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Woman is in church a saint , in the street an angel ,
in kitchens a devil , in bed an ape. attrib. 16th century
Wisdom cries in the streets and no man regards her.
Heav'n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn'd, |
The judge therefore adjourned the trial until Tue. Before Thursday's proceedings were interrupted Ms Andrews had been telling the court how she had been an abuse victim at age 8. But she said the abuse was not at the hands of her parents.
She had told her defence barrister John Kelsey-Fry, QC, that she did not want to go into details. The court was adjourned until the afternoon. Ms Andrews denies murdering Mr Cressman, 39, by hitting him on the head with a cricket bat and stabbing him in the chest, claiming she was acting in self-defence.
depression
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princessas Americanas |
vicious arguments
Earlier, the jury heard she had been raped by Mr Cressman on the day before his death after she said she was
leaving him. She said the couple had rowed after Mr Cressman had refused to see a therapist despite admitting he
needed help for sexual and commitment problems and his "black moods". Ms Andrews has repeatedly denied she
intended to murder her boyfriend, to whom she was "devoted". She claims she was acting in self-defence following
a series of vicious arguments between the pair. She fled the scene in a panic, got into her car and "drove and
drove
and drove", thez court heard. She began sending a series of text messages to her friends proclaiming her
innocence and was found days later in a car in Cornwall having taken an overdose of pain killers.
Mini spy cameras are the latest consumer
'must-have' in southern China, as spouses try to keep tabs on partners and shops keep an eye on theft, according
to the China Daily. The state-controlled newspaper said the cameras, which can be easily hidden from sight, were
"selling like hot cakes" in south China's Guangdong Province. Worries about the cameras even reached China's
National People's Congress, where deputy Weng Weiquan called for laws to stop secret filming. "Residents feel
unsafe as this method has been used to expose aspects of people's private lives," he said.
Spy cameras shot into public consciousness after one was used in Taiwan to film a politician having sex with her
married lover. Taipei City councilwoman Chu Mei-feng was forced from office after the film, which was
made without her knowledge, was widely circulated. She has since resurfaced as a pop singer, appearing
last week in concert in Singapore. Videos of her sexual performance, reproduced on to
optical disks, have been selling well across China & other Asian countries.
China Daily said it found spy-cameras selling for between 100 yuan ($12) to 3,000 yuan ($360) in one Guangzhou
shop. "I wholesaled more than 400 micro-cameras last month," one dealer told the paper. The dealer said some
people were buying the cameras to oversee their spouse's activities, while shops & businesses were also
using them as security devices. For anxious spouses, the dealer recommended one wireless camera that was able
to pick up signals within 1km.
12.31.01 Michael Bristow BBC |
2.7.02 BBC
Authorities seized video discs, but pirated copies circulated widely, on sale in Malaysia, Singapore and China. The
Chinese-language weekly has called the seizure of the discs "preposterous" and said the they were not
pornography but a move to "restore the face of the truth". Ms Chu, 36, New Party candidate in Dec.
parliamentary elections , did not deny she was the woman in the video and has apologised to the public. Not
available for comment following news of the charges, she told reporters late Wed. after Thailand holiday, "If the
society will accept me again, I want to do more good deeds," the Central News Agency quoted Ms Chu.
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Immaterial Girl
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Part Buddha, part Madonna, Supreme Master Ching Hai promises immediate enlightenment to San Jose's Asian immigrants 3.28.96 Rafer Guzmán Santa Clara Valley Metro ²
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She is one of the few drummers listed who has not been in a commercially successful pop, rock or jazz band. Instead Layne Redmond followed extremely unusual path specializing in small hand-held frame drum played primarily by women in the ancient Mediterranean world.
From 1981 through 1990 she performed & recorded the first contemporary frame drum compositions with percussionist Glen Velez for European & American labels.
1998 keynote lecture & performance at 8th annual Healing Sound Colloquium "Layne Redmond, leader of the Mob of Angels, is a superb percussionist; …. rhythms classic, melodies romantic, technique astounding."
"As I reevaluated it later in my life, cheerleading was a very important part of my training.
I was using rhythmic movement and chanted sound to entrain large groups of people with me. |
'Actually, my voice isn't very nice, and I don't sing that well, but you have given me strength,' she said demurely in
Mandarin at one point, her stiff body language betraying her nervousness. 'I'm behaving like a mummy. I don't dare to walk around, because I'm afraid I would step on my skirt,' she admitted at another point. Wrapped in a long, black dress, and with her face masked as if in a masquerade, she had made a dramatic sweeping entrance with 6 silk-kimono-clad dancers. As the Jeffrey Chung Models sextet stripped to black spandex slivers , the contrast of so much bare skin writhing next to the consciously covered-up singer became faintly ludicrous.
The shows' compere & organiser Yew How Peng aka Power Jackson took great pains in other ways to avoid references that might hark back to her VCD scandal. A $10,000 security bond he put up to obtain the entertainment licence for the 9 concerts would be forfeited by authorities if there was any mention of the taboo topic. Skirting around with words such as 'past difficulties' and 'unhappy events', the other 5 male performers still managed to make a running joke out of hitching a ride (da shun feng che in Mandarin) on the female star's notoriety
In the wake of her sex scandal, the former TV news anchor came under more media scrutiny when she published a tell-all book, started hosting a radio program and a late-night TV talk show. At the first concert at 7 pm, her reputation preceded her in the conspicuous presence of 15 security officers in shirt & tie, 6 uniformed policemen, and more than 50 members of the press from around the region, including Taiwan, Hongkong and Malaysia.
The faded 1,400-seat theatre was 80% full for the first show, but the second show at 9.30 pm managed only 60% says the organiser. Ticket sales as of Saturday for all the 9 shows averaged 70% and Mr Yew stands to lose a 5 figure sum at the box office. But in a post-concert interview, he said: 'It's not that big a loss. I can still afford it and I have no regrets. Don't you think I have done something Singapore should be proud of? No one has ever done a show that attracted so much international media attention.' From the start of the 2 hour concerts, it was obvious whom the audience had come to watch. Uncles & aunties were spotted strolling around during the short sets by Singaporean singer Wang Lei, Malaysian-Indian singer Xiao Hei, Hongkong actor Michael Huang, and former monk & DJ Lin Youfa. The audience, made up of an even number of middle-aged men & women with a handful of families with kids, settled down only during the second last act by 1970s idol Hsieh Lei, getting ready for the climax by Chu. Xiao Hei, Huang, Lin and Hsieh joined her in the closing number, a most ironic choice in the 1980s mega-hit by Lin Shurong and Li Maoshan, Silent Ending (Wu Yan De Jie Ju).
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Berlin 2 women committed suicide with their cat in Berlin early Friday by jumping together from the 23rd floor of a high rise building, police said. Police said the tabby cat was killed instantly along with the 2 women, aged 32 & 45, who jumped from an apartment block in the central Mitte district. The women left no clues as to why they had decided kill themselves or why they had taken the cat with them. Neither lived in Berlin; police said they were believed to have come from Rostock & Hannover to the German capital especially for the deed. Their identities were not disclosed; police said they did not know whether the 2 women were a couple or just friends. The younger woman left a farewell letter but gave no motive for the suicide. A 6 year old boy has been found dead & buried in mud near his home in a suburb of Dallas, TX, and his brother & sister have confessed to his killing, Texas authorities have said. Police were led to Jackson Carr's shallow grave by his 15-year-old sister after hours of searching, the AP news agency reported police as saying. She & her 10-year-old brother, who police say admitted to holding his little brother down during the killing, were being held at a juvenile detention centre on suspicion of murder, but formal charges have not been filed. The boy was reported missing on Monday evening. His brother had told their parents that he could not find him after a game of hide & seek. Mike Houser, a neighbour, was reported by AP as saying that the family had lived in the suburb of Lewisville for about 4 months. The children often played in the creek bed behind the home, neighbours said. |
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Taiwan sex video scandal explained | |
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Nemesis, goddess of retribution: "Baneful Nyx bore Nemesis, too, a woe for mortals..." |
per Hesiod, Theogony |
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pursues the insolent & wicked w/ inflexible vengeance; "Only the doomed see me" |
per folklorist Micha F. Lindemans |
Cases against 3 suspects go to Loudoun grand jury 3.8.02 Maria Glod Wash.Post pB3 Yesterday's hearings marked the first time bizarre details of the Dec. 8 slaying of Robert M. Schwartz were recounted in the courtroom. Each of the hearings centered on signed confessions from the 3 defendants and interviews with detectives. Investigators testified Hulbert said he is a vampire and told them he tasted Schwartz's blood and went into a "frenzy." Pfohl & Inglis told detectives that Hulbert told them he "had a job to do" and they knew that meant he would kill someone, according to testimony. Schwartz's younger daughter, Clara J. Schwartz, 21, friend of the defendants, is charged with conspiring with the 3 to have her father killed. During yesterday's hearing, prosecutors focused on the night of the slaying and did not reveal any new details about Clara Schwartz's alleged role in her father's death. | |
Hulbert told investigators he confronted Schwartz about the alleged abuse and saw a "confession in his eyes,"
Russ testified. Russ said Hulbert told him that he pulled out the sword, attacked Schwartz and the 2 began to
struggle. During the fight, Hulbert told detectives, he got blood in his mouth and "went into a blood lust," Russ said. Hulbert told detectives he left the house, found Pfohl & Inglis trying to coax Pfohl's Honda Civic out of the muddy area on the dirt road where it had become stuck, according to testimony. Detectives testified the 3 tried for more than 2 hours before Hulbert went to a neighbor's house to call a tow truck. It was the driver of the truck, authorities said, who led them to the 3.
[ This little lamia must have laughed
herself sick when she spotted these idiots. ]
Defense attys for Pfohl & Inglis yesterday argued that their clients did not know Hulbert would kill Schwartz
and that they did not help plan the slaying. Cannon found that Pfohl & Inglis knew Hulbert planned to kill
someone and that both helped drive the car. Hulbert, of Millersville, and Pfohl & Inglis, both of Haymarket,
were arrested days after the slaying. Schwartz was arrested 2.1.02 after authorities spent weeks poring over e-
mails & instant messages sent among the 4. The Loudoun grand jury is scheduled to meet 3.19.02. Schwartz is scheduled to appear in court for a preliminary hearing 3.21.02.
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Forester charged in Colorado fire 6.17.02 AP
Castle Rock CO U.S. Forest Service employee charged today with starting fire 6.8.02,
scorching more than 100,000 acres in the Pike National Forest and destroying at least 22 homes.
Forestry technician Terry Barton, 38, admitted starting campfire while patrolling forest to enforce a fire
ban, said U.S. Atty's Office Dist. of CO Bill Leone.
She said she started burning a letter from her estranged husband within a designated campfire ring, where fires normally would be allowed, and then tried to put out the blaze. Barton was charged with setting fire to timber in the national forest, damaging federal property in excess of $100,000 and making false statements to investigators. If convicted, Barton could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison and fines of up to $250,000. She was arrested this morning. Firefighters gained ground today on the wildfire that had burned within 40 miles of Denver city limits since it was started. With blaze 35% contained, about 5,400 people remained out of their homes. It was one of 7 fires burning in the state today. |
After forester's arrest, disbelief & anger 6.18.02 Wm Booth & Gerard Wright Wash.Post … Barton & her husband John Mark Barton have 2 daughters. While she was fighting the fire, he was back in the couple's house in Florissant, caring for the girls. …
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Nun quietly awaits prison for protest
Bellevue WA A light gong sounded the call to afternoon prayers, and the nuns gathered in the small chapel at the Congregation of Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace. Joining the group, Sister Miriam Spencer, 76, softly chanted the words to Psalm 137, the reading of the day: "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?"
Spencer wasn't looking to serve time behind bars, but knew she ran the risk. She believes it was worthwhile, telling the sentencing judge that she would not plead guilty because she has "no sense of guilt" about crossing the Ft Benning border as a "peacekeeper" charged with keeping the 3,400-person protest, a mock funeral procession, orderly & safe.
"When there is real evil going on, and your elected officials are not listening, … civil disobedience is a
sacrament," she said earlier this week. Main protest group School of the Americas Watch is led by Maryknoll priest Rev. Roy Bourgeois. Seattle Archdiocese spokesman Bill Gallant says Spencer's commitment fits well into a Catholic tradition where
"women religious & priests have been going to jail for acts of conscience since the church began."
School of the Americas protests began more than a decade ago, with opponents saying that its students, Latin
American military officers, are trained in ways that lead to torture & human rights abuses. The military has said that the school is meant to train Latin American soldiers in democratic principles, and that manuals from the 1980s that advocated torture & kidnapping as ways to fight rebels are no longer used.
Protests gained particular attention this year because of the ages of those sentenced incl 88-year-old Franciscan nun Sister Dorothy Hennessey from Iowa who told the judge to give her the same prison sentence as the rest, instead of the house arrest he offered. The Bellevue retreat of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace, with mature trees and lovingly tended grounds, houses more than two dozen nuns ages 47 to 99.
But they have sympathy for her stand; after all, some of them have demonstrated at Ft Benning, too.
Rourke, for example, said that after hearing Bourgeois speak out against it several years ago she prayed that the school would close. Then there came a point, she said, where she wondered, "Was I supposed to do more than pray?" She flew to Georgia and marched in the 1999 protests.
