NYTimes articles
Jul. 10th, 2005 02:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
One on euthanasia of infants
Euthanasia for Babies?
By JIM HOLT
One sure way to start a lively argument at a dinner party is to raise the question Are we humans getting more decent over time? Optimists about moral progress will point out that the last few centuries have seen, in the West at least, such welcome developments as the abolition of slavery and of legal segregation, the expansion of freedoms (of religion, speech and press), better treatment of women and a gradual reduction of violence, notably murder, in everyday life. Pessimists will respond by citing the epic evils of the 20th century -- the Holocaust, the Gulag. Depending on their religious convictions, some may call attention to the breakdown of the family and a supposed decline in sexual morality. Others will complain of backsliding in areas where moral progress had seemingly been secured, like the killing of civilians in war, the reintroduction of the death penalty or the use of torture. And it is quite possible, if your dinner guests are especially well informed, that someone will bring up infanticide.
Infanticide -- the deliberate killing of newborns with the consent of the parents and the community -- has been common throughout most of human history. In some societies, like the Eskimos, the Kung in Africa and 18th-century Japan, it served as a form of birth control when food supplies were limited. In others, like the Greek city-states and ancient Rome, it was a way of getting rid of deformed babies. (Plato was an ardent advocate of infanticide for eugenic purposes.) But the three great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, all condemned infanticide as murder, holding that only God has the right to take innocent human life. Consequently, the practice has long been outlawed in every Western nation.
This year, however, a new chapter may have begun in the history of infanticide. Two physicians practicing in the Netherlands, the very heart of civilized Europe, this spring published in The New England Journal of Medicine a set of guidelines for what they called infant "euthanasia." The authors named their guidelines the Groningen protocol, after the city where they work. One of the physicians, Dr. Eduard Verhagen, has admitted to presiding over the killing of four babies in the last three years, by means of a lethal intravenous drip of morphine and midazolam (a sleeping agent). While Verhagen's actions were illegal under Dutch law, he hasn't been prosecuted for them; and if his guidelines were to be accepted, they could establish a legal basis for his death-administering work.
At first blush, a call for open infanticide would seem to be the opposite of moral progress. It offends against the ''sanctity of life,'' a doctrine that has come to suffuse moral consciousness, especially in the United States. All human life is held to be of equal and inestimable value. A newborn baby, no matter how deformed or retarded, has a right to life -- a right that trumps all other moral considerations. Violating that right is always and everywhere murder.
The sanctity-of-life doctrine has an impressively absolute ring to it. In practice, however, it has proved quite flexible. Take the case of a baby who is born missing most or all of its brain. This condition, known as anencephaly, occurs in about 1 in every 2,000 births. An anencephalic baby, while biologically human, will never develop a rudimentary consciousness, let alone an ability to relate to others or a sense of the future. Yet according to the sanctity-of-life doctrine, those deficiencies do not affect its moral status and hence its right to life. Anencephalic babies could be kept alive for years, given the necessary life support. Yet treatment is typically withheld from them on the grounds that it amounts to "extraordinary means" -- even though a baby with a normal brain in need of similar treatment would not be so deprived. Thus they are allowed to die.
Are there any limits to such "passive" euthanasia? A famous test case occurred in 1982 in Indiana, when an infant known as Baby Doe was born with Down syndrome. Children with Down syndrome typically suffer some retardation and other difficulties; while presenting a great challenge to their parents and families, they often live joyful and relatively independent lives. As it happened, Baby Doe also had an improperly formed esophagus, which meant that food put into his mouth could not reach his stomach. Surgery might have remedied this problem, but his parents and physician decided against it, opting for painkillers instead. Within a few days, Baby Doe starved to death. The Reagan administration responded to the case by drafting the "Baby Doe guidelines," which mandated life-sustaining care for such handicapped newborns. But the guidelines were opposed by the American Medical Association and were eventually struck down by the Supreme Court.
The distinction between killing a baby and letting it die may be convenient. But is there any moral difference? Failing to save someone's life out of ignorance or laziness or cowardice is one thing. But when available lifesaving treatment is deliberately withheld from a baby, the intention is to cause that baby's death. And the result is just as sure -- if possibly more protracted and painful -- as it would have been through lethal injection.
It is interesting to contrast the sort of passive euthanasia of infants that is deemed acceptable in our sanctity-of-life culture with the active form that has been advocated in the Netherlands. The Groningen protocol is concerned with an element not present in the above cases: unbearable and unrelievable suffering. Consider the case of Sanne, a Dutch baby girl who was born with a severe form of Hallopeau-Siemens syndrome, a rare skin disease. As reported earlier this year by Gregory Crouch in The Times, the baby Sanne's ''skin would literally come off if anyone touched her, leaving painful scar tissue in its place.'' With this condition, she was expected to live at most 9 or 10 years before dying of skin cancer. Her parents asked that an end be put to her ordeal, but hospital officials, fearing criminal prosecution, refused. After six months of agony, Sanne finally died of pneumonia.
In a case like Sanne's, a new moral duty would seem to be germane: the duty to prevent suffering, especially futile suffering. That is what the Groningen protocol seeks to recognize. If the newborn's prognosis is hopeless and the pain both severe and unrelievable, it observes, the parents and physicians ''may concur that death would be more humane than continued life.'' The protocol aims to safeguard against ''unjustified'' euthanasia by offering a checklist of requirements, including informed consent of both parents, certain diagnosis, confirmation by at least one independent doctor and so on.
The debate over infant euthanasia is usually framed as a collision between two values: sanctity of life and quality of life. Judgments about the latter, of course, are notoriously subjective and can lead you down a slippery slope. But shifting the emphasis to suffering changes the terms of the debate. To keep alive an infant whose short life expectancy will be dominated by pain -- pain that it can neither bear nor comprehend -- is, it might be argued, to do that infant a continuous injury.
Our sense of what constitutes moral progress is a matter partly of reason and partly of sentiment. On the reason side, the Groningen protocol may seem progressive because it refuses to countenance the prolonging of an infant's suffering merely to satisfy a dubious distinction between "killing" and "letting nature take its course." It insists on unflinching honesty about a practice that is often shrouded in casuistry in the United States. Moral sentiments, though, have an inertia that sometimes resists the force of moral reasons. Just quote Verhagen's description of the medically induced infant deaths over which he has presided -- "it's beautiful in a way. . . . It is after they die that you see them relaxed for the first time" -- and even the most spirited dinner-table debate over moral progress will, for a moment, fall silent.
One about walking across the country
Walking for My Life
By STEVE VAUGHT as told to CANDICE REED
When you first tell people that you're going to walk across the country, a lot of them are like, "Wow, that takes courage just to say it." Others are like, "You'll never make it." I weigh 400 pounds, and I'm carrying an 85- pound backpack, and so far, I've gone more than 300 miles. If I was going to quit anywhere, it would be out here in the desert -- because this is not fun.
I am a 39-year-old married father of two great kids. But because I am fat, I am not happy, so I am walking across the United States from just outside San Diego to New York City to lose weight and to regain my life. It isn't only about the weight; I just feel that something is bound to change during this journey.
I haven't always been overweight. I used to be in the Marine Corps. I used to be an artist and a really funny guy. I was good-looking, living the good life in California. I had friends, belonged to a car club and chased girls.
But when I was 25, I killed two people in an auto accident. They got off a bus at a bad intersection, and I didn't see them. I was charged with vehicular manslaughter and spent 10 days in jail. I'll never stop being sorry for what happened. I feel so bad for the families. But from that moment on, my life changed forever, too. Over the years, my depression grew, I gained this weight and I haven't been able to shake it since.
My wife, April, is the younger sister of a good friend. Her family stuck by me after the accident. We built up a friendship that later turned to love, and we were married. But depression is a horrible thing. It can make you forget about the good things in your life, like family, and make you concentrate on all the bad things. I used to own a towing company and managed some other places. More recently I've worked low-paying jobs for friends, but when you weigh this much, no one wants to hire you. So a year ago we moved in with April's mom.
When I told April about my idea to walk across the country, I thought she'd say I was crazy. Instead she said, "Well, go ahead." You know, I could have gone out and had my stomach stapled, but that's not me -- and she knew it. And what would that have fixed? I had to go full-bore on this thing.
I didn't do much planning. I looked at some maps and charted a course on smaller roads instead of freeways. The people at a hiking-gear store advised me and gave me a backpack to use. And within a few weeks, I was walking down the road. I started on April 10 with a goal of reaching New York by October. I filled my pack with food, water and a tent, but I made room for two books, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" and the "Odyssey." A shoe company is giving me shoes. So far I've gone through nine pairs. A group of podiatrists is giving me shoe inserts, and I call them to report how I'm feeling. I have a cellphone, and that's pretty much the only way I can contact anyone if something goes wrong.
I'm averaging about 15 miles a day, and I think I'll walk even faster as the weight comes off. I was weighed in Bullhead City, Ariz., and it looks as if I'm losing about four pounds a week. If I keep up this pace, I'll be in Winslow, Ariz., in mid-July -- as in that Eagles song: "Well, I'm a standin' on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, an' such a fine sight to see."
People can be very mean to someone who is as overweight as I am, but so far only a handful of people have been unkind. People think I'm heroic, interesting or crazy, but almost everyone I've met has been helpful. I've had people open their houses to me. Occasionally I've taken them up on it, but mainly I camp outdoors, often under bridges. The few weeks I spent on Route 66 were tough; at one point I even ran out of water. It can get really boring. If you want to know your condition mentally, spend some time alone like this.
I think about the accident a lot out here, and I know it's not rational, but sometimes I think I'm going to get my karmic retribution and be run over. I know the world doesn't work like that, but when a car comes too close to me, in those two or three seconds, I think: This is it.
