Kama Sutra and feral cats
Thursday, December 21, 2006
To understand contemporary Russia, consider its airportsWORKING as a journalist in Russia, with its eleven time zones, its endless steppe and perpetual taiga, means spending a lot of time in the air. It involves flying in planes so creaky that landing in one piece is a pleasant surprise —then disembarking in airports so inhospitable that some visitors may want to take off again immediately.
But, if he has the strength, beyond the whine of the Tupolev engines and the cracked runways, a frequent flyer can find in Russia's airports a useful encapsulation of the country's problems and oddities. In their family resemblances, Russia's airports show how far the Soviet system squeezed the variety from the vast Russian continent; in their idiosyncrasies, they suggest how far it failed to. They illustrate how much of that system, and the mindset it created, live on, 15 years after the old empire nominally collapsed. Russia's awful, grimy, gaudy airports reveal how much hasn't changed in the world's biggest country—but also, on closer inspection, how much is beginning to.
Sheremetyevo: Landing at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, first-time visitors may be unnerved to see their more experienced co-passengers limbering up, as if for a football match or gladiatorial combat. When the plane stops taxiing, or before, the Sheremetyevo regular begins to run.
Sheremetyevo is war. The international terminal was built for the 1980 Olympics, to showcase the Soviet Union's modernity; now it recalls the old regime's everyday callousness (the anarchic domestic terminal is even worse). On a bad day, the queue at passport control stretches almost to the runway.
Sheremetyevo is war. The international terminal was built for the 1980 Olympics, to showcase the Soviet Union's modernity; now it recalls the old regime's everyday callousness (the anarchic domestic terminal is even worse). On a bad day, the queue at passport control stretches almost to the runway.
The Sheremetyevo virgin soon meets the various species of Moscow queue-jumper: the brazen hoodlum; the incremental babushka; the queue-surfing clans who relocate in groups when one of their number reaches the front. The immigration officer—usually sporting peroxide blond hair, six-inch heels and an abbreviated skirt—offers an early insight into Russian notions of customer service. Reflecting the country's neo-imperialist confidence, the immigration form was for most of this year available only in Russian (“distributed free”, it says, in case anyone is tempted to pay).
As with most Russian problems, cash can mitigate the Sheremetyevo ordeal: beautiful girls meet VIPs at the gate and escort them straight to the counter. If he passes customs unmolested, the visitor emerges into a crush of criminal-looking taxi drivers. If, as it will be, the traffic is bad on Leningradskoe Shosse, the road into town, the driver may try to ingratiate himself by driving on the pavement; a 50-rouble backhander will settle things if the police pull him over. On his return to Sheremetyevo, to reach his departure gate the visitor must negotiate a bewildering series of queues, starting with one to get into the building: if he is unassertive, he will still be standing in one of them when his plane takes off. There is nowhere to sit. Forlorn African students camp out in the upstairs corridors. The attendants in the overpriced food kiosks are proof incarnate that the profit motive is not yet universal—though stewardesses on Russian carriers offer unofficial upgrades on reasonable terms. For a small consideration, they sometimes oblige smokers on long-haul flights by turning off the smoke alarms in the toilets.
As with most Russian problems, cash can mitigate the Sheremetyevo ordeal: beautiful girls meet VIPs at the gate and escort them straight to the counter. If he passes customs unmolested, the visitor emerges into a crush of criminal-looking taxi drivers. If, as it will be, the traffic is bad on Leningradskoe Shosse, the road into town, the driver may try to ingratiate himself by driving on the pavement; a 50-rouble backhander will settle things if the police pull him over. On his return to Sheremetyevo, to reach his departure gate the visitor must negotiate a bewildering series of queues, starting with one to get into the building: if he is unassertive, he will still be standing in one of them when his plane takes off. There is nowhere to sit. Forlorn African students camp out in the upstairs corridors. The attendants in the overpriced food kiosks are proof incarnate that the profit motive is not yet universal—though stewardesses on Russian carriers offer unofficial upgrades on reasonable terms. For a small consideration, they sometimes oblige smokers on long-haul flights by turning off the smoke alarms in the toilets.
Mineralnye Vody: To reach this airport, in the north Caucasus, passengers pass through a series of military roadblocks, where documents and the boots of cars are checked by slouching policemen, looking for weapons or terrorists. But a sensible terrorist would leave his weapons at home and buy new ones at the airport, where a wide selection of enormous knives and ornamental Caucasian swords is on sale. There are also embossed Caucasian drinking horns, and a large number of Brezhnev-era copies of the Kama Sutra.
Mineralnye Vody airport is a lower circle of hell. In Soviet times, before the region that the airport serves was desolated by separatist insurgencies, blood feuds and government brutality, the nearby mineral spas were popular holiday resorts. The building is incongruously large for a part of Russia that today, for all its macho hospitality and merriment, feels more African than European in its violence, poverty and corruption. It is weirdly cold inside. Feral cats have been sighted. The floor has not been cleaned since perestroika; the toilets are hauntingly squalid. On the wall there are arrival and departure boards that no longer work, and a big, proud map of the Soviet Union.
Vladikavkaz: Roughly meaning “to rule the Caucasus”, this city, south of Mineralnye Vody, is an old tsarist garrison and the capital of North Ossetia, one of the semi-autonomous ethnic republics of the north Caucasus. Backed by the Caucasus mountains and bisected by the rugged Terek river, Vladikavkaz might be pleasant, were it not for the occasional terrorist eruption and internecine gangster bombing. The Ossetians are Christians, give or take some residual animism, and are Moscow's traditional allies against the restive Muslims of the other republics. Like several other local peoples, the neighbouring Ingush were deported by Stalin in 1944; the Ossetians took part of their territory, and the two fought a war in 1992.
Vladikavkaz airport is actually closer to another, smaller town, obscure and unremarkable until September 2004: Beslan. The road to the airport leads past the auxiliary cemetery that was used to bury the hostages slain in the terrorist atrocity at a Beslan school; toys and drinks (because the dead children were denied water by their captors) are scattered on the graves. The airport ought to be hyper-sensitive to security risks.
It seems not to be. When your correspondent passed through, he noticed a couple of shady characters and their hulking bodyguard talking to an airport official. The official took their documents to the security desk. “Who are they?” asked the security officer. “They are businessmen,” replied the official, as the documents were stamped. The party appeared to reach the runway via a side door, with a large hold-all seemingly unexamined.
Kaliningrad: This airport has a sort of holding pen in which passengers are kept before being released onto the tarmac. Surveying the assembled crew, with their standard-issue gangster coats and tattoos, it becomes obvious why Kaliningrad has a reputation as a smugglers' haven.
It used to be Königsberg, city of Kant and celebrated Prussian architecture. By the time the Nazis, British bombers and the Red Army had finished with it, little of pre-war Königsberg was left. Then Stalin took a shine to it, deported the remaining Germans and incorporated the region into the Soviet Union. It is now an island of Russia in a sea of European Union—an anomaly that is profitable for a certain class of businessmen. As well as contraband, the exclave boasts most of the world's amber and Russia's ageing Baltic fleet.
The Kremlin worries that the Poles or the Germans might try to take Kaliningrad back; but, in truth, no one else really wants it. As the aromas of vodka and Dagestani cognac waft around the airport holding pen, the consolation for the nervous traveller is that if one group of dodgy passengers starts something nasty on the flight, another one will probably finish it.
Vladivostok (“to rule the east”): At the other end of the Russian empire, near China and on the Sea of Japan, Vladivostok is the terminus of the Trans-Siberian railway. It became famous during the Russian civil war as a wild eastern entrepot of refugees and interventionists; nowadays it is described (mostly by people who haven't been there) as Russia's Hong Kong or San Francisco. Here you face a classic Russian-airport dilemma.
You have clambered around the tsarist fort, and inside the decommissioned Soviet submarine. You have seen the children riding reindeer on the cigarette-ash beach, and peered at the disconsolate alligator in the aquarium. You have also met the mayor, known in the city, not altogether affectionately, as “Winnie the Pooh”, or “Vinnie Pookh”. He acquired his nickname during his fabled reign as a gangland boss. The mayor has ridden the post-Soviet escalator from crime to business and on into politics, securing his office after his main election rival was wounded in a grenade attack. In response to questions about his past, the mayor inquires whether you yourself have ever been in prison. You are not sure whether the mayor is asking or offering.
A dubious car arrives to take you to Vladivostok airport, about an hour's drive from the city, along a road lined with the forests that, like crab and salmon, are one of the great but fragile prizes of far-eastern Russian power struggles. Your driver is keener on talking than driving. “The Chinese are too cunning for us,” he says, decelerating with every fresh lament. “We are giving away our natural resources”. The factories are all closed; there is no place for anyone over 40 in the new Russia. It becomes clear that this driver is not entirely sober. You are running perilously late for your flight out of Vladivostok. Should you or shouldn't you ask him to go faster?
Murmansk: Well into the month of May, the runway at Murmansk is still fringed with snow; it dusts the pine trees over which incoming planes descend, along with still-frozen ponds and rivers. In the airport's VIP lounge there is a set of sofas of daunting tastelessness. The main terminal is mostly empty, save for a bar, a pool table and some fruit machines. Downstairs, outside the toilets, there is a strange drawing of a man wearing a trilby hat, silhouetted against the sun. But upstairs there is a lovely metallic relief on the wall, depicting everything that is produced in the Murmansk region, or that was once produced.
The biggest city anywhere inside the Arctic Circle, Murmansk was built for and shaped by war. It was founded during the first world war, and was a destination for the famous allied sea convoys during the second, when it was utterly destroyed. When the Kursk submarine was raised from the floor of the Barents Sea in 2000, the corpse-laden wreck was towed back to the nearby dry docks; nuclear icebreakers are their regular customers. A church was built in memory of the dead sailors, and stands amid the other monuments to deceased warriors. Otherwise, Murmansk is cluttered with the usual post-Soviet paraphernalia: a Lenin statue; shabby kiosks; gambling halls; pavements that seem to dissolve into the road.
For all that, the Arctic setting has its own appeal. Icy it may still be, but from late spring the Murmansk girls don their short skirts, and it is light around the clock. In the small hours, down at the port, seagulls wheel around the cranes resting motionless, like giant, paralysed insects, against the illuminated pink clouds. A Ferris wheel rotates on a hill above the town.
Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk: In tsarist times, Sakhalin island was a giant prison camp. Visiting in 1890, Chekhov considered it the most depressing of the many depressing places in Russia. From 1905, when Russia lost its war with Japan, the southern part of Sakhalin was ruled by the Japanese; it was taken back in 1945, along with four smaller islands that the two countries still bicker over. Traces of Japanese architecture are still visible; so are the descendants of the Korean slave labourers whom the Japanese imported. The Soviet experiment bequeathed sparse squares and omnipresent Lenins. After the experiment failed, many of Sakhalin's inhabitants fled its wasting beauty. Salmon can still be scooped by hand from its rivers in the spawning season, but much of the fishing fleet is rusting in the bays.
Murmansk: Well into the month of May, the runway at Murmansk is still fringed with snow; it dusts the pine trees over which incoming planes descend, along with still-frozen ponds and rivers. In the airport's VIP lounge there is a set of sofas of daunting tastelessness. The main terminal is mostly empty, save for a bar, a pool table and some fruit machines. Downstairs, outside the toilets, there is a strange drawing of a man wearing a trilby hat, silhouetted against the sun. But upstairs there is a lovely metallic relief on the wall, depicting everything that is produced in the Murmansk region, or that was once produced.
The biggest city anywhere inside the Arctic Circle, Murmansk was built for and shaped by war. It was founded during the first world war, and was a destination for the famous allied sea convoys during the second, when it was utterly destroyed. When the Kursk submarine was raised from the floor of the Barents Sea in 2000, the corpse-laden wreck was towed back to the nearby dry docks; nuclear icebreakers are their regular customers. A church was built in memory of the dead sailors, and stands amid the other monuments to deceased warriors. Otherwise, Murmansk is cluttered with the usual post-Soviet paraphernalia: a Lenin statue; shabby kiosks; gambling halls; pavements that seem to dissolve into the road.
For all that, the Arctic setting has its own appeal. Icy it may still be, but from late spring the Murmansk girls don their short skirts, and it is light around the clock. In the small hours, down at the port, seagulls wheel around the cranes resting motionless, like giant, paralysed insects, against the illuminated pink clouds. A Ferris wheel rotates on a hill above the town.
Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk: In tsarist times, Sakhalin island was a giant prison camp. Visiting in 1890, Chekhov considered it the most depressing of the many depressing places in Russia. From 1905, when Russia lost its war with Japan, the southern part of Sakhalin was ruled by the Japanese; it was taken back in 1945, along with four smaller islands that the two countries still bicker over. Traces of Japanese architecture are still visible; so are the descendants of the Korean slave labourers whom the Japanese imported. The Soviet experiment bequeathed sparse squares and omnipresent Lenins. After the experiment failed, many of Sakhalin's inhabitants fled its wasting beauty. Salmon can still be scooped by hand from its rivers in the spawning season, but much of the fishing fleet is rusting in the bays.
Yet Siberia and Russia's far east have always been lands of opportunity, as well as exile. On Sakhalin, today's opportunities are mostly in oil and gas, which foreign consortia are extracting from beneath the frigid Sea of Okhotsk, off the island's northern shore. New pipelines cut through forests, and up and down mountains, to an export terminal in the south. A stone's throw away, there are elderly Russians living on what they can fish and find in the forest; the few remaining indigenous reindeer-herders survive on even less. But in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the capital, there are new hotels, bars and jobs.
The primitive domestic terminal at the airport has a tannoy system, but the announcements are inaudible, and their main effect is to spread fear. Destination names are put up, taken down and put up again above the check-in desks. The upper floor is appointed with weirdly ornate Soviet chandeliers. Last year a family of bears wandered onto the runway: the airport authorities hunted them in vain. But there is also a new international terminal to serve the flights from Japan and South Korea. The staff there speak English, and do not regard checking in as an unforgivable insolence.
Irkutsk: Five hours ahead of Moscow, in eastern Siberia, Irkutsk is the nearest city to Lake Baikal, the world's largest body of fresh water—water so clear that it induces vertigo in many of its visitors. The drive to the lake leads through vast forests, past the roadside shamanistic altars of the indigenous Buryats, under an enormous Siberian sky. In the 19th century Irkutsk was home to many of the so-called Decembrists, and the wives who followed them into exile after their 1825 revolt against the tsar: men and events that might have changed Russia's history, and the world's. Alexander Kolchak, a diehard White commander, was shot in Irkutsk in 1920; his body was thrown into the icy Angara river.
Planes descend into the city's airport over identikit Soviet apartment blocks and rickety Siberian dachas. The current arrivals terminal is a hut on the apron of the tarmac. Passengers wait in the street until the baggage-handlers feel inclined to pass their bags through a hole in the hut's wall. The bags then circulate on a terrifying metal device apparently borrowed from a medieval torture chamber. The nearby departure terminal is chaos, though by ascending an obscure staircase passengers can find an interesting photographic display on “minerals of eastern Siberia”.
The hut, however, is only temporary: a new, modern terminal is being built. It will be needed if the local authorities attract all the tourists they are hoping for. Lake Baikal, the awesomely beautiful main draw, was threatened by a new oil pipeline—until Vladimir Putin ordered its route moved away from the shores of what Buryats call the “Sacred Sea”.
Yekaterinburg: Long-term residents of this city in the Urals shudder when they recall the state of its airport in the 1990s: never any taxis, they say, and very often no luggage. The arrivals hall still has a faint abattoir feel. But, next to it, a colonnaded Soviet edifice has been turned into a business terminal. And there is a new, glass-walled international terminal of positively Scandinavian gleam and efficiency, erected recently using private money. It has a swanky bar that serves edible food. There is an internet café where the internet connections work. “An airport”, says one of its managers proudly, “is a city's visiting card.”
It is not too fanciful to see the contrasting parts of Yekaterinburg's airport as a metaphor for the city's development. It was in Yekaterinburg that the Bolsheviks murdered the last tsar in 1918. Outside town, close to the border between Europe and Asia, there is a memorial to the local victims of Stalin's purges—a rare and moving place in a generally amnesiac nation.
In a nearby cemetery stand what wry locals describe as memorials to the victims of early capitalism: life-size statues (complete with car keys) of the dead gangsters who earned the city its 1990s sobriquet, the Chicago of the Urals. Because of the military industries that moved there during the war, Yekaterinburg was closed to foreigners until 1990. But these days most of the surviving crooks have gone straight, or into politics. Hoteliers are parlaying the city's infamy into a tourist attraction, foreign consulates are being opened, and businessmen and tourists can fly directly to the new airport.
Sheremetyevo: Ignore the snarling waitresses and look again at Sheremetyevo: something is happening. Its operators have come under pressure from Domodedovo, Moscow's other main airport, which was reconstructed a few years ago, and to which airlines have migrated in such numbers that its spacious facilities are often overrun. Sheremetyevo is getting a makeover (as are several of the other airports mentioned in this article).
There is a new café. There are now electric screens on the baggage carousels, displaying the numbers and origins of incoming flights (even if they do not, as yet, always correspond to the baggage circulating on them, much of which is still wrapped in clingfilm to keep out thieves). The nightmarish domestic terminal is being replaced, and a third terminal is going up. A new train service will one day replace the agony of Leningradskoe Shosse. Haltingly, frustratingly but undeniably, Sheremetyevo has started to change—much like Russia itself.
posted by LeBlues @ 10:26 AM,
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9 Body Parts You Didn't Know Had Names
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
1. EPONYCHIUM
Another term for the cuticle of the fingernail, a narrow band of epidermal tissue that extends down over the margin of the nail wall.
2 FRENUM GLANDIS
Found in the male reproductive system, this delicate fold of skin attaches the foreskin to the undersurface of the glans penis.
3. GLABELLA
A flattened area of the frontal bone (forehead area) between the frontal eminences and the superciliary arches (eyebrows) just above the nose.
4. LUNNULE
The white crescent-shaped mark at the base of a fingernail.
5. OTOLITHS
Particles of calcium carbonate in the utricles and saccules of the inner ears. The otoliths respond to gravity by sliding in the direction of the ground and causing sensitive hairs to bend, thus generating nervous impulses important in maintaining equilibrium.
6. PHALANX
One of the bones of the fingers or toes. There are two phalanges in each thumb and great toe, while there are three phalanges in all other fingers and toes, making a total of 14 in each hand or foot.
7. PHILTRUM
The vertical groove in the middle portion of the upper lip.
8. PUDENDUM
A collective name for the external genitalia of the female; also known as the vulva. It includes the mons pubis, the labia majora, and the labia minora.
9. CANTHUS
The corners of the eye where the upper and lower eyelids meet.
Labels: Body Parts You Didn't Know Had Names
posted by LeBlues @ 2:35 PM,
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The big bang
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Pleasure and desire are found in real human encounters, not corruptions of them. But recognising that, writes Guy Rundle, will need a sexual revolution bigger than in the 1960s.
Shortbus begins with an act of auto-fellatio, and gets more explicit from there. Shortbus? If you've been down a mineshaft for the past month, Shortbus is the latest entry in the explicit-sex-film-that's-not-porn stakes, with a bevy of actors having workshopped together for several months being then let go to get it on on camera. "Just like the '60s," says one character of the eponymous club of the title, "but with less hope", the avalanche of real sex in the film was intended by director John Cameron Mitchell as an ironic yet optimistic riposte to the darkening clouds of conservative and repressive opinion in the US, and to rally the forces of liberty and freeplay.
Yet the most amazing thing is not the fact of a movie such as Shortbus getting a general release without much fuss, but the fact that I can begin an article about it with a word that, a generation ago, would have had a goodly section of the readership tear this paper clean down the middle through sheer astonishment. The presence of the word, the absence of any sort of barrier between public discourse and a private act would have been simply intolerable. Now it's not only unremarkable - though the act is, well, rare - but more or less essential that the debate can go to that sort of vocabulary if issues are to be discussed. Something has happened. Something has changed. But what?
The usual answer is something to do with liberation, something to do with permissiveness, something to do with being honest and open about sexual matters after the long night of fear and ignorance. But that's obviously wrong. We've been open about sex for four decades now, and while some areas took a while to, erm, fill in - substantial acceptance of homosexuality, say - we had pretty much hit, erm, saturation point (and no further innuendos will be noted) some years ago. Two generations have now grown up in a cultural framework of a more substantial openness about sex, and the period before it - one in which not merely the odd S & M film but literally thousands of books could be banned, and Bondi beach could be stalked by bikini inspectors - is fading into sepia-toned memory, as distant as shipbuilding and hop-picking.
