Let's Talk About Sex, Baby

Let's talk about sex, baby
Let's talk about you and me
Let's talk about all the good things
And the bad things that may be
Let's talk about sex

~ Salt’N’Pepa

I was, if I am not mistaken, eleven years old when I first discovered sex.

No, I do not mean I got laid at eleven, so you can put your eyeballs back in their sockets. No, this is what I meant:

I was eleven years old when I first found out what men and women did with each other so babies were made.

OK, I was not exactly that innocent. It wasn’t as though I didn’t know that babies came out of a woman’s belly and that the male parent had something to do with it. But the mechanics had been pretty much a mystery to me.

I think I shall have to take a step back and begin at the beginning.

My parents, it will not be a surprise to anyone to learn, never ever mentioned the word “sex” to me. Nor did they ever actually come out and admit the fact that I grew out of an embryo inside my mother’s belly – though, being a Caesarean, I allegedly nearly killed her (my father had to donate blood to her! Horrors!) and it was one of her recurrent grouses in later years, until I was in my teens, that she was still feeling the pain of giving birth to me.  

Of course, as I may have mentioned earlier here and there, neither of my parents had much to do with bringing me up. That was left to my paternal grandmother, whom I called “mother” until the age of three or four when she taught me different. My grandmother, a noted liberal for her day – she was born in 1907 – had not as much compunction about telling me about things as my parents did. The first time I asked her about where I’d come from – I must have been four or younger at this time; it is one of my earliest memories – I remember that she replied that my grandfather had “prayed to god” and I’d come floating down from heaven on a lotus flower. [My grandfather died when I was four, and he was alive at this time, which is how I know my age when I asked this.] By that time I had independently heard that my birth had had something to do with a hospital, so I had to somehow reconcile the flower story and the hospital story. I don’t think I ever did.

Some years later, my grandmother gave me a more detailed account of how a child came into the world; it grew, I learnt, inside the mother and later emerged. How did it emerge? I didn’t at that time think to ask, though somehow or other I took it for granted that it would be through the navel. I mean, it made sense, didn’t it? The navel was right there, in the middle of the belly!

No, actually I was not totally ignorant of the fact that males and females had different genitalia. I grew up with a cousin – whom I’ll call Miri – who was born exactly, to the day, a month before me. As kids, we saw each other naked all the time, and when I was visiting my maternal uncle, his kids and I also played naked in the heat of the summer day. So I knew that girls were different from me between the legs. I just didn’t know what it meant.

I remember one time when my maternal cousin and I were playing with their neighbour’s daughter. We were all naked – all of us were maybe five years old, so this was hardly something scandalous – and the girl (whom I remember to have been very pretty, even then, with a lovely little triangular face) told us solemnly that the previous night she’d woken up and seen her mum pulling her dad by the penis. All of us had a good laugh at the idea. Only many years later did I understand that she must have actually seen them having sex.

At that time, of course, I had no notion of what on earth “sex” was, anyway.

So, back to the navel. I once, probably around the age of eight or so, asked a family friend, all unwitting, if unmarried women never had children; I’d noticed that only married women seemed to be mothers. He blushed bright red and muttered something like “No, no, it only happens when you marry.” I then – curiosity totally unquenched – asked further if the baby did come out of the navel. He nodded vigorously and if I recall took the first opportunity to leave the room.

My grandmother had overheard this conversation, and she later drew me aside and informed me that the baby actually entered the world via the mother’s vagina, and that was how she’d had all her (eleven!) children. Only she didn’t say “vagina” – I did not know the organ existed – but used a child’s word that included both the male and female genitals. The English equivalent might be the “hoo-ha”. I was flabbergasted at this, because by then I’d long since got past the stage when I was still permitted to run around in the nude. By then I’d been taught that the genitals were shameful and had to be covered up. So I stared at my grandmother and asked her, “Weren’t you ashamed that the doctors and nurses were looking at your hoo-ha?”

“I was in so much pain,” she replied drily, “that I couldn’t spare any thought about who was looking at what.” And that was how I learnt that the birthing process was painful.

During all this time, of course, my parents – my actual, biological parents – had never once mentioned a word about how children were born to me.

No, we had no sex education at school. As far as I know, there is still no sex ed at school. And as long as the Hindunazis and other antediluvian morons rule over us, there still will not be any sex ed at school. After all, a couple of years ago yet another government commission decided that sex education was “unnecessary” because “sex comes naturally and does not have to be taught.”

