Historia cultural del pene

Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality, Volume 5, March 29, 2002

A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis

By David M. Friedman

The Free Press; ISBN: 0-684-85320-5; $26.00; 2001

Reviewed by David S. Hall, Ph.D.

This is a very interesting book, one of the more enjoyable reads in some time, that is if you don’t mind reading about castration, lynchings and medical horrors. Friedman, a writer of some note, has developed a combination of science, history and mythology into a fairly comprehensive whole. He has divided the history of the penis into six eras, each with a humorous title descriptive of the era.

The first, “The Demon Rod”, begins with a witch’s burning for having had intercourse with the Devil. In rather gory detail, he often describes the horrors inflicted upon, or because of, a penis. He moves quickly to Bobbitt and Clinton, and reviews the way the penis has been made an evil thing, the cause of original sin and moral weakness. He defines the Virgin Mary’s sanctity as her lack of contact with a penis. Reviewing mythology and history, he includes inscriptions on the walls of Karnak, circa 1200 BCE, listing the number of penises cut off various classes of prisoners, the use of circumcision for religious identification and purification, Augustine, and other Christian efforts to demonize male sexuality. Handbooks for confessors in 6th Century Ireland listed the length of penance for various sins, for example, seven years for premeditated murder, ten for coitus interruptus, fifteen for anal intercourse and life long for oral sex. The penis is worse than the poleaxe. There was one exception, the penis of Jesus. That Jesus was sinless and still had a penis proved that man could overcome his lust and live a pure life. In religious art of the 14th to 16th Century only Jesus was shown having genitalia, other men had them hidden. (The same is true today in the religious right’s efforts to ban all nudity in any art, and our Attorney General’s orders to cover the nude statues that often showed up behind him in press conferences.)

Sexualidad y discapacidad como política social

Sexuality and disability as social policy 

April 14, 2007
Helen Henderson

Is it time for people with disabilities to invite government into their bedrooms? Is this the year we should – whoa, Nelly – get public policy legislators working on sex?

I think so.

Time to shine light on the fact that one of the keys to well-being, namely sexual fulfilment, is not and never will be a private thing for many people who move and/or process information differently from the so-called norm.

In a world that routinely stigmatizes people with disabilities as asexual, how does someone with cerebral palsy summon the courage to ask for what is delicately known as “facilitation?” How can a woman who uses a wheelchair feel comfortable expressing her sexual preferences? When is a man with an intellectual disability competent to make decisions relating to sex?

How do personal assistants fit into the picture? Should government funding cover sexual services?

Jillian Weise

‘The Amputee’s Guide to Sex’ by Jillian Weise

A poet examines intimacy, disability and taboos.
By Leslie Schwartz
Leslie Schwartz, the current president of PEN USA, is the author of the novels “Jumping the Green” and “Angels Crest.”

April 15, 2007

READERS who can handle the hair-raising experience of Jillian Weise’s gutsy poetry debut, “The Amputee’s Guide to Sex,” will be rewarded with an elegant examination of intimacy and disability and a fearless dissection of the taboo and the hidden.

Weise fuses the sterile language of medical science with the fragile territory of the heart and dares to ask whether the body is the temple of the soul or its prison. In the poem “The Local Human Being,” she writes: “You say I’m obsessed / with bodies; they are nothing, they are everything.” Then she dips into the ineffable region of the soul and its relationship with the physical form, teetering between the desire for connection and the vulgarity of ill-mannered seduction.

This seesawing between body and spirit is reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Good Country People,” in which a seemingly dimwitted Bible salesman asks a woman to prove her love by removing her false leg. At first she’s horrified. “She was as sensitive about the artificial leg as a peacock to its tail. No one ever touched it but her. She took care of it as someone else would his soul, in private and almost with her own eyes turned away.”

¿Hay que revelar las infidelidades?

