The Medical Profession and Cutting: Part I
Posted on | August 31, 2010 | No Comments
A couple of the commenters on my last blog about genital cutting took a strong stance against doctors who promote and carry out the practice of cutting in our society. I too am bewildered by the barnacle-like attachment that our medical community has to cutting. But I do not believe that the answer is as simple as, “Doctors who perform circumcisions are bad people.”
I am visualizing the eyes rolling in the heads of some of my readers. I know that I come off as too moderate for many in the way that I express my inactivism. I do see clearly the malevolent aspects of cutting in the USA… that it’s a hangover from Victorian hostility to maleness, etc.; just read my other blogs on the topic, but I genuinely think that a nuanced view of the medical profession’s relation to cutting will help our push against it more than hurt. In my opinion, one great mistake of the anti-female circ movement was in demonizing Somalian grandmothers and communities for the way they cut their granddaughters. I hate all cutting, but I will not hate all cutters.
It could be raised in objection that I’m just proposing a secularized version of “hate the sin, love the sinner,” from the religion of my youth, and maybe so, but for what it’s worth, here are my thoughts on why the American medical community in general is so attached to dis-attaching our little boys’ foreskins.
I had no ideas on this topic fit for print until about eight months ago when I read Jan Patocka’s Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History. In his rightly famous essay on WWI, Patocka gives a quote from the psychoanalyst Kurt Lewin. (Seriously, hang in there. I’m going to get to my point any second. Just imagine… my wife has to put up with this every day.)
During or after WWI, Lewin visited army hospitals talking to soldiers fresh from the trenches. Patocka translates a telling statement from him that I’ll quote in full. The italics are Patocka’s, I think:
[In war] the topographic character of the landscape changes so abruptly that there is an end to it and the ruins no longer are what they had been, villages and so on, but have become what they can be at the given moment, shelters and reference points, so the landscape of life’s fundamental meanings had been transformed, it has acquired an end beyond which there can be nothing further, higher, more desirable.
Now I’ll rewrite the quote in the context of circumcision and the medical community (I have made the substituted words bold):
[In medicine] the topographic character of the body changes so abruptly that there is an end to it and the parts of the body no longer are what they had been, a foreskin, a labia and so on, but have become what they can be at the moment of illness, shelters for infection and diseased organs, so the landscape of life’s fundamental meanings had been transformed, it has acquired an end beyond which there can be nothing further, higher, more desirable.
Relevant to this paraphrasing of Lewin, I remembered the story of a friend of a friend who was a urologist and had actively decided to cut both her boys because she had seen the infections that older uncut men can get when they don’t wash well. The logical error here is only too obvious: A urologist does not get a well distributed population survey in the foreskin department. Old men don’t barge into her office and drop their boxers to show her the uninfected, healthy, intact penis that they are still enjoying the use of. Her shingle actively draws in the infected.
(It’s also ridiculous that a urologist, the single most overqualified professional in the area of male genital hygiene, did not trust herself to train her own two sons to wash themselves… like a dentist deciding to pull all his children’s teeth and give them dentures. “I’ll never get through to them about flossing!”)
So medical professionals, the soldiers in the human war against disease, go to battle in the terrain of our bodies. And just as the WWI soldier considered a church without seeing the beauty but only seeing a tower where a sniper could hide, medical professionals are all too ready to consider the penis without seeing the beauty, but only a fold of skin where disease might hide. This is why all arguments about intactness and the right to bodily integrity fall on deaf ears. And the fact that the disease protection is ridiculously exaggerated isn’t heard either because it’s better to be safe than sorry. We know as a matter of fact that there’s not a sniper in that steeple, but there could be a sniper when we come back through next week. So better to blow it up.
Church and village of Trangisvaag, circa 1900. Photographs of Frederick W.W. Howell, Cornell University Library
In this combined analogy, we of the anti-circ crowd are the villagers pleading with the soldiers to leave our church alone. “We’ll make sure snipers don’t get up there. Just don’t blow up our steeple. We like our church with a steeple on it. If there’s no steeple, how are we going to ring the bell?” And the pro-circ medical community looks at us condescendingly like we’re all the village idiots, “You don’t understand because you’re not in the war. We’ve seen snipers in steeples and it’s not pretty.”
As we carry out our argument about the snipers and the steeple, we anti-circ folks should be mindful that we are the ones who ask the medical community to fight the war, so it’s unfair to frame them all as simply steeple-hating maniacs. At the same time, pro-circ members of the medical community should be mindful that the only way to be totally safe from snipers is to level the whole village and at some point in the creation of total safety, you’ve destroyed everything that makes the village worth fighting for.
Blown up church in Merville, France during WWI, National Library of Scotland
Tags: Circumcision > foreskins > Jan Patocka > Kurt Lewin > sex negativity > Victorianism > World War I > WWI
Aggression and Childbirth
Posted on | August 17, 2010 | No Comments
Before we get into anti-social aggression, let’s acknowledge off the top that any form of life without aggression is impossible and undesirable. Sure, you can close your eyes and imagine a world where no one ever cuts in front of you in line (and if you become some kind of god later on, by all means create that world and invite me, because I’d like to shop there), but in the real world various forms of aggression are just a required tool for living.
With language, we do try to distinguish between acceptable and non-acceptable forms of aggression. The word violence means physical aggression that is unacceptable, although physical aggression is in no way generally frowned on: men’s and women’s sports, war, defending oneself… we approve of all these things and all of them are impossible without aggression.
The word assertive has been taken up in recent years to mean aggressive behavior that we approve of or think of as justified. But behaving assertively still requires aggression. I understand the word game that is being played but in my experience, there are a lot of people who use that distinction to go around like their sh__ doesn’t stink. They assertively declare their aggressive behavior to be assertive behavior when they are really just garden-variety A-holes.
So now let’s turn to the anti-social forms of aggression that we don’t want. Random violence, violence for the sake of control, rape, violently taking other people’s property. The highest profile forms of unwanted aggression are perpetrated by men, most of the destructive physical aggression by lower class men. (When upper class men and women are destructively aggressive, we “punish” them by calling them mister or ma’am and paying them millions of dollars in bonuses, even after they have personally destroyed our entire financial system.)
