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Eros Unbound
Friday, February 16, 2007

Valentine’s Day seems an appropriate occasion to honor the late Gershon Legman, who is said to have coined the slogan “Make love, not war.” Odd to think that saying had a particular author, rather than being spontaneously generated by the countercultural Zeitgeist in the 1960s. But I’ve seen the line attributed to Legman a few times over the years; and the new Yale Book of Quotations (discussed in an earlier column) is even more specific, indicates that he first said it during a speech at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, sometime in November 1963.

Legman, who died in 1999 at the age of 81, was the rare instance of a scholar who had less of a career than a profound calling — one that few academic institutions in his day could have accommodated. Legman was the consummate bibliographer and taxonomist of all things erotic: a tireless collector and analyst of all forms of discourse pertaining to human sexuality, including the orally transmitted literature known as folklore. He was an associate of Alfred Kinsey during the 1940s, but broke with him over questions of statistical methodology. If it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else; by all accounts, Legman was a rather prickly character.

But it is impossible to doubt his exacting standards of scholarship after reading The Horn Book: Studies in Erotic Folklore and Bibliography (University Books, 1964) — a selection of Legman’s papers reflecting years of exploration in the “restricted” collections of research libraries. (At the Library of Congress, for example, you will sometimes find a title listed as belonging to “the Delta Collection,” which was once available to a reader only after careful vetting by the authorities. The books themselves have long since been integrated into the rest of the library’s holdings, but not-yet-updated catalog listings still occasionally reveal that a volume formerly had that alluring status: forbidden yet protected.) Legman approached erotic literature and “blue” folklore with philological rigor, treating with care songs and books that only ever circulated on the sly.

Some of Legman’s work appeared from commercial publishers and reached a nonscholarly audience. He assembled two volumes of obscene limericks, organized thematically and in variorum. The title of another project, The Rationale of the Dirty Joke, only hints at its terrible sobriety and analytic earnestness. Sure, you can skim around in it for the jokes themselves. But Legman’s approach was strictly Freudian, his ear constantly turned to the frustration, anxiety, and confusion expressed in humor.

Not all of his work was quite that grim. Any scholar publishing a book called Oragentialism: Oral Techniques in Genital Excitation may be said to have contributed something to the sum total of human happiness. The first version, devoted exclusively to cunnilingus, appeared from a small publisher in the 1940s and can only have had very limited circulation. The commercial edition published in 1969 expanded its scope — though Legman (who in some of his writings comes across, alas, as stridently hostile to the early gay rights movement) seemed very emphatic in insisting that his knowledge of fellatio was strictly as a recipient.

Defensiveness apart, what’s particularly striking about the book is the degree to which it really is a work of scholarship. You have to see his literature review (a critical evaluation of the available publications on the matter, whether popular, professional, or pornographic, in several languages) to believe it. Thanks to Legman’s efforts, it is possible to celebrate Valentine’s Day with a proper sense of tradition.

Legman was a pioneer of cultural studies, long before anyone thought to call it that. He served as editor for several issues of Neurotica, a great underground literary magazine published between 1948 and 1952. Most of its contributors were then unknown, outside very small circles; but they included Allen Ginsberg, Anatole Broyard, Leonard Bernstein, and an English professor from Canada named Marshall McLuhan.

As the title may suggest, Neurotica reflected the growing cultural influence of Freud. But it also went against the prevalent tendency to treat psychoanalysis as a tool for adjusting misfits to society. The journal treated American popular culture itself as profoundly deranged; and in developing this idea, Legman served as something like the house theorist.

In a series of essays adapted from his pamphlet Love and Death (1948), Legman cataloged the seemingly endless sadism and misogyny found in American movies, comic books, and pulp novels. (Although Love and Death is long out of print, a representative excerpt can be found in Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester’s collection Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium, published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2004.)

Legman pointed out that huge profits were to be made from depicting murder, mutilation, and sordid mayhem. But any attempt at a frank depiction of erotic desire, let alone of sex itself, was forbidden. And this was no coincidence, he concluded. A taste for violence was being “installed as a substitute outlet for forbidden sexuality” by the culture industry.

