If you’d like your young daughter to be the next Dream Girl USA, take a look at this photo essay published by the St. Louis Riverfront Times. The National Little Miss Dream Girl Pageant gave this photographer wide access to many aspects of the pageant.

These photos contained in the slide shows tell it all: exploited children, numerous frumpy mothers, most mothers with bizarre values, absent fathers, and a sponsoring organization that works hard to over-sexualize little girls.  It’s a story that has been told repeatedly, yet many people keep supporting this sort of activity.

For a comment on the sexualization of young girls, see this previous post.

Under a bill to be introduced soon in Utah, sex education teachers would be criminally liable if they “deviate from state law governing sex education, which requires that it focus on physical and emotional development of adolescents, healthy relationships and the threat and prevention of diseases.”

The bill is being prepared in response to a recent allegation of alleged impropriety:

The Jordan School District is investigating allegations that a seventh- and eighth-grade health teacher violated the sex education statute by responding to questions from students about topics beyond the core curriculum, including homosexual sex, oral sex and masturbation.

What are we coming to?? How dare a sex ed teacher talk about homosexual sex, oral sex and masturbation!

A group called Birth Control Watch is suggesting that we ask the following questions to the candidates:

1. Do you support couples having access to safe and effective birth control options, including emergency contraception?

2. Do you agree that for women to achieve equality, they must have access to family planning services, including birth control and contraception?

3. Do you support requiring health insurance plans that cover prescription drugs to cover birth control and contraception?

4. Do you support expanding current federal funding for Title X and Medicaid so that women with low incomes have more access to birth control options?

5. Do you support requiring pharmacies to dispense birth control to patients without discrimination or delay?

6. Do you support comprehensive sex education being taught in schools that includes information about abstinence, contraception and how to avoid sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV/AIDS?

7. Do you support the Prevention First and Access to Birth Control (ABC) Acts?

John McCain would hate to answer any of these straightforward questions.  His policy toward birth control is incoherent when it doesn’t outright seek to invade the private sex lives of Americans.

This article at Alternet (”The Real Pro-Life Candidate”) makes it clear that Barack Obama is the true pro-life candidate.  Why?

Study after study suggests the right to life approach, which McCain has helped execute for decades, is actually the root of the problem: leading to more abortions and later ones too . . . The data show that the pro-choice approach is more effective at achieving what the American public views as “pro-life” goals — i.e. reducing the number of abortions, preventing late term abortion — than the so-called “pro-life” approach.

By the way, who is likely to support freely available birth control pills?  Almost everyone:

Obama could remind the voter that only 11% of sexually active women don’t use contraception and from this 11% comes 50% of the nation’s abortions. Ninety-one percent of the American public strongly favors contraception because of this very reason.

The only people not favoring birth control are those who seek to encourage unplanned pregnancies.  That’s a great policy in a world of dwindling resources, right?  Who are such nuts?  People like this .

I agree with the writers of the Alternet article.  It’s time to cater to 89% of sexually active women, thereby recognizing the right of women to control their own bodies and simultaneously decreasing the number of abortions.  For much more on the wacky resistance of a highly vocal minority to birth control pills, see here.

Today, my daughters and I had the opportunity to observe two male langurs fighting and then reconciling at the St. Louis Zoo today. First of all, here’s the fight (this is the tale end of a rough play session that turned noticeably unpleasant–the entire episode lasted about 3 minutes):

About 2 minutes after these langurs ceased fighting, I saw what clearly appeared to be a reconcilation. Here’s the progression. For most of the two minutes immediately following the fight, one of the langurs parked himself about 3 inches from me (separated by plexiglass). I wondered whether he was pouting or, maybe, whether he was a bit hurt. He looked to be checking out his foot.

After 2 minutes, he hopped up to a outcropping to join the other langur, where the two fighting langurs hugged for about 60 seconds.

I not certain I know how to interpret what happened next, but here’s the photo. It appeared to be of a sexual nature or, perhaps, grooming.

Langurs are marvelously athletic creatures. They bounce around in their enclosure, sometimes causing themselves to bounce off of the Plexiglas. They can jump up cliffs and grab ropes and swing without any apparent fear or effort. Check out the toes of the langur, which are much longer then the langur’s fingers.

I found this fight/reconcile exchange to be fascinating, especially in light of Frans de Waal’s discovery that primates often reconcile. He noted that these reconciliations often involve an expression of sexuality. I assume that this is what happened today.

At Alternet, Tana Ganeva reports on Gigi Durham’s new book, concerning the corporate media’s sexual objectification of girls. Durham characterizes the overall problem as the “The Lolita Effect,” which is the media’s sexual objectification of young girls. Here’s an excerpt:

In 2006, the retail chain Tesco launched the Peekaboo Pole Dancing Kit, a play set designed to help young girls “unleash the sex kitten inside.”

