sex

Arguments against gay marriage make no sense

history, law, politics / /

From Theodore B. Olson’s “The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage” (Truthout: 12 January 2010):

What, then, are the justifications for California’s decision in Proposition 8 to withdraw access to the institution of marriage for some of its citizens on the basis of their sexual orientation? The reasons I have heard are not very persuasive.

The explanation mentioned most often is tradition. But simply because something has always been done a certain way does not mean that it must always remain that way. Otherwise we would still have segregated schools and debtors’ prisons. Gays and lesbians have always been among us, forming a part of our society, and they have lived as couples in our neighborhoods and communities. For a long time, they have experienced discrimination and even persecution; but we, as a society, are starting to become more tolerant, accepting, and understanding. California and many other states have allowed gays and lesbians to form domestic partnerships (or civil unions) with most of the rights of married heterosexuals. Thus, gay and lesbian individuals are now permitted to live together in state-sanctioned relationships. It therefore seems anomalous to cite “tradition” as a justification for withholding the status of marriage and thus to continue to label those relationships as less worthy, less sanctioned, or less legitimate.

The second argument I often hear is that traditional marriage furthers the state’s interest in procreation — and that opening marriage to same-sex couples would dilute, diminish, and devalue this goal. But that is plainly not the case. Preventing lesbians and gays from marrying does not cause more heterosexuals to marry and conceive more children. Likewise, allowing gays and lesbians to marry someone of the same sex will not discourage heterosexuals from marrying a person of the opposite sex. How, then, would allowing same-sex marriages reduce the number of children that heterosexual couples conceive?

This procreation argument cannot be taken seriously. We do not inquire whether heterosexual couples intend to bear children, or have the capacity to have children, before we allow them to marry. We permit marriage by the elderly, by prison inmates, and by persons who have no intention of having children. What’s more, it is pernicious to think marriage should be limited to heterosexuals because of the state’s de-sire to promote procreation. We would surely not accept as constitutional a ban on marriage if a state were to decide, as China has done, to discourage procreation.

Another argument, vaguer and even less persuasive, is that gay marriage somehow does harm to heterosexual marriage. I have yet to meet anyone who can explain to me what this means. In what way would allowing same-sex partners to marry diminish the marriages of heterosexual couples? Tellingly, when the judge in our case asked our opponent to identify the ways in which same-sex marriage would harm heterosexual marriage, to his credit he answered honestly: he could not think of any.

The simple fact is that there is no good reason why we should deny marriage to same-sex partners. On the other hand, there are many reasons why we should formally recognize these relationships and embrace the rights of gays and lesbians to marry and become full and equal members of our society.

…

California’s Proposition 8 is particularly vulnerable to constitutional challenge, because that state has now enacted a crazy-quilt of marriage regulation that makes no sense to anyone. California recognizes marriage between men and women, including persons on death row, child abusers, and wife beaters. At the same time, California prohibits marriage by loving, caring, stable partners of the same sex, but tries to make up for it by giving them the alternative of “domestic partnerships” with virtually all of the rights of married persons except the official, state-approved status of marriage. Finally, California recognizes 18,000 same-sex marriages that took place in the months between the state Supreme Court’s ruling that upheld gay-marriage rights and the decision of California’s citizens to withdraw those rights by enacting Proposition 8.

So there are now three classes of Californians: heterosexual couples who can get married, divorced, and remarried, if they wish; same-sex couples who cannot get married but can live together in domestic partnerships; and same-sex couples who are now married but who, if they divorce, cannot remarry. This is an irrational system, it is discriminatory, and it cannot stand.

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How male water striders blackmail females into sex

science / /

From Ed Yong’s “Male water striders summon predators to blackmail females into having sex” (Discover: 10 August 2010):

Water strider sex begins unceremoniously: the male mounts the female without any courtship rituals or foreplay. She may resist but if she does, he starts to actively strum the water surface with his legs. Each vibration risks attracting the attention of a hungry predator, like a fish or backswimmer (above). And because the female is underneath, she will bear the brunt of any assault. By creating dangerous vibes, the male intimidates the female into submitting to his advances. Faint heart, it is said, never did win fair lady.

A male water strider doesn’t have to go through the hardships of pregnancy and he plays no role in raising the next generation. It’s a theme that echoes throughout the animal kingdom and it means that the best strategy for him is to mate with as many females as possible. After all, he has plenty of sperm to go around. A female, however, has a limited supply of eggs and mating opportunities. When she has sex, it has to count, so it suits her to be choosy. And she has the right equipment for the job.

Last year, Chang Han and Piotr Jablonski from Seoul National University found that female red-backed water striders (Gerris gracilicornis) can block their vaginas with hard genital shields. This defence is important because once the male manages to insert his penis, he can inflate it to make him harder to throw off. The female’s only hope is to prevent him from getting through in the first place.

