Sex at Dawn

Learning to Masturbate in Spain

Christopher Ryan — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:00:07 +0000

Extramadura, which is kind of like the Kansas of Spain, has instituted a sex education program for kids between 14 and 17 that is—brace yourself—not freaked out about masturbation. In fact, the program suggests that masturbation might be a sensible way for youngsters to deal with their sexual urges. A decade and a half ago, then Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders suggested something like this and soon found herself out of a job.

Asked at an AIDS conference if there was potentially a role for masturbation in helping young people avoid high-risk sexual behavior, she replied, "I think that it is part of human sexuality, and perhaps it should be taught." For this utterly common-sensical statement of undeniable fact, the distinguished doctor was drummed out of public life.

Of course, Spain is still an overtly Catholic country, and the religious folks are shocked and outraged. By now, everyone knows that the Catholic church's approach to teen-aged sexuality amounts to an abusive mix of denial and exploitation. To describe their credibility as "compromised" on the issue would be laughably generous.

In a sign of the level-headedness that prevails in Spanish culture these days, school officials are uncowed by the outcry, saying that those who oppose the program are "uniformed" and are overreacting. In fact, the neighboring province of Andalucia is looking into instituting a similar program.

Meanwhile, in the real Kansas, a middle-school teacher has been fired for jokingly noting the similarity of Florida to a penis. When a student drew a map of the U.S. with a disproportionately large Florida, the teacher said the state "must be excited," which left the students in stitches.

End. Of. Career.

You can just imagine the school-board meeting where some insane blue-haired lady (or man) declares that "there's nothing funny about penis jokes in seventh grade." Except, of course, that in seventh grade, NOTHING is funnier than penis jokes (and blue-haired ladies [or men]).

Moving to university students, the religious community of Durham, NC is in an uproar over a Duke research project in which women (adult women who can drive, vote, go to war, have babies, and so on) are asked about sex toys. Heaven help us!

Father Joe Vetter, director of the Duke Catholic Center, said: "I think it can give the impression that the university is endorsing behavior that I don't think the university should endorse." He adds, "I don't think it's a good developmental practice to just tell somebody to just sit around and masturbate."

Well, why the hell not, Father Vetter? If the Catholic church weren't so pathologically opposed to sitting around masturbating, tens of thousands of boys and girls wouldn't have been victimized by twisted priests and their tortured libidos in countries all over the world. Frankly, the opinions of Catholic priests concerning sexuality are about as relevant as Khmer Rouge teachings on agrarian reform.

Keep it to yourself, father. If you know what I mean (and I think you do).

Update: I failed to mention that the Duke University study is being led by fellow PT blogger, Dan Ariely. A pretty good round-up of Ariely's background and research is here: http://scienceblogs.com/terrasig/2009/11/response_to_dan_arielys_...

David Brooks Trips Over His Own Feet

Christopher Ryan — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:47:57 +0000

Writing isn't normally considered a high-risk activity, but when your job requires you to come up with 800 words of wisdom and originality to be read by millions week after week, things can go horribly wrong.

Although I generally disagree with his conclusions, I almost always enjoy reading David Brooks' columns in The New York Times. He normally resists the temptation to denigrate opposing views or to inflate the infallibility of his own, a trait that seems to be disappearing from the public political dialogue—especially on the conservative side, where Brooks lives.

So I was both saddened and fascinated to read his column this week on the Fort Hood shootings critical of the admirable hesitance of the press, politicians, and military officials to attribute any of it to Islamic militancy before a thorough investigation is completed.

I was saddened because Brooks inadvertantly did the psychological equivalent of leaving his house with no pants on. I was fascinated by the complex psychological processes exposed by his brilliantly delusional essay.

As usual, Brooks opens with a though-provoking observation:

"We’re all born late. We’re born into history that is well under way. We’re born into cultures, nations and languages that we didn’t choose. On top of that, we’re born with certain brain chemicals and genetic predispositions that we can’t control. We’re thrust into social conditions that we detest. Often, we react in ways we regret even while we’re doing them."

Hard to argue with any of that. We're all victims of circumstance and biology. We have only partial control of our cognitive processes and behavior. True that.

