| Friday, July 8, 2005 |  |
| Sex Slaves Freed in Russia | 0 comments |
| 8 Jul 2005 @ 06:43 We must never give up the fight to end misogyny and the dreadful symptoms of patriarchy. This is why..... 72 female sex slaves were freed by the police during the special operation in Primorsky Area of Russian Far East. The criminals were going to sell the girls abroad for prostitution, said Head of Russian Interior Ministry Rashid Nurgaliev at the meeting of the Head of Interior Ministries of CIS countries in Chisinau. According to the Minister, the criminals supplied the sex-slaves - girls from Russia and the other countries of the former USSR - to North America, Asia and Africa. The girls prepared for being sold abroad, were placed in the special bunker, the criminals deprived them of their passports and forced them to be prostitutes. The annual profit from trading people, predominantly sex-slaves, is up to $7 billion, said experts during the panel discussion in Izvestia newspaper. Every year up to 700,000 women are trafficked for sex slavery. Trading people is the third business on revenues after trading drugs and weapons, said the experts. Source: Pravda |
| Thursday, May 12, 2005 | |
| The Casanova Complex | 1 comment |
| 12 May 2005 @ 17:07 The Casanova Complex and the Women Who Love Them Peter Trachtenburg Book summarized by Lynne Namka Writer Peter Trachtenburg surveyed many men who admitted to having affairs and came up with patterns of emptiness in men who could not be faithful. The Casanova Complex of having affairs is more than a way of acting sexually--it is sexual addiction where a major portion of time the man's time is spent thinking about and pursuing sexual activities. Trachtenburg, who says he has this disorder says, "Any behavior that is used to anesthized pain is likely to become addictive." The need to womanize is a disorder of the feelings characterized by a man's compulsive and addictive--pursuit and abandonment of women or by symbolic flight through infidelity and multiple relationships." The man who has sexual addiction cannot allow feeling the deep pain within and his primary drug of choice becomes women. In this sexual addiction, the man sees women as good and bad--Madonna's and whores. In the chase of the new partner, he longs for the good mother. As the relationship cools, she becomes the castrating mother. After the chase and catch, he must discard her when the threat to himself becomes too great as he cannot deal with intimacy. Ongoing affairs are a pattern of conquering and manipulating women. According to Trachtenburg, there is an underlying personality disorder of narcissism in these men. In the early years there may have been a devouring, nonnuturing, rejecting mother and an ineffectual, emotionally distant father. The child's ego splits into two parts: (1) A false self which meets the parent's approval because the child is complaint and becomes a little adult meeting the demands of the dysfunctional system. (2) The true self of the child gives up and is withdrawn inward. As the boy grows up he seeks girls and women with haste and an intense courtship. Men with sexual addictions can be very charming, highly romantic and are masters of instant intimacy. This instant intimacy makes the woman feel special, singled out and valued giving them a rush... The hurry gives the man a relationship rush. The man needs to cement the liaison quickly as he knows that the "bloom" will fade soon. There is emotional fusion due to sharing the erotic excitement and the pseudo-opening of the self. The man sets up a dependence on the woman for nurturance, acceptance and excitement. His relationship with the primary woman (usually his wife) in his life becomes symbiotic. He fears fusion or being sucked into the woman. Affairs are seen as the means of escaping commitment and the sense of being smothered and consumed by the wife. There may be fear of his becoming femininized so he must act out sexually to prove his masculinity. The man flees intimacy and he is frightened of vulnerability. He is afraid of being truly himself with another human being. He is incapable of being himself and has a damaged capacity for connecting on a deep level in a long term relationship. Intimacy feels like being devoured by the woman. He feels invaded, possessed. Normal requests by the woman are seen as demands. The man must withdraw quickly to protect his fragile ego so that he does not get burned, leaving behind a string of broken hearts. Mutual Complicity in the Marriage --Let's Agree This Isn't Happening When the affairs start in a marriage, the man will often deny any wrong doing. The system is a closed one of complicity. After the wife initially confronts the man, she turns to not seeing the continual infidelity as a way of coping with the truth. She compromises herself and increases the rift of communication between them. Silence and feelings of deep shame build and both agree to keep the family secrets of dysfunction. Both man and wife avoid conflict around the issue and the husband is protected by