Hyper-violent males can sometimes wear the female down but some opt for a subtler approach – they tap intricate rhythms on the water with their legs. When Han and Jablonski discovered these rituals last year, they suggested that the males might be trying to demonstrate their quality, by tapping out the most consistent rhythms. Now, they have another explanation – the tapping is a form of blackmail, a way of coercing sex from the female with the threat of death.

The duo studied the preferences of the backswimmer – a predatory bug that floats upside-down at the water’s surface and listens out for the vibrations of potential prey. When given a choice between a silent male water strider and a mating pair with a tapping male, the backswimmer always headed towards the vibrating duo. And since these predators attack from below, the female was always the one who was injured while the male strode off to tap another day.

The backswimmer menace is so potent that after a few minutes of tapping from the male, the female relents by opening her genital shield. If she had been previously attacked by predators, she gave in almost instantly. And only when she relented did the male stop his threatening taps.

…

The battle of the sexes between male and female water striders has led to a whole suite of adaptations and counter-adaptations. Some males have evolved special grasping structures to give them a better hold of females, while females have responded by evolving spines and other defences to weaken their grip. Females evolved their impregnable genital shields, which males have countered with a behaviour that makes females more likely to lower their defences.

To be honest, the female water strider has an easy time of it. In other insects, where females have evolved an upper hand in the war of the sexes, males have developed even more extreme counter-strategies. Look no further than the common bedbug – the male bypasses the female’s genitals altogether and stabs his sharp penis straight into the female’s back, a technique known appropriately as traumatic insemination.

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The Irish Church lies in creative – and evil – ways

history, language & literature, law, religion, security, word of the day / /

From Patsy McGarry’s “Church ‘lied without lying’” (Irish Times: 26 November 2009):

One of the most fascinating discoveries in the Dublin Archdiocese report was that of the concept of “mental reservation” which allows clerics mislead people without believing they are lying.

According to the Commission of Investigation report, “mental reservation is a concept developed and much discussed over the centuries, which permits a church man knowingly to convey a misleading impression to another person without being guilty of lying”.

It gives an example. “John calls to the parish priest to make a complaint about the behaviour of one of his curates. The parish priest sees him coming but does not want to see him because he considers John to be a troublemaker. He sends another of his curates to answer the door. John asks the curate if the parish priest is in. The curate replies that he is not.”

The commission added: “This is clearly untrue but in the Church’s view it is not a lie because, when the curate told John that the parish priest was not in, he mentally reserved the words ‘…to you’.”

…

Cardinal Desmond Connell had explained the concept to the commission as follows:

“Well, the general teaching about mental reservation is that you are not permitted to tell a lie. On the other hand, you may be put in a position where you have to answer, and there may be circumstances in which you can use an ambiguous expression realising that the person who you are talking to will accept an untrue version of whatever it may be – permitting that to happen, not willing that it happened, that would be lying. It really is a matter of trying to deal with extraordinarily difficult matters that may arise in social relations where people may ask questions that you simply cannot answer. Everybody knows that this kind of thing is liable to happen. So mental reservation is, in a sense, a way of answering without lying.”

…

In Mr Madden’s case, emphasised he did not lie to the media about the use of diocesan funds for the compensation of clerical child sexual abuse victims.

[Cardinal Connell] explained to [Andrew] Madden [a sexual abuse victim, that] he had told journalists “that diocesan funds ARE (report’s emphasis) not used for such a purpose; that he had not said that diocesan funds WERE not used for such a purpose. By using the present tense he had not excluded the possibility that diocesan funds had been used for such purpose in the past. According to Mr Madden, Cardinal Connell considered that there was an enormous difference between the two.”

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Programmer jokes

cool stuff, language & literature / /

Q: How do you tell an introverted computer scientist from an extroverted computer scientist?

A: An extroverted computer scientist looks at your shoes when he talks to you.

Knock, knock.

Who’s there?

very long pause….

Java.

Saying that Java is nice because it works on every OS is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on every gender.

A physicist, an engineer and a programmer were in a car driving over a steep alpine pass when the brakes failed. The car was getting faster and faster, they were struggling to get round the corners and once or twice only the feeble crash barrier saved them from crashing down the side of the mountain. They were sure they were all going to die, when suddenly they spotted an escape lane. They pulled into the escape lane, and came safely to a halt.

The physicist said “We need to model the friction in the brake pads and the resultant temperature rise, see if we can work out why they failed”.

The engineer said “I think I’ve got a few spanners in the back. I’ll take a look and see if I can work out what’s wrong”.

The programmer said “Why don’t we get going again and see if it’s reproducible?”

To understand what recursion is you must first understand recursion.

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Cell phone viruses

business, security, tech in changing society / /

From Jim Giles’ “The inside story of the Conficker worm” (New Scientist: 12 June 2009):

Earlier this year, smartphone users in China started to get messages promising a “sexy view” if they clicked on a link. The link led to a download. That download was a spam generator which, once installed, sent identical “sexy view” messages to everyone in the owner’s contacts list.