Don’t Tell Me
Some couples say that when it comes to sleeping around, ignorance is bliss.
by Kai Ma
March 6, 2007

“If my girlfriend falls in love with another guy, I want to know,” says Serdna, a twenty-two-year-old painter from Queens. “If she goes on a date with a guy, or if she kisses another guy, I don’t want to know. If she sleeps with another guy, assuming she uses protection, I definitely don’t want to know. But if there ever comes a time that she can’t do this anymore, I want to know. And then we would work it out from there.”

Serdna is sitting across from me at a café in Manhattan’s East Village. Soft-spoken and calm, his large, boyish eyes contrast the scruff of his barely-there beard. What he’s telling me goes against all the conventional relationship wisdom I’ve ever heard. Even the most liberated, iconoclastic couples I know agree: total openness needs to be maintained in a healthy relationship. If you make the mutual decision to have an open relationship, fine, but you and your partner should practice complete transparency when it comes to the whos, wheres, whens and hows of your sexual activities.

But is this really the best way to do it? Or has it simply become gospel via hundreds of advice columns? The concept of “communication” is often defined as full disclosure. But people like Serdna think this rigid interpretation is illogical. For the past three years, he’s been in a “don’t ask, don’t tell” relationship with his girlfriend, a twenty-one-year-old fashion student we’ll call Leslie.

Beverly Whipple

Sex researcher focuses on new hot spots
Posted 3/2/2007 8:29 PM ET

By Linda A. Johnson, Associated Press
VOORHEES, N.J. — Sexuality researcher Beverly Whipple made her name a quarter century ago popularizing the “G spot,” the elusive female erogenous zone, but she has a different message these days: Move on.

“There’s so many ways that women can have sexual pleasure,” Whipple said. “We can’t deny the experiences of women. We have to validate them.”

Lesson number one: The biggest sexual organ really is the brain.

The longtime Rutgers University nursing school professor officially retired about five years ago, but still keeps a hectic schedule, doing research, writing, giving interviews and jetting off to speak at sexuality and women’s health conferences around the globe.

Her most recent book, The Science of Orgasm, co-written with Rutgers neuroscientist Barry Komisaruk and Mexican endocrinologist Carlos Beyer-Flores, explores how the brain produces orgasms and the complex biological processes involved.

It documents groundbreaking work showing that, contrary to what doctors tell them, some women with spinal cord injuries can still climax. Whipple said women with such injuries who were still experiencing orgasm came to her for support, so she began a study of others with the same injury.

Estudio científico de la sexualidad femenina

Women a mystery to sex scientists

By Judy Peres

Chicago Tribune

February 26, 2007

To get an idea of just how much remains unknown about an area that directly affects most people’s lives, you need to drop in on the International Society for the Study of Women ’s Sexual Health.

Researchers presenting their findings at the society’s sixth annual meeting are still trying to figure out which hormones and neurotransmitters make sexual arousal possible, where in the brain orgasm takes place, and which nerves control the genital organs. Much of their work is being done in rats.

‘Now we’re sticking needles into different parts of the brain,’ said Dr. Irwin Goldstein, the Boston urologist who founded the multidisciplinary group. ‘Whatever pharmaceuticals are proven to help … most likely will work in the central nervous system.’

Clinicians, frustrated by the slow pace of sexual science, want effective treatments for patients brave enough to seek help–a small minority.

Although social scientists have been studying women’s sexuality for decades, medical science did not become interested until the advent of Viagra in the late 1990s raised the possibility that female sexual problems might be treated by medication.

Viagra, which treats erectile dysfunction by increasing blood flow to the genitals, does not appear to work in women.

In fact, no drug has been approved in the U.S. for the disorder doctors call female sexual dysfunction. That may be understandable, given that experts aren’t sure what female sexual dysfunction is–or even if it exists.

Reproducción asistida

April 22, 2007
Children on Demand
By POLLY MORRICE

EVERYTHING CONCEIVABLE
How Assisted Reproduction Is Changing Men, Women, and the World.

By Liza Mundy.

406 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.