Censorship and repression were warping the American psyche at its deepest levels, Legman argued. The human needs that ought to be met by a healthy sexual life came back, in distorted form, as mass-media sadism: “the sense of individuality, the desire for importance, attention, power; the pleasure in controlling objects, the impulse toward violent activity, the urge towards fulfillment to the farthest reaches of the individual’s biological possibilities.... All these are lacking in greater or lesser degree when sex is lacking, and they must be replaced in full.”

Replaced, that is, by the noir pleasures of the trashy pop culture available in the 1940s.

Here, alas, it proves difficult to accept Legman’s argument in quite the terms framing it. His complaints about censorship and hypocrisy are easy to take for granted as justified. But the artifacts that filled him with contempt and rage — Gone With the Wind, the novels of Raymond Chandler, comic books with titles like Authentic Police Cases or Rip Kirby: Mystery of the Mangler — are more likely to fill us with nostalgia.

It’s not that his theory about their perverse subtext now seems wrong. On the contrary, it often feels as if he’s on to something. But while condemning the pulp fiction or movies of his day as symptomatic of a neurotic culture, Legman puts his finger right on what makes them fascinating now — their nervous edge, the tug of war between raw lust and Puritan rage.

In any case, a certain conclusion follows from Legman’s argument — one that we can test against contemporary experience.

Censorship of realistic depictions of sexuality will intensify the climate of erotic repression, thereby creating an audience prone to consuming pop-culture sadomasochism. If so, per Legman, then the easing or abolition of censorship ought to yield, over time, fewer images and stories centering on violence, humiliation, and so on.

Well, we know how that experiment turned out. Erotica is now always just a few clicks away (several offers are pouring into your e-mail account as you read this sentence). And yet one of the most popular television programs in the United States is a drama whose hero is good at torture.

They may have been on to something in the pages of Neurotica, all those decades ago, but things have gotten more complicated in the meantime.

As it happens, I’ve just been reading a manuscript called “Eros Unbound: Pornography and the Internet” by Blaise Cronin, a professor of information science at Indiana University at Bloomington, and former dean of its School of Information and Library Science. His paper will appear in The Internet and American Business: An Historical Investigation, a collection edited by William Aspray and Paul Ceruzzi scheduled for publication by MIT Press in April 2008.

Contacting Cronin to ask permission to quote from his work, I asked if he had any connection with the Kinsey Institute, also in Bloomington. He doesn’t, but says he is on friendly terms with some of the researchers there. Kinsey was committed to recording and tabulating sexual activity in all its forms. Cronin admits that he cannot begin to describe all the varieties of online pornography. Then again, he doesn’t really want to try.

“I focus predominantly on the legal sex industry,” he writes in his paper, “concentrating on the output of what, for want of a better term, might be called the respectable, or at least licit, part of the pornography business. I readily acknowledge the existence of, but do not dwell upon the seamier side, unceremoniously referred to by an anonymous industry insider as the world of ‘dogs, horses, 12-year old girls, all this crazed Third-World s—.’ ”

The notion of a “respectable” pornography industry would have seemed oxymoronic when Legman published Love and Death. It’s clearly much less so at a time when half the hotel chains in the United States offer X-rated films on pay-per-view. Everyone knows that there is a huge market for online depictions of sexual behavior. But what Cronin’s study makes clear is that nobody has a clue just how big an industry it really is. Any figure you might hear cited now is, for all practical purposes, a fiction.

The truth of this seems to have dawned on Cronin following the publication, several years ago, of “E-rogenous Zones: Positioning Pornography in the Digital Marketplace,” a paper he co-authored with Elizabeth Davenport. One of the tables in their paper “estimated global sales figures for the legal sex/pornography industry,” offering a figure of around $56 billion annually. That estimate squared with information gathered from a number of trade and media organizations. But much of the raw data had originally been provided by a specific enterprise — something called the Private Media Group, Inc., which Cronin describes as “a Barcelona-based, publicly traded adult entertainment company.”

After the paper appeared in the journal Information Society in 2001, Cronin says, he was contacted “by Private’s investor relations department wondering if I could furnish the company with growth projections and other related information for the adult entertainment industry — I, who had sourced some of my data from their Web site.” That estimate of $56 billion per year, based on research now almost a decade old, is routinely cited as if it were authoritative and up to date.

