Prison lingo 101

Have you ever wondered what the term "Sanchez" means in prison? Or "silent beef"? Ask no further. A modestly-titled but brilliant "Glossary of Prison Terms" leads off the book, Dead Man Walking: Teaching in a Maximum-Security Prison, by W. Reason Campbell, published in 1978. (It predates Sister Helen Prejean's book by the same name about the death penalty.) Campbell's book chronicles his years teaching English in the California prison system. His glossary seems to capture the cruelty, deprivation, and black humor that pervade our nation's penal institutions.

I can't speak to their continued usage, but here's a selection of gems from the glossary.

Bricks. Life outside the joint. A person "hits the bricks" when he is released from jail.

Christmas tree. Bringing a woman to orgasm. The term conjures up the image of the long, pointed, green fir tree with the star on top, the the bright candles burning and swaying, the tinsel and the ornaments, the merriment and the spirit of giving. I remember once a student in describing a lost love said, "She didn't love me, but she loved the Christmas tree."

Cold dude. Someone who can perform an act without regard to human emotions or human decency. The term can be used to describe anyone from a sadistic guard to a calculating holdup man. Many inmates have respect for this kind of person.

Duck. To make a duck of someone is to make him look foolish. It derives, I suppose, from the ungainly walk of such a fowl. It gives inmates pleasure to see someone make a duck of a free person.

Duke. A prison leader. Prison authorities are always trying to identify dukes and work through them. However, once a man becomes identified with the power structure, he loses the respect of his peers and destroys his dukedom.

Fat-butt boy. A young prison homosexual. When you are intolerably horny, you go to a fatt-but boy.

Fox. A girl.

Front. To put on a big show, to pretend to be something you aren't. For instance, inmates who talk very tough are usually in jail for less serious crimes. The ones in for very serious crimes don't front about their deeds at all.

Gunsill. A loud-talking aggressive inmate. They come, usually, from one of the Youth Authority facilities, and after a while the older inmates sober them.

Hank literature. Literature written by inmates for masturbatory purposes. It circulates privately, is illegal, and is utterly without redeeming social value.

Joint-converted Muslim. A man who has joined the Black Muslims in prison. He is extremely zealous in his new religion, excessively polite and formal with white people, and usually boiling inside with anger.

Sanchez. The other guy. The man who marries or makes love to your wife or girlfriend while you are in the joint. When an inmate would express concern about a woman, someone who invariably say, "Don't worry about that woman. Sanchez will take care of her."

Shank. A knife. It can be a toothbrush handle filed to a deadly point. It can be a bed spring. It's amazing how many things can be converted into a deadly weapon.

Shine on. To complete ignore another person. It's a necessary process where men live in a climate of enforced proximity. Inmates work out their own petty differences by this process. It avoids physical confrontations and has a devastating effect on people who have been conditioned to noisy abusive responses.

Silent beef. Crimes you were suspected of committing for which you were neither tried nor sentenced. When the parole board has a hearing they go into these other alleged crimes with the defendant. The parole board judges the man on his complete past record and is, in effect, judge and jury for these alleged other crimes. Many inmates feel that a silent beef is more important than the crimes for which they were convicted.

Skin search. To strip completely naked and be searched for weapons or contraband. A guard has the right to skin search an inmate at any time for any reason.

Stone fox. A beautiful girl.

Wife. A male girlfriend in prison.

Zoo-Zoos and Wham-Whams. Goodies and candy bars bought at the canteen.

HIV disclosure in the bedroom

In Ohio, as in many other states, it's a crime for an HIV+ person to engage in any sexual activity with another person (apart from kissing) without first disclosing his or her HIV status. It doesn't matter whether the sexual activity could result in HIV transmission (it doesn't have to be intercourse; use your imaginations, people), or whether the partners used protection, or even whether someone actually contracted HIV as a result of the encounter. At the end of the night (or day, if you're into that), sexual activity without HIV disclosure constitutes felonious assault, a rather serious felony of the second degree, according to the Ohio Revised Code 2903.11. A conviction carries a minimum prison term of two years and a maximum of eight years.

Is this law a good idea? Is it likely to reduce the risk of contracting HIV? No public health organization has supported such laws - which is one indication that they're based on fear and hysteria and not on a 'smart-on-crime' approach (i.e., does the law make us safer?).

Consider the law's perverse incentives: In the most basic case, an HIV+ person has sex with an HIV-negative person. They use a condom. The HIV+ person (perhaps in the heat of the moment) fails to disclosure his/her status. From the perspective of the law, it doesn't matter that they used protection or that (say) the other person walked away without contracting HIV. If the relationship turns sour from some reason, the HIV-negative person could easily call the police. The HIV+ person, unquestionably guilty, would go to prison for at least two years. With those potential consequences, the HIV+ person probably wouldn't say in the morning, "Hey, I screwed up, and even though we used a condom, you may want to get yourself tested just to be sure."

Who really suffers in that situation? The unsuspecting partner, if infected, could live for years without accessing life-prolonging treatment and could possibly pass along the virus to others.

On the other hand, the very existence of the law might encourage more people to disclose. Then their would-be partners could make more informed decisions about whether to have sex in the first place. The deterrence effect does bring a certain virtue to the law, but obviously its success depends on whether the law actually leads to greater disclosure. After all, how many people even know such a law exists? And studies indicate that people respond not to the severity of punishment, but to the likelihood. So I doubt an HIV+ person would disclose simply because there's a law on the books. They'd probably think: "It won't ever be an issue since we're using a condom."

Meanwhile, the intended result of the disclosure law - being aware of a partner's HIV status - can be achieved another way, without resorting to the criminal justice system: by educating people to ask. Asking, though sometimes awkward, is essential simply because some thoughtless people - law or no law - probably wouldn't disclose except if asked directly, "Do you have HIV/AIDS?"

No matter the answer, it's obvious one should use condoms. A fifth of people with HIV don't know they have the virus. So some might argue that they'd be wearing a condom regardless, that disclosure wouldn't change their choice to have sex, that the law then serves no purpose. But personally, if I learned that a potential partner had HIV, my risk-adverse self wouldn't bring her home. So yes, I absolutely support disclosure. Even with a condom, I would want to know.

