Thursday, 31 January 2008
| 12:00 am
| Advice
The last few times I’ve turned on the television in the middle of the day I’ve been confronted with advertisements for ED. Charming men gaze flirtatiously out from my 25″ monitor while holding steaming mugs of something, green tea perhaps, letting me know that they used to loathe themselves but now they are better! Cured! Real men once again! Gratitude for their pills, for their erections, steeps through their smoldering eyes and hits me somewhere smack in the middle of my gag reflex.
I hate everything about notion of “Erectile Dysfunction” down to and including the name. Dysfunction? Really? Somehow we’ve internalized the expectation that the penises in our lives should be under our command and willing to work at our beckoned call. Stand tall, soldier! Stand proud and proclaim your master’s masculinity across these bed sheets and beyond!
Real penises don’t work that way.
We put a lot of pressure on the penis. It has to be up when we want it to be up, hard enough when we need it to be hard. It has to stay down when slow dancing with sexy strangers and while presenting at business meetings, has to refrain from shooting too early when confronted with extreme pleasure, it has to be the right length, the right width, the right color, and sure not to bend too much in any direction. Managing a penis sounds like a full-time job. So much more, then, the struggle for guys who can’t keep theirs under control.
I get the feeling that having “Erectile Dysfunction” is synonymous with being utterly emasculated. It’s as if men that can’t keep it up long enough or keep it hard enough are worthless as males. It’s no wonder then that the promise of a magic pill would make guys pull out their wallets. If my femininity hinged on how wet I got when my husband brought me flowers, I’d plunk down some cash to remedy any shred of doubt, too. (More on why vaginas are not synonymous with femininity next week, perhaps.)
I’m not buying the TV-quoted statistic that some 15-30 million American suffer from ED. I do believe, however, that millions of men feel that their sexual prowess doesn’t measure up in some way, that their “manhood” is not representing their personhood fairly.
Am I being too simplistic with this interpretation? Too literal? Because all that comes to mind when I see these television advertisements for “male enhancement” is that we aren’t talking about erectile enhancement, we are telling guys that they are only as masculine, as meaningful, as their erections are stiff.
I’m also not buying that the current media boom surrounding male enhancement medication is a positive sign of some curtain of silence being lifted. If there is anything positive coming out of the medicalization of male sexuality, it is the consciousness that the penis is not infallible.
I believe we do damage to ourselves and to one another when we expect perfection from our inherently flawed bodies. When we begin to count on our cocks to get hard when they are sucked, when we expect our cunts to get moist when we are fondled, when we expect our bodies to perform and impress every single blasted time, we are bound to be disappointed.
And beyond the pressure we place upon ourselves to perform, what of the destructive demands we thrust upon one another? It isn’t any fairer to expect flawless sexual performance from our lovers any more than it is to expect it of ourselves. After all, who wants to have their legs spread open in the air and simultaneously negotiate how not to disappoint their lover while grasping for their own pleasure?
I have a dream that one day some husband and wife will be sitting on their sofa somewhere out there in the wide expanse of the country and they will see some terrible commercial about vaginal douching followed by another terrible commercial for ED medication and they will laugh at the idiocy of it all and cry at the injustices we do to our bodies with such exaggerated expectations of perfection. I dream that this couple will hold onto one another and roll to the floor and make sweet love in whatever way they have negotiated that feels good for them, imperfections and all. In reality though, I have little hope that this scenario will ever play out.
Given the culture of fear we have around sexual dissatisfaction and erotic shame, I’m rather amazed that so many people are able to take pleasure out of sexual exchanges at all.
I’m curious what we would think if we saw commercials that depicted an attractive man sipping green tea, flirtatiously telling us that, while finding it difficult to have intercourse with his wife one evening, he actually brought her to multiple orgasms with oral sex. Could we stand for such honest portrayals of human sexuality? And if we could watch such ads and assuming we were able to take away the larger message that we are allowed to be imperfect and human, I wonder what other ways we might to learn to forgive and accept ourselves.
