Homosexual y marroquí

Homosexual y marroquí

Abdelá Taia, escritor marroquí de 33 años residente en París, ha tenido la valentía de romper un tabú: reconocer públicamente su homosexualidad, algo penado con cárcel en su país. Aquí cuenta su experiencia, habla de sus amantes y denuncia la hipocresía

ABDELÁ TAIA

EL PAIS SEMANAL - 29-10-2006

Primero fue Rachid O., el primer marroquí que se confesó homosexual en un país en el que es un delito que el código penal castiga con penas de seis meses a tres años de cárcel. Pero aquel nombre era un seudónimo y muy pocos conocen su verdadera identidad. Después surgió Abdelá Taia, de 33 años, que en sus novelas aborda la homosexualidad y que declaró públicamente su orientación sexual.

“Temblaba por dentro”, recuerda Taia cuando, el pasado invierno, evocó en público por primera vez su homosexualidad en un debate sobre su obra literaria en la sala atiborrada del Instituto Francés de Mequinez (Marruecos). Nadie del público le agredió, y la prensa francófona marroquí, la más liberal, habla de él con respeto, mientras que la que está escrita en árabe, más conservadora, le ignora. Hasta la televisión pública le ha invitado a programas literarios.

Rutina

Violencia contra las mujeres en India

October 26, 2006

Law Protecting Indian Women Takes Effect

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW DELHI (AP) — Men who beat, threaten or yell at their wives or live-in girlfriends could be jailed and fined under a law that took effect Thursday and specifically targets the often-tolerated problem of domestic violence in India.

The law also applies to men or their families who harass wives for larger dowries, the government said.

The measure aims to prevent cases in which a husband or his family kills a wife because her family did not give a big enough dowry.

The Domestic Violence Act defines abuse broadly, including verbal, physical, sexual, emotional and economic mistreatment. Violators face up to a year in prison, a fine of $435, or both.

”We have been trying for long to protect women from domestic violence. In India, around 70 percent of women are victims of these violent acts in one or another form,” said Renuka Choudhury, the junior minister for women and child development.

Jock Sturges

Art flaps fade away, but Sturges and his nude photos thrive
- Steven Winn
Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Jock Sturges has been at this for more than 30 years now, and still we don’t quite know. Are his photographs of nude women, men, children and adolescents poised on puberty’s divide art or, well, something else?

Will we ever catch on to Sturges’ straightforward insistence that bodies as he claims to see and show them are simply, innocently beautiful? Do the photographs themselves tell a more complicated story? Can any nude photograph, in an Internet age of YouTube teases, celebrity peekaboos and pornography of infinite gradations and numbing profusion, escape the brand of the culture’s relentlessly sexualizing marketplace?

El feminismo y la moda

October 19, 2006

Good Girls Go Bad, for a Day

By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM

IN her thigh-highs and ruby miniskirt, Little Red Riding Hood does not appear to be en route to her grandmother’s house. And Goldilocks, in a snug bodice and platform heels, gives the impression she has been sleeping in everyone’s bed. There is a witch wearing little more than a Laker Girl uniform, a fairy who appears to shop at Victoria’s Secret and a cowgirl with a skirt the size of a tea towel.

Anyone who has watched the evolution of women’s Halloween costumes in the last several years will not be surprised that these images — culled from the Web sites of some of the largest Halloween costume retailers — are more strip club than storybook. Or that these and other costumes of questionable taste will be barely covering thousands of women who consider them escapist, harmless fun on Halloween.

“It’s a night when even a nice girl can dress like a dominatrix and still hold her head up the next morning,” said Linda M. Scott, the author of “Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism” (Palgrave Macmillan) and a professor of marketing at the University of Oxford in England.

The trend is so pervasive it has been written about by college students in campus newspapers, and Carlos Mencia, the comedian, jokes that Halloween should now be called Dress-Like-a-Whore Day.

Evolución de la homosexualidad

Homosexuality

All creatures great and small

Oct 26th 2006
How homosexuality, widespread in the animal kingdom, may have evolved

WHAT is taught in a country’s schools reveals much about the national psyche. The Norwegian curriculum requires that all 14-year-olds learn about homosexuality. Assisting with this education, the National History Museum at the University of Oslo has just opened an exhibition of gay animals.

