Tag: Premium

The Future Of Sex Toys

But first, Lux Alptraum knocks much of the conversation around sexbots for omitting any consideration of female pleasure:

[I]t is women, not men, who are the primary purchasers of sex toys, and thus the consumers most likely to literally take them home. “After 37 years [in the sex toy business], women have always been our customer,” says Coyote Amrich, purchasing manager for San Francisco-based sex toy shop Good Vibrations. “That was the driving force of our business.” … An analysis of U.K. sex toy distributor LoveHoney’s sales data shows that, even as high-tech sex gadgets make their way onto the market, it’s still the century-old vibrator that holds consumer interest – 18% of all purchases.

So what might a more magical Magic Wand look like?

Instead of futuristic gadgets that remake the very notion of sex, Amrich predicts innovations that are more about improving on existing technology; making toys that are lighter, quieter, and stronger, as well as using better materials and with better battery life. Amrich also sees a future for toys that enhance the sex we’re already having, “creating ways for people to have enhanced intimacy and enhanced sensation.” …

But what sort of technology could allow for that sort of enhanced experience? Dr. Kristen Stubbs, a queer/pansexual roboticist who has a PhD from Carnegie Mellon and runs a crowdfunding startup for sexuality-focused technology, offered up one possibility. For Stubbs, the true future of sex toys lies in shifting the products from open-loop to closed-loop controllers. In layman’s terms, a device with open-loop control responds only to its on/off switch: You turn it on, it does its job (in the case of a sex toy, by vibrating), and that’s the end of the story. A closed-loop control, on the other hand, has sensors that provide the device with information about the outside world, allowing it to adapt its behavior as the situation requires.

Marriage Equality Update

Puerto Rico’s ban has been upheld:

U.S. District Judge Juan M. Pérez-Giménez said in his decision that by dismissing an appeal in Baker vs. Nelson, a 1971 case in which two men sought to marry in Minnesota, the Supreme Court bound all lower courts to assume bans on same-sex marriage do not violate the Constitution. The high court could choose to overrule itself but has not, he said.

Lyle Denniston provides important context:

The San Juan jurist said the Supreme Court has never overruled that decision, so it is still binding on lower federal courts — an argument that has failed in all of the recent rulings against such bans.  But the judge also said that he was bound to follow the Baker precedent because the First Circuit, which has binding legal authority in Puerto Rico cases, had itself done just that two years ago.

In a Massachusetts case in which the First Circuit had struck down a key part of the Defense of Marriage Act, barring all federal marital benefits to same-sex couples already legally married under their state’s laws (the same result that the Supreme Court reached last year), the First Circuit had said that Baker v. Nelson was still a binding precedent, Judge Perez-Gimenez noted.  That ruling, he added, tied his hands.

Dale Carpenter explains the significance of the ruling:

[T]he issue of Baker‘s effect is actively being considered in other circuits. Most immediately, the Sixth Circuit is already considering a case that turns in part on whether Baker controls. In the Eighth Circuit, a motion to dismiss a same-sex marriage challenge was argued in a South Dakota district court last Friday. (The challenge was brought by my former student Joshua Newville.) And the Fifth Circuit will soon schedule argument in Texas’s appeal from a district court decision striking down that state’s limitation on marriage.

No matter whether it’s decided on Baker grounds or on substantive grounds, a decision denying same-sex marriage at the appellate court level would create the circuit split on same-sex marriage that awaits resolution by the Supreme Court.

Ian Millhiser expects the Puerto Rico decision will be reversed:

[W]hile Pérez-Giménez clearly holds very passionate views on the question of whether same-sex couples are entitled to the same rights as everyone else, his views are unlikely to persuade many of his fellow judges. It’s even possible that his opinion could ultimately wind up bolstering the case for marriage equality. That’s because his decision will appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, a court dominated by Democratic appointees (although, it is worth noting that Pérez-Giménez was appointed to the bench by President Jimmy Carter). All four of the states that comprise the First Circuit — Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island — are already marriage equality states, so a decision out of a federal court in Puerto Rico is the only path to bring a marriage equality case before this circuit.