At the start of this lucid, mostly approving look at how humans are tinkering with the age-old project of reproducing ourselves, Liza Mundy meets one of the British scientists whose tenacity in perfecting in vitro fertilization made possible the birth, nearly 30 years ago, of the first test-tube baby. The embryologist Robert Edwards charms her, and not just with his enduring zest for the procedure he helped invent. “Eye hoop they all have babies!” he declares in what Mundy, a writer for The Washington Post Magazine, calls his “wonderfully nonestablishment, workingman’s burr.” “What coood be better than a baby?”

That rhetorical question sums up an essential principle of Mundy’s book: that “having children and loving children is an unstoppable urge; that humans, or many humans, have an overpowering need to have — to be — a family.” Yet while “Everything Conceivable” is based on the proposition that people crave babies, it has a larger thesis to prove: that the increasingly complicated ways people are going about making babies is transforming babies and the world. Mundy seeks to make sense of assisted reproduction, a sprawling topic that now includes lesbian and single mothers who use sperm (and sometimes egg) donors, gay men who enlist surrogates and couples who “adopt” one of the nearly half-million frozen human embryos stored in tanks of liquid nitrogen across the United States.

Dudas sobre la infertilidad

Juancho García Velasco

El número de parejas con problemas de fertilidad es cada vez mayor. Afortunadamente, la reproducción asistida avanza con rapidez y muchos casos tienen hoy en día solución. Juancho García Velasco, director del Instituto Valenciano de Infertilidad de Madrid, respondió a las dudas de los internautas sobre este tema.

 

Día del libro

Historiando la historia de la sexualidad

Lesley A. Hall
Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine

[This was originally written in 2005 as an encyclopaedia article on the history of history of sexuality, but was not, in the event, published]
The history of the history of sexuality

While there has been a veritable explosion of interest in the history of sexuality since the 1970s, the study of the history of sexual behaviour and attitudes has itself a much longer history. R. P. Neuman commented in 1978 that ‘sexual behavior has interested historians ever since Suetonius described Tiberius on Capri’, an allusion invoking the recurrent accusation of deploying the past for prurient purposes which haunts the history of sexuality. Quite apart from this somewhat dubious tradition of accounts of debauchery and ‘grandes amoureuses’, history played a significant role in the evolution of sexology which has tended to be overlooked. Early sexologists were drawing on a range of intellectual disciplines, most of which have now separated out into mutually exclusive fields. Important influences on those attempting to apply reason and scientific methods to the study of sexuality included Lecky’s History of European Morals (1869), a work which might well be claimed to have been almost as significant as Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) to their enterprise. Lecky is now almost exclusively remembered for his much-cited invocation to the prostitute as ‘Herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue’. This was originally embedded within a subtle and nuanced account of historical differences in the treatment of illicit liaisons, amounting to a humane critique of Victorian severity towards sexual sin. Lecky thus manifested one of the abiding reasons for interest in the history of sexuality: the light it might shed on current moral assumptions and the prospects for transforming existing conditions.

During the nineteenth century developing sexology was also strongly influenced by anthropological/historical theories about the evolution of societies, especially the works of matriarchy theorists such as J. J. Bachofen and L. H. Morgan. These invoked the idea that sexual mores had changed radically over time, although the process was often depicted in evolutionary terms with the assumption that this had reached its peak with the domination of the white male in monogamous patriarchal marriage.

Píldora que elimina el periodo

April 20, 2007
Pill That Eliminates the Period Gets Mixed Reviews
By STEPHANIE SAUL

For many women, a birth control pill that eliminates monthly menstruation might seem a welcome milestone.

But others view their periods as fundamental symbols of fertility and health, researchers have found. Rather than loathing their periods, women evidently carry on complex love-hate relationships with them.

This ambivalence is one reason that a decision expected next month by the Food and Drug Administration has engendered controversy. The agency is expected to approve the first contraceptive pill that is designed to eliminate periods as long as a woman takes it. Doctors say they know of no extra risk to the new regimen, but some women are uneasy about the idea.

