Elf Sternberg

As everyone who reads my stuff knows, I'm fond of sex, robots, and sex with robots. It's rather too bad that there aren't any really good sex robots out there, but in the meantime, humans do just fine. I suspect I'll be one of those perverts who'll continue to find sex with humans interesting long after the robots have exceeded Aria Giovanni or Gavin Tate for exceptional human, ahem, quality.

So imagine my pleasure at stumbling upon Why Sex With Robots Is Always Wrong, a rather peculiar little diatribe in which the author takes the idea that sex with robots will be so much better than anything else that, long before reproduction stops, lolicon, shotacon and zoophile bots will have so corrupted us that society will grind to a halt.

Unfortunately, although his mainstreaming is intriguing, his actual imagination is paltry enough that I didn't find much interesting there to exploit for my own work. He kinda blows his own premise by insisting that the acronym he dreams, FACA or "Female Anatomically Correct Android", will persist long after society has shaded into his dystopian ideals of fuckable sexbots shaped like little boys, stuffed pandas or toaster ovens. And his "the day we accepted that they're robots" scenario churned my stomach for its biochauvanism. Still, it's fun to see more and more the Christians are worrying about the posthuman future.

I used to say this a lot back when I was young and dealing with whacked-out religious types who insisted "Jesus was coming soon:" He'd better get here in the next 40 years or so or he's gonna be outclassed.

Following up on the "Sex (in the UK) is Pleasurable" line, Violet points us to the "City Brights" blog at SFGate.com, where the host, Zennie, complains that the program is aimed at the wrong people, young people, who are too young to even be thinking about having sex, whereas all of the straight adults in the Bay Area apparently, again according to Zennie, are so uptight it's obvious they need to get laid.

While telling an anecdote second-hand from a "teacher friend" of his about catching kids in the act and stopping them, he basically feels that kids shouldn't have sex.

Zennie misses the point. Telling kids sex should be pleasurable has been shown to be a better tactic for getting them to delay sex and to have responsible sex than telling them to abstain. If you tell them that it should be pleasurable, all of the awkward, awful, sticky, uncomfortable fumblings become warning bells: if it's not pleasureable, something is wrong, stop, figure out what's wrong, and if it's the other person who is making it awkward, uncomfortable or awful, then do something about it. Get it better, or get out.

If only we could teach people that food ought to be pleasurable, too. And not used in the way that masturbation is sometimes a substitute for sex.

Speaking of which, does anyone remember Jocelyn Elders? She was the Surgeon General under Bill Clinton, until Clinton fired her for suggesting, off the cuff, that maybe telling kids masturbation is okay and pleasurable might be a good way to keep them from having sex. What was controversial fifteen years ago is, well, kinda obvious today.

Last week I dismissed Mary Eberstadt's piece on how our inability to clearly articulate morality about sex translated into zealous moral impulses about food. Eberstadt's article begged too many questions and omitted too many details. morality isn't a substance that flows along channels, where a shortage in one leads to a surfeit in another. Eberstadt oversimplified the question far too readily to have produced a meaningful discussion.

I do think there is merit, however, to another idea: deprived of the impression that they had some control over their destiny, the bluenoses in our country have started to lash out, looking for any outlet they can for their frustrated desire to frustrate desire in others.

I mean consider Eberstadt's article as of a piece with other anti-sex impulses rising around the country. Just weeks after the anti-abortion forces crowed that their blatant terrorist tactics were working, the group Americans for Truth About Homosexuality announced that they were subscribing to and monitoring every gay, lesbian, transgender, poly, and kink-friendly mailing list in the country they could find. Their goal was to target and protest public gatherings of non-normative sex groups and, as they succeed with the anti-abortion movement, force the organizers to spend extra time and money dealing with the press, the police, and health officers.

Don't miss AfT's article castigating the Unitarian Universalist for including "sadomasochism" and "non-monogamy" in a pamphlet for older teenagers trying to understand their sexuality, describing it as "pure evil." The language is becoming less restrained. OneNewsNow characterized a school's decision not to fire a transgender janitor as "outrageous" and added, "The whole idea that someone like this should be in the public schools, of course, is beyond belief."

