When Slut-Shaming Is Not Enough ...

... then it's time for a legal crackdown!

According to the Columbus Dispatch, an Ohio legislator has proposed a bill that would define "sexting" by teenagers as a first-degree misdemeanor:

Rep. Ronald Maag, R-Lebanon, said he will soon introduce a bill making the creation, exchange and possession of nude materials between minors – commonly known as “sexting,” – a first-degree misdemeanor.

“Local prosecutors have brought to my attention that under current Ohio law these teens could be charged with a felony and classified as sex offenders,” Maag said. “There is concern that this may not be appropriate for these minors.”

Now, in Maag's defense, it's an obviously good idea to ensure that teenagers don't get charged as felony sex offenders! But why criminalize this behavior at all? Adults can send legally naughty photos of themselves via cell or post them to the Internet. Obviously, nude photos of minors bump up against child porn laws, so there's good reason to restrict them on the Internet.

But as long as sexting remains an activity between two consenting teenagers, I see no reason for them to run afoul of the law. Why not use this chance to decriminalize it altogether?

Of course, teens shouldn't have sex until they're mature enough to handle it. Sexting is likely to magnify their vulnerability. I wouldn't want my kids involved in it when they're 13 or 16. There's too much scope for harming themselves and others. So this is an area that sex education ought to be addressing. I don't mean just sex education in the schools; I mean parents, the media, churches - anyone who cares about kids.

But it's a sign of moral bankruptcy, on the social level, if we think the criminal justice system should take over a role that properly belongs to education.

By contrast, it should definitely be illegal to disseminate a person's photos without permission, because it violates his or her consent. The sad story that spurred Maag's bill involved a girl in Cincinnati, Jessica Logan. She killed herself after her photos were circulated throughout her whole school. What drove her to despair wasn't her initial act of sending pictures to her boyfriend; it was the subsequent deception and breach of trust. While this isn't identical to rape, her consent was violated all the same, and in analogy to sexual assault laws, that violation deserves to be punished under the law.

Sex, Schools, and the Politics of Distraction

The superintendent of Westfall School District in south-central Ohio is being pilloried for accessing racy websites from work, the Columbus Dispatch reports. Okay, he shouldn't have done that. But is he really all that different from millions of other American employees who've done the same while at work? Don't millions more use work computers for personal stuff? This guy's biggest offense, I think, was forgetting how teachers and other school employees are held to higher standards than the rest of society. In other words, his main offense was stupidity.

And what did he actually look at? Well, he did check out one hardcore free porn site - exactly once. The rest appears to have been no spicier that what you see on the average newsstand. (Cosmo covers, anyone?)

At 6 p.m. on Oct. 22, 2007, [Superintendent] Cotner's computer was used to visit an Internet site that today features free online hard-core pornography videos, the newspaper [the Dispatch] found.

The computer assigned to the leader of the Pickaway County district also was used three times during the fall of 2006 to visit a site that sells sex aids and toys.

The majority of the site visits being examined by the Westfall school board involved Google image searches for pictures of swimsuit models, actresses and celebrities.

Some of those sites included Sports Illustrated swimsuit models and "almost-nude photos-wet-and-wild" of a female former American Idol contestant.

(Source: Columbus Dispatch)

Oooh, women in swimsuits! Wet women in swimsuits! I'm no big fan of the SI swimsuit editions (they give kids the idea that women's main role in sports is as eye candy), but does even the most prudish fundamentalist consider this to be porn? And is ordering a sex toy from a work computer any less ethical than shopping at Amazon while at work? Actually, if the superintendent had browsed the sex toy section of Amazon, no one would have been the wiser!

If I lived in this district, I'd be steamed, all right. But not about the superintendent's computer usage. The district's former treasurer is sitting in prison after pilfering tens of thousands of dollars. And its school board meeting drew a crowd of 300 last night. They came not to accuse the superintendent (though some attendees did call for his resignation), but to protest proposed budget cuts.

The politics of distraction is so handy in tough economic times.

Marx Was Wrong

Zombie bank kitteh from I Can Has Cheezburger?

The proletariat isn't killing capitalism. The banks are.

This is not an economics blog, but I thought Robert Reich really nailed it in his commentary on the big bonuses AIG is paying to the guys who orchestrated the failure of our economy:

This sordid story of government helplessness in the face of massive taxpayer commitments illustrates better than anything to date why the government should take over any institution that's "too big to fail" and which has cost taxpayers dearly. Such institutions are no longer within the capitalist system because they are no longer accountable to the market. [my emphasis]

(More like this here.)

The Obama Administration's greatest failure, so far, has been its unwillingness to insist on accountability. The lack of accountability built into the initial rescue package should have been obvious to the least perspicacious economic minds. I mean, it was obvious to me! But I thought Obama would institute accountability even though his appointees helped get us into this mess. I hoped he'd override Timothy Geithner on at least this one point.

Why is Robert Reich not in the White House? Why not Joseph Stiglitz? Dean Baker? George Soros? I could name a half-dozen other people who aren't so personally invested as Geithner or Larry Summers in maintaining the status quo. For crying out loud, Badtux the Snarky Penguin would make a helluva better Treasury Secretary than Geithner. (See this post for just one example of why I'm not joking about this!)

AIG and its ilk are going to have to be nationalized (or put into receivership, or whatever euphemism you prefer) sooner or later. The only question is whether Obama has the nerve and foresight to do it now, and not wait until another trillion or so is squandered. Joseph Stiglitz has a smart explanation of what's going wrong and how to fix it: basically, by splitting each of the zombie banks into two pieces, hiving off the bad investments, and sticking shareholders and executives with the losses. In other words, he advocates eliminating the current moral hazard and disincentives to lend while reinstating accountability.

Right now, the zombie banks are murdering markets and capitalism itself. Time for a new escape plan.

Medical Abortion under Pressure in Ohio

Ohio's Democratic, pro-choice Attorney General, Richard Cordray, is sticking up for a state law that restricts the use of medical abortion (RU-486, aka mifepristone or the "abortion pill") to a narrower window of time than good medical practice currently requires.

According to the Columbus Dispatch, a 2004 Ohio law limits the use of RU-486 to the first seven weeks of pregnancy, while doctors commonly use it up through the ninth week. The original FDA approval covered only the first seven weeks, but subsequent experience with vastly larger numbers of women has shown it to be safe and effective for two weeks beyond that window. Doctors have been prescribing it off-label through the ninth week, in line with current medical knowledge. The Ohio law has never been implemented because Planned Parenthood sued to block it. This week, the Ohio Supreme Court heard arguments on whether the law should be allowed to take effect; the case has not yet been decided.

So what stake does the Ohio AG have in this? The Dispatch reports:

Anne Berry Straight, an attorney in Cordray's office, said she's not asking the court to set medical policy, only to recognize that lawmakers had the right to regulate the drug. ...

Straight pointed out that Ohio lawmakers already have banned the use of anabolic steroids for muscle-building and amphetamines for weight loss.

[Ohio Supreme Court] Justice Terrence O'Donnell said the court shouldn't be put in the position of playing surgeon general for Ohio.

"The court is going to micromanage the practice of medicine if we start getting into managing off-label uses like we're being asked to do (with RU-486)," O'Donnell said.

I'm not sure why either the courts or the legislature are mucking around with the fine points of medical policy! Whatever happened to the notion that doctors and public health experts should be regulating drugs? Neither the legislators nor the justices have the slightest qualifications. Heck, as a historian of medicine, I'm way more qualified than they are! Seriously!

For instance, you only need a dollop of medical knowledge to understand the difference between a medication that the FDA found to be safe and effective (RU-486) and drugs that are notorious for being abused (anabolic steroids and amphetamines). One of these things is not like the other; one of these things doesn't belong! Geez, my legislators need to watch more Sesame Street. (And no, I'm not saying that the FDA's process is perfect. It's often deeply screwed up. In this case, though, the FDA approved RU-486 in spite of intense political pressure to ignore the science.)