Perturbed parents, voicing concern that their 5-year-olds might be too young to engage in sex work, lobbied to have the product pulled. Tesco removed the play set from the toy section but kept it on the market.

As M. Gigi Durham points out in The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do About It, Tesco’s attempt to sell stripper gear to kids is just one instance of the sexual objectification of young girls in the media and marketplace. Some of the many other examples include a push-up bra for preteens, thongs for 10-year-olds bearing slogans like “eye candy,” and underwear geared toward teens with “Who needs credit cards … ?” written across the crotch.

Perhaps it’s because I have two young daughters, but this issue has been strongly on my radar for a few years. I truly can’t believe what I see in mainstream stores and on the streets. I’ve previously addressed some of these issues here , here and here.

Ganeva’s article includes an interview of Durham.

Durham was asked what is driving this movement to sexualize young girls, she blames parents for not leveling with and protecting their daughters, but she also focuses on corporate profit-seeking. It’s the

marketers’ realization that they could cultivate cradle-to-grave consumers by targeting very young kids by getting them to buy into the frames that older women have been persuaded to buy into for a long time, such as trying to achieve unattainable bodies and present themselves as highly desirable to men.

What kind of conversations should parents have with their daughters to nullify the harmful effect of the media?  Here’s Durham’s answer:

The media are for-profit enterprises, and we need to recognize that from the start. Whatever they do to represent any aspect of human experience, it’s going to be connected to generating revenue. When they represent sex and sexuality, very obviously it’s going to have a commercial motivation behind it… [A]ny adult can start a conversation with their kids, even when they are really, really young, even as young as 2, which is what I’ve done with my kids. Not even specifically about sex, but about the selling intent behind advertising and comparing what goes on in real life compared to fiction and helping them sort out facts. You can start getting them to be critical of the media when they’re very young.

The “American Life League” is putting out this silly garbage. They are trying to make it illegal for anyone to purchase birth control pills. This would put us back to the 1965 case of Griswold v Connecticut.

Consider some of the this wacko group’s talking points:

Q: Is it OK to take the pill for my acne or other health reasons?
A: Although the pill may have some minor benefits, the fact that it can kill preborn babies and cause harmful side effects for the woman outweighs its minor benefits. Because the pill weakens the immune system, it can cause bacterial infections and can make a woman more susceptible to the AIDS virus. It can also cause the following side effects: pelvic inflammatory disease, infertility, cervical cancer, ectopic pregnancy, shrinking of the womb, breast cancer, blood clots, birth defects in children conceived while their mothers are on the pill, stroke, weight gain and much more. 2,3,4

Q: Isn’t it better to be on the pill when you
are sexually active?
A: Better for whom? The pill does not prevent you from getting a sexually transmitted disease, it is not 100 percent effective in preventing pregnancy and you could conceive a child who gets chemically aborted before the baby’s presence is even known to you. Moreover, sexual activity outside of marriage is seriously wrong.

These are not new tactics (these arguments have been used by “pregnancy resource centers” for years), but it’s as stupid as it’s ever been. These “conservatives” want to government to have the power to dictate private sexual behavior between consenting adults (including married consenting adults). Unbelievable.

The media needs to hit McCain in the head with this blunt question: “Do you support the right of American adults to freely choose from all available birth control pills and devices, without any interference from the government?” Make McCain decide if he wants to publicly assume the looney side of this issue too.

Jon Stewart takes a close look at some of the basic tenets of “Abstinence Only Sex Education” and finds this approach deficient.

What are we to make of this latest flap over a teen icon revealing herself as a potentially sexual being?

I was only dimly aware of Hannah Montana till the Vanity Fair scandal (if scandal is the word). Now it seems I can’t get away from her, which is, of course, the goal of marketing—to make something inescapable for the general public. There are elements of the incident that require less froth and more examination. The accusations of “whose idea was it in the first place and how was Mylie Cyrus manipulated?” are loud and in many ways naive.

First off, Hannah Montana is a Disney product. I don’t think we’re yet quite comfortable with the idea of a person—even a fictional one—being a “product” like a box of soap or a car, but this is indeed what the character is. Designed, engineered, and road tested, Hannah Montana is a money-making machine for Disney and the various participants in the show and franchise.

Pause for a moment and consider: Disney.

It is difficult to imagine a marketing machine that is better at what it does. Which means the chances of something being done with one of its properties that it (a) doesn’t know about and (b) doesn’t approve are next to zero. Especially when you add to that:

Vanity Fair.

Big magazine, famous magazine, a magazine people in show business lust to get into. In the vernacular, Lot A Bank there.

So we’re talking about two major corporate entities, huge public presence, who are involved—without a doubt contractually—in a presentation of a property. Again, the oddness of talking about a person as property is unsettling, but this is a show business idiom quite common. Agencies discuss “properties” all the time and they’re talking about musicians, actors, artists.