But that doesn't mean I support a disclosure law. Making non-disclosure a crime, with severe penalties, might seem like a good idea until you consider that deterrence works only when people think they might get caught. In this instance, I don't think it would work well. Instead, criminalizing non-disclosure sets up incentives that undermine people's health. How many HIV+ people have woken up thinking, "I should have disclosed last night, but now there's no way I would."

Bottom line (and attempted maxim): It can be a bad idea to enforce a good idea.

What if?

See xkcd's latest comic, titled, "Unsatisfied": (click for larger image)


Interpretation #1:

Regret, doubt, "shoulda woulda"... He wishes somehow he was dating the other gal.

Interpretation #2:

The text behind the image says, "Forever comparing, never evaluating on any external scale. If you were a search function, you'd break the nlogn barrier." With no objective measure for relationships, we can only compare to what we already know. Imagination aside, he doesn't actually want to be with the other gal. It's just that she somehow became a benchmark.

Interpretation #3:

The tragedy is not, despite first appearances, the incorrect choice of partner or the limiting structure of monogamy. It's that we really have no basis for comparison at all. It's just impossible - barring of course, a time-traveling machine allowing us to live out alternate realities. As much as we might dream about it, we simply cannot know what might have been if we had dated someone else, gone to a different school, or pursued a different career.

Interpretation #4:

He's just one of those chronically unsatisfied people. In general, I don't think that's such a bad orientation in life... Unsatisfied people, perhaps in yearning for more, tend to be more politically engaged. They "dream things that never were," as Ted Kennedy eulogized RFK, "and say why not." But politics aside, maybe that's not such a great model for romance.

Here's the "grass is always greener" interpretation. No matter what, he'd be unsatisfied.

Interpretation #5:

Not much of an "interpretation," but stick-figure sex is actually quite hot.

The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao

Warning: Serious spoilers. Ignore this post and first go read the book: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), the Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel of Dominican-American author Junot Díaz.

Seriously, if you haven't read the book, put down the blog.

The book centers around a fat Dominican boy named Oscar de Leon growing up in Paterson, New Jersey, and just dying to get laid. Though we don't know it for several hundred pages, the seemingly omniscient narrator is actually Yunior, Oscar's college roommate and the former boyfriend of Lola, Oscar's sister. Yunior narrates several generations of Oscar's family, going back to mid-1900s Dominican Republic under dictator Rafael Trujillo. Trujillo haunts both the book and the family: "He was our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator, a personaje so outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up" (2).

Oscar, a prolific lonely writer, seems like his own caricature: He's obsessed with science fiction, fantasy, comic books, and women. Oscar can't escape the "fukú," the curse that's plagued his family and according to a footnote, perhaps all of Latin America since colonization. It's tormented his sister Lola, his mother Beli, and his once-illustrious grandfather Abelard, killed by Trujillo.

Though it went a bit overboard at times, I loved the writing as much as the saga.

As Yunior narrates, Oscar just couldn't find love:

“Dude weighed 307 pounds, for fuck’s sake! Talked like a Star Trek computer! The real irony was that you never met a kid who wanted a girl so fucking bad. I mean, shit, I thought I was into females, but no one, and I mean no one, was into them the way Oscar was. To him they were the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega, the DC and the Marvel.” (173)

Oscar, though effectively celibate, did manage to torment himself with close female friends:

“Oh, they got close all right, but did they ever kiss in her car? Did he ever put his hands up her skirt? Did he ever thumb her clit? Did she ever push up against him and say his name in a throaty voice? Did he ever stroke her hair while she sucked him off? Did they ever fuck? Poor Oscar. Without even realizing it he’d fallen into one of the Let’s-Be-Friends Vortexes, the bane of nerdboys everywhere. These relationships were love’s version of a stay in the stocks, in you go, plenty of misery guaranteed and what you got out of it besides bitterness and heartbreak nobody knows. Perhaps some knowledge of self and of women. Perhaps.” (41)

After college, he worked as a substitute teacher, naturally identifying with the little guy.

“Every day he watched the ‘cool’ kids torture the crap out of the fat, the ugly, the smart, the poor, the dark, the black, the unpopular, the African, the Indian, the Arab, the immigrant, the strange, the feminine, the gay – and in every one of these clashes he saw himself. … Sometimes he tried to reach out to the school’s whipping boys, offer them some words of comfort, You are not alone, you know, in this universe, but the last thing a freak wants is a helping hand from another freak. These boys fled from him in terror.” (264-5)

Yunior is the opposite sort of persona. He dates Lola and yet can't seem to help himself. He's the classic anti-feminist villain, and Lola finally bids good riddance. Years later, Yunior reflects:

“Lola’s hair is long now and never straightened; she’s heavier and less guileless, but she’s still the ciguapa of my dreams. Always happy to see me, no bad feelings, entiendes. None at all.
Yunior, how are you?
I’m fine. How are you?
Before all hope died I used to have this stupid dream that shit could be saved, that we would be in bed together like the old times, with the fan on, the smoke from our weed drifting above us, and I’d finally try to say words that could have saved us.
______ ______ ______.” (327)

Some might criticize this book for Yunior's raunchy narration on sex and female anatomy, but justice, in all its cruelty, reappears at the end: The womanizer can't keep the one he truly loves.

And Oscar, meanwhile, never the lady's man, finds love, confidence, and perhaps even repose. While visiting the Dominican Republic with family, he falls for his neighbor, Ybon. She doesn't seem to return his love, or at least can't - she's engaged (loosely speaking) to "the capitan," a sort of regional dictator complete with paramilitary goons. The goons beat Oscar mercilessly. His family takes him back to New Jersey, but Oscar, as if under a spell, returns on his own. He lasts 27 days.

