15 January

As another window into the culture, and again our own cultures are as invisible to us as water is to fish, our ideas about bodily agency and sanctity are resolutely adolescent. For example, I’m sure most would say rape is one of the greatest violations of a person’s body. It is an act of violence and indefensible, absolutely. At the same time we are pathologically casual about infection. But infection is orders of magnitude more violating to your body than rape. Adolescent cultures sexualise most things, so that anything to do with sex is invested with almost hysterical moral urgency.  I thought one of the most profound parts of Germaine Greer’s essay on rape, which few read because of modern (adolescent) identity politics, was her pointing out that by investing something like penetration with so much symbolic meaning, we give a power to rapists that they shouldn’t have. They should be seen as pathetic, puny, ridiculous.  When she was raped, her main emotion was pity for the pathetic dickhead who did it. There was no way she was going to allow his act to be seen as some fundamental violation of her self, again that would grant a power to him that he absolutely didn’t have. This is more about infection for me, in contrast. You don’t need to read very much history to know that infection is far and away the greatest risk to humanity itself. The absolutely blasé, casual way we treat it today, coupled to that adolescent ‘it is what it is’, ‘we have to live with it’ fatalism, is a disgrace to centuries of human suffering and progress. Millions died to teach us lessons about infection that today we have zero respect for.