That accident changed me. I'm full of self-loathing, and I lack self-esteem. But I'm learning to take care of myself and survive. If I don't make it -- and I don't even want to think about that -- it will be because something unexpected happens, like an injury. And then what will probably happen, after a few years, is that I'll die. You don't see a lot of 400-pound 50-year-olds. If I died at 50, my kids would be 18 and 13. That's a horrible time to lose your father.
You've got to be out of your skull to do something like this. But I can't stand the thought of my kids without a father. I want to be healthy enough, physically and mentally, to be a good dad. If this is what it takes, then it's worth it. This walk is giving me back the discipline I once had. I'll make it. And when I do get to New York, I'll know that I'm not the failure that I've thought I was for the past 15 years. I'm a determined man -- once I finally make up my mind.
An article on a town full of people with MCS
In One Arizona Community, an Oasis in a Toxic World
By FRED A. BERNSTEIN
Snowflake, Ariz.
IN this town 150 miles northeast of Phoenix, "for sale" signs have become as commonplace as sagebrush. "Real estate has gone crazy around here," said Bruce Wachter, an agent with the local Century 21 franchise.
But one "for sale" sign has a group of residents worried. They suffer from multiple chemical sensitivities, an illness that led them to flee cities for this remote high desert town.
An electrical engineer from Mesa, a broker from Chicago, a software executive from Santa Cruz, Calif. - all settled in Snowflake to escape pesticides and paints that they say caused them devastating health effects.
Now they fear that a nearby house could be bought by a family that wants to use chemicals on its lawn, or install a blacktop driveway, rendering the fragile haven a haven no longer. "We might have to evacuate some people," said Susan Molloy, who has lived in the area since 1994.
The listing broker, Mr. Wachter of Century 21 Sunshine Realty, said it isn't his job to find a buyer who will avoid pesticides and paints. "I'll sell the house to anybody," he said. "I can't distinguish between a buyer who would use chemicals and a buyer who would not."
Snowflake (a town named for early settlers named Erastus Snow and William Flake) became a home for those suffering from chemical sensitivities in 1988, when Bruce McCreary, the electrical engineer, arrived here from Mesa. The year before, he said, chemicals in the aircraft factory where he worked had left him almost totally disabled.
About two dozen other people with multiple chemical sensitivities (M.C.S., or "environmental illness") have joined him, and Mr. McCreary helps them construct houses without the plastics and glues that are the mainstays of modern home building. They bought their home sites for $500 to $1,000 an acre.
The newest arrival is Gary Gumbel, until recently a floor broker on the Chicago Board Options Exchange. After exposure to pesticides in a Chicago suburb, he said, he became so ill that he had to sleep with an oxygen tank every night. A few weeks after coming to Snowflake, he said, he was able to return the tank to Chicago.
"Out here, you don't need a prescription for air," said Ms. Molloy, a perky 56-year-old who is the unofficial spokeswoman for the community. "I'm lucky - I'm healthier than some people," she explained, "so I can interact with the world more."
Some of her neighbors can't tolerate stores - where chemicals are ever-present - so she sometimes shops for them. Others can't be on computers - many of the chemically sensitive are also sensitive to electromagnetic fields - so Ms. Molloy handles their correspondence.
The house for sale, on 37 acres, was built by a family without chemical sensitivities. Still, they were nice people who took the community's needs into consideration, Ms. Molloy said. Whoever buys the house, "I hope they're kind to us," she said.
The best outcome, the residents say, would be for a family with chemical sensitivities to buy the house. But that isn't likely, they say. For one thing, the asking price of $359,000 is far beyond the reach of most sufferers, who are generally unable to work. (Some receive disability benefits.)
For another thing, most of them don't have a use for five bedrooms. "Mostly, our spouses leave us," Dawn Grenier, a refugee from Florida, said wryly.
Some real estate agents are conscious of the group's concerns. Kevin Dunn of Forest Properties in Snowflake, said he wouldn't sell the house on Hansa Trail without telling the buyer about the neighbors' sensitivities.
Mr. Dunn said he didn't think he was obligated, under the state's seller disclosure law, to do so. But he said he has other reasons. "For one thing," he said, "I like everybody in the M.C.S. neighborhood."
Mr. Dunn recently helped to arrange for the state to buy a property that is going to be converted into temporary housing for four to six chemical sensitivity sufferers.
Right now, people who arrive without a place to live often end up staying in a trailer in Ms. Molloy's driveway. "I'm always happy to have new people come, as long as they have friends or relatives to take care of them," she said.
On a recent morning, Mr. Gumbel oversaw progress on his new house, set on a 60-acre plot. Here, in Snowflake, he said, "you have elbow room, and nobody can spray you down." Mr. Gumbel found out about Snowflake from the Web site of the Chemical Injury Information Network, www.ciin.org.
A New York City firefighter named Bill who moved to Snowflake in 1990, after his wife developed M.C.S., is helping Mr. Gumbel build his house. He would not agree to publication of his last name, he said, for fear of being inundated with phone calls from similar sufferers seeking advice.
Ms. Molloy's house has bare concrete floors. Walls, of foil-coated Sheetrock, are unpainted. Her fixtures and furniture are metal. Ms. Molloy asks visitors to shower with unscented soaps that she provides, then change into clothes that have been washed with a special detergent.
Because she is also sensitive to electromagnetic fields, Ms. Molloy has few electrical devices. Her computer is contained in a metal-lined room, with the screen in another part of the house (an arrangement devised by Mr. McCreary).
Kathy Hemenway, a former executive from Silicon Valley, Calif., is also sensitive to electrical currents. Ms. Hemenway's house, which is one of the grandest in the neighborhood, comes with a switch on every outlet, so she can turn off the current when she doesn't need it. Her refrigerator is connected to a motion detector - it turns itself off whenever she approaches.
Her television set is in a metal-coated room; it projects through a long metal funnel onto the back of a screen, so that when Ms. Hemenway watches, she is as far as possible from the electronic components. Computer equipment is in a separate part of the house, with several thick walls between it and her living spaces. Bedroom walls are tile, not plaster or wallboard.
Ms. Molloy is always looking for housing options for those who share her ailment.
For the last few years, she has been trying to purchase a group of metal houses on the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va. The so-called Lustron houses, built shortly after World War II, have walls and ceilings of porcelainized metal. Considered important relics of the postwar era, the buildings are slated to be replaced with newer housing, and the Marine Corps has asked the contractor to try to find a use for them.
"They're perfect for people with M.C.S.," Ms. Molloy said. But, she said, she has been unable to find a way to move the houses to Snowflake.
"The standing joke," she said, surveying the rugged terrain outside her house, "is that we'll all pack up and move to Quantico."
An editorial about the wall between church and state.
The Church-State Wall Is the Best Protection Against Religious Strife
By ADAM COHEN
The wall of separation between church and state is in real danger of falling now that Sandra Day O'Connor is retiring. The Supreme Court narrowly reaffirmed its commitment to that wall last week in its Ten Commandments rulings, but only because Justice O'Connor voted to maintain that wall. If her replacement votes the other way, there may soon be more crosses, Ten Commandments monuments and prayers on government property.
There is a growing debate about what impact that would have on American life. That debate subtly found its way into last week's decisions. The justices generally focus more on what they think the Constitution means than on how their decisions are likely to be received. But two of last week's opinions made oblique reference to the rise of the religious right and its increasing anger over the court's religion rulings.
Justice Stephen Breyer, who was a key swing vote, suggested - in an argument that may be gaining strength nationwide - that being less strict about the separation of church and state might appease religious activists and reduce the nation's religious tensions. But Justice David Souter made the more compelling argument that the nation's growing religious divisions only underscore the need for the government to remain neutral in religious matters.
The Ten Commandments cases were decided against a backdrop of extraordinary attacks from religious activists. Shortly after the cases were argued, they staged "Justice Sunday," a rally addressed by the Senate majority leader that was beamed to hundreds of churches across the country. Speaker after speaker denounced the judiciary. On his radio show, James Dobson, head of Focus on the Family, has compared the "black-robed men" on the Supreme Court to the "men in white robes" of the Ku Klux Klan.
It appears, from last week's decisions, that this heated rhetoric may have had an effect on the court. The swing vote in the two cases was Justice Breyer, who usually sides with the court's four-member liberal bloc. In one case, he joined with the liberals - and Justice O'Connor - to strike down Ten Commandments displays on the walls of county courthouses in Kentucky. But in the other, he joined conservatives in upholding a Ten Commandments monument on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol.
Justice Breyer felt that because there were so many displays like the Texas monument around the country, ordering it removed could "encourage disputes" and "create the very kind of religiously based divisiveness that the Establishment Clause seeks to avoid." But it is not clear that as a practical matter, allowing more religious displays would reduce religious tensions.
In fact, Justice Souter, writing for the majority in the Kentucky case, argued just the opposite. Although America is "centuries away from the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre," he wrote, "the divisiveness of religion in current life is inescapable." Given that, Justice Souter warned, "this is no time to deny the prudence of understanding the Establishment Clause to require the government to stay neutral on religious belief."
It would be a mistake to make too much of Justice Breyer's brief comment about keeping the religious peace, especially since he also signed on to Justice Souter's opinion, which took the opposite position. But the argument has been made in other places, too. In his new book, "Divided by God," Noah Feldman, a prominent New York University law professor, uses similar reasoning to argue that the courts should "loosen up on religious talk and symbols."
There is undeniably a need for more common ground between conservative Christians and the rest of the country. But injecting more religion in public life is the wrong way to go about achieving it. If government forums are opened to religious expression, we can look forward to bitter fights about what kind to permit. The City Council in Boise, Idaho, hardly a hotbed of secularism, voted to move a Ten Commandments monument off city property a while back after a right-wing minister insisted on his right to put up his own religious monument - one denouncing homosexuality and saying that Matthew Shepard, the slain gay Wyoming college student, was in hell.