“My concern is that the menstrual cycle is an outward sign of something that’s going on hormonally in the body,” said Christine L. Hitchcock, a researcher at the University of British Columbia. Ms. Hitchcock said she worries about “the idea that you can turn your body on and off like a tap.”

That viewpoint is apparently one reason some already available birth control pills that can enable women to have only four periods a year have not captured a larger share of the oral contraceptive market.

Historia cultural de la impotencia

From The Sunday Times
April 15, 2007
Man’s worst nightmare
Michael Bywater

IMPOTENCE: A Cultural History by Angus McLaren

Chicago UP £19

Viagra? Tried them. Just out of curiosity; nothing wrong with me in that direction. Got them off a friend. Nothing wrong with him in that direction, either. Just curious. Now you can get them from the chemist, if you’re prepared to talk about it to some purse-lipped pharmacist, and who the hell would be? Glad to be unchained from the madman of desire, as they say; glad to be done with all that hurly-burly, you’d have thought, not to mention the fact that impotence is something that doesn’t happen to oneself. Happens to a friend, doctor.

We have no register for discussing impotence. Don’t know whether it’s a gag or a tragedy. It’s not about that little nubbin of gristle, that’s for sure; really, it’s an epitome, a fingerprint, a strand of DNA encoding all that we think about what it means to be a sexual man in any given culture. And that is what can kill. Literally. I knew a man who died to evade being, as he thought, unmanned. Prostate cancer; curable, but the operation might — might — have left him impotent. So (a brilliant man, at the height of his profession) he refused the operation and the cancer spread and killed him: stupidly young but still able to get it up. Still . .. potent.

In the end, it’s simple. You try; you can’t do it. So you trot out the excuses: it’s never happened to me before, I’m very tired, it’s been difficult at work, I’ve been unwell, I’m nervous, I’m overwhelmed by your beauty. And she trots out hers: it’s okay, it doesn’t matter, it’ll be fine in the morning, I love you anyway. (Nobody trots out the late Jeff Bernard’s observation: “I have discovered a cure for impotence. Find a woman you fancy.”) It’s not about sex. It’s about heterosexual sex; about a specific part of the repertoire, which afflicts one of the participants, while the other may (or may not) be entirely indifferent; and the wider culture may laugh, shrug, weep, cry “witchcraft!”, run to the doctor, or any of the array of responses that form the meat of Angus McLaren’s meticulous, diverting, enchanting and often hilarious book.

Sexualidad y genética

April 10, 2007
Pas de Deux of Sexuality Is Written in the Genes
By NICHOLAS WADE

When it comes to the matter of desire, evolution leaves little to chance. Human sexual behavior is not a free-form performance, biologists are finding, but is guided at every turn by genetic programs.

Desire between the sexes is not a matter of choice. Straight men, it seems, have neural circuits that prompt them to seek out women; gay men have those prompting them to seek other men. Women’s brains may be organized to select men who seem likely to provide for them and their children. The deal is sealed with other neural programs that induce a burst of romantic love, followed by long-term attachment.

So much fuss, so intricate a dance, all to achieve success on the simple scale that is all evolution cares about, that of raisingthe greatest number of children to adulthood. Desire may seem the core of human sexual behavior, but it is just the central act in a long drama whose script is written quite substantially in the genes.

Reglas para ser infiel

Lust in Translation

The Rules of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee
Pamela Druckerman

Penguin Press

French Men Don’t Get Caught
By Jardine Libaire, Best Life

Jane and Thomas were high school sweethearts, and now their own kids are in high school. About a year ago, Thomas, 47, a financial officer at a large corporation, suddenly started volunteering to take his son to soccer practice on Sunday mornings and began using his laptop at home. Jane noticed he seemed to hide the computer from her, and he never used it in front of her. He sought excuses to be alone; she became uneasy. One night, he made a hushed phone call downstairs while she was in bed. When he came upstairs, she asked who it was. He said it was no one, told her she was “hearing things,” and said it must have been the TV. His denial was all she needed. She asked right then if he was having an affair, and soon enough he admitted he was. Their world came crashing down.

