And now for something completely different...

...Sherlock Holmes and the Theology of the Body.

Via K-Lo.

On the other hand, what would Naomi Wolf have to say about this?

Study: Half of Women Are More Excited to Buy Jeans on Sale Than to Have Sex.

Maybe something like "why date the cow, when you can get half off of a $250 pair of jeans?"

Maybe the world ought to end on Saturday.

[See here for explanation of Naomi Wolf reference.]

From the "Theology of the Body" file - C.S. Lewis on the Problem of Porn.

Here is C.S. Lewis' observation on the problem of, well, uhm..."self-love."

"For me the real evil of masturbation would be that it takes an appetite which, in lawful use, leads the individual out of himself to complete (and correct) his own personality in that of another (and finally in children and even grandchildren) and turns it back; sends the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides. And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman. For the harem is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifices or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no woman can rival. Among those shadowy brides he is always adored, always the perfect lover; no demand is made on his unselfishness, no mortification ever imposed on his vanity. In the end, they become merely the medium through which he increasingly adores himself…After all, almost the main work of life is to come out of our selves, out of the little dark prison we are all born in. Masturbation is to be avoided as all things are to be avoided which retard this process. The danger is that of coming to love the prison." -C.S. Lewis

And here is Jewish Feminist Naomi Wolf's take on a similar issue:

For most of human history, erotic images have been reflections of, or celebrations of, or substitutes for, real naked women. For the first time in human history, the images’ power and allure have supplanted that of real naked women. Today, real naked women are just bad porn.


For two decades, I have watched young women experience the continual “mission creep” of how pornography—and now Internet pornography—has lowered their sense of their own sexual value and their actual sexual value. When I came of age in the seventies, it was still pretty cool to be able to offer a young man the actual presence of a naked, willing young woman. There were more young men who wanted to be with naked women than there were naked women on the market. If there was nothing actively alarming about you, you could get a pretty enthusiastic response by just showing up. Your boyfriend may have seen Playboy, but hey, you could move, you were warm, you were real. Thirty years ago, simple lovemaking was considered erotic in the pornography that entered mainstream consciousness: When Behind the Green Door first opened, clumsy, earnest, missionary-position intercourse was still considered to be a huge turn-on.

Amazingly similar conclusions from singularly different people, one before and one after the Sexual Revolution.

History is a two act play - The first act asks, "what could it hurt?"  The second act whines, "How were we supposed to know?"

Parodoxically, it seems that a population's risky sexual behavior is somehow mysteriously related to whether that population will have higher levels of AIDS.

First Things points out the data that distributing condoms causes an increase in AIDS:

The predominant Western approach to preventing the spread of AIDS in Africa has failed. Though in theory the risk reduction strategies favored by Western governments and aid agencies—handing out condoms, promoting counseling and testing, and treating other sexually transmitted infections (STIs) to block HIV transmission—can “work” in theory, they have not done so in practice. In Africa, despite years of promised improvements, they have not brought any downturn at all.


But a handful of African countries have actually forced down the AIDS rates, each of them by changing behavior—particularly reducing sexual partnerships—not through the heavily promoted risk reduction measures.

Well before western donors and condoms arrived on the scene, Uganda had cut its level of casual sex by two-thirds and subsequently its HIV rate by two-thirds. Several years later, Kenya replicated this success. A few other countries have also done so, with partner reduction always the most important factor.

In sharp contrast, South Africa has maintained high rates of multiple (and concurrent) partnerships and, despite its vigorous promotion of condoms, still suffers from persistently high rates of HIV infection. The same can be said of many of its neighboring countries, which lead the world in the prevalence of HIV, with some 15 to 35 percent of all adults infected.

These successes and failures are, tellingly, too often treated in a manner inversely proportional to their merits. Behavior change, though responsible for success, remains the least emphasized approach, while risk reduction invariably receives the benefit of the doubt despite its failure to deliver as promised. Its disappointing results always mean that efforts—along with funding—must simply be doubled.

Many in the AIDS Establishment will only unreservedly applaud success if it comes through the technical means promoted by Western governments and activist groups. In a 2005 PBS documentary, UNAIDS’ executive director Dr. Piot refused to concede that behavior change played the paramount role in Uganda’s unparalleled success. “But we also know,” he added, “that no country has been successful in bringing down the number of new infections of HIV without strong condom promotion.”