"Sexual intercourse began in 1963," the poet Philip Larkin wrote, and added, "which was rather too late for me" - but anyone that it was too late for, anyone who grew to maturity in an era before it was a contested zone, is now heading towards the mandatory retirement age. Sex, talking about it, negotiating its meaning, its centrality - sex is part of the psychic furniture, ever-present, at hand.
Yet in the time since then, sex became something else. Or to put it more exactly it always was taken as something else, standing in for another thing that was wanted. The sexual revolution that barrelled through the Western world in the 1960s and 1970s had started a lot earlier, in the salons of bohemian Paris, in the free morals of the Bloomsbury group (Lytton Strachey, upon meeting Virginia Woolf for the first time, pointed to a white stain on her dress and said "semen?") in psychotherapy, and even in the Russian revolution, but the tenor that ran under all of it was the expectation that sexual liberation was leading on to something else, more, other, a fuller liberation in human affairs.
It was Freud, in Civilisation and Its Discontents, who had established the notion that the exclusion of overt sexuality from everyday affairs was not simply a matter of humans becoming more refined, but a dynamic equation, a trade-off. Working in the age of the steam engine, Freud's theory copied its form - it was all about the exchange of pressures, and chambers and pipes, from ego to id and back. Civilisation was not refinement but repression, for which we paid a necessary price. Freud was reviled as some sort of antiChrist, but in fact he was the patron saint of bourgeois civilisation, arguing that what it offered - an everyday unhappiness relieved by moments of satisfaction - was superior to the ecstatic chaos of living instinctually. It took his follower Wilhelm Reich to argue that more could be had, that political and sexual liberation were not only possible, but two sides of the same coin, that only by putting sex at the centre of life could we reach true freedom.
Reich, who worked in Germany in the 1930s and thereafter in the US, has a fair claim to be the single greatest influence on everyday life that no one has ever heard of. If the women's magazines are crowded with clitoral stimulation rather than cake recipes, if the sex manuals crowd out whole sections of bookstores, if the notion of transfiguring orgasm has become the snow-dome centrepiece of our lives, then Reich is to credit/blame. His voluminous writings can be summarised into one principle: that sex, if done right, can clear the slate of accumulated hostilities, negativities, and sadistic impulses - and that by contrast repression or bad, perfunctory sex is the root of frustration, envy, hate and violence. It's an oversimplified theory, true, but you can't deny that it's one that people work from, a framework of assumptions brought to everyday life, one of the few things we all agree on, whether we admit to it or not.
Indeed it's so general a principle that it's difficult to convince people that there was a time when it did not hold sway, that sex was not credited as having a central role in cultural life. The pre-Freud, pre-Reich sex manuals were not puritan, anti-pleasure tracts - but they presented the pleasure of it as icing on the cake, not as a qualitatively distinct and incommensurable experience. The very title of even relatively liberated works such as Marie Stopes' phenomenally successful World War I sex manual Married Life, say it all - it's about the whole continuum, not the thing itself.
Reich went a bit crazy in the '50s - he believed that he could collect an energy called "orgone" using specially constructed boxes, and died in prison after years of persecution during the McCarthy era - but there were plenty of people to carry on his vision. The work of influential "heavy" writers such as Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse and above all Germaine Greer all bear the marks of his influence, as do films like Easy Rider or bands like the Doors - but it's above all in the magazines and the radio talkback and everyday life.
Reich thought that sexual liberation - or sexpol as he called it, sexual politics - would be a way into communism, to a world that would emerge from its deadened, commercialised nature, and be appreciable as sensuous and particular once again, and for a while it looked like that might be the case. The '60s slogan "make love not war" is Reich in four words.
But when that revolutionary wave rose and broke, it was inevitable that its radical impulses would be taken over by something else. By the late '70s, the sexual revolution was being sucked back into a more segmented and commodified form. Male pornography had - via Hustler and Penthouse - entered its gynaecological phase and, sex had also become part of the major discourse of everyday life, that of advertising. Even up to the early '60s, the bulk of advertising had had some vestigial relationship to the specific content of the product, its real or spurious qualities - it was in other words, literal. By the mid-60s this was changing rapidly, and the change was not merely technique, but that of its very being. By the late '60s, advertising was comprehensively metaphorical, its primary means of selling being to argue that a product was not what it was, it was something else - a car wasn't a mode of transport, it was success or power or speed. A cigarette wasn't a nicotine delivery system, it was friendship, or acceptance, or style. There wasn't much point in comparing one product to another product, that would be circular - one needed a sort of gold standard of desire, some human want that was unique and of itself, and sex was it. What began as a pretty woman draped over a car has become a default setting of selling. To expose yourself to any media is to be lathered, margarined in a sort of minimal low-grade sexual content, overwhelmingly heterosexual and male-directed of course. The effect is to empty sex of its content. Sex has become to the visual world what gold is to the material one - a universal standard of exchange which once had a character of its own, but which has long since become nothing more than an expression of everything else, a universal metaphor of no content. This worked to a degree at its inauguration in the '70s, but inflation has long since set in. Advertising, as most ad executives will admit after a few margaritas, stopped being effective for particular products decades ago (except when it's targeted at children). Advertising now sells only desire in general, and the sex within it is not there to stimulate desire but to symbolise it, to suggest some unimaginable beyond in which all desires could be fulfilled.
Yet it is not only advertising that empties sex of content. Even the most liberatory of discourses quickly became routinised. Nothing could be more "Reichian" than something like Cosmopolitan magazine, with its intense focus not only on the right type of orgasm, but also on the right to it - and yet the impression it gives is not of profound human freedom but of deep anxiety, of being subject to something. Often that's the duty of satisfying men but it is also to making wild anarchic sex regularised, all but Power-Pointed, postmodern pleasure taking on the same form of postmodern work - an admin job, segmented into dot point tasks and goals. And as femininity came to be grouped around the mysteries of the Big O, masculinity went in a different direction, as represented not merely by lads' mags like Ralph and FHM, but also by publications like Men's Health, upmarket erotica like Black+White, and the cult of the gym. Reich himself, watching the rise of the Nazi strength cult in the '30s, had been scathing about bodybuilding, seeing the buffed body, as actor Jack Nicholson, one of Reich's followers once put it, as "life-denying male sexlessness". Six-pack abs are not an expression of male power, but a fear of embodiment, neurosis made flesh, muscular armour to keep the world, and chance, and connection, out. You can see this in hardcore porn, in the now dominant US-San Fernando valley style - robotically hardbodied men and impossibly shiny, curvy women, going at it amid a setting of chain-store furnishings. The aesthetic is essentially fascist, futurist, human beings ascending to the status of machines - and in that respect exemplifying a sort of Protestant-porn-ethic of ceaseless anti-pleasure production.
Once a culture - especially one centred around the market - opens up the rules of sexual exchange and conduct, then it quickly gets into problems of transmitting and reproducing the transcendental pleasure that was sought after in the first place. Despite the protestations of Shortbus' director, there is something unwilled and automatic about the expansion of sex within a culture, such that it begins to occur to someone who wants to make something transgressive that the only way to do it is via the language of sex. The profound lassitude that that summons up has been effectively captured by the novelist Michel Houellebecq, whose portrayal of a nullified pan-sexual world is captured in the French title of his first work - Extension du Domaine de la Lutte (Extension of the Field of Struggle, 1994), his argument being that sexual liberation had been an enslavement to atomised competition in every field of life.
In that process we've become a little strange about sex, a cultural mix of knowing and unbelievably navety. Most cultures recognise its anarchic power, and thereby put in place rules to regulate conduct that allow, well, allow things to get done. Segregation of men and women, formalised courtship rituals, rites of passage between childhood and adolescence, we treat all these things - whether they appear in Islam or Inuit cultures - as essentially backward, waiting for the benefit of our liberation. At the same time we have both a culture of free sexual expression and an assumption that it will never get out of control
Future generations will wonder about a culture in which every fashion spread seems to be composed of 13-year-olds in adult clothes and make-up, yet goes into a rictus of horror every time a PE teacher and a student have an affair. Because we have turned sex into something other than itself, we can't feel its real power, can't credit it as requiring something more than sensible self-regulation to keep in control. And our notions of liberal equality have turned into a delusion of identity - we can't really get our head around the notion of gender difference, that men and women have a different relationship to visual desire. You can't say that the matter hasn't been settled - as, in the last two decades, the lapdance and strip clubs have expanded across every major city in the West, the market for male strippers remains confined to the hen's night market - the exception that proves the rule. What alarms us about Islam, and the veil, is not the repressive nature of some of its attitudes, but the fact that it acknowledges this difference, and the power of feminine embodiment. By some crazy logic the "ho" look of Britney Spears and Christine Aguilera, entirely oriented to male desire, is seen as a free choice, while a form of covering that denies it is an expression of false consciousness.
Forty years ago we had a revolution in desire whose surface effects in clothes and music fooled some people into thinking that it wasn't a fundamental cultural shift in the West, from a culture living along Judeo-Christian lines, to one dominated not by secular atheism, but by a pagan sensibility. By pagan, I don't mean the marginal nonsense of druids and healing crystals, which few people believe in deeply. What makes our culture pagan is that there has been a decisive shift in ethics in everyday life, from the centrality of the "good" to that of the will. What has become most sinful, as evidenced across the cultural field, from the art avant-garde to reality TV, is to not do as thou wilt, to abnegate, to pull back from the pursuit of satisfaction. To us, meekness - put at the centre of Christian belief by the sermon on the mount, as a riposte to the Roman Empire's will-to-power - is genuinely repulsive, a strangling of one's selfhood by a renunciation of what one wants. Of course, in some way we are more "ethical" than we have ever been, with the spread of the notion of human rights, and a concern for distant others unimaginable in the age of faith. But very few of us feel that domain of life as real, in the immediate and challenging way that power, ambition and above all desire figure in existence. Nietzsche was the first to propose, in the latter 19th century, that humanity could only be saved by going beyond Christian morality, which was choking off the free expression of the human spirit. Geoff Waite in his masterpiece Nietzsche's Corps(e), argues that the world we now have is one created by those ideas, bubbled through D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and Janis Joplin in equal measure. It is a world in which the central figure of Christian mythology, culminating in a figure like, say, Dickens' Oliver Twist, cannot be looked on without some contempt for their failure to act. Why does Oliver just take it, we think? Why doesn't he stab his tormenters in the throat - god knows they deserve it.