The other woman is a fellow employee who reports to him. She is 14 years Jane’s junior and possesses, in Jane’s words, “a Victoria’s Secret body.” Thomas agreed that he must end the affair, but for the past four months the evidence says otherwise. Jane has discovered cryptic text messages on her husband’s cell phone and there are regular hang-up calls from a blocked number. Jane considered telling the other woman’s husband about his wife’s affair, but then the woman—out of revenge—could sue Thomas for sexual harassment. This has the potential to bankrupt the family. So would divorce. Every time Thomas stays late at work, Jane can’t help but accuse him—even if it’s silently, just with a look—of having been unfaithful again. In their own home, Jane and Thomas are now deadlocked in marital misery, fighting tearfully and viciously.

Does it have to be this way? Must an affair lead a couple inexorably to divorce court or bankruptcy? Do other cultures handle the circumstances of infidelity with different protocol and ethics? I asked these questions of Anna, 30, an American with a European background and a 1960s Italian art-film look: a decadent face, a slim, curvy body in a tweed pencil skirt. One night exactly a year ago, Henri, a Parisian client of Anna’s company, came to town for a professional event. They flirted unapologetically throughout the evening. When she invited people to her place for late-night drinks, Henri stayed. Before they even kissed, he held up his finger. “You see I’m wearing this ring,” he said. Anna said she did. “You know nothing will change,” he continued. She answered that she did know that.

Mujeres y trabajo

Women’s Work
A journalist warns women that once they leave the career track, they may never get back on.

Reviewed by Rachel Hartigan Shea
Sunday, April 15, 2007; BW03

THE FEMININE MISTAKE

Are We Giving Up Too Much?

By Leslie Bennetts

Voice. 350 pp. $24.95
A pregnant friend once asked me why all the mothers she knew seemed so angry. “Lack of sleep and time,” I shrugged. But that’s not the reason, or not entirely. New mothers, or at least some, are angry because for the first time they’ve come up hard against the fundamental inequity between men and women. The biological differences — excruciating childbirth, endless late-night nursing — are stark enough, but the societal expectation that child care is a “women’s issue” feels worse. After all these years of supposed equal rights, it seems men still have more important things to do than watch their children, a message relentlessly hammered home by the insufficient day care, inflexible employers and pressure to take “mommy-tracked” jobs that burden so many mothers’ working lives.

It’s enough to make a woman quit her job and retreat home, which is what an increasing number of well-educated and well-off women appear to be doing. Though the dip in the numbers of working mothers could be the result of the recession in the early part of the decade, it has been reported (even lauded) as a sign that women, no matter how accomplished, are returning to their traditional role of child rearing. Apparently the idea that women can balance work and family was just a silly fad.

Whether having their mothers focused solely on them benefits children is a topic of interminable and sometimes nasty debate, but Leslie Bennetts makes it absolutely clear that abandoning the workplace is not good for women. “It’s hard to understand why so many women are willing to turn over their very ability to feed their children to another person who — if history is any guide — may not always live up to that responsibility,” writes Bennetts in The Feminine Mistake, her important but flawed book.

En busca de las claves del deseo

Birds Do It. Bees Do It. People Seek the Keys to It.
By NATALIE ANGIER

Sexual desire. The phrase alone holds such loaded, voluptuous power that the mere expression of it sounds like a come-on — a little pungent, a little smutty, a little comical and possibly indictable.

Everybody with a pair of currently or formerly active gonads knows about sexual desire. It is a near-universal experience, the invisible clause on one’s birth certificate stipulating that one will, upon reaching maturity, feel the urge to engage in activities often associated with the issuance of more birth certificates.

Yet universal does not mean uniform, and the definitions of sexual desire can be as quirky and personalized as the very chromosomal combinations that sexual reproduction will yield. Ask an assortment of men and women, “What is sexual desire, and how do you know you’re feeling it?” and after some initial embarrassed mutterings and demands for anonymity, they answer as follows: