knickers in a twist

Open Archive Day

I'm still struggling to understand the discussion about upskirting that's been raging around here - can't really imagine that any photos taken that way will be of a quality that could get anybody excited. Also, if a paraphilia focused on such pictures exists, it won't help to send the people affected by it to jail. (If anybody asked me, I'd just suggest to un-invent smartphones and selfie-sticks.)

Wikipedia seems to think that underwear fetishism is not in fact a paraphilia, which explains why it doesn't turn up in this list of paraphilias. (Which serves as a reminder that deviant desires can be a lot worse than the issue in question. There are more than 500 that have a name, and I spotted some that involve rape, cannibalism and other horrible things.)

Still, the whole area is still insufficiently understood, and our society, which only recently stopped regarding homosexuality as one of these perversions, is poorly prepared to deal with the issues which in some cases can become a life-and-death problem.

So I guess my 2014 feature on paraphilias may still be a useful starting point for those who want a scientific angle on these things:

Paraphilia or perversion?

For anybody who wants to spend more time on the issue I recommend the book that inspired the feature, namely

Perv - the sexual deviant in all of us, by Jesse Bering.




Detail of "The swing", by Fragonard - just paint a smartphone into the guy's hand and it's totally up to date ... (Still on view at the Wallace Collection, London, but who knows for how much longer?)


PS re. the title of this post - I love female-specific metaphors, so I'll take any excuse to let my hair down and get my knickers in a twist ...

deviant desires

My latest feature in Current Biology, partially inspired by the recent book Perv – the sexual deviant in all of us, by Jesse Bering, covers the biological diversity of sexual orientations in humans (and some animals) and our society's inability to deal with this serious problem in a rational manner.

Paraphilia or perversion?

Current Biology Volume 24, Issue 17, pR777–R780, 8 September 2014
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.07.047

OPEN access to full text and PDF

Leda and the Swan, a 16th-century copy by Peter Paul Rubens, after a lost painting by Michelangelo (National Gallery, London)

perverted policy

Perv – the sexual deviant in all of us, by Jesse Bering

review

Author Jesse Bering grew up as an insecure gay boy during the AIDS crisis of the 80s and knows a thing or two about what it feels like to have a sexual orientation that the “silent majority” very loudly disapproves of. Although things in the US and most western countries have changed dramatically since then, he has kept a healthy dose of anger and mistrust against similar moral panics.

He puts his scepticism and scientific expertise to good use in analysing the problems around the people who are as ostracised today as he was in the 1980s, including paedophiles and all those with other kinds of “abnormal” sexual orientations, technically described as paraphilias.

Sexual orientation – a concept which only emerged in the late 19th century – can easily be measured today (the author has great fun describing how it is done with male subjects) and it has become clear that in boys it is fixed by the age of 10. Thus there is no way to cure a paedophile of his orientation, just as one cannot straighten out gay people.

What society could do, but has failed to do so far, is to recognise that people with certain paraphilias have a problem and need help addressing it. Harm reduction, rather than moral, naturalness or normality, is the key issue in Bering’s argument. Podophilia (foot fetishism) isn’t likely to harm anybody, but paedophiles need help to live with an orientation that would inflict suffering on children if they lived out their secret urges.

Currently, society tends to label them evil (contrary to the scientific evidence showing that they haven’t chosen their orientation) and heaps so much shame on them that some resort to child murder rather than risking exposure of their sexual transgression.

Bering points to scientific evidence showing that in places where child porn was temporarily legally available, child abuse was less prevalent than when it wasn’t, suggesting that such material, repulsive as it is to the rest of us, doesn’t encourage transgression but rather provides an outlet and reduces crime.

These findings create a first-class philosophical dilemma – would it be ok to recycle confiscated child porn to offer it as a pressure valve to known paedophiles who might otherwise go out and stalk children? Even though the making of that material presumably harmed children in the past? And does it make sense to incarcerate “hands-off” offenders, i.e. people whose only crime is to have indecent images stored on their computers, if these very images may have stopped them from doing worse?

