Title of the Day: Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality

by John MacBeath Watkins

The subtitle is Readings from the Journal of Polymorphous Perversity.  The first essay is The Etiology and Treatment of Childhood, essentially a proposal to include in the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders to include the syndrome of childhood, characterized by:

1. Congenital onset
2. Dwarfism
3. Emotional lability and immaturity
4. Knowledge deficits
5. Legume anorexia

Sources cited for the paper include Seuss, 1983, Temple-Black, 1982, Rogers, 1979 and Tom & Jerry, 1967.  The paper speculates that children have few friends who are not themselves children because of the fact that while they may exhibit intelligence at or above normal, people afflicted by this syndrome lack general knowledge of art, politics or science.

The title paper, Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality, is based on the neo-Fruitloopian school, which finds that vegetarians exhibit "schizoid-like inability to empathize with certan living organisms (usually vegetables)" and "Paranoid and hypervigilant preoccupation with the oral zone..."

Fans of that famed periodical, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, will certainly enjoy more than the title of this book.

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