Female Orgasm: You Thought You Knew The Story

OK, at least I thought I knew the story about female orgasm.

I thought it went something like this:

Starting with Freud, there was this general idea out there that a woman could have an orgasm in two different ways: via the clitoris, and via the penis-in-the-vagina -- a "vaginal" orgams.

Then, it turned out that most women had orgasms from clitoral stimulation. Indeed, further research - I thought - showed that the clitoris is the basic organ of the female orgasm: sure, a girl can come from having a "p" in her "v" but it's only because the p -- or some other body part -- is indirectly stimulating her clitoris that she has an orgasm.

This, I thought, modulo some confusing stuff about ejactulation and the g-spot, was the basic story, and I took it to debunk the old theory that there were "inferior" and "superior" orgasms.

I felt comfortable, that is, shaking my head in disappointment when some ill-informed young man would write into an advice columnist, as they often do, to say, Hey, my girlfriend doesn't come just from intercourse . . . what's wrong with her? Should she see a doctor? All the girls in porn come that way.

Then the other day Jezebel had two posts (here and here) about an actual research article whose title is

"A Woman’s History of Vaginal Orgasm is Discernible from Her Walk"

The title really says it all - or, rather, most of it. Sex researchers guessed right most of the time whether a woman had a self-reported history of vaginal orgasm from wathing her walk. I haven't had the patience to read through the whole thing but they tested 30 girls.

The thing is, this story cites as known fact all that stuff I thought was false. Here's a characteristic passage:

"Compared to women who have had vaginal orgasm (triggered solely by penile–vaginal stimulation), vaginally anorgasmic women display more use of immature psychological defense mechanisms[1], are less satisfied with their relationships, mental health, and life in general [8,9], and are more likely to suffer from global sexual dysfunction [10]."

Whoa! Really? If you want to chase down those footnotes, the article is in J Sex Med 2008;5:2119–2124, that is, the Journal of Sexual Medicine. You'll have to be on a subscribing computer. Or you can email me for the pdf.

One of the references - the last - is to Fugl-Meyer KS, Oberg K, Lundberg PO, Lewin B, Fugl-Meyer A. "On orgasm, sexual techniques, and erotic perceptions in 18- to 74-year-old Swedish women." J Sex Med 2006;3:56–68.

Which sounds more like a Monty Python skit than an academic paper, but whatever.

I really don't know what is going on here.

"Women Are Irrational!"

When I learned as a young person that it used to be considered common sense to think that women were less rational than men, I was surprised.

I mean, aren't guys the ones known for getting into impulsive barroom fights, raping women, and buying expensive consumer electronics?

Aren't women known as the planners and the plodders of life? The ones who make grocery lists, nag people to eat their vegetables, and make "safe" but weak investment choices?

OK, I am overstating, but you know what I mean.

I got thinking about this recently when the Times did that series on love in Iraq, or whatever it was, and they quoted some man talking about how the reason one had to keep women indoors was that they were so irrational, they could be talked into anything. Let them out of the house, and some guy will sweet-talk them into having sex, and that'll be the end of it.

Leaving aside all the other questions this raises, I had to ask myself, Well, is this true? Are women are more swayed by emotions they haven't reflected on?

And I replied to myself, "Hmph! Swayed by emotions when it comes to sex? It's guys who are always saying they couldn't help themselves; it's guys who respond to the simplest visual cues; it's guys who actually make less rational decisions when there are pretty girls around (at least if this somewhat wacky study is true).

I explained my ruminations to a wise friend, who said something like, Well, maybe what it is is that women are more likely to change their minds about things in response to what is immediately in front of them, and men are more likely to say constant to abstractions despite conditions on the ground.

I think this may be right. But I don't think it shows women are more irrational. I mean, depending on your goals, sometimes it's means-end rational to change your strategy, or focus on the immediate, and sometimes it's not.

For example, people talk about moral "impartiality." The moral point of view should treat all persons the same.

But we also tend to think parents should take special care of their own children, and are right to lavish extra care on them.

It's easy to see how everyone might be best off when parents lavish extra care on their own children, which means these don't really conflict.

Focusing on the immediate, and not being impartial, can nonetheless be "rational" in the larger sense.

So: I don't think the difference in focus shows women to be less rational.

It is true that a kind of impulsivity can sometimes be irrational, and I think that's why I always thought it was more of a guy thing, especially in the sex and violence realm.

Then I thought, Aha! That's why people always thought of men as more rational: men are rational with particular exceptions. Exceptions they treat as irrationality. Whereas it's harder to carve out the parts of women's behavior that seem impulsive, calculating, emotive, etc. It's all kind of a mix.

And then I had a smaller kind of Aha when I thought, "Oh, and that's why sex was probably considered this strange dark force instead of just a normal part of life."

Maybe you already understood all of this. But it cleared up some things for me.

Speaking of non-impulsivity, here's a fun fact: according to Wikipedia, "a 'darcy' is a unit of permeability." OK it's not named after that Darcy but after another Darcy, but still, wouldn't it have been cuter and equally efficient if they'd made the darcy a unit of "impermeability" rather than permeability?

It's Quantity, Too

This is not meant to be a series of posts like dude-Paris-is-so-great I'm-going-to-become-an-expat oh-the-US-is-so-boring. Cause honestly, no one loves the US like I do. The US is the shit, and I can't wait to get back there.

But. There are, you know, a few areas in which the US could use improvement. And some of these are areas France feels like the savvy and suave wise man to our bumbling adolescent.

One area is the objectification of women, especially in advertising. OK, surprising, since France is fashion-central, and whatever. But every time I come here I'm amazed by how relaxing it is not to be constantly bombarded with images of semi-naked women. It feels good. You really do stop thinking so much about your female bodily deficiencies when you're not surrounded by this shit.

It's not just the quality of the ads -- though that is different. It's the quantity, too. I feel like the relentlessness of depictions of women being all sexy and cute and harmless and physically perfect in North America is just wearing me out.

Here in Paris there are a few giant ads in the Metro for some skin thing for summer and they do show some naked woman lying on her back. But you know, she's huge, and all muscular, and shiny. She looks ready to sunbathe, or get into a fight, not ready to smile softly and cheer your team of choice.