When Spencer went to sleep that night she dreamed of her aunt, also a nun in her order. She was telling her aunt not to worry about her, that she was going to be all right. The messages seemed clear. Spencer doesn't think she'll cross the line at Ft Benning again; she didn't intend to last year, either, given the written ban, and was swayed by a "desperate" call for peacekeepers. In the wake of 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, she said, organizers were worried that troublemakers might come in and disrupt the protest.
Her chaplain has told her she can probably bring her Bible to prison, and she expects she'll be able to minister to other inmates, a job that might make the months go by more easily. She doesn't expect the punishment to change her beliefs, or to keep her from future protests. She won't be there for the next ones, planned for November, but she doesn't think she'll be missed. "One of the other sisters has told me she'll take my place."
Anti-war nuns sentenced to 2½+ years
Denver CO Calling them ``dangerously irresponsible,'' a federal judge sentenced 3 nuns to at least 2½ years in prison Friday for vandalizing a nuclear missile silo during an anti-war protest last fall. Despite his strong words, U.S. District Judge Robert Blackburn gave the women less than the 6 year minimum called for under sentencing guidelines. Jackie Hudson was sentenced to 2½ years, Carol Gilbert to 2 years 9 months, and Ardeth Platte to 3 years, 5 months.
The nuns had until Aug. 25 to report to prison but chose to go immediately. Some peace activists have said the
felony convictions were harsh and intended to have a chilling effect on other protesters, but the prosecutor said the nuns were repeat offenders who deserved prison. He said Platte had been arrested at least 10 times at anti-war protests, Hudson 5 times and Gilbert at least 13 times.
Beforehand, the nuns defiantly told a crowd of 150 supporters outside the courthouse they were not afraid of
prison. "Whatever sentence I receive today will be joyfully accepted as an offering for peace and with God's help it will not injure my spirit," a choked-up Platte said.
The Roman Catholic nuns are longtime anti-war activists. Platte & Gilbert lived in a Baltimore activist
community founded by the late peace activist Philip Berrigan. Hudson lived in a similar community in Poulsbo,
Wash. After their arrest, the women chose to stay in jail, refusing the govt's offer to release them on their own
recognizance. |
Since 1987, almost half of all demonstrations in Tibet have been led by women. Nuns in particular have been the leaders of most of these demonstrations. Nuns are more able to protest than other women because they have no one dependent upon them who will suffer if they are caught. Most of the demonstrations have involved a small group of nuns shouting slogans or putting up posters, and have lasted for only a few minutes. Many of the nuns who have protested have been very young, some only teenagers, yet the punishment for protest if they are caught has almost always been detention or imprisonment.
Among youngest imprisoned was nun Sherap Ngawang from Michungri Nunnery, reportedly age 15 when arrested 2.3.92. She participated twice in small demonstrations in Lhasa on 8.14.89 & 2.3.92 when she & 4 other nuns from Michungri and a monk from Sera Monastery protested together. Ngawang Wangdron, just 16 at the time, was among the other nuns involved in this protest.
Life for Tibetan nuns as political prisoners has not been made any easier because of their gender or their youth.
Even young teenage girls have been forced to endure extreme torture in prison. When Rigzin Choenyi was
arrested after 9.22.89 demonstration, she was 18. After her arrest she was detained in solitary confinement at the Gutsa Detention Center for 2 months where she was interrogated between one and three times every day.
After she received her sentence of 7 years in prison and was moved to Drapchi Prison, torture became worse. In Drapchi she was shocked with an electric baton in the mouth if she was caught reciting Buddhist texts, and forced to kneel in water & ice when she was caught prostrating. She also had blood forcibly extracted on 3 occasions leaving her so weak that she had to be hospitalized for almost a month.
In Oct. 1993, 14 nuns in Drapchi Prison, largest in Tibet, made a recording of freedom songs on a tape-recorder
smuggled into the prison with the help of a non-political prisoner. The recording was then distributed throughout
Tibet and later the rest of the world. Despite the great risk, each of the women stated her name on the recording
and dedicated a song or poem to friends & supporters. Rigzin Choenyi, in Drapchi Prison at the time of the
recording, stated that the 14 nuns had taken this risk in order to let the world know of their presence in prison.
The songs are testament to Tibetan political prisoners the Chinese claim do not exist. …
The young nuns who recorded these songs were all put in Drapchi Prison for peaceful protests for Tibet's
independence. Phuntshok Nyidron was arrested for 10.14.89 protest. Gyaltsen Dolkar, Gyaltsen Choezom, Tenzin Thupten, Lhundrup Sangmo, Rigzin Choekyi, Palden Choedon, and Jigme Yangchen were all arrested for protests August 1990. Ngawang Lochoe, Ngawang Tsamdrol, and Ngawang Choekyi were arrested for protests May 1992. Ngawang Sangdrol, Namdol Lhamo and Ngawang Choezom were arrested for protests in June of 1992.
One of the nuns who made the recording was Ngawang Sangdrol. She was born in 1977 and arrested for the first time in 1987, at the age of 10, for participating in a demonstration. At that time she was detained for 15 days. In 1990, at the age of 13, she was again arrested for participating in 8.28.90 demonstration in Lhasa. Although she was considered too young to be tried, Ngawang was detained for 9 months.
Ngawang is currently the female political prisoner with the longest prison term in Tibet. She is not due to be
released until 2010 at which time she will have spent more than half of her 33 years in prison. All of the young nuns who made the recording in 1993 continue to live behind prison bars. Since 1993, many other nuns like these 14 have suffered simply for singing songs in prison.
For 2 months after this Sherap Ngawang had extreme pain in her kidneys and was unable to walk. She &
Ngawang Wangdron were released Feb. 1995, at the end of their 3 year sentences. Yet Sherap Ngawang was still very ill even after returning home, due to the severe beatings she had received in prison. Although she was taken to many doctors nothing could be done and she died shortly after her release from prison. • Jackie O.'s Russkie Mata Hari ¹ ² another sparkler for the Gemstone file
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What is glossed over in Goldsmith's narrative is the extent to which all her story revolves around 2 big pots of money Woodhull got by immense good luck, both from Commodore Vanderbilt.
She arrived in New York in 1870, hoping to earn a living there from prostitution, from holding seances where people could communicate for a fee with departed family members, and from other vulgar schemes she had practiced with her family all her life.
Woodhull was able to pass this information to Vanderbilt, who invested heavily in the shares in question and sold out at the planned price, just before the stock collapsed. Vanderbilt paid Woodhull half his earnings from this scam, which came to about $700,000, transforming her in one fell sweep from a pauper to one of the wealthiest women in America.
All the rest of what she did was based on the combination of this money and her need for attention; the stock brokerage was a mere front for the Vanderbilt interests and never made her any money; the presidential candidacy and newspaper were publicity stunts undertaken to promote the ideas of suffragists and social reformers of all kinds who were drawn to her by the magnet of her cash, and flattered her.
When the money was gone she tried to get more by using her newspaper to blackmail public figures with threats to write about their sex lives, but got thrown into jail instead.>br>
Broke and near dispair she proved how much the gods loved her by suddenly and even more unexpectedly acquiring a new huge pot of money.
Commodore Vanderbilt died, leaving a will which gave small annuities to 9 of his children and the rest of his immense fortune to one favored son. Some of the disfavored children challenged the will, claiming their father had been mentally incompetent, and that the proof of it was his association with spiritualists and similar crackpots. | |
Sugar and spice 3 new books tackle the third rail of sisterhood: female competition at work, w/ men & w/ each other. Can a woman play like a girl and win? 2.15.06 Peg Tyre Newsweek
The authors of 3 new books set out to help women sort through those conflicting messages about competition and power.
• Tripping the Prom Queen the truth about women and rivalry
• I Can't Believe She Did That! why women betray other women at work
• The Girl's Guide to Being A Boss (W/o Being a Bitch) succeeding as chick-in-charge
In "Tripping the Prom Queen," (St. Martin's Press, March 2006), Susan Shapiro Barash, a feminist scholar, argues that it's high time women pulled back the curtain on feminist orthodoxy. Yes, sisterhood is powerful. But it can also be fraught with conflict, envy, betrayal and jealousy. Power makes us twisted, she argues. Why?
Women are at best ambivalent and at worst, demeaned by the success of other women. Women are uncomfortable about competing openly and run down women who do.
Calling upon a musty-feeling psychoanalytic paradigm, Barash argues, somewhat confusingly, that women don't see themselves as individuals. They don't measure success in their own terms either but rather envy women who succeed and take pleasure in their failure. (Did I mention it was confusing?)
In her book, she interviews women who confess their own ugly feelings toward other women. Her conclusion is one that only a sorority pledge could deny: women pay a steep price for constantly measuring themselves against each other.
Nan Mooney, who wrote "I Can't Believe She Did That!" (St. Martin's Press, 2005), dwells on the debt modern women owe to feminism. Then she sets about showing how difficult it can be to work with women and how tough it can be for women to admit that. The problem, as Mooney sees it, is that women compete: who's the best-looking, who gets the guy, who gets the plum assignments at work.
But, unlike guys, who can be found pumping their fists in the air to celebrate a victory, women are uncomfortable even admitting they're interested in coming out on top. Instead, they do each other dirty in the dirtiest of ways, "attacking underground while continuing to appear warm and friendly on the surface."
Working women, she suggests, are often victims of their own inflated expectations for other women. Yes, we should all work together to create opportunities for each other. But "just because we are women," she writes, "does not mean we can predict or understand each other's needs."
The authors of "The Girl's Guide To Being a Boss (Without Being a Bitch)" (Morgan Road, April 2006), Caitlin Friedman and Kimberly Yorio, must have grown up in the post-Title IX era because their book doesn't concern itself much with the idea that "nice girls don't compete."
Just got the corner office? Relax, the authors advise. Enjoy. You've earned it. Friedman and Yorio, a public relations duo, have had enough experience in the workplace to know that being female doesn't make it any easier to manage or be managed. Want to be an excellent boss and a fine example to the younger women in your company? Make sure to use your power for good of yourself, your company and your underlings, not for evil.
The authors of "The Girl's Guide" weave in interviews from female small-business owners who describe the bitter and the sweet that comes with being the women in charge. Their revelation? If the woman you work for is a bad manager, it may have less to do with gender politics and more to do with the fact that managers everywhere can be anxious, insecure and poorly trained. The Girl's Guide lays out what women in power need to do in order to be firm, fair and above all, successful.
black widows
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Crashes: did 'black widows' bring down the planes? 9.6.04 M.Hosenball & A.Kuchment Newsweek
Russian officials confirmed what the rest of the world suspected: that terrorism was a likely cause of 2 nearly
simultaneous crashes of airliners that took off from the same Moscow airport one night last week. The FSB
(formerly the KGB) announced that traces of the explosive hexogen had been found in the wreckage of Siberia Airlines Flight 1047, en route to Sochi, and Volga-Aviaexpress Flight 1303, to Volgograd. The planes had taken off from Moscow's Domodedovo airport within 45 minutes of each other and apparently crashed just 3 minutes apart. FSB spokesman Nikolai Zakharov confirmed that investigators had "defined a circle of individuals possibly involved in conducting the terrorist act." The 2 crash sites were about 500 miles apart. 90 passengers & crew are believed to have died.
Edgy Russian officials initially tried to steer speculation about the possible causes of the crashes toward the
accidental: it was suggested that mechanical problems or contaminated fuel could have brought the planes down. Western experts, citing the lack of precedent for the crash of 2 planes within minutes of each other, ridiculed the early Russian explanations. Speculation about possible accidental causes was undermined when reports surfaced that a radio transponder which broadcast the identification of one of the planes to controllers briefly sent out a hijack-alert message before it cut out permanently, apparently as a result of the crash.
Then the FSB announced its finding of explosives residue.A little-known Islamic extremist group called the Al-
Islambouli Brigades, which previously claimed credit for trying to kill the president of Pakistan, issued a statement on a jihadi Web site claiming that 5 member teams of its mujahedin had hijacked the 2 planes; U.S. intelligence officials were not sure the claim was authentic. |
European women join ranks of jihadis
Authorities confront an unsettling new trend: militants' wives who are suspected of plotting suicide attacks, with their mates or alone. 1.10.06 Sebastian Rotella L.A. Times
Amsterdam The women of the Dutch extremist network were a new breed of holy warriors on the front lines where Islam and the West collide. In the male-dominated world of Islamic extremism, they saw themselves as full-fledged partners in jihad. Wives watched videos about female suicide bombers, posed for photos holding guns and fired automatic weapons during clandestine target practice.
The story of the Dutch network, 14 members of which are now on trial, reveals the increasing aggressiveness and prominence of female extremists in Europe. In a chilling trend in the Netherlands and Belgium, police are investigating militants' wives suspected of plotting suicide attacks with their husbands, or on their own.
In November, a Belgian named Muriel Degauque rammed an explosives-filled vehicle into a U.S. convoy in Iraq, becoming the first Western female convert to Islam to carry out a suicide bombing for the networks affiliated with Al Qaeda. U.S. commandos killed her husband a day later as he was reportedly preparing a suicide attack wearing an explosives vest near Fallouja, Iraq.