Opening up government forums to religion would almost inevitably prompt more fighting over exactly which religion gets to participate. A narrow view of which religion should be intertwined with government was on display last month in Guilford County, N.C., where the presiding judge ruled that Muslim witnesses cannot take their oaths on the Koran. If that were allowed, he said, someone who worshiped brick walls might want to swear on a brick.
When Justice O'Connor's successor joins the court, the church-state wall is very likely to weaken. If Justice Breyer is right, yielding ground to religious advocates could reduce "religiously based divisiveness." But if Justice Souter is right, it would only make things worse. The early response to last week's decisions was not encouraging. The day the rulings came down, the Christian Defense Coalition announced a campaign to place more Ten Commandments monuments in communities across the country. One community the group has taken aim at is Boise - which all but guarantees there is plenty more divisiveness yet to come.
That article claiming that men can't be bi
Straight, Gay or Lying? Bisexuality Revisited
By BENEDICT CAREY
Some people are attracted to women; some are attracted to men. And some, if Sigmund Freud, Dr. Alfred Kinsey and millions of self-described bisexuals are to be believed, are drawn to both sexes.
But a new study casts doubt on whether true bisexuality exists, at least in men.
The study, by a team of psychologists in Chicago and Toronto, lends support to those who have long been skeptical that bisexuality is a distinct and stable sexual orientation.
People who claim bisexuality, according to these critics, are usually homosexual, but are ambivalent about their homosexuality or simply closeted. "You're either gay, straight or lying," as some gay men have put it.
In the new study, a team of psychologists directly measured genital arousal patterns in response to images of men and women. The psychologists found that men who identified themselves as bisexual were in fact exclusively aroused by either one sex or the other, usually by other men.
The study is the largest of several small reports suggesting that the estimated 1.7 percent of men who identify themselves as bisexual show physical attraction patterns that differ substantially from their professed desires.
"Research on sexual orientation has been based almost entirely on self-reports, and this is one of the few good studies using physiological measures," said Dr. Lisa Diamond, an associate professor of psychology and gender identity at the University of Utah, who was not involved in the study.
The discrepancy between what is happening in people's minds and what is going on in their bodies, she said, presents a puzzle "that the field now has to crack, and it raises this question about what we mean when we talk about desire."
"We have assumed that everyone means the same thing," she added, "but here we have evidence that that is not the case."
Several other researchers who have seen the study, scheduled to be published in the journal Psychological Science, said it would need to be repeated with larger numbers of bisexual men before clear conclusions could be drawn.
Bisexual desires are sometimes transient and they are still poorly understood. Men and women also appear to differ in the frequency of bisexual attractions. "The last thing you want," said Dr. Randall Sell, an assistant professor of clinical socio-medical sciences at Columbia University, "is for some therapists to see this study and start telling bisexual people that they're wrong, that they're really on their way to homosexuality."
He added, "We don't know nearly enough about sexual orientation and identity" to jump to these conclusions.
In the experiment, psychologists at Northwestern University and the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto used advertisements in gay and alternative newspapers to recruit 101 young adult men. Thirty-three of the men identified themselves as bisexual, 30 as straight and 38 as homosexual.
The researchers asked the men about their sexual desires and rated them on a scale from 0 to 6 on sexual orientation, with 0 to 1 indicating heterosexuality, and 5 to 6 indicating homosexuality. Bisexuality was measured by scores in the middle range.
Seated alone in a laboratory room, the men then watched a series of erotic movies, some involving only women, others involving only men.
Using a sensor to monitor sexual arousal, the researchers found what they expected: gay men showed arousal to images of men and little arousal to images of women, and heterosexual men showed arousal to women but not to men.
But the men in the study who described themselves as bisexual did not have patterns of arousal that were consistent with their stated attraction to men and to women. Instead, about three-quarters of the group had arousal patterns identical to those of gay men; the rest were indistinguishable from heterosexuals.
"Regardless of whether the men were gay, straight or bisexual, they showed about four times more arousal" to one sex or the other, said Gerulf Rieger, a graduate psychology student at Northwestern and the study's lead author.
Although about a third of the men in each group showed no significant arousal watching the movies, their lack of response did not change the overall findings, Mr. Rieger said.
Since at least the middle of the 19th century, behavioral scientists have noted bisexual attraction in men and women and debated its place in the development of sexual identity. Some experts, like Freud, concluded that humans are naturally bisexual. In his landmark sex surveys of the 1940's, Dr. Alfred Kinsey found many married, publicly heterosexual men who reported having had sex with other men.
"Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual," Dr. Kinsey wrote. "The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats."
By the 1990's, Newsweek had featured bisexuality on its cover, bisexuals had formed advocacy groups and television series like "Sex and the City" had begun exploring bisexual themes.
Yet researchers were unable to produce direct evidence of bisexual arousal patterns in men, said Dr. J. Michael Bailey, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and the new study's senior author.
A 1979 study of 30 men found that those who identified themselves as bisexuals were indistinguishable from homosexuals on measures of arousal. Studies of gay and bisexual men in the 1990's showed that the two groups reported similar numbers of male sexual partners and risky sexual encounters. And a 1994 survey by The Advocate, the gay-oriented newsmagazine, found that, before identifying themselves as gay, 40 percent of gay men had described themselves as bisexual.
"I'm not denying that bisexual behavior exists," said Dr. Bailey, "but I am saying that in men there's no hint that true bisexual arousal exists, and that for men arousal is orientation."
But other researchers - and some self-identified bisexuals - say that the technique used in the study to measure genital arousal is too crude to capture the richness - erotic sensations, affection, admiration - that constitutes sexual attraction.
Social and emotional attraction are very important elements in bisexual attraction, said Dr. Fritz Klein, a sex researcher and the author of "The Bisexual Option."
"To claim on the basis of this study that there's no such thing as male bisexuality is overstepping, it seems to me," said Dr. Gilbert Herdt, director of the National Sexuality Resource Center in San Francisco. "It may be that there is a lot less true male bisexuality than we think, but if that's true then why in the world are there so many movies, novels and TV shows that have this as a theme - is it collective fantasy, merely a projection? I don't think so."
John Campbell, 36, a Web designer in Orange County, Calif., who describes himself as bisexual, also said he was skeptical of the findings.
Mr. Campbell said he had been strongly attracted to both sexes since he was sexually aware, although all his long-term relationships had been with women. "In my case I have been accused of being heterosexual, but I also feel a need for sex with men," he said.
Mr. Campbell rated his erotic attraction to men and women as about 50-50, but his emotional attraction, he said, was 90 to 10 in favor of women. "With men I can get aroused, I just don't feel the fireworks like I do with women," he said.
About 1.5 percent of American women identify themselves bisexual. And bisexuality appears easier to demonstrate in the female sex. A study published last November by the same team of Canadian and American researchers, for example, found that most women who said they were bisexual showed arousal to men and to women.
Although only a small number of women identify themselves as bisexual, Dr. Bailey said, bisexual arousal may for them in fact be the norm.
Researchers have little sense yet of how these differences may affect behavior, or sexual identity. In the mid-1990's, Dr. Diamond recruited a group of 90 women at gay pride parades, academic conferences on gender issues and other venues. About half of the women called themselves lesbians, a third identified as bisexual and the rest claimed no sexual orientation. In follow-up interviews over the last 10 years, Dr. Diamond has found that most of these women have had relationships both with men and women.
"Most of them seem to lean one way or the other, but that doesn't preclude them from having a relationship with the nonpreferred sex," she said. "You may be mostly interested in women but, hey, the guy who delivers the pizza is really hot, and what are you going to do?"
"There's a whole lot of movement and flexibility," Dr. Diamond added. "The fact is, we have very little research in this area, and a lot to learn."
And an article about asexuals
For Them, Just Saying No Is Easy
By MARY DUENWALD
BIRDS do it, bees do it. But not necessarily all of them. Among bees the sisters of queens do not engage in sex. And in certain species of birds - Florida scrub jays, for one - some individuals, known as helpers, do not breed but only help the breeders raise their offspring.
But could indifference to sex extend to humans, too? An increasing number of people say yes and offer themselves as proof. They describe themselves as asexual, and they call their condition normal, not the result of confused sexual orientation, a fear of intimacy or a temporary lapse of desire. They would like the world to understand that they can live their entire lives happily without ever having sex.
"People think they need to convert you," said Cijay Morgan, 42, a telephone saleswoman in Edmonton, Alberta, and a self-professed asexual. "They can understand if you don't like country music or onion rings or if you aren't interested in learning how to whistle, but they can't accept someone not wanting sex. What they don't understand is that a lot of asexuals don't wish to be quote-unquote fixed."
Considering the pervasive advertising for drugs to enhance sexual performance, the efforts to market a testosterone patch to boost sexual desire in women and the ubiquity of sexual references in pop culture, it is not surprising that those professing no sex drive whatever have been misunderstood, or at least overlooked. Only one scientific survey seems to have been done. And many experts in human sexuality, when told there is a growing Internet community of people calling themselves asexual, say they have not heard of it. Yet most of those experts find the concept unsurprising.
Three-fourths of the patients who go to the Center for Sexual Medicine at Boston University lack any sex drive, said Dr. Irwin Goldstein, its director, who is also the editor of The Journal of Sexual Medicine. "We call that H.S.D.D., hypoactive sexual desire disorder," he said.
Lack of interest in sex is not necessarily a disorder nor even a problem, however, Dr. Goldstein quickly added, unless it causes distress, if it leads, for instance, to conflict within a marriage or romantic relationship.
Dr. John Bancroft, the recently retired director of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction at Indiana University, said, "I think it would be very surprising if there weren't asexuals, if you look at it from a Kinseyan perspective, that there's this huge variation in human sexuality."