Really. They think sex education is about teaching children how to have sex. I am not making this up.

I will return to that point in a bit.

Naturally, just because there was no sex education at school didn’t mean that kids didn’t pick up things from outside, and by the time I was ten I began to hear giggly whispers in the classroom corners about “fucking”. I didn’t know what it meant. I assumed, from the little I picked up, that it meant “marriage”. So one time I made a fool of myself by replying, in front of the whole class, to a question about what I thought two characters in a story might do at the end: “I think they’ll fuck.”

I brought the house down, and I didn’t even know why.  

Later on, I heard some muttering that led me to think that someone was actually saying that the man put his hoo-ha inside the woman’s hoo-ha. Of course, I rejected the idea at once. It didn’t even bear thinking about. Such a ludicrous thing could never happen. How could anyone ever come up with it? So when a biology textbook coyly suggested that “fertilisation happens when the male sperm swims to the female’s egg and fuses with it” I envisioned the sperm crawling out of the man’s body, wriggling over the bedsheets, and then worming its way inside the woman. That was far more believable than one hoo-ha being put inside another.

And then I was eleven years old, and one rainy Sunday – which is etched clearly in my memory – I was going through the bottom shelf of a cupboard full of books. The top shelves were for the books everyone read – I was already, it will be no surprise to learn, a voracious reader at eleven – while the bottom shelf gathered all the detritus: old textbooks, Reader’s Digests, and the like. I was going through them looking for something interesting – I’d found a book of fairy stories there, and another on dairy farming, on earlier occasions – when I came across one with no cover on it, and no title page. It was bound in plain white paper front and back.

Curiosity aroused, I opened it at random, and – I promise you this – this is the first sentence my eyes fell on: “...after the natural insertion act of the penis.”

It was a sex manual. I think it was my father’s, though it might have been an uncle’s as well. I never knew whose it was. Not that it mattered. What mattered is that it was a bloody sex manual.

It was an extremely badly written sex manual. I think it was called the Koka Shastra. I don’t know who wrote it or why anyone would write such utter bilge. Sperm, for instance, were described as “small worms”. Men and women belonged to four different types each dependent on the lengths of their penises and the depths of their vaginas, and it was only when the matched pairs got together that they could be happy in their relationship; I recall three of the men being “rabbit, deer, horse” while the only woman type I recall was known as “she-elephant”. These were illustrated with coy line drawings of men and women chastely embracing each other. The men were all mostly dressed, the women at least had their breasts and pudenda modestly covered. There was not, in the whole entire book, a diagram of the human genitalia. And this was supposed to be a sex manual.

The whole book, in fact, was written for the male only. It was assumed that the reader would be a male. He was told how to seduce the woman, who was a naturally frigid creature who had to be warmed to want sex. The book specifically warned against sex with “very much laughing girl” and for some reason “woman with green eyes.” Don’t ask me why. Maybe laughter or green eyes meant lust?

This is part of the scintillating prose that is, after all these years, indelibly stamped in my memory:

“The man should lie the woman on the bed and tell her sex talk and coitus tales. By this the woman’s desire can be raised to some extent. Then the man can request the woman to remove cloth. First naked your male organ and press woman’s bust hardly but not so cruelly. Signs of woman’s desire: The woman will begin breathing fast, her eyes will become red and sweets will come out of hair veins. The woman will then become shameless, spread her limbs and let the man to do anything with her body as he wishes.”

Deathless erotica. Deathless, I tell you!

There was a little bit about pregnancy, including the information that the growing foetus caused pressure on the bladder that made the woman urinate more frequently, an interesting bit of trivia I hadn’t known. There was of course not a word about sexually transmitted disease, though there was some confusing and confused material about condoms...including one “which fits over the head of the penis only but I find not safe.” The only sex position described, of course, was missionary. Heaven forbid that the woman get on top, because that would need her to take the initiative instead of being led by the hand, after all!

In one way, though, I am still profoundly grateful for this utter and undiluted tripe; it was, however ridiculous, at least information; unlike the gurgle of rumour and innuendo which filled the classroom. At least I had some facts to work with – while they had none.

