Recently in Kochanie's posts Category

I shall go into a hare,
With sorrow and sighing and mickle care,
And I shall go in the Divel's name,
Aye, till I come home again.

Image: Cafe Risque courtesy of Online Athens

The city of Lavonia, Georgia decided that $997,000 was not too great a price to pay to stage its own Bonfire of the Vanities. Using the subterfuge of an unnamed third-party, the city officials succeeded in purchasing the Cafe Risque, a local strip club which the council has tried to shut down since it opened in 2001.

According to the City Council, Jerry Sullivan, the deceased owner of Cafe Risque, had obtained their approval for a family-style restaurant. However, once the establishment opened, it was advertised as Cafe Risque and seven years of legal proceedings by the town could not put the club out of business. When the owners of Cafe Risque announced their intention to sell the property, it was no secret that the owners refused to sell the property back to the city. Fearing that the weaknesses in the zoning ordinances would allow another adult business to operate in the same location, the city officials decided to buy the land and building through the guise of a third party. When the first transaction was completed, the city immediately purchased the property from the third party.

By that night, Lavonia's council members were having a victory party at the cafe, burning the business' signs in a parking lot bonfire. On Wednesday, Fesperman and city officials giddily began gutting the building

"We all took turns daring each other (to slide down the strippers' poles)," Fesperman said. "But nobody would actually go through with it."

You can read the entire article in OnLine Athens here

While the residents of Lavonia are celebrating the demise of Cafe Risque, here are some facts to consider.

• The population of Lavonia is less than 2,000.

• For 2003 Lavonia's crime statistics, according to city-data.com, were: 1 murder, 4 rapes, 4 robberies, 23 assaults.

• With a population of less than 2,000, Lavonia has a small tax base to support its annual expenditures of $1.8 million (based on the 2004 budget).

• The financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2002, which are the most recent statements available online on the city's website, indicate that Lavonia held $1.9 million in cash and certificates of deposit in the fund established for its water treatment operation. The water treatment facility had been financed through the issuance of long-term bonds totaling $4.1 million. According to City Manager Gary Fesperman, the $997,000 used to purchase the Cafe Risque came from the city's reserve fund which was slated to pay off those 1997 bonds used to build that water treatment plant.

The investors who hold the debt securities issued by Lavonia and the bond rating agencies will not be as jubilant as its citizens when they learn that $1.0 million of the liquid funds set aside for retirement of those obligations had been used to invest in an illiquid asset, i.e., real estate, during one of the worst markets in over a decade. While I do not know the specifics of Lavonia's debt covenants, I hope that this city will be able to meet its obligations to investors and creditors. But in the event that Lavonia defaults on its scheduled debt repayments, I would not be surprised if the city's use of those funds earmarked for the retirement of the long-term debt could be construed as fiscal mismanagement.

After looking at this information, I have to ask this question. What was so abhorrent about the Cafe Risque, its employees and patrons? Why would the public officials of Lavonia, a town with a very low crime rate and a small tax base, spend the money to file five lawsuits in the span of seven years and then jeopardize their town's bond rating just to get rid of a strip club?

Seems a shame, doesn't it?

Image: Courtesy of CuteOverload.com

While it may not be the best place to meet with your elected representative, the men's restroom provided a safe haven for this flock of flamingos at the Gladys Porter Zoo in Bronzeville, Texas during the recent hurricane-force winds.

See. There is a reason why women go to the restroom in groups.

Image: Detail from "The Hunt by Night" by Paolo Uccello, courtesy of The Yorck Project, Wikimedia Commons

I know the truth -- give up all other truths!
No need for people anywhere on earth to struggle.
Look -- it is evening, look, it is nearly night:
what do you speak of, poets, lovers, generals?

The wind is level now, the earth is wet with dew,
the storm of stars in the sky will turn to quiet.
And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we
who never let each other sleep above it.

1915 by Marina Tsvetaeva



For the members of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church.
For those who share their beliefs.
For those who oppose their beliefs.

In her post entitled Don't Call It Rape, Echidne of the Snakes discusses the case involving Tory Bowen, the alleged rape victim who was not allowed to use the word "rape" in her testimony. Echidne quotes from a recent article in the Kansas City Star:

But a judge prohibited her from uttering the word “rape” in front of a jury. The term “sexual assault” also was taboo, and Bowen could not refer to herself as a victim or use the word “assailant” to describe the man who allegedly raped her.
The defendant’s presumption of innocence and right to a fair trial trumps Bowen’s right of free speech, said the Lincoln, Neb., judge who issued the order.

The comments posted by Echidne's readers reflect the range of reactions in the feminist blogosphere to this case and other publicized rape trials. Legal professionals and those acquainted with the criminal justice system are not troubled by the language restrictions. Readers who do not have the knowledge of law and the rules of evidence are outraged that the alleged victim was virtually silenced and the charges against the alleged assailant were dropped. Echidne and her readers should be commended for discussing this emotional topic without the sorry spectacle of vitriol and name-calling, such as taunts of "rape apologist," for any commenter who spoke in favor of the language restrictions.

In June 2007, Figleaf wrote an insightful post about this case, The No-Sex Class: Disquieting Conversations About Rape, citing the criticisms made by Dalia Lithwick of Slate and Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon. Since there have been so many developments since June, 2007, here is a summary for those unfamiliar with this case.

October 31, 2004
The date of the alleged rape of Tory Bowen by Pamir Safi. Safi and Bowen were strangers before meeting on the evening of October 30, 2004. Bowen claims that a date-rape drug was administered to her and she has no memory of what occurred that evening or during the night. When she woke up on the morning of October 31, she was naked, in a strange bed and Safi was on top of her, performing penis-vagina sex.

November 2006
The first trial began October 23, 2006 and ended November 6, 2006 with a deadlocked jury. Prior to the first trial, Judge Jeffre Cheuvront granted a defense motion to bar prosecutors from eliciting testimony or making arguments in front of jurors using words like “rape,” “sexual assault kit,” “victim” and “assailant.” Furthermore, the jury could not be told that these specific words were prohibited from the testimony.

At the trial Bowen testified for nearly 13 hours. She was quoted by the JournalStar.com: “They’ll (jurors) think I’m choosing to use the word, ‘sex,’” she said. “I had to pause (at the first trial) and think, re-navigate (how to say what happened). ... Jurors won’t find me credible because I’m pausing to find the words.”

July 12, 2007
Lancaster County District Judge Jeffre Cheuvront, in a ruling from the bench, declared a mistrial in the second trial of Pamir Safi, immediately prior to jury selection. His reason was that the extensive publicity that the case received made it impossible for the defendant to receive a fair trial.

September 2007
Tory Bowen filed a lawsuit in Lancaster County against Judge Cheuvront, claiming that Cheuvront's banning of the words rape, sexual assault, victim, and assailant from the first trial in 2006 violated her right of due process and free speech. U.S. District Judge Richard G. Kopf dismissed Bowen's lawsuit as frivolous and wrote that there was no evidence the trial judge acted in bad faith.However, in a footnote Kopf took issue with the wisdom of the state judge’s decision. "For the life of me, I do not understand why a judge would tell an alleged rape victim that she cannot say she was 'raped' when she testifies in a trial about rape," he said.

January 2008
Prosecutors for the state of Nebraska dismissed the charges against Pamir Safi before a third trial due to the trial judge's ban on language and limits on evidence, including prior rape allegations against the defendant.

April 2008
The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the decision by a U.S. District Judge Richard G. Kopf to dismiss the lawsuit filed by Tory Bowen against Judge Cheuvront for violation of her right to due process and free speech resulting from Cheuvront's ban of rape and other related terms from Bowen's testimony. The appellate court upheld the decision on procedural rather than substantive grounds, citing that since a summons was never served on Judge Cheuvront, the court had no jurisdiction. Since the criminal charges against Pamir Safi were dismissed in January 2008, the issues in the case were moot. Lawyer Wendy Murphy of Boston, who represents Bowen, stated that she plans to file a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court.

I presented the detailed chronology of this case for a specific reason. Unlike many bloggers who have written about rape trials which received national attention, I do not believe that the banning of words such "rape" or "victim" is proof, in and of itself, of the judicial system's bias against women and/or rape victims. The limitation of language is intended to protect the defendant's right to a fair trial. One of Echidne's readers, Karen Marie, offered this lucid explanation.

