Sex talk

My grandmothers were married in their early teens.  My grandfathers were also only teenagers--only a couple of years older.  It was basically child-marriage, which was the norm back then.  My paternal grandmother delivered her first child when she was only 15!

Now, child marriages are illegal, thankfully.  Girls aren't condemned to be barefoot and pregnant, and they can grow up to become rocket scientists too.

But, the new social and legal structure for marriage does not mean that the reproductive biology has changed.  The hormones begin to kick in, and boys and girls are fully ready to have sex in their teens.  In fact, puberty appears to have been fast-forwarded:

Puberty generally begins between eight and 13 years in girls and nine and 14 years for boys. However, a number of global studies suggest the average age of puberty is falling.

The hormones are kicking and screaming, and porn is all around.  In traditional and conservative societies like India's, this can be a recipe for challenging times for boys and girls alike.

Living with parents tightly circumscribes the sexual lives of teenagers in most countries, including the US.  I have always jokingly hypothesized that this sexual urge is the biggest reason that American teenagers seek their independence after they turn 18 years old.  However, COVID-19 forced many of them to return to their parents' homes.  Even if they were out of the nests, quarantine and social distancing made sexual relations rather challenging, if not impossible.

Now, we have the vaccines, and young people here in America are eager to have sex.  However, more sex will not mean more kids; the fertility rate has been falling.  Within a decade or two, we will find out if this is good or bad news.

The contemporary world is a different planet compared to my grandmothers' teenage years. 

"She" sells ... by the sea shore!

Take a look at the image below:

Source

A woman in a two-piece swimsuit, staring at the ocean with a drink in her hand.  Right?

Now, imagine a man in his swim trunks staring at the ocean with a drink in his hand.

Unless the image of the woman is needed because it is a part of a story in which women are the focus, the story can be told with an image of a man, yes?

If the story is not really about women, or a woman, then why the graphic of a woman in a two-piece swimsuit with a drink on her hand?

It is the old saw of objectification of women. Sex sells!

BTW, the writer is a guy.  All the more then why a graphic of a guy in his swim trunks is more appropriate, I would think.

The story for which that graphic is a lead-in has the byline "one of the best ways to reduce stress while traveling is to just plan less and let spontaneity take over."  Tell me again why you need for this a graphic of a woman in a two-piece swim suit with a drink in her hand!

And, this is in the NY Times!

Oh well ...

As for the content?  I largely agree with the point that he makes: "I strongly recommend considering planning less, even if that’s leaving just a few days open."

Surely there are other graphics that will work to get this point across, don't you think?

Life without sex can have its downsides

Do not let the title of this post allow your imagination to run wild.  You are on a slippery path, dear reader!

The sex that this post is about is not about humans or porn.  Ditch that thought.  But, wait, don't go away.  You can always watch porn later.  Read this post, which will do you good ;)

Sex is nearly ubiquitous, but it hasn’t been easy to explain its ubiquity. ...
While sex may be a bit of a mystery to us all, it has been the grand enigma of evolutionary biology for decades.

No, it is not about humans.  It is about bananas and corn.  No, I am not using them as metaphors but literally.

Of the important global crops, the banana is the most genetically uniform. A single cluster of nearly identical genotypes, the Cavendish subgroup, nearly monopolizes the world’s banana groves and banana trade. In contrast to the riotous rainbow of genetic diversity that lends sustainability to natural plant and animal populations, the world’s banana industry has the stability of an upside-down Egyptian pyramid balanced on its tip.
That fact leads to another superlative: The commercial banana is the world’s most endangered major crop. The future of the intercontinentally traded banana was once, and is again, precarious.

Talking about the precarious state of bananas is not new here.  But, in that post, I didn't go into the importance of sex.

What about sex and bananas?

Domesticated banana plants are self-copying machines.

With the emergence of the 20th century, the confluence of the Industrial Revolution with plantation agriculture led to the propagation of a single globally favored banana genet (descended from a single instance of sperm-egg fusion) for export from the tropics to waiting markets in the industrial north.

So, why would I want you to think about sex when eating a banana?

Because most important crops reproduce only by sexual seed, they cannot be clonally propagated. Not surprisingly, the genetic variation generated by sexual reproduction is an obstacle for many folks looking to deliver a better crop product. For the past quarter century, some plant biotechnologists have argued that future crops should follow the banana, dispensing with sex entirely. Specifically, they are titillated by the idea of varieties that replicate the maternal plant via reliably uniform, asexual, apomictic seed.³ One proposal is that the plant breeders would maintain sexually fertile lineages that, when crossed, would create apomictic offspring. A second approach would be to genetically engineer plants to be apomictic. The seeds produced by either method could be delivered to farmers, who benefit from the crop’s uniformity.

So, is it a good thing, or a bad thing, to dispense with sex entirely?

It depends.

The explanation for sex isn’t straightforward. Sex is a hassle. To reproduce without sex, an organism can dedicate a cell toward creating a new individual, pump it up with some resources, and eventually set its baby free. The organism that uses sex to reproduce has a greater challenge; it has to create gametes that have to find other gametes. The process of seeking or attracting those other gametes typically involves allocation of resources to special structures and, in the case of animals, allocation of resources and time to special behaviors.

Why not let technologists work it out in the lab?

The original Cavendish-resistant Panama disease culprit has now been named Race 1. Panama disease fungi have evolved; the Race 1 genotypes are being replaced by one known as Race 4, which first appeared in 1965. Cavendish has no resistance to Race 4. The evolutionarily new and improved Panama disease organism has wiped out thousands of Cavendish acres in Southeast Asia. Since then it has been identified in the Pacific, Australia, Africa, and the Middle East. Worse yet, in 2011 Cavendish bananas in India started succumbing to what appears to be a new genetic variant of Race 1. The bad news is that Cavendish is fully sexually sterile.

Sex might be a hassle, messy, and needing resources.  But, it is key to survival. 

Source

Sex sells?

We live in strange times.  People have plenty of "friends" but perhaps feel way more alone than ever.  It is, but one measure, of how rapidly our lives are being transformed.  In the process--and more importantly--we are completely redefining what it means to be human, with human emotions.

Sex is one of those human emotions, which is also being rapidly redefined.  "Making sense of modern pornography" is what this New Yorker essay is about.  The following sentence there makes me think about how much even our "regular" vocabulary and approach to life has changed:

It has permeated everyday life, to the point where we talk easily of food porn, disaster porn, war porn, real-estate porn—not because culture has been sexualized, or sex pornified, but because porn’s patterns of excess, fantasy, desire, and shame are so familiar.

I know what the author is referring to; even in this blog, I have used phrases like 'poverty porn' when, for instance, critiquing Slumdog Millionaire.  The word "porn" has pretty much become a part of our daily vocabulary.

Porn is everywhere.  And at zero cost.  One small typo when entering a URL can easily send one to a porn site.

Years ago, back when the web was young, I wrote an op-ed about this, during my California years, in which I noted that life as a teenager has become immensely more complicated and how amazed I was that the kids were managing this quite successfully.  In the years since, the life of a young person has become even more challenging with porn so easy to access right from the smartphone, and with sexting becoming a part of the daily vocabulary.  I am so glad that I am not a stressed out teenager with hormones rushing through every possible vein.  Phew!