nondisclosure. There is mutual complicity--both agree not to talk about it or turn it over for problem solving. There may be a policing stage on the wife's part where she tries to monitor and check up. There may be anger at the other woman instead of looking at the relationship realistically and see the irresponsibility of the man. The wife may try to appease and win back the man's flagging interest in her, but no matter what she does, she cannot change his sexual addiction. She may revert back to childhood roles of helplessness and powerlessness to leave the relationship. She needs to be needed. She denies the pain of her own childhood. She confuses her own desire for dependence and the need to be needed. Her rescuing behaviors are merely attempts to control the situation. Some of the children in the family pick up this pattern and then act them out in their adult lives. Others marry partners with the sexual acting out pattern. Sexual addiction is thus passed as a pattern to the younger generations. Trachtenburg spends the rest of the book describing how a man can get out of sexual addiction through admitting his problem and making the decision to address it by attending a 12 step program and confronting the addiction. <:::>><<:::>><<:::>><<:::>><<:::>><<:::>><<:: Dr. Patrick Carnes' Resources for Sex Addiction & Recovery... Patrick Carnes is an international authority of sexual addiction at The Meadows, a recovery treatment center here in Arizona. The following are a series of statements which describe traumatic bonding in which a person bonds with an unfaithful or abusive partner on the basis of betrayal. This unhealthy pattern is what Patrick Carnes calls a "Betrayal Bond". The "Betrayal Bond" Index (Here are the first 15 of the 30 Question Quiz) Yes No Do you obsess about people who have hurt you even through they are long gone? Yes No Do you continue to seek contact with people whom you know will cause you further pain? Yes No Do you go "overboard" to help people who have been destructive to you? Yes No Do you continue to be a "team" member when obviously things are becoming destructive? Yes No Do you continue attempts to get people to like you who are clearly using you? Yes No Do you trust people again and again who are proven to be unreliable? Yes No Are you unable to retreat from unhealthy relationships? Yes No Do you try to be understood by those who clearly do not care? Yes No Do you choose to stay in conflict with others when it would cost you nothing to walk away? Yes No Do you persist in trying to convince people that there is a problem and they are not willing to listen? Yes No Are you loyal to people who have betrayed you? Yes No Do you attract untrustworthy people? Yes No Have you kept damaging secrets about exploitation or abuse? Yes No Do you continue contact with an abuser who acknowledges no responsibility? Yes No Do you find yourself covering up, defending, or explaining a relationship? Go the SexHelp.com to take this complete quiz on line and access Patrick Carnes' books on The Betrayal Bond, Don't Call It Love, Out of the Shadows--on Internet Sexual Addiction and other informative books on sexual addiction. More > |
| Tuesday, December 2, 2003 | |
| Women Needed to Test Orgasm Machine | 14 comments |
| 2 Dec 2003 @ 12:08 Women Needed to Test Orgasm Machine 11-28-3 LONDON (Reuters) No, really. An American surgeon who has patented a device that triggers an orgasm has begun a clinical trial approved by the Food and Drug Administration in the United States and is looking for female volunteers. "I thought people would be beating my door down to become part of the trial," pain specialist Dr Stuart Meloy told New Scientist magazine on Wednesday. But so far only one woman has completed the first stage of the trial, with apparently breathtaking results, and a second has agreed to take part. Meloy, of Piedmont Anesthesia and Pain Consultants in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is hoping to find eight more volunteers willing to have electrodes inserted in their spine and be connected to a pacemaker-size machine implanted under the skin to heighten their sexual pleasure. The married woman who tested the machine, dubbed an orgasmatron, had not had an orgasm for four years. But during the nine days she used it, she had several. "She even told me she had the first multiple orgasm of her life using the device," said Meloy. He stumbled on the unexpected side-effect while using a spinal cord stimulator a few years ago to treat a patient suffering with severe back pain. The woman had already had back surgery for degenerative disk disease and fusion surgery. When Meloy placed the electrodes into a specific spot on her spine to find nerve bundles carrying pain signals to the brain, she moaned with delight. "You're going to have to teach my husband how to do that," he quoted her as saying. The tiny impulses of electricity applied to the electrodes seemed to have turned on the patient's orgasm button. Although the device has been compared to the orgasmatron featured in the 1973 Woody Allen film "Sleeper," Meloy envisions patients using it temporarily to retrain their sexual response. The women in the trial described it as "really excellent foreplay." Although some medical experts are skeptical about the procedure and say a vibrator can produce the same results, Meloy believes it could help to improve sexual response in women who cannot have orgasms and might even help men as well. A full implant of the device would cost about 13,000 pounds ($22,000). "I don't see it any differently from procedures such as breast implants," Meloy told the magazine. More > |