None of the statements from the AG's office explain why Cordray believed he had to stick up for the legislature's right to make medical policy. I understand that it's a constitutional issue as well as a matter of women's health, but I cannot fathom why the AG would have a stake in it. I do know that Cordray has publicly supported abortion rights, and I seriously fail to understand why protecting the scope of legislative power would trump his commitment to women's health.

War of the Roses and Clematis

I have no energy to post on the stuff that's really got me thinking today - because I've become a casualty of the undeclared war of the roses and clematis.

Today was stunningly beautiful, and so our whole family trooped out to the yard to try and undo the winter's damage. Well, two of us tried; the other two, the small ones, played with household chemicals and made rockets blast off with Alka-seltzer tablets. On balance, this was probably less risky than entrusting them with pruning shears.

My mission was to save my poor diseased clematis. If you've been with me since summer, you might recall some of the pictures I posted here. Well, I have a confession: Like more conventional porn, my garden porn is cleverly cropped to hide imperfections. While I haven't stooped to airbrushing (yet!), I did conceal the fungus-ridden foliage on my clematis.

So I determined to prune them all hard (not just the jackmanii, which expects a hard pruning) and hope that what grows back will be less fungified. It took a few hours and I felt like I was performing an amputation, but I pruned my darlings back to short (4- to 6-inch) stumps, bagged up all the nasty foliage, and removed a bit of topsoil to boot. Now I'm praying to the Ceiling Cat that my plan works.

The only problem? My clematis shares space with the roses. All the garden guides will tell you that clematis and roses are excellent partners. I'm sure that the authors of said guides let their hired help do the pruning.

Because it was a bloody mess - quite literally. Even though I waited until my husband had first pruned the roses, I ended up with scratches and fragments of thorns in my arms, a deep cut in one finger (how I got that one, I can't even say), and a thorn under a thumbnail. Yes, that was as hideous as it sounds. I think I shouted some words that I usually avoid saying in front of the kids, but I really don't know, because I was seeing swirls and starbursts of yellow, orange, and red and trying not to scream a second time.

Oh, and I got a mild sunburn, too - while working in the shade, in Ohio, on the seventh day of March. I'm actually kind of tickled about this, since it really is mild and it seems just as happily anomalous as the perfect day that just ended.

I'm so grateful that I had the energy to work in my garden. I'm paying for it tonight, and I'll likely be kaput tomorrow, but it buoys my hope that I'll keep on healing. (In case you were wondering, I'm not back to "normal," though I'm continuously improving. The fatigue is the worst of my remaining symptoms.)

Since the only thing to show for my work is some black dirt and a blank trellis, here's a more photogenic alternative: an update on the crocus that popped up a week ago. It's no longer alone, so you can expect more pictures in the days ahead. If you click to embiggen the photo, you'll see the tracery of russet veins on the petals.

Foolishness about Smart People and Dating

Smart kitteh from I Can Has Cheezburger?

Are smart people romantically impaired? If you believe Alex Benzer's new HuffPost piece, "Why the Smartest People Have the Toughest Time Dating," you'd think that anyone who went to an Ivy League or equivalent college was doomed to watch their genes go extinct. His basic argument is that smart people invest too much time and energy into achievement with the result that their dating and mating skills are at best vestigial, at worst nonexistent.**

I think he's full of crap. I went to two of the schools he mentions. I'll leave grad school out of this, because that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish; the demands of an academic career skew the picture. But going back to my undergrad years at Stanford, virtually everyone I know is partnered. Very, very few people I know from my college years are divorced. (I can actually only think of two examples - a couple from band who were young, neurotic, and doomed from the start, and who filed upon returning from their honeymoon - and a former housemate who was always a free spirit.) I'm willing to use my college friends' low divorce rate as a proxy for happiness in love; it's at least as scientific as Benzer's method, which is to provide no real evidence at all, only assertions about what "smart people" are like.

Now, it's possible that my friends and I killed enough brain cells to collectively reduce our IQs by 30 points, opening the way to luck in love. Maybe being in California for my undergrad years, in the mid-1980s when admissions weren't yet so cutthroat, made my experience radically different from Benzer's time at Harvard. I'm willing to grant that Harvard may be more dysfunctional than my alma maters just by virtue of its mystique, so possibly Benzer's points apply to that much smaller pool. But funny thing: I know a few Harvard grads, too, and they're no more likely than my college friends to be single or unhappily partnered. Besides, someone has to be spawning all of those legacy admissions!

So I think Benzer is just plain wrong. But parts of his argument hold just enough truth to get under my skin, and so I can't resist dissecting it piece by piece, even though it might be, uh, smarter to just ignore, ignore. (His main points are in bold and taken verbatim from his own list.)

1. Smart people spent more time on achievements than on relationships when growing up.

This is one argument that resonated with me. I wasn't achievement-oriented, per se, and I was totally clueless about the college admissions game. But I didn't spend my whole adolescence pining after boys. Most of my energy went into music because I loved it and it often gave me an excuse to skip boring, slow-paced academic classes. And so I spent most of my teenage years with my lips attached to a French horn or my fingers glued to a piano keyboard. Although that didn't stop me from being interested in boys, it did keep some crucial body parts happily busy. Sublimation is not a bad thing when you're a 15-year-old girl; it can keep you from diving deep into sex before you're emotionally ready.

But here's the thing. Just because I wasn't cultivating intense romances doesn't mean I was neglecting relationships. I had plenty of friends, boys and girls alike. Most of them were not precocious daters, either; they played in band and/or they were part of what a high school friend dubbed the "smart and chaste crowd." (That sounds more prissy than it really was; we'd had a few drinks when she said it.) While many of us weren't world-class flirts, we definitely did learn social skills. Who says sex has to be thrown into the mix at a young age in order to learn to relate to a future partner?

It's true that there wasn't much of a dating scene in college. As one friend of mine said, "No one dates at Stanford. We just sleep together." We pioneered the "hookup culture," I suppose, for good or ill. People were busy (as Benzer rightly observes), the campus was isolated from the town by large swaths of land, and most of us didn't have cars. Oddly enough, people did find romantic partners, even without much formal dating and without the elaborate bar culture that dominates social life at the university where I now teach.

2. Smart people feel that they're entitled to love because of their achievements.

This is rank bullshit. I saw plenty of entitlement during my undergrad years. I'd say 99% of it was economic. I knew a handful of rich kids who thought they were above the rules (and a few of them got busted - unsurprisingly - for plagiarism). Maybe a few of them felt entitled to love, since they already believed that Daddy's money could buy anything. More prevalent were kids who weren't rich but figured their cleverness and work ethic predestined them for wealth. It was the height of the Reagan era, after all.

But entitled to love? My college friends were just as unsure about that as any other group of people I've known. If anything, because the dating scene was so rudimentary, most of us wondered how we'd ever find love. We spent many late nights eating ramen and commiserating about our lack of prospects. Almost no one ended up single in the long run, but my friends and I couldn't envision that back in 1983.

3. You don't feel like a fully-realized sexual being, and therefore don't act like one.

Here's where Benzer gets downright retrograde. Just see what it takes to be sexual!

Now you could be absolutely stunning (in which case you're both smart AND pretty and everyone hates you except for me -- call me, like, immediately), but your identity is still bound up in being The Smart One. So maybe you dress frumpy and don't pay a lot of attention to your appearance. Or never bothered to cultivate your sensuality as a woman. Or your sexual aggression as a male.

Attracting a partner is all about the dance of polarity. Energy flows between positive and negative electrodes, anode and cathode, magnetic north and south. Unless you actually convey femininity as a woman or masculinity as a man, you're not going to attract a suitable companion of the opposite sex.

Part of the issue is this: when all of your personal energy is concentrated in the head, it never gets a chance to trickle down to the heart, or, god forbid, the groin. By virtue of being born of the union of male and female, yang and yin, you are a sexual being. Deal with it. Now do what you need to do to perpetuate the race already. Use what mama amoeba gave you.