But there are also two other ads that are everywhere that show men. One of them is a goofball ad showing a guy in just his underwear trying to deal with his 20 electronic devices and cords. It's funny and cute. Guy is sort of buff but normal looking.

The other of them is this Dior ad, for "Eau Sauvage."

Hey, I like it. I'm not against objectification of persons for advertising. It's the cumulative effect that's driving me nuts back home.

A little variety, OK guys?

The True Fantasies Of Young Men

A week or two ago I read this graphic novel, Lily. The picture is above.

It's about a girl who is visited by four of her other selves: three future selves and one past self. They all have things to work out, issues, whatever.

I couldn't help but notice it's written by a guy. And illustrated by a guy.

That's fine. It's a good book, mostly, with interesting characters and a nice drawing style.

But I found myself noticing something about the story, guy-wise.

****Spoiler Alert*****

What happens in the book is that the girl is in high school, and she has a major crush on her dreamboat theater teacher. She's friends with a well-meaning but awkward guy her own age, who is in love with her. It's obvious to everyone that he is in love, but the girl doesn't notice. She's wrapped up in Mister Drama.

A big part of the story is that the 80-year-old self lets on to the teen self that she spent her life alone and lonely, and kicking herself for not pursuing the Nice Teen Guy. The older woman basically re-engineers the main character's life so that she recognizes Teen Guy for the gem he is, and goes out with him.

Um, OK. But I couldn't help but think this was kind of a guy's view of things. . . That girl who won't give you the time of day? Wouldn't it be awesome if she ends up alone and sad because she wouldn't date you? Wouldn't it be awesomer if she could know, now, that she'll end up alone and sad without out, and change her ways?

It also has that element of, you know, the only reason she's not dating the Teen Guy is that she's got her eye on Drama Teacher. You know, like she's just distracted. Sure, show her a good thing, she'll just, change her mind. "Oh, Johnny, now I love you! I wasn't paying attention!"

I know women are often attracted to bad guys and often not attracted to nice guys, especially when they're in high school, but I don't think just pointing out the error, or even threatening girls with life-long loneliness, is really going to change anything. So this book? Maybe kind of a Guy Fantasy. And not in a good way.

Consent To Bodily Harm: A Paradox?

The Toronto Star had an interesting story yesterday about a court case. I've tried and tried to find it on their website but I can't so it's lucky I saved the dead-tree-format version I was reading over my dinner.

The headline is, "People Can't Invite Violent Sex Acts, Judge Rules." The case involves a couple who routinely engaged in what's described as "raunchy" sex, over a period of years. Some of that was sado-masochistic. They had a safe word.

The guy is accused of sexual assault for having choked her to the point of unconsciousness and then, well, maybe you're reading this over lunch or something, so let's just say, he's accused of having followed this up with further sexual acts while she was "out."

The accuser called the cops one month after it happened, and then later tried to recant, explaining that since it was a consensual interaction, there was nothing he did wrong. The accuser says she "routinely" consented to being choked.

OK, let's pass quickly over the whole report-it-one-month-later-then-deny-there-was-anything business. About that we can just say, something is f***ed up between these two people.

What's more interesting to me are the comments of the prosecutor and judge. The article says that the prosecutor (or as we call it here in Canada, the "Crown counsel"), argued "successfully" that "an individual cannot consent to bodily harm, such as being choked to the point of unconsciousness." The prosecutor called it "paradoxical" that one who was unconscious could be "in a position to enjoy heightened or intensified sexual gratification."

Later it says quotes the judge saying, "Even if she had consented previously - or on that night - she cannot legally consent to sexual activity that takes place when she is unconscious."

This makes it sound like according to the judge, the accuser could have consented to being choked. And maybe she could have consented to being choked to the point of unconsciousness. But she couldn't consent to anything that happened when she was unconscious.

So, does this mean that to engage in any sex act legally, each party must be in a position to give consent at the moment of sex? Then if two longtime partners want to get really drunk and have sex, or if a guy has sex with his wife in the middle of the night and she falls asleep in the middle, or if one person wants to get really stoned and have their partner have sex with them, all those things would be sexual assault.

It also makes it sound like according to the judge, there's nothing paradoxical going on, and it's not a question of bodily harm. It's just a question of the possibility of consent, and when and how it's required.

On the other hand, the judge also said, "the reasonable man would conclude that choking someone to the point of unconsciousness does interfere with that person's 'health or comfort,' and can, in some cases, endanger life."

I don't know what the law is, but if there's a law against making other people uncomfortable, we're all in big trouble.

Sex And Anxiety: Essential Connection?

When I learned years ago that anti-depressants sometimes fuck with people's sex drive, the first thing I wondered was, "Hm, is that because anxiety and sexual interest are somehow related?"

I've thought about this off and on but never really came to any conclusions. And I've never been on anti-depressants so I don't have first-hand experience. And I know some of the newer drugs are less of a problem for sexual interest, and more of a problem for orgasm, which at least complicates my question.

But it's always seemed kind of plausible to me that there's something here -- that maybe to be really into sex you have to feel kind of anxious. Or nervous. Or something.

Two items of interest:

1) The classic aphrodisiacs are stimulants, and being stimulated is a little like being anxious.

2) Going through withdrawal from heroin, from what I understand, makes a person want to have a lot of sex -- or at least a lot of orgasms -- since it's the only relief from the agony.

There's something about being totally relaxed that feels so, I don't know, self-sufficient. And if you feel self-sufficient, you don't need anything, right? And what's sexual desire without a feeling of need?

I realize "un-depressed" and "non-anxious" do not equal relaxed. Still, they do seem connected to self-sufficiency and non-need. So I don't know.

If there is an essential connection between these, it fits my general view that what is good in one way is often bad in another, and vice-versa. But maybe that view is idiosyncratic. I don't know.

Open Source Boob Project: One Girl's Opinion

Maybe you heard about the Open Source Boob Project, where some geeks were at a sci fi convention and started imagining a better world, a world in which, if you wanted to touch a girl's breast, you could just ask, "can I touch your breast?" and she could say yes, or no, without any of the baggage that comes with reducing a person to her body parts or whatever.

Okay, I only know about it from this Jezebel post so it's not like I'm informed. But I can have an opinion on the story even if it's not accurately reported, right? I can have an opinion on the idea of an Open Source Boob Project?

