Lamenting the Loss of Courtesy

Miss Luce was a stern taskmaster who taught English at Rome Free Academy in Rome, New York. We all thought she was very tough and demanding and set very high standards for us in every assignment. One lesson included "bread and butter letters" which were letters or notes to thank someone for a gift, hospitality or other favor or kindness. This basic courtesy appears to have been lost in the proliferation of media - e-mail, twitter, texting, etc.

Gifts or other favors are seldom acknowledged. You would think that recipients would at least use the very convenient email or texting to say thank you to parents or grandparents for a gift. But invariably there is no reply. No indication that the gift was ever received or enjoyed. If it weren't for the cancelled check in many cases we wouldn't even know it had been received. Perhaps $50 or $100 is not perceived as substantial by the younger generation.

The other way to know if the gift had been received is to ask via cell phone or email. "Did you get the gift I sent? I just wanted to be sure you received it and it wasn't lost in the mail."

So after starting a modest campaign to revive the practice of bread and butter letters I eventually received brief but hand written notes, brief, lucid and warm in tone. The hand writing  or printing was neat and easy to read and the grammar was correct. They were delivered by the US Postal Service in good time.

Since these were notes from grandchildren I had some leverage in the form of a cooperating daughter who agreed with me that we should try and revive the practice. Her observation was that she thought it was a sign of the times and like me had let it slide when her gifts to nieces and nephews were not acknowledged.

The task they faced must have seemed terribly inconvenient: find a thank you card or note paper, write it, address the envelope, put a stamp on it and mail it especially compared to dashing off a short text: Thnk U Gpa 4 the gift. Luv, Mary.

But I despair because I don't think the "fix" is permanent and I don't think this not-so-subtle coerced success will survive me. But neither will the gifts. So I plan to encourage the practice of bread and butter messages via e-mail in the hope that it will at least provide the opportunity to establish some sort of intermittent contact with grandchildren and nieces and nephews especially when we are separated by decades of time, culture and thousands of miles.

 

The Heart Has Its Reasons

By KEVIN HELLIKER
February 9, 2008; Page A1, Wall Street Journal

(Note from Critical Curmudgeon. This article is reproduced here in its entirely so you can save the whole bizarre event.)

For 46 years, Toby Phalen Young was a model of propriety.

Married to her high-school sweetheart since the age of 20, Ms. Young was a respected mother, business professional and philanthropist. She found homes for stray dogs and did volunteer work at a prison. She never even got a traffic ticket. Her siblings called her "goody two shoes."

Almost exactly two years ago, however, on the eve of Valentine's Day, Ms. Young used her volunteer status at Lansing Correctional Facility to smuggle out a convicted murderer. At age 27, John Manard had convinced the 48-year-old Ms. Young of his undying love for her. Before running off with him, she withdrew $42,000 from her retirement plan, purchased a getaway vehicle and packed it with her belongings. Her husband found a pair of pistols missing from their home, a discovery that turned the fugitive lovers into America's most-wanted couple.

Toby Phalen Young at Leavenworth Detention Center

The escape brought a parade of journalists into this blue-collar town across the river from glittering Kansas City, Mo. But nobody here could or would offer insight into the sudden wild streak of a community pillar who lived down the street from her parents in the only town she'd ever called home.

Even after federal authorities located the fugitives in a honeymoon cabin in Tennessee, Ms. Young's friends and loved ones reserved judgment. Many were convinced she had fallen under the spell of a manipulator at a vulnerable time, when her father was dying and Ms. Young herself was recovering from cancer.

"In the middle of a mid-life crisis, she got caught in the trap of a no-good rotten con artist," says Michael Peterson, a state legislator here who has known Ms. Young's family, the Phalens, since the 1950s. Adds her attorney, Michael Harris: "Toby is lucky not to be lying in a ditch in Appalachia with a bullet in her head."

BUILDING TRUST, WITH A DOG'S HELP

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Wall Street Journal reporter Kevin Helliker² on how he convinced convicted murderer John Manard to tell him about his love for Toby Young.

Yet in Ms. Young's account, the first she has offered publicly since her arrest two years ago, Mr. Manard didn't wrong her and never would have. "Everybody wants me to hate him, but I don't," she says, visibly embarrassed to be sitting on the inmate side of plexiglass, a telephone pressed to her ear.

Her guilty pleas to felony charges in state court in 2006 and federal court last year offered no insight into the motivation behind her crimes, and she never provided any to the media -- in part, she says, for fear no one would understand. She cites a quote, from French philosopher Pascal, that she recently came across in prison, where she reads a book a day: "The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of."

John Manard

Her husband of 28 years, a fire captain named Patrick Young, has rejected all requests for interviews. For this article, he declined to return calls placed to his home, his cell phone and his place of work. "I want to assure you that no matter what may come of this, it will remain a private and personal matter," Mr. Young said in a statement to the media following Ms. Young's arrest.

In a prison cell elsewhere in Kansas, meanwhile, Mr. Manard professes his love for her. "I miss her so much, I'd have to wipe out an entire rainforest to put it on paper," he said in a recent letter to The Wall Street Journal.

The felonies that cost Ms. Young her home, marriage, financial security and freedom might never have occurred if she had shared her unhappiness with someone other than an inmate seeking to woo her. But she had lived her life according to a family credo, she says: "Phalens don't complain. Phalens suck it up."

