Sex Ed With Donald Duck

Family Planning is a short Walt Disney cartoon from 1967:

Dan Colman provides background:

Eventually translated into 25 languages, the film avoids anything sexually explicit. The family planning advice is vague at best and, perversely but not surprisingly, only male characters get a real voice in the production. But lest you think that Disney was breaking any real ground here, let me remind you of its more daring foray into sex-ed films two decades prior. That’s when it produced The Story of Menstruation (1946), a more substantive film shown to 105 million students across the US.

The Story of Menstruation is after the jump:

What Poems Are For

Meena Alexander plumbs the meaning of poetry, which tries to render into words “what is deeply felt and is essentially unsayable”:

The poem is an invention that exists in spite of history. Most of the forces in our ordinary lives as we live them now conspire against the making of a poem. There might be some space for the published poem, but not for its creation: no ritualized space is given where one is allowed to sit and brood, although universities can give you a modicum of that.

In a time of violence, the task of poetry is in some way to reconcile us to our world and to allow us a measure of tenderness and grace with which to exist. I believe this very deeply, and I see it as an effort to enter into the complications of the moment, even if they are violent; but through that, in some measure, poetry’s task is to reconcile us to the world—not to accept it at face value or to assent to things that are wrong, but to reconcile one in a larger sense, to return us in love, the province of the imagination, to the scope of our mortal lives.

The View From Your Burn

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A reader writes:

Sorry you didn’t make this year’s Burning Man.  It was outstanding in a number of ways: amazing art (especially this year’s crop of art cars), benign weather, the whimsy that ensures that Burners never take themselves too seriously – everything that makes a great burn.  Typical of Burner whimsy was a small site showing the history of transportation in Black Rock City, with hilarious commentary on the fictional days of Burning Man’s “early” years stretching back to the 1800s.  Did you know there was once a Black Rock underground, which had to be abandoned because so many Burners chose to stay in the cool, dustless comfort of the subway stations rather than coming to the surface to enjoy the event?

On the down side, Burning Man was more crowded then ever, although the effect was mainly evident in bike congestion on major arteries such as the Esplanade and long lines trying to visit the building housing the Man. We’re now trying to morph back from our Playa egos of Perky and Lashes to the default world reality of Alan and Judie.  We returned to increased tension in the Middle East and the approaching statute of limitations on wrong-doing resulting in the economic crisis.  We’re forced to start caring about such mundanities again, and we don’t particularly want to.

I urge you to find your way to Black Rock City in the near future so you can experience this wondrous event before it devolves into something more commercial and less freeing.

I created a blog a few years ago to encourage people 50 and over to attend Burning Man.  You might want to check out the series of reasons that my wife and I have for attending regularly at this later stage of our lives.  The frankly erotic atmosphere is certainly one of the benefits, because sex is a life force that has the capacity to keep us young.  The annual burn renews our physical relationship, our commitment to our marriage (of nearly 47 years), and our deep love for each other.  But it also provides us with a set of youthful Burner friends from whom we gain energy and with whom we share whatever wisdom we have acquired over our nearly 70 years of living.

It’s easy not to go.  It’s tough to get ready.  But it’s worth the trip at least once in your life.

I will go. But seriously: Perky and Lashes? Not so much.

(Photo by another reader, who captions: “View from The Man – 8/31/13, 12:00, Black Rock City, NV”, just prior to the wooden man going up in flames.)

The Beginnings Of The Beach Resort

Reviewing The Beach: The History of Paradise on Earth, Adee Braun describes how “long before the beach was a theater of bodies stuffed into tiny suits, exposing as much skin as possible to the sun, beach-going was often a strictly medical undertaking”:

In modern Europe, only peasants sought refuge from the heat in the cool seawater. And so the beach remained mostly empty until the English looked around and began to consider the medicinal potential of their chilly national shoreline. Eighteenth century British high society suffered from a mess of maladies. Fevers, digestive complaints, melancholia, nervous tics, tremors, and even stupidity were the epidemics of the day. The pressures of urban life, pollution, and the general deterioration of society were obviously to blame. Enlightenment physicians began to consider new remedies for old ailments spurred by the new emphasis on science and experimentation.

Their new wonder drug was… water. Cold sea water, specifically.

Beginning in the late 16th century, English physicians endorsed the healing effects of cold water for everything from heat stroke to melancholy. It was believed that a brisk shock of cold water stimulated the entire body, promoting the circulation of humors and even contracting tumors. … By the mid-18th century a standard therapy was developed, which resembled waterboarding far more than a spa treatment. It involved dunking society ladies in the freezing sea repeatedly until the twin effects of cold and suffocation caused terror and panic (read: revitalization). The frightened patient would then be hoisted from the water in her soaking flannel smock, revived with vigorous back rubs and feet warmers, and deposited on dry land for a cup of tea. The adrenaline from the shock of cold was thought to have soothing effects on the body, calming anxiety and restoring the body-soul balance. The patient would repeat her regimen every morning for the next several weeks of her therapeutic seaside sojourn. The men got to take their therapy naked.

It wasn’t enough to nearly drown in the sea to relieve your stresses and ailments; you had to drink it too.