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One of humankind’s greatest tools for studying the world is the scientific method, and since humankind tends to be pretty interested in sex, it’s no surprise that the shining light of science is often turned on the delightful (if sometimes darkness-shrouded) subject of sex. Let’s see what science hath wrought:
Yes, you can walk gay. At least, one study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that sexual orientation can be revealed by body type and movement. They put a group of straight and gay men and women on treadmills, recorded video of them from behind, and then showed the videos to 112 students, who were able to properly identify the sexual orientation of men with over 60% accuracy (though women are apparently more inscrutable; the guessers didn’t do any better guessing lesbians than they would have by flipping a coin).
Science is also providing more reasons to fuck! Studies reveal a wealth of health benefits to weekly shtupping: Preventing colds and flus, making you appear more youthful, preventing migraines, and more. Not getting enough nookie? Maybe you just need a doctor’s note! If you’re trying to have a baby, it turns out you should screw every day. Regular workouts increase your sperm’s health and repairs DNA damage. So tell the wife to put down the ovulation chart and pull up her skirts!
Of course, the reasons people should have sex aren’t necessarily the reasons they do, and science is interested in descriptive as well as prescriptive matters. Some social scientists did a nice big survey to find out why people have sex, and got 237 different reasons. (Me, I can come up with that many just on my own.) The reasons include to “help me fall asleep,” to “return a favor,” to “hurt an enemy,” because “I wanted to feel closer to god,” and because “someone dared me.” The top reasons across both genders were pretty unsurprising: “I was attracted to the person.” “I wanted to express my love for the person.” “I was sexually aroused and wanted the release.” “It’s fun.” Spoiler alert: men say “fun” more, while women say “love” more. Oh, well. Sometimes science just confirms what we already know.
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If you follow science fiction, movies or pop culture you’ve probably encountered the buzz around the movie Cloverfield. Produced by J.J. Abrams, co-creator of the übercult TV series LOST, Cloverfield tells the story of a monster attack on Manhattan through the “found footage” of some hapless civilian’s video camera. As such, it’s shot with a handheld camera, and CNN recently reported on a wave of violent nausea sweeping the nation, or at least those members of the moviegoing public who attend screenings of Cloverfield without having watched thousands of hours of POV porn.
But wait — I’m getting ahead of myself. The format of point-of-view handheld-camera fear-inducing mayhem has been around in horror movies for quite a time. It makes periodic appearances in American horror of the late ’50s and early ’60s, usually when someone is walking down a corridor or approaching a door behind which there might (or might not!) be a bloody corpse, raving lunatic, or monster. Interestingly, it’s largely absent in films from the major British horror studio of that era — Hammer Horror, creators of such seedy ’60s classics as Lust for a Vampire and The Evil of Frankenstein. The technique would show up in Hammer’s late ’60s and early ’70s films as the studio heaped on the sex and gore in an attempt to hold on to its slipping audience; handheld sequences are also featured prominently in the Italian school of horror and slasher filmmaking, particularly the films of Dario Argento and in the Giallo genre of sleazed-out sex-crime gorefests. Right now you might be saying “Wow, all these handheld camera techniques seem to show up before 1990 almost exclusively in weird pervy cinematic sex-and-blood orgies,” but you’ll also see it in Hitchcock, Apocalypse Now and plenty of political thrillers from the ’70s. But yeah, before the video era the handheld point-of-view shot does seem to show up in the more extreme and, well, earthy forms of horror.
In its earlier incarnations, or used in moderation, the handheld technique might pass largely unnoticed by a viewer who’s never studied film and/or never tried to hold a camera steady during their vacation and later vomited copiously on their keyboard while editing footage of Aunt Bessie at Disneyland.
But I digress — the point is, the handheld trembling-swaying camera is a time-honored technique from the film era for inducing uneasy feelings in the viewer. But the technique really came of age with the video era, with 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, which made handheld shots and found-footage meta-plot devices a cliche, and in doing so provided the central conceit for Cloverfield. These two movies are distinct from earlier horror-film uses of the handheld point-of-view concept in that they do it most of the way through. Hence the nausea, and CNN ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie. How vividly I remember watching a Blair Witch pre-release screener and the violent attack of nausea that made my then-girlfriend lie down on the floor moaning for half an hour — and not in a good way.