So, what causes men to become anti-socially aggressive?
1. Lack of touch, which I covered previously.
2. Testosterone is probably the most common answer a lay person would give (followed by a rousing chorus of “Cut all their balls off!”), but it’s also probably wrong, or at least much more complicated than most people suppose. Although studies do link raised testosterone with raised aggression, the direct affect of testosterone seems not to be aggression but rather a drive for social dominance.(4) We all get a whole lot of goodies out of testosteroned-up men and women who strive for social dominance because we have set up a society where they can get the dominance they want through largely non-violent and productive means: success, wealth, education, philanthropy, public service, etc. (The drive for dominance is a part of what drives the free market and although Adam Smith doesn’t emphasize dominance per se in Wealth of Nations, he does talk about the drive for the “esteem” of others, which I’ll take to be an approximate, social analog.)
3. Problems during pregnancy when combined with an unstable family environment increase a person’s risk of violent behavior later in life. Depending on circumstances, it increases it by 2 to 14 times.(1) What problems during pregnancy? Malnutrition towards the end of the first trimester, nicotine exposure, birth complications that lead to anoxia, a lack of oxygen. Forceps delivery and maternal high blood pressure during labor and pushing are common causes for anoxia during childbirth. (I should say that bad birth events might be overemphasized in the literature due to the fact that such abundant data exists about birth circumstances, compared to a relative lack of data about the amount of touching a person receives throughout their life, for example. Bad birth events certainly have an effect. I’m just saying that statistical availability shouldn’t fool us into thinking that they are a primary cause for all aggression. Fine point. My apologies.)
What is an unstable family environment? A criminal father, single mother, teenage mother, being unwanted by mother, psychotic mother or father, neglect, including lack of touch, not having a family in first year of life, orphanage. Teen pregnancy is a special problem because anti-socially aggressive men and women tend to mate early and often (and irresponsibly, meaning that the men don’t stick around).(2) So two sets of anti-social genes combine and then single/teen parenthood provides an adverse environment as a kicker. Plus, teen mothers are the highest level of pregnant smokers in this country and teens often spend months not knowing that they are pregnant, so even if they stop smoking when they find out (good luck with that), it may be too late to stop the effects of nicotine on their child. (Juno is still a funny movie, just a fantasy.)
The key thing to understand is that a genetic predisposition or bad birth event will remain dormant unless triggered by a bad environment. And the reverse seems also to be true that a good environment can prevent a genetic predisposition or bad birth event from blooming into antisociality. In a pretty large study of children with fetal alcohol syndrome who were raised in a stable home environment, their positive upbringing protected them from becoming anti-social.(1)
So why does anoxia during childbirth make a person stupid and aggressive rather than just making them stupid? Deprivation of oxygen affects the hypothalamus in particular and the hypothalamuses of murderers have been noted to be different from non-murderers, so that’s a possible answer that needs more investigation.(1) Mainly though, the part of the brain that is hurt during anoxia is the executive function. The brain can be conceived as a seamlessly integrated, three-part organ, a lizard brain (our brain stem) covered by a monkey brain (our midbrain) covered by a human brain (the cortex). The lizard brain handles stuff like breathing and swallowing, that we don’t want to be bothered with. The monkey brain is constantly proposing actions and statements to the cortex, which navigates the complexities of human society by rejecting or modifying most of what the monkey brain suggests.(3) For example:
Monkey Brain: That’s a delicious piece of fruit. Take it. Hit him and take it!
Human Cortex: Nope. Bad idea.
Monkey Brain: Tell that guy to go ef himself.
Human Cortex: No, again.
Monkey Brain: That girl is pretty / bent over / alone / looks confused / has a slight limp. Go push her down and make sex on her.
Human Cortex: No and no.
So by now, you can see where this is going. If critical parts of the human cortex are damaged, by anoxia or something else, that all-but-constant “No” that it sends downstairs to the monkey brain is not as firm or as quick and maybe under stress or under the influence of alcohol or some other aggression-inducing drug, the cortex will let one or two ill-advised monkey propositions through its guard and that person will hit someone and steal their fruit or tell someone to go ef themselves or rape someone.
To be continued…
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1. Developmental Psychobiology of Aggression, pp 13-35.
2.The Causes of Rape. pp 70-71.
3. That brain layer analysis is from a book called, The Consilient Brain by Gerald A. Cory, Jr. That analysis, when originally proposed back in the 50s or 60s (by somebody other than Cory) was thoroughly rejected by peers, but ideas have a way of coming back and Cory makes a convincing argument for it and the rest of his book is quite brilliant and again out of step with current thinking, which means that he might be right. Don’t listen to the sheep. They are only saying Baaaa.
4. Developmental Psychobiology of Aggression, pp 192.
Tags: Aggression > Childbirth > cortex > fetal alcohol syndrome > forceps delivery > gestation > lizard brain > monkey brain > pregnancy > rape > testosterone
The Ninety Percenters
Posted on | August 10, 2010 | 2 Comments
A couple of months ago, I got the following comment on the Goodreads feed for one of my blogs on pornography. The comment read:
What do you say about the statistics that show upwards of 90% of pornographic actresses have suffered some form of sexual abuse? That it’s a corollary of the intense — and hypocritical — moralizing?
He was commenting on this essay where I talked about why it’s important to understand the effects porn does or doesn’t have on viewers in actual fact rather than succumbing to hypocritical moralizing about it. After poking around for quite a while, the main thing I have to say about the 90% statistic is that I don’t think it’s a statistic. It’s taken me a particularly long time to respond to this comment because I just couldn’t find reliable numbers about how many porn actresses had suffered from sexual abuse. There are well publicized anecdotes about high-profile actresses and there are the accounts by actresses turned Christian, but the statistical claim, which is made many times on anti-porn sites, quite frustratingly never lead me to any kind of study or survey. Nobody who quoted the number, including the Goodreads commenter, pointed to any real examination of the issue.