Given the makeup of the First Circuit, the overwhelming consensus among federal judges in favor of marriage equality, and the belligerent tone of Pérez-Giménez’s opinion, it is unlikely that his decision will be upheld on appeal.

Vengeance Of The Nerds, Ctd

Readers won’t let go of the debate:

As Arthur Chu artfully pointed out, the basic dynamic of #GamerGate is no different than that of the Tea Party: white dudes angry about Those People encroaching on their turf. What #GGers lambast as the “corruption” of gaming journalism isn’t part of the creeping menace of sponsored content; it’s the default mode of operation. Gaming publications have always been willing and enthusiastic adjuncts of the industry PR machine. The field’s evolution is no different than any other kind of entertainment journalism – critical film, music, and sports coverage didn’t emerge until the 1960s. To this day, no major entertainment media outlet meets the journalistic standard #GamerGate purports to demand (see: ESPN and the NFL). Really, where’s the scandal?

The difference now, of course, is the existence of social media and how it enables new ways of lashing out. No one has more skill with the Internet’s tools of harassment and abuse than the stereotypical gamer. Pretending that violent threats against outspoken women – whose collective influence in gaming, I should point out, is minuscule at best – have nothing to do with #GamerGate is absurd.

Freddie responds to these readers at length:

The video game media, generally speaking, is garbage. … But here’s the thing, you guys: if video game journalism is garbage, then #gamergate is garbage from an Egyptian restaurant that’s been baking in the sun in July in a heatwave on a New York corner, complete with extra dog poop and infested with cockroaches that have names like Misogyny and Threats Against Women. However well-intentioned some members of #gamergate may be, and however much I may agree with some criticisms of the video game media, the grimy sexism and hideous threats that have been made in the name of #gamergate renders the whole “movement” totally unpalatable to me.

Yes, it is unfortunate to define any group by the actions of its worst members, and there are times in life, particularly when it comes to political struggles, that you have to hold your nose and align with people you can’t stand. But this isn’t one of those times, and too many people who complain about how #gamergate is discussed in the media refuse to be frank about how rife with ugliness the phenomenon is.

I mean, there’s even legitimate criticism of Anita Sarkeesian, such as her unpaid appropriation of other women’s artwork, which my friend Alex Layne of the brilliant site Not Your Mama’s Gamer discussed. That behavior bothers me. But in a world where Sarkeesian is subject to such insane, violent threats, my instinct is not to criticize her about intellectual property but build a bunker to defend her from attack.

That’s the thing about surrounding your movement with threats and misogyny: people who might be inclined to listen to you feel compelled to reject you out of hand. Whether through refusal or inability, the principled people who consider themselves part of #gamergate have failed to eject the sexist, threatening core of the movement, and for someone like me, that makes it impossible to take the whole enterprise as anything but ugly.

Laura Hudson adds:

While there are legitimate ethical concerns about games journalism, it’s telling that the movement remains laser-focused not on the ethically shady behavior of the multimillion-dollar gaming studios making the mainstream games they enjoy, but small, often impoverished independent creators and critics—and even within that subset, the targets are nearly exclusively women.

Jesse Singal pens a Reddit letter to all the Gamergate people trying to convince him the press has it all wrong:

So what is Gamergate “really” about? I think this is the sort of question a philosopher of language would tear apart and scatter the remnants of to the wind, because it lacks any real referent. You guys refuse to appoint a leader or write up a platform or really do any of the things real-life, adult “movements” do. I’d argue that there isn’t really any such thing as Gamergate, because any given manifestation of it can be torn down as, again, No True Gamergate by anyone who disagrees with that manifestation or views it as an inconvenient blight from an optics standpoint. And who gets to decide what is and isn’t True Gamergate? You can’t say you want a decentralized, anonymous movement and then disown the ugly parts that inevitably pop up as a result of that structure. Either everything is in, or everything is out.