For years, women have committed suicide attacks in places such as Chechnya and the Palestinian territories. At least one female suicide bomber had struck in Iraq before Degauque, and in November a would-be female suicide bomber was implicated in Iraqi operatives' bombing of 3 hotels in the Jordanian capital. |
Acquitted in the plot against Massoud, Aroud moved to Switzerland, where she has been charged with operating a website that incited terrorism. Newer female recruits include daughters of immigrant families who rediscover their Muslim roots as well as native Europeans such as Degauque. They are gaining more acceptance because of a perception among male leaders that all Muslims must defend the faith against attack, analysts say.
Western investigators are somewhat relieved that Degauque wasn't used for a more audacious attack in the West.
"It would have been valuable operationally to have a Belgian blond" for plots in Europe, said a senior French anti-terrorism official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "But I wonder if these networks are more erratic, more dispersed than that, leaving a lot to spontaneous individual initiative. Also, the Iraqi insurgency needs cannon fodder for suicide attacks."
Another case raised fears closer to home. In November, Moroccan police arrested Belgian-born Mohammed Reha, allegedly a top operative with myriad international connections. Reha told interrogators that he had met in Brussels with the wife of an extremist on trial in Belgium, investigators say. During the meeting at a train station last summer, the woman reportedly told Reha that she and other wives of imprisoned extremists were ready to become suicide bombers in Europe. She asked for help to get training and explosives, according to his account, which was first reported by Agence France-Presse news service.
Belgian police questioned the woman, who has not been arrested or publicly identified. She denied Reha's account, an investigator said.
Police, however, have confirmed that Reha met with a top suspect in the Dutch network, Samir Azzouz, who was allegedly planning an attack in the Netherlands. Belgian and Dutch authorities are investigating his claim that he offered to provide him with the aspiring female bombers from Belgium.
"It's very interesting to us," said prosecutor Van Boetzelaer. "Supposedly Azzouz says, 'I want to do an attack, do you have somebody for me?' Then Reha volunteers the 'sisters.' That's the version we have. But we have a lot to do to confirm this."
Azzouz, 19, was a central figure in the Dutch network whose members, mostly in their teens or 20s, were raised in a society proud of its progressive attitudes about equality of the sexes. That, investigators believe, helps explain the ferocity of half a dozen female militants in the group.
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[ This person is very much more responsible than any other single individual for the shape of the Middle East today. ] 
"Both Bell and T.E. Lawrence stood hardly 5'5", yet both could ride with great determination and endurance through the desert for hours on end.
Both died prematurely after recurring bouts of depression, burn-out and exhaustion."
"It was she who in 1913 dashed off for Herbert Samuel a map of Palestine Prima, the biblical region which the Jews claimed as their inheritance,
without knowing that, within a year, in the turmoil of war, the recipient would present a paper to the cabinet entitled 'The Future of Palestine'."
Through her instruction of Kim Philby's father, she also determined creation of Saudi Arabia, and thereby the Wahhabi domination of the Arab world.
"In 1922, as the right arm of Sir Percy Cox, Britain's High Commissioner in the newly mandated Iraq, she drew the frontiers of Transjordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the Yemen and adjacent territories, for her chief to present to Arab leaders at a conference at Ujair on the Gulf Coast. When she arrived in Cairo with Cox and the Sharifian or Hashemite delegates to whom the largest of those promises was made, she was delighted to find Churchill's package, formulated in London with aid of pro-Arab TE Lawrence at one elbow and pro-Israeli Richard Meinertzhagen at the other, agreed in almost every detail with hers." |
Azzouz's wife, Abida, 25, came to Islam through her mother, a Dutch convert. His defense lawyer has alleged that Abida was the driving force behind Azzouz's radicalism, but authorities say they do not have enough evidence to charge her. Azzouz, who was arrested in October, is considered a top figure in the Dutch network, along with Nourredine Fatmi, a diminutive, Moroccan-born militant with a reputation as a hot-headed charmer.
Fatmi "married" a 16-year-old girl in a secret and unofficial ceremony presided over by another militant, Mohammed Bouyeri. The newlyweds spent the wedding night watching videos of suicide bombers, according to testimony.
"Once, when she was with Fatmi in a car, he said to her that she had to die as a martyr," said Wim de Bruin, a spokesman for Dutch prosecutors. "He talked about filling a car with explosives and driving it into a shopping center. He said they would do it together."
In November 2004, Bouyeri assassinated filmmaker Theo van Gogh. After his arrest, police rounded up Bouyeri's associates for allegedly plotting follow-up attacks. Fatmi left his "wife" and went underground. Last spring he met and quickly "married" another woman, Soumaya Sahla, a 21-year-old nursing student and ardent fundamentalist.
They floated among hide-outs in the Netherlands and Belgium. He took her to Morocco to meet his parents; he also took her to a forest outside Amsterdam to practice shooting with an Agram 2000 machine gun, according to testimony.
Sahla allegedly gathered intelligence on potential targets. In a wiretapped phone call June 20, she tried to persuade her sister, an employee of a pharmacy frequented by politicians, to give her the home address of legislator Ali, whose crusade against fundamentalism has made her a target.
During the couple's final days on the run, they hid at the home of Martine van der Oeven, an accused accomplice in The Hague. She drove them to Amsterdam on 6.22.05.
Fatmi has admitted that he was on his way to assassinate Ali, according to recent testimony. Police swarmed the couple on the platform of a subway station. The officers overpowered them as Fatmi reached into his backpack for the Agram machine gun and Sahla shouted, "Allah is great!"
Sahla is now serving a prison sentence for weapons possession. Fatmi is on trial. Minutes after they were captured, police outside the station arrested Van der Oeven, the driver. Her profile sums up the worst fears of investigators. She is a convert with cherubic Dutch looks.
Her former profession: policewoman.
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2.28.06 BlackNews
NYC Much maligned by the U.S. media, Sudan's top selling literary novelist, Kola Boof, proves that she was Osama Bin Laden's mistress in startling detail as her autobiography Diary of a Lost Girl finally hits America today in hardcover.
Boof's 441 page autobiography is decidedly literary and contains over 90 detailed pages of her time with bin Laden, including hunting & fishing excursions with the terror chief, very graphic details about their sex life, bin Laden's gift for writing poetry, his marijuana smoking and his reputed illnesses (Boof claims that Ayman Al-Zawahri acted as Bin Laden's doctor and that his "kidney disease" is greatly exaggerated).
Boof, who is half Arab Egyptian and was born Muslim, has become infamous for her criticism of Arab Muslim "imperialism", particularly the abuse of black women and children in Sudan & Egypt, and writes quite passionately about "terrorism" and why she believes Americans should take it more seriously.
Kola Boof, who's published 6 books in 8 countries, was adopted & raised in U.S. by black Americans in 1979, became a U.S. citizen in 1993 and returned to North Africa as an adult in 1994. She's the mother of 2 sons. |
Interview w/ Osama bin Laden's former African mistress
2.06 & Bruce Dunne BlackNews
Author of 6 books published in 8 countries, Kola Boof is not only Sudan's top selling novelist, but in 1996, was the mistress of Osama Bin Laden, a fact that jeopardized her American citizenship 4 years ago, until Morocco's Prince Fabrizzio Ruspolli confirmed Boof's claim that she had been held against her will by bin Laden at Ruspoli's estate for sexual purposes.
Bruce Dunne : Where is bin Laden?
B. Dunne : What do you think of the recent rumors that Bin Laden is dead?
B. Dunne : You say you lived with bin Laden for 6 months in 1996, and I'll be asking you some very tough questions about that in a moment, but what was he like back then?
Because I'm black and wasn't Muslim at that time, he considered me a "non-woman". A piece of meat for men to wipe their sins off on.
B. Dunne : Bin Laden biographer Peter Bergen has called you delusional. He says that Osama Bin Laden was never in Morocco in 1996. He claims bin Laden has never been to Morocco period.
B. Dunne : Peter Bergen says that bin Laden is a chronic prayer, praying ten or twelve times a day. |
B. Dunne : You say that you're annoyed by American women who complain that you don't act like a rape victim.
K. Boof : It was ten years ago that Bin Laden raped me. I can't imagine why I should be crying and acting emotional. Of course it was terrible being raped, but I had to survive and that meant I had to pretend to like the man. There was no time for whining..and, in writing the book, no time for feminist theatrics. He raped me the first night and we became lovers, because I had to survive.
B. Dunne : Most people definitely haven't read your novels and poems. They don't know that you're Sudan's most published literary writer. You say that it's because you're so intelligent that bin Laden was attracted to you.
K. Boof : Osama's mother was like a feminist, she refused to wear a burka, two or three of bin Laden's wives are university professors. I don't see why that's so hard for Americans to believe. They think because they've never heard of me or because my name sounds comical to them that I'm just a bimbo. And stupid. When they see that I'm black, they tack on "liar".
B. Dunne : I have to admit I loved your autobiography, but do you really believe that you know more about bin Laden than his wives?
K. Boof : Well in any mansion, it's the maids and the "whores" who know the most. Trust me.
B. Dunne : Bin Laden's been rumored to have suffered from kidney problems. Can you tell us anything about that?
K. Boof : I'd rather people buy the book, so they can read about his health difficulties in detail. An interview isn't the proper...
B. Dunne : You say that you're a liberal Democrat, but you're very supportive of President Bush's war on terrorism. Is that correct?
K. Boof : I'm not interested in President Bush in the least, and yes, I'm a liberal Democrat. I'm also a person who comes from the Arab world and I can tell you that I was raised in Sudanese elementary school to believe that America is Satan's country, that white men are "the devil" and to strap a bomb on my back and blow up innocent people at the post office in the name of Allah.
Look at this idiot president in Iran. I want blacks in America to understand that the "Arab" is just as much of a Satan as the White man. To me, the Arab man is more Satanic than the White man. No race likes black people, not Arabs, Caucasians, Asians, Latinos, Mulattoes; nobody likes blacks. Black Americans need to look at the recent massacre of Black Sudanese in a public park in Egypt and get a clue.
You have to be sensible about terrorism, and I think that Americans are way too spoiled, too rich and comfortable. They like to fancy themselves as fair people, but it's the relaxed, fair ones that die of poisoned drinking water while listening to their Barbra Streisand records, although I'm a huge Streisand fan myself.
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Herodias 15 BC - 40 AD Jewish princess, Herod's grandaughter. Via her daughter Salome's salacious dancing, advocated John the Baptist's execution. Mistaken by name for nocturnal aspect of goddess Diana, deity of witches & lesbians. |
I advise Americans to question their govt's tactics, surely, but when it comes to Arab muslim imperialism and terrorism, support your govt. There is corruption in every world govt, but none are more corrupt than the govts of the Arab world, and that is Kola Boof's experience as a half-Arab, Black African woman, and my opinion is just as important any other American's.
B. Dunne : Who despises you the most? Arab Muslim leaders, the Nation of Islam, American media, Black American men or Bin Laden experts?
K. Boof : I don't know.
B. Dunne : In 2004, you were able to secure about 600 million dollars worth of guns & ammunition for Sudan's south rebel army by giving a rather powerful speech in Israel. You were also featured on Benjamin Netanyahu's web site. What exactly are your connections to Israel or the SPLA's for that matter?
K. Boof : Israelis and the South Sudanese are nothing alike, but we share a common enemy, a very common struggle. If it weren't for Israel we wouldn't have had food or medicine or weapons to defend our children in the South Sudan. We had no other offering of help. As a member of the SPLA, I had to work very closely with the Israelis on behalf of my people. I would do anything for Africa.
B. Dunne : Very recently, with the James Frey scandal and the debates about the integrity of memoir nowadays, how do we know that your book isn't a pack of lies, just another fabulous scheme to further your own writing career by getting rich off bin Laden's name?
K. Boof : You don't know. My book is true and none of it is fabricated, and for those who think otherwise, I really don't give a damn. This is my life story, my soul book.
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1.1.07 Jessica Garrison L.A. Times
When Yanic Chan and Vanessa Van split up in 1995, they couldn't afford a lawyer. So, like thousands of other people without money, they filled out the divorce paperwork themselves, with help from a friend. In November 1997, Van went to the Riverside County Courthouse to enter a final judgment. "The clerk put the stamp on it," Van said. "I asked, 'Everything finished?' She said 'Yes.' "
Driven by rising legal fees, a shortage of legal aid lawyers and a do-it-yourself philosophy, about 80% of people in California handle their own divorces, according to court officials. Court officials across the state say they suspect the problem is vast. In Los Angeles County, Kathleen Dixon, who heads the Superior Court's programs for self-represented people, estimated that a third or more of all divorce petitions filed in the county in the last several years have not been finalized. |
One L.A. County Superior Court judge, Mark Juhas, found that about a third of the roughly 3,600 divorce cases filed in 2001 and 2002 and assigned to his courtroom remain open. Some of those couples may have reconciled, but Juhas suspects that many more are stuck or may even think they are divorced when they are not.
Bonnie Hough is supervising attorney for the Center for Families, Children and the Courts, a division of the state Judicial Council's Administrative Office of the Courts. She noted a study in Placer County in the 1980s that found that 30% of people there who filed for divorce did not complete the process.
At one legal services center in Van Nuys, officials say they see 20 people a month who incorrectly thought they were divorced.
