Catching up on my articles
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/07/us/07haggard.html?th&emc=th
February 7, 2007
Ousted Pastor ‘Completely Heterosexual’
By NEELA BANERJEE
Forced by a gay sex scandal to resign as president of the National Association of Evangelicals, the Rev. Ted Haggard now feels that after three weeks of intensive counseling, he is “completely heterosexual,” says an overseer of the megachurch Mr. Haggard once led.
The church official, the Rev. Tim Ralph, said in an interview published yesterday by The Denver Post that Mr. Haggard had also told the board of overseers that his only sexual relationship involving another man had been with Michael Jones, the onetime Denver prostitute who exposed that three-year affair last fall. Mr. Jones said then that he was making it public because Mr. Haggard had acted hypocritically in promoting a constitutional amendment to bar same-sex marriage.
Mr. Haggard, who as a result of the scandal was ousted by the overseers in November as senior pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs, broke a three-month silence over the weekend when he contacted members of the church by e-mail to tell them that he was healing.
His three weeks of counseling, in Phoenix, felt like “three years’ worth of analysis and treatment,” but now “Jesus is starting to put me back together,” Mr. Haggard wrote in the e-mail message, which was published in The Colorado Springs Gazette on Monday.
“I have spent so much time in repentance, brokenness, hurt and sorrow for the things I’ve done and the negative impact my actions have had on others,” he said.
Mr. Haggard could not be reached for comment yesterday. Mr. Ralph declined through a spokeswoman to comment, and there was no response to telephone calls and e-mail to another overseer or to a New Life spokesman. But Mr. Ralph told The Denver Post that Mr. Haggard had come out of the counseling convinced of his heterosexuality.
“He is completely heterosexual,” Mr. Ralph told The Post, adding that Mr. Haggard’s homosexual activity had not been “a constant thing.”
Dr. Jack Drescher, a New York psychiatrist who is an expert on issues of gender and sexuality, said that while it was people’s prerogative to identify their sexual orientation as they wanted, the notion of being able to change that orientation was “not consistent with clinical presentations, but totally consistent with theological belief.”
“Some people in the community that Mr. Haggard comes from believe homosexuality is a form of behavior, a sinful form of behavior based on certain things in the Bible, and they don’t believe you can create a healthy identity based on sinful behavior,” Dr. Drescher said. “So they define it as a behavior that can be changed, and there is this thinking that if you control those behaviors enough, heterosexual attractions will follow.”
Mr. Haggard said in his message to New Life members that he and his wife were taking online courses to get master’s degrees in psychology, and Mr. Ralph told The Post that the oversight board had recommended to Mr. Haggard that he take up secular work.
This is the same guy who told his congregation thta he had been praying for years and years for Jesus to cure his homosexuality, and it had never worked. Now that he's in the news, it's taken three weeks.
And, dear goddess, the thought of Haggard as a psychologist frightens me.
Monday, January 22, 2007
Public Libraries: Censorship and Intellectual Freedom, a Minoritarian View
(This is a version of a short essay written for one of my classes at the Florida State University College of Information, "Introduction to Information Professions," with Dr. Renee Franklin.)
Censorship, while a problem in all types of libraries, is especially a problem in public libraries. A major role of public libraries is to inform and entertain the entire community in which the public library resides. A political reality of public libraries is that funding of the public library is in the hands of the people who reside in that community. (Some-I contend principally the censors and their allies-view funding as a means of political control.) In censorship cases in public libraries, these two realities are directly in conflict.
A case study in censorship is Alison Bechdel's book Fun Home: a Family Tragicomic. Bechdel's book was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review. The review notes that
Bechdel's slim yet Proustian graphic memoir, "Fun Home," must be the most ingeniously compact, hyper-verbose example of autobiography to have been produced. It is a pioneering work, pushing two genres (comics and memoir) in multiple new directions, with panels that combine the detail and proficiency of R. Crumb with a seriousness, emotional complexity and innovation completely its own. (Wilsey 2006)
Bechdel's memoir (which I recently read, after checking it out unfettered from my local library) contains discussion of adult themes in a manner appropriate to a young adult, and of a nature that might well prove beneficial to a young adult. As a transgendered formerly female friend of mine, who used to self-identify as a lesbian, puts it, "I grew up in a vacuum, and Alison Bechdel's work was one of the few [queer-positive materials] that was findable... that portrayed its characters as more than just their sexualities.... Her characters are open about what they are." My friend could relate to Bechdel's characters, who [in Bechdel's independent, syndicated comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For] are a full spectrum of the lesbian community, and portrayed aspects of that community-including their disagreements-in a way that no one else did. (E. L. I. Knapp, personal communication, January 17, 2007) (Note)
Fun Home does include explicit content, primarily, images of two women making love. But given the above, Fun Home has serious literary, artistic and political value (this is the Miller test, after the Supreme Court case Miller v. California that currently defines obscenity in the U.S.), and would no doubt pass muster to a higher level of scrutiny.
