Jonah Raskin : Sex on Campus and Ulysses Un-Seen

Censored image from Ulysses Seen. Graphic from Literature R Us.
Girls Lean Back:
Sex on campus,
And the ongoing appeal of pornography

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / June 15, 2010

Don’t the censors of sexually explicit materials get it? Well, apparently not. Not even in this day and age.

Apple has forced the authors of Ulysses "seen" -- a web comic book adaptation of James Joyce’s magnificent novel, to remove images of a woman’s breasts for a version to be used with its iPad app.

Can you believe it? I thought that the issue of obscenity had been settled long ago; in the 1920’s, Joyce’s Ulysses was found to be artistic and that it could not be legally censored. But pornography is apparently an intractable problem. It just won’t go away; every time there’s a new technology it comes back.

In his big, thorough book about pornography, which he entitled Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius, Edward De Grazia, argued, among other things, that sex was irrepressible and unstoppable. An expert on sex in literature and film, De Grazia argued some of the toughest obscenity cases of the 20th-century and won against the state again and again. The censors at Apple ought to read his book and learn a thing or two.

Every semester for the past 20 years, I’ve used his book in the law class I teach -- there’s a week on pornography -- and every time I teach the class I can’t help but think about his book and its apt title. I look out at the students, usually 60 or so of them, all seniors, and I notice every time that the girls and the women in the class do lean back. They also lean forward and to the side. They lean every which way, and almost every way they lean, they reveal a part or parts of their bodies -- legs, necks, ankles, and breasts.

Sometimes they come to class in slips and negligees, with push-up bras or no bras, and class is a kind of striptease, though nobody disrobes completely. The men in the class lean back too; they lean forward and to the side, and they can be as sexual as the women. They’re all -- these students -- in their early twenties, and they drink and smoke and have sex. Big surprise!

Isn’t that what college students have been doing for eons? I think so. The students today belong to a post-60’s, post-70’s, post-80’s, post-90’s, post-first decade of the 21st century generation. They have lived with pornography all their lives, pornography on TV and the Internet, and they have come to accept pornography as a part of life, as much a part of life as driving a car, and making calls from a cell phone.

They eat and sleep and dream pornography and the idea that someone, anyone in authority, would try to stop or prevent them from having access to pornography seems ludicrous to them. Because, at this point in time, there’s no way to stop it, though the dinosaurs of the 21st century -- college teachers -- would like to do just that.

Faculty members, mostly male, are often made uncomfortable by the leaning back and the leaning forward of the students, mostly female, and sometimes they even tell students to dress more appropriately -- whatever that means -- and not to wriggle about as often or as dramatically as they do. Welcome to the new generation gap!

The faculty members -- now in their 40’s and 50’s and 60’s -- were once young themselves and did a lot of leaning on their own, and resented members of the older generation who tried to police their bodies. Now, the shoe, the slip, or the negligee is on another body, a younger body, a beautiful body, and the professors don’t like it. They have turned prudish. They’d like the students to cover up.

Now, I can imagine that someone might ask, well, do you teach at a university connected to a church? No, I do not. I teach at one of the 25 campuses in the statewide California State University (CSU) system. This is California, and in California when the sun shines, students take off their clothes, as many different layers and items as they can take off, and not be arrested for indecency. They walk around campus as though they’re in the Garden of Eden -- without shame, and without guilt.

Now, the faculty thinks -- this is what faculty members have actually said to me -- that the students have sex on their minds all the time, and that it’s the job of the teacher to encourage the student not to think about sex. And -- so the argument goes -- that can best be accomplished if the teacher doesn’t talk about sex or even mention the word “sex.”

Not long ago, a group of faculty members came to my office to request that I remove a photo I had on my wall of Marilyn Monroe. In the photo, Marilyn holds two roses against her breasts so that one can’t see her breasts at all. That photo, I was told, would encourage students to think about sex; it would validate their own thoughts and it would encourage them to go with their sexual daydreams. I was a role model, whether I wanted to be or not, I was told, and I had an obligation to take down the photo.

If I didn’t... well... there was a committee on issues of sexual harassment. So, I took down the photo and brought it home. Marilyn is on the wall in my dining room now. I didn’t want to fight that battle at that time.

One of the things I’ve learned, not surprisingly, is that students have continued to think and talk about sex; the removal of that photo of Marilyn had no influence on them whatsoever because they swim in a media sea of sexuality. Sex is all around them, and inside, too, and faculty members on my campus have the ludicrous notion that the best way to deal with the situation is just to ignore it -- not to talk about it. Bury their heads in the sand.

At a meeting recently to talk about a book that will be assigned reading for entering freshman next semester, the issue of sex came up again. The title of the book is Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides, Pulitzer Prize winner. Now, I suggested that someone deliver a lecture to the students about sex -- because, well, “sex” is in the very title of the book. The faculty members were shocked that someone would even suggest the idea, and it was swept under the table.

It’s a sad day for academia. A sad comment on a generation that once believed in sexual freedom, sexual liberation and that resented their elders telling them to resist the temptations of sex. I do think that sex ought to be discussed -- and not just in the sex education class that they are required to take in which they learn about sexualy transmitted diseases and HIV and AIDS.

I think it might be healthy if the students were to read pornographic books and watch pornographic movies, and talk about them openly. If we did that, it might help to break the unhealthy cycle of Puritanism that comes back again and again no matter how many generations rebel against it -- for a time.

At the end of the meeting to discuss Middlesex one faculty member suggested that students would be made uncomfortable if there was an open discussion about sex and sexuality. “Our students don’t think of us as sexual beings,” he said. And without missing a beat, I said, “Speak for yourself, sir.” I hope that my students think of me as a sexual being, much as I think of them as sexual beings because I am and they are sexual, and sex won’t go away and especially if we pretend it’s not there.

So, damn the censors. The girls will lean back and the boys will lean back; it’s part of the mating game, part of being human, and at the age of 19, 20, and 21 leaning back is going to happen no matter what. Maybe some of the teachers should lean back too.

Celibacy isn’t for this generation. Sex is. And that’s on the whole a good thing. I’m happy to say that sex is still with us. I even think it’s here to stay. Case in point: a woman student came to my office on the last day of the semester to tell me that she attended what she called a “private swingers club in San Francisco,” and that if she had not attended she “never would have learned as much as I know about myself today!”

Students are going to “sex clubs.” On their own, because they are one of the few places where they can learn about sex. It might make sense, it might help them, if more of them could and would talk openly on campuses about their own sexual experiences. Sex ought to be far more openly discussed on campuses than it is today.

We have to believe and to recognize too that talking about sex is not the same thing as having sex. In the landmark Ulysses case from the 1930s, Justice John Woolsey ruled that people would read Joyce’s book, have a vicarious experience, and not want to actually go out and have sex. That idea was revolutionary in the 1930s; I guess it’s still revolutionary today.

[Jonah Raskin was a member of the Yippies; he teaches law at Sonoma State University.]

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Big Pharma : The Orgasm Scam

'Restless Vagina Syndrome':
Big Pharma's newest fake disease

By Terry J. Allen / November 9, 2009

It’s not your fault, ladies (and certainly not your partner’s), that you don’t orgasm every time you have intercourse, or that you lack the libido of a 17-year-old boy. You have a disease: female sexual dysfunction (FSD), and the pharmaceutical industry wants to help.

You are among the "43 percent of American women [who] experience some degree of impaired sexual function," according to a Journal of the American Medical Association article. The FDA’s evolving definition of FSD includes decreased desire or arousal, sexual pain and orgasm difficulties -- but only if the woman feels "personal distress" about it.

So, convincing women to feel distress is a key component of the drug company strategy to market a multi-billion-dollar pill that will cure billions of women of what may not ail them.

By promoting the belief that "normal" women have explosive sex all the time, BigPharma helped launch the disease. However, the FDA has yet to approve a treatment for women who fall short. Until then, they could try the Orgasmatron: a dial-a-delight spinal implant that rarely works -- and risks infection and paralysis. Or, for $60/month, pop LexaFem pills -- containing (how-could-it-not-work) "horny goat weed extract" in order to "feel like a real woman today." Its website promises, "You won’t ever feel unhappy again with LexaFem in your arsenal."

But the big swinging dicks of global FSD marketing (and off-label marketing) are Pfizer -- whose stop-gap strategy is selling women Viagra based on the fact that it works for men, and Procter & Gamble (P&G), which, using the same logic, has put its money on testosterone.

Viagra’s failure in trial after trial to work on women has not stopped doctors from writing 1.4 million off-label prescriptions. FSD is "a classic example of starting with some preconceived, and non-evidence based diagnostic categorization for women’s sexual dysfunctions, based on the male model," said John Bancroft, director of the Kinsey Institute, in an interview with BMJ (British Medical Journal).

No drug follows the male model more literally than testosterone. Despite FDA refusal to approve P&G’s testosterone patch Intrinsa, U.S. doctors wrote 2 million off-label testosterone prescriptions in 2007. Like Pfizer’s little blue pill, the Intrinsa patch doesn’t really work for women. No wonder: Researchers don’t even know what constitutes a "normal" female testosterone level, and women with low levels of the hormone are as likely as those with high levels to be happy with their sex lives. And as filmmaker Liz Canner shows in her excellent new documentary Orgasm, Inc., testosterone is usually teamed with estrogen, which increases risks for stroke, cancers and dementia.

The companies and clinics that narrow the range of sexual normality to porn industry standards suffer their own disease. Symptoms include: a compulsion to concoct illnesses and then develop drugs to treat them, and vice versa. Either way, the syndrome is typically accompanied by a rash of conflicts of interest.

A Pfizer survey in Malaysia found that Malay women are even more diseased than their American counterparts, with "69.6 percent experiencing some form of FSD," according to the Journal of Sexual Medicine, which also published an industry-supported supplement on FSD. Journal editor and urologist Irwin Goldstein denies a conflict of interest. "Science is science," he says. "It comes down to the bottom line. What the data shows, the data shows." Actually, no. Drug company-funded studies are more likely than independent studies to find the new drug superior to the old. Perhaps the bottom line Dr. Goldstein refers to is his income as a paid consultant for drug companies, including P&G and Pfizer.

Goldstein established an FSD clinic with Dr. Jennifer Berman, who now heads a Beverly Hills clinic and appears on Oprah. As one of the health professionals on a 1998 panel that received financial sponsorship from eight pharmaceutical companies, she helped define female sexual dysfunction. Some 22 drug companies, including Pfizer, had financial ties to 18 of the 19 authors of that panel’s report, the BMJ revealed.

"Maybe the best approach is not ineffective, over-hyped drugs with nasty side effects, but an end to disease mongering and a strong dose of comprehensive sex education," says filmmaker Canner. Her film hits female erogenous zones that pharmaceutical fixes can’t find: your brain and your funny bone. 

© 2009 In These Times. All rights reserved.

Terry J. Allen is a senior editor of In These Times. Her work has appeared in Harper's, The Nation, New Scientist and other publications.]

Source / In These Times / AlterNet

Thanks to Mariann Wizard / The Rag Blog

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And Sunglasses Don't Help

Senator Larry Craig of Idaho and his wife, Suzanne. Photo: Troy Maben/Associated Press.
Rules of the Wronged
By Maureen Dowd / June 30, 2009

Stay focused, ladies. Here is The Practical Guide to Help Spurned Political Wives Survive Old Problems in the Era of New Technology.

1. Skip the press conference, especially when your husband is copping to call girls, gay pickups in airport bathrooms or “tragic” and “forbidden” telenovela-style love stories. Stoicism at the skunk’s side is overrated and, as Larry Craig’s wife learned, sunglasses don’t help.

2. When there’s an Associated Press bulletin quoting your husband saying that he has found his soul mate but he’s going to try to fall back in love with you, change the locks. (At your second home, too.)

3. If you can’t maintain a dignified Silda Spitzer silence; if you can’t find a girlfriend, a shrink, a personal trainer, a hairdresser or a yoga teacher to confide in; if you must unburden yourself of your fury about your loser husband, go to Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton or even Deepak Chopra before crying to The A.P. A news wire is not a spiritual adviser.

4. When your husband turns into a Harlequin romance, babbling to The A.P. — yes, even The A.P. thought it was T.M.I. — about a magical encounter on an open-air dance floor in Uruguay, “a soul that touches yours in a way that no one’s ever has,” and the “left brain and right brain” compartmentalization of “the world of ideas that impact this country and state” and “the pursuit of happiness, whatever that is,” just beat it.

5. If you think the worst is over, it’s probably only beginning. On Tuesday, after you thought Mark Sanford had already emoted and burbled more than any man in history, he volunteered to The A.P. (again!) that he had “crossed lines” with a handful of women on trips out of the country, but only “crossed the ultimate line” with his enchanting Maria. And just when you thought John Edwards could not sink any lower, there is news of a sex tape, in which Rielle Hunter shows off her skills not only in videography but pornography.

6. No matter how revolting your husband’s behavior is, don’t be passive-aggressive in public. Refrain from making any remarks that have a veneer of dignity but derogatory subtexts that sound like: “We’re trying to reconcile but it’s going to be tough because he has irreparably damaged my children” or “He has no integrity and I want my kids to have integrity” and “Sure, I’d like to give him a chance if he weren’t such a sleazeball.”

7. Don’t bring the children into it. They suffer enough being the kids of politicians. In the era of Facebook, texting, Google and iPhones, calling him out as a bad father will just go viral in the kids’ circles. Don’t trot out the family on “Oprah,” as Elizabeth Edwards did, or weepily show The A.P. the report cards of your two oldest sons from their elite private school in Columbia, S.C., as Jenny Sanford did.

8. Even if you’re a clever, competent woman, you risk sounding like a stereotypical harridan if you use the kids as a bludgeon and tell the press, as Jenny did: “You would think that a father who didn’t have contact with his children, if he wanted those children, he would toe the line a little bit.” When kids are involved, it’s best to chill when dishing out revenge.

9. Don’t slam his girlfriend for lying when you know she’s telling the truth. Don’t refer to the baby your rival had with your husband as “it.” Don’t trash a mistress, as Hillary and Elizabeth did, as a wacky stalker. No one — except the wife — blames the girlfriend as much as they blame the husband. Besides, you invite The Other Woman’s retaliation, as when Rielle decided — after watching Elizabeth spill to Oprah — that she might want that DNA test after all.

10. High-powered women like Hillary, Elizabeth and Jenny who give up their careers to focus on their husbands’ ambitions feel doubly betrayed. But it’s not your husband’s fault if you sacrifice more for the relationship than he does. Like an investor in a down market, you took a risk without a guarantee it would pay off. If you make your husband your career and you lose your husband, you lose your career, too.

11. Cut your losses and keep going. Don’t let yourself get dragged into his drama or your reputation may follow his down the well. Hillary refused to let that happen. She salvaged her long investment in Bill Clinton and turned a profit when she became a senator.

12. As you stay out of the spotlight that singes your husband, listen to whatever messages he is sending you through the press. When your husband says that is a world-class love story, ask him what this is. Just don’t do it through The A.P.

Source / New York Times

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On Cumming and Going : RIP, Grasshopper

David Carradine as Shaolin monk Caine from 1970's tv series "Kung Fu." Apparantly there was one habit he didn't kick. Photo from Hulton Archive / Getty Images.

Auto-erotic asphyxiation is quite common, but is usually kept quiet when the deceased is not famous... there are a number of guys in the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences... who make their livings as auto-erotic asphyxiation experts.

By Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / June 8, 2009

Auto-erotic asphyxiation is quite common, but is usually kept quiet when the deceased is not famous. Just like the birth of babies of difficult to discern sex is usually "fixed" and covered up.

How do I know?

Well, there are a number of guys in the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (I've been a member since 1990 or so) who make their livings as auto-erotic asphyxiation experts.

Who pays them?

Well, if it's auto-erotic asphyxiation, the insurance has to pay, since that is death by accident. If it's suicide, the insurance does not have to pay. There's normally at least one expert on each side.

I have seen their photo collections. All the victims are nude except the ones that are cross-dressed. Men outnumber women 7 or 8 to one.

Some of the cases are really hard.

One fighter ace from the Vietnam War did it in a really simple way, hanging over the edge of the bed. If he had not been cross-dressed, I think the insurance company would have won that one.

Then there was a college girl found hanging, nude, in a dorm closet with all the doors and windows locked, just before she was to both graduate and get married. It was treated first as a very clever homicide, principally because nobody could figure out how her hands got strapped behind her back.

The case was solved by the expert's wife, based on something she noticed in the picture of the way the body was found. I must confess I saw the picture and it went right past me.

She noticed a brand name of belt had secured the wrists and she knew that it was woven in a manner so it would bend like a regular belt would not. She was able to show her husband how she could step in and out of having the belt in the very position in which it was found.

Then there was a guy who liked to chain his genitals to his VW and drive it around a parking lot, ghost riding. His sex play went wrong when the chain wrapped around the axle and he could no longer reach the controls. He was found twisted up into the wheel well. Boy, that had to hurt....

Personally, I find this drive to "other" other people in terms of their sex practices much more disturbing than the practices.

And, of course, if you take up for somebody who has a stuffed animal fetish or whatever, the uglies immediately assume that you must have the same fetish.

I am skeptical that there is anybody who has no fetish at all. That is, an object or part of the body or song or place or whatever that begins the process of sexual arousal without regard to the rest of the context.

It is not strange to me that more men are "into" fetishes deeply than women. It is one of the adaptive traits that sets men apart from women that we can be sexually aroused "out of context," the most obvious being response to another woman when in the presence of our mate--which does us no good in the political bedroom but has its advantages for the species generally.

I can tell you exactly how AEA got started.

Hangings used to be public. It was hard not to notice that felons typically died with a roaring erection. There was some colloquialism for a post-mortem erection that escapes my aged brain right now, and good literature is rife with references to it--e.g., Billy Budd. Melville is no pornographer and neither were most of the other writers who referenced it. It was common and everybody knew it. If you did not, you had never seen a hanging and in the days of the death penalty for any felony, that meant you didn't get out much.

Of course, those among us medically trained will know the counter-intuitive fact that an erection results not from tense muscles but from relaxed ones, and this explains why the erections did not disappear when the hangmen moved from "turning off" to the drop.

Yes, the drop, done correctly, broke the neck and killed virtually instantly. But there was the erection anyway. What happened to the major erogenous zone being the brain? How can a person get turned on with a broken neck?

While I have no first hand experience, I doubt that you can get turned on while being executed unless you have a death fetish.

There's nothing erotic about the erection at a hanging. It's mechanical. The muscles of the pelvis go limp and the blood rushes in.

Non-medical types now don't know that; even medical types then did not know it. I guess they thought his Invisible Friend was giving him a delightful send off.

Anyway, a little light strangulation during sex, people found out, can give you quite an intense jolt. Either sex. Some people want to dial up their orgasms and they get in the habit.