But, Brooks continues, what makes humans different from other creatures is our need for narrative: "We have a need to tell ourselves stories that explain it all." So far, so good. But then Brooks fatefully lets us in on one of the stories he tells himself to "explain it all." Turns out, his story is a crock.

Please read his column yourself, if you're interested. It's well worth the few minutes it takes to read. Essentially, Brooks' point is that peoples' hesitance to immediately attribute this attack to Islamic fundamentalism represents "a willfull flight from reality," not admirable caution to jump to ugly conclusions before the facts are in.

At best, this is a very weak argument, more suited to a lynch mob than an influential intellectual.

But the real problem is that in order to make his argument, Brooks exposes an embarassing lack of self-awareness. He points to the Muslim extremists who "shrink their circle of concern" and "don't see others as fully human" while never mentioning his sustained public support of repeated bloody American and Israeli attacks on innocent Muslims from Gaza to Pakistan.

In his devestating rejoinder, Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald wastes no time in pointing out just how shrunken Brooks' own circle of concern is, writing,

"David Brooks' column today perfectly illustrates what lies at the core of our political discourse: namely, self-loving tribalistic blindness laced with a pathological refusal to accept responsibility for one's actions."

After laying out in excruciating detail just how lethal this blind hypocrisy is, Greenwald concludes, "So here's a person who is constantly advocating and justifying the killing, bombing, and slaughtering of Muslims, including well over 100,000 innocent civilians. And yet today he writes a column saying: Look over there at those radical Muslims; can you believe how degraded and inhumane they are?"

Like all of us, Brooks is telling himself stories to make sense of it all. But one of the stories he's telling himself is demonstrably false. It's a story that somehow "makes sense" of his vocal support for multiple invasions and occupations of Islamic countries around the world while simultaneously decrying the unfeeling radicalization of some Muslim groups who seek revenge against their foreign occupiers.

Brooks is a smart guy, so you've got to wonder if one part of his brain isn't sending a message to another part, saying, "Wake up, David, this doesn't make any sense. You're sleepwalking out the door with no pants on."

The Courage to Quit: U.S. out of Afghanistan

Christopher Ryan — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:48:57 +0000

In my last post, I cited the example of a guy playing high school football in Texas who broke his arm early in the game, but continued playing until his arm was so swollen that his forearm pads had to be cut away at half time. For me, this was an unequivocal example of someone whose common sense was clearly overwhelmed by fealty to a highly militaristic sense of "honor," a self-destructive "duty" to sacrifice for abstractions like "manly honor" and "team spirit."

Go Panthers. Go Tigers. Go Yankees. Go Crazy.

Imagine my surprise when one commenter harshly chastised me for encouraging kids who break their arms to just "give up" and "fail." "You are saying that not quitting is bad," he wrote.

Right. When your arm is broken, not quitting is bad. When you're risking permanent disability for the sake of a triviality like a high school game, that's precisely what I'm saying. A word to all you athletes out there. If you break a bone or get hit so hard you can't remember what day it is, please remember to walk off the field (Quit! Fail!) before you lose something far more precious and irreplaceable than your bearings. Forget all the propaganda about how "quitters never win" and so on. I'm telling you that those who don't know when to quit are the biggest losers of all. I'm not talking about the adolescent drama of high school football; I'm talking about real life.

For all his brilliance, President Obama appears to have painted himself into a bloody corner of Afghanistan by following the very American anti-quitting script. American culture being what it is, I'm betting that he and his advisors agreed it would be self-defeating for an intelligent, literate, educated man to tell the public the brutal truth: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were colossal blunders at best, high crimes at worst, and both should be ended as soon as humanly possible. Maybe he could get away with something like that if he were a horse-rider or a brush-clearer, but a constitutional scholar? Not a chance.

How to tell the cold, horrible truth? Those who lost their lives in these wars were tragic sacrifices to the egos of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Kristol, and the rest of the pallid cowards who misled a compliant nation into yet another bloody demonstration of American military might. To have said such a thing would have been politically impossible. Just ask Dennis Kuchinich.

So, Obama being Obama, he took the middle path. Iraq was "a mistake" he told us, but Afghanistan was "necessary." We can end the war in Iraq because we're going to "finish the job" in Afghanistan.

