Tue, 2007-07-31 09:44

Ann Friedman of Feministing has a post up about an issue that’s very near and dear to my heart: young, often single people who seek vasectomies or tubal ligations in their late teens and early twenties.

For once, I’m not talking about the anti-choice movement. American Sexuality magazine has a piece describing one young woman’s travails in finding a doctor willing to perform a tubal ligation on her. She’s in her early 20s, and absolutely, positively, 100% certain she never wants children. Never.

“[Planned Parenthood of Boston**] said it was much too permanent and weren’t going to give it to me, plus my insurance wasn’t going to cover it,” recalls Green. What’s more, according to Green, “It was all and only about my age.” She was twenty-two at the time.

Green’s experience is not that unusual. Though no actual laws have ever been put into place, most OBGYNs refuse to provide women under thirty with permanent forms of contraception. Dr. Daniel Wiener, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at McGill University in Montreal, is one such doctor.

With thirty plus years of medical practice, Dr. Wiener finds no good reason for putting otherwise healthy patients in surgery: for one, there are anesthetic risks involved. Plus, tubal ligations are considered elective surgeries (assuming the patient can use other, less invasive forms of birth control). More pressing, still, is the fear that a patient may one day change her mind. Sound familiar?

Read Friedman’s words in context here.

Went there and did that. At age 21, back in the 1970s, it took a little while to find a clinic willing to give me a vasectomy and even at the women’s clinic that finally said yes it took a little talking to before they were sure I was making an informed decision.

Fast forward 20-some years and, as I had prepared for at 21, I met someone and several years after marriage we decided we might like to have children after all. And so, again as I decided back at age 21, we explored a vasectomy reversal with adoption (which costs about the same) as a backup. The reversal worked like a charm and, days after our second child was born, another 15-minute stitchless vasectomy undid all the previous surgeon’s hard work.

But if the reversal hadn’t worked adoption would have been acceptable to both of us.

Bottom line: if there was no such thing as medical progress in vasectomy or tubal-ligation reversal and egg extraction and IVF, if there was no such thing as adoption, if there was such a thing as 100% cold evidence that virtually all who with their eyes open are sterilized at an early age regretted it (I don’t know any who have though I’m sure some do somewhere) then yeah, maybe it would be ok to decline to perform voluntary sterilization on young people. But I just don’t think that’s the case.

Oh yeah, one more thing. The tubal ligation sought in the article Ann references really is a far more intrusive and therefore risky procedure than men’s vasectomies. But that’s not the standard of comparison. Instead how does it compare to, say, breast or cheek implants, nose jobs, labiaplasty, and other voluntary procedures cheerfully undertaken by surgeons.

I really don’t know, even relatively minor abdominal surgery really could be that much riskier than “superficial” plastic surgery. But if not then these guys who decline to perform the surgery really don’t have a leg to stand on.

Update: Friedman adds a point raised by Radical Doula that, of course, poor, uneducated, disabled women and women of color, and southern Appalachian rural whites have historically had a harder time avoiding forcible sterilization than obtaining them voluntarily. For instance:

[Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendal] Holmes wrote for the majority, which upheld the constitutionality of a Virginia law proposing involuntary sterilization of persons believed to be mentally retarded—the “feebleminded,” in the jargon of the day. “The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes,” Holmes wrote in Buck v. Bell (1927). “Three generations of imbeciles,” Holmes volunteered, “is enough.”

Randomly Google’d quote located here.

Yikes! I can’t believe I forgot about that case! The cool thing about being pro choice, by the way, and something the ostinsible “pro-life” abortion opponents just don’t get, is that reproductive freedom means reproductive freedom! Not something to be forced on anyone, neither to be denied by cupidity either.

Update: Amanda Marcotte very nicely reinforces the point about choice and autonomy.

Mon, 2007-07-30 10:41

When I was in 10th grade my English teacher went into the hospital with some kind of abdominal complain and came back out with a full hysterectomy. Which didn’t sit very well with her, her being newly married, still childless, and still only in her mid 20s. She’d let it pop up in conversation every now and then and each time she’d cut it off with a remark along the lines of “well, I guess I’m supposed to feel lucky I’m alive.”