Usually I'm all in favor of whatever: y'all are having fun, knock yourselves out. Sure. And basically that's my attitude here.

But still, something about the Open Source Boob Project gets a little on my nerves. What is it?

I think part of it is that the reason girls are touchy about having their breasts groped is precisely because of the attitude implicit in the Open Source Boob Project. Not that "I'd like to touch your breasts" is somehow bad in itself. But the idea that touching breasts is a kick for a guy in a way that has nothing to do with whether you're attracted, interested, thinking of pursuing further interaction.

I don't mean pursuing a relationship. No. I mean, pursuing further sexual interaction. The Project is supposed to be boob touching without even the context of "gee, maybe we'll, you know, um, later or something."

If touching breasts is such a kick to guys that it's like candy, regardless of whether there's any sexual anything going on, at all, in any way, well, honestly, all I can say is that that makes me kind of want to reserve my breasts for more special occasions.

So I guess I'll be one of the girls wearing the buttons that say, "No, you may not."

Actually there won't be any buttons, because those were part of the long-term plan that got nixed when people all over the internet were like, "Huh? What? Open Source Boob Project? What is wrong with you people?"

I'm sure it was fine between friends. But I think the trouble I've pointed out is one reason it's not going to work on a grand scale. Sorry. Even for a good-time girl -- perhaps even more so for a good-time girl -- boobs are kind of "closed source" items.

Women Eating Dirt. WTF?

As I mentioned before, I used to read The Superficial. It's a celebrity site that walks that familiar line between irony and actual childish meanness: under the guise of ironically making fun of the way we gossip about celebrities, especially women and their bodies, we get to gossip about celebrities, especially women and their bodies.

I used to find it sort of palatable because 1) it was sometimes sort of funny and 2) the authors jokes were often self-deprecating, including, e. g. jokes about the smallness of their penises and so on.

But then one day there was a picture of some older woman, I can't remember who, looking kind of reasonable and normal, and the entry was all about how disgusting and revolting she looked and I had just had enough and I decided to stop reading.

Occasionally when I'm super bored and I feel I've been super good, I allow myself a peek. This morning, a Sunday, I spent the whole morning working on something difficult, and I wanted a bit of mental candy, and I typed in the URL.

The first thing up was an old picture of George Clooney's girlfriend with her ass up in the air and her face down on a dirty magazine, sort of licking at it or something, posing for some sexy photo for some reason, with predictable commentary about her being not the kind of girl you'd bring home to mother and being a slut and all that.

Ugh. I'm pretty freewheeling about sex and sexiness for women, and I was young during the 80's when women being sexual was no big deal. I'd have thought nothing of it if a friend of mine had posed for sexy pictures.

I'm amazed, though, at how much "sexy" has been made over into slutty. How did this happen?

Actually there are two things. First, so much of what is considered "sexy" for women now is implicitly or explicitly demeaning to them. Like what's-her-name having her face in the dirt. Yuck. And second, the having of sex of normal sex now is considered "slutty" and trashy.

I honestly don't get where this is coming from. Is it just hatred of women?

I mean, for a long time, Playboy was the kind of standard representative of what it was to represent women as sexy. And if you look at Playboy, the women are not eating dirt. I mean, you can argue 'til the cows come home about whether the very photography itself demeans women, but whatever you think about this, there's still a huge difference between a woman posed elegantly, and intelligently, and a woman eating dirt. And the Playboy girls usually look pretty elegant and intelligent, in my opinion.

Playboy even goes out of its way to emphasize the women's real life accomplishments. Even if this is made-up, it's clear their point of view is that the woman is sexier if she's a real person, worthy of respect. In fact, this is so especially if it's made-up.

Also, Playboy always commands its readers to respect women's sexuality. In their advice columns and so on they always steer readers away from a double-standard: women who like sex, they say, should be respected, and never regarded as "slutty" or bad.

I'm not defending Playboy, here, though I think a good defense of Playboy on these grounds is plausible and could be given. I'm just drawing a contrast between this long-time standard and the new misogyny.

What is up with that? Have men always wanted to watch women eat dirt, and they only used to read Playboy 'cause they couldn't get away with the dirt business? Or is this all something new? WTF?

Anyway, it's horrible. Guess I'll have to find my mental candy somewhere else.

Autonomy And Lust

In my proto-post on Viagra I promised reflection on the whole Viagra-for-women controversy.

What controversy, you ask? Well, obviously Pfizer and other pharmaceutical companies are dying to make and market a female equivalent to Viagra.

Turns out that's more complicated than they thought, because women's physiology, and women's sexuality, is more complicated than men's.

And some women are arguing that not only is a female desire pill elusive, it's also a step down a wrong and dangerous road: it improperly treats women's lack of desire as medical "problem" or disease, while in fact it is both natural and a proper response to certain life conditions, like age.

Leonore Tiefer, a psychiatry prof at NYU, has become a kind of spokesperson for this view, and has started The New View campaign to educate women and industry about the idea that "female sexual dysfunction" may not be dysfunction at all.

For Viagra's 10th anniversary, US News and World Report interviewed Tiefer; you can read it online here. While I agree that there are certain dangers associated with any drug that alters the way a person feels, it seems to me the push to not create such drugs at all is a dramatic overreaction to these dangers.

The most obvious point here is that some women do experience loss of desire in a way that does seem "dysfunctional" and in a way that makes them unhappy. Women who've had various diseases, women on anti-depressants and other drugs, women who have unusual hormonal distributions may experience loss of sexual desire as a physiological effect in a relatively simple sense. It's hard to see why they should be prevented from treatment they want.

Others have made this point effectively. But I want to defend the more radical point of view that desire-enhancing drugs are appropriate for pretty much any woman who wants them.

Sometimes the worry is that "medicalizing" women's desire is a way of manipulating and controlling women from the outside. In a sense this may be true -- I return to it below. But there is one important sense in which it isn't true.

Sometimes philosophers who work on identity distinguish between those desires we identify with and those desires we feel are imposed upon us "from the outside." For instance, if I think of myself as someone who is kind and gentle, and I have an urge to punch you in the face after I lose at checkers, I may feel the violence as alien to my sense of self, even if it comes literally from inside me.