That was the first virus known to travel by text message. It was chiefly an annoyance, but there is great potential harm from mobile viruses, especially as technologies such as Bluetooth provide new ways for viruses to spread. But there has never yet been a cellphone threat as serious as Conficker is to PCs.

There are two reasons for that, says Albert-László Barabási of Northeastern University in Boston. He and his colleagues used billing data to model the spread of a mobile virus. They found that Bluetooth is an inefficient way of transmitting a virus as it can only jump between users who are within 30 metres of each other. A better option would be for the virus to disguise itself as a picture message. But that could still only infect handsets running the same operating system. As the mobile market is fragmented, says Barabási, no one virus can gain a foothold.

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Extreme male brains

business, education, science / /

From Joe Clark’s “The extreme Google brain” (Fawny: 26 April 2009):

… Susan Pinker’s The Sexual Paradox, which explains, using scientific findings, why large majorities of girls and women behave almost identically at different stages of their lives – while large minorities of boys and men show vast variability compared to each other and to male norms.

Some of these boys and men exhibit extreme-male-brain tendencies, including an ability to focus obsessively for long periods of time, often on inanimate objects or abstractions (hence male domination of engineering and high-end law). Paradoxically, other male brains in these exceptional cases may have an ability to experiment with many options for short periods each. Pejoratively diagnosed as attention-deficit disorder, Pinker provides evidence this latter ability is actually a strength for some entrepreneurs.

The male brain, extreme or not, is compatible with visual design. It allows you to learn every font in the Letraset catalogue and work from a grid. In fact, the male-brain capacity for years-long single-mindedness explains why the heads of large ad agencies and design houses are overwhelmingly male. (It isn’t a sexist conspiracy.)

In the computer industry, extreme male brains permit years of concentration on hardware and software design, while also iterating those designs seemingly ad infinitum. The extreme male brain is really the extreme Google brain. It’s somewhat of a misnomer, because such is actually the average brain inside the company, but I will use that as a neologism.

Google was founded by extreme-male-brain nerds and, by all outward appearances, seems to hire only that type of person, not all of them male.

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Gottman on relationships

science / /

From THE MATHEMATICS OF LOVE: A Talk with John Gottman (Edge: 14 April 2004):

So far, his surmise is that “respect and affection are essential to all relationships working and contempt destroys them. It may differ from culture to culture how to communicate respect, and how to communicate affection, and how not to do it, but I think we’ll find that those are universal things”.

…

Another puzzle I’m working on is just what happens when a baby enters a relationship. Our study shows that the majority (67%) of couples have a precipitous drop in relationship happiness in the first 3 years of their first baby’s life. That’s tragic in terms of the climate of inter-parental hostility and depression that the baby grows up in. That affective climate between parents is the real cradle that holds the baby. And for the majority of families that cradle is unsafe for babies.

…

So far I believe we’re going to find that respect and affection are essential to all relationships working and contempt destroys them. It may differ from culture to culture how to communicate respect, and how to communicate affection, and how not to do it, but I think we’ll find that those are universal things.

…

Bob Levenson and I were very surprised when, in 1983, we found that we could actually predict, with over 90 percent accuracy, what was going to happen to a relationship over a three-year period just by examining their physiology and behavior during a conflict discussion, and later just from an interview about how the couple viewed their past. 90% accuracy!

…

That was surprising to us. It seemed that people either started in a mean-spirited way, a critical way, started talking about a disagreement, started talking about a problem as just a symptom of their partner’s inadequate character, which made their partner defensive and escalated the conflict, and people started getting mean and insulting to one another. That predicted the relationship was going to fall apart. 96% of the time the way the conflict discussion started in the first 3 minutes determined how it would go for the rest of the discussion. And four years later it was like no time had passed, their interaction style was almost identical. Also 69% of the time they were talking about the same issues, which we realized then were “perpetual issues” that they would never solve. These were basic personality differences that never went away. She was more extroverted or she was more of an explorer or he was more punctual or frugal.

Some couples were caught by the web of these perpetual issues and made each other miserable, they were “grid locked” like bumper-to-bumper traffic with these issues, while other couples had similar issues but coped with them and had a “dialogue” that even contained laughter and affection. It seemed that relationships last to the extent that you select someone whose annoying personality traits don’t send you into emotional orbit. Once again conventional wisdom was wrong. The big issue wasn’t helping couples resolve their conflicts, but moving them from gridlock to dialogue. And the secret of how to do that turned out to be having each person talk about their dream within the conflict and bringing Viktor Frankl’s existential logotherapy into the marital boxing ring. Once people talked about what they wished for and hoped for in this gridlock conflict and the narrative of why this was so important to them, in 86% of the cases they would move from gridlock to dialogue. Again a new door opened. Not all marital conflicts are the same. You can’t teach people a set of skills and just apply them to every issue. Some issues are deeper, they have more meaning. And then it turned out that the very issues that cause the most pain and alienation can also be the greatest sources of intimacy and connection.