But what was that job again?

The United States proposes to impose a strong central government on a collection of tribal societies who have never been united by anything other than a figurehead king, but who have forever been separated by language, custom, endless cycles of vengeance, and the most impenetrable mountains on Earth. We are going to impose our idea of government on a region that has rebuffed every empire that sought to absorb it, from Ancient Rome to the USSR. Sure, and then what, General?

Who is going to pay for the army and police force the U.S. is proposing to create in Afghanistan? Once the dollars dry up, as they must, where will the funding for this central government come from? There's no oil in Afghanistan. The only source of hard currency is the heroin trade, which is the focus of America's other unwinnable yet never-ending war: The War on Drugs.

And even if we assume the nearly-inconceivable—complete success in Afghanistan—what's to stop Al Qaeda from simply relocating to Pakistan, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, etc.? Is the United States going to invade, occupy, and govern every failed state on the planet?

Delusions of grandeur, anyone?

Like LBJ, Obama looks poised to squander his opportunity for bringing American culture back to some realistic sense of its place in the world. We could have a Great Society, as LBJ put it, but not if we lack the courage to quit.

America Eats its Young: Playing Hurt at Fort Hood

Christopher Ryan — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 13:19:22 +0000

Listening to Rachel Maddow's coverage of the Fort Hood killings last night, I heard her declare that, "Anyone who commits a massacre is criminally insane, or just a criminal." This is the kind of statement that seems obvious to the person saying it and to most of those hearing it, but imagine how it would sound to an Afghani, Pakistani, or Iraqi. Unlike most of the American audience, they'd likely be struck not by the obvious truth of the statement, but by the incredibly deep-rooted ignorance and hypocrisy that allows even someone as knowledgeable and broad-minded as Ms. Maddow to say something so obviously false.

The shameful assumption underlying Maddow's statement, and the predominant American view of world affairs is that thirteen dead Americans is "a colossal loss of life," to quote Brian Williams on NBC news, but twice, three times, or a hundred times that many civilians killed by the American military is hardly worth mentioning at all. Everyone knows that 3,000 Americans died on 9/11, but who knows how many Iraqis have died under American bombs since then? How many Pakistanis died in drone attacks last year? Last month?

To take just one example out of many, how many anguished minutes did NBC News devote to lamenting the "colossal loss of life" occasioned by the mistaken bombing of yet another Afghani wedding party a year ago, in which 33 women and children were killed (as well as an unmentioned number of men)? If "anyone who commits a massacre is ... a criminal," as Maddow asserts, why do we call the guys operating drones from a base in Nevada "soldiers," "heroes," and "patriots" despite the scores of innocent people they've killed on the other side of the world with the push of a button or the click of a mouse? Why aren't they (we) "criminals" as well?

Home of the brave?

American culture is, frankly, pathological. I'm sorry if you're offended by that, but please stay with me here. There is no escaping the fact that our self-image is founded on denial.

We see ourselves as a freedom-loving nation, but no country on Earth has more of its people behind bars than we do. With three times as many people, China has half a million fewer people in its prisons, according to a recent article in The Atlantic. To get a sense of how many Americans are behind bars right now, try to imagine the entire populations of Atlanta, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Des Moines, and Miami ... every person in those cities in a cage.

Land of the free?

Americans see themselves as defending peace in the world, but no country is more war-like than we are. We spend more money on war than the rest of the countries in the world combined. What are we so afraid of? Since WWII, we've been constantly at war (officially or unofficially) somewhere, without pause. American military bases are still spread throughout the world, from Japan and Korea to Australia and Germany. Why? How is the only developed country that's too poor to offer basic medical care to all its citizens the only one rich enough to police the planet? If invading and bombing Afghanistan is the rational response to terrorism having been planned there, why aren't we bombing Tim McVeigh's home town? Does anyone really believe we can bomb the world to peace? (For an unusually intelligent discussion of this issue, see this interview.)

America is at war because it's what we do better than anyone else. Simple as that.

Of the big three American sports (baseball, basketball, and football), only football has failed to catch on anyplace else. While Nicaraguans and Japanese practice their fast-balls and Croatians and Argentineans work on their jump-shots, nobody else is interested in playing American football. Why is that?