"They come in screaming," said Norma Valencia, a paralegal at the center operated by Neighborhood Legal Services. "They say, 'You don't understand my situation. I want a divorce right now.' "
Others show up weeping: They've remarried without a finalized divorce, and they're afraid to tell their new spouses. Many people, Valencia said, think divorce is like a traffic ticket and if they fail to take care of it properly, the court will track them down and notify them.
But it doesn't work like that. In California, getting divorced takes at least three steps: filing divorce papers, serving them on the spouse and then writing and processing a judgment with the court. The process can be more complicated if there are children or fights over assets. A divorce cannot become final until at least 6 months after the date the papers are served.
Increasingly, across California and the nation, people are handling their own civil court matters. In San Diego County, one of the few counties where statistics are available, 46% of people represented themselves in divorces in 1992; by 2000 that figure had climbed to 77%.
One reason: increasing fees for lawyers combined with decreasing legal aid services for poor people, said Richard Zorza, who coordinates a national network of organizations working on self-representation. Also a factor, he said, is a "Home Depot philosophy of people feeling they can do things on their own." But the legal system wasn't organized with a do-it-yourself approach. It's meant to be navigated by lawyers. And people without legal training often make mistakes.
"People just don't get it done. They don't know how to get it done," said L.A. Superior Court judge Juhas. "That's troubling. There are legal ramifications to continuing to be married."
Juhas said the problem was brought home to him a few years ago, when two people appeared in his courtroom on a routine matter. They had filed for a divorce a few years earlier, and both had since remarried. Juhas said he looked down at their file and then back up at the couple. "I said, 'Do you realize your judgment was never entered?' "
In plain English, that meant they weren't divorced. Luckily for the couple, and their new spouses, Juhas finalized their divorce without invalidating their new marriages. But it got him thinking: What about the thousands of other people whose files remain open?
Last spring, the judge, one of more than 40 who handle family law in L.A. County, began calling in about 100 people a month whose divorce cases have languished and asking them if they need help. About 10% say they have reconciled, and about 30% ignore his summons. But more than half, he said, want to be divorced and just need some help.
Just after 9 a.m. on a recent morning, Juhas hoisted a stack of divorce files onto his desk and began calling names. About a dozen people stared back. Some were alone. Some were with spouses. Some looked fearful. Others glowered. Juhas asked them to stand and follow Janice Shurlow, a lawyer who works with the court helping people representing themselves.
Shurlow led them to a conference room. "If both parties are here and you get along, please feel free to sit together," she said. "If you don't get along, feel free to sit on opposite sides of the room."
For the next two hours, attorneys, some volunteer, others employees of the court's family law resource center, assisted people with paperwork.
A man with tattoos lacing up his neck and down his arms bent over a stack of forms in the front of the room. The man, who said he did not want his name printed because of the personal nature of the matter, said he had filed for divorce in 2002.
"I thought I was divorced," he said. A moment later, he said he knew he wasn't divorced but was uncertain about what to do after his spouse refused to sign papers he gave her.
"Out of sight, out of mind," he said. He looked at the mass of paperwork in front of him and sighed. "It's so easy to get married. Sign your name and say, 'I do,' " he said. "Say I don't. I don't want to be married anymore."
Court officials say they are studying Juhas' approach and may expand it if it proves successful. At the same time, court officials in L.A. and elsewhere in the state have launched self-help programs so people can get divorced. But that does little to help the thousands who are stuck in legal limbo now, Chan and Van among them.
After they thought their divorce had become final in 1997, Chan married a second time. He divorced, properly, in 2003, although he later discovered that marriage was not legally valid. But that was nothing compared with the problem he encountered when he tried to bring his third wife to the U.S.
Earlier this year, he got a notice from the U.S. State Department asking for proof of his divorce from Van. He provided the paperwork the Riverside court had given him in 1997.
"They said everything is not final," Chan said. "I felt very upset. I could not eat for 3 days."
He found a lawyer, Faith Nouri. She said a judge had asked for additional information about child visitation. But Van and Chan say they had never received any notice from the court. In 2001, after their case had been dormant for 5 years, the Riverside court dismissed it. Again, Chan and Van said they were never notified.
But now there is no easy way for a judge to retroactively divorce them. Nouri said she plans to ask a judge later this month to set aside the dismissal, but she said "it's a long shot." If the judge won't, Nouri said, she doesn't know how Chan can bring his new wife to this country.
"Then he is in a bigamous marriage," she said. "There will be a lot of explaining to do."
3.22.02 Jim Parker ComputerEdge |
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Emotional investment
… One wonders whether Brooks & his students misled themselves the moment they gave their
mechanical contraptions pet names. Brooks indirectly acknowledges this pitfall by retelling the story of computer
program ELIZA developed by AI pioneer Jos. Weizenbaum to simulate circular conversation technique of trained
psychotherapist, goal being demonstration of how easily a computer simulates conversation thereby proving
bankruptcy of efforts to reproduce human cognition. |
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I activated Pop-up Stopper & closed all windows, then returned to the chat. There I noticed something odd
about "angie". I kept seeing the same generic messages, things like "hi everybody!" "a/s/l/?" and "anybodyelse got
a webcam?" (note the intentional typo). With a start, I realized that Angie was a bot. In this case, a simple
"chatterbot". A bot isn't just an engine for searching the Web. It's any little app that mimics human behavior in a limited way, like searching the Web or luring unwary people to pay porn sites. Anybody with a little Visual Basic experience can make simple bots, which are little more than fancy macros. I figure that MSN chat room had at least ten bots in it, among a whole bunch of lonely people. |
If a bot were somewhat interactive, you could expect it to respond in a limited fashion, but its responses would lack
any creativity & meaningful detail. MSN could filter for bots with a program that ejects "chatters" that appear in
multiple chat rooms, something few humans would do. It could also instruct its human hosts to watch for bots, if
Microsoft gives a hoot. It probably doesn't.
What if you can't tell? Someday, software will be good enough to fool you, maybe good enough to fool anybody. If
you've seen Blade Runner, you may remember how the protagonist asked the "skin job" some pointed,
personal questions. This is also what a judge in the Turing Test does. Usually, the program doesn't stand up to
more than a few questions before the facade is foiled. It takes some serious cleverness to mimic human
conversation realistically. Most of the theme-limited chatterbots produce monotonous output, while the "creative"
ones produce gibberish. But what if somebody half way smart develops a program that analyzes your sentence
structure, has an attitude, and can describe a lot of simulated personal items? When will you have your first
intimate chat with Cyber-Barbie?
"Skye178" was being kind of quiet, so I typed, "Skye, prove you're not a bot. Describe something in your
room."
"In my room?" ELIZA, is that you?
She stretched her 15 minutes of fame to 30 by converting to feminism and condemning pornography as "legalized
rape," but there was never much conviction in anything she said or published. And yet there was a softness to her,
and a gullibility, and a desperate desire to be loved & accepted, making her seem more like a confused girl
from Yonkers than the leader of the porn revolution.
She was probably as stunned as everyone else when Deep Throat became the most famous & profitable smut
movie in history, especially since it was little more than a down & dirty stag film shot in ratty Miami motel
rooms. In the context of the tens of thousands of porn movies made both before & after, it ranks pretty close to
the bottom in terms of cinematography, acting, entertainment value, and just plain sexual thrills. But Deep Throat,
strange as it may seem, changed America's sexual attitudes more than anything since the first Kinsey Report in
1948.
It altered the lives of everyone associated with it. It super-charged the feminist movement. It gave the Mafia its most lucrative business since Prohibition. And it changed the nation's views of obscenity forever. We'll never know exactly how much money it made and continues to make, but estimates have gone as high as $600 million, which would make it one of the most successful motion pictures of any kind in any country in the history of the world. Nations, like people, have moments when they just need to get drunk & party, and apparently something of the sort was happening in June 1972 when, at almost the same moment, the Watergate burglars broke into the DNC offices and Deep Throat opened at the World Theater in NYC. Deep Throat was not just a dirty movie, it was a cause, and it was so popular that most film critics were afraid to deprecate it for fear of seeming unhip.
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Flynt says he won't use nude Lynch photos 11.11.03 Sara Kugler AP ¹ £
"Jessica Lynch is a good kid, she's not a hypocrite or out to fool anyone," Flynt's statement said. "She's just a
victim
of the Bush administration, who is using her to justify the war in Iraq and force-feed us a Joan of Arc." In an AP
interview Tuesday, Lynch declined to comment on any aspect of the matter, including whether such photos exist.
The interview was scheduled to publicize her biography, "I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story," which was
released Tuesday.
Published reports Tuesday said the photos showed Lynch topless, but Flynt's publicist claimed the former soldier is
nude in the pictures. "At this point Mr. Flynt has no comment as to the content of the photographs except to say
Jessica Lynch is not wearing any clothes in them," she said. Flynt's publicist would not say how much the publisher
paid for the pictures, or who sold them.
Lynch ponders survival, celebrity
Charleston WV Fame has come at a price for former POW Jessica Lynch. Since the supply clerk's
wounding & rescue made her the Iraq war's most famous soldier a year ago, well-wishers have been drawn to
her at every public appearance, whether at the diner near her home or at the Golden Globe Awards in Beverly
Hills.
With help from publicists, the young woman who joined the Army to see the world and receive an education has
made a handful of appearances since last year's book tour for Rick Bragg's biography, "I Am A Soldier, Too."
Lynch, still a few weeks shy of legal drinking age, won an award from Glamour magazine (where she met Britney
Spears); rode in the Gator Bowl parade; starred at Gov. Bob Wise's State of the State speech; attended parties
after the Golden Globes (where she met Leonardo DiCaprio); and took a 3 day jaunt to the Bahamas after
christening a cruise ship.
As she grapples with fame, she also struggles with questions both personal (When should I go to college? When
should I get married?) and philosophical (Why did I survive when others didn't?). "I mean, obviously, there has to
be a reason," she said. "I don't know what it is yet. So I have to explore all these things to figure it out."
Lynch's whirlwind started 3.23.03, when her 507th Maintenance Company got lost in the southern Iraqi desert and
was ambushed in Nasiriyah. With her vehicle stalled and her rifle jammed, Pfc. Lynch hopped into a Humvee
driven
by her best friend, Pfc. Lori Piestewa. The vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed. The 11
American soldiers who died in the ambush included Piestewa and 3 others in the Humvee: 1st Sgt. Robert Dowdy,
Sgt. George Buggs and Spc. Edward Anguiano.
It also stirred complaints of U.S. govt media manipulation. Early reports, never stemming from Lynch or her
family and later disproved had the flyweight, blonde, former Wirt County Miss Congeniality suffering knife
& bullet wounds while fighting off attackers until running out of ammunition.
"They say a millimeter a day the nerves grow" from where her back was damaged, she said. "They're giving me
another year. After that, it might not be looking so good. But there's still hope." One of the reasons for her survival,
as she sees it, has been to allow her to tell her story to the families of the 4 soldiers who died next to her.
Eventually, Lynch said, she will go to college to work toward her goal of teaching kindergarten. Her face lights up
whenever she discusses the job, or children. Lynch is uncertain whether her wounds will prevent her from starting
her own family. "I do have a lot of problems with everything inside, so I don't know if that'll affect it or not. I hope
not, because I'd love to have children," she said. With a shy smile, she added, "Love it."
Poster poachers rip off titillating tax talent
Japan is notorious for its fixation for schoolgirl cheesecake, but middle-aged actress Hitomi Kuroki is also showing
that guys can long for the long in the tooth, according to Shukan Taishu (3/17). Though long a top performer in
Japan's entertainment world, Hitomi skyrocketed to superstardom five years ago in the movie "Shitsurakuen," when
she played the part of a woman who carries out a suicide pact with her married lover.
"Hitomi is probably the perfect woman for middle-aged Japanese men. She attracted attention for her incredibly
steamy bed scene in 'Shitsurakuen' and her acting now is just oozes sexuality," a reporter on the TV industry tells
Shukan Taishu. "The program's high ratings are all because of her." But that's not the only area where Hitomi is
proving a hit.
"We were certainly flooded with calls from people who wanted a copy of the Kuroki poster. But we had only
budgeted for 320,000 posters to cover the entire country, so there were hardly any left when we'd finished with
them," a desk jockey from the National Taxation Agency tells Shukan Taishu. "The posters are there to get
everybody to file their tax returns, so all we can do is ask citizens not to take them away."
Though they'd never say as much, the tax agency appears delighted with the success Hitomi has brought to the
project. "To become the 'face' of the taxation agency, you need to be scandal-free and be reasonably well known. It
also helps if you're paying large amounts of tax, too," a source close to a talent agency tells Shukan Taishu. "You
often hear of posters featuring young girls clad in bikinis being stolen, but this is the first time I've heard of people
pinching posters of an actress in her 40s. It's as though all the dirty old men are acting like teen fans."