Not all clinicians agree that lack of interest in sex can be considered normal. "It's a bit like people saying they never have an appetite for food," said Dr. Leonard R. Derogatis, a psychologist and the director of the Center for Sexual Health and Medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. "Sex is a natural drive, as natural as the drive for sustenance and water to survive. It's a little difficult to judge these folks as normal."
Asexual people often say they have been aware of their lack of interest in sex since adolescence and that while it may have troubled them, they never knew anything different. "I realized I was asexual about the same time I realized I was short, when I was about 15," said Miss Morgan of Edmonton, who is 5-foot-1. "I realized I was short when everyone grew taller than me, and I realized I didn't have sexual feelings when everyone else started expressing and experimenting with theirs."
The Internet has provided a platform for people calling themselves asexual to announce their collective existence. The anonymity of the Web makes it easier to converse about the topic, said Todd Niquette, 36, a systems analyst in St. Paul and a member of the Asexual Visibility and Education Network, an Internet group. With more than 4,000 registered participants, it is the largest such community of asexuals. "What we're really trying to find out is: how can I feel less alone in this?" Mr. Niquette said.
His network defines an asexual as someone who "does not experience sexual attraction." This definition is, of course, distinct from the much older concept of asexual reproduction, practiced by amoebas, jellyfish and whiptail lizards, for example, as well as by many species of plants.
Asexuals might have sexual urges and even masturbate, but they do not want to have sex with other people, said David Jay, 23, who founded the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (called AVEN by its members) four years ago, when he was in college. Asexuals often feel romantic attraction for other people, Mr. Jay said. It just doesn't involve sex.
Mr. Jay, who works for an educational nonprofit organization in San Francisco, is a talkative, outgoing man with a ready smile and plenty of friends. He is, he said, interested in "deep emotional involvement" and in raising children (though "not necessarily having my own"). But he has never had sex, he said, adding there is a good chance he never will.
If asexual people are commonplace, why have they not been mentioned in history books or anywhere else before the advent of the Internet? Elizabeth Abbott, a research associate at Trinity College of the University of Toronto, is the author of "A History of Celibacy." She speculates that it may be because such people have stayed under the radar. They never married perhaps, or they entered into sexless marriages, or they had sex without wanting to. Unlike homosexuality, she noted, asexuality has never been illegal.
Society has not always accepted it, however. As early as the Middle Ages, Dr. Abbott said, "nonconsummation of marriage" was considered "an insult to the sacrament of marriage" and a ground for divorce.
Asexuality, she noted, is distinct from celibacy, which implies a conscious decision to stifle a desire for sex. What appears to be the only published study of asexuality - which defined it as a lifelong lack of sexual attraction to either men or women - found that 1.1 percent of adults may be asexual. The figure was drawn from a survey of 18,000 Britons who were interviewed in 1994 about sexually transmitted diseases. The data were reanalyzed by Dr. Anthony F. Bogaert, a psychologist at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, who published his findings last August in The Journal of Sex Research.
Dr. Bogaert found that 44 percent of those expressing no interest in sex were either married or living with partners or had been in the past.
One might assume that by avoiding sex and all the emotions and responsibilities that go with it, let alone the health risks, asexuals might have a comparatively easy life.
"But I think we exchange all that for a different set of trouble," Mr. Jay said. "Sex is very central to life in a lot of ways, and one of the real challenges of being asexual is trying to figure out where you fit."
That problem typically arises during the teenage years. "I knew when I was 16 or 17 that sex was just something that seemed tremendously important to everybody else but that I just didn't get," said David Warner, 55, a technical writer and editor in a Virginia suburb of Washington.
Like many other asexuals, Kate Goldfield, 21, a student at Goucher College in Baltimore, once thought she might be a lesbian. "I decided I must be gay because I knew I wasn't straight," she said. But she said she has since realized that she is not sexually attracted to women either.
Asexuals say they are often told that they will change when they meet the right person or when circumstances change, but those predictions do not ring true to them.
"Why do I need sexuality in my life so much that I should divert my time and energy to finding out what it is that will turn me on?" Mr. Jay asked.
Physicians have found that they can prompt sexual desire in both women and men by giving them supplemental hormones. And some scientists suspect that hormones might be involved in some cases of asexuality. Or, Dr. Bogaert suggested, it could be that certain brain structures may have developed differently in asexual people.
Dr. Derogatis agreed that low hormone levels usually underlie low libido but said sometimes psychological mechanisms come into play. "Some of these people may have a very powerful phobia about sex," he said.
Yet a small and still unpublished survey of 1,146 people - including 41 who described themselves as asexual - conducted in online interviews by Nicole Prause, a graduate student in psychology at Indiana, found that asexuals do not resist having sex because of fear. Rather asexuals "only lack the excitatory drive," Ms. Prause said in an e-mail message.
Barry W. McCarthy, a professor of psychology at American University and an author of "Rekindling Desire," a self-help book for married couples, said many people who experience inhibited desire would be well advised to examine that inhibition because it may turn out to be the result of fear, rather than a natural desire to forgo sex. "You have to respect people's individual differences," he said. "But for the great majority of people with inhibited desire the answer is not asexuality."
People often experience periods of asexuality. Many married couples give up sex after a number of years, said Dr. Pepper Schwartz, a sociologist at the University of Washington in Seattle and the author of "Everything You Know About Love and Sex Is Wrong." "Some people are relieved to not only back-burner sex, but to no-burner it," she said.
Mr. Jay acknowledged that some asexuals have spent - or will spend - some time being sexual. "We'll have people in AVEN who get into a relationship where suddenly they enjoy sex, and we have many people who say they used to enjoy sex but really not anymore," he said. "But the majority of the community is pretty stable."
A 32-year-old man in Dallas named Keith (he declined to give his last name) said he had tried to cope with his asexuality by marrying. "I thought that getting married would fix me and suddenly I would become interested in sex." After six years he and his wife were divorced, and now he is living with a younger man in a relationship that he described as loving and romantic but free of sex.
Mr. Jay said he believes asexual people can learn to negotiate relationships with sexual people.
"In high school and early college, when I would sense that someone was hitting on me, I would go into defensive mode and be like, 'O.K., this can't work,' " he said. "But since then I've realized that if someone is going to approach me sexually, it means they like my personality."
In recent months many people have logged on to the asexuals' network Web site to learn to understand better partners or spouses who are asexual, Mr. Jay said.
"There's a real desire out there to figure out how do you manage relationships without sexuality?" he said. "We don't have anything like a self-help book we could write on this yet."
Euthanasia for Babies?
By JIM HOLT
One sure way to start a lively argument at a dinner party is to raise the question Are we humans getting more decent over time? Optimists about moral progress will point out that the last few centuries have seen, in the West at least, such welcome developments as the abolition of slavery and of legal segregation, the expansion of freedoms (of religion, speech and press), better treatment of women and a gradual reduction of violence, notably murder, in everyday life. Pessimists will respond by citing the epic evils of the 20th century -- the Holocaust, the Gulag. Depending on their religious convictions, some may call attention to the breakdown of the family and a supposed decline in sexual morality. Others will complain of backsliding in areas where moral progress had seemingly been secured, like the killing of civilians in war, the reintroduction of the death penalty or the use of torture. And it is quite possible, if your dinner guests are especially well informed, that someone will bring up infanticide.
Infanticide -- the deliberate killing of newborns with the consent of the parents and the community -- has been common throughout most of human history. In some societies, like the Eskimos, the Kung in Africa and 18th-century Japan, it served as a form of birth control when food supplies were limited. In others, like the Greek city-states and ancient Rome, it was a way of getting rid of deformed babies. (Plato was an ardent advocate of infanticide for eugenic purposes.) But the three great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, all condemned infanticide as murder, holding that only God has the right to take innocent human life. Consequently, the practice has long been outlawed in every Western nation.
This year, however, a new chapter may have begun in the history of infanticide. Two physicians practicing in the Netherlands, the very heart of civilized Europe, this spring published in The New England Journal of Medicine a set of guidelines for what they called infant "euthanasia." The authors named their guidelines the Groningen protocol, after the city where they work. One of the physicians, Dr. Eduard Verhagen, has admitted to presiding over the killing of four babies in the last three years, by means of a lethal intravenous drip of morphine and midazolam (a sleeping agent). While Verhagen's actions were illegal under Dutch law, he hasn't been prosecuted for them; and if his guidelines were to be accepted, they could establish a legal basis for his death-administering work.
At first blush, a call for open infanticide would seem to be the opposite of moral progress. It offends against the ''sanctity of life,'' a doctrine that has come to suffuse moral consciousness, especially in the United States. All human life is held to be of equal and inestimable value. A newborn baby, no matter how deformed or retarded, has a right to life -- a right that trumps all other moral considerations. Violating that right is always and everywhere murder.
The sanctity-of-life doctrine has an impressively absolute ring to it. In practice, however, it has proved quite flexible. Take the case of a baby who is born missing most or all of its brain. This condition, known as anencephaly, occurs in about 1 in every 2,000 births. An anencephalic baby, while biologically human, will never develop a rudimentary consciousness, let alone an ability to relate to others or a sense of the future. Yet according to the sanctity-of-life doctrine, those deficiencies do not affect its moral status and hence its right to life. Anencephalic babies could be kept alive for years, given the necessary life support. Yet treatment is typically withheld from them on the grounds that it amounts to "extraordinary means" -- even though a baby with a normal brain in need of similar treatment would not be so deprived. Thus they are allowed to die.