“Against Nature?” does not tell zoologists anything new. Homosexuality has been recorded in some 1,500 species so far, and been well documented in about a third of these cases; it has been known since the time of Aristotle, who thought he witnessed two male hyenas having sex with one another. But the exhibition’s purpose is not to educate zoologists. It is to persuade the public that, as there are gay whales and worms, gay humans do not disturb the natural order.

Homosexualidad animal

HOMO ON THE RANGE

Gay Marriage in the Animal Kingdom

By Christoph Seidler in Oslo

Two male giraffes in unequivocal pose, a lesbian swan couple, two male whales stimulating each other: a new exhibit in Oslo displays examples of animal homosexuality.

“Normally,” says Geir Söli with a smile, “natural history museums just show pretty boring things: rocks, stuffed birds and the like.” Not so with the Norwegian zoologist’s latest project. After three years of preparation, Söli and his colleagues from the Natural History Museum in Oslo have just inaugurated the world’s first exhibit on animal homosexuality.

“Against Nature?” is the name of the exhibition in the red brick building on the edge of Oslo’s Botanical Gardens. The question mark at the end of the title is of particular importance to exhibit director Söli. He wants to qualify the argument that homosexuality is against nature because, he says, the facts paint a different picture: homosexual behavior has been observed in at least 1,500 species, and in roughly 500 of these cases the findings have been well documented. “And that’s only the tip of the iceberg.”

All too often, Söli says, zoologists have simply ignored the homosexuality of their research subjects. Against the backdrop of a 4-meter-tall image of two giraffes in an unmistakable pose, Söli explains how the whole thing usually worked: In a study on giraffes in Africa, for instance, scientists classified the mere sniffing of a female by her male counterpart as “sexual interest.” But when one male giraffe mounted another, the scientists recorded this as a “territorial fight” — even when they observed an ejaculation — because what must not be, cannot be.

Historia de la piel

Inquiry on skin goes beyond the superficial
- Reviewed by John Vaughn
Sunday, October 22, 2006

Skin

A Natural History

By Nina G. Jablonski

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS; 266 Pages; $24.95

Your doctor may not admit it, but to most of us, the skin is like the Internet; we all see it every day — often stumbling across areas better left unseen — and while a few of us make a good living repairing or enhancing it, most of us are quickly befuddled when it goes offline. We try a couple of medical ctrl+alt+deletes — a little steroid here, some antibiotic there — but if they don’t work, we’re usually stumped.

The problem is that our integument is subject to thousands of insults, and it reacts to them in surprisingly chameleon-like ways. The heart murmur caused by mitral valve prolapse sounds the same whether you’re from Tanzania or Norway. A broken ankle looks the same on an X-ray whether you’re fair or swarthy. But the same rash can look completely different on different people and even different on the same person at different times.

Luckily, Nina Jablonski, until recently the Irvine Chair and Curator of Anthropology at the California Academy of Sciences and currently the head of the anthropology department at Penn State, has written “Skin: A Natural History” to explain how it is that what appears to be just a simple wrapping for our more vital bits has come to be such an extremely complicated and active system.

Historia del parto

Hard Labor
For humans, childbirth has rarely been natural.

Reviewed by Sara Sklaroff
Sunday, October 22, 2006; BW08

BIRTH

The Surprising History

of How We Are Born

By Tina Cassidy

Atlantic Monthly. 312 pp. $24

Blame it on the pelvis. The awkward shape and size of that bony structure makes childbirth both difficult and dangerous. As a result, humans are the only mammals who need help to deliver their children, notes Tina Cassidy in Birth . Other animals have a straight shot through the birth canal, but our babies have to twist and turn to get out of that darn pelvis — or, as I came to imagine it during my own pregnancy, to squeeze themselves like a basketball through a Pringles can.

But infrastructure is only the first problem. Human interference can make things much worse. In this breezy popular history, Cassidy, a former Boston Globe reporter and editor, surveys centuries of terrible childbirths around the world, attended by doctors, nurses and midwives with strange theories and, in more than a few cases, deeply sadistic streaks. Tirelessly wide-eyed, Cassidy details how laboring women have been strapped down and shackled, drugged into oblivion and ripped open with a macabre array of tools more suited to taxidermy than obstetrics. It’s amazing anyone got out of the womb alive.

Alice Miller y el abuso

Times Online October 25, 2006

They may not mean to . . .

Carol Tavris

Alice Miller

THE BODY NEVER LIES

The lingering effects of hurtful parenting

Translated by Andrew Jenkins

229pp. Norton. £16.99 (US $23.95).