For starters, if you're not 100% heterosexual, you're apparently SOL and Benzer can't help you. Sorry, kthx bai.

If you're straight, then you're just not trying hard enough to live up to gender stereotypes. Smart girls let themselves go! A boy will never notice you if you wear sweats to class! And smart boys aren't aggressive enough! (How this squares with a sense of sexual entitlement remains a mystery.)

In other words, smart girls had better look hot. Smart boys had better act butch.

We just need to retreat into rigid, clichéd gender roles, in Benzer's scheme, and romantic fulfillment will be ours. There's no place for female sexual initiative in this vision. Nor does he imagine men can be sensual. Heaven forbid you've got any yang mixed with your yin - or vice versa.

I can't help but think that Benzer's ideas have some kinship to that silly pseudo-survey last spring that claimed smart girls have lousy sex. On the surface, he appears to be an equal-opportunity critic of men and women, since he says men need to adjust their habits, too. Dig a little deeper, though, and his views on sexuality are equally sexist. There's nothing new at all about telling women to act more feminine and men to be more aggressive.

4. You're exceptionally talented at getting in the way of your own romantic success.

Sure. Smart people routinely overthink things. That's not limited to love.

But Benzer claims we overthink love and lust to such an extreme that we've tuned out the most basic biological wisdom:

To put it plainly, you are programmed to reproduce. Now quit thinking you're smarter than the 3 billion base pairs in your genome and 4 billion years of evolution. Actually, just stop thinking altogether. Let the program do its work.

Evidence, please?

Or is this just a backdoor way of invoking the most cartoonish principles ev psych - man hunter, woman hunted? (Nostalgia for yin/yang gender stereotypes) + (vague appeals to evolution) = (pop ev psych)!

I'm always skeptical when someone tells me to stop thinking.

5. By virtue (or vice) of being smart, you eliminate most of the planet's inhabitants as a dating prospect.

Benzer exhorts us to "loosen up" - to stop expecting to pair off with a partner who's comparably smart. The penalty for not doing so? Celibacy - or exile to Germany's fashion capital!

Do a very thorough search all over the planet and be prepared to move to Duesseldorf.

I didn't actually move to Duesseldorf. Berlin was more fun (especially for a frump: Duesseldorf is way too stylish). It's also where I conveniently met my husband while using a truly revolutionary technique for man-hunting: doing the things that already made me happy. (I met him while standing in line for symphony tickets, but that's another story.)

Benzer has a legitimate point: If you're smart and want intelligence in a partner, you do narrow your potential pool. Sometimes dramatically. It's important to be aware of the trade-offs entailed by high expectations.

What Benzer doesn't mention: Yes, holding out for someone who's a kindred spirit may mean many youthful Saturday nights spent hanging out platonically with pals. In the long run, though, being picky and knowing what you want just might increase the chances of finding a happy match. My Saturday nights are usually still just spent hanging out, now with my husband. Seventeen years after chatting him up in the ticket line, I'm nowhere close to bored with our conversation. Of course that's not due to his intelligence alone - he's kind and funny and a bunch of other good stuff - but I can't imagine being nearly as beguiled if he weren't bright enough to still surprise and challenge and delight me.

**Benzer conflates "smart" with "people who attend 'elite' schools" and I recognize how problematic this is. I had two real dates while at Stanford, and one of them was with a guy who was so dull it hurt. Conversely, oodles of brilliant people go to less fancy-pants schools or drop out altogether. (I married a high-school dropout who eventually earned a Ph.D.) Obviously, there are lots of other forms of intelligence that don't depend on being bookish, as well. So even though this post discusses academically bright high achievers who went to Ivy-ish schools, I don't for a minute think that Benzer is right when it comes to that much larger universe of smart folks, either.

Lactophobia and "Discretion"

Stymied milk-slurping kittehs from I Can Has Cheezburger?

So the Denny's in Asheville, North Carolina, is just the latest in a long line of businesses where some twit took it upon himself to tell a nursing mama she couldn't feed her baby where everyone else was dining. Daisy at Daisy's Dead Air reports on the brouhaha - in which the restaurant manager threatened to call the cops! - and the resulting protest. North Carolina law guarantees the rights of mothers to breastfeed anywhere and anytime, but I guess lactophobia trumps the law.

Among all this absurdity, what jumped out at me is that the manager was going to call the police unless the mother covered herself.

In my experience, the demand for "discretion" while nursing may sound like a compromise, but in fact it's completely unreasonable.

My two little creatures partook of mama-milk until they were each about ten months old. As newborns, they wiggled a bit while nursing but mostly concentrated at the business at hand. It can't be easy to drink and breathe at the same time, but they practiced and practiced (oh, did they practice! about every hour and a half! for weeks on end!) until they'd mastered the task and grew large and fat. (Each of them gained about 5 1/2 pounds in their first six to seven weeks. Seriously.) Even as novices, they weren't exactly inert, but I could usually arrange a blanket around them and not feel too exposed.

And then one day, they discovered that mealtime was for socializing, not just for sustenance. They'd drink a little, and then blop! They'd pop off the nipple, look around, smile, drool, and flirt with everyone in the room. I'd be left with my breast waving at the world, chilly and exposed, until their Royal Babyness deigned to latch on again. If we were in a public place, I could be grateful if a jet of pressurized milk didn't spray any innocent bystanders.

Now, I'll admit I never went in for those "nursing" clothes that promise discretion. You know, those goofy, dowdy shirts with flaps and buttons that oh-so-discreetly announce "I'm lactating." That didn't matter, though, because once a baby pops off the boob, no flap in the world is gonna hide you.

There are blankets, you say? And the mama can artfully drape her nursing baby in flannel and fleece? My guys saw the mealtime blanket as a fun challenge. Grabbing and wadding up and throwing it probably did wonders to develop their motor and visual skills. But coverage? The net effect of a blanket was probably negative, because if you relied on it, you'd end up flashing even more skin once the kid wrestled it to the ground.

Besides: In order to fully cover your breast, you've got to swaddle your baby's entire head, too. Last I checked, infants need air as much as they need milk.

The standard feminist response to lactophobia is to say that men have issues with naked breasts that aren't displayed for their express pleasure. There's surely some truth to that. Prudery and prurience are often two sides of a single coin.

But the other thing about naked lactating breasts is that they bluntly remind us of our animal nature. Mammaries make it impossible to deny that we're mammals. There's no way to cover that up when you've got a baby at the breast, no matter how uncomfortable it may make some folks.

Update 12 noon, 2-27-09: Vanessa at Feministing alerts us to an example of how these two forms of lactophobia can intersect: Milwaukee hate-radio talk-radio host Mark Belling recently called breastfeeding mothers "sows" on his program, saying, "It's..it's what a pig does and it does it in public, right?" Just goes to show that misogyny and disgust at our animality make a happy, harmonious match.

Wednesday Anti-recipe: Aluminum Soup

So here's what I made for dinner tonight:


That's, um, aluminum soup on the burner. I'd had a burst of energy and decided to make quiches for dinner - one with artichoke hearts, the other with asparagus. I put the pot on the burner, cranked it up to high, chopped the asparagus, and went to dump it into the pot.

That's when I saw the pot was empty. I'd neglected to add water. (What was that about my beautiful brain?)

I picked up the pot to rescue it from the heat, and the aluminum soup spilled out in a big glop. The aluminum layer sandwiched between two layers of stainless steel had liquified, expanded, and popped the bottom off the pan.

The blobular aluminum was shiny and pretty, in a perverse way:


Now, the good news is that this stove is 25 years old. It bakes unevenly and I've been jonesing for a new one ever since we bought this house nearly seven years ago. I know we could just replace the burner, but maybe this is the nudge I need to do a little research and buy a new range. Any suggestions? Past negotiations on this have always hit a stalemate because I long for a gas stove, while my husband wants something like a ceramic top that's easy to clean. As you can see, he's not being unreasonable - not at all.

