Author Archives: Noah Berlatsky

Skeptics and Believers United

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On Slate’s Double XX blog, Rebecca Watson yesterday put up a deeply depressing post about the sexism she’s faced in the skepticism/atheism community. At a skepticism conference some guy had asked her in an elevator to come back to his room for “coffee”. She later mentioned offhand in a public address that skeevy sexual pick-up lines are not necessarily best-practice for men who want to not be assholes. She was then, inevitably, deluged with hate mail from men telling her she was a bitch and that they didn’t need to be lectured about sexism by no bitch, duh, ’cause we’re smart and skeptical, yeah? (And if you think I’m being unfair to her interlocutors, just read the comments on her post.)

Anyway, Richard Dawkins weighed in with a post on a blog about the controversy. As you’d expect, he was thoughtful, even-handed, and eminently rational.

Dear Muslima

Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and … yawn … don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.

Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep”chick”, and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn’t lay a finger on her, but even so …

And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.

Richard

So Richard Dawkins is a giant flaming asshole. No one is especially surprised, I’d guess.

But what’s interesting I think is the way his assholish-ness is framed. Specifically, his misogyny — his sneering at women for acting as if harassment matters — is framed through and by his explicit antipathy towards the Muslim world. Violence against women abroad doesn’t raise his consciousness about violence against women at home. Rather, misogyny abroad (the fault of some other culture) becomes an excuse to dismiss misogyny at home (which may be less virulent, but is certainly something that is more his responsibility.)

Dawkins’ knee-jerk rhetorical recourse to the evil of Muslims to wipe clean his own sins reminded me again of the main reason that the new atheists creep me out. That reason being that the new atheism is an imperialist ideology. It’s marinated in US-Islam tension, weaponized by 9/11, and generally used as a justification for variously sneering at, bombing, and conquering peoples who it is convenient for us to view as irrational barbarians.

Dawkins’ comment also shows, with unusual clarity, why imperial adventures abroad are horrible for civil liberties at home. In an imperial power, the evil of your enemies is always infinitely more important than the evil at home. The injustice committed by those benighted religious backwards subhumans always trumps any possible injustice committed by you or me. Moral outrage is kept safely for the other, the opposition to whom guarantees one’s own immaculate virtue. Anyone who disagrees is a pampered whiner, who doesn’t realize how good (s)he has it. After all, are our rational bombs not the scourge of evil bearded menfolk everywhere? (And perhaps of the occasional woman in hijab as well, who is probably better off dead anyway?)

Of course, it’s not just atheists who are imperialists or anything. The Christian right, not to mention the Jewish right, have thrown their all behind our ongoing crusade of blood and self-righteousness. Dawkins likes to think those believing blowhards are his enemies – but his oleaginous condescension and brazen hypocrisy tells a different story. A bully who hits you on the orders of the hairy thunderer isn’t much different, after all, from a bully who hits you at the dictates of his own immaculate reason.
 

Some Stepford Wives Are Bigger Than Others

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I saw the 1975 Stepford Wives last night. It was an slow, creepy, smartly made film. I was particularly struck by this:
 

 
The two main leads are off to the left there: Katharine Ross as Joanne and Paula Prentiss as Bobbie. You can tell them apart because Prentiss, at 5″10, is a full five inches taller than Ross at least. When they’re shot together, Prentiss often looks like a giant.
 

 
Of course, in real life, you see big people and short people together all the time. In movies, though, you (or at least I) rarely notice discrepancies like this when they aren’t directly related to the plot or power disparities. You might have a looming evil villain being monstrous, but the two best friends are usually cast (or at least placed) so you’re not always noticing that one of them is gigantic and the other is tiny.

So the height differential here really stands out…which is I think quite clever thematically. The film is about the erasure of difference; the women all become identical drones — and, moreover, they all become mere appendages of their husbands. It seems right, then, that the film emphasize what is being lost by accentuating the visual disparity between, and visual individuality of, the two women. It’s especially effective, too, in that second scene above, where Bobbie has been transformed into Robot Bobbie, so that her height is a kind of frightening, looming reminder of difference past — a nightmarish Brobdingnagian shell left behind after the insides have been vacuumed out.
 