And yet Fun Home is, predictably, being censored.
"My concern does not lie with the content of the [graphic] novels [Fun Home and Craig Thompson's Blankets]. Rather my concern is with the illustrations and their availability to children and the community," said [Marshall, MO] resident Louise Mills, during a recent public hearing. "Does this community want our public library to continue to use tax dollars to purchase pornography?" (Twiddy 2006)
The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and the National Coalition Against Censorship jointly sent a letter to the Marshall Public Library's chief librarian, Amy Crump, at the beginning of this controversy, defending Fun Home and Blankets. (Comic Book Legal Defense Fund 2006)
The library board has since removed the two books from circulation while it develops a collections policy. (Twiddy 2006)
There are, as Rubin implies in chapter 9, two models of the library as educator of youth. The first is the majoritarian, control-oriented model, intended to protect young minds from malign influences. The second is the liberal, critical thinking-oriented model, intended to help youth to appreciate the wide variety of perspectives in the world. (Rubin 2004, pp. 399-400) Rubin's models here deal with schools and school library media centers more so than public libraries. But they apply to the youth-oriented services of public libraries equally as well. And historically the former view has been popular in public libraries. As Melvil Dewey famously said, and as Rubin quotes, "'only the best books on the best subjects' were to be collected." (Rubin 2004, p. 190) As American Library Association President Arthur E. Bostwick said in his inaugural address at the 1908 Annual Conference:
‘Some are born great; some achieve greatness; some have greatness thrust upon them.’ It is in this way that the librarian has become a censor of literature. . . Books that distinctly commend what is wrong, that teach how to sin and how pleasant sin is, sometimes with and sometimes without the added sauce of impropriety, are increasingly popular, tempting the author to imitate them, the publishers to produce, the bookseller to exploit. Thank Heaven they do not tempt the librarian. (Krug 2003, p. 1380)
But what about my friend (and those similarly situated)? What about the next time a Louise Mills decides that someone else's positive role model is her pornography? For the Louise Millses of the world, the solution is simple: do not check Fun Home out of the library. I am not advocating by this that libraries not have priorities when it comes to collection development. Instead, I am advocating two things. First, that libraries firmly maintain the distinction between selection and censorship that Rubin (2004, pp. 189-90) makes: selection is based on reasonably objective criteria, while censorship relies on nothing more than personal bias. And second, that when it comes to selection, that libraries develop collections that reflect their entire community, no matter how marginalized some of its members may be.
The broad goal of serving the library's entire community-including children and young adults who may find such materials especially valuable-is much more important than narrow moralizing, especially in the absence of proof that honest depictions of sexuality are harmful to children or young adults. (As Rubin [2004, p. 192] mentions, there is evidence that depictions of violence may actually injure this population.)
Note: My friend's situation-he is a former lesbian who is now a transgendered male-is becoming increasingly common in the lesbian community, not without controversy. See Vitello (2006).
References
Bechdel, A. (2006). Fun home: A family tragicomic. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. (2006, October 10). CBLDF sends letter to Marshall, Missouri. Retrieved January 17, 2007, from http://www.cbldf.org/articles/archives/000309.shtml
Krug, J. F. (2003). Intellectual freedom and ALA: Historical overview. In M. J. Bates, M. N. Maack & M. Drake (Eds.), Encyclopedia of library and information science [Electronic version]. New York: Marcel Dekker.
Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973).
Rubin, R. (2004). Foundations of library and information science (2nd ed.). New York: Neal-Schulman Publishers, Inc.
Twiddy, D. (2006, December 18). Library patrons object to some graphic novels. [Electronic version]. The Washington Post, pp. C03.
Vitello, P. (2006, August 20). The trouble when Jane becomes Jack. [Electronic version]. The New York Times, pp. 9.1.
Wilsey, S. (2006, June 18). The things they buried [Review of the book Fun Home]. [Electronic version]. The New York Times Book Review, pp. 9.
I'm so very sick of "protecting the children." Should I say that any book I wouldn't want a six year old reading doesn't belong in a public library?
And finally, something a bit amusing.
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,72524-0.html?tw=rss.columns
Teledildonics Takes a Step
*
By Regina Lynn
02:00 AM Jan, 19, 2007
Editor's note: Some links in this story lead to adult material and are not
suitable for viewing at work. All links of this nature will be noted with
"NSFW" after them.
"If you wanted to be a porn star," says Emi, a spokeswoman for Segment, "but
you didn't want to get an agent and a manager and all that, you could use
our products and build a fan base and get famous."