Your Heartbeat As Your Password

Natasha Loma introduces the Nymi:

The wristband relies on authenticating identity by matching the overall shape of the user’s heartwave (captured via an electrocardiogram sensor). Unlike other biotech authentication methods — like fingerprint scanning and iris-/facial-recognition tech — the system doesn’t require the user to authenticate every time they want to unlock something. Because it’s a wearable device, the system sustains authentication so long as the wearer keeps the wristband on.

Dan Goodin worries about security:

Alas, there’s not enough information available about the Nymi’s inner workings to know if it is truly groundbreaking or another dose of the kind of snake oil that’s all too common in the security circuit.

Karl Martin, CEO of the Nymi creator Bionym, said the device hasn’t yet undergone a formal security audit. That means even he can’t say just how impervious it is to the kinds of sophisticated attacks that would inevitably target a universal sign-on gizmo, although he gave some high-level details that are encouraging. That said, there are several classes of hacks that might be used to compromise the security assurances of the device.

Francie Diep has other questions:

When I asked independent researchers if they had any concerns about Nymi, the one thing they brought up was that it’s not clear how accurate the wristband will be at identifying users. Bionym worked with the University of Toronto to test Nymi’s ECG-IDing accuracy in more than 1,000 people, Martin says. They’ve found Nymi is comparable to fingerprint recognition and more accurate than facial recognition. They will test its accuracy further this fall.

However, such results aren’t published yet in the peer-reviewed literature. What has been published indicates it’s “premature” to say an ECG identification scheme can compare to fingerprints and facial recognition, says Kevin Bowyer, the chair of the computer science department at the University of Notre Dame.

Where Iran Really Is Revolutionary

In an interview about the risks of human overpopulation, Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us, argues that Iran, of all places, has developed “the most successful family-planning program in the history of the planet.” How they did it?

[T]he present ayatollah, Khamenei, issued a fatwa saying there was nothing in the Qur’an against having an operation if you felt that you had enough children that you could take care of. Everything from condoms through pills, injections, tubal ligations, vasectomies, IUDs—everything was free, and everything was available in the farthest reaches of the country.

I interviewed this wonderful woman, an OB/GYN who was part of this, right after the plan was implemented, ten years after the Iranian Revolution, in the late ’80s. She was going on horseback into these little villages to help perform vasectomies and tubal ligations. As the country grew more prosperous, her transportation changed to four-wheel-drive trucks and even helicopters. Everyone was guaranteed contraception if they wanted it.

The only thing that was obligatory in Iran was premarital counseling, which is actually a very nice idea. I recommend it to everybody who’s contemplating getting married. The Quakers do it in our country, and, for six months before a couple gets married, they attend classes. In Iran, you could go to a mosque, or you could just go to a health center. They would talk about things to get you prepared for getting married, including what it costs to have a child, to raise a child, to educate a child.

People got the message really well. They were told, “Have as many children as you want to have, as you think you can take care of.” Most Iranians continue to choose to have either one or two.

A few months ago, Narges Bajoghli reported that sanctions have made birth control harder to come by in the country:

For years, there has been a plethora of birth control pills and other contraceptives easily available and extremely affordable in Iran, a country that boosts one of the most successful family planning programs in the world. It is only in the aftermath of cumulative American-led sanctions against Iran’s banking and financial sectors that most of these options have disappeared from pharmacies. Up until two months ago, pharmacists told me, there were simply no foreign made birth control pills available at all. Many doctors are wary of prescribing the Iranian-made pills because sanctions have made access to the raw materials required to produce them nearly impossible, making many of these drugs unreliable.

The Art Of Beer

Ben Marks profiles artist John Gilroy, whose oil paintings were the basis of Guinness’ advertising campaigns in the mid-20th century:

“Within the Guinness archives itself,” [brewing expert David] Hughes says of the materials kept at the company’s Dublin headquarters, “they’ve got lots of advertising art, dish_guinness watercolors, and sketches of workups towards the final version of the posters. But they never had a single oil painting. Until the paintings started turning up in the United States, where Guinness memorabilia is quite collectible, it wasn’t fully understood that the posters were based on oils. All of the canvases will be in collections within a year,” Hughes adds. For would-be Gilroy collectors, that means the clock is ticking.

As it turns out, Gilroy’s entire artistic process was a prelude to the oils. “The first thing he’d usually do was a pencil sketch,” says Hughes. “Then he’d paint a watercolor over the top of the pencil sketch to get the color balance right. Once that was settled and all the approvals were in, he’d sit down and paint the oil. The proof version that went to Guinness for approval, it seems, was always an oil painting.”

Based on what we know of John Gilroy’s work as an artist, that makes sense. For almost half a century, Gilroy was regarded not only as one of England’s premier commercial illustrators, but also as one of its best portraitists. “He painted the Queen three times,” says Hughes, “Lord Mountbatten about four times. In 1942, he did a pencil-and-crayon sketch of Churchill in a London bunker.” According to Hughes, Churchill gave that portrait to Russian leader Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which may mean that somewhere in the bowels of the Kremlin, there’s a portrait of Winnie by the same guy who made a living drawing cartoons of flying toucans balancing pints of Guinness on their beaks.

