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Which is more important: food, sleep, or sex? My instinct is to go with sleep, on the grounds that if you try to avoid all three, sleep is the one that will overtake you first. It's the one you need most. If that's true—and if we know that it's unreasonable and dangerous to insist that people abstain from sex—then isn't it stupid to expect pilots to abstain from sleep?
More here.
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In other words, boys don't have to get vaccinated against HPV for the same reason they don't have to wash dishes, do laundry, buy birth control, or think about other people in general: Girls will do it for them.
More here.
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I've been reading your comments on the Roman Polanski case. Some of you are mischaracterizing what I wrote on Tuesday and Wednesday. But if I'm going to criticize you for confusing the issues, I'd better criticize myself, too.
What we've been debating in "The Fray" are at least three different questions. One is whether Polanski raped Samantha Geimer outright. By this, I mean rape defined by coercion, not simply by the younger party's age. This is a question of fact. Ideally, if we were a jury, we'd hear her testimony and his, and we'd be presented with corroborating evidence for each side, to the extent that it could be produced. Unfortunately, we don't have such a complete case. What we have is her grand jury testimony and a few other bits that have been disseminated over the Internet. Under these circumstances, I can't pretend to resolve the facts, and this wasn't my point anyway. But I should be clear: If the case is ever fully presented and Polanski is proved guilty of rape, he should be put away for a long time, and that's that.
If he isn't proved guilty of rape, we move on to the second question: Should he have been allowed to plead to statutory rape instead? I can understand the desire of prosecutors and the public to nail him for something. But I don't like using rape defined by age as a proxy for rape defined by coercion. (I don't like using sodomy as a fallback charge, either, which the prosecution also employed in this case.) To the extent that elements of coercion are present—and according to Geimer's testimony, they were—it's better to make them part of the statute and the prosecution's case.
The third question is whether to treat sex with a 13-year-old as pedophilia. That was my original question, and my answer is complicated: The age of consent can't really be one number, since people mature in different ways at different ages. This question touches on the claim from Polanski's probation report that I originally targeted: that there was evidence "that the victim was not only physically mature, but willing." Is maturity an arguable factor with a 13-year-old, particularly one who's posing nude in a jacuzzi? Yes. Is Polanski's age, as opposed to Genarlow Wilson's age, an arguable factor in assessing his culpability? Yes again. Is either factor dispositive? No.
Several of you have said that Polanski is a bad case for making my point about pedophilia. You're right. I tried to focus on the third question and then the second, but the first overwhelms the conversation. I don't mean to slight the first question. But I do want to separate the three questions so we can talk about each of them clearly.
On that point, I'm guilty of conflating them myself. In my first post on this subject, I mentioned that the probation report said Polanski's offense "appears to have been spontaneous and an exercise of poor judgment by the defendant." I then wrote: "That's an entirely reasonable assessment of the incident." I shouldn't have written that sentence, because it characterized the whole case and thereby took a position on the first question, which wasn't my point and on which I had no expertise.
I hope that by laying out the issues this way, I've undone some of the confusion I caused and liberated each of the questions for clearer consideration.
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Yesterday I wrote about the importance of legal and moral distinctions in the Roman Polanski case. Many of you, in response, called attention to the victim's grand jury testimony, which alleges that Polanski gave her a Quaalude and that he ignored her instructions to stop. Those allegations are important pieces of evidence. Not decisive—we don't convict people in this country based on grand jury testimony from one party—but important. So are other parts of her testimony, which detail apparently voluntary acts of compliance, such as taking off her underwear.
It's obvious to everyone—including Polanski, who has conceded as much—that what he did was wrong. Viscerally, I'd like to punch the guy in the mouth. And I wish the rape charge had been tried and resolved. But we shouldn't contort our justice system to nail this or that defendant. The distinctions we draw or fail to draw in our laws endure from case to case. We have to get them right.