A possible solution that the author appears to support would be to allow computer animation material to be produced and consumed. Strictly following the harm reduction idea this would make sense, as nobody is harmed in the production of such footage, and if it helps to reduce actual harm to actual children, it must be a good thing, right? Now try explaining that to the media outlets with the biggest megaphones …

Combining passion rooted in his own experience with an impressive writing talent, Bering has distilled a difficult subject matter into a fascinating book. It may still take a few decades until society (any society on the planet, really) is ready to extend evidence-based policy to the unspeakable issues addressed here. If Bering’s book helps to speed up progress just a little bit, it will be remembered as a huge achievement.

I admit that the cover design is kind of clever, but it might create problems if you do your reading on public transport ...

PS: as I usually do, I also tried posting a version of this review on the amazon UK page of the book. Strangely it hasn't shown up there.

a naked paradox

Book review:

Die Nackten und die Tobenden

Ernst Horst

Blessing Verlag 2013

This summer was perfect for being out and about with nothing but a sun hat, and the perfect book to enjoy with that would be one about the weird and wonderful cultural history of nudism in (western) Germany, from its beginnings until ca. 1970.

At the heart of this book is an appreciation of the many nudism magazines which blossomed in the 1950s and 1960s, partly thanks to buyers who weren’t necessarily nudists - although both the magazines and the nudists’ associations sometimes connected to them would strenuously deny any kind of erotic subtext to their publications filled with pictures of beautiful naked people (the cover of the book shows a typical cover photo from one of those magazines). This commercially successful double life ended when the unstoppable rise of openly erotic magazines like Playboy (which launched a German edition in the early 70s) deprived them of a large part of their audience.

This paradox is to me the most intriguing aspect of organised and card-carrying nudism to this day, but it was even more pronounced in the prohibitive climate of the 1950s. Nudists were fighting for the right to be different, to indulge in the minority interest of running around in their “Lichtkleid” (i.e. only dressed in light), confronting a catholic/conservative society that saw nothing but sin in nudity. At the same time, however, they were just as keen to be seen as normal people who had no links to anything unspeakable like sex, promiscuity, or homosexuality. Rather than fighting for a more open-minded society, they chose to campaign only for their lifestyle to be accepted as normal, while everybody else who fell outside the norms could go to hell. Ironically, there was no such battle in the GDR, as nudism was one of the liberties tolerated by the regime.

Ernst Horst previously published a book about Erika Fuchs, the highly influential translator of Disney comics, which I still have to read. Here he adopts the pose of an amateur anthropologist somewhat restricted by the scope of what magazines he can find on flea markets and what information he can search on the web. I wouldn’t mind that so much, except that he talks a little bit too much about writing the book, instead of actually covering the subject matter. Apart from that gripe, however, this is a cultural history well worth reading, regardless of whether you’re sporting tan lines or not.

O

O: The intimate history of the orgasm
Jonathan Margolis
Century, 2003

Der Mensch wird auf natürlichem Wege hergestellt, doch empfindet er dies als unnatürlich und spricht nicht gern davon. Kurt Tucholsky, Der Mensch

Every one of the seven billion humans alive today, as well as everybody who has lived before, owes their life to at least one person having an orgasm, as Margolis points out at the end of this book. (Although twins and sperm-donor children may have to share one, I might have added.) When it’s off its reproductive duty, the orgasm is free and healthy, though short-lived fun accessible to most people. So why have dominating cultures and religious creeds demonised it for centuries, insisting that women should feel no sexual pleasure at all, and men should limit theirs to procreation?

Following the cultural history of sexual pleasure – for which he uses “the orgasm” as a shorthand – Margolis gives a broad overview of the shifting attitudes towards it. His history starts off a bit shakily with speculations on stone-age sex, where he repeatedly admits that we don’t really know what went down, but then continues to speculate anyhow.

The writing gets much stronger as soon as the killjoy tendencies of the Christian church start to kick in, which he contrasts with the more liberal attitudes in other cultures including ancient China and India. Margolis argues convincingly, for instance, that the restrictive sexual morals of the catholic church, gradually getting worse as its power grew, also infected other cultures and religions, which started out with a much more relaxed attitude than they have today.

The general perception is that this anti-orgasmic ideology peaked in Victorian times and that things have gradually improved since then, with things like the Kinsey report, the Lady Chatterley trial, and the pill representing the much-cited milestones on our way back to a more natural and reasonable attitude to our own reproductive biology.