Are there any limits to such "passive" euthanasia? A famous test case occurred in 1982 in Indiana, when an infant known as Baby Doe was born with Down syndrome. Children with Down syndrome typically suffer some retardation and other difficulties; while presenting a great challenge to their parents and families, they often live joyful and relatively independent lives. As it happened, Baby Doe also had an improperly formed esophagus, which meant that food put into his mouth could not reach his stomach. Surgery might have remedied this problem, but his parents and physician decided against it, opting for painkillers instead. Within a few days, Baby Doe starved to death. The Reagan administration responded to the case by drafting the "Baby Doe guidelines," which mandated life-sustaining care for such handicapped newborns. But the guidelines were opposed by the American Medical Association and were eventually struck down by the Supreme Court.
The distinction between killing a baby and letting it die may be convenient. But is there any moral difference? Failing to save someone's life out of ignorance or laziness or cowardice is one thing. But when available lifesaving treatment is deliberately withheld from a baby, the intention is to cause that baby's death. And the result is just as sure -- if possibly more protracted and painful -- as it would have been through lethal injection.
It is interesting to contrast the sort of passive euthanasia of infants that is deemed acceptable in our sanctity-of-life culture with the active form that has been advocated in the Netherlands. The Groningen protocol is concerned with an element not present in the above cases: unbearable and unrelievable suffering. Consider the case of Sanne, a Dutch baby girl who was born with a severe form of Hallopeau-Siemens syndrome, a rare skin disease. As reported earlier this year by Gregory Crouch in The Times, the baby Sanne's ''skin would literally come off if anyone touched her, leaving painful scar tissue in its place.'' With this condition, she was expected to live at most 9 or 10 years before dying of skin cancer. Her parents asked that an end be put to her ordeal, but hospital officials, fearing criminal prosecution, refused. After six months of agony, Sanne finally died of pneumonia.
In a case like Sanne's, a new moral duty would seem to be germane: the duty to prevent suffering, especially futile suffering. That is what the Groningen protocol seeks to recognize. If the newborn's prognosis is hopeless and the pain both severe and unrelievable, it observes, the parents and physicians ''may concur that death would be more humane than continued life.'' The protocol aims to safeguard against ''unjustified'' euthanasia by offering a checklist of requirements, including informed consent of both parents, certain diagnosis, confirmation by at least one independent doctor and so on.
The debate over infant euthanasia is usually framed as a collision between two values: sanctity of life and quality of life. Judgments about the latter, of course, are notoriously subjective and can lead you down a slippery slope. But shifting the emphasis to suffering changes the terms of the debate. To keep alive an infant whose short life expectancy will be dominated by pain -- pain that it can neither bear nor comprehend -- is, it might be argued, to do that infant a continuous injury.
Our sense of what constitutes moral progress is a matter partly of reason and partly of sentiment. On the reason side, the Groningen protocol may seem progressive because it refuses to countenance the prolonging of an infant's suffering merely to satisfy a dubious distinction between "killing" and "letting nature take its course." It insists on unflinching honesty about a practice that is often shrouded in casuistry in the United States. Moral sentiments, though, have an inertia that sometimes resists the force of moral reasons. Just quote Verhagen's description of the medically induced infant deaths over which he has presided -- "it's beautiful in a way. . . . It is after they die that you see them relaxed for the first time" -- and even the most spirited dinner-table debate over moral progress will, for a moment, fall silent.
One about walking across the country
Walking for My Life
By STEVE VAUGHT as told to CANDICE REED
When you first tell people that you're going to walk across the country, a lot of them are like, "Wow, that takes courage just to say it." Others are like, "You'll never make it." I weigh 400 pounds, and I'm carrying an 85- pound backpack, and so far, I've gone more than 300 miles. If I was going to quit anywhere, it would be out here in the desert -- because this is not fun.
I am a 39-year-old married father of two great kids. But because I am fat, I am not happy, so I am walking across the United States from just outside San Diego to New York City to lose weight and to regain my life. It isn't only about the weight; I just feel that something is bound to change during this journey.
I haven't always been overweight. I used to be in the Marine Corps. I used to be an artist and a really funny guy. I was good-looking, living the good life in California. I had friends, belonged to a car club and chased girls.
But when I was 25, I killed two people in an auto accident. They got off a bus at a bad intersection, and I didn't see them. I was charged with vehicular manslaughter and spent 10 days in jail. I'll never stop being sorry for what happened. I feel so bad for the families. But from that moment on, my life changed forever, too. Over the years, my depression grew, I gained this weight and I haven't been able to shake it since.
My wife, April, is the younger sister of a good friend. Her family stuck by me after the accident. We built up a friendship that later turned to love, and we were married. But depression is a horrible thing. It can make you forget about the good things in your life, like family, and make you concentrate on all the bad things. I used to own a towing company and managed some other places. More recently I've worked low-paying jobs for friends, but when you weigh this much, no one wants to hire you. So a year ago we moved in with April's mom.
When I told April about my idea to walk across the country, I thought she'd say I was crazy. Instead she said, "Well, go ahead." You know, I could have gone out and had my stomach stapled, but that's not me -- and she knew it. And what would that have fixed? I had to go full-bore on this thing.
I didn't do much planning. I looked at some maps and charted a course on smaller roads instead of freeways. The people at a hiking-gear store advised me and gave me a backpack to use. And within a few weeks, I was walking down the road. I started on April 10 with a goal of reaching New York by October. I filled my pack with food, water and a tent, but I made room for two books, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" and the "Odyssey." A shoe company is giving me shoes. So far I've gone through nine pairs. A group of podiatrists is giving me shoe inserts, and I call them to report how I'm feeling. I have a cellphone, and that's pretty much the only way I can contact anyone if something goes wrong.
I'm averaging about 15 miles a day, and I think I'll walk even faster as the weight comes off. I was weighed in Bullhead City, Ariz., and it looks as if I'm losing about four pounds a week. If I keep up this pace, I'll be in Winslow, Ariz., in mid-July -- as in that Eagles song: "Well, I'm a standin' on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, an' such a fine sight to see."
People can be very mean to someone who is as overweight as I am, but so far only a handful of people have been unkind. People think I'm heroic, interesting or crazy, but almost everyone I've met has been helpful. I've had people open their houses to me. Occasionally I've taken them up on it, but mainly I camp outdoors, often under bridges. The few weeks I spent on Route 66 were tough; at one point I even ran out of water. It can get really boring. If you want to know your condition mentally, spend some time alone like this.
I think about the accident a lot out here, and I know it's not rational, but sometimes I think I'm going to get my karmic retribution and be run over. I know the world doesn't work like that, but when a car comes too close to me, in those two or three seconds, I think: This is it.
That accident changed me. I'm full of self-loathing, and I lack self-esteem. But I'm learning to take care of myself and survive. If I don't make it -- and I don't even want to think about that -- it will be because something unexpected happens, like an injury. And then what will probably happen, after a few years, is that I'll die. You don't see a lot of 400-pound 50-year-olds. If I died at 50, my kids would be 18 and 13. That's a horrible time to lose your father.
You've got to be out of your skull to do something like this. But I can't stand the thought of my kids without a father. I want to be healthy enough, physically and mentally, to be a good dad. If this is what it takes, then it's worth it. This walk is giving me back the discipline I once had. I'll make it. And when I do get to New York, I'll know that I'm not the failure that I've thought I was for the past 15 years. I'm a determined man -- once I finally make up my mind.
An article on a town full of people with MCS
In One Arizona Community, an Oasis in a Toxic World
By FRED A. BERNSTEIN
Snowflake, Ariz.
IN this town 150 miles northeast of Phoenix, "for sale" signs have become as commonplace as sagebrush. "Real estate has gone crazy around here," said Bruce Wachter, an agent with the local Century 21 franchise.
But one "for sale" sign has a group of residents worried. They suffer from multiple chemical sensitivities, an illness that led them to flee cities for this remote high desert town.
An electrical engineer from Mesa, a broker from Chicago, a software executive from Santa Cruz, Calif. - all settled in Snowflake to escape pesticides and paints that they say caused them devastating health effects.
Now they fear that a nearby house could be bought by a family that wants to use chemicals on its lawn, or install a blacktop driveway, rendering the fragile haven a haven no longer. "We might have to evacuate some people," said Susan Molloy, who has lived in the area since 1994.
The listing broker, Mr. Wachter of Century 21 Sunshine Realty, said it isn't his job to find a buyer who will avoid pesticides and paints. "I'll sell the house to anybody," he said. "I can't distinguish between a buyer who would use chemicals and a buyer who would not."
Snowflake (a town named for early settlers named Erastus Snow and William Flake) became a home for those suffering from chemical sensitivities in 1988, when Bruce McCreary, the electrical engineer, arrived here from Mesa. The year before, he said, chemicals in the aircraft factory where he worked had left him almost totally disabled.
About two dozen other people with multiple chemical sensitivities (M.C.S., or "environmental illness") have joined him, and Mr. McCreary helps them construct houses without the plastics and glues that are the mainstays of modern home building. They bought their home sites for $500 to $1,000 an acre.
The newest arrival is Gary Gumbel, until recently a floor broker on the Chicago Board Options Exchange. After exposure to pesticides in a Chicago suburb, he said, he became so ill that he had to sleep with an oxygen tank every night. A few weeks after coming to Snowflake, he said, he was able to return the tank to Chicago.
"Out here, you don't need a prescription for air," said Ms. Molloy, a perky 56-year-old who is the unofficial spokeswoman for the community. "I'm lucky - I'm healthier than some people," she explained, "so I can interact with the world more."
Some of her neighbors can't tolerate stores - where chemicals are ever-present - so she sometimes shops for them. Others can't be on computers - many of the chemically sensitive are also sensitive to electromagnetic fields - so Ms. Molloy handles their correspondence.
The house for sale, on 37 acres, was built by a family without chemical sensitivities. Still, they were nice people who took the community's needs into consideration, Ms. Molloy said. Whoever buys the house, "I hope they're kind to us," she said.