It's entirely legitimate and relevant to cite evidence "that the victim was not only physically mature, but willing," as Polanski's probation officers did. It's also legitimate and relevant to cite evidence that the victim was unwilling, as her grand jury testimony did. The same goes for the fact that he gave her a Quaalude, that he took one himself, and that she saw the one he gave her and took it anyway, knowing what it was because she had taken one before. All these details are relevant.
This isn't an argument for knowing or thinking less about such incidents. It's an argument for knowing and thinking more. Sometimes that means rethinking sentences that conflate teen exploiters with pedophiles. Sometimes it means exposing child abuse that's been swept under the rug. For an illustration of the latter problem, check out the story in today's New York Times about ultra-Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn who are beginning to report child sexual abuse to police instead of leaving such cases to rabbinic authorities. According to the article,
The father of a Brooklyn 10-year-old said in an interview that the mishandling, as he viewed it, of sexual abuse cases by rabbinical courts had persuaded him to contact the police immediately when his son told him last year that a neighbor had abused him. ... When his 6-year-old son told him one day that Rabbi Kolko had sexually abused him, [another] father said he resolved to go to the police because he knew that the Brooklyn hierarchy had protected the rabbi in the past.
These aren't 13- or 15-year-olds, for whom an argument about willingness can at least be made. They're prepubescent kids. And ultra-Orthodox communities seem to have been slow to recognize the rights of individuals, as opposed to families or peoples:
Taboos codified long ago during times of persecution discourage community members from informing on other Jews; violations can result in ostracism. ... Rabbi Meir Fund, who leads a synagogue known as the Flatbush Minyan, said that child molesters should be prosecuted, but that victims should consult with a rabbi before going to the police. Connections among the [ultra-Orthodox] are too entangled to discount the damaging ripple effects of accusations on the accused person's family, Rabbi Fund said. Advocates for victims say similar views have informed some of the Brooklyn rabbinical leadership's worst judgments, allowing prominent rabbis who were repeatedly accused of abuse to keep their jobs and reputations.
This kind of coarseness gets in the way of justice. Victims and perpetrators deserve their due as individuals. They mustn't be ignored or protected for the putative sake of their families or their communities.
The same goes for laws about sexual abuse. If you have the goods to convict a man of rape, prosecute him for rape. Don't invite him to plead guilty to sex with a teenager. That kind of plea deal, coupled with a stiff jail sentence, just furthers the conflation of sexual assault defined by force with sexual assault defined by age.
And if you think it's fine to conflate these two definitions of rape—that any statute is worth using to put away this or that scumbag—don't forget the other crime Polanski was charged with: sodomy. Sex-crime prosecutions, detached from proof of force, can take you places you don't want to go.
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Should Roman Polanski get a tougher sentence for sex with a 13-year-old girl than he would have gotten 30 years ago?
The New York Times suggests he might:
Manners, mores and law enforcement have become far less forgiving of sex crimes involving minors in the 31 years since Mr. Polanski was charged with both rape and sodomy involving drugs. He fled rather than face what was to have been a 48-day sentence after he pleaded guilty to unlawful sex with a minor. But if he is extradited from Switzerland, Mr. Polanski could face a more severe punishment than he did in the 1970s, as a vigorous victims' rights movement, a family-values revival and revelations of child abuse by clergy members have all helped change the moral and legal framework regarding sex with the young.
The Times portrays the differences between then and now as reflections of a shameful past. And some of the attitudes reflected in the original Polanski prosecution really were stupid. For example, a 1977 report by two probation officers on Polanski mentioned "some permissiveness by the mother" of the girl in question, since she had let the girl spend time with the director. How is a mother's permissiveness relevant to the culpability of the guy who bangs her daughter? It isn't. It's straight old-fashioned cultural bigotry, blaming a crime against an individual on the morals of her family.
But what about other factors cited in the probation officers' report? The Times notes that "in a conclusion that might particularly jar readers today, [the report] pointed toward evidence ‘that the victim was not only physically mature, but willing.' "
Hold it right there. Why exactly should we be aghast that the legal system of the 1970s considered such evidence relevant to Polanski's culpability? Why aren't the physical maturity and willingness of the girl—or boy—significant?