Obviously, the handheld point-of-view shot is considered effective for horror partially because it induces motion sickness, but also because it’s immediate. That’s why, as the Blair Witch was making headlines, an entirely different but oh-so-related genre was growing: Point-of-View Porn.
In POV pornography, as you probably know, the viewer watches from the perspective of a participant in the explicit sexual action. Assuming you’ve seen little or no POV porn yourself, would it shock you to know that means there’s always a dick due South from the viewfinder? Yeah, I didn’t think so.
POV porn is a perennially popular genre of porn, and to me it seems to be getting ever more prevalent as more consumers buy video cameras — thus making the idea of being “in” the action a gimme — and as more male porn performers realize they can make just as much if not more money as “directors,” i.e., guys holding the camera, than as hired cocksmen in someone else’s movie.
Like the fictional concept of Blair Witch, POV porn could only exist with the propagation of compact video equipment. The dude getting the blowjob/inserting his turgid member has to hold the camera while performing sexually (or be comfortable with Larry the camera guy breathing down his neck, but usually it’s the former).
Some POV titles are in fact made by pornographers so mind-bendingly clueless that after an initial vomit-conjuring sweep of the female star’s attributes, they plant the cam on a tripod and just sort of forget about it. But most POV porn utilizes the format with reasonable efficiency. It starts with an obligatory establishing interview wherein the “filmmaker” asks the female star her name and age, asks her to bend over, and says “Wow, oh, wow. Oh, wow. Wow. Wow, oh wow. That is one nice butt. Nice butt. Yeah, wow, that is a nice butt, wow, oh, man, you are amazing, that butt is amazing. Oh, wow, oh, man, that is a nice butt. What a nice butt.” If you’ve never seen any POV porn, you probably think I’m overstating the matter . . . I’m not. Most POV porn sucks precisely because the “filmmaker” doesn’t have anything to say about a nice butt other than the fact that it’s a nice butt . . . which, let’s face it, we know.
After an agonizing few minutes of non-conversation, the “filmmaker,” pointing the camera, gets blown and/or fucked, or some combination thereof, and as long as he doesn’t enjoy himself too much the footage is probably not going to make you hurl. Luckily, he’s not likely to enjoy himself too much, at least not evidently. Most of what a guy does in commercial porn is stand there while the girl goes crazy; rarely in POV porn does the character need to run through the dark corridors of an ancient mansion being chased by Lovecraftian ectoplasm (though I will definitely rent that title when it becomes available). Point-of-view porn only seems to work when the guy is a wall of solid concrete with a cock sticking out: as Christopher Isherwood said, “ . . .a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” Not human, or maybe human in some strangely inorganic way.
It’s the polar opposite of point-of-view horror, where the character’s vulnerability is paramount. In the spiritual precursor of all point-of-view horror, H.G. Wells’s 1898 The War of the Worlds, the narrator is unnamed, an Everyman, but his humanity, his vulnerability and his emotional response to the horrors he witnesses, are not in question. That means that the reader can identify with him, as the viewer can identify with the hapless victims of the Blair Witch and the main characters of Cloverfield.
For the male viewers of point-of-view porn, the identification with the POV character seems to exist because he’s got a hot chick in his apartment or motel room and he’s got nothing to say to her except to reiterate that she has, in fact, a nice butt.
It’s a weird contrast, because the appeal of POV porn in the marketplace is about the viewer being “in” the action, as evidenced by the promises on the DVD covers, which generally say something like “You are IN the action!” just above the burst that says “COAT KANDY KUMMINGS WITH GALLONS OF YOUR CREAMMY BALL-SNOT!!!” Visceral stuff, that. Point-of-view horror isn’t quite that straightforward; it’s still enough of a novelty that any horror film using the handheld technique gets compared to Blair Witch — and in future months and years, presumably, Cloverfield. Point-of-view porn, on the other hand, promises to get more and more popular as more men accept one of the most dysfunctional ideas of modern sexual masculinity: you, my friend, are nothing but a hard cock and an observation that this girl has a nice butt.
What both POV porn and handheld horror offer to the viewer is the chance to step outside himself or herself by stepping into someone else. But that’s an uncomfortable, illusory, and largely impossible task, hence the motion sickness of Cloverfield and the wooden-bodied sexual disconnect of the POV porn genre. As with interactive porn, the possibilities of erotic imagination run headlong into the problem that too often male pornographers don’t have anything to say about themselves.