Superman vs. the Zeitgeist

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As you may or may not know, Clark Kent apparently quit his job to become a blogger. It’s gotten a lot of mainstream media play (because the media likes to talk about the death of media, and bloggers like to talk about the rise of bloggers, natch.) Tim Hodler at TCJ is less impressed:

—Apparently Clark Kent quit his job or something? I’m not going to link to them (such behavior should not be rewarded), but newspapers are actually reporting on this comic-book plot point as if it is news. This continual urge on the part of the media to treat fictional events as newsworthy developments is the one thing comics as an art form has going for it that no other American art form seems to, but boy does it seem dumb.

Like Tim, I’m not going to read this comic. But I think most of his other comments here are kind of confused. First of all, other media get treated as newsworthy all the time. Movie releases are huge, high profile news events with no small frequency. Many media outlets (the Atlantic, for example) regularly devote space to episode recaps of television shows; the twist on Homeland was big enough news that I know there was a twist on Homeland even though I actually know just about literally nothing about Homeland. That stupid Aaron Sorkin show (the “Newsroom” right?) was reported on in much the same way the Superman-leaving-news is being reported on; that is, it was a media-enthusiastically-covering-the-media story. In fact, from the one page Andrew Sullivan is reproducing, the media reporting on entertainment is actually the reason Clark is leaving the Daily Planet — a nicely incestuous meta-twist to the nicely incestuous meta-memeness of it all.
 

 
In fact, I’d say that comics is actually far less likely to get these kinds of stories into mainstream outlets than other mass-entertainment — for the very logical reason that comics is a lot less popular than television or film or (for that matter) sports. It’s because having a story like this in the mainstream is novel that it’s noticeable.

Moreover, I’d say that getting media attention is a sign that DC is doing something right. Pulp entertainment is supposed to slavishly and shamelessly follow the zeitgeist; it’s supposed to be about whatever stupid shiny thing happens to be in the news. Mainstream comics are actually pretty bad at doing this, partly because they’re built around 40-70 year old characters, and mostly because their fanbase is incredibly hermetic and insular.

So a storyline like this — which effectively panders to a great big audience rather than to the same old tiny audience — seems like a step forward, to me. Someday, maybe, in some golden dawn, mainstream pulp comics can rise out of their subterranean level of shittiness, and attain the relatively elevated mediocre shittiness of 24 or Homeland or Breaking Bad. Dare to dream.

Update: Tim has interesting clarifications in comments, as do several other folks, so please be sure to scroll down.

Ethan on the Advantages of Comics Journalism

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My post on Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza, and my skepticism about comics journalism, prompted several interesting responses from Ethan. I thought I’d highlight them below.

I can recall at least one specific, focused example Sacco has given in numerous interviews as to what benefit he sees in using comics: he can present environmental or visual details unobtrusively or repetitively in a way that other mediums cannot. He has spoke about how his drawings of the West Bank allow him to depict, for example, the ubiquitous presence of children and of mud without having to repeat at the end of every sentence “and the ground was muddy and there were kids everywhere.” You feel that impact through background drawings. On the other hand, were this a documentary, he would be entirely dependent on stock footage or b-roll of contemporary Gaza– and I imagine stock footage of 1956 Gaza is hard to come by, if it exists. Thus he is able to give his narrative much more visual impact than the “talking heads” would of a documentary. Plus, of course, he gains the ease of access and portability that a book has over a documentary, as well as the length and depth of the book (this documentary would be hours long if all the dialogue was read out loud). These are all relatively superficial advantages comics has. I’m sure you could come up with more.