Despite falling church attendances, church leaders tend to crow whenever some survey finds that 70 to 80 per cent of people sampled believe in God. Of course people do - there are even fewer atheists in focus groups than there are in foxholes. But the god to which such people subscribe is not the incarnated man-God-spirit of Christianity, mediated through 2000 years of tradition - if it were people would actually be turning up to church. What people believe is some sort of formless theistic point, the sky-God of animist and pagan tradition who is simply the unknowable font of creation - and who has no opinion about where you put your genitals, or much more besides. Cardinal George Pell and Archbishop Peter Jensen will continue to act as if they have an army behind them, but in terms of what people actually do with their lives and the choices they make - especially as regards sex and desire - they are significantly less influential than a 22-year-old deputy editor of Dolly magazine.
The essence of paganism is that we're here for a good time, not for a long time - that the afterlife is an unknown quantity, and that what we really get is 30,000 sunsets and the warmth of others, and renunciation of that for a possible redemption ain't a great deal. Hence the victory of sex, and its return to the centre of human life - because nobody could remember what the fuss was about. Yet it only took two decades for it to pass from liberatory moment into the market, and the circuit of images, to a point where terms like "porn", "prostitution", "pole-dancing" are bandied about as something verging on career options. Now sex has become the denial of desire, its antithesis, a metaphor for everything else. Shortbus has tried to reclaim a shame-free space from the religious right, and the aim is noble, but what its makers haven't realised is that the problem comes not from without neo-pagan culture, but from within, from a culture which, in trying to get nearer to the transcendental alchemy of sex and what is really behind it - the connection to nature - we have turned it into the opposite of itself, into industry and image. Reclaiming not merely sexuality, but human life itself, involves not reclaiming the image, via art, but turning away from its power - a revolution far more comprehensive than the '60s one, and one whose mere suggestion fills people with horror. What? I won't find liberation at a film festival? Well, no. If sex is about the real encounter with the other, then its apotheosis won't be found in art. We could try and ban sexual imagery in ads etc, as we have tried to do before, but piling regulation upon corruption is really the antithesis of freedom. What Shortbus is hinting towards, is something its own medium belies, that as the poet John Ashbery suggested in Some Trees
We will recover desire only when we can turn away from the screen and back to full human presence. When we do, narrow life-denying Christian and Islamic fundamentalism will be as discarded and useless as an old combine-harvester, their reasonable and identical response to the sexual meat-market - "keep it all off" - rendered irrelevant. But it will only happen when we realise that Pell and porn, Sheikh Taj al-Din al-Hilali and hardcore are two sides of the same de-denominated coin. We are face-to-face with the unmediated natural world of sex and death for the first time in history and without easy stories, both conservative and liberated, we will have to make sense of it.
Shortbus begins with an act of auto-fellatio, and gets more explicit from there. Shortbus? If you've been down a mineshaft for the past month, Shortbus is the latest entry in the explicit-sex-film-that's-not-porn stakes, with a bevy of actors having workshopped together for several months being then let go to get it on on camera. "Just like the '60s," says one character of the eponymous club of the title, "but with less hope", the avalanche of real sex in the film was intended by director John Cameron Mitchell as an ironic yet optimistic riposte to the darkening clouds of conservative and repressive opinion in the US, and to rally the forces of liberty and freeplay.
Yet the most amazing thing is not the fact of a movie such as Shortbus getting a general release without much fuss, but the fact that I can begin an article about it with a word that, a generation ago, would have had a goodly section of the readership tear this paper clean down the middle through sheer astonishment. The presence of the word, the absence of any sort of barrier between public discourse and a private act would have been simply intolerable. Now it's not only unremarkable - though the act is, well, rare - but more or less essential that the debate can go to that sort of vocabulary if issues are to be discussed. Something has happened. Something has changed. But what?
The usual answer is something to do with liberation, something to do with permissiveness, something to do with being honest and open about sexual matters after the long night of fear and ignorance. But that's obviously wrong. We've been open about sex for four decades now, and while some areas took a while to, erm, fill in - substantial acceptance of homosexuality, say - we had pretty much hit, erm, saturation point (and no further innuendos will be noted) some years ago. Two generations have now grown up in a cultural framework of a more substantial openness about sex, and the period before it - one in which not merely the odd S & M film but literally thousands of books could be banned, and Bondi beach could be stalked by bikini inspectors - is fading into sepia-toned memory, as distant as shipbuilding and hop-picking.
"Sexual intercourse began in 1963," the poet Philip Larkin wrote, and added, "which was rather too late for me" - but anyone that it was too late for, anyone who grew to maturity in an era before it was a contested zone, is now heading towards the mandatory retirement age. Sex, talking about it, negotiating its meaning, its centrality - sex is part of the psychic furniture, ever-present, at hand.
Yet in the time since then, sex became something else. Or to put it more exactly it always was taken as something else, standing in for another thing that was wanted. The sexual revolution that barrelled through the Western world in the 1960s and 1970s had started a lot earlier, in the salons of bohemian Paris, in the free morals of the Bloomsbury group (Lytton Strachey, upon meeting Virginia Woolf for the first time, pointed to a white stain on her dress and said "semen?") in psychotherapy, and even in the Russian revolution, but the tenor that ran under all of it was the expectation that sexual liberation was leading on to something else, more, other, a fuller liberation in human affairs.
It was Freud, in Civilisation and Its Discontents, who had established the notion that the exclusion of overt sexuality from everyday affairs was not simply a matter of humans becoming more refined, but a dynamic equation, a trade-off. Working in the age of the steam engine, Freud's theory copied its form - it was all about the exchange of pressures, and chambers and pipes, from ego to id and back. Civilisation was not refinement but repression, for which we paid a necessary price. Freud was reviled as some sort of antiChrist, but in fact he was the patron saint of bourgeois civilisation, arguing that what it offered - an everyday unhappiness relieved by moments of satisfaction - was superior to the ecstatic chaos of living instinctually. It took his follower Wilhelm Reich to argue that more could be had, that political and sexual liberation were not only possible, but two sides of the same coin, that only by putting sex at the centre of life could we reach true freedom.
Reich, who worked in Germany in the 1930s and thereafter in the US, has a fair claim to be the single greatest influence on everyday life that no one has ever heard of. If the women's magazines are crowded with clitoral stimulation rather than cake recipes, if the sex manuals crowd out whole sections of bookstores, if the notion of transfiguring orgasm has become the snow-dome centrepiece of our lives, then Reich is to credit/blame. His voluminous writings can be summarised into one principle: that sex, if done right, can clear the slate of accumulated hostilities, negativities, and sadistic impulses - and that by contrast repression or bad, perfunctory sex is the root of frustration, envy, hate and violence. It's an oversimplified theory, true, but you can't deny that it's one that people work from, a framework of assumptions brought to everyday life, one of the few things we all agree on, whether we admit to it or not.
Indeed it's so general a principle that it's difficult to convince people that there was a time when it did not hold sway, that sex was not credited as having a central role in cultural life. The pre-Freud, pre-Reich sex manuals were not puritan, anti-pleasure tracts - but they presented the pleasure of it as icing on the cake, not as a qualitatively distinct and incommensurable experience. The very title of even relatively liberated works such as Marie Stopes' phenomenally successful World War I sex manual Married Life, say it all - it's about the whole continuum, not the thing itself.
Reich went a bit crazy in the '50s - he believed that he could collect an energy called "orgone" using specially constructed boxes, and died in prison after years of persecution during the McCarthy era - but there were plenty of people to carry on his vision. The work of influential "heavy" writers such as Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse and above all Germaine Greer all bear the marks of his influence, as do films like Easy Rider or bands like the Doors - but it's above all in the magazines and the radio talkback and everyday life.
Reich thought that sexual liberation - or sexpol as he called it, sexual politics - would be a way into communism, to a world that would emerge from its deadened, commercialised nature, and be appreciable as sensuous and particular once again, and for a while it looked like that might be the case. The '60s slogan "make love not war" is Reich in four words.
But when that revolutionary wave rose and broke, it was inevitable that its radical impulses would be taken over by something else. By the late '70s, the sexual revolution was being sucked back into a more segmented and commodified form. Male pornography had - via Hustler and Penthouse - entered its gynaecological phase and, sex had also become part of the major discourse of everyday life, that of advertising. Even up to the early '60s, the bulk of advertising had had some vestigial relationship to the specific content of the product, its real or spurious qualities - it was in other words, literal. By the mid-60s this was changing rapidly, and the change was not merely technique, but that of its very being. By the late '60s, advertising was comprehensively metaphorical, its primary means of selling being to argue that a product was not what it was, it was something else - a car wasn't a mode of transport, it was success or power or speed. A cigarette wasn't a nicotine delivery system, it was friendship, or acceptance, or style. There wasn't much point in comparing one product to another product, that would be circular - one needed a sort of gold standard of desire, some human want that was unique and of itself, and sex was it. What began as a pretty woman draped over a car has become a default setting of selling. To expose yourself to any media is to be lathered, margarined in a sort of minimal low-grade sexual content, overwhelmingly heterosexual and male-directed of course. The effect is to empty sex of its content. Sex has become to the visual world what gold is to the material one - a universal standard of exchange which once had a character of its own, but which has long since become nothing more than an expression of everything else, a universal metaphor of no content. This worked to a degree at its inauguration in the '70s, but inflation has long since set in. Advertising, as most ad executives will admit after a few margaritas, stopped being effective for particular products decades ago (except when it's targeted at children). Advertising now sells only desire in general, and the sex within it is not there to stimulate desire but to symbolise it, to suggest some unimaginable beyond in which all desires could be fulfilled.