That's how AEA becomes a sub-specialty in my academic field. There's a lot of it and people often get killed in mishaps. If you do erotic asphyxiation with a partner, not only is there no problem stopping (normally), you also have somebody who cares about you right there to revive you in case of error...or not.

All of this seems perfectly understandable to me and no occasion to belittle the dead.

[Steve Russell, Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is a Texas trial court judge by assignment and an associate professor of criminal justice at Indiana University. Steve, who lives in Bloomington, wrote for Austin’s The Rag in the Sixties and seventies and is a regular contributor to The Rag Blog.]

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David Carradine's Death, and Bizarre Memories from a Reporter's Early Years

Graphic by Larry Ray / The Rag Blog.

I had never seen anything as ghastly. His upper body was pasty white. From about his pelvis down, the flesh was a dark port color.

By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / June 6, 2009

Shocking details in news reports today about motion picture actor David Carradine's death in a Bangkok hotel room literally jolted my memory back to my days as a rookie police beat reporter in South Texas almost 45 years ago.

The police radio in the radio station's rattletrap old news wagon broadcast one brief call, "All cars bay front area, possible suicide, Shoreside Motel." I was just a couple of blocks away, and headed over to the motel. No sophisticated news crews and fancy live broadcasts in the mid 1960's. And you had to be on a beat for a while and make good contacts or the cops wouldn't even let you near a crime scene. But there were ways.

About the time I pulled into a side parking space, two sheriff's cars and a city patrol car rolled into the back parking lot. They made a beeline toward an open first floor hallway end door. I just walked in with them. All focus was on a hysterical, weeping housekeeper, pushing the door open into a room.

We started to enter the room, then those in front halted abruptly. Magazines and trash were scattered around the small single room. A bottle of cheap Bourbon was on a table. The ones at the front could see the closet to the left of the door. "Damn, look at that, " an old deputy grunted. The rest of us worked our way inside and then I saw the closet.

Its cloth curtain had been pulled to one side. A paunchy completely naked man, with a pillowcase pulled over his head, was leaning forward, hanging motionless from a rope tied to a closet clothes rod and then around the pillowcase and his neck. A vanity stool from the room was toppled over in front of his folded knees. "He's been there quite a while," one of the city cops observed, "All the blood's drained down into his lower torso and legs."

I had never seen anything as ghastly. His upper body was pasty white. From about his pelvis down, the flesh was a dark port color. The maid had found him and was in a state of shock mumbling that the victim was a merchant seaman. I was working hard to be professional, casual, but one of the deputies finally turned and spotted me. "What are you doing in here!" I told him I was with KEYS Radio and was there on the suicide call. "Well you back your butt out of here," he ordered. I persisted, asking him if he had ever seen a strange suicide like this before. "This ain't no suicide, and this ain't no story. Now beat it. I ain't telling you again."

I had not been on the police beat very long, and with no more to go on than what I had seen, and having been stiffed by the deputy, I backed out of the parking lot feeling I didn't have enough for a story. But I wondered that if what I saw wasn't a suicide, then what kind of murder could it have been? A couple of months later, I learned it was neither.

The Carradine death is initially puzzling to everyone. He reportedly was shooting a new film, "Stretch" in Bangkok, and friends said the 72 year old actor was, "Working hard on the set, and we were liking what we were seeing." News reports say Carradine hung around the hotel lobby Wednesday night, even playing the grand piano to the delight of those at the lobby bar. He reportedly had a shot of vodka, a cola, then told those at the bar he was going up to his room and have a "special whiskey."

Police say he entered his room Wednesday night and was discovered around 11 A.M. the next morning by the maid who had come to clean the room. He was reportedly found nude in a closet of his hotel suite with a yellow nylon rope tied around his neck and a black rope around his genitals. The two ropes, according to the Associated Press, were tied together, and he died of asphyxiation. Suggestions that it was a suicide were strongly denied by his wife and his manager. The bartender told reporters that Carradine had made a reservation for a table for a party with friends for Thursday, the day he was found dead. Bizarre, puzzling. Police said there were no signs of forced entry into his room, which was neat and undisturbed. No immediate evidence of foul play.

The details David Carradine's death jarred loose all the forgotten details of my once seeing a nude hooded dead man hanging from a rope in a motel closet. A man discovered by the maid who came to clean his room. Then other memories came racing back. I remembered being on the scene of a murder one evening months after the mystery motel hanging. The deputy who had run me off from the crime scene in the motel was there, and had warmed up to me after hearing my newscasts saying I, "just might be a fair to middling decent reporter." It was a misty evening and after he gave me what information he had on the murder, I decided to ask him about the strange hanging in the motel, and if they ever solved that murder. As if he were talking to a police academy class he dispassionately explained what had happened to the man in the motel.

"Look, we see this regularly enough year after year. There are just some people who get sexually excited by letting themselves down slowly on a rope around their neck and as they are almost about to pass out they have an orgasm. Then they ease themselves back up and release the pressure on the neck." He screwed his mouth to one side, then took a deep breath and continued as if he were teaching me his trade.

"The first thing we do is to check the underwear or hands to see if there is evidence of an ejaculation. The old guy in the motel had used the vanity stool to kneel on as he lowered himself down on the rope. Who knows why he had the pillowcase over his head, but what happened is that the stool fell forward and he was unable to get the pressure off the rope in time. Probably had been hitting the bottle pretty heavy."

I asked if he knew why people do this and he shrugged, "These people aren't trying to commit suicide, they sometimes just don't release the pressure on their neck in time and die. No one would ever know about what they do otherwise. They accidentally strangle and then leave everyone all confused because nobody dreamed that their husband or son or father would be into anything like that. They want to insist it was murder or something, anything, else. We see all kinds of weird sex stuff out there."

I was astounded, and felt unsteady on my feet. I really didn't want to hear any more at that point. I now remember those thoughts racing and crisscrossing as I imagined the world this police officer lived in. The things he had seen, the sorry and secret underbelly of people that had become his world. I couldn't even imagine what the longshoreman's life had been like, and why his scary, strange sexual need led him to his eventual death. Several months later I got an offer from a local ABC TV affiliate and chasing ambulances and police calls was less intense.


Now comes today's instant reporting on the Internet about David Carradine's death with shocking details of his nude body, color of the ropes, where they were tied, and that he asphyxiated, all things that would not have been reported 45 years ago in South Texas. Details similar to the grisly ones I had long ago buried and forgotten.

The Associated Press is already reporting that Thailand's Central Institute of Forensic Science, said the circumstances under which Carradine died suggest the 72-year-old actor may have been performing auto-erotic asphyxiation.

Carradine's family wants to fight a finding of suicide as the cause of death and has asked the FBI to assist in the investigation. Gossip columnists are even suggesting Carradine's connections to Scientology, though he was not a member, could be connected with his death.

Who knows for certain how or why David Carradine died? I certainly do not. Only being able to know and understand his deepest, darkest secrets could one perhaps know the hows and whys of his death.

The awakening of that memory from so long ago did make this old reporter finally do a little research on what the detective deputy told me all those years ago about the reason the longshoreman died.

It took a little time on Google to narrow the detective's explanation down to a clinical term, asphyxiophilia. The research even notes that auto-erotic asphyxiation has been known since the 1600's.

Once again, more information there than I ever wanted to know. Now I can only hope that the awakened grisly memories from all those years ago will again fade away deep back into my old gray cells.

[Retired journalist Larry Ray is a Texas native and former Austin television news anchor. He also posts at The iHandbill.]

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Consumerism: Leading the Life of the Peacock

Graphic: Viktor Koen.
Message in What We Buy, but Nobody’s Listening
By John Tierney / May 18, 2009

Why does a diploma from Harvard cost $100,000 more than a similar piece of paper from City College? Why might a BMW cost $25,000 more than a Subaru WRX with equally fast acceleration? Why do “sophisticated” consumers demand 16-gigabyte iPhones and “fair trade” coffee from Starbucks?

If you ask market researchers or advertising executives, you might hear about the difference between “rational” and “emotional” buying decisions, or about products falling into categories like “hedonic” or “utilitarian” or “positional.” But Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, says that even the slickest minds on Madison Avenue are still in the prescientific dark ages.

Instead of running focus groups and spinning theories, he says, marketers could learn more by administering scientifically calibrated tests of intelligence and personality traits. If marketers (or their customers) understood biologists’ new calculations about animals’ “costly signaling,” Dr. Miller says, they’d see that Harvard diplomas and iPhones send the same kind of signal as the ornate tail of a peacock.

Sometimes the message is as simple as “I’ve got resources to burn,” the classic conspicuous waste demonstrated by the energy expended to lift a peacock’s tail or the fuel guzzled by a Hummer. But brand-name products aren’t just about flaunting transient wealth. The audience for our signals — prospective mates, friends, rivals — care more about the permanent traits measured in tests of intelligence and personality, as Dr. Miller explains in his new book, “Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior.”

Suppose, during a date, you casually say, “The sugar maples in Harvard Yard were so beautiful every fall term.” Here’s what you’re signaling, as translated by Dr. Miller:

“My S.A.T. scores were sufficiently high (roughly 720 out of 800) that I could get admitted, so my I.Q. is above 135, and I had sufficient conscientiousness, emotional stability and intellectual openness to pass my classes. Plus, I can recognize a tree.”

Or suppose a young man, after listening to the specifications of the newest iPhone or hearing about a BMW’s “Servotronic variable-ratio power steering,” says to himself, “Those features sound awesome.” Here’s Dr. Miller’s translation:

“Those features can be talked about in ways that will display my general intelligence to potential mates and friends, who will bow down before my godlike technopowers, which rival those of Iron Man himself.”