Another surprise: we followed couples for as long as 20 years, and we found that there was another kind of couple that didn’t really show up on the radar; they looked fine, they weren’t mean, they didn’t escalate the conflict — but about 16 to 22 years after the wedding they started divorcing. They were often the pillars of their community. They seemed very calm and in control of their lives, and then suddenly they break up. Everyone is shocked and horrified. But we could look back at our early tapes and see the warning signs we had never seen before. Those people were people who just didn’t have very much positive connection. There wasn’t very much affection — and also especially humor — between them.

…These sorts of emotionally disconnected relationships were another important dimension of failed relationships. We learned through them that the quality of the friendship and intimacy affects the nature of conflict in a very big way.

…

One of the major things we found is that honoring your partner’s dreams is absolutely critical. A lot of times people have incompatible dreams — or they don’t want to honor their partner’s dreams, or they don’t want to yield power, they don’t want to share power. So that explains a lot of times why they don’t really belong together.

Psycho-physiology is an important part of this research. It’s something that Bob Levenson brought to the search initially, and then I got trained in psycho-physiology as well. And the reason we’re interested in what was happening in the body is that there’s an intimate connection between what’s happening to the autonomic nervous system and what happening in the brain, and how well people can take in information — how well they can just process information — for example, just being able to listen to your partner — that is much harder when your heart rate is above the intrinsic rate of the heart, which is around a hundred to a hundred and five beats a minute for most people with a healthy heart.

At that point we know, from Loren Rowling’s work, that people start secreting adrenalin, and then they get into a state of diffuse physiological arousal (or DPA) , so their heart is beating faster, it’s contracting harder, the arteries start getting constricted, blood is drawn away from the periphery into the trunk, the blood supply shuts down to the gut and the kidney, and all kinds of other things are happening — people are sweating, and things are happening in the brain that create a tunnel vision, one in which they perceive everything as a threat and they react as if they have been put in great danger by this conversation.

…

Because men are different. Men have a lot of trouble when they reach a state of vigilance, when they think there’s real danger, they have a lot of trouble calming down. and there’s probably an evolutionary history to that. Because it functioned very well for our hominid ancestors, anthropologists think, for men to stay physiologically aroused and vigilant, in cooperative hunting and protecting the tribe, which was a role that males had very early in our evolutionary history. Whereas women had the opposite sort of role, in terms of survival of the species, those women reproduced more effectively who had the milk-let-down reflex, which only happens when oxytocin is secreted in the brain, it only happens when women — as any woman knows who’s been breast-feeding, you have to be able to calm down and relax. But oxytocin is also the hormone of affiliation. So women have developed this sort of social order, caring for one another, helping one another, and affiliating, that also allows them to really calm down and have the milk let-down reflex. And so — it’s one of nature’s jokes. Women can calm down, men can’t; they stay aroused and vigilant.

…

Physiology becomes really critical in this whole thing. A provocative finding from Alyson Shapiro’s recent dissertation is that if we take a look at how a couple argues when the woman is in the sixth month of pregnancy, we can predict over half the variation in the baby, the three-month-old baby’s vagal tone, which is the ability of the vagus nerve, the major nerve of the parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system, which is responsible for establishing calm and focusing attention. That vagus nerve in the baby is eventually going to be working well if the parents, during pregnancy, are fighting with each other constructively. That takes us into fetal development, a whole new realm of inquiry.

…

You have to study gay and Lesbian couples who are committed to each other as well as heterosexual couples who are committed to each other, and try and match things as much as you can, like how long they’ve been together, and the quality of their relationship. And we’ve done that, and we find that there are two gender differences that really hold up.

One is that if a man presents an issue, to either a man he’s in love with or a woman he’s in love with, the man is angrier presenting the issue. And we find that when a woman receives an issue, either from a woman she loves or a man she loves, she is much more sad than a man would be receiving that same issue. It’s about anger and sadness. Why? Remember, Bowlby taught us that attachment and loss and grief are part of the same system. So women are finely tuned to attaching and connecting and to sadness and loss and grief, while men are attuned to defend, stay vigilant, attack, to anger. My friend Levenson did an acoustic startle study (that’s where you shoot of a blank pistol behind someone’s head when they least expect it). Men had a bigger heart rate reactivity and took longer to recover, which we would expect, but what even more interesting is that when you asked people what they were feeling, women were scared and men were angry.

So that’s probably why those two differences have held up. Physiologically people find over and over again in heterosexual relationships — and this hasn’t been studied yet in gay and Lesbian relationships — that men have a lower flash point for increasing heart-rate arousal, and it takes them longer to recover. And not only that, but when men are trying to recover, and calm down, they can’t do it very well because they keep naturally rehearsing thoughts of righteous indignation and feeling like an innocent victim. They maintain their own vigilance and arousal with these thoughts, mostly of getting even, whereas women really can distract themselves and calm down physiologically from being angered or being upset about something. If women could affiliate and secrete oxytocin when they felt afraid, they’s even calm down faster, probably.

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One group files 99.9% of all complaints about TV content

business, language & literature, law, politics, tech in changing society / /

From Christopher M. Fairman’s “Fuck” (bepress Legal Series: 7 March 2006):

The PTC [Parents Television Council] is a perfect example of the way word taboo is perpetuated. The group’s own irrational word fetish – which they try to then impose on others – fuels unhealthy attitudes toward sex that then furthers the taboo status of the word. See supra notes 119-121 and accompanying text (describing this taboo effect). The PTC has even created a pull-down, web-based form that allows people to file an instant complaint with the FCC about specific broadcasts, apparently without regard to whether you actually saw the program or not. See, e.g., FCC Indecency Complaint Form, https://www.parentstv.org/ptc/action/sweeps/main.asp (last visited Feb. 10, 2006) (allowing instant complaints to be filed against episodes of NCIS, Family Guy, and/or The Vibe Awards). This squeaky wheel of a special interest group literally dominates FCC complaints. Consider this data. In 2003, the PTC was responsible for filing 99.86% of all indecency complaints. In 2004, the figure was up to 99.9%.

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Fouche’s blackmail of Napoleon

history, politics / /

From Napoleonic Literature’s “The Court and Camp of Buonaparte: The Ministers: Fouche“:

[Fouche,] who was so profoundly versed in the state of parties, — who was obeyed by one, courted by another, and feared by all; who, by means of his countless agents, could at any time congregate the scattered elements of resistance to the authority of government, was too formidable to be allowed to continue for ever in so dangerous a post. To this we may add that Buonaparte well knew the channel through which the knowledge of his amours passed to Josephine. Of the extent to which the head of the state was subjected to this galling system of espionage, Fouché furnishes us with an amusing proof:–

One day Buonaparte observed that, considering my acknowledged ability, he was astonished I did not perform my functions better, — that there were several things of which I was ignorant. ‘Yes,’ replied I, ‘there certainly are things of which I was ignorant, but which I now know well enough. For instance, a little man muffled up in a grey cloak, and accompanied by a single servant, often steals out on a dark evening from a secret door of the Tuileries, enters a closed carriage, and drives off to Signora G—-. This little man is yourself; and yet this fanciful songstress jilts you continually out of love for Rode the fiddler.’ The Consul answered not a word: he turned his back, rung, and I immediately withdrew.” — Memoires, tom. i. p. 233.

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India’s transgendered folks

commonplace book, history / /

From Henry Chu’s “Bullied by the Eunuchs” (Los Angeles Times: 7 June 2006):

I was being hit up for a handout by one of this country’s many hijras.

They are eunuchs or otherwise transgendered people by birth, accident or choice. Something between male and female, they are shunned by Indian society as unclean. Many make a rough living through prostitution or by crashing weddings, birthday parties and other festive occasions, threatening to disrupt the celebrations with vulgar behavior and to bring bad luck unless they are paid off. …

India has somewhere between half a million and a million eunuchs. The estimates are very approximate, because the hijras live in a secretive, shadowy world they’ve created for themselves away from the abuse and persecution of general society.

They gather in public in large numbers only at their annual conventions, which always attract media attention for the skillful dancing, the raucous atmosphere and the sight of gaudy clothing draped around burly shoulders and dainty jewels hanging off overly thick wrists.

In antiquity, India’s eunuchs dressed as men, and a few were granted royal jobs — for example, as guardians of harems. But today’s hijras make themselves up as women. In the West, they would probably be identified as something between a cross-dresser and a transsexual; in India, they often describe themselves as a third sex, and refer to themselves as “she.” …

Only a handful of outsiders have managed to pierce the veil of secrecy surrounding the hijra community. The writer William Dalrymple, in his book “City of Djinns,” describes an often well-ordered sisterhood divided geographically into local “parishes” whose members, overseen by den mothers, diligently work their beat. …

The short one continued to appeal to me directly, gazing at me meaningfully and sprinkling her Hindi with unmistakable English phrases like “a thousand rupees” (about $22). At one point she knelt down and touched my feet in a sign of obeisance or importunity. Then, growing frustrated by my stinginess, she drew up the hem of her sari, perhaps to warn me that she was ready to flash her mutilated parts, a common tactic among eunuchs to hurry horrified partygoers into forking over cash to get their uninvited guests to leave.

How the hijras come by their condition varies. Some are born hermaphrodites, considered by many Indians to be a terrible curse. Others feel as though they are feminine souls trapped in masculine bodies and undergo voluntary castration — the luckier, better-off ones through chemicals or by trained surgeons, the poorer ones in dangerous back-alley operations involving little more than booze and a dirty knife. There are also hushed stories of boys being kidnapped and mutilated against their will.

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History & numbers on prison rape

history, law, politics, security / /

From Daniel Brook’s “The Problem of Prison Rape” (Legal Affairs: March/April 2004):

In his 18 months at [the maximum-security Allred Unit in Iowa Park, Tex.], [Roderick Johnson, a 35-year-old African-American who is suing the Texas Department of Criminal Justice] did time as the property of the Bloods, the Crips, the Mandingo Warriors, and the Mexican Mafia, all of whom forced him to have sex with their members. They also sold his services to other inmates, usually for between $5 and $10. (A cigarette in Allred goes for $1.50.) …

The prevalence of rape in prison is fearsome. Line officers recently surveyed in one southern state estimated that one in five male prisoners were being coerced into sex; among higher-ranking officials, the estimate was one in eight. Prisoners themselves estimated one in three. (Female prisoners are the victims of rape as well, though they are usually assaulted by male guards, not other inmates; the phenomenon of male-on-male prison rape is generally studied separately.) …

The traditional rationale for prison rape is the lack of women, but most psychologists consider this facile. They see prison rape mainly as a means by which people who have been stripped of control over the most basic aspects of their lives – when to eat a meal, take a shower, or watch TV – can reclaim some sense of power. As one Louisiana prisoner, Wilbert Rideau, wrote, “the psychological pain involved in such an existence creates an urgent and terrible need for reinforcement of [a prisoner’s] sense of manhood and personal worth.” Others believe that prisoners become rapists out of fear of becoming victims themselves; it’s a choice between becoming predator or prey. The psychologist Daniel Lockwood, in his study Prison Sexual Violence, calls this strategy “pre-emptive self-defense.” …

IN 1826, IN WHAT WAS LIKELY THE FIRST PUBLISHED MENTION of prison rape in the history of the republic, the Rev. Louis Dwight wrote that “Boys are Prostituted to the Lust of old Convicts” throughout the institutions he surveyed from Massachusetts to Georgia. Dwight, the founder of the Prison Discipline Society of Boston, a prison reform group, wrote that “Nature and humanity cry aloud for redemption from this dreadful degradation.” It was not until the 21st century, however, that the nation saw its first anti-prison-rape legislation.

Last year, Congress passed the Prison Rape Reduction Act, which allocates $60 million to support rape-prevention programs run by federal, state, and local corrections staff and to aid investigations and punishment of perpetrators. The bill, which enjoyed bipartisan support in the House and the Senate, also requires states to collect statistics on prison rape.

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The Mann Act as problematic law

history, law / /

From Roderick M. Hills, Jr.’s “The Federalist Capers” (Legal Affairs: May/June 2005):

BY CONTRAST WITH THE COURT’S RECORD IN ECONOMIC MATTERS, the pre-New-Deal court was oddly reluctant to impose any limits on federally sponsored cultural conservatism. The Mann Act, which prohibited any person from aiding in the interstate transportation of a “woman or girl” for “prostitution, or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose,” provides a useful illustration of the limits that judicially enforced federalism will go to.

Congress enacted the Mann Act in 1910 by comfortable majorities, in the wake of a national furor over allegations that young women were being kidnapped by syndicates of brothels and forced to work as prostitutes. In retrospect, historians explain the panic over “white slavery” as largely attributable to anxieties over immigration (the syndicates were said to be run by foreigners, especially foreign Jews) and urbanization, which led to a rise in the numbers of unaccompanied single women visible in public places.

Although the act was inspired by fears of coerced prostitution, it was soon enforced by the federal government as part of a crusade against nonmarital sex in general. As David Langum has shown in Crossing Over the Line, a large majority of the FBI’s Mann Act investigations during the 1920s was for noncommercial offenses, typically prosecutions of unmarried but romantically involved couples who crossed state lines. Even the purpose of protecting women from coercion was soon dropped. The Department of Justice took the view that the female “victim” should generally be prosecuted as a co-conspirator if she consented to “immoral” travel. Charges were frequently foregone if the “victim” married the perpetrator, suggesting that the statute was really a federal effort to protect males’ control over their wives and daughters. Though the federal government abandoned the effort to enforce the Mann Act in the 1930s against noncommercial sex, J. Edgar Hoover later used it in raids on brothels to collect information about public persons, like Charlie Chaplin, whom he regarded as subversive.

In short, the Mann Act was everything that you would expect from centralized enforcement of sexual morality – oppressive, gratuitous, and subject to all the abuses of prosecutorial discretion. The regulation of interstate transportation was a thin pretext for federal intervention, given that the act’s authors surely were not concerned that the states were somehow incompetent to regulate sexual morality within their boundaries.

In light of all of these concerns, you might expect that the Supreme Court would have found the Mann Act to be an easy case for invalidation under principles of federalism. But the court unanimously upheld the act in 1913 in Hoke v. United States, and then also upheld its application to noncommercial consensual sexual liaisons four years later in Caminetti v. United States.

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James Jesse Strang, Mormon King of Michigan

history, politics, religion / /

From Geoffrey Gagnon’s “King James I, of Michigan” (Legal Affairs: September/October 2005):

One letter that isn’t on display is the one that James Jesse Strang said he received from Smith just before the Mormon leader was murdered in June 1844. In the letter, which now resides in a university library, Smith bequeaths the nascent Mormon Church to Strang – a new friend, a Mormon of just five months, and, of all things, a lawyer. “If evil befall me,” Smith wrote to Strang in the letter, “thou shalt lead the flock to pleasant pastures.”

Strang’s rivals, among them Brigham Young, dismissed the missive as a forgery and Strang as an unworthy successor to Smith. Yet a couple of hundred church members – Joseph Smith’s widow, mother, brother, and sisters among them – believed the letter was authentic and that it granted church leadership to Strang. A disgusted Brigham Young took his followers west to Utah and built what is now the fastest growing religion in the United States. Strang took his followers to a remote island in Lake Michigan and declared the place his sovereign kingdom.

Hold up the palm of your right hand and you’re looking at a map of Michigan’s lower peninsula. Thirty miles off the coast of your ring finger sits Beaver Island, a 55-square-mile island on the inland sea of Lake Michigan. Only one building survives from Strang’s sojourn, a museum in which Strang artifacts fill one room. …

An old metal press, long since disappeared, once filled the building’s big front room. Strang used the press to spit out the Northern Islander, the region’s first newspaper, and to print his magnum opus, The Book of the Law of the Lord. The long-winded tome of decrees includes what Strang described as the lost transcription of the meeting between Moses and God on Mount Sinai. …

He settled, for the time being, on being a lawyer. “I should rather be the best hunter in an Indian tribe than a commonplace member of the New York bar,” he wrote. But a decade of legal practice yielded little more than common accomplishments, and little more power than that which was afforded him in his capacity as the postmaster of Chautauqua County. …

Strang met the church’s leader after making the acquaintance of Smith’s brother Aaron, who lived near Strang in Wisconsin. Initially, he wasn’t impressed with Joseph Smith, describing him in his diary as a man of “meager education.” Smith, however, seems to have been smitten with Strang’s intelligence. Within weeks of meeting Strang, Smith baptized him, and just weeks after that, he named him a church elder.

Strang, who as a teen was tossed out of the local Baptist church for questioning its precepts, had called himself the “perfect atheist” before moving West, but once on the frontier he realized he might command from the pulpit the power that had eluded him. Strang didn’t bother to familiarize himself with Mormon doctrine until long after he was a church leader. …

In June of 1844, an anti-Mormon crowd killed Joseph and Hyrum Smith. At the instant Smith met his demise, Strang claimed that he received a visit from an angel who anointed his head with oil and declared him the leader of the Mormons. A few days later, a letter to the same effect, purportedly mailed by Joseph Smith before his death, arrived in Strang’s hand. His years as a postmaster, perhaps, had not been wasted. …

Strang and his followers arrived on Beaver Island in the spring of 1847 and spent three difficult summers recruiting followers before he was convinced he had enough subjects to make a respectable kingdom. In 1850, with 200 followers on hand in an unfinished log tabernacle, Strang enlisted a traveling Shakespearean actor named George Adams to muster all the pomp and circumstance he could. Strang appeared before an audience of several hundred on a moss-stuffed seat, wearing a giant red flannel robe trimmed in white. Adams came before the crowd and placed a makeshift crown on Strang’s head, anointing him King James the First. Taking hold of a two-foot wooden pole, Strang returned the favor and named Adams his prime minister.

IN THE SPRING OF 1851, NOT YET A YEAR after Strang had taken royal possession of Beaver Island, the sound of waves helped cover the midnight approach of a rowboat full of troops and U.S. Marshals. Carrying government-issue revolvers, the men slipped toward the glow of an oil lamp in a square log house. Expecting a fight, they instead found the small village of St. James asleep. Marines lay on the deck of the iron-hulled Michigan, armed and ready to charge the beach. But no shots were fired. Within an hour of coming ashore, the landing party had matter-of-factly taken the king into custody. …

President Millard Fillmore, who had entered office the day after Strang’s coronation, reportedly received news of the frontier king from his brother, Charles Fillmore, who lived in Detroit. He soon began hearing about the king from prominent members of his party as well, who pressured the president to take action. Among them was Abraham Lincoln’s 1858 Senate rival, Stephan Douglas, who was wary of giving the South a secession movement to point to in the North. Fillmore instructed his attorney general and the secretary of the Navy to arrest the king. …

Judge Ross Wilkins told the prosecution that because the king and his followers hadn’t engaged in war against the United States or aided enemies of the nation in doing so, the king couldn’t be convicted of treason. That left the federal government with charges against Strang of trespassing on federal land, counterfeiting coins, and obstructing the mail. …

The next morning they delivered a verdict of not guilty. …

STRANG RETURNED FROM DETROIT AND DECLARED HIS TRIAL VICTORY a mandate for his absolute rule. He modernized the kingdom with roads (the King’s Highway, recently resurfaced, is still traveled), managed a lumber export business and a booming fishing trade, and enacted progressive conservation laws (“Ye shall preserve the trees by the wayside. And if there be none, ye shall plant them”). He even appointed garbagemen to keep the kingdom clean.

A year after his win in court, Strang won election to the Michigan Legislature, representing the island and a huge swath of the northern woods, and he commuted to the mainland to serve a pair of two-year terms. He deigned to recognize Michigan’s government, he said, because he saw that as engaging in international relations with a neighboring country. …

After his court victory, Strang’s absolute power began to corrupt him, if not quite absolutely, then bizarrely. He had a fixation with fashion that led him to decree that, for reasons of health, women should wear only loose fitting, knee-length bloomers as opposed to anything that “pinches or compresses the body or limbs.” The king’s stance, and the resulting uproar, unraveled the kingdom. When a collection of outspoken wives refused to don their new pants, Strang had their husbands flogged with a willow whip for “endeavoring to incite mischief and crime.” He reprimanded his subjects in print as well. “We laugh in bitter scorn at all these threats,” he wrote, using the royal we, in what proved to be one of the final issues of the Northern Islander.

Less than two weeks later, a mob of angered husbands, still smarting from their willow lashings, ambushed the king. Strang was pistol-whipped and then felled by an assassin’s bullet. … When Strang fell, pillaging mainlanders flooded the island to drive the Mormons away. The kingdom was scattered and soon forgotten to all but a handful of us Michiganders.

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When newspapers began to cover trials

business, history, language & literature, law / /

From Caleb Crain’s “In Search Of Lost Crime” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2002):

In American cities in the 1830s, 1- and 2-cent newspapers for the working class abruptly challenged 6-cent newspapers published for merchants and political parties. As Patricia Cline Cohen explains in The Murder of Helen Jewett, an account of the 1836 killing of a New York City prostitute, the penny papers transformed the reporting of murder trials. To satisfy their unsqueamish readers, editors for the first time actively investigated crimes. James Gordon Bennett of The New York Herald pioneered by visiting Jewett’s brothel and tracking down witnesses who had not yet found their way to the police station or the courtroom. While the Herald was running the Jewett story on its front page, circulation tripled.

For a sensational trial, the penny papers sent reporters to the courtroom every day. During the trial they published daily installments, which they collected and issued as a pamphlet once it was over. The trial pamphlet blossomed. The most vivid and novelistic pamphlets are of trials that took place between 1830 and 1875: the trial of Richard P. Robinson for the murder of Helen Jewett, the court-martial of Alexander Slidell Mackenzie for his role in the so-called Somers mutiny (1843), the trial of the Harvard professor John Webster for the murder of a Harvard benefactor named George Parkman (1849), and the trial of the Lincoln assassination conspirators (1865), among others.

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30 seconds to impress

commonplace book, science, social software / /

From The Scotsman‘s “Men, you have 30 seconds to impress women“:

HALF of all women make their minds up within 30 seconds of meeting a man about whether he is potential boyfriend material, according to a study on speed-dating.

The women were on average far quicker at making a decision than the men during some 500 speed dates at an event organised as part of Edinburgh Science Festival.

The scientists behind the research said this showed just how important chat-up lines were in dating. They found that those who were “highly skilled in seduction” used chat-up lines that encouraged their dates to talk about themselves in “an unusual, quirky way”.

The top-rated male’s best line was “If you were on Stars In Their Eyes, who would you be?”, while the top-rated female asked bizarrely: “What’s your favourite pizza topping?”

Failed Casanovas were those who offered up hackneyed comments like “Do you come here often?”, or clumsy attempts to impress, such as “I have a PhD in computing”.

About a third of the speed dates were actually over within the first 30 seconds, but there was a marked difference between the sexes with 45 per cent of women coming to a decision within 30 seconds, compared with only 22 per cent of men.

… Conversation topics were also assessed. Only 9 per cent of pairs who talked about films agreed to meet again, compared with 18 per cent who spoke about the subject found to be the most suitable for dating: travel.

It is thought women’s taste for musicals clashed with the male liking for action films, while talking about “great holidays and dream destinations” made people feel good and appear more attractive to each other.

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