Then we had Susan James's atrocious ABC report on kinky sex, which followed on our local ABC affiliate, KOMO TV's, hit piece on a private sex club in Seattle. The club is registered as a private social club (imagine that!) and KOMO's objection was that by registering in such a way the club derived the same tax benefits as hunting clubs and even private drinking clubs. The headline read, "Are your tax dollars going to pay for a sex club?" (The KOMO article was so bad KOMO eventually retracted it, and publicity for the Center for a Sex Positive Culture actually led to a significant increase in membership.)

Meanwhile, the right is absolutely lathered that David Ogden has been nominated for a position at the Justice Department because he has worked for pro-pornography groups in the past, defending their 1st Amendment Rights.

I really do hope that all of this recent anti-sex lathering is coincidental, but I have my doubts. Freed from the time-constraining responsibility of carrying water for a failed presidency and desperate for some cause to embrace and vent their excessive anger upon, the forces of repression have returned to their favorite themes of policing your bedroom and your heart.

A couple of days ago I was in a Bartells to buy some more antihistamine and dental floss, very exciting. Sharing the aisle with the floss was the "feminine hygiene and contraceptive products," and among the narrow selection of sex lubricants I spotted this little gem: Elbow Grease.

Elbow Grease in Bartells? A drugstore so uptight only dogs can hear it fart is stocking the lube of choice for gay men who don't know any better? Elbow Grease was deliberately created for anal fistfucking and for no other purpose, as you can readily see from the illustration on the package. Gay men who really know better use Crisco, for the simple reason that it's cheap, it's easy to get everywhere, and it works much, much better than any petroleum-based lubricant out there. Sure, it's not condom-safe, but fisting and actual intercourse rarely go together; you're either out to do one or the other, not both, on any given night.

Mary Eberstadt, another deep Catholic thinker with ties to Leon Kass, New Atlantis, and First Things, has a strange and silly essay in Policy Review in which she tells a fantasy of two women, one from the 50s, and one from the 90s. Eberstadt claims the woman of the 50s had mass-produced food, the production of which she had few moral questions about, but when it comes to sex, she had very strong opinions about it. The woman of the 90s, in contrast, has very strong opinions about the morality of her food, but no strong opinions about sex. The essay is uncleverly entitled Is Food the New Sex?.

The answer, sadly for Ms. Eberstadt, is "no." Her conclusion is a funny one. After going through the usual arguments about how monogamous men are happier than promiscuous ones, and how "nontraditional sexual morality" is bad for the children (cue George Carlin) (and to be honest, I give her some slack on the evidence there), she writes:

In the end, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the rules being drawn around food receive some force from the fact that people are uncomfortable with how far the sexual revolution has gone — and not knowing what to do about it, they turn for increasing consolation to mining morality out of what they eat.

This is ridiculous nonsense.

She starts out with a peculiar notion-- that we are post-scarcity on food and sex. She has two different and contradictory definitions of sex in her essay. The first is risky, it involves the vulnerability of nakedness and the dangers of swapping bodily fluids. The second is impersonal, removed, the participants separated from one another by time and space. Eberstadt deliberately and cynically conflates masturbating to pornography with having sexual congress, and she does so only to highlight the malevolent aspects of each. She wants her audience to believe that out there people are having impersonal, distant, sex-for-money relationships separated by time and distance that still, somehow, result in STDs and unwanted pregnancies.

But the important thing that Eberstadt misses is that food has become a moral issue not because we have become less aware of the dangers of sex; it's that we have become more aware of the complications of food. Ebestadt's 1950s mom died in 1983 of congestive heart failure, mostly due to bad dietary habits. She developed diabetes and spend her last six years confined to a bed due to crippling rheumatoid arthritis aggravated by sharp weight gain late in life. The 1990's woman is more aware of what happened to previous generations than any generation prior; she has more documentation, in full color and surround sound, about what her parents' generations went through, a signficant and impactful historic awareness of recent history that I don't think gets enough attention. (Her awareness extends to food and sex.)

Food has become more diverse and more interesting-- and even worthy of moral concern-- because there's more of it. We now have the freedom to debate the merits of canned versus fresh, a luxury of which Miss Eberstadt points out and then fails to miss the import. We have the freedom, and the knowledge to debate the merits of free ranged versus factory farming. More importantly, we have access to an incredible range of knowledge about food, and we've become uncomfortably aware that food production can be the cause ecological harm and, depending upon your view, morally unacceptable suffering. Mrs. 1950s probably never thought twice about the life her meat led. Ms. 1990s very much has.