Most of us will insist there are other reasons for going to Harvard or buying a BMW or an iPhone — and there are, of course. The education and the products can yield many kinds of rewards. But Dr. Miller says that much of the pleasure we derive from products stems from the unconscious instinct that they will either enhance or signal our fitness by demonstrating intelligence or some of the Big Five personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, stability and extraversion.

In a series of experiments, Dr. Miller and other researchers found that people were more likely to expend money and effort on products and activities if they were first primed with photographs of the opposite sex or stories about dating.

After this priming, men were more willing to splurge on designer sunglasses, expensive watches and European vacations. Women became more willing to do volunteer work and perform other acts of conspicuous charity — a signal of high conscientiousness and agreeableness, like demonstrating your concern for third world farmers by spending extra for Starbucks’s “fair trade” coffee.

These signals can be finely nuanced, as Dr. Miller parses them in his book. The “conspicuous precision” of a BMW or a Lexus helps signal the intelligence of all the owners, but the BMW’s “conspicuous reputation” also marks its owner as more extraverted and less agreeable (i.e., more aggressive). Owners of Toyotas and Hondas are signaling high conscientiousness by driving reliable and economical cars.

But once you’ve spent the money, once you’ve got the personality-appropriate appliance or watch or handbag, how much good are these signals actually doing you? Not much, Dr. Miller says. The fundamental consumerist delusion, as he calls it, is that purchases affect the way we’re treated.

The grand edifice of brand-name consumerism rests on the narcissistic fantasy that everyone else cares about what we buy. (It’s no accident that narcissistic teenagers are the most brand-obsessed consumers.) But who else even notices? Can you remember what your partner or your best friend was wearing the day before yesterday? Or what kind of watch your boss has?

A Harvard diploma might help get you a date or a job interview, but what you say during the date or conversation will make the difference. An elegantly thin Skagen watch might send a signal to a stranger at a cocktail party or in an airport lounge, but even if it were noticed, anyone who talked to you for just a few minutes would get a much better gauge of your intelligence and personality.

To get over your consuming obsessions, Dr. Miller suggests exercises like comparing the relative costs and pleasures of the stuff you’ve bought. (You can try the exercise at nytimes.com/tierneylab.) It may seem odd that we need these exercises — why would natural selection leave us with such unproductive fetishes? — but Dr. Miller says it’s not surprising.

“Evolution is good at getting us to avoid death, desperation and celibacy, but it’s not that good at getting us to feel happy,” he says, calling our desire to impress strangers a quirky evolutionary byproduct of a smaller social world.

“We evolved as social primates who hardly ever encountered strangers in prehistory,” Dr. Miller says. “So we instinctively treat all strangers as if they’re potential mates or friends or enemies. But your happiness and survival today don’t depend on your relationships with strangers. It doesn’t matter whether you get a nanosecond of deference from a shopkeeper or a stranger in an airport.”

Source / New York Times

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When It Comes to Combating Teen Pregnancy, the Palin Family Has Done Enough Damage Already

Bristol Palin attends the Candie’s Foundation town hall meeting on teen pregnancy prevention at TheTimesCenter on May 6, 2009 in New York City. Photo: Bryan Bedder/Getty Images.
Bristol Palin’s New Gig
By Gail Collins / May 6, 2009

“Just because you’re wearing high-heeled sexy shoes doesn’t mean you should have a baby,” said Neil Cole.

I believe we can all rally around this sentiment.

Cole is the head of Iconix, a company that makes the Candie’s line of teen fashions. A couple of years ago, under fire from critics who accused him of dressing high schoolers like tarts, he established the Candie’s Foundation, which fights teen pregnancy. And there he was on Wednesday introducing the foundation’s new teen ambassador, Bristol Palin.

Palin is not in any way to be confused with the new Candie’s brand spokesperson, Britney Spears. Bristol is the one endorsing abstinence; Britney is the one promoting “hot bottoms.”

Can I say upfront that this is a terrible, terrible idea? Not the sexy clothes. Perhaps in the best of all possible worlds we would not have 12-year-olds dressing as if they were auditioning for a leading role in “Girls Gone Wild,” but history suggests that resistance is futile. There was one minute back in the late 1960s when the women’s movement tried to convince everyone that being liberated involved wearing sensible shoes. It was not a success. Really, you should never try to impose feminist principles that even Gloria Steinem refuses to pay attention to.

But surely, when it comes to combating teen pregnancy, the Palin family has done enough damage already. What worse message could you send to teenage girls than the one they delivered at the Republican convention: If your handsome but somewhat thuglike boyfriend gets you with child, he will clean up nicely, propose marriage, and show up at an important family event wearing a suit and holding your hand. At which point you will get a standing ovation.

Now a single mom on the outs with the father of her baby, Bristol wants a new kind of happy ending.

“I just want to go out there and promote abstinence and say this is the safest choice,” she said on “Good Morning America.”

“It’s not going to work,” said her ex-boyfriend, Levi Johnston, in a dueling early-morning interview.

If you have ever watched Levi Johnston on TV for two minutes you will appreciate how terrifying it is when he has the most reasonable analysis of a social issue.

Because Bristol’s own philosophy seems, at minimum, tentative, it’s hard to tell whether she believes that cheerleading for abstinence should be coupled with education about birth control methods. She and Levi used condoms, except when they didn’t.

Her mom has said in the past that she opposes “explicit” sex education, which kind of sounds like ... sex education. And while encouraging kids to wait is obviously fine, the evidence is pretty clear that abstinence education is worse than useless. Texas, where virtually all the schools teach abstinence and abstinence alone, is a teen pregnancy disaster zone. “It’s had one of the highest rates for as long as I can remember,” said David Wiley, a professor of health education at Texas State University.

Bristol appeared Wednesday at Event to Prevent, a teen town hall, during which she said very little except to assure her audience that having a baby is no picnic. (“You have so much responsibility. It’s just hard work all the time.”) It’s hard not to suspect that for her, being the anti-pregnancy ambassador is just a good excuse to get out of Wasilla.

But where were her parents? Her mom ought to know by now that the only way to protect your family from becoming tabloid fodder is to make it clear to the media that the kids are absolutely, totally off limits. You can’t put them on network TV one day and then complain the next when a reporter asks whether the baby’s other grandmother is still facing drug charges.

“We contacted the governor’s office, and the next thing we knew Todd Palin was on the phone and said Bristol wanted to talk,” Cole said, explaining how his ambassador had been recruited. And indeed, there was Todd, beaming as his beautiful daughter stood in front of about 50 shrieking photographers, smiling a fixed smile.

We have seen so many bad plans about breaching the public-private divide lately. Elizabeth Edwards’s book tour. Eliot Spitzer’s media blitz. (Can we point out here that when 51 percent of the public tells pollsters that they would rather have Spitzer as governor than the current incumbent, David Paterson, that is not the same as saying they would like Spitzer to come back? You could probably get 51 percent of the voters to say they would rather have Vlad the Impaler than David Paterson. Or at least 30.)

But when a teenager goes out on this kind of mission, you have to wonder where her parents’ heads were. What does this say about Sarah Palin’s judgment?

Although we’ve sort of answered that question before.

Source / New York Times

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Economic Stimulus : Try Whips and Chains

Graphic courtesy of The Daily Beast.
Kinkonomics:

With staff jobs evaporating and former nine-to-fivers cobbling together incomes through scattered side projects, freelancing as a dominatrix -- or “pro-domme,” as industry types prefer to call it -- has become a plausible gig option.

By Tracy Quan / February 7, 2009

As the economy takes a spanking, many women are turning to freelance fetish work to supplement their incomes.

"I've seen it before," says Linda, “during the tech bust in 2002. Women who thought they would always make a decent living in the tech sector lost their jobs.” They came looking to Linda’s industry for freelance work, and now it’s happening again: professional women whose cubicle-bound careers have been downsized are entering Linda’s corner of the “gig economy”—a corner that involves whips, ropes, and occasionally, nipple clamps.

With staff jobs evaporating and former nine-to-fivers cobbling together incomes through scattered side projects, freelancing as a dominatrix—or “pro-domme,” as industry types prefer to call it—has become a plausible gig option. As a former call girl, I know plenty of people in the industry, and I recently spoke to several who have started doing kink work to supplement their incomes. (I’ve changed their names to protect their privacy.) They agree: The sector is poised for expansion as more unemployed and underemployed women begin looking for extra cash.

Linda began working in a dungeon when she was a student. Now she works a regular day job, picking up occasional domination gigs at night to supplement her income as an editor. Throughout her time in the industry, she’s seen “regular” jobs and kink jobs happily coexist—even complement each other. She knows women who were self-employed pro-dommes before the tech boom began. Then, she says, “during the boom, they got tech jobs.” And after the bubble burst, they brought their skills back to the kink industry and built new websites for themselves with the updated skills they’d acquired.

Many freelance dommes prefer to work a regular shift in a commercial dungeon with equipment and advertising provided by management. They do much of what you’d expect, specializing in bondage, verbal humiliation, spanking or paddling, whipping, and genital torture. Some aspects of domme work—nipple-clamping a customer, wearing a strap-on dildo, allowing a man to worship your feet—are familiar to traditional call girls, but the more rigorous assignments could make some prostitutes faint. Still, working a shift at a dungeon can provide a more similar structure to regular work, which adds a level of comfort for those just doing it as a side gig. The busy night shift works well for women with regular day jobs, but some women prefer the early shift—neighbors, relatives, husbands, and children are less likely to wonder what you’re up to while the sun is out.