It's hard to distinguish these conceptually, or to find a good criterion. But one popular attempt to do so tells us that the desires that are "ours" are the ones we want to have: if I want to want to be kind, that desire is my own; since I would much rather not want to punch you, that desire is not. (see, e. g., the work of Harry Frankfurt).

Theorists endorsing this line of thought sometimes say that the ability to have the desires you want to have makes you more free, more autonomous, more yourself. I If I punch you after checkers I am less free, less autonomous, less myself, because I am controlled by a force that is not me: my rage.

On this criterion, anyway, desire-enhancing drugs would make the person who takes them more free, more autonomous, and more herself -- assuming her longing to feel desire is genuine -- since she would then have the desires she wants to have. So such drugs would not at all be manipulative.

It is true that for this to be the case, a woman's preference must be genuine. And perhaps one may say that once there are drugs for female desire, the social pressures to take them, or the pressure from men to take them, would make such preferences social, and not autonomous -- not belonging to the woman herself.

I admit such dangers are real. But for these considerations to trump others, it seems to me we have to assume that they are overwhelming: that women's preferences in this area could seldom be genuine, could seldom be their own, will always be the result of pressure. Women, on this view, must be incapable of choosing for themselves.

It seems to me the dangers of such an assumption are worse than the dangers of medicalizing female desire. So, on this autonomy thing, I'm coming down on the side of the pharmaceutical companies: you want to make female Viagra, and market it to the world, and become rich? Fine. Knock yourselves out.

I will say that if Viagra continues to be covered by insurance and the female drugs are not I will be pissed off on principle!

Viagra's 10th Birthday: A Proto-Post

OK, I was trying to write a post this afternoon about the 10th anniversary of Viagra and the whole "Viagra-for-women" controversy and how everyone is saying that popping a pill is no substitute for intimacy or choosing the right partner and yada yada yada and I was going to try to explain why I'm all for Pfizer in this case but time ran out on me so it's going to have to wait 'til later.

But I will say this now: halfway through writing I googled "viagra image" for a cute snapshot of some Viagra pills, and I came across this article in an online science magazine in which some Pfizer guy writes about "How I discovered Viagra." (I also came across the image above. Cute pill pic!)

And the pull-out quotation from the article is this: "I remember thinking that, even if it did work, who would want to take a drug on a Wednesday to get an erection on a Saturday?"

The answer, of course, is "everyone." I mean, I know the time lag has gotten shorter but wasn't the previous treatment like a needle in the penis or some shit like that? Obviously people would have put up with even a radically inferior product. Is it just 20-20 hindsight that makes this so obvious?

It makes me happy that the discovery of Viagra is associated with goofiness and accidents. Like after the discovery supposedly the inventor took it, before his conference presentation or whatever, and took down his pants, and walked around and showed his hard-on to everyone. "Look! It works! Check it out, Beavis!"

That. Is. Awesome. Can we have more crazy shit like this in academia? Please? I'm going out of my mind with boredom!

Angry Women

A couple of weeks ago The New York Times ran a piece they called "Post-Feminism and Other Fairy Tales." Reading it I had one of those moments you have where you're like, "Wait. What?" "Post-feminism"? Us?

Oh, right. Feminism, that's so 80's.

According to The Times, we thought we were in a "post-feminist" era, when "the big battles were over" and the "younger generation" was "less hung up" on stuff. But, well, I guess we were wrong, or something.

OK. I know a lot of young women don't consider themselves feminists, and indeed, regard many of the issues associated with feminism as somehow "over" or boring. But I associate that idea with, like, 20-somethings. Are 20-somethings now the target audience of Times readers? What is up with this?

I'm thinking there are two things going on here:

1) Some female readers of The Times believe that to be a feminist one need not give up on sex, fashion, and femininity. That doesn't seem to me really a post-feminist idea, though I guess you could call it that if you want people to read and link to your story.

2) Some male readers of The Times are excited by, or eager for, more "post-feminism" than there really is out there.

Well, you know, the tone of the story is like, "oops!" turns out women are, you know, maybe a little angry. You didn't know that, but it's true! Angry!

I got thinking about this today because two things made me angry.

First, Dan Savage made fun of the bloggers at Jezebel because they said Abby (of dear Abby) gave the wrong advice to a guy who claimed his brother had sex with his wife while she thought it was him. Abby said something like, "Uh, are you sure you trust her story, when she says that she didn't know"? Jezebel said something like, "Uh, gee, when your wife says someone had sex with her under suspicious circumstances, you gotta believe her, dude!" Which seemed to me pretty obviously correct.

Dan Savage said they overreacted because the letter was fake; a guy's typical fantasy.

This pissed me off. Even if the letter is fake, if you're going to answer it, don't you have to answer it with actual advice? And if the letter represents a male fantasy, isn't it worth reminding a guy that if something like this happens on his watch, he'd better OK it with the wife first, rather than later?

Savage seemed partly upset that Jezebel called the situation rape. But yeah, actually, if a man comes into a sleeping woman's room and has sex with her without her say-so, this is rape. That's not any kind of semantic puzzle or grey area. How could this not be the main thing happening in that story?

The second thing that pissed me off today was when this owner of a vegan strip-tease club was quoted in the Times as saying that he doesn't worry too much about his "feminazi" critics. Seems those critics have posted on the internet complaining, and "one of them came in once" to the club and acted crabby.

OK, listen. You can't have sex with women without their consent; if you do it's rape. And you can't call someone a "feminazi" for peaceful criticism of your sex business. Actually, let me qualify: you can't call someone a "feminazi" for any reason, whatesoever! period!

These rules aren't complicated! Sheesh! No wonder women are so pissed off.

Disgust and Purity: Should We Care?

Disgust, repugnance, and fears of impurity have made three appearances in The New York Times over the last few weeks. OK, it's not Britney, but still. For an abstract concept, three is a lot.

First, as I wrote about before, we have Stephen Pinker's essay, The Moral Instinct. There, Pinker says early on that, psychologically speaking, there are (roughly) five distinct sources of moral sense: not harming others, being fair, being loyal to a community or group, respecting authority, and purity.

Later in the piece, Pinker says that the excessive pursuit of purity can be a source of moral illusions: those who are against cloning because it gives them "a moral shudder," he says, just aren't being thoughtful or reasonable enough. It's a kind of prejudice.

