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The Nine Circles of Hell! – all the news that gives you fits in print – includes three bonus stories on the former Mossad chief’s controversial remarks under the ‘more’ button. The Nine Circles for Wednesday, June 23, are:

More oil, deaths, coming from Gulf spill

To US, “Indian children’s lives are cheaper than fish”

Supreme Court “makes it a crime to work for peace and human rights”

Supremes rule Monsanto can sell GM seeds before safety tests completed

US healthcare comes in last – again

Ex-Mossad chief says Israel should execute pre-emptive strike on Iran

Still no electricity, but more attacks in Iraq expected this summer

Detroit faces obstacles in transforming shrinking city

Will porn make us so ‘intellectually lazy’ that our creativity is affected?

More oil, deaths, coming from Gulf spill
NBC News
(6/23/10)

Oil gushing at spill site after vent damaged

Oil was again gushing from the BP spill site on Wednesday after the company was forced to remove the containment cap when a robotic submarine hit a vent. The news came as officials also reported two deaths of people who had been hired for the response effort.

BP hoped to reinstall the cap later Wednesday after fixing the vent and checking for safety.

When the robot bumped the system, gas rose through the vent that carries warm water down to prevent ice-like crystals from forming in the cap, Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said …

The cap was removed and crews were checking to see if crystals had formed before putting it back on. Allen did not say how long that might take.

“There’s more coming up than there had been, but it’s not a totally unconstrained discharge,” Allen said …

The deaths reported Wednesday were not tied to the containment operation. The Coast Guard said the workers had been involved in cleanup operations that their deaths did not appear to be work related.

One death was a boat captain who died of a gunshot wound, a Coast Guard spokesman said. Further details were not immediately available.

To US, “Indian children’s lives are cheaper than fish”
Guardian
(6/23/10)

India fury over US ‘double standards’ on BP and Bhopal

Indians have reacted with fury to President Barack Obama’s tough stance against BP, accusing the US of double standards over industrial accidents after the failure to convict Americans involved in the Bhopal disaster of 1984 or to obtain what many view as adequate compensation for victims.

The anger goes beyond that of campaigners or activists with some of India’s best-known writers and journalists weighing in.

“It looks like Indian children’s lives are cheaper than [those of] fish,” Chetan Bhagat, the country’s best-selling writer, said. “Obama should bang his fist on the table. If he can do that for fish, how about our kids? Or are they only Indians?”

The Pioneer and Hindustan newspapers ran headlines last week repeating the charge that the US reaction to the Gulf Coast disaster, which has killed 11 people, and to Bhopal, where at least 15,000 died as a result of exposure to toxic gases leaking from a US-owned pesticide plant, was evidence of double standards.

“Everything that Obama has said about BP and the spill was what the US should have said about Bhopal,” said Suhasini Haider, one of India’s best-known TV journalists who chaired a prime-time discussion comparing reactions to the two disasters. “There is the question of compensation, the way Obama has gone after senior executives personally. This is the exact opposite of what happened with Bhopal.”

One reason for the anger lies in the timing of the Obama’s address to the American nation on the oil spill, which came a week after the first verdicts in a criminal trial related to the Bhopal disaster.

Seven Indian managers at the plant were sentenced to two years in prison and immediately bailed by a court in India. Warren Anderson, the then chief executive of Union Carbide, the American firm which owned the plant through an Indian subsidiary, has never faced trial and attempts by Indian governments to extradite him from the US have failed.

“It seems ridiculous that there are such small punishments for [Bhopal] and at the same time we are watching the US getting so agitated about the spill,” Haider said.

Supreme Court “makes it a crime to work for peace and human rights”
Guardian
(6/21/10)

US supreme court: Nonviolent aid to banned groups tantamount to ‘terrorism’

The US supreme court  has upheld a broad-ranging law that allows Americans who offer advice to banned organisations, including legal assistance and information on conflict resolution, to be prosecuted as terrorists.

The case arose out of human rights advice given by a California group to Kurdish and Tamil organisations that are listed as terrorist groups in the US.

The supreme court upheld the Obama administration’s argument that even advice intended to be used for peaceful purposes amounted to “material support” for terrorism.

That includes a lawyer submitting a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of a banned group or helping a proscribed organisation to petition international bodies to bring an end to a violent conflict.

“The supreme court has ruled that human rights advocates, providing training and assistance in the nonviolent resolution of disputes, can be prosecuted as terrorists,” said (past This is Hell! guest) David Cole, a Georgetown university law professor who argued the case before the court.