The other reason I can't be upset about this is that I'm ecstatic about the surge of energy behind this kitchen fiasco. Yesterday I rode my bike to work and was pretty useless for the rest of the evening. Today I felt strong enough to bike to work again, and I still had enough oomph to embark on cooking a real dinner for just the second time since I fell sick on January 20.

As for the quiches? They were delicious.

Personhood Provocateurs in North Dakota

Photo of North Dakotan Badlands by Flickr user JJSchad, used under a Creative Commons license. This somewhat gratuitous picture is included lest you think North Dakota boasts nothing but snow and gophers and pro-life zealots.

North Dakota's new "personhood" law, which made it halfway through the legislative process on Tuesday, may no longer be the reproductive folly du jour, but it's still preoccupying me. Why would my home state even consider such a silly law - one that, much like Colorado's failed Proposition 48 last fall, could criminalize not just abortion but also most forms of birth control, IVF, and even normal miscarriage and menstruation? How the heck did this happen?

My husband said to me, "Curb your patriotism." But it's not just loyalty that's got me wondering. North Dakotans are churchgoing and God-fearing, yes; but they're also deeply pragmatic. Or at least they used to be when I lived there.

That's not just childish nostalgia speaking, by the way. Not even the abortion controversy has historically negated North Dakotan's basic pragmatism. Faye Ginsburg's wonderful ethnography, Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community looked at activists on both (or actually, all!) sides of the issue in Fargo during the 1980s. While she found plenty of drama and conflict, she also found that activists of all stripes shared a basic set of values regarding family and women as nurturers.

Perhaps the growing season in North Dakota is just too short for extremism to thrive.

Leslie Unruh, you say? Nope. She belongs to South Dakota.

So what planet did HB 1576 come from? How did a bunch of part-time legislators dream up the idea of conferring legal personhood on fertilized eggs even prior to implantation? Because that's what the text of the bill does:

[F]or purposes of interpretation of the constitution and laws of North Dakota, it is the intent of the legislative assembly that an individual, a person, when the context indicates that a reference to an individual is intended, or a human being includes any organism with the genome of homo sapiens.

If this language is eerily reminiscent of the Colorado referendum, that's because this is not an indigenous product of North Dakota. It's written and promoted by the same people who brought us the Colorado foolishness.

In other words, the Colorado referendum wasn't a one-off. It has spawned an apparently new tentacle of the pro-life movement, Personhood USA, whose ultimate aim is to pass "personhood" laws in as many states as possible, ultimately setting up a judicial confrontation with Roe v. Wade. Here's their call to arms:

The fight for life is raging nationwide right now like never before and we wish to thank you for your conscientious decision to support every preborn child's right to life. We are Personhood USA and our goal is simple: Together, we will glorify Jesus and then stop the dehumanizing of and destruction of preborn people.

The organizers that got personhood on the ballot in Colorado, would like to help in North Dakota as well. By getting personhood on the ballot, we force the question that the pro-death side does not want to answer, "when does life begin"?

Personhood USA claims grassroots support, and I have no doubt that North Dakota has its fair share of pro-lifers (even if the North Dakota League for Life's website is pretty rinky-dink and years out of date). Here's how Personhood USA describes its campaign in North Dakota:

"North Dakotans have gotten used to cold temperatures like -44 degrees, but they haven't gotten used to child-killing. We applaud and support their efforts to protect every baby by love and by law," commented Cal Zastrow, who, along with his family, worked on the North Dakota bill on the grassroots level.

Reading this, you might reasonably believe that Cal Zastrow is part of a burgeoning pro-life movement among North Dakotans. That's the implication, right? But Zastrow would be a mighty unusual name among all those grandchildren of Germans and Norwegians. So I couldn't resist googling Cal Zastrow. He's from Michigan - two states over! No, Personhood USA didn't lie about this; it just used the term "grassroots" to insinuate. Here's how Michigan Citizens for Life describes him:

Cal Zastrow resides in Kawkawlin [Michigan] with his wife, Trish, where they homeschool their children. They are missionaries to the preborn who speak in churches, schools, and on the streets. Cal trains pro-life activists and conducts seminars to make the killing of preborn children unthinkable and unavailable through peaceful means.

Ordinarily I include links to groups like this just for substantiation, not because I think you need to waste any time going there, but Cal Zastrow has a such a dorky, douchey picture that he's worth a visit if you're in a snarky mood. Also, maybe you'll discover WTF it means to be a missionary to the preborn. I'm still mystified.

So the success of the personhood bill in North Dakota depended crucially on the work of a provocateur from out of state.

I have to admit, though, that the bill's sponsor, Dan Ruby, is a completely homegrown zealot who claimed "This language is not as aggressive as the direct ban legislation that I've proposed in the past." Nor can I claim that the 51 legislators who voted for the bill (against 41 opponents) were bussed in from out of state.

What are the prospect for this bill actually becoming law? According to Kay Steiger at RH Reality Check, the bill's introduction caught Planned Parenthood - the only pro-choice group with any presence in North Dakota - by surprise. That surely won't still be the case when it comes before the state senate in a few weeks. At that point, Tim Stanley, senior director of government and public affairs for Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota, hopes for a better outcome:

The personhood bill will go on to the state Senate by the end of the week, and Stanley says it is likely not to be voted on until the end of the legislature's session, in April. Stanley believes that ultimately North Dakotans may not want to draw national attention with a challenge to Roe. If the bill does pass, Planned Parenthood's affiliate will begin reaching out to the medical and religious community to begin building a coalition of support to fight the measure.

"My experience had been that this legislature is grounded in reality, as opposed to some other legislatures," Stanley said. "South Dakota is not the most rational legislature when it comes to this kind of stuff. They're known as being slightly out there and willing to take those high-profile risks to fight this fight. My feeling is that North Dakota is just slightly more reticent to do that. To their credit they're not a state that looks [for] and seeks undue attention."

(Source: RH Reality Check)

See, North Dakota doesn't just have the prettier badlands, it also has a more level-headed legislature than South Dakota. And again - Dan Ruby is no Leslee Unruh! I'm hoping the state senate is rational enough to realize how ruinous it would be to litigate the "personhood bill" all the way to the Supreme Court, as required by the bill's second paragraph.

But even assuming this bill dies before the tulips are blooming in Bismarck, Personhood USA won't stop its quest. According the the American Life League, similar "personhood" legislation is pending in 15 other states. Even if there's good reason to be relatively sanguine about the North Dakota state senate stopping this foolish bill, odds are good that it will pass somehow, somewhere, and ultimately land in the laps of the SCOTUS.

Another ominous aspect of this: the "personhood" movement is trying to shift the discourse. To some extent, they're already succeeding. Just look at how RH Reality Check and I are both repeatedly referring to the bill and the movement within their frame: "personhood." Repeat it often enough, and people may start believing that a fertilized egg is indeed a person.

A Sweeter Gig than Wall Street Tycoon

"Money" by FLickr user TW Collins, used under a Creative Commons license.

So the poor Wall-Street fat-cats are wincing at a $500,000 pay cap? They just picked the wrong job. A recent article in the Columbus Dispatch reported that the presidents of Ohio's public universities and their senior henchmen advisers won't see pay cuts this year - although unionized state employees are staring down a six percent cut:

According to figures compiled by the Associated Press, the 154 individuals at Ohio's 14 four-year public institutions made a combined $34.6 million last year.

They were led by Ohio State University President Gordon Gee, the highest paid public university president in America. He makes $775,008 a year before bonuses. [My emphasis. WTF does he make after bonuses??!!]

A 6 percent pay cut akin to what Strickland is seeking from unionized agency workers would amount to a $2 million savings if applied to university presidents and other top university officials.