To viewers who have never had reason to think twice about the issue, this might sound like a sober assessment. Human sexual behavior, we tend to assume, is hard to change and so the most effective way to reduce the number of people getting sexually transmitted diseases must therefore be to reduce the risk of sexual activity. That appears to many people just common sense.

But Uganda clearly refutes Piot’s claim, as does the fact that the countries with the most robust condom promotion programs have some of the most severe AIDS epidemics in the world. The evidence suggests that common sense may be wrong.

For starters, people tend to take greater risks when they feel protected by technical innovation. In a state of the art program in Uganda, for example, those explicitly encouraged to use condoms ended up at greater risk than the control group not exposed to the sophisticated intervention, because they had more sexual partners than those not told to use condoms. People have also been seen to take greater risks when antiretroviral therapy for HIV/AIDS became available.

This “risk compensation” or “behavioral disinhibition” is now, fortunately, receiving more attention in scientific circles. It is one reason why vigorous promotion of risk reduction—even if it “works” in isolated cases—can do more harm than good. The “common sense” presupposition that condoms will decrease infection rates does not easily give way to the common sense observation that promoting devices capable of reducing risk encourages people to take more risks.

But risk reduction measures have a deeper and more damaging defect: a deflating absence of hope. They too often imply that we cannot influence behavior—that the best we can hope for is reducing and controlling the damage of behavior people will engage in whatever we say. More damagingly, they too often imply that we cannot change our behavior, that in matters of sexuality in particular we are doomed to live dangerously, that we are too weak to do what is best for us.

Thoughtful strategies to change behavior, on the other hand, reinforce the human capacity to recognize and choose what is good. As the Ugandan experience has proved, all people—especially the young—respond to this message when it is sincerely delivered.

Abstinence and monogamy - they work in practice, but can they work in theory?

A Window into Dante's Hell.

It would take a heart made of stone not to laugh at the cry of pain issuing from Elizabeth Wurtzel's long, windy essay on how after a lifetime of faithfless pursuit of her own appetites she finds herself at age 40 to be alone, old and unhappy.  Choices build habits, habits build character, and character builds destiny, and it seems that Wurtzel's character defines clinical narcissism. Check out her introduction:

So here’s what I’m getting at: I was, at least at some baseline, a pretty girl, the kind that boys were supposed to like and sometimes did. And because I was cute all along—it’s not like I blossomed into honeysuckle after adolescence—I was given to believe that love would be easy, men would be elementary, and I would have my way. I was meant to date the captain of the football team, I was going to be on a romantic excursion every Saturday night, I was destined to be collecting corsages from every boy in town before prom, accepting such floral offerings like competing sacrifices to a Delphic goddess. It was all supposed to be to the tune of some glorious Crystals song from the early ’60s, when everything was still innocent, and my life would be a wall of sound from “Then He Kissed Me.” Love would be simpler than tying a string bikini, the kind I wore a lot while waiting on the beach for my ship to come in.


Alas, love has been complicated.

Love, alas, was complicated because it seems that decent men are eventually driven away from tramps, no matter how pretty.  Here's Wurtzel's description of how she treated a quintessentially nice guy when she realized that her narcissism couldn't be satisfied with the love of one man:

And so, I cheated on him. With everyone I could. Bass players, editors, actors, waiters who wished they were actors, photographers. And everywhere I could, like that Sarah Silverman and Matt Damon video: on the floor, by the door, up against the minibar. I couldn’t sit still or stand still or lie still. And I didn’t want to lose Gregg either.


He knew, or must have known. But he was such a gentle guy that he gave me a chance to fix the damage. We were sitting at brunch one Sunday; Gregg was in his denim jacket and Sonic Youth T-shirt, his hair swept across his face, and he grabbed my hand over the table and looked at me so earnestly that if it had been a movie, the audience would have laughed. “I wish I could make whatever is bothering you feel better,” he said.

“I know,” was all I could say.

Months later, when Gregg found out for sure what I was doing, when he went through files on my Mac and found letters never sent to this lover or that one, he didn’t want to make me feel better anymore. He threw a two-thirds-empty bottle of Stolichnaya at my head when I finally found him at a friend’s house. He told me, I was your only chance at happiness—now it’s over for you.

Years later, when I was dating a guy who drank much too much and did things like toss lamps around because he had a temper when he was loaded, and I was ducking to avoid some projectile and wondering how I’d found my way to this, I knew Gregg had been right: I could have been a contender; it was over.