Arriving at the present day, one is tempted to think we live in the best of all times and have overcome most of the religious hang-ups. Except that fundamentalism is on the increase, and some of today’s dominating cultural forums play by rules that are downright Victorian. For instance, no breastfeeding pictures are allowed on facebook, and a female nipple on a cinema screen is deemed off-limits for children (who, on the other hand, are allowed to watch people getting murdered). So I wouldn’t quite share the author’s optimism that we’re at the beginning of an age of enlightenment. Things can slip back fairly quickly.

There isn’t much new material or original thought in this work, and it could have done with more thorough editing, but there are lots of lovely quotes and factoids to enjoy along the way, from the pharaohs’ duties in fertilising the Nile with their own seeds to J. Edgar Hoover’s admission that the FBI is powerless against the almighty “oral-genital intimacy.” I am particularly grateful that the author mentioned a book from 1839 with the intriguing title The women of England: Their social duties, and domestic habits. I found that it has actually been re-issued recently and is available to buy.

Thus, as a “review” drawing on a vast range of sources, O is certainly worth reading.

Cover of the Italian edition - very similar to my English edition though.

PS: It is really weird that I seem to have missed this when it came out, especially as I translated/edited Lust and Love in 2004/05, so would have had my eyes wide open for related works. I think it must have been comprehensively ignored by the media around here. I only discovered it a month ago in one of those bookshops where every book is £2. So it was cheaper than the Saturday edition of our newspaper, come to think of it, and it's very good value at that kind of price.

sexual politics

My latest feature investigates the important question why so many stupid things are said and done at the interface between sex and politics, pegged to Todd Akin's remarks on rape victims not getting pregnant, but I think the stupidity in this field is eternal.

It is a serious problem, but on the other hand it's also an opportunity to make fun of ridiculous things, so I should admit that writing this was as much fun as one can have with one's clothes on (to tick the only sex-related clichee that I haven't used in the article itself).

Anyhow, you have been warned, 18+ readers only are invited to read the full story in today's issue of Current Biology.

When reproductive biology becomes political

Current Biology, Volume 22, Issue 18, R779-R781, 25 September 2012, doi:10.1016/j.cub.2012.09.006

Read the story in HTML and PDF format (NB: my features remain on free access only until the next issue appears, i.e. normally 2 weeks, sometimes 3, and they return to free access a year after publication)

ecce homo

When I was 18, there was some kind of party involving my dad’s work colleagues in our garden. Observing from the sidelines, I noted that one of the secretaries wasn’t much older than me. She was polished to perfection, all fake smiles, polite phrases, small talk and social graces. As a grumpy teenager who had none of these attributes and gloriously failed to see their point, I probably wondered how much voltage you need to convert a human being into this kind of robot.

Later that night, it fell to me to drive this very same robot home, and during a half-hour drive I was surprised to find that there was a human being behind that robot façade. I don’t recall what we talked about, but I was so impressed I might have fancied her if I hadn’t seen her other side earlier in the evening, the memory of which still scared me. (I wrote a poem about this, called ecce homo, which you’ll find below – in German.)

Now I had a similar revelation from the infamous topless photos of the woman formerly known as Kate Middleton (easy to find on tumblr). I hated the whole wedding shebang with a passion and found every one of the officially approved fake-smile photos revolting, but on seeing those paparazzi shots I got, for the very first time, the impression that there may actually be a human being behind that robotic façade.

As the editor of the Italian magazine Chi said, they show two normal human beings in love. Maybe that’s why we (here in the UK) are not allowed to see them. The monarchists don’t want us to know that there are normal human beings underneath all the fancy clothes. In that case, there actually is a very strong public interest case to be made for publication of the photos, in order to break through the deception we’re getting all the time.

It is also noteworthy that, on the travels during this affair, she put on a headscarf when visiting muslim countries where women are expected to do so, but when visiting Pacific island nations where women go topless, she didn't adopt the native dress code. Very puzzling all this.

Still, why a lively human female in her 20s would choose to live a robot’s life, remains a mystery to me, in both cases.

PS: I tend to agree with Jonathan Jones's recent comment on all this.

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I have found a lovely photo I would like to use here, just asked the photographer for permission and am awaiting response. In the meantime, enjoy the cover of Chi magazine and Steve Bell's topless royal family, and please check back tomorrow.

