AlterNet.org: Culture

Best Thing of the Day: WikiLeaks Leaks Transcript of Hollywood's Doc on the Online Activists

Steven Hsieh, AlterNet — Fri, 24 May 2013 07:14:00 -0700

"We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks" premieres today -- but the transcript hit the internet last night.

Beating the entertainment industry in the message control race, Wikileaks leaked the transcript of the new documentary, “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks,” one night ahead of its worldwide release. The leaked transcript includes annotations that allege factual errors, misrepresentations and misguided framing in the film, directed by Academy Award winner Alex Gibney.

An unnamed annotator disputes several over-arching conclusions drawn in Gibney’s film, starting with its title, which implies that Wikileaks “steals secrets.” “In fact, the statement is made by former CIA/NSA director Michael Hayden in relation to the activities of US government spies, not in relation to WikiLeaks,” the annotator writes.

The annotator also addresses Gibney’s characterizations of Bradley Manning, the private accused of leaking classified information to WikiLeaks. By focusing on Manning’s alleged sexuality, rather than political motivations, the writer says, “Gibney's portrayal of Manning is as a disempowered individual, rather than as someone courageous and principled.” As a press release from Wikileaks notes, these details are especially relevant now, as Manning’s 12-week-trial continues on Monday. “The premiere of "We Steal Secrets" is opportunistically timed,” the release states. “Manning may face life in prison and could potentially face the death penalty. Charges include espionage and aiding the enemy.”

The annotator also takes issue with suggestions in the film that Manning was in contact with Wikileaks-founder Julian Assange and claims misinformation about the sexual allegations against Assange. Wikileaks not only hit Gibney for the what’s in his documentary, but also its omissions. “Gibney's film could have been an important and timely project,” the release states, “The film barely touches on the US investigation against WikiLeaks, never mentions the words "grand jury", and trivialises the larger issues, perhaps because the film-maker could not secure an interview with Julian Assange.”

According to Reuters, Gibney sought to include Assange in the film, but chose to proceed without him due to difficulties in securing an interview. Media accounts suggest a dispute between Gibney and Assange over framing in the filmmaker’s final product. "He likens himself as the puppet master, the one who's pulling the strings on the media. I think he took some offense at the idea that I was independent," Gibney told Reuters, adding that Assange allegedly asked for money to be interviewed.

Firedoglake’s Kevin Gosztola, who has extensively covered WikiLeaks and Manning’s trial, wrote a detailed analysis of the film and this annotated transcript. “As someone who has extensively covered the story of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and Bradley Manning, there are multiple aspects of the film that happen to be misleading, disingenuous or seem to be the product of a director who has an axe to grind,” Gosztola writes.

How MDMA Can Take You on the Healing Path ... Even for a Former Nun

Ralph Metzner, AlterNet — Thu, 23 May 2013 15:16:00 -0700

Ralph Metzner re-examines uses and potentials of MDMA "Through the Gateway of the Heart."

The following is an excerpt from the book, "Through the Gateway of the Heart; Accounts of Experiences with MDMA and Other Emphathonic Substances," by Ralph Metzner. The first part of the text includes the Foreward to the 2012 edition, and following it, a first-hand experience by a former nun. (Four Trees Publications, 1986. 2012 Edition).

Ecstasy, empathy, openness, compassion, peace, acceptance, being, forgiveness, healing, re-birth, unity, emotional bonding, caring, celebration—these are some of the terms people use to describe their experiences with a class of substances, of which MDMA 3,4-methylenedioxy- amphetamine (also known as Adam, Molly, Ecstasy or XTC) has become the best known. Although related in a general way to the psychedelic “mind-manifesting” substances such as LSD, psilocybin and mescaline, these substances are different in that they do not usually produce visions, hallucinations, or altered perceptions of reality.

Even more importantly, these substances seem to consistently induce a positive affect and reduce or attenuate anxiety—in significant contrast to the classical psychedelics which can amplify and elaborate both positive and negative affects. Because of the high percentage of major positive insight experiences reported with these substances, and the relatively low incidence of undesirable side-effects, these drugs have attracted favorable attention from a number of psychotherapists, who regard them as facilitators of therapeutic insight and change. They have also been used by some teachers and practitioners of meditation, who see them as important amplifiers of emotional and sensory awareness, and as aids to spiritual practice.

The Use of MDMA in Overcoming Fear and Trauma

The book "Ecstasy: The Complete Guide," edited by Julie Holland, MD (Park Street Press, 2001) offers a comprehensive look at the risks and benefits of MDMA, as well as a summary of the pharmacological effects identified thus far. Jessica Malberg and Katherine Bonson in their chapter on “How MDMA works in the brain," summarize the effects the main brain neurotransmitters as follows:

"MDMA acts in the brain through three main neurochemical mechanisms: blockade of serotonin re-uptake, induction of serotonin release, and induction of dopamine release. With these actions, MDMA is essentially a combination of the effects of fluoxetine, a serotonin reuptake inhibitor and anti-depressant; a serotonin releaser and amphetamine, a dopamine releaser (op. cit. p. 29)."

More recent studies by Gillinder Bedi and others have used functional magnetic resonance imaging techniques to show that MDMA attenuated amygdala response to (pictures of) angry facial expressions, but did not affect amygdala response to fearful expressions. Responses to happy emotional expressions were enhanced with MDMA. Further studies done with recognition of emotions in facial expressions in photographs suggested to these authors that MDMA reduced the perception of fear in the images, leading to more “pro-social behavior.” Summaries and detailed descriptions of these and other studies may be found by consulting the MAPS website (www.maps.org), which maintains a comprehensive database of all published research on MDMA and other psychoactive drugs of potential value and interest.

These findings of reduced fear-perception are consistent with anecdotal reports (including many of those in this book) that MDMA significantly attenuates interpersonal fear and anxiety. This is probably the basis for its marked therapeutic utility, especially in the treatment of PTSD, where the perceptual fixations on a real life-threatening situation blocks the normal processing of memories.

The potential applications of MDMA in the treatment of debilitating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which is now being researched by Michael Mithoefer and associates at the University of North Carolina, is exemplified in two of the accounts in this book, whose authors were able to confront the traumatic experience of rape. One is called “I Can Now Move through the Trauma.”

She wrote:

“There seemed to be some quality of the Adam that broke down the repressive/defensive network and took me back into the experience of the attack that was too much for my psyche to bear. Over a period of eight to twelve months I was able to re-experience fragments of the attack, thereby recreating and de-sensitizing me to the experience.”

The other account, by a school teacher, is titled “To Speak of What Was too Painful to Remember,” and she writes about realizing that a rape that had occurred eight years ago, had been,

“... hidden in the back of my mind… and all the little details that I had wanted to ignore were eating at me like a cancer…The suffering became more intense, but I still wanted to talk about it and I felt that I could deal with the pain, that this was a start to try to defeat this cancer.”

The potential value of using MDMA in the treatment of PTSD can hardly be overestimated, considering that there are some 350,000 veterans from US wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, who are suffering from this and who only receive palliative support, if any, from the usual prescriptions of SSRIs offered by the over-burdened Veterans health care system.

One of the people I (RM) worked with in MDMA-supported psychotherapy in the early 1980s was a Vietnam War veteran, who was able to release an enormous amount of war-related trauma in one intensive session, and subsequently turned his life completely around, becoming a dedicated peace activist and co-founder of the group Veterans for Peace, giving talks with fellow veterans on the realities of war to groups of high-school students (Ed Ellis & Ralph Metzner, From Traumatized Vet to Peacemaker Activist. MAPS Bulletin, Vol XXI, No. 1, 2011).

MDMA, Intimacy and Sexuality

Torsten Passie, MD, a research psychiatrist at the University of Hanover medical school in Germany, has done studies on the neurohormones released in the MDMA state and how this relates to the subjective effects. He states, on the basis of his studies, that MDMA deactivates the amygdala (the seat of fear-rage emotional reactivity) and reciprocally activates prefrontal brain circuits (which underlie calm thinking). This is the neurophysiological counterpart to the empathic understanding of self and others, reported by the patients. There is also a massive release of serotonin, the neurotransmitter associated with a non-depressive, non-fearful attitude. Passie’s research is described in a monograph published in 2012 by the Multi-disciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS): Healing with Entactogens: Therapist and Patient Perspectives on MDMA-Assisted Group Psychotherapy by Torsten Passie, M.D.

To my mind the most provocative of his findings is that MDMA results in a massive release of prolactin, the hormone associated with breast-feeding, as well as oxytocin, sometimes called the “cuddle hormone.” Both of these hormones are released during non-sexual post-orgasmic intimacy. As Dr. Passie points out, this release of non-sexual intimacy hormones correlates perfectly with the often-remarked subjective experience of MDMA-users— that they feel intimate with others, wanting to touch and be physically close, but not sexually aroused.

The experience of sensory and sensual intimacy without sexual activity or even desire is expressed in this book in the account titled “Desire Transcended by Being Fulfilled.” In this account the subject, a 48-year old male, reported an experiment of having a massage at the Esalen retreat center, on two occasions – once without MDMA and once with. The man reported that the second massage

“seemed longer and slower, and my body responses much deeper and more total. I felt blissful. I recalled my wanting and desiring the masseuse, from the first session, and realized I did not have that craving or desire now; instead I felt as if we were making love! The desire was transcended by being fulfilled, virtually (p.125)."

Even couples who were intimately involved have reported that with MDMA the sexual drive was often just not there. This effect is, in my opinion, one of the main reasons why MDMA has such unparalleled usefulness in enhancing psychotherapy: it facilitates the heart-felt, empathic, verbal and postural expression of emotional intimacy, without the slightest hint of sexual arousal or interest (which is often a confounding issue in therapist-patient interactions, as is well-known).

Entactogens vs. Empathogens

I want to say a word here about terminology. Torsten Passie, like most of the European researchers uses the word entactogen to describe the class of drugs like MDMA, whose primary neuropsychological action is a marked decrease of interpersonal and intrapsychic fear —thereby facilitating a seemingly effortless re-integration of previously defended and traumatic memories and perception. This is in marked contrast to the primary effect of the classical psychedelics (LSD, mescaline, psilocybin) which involve visual and affective amplification of all psychic contents and processes, including fear—thereby making difficult or “hellish” trips much more likely than with MDMA (where they are virtually absent). Entactogen means something like “touching within” or getting in touch with one’s own inner processes.

In a friendly debate which I had with a couple of my colleagues in the pages of the MAPS bulletin several years ago, I suggested that “touching within” doesn’t really distinguish the MDMA-type experience from the LSD-type experience. My own preferred term for these substances (and the experience they can facilitate) is empathogen—generating a state of empathy, both empathy for others and empathy with one’s own self in past or present conflict situations. This to me is the basis for the heightened affective understanding, the integration of emotion and reasoning, consequent upon the absence of fear and anxiety, that Dr. Passie’s study demonstrates.

The Use of MDMA in Alleviating Terminal Anxiety

A dramatic and powerful account of MDMA’s ability to attenuate fear and terminal anxiety is given in the book by Marilyn Howell "Honor Thy Daughter," also published by MAPS (2011). In this book, Howell relates how her 27-year old daughter who had colon cancer, struggled terribly to marshall her life-forces and resist the illness, in spite of the increasingly discouraging feedback from the medical professionals and increasingly painful side-effects of the chemotherapy drugs she was receiving. She fought for her life, using one extreme, technological method after another. She didn’t want to hear, think or talk about her possibly impending death. I think most researchers would agree that actually, for end-of-life palliative care the classical entheogens like LSD and psilocybin are better than MDMA at expanding awareness into the spiritual dimensions. But in the case of this young woman, since she was so relentlessly committed to fight for her life, and in denial about death, the turning point came when she could accept the possibility that the MDMA would ease her existing pain and anxiety, without thinking about death, the after-life or similar concerns. She was able to have a relatively peaceful and painless dying, in the company of her loved ones.

When MDMA first became known in therapists’ circles in the early 1970s, its possesion or use was not illegal—until the FDA, invoking emergency powers, placed it on Schedule I in July 1985, just around the time the first edition of this book was published. Because of the change in its legal status, and for obvious reasons of confidentiality, the individuals reporting, the therapists or group leaders facilitating, and the researcher who compiled and edited the accounts all chose to remain anonymous. Now, more than 20 years later, MDMA is still illegal, and listed on the FDA’s Schedule I (along with heroin, cocaine, LSD and marijuana) although researchers can obtain small amounts for their controlled and approved research studies. Such studies all have to be privately funded, since no pharmaceutical company can put its development resources behind it. In spite of the promising research studies demonstrating the relative safety of MDMA, and the positive anonymous self-reports published on the Erowid website—MDMA is no closer to being formally and legally available for any condition or purpose than it was in the 1980s. However the informal, underground distribution of Ecstasy at rave concerts, and in the context of small, anymous, secretive groups, has led some observers to estimate (though of course no hard statistics are available) that several million doses of Ecstasy are distributed and consumed every year—in the US, most European countries, as well as India, Japan, Australia, South Africa and possibly China.