| Tuesday, August 12, 2003 | |
| Increase In Teen Prostitution | 2 comments |
 12 Aug 2003 @ 13:39LAW-ENFORCEMENT OFFICIALS NOTE MARKED NATIONWIDE INCREASE IN TEEN PROSTITUTION; TRENDS SHOW KIDS GETTING YOUNGER, MORE FROM MIDDLE-CLASS HOMES Newsweek August 18, 2003 Issue NEW YORK, Aug. 10 /PRNewswire/ -- Over the last year, local and federal law-enforcement officials say they have noted a marked increase in teen prostitution in cities across the country, reports Assistant Editor Suzanne Smalley in the August 18 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, August 11). Law-enforcement agencies and advocacy groups that work with teen prostitutes say they are increasingly alarmed by the trend lines: the kids are getting younger; according to the FBI, the average age of a new recruit is just 13; some are as young as 9. And, while the vast majority of teen prostitutes today are runaways, illegal immigrants and children of poor urban areas, experts say a growing number now come from middle-class homes. "Compared to three years ago, we've seen a 70 percent increase in kids are from middle- to upper-middle-class backgrounds, many of whom have not suffered mental, sexual or physical abuse," says Frank Barnaba of the Paul & Lisa Program, which works with the Justice Department and the FBI in tracking exploited kids. Child advocates are especially concerned that pimps are increasingly targeting girls at the local mall, a place many parents consider a haven for their kids to gather after school and on weekends. "Ten years ago you didn't see this happening," says Bob Flores, who heads the Justice Department's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. "We've got kids in every major city and in suburbia all over the place being prostituted." "Potentially good sex is a small price to pay for the freedom to spend money on what I want," says 17-year-old Stacey [not her real name], who liked to hang out after school at the Mall of America, Minnesota's vast shopping megaplex, Newsweek reports. After being approached last summer by a man who told her how pretty she was, and asked if he could buy her some clothes, Stacey agreed and went home that night with a $250 outfit. Stacey, who lives with her parents in an upscale neighborhood, began stripping for men in hotel rooms -- then went on to more intimate activities. She placed ads on a local telephone personals service, offering "wealthy, generous" men "an evening of fun" for $400. (The Mall of America, whose spokesman declined to comment, has an extensive security operation, and rules requiring juveniles to have chaperones on weekend evenings. Law-enforcement officials, who praise the mall's efforts to combat the problem, nonetheless concede pimps are active there. "The Mall of America is a huge recruiting center," says FBI Special Agent Eileen Jacob.) Child advocates are just as worried about, and puzzled by, girls like Stacey, who aren't forced into prostitution but instead appear to sell themselves for thrills, or money, or both. Richard Estes, a University of Pennsylvania researcher, says so-called designer sex is becoming more common in cities across the country. "Everyone thinks they are runaways with drug problems from the inner city," says Andy Schmidt, a Minneapolis detective who helped bust a major Twin Cities prostitution ring. "It's not true. This could be your kid." In response, local, state and federal officials are starting to clamp down on the crime, which is still treated as a minor offense in many cities. The FBI, working with the National Center of Missing and Exploited Children, recently identified 13 cities-including Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York, Chicago, Miami, Minneapolis and Dallas-that have juvenile-prostitution problems. More > |
| Monday, July 14, 2003 | |
| In Favor Of Sexual Pluralism | 37 comments |