The money’s not bad, either. Jessica, a pro-domme in her late twenties, apprenticed at a dungeon before striking out on her own. In Manhattan dungeons, she says, the typical cut on a $200 session is 60-40 in the dungeon’s favor. To people who make their entire living in the sex industry—professional escorts who get $500 an hour, for instance—such rates can seem abusive. But freelancers see it differently. “If you’re making $8 an hour at your day job, $80 is awesome,” says Jessica. “There’s no shortage of women willing to work at those rates.”

Jessica recently got a new day job working for a website designer three days a week, leaving her time to see a few regular fetishists. Like other freelancers, she’s responsible for her own health insurance. Does she want a full-time tech job with benefits? “In this economy? Forget it,” she says. “I didn’t really try to get a full-time job.” She embraces her role in the gig economy—one gig, her tech job, enhances her resume, while her fetish work makes life in New York affordable. What’s more, her part-time tech work makes her a legitimate freelancer, which comes with perks. “I joined the Freelancers Union for medical insurance,” she says, an option she wouldn’t have had if working exclusively as a domme.

Freelance kink work is a more viable option for women today than ever before. Over the past two decades, kink has gone thoroughly mainstream, infiltrating everything from liquor ads to sitcom scenarios to school-supported student groups. And while a prostitution arrest is still a serious worry, legit dungeons operate legally and openly—The New York Post recently reported on pro-domme efforts to form a union and a political action committee.

And at $200 an hour, a piquant visit to a Manhattan dungeon for a spanking administered by a good-looking girl with a liberal arts degree is easier on a guy’s wallet than the “girlfriend experience” offered by many an Internet courtesan. If a pro-domme permits him to “satisfy himself,” the end result may be similar enough to what he would get from an escort—and less expensive. Men who pay for kink aren’t all diehard fetishists or submissives—a spanking isn’t essential to their personal happiness. It may be an occasional side thrill. Clients are middle-management types, small-business owners, dentists, young lawyers, even a few single males who see themselves as casualties of the gig economy. A fence-sitter—flirting with, not truly committed to kink—might discover that the antidote to a recession resides in the nearest S&M parlor.

He might also be surprised to learn that the woman whose toes he’s sucking isn’t much kinkier than he is. Because many of these freelance pro-dommes are just supplementing their incomes and don’t plan on staying in sex work forever, they may not be as erotically hardcore in their outside lives. “I wasn't really that interested” in S&M, says Chloe. “I got involved because it was easy money. The strap-on? I'm OK with it, but it's not really a personal interest of mine.”

Chloe is a middle-income student about to graduate from the School of Visual Arts. Her dungeon activities pay for school supplies, shoes, laptop equipment, Metro cards, and food. She’s even used freelance kink work to allow her to take an unpaid internship—something you can't necessarily do if you're not bankrolled by your parents. In this way, S&M promotes social mobility. Chloe says her mother "would probably cry" and be "very upset" about her fetish gigs, but I suspect some parents would be secretly proud of a daughter resourceful enough to hack the increasingly rigid class system that permeates New York life.

Though dominatrix work is considered by many to be the hardest in the sex industry, being able to avoid actual intercourse is key to its appeal to “everyday” women who are just looking to pick up a little extra money to pay the bills. Because of this, counterintuitive as it sounds, the kink sector tends to attract women who are more risk-averse than traditional call girls—and more law-abiding.

Lyla, for instance, has worked the fetish party circuit as a popular foot model and pro-domme, always “staying within the bounds of what was legal.” She is understandably proud to have “a very particular foot with a high arch.” On a good night, she might bring in $1,000—“you get to keep it all, and it's completely legal,” she adds, citing a celebrated 1994 decision (New York v. Georgia A.) concerning the definition of “sexual conduct,” a key element of prostitution law.

That court decision has been a blessing and, perhaps, a curse—contributing to an oversupply of talent. Not every pro-domme earns as much as Lyla does because, she says, “dungeon managers take advantage of the social stigma around our work.” Some domination houses pocket a pro-domme's tips, while others impose wacky fines. Although the work itself is legal, people—especially freelancers—are reluctant to challenge these practices through official channels.

So has kink lost its glamour? Is it just a bunch of office drones slipping it into their schedules of consulting gigs and child rearing? Actually, kink was never as glam as people imagined it to be. Trust me, I know: Even if you’re bossing your client around in a pair of thigh-high boots, you’re still working in a service industry. And after an hour, your feet hurt.

[Tracy Quan's latest novel is Diary of a Jetsetting Call Girl, set in Provence and praised in The Nation as a "deft account of occupational rigors and anxieties before the crash." She is the author of the bestsellers Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl and Diary of a Married Call Girl and is a columnist for The Guardian.]

Source / The Daily Beast

Thanks to Jesse James Retherford / The Rag Blog

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BOOKS / Edward Carpenter : A Life of Liberty and Love

A Pioneer's Life Richly Rendered:
Sheila Rowbotham offers the comprehensive, critical, contextualized biography Edward Carpenter deserves.

By Doug Ireland

Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love
By Sheila Rowbotham / Verso / 565 pages, $39.95.

When Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) broke free of the stifling world of upper-class Victorian England into which he was born, his rejection of its cosseted, impossibly mannered life was total. In his time, he became the most famous apostle of a wide-ranging revolt against sexual hypocrisy and the straightjacket of class divisions in human interpersonal relations. And Carpenter's courageous contributions over a long life made him one of the most important precursors of gay liberation, one whose influence spanned countries and continents.

Carpenter and his working-class lover of 37 years, George Merrill, became one of history's most celebrated same-sex couples, on a par with Jean Cocteau and Jean Marais or with Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. Yet despite his well-known defense of homosexuality, Carpenter was one of the most beloved figures of British socialism, so much so that on his 80th birthday in 1924, 43 years before same-sex relations were legalized in the United Kingdom, the entire Cabinet of the first Labour Party government, led by Carpenter's old friend Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, signed a profuse tribute to him.

A poet, essayist, and philosopher, a pioneer environmentalist and feminist, the most generous of humanitarians, an advocate of alternative democratic lifestyles who eschewed the bourgeois accumulation of possessions, and a tireless and skilled propagandist for social change, Carpenter is primarily remembered today for his writings on homosexuality.

But it is one of the great merits of Sheila Rowbotham's superb new biography, the first in-depth account of his life and work, that she restores the remarkable Carpenter to his proper place as one of the most significant figures in the rise of the British cultural left and in the creation of the shifts in attitudes that made the election of the first Labour government possible.

When Carpenter was born, "sodomy" was still a capital crime technically subject to the death penalty, a sanction that was only changed to life imprisonment in 1861 when Carpenter was 17, and although aware from an early age of his intense attraction to his own sex he did not have his first sexual experience with a man until he was 20. His first love occurred while he was an increasingly radical and egalitarian university student at Cambridge, but it was fleeting, painful, and an apparent single carnal episode with the love object - Edward Beck, a somewhat younger student who later became a conservative Cambridge dean - was not repeated, because as Rowbotham writes, "the ambiguity of strong friendships in the 1870s blurred any explicit expression of sexual passion [and] the equivocal attitudes to homosexual desire in Cambridge... created a perplexing kind of freedom which had to be intimated within bounds which could never be clearly marked out."

After Beck broke off their brief romantic friendship, leaving a lasting wound, Carpenter visited Paris in search of male prostitutes in a country in which homosex was not illegal, but his sexual experiences there left him emotionally empty, unfulfilled, and unhappy.

Carpenter's sense of alienation from his sexual self only really began to dissipate when he read Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," for "Whitman's advocacy of an 'adhesive' democratic, manly comradeship was attractive to Carpenter because it provided a new homoerotic possibility, and at the same time touched a political nerve. Whitman's 'Democratic Vistas' (1871) presented 'adhesiveness' as the complement to individualism, a brotherhood in which all races fused as comrades."

Carpenter became a confirmed Whitmanite, but it was not until 1874 as he was about to graduate from Cambridge that Carpenter worked up the courage to write "a long letter" to Whitman. "Because you have... given me a ground for the love of men, I thank you continually in my heart," Carpenter wrote the bard, "and others thank you though they do not say so. For you have made men to be not ashamed of the noblest instinct of their nature. Women are beautiful, but to some there is that which surpasses the love of women."

Whitman loved the letter, and there ensued a correspondence that would only end with Whitman's death.

Using a trip to America on behalf of his wealthy family's financial entanglements there as an excuse, Carpenter - who after a brief stint as a cleric had joined the Cambridge University Extension program to teach the working classes in northern England - finally met Whitman and spent a week in his house with him. (He also sought out and met Ralph Waldo Emerson.)

One of Carpenter's young gay disciples in later years, Chester A. Arthur III (1901-1972), the grandson and namesake of the US president, recalled in his old age that Carpenter had told him he had "slept" with Whitman, and that Whitman "thought people should 'know' each other on the physical and emotional plane as well as in the mental. And that the best part of comrade love was that there was no limit to the number of comrades one could have."

Meeting Whitman, writes Rowbotham, "clarified new ways of seeing, feeling, and being for Carpenter, giving him a different means of denoting significance. It was the start of an alternative outlook on the world." Moreover, "Carpenter's visit to Whitman... made him more bold sexually: he embarked on exploratory encounters with working-class men, 'railway-men, porters, clerks, signalmen, ironworkers, coach-builders, Sheffield cutters,' discovering he could 'knit up more alliances more satisfactory to me than any I had before known... I felt I had come into, or at least in sight of, the world to which I belonged, my natural habitat.'"