Thomas Roche is the managing editor of Eros Zine, teaches at San Francisco Sex Information, and also blogs on sex, drugs and cryptozoology at thomasroche.com.
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Friday, 25 January 2008
| 12:00 am
| Culture
This is about the first time I had sex with a guy, after I’d finally started having sex with women.
And it’s about how having sex with women radically changed the way I have sex. With everybody. Men, women, everybody.
Here’s what happened. I was making out with this friend of mine. Male. And this was clearly not the “just fooling around” variety of making out. This was the “lead-up to having sex” variety. We’d actually decamped from another friend’s living room, where things had gotten started, and gone back to his place to keep things going. This was “making out, otherwise known as foreplay.”
So we were making out on his sofa, getting increasingly hot and heavy . . . when for no apparent reason, his momentum slowed down. Like, a lot. Trying to figure out what the heck was happening, I asked if he wanted to get a condom and go into the bedroom . . . and he said, with obvious embarrassment, that he’d already come, while we were making out.
(I think it had been a while since he’d had sex.)
And here’s where the “having had sex with women” part comes in.
Before I’d started having sex with women, my reaction to a guy’s premature ejaculation had been pretty traditional: disappointment, frustration, embarrassment on his behalf, attempts to soothe his ego, feeling like I’d done something wrong.
But this time, my reaction was to say, casually and matter-of-factly, “Oh. Well, is that any reason to stop?”
I wasn’t trying to make a statement or anything. I honestly didn’t even think about it. I certainly wasn’t thinking of it in terms of, “this is the great lesson I have learned from having sex with women.” It was just an automatic, instinctive reaction.
But it was an automatic, instinctive reaction that was the complete opposite of the one I would have had a year or two before. It was an automatic, instinctive reaction that had been shaped by the sex I’d been having with women — sex in which one person’s orgasm didn’t stop the whole train, but was simply one of many sights on a long and eventful excursion.
And here’s the thing I found especially interesting:
When I said it, he was relieved.
He wasn’t angry, or annoyed, or anything even remotely approaching angry or annoyed. He was relieved. He was happy.
He didn’t want our encounter to be just about his orgasm, either. Especially since it had fired off before either of us was ready. “Is that any reason to stop?” was a way we could do that. It was a way he could feel good about our encounter, like a sexy, sensitive, open-minded lover instead of a gawky klutz who couldn’t control himself. And it was a way we could keep on having sex. It was a way we could actually have sex that night, instead of an aborted make-out session.
And we did.
I don’t even remember if we wound up fucking per se. But we had sex. Wonderful, sweet, delicious sex. For a good long while. An hour or two, if I recall correctly. With many sights on a long and eventful excursion.
Now, of course, you don’t need to be bisexual to learn this lesson. Lots of straight people figure out that sex doesn’t necessarily equal fucking, or even fucking and sucking. Lots of straight people figure out that the presence of an erect penis is not necessary for sex to count as sex.
But lots of other straight people never figure that out. Even today, even in our post- Monica- Lewinksy, “it depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is” era, the default definition of sex is still, “a hard dick going inside a hole.”
And I think it’s important to remember that this state of affairs doesn’t just suck for women. It sucks for men, too. My friend was so disappointed and embarrassed that his premature ejaculation had screeched our evening to a halt . . . and he was so relieved and happy to be offered the idea that it didn’t have to. The obsessive spotlight on the hard dick as the sole focal point and defining feature of sex . . . it makes for some seriously unsatisfied women, of course, but I think it’s a raw deal for men as well. It’s too much pressure on one little organ.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I think my point is just this: An awful lot of people, of all genders and orientations, would benefit from the kind of sex that lesbians take as a given. The kind of sex where success isn’t overwhelmingly defined by one partner’s “performance.” The kind of sex that doesn’t make a sharp distinction between “foreplay” and “sex,” and that doesn’t have a strong opinion about which has to happen first. The kind of sex where the journey is the destination.