Other reasons: Sacco has said he appreciates the necessary slowness of comics, which requires abandoning any sense of timeliness in favor of “slow journalism.” Carrying a sketchbook and pencil into a strange location is much less obtrusive and alienating (and much cheaper) than carrying expensive camera equipment. People react very differently when you put a camera on them.

“He was doing comics for years when almost nobody cared” — reminds me of more good reasons. Comics, especially when Sacco started, used to fly so far under the critical radar of wider society that you could get away with doing a book about Palestinians without any pushback, or, y’know, attention. On the other hand, the novelty of “Hey, it’s a comic about Palestine” probably got him a lot of readers and attention that he wouldn’t have gotten from (yet another) book or documentary. I mean, Edward Said wrote the introduction to the collected ‘Palestine’ volume.

 

Comics Journalism…Why?

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Reading Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza, I kept coming back to the same question. Namely — journalism as comics? Why? Sacco’s project — interviewing individuals in the Gaza Strip who were witnesses to two different Israeli massacres in 1956 — could easily have been presented as an agitprop book or as an agitprop documentary film. His methodology — the careful documenting of atrocities, the humanizing of the enemy, the nuanced by firm advocacy for the powerless — are all familiar tropes and tactics of left-wing investigative print and film journalism. Given that the content is familiar, what exactly does the comics form add? Why bother with it?

It’s a question that’s likely to make comics fans bristle. After all, to turn the question around, why should comics have to justify itself while other forms do not? Shouldn’t the success of the endeavor be more important than the medium?

Perhaps. And yet the question persists…in part because when you’re doing Joe Sacco’s brand of journalistic advocacy, journalism in prose and journalism in video have some major, easily apparent advantages over journalism in comics. Prose is unobtrusive and easily distributed; a Human Rights Watch report, for example, can provide facts and talking points with minimal fuss, and can also be readily quoted, linked, and copied, spreading a targeted, clear, footnoted message to as broad a range of people as possible. Film, on the other hand, can provide a sense of presence and urgency which is difficult to duplicate, allowing witnesses to speak in their own words with an authority and resonance that is very difficult to duplicate.

The advantage of prose or of film can perhaps be summed up as “authenticity.” Journalism’s goal is to show truth, and so spur to action. Prose and film are, for historical and formal reasons, often seen as at least potentially transparent windows on truth. Comics, on the other hand, foregrounds its artifice; as Sacco mentions in his introduction, everything you see on the page is rendered by his hand. And this is, incidentally, why Sacco is seen as an artist, rather than just as a reporter. Certainly, nobody that I’m aware of has ever referred to an HRW report as the work of a mature artist who has found his own style and voice, which is what friend-of-the-blog Jared Gardner called Sacco in his review of Footnotes in Gaza.

One upshot of making journalism comics, then, is to make journalism art, and to make the journalist an artist. The downside of this is that you then end up in a situation where the genius and sensitivity and angst of the journalist ends up pushing to the side the suffering and injustice which is the journalism’s putative subject. Sacco is certainly aware of this danger, and makes moves to undercut it, or problematize it, as on this second-to-last-page of the graphic novel.
 

 
However, I don’t think these gestures are ultimately successful. In this case, for example, indicting himself for insensitivity and hubris ends up validating his sensitivity and honesty, and also makes the book as a whole about his psychodrama and growth — about his experiences in Gaza, rather than about the experiences of those who are stuck in the place on a more permanent basis. In this context, contrition for selfishness still ends up as a way for the self to take up more space. The comics form has allowed/impelled Sacco the journalist to become Sacco the genius.

But while the artifice of comics journalism has its downsides, it has some advantages as well. Most notably, Sacco’s narrative is in no small part about the uncertainty of memory and of history. Comics, precisely because of its unfamiliarity as journalism, is less transparent; it demonstrates, almost reflexively, that journalism is not “truth,” but an effort to reconstruct truth.

Again, precisely because comics is a less familiar form for journalism than film or prose, it ends up emphasizing its own artificiality. Everything you see in Footnotes in Gaza is created and represented by Joe Sacco. His account always has a built in asterix. What he shows you is not what happened, but a collage stitched out of the words and memories of his interviewees and the fabric of his own visual imagination.
 