The research with the classic psychedelic drugs (psilocybin, LSD etc) carried out during the 1960s had led to the hypothesis, widely accepted by workers in the field, that psychedelics are non-specific psychic amplifiers, and that the content of a psychedelic experience is primarily a function of the “set” (expectations, intention, attitude, personality) and the “setting” (physical and social context, presence and attitude of others, including the guide). This set-and-setting hypothesis is a useful model in coming to understand the experiences with MDMA also. The specific insights, feelings and resolutions of problems that occur are of course unique to the individual, although there is a commonality in the kinds of feeling states that are named, such as “empathy”, “ecstasy”. Individuals are often able, if their intention in taking the substance is serious and therapeutic, to use the state to resolve long-standing intrapsychic conflicts or interpersonal problems in relationships. One therapist has estimated that in five hours of one MDMA session clients could activate and process psychic material that would normally require five months of weekly therapy sessions.

Because of the importance of the set and setting variables, a brief description of the nature of the set and the setting was requested of each of the individuals whose accounts were included. These are shown at the bottom of the first page of each account; and one can obtain a pretty clear sense of the operation of this principle by comparing that statement with the content of the experience. In addition, the text lists as “catalyst” the precise identity and the amount of the particular substance used. In many of the sessions, an initial dose was followed after an hour or so by a “booster” of a lesser amount of MDMA, or with a related compound called 2-CB. Invented by Alexander Shulgin, the famous independent chemist who identified and synthesized hundreds of previously unknown psychoactive compounds (described in his booksTIHKAL and PIHKAL), 2-CB is in many ways analogous in its effects to MDMA, though much less research has been done on it, nor is it as widely available in the underground scene.

With all these empathogenic (or ‘entactogenic’) substances, the catalyst triggers a change of feeling state, in which insights and perceptions take place. These insights and perceptions, though they may appear ordinary and commonplace when they are afterwards heard or read by others, are felt with a depth and poignancy of emotion that was for most people unheard of in their lives before the time of that first experience.

None of this is meant to say or imply that similar or identical changes of consciousness could not be produced or arrived at without the use of these empathogenic substances. Obviously, many people have in the past, and continue to have, empathic and heart-opening experiences without the use of any external aid, pharmaceutical or other. For the people whose experiences are recounted in this volume, the heightened and deepened state of awareness facilitated by the drug served as a kind of preview, as it were, a taste of the possibilities that exist for much greater emotional openness and relatedness than they had imagined.

They are clearly aware, too, that the drug-experience is a temporary state, and one that can be converted into the ongoing reality of everyday consciousness only with continuing therapeutic and spiritual practice—and not with the continued use of the drug. Most people do not want to repeat the experience very often—it is felt to be too intense, too sacred. Although the possibility of becoming psychologically dependent on this, or any drug, cannot ever be ruled out, there is a fairly high degree of consensus that MDMA is not addicting, in the way that opiates are. None of this positive potential therapeutic work with MDMA discounts or denies the existence of patterns of extreme overuse of Ecstasy that have become associated with the international rave culture, nor do we intend to minimize the potential harm from such overuse.

Under favorable circumstances and with a supportive set and setting people feel that the MDMA experience has elicited true compassion, forgiveness, and understanding for those with whom they have important relationships; and most importantly, for themselves, for their ordinary, neurotic, childish, struggling persona or ego. The relative absence or attenuation of normal amounts of anxiety and fear in these states is perhaps the single most important feature in regard to their therapeutic value. People report being able to think about, talk about, and deal with inner or outer issues that are otherwise always avoided because of the anxiety levels normally associated with those issues.

The accounts presented in this book derive from about fifty individuals, of various ages, professions, and degrees of psychospiritual sophistication. They were apparently gathered from about twenty anonymous therapists, mostly, though not exclusively, from the West Coast of the United States. Some of the reports are from guided therapeutic sessions; others are from sessions with serious psychological or spiritual intention, where the “sitter” might be a trusted friend or partner, rather than a therapist. A considerable number are by individuals who are themselves therapists—which suggests that some of the most promising potentials of these substances may lie in the training of therapists – where the capacity for empathy is a highly-valued.

A smaller number of the reports are from group experiences, usually of a highly structured or ritualistic nature. Although the relatively unstructured, recreational use of Ecstasy in informal small groups of friends is probably more common, most people are agreed that the use of rituals similar to those of the Native American Church, or other shamanic traditions, is the preferred mode of operation when powerful sacramental substances are taken in a group context.

The editor of this volume, the writers of the Foreword and Guidelines, and the publishers, do not advocate the use of any illegal substance. Nor do they advocate that individuals attempt to treat their own medical or psychological problems with the use of this or any other substance. Nor do they recommend the use of these substances by individuals without the supervision and consultation of one’s physician. Given these obvious limitations on the use and accessibility of these drugs, the question might be raised as to the point of publishing these accounts since the experience with MDMA is now one that has become illegal. The answer to this question that the therapists and their clients using these substances would give, is that it is in the public’s interest to be aware of what is an extraordinarily promising new tool for the exploration of the human mind and for the improvement of human relations.

Perhaps greater public knowledge of these substances and their potential human benefits can lead to a considered re-examination of the social and legal framework with which our society deals with such matters, so that as other substances of similar import are discovered, their uses and potentials will not be wasted. Many of the individuals whose experience are recounted in this volume expressed the wish and hope that, given the gravity of the planetary crisis in which we find ourselves, aids to the evolution of consciousness such as these substances will be thoroughly explored, and applied to the solution of the immense human problems that confront us.

***

The following is another excerpt from "Through the Gateway of the Heart." This excerpt, titled, "I Was Resting in the Palm of His Hand," includes the experiences of an ex-nun during an MDMA treatment.

35 year-old former school teacher, ex-nun

Set: therapeutic, spiritual.

Setting: therapist’s office, with guide.

Catalyst: 150 mg MDMA plus 50 mg MDMA.

Perhaps the most obvious feeling for me at the beginning and throughout the session was the incredible sense of peace and release from the bondage that I felt. My body was no longer a trap, a prison, but instead became like a kaleidoscope, a mingling of different energies. I felt myself being several “I”s in a very strange way. Sometimes I felt myself very wise, sometimes I was the adult me (not so wise) and sometimes I was a child. I felt a deep friendship with the guide, as if I had known him for a long time. Certain other relationships came up and I saw them as equally lovable. I was able to detach from intense attachments that bring pain and was able to love gently and freely, a truly wonderful gift for me.

I found myself thinking of God the Father and felt that I was resting in the palm of His hand, just as Isaiah says in the Bible. I was being rocked in a large hand with darkness as universe all around me. It was incredibly soothing and loving. When the guide put on certain music, I felt romantic, and instead of being with God the Father, I was dancing with a very handsome man whom I don’t know. It was very peaceful, not passionate; very graceful and free. Then I was confused, and it became the figure of Jesus. I was amazed. I told the guide that Jesus was my brother whom I loved very deeply. The guide suggested that Jesus was also my lover and yes, I have felt that, though a bit guiltily. But love like that with a man is what I have sought…passion and gentleness together…peace. In my life both aspects have always been separate. A man is either passionate or gentle, and I love both, but they are separate.

I knew instantly what my life’s purpose was…to continue to seek the heart and mind union, to continue to remember the essence within which was so peaceful, in spite of worldly activities. Adam revealed a new potential which I knew was there, but was too afraid to experience alone. As far as my studies, I realized they were important, but they only mattered in the world. I saw that I was worrying too much about others’ opinions of my work. I realized that the intellectual work has been a saving grace for me…I truly love the work of the mind, I have always been an avid reader. But, now I can put it in perspective. I have been putting too much energy in concepts and theories that may change in ten years, whereas the eternal principles of love, truth, self-realization, etc., remain the same. Now I can, with the help of Adam, tap into the deeper resources which were always my goal. I am still a bit afraid of the future, of going back “into the world,” but after the session, I feel that the inner connection will guide me through and I will find my place. The place will definitely be working directly with love energies.

When the guide played Vangelis’ Odes I felt as if my soul had been called. I remembered my Greek heritage and I went back to ancient times in feeling and memory. I felt very, very old. I could have died at that point and not felt bad about leaving my loved ones. Somehow I felt that they would understand. Death was so natural, so peaceful.

With the South American jungle music, I felt very earthy and that felt threatening. I felt that I was going to be sacrificed, and my dream of running away over the mountain was remembered. Going into instinctual waters is very scary for me, I realized then. I felt the possibility of the mind gone wild, of no principles to live by, of evil sorcery and of life being worthless. Since then I have realized that I feel the same way about certain areas of the ghetto where I grew up. in fact, some were even called “the jungle.” There is a sense of being ripped open and apart. I have felt that passion does that, when it is purely egotistical desire without taking the beauty and dignity of the human being into account. In some ways, my quest for the spiritual was to purify myself from those threats. I have never seen that before. But I think I definitely have to face those instincts now, though I am afraid.

During the session I saw my mother’s life and realized that her suffering was hers, not mine. This has been a great release for me. I saw that, just as I could have died then and there and known it was right, that she also, at some level, perhaps had that feeling. I could see under the normal layers, in a way, and know that we all know the truth underneath. So too my mother may have known that someday I would understand and accept her death, without feelings of abandonment. This was a wonderful gift. When I thought of my father, I missed that sense of security and power that comes from the male (at least for me) but I was getting it from God the Father as energy and love. I was able to see my parents as earthly extensions of Divine parents and as such of course limited. But since I now felt the presence of Divine parents, it was O.K. I still hold that feeling to this day, though not as strongly as during the session.

I realized that I have a hard time receiving love, I mean, really experiencing it. I know that I am loved, but I feel shy and don’t seem to give it much importance. I felt a deep sense of self-love, a feeling of rightness about me, as I was. In loving freely, I want to give without expectations but also receive without judgment. I see this very clearly. It will be my life’s goal. I’m really excited about it. Life now becomes a mystery, but a good one. Before, it was always a problem. As a mystery, I am not judged if I am me, I am looking to see who that “me” is. And looking, in itself, is worthwhile. Another relief.

One of the most beautiful experiences of the session was the resolution of Christian and Buddhist compassion. This has been an inner question for me for many years. How could Buddha love and not feel sad; how could Jesus feel sad in loving and still be enlightened? Somehow, during the session, they came together. I saw that Jesus’s heart, sad with the ignorance of the world, was an expression of his life externally, but that internally, he was absolutely sure that he and the Father were one and so, his soul was at peace. Buddha’s external expression was mind, a peaceful, harmonious mind, but his internal experience was a deep sadness and heartfelt compassion for the suffering of the world. So he, too, gave his life to save others from suffering. For me, Jesus and Buddha, in front of whom I pray and meditate, became two sides of the same coin, two perspectives of one experience. That question is over and I am truly grateful, for I can cultivate both heart and mind, knowing that sadness and peace can be simultaneous emotions or feelings, and not judge them as separate. Also, that sadness and love are one aspect and that joy and love are also expressions of love. Love can and should also be practical.

10 Most Absurd Sex Tips from the Christian Right

Amanda Marcotte, AlterNet — Thu, 23 May 2013 10:42:00 -0700

Modern conservatives can't stop talking about sex. And what they say opens a window into the strange, sexist worldview of patriarchal religion.

Modern conservative Christianity is obsessed with marriage, relationships, and sexuality to the point where these concerns crowd pretty much everything else out. Much of their obsession is directed towards trying to get the government to force you to live by their rules, but they also spend a great deal of time offering advice on these issues to each other. Unfortunately, most of their advice is utter garbage that puts prudery, unfair expectations, and strict gender policing over actual advice that can make your life better. Here are ten examples of evangelical advice that show how far adrift the Christian right advice industry is from the real world:

1) Be a better housekeeper to prevent cheating. Recently, Pat Robertson addressed a question that haunts many a woman who has a husband with a wandering eye: How to get past his cheating? Robertson all but told women not to worry their pretty little heads about their husband’s infidelities, suggesting that male infidelity in nigh-inevitable. He did, however, make some suggestions on how to minimize the straying: “What you want to do is make a home so wonderful that he doesn’t want to wander.” On top of implying that clean floors and the smell of baking bread can prevent men from looking for strange women, Robertson asked women to sympathize with how hard it is for men, saying that they are “captured” by their sexual desires and it’s up to women to “get him free”. In general, Robertson takes the line that all problems in marriage are the fault of wives and never husbands. While most Christian advice-givers rarely go that far, most do adhere generally to the belief that keeping a marriage together is mostly a wife’s job.

2) Women need to submit to their husbands. Throughout fundamentalist Christianity, one piece of advice rings out above all others, which is that marriage only works if wives submit to their husbands. When speaking to outsiders, they often play it off like “submission” is just a bit of Biblical-language goofiness isn’t to be meant in the secular sense, but in practice “submit to your husbands” means exactly what it sounds like. Richard Strauss from Bible.org made it clear that women are to obey their husbands at all times, even when he’s being cruel. “Obedience is not to be practiced only when you feel like it, or when you wholeheartedly agree with your husband, or when he is treating you with Christ-like love, but in everything!” Michelle Duggar, right wing Christian icon and reality TV star, summarized some of the points of practicing wifely submission. She specifically singled out financial independence as something women should never have, saying, “Love is killed by self-sufficiency.” Sheryl Sandberg’s loving husband would be surprised to hear that!

3) How to make sex interesting in a Christian marriage. Conservative Christians are expected to abstain from sex until marriage, but for evangelicals, at least, as soon as you get married, you’re supposed to immediately drop years of prudish sexual avoidance and throw yourself completely into your intimate relationship. (Indeed, many proponents of wifely submission come down hard on women who are reluctant to have sex as often as their husbands want to.) In an attempt to overcome the obvious problems with these expectations, some Christians have created sex advice websites like Christian Nymphos, to get their readers in touch with those sexual desires they spent years repressing. Sadly, despite their best intentions, their advice is often the opposite of erotic. “Wake up each day, look in the mirror and ask Jesus to tell you what is beautiful about you,” they advise. Despite the winking permission to let yourself have some fun now that you’re married, Christian Nymphos can’t quite let go of the constant sex policing, either, particularly coming down hard on sexual fantasy, because it’s rarely “about a married couple enjoying each other exclusively, in a loving manner”.