The best outcome, the residents say, would be for a family with chemical sensitivities to buy the house. But that isn't likely, they say. For one thing, the asking price of $359,000 is far beyond the reach of most sufferers, who are generally unable to work. (Some receive disability benefits.)
For another thing, most of them don't have a use for five bedrooms. "Mostly, our spouses leave us," Dawn Grenier, a refugee from Florida, said wryly.
Some real estate agents are conscious of the group's concerns. Kevin Dunn of Forest Properties in Snowflake, said he wouldn't sell the house on Hansa Trail without telling the buyer about the neighbors' sensitivities.
Mr. Dunn said he didn't think he was obligated, under the state's seller disclosure law, to do so. But he said he has other reasons. "For one thing," he said, "I like everybody in the M.C.S. neighborhood."
Mr. Dunn recently helped to arrange for the state to buy a property that is going to be converted into temporary housing for four to six chemical sensitivity sufferers.
Right now, people who arrive without a place to live often end up staying in a trailer in Ms. Molloy's driveway. "I'm always happy to have new people come, as long as they have friends or relatives to take care of them," she said.
On a recent morning, Mr. Gumbel oversaw progress on his new house, set on a 60-acre plot. Here, in Snowflake, he said, "you have elbow room, and nobody can spray you down." Mr. Gumbel found out about Snowflake from the Web site of the Chemical Injury Information Network, www.ciin.org.
A New York City firefighter named Bill who moved to Snowflake in 1990, after his wife developed M.C.S., is helping Mr. Gumbel build his house. He would not agree to publication of his last name, he said, for fear of being inundated with phone calls from similar sufferers seeking advice.
Ms. Molloy's house has bare concrete floors. Walls, of foil-coated Sheetrock, are unpainted. Her fixtures and furniture are metal. Ms. Molloy asks visitors to shower with unscented soaps that she provides, then change into clothes that have been washed with a special detergent.
Because she is also sensitive to electromagnetic fields, Ms. Molloy has few electrical devices. Her computer is contained in a metal-lined room, with the screen in another part of the house (an arrangement devised by Mr. McCreary).
Kathy Hemenway, a former executive from Silicon Valley, Calif., is also sensitive to electrical currents. Ms. Hemenway's house, which is one of the grandest in the neighborhood, comes with a switch on every outlet, so she can turn off the current when she doesn't need it. Her refrigerator is connected to a motion detector - it turns itself off whenever she approaches.
Her television set is in a metal-coated room; it projects through a long metal funnel onto the back of a screen, so that when Ms. Hemenway watches, she is as far as possible from the electronic components. Computer equipment is in a separate part of the house, with several thick walls between it and her living spaces. Bedroom walls are tile, not plaster or wallboard.
Ms. Molloy is always looking for housing options for those who share her ailment.
For the last few years, she has been trying to purchase a group of metal houses on the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va. The so-called Lustron houses, built shortly after World War II, have walls and ceilings of porcelainized metal. Considered important relics of the postwar era, the buildings are slated to be replaced with newer housing, and the Marine Corps has asked the contractor to try to find a use for them.
"They're perfect for people with M.C.S.," Ms. Molloy said. But, she said, she has been unable to find a way to move the houses to Snowflake.
"The standing joke," she said, surveying the rugged terrain outside her house, "is that we'll all pack up and move to Quantico."
An editorial about the wall between church and state.
The Church-State Wall Is the Best Protection Against Religious Strife
By ADAM COHEN
The wall of separation between church and state is in real danger of falling now that Sandra Day O'Connor is retiring. The Supreme Court narrowly reaffirmed its commitment to that wall last week in its Ten Commandments rulings, but only because Justice O'Connor voted to maintain that wall. If her replacement votes the other way, there may soon be more crosses, Ten Commandments monuments and prayers on government property.
There is a growing debate about what impact that would have on American life. That debate subtly found its way into last week's decisions. The justices generally focus more on what they think the Constitution means than on how their decisions are likely to be received. But two of last week's opinions made oblique reference to the rise of the religious right and its increasing anger over the court's religion rulings.
Justice Stephen Breyer, who was a key swing vote, suggested - in an argument that may be gaining strength nationwide - that being less strict about the separation of church and state might appease religious activists and reduce the nation's religious tensions. But Justice David Souter made the more compelling argument that the nation's growing religious divisions only underscore the need for the government to remain neutral in religious matters.
The Ten Commandments cases were decided against a backdrop of extraordinary attacks from religious activists. Shortly after the cases were argued, they staged "Justice Sunday," a rally addressed by the Senate majority leader that was beamed to hundreds of churches across the country. Speaker after speaker denounced the judiciary. On his radio show, James Dobson, head of Focus on the Family, has compared the "black-robed men" on the Supreme Court to the "men in white robes" of the Ku Klux Klan.
It appears, from last week's decisions, that this heated rhetoric may have had an effect on the court. The swing vote in the two cases was Justice Breyer, who usually sides with the court's four-member liberal bloc. In one case, he joined with the liberals - and Justice O'Connor - to strike down Ten Commandments displays on the walls of county courthouses in Kentucky. But in the other, he joined conservatives in upholding a Ten Commandments monument on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol.
Justice Breyer felt that because there were so many displays like the Texas monument around the country, ordering it removed could "encourage disputes" and "create the very kind of religiously based divisiveness that the Establishment Clause seeks to avoid." But it is not clear that as a practical matter, allowing more religious displays would reduce religious tensions.
In fact, Justice Souter, writing for the majority in the Kentucky case, argued just the opposite. Although America is "centuries away from the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre," he wrote, "the divisiveness of religion in current life is inescapable." Given that, Justice Souter warned, "this is no time to deny the prudence of understanding the Establishment Clause to require the government to stay neutral on religious belief."
It would be a mistake to make too much of Justice Breyer's brief comment about keeping the religious peace, especially since he also signed on to Justice Souter's opinion, which took the opposite position. But the argument has been made in other places, too. In his new book, "Divided by God," Noah Feldman, a prominent New York University law professor, uses similar reasoning to argue that the courts should "loosen up on religious talk and symbols."
There is undeniably a need for more common ground between conservative Christians and the rest of the country. But injecting more religion in public life is the wrong way to go about achieving it. If government forums are opened to religious expression, we can look forward to bitter fights about what kind to permit. The City Council in Boise, Idaho, hardly a hotbed of secularism, voted to move a Ten Commandments monument off city property a while back after a right-wing minister insisted on his right to put up his own religious monument - one denouncing homosexuality and saying that Matthew Shepard, the slain gay Wyoming college student, was in hell.
Opening up government forums to religion would almost inevitably prompt more fighting over exactly which religion gets to participate. A narrow view of which religion should be intertwined with government was on display last month in Guilford County, N.C., where the presiding judge ruled that Muslim witnesses cannot take their oaths on the Koran. If that were allowed, he said, someone who worshiped brick walls might want to swear on a brick.
When Justice O'Connor's successor joins the court, the church-state wall is very likely to weaken. If Justice Breyer is right, yielding ground to religious advocates could reduce "religiously based divisiveness." But if Justice Souter is right, it would only make things worse. The early response to last week's decisions was not encouraging. The day the rulings came down, the Christian Defense Coalition announced a campaign to place more Ten Commandments monuments in communities across the country. One community the group has taken aim at is Boise - which all but guarantees there is plenty more divisiveness yet to come.
That article claiming that men can't be bi
Straight, Gay or Lying? Bisexuality Revisited
By BENEDICT CAREY
Some people are attracted to women; some are attracted to men. And some, if Sigmund Freud, Dr. Alfred Kinsey and millions of self-described bisexuals are to be believed, are drawn to both sexes.
But a new study casts doubt on whether true bisexuality exists, at least in men.
The study, by a team of psychologists in Chicago and Toronto, lends support to those who have long been skeptical that bisexuality is a distinct and stable sexual orientation.
People who claim bisexuality, according to these critics, are usually homosexual, but are ambivalent about their homosexuality or simply closeted. "You're either gay, straight or lying," as some gay men have put it.
In the new study, a team of psychologists directly measured genital arousal patterns in response to images of men and women. The psychologists found that men who identified themselves as bisexual were in fact exclusively aroused by either one sex or the other, usually by other men.
The study is the largest of several small reports suggesting that the estimated 1.7 percent of men who identify themselves as bisexual show physical attraction patterns that differ substantially from their professed desires.
"Research on sexual orientation has been based almost entirely on self-reports, and this is one of the few good studies using physiological measures," said Dr. Lisa Diamond, an associate professor of psychology and gender identity at the University of Utah, who was not involved in the study.
The discrepancy between what is happening in people's minds and what is going on in their bodies, she said, presents a puzzle "that the field now has to crack, and it raises this question about what we mean when we talk about desire."
"We have assumed that everyone means the same thing," she added, "but here we have evidence that that is not the case."
Several other researchers who have seen the study, scheduled to be published in the journal Psychological Science, said it would need to be repeated with larger numbers of bisexual men before clear conclusions could be drawn.
Bisexual desires are sometimes transient and they are still poorly understood. Men and women also appear to differ in the frequency of bisexual attractions. "The last thing you want," said Dr. Randall Sell, an assistant professor of clinical socio-medical sciences at Columbia University, "is for some therapists to see this study and start telling bisexual people that they're wrong, that they're really on their way to homosexuality."
He added, "We don't know nearly enough about sexual orientation and identity" to jump to these conclusions.
In the experiment, psychologists at Northwestern University and the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto used advertisements in gay and alternative newspapers to recruit 101 young adult men. Thirty-three of the men identified themselves as bisexual, 30 as straight and 38 as homosexual.
