Procrustean bed

Related to Procrustean bed: Procrustes, Prokrustes

Procrustean bed

A situation or place that someone is forced into, often violently. In Greek mythology, the giant Procrustes would capture people and then stretch or cut off their limbs to make them fit into his bed. This new law creates a Procrustean bed designed to get those people deemed undesirable by the local government to move out of the neighborhood.
See also: bed, Procrustean
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

a Procrustean bed

something designed to produce conformity by unnatural or violent means.
In Greek mythology, Procrustes was a robber who tied his victims to a bed, either stretching or cutting off their legs in order to to make them fit it.
1998 Spectator Intellectuals often employ their intellects for foolish purposes, forcing facts onto a Procrustean bed of theory.
See also: bed, Procrustean
Farlex Partner Idioms Dictionary
See also:
  • a Procrustean bed
  • Procrustean
  • Procrustean solution
  • crash into
  • crash into (someone or something)
  • fleece
  • go in search of the golden fleece
  • Damocles' sword hangs over (one's) head
  • a/the sword of Damocles hangs over (one)
  • a/the sword of Damocles hangs over (one's) head
References in periodicals archive
Comment on "(Re) Making the Procrustean Bed? Standardization and Customization as Competing Logics in Healthcare." Int J Health Policy Manag.
While offering the theory of intermediality as an alternative to describing film sound in terms of diegetic relationships (what she calls "the Procrustean bed of diegesis," p.
The inattention to gay violence happens because gay violence cannot be fitted into DeKeseredy's Procrustean bed of heterosexual ("patriarchal") male violence.
"The Procrustean Bed of Film Adaptation." Mythlore 11.3 (#41) (1985): 3.
It was also a clear departure from the conventional foreign-policy straightjacket devised by Kemal Ataturk, which had for decades forced Turkish diplomacy into the Procrustean bed of 1920s-style integral nationalism.
Given the empirical detail and the plausible narrative that Dwyer gives us, his pressing of the maneuvering by the Mexican government and its diplomatic representatives into the procrustean bed of "everyday resistance" and the "weapons of the weak" seems a bit gratuitous, since it does little work in adding to the reader's understanding of the history.
At their most dogged, or programmatically theoretical, they bludgeon the reader so that by a certain point he can predict what they will have to say when they lay the matters of their analysis reductively upon a Procrustean bed. Other books work deftly and with nuance, refining arguments and looking more at the trees than the forest.
Yet, a "one size fits all" approach is the Procrustean bed that RiskMetrics is seeking to impose with its new approach.
Still, their peripatetic day remains highly amusing, for old Dad is quite a character, while his son, dour and melancholic by comparison, rouses himself by and by from his procrustean bed of self-tormenting freedom to realize that he loves the old man, despite the differences time and temperament have wrought on their mutual regard.
The problem is when society (or elements thereof) try and force all media to conform to the Procrustean bed of whatever happens to be popular in media.
Although he is aware that strict definitions, especially if not deeply contextually located, can get caught in a procrustean bed, Olson's definition of "science" may have already short-sheeted the project.
But, he claims, "the a posteriori use of first philosophy is demanded by the prior claims of Christian faith itself" (30), and it need not be a Procrustean bed that constricts Christian truth.
To her credit, Howe does not try to fit the peculiar saint into this or any other Procrustean bed. Accepting Teresa on her own terms, she also takes the opportunity to discuss convent culture and what level of learning might have been expected from the choir nuns versus the abbess.
The sensitive critic of Shakespeare, as Nuttall demonstrates over and over in his close readings, seems to find that the Bard has always included another layer of complexity in his art that resists the urge of the critic to create a Procrustean bed of meaning.
The Procrustean bed of physics tells us that such expansion comes at the price of penetration.