“They looked at Oscar and he looked at them and then he started to speak. The words coming out like they belonged to someone else, his Spanish good for once. He told them that what they were doing was wrong, that they were going to take a great love out of the world. Love was a rare thing, easily confused with a million other things, and if anybody knew this to be true it was him. He told them about Ybon and the way he loved her and how much they had risked and that they’d started to dream the same dreams and say the same worlds. He told then that it was only because of her love that he’d been able to do the think that he had done, the thing they could no longer stop, them if they killed him they would probably feel nothing and their children would probably feel nothing either, not until they were old and weak or about to be struck by a car and then they would sense him waiting for them on the other side and over there he wouldn’t be no fatboy or dork or kid no girl had ever loved; over there he’d be a hero, an avenger. Because anything you can dream (he put his hand up) you can be.” (321-2)

Yes, they killed him, but Oscar, that fat New Jersey geek, somehow emerged the hero. He feared nothing, not even death, for love (nevermind, I guess, that his pursuit also imperiled his lover).

“Turns out that toward the end of those twenty-seven days the palomo did get Ybon away from La Capital. For one whole weekend they hid out on some beach in Barahona while the capitan was away on ‘business,’ and guess what? Ybon actually kissed him. Guess what else? Ybon actually fucked him. Praise be to Jesus! He reported that he’d liked it, and that Ybon’s you-know-what hadn’t tasted the way he had expected. She tastes like Heineken, he observed. ... He wrote that Ybon had little hairs coming up to almost her bellybutton and that she crossed her eyes when he entered her but what really got him was not the bam-bam-bam of sex - it was the little intimacies that he’d never in his whole life anticipated, like combing her hair or getting her underwear off a line or watching her walk naked to the backroom or the way she would suddenly sit on his lap and put her face into his neck. The intimacies like listening to her tell him about being a little girl and him telling her that he’d been a virgin all his life. He wrote that he couldn’t believe he’d had to wait for this so goddamn long. ... He wrote: So this is what everybody’s always talking about! Diablo! If only I’d know. The beauty! The beauty!” (334-5)

I am sure I've missed some key themes, discussed in a Slate interview with the author: masculinity, diaspora, family dynamics, the haunting legacy of the Trujillo regime. But more immediately, I walked away with the tragic, almost cosmic, sense that there is such a thing as a better or a worse life. That love is liberation and "fukú" all at once. And that Oscar, in boarding an airplane back to the Dominican Republic in the ultimate act of desperation, determination, and death - indeed, the very epitome of Free Will - seems bound instead by family history and the "laws of nature":

“Yunior?
What?
Are you awake?
If it’s about Star Trek –
It’s not about Star Trek. He coughed. I have heard from a reliable source that no Dominican male had ever died a virgin. You who have experience in these matters – do you think this is true?
I sat up. Dude was peering at me in the dark, dead serious.
O, it’s against the laws of nature for a dominicano to die without fucking at least once.” (174)

3 cartoons

Three excellent cartoons from this week's New Yorker (full collection here):

On prison rehabilitation... The cartoon recalls a book by Virginia prisoner Jens Soering entitled, An Expensive Way to Make Bad People Worse. Prisons do not prevent crime or promote rehab in a cost-effective way (if much at all). And for low-level or drug offenders, we have alternatives.


On the strange phenomenon of tenure:


On the possibility of non-monogamy versus "mating for life":

SEX in America

If you want to talk politics in America, you've got to talk about sex: adultery, abortion, homosexuality, teen sexuality, abstinence education, sex education, family values... Do other countries operate this way or do we still suffer from Puritan tendencies? Perhaps our national discomfort stems from our inability to resolve the conflicting messages that people continue to receive about sex - that it's dirty and that we should therefore save it for the one we love. Huh?

Sex grabbed headlines today after Bristol Palin was interviewed about her sudden motherhood (transcript, video). She reportedly declared that abstinence is "not realistic." But here's her entire sentence, in all its glory: "I think abstinence is, like -- like, the -- I don't know how to put it -- like, the main -- everyone should be abstinent or whatever, but it's not realistic at all." To me, what stood out in that sentence and throughout the interview, was just how juvenile, how adolescent, she was. "I love being a mom," she said, "it's awesome." And: "I wished it would have happened in, like, 10 years so I could have a job and an education and be, like, prepared and have my own house and stuff." That sends a powerful message: that kids are still kids and shouldn't be having kids. But Bristol sends a mixed message: while she'd "love to be an advocate to prevent teen pregnancy," her son "brings so much joy, I don't regret it at all."

Gov. Sarah Palin enters at the end of the interview and says of her daughter's pregnancy: It's "an absolute shock that it happened." Uh, nope, not when you're having sex without birth control.

But my real point: I wish people would stop arguing about whether abstinence is "realistic," as in realistic to expect from teens, without noting the evidence: Abstinence education doesn't work.

Meanwhile, 60% of Americans in a 2009 poll have no objection to premarital sex, while fewer than a third (32%) disagree (51% among people 65 and older). Thirty years ago, the numbers were 56% to 37%. If that's not reason enough to teach real sex ed and make condoms available, Dan Savage adds a compelling point about the pernicious and paradoxical impact of abstinence education, particularly when combined with homophobia: Straight kids, feeling pressure to preserve their virginity, have (unsafe) anal intercourse (which somehow doesn't count) instead of vaginal, while gay kids, feeling pressure to prove their straightnees, have vaginal intercourse. WTF.

Condom teletubbies?

From the people who gave us the Kama Sutra, comes a new video that leads the way in promoting safer sex. See this 6.58-minute clip produced by the International HIV/AIDS Alliance in India with help from artists from the Nrityanjali Academy. The dancing condoms sing in Telugu in an appeal aimed at the estimated 60,000-70,000 sex workers in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. (Wouldn't it be great to see people dressed up as condoms on American television?) Besides the Indian video, be sure to check out this hilarious commercial from France.

Better dead than deflowered

Better to contract HIV/AIDS than to spill his seed in a condom. Or so espouses the Catholic Church. Their opposition to contraception has contributed to millions of deaths worldwide (not to mention millions of unwanted babies). Latin America, home to 1.1 billion Catholics and 1.7 million people with HIV/AIDS is just one example. The region recorded 410,000 new cases in 2006, up from 320,000 new cases in 2004. Alberto Stella, UNAIDS coordinator for Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, considered why:

"In Latin America the use of the condom has been demonized, but if it was used during relations I guarantee the [HIV] epidemic would be eliminated in the region. ... The fact that young people become sexually active between the ages of 15 and 19 without any sexual education contributes to the spread of the virus, and evidence shows that abstinence does not work."