In fact, they are. As I've pointed out before, over the past 150 years in the United States and Europe, the average age of menarche—a girl's first period—has fallen two to four months per decade, depending on the country. In 1840, the age was 15.3 years. By the early 1980s, it was 12.8. It's quite plausible that the 13-year-old girl Polanski had sex with in the late 1970s was, to some degree, sexually mature.
Having sex at 13 is a bad idea. But if you're pubescent, it might be, in part, your bad idea. Having sex with a 13-year-old, when you're 40, is scummy. (Personally, I'd be stricter. If I ran a college, I'd discipline professors for sleeping with freshmen.) But it doesn't necessarily make you the kind of predator who has to be locked up. A guy who goes after 5-year-old girls is deeply pathological. A guy who goes after a womanly body that happens to be 13 years old is failing to regulate a natural attraction. That doesn't excuse him. But it does justify treating him differently.
And that's exactly what Polanski's judge and probation officers were inclined to do. The Times reports that the authorities treated Polanski "not so much as a sexual assailant but as ... a normally responsible person who had shown terrible judgment by having sex with a very young, but sophisticated, girl." The probation officers' report "quoted a pair of psychiatrists as saying that Mr. Polanski was not ‘a pedophile,' " and it concluded that his offense "appears to have been spontaneous and an exercise of poor judgment by the defendant."
That's an entirely reasonable assessment of the incident. There's a difference between pedophilia and taking advantage of somebody who's old enough to be interested in sex but too young to judge the physical and emotional risks of messing around. If the legal officers and moral critics of the 1970s saw that distinction more clearly than we do, the shame is ours.
(See Wednesday's follow-up post on Polanski.)
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If you're a woman in a conservative Muslim country, you had better bleed on your wedding night. If you don't, your husband or his family will know you aren't a virgin. For that, you could be beaten or killed.
If you're a man, on the other hand, all you have to do on your wedding night is ejaculate. Nobody expects you to bleed or produce any other proof of virginity.
Some day, this barbaric and hypocritical tradition will end. Until then, the best we can do is fool it. You want blood on your wedding night? We'll give you blood. Fake blood.
For many years, doctors have quietly offered hymenoplasty, a procedure that restores your hymen so you can fake virginity on your wedding night. And now you don't even need a doctor. Joseph Freeman of the Associated Press reports:
The Artificial Virginity Hymen kit, distributed by the Chinese company Gigimo, costs about $30. It is intended to help newly married women fool their husbands into believing they are virgins—culturally important in a conservative Middle East where sex before marriage is considered by many to be illicit. The product leaks a blood-like substance when inserted and broken. Gigimo advertises shipping to every Arab country.
On its Web site, Gigimo explains more about the product:
Artificial Virginity Hymen is created from Kyoto, Japan at 1993. it was first introduced to the locals, then it gets famous and spread to Thailand at 1995 and now available in South East Asia, South Asia and in the Middle East countries. It is mainly made of natural albumin, medical use inflation element and water-soluble base medicinal preparation which have no side effect. Insert this artificial hymen into your vagina carefully. It will expand a little and make you feel tight. When your lover penetrate, it will ooze out a liquid that look like blood not too much but just the right amount. Add in a few moans and groan, you will pass through undetectable.
Outraged Egyptian lawmakers are demanding a ban on the kit. Freeman reports:
Sheik Sayed Askar, a member of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood who is on the parliamentary committee on religious affairs, said the kit will make it easier for Egyptian women to give in to temptation. He demanded the government take responsibility for fighting the product. ... Prominent Egyptian religious scholar Abdel Moati Bayoumi said anyone who imports the artificial hymen should be punished. "This product encourages illicit sexual relations. Islamic culture forbids these relations except within the confines of marriage," Bayoumi said. ... "If this thing enters Egypt, the country is going to go to waste. God protect us," commented a reader on the Web site of Egyptian newspaper Al-Youm Al-Sabie.
Pause for a moment to consider what these men are asking God to protect them from: a cheap, mass-produced insert that releases fake blood. It's the technical equivalent of a Halloween gag. But to them, this is no gag. It's an offense against God.