I have been typing Massachusetts Superior Court trial transcripts for over 25 years and I can explain to you very simply why this apparent "outrage" is not really such an outrage.
"Victim" is a highly charged word, it presupposes, preassumes "victim" status. Refer yourself to the concept of presumption of innocence, which is the principle that a person can only be found guilty through credible evidence.
We are all aware of the many unfortunate people who are wrongly convicted of emotionally-charged crimes (or because they are from a currently unpopular ethnic/religious group).
It is important that the level of emotion be tamped down in legal proceedings so as not to unfairly prejudice the jury against the defendant.
Thus, in Massachusetts the term "the complaining witness" is used in place of "victim."
"Rape" in a court is a legal term with specific essential elements which must be proved in order to find a defendant guilty. to allow a complaining witness to say "he raped me" jumps the intervening evidentiary requirements. what the complaining witness is asked to do is describe precisely what acts the defendant committed -- i.e., "he stuck his penis in my vagina," "he touched my breast," etc.
To do otherwise, to allow the use of emotionally-charged language would harm us all. the law, rules of evidence and procedure are there to protect all of us, and especially important in highly emotional cases where the mere fact of being arrested and charged leads many to assume WITH NO EVIDENCE that they in fact committed the crime.
Just think how you would feel if you were charged with a crime and at your trial the prosecution were allowed to present its case through incitement of emotion to overcome jurors' ability to evaluate the credibility of evidence in deciding whether you are guilty or not guilty.
ALL of the rules of law MUST apply to ALL defendants, regardless of whether there were seventeen eyewitnesses or none. Even if seventeen people SAW someone get raped by someone else, the same rules must apply and the state cannot be permitted to jump those intervening steps and produce evidence to prove "each and every essential element of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt."
Even after over 25 years, those words still make me very proud to be a citizen of this country.

The title of this post, The Troubling Language of Rape, was the name of a conference held by the Judicial Language Project of the Center for Law and Social Responsibility at the New England School of Law. The Judicial Language Project, which was the subject of a post by Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors, aims to identify language in judicial opinions that implies that victims willingly participated in the violence or were responsible for the violence. For example, a defendant was convicted of ten criminal counts including sexual assault, rape and kidnapping. The appeal that was filed contained the words "engaging in vaginal intercourse" or "engaged in sexual activity." The defendant was an adult male and the victim was his 8-year old granddaughter whom he sexually abused over a two year period.

According to the JLP analysis, the term "engaged" implies the child was participating and lessens the defendant's responsibility for his coercion of the child. The language that the court should use is precise: "forced penetration of the child's sexual organ." And because it is precise, the language places sole responsibility for the act where it belongs: with the defendant.

Professor Elizabeth Wood wrote about the need for this precision of language in her post entitled, Why We Need More Explicit Sex Talk in Courtrooms. Her point is that, as uncomfortable as we may be with explicit descriptions of sexual acts, we cannot afford to be vague or use euphemisms in a court of law.

It is no wonder that the story of this case and Tory Bowen's ordeal was picked up by so many feminist blogs. Since I have not read transcripts of the trial, I do not know whether Ms. Bowen was required to substitute vague terms such as "sexual intercourse" for "rape," or if she could use precise language to describe the fact that she was unconscious when Safi penetrated her vagina with his penis. Both Tory Bowen and her attorney, Wendy Murphy, were listed as presenters in the agenda for the JLP conference and, I would be very interested in reading their presentations so as to understand what Ms. Bowen could and could not say in court. But until I do, I will withhold judgment and outrage. And I urge my fellow bloggers to do the same.

Image: Girl by Stream by Flickr user Wisconsin Historical Society, used under Creative Commons License

In his book, Coming to our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World through Mindfulness, John Kabat-Zinn describes this revealing scene of a group of very busy adults.

I once led a mindfulness workshop at a business conference in Chicago. About fifty people in suits showed up. I opened our time together by suggesting that we simply sit together for a few minutes with no instructions and no agenda. I suggested that we let go of whatever expectations and stories we were bringing into the room about the workshop and why we were there (after all, something brought them there, no one was in the room by accident), put down our coffee cups and newspapers, and just take a few minutes to allow ourselves to feel how things were for us in that moment, however they were. A few people started crying.
In the conversation afterward, I asked what the tears were about. One executive said, "I never ever do anything without an agenda." Heads nodded in agreement. Just the words, "let's sit without an agenda," were liberating, releasing dammed-up feelings of grief they didn't know they had.

The people in that conference room may have been masters of hiding those damned-up feelings of grief from themselves, but I wonder how successful they were in hiding them from their children. When the topic of teen suicide is discussed, the causes typically cited are drugs, the influence of fatalistic song lyrics, bullying and the never-ending pressure for grades. One cause that is often ignored is the despair that young people experience when they look at the lives that their parents lead. A teenager will hear his father angrily rehash the office politics, see the weariness in her mother's face from the long hours at the job, mark the hours his parents spend staring vacantly at the television, and ask, "Is this what my life will be like?""

That sense of despair is what I recalled when reading a post written by Her of Desire X entitled, Generation-Y. Coming of age in the late 1980's, Her is, by her own account ...a woman without a generation. Or maybe just without a cause. The radicalism of the 1960's came to Her in a watered-down version from teachers, erstwhile hippies, who

...waxed poetic about Abbie Hoffman. Our response, isn't Abbie a girl's name? The Black Panthers, The White Panthers. Was it the Chicago Seven or Eight? Had to remember that for the test.

In this post, Her gives us a snapshot of her mother who, in her own rebellious youth, was anything but watered-down.

My mother drove across country in a VW bus packed full of hippies, Grace Slick's White Rabbit blaring out of the window, scaring all-fuck out of the Provincials, swearing that the only way to truly change the world was to get naked and perform an impromptu, ad lib, acid induced version of Major Barbara on the courthouse lawn, and then get arrested for public indecency and inciting a riot. When her father drove cross country to post her bail he found that she had changed the name of the father in Major Barbara to his name. He looked at his daughter, standing in a holding cell with her hippie friends, wearing only a jacket that someone had given her and, staring straight into her eyes, said unflinchingly, 'I do not know this woman. This is not my daughter.' She swore she had seen the world with New eyes through a glistening ball of liquid on the end of a medicine dropper. She marched on Washington. She went to Woodstock. She was turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.

It is that firebrand quality that Her treasures in a friend destined for Berkeley and a major in Women's Studies:

I loved her because she loved my mind. I adored her because she called me brilliant. She was a radical, a rebel, a warrior: a simulacrum of my mother in her youth.

When Her announces that she wants to attend Berkeley, her firebrand of a mother objects, calling the university ...Berserkly from the drugs and craziness she had experienced there during her past.. But Her is determined. She begins writing a paper that will not only cure her generation of complacency, but her mother as well.

There were also some old photos of her tucked haphazardly into shoe boxes and pushed to the back of her closet. One in particular had always been my favorite, she was smiling, dressed in hippie beads, a brown mini-skirt and moccasin boots, her long blond hair a tangled mess. A too-big Army camouflage jacket was draped over her small shoulders. She had a joint in one hand and was making a peace sign with the other. She was beautiful, angelic, but her eyes were fierce, intense. She was happy. When I see this photo I'm always reminded of Raymond Carver's Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year. I've wanted my whole life to meet this girl. To know her. To be her friend and companion in chaos.

But when Her's mother reads the paper, Her does not catch a glimpse of that beautiful girl in the photograph. She is face to face with a woman who is ..pleased. Not excited, not enflamed. Her does not go to Berkeley:

Life took some turns for me that sent me in other directions.
I won't rehash it. What followed has already been written.
The Church of Coke Whores 1
The Church of Coke Whores 2

Be warned. The Church of Coke Whores offers only one sacrament: Extreme Unction.

I referred to Her's mother as a firebrand, which is defined as someone who deliberately foments trouble. But it is the word's second meaning that I had in mind: a piece of wood that has been burned or is burning. How long can one woman remain on fire if she does not have the support of others? For many of the women who came of age in the sixties, who were responsible for raising children in the seventies and eighties, there was little support for that rebel flame in the home or the corporate workplace or the university. Little support but a ready supply of misogyny, as the poet Sharon Olds found when, in the ninth month of pregnancy, she arrives for the review of her dissertation. The men who will review Olds' dissertation may have been so courteous as to offer a pregnant woman a seat on a crowded subway train. But they show no such compunction for the jabs they deliver to Olds' other child, the one she fleshed from experience and learning.

When I walked into the seminar room
with my dissertation, our son floated in out
before me, treaded water in,
almost nine months old, upside-
down, sucking his thumb. My advisor
had called my thesis original,
richly metaphorical, and so
free of footnotes--I secretly thought
I might win something. But he didn't show up,
and the Chair of the Department had a pillar of mail
and a wastebasket by his leg -- for two hours,
he disemboweled. Two other men were
muttering to each other out the sides of their mouths
and doing their hard har, har,
har. I cited my advisor for his
encouragement, I described the yards
of file cards, the research, but after five minutes of their
jokes and smirks, I saw they meant
to flunk me. I drew my powers together,
120 pounds of me,
40 of the pregnancy
and 7 of my baby. Two hours later,
they asked me to leave the room for an interval
and they voted: Fail, Fail, Fail,
Fail, and You Can't Do That--
the one woman. When I lumbered back in,
our son's sweet palate may have wrinkled up
at the taste of fear's sour effluent--
who was polluting his waters? (Rip)
They wanted (Rip) a dissertation
absolutely new, without one
word (Rip) of this one--except
"the" was all right, and "and." How much
time shall we give her, gentlemen? How about
--nine months? Har, har
har. My cervix bent, for a moment,
with intimate, private hurt. I said,
Thank you. I thought, if you have hurt my child,
if you have curdled my milk with that, I will find you, and I will kill you.
And at that, my son's hair stood
on end, in the saline.