“Many of the numbers bandied about by journalists, pundits, industry insiders and market research organizations,” he writes, “are lazily recycled, as in the case of our aforementioned table, moving effortlessly from one story and from one reporting context to the next. What seem to be original data and primary sources may actually be secondary or tertiary in character.... Some of the startling revenue estimates and growth forecasts produced over the years by reputable market research firms ... have been viewed all too often with awe rather than healthy skepticism.”

Where Legman was, so to speak, an ideologue of sex, Blaise Cronin seems more scrupulously dispassionate. His manuscript runs to some 50 pages and undertakes a very thorough review of the literature concerning online pornography. (My wife, a reference librarian whose work focuses largely on developments in digital technology and e-commerce, regards Cronin’s paper as one of the best studies of the subject around.) He doesn’t treat the dissemination of pornography as either emancipatory or a sign of decadence. It’s just one of the facts of life, so to speak.

His paper does contain a surprise, though. It’s a commonplace now that porn is assuming an increasingly ordinary role as cultural commodity — one generating incalculable, but certainly enormous, streams of revenue for cable companies, Internet service providers, hotel chains, and so on. But the “mainstreaming” of porn is a process that works both ways. Large sectors of the once-marginal industry are morphing into something ever more resembling corporate America.

“The sleazy strip joints, tiny sex shops, dingy backstreet video stores and other such outlets may not yet have disappeared,” writes Cronin, “but along with the Web-driven mainstreaming of pornography has come — almost inevitably, one has to say — full-blown corporatization and cosmeticization.... The archetypal mom and pop business is being replaced by a raft of companies with business school-trained accountants, marketing managers and investment analysts at the helm, an acceleration of a trend that began at the tail-end of the twentieth century. As the pariah industry strives to smarten itself up, the language used by some of the leading companies has become indistinguishable from that of Silicon Valley or Martha Stewart. It is a normalizing discourse designed to resonate with the industry’s largely affluent, middle class customer base.”

As an example, he quotes what sounds like a formal mission statement at one porn provider’s website: “New Frontier Media, Inc. is a technology driven content distribution company specializing in adult entertainment. Our corporate culture is built on a foundation of quality, integrity and commitment and our work environment is an extension of this…The Company offers diversity of cultures and ethnic groups. Dress is casual and holiday and summer parties are normal course. We support team and community activities.”

That’s right, they have casual Fridays down at the porn factory. Also, it sounds like, a softball team.

I doubt very much that anybody in this brave new world remembers cranky old Gershon Legman, with his index cards full of bibliographical data on Renaissance handbooks on making the beast with two backs. (Nowadays, of course, two backs might be considered conservative.) Ample opportunity now exists to watch or read about sex. Candor seems not just possible but obligatory. But that does not necessarily translate into happiness — into satisfaction of “the urge towards towards fulfillment to the farthest reaches of the individual’s biological possibilities,” as Legman put it.

That language is a little gray, but the meaning is more romantic than it sounds. What Legman is actually celebrating is the exchange taking place at the farthest reaches of a couple’s biological possibilities: the moment when sex turns into erotic communion. And for that, broadband access is irrelevant. For that, you need to be really lucky.

posted by LeBlues @ 1:03 PM, ,




Romance, schmomance -- Natural selection continues even after sex
Thursday, February 15, 2007

Some breaking news, just in time for Valentine's Day: Researchers have identified something called "sperm competition" that they think has evolved to ensure a genetic future. In sexual reproduction, natural selection is generally thought of as something that happens prior to – and in fact leads to -- the Big Event. This thinking holds, for example, that we are drawn to physical features that tell us our partner is healthy and will give us a fighting chance to carry on our genetic lineage. But a new article in the February issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science suggests that the human male has evolved mechanisms to pass on his genes during post-copulation as well, a phenomenon dubbed "sperm competition."

In their article, Todd Shackelford and Aaron Goetz at Florida Atlantic University describe this as "the inevitable consequence of males competing for fertilizations."

How much more romantic can you get?

For a monogamous species, sperm competition may seem beside the point. But according to the authors, extra curricular copulations (i.e. affairs) appear to be a significant part of our ancestral history and could, evolutionarily speaking, spell disaster. A male whose female partner engages in some off-line dalliances unwittingly may be investing his resources – food, protection, credit rating -- in a genetically unrelated offspring.