OK, giving up on that photo, here is plan B:

Spare a thought for poor old Kate Topping, she will have a lot of unexplained traffic on her linked-in profile this week! But seriously, while Google Germany categorically refused to censor the autocomplete algorithm just last week, when the ex-president's wife asked them to stop the auto-propagation of rumours, it looks like Google UK has decided to lend the royals a hand. Another scandal within the scandal.

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ecce homo

vorgestellt

als funktion
von erwartung
und leistung

als apparat
mit optimalem
wirkungsgrad

als kommunikations
element geölt
mit höflichkeit

doch dann
aus dem
rahmen getrennt

sieh da
ein mensch

one hundred strokes of the brush

review of

Melissa P

film by Luca Guadagnino, 2005

Based on the book “One hundred strokes of the brush before bed” by Melissa Panarello (which I haven’t read), this Italian / Spanish production describes the descent of a young girl into a series of increasingly unwise sexual encounters. It is far less explicit than the UK’s 18 certificate might suggest (unless nipples on display are nowadays sufficient reason to slap the red badge on), and it is far better than any of the comments I have read would give it credit for.

As parents we do need to be aware that for vulnerable girls, who may be low on self-esteem, there are very real dangers arising from their sexuality and from its ruthless exploitation by men of all ages. The recent phenomenon of the “loverboys” in the Netherlands, who coax schoolgirls into prostitution, shows that this is not as rare as we might have hoped.

The film handles this difficult subject tactfully. For instance, the nudity is only on display when Melissa is ensconced in the comfort of her home, either alone in her room, or in the bathroom with her beloved grandmother (whose nipples are also revealed in an old photograph – maybe that pushed the censors over the edge?). On the other hand, the more dangerous her encounters with men become, the less we get to see of them, and the more is left to the viewer’s imagination.

The film only makes limited use of language – as I understood most of the Italian without ever having learned that language, it can’t have involved any sophisticated phrases. I‘m guessing this may be on purpose, as the body and visual languages are more important to the protagonists and the movie, and lead actress Maria Velverde can express herself very eloquently without saying a word.

On the visual side, I loved the locations chosen with a great sense of place and visual effect, such as the descent into the improbably cavernous historic basement which ends up being a descent in more than one way.

Here’s another film condemned to the trash bin by people who can’t see past a bare chest, and that’s a shame.

IMDB page

amazon.co.uk




PS From the same director comes the more recent I am love, one of the few continental films that have managed to cross the English Channel recently (UK release April 2010).

Valentine's chemistry

In the round-up of German pieces published this month, we have Maya art works, arsenate eaters, disordered proteins and some seasonal musings on the chemistry of Valentine's day:

Nanopartikel zur Rettung von Maya-Kulturschätzen
Chemie in unserer Zeit
Volume 45, Issue 1, page 6, Februar 2011
DOI: 10.1002/ciuz.201190013
abstract and restricted access to PDF file

Arsenat-Verwerter: anders oder nur angepasst?
Chemie in unserer Zeit
Volume 45, Issue 1, page 9, Februar 2011
DOI: 10.1002/ciuz.201190018
abstract and restricted access to PDF file

Unordentliche Proteine
Nachrichten aus der Chemie 59, 133-4
(feature on intrinsically disordered proteins, some thoughts on this available in English here)

Valentins-Chemie
Nachrichten aus der Chemie 59, 111
(an eternal favourite, also see Cupid's chemistry)



A nicely ordered folding pattern I saw at Barcelona, while attending the conference on intrinsically disordered proteins. (Passeig de Gracia No 83, the Suites Avenue hotel, designed by architect Toyo Ito.)

Nothing is as obscene as censorship

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the verdict in the Lady Chatterley trial, arguably the beginning of free expression in this country. A lot has been written about the trial ahead of the anniversary, see for example Geoffrey Robertson’s insightful essay here. "The verdict was a crucial step towards the freedom of the written word, at least for works of literary merit," Robertson writes.



I’ve lived in the UK for the last third of this half-century since the trial, and coming from a country where censorship is explicitly ruled out by the constitution (since 1949):

Eine Zensur findet nicht statt. (Censorship does not take place.)
Grundgesetz Art. 5, Abs 1

I still find a shocking amount of censorship at work here. The ways, means and excuses have changed, of course. Today it’s not about what women and servants might read, but allegedly about protecting children (from seeing anatomical details of human beings, shock, horror).