With the growth in technology, we knew it was only a matter of time before we reached that strange twilight zone issue--robot sex.  And, therefore, robot porn. And, heck, robot brothels.

Apparently it already arrived and I never knew about it!

A Canadian company wants to open a so-called “robot brothel” in Houston, but is getting pushback from officials and community groups, with the mayor saying the city is reviewing its ordinances to determine if they address public safety and health concerns potentially associated with the business.
...
Kinky S Dolls says it’s opening a “love dolls brothel” in Houston. It opened a similar venue in Toronto in 2017.

What is the business about?

KinkySDolls is one of many manufacturers of sex dolls that range in price from $4,000 to $20,000 depending on the features. The company operates a try-before-you-buy store in Toronto, where time alone in a private room with one of the products ranges from $80 to $120.
Or put another way, the company offers a hotel room with a sex doll in it on an hourly basis.

Why Houston?  I am sure the company did the background market research.  While people who don't care for profits make location decisions for crazy reasons, businesses guided by the profit motive don't casually choose locations.  I wonder what it is about Houston!

The profit-loving people will perhaps love this, despite their rhetoric!

As one who cares about humans and empathy and emotions, I am not thrilled with this.  But, I am not surprised that it has come to this :(

The implicit brutality of male sexuality

Years ago, an older friend who was married to an European, remarked about an aspect of the male-female relationship that did not exist in my old country nor in the adopted one.  "Harmless flirtation" at parties and at places of work is very European, he said.  Of course, the European flirtation that he referred to was in the married context, where people are in committed relationships.

Having been raised in a culture where girls and boys, and women and men, lived socially separate lives, and as one curious about how different societies around the world dealt with issues like this, I found all these to be fascinating.  In the old country, women even in my grandmother's generation rarely talked with men, which then did not even crack open the possibility of harmless flirtation.  

In enforcing such a separation between the male and the female, one of the metaphors in the Tamil culture was about fire and cotton--these need to be kept far away from each other because otherwise the cotton will get burnt.  Females being the cotton here, of course.  It was to protect women from the fire and fury that men are.

Vice President mike pence practices such a separation between men and women.  He has proudly noted how he doesn’t eat alone with any woman other than his wife.  While it might seem like a great idea, it is another version of la majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain.  Why?  Because, in practice it means like this:

One reason women stall professionally, research shows, is that people have a tendency to hire, promote and mentor people like themselves. When men avoid solo interactions with women — a catch-up lunch or late night finishing a project — it puts women at a disadvantage.

So, isn't a better approach to empower women?  Give them agency?

Masha Gessen notes:

In the current American conversation, women are increasingly treated as children: defenseless, incapable of consent, always on the verge of being victimized. This should give us pause. Being infantilized has never worked out well for women.

In this post-weinstein era, I hope we don't swing to the other extreme and strictly enforce the gender separation that continues to exist in many parts of the world.

Instead, I want something else: Serious and sincere conversations on how to deal with the biological wiring in men, and how nurture can address that aspect of nature.  But then, nobody listens to what I have to say!

Size is not everything!

With the background of the pussygrabber and now the weinstein scandals, one would think that journalists will be careful in their choice of words.

But then I am naive to have such expectations!

Monday morning, I picked up the newspaper that was waiting for me on the front porch, and the front page headlines was, well: pathetic, shocking, disgusting.  Check it out:

Seriously, "a study in size" is how the editors decided to refer to a news story about a small college in town?  Size?  WTF!

There is a good chance that most of us do not even notice these anymore, because we are so much used to such language.  Locker-room talk has been mainstreamed.

The report was not really a "study" in size either.  It was not as if there was any analysis of educational outcomes across colleges and universities that are small and big. 

In order to provide a link to the story, I searched the newspaper's website.  Guess what?  The headline there is different:

Why didn't they run that in the original, right?  "Small is beautiful" is not only a phrase that many of us are familiar with, especially thanks to Schumacher, but guess what?

One of the taglines on Gutenberg’s website? “Small is beautiful.”

Yet, the newspaper's editors originally captioned the story as about "size."  Idiots who continue to peddle that old and awful idea that sex sells!

Were Adam and Eve the first ever to fuck?

I doubt that I knew anything about homosexuality when I was a kid.  I was drawn to girls from a very early age, though the feelings were forcefully repressed and buried deep down thanks to the screwed up social mores of those days.

As I got older, I have always wondered whether the love for the other sex does not preclude satisfying physical relations with the same gender.  Not having tested this out myself, I can only rely on what scientists and commentators have written about, and it seems like sexual fluidity is for real.

Whether or not straight people have sex--or fall in love--with others of the same sex, the more I have walked away from the old traditions of the old country, the more I have wondered what place law has in who people love, or who they have sex with.  I can even understand the religious orthodoxy issuing decrees on what makes something a sin.  If people do not like those religious decrees, then they can always shed that religious cloak.  But, the law?  One cannot simply walk away from one country to another, right?

In the old country, homosexuality as a crime was leftover from the years of the bastard empire's rules. A free India merely replaced the white masters with home-grown brown masters.

The criminalisation of homosexuality or what is popularly referred to as Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) dates back to 1860 when the British introduced it as sexual activities against the “order of nature.” ... The roots of the legality, however, can be found in European culture which for a long time had influenced Indian ways and thoughts.

We then have to ask ourselves where the white colonizers got the idea that homosexuality is not the “order of nature.”

Britain was Christian, though Catholics and Protestants killed each other in the name of Christ!  In the narratives that developed a couple of centuries after the death of Jesus, Saint Augustine invented the story of sex:

He needed to understand the peculiar intensity of arousal, compulsive urgency, pleasure, and pain that characterizes the human fulfillment of desire. He was not looking back on these feelings from the safe perch of a diminished libido, or deluding himself that they were abnormal. As a young man who had already fathered a child, he knew that, for the entire human species, reproduction entailed precisely the sexual intercourse that he was bent on renouncing. How could the highest Christian religious vocation reject something so obviously natural? In the course of answering this question, Augustine came to articulate a profoundly influential and still controversial vision of sexuality, one that he reached not only by plumbing his deepest experiences but also by projecting himself back into the remotest human past.

Or, to put it in simple words, Augustine had a penis problem!

How weird it is, Augustine thought, that we cannot simply command this crucial part of the body. We become aroused, and the arousal is within us—it is in this sense fully ours—and yet it is not within the executive power of our will. Obviously, the model here is the male body, but he was certain that women must have some equivalent experience, not visible but essentially identical.

So, what did Augustine do?

Augustine’s tortured recognition that involuntary arousal was an inescapable presence—not only in conjugal lovemaking but also in what he calls the “very movements which it causes, to our sorrow, even in sleep, and even in the bodies of chaste men”—shaped his most influential idea, one that transformed the story of Adam and Eve and weighed down the centuries that followed: originale peccatum, original sin.
This idea became one of the cornerstones of Christian orthodoxy

Augustine blamed his own penis problem on Adam and Eve's sexual relations!

That whopper of an explanation from 1,700 years ago bled into Catholic, and later Protestant, doctrines, which the white settlers brought to the United States too.