The Constant Sinner Mae West author © 1930,
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Johnny Carson The Tonight Show sidekick Ed McMahon was such a fan of the movie he showed up with 6 friends and a case of beer, then stood outside the theater afterward enthusing with the public. Frank Sinatra was one of the early audience members, along with VP Spiro Agnew, Warren Beatty, Truman Capote, Shirley MacLaine, Nora Ephron, Bob Woodward, and Sammy Davis Jr., who grew so enamored of Linda Lovelace that within the year he & his wife would be having group sex with her & her husband. Deep Throat is finally one of those movies that really can't be explained. It was simply there at a certain crazy time, and it brought out every suppressed urge of a public starved for sensation. And Linda Lovelace was the ill- equipped starry-eyed girl at the center of that vortex. Lovelace may be the only American celebrity to publish 4 best-selling autobiographies. First 2 celebrate free uninhibited sex as the most liberating form of human expression since man learned to speak. The last two describe pornography as a felony assault against women, a menace to the future of civilization and the very essence of evil. In this one desperately unhappy woman we have both the yin & yang of the sexual revolution played out before our eyes.
Linda Boreman, her real name, in 1969 was recuperating from a car accident at her parents' condo in Ft
Lauderdale, FL. She & her girlfriend were relaxing poolside in their bikinis, despite scars all over Linda's body,
when a bar owner and sometime pimp named Chuck Traynor spotted her and offered the two girls a joint & a
ride in his Jaguar. She was 21. He was 27. In a matter of weeks she had moved in with Traynor, and she soon
found out that opposites truly attract. He was the rough & possessive type, part of the small-time criminal
underworld; she was the protected daughter of a cop. She didn't know much about sex at the time, but Traynor said
he would teach her, using hypnosis to increase her sexual appetite.
The hypnosis apparently worked, because within a few weeks Lovelace was turning tricks. Traynor owned a bar,
the Vegas Inn in North Miami, but when business dropped off, he returned to pimping. In later years Lovelace
would claim that she was a virtual prisoner during her prostitution years, 1969 to 1972, and that she was frequently
beaten & threatened with a gun. The truth is difficult to determine, because Traynor freely admits beating her
but says it was part of mutual sexual games, and that he did carry guns but he never threatened to use one on her.
He also claims she could have left at any time. As late as 1974, Lovelace was declaring in public interviews that
she loved Traynor.
Eventually he moved her to NY where he hoped to sell her services to the most famous madam of her day, Xaveria
Hollander, the "Happy Hooker" herself. But Hollander turned her down as an employee, and it's not difficult to see
why. Lovelace was not a particularly attractive woman, especially by the standards of the call-girl world. She had
frizzy hair and a square mannish face; her breasts were fake, the result of illegal silicone injections she got in 1971,
before implants had been invented. Her sole appeal, according to those who worked with her, was that her
personality came off as winsome and girl-next-doorish. There was also a little bit of the hippie "free love" spirit
about her.
Undeterred by Hollander's rejection, Traynor turned to the next best thing , "loops." These were 5 to 10 minute
filmed sex acts that were also known as stag films, smokers, and peeps. They were all illegal, filmed secretly with
8mm cameras in NYC apartments with anonymous actors, crews, and moneymen supplied by the Colombo crime
family. Lovelace made dozens of these, most directed by a guy named Ted (Tom) Snyder, who wore cowboy hats,
gold chains and a gold pinky ring with "Ted" spelled out in diamonds. When Traynor & Lovelace met Snyder in
1970, he was working out of a filthy apartment on 48th St in Times Square area, and frequently used an actor
named Rob Everett as Lovelace's partner.
Under Traynor's guidance, the loops got more & more freaky. Lovelace appeared in a bestiality loop that she
would describe in one of her autobiographies as something she did at gunpoint. But the six people on the set that
day were interviewed by film historian Jim Holliday, and all except Lovelace claim that she not only did it willingly,
she seemed to enjoy it. Traynor & Lovelace got their big break at a cocktail party for swingers where they met
Gerard Damiano, a director of softcore porn who was casting hardcore scenes for a new movie called Changes.
Damiano was so impressed with Lovelace that he wrote a script especially for her. That script would become Deep
Throat, but first Damiano would have to convince his Mafia bosses to use her.
One of the crewmembers making the trip with Damiano was Herbert Streicher, 25-year-old Jewish kid from
Westchester who had done Wheaties commercials and Off-Broadway theater but was still struggling to make it as
a
legitimate actor. He had turned to porn, both behind and in front of the camera, to pay the bills, and had even made
a couple of loops with Lovelace. On this trip he was hired strictly as a grip & gaffer. Streicher liked Lovelace,
and would always defend her as a sweet trusting person, even though he pooh-poohed her accounts of being
forced into porn. "She's a beautiful person," he would say later. "As far as a personality, Linda has got that
magnetic ability to draw an audience or anybody in a room directly to her, that twinkle in the eye, that real smile
without phoniness or presumptuousness. Linda's a sweet, sweet girl, a very together person. She's not super
bright, and she's not an actress, but she's totally open & free sexually."
If anyone knew what he was talking about, it was Streicher: his screen name was Harry Reems. When Damiano
couldn't find anyone to play the key role of the doctor, he took Streicher/Reems off gaffer duty, bought him a white
coat at a barber supply house, and film history was about to be made. The cast and crew settled into the Voyager
Inn on Biscayne Boulevard and spent an uneventful 6 days shooting scenes that could just as easily have been
shot in Brooklyn. Lovelace would later claim that Traynor savagely beat her on the night before shooting began, but
no one else noticed anything strange about his or her behavior. If anything, they thought Lovelace was a little too
much in love. "She doted on [Traynor]," said Damiano. "She loved him, she was close to him, she was never out of
his sight." In fact, Damiano discovered that she was so protective of Traynor's feelings that she would try to
disguise the fact that she was enjoying the on-screen sex. After a while they started sending Traynor out to get
cigarettes when they needed a "money shot and the sex got 5 times better because she relaxed," recalled
Reems.
Of course, the other way to interpret that is that she was an abused intimidated slave, the way she would be
portrayed by Andrea Dworkin & Gloria Steinem, among others, in later years. Deep Throat was the longest 62
minutes that millions of people would ever sit through. In retrospect, the most inspired decision Damiano made was
to rename the movie Deep Throat. Nothing else could possibly explain its success. Lovelace was interviewed by
Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, further stoking the interest of socialites, students, swingers, and the curious.
Sinema magazine summed up the effusive prose of the day, praising Lovelace's "fresh carnality, the air of
thoroughly debauched innocence, the sense of a woman exploring the limits of sexual expression and feeling.
Linda Lovelace is the girl next door grown up into a shameless . . . woman."
What's odd, in retrospect, is that she failed to do the one thing that would have provided her with long-term income. Although she did occasional single-scene appearances in other porn movies, she only made one other full-length film, the sequel to Deep Throat, then swore off hardcore altogether.
The beginning of the end came when Lovelace was arrested at the Dunes Hotel in Las Vegas in January 1974 for possession of cocaine & amphetamines. She was just starting out on what she hoped would be a legitimate nightclub & theater career.
Winters became her new Svengali, setting up a new book deal for her that led to her second autobiography, The Intimate Diary of Linda Lovelace, and a movie called Linda Lovelace for President that ended her dreams of mainstream stardom for good.
Perhaps the most revealing interview she ever gave appeared in Penthouse magazine, and in it she sounds like a
country girl lost in the big city. "After I got away from Traynor," she told Eric Danville, "it was a lot more fun,
because I wasn't being sexually abused. I was walking around with transparent clothes on, but that wasn't too bad.
By 1976, when Linda Lovelace for President ended her career, she had called it quits with Winters and run straight into the arms of yet another man, a construction worker named Larry Marchiano. By 1980 she had become a mother of 2, a born-again Christian, and a feminist, and was living on welfare as her husband tried to make ends meet as a cable installer on Long Island.
Time to tell her story a third time, in the book Ordeal, cowritten by Mike McGrady, the writer who had planned the
Naked Came a Stranger hoax of 1969. (The publisher, perhaps leery of McGrady, was so concerned about libel
suits that Lovelace was required to take an 11-hour lie-detector test before they would go ahead with it.) This is the book in which she made her most serious charges, accusing Traynor of virtual white slavery and the porn business as a whole of legalized rape.
She hit the lecture circuit, talking about the evils of porn for $1,500 per speech, and would eventually testify before the Meese Commission on Pornography in 1986. Her old friends in the business never really took the allegations
seriously.
Yet she continued to be haunted by the film. Throughout the 1980s she was still in demand as a professional
witness for anti-obscenity movements. She appeared on Donahue and testified before the Minneapolis City Council when it was considering a law defining pornography as discrimination against women. And in 1986 she wrote her last autobiography, Out of Bondage, with an introduction by Gloria Steinem.
Just as the book came out, though, her health fell apart. First she had a double radical mastectomy, the result of
the silicone injections she'd gotten in 1971. But during the procedure, doctors discovered that her liver was
malfunctioning, the result of the blood transfusion she'd had after her 1969 car accident. Apparently the original
blood donor had Hepatitis C, and barring a liver transplant, she would die. A liver did become available in March
1987, and she underwent a 15-hour procedure at Presbyterian-University Hospital in Pittsburgh, followed by two
months' convalescence.
In 1993 she went to work for a computer company, doing purchasing & record keeping for $9.45 an hour, but
she was fired a year later for falsifying a time card. Her third marriage broke up in 1996. Continuing her pattern of
vilifying her exes, she described Marchiano as an emotionally abusive alcoholic that she had loved for only the first 2 years.
For the generation born after Deep Throat, the term had entered the vernacular as a synonym for oral sex and the
name of several cocktails. (All of them are served in a shot glass with either whipped cream or Bailey's on top.) But even Generation Y knows who Linda Lovelace is, as her daughter found out in high school. "I'm not ashamed of my mother," she said. "I'm never going to say, oh no, that's not her . . . I just have to deal with it .…"
But even as the very last smidgen of controversy seemed to have been milked out of Deep Throat, Ron Howard,
the Hollywood producer/director, optioned the rights to Ordeal for $3,000. So given the growing Hollywood
fascination with all things sordid, we may see her story told one more time. Until then, she'll mostly be remembered as the "How did she do it?" girl among the people who saw the film, and the "Bad men made me do it" girl among feminists & Christian crusaders.
The porn industry has coined its own term, "The Linda Syndrome," to describe porn stars, like Angel Kelly &
Samantha Fox, who become stars and then disavow their porn past and embrace feminism. Lovelace was the
longest-surviving member of her original liver-transplant support group, so it's ironic that she died alone, as the
result of losing control of her car 4.3.02 and hitting a concrete post. For almost 3 weeks she remained on life
support. |
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Sex peddled as power in pornified girl culture Does the trend build confidence in young women or diminish it? 6.3.07 Martha Irvine AP
Chicago Porn used to be relegated to a video hidden in the bottom drawer, or a magazine under the mattress. Today, it’s part of everyday life. Hugh Hefner’s girlfriends have become TV’s “girls next door.” Porn stars have MySpace pages and do voiceovers for video games. “Porn on demand” is standard for hotel TVs and upgraded cable packages; it’s even easier to find it with a few clicks on the computer.
In today’s world, sex doesn’t just sell. The pervasiveness of porn has made sexiness, from subtle to raunchy, a much-sought-after attribute online, at school and even at work. Many agree that the trend has had a particularly strong influence on young women, in some cases, taking shape as an unapologetic embracing of sexuality and exhibitionism.
For Eglinton, taking off her clothes for an Internet audience was freeing, fun and a little rebellious.
Michael Simon, a therapist and high school counselor in the San Francisco Bay area, has seen an increasing number of girls and young women in his private practice after episodes in which they undressed or masturbated in front of a Web cam for people they met online.
Yvonne K. Fulbright, a sexologist and author who co-hosts the “Sex Files” program on Sirius satellite radio, also has seen the shift in attitude. She’s posted messages on Craigslist looking for people who want to comment on various topics for the show, and, instead, often receives responses from young women who send descriptions of their breast and waist sizes.
Indeed, there was a time when dancing for the masses in barely there outfits was the realm of music video stars and strippers. Then the Internet and reality TV came along, providing new platforms for young women to flaunt it for a shot at fame. In one hit prime-time series, for instance, eager young contestants perform soft-core porn dance routines in hopes of becoming the next member of The Pussycat Dolls singing group.
Some employers taken aback by the trend have responded by setting tougher dress codes. Many school administrators have done the same.
It’s a big topic of discussion among researchers. A 2007 report from the American Psychological Association compiled the findings of myriad studies, showing that the sexualization of young women and girls, in particular, can hurt them in many ways. Problems can include anything from low self-esteem and eating disorders to depression and anxiety.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with their sexual pleasure", says Simon. “It has to do with pleasing somebody else, the grasping for attention. As a parent, it makes me want to cry.”
Anna Stanley, a 25-year-old in Madison WI, knows all about that double standard. She also wonders if she and her peers place too much importance on the power of sexiness.
She wishes there was more focus on helping women develop a healthy sense of their own sexuality. “Suicide Girls” pinup Web site founder Missy Suicide couldn’t agree more. |
Still, many skeptics remain.
“To be sure, it can make you feel powerful to know that you are arousing strong feelings in other people, that you have their attention and admiration,” says UC Santa Cruz psychologist Eileen Zurbriggen who helped compile the APA report.
“This is the same sense of power experienced by charismatic rock stars and politicians. But politicians also wield other kinds of power. They can make actual changes to the legal, economic, and geopolitical landscapes, changes that have far-ranging impacts. “Women,” she says, “might be better off developing other sources of power".
introduction
The parents sat momentarily in silence, stunned. This was before President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky made oral sex a household word, and two years before the popularity of oral sex in middle schools percolated through the media. One mother, who had heard the news over the phone from a school counselor before the meeting, told me later, “I almost dropped the phone".