 
Sacco uses comics, then, to emphasize subjectivity. But…do you need to use comics to do that? Writers have been exploring the wavering, difficult nature of truth and of history for hundreds of years in prose, surely. Joseph Conrad’s narratives within narratives within narratives, or Paul Celan’s bleak koans hovering on the edge of comprehensibility, to cite just two examples, seem like more challenging and more thoroughgoing efforts to wrestle with the intersections of meaning, subjectivity, and historical trauma. For that matter, those Human Rights Watch reports I mentioned are usually pretty good about discussing the difficulty of gathering evidence and the conflicting testimony of witnesses. Do we really need the comics form to tell us that human memory isn’t perfect?

Indeed, the use of comics seems in some ways like a epistemological shortcut. Subjectivity can be linked to, or summarized as, the comics form, which is shown as obscuring the objective truth of reason and trauma. Comics may serve to call reportage into question…but it also, at the same time, validates or stabilizes the reportage. Thus, in that page above, the images of the Israeli’s swinging clubs are imaginative, or unverified…and their unverifiedness contrasts, or highlights, the more vouched veracity of the portraits, which are (at least probably) photoreferenced. And the referenced images, in turn, highlight the even greater veracity of the words, taken down from (presumably taped) interviews. Thus, while the comics form may initially appear to highlight subjectivity, it could instead be said to create a fairly clear hierarchy of representation, in which Sacco’s deployment of his research materials and his illustration signals the reader what is “truth” and what is less so.

This isn’t necessarily a weakness. You could argue that comics’ strength as journalism lies not in its artificiality per se, but rather in the ease with which it can evoke differing degrees of artifice; in the resources it has available for signaling truth or falsehood, or different levels of both. For example, one of the most interesting aspects of Sacco’s book is the way that he shifts back and forth between the 1956 atrocities and the ongoing violence on the West Bank. For comics, where still images evoke time, it is relatively easy to make two times equally physical and equally present.

Comics’ ability to show bodies discontinuous in time is used here to show trauma across decades; the self from the past is as real as the self in the present. That is, it’s not entirely real, but is composed of representation and memory, the present self made of a past self, as the past is made of, or created out of, the present.

The problem is that Sacco’s manipulation of artifice and memory is not always so deft. In that page we looked at earlier, for instance:

 

 

The cartooning turns the Israeli soldiers into deindividualized, snarling bad-guy tropes, all teeth and slitted (or entirely obscured) eyes. Is this how the Palestinian’s are supposed to have seen them? Or is it how Sacco sees them? And is the acknowledgedly subjective nature of comics supposed to make us question this demonization? Or is it supposed to excuse it? Or, as perhaps the most likely possibility, has the impetus for dramatic visuals been catalyzed by comics’ history of pulp representation to create a pleasing collage of villainy from which readers are encouraged to pleasurably recoil?

Or another example:
 

 
This is one of a number of times when Sacco zooms in on a grizzled Palestinian fighter, dramatically showing us his crazy eyes. As with the thuggish snarling Israelis, the formal contribution of comics here has to do less with emphasizing subjectivity and physicality, and more to do with the pleasures of pulp tropes. It’s Sacco’s own “Muslim Rage!” moment.

From this perspective, the advantage of comics as a form may be less the meta-questioning of the journalistic project, and more its unique ability to present itself as serious art while simultaneously coating its earnest reportage with a sugary dab of melodrama. One can debate whether this is ethically or aesthetically desirable, but either way it’s clear that Sacco’s comics provide something — a mix of high-art validation and accessible low-art hints of pulp — that is uavailable in prose or video long-form journalism. I don’t necessarily like Footnotes in Gaza that much, but I have to grudgingly admire its creator’s marketing instincts in finding and exploiting such an unlikely genre niche.

