Gays en Irán

Ser homosexual en el país de Ahmadineyad

Gays iraníes relatan la dureza de vivir en un régimen que niega su existencia y que mantiene la pena de muerte para los ‘desviados’

ÁNGELES ESPINOSA  -  Teherán
EL PAÍS  -  Internacional - 30-09-2007

“Entonces, ¿yo no existo?”, exclama incrédulo M., un gay acomodado de Teherán ante la afirmación de que “en Irán no tenemos homosexuales” pronunciada por el presidente, Mahmud Ahmadineyad, en la Universidad de Columbia el pasado lunes. “Lo que debiera hacer es informarse antes de hablar para no meter la pata como con el Holocausto”, añade Taha, de los pocos gays iraníes que ha aceptado hablar con este diario. La discreción es la norma de supervivencia en un Estado cuyo código penal establece la pena de muerte para quien mantiene relaciones homosexuales. Algo que también ocurre en países aliados de EE UU como Pakistán, Arabia Saudí o Yemen.
“Ahmadineyad sólo tiene que darse una vuelta cualquier tarde-noche por el parque Daneshju para descubrir que en su país sí que hay homosexuales”, sugiere un estudiante universitario. El Daneshju es uno de los típicos lugares de encuentro gay de Teherán. Quizá el más democrático. A diferencia del centro comercial Jam-e Jam, donde el ambiente pijo hace que sus camisetas ceñidas y sus cejas arregladas pasen desapercibidas, en el parque confluyen chicos tanto del norte rico como del sur más modesto. A menos que alguno se muestre extremadamente cariñoso, la policía no suele intervenir.

Como en el caso de los heterosexuales, la República islámica considera inmoral cualquier muestra pública de afecto. De acuerdo con la moral que institucionalizó la revolución islámica de 1979, toda relación fuera del matrimonio heterosexual es ilícita y punible.

Relaciones de propiedad

Necesidad de besarse

Mouth-to-Mouth Resuscitated
Kissing moves up the sexual pecking order
by Tristan Taormino
September 25th, 2007

Researchers at the State University of New York at Albany recently published the results of their study about kissing in Evolutionary Psychology. Many of the findings reflect gender differences and back up common stereotypes about male and female sexuality. Women emphasize kissing more than men; men like tongue- kissing more than women. Women are more likely than men to kiss their partners after intercourse. Men feel that kissing should lead to sex more often than women do. The researchers posited that one of the functions of kissing is to “promote, maintain, and assess the status of bonding.” Citing two other sources, they wrote: “If kissing serves to create a bond between two partners, one would not expect to see kissing in situations where bonding is not wanted. . . . For example, prostitutes often refuse to kiss clientele . . . [which] is thought to be an emotional distancing technique.” There is this notion out there that kissing is seen as “too intimate” by sex workers, but is it truth or misconception? What do people who have sex for a living really think about kissing?

Mitos sobre los anticonceptivos

 

SEXUALIDAD Y SALUD
Mitos sobre los anticonceptivos

 

CRISTINA DE MARTOS

MADRID.- Su uso se ha relacionado con numerosos mitos que la ciencia ha ido poco a poco derribando. Aún así, a pesar de toda la información disponible, muchas mujeres siguen pensando que tomar la píldora engorda, algunas parejas piensan que el ‘coitus interruptus’ es un método seguro y todavía hay quien piensa que en la primera relación sexual no hay riesgo de embarazo. Estos y otros son los mitos más extendidos acerca de la anticoncepción.

• La píldora aumenta el riesgo de sufrir un cáncer.

Al contrario, los anticonceptivos orales no solo no predisponen a la aparición de muchos tipos de tumores sino que la previenen. Así lo refleja un estudio publicado recientemente cuyos resultados indican que la reducción de sufrir cualquier tipo de cáncer es del 12% entre aquellas mujeres que han tomado la píldora durante menos de ocho años.

• Los métodos “tradicionales” son seguros.