Eberstadt tries to joke about the different labels for different types and degrees of vegetarianism, saying, "The terminological complexity only amplifies the point that food now attracts the taxonomical energies once devoted to, say, metaphysics." I wonder what Eberstadt thinks of the taxonomical complexity of heavy metal bands? You've got heavy metal, vegetarian progressive grindcore, superblack metal, Viking dëath mëtal, progressive metal mathcore, and lounge. Does she think that the taxonomic complexity of sex has somehow faded? Quick, make her listen to six hours of a poly-vs-open-relationships shouting match!

Taxonomic complexity occurs when the fundamentals have been decided upon; all that's left is tribal arrangement by precision. The fundamentals of vegetarianism are well-established, as are the steps one must go through to ensure nutritional sufficiency.

And sure, there is some moral high-minded and noisy opinionating between fish-eaters versus dairy-drinkers. If Eberstadt doesn't think the same thing isn't going on among people who have sex, now, where did I leave that six-hour tape of a poly-vs-open-relationships screaming match again?

Food isn't the new sex. It isn't the new heavy metal, either. Food and sex are on similar courses, both aided by technology. We have moral opinions about food because we assume that our stewardship over the Earth includes a responsibility to eliminate suffering in those weaker than ourselves and because our food choices do have a long-term impact on the planet we hope to leave behind for future generations. Sex, despite Eberstadt's handwringing, doesn't. We assume that adults having sex with other adults have the responsibility needed to do so with regard to each other and their offspring. (Eberstadt really goes off the rails when she claims that young people today have no strong moral feelings about unplanned children about whom the parents cannot manage responsibility. Does she even know any young people?)

The challenges of food and sex are challenges about our bodies, and control over them, and the ever-widening awareness we have of what "food" means, combined with the de-mystification of what "sex" means. Control that humanity is wresting away from both cruel biological fate and the old, cold hands of dead "tradition" by the inexorable reach of technology. Someday, there will be a cure for everything, an ideal form of birth control, and an efficient, minimally ecologically harmful way of producing a diversity of food sufficient for every living soul. We aren't there yet. We are definitely on our way.

To ask "Is Food the New Sex" is to miss the point: both the "old food" and the "old sex" have been left behind. Moral sensibilities about both have evolved, not in some absurdist zero-sum way as if morality was phlogiston to be pushed about, now some here, now some there. I don't think we'll get to a "post-moral" world. We don't argue about the morality of sexual congress; we argue about the morality of bringing children into the world you can't raise, and about having sex without taking into account the risks of disease and broken hearts. We argue about pig farm waste versus salmon farm waste versus overfishing versus industrial crop farming because those, too, have important moral consequences. Mary Eberstadt is being left behind by our world, and I hope she doesn't suffer too much being so.

I have been feeling significantly unwriterly recently. (Actually, I've been feeling a lot of 'un-'s recently, but we'll talk about those later.) This morning during the commute, I pulled up my 'topics' list, which includes both things I want to write blog entries about, and ideas that might spark a story.

The topic I stumbled upon was 'Labiaplasty': surgical modification of the labia to meet a popular ideal of beauty.

Now, here's the funny thing: I'm not sure how I feel about the topic. I'm just not shrill enough on the topic, one way or the other. The Atlantic Monthly magazine had a great article recently entitled First Person Plural, about the multiplicity of personalities each one of us carries in our heads, and how those personas interact through time. Read it if you have time; I'll be recommending it several times in the next couple of months, I'm sure.

On the subject of labiaplasty, though: the civil libertarian in me thinks that people ought to be able to modify their bodies in whatever way they choose. The hound-dog bioconservative (but not bioluddite) me is shocked and horrified, experiencing a Kassian 'Wisdom of Repugnance' moment, mostly because I happen to think that the generic photoshopped, hacked-back labia of most porn starlets is pretty boring and uninteresting compared to what I've encountered "in the wild." The biolibertarian thinks that the practice ought to be legal everywhere, because attempting to limit it while continuing to permit transsexual reassignment surgery would be a legislative and judicial nightmare. The father in my wants my daughters to never, ever have to even think about this kind of thing. The humanitarian in me sees a difference between the deep identity issues of sexual identity and the fashion-driven loathe-your-body memes that encourage labiaplasty.