Just two areas where I bump into outrageous censorship all the time:

First, classification of movies by the BBFC (the British Board of Film Censorship, now rebranded Classification). Our experience from 17 years is that the BBFC damages the chances of European movies to find an audience here by handing out age limits that are frankly ridiculous. Goodbye Lenin had a 15 certificate here, while in Germany anyone over the age of 6 was allowed to watch it. The effect of this is not only that it stops families from watching films that would actually have been educational for their children (like Goodbye Lenin, which deals with the reunification and the breaks it involves for people from eastern Germany). It is also extremely damaging to the commercial prospects of the films involved, and I find that more and more often the European films that I would have liked to see in the cinema here don’t even get a distribution deal. I’ve started to compile a list of such films in a recent blog entry.

Secondly, email and internet access for children at our secondary school. I recently requested information about a forthcoming school trip and received an email from the teacher referring to an attached powerpoint presentation. Only the school’s censorship system had removed the attachment – they don’t even trust their teachers. Yahoo mail is blocked on school computers so children can only use their school email addresses, which are heavily filtered. On one occasion, an email with a review of a children’s book attached was blocked. The book review had contained the word “fetish”. I have started to use the term “the Chinese authorities” when referring to whoever controls this. (Thankfully, the Chinese authorities can't read this blog, as they block blogspot as well!)

By contrast, passing through Paris on the way back from Barcelona, I was amused to see stacks of the daily paper Liberation with a very explicit sexual image on the front. The paper was outraged – about the fact that the mayor of Paris had restricted access to the exhibition of works by Larry Clark containing this image to over 18s. Accordingly, they made sure that every under-18 could now see it at every news stand in the country. Liberation spent three entire pages on spelling out how scandalous this decision was. Needless to say I bought a copy of the paper and treasure it.

So, 50 years after Penguin got the green light to publish Lady Chatterley’s lover (now republished in a special anniversary edition), there is still a long way to go towards liberating this country from censorship, but the Lady C trial certainly was an important beginning. As one of the lovely Waterstones ads in the 90s said:

Nothing in a book could be as obscene as censorship.

Tweet

nipplephobia

updated 20.10.2012

Time and again, events like the Timberlake / Jackson “nipplegate” scandal remind us that in the Anglosaxon parts of the world, the exit of the human female’s milk ducts is something so obscene that it must under no circumstances see the light of day, or of a camera. To somebody who moved into the Puritan realm only 17 years ago this is still very puzzling, as in continental Europe, for instance, the sight of this small round anatomical detail is common on beaches, in cinemas, and in art galleries. Needless to say that mannequins in French shop windows typically have nipples (see below) while their sisters here in Oxford don’t have any. Why do Anglosaxons have a problem with the simple fact that the Homo sapiens female has nipples? Why do they try to hide this aspect of the human anatomy from their children (BBFC slams a 15 age limit on anything that includes a visible one)?



Let’s investigate some of the possible explanations. You can’t get pregnant via your nipples, so I wouldn’t count them as genitalia sensu strictu, and thus they shouldn’t be covered by the same rules as the more centrally located organs of both sexes. I’ll admit that they are erogenous zones, but if the Anglosaxon rule is that all erogenous zones of the female have to remain invisible, women would also have to cover their earlobes, lips, etc, and would probably end up with a dress code that even the Taliban would approve of. Very conveniently, this rule would still allow the male of the species to walk down the high street in nothing but speedos.

Maybe it’s not about the excitability of the female but about the excitement of the onlooking male? This part of the problem is a vicious circle: if the sight wasn’t so unnaturally rare, its effect on the excitable young males would be smaller. Witness the recent report about a UK aquarium which allegedly “had to” fit a bikini to a mermaid figurehead in one of the displays, as the admiring schoolboys were causing traffic jams. Against this theoretical explanation I have to object on the grounds that I, for one, can find a beautiful face just as attractive and exciting as a well-rounded chest, so the logic of “what excites the male must be hidden” would again lead us to the Burkha.

My scientific analysis shows that we are left with exactly zero good reasons that could justify the Anglosaxon nipplephobia without also condoning the complete cover-up ideology of the Taliban and their friends. Recently, the GoTopless movement in the US has held another demonstration in support of this point. I understand that for the occasion the men put on bikini tops while the women went without. The Guardian printed a comment by Julie Bindel about the event, accompanied by a photo of a topless woman – from behind. One has to respect the state secret at all costs, it appears. (Ostensibly, they wanted to show the other photographers at the event, who were mostly male. However, I seem to recall that at most events the majority of the photographers are male. Something to do with the shape and size of those long lenses, I suspect.) What the Guardian did not mention was that the movement was launched and is supported by the Raelians, which is a bit problematic for me as they support Intelligent Design.