Hmm. Another interesting article from ScienceDaily.com, this time about sexual problems for long-term cancer survivors from the University of Chicago Medical Center. (I used to read ScienceDaily for work, well, daily. I’ll probably start dialing it back into my regular rotation again.)

“Discussions with a physician about sexual consequences of cancer and cancer treatment matter a great deal to many of these patients,” Lindau said. “But survivors report that such conversations infrequently occurred. If such discussions are not happening in this context,” she said, “we suspect that they are even less likely to occur when the connections between disease or treatment and sexual function are less apparent.”

“It seems unbelievable to me,” added one cancer survivor who responded to the survey, “that a surgeon would remove one’s sexual organs and never talk about sex.”

Read the whole article here.

Two points worth mentioning about the study. First, it focused on 20 year survivors and a lot (a lot!) has changed since then when it comes not only to quality of sex but general quality of life issues in medicine. The attitude back then was much more “you’re lucky to be alive, quit complaining.” Or at least a lot less than there used to be.

Second point being that only women survivors were studied but I’m pretty sure the findings and recommendations would benefit all survivors.

The first study to look at sexual function in very long-term female survivors of genital-tract cancer found that these women were pleased with the quality of their cancer care but less satisfied with the emotional support and information they received about dealing with the effects of the disease and treatment on sexuality.

While 74 percent of the women in this study believed that physicians should initiate a discussion about sex, 62 percent of women who had undergone “severe compromise to their reproductive and sexual organs” said their physicians had never brought up the effects of their treatment on sexuality.

Women who had not had such a discussion were three times as likely to suffer from multiple sexual problems at the time of the survey, the researchers report in the August 2007 issue of Gynecologic Oncology.

And of course a disconnect between treatment of non-sexual vs. sexual side effects isn’t limited to cancer survivors. Any number of other medical procedures, and all kinds of prescription drugs also affect sexuality in all kinds of ways from instant menopause after hysterectomy to instant impotence from major nerves severed during prostate surgery to a simple inability to reach orgasm on some antidepressants or loss of interest on others. Oh yeah, and some people wind up with frequent, spontaneous, uncontrollable-and-therefore-unwelcome orgasms.

I know some of my readers are in school to become sex therapists. If I was looking into careers in sexology, medicine, and/or sex and relationship counseling I think I might do worse than specialize in the study and treatment of medically-induced problems with sex. Unless I’m terribly behind the times I think it would be a wonderful area to go into where I think you could help a lot of people.

Mon, 2007-07-30 09:54

Follow-up on yesterday’s post about circumcision and HIV: the studies that seemed to demonstrate that at least for African men who were circumcised for the study the rate at which they contracted HIV went down and the rate at which they passed it to their partners appeared to go down even further.

Yesterday I mentioned Kelly Cogswell of A dyke abroad’s bitter point that “Forgotten also are all the circumcised men in the States that dropped dead before ARV’s came on the scene. A foreskin more or less didn’t help them. Or don’t faggots count when you’re counting heads?” And in comments to that post A of A traveling spouse, who’s no slouch when it comes to research, said she couldn’t find an explanation for why American gay men clearly weren’t protected by circumcision.

Quick digression: years before I started writing about sex I participated in the old Usenet pregnancy and parenting forums. While there were lots of things to talk about there were two that, no matter what just. Wouldn’t. Go. Away: breast vs. bottle and circumcision vs no circumcision. My conclusion after listening to way too much of that debate was that we’d leave it up to our (then newborn) son to decide, with the bonus observation that at least in our neighborhood back then tattoo and piercing parlors were opening faster than coffee shops and that I was sure that by the time he was of age piercers would be offering not just plain but fancy circumcisions.

Anyway, thinking about that got me thinking about body piercing in general, and that reminded me of a couple of bloggers who talked about the recovery period for their cock piercings and ampallings (I think I spelled that right.) Anyway the short answer was that recovery for piercings takes months. And months.