Faced with this complete lack of clarity, all I or other journalists can do, then, is journalism: We ask the people in the movement what they stand for and then try to tease out what is real and what is PR. And every, every, every substantive conversation/forum/encounter I’ve had with folks from your movement has led me to believe that a large part of the reason for its existence is discomfort with what you see as the burgeoning influence of so-called social-justice warriors in the gaming world.

Update from a reader:

In case you missed it, Clickhole has the ultimate encapsulation of GamerGate ( … unless anyone in GamerGate disagrees with it).

The Mysterious Death Of Edgar Allan Poe

Natasha Geiling reminds us that earlier this month in 1849, the writer was found “delirious and dressed in shabby second-hand clothes, lying in the gutter” in Baltimore. He died a few days later – and we still don’t know why, exactly. Geiling walks us through a few of the theories surrounding Poe’s death, including the notion it might have been due to “cooping,” a form of voter fraud “practiced by gangs in the 19th century where an unsuspecting victim would be kidnapped, disguised and forced to vote for a specific candidate multiple times under multiple disguised identities”:

Voter fraud was extremely common in Baltimore around the mid 1800s, and the polling site whereEdgar_Allan_Poe_daguerreotype_crop Walker found the disheveled Poe was a known place that coopers brought their victims. The fact that Poe was found delirious on election day, then, is no coincidence.

Over the years, the cooping theory has come to be one of the more widely accepted explanations for Poe’s strange demeanor before his death. Before Prohibition, voters were given alcohol after voting as a sort of reward; had Poe been forced to vote multiple times in a cooping scheme, that might explain his semi-conscious, ragged state.

Around the late 1870s, Poe’s biographer J.H. Ingram received several letters that blamed Poe’s death on a cooping scheme. A letter from William Hand Browne, a member of the faculty at Johns Hopkins, explains that “the general belief here is, that Poe was seized by one of these gangs, (his death happening just at election-time; an election for sheriff took place on Oct. 4th), ‘cooped,’ stupefied with liquor, dragged out and voted, and then turned adrift to die.”

Another possibility for Poe’s demise?

One of the most recent theories about Poe’s death suggests that the author succumbed to a brain tumor, which influenced his behavior before his death. When Poe died, he was buried, rather unceremoniously, in an unmarked grave in a Baltimore graveyard. Twenty-six years later, a statue was erected, honoring Poe, near the graveyard’s entrance. Poe’s coffin was dug up, and his remains exhumed, in order to be moved to the new place of honor. But more than two decades of buried decay had not been kind to Poe’s coffin—or the corpse within it—and the apparatus fell apart as workers tried to move it from one part of the graveyard to another. Little remained of Poe’s body, but one worker did remark on a strange feature of Poe’s skull: a mass rolling around inside. Newspapers of the day claimed that the clump was Poe’s brain, shriveled yet intact after almost three decades in the ground.

We know, today, that the mass could not be Poe’s brain, which is one of the first parts of the body to rot after death. But Matthew Pearl, an American author who wrote a novel about Poe’s death, was nonetheless intrigued by this clump. He contacted a forensic pathologist, who told him that while the clump couldn’t be a brain, it could be a brain tumor, which can calcify after death into hard masses.

Previous Dish on Poe here.