Anyhow, intelligently designed topless demos notwithstanding, the trend seems to be going in the other direction. As Viv Groskop reported in the Guardian recently, “hooter hiders” are tent-sized garments designed to hide breasts and babies (and most of mum, too!) during breastfeeding. Apparently, these monstrosities are already widely used in the US and are now taking over the UK. Even in connection with the process it was designed for (sorry, the process it evolved for), the nipple must not appear in public. At the risk of repeating myself, this reminds me of the burkha again. Are we quite sure that it’s safe to allow males to gawp at women’s faces, hairstyles, arms, legs? Maybe the explanation for all this is that the Taliban won the war, and nobody told me?

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PS sorry, but I just had to get this off my … err … chest, after all these years of silent suffering. Rant over now. Normal science / culture service will resume as soon as my blood pressure has returned to safe levels.

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PPS 2012 updates:

• Guardian response to Facebook's ban of breastfeeding pix
• article about naturists getting into trouble with Facebook and Google+

Julio Medem's room in Rome

UPDATE 24.10.2010 Just posted my review of the movie here.

UPDATE 9.9.2010 Amazon.co.uk lists room in rome DVD with a release date of Oct. 18, at a reasonable price of 11.99. Pre-order now before they change their mind.
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I’ve started reading a little book about my favourite film maker, Julio Medem, which just appeared this spring (by the gloriously basque-named author Zigor Etxebeste Gómez, Ediciones Cátedra 2010). I found out that he has a new film out in Spain, called Habitación en Roma (Room in Rome), which had its premiere at the Málaga Film Festival in April, and full release in May.

I’ve checked the IMDB entry and found out that there isn’t a release date for the UK (or any other country) at this point. Reading what Etxebeste writes about the new film, however, I am getting extremely worried that it may not get a UK release at all. It appears that it is a love story between two women who are undressed most of the time, and the DP uses lots of macro lenses to show the physical geography of each woman as the other would see it from very close up. Now something is telling me that the UK censors will not be looking very kindly at this approach. (Yes, I know that the C in BBFC stands for classification these days, but it still amounts to censorship, as it stops people from getting to see the films.)

So, I guess I’ll have to chase around Barcelona when I get there in October for some little backyard cinema that still shows films months after their release. Watch out for the resounding silence with which the British press will meet this film, even if it gets a UK release. Medem’s previous film, Caótica Ana, didn’t get released here (in that case it’s more likely due to the political aspects of the movie) and I don’t think it ever got mentioned anywhere, which is good for me, in a way, because my blog entry about the film emerges as the highest ranking google result in English.

Meanwhile, I looked on YouTube and found a completely marvellous “musical trailer” which is essentially a music video for the wonderful song “Loving Strangers” by Madrid folk singer song-writer Russian Red (aka Lourdes Hernández) furnished with scenes from the movie:



There is also a proper trailer, but that one is really too hot to handle for the English-speaking parts of the world.

PS One intriguing detail that I didn’t know about Medem is that his paternal grandfather, and thus the palindromic name which inspired the structures of some of his movies, came from a German family. The family history of the Medems, going back to Caspar von Medem (* 1560) is here. Note the frequency of the palindromic names Otto and Ana, which Medem used in Los amantes del circulo polar.

february

As it's february now, I've put up a new title picture for the blog (new year's resolution: new picture for every month, like a good old-fashioned wall calendar!). What looks like the road to nowhere there, is actually the much appreciated (and normally much busier) cycle path towards Oxford city centre.

It also means that Valentine's Day is coming up. If you're looking for a present for your scientifically minded love interest, I recommend:

Lust and love: is it more than chemistry?

... which I translated and edited. The book is still available in the original German edition, and has also been translated into Korean and Spanish.

Y - the missing link

In my collection The Birds the bees and the platypuses, I have included articles about the chimp genome (as compared to our own, of course) and the confusing hall of mirrors that is the human Y chromosome. Now, released online in Nature last week, the missing link has also been brought to book: the Y chromosome of the common chimp.