She smiles brightly and proceeds to show me a product suite from her
Japan-based company (NSFW) that
is the latest entry into consumer-level teledildonics. It's an example of
what happens when folks from diverse disciplines combine their skills to
create new ways to merge sex and tech -- and then introduce the result to
the adult industry.
In this case, it's a collaboration between software developers and a product
designer with a background in medical devices. And it moves teledildonics in
an interesting direction.
Unlike HighJoy (NSFW) and Sinulator
(NSFW), which connect two people's sex toys in
real time over the internet, the Segment system combines video and tactile
input into a single file that your fans -- or your lovers -- can play back
at their leisure.
The input device, called Run, is an onyx shaft with a bulb on one end and
sensors spaced along its surface. You use it in tandem with a webcam or
camcorder and the Segment software. When you stroke the device with your
hands, or lips, or whatever, the software captures the placement and
pressure of each touch and embeds the signals into the video.
During playback, those signals are translated and sent to another USB
device, Segment's Takumi toy. The Takumi is a soft sheath surrounded by nine
motors and encased in a plastic shell that looks like a chrome bowling pin.
("So it is more discreet sitting there on your desk," Emi explains.)
The sensors on the Run correspond to the motors in the Takumi. Touching one
end of the input device activates the motor near the opening of the sheath.
Touching the other end of the stick activates motors deeper inside the
sheath.
Segment is marketing the system to webcam actresses and porn stars as a
shared-revenue proposition. Record a few videos, upload them to the Segment
website, promote yourself like crazy, and collect 40 percent of the profits
whenever your videos sell.
Certainly, if you already have a following as a webcam performer, offering
archived videos with this additional touch seems like a simple way to
increase your income. Assuming enough men will purchase the Takumi to make
it worth your while.
And yet my first thought as I recorded and played back a video of myself was
not about adult entertainment but rather about the opportunities for lovers.
At first, I was annoyed that the stimulation is one-way, from the stick to
the sleeve. But then I realized that the Takumi is a man's answer to the Je
Joue sensual massager.
The Je Joue comes with software that enables you to create custom
stimulation patterns -- swirls and twirls, up and down, vibration -- at
various speeds and intensities. You download the pattern to the handset,
disconnect it from the USB cable, and take yourself off to play.
Men and women can both create the patterns. But the massager itself is
designed for women; it is a rare man who would find it a satisfying physical
experience.
Likewise, men and women can create encoded videos with Segment. But the
focus is on the man's physical stimulation, and the real-time cybersex only
goes one direction: from the input-only Run to the response-only Takumi.
Yet for both the woman's Je Joue and the man's Takumi, if the mental
connection is there, the physical stimulation does not have to involve all
partners at once.
It's like oral sex. Sometimes you want the excitement of simultaneous,
mutual stimulation. But other times -- most times, in my case -- you want
the focused pleasure of moseying down one at a time.
Why wouldn't I enjoy going at it with the Run and watching my man feel the
results, hands-free? That certainly beats deep-throating a dildo on webcam
to give him the visual while he takes care of things at his end.
His pleasure, from the Takumi's nine motors and my wantonness, would
heighten my pleasure. If I needed genital stimulation at the same time,
there's no reason I couldn't reach for another toy of my own. Goodness knows
that as a woman, I have thousands of options available to me.
And I like the opportunity to share sexual experience asynchronously, too. I
can see myself creating a video in which I act out an erotic story that I've
written. A lover could read the story or watch the video; either way, he has
the actions right there in his lap.
I can imagine a virtual Run in the hands of a sexy avatar in an erotic
world, the Takumi enabling you to feel the avatar's "hands" on your flesh as
you interact.
I almost didn't write about Segment this week, because for all its
potential, the product isn't available yet -- not even an advance press
sample for review. (Or if it is, it's a conspiracy and they are all lying to
me.)
Emi says "end of March" for general release but in software development
terms that translates into "we really hope by September." The Run itself
wasn't ready for the Adult Entertainment Expo
booth last week,
although I was able to admire its light weight and be amused by the shape of
the bowling pin sheath.
When I do get my hands on a review version, I'll dive more deeply into the
practical concerns. Is the encoded video file too big for e-mail? How good
does the Takumi feel for a man, really? How varied is the stimulation? How
much editing can you do before exporting the final video? What if the Run
gets wet or sticky?
For now, I'm just glad to see more people attempting to push teledildonics
forward. The technology is here and continues to evolve; it's the money, the
patents, the legal issues and the social shame that still hangs over the
more overt ways we apply tech to sex that prevents progress.
I've spoken with a handful of entrepreneurs over the years who were working
on various interactive appliances who have encountered so many obstacles,
technical and otherwise, that they have given up or put their projects on
hold indefinitely.
It's too bad, because combining physical stimulus with communications
technologies is such a logical development, and I can't think of a better
way to encourage such innovation than sex.
See you next Friday,
Regina Lynn