MagicThought

Apparently the current democratic primary season isn’t the only competition in town between a man and a woman:

http://www.slate.com/id/2184363/

MEDICAL EXAMINER
The Merry Band of Wrigglers
Men, women, passion, and sperm.
By Melinda Wenner
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2008, at 11:57 AM ET
The old adage says that a wife can’t change her husband, but the truth is that women for thousands of years have been shaping one crucial male attribute: sperm. Men tend to produce as many sperm as possible as quickly as possible, a manufacturing decision that sacrifices quality control: Their sperm are frequently mutated or deformed as a result. Why, then, do men make millions of sperm at once? Because they’re adapting to ward off the effects of women’s frequent cheating, according to a paper published in December in the Journal of Theoretical Biology.
Humans aren’t especially good at monogamy. Evidence gathered from surveys and paternity tests suggests that 25 percent of women and 30 percent of men cheat on their spouses at least once during marriage. The evolutionary reason that men cheat is pretty simple: to father as many children as they can. It’s more complicated for women, who can only give birth so many times. The quality of the child, then, wins over quantity. Because men with the best genes aren’t always the most stable and resourceful partners (they don’t have to be), women might marry the latter but cheat with the former. Then they can become pregnant with a genetically superior child who will, if her mother can pull it off, grow up with the help of her unwitting spouse.

Women aren’t consciously playing out these underlying reasons for their urge to cheat, of course. But if this cheating “pays off” in children who are more likely to survive and reproduce, the predilection to cheat will become an evolutionally advantageous trait—and the net result, over many generations, will be women who cheat.

Clearly, though, this is no good for their husbands, who are duped into raising kids who aren’t theirs. Some scientists believe men have adapted clever ways to prevent this from happening. Not only are there studies to indicate that husbands do things to keep their wives from cheating in the first place—such as tracking their whereabouts—there is research that suggests men have evolved so as to correct for women’s cheating after the fact, by maximizing the chances that their sperm will conceive over someone else’s.

The idea of “sperm competition,” as it is called, is a familiar one in the animal world—there’s lots of literature about it. For example, male flour beetles have spiny penises designed to remove rival sperm from a female’s reproductive tract. And in a study published in 2002, scientists compared two groups of nematode worms: those that mated with females in the presence of competing males and those that mated without any male competition. After 60 generations had passed under these conditions, the offspring of the worms with the competition ejaculated sperm that were on average 20 percent larger than the sperm of other males. In nematodes, larger sperm crawl faster and can reach the eggs sooner.

The study of sperm competition in humans, though, is fairly new. In a study (with photos!) published in 2003, researchers at the State University of New York-Albany used a variety of dildos, artificial vaginas, and a homemade semen recipe to test whether the penis might be elegantly designed not only to deposit semen in the vagina, but also to remove it. The researchers speculated that when a man has sex with a woman who has recently slept with another man, the first man’s semen is pulled out with the second man’s penis (because it gets caught behind the second man’s coronal ridge, which separates the head of the penis from the shaft). This lends meaning to the term “sloppy seconds”: Sex the second time around is sloppy, because the semen that is removed ends up, well, making a mess.

The researchers found evidence to support their hypothesis: Dildos featuring a coronal ridge, like a real penis, displaced 91 percent of semen that got there first. Dildos without ridges displaced only 35 percent. Given that chimpanzees, our closest primate relatives, do not have ridges on their penises, this is “pretty strong evidence for the fact that the human penis evolved to compete with rival male semen in the female reproductive tract,” says SUNY psychologist Gordon G. Gallup, who led the study. (Chimpanzees are very promiscuous, but they appear to solve the sperm competition problem differently: They produce extremely large volumes of semen that solidify in the vagina. Like a plug.)

That the human penis might have evolved as a semen displacement device is “not an outrageously ridiculous idea,” says Todd Shackelford, an evolutionary psychologist at Florida Atlantic University. Size, too, may matter here—the longer a man’s penis is, the more likely it is to deposit semen out of reach of other men.

Of course, if a man has sex with a woman twice in quick succession, then there is the risk that he will displace his own semen. But researchers believe that men have evolved ways of preventing this from happening—for instance, men usually need to “recover” for a few hours between orgasms, and they rarely continue to thrust after they ejaculate. Both of these behaviors help keep men from accidentally removing their own goods.