In his deeply researched new book, Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion, and Law from America’s Origins to the Twenty-First Century, Geoffrey R. Stone gives his answer to these and other questions about our country’s regulation of sex, with a special emphasis on same-sex activity. According to Stone, a scholar of constitutional law at the University of Chicago, Christianity has exerted the biggest influence on how we have addressed the issue from colonial times to today. The “central theme” of Sex and the Constitution “is that American attitudes about sex have been shaped over the centuries by religious beliefs—more particularly, by early Christian beliefs—about sex, sin, and shame.”

Stone reminds us that life was different in the pre-Christian, pre-Augustine Europe:

In a brief survey of sexual attitudes in the ancient world, he blames the early Christians for having taken all the fun out of sex. In pre-Christian times sex was considered “a natural and positive part of human experience” and not “predominantly bound up with questions of sin, shame, or religion.” He echoes previous scholars in finding that “classical Greek morality and law focused not on sexual sin, but on whether an individual’s conduct was harmful to others.”

The missing link between Augustine and the British sodomy laws?

If Stone holds Augustine responsible for promoting the idea of sex as an evil force, he presents Saint Thomas Aquinas as “the man most responsible for the hardening of the Church’s attitude toward same-sex sex.” Aquinas “systematized and expanded upon Augustine’s thinking.” His Summa Theologica (1265–1275) “rewrote the whole of Christian moral theology” and pronounced same-sex activity, which could not be for procreation, “especially contemptible in the sight of God.” Aquinas distinguished sinful acts carried out by opposite-sex couples from the sexual activity of same-sex couples. The latter activity was per se the “more grievous sin.” The church conferred formal authority on Aquinas’s views on these and other matters at the Council of Trent in 1563.

At some point in time, the sooner the better, we better develop for ourselves an understanding of what it means to be human, which will then provide clear answers to questions such as who the fuck cares what Adam and Eve did!

What is a youth? Impetuous fire.

I would think that for most people the hormonal biology is the same, irrespective of the continents in which we live.  Language, religion, ethnicity, and any cultural marker has got nothing to do with the growth of male facial hair, pubic hair, hair under the armpits, and--most importantly, the sex hormones.

I was a basket case when the biochemistry started changing inside, leading to visible external changes. Imagination ran wild.  If I were looking for cheap notoriety, well, I have my own horror stories to tell.  But, I am too grown up for a tell-all.

To react to those hormonal changes is normal.  It is human.  It is very much a part of the biological species that we are.  Now, it does not mean that we should then behave like dogs in heat and do it doggy-style.  We don't want to behave like animals, no doubt.  But, suppressing those hormonal desires is another.  It is abnormal.  It is destructive.

Trying to control that is like pressing against an inflated balloon.  Either the balloon gets squished into a different shape, or it simply bursts.  Right?  Ellen Barry writes about this sexual oppression balloon in India:

Intentionally dialing wrong numbers is a labor-intensive way to find a girlfriend. But it is increasingly common in a range of countries — Morocco, Papua New Guinea, Bangladesh and India are examples — where traditional gender segregation has collided head-on with a wave of cheap new technology.

These are not old men trolling around for trophy wives.  Nope.  Young men.  Like Premsagar Tiwari:

Premsagar Tiwari, whose given name in Hindi translates as “Sea of Love.” Mr. Tiwari, 24, turned out to be a high-strung, pencil-necked man who grew up in two small rooms in the corner of the down-at-heel government school where his father worked as a night watchman. Outside his window, young women came and went in their crisp school uniforms. But the night watchman’s son could not approach them.

24 years old.  Let us say that the hormones have been tormenting him since he was 14.  A full decade of hormone craziness.  He sees girls in the real world. He sees girls in movies and television shows.  He sees girls in porn.  But, there he is in a prison that society has built around him, and his cellphone is the only way to reach the other side.

He said he had heard many stories of men and women meeting over social media and going on to marry.
“I may be a failed man,” he said, “but I am very passionate.”
The police were not impressed, and held him in custody for 15 days.

I don't mean to imply that this Tiwari guy is innocent.  He is guilty as hell.  But, we need to pause and think about the hundreds of millions of young men and women in India, in Morocco, in Bangladesh, ... in societies where the youth are forbidden from interacting across the genders.

BTW, plenty of young women look forward to these cellphone encounters:

Ms. Huang, the anthropologist, said the women she met in Bangladesh were often happy to engage in telephone courtships with anonymous strangers, and some maintained five or six at once. Phone contact, they told her, was safer because it presupposed physical distance. Also, it forced the men on the other end of the line to listen to them for long stretches.
“It’s one of those boundary-expanding experiences that allow you to think about opportunities that were not previously available,” she said. Young women, she said, described these relationships with “kind of a fearful excitement.”

We forget that in Romeo and Juliet, Juliet was barely 14, and Romeo was only three years older.  The very ages when teenagers all across the world go cuckoo.  The Tiwaris are 24, even 30.  There is also that other connection to such repressed men and the "blue balls" theory of terrorism; but, that is a post for another day.

Not fifty, but a thousand shades of gray

"Can you explain to me this gay thing?" she asked.

"It is complicated," I replied.

In the first place, I am not sure if I have enough expertise to talk about this. On top of that, the usual complaint is that my responses are always way longer than what the questioner had in mind.  I suppose I don't like to merely give the bottom-line, consistent with my philosophical approach to life that it is never merely about the destination but also about the journey itself.

So, without any expertise I launched into a lengthy explanation.

"It is not as if things are black-and-white when it comes to being gay.  Most researchers now talk in terms of sexual fluidity" I started.

I keenly watched out for any glazed expression. Or the eyeball disappearing after having been rolled way up. No signs.  There was an attentive posture.  I got encouraged.

"The this-or-that approach is modern.  In olden times, it seems like people might have been way less rigid about this than we are now."  I went on and on and on.  Interestingly enough, there were even questions posed and it became an interactive session!

A few days later, I read this awesome essay by Siddhartha Mukherjee, on sex, gender, and gender identity.  Yes, the same Mukherjee whose book on cancer won him a Pulitzer.  This essay is an excerpt from another book of his: The Gene: an Intimate History.

Mukherjee writes:

The distinction between the three words is relevant to this discussion. By sex, I mean the anatomic and physiological aspects of male versus female bodies. By gender, I am referring to a more complex idea: the psychic, social, and cultural roles that an individual assumes. By gender identity, I mean an individual’s sense of self (as female versus male, as neither, or as something in between).

Across the world, as we begin to move away from the old collective arrangements that denied an individual's sense of self, we are beginning to see even the supposedly conservative societies having to face the complexity of sex, gender, and gender identity.

Strictly from a genetic perspective:

Sex, one of the most complex of human traits, is unlikely to be encoded by multiple genes. Rather, a single gene, buried rather precariously in the Y chromosome, must be the master regulator of maleness. Male readers of that last paragraph should take notice: We barely made it.

If you are a long-time reader of this blog, you know about the geographic migratory path of my maleness that came from the African Savannah.

Anyway, even from a genotype/phenotype perspective--without the cultural/socialization aspects--the story is complex:

In 1955, Gerald Swyer, an English endocrinologist investigating female infertility, had discovered a rare syndrome that made humans biologically female but chromosomally male. “Women” born with “Swyer syndrome” were anatomically and physiologically female throughout childhood, but did not achieve female sexual maturity in early adulthood. When their cells were examined, geneticists discovered that these “women” had XY chromosomes in all their cells. Every cell was chromosomally male—yet the person built from these cells was anatomically, physiologically, and psychologically female. A “woman” with Swyer syndrome had been born with the male chromosomal pattern (i.e., XY chromosomes) in all of her cells, but had somehow failed to signal “maleness” to her body.