Pimp With a Heart of Gold

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This first appeared on Splice Today.
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The first scene of Pretty Woman (1990) is devoted to the ritzy lifestyle and rocky romantic life of financier Edward Lewis (Richard Gere). Edward is the guest of honor at a massive LA soirée for his obscenely wealthy business associates and friends. In quick succession, he breaks up with his girlfriend by phone, seeks affirmation from a now-married ex, and drives off with the hot car of his asshole-but-subservient lawyer, Philip (Jason Alexander). It’s only after this montage of privilege and pique that we turn our attention to the female lead, the prostitute-with-heart-of, Vivian (Julia Roberts.) The first shot of her we see, however, focuses not on her heart, but on her panty-clad ass, followed quickly (as she turns over in bed) by a close-up of her crotch.

Pretty Woman, and its treatment of women, was in the news this week when Miss Ohio cited Julia Roberts’ character as a positive role model for women. This sparked a predictable, and justifiable, backlash, encapsulated by Amanda Marcotte who pointed out that Roberts’ “character is functionally a warm-blooded dress up doll with no will of her own.”  Along similar lines, Crooks and Liars took the opportunity to quote Darryl Hannah, who in 2007 said that “[O]ne of the things I’m most proud of is refusing to take Julia’s role in Pretty Woman.” She went on, “Every time I see it I like it less and less. They sold it as a romantic fairytale when in fact it’s a story about a prostitute who becomes a lady by being kept by a rich and powerful man. I think that film is degrading for the whole of womankind.”

I don’t really disagree with either Marcotte or Hannah—Pretty Woman, as that opening crotch shot makes immediately clear, treats its main character as a body to be dressed up, eyed, manipulated, condescended to, and fucked. The film appears to grant Vivian’s every wish—riches, a perfect lover, a happy-ever-after ending. But in defining those wishes in such a limited way, and by robbing her of agency in their fulfillment, it ends up treating her with a systematic and remorseless contempt.

The problem is, sneering at Roberts (or at Miss Ohio) doesn’t so much undo that contempt as replicate it. To sneer at Vivian for being a “dress-up doll with no will of her own” is accurate, but it’s also a reiteration of the way the movie (more subtly but still) sneers at Vivian for being a dress-up doll with no will of her own. Similarly, Hannah’s comments seem powered by her disgust with prostitution—a disgust which is not at all foreign to the film, and which is indeed at the center of its own misogyny. Turning Vivian into a critical object for censure and revision simply replicates the mechanics of the film. You say she is vulgar and stupid? Richard Gere agrees with you! Let’s laugh at her pitiful yet charming efforts to eat escargot together, and then take her to the opera for some consciousness raising!

If you want to read against the film, then, I think you have to do it by taking your eyes off Vivian, and focusing instead on Edward. Admittedly, this is difficult to do, since Julia Roberts is appealing and funny and animated and Richard Gere has the proportional charisma and energy of a gray-suited slug.

Beneath that colorless exterior, though, there lurks a well of bland viciousness. Edward makes obscene amounts of money by buying companies, selling them off in pieces, and fucking over whoever gets in his way. His job is his life, not just in the sense that he works all the time, but in the sense that it defines how he sees everyone around him. He uses people as things. As I mentioned, one of his first acts of the movie is to break up with his girlfriend because she isn’t jumping through all the hoops he wants her to; shortly thereafter he drives off in his employee’s car without permission just because he feels like it. He dickers with Vivian over how much he’ll pay her to spend a week as his escort, and then gloats about how he got her for a bargain price—which is supposed to be cute and flirtatious, but given the power disparities and how much money he has, just ends up seeming like he’s a miserly asshole. And, of course, his business dealings are vile. At one point, he finds out that the shipbuilding company he wants to purchase has a defense contract in the works that will make its stock spike. So he calls his pal the Senator and tells him to hold up the contract in committee. It’s okay though; political corruption and naked influence peddling are charming when you’re cute like Richard Gere.