Men also act differently when they have reason to believe that their partner may have cheated. Several survey-based studies suggest that the more time that has passed since a man has last seen his spouse, the more he will want to have sex with her. When men sleep with their partners in these circumstances, they also thrust deeper and harder than usual—consistent with the idea that they are attempting to “scoop out” rival semen—and release more sperm when they ejaculate. Not that men are aware that they’re doing this.

If men have evolved adaptations to thwart women from having other men’s children, what is to stop women from evolving counter-adaptations? Nothing. “You have what biologists call an evolutionary arms race of sorts,” Gallup explains. Just as a man is more likely to initiate sex with his partner if he suspects she has been unfaithful, a woman who has cheated does the opposite, according to other research. She tries to wait as long as possible before having sex again, perhaps to maximize the chances that her egg will be fertilized by the superior male she dallied with. In addition, women are most likely to cheat when they are at the most fertile point in their menstrual cycle, and they’re more likely to orgasm, too; some biologists argue that the female orgasm, which is accompanied by vaginal and intrauterine contracts, helps to pull semen into the reproductive tract.

Of course, there are other more obvious explanations for the waiting and the orgasms: guilt in the first instance and pleasure in the second. Perhaps, too, women wait because they don’t want their husbands to smell the scent of another man. Cheating for evolution’s sake is one thing; getting caught on an individual basis is another. A husband isn’t likely to be more sympathetic when his wife tells him that evolution made her do it.

Melinda Wenner is a science writer living in Brooklyn, N.Y.
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Just when you thought it was safe to watch the superbowl becuase they’ve made sure there will never be another wardrobe malfunction by hiring only people over 50 to perform at the half-time show (God help us if Tom Petty’s wardrobe malfunctioned; if Prince’s wardrobe had malfunctioned last year you would have needed to hold up a magnifyng glass to your tv screen to see anything)….enter GoDaddy.com, whose superbowl ad this year flirts with a wardrobe malfunction, this one purposefully undertaken by Indy500 race car driver, Danica Patrick.

Here’s the ad you saw if you watched the superbowl:
http://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/media/play.asp?isc=superbowl&mediaID=spoton&ci=11467&tab=sb

And here’s the one GoDaddy wanted you to see, but were prevented from doing so by that grand arbiter of good taste otherwise known as Fox:

http://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/media/play.asp?isc=superbowl&mediaID=exposure&ci=11526&tab=sb

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the company, i.e., don’t spend a lot of time oggling Candice Michelle’s (aka Nikki Capelli) Silicone Valley, GoDaddy.com is a company that sells web domains. Yes the Symbolic/Digital revolution is being sold piece-by-piece by a company named GoDaddy.com. Makes perfect sense to me. But what makes even more sense, in the most intellectually perverse of ways, is the singular obsession with Michelle’s/Capelli’s obviously silicone-stuffed breasts that has dominated their superbowl ads in previous years.

Here are GoDaddy’s ads for the previous three superbowls:

2007: http://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/media/play.asp?isc=superbowl&mediaID=sb07ext&ci=11199&tab=sb

2006: http://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/media/play.asp?isc=superbowl&mediaID=sb06ext&ci=11200&tab=sb

2005: http://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/media/play.asp?isc=superbowl&mediaID=sb05ext&ci=11201&tab=sb

You’ll note the rather conspicuous product placement of the company’s name and logo on the site of the Imaginary image par excellence in all of the ads, and in those aired during the 2005 and 2006 superbowls, there are rather overt representations of the Law of the Father: a committe hearing and an elderly patriarchal judge-like figure in a study crammed with books, respectively.

This year’s ad, however, replaced Michelle with Patrick, and displaced the anatomical locus of the commercial from a threatened-but-unrealized “exposure” of the Maternal/Imaginary to an implied focus on what Freud, wistfully referring (in Civilization and its Discontents) to from whence we all come, characterized as “between urine and feces”, in the ad represented by animatronic Beavers. The underlying joke, of course, builds on recent well-publicized panty-malfunctions “suffered” by the likes of Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton. Presumably, the ad’s central joke contends, Danica Patrick doesn’t need to expose her beaver in public because unlike Mademoiselles Britney, Lindsay, and Parisy, Patrick gets all the exposure she needs thanks to the domains and websites she’s bought from GoDaddy.com. Asked by camera-wielding paparazzi as to the whereabouts of her beaver, Patrick suggestively begins to unzip her leather jacket, then immediately zips it back up, assuring us that GoDaddy.com enables her to keep her beaver “safe and out of sight.” Not for Patrick the cunning stunts of the aforementioned publicity whores she seeks to differentiate herself from. Accustomed, perhaps, to the “genteel company” of the NASCAR crowd, she momentarily flirts with the self-promotional antics of her charming contemporaries, then opts out. But in that brief, unzipped moment, the name of the company emblazoned across her chest is bifurcated as follows: God — bare flesh — addy.com. Thus, our Father who art in heaven, the Symbolic realm (represented here by “.com”), and the Law of the Father (the censorship laws that compel her keep her clothes on for the 97 million people watching the game) are thrust together, remarkably enough, on the site of the Maternal/Imaginary courtesy of a company that traffics in web space.