In after years I came to realise just how lucky I’d been; I had, and have, no sexual hang-ups, from genital size to belief in any myths about virginity. I later discovered highly educated men who were so crammed to the brim with misinformation about sex that they could barely be called functioning sexual beings. I mean, they could breed and all that, but in that they were little better than sperm donors. I doubt they ever gave their partners an orgasm except by accident.

In fact, I’m pretty sure that they would have regarded their wives having an orgasm with deep suspicion. “Where did you ever learn to have pleasure in sex?” would be the idea floating above their heads. “How dare you have pleasure? With whom will you go looking for it if I don’t give it to you?”

This was all, of course, before the mental meltdown of my late teens, a phase marked by obesity, deep depression, acute loneliness, and death thoughts which culminated in three suicide attempts in five days; even if I’d had access to female company, and being in an all-male educational institution run by Catholic monks I didn’t, I had rather more important things on my mind than girls. The question of just how I would kill myself, and when, for instance. It wasn’t until a few years later that my attention returned to the female gender, and that was when a certain young woman in an evening class took me home, took me to bed, and then informed me – after rubbing herself off to a couple of orgasms on my body – that she didn’t want sex. That, again, pretty much killed off my sexuality for a while.

But that’s enough about me.

During the course of this narrative, I’m sure, the reader will have noticed that I have repeatedly said that my parents never mentioned sex to me. I think the only time my father even skirted the topic was once when I asked him, and this was before I found the book, how a woman knew she was pregnant. He replied, without even looking at me, that “when she thinks she’s pregnant, she goes to a doctor and has tests done.”

Was this an answer?

This reticence wasn’t, and isn’t to this day, unusual among Indian parents. Quite the reverse. Among all my friends, acquaintances, and lovers, I have only known one person who told her daughter about sex. And she later met another young woman who...at the age of 23...did not even know she had a vagina.

Not joking.

This, you understand, is in a country with appalling levels of overpopulation, with cities whose infrastructure is falling apart at the seams, with a still unacceptable rate of maternal mortality, where women of all but the upper classes still have virtually no control over what to do with their bodies. This is a country where men still don’t even know that you can get diseases from sex, or, if they do know, they think it can be cured by such expedients as deflowering a virgin. Brothels even have virgins laid on for customers willing to pay for this kind of privilege. (I will refrain from pointing out the college students in the West who similarly auction their virginities to pay for college tuitions.) This is a country where 53% of the children are sexually molested to some extent or other at some point – more than half – yet they are never told about sex, let along what touch is “inappropriate”; and they don’t even know they can be sexually exploited until they already have been.

I recall some years ago, after the figures about child molestation rates came out, there was a debate in the execrable tabloid known as the Telegraph of Calcutta (an even more right wing excuse for journalism than the British Telegraph). The topic was whether children should be warned about sexual exploitation to save them from it. The instant response from parents was “No, it will spoil their innocence.” It would be laughable if one didn’t know that a substantial proportion of the sexual exploiters of those kids...were their own parents.

And this is the country whose government claims sex education is not necessary because “sex is natural and does not have to be taught.”

In fact, yes, it does have to be taught. Prakash Kothari is India’s most well known sexologist, who had pioneered the field when it was almost taboo. He has recounted several pathetic and hilarious cases. For example, once, a woman brought her daughter and her son-in-law in for an examination, since the younger woman had not become pregnant even after a few years of marriage. Kothari speedily discovered that the couple had never had sex. The man, when asked about it, however, angrily denied that they hadn’t done it. “We have sex every night,” he said.

“How do you do it?” Kothari asked.

“Why,” the man said, “I embrace her and go to sleep, of course.”

Kothari calls India the Land of the Unconsummated Marriage. Of course, a lot of them are also “lavender marriages”, where gay men get married to try and pretend, even to themselves, that they aren’t gay. Not surprisingly, they can’t exactly rouse themselves to passion with a female partner. And then they both suffer in silence, unless they have the courage – as an increasing number do – to file for annulment or divorce.

It wasn’t always like this, of course. Go back a couple of thousand years, when the Kama Sutra was being written, and Indian society was open about matters sexual. Women routinely went topless, men didn’t wear that much in the way of clothes either, and sex education was imparted in the most direct way. Young men went to temple courtesans to be initiated into sex. Young women grew up together, and it was expected that they would experiment with each other, and of course they did. Even the artwork of the time made no bones of that. The most popular Hindu deity of the period, Krishna, was a hypersexed multiple seducer who had a huge harem of concubines, and whose most torrid relationship, described as sacred, was with a woman who was very much not his wife.