Months during which I’m guessing that even with a condom to keep everything from pulling and tugging you’re not going to want to be doing anything where friction’s going to be involved. Like, say, sex.

And so my next questions about the study (and don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty sure the researchers would taken these things into account) are:

- Just how long does it take for an adult man to recover from a circumcision anyway? Enough to be interested in sex again, for instance. Especially in the kind of dry, high-abrasion style intercourse allegedly (and I mean that, allegedly) too-often favored by tradition in sub-Saharan Africa. For instance.

- How long were the studies that led to the circumcision recommendations? (Remember that at least one such study was cut short because the success rate for circumcised men was so high.)

Anyway, the point being that the men in the study were all freshly circumcised as part of the program, and you’d want to make sure the results weren’t skewed by, say, reluctant celibacy while the wounds and/or secondary infections related to the wound heal. If, and I’m only saying if, that was a factor, and I’m not saying it was, then the long-term benefits might not be so high and, especially, it would account for the perceived lack of protection for men (American gay men, North African straight men) who are traditionally circumcised in infancy.

The old punchline has it that we know almost all circumcised infants are unable to walk for up to a year after the procedure. But how long for an adult?

Sun, 2007-07-29 20:57

I gotta say I just loved, loved, loved Jim Carney’s Once. Loved it. Cried through half of it, felt like a doofus for it, didn’t give a shit.

It’s just a perfect reconceptualization of the whole idea of what a movie musical ought to be — just barely enough plot to hold the songs together… except that instead of bursting into song for no good reason at all, stopping everything, and hoofing it around in antic costumery… the characters are working and/or aspiring musicians who just show each other what music they’re working with in their respective lives.

And what’s just so cool is that while they’re attracted to each other, and on top of that they mean something to each other, other parts of their respective lives have their own pull and so more than everything else they have the music the put together first over lunch breaks in music store pianos, or late night drinking and singing sessions with friends (my partner says this is more common in Ireland, where the movies’ set, than in the states), and then finally in an all-night recording studio session with other Dublin street musicians recruited for the occasion. And then…

Not to change the subject (or give anything away) but the actors playing the lead man and woman (their characters are never named) wrote and performed nearly all the songs.

Sigh.

Something else that’s so cool is that while they lyrics of the songs don’t carry the plot — they’re just songs two very, very good aspiring musicians might write — the way they’re played, filmed, acted in character carry the show.

Sigh.

I just loved that movie. If more musicals were like that I’d really like musicals a lot more. See it if you get the chance.

Sat, 2007-07-28 14:08

So I was just reading a nifty article in ScienceDaily that says the surface of people’s tonsils, with their high levels of immune cells, may facilitate oral HIV/AIDS infection.

Last winter there was a big brouhaha over a finding that male circumcision substantially reduces HIV transmission. Which is great for those who are too stupid, irresponsible, uneducatable, or prohibited by social or moral “reasons” to use condoms, but otherwise highly inferior compared to, well, using condoms.

And putting two and two together I was wondering if we’d start to hear calls for pre-emptive tonsillectomies from the (largely judeo/christian/islamic, homophobic, and/or doesn’t reduce my enjoyment so go for it) groups that were endorsing compulsory circumcision earlier this year. (Note: many of the sources cited point to, but don’t necessarily support, the represented positions.)

But since it’s been a while I needed to go find a link. And while I was Googling around I ran across a remarkable new post from Kelly Jean Cogswell of A dyke abroad (It also appeared as an editorial in Gay City News)

Cut It Off – And Stop AIDS
By: KELLY JEAN COGSWELL
07/26/2007

Women are dying of AIDS while some researcher bends over his penis, smiles at it fondly, and imagines what little alteration would make it an all-purpose tool safe to use again.

He’s not the only one with his dick in his hand. Each new report on male circumcision pumps up the protection believed to be provided by that little snip, snip so that pretty soon I expect to see the numbers not only show the procedure will stop HIV dead, but also reduce global warming, and maybe slow the Iraq war, too.