As for the game itself — wherein the Giants vanquished the Patriots (a victory the NYT called “stunning and historical) — remarkably enough it replicated in reverse the movement that gets elaborated in Hesiod’s Theogyny, precisely two days before the first serious female contender for the presidency in the history of this country tries to seal the deal in twenty-two states. (Has anyone noticed that the contenders for the Democratic nomination embody the printed page, as in the old joke: What’s black and white and read all over? Indeed, the nomination presently stages a struggle between white female flesh (parchment) and a black male (penis/pen). If, etymologically, “patriot” can be traced back to the Latin word for father (pater), then the outcome of the game stages a reversal of the movement in Hesiod’s genealogy of the Gods, in which the Giants (Titans), the first race of beings to occupy the world are ultimately displaced by the gods in the transition from the matriarchy to the patriarchy. And it does so at a moment in this country’s history when – as the outcome of the game suggests – we are poised to undo this primordial movement by putting a woman/mother in a position of executive authority over the epistemic system, the maternal/imaginary over the paternal/symbolic. Thank God for such things, because otherwise the game had the same score for nearly three quarters and the half-time show sucked.

Given the hastening subordination of reality to the symbolic, courtesy of digitalization, it should come as no surprise that one group of inadvertent holdouts against this trend, wildlife, is now the subject of a new film that “focuses” on capturing their pre-oedipal existence on camera, albeit through the efforts of stoners who are themselves trying to reconcile themselves with “the law of the father,” when, that is, they are not trying to escape it all together. It is also worth noting that one of the actors in this film, Jonah Hill (no doubt named for the biblical story of parthenogensis and male maternal fantasies — Jonah and the whale) has also been in some of the other recent films that are monitoring the cultural unconscious, including “Knocked UP” (pregnancy and paternity), “Evan Almighty” (a retelling of the apocalyptic story of Noah and the Ark), “Superbad (in which adolescent boys are obsessed with their penises), and the “40-Year-Old Virgin” (the title speaks for itself). Hill’s next film, interestingly enough, is utterly grounded in the imaginary, the realm of the ear, as it’s an animated film based on a book by one of the great masters of Magic Thought, Dr. Seuss: “Horton Hears a Hoo.” And after that he’s slated to star in a film titled, “The Middle Child.” Hmmmmm

February 2, 2008
Attention, Slackers: It’s a Jungle Out There

By MATT ZOLLER SEITZ
Underachieving even by the standards of stoner comedies, “Strange Wilderness” is so inert that it doesn’t so much unreel on screen as loiter there, giggling at its own outrageousness.

Steve Zahn, who can do better than this, stars as Peter Gaulke, the rascally, pot-smoking host of a nature show that he inherited from his father and allowed to degenerate into a ready-for-cable-access shadow of its former self. When Gaulke’s fed-up employer (Jeff Garlin), the boss of a Nature Channel-type network, threatens to cancel the series, Gaulke loads up his Winnebago with camera equipment and deranged, intoxicant-inclined, seemingly incompetent crew members (including Allen Covert of “The Wedding Singer” and Jonah Hill of “Superbad”) and drives to Costa Rica in search of Bigfoot.

What follows is copious bong humor; a mobile bacchanal sparked by nitrous oxide; an encounter with a deranged survivalist Vietnam veteran (Robert Patrick) who proudly shows off his mutilated testicles; several lame, cutesy-profane acoustic guitar numbers performed by Mr. Hill that make you wish you were watching a Jack Black movie instead; piranha and shark attacks played for laughs; and an unprintable, perhaps indescribable, admittedly audacious gag that puts a turkey in a compromising position.

Adding to the sense that you’re watching a feature-length in-joke, Mr. Zahn’s character is named after Peter Gaulke, a screenwriter and former writer for “Saturday Night Live.” Mr. Covert’s character, a sound man, is named after Fred Wolf, who is making his directorial debut with “Strange Wilderness” and is also a former “SNL” writer. Mr. Wolf and Mr. Gaulke wrote the screenplay.