4) If you’re gay, marry someone of the opposite sex and try not to think about it too much. While most people are familiar with the “ex-gay” movement that encourages people to try to turn straight, the new strategy is a bit more subtle: Encourage gay Christians to just live like they’re straight and ignore their real desires. Josh Weed, a gay Mormon married to a woman, is one of the most straightforward examples. He claims his marriage is better than ones where there’s sexual attraction, claiming that their sex life is “about more than just visual attraction and lust”, insinuating that a marriage without lust in it might even be better. Even the head of the infamous ex-gay organization Exodus International has embraced the “gay but not acting on it” line, having his wife write on their website that she doesn’t even want a heterosexual husband, because his lack of attraction to other women means “I am the only person he chooses to direct his attraction toward.” Marry a gay man and rest assured he won’t sleep with other women! It’s more foolproof than Pat Robertson’s advice to keep him at home with good housekeeping.

5) Men, do not masturbate. Women, either, I suppose, but most anti-masturbation materials on the Christian right focus on men and casually assume women don’t have the same urge towards hearty self-loving. To prevent themselves from masturbating, young men are encouraged to start “accountability groups” where they try to de-lust themselves, mostly by telling each other to think of Jesus when they’d rather think of boobs. (Unlike the Christian Nymphos, these groups understand that thinking of Jesus is not sexy.) But while there’s some small attempt to make men responsible for their own behavior, most of the attention on preventing male lust is given to young women, who are mostly told to wear more clothes.

6) If husbands want more sex, women should do everything they can to give it to them. Focus on the Family’s marriage counselor Juli Slattery is blunt about: Married men need sex, and so wives who aren’t providing enough need to step up. While she claims she isn’t trying to guilt trip women into having more sex, she argues that sex is a physical, emotional, spiritual, and relational need men have. (Though apparently not when they’re single and can’t even fill this need on their own time.) “You cannot love him as a husband but reject him sexually,” she says, suggesting that regardless of the hold-up, women whose husbands want sex more need to find a way to provide it.

7) However, if wives want more sex, they should learn to go without. Slattery has very different advice for wives whose problem is that they want to get laid more, but have unwilling husbands. While you should move heaven and earth to drum up more desire for a husband who wants more sex, if you’re the undersexed one, you’re instructed to tell yourself “friendship, seasoned love, and shared history are often enough to maintain a marriage in which sex is no longer possible”. Men who want more sex are entitled to wives who try to provide it, women who aren’t getting any are told to be happy with “forms of physical affection that don't involve the pressure of sexual intercourse, such as back rubs, holding hands, playful touching, and hugging”.

8) Men should not believe their partners who say they want abortions. While the Christian right doesn’t like to talk about it, plenty of Christian women want abortions, at about the same rate as other women. Anti-abortion activists then turn to men in an effort to prevent these abortions. Daybreak Crisis Pregnancy Center encourages men to disbelieve women who tell them they want abortions, instead saying the women were secretly “waiting for their boyfriends/husbands to stop them”, even if that means “rush through the door to rescue me and take me away somewhere safe”. Luckily for women who, generally, aren’t playing mind games by choosing abortion, most clinics have enough security to stop men who have crazed Christian right-induced white knight fantasies.

9) Handy tips to keep from screwing. The Christian right loves to chastise and scold the unmarried for having sex, but beyond a purity ring and encouragement to just say no, there’s surprisingly little advice to those who want to be abstinent on how to do it. What little advice there is out there is vague and useless. These ten tips on purity by Ron Hutchcraft at Christianity Today are typical. “You do not own the person you're dating,” he says, as if a feeling of ownership is necessary to feel desire. “That person belongs to God.” Knowing that kind of abstraction may not be that helpful, he also suggests not spending time alone with your dates, and “avoid French kissing and petting—anything that is sure to ignite the fires of passion”. Wait until you’re married, at what point you are expected to go from 0 to 60 in one night.

10) Be extremely paranoid about your teenager’s sexuality. Needless to say, parenting advice from conservative Christians is obsessed with the haunting fear that your kids are interested in sex, and no amount of guilt-tripping and shaming them for it will keep them away from it forever. Today’s Christian Woman recommends a Big Brother approach when teens bring dates home: “[T]here should never be a moment when they are alone without an adult in the house.” Turn your back for one second, and that’s the second penis slips into vagina! What Christians Want To Know recommends adding some thought policing duties to the pile. “What are you allowing your teen to watch on the TV or at the movie theatre?”, they ask. “Anything that has a rating now-a-days above “G” has sexual content.” History has long demonstrated that rebellion cannot be prevented by telling your teenager they can’t watch anything that’s not a cartoon produced by Disney. The frequency with which this useless tactic is recommended by Christians, however, suggests that playing censorship cops with your teen is its own reward.

The wide, weird world of Christian advice, when taken together, paints a grim view of what they expect out of love and sex. Mainly, it’s a world where men have very little responsibility in relationships, and women are given the job of doing most of the sacrificing and emotional work. The wedding ring is given almost magical qualities that are expected to turn nearly-asexual beings into hump monsters that nonetheless have no non-monogamous urges at all. One gets the impression that setting their followers up to fail---and therefore to turn to the church’s power for forgiveness and absolution---is the point behind all these impossible rules.

Biblical Medicine? How Religious Corporations Are Gobbling Up Healthcare Facilities

Valerie Tarico, AlterNet — Thu, 23 May 2013 10:15:00 -0700

Catholic hospitals and healthcare corporations are becoming “health care ministries.”

When it comes to matters of individual conscience, Washington State voters have a don’t-mess-with-us attitude that makes Texans look like cattle—and it goes way back.

In 2012 Washington voters flexed their muscle by legalizing recreational marijuana use and marriage for same-sex couples. In 2008, death with dignity passed some counties by as much as 75 percent. In 2006, Washington lawmakers outlawed discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. In 1991 a citizen initiative established that “every individual has the fundamental right to choose or refuse birth control” and “every woman has the fundamental right to choose or refuse abortion.” It also guaranteed an absolute right to privacy around mental health and reproductive issues for teens aged 13 and up. Washington state’s constitution includes an Equal Rights Amendment and (from the get-go) a stronger wall of separation between church and state than the U.S. Constitution.

In other words, west of Moscow, Idaho, and north of Portland, any bishops who want to control what they think of as their sacramental turf --birth, coming of age, sex, marriage, trippy transcendent experiences, and death—haven’t got a chance in hell at the ballot box. Washington even has extended statutes of limitations on child sex abuse—something Archbishop Timothy Dolan successfully fended off in New York and Pennsylvania. The Archdiocese of Spokane declared bankruptcy.

But the Vatican hasn’t survived for 1,500 years by being stupid. And as my devout family members like to say, “Where God closes a door, he opens a window.” The window the bishops found open in Washington takes the form of independent hospitals with financial problems.

Thanks to changes in healthcare delivery, more and more independent hospitals are being forced to merge with large healthcare corporations. The pressures include expensive equipment, complex electronic record keeping technologies, and an Obamacare-driven push for greater administrative efficiency. Rather like mom-and-pop hardware stores that survived by becoming Ace franchisees with standardized, streamlined supply and distribution systems, independent health facilities are surviving through acquisitions and mergers with other hospitals and healthcare corporations.

Of the largest healthcare corporations in the country, five of six are administered by the Catholic Church including the famously conservative Catholic Health Initiatives which operates the Franciscan brand and has $15 billion in assets. By the end of 2013, if all proposed mergers go through, 45 percent of Washington hospital beds will be religiously affiliated. In 10 counties, 100 percent of hospital facilities will be accountable to religious corporations, which are rapidly buying up outpatient clinics, laboratories and physician practices as well.

In the words of the U.S. Conference of Bishops, Catholic hospitals and healthcare corporations are “healthcare ministries” and “opportunities:”

New partnerships can be viewed as opportunities for Catholic healthcare institutions and services to witness to their religious and ethical commitments and so influence the healing profession. . . .For example, new partnerships can help to implement the Church’s social teaching.

Here is the diabolical stroke of genius. In any merger between a secular and Catholic care system, fiscal health comes with a poison pill. One condition of the merger is that the whole system becomes subject to a set of theological agreements call the “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services” or ERDs. Rather than care being dictated by medical science and patient preference, a set of religious doctrines place restrictions on what treatment options can be offered to (or even discussed with) patients.

Under these agreements, the patient-doctor relationship becomes a patient-doctor-church relationship: “The Church’s moral teaching on healthcare nurtures a truly interpersonal professional-patient relationship. This professional-patient relationship is never separated, then, from the Catholic identity of the healthcare institution.” Furthermore providers who work in these systems are required to sign binding contractual agreements to adhere to the religious directives, whether or not they are Catholic: “Catholic healthcare services must adopt these Directives as policy, require adherence to them within the institution as a condition for medical privileges and employment, and provide appropriate instruction regarding the Directives . . . .”

The ERDs in full are readily available to public, but here are some key samples and implications:

Fertility Treatment: “Reproductive technologies that substitute for the marriage act are not consistent with human dignity.” This provision excludes in vitro fertilization and related treatments. It especially affects same-sex couples, who may rely on surrogacy or insemination for childbearing, but it also affects the 10 percent of American couples who have fertility problems.

Contraception: “Catholic health institutions may not promote or condone contraceptive practices.” . . . “Direct sterilization of either men or women, whether permanent or temporary, is not permitted in a Catholic health care institution.” While we don’t typically associate contraception with hospitals, state-of-the-art long acting methods like IUD’s increasingly are provided at the time of delivery, because postpartum insertion improves health outcomes. Under ERD guidelines, a woman who delivers a baby at a Catholic hospital and wants an IUD or to have her tubes tied has to have a second, separate procedure at a secular facility—if she can find one.

Abnormal Pregnancies: “In case of extrauterine pregnancy, no intervention is morally licit which constitutes a direct abortion.” Catholic practice encourages the removal of the entire fallopian tube to end an ectopic pregnancy, rather than the standard practice which simply ablates the developing fetus. That is because the standard treatment is considered abortion, while in the invasive and fertility-destroying surgery, death of the embryo is simply a side effect. More broadly, Catholic “ethics” forbid abortion even to save the life of a mother carrying a nonviable fetus. The battle to save a young woman named Beatriz in El Salvador exemplifies this very situation.

Advance Directives: “A Catholic health care institution . . . will not honor an advance directive that is contrary to Catholic teaching.” Where patient directives and bishop directives conflict, the directives of the bishops take precedence regardless of a patient’s own religious or conscience obligations.

DNR: “The free and informed judgment made by a competent adult patient concerning the use or withdrawal of life-sustaining procedures should always be respected and normally complied with, unless it is contrary to Catholic moral teaching.” Since this battle heated up, stories are emerging in which Catholic hospitals have force-fed incapacitated patients whose advance directives specifically forbid this.

Death with Dignity: “Catholic healthcare institutions may never condone or participate in [Death With Dignity] in any way.” Physicians are prohibited even from discussing options that exist in other institutions or making referrals.

To many non-Catholics, the most shocking statement in the ERDs is the suggested alternative to death with dignity: “Patients experiencing suffering that cannot be alleviated should be helped to appreciate the Christian understanding of redemptive suffering."Redemptive suffering is a theological notion that derives from the crucifixion story—the idea that the blood sacrifice of a perfect being could redeem harm done. (Theories about how this works have varied over the course of Christian history.) By extension, suffering itself has redemptive value, which is why Mother Teresa’s order, for example, practiced self-flagellation and glorified suffering of the poor, ill and dying.

Given the clash between Washington State’s independence streak and the top-down approach of the Catholic bishops, Washington citizens are pushing back. After Catholic Peace Health got an exclusive contract near her home in the San Juan Islands, advocate Monica Harrington created a website, Catholicwatch.org to complement the efforts of the national Merger Watch. Merger Watch has been fighting the religious takeover of secular systems across the country for over a decade, and sometimes winning, but describes a recent surge that overwhelms their resources. The ACLU of Washington is ramping up and aggregating funds to fight for a state-wide solution, the first in the country, and is soliciting stories (confidentiality protected) from patients and providers anywhere in the U.S. who have experienced religious interference in medical decisions.

Even so, on May 20, the Seattle Times announced an affiliation agreement between the University of Washington system and Peace Health. Even within Catholic-controlled hospitals, less than five percent of revenues come from the Catholic Church. Most are tax payer funds in the form of Medicaid, Medicare and capital grants for public services—and insurance reimbursement. So, the thought of the bishops influencing a public owned and funded institution adds insult to injury. In response, Columnist Danny Westneat, of the Times, framed a pointed question. “Most of us aren’t Catholic, so I’m guessing we’d never go along with letting the creeds of that one faith run something as universal as education [even if ‘the Catholics have a good record of running quality schools’]. So why are we allowing it with healthcare?”

Why indeed.

The Latest Cannabis Discoveries That the Federal Government Doesn’t Want You to Know About

Paul Armentano, AlterNet — Wed, 22 May 2013 16:22:00 -0700

Federal lawmakers and the White House continue to willfully ignore science in regards to the cannabis plant.