His Whitman visit had also awakened a deepening love of nature, and on his return Carpenter moved first to the working-class industrial city of Sheffield, then to a farm in a nearby village where he worked at market gardening and wrote his first book, "Towards Democracy" (1883), a long prose poem greatly influenced by Whitman and the influential Christian Socialist art critic and social essayist John Ruskin.

The book "contains Carpenter's observations of the poverty he saw in the streets of the northern cities, the crushing, destructive working conditions, and the lack of human contact between people of different classes. These are mixed together with Ruskinian diatribes against commercialism... and a romantic Whitmanite embracing of all humanity, however despised or outcast." Politics was a means to an end, for the "democracy" Carpenter sought was "a new way of being human, a new manner of encountering others," flecked with homosensual accents. The book attracted a growing audience of socialists and sexual rebels over the ensuing decades and converted many to the radical cause.

By this time Carpenter had inherited considerable wealth on the death of his father, and bought three fields at Millthorpe, a "tiny, remote settlement in the Cordwell Valley" not too far from Sheffield, where he had a gray stone house built and set up to live a simpler life as a market gardener with the aid of a local farming family.

Having been converted to socialism after reading "England for All" (1881) by the pioneer of British socialism, Henry Hyndman, he began attending meetings of Hyndman's Social Democratic Federation and gave ₤300 to Justice, the first and longest-surviving Marxist newspaper in England, which Hyndman started that year. And Carpenter began criss-crossing English towns and cities to lecture where "little networks of heresy," from utopians to hard-headed municipal reformers, "coalesced to become the cores of the new [Socialist] movement." He continued to keep a heavy lecture schedule until he was nearly 80.

He helped found the Sheffield Socialist Society, and in 1885 helped the Working Men's Radical Association put up one of the first independent labor candidates for Parliament.

As Rowbotham puts it, "Carpenter's unusual circumstances as a Millthorpe market gardener endowed him with a certain mystique among the newly radicalized intelligentsia earnestly debating poverty, class inequality, sexual relations, new ethical codes..." and he gained renown as a practitioner of an alternative style of living even as his lectures, constant stream of books, and never-ending series of articles in the new socialist and radical publications made him well-known.

In all his speeches and writings, he "stressed, as he had in 'Towards Democracy,' that the moral elements in historical movements were the key to change because they caused men and women to desire an alternative." Carpenter's libertarian brand of socialism had a strong anarchist tinge, but he had an entirely ecumenical view of the left that saw all its factions as working toward a common goal, and envisioned a labor "movement" that would unite them all.

For Carpenter, "Socialism was not merely a movement for industrial emancipation, it 'meant the entire regeneration of society in art, in science, in religion, and in literature, and the building up of a new life in which industrial socialism was the foundation,'" as he put it in 1887.

However, Carpenter's simple, alternative lifestyle, which included rejection of traditional bourgeois dress, a sometimes backsliding vegetarianism, and his fondness for sandals (which he eventually began to make at Millthorpe as a supplement to his income) was not to the taste of all leftists; his Socialist comrade George Bernard Shaw dryly nicknamed Carpenter "the Noble Savage."

In one of his most successful books, "Civilization: Its Cause and Cure" (1889), which went through 18 editions in English in the ensuring four decades and was widely published in translation, including Japanese, Carpenter flayed class divisions, "Panglossian Victorian complacency," and "faith in automatic progress as a result of external changes in science, technology, productivity, and material prosperity." Deploying references to Plato, Carpenter "wanted to validate physical desires denigrated by Christianity, and homosexuality peeps out gingerly from [its] pages, smuggled in under cover of the classics."

Carpenter met the man who was to become his partner for the rest of his life, 25-year-old George Merrill, in 1892 as they were descending from a train at Sheffield. They briefly and wordlessly cruised each other, and Merrill followed Carpenter at a distance as he walked off toward Millthorpe in the company of waiting friends. Eventually Carpenter stopped and turned, the two exchanged names and addresses, and a relationship that would last for the next three and a half decades was born. Their life together at Millthorpe entered into legend.

Rowbotham relates that "After meeting Merrill, Carpenter was seeking a more outright way of expressing male-male love than was possible under Whitman's cloak of comradeship." In 1893 and 1894, Carpenter set to work on four pamphlets - "Woman and Her Place in a Free Society," "Marriage in a Free Society," "Sex-love and its Place in a Free Society," and "Homogenic Love and its Place in a Free Society."

"The decision to write about sexuality in general," notes Rowbotham, "was consistent with Carpenter's tendency to seek out broad alliances rather than to isolate himself. Moreover the other pamphlets gave 'Homogenic Love' a degree of cover, for he could appear as a writer on sexual topics in general rather than as a homosexual pleading a case."

The first three pamphlets, which took an advanced feminist position arguing that women deserved full social and economic freedom, that marriage was a form of prostitution, and that housework was real work, were all published, and eventually collected as "Love's Coming of Age" in 1896. But the publisher refused to bring out "Homogenic Love," so Carpenter paid to have it privately printed, and "the first British statement by a homosexual man, linking emancipation to social transformation, was destined only for friends and acquaintances."

Drawing on the works in German of the pioneer German homosexual liberationist Karl Ulrichs (Carpenter was fluent in German, French, and Italian), "Homogenic Love" argued that same-sex desire was congenital and that private sexual behavior should be no concern of the law, which could not stop "natural" feelings, only persecute those individuals caught expressing them, while offering fertile terrain for blackmailers.

In the wake of the imprisonment and trial of Oscar Wilde - who had admired Carpenter's "Towards Democracy" - the following year, an event which "left a vortex of fear in its wake," Carpenter's attempts to find a publisher for "Homogenic Love" were universally rejected, and his attempts to publish articles based on his privately printed plea for homosexual liberation were repeatedly rejected, even by journals on the left which normally welcomed him. But "Homogenic Love" was published in German in 1895, in the French journal La Societé Nouvelle the next year, and copies made their way into the hands of sympathetic American sex radicals, particularly in the anarchist movement, which greatly admired Carpenter and Whitman.

In 1897 Carpenter finally managed to get his article on same-sexers, "An Unknown People," published in the freethinkers' magazine The Reformer, arguing for sexual education for lonely young "Urnings" (he'd adopted Ulrichs' term for homosexuals) and insisting that they were not the "decadents" of popular imagination but "fine, healthy specimens."

In an 1899 article in the International Journal of Ethics on "Affection in Education," Carpenter argued that "intense and romantic" friendships between pupils, and between teachers and pupils, played a vital part in education. And when the scientific study "Sexual Inversion" by the pioneering sexologist Havelock Ellis, a longtime friend and admirer of Carpenter who was married to a lesbian, was crucified in the press and pursued by the censors, Carpenter did not hesitate to spring publicly to its defense.

In 1902 Carpenter edited "Ioläus," an anthology celebrating same-sex love which drew its title from the name of Hercules' warrior comrade, and in which is chronicled, as Rowbotham puts it, "a great crowd of historical 'friends.' Greek and Spartan warrior lovers and shepherd boys appear in the procession along with Sir Thomas Browne, Michelangelo and the Persian poet Hafiz. From more recent times, Richard Wagner, King Ludwig II of Prussia, Walt Whitman, Byron and Shelley present themselves in its pages. Nor were the women forgotten; Carpenter included Queen Anne and Lady Churchill as well as the resolute Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby who eloped to live in Wales and became known as the 'Ladies of Llangolen' during the 18th century."

Over the years, Millthorpe and the Carpenter-Merrill ménage acted as a magnet for young men troubled about their same-sex attractions, both those from the working classes Carpenter favored - and whom he often bedded, sometimes arousing temporary fits of jealousy from the equally promiscuous Merrill that soon subsided - and a stream of younger, disconsolate would-be writers and intellectuals who were homosexual.

Among those whom the charismatic Carpenter served as sexual therapist and literary counselor were the budding poet Siegfriend Sasson, who wrote in requesting an audience that Carpenter's writings had helped him understand the antipathy he felt to young women; and the even younger Robert Graves, a schoolmaster dismissed for an affair with a schoolboy, who wrote in a thank you note that Carpenter had "absolutely taken the scales" from his eyes. Graves eventually gained worldwide fame as the author of "I, Claudius."

Even the already well-known author E.M. Forster benefited from his 1914 Millthorpe pilgrimage. "Merrill," Rowbotham relates, "who was familiar with the syndrome of nervous devotees, intuitively broke through Forster's self-conscious reticence."

As Forster later recalled, "George Merrill touched my backside - gently and just above the buttocks - I believe he touched most peoples. The sensation was unusual and I still remember it, as I remember the position of a long-lost tooth. It was as much psychological as physical. It seemed to go straight through the small of my back into my ideas, without involving any thought."

On Forster's return home, he immediately sat down and wrote his novel "Maurice," a homosexual story of love across the class divide for which the Carpenter-Merrill couple was the template, and in which the character of Alec Scudder the servant gamekeeper was loosely based on Merrill. Forster regarded Carpenter as "a saviour" and noted ecstatically in his diary, "Forward rather than back, Edward Carpenter! Edward Carpenter! Edward Carpenter!"

But Carpenter's home also was a magnet for a never-ending stream of radicals - working-class trade unionists, Socialist and Labour Party leaders, rebellious aristocrats, emancipated women (who numbered among his most important friendships), environmentalists, land reformers, leaders of cooperatives, freethinking spiritual seekers, and delegations en masse from Socialist youth walking clubs all trouped to Carpenter's door and enjoyed his warm and bountiful hospitality.

