His & Hers Paranormality: Part 1

The New Zealand Woman's Weekly has been the recipient of a New Zealand Skeptics' Bent Spoon Award. Does Broadsheet, "New Zealand's feminist magazine", make a more intelligent response to matters of interest to Skeptics?

The magazine is included in a guide to "Alternative centres" prepared by Sun Energy Communications of Auckland. The guide also lists CORSO, the Cooperative Enterprise Loans Trust and the Cistercian monastery in Southern Hawke's Bay, but the names of virtually all the 201 other "centres" are resonant of the New Age. How does Broadsheet fit in this company?

A number of recent articles in Broadsheet may provide the answer.

In "Brave New Age, Right?" (November, 1988) Sue Fitchett looks at some of the personal growth therapies.

The article makes the not too startling point that the emphasis of the Forum on the individual and self-interest "seems at odds with 'sharing', the collective 'we' unconscious the New Age is supposed to promise."

To illustrate the ridiculous degree to which some therapies push the notion of personal responsibility we are, perhaps predictably, given an instance of a woman who at aged three had been sexually abused and who during a rebirthing course "had been told she had chosen that abuse, (and) the new guilt had broken her".

One may have misgivings about some of her other arguments. The article claims "There is some evidence of types of self-improvement courses... being used in South East Asian countries to de-radicalise an activist population by making people happier, more self-content and skilled: their cynicism, their dis-satisfaction will be neutralized." However, the evidence for these dastardly schemes is withheld from us. A paragraph expressing sympathy for the critique of capitalist individualism found in B.F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) ends with the pointed sentence: ""B.F. Skinner's passport was taken off him by the American government." If this is true, B.F. Skinner doesn't see fit to mention it in A Matter of Consequences (1983), the third and final volume of his autobiography. (The volume deals with the post-World War Two years—including the Cold War era.) On the contrary, Skinner seems to have been much-honoured and much-traveled throughout this period, and especially so since the publication of Beyond Freedom and Dignity.

Fitchett's article is written from a politically "correct" if presumptuous viewpoint. She asks: "As more and more feminists are attracted to the self-growth movements and a number are returning to 'normality', that is, back to the nuclear family, back to heterosexuality, is it possible to winnow the chaff from the grain, get what's good from these movements and dump the apolitical, the reactionary?" Not really. The therapies are hopelessly free-market. Moreover they are deficient in one serious way—they "do not at any point address the question of power—who holds it and who will continue to hold it—or suggest this should be or could be changed, nor how. A successful woman has to be a superwoman, a successful man has only to be white."

So her article climaxes with a slogan—one she may have seen spray-canned on a wall in Aro Valley. This is disappointing in an article which, as Fitchett explained in a letter in Broadsheet's August 1989 issue, was the result of several years thinking around the issue.

As a consolation it does contain some gems of libspeak (for example, about the use of the concept of "karma" by the Self-transformation and Rebirthing movements, Fitchett says "This colonising angers a friend of mine who is a woman of colour") and it inspired, in the May 1989 issue of Broadsheet, a rejoiner by a New Age advocate, Cushla Dodson, which was simply ludicrous.

Another article in the May 1989 issue, "Being well and Feeling Better" by Pat Rosier, is subtitled "Alternative health remedies under the microscope". This is misleading. Alternative health remedies are not considered in any detail at all. Instead, a lot of questions are asked. (It even questions if the concept of "karma" is "good"!) We are told that the questions raised during a discussion at Broadsheet included "Who is a charlatan and who isn't? How can you tell?" But not even tentative answers are given. The article says "...there are many genuine people, a lot of them women, working from an honest belief in what they are offering and attempting to make it as widely available as possible". Instead of asking if "an honest belief" is sufficient, Rosier goes on to lambaste the commercial exploitation of this market by what she calls "the profit boys". Perhaps unwittingly, this suggests the consumers are helpless, wimpy wimmen at the mercy of male commercial nous—not the female stereotype the Broadsheet collective normally promotes.

The article concludes: "It is really a matter of applying to alternative medicines the same search for reliable information and critical evaluation that we have learnt to apply to the medical industry". Is this heartening? The words "science" and "scientific" are not used once in the article though they may be implied in "reliable information". "Critical evaluation" may imply objective evaluation.

The approach of the New Zealand Woman' s Weekly to the New Age and the alternative health (and probably any other subject) is in complete contrast to Broadsheet' s. A recent NZWW (25 September 1989) has a two page article about a psychic healer who considers rejection in transplant operations to be caused by a lingering spiritual connection between the transplanted organ and its donor. The same issue's "Beauty" section devotes two pages to "Celulite—is there any such thing?" It quotes two sceptics, but gives more space to Professor S. B. Curri of the Centre for Molecular Biology at the University of Milan, "one of the few doctors to go on record stating that celulite may indeed be different from ordinary fat". The article then proceeds on the basis that, yes, celulite does exist. Another part of the "beauty" section is headed "Can Aroma Therapy Really Help?" The answer would seem to be yes.

One is thankful this sort of thing does not appear in Broadsheet. One is pleased that in Broadsheet New Age claims are being questioned. One is only sorry the debate there is at such a low level.