My own university's president makes less than $400,000, a comparatively penurious sum. Of that, $85,000 came from this year's raise alone (about a 30% increase on his previous base). Elsewhere in Ohio, Miami University's president is foregoing his $68,000 performance bonus. No word of anything similar happening here.

Instead, my university has hired a headhunting firm to control the search for our next provost. According to the Athens News, the headhunters will be paid a quarter of the new hire's first-year salary. The outgoing provost makes $264,000. Administrators are not typically hired at lower salaries than their predecessors, so my university will likely shell out over $65,000.

For that amount they could hire:

• one well-paid assistant professor
• one-and-a-half instructors at my current level
• five people working under my former conditions as an adjunct
• or a scant one-fifth of our current president.

I guess they need a headhunter because there just aren't any smart, ambitious university administrators willing to work for less than half a million, and so none would apply. They'd all waltz off to Wall Street instead. Hey, times are tough all over.

Dick Armey: North Dakota's Worst Export

North Dakota grows a lot of durum wheat. You've surely eaten it in your noodles. North Dakota is first in the nation in exporting sunflower products. It also ships out sugar beets and other wholesome foodstuffs.

Years ago, however, we sent a rather toxic export south to Okalahoma. Having made a career as an economist, he wandered onward to Texas and thence to Washington, DC, schlepping the sludge of free-market fundamentalism, religious intolerance, and general mean-spiritedness wherever he went.

That unfortunate export was Dick Armey, who turned up this week on Chris Matthews' "Hardball" program insulting Joan Walsh, the editor-in-chief of Salon.com:

I am so damn glad that you could never be my wife cuz I surely wouldn't have to listen to that prattle from you every day.

(Quotation courtesy of Henry the Cat of Henry's Travels)

Joan Walsh had a great, real-time comeback: "Well, that makes two of us."

Henry - who also posted the video - tried and failed to determine whether our pal Dick actually has a wife. He consulted Wikipedia, which was so sadly worthless, you have to wonder if it was sanitized by Dick's own people.

But Henry: If you want to know something about a North Dakotan - even one in the diaspora - you ask another North Dakotan. Because we know each other. And if we don't, we know someone who knows someone. That's me: well-connected at the top levels of North Dakota society, and shamelessly willing to dish. It's all hearsay, of course. But that's what you're here for, right?

So I happened to know that Dick Armey went to Jamestown College. (This is confirmed by his online hagiography.) That's where both my parents got their degrees (my dad in music, my mom in English and bridge ... but mostly bridge). They weren't classmates - Dick is too young for that - but Mom taught school with a woman who knew him directly.

From that connection, I knew that Armey had been married - I think to a gal from North Dakota - but at some point he dropped his first wife. My mom's friend was indignant about this, but I don't know the details, and Mom's not clear on them anymore, either. I seem to recall hearing he traded Wife #1 in for a younger model, but I'm not certain.

At any rate, even if I've gotten every insinuation wrong, there's plenty of hypocrisy to go around. According to the Religious Freedom Coalition of the Southeast, Dick distinguished himself by preaching fundie "values," but prior to his political career, he allegedly sexually harassed some of the students he taught ... and traded up to a second wife who just happened to be a former student.

Dick Armey's "documented conduct along the lines of the President's" was reported in the May 4, 1995, Dallas Observer. Three women who had been students when Armey was a professor at North Texas State University went on the record to document Armey's "inappropriate" behavior. Susan Aileen White (who earned a master's in economics from the institution), Anna Weniger (who subsequently acted as an economist for the New Mexico legislature) and Anne Marie Best (a future economics professor at Lamar University) all took offense at Armey's inappropriate behavior toward female students. Weniger left the university for several months, partly because of Armey's actions.

Not all the women at North Texas State were offended by the professor's advances. Armey's current (and second) wife had been one of his students.

I can't vouch for the accuracy of their report, but the hypocrisy sure rings true, based on what my mom's friend told her.

Or, as my mom said to me on the phone last night: "Well, from what she said, he's just an asshole." Coming from my mom - who is literally a former church lady - that's salty language. And for that allegation, Dick Armey's political career provides evidence galore.

So Henry, is there a Mrs. Armey? I'm not sure if there's currently one. But if there is, I sure wouldn't blame her for kicking him to the curb.

P.S. You have no idea how much self-control it cost me not to play with - nay, diddle with! - Rep. Armey's first name in this post. I'm trying to act like a grow-mutt. I was doing pretty well until, oh, ten seconds ago.

Update, 1-31-09, 12:30 a.m.: Salon has a much better sourced account of Dick Armey's misogynist misadventures. It largely confirms my version, except that his first wife, Jeanine Gale, was the one who filed for divorce. Makes perfect sense, if she's a smart woman and he is, indeed, an asshole. The money quote from Salon:

Armey's brother Charley, who has stayed close with his first wife, says Jeanine Gale, who had a master's in education and taught school, was "a women's libber" who didn't put Armey's needs first. Armey's second wife, Susan, his brother says, is nearly the opposite.

No wonder poor Joan Walsh - and I - will never stand a chance!

Sweet Schadenfreude: Adieu, Bill Kristol

Yesterday, in response to Amanda Marcotte's post arguing that that New York Times should give Steven Pinker a column on language to distract him from bloviating on ev psych, I said:

Now that you’re found the perfect job for Pinker, can we launch a re-employment program for Bill Kristol, too?

And lo! Today comes word that the Times has ended Kristol's contract (I read the happy news at Skippy the Bush Kangaroo.) I feel a lot of empathy for people getting laid off right now. For Kristol, it's pure schadenfreude, sullied only by the news that the Washington Post has already offered him a monthly gig.

So I may be cognitively impaired at the moment. (I'm feeling much like I did a few days ago: still much afflicted with these neurological symptoms, still waiting for an answer.) But I seem to be developing powers of prognostication. Maybe even mind control! I'm gonna go try to bend some spoons now.

The End of Our Long National Hairball

Hairball kitteh from I Can Has Cheezburger?

Poor Grey Kitty suffered horribly from hairballs. (No, that's not her in the pic above; she was much prettier, even while yakking.) She'd groom herself neurotically and then try to hack up a ball of hair the size of a small kitten. No sooner had she eliminated one hairball than the next one would be queued up, ready to go. She'd sprint furious circles around the house, growling and yowling, until finally she'd cough one up. Preferably at 4 a.m. Preferably on the carpet. Groom, rinse, and repeat.

The past eight years haven't been all that different. It's been just one hairball after another. We've had the Enron debacle, 9/11 and "My Pet Goat," Katrina, "Misssion Accomplished" in Iraq and Afghanistan, collapse of the rule of law, Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, and the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression. (I'm sure I've missed a few, so check out Jeff Fecke's depressingly dead-to-rights countdown of the ten worst Bush moments, starting here.)

We too have spent the past eight years running in circles, making no headway on climate change, oil dependency, and our crumbling health-care system. The Bush regime has been utterly indigestible. It's made us sick - at least at heart - and too often, literally. Unlike the feline version, which only rarely prove fatal, the Bush hairballs have been lethal.

We'll be cleaning up the mess on the carpet for years to come.

Ignorance Is Not Bliss: The Sad State of Sexual Medicine

Not long ago, I discussed the discomfort physicians too often feel while discussing sexual issues with their patients. This discomfort is rooted in broader anti-sex attitudes in America - and no, the ubiquity of sex in the media does not mean that America celebrates sex, only that we commodify it. The result is that patients often don't get even very basic medical advice that could help them ameliorate sexual dysfunction.

But I totally overlooked a second problem: plain old ignorance! I just read an insider's perspective from Dr. John P. Mulhall, MD, director of the Male Sexual and Reproductive Medicine Program at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, and author of Saving Your Sex Life: A Guide for Men with Prostate Cancer (Hilton Publishing Company, Chicago, 2008). In an interview published last week in Renal and Urology News, Dr. Mulhall said:

There's a famous slide I often use during talks—it shows a patient on a bed beside the doctor and both have “thought bubbles” that say, “I hope he brings up the topic of erection problems.” So it's usually on people's minds but rarely discussed. In addition, we only get one or two hours of sex medicine information in medical school. There's more time spent on tropical medicine.