Then, there is this gem of an insight, which must be the narcissist's slogan:

But I am baffled by men. When they want me, I don’t want them; when I want them, they don’t want me.

After that there is this almost, but not quite, insight that eventually doesn't connect with truth:

No one says to my face that 41 is just a little too old to still be dating—in fact, people like to point out how it’s normal these days, which is also true—but I know what’s up. I just moved a couple of months ago, and I made a determined effort to put my effects in order. I went through a box of old photographs and contact sheets from shoots I had done throughout my twenties and thirties, pictures in all kinds of poses, various stages of dishabille and froufrou and frippery, too much makeup and barely a bit of blush, Kodachrome and black and white, in studios and hotel rooms and cornfields and corners of streets—piles of portraits, marking a life. And I looked at the girl in all these images, as varied as they were, and still I could see the same person somewhere in there. But most of all it wasn’t me anymore. It’s not what I look like now—I have aged since. Oh, it’s nothing to cry about, nothing to mourn for—I probably have another decade before I really start to look old, but something has changed.

That sounds about right.  I returned to the dating market around that same age and have been on the dating market for the next decade, and I have seen other women who were hot numbers at 40 who had definitely lost the bloom on the rose at 50.  Sadly, such women knew in some sense that something had changed - men were no longer coming around - and they were frustrated by it. But they had created their reality.  At age 40 and younger, all they had to do was "be themselves" and nothing else, but by age 50, and shopworn, they had to provide some "value added" - personality, intelligence, compassion, empathy, somthing - in order to make it worth a man's while to spring for the drink or the dinner.  Otherwise all they had left to trade was sex, and that was too much like being dependent and used. Listen to what Wurtzel has to say about this:

So here’s the funny thing: There seem to be more men coming around these days, and they keep getting younger as I get older—I’m an interesting, mature woman to a man in his twenties, while to a guy my age, I’m just jaded—but I think they are falling in love with a person I used to be, with a girl in a picture, with an idea or an image, not with who or what I am now. Because with every passing second, I feel I am less physically desirable, even though I’m finally, in fact, a desirable person. It makes no sense, it’s not fair, and it sucks.

Obviously, those younger men are "coming around" because they treasure Wurtzel's experience and wisdom and want to create a monogamous life with her.  Alternatively, they understand that she's desparate and an "easy lay."  Given her history of being an unfaithful tramp, and knowing the younger male mind, I'm betting on the latter.

Wuerzel's coda is this pathetic passage:

I’m hopeful that there will be a moment in the next few years when I’ll be more striking than ever because some aura will wash over me in that way that these things just do: as when feminine confidence and feisty intelligence overwhelm the depredations of age, and suddenly women smolder anew—running companies, winning Oscars, reaping millions, landing heavenly younger men. After all, there are many famous women who seem ageless, like Catherine Deneuve; or have aged sexily, like Susan Sarandon; have aged voluptuously, like Catherine Zeta-Jones; have aged beauti­fully, like Michelle Pfeiffer. But eventually, at some somber and sobering calendar date, most of us lose our looks and likewise one of our charms—and I will lose mine. At which time, for me at least, there won’t be much point to life anymore at all.

It seems that there will be no "point to life" when Wurtzel "loses her looks"?  That makes sense only insofar as Wurtzel defines life as material things and views the nature of friendships and marrriage as a kind of commodity transaction where she offers her "looks" and the man in her life offers adoration. 

Sadly, having spent too many nights in too many bars, that attitude is all too common among people who have lived their life according to the law of commoditized relationship that Wurtzell subscribes to.

Uber-cynic Vox Day offers this analysis:

Elizabeth Wurtzel is in stage E. She is past her prime, she knows she is past it, and she is now regretting the potential husband she foolishly threw away in stage C. Her focus is now on finding a husband, although she knows it is probably too late for children. She appears destined to be a Stage F failure, also known as a Companion to Many Cats. This is not a worthless societal role, or necessarily an undignified one, but it is not one that most young women in their teens dream about.

If Vox Day's economic explanation doesn't work for you, then consider Harlan Ellison's mystical explanation from "On the Downhill Side":

"Lizette and I were two sides of the same coin, cast off after death for the opposite extremes of the same crime.  She had never loved. I had loved too much.  Overindulgence in something as delicate as love is to be found mounstrously offensive in the eyes of the God of Love.  And some of us - who have never understood the salvation of the Golden Mean - some of us are cast adrift...."

A lesbian trapped in a man's body.