 14 Jul 2003 @ 00:06Leif Ueland, Nerve.com An ambivalent heterosexual comes out in favor of sexual pluralism... Trials of a Gay-Seeming Straight Male By Leif Ueland, Nerve.com August 5, 2002 I am sitting on her lap as she plays with my hair. I've got a longish late-70s do, and the strands are blond and baby-fine. She runs her fingers through them, massages my scalp. She is a beautiful girl, probably sixteen, with white poreless skin, full eyebrows, a disarming stare and the naturally red lips for which Snow White was famed. At our performing arts school, run by a renowned theater in the Midwest, we wear black karate pants and gray t-shirts with a bluebird on the front, but she has cut a small V in the neck of her shirt. It's thanks to the V and the way her arms are raised to work on my scalp and the angle at which she is holding my head and the fact that she isn't wearing a bra that I can see her breasts, study them, without worrying that I'll be caught. Her voice is smoker-gravely and she speaks with flawed grammar and an ease with profanity that to my suburban ears is very cool. "Leif, you're not going to be one of them, are you?" I laugh, it tickles. "Huh? Are you? Leif? Listen to me. Promise me. You're not . . . won't . . . be gay. Promise me." I turn back to her. Inside the shirt, her nipples have stiffened, extended. My cheeks flush deeply, feverishly. "I promise." I am apparently not the straightest-seeming guy you could ever meet. I don't know what it is about me – my pierced ears and pageboy haircut, perhaps, or maybe I'm just too clean. For whatever reason, my heterosexuality is frequently called into question. It happens all of the time. A total stranger will approach me, usually in a straight bar, and say "My friends wanted to know if you're gay or straight?" I feel like I'm in a Kafka novel as adapted for the screen by Woody Allen. How am I to respond? If I say I'm straight, isn't that exactly what George Michael used to say? And if I indicate that I am a practicing heterosexual, won't they then assume that I am headed toward an inevitable sexual epiphany, akin to the great John Cheever's? Most recently I joked, "I'm totally straight, but I can't resist sucking the occasional cock." It certainly ended the conversation. When I told a good female friend I was writing about the topic of my misunderstood sexuality she said without a second's hesitation, "Oh yeah, everyone thinks you're gay." To the best of my knowledge I'm straight, but the question is hurled at me so frequently that I'm beginning to think everyone knows something I don't. Sometimes, if there's a point, I'm willing to go along and play gay. Last summer, I was doing research in a Carnegie library in a small Midwestern town, a place best known for hosting the national lumberjack championships, when I noticed an adolescent boy between rows of books fixating on me. Taking in his delicate features, ivory skin and black clothes, I thought to myself, town loner, doesn't yet know he's gay, feels a connection with the effeminate stranger. Not wanting to interrupt my work, I was relieved when he disappeared. Fifteen minutes later, though, he was back and bearing a gift. Blushing to his ears, he presented me with a scalding café latté from the town's new and only gourmet coffee joint. There was no point in explaining the misunderstanding, so while I drank the coffee, we cryptically discussed the difficulties of being different, talked around the terrifying subject. Gay-and-understanding-me encouraged him to hang on until eighteen and then get the hell out of town. Until being sworn to heterosexuality by that suburban Snow White, the possibility that I might be gay never even occurred to me. I'd always had girlfriends – from the vixen in first grade who, after some discussion, let me go so far as kissing her index finger, to the girlfriend in seventh grade who sanctioned a visit to "second base." I spent more time wondering if I was a vampire. Only in high school, when a trusted older friend and homosexual told me, "One morning you just wake up and you know," did I start to suspect that homosexuality was not a question of choice. This was an explosive, frightening thought, with one unavoidable implication: I might be gay! Me, the kid with all the girlfriends, the reacher of second base, the suburbanite with loving parents and a great family, I might be, I might . . . That was the beginning of a lot of adolescent soul-searching. But even now when I replay every kiss, grope, or penetration of my first thirty-two years, all I see are females. Even leafing through the scrims behind my countless solo sexual efforts, I only come up with women, just one depraved fantasy after another. Granted, throw dreams into the mix and we may have something there; I am willing to concede that I may have had a handful in which it suddenly dawned on me, "Hey, that's no woman, that's the guy who fixes my car!" just as I would have to admit there have been relatives, minors, family pets, inanimate objects and a brief but very kinky cameo by a genderless character who called himself Satan. The doubting continued until one morning in tenth grade when I woke up soaking in what I initially misdiagnosed as a bed-wetting relapse. As the dream came back to me I felt something akin to what Zora Neale Hurston described as the pride of finding a first pubic hair when I realized that though the vision had not been Farah, it was a woman, and a relief on so many levels. Finally, at seventeen I had a serious girlfriend. Fellow neophytes, we would fall deeply, crazily in love, lose our virginity together and be a couple for the next seven years. Like all males, I couldn't wait