La marcha atrás o ‘coitus interruptus’, el método Ogino o el Billings no son fiables a pesar de la gran aceptación que tienen entre algunos sectores. Una encuesta realizada por la Sociedad Española de Contracepción reveló que un 15% de las mujeres mantiene relaciones sin protección y un 13% practica el coito interrumpido. El peligro es que el líquido preseminal puede contener espermatozoides, que pueden fecundar el óvulo, además del riesgo de no “parar a tiempo”. En total, alrededor de un millón de españolas utiliza métodos de eficacia dudosa.

Canibalismo

Archives of Sexual Behavior, August 2007  10.1007/s10508-007-9227-7

Clinical Case Report Series
Good Enough To Eat

Friedemann Pfäfflin
Forensic Psychotherapy, Ulm University, Am Hochsträss 8, 89081 Ulm, Germany
Contact Information     Friedemann Pfäfflin
Email: friedemann.pfaefflin@uni-ulm.de

Abstract

In mythology, religion, and literature, there are many examples of cannibalism that have been passed down over the centuries and which do not strike us as shocking as long as they remain fixed in a symbolic context. Things only become problematic when cannibalistic impulses are taken literally and put into practice. Apart from situations of extreme emergency in which this rare phenomenon might enjoy a certain sympathy, it also occurs within the context of serious sexual offences. Recently, in Germany, there was the case of a man who used the internet to find a person who wanted to have himself eaten. The victim’s consent unsettled not only the public at large, but also the judiciary, which at first did not know how the case was legally to be appropriately assessed. In a first trial in January 2004, the man was sentenced to a comparatively short prison term of only a few years, a sentence that was lifted by the Federal Supreme Court. In a fresh trial in May 2006, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder. In this essay, I discuss to what extent mythological, religious, and artistic models of cannibalism express something fundamentally anthropological and how concrete examples should be assessed against this background.

Keywords  Cannibalism - Forensic sexology - Forensic psychiatry - Responsibility

Hombres inmaduros

The Entertainment Industry’s Love Affair With Immature Men
By Alicia Rebensdorf, AlterNet
September 13, 2007

You know the guy. He has a monosyllabic retro name like Hal or Earl or Chuck, mildly wacky hair and a death grip on his adolescence. He’s got frat house furniture and dependency issues with his friends, and is hapless or commitment-phobic with women. The Act One diagnosis is usually that he just “needs to grow up.”

No, not Michael Vick. Though the Falcon quarterback’s explanation for dog fighting — “I need to grow up” — does show just how ubiquitous the Peter Pan excuse has become. Male leads in recent popular TV shows and movies are increasingly portrayed as victims of their own immaturity. If only instead of claiming he had found Jesus, Vick had said he’d found some fantastically attractive and accomplished woman, perhaps the viewing audience would’ve gone along. In today’s romantic comedy scripts, the man-child always meets his Wendy. Only through the innate, successful, high-achieving grace of a female may our hero be saved.

Taken one at a time, it’s easy to pass off this trend as a simple, comedic trope. But considering the storyline’s popularity and how it is affecting gender relations at large, this narrative is worthy of closer attention.

La revolución de los solteros

LA REVOLUCIÓN DE LOS ‘SINGLES’

Andrés Pérez

Un nuevo segmento comercial ha emergido en la primera década del siglo XXI. Son ricos, felices y viven solos en pisos céntricos. Sin embargo, lo que la sociedad olvida –o silencia– es la otra cara de estos neosolteros: pobres sin interés para el marketing, divorciados, parados e ignorados por el mercado.

Hace unos años, una broma pesada corría en el mundo de los negocios a propósito del segmento de mercado entonces de moda, al descubrirse el envejecimiento de la pirámide de población: los llamados seniors. La broma rezaba así: “¿Cuál es la diferencia entre un viejo y un senior?”. Y la respuesta, que se suponía debía dejar estupefacto al interlocutor de turno, antes de hacerle reír a carcajadas, decía así: “30.000 euros en la cuenta corriente. Si el viejo los tiene, es un senior; si no, no es más que un viejo”. Este chiste tiene garantizado un próspero futuro con el nuevo segmento del mercado puesto de moda por la gente de los negocios en esta primera década del siglo XXI. Se trata de los llamados singles o, si prefiere, los neosolteros.

Porque, ¿cuál es la diferencia entre un solterón fracasado, que no encuentra pareja, desempleado, ignorado por todos, aislado y sin recursos en un barrio deprimido, y uno de esos estelares singles, célibattants, solos y neosolteros tan en boga en las revistas de último grito, en las series de televisión de mayor éxito, categoría ascendente de nuestras sociedades, objeto de toda la luz de los proyectores del planeta? Obligado reconocer que la única diferencia es el poder adquisitivo. Poderoso caballero: ha hecho perder la brújula a los medios de comunicación, que desbordan ríos de tinta sobre un supuesto mundo de solos libres, felices y ricos, cuando todos los indicadores señalan que las tasas de pobreza son brutalmente elevadas en el mundo de los solteros.

Gardasil

102 EUROS CADA UNA DE LAS TRES DOSIS
La vacuna contra el cáncer de cuello de útero costará 312 euros
20/09/2007
RAFAEL J. ÁLVAREZ

MADRID.- Cada una de las tres dosis de vacuna que reciba una mujer le costará al sistema público español 104 euros. Así que la sanidad española pagará al laboratorio que fabrica la vacuna contra el cáncer de cuello de útero 312 euros por adolescente protegida.

Ése es el precio que la Comisión Interministerial de Precios acaba de fijar para la primera y controvertida medida tomada por el ministro de Sanidad, Bernat Soria.

Fuentes del Departamento que dirige este investigador, famoso por sus trabajos en el campo de las células madre, aseguran que los 104 euros por dosis es el precio más barato de toda Europa, que ningún otro país con la vacuna aprobada paga menos que España.

Otra cosa será la negociación que cada comunidad autónoma haga con el laboratorio Sanofi Pasteur, la empresa que comercializa Gardasil, la vacuna que se inyectará a las adolescentes españolas. Se supone que en función del número de vacunas que cada consejería vaya a administrar en base a su población, el precio podrá variar.

Construcción acartonada de la sexualidad masculina

Rigid Scholarship on Male Sexuality

By CAMILLE PAGLIA

BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY

Images of Bliss: Ejaculation, Masculinity, Meaning, by Murat Aydemir (University of Minnesota Press, 2007)

 

Impotence: A Cultural History, by Angus McLaren (University of Chicago Press, 2007)

 

Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluid, by Lisa Jean Moore (New York University Press, 2007)

Three provocative books on male sexuality recently published by university presses provide a good barometer of the current state of campus gender studies. A welcome development of the past decade has been the expansion of the gender lens to include men, who were routinely stereotyped by women’s-studies curricula as they took shape from the 1970s on. These books reflect that broader perspective and also display a more liberal attitude toward pornography, which was assailed in the 1980s by religious and cultural conservatives oddly allied with crusading feminists. By the 90s, pornography was legitimized as a field of study by gay male academics as well as an insurgent wing of sex-positive feminism. However, despite their greater sexual sophistication, the three books under review still retain traces of the old archfeminist censoriousness toward men — or, more exactly, toward the majority of men in the world who do not happen to conform to the tidy bourgeois values of political correctness.