Despite issuing a highly publicized memorandum in 2009 stating, "Science and the scientific process must inform and guide decisions of my Administration," it remains clear that federal lawmakers and the White House continue to willfully ignore science in regards to the cannabis plant and the federal policies which condemn it to the same prohibitive legal status as heroin. In fact, in 2011 the Obama administration went so far as to reject an administrative petition that called for hearings to reevaluate pot’s safety and efficacy, pronouncing in the Federal Register, “Marijuana does not have a currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States or a currently accepted medical use with severe restrictions. At this time, the known risks of marijuana use have not been shown to be outweighed by specific benefits in well-controlled clinical trials that scientifically evaluate safety and efficacy.” (The Administration’s flat-Earth position was upheld in January by a three-judge panel for the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.)

Nevertheless, scientific evaluations of cannabis and the health of its consumers have never been more prevalent. Studies are now published almost daily rebuking the federal government’s allegations that the marijuana plant is a highly dangerous substance lacking any therapeutic utility. Yet, virtually all of these studies – and, more importantly, their implications for public policy – continue to be ignored by lawmakers. Here are just a few examples of the latest cannabis science that your federal government doesn’t want you to know about.

Frequent cannabis smokers possess no greater lung cancer risk than do either occasional pot smokers or non-smokers

Subjects who regularly inhale cannabis smoke do not possess an increased risk of lung cancer compared to those who either consume it occasionally or not at all, according to data presented in April at the annual meeting of the American Academy for Cancer Research.

Investigators from the University of California, Los Angeles analyzed data from six case-control studies, conducted between 1999 and 2012, involving over 5,000 subjects (2,159 cases and 2,985 controls) from around the world.

They reported, “Our pooled results showed no significant association between the intensity, duration, or cumulative consumption of cannabis smoke and the risk of lung cancer overall or in never smokers.”

Previous case-control studies have also failed to find an association between cannabis smoking and head and neck cancers or cancers of the upper aerodigestive tract.

Nevertheless, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration continues to maintain, “Marijuana smokers increase their risk of cancer of the head, neck, lungs and respiratory track.”

Consistent use of cannabis associated is associated with reduced risk factors for Type 2 diabetes

Will the pot plant one day play a role in staving the ongoing epidemic of Type 2 diabetes? Emerging science indicates that it just might.

According to trial data published this month in the American Journal of Medicine, subjects who regularly consume cannabis possess favorable indices related to diabetic control compared to occasional consumers or non-consumers.

Investigators at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre in Boston, assessed self-report data from some 5,000 adult onset diabetics patients regarding whether they smoked or had ever smoked marijuana. Researchers reported that those who were current, regular marijuana smokers possessed 16 percent lower fasting insulin levels and reduced insulin resistance compared to those who had never used pot. By contrast, non-users possessed larger waistlines and lower levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL or ‘good’) cholesterol – both of which are risk factors for type 2 diabetes.

Similar benefits were reported in occasional cannabis consumers, though these changes were less pronounced, “suggesting that the impact of marijuana use on insulin and insulin resistance exists during periods of recent use,” researchers reported.

The recent findings are supportive of the findings of 2012 study by a team of UCLA researchers, published in the British Medical Journal, which reported that adults with a history of marijuana use had a lower prevalence of type 2 diabetes and possess a lower risk of contracting the disease than did those with no history of cannabis consumption, even after researchers adjusted for social variables (ethnicity, level of physical activity, etc.) Concluded the study, “[This] analysis of adults aged 20-59 years … showed that participants who used marijuana had a lower prevalence of DM (Diabetes Mellitus) and lower odds of DM relative to non-marijuana users.”

Diabetes is the third leading cause of death in the United States after heart disease and cancer.

Inhaling cannabis dramatically mitigates symptoms of Crohn’sdisease

Smoking cannabis twice daily significantly reduces symptoms of Crohn’s disease, a type of inflammatory bowel disorder that is estimated to impact about half a million Americans. So say the results of the first-ever placebo-controlled trial assessing the use of cannabis for Crohn’s – published online this month in the scientific journal Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology.

Researchers at the Meir Medical Center, Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology in Israel assessed the safety and efficacy of inhaled cannabis versus placebo in 21 subjects with Crohn’s disease who were nonresponsive to conventional treatment regimens. Eleven participants smoked standardized cannabis cigarettes containing 23 percent THC and 0.5 percent cannabidiol – a nonpsychotropic cannabinoid known to possess anti-inflammatory properties -- twice daily over a period of eight weeks. The other ten subjects smoked placebo cigarettes containing no active cannabinoids.

Investigators reported, “Our data show that 8-weeks treatment with THC-rich cannabis, but not placebo, was associated with a significant decrease of 100 points in CDAI (Crohn’s Disease and activity index) scores.” Five of the eleven patients in the study group reported achieving disease remission (defined as a reduction in patient’s CDAI score by more than 150 points). Participants who smoked marijuana reported decreased pain, improved appetite, and better sleep compared to control subjects. Researchers reported that “no significant side effects” were associated with cannabis inhalation.

The clinical results substantiate decades of anecdotal reports from Crohn’s patients, some one-half of which acknowledge having used cannabis to mitigate symptoms of the disease.

Marijuana-like substances halt HIV infection in white blood cells

The administration of THC has been associated with decreased mortality and ameliorated disease progression in monkeys with simian immunodeficiency virus, a primate model of HIV disease. So could cannabinoids produce similar outcomes in humans? The findings of a newly published preclinical trial indicate that the answer may be ‘yes’ and they reveal the substance’s likely mechanism of action in combating the disease.

Writing in the May edition of the Journal of Leukocyte Biology, investigators at the Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia reported that the administration of cannabinoid agonists limits HIV infection in macrophages (white blood cells that aid in the body's immune response). Researchers assessed the impact of three commercially available synthetic cannabis agonists (non-organic compounds that act on the same endogenous receptor sites as do plant cannabinoids) on HIV-infected macrophage cells. Following administration, researchers sampled the cells periodically to measure the activity of an enzyme called reverse transcriptase, which is essential for HIV replication. By day 7, investigators reported that the administration of all three compounds was associated with a significant decrease in HIV replication.

“The results suggest that selective CB2 (cannabinoid 2 receptor) agonists could potentially be used in tandem with existing antiretroviral drugs, opening the door to the generation of new drug therapies for HIV/AIDS,” researchers summarized in a Temple University news release. “The data also support the idea that the human immune system could be leveraged to fight HIV infection."

Cannabinoids offer a likely treatment therapy for PTSD

Post-traumatic stress syndrome is estimated to impact some eight millions American annually and effective treatments for the condition are few and far between. Yet just published research in the May issue of the journal Molecular Psychiatry indicates that cannabinoids hold the potential to successfully treat the condition.

Researchers at the New York School of Medicine reported that subjects diagnosed with PTSD possess elevated quantities of endogenous cannabinoid receptors in regions of the brain associated with fear and anxiety. In addition, authors also reported that these subjects suffer from the decreased production of anandamide, an endogenous cannabinoid neurotransmitter, resulting in an imbalanced endocannibinoid system. (The endogenous cannabinoid receptor system is a regulatory system that is present in living organisms for the purpose of promoting homeostasis).

Authors speculated that increasing the body’s production of cannabinoids would likely restore the body’s natural brain chemistry and psychological balance. They affirmed, “[Our] findings substantiate, at least in part, emerging evidence that … plant-derived cannabinoids such as marijuana may possess some benefits in individuals with PTSD by helping relieve haunting nightmares and other symptoms of PTSD.”

The researchers concluded: “The data reported herein are the first of which we are aware of to demonstrate the critical role of CB1 (cannabinoid) receptors and endocannabinoids in the etiology of PTSD in humans. As such, they provide a foundation upon which to develop and validate informative biomarkers of PTSD vulnerability, as well as to guide the rational development of the next generation of evidence-based treatments for PTSD.”

But don’t expect federal officials to help move this process forward. In 2011 federal administrators blocked investigators at the University of Arizona at Phoenix from conducting an FDA-approved, placebo-controlled clinical trial to evaluate the use of cannabis in 50 patients with PTSD.

Scientific integrity? Not when it comes to marijuana. Not by a long shot.

Penis Cakes, Penis Straws ... Penis Piñatas? Why the Modern Bachelorette Party Is Filled With Male Genitalia

Madeline Grimes , Bitch Magazine — Wed, 22 May 2013 10:37:00 -0700

The penis-prop industry is a relatively new addition to the bachelorette party. Why is it there?

The following article first appeared in Bitch Magazine.

A few weeks ago, I attended a friend’s bachelorette party. In the days preceding, my kitchen morphed into a workshop dedicated to constructing penis-shaped objects to eat and to hit. Resting atop my kitchen table like a prize pig at a state fair was a large pink papier-mâché penis piñata stuffed with condoms, chocolates, and individually wrapped packets of lube. Meanwhile, a large, thickly frosted phallic cake occupied the lower half of my refrigerator.

It wasn’t until later (one slice of penis cake down, and the remnants of a bashed piñata safely deposited in the garbage can) that I realized how odd it is that the modern bachelorette party—by and large, a gender-segregated event—is festooned with facsimiles of male genitalia. It seems there is an entire industry devoted to shoving genitals—penis whistles, penis pasta, penis straws, and of course, penis cake—into a bride’s face. (Vagina whistles, pasta, piñatas, and cakes are hard to come by.) Ask anyone to spot the bridal party at a crowded bar, and he or she will inevitably point to the group of women sucking on penis-shaped lollipops (“cocksuckers,” get it?) and ordering rounds of Sex on the Beach (it’s sex—on a beach!). The use of gag gifts at bachelorette parties has become so ingrained in our culture that to have a party that does not in some way feature phallic objects is almost blasphemous.

But the penis-prop industry is a relatively new addition to bachelorette parties, events originally intended to give the bride an opportunity to participate in prewedding festivities and express her sexual freedom. Early bachelorette parties emerged sometime during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and were loosely modeled after the bachelor party. These male-oriented celebrations have roots that stretch much deeper than that of the bachelorette party. They began in the fifth century BC, when Spartan soldiers held a dinner for the groom and a toast to his honor. Over time, the parties grew more rowdy, and the celebratory activities were perceived as more lewd and sexual in nature. Emily Post’s Wedding Etiquette describes the bachelor party as “a sodden good-bye to old bachelor days, an event where the groom and his ushers share an evening of abandonment a night or two before the wedding that usually includes a great deal of drinking.”

Later, pop culture lauded the bachelor party as a night of pure debauchery before the heavy cuffs of marriage end a groom’s days of sexual freedom. Bachelor Party (1984) was the first film to focus on the exploits of the eponymous event, with Tom Hanks starring as the perennial party-animal-turned-fiancé. His friends, incredulous at his interest in settling down, throw him a wild party complete with a donkey snorting cocaine, an orgy, and his fiancée eventually questioning his fidelity. (The bride and her friends also hit the town in retaliation for the bachelor party’s perceived debauchery. It is, however, never explicitly called a “bachelorette party.”)

Then there’s arguably the most famous film in the bachelors-gone-wild genre, 2009’s The Hangover, in which four friends head to Vegas for a night of revelry before the wedding. In the course of the evening, they lose the groom, collect a baby, engage in infidelity (a member of the wedding party drunkenly marries a stripper), and steal a tiger from Mike Tyson. The message of these films is that the bachelor party is simply a glorification of men behaving badly.

Prior to the 1960s, women didn’t celebrate the “end” of their sexual freedom in ritualized parties like men because it was believed that women weren’t actually giving anything up in marriage. Women were not expected to feel sad about their impending nuptials, nor were they expected to lament the end of their single days in drunken bacchanalia—marriage was the aspirational end point. Bachelorette parties emerged only when attitudes about sexuality and marital roles shifted; specifically, when the brides-to-be were no longer assumed to be virgins on their wedding night.

Instead of bachelorette parties, brides were given showers in which they were given gifts—usually housewares and cooking utensils—to prepare them for married life. The shower remains a pillar of prewedding ritual (according to TheKnot.com and WeddingChannel.com’s 2012 Real Weddings Study, 83 percent of brides have showers) and a time in which married women pass on advice and secrets to successful marriage. Many bridal-shower themes focus on the traditional domestic role of women, such as cooking or garden parties. These parties are ruled by etiquette, and they tend to romanticize marriage as the pinnacle of a woman’s aspirations. Jaclyn Geller, author of the 2001 book Here Comes the Bride, points out that “as opposed to the raunchy bachelor party, the female shower is mawkishly sentimental and marriage oriented.” Though once it may have served to socialize the young bride to sex through advice and gifts of racy lingerie, the shower was rarely overtly sexual in nature.

Early bachelorette parties typically followed the more formal bridal shower, and included guests outside of wedding attendants, but there is little research on them detailing what actually took place. Beth Montemurro, a sociologist who studies bridal events, suggests that early parties sought to provide “the bride with an unforgettable last weekend where she would be able to realize the magnitude of the transition from single to married.”

According to Montemurro, through the 1980s bachelorette parties did not explicitly mimic bachelor parties in their perceived sexual deviance. Instead, they were events that sought to reaffirm friendship before marriage without the formality of other prewedding rituals. In other words, the bachelorette party was more about celebrating friendship in a relaxed setting than participating in debauched or sexualized antics.