On top of the lack of reference, there’s the issue of the number itself: In every place I found it, the number was always quoted at 90% or above, which reeks of a made-up stat that’s being repeated over and over by like-minded people. In the social sciences, I haven’t found any number on any topic to be this consistent, which makes it pretty suspect from jump. (If anyone knows of a real study, please direct me to it. I’ll try to find something next time I’m at UCLA. The internet is clogged with partisan junk on this topic.)
I’m always ready to be proven wrong, but I doubt that this number has a real origin anywhere. In lay-language, people say, “like 90% of the time” when they mean, “almost all the time.” They don’t mean to say that they’ve read a study that used any kind of sampling followed by any kind of math to draw any kind of conclusion. They throw out the number because numbers lend emphasis to declarations, as in my non-favorite, “I always give 110%.” Giving any percent over 100% is impossible. It’s just a turn of phrase based on a misunderstanding of the idea of percentages.
Having said that, it would not surprise me to learn that the percentage of molested women was higher in the ranks of sex workers than in the general population. As I discussed here, at the beginning of their productive lives, people with no training or education typically enter the workforce by monetizing “home skills” like yardwork or housekeeping. As disturbing as it might be to think about, if someone has been molested, sex is a home skill that a woman might choose to take into the world and make money from. But a sexually precocious teen who has only had experiences with peers would also count sex as a home skill and could well make the same choice with abuse being no part of it. A woman who grew up knowing that she was pretty and could manipulate men easily might also choose to put her body and looks into service as a money-making machine. (I’ll only talk about women sex workers from here on because while I care about male sex workers, that’s not who the “ninety-percenters” are up in arms about.)
One way that the ninety percent number might be true is if it relies on the modern definition of abuse. In our legal system, a 19-year-old having consensual sex with a 17-year-old is technically rape / abuse, even though neither party would identify it as such. I tend to doubt that a girl who starts acting in porn films at 18 or 19 has abstained from having sex with a man 18 or over while she was 17 or younger. But to call that relationship abuse or molestation is, as I see it, a hazardous dilution of the concept of abuse to the point where it verges on becoming a meaningless idea. I expanded on that here.
The belief in the ninety percent stat seems to derive from the notion that a woman must be damaged in order to choose to get into sex work. I find this to be a sketchy conclusion. What if a girl looks around and sees that she has the options of getting a part-time minimum wage job at a Subway sandwich shop or joining the army or marrying her high school boyfriend and pumping out kids? Does she have to have been molested by her uncle to look favorably on doing porn or stripping or even hooking? All choices that could pay her in a day what the others pay her in a month.
I don’t think those choices are necessarily signs of damage or depravity. If we’re really charged up about young adults making other choices, we need to work on giving them better choices to make. Alan Greenspan and Ronald Reagan, in their partly coordinated war on working-class America, have effectively outsourced and de-unionized the labor base that provided decent jobs for those folks, so if you’re really upset about women becoming whores and porn stars, write some hate mail to Greenspan. He and his incompetence and his dogmatic Ayn Randism have made more porn stars, strippers and prostitutes than abuse and loose morals ever could have.
And some porn stars just choose the life even in the presence of good options. Examine the case of Nina Hartley, for instance, who is a registered nurse and an incredibly bright woman who wasn’t abused in her youth. (I had a conversation with a high school classmate of hers who just ranted about how brilliant she was.)
Mainly though, regardless of the reasons a young person chooses to go into sex work, we need to do a better job treating them with love and compassion. If that employment choice makes them criminals and untouchables, they only become that much more vulnerable to the very real hazards of the work: trafficking, violence, drug use, unsafe sex and control by pimps, madams and video producers.
And as consumers we need to take our compassion to the marketplace. In this era of international free trade, it may be impossible to consume anything ethically. (Were your socks sewn by mistreated child laborers? You don’t know. And you’re kidding yourself if you think you do.) But as consumers of sex work, we fortunately can be a more aware than we can as consumers of clothing because the people doing the work are right there in front of us. There are laws that make sure we know their names. And there are ethical porn producers. Look at the titles sold at blowfish.com. I trust them to keep an eye out for the performers in the films that they sell.
I’ll contact a couple of folks I know in the porn industry and ask them what we as consumers can do to ensure that we’re supporting ethical porn and I’ll post the results of that conversation in a later essay.
Tags: Alan Greenspan > Christianity > Nina Hartley > Pornography > prostitution > rape > Sexual Violence > stripping
My Boy
Posted on | August 3, 2010 | 20 Comments
Anyone who has read the comments sections of my blogs already knows that my wife and I had a baby boy, a couple of months ago now. (Babies. That’s where all this sex stuff leads.) And anyone who has read any of my blogs at all knows that I’m against genital cutting so, needless to say, I did not have my boy circumcised, even though I am circumcised myself.
I was circumcised without my parent’s permission back in the era of automatic, precautionary circumcision, so I went into the situation a bit worried that the same would happen to my boy and was determined to never let him out of my sight. But I’m happy to report that times have changed and that I was worried for nothing. In our particular hospital, they were respectful of our decision to leave our boy uncut and I’m pretty sure that I didn’t need to guard him like I did. But even still, I did.
The last thing I was thinking about after the ordeal of the birth was his penis, but I have to say that it came quickly back to mind when I first laid eyes on him. I was shocked to see that most of the skin covering his penis was the skin that would have been cut off in a circumcision. In the anti-circumcision literature, they say that half the skin on a baby boy’s penis is cut off, but that seems like an underestimate. It’s something you’d kind of have to see for yourself to believe. I’m sure I’d be prosecuted for child pornography if I posted a picture of my boy’s or any baby’s penis. So I’m going to have to do my best to describe it.
My kid’s penis looks like a fleshy, scale replica of an onion-dome minaret. The shaft is pretty stubby. The sizable part is the head. In terms of real estate, there’s hardly any skin needed to cover the shaft. Most of a baby boy’s skin is used to cover that head and if you peel back and cut all that off, there’s precious little skin left.