What rankles isn’t the gross-out humor or the verbal non sequiturs, which are expected, even welcome, in this sort of movie. It’s the smug sense of entitlement — that of intoxicated dweebs tittering endlessly and obnoxiously at their own supposed cleverness. “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle” is the gold standard in this genre. “Strange Wilderness” is a counterfeit bill.

“Strange Wilderness” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has profanity, drug use, nudity, violence and many graphic injuries to the gonads.

STRANGE WILDERNESS

Opened on Friday nationwide.

Directed by Fred Wolf; written by Mr. Wolf and Peter Gaulke; director of photography, David Hennings; edited by Tom Costain; music by Waddy Wachtel; production designer, Perry Andelin Blake; produced by Mr. Gaulke; released by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes.

WITH: Steve Zahn (Peter Gaulke), Allen Covert (Fred Wolf), Jonah Hill (Cooker), Kevin Heffernan (Bill Whitaker), Ashley Scott (Cheryl), Peter Dante (Danny Gutierrez), Harry Hamlin (Sky Pierson), Robert Patrick (Gus Hayden), Joe Don Baker (Bill Calhoun), Justin Long (Junior), Jeff Garlin (Ed Lawson) and Ernest Borgnine (Milas).

If you don’t watch Nip/Tuck regularly you are missing out on a show that has its hand firmly on the pulse of the cultural unconscious. As we move from the analog to the digital, in much the same way as we when we moved from scribal culture to print, the body makes a come back, especially fetishized in our efforts to manipulate and modify it. And where there’s paternity and technology, there is almost always incest. Witness a review of the show in today’s NYT:

December 18, 2007
Television Review
The Quest for Beauty Gives Way to Ugliness

By GINIA BELLAFANTE
Kimber, the porn star turned porn mogul turned coke addict, cultist and meth-head, has been tussling with her ex-boyfriend and former plastic surgeon, Dr. Christian Troy, who by the logic of “Nip/Tuck,” now in its fifth anarchic season on FX, must always look as if he bathes in canola oil and also happens to be the biological father of her husband, Matt.

“Nip/Tuck,” among its many other distinctions, is probably more committed to incestuous takes on genealogy than any other show on television. Matt’s other father, the man who reared him into his current namby-pambiness, is Sean McNamara, Christian’s partner in McNamara/Troy. A cosmetic-enhancement outfit the men founded in their 20s, it moved to Beverly Hills from Miami Beach this season because, as Christian explains it: “I’m a jack rabbit. I don’t do slow and steady. I paid my dues, and I want some overnight success.”

The series needed reigniting, and it got some from the location shift: Los Angeles allows “Nip/Tuck” to indulge the full courage of its sleaziness. It feels less and less like a moralizing satire on the ruthlessness of vanity and more and more like a joyless exploration of desperate sex hatched in a windowless building of a strip mall in the San Fernando Valley. (As if to drive the point home, the namesake of Matt and Kimber’s barely surviving new baby is the sex film star Jenna Jameson.)

“Nip/Tuck” seems no longer to be about the misery guaranteed by striving for ideals of physical perfection; it is about the cruelty and ugliness guaranteed simply by waking up. The show has become bleaker as it has become more grotesquely farcical. (Suffice it to say that there has been at least one gastrointestinal accident in a hot tub.) No one is left unmolested physically, psychically, spiritually. “Nip/Tuck” demands the complicity of your self-loathing to really be enjoyed now. A show that’s always been about abjection, it now seems almost entirely directed at the abject.

“Have you looked in a mirror lately?” Christian asked Kimber recently. “Your face looks like a fraternity couch.” It’s a great line — the show’s still full of them — but it also describes what it feels like to watch: flattened, spit on, used, washed out.

People come and go, selling themselves to a thousand different devils this season. A handsome black patient arrives at McNamara/Troy to have scars removed from his back; he got them catering to white soccer moms at sex parties. In a recurring guest appearance as the millionairess Dawn Budge, Rosie O’Donnell is abused by a fake hospital orderly, and then so is her new television producer boyfriend (brilliantly played by Oliver Platt), only he ends up enjoying it.

And heaven save the children this season! Sean’s skinny 9-year old daughter demanded liposuction. Why? Because the high school-age daughter of her mother’s girlfriend has been telling her that she needs to cut the carbs and lose the pudge. Sean hates the older girl, the vicious Eden, until he decides that she’s just what his midlife crisis needs and stumbles into circus sex with her: dozens of positions, lots of tents. Things don’t work out because, well, pedophilia rarely does.

