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Across the street from the incubator is the Pemco insurance building, and one of the big deals is this sign on the side that proclaims in big letters, "The solar panels on the roof of this building are generating 3.3KW of power!" And I used to wonder, exactly how much power is that? What is that in meaningful terms?

Today, it's a grey day and the sign is showing a pathetic "0.11KW of power." And then it hit me: holy chao, that's 110 watts. That's two lightbulbs. The proud LED sign braying out how much energy they're generating probably takes more power to run than the solar cells generate.
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NPR's article yesterday on the risks of the HPV vaccine has to be one of the most irresponsible piece of journamalism I've heard on NPR in a long while.

It starts off with this quote:
There's a new report on health problems associated with the vaccine against HPV - that's the human papillomavirus, which can lead to cervical cancer.
And then it goes on, paragraph after paragraph, sound bite after sound bite, to show how there is no discernable pattern of risk evident in the data, and overwhelmingly, the lives saved by the HPV vaccine far outweigh the risk of vaccination. Cervical cancer kills 4000 women every year, and the CDC says that two deaths from the vaccine are "suspect." Cutting deaths down by a factor of 2000 is a huge, huge benefit to the population.

These are the gold standards of vaccination deployment. They're the kind of results vaccine researchers look for: a lowering of risk factors by at least one order of magnitue (and in this case, three orders of magnitude), and no discernable causal pattern of risks related to vaccination. Gardisil's risk profile is exactly the same as other childhood vaccinations-- a point Wilson never raised.

Brenda Wilson, the reporter, chose to end her piece with this comment:
To put things into perspective, Dr. Halsey reminds us that people of all ages have health problems and all people die, even young people the age of those who got the vaccine.
That's the sort of, "Well, kids die sometime. Yours might. It might be the vaccine's fault, but researchers are just gonna shrug their shoulders anyway."

The Christian Right hates Gardisil. They hate it with a passion because it's the first vaccine for a sexually transmitted disease. For them, sex ought to be risky. It ought to be frightening. Focus on the Family's "position of the HPV vaccine" is that Gardisil will convince young women that sexual intercourse is socially acceptable and will encourage promiscuity, whereas if young women know they're at risk for cervical cancer they'll be more likely to abstain. It's all about controlling women with fear; technological alleviations of fearful sex are an abomination before their god.

Nothing in Wilson' piece supported the opening sentence. The presentation, the opening fnord and the overweening de-emphasis on the nature of science, the lack of comparison of these results to those of the polio vaccine, the rubella vaccine, or the meningitis vaccine-- all vaccinations that save lives-- all lead up to an enraging piece of journamalism that feeds into the Christian Right's agenda.

And yes, I've complained to NPR about this crap.
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"Sex is the sewer drain of a healthy body, sir. Any use of the sexual act other than procreation is a waste of vital energy. Wasted seeds are wasted life. Masturbation is the silent killer of the night." Dr. John Harvey Kellogg Well, okay, that's the quote from TC Boyle's novelization of Kellogg's life, but apparently all of these are taken from Kellogg's book Plain Facts for Young and Old.

I was reminded of Kellogg and his obsession this morning, when several sources, most notably Violet Blue, drew my attention to probably the most wrong-headed and ill-informed article about the online kink community ever written: ABC News' Susan James's Therapists Say Kinky Sex Is on the Rise.

It starts out with the worst definition, a "paraphilia" is a "socially unacceptable sexual practice," and then contrasts that with "teleoiphiles." First, the word paraphilia is simply wrong here; it implies that kink is a "requirement," not a flavoring or recreational extra. Susan James claims that if you like kink, you can't have it any other way.

But worse, she contrasts "paraphilia" with "teleoiphilia." Have you ever heard the word "teleoiphilia?" I did, when I was considering becoming a psych major many years ago. It is not an antonym for "paraphilia." It's an antonym for "pedophilia." Her first on-topic paragraph starts by tarring all kinky people with the broad brush of accusation: We're not just weird, we're dangerous, we haven't gotten the message about what's normal or we don't care about what's normal, we'll be inappropriate all the time so you had better watch out for your children.