“In the name of fighting terrorism, the court has said that the first amendment [on free speech] permits congress to make it a crime to work for peace and human rights. That is wrong” …

The ruling involved the Humanitarian Law Project in Los Angeles, which provided human rights training to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

It argued that the assistance was nonviolent and did not promote the goals of the PKK …

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party is one of about 30 organisations listed as terrorist organisations by the US government. The others include Hamas, Hezbollah and the Khmer Rouge.

A lower court had struck down the law as unconditionally vague.

But by a majority of 6-3, the supreme court ruled that the government has the right “to prohibit providing material support in the form of training, expert advice, personnel, and services to foreign terrorist groups, even if the supporters meant to promote only the groups’ non-violent ends”.

The chief justice, John Roberts, said: “At bottom, plaintiffs simply disagree with the considered judgment of congress and the executive that providing material support to a designated foreign terrorist organisation – even seemingly benign support – bolsters the terrorist activities of that organisation.”

The dissenting judges said that the decision “deprives the individuals before us of the protection the first amendment demands”.

In hearing the case, the justices discussed what amounts to specialist advice and whether it is a crime to teach a terrorist to play the harmonica.

The government’s case was argued in February by Elena Kagan, who is now the Obama administration’s nominee to the supreme court.

“Hezbollah builds bombs. Hezbollah also builds homes. What Congress decided was when you help Hezbollah build homes, you are also helping Hezbollah build bombs. That’s the entire theory behind the statute,” she told the court.

Supremes rule Monsanto can sell GM seeds before safety tests completed
BBC News
(6/21/10)

Monsanto GM seed ban is overturned by US Supreme Court

The bio-tech company Monsanto can sell genetically modified seeds before safety tests on them are completed, the US Supreme Court has ruled.

A lower court had barred the sale of the modified alfalfa seeds until an environmental impact study could be carried out.

But seven of the nine Supreme Court Justices decided that ruling was unconstitutional.

The seed is modified to be resistant to Monsanto’s brand of weedkiller …

Environmentalists had argued that there might be a risk of cross-pollination between genetically modified plants and neighbouring crops.

They also argued over-use of the company’s weedkiller Roundup, the chemical treatment the alfalfa is modified to be resistant to, could cause pollution of ground water and lead to resistant “super-weeds”.

US healthcare comes in last – again
Reuters
(6/23/10)

U.S. scores dead last again in healthcare study

Americans spend twice as much as residents of other developed countries on healthcare, but get lower quality, less efficiency and have the least equitable system, according to a report released on Wednesday.

The United States ranked last when compared to six other countries — Britain, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand, the Commonwealth Fund report found.

“As an American it just bothers me that with all of our know-how, all of our wealth, that we are not assuring that people who need healthcare can get it,” Commonwealth Fund president Karen Davis told reporters in a telephone briefing …

In 2007, health spending was $7,290 per person in the United States, more than double that of any other country in the survey.

Australians spent $3,357, Canadians $3,895, Germans $3,588, the Netherlands $3,837 and Britons spent $2,992 per capita on health in 2007. New Zealand spent the least at $2,454.

And yet Americans get less for their money, said the Commonwealth Fund’s Cathy Schoen.

“We rank last on safety and do poorly on several dimensions of quality,” Schoen told reporters. “We do particularly poorly on going without care because of cost. And we also do surprisingly poorly on access to primary care and after-hours care.”

The report looks at five measures of healthcare — quality, efficiency, access to care, equity and the ability to lead long, healthy, productive lives.

“On measures of quality the United States ranked 6th out of seven countries,” the group said in a statement.

U.S. patients with chronic conditions were the most likely to say they got the wrong drug or had to wait to learn of abnormal test results.

Overall Britain, whose nationalized healthcare system was widely derided by opponents of U.S. healthcare reform, ranks first, the Commonwealth team found.

Ex-Mossad chief says Israel should execute pre-emptive strike on Iran
Agence France Presse
(6/21/10)

Ex-Mossad chief calls for Iran strike

Israel should launch a pre-emptive strike to prevent arch-foe Iran from going nuclear, a former head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency said on Monday.

“I am of the opinion that, since there is an ongoing war, since the threat is permanent, since the intention of the enemy in this case is to annihilate you, the right doctrine is one of pre-emption and not of retaliation,” Shabtai Shavit told a conference.

