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Frances Wilson reviews a pair of new books about sexual perversion: Julie Peakman’s The Pleasure’s All Mine: a History of Perverse Sex and Jesse Bering’s Perv: the Sexual Deviant in All of Us:

The difference between Peakman and Bering is one of position. While Bering uses humour to take a vertical plunge into the depths of the psyche, Peakman stays horizontal, giving an overview of all the nonsense that has been written about sex from the ancient to the modern worlds, and adding some of her own: “It is not so much that the internet has contributed to sex in the 21st century; to a large extent it is sex.” Neither book makes easy reading: Peakman’s because it is lazily written and she has no rapport with the reader, and Bering’s because he takes us into the worlds of those who have not so much been hiding in the closet as quivering in the panic room of a building in a David Lynch film.

But the reader faces other challenges too.

Some of us (or all, if Bering has his way) might feel uncomfortable stirrings of desire as we recognise our secret selves on the page; most will feel disgust or the urge to laugh. Once “the disgust factor” kicks in, Bering argues, social intelligence disappears. Desire and disgust are antagonists but they are also bedroom playmates; disgust towards the object of desire is a not uncommon post-coital reaction. As de Sade wrote, “Many men look upon the sleeping woman at their side with whom they have just had intercourse with a feeling as if they could at least thrash [her].” The secret to our success as a species, for Bering, is the way we have kept our disgust under control in the face of bodies that snore, smell, leak, swell and sprout unsightly hairs. As the open-minded millionaire Osgood Fielding III puts it in Some Like It Hot, when told he has mistakenly proposed to a man, “Well, nobody’s perfect.”

In a 1924 essay from TNR‘s archives, Virginia Woolf ponders what might have awaited the novelist had she lived past the age of 42:

She would have stayed in London, dined out, lunched out, met famous people, made new friends, read, travelled, and carried back to the quiet country cottage a hoard of observations to feast upon at leisure. And what effect would all this have had upon the six novels that Jane Austen did not write?

She would not have written of crime, of passion, or of adventure. She would not have been rushed by the importunity of publishers or the Battery of friends into slovenliness or insincerity. But she would have known more. Her sense of security would have been shaken. Her comedy would have suffered. She would have trusted less (this is already perceptible in Persuasion) to dialogue and more to reflection to give us a knowledge of her characters. Those marvelous little speeches which sum up in a few minutes’ chatter all that we need in order to know an Admiral Croft or a Mrs. Musgrove forever, that shorthand, hit-or-miss method which contains chapters of analysis and psychology, would have become too crude to hold all that she now perceived of the complexity of human nature. She would have devised a method, clear and composed as ever, but deeper and more suggestive, for conveying not only what people say, but what they leave unsaid; not only what they are, but (if we may be pardoned the vagueness of the expression) what life is. She would have stood further away from her characters, and seen them more as a group, less as individuals. Her satire, while it played less incessantly, would have been more stringent and severe. She would have been the forerunner of Henry James and of Proust—but enough. Vain are these speculations: she died “just as she was beginning to feel confidence in her own success.”

Previous Dish on Jane Austen here.

A poet? A rock star? Something else entirely? Dana Stevens argues (NYT) that “creative activity at a certain level renders genre categorization moot”:

Dylan’s songs at their best seem to originate from some primal foundry of creation, a Devil’s crossroads where Delta blues, British folk ballads, French Symbolism and Beat poetry (to name only a few of his early influences) converge and fuse. But his music reaches forward in time, toward more modern art forms, as well. There’s something distinctly cinematic, for example, in the crosscutting and temporal leaps of a narrative ballad like “Tangled Up in Blue,” which compresses a feature film’s worth of images, locations and encounters into four and a half minutes of bravura storytelling. If it’s a kind of sung movie, “Tangled Up in Blue” is one that, like so many Dylan compositions, consciously aspires to the condition of literature. In one verse, an erudite topless-bar waitress hands the first-person narrator — or in some versions of the song, a third-person stand-in — a life-changing volume of verse by “an Italian poet / From the 13th century.”

Francine Prose likewise emphasizes Dylan’s category-defying art:

The Dylan songs I keep returning to are the ones that spin out images like a surrealist or expressionist film, like Buñuel’s “Andalusian Dog” crossed with “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones? “Visions of Johanna” may be our most accurate, haunting evocation of the semi-hallucinatory insomnia that can be an unfortunate side effect of love. Perhaps I have a weakness for songs about the apocalypse (another favorite is Exuma’s “22nd Century,” performed by Nina Simone), but I’ve always admired “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” Dylan’s images cascading in the cadence of a children’s rhyming game: a partridge in a pear tree in a post-nuclear hell. Dylan is a master not only at translating rage into song (“Positively 4th Street” and “Idiot Wind” come to mind), but also at convincing us we’ve felt exactly the same kind of anger he’s describing.

He’s the heir, the unlikely offspring of Arthur Rimbaud and Walt Whitman. But he’s neither Rimbaud nor Whitman. He’s Bob Dylan. Is he a poet or a songwriter? The same answer applies: He’s Bob Dylan. I find myself falling back (again!) on Emily Dickinson’s remark: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Dylan’s songs can make us feel that pleasurable shock of being partially decapitated by beauty.

Robert Colls, who recently wrote a book on the author, sighs, “Orwell, you should be living at this hour”:

A medium ranking, 30 something year old man works on programmes concerned with gathering global information and using it in the interests of the state. Although he is an agency insider and enjoys the modest state privileges that derive from that, he comes to the conclusion that ‘The People’, in whose name he does these things, are not its beneficiaries but its victims, and that for all its talk of freedom and truth the state is intent on deceiving them. The man wants to admit his rebellious thoughts and reveal the deception but knows that by doing so he is going to make the rest of his life difficult, not to say short, and there will be no going back. He does it all the same. He has no accomplices, except his girlfriend. The world has yet to decide what will happen to him.

I am of course talking about Edward Snowden, who worked for the American National Security Agency before tipping its secrets last summer. But I could have been talking about Winston Smith, hero of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Winston, like Snowden, works in state security. Winston, like Snowden, acts alone. In spite of his name, Winston, like Snowden, is no action hero. … Here’s my point: Winston Smith and Edward Snowden are ordinary guys. You might say geeky-ordinary. But they had access to what we do not have access to, and came to believe that the job they were doing was not ordinary but extraordinary, and was not only wrong it was pointless.

Colls notes ironically that “Orwell spent his life loathing intellectuals and state technicians like Edward Snowden”:

He was sure they would betray the people. Well, Orwell did not always get it right and in this particular matter there can be no doubt that – as the cliché goes – if he was alive today the greatest political commentator of the 20th century would be supporting the young American. For Edward Snowden recognized two great Orwellian truths; first that liberty depends on millions of private lives kept private. As a fully paid-up non-deceived realist, Orwell would have argued the difficult case as to the point at which state secrecy should end and private life begin. Second, Snowden recognized that the War on Terror is no war and the quicker we drop the impossible abstraction of it all the better. Far better that we stick to what is ordinary: ordinary law, ordinary war, ordinary security, ordinary guys.

(Photo of demonstration against PRISM in Berlin, June 19, 2013, by Flickr user ubiquit23)

Maia Szalavitz describes how neuroscientist Henry Markram, father to an autistic son, has come to interpret the disorder:

Imagine being born into a world of bewildering, inescapable sensory overload, like a visitor from a much darker, calmer, quieter planet. Your mother’s eyes: a strobe light. Your father’s voice: a growling jackhammer. That cute little onesie everyone thinks is so soft? Sandpaper with diamond grit. And what about all that cooing and affection? A barrage of chaotic, indecipherable input, a cacophony of raw, unfilterable data. Just to survive, you’d need to be excellent at detecting any pattern you could find in the frightful and oppressive noise. To stay sane, you’d have to control as much as possible, developing a rigid focus on detail, routine and repetition. Systems in which specific inputs produce predictable outputs would be far more attractive than human beings, with their mystifying and inconsistent demands and their haphazard behavior.