It wasn’t until the 1980s that the bachelorette party was even given a name, and the late ’90s before it was widely discussed in media (including women’s and bridal magazines) or studied in academia. (Cosmo’s first article about bachelorette parties appeared in 1998 and suggested that activities should be tailored to the bride’s tastes, even if “you know your pal secretly wants to rub oil on the gun of a scantily clad ‘police officer.’”) The 1980s brought a subtle shift in tone to the parties—they were usually planned in advance and began to shadow the male version in activity. The first newspaper article to explain what a bachelorette party entailed appeared in 1988, and in it the male author, Richard Roeper (yes, of Ebert & Roeper fame) exclaims conspiratorially, “Guys, you’re not going to like this, but my research indicates that on the Bawdy Meter, the typical bachelorette party easily tops its male counterpart.”

This shift marked the end of the staid bachelorette soiree, one in which friendship above all else was celebrated, and the beginning of the move toward a manufactured mimicry of the male version. Geller maintains that the bachelorette party is “a gesture of retaliation rather than a real sensual adventure…[answering] an imagined insult, responding to the bachelor party’s text (lewd sexuality) rather than its subtext (lamenting lost friendship).”

Several factors contributed to the rise of the penis-centric modern bachelorette party. Montemurro notes that “throughout the late 1990s and into the first few years of the 21st century, there was a boom in print media coverage of bachelorette parties, reflecting the increase in the popularity of the parties themselves.” Descriptions of rowdy women commandeering bars and salivating over the chiseled pectorals of male strippers became salacious fodder for women’s and wedding magazines. Additionally, women began taking bachelorette activities outside of private homes and into the public sphere. Bars, clubs, and restaurants became popular venues for bachelorette festivities, and because women were celebrating in public, it was easy to witness (and comment on) their rowdy behavior.

According to the 2012 Real Weddings Survey, 77 percent of brides have a bachelorette party. Activities are designed to pantomime naughtiness without creeping past the boundaries of acceptable behavior. After all, a penis straw is too quirky to be salacious, right? But bawdy bachelorette culture is a manufactured construct that grew from the hushed urgings of big business. Between 1990 and 2002, the average cost of a wedding grew by almost 50 percent. There are nearly 2.1 million new marriages each year, and in 2012 couples spent an average of $28,427 on their wedding and the flurry of ritualized events that precede it. From the engagement party and bridal shower to the rehearsal dinner and bachelor and bachelorette parties, getting married is more expensive than ever. Weddings and prewedding rituals have become lavish affairs that barely resemble past traditions. In her 2007 book One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, Rebecca Mead points out that in the first decade of 2000, bridal magazines conveyed the message that a wedding is “a consumer rite of passage, in which the taking up of a new role in life is given material substance through the acquisition of products and services for both the wedding itself and for the marriage that is to follow.”

The bachelorette party has become its own consumer rite of passage, and as the parties gained popularity, new rituals were introduced. Embarrassing the bride became a central focus, with bachelorettes instructed to wear fancy sashes, veils, or hats to distinguish them from their friends, and it’s customary to shove various symbols of genitalia into their blushing faces. An article on TheKnot.com lists the seven “must-have” party props for modern bachelorettes. The author advises women to “add a hint of hooker to the bachelorette’s outfit to make her feel dangerous, daring, and fabulously embarrassed,” and to “make a beeline for the penis sipper (a.k.a. ‘dickie sippie’) and straws…these two items make the most sense, provide a constant laugh, and allow everyone to get in on the phallic fun.”

The forced use of phallic symbols at bachelorette parties suggests that the role of women in heterosexual marriages is simply to penis-please and that an evening of female bonding must include a reminder of the men they’re leaving at home. During the bride’s last night to express her sexuality, she is instead encouraged to worship and covet cutesy symbols of the penis. It’s unlikely that a woman would be seen carrying around a penis straw at a Sunday luncheon, but within the confines of the prescribed hypersexual bachelorette party it seems only normal.

The use of penis props also mocks the supposed sexual purity of a bride (after all, she’ll likely be wearing white on her wedding day to symbolize her virginity) by insinuating that she’ll be horrified or embarrassed by all the cocks around her. These props are emblematic of the contradictory roles the bride is forced to play: Within hours of the bachelorette party ending, she’ll morph from bawdy bachelorette to blushing, virginal bride.

The rise of queer marriage has already shifted the conversation about the sacred institution, and it will no doubt shift the traditions surrounding it as well. Steven Petrow, author of Steven Petrow’s Complete Gay & Lesbian Manners, notes that same-sex couples are creating their own wedding rituals, ones that often leave gender-essentialist rituals by the wayside. These changing traditions will inevitably trickle down into prewedding events, either queering bachelor and bachelorette parties or perhaps speeding toward the end of such festivities entirely.

The business of being a bride-to-be mandates a wild party, contrived sexual deviance (within the boundaries of acceptable behavior), and a set of rituals that have strayed far from their original intent. Though bachelorette festivities still celebrate female friendships, the ritual of bonding is often overshadowed by the manufactured naughtiness of the penis-prop culture. I wonder how bachelorette parties will change in coming years as they become institutionalized rituals of weddings. I wonder if the traditions created by queer marriages will usher in a new era of celebratory activities. And I can only hope that when it comes time for my own bachelorette party, it’s devoid of penis propaganda.

Why Has Humanity Always Fantasized About the Capture and Rape of Women?

Lynn Stuart Parramore, AlterNet — Wed, 22 May 2013 07:13:00 -0700

Misogyny’s deepest roots are exposed in the endless repetition of stories about capture and rape.

If you think about it, a woman carried off against her will is one of the most popular stories in human history. Whether she’s forced to marry, sexually violated, or otherwise tormented, the female captive pops up in Persian tales, Arthurian legends, and the great epics of India. She’s a staple of every art form and cultural product, from the paintings of great masters to true crime stories, from sonnets to soap operas. She’s woven into explanations of imperial origins: the Romans became the Romans because they snatched women from a neighboring tribe in a celebrated event known as the Rape of the Sabines. Biblical stories of captured women are so commonplace that the Lord issues helpful instructions on how to do the thing correctly, which include shaving the captive’s head, and if she fails to please you, properly disposing of her after she has been “dishonored.” (Deuteronomy 21:10-14).

Myths overflow with women abducted and raped (the two terms have an ancient linkage): Persephone is carried off by Hades, Europa by Zeus, and Helen by Paris, which sets off the Trojan War. The romance would not be the romance, nor the novel the novel, without the long tradition of captive women in everything from the legendary medieval romance Apollonius of Tyre, to the grotesqueries of the Marquis de Sade, right on down to Stieg Larsson’s pop culture sensation, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (original title: Men Who Hate Women).

How do we explain this persistence? First, there’s the ancient notion of a maiden taken for the purpose of bringing “new blood” to the tribe – what anthropologists call “exogamy.” This idea, usually expressed in a rape or a violent raid, gets sanitized and elevated in originary cultural narratives like the story of the Virgin Mary, whose divine impregnation (which she didn’t appear to choose), transforms her into the mother of the Christian religion.

Sometimes the captive woman expresses dramatic tensions, and even attractions, between men, as in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, where the capture and violation of a female creates a fraught male triangle. Other times captive women express economic and political conflicts between large groups. In Europe, popular stories of women abducted into Oriental harems (often featured in erotica) were brought over by settlers to America, where they gave way to tales of white people – often young women – taken captive by Indians (Western movies like The Searchers carried on this tradition). The visual titillation provided by captive women, a favorite theme of great European painters like Rubens and Titian, became a cinematic staple of schlocky slasher films, where young girls are abducted and terrorized until a “rescue” releases the audience from any collective feelings of guilt about watching women chopped into confetti.

The horror doesn’t end with the story. Captivity tales have a disturbing way of floating between fantasy and enactment. The key modern captivity novel, John Fowles’ The Collector, centers on a lonely clerk who collects butterflies until he kidnaps the object of his romantic obsession and locks her in the cellar. The novel inspired countless imitations in literature and film. It was also cited as the real-life inspiration for not one but three different American serial killers, one of whom, Leonard Lake, actually named his kidnapping and killing spree “Operation Miranda” after the victim in Fowles’ book.

In the porn industry, the capture, degradation and torture of females constitutes an entire subgenre. Women are hogtied, gang-banged, and locked away in dungeons. The captured and raped schoolgirl is a favorite theme of Japanese erotic hentai cartoons and video games. Monster porn adds the spectacle of tentacled aliens and horned devils delivering the torture.

There is no telling how many souls sit in darkened rooms consuming these flickering fantasies, which reflect the whole pantheon of sexual taboos and repressions. It’s not only men; women, too, have fantasies associated with capture-and-rape, for a variety of reasons, among them the need to erase culturally prescribed guilt about initiating sex. For a reasonably well-adjusted adult, consumption of violent porn may be a way to process common human fears and desires in a way that doesn’t actually hurt anyone. For others -- it’s impossible to know how many -- the images may become haunting demons that taunt the watcher into action.

In any case, the fantasy of capturing a woman and getting away with it is nothing if not pervasive. But how exactly does the fantasy come to be acted out? Would it happen, or happen as often, without the images and the narratives pointing the way?

We don’t yet know what combination of elements drove Cleveland kidnapper Ariel Castro to enact his particular fantasies, what biological components and individual life experiences set the stage for his horrific actions. But we do know that the capture-and-rape narrative is deeply embedded in our cultural DNA. We think of acts like Castro’s as the aberrations of a monster or the sickness of a pervert, but they reflect something that permeates our shared culture – our literature, myths, religious rituals, everything that forms what Freud called our archaic inheritance, or, if you prefer Jung, our collective unconscious.

It is the myth of Persephone, I think, which exposes the deepest roots of the capture-and-rape fantasy. In that ancient tale, Persephone is out gathering flowers when a cleft in the earth opens and out leaps Hades, Lord of the Underworld, who snatches her and carries her off to his dark kingdom. Eventually, Persephone is allowed to return to the upper world for half the year. The part where she is down below is winter, and her return signals spring.

In this case, the abduction of a woman is meant to explain the cycles of nature. That makes sense when you consider that a woman’s body is always more connected to the cycles of nature than a man’s. It’s she who bleeds every month, and she who gives birth. Because of her association with the cycles of life, she’s always connected to death. After all, that which is born must also die. (The death and the maiden motif, a cousin of capture-and-rape, is its own artistic subgenre.) The womb is always connected to the tomb. And woman must be punished for it.

In many ways, human civilization can be seen as a frantic effort to transcend nature – to break away from the cycles that condemn us to die. Patriarchal cultures work desperately to erase our dependence on nature, personified in women’s bodies. We give children the names of their fathers, erasing matrilineal history, and in our religious fantasies we turn mothers into virgins impregnated by gods. We intuitively understand that manly gods, whether Zeus or Yahweh, must impose themselves over nature and humans – that is how we know they are gods. We are conditioned to expect that they will exert their authority through and over the bodies of women.

In the kingdom of his dilapidated home, Ariel Castro could fancy himself a godling; transcendent over the processes of nature. He could control the sexuality of the women he imprisoned. He could control the process of birth, which he evidently did with deadly enthusiasm, forcing Michelle Knight to deliver Amanda Berry’s baby, threatening to murder her if the infant did not survive. He was in charge of the process of life and death. Destiny itself belonged to him.

Castro is a deeply disturbed criminal, but he is not an alien. The sensationalistic coverage of the Cleveland kidnappings, with its rapt attention to every lurid detail, every particle of torture, expresses both our horror at the criminal’s actions and our voyeuristic participation in his fantasy. The comforting notion that we are only trying to understand brutality erases the shared guilt we feel in suspecting that a whole host of psychological, cultural and political structures in our society reinforce the idea that a woman is an object to be taken and owned, a bit of prey to be hunted, a temptation whose behavior can suddenly spark a man’s animal nature. The focus on the criminal’s punishment – will he or won’t he get the death penalty? -- promises the counterpart of the “happy ending” in the slasher film. And yet once the criminal has been brought to justice, the vicious dynamics of power, the negligence of the legal system, the visual culture dependent on tormented female bodies, and the lingering curse of patriarchy itself, remain largely undisturbed.

But no matter, soon we’ll get to see the made-for-TV movie.

My Friend, the Murderer

Amy Butcher, Salon — Fri, 17 May 2013 16:47:00 -0700

The Kevin who took a steak knife to his ex's throat is not the Kevin I know.

Here’s what the news reported: An area man murdered his former girlfriend in the upper-level apartment of his split-level home. He sat with her body for 20 to 40 minutes, then phoned the local police, claiming a complete mental breakdown. I don’t know what just happened, he said, but you need to come quick. He waited for police on the sidewalk with his hands behind his head, and officers lowered him into their squad car just past dawn without incident.

What they did not say is this: I was his close friend. He walked me home before it happened. Kevin Schaeffer liked pizza and history and music, and most especially the band Dr. Dog. He wanted to move away — to Nashville, to San Francisco — and in every memory I have of him, he wears a purple sweat shirt, one I’m not certain he even owned. He was president of the college radio station, a Dean’s Honors student, and a history major who also liked writing. He could draw a very convincing Rastafarian. The year prior, he’d attempted suicide by lining a bathtub with electronics, but returned to our college campus just five days later, where we assumed he was receiving treatment. He was not receiving treatment. He had been suffering from long-term, severe depression and suicidal ideation for over a year on the night he killed her, and yet our conversation was pleasant: We talked that night about the Badlands, canine rain boots, an upcoming potluck, a tie-dyed cake. I’d learned how to do it online, I told him — it just involved food dye and a little patience.