You could not say Indian society, whatever other faults it had, was shy about intercourse.

What happened?

The Muslims came, with their Puritan ethic. They stayed, mellowed a bit, but never fully. They were the rulers, and they imposed their cultural Puritanism. However, it didn’t totally destroy Indian sexuality. That was left up to the British. The Victorians, you know.

Today, Indian laws, including sexual laws, are almost all still based on British edicts passed a hundred and fifty years ago. That’s why (male) homosexuality is still illegal in this country; lesbian relations aren’t because Indian women, being pure, are supposed not to have any sexual desire anyway.

Just how ludicrous the whole situation is can be seen by the simple fact that actual Indian society isn’t sexually isolated at all. In fact, ever since the 1990s, India’s been going through a quiet sexual revolution. Even before the days of the net, porn was freely available in back alley bookstalls, and contraceptives can be bought over the counter at any pharmacy. It’s a totally different thing that since there’s no sex education half the people don’t even know what the hell contraceptives are and wouldn’t know how to use them anyway.

Today, airport bookstalls have highly detailed sex manuals of an infinitely superior standard to the awful Koka Shastra, sold perfectly openly, right next to shelves with children’s comics, and, as a certain actress said a few years ago, “No educated man should expect his wife to be a virgin.” In fact, there are hardly any virgins among educated young people any longer. I don’t know of any among my, admittedly limited, acquaintance. But having sex and having safe sex are different things altogether, and how many of them do the latter I wouldn’t venture to guess. Especially since they have to mostly do it surreptitiously, hiding the fact from their parents that they are sexual beings.

That's probably why most towns have ads promoting quacks who promise remedies for all sexual ailments, come to that.

Yes, I believe parents have a duty to tell their kids about sex. No, I do not believe they will do so. And nowadays, with the internet, they imagine there is no need for them to do it, since it’s all available online anyway.

Literotica as a sex education manual. That’s going to work so well, right?

I’m, of course, not a breeder, and never will be one. But if I were, I’d definitely tell my kids all about it.

That is one thing I could do for them.

[Image Source]

This is a post about sex and about Bill

A day or two ago I read an article about the emotional aspect of sex, and how men are much less emotionally involved in it than women, and that kind of thing.

Not exactly.

I must say that from my experience, sex without emotional entanglement is liberating for both partners by far.

No, I'm not going to link to the article in question, because this isn't about it, it's about me.

I'm not now in a relationship and I am, therefore, celibate. I have had sex both in and out of relationships, and I've been much more badly hurt by the women with whom I have been in relationships than by the others.

I lost my virginity to a woman who wanted recreational sex, said so, and took her pleasure with me with neither of us pretending there was anything to the act more than intercourse. Yes, we used each other, but we both knew we were using each other, and there was no pretence involved. We were looking for different things, it’s true. She wanted sexual release, and said so. I wanted to feel that I was desirable enough for a woman to want to have sex with me – this was after an episode of being used by another young woman who left me psychologically sexually crippled for years – and that, too, I didn’t try to hide. We each got what we wanted, went our separate ways, and never met again. And that episode – though it was far from the best sex I ever had – remains one of my best and most treasured memories.

On the other hand, sex I have had with women with whom I was in relationships caused me much, much greater emotional grief and turmoil from the memories when those relationships ended - to the point where I ended up depressed and suicidal. And going by the things the women involved said to me, it wasn’t much better for them either, psychologically speaking.

If I were to be given a choice today between having sex with and without emotional involvement, I would at once choose the latter, because there would be no regrets on either side afterwards.

Yes, by the way, we men do invest a tremendous amount of emotion into sexual relationships – to the extent where the absence of emotional entanglement is a positive relief. It is not true that we necessarily get a big charge out of notching up marks on the bedpost; that’s one of the more ridiculous myths. It is true that some of us have been hurt so badly that we don’t want to be hurt again.

That’s all I would like to say on this subject.

For now.

[Source]

Axe-ing Rape: Sonnet Ehlers and Rape-aXe

Suppose you’re a woman walking down a lonely street in the dead of night. All of a sudden, a man jumps out of the bushes, shoves a knife in your face, and demands that you submit to him. And then throws you down, gets on top of you and begins thrusting away.