In this way, the artificial hymen serves as a useful test of religious idiocy. If a $30 item that leaks fake blood violates your faith so profoundly that you must ban it, then what you have isn't really a faith. It's a fetish. And your fetish won't survive globalization.
Sex within marriage is a perfectly good idea. It encourages commitment, structures relationships, builds a foundation for society, and secures a healthy environment for raising children. But rigid proscriptions against premarital sex are excessive, futile, and unnecessary. They breed hypocrisy and contempt for authority. In the age of the artificial hymen, you can still preach and practice fidelity. Just don't ask God to protect your sick craving for wedding-night blood. She can't and won't.
Virginity fetishism is doomed, boys. Give it up.
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Ultimately, the militants don't care what's in the abortion-reduction bill. The mere fact that some pro-choicers support it is, by their reckoning, grounds to oppose it. NRLC Legislative Director Doug Johnson scoffs that the bill was drafted "under the direction of [a] career pro-abortion activist" (Rachel Laser of Third Way) and her congressional "sock puppet" (Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio), who's trying to hide "his close collaborative relationship [with] key pro-abortion groups." Never mind that Laser has put in years of work, antagonized her friends, and risked her career as a pro-choicer for Johnson's cause. Never mind that Ryan has stood up for unborn life, vote after vote after vote after vote, in a party committed to legal and publicly funded abortion. Any pro-lifer who collaborates with pro-choicers is a traitor, any pro-life bill involving a pro-choicer is a "scam," and any Catholic who supports such a bill is a "fake" Catholic. Common ground is impossible. In the name of life, we must fight to the death.
More here.
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According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, masturbation is "intrinsically and gravely disordered." That's because "sexual pleasure is morally disordered when sought for itself, isolated from its procreative and unitive purposes."
But what if playing with the equipment helps you make babies? Dr. David Greening, an Australian infertility expert, reports that 81 percent of the men in his study significantly improved their sperm quality, as measured by DNA fragmentation, through a simple one-week program. According to a summary of the study, "The men were instructed to ejaculate daily."
More here.
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Sanford's e-mails paint a vivid and sad picture. It's a picture of two people in love but tragically bound by commitments they have already made. A man who has been married for two decades seems to be discovering, for the first time, how love feels. He writes of solitude, longing, and spirituality in a style that oscillates between Spanish love songs and bad country music. He seems naive about everything: love, poetry, and e-mail. He is writing for publication and doesn't know it.
Wise up, cheaters. Your passion for what's-her-name may be gone with the sunrise, but text is forever. Just because it has vanished from your screen doesn't mean it has ceased to exist, any more than your wife and kids cease to exist when you fly to Argentina.
More here.
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If you're looking for a safe industry to invest or earn a living in during the recession, maybe you should think more about sex. No, I'm not suggesting a career in porn or prostitution. I'm talking about condoms. Charisse Jones has the update in USA Today:
While car purchases plummeted and designer clothes mostly stayed on the racks, sales of condoms in the U.S. rose 5% in the fourth quarter of 2008, and 6% in January vs. the same time periods the previous year, The Nielsen Co. reports.
Why are condoms up while the rest of the economy goes flaccid? Theory No. 1 is that the sex drive is immune to bad times. No offense, but I'm not buying. See, for example, this November story from the Los Angeles Times about the economy whacking the sex trade:
Signs of the economic free fall have cropped up in many of Nevada's 25 or so legal brothels. ... This summer, the Shady Lady gave $50 gas cards to those who spent $300. The Moonlite Bunny Ranch offered extras to customers paying with their economic stimulus checks. ... Donna's Ranch has seen its business plummet nearly 20%. More than three-quarters of its customers are long-haul truckers, and high fuel and food prices have drained them of "play money," owner Geoff Arnold says.
Theory No. 2 is that it's cheaper to stay home than to go out. Jones reports:
The sales bump squares solidly with one of the nation's most common trends during any recession: nesting. ... "If people don't have the money to go out to a fancy dinner or are looking to cut back, Trojan gives them some real affordable ways to stay in and make some great memories together," says Jim Daniels, vice president of marketing for Trojan, the nation's No. 1 condom maker.
