Consumismo, necesidades, deseos y apetencias

Leyendo Las arquitecturas del deseo de José Antonio Marina he encontrado una cita maravillosa que distingue con gran claridad entre necesidades, deseos y apetencias. En seguida me ha venido a la cabeza lo útil que sería enseñar a los adolescentes las diferencias entre estos conceptos en las clases de educación sexual. Así que os la dejo aquí por si os resulta de provecho. Por cierto, la cita no es de Marina sino de un libro sobre publicidad, escrito por el Grupo Marcuse, titulado De la miseria humana en el medio publicitario (Melusina, 2006)

El consumismo actúa en un plano muy distinto, el de las apetencias. Que algo nos apetezca significa por un lado que ese algo nos es indispensable (no es una necesidad) y por otro lado que no lo anhelamos desde lo más profundo de nuestro ser (no es un verdadero deseo). Las apetencias sociales son sociales y fugaces, siempre relativas a individuos cuyo estatus envidiamos. La publicidad las azuza. Recurre a modelos que dan envidia, hace apetentes a los consumidores y los fuerza a un mimetismo tan caprichoso como rápida es la renovación de las panoplias que hay que poseer para identificarse con los estereotipos que propone. El consumismo es el mundo social de las apetencias y el reino momentáneo de los caprichos. Por eso no debe sorprender que no sea demasiado satisfactorio. El placer es proporcional a la intensidad del deseo, que cree con el tiempo de la privación. La apetencia es el grado cero del deseo. Ceder a ella no aporta más que un breve y limitado placer, como puede verse en los ninños consentidos o con la “depresión poscompra”. La excitación aumenta hasta pasar por caja, y se desvanece tan rápido como había aparecido. La apetencia es fundamentalmente una pasión triste (Spinoza). Cargada de resentimiento, solo engendra frustración, porque siempre habrá alguien y algo que apetecer. Ése es precisamente el ardid del consumismo. Puesto que se basa sólo en apetencias, se alimentará a sí mismo en una huida hacia adelante que, si no tiene el mérito de satisfacer a las personas, por lo menos lubrica la maquinaria capitalista.

Por la vuelta al matrimonio privado

November 26, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
Taking Marriage Private
By STEPHANIE COONTZ

Olympia, Wash.

WHY do people — gay or straight — need the state’s permission to marry? For most of Western history, they didn’t, because marriage was a private contract between two families. The parents’ agreement to the match, not the approval of church or state, was what confirmed its validity.

For 16 centuries, Christianity also defined the validity of a marriage on the basis of a couple’s wishes. If two people claimed they had exchanged marital vows — even out alone by the haystack — the Catholic Church accepted that they were validly married.

In 1215, the church decreed that a “licit” marriage must take place in church. But people who married illictly had the same rights and obligations as a couple married in church: their children were legitimate; the wife had the same inheritance rights; the couple was subject to the same prohibitions against divorce.

Not until the 16th century did European states begin to require that marriages be performed under legal auspices. In part, this was an attempt to prevent unions between young adults whose parents opposed their match.

The American colonies officially required marriages to be registered, but until the mid-19th century, state supreme courts routinely ruled that public cohabitation was sufficient evidence of a valid marriage. By the later part of that century, however, the United States began to nullify common-law marriages and exert more control over who was allowed to marry.

Mercedes Milá y la transexualidad

La semana pasada, al dar una charla de educación sexual en un instituto de la Comunidad de Madrid, explicaba a los adolescentes que la identidad sexual consiste en sentirse hombre o mujer. Al preguntarles, como ejemplo de transexual, por Amor de Gran Hermano, hubo asentimiento general en que era una mujer si así se sentía. Salvo una chica que expresó sus dudas: “Yo creo que aunque la tenga chiquitita, sigue siendo un hombre”. Si los genitales son lo definitorio, le pregunté, ¿qué pasaría si tuviesen que extirparte el útero y los ovarios por un cáncer? ¿Seguirías siendo mujer? “Sí, claro”, me contestó. ¿La identidad sexual depende entonces de los genitales o de lo que pase por tu cabeza? Tras un balbuceo y una mueca de lucha interna, musitó: “depende de la cabeza”.
Si una chica de 15 años es capaz de reflexionar sobre sus prejuicios, no espero menos de Mercedes Milá (”una mujer lo es en la medida en que físicamente tiene todo lo que debe tener una mujer”. EL PAÍS 27/11/2007). Y no lo digo por politiquería correcta o incorrecta, sino por sentido común, ciencia y decencia.