to tell my friends after the first time, and was thankful that the issue was apparently settled, but mostly I was just overwhelmed by the power of emotional and physical love that converged when I was with her. It seemed it would vaporize me. I have to think that those feelings at least make me bi. To be frank, I am sick to death of this topic. I have been suppressing my homosexuality for so long it cuts too close to the bone. Just kidding! The fact is I don't particularly mind that what everyone's really trying to say is, "Leif, you are a gay man in denial." What drives me crazy is that they say these things with an air of not having their own secrets, aspects of their own sexuality that don't conform to whatever the cookie-cutter conception of normal sex is. I feel a strong bond with my fellow gay-seeming straight males. I especially treasure the virtual queens who exhibit the mating habits of the homo sapien heterosexual. Strange as it may seem, there is such a category. I'm tempted to propose we all start a club or a support group and print up t-shirts that scream, I LOVE THE VAGINA EXPERIENCE! I prize my gay-seeming straight male friends so much that when one of them crosses over to gay-seeming gay male, as not infrequently happens, I go through a little mourning, realizing as I do that they have just made it a little harder for the world to buy my sexuality. Most recently it was an old college friend. Talk about gay-seeming – tall, handsome, former male model, voice well-suited for the fading matriarch of a clan in a Tennessee Williams play . . . He announced recently that he was divorcing his wife and was not, in fact, straight. In hindsight, there was always something forced about his collegiate stories of female conquest, like a teenage boy feigning enthusiasm for the taste of beer. I think I wanted to believe almost as much as he did. I feel the same way about the other side: straight-seeming gay males. I sometimes go to a dance club where they are everywhere – young guys I could swear were straight, except for the fact that they are all kissing each other. A woman I'd brought once cut in on such a couple and started making out with one of the guys. He took a pause and said, "You know I'm gay, right?" To which she responded, "Of course." The shocking thing is that I think of myself and all my mixed-signal comrades as the normal ones. I wonder about everyone else, all the people who seem compelled to keep their mannerisms, interests and selves marching in step with the mores expected of their sexuality. How scary is that? And to be honest, I harbor the sneaking suspicion that my team represents the future, when the masses, including homosexuals, come to honestly accept the full range of sexual nuance. In the meantime, I think I know what might help. There's a scene in a movie, or perhaps it was a comedic sketch, where the obviously gay character is accused of being gay. He nervously laughs, "Well, well, if I'm gay, well they're going to have to change the definition." Maybe what my people need is a new definition, a nice user-friendly label. Something that says, "not gay, but not straight in the way to which you're accustomed, and maybe not even willing to rule out the possibility of being gay in the future." I've been using "gay-seeming straight male," but since that's unwieldy, perhaps we could go with the abbreviation: GSSM. I guess that would be pronounced "jism," as in "No, I'm not gay, but I am jism." On second thought, maybe labels are not the answer. (Leif Ueland received a Master's Degree in the Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California. He has written for public radio's Marketplace and several newspapers, and had a play produced in Minneapolis. His first book, Accidental Playboy, will be published by Warner books in November 2002 More > |
| Saturday, June 28, 2003 | |
| We're Not In The Mood | 0 comments |
 28 Jun 2003 @ 15:54WE¹RE NOT IN THE MOOD By Kathleen Deveny With Holly Peterson, Pat Wingert, Karen Springen, Julie Scelfo, Melissa Brewster, Tara Weingarten and Joan Raymond Newsweek June 30 Issue For married couples with kids and busy jobs, sex just isn¹t what it used to be. How stress causes strife in the bedroom -- and beyond For Maddie Weinreich, sex had always been a joy. It helped her recharge her batteries and reconnect with her husband, Roger. But teaching yoga, raising two kids and starting up a business -- not to mention cooking, cleaning and renovating the house -- left her exhausted. She often went to bed before her husband, and was asleep by the time he joined her. Their once steamy love life slowly cooled. When Roger wanted to have sex, she would say she was too beat. He tried to be romantic; to set the mood he'd light a candle in their bedroom. "I would see it and say, 'Oh, God, not that candle'," Maddie recalls. "It was just the feeling that I had to give something I didn't have." Lately, it seems, we're just not in the mood. We're overworked, anxious about the economy -- and we have to drive our kids to way too many T-Ball games. Or