Due to a tangled web of book club/philosophy discussion groups I'm involved with, I received an invitation to listen to a talk by Angela Pettit on his/her experience with the transgender experience.

That's a picture of Angela, Angela's daughter and Angela's wife, from right to left. Angela's biography on the PFLAG site reads:

I am a post-op male to female transsexual. My SRS was with Dr. Brassard in January of 2002.

For those of you who care about such things, I was born October 27, 1942. (You can do the math.) I like to say that I now have three birthdays every year: my natal day; the day I started living full time as a woman – June 23, 2000; and the day of my SRS January 7, 2002. Strangely, my family only gets together to celebrate my natal day. No amount of advocacy seems to convince them that I really should have three birthdays each year.

Since the beginning of my transition in 1999, I have been very active in a variety of transgender organizations. I founded the Central Valley Transgender Support Group to serve the Fresno, CA area and began speaking at college campuses, churches, and business conferences. In addition, I am leader of PFLAG-Fresno, and was recently appointed TNET Coordinator for the Mid-Pacific Region. My personal philosophy is that the many battles that GLBT people face can best be addressed through education of the general populace.

I suppose that I am different from most transsexuals in that I have been lovingly accepted by my immediate family, my birth family, and my wife's birth family. My immediate family is composed of Jonni, my wife of 38 years, and our daughter, Audra, and her husband. All have been most accepting and understanding from the first time we notified them of my transition. I am truly blessed.

In 2001 I was notified that I, along with Jonni and Audra, had been chosen to participate in the shooting of a one-hour Discovery Channel special entitled, Changing Sexes: Male to Female. The footage was shot in December and January of 2001-2002 and was finally shown in the fall of 2002. (It is still being shown approximately every six weeks.)

I served in the U.S. Air Force as a navigator/bombardier on a B-52 from 1963 until I retired in 1984. I flew more than 280 combat missions over Vietnam. As a result, I hold 13 Air Medals and a Distinguished Flying Cross. After retirement from the Air Force, I became a teacher of high school math. More specifically, I was department head for both the math and science departments. I taught all levels of math but my greatest love was teaching pre-Calculus, and AP Calculus. Since I taught at a school in a small farming community, I elected to take early retirement when I started living full time as a woman.

It sounds like Angela has made a happy, succesful reassignment.

My sense is that on some level "gender reassignment surgery" is deeply compatible with the post-modern American ethical system. The highest value according to our highest Court is the aiblity to define our own value and seek the good as we find it. Certainly, as modern Americans, we deeply believe that we shouldn't be limited to the role defined by our history, or DNA, for that matter. GBLTism is an organized group that has a recognized place in the alphabet soup of minorities that Democrat politicians must recognize.

Is there, however, any wisdom to the now-distant conventional wisdom that human nature is not infinitely malleable?

Here is the controversial First Things essay by Paul McHugh. McHugh was the head of John Hopkins that shut down the "gender reassignment surgery" that Hopkins had become famous for. McHugh's decision was based on his conclusion that people claiming to be transgendered were not in fact being helped by the psychiatric profession through surgical intervention.

This passage is universally described by proponents of transgenderism as "hateful":

Their regular response was to show me their patients. Men (and until recently they were all men) with whom I spoke before their surgery would tell me that their bodies and sexual identities were at variance. Those I met after surgery would tell me that the surgery and hormone treatments that had made them “women” had also made them happy and contented. None of these encounters were persuasive, however. The post-surgical subjects struck me as caricatures of women. They wore high heels, copious makeup, and flamboyant clothing; they spoke about how they found themselves able to give vent to their natural inclinations for peace, domesticity, and gentleness — but their large hands, prominent Adam’s apples, and thick facial features were incongruous (and would become more so as they aged). Women psychiatrists whom I sent to talk with them would intuitively see through the disguise and the exaggerated postures. “Gals know gals,” one said to me, “and that’s a guy.”

For what it's worth, the same people who see hate in this description, also explain McHugh's putative hatefulness on his Catholicism, as if that dispenses with any need to intellectually engage McHugh's experience.

There is also sad site by a transgendered person for whom things did not go so well, it seems. One wonders how many others are not celebrating their new identity.

There is also the question of why others should be required to participate in what they think is a charade. Did Rene Richards, for example, really become a "women's" tennis player simply because they readjusted his genitalia?

Similarly, can a man formed into the likeness of a woman really understand the female experience of rape or sexual violence? That seems to be a real concern motivating this this post by a Canadian "rape relief center."