I'd propose it's because nobody else takes as much conflicted pleasure in war as we do. American "smash mouth" football is all about war: long bombs, "blitz" surprise attacks, grinding out the ground game, specialized units, penetration of enemy territory, clearly-defined hierarchical chains of command.... Sure, there's a measure of violence in other sports, but there's more pure brutality in a single kick-off return than in an entire season of European soccer.

Having grown up in the United States, I "get it" when Coach Taylor, on TV's Friday Night Lights, talks about how high school football teaches young men about honor, and discipline, and the dignity of suffering. But I wonder about the realities underlying such stirring locker-room speeches.

In a recent article in The Daily Beast called Football's Bloodiest Secret, Buzz Bissinger, the author of the book on which Friday Night Lights is based, recalled some of the young people he met in Odessa, Texas, a couple hundred miles from Fort Hood. He remembers a guy named Allen, talking about his son, Phillip:

"Allen was the first to admit that Phillip was not a gifted athlete, but what he lacked in skill he made up for in toughness. To prove the point, Allen told the story of when Phillip broke his arm at the beginning of a high school football game. Rather than come out, Phillip continued to play. It was only at half time, when his arm had swelled so badly that his forearm pads had to be cut off of his body, that he reluctantly went to the hospital."

This is not sport. This is a culture preparing its sons for war and parents for loss. Toughness, brutality, loyalty to team, blind obedience to authority.... These are the qualities of a warrior. The two places young men can be heard screaming "Yes sir!" at the top of their lungs are Boot Camp and football practice.

Bissinger recalls the pride those Texas parents felt at their kids' suffering on the field of play, "showing fearlessness and the absorption of agony in a tradition linking back to the war heroes of Sparta. No amount of studies and medical warnings," writes Bissinger, "are going to fully extinguish the attitude that playing hurt is all part of the price."

The price of what, exacly?

Fascinating Figures: Andrew Weil

Christopher Ryan — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:02:27 +0000

Dr. Andrew Weil was a good boy with bad intentions. In fact, he may turn out to have been one of the most subversive hippies of them all. Not because he wanted to hurt anyone or blown up any buildings. No, he wanted to explode something far more heavily protected than a bank.

From the beginning, Andrew Weil dreamt of blowing peoples' minds. He wanted to slip past their defenses by impressing them with his impeccable credentials: undergrad and medical degrees from Harvard University, medical residency at Mass General Hospital-one of the most prestigious in the world, researcher at the National Institutes of Health, author of many books and articles, student and friend of Richard Evans Shultes (see last month's profile in this space), and so on. Once accepted as a trusted authority and admired colleague, he'd quietly plant the cognitive bombs.

This pattern was obvious in his early years. Weil knew he wanted to study medicine at Harvard. But did he begin by focusing on chemistry or biology, like everyone else? No, his undergraduate degree is in botany. While the study of plants may seem an obvious preparation for a shamanic healer, it was an unusual preparation for medicine at Harvard in the early 60s. But with his characteristic blend of sharp intelligence, hard work, and charm, he was successful in doing things his own way.

When Weil decided to research the effects of marijuana, he was one of the first scientists to apply the double-blind methodology to such investigations (where neither the subject nor the investigator knows who has taken the drug and who has taken the placebo). Although this procedure was already considered standard practice in those days, sloppy scientific methods were apparently acceptable when studying "illicit" drugs as long as the results confirmed the prevailing assumptions.

The combination of solid scientific methodology and novel experimental designs led to some fascinating, if unwelcome, conclusions concerning the effects of marijuana. Weil's research led a paper published in Science (December, 1968) - while he was still just a medical student. In a chapter called "What No One Wants to Know About Marijuana," from his first book (The Natural Mind), Weil discusses his results, which included this: "In some cases, the performance (of regular smokers) even appears to improve slightly after smoking marijuana."

What kind of science is this? Weil had reasonably concluded that it was not good science to test people who were experiencing an altered state of consciousness for the first time and then generalize these findings (as all previous researchers had done). So he used some subjects who were familiar with the effects of marijuana and gave them the opportunity to practice various tasks while stoned. Then he tested them and compared the results. Perfectly logical. Excellent science. Extremely unwelcome results.