Esta noche no

Verdades silenciadas del aborto

Verdades silenciadas del aborto

EVA RODRÍGUEZ ARMARIO
EL PAÍS - 18-09-2007

Durante mucho tiempo se ha hablado del recurso al aborto como una prestación casi exclusiva de la sanidad privada debido a que las clínicas acreditadas para el aborto en España vinieron a cubrir una necesidad social que ningún otro colectivo se atrevió a solucionar. De hecho, fue un grupo de profesionales el que decidió atender esta necesidad y soportar individualmente los posibles problemas legales, civiles y penales, creando una serie de centros médicos que dieran una solución digna a la demanda de unas mujeres que hasta ese momento tenían que hacer turismo abortivo o arriesgar su vida para abortar. Esta realidad innegable nos lleva a preguntarnos acerca de las causas que han propiciado que el 97% de los abortos se realice en clínicas privadas.
Para la Asociación de Clínicas Acreditadas para la Interrupción del Embarazo (ACAI), la ambigüedad de las dos principales leyes que regularon la interrupción del embarazo (la Ley del Aborto 9/1985, de 5 de julio, y el Real Decreto 2409/1986, de 21 de noviembre) ha sido un elemento clave para que fueran las clínicas privadas, y no los hospitales públicos, las que llevaran a cabo esta prestación. La ambigüedad procede de que la ley sólo autoriza la interrupción del embarazo en los casos de violación, malformación del feto y grave peligro físico o psíquico de la embarazada, y exige para ello unos requisitos basados en dictámenes preceptivos.

Presunción de culpabilidad

 Presumed guilty

Sep 13th 2007

A superb new book shows how trumped-up charges exposed faults in some of America’s grandest institutions

ON THE night of March 13th 2006, 47 lacrosse players at Duke University, North Carolina, paid a couple of strippers to entertain them. Things went badly from the start. The girls arrived late. One of them, Crystal Mangum, was so drunk that she could not utter a coherent sentence. Her “dance” lasted four minutes. But over the next few days a sordid evening mutated into a life-ruining tragedy. Ms Mangum alleged that some of the players had beaten and gang-raped her. And the full force of the American legal system and media machine was deployed against a group of young men who were presumed to embody all the evils of America’s demons of racism and sexism. The students Ms Mangum accused are white: Ms Mangum is black.

The accusation was a transparent lie from the start. Ms Mangum, who had been picked up by the police, brought up the subject of rape only when she was confronted with the possibility of a spell in a mental hospital. She recanted her accusation and then recanted her recantation. She told conflicting stories that numbered her assailants at anything from two to 20. Her co-dancer described her claims as “a crock”. The police who interviewed her on the first night regarded her charges as incredible—and, in truth, she had a long record of alcohol and drug abuse, mental instability and making up far-fetched stories.

Yet, a few weeks later, three of the students were arrested and charged with rape amid the usual media frenzy. Why did such a tissue of lies produce a high-profile prosecution? And why did the media and many of Duke’s faculty side with the stripper, not the lacrosse players? This is the subject of “Until Proven Innocent”, a superb new book by Stuart Taylor and K.C. Johnson: a book that not only reads like a legal thriller (John Grisham provides one of the blurbs), but also exposes deep problems with America’s legal system and academic culture.

Historia de los vibradores

Pussy at Play
New film documents the history of vibrators
by Tristan Taormino
August 28th, 2007

I never thought I’d see vibrators dancing in the closing credits of a movie at Lincoln Center. But that’s just what I saw at the world premiere of  Passion & Power: The Technology of Orgasm (technologyoforgasm.com) at the Walter Reade Theater last month. The independently funded documentary was produced and directed by Wendy Slick and Emiko Omori and is based on the book  The Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction  by Rachel P. Maines. It’s a fascinating look at the history of vibrators and the female orgasm in America.

The film begins with Maines sharing some history about how the vibrator first came to exist. From as early as Hippocrates, doctors began diagnosing women with a condition called hysteria that had a broad range of symptoms, including anxiety, insomnia, crankiness, and nervousness, and that brought on erotic fantasies and heaviness in the pelvic region. The treatment for hysteria was a vulval and clitoral massage performed by a doctor in order to achieve what was called “hysterical paroxysm”—an orgasm. In other words, you went to the doctor, he got you off, and you went home feeling better. At the end of the 19th century, the first vibrators were invented in order to make the doctor’s job easier. Although the prototypes were huge and clunky (one early one was practically the size of a bed, another was powered by coal), eventually there were smaller handheld versions. Pretty soon, manufacturers began marketing them directly to consumers.

Futari Ecchi

Journal of Sex Research, May 2007, Vol. 44, Issue 2
Very Graphic, Graphic Novels

Martha Cornog; Timothy Perper.