That makes sense: Make love, not reservations. Instead of buying your date dinner and hoping for sex, skip the dinner part and go straight to the main event.
Then there's theory No. 3: controlling the family payroll. "Condoms make for a relatively inexpensive form of birth control at a time many cash-strapped families are hesitant to grow," Jones observes. "Contraception may also be more popular during a time when families are stretching dollars and want to avoid having more mouths to feed."
I'm rooting for theory No. 3. I'd like to think that when times are tough, people become increasingly rational and careful about limiting their financial commitments, especially when the welfare of existing children is at stake. But the part about condoms being a "relatively inexpensive form of birth control" worries me. Including a barrier method is generally a good idea. But if people are cutting back on more foolproof contraception and relying entirely on condoms, there's always a risk that one screw-up will lead to pregnancy. And if you're really strapped, that's an economic and moral cost too great to risk.
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Do some women fantasize about rape? Do some become aroused during rape? If so, what does it mean?
Daniel Bergner, a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, raises those questions in the magazine's current issue. Obviously, Bergner's a guy. So am I. But the evidence and theories in the article come from women who have been researching female sexuality. For instance, Meredith Chivers, a psychology professor at Queen's University,
has confronted clinical research reporting not only genital arousal but also the occasional occurrence of orgasm during sexual assault. And she has recalled her own experience as a therapist with victims who recounted these physical responses. She is familiar, as well, with the preliminary results of a laboratory study showing surges of vaginal blood flow as subjects listen to descriptions of rape scenes.
Moreover,
According to an analysis of relevant studies published last year in The Journal of Sex Research, an analysis that defines rape as involving "the use of physical force, threat of force, or incapacitation through, for example, sleep or intoxication, to coerce a woman into sexual activity against her will," between one-third and more than one-half of women have entertained such fantasies, often during intercourse, with at least 1 in 10 women fantasizing about sexual assault at least once per month in a pleasurable way.
How could anyone want something done to her against her will? Isn't that self-contradictory? And if she doesn't want it, why would she become genitally aroused?
The answer, some of these researchers propose, is that women's sexuality is split. In one of Chivers' studies, for example, "men's minds and genitals were in agreement" while watching sexual videos. But among women, genital blood differed sharply from self-reported arousal: "During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated; watching gay men, they reported a great deal less; and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much more." Even lesbians, while watching videos of men, "reported less engagement than the [blood-flow monitors] recorded."
Chivers speculates that female sexuality might be split between "physiological" and "subjective" systems. This could explain the rape data:
[T]o understand arousal in the context of unwanted sex, Chivers, like a handful of other sexologists, has arrived at an evolutionary hypothesis that stresses the difference between reflexive sexual readiness and desire. Genital lubrication, she writes in her upcoming paper in Archives of Sexual Behavior, is necessary "to reduce discomfort, and the possibility of injury, during vaginal penetration. ... Ancestral women who did not show an automatic vaginal response to sexual cues may have been more likely to experience injuries during unwanted vaginal penetration that resulted in illness, infertility or even death, and thus would be less likely to have passed on this trait to their offspring." Evolution's legacy, according to this theory, is that women are prone to lubricate, if only protectively, to hints of sex in their surroundings.
In other words, part of the female arousal system is designed for self-protection and is particularly well-suited to what we now regard as abuse. Sounds horrific, right? But Marta Meana, a psychology professor at the University of Nevada, offers an arguably more disturbing theory. She points to research suggesting that 1) "in comparison with men, women's erotic fantasies center less on giving pleasure and more on getting it"; 2) "as measured by the frequency of fantasy, masturbation and sexual activity, women have a lower sex drive than men"; and 3) "within long-term relationships, women are more likely than men to lose interest in sex." These and other findings fit her theory that female desire is driven by "being desired."