Imagine that!  What a complication, right?  In the extended family, we have had at least two cases of girls who were biologically girls but who never reached that sexual maturity in their teens.  I wonder if they too could have been chromosomally male?

But do not jump to conclusions about this chromosomal aspects:

Women with Swyer syndrome are not “women trapped in men’s bodies.” They are women trapped in women’s bodies that are chromosomally male (except for just one gene).

Pause for a second and think about this: "women trapped in women’s bodies that are chromosomally male (except for just one gene)" Head-spinning, right?

How can we reconcile this idea—of a single genetic switch that dominates one of the most profound dichotomies in human identity—with the fact that human gender identity in the real world appears in a continuous spectrum? Virtually every culture has recognized that gender does not exist in discrete half-moons of black and white, but in a thousand shades of gray.

Every single fucked up homophobe, condemning people to hell-on-earth based on some fucked up religious interpretation, should be locked up in a room until they read and understand all these complex issues.

At the top of the cascade, nature works forcefully and unilaterally. Up top, gender is quite simple—just one master gene flicking on and off. If we learned to toggle that switch—by genetic means or with a drug—we could control the production of men or women, and they would emerge with male versus female identity (and even large parts of anatomy) quite intact. At the bottom of the network, in contrast, a purely genetic view fails to perform; it does not provide a particularly sophisticated understanding of gender or its identity. Here, in the estuarine plains of crisscrossing information, history, society, and culture collide and intersect with genetics, like tides. Some waves cancel each other, while others reinforce each other. No force is particularly strong—but their combined effect produces the unique and rippled landscape that we call an individual’s identity.

Like I said, it is complicated.

Source

Buck Naked

We live in strange times.  People have plenty of "friends" but perhaps feel way more alone than ever.  It is, but one measure, of how rapidly our lives are being transformed.  In the process--and more importantly--we are completely redefining what it means to be human, with human emotions.

Sex is one of those human emotions, which is also being rapidly redefined.  "Making sense of modern pornography" is what this New Yorker essay is about.  The following sentence there makes me think about how much even our "regular" vocabulary and approach to life has changed:

It has permeated everyday life, to the point where we talk easily of food porn, disaster porn, war porn, real-estate porn—not because culture has been sexualized, or sex pornified, but because porn’s patterns of excess, fantasy, desire, and shame are so familiar.

I know what the author is referring to; even in this blog, I have used phrases like 'poverty porn' when, for instance, critiquing Slumdog Millionaire.  The word "porn" has pretty much become a part of our daily vocabulary.

Porn is everywhere.  And at zero cost.  One small typo when entering a URL can easily send one to a porn site.  Years ago, back when the web was young, I wrote an op-ed about this, during my California years, in which I noted that life as a teenager has become immensely more complicated and how amazed I was that the kids were managing this quite successfully.  In the years since, the life of a young person has become even more challenging with porn so easy to access right from the smartphone, and with sexting becoming a part of the daily vocabulary.  I am so glad that I am not a stressed out teenager with hormones rushing through every possible vein.  Phew!

Despite porn’s ubiquity, the Internet has also made it more private, and its effects less knowable. The consequences of seeing sex before having it are as unclear as those of Facebook’s colonization of our leisure time. Pornography isn’t hermetically sealed from the rest of culture, and today it sits on a continuum with other problems of technology that we don’t yet know how to address.

I love how the author has summed it up: "it sits on a continuum with other problems of technology that we don’t yet know how to address."  We have no freaking idea.

Meanwhile, technology is apparently flooding the market with sex toys that are so beyond my wildest imaginations, like these:

Then there are smart toys and machines such as the Bluetooth WorldVibe vibrator, with shareable vibration patterns and an app that controls the device, and the Limon, which uses ‘squeeze technology’ that allows one partner to squeeze the toy, programming it to a personalised rhythm and pressure the other can enjoy. There’s also Vibease, the ‘world’s first wearable smart vibrator’, which is controlled by an app on either iPhone or Android. One partner can wear the vibrator inside her underwear and the other, regardless of where she or he is, can control it.
There are toys for men too, although unlike toys for women, which straddle solo and partner play, heterosexual men’s toys are largely masturbatory devices.

Am I the only one who finds it creepy with such intersections of technology and sex?  More than the creepiness factor, what worries me more is the one with which the author ends the essay: "we risk alienating ourselves from each other all over again."  

The scenarios presented by Hollywood in Her and Ex Machina do not seem that far away. All the more to look forward to turning 75.

These are the best of times ... but also the worst of times?

With all the women's liberation and advances in feminism, could it be possible that young girls of today feel the pressure of their gender as much as--or perhaps even more than--young girls of the bad old days?

I have been thinking about this for a long time.  On the one hand, boys and young men are falling behind so rapidly that I have been blogging about "save the males."  On the other hand, I have also been blogging about how heterosexuality, which is the overwhelming sexual identity and behavior, then translates into even the loser guys having an easier time in contrast to young women--who have to now fiercely compete for their man.

Girl power seems to be increasingly measured in terms of sexuality.

American girls may appear to be “among the most privileged and successful girls in the world,” she writes, but thanks to the many hours they spend each day in an online culture that treats them—and teaches them to treat themselves—as sexual objects, they are no more, and perhaps rather less, “empowered” in their personal lives than their mothers were thirty years ago.

This has been my worry too.  Even on campuses and in public social spaces, young women seem to be hypersexualized than ever before.  The weather warms up and the skimpiest of hotpants are de rigueur, it seems.

Even in the Olympics, which I did not watch--of course--I did notice in the sports pages that while male track and field athletes wear shorts and vests that are tight and long covering most of their bodies that we relate to sexuality, many of the female athletes are covered with gear that is only a little more than a two-piece bikini.  Apparently the female beach volleyball team even voted to wear only the skimpiest minimum--even though the bikini is not a requirement!

If everywhere we turn it is the sexualized image of women, then?

The unsparing gaze that social media train on girls’ sexuality—the supreme value that they place on being sexually appealing—engenders a widespread female anxiety about physical appearance that is highly conducive to “self-objectification,” Sales claims. All of her interview subjects agree that on sites like Instagram and Facebook, female popularity (as quantified by the number of “likes” a girl’s photos receive) depends on being deemed “hot.” “You have to have a perfect body and big butt,” a fifteen-year-old from the Bronx observes grimly. “For a girl, you have to be that certain way to get the boys’ attention.”

Teenage biology points to the direction of sex.  In this, I am not sure whether young women today are better off than those in the past:

Some of the misery of teenage girls’ sexual experiences is attributable, Orenstein contends, to the “hookup culture” in which sex, “rather than being a product of intimacy…has become its precursor, or sometimes its replacement.” (Rates of female orgasm are much lower for casual encounters, she notes, than for sex that takes place within committed relationships.) Another contributing factor, she suggests, is the part that pornography now plays in determining normative standards of teenage sexual behavior.