Shavit, who served as chief of Israel’s foreign spy agency from 1989 to 1996, was speaking at a conference held at the Bar Ilan University outside Tel Aviv …

Israel, which has the Middle East’s sole if undeclared nuclear arsenal, regards Iran as its principal threat after repeated predictions by the Islamic republic’s hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of the Jewish state’s demise.

Along with the West, it suspects Iran of trying to develop atomic weapons under the guise of its nuclear programme, a claim Tehran denies …

In 1981 Israel bombed an Iraqi nuclear reactor and reportedly also attacked a suspected Syrian nuclear facility in 2007.

Iran insists that its nuclear programme is aimed solely at power generation and medical research and says that the international community should focus its attention on Israel, which, unlike Iran, is not a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

• This may be just a coincidence, but on Saturday, Haaretz ran a story headlined, “Report: U.S., Israeli warships cross Suez Canal toward Red Sea”. That story reads:
  More than twelve United States Naval warships and at least one Israeli ship crossed the Suez Canal towards the Red Sea on Friday, British Arabic Language newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi reported Saturday …
  The Suez Canal is a strategic Egyptian waterway which connects between the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea.
• This may be just another coincidence, but Yedioth Ahronoth posted a story today entitled, “Report: IAF aircraft land at Saudi base.” That story reads:
  Israeli Air force aircraft landed during the past weekend at a military base in Saudi Arabia and unloaded large quantities of military gear, according to a report published Wednesday by Islamic website Islam Times …
  Another report published two weeks ago claimed Saudi Arabia tested its defense missile systems In order to allow IAF airplanes to pass through its airspace en route to bombarding nuclear facilities in Iran.
• Okay, so the Islam Times story Yedioth Ahronoth cites is considered questionable. But another website, DEBKAfile, has a story headlined, “Iran on war alert over ‘US and Israeli concentrations’ in Azerbaijan.” That story says:
  In a rare move, Iran has declared a state of war on its northwestern border, debkafile’s military and Iranian sources report. Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps men and equipment units are being massed in the Caspian Sea region against what Tehran claims are US and Israeli forces concentrated on army and air bases in Azerbaijan ready to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities.
  The announcement came on Tuesday, June 22 from Brig.-Gen Mehdi Moini of the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), commander of the forces tasked with “repelling” this American-Israeli offensive. He said: “The mobilization is due to the presence of American and Israeli forces on the western border,” adding, “Reinforcements are being dispatched to West Azerbaijan Province because some western countries are fueling ethnic conflicts to destabilize the situation in the region.”
  In the past, Iranian officials have spoken of US and Israel attacks in general terms. debkafile’s Iranian sources note that this is the first time that a specific location was mentioned and large reinforcements dispatched to give the threat substance.

Still no electricity, but more attacks in Iraq expected this summer
The Christian Science Monitor
(6/21/10)

Bombings, deadly protests point to long, hard summer in Iraq

The morning after a double suicide bombing of Iraq’s Trade Bank, employees working around collapsed ceilings and bent beams to pack up computer equipment and files say they are a day away from reopening the institution central to Iraq’s reconstruction efforts.

Resilience is a way of life here. But between the attacks, faltering electricity, which has sparked deadly protests, and the lack of a new government almost four months after national elections, Iraqis are dreading a long, hot, difficult summer ahead.

Iraqi security forces in Basra over the weekend opened fire on protesters demanding the resignation of the electricity minister, killing one protester and wounding two others.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki called for emergency measures to increase electricity to the port city, where temperatures are already 120 degrees F., to nine hours a day. In the southern city of Nasiriyah on Monday, protesters enraged over the power cuts threw stones at provincial council buildings, wounding 17 police officers and demonstrators.

In central Baghdad, outside the bank where two suicide car bombers struck on Sunday, the tangled blackened frames of parked vehicles were draped with yellow crime scene tape, indicating where some of the 26 victims were killed. Three of them were bank guards but most were passersby, conducting business at the beginning of the busy work week.

Parts of the suicide vehicles were flung onto the roof of the three-story bank. It was the second attack in a week on an Iraqi financial institution. An insurgent umbrella group that includes Al Qaeda in Iraq took credit for the June 13 suicide attack on Iraq’s Central Bank that killed 15 and injured dozens more.

Mohammad Shaker, the Trade Bank’s deputy general manager, said several of the departments, including the money-laundering investigation unit, had been damaged but none of the files lost.