Surprisingly (but then again, not that surprisingly), the chimp's Y chromosome is massively more different from ours than the rest of the genome. Rapid change in the Y chromosome is easily explained by the fact that -- unlike all other chromosomes -- it doesn't have a matching partner that can serve as a quality control and backup copy. While it has evolved its own internal control mechanisms, which are responsible for the large number of repeats and mirrored sequences seen in the Y, this still means that it is much more vulnerable to mutation.

The news item in the current print issue of Nature tries to put a positive spin on it, saying it evolves faster. Well, it certainly changes faster, but not always for the better. There is a school of thinking saying that it decays and is on the way out in the long term. Lucky that our species will self-destruct before that time anyway.

Reference:

Chimpanzee and human Y chromosomes are remarkably divergent in structure and gene content
Jennifer F. Hughes, Helen Skaletsky, Tatyana Pyntikova, Tina A. Graves, Saskia K. M. van Daalen, Patrick J. Minx, Robert S. Fulton, Sean D. McGrath, Devin P. Locke, Cynthia Friedman, Barbara J. Trask, Elaine R. Mardis, Wesley C. Warren, Sjoerd Repping, Steve Rozen, Richard K. Wilson & David C. Page

doi:10.1038/nature08700

Intimate adventures of a scientist

Belle de Jour: The intimate adventures of a London call girl
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2005

This book is a bit of a cause célèbre in the UK but readers elsewhere in the world may not know that it’s the intermediate between a very successful early noughties blog and a somewhat controversial TV series starring Billie Piper, a former teen pop star and Dr Who assistant. I found a copy at Oxfam a while ago and read the first 50 pages or so, but then something else must have been more urgent and I forgot all about it. I picked it up again after the revelation that the author is a working research scientist, Brooke Magnanti, with a PhD in cancer epidemiology.

Intrigued by the strange case of Dr Magnanti and Ms. Jour (presumably she must have had a third name for the agency work?), I finished the book off quite quickly, and found it was even more fascinating to read as “The intimate adventures of a London scientist” rather than as those of an anonymous call girl.

With hindsight, it really is quite obviously the work of a scientist. In a section about comforting an acquaintance over a breakup, she concludes: “… I felt for her. I’ve been on both sides of that equation.” Similar science-inspired expressions and observations are pop up repeatedly. She often refers to her university years, though she doesn’t quite tell us what she studied and where. Or does she?

In fact, one section that is quite hilarious to read post facto is a list of “Pub Games for Whores.” One such game, designed to confuse men who try to chat you up, is to invent an “implausible occupation.” The paragraph ends:

Extra points if he actually holds that job. ‘Really? You’re an epidemiologist? What a coincidence!’ (p187)

Coincidence, indeed. The truth is in there. Also, the tabloids needn’t have bothered to chase her poor old dad. It’s in the book:

Have I mentioned that my father is an embarrassing perv? Runs in the bloodline, I suppose. (p168)

Reading the book as the work of a fellow scientist makes it quite endearing. We have all shared the same career worries at some point in our lives, after all. Although there are very few scientists who can write as well as she does. Clearly, this woman has many talents – research experience, communicates well, can deal with people even in awkward situations – so, from a society point of view, I find it troubling that she was underappreciated and unemployed for long enough to even consider prostitution.

I was glad to hear that, having explored other career paths, she’s sticking with science although her publishing success alone would probably pay the bills quite nicely. “Working in science is important to me” Magnanti told New Scientist in an interview after coming out. So good luck to her, I’m sure she will do well, and I hope that one day she’ll write about science too.

the fine art of surfacing

Fitting in with the Cupid theme of the week, I discovered this semi-submerged (emerging from the confinement of two-dimensionality? transferring between parallel universes?) galipette in the Turrill Sculpture Garden which hides behind the council library in Summertown and hosts temporary exhibitions of the work of local sculptors. I'm afraid I forgot to pick up a leaflet with the details of the sculptures, so I haven't got a clue who made this one.

how to beat the tabloids

amidst all the fall-out of the Belle de Jour story, I loved yesterday's report in the Guardian, saying that a fellow blogger alerted her when the Daily Mail got wind of it. The clever chap called Darren had figured out her identity from the fact that she appeared to be an experienced blogger even when she started blogging as BDJ, so he looked round the small circle of people in the UK blogging scene and found the right one. He set up a website which casually mentioned both her real name and her pseudonym. At the time this was of course the only website to do so (technically called a GoogleWhack), so anybody searching for both names would end up on his site and register in his visitor stats. So he could sound the alarm when the Daily Mail computers showed up, and Brooke Magnanti was able to out herself before becoming a trophy on the Mail's wall.