Now, in 1964, my 8th grade girlfriends and I were no prisses; we had secret places around town where we went to kiss and neck with our boyfriends. But when did teenaged girls, everyday girls, not just the “fast” girls or the “loose” girls, start skipping the smooching and go straight to giving head? How did they come to believe that offering their services to guys they barely knew “was no big deal”?
Eventually, after much debate, they published the article on the front page, and that launched me on an investigation that continues today into the sexual and romantic lives of America’s young people.
Bumping and grinding to a new rap number, they ripped off their jackets to reveal short nightgowns—see-through black, with pink polka dots over black bras and lacy fuchsia boy shorts. Fifty dollars! The bidding began. A couple of players started to strip further and, drunk out of their minds, fell down.
The next thing Morgan knew, it was early morning and she was lying in her own bed next to someone she thought of as just a friend. He told her that they had hooked up after the auction and that she had been a willing partner.
He also told her that they had had sex. After inspecting herself briefly, she realized it was true.
Her grades were falling, putting her at risk of losing her scholarship. She had had several sessions with a psychiatrist, who prescribed an antidepressant that made her groggy.
Listening to her in the spring of 2005, my mind went back to 1968 again and I found myself making generational comparisons once more. Sure, we used to leave our college dorm windows cracked so our boyfriends could sneak in. But we were terrified of being found out and wouldn’t think of taking off our clothes until the guys were inside and the lights were off.
Clearly, young women have changed not only the way they relate intimately to young men but also the way they think about intimacy. My Post articles on sexuality since the oral-sex scandal have not been about isolated acts of a promiscuous few but indications of a large cultural shift.
High school and college teachers I’ve talked to, as well as researchers, remark on this: Relationships have been replaced by the casual sexual encounters known as hookups. Love, while desired by some, is being put on hold or seen as impossible; sex is becoming the primary currency of social interaction. Some girls can handle this; others, like Morgan, are exhausted physically, emotionally and spiritually by it.
Science tells us that sexual attractiveness plays a significant role in the emotional and social lives of young women. Parents seem largely unaware of this or of how firmly hooking up has taken hold in young people’s imaginations and lives. They are reassured by statistics that show a significant decline in teen pregnancies and a slight drop in the proportion of high school students having intercourse.
Hooking up’s defining characteristic is the ability to unhook from a partner at any time, just as they might delete an old song on their iPod or an out-of-date “away” message on their computer. Maybe they tire of their partner, or find someone who is “hotter” or, for some other reason, more to their liking.
Unhooked: The new culture of casual sex
Nearly 50 years since the pill first revolutionized sex on college campuses, "free love" may be a thing of the past, but a new culture of casual sex, known as "hooking up," has now become the norm per Laura Sessions Stepp's new book "Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both"
3.5.07 excerpt Laura Sessions Stepp
I can explain the origin of this book with two stories, one brief, the other more detailed.
In the spring of 1998, the principal of a suburban Washington, D.C., middle school called about 25 parents to a special night meeting. There, over the annoying hum of the fluorescent bulbs found in 8th grade classrooms around the country, she announced that as many as a dozen girls had been performing oral sex on two or three boys for most of the school year. The 13 and 14 year-old students were getting it on at parties, in parks and even in a couple of neighborhood parking lots.
The school was my son’s. He was not involved, but kids he knew were. I wrote about the sex ring for The Washington Post and I remember, to this day, what one girl in particular told me.
“I did it first in the fall with a boy I kinda liked, thinking it would make him like me,” she said. “It didn’t. Then I did it a couple more times in the spring at parties. We would go outside, then come back in and sit around and talk about it. It was no big deal".
My reporting instincts shifted into high gear as I discovered that this was not an isolated case. School administrators were beginning to report similar behaviors in middle schools around the Washington area. My editors, extremely uncomfortable about putting the phrases “oral sex” and “middle school” in the same newspaper story, pressed for multiple, concrete examples, and I delivered.
Now for the second, longer story. It took place almost 7 years later, in January 2005, on a college campus in downtown Washington. Rapper T.I.’s voice and more than a few shots of liquor had hundreds of students buzzed that Saturday night inside the Marvin Center of George Washington University (or GW).
Crowded along both sides of an elevated catwalk, waiting for scantily clad freshman women to emerge from a tent at one end, the students sang along with the music:
Who set the city on fire as soon as he got freed
Out they came, one act after another, 18 and 19 year old Division I athletes, ranging from passably pretty to drop-dead gorgeous, putting themselves up for bid at the annual “date auction” sponsored by GW’s student athletic council. Big white bidding cards popped up immediately. Fifty dollars for a night on the town with a couple of lacrosse players! Seventy-five dollars for members of the crew team!
Da king back now, ho’s don’t even know how to act now
Hit the club strippers gettin’ naked ’fore I sit down
Bring ’em out! Bring ’em out!
The water polo players, dressed in swim parkas and strappy black stilettos, brought down the house. They had been practicing polo for 8 months, spending thirty hours a week in the pool. Their season over, they left little question in anyone’s mind that they were ready to party.
Seventy-five dollars! One player pretended to go down on another girl. Eighty dollars!
Morgan, a muscular blonde freshman, started flashing the audience. One hundred dollars! Sold!
Morgan turned to wobble back boozily into the tent.
“Nice vagina!” yelled a boy standing just below her as she left.
4 months later, she sat across a table from me in a campus coffee shop, her hair pulled back by a Burberry plaid headband. She sketched out the rest of that year at college. She’d had a series of sexual encounters, and none of them amounted to anything. She depended on alcohol to get ready for boys and, when things didn’t work out, to take the edge off her disappointment.
“I’ve dug myself a pretty deep ditch,” she admitted.
Would she participate in a date auction again, knowing what she knew now? I asked.
“Absolutely,” she said. “It was so much fun. The energy, the hype . . . The next day everyone was saying, ‘Those water polo girls were outrageous.’ . . . I knew I was an object, yeah. But I didn’t feel like a piece of meat at all. If it was in any way degrading, I never would’ve done it".
Now girls were stripping in the student center in front of dozens of boys they didn’t know, pantomiming sex onstage and later doing the real thing without saying much, if anything, to their partners. When did conversation and negotiation drop completely out of the picture?
To some degree, depending on their temperament, upbringing and luck, all girls are caught up in the changes. Young people have virtually abandoned dating and replaced it with group get-togethers and sexual behaviors detached from love or commitment, and sometimes even from liking.
They struggle largely outside the awareness of parents who either don’t know what is going on or are vaguely aware but don’t know what to do.
What they don’t understand is that sexual intercourse, or any other sexual act, is only part of the story. What is or isn’t going on in addition to sex is at least as important. The crucial thing to remember in all of this is that hooking up, in the minds of this generation, carries no commitment. Partners hook up with the understanding that however far they go sexually, neither should become romantically involved in any serious way.
Maybe they get burned badly in a relationship, or find themselves swamped with term papers and final exams.
The freedom to unhook from someone ostensibly without repercussions gives them maximum flexibility. Although I use both phrases, this is not a hookup culture so much as an unhooked culture. It is a way of thinking about relationships, period.
2.2.03 Reuters
Nairobi, Kenya An infertile lioness with a strong maternal instinct has tried to adopt a baby antelope, only to watch it die like several others she has snatched. The lioness grabbed the new-born impala calf from its mother in Kenya's Samburu national reserve on Saturday, but instead of eating it, began licking its coat like one of her own. "We thought it was just a normal kill, but when it got hold of the impala we realised it wasn't going to eat it up, we realised it was an adoption again," said George Oluoch, manager of Larsens Camp, a tourist site in the reserve. He said the baby impala was found dead on Sunday, apparently having died from a combination of stress, exhaustion and lack of its mother's milk. The lioness, named Kamuniak or "blessed one" by wardens, is a loner who appears to snatch antelopes because she cannot have young of her own. Each attempt has been short-lived, despite her efforts to nurture the calves, in some cases even allowing their natural mothers to feed them. One of Kamuniak's antelopes was eaten by a male lion, another died, while others have managed to escape back to their natural mothers or were taken away by game wardens. |
New version of dinosaur extinction; asteroid is not to blame
4.22.04 Pravda
A new study by fertility experts on how higher temperatures could have led to too many male and not enough
female baby dinos points to another way the dinos could have been wiped out without an asteroid impact. Most experts agree asteroid's impacts triggered a series of global changes that killed off the dinosaurs. The new research found the impacts would also have kicked up dust that cooled the air and triggered volcanic activity that would have created even more dust and ash.
Experts say even a small skewing of populations toward males would have led to eventual extinction. If dinosaurs were more like modern-day reptiles such as crocodiles, they change sex based on temperature. Temperature at which eggs are incubated can affect the sex of the developing babies.
Palaeontologists and biologists had raised the idea before, said palaeontologist Dr Mark Norell of the American
Museum of Natural History. But this was the first time experts in human fertility had done so. "We thought we could bring some new angles to dinosaurs," Miller said.
In mammals, birds, all snakes, most lizards, amphibians, and some fish, sex is determined genetically, though in different ways. For example, male mammals have a Y chromosome. Using genes instead of temperature or
another environmental condition was probably nature's way of protecting mammals from sudden climate changes, Miller said. |
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Sperm no longer needed for reproduction 4.22.04 Pravda
Japanese
researchers have demonstrated for the first time how mammals can reproduce without a male, leading to
the birth of apparently healthy baby mice by mixing two sets of female genes inside an egg. Experts said it will be a long time before men are relegated to the role of bystanders in human reproduction. But the latest experiments suggest that laboratory tricks can essentially eliminate the need for fertilization, at least in mice.
Female-only reproduction is common in the insect & reptile worlds, but there is no evidence yet that it can
happen in humans or other primates. Among the many practical hurdles: One of the sets of female-derived mouse genes came from a very early-stage egg not readily found in an adult human, report sfgate.com The discovery may shed light on why mammals need genes from each parent to survive. The technique has few applications beyond the research world and probably wouldn't be attempted by humans because of the high failure rate, the doctors said. |
Mammals are the only group of animals that do not sometimes reproduce by parthenogenesis, a process in which unfertilised eggs start to develop on their own and produce healthy offspring. Aphids and turkeys are among the species that employ it, and some lizards breed exclusively in this way. Tokyo team leader Tomohiro Kono claimed Kaguya as the first example of a mammal born by parthenogenesis. This, however, has been challenged as she has 2 parents rather than one, and did not develop from a single unfertilised egg.
What is beyond dispute is that she is the first mammal to be born without a father. Even female clones such as
Dolly the sheep technically have a father; the male that sired the female adult from which they were cloned
per timesonline.co.uk
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Lesbian brains react like men's in study Adds weight to physical basis for homosexuality 5.9.06 Randolph E. Schmid AP ø
Wash.D.C. Lesbians' brains react differently to sex hormones than those of heterosexual women
An earlier study of gay men also showed their brain response was different from straight men, an even stronger difference than that found in lesbians.
''It shows sexual orientation may very well have a different basis between men and women … this is not just a mirror image situation," said McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario) Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine brain anatomy and sexual orientation specialist Sandra Witelson.
Whether humans respond to pheromones has been debated, although in 2000 American researchers reported finding a gene that they believe directs a human pheromone receptor in the nose.
Heterosexual women found the male and female pheromones about equally pleasant, while straight men and lesbians liked the female pheromone more than the male one. Men and lesbians also found the male hormone more irritating than the female one, while straight women were likelier to be irritated by the female hormone than the male one.
The brains of all 3 groups were scanned when sniffing male and female hormones and a set of 4 ordinary odors. Ordinary odors were processed in the brain circuits associated with smell in the volunteers. In heterosexual males, the male hormone was processed in the scent area, but the female hormone was processed in the hypothalamus, which is related to sexual stimulation. Each of the 3 groups of subjects included 12 healthy, unmedicated, and right-handed individuals. The research was funded by the Swedish Medical Research Council, Karolinska Institute and the Wallenberg Foundation.
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Deep, dark secrets of his & her brains Sandra Witelson had studied scores of brains looking for gender differences. Then she found one that made a difference: Einstein's. 6.16.05 & Robt Lee Hotz L.A. Times
Hamilton, Canada The invitation curled from her fax machine, a courtly question scrawled above the signature of a man whose name she did not recognize.
In 1955, he had conducted a routine autopsy of Einstein after the 76-year-old physicist died at Princeton Hospital. The remains were to be cremated. Harvey, however, decided to preserve the organ responsible for the theory of relativity and the principle of the atomic bomb.
When Witelson began acquiring human brains, sex was the last thing on her mind. Inside her walk-in refrigerator at McMaster University here in Ontario, her collection filled 3 walls of metal shelves. The 125 putty-colored specimens sat in frosted jars and snap-top plastic tubs like quarts of boiled shrimp and wedges of cheese.
The two hemispheres of the brain are almost symmetrical physically but can seem to be separate minds when it comes to awareness and mental processing. They even have different problem-solving styles, researchers report. Yet they work together seamlessly to produce a single mind.
