On her book Aging by the Book: The Emergence of Midlife in Victorian Britain
Cover Interview of January 13, 2010
Editor’s note
Originally, this interview ran on the Rorotoko cover page under the headline
“We inherited our obsession with being ‘over the hill’ from the nineteenth century.”
We highlighted two quotes.
On the first page:
“The 1871 census defines middle age as thirty to fifty for both sexes, but novels demonstrate a clear gender difference: fictional women begin middle age at thirty while men remain ‘young’ a decade longer.”
On the second:
“Older women had long been devalued in Britain, but Victorians added a new twist. With the rise of gynecology, female sexuality was considered delicate and pathological in comparison to the male norm.”
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
Editor’s note
Originally, this interview ran on the Rorotoko cover page under the headline
“We inherited our obsession with being ‘over the hill’ from the nineteenth century.”
We highlighted two quotes.
On the first page:
“The 1871 census defines middle age as thirty to fifty for both sexes, but novels demonstrate a clear gender difference: fictional women begin middle age at thirty while men remain ‘young’ a decade longer.”
On the second:
“Older women had long been devalued in Britain, but Victorians added a new twist. With the rise of gynecology, female sexuality was considered delicate and pathological in comparison to the male norm.”