Yet it is not only advertising that empties sex of content. Even the most liberatory of discourses quickly became routinised. Nothing could be more "Reichian" than something like Cosmopolitan magazine, with its intense focus not only on the right type of orgasm, but also on the right to it - and yet the impression it gives is not of profound human freedom but of deep anxiety, of being subject to something. Often that's the duty of satisfying men but it is also to making wild anarchic sex regularised, all but Power-Pointed, postmodern pleasure taking on the same form of postmodern work - an admin job, segmented into dot point tasks and goals. And as femininity came to be grouped around the mysteries of the Big O, masculinity went in a different direction, as represented not merely by lads' mags like Ralph and FHM, but also by publications like Men's Health, upmarket erotica like Black+White, and the cult of the gym. Reich himself, watching the rise of the Nazi strength cult in the '30s, had been scathing about bodybuilding, seeing the buffed body, as actor Jack Nicholson, one of Reich's followers once put it, as "life-denying male sexlessness". Six-pack abs are not an expression of male power, but a fear of embodiment, neurosis made flesh, muscular armour to keep the world, and chance, and connection, out. You can see this in hardcore porn, in the now dominant US-San Fernando valley style - robotically hardbodied men and impossibly shiny, curvy women, going at it amid a setting of chain-store furnishings. The aesthetic is essentially fascist, futurist, human beings ascending to the status of machines - and in that respect exemplifying a sort of Protestant-porn-ethic of ceaseless anti-pleasure production.
Once a culture - especially one centred around the market - opens up the rules of sexual exchange and conduct, then it quickly gets into problems of transmitting and reproducing the transcendental pleasure that was sought after in the first place. Despite the protestations of Shortbus' director, there is something unwilled and automatic about the expansion of sex within a culture, such that it begins to occur to someone who wants to make something transgressive that the only way to do it is via the language of sex. The profound lassitude that that summons up has been effectively captured by the novelist Michel Houellebecq, whose portrayal of a nullified pan-sexual world is captured in the French title of his first work - Extension du Domaine de la Lutte (Extension of the Field of Struggle, 1994), his argument being that sexual liberation had been an enslavement to atomised competition in every field of life.
In that process we've become a little strange about sex, a cultural mix of knowing and unbelievably navety. Most cultures recognise its anarchic power, and thereby put in place rules to regulate conduct that allow, well, allow things to get done. Segregation of men and women, formalised courtship rituals, rites of passage between childhood and adolescence, we treat all these things - whether they appear in Islam or Inuit cultures - as essentially backward, waiting for the benefit of our liberation. At the same time we have both a culture of free sexual expression and an assumption that it will never get out of control
Future generations will wonder about a culture in which every fashion spread seems to be composed of 13-year-olds in adult clothes and make-up, yet goes into a rictus of horror every time a PE teacher and a student have an affair. Because we have turned sex into something other than itself, we can't feel its real power, can't credit it as requiring something more than sensible self-regulation to keep in control. And our notions of liberal equality have turned into a delusion of identity - we can't really get our head around the notion of gender difference, that men and women have a different relationship to visual desire. You can't say that the matter hasn't been settled - as, in the last two decades, the lapdance and strip clubs have expanded across every major city in the West, the market for male strippers remains confined to the hen's night market - the exception that proves the rule. What alarms us about Islam, and the veil, is not the repressive nature of some of its attitudes, but the fact that it acknowledges this difference, and the power of feminine embodiment. By some crazy logic the "ho" look of Britney Spears and Christine Aguilera, entirely oriented to male desire, is seen as a free choice, while a form of covering that denies it is an expression of false consciousness.
Forty years ago we had a revolution in desire whose surface effects in clothes and music fooled some people into thinking that it wasn't a fundamental cultural shift in the West, from a culture living along Judeo-Christian lines, to one dominated not by secular atheism, but by a pagan sensibility. By pagan, I don't mean the marginal nonsense of druids and healing crystals, which few people believe in deeply. What makes our culture pagan is that there has been a decisive shift in ethics in everyday life, from the centrality of the "good" to that of the will. What has become most sinful, as evidenced across the cultural field, from the art avant-garde to reality TV, is to not do as thou wilt, to abnegate, to pull back from the pursuit of satisfaction. To us, meekness - put at the centre of Christian belief by the sermon on the mount, as a riposte to the Roman Empire's will-to-power - is genuinely repulsive, a strangling of one's selfhood by a renunciation of what one wants. Of course, in some way we are more "ethical" than we have ever been, with the spread of the notion of human rights, and a concern for distant others unimaginable in the age of faith. But very few of us feel that domain of life as real, in the immediate and challenging way that power, ambition and above all desire figure in existence. Nietzsche was the first to propose, in the latter 19th century, that humanity could only be saved by going beyond Christian morality, which was choking off the free expression of the human spirit. Geoff Waite in his masterpiece Nietzsche's Corps(e), argues that the world we now have is one created by those ideas, bubbled through D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and Janis Joplin in equal measure. It is a world in which the central figure of Christian mythology, culminating in a figure like, say, Dickens' Oliver Twist, cannot be looked on without some contempt for their failure to act. Why does Oliver just take it, we think? Why doesn't he stab his tormenters in the throat - god knows they deserve it.
Despite falling church attendances, church leaders tend to crow whenever some survey finds that 70 to 80 per cent of people sampled believe in God. Of course people do - there are even fewer atheists in focus groups than there are in foxholes. But the god to which such people subscribe is not the incarnated man-God-spirit of Christianity, mediated through 2000 years of tradition - if it were people would actually be turning up to church. What people believe is some sort of formless theistic point, the sky-God of animist and pagan tradition who is simply the unknowable font of creation - and who has no opinion about where you put your genitals, or much more besides. Cardinal George Pell and Archbishop Peter Jensen will continue to act as if they have an army behind them, but in terms of what people actually do with their lives and the choices they make - especially as regards sex and desire - they are significantly less influential than a 22-year-old deputy editor of Dolly magazine.
The essence of paganism is that we're here for a good time, not for a long time - that the afterlife is an unknown quantity, and that what we really get is 30,000 sunsets and the warmth of others, and renunciation of that for a possible redemption ain't a great deal. Hence the victory of sex, and its return to the centre of human life - because nobody could remember what the fuss was about. Yet it only took two decades for it to pass from liberatory moment into the market, and the circuit of images, to a point where terms like "porn", "prostitution", "pole-dancing" are bandied about as something verging on career options. Now sex has become the denial of desire, its antithesis, a metaphor for everything else. Shortbus has tried to reclaim a shame-free space from the religious right, and the aim is noble, but what its makers haven't realised is that the problem comes not from without neo-pagan culture, but from within, from a culture which, in trying to get nearer to the transcendental alchemy of sex and what is really behind it - the connection to nature - we have turned it into the opposite of itself, into industry and image. Reclaiming not merely sexuality, but human life itself, involves not reclaiming the image, via art, but turning away from its power - a revolution far more comprehensive than the '60s one, and one whose mere suggestion fills people with horror. What? I won't find liberation at a film festival? Well, no. If sex is about the real encounter with the other, then its apotheosis won't be found in art. We could try and ban sexual imagery in ads etc, as we have tried to do before, but piling regulation upon corruption is really the antithesis of freedom. What Shortbus is hinting towards, is something its own medium belies, that as the poet John Ashbery suggested in Some Trees
That their merely being thereMeans something; that soonWe may touch, love, explain.And glad not to have inventedSome comeliness . . .
We will recover desire only when we can turn away from the screen and back to full human presence. When we do, narrow life-denying Christian and Islamic fundamentalism will be as discarded and useless as an old combine-harvester, their reasonable and identical response to the sexual meat-market - "keep it all off" - rendered irrelevant. But it will only happen when we realise that Pell and porn, Sheikh Taj al-Din al-Hilali and hardcore are two sides of the same de-denominated coin. We are face-to-face with the unmediated natural world of sex and death for the first time in history and without easy stories, both conservative and liberated, we will have to make sense of it.
posted by LeBlues @ 9:47 AM,
,
Aphrodisiacs That Really Work
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
For as long as humans have been having sex, they've been trying to get in the mood--or get their partners in the mood. And if necessity is the mother of invention, it's no surprise that humans have developed a wide variety of creative solutions for the old "I've-got-a-headache" problem.
The most recent solution, of course, is Pfizer's Viagra. But in ancient India, a young man who proved passionless in the sack might have tried goat testicles boiled in milk. Oysters are another common turn-on; the Roman satirist Juvenal was the first to note their seductive qualities. In medieval times, honeyed mead was the equivalent of Bud Lite for loosening up carousing swains.
Fresh snake blood is still revered as a stimulant in parts of Asia, as are bat blood, reindeer penises, shark fins and ground rhino horns. And what sad-sack hasn't at least contemplated Spanish Fly? It's not a fly at all, actually, but the dried remains of beetles, which irritate the male urogenital tract, causing a prolonged erection--and potentially causing serious discomfort and even death, according to the Food and Drug Administration.
In Pictures: Ten Aphrodisiacs That Work
Beyond their collective exoticism, the only thing the above have in common is that they don't work. Named for Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of sex and beauty, an aphrodisiac is just about anything that awakens or increases sexual desire--be it your own, or the object of your desire's. In reality, however, most aphrodisiacs are folklore at best and hazardous to your health at worst. As the Food and Drug Administration has declared: "There is no scientific proof that any over-the-counter aphrodisiacs work to treat sexual dysfunction."
But there is still some hope for those seeking a libido boost. The herbal supplement Ginkgo Biloba is being studied by the Office of Dietary Supplements, a subsidiary of the National Institute of Health, as a treatment for erectile dysfunction. The FDA has called animal studies of yohimbine "encouraging." Derived from the bark of an African tree, yohimbe has been used as a sexual stimulant for centuries. But the FDA notes that animal studies can't be used to prove effectiveness in humans.
Even when aphrodisiacs do show promise, they don't always work for everybody. Sexual desire is rooted in the mind more than the genitals. One person's fantasy could be another's turn-off. "We're all unique individuals, and we all respond differently to different things," says Dr. Beverly Whipple, a professor emerita at Rutgers University and author of, most recently, The Science of Orgasm.
At the root of human sexual desire is the "core erotic personality"--a.k.a. "sexual template"--which, in a nutshell, is whatever gets you off. "Everyone has in their mind an image of someone or thing they find sexually desirous," explains Dr. William Granzig, dean of clinical sexology at Maimonides University in North Miami Beach and president of the American Board of Sexology.