Would you, at that moment, wish you had teeth inside your vagina so that you could amputate his penis and leave him thrashing in agony on the ground? Wouldn’t it be the perfect punishment?

Apparently, the same thought occurred to a South African doctor (also described as a medical technician; I don't know which is correct but let's give her the benefit of the doubt and call her a doctor) named Sonnet (or Sonette; I've come across both spellings) Ehlers, who happened, she says, to have heard a rape victim sobbing that she wished she “had teeth down there.” Sometime later, Dr Ehlers says she saw a man in agony due to his foreskin being caught in his pants zipper, and, putting two and two together, came up with something she calls Rape-aXe.

On the face of it, it’s every potential rapist’s nightmare come true: a device resembling a female condom, placed inside the vagina by means of an applicator, with serrated teeth meant to catch on a rapist’s penis. (The description of the device on Dr Ehlers’ website mentions specifically that it only engages the skin of the shaft of the penis – this is significant for reasons I’ll go into later in this article.) The Rape-aXe can then, again according to Ehlers’ claims, only be removed in a hospital emergency room, presumably with a policeman standing by with handcuffs.

I said, as you’ll note, that on the face of it this is every potential rapist’s nightmare come true. As soon as one looks into it with any attention, though, it seems more of a nightmare for the potential rape victim than the perpetrator. Let’s see how.

First of all is the obvious point that this Rape-aXe ceases to work if the woman isn’t wearing it at the time of attack. No rapist is going to, you know, allow her to insert and position it before beginning his crime. Therefore, in order to be protected by it (for whatever that protection is worth; not much, as I’ll talk about) the woman would have to wear it at all times except when she’s having consensual sex. Is this even possible?

There are two potential responses to this point: first, that the Rape-aXe is meant to be used only when venturing into potentially “dangerous” situations; and, secondly, that the uncertainty of whether the victim is using it will serve as a deterrent. Both these responses are fallacious.

Let’s take the “dangerous” situation first, which Dr Ehlers addresses on her site (she recommends using it when “...you may be in a compromising situation, such as going on a blind date, or having to use public transport late at night”). As far as I’m aware, most rapes worldwide happen in circumstances where the woman can be got at when she’s alone, and where the perpetrator will have the time and privacy to carry out his crime without fear of interruption. Also, a large proportion of rapes are committed by friends or relatives, rather than strangers (even Dr Ehlers’ own site says 69% of rapes are committed by people who aren’t strangers); in other words one is at least as much at risk in one’s own home or in a friend’s home than in the archetypal dark street at the dead of night I talked about earlier. Or, and this is not uncommon in India, a woman can be kidnapped, put in the rapists’ vehicle, and raped as they drive around town – frequently for the duration of the night.

All this means that when a woman might think she’s in a “safe” situation, she’s nothing of the sort; and, when she’s in a “dangerous” situation, she might actually be safer than at other times since she’s far more likely to be on her guard and less vulnerable.

Then, there’s the idea of “uncertainty causing deterrence”. As far as general crime trends go, uncertainty hasn’t stopped any kind of crime – it’s merely made criminals try and neutralise the uncertainty factor. Let’s say the attacker with the knife I mentioned holds it in the woman’s face and says, "If you're wearing one of those things, take it out right now or I'll cut you up so bad your own lover won't want to ever look at you again." What will the woman’s reaction be? To take it out, right? Really, what other alternative does she have? Well, according to Dr Ehlers, she

“...would then have a free hand at which point you either grab his testis or twist them (sic) or poke your fingers into his eyes and get away from the scene. Rape-aXe will buy you time.”

It somehow strikes me that Dr Ehlers (who says she hasn’t been raped) hasn’t put herself in a situation where she has to choose between being cut up and complying with orders. Also, her entire invention is based on the idea that the victim is faced with a single rapist. A significant proportion of rapes, including rapes in southern Africa, are committed by gangs, and it strikes me that her advice is a good way of getting oneself turned into a smear on the ground.

Or, let’s take one of those facts about rape that just about everyone, including Dr Ehlers herself, agrees with: that it isn’t about sex, it’s about power. The least important part of the rape is the fact of the rapist’s penis entering the victim’s vagina. It’s the actual and total domination that the rapist exerts over his victim that matters, not the penetration itself. Therefore, it doesn’t really necessarily signify that rape will involve penile penetration of the vagina. It can be anything including forced anal or oral intercourse, or merely partial penetration of the vagina – not nearly enough to let the Rape-aXe engage its target – or penetration of any of the above with other objects. I wonder how effective Dr Ehlers’ invention will be against a baton or a beer bottle. Not very, I don’t think.

