There are two versions of the Sphinx: male and female, most commonly found in ancient Egypt and Greece. The male (Egyptian) sphinx is stately and solemn, not very sexy. The female (Greek) one, instead, has a sex appeal that you can't ignore. Which other half-human creature in mythology is so often associated with naked breasts? Mermaids, harpies, medusas, chimeras, sirens-- they are all females and, occasionally, they are shown sporting human breasts (and, in the case of Hollywood mermaids, bras as well). But the image that we normally have in mind of the Sphinx is clear and consistent: she has these prominent female breasts and, almost always, no bra.

Where does this busty image of the Sphinx come from? For an answer, we must examine the origins of a myth that has been with us for a long time; millennia. Ancient images of winged lions are common all over the Mediterranean and, sometimes, the lion is associated with a Goddess riding it. When the lion’s head is human, we call the creature a sphinx. Sometimes we can recognize the creature as a male sphinx, and sometimes as a female one. But, even in the latter case, we don’t normally see human breasts in these very ancient images.

From Minoan times, back to the 2nd Millennium BC, all the way to classical Greece, we have plenty of paintings or sculptures of sphinxes of all shapes and sizes. Breasts, however, just aren’t there. As an example, on the right we see a Greek sphinx from the Delphi museum (6th Century BC). The same we can say for ancient text sources; we have several mentions of the Sphinx, from Hesiod, (probably 9th Century BC) to Sophocles (5th Century BC) and onwards. It is often said that the creature is female but breasts are never mentioned.

Apparently, however, the image of the Sphinx evolved in time. During the classical Greek, and later Roman, period, breasts started to appear, associated with sphinxes. In some images, we see rows of breasts under the belly, as proper for a lioness, as we see in the image on the left - found on the web (unfortunately without a source attribution), is an example. It is a curious image, almost a comic book one. As befits a Sphinx, this one is literate, she is reading something. She has several breasts a row, but they go all the way to the front of the chest, in a position where no four-legged creature has breasts. And these breasts are plump and nearly spherical, not like animal breasts; more like human female breasts.

In time, it seems that the Classical image of the sphinx evolved in a form that showed just a couple of human-sized breasts. Here, we see a Sphinx (ca. 400 BC) said to have belonged to the private collection of Sigmund Freud himself.

With the decline of the classical world, the Sphinx theme declined from the visual arts, although it never disappeared. Medieval artists loved fantastic beasts, but they didn't seem to be especially interested in sphinxes. However, with the late Renaissance, the classical world burst out again on the art scene and, with it, breasted sphinxes came back with a vengeance. This image on the left, by the Italian mannerist painter Perino del Vaga (ca. 1500-1547) gives us some idea of how things had changed. This sphinx is almost aerodynamic; it almost looks like one of those Detroit cars of the 1960s, (maybe those prominent car bumpers of the time had a sexual meaning!) And, considering the frontal weight, one wonders whether this creature would be able to walk without falling on her… er… face.

With the late Renaissance and early post-Renaissance, there also came a wave of erotic interest in female breasts that had been unknown before. In the 17th Century, women started wearing corsets, to sport deep décolletages, and to flaunt their cleavages to men. Nobody seem to know for sure what caused this change in fashion and in attitudes, but sphinxes seem to have been affected by this evolution, too. From then on, no artist would think to draw or paint a breastless Sphinx.

During the “Neoclassical period”, from late 17th Century onward, female sphinxes became a commonplace decorative element in gardens all over Europe and were referred to as the “French Sphinx”. Sometimes, these creatures don’t look very sensual, at least to our modern eyes. Their body is heavy, more like that of a cow than that of a beast of prey. Their posture is solemn, and their hairdo often a funny mix of what may have been the fashion of the time and what the artist thought it should have been in ancient Greece or in Egypt. But their breasts carry a message: no more the virginal breasts of later Greek art, but full breasts of a mature woman.

Garden Sphinxes. From left: Tivoli Gardens, Roma. Belvedere Gardens, Vienna, Chickwick gardens, London.

The eroticism of the Sphinx in art went up of a couple of notches with the 1800's. The first to start pushing things in this direction was the French painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867). Ingres painted three images of Oedipus and the Sphinx, the last one in 1864. The one on the left was painted in 1825. In all these images, the Sphinx is half-hidden in shadows, but her human breasts are in full light. Note Oedipus’s posture, the height of his face, the position of his hand and finger. All these elements emphasize the Sphinx’s breasts as the central theme of the whole painting.

In the 19th century, the Sphinx, became a favorite theme of the Symbolist school. The Symbolists tended to eroticize everything classical, and the sensual side of the Sphinx – her breasts – was something that they didn’t miss. Their attitude may have had something to do with the moral attitudes of the time. Many Symbolists were English and they lived in Victorian England. So, they tended to react as they could to the official prudery of their times: they couldn't paint naked women, but they could explore the anatomical features of a non-human creature and eroticize them at will. Gustave Moreau (1826-1898) was one of the Symbolists who explored the Sphinx theme in detail. His sphinxes are always shown as human-breasted and strongly sensual.

Some of Moreau’s Sphinxes

In time, the sensuality of the Sphinx literally exploded on the canvas of the artists. On the right, you an see an interpretation by the Belgian symbolist Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921) in a 1896 painting that he entitled “Caresses”. Here, we see how sensual a Sphinx can be, even without prominent human breasts. She is a leopardess, tenderly embracing an ephebic Oedipus. Their expression, their posture, are all details that convey the impression of a seductress, happy with her conquest.

But it was Franz Von Stuck (1863-1928) who best captured the Sphinx's sensuality with this 1895 painting. No trace of lions or leopards, here, no wings and no serpent’s tail. Yet, Von Stuck had no need to write “Sphinx” on the top of his painting to tell us what he was showing. It is perfectly clear that we are looking at the Sphinx, divine seductress. She has gone full cycle, from lioness to woman. She has large eyes, a sensual mouth, well rounded buttocks and, of course, well formed breasts. She is relaxed, dominant, self-assured, and in full flower. Under the Sphinx, we see the parable of human life. In this composition, the Sphinx takes on her proper role of Goddess, dominating the creatures of the Earth.

The fascination of the symbolists with the Sphinx’s myth lasted for about a century and gave us many splendid images. In time, the theme was explored and re-interpreted over and over. In our times, the number of images of the Sphinx is prodigious and the number of variations is beyond all possible attempts of classification. One thing that didn't change, however, was the idea of the “lioness with human breasts.” Sometimes breasts are shown in full, sometimes just hinted at, but they are always there. Here are some examples.

From left: Mark Ellis, Salvador Dali, Selina Fenech, Darren Davy.