I was struck at the time: how can disgust be a source of moral judgment and also be a distorting factor on moral judgment?

Then there was this recent short item in the Arts section: "Economists Dissect the 'Yuck' Factor." Here, Patricia Cohen points out that disgust is a complex issue for conservatives: on the one hand, economic conservatives favor fewer limits on markets, so the fact that you feel grossed out by, say, kidney purchasing or baby buying is simply not relevant to whether these things are good or bad. On the other hand, social conservatives (as Pinker points out) frequently invoke the moral shudder in explanations of wrongness.

As she tells the story, economists say that everything should be open to markets unless you can prove otherwise, while skeptics say that the burden of proof is on the other side -- that if you want to open up a market, you must make a case for the morality of the proposed transactions.

Interestingly, she cites Pinker's essay as one source of the idea that disgust is an "early warning system" -- a feeling that alerts us that something needs moral scrutiny.

On this view, the answer to my question is that disgust is a not a source of moral judgment, but is merely an indicator, and when trusted, acts as a distorting factor.

This answer is supported by the third appearance of disgust, in the pyschologist Paul Bloom's review of a new book by philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah. There, Bloom summarizes some research as showing that disgust and other emotions cause us to make judgments we later find we cannot justify.

Interestingly, this approach almost seems to side with the economists, insofar as the suggestion is that if one cannot give a justification in terms of other factors -- such as harm -- then disgust is irrelevant.

I'm no fan of purity obsessions, believe me. But at the same time, I also think we humans are not always very good at figuring out what's good for us -- as I've said before, once we start doing cost-benefit analysis, we tend to start estimating wrong.

I'm left uncertain over whether, and when, and how, to care about disgust. If a poor man risks his life selling a kidney to a rich man and then gets sick and dies, I feel a kind of disgust. I'm inclined to take my reaction as morally significant whether or not I can back it up. But I know that some people feel a kind of moral disgust at sexual freedom, homosexuality, and so on, and there I feel, well, no, that's not morally significant.

I suppose ideally I would be able to articulate in other terms what is bad about free markets for organs donations. But in the meantime, what am I supposed to do? It's not like cost-benefit analysis has such a great track record, either.

A Female Holden Caulfield, My Ass

I just finished reading this book about a teenage girl called How the Light Gets In. Lou, a poor girl from Australia with a loutish family, comes to mid-western America as an exchange student, dreaming of starting over with a new life and new personality.

It was good. The end of the book was a little weird -- weird in that way that sometimes when you're reading along, caught up in something, your attention is suddenly drawn to the book as a book -- you start thinking about the novelist making choices. That's not usually a good experience. I guess there's no real reason it should be a bad one, but I don't really go for it.

I bought the book based on the cover:


And also based on the fact that it had won some awards, and so on etc.

Two of the blurbs on the back of the book described the heroine as a "female Holden Caulfield," and the summary part grabbed onto that in describing what the book is like. I have to say, I bought the book despite this, and not because of it. That kind of thing is always a turn-off to me in a book blurb.

Of course, once I finished the book I couldn't help reflecting on the comparison. And, really, there's no similarity at all. Lou is needy -- needy on the surface, not just "crying out for help." Lou writes obsequious notes to her host family hoping to earn a little affection and smooth over being a nervous weirdo. Lou pretends to sleep while her host brother puts his hand down her pants. Lou gets drunk, but partly in order to get over her intense nervousness about auditioning for the school musical.

That last detail alone should have stopped these people in their tracks. Isn't it of the essence of Holden Caulfield that he would not be caught dead auditioning for a fucking school musical? Come on, people.

About the most you could say, I think, about the similarities between Lou and Holden are: they're teenagers; they want to have sex; they're unhappy; they drink. They misbehave.

It's not a long list. I mean, really, "they're teenagers" just about covers all the others, right? What -- "Oh, they're unhappy teenagers who act out want to have sex?! Oh, what a coincidence! A female Holden Caulfield! It's almost plagiarism."

In a generous mood, I think, well, OK, maybe there's something about the internal passive-aggressiveness that reminded people of Salinger.

In a paranoid mood, I think something more like, hey, it's only because we sexistly think that girls don't act out their manias that when we see Lou doing so, we have to compare her to that actor-outer-of-all-time, good old Holden Caulfield. It's true: instead of dieting herself into anorexia, or becoming a "mean girl," or belittling her friends, Lou drinks, occasionally loses her temper, goes for unauthorized walks alone outside, and rolls her eyes a lot.

But really: walking outside the neighborhood alone? Holden Caulfield my ass.

Now, I actually would like to read a book about a female Holden Caulfield: a fearless girl who has money, illusions of total independence, an ability to ignore the pain of others, impatience with the entire stupid world, a taste for totally reckless behavior, and crazy mood swings.

Let me know when it comes out, OK?

2008, And You Still Can't Get An Ought From An Is

Since yesterday I'd been planning a post about girls, and boys, and The Power Rangers TV show, which I saw for the first time at the gym yesterday. I'd had no idea the show was for kids; I'd had no idea it was cute and a little hokey; and I'd had no idea two of the Rangers are girls. Wow!

The main thing I was going to write about was how funny it was that the girl Rangers have little skirts in addition to the standard, unisex, form-fitting outfits. I mean, the whole boy-pants, girl-skirt thing makes sense when there's a peeing issue, and the boys can just, you know, unzip, and the girls have to squat. Then maybe a girl wants a skirt.

But once you're both wearing tight-ass legging sort of things, what's the point? In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb, and say that, modesty-wise, once you're both wearing tight-ass legging sort of things, it's boys who need little skirts. I remember going to a ballet performance as a young child, and thinking, no, wait, that bulge is the outline of the man's penis that I can see under his tights? Shocking! Funny! Possibly obsene!

The boy Power-Rangers don't have any, uh, parts showing, of course. I checked it out. (But how do they manage that, exactly?) And I know, I realize, that the reason the girls have skirts is that it's cuter that way. Hey, if I were a Power Ranger, there is a 100 percent chance I'd have a little skirt, too. So I'm down with all that.

But instead of pursuing my theme further, with reflections on the movie Juno, which I just saw, and the irritating piece in today's Times that says that since birth and abortion are both major emotional traumas, sex for girls is basically doomed, I have to write instead about morality.