So in the above picture, which I got from Wonderlane on Flickr, the foreskin which would be cut off is all the gold and the part they would have left on is the white part. Just to be super-clear, my baby’s penis does not have the elaborate ball and cross on top, so don’t worry yourself on that account ladies… or gentlemen. Let’s not press a sexual orientation on the child.
The easiest moral decision to make is for cut people to cut and uncut people not to cut. Having a child of the same sex brings up all kinds of issues about wanting your child to be like you. Two men I know quite well recently made the opposite decision: without being religiously or ethnically bent towards cutting, they both decided to cut their boys primarily because they were cut themselves. These aren’t bad people in any way. They’re both great and I’m sure they’re going to be fantastic fathers.
But when there’s a medical establishment encouraging you to do it and when choosing against it implies, however obliquely, that there’s something wrong with you and when you want your boy to be like you…
That’s a lot of weight on the side of cutting your child in the way that you were cut, which is why cutting so quickly becomes an entrenched part of a society, whether that’s women cutting their daughters or men cutting their sons, and that’s why, even though it’s nothing classically heroic like pushing someone out of the way of an oncoming car, I am proud of pushing against all that weight and not cutting my boy.
The Two-Word Solution to Anti-Social Aggression
Posted on | July 20, 2010 | 3 Comments
Touch kids.
That’s it. I’ll expand on that below, but if you don’t like reading, you can surf away knowing that you have the answer.
The relation between touch-deprivation and violence is in no way a hippie-dippie or Jesus-freaky fantasy about the world. It is well understood and has been for decades. I’ll give a few references as I go so you can dig further on your own.
James W. Prescott, back in the 1970s, established a strong basis for valuing touch and went quite far in his ideas about the long-reaching negative effects of touch deprivation. The results of his research boil down to this: People who regularly get bodily pleasure are non-violent. People who don’t are violent. It’s that simple. This formula includes infants, kids, adults and spills into politics. Touch-deprived societies make wars. Non touch-deprived societies don’t. Even if a culture touches their kids enough but then makes a reverse in adulthood by suppressing adult and especially women’s sexuality, that culture is more violent. Go here or here or here to follow up on these ideas and on Prescott in general.
In a 1990 study he did of 49 “primitive” societies: The amount of childhood touching and adult violence is an absolute inverse relationship. Lots of infant physical affection meant little to no adult physical violence, including suicide. Little infant physical affection meant lots of adult physical violence.(2)
And where, you might wonder, does the USA rank in touching? In a study done in 1966, measuring touching between couples in cafés in Paris, France; London, England; Gainesville, Florida; and San Juan, Puerto Rico, Sidney M Jourard found that there were actually cafés in Gainesville, Florida. (And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you set up and punch a Florida joke.)
Seriously though, Jourard found that the Puerto Ricans touched 180 times per half-hour, the Parisians 110, the Floridians 2 and the Londoners zero (or zed, as they might say without touching you).
That’s adults though. What about kids? In 1999, Tiffany Field did a much-quoted study of touching interactions among preschool children in a Mcdonalds in Paris vs a Mcdonalds in Florida. I’ll graph out the results.(2)
I will narrate, for those who prefer verbal learning. The Florida parents ignore their kids three times as much as Parisian parents. The Parisians spend more time watching and talking to their kids and three times as much time touching their kids. So what? Well look at what their kids are doing: The Parisian kid spends twice as much time as the Floridian kid actually playing, which is presumably what they’re supposed to do in a Mcdonalds playground. The Parisian kid spends twice as much time talking to their parent, touches his or her parent six times more than the Florida kid and, wait for it, the Parisian kid spends 1% of its time being aggressive towards his or her parent vs 19% of the time for the Florida kid.
And if you think that’s mindblowing, here’s how those same preschool kids were treating one another on that playground:
The little Parisian kids were touching one another twice as much, grabbing one another at half the frequency and being aggressive at a 1 to 29 ratio to the aggression of Floridians, who were spending 29% of their playtime being aggressive to one another. The fussing (which can be seen as verbal aggression, I suppose) was rated at 4 to 30.
All that is sobering, but I’ve saved the most depressing stat for last. It’s the touching behavior not of preschoolers but of adolescents in those same Macdonalds:
Among Parisian adolescents, leaning, stroking, kissing and hugging range from 160% to 283% higher than that of Floridians, and the real kick in the groin is what the purpose of any of that touching is. In Parisian kids 43% of their touching is used to express affection to other adolescents and 8% is self-stimulation. In Floridians, that ratio is almost precisely reversed: Only 11% of the touching expresses affection towards others and 41% is self-stimulation.
So many things to say, but I’ll start at the last graph. We manufacture adolescents who are so touch-deprived that the primary physical affection they engage in is self-stimulation and then we hop up on our high horses and wonder why pornography is so popular. We have built a little version of hell on earth where the only person who will touch you for your pleasure is yourself and then we indulge in a clutch-the-pearls moment about why anyone would watch porn?! Because porn helps you touch yourself! If you don’t want kids to like porn so much, touch kids. If you’re not going to touch kids, the least you could do is make some high quality pornographic material for them to enjoy their self-touching with.
One last comment, despite the Florida joke from earlier, I’m not picking on that state. Florida just happened to be the home to Tiffany Field, the excellent researcher who took the trouble to do this study while employed at a Florida university, so blaming Florida is essentially shooting the messenger. I doubt if any part of the US is better (certainly not my home state of Texas or my adopted state of California). But having said that, I do think that it’s appropriate for this study to have been done in one of the classic “get tough on crime” states (the others being Texas and California) since those states have spent countless millions building prisons and, I would imagine, next to nothing on one of the most well recognized root causes of violence: the lack of touch.
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Here are the references from the above footnotes.
1. Harmful to Minors, Judith Levine, p 179.
2. The original article, which I can’t find a free online copy of is here, Early Childhood Development and Care, 151, 11-17. Tiffany Field discusses her data in Chapter 6 of the book Developmental Psychobiology of Aggression, Stoff, Susman, which you should be able to find at a good university or medical library or borrow from any public library using interlibrary loan. The whole book is pretty mindblowing and written at a quite understandable level.