...

In the real world of South Africa, there’s very little difference in HIV rates between communities that snip, and those that don’t. In Northern Zambia, the difference only lasts until the young men move to the big city with its bright lights and Manolo Blahniks, metaphorically speaking.

Forgotten also are all the circumcised men in the States that dropped dead before ARV’s came on the scene. A foreskin more or less didn’t help them. Or don’t faggots count when you’re counting heads?

...

Women aren’t factored in at all except as a vector of disease. While millions of dollars are already pouring into circumcision programs even if only men have foreskins to whack off, women are struggling for equivalent funds for female condoms and microbicides – never mind programs with as vague a goal as girl power, the real key to HIV prevention.

It’s young women getting AIDS these days. UNAIDS says we already make up 60 percent of the 15 to 24-year-olds living with HIV/AIDS.

In sub-Saharan Africa girls of that age are three times more likely to be positive than their male peers. In the Caribbean it’s 2.5 times. Why? Because in most places we still don’t own our own bodies. Men think we’re dirt and they treat us that way.

...

It’s time for AIDS activists and researchers to shift their attention away from the penis and see the connection between hate and HIV and dead women. Only power will save us, not cuts, not even condoms unless we can make men wear them.

And if somebody still insists on tinkering around with men’s dicks to stop spreading HIV, maybe they should do a more comprehensive procedure, call it the Bobbitt and cut the whole thing off.

Read these excerpts in context here.

At last! Someone who can’t possibly be accused of mere anti-circumcisionism who’s nevertheless unimpressed by the yet-another-latest-and-greatest-bestest reason why we always have and always will need to circumcise men…

...but not, evidently, tonsillectomise them.

Whatever. Again, I’m not particularly fanatic about circumcision one way or another (for instance Circumcision may not impact sexual sensation, also from ScienceDaily, sounds perfectly plausible.)

It’s just that if it were any other body part but the foreskin, for far less than half the benefit of condom use, the conversation just wouldn’t be happening. Or certainly not happening under the same terms.

Fri, 2007-07-27 20:27

So, here in the Monica Goodling-influenced legal era it wouldn’t surprise anyone to hear an attorney claim that since Bill Gates has so much money his client’s trial for embezzling $1,000,000 should be held in small claims court. Nor in the Fred Fielding / Harriet Meirs-influenced era would be par for the course for an attorney asked for armed robbery charges be dropped because his client’s victim was a communist who doesn’t believe in private property. And especially in the Alberto Gonzales-inspired legal era, where the underside of one’s shoe in a dog park has more honor, integrity, dignity, and honesty than the nation’s top lawyer, it shouldn’t surprise us that an attorney would argue his client’s multiple-rape-at-gunpoint sentences should be reduced to simple armed-robbery status because since his victims were all prostitutes his only offense was failure to pay.

What should and does surprise us is that a judge, who really ought to know better, would buy such a whopper.

We now learn that last June a Washington State appeals court expressed similar surprise and told an offending judge that upholding the law is more important than upholding his personal prejudices and lock a defendant up for 30 years instead of 9 after he was found guilty of raping two prostitutes who had voluntarily gotten in his truck.

That’s good news for folks who recognize that even subsistence prostitutes are full-fledged human beings who deserve justice no less than anyone else. The good news, here in the land of serial murderers who are inordinately drawn to prostitutes, is that all four known victims are alive to see justice done.

The details:

Lighter prison term in rapes of prostitutes is thrown out
Seattle trial judge’s reasoning ‘clearly erroneous,’ court says

A man convicted of raping two women at gunpoint shouldn’t have gotten a lighter prison sentence simply because the victims were apparently working as prostitutes, the state Court of Appeals ruled this week.

Calling the Seattle trial judge’s reasoning “clearly erroneous,” the court threw out Jeffrey McKee’s 19-year prison term, clearing the way for the Kent man to be resentenced to up to 30 years behind bars.

...

King County prosecutors were also pleased with the court’s ruling and the longer prison sentence it will presumably bring for the convicted rapist.