“That sounds amazing,” he said, nodding. “I’d eat that cake for sure.”

It was April of 2009, just four weeks before our graduation at Gettysburg College, and we were just 22. I never thought I’d know a murderer. Certainly Kevin never thought he’d be one. My biggest concern that night was packing: how in the world I’d fit a swivel chair into the back of my Toyota Camry.

“That’s easy,” Kevin had told me. “You just put it in on a diagonal.”

Then 12 hours passed, and I sat in my living room, watching “The Price Is Right” in my pajamas, while blocks north, police combed through Kevin’s apartment, stripped him of his possessions, and told him to look into the camera.

“Straight ahead,” they might have said, and then they pressed his inky finger to a pad of paper.

* * *

Kevin and I had been friends at that point for nearly four years, since the first week of freshmen year. Gettysburg College was a private school of just over 2,000 students, and it sat surrounded by the historic battlefields that had once served as the turning point of the Civil War. Forty-six thousand men died on the fields surrounding our private campus, but we ever only knew the college green, the library, an Irish bar, a Dairy Queen. That evening, we’d gone for drinks at a bar that had once been used as a makeshift hospital, but I only joked about the bodies: how undoubtedly their blood once soaked and permeated into the floors.

To me it was funny: the subtext of violence in everything. I couldn’t see the bodies or the men strapped to leather gurneys. I couldn’t hear their cries or the gunfire or the hulking cannons. I ordered a Bay Breeze with extra limes, and then Kevin walked me home.

So when the newspapers announced what happened, I sat down and wrote a letter. He was my friend and was now in prison; everything else seemed arbitrary.

I can’t make sense of what you did,I wrote. I will try to understand, but I obviously wish this hadn’t happened.

This was all I could say — the only things I knew with absolute certainty I would never regret. I knew even then that details might emerge even before Kevin received my letter, and so to say that I’d be there for him, or that I trusted it’d been a mistake — there seemed a risk in each admission.

It took 18 months for defense and prosecuting attorneys to finalize their case, and all the while, I wrote him monthly: a careful letter detailing my life. When finally the lawyers were ready to present their arguments, they chose to settle for a plea bargain, instead. Kevin was sentenced to 27 to 50 years in a maximum-security prison, but this in lieu of an arduous trial, one that would be undoubtedly difficult for everyone involved. He was not obligated to receive mental health treatment, not required to ever talk about what happened. and because there was never a trial, the only information I’ll ever have is what I first heard on the evening news.

* * *

I still write Kevin once a month. I tell him about everything: how I visited the Iowa State Fair, for example, or how I saw an astronaut carved from butter. How I’d eaten the state’s largest pork tenderloin and half of the 50 food items served on sticks. And I think — every time — about asking: What happened that night and how in the world could it?

But instead I say nothing, because I fear I am not equipped. I have no idea how to handle his mental illness, which I know is still ongoing, because every few months — along with his letter — he includes a new graphic story: a woman stabs a man in the neck, or blood oozes into a loaf of bread. He is trying — the best he can — to work through whatever happened, but there are no professionals assisting him along the way, no trained specialists to help him get better. He’ll spend nearly his whole life in prison, safe from society but never himself.

It is tempting — considering recent events — to jump to a grandiose conclusion, to assert what I have learned, to say that my friendship with Kevin Schaeffer has taught me everything, including this world. That in knowing him, I know myself. But the truth is, I’ve learned nothing, and I’m not certain I ever will, except that our society is one of indifference and apathy for the mentally ill. Through Kevin, I’ve learned the facts: that the rate of mental illness in inmates is five times that of the general population, that it’s rising with every year, that we put the sick in prisons because we don’t know what else to do. And in the past three years alone, $2.2 billion has been cut from state mental-health budgets.

“Wishing that mental illness would not exist has led our policymakers to shape a healthcare system as if it did not exist,” announced Paul Appelbaum, president of the American Psychiatric Association, in his inaugural address.

I think even about the media coverage, how the footage is always sensational: the body, the blood, the mother, how she grieves deep into her husband in some suburban, fenced-in yard.

Meanwhile, they keep appearing: I mean here, of course, Adam Lanza, James Holmes, Jared Loughner, the Tsarnaev brothers. We hate these men because it’s easy, but we never consider what remains difficult: that mental illness is real and pressing, that if left untreated, it results in violence. That rather than fear or ignore the ill, we should work for treatment and a resolution.

I feel like an animal, Kevin wrote me once. I feel locked inside a cage.

* * *

This month marked the four-year anniversary of all that happened, and still I wait for a letter that comes monthly. The envelopes are always stamped to indicate they originated in a prison, and when I stand in my foyer and hold them, I think, Friend. I don’t think, Crime.

It seems to me someone should be listening to him, even if that person is only me.

So I read with attention about each new cellmate, each new book, each new class, or the radio Kevin’s finally saving for so that he can again listen to music.

A friend or family member asks me what he was like, and it’s all I can do to just be honest. “He was one of my best friends,” I say. “He was normal. He made great salsa.”

The Kevin I know is not the Kevin anyone imagines. They know only the man in a jumpsuit, his hands shackled to his waist. We crave for things to be simple — a case of a bad man who was bad — but Kevin was my friend, and that night, he walked me home. He is both the man I remember and the one who now lives in prison. Our friendship isn’t one documented by the cameras, not by the news anchors or their scripts. Above all, I know this: It is not a switch one can simply turn off.

Write back, Kevin writes, and each month, I always do.

Punk at the Met: For People Who've Never Had to Safety-Pin Their Clothes

Ayesha Adamo, AlterNet — Wed, 15 May 2013 07:53:00 -0700

The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art takes on punk, with mixed results.

The new “Punk: Chaos to Couture” exhibition at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art is sort of like its very own Costume Institute Gala co-chair, Rooney Mara. You know: the type who’d sport some fake tattoos, a new haircut, a blank look, and pretend to be a hacker anarchist within the glamorous context of cinema, when in actuality her family owns the New York Giants and she’s probably never dipped so much as a pinkie toe into the Pirate Bay to acquire what she can’t afford to buy, let alone honed her skills to hack it like Anonymous.

And that’s what this exhibit at the Met is: “punk” for people who never had to safety pin anything themselves. Perhaps this fashion spectacle is what Guy Debord—famed Situationist thinker and influence on Malcolm McLaren in his molding of the punk movement—was talking about all along: a world of spectacle where "all that was once directly lived has become mere representation." We’ve come to the Met to see “Clothes for Heroes,” as promised on the door of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s 1970s London shop at 430 King’s Road, but what we get are clothes for rich people. Really stunning ones, though.

At the entrance of the exhibit, we are presented with a confrontation: one mannequin, clad in revolutionary-red bondage pants—a staple of the Westwood/McLaren shop in the 1970s—faces off with a second mannequin in head-to-toe glitzy Dior from the 2006-2007 collection. The Westwood/McLaren mannequin gestures lewdly at her Dior adversary. The audio is the Sex Pistols versus Rossini. Clearly, this means war.

This confrontation between '70s punk and modern couture sets the tone for the displays that follow, and it’s worth noting that throughout the exhibit, pre-runway Westwood/McLaren ensembles are the sole examples of punk’s “then” in the then-now comparison, or I suppose the “Chaos” part of “Chaos to Couture.” There is no display of actual DIY clothing from actual punk individuals of the late 1970s to represent the bulk of punk’s adherents, who existed outside of the fashion business. The works of these nameless creators might have stood in sharper contrast to the inventions of the couture fashion houses that adopted punk’s DIY ideas and spun them out, but this exhibit prefers to compare fashion with fashion.

While Westwood and McLaren started out clothing punk rock’s brightest stars, instead of runway models and social elites, they were marketing what was, and still is, a fashion business. There was little chaos about it; in fact, their marketing seems to have been pretty direct when you consider that the style and aesthetic of the clothing, as well as the careers of some of the punk rock stars who wore the clothing, were both under McLaren’s management.

So “Chaos,” as it is applied to this exhibit, is a misnomer. To confuse the alternative marketing strategy employed by Westwood and McLaren with chaos is like confusing anarchy itself with chaos, when in fact, the lack of formal government does not mean the same thing as chaos, or disorder, at all. Even Guy Debord and the original Situationists, from which Malcolm McLaren derived much of his inspiration as the impresario of punk, were not proponents of chaos. And McLaren, as impresario, by definition and by his actions was an organizer of spectacle, not a disorganizer of it. One man’s disruption is his seditionary’s well-strategized plan, and for Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, the SEX/Seditionaries shop was always a boutique business with a street look. Those vintage Westwood duds in the exhibit’s main room have silk fringe and mohair knits. Boutique to Couture: this is the real comparison. And there’s nothing wrong with that, so why not call it what it is?

In spite of being fashion-world-centric, the main theme of the exhibit is DIY. Don’t be alarmed, though. This is no Conceptual art show, so you won’t leave saying, “I made better art in third grade.” If you can manage to DIY even a fraction of the clothing on display at this exhibit, then you are definitely in rare company and you might well be the next Alexander McQueen. Sure, trying to relate such unattainably high fashion to punk is like imagining a bunch of squatters on amphetamines attempting to construct a Fabergé egg, but in terms of displaying a collection of beautifully constructed fine art apparel, the Met succeeds mightily.

Even the most seemingly pedestrian pieces, like the Balmain ripped jeans and American flag T-shirt ensemble in the final DIY Destroy room, are truly works of art. Forget the perfectly positioned tears and rust stains; that tattered flag tee is no cotton blend—it’s linen! Understated as old money, and in the shape of working-class fortitude, this shirt is where radical anarchy, rustic Americana and the filigree lacework of a tobacco habit weave seamlessly into one another. It’s excellent.

The other DIY rooms are dedicated to Hardware, Bricolage and Graffiti & Agitprop. The exclusively black-and-white heavy contrast of the DIY Hardware room immortalizes Sid Vicious in grey-scale LED light, illuminating a hallway of black-and-white apparel adorned with flowers of safety pins and staples that could pass for bugle beads. The DIY Bricolage room makes recycling glamorous (as well it should be), with bottle cap masterpieces from Prada and Helmut Lang, as well as the juxtaposition of Gareth Pugh’s 2013-2014 real trashbag designs with Alexander McQueen’s 2009-2010 faux trashbag ones.

But it seems to me that the Bricolage room would have been one step closer to divinity if it featured Imitation of Christ, as this label in so many ways embodies a more recent expression of the punk ethos in fashion, and certainly the Bricolage theme, with its slash-and-sew resurrection of thrift store gems. Also, the radical activist-style spectacles that Imitation’s runway shows inevitably became, and the way that the label spontaneously combusted onto the scene and stumbled into obscurity just as quickly—all this would have made it an even more ideal design house to feature in an exhibit devoted to all things punk. I could have easily seen one of Tara Subkoff’s earlier works, or the dress made of cell phone bills that she created this past February, on display here. It would have added something just a bit more authentically punk to the spirit to the space.

In the DIY Graffiti & Agitprop room, T-shirts were king—though the paint-splattered Marie Antoinette gowns from Dolce were most assuredly queen. But overall, it seemed that the shirt showings could have been more radical. The Maison Martin Margiela T-shirt stating, “There is more action to be done to fight AIDS than to wear this T-shirt but it’s a good start” from the Spring/Summer 2009 collection—which Margiela himself probably had little to do with since he formally left the fashion business later in 2009—would have been a lot more radical 20 years earlier.

I’m thinking of the “I’m HIV positive” T-shirts that were being worn by members of ACT UP as early as 1987 to raise awareness of the AIDS epidemic at a time when no one in government or elsewhere wanted to acknowledge it. This is a case in which the fashion was the action, and it was a big deal. Activists wearing those shirts on the New York City subway or in the street in the '80s both frightened people and made them think, because no one was entirely sure how you got the disease then, so the extent to which people with HIV were stigmatized was tremendous. It seemed like this section of the exhibit could have had a lot more of that type of punch—a greater focus on outlining the designers’ activist actions, which in the case of designers like Vivienne Westwood are plenty.

So, in spite of the beautiful garments and the stylish video and sound design accompanying them, such thematic weaknesses leave the astute folks who came for more than the hemlines wondering what this exhibit is trying to say. Is it somehow flaunting the truth: that consumerism swallowed up even the ethos and spirit of a great non-consumerist, DIY production-oriented movement? That in so much swallowing up of the past, there really is “No Future,” just like the Sex Pistols said? The wall of the final room, DIY Destroy, states this:

“Through its ethos of do-it-yourself, punk not only de-established the authority of the designer, but it transformed it to the wearer. Once and for all, it rejected the concept of the designer as unique creator. Effectively, punk democratized creativity and invention. It broke all the rules and allowed anything to be possible.”

Anything, that is, except touching or photographing the exhibit.

And this is where, in spite of itself, “Chaos to Couture” does manage to capture the essence of punk in ways that none of its creators could have expected. As alarms go off to reprimand those standing too near the mannequins, museum employees engage in a hypnotic, if threatening, chant of “No photos! No video!” They’re making sure there won’t be any Brian Eno action on those CBGB replica urinals at the front of the exhibit…or anywhere else. This is no Temporary Autonomous Zone.

The Met, simply by being the Met, has created a police state environment that tells us “No!” at every turn—no touching, no photos, no standing too close—even as we stand amidst the larger-than-life images of Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten, glittering spikes and staples and spray-paint. Is it an accidental act of détournement? Or just a bit of cheeky irony? With the roar of those alarms sounding off in the name of upholding museum law, it might be enough to propel even the most docile among us into an act of sedition. With so much flash and noise, they might make punks of us yet.

