You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (42 page)

58.
      Marvin Perry, ed.,
History of the World
(1985), p. 336.

59.
      Napoleon had a buttocks fetish. He described his first wife’s bottom as “the prettiest little backside imaginable,” and when one of his mistresses wore skintight white pantaloons he went into a “near frenzy.” Irving Wallace, et al.,
Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People
(1982), p. 335.

60.
      The philandering king asked if a suggested paramour had “a good bust.” The recommending attendant replied that he had not looked. The king scolded him saying, “You are a booby! That is the first thing one looks at in a woman.” Ibid., p. 333.

61.
      Ibid., p. 15.

62.
      Recent exceptions were the movie
Apocalypto
(2006) and the television series,
Rome
(2005). Predictably, a
Rome
review on
Amazon.com
by “Hispania” read, “[Rome] exaggerated the sex and violence to appeal to our baser selves.” Ret. 21 June 2006.

63.
      Following two paragraphs from John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman,
Intimate Matters
(1988), pp. 7–9.

64.
      Ibid., p. 7.

65.
      Ibid., p. 8.

66.
      James Loewen,
Lies My Teacher Told Me
(1995), p. 101.

67.
      Ibid.

68.
      Peter Farb,
Man’s Rise to Civilization
(1978), p. 262.

69.
      Frederick Turner,
Beyond Geography
(1992), p. 245.

70.
      Loewen,
Lies My Teacher Told Me
, p. 101.

71.
      Reay Tannahill,
Sex in History
(1980), pp. 425–426.

72.
      In the early 1990s half of all masturbators felt guilty about it. Robert Michael, et al.,
Sex in America
(1994), p. 166.

73.
      This is exhibited by the copious Internet spam and other advertising for ineffective penis enlargement pills. Internet analysts have estimated one in four unsolicited Internet ads are for penis enlargement. This would not occur if men were not buying. “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of a Penis of Unlikely Dimensions,”
Australian
, 8 July 2003.

74.
      A Korean study showed that men who believe they have small penises are more depressed. Hwancheol Son, et al., “Studies on Self-Esteem of Penile Size in Young Korean Military Men,”
Asian J. Androl
., Sep. 2003, pp. 185–189.

75.
      Melissa Healy, “Intimate Makeover,”
Los Angeles Times
, 13 Mar. 2006.

76.
      H. Wessells, T.F. Lue, and J.W. McAninch, “Penile Length,”
J. Urol
., Sep. 1996, pp. 995–997.

77.
      N. Mondaini, et al., “Penile Length is Normal in Most Men Seeking Penile Lengthening,”
Int. J. Impot. Res
., Aug. 2002, pp. 283–286.

78.
      Another time Dooley referred to H.W. Bush’s penis as a “little stick.” Kitty Kelley,
Family
(2004), p. 495.

79.
      Healy, “Intimate Makeover.”

80.
      Marjorie Heins,
Not in Front of the Children
(2001), p. 26. This is also a theme of Michel Foucault.

81.
      Ibid.

82.
      Reay Tannahill,
Sex in History
(1980), pp. 355–356.

83.
      John Leo, “Is There Life in a Swingers’ Club?”
Time
, 16 Jan. 1978, p. 53.

84.
      Sam Keen, “Voyeur in Plato’s Cave,”
Psychology Today
, Feb. 1980, p. 88.

85.
      Tom Buckley, “Oh Copenhagen,”
New York Times Magazine
, 8 Feb. 1970, p. 46.

86.
      
Report of the Commission
, p. 202.

87.
      For example, Hugh Grant in 1995, Heidi Fleiss in the mid-1990s, and in the late 2000s, Deborah Jeane Palfrey.

88.
      HBO’s
Cathouse
(2005, 2007).

89.
      Women have a much easier time finding short-term temporary sex partners. See Chapter Four.

90.
      Matt Kailey,
Just Add Hormones
(2005), pp. 50–51.

91.
      Depo-Provera is used to chemically castrate sex offenders in some states. In one instance, a gay male couple requested Depo-Provera so that they would be less tempted to have sex with other men. The men are now enjoying its effects in a monogamous gay relationship. James Dabbs and Mary Dabbs,
Heroes, Rogues, and Lovers
(2000), p. 101.

92.
      Even Neil Malamuth, who has spent his career trying to find a causal relationship since meeting with feminists in 1979, admitted in an exhaustive analysis of numerous studies that “for the majority of American men, pornography exposure (even at the highest levels assessed here) is not associated with high levels of sexual aggression . . .” Neil Malamuth, Tamara Addison, and Mary Koss, “Pornography and Sexual Aggression,”
Annu. Rev. Sex Res
. (2000), p. 85.

93.
      In addition, the states with the least amount of Internet access had an increase in rapes, while the states with the most access had a decrease. Anthony D’Amato, “Porn Up, Rape Down,” Northwestern Public Law Research Paper No. 913013, 21 June 2006.

94.
      Milton Diamond and Ayako Uchiyama, “Pornography, Rape and Sex Crimes in Japan,”
Int. J. Law Psychiatry
, 1999, 22(1), pp. 1–22.

95.
      John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman,
Intimate Matters
(1988), pp. 8–9.

96.
      Gerald Davison and John Neale,
Abnormal Psychology, Rev. 6
^th
Ed
. (1996), pp. 340–342, 372–373.

97.
      The ratio of those professing a faith in the general prison population to those not was 2:1. For sex criminals it was 3:1. Dominic Kennedy, “Prison Figures Show a Link Between Sex Crime and Religion,”
TimesOnline.co.uk
, 25 Nov. 2006.