The Catholic News Agency, in reporting the news, insinuated that Alberto Stella put the blame on the Catholic Church to avoid admitting "the failure of the UN to stop the disease." So who's right in this blame game? To dissect: Two position underlie the Catholic view: (1) that abstinence is best, and (2) that 'abstinence education' can effectively teach people to be abstinent. The second claim is patently false. Numerous studies demonstrate that 'abstinence education' (I'm not relinquishing the scare quotes) isn't actually educating people. The first claim, by contrast, is ideological, and I won't dispute it. People have many views of the good life. The burden of liberalism is to construct a society where alternate views can flourish. So I respect that some people want to wait till marriage to breach that physical intimacy. But at risk of shedding my liberalism, I have no tolerance for those who impose their view on others (under threat of eternal damnation, of course) at the cost of real human lives. I will defend anybody's right to be wrong, but not to do wrong.

Note: previous post on religion's pernicious effect on women's health.

PETA strikes again

An animal is not just a piece of meat. A woman on the other hand... So suggests (though not directly) PETA's new ad featuring Alicia Silverstone (below). It sends a very different message than their previous, more humorous "State of Union" ad available here (warning: nudity!).



Sex sells, of course. Everything is sold through sex. So maybe it's ludicrous to expect more from PETA. In the various vegetarian circles I've traveled in (including in my pre-vegetarian days), friends often debated the impact of PETA's ads on the public's perception of the vegetarian movement. Some think PETA is more of an asset than a liability, others vice-versa. But nearly no one thinks it doesn't constitute, on some level, a liability. I find PETA's tactics disappointing because they pit feminists against vegetarians when the two should complement each other. Some who study the "sexual politics of meat" even suggest they should cooperate. I also dislike PETA for making me and my vegetarian-ness radical. But everyone has beef with PETA, and their message doesn't derail mine. Most veggies have come to consider the group a fact of life. So we move on, pick up, and find better reasons to go veg. PETA's latest ad presents a fairly simplistic reason, more-or-less amounting to: "Since I went veg, I feel great." We can do better.

Too much of a good thing

One of my duties as a bioethics research assistant is to monitor the news on a whole range of topics in health policy, clinical medicine, and global health. Well, here's what I found today:

Mom sues after IVF brings 2 babies instead of 1 (Sept 18, 2007)
Australian woman seeks $332,000 to cover cost of raising extra child

Wacky. The requested $332,000 would pay for private school fees and would allot $12,427 to compensate for time off work. But as my mother always says, "If one child takes 100% of your time, two children can't take any more." (She's a mathematician.) I handed the article to the professor here who specializes in health law and reproductive medicine, who said, "Good god! They should take both kids away!" He hopes the children will grow up to be fertility specialists.

Also not to be missed, check out the New York Post's article, "A 'Baby Bjorn' Sperm Crisis: Shortage hits wannabe parents." I actually saw the article in print, which had the additional headline, "Sperm Blank: City Shortage Causing Panic." Panic?! As the article reports, NYC sperm banks are running out of seed 'donated' (for $75 a pop) by tall, blond, blue-eyed people. Why? Because "the Food and Drug Administration banned sperm samples from 30 countries to prevent the spread of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare, fatal disorder caused by eating beef contaminated with mad-cow disease." Pictured at right is a profile of one of those handsome Nordic sperm donors, named "Oluf," who quite sadly may have no more American progeny.

How society exploits men (too)

A few weeks ago, the blog Feministing, in its usual exemplary spirit, asked readers to share what double-standards drive them crazy. It was an incredible list. Readers uncovered the subtle yet pervasive ways that we (as a society) expect more (or less) from women.

Some examples:

"Slut/Stud."

"[E]ngagement rings? Two people decide to get married, but only one of them is marked as 'taken'?"

"[The] father 'giving the bride away' at her wedding. No one gives the husband away."

"If women want to get married, they're clingy. If men want to get married, they're respectable and responsible. If women DON'T want to get married, they're weird. If men DON'T want to get married, they're normal."

"Men get wiser, more 'distinguished' looking. Women get old."

"If a man were raped, nobody would ask what he was wearing, or whether or not he'd had sex before, or how many sexual partners he'd had, or if he was walking in a bad part of town, or if he was drunk, or..."

"Boy Scouts vs. Girl Scouts. Camping vs. crafts."

"Women belong in the kitchen, unless it's attached to a restaurant."

"Lots of different methods of birth control for women, but not men."

True. To ask another question, which in no way detracts from the first: How are men victims of double-standards? In what ways does society expect more (or less) from them?

A list:

Male-on-female rape is horrible. Male-on-male rape, especially in prison, is funny.

Being proud of one's maleness is seen (in some circles) as being proud of patriarchy.

If a woman cries, she's normal. If a man cries, he's a 'pussy.'

"If a woman is selective about who she sleeps with, she's responsible; if a man is selective about who he sleeps with, he's a loser." (Offered by a Feministing reader.)

Some double-standards speak negatively of both women and men. For example: Men don't get custody because they're violent. Women do get custody - because they're natural mothers.

Finally, men as a group take the blame. War? Blame it on men. Sexism? Blame it on men. Not on some men. But all men. An example wasn't hard to find. Kira Cochrane in the Guardian considers why high-powered celebrities like Nicole Kidman continue to sell their bodies to magazines. "[N]o matter how successful they are," she concludes, "the need to be pleasing to men, to say, 'However powerful and clever I might seem, I'm just a playful, bra-baring bunny underneath,' trumps everything." Indeed, blame it on men. As a group, we are homogenized and vilified. Charlotte Perkins Gilman played with the idea in her insidious book, Herland. The result: Rather than cultivate a positive sense of maleness, young men flee from everything associated with it. Their own own bodies disgust them. If that's what it means to be a man - so the thinking goes - then I want nothing to do with it. The result: Alienation from oneself. Embarrassment of who you are. But double-standards are noxious, even when they afflict the relatively privileged.