“Tomorrow we will resume working with the Iraqi government and we will have the ability for full recovery in one week,” Shaker said as he supervised moving the bank’s letters of credit and guarantee operations to a nearby building …

“Just after the explosion one of the (relatives) of the men who were killed called me asking me to give him the day off because his wife was giving birth,” said supervisor Ali Jaber, who was thrown into the air and knocked out by the explosion. “I just hung up – I couldn’t say a word,” he said. The guard, Wissam Abdullah, was recently married.

“They are all from poor backgrounds – if they didn’t have to, they wouldn’t do this job,” he said. The guards make about $400 a month.

Without a stable government, Iraqis feel vulnerable to more attacks this summer.

“I believe we can expect the worst because the situation is still critical in Iraq, particularly the political situation,” said Shaker. “If we had a government there (it) would (make) a lot of difference – anyone who wanted to try to attack or do something to us would think twice.”

The March 7 elections were seen as the best hope for a more broad-based government than the current one in which Sunni Arab Iraqis felt widely excluded. But more than three months after the poll took place, as U.S. forces continue to draw down tens of thousands of troops, political leaders are still wrangling over who will be prime minister and have made little progress in forming a government.

The political vacuum and the violence have been hugely unsettling to Iraqis. With the onset of summer, where temperatures hover close to 150 degrees F., the prospect of continued electricity cuts has plunged many into deeper despair.

“This is worse than Saddam. At least with Saddam we had electricity every two hours,” said Jaber, who said he has been sleeping on the floor in the Trade Bank office for the past 25 days because of the electricity cuts in his neighborhood.

“It’s like Christmas lights – it goes on and off.” When the electricity comes on, the water cuts out, he said. His wife and two children – aged 6 and 2 years old – have it the worst.

“When you see your child being tormented by the heat and you can’t do anything but fan them it’s like a fire eating you up inside,” he said. “We’ve decided not to have any more children to save them this torment.”

Detroit faces obstacles in transforming shrinking city
The New York Times
(6/20/10)

Razing the City to Save the City

For generations, residents of this hollowed-out city hoped that somehow Detroit could be reborn — its population would return and its crumbling core would be rebuilt. No idea was more heretical than widespread demolition of thousands of derelict buildings.

But a new momentum has taken hold here that embraces just that: shrinking the city in order to save it …

Strategies are now coming from every corner, with community groups and nonprofit organization and trade groups producing frameworks.

The burst of creativity is partly a function of desperation. For the sixth decade in a row, this year’s census will bring bad news: the population, already sparsely distributed over a vast 139 square miles, has declined again, to an estimated 790,000 residents, down from 951,000 people in 2000 and a high of almost 2 million in 1950. Population loss was hastened in the last few years, experts said, by the twin blows of the foreclosure crisis and jobs lost to the recession.

Detroit has already struggled through 55,000 foreclosures since 2005 and is expecting another wave to hit soon as temporary moratoriums, meant to stabilize the nation’s housing markets, are lifted. That will mean even more vacancy, emptiness and blight.

After decades of mostly ignoring its hemorrhaging population, the city government earlier this year began using federal money to demolish 10,000 empty residential buildings, with a goal of bringing down the first 3,000 structures by the end of the year.

But only 784 demolitions have been completed so far, and Mayor Dave Bing, whose predecessors were chastised at the mere mention of large-scale demolition, has been criticized not for embracing the idea but for failing to articulate a long-term vision.

“They haven’t really thought this through,” said Kurt R. Metzger, an urban affairs expert and demographer who directs an independent agency, Data Driven Detroit, which is given money by foundations to create a demographic, real estate and infrastructure database about the city. “You don’t have any real direction given by anybody.”

The group released a lot-by-lot survey in February showing that, on average, 20 to 30 percent of the city’s lots were vacant.

In February, Community Development Advocates of Detroit, a nonprofit trade group of local development organizations, offered a framework developed after 15 months of study that suggests classifying each part of the city into one of 11 neighborhood types like green zones, homestead sectors, village hubs and traditional residential sectors, to name a few.

High-density neighborhood hubs and downtown business and civic centers would be connected by green thoroughfares — low-maintenance, naturally landscaped traveling corridors that could help Detroit handle one of its main challenges: that its strongest areas are on the fringes, with weaker patches scattered throughout the core.

An urban homestead — one of the more popular parts of the plan — would be tantamount to country living in the city, the plan says, with homeowners enjoying an agricultural environment and lower taxes in exchange for disconnecting from some city services like water.

Another community group, Detroit Declaration, has developed a land-use policy that proposes setting up urban farming and reducing the size of lots for building to encourage housing development known as in-fill.