So does reproductive logic, according to Chivers:
[O]ne possibility is that instead of it being a go-out-there-and-get-it kind of sexuality, it's more of a reactive process. If you have this dyad, and one part is pumped full of testosterone, is more interested in risk taking, is probably more aggressive, you've got a very strong motivational force. It wouldn't make sense to have another similar force. You need something complementary.
And here's where it gets icky.
A symbolic scene ran through Meana's talk of female lust: a woman pinned against an alley wall, being ravished. Here, in Meana's vision, was an emblem of female heat. The ravisher is so overcome by a craving focused on this particular woman that he cannot contain himself; he transgresses societal codes in order to seize her, and she, feeling herself to be the unique object of his desire, is electrified by her own reactive charge and surrenders. ... [Meana] spoke about the thrill of being wanted so much that the aggressor is willing to overpower, to take.
Does this mean women want to be raped? No. Both theories assume the opposite. And that's a pretty safe assumption, given the logical impossibility of willing a violation of your will. The challenge is to explain the data on rape fantasies and arousal from sexual assault, given that nobody literally wants to be raped. What part of rape or the idea of rape is arousing? And what part of the woman is aroused?
The first theory, lubrication, suggests that rape-related arousal is purely physical and reflexive, leaving the will untouched. Your vagina says one thing, your brain says another, and (this is the crucial part for men to understand, morally and legally) your brain is what matters. But that doesn't explain the data on rape fantasies. Fantasies imply brain arousal. And that, in turn, implies that we should be asking not which part of the woman is aroused, but which part of the rape fantasy is arousing.
The second theory, which Meana frankly calls narcissism, posits a clear answer. We generally define rape as sex against the victim's will. But a woman mentally aroused by a sexual assault fantasy isn't thinking about the victim's will. She's thinking about the perpetrator's. She's imagining being wanted. That's what she wants—and the fact that she wants it exposes the fantasy, by definition, as not really rape. The imaginary act arouses her not because the woman in the scenario doesn't want it, but because the man does.
But if that's what these fantasies are—one person drawing her will from the will of another—what does it say about us? If derivativeness of will is, as some of these researchers posit, a fundamental difference between male and female arousal, what does it say about equality between the sexes? Are women, in this sense, inherently less autonomous?
(Update: My colleagues at the XX Factor, who actually have the relevant equipment, are discussing this topic right now. Meghan O'Rourke has flagged the same question about whether female sexuality is reactive. I'll be interested to see other comments from the focus group.)
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I'm now going to depict an adult and a minor having sex. The adult is represented by the character on the left. The minor is represented by the character on the right. Here is my depiction:
&i
Have I just committed a crime punishable by 10 years in jail?
Under a ruling issued last week in Australia, it's quite possible that I have. The ruling, issued by the Supreme Court of New South Wales, affirms that a cartoon can be prosecuted as child pornography. Here's the background of the case:
[T]he plaintiff was convicted ... of possessing child pornography contrary to s 91H(3) of the Crimes Act 1900 (the Act) and using his computer to access child pornography material contrary to s 474.19(1)(a)(i) of the Criminal Code Act 1995 (the Code). The alleged pornography comprised a series of cartoons depicting figures modelled on members of the television animated series "The Simpsons". Sexual acts are depicted as being performed, in particular, by the "children" of the family. The male figures have genitalia which is evidently human, as do the mother and the girl.
The Australian laws in question define child pornography as depictions of a "person" or depictions of "a representation of a person." A related memorandum says such definitions "are intended to cover all visual images, both still and motion, including representations of children, such as cartoons or animation." But even without the memorandum, the court says child pornography laws are in part "calculated to deter production of other material—including cartoons—that ... can fuel demand for material that does involve the abuse of children." Accordingly, "The depictions and representations of persons to which the definition refers include a drawing (or, for that matter, a model or sculpture) and, hence a cartoon, of a fictional character."
Does it matter that we're talking about the silly-looking Simpsons? No, says the court: "Even a substantial departure from realism will not necessarily mean that the depiction is not that of a person in this sense." The court upholds the initial ruling that the characters "were indeed depictions of persons" under the law. The convictions stand.