0 393 06065 9

 

The narcissism at the core of Alice Miller’s writing and the impoverished quality of her scholarship are evident in her notes. The introduction to her new book, The Body Never Lies, translated by Andrew Jenkins, has four notes, three of them references to her own previous works. Chapter Two has two notes, one of them to an earlier book; Chapter Nine has only one note, to one of her books. Chapter Eleven has no notes, but it begins by describing the fear the author felt when she was writing Thou Shalt Not Be Aware (1998). Chapter Twelve, a brief essay about a French serial killer who, Miller claims, murdered his victims because of his repressed hatred of his mother, has two notes, one to one of her books and the other to a profile of the killer in Le Monde, which appears to be the sole source of Miller’s analysis of his life. Chapter Six, “Suffocated by Mother Love”, has the largest number of notes (six), all by or about its subject, Marcel Proust. Nine chapters have no notes at all. In spite of Miller’s repeated claims that her ideas are based on “empirical” evidence as well as observations in psychotherapy, she provides only one note to anything faintly like a research study; this is not even to a published study in a peer-reviewed journal, but rather to a summary of the study on a website.

Madres solteras

Mamá y el señor x

Durante siglos, las mujeres sin pareja, fija o esporádica, tuvieron que renunciar al sueño de la maternidad. Ya no. El reloj biológico apremia, y cientos de españolas recurren cada año a la donación de semen para tener hijos naturales. ¿Y el amor? Que llegue cuando tenga que llegar.

CARMEN PÉREZ-LANZAC

EL PAIS SEMANAL - 22-10-2006

María remueve el café con la cucharilla. Echa un vistazo al lugar de su antebrazo por donde hace media hora entró la jeringuilla. Suspira. “Dentro de dos horas me llaman. Si es positivo me cojo el día libre y voy a ver a mis hermanas, que no saben nada. Después llamaré a mi mejor amigo. Hace dos semanas que no hablo con él porque me pone frenética. ¡Qué emoción! Ahora tengo que pensar en las cosas buenas. En las negativas ya lo he hecho. ¿Cuáles? Que otra cosa más que tengo que hacer sola, que por qué yo. Una amiga me dijo el otro día: ‘Anda que cuando llegue tu príncipe azul te va a encontrar con el piso, el coche, el niño…”.

Dos semanas antes un ginecólogo introdujo en la vagina de esta madrileña de 34 años alta, rubia, robusta y extrovertida, sin pareja, pero decidida a ser madre, una muestra de esperma de un desconocido. Unos días más tarde, frente a una cerveza sin alcohol –“por si acaso ya estoy embaraza”– María (nombre ficticio) se sinceraba, emocionada: “Por suerte o por desgracia no me ha ido bien con los hombres. No salgo por ahí a ligar, estoy cansada de eso. Claro que me ha costado hacerme a la idea. Nos han educado con el ideal del papá y la mamá. Antes las mujeres como yo eran las solteronas. Se tenían que resignar. Pero ahora, ¿por qué voy a resignarme? El año pasado cumplí varias cuentas pendientes: empecé a colaborar con una ONG, fui de voluntaria al Amazonas. Fíjate si tenía presente lo de ser mamá que me compré un coche con cinco puertas y completé una colección de películas infantiles. Entonces me dije que había llegado la hora”.

Exposición fotográfica de discapacidad y sexualidad

LA GALERÍA ZERO DE BARCELONA ACOGE LAS IMÁGENES

UNA EXPOSICIÓN DE FOTOGRAFÍAS MUESTRA LA CONEXIÓN ENTRE DISCAPACIDAD Y SEXUALIDAD

 

La exposición de fotografías ‘Encuentros Íntimos’ explora las conexiones entre la discapacidad y la sexualidad y sus “mitos ocultos” con imágenes tomadas por la fotógrafa Belinda Mason-Lovering.

El trabajo de Mason-Lovering, que podrá verse hasta el próximo 3 de noviembre en la Galeria Zero de Barcelona, pretende “levantar la voz para hacer visible la sexualidad entre las personas discapacitadas”, “negando el mito de que sólo las personas bellas y ‘glamourosas’ tienen una vida sexualmente activa”.

Las 40 imágenes de la exposición, realizadas durante el viaje de la fotógrafa de dos años a Australia, crean nuevos mensajes visuales sobre la discapacidad, basados en las realidades vividas por discapacitados. Personas con discapacidades físicas, intelectuales, de aprendizaje, psiquiátricas y neurológicas han compartido algunos de sus pensamientos y sentimientos más íntimos al ser fotografiados de una forma erótica.