Yet another proposal has come from Mr. Ogden’s group, Next Detroit Neighborhood Initiative, which calls for an intensive intervention to prop up the city’s strongest areas, the city’s tax base and community anchors, which are just starting to suffer after weathering decades of storms.

“It’s really about reorganizing our land to make a more livable city,” said Tom Goddeeris, an architect who lives in the vibrant northwest part of the city and is a longtime advocate of rethinking Detroit. “I don’t know that it’s ever been done before on our scale, but we’ve got to get started.”

Despite the energy poured into rethinking the city by a half dozen groups, there are limits to how much those outside government can accomplish. There are both political and financial obstacles to putting any of the plans into effect.

For instance, though many of the plans presented to the city for consideration aim to create density in viable neighborhoods by consolidating and relocating residents from dying or dead neighborhoods, most do not go so far as to say which areas they would choose for destruction. Those decisions, group leaders said, are for the city to make.

One idea calls for the some abandoned areas of the city to be designated as agricultural.

“What we believe is that it should be data driven, in collaboration with residents,” said Anita Lane, director of programs at Community Development Advocates of Detroit. Any process for redesigning the city, she said, “needs to have all the stakeholders coming together to take ownership for this.”

Her organization’s idea to designate 11 types of neighborhood does not have a price tag yet, and it is hard to gauge how much the total remodeling of a city would cost, especially on the scale of Detroit, which is already on life support from the federal government and philanthropic organizations. As a point of reference for the cost of a larger project, the city is expected to spend $20 million on demolitions alone this year.

“This is by far the biggest city that has faced this challenge in this country,” said Frank Popper, a professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers University. “Some of the thinking has been that Detroit would be the model.”

That hope has taken a hit.

“My sense is while there may be plans on the ground, the situation is so fluid that everybody’s winging it,” Dr. Popper said. “I’m trying to follow it day to day, and I get the feeling of improvising all the way. But doing nothing is a prescription for dwindling away, if not dying.”

There are skeptics of large-scale change, to be sure.

The Michigan Citizen, a local alternative newspaper, has likened neighborhood change and possible resident relocation to “a modern-day ‘Trail of Tears’ for Detroiters.”

Will porn make us so ‘intellectually lazy’ that our creativity is affected?
Scientific American
(6/22/10)

One reason why humans are special and unique: We masturbate. A lot.

This conjuring ability to create fantasy scenes in our heads that literally bring us to orgasm when conveniently paired with our dextrous appendages is an evolutionary magic trick that I suspect is uniquely human. It requires a cognitive capacity called mental representation (an internal “re-presentation” of a previously experienced image or some other sensory input) that many evolutionary theorists believe is a relatively recent hominid  innovation.

When it comes to sex, we put this capacity to very good—or at least, very frequent—use. In a now-classic, pre-Internet-porn (I’ll get to that later on) study by British evolutionary biologists Robin Baker and Mark Bellis, male university students were found to masturbate to ejaculation about every 72 hours, and “on the majority of occasions, their last masturbation is within 48 hours of their next in-pair copulation.” If they’re not having intercourse every day, that is to say, men tend to pleasure themselves to completion no more than two days prior to having actual sex.

Baker and Bellis’s quite logical argument for this seemingly counterintuitive state of affairs (after all, shouldn’t men try to stock up as much sperm as possible in their testes rather than spill their seeds so wastefully in a rather infertile swath of toilet paper or a dirty sock?) is that because there is a “shelf-life” for sperm cells – they remain viable for only 5-7 days after production – and because adult human males manufacture a whopping 3 million sperm per day, masturbation is an evolved strategy for shedding old sperm while making room for new, fitter sperm. It’s quality over quantity …

Unconvinced? Well, Baker and Bellis are clever empiricists. They also apparently have stomachs of steel. One way that they tested their hypotheses was to ask over 30 brave heterosexual couples to provide them with some rather concrete samples of their sex lives: the vaginal “flowbacks” from their post-coital couplings, in which some portion of the male’s ejaculate is spontaneously rejected by the woman’s body …

Now back to masturbation fantasies and cognition—and this is where it gets really interesting. Baker and Bellis’s theory may be peculiarly true for human beings, because from all appearances, under natural conditions, we are the only primate species that seems to have taken these seminal shedding benefits into its own lascivious hands. Unfortunately, there have been a paltry handful of studies tracking the masturbatory behaviors of nonhuman primates. Although some relevant data is probably buried in some mountain of field notes, I didn’t come across any targeted studies on the subject in wild chimpanzees  , and even the prolific Jane Goodall doesn’t seem to have ever gone there. But nevertheless by all available accounts, and by contrast with human beings, masturbation to completion is an exceedingly rare phenomenon in other species with capable hands very much like our own. As anybody who has ever been to the zoo knows, there’s no question that other primates play with their genitalia; the point is that these diddling episodes so seldom lead to an intentional orgasm …