“Everyone deserves the protection of our laws,” Deputy Prosecutor Andrea Vitalich said. “The failure to protect the most vulnerable in our society is a failure to protect everyone.”

...

But as sentenced McKee, according to the appeals court ruling, [original trial judge Douglas] McBroom said the sex acts were against the victims’ will only because they didn’t get paid, and prostitutes were “a far cry from the innocent rape victim” that lawmakers envisioned when deciding the severe penalties for the crime.

...

The three-judge panel also rejected many of McKee’s claims, including an assertion that his crimes were more like robbery than rape, and that prostitutes are not as traumatized by rape as other victims.

Source: Seattle Post-Intelligencer

And here are the relevant sections of the appeals court decision (emphasis mine)

The record does not support the trial court’s reasons for imposing the exceptional sentence. The State does not dispute the trial court’s finding that Korbut and Ray willingly entered McKee’s truck for the purpose of engaging in prostitution or some other illegal activity. However, contrary to McKee’s argument, these facts do not provide support for the trial court’s finding that “the presumptive sentence for Jeffrey McKee is far in excess of the top of the range for crimes that are even more brutal than the crimes committed by McKee.” This is not a factual finding, but rather a reflection of the trial court’s [meaning the trial court judge’s —fl] personal opinion and subjective belief that raping a prostitute is not as brutal as raping a woman who “did not willingly start off ready to perform a sex act.” Thus, it is clearly erroneous.

We also reject McKee’s claim that the trial court’s reasons for imposing the [greatly reduced —fl] sentence were substantial and compelling because his crimes were more like robbery than rape, and because prostitutes are not as traumatized by rape as other victims are. The court’s conclusions of law stated that “[o]peration of the multiple offense policy of RCW 9.94A.589 . . . results in a presumptive sentence that is clearly excessive” because they “were initiators and/or willing participants in the illicit circumstances, or precursor offenses, leading to their rapes.”

At sentencing, the court explained that the sexual relations were against the victims’ will only in the sense that they did not get paid, and that prostitutes are a “far cry from the innocent rape victim” the Legislature envisioned when enacting the very severe penalties for this crime. We disagree.

The fact that Korbut and Ray may have been willing to have sex for money does not trivialize the trauma of being raped at gunpoint orally, vaginally, and anally. Such crimes are extremely egregious no matter whom they are perpetrated against. Korbut and Ray were in no sense willing participants in these acts. Accordingly, we hold that the trial court abused its discretion in imposing a sentence that was too lenient under the circumstances, and we remand to the trial court for resentencing within the standard range.

Sourc e: www.courts.wa.gov

Always nice, and a bit of a surprise (even though it shouldn’t have to be) any time American-style justice and the rule of law pops up in today’s legal system.

Thu, 2007-07-26 07:54

As you’ve probably noticed I’ve got a bit of a bias against evolutionary theory as applied to human beings. It’s not that I don’t believe human behavior isn’t subject to evolutionary pressure, I’m just highly skeptical when someone says something like “well, evolutionary theory says this might happen, this seems to happen, therefore evolution’s responsible.” Particularly when the behavior has to be both highly sophisticated and highly gender-specific. Like I say, I’m biased because I happen to believe the signal to bias ration of evolutionary psychology is terribly high.

As luck would have it, a different blogger from (Oxfords?) Overcoming Bias, Norman Siebrasse, invokes evolutionary psychology in a discussion of efforts to reduce high-risk behavior.

A recent Australian campaign against reckless driving, aimed specifically at young men…

The traditional campaign, emphasizing the risks involved with speeding by showing graphic road crashes, was ineffective. This is as would be predicted by evolutionary psychology. Young males of many species engage in risky behaviour in order to signal their extraordinary prowess to women. A man who succeeds, mates, and one who fails might as well be dead anyway, in evolutionary terms. The traditional campaign assumes that young male speeders don’t realize their behaviour is risky, when in fact they speed because it’s risky…

The new campaign encourages women to signal a small penis by wiggling their pinky at speeders, a sign which apparently signals a small penis. This hits the mark, in evolutionary terms…

Read an un-excerpted version here.