That was the beginning of a career that has included the study of altered states of consciousness (Marriage of the Sun and the Moon, 1980), psychoactive substances of all kinds (From Chocolate to Morphine, 1983) native healing techniques and integrative medicine (Spontaneous Healing, 1995). Andrew Weil is now one of the most famous physicians in the United States and has done as much as anyone to move the medical establishment toward acceptance of carefully researched alternative (or, as he prefers to call it, complementary) medical practice.

That's one dangerous hippie.

Did Monogamy Begin 4.4 Million Years Ago?

Christopher Ryan — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:20:08 +0000

Archaeologist Peter Bogucki has written that, "Archaeology is very much constrained by what the modern imagination allows in the range of human behavior." A glaring example of this constrained thinking was published in one of the world's leading scientific journals last week. A very prominent anthropologist with the unbeatable name of Owen Lovejoy published a paper called, "Reexamining human origins in light of Ardipithecus Ramidus" in which he argues that 4.4 million year-old bits of bone found in Africa demonstrate that our ancestors were joined by love-joy in pair-bonded couples even then. (The papers are available here, free. Lovejoy's is the last in the list.)

This isn't the place for a technical appraisal of Lovejoy's argument. (I've submitted a letter to Science, co-authored with Todd Shackelford for that. If it's published—or not, I'll say something here.) But even a cursive look at Lovejoy's paper illuminates—not how our ancestors lived 4.4 million years ago—but the constrained thinking reflected in his factually flawed, logically incoherent analysis that somehow made it through rigorous peer review, editing, and fact-checking at Science—one of the world's most prestigious journals.

In a nutshell, Lovejoy argues that the evidence he and his colleagues presented indicates an absence of sperm competition in the human line and shows male provisioning of females that eventually led to the modern nuclear family. Simple enough. But to make this all-too-familiar argument, Lovejoy misleads, misunderstands, and mis-states his own findings to the point where, if this were a graduate-school paper, his professor would demand a re-write.

Some examples:

Lovejoy's argument is founded on the idea the minimal difference in the size of males and females indicates reduced competition between males for mating. This is true. But Lovejoy—like many other theorists—too easily assumes that reduced male-male competition can only indicate monogamy, whereas it's more likely that promiscuity explains the lack of conflict, given that our two closest relatives (chimps and bonobos) both have roughly the same m/f size differences and are both promiscuous.
To dismiss the question of promiscuity among our ancestors, Lovejoy tries to show that our contemporary bodies are ill-equipped for sperm competition (a sure sign of promiscuity in mammals) (4, 5). He cites a few "facts" in support of this position.
- Lovejoy writes that human sperm production capacity is less than 0.06x10⁶ in humans, whereas the paper he cites for this number has it at 6x10⁶, a hundred-fold difference. Other sources confirm that he's dramatically under-stated human sperm production capacity, and that the latter figure is correct (1).
- Lovejoy writes that "Humans have the least complex penis morphology of any primate." Unfortunately, he never defines what he means by "complex;" nor does he discuss the fact that the human penis is, by most measures, the longest, thickest, most prominently displayed penis among primates. No mention of the unusual flared head or the external scrotum—both strong indications of sperm competition in our species.
- He argues from contemporary anatomy without mentioning significant evidence that our bodies, particularly spermatogenic tissue, is subject to extremely rapid evolution (6).
Aside from his oversights and outright errors concerning sperm competition, Lovejoy gets basic facts about primates wrong. For example, much of his thesis hinges on the absence of pronounced canines teeth (fangs) in the fossils found. He writes that we can assume that both males and females lacked these canines (even if the teeth were from a female) because "The SCC [sectorial canine complex] is not male-limited; that is, it is always expressed in both sexes of all anthropoids…." But this is wrong. Male bonobos have long canines, while females don't (2, 3). Lovejoy also claims an association between reduced canines and pair-bonding, but as this photo of the skull of a monogamous gibbon demonstrates, even this claim is suspect.

You might ask, as I did, "How can such basic, glaring mistakes make it to publication in one of the world's premier journals?"