This, Markram and his wife, Kamila, argue, is what it’s like to be autistic. The behavior that results is not due to cognitive deficits—the prevailing view in autism research circles today—but the opposite, they say.

Rather than being oblivious, autistic people take in too much and learn too fast. While they may appear bereft of emotion, the Markrams insist they are actually overwhelmed not only by their own emotions, but by the emotions of others. Consequently, the brain architecture of autism is not just defined by its weaknesses, but also by its inherent strengths. The developmental disorder now believed to affect around 1 percent of the population is not characterized by lack of empathy, the Markrams claim. Social difficulties and odd behavior result from trying to cope with a world that’s just too much.

Previous Dish on autism here, here, and here.

Christian Jarrett offers “a calm look at the most hyped concept in neuroscience — mirror neurons,” which have been linked to human empathy and “the birth of human culture”:

[W]e do not yet have the research to show that mirror neurons are vital for human empathy, and there are reasons to believe that empathy is possible without them. For starters, we are able to comprehend the intentions behind the actions of other people or animals even if we’ve never performed, or are incapable of performing, their actions ourselves. Many brain damaged patients who can no longer produce speech are still able understand it. There are other patients who have lost the ability to express emotion yet can still understand the emotion of others.

He praises a recent paper by neuroscientists James Kilner and Roger Lemon:

Reading their paper it soon becomes clear that the term “mirror neurons” conceals a complex mix of cell types.

Some motor cells only show mirror-like responses when a monkey sees a live performer in front of them; other cells are also responsive to movements seen on video. Some mirror neurons appear to be fussy – they only respond to a very specific type of action; others are less specific and respond to a far broader range of observed movements. There are even some mirror neurons that are activated by the sound of a particular movement. Others show mirror suppression – that is their activity is reduced during action observation. Another study found evidence in monkeys of touch-sensitive neurons that respond to the sight of another animal being touched in the same location. …

Importantly, Kilner and Lemon also highlight findings from monkeys showing how the activity of mirror neurons is modulated by such factors as the angle of view, the reward value of the observed movement, and the overall goal of a movement, such as whether it is intended to grasp an object or place it in the mouth. These findings are significant because they show how mirror neurons are not merely activated by incoming sensory information, but also by formulations developed elsewhere in the brain about the meaning of what is being observed.

This is not to detract from the fascination of mirror neurons. It does show they are not the beginning of a causal path. Rather they are embedded in a complex network of brain activity.

Toobin covers the recent surge in court victories. He calls Monday’s ruling in Ohio possibly “the most important of all”:

James Obergefell and John Arthur, who lived together in Cincinnati, married in Maryland at a time when Arthur was gravely ill. In anticipation of Arthur’s death, the couple petitioned the state of Ohio for Arthur to be listed as “married” on his Ohio death certificate, and to record Obergefell as the “surviving spouse.” Ohio, which does not allow same-sex marriages, refused, but federal judge Timothy S. Black ruled against the state and in favor of the couple. The judge said it was “not a complicated case.” Throughout Ohio’s history, Ohio has treated marriages solemnized out of state as valid in Ohio. “How then can Ohio, especially given the historical status of Ohio law, single out same-sex marriage as ones it will not recognize?” Black asked in his opinion. “The short answer is Ohio cannot.”

The Ohio decision is crucial because people in the United States tend to move from state to state. Like Obergefell and Arthur, people in same-sex marriages may well end up living in states where such marriages are illegal. Once they are in those states, these couples will become enmeshed in the legal system in the way that heterosexual married couples do. They will have children; they may divorce and dispute child custody; they will seek to file joint tax returns; they will visit each other in the hospital; they will want to be with each other when they die. Their lives will intersect with the legal system in scores of ways at those junctures. In light of this, many judges will face dilemmas similar to the one Black just resolved.