None of this, however, will prevent Eden from being invited by Sean’s former wife, Julia, to spend Christmas with the family (the subject of Tuesday’s episode) and Christian too, whom Julia has been sleeping with again even though she has been dating Eden’s mother. (Sean and Christian, who are best friends, aren’t sleeping together but might as well be because they are living under the same roof, “My Two Daddies” style, with Christian’s sporadically appearing young son.)

For four seasons “Nip/Tuck” danced around the idea that sex creepily ought to stay within the province of family life’s pre-existing perversions; now it is saying so more directly, and with home-baked fruitcake.

NIP/TUCK

FX, Tuesday night at 10, Eastern and Pacific times; 9, Central time.

Here is a very smart and original response paper on Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex.
Dr. B.

The Root of Foreclosure
There are five choral odes within Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and in the central choral ode is the line “[Hybris] sires the tyrant….” According to Aristotle, the first word, hybris, is an act of physical or verbal assault that brings shame to the victim. However, in Athenian law, hybris was much more than mere assault because someone who gets away with hybris often places himself within a position of superiority; this is why the Chorus says that hybris sires the tyrant. The idea of hybris appears to have originally referred to cultivated plants that grew beyond their designated boundaries and, thus, had to be pruned. Pruning is a necessary aspect of gardening; if the gardener fails to prune when needed, a plant could potentially overrun the garden and destroy it.

The fact that the second word in this sentence is “sire” is unbelievably astounding to me. Not only is this word used as a respectful form of address for someone in a position of power, i.e. a king, it also refers to the male parent (father). Like a gardener, a king is charged with the protection of the country (the garden), he is expected to rule justly (prune), and to provide heirs to stabilize the throne (to ensure future success of the garden). However, in an attempt to save his own life, “King” Laius chooses not to provide an heir. In a selfish act of hybris, Laius pierces his son’s ankles and sends him away to die, but Oedipus doesn’t die. He’s forced to live with the shame of his ankle marks; he even refers to it as the “terrible disgrace I took from my cradle.”

One of the most famous lines from the movie “The Matrix” is after Neo breaks the vase and the Oracle tells him, “Oh, what’s really going to bake your noodle later on is, would you still have broken it if I hadn’t said anything?” In Oedipus Rex, would the prophecy have come true if Laius hadn’t been told of it? Personally, I doubt that it would have. Aside from the fact that Oedipus flees from those whom he believes to be his parents upon hearing the prophecy, the basis of my argument hinges on the notions behind circumcision. When a son is eight days old, he is circumcised and given his name or names. The book, Symbols of Judaism states, “Circumcision is a way of introducing language into the body and bringing the body of the infant into the sphere of language…[it] enables human beings to enter into the dimension of language.” I would argue that circumcision is the human form of pruning; it is designed to prevent the child (plant) from overstepping his boundaries (becoming a hybris) by means of connecting the son to the father. This ritual of symbolic pruning essentially establishes paternal authority (though it does not establish paternity) and marks the beginning of what will hopefully become a healthy relationship with the law. I would also argue that it was Polybus, not Laius, who circumcised Oedipus because Oedipus was not given his name until he was adopted. Oedipus grew up having a healthy relationship with Polybus, his “father,” but the moment Polybus’ paternity is called into question, that paternal authority is severely undermined. Almost overnight, Oedipus becomes a tyrant. Before he can even say “Hybris,” he meets King Laius at the place where three roads meet (Oedipus, Laius, and Polybus arguably being the metaphorical three roads). Even though Laius has paternity over Oedipus, he does not have paternal authority because he failed to circumcise his son. The result is that – like a child screaming, “I don’t have to listen to you! You’re not my dad!” – Oedipus disobeys him and kills him. Oedipus doesn’t know to whom he should listen; one father has paternity, the other had paternal authority. If one is called into question (or is never established), foreclosure results and the child becomes a hybris. If a father is continually absent, how can he establish paternal authority? The lack of paternal authority is thus the root of foreclosure and hybris.

Hybris, in the line of Cadmus, begins with Laius and carries over to Oedipus. Laius committed an act of hybris the moment he became selfish and placed himself before the “fatherland.” Tragically, the notion that the son must pay for the sins of the father becomes true in a very evident manner in Sophocles’ Play. As a result, because the gods know that hybris will only breed tragedy and destruction for those involved, they “prune” the line of Cadmus and end it.