The pressure that girls and young women must feel to look good 24x7, day after day means that they are continuing to respond to the male-defined world even though boys and young men are rapidly falling behind when it comes to successful schooling and other responsibilities of that age?  Will the young women really feel confident to say no when the situation warrants it, or will they say yes only because of the intensity of the pressure and the competition?

In such a context, it does not help when the presidential candidate of the "family values" party loudly says things that are outrightly misogynistic but which get him loud applause and cheers from his adoring millions of supporters.  After all, if the overwhelming majority do not think for themselves, then they will only imitate the behavior and thinking of "leaders," right?

I suppose I should be relieved that I do not have a young girl to raise and worry about!

Source

OMG! Another mass shooting that was committed by a woman?

A couple of years ago, when visiting the old country, I overheard one middle-aged father remark that his son and his friends were spending time in the internet places in order to watch "dirty stuff."  It was not even a comment that was addressed to me, which all the more became easy for me to ignore it.  I would have liked to tell him that it is only natural for boys and young men to respond to the signals from their internal biochemistry, and that as a parent he ought to teach his son how to deal with that biology, and about respectful treatment of the female.

Over the years, I have come to understand that it takes enormous effort to overcome the role of biology and the hormones.  Women have to deal with their hassles, while we men have to work against testosterone.  When they complain about their PMS and menopause issues, women have no idea how tough it is being a man ;)  It is only through a conscious and challenging effort that we can tame the testosterone within.

The old country was getting away from the terrible practices like child marriage just as Victorian ideas of sex got embedded within the culture.  Later, with the emphasis on higher education, it is not a surprise anymore that while girls and boys are biologically ready for sex even as they turn twelve--or even younger--marriage, unlike with my grandparents, gets awfully delayed.  In a culture where premarital sex is practically taboo, is it any surprise that boys and young men seek the company of the internet?

The good thing is this--owning a gun is difficult for Indian males.  Why is this important?  Almost always, the mass shooter in the US "is socially alienated, and he can’t get laid":

The facts of toxic masculinity are rarely discussed after mass shootings, as we beat the usual drums of gun control and mental health. Or toxic masculinity is blithely attributed to some patriarchal conspiracy that is unconsciously educated into boys. But consider the bigger, evolutionary picture. Social life requires the domestication of men. This is not some contemporary political interpretation of maleness. It’s a biological generalisation that applies to most social mammals. Intermale aggression must be turned into guardian instincts, if primate societies (such as ours) are to attain stability. Males must transform from little tyrants, competing for females, to selfless bodyguards and potential providers.

In the old days, we had wars that provided an outlet for the testosterone.  We sent the hormone-raging young men to go kill others.  Of course, the wars also led to raping the females--young and old alike.  Thankfully, that kind of killing and raping is in the past.  But, it means that we need to work that much harder to make sure that the testosterone-filled young men are being tamed, or are getting laid, or both.

Without a partner or sexual fulfilment, many men remain emotionally juvenile – aggressively impulsive, self-serving and potentially violent.
Young men who cannot find a place in the socialisation process will often take up a disdainful hostility towards domestication itself. The terminal rebel takes shape.

 In the old country, rapes and "eve teasing" are certainly tied to this dynamic.  Here in the West?

in the contemporary West, natural sexual frustration is intensified by a culture that throws sex in your face at every turn, reminding you that you’re not getting any. These are existential issues because they resonate – rightly or wrongly – at the core of how many men see themselves. The problem is that many of our social norms and cultural narratives increase rather than defuse resentment. And resentment is the psychological fuel that gets the fire of violence going, whatever the ideological justification.

So, any concluding thoughts?

Male desire and craving are not intellectualised away with some didactic lecture about how the brain or the economy works, or some sermon about what Jesus or Muhammad want from you. Desire must be redirected into some form of non-destructive expression, or defused, not just talked about. It’s the job of culture to help with this redirection, and the Abrahamic cultural traditions have outlived their effectiveness in doing so. We need to get working on some new cultural inventions to domesticate resentment and the hydraulics of hate, or the growing pack of weaponised losers will make political terrorism look tame by comparison.

Exactly.

One of the old jokes about the higher education system is that nobody cares about the education itself as long as the young men are able to have sex and if the alums and the public are happy with the ballgames.  The ballgames are also outlets for the testosterone; anybody who watches team sports--or better yet, been to a meet--knows well the war-like parallels.  Which is also why the author quotes my favorite intellectual, George Orwell, who "referred to international sport as ‘war minus the shooting’."

I have been saying all these for years; but, hey, who listens to me!  If only the wuss that I am had enough testosterone for me to beat the crap out of people who don't listen to me ;)

Real men are never afraid of sex!

Back in the old country, we boys and girls operated in gender-segregated worlds.  The school was coeducational, but boys and girls dared not to speak with each other.  It was not until the reunion thirty years later that we were able to even understand how much of a missed opportunity it was to get to know fellow-classmates for the wonderful (or, in some cases, the unpleasant) humans we were and are.

I suppose that segregation was nothing but a reflection of the traditional fear of sex.  And that fear of sex meant that the lives of girls were a lot more tightly circumscribed compared to the relative freedom that we boys had.  Even in the most enjoyable parts of childhood that had nothing to do with sex--like bicycling around or playing outside even after sundown--we boys were freer than girls.

College life was no different--men and women kept to their own kind.  It did not mean that the men ignored the testosterone that was rushing through their bodies.  After all, biology is biology.

At least all those were decades ago.  That was a world before the internet.  We didn't really have an idea of how young men and women in different parts of the world dealt with their biological triggers.  Now, the proverbial genie is out of the bottle.  Which is why a report like this, from another part of the world, seems so bizarre to me:

More than 30 college students were arrested, interrogated and within 24 hours were each given 99 lashes for attending a graduation party that included men and women, Iran’s judiciary has announced.

WTF!

College graduates got together to celebrate and to party, which then resulted in 99 lashes each?  That is 99 lashes more than what they deserved.  How terrible!  What happened at the party?

more than 30 female and male students — the women were described as “half naked,” meaning they were not wearing Islamic coverings, scarves and long coats — were arrested while “dancing and jubilating” after the authorities received a report that a party attended both by men and women was being held in a villa on the outskirts of Qazvin.

WTF!

Torquemada, er, the prosecutor, adds this:

We hope this will be a lesson for those who break Islamic norms in private places

WTF!

In "private places."  Adults--college graduates.

If these college graduates wanted to live alone?  Apparently it is not a crime.  But:

In Semnan, several “polluted singles houses were cleaned” and 97 people, including 10 women, were detained.
Col. Mojtaba Ashrafi of the Semnan police told the news agency that the raids were carried out over a 48-hour period, after the authorities monitored for several weeks 58 homes in which single people were believed to be living.

WTF!

I am quite prudish myself.  But, what adults do is none of my concern, as long as they don't force me to do what they want to do.  Why should it bother the bearded mullahs that college graduates might want to live alone and party with their friends?  Maybe the old men didn't ever go to coed schools!

Sex is for fun ... and a lab will be for reproduction?

My  comment at this post was tongue-in-cheek about sex being a cornerstone of most, if not all, religious beliefs.  Science and technology have continually pushed our understanding of sex and reproduction.  From preventing reproduction--thereby, rendering sex recreational--to various fertility enhancement technologies as well; the pill and the condom, on one side, and test-tube baby and womb-to-rent on the other side, have generated quite some headaches for the believers and their leaders.