Unfortunately, "I think it's an unnecessary mutilation of a body part that unsder no circumstances deserves the attention of the knife for purely aesthetic purposes, the popularity of which is driven by a vicious fashionability that dislikes the natural variance of the female body, but I don't think it ought to be illegal," really kind of falls apart there at the end with its lack of vehemence. It gets the crowd all riled up about a problem and then at the end says, "But nothing should be done. Go about your business as normal."

Which is to say that writing an essay about labiaplasty means, essentially, trying to figure out how I feel about it. My feelings are too mixed up to do so effectively. I'm apalled by labiaplasty; I'm also driven by principle not to interfere with those women who want it for aesthetic reasons. I want desperately to convince them that their ladyparts are just fine, even gorgeous, in their natural diversity, and I want to convince myself that my loathing isn't merely a feeling, the consequences of acting on which would be tragic-- which is how I understand the Kassian moral universe.

Back in the 1960's, the GI Joe doll was introduced to the American people. In order to avoid the stigma of "boys playing with dolls," the word "doll" appears nowhere on GI Joe packaging. The masculinized term is "action figure." And yet, the men who buy love dolls seem comfortable with the idea of buying "dolls."

The "love doll" phenomenon just seems to get bigger and creepier the more I look at it. Not that it wouldn't be convenient and aerobic in some ways to own one of the stealth models (take out the "love" sleeves and put on a pillowcase and it's indistinguishable from a normal pillow), but man, the anatomically accurate disembodied torsos disturb me, as does the blatant kindergartener model and the instructions on how to shop for kid's clothes.

You can buy high quality heads, and several high-end, better than Realdoll models. And some guys have just huge collections.

There are also two forums for consumers of these products, predictably one American and one Japanese. The American one has very strict guidelines against suggesting that your doll might be underage or that you buy things for her that might make her appealing in an immature kind of way; the Japanese one has a contributor, "Kodi," who likes to brag about the frilly girly dresses he found or the black patent vinyl schoolgirl shoes he found.

One thing that intrigues me: most of the contributors to the Japanese forums can't stand the "fabric" models and are much in favor of the silicone skin, often implying that the simple love pillows aren't worth the emotional investment. Which makes me wonder just how far these guys are going with their obsession with cold, still, poseable "action" figures. There's a thick, heavy line between those seeking masturbation aids and those looking for a relationship that borders on the necrophiliac.

Of course, none of that really matters for the lonely or horny here in America. There's really no continuum. Either you get the Cadillac RealDoll or BoyToy, or you're left with an atrocious blowblow up doll.

Maybe Dekunoboo needs an American distributor.

Not me, of course. I have my reputation to consider, after all.

All of the following links are NSFW.

When it comes to masturbation, the Japanese are positively centuries ahead of us. Case in point, the love cover, a pillowcase imprinted with a pretty woman that goes over your inflatable masturbation device ($25) or, if you're feeling spendy ($165), a headless female mannequin with several different vaginal texture simulators with different textures, twists and turns, and so on. The company even sells its own brand of lube, the appropriately named Hole's [sic].

Ooh, here's one I haven't heard before. I was reading an article the other day about wild courses taught on college campuses and came across this one: "What are the political ramifications of identifying as gay, lesbian, straight, bi, queer, asexual, spectral, or something else?"

And what the heck is a "spectral sexual orientation?" It is the orientation one chooses when one wishes to be intimidating to straight society, a "threatening spectre feared by the heterosexual mainstream."

I don't know many spectrals anymore-- I'm probably too old-- but it's still a fun label.

One of the most interesting intersections of sex, craigslist, and wifi has started to emerge in places like Boston and Atlanta: gay men posting to the Craigslist Men4Men forum with comments like "I'm stuck in Atlanta, Gate C-18, for a three-hour layover. Anyone wanna get laid? I'm wearing the blue pin stripe suit and have an Armani gym bag. IM name gets same."

Who knew that the personals ads had gone real-time? Goddess bless, I see a science-fiction short in the works already. But I also see an entrepreneurial opportunity in the making: convert one of the post-security shops into a four-bed mini-hotel, $50 an hour. Soundproofed of course. You know it's not prostitution because the only people allowed past security are those with tickets. It's just a few people taking advantage of their layover to get some uh, personal time. I mean, because of the big security issue those store past the TSA goons are struggling and jacking up prices. This sounds like an excellent opportunity at the bigger airports.