Nor does the Rape-aXe offer any protection at all against a far more important danger faced by a woman in the so-called “dangerous” situation – against assault. This may include anything from being verbally abused and/or hit, to being slashed with a knife or (and again this is quite common in India, much used by jilted suitors) being splashed with sulphuric acid. As a matter of fact, I’d even say that in a situation where women are known or suspected to be wearing Rape-aXe or similar devices, the possibility of potentially substantially more damaging assault increases. The mindset goes something like this: “So you think you’ve won, bitch? Well, let’s see how you like this.” If Dr Ehlers’ claim in her website is to be taken at face value, and rape is a “hit and run offence”, well, assault is an even easier hit and run offence.

But let’s imagine that all of Dr Ehlers’ claims are correct, and see where that gets us. Let’s assume that the Rape-aXe works exactly as she claims it to, that it engages the penis shaft’s skin, and that it can’t be removed without the assistance of facilities available in a hospital emergency room only. What then?

We’ll consider a situation where a rapist has achieved his purpose and penetrated a woman vaginally, against her will, while she’s wearing a Rape-aXe, and deeply enough for the teeth on the instrument to engage him. I don’t know if this device can cope with condoms, but let’s say it can; let’s for the sake of argument claim that it will engage his penile skin whether he’s using a condom or not. Assuming, then, that his wearing of a condom or not doesn’t matter, even if he’s caught by the Rape-aXe, he’s actually already committed the rape, am I right? It’s not a rape-prevention device, it’s just a device to try and make the consequences more severe.

And what happens if he’s not wearing a condom? I’ll just point out that this instrument is a South African invention, and that southern Africa has one of the highest incidences of HIV in the world. So, the lady might have caught her rapist, but she might have caught something else besides. Of course, that’s true of any rape, but this instrument of vengeance can’t stop her from running the risk of getting HIV, which a can of pepper spray or some simple precautions like going about in groups well might. (I should mention that according to Dr Ehlers’ site, the Rape-aXe is supposed to prevent the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases from the rapist to the victim, but she gives no data proving this contention. Nor does she mention what happens if the rapist is wearing a condom.)

Then, let’s take it from the rapist’s perspective. According to the site, he’s supposed to be hooked through the penile skin and therefore “tagged”. Well, let me tell you something as someone who’s actually – back as a kid, when I wasn’t yet circumcised – got his foreskin stuck in a zipper; it’s painful, but unlike a crushing injury (like a kick to the penis or testicles) is very, very far from incapacitating. All that the pain is likely to do is infuriate the rapist and likely end up with the woman getting the beating of her life, if not killed. It’s kind of interesting that Dr Ehlers seems to be aware of this problem – she mentions it in the FAQ (it’s, in fact, Question No 1) but her answer is anything but direct. All she does is repeat that the rapist is “tagged”; how is that supposed to stop the victim from getting her head beaten in? According to Dr Ehlers, the rapist won’t do anything further because he’ll be in “double trouble”. I doubt if an enraged rapist will stop to think of further consequences at that moment. It’s as though Dr Ehlers has never even seen anyone in a frenzy of anger. And if there’s more than one rapist, the chances of major violence increase to a complete certainty.

It’s interesting that in one of the pages on her site, Dr Ehlers talks at some length about rape as a weapon of war – and yet that rape is always one with multiple perpetrators. It’s not as though her invention would be helpful in that situation.

Dr Ehlers claims for her invention that it will prevent the rapist from urinating until it’s removed. I don’t really see how that works since according to her it’s basically a barbed latex sheath. It seems to me that the end of a latex sheath can be cut off without too much trouble, just like the end of a condom, which is also a latex sheath, can. But then I haven’t actually seen one of these contraptions for myself so I can’t really swear to that.

What I can say, though, is that even if we are to take Dr Ehlers’ assertion that the Rape-aXe can only be removed by a surgeon at face value, there’s no reason to accept her assertion that the rapist will end up being “tagged” and arrested. Where there’s a demand, it will be satisfied, and crooked surgeons aren’t exactly unknown. Any number of clinics will be on hand to quietly remove the Rape-aXe from anyone it’s attached to, if and when the time comes.