Enough of these myths of masculinity. Men should be proud to be men.

Coetzee's grace

I couldn’t figure out what to title this entry. It’s a review of J.M. Coetzee’s book, Disgrace. The book itself won the Booker Prize in 1999 and the author won the Nobel Prize in 2003. It’s also a commentary on animal welfare, sex, and race relations in post-Apartheid South Africa. I'd give it 5 stars (out of 5).

Warning: Spoilers follow.

Middle-aged David Lurie is a professor of romantic languages at the University of Cape Town until his university cancels his department. Though he stays on as an adjunct professor of communications, he never regains his stature. Then, the middle-age professor feels himself seduced by a student named Melanie Isaacs, who reluctantly accepts his advances. But Melanie’s unhappy boyfriend alerts the press, and Lurie, though unrepentant, is forced to resign. Disgraced, he goes to live with his daughter Lucy in the rural Eastern Cape.

As one might expect, a professor of English poetry doesn’t take well to farm work, but he volunteers anyhow to help Lucy’s friend Bev at an understaffed animal clinic. Bev’s chief duty is to kill unwanted dogs. David Lurie has no great aversion to animals, but no fondness for them either. Still, he can sense their suffering, though not at first. He tells Lucy at one point: “It’s admirable, what you do, what she [Bev] does, but to me animal-welfare people are a bit like Christians of a certain kind. Everyone is so cheerful and well-intentioned that after a while you itch to go off and do some raping and pillaging. Or to kick a cat” (73). Later, though, David Lurie himself gently places the dogs’ corpses into the incinerator because he can’t bear the thought that the workmen would beat the hardened bodies with the back of shovels to make them more pliable (146).

The story unfolds in post-apartheid South Africa, where a white man like David Lurie has not only fallen from grace but also from power. He is powerless to stop an attack on his daughter’s farm by three black men who rape her and light him on fire. This event and its meaning lie at the heart of the novel. Coetzee doesn’t need to embellish the event, as amateur writers often do well beyond necessity. Everything unfolds in simple language. I should add, though, that I was frustrated with how late Coetzee introduces the scene – halfway through the book – seeing how this book-turning “afternoon of violence that shakes all his beliefs” was ominously promised on the book-flap.

I’ve never read a writer quite like Coetzee. His writing is distinctive not only in its style and simplicity, but in the way he manages to include meaningful digresses. After the attack, for example, Bev’s husband Bill Shaw sees David Lurie to the hospital. Lurie thanks him.

“‘Nonsense!’ says Bill Shaw. ‘What else are friends for? You would have done the same.’

Spoken without irony, the words stay with him and will not go away. Bill Shaw believes that if he, Bill Shaw, had been hit over the head and set on fire, then he, David Lurie, would have driven to the hospital and sat waiting, without so much as a newspaper to read, to fetch him home. Bill Shaw believes that, because he and David Lurie once had a cup of tea together, David Lurie is his friend, and the two of them have obligations towards each other. Is Bill Shaw wrong or right? Has Bill Shaw, who was born in Hankey, not two hundred kilometers away, and works in a hardware shop, seen so little of the world that he does not know there are men who do not readily make friends, whose attitude towards friendships between men is corroded with scepticism?” (102).

Coetzee also speaks of the process of healing:

“He has recovered the sight of his eye completely. His scalp is healing over; he needs no longer use the oily dressing. Only the ear still needs daily attention. So time does indeed heal all. Presumably Lucy is healing too, or if not healing then forgetting, growing scar tissue around the memory of that day, sheathing it, sealing it off. So that one day she may be able to say, ‘The day we were robbed,’ and think of it merely as the when they were robbed” (141).

And of course, from the first paragraph of the book to the end, Coetzee speaks of sex, such as when David Lurie meets with his ex-wife Rosalind: “His best memories are still of their first months together: steamy summer nights in Durban, sheets damp with perspiration, Rosalind’s long, pale body thrashing this way and that in the throes of a pleasure that was hard to tell from pain. Two sensualists: that was what held them together, while it lasted” (187).

Sex is ubiquitous in this book, though not in a distasteful way. It is remarkable how Coetzee can write so much on sex, in a way that makes it routine, and yet reserve a special place for rape. Rape is not sex. And though Lucy and her father rarely speak of it, her rape changes everything. To some extent, it is a commentary on David Lurie’s own behavior with his less-than-consenting student. But this rape of a white woman by three black men is also, and more terrifyingly, a commentary on race relations in post-Apartheid South Africa. This exchange floored me:

“‘It was so personal,’ she says. ‘It was done with such personal hatred. That was what stunned me more than anything. The rest was … expected. But why did they hate me so? I had never set eyes on them.’

‘It was history speaking through them,’ he offers at last. ‘A history of wrong. Think of it that way, if it helps. It may have seemed personal, but it wasn’t. It came down through the ancestors.’

‘That doesn’t make it easier. The shock simply doesn’t go away. The shock of being hated, I mean. In the act’” (156).

And later:

“What if… what if that is the price one has to pay for staying on? Perhaps that is how they look at it; perhaps that it how I should look at it too. They see me as owing something. They see themselves as debt collectors, tax collectors. Why should I be allowed to live here without paying? Perhaps that is what they tell themselves” (158).

I offered a similar interpretation in the case of a robber who was placated by a glass of wine. Those who have been historically disempowered feel it is their prerogative to take vengeance, or at least to take what they consider theirs, what ought to belong to them.

Love in the time of cholera

If you’re looking to re-experience the enchantment of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (GGM), then read that book again. You won’t find it in Love in the Time of Cholera, a novel about two lovers in a love triangle in an unnamed Columbian port city. In brief soap opera form, Florentino Ariza falls for Fermina Daza, who marries another man.

Warning: Spoilers follow.