In Spanish, the word esperar, can mean to expect or to hope-depending on context. Perhaps editors, fact-checkers, and general readers are over-eager to accept even the weakest arguments, as long as these arguments support the notion that sexual monogamy is characteristic of our species' evolutionary past. This is what they expect and hope to be told.

References and Notes

1. E. J. Peirce, W. G. Breed, Reproduction 121, 239 (2001).
2. F. B. M. de Waal, F. Lanting, Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997).
3. A. F. Dixson, Primate Sexuality: Comparative Studies of the Prosimians, Monkeys, Apes, and Human Beings (Oxford University Press, New York, 1998), page 219.
4. T. K. Shackelford, N. Pound, A. T. Goetz, Review of General Psychology 9, 228 (2005).
5. R. L. Smith, in Sperm Competition and the Evolution of Animal Mating Systems (Academic Press, Orlando, FL, 1984), pp. 601-659.
6. G. J. Wyckoff, W. Wang, C. Wu, Nature 403, 304 (2000).

Correction (10/15/2009): Due to my own bone-headed miscalculation, my numbers on testicular tissue to body mass ratios were wrong. I've removed the offending paragraph.

Love, Lust, and Letterman

Christopher Ryan — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 07:24:03 +0000

Responding to a previous blog post, a reader (Faye) wrote the following:

"Men are wired to lust and not love. … Because of the male wiring, men don't realize how different they are. They think they love when they really have no clue. If you don't have the biological means to experience love all you can do is call the imitation love. … Men can go through the motions but they cannot feel differently. They lust. … Women, being wired differently, don't get that men experience it all differently. They assume that men do feel as they do."

I think Faye is both very right and yet very wrong in her observations. She's right that nobody thinks they have an accent. In other words, most of us take our own experience as "normal" and assume that others feel more or less the same things we do. And I think Faye is right that men and women experience love and lust differently. But I think she is very wrong in then concluding that, because men seem to experience "love" differently than women do, what men feel is "imitation love" and not the real thing.

Faye continues, "The solution is to give up on the notion of love. It does not exist. It does not serve women well. Men can provide sperm and sex but that is it. … Women need to ditch their romantic notions and see it as it is. Men don't care about women. They. Don't. Care. No amount of agonizing, lying to oneself, rationalizing their behavior, blaming oneself or jumping through hoops is going to change this fact. To men, the world revolves around their penis. How that affects women is irrelevant. End. Of. Story."

Ouch. As a man, I can't help feeling some measure of shame and responsibility for Faye's despair and the treatment she's received from men. She's obviously been hurt by some uncaring cads in her day and has given up on the rest of us. Fair enough.

But is she right about men? Are we really incapable of love?

Of course not. It seems to be true that the interplay of love and lust is different for most men and women. Most men report that as love deepens, lust receeds (see the Coolidge effect)—while many women experience the opposite: the more love and security they feel with a given man, the more relaxed they are about experiencing unrestrained lust. So yes, there is space between our experiences, but that doesn't mean either is false or invalid.

What's this have to do with David Letterman? I think we have to begin by admitting two things:

1. Nobody really knows what lies at the heart of someone else's relationship;

2. Much of what Letterman does and says publicly is calculated to heal his relationship with his audience and is not necessarily a response to his private situation.

Other observers have concluded that Letterman is a cad, a liar, a narcissist and a cheat. They may well be right. But maybe his reluctance to get married, despite his very long-term relationship, was due to his understanding of these differences in men's and women's feelings about love and lust. Perhaps he and his partner had some sort of understanding that allowed him to have his casual sexual relationships on the side as long as they weren't a threat to their primary, deeply emotional connection (an arrangement, we should remember, that is common around the world). Women seem to like Mr. Letterman, so it shouldn't be so surprising that some would be willing to have a non-exclusive relationship with him—especially if, despite the many claims to the contrary—he is capable of authentic intimacy.

Some women, like Faye, learn that many men experience intimacy differently and conclude that men are liars, incapable of feeling "real" love. Others—particularly women from cultures less puritanical about sex than America—conclude simply that men and women are different, and that some things can be accepted, even if not fully understood.