Throw into the mix Annie Liebowitz, who is arguably iconic herself. From the early days at Rolling Stone up through the present, Annie is a public figure. Meaning that, especially “in the business”, everyone knows what she does. She would also have been involved in the arrangements between Disney and Vanity Fair.

So far so good. Everyone knew what was going on.

Now, the photoshoot was crowded. Lots of people there. Including Mylie Cyrus’s parents. Not sure who mom is, but dad—Billie Ray—is an entertainment industry insider. He’s been around a long time. He has survived quite well. He knows the ropes. He is not a “stage dad” in the sense of not knowing what’s going on.

I’ve laid this out at some length to show how utterly unlikely it is that the photographs of 15-year-old Mylie in a pose more appropriate to a 20-something were an accident. That no one knew what was happening. It’s not like this was done in a basement studio, digitally, and the shots immediately posted to the web. Disney would have had to clear the shots. I cannot imagine it wasn’t in the contract that someone at Disney would get to look at them and say, one way or the other, whether they could be published. Of the two, Disney is by far the bigger gorilla—Vanity Fair was not likely to hold them over a barrel.

So what then is the Big Deal? And, if this is so inappropriate, why was it allowed?

Control over a teen-age superstar is doable. Look at Leann Rimes. Her burgeoning sexuality, while certain present and eminently marketable, was not “unleashed” till she was over 18. Her parents kept a handle on it. We can doubtless find other examples. Reese Witherspoon. Jody Foster. Helen Hunt. Even earlier, Annette Funicello.

(Though Annette is a curiosity—she never really stopped being a Mousketeer. Her emergent sexuality—blatant and impossible to get around—somehow failed to take her into “adult” consideration. Management may have been too tight and she remained—popularly—the girl on the beach who never went past the first kiss. This happens—actresses who have the audacity to “grow up” and find themselves trapped in an adolescent image. Sally Fields is a case in point. She went from Gidget to The Flying Nun, completely bypassing a mature sexual phase, and nearly remained stuck with it. She made a minor film—I forget the title—in which she appeared nude. In an interview, she admitted that the decision to do so was calculated to shatter the Gidget/Flying Nun image so she could then be taken seriously as an adult actress. The tactic might be questionable to some, but the result was a critically-successful career.)

Managing the property is the whole game here. And Hollywood (and Nashville, etc) have a problem with starlets like Mylie. Once they establish them as an icon for preteens to teens—what is called “tweens”—what do you do when they grow up and start acting like women?

Age here isn’t the issue. Let’s face it, sexuality strikes in the teen years, some sooner than others, and the limelight of a successful career seems somehow to advance the timetable. We are all-too-familiar with the meltdowns in instances where the transition is, well, bungled—Lindsey Lohan and Britney Speers are the poster girls of crash and burn. (more…)

I previously wrote that I bought a little camera that I try to take everywhere. Having that camera nearby forces me to look more carefully at the startling sights that are everywhere. Many of those sights are the postures and expressions of people, but privacy concerns keep me from freely photographing or sharing the photos of strangers (I haven’t given up somehow accomplishing this!). To this point, I’ve focused on taking photos of nature and architecture. This morning, my wife Anne and I took a walk in Forest Park (in St. Louis, Missouri). In the morning light, we came upon some startling bursts of color, causing me to take out my little camera.

When I look at biological wonders, I sometimes imagine standing with Charles Darwin and learning from him. That’s how I felt a few weeks ago at an orchid show at the Missouri Botanical Garden. Even before Darwin published his findings there were various levels at which one could appreciate nature (it’s beautiful, it’s functional, it inspires poetry). Darwin added an explosive new level, however. Such was his impressive legacy. Before I appreciated Darwin’s contributions, my attention to plants was limited. But now I see functionality embedded in the beauty–there is now so much more to behold [I was also inspired last year when I viewed David Attenborough's Private Life of Plants and Life in the Undergrowth (focuses on bugs). These are both spell-binding must-watch collections].

There are life and death wars going on out there among the plants and bugs. The thing that first caught our eye this morning was this flowering fruit tree. It was truly exploding with blossoms in its effort to propagate.

It’s beauty was “fractal,” in that it offered similar views from different distances. Anne especially enjoyed the contrast between the blossoms and the blue sky behind them. She took the photo below.

I was most fascinated by the sex organs of the trees (see below photo–parental discretion advised).

As we strolled away from this tree I noticed the expansive patches of clover that were lit up by a huge ball of nuclear explosions 93 million miles away. I took this picture to illustrate a quirky story: I have repeatedly seen something (actually many things) that I can’t explain. This particular story has to do with my wife Anne. She has the uncanny ability to spot a four-leaf clover while walking briskly. I’ve seen her do this several dozen times. When walking, she will stop suddenly, maybe back up a step or two and then reach down to pick up a four leaf clover. The first few times I witnessed this, I suspected that it might be a trick, but it wasn’t. She can really do it.

