.

If you don't happen to have a copy of the book, some of the relevant facts can be found here.

This disturbing bit of history has some interesting parallels with the urban myth, widely reported, that in South Africa men are raping children in the mistaken belief that sex with a virgin will cure AIDS. A thorough investigation of this myth, with a fair exploration of its origins, can be found here.

As for the English--well, let's just that I don't think colonialism is the only terrible thing that they did.