The researchers asked the men about their sexual desires and rated them on a scale from 0 to 6 on sexual orientation, with 0 to 1 indicating heterosexuality, and 5 to 6 indicating homosexuality. Bisexuality was measured by scores in the middle range.
Seated alone in a laboratory room, the men then watched a series of erotic movies, some involving only women, others involving only men.
Using a sensor to monitor sexual arousal, the researchers found what they expected: gay men showed arousal to images of men and little arousal to images of women, and heterosexual men showed arousal to women but not to men.
But the men in the study who described themselves as bisexual did not have patterns of arousal that were consistent with their stated attraction to men and to women. Instead, about three-quarters of the group had arousal patterns identical to those of gay men; the rest were indistinguishable from heterosexuals.
"Regardless of whether the men were gay, straight or bisexual, they showed about four times more arousal" to one sex or the other, said Gerulf Rieger, a graduate psychology student at Northwestern and the study's lead author.
Although about a third of the men in each group showed no significant arousal watching the movies, their lack of response did not change the overall findings, Mr. Rieger said.
Since at least the middle of the 19th century, behavioral scientists have noted bisexual attraction in men and women and debated its place in the development of sexual identity. Some experts, like Freud, concluded that humans are naturally bisexual. In his landmark sex surveys of the 1940's, Dr. Alfred Kinsey found many married, publicly heterosexual men who reported having had sex with other men.
"Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual," Dr. Kinsey wrote. "The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats."
By the 1990's, Newsweek had featured bisexuality on its cover, bisexuals had formed advocacy groups and television series like "Sex and the City" had begun exploring bisexual themes.
Yet researchers were unable to produce direct evidence of bisexual arousal patterns in men, said Dr. J. Michael Bailey, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and the new study's senior author.
A 1979 study of 30 men found that those who identified themselves as bisexuals were indistinguishable from homosexuals on measures of arousal. Studies of gay and bisexual men in the 1990's showed that the two groups reported similar numbers of male sexual partners and risky sexual encounters. And a 1994 survey by The Advocate, the gay-oriented newsmagazine, found that, before identifying themselves as gay, 40 percent of gay men had described themselves as bisexual.
"I'm not denying that bisexual behavior exists," said Dr. Bailey, "but I am saying that in men there's no hint that true bisexual arousal exists, and that for men arousal is orientation."
But other researchers - and some self-identified bisexuals - say that the technique used in the study to measure genital arousal is too crude to capture the richness - erotic sensations, affection, admiration - that constitutes sexual attraction.
Social and emotional attraction are very important elements in bisexual attraction, said Dr. Fritz Klein, a sex researcher and the author of "The Bisexual Option."
"To claim on the basis of this study that there's no such thing as male bisexuality is overstepping, it seems to me," said Dr. Gilbert Herdt, director of the National Sexuality Resource Center in San Francisco. "It may be that there is a lot less true male bisexuality than we think, but if that's true then why in the world are there so many movies, novels and TV shows that have this as a theme - is it collective fantasy, merely a projection? I don't think so."
John Campbell, 36, a Web designer in Orange County, Calif., who describes himself as bisexual, also said he was skeptical of the findings.
Mr. Campbell said he had been strongly attracted to both sexes since he was sexually aware, although all his long-term relationships had been with women. "In my case I have been accused of being heterosexual, but I also feel a need for sex with men," he said.
Mr. Campbell rated his erotic attraction to men and women as about 50-50, but his emotional attraction, he said, was 90 to 10 in favor of women. "With men I can get aroused, I just don't feel the fireworks like I do with women," he said.
About 1.5 percent of American women identify themselves bisexual. And bisexuality appears easier to demonstrate in the female sex. A study published last November by the same team of Canadian and American researchers, for example, found that most women who said they were bisexual showed arousal to men and to women.
Although only a small number of women identify themselves as bisexual, Dr. Bailey said, bisexual arousal may for them in fact be the norm.
Researchers have little sense yet of how these differences may affect behavior, or sexual identity. In the mid-1990's, Dr. Diamond recruited a group of 90 women at gay pride parades, academic conferences on gender issues and other venues. About half of the women called themselves lesbians, a third identified as bisexual and the rest claimed no sexual orientation. In follow-up interviews over the last 10 years, Dr. Diamond has found that most of these women have had relationships both with men and women.
"Most of them seem to lean one way or the other, but that doesn't preclude them from having a relationship with the nonpreferred sex," she said. "You may be mostly interested in women but, hey, the guy who delivers the pizza is really hot, and what are you going to do?"
"There's a whole lot of movement and flexibility," Dr. Diamond added. "The fact is, we have very little research in this area, and a lot to learn."
And an article about asexuals
For Them, Just Saying No Is Easy
By MARY DUENWALD
BIRDS do it, bees do it. But not necessarily all of them. Among bees the sisters of queens do not engage in sex. And in certain species of birds - Florida scrub jays, for one - some individuals, known as helpers, do not breed but only help the breeders raise their offspring.
But could indifference to sex extend to humans, too? An increasing number of people say yes and offer themselves as proof. They describe themselves as asexual, and they call their condition normal, not the result of confused sexual orientation, a fear of intimacy or a temporary lapse of desire. They would like the world to understand that they can live their entire lives happily without ever having sex.
"People think they need to convert you," said Cijay Morgan, 42, a telephone saleswoman in Edmonton, Alberta, and a self-professed asexual. "They can understand if you don't like country music or onion rings or if you aren't interested in learning how to whistle, but they can't accept someone not wanting sex. What they don't understand is that a lot of asexuals don't wish to be quote-unquote fixed."
Considering the pervasive advertising for drugs to enhance sexual performance, the efforts to market a testosterone patch to boost sexual desire in women and the ubiquity of sexual references in pop culture, it is not surprising that those professing no sex drive whatever have been misunderstood, or at least overlooked. Only one scientific survey seems to have been done. And many experts in human sexuality, when told there is a growing Internet community of people calling themselves asexual, say they have not heard of it. Yet most of those experts find the concept unsurprising.
Three-fourths of the patients who go to the Center for Sexual Medicine at Boston University lack any sex drive, said Dr. Irwin Goldstein, its director, who is also the editor of The Journal of Sexual Medicine. "We call that H.S.D.D., hypoactive sexual desire disorder," he said.
Lack of interest in sex is not necessarily a disorder nor even a problem, however, Dr. Goldstein quickly added, unless it causes distress, if it leads, for instance, to conflict within a marriage or romantic relationship.
Dr. John Bancroft, the recently retired director of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction at Indiana University, said, "I think it would be very surprising if there weren't asexuals, if you look at it from a Kinseyan perspective, that there's this huge variation in human sexuality."
Not all clinicians agree that lack of interest in sex can be considered normal. "It's a bit like people saying they never have an appetite for food," said Dr. Leonard R. Derogatis, a psychologist and the director of the Center for Sexual Health and Medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. "Sex is a natural drive, as natural as the drive for sustenance and water to survive. It's a little difficult to judge these folks as normal."
Asexual people often say they have been aware of their lack of interest in sex since adolescence and that while it may have troubled them, they never knew anything different. "I realized I was asexual about the same time I realized I was short, when I was about 15," said Miss Morgan of Edmonton, who is 5-foot-1. "I realized I was short when everyone grew taller than me, and I realized I didn't have sexual feelings when everyone else started expressing and experimenting with theirs."
The Internet has provided a platform for people calling themselves asexual to announce their collective existence. The anonymity of the Web makes it easier to converse about the topic, said Todd Niquette, 36, a systems analyst in St. Paul and a member of the Asexual Visibility and Education Network, an Internet group. With more than 4,000 registered participants, it is the largest such community of asexuals. "What we're really trying to find out is: how can I feel less alone in this?" Mr. Niquette said.
His network defines an asexual as someone who "does not experience sexual attraction." This definition is, of course, distinct from the much older concept of asexual reproduction, practiced by amoebas, jellyfish and whiptail lizards, for example, as well as by many species of plants.
Asexuals might have sexual urges and even masturbate, but they do not want to have sex with other people, said David Jay, 23, who founded the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (called AVEN by its members) four years ago, when he was in college. Asexuals often feel romantic attraction for other people, Mr. Jay said. It just doesn't involve sex.
Mr. Jay, who works for an educational nonprofit organization in San Francisco, is a talkative, outgoing man with a ready smile and plenty of friends. He is, he said, interested in "deep emotional involvement" and in raising children (though "not necessarily having my own"). But he has never had sex, he said, adding there is a good chance he never will.
If asexual people are commonplace, why have they not been mentioned in history books or anywhere else before the advent of the Internet? Elizabeth Abbott, a research associate at Trinity College of the University of Toronto, is the author of "A History of Celibacy." She speculates that it may be because such people have stayed under the radar. They never married perhaps, or they entered into sexless marriages, or they had sex without wanting to. Unlike homosexuality, she noted, asexuality has never been illegal.
Society has not always accepted it, however. As early as the Middle Ages, Dr. Abbott said, "nonconsummation of marriage" was considered "an insult to the sacrament of marriage" and a ground for divorce.
Asexuality, she noted, is distinct from celibacy, which implies a conscious decision to stifle a desire for sex. What appears to be the only published study of asexuality - which defined it as a lifelong lack of sexual attraction to either men or women - found that 1.1 percent of adults may be asexual. The figure was drawn from a survey of 18,000 Britons who were interviewed in 1994 about sexually transmitted diseases. The data were reanalyzed by Dr. Anthony F. Bogaert, a psychologist at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, who published his findings last August in The Journal of Sex Research.
Dr. Bogaert found that 44 percent of those expressing no interest in sex were either married or living with partners or had been in the past.
One might assume that by avoiding sex and all the emotions and responsibilities that go with it, let alone the health risks, asexuals might have a comparatively easy life.
