Citadels of Pride argues for specific legal and cultural reforms to make sexual violence less common
In the Purgatorio, Virgil leads Dante upwards. A series of terraces correspond to the seven deadly sins. At each, souls work on understanding their ethical flaws. First is the terrace of pride. There, Dante finds people bent into weird semicircles. Martha Nussbaum interprets this image in her new book,. The proud, she writes, “cannot look outward at the world” to see others: “Since their faces don’t look out, but only inward at themselves, they can neither see nor be seen.
But more deeply, the book explores a core part of the psychology of sexual abusers: the emotion of pride. Pride, as Nussbaum defines it, is “the vice that consists of thinking that you are above others and that other people are not fully real.” Greed and envy are “relatives” of pride in the family of emotions. “Human decency” is pride’s opposite.
To the philosopher’s credit, she does mention the laws against gender identity discrimination. She is clearly anti-transphobic. But it would have been valuable to hear Nussbaum’s take here in a more developed way.Nonetheless, it is easy to extrapolate from what Nussbaum writes: “Because pride plays a pernicious role in racism and class inequality, as well as sex discrimination, it offers us a way of understanding how one form of abuse is related to others.
In key ways, Citadels of Pride is a 21st-century Purgatorio. The book’s heart is an analysis of prominent sexual abuse cases in the “citadels” of music, sport and law. As Nussbaum evokes them, these scenes are not so dissimilar from the Dantean terraces, stalked by abusers warped by delusions of superiority.
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