maybe it's all those libido-dimming antidepressants we're taking. We resent spouses who never pick up the groceries or their dirty socks. And if we actually find we have 20 minutes at the end of the day -- after bath time and story time and juice-box time and e-mail time -- who wouldn't rather zone out to Leno than have sex? Sure, passion ebbs and flows in even the healthiest of relationships, but judging from the conversation of the young moms at the next table at Starbucks, it sounds like we're in the midst of a long dry spell. It's difficult to say exactly how many of the 113 million married Americans are too exhausted or too grumpy to get it on, but some psychologists estimate that 15 to 20 percent of couples have sex no more than 10 times a year, which is how the experts define sexless marriage. And even couples who don't meet that definition still feel like they're not having sex as often as they used to. Despite the stereotype that women are more likely to dodge sex, it's often the men who decline. The number of sexless marriages is "a grossly underreported statistic," says therapist Michele Weiner Davis, author of "The Sex-Starved Marriage." If so, the problem must be huge, given how much we already hear about it. Books like "The Sex-Starved Marriage," "Rekindling Desire: A Step-by-Step Program to Help Low-Sex and No-Sex Marriages" and "Resurrecting Sex" have become talk-show fodder. Dr. Phil has weighed in on the crisis; his Web site proclaims "the epidemic is undeniable." Avlimil, an herbal concoction that promises to help women put sex back into sexless marriage, had sales of 200,000 packages in January, its first month on the market. The company says it's swamped with as many as 3,000 calls a day from women who are desperately seeking desire. Not that the problem is confined to New Agers: former U.S. Labor secretary Robert Reich jokes about the pressure couples are under in speeches he gives on overworked Americans. Have you heard of DINS? he asks his audience. It stands for dual income, no sex. Marriage counselors can't tell you how much sex you should be having, but most agree that you should be having some. Sex is only a small part of a good union, but happy marriages usually include it. Frequency of sex may be a measure of a marriage's long-term health; if it suddenly starts to decline, it can be a leading indicator of deeper problems, just like "those delicate green frogs that let us know when we're destroying the environment," says psychologist John Gottman, who runs the Family Research Lab (dubbed the Love Lab) at the University of Washington. Marriage pros say intimacy is often the glue that holds a couple together over time. If either member of a couple is miserable with the amount of sex in a marriage, it can cause devastating problems -- and, in some cases, divorce. It can affect moods and spill over into all aspects of life -- relationships with other family members, even performance in the office. Best-selling novels and prime-time sit-coms only reinforce the idea that we're not having sex. In the opening pages of Allison Pearson's portrait of a frazzled working mom, "I Don't Know How She Does It," the novel's heroine, Kate Reddy, carefully brushes each of her molars 20 times. She's not fighting cavities. She's stalling in the hopes that her husband will fall asleep and won't try to have sex with her. (That way, she can skip a shower the next morning.) And what would Ray Romano joke about on his hit series "Everybody Loves Raymond" if he didn't have to wheedle sex out of his TV wife? Romano, who has four kids, including 10-year-old twins, says his comedy is inspired by real life. "After kids, everything changes," he told NEWSWEEK. "We're having sex about every three months. If I have sex, I know my quarterly estimated taxes must be due. And if it's oral sex, I know it's time to renew my driver's license." Yet some couples seem to accept that sexless marriage is as much a part of modern life as traffic and e-mail. It's a given for Ann, a 39-year-old lawyer with two kids who lives in Brooklyn. When she and her husband were first married, they had sex almost every day. Now their 5-year-old daughter comes into their bedroom every night. Pretty soon, the dog starts whining to get on the bed, too. "At 3 or 4 a.m., I kick my husband out for snoring and he ends up sleeping in my daughter's princess twin bed with the Tinkerbell night light blinking in his face," she says. "So how are we supposed to have sex?" READ ON.... More > |
| Friday, June 6, 2003 | |
| A Brief History of the Kinsey Report | 2 comments |