Competition may also affect sperm count, say the authors. The more time men spend away from their partners (time that their partners could have spent with other males), the number of sperm in their ejaculate increases upon their next copulation. In one study, the authors note, artificial phalluses constructed to resemble the structure and function of the human penis actually removed an ejaculate-like substance from an artificial vagina. This could indicate that the penis acts as an anatomical squeegee to remove an interloper's calling card.

But sperm competition is not just biology. According to the authors, many sexual behaviors such as deep copulatory thrusting may function to remove rival sperm. Sexual partners report that men thrust more deeply and quickly into the vagina following allegations of infidelity. The same periods of separation that increase sperm number in male ejaculates may also help to explain the increasingly lustful feelings human males develop after long periods of time apart from their mate. That is, the human male may want to copulate as soon as possible as insurance against possible extra-pair copulation.

These latest findings lead us to wonder about what other undiscovered ways humans have evolved in a world dictated by "survival of the fittest." In fact, the authors compare sexual adaptation to a Cold War phenomenon: "Sexual conflict between males and females," Shackelford and Goetz describe, "produces a coevolutionary arms race between the sexes," in which an advantage gained by one gender leads to counteradaptations in the other. They speculate that research may move beyond male adaptations to, for example, see if females have developed biological or behavioral mechanisms to increase retention of sperm from men with the most favorable genes. But that's for another Valentine's Day.

posted by LeBlues @ 1:28 PM, ,




Do Astronauts Have Sex?
Wednesday, February 14, 2007

In space, no one can hear you moan.

Astronaut Lisa Nowak is facing attempted murder charges after she drove nearly 1,000 miles to confront a rival for the affections of another astronaut, Bill Oefelein. Nowak said that she and Oefelein had "more than a working relationship, but less than a romantic relationship." Wait, did they ever get it on in space?

No. Nowak and Oefelein were never on the same mission, so they couldn't possibly have joined the 62-mile-high club. But some of their colleagues may well have engaged in some extraterrestrial hanky-panky. Former and current astronauts don't like to talk about space-shuttle sex, and NASA says that if it's ever happened, the agency doesn't know anything about it. (NASA has never conducted official experiments on animal reproduction in space, says a spokesman.)

If astronauts have had space sex, it would have been very difficult. First off, there isn't much privacy up there. A regular shuttle is about as big as a 737, and the two main areas—the crew cabin and middeck—are each the size of a small office. The bathroom is little more than a seat with a curtain, and there aren't any closed rooms where two people could retreat. The space station, on the other hand, has a little more room to operate. The three-person crew generally splits up for sleeping time: Two of them bed down in a pair of tiny crew cabins at one end of the station, and the third might jump in a sleeping bag at the other end, almost 200 feet away. (The panel-and-strap design of a space bed might not be that conducive to lovemaking.) Astronauts also have a demanding work schedule, leaving them with little time or energy for messing around. Space-station crews do get time off on weekends, though, when they can watch movies, read books, play games, "and generally have a good time."


Of course, speculation has been rampant. The first mission that included both men and women launched in 1982. But on that flight, cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya's reputation for toughness, not to mention her married status, stamped out rumors. The first married couple went to space in 1991, when training-camp sweethearts Jan Davis and Mark Lee served together on a mission. NASA normally has a policy against letting married couples fly together, not because they're afraid they'll have sex, but because it might hurt the team dynamic. However, they made an exception for Davis and Lee since the couple got married so close to launch time. (In this photo, taken during the mission, Lee has his arm around Davis.) Both have refused to answer questions about the nature of their relationship during the mission. In the 1990s, rumors circulated about unorthodox coziness between Elena Kondakova and Valery Polyakov on a mission to the space station Mir, especially after a video got out showing Valery playfully splashing water on Elena during the flight.

The question of space sex has prompted at least one hoax. In his book The Last Mission, French author Pierre Kohler claimed that NASA had commissioned a study on sexual positions in outer space. He cited a fictional document, widely available online, that describes subjects experimenting with 10 different positions, six of which required an elastic band or sleeping-baglike tube to keep the couple together in zero gravity.