Still, the book has other redeeming qualities, including GGM’s ability to relate wrenching tragedy and cruelty with dispassionate steadiness (79):

“He [Florentino Ariza] had awakened at dawn that morning, as a condemned man awakens at dawn on the day of execution, and that entire day he had done nothing but imagine, minute by minute, each of the events at Fermina Daza’s wedding. Later when he returned home he realized that he had made a mistake in the time and that everything had been different than from what he had imagined, and he even had the good sense to laugh at his fantasy” (146).

Tragedy and cruelty aside, this book is an extended meditation on love. Actually, don’t put tragedy and cruelty aside; in this book they might as well be synonymous with love. The highlights:

1. Can lovers detect fellow lovers? “Her cousin Hildebranda Sanchez, two years older than she and with the same imperial haughtiness, was the only who understood her condition as soon as she saw her, because she, too, was being consumed in the fiery coals of reckless love” (85).

2. GGM writes that Fermina Daza “had not realized that every step she took from her house to school, every spot in the city, every moment of her recent past, did not seem to exist except by the grace of Florentino Ariza” (133). In a way, Florentino Ariza feels it also. Years later, at the sight of Fermina Daza and her husband, he “did not feel either jealousy or rage – only great contempt for himself. He felt poor, ugly, inferior, and unworthy not only of her but of any other women on the face of the planet” (153).

I’ve rarely felt so consumed by love. But lovers do report seeing each other everywhere or evaluating every decision in terms of how the other might feel. Indeed, once when my two roommates started dating, I saw it more up-close than I wanted. But that is not, I imagine (yes, I can only imagine), how many others experience love. I see it expressed in tribulations and heartache. (Also be aware that an all-consuming love can at times make for a boring book.)

3. People change. I know, not so profound, but GGM’s writing can still make me gasp:

“She turned her head and saw, a hand’s breadth from her eyes, those other glacial eyes, that livid face, those lips petrified with fear, just as she had seen them in the crowd at Midnight Mass the first time he was so close to her, but now, instead of the commotion of love, she felt the abyss of disenchantment. In an instant the magnitude of her mistake was revealed to her, and she asked herself, appalled, how she could have nurtured such a chimera in her heart for so long and with so much ferocity. … ‘No please,’ she said to him. ‘Forget it’” (102).

4. Casual sex between passing “lovers” isn’t love, but it’s not insignificant either. In fact, it might be better than love. Florentino Ariza’s many affairs were “always without pretensions of loving or being loved, although always in the hope of finding something that resembled love, but without the problems of love” (151). Best of all, GGM suggests that it's supposed to be fun:

“He persuaded her to let themselves be observed while they made love, to replace the conventional missionary position with the bicycle on the sea, or the chicken on the grill, or the drawn-and-quartered angel, and they almost broke their necks when the cords snapped as they were trying to devise something new in a hammock. … He had taught her that nothing one does in bed is immoral if it helps to perpetuate love” (151).

5. The pain of being denied. Even the smooth debauchee Florentino Ariza would court women “with caution, for he felt that nothing was more embarrassing or more demeaning than a refusal” (152). Why do I feel similarly? Is it a scar of having been rejected oneself? Is it really an embarrassment to admit liking someone who doesn’t reciprocate? In another episode on a similar theme, Florentino Ariza seems to feel as I do: “Ever since his rejection by Fermina Daza, Florentino Ariza had learned always to keep the final decision for himself” (201).

6. I like that GGM speaks not only of love but also of compatibility, especially between Fermina Daza and her husband Dr. Juvenal Urbino: “He was aware that he did not love her. He had married her because he liked her haughtiness, her seriousness, her strength, and also because of some vanity on his part… They did not speak of it that first night, when they spoke of everything until dawn, nor would they ever speak of it. But in the long run, neither of them had made a mistake” (159). Yet Fermina Daza doesn’t forget the “poor man” Florentino she left behind, and so “she was always pleased by the good news she heard about him, because that helped to alleviate her guilt” (223). For the (few) women I have left behind, I feel similarly.

A final comment: Despite these insights, I did not especially enjoy this book. Why? Florentino Ariza waits “fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days and nights” (348) for love. GGM glorifies such struggle, such suffering, as if this masochistic pursuit were a noble enterprise. But I see the suffering of love just for what it is: Miserable. And that’s all I have to say about this book. In fact, if I use the word ‘love’ one more time today, I think I’m going to throw up.

What "abstinence-only" really means

News flash: The director of Bush's HIV/AIDS program, which emphasizes abstinence, regularly used an 'escort service' which is now being investigated for prostitution. He abruptly resigned.

Randall L. Tobias (pictured) headed the U.S. Agency of International Development (USAID), a post he acquired in January 2006. He oversaw all foreign assistance granted by the U.S. government. In 2003, somewhat out of the blue, Bush appointed him to lead the $15 billion President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Before that, he was CEO of the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and had little background in AIDS policy or international development.

As director of PEPFAR in 2004, Tobias asserted that "condoms really have not been very effective." His reasoning: "It's been the principal prevention device for the last 20 years, and I think one needs only to look at what's happening with the infection rates in the world to recognize that has not been working." His preferred approach to HIV/AIDS prevention was to promote the well-known ABC strategy - be abstinent, be faithful, use a condom - except leaving off the c. Nevermind that abstinence education doesn't work. Under Tobias, PEPFAR required that grantees sign an "anti-prostitution" pledge that prevented them from reaching out to sex workers and undermined their prevention efforts, as this 13-minute video featuring sex workers from Bangladesh, Brazil, Cambodia, Mali, and Thailand attests.

Now the man who embodied the abstinence-only agenda is caught with his pants down. For his part, Tobias said he used the escort service "only to have gals come over to the condo to give me a massage." (Nothing suspicious there...) The head of the escort service, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, told reporters that her business disallows prostitution and offers only legal, sexual game-playing - at a cost, by the way, of $275 per 90-minute session. But absolutely no sex. So maybe Tobias wasn't being hypocritical. Maybe all he wanted was to prove that abstinence can be sexy after all.

The social justice sisterhood

I'm part of an advisory group for a new 'global health office' at the medical school. The office will help med students make contacts abroad and will sponsor a lecture series on issues such as refugees, sex trafficking, HIV/AIDS, and migrant labor. The group - which includes both students and professors - met a week ago. Of the 12 people around the conference table, 2 of us were men.