"The Defense" from Blood, Tin, Straw by Sharon Olds

I do not know if this scene is what Her's mother imagined when she read that fledging dissertation. But she had learned that an impromptu performance of Major Barbara could not change the fact that the world has little use for firebrands or brilliant girls. Perhaps being pleased rather than enflamed was the way that Her's mother tried to protect her child. Unfortunately, there is no way to protect a child, except to show her how to recognize danger, when to pick her battles, and that being a good little girl is the worst danger of all.

References:

Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World through Mindfulness, by John Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., Hyperion, New York, 2005. ISBN: 0-7868-6756-6 (Quoted text: page 447)

"The Defense" from Blood, Tin, Straw by Sharon Olds, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2001. ISBN: 0-375-40742-2 (Quoted text: pages 8-9)

After I read Melissa Bruen's acccount of her assaults at the University of Connecticut, I kept returning to the same questions. How would the parents of these young men react if they learned that their son grabbed and dry humped this young woman? Or that their son had responded to this young woman's outrage by exposing and grabbing her breasts before a crowd of spectators? Or that their son or daughter stood by and did nothing except laugh?

While I am not in favor of shame as a tool to control sexual behavior, I hope that at least a few of the young men in question felt a vestige of that emotion. If nothing else, I hope these students would have cause to fear the loss of financial support if their parents learned of their acts or their failure to act. After all, The acorn does not fall far from the tree. But as soon as I thought of that old adage, I realized that if we want to understand what happened to Melissa Bruen, we have to find the source of this sickness. And it's not just the acorns that are diseased, but the entire tree.

In a discussion thread at Feministing, one commenter recommended that the University of Connecticut require all new freshmen to enroll in a mandatory course on aggression against women. Another commenter, Blue Cat, explained why college level training does not work:

I hate to say it, but my college out in the midwest tried to do that sort of education with entering freshman...starting in 1990. Unfortunately, by then it's too late. It had no effect on crime at all. In my experience, it doesn't matter how much of a "stand up guy" he is, there is a strong possibility that his attitudes are different when he's around the guys, ESPECIALLY if he's drinking. I've unfortunately seen it too often. The only way to affect these attitudes is a change in how children are raised in our culture, both genders. This has to start with the parents. In my view, the best way for us to combat it is to raise our sons to not need to follow the pack to validate their manhood, and for our daughters to learn that it's OK for women to be aggressive, as much so as men (especially if danger lurks). And we must be as vigilant in monitoring our sons' activities as our daughters, to make sure that they behave well and are around good influences. If you've done all of that, then likely you won't see this idiocy happening later when they're let loose.

Consider the controversy that occurred at the prestigious Horace Mann School in New York. In mockery of a student organization called the Women's Issue's Club, Horace Mann students created a Web page for a Facebook group named the "Men's Issues Club." Forty-four of Horace Mann's students were members of the group, included children of prominent families and trustees on Horace Mann's board. The online conversations included insults of teachers such as "crazy ass bitch" and puerile boasts from boys of "banging a teacher in the music dept. bathroom" and "beating up women when drunk." According to the members of Men's Issues Club, the answer to the question where women belong was, "IN THE KITCHEN!! IN THE KITCHEN!!" The club's mission statement:

For too long men have not had a way to express themselves and their beliefs in society. Men need to have a voice, we aren’t meant to be seen and not heard. Let freedom ring, bitches.

One of the slandered teachers, Danielle McGuire, logged into the H.M. Facebook group using her married name. McGuire found that her liberal politics had earned her the title “Official Minority Rights Officer and Head of Protection for Feminist Society” and “Representation of Oppressed ‘Indians’ of America.” But the worst was

... the crude illustration of Tituba, whom she had lectured on last year. Tituba as Aunt Jemima, she thought. The artist had painted a racial slur. In every word on the page, McGuire saw herself depicted as a witch or a bitch.

While the administration of Horace Mann announced that the punishments for students in the group would be severe, the teachers who had viewed the Facebook group pages were told that their employment contracts were under review. One trustee, who was also the parent of a member of the Facebook group, confronted McGuire in public about viewing the site under a false name. When McGuire claimed that she had the right to protect herself against defamation, the trustee countered that the illustrations and insults were nothing more than students "just blowing off steam...[t]hey're very stressed; it's not unusual for them to say racist and sexist things."

[You can read the entire article here, which I found courtesy of Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors].

Some have criticized the article which appeared in New York Magazine as staging the conflict between the teachers and the privileged students and their influential parents. Horace Mann will accumulate a debt of $339 million for new construction and other improvements and, as a result, the composition of its board has changed to include lawyers, investment bankers and real estate developers rather than academics. However, the bigger issue here is the ease with which the parents and trustees could overlook the misogyny and racism displayed by their children.

In November 2007, Thomas E. Ford, a psychology professor at Western Carolina University, and his graduate student co-authors published an article detailing the results of two projects designed to determine the effects of sexist humor. According to Ford,

Sexist humor is not simply benign amusement. It can affect men’s perceptions of their immediate social surroundings and allow them to feel comfortable with behavioral expressions of sexism without the fear of disapproval of their peers...Specifically, we propose that sexist humor acts as a ‘releaser’ of prejudice...Our research demonstrates that exposure to sexist humor can create conditions that allow men – especially those who have antagonistic attitudes toward women – to express those attitudes in their behavior. The acceptance of sexist humor leads men to believe that sexist behavior falls within the bounds of social acceptability.

...just blowing off steam...[t]hey're very stressed; it's not unusual for them to say racist and sexist things.

Indeed.

But they're not as stressed as the Horace Mann teachers whose employment contracts were not renewed.

I doubt that they're as stressed as Yale student Jessica Sverndson on one January night when a group of 20 frat boys stood in front of the Yale Women's Center chanting "Dick! Dick! Dick!"

Nor will they ever be as stressed as 80% of the victims of sexual assault, like Melissa Bruen, who may suffer chronic physical or psychological problems over time.

According to an article on MSNBC, John Hopkins University had programmed its computers to ignore abortion as a valid search term when utilizing a publicly financed database.

A prominent public health school has restored the word "abortion" as an acceptable search term on a reproductive health Web site funded by a federal agency that restricts references to abortions.The move by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health follows criticism from some health advocates and librarians that the restriction amounted to censorship.The restriction on the POPLINE Web site — "population information online" — had been put in place after inquiries by the United States Agency for International Development, which funds the site, according to a statement from Dr. Michael J. Klag, the dean of the Bloomberg school.USAID denies funding to non-governmental organizations that perform or actively promote abortion as a methods of family planning in other nations. The policy was started under President Ronald Reagan and was revived when President Bush took office in 2001.
"I could not disagree more strongly with this decision, and I have directed that the POPLINE administrators restore 'abortion' as a search term immediately," Klag said in a statement. "The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge and not its restriction."

You can read the entire article by clicking here.

Dr. Klag's decision received the support of the American Library Association. According to the ALA's press release, Loriene Roy, President of the American Library Association, stated:

We applaud Dr. Klag's swift action to restore full access to the POPLINE database. We are dismayed, however, at the circumstances that caused the administrators running the POPLINE database to begin blocking any and all searches on the word "abortion." Any federal policy or rule that requires or encourages information providers to block access to scientific information because of partisan or religious bias is censorship. Such policies promote ideology over science and only serve to deny researchers, students and individuals on all sides of the issue access to accurate scientific information.

The American Library Association has vigorously opposed the use of internet filtering and filed suit to overturn the restrictions of the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) on the grounds that the Act violated the First Amendment rights of patrons of public libraries. The ALA claimed that the search filters required to comply with CIPA restrict from access a wide array of materials, including medical information. In 2003, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld CIPA, with the provision that libraries must comply with requests from adult patrons to disable the filters. The ALA continues to provide assistance to libraries that must implement CIPA to comply with federal funding requirements.

To determine if internet filtering did restrict access to health information, the Kaiser Foundation conducted a large-scale, scientific study designed to help determine whether Internet filters would block young people’s access to non-pornographic health information. The results of the study, released in 2002, supported the ALA's claim concerning filters:

But as filters are set at higher levels, they block access to a substantial amount of health information, with only a minimal increase in blocked pornographic content.

The full report, in pdf format, is available for download here.

The Kaiser report also included a list of health sites blocked by the search filters such as suicide hotlines, the CDC pages on sexually transmitted diseases and diabetes, an FDA article on testicular cancer and a site dedicated to preventing teen pregnancy. Do teenagers really look up information about health? Yes, they do, according to an earlier Kaiser study that indicated 70% of 15-17 year-olds have used the Internet to look up health information, including 40% who have researched sexual health issues such as birth control or sexually transmitted diseases.

So when you are done with your Sunday morning coffee, please write to Dr. Michael Klag, Dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Loriene Roy, President of the ALA, and thank them for protecting your reproductive freedom. Am I exaggerating? Not at all. You cannot use federal funds to pay for abortion and, if not for advocates like these, you could not use federal funds to even read about an abortion.