That image might be a person of specific age, race or hair color, or it might be every person. It could be a fondness for a particular style of dress, objects such as women's shoes or fur-lined handcuffs, or behavior such as cross-dressing or exhibitionism. Whatever it is in particular, the sexual template is believed to develop early on during a childhood erotic experience--perhaps as early as age three or four--and it sticks with you for life.
The difficulty of maintaining sexual desire over the long term, of course, is that if your partner falls outside of your sexual template--or you fall outside theirs--sooner or later one of you could lose interest. "Many people whose template is not, say, age-specific, can have great sex throughout their lives," notes Granzig. "But if you're only attracted to 20-year-olds, once your partner hits 30, your desire will decrease. Unless, of course, you can figure out some ways to spice things up."
Spicing things up is where sex gets complicated, because men and women sometimes have wildly divergent desires. For men, a sexy photo is often enough to get blood flowing in the right direction. For women, pornography can be a major turn-off. Orgasms are also less central to women, who sometimes need full body stimulation, not to mention mental seduction, in order to achieve climax. "There are just so many variables that go beyond the physical in sex for women," says Dr. Janice Epp, a clinical sexologist at the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco.
There are also a host of external nuisances that weigh heavily upon sexual desire--and that may dampen the mood. Studies routinely rank American culture as one of the most sexually repressed in the world thanks to its forbidding Judeo-Christian origins, high incidence of sexual problems and dysfunction, and a lingering Puritan discomfort with the very topic of sex.
And while Europeans take mandatory month-long vacations, Americans routinely work 60-hour weeks, and stretch their ten vacation days over the entire year. With the demands of our modern day technological society, it's little wonder the search for aphrodisiacs continues. "I see a lot of highly evolved, highly skilled people who are losing desire because they have such an overriding focus on their profession," says Epp, who works in Silicon Valley. "For them, the temptation to believe that there's a magic pill that will make them desirous of sex again is very strong."
Inspired by the phenomenal success of Viagra, which rang up over $1.6 billion in sales for Pfizer in 2005, it's perhaps not surprising that there has been a recent push to find more pharmaceutical remedies for flagging sexual desire. It's a focus that throws many in the sex field into apoplexy. "The idea that you can just give someone a pill, and they'll be interested in sex is like putting a band-aid on a tumor," says Epp.
In the end, the only truly effective aphrodisiac seems to be that's been working for humans all along. "Your biggest sex organ is the one between your ears," says Dr. Granzig. "What is desire, after all, other than the hope that you can fulfill your sexual fantasies? And that's all in your mind."
Labels: Aphrodisiacs
posted by LeBlues @ 9:58 AM,
,
Women may respond to porn, but not in a way that counts
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Recently, researchers at McGill University in Canada reconfirmed what we'll call the porn paradox: When hooked up to instruments measuring sexual arousal, men and women reacted with equal speed when watching pornographic films.
This raises several questions, including why women are so much less likely than men to consider viewing porn a valuable use of our time. But the type of material used in the study also raises broader questions about the effects of porn on both sexes.
Irv Binik, who led the research, said he used special sex films borrowed from the Kinsey Institute. One was predetermined to be arousing to men, another to women, though Binik says they both looked the same to him. Both showed heterosexual couplings.
Why do any of us find it arousing to watch films of other people having sex? These people are busy. They're not inviting you to join them.
For men at least, British zoologist Robin Baker has an interesting hypothesis: The pornography industry owes its billions to an ancient animal instinct still seen in rats and monkeys: If a male of one of those species runs across a pair mating, the onlooker will not only become aroused at the sight but will move sperm into the urethra. Which means, as Baker puts it, "he's loaded and ready to fire."
In the evolutionary game, such a reaction could prove advantageous if you're tough enough to take over, or sneaky enough to wait till he leaves and move in.
Humans tend to have sex in private, so such opportunities don't present themselves often, but the instinct could remain with us to be exploited by pornographers.
Harvard professor Stephen Pinker offers that some male birds will try to mate with anything resembling a female of the species — a stuffed female or even just the head of a stuffed female.
This raises several questions, including why women are so much less likely than men to consider viewing porn a valuable use of our time. But the type of material used in the study also raises broader questions about the effects of porn on both sexes.
Irv Binik, who led the research, said he used special sex films borrowed from the Kinsey Institute. One was predetermined to be arousing to men, another to women, though Binik says they both looked the same to him. Both showed heterosexual couplings.
Why do any of us find it arousing to watch films of other people having sex? These people are busy. They're not inviting you to join them.
For men at least, British zoologist Robin Baker has an interesting hypothesis: The pornography industry owes its billions to an ancient animal instinct still seen in rats and monkeys: If a male of one of those species runs across a pair mating, the onlooker will not only become aroused at the sight but will move sperm into the urethra. Which means, as Baker puts it, "he's loaded and ready to fire."
In the evolutionary game, such a reaction could prove advantageous if you're tough enough to take over, or sneaky enough to wait till he leaves and move in.
Humans tend to have sex in private, so such opportunities don't present themselves often, but the instinct could remain with us to be exploited by pornographers.
Harvard professor Stephen Pinker offers that some male birds will try to mate with anything resembling a female of the species — a stuffed female or even just the head of a stuffed female.
"The sight of a fertile member of the opposite sex would normally correlate with an opportunity to make babies," he said. Porn fools your body into reacting instinctively as if the images were real.
Pinker goes on to say men's taste for pornography goes directly to one of the most salient behavior differences between men and women: Men are much more likely to have sex with a total stranger.
And assuming you don't have many friends who are porn stars, porn shows you images of strangers who haven't even so much as bought you dinner.
Binik, the study's author, said he didn't actually show that women like pornography — just that their bodies react to it. He launched this study as part of a wider investigation into why some women experience chronic pain during intercourse. Arousal problems can be a factor.
In the past, measuring arousal involved various probes and meters that many people found intimidating. So he tried an instrument called a thermograph that uses a version of remote sensing to measure blood flow through the body. You still have to take off your clothes, he said, but the machine doesn't actually touch anything.
For him, the most important result of the study was that the instrument worked. Others before him had seen the same effect, he says, and he doubts the prospect that women secretly like pornography as much as men do.
"In women, you get a lot of disagreement between what the body is saying and what the mind is saying," he said.
Which shows that, at least for women, arousal doesn't necessarily imply desire.
posted by LeBlues @ 9:50 AM,
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The frog robot condom
Monday, December 11, 2006
Robo-staurois under construction. Peter Narins needed a way to convince real frogs that a male intruder has just hopped into their territory and is croaking boldly. So the animal communication researcher came up with the obvious choice: condoms. In 2000, Narins, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues at the University of Vienna glued a condom to the jaw of a robotic frog equipped with an air pump and speaker. It worked: The condom makes such a believable vocal sac that the robot, despite its immobility, can incite a real frog to spar.
Condoms will no longer be an issue for Narins' latest version of a frog robot. In August 2007 Narins will embark on a field expedition to study a different species, one he expects to be less focused on condoms and more interested in legs. Staurois natator, the black-spotted rock frog, lives near loud, fast-running streams in forests, and Narins thinks it's unlikely the animals make vocal calls over the din. Rather, he suspects the frogs' communication relies on a graceful movement called foot flagging, where the frog stretches out its rear leg and slowly rotates it in the air. Instead of an inflatable vocal sac, "robo-staurois" will have three miniature motors (each measuring 2x6 mm) to mimic and modify foot-flagging motions, so Narins and colleagues can see what signals frogs respond to in the field.
"We actually had two casualties," Narins recalls. Robots were broken during wrestling matches, which Narins says can last up to 15 minutes. "They put their fist right through the condom. I hate when that happens."
To get to the field Narins will have to travel across the globe. In his spacious office at UCLA, surrounded by artifacts collected from his work around the world, Narins opens up a map of Southeast Asia and points to a dot on the northern coast of the island of Borneo. "Going to Brunei," says Narins looking up with a smile.
Narins has been on 42 field expeditions. He's uncovered ultrasonic communication in a Chinese frog, multicue processing in a French Guianan dart-poison frog, and ground vibration hearing in the Puerto Rican white-lipped frog. Narins's trip to Brunei will be his first to focus on visual signals, and robo-staurois, still under construction in Austria, is intended to be a perfect look-alike for the tiny, pimply-skinned S. natator (snout to vent, it's 3-5 cm long).
Columbia University professor Darcy Kelley can attest that it doesn't take much resemblance to the real thing to get frogs to respond to stimuli in the field. In her studies, Kelley has found frogs will grow so enamored of a loudspeaker broadcasting frog calls that they will try to mate with it. Kelley witnessed one suitor persist for a half hour. "It's like they don't believe the evidence of their senses," she says.
Narins has employed his robots to fool frogs' senses in more ways than one. Using a "robo-rana" model to study the dart-poison frog Allobates femoralis, Narins and Walter Hö dl's group from the University of Vienna showed that frogs will fall for a ventriloquism illusion. They positioned a robot frog to inflate its vocal sac when a nearby loudspeaker played frog calls. A real frog would hop over to the robot when the loudspeaker was 12 cm away from the robot; at 25 cm, however, the ventriloquist-effect no longer worked and the frog ignored the robot. Narins says these were his favorite experiments using robo-rana. "This is the first example showing multimodal processing in a nonendotherm, and ... it's the first time it was done in a natural habitat," Narins says.
"He's very imaginative," says Kelley of Narins. "The nice thing [about his studies] is they're experimental, not observational." Part of that ability to experiment in the field is helped by the reliability of the frogs' response to the robots. Dart-poison frogs in French Guiana will attack a croaking robo-rana 89% of the time, says Narins. And the robot's likeness to the real deal is so striking, it can even fool a human. "A foot away or two feet away," Narins admits, "I can't tell if it's a real frog or a model frog."
Labels: condom
posted by LeBlues @ 10:03 AM,
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Condoms 'too big' for Indian men
Friday, December 8, 2006
A survey of more than 1,000 men in India has concluded that condoms made according to international sizes are too large for a majority of Indian men. The study found that more than half of the men measured had penises that were shorter than international standards for condoms.
It has led to a call for condoms of mixed sizes to be made more widely available in India.
The two-year study was carried out by the Indian Council of Medical Research.
Representative
Over 1,200 volunteers from the length and breadth of the country had their penises measured precisely, down to the last millimetre.