This imbalance isn't exceptional. My public health courses in college were brimming with women; they outnumbered the men 10 to 1. I didn't complain much. I'd joke that I studied public health for romantic reasons. Plus, it was quite exciting to bring diversity to a group - which as a white male I don't often get to do - though it meant I was often looked upon as a curious XY specimen. But the imbalance always bothered me. Really, where were all the men? I don't have any studies about it, just anecdotal evidence. In Providence, I spent a week with a Brown program exploring issues of homelessness and affordable housing - with 25 women and 5 men. In Syracuse, I've been tutoring through the city's literacy corps, a group that teaches adults how to read and write. In my training class of 17 people, 3 were men. I tell ya, it sure is hard to be a man in this world...

So when did social justice work become an old girls network? Here's a hypothesis:

In both developed and developing countries, women disproportionately suffer from economic and social inequalities. In the United States, women earn 77 cents to a man's dollar, occupy fewer CEO positions, can't take time from work to breastfeed, and may even get kicked off a plane for it. Sexual violence, meanwhile, is as frequent as it is perverse. A 2007 study published in last month's Journal of American College Health found that only 2 percent of victims of sexual or physical abuse (that's 1 in 50!) contacted the police. Many women don't report such abuse because they feel ashamed or embarrassed or somehow at fault or because they see the abuse as an isolated incident and not as part of a larger epidemic. We evidently have a fairly vacuous sense of sexual violence.

Inequalities in developing countries also disproportionately affect women. Complications from pregnancy kill half a million women a year. It's safer to donate a liver lobe in New York than to give birth in Afghanistan. In some African countries, women can't insist on condoms or refuse sex and may contract HIV from their husbands. In Muslim countries, no man is killed for raping a women, but women are sometimes killed for 'losing their honor' - or otherwise beaten. On the economic front, we know that the whole family benefits when women achieve financial independence. In fact, UNICEF's 2007 State of the World's Children Report went as far as to say that expanding women's opportunities in South Asia would save 13.4 million children from malnutrition.

I would bet that the pervasiveness of women's victimization - and women's awareness of it - is a key reason why women disproportionately gravitate toward work in public health and social justice. Perhaps women seek to rectify injustice because they tend to bear the brunt of it. Another idea is that women - because they have been marginalized - have great sympathy for fellow sufferers. Both help explain why women greatly outnumber men in public health - a field with a very wide social justice purview - but don't outnumber men in medicine. I also bet (though I have no stats) that female medical students are more likely to see their medical training as part of an overall effort to promote social and economic opportunity and reform 'the system.' The radical conclusion, of course, is that if medical schools want to foster social justice, they should admit more women.

That, anyway, is my preferred explanation. An alternate explanation maintains that women are simply more caring than men - an explanation that's always smacked of reductionism to me and begs the very question it purports to answer: why are women (supposedly) more caring?

Blood, Sex, etc.

I gave blood on Friday. In fact, I've been giving blood regularly since 2003. Every time I donate, I have to check the "I have not have sex with other men since 1977" box.

"I don't like that question," I told the Red Cross worker.

"I know, I don't like it either," he said uncomfortably. He was a young guy with a full beard and a lip ring. I felt sorry for making him sit through my badgering.

"I just feel like I need to register my complaint," I said. "I don't have many options."

It feels sometimes like I'm riding the "whites only" buses - except that buses, unlike blood donations, don't save lives. A boycott is generally the right idea when businesses discriminate against gays. But if we were to launch such a campaign, patients would suffer. So even though I hate checking off that box, I don't know what else to do. Meanwhile, the Red Cross itself diverts responsibility by saying that it just follows the FDA's rule on the matter. Some gay friends of mine won't give blood as a way of protesting the FDA rule, but I don't see how that helps anybody. You can't protest by NOT donating blood that the FDA doesn't want anyway. Someone might say that the FDA might change its policy if a large number of people began boycotting. In fact, a potential decision of Santa Cruz schools might point that way. But while people were boycotting blood drives, how many people will die for lack of transfusable blood? So boycotting is out of the question.

The FDA prohibits men who have had sex with men - even once - since 1977 from donating because: "Studies have shown that men with a history of male to male sex since 1977 may be infected with HIV and/or may have evidence of a lifestyle that potentially exposes them to HIV." Follow the link for more information on the FDA's self-described "conservative" approach.

I searched the medical literature and found a 2003 study (Transfusion 43(1)) that endorses the FDA's screening criteria. The study computed the likely outcome if the FDA changed its rule to only bar men who've had gay sex in the last 12 months. The number of donations would increase by only 1.3 percent, while the number of HIV-contaminated units would increase by 8 percent, from 1 in 150,000 to 1 in 136,000 donations. (By the way, U.S. stats are rather poor compared to Canada, but not when compared to Zambia or other developing countries.) The authors of the study conclude that the gain is not worth the risk. When I discovered this study, my heart sank. It was a lot easier to criticize the FDA when its rule wasn't backed up by reputable evidence.

I'm obviously glad that the FDA takes precautions. A screening process is necessary because just testing the blood is not a fail-proof way of eliminating the HIV risk. But I'm not pleased that we can't be more creative in designing the screening process. The need for blood is expanding as more and more patients require C-sections, organ transplants, joint replacements, and other operations. Donated blood lasts just 42 days, so the nation's blood supply must be constantly replenished - and shortages are very possible. It seems to me that the FDA could safely expand its donor pool by asking people who would otherwise be excluded to present a recent negative HIV test. Or perhaps the FDA could admit men who haven't had gay sex in ten years, instead of thirty, or men in monogamous relationships. The current policy just seems ridiculous. If you acquired HIV in 1977, you'd know it by now. Since no one wants to end up in an ICU without blood, reforming the policy seems like something everyone should favor. Even a homophobe who won't shake hands with a gay person would probably take "gay blood" if the alternative were death.

A question: Suppose for the sake of argument that you (a man) had sex with another man. From repeated testing, you know for certain that you don't have HIV. Should you lie (and perjure yourself) to donate? Lying is generally wrong, but is it worse than withholding blood?