That's because Stephen Pinker had a thing in the Times, too, laying out the state of empirical findings about the psychology of morality, and drawing some conclusions.

The empirical findings were interesting, and fit with some things I already believed.

There are, he explained, several distinct moral themes that are roughly universal. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt's list includes: not harming others, being fair, being loyal to a community or group, respecting authority, and purity.

Then disagreement and cultural variation happen because some people care more about some of these things than about others, and some don't care much about some of them at all, and different people moralize different parts of life.

OK, interesting, and plausible. But you know, this is all just a description. Of some putative facts. What are we supposed to do with this information? Does it tell us anything about morality itself, or how to live?

The great 18th-century philosopher and historian David Hume is famous for his idea that "you can't get an ought from an is." That is, nothing about what to do follows from simple facts about what the world is like. You have to make some assumptions about what to value, what to care about, what to want, before facts tell you what to do. (Hume also said "Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the desctruction of the entire world to a scratch on my little finger," which I think is just a really stylish, cool, true thing to say).

The first time Pinker seems to maybe wander into the "ought" realm is when he compares conservatives to liberals in the US. Liberals, he says, put a "lopsided" moral weight on harm and fairness, and care less about the others. Conservatives place a moderate weight on all five things.

On this point I may be being oversensitive, but the idea of "lopsidedness" to me suggests that somehow those who value harm-prevention and fairness are missing something real. But, of course, the moral outlook he is describing is one on which people have come to believe that loyalty, respect for authority, and purity aren't so much simple goods in themselves as they are ways of living in a prosperous, fair society full of happy people.

They may be wrong about the means to happiness and fairness, but that doesn't make their view "lopsided"; it just makes it different.

But maybe "lopsided" wasn't meant to be a normative judgment. OK, fine. Things are more interesting when Pinker claims that the implications of these findings for moral theory are "profound."

Pinker is very impressed by two elements of morality that he thinks really are grounded in "reality." First, sometimes when agents cooperate, each does better. Life is a non-zero-sum game. Second, I can't treat myself as special in moral thinking, because whatever I ask you to do for me, you get to ask me to do for you, because otherwise you'll just shrug and walk away. (Unless I am Galactic Overlord, of course.)

One implication Pinker draws concerns moral "illusions," where you see what isn't there. Leon Kass, he says, was blinded in this way by his own sanctimony when he said that cloning was obviously wrong because it gives us a moral shudder. Pinker suggests thinking this way is confusing "morality" with "purity," and notes that lots of shudders were induced for bad reasons (as when people shuddered at seeing blacks drink from the "white" fountain).

I'm no fan of Leon Kass. But, as philosophers well know, if you take tit-for-tat as morally fundamental, and take unexplained moral feelings to be bunk, you end up with a very particular kind of moral culture: one on which you respect the strong because they can hurt you. In its most famous version, "contractarianism," such a moral theory leaves unexplained why one ought morally to care about the weak, the sick, the old, and the small.

A second implication Pinker draws has to do with global warming. No matter how much we moralize consumption, he says, we'll never get anywhere, because no matter how much we reduce our consumption, "two billion Indians and Chinese are unlikely to copy our born-again abstemiousness." So we're going to need things like nuclear power and maybe deliberate control of oceans and so on.

Hmm. This is the kind of case where I'd be apt to say we maybe should be getting our moral panties all in a twist. Not because the earth is, itself, valuable, but because other people are going to want to live on it, in the future, and don't we owe them something?

Well, not under the tit-for-tat thinking, anyway, since they can't do anything for us. They're not here yet.

Look, I'm with Pinker that extending the moral domain into new territories is sometimes a fruitless or dangerous enterprise. Sure. And he is onto something with his "practical" recommendations, that to reason with others, you should see your moral opponent as a certain kind of moral believer rather than a psychopath (unless, of course, you actually are dealing with a psychopath)

But no amount of empirical findings is going to help you figure out when moralizing is fruitless, when it's dangerous, and when it's laudable. Because no amount of empirical findings is going to determine for you what counts as valuable, and what is worth caring about. Only people who care about stuff can do that, and they can only do it by caring about things.

In both discussions, Pinker warns of the dangers of confusing "morality" with "purity." But I thought purity was on the moral list? It seems to me Pinker has his own ideas about which of the categories to care about most. It's OK, we all do. And I'm not big into "purity" either, believe me. But let's be honest: this is a belief with moral content, not one that just follows from the facts.

You still can't get an ought from an is.

Rational Teens, Crazy Adults

It's one of those things everybody knows: teenagers engage in risky behaviors because they have a feeling of invulnerability -- an emotive, but incorrect, sense that the odds are in their favor.

On Tuesday, The New York Times ran of those "everybody knows this, but it's false" stories (link here). In fact, the data show that teenagers generally overestimate the risks involved in their activities. Even more than adults, they tend to say that something bad is bound to happen, even more than it actually is.

The reason kids do risky things, it turns out, isn't that they don't know the risks, but rather that to them, the benefits simply outweigh the risks. They quite rationally judge that since the risk of pregnancy with unprotected sex is quite small, even when overestimated, and the thrill associated with the (possibly fleeting) opportunity is high, the rational action is to go ahead, get it on.

Ergo: reminding teens the activities are risky isn't going to work.

OK, fine. But then the story gets weird. The risk-prevention specialist featured in the article explains that where teens are actually going wrong isn't in judging risk, its in understanding "gist."

The “gist" of a situation is an overall sense of what is the best course of action. It's an intuitive judgment about what to do.

The Times quotes the specialist as saying, “Young people don’t get it. They don’t get the gist of a situation. Gist is based on one’s culture, background and experiences, and experience is what teens lack.”

Oh. I see. So if teenagers are making rational risk-assessment choices, and we're making intuitive judgments that reflect cultural expectations, they're the ones who are supposed to change their decision-making?

This strikes me as bullshit. Look, older people don't want teenagers doing risky things. And for good reasons. But that doesn't mean the teenagers themselves aren't thinking clearly.

The most you could say, I think, is that teenagers may be less capable than adults of predicting what things it will make them happy to have done in five years, as opposed to what things are going to make them happy now. But it's dumb to say they aren't accurately judging what they want now. They are. They just want more fun and excitement than adults do. And they want it more.