(Image via Collectors Weekly)

Making It Harder To Adopt

Emily Matchar profiles the growing “anti-adoption movement,” a group fighting for “transparency and a much higher degree of ethical oversight, legal and otherwise”:

They run message boards with names like “First Mother Forum” and “Pound Pup Legacy,” full of tales of bitterly regretted adoptions. They hold retreats for birthmothers and adoptees. They’ve formed several grassroots activist organizations, including Parents for Ethical Adoption Reform, Origins-USA, and Concerned United Birthparents. Some call themselves adoption reformers. Others prefer terms such as “adoption truth advocate.” A few will come straight out and say they’re anti-adoption.

They want, among other things, a ban on adoption agencies offering monetary support to pregnant women. They want to see laws put in place guaranteeing that “open” adoptions (where birthparents have some level of contact with their children) stay open. They want women to have more time after birth to decide whether to terminate their parental rights. These activists have become increasingly loud of late, holding prominent rallies, organizing online, and winning several recent legislative victories.

Previous Dish on the political criticism of the adoption industry here.

The View From Tehran

Juan Cole points out the Islamic Republic is conflicted over its ally’s use of chemical weapons:

Although he later had to walk it back, former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani deplored the Syrian government’s use of gas against its own people, and Tehran-watchers are convinced that the Baath army’s action has provoked a heated debate within the closed Iranian elite. Current Iranian President Hasan Rouhani has condemned all chemical weapons use. Because Tehran backs the Syrian Baath government, it has publicly taken the same position as Russia, that the rebels gassed themselves. That allegation is not plausible, and it is clear that even some high ranking Iranian political figures have difficulty saying it with a straight face.

On the other hand, Scott Lucas notes that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards seem ready for vengeance should the US decide to strike:

While the Guards are careful not to say that they will respond with direct attacks against American interests — e.g. through troops in Syria, anti-aircraft support to the Assad regime, or blockage of the Straits of Horumz — its leaders are [signaling] that the Islamic Republic would respond via allied groups by carrying out unspecified attacks against American interests in the Middle East. Revolutionary Guards commander General Mohammad Ali Jafari threatened on Saturday: “The US imagination about limited military intervention in Syria is merely an illusion, as reactions will be coming from beyond Syria’s borders.” Jafari’s warning extended to any countries who joined Washington in the attacks, saying they would face “immediate crises in their national security”.

Alireza Nader examines the struggle between Rouhani and Iran’s hardliners:

Could Rowhani win them over, or even manage to outmaneuver the most recalcitrant Guards officers? This is a possibility considering Rowhani’s sharp political skills and the economic pressures faced by Tehran. But we shouldn’t underestimate the capability of U.S. military strikes against Syria to undermine nuclear negotiations, especially if they inflict significant damage on Assad. …

The key question is whether [the hardliners] will prevent [Rowhani] from adopting a softer line. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is a stalwart supporter of the Assad regime, which he views as the frontline of “resistance” against Israel and the United States. Khamenei, despite his supposed fatwa against nuclear weapons, is less likely to care about Assad’s chemical use. He appears to view Syria through a very cold and calculating lens; Tehran must support Assad, as the regional influence and even the existence of the Iranian regime would be in jeopardy without him. Khamenei may also fear a retreat from this steadfast position could endanger Iranian deterrence vis-à-vis the United States in the future. Today Damascus, tomorrow Tehran.

Sune Engel Rasmussen thinks Iran would be better off if it abandoned Assad:

Iran’s support for Assad [is] financially costly and strains an economy already suffering under sanctions, inflation, and widespread mismanagement. This is partly why Iran wouldn’t be able to afford a proportionate response to a U.S. attack on Syria. As Meir Javedanfar has argued, Iran wouldn’t want to risk the loss of hard-to-replace anti-aircraft systems and fighter aircrafts, or to expose its nuclear facilities to attacks from Israel. …

[T]here are plenty of reasons Iran might have already cut Assad loose, were it not for the fact that Syria is Iran’s most important regional ally. But that relationship is changing. The fall of Saddam Hussein has paved the way for much friendlier relations between Iran and Iraq and rendered Syria less vital for Iran than it used to be. So there is a good chance that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei would be willing to “cut the head off the snake” in Damascus and keep the body. Assad is not as important for Tehran, as is ensuring that Syria’s power structure is friendly to Iran’s interests. Aware that a negotiated solution is the only way to achieve that, Iran has long called for political reforms in Syria.

Karl Vick adds that Iran could dramatically improve its image by working to end Assad’s use of chemical weapons: 

If, as a crucial ally of Assad, Tehran can help coax the Syrian dictator to amend his behavior — perhaps by a dramatic gesture such as surrendering its stockpiles of WMDs to a third party, like Russia — the implications would be immense. Not only would chemical and biological weapons exit the Syrian theater, where combatants include Islamist extremists, but the West would also have an encouraging answer to the question of whether the Iranians, represented by a newly elected leadership, can negotiate in good faith on the question of controlling weapons of mass destruction.