Lyle Denniston notes how the Ohio ruling relies and expands on Windsor. Mark Joseph Stern games out the cases that might make it to SCOTUS. On Utah:

With Turkish officials resigning right and left over a corruption scandal, Kemal Kirişci unpacks the deepening political crisis in Turkey:

A graft scandal involving individuals close to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his cabinet erupted on December 17. Subsequently, the government has removed a string of police chiefs and officers as well as members of the judiciary from their posts claiming that there is a “conspiracy” directed against the government. The PM referred to a long list of conspirators, including unnamed ambassadors that he threatened with expulsion. However, supporters of Erdogan have identified Fetullah Gülen, the head of a religiously conservative civil society movement that enjoys broad-based societal support and is alleged to have sympathisers in the ranks of the Turkish National Police and judiciary, as the primary culprit. Gülen, who has lived in the US since the late 1990s, was a long-time ally and supporter of the PM’s Justice and Development Party (AKP). Relations between the PM and Gülen’s movement had been deteriorating for some time on a wide spectrum of issues, ranging from relations with Israel to Erdogan’s recent attempt to have the lucrative prep schools shut down.

The corruption scandal comes at an unfortunate time for the government as Turkey enters an 18-month-long election cycle that will see local elections in March, presidential elections in August and a parliamentary one in mid-2015. The resulting instability from the corruption scandal also coincides with a period when Turkey’s international image has been tarnished and its foreign policy faces growing challenges in a deeply unstable neighbourhood.

Marc Champion sees signs that Erdogan is not as politically astute as he used to be:

Precisely because Erdogan has concentrated power so closely around himself in just a few men, any perception that they are corrupt will immediately infect his personal image and support. This is why Erdogan hasn’t fired the four ministers: He says the allegations against them are part of a plot to unseat him.

My guess is that he’s right, but his response gets to the second reason Erdogan may not survive, despite being far stronger than Gulen: himself. Erdogan is an extraordinary politician, one of the most intuitive I have met. Yet since the AK Party’s third thumping election victory in 2011, when he declared his “master period” to be at hand, Erdogan appears to have lost the political compass that once told him when to be pragmatic and cut his losses. His fight-or-flight response now includes only one — to fight.

In response to the allegations, Erdogan has fired dozens of Istanbul police chiefs involved in the arrests, the same ones he defended and praised over their handling of the Gezi Park protests earlier this year. He says the corruption cases are part of the same plot he detected behind the Gezi Park protests, conducted by the same dark morass of international conspirators. Except that now the police who cracked down on the protesters must be part of the conspiracy, too. This is just untenable. To make it stick and purge Gulen’s supporters from the police force, prosecutor’s office and courts, Erdogan will have to crack down in ways that will destroy what remains of Turkey’s independent law enforcement institutions and media freedoms. That will deal a huge blow to the so-called Turkish model, the idea that Turkey had cracked the code for implementing genuine democracy in the Muslim world. And that would be a tragedy, because the Turkish model is real and important, if overhyped, oversimplified and already under strain.

Michael Koplow thinks the prime minister may be done for:

If the AKP does worse than expected in the local elections in March, which is a very likely possibility, it seems to me that Erdoğan’s aura of invincibility and stranglehold on his party will be permanently broken. Once that happens the long knives are bound to come out, and with the perfectly acceptable alternative of Abdullah Gül waiting in the wings, Erdoğan’s tenure as the sun around which Turkish politics revolves (to quote my friend Steven Cook) may be done. While I have learned enough to know that Erdoğan should never, ever be counted out or underestimated, we may have finally arrived at the exception to this longstanding rule of Turkish politics.

Jack A. Goldstone puts a positive spin on the corruption probe:

Unfortunately, ALL emerging democracies tend to have considerable amounts of corruption (maybe make that ALL democracies, period. The United States had a recent case of a Congressmen found with wads of cash stuffed in his freezer, and Japan has recurrent corruption scandals). It is difficult, when people who have had no access to political power for a very long time suddenly come into very powerful positions for everyone to act like angels. It is inevitable that some people will succumb to the temptation to turn their positions into sources of income. That is why all respectable democratic regimes have vigorous investigative and judicial arms that are concerned to ensure that the law is followed and corruption is rooted out — even if that leads to people at the very highest levels of authority. Indeed, one measure of the degree to which a country is truly a well-functioning democracy is whether such investigations and the pursuit of corruption ends with low-level officials, or whether even the highest officials in the land are held accountable if they break the law. On that score, the current investigations are a sign of the maturing and truly democratic character of Turkey’s regime.