Which raises the question: Would space sex be any good? Recent research suggests it would not. For one thing, zero gravity can induce nausea—a less-than-promising sign for would-be lovers. Astronauts also perspire a lot in flight, meaning sex without gravity would likely be hot, wet, and surrounded by small droplets of sweat. In addition, people normally experience lower blood pressure in space, which means reduced blood flow, which means … well, you know what that means.

posted by LeBlues @ 10:06 AM, ,




Searching for Mr. Right
Tuesday, February 13, 2007

HAVING lost Congress and faith, at times, in President Bush, social conservatives are now holding out for a hero in the 2008 Republican presidential campaign.

But who? And what kind of hero?

Is it the hero of 9/11, Rudolph W. Giuliani, whose support of abortion rights is anything but heroic to social conservatives? Is it the hero against gay marriage in Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, who nevertheless once championed gay rights? Or is it a hero of wartime, John McCain, who has also betrayed them on issues like federal judicial appointments?

Eleven months before the first presidential caucuses, social conservatives are in no mood to compromise; many don’t want to settle for Senator McCain, nor can they abide Mr. Giuliani. They want a true believer, reliably opposed to abortion rights, gay rights and gun control, tough on immigration and a supporter of conservative judicial appointments.

But are any second-tier contenders strong enough to carry the mantle of their idol, Ronald Reagan — and also, strong enough to win?

Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas strongly opposes abortion rights and gay marriage; former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas is a Southern Baptist minister who talks about religion and civic life; and Representative Duncan Hunter appears to have solid conservative credentials. Yet all three are largely unknown beyond their states and Capitol Hill. The same goes for Representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado, who appears to be a one-issue candidate, focused on fighting illegal immigration.

Gone is the sense that social conservatives are a unified bloc. The movement that rose with the candidacy of Ronald Reagan in the 1970s is now fractured over both its messengers and its message. The issues that social conservatives care about most are often overshadowed by Iraq and terrorism, energy and taxes. And if their vote splinters in 2008, their political potency could be sapped.

If these voters split into factions for different Republican candidates, either Mr. Giuliani or Mr. McCain could slip through the middle (while wriggling around the so-called values issues), uniting enough fiscal conservatives and national security conservatives — and moderate and liberal Republicans — to win the party’s nomination next year. And Mr. Giuliani, for one, is starting to shade his support for abortion rights in hopes of assuaging opponents.

“A fractured movement is Rudy Giuliani’s dream,” said Paul M. Weyrich, chairman of the Free Congress Foundation, a conservative research group. “What I hear constantly is, ‘We’ve got to beat Hillary; we can’t allow her to be president.’

“What I’m hearing is, ‘We hate him, we don’t agree with his positions, we feel that his personal life is a travesty — but on the other hand, he probably could beat Hillary.’ I hear this over and over again. I keep telling people, don’t fall for that.”

Yet Mr. Weyrich, a savvy political strategist, knows that if social conservatives are torn on Election Day, many may stay home, and the consequence might be another Clinton presidency. So a moment of political reckoning for social conservatives seems inevitable. Will they give ground on their issues in order to elect a Republican?

“I don’t see social conservatives making compromises to win in 2008,” said the Rev. Donald Wildmon, founder of the American Family Association, a conservative Christian broadcaster and advocacy group. “Social conservatives don’t blindly follow the Pied Piper anymore. We’ve been disappointed and taken for granted by Republicans at times. I don’t think there’s any appetite for compromising core values.”

Nor should there be, according to Governor Huckabee. In recent interviews, he has artfully tied his religious devotion to broader social concerns. For instance, on NPR last week, he said that reclaiming a nation for Christ was not a matter of proselytizing.

“It means that we would reflect what he reflected, and that is compassion and love,” Mr. Huckabee said.

Yet he was also critical of some opponents of abortion rights, suggesting that they focus too much on embryos. “I want to be concerned about making sure every child has music and art education,” he said. “There are a lot of things that, to me, are a part of my being pro-life.”

Senator Brownback, meanwhile, has told some allies that he will not allow Iraq or economic issues to distract him from talking about social issues. Indeed, in a speech last month, he listed reviving faith among Americans and opposing same-sex marriage as examples of his priorities.