At this point, we may ask ourselves what is the whole idea about. Why is the Sphinx always endowed with these prominent frontal objects? Surely, they are not to be intended as overdeveloped flying muscles (as Roy D. Pounds suggested). Several generations of artists couldn’t just have been involved with a mere decorative element, a detail of no significance. These breasts must mean something and the artists who have shown them so often seem to have been able to catch an aspect of the myth that may difficult or impossible to express in words.

From the early studies of Desmond Morris (“the naked ape”, 1967), anthropologists have noted that the shape of human breasts is much different from that of four-legged animals. The idea that has been proposed is that human breasts carry a visual meaning immediate for creatures like us, who interact with each other by standing in front of one another. It may be that prominent breasts signify the health of a woman, her sexual status, her ability of raising children, or something else. In any case, they may be a sexual message aimed at males.

This attitude has genetic origins, but it is surely mediated by cultural factors. We know that the modern Western erotic interest in female breasts is not necessarily shared by other cultures, ancient of contemporary. But our attitude is not unique in human history. For instance, in the sophisticated and complex Minoan art of the second millennium BC, women are shown with exposed, pear-shaped breasts. These Minoan ladies wouldn’t be out of place on the pages of the modern “Playboy” magazine. (Image on the right, from J. Campbell’s “The Masks of God”).

However, the attitude of the Classical world toward female breasts was completely different. In Greek, and in later Roman art, naked female breasts are not uncommon, but they don’t seem to carry a strong sexual message. Breasts appear mainly when there was a logical reason for a woman to be shown naked. That was the case of amazons and athletes, for instance. In other cases, a woman could be caught fully undressed while bathing, but these images were not centered on breasts as an erotic element. Or, an exposed breast could be a sign of distress. This seems to be the case of the piece of statuary known as the “Barberini Suppliant,” that may represent the rape of Cassandra after the fall of Troy. There are other examples of this kind.

A literary glimpse of ancient attitudes towards breasts comes from Pseudo-Lucian’s “Amores” (probably 2nd Century AD). Here, two friends discuss the relative merits of straight and gay love as they pause to admire the statue of Venus in Cnidos. Many facets of human sexuality are explored in considerable detail in this ancient text, but women’s breasts are never mentioned as an object of erotic interest. Even the one of the two characters who expounds straight sex doesn’t seem to find the naked breasts of the goddess particularly exciting. When breasts are mentioned, the sense is much different. So, we are told (41) that women would wear,

“.. thin veils that pass for clothes so as to excuse their apparent nakedness. But everything inside these can be distinguished more clearly than their faces except for their hideously prominent breasts, which they always carry about bound like prisoners.”

Yet, we can say that the ancient Greeks were not indifferent to female breasts, they just saw them differently. We may find a hint of what was their attitude in one of the few surviving fragments of the “Little Iliad” (written a couple of centuries after Homer’s Iliad). Here we read that, after the fall of Troy, Menelaus was ready to kill his wife, Helen, out of revenge. But he cast away his sword when he caught "a glimpse of her breasts, unclad". In our modern view, we would see a woman unveiling herself as passing a sexual message. But we saw that breasts didn’t have a strong erotic meaning for ancient Greeks. So, in showing to Menelaus her breasts, Helen was sending him a quite different message; a message of intimacy. In Euripides (5th Century BC), we hear Helen, captive in Egypt, fondly remembering Menelaus “caressing her breasts”. Breasts that a Greek woman would normally keep “bound like prisoners, ” but that she couldn’t keep hiding while in bed with her husband. So, what Helen was saying to Menelaus with her gesture was, “know who I am: I am your wife.”

In the Iliad, Menelaus was arriving in front of Helen with his sword still dirty of the blood of Deiphobos, Helen’s second Trojan husband. In the myth of the Sphinx, Oedipus was arriving in front of the Sphinx with his sword still dirty of the blood of his father, Laius. These two scenes are eerily similar and, by showing her breasts, the Sphinx was passing to Oedipus the same message that Helen was passing to Menelaus, “know who I am”. When a woman unveils her breasts, she is revealing an intimate part of herself; she is showing herself for what she is.

The Sphinx was opening herself to Oedipus, showing him her intimate essence. What this essence was, can be understood from the riddle she asked him, “what is it that walks on four legs in the morning, on two legs during the day, and on three legs in the evening?” We all know that the standard answer is “man”. But this is a silly answer to a riddle which is not a silly one. Think of a different answer: why not “woman”?

This is not just a question of political correctness: think how the life of a woman is naturally divided into three periods: virgin, mother, and crone. It is a much sharper subdivision than anything that we can relate to a man. And this simple reversal of roles opens up a whole universe. If the riddle hints at the ages of a woman, what the Sphinx was showing to Oedipus was a vision of the triple essence of the Moon Goddess. The moon can be waxing, full, and waning. The Sphinx herself, being of divine nature, had a triple shape: woman, bird, and lioness. These three shapes are the three elements of the female essence: the lion (the strength of a virgin), breasts (motherhood of a mature woman) and wings (the link with the sky: the wisdom of an old woman). (Image on the right, front cover of R. Graves’s “The White Goddess”)

So, Oedipus was presented with a vision of the Female Deity. The Sphinx was offering him nothing less than a sacred initiation to the Goddess’s mystery. As a characteristic of initiations, he would be symbolically “devoured” by the Sphinx, and he would experience death and rebirth. But Oedipus couldn’t understand what was being offered to him. He gave a silly answer, refusing the Sphinx’s offer. Later in the story, Oedipus’s curse was to become blind, but he had started out blind. Blind to the beauty and the power of the triple goddess. Some say that Oedipus actually killed the Sphinx, some that he didn’t touch her, she killed herself. It doesn’t matter; Oedipus’s blindness gave him the power of destroying everything and everyone he came in contact with. When meeting the Sphinx, he had already killed his father and, later on, he would cause the death of Jocasta, his mother and bride. Later still, the death of his daughter Antigone and of his sons was, again indirectly, caused by Oedipus’s actions.

Men are cursed with the power of giving death. Women, instead, have the power of giving life. This is the ultimate meaning of the Sphinx’s breasts. It doesn’t matter if breasts are seen as erotic objects (as they are to us) or as tokens of intimacy between husband and wife (as they were for ancients Greeks). Breasts remain the source of life’s nourishment, the awesome power of the Goddess: Inanna the moon goddess, Tiamat the dragoness, Eurynome, who created the whole universe with her dance.

In our times, the myth of the Sphinx is emerging from the depth of the past millennia to confront us again with Oedipus’s dilemma. The Sphinx is bringing to us a message that goes to the heart of what means to be human, to our relation with everything which is alive around us on this planet. As a Goddess, she is carrying with herself the power of creation and of destruction at the same time. Creation and destruction are the laws of the universe, which will eventually devour us all, no matter what silly answers, in our blindness, we think we can give to its riddles.

I am not a conspiracy theorist. And as recently as a year and a half ago, if someone had told me the things I am reporting here, I would have accused them of culture-war paranoia. That was before I enrolled in a professional training program that I’d hoped would expand my skills as a therapist, but instead delivered an extreme form of ideological indoctrination.

The Sexual Health Certificate Program is a prestigious University of Michigan program conducted in affiliation with the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists (AASECT). As someone who recently studied in the program, I can attest that, notwithstanding whatever mission AASECT once had, it now operates largely as a de facto activist group that seeks to reshape standards applied to mental health care and education, and to limit the rights of parents to make decisions about their children.

And no, I am not an extreme social conservative complaining about the failure of these organizations to support “abstinence only” sex education. Nor do I object to teaching kids that it’s okay to be gay or bisexual. The agenda of AASECT now extends far beyond those old debates, and into an overlapping set of doctrines that encompass gender, violent BDSM subcultures, polyamory, pornography, and intersectionality. My opinion is that it is no longer focused on teaching scientifically verified knowledge or responsible clinical practices, and now seeks to instead impose an orthodox set of beliefs about sexuality.

To be specific, AASECT’s program teaches:

• that self-defined gender identity should dictate a person’s status in law, while biological sex is all but meaningless;
• that any supposed differences between boys and girls are culturally imposed artifacts or labels applied to humans at birth;
• that incorporating violence into sexual play is normal, healthy, and fun;
• that children questioning their gender identity should be given easy access to pubertal suppressants and cross-sex hormones—both of which, they claim, carry little to no risk—whether their parents support such steps or not;
• that polyamorous sexual relationships are just as rewarding, sustainable, and healthy as monogamy;
• that “sex work” is just another kind of legitimate career aspiration;
• that not only is the use of pornography normal and healthy, but that the refusal to use pornography is unrealistic, and even pathological;
• that discussion of the conceiving and raising of children is, at best, peripheral to the study of sexuality; and, at worst, a relic of patriarchal and heteronormative systems of oppression;
• that personal religious or moral beliefs that would limit consenting sexual activity are harmful, and tantamount to “sex negativity”;
• that the most important lens through which to view any situation, including those involving sex, is the lens of power and oppression—a worldview rooted, academically, in Critical Theory and, politically, in faddish doctrines connected to social justice;
• and, perhaps most importantly, that all of the foregoing is to be encoded in the system of pedagogy transmitted to children, at the earliest possible age.

Many (though not all) of these ideas can be sourced to what some call “gender ideology,” a loosely defined set of beliefs that rest on the premise that all of us have an inherent, soul-like gender identity that transcends biological reality. Gender ideology also presents the idea of man and woman as a “false binary,” and replaces the reality of human sexual dimorphism with a “spectrum”-based construct. Until enrolling in this program, I had never even heard the term gender ideology, nor known that this sort of fringe belief system was taught at reputable schools. My experience shows how a process of radicalization has permitted this view to spread within rarified professional subcultures without much in the way of public notice.

When I signed up for the University of Michigan’s unique, year-long “Sexual Health Certificate Program” (SHCP), however, I truly did believe the experience would be both professionally and intellectually rewarding. I care about sexuality. I know that it is a fundamental component of the human search for joy and meaning. As a Michigan-based psychotherapist and licensed professional counselor, I wanted to deepen my understanding of sexuality, and become better equipped to provide care for the many clients who come to me with issues related to sexual health. The American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists sounded like the perfect fit for me, and the idea of becoming an AASECT-certified sex therapist appealed to me. I applied and was accepted for the 2019-2020 cohort. When I showed up, my class included participants from around the world—including Iceland, Egypt, Lebanon, and China—just as you’d expect at the kind of high-value, authoritative program that we all believed we’d signed up for.

The doubts started to creep in early, though—on day one, to be exact. Our first classroom module was titled “Sexual Attitude Reassessment.” I amused myself with the thought that this sounded like an unsettling euphemism for a brainwashing session. Sadly, that’s what it was.

It quickly became clear that the issue of sexuality—the ostensible subject—often would serve merely as a pretext for more general harangues about society, and the urgent need to remake it according to AASECT’s ideological blueprint. In a keynote lecture entitled “Why Fetishism Matters,” the speaker argued that the world we inhabit is socially constructed, and told us (with what now seems like admirable candor), “I’m not neutral. I’m here to recruit you to a particular point of view about how kink should be valued.” The same speaker said that he’d been accused of teaching students that any form of sexual behavior is acceptable as long as there is consent from all parties. “Yes, that’s exactly right,” he said. Clearly, our attitude “reassessment” was well underway.

From the get-go, the scientific content was mostly superficial, and was often undercut by claims that the very idea of truth is a harmful (and even oppressive) construct. The teaching was not so much impartial and informative as it was evangelistic. Yet it was also self-contradictory: Declarations that there are no real “correct” moral values were uttered (without irony) alongside absolutist proclamations about the correct way to understand sex—and morality.

As I learned, “Sexual Attitude Reassessment” (SAR) is an established term in the field, one that is often used to describe curriculum content that serves to educate sexual-health professionals about the wide range of sexual experiences that they may encounter among clients. The object is to ensure they won’t be shocked when such encounters occur, and to invite them to reassess their judgments and assumptions about various expressions of sexuality. These are valid and important goals. Unfortunately, the SAR in the SHCP descended into an exercise in overstimulation and desensitization—specifically, two full days of pornographic videos and interviews. At times, it felt like the famous brainwashing scene from A Clockwork Orange. There was a series of videos of people masturbating (one of which involved a strange interaction with a cat), a woman with “objectiphilia” who had a sexual attraction to her church pipe organ, various sadomasochistic acts, and a presentation on polyamory designed to make it clear that the polyamorous lifestyle is healthy, wholesome, and problem-free.

The focus on BDSM was a particular fixation throughout the program. In the SAR, we were shown videos of a woman meticulously applying genital clamps to the scrotum of a willing man, and a dominatrix teaching a class how to properly beat people while demonstrating on an eager participant. We also watched an interview with a sex-dungeon “dom” (the male equivalent of a dominatrix) who described one of his experiences: His client had instructed him, as the dom recounted it, “I want you to bind me and then beat me until I scream. And no matter how much I scream or beg you to stop, I want you to keep beating me.” The dom did as he was told, continuing the beatings through the customer’s begging and pleading, until the client went totally limp and silent, seeming to dissociate. At this point, the dom unbound the man, who then began to weep uncontrollably in the dom’s arms.

BDSM is a real and active sexual subculture, and I don’t object to its inclusion in the course materials. But I was shocked to see how much further the professors in the program took things, insisting that BDSM behaviors—up to and including the sexual “Fight Club” style of behavior described above—must be uncritically viewed as wholesome and beautiful. Students learned to sing from the same psalm book, with one memorably exclaiming “I’m so inspired by the wisdom and beauty in the BDSM community!” and insisting that the behavioral codes observed among BDSM participants can help us create a similar climate of safety and respect “in all our relationships.”

The program was focused on an agenda of “centering” the experience of minorities—in this case, sexual minorities. This meant that huge portions of time in class after class were spent focusing on BDSM, LGBTQIA+ issues, and polyamory, not to mention the obligatory discussions of oppression and privilege that were shoehorned into every discussion. Meanwhile, mainstream sexual health issues that affect wide swaths of the population, such as marriage, reproduction, and family life, were treated as niche topics. Further, while many Americans view sexuality through the prism of faith, religion hardly came up at all. And when it did, it was typically so that religious values could be denigrated. Even the few religious people in the program got the message: Whenever any made passing reference to their own observant religiosity, it was usually in a spirit of shame or penance.

Such self-flagellation was perhaps a fitting response, as the program is designed to convert therapy offices and classrooms from places of learning and self-discovery into venues for moral re-education. For example, when one professor was asked by a therapist in the program about a couple that had come to therapy because the husband’s pornography use was hurting the marriage, the professor suggested that the wife’s prudish anti-porn attitude was the real problem that needed treatment. This was too much for me, and I asked whether he might have an alternative suggestion, since I have some clients whose moral beliefs preclude them from using pornography. I was surprised to see that he had no coherent answer, presumably because this is not the kind of question he usually gets asked. (Following such classroom exchanges, I would sometimes get private messages from classmates to the effect of “I’m so glad you said that. I was feeling the same thing” or “I don’t feel like I’m allowed to have a different opinion.”)

According to the precepts taught at the SHCP, it is immoral to apply a moral lens to sexuality. While it was acknowledged that some people do experience their sexual behavior as “out of control,” it was generally assumed that those who claim to have a problem with pornography addiction are probably just dealing with some kind of “sex-negative” indoctrination. (We got the same message when it came to sex addiction—an issue that, as I will discuss below, is at the root of much of the academic radicalization I observed.)

Of course, there is a very real debate about how to understand the problem of compulsive use of pornography in our society. And it is absolutely true that sexual shame is a problem, and one that often is linked with religious beliefs and upbringings. But the suggestion that therapists should take it upon themselves to “correct” the moral beliefs of clients with whom they disagree would appear to violate the codes of ethics that guide the counseling profession. This is dogma masquerading as therapy.

When it came to pedophilia, here’s where professors and students landed: Pedophilia is an inborn and, for clinical pedophiles, unchangeable sexual orientation. They did reject pedophilia as a legitimate sexual choice—but not, as one might hope, through thoughtful application of moral principles to sexual behavior. Rather, they simply declared that minors are by definition unable to give consent.

Where the program really lost touch with common sense and logical consistency was on the topic of gender. Of course, gender dysphoria is a real phenomenon, and some people really do go through their entire lives with a longing to bring their identity and appearance in line with their non-birth sex. But it’s also true that some people come to their trans identity later in life, or desist from a previously declared trans identity. In the case of prepubescent children especially, most trans-identified individuals who present for clinical treatment end up reverting to a self-identified gender that aligns with their birth sex—boring old cis people, in other words. Yet one professor confidently declared that at birth, we are all handed a “gender envelope” containing our gender identity, and that this identity can’t be affected by outside forces like trauma or culture (ignoring mounting evidence that this sort of thing happens often, especially in the case of teenage girls, thanks in large part to the spread of gender-ideology dogma itself).

This quasi-religious conception of gender was connected to the message that trans-identifying children should be given easy access to puberty blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones. Both treatments were breezily declared to be safe options with little risk of adverse consequences—something that, again, we now know to be untrue. And yes, we were fed the morbid claim that any delay in affirming a child’s self-diagnosed trans identity could relegate them to the grave: “Do you want a live trans-child or a dead cisgender-child?” is the question we were trained to use to pressure parents into immediate affirmation. To summarize: If a child agrees to have an adult pedophile stimulate his genitals, that desire should be disregarded (because children are by definition unable to give real consent). But if a child wants to have an adult surgically remove those genitals, his desire should be honored: Suddenly, the child’s expression of consent is not only valid, but ironclad; and acquiescence is not only permissible but mandatory.

Interestingly, though, the mystical “gender envelope” logic sometimes broke down when it came to discussions of sexual orientation. Usually, it was asserted that LGBTQIA+ individuals are born that way. But straight-identifying persons are another story, apparently. Many, we were told, have had their sexual desires artificially limited by social conditioning. Obviously, the phenomenon of closeted men and women is hardly unheard of. Yet I found it notable that the same commitment to unfettered self-identification that’s applied to trans-identifying children young enough to believe in Santa Claus apparently isn’t deemed reliable when it comes to the sexual preferences of their adult parents.

A meta-theme that emerged from the course was the idea that we wouldn’t just be graduating into roles as therapists or clinicians. Our professors were also counting on us to be reliable combatants in the culture wars. They often used us-versus-them language, referring to the work of social justice that “we” are trying to accomplish, as if my enrollment in the program had implicitly bound me to an activist team. And SHCP instructors didn’t mince words on the identity of the “enemy” in these wars: conservatives who engage in “moralizing” about sex, promote abstinence-only education, oppose pornography and the legitimization of “sex work,” and who question the existence of the gender envelopes their children were supposedly handed in baby heaven. One of my professors had the honesty to explicitly admit that progressives have deliberately distorted scientific data in some areas, exaggerating the extent to which sexual orientation is known to be inborn, to advance their political purposes, albeit in (as he saw it) a good cause. The professor did not condemn the practice, and I was left wondering which of the “scientific” claims I had been fed in the program could be trusted.

While terms such as Critical Theory weren’t explicitly included in the materials, every lecture was saturated with the idea that society exists in a state of oppression, and that our duty was to apply our expertise in the service of the oppressed. The assumption was that the reason sexuality is such a difficult area of life for so many people is not, as one might think, because sex is complicated and humans are morally fallible, but solely because of systems of oppression that marginalize minorities and instill people with shame. In a reversal of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s famous claim, the SHCP approach to sexuality suggests the line separating good and evil passes not through every human heart, but instead cleaves those identity groups who have power from those who do not.

In fact, many of the materials we studied had been written in a way that simply assumed that avant-garde approaches to gender and sex are linked, in some vague way, to other social-justice struggles. For instance, the Transgender Training Institute—whose founder, Dr. Eli Green, was one of my professors in the program—teaches “that in order to enact true social change through education… an Intersectional approach is necessary to disrupt and dismantle the multiple oppressions (racism, classism, ableism, sexism, heteronormativity, colonialism, and more) that impact transgender and non-binary individuals and communities (and beyond).” In class, Dr. Green boldly proclaimed that “anti-oppression frameworks are the future of sex education.”

Within such frameworks, sex education shall not be deemed truly inclusive unless it incorporates explanations of every possible kind of sexual activity one might consider pleasurable, up to and including kink, polyamory, and BDSM. When I directly asked one professor in the program whether very young children were really psychologically ready for exposure to some kinds of content, he argued that “age appropriateness” was a conservative myth. For the AASECT faithful, no age is too young to encourage a child to wonder whether they identify as a non-binary, polyamorous, kinky, pansexual. We were even given pointers about how to sidestep local regulations by creatively shoehorning banned sexual content into lessons. (Pro tip: See if you can look into your local school district’s “anti-bullying” policies and lessons. Unlike sex-education curricula, parents typically aren’t given easy access to the content of these lessons; nor do they usually have the right to opt-out their children from them. So some activists are using these lessons as a pretext for teaching gender ideology without parents finding out.)

In one class activity, Dr. Green had the class vote (anonymously) about which age they think a variety of topics in sexuality education should be taught. For each topic, the bulk of the class voted “elementary school.” Whenever votes for a later stage of education were revealed, exclamations of shock and horror rippled throughout the room, often accompanied by derisive laughter. Dr. Green called out students who made especially derisive comments, saying, “We need to be careful not to commit microaggressions against people who might have different opinions.” I appreciated this nod to impartiality.

But the professor’s expression of tolerance was short-lived. It became clear that what he meant by “different opinions” was ignorant opinions. “In this work that we care so much about, we have a long way to go,” Dr. Green told us. “And we have to be aware that we are going to be opposed by people who are going to attack us and bring accusations against us. So, it’s important that we be aware of the arguments and strategies that are going to be used by those who oppose us.” Then, to inform the class about the kinds of attacks “we” would face, Dr. Green showed us an episode of Last Week Tonight with comedian John Oliver. Everyone cracked up as Oliver set up and then knocked down a series of caricatures of conservative views on sex education. The ensuing class “discussion” was, unsurprisingly, focused on venting anger and contempt for conservative views, as opposed to understanding them. How is this kind of training helpful for therapists and educators who will work with people whose political and moral beliefs span the cultural spectrum? Are we supposed to treat some with compassion, but laugh others out the door when they express wrongthink?

Notwithstanding the lack of viewpoint diversity I observed during my course, there is public disagreement among sexuality specialists on certain issues, especially sex addiction. In the not-so-distant past, AASECT did not take a clear stance for or against the sex addiction model. But some within AASECT—such as Dr. Michael Aaron, a sex therapist and clinical psychologist—believed the group should come out firmly against the sex addiction model, which he claims is “extremely destructive to clients as it often addresse[s] sexuality concerns from a moralistic and judgmental perspective.” In one of those lengthy digital melodramas that plays out within certain professions, Dr. Aaron used the AASECT listserv to implement what he calls “renegade, guerilla tactics” against his critics, eventually blustering his way to victory after two years of vicious online character assassination. That’s why the AASECT position now reads, in part: “It is the position of AASECT that linking problems related to sexual urges, thoughts or behaviors to a porn/sexual addiction process cannot be advanced by AASECT as a standard of practice for sexuality education delivery, counseling or therapy.”

Aaron recounted the whole story in a 2016 Psychology Today story, and ticked off more than a dozen ideological allies who’d assisted him in overturning AASECT’s traditional position on pornography and sex addiction. That essay helped me understand why the content of my academic program seemed so torqued and partisan: Some of my professors at the University of Michigan were the very same people who’d “won” this civil war within AASECT, and who still retain the same militant rhetorical tactics and us-versus-them approach when they discuss these issues in the classroom.

It’s not the purpose of this essay to argue for or against the so-called sex addiction model. But it was unsettling to see AASECT representatives use their classroom pulpit to extol one side of the debate and mock the other. The arguments they gave were not rooted in science, nor in rationality, but rather in their moral objection to the very idea that anyone would cast scorn on porn and promiscuity (this from the same people who, in every other context, view morality as a four-letter word). And after everything I experienced in the SHCP, that should not surprise me: For all their scientific pretentions, many of my professors never really elevated their discourse above a children’s Gender Unicorn handout or I Am Jazz.

When I entered the SHCP, I took it for granted that education should do two things: introduce students to a well of wisdom and knowledge about a given topic, and push them to think critically about that topic. These are not the goals of AASECT. To be fair, some actual education and quality therapeutic training did occur in the program. But the bulk of what I encountered was indoctrination. The main goal of SHCP is to turn participants into evangelists for AASECT orthodoxy who will root out heretical beliefs in schools and therapy offices.

However, the story of the SHCP isn’t just about a single specialized program at a single American university being co-opted by extremists. It’s a case study in how a radicalized viewpoint can emerge from a small group of ideologically motivated actors, become the official belief system of a trade body, then form the basis of an academic course, which in turn trains legions of professionals, who then proceed to spread this same gospel to children, parents, and vulnerable patients. And while we aren’t quite past the point of no return, doctors, therapists, and teachers who haven’t already bought into this ideology have become afraid to speak out lest they be branded bigots, transphobes, or proponents of conversion therapy. After all, the ideologues have the imprimatur of AASECT and the University of Michigan, right? What hope do dissenters have of protecting their reputations and livelihoods?

I admit that I, too, feel a temptation to go with the pack—to use virtue signaling to show others that I have absorbed the orthodoxy I was taught. That’s the path of least resistance. But I know that such concessions only encourage the process of radicalization. I might be able to mouth this nonsense while secretly rejecting it. But others—especially children—might be seduced by it. That’s why I’ve chosen to speak out. And I encourage others to do the same.

Tim Courtois is a Michigan-based licensed professional counselor.

A Life without Romance, 'twould simplifye tings, eh? Lets finde out, startin' wid the letter Eh? Eh?

Bacha bazi is a traditional practice in Afghanistan and some other central Asian cultures, in which boys and adolescent males are compelled to dance for older men, usually as a prelude to pederastic sex. PBS’s Frontline did a documentary on The Dancing Boys Of Afghanistan. Warning: it’s not safe for work.

I bring all that up as background to something disgusting that just happened in New York City. The 11-year-old drag superstar who goes by the name “Desmond Is Amazing” performed onstage at a Brooklyn gay bar, vamping and receiving money like a stripper. Here’s the full-length version of the image at the very top. Note the cash in Desmond’s hands. I’ve seen a clip of this little boy onstage at the gay bar, 3 Dollar Bill, which funnily enough, does not mention the December 3 performance on its racy Facebook page. You can see a clip of it from Instagram, starting at around the 1:50 mark on this YouTube commentary. 

This is a manifestation of pedophilia, straight up. No, I’m NOT saying that anyone sexually abused this kid, or laid his hands on him in any way. I am saying that sexualizing an 11-year-old, and having him prance around stage performing a sexually suggestive dance in a bar, for grown men to throw money at him, as if he were a stripper — well, look, if that’s not pedophilic grooming, what the hell is?

Believe it or not, 3 Dollar Bill is not likely to lose its liquor license over this. Under New York State law, a minor can be in a bar if accompanied by parent or guardian. Desmond’s parents were probably there with him, allowing their little boy to perform in a bar for men who desire men. Andrew and Wendy Napoles have been full partners in exploiting their child — and have received lots of media praise for their progressive attitudes.

Desmond has been celebrated on Good Morning America — not reported on, but actually celebrated: NBC’s Today show has also celebrated Desmond as “inspiring”. And so on. There is almost nothing that our mainstream media will not celebrate if it is labeled pro-LGBT. Is it going to take us 30 years or so to look back on this with disgust, as we now do to Woody Allen’s exploitation of Mariel Hemingway, which was celebrated in its day?

Let’s remember Mariel Hemingway’s words of reproach about her parents: I wanted them to put their foot down. They didn’t. They kept lightly encouraging me. Desmond’s parents, the gay bar owners, the television producers and celebrities who praise him — they are heavily encouraging this child to destroy himself. Weimar America is a hell of a place, ain’t it?

In Whit Stillman’s splendid third film The Last Days of Disco, Alice turns distraught when her friends Charlotte and Holly head off late at night with their new boyfriends. “I thought we were here as a group,” she protests, perhaps feeling isolated after she was insulted earlier in the evening by a young man who a few days before had captured her virginity. After they leave, Alice complains to Des, the disco functionary, “All week Charlotte’s been talking about the tremendous importance of group social life, opposing all this ferocious pairing off.”

To which Des turns philosophical. “Well,” he says, “group social life has its place, but at a certain point other biological factors come into play. Our bodies weren’t really designed for group social life. A certain amount of pairing off was always part of the original plan.”

That exchange came to mind the other day when I read in The Wall Street Journal that radio stations across the country have been banning from their playlists Frank Loesser’s famous song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” an instant hit and perennial Christmas favorite since it captured an Academy Award as best original song in 1949’s Neptune’s Daughter. It seems that some of the #MeToo people think it evokes “date rape and coercion,” as the Journal puts it.

But does it? Nearly everyone knows the song. It’s cute and clever and definitely a period piece. Loessing wrote it as a little ditty for him and his wife to sing at parties—hardly evoking, at least at the time, anything sinister or troubling. It’s about a guy—in the 1940s, remember—who’s trying to seduce a woman after what appears to have been a lovely but sexually incomplete evening. She says she has to go home (to her parents) because it’s late and people will talk if she stays the night, and she must, after all, do what’s right. But wait, he says, it’s snowing and cold, and the night is forbidding while inside the fire is roaring. Besides, he thrills when she touches his hand, her hair looks swell and her eyes are like starlight.

The song doesn’t tell us how the little drama plays out. All we know is that the couple was navigating that delicate territory that Disco Des identified as “always part of the original plan.” He’s using cajolery, a bit of pleading, and plenty of flattery—pretty much all the tools that respectable men of the time employed in that endless negotiation between the sexes. She isn’t insulted by any of it, and clearly she wants to stay, but she’s held in check by the conventional morality of the day. As a female friend characterized to me her apparent struggle, “I want to but I don’t want to, or rather I want to but I don’t want to want to, and I have to always think about what other people will think. But I want to. So what should I do?”

As a writer who identifies as a leftist, and who sympathizes with Noam Chomsky’s anarcho-syndicalism on a root personal level, I should theoretically be joining the chorus of critics who have decided that Jordan Peterson is a reactionary.

In fact, Jordan Peterson has plenty of followers on the left, but watching the media climate surrounding his book release, you’d think he appeals only to the most reactionary, hyper-masculine discontents of the modern world. To be fair to the journalists, it is true that there are two Jordan Petersons. There is the lecturer, who juxtaposes mythological and religious themes with psychology and evolutionary biology, presenting a synthesis of science and religion, and then there is the social media culture warrior. Watching Peterson’s lectures versus watching snippets of him online, in recent interviews, you are watching two different men. It’s what the digital era does to people – it fragments them. Hundreds of hours of brilliant speeches are to be judged based on a few soundbites on Mic or Vice, or whatever dense abstractions can be made to look absurd by a political writer with no interest in Peterson’s field, such as Nathan Robinson.

But Peterson’s critics have barely engaged with his basic claims. Maps of Meaning is an attempt to take the wisdom of religion and ancient cultures and explain, through a contemporary lens of modern psychology, what these cultures got right. It is an attempt to revive the past as a source of deep knowledge, not wreckage to be discarded at the altar of scientific materialism, or a postmodern presentism.

Jordan B Peterson

Peterson’s argument is simple: repeated cultural symbols, in large part, represent aspects of our psychobiological nature, and many of these symbols have been expressed universally across cultures through myths, legends and archetypes.  Such symbols may include the snake swallowing its own tail (chaos) and the heroic individual (the Self emerging out of chaos). This Jungian work may be difficult to read, and to validate empirically, but it is not subjective mist. Its basic assumptions derive from neuroscience, evolutionary biology and developmental psychology. Unlike postmodern thought, Peterson’s work is built on synthesising what we know from the behavioural sciences with the vast accumulated record of mythological story-telling and what these stories tell us about human nature. It is an ambitious project that no other public intellectual has dared to provide in an age that is exhausted and cynical of grand narratives.

What is credulity, and what – if anything – is wrong with it? And if credulity is a fault, might it be a fault not only of judgment but also of character? These questions strike me as important, in the light of certain recent events, but they are also surprisingly hard to answer. We know roughly what credulity is: a tendency to give too much credence to certain claims or appearances; to be too ready to believe things we should not believe. Hence, someone who is habitually taken in by con-artists is prone to believe the stories used to part him from his money. Someone who tends to believe insincere apologies is too ready to believe that those apologising are sorry for what they have done. We could come up with any number of examples. But is there any more to be said, other than that it is a disposition to be irrational?

...

The Case of ‘Nick’

In November 2014, an illustrative case in the UK became something of a media sensation. A middle-aged man known only as ‘Nick’ claimed that, as a child, he was sexually abused by several prominent men, including Edward Heath, a former Prime Minister; Leon Brittan, a former Home Secretary; Harvey Proctor, a former Tory MP (who resigned his seat in 1987 after being charged with gross indecency with males who were under-age according to the law at the time); Lord Bramall, a former head of the Army; and two former heads of the UK’s intelligence services. Nick claimed that these men were members of a larger ‘VIP paedophile ring’ operating in clandestine locations during the 1970s and ’80s. He also claimed that members of this group had murdered three children.

This month, British Vogue profiled feminist activists as “the new suffragettes.” Such a comparison flatters today’s campaigners. Nowadays, women’s lives are, thankfully, free of many of the restrictions imposed upon them a century ago. Then, not only could women not vote, they couldn’t open bank accounts, initiate divorce proceedings, control their own fertility, work in many professions, or even study for a degree at most universities. Today, women outperform men in education and then go on to dominate many professions. They have freedom and sexual equality unimaginable to their grandmothers. Then, women fighting for the vote routinely risked imprisonment, violence, social ostracism, and forced separation from their children. Today’s feminists are more likely to be found on primetime television debate shows presenting award ceremonies or on social media declaring #MeToo.

It’s easy to mock comparisons between those who bravely fought for women’s rights in the past and today’s keyboard warriors. But significantly, the #MeToo movement does point to some historical continuities in feminism. Nowadays, just as in the past, feminism positions women as not just different but morally superior to men, less driven by animal appetites, and, as such, able to enforce a civilizing etiquette on the unrulier elements of the male species.

#MeToo began in October of last year as numerous rape and sexual assault accusations against Harvey Weinstein began to surface. But as more women have taken to social media to share their experiences of sexual harassment, #MeToo has morphed into something different. Men from all walks of life stand accused; their alleged crimes encompass rape, knee touching, unwanted kisses, and inappropriate text messages. The widely reported story of “Grace” who described her date with comedian Aziz Ansari as the worst night of her life brought some of the problems with the direction of #MeToo to a head.

Grace was neither raped nor sexually assaulted by Ansari; she just didn’t want to have sex with him. But instead of simply walking away, Grace chose to chastise Ansari later for his bad behavior and failure to pick up on her “non-verbal clues.” While some, such as Caitlin Flanagan writing at The Atlantic, were quick to condemn Grace’s “3,000 words of revenge porn,” high-profile feminists such as Jessica Valenti argued Grace’s story was important because “part of what women are saying right now is that what the culture considers ‘normal’ sexual encounters are not working for us, and oftentimes harmful.” All this has put the #MeToo movement in danger of rehabilitating ancient tropes that depict men as lustful creatures driven by sexual appetite and uncontrollable urges and women as passive and restrained. Today’s dominant view is that women enjoy sex but only after permission has been formally sought and granted. Men are ruled by instinct and passion while women exercise restraint and control.

That’s who I am. I am the generic he, as in, “If anybody needs an abortion he will have to go to another state,” or “A writer knows which side his bread is buttered on.” That’s me, the writer, him. I am a man. Not maybe a first-rate man. I’m perfectly willing to admit that I may be in fact a kind of second-rate or imitation man, a Pretend-a-Him. As a him, I am to a genuine male him as a microwaved fish stick is to a whole grilled Chinook salmon.

I admit it, I am actually a very poor imitation or substitute man, and you could see it when I tried to wear those army surplus clothes with ammunition pockets that were trendy and I looked like a hen in a pillowcase. I am shaped wrong. People are supposed to be lean. You can’t be too thin, everybody says so, especially anorexics. People are supposed to be lean and taut, because that’s how men generally are, lean and taut, or anyhow that’s how a lot of men start out and some of them even stay that way. And men are people, people are men, that has been well established, and so people, real people, the right kind of people, are lean. But I’m really lousy at being people, because I’m not lean at all but sort of podgy, with actual fat places. I am untaut.

I don’t have a gun and I don’t have even one wife and my sentences tend to go on and on and on, with all this syntax in them. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after “semicolons,” and another one after “now.”

And another thing. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than get old. And he did. He shot himself. A short sentence. Anything rather than a long sentence, a life sentence. Death sentences are short and very, very manly. Life sentences aren’t. They go on and on, all full of syntax and qualifying clauses and confusing references and getting old. And that brings up the real proof of what a mess I have made of being a man: I am not even young. Just about the time they finally started inventing women, I started getting old. And I went right on doing it. Shamelessly. I have allowed myself to get old and haven’t done one single thing about it, with a gun or anything.

Sex is even more boring as a spectator sport than all the other spectator sports, even baseball. If I am required to watch a sport instead of doing it, I’ll take show jumping. The horses are really good-looking. The people who ride them are mostly these sort of nazis, but like all nazis they are only as powerful and successful as the horse they are riding, and it is after all the horse who decides whether to jump that five-barred gate or stop short and let the nazi fall off over its neck. Only usually the horse doesn’t remember it has the option. Horses aren’t awfully bright. But in any case, show jumping and sex have a good deal in common, though you usually can only get show jumping on American TV if you can pick up a Canadian channel, which is not true of sex. Given the option, though I often forget that I have an option, I certainly would watch show jumping and do sex. Never the other way round. But I’m too old now for show jumping, and as for sex, who knows? I do; you don’t.

Here I am, old, when I wrote this I was sixty years old, “a sixty-year-old smiling public man,” as Yeats said, but then, he was a man. And now I am over seventy. And it’s all my own fault. I get born before they invent women, and I live all these decades trying so hard to be a good man that I forget all about staying young, and so I didn’t. And my tenses get all mixed up. I just am young and then all of a sudden I was sixty and maybe eighty, and what next?

Not a whole lot.

I keep thinking there must have been something that a real man could have done about it. Something short of guns, but more effective than Oil of Olay. But I failed. I did nothing. I absolutely failed to stay young. And then I look back on all my strenuous efforts, because I really did try, I tried hard to be a man, to be a good man, and I see how I failed at that. I am at best a bad man. An imitation phony second-rate him with a ten-hair beard and semicolons. And I wonder what was the use. Sometimes I think I might just as well give the whole thing up. Sometimes I think I might just as well exercise my option, stop short in front of the five-barred gate, and let the nazi fall off onto his head. If I’m no good at pretending to be a man and no good at being young, I might just as well start pretending that I am an old woman. I am not sure that anybody has invented old women yet; but it might be worth trying.

Bruce and his twin brother Brian were born in Canada in the 1960s. At the age of seven months, the otherwise healthy boys were circumcised. But the doctors used a new method of circumcision, involving an electric cauterizing needle, on Bruce. An accident occurred, completely burning off the little boy’s penis. Brian’s operation was canceled, but his parents were devastated.