Why Do Christian Megapastors Keep Getting Caught in Sordid Sex Scandals?

April M. Short, AlterNet — Tue, 14 May 2013 15:49:00 -0700

Christian leaders accountable for their actions? Well, sort of. An Evangelical news outlet blames the Jezebel.

Pastor David Loveless is the third megachurch leader in the Fla. area to resign in the wake of a sexual affair in the last half of a year. Loveless, former lead pastor of Discovery Church in Orlando, follows Isaac Hunter—former lead pastor at Orlando’s Summit Church, and Sam Hinn—former pastor of the Gathering Place Worship Center in Stanford, Fla. in his resignition following an extramarital sexual encounter.

Loveless has been married 37 years according to Christian Post, and co-authored the book Church Wounds, which examines the mishaps and blemishes of the modern-day church and its sometimes negative effects on Christians. He and his wife Caron have three married sons and seven grandchildren, according to his blog.

In her article Why Megachurch Pastors Keep Falling Into Sexual Immorality, Jennifer LeClaire, editor of the right-leaning Christian news site Charisma, points out that pastors Loveless, Hunter and Hinn aren’t the only three to “rock their churches with sexual scandals” in recent times. LeClaire, author of a book titled Spiritual Warrior's Guide to Defeating Jezebel, takes the uncommon position of holding male Christian leaders accountable for their adulterous behaviors—well sort of. LeClaire attributes immorality and idolatry to the “spirit of seduction” of the biblical character Jezebel, who “woos people into sexual immorality and idolatry.”

She writes, “Sadly, the spirit of Jezebel is picking off pastors one by one as they succumb to the evil desires in their own hearts. Too few recognize the sinister workings of Jezebel's covert seduction. They’ve bought into what I call the ‘Jezebel deception’ and are either tolerating sexual immorality in the church or merely failing to recognize the true Jezebel in operation because they are on a witch hunt for controlling, manipulative women.”

Brent Bailey founded the Direction Church Orlando seven months ago, and has been in ministry for 20 years. He told The Christian Post(CP) that hearing about the moral failure of other pastors saddens him and causes him to reflect on his own vulnerabilities.

"It also makes us realize how vulnerable every human being is no matter how long they've been in ministry or how many lives they've touched," he told CP. "There really is an enemy out there that's trying to do his best to take every one of us out."

What Will It Take for Us to Recognize That the Way We Live Could Be Destroying Life as We Know It?

Marty Kaplan, AlterNet — Tue, 14 May 2013 10:24:00 -0700

CO2 is at a level not seen in millions of years—if this happened in science fiction, the planet would pay attention.

Say goodnight, Earthlings.

That message — plus the slimmest of shots at an eleventh-hour reprieve — was announced to the people of the world last week.

When this happens in science fiction — 1951’s “The Day the Earth Stood Still” is the classic — the planet pays attention. The flying saucer lands; an alien, in this case played by Michael Rennie, emerges; a final warning is issued: Stop it. If you don’t, you’re doomed.

Back then, the “it” was violence — the Cold War, and the threat of nuclear midnight. Last week, it was climate change — greenhouse gases, and the promise of ecological extinction.

“Heat-Trapping Gas Passes Milestone, Raising Fears,” ran the headline on the front page lead story in Saturday’s New York Times, with this sub-head: “CO2 at Level Not Seen in Millions of Years, Portending Major Climate Changes.”

A headline like that — millions of years? really? — normally turns up in comic books and superhero movies, not in the paper of record. In fiction, what usually comes next is a montage. At breakfast tables and on street corners, in souks and igloos, in the Oval Office and at the U.N., the shocking news galvanizes humanity into action.

In the real world, it was pretty much a one-day story.

What does it take to grab us by the eyeballs? Chris Christie’s waistline is guaranteed wall-to-wall coverage. The next Jodi Arias is waiting in CNN’s wings. The Benghazi circus will be in town at least through 2016. Sure, disaster porn is always good for ratings, but though a Superstorm Sandy may momentarily raise the specter of climate change, daily bulletins on the parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere apparently aren’t Nielsen enough.

It’s not that people who know our planet’s hair is on fire aren’t trying to get our attention. The animated graph from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth Science Research Lab showing how atmospheric carbon dioxide has changed over the last 800,000 years should be as horrifying as any computer-generated imagery Hollywood has to offer. Along with the news that we had hit the 400 ppm mark on the CO2 curve for the first time since the Pliocene epoch came scary quotes from scientist after scientist calling this our last chance before the point of no return. Unless we act, children born today will see temperatures rise irreversibly and sea levels rise catastrophically. Weather patterns will be disrupted, deserts and drought will spread and—in the words of Lord Stern, head of the U.K.’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment—“hundreds of millions of people will be forced to leave their homelands because their crops and animals will have died ... [W]hen they try to migrate into new lands ... [they will be brought] into armed conflict with people already living there. Nor will it be an occasional occurrence. It could become a permanent feature of life on Earth."

If graphs and quotes aren’t sexy enough to warrant a permanent place in the news, there are other ways to hang on to the spotlight. The Climate Reality Project’s website features 18 disturbing but entertaining videos about the price of carbon and our addiction to fossil fuels. “Do the Math,” the film that journalist Bill McKibben is using to spark his 350.org movement, has a dramatic narrative that’s compelling but not preachy. “The Years of Living Dangerously,” Showtime’s climate change documentary series now being shot, has producers who know a little something about how to capture audiences: James Cameron, Jerry Weintraub and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Those efforts use media to engage an informed, activist public. Could such a citizenry make change? There’s plenty we can do in our personal lives to reduce our carbon footprint. Local and state policies in conservation, transportation, building design and urban planning can also curb greenhouse gas emissions. But without federal leadership like killing the Keystone XL pipeline and putting a tax on carbon, and without global commitments with teeth to enforce them, it’s hard to imagine a path back from the brink.

In the U.S., the same dysfunctions that prevent anything else useful from happening—the Senate filibuster, the gerrymandered House, the corrupt campaign finance system—also hold climate change mitigation hostage. So does denial. And though some denial can be attributed to hoax propaganda funded by the fossil fuel industry, some comes from an infantile strain in the American psyche that should not be mistaken for religious freedom.

Last week, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) gave a floor speech urging his colleagues to “awaken to what carbon pollution is doing to our planet, to our oceans, to our seasons, to our storms. And I wonder, ‘Why is it that we are so comfortable asleep, when the warnings are so many and so real?’ What could beguile us away from wakefulness and duty? I was recently at a Senate meeting where I heard a member of our Senate community say, ‘God won’t allow us to ruin our planet.’ ... [That] statement ... is less an expression of religious thinking than it is of magical thinking.”

I admit that my fantasy that last week’s CO2 headlines might rally our planet like an alien invasion may make me as guilty of magical thinking as Senator God-Won’t-Allow-Us. On the other hand, Ronald Reagan was a big fan of “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” and as president he often referred to it. When he first met Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, he speculated that the threat of an alien invasion might get the Americans and the Soviets to cooperate. If Michael Rennie’s “Klaatu barada nikto” line is the father of “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” maybe blowing past the 400 ppm barrier can be the progenitor of “Mr. Obama, cancel that pipeline.”

The following is a column from The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. Read more of Marty Kaplan's columns here.

Cleveland Horror Caps Week of Violence Against Women

Leslie Savan, The Nation — Fri, 10 May 2013 12:06:00 -0700

These tales of misogyny should jolt us shine a stronger light on the violence against women that’s always there beneath the surface.

In just the last few days, we’ve seen a series of news stories involving violence against women. The violence comes in different forms -- physical, psychological, financial -- and from different quarters: a former school-bus driver in Cleveland, the NRA convention in Houston, the military, congress. And so it’s not surprising that the media, as usual, is delivering these stories as unrelated incidents. But arriving almost simultaneously, these tales of misogyny should jolt us all to connect the dots and to shine a stronger light on the violence against women that’s always there, just below the surface.

The story of the three Cleveland women who were found alive after being held captive (and, by all accounts, raped, beaten and bound) in a neighbor’s house for 10 years is the most shocking. The suspect, Ariel Castro, 52, reportedly let them outside only twice in all that time. Michelle Knight was 20 when she disappeared in 2002, Amanda Berry had been reported missing in 2003 when she was 16, and Gina DeJesus vanished at age 14 in 2004 on her way home from school. Berry’s mother died in 2006 of what friends say was “a broken heart” less than two years after a psychic on "The Montel Williams Show" told her Amanda was dead. DeJesus’ mother believed her daughter had been sold into the sex trade. On Monday, Berry and her 6-year-old daughter (possibly fathered by Castro) escaped with the help of neighbors Charles Ramsey and Angel Cordero. The other women came out shortly after. Berry and DeJesus are now home, while Knight remains in the hospital.

As this story unfolds, it will serve as fascinating cable TV filler: We’ll learn more of the horrific details and get to know the victims, their friends and families, and the suspect; we’ll urge neighbors to keep a closer eye on each other; and hopefully we’ll learn why the police didn’t follow earlier leads. But this shouldn’t be treated as just the latest incredibly sad and sensational crime story, as if it were devoid of social and political context -- or unrelated to the other news of anti-women violence that accompanied it this week.

When I first saw the photo of a freed Amanda Berry with her sister and daughter, and tried to imagine the women’s unimaginable captivity, I couldn’t get another set of images out of my mind -- that of the "Ex,” a target mannequin that squirts blood when you shoot her.

The Ex (variously called the "Ex-Girlfriend" and “Alexa”) is a large-breasted white woman, her clothes partly ripped off, and blood dripping from her mouth down her cleavage. The mannequinwas sold with other “bleeding zombie targets” at the NRA convention in Houston last weekend. A target mannequin that looks like Obama painted green (one happy customer calls him “Barry” in a video that has been removed) also made the news. Buzzfeed reported that the NRA asked the vendor, Zombie Industries, to remove it from display, but it continued to be sold, a reminder of the racism that fuels the pro-gun paranoia. But the NRA didn’t object to displaying the Ex, and she still appears on the company’s website, where one commenter writes, “This Zombie Bitch is awesome, reminds me of a girl I knew in High School.”

Up until yesterday Amazon was also selling the $89.99 product. (“Great for a bachelor party!” read the only five-star review. “This was a very original, cool way to kick off a bachelor party for a firearm enthusiast, such as myself.”)

Noting that "The Ex shooting target turns violence against women into a joke and promotes the idea that men should want to kill their ex-wives or ex-girlfriends,” the activist group Ultra Violet petitioned Amazon to stop selling it. In less than 24 hours, 63,000 people signed and the Ex was gone.

A similar, if real-life, ex target was Grimilda Figueroa, the former wife of kidnap suspect Ariel Castro. Castro was accused of beating Figueroa, breaking her nose twice, knocking out a tooth, dislocating her shoulders and threatening to kill her and their children, according to a filing in Cuyahoga County Domestic Relations Court. The filing also said that Castro “frequently abducts [his] daughters and keeps them from mother/petitioner/legal custodian.”

Figueroa’s brother, Jose Figueroa, told RadarOnline that in 1996, Grimilda and her children fled to a battered women’s shelter. “If she stayed with Ariel, he would have killed her,” Jose said. “She had gone to the hospital and called the police many times but they never did anything.” (Grimilda remarried and moved out long before Castro allegedly kidnapped the three women; she died of cancer last year.)

If Jose Figueroa’s account is accurate, his sister may have saved her life and her children’s, as so many abused women do, by finding refuge in a women’s shelter. But, as learned this week, men who abuse women will be able to corner them even more easily: The sequester is cutting some $20 million of funding for women’s shelters and protection programs over the next year.

Like all sequester cuts that don’t involve airplane delays, the cuts to shelters are not making the national news, but they are locally. From KSL.com in Utah:

Julee Smith, the director of Your Community Connection in Ogden, said she works with people every day who are running from violent situations. She said many abuse victims need a place to stay, and due to the lack of funding, she has had to start turning them away,
“We literally had a lady call, she had four children and begged to get in our shelter,” Smith said. “She said, ‘I have 45 minutes to get out.’ And we said ‘We’re sorry, we don’t have any room.’ And then the police call and say that she has been abused again.”

Tim Murphy of Mother Jones cites other shelters and domestic violence programs that are being reduced or completely eliminated in Louisiana, Kentucky, Rhode Island, Oregon and other states. “The projections are bleak,” he writes.

Sen. Tom Harkin’s (D-Iowa) office estimates that 70,120 fewer domestic violence victims will have access to recovery programs and shelters; 35,900 fewer people will get help obtaining non-shelter services such as restraining orders and sexual assault treatment. Cuts to programs related to the Victims Against Crime Act will hurt another 310,574 people.

This increased danger to women has been made possible by the same pols, mostly Republicans, who are too scared of the NRA to pass an expansion of background checks, checks that would block sales of guns to anyone convicted of domestic violence, among other crimes.

And you know that big-shock Pentagon report released Tuesday that estimates 26,000 sexual assaults took place in the armed forces in 2012, a 37 percent increase over 2010? The report that also said that fewer than 10 percent of the sex-assault cases end with a conviction at court-martial, while 62 percent of victims who dare to report an assault are rewarded with retaliation?