Mr. Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, has tried to explain his conversion on abortion rights, from support to opposition, with a made-for-television story: As he listened to a Harvard researcher discussing stem-cell science, and the destruction of embryos, he saw the antiabortion cause in a new light.

At some recent conferences for social conservatives, Mr. Romney has used a line that some conservatives find credible: “On abortion I was not always a Ronald Reagan conservative. Neither was Ronald Reagan.”

This sort of language also resonates with other conservative wings of the party, like some members of the antitax faction who do not want to get bogged down over whether Mr. Romney is now sufficiently sincere in his opposition to abortion.

“Romney has a one-way, one-time migration on abortion to explain,” said Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform. “Senator McCain, meanwhile, was a Reaganite on taxes and then drifted for six years and now wants to come back. Same on guns. Same on judges. He was a two-way migration on several issues, and a lot of conservatives will have a hard time with that.”

Yet on a fundamental matter like the life of a fetus, some social conservatives say, the turnabout by Mr. Romney is worthy of skepticism.

“I know people can change, but sometimes when people want to be president, they speak of a change that has not occurred,” Mr. Wildmon said. “I like to go with a person whose words match their actions.”

Mr. McCain’s campaign is counting on a sharp split among social conservatives in the 2008 primary. Mr. Brownback and Mr. Huckabee, his strategists believe, lack the money and organizational strength to mount serious bids that would galvanize social conservatives. Meanwhile, Mr. McCain and Mr. Giuliani are portraying themselves as conservatives on taxes and national security.

“If someone can make a credible case to the social conservatives and have a position on Iraq that appeals to the broad majority of Republicans, you may see an election where the social issues, the moral values issues, are not as central as they were in the past,” said Matthew Dallek, the author of “The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan’s First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics.”

Mr. Dallek notes that Mr. Reagan, as governor of California in the 1960s, took steps to support abortion rights and raise taxes. Yet he became a unifying figure for social conservatives because of his staunch anti-Communist credentials, and because he came to embrace their positions opposing abortion rights as well as tax cuts.

“Social conservatives may come to see one of the leading candidates as solid enough on their values issues, while keeping the national focus on the major issue of the day — defeating Communism for Reagan, and fixing Iraq and winning the war on terror for a McCain or a Romney,” Mr. Dallek said.

Yet this outcome seems an unlikely prospect to some political analysts.

In a survey of voters in the 2006 elections, the Pew Forum found that so-called values issues like opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion rights mattered the most to white evangelical Protestant voters. Forty-five percent of them ranked values issues highest; 17 percent chose the war in Iraq; and 12 percent cited illegal immigration.

“White evangelical Protestants are not only still a real component of the Republican Party, but they are also concentrated in key primary states like South Carolina, Florida and Virginia,” said John Green, a senior fellow in religion and American politics at the Pew Forum. “They are not going away, and it’s too soon to say how fractured they will be.”

posted by LeBlues @ 11:54 AM, ,




The Hypocrisy Hunter's Guide
Saturday, February 10, 2007

Sex, politics and religion have been bedfellows since 1804

The announcement this week that the Rev. Ted Haggard has embraced therapy and discovered his true heterosexuality rounds off a year of scandals that have plagued the powerful Religious Right-Republican Party alliance. It began with revelations about disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff's back-room dealings with Ralph Reed, former golden boy of the Christian Coalition; gained momentum with Mark Foley's emails; and peaked with Mr. Haggard's spectacular gay-sex scandal.

Among Republicans there has been much hand-wringing over the moral decline of the party's leadership, and--a continuing theme--our waning days as a Christian nation. In turn, Democrats and hypocrisy-hunters have offered gleeful "I told you so's" and redoubled their calls for a return to an era before the rise of the Moral Majority, before religion thrust itself into the political sphere.

Unfortunately, both sides are nostalgic for "good old days" that never existed. Sex, politics and religion have been regular, if cantankerous, bedfellows since 1804--when the Rev. Timothy Dwight, then head of Yale College, warned voters that if they didn't toss Thomas Jefferson out of office, the president "would make our wives and daughters the victims of legalized prostitution."