 6 Jun 2003 @ 10:39A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE KINSEY REPORT By Clare Rudebeck Alfred C Kinsey published Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female in 1953, as the sequel to his study into male sexuality. Kinsey spent 13 years interviewing a total of 18,000 people for his research into their sex lives. The 842-page report was an instant success, selling 270,000 copies in a month. Findings that sent the public running to their nearest bookshop included the revelation that half of all women have sexual relations before marriage, and one in four women commit adultery. Kinsey was a zoologist who had studied gall wasps for more than 20 years when he was asked to teach a course on marriage. Finding little research into human sexuality, he decided to conduct his own. The book was banned from libraries of the US Army in Europe, and South African customs officials prohibited bookshops from selling it without permission. Priests in Owensboro, Kentucky implored their parishioners not to read it or its reviews. And doubt was cast over Kinsey's research when it emerged that he had relied almost entirely on volunteers. Were those who wanted to tell the world about their sexual exploits representative of the population as a whole? Soon after publication, the Rockefeller Foundation cut off Kinsey's funding. Three years later, in 1956, he died. ------------ HOW WAS IT FOR YOU? The Independent May 34, 2003 Fifty years ago, Alfred C Kinsey published his groundbreaking report into Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female. Below, five generations of Independent writers report on their experience of sexual behaviour in the human female, and ask how relevant Kinsey is to women's lives today. ............ FIFTIES: Virginia Ironside Age 59 Though Alfred Kinsey was heralded as a sexual liberator, I think that you can lay the blame for a lot of sexual misery at this old pervert's door. (And he was an old pervert. He even had sex himself with many of the white, middle-class, gay, sado-masochistic, totally unrepresentative group of Americans that he interviewed.) The trouble with him was that he approached sex like the biologist he was. He was like a man who tries to understand the thrill of a conjuror's act by revealing how each trick is performed; or convey the pleasure of a great meal with friends by recording how many times each guest masticates each mouthful. The result is that, ever since his report, sex hasn't been seen as something magical, experienced when two people learn to trust each other, and make love. No, these days, because Kinsey looked at sex in a coldly scientific way, it has now been reduced to a commodity -- something that you go out and "get": a leisure activity. And though women may have been racked with sexual guilt before Kinsey came along, boy, were we worried after the report came out. It was Kinsey who prompted the endless questions from women, such as, "How many orgasms should I have a night?". Or, if you were a man, "How many minutes, how many inches, and how often?" It was Kinsey who made us believe that if we didn't have good sex, we'd probably die of cancer; that if we didn't have a squillion orgasms a night, we were horribly repressed. He was also surprisingly liberal about underage sex. His report has spawned thousands of sexual-help clinics, sexual-dysfunction therapists, and dodgy medication. While assuaging some sexual guilt, he unleashed thousands of other demons that thrive on sexual anxiety and expectation. The creepy old doc should have stuck to his gall wasps. FORTIES: Victoria Summerley Age 46 When I was 14, Alfred Kinsey seemed indistinguishable from Alex Comfort, who had just published The Joy of Sex in 1972. They appeared to be two scientists who, incredibly, earned good money by talking about people's sex lives; they seemed to have discovered the academic equivalent of the G-spot. This, I later discovered, was pretty unfair on poor, earnest Kinsey, who died the year I was born, four years before the Swinging Sixties. Alex Comfort is said to have rather enjoyed researching his book, especially the bits on group sex, but Kinsey was dragged away from a study of gall wasps into a veritable hornet's nest of controversy over masturbation. Yet it was Kinsey's report that ensured constant female insecurity ever since. Never experienced orgasm while eating cornflakes? Studies show X out of Y women do. Never had sex while cleaning the bathroom? Hey, what are you, some kind of freak? Ironically, when I was at university, if you wanted to talk about sex, you started talking about the Kinsey Report. If the other party showed any enthusiasm for this topic, you could safely bet they were up for it. Well, it was cheap. If you want to get someone of my generation into bed these days, you have to buy dinner at The Ivy. Those of us in our forties should be forgiven the odd twinge of bitterness about the sexual revolution. We were too young to experience the Sixties, and our sexual awakening took place during the Seventies, when the rest of the nation was more preoccupied with keeping the lights on (thanks to the miners' strike) than turning them down real low. Then, just when we realised that the Seventies were over, the horror stories started. Incurable gonorrhoea, said to have been bred in Vietnam by careless GIs; genital herpes, a ghastly variation on the humble cold sore; Aids, the new killer. We were too full of social conscience to enjoy the Eighties, yet too inhibited by harsh reality to retreat