What makes it more amazing (or, perhaps, more believable) is that Anne’s mother can also do this. They are both gifted with incredibly sharp long-distance vision, but that really doesn’t explain this ability. For most people, finding a four leaf clover requires getting down on one’s knees and carefully and slowly fingering through the individual plants. When I ask Anne how she does it, she says “I just see them. Four leaf clovers stand out. (more…)

The disturbing part of this story is the reactions of so-called medical professionals to this couple’s situation and decision.

Now there are two ways to look at this. The one that might make more sense (though certainly no more palatable) is that these physicians et al are concerned with Insurance issues. What’s covered here? How does malpractice potentially enter into it? And while these folks are relatively well off and can carry their own expenses, what kind of precedent might be set here that will spread to the uninsured or Medicaid?

Unpleasant, but it would give a dimension to it that we could wrap our disgust around.

The other way to see it is as an example that, much as we might as a society wish to see ourselves as maturing, getting beyond such primordial reactions (namely—”Ugh! You different! You die!”), it turns out not to be true. That what we have is a facade and as long as no one really tests it, we can be what we think we are, at least to ourselves.

My reaction to what this couple is doing was initially (and continues to be) “Wow, cool!”

But I may well be in the minority.

I’ve sometimes wondered this, and this article in Discover Magazine presents the answer.  Four percent of men are raising another man’s child:

From the clinics to the courts, routine DNA tests uncover genetic identities—and even family secrets. British public-health researchers examined nearly 50 years of medical data from around the world and came to a startling conclusion: One in 25 men unwittingly raises another man’s child.

The researchers found evidence of mismatched paternity in each of 14 countries studied—from the United States to South Africa. Few socioeconomic groups seem immune, but the probability of parental discrepancy seems higher among unmarried couples, the poor, and women under 35 (who are more likely to have more than one sexual partner).

4% might not seem like a large number, but every big classroom probably has a student who is being raised by a man who falsely believes that child to be his child. 

It’s hard to know what to do with such numbers.   For instance, I am the father of two adopted girls.  To me, the fact that I am not their biological father is of no importance whatsoever when evaluating my relationship with them.   Then again, that’s how my wife and I planned it.   There weren’t any surprises sprung on us.

I would fear for those children involved, were it to become known to the man who is raising them and loves them that he is not there biological father, where he currently believes that he is.   I would hope that that relelationship wouldn’t change anything at all between the father and the children, but it would be naive to expect this.  

How important is it to people that they are raising children who are their biological children?  Just consider the vast amounts of money many couples spend on extraordinary medical treatment so that they can have their “own” children.

I understand that impulse, but it is clear that the great majority of our genome is exactly the same as that of every other person on Earth.   Rather than worrying about whose child is whose, it would be far healthier to acknowledge that we are all related to every child on the planet–they are all our children. 

This Discover article (”20 Things You Didn’t Know About Sex”) will provide you with ample (scientific) information to make you the center of attention at the next party you attend.  

Not all hookers are like “Kristen,” the gorgeous, high-living prostitute allegedly employed by Eliot Spitzer.  Not all prostitutes work for wealthy and powerful executives or politicians.   Not all prostitution is provided under the supervision of a sophisticated club like the Emperor VIP club.  

A friend of mine, Geri Dreiling, wrote a detailed article about the other kind of prostitute, the kind that will trade sex for “a sandwich from a nearby convenience store, even a bucket of chicken from KFC.”  Geri’s award-winning article was published by a St. Louis alternative newspaper, The Riverfront Times, in 2002.

Here are a few excerpts:

Like most prostitutes working the streets of St. Louis, Tammy Sue Curtner is a drug addict.

A 33-year-old mother with wavy brown hair and pale skin, Tammy traded her body for drugs, a blowjob for twenty bucks. She’d turn tricks in an alley, in a stranger’s car, on a dirty communal mattress in a vacant building littered with broken bottles and used needles.

Her johns were downtown businessmen on the way to work in the morning, construction workers on lunch breaks, married men bored with their subdivision lives.

“I’ve met all types of guys, straight down to the weirdest and the nastiest,” she says. “Lawyers, doctors, straight down to bums.”

. . . The four-hundred-plus women [Judge Jim Sullivan] sees are, on average, over the age of 31 and sexually abused drug addicts; some are mentally ill, dropouts with an eleventh-grade education and the mothers of two children. Some have HIV, and at least one study suggests that close to 30 percent of the women have hepatitis C, another deadly disease.

And no one resembles Julia Roberts.

Many are overweight, filthy from living on the streets, sick and desperate. They don’t wear seductive garb; instead, these women sport dirty T-shirts and shorts or discarded clothing thrown away in alley Dumpsters.

I have no sympathy. I can’t help it, but powerful people who behave this way strike me as the essence of…

Spitzer wired the call girl service the money. Granted, he set up a relatively elaborate blind to hide the transaction (it was his own money, not the state’s), primarily from his wife, but the fact is he established the monitoring protocols in the banking system in New York to catch exactly this kind of covert transfer. In other words, he made sure the system could catch him.