New Zealand Woman's Weakness

A sequence of eight issues of The New Zealand Woman's Weekly have been surveyed in order to assess systematically the paranormal obsession of that magazine. The issues were the top six copies of the pile of NZWWs in the Ministry of Commerce library plus two missing issues (26 February and 2 April) which were obtained elsewhere. Only feature articles or regular columns were examined—not, for example, letters or household hints.

19 February

(A) P.14-17 "He looked at me with such a look of love" (Rosemary Vincent)

Susan Campbell, the mother of the New Zealand victim of United Airlines "gaping hole in the fuselage" accident, sees portents of her son's death in his poetry and bedroom wall decorations.

(B) P.44—46 "Star Quality—it's all in the hands" (Kate Saunders)

A report on a book "Star Palms" by "top palmist" Sue Armstrong complete with prints and analyses of the palms of Stephanie Beacham, Susannah York, Barry Humphries and the late Roy Kinnear.

(C) P.52-53 "Animal Heroes Spurred by 'Psychic Link' " (Kate Saunders)

A report on a book "Psychic Animals, by Dennis Bardens. An 82-year old woman is saved by a seagull, and other stories.

26 February

(D) P.34-35 "Would you believe a cat that TALKS (in Russian)?" (Henry Gris)

(As it is a Russian cat it would be more unbelievable if it spoke in, say, Japanese.) The moggy, General Donskoy, belongs to a freelance parapsychology lecturer and has never miaowed but in the last half of its life has built up a vocabulary of 100 words. The beast's owner is not a ventriloquist. She is "too serious a scientist to use cheap trickery that, in these circumstances, would also serve no purpose whatsoever", says the journalist. The owner claims the cat "has developed a definite extrasensory perception, I think, by following the psychic seminars I hold in this very room every afternoon. He watches me and my pupils in a way which makes me feel he understands everything, not just the spoken word but also our thoughts. I may be an old fool, but I think the General is psyhic (sic)". The talking cat is the subject of a paper Dr Oleg Dubnov is to present to the Academy of Sciences. Dubnov is "a noted psychologist specialising in animal behaviour patterns". Dr Vladimir Inyushin, head of Moscow's Deaf Mute Institute, is also a believer.

March 5

(E) P.48-49 "An Amazing recovery... Thanks to my dreams'" (Kate Saunders)

Sue Armstrong, a car crash victim dreamed of people healing her. Now she helps others "understand the magic of the message in their own dreams" and has become a professional dream translator—charging $68 for a personal reading and $40 for a postal one. This Sue Armstrong is the same age and lives in the same English county as the Sue Armstrong in (B) above.

March 12 Nothing of Skeptical interest in this issue.

March 19

(F) P.100-101 (Beauty) "Touch and Glow" (Danae Brook &

Jackie Kemp)

A precis of the book Aromatics by Valerie Anne Wormwood. "Each (concentrated essential) oil has different healing qualities and affects (sic) on our mind and body."

March 26

(G) P.34-35 "Amalgam fillings, mercury poisoning... Is there a link?" (Leigh Parker)

The article is mostly devoted to the claims of "a small group of dentists and doctors" that hundreds of New Zealanders are being poisoned by mercury leaking from fillings. Coverage is given to the conventional view that there is no serious risk, without the matter being examined in depth. The concluding paragraphs are also devoted to the claims of the "small group".

(H) P.54-58 "Ghosts? The Royals take them in their stride" (Sarah Gibbings)

Prince Charles once tried to photograph the ghost of Henry VII in Windsor Castle (the "special infra-red film" he just happened to have in his handily-placed camera turned out blank), and other stories of ghost/Royal encounters.

April 2 Nothing of Skeptical interest in this issue.

April 9

(D P.46-47 "How 'normal' are you?" (Tom Crabtree)

Being a little odd means you are "probably in better mental and emotional state than the rest of us". More than half of one page is taken up with a photograph of Shirley Maclaine with a caption saying she believes she was a madam in a previous life and once went hunting flying saucers in Peru. (K) P.52-53 "Inga is a magnet" (Henry Gris)

The man who brought you the talking cat now brings you a Russian girl who attracts objects made of paper (such as encyclopaedias), plastic (such as ballpoints), as well as plain old metal. Gris claims "a score of Soviet scientists including several members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences have examined Inga and come up with complicated theories none of which made sense to Maria Ketskova (Inga's school principal). 'Our scientists are that way', the school principal shrugged. 'They will never admit ignorance'." Professor Vladimir Volchenko, "noted specialist in energetics at the Moscow Technological Institute", is apparently the only Soviet scholar to admit defeat. The article reports that a journalist has found Inga's hand has to be in a vertical position to exercise its magnetic power, but it also reports Inga has difficulty playing the piano because the keys stick to her fingers. It doesn't mention if she has difficulty reading the newspaper.

Paranormality Quotient (PQ) Analysis.

We can discount (A) and (I) because the paranormal is a minor part of the story, and (G) because the extraordinary claim is questioned, although the article appears biased in favour of it. This leaves 17 pages devoted to articles for which one would be justified demanding more evidence; to which must be added 8 pages of horoscopes and 'Planting by the Moon', total 25. These issues of NZWW had a total of 862 pages, giving a PQ of 2.9%.