Of course, the film is aware that Edward is a dick. He had a bad relationship with his father and as a result has difficulty expressing emotions. The love of Vivian, though, is supposed to transform him. He takes a day of work; he smiles more; he decides to go easy in his business dealings. Instead of breaking apart the shipbuilding company and selling it for parts, he decides to invest in it. He is no longer a parasitic financial leech; instead he’s a patriotic enabler of America’s global imperialism. “I’m proud of you!” declares the elderly shipbuilder whose company Gere has decided to spare, and it’s a lovely father-son moment. Daddy issues resolved.

From this perspective, Pretty Woman isn’t really about Vivian’s retooling; it’s about Edward’s. Vivian gets new clothes, but she doesn’t really change as a person. The emotional dynamics of the film depend on her being the same charmer from the beginning to the end. That charm saves Edward and teaches him how to be a good man—which is to say, it teaches him how to exercise patriarchal power with a touch of generosity and emotion. He still is surrounded with sycophantic servants, but he treats them better. He learns the name of the manager of the hotel where he’s staying; he brings Vivian flowers, and will apparently take her to New York with him rather than just putting her up in an apartment in LA. Furthermore, the limo driver seems touched to see Vivian and Edward get together. Who doesn’t revel in the happiness of their betters, after all?

In the beginning, then, Edward purchases Vivian to be at his sexual and romantic beck and call. In the end, he’s learned that you shouldn’t treat people that way. So instead, he uses Vivian to make him slightly kinder and slightly gentler and to help him work through his issues with older men. Thus Vivian goes from being a blow-up doll for wanking to being a blow-up doll for emotional growth. Not exactly an inspiring career arc, but that’s hardly her fault. When pimps rule the world, everybody’s a whore—even, or perhaps especially, if we’re supposed to believe that the biggest pimp has a heart of gold.

The Penis No One Knows

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I recently stumbled on this piece I wrote four or so years ago for a sex website which, as far as I’ve been able to tell, never used it. I still think it’s funny — so I figured I’d see if anyone else agreed.
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“Adam’s young bride was proud of her man, but she blanched at the thought of the ghastly White Worm.”
Bram Stoker, The Lair of the White Worm

Nothing spurts out fanciful narratives quite like a penis. The best mythologizer of the privates, of course, was Freud who, one portentous day, stroked his beard, sat on the pot, looked nether-ward, and suddenly shouted, “Eureka! I bet Martha wishes she had one of these!”

Sure, Freud was a silly bugger — but phallic disinformation afflicts us all. To rectify this classic malady, read on.

Break You Off — That’s Just an Expression, Right?

Can you break an erect penis? Obviously, you’re hoping that the answer here is “no.” And, in fact, a penis has no bones, so you can’t damage it in quite the way you would an arm or a leg. Still, if you’re young, determined, unlucky, and, maybe, kind of dumb, you can, in fact, injure yourself in ways that will surprise you and make you go…ergh.

When you get an erection, two tubes of spongy tissue that run along the inside length of the penis fill with blood. These tubes are called the corpora cavernosa, and they are located in a tough sack made of tissue called the tunica albuginea. Now, let’s say you’re not only lusty, but also young, which means that you are especially rigid. And let’s say further that you’ve got a willing peasant girl spread out on a bed at the other end of your palatial throne room. You emit a lascivious grunt and begin to race towards her…but, unfortunately, in your haste, you fail to notice the second peasant girl sprawled on the floor…you trip over her…sail gracefully thorough the air…and smash erection-first into the decidedly unyielding flagstone floor.

At this point, the tunica albuginea will tear, and blood will start to leak out of the tubes. What you’ll hear is a cracking sound, and then you’ll probably say something like, “Zounds!” or, “Holy fucking fucking fuck!” because it’ll really hurt. Your erection will go down, and you and the peasants can then sit around watching your bruised and probably visibly bent penis swell and take on a meaningful shape as it adjusts to its new and complex reality. You can also consider what your life will be like now that you can no longer sustain an erection, or — if your injury is especially spectacular— pee. Alternately, you can get up off your butt and GO TO THE DOCTOR! RIGHT NOW! YOU JUST BROKE YOUR PENIS! RUN, FOR GOD’S SAKE! RUN!