The first question that came to my mind was: why didn’t he use cash?

The second question—

Well, the second question is such a cliche it almost doesn’t bear asking, but: what he hell was he thinking?

Not thinking. Acting. Reacting. Making an assumption. I’ve already heard the term “self destructive” applied, and it would indeed seem the case. He was instrumental in breaking up a prominent prostitution ring as a prosecutor, he’d gone on record about the destructiveness of prostitution to families and to society, he had made a Big Deal about ethics in all his campaigns.

For the record, while I certainly agree that prostitution can be destructive, I do not agree that it is necessarily so. Like other things, it depends on context, and in the context of a society that criminalizes it, thereby making sex workers vulnerable to all sorts of criminal control elements, yes it is very destructive. But not in and of itself as an idea. There have been times and places where it was not so, and even in this country (Nevada) we can see instances where it is the avenue to financial independence for women and men (yes, men—we forget in the salaciousness of scandal that there are male prostitutes, both straight and gay, that women from time to time have been known to pay for sex they can’t get “at home”). Like any other industry, there are levels, and like any otehr industry in history where social controls did not exist, there are abuses. Keeping it illegal means normative protections and access to all the safeguards that, say, construction workers take for granted do not and cannot apply.

However. In Spitzer’s case he created his own disaster by loudly proclaiming his support for keeping prostitution illegal and then acting on that stance. Add to that the banking practices for which he was also responsible, and I find I have no sympathy for him. He acted foolishly.

Clinton did not run on an extreme family values platform. It was there, he gave it lip service, but it was never a centerpiece of any of his campaigns. One may question his judgment in the case of Monica, but the lying to Congress was far worse than his little breech of conduct in an anteroom of the Oval Office.

People at that level should know better. To be crude, they have staff who can handle that sort of thing. (Let’s be honest—even CEOs, presidents of corporations, and so forth hire “handlers” who do everything from scheduling high powered meetings to getting the cleaning done. Arranging trysts—and making sure they stay off the radar– would simply be one of their functions, and a governor, much less a president, should have two or three people like this.)

As to why he did it…do we really need to ask that? Come on. Sex and its convolutions is one of those areas wherein we turn a blind eye as if a part of our brain had been excised and we can’t bear to think about it.

What follows is a teensy-bit R rated. Nothing graphic, but the ideas might shock.

You’re married. You have 90% of a good relationship with your spouse. But you like this one thing in bed, really like it, the way wine connosieurs like a rare Bordeaux—and for whatever reason your spouse just won’t do it. The question is, do you just shut that desire off and go to your grave never having it? Or do you step outside to have your Bordeaux?

We all have choices, sure, but the nature of that one seems draconian. You might say to the connosieur “You’ve become an alcoholic, you may not drink at all,” and that would be valid. But to say “I don’t like Bordeaux, at least not that vintage, so you can’t have it either as long as you’re with me…” That’s not the same.

How one chooses to handle this problem is also another matter. I’m all for open discussion. Sneaking around behind your spouse’s back is a major Do Not Do for me. But one ought to be able to talk about this. (Personally, I have always been of the opinion that the Clinton’s have an arrangement like this, going all the way back to Bill’s days as governor of Arkansas. I think what incensed Hilary was that Bill picked that partner under those conditions, and then lied about it. After all, he had handlers…)

But my lack of sympathy for Spitzer has nothing to do with the sex. It is the two-faced way he has conducted his public policy life. Obviously, he thought the rules he advocated for everyone else ought not to apply to him.

Or, more perversely and I think not at all uncommon, he wanted to rid the landscape of any and all opportunity in order to keep temptation away from himself—that he knew on some level that he couldn’t say no, so the only way to protect his integrity would be to banish the object of his desire.

But that meant banishing it for everyone else as well. So to serve the interests of his own inability to manage an appetite, everyone had to pay the price.

Just as they kind of are now.

He rendered himself ineffective as a governor in this. Because of the illegal nature of prostitution, because of that he opened himself up to blackmail. The only way out of that trap would be to declare that he didn’t care and that he believed prostitution ought not be a crime in any event.

But he’d already closed that avenue of argument.

No sympathy at all.

Idiot.

Perhaps Elliot Spitzer was really sorry for having sex with a prostitute from the Emperor’s Club, but he failed the I’m sorry Test.  Why?  For two reasons.  Because it wasn’t Spitzer’s turn to apologize and his apology was mis-directed. 

It was George W. Bush’s turn to apologize, I’m fairly certain.   Why do I write this?  Because Bush has done each of the following:

• Plunged the U.S. into armed combat and an extended occupation of Iraq based on numerous lies.
• Mismanaged the medical treatment of veterans at Walter Reed.
• Mishandled Plamegate (Chief of Staff to the Vice President was convicted of perjury).
• Mishandled Iraq (assuming that we should have been there at all), due to lack of preparation for occupation, looting, including the National Museum, too few troops, lack of training, lack of equipment, lack of securing loose Iraqi munitions, disbanding the Iraqi army . . .
• Invited no bid contracts in Iraq, including to Halliburton and companies that provide mercenaries with little or no accountability.
• Encouraged torture, indefinite detention, the end of habeas corpus, and kangaroo courts.
• Mishandled the political firing of US attorneys.
• “Heck of a job, Brownie,”
• Authorized warrantless NSA wiretapping in October 2001.
• Allowed extraordinary rendition to facilitate interrogation by torture
• Maintained cozy corrupt relationships with K Street Lobbyists.
• Allowed Cheney’s Energy Policy and refused to divulge the oil industry participation.
• Encouraged financially irresponsible cuts for the wealthiest, big corporations.
• Denied of Global warming and its human causes.
• Attempted to disband the 911 Commission.
• Damaged to the US reputation internationally.
• Led the White House War on Science, against stem cell research, global warming, evolution, research funding, energy, abstinence programs and AIDS prevention.
• Abu Ghraib & Guantanamo.
• Attacked Plan B contraception, staffing Women’s Health positions with religious conservatives.
• Fought for the right to spy on U.S. citizens, including opening US mail.
• Failed to be accountable for “lost” White House emails.

Bush should also apologize for providing numerous false reasons for the Iraq invasion and occupation: 

1. WMD
2. Saddam Hussein behind 9/11
3. Saddam Hussein connected with al Qaeda
4. Fighting terrorists there so we don’t have to fight them here
5. Spread democracy
6. Saddam Hussein was a bad man
7. Iraqi violations of UN Resolutions
8. The 1993 assassination attempt against GHW Bush
9. Oil
10. Bases
11. Defend Israel
12. Bad intel
 
[Thanks to Hugh’s Comprehensive Bush Scandal List for it’s comprehensive list of these problems and many others.]

Most of Bush’s wrongful acts and omissions occurred years ago.  Spitzer’s use of a prostitute was rather recent (February of this year).  Therefore, it was Bush’s turn to apologize.  I’m been waiting for a Bush apology for at least five years . . . I’m still waiting.

The second problem is that Elliot Spitzer’s apology was misdirected.  I can understand an apology to his wife, but why apologize to everyone in NY for soliciting a prostitute?   We all know that this was not really an apology but an act of public submission.  It was but a little dance that all politicians do when they have offended the People.  That Spitzer has to get up and do this sort of mea culpa is palpable evidence of the America’s unhealthy obsession with sex.

It’s plainly evident that a person can no longer do the work of a politician in the U.S. unless he or she has the right kind of private sex with the right kind of person.   God help a politician who has an orgasm in private with a person to whom the People of New York haven’t given their stamp of approval.  

Elliot Spitzer had sex, in private, with a woman who wasn’t his wife?  “Gad, how could he possibly be qualified to be governor?” chant all of the holy and moral politicians on the sidelines.  Those protesting “holy” politicians are the ones who feign lots of anger in public while, in the privacy of their homes they lap up the salacious accounts of Elliot’s young and beautiful consensual sex partner; they virtually lick the words off their newspapers as part of the process of working up more faux rage for tomorrow’s press conference.  They practice their horrified expressions in their mirrors, so that they can make it clear to the People how awful it is for two people to have consensual sex where money is exchanged instead of a diamond ring. (more…)

For its entire existence as a sport bodybuilding has struggled to gain acceptance with a mainstream audience. Some say it never will. They say that the freakishly exaggerated physiques of bodybuilders will never be applauded by the general public. And so, bodybuilding remains a cult sport. Looked down upon by many as a freak show.

As hard as it is for male bodybuilders to gain acceptance as legitimate athletes, it’s even harder for female bodybuilders. The male bodybuilder creates an exaggeration of the male form. They have taken the shape and the characteristics of male-ness and pushed it to its limits. They give the impression of being a “super-male”. Though freakish to some, at least it’s consistent with their gender.

The problem for very muscular women is that as they become more muscular the general public sees them as becoming less feminine and more manly. This has been a growing problem for women’s bodybuilding since the early nineties as advances in training and chemistry have enabled female bodybuilders to far exceed their natural muscle building capacity. Debates about “feminity vs masculinity” in female bodybuilding are an eternally hot topic on bodybuilding forums around the world and discussed with the same fervor that “God vs no God” is debated here on Dangerous Intersection.

Into this fray jumps celebrated photographer Martin Schoeller. Martin’s latest project is a series on female bodybuilders that is being exhibited at the Ace Gallery starting in March. Known for his stark brand of portraiture, Martin’s work has a frankness that is often controversial. Presidents, royalty and celebrities have all sat in the glare of his harsh lighting. The result has been described as honest or raw; real or unflattering, depending upon your point of view.