I don’t know where my friend is now. But I hope he remembers. I hope he remembers as fondly as I do. And I hope that from that night on, whenever he couldn’t get hard, or came before he wanted to, he was able to smile and say to his lover, “Well, is that any reason to stop?”
Greta Christina, copyright © 2008. Be sure to check out Greta’s blog.
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Thursday, 24 January 2008
| 12:00 am
| Advice
While I don’t suppose that everyone wants to make the good ‘ol standard fantasy of a threesome a reality, I imagine that it has crossed many a person’s mind from time to time. Not one cock, but two! Not two breasts, but four! If sex is nice with one lover, why shouldn’t it be twice as nice with two?
Problem is, we can’t just up the players and guarantee an increase of fun. Sex is more like an oven than a multiplication problem; we can’t bake a cake twice as fast by simply doubling the temperature and hoping it will turn out alright. These things have rules. Sure, setting “rules” may ruin the spontaneity of the fantasy, but they also serve the very important function of keeping all members safe and happy to be participating.
Assuming you the reader are part of a dyad that wants to instigate a threesome with some other willing individual (perhaps a column on this in the future), and also assuming that this third party is game with your kinky antics (how to find a willing third, definitely a column in the future), it will be vital to keep the following in mind:
1) Clarity is Next to Godliness
It’s difficult to engage sexually with someone outside of the relationship without having an out-and-out conversation about boundaries. Or rather, it is very easy to engage sexually, but not having said discussion can lead to disappointments and/or consequences.
Both parties should be prepared to talk about their fears around what might happen. This is the place to speculate on the details and really suss out what you want as a couple to occur. I really like the “how would you react, what would you say” game. For example, I might tell my partner, “I don’t want you to engage in penetrative sex with our third. How would react if they asked you to? What would we say?”
Talking about the goals of the interaction can be just as, if not more, important than imagining the consequences. It would be interesting to know what leads your lover to wanting to have a threesome as well as how they see the event going down (so to speak). Do they want certain things to happen or in any specific order? Should you steer the action away from certain activities, toys, pieces of furniture?
If anyone has particular boundaries on anything, these need to be stated outright before the event. It also couldn’t hurt to have “redirect” words, sort of like a safe word that partners know to alert one another that someone is having strong feelings. Perhaps one partner is worried that they will feel left out or out of control or jealous and could work a pre-decided phrase into the play to communicate they need some reassurance. Which brings me to number two:
2) If one Person Vetoes, the Final Answer is No
No one wants your fantasy to turn into infidelity, that is, unless you planned it that way. If someone doesn’t want to play a certain way, that’s it. Respecting one another’s limits and comfort levels should be your top priority.
3) Welcome to Reality
If you decide to make your fantasies a reality, you also have to deal with the mundane details of reality. Not only does this mean engaging in safe, protected sex (c’mon, you can make it fun!), it also means realizing that the three people having sex together all likely want to get aroused, stimulated, and likely you will all want to orgasm. Pleasure in a twosome often moves back and forth, but in threesomes the pleasure can move in a cycle that goes person to person. This means someone could be “left out” at any given moment.
How can you keep yourself busy when the action does not involve you? Masturbate is one great way of being occupied without distracting the action. Also take some time to be one of the groping hands or mouths in someone else’s fantasy and pleasure them. Is there an available thigh that could use a caress? Is there a pussy available that can be licked? A nipple that is begging for a tweak? Consider what you can give in the moment and rest assured the attention will come full circle at some later point.
4) In the End, You Still Have a Relationship
As my mother used to say, “To thine’s partner one must be true, even if they are being schnooped by someone else.” Alright, she never said that. But it is true. Your third person is there for but a night and your lover, well, your lover is there for longer than a night. If the intentionality of the interaction is for shared pleasure, the end result will be far more satisfactory than one person looking out for their own needs above all else. Not to mention that helping your lover have the best threesome possible with simply increase the likelihood that they will want to do it again some other time (hopefully also benefiting you in the future).
5) Discuss over Brunch the Next Day, as a Couple not a Trio
While cuddling post-coitus is lovely in triple-spoon formation, it is not necessarily a great idea to have your threesome partner spend the night. Waking up just the two of you can give you both the time and space to talk about what transpired. Not only will this conversation give you ammunition to make next time (should there be one) even better, it will nip any issues of jealously or doubt in the bud.