So I was half right in blaming doctor's comfort level - or lack thereof. But only half.

I'm shocked, honestly, that doctors get only an hour or two of formal training in sexual medicine. Then again ... if they know more about malaria than about sexual dysfunction, it explains a whole lot.

• No wonder people are often prescribed anti-depressants without sufficient information on their sexual side effects.
• No wonder prostatectomies are frequently performed without full discussion of what the patient should expect (some men are not informed that they won't ejaculate afterward, for instance!) and without followup aimed at restoring sexual function.
• No wonder doctors often don't screen women for sexual problems after childbirth and menopause, waiting instead for women to bring mention them.

Shame and ignorance make a perfect couple, don't they? Each reinforces the other. It's as if medicine were cousin to the abstinence-only movement, where shame and ignorance are wedded for life in one of those really lousy marriages that makes everyone miserable.

God O Thunder Falls to Earth

Lego version of Thor, the Norse God of Thunder; image by Flickr user Dunechaser, used under a Creative Commons license.

Yesterday, Columbus police arrested a guy who'd been an active member of an Internet discussion board for johns, where he reviewed prostitutes and issued advice on not getting busted. The Columbus Dispatch reports he posted under such charming screen names as "God O Thunder." Among the allegations is that he promoted online the prostitution services of a 17-year-old.

The real name of this Thor wannabe: Robert Eric McFadden.

Previous government position: director of Ohio's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Before that, he was field director for Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good.

Current employer: Ohio's Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.

So (assuming the charges are true), he's managed to come pretty close to maxing out the hypocrisy angle, and he's making good headway on the irony angle, too. Does his current job mean he might be able to oversee his own prison sentence?

It gets even more sordid (again from The Dispatch):

Police said they have seized a computer and two vehicles. One was his wife's car, which detectives said was the setting for photos of the 17-year-old girl that McFadden then posted online.

Eeeew. This man sounds like he's got some serious boundary issues. Not that I think it'd be perfectly kosher if he'd used his own car. Still, using his wife's vehicle speaks to a level of hubris and/or passive aggressiveness that too-neatly matches his pseudo-Norse-god alias.

There's also a nice irony in his being busted through one of these john forums. I'm pretty grossed out even at the idea of such forums. The little I've seen of them looks to me like they're more about reviewing a product than a service. They confirm my sense that too many johns view women's bodies as commodities. They underscore my suspicion that for too many of them, paying for sex is both an exercise in and confirmation of masculine sexual entitlement.

Professional escort Peridot Ash, who obviously knows a heck of a lot more about sex work than I do, seems to concur. She recently had a smart post on the demeaning terms johns use in these "reviews." She concludes that their disparagement of prostitutes' bodies is just an extension of contempt in which they hold all women's "saggy, fat, and ugly" bodies. She writes:

This list says to me: women are THINGS. And we only like certain kinds of these things. And the consumer has a right to prefer these things. Because in business, the market decides. Female bodies are consumable and the market has decided that fat, black, old, or flat-chested ones are not as economically valuable as nubile, white, young, big-boobied ones. BUYER BEWARE.

(Read the whole thing.)

And that's why - even though I'm sorry for McFadden's wife and others who'll have to deal with the fallout, and even though I'm convinced that criminalizing prostitution only multiplies its ills - I can't feel sorry that this particular God O Thunder is apparently hoist on his own lightning bolt.

A Catty Comment on the Weather

So this is how people react to winter where I grew up (and yes, I'm from North Dakota, but the mindset is identical - so laconic that you'd think tempers had frozen solid):

[S]ome Minnesotans took it as just another winter day, even in the state's extreme northwest corner where thermometers bottomed out at 38 degrees below zero at the town of Hallock and the National Weather Service said the wind chill was a shocking 58 below.

"It's really not so bad," Robert Cameron, 75, said as he and several friends gathered for morning coffee at the Cenex service station in Hallock. "We've got clothing that goes with the weather. ... We're ready and rolling, no matter what."

(Source: AP via Columbus Dispatch)

And this is what happens here in Southeastern Ohio: Monday morning, with a scant 3/8 inch of snow on the ground, school is delayed two hours, with my husband - and our one and only car - out of town for the day.

Another 3/8 inch fell this evening, again on bare ground, and I'm already wondering what'll happen tomorrow. Not to mention Friday, when we'll get subzero temps, which also typically crash the school system. Adding to my antsiness, the radio station that posts closings is super-slow to update and the school's website has been down for over a month.

I realize that the root of these hassles is poverty. Well, okay, also an absurdly nervous superintendent. But if the region weren't so poor, roads might get cleared. The school district's website might get fixed. And there'd be less worry about kids being underdressed for the conditions. Those same kids don't get subsidized meals when school is off, nor do their parents typically get paid if they can't make it to work.

Failing that, I'd love at least an improved weather prediction service. Like this one (via Lynn Gazis-Sax at Noli Irritare Leones).



(Translation: Temperatures have been pretty darn brisk in Germany, too - at least for those not snuggling their own personal furry heat source.)

Frustrated as I am with the capriciousness of my school district's snow day policy, I'm not blind to my blessings. A friend of mine, a transplant from Indiana, loaned me her car Monday so I could haul my kids to my office, meet with students, and then schlepp the kids to school by eleven. When I thanked her that evening, she said:

None of us have family here.
And so all of us have family here.

Dispatches from the Universe Where All Men Are Rapists

Oh dear. With friends like this, feminism doesn't need enemies. Thanks to this sharp takedown by Natalia Antonova, I checked out Maggie Hays' thoughts on rape, and I left with the feeling that Ms. Hays is living in a parallel universe to mine - one where men are the enemy and any woman who loves men is a traitor to the cause.

Did you know rape is the same as seduction? Here's what Ms. Hays originally wrote under the headline "Rape can take different forms":

- seduction: when a man persuades a woman to have sex with him, often subtly, through being kind, polite, chivalrous, etc.

- rape of our souls: when we, women, are not allowed to be ourselves because of having to conform to patriarchal feminine gender 'norms'. Whether we do it to "be liked" or not to be criticized, most of the time, we conform.

In response to comments - and after she'd apparently had a chance to think it over again, which is maybe scariest of all - Ms. Hays added:

Seduction is a form of male sexual exploitation of women. And I certainly do not condone when men screw women over, whether in an individual case or culturally. I will need to get back to this somehow, sometime: seduction does not feel like rape at all when a woman has fully accepted to submit to the patriarchy; that does not change the fact that patriarchal masochism is a destroyer of inner female energy. I think I should have called seduction 'a form of male sexual exploitation that intends to destroy female energy', but I will surely go back to that in a future post. ...

Seduction may not be exactly called rape, but it still generally does involve a man fucking a woman over and deceiving her. Damn! I've seen this happen to me and women friends so many times, I'm not crazy: I have heard them complaining about what assholes often men can be... Any form of sexual exploitation (even a subtler one) you don't really want to happen to you or that you feel shitty or depressed about the fact it has happened to you is a form of rape or male sexual exploitation of women somehow.

That's only adding nuance if you distinguish "rape" from "male sexual exploitation," which both the original post and her update gleefully fail to do. By the way, she does not use "seduction" as shorthand for "getting a woman shitty drunk so she can no longer consent to sex or say no." She includes kindness and politeness under its banner, for fuck's sake.

Now, if like me you think conflating all these things trivializes rape almost beyond recognition, you should go read Maggie Hays' original post (so you can see I'm not taking things out of context) and then check out Natalia's wonderful dissection of it. Here are a few of Natalia's juiciest bits:

The thing about seduction is - of course it can end up with you making choices that you may later regret. This goes for men and women. How many of us haven’t been charmed by a person who turned out to be a scumbag or asshole in one way or another? But the key word here is “choice.” I’m sorry, but the very definition of rape implies the absence of choice, one way or another.