Martin’s art intrigues me as a documentary filmmaker. Martin attempts to get a photograph of the “real” person by removing all artifice and getting them to let down their guard. He does this by stripping away every crutch that photographers, the photographed, and we as viewers have come to expect. There are no costumes, no props, no scenery, no backdrop, sometimes no makeup, no sense of place or time or fashion. What is left is deceptively simple and leads people to think that it is cheap or easy. It is not, because the hard part comes when he then attempts to disarm his subject, relax them and catch them off guard. A tactic that I endeavor to employ every time I shoot footage for my films.

True to form Martin photographs the bodybuilders when they are at their most vulnerable. Spirited away in the midst of their contests before they know their placings, some of them literally right off the stage, the women are exhausted, insecure and dehydrated. He then strips them of their last crutch…he does not allow them to pose. Asking a bodybuilder not to pose is like asking a singer not to sing, a dancer not to dance or a politician to be silent. There is nothing left to do but be yourself. (more…)

I’ve spent a lot of time studying Republican political anatomy.   You see, I’m not only an armchair anthropologist, but I’m a social neuro-surgeon (a brand-new expertise, created today).   After careful review of all available relevant data, I have developed a precise chart (click on the thumbnail below) detailing each of the major features of the modern Republican brain.  

No, you won’t find “Iraq” on this anatomical diagram, even though it reveals each of the major neural substructures found in the modern Republican brain.  That’s because the modern Repubublican has developed relatively recently.  No specialized “Iraq” module has thus had time to evolve. You will nonetheless find each of the brain structures that, working together, compel the instigation of multiple fear-induced, needless, destructive, ineptly planned, corrupt and potentially non-ending military conflicts in the Middle East. 

Whenever sufficient numbers of these malignant features are found in the brains of those who hold substantial political power, one can expect the atrophy of an entire country, absent immediate and dramatic political resuscitation. 

Without further ado, here it is.  Just click on the thumbnail for all the gory details:

If you’d like to review some fascinating and rigorous psychological data of what it means to be a conservative, check out this post regarding a study by Frank Sulloway or this post considering the work of psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

It appears that John McCain has put himself into situations suggesting that he had an sexual affair with a 40-year-old female lobbyist.  This politically devastating information can’t possibly be relevant to the current presidential campaign, unless…

Unless McCain has long-supported a political party that has consciously decided to make sexual moral pronouncements a major and unrelenting part of its political existence, all-the-while conflating the U.S. Constitution with the Ten Commandments and spewing this mentally-stunted version of democracy in a holier-than-thou piss-on you-if-you’re-different-than-who-we-claim-to-be sort of way.  McCain, of course, is also a prominent member of the Republican serial polygamy club, another manifestation of Republican hypocrisy when it comes to alleged Republican sexual purity.

Those conservatives who get angry at seeing political smear tactics involving sexual innuendo need to shut up and take this medicine because they’ve all earned it by voluntarily associating with a political party that specializes in hypocritical villainizing (sexual, racial, immigration status, religious beliefs, you name it).  If those who are upset by the release of this information regarding McCain and Iseman want these sorts of incidents to become irrelevant, they need to tell the Republican Party (by voting) to get government out of America’s bedrooms, for starters.

[The General George Meade statute located in front of the E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse in Washington, D.C., created by Charles Grafley in 1927, apparently in a cultural climate much different than our own.  Posted here just for the hell of it - photo by Erich Vieth]

We’ll know that we’re cured of our obsession with the sexual practices of politicians when a politician’s private sexual choices are no more interesting to us than the private sexual choices of a sports celebrity or a famous movie director.   Can you imagine refusing to go to a movie because the director once had a marital affair?

Incidentally, private sexual conduct has nothing to do with whether a person would be a competent president.  Consider that each of the following presidents reportedly had affairs: Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy , Dwight D. Eisenhower, Franklin Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland (who had a child with his mistress) and Thomas Jefferson.  And this is just the tip of the iceberg, because extremely powerful men are highly likely to have sexual affairs. It’s a fact of life, though this information often doesn’t come out until 30 years after the man’s death.  While that fact is not publicly known regarding a particular powerful living man, it is usually because he has a close-knitted circle of powerful comrades who keep that knowledge in check (for example, visit the above links and read about John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt).

The real dirt about McCain is not that he might have had sex with lobbyist Vicki Iseman, but that he spends so much time with lobbyists.  McCain, the “anti-lobbyist,” is very comfortable with lobbyists.  For instance, consider with whom McCain huddles these days now that he’s essentially wrapped up the Republican nomination:

[W]hen McCain huddled with his closest advisers at his rustic Arizona cabin last weekend to map out his presidential campaign, virtually every one was part of the Washington lobbying culture he has long decried. His campaign manager, Rick Davis, co-founded a lobbying firm whose clients have included Verizon and SBC Telecommunications. His chief political adviser, Charles R. Black Jr., is chairman of one of Washington’s lobbying powerhouses, BKSH and Associates, which has represented AT&T, Alcoa, JPMorgan and U.S. Airways.