The scientists even checked their sample was representative of India as a whole in terms of class, religion and urban and rural dwellers.
Doctor Chander Puri, a specialist in reproductive health at the Indian Council of Medical Research, told the BBC there was an obvious need in India for custom-made condoms, as most of those currently on sale are too large.
The issue is serious because about one in every five times a condom is used in India it either falls off or tears, an extremely high failure rate.
And the country already has the highest number of HIV infections of any nation.
Mr Puri said that since Indians would be embarrassed about going to a chemist to ask for smaller condoms there should be vending machines dispensing different sizes all around the country.
"Smaller condoms are on sale in India. But there is a lack of awareness that different sizes are available. There is anxiety talking about the issue. And normally one feels shy to go to a chemist's shop and ask for a smaller size condom."
'Not a problem'
But Indian men need not be concerned about measuring up internationally according to Sunil Mehra, the former editor of the Indian version of the men's magazine Maxim.
"It's not size, it's what you do with it that matters," he said.
"From our population, the evidence is Indians are doing pretty well.
"With apologies to the poet Alexander Pope, you could say, for inches and centimetres, let fools contend."
posted by LeBlues @ 4:34 PM,
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Filth and Sexual Excess
Some Brief Reflections on Popular Scatology
- Pornography can appear as a staid genre with a rigid series of rules and representations, each video consisting of a specified number of liaisons and pre-designated sexual acts, but it is also a genre that has developed and focused its numerous activities. What was considered to be an arousing taboo in the 1970s would not, for example, be considered as such today. Anal sex, while once comparatively rare in pornographic films, is now commonplace, and, while once utterly unspoken in mainstream heterosexual culture it is now acknowledged and celebrated, even by female targeted films such as Brigit Jones’ Diary (Sharon Maguire, 2001).
- Pornography, however, has raised the stakes again. Hardcore is dependent on so called ‘nasty girls’ and most interviews with starlets focus on their ability to enjoy being ‘nasty’, to enjoy what are considered or labelled as ‘perverse’ manifestations of sexuality by the normalising discourses of dominant culture and society. While once a porn star merely had to enjoy – or pretend to enjoy – sucking cock, now it is expected her repertoire will include a wider range of activities.
- With anal sex, an event that transpires in most modern pornography, the site of penises – either singularly or in pairs – pushed into swollen sore assholes is a visual commonplace. In the 1980s and 1990s (when the representation of heterosexual anal sex became truly dominant in pornography) there was a recognizable process of sexual acts, between penetration of mouth, vagina, and asshole. Each penetration would be edited and between each take the male star would wipe down his penis.
- Until somebody in hardcore pornography developed the A-to-M, a.k.a ass-to-mouth aka A2M.
- In this move the male pulls his cock from the asshole of the female and then sticks it straight into her open mouth and down her throat without wiping it clean first. All of this is presented unmediated to the viewer, in one singular shot that follows the penis as it moves from one willing hole to the other (and the body must be understood as fragmented, it is a collection of zones and areas, in this instance orifices each with their own signifying practices, not a singular organic whole). Even assuming that the nubile starlet has had an enema to blast clean her rectum prior to filming there will still be microscopic traces of her shit and rectal mucus on his penis. Indeed the pleasure for the viewers is in the knowledge of the authenticity of the movement between ass and mouth, in the knowledge that there will be small flakes of shit stuck to her lips and teeth (a variant of the ass-to-mouth sees the penis being pulled from one starlet’s anus and inserted into another starlet’s gaping mouth, again in one unedited shot).
- Shit escapes simple ontology it is opposed to all manner of being, all manner of knowledge and of existence yet it is also intimately linked to self-presence and continuity. From earliest infancy we are encouraged not to engage with it, rather it is that which is to be flushed away immediately, it is everything about being human that is repulsive, rejected and denied. Shit escapes simple symbolism; it exists in its own discursive zone. While death may be similarly horrific to us, it is so because it is utterly unknown shit, however, horrifies precisely because it is known to us. Like death, shit makes us all equal, but shit is familiar, we know its fragrance, we know its texture, we know its colour, and – yes – deep down, repressed in our animal brain we know its taste. Its familiarity results because it is a part of us, yet it is no longer of us. In death the cadaver can be theorized as the body without a soul, without spirit, or without personality, but with shit humanity does not have this luxury, shit is the part of us that both defies and defines humanity. Shit is that which was us but is no longer, yet it never fully stops being part of us, it contains traces of our genetic material, pieces of our diet, even as it is flushed more is already being pushed down our intestine. Shit is substance and process.
- If the act of fucking is that which affirms vital existence against death, then introducing shit into the equation becomes utterly transgressive. Defecation and copulation are antithetical St Augustine’s recognition that we are born between piss and shit – inter faeces et urinam – understands the animistic nature of existence and sex as contaminated by sin, but he does not conflate the act of shitting and fucking as the same, his description is powerful precisely because they are not understood as the same.
- Introducing shit into sexual activity is culturally forbidden, genuine scatologists, coprophiles and shit fetishists are rare, and most keep their desires secret even from their closest companions. Even the few that confess to enjoying ‘brown showers’ do not admit to eating raw shit, either their own or that of somebody else. The practice is considered to be too dangerous, too unhealthy, and too disgusting. Even amongst the radical sexual communities many find that it stinks of excess, as if desires and fantasies had limits.
- In Pier Paolo Pasolini’s cinematic masterpiece Salo (1975) the quartet of libertines and their fellow explorers in unleashed lust – both the willing and the coerced – indulge in a vast coprophilic feast, but in this film the shit that is slathered over the bodies of the young charges and greedily scoffed down is not real. However there are a handful of directly scatological pornographic videos, often they depict people crouching down and shitting, the shit being rubbed on to nude bodies and eventually consumed. In some videos hungry mouths open directly under the puckering asshole, allowing the brown turd to plop directly onto the enthusiastic tongue and into the mouth. Cameras zoom in to show the shit-smeared lips and teeth. Like the image of ejaculation manifested in the cum-shot of mainstream hardcore pornography this sight is a vindication of the authenticity of the action. Such videos are watched by both fetishists and the curious – commonly teenage males trying to out shock each other. Unlike ‘traditional’ heterosexual hardcore pornography, which depicts explicit penetrative sex, scatology films rarely appear on the shelves of video stores and enthusiasts are compelled to search the dark bowels of pornography to find them.
- Yet the popularity of the ass-to-mouth sequence in hardcore suggests that there is an interest with such faecal taboo acts that may be more common that previously imagined. This is not to suggest that the audience who witness an ass-to-mouth scene want to go and eat shit, or want their partners to, but it does suggest that there is an interest in the transgressive potential of shit or the idea of shit on an erect penis. Watching these scenes the audience’s attention is drawn to the movement from the locus of defecation to that of consumption. Perhaps the visual pleasure lies in the degradation of the ‘nasty’ girl, in the knowledge that she can taste her own mucus and faecal matter. But if the pleasures are purely sadistic then these films fail, they do not (just) depict the starlets ‘suffering’ as they engage in these activities, in contrast, they are ‘normalised’ into the sexual conventions of the form.
- Hardcore pornography is about the depiction of literal excess; about multiple penis plunging into one asshole or one vagina (or even both) about orgies about the world’s biggest gang bangs and facials in which a dozen or more men shoot their genetic material onto the grinning faces of starlets as cum slathers their forehead, cheeks, chin, lips, and teeth. The sheer unremitting quantity becomes an object in itself. Nothing can ever be enough.
- This excess is also philosophical; all non-reproductive sexual activity belongs to the category of excess expenditure, where the unrestrained pursuit of pleasure becomes in itself both object choice and subject. Some would see such pornographic activities as anti-humanist, as cold, and as nihilistic, but such an interpretation fails. In watching these films, in seeing the penis move from asshole to mouth the audience are compelled by the authenticity of the gesture to read the starlet as human the ‘pleasure’ is in knowing that she can taste her own shit on some anonymous cock. Finally, she is smiling through its musky taste so we do not have to.
Appendix / Sources / Notes / Parallel Text : - Throughout this paper I am referring only to pornographic material marketed to an audience who are identified or identify as heterosexual. These films may contain scenes with multiple males and females having sex at one time, however while there may be what the industry refers to as girl-on-girl action there will be no direct male-on-male contact (although often all that seperates two male penises is the paper thin wall of fleshy tissue between the vagina and anus).
- The socio-cultural history of heterosexual anal sex is a complex one, made more so because of its illicit and, in some jurisdictions, illegal status. It is safe to assume that many people have engaged in it even if they have not subsequently undertaken an active interest in it (statistics published in Exploring the Dimensions of Human Sexuality 2nd Edition suggest that 28% of male and 24% of female American college graduates and 21% of male and 13% of female high school graduates have experienced anal sex [377]).
- In hardcore pornography it is the male who penetrates the female, who presents her asshole for the viewer’s delectation. In personal sexual behaviour heterosexual males may also enjoy anal penetration from a female partner both in order to stimulate the sensitive tissue around the anus and to stilulate the prostate, but the representation of such activities is very rare in the mainstream of American hardcore porn. As inventer of gonzo porn John Stagliano commented when interviewed about his sexual proclivities in The Other Hollywood , “…you know, admitting that I really wanted to get fucked in the ass, and might really like it, is not necessarily a socially acceptable thing for a straight man” (587).
- Anal sex was most coherently radicalised by the Marquis de Sade, the master of sodomaniacal literature, who understood penetrating male / penetrated female anal sex as a way in which erotic pleasure/s could be divorced from any reproductive metanarrative.
- The scene in Brigit Jones’ Diary is made all the more strange because there is no mention of safe sex. There are, however, repeated references and representations of the size and shape of the heroine’s buttocks and her willingness to acquiesce to the evidentially dominant will of her ‘bad’ boyfriend the aptly named Daniel Cleaver.
- For more on heterosexual anal sex in cinema see my ‘Hot, Hard Cocks and Tight, Tight Unlubricated Assholes.Transgression, Sexual Ambiguity and ‘Perverse’ Pleasures in Serge Gainsbourg’s Je T’Aime Moi Non Plus’, in Senses of Cinema 30 (Jan.-March 2004).
- Hardcore pornography commonly means that which features a depiction of penetrative intercourse and the visual presentation of male ejaculation as a climax to a sequence. For more on the contemporary porn scene and the ‘nasty girl’ see Anthony Petkovich, The X Factory: Inside The American Hardcore Film Industry, which contains numerous interviews with porn starlets and industry insiders.