So why don’t monkeys and apes masturbate even nearly as much as humans? It’s a rarity even among low status male nonhuman primates that frustratingly lack sexual access to females–in fact, the few observed incidents seem to be with dominant males. And why haven’t more researchers noticed such an obvious difference with potentially enormous significance for understanding the evolution of human sexuality? After all, it’s been nearly 60 years since Alfred Kinsey first reported that 92 percent of Americans were involved in masturbation leading to orgasm.

The answer for this cross-species difference, I’m convinced, lies in our uniquely evolved mental representational abilities—we alone have the power to conjure up at will erotic, orgasm-inducing scenes in our theater-like heads … internal, salacious fantasies completely disconnected from our immediate external realities. One early sex researcher, Wilhelm Stekel, described masturbation fantasies as a kind of trance or altered state of consciousness, “a sort of intoxication or ecstasy, during which the current moment disappears and the forbidden fantasy alone reigns supreme.”

Go on, put this article aside, take a five minute break and put my challenge to the test (don’t forget to close your office door if you’re reading this at work): Just try to masturbate successfully—that is, to orgasmic completion—without casting some erotic representational target in your mind’s eye. Instead, clear your mind entirely, or think of, I don’t know, an enormous blank canvass hanging in an art gallery. And of course no porn or helpful naked co-workers are permitted for this task either.

How’d it go? Do you see the impossibility of it? This is one of the reasons, incidentally, why I find it so hard to believe that self-proclaimed asexuals who admit to masturbating to orgasm are really and truly asexual. They must be picturing something , and whatever that something is gives away their sexuality …

A side note: both sexes claimed equally to have used their imaginations during intercourse. Basically, at some point, everyone tends to imagine someone—or something—else when they’re having sex with their partner. There’s nothing like the question, “What are you thinking about?” to ruin the mood during passionate sex.

Here are some other interesting tidbits. Males report having sexual fantasies earlier in development (average age of onset 11.5 years) than do females (average age of onset 12.9 years). Females are more likely to say that their first sexual fantasies were triggered by a relationship, whereas males report having theirs triggered by a visual stimulus. For both men and women, straight or gay, the most common masturbation fantasies involve reliving an exciting sexual experience, imagining having sex with one’s current partner and imagining having sex with a new partner.

It gets more interesting, of course, once you step a little closer to the data. In one study with 141 married women, the most frequently reported fantasies included “being overpowered or forced to surrender,” and “pretending I am doing something wicked or forbidden.” Another study with 3,030 women revealed that “sex with a celebrity ,” “seducing a younger man or boy,” and “sex with an older man” were some of the more common themes. Men’s fantasies contain more visual and explicit anatomical detail (remember the giant, pulsating penis from Lukianowicz’s study?) whereas women’s involve more story line, emotions, affection, commitment and romance. Gay men’s sexual fantasies often include, among other things, “idyllic sexual encounters with unknown men,” “observing group sexual activity,” and here’s a shocker: images of penises and buttocks. According to one study, the top five lesbian fantasies are “forced sexual encounter,” “idyllic encounter with established partner,” “sexual encounters with men,” “recall of past gratifying sexual encounters,” and—ouch!—“sadistic imagery directed toward genitals of both men and women” …

And so I’m left wondering … in a world where sexual fantasy in the form of mental representation has become obsolete, where hallucinatory images of dancing genitalia, lusty lesbians and sadomasochistic strangers have been replaced by a veritable online smorgasbord of real people doing things our grandparents couldn’t have dreamt up even in their wettest of dreams, where randy teenagers no longer close their eyes and lose themselves to the oblivion and bliss but instead crack open their thousand-dollar laptops and conjure up a real live porn actress, what, in a general sense, are the consequences  of liquidating our erotic mental representational skills for our species’ sexuality? Is the next generation going to be so intellectually lazy in their sexual fantasies that their creativity in other domains is also affected? Will their marriages be more likely to end because they lack the representational experience and masturbatory fantasy training to picture their husbands and wives during intercourse as the person or thing they really desire?

I’m not saying porn isn’t progress, but I do think that over the long run it could turn out to be a real evolutionary game-changer.