Image by from Young Lusty Sluts:A Pictorial History of Erotic Pulp Fiction by Michael R. Goss, published by The Erotic Print Society

The Prudish Libertine could not be happier. In a recent post about his return to the classroom, Figleaf exclaimed:

I gotta figure out where I can do more of this work, especially in groups, either in graduate programs or for (gasp!) work. Because it's not just good it's been *good* for me!

I could not think of a better way to to keep the Libertine Prude in the pink than to present him with an Extra Credit Assignment:

Prepare a post for your blog analyzing the societal views of gender as expressed, both directly and indirectly, in the following three selections:
No. 1: Fast Women from Godey's Lady's Book, February, 1857
No. 2: I was encouraged by my culture to be a man from Buying Sex: A survey of men in Chicago.
No. 3: Inability to confine sexual behavior to private life is considered low class and untrustworthy. from comments in response to Amber Rhea's post, Compartmentalize, or you'll get 20 lashes!

No. 1: Fast Women from Godey's Lady's Book, February, 1857

FAST WOMEN.--One of our most promising lady writers, Mrs. R. B. Hicks, editress of the Kaleidoscope, thus deftly describes this new variety of womankind:

This fast age, with its fast horses and faster men, has brought about that rather fashionable monstrosity, the fast woman. They were a want of the age, those fast women, or the age would never have developed them. Fast young men wanted something to keep up with them, and, presto! We have the fast young woman. The gum-elastic nature of woman supplied the deficiency; and she, who is the pride of earth and the incentive to heaven, consented to lend her splendid capabilities to fill up the measure of Young America's insolent requirements, and to become, for his convenience, the fast woman.
Accordingly we see them with dresses decollete and bare arms, with loud-ringing laugh and questionable wit, with polka and Redowa, and a thousand other accomplishments peculiar to themselves, attracting the blasé foplings, whose attention the true woman would instinctively shun. They are up with the times and, to the honor of Old Virginia be it said, somewhat in advance of her daughters, these fast young women. But, though they are so attended, and so applauded, and so exhilarated, there is no young fopling in their train who has not at least brains enough to sneer at them behind their backs. And thus it happens that these fast young women do not marry quite as fast as they dance. In the hymeneal race, we find them lagging behind; and, as their speed is all gotten up expressly for the hymeneal race, it must be exceedingly mortifying to them to find themselves beaten by dozens of quiet, genteel girls who never danced a polka in their lives. It is the old fable of the hare and the tortoise. We would advise them not to be quite so fast.

No. 2: I was encouraged by my culture to be a man from Buying Sex: A survey of men in Chicago.

The title of this selection was the response given by one man when asked why he paid for sexual services. He was one of 159 men interviewed by volunteers of the Chicago Coalition of the Homeless on April 23, 2004. While there has been considerable research about the women and girls engaged in prostitution in Chicago, little research has been conducted on the customers of the sex industry. The Prostitution Alternatives Round Table (PART), a project of the CCH, decided to conduct these interviews to determine their age and marital status, the frequency with which they purchase sexual services, and any contact with law enforcement. The volunteers, who were former prostitutes, wanted to find out how much these customers knew about the prostitutes and the violence that was part of their existence.

The interviews were conducted in bars throughout the Chicago neighborhoods, during a televised game of a Chicago sports team. While this survey does not purport to be a statistically valid sample, the findings do reveal more about the consumers of the sex trade. For the purposes of this survey, the sex trade was defined as street level prostitution, strip clubs, escort services, massage parlors, private parties, and indoor venues. The key findings quoted in the report are as follows:

• A large percentage, 81 percent, of all men surveyed admitted to having been to a sex trade venue at least once in their lifetime.


• There were no significant differences between users and nonusers of the sex trade industry based on marital status, age,ethnicity, and race. Users in this sample are younger, on average, than non-users, but frequent users are older. Frequent users are more likely to be older and married.


• On average, users of the industry visited 2 sex trade venues. The majority visited two or more.


• Over 50 percent of men who said they had visited strip clubshave done so 6 or more times in their lifetime.


• Men find out about sex trade venues primarily through word-of-mouth referrals.


• The majority of users in this sample frequented indoor sex tradevenues, rather than street-level venues. Based on the men’s responses, illegal sex trade activity appears to be occurring in legal, regulated indoor sex trade establishments such as strip clubs.


• Only 4 of the 129 men who are users admitted they had any contact with law enforcement.


• Large numbers of the men appeared indifferent to the plight of the women from whom they are purchasing sex-acts.

Forty-two percent said “yes” and 44 percent said “no”.

No. 3: Comments in response to Amber Rhea's post, Compartmentalize, or you'll get 20 lashes!

First, I recommend that you read Amber's post entitled Why I Quit Download Squad. Second, follow the links in her post to her article, Compartmentalize, or you'll get 20 lashes!, in which she challenges the general assumption that if a woman's online image is sexual, she will be stigmatized as unprofessional. Or, as Amber stated:

So, YES, if one's sexuality is the ultimate representation of what it means to be unprofessional, then absolutely we have a problem here.

Inability to confine sexual behavior to private life is considered low class and untrustworthy.

Ok... there's only one way to settle this... why don't you go ahead and post some naked pictures of yourself and perhaps some voting buttons... "Pro" / "Unpro". See what the stats say after say... 24 hrs ;-)

[I]if you hang your goodies out for all to see, you're unprofessional. It's low class and slobby. Do you have the freedom to get a tramp stamp? Sure. Accept the fact that you are stamping "tramp" on yourself.

Facts is facts. Hot women and powerful men are pursued. Plain or ugly women and wimpy men resent it.

Okay, Figleaf. Time to put your handsome shoulder to the wheel.

Image by Flickr user Paintlab, used under Creative Commons License

I read the news today oh boy
Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire
And though the holes were rather small
They had to count them all
Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.
I'd love to turn you on...
[from A Day in the Life, by John Lennon and Paul McCartney]

If Lennon and McCartney had substituted the holes that lurk on the thoroughfares of the greater Chicagoland area, they would not need 4,000. Our potholes are large. They are deep. And they want to cause you pain, both physical and financial.

I had taken special precautions to avoid these gapings mouths that maw at the wheels of passing vehicles. I resigned myself to longer commutes and traveled secondary roads uninfested by these gravel-lined monsters. But weariness and the approaching hour of midnight found me taking a road I should not have travelled. Without warning the car shuddered, the lights on the digital dashboard flashed on and off, and a scream escaped from the right fender. Slowly I steered the wounded car into a empty parking lot.

In the yellowish glare of the sodium vapor light, I saw that the rim had shrugged off the the deflated tire. Even worse, the rim itself was cracked, perhaps beyond repair. No use in even trying to wrestle with the dreaded spare tire.

There in the cold night in a deserted parking lot, chivalry made not one, but two appearances. A car of battle cruiser proportions, vibrating with the familiar beat of rap music, pulled up next to me. Darkened windows slid down to reveal four young men who were probably violating curfew. They asked if I needed help? No, I explained, the wheel and the tire were beyond help. Was I sure? Did I have a spare? Yes, I was sure. I thanked them and was both sorry and relieved to watch them drive away.

I started to get inside the car to call a cab and a tow truck, when I saw a parka-bundled man walking towards me. He yelled, "You need help, lady?" When I replied, "No thanks. I'm going to call a tow truck," he offered, "Maybe I can help. Where's your spare?" I did not want to open the trunk of the car with a stranger at my elbow, or hand over my lug wrench, that weaker cousin of the menacing tire iron. Again I demurred, telling my would be rescuer that all I had was a pitiful lug wrench that could never summon the torque needed to budge the pneumatically tightened lugs. He stared at me, then huffed with wounded pride, "Okay. Suit yourself." He turned and retraced his steps across the parking lot.

As with other invitations received from men during my life, these offers of help were appreciated in the same moment they were refused. The discomfort of cold and weariness could not make me forget the stories of people who disappear without a trace until their remains are found by a curious dog during the spring thaw. One does not reach the age of fifty by relying upon the kindness of strangers.

I thought about how eager these men were to offer help to a woman they did not know. Since I am writing this post without having suffered any injury, other than literal and figurative cold feet, I will assume that their intentions were not sinister. I doubt that I was the first woman to refuse their offers of help or invitations to dance. Yet I wonder if they realized that caution and fear were the reasons for this and other refusals, not their worthiness or lack of it.

But if, according to Melissa Fine's concept of the Missing Discourse of Desire, "sex for women is articulated in terms of danger, accommodation, exploitation, reproduction, satisfaction of their partners," perhaps it isn't surprising that these men were so eager to help. And resentful when I did not accept their help.

I prefer to think that they were just nice guys and hopefully not too offended by my self-sufficiency. But maybe there is more to this beneath the surface. Just like one of those godawful potholes.

In response to his post, Libertie, Equalitie, and ...More Equalitie?, Figleaf and his readers engaged in a fascinating discussion on the concept of grammatical gender. Several commenters expressed the view that that there is no sociopolitical implication to the fact that native speakers often ignore the genders of words in their languages, because grammatical gender and biological gender are two different concepts. But Figleaf expressed his doubts:

And then there's the *philosophical* effort of trying to suppress incredulity that the etymology for each word really, truely has no gendered signficance.