Merrill died suddenly in 1928, and, shattered by the loss, Carpenter soon followed a year later. They are buried next to each other.

In Rowbotham, Carpenter has at long last found the biographer he deserves. A disciple of the great English historian E.P. Thompson and a socialist feminist historian and essayist whose writings over the last three decades have made her a revered figure in the women's movement, Rowbotham has always insisted on the importance of grassroots social movements from below.

And in her massive book on Carpenter, Rowbotham details his tireless activism and its incredible impact in fostering and nurturing the British left and the labor movement. Tens of thousands of workers who never read Carpenter had heard him lecture, or speak at open-air public meetings which attracted crowds in the thousands, whether he was appearing in support of strikers, arguing for women's suffrage, calling for the curtailment of pollution by industry, opposing the Boer War and World War I, or demanding that the privileged aristocracy's control of the land be ceded to the people who worked it.

Many more knew Carpenter, a talented musician who entertained Millthorpe visitors by playing his beloved Beethoven on the piano, as the composer and lyricist of the popular socialist hymn "England, Arise!," which was one of the frequently-sung anthems of the labor left.

Rowbotham is a felicitously vivid, witty, and evocative writer who captures Carpenter's magnetic personality and makes him come alive. But this is no undiluted hagiography, for Rowbotham neatly picks apart Carpenter's failings, foibles, and blind spots, including his unfortunate tendency to an ideological anti-Semitism (although he had close friends who were Jews) and a certain condescension, typical of Cambridge men of the era, toward Third World peoples - this despite his outspoken opposition to British colonialism and imperialism and his early and then-controversial support of the movement for independence in India, which he'd visited and written about.

Carpenter's legacy includes a direct, linear connection to the modern American homosexual rights movement, for it was when a young Harry Hay in 1925 stumbled across a restricted library copy of Carpenter's influential 1916 book "The Intermediate Sex," with its visions of same-sexers organizing to demand their rights, that Hay grasped the principals of homosexual emancipation which, two and half decades later, would lead him to found the Mattachine Society.

As brilliantly researched and told by Rowbotham, "Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love" has lessons for same-sexers, and for the left, which are invaluable in considering how we got to where we are and whither we should go. If you think you know Carpenter, this book's revelations will nonetheless surprise you, as they did me. And if you don't know him, you owe it to yourself to add this important and entertaining work, illustrated with numerous photos, to your bookshelf.

Carpenter's most important writings, including "Toward Democracy," "Ioläus," "The Intermediate Sex," and his word-portrait of his lover George Merrill are all available online. The music and lyrics to Carpenter's working-class anthem, "England, Arise!" are here. And the Edward Carpenter Forum provides a wide range of Carpenteriana at here.

Doug Ireland can be reached through his blog DIRELAND.

©GayCityNews 2008

Source / Gay City News / Nov. 26, 2008

Find Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love at Amazon.com

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Quickie Questionaire : How Long Have You been a Heterosexual?

The Heterosexual Questionaire : Turning the other cheek.

The Heterosexual Questionnaire was created back in 1972 to put heterosexual people in the shoes of a gay person for just a moment. Questions and assumptions made of Gays and Lesbians that are unfair, are reversed and this time asked to the straight people.

This is a fun survey, but also an activist survey. Please repost this to your email list, myspace bulletin, use it in a group setting, have fun with it but also let the point be made.

1. What do you think caused your heterosexuality?

2. When and where did you decide you were a heterosexual?

3. Is it possible this is just a phase and you will out grow it?

4. Is it possible that your sexual orientation has stemmed from a neurotic fear of others of the same sex?

5. Do your parents know you are straight? Do your friends know- how did they react?

6. If you have never slept with a person of the same sex, is it just possible that all you need is a good gay lover?

7. Why do you insist on flaunting your heterosexuality... can’t you just be who you are and keep it quiet?

8. Why do heterosexuals place so much emphasis on sex?

9. Why do heterosexuals try to recruit others into this lifestyle?

10. A disproportionate majority of child molesters are heterosexual... Do you consider it safe to expose children to heterosexual teachers?

11. Just what do men and women do in bed together? How can they truly know how to please each other, being so anatomically different?

12. With all the societal support marriage receives, the divorce rate is spiraling. Why are there so few stable relationships among heterosexuals?

13. How can you become a whole person if you limit yourself to compulsive, exclusive heterosexuality?

14. Considering the menace of overpopulation how could the human race survive if everyone were heterosexual?

15. Could you trust a heterosexual therapist to be objective? Don't you feel that he or she might be inclined to influence you in the direction of his orher leanings?

16. There seem to very few happy heterosexuals. Techniques have been developed that might enable you to change if you really want to.

17. Have you considered trying aversion therapy?

Martin Rochlin, Ph.D., 1972

Source / Queers United

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Abstinence Only : Sex Education as Politics

Annual funding for abstinence-only is close to $175 million
By Scott Murray / October 1, 2008

When Alfred Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948, he included a stern word of caution to his readers: "as long as sex is dealt with in the current confusion of ignorance and sophistication, denial and indulgence, suppression and stimulation, punishment and exploitation, secrecy and display, it will be associated with a duplicity and indecency that lead neither to intellectual honesty nor human dignity." In the 60 years following Kinsey's groundbreaking study, the decision-making establishment of the U.S. has consistently ignored his rebuke, preferring to pursue harmful policies that further their own reactionary agendas.

One of these policies is abstinence-only sex education, which teaches that remaining abstinent until marriage is the only safe and acceptable option for adolescents and teens. These courses avoid all discussion of contraceptives and their use or only emphasize the alleged failure rate of common devices like condoms and the birth control pill. Since 1982, the federal government has spent over $1.5 billion subsidizing abstinence-only programs which, according to the Guttmacher Institute, are used in over one-third of public school districts in the United States. Annual funding for abstinence-only now stands at nearly $175 million, more than double the amount spent at the beginning of the Bush presidency.

The prevalence of abstinence-only programs in the education system illustrates the severe democratic deficit in the United States. For decades, the American population has overwhelmingly opposed abstinence-only sex education, and for good reason: the programs are medically inaccurate, misrepresent the evidence on which they claim to be based, and are rooted in sexist and fundamentalist attitudes. However, despite widespread popular disapproval, those in positions of power, including President Bush, have not only allowed abstinence-only curricula to flourish in American schools, but have worked tirelessly to ensure their proliferation both at home and abroad at the expense of comprehensive sex education.

Public Opinion

In a book review for the journal Critical Sociology, Lesley Shore writes that public opinion polls taken as early as the 1960s "revealed widespread support for comprehensive sex education" among Americans. Little has changed since then. A 2004 survey, conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), found that over 90 percent of parents felt it was "very or somewhat important" to have comprehensive sex education in public schools. In addition, two-thirds of American voters expressed support for comprehensive sex education and 67 percent of the adult population favored "comprehensive sex education programs that included information on how to obtain and use condoms and other contraceptives." These findings were confirmed earlier this year, at the state level, when the University of Minnesota published a report detailing how nearly nine out of ten Minnesota parents support comprehensive sex education programs that "[include] information about abstinence and prevention of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases." The study also found that Minnesota's "overwhelming" support for comprehensive sex education cut across gender, age, race, class, and political lines. Minnesota is not unique in this regard as opposition to abstinence-only is so widespread that nearly 20 states, including Minnesota, have rejected Title V sex education funding because of the federal government's stipulation that it be spent on abstinence-until-marriage programs.

Teenagers and young adults, like their parents, extensively support comprehensive sex education as well. According to one survey by Tina Hoff (KFF), 82 percent of teens ages 15-17 and three-quarters of young adults ages 18-24 favored sex education curricula that included information on "how to protect yourself from HIV/AIDS and other STDs," "the different types of birth control that are available," and "how to bring up sexual health issues such as STDs and birth control with a partner." Reflecting the attitudes of American parents and teens, a number of influential professional groups have also issued statements opposing abstinence-only sex education, including the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Public Health Association, the National Education Association, and the American School Health Association.

Contrary to impressions, support for abstinence-only sex education is limited even among Christians in the United States, who traditionally are expected to take strong conservative positions on issues of sexuality. According to one survey cited by Susan Rose the journal Social Forces, eight in ten people who identify as conservative Christian support comprehensive sex education in high schools, and seven in ten support it in middle schools. Another study, carried out by NPR and the Kennedy School of Government, found similar results: nearly nine in ten people who describe themselves as "conservative Evangelical" or "born-again Christians" favor the teaching of human sexuality in schools. (No significant evidence exists on the attitudes of American Jews and Muslims regarding sex education, although some of them—such as those belonging to the Union for Reform Judaism—have publicly spoken out against abstinence-only programs.)

The American public opposes abstinence-only sex education for a number of sensible reasons. First, the programs are remarkably and consistently inaccurate. The most comprehensive analysis of the medical accuracy of abstinence-only courses was carried out, incidentally, by a U.S. House of Representatives committee in 2004. This widely-cited review, often referred to as the Waxman report, discovered that over 80 percent of federally funded abstinence-only curricula contained "false, misleading, or distorted information about reproductive health." The courses were found to teach, among other things, that pregnancy occurs once out of every seven times a couple has intercourse using a condom, that 10 percent of abortions result in sterility, that HIV can be transmitted through sweat and tears, and that a human being has 48 chromosomes. Abstinence-only programs are also known to teach that touching another person's genitals can "result in pregnancy," that a 43-day-old fetus is a "thinking person," and that half of the gay male teens in America are infected with the AIDS virus. Some members of Congress, namely the Republicans who endorsed the 2002 Personal Responsibility, Work and Family Protection Bill, have attempted to deflect such criticism, arguing that "it would be impossible to agree on what information is medically accurate."