James's reportage is utterly incompetent, designed to be sensationalistic. She quotes from a "sexpert," Susan Quilliam, who apparently did the current revision of The Joy and Sex, (My opinion on the previous work is not a kind one, and given what little she's allowed in this column, I doubt I'll find the third edition any more enlightening. Go buy The Guide To Getting It On instead) and writes: Creating a "safe" arena for experimentation is critical, she said, and couples should have special words, should they be uncomfortable, to call for "an immediate halt to the activity." Huh. That never occurred to us before. Thanks, "sexpert." If only there was a word for that, and if only we'd been using it twenty years ago.

James's pet sexpert makes irresponsible connections, and James eats them up uncritically. Did you know, for example, that you might start off a swinger and end up a cannibal? It's true! You start out with one perversion and, according to Quilliam, you'll end up at "one of the fastest growing perversions on the Internet — cannibalism." Quilliam, meet Dolcett. Meet fantasy.

Even worse, she talks to a documentarian of the kink scene, but someone who's not kinky himself apparently, and takes this quote from him:
After the pain threshold is crossed, they describe a type of ecstasy called 'flying." It is no longer painful and gives an entirely sexual as well as psychological, transcendent place. Flying is bigger than any drug.
Okay, anyone who's ever read any of my flogging stories knows damn well that I've described the "pushed past pain" point several times, both as a top and a bottom, and describing it as drug-like both demeans it and sensationilizes it. This is language chosen to arouse the anti-sex forces, to legitimize the concept of "erototoxins," and to legislate against us.

The stupid, it just irritates. She goes from singular, criminal examples (like the Hans Miewes case) to a general "It's everywhere! On the Internet! It's not just bad for children! It'll get you! Run for your lives! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!" All psychologists know that paraphilia are the result of childhood trauma. And sado-masochism [sic-- what's wrong with her dictionary, anyway?] is never fantasy or light, and eventually your dominatrix will toss you on a spit and roast you alive.

And she makes the claim that once you've tried something kinky you can never have "normal" sex. Because, you know, people who love hot sauce can't stand ice cream or a decent burger without one, right? I'm reminded of Kellogg again, and his obsession with keeping "stimulating" foods away from teenagers because, so his logic went, if they were stimulated in one thing they might become stimulated in others, and that would lead to the victim "dying by his own hand," as Kellogg tried to make wit.

The entire article makes sex out to be this Big Scary Thing, and kinky people are playing with the Big Scary Thing in Dangerous Ways, and maybe They Must Be Stopped.

Grrr. Hulk Smash.
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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.
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There is worse than being between Judith Reismann and the Concerned Women for America on one side, and Max Hardcore ATOGM movies and bareback pig sex parties on the other. And that's when someone who obstensibly sets herself up as one of the good guys gets something naively wrong.

My example du jour is Make Love, not Porn, which seeks to counter the terrible messages often encountered in mainstream pornography. Most of them are okay. It has a two-panel display showing two cases. The left one reads "Porn World" and says things like "Women love to be spat upon" or "Women love anal sex." The right-hand panel reads "Real World" and usually has something wishy-washy like "Some do, some don't."

The one that has most of us who are or have been sex educators up in arms is the one labeled "Clitoris." The "porn world" reads "Women come all the time from positions where nothing is going on anywhere near the clitoris." The "real world" one reads "There has to be some sort of pressure on the clit in just the right way to make a woman come. It has to be there."

The clitoris is (I hate to belittle it, but here goes) just a particularly well-situated bundle of nerves. Orgasm, y'know, happens elsewhere, somewhere above the neckline; everything else is just setting the stage for it. I've been lucky enough to know men and women who can and do climax from stimulation that has absolutely nothing to do with the traditional places to touch and stroke and lick, and to simply toss their experiences out as non-existent or unreal is unfair to them.

"I know that's wrong and I'm gonna change the world with my 133t D35|Gn SK|llz" is nice, but please, know what you're talking about, know what's correct, before you go and do it. At the very least, read a book about it, okay kid?

The one on anal sex is a hoot too, but then I'm just a pervert. A lot of the assumptions on the website is that all porn is nasty porn, and that producers like Abby Winters and Crashpad and Tristan just don't exist.

[Added: Fleshbot (obviously NSFW) has their own review, and it's similar to mine. (via Violet Blue.)]
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A peek into the far right echo chamber:

Pretty long )

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Elf Sternberg

May 2025

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