By 1987, 120 men and women had agreed to donate their brains after death. They all submitted to thorough psychological and intelligence tests so that each brain would be accompanied by a detailed profile of the mind that had animated it.
In the prime of life, the cerebral cortex contains 25 billion neurons linked through 164 trillion synapses. Thoughts thread through 7.4 million miles of dendrite fibers and 62,000 miles of axons so compacted that the entire neural network is no larger than a coconut.
No 2 brains are identical, nor are 2 minds ever the same. |
She traced synapses, the junctures where impulses pass from one neuron to another in the hidden root cellars of the brain. Wherever she looked, she discerned subtle patterns that only gender seemed to explain.
"We actually didn't set out to find sex differences," she said. "Sometimes as a scientist, you are doing one thing and you bump into something else."
The brains in Witelson's freezer are contested terrain in a controversy over gender equality and mental performance. Her findings, published in Science, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet and other peer-reviewed journals, buttress the proposition that basic mental differences between men and women stem in part from physical differences in the brain. Witelson is convinced that gender shapes the anatomy of male and female brains in separate but equal ways beginning at birth.
On average, she said, the brains of women and men are neither better nor worse, but they are measurably different. Men's brains, for instance, are typically bigger, but on the whole, no smarter.
"What is astonishing to me," Witelson said, "is that it is so obvious that there are sex differences in the brain and these are likely to be translated into some cognitive differences, because the brain helps us think and feel and move and act. Yet there is a large segment of the population that wants to pretend this is not true."
No one knows how these neural differences between the sexes translate into thought and behavior, whether they might influence the way men and women perceive reality, process information, form judgments and behave socially.
But even at this relatively early stage in exploration of the brain's microanatomy, battle lines between scientists, equal rights activists and educators have formed. Some activists fear that research like Witelson's could be used to justify discrimination based on gender differences, just as ill-conceived notions of human genetics once influenced laws codifying racial stereotypes about blacks, Asians and Jews.
Other experts argue that the physical differences Witelson observed may result not from the brain's basic design but from conditioning that begins in infancy, when the brain produces neurons at a rate of half a million a minute and reaches out to make connections 2 million times a second. Spurred by learning, neurons and synapses are ruthlessly pruned, a process that continues in fits and starts throughout adolescence, then picks up again in middle age.
"The brain is being sculpted gradually through sets of interactions," said Brown University gender studies expert Anne Fausto-Sterling. "Even when something in the brain appears biological, it may have come to be that way because of how the body has experienced the world."
As Witelson's research helped establish, however, the mental divide between the sexes is more complex and more rooted in the fundamental biology of the brain than many scientists once suspected. In the last decade, studies of perception, cognition, memory and neural function have found apparent gender differences that often buck conventional prejudices.
Women's brains, for instance, seem to be faster and more efficient than men's. All in all, men appear to have more gray matter, made up of active neurons, and women more of the white matter responsible for communication between different areas of the brain. Overall, women's brains seem to be more complexly corrugated, suggesting that more complicated neural structures lie within, researchers at UCLA found in August.
Men and women appear to use different parts of the brain to encode memories, sense emotions, recognize faces, solve certain problems and make decisions. Indeed, when men and women of similar intelligence and aptitude perform equally well, their brains appear to go about it differently, as if nature had separate blueprints, researchers at UC Irvine reported this year.
"If you find that men and women have fundamentally different brain architectures while still accomplishing the same things," said neuroscientist Richard Haier, who conducted the study, "this challenges the assumption that all human brains are fundamentally the same."
Yet, for the most part, scientists have been unable to document such patterns conclusively.
No one, however, had scrutinized as many brains as Witelson. She began by studying the corpus callosum, the cable of nerves that channels all communication and cooperation between the brain's two hemispheres. Examining tissue samples through a microscope, she discovered that the more left-handed a person was, the bigger the corpus callosum.
To her surprise, however, she found that this held true only for men. Among women there was no difference between right-handers and left-handers.
"Once you find this one difference," she remembered thinking, "it implies that there will be a cascade of differences."
As she systematically analyzed the brains in her refrigerator, she discovered that other neural structures seemed larger or smaller among men, depending on whether the man had been right-handed or left-handed. They were relatively the same size in women.
"The relationships that we were finding were always, and I do mean always, different for men and women," she said.
She narrowed her study to right-handed men and women, still looking for differences in microscopic anatomy between the left side of the brain and the right side. She meticulously counted the neurons in sets of tissue in which each sample measured 280 microns wide, about twice the thickness of a human hair, and 3 millimeters deep.
Staring through the microscope, she was baffled.
"I had the first two patients, and they were so very different," Witelson said. "I kept looking and looking at them, trying to see what the difference could be."
Then she consulted the donor documentation for each tissue sample. "Finally, I saw that one was a man, and one was a woman."
Among women, the neurons in the cortex were closer together. There were as many as 12% more neurons in the female brain. That might explain how women could demonstrate the same levels of intelligence as men despite the difference in brain size.
"So among female brains, the cortex is constructed differently, with neurons packed more closely together," she said.
Witelson probed deeper. She knew that the human cortex was a sandwich of six layers, each packed with neurons. She peeled away the sheets of the temporal lobe, a region associated with perception and memory, in several of her brain specimens. She discovered that the increased neural density occurred only on layers 2 and 4, which form the hard wiring for signals coming into the brain.
Then she analyzed the microscopic structure of the prefrontal cortex. There the crowding of neurons was evident only in layers 3, 5 and 6, which carry the wiring for outbound signals.
Just to be sure, she checked left-handed brains as well as right-handed brains. She found the same sex differences when she surveyed her left-handed brains.
Perhaps, she speculated, these neuron-rich layers in an area associated with perception and speech were the reason women scored more highly than men on tasks involving language and communication. Slowly, she formed a theory: The brains of men and women are indeed different from birth. Yet the differences are subtle. They might be found only among the synapses in brain structures responsible for specific cognitive abilities.
For so long, scientists had championed the idea of larger brains as an indicator of intellect. Witelson, however, gradually became convinced that overall brain size didn't matter.
"One of the things that firmed it up for me," she recalled, "was the case of Einstein."
By taking Einstein's brain, Thomas Harvey had succumbed to an impulse older than medicine. Since the days of Hippocrates, philosophers and scholars have been arguing over how the brain houses an intangible human spirit. St. Augustine was convinced that the soul lodged in the fluid-filled cavity of the organ's middle ventricle. Galen, the ancient pioneer of medicine, argued that vital spirits resided in the fourth ventricle.
When modern scientists discovered that intellect could be traced to neural tissues, brains became precious curios. Pathologists collected the brains of gifted musicians, scientists and other notables the way 18th century literary enthusiasts held onto the hearts of poets such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron.
Researchers at the Moscow Brain Institute measured dozens of the most brilliant brains. Vladimir Lenin, the leader of Russia's Soviet revolution, had a brain weighing about 3 pounds, they determined. The brain of writer Ivan Turgenev weighed 4.4 pounds. That of satirist Anatole France was 2.1 pounds.
At Princeton Hospital, Harvey weighed Einstein's brain on a grocer's scale. It was 2.7 pounds, less than the average adult male brain. He had the fragile organ infused with fixative and dissected it into 240 pieces, each containing about two teaspoons of cerebral tissue. He shaved off 1,000 hair-thin slivers to be mounted on microscope slides for study.
For years, Harvey agonized over how next to proceed. His odd pursuit inspired two books: "Possessing Genius" by Carolyn Abraham and "Driving Mr. Albert" by Michael Paterniti. Through the decades, however, he drifted in obscurity. Finally in 1985, pioneering neuroanatomist Marion Diamond at UC Berkeley persuaded him to part with four small plugs of brain tissue. Diamond discovered that the physicist's brain had more cells servicing, supporting and nurturing each neuron than did 11 other brains she studied. These unusual cells were in a region associated with mathematical and language skills.
When they published their findings, the researchers speculated that these neurons might help explain Einstein's "unusual conceptual powers."
Critics contended the study was riddled with flaws, its findings meaningless. Eventually, Harvey mailed bits of Einstein's motor cortex to a researcher at the University of Alabama, who reported that the cortex appeared to be thinner than normal but with more tightly packed neurons. Had it simply been compacted by time and storage conditions? DNA testing revealed nothing. The preservative fluids apparently had scrambled Einstein's genetic code.
Then in 1995, Harvey happened across Witelson's work. He read her research paper on gender differences and neuron density in the Journal of Neuroscience.
"It was impressive," he recalled. He was even more intrigued to learn about her collection of brains. He was 84, still hoping that his tissue samples had something to teach about the neural geography of genius. To make ends meet, he was working in a plastics factory.
Worrying about Einstein's brain, like the years, had become a burden. Harvey carefully packed it in the back of his battered Dodge and drove north to Witelson's laboratory. "I had the brain in a big jar," Harvey, now 94, recalled.
At midnight, he crossed over the Rainbow Bridge by Niagara Falls into Canada. Customs officials asked if he had anything to declare. Just a brain in the trunk, he told them. They waved him through.
Witelson could barely contain her curiosity. Einstein's brain, so far from ordinary in its intellectual achievement, might reveal a telltale anatomical signature. Size alone certainly could not account for his brain power.
"Here was somebody who was clearly very clever; yet his overall brain size was average," Witelson said. "It certainly tells you that, in a man, sheer overall brain size can't be a crucial factor in brilliance."
For a moment, she was like a schoolchild picking candies from a Valentine's Day sampler. She judiciously selected 14 pieces of Einstein's brain. She took parts of his right and left temporal lobes, and the right and left parietal lobes. Never had Harvey given away so much brain.
Witelson and her colleagues carefully compared the 40-year-old tissue samples with dozens of normal male and female brains in her collection. She also compared them with brains from 8 elderly men to account for any changes due to Einstein's age at the time of his death.
She found that one portion of Einstein's brain perhaps related to mathematical reasoning, the inferior parietal region, was 15% wider than normal. Witelson also found that it lacked a fissure that normally runs along the length of the brain. The average human brain has two distinct parietal lobe compartments; Einstein's had one.
Perhaps the synapses in this area were more densely interconnected.
"Maybe this was one of the underlying factors in his brilliance," she said. "Maybe that is how it works."
She took it as confirmation of her suspicions about the anatomy of intelligence. If there were differences affecting normal mental ability, they would show up in the arrangements of synapses at particular points in the brain. Einstein, she was convinced, had been born with a one-in-a-billion brain.
"We suggest that the differences we see are present at birth," Witelson said. "It is not a consequence of environmental differences."
She turned again to the brains in her refrigerator. Wherever she looked, she began to see evidence of how microanatomy might underlie variations in mental abilities. As she matched the brain specimens to the intellectual qualities of their owners, she discovered that differences in the size of the corpus callosum were linked to IQ scores for verbal ability, but only in women. She found that memory was linked to how tightly neurons were packed, but only in men.
Witelson determined that brain volume decreased with age among men, but hardly at all among women. Moreover, those anatomical changes appeared to be closely tied to a gradual decline in mental performance in men. "There is something going on in the male brain," she said, "that is not going on in the female brain."
Last year, a worried farming couple brought their youngest child to McMaster University Medical Center. They were no longer certain whether their child was a girl or a boy. The youngster had traits of both, as occurs in about one in 5,000 births. In this child, nature had devised a living test of gender and the brain.
The medical experts determined that the child's body was a composite of normal and abnormal cells. Some had a girl's usual complement of two female sex chromosomes. Many, perhaps due to a mutation, had only one female chromosome and consequently were almost male.
"Which cells got to the brain?" wondered Witelson, who was called in as a consultant. "You have to consider the sex of the brain."
The doctors all suspected the child's brain was masculine. There was no way to know for sure. They could not safely take a sample of neural tissue to biopsy. Until recently, reconstructive surgery based on a doctor's best guess was the rule in such cases. But in Hamilton, they counseled patience, Witelson recalled.
"We said, 'Let the child's behavior tell us what sex the child is.' "
Given time, she believed, the brain would reveal itself.
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Double Your bubbles Japanese school girl watch
7.05 Todd Jatras Wired
Why waste money on Pocky or Meltykiss chocolates when a girl can buy candy that boosts her cup size? Tokyo-based company B2Up has created Bust-Up, a chewing gum fortified with phytoestrogens, naturally occurring compounds that mimic estrogen and are found in everything from tofu to flaxseed. A limited supply of Bust-Up is available in the US for $50 per 100-piece bottle via bust-up-gum.com. The libido killer Disturbing side effect of birth control pills - women losing interest in sex 1.11.06 Carlson Tucker MSNBC
Recent studies suggest there may be some of the major problems with the birth control pill and its effect on womens sex drive. Dr. Drew Pinsky, “Love Line” radio show & Discovery Health Channel “Strictly Sex with Dr. Drew” host discussed the findings w/ Tucker Carlson.
Carlson : Long-term use of the birth control pill can affect a woman‘s sex drive. Even after she goes off it, though most women cycle on and off the pill, or many do throughout their lifetimes, even when they go off it, they have decreased sex drive.
Dr. Pinsky : Physicians have been irresponsible in not discussing this in great enough detail with female patients.
I‘ve seen the same thing with antidepressant medicines, another thing commonly prescribed for patients. We really don‘t counsel them in great detail (as to) potential affect on their libido.