Reassure your partner that you are committed to your relationship and that they are your primary concern. It would be totally appropriate to tell them how much they turn you on and how wonderful it was to be able to experience their pleasure from a different perspective. It’s not out of the question that your relationship could actually grow from this shared sexual experience and keeping one another at the forefront of your minds throughout the process will help guarantee you’re in it together.
— Rebekah Skoor, MA
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Here we are in January, the Sargasso Sea of the Hollywood machine. The early part of the year is where Hollywood tends to dump its dogs, its dregs, and its weird little experiments, and there are usually precious few movies worth seeing in theaters. What better time, then, to look to the past for cinematic gold?
Mr. Skin, an indispensable porn site for the combination of sex and movies, compiled a list of The Top 20 Movie Nude Scenes of 2007, sure to make you wish you’d spent a little more time in the theater. Marisa Tomei’s boobs and butt in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, topless Keeley Hazell frozen in time in Cashback, the bare bottom of Natalie Portman in short film Hotel Chevalier, Christina Ricci’s malnourished bosoms in Black Snake Moan, and more. Specifically, 16 more. (There are links to pictures . . . but only if you’re a member of the site. Still, a little googling should take care of you otherwise.)
Want to reach back farther in time? Nerve.com can help, with their Hollywood Sex Scene Database! They’ve got video clips and lots of wonderful lists. At the moment, the main page features the Top Five Awkward Sex Scenes, which is sure to make you squirm for all the wrong reasons. Past features include The 50 Greatest Sex Scenes in Cinema, The Top Five Voyeuristic Sex Scenes, and . . . The Top Five Sex Scenes Featuring James Spader? Huh. Now that they mention it, he has been in some weirdly sexy stuff . . .
Of course, there’s always TV, though outside of premium cable, really sexual stuff is tough to come by. (You can see a surprising number of male asses on basic cable, but otherwise . . .) Fortunately, you can find ample porn on FOX News! Don’t believe me? Check out FOX News Porn for the skinny on how our favorite fair and balanced news network uses sex to distract viewers from things they should be outraged about. (Or, if you’re feeling apolitical, just look at the pictures of boobies.)
Finally, a look at a film from even farther back: Bernardo Bertolucci’s Novecento from 1977. Why are we interested in an epic historical film that’s more than 30 years old? Because it features both Gerard Depardieu and Robert De Niro in full-frontal nudity, in the same scene . . . and not only that, they’re getting a simultaneous two-fisted handjob from a hooker. OMG Blog has all the details, with video and pictures. It will either haunt your dreams or inspire new dreams, depending on your personal predilections.
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It’s no secret that urban legends are one of the ways that a modern society spreads sexual information — or, more appropriately, misinformation. Their endurance and stickiness, if you’ll forgive the pun, has to do with both morbidity and titillation. Urban legends let you look at brands and flavors of sexuality that might disgust or frighten you, but that have some compelling characteristic — like, just maybe, they turn you on, maybe just a little. Like so many ways of spreading sexual information, urban legends can get you hard or wet and convince you never to have sex again — a tantalizing twofer!
Best of all, urban legends are usually reported as fact, both by people bending your ears in social situations (”No, really, she found out he was her father!“) and by “legitimate” news organizations. I cannot stress enough how important it is for right-thinking sex-positive people to call bullshit on sexual urban legends, which use the engine of sexual titillation to drive a malevolent societal phobia of sex.
Recently, two particularly fishy news stories were linked skeptically by one of my favorite urban legend sites, the Museum of Hoaxes.
First, from Reuters there’s the story of a Polish man who discovered his wife at a brothel. The couple had been married for 14 years, and the husband had no idea that his wife was a prostitute. Oh, and I’m just guessing that the wife had no idea her husband was going to visit brothels.
Sound possible? Of course, it’s far from impossible; I’m sure some working girls out there hide their secret occupations from partners. But this thing sounds dicey; its source, a Polish tabloid called Super Express, makes it fairly unassailable to English speaking news sources, as the MoH pointed out. That didn’t stop Reuters, which reported almost no specifics in their story on the “discovery.” That’s one of the hallmarks of an urban legend — details are either minute (ie, made up) or extremely vague, in either case deviating from the level of detail available in a legitimate news story.