(Carta enviada al director de EL PAÍS el 28/11/2007)

El sexo es un valor

Hace un par de meses Adimeco, la asociación nacional de discapacidad y medios de comunicación, organizó unas jornadas sobre sexualidad. Las intervenciones están disponibles aquí. Me gustaría recomendar muy especialmente la ponencia del director del Instituto de Sexología, Efigenio Amezúa, por la sencillez con que aborda en El sexo es un valor eso que suena tan chocante la primera vez que se oye. Se habla de que el sexo es reproducción, un placer, fuente de enfermedades… ¿Pero un valor? No perderé el tiempo parafraseándole; os animo a leerlo directamente. Y por supuesto, a los demás ponentes.

La pareja represora

La pareja represora

VICENTE VERDÚ
EL PAÍS  -  Sociedad - 24-11-2007

Se lee El arte de amar de Ovidio, escrito a partir del año 1 a. de C. y se obtiene la sumaria impresión de que la estrategia amorosa apenas ha cambiado a lo largo de los siglos. Los celos, las infidelidades, las armas del halago y el regalo, la preparación de las apariencias incluida la depilación de los varones (entonces con piedra pómez) y el bronceado de la piel, el cortejo, la insistencia, componen un repertorio altamente familiar. Incluso una táctica especialmente estimada por Ovidio como era la interrupción del contacto amoroso por intervalos constituye una tendencia boyante en la evolución de la pareja actual.
No es necesario considerar este recurso como una artimaña calculada. La discontinuidad de las relaciones amorosas procede ya de la misma dinámica del mercado. Cada vez más cónyuges que trabajan fuera de casa tienen su empleo en diferentes localidades y se ven sólo de vez en cuando.

El fenómeno apenas empieza en España pero se registra con claridad en el conjunto de Europa y elocuentemente en Estados Unidos donde los matrimonios formados por commuters han pasado de 1,7 millones en 1990 a casi 4 millones en 2006. Algunos commuters se reúnen cada fin de semana, otros cada quince días y no pocos algunos días al mes.

La relación se mantiene, sin embargo, con insólita firmeza. O más aún, pervive tanto o más que aquella en que sus componentes duermen juntos a diario. Sin la independencia económica de las mujeres y el abaratamiento de los transportes no habría sido posible este modelo pero, a la vez, esta modalidad, hija del nuevo mercado, introduce un tipo de vinculación funcional y afectiva inesperado. Introduce un tipo de eslabón que, multiplicándose, altera la naturaleza de la familia y de la sociedad, de la paternidad y de la aventura amorosa.

Me olvidé, cariño

Condones a medida

German Invents ‘Spray-On’ Condom to Fit All Sizes

Good news for men whose penises are either so large or so small that they can’t find a condom to fit them: A German inventor has come up with a sprayed-to-measure system that should ensure a snug fit for even the most unusual sizes.
A German condom expert has developed a “spray-on condom” system in the form of a pump that squirts out liquid latex through a multitude of nozzles that cover the erect member with a latex sheath in a matter of seconds.

“If you go into a drug store to buy condoms, the ones they sell are mainly suited to men with the average penis length of 14.5 centimetres (5.51 inches), but a lot of people have penises that are smaller or larger than that,” Jan Vinzenz Krause, director of the Institute for Condom Consultancy, told SPIEGEL ONLINE.

“We thought why not come up with a condom that fits the man rather than vice versa? This would represent a revolution in the condom market,” said Krause, whose institute gives sex education as well as providing advice on AIDS prevention and contraception.

Historias de transexuales

The Journal of Sex Research. Nov 1, 2004

A chorus of transgender voices

Finding the Real Me: True Tales of Sex and Gender Diversity. Edited by Tracie O’Keefe and Katrina Fox. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003, 293 pages. Paper, $17.95.

Reviewed by Dallas Denny, Gender Education & Advocacy, P.O. Box 33724, Decatur, GA 30033-0724: e-mail: aegis@mindspring.com.

Challenging our own sense of self, looking inward to find who we
are, using the process of autobiography that we know so well, is
producing some very interesting answers that challenge the very
binary structure of the complacent world in which gender was
invented, and by which it has become obsessed. (from foreword
by Stephen Whittle, p. xi)

Strange as it may seem, gender-variant people–those who were out of the closet, at any rate–made almost no contributions to the professional literature on gender variance prior to the 1990s. Exceptions that come to mind are Magnus Hirschfeld in turn-of-the-century Germany and transgenderist Charles (now Virginia) Prince, who presented at sexology conferences and authored and coauthored a number of articles in medical journals from the late 1950s on (e.g., Prince, 1957). With regard to transsexuals, there were no exceptions; not a single transsexual had written or edited a text or been even the second or third author of a journal article.

Transsexuals nonetheless made their voices known. They did so by writing autobiographies. Between 1952 and the end of the millennium, as many as 100 different transsexual autobiographies were published. Even as medical journals speculated on the causes of transsexualism and debated the advantages of different surgical techniques, transsexual men and women were revealing in print their innermost feelings and describing the steps they took to find comfort in their lives. And, in considerable numbers, the public was reading and learning about transsexualism and adjusting its attitudes.

Today, of course, transsexuals and other transgendered people have a significant voice in the literature of gender variance. Still, there is a continuing demand for transsexual autobiographies. They continue to be published in significant numbers (e.g., Boylan, 2003) and continue to influence public attitudes. This is not the case with non-transsexual transgendered people, however. It’s almost as if the criterion for acceptance for publication of an autobiography is a 3-hour genital operation. The personal stories of crossdressers and transgenderists–and for that matter, intersexed people–are rare.

VIH, preservativos y abstinencia

Leyendo el nuevo artículo de Ana Belén Carmona en El Confidencial sobre los preservativos y las actitudes ante la prevención del VIH, me ha encocorado ver luego dos comentarios tipo de las huestes conservadoras. Uno, que el preservativo falla y que no hay nada mejor que una pareja monógama y fiel. Porque como la gente solo tiene una pareja en toda su vida, que a su vez no ha tenido ninguna otra pareja, y se mantienen siempre fieles, qué mejor alternativa, ¿verdad? Suena increíble, pero todavía se esgrimen estos argumentos.

El segundo comentario es más elaborado y ya lo he visto tergiversado varias veces: el caso de Uganda. Lo primero que habría que mencionar es que el contexto social de ese país es tan distinto del de España que no tiene mucho sentido calcar las propuestas de prevención que allí funcionaron. De hecho, es justamente esa ignorancia del contexto lo que les anima a defender impúdicamente la abstinencia como clave para el descenso notable de nuevas infecciones por VIH en Uganda. Lo cierto es que fue una mezcla del aumento del uso de condones, así como la restricción en el número de parejas (en Uganda abundan las relaciones concurrentes y eso multiplica las probabilidades de contagio) lo que llevó a ese descenso.

Para un recuento más elaborado de este planteamiento con cifras y por expertos que han trabajado en la zona, recomiendo especialmente el libro de Helen Epstein The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS o alguno de sus artículos en la New York Review of Books o el New York Times. Otra buena fuente a la que acudir son los informes del Instituto Guttmacher, como por ejemplo éste.

Violación: Historia de 1860 a la actualidad

Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present
By Joanna Bourke: an examination of the many preposterous ways that rape has been explained over time by all manner of experts

Reviewed by Isabella Thomas

Rape, says Joanna Bourke, used to be understood as the act of sex with a woman who does not “belong” to the perpetrator. In the 19th century it was widely thought that an unwilling woman could not be raped because “merely by vibrating”, a vagina “could ward off attack”. A victim of rape was, therefore, a contradiction in terms. Some thought that if the woman had experienced orgasm in the act, or had finally succumbed, then she could not claim to have been raped. The belief that women were prone to lie about rape to gain attention was, of course, widespread, and rape trials were notorious for their prurient investigations into a woman’s past. In the past 50 years or so, western feminists have argued – with some success – that rape is more about power than sex. In British courts these days, rape does not have to involve violence to justify the name. Lack of consent (which is itself potentially ambiguous) suffices.

As Bourke shows in her scholarly historical survey of rape and rapists, part of the problem with this subject is that “imprecision permeates much of the clinical and psychiatric literature”. Her examination of the many preposterous ways that rape has been explained over time by all manner of experts – doctors, academics, lawyers, psychologists et al – is an attempt to lift the obfuscation.

La culpa

El negocio de la adicción sexual

Addicted to love?
Debate simmers over whether sex addiction truly exists
By Brian Alexander
MSNBC contributor
updated 9:51 a.m. ET Nov. 8, 2007

Hello. My name is Brian and I am a sex addict.

It never occurred to me that I might be addicted to love. But then Marty Klein, a sex therapist in Palo Alto, Calif., and author of the book “America’s War on Sex,” asked me to take a Web screening test created by Patrick Carnes, the best-known popularizer of the “sex addict” idea.

I answered all the questions as honestly as I could, but some seemed awfully vague — “Do you often find yourself preoccupied with sexual thoughts?” — or rather commonplace — “Have you subscribed to or regularly purchased or rented sexually explicit materials (magazines, videos, books or online pornography)?” But then Carnes’ definition of sex addiction itself can be vague: “Sexual addiction is defined as any sexually-related, compulsive behavior which interferes with normal living and causes severe stress on family, friends, loved ones and one’s work environment.”

That may seem specific but it all depends on how one defines “compulsive” and the effects on others who may or may not be disturbed by another’s sexual proclivities.

Anyway, here is what I was told: “We have compared your answers with people who have been diagnosed with sex addiction. Your answers HAVE MET a score on [the] basis of six [of] the criteria that indicate sex addiction is present.”

Don’t feel bad, Klein told me. He often asks professional audiences to take the same test and a lot of them come up sex addicts, too, which may say something about therapists, but more, perhaps, about the test.

Sexo, mentiras y revistas de mujeres

Sex, Lies, and Women’s Magazines
BY LIZA FEATHERSTONE

Standing on line at the grocery store almost anywhere in America, the hapless shopper is bombarded with insistent exhortatory headlines: blow his mind; sexual bliss secrets!; get his sexual attention instantly; what he’s thinking about you . . . naked. Perhaps she stands in front of them to prevent her mother or her kid from reading them aloud. Or she skims the copy to see if it might deliver the promised ecstasy. Whether or not she actually buys women’s magazines, she can’t escape their sexual anxieties, enthusiasms, and obsessions.
Our shopper might have been all ears at a fall cocktail-hour panel of women’s magazine editors, hosted by Mediabistro.com, a media networking organization, and held at Obeca Li, a trendy nouvelle Asian restaurant in lower Manhattan. Audience members, mostly senior-level editors and writers for women’s magazines, joined the panelists in voicing many familiar complaints about the industry: too many skinny models, even more emaciated feature stories, and too much advertiser influence on editorial content. Laurie Abraham, executive editor of Elle magazine, however, had something else on her mind. The worst thing about women’s magazines, she asserted during the panel discussion, is how much “we lie about sex.”

Under normal circumstances, a roomful of experienced journalists might rise up in outrage at being called liars. But Abraham’s statement was met with nods of guilty agreement and mildly embarrassed “tell me something I don’t know” shrugs. No one denied the charge.

This is not Watergate, of course, or even Monica-gate. Yet these ubiquitous stories about sex are presented as journalism, chock full of analysis and quotes, and they are surely believed by many of their readers. They are a formidable cultural force, shaping and reinforcing our attitudes about men and women, orgasms and relationships. Women’s magazines run scrupulously reported and fact-checked articles on such subjects as breast cancer and women under the Taliban. Do they have a problem with sex?

Trabajarse el amor

Trabajos de amor

13 de noviembre.- Del libro de Kluge, sobre eso que llamamos coloquialmente ‘trabajarse el amor’, paradójico asunto:

“Una economista agrícola del oeste de Stavropol, Liuba W., que proseguía sus estudios en la Universidad Humboldt de Berlín (el dinero para vivir lo gana en un establecimiento de Wedding), insistía en que el amor como objeto de trabajo para las personas civilizadas tiene su sede no en el interior del individuo, sino en la red que surge espontáneamente entra las personas que mantienen entre sí una relación amorosa. Dicha red es siempre más rica que las intenciones de dos personas que dicen quererse. Está, además, el amor a los padres, el amor a los horizontes de expectativas, el afecto a los lugares conocidos. Hasta la mirada casual de un transeúnte puede aportar algo, y todas esas cosas el otro no tiene por qué compartirlas ni saberlas.

En este AMOR = SER VIVO, comparable a un animal que se tiende a descansar entre los enamorados, puede uno de ellos o los dos (bien como mediadores, bien como amigos de terceros), trabajar o, más concretamente, desarrollar una actividad que transforma la materia. No se aplica lo mismo a la actividad solitaria, dirigida hacia el interior, de los amantes. Liuba compara esta especie más bien inquietante de ocupación con el TALLER DE UN ALQUIMISTA. Es preindustrial, dice. Como si se almacenaran reservas de venenos y medicinas. Pero ¿beberá el otro? ¿Aceptará el obsequio?

Así, en compañía mutua, dos personas podrían producir interioridad a lo largo de toda una vida sin alcanzar ninguna transformación de la materia (reparación, adaptación, cambio del estado de agregación) de su relación. En esa medida, afirma Liuba, en el amor el aislamiento no conlleva ninguna oportunidad civilizadora.”.

Mitos y hechos sobre los agresores sexuales

Sexual Offender Treatment, Volume 2 (2007), Issue 1

Myths and Facts about Sexual Offenders: Implications for Treatment and Public Policy

Timothy Fortney¹, Jill Levenson², Yolanda Brannon³ & Juanita N. Baker^4
1Florida Institute of Technology, ²Lynn University, ³Florida Institute of Technology, ⁴Florida Institute of Technology

 

Abstract

Aim: The purpose of this study was to determine to what extent perceptions about sexual offenders are based on empirical evidence or misconceptions.
Background: Sexual offenders have often been under the spotlight of media attention and public censure. Legislatures in the United States and abroad have passed increasingly restrictive and intrusive laws in order to protect the public from convicted sexual offenders. Sex offender policies are often passed hastily and are not based on scientific evidence but on emotional reactions to high profile, violent, disturbing cases.
Method: Data were collected in Brevard County, Florida from 192 community members and 125 sexual offenders in outpatient treatment, all of whom were surveyed regarding their knowledge about five common themes. Comparisons between groups were analyzed, as were comparisons between participants’ responses and published data.
Results: Results revealed that both sex offenders and the public overestimated the rate by which strangers victimize children, and overestimated the number of sex offenders who were victims of sexual abuse in childhood. Both offenders and the public overestimated the number of sex crimes that come to the attention of authorities. The public more extensively than offenders overestimated the frequency of sexual recidivism rates and underestimated the efficacy of sexual offender treatment in comparison to the literature.
Conclusions: Common misconceptions may interfere with offenders’ treatment and reintegration into society as well as influence legislatures to pass laws that are misguided and inefficient. Implications for policy and practice are discussed.

Key words: sex offender, public perception, sexual abuse, myths, misconceptions, public policy

Descuida, cariño, tomo la píldora