Once you get your sorry, sorry dick to the hospital, you’ll need surgery to repair the tears in the tunica albuginea. In most cases, this should solve all your problems and allow you to live a productive, erection-and-pee-filled life. In other cases, you will need a transplant, usually using tissue provided by bonobo monkeys, or occasionally, by Robert Plant. No, that whole last sentence isn’t true. I don’t know what happens in other cases. Furthermore, I don’t want to know, and I doubt you do either.

I Love the Smell of Wood in the Morning

Lots of people think they know the secret of morning wood. “Oh, yes,” they will tell you nonchalantly as you and your stubbornly conspicuous thing shuffle bathroom-wards. “Morning wood. Caused by a full bladder pressing on the medulla oblongata of the lower reaches.”

In fact, morning wood is not caused by a full bladder. It doesn’t seem to be caused by alien transmissions or nanomachines, either. Nor by the Masons or the Trilateral Commission. What does cause it, you ask?

Well, um,…the same thing that causes nocturnal emissions! Yes, you see, while they’re asleep, any man without erectile dysfunction will just get an erection, and sometimes one of those erections is still hanging around when they wake up. In fact, this is one of the main ways that experts diagnose erectile dysfunction. If you’re having trouble maintaining an erection, your local upstanding erection expert will fit you with an elastic thingy (technical name elastic thingy) to wear on your penis to monitor its friskiness and girth. If, on a romantic night, the penis is sufficiently frisky and girthful, a computer dings and the expert knows that your dysfunction is psychosomatic; if the computer refuses to ding, the expert knows that there’s a plumbing prob….

What was that? What causes the nocturnal erections? Errr….

Okay, we don’t know! All right? The penis, it just goes up at night! Stop bothering us with this crap!

In other words, experts are baffled. They have given the phenomena a great name though: nocturnal penile tumescence. I don’t think we can really expect more from science than that.

Diet Like a Porn Star

“Some people think semen is low-carb,” my esteemed editor told me. “You should write about that.”

“What? Who cares? It’s not like you’re eating enough of it to…”

He fixed me with a gimlet eye. Over email. And you’ve never been gimleted by an eye until it’s been disembodied and sent electronically. Gross.

So, fine. Semen’s made of fructose and enzymes, and it’s not low-carb. Now you know.

XY Marks the G-spot

Long, long ago, when men were men, Neanderthals were Neanderthals, and butt plugs were carved out of flint, a tribal wise man named Ernst Gräfenberg discovered the female G-spot in the latest issue of Cosmo. Shortly thereafter, of course, some disreputable wag with a monosyllabic appellation — Ogg, let’s say — piped up with the inevitable query: “Erg! Ugh! Grunt? (snicker)” Or, translated, “Hey Gräfenberg! Screw the gals! Where’s our G-spot? (snicker)” To which Gräfenberg responded frostily (it being the ice age) “We don’t have a G-spot, okay? And if we do, I don’t know where it is. I only read Sports Illustrated for the interviews.”

Well, believe it or not, Ogg the Wag has the last laugh. The female G-spot remains a site of violent and sweaty theoretical exploration by scientists and feminists alike, but everyone agrees on the existence and location of the male equivalent. For guys, the G-spot is simply the prostate, right there at the back of the penis, bung up against the anus. To locate it, lie on your back with your legs elevated, and then gently push a well-lubricated finger into the anus. Two inches beyond the anal opening you should feel a bump about the size of a chestnut. Manipulate it and you too will wag like Ogg.

So there you are. You’ve now got more penis facts in your pocket than even Sigmund Freud, and some of them are even true. Whip ’em out to awe your friends, impress the ladies, or just for the pleasure of playing with your ever-expanding diction.