"But I think we exchange all that for a different set of trouble," Mr. Jay said. "Sex is very central to life in a lot of ways, and one of the real challenges of being asexual is trying to figure out where you fit."
That problem typically arises during the teenage years. "I knew when I was 16 or 17 that sex was just something that seemed tremendously important to everybody else but that I just didn't get," said David Warner, 55, a technical writer and editor in a Virginia suburb of Washington.
Like many other asexuals, Kate Goldfield, 21, a student at Goucher College in Baltimore, once thought she might be a lesbian. "I decided I must be gay because I knew I wasn't straight," she said. But she said she has since realized that she is not sexually attracted to women either.
Asexuals say they are often told that they will change when they meet the right person or when circumstances change, but those predictions do not ring true to them.
"Why do I need sexuality in my life so much that I should divert my time and energy to finding out what it is that will turn me on?" Mr. Jay asked.
Physicians have found that they can prompt sexual desire in both women and men by giving them supplemental hormones. And some scientists suspect that hormones might be involved in some cases of asexuality. Or, Dr. Bogaert suggested, it could be that certain brain structures may have developed differently in asexual people.
Dr. Derogatis agreed that low hormone levels usually underlie low libido but said sometimes psychological mechanisms come into play. "Some of these people may have a very powerful phobia about sex," he said.
Yet a small and still unpublished survey of 1,146 people - including 41 who described themselves as asexual - conducted in online interviews by Nicole Prause, a graduate student in psychology at Indiana, found that asexuals do not resist having sex because of fear. Rather asexuals "only lack the excitatory drive," Ms. Prause said in an e-mail message.
Barry W. McCarthy, a professor of psychology at American University and an author of "Rekindling Desire," a self-help book for married couples, said many people who experience inhibited desire would be well advised to examine that inhibition because it may turn out to be the result of fear, rather than a natural desire to forgo sex. "You have to respect people's individual differences," he said. "But for the great majority of people with inhibited desire the answer is not asexuality."
People often experience periods of asexuality. Many married couples give up sex after a number of years, said Dr. Pepper Schwartz, a sociologist at the University of Washington in Seattle and the author of "Everything You Know About Love and Sex Is Wrong." "Some people are relieved to not only back-burner sex, but to no-burner it," she said.
Mr. Jay acknowledged that some asexuals have spent - or will spend - some time being sexual. "We'll have people in AVEN who get into a relationship where suddenly they enjoy sex, and we have many people who say they used to enjoy sex but really not anymore," he said. "But the majority of the community is pretty stable."
A 32-year-old man in Dallas named Keith (he declined to give his last name) said he had tried to cope with his asexuality by marrying. "I thought that getting married would fix me and suddenly I would become interested in sex." After six years he and his wife were divorced, and now he is living with a younger man in a relationship that he described as loving and romantic but free of sex.
Mr. Jay said he believes asexual people can learn to negotiate relationships with sexual people.
"In high school and early college, when I would sense that someone was hitting on me, I would go into defensive mode and be like, 'O.K., this can't work,' " he said. "But since then I've realized that if someone is going to approach me sexually, it means they like my personality."
In recent months many people have logged on to the asexuals' network Web site to learn to understand better partners or spouses who are asexual, Mr. Jay said.
"There's a real desire out there to figure out how do you manage relationships without sexuality?" he said. "We don't have anything like a self-help book we could write on this yet."
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
bisexuals and men
Date: 2005-07-10 12:06 am (UTC)i won't say that bisexual men dont exist, i just haven't met any in my travels and experiences and my partying past that are genuine.
Re: bisexuals and men
Date: 2005-07-10 12:46 am (UTC)I think the study is missing large possible factors. I haven't watched any male homosexual porn, so maybe it's out there - but I'm a straight female and I've seen some pornography. But I've never seen an attractive or sexy male in pornography. I'd be more likely to be aroused by the women, because at least they're pretty and I can try to put myself in their place.
This study doesn't say anything about asking men about their type or trying to show them images they claimed they were attracted to and measuring their arousal. I was ranting out loud about it, and it was suggested that I re-write the article as: Psychology study finds desperate need for higher quality porn.
Re: bisexuals and men
Date: 2005-07-10 12:51 am (UTC)Re: bisexuals and men
Date: 2005-07-10 01:02 am (UTC)I don't personally know any bisexual poly men currently in relationships with at least one male and at least one female, but I've certainly heard of such things in poly circles. But bi, poly, and male is a much smaller segment of the population. Bi, poly, male, and happily settled into relationships is much, much smaller still, and so it's not surprising I don't personally know any.
Although from a totally non-scientific personal observation front - bisexuality does seem more common in women than men.
Re: bisexuals and men
Date: 2005-07-10 01:30 am (UTC)Bisexual women are "cool" and "natural" and "can I watch" and "can I particpate" and whatever other drivel misogynistic men want to label them, bisexual men are "queers" and "freaks" and "effeminate" and "unnatural" and "needing an ass-whoopin'" and a lot of far more dangerous things.
Re: bisexuals and men
Date: 2005-07-10 02:57 am (UTC)Re: bisexuals and men
Date: 2005-07-10 12:26 pm (UTC)Re: bisexuals and men
Date: 2005-07-10 12:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-10 12:59 am (UTC)first, good women were expected to be asexual. So, why would anyone comment on a woman having no sex drive? It was those sluts who enjoyed sex who got the comments.
Now, a man with no sex drive is another thing... but if you wanted to hide as a male or female, you could claim (or possibly even misinterpret) it as a calling to be a monk/priest/nun. While you may be expected to be deliberately controlling your sex drive, who is going to care or mind if you don't have one? They'd probably see it as a sign of being more spiritual.
This just leaves the asexual men who marry... and really, would anyone be publicly talking about how often he has sex with his wife? If he never did, there would be whispers. But there was the need to mention that it's wrong not to consummate. In fact, Judaism has laws to allow a woman to leave the marriage if the man won't have sex with her... those were clearly needed to exist. And probably most of them had sex now and then, to get her pregnant, and then let it be. It's not like most women could complain that there men weren't having sex with them enough.
Of course, in modern times when women can, many have.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-10 01:31 am (UTC)Islam allows that, too, and in fact, encourages the woman to leave the relationship if the man isn't performing well enough to satisfy her.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-10 01:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-10 10:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-10 01:36 pm (UTC)Or not.
I'm skeptical that a study structured the way this one is described actually measures what the researchers say it measuers. I also wonder if this might not have more to say about why and what type of men identify as bisexual versus why and what type of women do so, than about the absolute existance or nonexistance of bisexuality at either end of the gender spectrum.
bisexuals and men
Date: 2005-07-10 12:06 am (UTC)i won't say that bisexual men dont exist, i just haven't met any in my travels and experiences and my partying past that are genuine.
Re: bisexuals and men
Date: 2005-07-10 12:46 am (UTC)I think the study is missing large possible factors. I haven't watched any male homosexual porn, so maybe it's out there - but I'm a straight female and I've seen some pornography. But I've never seen an attractive or sexy male in pornography. I'd be more likely to be aroused by the women, because at least they're pretty and I can try to put myself in their place.
This study doesn't say anything about asking men about their type or trying to show them images they claimed they were attracted to and measuring their arousal. I was ranting out loud about it, and it was suggested that I re-write the article as: Psychology study finds desperate need for higher quality porn.
Re: bisexuals and men
Date: 2005-07-10 12:51 am (UTC)Re: bisexuals and men
Date: 2005-07-10 01:02 am (UTC)I don't personally know any bisexual poly men currently in relationships with at least one male and at least one female, but I've certainly heard of such things in poly circles. But bi, poly, and male is a much smaller segment of the population. Bi, poly, male, and happily settled into relationships is much, much smaller still, and so it's not surprising I don't personally know any.
Although from a totally non-scientific personal observation front - bisexuality does seem more common in women than men.
Re: bisexuals and men
Date: 2005-07-10 01:30 am (UTC)Bisexual women are "cool" and "natural" and "can I watch" and "can I particpate" and whatever other drivel misogynistic men want to label them, bisexual men are "queers" and "freaks" and "effeminate" and "unnatural" and "needing an ass-whoopin'" and a lot of far more dangerous things.
Re: bisexuals and men
Date: 2005-07-10 02:57 am (UTC)Re: bisexuals and men
Date: 2005-07-10 12:26 pm (UTC)Re: bisexuals and men
Date: 2005-07-10 12:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-10 12:59 am (UTC)first, good women were expected to be asexual. So, why would anyone comment on a woman having no sex drive? It was those sluts who enjoyed sex who got the comments.
Now, a man with no sex drive is another thing... but if you wanted to hide as a male or female, you could claim (or possibly even misinterpret) it as a calling to be a monk/priest/nun. While you may be expected to be deliberately controlling your sex drive, who is going to care or mind if you don't have one? They'd probably see it as a sign of being more spiritual.
This just leaves the asexual men who marry... and really, would anyone be publicly talking about how often he has sex with his wife? If he never did, there would be whispers. But there was the need to mention that it's wrong not to consummate. In fact, Judaism has laws to allow a woman to leave the marriage if the man won't have sex with her... those were clearly needed to exist. And probably most of them had sex now and then, to get her pregnant, and then let it be. It's not like most women could complain that there men weren't having sex with them enough.
Of course, in modern times when women can, many have.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-10 01:31 am (UTC)Islam allows that, too, and in fact, encourages the woman to leave the relationship if the man isn't performing well enough to satisfy her.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-10 01:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-10 10:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-10 01:36 pm (UTC)Or not.
I'm skeptical that a study structured the way this one is described actually measures what the researchers say it measuers. I also wonder if this might not have more to say about why and what type of men identify as bisexual versus why and what type of women do so, than about the absolute existance or nonexistance of bisexuality at either end of the gender spectrum.