into a carefree hippiedom. FORTIES: Deborah Orr Age 40 The shocking revelation of the Kinsey Report was essentially that women were just as capable of enjoying sex as men. So it's still weird that this news caused such a furore, because individual experience all over the US must have borne out its truth. Certainly, the prevailing propaganda was that "nice girls didn't". The attempts to discredit the Kinsey Report confirm that powerful forces wanted that status quo to remain. But presumably, for both women and men, privately having sex that they both liked, there must have been a suspicion that all this was more myth than reality anyway. One ghastly conclusion of this line of thought is that the vast majority of women, keen for intercourse, familiar with lust, must all have been quietly assuming that they were the exception, with their partners likewise thinking that they'd hit some kind of one-in-a-million virgin-whore jackpot. Which doesn't seem at all healthy. Whether these women felt guilty or lucky would, I suppose, depend on how much they wanted to conform to prevailing ideas of femininity. One set of social mores that they presumably did stick to, though, was that sexual relations between partners should not be discussed with others, or they might all have learned from their friends what it eventually took scientific research to unveil. It has become, through the agency of everything from David Lynch movies to daytime chat-shows, a cultural cliché to assume that the most fervid sexual activity is taking place in the most buttoned-up and respectable of suburbs. Likewise, we tend to assume that kerb-crawling in red-light areas or spending night after night in Spearmint Rhino is the preserve of the sexual incontinent. If you allow yourself to be guided by the major sexual surveys, a theory can be formed that it is the same for entire societies. Kinsey, in 1953, revealed private lives in which women were enjoying sex even though this was not expected of them. The Hite Report, in 1976, well into the sexual revolution, had a rather less upbeat message about women's sexual satisfaction. In 1999, after feminism had taught us that sexual freedom did not have to be another sort of tyranny, another monolithic study, published in the Journal of American Medicine, revealed that about 40 per cent of women were not happy with their sex lives. From this, the assumption can only be that the less we are expected to enjoy sex, the more we do. Or that sexual surveys have no bearing at all on how couples get on in bed. Read on...other age groups More > |
| Monday, March 24, 2003 | |
| Sex Museum Seeks to Break Taboos | 2 comments |
 24 Mar 2003 @ 19:01The painting that accompanies this article is from an interview GQ magazine did with me in 1997. Though some of my thoughts and ideas have changed I think it is still appropriate for today. Sex Museum Seeks to Break Taboos By Jayashree Lengade BOMBAY (Reuters) - It tells you all you ever wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask. India's first sex museum in the western city of Bombay takes curious visitors on a journey into a world that is still considered taboo in the tradition-bound country. Unlike similar museums in the West, the Bombay museum aims to tutor rather than titillate. "This is not a place that will arouse passions," said Arvind Shah, a doctor and a founder of the museum. "We have designed the museum to educate and provide correct information." Tucked away in a century-old building near a red-light district, the museum juxtaposes ancient texts with modern caricatures and models to educate people on a range of subjects from reproduction to the dangers of AIDS (news - web sites). "For the first time I learned how a baby was born," said Sher Singh, 22, father of a seven-month-old baby. The museum, named "Antaranga," or "Inner Self," begins with abstract drawings of entwined couples and verses from the "Kamasutra," India's ancient treatise on the art of love. The exhibits are a mix of the academic and the explicit. Apart from clay sculptures of sex godesses, the museum also uses fiber-glass models of human genitalia as well as Adam and Eve statues locked in a passionate embrace. "What are we ashamed about?" asked Dr Shah. "Young people are usually confused. We want to clear their minds." A 16-year-old student, Rahul Jadhav, said he felt awkward looking at the naked figures but the museum was a "storehouse of information." Apart from providing sex education, the museum also seeks to build awareness about AIDS through real-life stories, explanations on how to use condoms and illustrations of the HIV virus (news - web sites) depicted like a vulture eating into the human body. India has nearly four million people suffering from HIV (news - web sites)/AIDS, second only to South Africa, and health experts warn the numbers could spiral if urgent steps are not taken. While critics say the museum is a bit too explicit, visitors say it is a good way of educating people in a country where people tend to shy away from any discussion of sex. More > |