Don’t Ruin Pornography for the Rest of Us
Posted on | July 13, 2010 | 3 Comments
In a series of comments on my pornography blogs, one reader makes the point that although porn might not manufacture rapists, “it DOES have a negative impact on the sexual expectations placed upon women” because it makes men think that they can 1. have anal sex with you without extensive foreplay / lubrication or 2. try to push their penis into your throat when you have a fully intact gag reflex, thank you very much, or 3. make them think that you might like to take your penis inside your mouth after they’ve been having anal sex with you even though you’d rather not get an e-coli infection or 4. make them think that all women, not just the ones in BDSM scenarios, get off on being degraded/humiliated in various ways. (Find her whole comment at, Pornography: Part I.)
So here’s a note to all the men who are out there taking notes during porn films as if they were sex training videos: You are right. I don’t know what that crazy girl is talking about. All movies, not just porn, are basically documentaries that you can use to construct a perfectly accurate guide to reality. Did you know, for example, that you can outrun an explosion? You’ve seen it in dozens of action movies. Please go try it. Get a few sticks of dynamite, light them, give yourself only about a twenty-foot head start. Wait until you hear it blow up, then start running. As you know, explosions can’t hurt you if you’re running away from them. Just like in the movies, you’ll be a little out of breath, and have an attractive, rugged looking make-up smudge on your face, but otherwise, you’ll be fine. OK, go do that. It’ll be super-cool.
Are you gone yet?
Great.
Seriously gentlemen, don’t ruin pornography for the rest of us by being complete jackasses. I don’t know who exactly I’m talking to any more since the idiots are off blowing themselves up, but movies are fantasies. In the real world, you can’t outrun an explosion, you can’t stampede right to anal sex without some skillful foreplay and you can’t assume that all girls are capable of or interested in deep throating.
The main thing that bugs me about the deep-throat confusion is not that these guys are watching too much or the wrong kind of porn but that they aren’t watching their porn carefully enough. Pay attention. Not all porn girls can deep throat! Haven’t you noticed that?! They’d get paid more money if they did, so if they could they certainly would. And if all porn girls don’t deep throat, take a wild guess as to whether all girls in real life can deep throat.
But even more disturbing than that oversight is the fact that this charmless brand of man, who my commenter has has such poor experiences with, seems set on re-enacting his favorite porn scenes regardless of how an in-real-life woman is reacting to his efforts. I should confess that I myself have been guilty of pushing too far into a woman’s mouth and making her gag. I did it exactly once. It was early in my sexual career and, yes, it’s possible that the porn I had seen influenced me into thinking that I could push in further than I really could. The girl got me out of there, coughing. I apologized profusely and then I went down on her. (Like I say in my book, there aren’t a lot of relationship gaffes that can’t be solved by a simple apology and some head.)
And the next time she went down on me, I noticed how far she took my penis into her mouth while she was in control and from then on, I only went in that far. (I have written extensively about the human gag reflex here if you want to dig into the biology of it.) In my experience, there is not a significant amount of variation from person to person in the distance between a human being’s lips and the part of the throat that triggers the gag reflex. I have a vein running down the middle of my penis and I could take a Sharpie marker and draw a line on the exact place along that vein where I need to stop pushing. I’ve known where that spot was for over twenty years now.
I am fully inclined to tag my commenter’s men as irremediablly unconsilient and insensitive A-holes, but I found myself at a party recently, talking to a woman who had read my book, and I trotted out this issue. She wholeheartedly seconded my commenter’s lament that some men do try to re-enact porn scenes, but added that in her experience, it had only been men who had never had a girlfriend. If a man has never stuck around for long enough to get feedback on his lovemaking technique, he just acts out what he has jerked off to. Makes sense.
I have had the experience of sleeping with a very inexperienced and also insensitive person. The sex was terrible. Her favorite foreplay was tickling. I complained repeatedly that I hated ticking but she never stopped tickling me because it’s what she liked. She would ride on top so roughly that she managed to break my penis once. Whenever she touched my penis, she always grabbed it like it was a pole on a bumpy bus and she was desperately trying to hold on. No matter how many times I told her to be more gentle, she never stopped strangling it. I can’t blame all that on porn. (Even though I’m quite confident that there is a website offering rough lady on top erotica that encourages Kung-Fu gripping a man’s Johnson.) She was just an inexperienced lover who, on top of all that, didn’t much care whether I was enjoying myself or not.
So gentlemen, don’t ruin pornography for the rest of us by acting like it’s a documentary. And for the ladies and gentlemen: if your sex life has been a series of one-night stands or brief encounters; if you’ve never been with someone for long enough for him or her to feel comfortable complaining about how you throw your underwear on the floor or don’t change the toilet paper or anything non-sexual like that, then don’t even begin to imagine in any part of your brain that you are good in bed. All that newness makes it impossible not to feel excited those first few times, so you get exactly zero credit for being able to excite someone at first. Come back the twentieth time and make that person feel physically loved and now I might believe you.
Questions Your Children Ask Me:Can you get a famle pregnet from sex in the anus with a condom.
Posted on | July 6, 2010 | No Comments
I volunteer at Los Angeles-area public schools teaching sex ed to 9th graders. At the end of every class, I hand out index cards to the kids and they write down questions they don’t want to ask out loud. These are your kid’s questions. These are my answers.
When I tell people that I teach sex ed to kids, they often ask if I’m freaked out about how much porn they’ve been exposed to or about their being too sexual too soon. It’s true that lots of the kids have seen porn and that they’re more sexually precocious than I was at their age, although that’s not saying much. But none of that freaks me out. What sends me into a panic is the shocking number of them who border on illiterate.
I’m not a spelling and grammar ninny. I misspell words all the time myself. But this kid didn’t brain fart and write an e for an a. Ninth grade, and he or she is phonetically spelling the words pregnant and female, as if he or she had never read or written either.
The full question was “Can you get a famle pregnet from sex in the anus with a com condom.” The kid had so effectively lowered my expectations with famle and pregnet, that by the end of the sentence, I had become a fan (based on the correct spelling of anus and the prudent correction of condom), so was entirely unphased by the lack of a question mark.
While reading the question aloud, I lingered over my pronunciation of fe-male and preg-nant, then I said that the answer was no. Condom or no, anal sex isn’t going to lead to a pregnancy, but I didn’t offer that information, since a large part of the reason we’re there is to get kids in the mode of thinking of condoms as a non-optional part of their sex-gear. It is highly unlikely for anal sex to lead to pregnancy. Overspill that arrives at the mouth of the vagina isn’t at hazard of fertilizing anyone. Sperm aren’t army rangers with grappling hooks and rapelling ropes. They pretty much need to be deposited inside the vagina to have any chance of reaching the fallopian tubes.
Every once in a while, I show a question like this one to a teacher. They generally roll their eyes and tell me I don’t know the half of it. When they feel like talking, the most consistent answer I’ve gotten to how a kid this uneducated could be sitting in a ninth-grade classroom is “social promotion.”
Social promotion is the practice of passing a failing child on to the next grade based on the idea that it’s more beneficial to keep a kid with his or her peers than it is to actually teach them the curriculum. Teachers want to hold back kids who aren’t making it. They know very well the trouble they are causing when they don’t. And they acutely realize the benefits of giving a kid firm footing before letting him or her step forward. The grades where social promotion are just devastating to a child’s education are first and second. Without an iron-fisted grasp of basic reading, writing and math skills, socially promoted kids get lost in the now-inscrutable curriculum of the next grade and they never find their way back on track.
One teachers talked to me about the particular benefits of holding back boys. Aside from the academic problems a particular boy might be experiencing, they are also likely to be less mature than girls, so they often can find a more appropriate peer group by stepping back one year.
It’s the administrators, bureaucrats and lawmakers (who are safely located miles away from classrooms) who demand that teachers pass most or all of their students every year. If a teacher wants to fail a kid, they have to jump through several hoops and get the kid’s parents on board to do so. But I don’t want to imply that the administrators, bureaucrats and lawmakers are evil. They are all staring at budgets that barely allow them to educate a kid once, much less twice, so they probably invented the idea of social promotion to somewhat justify keeping the conveyor belt moving, since it’s something they have to do anyhow.
In my home state of California, the voters themselves are at least half responsible for the schools having insufficient funds to educate children. In 1976, the decision in Serrano vs Priest, an equal rights court case in CA, judged that it was unfair for rich districts to have better schools than poor districts. So middle and upper class people lost interest in a public school system (unless they lived in independent municipalities like Santa Monica or Beverly Hills where the pretty ubiquitous wealth kept the quality high regardless of this ruling). Not at all by coincidence, the infamous Prop 13, passed two years later, gutting the property tax base that schools used to get their money from. The middle class resoundingly decided, “OK, if I can’t use my property tax to make my own children’s school better, then guess what? I’m not going to pay any property tax. Eat that up with a spoon.”
(This is a classic repeat of the Marx by way of Lenin error of unhooking the middle class from the cart. It’s a fascinating story about how Kulaks (middle class farmers) were ruthlessly persecuted for being elitist and then, unsurprisingly, the whole Russian agricultural system fell apart because the old farming know how had been killed off and none of the youngsters had any incentive to achieve. Lesson being, never unhook the middle class from the cart.)
And prop 13 required a 2/3 vote to pass any revenue measure. This allows tiny oppositional groups to hold up a budget for any reason and has kept the state in an almost constant fiscal crisis since that stupid constitutional amendment was passed. Certainly, nothing logical can happen like money being given to failing schools.
In 1978, California had a top ranked school system, now we’re in the bottom five, depending on the test or study you look at. From 2003 to 2007, we decreased spending on schools by 4% but increased spending in the justice department (meaning prisons) by 56%.
The philosophy in California is: Don’t educate people, just throw them in jail. Here’s a quote from a 2009 article in the Silicon Valley Mercury News:
The state prison system received the biggest share [of the budget increase], about $4.1 billion of it. Corrections spending has increased fivefold since 1994. At $13 billion last year [2008], it now exceeds spending on higher education. Tough laws and voter-approved ballot measures have increased the prison population 82 percent over the past 20 years.
Conservatives in California are always up in arms about the all powerful teachers union but you never hear complaints about the prison guard union. Judging from recent events, the teacher’s union isn’t halfway as effective as the prison guards union in getting their interests served.
If he forgets what my answer was, maybe, when he grows up, my little 9th grader can ask his prison guard how famles get pregnet.
Tags: california > california constitution > condoms > education > literacy > pregnant > prisons > prop 13 > taxation
The Errors of Infidelity: Revisited
Posted on | June 29, 2010 | 1 Comment
A month or so ago, I posted some thoughts on infidelity, why we are so obsessed with it and what the reality of it is in America… In examining some of the data from a report titled “American Sexual Behavior” out of the National Opinion Research Center from the University of Chicago, I ran across a very interesting data set indicating that male infidelity has decreased over the last few generations even dipping below the infidelity of women. I generated the graph below to illustrate the trend.
As far as why that data changed from the generation just after the men who fought in WWII to my generation… Feelings of success/popularity ramp up testosterone, which helps explain the sexual overindulgence of professional athletes. Now the folks Tom Brokaw named “The Greatest Generation,” fought in WWII, and came home to an America that was the unchallenged master of the Western world. You’d think they might have, but judging from the reports of their survivors, in the graph below, they didn’t mess around that much, but before you get all soft thinking about Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan and how Mr. Tom Hanks would never ever… remember that the graph below has ladies who are dragging the men’s average down. Also, the data was taken from people of the Greatest Generation who survived past 70. Messing around on people is a high-risk behavior that is likely to come bundled with other high-risk behaviors, like smoking and drinking, etc. So many of the lotharios of that age probably kicked it in the 70s from coronary heart failure and lung cancer, hopefully before their IBM stock took a dump. If we polled my generation after 70, I’m sure we’d have lost a good chunk of the cheaters to… still cancer and heart failure because people still smoke cigarettes, amazingly enough.