The "gist" of a situation is just a fancy way of talking about the fact that adults want certain things, and they want their children to want those things too.

My own opinion is that adults should just be honest here. Speaking for myself, I don't want young people to drive drunk, take too many drugs, have sex without condoms, etc. But the reason is just that I care about them, and it makes me feel bad if bad things happen to them. These are selfish motives, but they're the good kind of selfish motives -- the kind that say, "If you suffer I will suffer. So take care of yourself! Please!" Do it for me.

The "gist" specialist says the right approach is rather to train kids in strategies. From The Times: "In helping a teenage girl resist spontaneous, unprotected sex, a gist-based approach has her practicing ways to say “no” and not worry about losing her boyfriend.

Ohhh brother. Don't even get me started.

Aqsa, I Am So Sorry

As they sometimes say over at Jezebel, I've been drinking. So I'm, like, blogging with a reduced filter. Blogging without a net. Whatever.

I'm American but I live in Canada. I live in Toronto. For the past couple of weeks, I've been in the US, and then today I came back home. And of course the news here in Toronto is all about Aqsa Parvez, a 16 year-old girl who lived in a Toronto suburb and was killed by her father Monday night.

No one knows exactly what happened, but all of Aqsa's friends say that she and her family had been fighting ferociously about her clothes. Her family wanted her to wear modest clothes and a hijab; she wanted to wear fun teenagerish Canadian fashions. Her friends said she'd come to school and change in the bathroom then change back before going home.

I know a lot of 16 year-old girls die for a lot of reasons, but this story has hit me very hard. One reason it has is that this is evidently Aqsa's myspace picture:


I love this picture. When I saw this picture in the paper over dinner I could hardly stop myself from crying. I'm not sure why, exactly, except there's something so awesome about this girl in this photo. What a great expression! What a cool coat! What awesome hair! I want to be friends with her.

But she's dead. I'm sorry, Asqa. I'm sorry the world is so fucked up, and I'm sorry death is so final. I look at this picture and I think, well, surely there's just been a mistake. I mean, whatever happened -- we can undo that right? And she can sign up for courses next term?

Sometimes you get the feeling that people think that talking about sex and fashion is, you know, talking about something trivial. But women all over the world are threatened, menaced, and killed over sex and fashion.

And it's not just because, you know, some people are crazy. When people say they don't want their daughters becoming sex objects, they have a point. It's not a crazy demand. But when girls say, Hello, I'm going to do whatever the fuck I want, they have a point too. Because they get to. That's the deal we've all signed up for around here.

I could go on and on, but let's let Aqsa have this post, and this moment, to herself. We can argue about it later.

Moral Anti-Minimalism: The Case of Dr. Phil and Dan Savage

Two guys you might think didn't have a lot in common: Dr. Phil and Dan Savage.

Dr. Phil is the Oprah protégé who has that annoying afternoon TV show. He's full of family-values opinions and over-reactions that drive me crazy. "You were smoking pot and having sex? You're a drug addict! You're going to ruin your entire life!"

Dan Savage is the writer of the advice column Savage Love. His main thing is, sex is important; it matters a lot to people. Take it seriously; be open-minded, and be nice to each other, but if you're still not satisfied you may have to break up and find someone new.

OK, so pretty different. But Dr. Phil and Dan Savage have one big thing they share: a belief that the moral minimum is not enough.

Dr. Phil frequently tells people in conflict that it's not enough to think about what's fair: for the relationship to work, or move forward at all, one or both of them is going to have to "be a hero" -- to forgive or forget, or reach out, or something. To do more than would be strictly required.

Dan Savage frequently tells people whose sexual desires are an uneasy fit that they must be "GGG" with one another: Good, Giving, and Game. "Game" here means being open to another person's fantasies, no matter how strange or unsettling they strike you. If your boyfriend is dying for you to dress up in a wetsuit, well, you owe it to him to try it out. Even if, you know, it's not really your thing. Do it anyway.

These both strike me as expressions of the same basic idea: that when you live interconnectedly with other people, sometimes "fair" or "within my rights" just aren't the relevant things to consider. It's not fair that you have to forgive before the other person changes; it's my right not to dress up in a wetsuit if I don't want to. But the moral minimum is not enough: these are still, nonetheless, the things one must do.

One reason I think these guys find they have to give this advice so often that they've got handy phrases for it ("be a hero," "GGG") is that we've sort of become moral minimalists.

We're very good at signing on for moral requirements specific things you must do, rules you must obey, things in which a transgression is obviously blameworthy. You can't kill people, cheat on your taxes, rob a bank. You can't cheat on your spouse.

But a world of moral minimalists is a shitty world. It's a world in which everyone is calculating how little they can do, and what they can get away with. Everyone's a defensive little island. It's no way to live.

In a world of moral minimalists, the least misunderstanding, the least unforeseen bit of trouble, the least disruption in the agreed on order throws everything into chaos.

In a world of moral minimalists, you do things for other people, but always with a silent calculation that changes the very interaction. Maybe you can get your partner to dress up in a wetsuit. But the very elements of exchange ruins the feeling: you can't help but be reminded, "Oh, I know, it's a favor. I know."

It's funny that the actual word for going beyond the moral minimum is "supererogatory," a word that no one even knows.

You're Being Such A Vajayjay!

Look, I'm sorry. I apologize in advance. I know you don't want to read anything else about "Vajayjay." Feel free to skip this, walk on by.

Everyone probably knows the basics by now: some character on the show "Grey's Anatomy" used the word "vajayjay" to refer to her, you know, vajayay. Oprah liked it, used it. It became a hit.

Predictably, there's been some hand-wringing. The charge has been leveled that people like "vajayjay" because they are squeamish about "vagina," and that they're squeamish about "vagina" for some dark reason having to do with fear of women and sex.

OK, listen, this is just wrong. You don't need any squeamishness or fear to think that "vagina" is an awful word. It sounds bad. It's not fun to say. It's not remotely sexy. You can tell that it is the sound of the word that is the problem because even extremely close variants are way better: "vagine," say, or "vagina" pronounced so that is rhymes with Tina. Also, "clitoris" and "clit" are both fine.