Another apparent urban legend reported by the MoH seems, at first glance, a bit less fishy, since it has a few more specifics. It’s the tale of the English twins, separated at birth, who met and married without realizing they were twins. This one was reported by numerous news sources in the West, including the BBC, which helpfully used a stock photo of two pairs of feet to illustrate its story.
Apparently the report originated with a comment by the Roman Catholic anti-abortion activist, Lord Alton, who used it as an argument in the House of Lords in favor of a bill to force agencies to reveal the identity of any adopted child’s biological parents. The presentation of an unverifiable load of horse crap as fact during an argument in favor of certain legislation has a long tradition in both the US and Britain, but it’s particularly telling when it relates to sex and reproduction.
As for the gentleman finding his wife in a Polish brothel, I’ll admit to having more than a few brothel fantasies myself, some of them fueled by a very hot and very nonconsensual story I read in a comic book called Spanish Fly by Spanish artist Tobalina in which, brace yourself, a guy discovered his fiancée turning tricks in a brothel. Tobalina’s version is rendered as erotica, and is therefore more or less harmless despite the fact that in the story the discovery is followed by a semi-rape sequence in which the guy insists on “using” his fiancée despite her protests — after all, he’s paid for her. Tobalina’s tale is a stroke story getting off on duplicity, force and humiliation; the Reuters/Super Express version is a largely unverifiable but supposedly real story that does two things: it warns against utilizing brothels either as a customer or an employee, and it turns you on by revealing the secret, sordid and fraudulent life of a happily married couple. Sex is bad, it says, and if you seek it you’ll get divorced.
Lord Alton’s story is more abstractly anti-sex. Alton, a pro-family advocate, used this spurious tale as an example of why all children should have the right to know who their biological parents are. It’s probably peripheral that in typical fashion, a conservative politician who opposes abortion is trying to muddy the waters of adoption, revealing that his true agenda is to prevent supposedly immoral sexual congress, not just to prevent abortion.
What’s more disturbing is that this story scapegoats the adopted as freaks who are vulnerable to a horrific moral transgression, incest, without even knowing they’re doing it. The message is twofold: One, that the institution of adoption must be undermined or it will lead to incest; two, that adopted people are less fortunate than the rest of us, since they can’t avoid fucking their siblings.
Lord Alton claims that the twins felt an inevitable attraction he considers to be genetic. Something like that is called “genetic sexual attraction,” and it appears to be a load of horse hooey given that the Wikipedia article on the topic lists as its sole real-world example — you guessed it, Lord Alton’s story, at the end of a lengthy list of fictional references.
That incest is a common sexual fantasy only gives the story legs, allowing it to be told and retold without the teller or the hearer having to cop to being titillated by it. The statistical improbability of this story, coupled with its salacious nature, makes it stink to high heaven as far as I’m confirmed, and the Museum of Hoaxes concludes that it’s got to be filed in the category of an urban legend until proven otherwise.
Why do I believe it’s so important to debunk sexual urban legends like this, other than because I’m a pedantic disbeliever who believes everything is bullshit until I’m convinced otherwise? It’s important because so much sexual misinformation already exists; the promulgation of myths like this only makes sex seem more dangerous. That does two things: It frightens us away from sex, and it distracts us from the very real dangers sex offers, making us less likely to take responsible steps to have responsible sex. It’s familiar to me from the harm reduction model of public health: preaching against a behavior, especially incoherent or unsupportable preaching, results in more risky behavior, not less.
That does not mean that on hearing this story, adopted people are going to go fuck their siblings, or that Polish wives are going to head for the brothels. It means that the fear of the titillating but highly improbable (or impossible) dangers of sex distract us from the very real task of having a healthy sex life.
Urban legends are the dark side of the oral tradition — now rendered more viral than ever by the web. That makes it even more important that intelligent, sex-positive readers learn to be skeptical and look for the anti-sex agenda in stories reported as fact.
Thomas Roche is the managing editor of Eros Zine, teaches at San Francisco Sex Information, and also blogs on sex, drugs and cryptozoology at thomasroche.com.
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