As much as I have fun at the expense of believers in all these issues, I certainly empathize with their fundamental problem--the scientific and technological advancements challenge an understanding of what it means to be human.  If life--a baby--can be created in a petri-dish, then what does it mean to be human?  If materials from three "donor" parents can be assembled in a lab, and then that compound begins to grow in a womb as a baby, what does it mean to be human?  This atheist and many sincere believers struggle with that question of what it means to be human, while the vast majority--who are believers--seem to go about as if such technologies do not change a damn thing.

Everybody ought to think about that though.  Such thinking should not be outsourced to experts or--worse--to half-baked people like me.  But, most don't seem to be bothered--after all, there are a gazillion television channels to watch on top of those internet videos of cats playing piano!  While people are in a stupor with mind-dulling entertainment, there are more creepy things happening in the world of science.  Like this headline from the New York Times

Scientists Talk Privately About Creating a Synthetic Human Genome

It should have made people sit up and worry.  But, of course, this may not have even blipped through all those ballgames and viral videos!

What was that meeting about anyway?

Scientists are now contemplating the fabrication of a human genome, meaning they would use chemicals to manufacture all the DNA contained in human chromosomes.
The prospect is spurring both intrigue and concern in the life sciences community because it might be possible, such as through cloning, to use a synthetic genome to create human beings without biological parents.
While the project is still in the idea phase, and also involves efforts to improve DNA synthesis in general, it was discussed at a closed-door meeting on Tuesday at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

Routine news.  Yawn!  Bring on that video of a cat playing soccer!

Of course, we are a long way from creating humans in labs from chemical molecules without involving biological parents.  But, it is the trend line that should alert us.  Trends like this:

Right now, synthesizing DNA is difficult and error-prone. Existing techniques can reliably make strands that are only about 200 base pairs long, with the base pairs being the chemical units in DNA. A single gene can be hundreds or thousands of base pairs long. To synthesize one of those, multiple 200-unit segments have to be spliced together.
But the cost and capabilities are rapidly improving. Dr. Endy of Stanford, who is a co-founder of a DNA synthesis company called Gen9, said the cost of synthesizing genes has plummeted from $4 per base pair in 2003 to 3 cents now. But even at that rate, the cost for three billion letters would be $90 million. He said if costs continued to decline at the same pace, that figure could reach $100,000 in 20 years.

So, it is not that unimaginable that a breakthrough in the future would mean creating a fetus without bothering about an egg and a sperm.  A chemical kit that will be assembled.  Sex, for those humans who want it, will be recreational.  The end of sex as we know it:

The End of Sex is eye-opening about the prospects created by biomedical technology. Regardless of how we end up applying it, biotech has already transformed our view of what it means to be(come) human. ...
Yet the important question that Greely’s book raises is not so much whether his vision of near-universal “sex-free conception” will come to pass, but how we will cope with what current biological technologies make (literally) conceivable. On two occasions he confesses that, despite having studied this field for many years, he was caught unawares by suggestions of how the technologies might be used. One is “uniparenting”, whereby a person (either male or female) has both eggs and sperm made from their somatic cells and used to create a child – who would, because of the recombination of chromosomes during conception, not then be a clone in the strict sense. “The other is “multiplex parenting”, in which two people make an embryo which then in effect conceives a child through IVF with another embryo, by mixing their gametes. It would, says Greely, allow a couple to have their “child” mate with someone else without even first being born, let alone reaching puberty.” Such ideas, he concludes, are “evidence of just how wide-ranging and non-intuitive the implications of new biological technologies may be for human reproduction”. Even the experts concede that their imagination is boggled by the possibilities.

Imagine theologians trying to explain god's take on "multiplex parenting"!  

Feminism in these modern times

Sex in advertisements.

Which is why there was that woman on the sidewalk by a major thoroughfare, holding a sign for fundraising via car-wash.

No, just because it is a woman holding a sign I would not conclude that "sex sells."  But I would because of the clothing that she had on her.  Shorty-shorts that made sure that her legs were all exposed.  And then the skimpy bikini-bra-top that barely contained her big breasts.

We were stopped at the traffic light and she walked like a sex kitten waving the sign.

"Why don't you put a shirt on?" a voice rang out from the waiting vehicles.  The voice sounded friendly, as in a constructive and engaging tone.  Perhaps a middle-aged woman's voice.

I turned to the left, which is where the voice came from.  It was a pick-up truck that had a female driver and an older female passenger.  The passenger was beginning to roll up the window.  I suppose after voicing their thoughts, they were done.

"Am good" the sign-carrying woman replied, with a smile and with a thumbs-up from her free hand.

"A shirt might help" the voice rang out again from the truck.  The woman on the street smiled again.

The light turned green.

The two cars ahead of me kept going straight.  I read the sign that she was holding as I passed her.  I was curious what the fundraising was for.  For ladies football!

As I passed her, I kept watching the traffic in the rear to see if any car turned towards the car-wash.  None.  I was happy that sex does not sell.  At least, not all the time.

We live in strange times.  On the one hand, we have made enormous progress and have largely moved away from acting on our primal, animal instincts.  We don't beat the crap out of somebody when we disagree, and we don't sexually assault another.  Well, mostly.  This kind of a healthy progress has created the space for people to be what they want to be and say what they want to say.  Mostly.  But, this freedom, the progress, now means that a woman can be practically semi-nude on a city sidewalk in the middle of the day.  Is such an element of sexuality a good thing or a bad thing?

That's practically the question that The Economist also addresses in reviewing two books, which are about the troubling aspects of young girls, their sexuality, and modern technology:

That young women often aspire to be titillating should not be surprising given that the most successful female celebrities often present themselves as eye-candy for the male gaze. “Everybody wants to take a selfie as good as the Kardashians’,” says Maggie, a 13-year-old. 

"If you've got it, flaunt it!" has become "normal" behavior.

 [Unlike] past feminists, who often protested against their sexual objectification, many of today’s young women claim to find it empowering. “There are few times that I feel more confident about my body than when I wear a crop top and my boobs are showing and my legs are showing,” says Holly, a college student. “I never feel more liberated.”
This hardly seems like progress, particularly when only certain bodies, those that are sexy to men, are allowed to be a source of pride.

As the review notes, "For anyone raising a daughter, these books do not make for easy reading."  Not easy materials even for us worrywarts who are all done with raising a daughter.

Far from the madding crowd

Even as a kid, I hated crowds.  I was to some extent even terrified of large numbers of people.  I wanted space.  My parents knew this well and sometimes would even give me the out by saying, "Sriram doesn't like crowds."  And that was when I was a kid growing up in India!

Now, after living nearly three decades in the US, and half of that in Oregon, I am even more uneasy when I am in a crowd.  Visiting India is stressful for that reason too.

Of course, the crowds in India--even in the regular daily life, leave alone those Kumbh Melas--are a reflection of the phenomenal population growth in the old country.  In my own lifetime, India has added--I hope you are sitting down for this--about 750 million people.  Imagine that!  I mean, since the time I was born.  Phew; mind blowing!

Intellectually, this is not news to me.  But, there are some facts that mean more than the mere intellectual ideas they quantify.  Here is another way to think about it: When Indira Gandhi and her son, Sanjay Gandhi, introduced their atrocious family planning schemes in the mid-1970s, India's population was only half of what it is today.  How about that!