If you'd like to read a bit more about a particularly "male" perspective on love, sex, and commitment, I can't recommend this short essay highly enough. It's called A Ladies' Man and Shameless, and is really worth a few minutes of your time. (Note: The essay contains a few photos that may or may not be appropriate for work—depending on where you work.)

Update: A friend just sent me this from someone who worked with Letterman:

http://ethicist.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/who-is-letterman-hur...

Destroying Kids to Save Them (From Sex)

Christopher Ryan — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 22:58:16 +0000

A little over a hundred years ago, John Harvey Kellogg, a physician, claimed the moral authority to instruct parents on the proper sexual education of their children. If you're unfamiliar with the writing of Kellogg and others of his day, their gloating disdain for basic human eroticism is chilling and unmistakable. In his best-selling Plain Facts for Old and Young (written on his sexless honeymoon in 1888), Kellogg offers parents guidance for dealing with their sons' natural erotic self-exploration in a section entitled Treatment for Self-Abuse and its Effects. "A remedy which is almost always successful in small boys," he writes, "is circumcision." He stipulates that, "The operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anaesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment...."

If circumcising your struggling, terrified son without anesthesia wasn't quite what a parent had in mind, Kellogg recommended "the application of one or more silver sutures in such a way as to prevent erection. The prepuce, or foreskin, is drawn forward over the glans, and the needle to which the wire is attached is passed through from one side to the other. After drawing the wire through, the ends are twisted together, and cut off close. It is now impossible for an erection to occur...." Parents were assured that sewing their son's penis into its foreskin, "acts as a most powerful means of overcoming the disposition to resort to the practice [of masturbation]."

No doubt.

Lest you think Kellogg was interested only in the severe, sadistic torture of boys, in the same book he soberly advises the application of carbolic acid to the clitoris of little girls to teach them not to touch themselves. Kellogg and his like-minded contemporaries demonstrate that sexual repression is a "malady that considers itself the remedy," to paraphrase Karl Kraus' dismissal of psychoanalysis.

Shocking, no? Barbaric. Unthinkably cruel.

Yes, but don't kid yourself. While American moralists aren't sewing boys' foreskins closed or pouring acid into the vaginas of little girls who dare to touch themselves, they continue to destroy the lives of children caught in the most innocent acts of sexual exploration. By labeling these kids "sexual offenders," the long-standing tradition of sacrificing innocents in the name of erotic hypocrisy continues:

"It takes so little for this happen to a child. A girl in school has oral sex with a boy in school. She becomes a sex offender for the rest of her life. Streaking a school event, as a practical joke, becomes a sex crime in the new America. Two kids 'moon' a passerby and are incarcerated in jail as sex offenders."

The quoted passage above, and the heart-breaking photos can be found here):

In 2003, 17 year-old honor-student and homecoming king Genarlow Wilson was caught having consensual oral sex with his girlfriend, who had not yet turned 16. He was convicted of aggravated child molestation, sentenced to a minimum of ten years in a Georgia prison, and forced to register as a sex offender for life. If Wilson and his girlfriend had just had good old-fashioned intercourse, as opposed to oral sex, their "crime" would have been a misdemeanor, punishable by a maximum of a year in prison and no sex offender status.

The previous year, Todd Senters videotaped consensual sex with his girlfriend, who was over the age of consent. No problem, right? Wrong. According to Nebraska state law, although the sex itself was perfectly legal, taping it constituted "manufacturing child pornography." The 17 year-old was legally permitted to have sex, but images of her doing so are illegal. Go figure.

Adolescents all over the country are getting into serious legal trouble for sexting one another: snapping a risqué photo of themselves with their cell-phone and sending it to a friend. Turns out, in many states, these kids can be sent to prison (where sexual abuse is rampant) for photographing their own bodies (manufacturing child pornography) and sharing the photos (distributing child pornography). They're being forced to register as sex offenders despite the fact that they themselves are the victims.

Being freaked-out about sex isn't just sad and ridiculous. It leads directly to horrible abuse of people who aren't responsible for the twisted sexuality of adults.

------------

For a thorough look at this issue from an international perspective, go here.