In fact, as the historian John H. Summers has observed, the 19th century suffered many more scandals than the 20th, when evolving standards of personal privacy, political professionalism and objective journalism brought a new decorum to public discourse. Ironically, a resurgence came in the 1980s, as the evangelical Christian movement began its political ascent, suggesting that mixing religious righteousness with politics may cause more imbroglios than it prevents.


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The biggest of the 19th-century scandals, during the presidential election of 1884, offers a case in point. After a decade of government-corruption outrages--including the Whiskey Ring and Boss Tweed's Tammany Hall--the country had what we'd now call "scandal fatigue." Thus many Republicans were infuriated when their party's presidential nomination went to James G. Blaine, the former secretary of state who was dogged by rumors of graft and profiteering.

The Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, at the time America's most celebrated preacher and the Republican Party's most influential religious champion, was particularly incensed by Blaine's nomination. The minister had campaigned aggressively for every Republican presidential candidate since the party's founding in the 1850s. He promoted candidates from the pulpit of his 3,000-seat "mega-church" in Brooklyn, N.Y., and spoke at rallies nationwide, urging all good Christians to vote Republican.

For Beecher, Blaine's nomination was the final straw after years of growing disgust with both the ethical shenanigans in Washington and the GOP's shift from being the party of moral reform to the party of big business. This time, he declared, he was backing the Democratic candidate, Grover Cleveland. The former governor of New York had won a reputation for rare rectitude, earning the nickname "Grover the Good."

Just as Beecher announced his defection, a firestorm erupted: Newspapers reported that as a young bachelor in Buffalo, N.Y., Cleveland had fathered a child out of wedlock. Cleveland responded by confessing that he had indeed paid support to the child's mother for the past 14 years.

Most ministers would have abandoned the accused sinner, but Beecher was not like other men of the cloth. Only 10 years before he had faced down his own national sex scandal after being accused of seducing a married woman in his congregation. When the cuckolded husband sued Beecher in civil court, the story generated more press coverage than the entire Civil War. Unlike Cleveland, however, Beecher denied all, and the trial ended in a hung jury, allowing the minister to retain the mantle of innocence, however muddied.

When the Cleveland illegitimate-child story broke, Beecher's friends urged him to back off and save his own reputation. Instead, he threw all his weight behind the Democrat, who was continually taunted for his peccadillo during the unusually nasty campaign, including the famous ditty: "Ma! Ma! Where's my pa? Gone to the White House, Ha! Ha! Ha!"

Beecher seemed to take these slings personally; indeed, to be invigorated by them. As the campaign grew uglier, his rhetoric grew more reckless. "If every man in New York State tonight, who has broken the seventh commandment, voted for Cleveland, he would be elected by 200,000 majority!" he shouted at rallies, shocking even his most devoted followers and rekindling rumors of his own infidelity.

Beecher's instincts about the electorate were right, however. Cleveland won by a tiny margin, put over the top by New York. The victory came partly because voters believed that Cleveland had honorably confessed his mistake and partly because they found the Republican candidate's alleged financial and ethical transgressions slightly more repellent than the Democrat's sexual misdeed.


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If history offers a lesson in these matters, it is that leaders take a large risk when they embrace the rhetoric of religious righteousness. Americans are awfully forgiving, but they harden their hearts to coverup and hypocrisy. Cleveland was saved from his sin by candor. Beecher's role reminds us that the task of a great moral teacher is not to condemn others from on high but to show us that we are all sinners and that the only figures worthy of public trust are those who have the courage to grapple honestly with their flaws. As Beecher so aptly put it: "Cant is the twin sister of hypocrisy."

posted by LeBlues @ 12:12 PM, ,




Sex and the Single Superhero
Wednesday, February 7, 2007





posted by LeBlues @ 10:11 AM, ,




The L Word
Sunday, February 4, 2007

Men have been talking their way into women's pants since the dawn of human speech, but a new report shows some significant geographic variance in method. Harlequin Publishing (yes, that Harlequin) recently asked males in various countries whether they'd said "I love you" solely as a means of getting past third base. The results are striking, with Frenchmen appearing to be twice as likely to use the endearment as their German counterparts—though it bears noting that "je t'aime" does sound a hell of a lot sexier than "Ich liebe dich."*

France: 67%

The Netherlands: 58%

United States: 55%

Australia: 50%

Sweden: 43%

U.K. 42%

Canada: 38%

Germany: 33%

*Alternatively, of course, this survey could just mean that German girls are twice as easy.

posted by LeBlues @ 11:05 AM, ,




New Exhibition Pays Tribute to 100,000 Years of Sex
Friday, February 2, 2007

Ancient phalluses, the world's oldest condom, a naked anatomically correct Neanderthal: visitors to the new exhibition "100,000 Years of Sex" will find plenty to stimulate their brains -- not to mention other organs.