(Daguerreotype of E.A.P., 1849, via Wikimedia Commons)

“I Read Myself Out Of The Closet”

And other quotes from a variety of gay and lesbian writers:

Philip Kennicott looks back with ambivalence at the classic gay literature – think Oscar Wilde, Jean Genet, Andre Gide, and Thomas Mann, among others – that shaped the way he came to terms with his own sexuality. While certain novels allowed him to understand he wasn’t alone, the “pleasure of finding new access to these worlds was almost always punctured by the bleakness of the books themselves”:

It is painful to read the bulk of this early canon, and it will only become more and more painful, as gay subcultures dissolve, and the bourgeois respectability that so many of these authors abandoned yet craved becomes the norm. In Genet, marriage between two men was the ultimate profanation, one of the strongest inversions of value the author could muster to scandalize his audience and delight his rebellious readers. The image of same-sex marriage was purely explosive, a strategy for blasting apart the hypocrisy and pretentions of traditional morality. Today, it is becoming commonplace.

I wonder if these books will survive like the literature of abolition, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—marginal, dated, remembered as important for its earnest, sentimental ambition, but also a catalog of stereotypes. Or if they will be mostly forgotten, like the nineteenth-century literature of aesthetic perversity and decadence that many of these authors so deeply admired? Will Gide and Genet be as obscure to readers as Huysmans and the Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore-Lucien Ducasse)?

I hope not, and not least because they mattered to me, and helped forge a common language of reference among many gay men of my generation. I hope they survive for the many poignant epitaphs they contain, grave markers for the men who were used, abused, and banished from their pages. Let me write them down in my notebook, so I don’t forget their names: Hans, who loved Hermann; Basini, who loved Törless; the Page of Herodias, who loved the Young Syrian; Giovanni, who loved David; and the all rest, unnamed, often with no voice, but not forgotten.

Ebolisis And Its Enablers

Derek Thompson blames the media for overhyping – and thereby exacerbating – Ebola panic in the US:

For the last two weeks, the American Ebola panic has been relentlessly overstated. When Gallup asked Americans if they were worried about contracting the Ebola virus, just 23 percent said yes in a October 11-12 poll, days after Thomas Duncan was the first person to die in America from the disease. That was up just one percentage point (well within the margin of error) from a similar survey administered one week earlier. Just 16 percent told Gallup that they actually thought someone in their family would likely get the virus, up just two percentage points from a week earlier.

One in six people thinking they’re about to die from Ebola is a serious matter. But you can get about approximately 20 percent of Americans to say all sorts of crazy things in anonymous polls.

Waldman takes on another trope of Ebolisis – that in the words of Republican Congressman Tim Murphy, “we have to be right 100 percent of the time, and Ebola only has to get in once.” It’s the viral equivalent of the one percent doctrine:

The objection some now have to the federal government’s response is that it isn’t enough like our response to terrorism, which is to say it doesn’t reflect that 100 percent perspective. You can find that perspective in some places — for instance, today the New York Times reports on some of the reaction from people who are both terrified and ignorant, like the parents who kept their kids home from school because the principal had travelled to Zambia, where there has been no Ebola despite being in the very same continent as Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. So why not close all the schools? And while we’re at it, stop all flights in and out of Texas and post Army units at the highways on the state’s border with shoot-to-kill orders on anyone trying to leave? After all, Ebola only has to be right once.

All of this underscores Saletan’s point that when it comes to public health, giving the public what it wants is simply nuts:

Rep. Sam Johnson of Texas is introducing a travel ban in Congress because Obama “is refusing to listen to the American people.” Virginia lawmakers, citing the views of “the American people,” are calling for a ban on travel from West Africa to their state. Behind these initiatives, an army of conservative media outlets is quoting polls and trumpeting what “the American people want” and “the American people favor.”

On some issues, this kind of thinking is healthy. It’s democracy. But on matters of science and medicine, it’s reckless. The reason why public opinion on Ebola diverges sharply from what experts recommend, not just on a travel ban but on everyday behaviors to avoid the virus, is sheer ignorance. Telling health officials to listen to the public, rather than the other way around, is the worst kind of demagoguery.