Seduction is not coercion. A man who makes you feel like wringing out your panties is not a rapist by definition. Why the hell do I even need to point this out to anyone? ...

It’s true that women are supposed to regret their bad choices much more than men. What Maggie Hays is doing is essentially perpetuating this idiotic double standard, and turning around and calling it feminist.

The other ridiculous assumption being made here is that a woman couldn’t possibly go out of her way to seduce a man.

That’s right. The many times that you and I have done this, girls, we were:

a) Blinded by the Patriarchy’s shiny penis and unable to understand what it was we were doing, b) We were, in fact, raping ourselves, or c) Unknowingly replicating the evil behaviour of evil, dirty males, forever compromising our precious purity. Well, I’m glad all of that has been cleared up!

This is disgusting, because it’s a huge trivialization of rape. It’s like those people you sometimes meet, the people who can’t handle anyone disagreeing with them ever, so they say things like: “Stop talking to me! Stop assaulting me with your disagreeable rhetoric! You’re no better than a rapist!”

(But really, go read the whole thing here.)

I especially appreciate that last point because it reminds me of Elaine Scarry's argument (in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World) that using the word "torture" figuratively minimizes the horror of actual torture. Since I read that book, I've been pretty scrupulous about reserving "torture" for the kind of shit that's gone down in Guantanamo Bay.

If you don't want to follow me on that tangent, though, consider this item from today's Columbus Dispatch, which is just logically impossible in Maggie Hays' parallel universe:

The Scioto County sheriff's office is investigating two separate cases of young boys being sexually assaulted by older boys.

Three juveniles have been charged with rape in the first case, in which a 7-year-old boy was sexually assaulted in a West Portsmouth neighborhood. Detective Jodi Conkel said the assault occurred on Dec. 15 in a vacant building that is being renovated into a church.

Conkel said the boy often hung around with the juveniles, and detectives think the boy could have been assaulted more than once. Two of the suspects are 12 years old and the third is 14.

In a second case reported Wednesday, a 16-year-old Wheelersburg resident is accused of raping three young boys, ages 3, 5 and 10, while they were visiting his home.

The teen has a juvenile record and is being held in a detention center pending a court appearance, Conkel said.

Conkel and Scioto County Prosecutor Mark Kuhn refused to release the names of the juvenile defendants in each case.

This is just horrifying. I have two young sons. One is five, the other nine. At the risk of sounding like someone who's watched too much Faux News: the law would have to protect the perp from me if anyone harmed my boys.

Maggie Hays would have me believe that only women are victims of The Patriarchy. The victimization of boys is simply impossible and incoherent in the framework she presents: All men are assholes, assholes = rapists, and all women are victims. She has no way to even recognize the existence of boys as victims. In comments, she makes clear that she'd been a victim of rape (and I am deeply, sincerely sorry to hear that). Her experience does not, however, give her the right to nullify the equally valid experiences of others.

I'm hoping someone will plug the wormhole between Maggie Hays' universe and mine. Of course, if hers is a female universe, she might call that rape, too. (And yes, I realize that's a juvenile remark, but I'm gonna make it anyway.)

What I Never Knew about Sex and Anti-Depressants

From I Can Has Cheezburger?

By now, I think it's pretty common knowledge that Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, and all the other anti-depressants in that class (SSRIs - selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) can cause serious sexual side effects. They can cause delays in arousal and orgasm. Some people lose the ability to have orgasms altogether. Some men develop erectile dysfunction. Some people lose their libido altogether.

In this week's Boston Globe, journalist Carey Goldberg reports that the scope of SSRI-induced sexual problems is greater than had previously been recognized. Early studies put the number of Prozac users who developed sexual dysfunction at about four percent. Now, Goldberg says, that percentage is being revised dramatically upward:

But more recent studies, in which patients were more likely to be asked about specific sexual side effects and thus more likely to report them, suggest that the ballpark range of those affected by SSRIs is between 30 percent and 50 percent, said researchers including Dr. Richard Balon, a psychiatry professor at Wayne State University who studies the symptoms.

That would translate into millions of affected sex lives among the estimated 1 in 8 American adults who have tried these antidepressants in the past decade or so. Some studies have found the range still higher.

Wow. Fancy that. Doctors hadn't bothered to ask specifically about sexual problems. I guess they were trusting that patients would volunteer the information? And then they just assumed that no news was good news?

This goes way beyond naivete or cluelessness. This is not just another instance of doctors being pathetically repressed when it comes to sex - although it's true that far too many doctors are embarrassed to talk about sex ... and then they wonder why their patients don't raise the issue? This is also more than just the drug companies not wanting to know the complete downside of some of their most profitable products.

This is boneheadedness. Plain and simple. This is the ostrich approach to practicing medicine. Just prescribe a powerful drug, then stick your head in the sand of comfortable ignorance and assume all is well.

However, the wide prevalence of SSRI-induced sexual dysfunction is not even the worst news. The most disturbing part of Goldberg's article is this:

[A] handful of recent medical and psychological journal articles document a small number of cases in which sexual problems remain even after a patient goes off the drugs.

This is something I'd never heard. And I'm one of the folks who's been paying attention. I know plenty of people who've taken SSRIs for short periods or long-term, and I'm willing to bet very few of them realize that sexual side effects may be permanent.

Goldberg reports that the scope of this problem is unknown because - surprise, surprise! - it hasn't been studied.

Based on recent case reports of persistent effects, an article earlier this year in the Journal of Sexual Medicine said patients should "be told that in an unknown number of cases, the side effects may not resolve with cessation of the medication." ...

In the past two or three years, scattered published case reports from around the country have described patients whose sexual symptoms failed to resolve after going off antidepressants.

Dr. Robert P. Kauffman, chair of obstetrics and gynecology at Texas Tech University, has published accounts of three cases in his practice. "It's probably a small number of men and women," he said, "but I really think it deserves investigation."

Psychologist Audrey Bahrick at the University of Iowa said she became concerned when she observed that several clients whom she followed went off SSRIs and "very, very credibly to me, they did not recover" sexually.

Among their symptoms, she said, were "telltale signs" of SSRI-caused dysfunction, unrelated to the known effects of mental illness. They had "pleasureless orgasms," and "genital anesthesia," in which sex feels no more intense than a handshake. She became particularly concerned about adolescents put on antidepressants, whose sexuality might never have a chance to develop normally.

Bahrick began to explore. She found that post-SSRI sexual effects had never been systematically studied, but she came across a Yahoo group called SSRIsex, a support group for people with "persistent SSRI sexual side effects" that now has more than 1,800 members.

I'm not suggesting that this figure of 1800 sufferers tells us anything about the true scope of the problem. The thing is, no one knows how big the problem may be. And the ostrich approach isn't miraculously going to shed any light on it.

Now, I'm not trying to demonize anti-depressants. I've seen them drag people out of despair. At the risk of sounding overdramatic, I'll even say I've seen them save lives.

I'm just saying we need to have a grip on the full range of these medications' possible side effects and their probability, so that patients can decide, in consultation with their doctors, when the risks just might outweigh the benefits.

And if that's not happening - if patients are tinkering with their brain chemistry without fully informed consent - well, that's just depressing.

Our Most Naked Selves

Gustav Klimt's Danae, posted on Flickr by freeparking, used under a Creative Commons license.

A couple of weeks ago, Cosmo got piled on - deservedly, in my opinion - for a headline on the cover of its December issue that reads "Your Orgasm Face: What He's Thinking When He Sees It." I haven't read the article. I'm loathe to buy the magazine. I was even more loathe to read it while waiting to pay at the supermarket while my little Bear (age 9) reads over my shoulder. So I'll rely on the précis of it from a long discussion thread on it at Open Salon, where someone who actually had seen the article weighed in and noted that it was relatively benign, apparently intended to reassure women that men like their O-face.