98.
      John Money quoted in Judith Levine,
Harmful to Minors
(2003), p. 12.

99.
      James Prescott, “Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence,”
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
, Nov. 1975, p. 14.

100.
    Ibid., p. 15.

101.
    For an example, see Jeannette Angell,
Callgirl
(2004), p. 232.

102.
    A study found that ninety-four percent of street prostitutes had been raped by a customer. J. Miller, “Gender and Power on the Streets,”
J. Contemp. Ethnogr
., 1995, 23, pp. 427–452.

103.
    Police easily extort sex from prostitutes. Donna Gentile, a San Diego street prostitute, was an example. She reported extortion in the mid-1980s. The offending officer was fired but was not prosecuted. Gentile went to jail. She left a tape with her lawyer predicting the police were going to kill her and was soon found dead with a broken neck. For more see Norma Jean Almodovar’s
Cop to Call Girl
(1993), pp. 223–225, 329.

104.
    Julie Pearl, “Highest Paying Customers,”
Hastings Law J
., Apr. 1987, p. 785.

105.
    Prostitute figure from J.J. Potterat, et al., “Mortality in a Long-Term Open Cohort of Prostitute Women,”
Am. J. Epidemiol
., 15 Apr. 2004, pp. 783–84. Soldier figure from 2,426 casualties of combat of the 650,000 serving from March 2003 to the end of 2006,
iCasualties.org
, ret. 3 Jan. 2006, and Pamela Hess, “Analysis: U.S. Reserves Returning to Iraq,” UPI, 28 Dec. 2006. Others from Eric Sygnatur and Guy Toscano, “Work-related Homicides: The Facts,”
Compensat. Work. Cond
., Spr. 2000, pp. 4–5.

106.
    Twenty percent of women orgasm only sometimes during sex with their primary partner. Another four percent orgasm rarely and another four percent never do. Robert Michael, et al.,
Sex in America
(1994), p. 128.

107.
    Personal conversation had on the streets of New York City’s Upper West Side circa 2000.

108.
    J.M. Bailey,
Man Who Would Be Queen
(2003), p. 57.

109.
    Anal sex is not universally accepted among gay men. Almost twenty percent of men who self-identify as gay or bisexual have never been the receiver in anal intercourse. Gregory Herek, Jared Jobe, and Ralph Carney,
Out In Force
(1996), p. 31.

110.
    
Sex at Dawn
, p. 295.

111.
    Dan Savage, “Do Monogamous Gay Couples Exist?”
TheStranger.com
, 20 June 2012.

112.
    Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá,
Sex at Dawn
(2010), p. 311.

DRUGS I

W
HAT
T
HEY
A
RE

U
NDERRATED

Growing up in a small rural town, I was an All-American boy—class president, three-sport letter winner, top five percent of my class, blah, blah, blah. I didn’t do drugs. In high school, I drank an occasional beer just to separate myself from the holier-than-thous and to show that I didn’t swallow the anti-drug propaganda hook, line, and sinker. At the time, I did not realize that the sinker was irrelevant because the hook was firmly in my head.

I had too much to risk to join the merrymakers in their drug use. My future was bright. I was young and spry. I was the golden boy who was going places. No one even tried to peer-pressure me into doing anything. In retrospect, I wish someone had.

I felt superior to the kids who drank, did drugs, and had fun. I knew from teachers and the press that they were due for alcoholism, addiction, arrest, or a premature death behind the wheel of a car. One teacher familiar with the large number of students who drank and drove warned that our high school was long overdue for a
fatality of that sort. Of the thousands of kids in my area, the only student who died behind the wheel had fallen asleep. All the drinking drivers, the pot smokers, and the acid droppers never suffered. I figured they were just lucky. They were frolicking now, but they would eventually pay for disregarding the wisdom of our elders. They had to . . . because if they didn’t, I was a schmuck.

At George Washington University in the mid-’90s, as with almost every college, drinking was so prevalent that any stigma it might have had in high school was lost. It was impossible to maintain, because for every idiot who drank and did idiot stuff there were dozens of responsible students who drank and just had a good time. Most of the non-drinkers abstained only for religious reasons. The other non-drinkers didn’t drink because they did not have access to it, which usually meant they did not have many friends. A group of friends of any size often had at least one connection to someone who was twenty-one or somehow had an ID.

In college I soon learned that alcohol played an integral role in the relationships between the sexes. Because of my limited exposure to alcohol, I still believed the demon drug myth. That is, alcohol
causes
women to have unprotected sex. That was one of the tenets of anti-alcohol messages. Women shouldn’t drink to excess because they would spread their legs to the whole world and not require it to wear a condom. Movies and television reinforced this with hungover women waking up with naked strangers in their beds, befuddled as to how the stranger got there, regretful.

Perhaps I should have realized that this was all an exaggeration, but instead I learned by embarrassing myself. In the beginning of my freshman year I went to a club with a female friend and a male friend. We all started drinking and when we were ossified the female started making out with the male. I naively thought that since she was in the throes of alcohol she didn’t care who she kissed, so I shoved my head in there and tried to get in on the hot action.

I also learned that alcohol’s pharmacological effects had little to do with its social value. Alcohol minimized the nervousness and fear of rejection that hitting on another person entails—liquid courage—but more important than lowered inhibitions was the
pretense
of lowered inhibitions. For example, one night I tried to make out with a dorm neighbor while grinding on her on a club dance floor. She politely refused and I moved on to grind on another poor lass. When I ran into her days later, I apologized for my aggressiveness, blaming it on the alcohol and she
amicably concurred that it was the alcohol. We both knew I would try to make out with her stone sober right there in the hallway if it was socially acceptable, but alcohol had saved face.