License To Strip

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Elizabeth Nolan Brown asks whether it’s really necessary for strippers to have occupational licenses:

Dancers and managers at a Washington state strip club are now suing to stop their county from releasing their names, photos, and other identifying information to a man who has filed a public records request for it. The complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Tacoma [last] Tuesday, says the Pierce County Auditor’s Office received a request from David A. Van Vleet for copies of all adult entertainment licenses on file for Dreamgirls at Fox’s. Why does this man want identifying info on current and former dancers at the Tacoma-based strip club? Nobody knows. (I reached out to Van Vleet yesterday but haven’t heard back.) But because strippers in most areas of Washington must obtain an “entertainer’s license”, their identities are a matter of public record.

Attorney Gilbert H. Levy acknowledged that the information was technically fair game under the state Public Records Act, but said the privacy and safety interests of strip club workers necessitates keeping their real names and identities confidential. “It’s a unique occupation and it’s a controversial occupation,” Levy told CBS Seattle. “Some people like nude dancers, and other people for religious or for other philosophical reasons don’t. There’s some stigma attached to the occupation, and most dancers for personal privacy reasons and safety reasons, don’t want the customers to know who they are outside of the club.”

In other words, it’s entirely likely the person who wants this information is a crazy stalker or an anti-sex nutjob. Maybe merely a blackmailer or a 4chan-er. At any rate, it’s hard to imagine many non-nefarious reasons for requesting personal information on a wide swath of individuals in a sensitive job.

(Photo by Flickr user Michael)

Why Are The Midterms So Meh?

Nate Cohn declares that “this is a great election. It’s way better than 2012. All around, it might be the best general election in a decade.”

There are a dozen competitive and close Senate contests and, for good measure, there are another dozen competitive governors’ contests. Better still, these close Senate races add up to something meaningful and important: control of the Senate.

But Americans are nevertheless losing interest in the midterms. How Suderman explains the lack of enthusiasm:

With just two weeks until election day, the most striking thing about the 2014 midterm may be how petty and substance-free it is. No major policy issue has defined this election; no major legislation is immediately at stake. It is possible to find candidates talking about a variety of policy issues—Obamacare, the minimum wage, immigration, the Export-Import bank, and more—but the implications are described almost entirely in political terms. For the most part, the focus for both parties is not on what they would do, but what they wouldn’t, not who they are, but who they aren’t. It’s an election about nothing, except, perhaps, who one hates the most. …

The result is an election in which Democrats cannot run on what they have done, and Republicans cannot run on what they will do. So petty squabbles and Twitter-friendly soundbites dominate the news as each side attempts to drive turnout by campaigning the notion that the other party is worse—for women or for struggling workers, for the economy or for America’s place in the world. It’s not an election about which side to vote for. It’s an election about which side to vote against.

What Is The Surgeon General Good For?

Part of the liberal line in the political battle over Ebola is that we’d be much better placed to respond to the crisis if only Congressional Republicans would stop stonewalling the confirmation of Obama’s nominee Dr. Vivek Murthy to the post of surgeon general, which has been empty for over a year. But Mike Stobbe doubts this would really make much difference, considering how the role of the surgeon general has changed over time from front-lines crusader against disease to mere public health advocate:

[I]t was in the 1960s, during the Democratic presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, that things really started to go downhill for the surgeon general. Administration officials were pushing to enact Great Society programs, and increasingly viewed the surgeon general and his troops as foot-draggers reluctant to take on the new initiatives—especially Medicare and Medicaid. … Dr. Luther Terry became renowned in 1964 for releasing a report that finally convinced many Americans of the deadliness of cigarette smoking, but he was shown the door a year later, after only one term. By 1968, the HEW Secretary had stripped away the surgeon general’s administrative powers and redistributed them to others.

Since then, the surgeon general has been little more than a health educator—“a pathetic shadow of authority who traveled around the country lecturing high school students on the hazards of smoking,” as the political scientist Eric Redman once wrote.