Well, expect those stats to get worse. The sequester is putting on hold Department of Defense plans to hire 829 “sexual assault response coordinators.” Army Secretary John McHugh and Chief of Staff Ray Odierno told the Senate Armed Forces Committee last month that sequestration will hurt efforts to reduce sexual harassment and assault in the Army in many ways, from “slowing hiring actions to delaying lab results, which hinders our ability to provide resolution for victims.”

Of course, as we also learned this week, the value of some of those sexual assault response coordinators is questionable to begin with. On Sunday, Lt. Col Jeffrey Krusinski, the chief of the Air Force Sexual Assault Prevention and Response program, was arrested in a northern Virginia parking lot for sexual assault. A police report says that Krusinski, 41, was drunk and had grabbed a woman’s breast and buttocks. She fought him off, and his mug shot has the cuts to prove it.

While millions of men worldwide and the institutionalized male establishment at large still believe it’s their right to subjugate women, let’s not leave the impression that only women are victims. In the Pentagon report above, an estimated 13,900 of the 1.2 million active duty men said they had experienced some form of sexual assault in the past year (a far smaller portion than the active duty women). About a quarter of the victims of non-family child abductions are boys. And from 1994 to 2010, about four in five victims of intimate partner violence were female, according to the Bureau of Justice stats. But that leaves one in five victims to be men.

As if to prove the exception to the female-victim rule, there’s Jodi Arias. She was found guilty this week of first-degree murder of her ex, Travis Alexander. It was a particularly gruesome murder, with a heavy sexual backstory. A media circus, led by CNN’s sister channel HLN, has been making ecstatic noises over the trial’s every salacious detail.

When the Cleveland story broke Monday, it was hard to tell if HLN resented it for overshadowing the climax of its Jodi Arias witch-burning or welcomed it as a replacement now that the Arias case is winding down.

But instead of another media circus over the story in Cleveland, let’s see if the media and its audience -- that is, all of us -- can more seriously address the violence against women that is woven into our culture and that politicians in Washington threaten to make worse.

The Cruelty of the American Empire Makes Mother's Day Impossible for Countless Moms Across the Planet

Jodie Evans, Charles Davis, AlterNet — Fri, 10 May 2013 11:38:00 -0700

As we celebrate Mothers' Day, more than a hundred mothers think of their children, never charged with crimes, who will be starving to death in Guantanamo cells.

He disappeared more than a decade ago, just 18-years-old and teaching abroad, separated from his family for the first time in life. His mother and father, sick with worry, heard nothing. For all they knew he was dead. Then, one day they opened a newspaper and learned their son was being held in a military prison run by the US of A, accused of – but never charged with – being an enemy of the state.

Were Abdurahman al-Shubati a US citizen, his case would be featured on CNN, his face plastered on television screens next to a graphic listing his days in prison without trial. Some go-getting entrepreneur would be selling yellow wristbands with his name and “#solidarity” printed on them. The president, affecting the right level of empathy for the family and strong but stately anger toward his captors, would be telling us: “Never forget” and “There will be justice.”

But Abdurahman was born in Yemen, which means he's not entitled to all those rights said to be endowed to us by our creator, at least in the eyes of the US government. And that means, despite being detained since 2001 and formally cleared of any wrongdoing in 2008, he remains trapped in a prison cell at Guantanamo Bay, slowly starving to death. A combination of racism, Islamophobia and simple guilt by association, have caused the U.S. government to keep him locked up.

Since Barack Obama became US president after pledging to close Guantanamo, which his administration is now seeking to expand, conditions at the military prison have only gotten worse. Prisoners there who were once promised their freedom are complaining of physical and mental torture. Though he has unilaterally waged war, Obama has decided that he can't – nay, won't – unilaterally free them. In fact, the opposite: he issued an executive order creating “a formal system of indefinite detention for those held at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay.” The Obama administration has unilaterally decided that dozens of men will never be tried so much as in a military tribunal because the evidence against them was obtained through torture, but that they can never be freed because they are nonetheless deemed “too dangerous.”

Not that the US government is too keen on freeing anyone else, either. A US military committee has already determined that Abdurahman, like 57 other Yemenis imprisoned at Guantanamo, should be returned home; that he spent his 20s in prison for a crime he didn't commit, and with which he wasn't even charged, much less convicted. Obama, however, refuses to release the men, ostensibly out of fear they may seek revenge against their former captors once they return to Yemen.

Understandably, this has created a sense of hopelessness among the 166 people still imprisoned at Guantanamo. More than 100 of them are now on a hunger strike. What other option is left for them at this point? Because of their symbolic act of defiance, however, they are being tortured even more – “how dare you embarrass us by dying” – with US personnel force-feeding them to avoid another public relations problem (the United Nations says the practice is simply “unjustifiable”).

“Can you imagine what this is like for a mother?” asks Abdurahman's own mom in an appeal for his freedom. “To imagine my son in such a loveless place, refusing nourishment to protest his detention; to think of him being painfully force fed – it breaks my heart every second of every day. Don’t they realize we are human beings, not stones?”

As Mothers' Day is celebrated this year in the US, a holiday with roots in the fight for peace and justice, Abdurahman and more than a hundred others never charged with crimes will be sitting in prison cells, alone. George W. Bush will get to hug his mom. Michelle Obama will get to hug her children, but the mothers of Guantanamo prisoners don’t get to hug theirs, ever. The best they can hope for is a phone call every two months.

In an 1870 appeal to women of the world, writer and activist Julia Ward Howe – the originator of the Mother’s Day we celebrate – implored her readers to not let their children become complicit in the machinery of war and injustice; to not let them unlearn the lessons they were taught “of charity, mercy and patience”; to not let them “be trained to injure others.”

Here in the 21st century, we need to relearn those lessons and focus on training our children to be instruments of peace, not oppression. Right now, too many kids of American mothers are making mothers in other countries cry. We need to teach them that the practice of compassion and mercy shouldn't stop at one's mailbox or a country's borders. Mothers overseas are in anguish over the kidnapping and loss of their children, too.

Is 'The Great Gatsby' a Movie or a Shopping Promo?

Lynn Stuart Parramore, AlterNet — Fri, 10 May 2013 08:16:00 -0700

Baz Lurhmann's new film makes style the star and substance the understudy.

It’s good to see a fine book in style this year. But are we focusing on the book, or the style? Baz Lurhmann’s new movie version of The Great Gatsby opens today, and unfortunately, its obsessive attention to glittering gowns, sumptuous suits and deco trappings makes style the star and substance the understudy.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a book about the very nasty things that happen when we set money as the marker of our value. But you wouldn’t know it from Lurhmann’s film, which celebrates the love of wealth and comes with more shopping tie-ins than the beads in Daisy’s dress.

Glamour! Excess! Hedonism! These are the words that repeat themselves in endless ads associated with the film’s release. High-end brands are practically characters in the movie, with appearances by Prada, Miu Miu, Tiffany and Brooks Brothers. French lace-maker Solstiss produced 1,400 meters of lace in deco patterns for the costumes. Daisy Buchanan is a walking display of runway-ready styles and glittering jewels. Her diamond-studded Tiffany headpiece retails for $200,000, if you need ideas for Mother’s Day.

All is designed to make you hit the stores the minute you leave the theater. Brooks Brothers has its own “Gatsby web experience,” complete with “behind the scenes video” featuring clips from the movie and discussion of the “partnership” between the clothing giant and the film.

The tie-ins don’t stop with the bling. Hotel advertisements tempt you to “live the life of Gatsby” (which presumably does not include his horrible end) at any number of swank retreats. For the bibliophile traveler, the Chatwal New York provides copies of the novel in each sumptuously appointed room (hey, it beats cable!). Not to be outdone, the Seelbach Hilton in Louisville, Kentucky, touts the fact that Fitzgerald used it as a backdrop for Tom and Daisy Buchanan's wedding as a selling point.

But Donald Trump wins the prize for all-out shamelessness, offering a $14,999 three-night stay at Trump New York, which comes with dinner at Jean-Georges, a bracelet designed by Ivanka Trump and a bottle of bubbly.

When you look at current consumer trends, all this swooning over luxury makes a perverse kind of sense. Despite the fact that most of us are mighty worried about our economic well-being, wealthy America is experiencing what Brad Tuttle at Time calls the “Splurge Surge.”

“They’re going on shopping sprees,” Tuttle writes, “.....with increasing sales seen for luxury hotel stays, high-end automobiles, and more.” Polls show that the rich really don’t think the economy is recovering, but they’re spending anyway. The reason is simple: From 2009 to 2011, the mean net worth of households in the top 7 percent rose by 28 percent. Everbody else’s dropped by 4 percent over this same time period. There’s still a recession happening, just not for them. Whoopie!

A movie like The Great Gatsby conspires to make the 99 percent forget our credit card debt and join the rich in a shopping spree. Maybe we'll get the down-market version of Daisy's dress, but we'll think, for a moment, that we're getting a piece of the action (Seventeen magazine highlights a variety of 1920s-style prom dresses in the $300-$600 range). All is well and good until the bill arrives.

The last time America saw such a disconnect between the experiences of the rich and the rest was, of course, the Roaring Twenties. Which ended very badly, just like Gatsby’s race to the top of the capitalist heap.

The New York Times' Review on Iron Man 3 Misses the Point

Jim Naureckas, FAIR — Thu, 09 May 2013 12:36:00 -0700

Did this film critic and I see the same movie? Iron Man 3 is political.

As a media critic, I don't usually argue with film critics, but sometimes a review leaves me wondering: Did the critic and I see the same movie?

Such is the case with Iron Man 3 and its New York Times review by Manohla Dargis (5/3/13), headlined "Bang, Boom: Terrorism as a Game." Here's the essence of her take on the film:

Iron Man 3 is conspicuously meant to be escapist entertainment…. But Mr. Black and his colleagues, like other filmmakers who use the iconography of September 11 and its aftershocks, want to have it both ways.
They want to tap into the powerful reactions those events induced, while dodging the complex issues and especially the political arguments that might turn off ticket buyers. The result is that in some movies September 11–along with Afghanistan, Iraq, terrorism, the war on terror and torture –registers as just a device, at once inherently political and empty, in a filmmaker's tool kit.

Now, Dargis says critics at the screening she attended were urged by a studio publicist not to divulge critical plot details, a request that made her wonder "what I could possibly divulge that would spoil the pleasure of an innocent ticket buyer." In fact, the film's plot hinges on a major twist–and I don't think it's possible to explain how peculiar her take on the film is without at least hinting at what that twist involves. So if you haven't seen it, might still want to see it and like to be surprised, you should probably stop reading here.

Whereas in the previous Iron Man movies, the hero Tony Stark generally wears his super-powered armor, in this incarnation the suits are more often deployed as remote-controlled flying weapon platforms–evoking the rise of drone technology. In this context, the fact that Stark chooses to destroy his suits at the end of the film–and at the same time remove the shrapnel from his heart that made him need to wear the armor in the first place–is a political message that's not particularly hard to decipher.The argument of the film, essentially, is that terrorists and the military contractors who fight terrorism are actually on the same side–and both in the business of terror to profit from it. It suggests that you should worry less about supervillains making "death to America" videos and more about sinister vice presidents. It also urges you to be skeptical when weapon systems are rebranded from "War Machine" to "Iron Patriot."

Yet fail to decipher it Dargis evidently did. If she objected to the film's politics, I wouldn't be writing this post, but instead she asserts, at length, that the film has no politics whatsoever:

Iron Man 3…at once invokes September 11 and dodges it, and does so with a wink and a smile. It's not the first movie to do so, by any means. But the proximity of its highly publicized release to the Boston Marathon bombings simply makes it the latest, most conspicuous example of how profoundly disconnected big studio movies of this sort are from the world in which the rest of us live.
The point isn’t that movies like Iron Man 3 don't have any business taking on tough issues. The point is that…they should take on the toughest issues–not just exploit them.

As an example of the kind of filmmaker willing to take on tough issues, she cites Steven Soderbergh–whose latest movie, the drug industry thriller Side Effects, is actually far less political than Shane Black's Iron Man 3, with a plot twist that neutralizes all social issues. She quotes his recent speech at a film festival:

Mr. Soderbergh said he thought that the country still has post-traumatic stress disorder "and that we haven't really healed in any sort of complete way and that people are, as a result, looking more toward escapist entertainment."

Which is an odd thing to quote as an attack on Iron Man 3, because in that film Tony Stark is literally suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder from the horrors his character experienced in the film The Avengers–events that are repeatedly referred to in IM3 by the shorthand "New York," if the analogy were not clear enough. But rather than giving Black credit for taking on the very issue that Soderbergh highlights–or, say, criticizing him for doing so in a heavy-handed way–she seems to have missed the fact that the title character is suffering from PTSD altogether:

Originality isn't the point of a product like Iron Man 3, which, despite the needless addition of 3-D and negligible differences in quips, gadgets, villains and the type of stuff blown up, plays out much like the first two movies…. Once again, Tony Stark aka Iron Man aka Robert Downey Jr. jokes and poses, wears his superhero suit and flirts with Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow)…. He essentially functions as the delivery system for a repertory of Tony Stark poses, gestures, expressions and line readings that, with his superhero costume, established the Iron Man brand on screen.

Again, you could argue that Downey portrays PTSD well or poorly. But to not notice that the character is suddenly having dramatic anxiety attacks and days-long bouts of insomnia, explicitly as a result of experiences that evoke September 11–it makes me wonder whether Dargis actually did watch the same movie I did, or whether perhaps instead of watching the film, she was typing up a review claiming she'd already seen it.

AlterNet.org: Culture

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