I have to say that I agree with Figleaf on this point, and here is why.

My experience with the study of foreign languages is limited to three years of Latin during my high school years. That may seem too quaint to allow me to add anything of value to this discussion, but looking at the gender assignment in the Latin language is valuable for two reasons. First, since Latin is technically a dead language, in that it is not currently used and therefore not subject to random change, it provides a frozen specimen to test the assertion that there is some underlying rationale to the assignment of genders to animals, objects or abstract ideas. Second, until the 1960's the study of Latin was a requisite in the secondary educational curriculum in North American and, I would guess, Western Europe. For centuries the associations of certain objects or abstract ideas with nouns whose gender had to be memorized was part of the formal education for men and eventually for women. Therefore, the nuances hidden within these gender assignments would have been absorbed, although unconsciously, by students and scholars for hundreds of years. To assert that the associations and judgments embedded in the gender assignments did not exert an influence on literature and philosophy would be disingenuous, IMO.

Let us begin with the body, for it is my belief that the way we think of our own flesh will reveal the way we think about sex and the sexes.

Consider that in Latin, blood (cruor), sweat (sudor) and breath (spiritus) are masculine nouns. Masculine is the gender of the Latin words uterus and fetus, which have become part of the English lexicon.

Nouns that represent the less noble effluvia such as urine are designated as feminine (urina). The Latin word for sewer is the feminine noun cloaca, which also has been used to describe the stomach of a drunken woman. Is it insignificant that the sewer system of Rome was named Cloaca Maxima, and was believed to be under the protection of the goddess of filth, Cloacina, who also presided over sexual intercourse in marriage? The feminine noun latrina is the Latin word used to denote both a toilet and a brothel. After reading this should one be moved to shed a tear, please note that its Latin equivalent would be the feminine lacrima.

The concept of Nature is designated as the feminine Natura, and the feminine sylva is the Latin name for forest or woodland. But the feminine gender is also assigned to the less wholesome elements of the natural world: shade or shadow (umbra), fen or bog (lama) or a wild animal (fera). The less wholesome elements of the supernatural world are also designated as feminine: the lamia are the witches, vampires and ghosts.

As for the virtues, I am happy to report that courage or daring (audacia) and piety (pietas) come in on the distaff side. Unfortunately, they must share the stage with ira, their Latin cousin so given to anger.

The Wikipedia article on grammatical gender states:

Since all nouns must belong to some noun class, many end up with genders which are purely conventional. For instance, the Romance languages inherited sol "sun" (which is masculine) and luna "moon" (which is feminine) from Latin but in German and other Germanic languages Sonne "sun" is feminine and Mond "moon" is masculine. Two nouns denoting the same concept can also differ in gender in closely related languages, or within a single language. For instance, in Polish the word ksie;z.yc "moon" is masculine, but its Russian counterpart is feminine. The Russian word for "sun" is neuter...here is nothing inherent about the Moon or a potato which makes them objectively "male" or "female". In these cases, gender is quite independent of meaning, and a property of the nouns themselves, rather than of their referents.

I disagree that gender is quite independent of meaning. The meaning may be obscure, forgotten, or hidden in the oral traditions of the culture -- but it exists. Consider the fact that the moon is a feminine noun in the Romance languages and a masculine noun in Polish. If you examine the mythologies of these two cultures, you will find that in the Roman mythology Luna is the goddess associated with the moon. In the Polish pantheon of gods, Miesiac, the moon deity, is seen as both male and female. Before a culture would have recorded the names of objects, places and gods in written form, these words would have been part of an oral tradition, the stories of creation by which people tried to make sense of the outer physical world and the inner world of perception and emotion.

While there are valid criticisms of the the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, I think its value is the assertion that the instrument by which we name the external and internal world is not objective or neutral. While the connotations hidden within language may not have determined (in the strict sense of the word) our views about sex, the fact that we have to struggle to change our thinking about the qualities "naturally" attributed to each sex is an indication of the influence of these hidden meanings and the power of language.

In the final paragraph of his post, Missing Discourse For Intercourse, Figleaf makes the following request:

I know I can't possibly be the first person to bring this up (this isn't the first time I've brought it up either.) But I'm realizing it's a big deal. And that finding and using some nice, earthy, evocative, preferably Anglo-Saxon (or even just Anglo-Saxon *sounding*) words for it would be an even bigger deal.

Yes, it is a big deal, and the truth is that if you want to be a good lover or a good poet you have to learn to talk dirty. And the best dirty are the single syllable Anglo-Saxon words for all the messy business of being alive and being human.

Forget those weak Latinate cousins: fellate will not get you going like lick or suck. If you want to vary the length of your strokes, stay on the Middle English side of the fence so you can easily dip or daub.

If you want more help to flesh this out, here you go:

Note: Talking dirty is not as easy as it sounds. Tess Danesi is teaching a course on talking sexy (dirty included). Perhaps if Figleaf will ask nicely (or not-so-nicely), Tess could be persuaded to help him with his homework. ;-)

is not my avocation of choice. Unfortunately, like so many adults who are sans health insurance, I find myself posing these questions to my "new internist," Dr. Kochanie (me), when the Hydra of symptoms raises a new head:

What do you think?
Is this serious?
Should we go to the emergency room?
Or maybe I should just go see a "real" doctor?

Fortunately, both Dr. Kochanie and I are naked when these consultations take place, so I do not have to contend with the power inequality that typically results when one person is clothed and the other is naked. Which is why Dr. Kochanie did not even flinch when I said, "go see a real doctor."

For those kind readers whose comments here have gone unanswered, for the blog posts I have drafted and not finished, for the comments I have not left at the posts of the blogs I frequent: I apologize, and I hope to catch up in the next few days.

What can I say except that the spirit was willing, the flesh was weak and affordable healthcare remains elusive?

I have not forgotten that today, January 22, is Blog for Choice Day. While this may seem to be an unlikely place to quote General MacArthur, "I shall return" and do my part.

Now, I am off to the auto repair stables to retrieve my worthy steed.

While offering blogday congratulations to M. Feuillet de Figue Feuille de Vigne,* Philadelphia Burke said:

One of my favorite things about your blog is the atmosphere in the comments section. I feel pretty nervous about conversing over the Internet (one reason I couldn't keep up the momentum on my own blog), but nobody here has ever made me feel belittled or uncomfortable. It's not like everybody agrees about everything but the regulars are respectful of each other, and disrespectful people don't stick around for too long.

Sorry to hear that because I truly enjoyed reading your blog, Philadelphia. Perhaps a philosophical question may entice you to resume blogging. If I recall correctly, your examination of Wittgenstein was quite thorough. So this question is for you, although others are encouraged to reply if so moved.

If, for as long as I could remember, I had an interest in spanking, would it be correct to classify that knowledge as a priori? However, if I realized I was an enthusiast only after I was spanked, would that knowledge be classified as a posteriori?

;-)

* Note: Here I need the assistance of one who has a command of both the English and French languages. A in France: is "M. Feuillet de Figue" the appropriate translation for "Mr. Figleaf"? I thought that combining the masculine "feuillet" and the feminine "figue" would be a good choice considering his views on gender stereotypes. But, like too many Americans, I am a monolinguistic dolt, so please advise.
Update: my linguistic knuckles have been rapped by Zeborah, who explains in her comments, "Re "feuillet" - no, you can't do that..." This author is appropriately red-faced and grateful to receive such prompt instruction. As for the long-awaited never-delivered spanking promised by M. Feuille de Vigne, the author has resigned herself to the fact that she may be the first blogger to be spanked posthumously.
;-(

Image by Stephanie Sinclair, USA, from UNICEF Photo of the Year 2007

“We needed the money”, said the parents of eleven-year old Ghulam, shown in the photo above. She is seated next to her fiance, a forty year old Afghan man, Mohammed Faiz. The photo, taken by Stephanie Sinclair, has won first place as UNICEF's 2007 Photo of the Year. While in Afghanistan, Sinclair noted how many young girls were married to older men, even though the legal age for marriage is sixteen. Villagers in the couple's province of Ghor predict that Ghulam will be married with a few weeks of her engagement and will begin to bear children for Faiz.

In a comment to Figleaf's post The Ultimate 'No-Sex' Class, A in France of A Changing Life said:

Off-topic in a way, but let's not forget that child marriage is widespread in the developing world *and receives little or no attention*. In some countries 25% of girls are married and give birth by the age of 15.

Not off topic at all, A in France, and thank you for bringing to mind this photo and story.

According to the accompanying story at the UNICEF site:

Early marriages are not only a problem in Afghanistan: worldwide there are about 51 million girls aged between 15 and 19 years who are forced into marriage. The youngest brides live in the Indian state of Rajasthan, where 15% of all wives are not even 10 years old when they are married. Child marriages are a reaction to extreme poverty and mainly take place in Asian and African regions where poor families see their daughters as a burden and as second-class citizens. Already in their younger years, girls are given into the “care” of a husband, a tradition that often leads to exploitation. Many girls become victims of domestic violence. In an Egyptian survey, about one-third of the interviewed child brides stated that they were beaten by their husbands. The young brides are under pressure to prove their fertility as soon as possible. But the risk for girls between the ages of 10 and 14 not to survive pregnancy is five times higher than for adult women. Every year, about 150,000 pregnant teenagers die due to complications – in particular due to a lack of medical care, let alone sex education.

You can read the rest of the story here.

It is a bitter irony the the name of the province of the young Ghulam, Ghor, so closely resembles the adult science fiction fantasy world created by John Norman, the Chronicles of Gor. A world of strict rule, social caste, constant warfare, and female subjugation, in some ways Norman's Gor is not that different from the real world of Ghor. But for Ghulam, the prospect of an early death does not disappear when she closes a book, assuming that she is ever given the opportunity to learn to read. Her story is a chilling reminder that a practice,which we in the West and in developed nations have eroticized and churned into a lucrative fantasy, is a painful and often fatal reality for millions of young people and their families.

Ladies and gentlemen, kindly direct your gaze to the sidebar on your right. Thank you. You may have noticed that the addition of a new statistical measure, Author Archives, which proudly announces this score:

Just to clarify.
This is not a running tab of our respective sexual partners.
Or our respective orgasms.
Just our respective posts.

And no, the reason I write so infrequently is not because I'm too busy having sex. Maybe it is because I am too busy thinking about sex. Hmmm. [epiphany ensues].

That was all.
Carry on.

[I need to think about this some more.]

"What do you think?"

Late afternoon on a sodden November day. The weak light steps aside for evening, and a reflection slowly emerges in the office window: a woman, seated on the sofa, attired in a dark business suit, pale stockings, high heeled shoes, hands resting on an open book balanced in her lap. I cannot see her face because she has no head. Her image has been guillotined at the throat by a venetian blind.

Apt metaphor, I thought, as I turned away from my reflection in the glass and looked at the woman sitting across from me. A mother of ten and grandmother of many more, she was wise, calm, and looked like a woman half her age. I owed a great deal to this woman, my therapist, who guided me as I grappled with the abuse of my childhood. She had taught me that the memory of betrayal, pain and fury were not neatly stored in the brain, but written in flesh, soft tissue and bone. And with her help I hoped to reconnect my head to my body.

We had spent the session discussing sexual fantasies, the fantasies and writings of other women because I was too uncomfortable to speak directly of my own fantasies. The fantasies I questioned came from the book I held in my lap, Erotica: Women's Writing from Sappho to Margaret Atwood. In that volume I found the bloody prose of Angela Carter, a gang rape scene described by Pat Califia, and the veiled sexuality in Christine de Pazan's account of the torture and martyrdom of virgins, whose resilience left their executioners weak and exhausted.

I never told anyone that these scenes -- violent, intense, bloody, degraded -- were what took me to the edge in a way no lover ever did. I assumed they were the remnants of the abuse, so that no matter what I had accomplished in my career, no matter how polished my appearance, the damage, the humiliation would always be there.

But when I found images that resembled my own fantasies in the stories and poems written by women, including some who were avowed feminists, I found the courage to ask my therapist the questions I had been avoiding. Was it possible that so many writers experienced abuse, the germinating seed for these violent images? She assured me that men and women who had never experienced any form of abuse fantasized about rape, bondage, and blood play. The images of violence, force or humiliation were not markers for abuse, whether experienced in childhood or adulthood.

Even if these disturbing images could be considered normal, why did they appear in stories and poems authored by women who were reputed to be feminists? She replied that this question of sexual fantasies, fantasies of dominance, submission, and sado-masochism, was the cause of an angry debate among feminists. Some believed that these fantasies were the result of the oppression of women, and even if a woman did not personally experience sexual or physical abuse, violence and degradation were so prevalent in our culture that these images were inescapable. To eliminate this violence and cruelty, women and men must consciously seek to eradicate their own dark urges, including the expression of these desires in art, fiction and cinema. Other feminists argued that the need for violence, blood, dominance or submission was hard-wired at birth. It was part of human nature.

Then I asked, "Is it possible to change such violent desires, to make them politically correct? What do you think?" She did not answer immediately, but looked directly in my eyes and said, "No, the desires, the fantasies are what they are. They cannot be changed. What you can change is how you choose to express these desires."

And with those words I began to reconnect my head to my body.

Ten years later, I remembered that conversation when I encountered the work of another woman, a psychiatrist who is also a sexual submissive. She writes under the name of Yaldah Tovah, which in Hebrew means "good girl." Based on her own experience and those of her analysands who are sexually submissive, Tovah has written several essays on the psychological profiles of submissive women, differentiating those who are psychologically healthy from those suffering from personality disorders.

A common dilemma for a person who is submissive or dominant is finding a partner who understands and can complement one's sexual nature. Many people have not even recognized their proclivities as valid, but believed that these urges to dominate or be dominated were unhealthy, peculiar and thus tried to ignore or override them. The end result was often a long-time relationship with a man or woman who could not understand or accept his/her partner's true sexual needs.

For the man or woman who is fortunate to know and accept the validity of his/her need to dominate or submit, the challenge is finding a partner who is honest about his/her own desires. Today, there is an abundance of information describing BDSM lifestyles. In some circles, dark sexuality is not merely accepted; it has become fashionable. Kink has become trendy and, some people will claim they are dominant or submissive to appear more sexually adventurous. But their performance, and it is only performance, cannot maintain or endure the delicate balance of power, fear and arousal. And so the genuinely dominant or submissive partner feels cheated and frustrated.

How then can a man or woman determine if a partner is truly dominant or submissive? Tovah claims that the answer lies in what she terms "signal fantasies."

In contemplating early roots of "kink" I have come to consider the role of early sexual fantasies, and their significance. I believe that some people have particular kinds of sexual fantasies that hold enormous power to shape not only their sexuality, but also their lives. I call these fantasies "signal fantasies" because they call attention to an overriding psychosexual need, which can be so determinative of behavior that they define identities and shape lives. Fantasies such as these are typically masturbatory, begin very early in childhood, as young as 3 or 4 years of age for some, remain fairly fixed over a lifetime, and are the "efficient" fantasies, the reliable ones, the ones that bring its creator to climax more quickly than any others.

The body doesn't lie
.
These fantasies are the ones that get a person who has them reliably wet, reliably hard, every time. They are the fantasies that play in the mind during sexual activities too far afield from them to be satisfyingly arousing. These are the fantasies that when encountered in literature, in the movies, online for the first time, shock the person who is unfamiliar with the power they hold, and usually disturb the person to some degree with that power...

The earlier these fantasies appear, and the more reliable and efficient they are, the more they have been fixed over a lifetime, the greater the degree of necessity to live them out for real satisfaction. Those people with the earliest, most fixed, most intransigent signal fantasies can be considered to be "hard-wired" for the behavior.

You can read her entire essay, "The Significance of Fantasies," here.

According to Tovah, if a person is "hard-wired," i.e., if her fantasies arose early in childhood, she must determine where her potential partner's desires are on the spectrum of dominance/submission, hetero/homosexuality, or sado-masochism:

A hard-wired female submissive will never be truly happy with a non-Dominant man. To put it simply, we love differently. A gentle, non-Dominant passive man will never be able to keep a profound submissive happy. His gentle, giving, passive lovemaking will leave her to turn to her fantasies of force, authority, bondage, and pain to carry her through her their sexual acts.

Is this true? Can we see beyond the defenses we constructed out of shame and timidity throughout our lives and look back to childhood to see our true sexual nature? Based on my own experience, I would say yes. Would I choose the same lovers or partners if I did not suppress my need for sexual submission and ravishment? Probably not. This is not to say that there was no sexual attraction, or that these men did not possessed other excellent qualities. It was unfair to pretend to be what I was not to avoid ridicule. Unfair to them and to me.

Other men and women have also claimed that their desires for pain, spanking, etc. have remained unchanged from their childhood years. In a discussion forum, one woman gave this description of her earliest fantasies:

Let me preface this by saying I’m not a crackpot or a co-dependent kook. I’m a married professional woman in my late-30’s with a life-long spanking fetish. The earliest spanking fantasies I can remember occurred when I was around six. I remember thinking how much I would fancy being spanked by David Brinkley. Go figure.

According to Tovah, the games children play are often stagings of these signal fantasies.

Some young submissives play "house" in which they manage to get themselves spanked by baby Dominants. Some children are insistent on playing "cowboys and Indians" because of the tying up part of the game. Others, bold little creatures, are determined to find playmates for a game of "Master and slave."

There are often feelings of guilt and shame about feelings that differ so widely from what the child observes around him. In an article at the Taken In Hand site, one man described a childhood game that revealed his true sexual nature, as well as his fear and confusion about his sexual arousal:

When I was a young teen (not sure exactly how old, about 13 I think), a fairly attractive girl was at our house one day. She was slightly younger than me, and frankly, not that interesting to me. Being bored, and looking for something to do, we played various games, one of which was to see if we could do a Houdini and escape from being tied up (with an old necktie, of all things). I quickly realized that being tied up was something I really hated, and was soon free – probably from the sheer adrenaline of the mild state of panic being so helpless put me in.
But then it was her turn. As soon as I tied her up, I found myself incredibly turned on by the exchange of power. I didn’t understand why I felt that way, or why it scared me so, and so I forgot about the whole thing. For a few years.

There are some who believe that, with patience, dominance or submission can be learned. I disagree, with one exception which should be the topic of a separate post. Unless one is awakening a sexual nature that has been buried for so long, what a person will learn is ritual or protocol. His/her performance will lack intensity, the same quality that makes vanilla sex memorable. IMO, the intensity of BDSM is derived from the eroticism of power, which can be expressed sexually or nonsexually. Difficult to fake on a consistent basis. Far better to be an intense vanilla, than a poor imitation dominant.

And if you are in doubt, could there be a more reliable litmus test than this?

The body doesn't lie...Overpower a submissive, or set her to service, and she will be wet. Present a submissive posture to a Dominant, and he will get hard.

The arrangement is making you a whore and me wretched.

Those words from Jane Campion's screenplay, The Piano, are spoken by George Baines, a man of European and Maori ancestry, to Ada, the woman he tries to lure into a sexual relationship with an unusual barter arrangement. Ada McGrath is a Scotswoman sold into marriage by her father to the New Zealander, Alistair Stewart. Ada is mysteriously mute and expresses herself through the music she plays on her piano. Her illegitimate six-year old daughter Flora serves as her interpreter when Ada resorts to sign language. When Ada and Flora arrive on the New Zealand shore, Ada learns that her piano will be abandoned on the beach, since Stewart claims the instrument is too massive to be transported up the hills and cliffs to his homestead. George Baines, the neighbor of Stewart, buys the piano from Stewart, despite Ada's vehement protests. Baines asks Stewart if Ada can teach him to play the piano, and Stewart agrees. And so the scene is set for Baines to offer Ada the return of her piano, if she agrees to perform certain sexual favors for him. His initial requests appear quite tame, in contrast to the wilderness surrounding the hut where Ada plays her compositions at the keyboard, removing more articles of clothing at each lesson, while Baines drinks in the sight, sound and scent of her. Ada does perform the required acts, but with an emotional reserve that frustrates Baines. He tells her that the piano is hers and no further need for the pretense of lessons:The arrangement is making you a whore and me wretched. I want you to care for me, but you can't.

Perhaps it is that admission, that Baines wants more than sexual gratification, that frees Ada from her reserve. As she has shed her carapace of corset, hoopskirt, and pantaloons, she silently considers her feelings for Baines as well as her husband. By the time Baines is ready to end their wretched-making arrangement, she is ready to dispense with the bartering and offer herself as a woman and accept Baines as a man.

The Piano is set in the mid-19th century in a colonial settlement that has imported Victorian morality and sentamentality along with the the flowered teacups and starched linens. A child born out of wedlock has reduced Ada's matrimonial value, and so she ends up at the other end of the earth, married to a man she has never met and would probably never choose. She has every reason to hide behind an emotional reserve when she barters with Baines, for her punishment for adultery will be severe and Ada will pay with her portion of flesh.

What is even sadder is that 150 years later, women are still being urged to withhold sex until that elusive promise of marriage to the decent man has been secured. Listen in on this disconcerting conversation between Always Aroused Girl and her mother:

I hope you find a good man to take care of you and the children someday, honey. You deserve it.” My mother said this to me last week as we sat on the couch watching the little ones play.

“We’ll see, Mom,” I said, then turned to pick up a baby. I’d hoped she’d be distracted enough to drop the topic. I was loath to have a conversation with her about what sort of “good man” I’d been seeing or about what I did or didn’t deserve.

“What do you mean you’ll see? Don’t you want to be with someone who really loves you?”

I already am, I thought.

I only said, “Of course. But taking care of me and the children? That’s something I’d be really cautious about pursuing. The last thing I’d want to do is bring around a man who might or might not be around long-term, have the children get attached to him, and then have things end between us. I can handle that, but I wouldn’t want the kids to be in that situation.”

My mom didn’t even pause to think about it. “This is why you have to take things slowly. Don’t get carried away with some guy before he makes a commitment to you. Make him work for it. Why buy a cow when the milk is free?”

Two decades ago this exact same phrase was drilled into my head at every opportunity. I didn’t buy it then and I certainly don’t buy it today.

If I could single out the one vital support column for the pathetic structure known as the "no-sex" class, this is what I would point to: this practice of bartering sex so that a woman can remain "respectable." While figleaf has taken men to task for refusing to see women as adults with a full range of sexual needs, desires and fantasies, I take to task the women who shame or ridicule other women who refuse to play this antiquated game of respectability.

Caryatids Marilyn French called them: these women, like AAG's mother, who stand like edifices supporting the patriarchal status quo. Some of them do so with the best of intentions, for they fear that a woman with children and no husband is in a precarious financial position, and they are right: women and children make up the largest component of people living below the poverty level in the U.S. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, of the 36 million Americans living below the poverty level in 2006, more than 24 million are women and children.

But the welfare of children is not the primary motive for the shaming of girls and women who became pregnant out of wedlock. In her review of Ann Fessler's book, The Girls Who Went Away, Carolyn McConnell explains how this stigma of shame was reinforced in the U.S. in the 1950's and 1960's:

Fessler explains that the postwar era was a time of upward social mobility and therefore of anxiety about class. Families that had recently reached the middle class feared their new status would be ruined by a daughter pregnant out of wedlock... In their fear of ostracism, families treated pregnant daughters with startling cruelty, as Fessler's stories show in heartbreaking detail. Perhaps the most poignant feature of these stories is how many mothers pushed their daughters away in their deepest time of need. Yet the men and boys who got them pregnant paid little or no price.

How was this message of shame delivered by mothers and older sisters to their daughters and younger siblings? What I recall from this time was the contempt expressed for any girl who was reputed to go all the way before marriage: "That's the only way she could get a date." According to the conventional wisdom of the day, any girl who had sex before marriage or at least an engagement, was obviously too ugly, too dumb, or too desperate to keep a guy around until he proposed marriage. The underlying message was, "Forget about your own desires: this is serious business and the stakes are high for you and your family. Don't screw up, because once you do, no decent man will want you." To younger generations this reasoning must sound as absurd as it really is. However, if contemporary women are reluctant to disclose the true number of their sexual partners, rest assured the shame mechanism remains in full operation, even if its calibrations have been adjusted slightly.

Shaming keeps people in line and for generations of women, it worked. I cannot think of a more effective way to make a woman distance herself from her own sexuality as this threat of disgrace should she ever let down her guard. It took many years for me to realize my enjoyment of sex depends upon my ability to open myself physically and emotionally to my partner. Difficult to manage if you fear that asking for sex too often or enjoying it too much will increase your slut rating.

I remember one party that I attended soon after graduating from high school. I went to the party with two girlfriends, staunch virgins who vowed they would never end up like some '57 Chevy, passed around from guy to guy. It was the late 1960's and more American troops were being deployed in Vietnam. There were several sailors at the party, all scheduled to depart the next day for their first tour of duty off the coast of Vietnam and Cambodia. Loud music, lots of beer, but an uneasy mood.

I found myself outside in the cold evening air with one of the sailors, who had no interest in my banter. He was all hard-on-the-mouth kisses and fondling that was no longer gentle. But when my friends told me they were leaving, it seemed I had no choice but to leave with them. I had no other way to get back and if I stayed, someone would call my parents and there would be hell to pay when I got home.

I never knew what became of him, for I did not even know his full name. But I can tell you this: I wish I had stayed that night. In my heart of hearts, I wished I had fucked him before he left.

If you journey through the blogosphere and visit the ports-of-call known as the sex blogs, and if you read carefully what is written there, you will discover that a fair number of sex bloggers, both men and women, have written about their experiences of abuse: physical, emotional or sexual; during childhood or adulthood. Some observers might scoff and say this is evidence of the victim mentality of modern culture. While it may be true, as one psychiatrist has said, that "the statute of limitations has expired on most of our childhood traumas," that may not be case with early childhood abuse or neglect. The act of writing, in the anonymous media of a web journal, may be an essential part of the writer's healing process. The reason why this is so can be attributed to the different types of memory.

In the nineteenth century, the psychiatrist Pierre Janet suggested that one of the most basic activities of the mind was the sorting and storing of sensory information into memory, and retrieving that information when needed. He noted that certain types of sensations did not follow this basic pattern. He theorized that painful events produce intense emotions which are repressed, and not retrieved like other stored data. These memories of trauma are retrieved as sensations: unexplained fear; somatic symptoms of stress such as headaches or high blood pressure; visual images in nightmares or flashbacks.

Joan Borysenko, Ph.D., cofounder and former director of the Mind/Body Clinic of Harvard Medical School explains this process of repression as follows:

Repression can occur because there are two types of memory. The usual kind is called semantic or declarative memory, which is stored in the words through which we recall events. This storytelling mode of memory hinges of the ability to verbalize our experience, encode the memory traces in a part of the brain called the hippocampus, and then consciously fit the memory into the scheme of our existing experiences. Since semantic memory doesn't occur until we are old enough to speak, we can't generally recall much before the age of three or four. We do, however, have memories of that time encoded in a different system that stores images, or icons, of our experience. The early childhood memory system relies on the amygdala, which is also the storage site for emotionally charged or traumatic memories. The icons, or visual representations, do not fade over time as semantic memory does. And while semantic memory falters under stress, the iconic memories surface: whereas semantic memories are linear and rational, iconic memories are timeless. They are as strong today as they were when they were first engraved by the neurotransmitters within the amygdala.

Borysenko also states that "conscious censors," which keep the repressed memories at bay, weaken as we age. So while we may seem to have placed the horrors of childhood behind us, with careers and accomplishments in early adulthood, traumatic memories often emerge, inexplicably it would seem, in the late thirties and forties.

It does not take a major occurrence of a new trauma to make the repressed memory rise to the surface. Something in a current event, even the feeling of acute stress -- a dispute with a boss, a car accident, the nighttime crying of a teething baby -- is an echo which reminds us of the original event, the images of which have been dormant.

Borysenko refers to the work of Bessel Van der Kolk, a psychiatrist at Harvard, to provide the following explanation:

Research has shown that, under ordinary conditions, many traumatized people, including rape victims, battered women and abused children, have a fairly good psychosocial adjustment. However, they do not respond to stress the way other people do. Under pressure, they may feel, or act as if they were traumatized all over again. Thus, high states of arousal seem to selectively promote retrieval of traumatic memories, sensory information, or behaviors associated with prior traumatic experiences.

Because we seek the comfort of the familiar when we relive the emotions of a past trauma, we may inexplicably choose to remain in a toxic or abusive situation, when rationally we should leave as fast as we can. So how do we stop this endless cycle that is controlled by memories we did not know we possessed?

Through therapy, by which we try to make sense of our feelings and emotions with the guidance of a professional. Some trauma victims will repeatedly tell their stories to friends or family, or write them in a journal. Boryshenko gave this poignant example:

When my father, ill with cancer, ended his life by jumping from a thirty-seventh story window, my mother was emotionally devastated. She told and retold her story to anyone who would listen. Some of the family became concerned that the constant repetition would do her more harm than good. But speaking and being listened to heals. It actually changes our neural circuitry, as does touch.
To speak, to be heard, and to be held are basic to healing, as is the creation of meaning.

While the anonymous web journal can provide the survivor of past trauma a medium with which to tell his/her story, and to hear the stories of other survivors, it has an inherent risk. The anonymous reader may be bolder than he or she would ever be in person. Remarks that would never be made if speaker and listener were face to face have become commonplace in the blogosphere. If the listener had to stifle contempt or disbelief in the past, with this new anonymity he or she has no such compunction. And so the survivor may choose to remain silent rather than experience the shame of being questioned, dismissed, or ridiculed.

How does one provide a safe place for the unfinished stories that need to be told? While some blog owners feel that censoring comments may infringe upon free speech, I think there are a sufficient number of venues where caustic remarks and diatribes will pass for wit. Advise such commenters to go there and good riddance.

And if by chance you come across such a story, told by someone whom you know could "never" be your friend, whose opinions you vehemently oppose, take a moment before you compose that witty, acerbic comment. Remember that even your enemy is entitled to this: to speak, to be heard, and to be held.

Sources:
The Body Keeps The Score:Memory and the Evolving Psychobiology of Post Traumatic Stress by Bessel van der Kolk
http://www.trauma-pages.com/a/vanderk4.php

A Woman's Book of Life: The Biology, Psychology, and Spirituality of the Feminine Life Cycle by Joan Borysenko, Ph.D.

If you have not visited the new site for Sex In the Public Square.org, I highly recommend that you do so. Elizabeth Wood of SexinthePublicSquare.com has teamed up with Chris Hall of Literate Perversions and Tom Joaquin of The Free Lance to create a place where people can freely write and talk about sexuality. The new site features forums, book reviews, a calendar of events, posts and links to various sex blogs. The mission statement of Sex in the Public Square.org states:

We believe that sexuality is a fundamental component of human life, and that it cannot be excluded from "polite conversation" without losing an important element of democratic participation. We are working to expand the space available for discussions of all aspects of sexuality, and to build communities where respect and inclusion are the norm. We also believe that talk about sex needn't always be "serious" in order to be "appropriate" and we welcome playful conversations that focus on the fun of sex as well as serious conversations that focus on things like policy, safety, and identity.

In 2006 Illinois adopted the Predator Accountability Act, which allows victims of the sex trade to sue those people who perpetuate and profit from the exploitation of women, men and children. Under the Predator Accountability Act, victims of the sex trade are granted the right to sue pimps, brothels and customers. People who can sue include adults and children who have been solicited, threatened or forced to act as a prostitute, persons who have been sexually exploited and those who have appeared in obscene materials or materials constituting child pornography, and people who have been trafficked. The remedies available to these victims include compensatory damages (money), punitive damages and attorneys’ fees. This law gives the sex workers rights under civil law which the existing current criminal code does not provide. The new law provides that the person being sued may not raise as a defense the fact that the victim consented to the conduct, that the victim was paid for the conduct, that the victim did not flee, that the conduct was not violent, or the fact that the conduct only happened one time -- thus recognizing how victims will behave to protect themselves or others. The victim has ten years after the last act involving the sex trade to bring a lawsuit in the civil courts. Unlike many well-intentioned projects undertaken by social activists, this law may help rather than hurt sex workers.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the reason why this bill was passed in Illinois was due to the lobbying efforts by sex workers. One of the most effective messages in the lobbying campaign was a documentary entitled Turning A Corner produced by Beyondmedia Education, which tells the stories of people involved in Chicago's sex trade by recounting their survival and triumph over homelessness, violence and discrimination. Created in a media activism workshop with over a dozen members of Prostitution Alternatives Round Table (PART), Turning a Corner is a powerful film in which Lucretia Clay, a prostitute for 26 years, describes how she was kidnapped and raped while her pimp sat in a car, watched, and did nothing. Brenda Myers-Powell, a former prostitute turned activist who was stabbed and shot five times, describes how she was ignored by police after she was attacked by a serial killer who was targeting prostitutes in Chicago's impoverished Englewood community.

According to Salome Chasnoff, executive director of Beyondmedia, "Prostitution seems to be the nexus of a number of intersecting human rights issues, from domestic violence to health to criminalization to labor rights. Women in prostitution are on the lowest rung of the hierarchy in this society, the object of so many kinds of discrimination."

Beyondmedia Education's mission is to

...collaborate with under-served and under-represented women, youth and communities to tell their stories, connect their stories to the world around us, and organize for social justice through the creation and distribution of alternative media and arts. Beyondmedia Education works with communities most in need of media education and services because of economic and/or social exclusion. Since 1996, we have partnered with over 100 community-based organizations and schools to produce media arts on subjects ranging from girls' activism to women's incarceration.

True to its mission, Beyondmedia has a stunning list of accomplishments:

Through Beyondmedia's Women and Prison program, incarcerated women and girls, former prisoners and their families use media arts to voice their stories, promoting public dialogue, healing and community organizing. Since 1997, Beyondmedia has collaborated extensively with women and girls in prison and after their incarceration to create interdisciplinary, multimedia educational forums on women and prison. I would also recommend that you read The Sex Trade and Feminism, An Interview with Ann Russo, director of Women and Gender Studies at Depaul University. Russo provides a balanced and informative recap of the emergence of different views on the sex industry within the feminist movement. Russo also serves on the board of the Young Women's Empowerment Project, a harm reduction organization which provides a safe, non-judgmental space for young women and girls involved in street prostitution in Chicago.

The mission of Q’d In Media is to support queer and allied youth organizing and community building, combat homophobia in the many communities where queer youth live, learn and struggle, and make the real and complicated lives of queer youth visible to a larger public.

Another video production is Doin' It: Sex, Disability, And Videotape. The Empowered Fe Fes, a peer group of young women aged 16 to 24 with different disabilities provide an insightful investigation into the truths about sex and disability. In the video, the Fe Fes educate themselves about sex from many angles by talking with activists and scholars. The viewer tags along on a date between a woman with a disability and her able-bodied boyfriend, exploring relationship issues of dating with a disability over a candle-lit dinner.

Beyondmedia Education and the production of Turning a Corner is just one of the many organizations and projects funded by the Chicago Foundation for Women (CFW) . Since 1986, CFW has granted over $13 million to over 2,300 organizations that serve women and children. I mention this because IMO this is what feminism is about. Not long discussions about what does or does not hurt women or men or children, but giving people the support and resources to change their lives.

Note: When I referred to "long discussion about what does or does not hurt women or men or children" I am not suggesting that discussions examining our beliefs about sex are not valuable. I would not be posting here if I did not consider such analysis valuable. But to be a viable movement, IMO, feminism cannot exist solely as an academic exercise. It must result in action.