McArdle takes a broader view, noting that “this is not your grandfather’s public health system”:

Public health experts were, in a way, too successful;

they beat back our infectious disease load to the point where most of us have never had anything more serious than Human papillomavirus or a bad case of the flu. This left them without that much to do. So they reinvented themselves as the overseers of everything that might make us unhealthy, from French Fries to work stress. As with the steel mills, these problems are not necessarily amenable to the organizational tools used to tackle tuberculosis. The more the public and private health system are focused on these problems, the less optimized they will be for fighting the war against infectious disease. It is less surprising to find that they didn’t know how to respond to a novel infectious disease than it would have been to discover that they botched a new campaign against texting and driving.

Don’t get me wrong: Fighting infection is still one of the things that the public health infrastructure does, and though I hope it doesn’t come to that, I expect that our system will do a much better job next time. But the CDC did not botch the job because there’s something wrong with Barack Obama, or government, or the state of Texas, or private hospitals. They dropped the ball because the public health system no longer needs to work so many miracles, and consequently hasn’t had much practice.

The way Steven Malanga sees it, CDC Director Thomas Frieden’s embrace of that new role as nanny-in-chief is part of why he’s not really that good at his job:

As New York City’s health commissioner, Frieden engineered a law requiring food chains to post calorie counts on menus, though there was no evidence that the availability of such information has any effect on eating habits. Frieden also led a campaign to cut salt consumption despite studies that had shown, in fact, that some individuals fared poorly on a salt-restricted diet. Frieden’s campaign led one world-renown hypertension expert to proclaim that New York was attempting to engineer a giant uncontrolled experiment.

As time passed, Frieden’s practice of recommending sometimes outrageous solutions to health problems based on few facts grew more disconcerting. In 2007, he even proposed a campaign to persuade uncircumcised adult men in New York to get circumcised to reduce their risk to HIV; a study in Africa had concluded that the practice helped lower infections there. But Frieden’s proposal was widely derided and quickly dismissed because of the vast differences between the two populations and the preliminary nature of the research.

Ugh. Back to the issue at hand, Byron York blames the surgeon general vacancy on Democrats rather than Republicans:

[H]ere is the basic fact about charges that Republicans are blocking the surgeon general nominee: There are 55 Democrats in the Senate. Since Majority Leader Harry Reid changed the rules to kill filibusters for nominations, it would take just 51 votes to confirm Murthy. Democrats could do it all by themselves, even if every Republican opposed. But Democrats have not confirmed Murthy.

The reason has more to do with Murthy himself than anything else. As doctors go, he is a very political man, so it’s no surprise his politics have created political problems.

York notes that the NRA “took a strong stand against Murthy, a position that caught the attention not only of Republicans but of red-state Democrats seeking re-election.” Weigel adds context:

The NRA actually promised to score votes for Murthy – anyone who backed him would see a drop in his grade from the gun lobby. Among the horribles that made Murthy unacceptable were tweets like this (as York cites):

You can see why the NRA wanted to prevent such a doctor from becoming surgeon general. And you can sort of see why red state Democrats begged Harry Reid to prevent a vote on him.

Art And Ambiguity

Freddie considers the limits of art criticism in the Internet age, “a vast explosion in the analysis and examination of the art around us”:

These efforts to cast the brute emotional power of art into the conventions of thinking are necessary, natural, and fun. But they can result in, for example, the deep hatred for ambiguity in art, the effort to tease out of every creator what really happened. More, so many takes on art today, straining for political relevance, misunderstand that it is precisely the ability of art to express the indefensible and the disturbing that lends it enduring power.

If you are yet another person online to point out that the lyrics of “Run For Your Life” off of Rubber Soul are disturbing and misogynist, you are yet another to fail to understand that John Lennon didn’t kill anybody. He wrote a song about his impulses to kill — his scary, ugly, unmentionable impulse to kill, driven by the frightening irrationality at the heart of love and desire. He put those impulses into his art because that is where they could be acknowledged without danger. His music was where the unforgivable monster of his feelings could live and do no harm.