Ok, so here’s one of those things that bugs me about the whole sociobiology/evolutionary-psychology mindset. Notice how it’s always, and generally only, male animals that engage in risky behavior? Notice also that in those scenarios female animals merely stand by, ready to pick and choose the winners but never subject to risk-related and/or prowess-related selective pressure.

Yup, yup, in humans as in, say, elk or antelope, men compete by taking risks and women just sit on lawn chairs and go along with which ever man wins. Yup, yup, and if there are multiple women sitting about then the winning man just impregnates all of them and Bob’s everybody’s uncle. Yup, yup. And men, being so dumb women had to evolve big boobs to remind him of buttocks so they’d remember to mate face to face and all, are completely indiscriminate when it comes to partner selection.

Oh wait! That’s why women never worry about their looks, never invest in makeup and clothing, never get plastic surgery, never diet or stress out about their weight, never read the “Hot Issue” of Cosmopolitan for ways to drive “him” mad in bed, never get their pubic hair yanked out by relative strangers from Brazil, never pretend to make out with friends but only in front of…

...often allegedly passive contemporary young men!

DId I already say “oh wait?” Hmm. Instead I’ll just say that maybe, just maybe women aren’t the passive receptacles posited by the “no-sex” class paradigm and the evolutionary theory that paradigm biases. Maybe instead, and unlike a surprising number of the (domesticatable or easily hunted) animals humans are most likely to come in contact with, women are no less subject to pressure to actively take risks as men — somewhat different risks, perhaps, though perhaps also with equal risks of personal extinction (genetic or otherwise.)

Ok, look. I could see meeting the Evolutionary Psychology people half way. I might grudgingly admit that some human sexual behavior has selective pressure backing it up… if just once they tried to bypass the enormous biases imposed by our dominant paradigms and admit that if there’s selective pressure to distinguish one’s self from one’s peers both genders can end up in fairly fierce competition for sexual partners.

Wed, 2007-07-25 23:00

So something I’ve been meaning to do for more than the two-and-a-half years I’ve been blogging (I used the nom de plume ‘figleaf’ in a previous discussion forum) was to actually grab some fig leaves from the many fig trees that were brought to the Northwest by Mediterranean immigrants generations ago.

I’m not sure what too so long but… I guess no time like the present.

It’s pretty obvious why ancient aphorists, and Victorian Bowdlerizer chose fig leaves to cover the genitals. But, by traditions both ancient and Victorian I’m entirely, decently half-nekkid.

Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)

Wed, 2007-07-25 21:03

Earlier this month economist Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution highlighted this passage by Robin Hanson from Overcoming Bias.

Fiction is not only not real, it differs from reality in systematic ways. For example, characters in novels, plays, TV tend to be more attractive, articulate, expressive, and principled than real people. Now we also like to tell stories about ourselves and the events we see around us. These stories are more constrained by the facts we see than fictional stories, but I suspect they suffer from similar biases…

For example, it seems to me that teen romp movies tend to portray parents and teachers as inept, clueless, sexually repressed, but ready to help when help is wanted. If so, teens should realize that parents and teachers probably know more, are more sexually satisfied, but less available to help, than teens realize. We should be able to find hundreds of other applications, such as using the standard biases of science fiction.

Hanson said it here.

I think fictional bias plays an astonishing role in human sexuality, not least because… well… when it comes to sex the ratio of what we actually do to that which is related to us is extraordinarily high.

And I’m not just talking about young people and porn, though fiction bias in porn surely affects everyone to some extent. When it comes to young people, for instance, consider the fiction bias in J.K. Rowling’s fiction — over the course of the last three or four books adolescent characters spend upwards of months of completely unsupervised time together with no breath at all of sexuality. (What breaths there are, as with the Harry and Cho characters, take place almost entirely in places where if supervision isn’t present than discovery is highly likely.) Consider further that whereas at age 62 the very real Professor Schwartz continues to discover (stirring!) new ways to enjoy a rich and varied sex life, we are left with no other impression of the fictional Professor McGonagal than a dry, dour, and thoroughly sexless grouch. (Note: Maggie Smith, who plays McGonagal in the movie, was only two years older than Schwartz in the first Potter movie.)