Media Watch: David Gregory (Among Others) is Full of Sh#t

Christopher Ryan — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 11:01:04 +0000

Here's what Jimmy Carter actually said: "An overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he's African-American."

By "intensely demonstrated animosity," one can safely assume that Carter meant the Obama=Hitler/Stalin/Pol Pot/Devil signs, the loaded guns brought to presidential events, and the histerical lunatics screaming that he's a Muslim African who wants to kill all the grandparents in this great home of the brave. Those would all qualify as acts of "intensely demonstrated animosity."

Here's what David Gregory claimed Carter had said: "This week you had a former President, Jimmy Carter, saying most — not just a little, but most — of this Republican opposition against you is motivated by racism. Do you agree with that?"

Republican opposition—unlike the Hitler signs and loaded guns—DOES NOT qualify as "intensely demonstrated animosity!"

My question: Is David Gregory (and the other mainstream media types who consider themselves to be "serious journalists") too stupid to understand how much he's distorting what Carter said, or does he actually believe that doing so somehow helps his country?

Fascinating Figures: Richard Evans Schultes

Christopher Ryan — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 11:07:45 +0000

Richard Evans Schultes (Jan 12, 1915 - April 10, 2001) was the sort of character Hollywood hasn't the imagination to invent. Although certainly one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, few have heard of him. This didn't bother him. His idea of a good time involved being very far away from those who might recognize him - among people who had seen few, if any, white men at all.

"I do not believe in hostile Indians," Dr. Schultes was quoted as saying in a 1992 article. "All that is required to bring out their gentlemanliness is reciprocal gentlemanliness."

He was often called the father of ethnobotany, which is the study of the relationship between native cultures and their use of plants. Over decades of research, mainly in Colombia's Amazon region, he documented the use of more than 2,000 medicinal plants among Indians of a dozen tribes; his visit often being their first contact with outsiders. He was widely considered the preeminent authority on hallucinogenic and medicinal plants (One of the many students Schultes inspired to take a more holistic, cross-cultural approach to medicine was Andrew Weil, whom many consider one of the founders of "complementary medicine" in the U.S.).

As a young student at Harvard in the 1930s, Schultes wrote an undergraduate paper on the mind-altering properties of peyote, based on research he undertook with Kiowa Indians in Oklahoma who ingested the hallucinogen in ceremonies to commune with their ancestors. He later wrote that this experience was the birth of his whole career. For his doctoral thesis, also at Harvard, he chose the plants used by the Indians of Oaxaca, a southern state of Mexico. In his research there, he came across a species of morning glory seeds that contained a molecule very similar to LSD.

Dr. Schultes's research into plants (like peyote and ayahuasca) that produced hallucinogens made some of his books very popular among drug experimenters in the 1960's. By the time altered states of consciousness became "fashionable" in the 60's, Schultes had been studying hallucinogenic plants for 30 years. He had never encountered the use of hallucinogens outside of a cultural milieu in which these substances were revered and respected. The importance of the connection of the plants' properties with the spiritual and mythic lives of the people who used them was obvious to him. Thus, he was dismissive of Timothy Leary and others who seemed to think that hallucinogens offered an instant cure to the problems of Western society or that they could be used "recreationally" — divorced from the respect and spiritual status native people universally held for them.

Schultes' interest in hallucinogens sprang from the same altruistic roots as his interest in the healing power of plants for all of the ills that afflict humanity. He had seen the role that such plants played in the spiritual and cultural life of the peoples he lived with, worked with, and loved. Perhaps he had an intuition that hallucinogenic plants, used in the proper way, could do much to heal the spiritual ills of our own confused civilization. His job, as he saw it, was to document these "proper" uses and preserve this knowledge, until such time as a more humane, open-minded culture could appreciate them, and perhaps even use them wisely.

In a short piece like this, it's impossible to do more than suggest the wonders of this man's life. If you'd like to know more, I highly recommend One River, by Wade Davis. Davis is an excellent writer, and was a student and friend of Schultes'. The book is exciting, moving, and fascinating.

Touching memories of Schultes by German Zuluaga, M.D. - written in Spanish by a Columbian doctor who knew him: http://www.ethnobotany.org/actnew/news-schultes-esp.html