As I often tell students, such increases in population have come about despite the fact women have fewer children than ever before.  All because we don't easily die!  Somini Sengupta also touched on this during an interview on NPR:

My parents, who were born during the independence era - they're called midnight's children. In their time, life expectancy was 32, and today, it's 66. In their time, infant mortality rates were sky high, and now it's diminished remarkably.

Mortality rates are down. People are living longer. Is it any surprise then that 750 million more have been added since I was born?

There is one huge problem:

Today, India is youngest country in the world with 365 million people between the ages of 10 and 24. A million turn 18 every month.

When the young don't have things to keep them busy, then any society will be in deep trouble.

This is just part of India’s staggering challenge. Every year, the country must create an estimated 12 million to 17 million jobs.

Yep, it is only a part of India's many challenges.

The youth issue is not merely India's problem though.

Worldwide, young workers are in precarious straits. Two out of five are either not working or working in such ill-paid jobs that they can’t escape poverty, according to figures recently released by the International Labour Organization. In the developing world, where few can afford to be unemployed, most young workers have jobs that are sporadic, poorly paid and offer no legal protection; women are worse off.

It could get worse if young men with testosterone peaking in their systems cannot find women.

Little surprise then that the recent caste protests in India took place in Haryana, the state with the sharpest gender imbalance in the nation, with 879 women for every 1,000 men in the population.

I tell ya, I feel so relieved that I am far from the crowds and am safe in the shelter of my ashram.  Om! ;)

Yep, from the New Yorker ;)

When a man sees a woman ...

As I look back at my angst-filled teenage years from the comfortable distance of my middle age, I can see that sex was one of the greatest sources of angst.  Sex seemed to be everywhere, and yet there were structures in place to make sure that there would be no outlet for those basic instincts.  I would think that even in contemporary India a typical young male (I can only speak for my heterosexual kind) can relate to all that, and even to this essay on "The Sexual Misery of the Arab World":

Today sex is a great paradox in many countries of the Arab world: One acts as though it doesn’t exist, and yet it determines everything that’s unspoken. Denied, it weighs on the mind by its very concealment.

That paradox generates a great deal of tensions, within the body and out in society.  The following that the writer has to say about the Arab World could easily describe India too:

Desire has no outlet, no outcome; the couple is no longer a space of intimacy, but a concern of the whole group. The sexual misery that results can descend into absurdity and hysteria. Here, too, one hopes to experience love, but the mechanisms of love — encounters, seduction, flirting — are prevented

A few years ago, when visiting Chennai, I was shocked to read news reports about the police arresting young people holding hands and attempting to kiss at one of the public parks.  Seriously, the cops had nothing better to do?

A white woman friend and her white husband (I am intentionally stressing on the "white") from this town are big time Indophiles and, over the years, have visited India seven or eight times, spending three to four months during each visit.  The woman is more than a decade older than me.  She once joked that in India, the young men hit on her too.  Well, there is a reason.

In trying to understand the reason, consider what happened in Cologne, Germany on New Year's Eve:

That night, gangs of young men, mainly asylum-seekers, formed rings around women outside Cologne station and then robbed and sexually assaulted them. More than 600 women reported to the police that they had been victimised.

Young men, from the Arab world.

Migrants are no more likely to commit crimes than natives. But it would be otherworldly to pretend that there is no tension between the attitudes of some and their hosts. European women cherish their rights to wear what they like, go where they like and have sex or not have sex with whom they please. No one should be allowed to infringe these freedoms.

Cologne did not simply happen, nor was the local white woman friend accidentally hit on.  How do we begin to explain that?

with the latest influx of migrants from the Middle East and Africa, the pathological relationship that some Arab countries have with women is bursting onto the scene in Europe.

A pathological relationship with the female kind!

I have a difficult time in a class on diversity that I teach every year--I have to make sure that students think about issues from multiple perspectives without giving away my own opinions on such matters.  Thus, of course, in the class my task is only to force them to think about how they would begin to understand the differences across the culture--even when I know well that I believe it is not kosher to treat women as property, which is the case in the traditional societies be they Islamic or Hindu.  Unless that pathological issue is addressed,"The path to orgasm runs through death, not love."

Only for the articles, ma'am. For real!

Last December, when I was in the old country, a middle-aged cousin in the extended family commented that his cohort of parents find the internet to be terrible for how it has made porn so easily accessible to their high school- and college-age children.  "Most of the time these kids go to the internet cafes only for this" he worried.

Life was easier when I was a kid, and then a college student.  There was no internet and no easy access to porn.  In the world that I inhabited, there were no porn magazines either, which is why some of the stories of reading porn that classmates joked about during the reunion surprised me.  But, their stories about porn were tamer than the sex and nudity of a typical "R" rated movie these days.

Porn is seemingly everywhere.  One has to be careful to click when visiting webpages, or typing the URL.  The run of the mill porn is free and unlimited, while one has to pay to read the NY Times after the freebie offerings!

This has had one good result though--Playboy is in financial trouble:

From a peak of 7.2m copies in November 1972, its circulation has shrunk to a mere 800,000 today.

Ah, yes, the "shrinkage" is for real ;)

So, Playboy is "reinventing the brand by banning full nudity from the Playboy website."

On October 13th Playboy Enterprises said that from March next year Playboy will not publish full nudity any more, though it will continue to show “sexy, seductive pictorials of the world’s most beautiful women”. It will also continue to choose a “Playmate of the Month” and hire a “sex-positive female” as a sex columnist. And it says it will go on publishing long-form journalism, interviews and fiction.
“The quality of the content was always overshadowed by the nude pictures,” says Americus Reed at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

What does the living American icon of feminism, Gloria Steinem, think about this?

it’s as if the NRA said we’re no longer selling handguns because now assault weapons are so available.

A good line ;)

So, about the abundance of porn that parents all over the world are worried about.

The more traditional critiques say that pornography is inherently degrading to women – or whoever happens to be the object of sexual activity – and fosters unrealistic expectations of sex. It decreases the quality of real relationships and the self-image of those involved – and increases negative sexual attitudes and actions. Porn-users compare real humans to the fantastical images, and either come out unimpressed and reluctant to have real sex, or, at worst, demanding the types of behaviours they see on screen, regardless of their desirability to their partner. One poll from the US Pew Research Center in 2007 quantified the feeling, finding that 70 per cent of Americans said pornography is harmful.
Do any of these criticisms hold water?

 A good question to ask, right?

After reviewing a bunch of research, the conclusion is:

The negative behaviours we blame on pornography, in other words, might have emerged no matter what; porn is perhaps more symptom than cause.

Porn is, to use my favorite Hitchcock phrase, a McGuffin!

The way to change that – and to change the negative effects such a misperception can have – isn’t to restrict or ban pornography. It’s to bring the discussion of sexual pleasure to the foreground, especially in sex-ed. ‘We need to supplement pornography with non-porn sexual education, so that porn becomes fantasy sex rather than a real-world template,’ Zhana Vrangalova, a psychologist at NYU who specialises in sexuality, told me. ‘We need to give people permission to enjoy sex. Until we do that, they will go to porn. Because you can’t kill curiosity.’