Click to enlarge image.

Second, in addition to containing "false, misleading or distorted" sexual health information, abstinence-only programs misrepresent the evidence on which they are based. One of the most instructive examples is found in AC Green's Game Plan, a federally funded abstinence-until-marriage program produced by the Illinois-based Project Reality. Early in the student workbook, it quotes a 2001 survey conducted by the National Campaign to End Teen Pregnancy as saying that American teens desire a "strong message...that they should abstain from sex" until marriage. This is inaccurate. The quotation, which is found on the second page of the survey, actually reads that American teens desire a "strong message...that they should abstain from sex until they are at least out of high school," a sentiment that is at variance with the abstinence-only ethic. In fact, that same paragraph, and indeed the rest of the survey, goes on to report that both parents and teens strongly desire a "greater emphasis on contraception" in sex education courses, findings conveniently—and likely consciously—omitted from the student workbook. Such misrepresentations are much too common in abstinence-only programs, and should trouble those who believe that adolescents and teens deserve honest sexuality education.

Third, many Americans strongly object to the sexist and fundamentalist attitudes expressed by abstinence-only sex education programs. According to the previously cited Waxman report, several courses "present [gender] stereotypes as scientific fact," especially those related to women and girls. One popular curriculum, Why kNOw, teaches that "men's happiness and success hinge on their accomplishments," while women "gauge their happiness and judge their success by their relationships." Another program, WAIT Training, lists "financial support" as one of the "five major needs" of women, while listing "domestic support" as one of the major needs of men. Choosing the Best, the most popular federally funded abstinence education program, regales students with a tale of a knight who rescues a princess from a dragon. The dragon soon returns to seek revenge, but the princess advises the knight to slay the dragon with a noose and poison. The tactic works, but the knight believes he fought dishonorably and feels "ashamed." In the end, the knight does not marry the princess, but rather a village maiden—and "only after making sure she knew nothing about nooses or poison." The "moral of the story," it concludes, is that "occasional suggestions and assistance may be alright, but too much of it will lessen a man's confidence or may even turn him away from his princess."

Further stereotypes abound. Many abstinence-only programs teach students that "men are always ready for sex," while women "often need hours of emotional and mental preparation." In a talk delivered on the Google campus, sex educator Violet Blue quotes the Why kNOw curriculum as saying that "girls are responsible for boys' inability to control their sexual urges," a statement which implies that girls are at fault if they are harassed, sexually assaulted, or even raped. Glencoe Health, a secular abstinence-only health textbook produced by education giant McGraw-Hill, discourages premarital sex by teaching that sexually active teens, presumably girls, "risk developing a reputation among peers as someone who is ‘sexually easy'"—a sanitized way of telling young women that if they have sex, their classmates are expected to call them a "slut"—just as they did publicly to Harvard student and sex blogger Lena Chen earlier this year after participating in a debate at her school.

Patricia Miller, a journalist and reproductive policy analyst, explains that the federal government's earliest abstinence-only policies had religious motivations, beginning with President Reagan's Adolescent Life and Family Act which "frequently promoted specific religious values" until successfully challenged by the ACLU in 1993, following a ten-year court battle. The religious right recovered soon after, though, when Democrat Bill Clinton supported a funding provision for abstinence-only programs in his 1996 welfare reform bill. The measure, which allotted $50 million a year in subsidies to abstinence education curricula, was not drafted by medical professionals or educators, but by "representatives from the Family Research Council, the Christian Coalition, and other conservative groups," who in turn cooperated with Heritage Foundation policy analyst and abstinence-only champion Robert Rector.

Although many abstinence-only courses do not explicitly reveal their Christian foundations, there are a number that do. In an official newsletter accompanying the widely-used Why kNOw curriculum, for example, the author laments contemporary social mores, writing that "no longer were we valued as spiritual beings made by a loving Creator." The author closes the letter by signing "In His Service." True Love Waits, a popular program produced by LifeWay Ministries, aims to "[teach] students the Biblical standards for purity," and desires to create a generation of teens that will "[live] for the glory of God with sails raised for revival" and be "prepared for Biblical, lifetime marriages." Sex Respect, which reaches students in over 20 countries and bills itself as "the world's leading abstinence education program," informs visitors to their website that their abstinence courses are consonant with Catholic doctrine.

The Democratic Deficit

The federal government's shaping of sex education funding programs, its appointment of extreme reactionaries to high positions of sexual policy planning, and the feeble opposition to abstinence-only waged by congressional Democrats vividly illustrate the fact that the United States is little more than a formal democracy where opportunities for public participation are limited to selecting leaders from a pool of virtually indistinguishable candidates, with identical financial backers and only marginally different interests.

To begin, the programs that fund sex education in the United States are structured in such a way that they support only abstinence-until-marriage curricula at the expense of comprehensive sex education courses. According to Section 510 of the Social Security Act, which was authorized during the Clinton administration, sex education programs in the United States are eligible for Title V federal funding only if their "exclusive purpose" is to "[teach] the social, psychological, and health gains to be realized by abstaining from sexual activity." Sex education courses receiving federal funding must also preach that "a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity," and that "sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects." Furthermore, abstinence-only programs receiving federal funding are not reviewed by the federal government for factual or medical accuracy, which explains why the Waxman report discovered "serious and pervasive problems with the accuracy of abstinence-only curricula" that permeate the American education system.

With a little investigation, it is easy to learn why sex education funding programs, like many other public health policies in the United States, are so morally draconian: key decision-making positions regarding sexual policy are held by extreme conservative reactionaries who are selected based on ideological conformity rather than professional qualification. There are several examples of these officials who currently sit in high positions of sexual authority or have done so in the recent past. Thomas A. Coburn, now a junior senator from Oklahoma, served as co-chair of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, where he pledged to "challenge the national focus on condom use for preventing the spread of [HIV]" and lamented what he called the "gay agenda" that has "infiltrated the very centers of power in every area across this country" and "wield extreme power." Robert George, a member of the eminent President's Council on Bioethics, wants laws passed to outlaw masturbation, and the former chair of the Council, Leon Kass, has spoken out against sexual indecencies like the licking of ice cream cones in public, since "eating in the street is for dogs." Susan Orr, who recently resigned from her position as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Population Affairs, was a senior director at the archconservative Family Research Council and advocates "abstinence over making contraceptives more available." She also has called birth control providers "collaborators with the culture of death."

Orr's successor has not yet been named (at the time of writing), but the nature of Washington's previous appointees does not bode well for the future. Dr. Eric Keroack, Orr's immediate predecessor, is a prominent abstinence advocate who sits on the Medical Advisory Council for the Abstinence Clearinghouse. He is a staunch opponent of abortion who has stated that contraceptives are "demeaning to women, degrading of human sexuality, and adverse to human health and happiness." Dr. Alma Golden, who held the Deputy Assistant Secretary position before Keroack, characterized contraceptive education and distribution programs as merely offering teens "free condoms for their weekend party" and worked to put "more emphasis on ‘abstinence-only'" in the family planning programs she helped administer.

Although many staunch abstinence-only advocates hold high office in the United States government, there are state officials that are opposed to such programs. Unfortunately, these dissenters have put forth a dubious effort in trying to curb abstinence-until-marriage sex education courses and have even consciously contributed to expanding it to make political gains elsewhere. The Waxman report, for instance, which represents the federal government's harshest and most notable internal critique to date, contained no policy recommendations or suggestions whatsoever. Another report, published by the Government Accountability Office in 2006, was similarly weak—its strongest suggestion was that federally funded abstinence-only programs should be made to "sign written assurances in grant applications that the materials they use are accurate." Neither of the government reports called for the abolition of abstinence education programs.

Congressional Democrats, who typically oppose abstinence-only programs, signed on to a bill last June that increased funding for abstinence-only by $27 million, just weeks after issuing a misleading promise to "end abstinence-only funding." The reason for this maneuver, according to Democratic officials, was to gain "leverage—namely Republican allies in Congress—in fights to come with Bush over domestic spending," demonstrating clearly their committed opposition to abstinence-only sex education while being conciliatory during a recent congressional hearing on abstinence-only where the discussion "rarely moved beyond championing the value of pre-marital abstinence," according to Bob Roehr of Pride Source Media Group, and ended in the mild suggestion that block grants be created for states to spend on comprehensive sex education, if they so choose.

The continued expansion of abstinence-only sex education programs, coupled with the unfailing pragmatism of the alleged opposition party, illustrates the severe democratic deficit in the United States. As with many other public policy issues—including healthcare, domestic spending, and the war in Iraq—public opinion is held in extremely low regard and often dismissed as "politically unrealistic." Those who oppose abstinence-only sex education cannot and should not rely on their elected officials to effect positive social change. The need for popular mass action in support of comprehensive, candid, and inclusive sex-education programs has never been greater, and there are many opportunities for action. Students and teachers can participate in noncooperation, refusing to take part in or teach from curricula that preach only abstinence-until-marriage. Members of the community, including health professionals, educators, and concerned families can organize neighborhood sex education seminars that provide adolescents with the reproductive health information they desperately want and need. As long as abstinence-only sex education is allowed to flourish unchallenged, young people in the United States will suffer a form of indoctrination that leads "neither to intellectual honesty nor human dignity."

[Scott A. Murray is an undergraduate student of rhetoric, gender studies, and human sexuality from central Illinois.]

Source / Z Magazine

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