The generation immediately at the heels of the Greatest Generation provides the first data point of the above graph and the next to far right point on the graph below. Those men didn’t have to fight in a war so avoided negative psychological consequences, but they got all the benefits of America as ascendant superpower with abundant jobs. To paraphrase what Cactus Prior said about George W. Bush, “They were born on third base and thought they’d hit a triple.” That may do something to explain that high level of infidelity and the slide from that time on coincides with the decline of America’s all-time-high influence in the world.
Men of my generation never expected to be able to support a wife without her working. So maybe the idea that we were entitled to a nooner on Wednesdays while the wifey picked out the colors for the drapes just didn’t seem right to us, even if we did have a non-working spouse.
The rest of this graph tells us a bunch of stuff that coincides with conventional wisdom. In their 40s, infidelity within the last 12 months does bump up, perhaps confirming the classic mid-life crisis? In the 20s, infidelity within the last 12 months is highest, as young couples struggle to transition from a single life of sexual freedom to monogamy. This graph is a different study than the first, and does report a slightly higher overall infidelity rate, which could just be how they asked the question. And I’m not going to make any conclusions about the higher morality of the younger generations because they aren’t done yet and might well catch up to their elders.
Three general comments to wrap up:
1. What’s all this about declining morals? According to the first graph, the men of my generation were about five times more moral than most of the old farts who keep prattling on to us about how everything is going straight to hell. Sure, if you’d been at your prime in the ’70s and ’80s, you’d have screwed everything that moved plus a chicken. Not us. We’re officially better than you, so back off.
2. There’s just not that much infidelity going on. Nowhere near the alarming stats reported on the internet and in magazines. Make a new tab and search for “infidelity statistics.” Numbers are quoted around 45% and 60%, for both men and women. Five minutes of surfing and you’ll want to google, “chastity devices.” But it is all baseless, alarmist nonsense. Why is infidelity such a popular delusion?
3. Back to success-raising testosterone… Is the practice, in both men and women, of belittling a spouse simply an effective means of down-regulating that individual’s sense of success until their testosterone decreases to the point where he or she won’t mess around? (Remember that women run on testosterone too.)
Hmmm.
Aggression: Are All Men Potential Rapists?
Posted on | June 22, 2010 | 2 Comments
A couple of posts ago, I wrote about castration of men as a sexual fantasy or behavior. This sent me back to the UCLA library to take a look at the books that had originally taught me about male aggression and what causes it to turn anti-social. So in this blog and maybe another few after, I’ll take a breezy trot through what I’ve read about the inconvenient side of masculinity, namely the physically violent, anti-social aggression side.
If you are interested in reading more about this, definitely check out The Causes of Rape. It’s a bit academic in spots but overall very accessible and rewarding. The authors are Canadians. Americans have a real ideological block it seems about investigating this phenomenon, which is too bad. The US doctrine that rape is violence and only violence precludes researchers in the lower 48 from teasing out the part of rape behavior that is a reproductive strategy vs the part that is garden-variety violence vs the part that is a sadistic violence vs the part that is one among many control strategies.
Not that a woman who has been raped is likely to care what exactly caused the event that was, most probably, the most terrifying experience of her life, but it is important to know the exact cause if we hope to effectively treat it, stop it, and keep people out of society who are unlikely to stop doing it. (It was all fun and games to build more prisons than schools when we were drunk off spending our great-great-grandchildren’s inheritance but now that China is lending us our lunch money we might have to actually think a bit before we throw away the key on flashers and pot-smokers and some drunk guy who felt up a 17-year-old who flashed a fake ID to get into a bar, as if they’re all future serial rapists and organized criminals.)
So are all guy’s potential rapists? That too-often repeated and hideously violent notion is only partly true and only in a very limited context: If a young man is taken out of his home community and indoctrinated to think about the women in his new environment as sub-human or inconsequential or enemies in some way, most young men are, unfortunately, capable of rape. This applies almost exclusively to war scenarios: The Mongolian conquests, Russian soldiers during the occupation of Germany at the end of WWII, the Japanese in the Rape of Nanking (why did they call it that?), and more recently the horror stories of Muslim women being raped in Bosnia. War is horrible. We do try to restrict war to young men being horribly violent to other young men, but that (noble?) goal is often not attained, especially of late.
Within their own communities, however, the vast majority of men are NOT capable of rape. The low percentage of men who are fall into three pretty distinct categories (or taxons): 1. Psychotics. 2. Lifetime persistent delinquents. 3. Juvenile delinquents. (This is mostly from my memory of The Causes of Rape. A book I have read three times.)
1. Psychotics are low-risk averse, non-empathetic individuals who leach off an otherwise consilient (mutually assisting) society. In any social population where most people (or animals) are oriented to helping one another, there can be a percentage of people (or animals) who cooperate not at all but just go around taking advantage of the habitual mutual aid and sharing of others. Psychotics are a large part of that anti-social group.
2. Lifetime-persistent delinquents are usually folks who have been compromised by a problematic birth or unhealthy gestational environment and have low levels of brain damage as a result. (Moms smoking and drinking while pregnant, certain birth complications that cut off air from the fetus, unsuccessful attempts at self-induced abortion, stuff like that.) These folks look around at their peers, pretty accurately assess that they are going to be outcompeted if they try to get everything they want through normal channels, so they develop a lifelong strategy of taking it. When they take property that’s called stealing and when they take sex that’s called rape.
3. Juvenile delinquents are something like the lifetime-persistent delinquents except that they will ultimately get to a place in their lives where they can acquire property and sex without taking it. They’re just in a frustrating transitional phase where they want the full entitlements of adulthood but they cannot acquire them for lack of money or skill or experience. For these folks, delinquency is a phase they will pass through once they acquire things or loved ones that they don’t want to lose. At that point, if they haven’t been lost to the criminal justice system, they will most likely transition into responsible citizenry.