When I learned that the city of Regina, in Canada, has a name that is properly pronounced so that it rhymes with vagina, I almost fell off my chair. Somebody needs a branding consultant up there, quick.

Anyway. Roots in fear and squeamishness is not the problem with "vajayjay." "Vajayjay" is fine, I'd say, for some purposes: if you're just discussing vajayjays in general, say; or if you're making a joke.

But. As Cleo argues so pursuasively in my favorite novel, Amazons, it's annoying that girl parts have such dopey names. How come guys get cock, prick, penis, while girls get boob, nookie, pussy? As she says, The only one worth anything at all is "cunt," and some woman probably came up with that one.

Also. It's not like vajayjay is a sexy word either. You're not going to say in the heat of the moment, "Oh, honey, lick my vajayjay! Yeah!" No.

As the predictable Times story on "vajayjay" reminds us, the vagina isn't even really the sex part, it's the inside part. The sex part is the "vulva." A word you almost never hear, though really, it's kind of a cool word in a weird way. "Vulva" kind of side-steps the whole contrast between the aggresion of "prick" and the stupidity of "nookie." "Vulva" just has its own thing going on.

The Times story also reports on the host of The Soup (which I've never heard of) saying in favor of "vajayjay," "It’s not derogatory. It’s not 'You’re being such a vajayjay right now.' It’s kind of a sweet thing."

Sweet or not, now that you mention it, I can imagine lots of situations that would call for "You're being such a vajayjay right now." I'm all over that.

Incidentally, the (female) creator of "Grey's Anatomy" wanted to use "vagina," and the broadcast standards people said "no way," even though they had used the word "penis" 17 times in one episode once. Vajayjay was a compromise.

So maybe for some people there is a squeamishness and fear thing going on.

What a bunch of fucking vajayjays.

Let Me Persuade You To Follow My Example, And Take A Turn About The Room

This blog is no stranger to talk of objectification -- there's this post and this one.

But, despite the sense that I am maybe worrying the issue like a dog with a slightly mangy bone, it's on my mind again due to my reading of the Advice Goddess Blog, to which I am strangely addicted. I say strangely because a) our political views do not coincide and b) I am exactly the sort of weak-kneed liberal she regards with derision/horror. On the other hand, she pretty unflinchingly addresses the issue of women's place in the world and then there's the fascination of knowing what somebody whose views differ almost entirely from yours thinks about things.

And in this post she said that a group of some kind is protesting the fact that the makers of Dove products, who have this whole real women/real beauty public image campaign going, are also the makers of Axe body spray, which has this whole sorority girl/pillow fight/sex in elevators public image campaign going.

The Advice Goddess makes the point that it's stupid in the first place to expect Dove's campaign to mean anything other than an attempt to sell product. Which is probably true, but might still be a point worth making.

This is all so much prelude. This quote is what hooked me:

"Men objectify women and women objectify women -- meaning, they objectify themselves. I think it was my friend, professor Catherine Salmon, who pointed this out in an essay. Male sexuality is visually driven. When men fantasize, they picture the woman (or the gay man) as the object of their desire; women generally picture being the object of desire. (Shouldn't the angry ladies be vilifying women for this, too?)"

This is very clearly put and certainly fits in with my personal experience.

And it does bother me, that self-objectification. In point of fact, it terrifies me, sends me waking up screaming.

While I am not unsympathetic to the difficulties of being the pursuer -- the risks of being shot down, mocked, the difficulties of getting laid -- at least at the end of the day the pursuer wants things, knows he wants things, moves towards them. Whereas, if your chosen role is as an object of desire, you are not supposed to want things. You are supposed to shed your desires, ignore them, go ahead and drift, so that you can eventually be taken by surprise and succumb to the desires of some conscious actor.

Zombie girls from Mars, really.

This mode, blissful non-desire, is often brought back to evolutionary biology. Which is fine; I don't really have any knowledge and/or interest in evolutionary biology. But I refuse to believe, with an almost religious faith, that there is an unalterable biological destiny that forces these roles upon us. And so I am left hoping that, as as Noko Marie suggested, we are somewhere in the middle of the feminist movement, rather than at the end.

"Nokomarie, Grow Your Penis!"

Whenever I get an email that starts, "Nokomarie, grow your penis safely and naturally!" it gives me pause.

I understand this email is intended for men and isn't suggesting "Nature's Path to Hermaphrodism." Still, for the briefest of moments, I think, "Really? How?"

I probably see more spam than most people. I use a very old-fashioned text-based email program: Pine. I love Pine. I can look at and delete tons of messages in less than a second with the "d" key -- no clicking required. Each message loads instantly. There is zero risk of getting your computer infected with a virus because all that's coming through is text, text, text.

OK, it's not great for attachments. I admit it. And there's no images. I can't click on any links . . . it's true. It's just those 26 letters and me. But the simplicity of that kind of knocks me out.

All this means I often scroll through and delete rather than deleting the messages right from the inbox. So I see a lot of spam.

It's always funny to see it while you're working. There you are reading some important internal memo about the creation of a new department offering a new Masters Degree in Socially Responsible and Innovative Leadership (names have been changed to protect, well, me, but this is not far from the truth). And you click "Save" for that one and the next one pops up and screams, "ERECTILE!" Always makes my day a little brighter.

Also it's nice to know there are so many things that men and women share when it comes to spam. I remember reading somewhere that spam was like the collective unconscious of the entire culture. . . it's what we're all thinking about and emoting about on the inside while we talk about other things. Spam is about our deepest and scariest hopes, dreams, and unmentioned desires.

And except for penis- and breast-enlargement, spam is pretty unisex. Make millions from Nigerian warlords. Refinance your mortgage. Lose unwanted kilos! (Isn't it weird they neither use the right units nor spell check? How much better would phishing work if you weren't being asked to "please now to type your PIN code into the CItybank page.")

With respect to the big things -- old age, death, money, sex -- men and women, we're all in this together.

There is, though, one real outlier here, and that is: software spam. Software? There you are being promised everlasting youth, riches, beauty, sex, and . . . free OEM software?

Uh, thanks, but maybe some other time. Right now I'm busy imagining how my new penis is going to work when when my Nigerian wealth lets me take my Russian bride to my timeshare in Florida. Will its size satisfy her? Or will I need to bring some Vi@gra?