Which goes to show -- UK prime ministers past, present, and future take note! -- that one can beat the tabloid press if one is clever enough.

PS With hindsight, there is a clue in her publication list too. Four of the seven scientific papers she co-authored have a title starting with the word "sex". I admit that the papers are not about sex, but about sex-specific effects in cancer epidemiology, but she could have used the term gender-specific ?

Cupid in overdrive

It's been a crazy time for the interface of science and sex (which I tend to file under the label "Cupid's Chemistry" -- the preliminary title for the translation project that ended up being published as Lust and Love: is it more than chemistry?).

First everybody went batty over the fruity practices of fruit bats. Clearly, everybody else angling for next year's IgNobel prize in biology can stop trying now. There's not a chance in hell you can beat that.

Then "21st century Moll Flanders," blogger, and bestselling author Belle de Jour turns out to be a working ... scientist. On hearing the news I went looking for my copy of her first book (one of the treasures I found at Oxfam), and found I had already put it on my "Cupid's chemistry" shelf. Very prescient. Also found out she has just published her fourth one, will need catch up with the reading ... Which shouldn't be a problem, as she writes extremely well, for a scientist.

And now we have a "female viagra" which turns out not to be acting on the blood flow, but on the brain, so nothing like viagra really, except that it helps getting some action going. Flibanserin turns out to be a failed anti-depressant developed by Boehringer Ingelheim, which now was tested successfully for treatment of "hypoactive sexual desire disorder". Which leaves me wondering who (men or women) defines where the normal ends and the hypo starts. But anyhow, the drug should be around soonish. Watch out for the spams offering it cheaper.


PS -- re. comments: I'm sorry I have now been forced to add anti-spam measures to the comment handling, as the blog is attracting an increasing flow of spam comments. Word recognition will be required for all comments, and on older posts there will also be a moderation step.
And if you see any dodgy comments, _don't_ click on the links!

women doing it for themselves

There was a huge fuss in the media this week about the first sperms to be made from human stem cells. It's not at all surprising that it can be done, of course. As pluripotent stem cells can be made to produce any kind of cells (with the right incentive), they can also produce eggs and sperms.

(added 30.7. -- I hear this paper has now been retracted over plagiarism allegations, according to science magazine )

But why would one want to make artificial sperm when the natural thing is the one resource we have in zillion-fold excess over demand? There is only one reasonable answer -- people behind this are working towards making men redundant. In the future, one could easily make sure that only girls are conceived, and in order to keep fertilisation going, one would need to make sperms from stem cells. Easy as that. You can imagine the consequences (mainly positive, I happen to think) for yourself, or read this.

In a world without men, women will of course have to provide their own stimulation, as it were, and this is what this commentary is about. One of the authors used to live in our neighbourhood for a while, and I actually like her books, so I am sorry to see the imprint close down. I think the publishers have failed to read their crystal ball correctly ...

oxford laid bare

... or almost. The news today is that Oxford students have released a charity calendar with "nude" pictures of, well, Oxford students. Health warning: as always in this country, "nude" means that no specific anatomic details are visible. The rule is that children must not find out that women have nipples, or else civilisation will come to an end. So in this spirit, the students have shown as much as they can in their Oxford Undressed TravelAid Charity Calendar, but a few burning questions remain.

* Did they really take the outdoors pix in the locations shown, or did they shoot the locations and then photoshopped naked students in? I have a horrible suspicion that it may be the latter. Next time I want to be invited to the photoshoot to testify that the pix are for real.

* The woman holding the cello in the string quartett picture is anything but a cellist. I can spot about 10 mistakes in her posture and and the way she holds the instrument and the bow. My daughter's cello teacher would have a heart attack if any of her students sat down with a cello like that, let alone pretended to play it like that. (and believe me, I have seen a naked cellist before!)

* The library shot looks like the library where I often work, I wonder when they took that one ?

I think I'll survive without this calendar, for some better photos I recommend:
VIEW fotocommunity.