The Reimers decided to take Bruce to Dr. John Money, a psychologist and sexologist at Johns Hopkins they had seen on T.V. Dr. Money had a theory that aside from reproductive and urinary functions, gender was a social construct. Until the Reimer twins, he had largely worked with intersex cases – children born with ambiguous genitalia or abnormal sex chromosomes.

But the Reimer twins – otherwise healthy and biologically normative – were the perfect experiment on which to test his theory of gender fluidity. Brian would be raised as a boy, and Bruce would from now on be called Brenda, and raised as a girl. The Reimers agreed, and insisted on girl’s clothes and socialization for Brenda throughout childhood. They never told the twins about the accident, or about Brenda’s biological sex.

The twins were brought in for a yearly observation with Dr. Money, who dubbed the case a wild success by the time the twins were nine years old. “No-one else knows that she is the child whose case they read of in the news media at the time of the accident,” he wrote. “Her behavior is so normally that of an active little girl, and so clearly different by contrast from the boyish ways of her twin brother, that it offers nothing to stimulate one’s conjectures.”

The on-paper success of Brenda Reimer as a lovely and well-adjusted little girl did not match the lived reality of the child, Dr. Lappert said. Brenda Reimer was a rambunctious tomboy – shunned by the boys for wearing dresses, and by the girls for being too wild. “She was very rebellious. She was very masculine, and I could not persuade her to do anything feminine. Brenda had almost no friends growing up. Everybody ridiculed her, called her cavewoman,” Brenda’s mother, Janet, recalled in an interview with BBC News. “She was a very lonely, lonely girl.”

Every one of Laura Dodsworth’s penises is unique: introvert and extrovert, straight and bendy, wobblers and bobblers, growers and showers. There are contented penises that have led full lives, and disappointed penises that have let down their owners – or been let down by their owners.

In Dodsworth’s new book Manhood, every penis tells a story. There is the trans man who invested in the biggest and best; the underpowered poet hung up on his for years, until he decided to celebrate it with The Big Small Penis Party; the man who as a teenager thought he had genital warts and considered killing himself, until he found out they were normal spots; the business leader whose small penis taught him humility; the sex addict whose wife tried to cut it off; and the vicar who enjoyed his first threesome while training for the priesthood.

There was something interesting about going through a divorce, then meeting 100 men in an intimate way
This is not Dodsworth’s first foray into body parts. In 2014’s Bare Reality, also previewed in Guardian Weekend, the photographer interviewed women about their relationship with their breasts. That was delicate, Dodsworth says, but not as delicate as this. Breasts have been commodified and aestheticised, so we’re used to seeing them in everyday life; the same cannot be said of penises, which remain largely unseen and very much taboo.

Dodsworth’s earlier project was personal. Like many of us, she says, she is uneasy with her own body. “You see lots of pictures of breasts everywhere and you can’t help feeling you don’t measure up.” When she talked to women, she discovered many of them could tell their life story through them. And she has had a similar experience with Manhood. “I had this sense that men were in a ‘man box’ as much as I’d been in a ‘woman box’, and I wanted to get to know them better and hear their stories. One word for penis is manhood, so it seemed a perfect starting point to talk about being a man.”

In Norse mythology, Odin – Allfather, the archetypal male and king of the world- symbolises traits that feminism derogates as ‘toxic masculinity’ associated with the feminist conception of patriarchy. The proposed amendments to the sexual consent law in Sweden can be analysed as a symbolic castration of the Nordic male, but a further symbolic implication is that of nuetering his female partner Frigg, the goddess of fertility, motherhood, love and marriage – Earthmother, the archetypal female and queen of the world – whose divinity is tied to the libidinal potency of Odin.

In my earlier article Semantogymnastics about Microconsent I have evaluated an emerging trend in the jurisprudence of sexual consent. It appears that the first country to apply the associated principles to criminal law will be Sweden.

Sweden plans changing the law to require explicit consent before sexual contact (The Guardian) and at each step of sexual encounter (RT). I have contacted the Swedish Ministry of Justice for comment and have been advised by Kristoffer Strömgren that the wording of the draft legislation has now been amended by removing the ‘explicit consent’ requirement in favour of just ‘consent’.

The Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven previously attempted to clarify the meaning of the proposed legislation by stating that you should not engage in sex unless you are sure that consent had been granted – “If you are unsure, then refrain!” (The Independent). This seemingly innocuous answer does not clarify the matter at all – it is now unclear what would constitute a reasonable ground of being sure that consent had been granted. It also implies a requirement of strict certainty rather than all-things-considered subjective judgement that would allow for the possibility of fair misunderstanding – on one view, we can never be sure about the state of mind of another.

All the social conventions have broken down. Anomie.

There are no social conventions, and on top of that there is tremendous despair. Everyone I meet there is in despair. I get into a taxi and the driver talks to me about his feeling of despair, about how he’s using tramadol. I enter a restaurant where I always dine, the waiters sit with me at the table and tell me about their despair. I visit a psychiatric hospital, and the psychiatrists and psychologists immediately come and want to talk to me about their personal problems, before we begin talking about professional matters. Everyone is in despair. They don’t enjoy anything.

No wonder sex becomes an obsession. It’s perhaps the only enjoyment that’s available. The only vitality they can feel.
I think they engage in sex not for enjoyment but for release. That for them, sexuality is connected to hope. With all the death and the symbols of death they’re surrounded with, this is life. It’s impossible to really understand what’s happening in Gaza, impossible to understand what’s really happening within people’s psyche. Even I, who deal with mental health, can’t really understand what they think and feel.

It’s like the plot of a dystopian book or film, or like a frightening social experiment. A totally isolated society living in horrific conditions, without electric power, between ruins, under a dictatorial government. What holds that society together?
Nothing. They’re in the throes of an internal struggle. At one time, what united them was the feeling that they were all in the same boat: Everyone suffers from the blockade, from the Israeli attacks. There was a sense of shared destiny. That no longer exists. They blame one another for the situation, quarrel, fume; it really is chaos. The only thing that can perhaps be said to be an organizing factor is the regime.

But why are men’s and women’s brains different? One big reason is that, for much of their lifetimes, women and men have different fuel additives running through their tanks: the sex-steroid hormones. In female mammals, the primary additives are a few members of the set of molecules called estrogens, along with another molecule called progesterone; and in males, testosterone and a few look-alikes collectively deemed androgens. Importantly, males developing normally in utero get hit with a big mid-gestation surge of testosterone, permanently shaping not only their body parts and proportions but also their brains. (Genetic defects disrupting testosterone’s influence on a developing male human’s cells induce a shift to a feminine body plan, our “default” condition.)

In general, brain regions that differ in size between men and women (such as the amygdala and the hippocampus) tend to contain especially high concentrations of receptors for sex hormones.