From the perspective of a raped woman or from women fearful of rape, I can understand the desire to take all three kinds and castrate them or lock them away or both, but it’s important to cull out the juvenile delinquents else we waste huge amounts of money giving them long jail sentences when, if we all but left them alone, they would form into decent citizens. The recent trend of trying teens as adults on a variety of charges and the labeling of young males as sex criminals for life, even if they committed non-violent sex crimes like exposure or consenting sex with a 17-year-old, for example, has made it all but impossible to effectively police the otherwise manageable group of psychotics and lifelong-persistent delinquents that cause the headline-grabbing chaos.
My state, California, has an abundance of laws regarding sex offenders and yet, because all these overlapping laws have our police pointlessly surveiling a mushrooming list of peeping toms and public masturbators who are more pathetic than dangerous, Phillip and Nancy Garrido were able to kidnap a girl in 1991 and keep her (and the two children that resulted from Garrido forcing himself on her) in their backyard for 18 years. (Can we stop the war on pot and use that money to catch evil people like the Garridos? Just a question.)
Dating from the devil-cult scare of the ’80s, American jurisprudence has been completely asses-to-elbows when it comes to prosecuting sex crimes. Instead of using the real science available to determine the likelihood that a particular man will repeat a crime, we have succumbed to whack-job psychiatry and religious/superstition-based paranoia about who the sex criminals are and how to catch them. There were no devil cults. Period. That was all a Jesus-freaky fantasy that got backed up by greedy psychiatrists draining the insurance funds of depressed, vulnerable people. Nevertheless, uncounted hundreds and maybe thousands of men and women went to jail on false charges. It’s as if there were tons of folks in jail for being orks or warlocks. It was that crazy. And we haven’t gotten too much better since then.
Bottom line is: If we want to be able to spend our not-unlimited resources to make women safer, which is a goal that I think we all share, we need to coldbloodedly separate dangerous male aggression from what the mob considers to be oddball or undesirable or weird sexual behavior.
To be continued…
Tags: Aggression > Croatia > devil cults > juvenile delinguents > psychotics > rape > Rape of Nanking > Sex Health > The Causes of Rape
Pornography: Aleksander Štulhofer
Posted on | June 15, 2010 | No Comments
In my investigation into how porn affects the sexual attitudes of young teens, I ran across the work of a terrific sex researcher from Croatia who has done some even-handed studies about porn, the latest trying to see if he could confirm the sacrosanct assumption, all but universally held by US researchers, that porn use has a significant negative affect on the viewer’s capacity for intimacy and increases a viewer’s sexual compulsiveness.
His name is Aleksander Štulhofer. In 2004, he used the results of a study conducted at CSUN (California State University at Northridge) to see whether he could confirm the common presumptions about negative effects among lifelong habitual porn users. In a second study published in 2007, he looked at whether sexual compulsivity was affected by porn usage at 14 years old in both men and women. In a 2008 study, he collected data among 650 young Croatian men to see if he could distinguish between the effects of viewing mainstream sexually explicit materials (SEM) and paraphilic (fetishy) SEM.
The 2004 study on habitual porn users came to the conclusion, “… habitual exposure does not contribute to the endorsement of sexist attitudes, nor does it appear to increase the likelihood of aggressive sexual behavior.” So we can scratch those two things off the list of sacred American beliefs about pornography.
What I find fascinating is that even though the 2004 study was done at Cal State Northridge, which is an hour away from my house, I can only read the abstract not the entire paper, as I like to do, because it was never translated from Croatian into English. I wish I knew the whole story of why a study performed by a US university wasn’t analyzed in the US, but I’ll hazard a guess: I bet that you simply cannot publish in this country any study that doesn’t find that pornography has a negative effect on people. If you did, you’d lose your funding. I get the feeling from reading the research papers available in English that the vast majority of research done into porn’s affect on people is not in any way an open, honest questioning into what it does in actual fact, but rather a scavenger hunt for harmfulness. According to the Štulhofer study, the answer to the rarely asked open question seems to be that porn doesn’t do much at all.
The anti-porn folks, in the ways that they support and ignore the research, are simply taking the role of the Tobacco Research Council but in reverse: instead of working to suppress results showing the harm of tobacco, they work to suppress work that shows porn as neutral or (tie up the dogs) positive. (I’m not saying there’s a conspiracy, by the way; there doesn’t need to be a conspiracy when enough people unthinkingly believe in the same thing.)
In his 2007 paper, Štulhofer tested another common assumption of the anti-porn crowd: that use of porn increases a person’s sexual compulsiveness (defined as “a rigid pattern of sexual behavior with preoccupations and obsessive desires that are resistant to change”). He did manage to confirm that subjects with high sexual compulsiveness have low intimacy and negative attitudes about relationships. The sexually compulsive were also more prone to sexual boredom and sex-related anxiety/guilt. But the use of pornography was not a predictor for sexual compulsiveness either among the men or the women studied. The only potentially negative correlation he did find was that sexually compulsive men were more likely to use paraphilic, as opposed to mainstream, porn.
In his 2008 paper, Štulhofer revisits that one negative correlation (between paraphilic porn and sexual compulsiveness) and confirms that the users of paraphilic porn are distinct from users of mainstream porn: The paraphilic/fetishiy porn user is, on average, slightly less intimate, has a slightly less varied sexual experience and is a bit more sexually compulsive.
Anti-porn folks would most likely cry out in triumph at finding this one negative correlation, but they’re only happy because their blindered imaginations have already concluded that porn caused the negative. Only correlation isn’t causality, of course. I’d love to see more work from the likes of Štulhofer to dig down to the bottom of this correlation and find what caused what. It’s my intuition that high levels of sexual anxiety/guilt and a person’s capacity for intimacy are behind the other behavior differences. But unlike the true believers in the anti-porn crowd, I won’t go around talking like that’s a fact before the data is in.
Tags: Aleksander Štulhofer > Christianity > Croatia > intimacy > Pornography > sexual compulsiveness
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