Other rather critical artifacts of fiction bias? Oh, how about that women are naturally chaste while men are naturally horny? That comes right out of nursery fiction as in boys are made of snakes and snails and puppydog tails while girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice and “some day my prince will come.”

And how about “big black men are hung like horses,” that prostitutes are inevitably either trafficked thralls or high-income private listers moonlighting while they complete their economics PhDs, that teenage boys will fuck anything that holds still, or that girls don’t want to have fun… unless they’re drunk as lords on spring break in Cancun.

What other gender and sex biases are instilled in us far more by fiction then by experience?

Wed, 2007-07-25 14:12

When I was a very, very young boy my best friend’s family owned and lived in a little boarding house, a holdover from the Depression, catering to those for whom those years were still very real. And sometimes while visiting I’d read the tabloids that were left behind when guests moved on — sensational stories and “common sense” advice for those who’d never finished high-school (back when there was still no real shame in that.) And in the back were advertisements for the most unreasonable products for the insecure but extremely proud poor.

The ads that, better than 40 years later, I vividly remember from issue after issue promised “fake-proof social-security cards: never have your social security card faked again.” Even as an early elementary school student I recognized the inherent absurdity of somehow “fake-proofing” a social security card. For one thing back then there were no photocopiers, or anything like them. For another, your official, government-issued social security card was a simple printed card with your name and social security number hand typed on it! The point being, though, that in the advertisements, and often in the articles themselves, the tabloids of the boarders were designed to increase the financial insecurity of it’s readers without alleviating it, to distract them from ways they might have genuinely improved their security, and indeed to profit from maintaining or increasing that insecurity. Which brings me to…

So there next to the checkout stand in the grocery store this afternoon sits a giant pink copy of Cosmopolitan magazine (August, 2007 issue.)

Cover stories, I kid you not:

- Erotic Sex. – 50 Ways to be Closer to Him – Guys Uncensored – How to Feel More Pleasure Every Day – 6 Skills Sex Goddesses Master – What to Do When Sex Hurts – Weird Sex Questions We’re Asked

(Also, 16 sexy new hairstyles, “True Crime Story: Her Boyfriend Killed Her for Breaking Up With Him” and “Julia Stiles, The Least Bitchy Girl In Hollywood.”)

So…

About that Erotic Sex article. The inside title is a bit more expansive: “Make Sex More Erotic: Amp up the electricity in the bedroom by pushing the boundaries. (Don’t worry, you’ll want to do this stuff.) Sex therapist Ian Kerner, PhD, explains.”

The advice itself seems perfectly fine if also marvelously bland: Get him to think dirty; be creative; treat him to some sexy sights (ok, this is problematic — they just mean new lingerie); catch him off guard; tempt and tease (ok, problem with the terminology but, again, not the actual recommended procedure); be a voyeur (best advice yet, actually — have him show you how he touches himself); switch up the venues (an odd one, the author calls this “shakey-bridge” sex but seems to mean outside the bedroom as in the shower or living room.)

Sigh…

Look, whereas there’s nothing quite as rated for violence against common sense as the woefully false bravado in Details Magazine “demanding anal” article the magazines are clearly birds of a feather, aimed at demographics identical in all respects but gender…

... and aimed at keeping them right there!

C’mon! Perfectly ordinary, not-even-French-Vanilla suggestions promising sex that’s actually erotic, with the extra anxiety-inducing claus no to worry because you’ll want to do that stuff.

Actually on further consideration it really isn’t that far from the Details article is it? Yeah, it might be lies their readers want to hear, but they’re still selling lies — fake-proof orgasms, perhaps, but not fake-proof fulfillment with fake-proof partners.

%#$!$#!~@$