That still didn't make the cover okay! Isn't it just typical of Cosmo that whatever the article's content, its headline fans women's insecurities?! I mean, we all know that the lure to buy the magazine isn't desire; it's fear of what our partner might be thinking. And if the article is eventually reassuring, well, then it's responding to a need that the cover headline helped create in the first place.

On one level, of course, Cosmo is tapping into the way women's pleasure is viewed more generally in our culture: as something to be performed for a male partner's benefit and not just enjoyed authentically in its own right. This is only the latest salvo in the objectification and commodification of women's bodies and pleasure. It totally deserves the snark it got from commenter CrossWord at Jezebel:

Please. He is waaaay to busy being grossed out by your pubic hair/shape of your labia to notice your O face.

Heh. If he's got a kebab fixation, he doesn't deserve to notice anything else.

All snark aside, I also think there's a vulnerability in orgasm that's not entirely reducible to social conditioning. And this, I think, is far more interesting than Cosmo's foolishness. Now that I've got that mini-rant out of my system, I'd like to ponder this vulnerability from a more philosophical angle.

For me, at least, there's an element of trust and intimacy in letting a man see me at that moment, naked in every sense, which I hope would be appreciated, enjoyed, and never treated casually or with contempt. Thankfully, I've never been teased about it; I've never felt judged. Appallingly, several of the commenters at Jezebel mention exes who actually did give them a hard time. The right retort to that comes from their fellow Jezzie commenter Swashbuckling: "If a guy can't deal with an orgasm face, he's well within his rights to give up sex." Indeed.

However, in my chequered past I have experienced partners who did a quick disappearing act, which felt too much like disrespect for my vulnerability (and perhaps for their own). In one case, the guy's retreat was literal and almost instantaneous, as he leapt off of me, into his trousers, and out the door. Other times, the guy conspicuously avoided me once everyone's clothes were on again. Either way, I found it hurtful and bewildering. Note that these were situations involving friends where I wasn't pressing for any deeper involvement. I assume that their reactions had more to do with a general fear of intimacy or unresolved inner conflicts about their own boundaries, but that's all conjecture since, after all, they didn't stick around to explain.

Nonetheless. Even in a supposedly low-commitment situation, when I allowed myself to be that naked and my partner's reaction was a rapid retreat, it felt like a breach of trust. And I think this has to do with the vulnerability of having been seen with every defense down, exposed in every way.

Now, I suppose one solution would be to avoid such vulnerability. The only problem? I think that really wonderful sex, whether with a long-term partner or just a partner-for-tonight, requires precisely this vulnerability. In my experience, anyway, there's a deep need to be really seen, for a partner to look at my exposed self, with all its messy desires and pleasures, and to embrace it anyway. No, more: to be embraced because of that wild nakedness.

If this isn't just my personal quirk (and if I really thought it was, I'd shut up), it sheds some light on why "casual sex" is so often not really casual and even less often meaningless. I also imagine that this is one reason why so many people are sexually unsatisfied even where the mechanics of libido, arousal, and orgasm work just fine. It might help explain why some people seek out affairs or prostitutes. (For me, it suggests why I find commercialized sex so unappealing, but I know it's true that many men seek more from a prostitute than just physical release.) It illuminates why solo sex apparently strikes so many of us as a wholly inadequate substitute for coupling with another person.

And so sex is about much more than just pleasure and orgasms, or even love and affection; it's about the need to be seen and embraced in our orgasmic vulnerability.

I don't for a minute believe that long-term relationships hold a monopoly on this sort of connection. It can happen in the shortest-term liaison as long as there's mutual regard and a willingness to take emotional risks. It can occur between friends with benefits as long as the friendship is real and not a mere fiction. It can be absent in long-term relationships, even in otherwise loving and intimate ones. In fact, familiarity may tempt us to think we know our partners fully, to stop seeing them afresh, and to carry this jadedness over into routinized sex that feels "safe" in all the wrong ways.

When this sort of vulnerability is nurtured over the long run, its rewards can be greater, I think. But this requires a willingness to take risks.

Whatever the relationship context, people may tend to default to emotional pseudo-safety in sex because the need for shared, perceived, embraced vulnerability collides with another need: to protect ourselves against possible rejection. Because what if your partner sees you in your naked neediness and is repulsed - or just alarmed at the too-muchness of it? What if your partner beats a quick retreat (see above)?

This pushme-pullyou of vulnerability and fear isn't only about gender, though it has some gendered dimensions. In the Western world, throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, women were held to be more carnal than men: voracious, sexually aggressive, and just plain out of control. Kochanie recently suggested that

By attributing such power and malice to women, men became, by default, the submissive class. A resentfully submissive class.

This puts a new spin on why men put (respectable) women on a pedestal in the nineteenth century - and why, despite its ongoing costs to all of us, so many men persist in claiming women are the less lusty sex. This historical legacy also suggests that men may put more at risk in letting themselves be vulnerable, sexually, because vulnerability can edge into loss of power and privilege, if not necessarily submission per se.

In the wake of this history, men can too easily conflate vulnerability with weakness. They are not the same.

What's more, the blurring of self/other boundaries that can happen when you risk sexual vulnerability challenges the very notion of the autonomous self. Men have more invested than women in the illusion of autonomy and self-containment. The autonomous and controlled self has been fundamental to Western masculinity. It was essential to John Locke's articulation of the modern political subject. Sigmund Freud saw it as the result of successfully navigating the phallic phase. Jean-Paul Sartre asserted the superiority of transcendence over immanence. All of these subjects were deeply gendered as masculine. And while Locke would probably be appalled, you could trace the association of masculinity with self-contained autonomy all the way up to the emergence of the "pick-up artist" and the Seduction Community, which as far as I can tell is largely about using sex to avoid real sexual vulnerability.

However. Vulnerability is scary for everyone, not just for men. I recently mentioned bell hooks' take on romance as consisting of people putting a false front, trying to impress their partner (and maybe trying to fool their very own selves, too). That false front doesn't just get in the way of love, as hooks notes. It also prevents us from letting our vulnerability show, sexually and otherwise. I tend to think that the people who maintain the facade most ferociously are also precisely those who may feel the most vulnerable under the surface - and who might gain the most from dropping the mask.

And this false front interferes mightily with good sex. This is partly because forgetting yourself is no small part of good sex, which is why anything that makes us judge our performance through external eyes is so pernicious. (Yep, I'm talkin' to you again, Cosmo!) It's also because vulnerability itself can be hot.

In the end, though, the imperative to drop the mask is about way more than just heat and friction. It's about an existential need to convince ourselves, if only for one peak moment, that we're not truly alone. That we're not ultimately disconnected and atomized. That we don't have to be self-contained.

If the existentialists exalted the transcendent, autonomous, self-directed man, they also recognized the anxiety (the nausea, as Sartre would have it) that comes with seeing ourselves as wholly alone and wholly free. If Sartre were around to comment on this post, he'd likely see me as either naively romantic or stupidly mired in immanence.

But Simone de Beauvoir (who I'm pretty sure would hate that Cosmo cover) might have thought I'm on the right track. Here's her final word in The Second Sex on sexuality in a world where women and men would be equals (my emphasis):

It is nonsense to assert that revelry, vice, ecstasy, passion, would become impossible if man and woman were equal in concrete matters; the contradictions that put the flesh in opposition to the spirit, the instant to time, the swoon of immanence to the challenge of transcendence, the absolute of pleasure to the nothingness of forgetting, will never be resolved; in sexuality will always be materialised the tension, the anguish, the joy, the frustration, and the triumph of existence. To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue none the less to exist for him also: mutually recognising each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other.

It's this mutual recognition that I think we yearn for - and that I believe we deeply, deeply need, women and men alike. It's neither utopian nor romanticized. It can only happen, though, when we drop the mask and pretense and allow ourselves to be seen fully, nakedly, as equals transfigured by desire.