A federal judge today dismissed an ACLU lawsuit to shut down the NSA’s phone metadata collection program:

Handing down an unusually sweeping ruling, Judge William Pauley III ruled that the NSA’s phone record database was fully lawful under section 215 of the Patriot Act. Beyond that, the judge ruled, “the question of whether that program should be conducted is for the other two coordinate branches of Government to decide. Judge Pauley opens the opinion with thoughts on the attacks of 9/11, which he describes as “a bold jujitsu.” The opening paragraphs detail the case of 9/11 hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar, who the NSA mistakenly believed was living in Yemen at the time of the attacks because of insufficient data collection. (This anecdote, based on General Alexander’s congressional testimony, has been widely disputed.) The metadata collection program grew up in response to those intelligence failures, collecting more and more data so as to suss out the missed connections. Calling the program, “a wide net that could find and islolate gossamer contacts,” Pauley concludes, “this blunt tool only works because it collects everything.”

David Kravets fears that efforts to reform the program might end up making things worse:

Right now, the phone companies store phone metadata for varying times. Verizon and U.S Cellular store it for about a year; Sprint for 18 months. At the other end of the spectrum, T-Mobile maintains it for seven to 10 years, and AT&T for five, according to a congressional inquiry. While Obama’s review group’s recommendation was short on details, everybody familiar with the plan agrees it would require telcos to store metadata for some minimum amount of time, presumably for longer than many of them already do. That means the authorities would have access to this data for far longer than they otherwise might.

Meanwhile, although the NSA has maintained that metadata is anonymous, researchers have found that it can easily be used to identify people:

Armed with very sparse metadata, Jonathan Mayer and Patrick Mutchler found it easy—trivially so—to figure out the identity of a caller. Mayer and Mutchler are running an experiment which works with volunteers who agree to use an Android app, MetaPhone, that allows the researchers access to their metadata. Now, using that data, Mayer and Mutchler say that it was hardly any trouble at all to figure out who the phone numbers belonged to, and they did it in just a few hours.

It may be increasing (NYT):

“It’s no longer just a piece of paper that you can repeal and it goes away,” said Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin and a Tea Party favorite. “There’s something there. We have to recognize that reality. We have to deal with the people that are currently covered under Obamacare.”

Ezra thinks Johnson’s “realization is how repeal-and-replace becomes criticize-and-reform”:

Republicans who want to reform Obamacare remain the (growing) minority. But in another sign that Republicans see the politics of Obamacare changing, there’s more talk of producing an actual Republican alternative before the 2014 elections. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), for instance, plans to unveil the successor to his Patients’ Choice Act act early next year. That, too, is an admission that something like the Affordable Care Act is here to stay, and Republicans need to begin proposing policy for a post-health reform world rather than fantasizing about a return to a pre-health reform world.

Philip Klein wonders how GOP candidates will decide which reforms to support when “it’s very difficult to predict what the health care landscape will look like a few months from now, let alone several years from now when a potential Republican president would have a chance to make changes”:

Without knowing how much of Obamacare could be in play, it’s hard to settle on a policy. On the one hand, basing policy on the assumption that Obamacare can be entirely repealed is likely unrealistic, while on the other hand, treating Obamacare as mostly untouchable could cause Republicans to preemptively concede too much policy ground. Mounting failures of Obamacare could put more of the law in play than seemed possible just a few months ago.

Most likely, the future of Republican health care policy will be sorted out as its presidential candidates begin to lay out their plans during the 2015 primaries. But those candidates will have to adopt policies in an environment that’s largely a product of what happens in 2014.