Then, we have the fact that something like this can actually be misused. In a world where we have people like Lorena Bobbitt, I can see instances where some women trap their boyfriends or colleagues into having sex with them, and then accuse them of rape. It’s not exactly a minor consideration, given that those are precisely the men who are liable to go to official hospitals to have the device removed.

In any case, the purpose of this invention isn’t to prevent rape; it’s basically Dr Ehlers’ route to fame if not fortune. A look at her website, and this becomes clear. Not only does she offer no statistics as to how many rapists have been brought to justice as a result of her invention, this is what she states as her “mission statement”:

“In this day and age there are communities where practices such as virginity testing, female genital mutilation, child marriages, arranged impregnations and then forced marriage are practiced. My mission is to highlight the plight of these women and give them the choice!”

Does this seem kind of highfalutin tripe to the average reader? How does “tagging” a rapist, even if that could work, affect in any way child marriages, “arranged impregnations” (whatever that might be) and forced marriage? But for Dr Ehlers,

“Rape-aXe is the beginning of my crusade towards curbing the scourge of violence against women and girls!”

At this point, I’d really want to see some statistics. How many rapists has Rape-aXe brought to book? A thousand? A hundred? One?

Actually, the answer seems to be zero, since 

the device has never been marketed to the public and it remains unclear whether the product will ever be available for purchase.

In other words, we have a "crusade for women's empowerment", we have a website, we have a lot of publicity - and we do not have a marketed and testable product which is supposed to achieve any of the claims made for it.

Pardon me for not ranking Dr Ehlers' credibility too high.

With all the obvious criticism that can be directed at her invention, it’s curious that Dr Ehlers addresses only two, and these two are so infantile as to be practically straw-man arguments.

The first, in her own words? “I have been accused of all sorts, my all-time favourite though is that I am the inventor of a most medieval device… my response, quite frankly is that a medieval deed deserves a medieval consequence.”  

Does this even mean anything? Rape is a crime that has been around as long as there have been humans (and is far from unknown among other animals either). Burglary and murder are crimes that have been around as long as there have been humans, too, and are to this day punished in certain nations by amputation or death. How is hooking a man’s penis skin a medieval punishment? Castration might have been more like it.

The other? “My second favourite criticism comes from Victoria Kaija, from the Center (sic) for Disease Control and Prevention, Uganda. She refers to my invention as a form of ‘enslavement’. Apparently wearing the device, according to Victoria, is a constant reminder, to women, of their vulnerability.”  

This is like saying taking elementary precautions like wearing a seat belt while driving a car shouldn’t be done because it makes you feel vulnerable; obviously a ridiculous argument, and easy to strike down. It seems to me extremely unlikely that more cogent arguments have not been made, but if so, Dr Ehlers absolutely refuses to mention them.

Rape is a serious problem, and merits serious attempts at prevention. Gimmicky devices like this are not the solution, and are actually liable to exacerbate the problem.

But in the final analysis, ladies, tell me this: would you be psychologically comfortable walking around with a latex sheath inside your vagina, which you know to be lined with metal hooks? How does that idea make you feel?

Not all that good, I’ll bet.

Erratica

“His hard, throbbing manhood slipped easily into her warm, enfolding wetness, his eager yearning matching her ecstatic sighs. They moaned and arched together, their pleasure coming in waves, like the rhythm of the universe.”

All right, that was me. Now, again, this is me:

“His fuck pole pounded in and out of her love hole.”

I have this thing about erotic writing. Most of the time I can’t read it without getting intensely irritated.

The problem is that most erotic writing, actually, isn’t. There are some rare and precious exceptions, but those are precious because they are, damn it, so rare.

As for the rest:

At one end is the self-conscious coyness of the genre known as bodice-rippers, whose authors speak of a love which dare not, apparently, write its name. What the hell is wrong with these people? It’s like, they decide that they have to take the plunge and write about sex; then they stick a toe in the water, shiver, keep the toe in the water, and write from that level. Classic example: Jean M Auel’s Earth Children series, all but the first (and only readable) volume, The Clan Of The Cave Bear. That was a good book. From volume two, The Valley Of Horses, she seems to have run out of ideas and padded it out with “sex”. Not sex, mind you; I don’t have anything against sex. Just “sex.”

And on the other hand there’s porn. Which is porn.

Gah!