Can drunk people consent to sex?

Last year, a British man was cleared of rape charges when his victim, a student at Aberystwyth University in Wales, acknowledged in court that even though there was "no way" she agreed to sex, she was too drunk to recall any details. Because she couldn't definitively say whether she consented, the judge told the jury to find the defendant not guilty.

Obviously, that's fucked up. The good news is that Britain's legislators agree. Under the proposed legislation, having sex with a drunk person constitutes rape. It doesn't matter whether the drunk person nods her/his head. The underlying idea is that a drunk person is simply incapable of consent.

The law has the right intent, especially in a country with such a high prevalence of rape (1 in 20 women) and widespread under-reporting. But does it go too far? Someone's going to ask: Is it really true that drunk people can't consent? I've debated this question with friends, and in the end, we can't agree, splitting about 50-50 on the question. I don't think drunk people can consent. I think the reason why many people hesitate to admit that intoxicated people are, well, incapacitated, is that they're scared of what that might mean for the alcohol-laden culture of the party scene.

Obviously a drunken nod is "consent" in the simplest meaning of the term. But what kind of consent is it, coming from someone who can't speak without slurring words? The value of this so-called consent is further undermined when you consider that some people have limited capacity to give consent to begin with (i.e., a naive, underage first-year enamored by the party scene in her first week of college). I think it's obvious that people who can't walk in a straight line don't have the capacity to consent to sex - especially as sex becomes all the more dangerous thanks to STDs.

Okay, seems simple enough: Having sex with a person who can't consent is rape. But it's not simple (big surprise). Is it rape if the man is also drunk (assuming he's the aggressor)? Is it rape if both people feel violated, or if neither person is solely to blame? Is it rape if she intended, from the beginning of the night, to have sex, but didn't consent when the clothing came off (how could she if she was drunk?)? Can the guy (again, assume the aggressor is male) ever know what the girl intended? And is it rape if they're in a subsisting sexual relationship? Or if they've had sex before?

Since a drunk person cannot give a legitimate "okay," all unintended, drunk sex is rape - at least according to the proposed British law. Legit?

World AIDS Day

I'm not sure what to write for World AIDS Day. It's one of those things for which there's both everything and nothing to say.

I suppose I'll start with statistics. Since 1981, more than 25 million people have died of AIDS. 40 million people worldwide are infected. 1.1 million Americans are HIV-positive, and 25% of them don’t know it. Another 40,000 become infected each year. In New York State alone, 7,600 people were diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in 2004 (the worst nationwide). The bulk comes from New York City, where approximately 1 in 70 has HIV. Obviously, some populations have sufferred from this epidemic more than others. When sorted by demographic, the HIV infection rates (from the NYC Department of Health) are especially alarming:

• 1 in 40 African Americans.
• 1 in 25 men living in Manhattan.
• 1 in 12 black men age 40-49 years.
• 1 in 10 men who have sex with men.
• 1 in 8 injection drug users.
• 1 in 5 black men age 40-49 in Manhattan.
• 1 in 4 men who have sex with men in Chelsea.

Meanwhile, the disease rages across sub-Saharan Africa, where 24.5 million people were living with HIV at the end of 2005 - 2.7 million more than at the year's start. In 2006, 2 million people there died from AIDS. Altogether, 12 million children have lost their parents. The map to the right (borrowed from Wikipedia) shows the national HIV infection rates in Africa. In the face of so much illness, nothing I say seems worth it. But something has to be said.

So I will quote from a recent WHO report on how the migration of health care workers from poor countries to rich countries impacts the AIDS epidemic. It finds, unsurprisingly, that: "Shortages are most severe in sub-Saharan Africa, which has 11% of the world's population and 24% of the global burden of disease but only 3% of the world's health workers." Meanwhile, the United States and other Western countries - the countries most pro-active in AIDS funding, ironically - attract (and even recruit) health care workers from, yep, you guessed it, sub-Saharan Africa.

Why? Here's why, I think: "Better you than me."

Does it stand up?

Religion -> Sex -> Death?

A special edition of this month's Lancet on Sexual and Reproductive Health reports on the dire state of sexual health in the world:

[Every year,] more than 120 million couples have an unmet need for contraception, 80 million women have unintended pregnancies (45 million of which end in abortion), more than half a million women die from complications associated with pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period, and 340 million people acquire new gonorrhoea, syphilis, chlamydia, or trichomonas infections. [Glasier et al. Sexual and reproductive health: A matter of life and death. The Lancet. Nov. 2006.]

These horrible numbers are partly the result of the U.S.'s "global gag rule" (called the "Mexico City Policy" in the Reagan years, named for the city in which it was announced), instated by George W. in his first week in office. Under the rule, foreign family-planning NGOs that perform abortions cannot receive US money. Those that do receive US money are barred from lobbying for abortion rights in their countries. Apparently, our government believes that freedom of speech applies only in America (and perhaps not even here). If it's any consolation, NGOs that receive US money may still perform abortions for the big three: rape, incest, and threat to the woman's life. Still, restricted access to abortion providers makes these cases difficult.

Religion plays a role - a negative one. At the UN General Assembly special session on children in May 2002, for example, some countries sought to redefine "reproductive health services" to exclude abortion and to deny couples' access to information about contraception. Which countries? Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, the Vatican, and the USA. An odd and frightening alliance. It reminds me of a rare and historic meeting of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim leaders in Jerusalem last year... to protest the gay pride parade. You'd never see ideological opposites join forces to discuss poverty or war or the environment. But sex? For sure.

It doesn't take the Oracle at Delphi to see that last week's decision by Nicaragua's legislature (52-0!) to ban all abortions, including in cases of rape, incest, and threat-to-woman's life, had serious Catholic undertones. Yet Brazil, also a Catholic country, leads the world in promoting condoms. Exceptions aside, I suspect that religion bolsters conservative and patriarchal forces, encourages women to marry young (far younger than men), and puts the decision over how many children to bear in the hands (or other body part) of the husband.

Not to mention that God hates women. But that's for another time.