- While pornography is remembered for a number of key texts such as Deep Throat (Gerard Damiano, 1972) or Behind the Green Door (Jim & Artie Mitchell, 1972), these were shot and marketed as erotic narrative film and released theatrically (albeit to grindhouse and specialist cinemas). However since 1982 and the widespread availability of video – and more recently DVD – pornography has been produced almost exclusively for home consumption. The increasing demands of the consumer, combined with the accessablity of technology and cheap production costs of video when compared to film have led to a glut of available material. Now videos/DVDs are often released in series with absurdly self descriptive titles such as Anal Pounding, Lesbian Bukkake, and Pussy Party, most of which provide examples of the mise-en-scene of contemporary hardcore, specific ass to mouth series include Ass to Mouth (vol 1 – 15), Ass to Mouth CumShots (vol 1 – 5), Her First Ass to Mouth, From Her Ass to Her Mouth, From My Ass to My Mouth, A2M (vol 1 – 9), and no doubt many others.
- For more on hardcore pornography and its common themes and visual styles see Linda Williams, Hardcore.
- Wikipedia suggests that the director Max Hardcore was responsible for introducing the form in the early 1990s in his series Cherry Poppers. The act is now a staple of the form. (Note that while Wikipedia can not normally be considered an academic source the vagaries of the subject matter necessitate that research takes place where necessary).
- All pornographic positions and gestures have a nickname, industry shorthand, thus there are terms such as the DP (double penetration) or the reverse cowgirl. These names are no more or less shocking than the translations for sexual positions offered in ‘classic’ erotic guidebooks such as the Kama Sutra.
- This fragmented body is a result of the cinematic gaze of pornography. Lenses are able to zoom in and focus on the body, and especially the genitals, in minute detail and present the flesh enlarged to proportions that are impossible to see in actual sexual encounters. The body viewed under such scrutiny but devoid of singular organic plenitude echoes the body without organs of Deleuze and Guattari (in contrast some radical feminist writers such as Andrea Dworkin would merely interpret such images as reflecting the misogyny of male dominated discourse).
- For more on the psychological development of the infant and the construction of the clean and unclean see Julia Kristeva Powers of Horror.
- It should be noted that commonly those who enjoy enema play – klismaphiliacs – are not related to scatologists, and often draw a distinction between their play, which is seen as a process of cleansing, and scatologists’ play, which is understood to be a celebration of the physical shit itself.
- Salo has undergone numerous sanctions, been banned, scorned, and even been interpreted by some as a metaphor / allegory for the director’s subsequent murder. Such understandings and pseudo-explanations do not do justice to either the director or to his film and its radical engagement with de Sade’s literature.
- These videos always come from ‘elsewhere’ of course, never close to home, thus in Different Loving the authors note “the Germans seem to specialize in scat” (518).
- Correspondence concerning the infamous bestiality film Animal Farm (197?) in the journal Headpress (issues 15 and 16, 1998) suggested that the audience was made up from teenage males watching it as a rite of passage, rather than by true zoophiles.
- Those I have seen were on shock and ‘gross out’ Internet sites rather than pornographic sites.
- Disclaimer – I have no interest per se in scatology, but an ongoing interest with the vagaries of human thought, and desire in particular, necessarily involves exploring areas others turn their noses up at.
posted by LeBlues @ 10:11 AM,
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A Rubber Ideology
Thursday, December 7, 2006
The uproar over President Bush’s appointment of a prominent abstinence advocate to head up the federal Office of Population Affairs reveals as much about the screamers as it does about the scream-ee. Dr. Eric Keroack advocates abstinence as the most reliable method of pregnancy and STD prevention. His critics are outraged that Bush would appoint someone who isn't all about contraception to head up the federal office responsible for family planning. These critics don’t seem to realize that the same office also oversees the federal abstinence programs. They seem to think that only an empty-headed ideologue could promote abstinence. But there is also an ideology surrounding contraception.
I call it “condomism.” This is the belief that all problems surrounding sexual activity could be solved with enough contraception. Some adherents, such as contributors to the recent special issue of the Lancet, go even further. They believe that we could end world hunger and save the environment, if only we had enough condoms. Here are some of the tenets of condomism:
- Every person capable of giving meaningful consent is entitled to unlimited sexual activity.
- All negative consequences of sexual activity can be controlled through the use of contraception. Sexual Transmitted Diseases can be controlled through the use of condoms. The probability of pregnancy can be eliminated through contraception, properly used.
- No one is required to give birth to a baby, in the event of pregnancy. Abortion, for any reason or no reason, at any time during pregnancy, is an absolute entitlement.
- Any negative consequences of sexual activity that can not be handled by contraception or abortion are not worth talking about.
The controversy over Keroack’s views on bonding during sexual activity illustrates this last point. Evidently, Keroack has given lectures in which he claims that there are long-term emotional costs to non-marital sexual activity. According to Amanda Schaffer, writing in Slate, Keroack said this: “People who have misused their sexual faculty and become bonded to multiple persons will diminish the power of oxytocin to maintain a permanent bond with an individual.”
Schaeffer cites this as an example of outrageous claims that Keroack makes to “scare the bejesus out of kids to convince them to remain abstinent.” But I think her outrage reveals the zeal of condomist ideology. No known contraceptive method eliminates the risk of being emotionally wounded by inappropriate sex. Therefore, condomists must stamp out discussion of negative consequences of sexual activity that can’t be handle with contraception.
Schaffer cites as evidence a recent review article on oxytocin. But “The Neuroscience of Affiliation,” by Drs. Jennifer Bartz and Eric Hollander, only bears indirectly on the question at hand. According to Bartz and Hollander, “Overall, the findings from the studies of healthy humans parallel those from animal studies and point to the role of oxytocin in stress response and in enhancing social affiliation; however, the underlying mechanisms are not yet well understood.”
More to the point: Look at what we do know for sure. We know for sure that oxytocin promotes bonding and affiliation, even though we don’t know everything we’d like to know about how the mechanism works. We know that sexual activity promotes oxytocin production, especially though not exclusively in women. We know that young people with early sexual initiation and multiple sexual partners are less likely to be in a stable happy relationship at age 30. And we know that sexual activity, particularly casual sex and multiple partners, increases the risk of depression for teenage females. I have presented material on sexual behavior and the physiology of attachment many times.
I have gotten a pretty good feel for how audiences react. I use a phrase from Theresa Crenshaw, author of The Alchemy of Love and Lust: The oxytocin response can create “an involuntary chemical commitment.” When I explain that women are particularly prone to get an oxytocin-generated feeling of attachment, the room gets very quiet, as people start thinking back over their experiences. Some people do not welcome this information. But most are relieved: They see an explanation for some of the seemingly inexplicable things they’ve done and impossible situations they have gotten themselves into.
People have told me that they now understood why they found it difficult to break off with a cohabiting partner whom they knew was not really right for them. I’ve had counselors tell me that the oxytocin connection helps them understand why sexually active couples whom they can see are incompatible, nevertheless get married. I’ve had young people tell me that they were glad they had heard me talk when they were 22, instead of much later. They felt I had spared them a lot of grief.
Whether Keroack’s string of inferences or causal chain is exactly correct I cannot say. But it is beyond doubt that his general conclusion is absolutely correct: The physiology of attachment is undoubtedly part of the explanation for why non-marital sex is a risk factor for later relationship difficulties. He is drawing a perfectly logical conclusion from the available evidence.
And besides, what is the alternative position that Keroack’s critics would promote? That unattached sex is completely costless, as long as it is safely contracepted? That young people should feel perfectly free to have as many sexual encounters as they want, provided they use a condom?
This is why I say condomism is an ideological position. Any problem that can’t be solved with contraception is not worth talking about.
I cannot vouch for everything Keroack and any organization he’s been involved with have ever said or done. But it is not scaring the bejesus out of people to inform them of the substantial emotional risks associated with casual sex.
posted by LeBlues @ 4:47 PM,
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Jumping jack flash
Naughty "striptease" workouts may be the hottest new fitness craze, but when it comes to female sexual power, I'm not sure any one want to take cues from Carmen Electra.
There are women who can work it while they work out. When they feel the burn, they break into a healthy glow that they dab at provocatively with a pink towel. But me? my girl is more the matted of hair, red of face, sweat stained of oversized, 10-year-old T-shirt type. she is also spectacularly short on time and don't have a nearby gym. So it happens that se has become a devotee of DVDs -- and subsequently discovered that Carmen Electra is the biggest thing to happen to exercise since leg warmers.
The former Prince protégé, Playmate and owner of the second most famous pair of boobs ever to grace "Baywatch" has the top-selling fitness title in the country, according to Billboard. Electra's 3-year-old "Aerobic Striptease" has spent 24 weeks near No. 1 on the charts, while her "The Lap Dance" has settled a few slots below. Together they are the "Child Called It" of ecdysiastic aerobics.
And because rump quaking abhors a vacuum, the Pussycat Dolls have gone from fanciful novelty to MTV omniscience, Fuse TV's amateur disrobing contest, "Pants-Off Dance Off," has become the fledgling network's first real hit, and dance poles are going up in homes where treadmills gather dust. We thought stripper chic peaked a decade ago. Instead, it just trickled down.
posted by LeBlues @ 10:17 AM,
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Stripping is art, Norway decides
A Norwegian appeals court has ruled that striptease is an art form and should therefore be exempt from value-added tax (VAT).
The owners of the Diamond Go Go Bar in Oslo had refused to pay VAT of 25% on entry fees as tax authorities demanded.
The local authority had taken the club to court over its refusal to pay tax.
Lawyers for the club's owners argued that striptease dancers were stage artists just like sword-swallowers and comedians and deserved the same status.
"Striptease, in the way it is practised in this case, is a form of dance combined with acting," the judges ruled, according to AFP news agency.
The court's ruling upholds an earlier verdict of May 2005.
"One can suspect there were moral scruples behind the tax authorities' claim since all forms of stage dance are free of value-added tax," Reuters news agency quoted the club owners' lawyer as saying.
The court ordered the state to cover the court costs of the owners of the Diamond Go Go Bar.
posted by LeBlues @ 10:15 AM,
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