Porno y discapacidad

Un madrileño en silla de ruedas, primer actor porno discapacitado

Teresa Ródenas

‘Querer es poder’ es el título de la primera película porno protagonizada por un actor discapacitado. ‘Josito’ ha participado en la cinta con el fin de hacer un poco de ‘ruido’ y demostrar a las mujeres que no han de temer acercarse a un hombre en silla de ruedas.

Este madrileño de 23 años, que desde los 17 vive con una lesión medular debido a un accidente, afirma tener aún “muchas dudas por lo que pueda pensar la gente o por lo que esto me pueda traer en el futuro”. Pero lo cierto es que es el primer actor en silla de ruedas que se ha atrevido a ponerse ante la cámara para rodar un largometraje de este tipo.

Innovaciones anticonceptivas

October 17, 2006

Personal Health

New Devices and Effective Options in Contraception

By JANE E. BRODY

Every year in the United States, six million women become pregnant, and half of these pregnancies are unplanned. More than three-fourths of teenage pregnancies and half of the pregnancies among women approaching menopause are unexpected.

A shocking 60 percent of unplanned pregnancies occur in women using contraception, and nearly half of unplanned pregnancies end with an elective abortion. This should not be happening in a country with such a wide variety of contraceptive options. The safest and fastest way to reduce abortions and unwanted births is to assure that every sexually active woman is always protected by a contraceptive that suits her needs and health circumstances, unless and until she chooses to become pregnant.

Condoms, diaphragms, sponges, cervical caps, and spermicidal jellies and creams, which must be applied at times of sexual activity, often fail because couples are unprepared or unwilling to interrupt a moment of passion. But a broad range of hormonal contraceptives and intrauterine devices are highly effective in preventing pregnancy.

Condones en primaria

Teach contraception to primary pupils, says report

Jeevan Vasagar
Monday October 23, 2006
The Guardian

Children should be taught about contraception while they are still in primary school, according to a report published today. Condoms should be free or sold at low cost to teenagers in schools and sports centres, according to the report by the Institute for Public Policy Research, which notes that almost one in three 15-year-olds did not use a condom the last time they had sex. British teenagers are the most sexually active and have the highest birth rate in Europe.

The study, which will be published in full next month, recommends children learn about contraception in their final primary school year, when aged 10 or 11.

The school lesson personal, social and health education (PSHE) should become statutory in all primary and secondary schools in England and Wales, instead of just being a recommendation as at present, according to the report. Currently, all schools have to teach sex education during key stage 3 (11- to 14-year-olds) as part of the science curriculum, but schools can choose to teach it through PSHE.

The report notes that Britain has the highest rate of births to teenagers in Europe, with an average of 26 live births per 1,000 girls aged 15-19. That is almost a fifth higher than in Latvia, which ranks second, and more than four times the rate in Cyprus, Slovenia, Sweden and Denmark.

Sobre la belleza

Más que guapos, resultones

¿Existe un canon rígido de belleza? La realidad demuestra que el término es relativo y que la atracción que ejerce una persona depende de su actitud y también de las sensaciones que provoca en los otros

VICENTE VERDÚ

EL PAIS SEMANAL - 22-10-2006

La belleza ayuda a triunfar. Por si no fueran bastantes las evocaciones que lo bello hace de lo bueno, lo justo o lo verdadero, la estetización general del mundo ha situado la belleza en un lugar central.

Desde la escuela al puesto de trabajo, desde las mejores calificaciones académicas a las mejores remuneraciones, correlacionan con el aspecto físico. En consecuencia, el sector actual de máxima expansión es el destinado a perfeccionar la apariencia, eliminar los kilos de más, solventar la deficiencia, enderezar las narices, borrar las arrugas o rebajar las pistoleras. El cuerpo, con la cara por delante, ha ganado una importancia insólita y sin equivalencia en sociedades anteriores donde el efecto a primera vista no llegaba a ser tan apreciado en la estrategia mercantil.

En la época de predominio fabril no resultaba relevante que el empleado fuera apuesto y la obrera un adefesio, pero dentro de los servicios los efectos de productividad tienen mucho que agradecer a las conexiones inmediatas. Estas conexiones no terminan en los signos físicos, pero por ahí se empieza, por ahí se caza.