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Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 24, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I feel as if I heard more about co-dependency in the 90s or early 2000s, and most always in pop psych ways, again most always in the context of a romantic relationship. I.e. she needs to be needed, is happiest when tending to the bruises of a damaged man, even when he's violent, moody, not particularly kind, etc.

I read a few of Rand's books in the early 90s, having been given a few by friends. Apart from its fetishizing of grand-level accomplishment, The Fountainhead had some, to me, weirdly rapey scenes in it, and not in a "reader should see this scene as bad" way, more of a "height of eroticism" way. Ten years later Ian Fleming would, in Casino Royale, have Bond musing on "the sweet tang of rape" so maybe it was just a really different era. The collection of objectivist essays The Virtue of Selfishness, co edited by her lover Nathaniel Branden (whom Rand knew along with Branden's wife) seemed to lay out the tenets of objectivism more explicitly than Rand's novels. Fervently anti-altruism and--arguably at the time just as importantly--anti-christianity.

I don't know exactly why you're lumping putting the two together.