It’s difficult to overcome the prejudice that having more choices is always better.   In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz made a convincing case that too much choice can overload and paralyze us.   I couldn’t help but think of the paradox of choice while grocery shopping yesterday.  

One of the major chains of grocery stores in the midwest is Schnucks (that’s right, 7 consonants and only one vowel).   Schnucks has done business in St. Louis since well before I was born.  I’m assuming that Schnucks is a typical grocery store and, therefore, that it stocks as many as 30,000 different products in each of its stores–a formidable number.

As I shopped yesterday, I took a few photos to illustrate the point made by Barry Schwartz.   Here, for instance, is the mustard aisle, offering you about 30 kinds of mustard:

And that’s just the beginning.  Here’s the pickle department.  I will occasionally eat a pickle, but if you told me that I could never again have a pickle, it wouldn’t upset me in the least.  Many people value pickles more highly than I do, apparently.  Here they are, dozens of types of pickles, ready for you to choose.

I was on a roll (and I was having some fun), so I moved over to the pasta aisle:

There were a lot more types of pasta than one could fit in a single photo.  

Was there any major product, I wondered, where you could simply choose between two or three types?  The answer is “no” regarding most of the things most of us purchase most of the time.  There were hundreds of types of liquor, tea, cheese, snacks, cookies, cake mixes, cereals and pizzas, all of this choice making it so incredibly difficult to whisk in and out of the store.   You can imagine a comment echoing across America every day:  “No, not that type!  I wanted you to buy the mini, mint flavored, instant, Brazilian, fiber-enhanced, artificially sweetened low-fat version with individual servings!”

Ready for another photo?  How many types of peanut butter can there possibly be?  After all, it’s only smashed up peanuts with a bit of sweetener, right?

Actually, there are many types of smashed up peanuts with a bit of sweetener (some types coming with no sweetener).  

I decided to end my little tour at the non-dairy creamer section, assuming that there would be only few types of this product (I’m not a coffeee or tea drinker, and I’ve never actually paid attention).

There they were.  Enough brands to start a fight in any well-behaved household in the country. 

I can’t find the statistics to support me at the moment, but it seems to me that grocery stores doing business when I was young (in the 1960’s) probably carried only 20% as many products as modern grocers.  It’s also funny to consider what “works” for modern buying clubs.  Costco seems to do very well with only a couple types of each food product.   If you want pretzels, you pick either this one or that one.   If you want a jar of Vitamin D tablets, here’s your only choice (unlike the mega vitamin selection you’ll find in a Walgreen’s–if you really want to have your head spun around by choices of vitamins or supplements, shop on the Internet.  For instance, the Vitamin Shoppe brags that it carries 20,000 distinct products. 

Choosing a tombstone can also be exhausting, according to Rock of Ages.  You’ve simply got to pick the right one, or else the dead person might get hurt feelings: 

Selecting the granite for a memorial can be confusing-much like selecting a fine gemstone. If you’ve ever purchased a diamond, you know that even stones that appear similar can vary greatly in quality and value. It takes special tools and expertise to tell a perfect stone from an imperfect one-whether diamond or granite.

And what about choosing a pet dog?  For our family, it was relatively easy.  We went to the local Humane Society and took home one of the bouncy mutts (I admit that we focused on type of dogs known to be friendlier with children).   If you want to do it right, though, you might want to spend a few hours looking over all of this material at Wonder Puppy.  Before having a wine and cheese party, you simply must spend a few days learning to become a competent beginner wine-buyer here. 

It just doesn’t stop, here in the U.S.    Good enough is simply not good enough.  It’s often said that we are so choosy because we need to make the “right” choice, but that rationale doesn’t convince me.   I think that there we are often shopping for sex, whether we realize it or not.  The cure for this madness?  I don’t know that there is one, though the “Church of Stop Shopping” is trying to lend a hand to neurotic shoppers everywhere.

If choice makes us neuotic (Schwartz has convinced me that it has), we are “lucky” that we don’t have excess choices in all aspects of life.  For instance, we are in the process of wiping out many types of fish, by some estimates, 90% of the large predatory fish of the oceans, such as swordfish, marklin and the biggest types of tuna.   Soon, we’ll be surprised that there is any fish at all in the restaurant.  We’ll happily take whatever they have.

And our voting neuroses will be kept to a minimum this election (as almost every election), because we only have two choices for president (at least for those of us who vote for someone who might actually serve as President).    

This article, by Ann J. Simonton of Common Dreams recommends that we slow down in order to better appreciate, absorb and enjoy all aspects of life.

It isn’t just fast food that reminds us fast is not always better. The frantic pace of everyd