You have got to be kidding me.
Look: If you molest my kid, I'll see that you burn in hell. If you take a picture of my kid and Photoshop it so it looks like a sex act with you, I'll use any law I can find to put you away. If you make a sicko cartoon and digitally alter it so it looks like my kid, I'll throw the book at you. But if what you've made doesn't look like anyone's kid—if it's just a revolting mockery of the Simpsons—I'm supposed to convict you of child pornography? Really?
What's happening to child pornography is what's happening on the Internet and in software generally: Technology is blurring boundaries between action and thought, public and private, real and fake. On this point, the Australian court quotes the Supreme Court of Canada: "With the quality of contemporary technology, it can be very difficult to distinguish a 'real' person from a computer creation or composite." This gray area unnerves us, so we prosecute it. Two years ago, then-Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., was forced out of Congress for soliciting teenage boys online, though there's no evidence he ever touched a minor. This year, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a ban on sexual images of children even if they're computer-generated or nonexistent. Apparently, more people are now arrested for using the Internet to solicit cops posing as kids than for using it to initiate relationships with real kids.
I understand why we do this: We're afraid that if we don't prosecute cyber-perverts, they'll move on to the real thing. But the danger runs both ways. How far will we extend felony prosecution into the realm of the private, the fake, and the abstract? If the Simpsons count as child pornography, what's next?
Actually, the Australian court has answered that question. Under the relevant child pornography laws, says the court, "a stick figure ... might well depict a representation of a person. No bright line of inclusion or exclusion can be sensibly described."
Well, then, come and get me. If there's no boundary between real and fake, between people and "depictions of representations," then prosecute me for my stick figures. Or admit it's ridiculous—and an insult to the real thing.
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If you're looking for interesting bathroom reading, allow me to recommend Urology. The July issue is chock full of page-turners: "Robotic Prostatectomy," "Scrotal Mass with Bladder Outlet Obstruction," "Histologic Comparison of Pubovaginal Sling Graft Materials," "Multi-Drug-Resistant Bacteremia After Transrectal Ultrasound Guided Prostate Biopsies," and my favorite, "Modern Management of Adult-Acquired Buried Penis" (it's "a result of obesity" - don't ask).
Seriously, though, I want to talk about an article in the July issue. It's called, "Does ‘Normal' Aging Imply Urinary, Bowel, and Erectile Dysfunction?" Here are key excerpts from the abstract:
We assessed if urinary, bowel, and sexual dysfunction and associated bother were part of the "normal" aging process in the general male Dutch population. ... Three thousand eight hundred ten (3810) men responded (81%), mean age 67 years, range 58 to 78. ... Bowel dysfunction and bother were not related to age. Erectile dysfunction was reported by 19%, ranging from 12% in the youngest to 26% in the oldest group ...
Conclusions: Urinary and bowel dysfunction were not part of the "normal" aging process. Erectile dysfunction was significantly more prevalent in older men.
And here's the headline on the Reuters write-up: "Erectile dysfunction may be ‘normal' with age."
The curious thing here is the word normal. It's being used in this context to mean age-related. Most men in the sample didn't have erectile dysfunction. But because ED's frequency increases with age, and because we think of aging as a universal process accompanied by physical decline, ED seems normal.
Since "urinary and bowel dysfunction were not part of the ‘normal' aging process," the authors conclude, they "may well be related to prior treatment" in men who have been treated for prostate cancer. This appears to make them logical targets for prevention or remedy. Does the opposite implication follow for ED? Does its "normality" make it a less compelling target?
There are many plausible ways to think about normality and health. Age-dependence is one of them. To me, the authors' framework makes sense: Medicine should focus first on maladies that strike some people unusually early in life. Maladies that accumulate with age are less unfair. They're also less tractable, since they're more biologically inherent.
ED, however, is a confounding example because it's in the process of being transformed from a "normal" to a commonly treated condition. Bob Dole made his famous ad for Viagra in 1999, when he was 76. In the last decade, 35 million men have used Viagra. Millions more have taken similar drugs such as Cialis or Levitra. Modern man has set out to conquer the ancient loss of manhood.
Which brings us back to the question posed in Urology: Does normal aging imply ED? The answer seems to be: It used to. And that's not just a change in the way we think about erections. It's a change in the way we think about aging.
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Wow. Chastity belts.
Here's the report from Indonesia, courtesy of Paul Watson in Sunday's L.A. Times:
In a bid to prevent any hanky-panky between masseuses and their clients, several massage parlors ... are insisting that the women wear padlocks across the zippers of their work pants. ... [The instigating parlor owner] settled on black pants that zip up at the side, where a padlock is slipped through two cloth loops and snapped shut each time a masseuse meets a client. ... He stores the padlocks and keys in a special box at the cashier's counter. When a customer arrives for a massage, given in a private room behind a curtain, the "cashier calls one masseuse, asks her to prepare things and locks her pants," ... [and] "when the client is done, the masseuse comes to the cashier, and the cashier opens the padlock."
Several other parlor owners have supposedly decided to adopt similar locks. A local official says, "We expect this policy to be enacted as city legislation."
Any time somebody tries to take society back a few centuries, I like to know why. The instigating owner, Franky Setiawan, says he resorted to the belts because men "bombarded" his masseuses with sexual demands, and he wanted the women to feel safe. He says he and other owners have been looking for ways "to handle some naughty guests."
Ah. The old feminine-protection rationale.
The idea isn't crazy. To say that men often behave like pigs is to insult pigs. Boorishness, harassment, and sexual coercion are real problems. But let's think this through.
To begin with, there's the small problem of excretion. What the man thinks of as his—or some other guy's—way into the woman happens to be, rather more importantly, her way out. That's why, as Setiawan mentions, the masseuse "usually pees" before the cashier locks her pants. So, we're starting with a glaring engineering mistake: inconveniencing the victim more than the perpetrator.
Next, there's the political context. "In recent years, conservative Islamic values have gained influence" in Indonesia, Watson reports. "Last month, Indonesia's parliament passed a bill that makes it a crime to look at violent or pornographic material on the Internet. The penalty is up to three years in prison." So when Setiawan talks about how the chastity outfits will improve his industry's public image, you can see how workplace protection serves as a fig leaf for his awkward mix of puritanism and financial self-interest.
Finally, there's the telltale language of sexual paternalism. The problem with the some of the industry's male clients, according to Setiawan, is that "they try over and over and over again, persuading our workers with their dangerously sweet words."
Persuasion? Sweet words? This is the crisis? Words are intolerably coercive, but chastity belts aren't?
You can see how easy it is, as a paternalist, to talk yourself into absurdity. Once you get it into your head that motive is more important than method, you and your excellent motives are on the way to dystopia.
Before you deride the Indonesians, look at what's happening in the United States. Legislatures are passing laws right and left to mandate provision of ultrasound images to women seeking abortions. I support the idea of viewing an ultrasound before you make the decision. But when legislators add doctor scripts, patient viewing mandates, waiting periods, and other heavy-handed paternalist garbage, count me out.
Now comes a ballot initiative in Missouri that would hold doctors liable for "medical negligence" unless, prior to any abortion, they administer a formal psychological evaluation to ascertain whether the woman has been pressured into it. The measure's sponsors propose that women be asked: "Is someone else encouraging you to have this abortion? Do you want this abortion to satisfy your own needs or are you looking to do this to please someone else?" These questions are necessary because, as all paternalists know, women don't really want what they came to the clinic for. "The sad reality is that many abortion providers simply do abortions on request, no questions asked," the measure's sponsors lament. By failing to second-guess their patients, these providers fail "to help women in the ways they want and deserve."
I'm not saying coerced abortions never happen. There's clear evidence that they sometimes do. But you can see from the Missouri initiative how easily the notion of feminine vulnerability leads to interference dressed up as protection. And this is the crucial lesson of chastity belts, abortion regulation, and most other paternalist measures: The pressure from which you set out to protect women, bad as it may be, is seldom as ugly or coercive as the pressure your intervention imposes.