Carlson: What is the percentage of American women on the pill?
Dr. Pinsky : I don‘t know the number. A biological anthropologist named Lionel Tiger took chimpanzee pods and put the female chimpanzees on the birth control pill then watched how the pod behavior was profoundly affected. One of the most prominent things he saw is the female chimpanzees were no longer interested in the males. They were no longer interested in reproducing.
The birth control pill basically works by tricking the women‘s body into, let‘s say, believing that it‘s pregnant. Some biological changes result from testosterone, primary hormone of sex drive in both men and women, and a sex hormone binding globulin, a protein that circulates in blood and binds testosterone and other sex hormones.
Carlson: The pill‘s been around for 40 years. Are there other medications that are being prescribed whose long term affect we don‘t know?
Dr. Pinsky : Every medication every time interacts with the medical system, risking harm. There‘s not a medication on earth, whether aspirin, Tylenol or Sudafed, that cannot harm you. All medicines can be harmful.
We‘ve known it‘s happened while people on are on the pill. We figured we can change the pill, adjust it, figure out what‘s going to give the least amount of side effect. Now here‘s evidence that it can be persistent; that‘s what doctors really have not known until now.
For women, nothing's like the smell of men's sweat
2.7.07 Will Dunham Reuters
Wash.D.C. UC Berkeley researchers said women who sniffed a chemical found in male sweat experienced elevated levels of an important hormone, along with higher sexual arousal, faster heart rate and other effects. The study, published this week in the Journal of Neuroscience, represents the first direct evidence that people secrete a scent that influences the hormones of the opposite sex.
The study focused on androstadienone, considered a male chemical signal. Previous research had established that a whiff of it affected women's mood, sexual and physiological arousal and brain activation. Its impact on hormones was less clear.
A derivative of testosterone, it is found in male sweat as well as in saliva and semen. It smells somewhat musky.
Cortisol levels in the women who smelled androstadienone shot up within roughly 15 minutes and stayed elevated for up to an hour. Consistent with previous research, the women also reported improved mood, higher sexual arousal, and had increased blood pressure, heart rate and breathing.
Wyart said while this marked the first time a specific component of male sweat was demonstrated to influence women's hormones, other components of sweat may do similar things. The study did not determine whether the increase in cortisol levels triggered mood or arousal changes or whether those changes themselves caused the cortisol elevation.
The Viagra dialogues
This drug can put the bloom back in sex, but it can also cause relationship problems.
Finally Gary saw a urologist, who diagnosed erectile dysfunction (ED), a condition caused by aging as well as by certain medical problems. Penile injections helped, but were uncomfortable. Then, in 1998, Viagra appeared.
Hailed as "vitamin V," Viagra created a stir when it was introduced. Since then, it's helped to repair countless marriages. In early TV commercials, the long-married, 70-something former senator Bob Dole extolled the virtues of Viagra. Now virile young athletes do the endorsements.
At a recent all-girls lunch in Dallas, Viagra was the prime topic of conversation. One woman in her 50s confided that the drug had saved her 10-year marriage.
Women have even started to take the initiative when it comes to Viagra, asking their husband's doctor for a prescription. Loyola University Sexual Dysfunction Clinic dir. Domeena Renshaw, M.D. (Chicago) recalls a woman in her 60s asking what the drug tasted like because she wanted to slip a tablet into her husband's hot chocolate.
Experts insist that Viagra by itself can't solve underlying problems in a relationship.
Two Viagra-like drugs, Cialis and Levitra, are scheduled to debut this year, pending FDA approval. There is obviously a market: Erectile dysfunction affects an estimated 20 million to 30 million U.S. men. Like Viagra, the new drugs increase blood flow to the penis, triggering an erection in 30 minutes to an hour or less. Viagra has also been prescribed for women with arousal problems, but it is not approved by the FDA for this purpose, which means no one knows for sure if it's safe and effective. But a new topical medicine for women, called Alista, is in the pipeline. It's designed to increase blood flow to the genital area. |
The Coming Boom Big Pharma has made billions pumping up the male population. Now neuroscientists are reverse engineering the female orgasm. 7.05 Annalee Newitz Wired
In Newark NJ, in a small room dominated by a large conference table, there are no windows, and no sounds except for the whir of the ventilation system. "This is going to be great," says my host, Rutgers neuropsychologist Barry Komisaruk, grinning.
"So what do you call this?" I ask. The device looks like a tampon attached to a hefty electric toothbrush, which is in turn wired to a box with a glowing red digital readout.
The tampon looks big enough to be in the supersize range and is connected at a 45-degree angle to the metal handle, which houses the transducer. Scores of women have inserted Breen's contraption into their vaginas (the tampons are disposed of after each use). As I fiddle with the tampon, the pressure from my fingers registers as a few grams of force.
The tools are crude, but that's because the science of sexual arousal is still young. Viagra revolutionized the field in the 1990s. The little blue pill that gets blood flowing to the right places at that special moment became a blockbuster for Pfizer, spawning Eli Lilly's Cialis and GlaxoSmithKline's Levitra. Millions now take these drugs to kick-start an evening of private recreation.
The results were surprising and frustrating to the pharmaceutical industry, which had assumed that what was good for the gander would be good for the goose. Psychology prof. and Kinsey Institute dir. Julia Heiman conducted some of Pfizer's Viagra studies and found that while some women "really noticed their genitals" and felt aroused, others "barely paid attention" to them and weren't aroused at all.
"The brain is where things are made sexual," Heiman explains. "It's the organ that causes us to be attracted to certain body types or looks. That kind of preference isn't processed in the genitals."
The first arousal drugs aimed at women's gray matter are expected to be on the market in the next couple of years. The active ingredient: testosterone, a "male" hormone that is also naturally present in women's bodies in smaller quantities. Procter & Gamble plans to release a testosterone patch, Intrinsa, and Illinois-based BioSante is entering Phase III clinical trials with its testosterone formulation, LibiGel.
Even so, most researchers agree that testosterone isn't the end of the story. Testosterone drugs will never have a direct, rapid effect on women the way Viagra does on men, because it's a hormone that fosters an overall sense of strength and well-being rather than specifically catalyzing sexual arousal.
More promising is a drug called PT-141, which is being developed by Palatin Technologies in New Jersey. The first in a new class of drugs called melanocortin agonists, PT-141 targets the central nervous system. Early trials show both genital arousal and increased sexual desire in women who take it. But even more precisely targeted drugs are coming, those that won't light up the entire nervous system in the blind hope of hitting pleasure buttons, but actually home in on parts of the brain that are directly connected to arousal and orgasm.
The total market for male arousal drugs is $2.7 billion per year and rising. With a study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association estimating that 43 percent of women are dissatisfied with sex, as opposed to 31 percent of men, a market for a pink Viagra could be even bigger. For now, those future billions are locked up in the labs where scientists are attempting to reverse engineer the female orgasm.
Ken Maravilla is small, dignified, and quiet. He comes across as someone who would never tell a dirty joke, which is why he's perfectly cast in his role as one of the only radiologists in the US to specialize in examining the brain scans of sexually aroused women. But there's nothing prurient here, he's in it only for the magnet.
Maravilla's tiny office is in the basement at the University of Washington in Seattle behind 2 large metal doors emblazoned with the warning: Danger - restricted access - strong magnetic field - the magnet is always on!
Heiman is less delicate. "They're erotic videos," she says. "Female-friendly films by Candida Royale."
Women wear video goggles in the magnet so they can see the movies. They watch 5 minutes of Candida Royale, then 5 minutes of a flick about mitochondria. Then the process is repeated: 5 minutes of arousal, 5 minutes of edutainment. Over a period of roughly half an hour, Maravilla examines what the difference is between a brain on Candida and a brain on Nova.
So can female arousal be quantified? The answer, Maravilla's team concludes, is yes. Brains in the throes of excitement light up in consistent, measurable ways. Furthermore, it turns out that excited women's brains look almost exactly like excited men's brains. Maravilla boots up his laptop and shows me several MR images of brains whose glowing hypothalamuses and cingulate cortices are neural maps of female desire.
Down a short hall in the fMRI's tiny control booth, I met Seth Friedman, a researcher and colleague of Maravilla's. We chat about how difficult it is to study cognitive and genital arousal with MRI alone. "They're 2 parallel responses separated by a couple of feet," Friedman says.
Getting good images of the aroused female brain is easy. It's orgasm that's the problem.
Vicky, not her real name, is one of these women. A California college student, she can climax by "thinking off." She contacted Komisaruk after hearing about his work from one of his other test subjects at a party.
Vicky and the imaging team worked out a hand signal she can flash when she starts to orgasm. "Basically, my head was strapped to a board in an extremely loud machine, and I had to let them know when I was about to come, so they could mark it on the computer," she laughs. "Whoo, so sexy!"
Certain brain regions really stand out once the noise is eliminated: For example, the nucleus accumbens, associated with the brain's reward system, turns out to be a big player in orgasm. There is also heightened activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, which is linked to pleasure, pain, and craving; and in the amygdala and the hypothalamus, areas that process emotion. "Orgasm is probably incredibly good for the brain," Komisaruk says. "The entire organ is being oxygenated."
At the other extreme are research subjects who were thought to be unable to reach orgasm at all. In the early 1990s a colleague of Komisaruk's, Rutgers professor Beverly Whipple, began a series of studies on women whose spinal cord injuries had left them totally numb below the waist. Many had been told by doctors that they would never orgasm through genital stimulation again, but Whipple wasn't so sure.
An early version of Komisaruk's calibrated vaginal stimulator turned out to be the perfect tool for the job. Because the subjects have no sensation in their genitals, there was the slight but real possibility that they'd inadvertently hurt themselves while masturbating. But using the force-measurement readout as a guide, the scientists could see how much pressure the women were exerting and prevent them from injuring themselves.
The conventional wisdom held that these were "phantom orgasms", more like a memory or a dream than the real deal. But Whipple and Komisaruk had an alternative explanation: that the anatomy textbooks, which had all the vaginal nerves routing to the brain via the spine, were wrong.
To test the theory, they turned to the magnet, comparing the so-called phantom orgasms of paralyzed women with the orgasms of ambulatory women. They got a match.
Komisaruk's grad student, Breen, continues to investigate the vagus nerve. Not only is it a pathway to orgasm, it might also modulate pain signals. I learn this the hard way. I'm messing with the vaginal stimulator when Breen shows me another contraption. Analgesy meter is stenciled across its side. |
"Tell me when it gets to be too much," she says.
It reaches about 13 before I yelp. "OK, too much!"
Breen's eyes are shining. "One of the things Dr. Komisaruk discovered is that women who are stimulating the anterior vaginal wall can take 50 percent more pain than they can when they're not," she tells me excitedly. "If they have an orgasm, their pain threshold rises 100 percent."
Breen's doctoral work indicates that a woman with lingering soreness from a back injury can get up to a full day's relief by using the stimulator once a day for several minutes. Komisaruk and Breen hope to someday develop a painkiller based on this quirk of the female body. Komisaruk has even patented a small sequence of amino acids associated with the pain-dimming effects of vaginal stimulation.
"In rats we've determined that our analgesic is more effective than morphine," he says.
How will the pleasure pill work? The person with the big picture, and with the closest thing to an answer, is Gemma O'Brien. Perhaps the only orgasm theorist in the world, O'Brien is an Australian biomedical researcher at the University of New England in New South Wales; she has spent the last decade tracking down every study available on orgasm and the brain.
She has a kind of unified field theory of female orgasm, summed up by an elaborate Venn diagram. Its three overlapping circles represent emotion, pleasure, and euphoria, along with their associated hormones and regions of the brain.
O'Brien is convinced that there's no reason why women shouldn't be as sexually satisfied as men. Because orgasmic brains look nearly the same across gender lines, she believes that inorgasmic women may be suffering due to early social experiences. Sexually repressive environments "may affect the growth of brain pathways in girls," O'Brien says.
Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics brain researcher Andreas Bartels in Tübingen, Germany, has done research that seems to back up O'Brien's theory. He's imaged the brains of women thinking about their sex partners. Bartels says the hypothalamus appears to be a key indicator of romantic love, and it's also a main area in the brain where oxytocin is absorbed. The chemical is released during orgasm and other sorts of mating rituals.
Most experts believe a truly effective aphrodisiac for women will hit the market in the next decade. Meanwhile, researchers are following new neural pathways and disproving the conventional medical wisdom about orgasm. They're investigating regions of the brain whose paradoxical roles as pleasure enhancers and pain modulators may yield more than one kind of drug. Komisaruk is even suggesting a technological fix for arousal problems, a neurobiofeedback machine that could help women learn to be superorgasmic.
She suggests that there may also be a genetic reason why certain women enjoy sex less than others. Just as some people are depressed because their brains reabsorb too much serotonin, some may be less sexually charged because their brains reabsorb too much oxytocin or dopamine. Researchers could "provide a fix for that with drugs," she says, sketching out plans for a pill that keeps the oxytocin from getting absorbed too quickly. If the fix works, "you might experience bliss instead of having just an OK sort of time."
"Love is just a biological mechanism," says Bartels with laugh. He's certain that a drug that tinkers with oxytocin isn't far down the road. "You can inject an animal with oxytocin and make it pair bond with a stranger," he says. "All we need to do is apply it to humans."
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