Most people have enough trouble imagining their parents having sex. But your ancestors from 100,000 years ago? Yes, they had sex too, strange as it may sound. In fact, humans have been having sex since ... well, since humanity existed.

Now a new exhibition in Germany pays tribute to 100 glorious millennia of making out and doin' it. The show "100,000 Years of Sex" at the Neanderthal Museum in Mettman near Düsseldorf addresses -- in a strictly scientific manner, of course -- such burning questions as: When did we start feeling lust and thinking about sex? Did meat get exchanged for sex in the Stone Age? And just how did the ancient Greeks and Romans do it?

The exhibition which opens Feb. 3 and runs through May 20, features voluptuous clay figures, well-endowed statues and ancient containers featuring rather raunchy engravings. The visitor can expect a "journey through time as interesting as it is pleasurable," the museum said in a press release. Highlights include a 28,000-year-old phallus and the oldest condom in the world.

The show also addresses how sexual attitudes -- often seen as set in stone today -- have evolved over the millennia. Attitudes to marriage, homosexuality and pedophilia were very different in the past, and what went in ancient Rome was frowned upon in the God-fearing Middle Ages, not to mention our own puritanical age. Sexual mores from all periods are explained in the no-holds-barred exhibition.

Visitors to the museum will be greeted by a reconstruction of a Neanderthal individual who has been specially stripped of his usual leather garments for the occasion -- and who is anatomically correct.
The Neanderthal mannequin is the symbol of the museum, which is located in the German valley where Neanderthal remains were found and which gave the humanoid species its name. (The scientific jury is still out on the question of whether Neanderthals and humans actually had sex, however.)

Just to make sure humanity continues to propagate itself for the next 100,000 years, the museum offers "singles tours" around the exhibition as part of its program -- complete with complementary glass of red wine to help lower those inhibitions and let the erotica on offer take its course.

posted by LeBlues @ 9:24 AM, ,




Hospice helps dying man lose virginity
Thursday, February 1, 2007

Thanks to a church-run hospice, one disabled man was granted his dying wish: to lose his virginity.

22-year-old Nick Wallis, who has muscular dystrophy, had hoped to experience sex before he died. After telling staff at the Douglas House hospice in Oxford of his wish, they decided to help him, reported London's Daily Telegraph.

Click here for read the original story.

Wallis had hoped to form a relationship through which to experience sex, but it just never happened.
"I had hoped to form a relationship when I went to university, but it didn't happen. I had to recognize that if was to experience sex I would have to pay for it out of my savings. My mind was made up before I discussed it with anyone else," Wallis said.

"I found an advert from a sex worker in a magazine for the disabled," Wallis said. "The initial contact was by email and then by phone."

It was arranged for the prostitute to visit Wallis' home while his parents went out.

"It was a decision two years in the making and I discussed it with my carers and my parents. Telling my mother and father was the hardest part, but in the end they gave me their support," Wallis told the Telegraph.

The hospice staff consulted a solicitor, clergy, and health care professionals before agreeing to assist Wallis.

Sister Frances, the founder of the hospice, described Wallis as "delightful, intelligent and aware young man."

"I know that some people will say 'You are a Christian foundation. What are you thinking about?' But we are here for all faiths and none," she said.

"It is not our job to make moral decisions for our guests. We came to the conclusion that it was our duty of care to support Nick emotionally and to help ensure his physical safety."

Wallis said the experience was not quite what he had hoped.

"It was not emotionally fulfilling, but the lady was very pleasant and very understanding. I do not know whether I would do it again. I would much rather find a girlfriend, but I have to be realistic."

Wallis made the decision to talk about his experience as part of the BBC documentary series about life inside Douglas House and its associated children's hospice, Helen House.

posted by LeBlues @ 9:50 AM, ,