The Blowfish Blog

OTAKU MAnKO: Two Urban Legends to Wank To

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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This entry was posted on Tuesday, 22 January 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.