Step Up Love Story: Futari Etchi.
By Katsu Aki.
Japanese edition: Tokyo: Hakusensha, 1997-. Paper, $10.99/volume.
French edition: Boulogne: Senpai/Pika Édition,
2004-. Paper, 7.1 Euro/volume.

Step Up Love Story is a Japanese graphic novel (in Japanese, manga), now up to volume 19 in Japan. So far, volumes up to 11 have been translated into French and a good many into Spanish and German. It has not been translated into English. This review is based on the French edition.

The Japanese title blends English and Japanese. Futari means “couple” and etchi means “H,” an abbreviation for hentai, “perverted” or “sexy.” We’d probably translate the title as something like Step-by-Step Love Story: X-Rated Couple.

Why are we reviewing a Japanese-language manga series readable to us only in French? Because it’s something most pointedly NOT available in America: a unique, engaging, and quite intriguing blend of sex manual and erotic soap opera.

The overall plot centers on the sexual life of 25-year-old newlyweds Makoto and Yura, both shy and without any sexual or dating experience and who meet through a marriage broker. Arranged marriages are still fairly common in Japan, though not in the majority. Aki uses this premise so that he can take the new couple from, sexually speaking, square one to square N. Currently, the series is still being published in Japan, with, the cover says, over 16 million copies sold so far. Each episode tells a mini-story and imparts a sex-related lesson.

El arcoiris de la evolución

Nature 429, 19 - 21 (06 May 2004); doi:10.1038/429019a

Sexual diversity and the gender agenda

SARAH BLAFFER HRDY

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy is professor emeritus in the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Davis, California 95616, USA. Her most recent book is Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection.

Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender and Sexuality in Nature and People
Joan Roughgarden
University of California Press: 2004. 472 pp. $27.50, £18.95

CHRISTIAN DARKIN
Rather than being one coherent book, the narrative of Evolution’s Rainbow shuttles between three interwoven agendas. The first is a passionate cry from the heart for greater understanding of sexual diversity in nature and greater tolerance for the many gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, transgenders and others who do not fit comfortably into male or female binary categories.

The author, eminent Stanford biologist Joan Roughgarden, who is herself a transgendered woman previously known as John, cites poignant case studies that illustrate the anguish leading up to decisions to switch genders. As one such transgendered woman put it: “I’ve laid everything I’ve achieved in life — job, relationship, family, health, future — on the table, and it seems fate will decide what I am allowed to keep, if anything. It’s kind of like starting life all over again.” Roughgarden even includes rare practical advice on how to inform your boss that you intend to switch genders without losing your job. Few readers of Nature will disagree with the main tenets of what is essentially a human-rights agenda, even if they don’t agree with all of Roughgarden’s interpretations or policy recommendations.

The second, and for me most interesting, book-within-a-book provides a cornucopia of information about sex and gender diversity across human societies and the natural world. There are vignettes about homosexuals in Ancient Greece, eunuchs in Rome, hijras in India, and Native American ‘two-spirits’. Roughgarden then takes us on a whirlwind tour through the zoological counterpart of human gender studies, introducing fish that change from females into males; intersex kangaroos that have a penis as well as a pouch equipped with mammary glands; kangaroo rats, in which up to 16% of a population have both sperm- and egg-related plumbing; intersex bears that give birth through the penis; hermaphroditic whales; and homosexual black swans that turn out to be more successful at rearing young than their heterosexual counterparts.

Adulterio

El matrimonio encuentra su satisfacción natural en el adulterio.
Simone de Beauvoir

Las cadenas del matrimonio son tan pesadas que son necesarias dos personas para soportarlas, y a veces tres.
Alejandro Dumas

Hay maridos tan injustos que exigen de sus mujeres una fidelidad que ellos mismos violan; se parecen a aquellos generales de ejército que huyen cobardemente del enemigo, quieren sin embargo, que sus soldados sostengan el puesto con valor.
Plutarco

Do infants enjoy infancy as much as adults enjoy adultery?
Wynn Catlin