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In outer space, when an object becomes so powerful that it sucks everything nearby into itself, we call it a black hole.
In cyberspace, when a device becomes so powerful that it sucks every electronic function into itself, we call it a BlackBerry.
Over the last couple of years, we've witnessed the consolidation of more and more functions into what used to be called a cell phone. First it was a phone, then a texting device, then a camera, then a game console, then a Web surfer, then a music player. Then it became a reader of physical hyperlinks. Then a reader of 3-D digital maps. Then a universal remote. Today, we call this thing a smartphone. Within three years, we'll be calling it something else. As it absorbs one function after another, it's becoming strong enough to consume the ultimate prey: the minds of its users.
Here's one more job the phone is devouring: GPS.
Jenna Wortham presents the latest trend data in the New York Times:
More than 40 percent of all smartphone owners use their mobile devices to get turn-by-turn directions, according to data from Compete, a Web analytics firm. For iPhone users, the figure is even higher, eclipsing 80 percent. ... Sales of traditional GPS units from companies like TomTom, Garmin and Magellan (a unit of MiTAC International) have fallen sharply recently. During the first quarter, TomTom said it shipped 29 percent fewer GPS units compared with the period in 2008. Garmin said unit sales fell 13 percent in the first quarter compared with the previous year. ... Meanwhile, shipments of smartphones in North America are expected to grow by 25 percent this year, with more than 80 percent of them equipped with GPS, according to ABI Research.
One reason for the exodus from dedicated GPS devices is cost: You can get a smartphone for $100 to $300 instead of spending $177 on a GPS unit. But the main reason is consolidation: Nobody wants to carry two devices—or three, or four, or five—when you can carry one that does all five things.
Some GPS makers, Wortham reports, are responding to this trend by selling GPS as software for smartphones instead of selling it as hardware. Others are adding phone service to their GPS devices. Good luck with that. But the bottom line is that no matter how this fight ends—smartphones with GPS, GPS with smartphones, or add-on GPS software for your smartphone—only one device will remain. Consolidation is inexorable.
What will the smartphone eat next? In no particular order, my money's on credit cards, car keys, flashlights, flash drives, books, television sets, and laptops. Some of these functions are already being absorbed. And one of these days, somebody will figure out how to add a stun gun. Just try not to hit the wrong button.
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Is it rude to focus on your smartphone during meetings?
It's way more than that. It's another sign that the virtual world is overtaking the physical world.
Here are the evolving facts on the ground, so to speak, as presented by Alex Williams in Monday's New York Times:
The phone use has become routine in the corporate and political worlds—and grating to many. A third of more than 5,300 workers polled in May by Yahoo HotJobs, a career research and job listings Web site, said they frequently checked e-mail in meetings. Nearly 20 percent said they had been castigated for poor manners regarding wireless devices.
Despite resistance, the etiquette debate seems to be tilting in the favor of smartphone use, many executives said. Managing directors do it. Summer associates do it. It spans gender and generation, private and public sectors. A few years ago, only "the investment banker types" would use BlackBerrys in meetings, said Frank Kneller, the chief executive of a company in Elk Grove Village, Ill., that makes water-treatment systems. "Now it's everybody." He said that if he spotted 6 of 10 colleagues tapping away, he knew he had to speed up his presentation.
It is routine for Washington officials to bow heads silently around a conference table—not praying—while others are speaking, said Philippe Reines, a senior adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Although BlackBerrys are banned in certain areas of the State Department headquarters for security reasons, their use is epidemic where they are allowed. "You'll have half the participants BlackBerrying each other as a submeeting, with a running commentary on the primary meeting," Mr. Reines said.
The Times headlined this article, "At Meetings, It's Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners." But the story is much bigger than manners. It's the ascent of the virtual world as a rival to the physical world. We've talked about this trend before in the context of cell phones and driving. When phone calls draw your eyes off the road, and when electronic messages pull your attention out of business meetings, it's time to think about what's happening to the relationship between your mind and your body. You're drifting out of physical space. Not just you but the millions of others who are doing the same thing.
That point about "the etiquette debate ... tilting in the favor of smartphone use"? That's the virtual world gaining parity and vying for supremacy. That guy who speeds up his presentation when most of his listeners disappear into their BlackBerrys? That's the physical world struggling to keep up. That observation from Clinton's adviser about "half the participants BlackBerrying each other as a submeeting"? That's no joke. They really are having a meeting. It just happens to be in the virtual world. If your body is in the room but your brain is offline, you're missing that meeting. You're absent.
The virtual world has many advantages in the fight for your attention. It can connect you to people and places far away. It can tell you almost instantly what you need to know. It lets you flip through incoming messages at your own pace, unlike the boring presentation you're enduring in the physical world. And it lets you communicate privately, even in public. That's what many of those "submeetings" are, an executive tells Williams. They're exchanges of "things that you might not say out loud."
There's the real story: People are migrating from the old world to the new one. That's why you're here, reading and exchanging ideas with people you've never met offline. "Manners" is just the old world's way of protesting this migration. But protestation is weak. The old world has no inherent claim to your attention. It will have to earn it.
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The next battlefield in the evolution of warfare won't be in physical space. It'll be in cyberspace.
Today, President Obama will announce a civilian office to protect the nation's computer networks. Meanwhile, backstage, the U.S. military is preparing its own cyber-defense organization. If you haven't taken cyberwar seriously as a threat, it's time to start thinking about it. This morning's New York Times story is a good place to begin. Here are four points worth gleaning from it.
1. Cyberspace is a new dimension of battlespace. According to the story, U.S. officials now see
cyberspace as comparable to more traditional battlefields. "We are not comfortable discussing the question of offensive cyberoperations, but we consider cyberspace a war-fighting domain," said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman. "We need to be able to operate within that domain just like on any battlefield, which includes protecting our freedom of movement and preserving our capability to perform in that environment."
Wars used to be two-dimensional, confined to land and sea. Air power added a third dimension. Cyberspace adds a fourth. It has spatial properties, such as freedom of movement, but it isn't necessarily affected by events in physical space. I can invade your cyberspace and cripple your forces without controlling any other dimension of the war.
2. It defies national boundaries. As the Times notes,
the military debate over whether the Pentagon or the [National Security Agency] is best equipped to engage in offensive operations ... hinges on the question of how much control should be given to American spy agencies, since they are prohibited from acting on American soil. "It's the domestic spying problem writ large," one senior intelligence official said recently. "These attacks start in other countries, but they know no borders. So how do you fight them if you can't act both inside and outside the United States?"
Exactly. And this is just one of many puzzles created by the nonoverlap of cyberspace with physical space. How can defense and intelligence forces organized by nationality and territory patrol, hunt, and fight across computer networks that transcend such boundaries? We'll have to rethink the whole notion of domains.
3. It empowers nonstate actors. One major factor in the rise of terrorism over the last decade is the proliferation of physically destructive technology. Cyberspace multiplies that problem by allowing ubiquitous information technology to become destructive in a different way. It lowers the barriers to military entry, enabling mischief by individuals, small groups, and loose networks. According to the Times, our civilian cybersecurity office will be "responsible for coordinating private-sector and government defenses against the thousands of cyberattacks mounted against the United States—largely by hackers but sometimes by foreign governments—every day." Are the hackers less dangerous than the governments? Don't count on it. And they're certainly harder to pin down.
4. It facilitates economic destruction. The civilian office will report "to both the National Security Council and the National Economic Council" and will "protect systems that run the stock exchanges, clear global banking transactions and manage the air traffic control system," says the story. Why the focus on commerce and finance? Because that's how you bring a country to its knees in this century. It's one reason why the 9/11 terrorists targeted the World Trade Center.
To hit our financial system in physical space, al-Qaida had to get 19 guys through airport screening. And that was before we beefed up security at our airports and borders. But borders and screeners no longer protect us, because cyberspace dissolves distance.
In the old days, you needed physical reach to cripple your adversary's livelihood. It took an invasion or massive bombing to devastate his manufacturing base. An information economy enjoys no such buffer. It can be hit instantly through the computer networks that sustain it.
Over the last couple of months, we've talked about some of the incremental steps through which the physical and digital worlds are beginning to converge and blur. One is physical hyperlinks, which assign a digital incarnation to each physical object. A second is the integration of physical perception with 3-D digital maps. A third is the convergence of the phone and the Internet device with the universal remote.
Cyberwar is part of this revolution. We'd better wake up to it.
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We've talked a lot in this blog about what happens when war, through remote-controlled drones, becomes more like a video game. But what happens when a video game becomes more like war?
Six Days in Fallujah, an interactive product being developed by Atomic Games, raises that question. Jamin Brophy-Warren explained the project in last week's Wall Street Journal:
The company sees it as a new kind of documentary. "For us, games are not just toys. If you look at how music, television and films have made sense of the complex issues of their times, it makes sense to do that with videogames," Mr. Tamte [Atomic's president] says. ... "Six Days," which uses actual events as its backdrop, is billed as having far deeper roots in reality and will be the first major game released about the ongoing war in Iraq. "We replicate a specific and accurate timeline—we mean six days literally," says Mr. Tamte. ... Atomic is working with more than three dozen soldiers who were in Fallujah, consulting thousands of photographs (some of which were mailed on memory cards from Camp Fallujah), and looking at classified satellite imagery to ensure that the game's appearance is faithful to the actual location.
The project's developers call it a "game-amentary." It sounds educational. But then a different kind of reality—commercial interest—intrudes on the documentary spin:
"Six Days" lacks one notable aspect of documentary: commentary. ... [T]hose involved in the new game said they didn't want to push a particular viewpoint and certainly weren't taking a stance on the morality of the invasion. "We're not trying to make social commentary. We're not pro-war. We're not trying to make people feel uncomfortable. We just want to bring a compelling entertainment experience," says Anthony Crouts, vice-president of marketing for Konami, the game's publisher. "At the end of the day, it's just a game."
Unless you think the battle of Fallujah was entertaining in real life, you can't make a video product about it that's both documentary and "just a game." Maybe someday, somebody will produce an interactive replica of the Iraq war. This doesn't sound like it.
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From time to time, Human Nature checks in on the man-vs.-machine war experiment that's going on halfway around the world in Pakistan. It's like a video game, except real people are being killed. Al-Qaida and the Taliban are fielding human fighters. The United States is fielding remote-controlled unmanned aircraft armed with missiles. American generals and defense planners are watching this war to find out how much an unmanned force can accomplish. The less blood we have to risk and shed, particularly against an enemy who thrives on body bags and terror, the safer we'll be at home and abroad.
So, who's winning: the jihadis or the joysticks? Greg Miller of the Los Angeles Times brings us a fresh update. Here's an analysis of his report and other stories filed in the last week, explaining the most important developments and why they matter.
1. How many strikes and kills? Since Aug. 31, there have been 38 Predator strikes, killing 9 "senior" al-Qaida leaders and many lower-level fighters. And that's not counting conventional airstrikes based on hot intelligence from the drones.
2. Why the increase? We stopped asking Pakistan for permission before striking. This has three effects: Strikes don't get vetoed, they don't get delayed till the intelligence (e.g., about who's in the compound) is cold, and the targets don't get tipped off by friends in the Pakistani government.
3. Where do the drones fly from? This has been a politically explosive question lately. Miller says the CIA Predators "take off and land at military airstrips in Pakistan."
4. Can they see through walls? Not literally, but in effect, yes. They're "outfitted with additional intelligence gear that has enabled the CIA to confirm the identities of targets even when they are inside buildings and can't be seen through the Predator's lens." If true, this is a huge development. It means the men have nowhere to hide from the machines.
5. Do the joystick pilots understand real combat? I've raised this question before, on the theory that killing real people from a faraway drone console can look too much like a video game. The CIA is mum about its people. But Christopher Drew of the New York Times reports that the Air Force "has begun training officers as drone pilots who have had little or no experience flying conventional planes."
6. Why is Pakistan tolerating the strikes? "Because the CIA has expanded its targeting to include militant groups that threaten the government," Miller reports. To that extent, the machines have become Pakistan's allies. If true, this is another big development. The Pakistan war experiment isn't just technological. It's political. It's a test of whether the drones can inflict military damage without triggering too much anti-Americanism. By buying off the host government with hits on its enemies, we're buying time to keep hitting our own enemies there. Politically, it's hard to imagine a manned U.S. force getting away with what the drones have done.
7. What are the drones' psychological effects? Among other things, the Pakistan experiment is testing how a war waged by machines affects the morale of their human adversaries. U.S. officials tell Miller that the militants, hounded and pounded by the drones, "have begun turning violently on one another out of confusion and distrust." One official says that al-Qaida operatives are "wondering who's next," that they're "hunting down people who they think are responsible" for exposing them to the drones, and that "people are showing up dead or disappearing." Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times adds that in northwest Pakistan, "[s]ome locals have given up drinking Lipton tea, out of a growing conviction that the [CIA] is using the tea bags as homing beacons for its pilotless planes."
On the other hand, Mazzetti reports many Pakistanis think that the drones "reveal the fears of Americans to take casualties"—that we're "sending robots to do a man's job." He cites P.W. Singer's book Wired for War, in which Muslim insurgents "said that America's reliance on drone weapons is a sign that the United States is afraid to sacrifice troops in combat."
I'm not buying this. I'm not buying the U.S. spin that the drones are reducing al-Qaida to fratricide. And I'm sure not buying this jihadi propaganda about the glory of sacrifice. Sacrifice is for suckers. Even terrorists know that. That's why, as Drew reports, our ostensibly cowardly drone operators are watching this:
On a recent day, at 1:15 p.m. in Tucson—1:15 the next morning in Afghanistan—a pilot and sensor operator were staring at gray-toned video from the Predator's infrared camera. ... The crew was scanning a road, looking for ... signs of anyone planting improvised explosive devices or lying in wait for a convoy. ... "We spend 70 to 80 percent of our time doing this, just scanning roads," said the pilot. ...
In short, our people are hiding behind lethal gizmos watching your people plant lethal gizmos and hide. Your people don't intend to be there when the bombs go off any more than ours do. So if we're sissies, so are you.
8. Obama's plans? "Because of its success, the Obama administration is set to continue the accelerated campaign," Miller reports. The New York Times' David Singer and Eric Schmitt add that Obama is thinking of extending the strikes deeper into Pakistan:
The extensive missile strikes being carried out by [CIA]-operated drones have until now been limited to the tribal areas. ... But some American officials say the missile strikes in the tribal areas have forced some leaders of the Taliban and Al Qaeda to flee south toward Quetta, making them more vulnerable. In separate reports, groups led by both Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of American forces in the region, and Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, a top White House official on Afghanistan, have recommended expanding American operations outside the tribal areas if Pakistan cannot root out the strengthening insurgency.
Broadening the war in Pakistan is hugely dangerous. But if we do it, the safest force to send in isn't the Marines, Green Berets, or stealth fighters. It's the drones.
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Two days ago, we were talking about how the physical and digital worlds are beginning to converge and blur.
Step 1: physical hyperlinks.
Step 2: the integration of physical perception with 3-D digital maps.
Step 3? I speculated that it might be a change in human perception through external devices, biotechnology, or acculturation. But maybe that's Step 4. Maybe Step 3 is the convergence of the phone with the universal remote.
There's nothing mind-blowing about this idea. But that's the point. In real life, cosmic revolutions unfold incrementally: a device here, a software upgrade there. The New York Times lays out some of the new options:
1. A free application (called Remote) and a gizmo (called Intelliphone) that enable iPhones to control computers.
2. A $100 hardware-software package (called Shadow) that "converts a BlackBerry's Bluetooth transmission into an infrared signal your TV can understand." A similar device lets the BlackBerry control a garage door.
3. A $10 app (called i-Clickr) that uses the iPhone screen to display buttons that will operate a PowerPoint presentation on a nearby PC.
The Times says this is "probably the beginning of the end" for the universal remote, since it relies on buttons, whereas a smartphone screen can provide as many options as you need. But my guess is that a more fundamental dynamic is at work: We want to centralize our power to manipulate the things around us. The universal remote was supposed to do that. But it doesn't, because it can't navigate the digital world the way the smartphone can.
We need to consolidate these two devices. And it's a lot easier to put the remote's abilities in the smartphone than vice versa.
Bye-bye, universal remote. You can't be universal when you don't reach the other universe.
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How do alternate universes materialize, coexist, and converge? Here's one answer: Look at your cell phone.
Two years ago, I saw an article in the New York Times about "physical hyperlinks." Essentially, these are contact nodes between the physical and digital worlds. I can hardly begin to explain them. So I'll let the Times' Louise Story do the talking:
New technology, already in use in parts of Asia but still in development in the United States, allows [cell] phones to connect everyday objects with the Internet. In their new incarnation, cellphones become a sort of digital remote control, as one CBS executive put it. With a wave, the phone can read encoded information on everyday objects and translate that into videos, pictures or text files on its screen. ...
In Japan, McDonald's customers can already point their cellphones at the wrapping on their hamburgers and get nutrition information on their screens. Users there can also point their phones at magazine ads to receive insurance quotes, and board airplanes using their phones rather than paper tickets. And film promoters can send their movie trailers from billboards. ...
"You've picked up this product, and you don't want to go back to your PC," said Tim Kindberg, a senior researcher at the Bristol, England, lab of Hewlett-Packard. "Or you're outside this building, and you want more information. We call it the ‘physical hyperlink.' "
In much the same way that Web publishing took off because of the ability to link to other people's sites, cellphone technologies linking everyday objects with the Web would reveal the digitally encoded attributes of tangible things on grocery shelves or newsstands.
In this rendering of the nexus between space and cyberspace, the cell phone is the reader. It translates physical objects into their digital incarnations. The operative digital incarnation, as of 2007, was bar codes:
The most promising way to link cellphones with physical objects is a new generation of bar codes: square-shaped mosaics of black and white boxes that can hold much more information than traditional bar codes. The cameras on cellphones scan the codes, and then the codes are translated into videos, music or text on the phone screens. ... Now, as more cellphones come equipped with cameras and the ability to run small computer programs, the codes are beginning to appear on some state drivers' licenses and on some mailing labels ... In Japan, some highway billboards have codes large enough for passing motorists to read them with their phones. Hospitals put them on prescriptions, allowing pharmacies to instantly scan the medical information rather than read it.
So, in a way: cell phone + bar code = wormhole.
That was two years ago. I've been waiting for the next piece of the puzzle. I think this is it: the integration of physical perception with three-dimensional digital maps. Here's the Times' John Markoff:
Digital map displays on hand-held phones can now show the nearest gas station or A.T.M., reviews of nearby restaurants posted online by diners, or the location of friends. ... Indeed, a new generation of smartphones like the G1, with Android software developed by Google, and a range of Japanese phones now "augment" reality by painting a map over a phone-screen image of the user's surroundings produced by the phone's camera. With this sort of map it is possible to see a three-dimensional view of one's surroundings, including the annotated distance to objects that may be obscured by buildings in the foreground. For starters, map-based cellphones simply translate paper maps into a digital medium, but future systems will probably begin to blur the boundaries between the display and the real world. ...
Steve Capps, one of the designers of the original Macintosh interface, [asks], "How long will it be before you come out of the subway and you hold up your screen to get a better view of what you're looking at in the physical world?"
Increasingly, phones will allow users to look at an image of what is around them. You could be surrounded by skyscrapers but have an immediate reference map showing your destination and features of the landscape, along with your progress in real time.
If I understand this transition correctly, we're no longer talking about two worlds, one physical and one digital, connected at selectively engineered nodes. We're now talking about a wholesale overlap between the two worlds. Every physical object, or at least every object of sufficient size to be mapped, will have a digital incarnation. And you'll be able to alternate smoothly between the two worlds, most conspicuously by using your 3-D digital map to see right through a visual obstruction.
This is how cosmic revolutions unfold in real life: not abruptly or mysteriously, as in science fiction, but incrementally. A device here, a software upgrade there, a synchronization, a multiplication. New technologies, new possibilities, new combinations, new habits. Economics and culture are as crucial to this process as technical innovation.
The next piece of the puzzle may not be a change in either of the two worlds. It may be a change in what is, for now, the ultimate reader: the human being. This could take place through externally worn devices, biotechnology, or acculturation. But one way or another, we'll begin to shift our mental attention and our comfort zone from the physical to the digitally enhanced environment. If you want to see what this kind of mental migration looks like, just glance at all the people around you who are talking on cell phones, lost in invisible worlds, oblivious to their surroundings.
If we're lucky, the next migration will bring our minds back into alignment with our bodies. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. In a gesture as simple as holding up your smartphone to see what's around you, we'll begin to inhabit the new world, without leaving the old one.
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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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For ages, we've been telling children that ghosts aren't real. But the Department of Defense has just put out a request for proposals to create what are, in effect, virtual ghosts. Another truism of parenting is about to become untrue.
More here.
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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.