We cannot kill curiosity, which leads the young to the forbidden places in the old country.

Did the Lepcha believe in Dante's nine circles of hell?

A long time ago, in the old country, I loved going to the local "Park club" every weekend, not only to chance upon that girl but also because that's where I could get to watch movies that otherwise was not possible in that small little industrial township. The first ever Malayalam movie that I watched was in that open-air setting.  I never forgot the movie or this song because of how much I was compelled to seriously think for the first time about love and sex and age.  In that Malayalam movie, it was an old man marrying a young woman, whose love was another young man.  To borrow from a recent movie title, "it's complicated."

Of course, in our daily lives back then, people did not talk about love and sex.  Those were essentially taboo. Via metaphors, the elders reminded us youth to control our impulses, even as we were being transported to the fictional print and film worlds where love and sex ruled supreme.  And love and sex and marriage in the old ways was anything but the practices of today.  Children got married.  Sometimes it was fully grown adults who married the children.

The Humbert Humbert character in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita explains his fixation in nymphets and draws comparisons with societies elsewhere:

Marriage and cohabitation before the age of puberty are still not uncommon in certain East Indian provinces.  Lepcha old men of eighty copulate with girls of eight, and nobody minds.  After all, Dante fell madly in love with his Beatrice when she was nine, a sparkling girleen, painted and lovely, and bejeweled, in a crimson frock, and this was in 1274, in Florence, at a private feast in the merry month of May.  And when Petrarch fell madly in love with his Laureen, she was a fair-haired nymphet of twelve running in the wind, in the pollen and dust, a flower in flight, in the beautiful plain as descried from the hills of Vaucluse.

My idiocy means that I am stumped about: (a) Lepcha: who are they and did they really practice this?; (b) was this Dante thing for real?; (c) the name Petrarch rings a bell, but I can't' place it; and (d) what the heck does "descried" mean?

I knew I would run into such situations even when I chose Lolita as one of my summer deep reads.  And that is exactly why I chose that--it was not because of the plot of the older man's relationship with a young girl.  That story-line is merely the vehicle for me to to understand a little bit more about the human condition, and it is working out well thus far.

The annotations in the book answers a whole bunch of questions that arise as I read the book, and Google fills in with the rest.  But, I got really, really curious about the Lepcha.  In India?  Wikipedia helps out!

What amazes me is this: Nabokov did not have any Wikipedia. No Google. No nothing.  Yet, he easily strings together a paragraph in which he mentions the Lepcha, Dante, and Petrarch, and the fine details about them?  WTF!  At this rate, when a new academic year begins, I will be really, really convinced that I am a fake who doesn't know any damn thing and I will hope that students never ever find that out ;)

Sugar-babies, too, are a part of capitalism :(

In graduate school, I was vaguely acquainted with a student from India, who was also of Tamil Brahmin stock and had come to America for higher education.  That common heritage aside, we had nothing in common other than a few friends.  Once, after a movie, my friend dropped her off first at her apartment before I got dropped off.  She lived in a much better neighborhood, way pricier than mine.  She could afford that because somebody else paid for it.  In exchange, she had to be available for that patron.

I never would have imagined such possibilities.  But, there it was.  She was brilliant, charming, beautiful, yet something offbeat like this.

A year ago, the Atlantic featured such arrangements that were apparently becoming more and more possible thanks the internet and smartphones.

In 2013, Seeking Arrangement announced that approximately 44 percent of its 2.3 million “babies” are in college. This is a trend that the website encourages—if babies register with a .edu email account, they receive a free premium membership (something the guys have to shell out as much as $1,200 for). Seeking Arrangement creates the illusion that the sexual element of these relationships isn’t forced, but organic. No one associated with the website wants to admit that what it’s doing is facilitating sex-for-money exchanges. The large number of college women on the site helps preserve this illusion, for both the daddies and the babies.

That graduate school acquaintance was a sugar-baby; a phrase that perhaps existed even back then.

But, I didn't think much about that Atlantic piece, until now.  Because, the Economist also has something to say about sugar-babies.  As I always comment, if the Economist and the Wall Street Journal report on such social aspects, then it means that it is not any fringe happening.

As the cost of university has risen, so has the number of “sugar babies” who pay for it by selling companionship and sex to wealthy older men. Monthly pay for this is typically about $3,000, though some “sugar daddies” offer much more. According to SeekingArrangement, a firm based in Las Vegas, two-thirds of sugar-baby graduates have no student debt.
Students who post profiles on SeekingArrangement.com know what they want, so “it’s almost like a business partnership”, says Angela Bermudo, a spokesman for the company. The site hosts some 900,000 profiles of sugar babies enrolled in American universities, up from 458,000 two years ago. Their ranks swelled during the recession and are still growing fast, says Brandon Wade, the site’s founder.

I suppose if we live long enough, we will get to witness quite a few strange things in life.

The boom is fuelled by increased acceptance of “sugaring” (dating for money), says Steven Pasternack, the owner of a Miami firm known as Sugardaddie. The company’s site gets more than 5,000 new profile uploads worldwide every day. A quarter are students. Astute marketing helps. Sugardaddie’s pitch notes that it does not “discriminate against people’s desires”. Sugar babies are increasingly advised to negotiate not an “allowance”, but rather a certain “lifestyle” in exchange for dates. These arrangements can remain discreet. New Yorker Keith and the younger woman he met online, seeking a sugar daddy to pay for college, both tell friends that they met in a bar. His weekly $500 deposits into her bank account will cease, he says, if she becomes unavailable.

You are probably thinking, "hey, this is prostitution."  And you run into legal trouble for prostitution.  Right?

Might any of this qualify as prostitution? The websites say no. A sugar daddy doesn’t want his sugar baby to leave, whereas no client of a prostitute “wants the hooker to stick around”, as SeekingArrangement puts it. This argument has prevailed in America’s courts. If a relationship exists, payment can be labelled as compensation for companionship, not sex.

As that Atlantic essay noted:

When we consider what it means to be a high-end prostitute, we generally think about Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman—a desperate young person willing to trade some of her dignity for the chance to avoid working on curbs at two in the morning. A college education seems fundamentally at odds with that image. By actively seeking out college students, and publicizing the high numbers already in its ranks, Seeking Arrangement makes it easier for smart, young women with bright futures to rationalize the decision to join Seeking Arrangement: If so many college women are signing up for the site, it must be something different. It must be more socially acceptable somehow. It can’t really be prostitution.

Sugar-babies are yet another reason why we need to spend time thinking about what it means to be human, what it means to belong to humankind, and what our existence means in this universe that is a mystery; I have quoted the following before and is worth repeating:

we're living at a time when public moral deliberation is rapidly moving away from considerations of ultimate ends, ideals of human flourishing, in favor of a morality of rights that is largely indifferent to what individuals do with their freedom. As long as you refrain from harming others, you are free to pursue happiness however you like, no questions asked.
Politically speaking, this might be the best available strategy for people who disagree about the highest good to live together pluralistically in relative peace. But this doesn't mean that it's possible for individual human beings to forego the question of how to live, to bypass the question of human flourishing — what it consists in, and how to achieve it. In fact, with the retreat of institutions that once proposed compelling comprehensive visions of the good life, the burden of choosing among various ways of life falls more than ever on the shoulders of individuals.

Life!