Even by those standards, Ms. Young's father, James Phalen, stood out. At age 27, he nearly died in a fire that burned off his ears and hospitalized him for six months. Upon discharge, he could barely move his arms, so tight was his scalded flesh. Returning to his job as a machinist at the railroad, however, he didn't seek work that would accommodate this limitation. Instead, he sought the most-hated job on his shift -- crawling under an engine and reaching up to replace its brake shoes -- for the purpose of painfully forcing that skin to stretch. It was a story he sometimes told when he heard his children complaining.

Of the seven Phalen children, none took it to heart more than the oldest, Toby. "'Great' was the only answer Toby ever gave to 'How's it going?'" says her youngest sister, Amy Phalen, an Arkansas housewife.

Toby Phalen Young awaits her sentencing in 2006

At the Catholic high school where her grandmother had been a teacher and her father a football standout, Ms. Young is still remembered as the pep-club president, a straight-A student and the steady girlfriend of a baseball star named Pat Young. A good-looking kid from a troubled part of town, Pat hung out so often in the Phalen house that Toby's younger siblings say they considered him a brother. "Shy, quiet, polite," is how Ms. Phalen, Toby's sister, describes her former brother-in-law, whom she says she loves.

At age 20, Pat and Toby married. Of the 200 members of the Bishop Ward High class of 1975, dozens married their high-school sweethearts. These unions in part reflected a belief in church teachings: When a Bishop Ward couple started thinking about having sex, marriage was the right thing to do. And among her siblings, Toby was known as fanatical about doing the right thing. "She was less like a sister than like a third parent," says Ms. Phalen.

Pat became a fireman, Toby a secretary. They bought a house not far from her parents and had three children within seven years. The middle child, their only daughter, died a few hours after birth.

Ms. Young says her method of handling that setback, and hardship generally, was to stay busy. While raising two sons and working full-time, she attended college at night and obtained two undergraduate business degrees. She landed a job at Sprint Corp., where she became a project manager specializing in systems analysis. "Toby figured out a way to make any process more efficient," says Steven Smith, a tax expert who worked with Ms. Young on several projects at Sprint.

In 2001, she was earning a six-figure income as a member of a project at Sprint called ION, an attempt to bundle telephone and Internet services. But the attacks of 9/11 rocked the economy at a time when Sprint was already reeling from the failure of its proposed merger with MCI WorldCom Inc. In October 2001, Sprint killed the ION project and laid off most of ION's work force, ending Ms. Young's 14-year career at the company.

Reeling from the loss of her executive dreams, she bounced around: She started a Web-design venture with her 20-something son, enrolled in nursing school, began working part time at a veterinary clinic. Then a lump on her neck turned out to be thyroid cancer. In March of 2004, she underwent surgery.

This glimpse of her mortality evoked in her a desire for meaningful work, and her mind turned to dogs. Rescuing, training and showing dogs had been a life-long avocation. At the veterinary clinic where she worked, she became aware of the large number of strays around Kansas City that got exterminated for lack of adoptive owners. So she broached the idea of starting a dog-adoption service.

John Manard displays his tattoos in photo taken by Kansas Department of Corrections.

A fellow clinic employee, whose husband worked at Lansing Correctional Facility, a nearby state prison, suggested Ms. Young consider using prisoners to train stray dogs. Around the country, so-called cell-dog programs had been shown to reduce inmate violence and convert doomed canines into adoptable pets.

A visit to the warden's office at Lansing Correctional Facility convinced Ms. Young the idea would work. Going onto the Internet, she downloaded the documents needed to create a non-profit, which she called the Safe Harbor Prison Dog Program. She enlisted volunteers and raised money. Within a year, the program trained and found homes for nearly 700 strays.

These penitentiary pooches became famous across the Midwest, attracting dog seekers to the suburban Kansas City PetSmart store where Ms. Young held adoption fairs on weekends. Violence diminished inside the prison, officials said, in part because many inmates wanted to share their cells with a dog, and obtaining one required good behavior.

The program brought a new kind of publicity to an institution known for four decades as the harsh setting of Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood." In media outlets ranging from television and talk radio to newspapers and pet publications, the dog program generated coverage that made prison officials look progressive and hardened criminals humane. "Part of your heart goes into each dog," Leslie Ellifritz, a convicted murderer and rapist, told the Associated Press.

Manard and Young at Lansing Correctional Facility in 2005 before his escape.

The publicity turned Ms. Young into one of Kansas City's highest-profile nonprofit executives. In animal-control circles, she became known as a savior. "Toby took the lame, the ugly, the dogs nobody else wanted," says Karen Sands, shelter director of the Humane Society of Greater Kansas City.

But privately, she was coming unglued. The sense of well-being she'd always received from striving non-stop eluded her now, she says, and in an attempt to regain it, she worked all the harder. When she wasn't collecting strays or training inmates or updating her Web site with photos of adoptable canines, she was writing her weekly newsletter or cleaning the kennel behind her house, where 15 or so dogs awaited transfer to prison.

Yet staying busy no longer warded off a sense of despair and alienation, Ms. Young recalls. Her achievements -- no matter how celebrated -- seemed inadequate to her, because thousands of local dogs continued to be exterminated each year. Behind the wheel of the Safe Harbor cargo van, she says she increasingly found herself battling the impulse to steer into oncoming traffic.

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At times, Mr. Manard wrote directly to Ms. Young in letters he sent to Mr. Helliker. Click to see a larger version.

Only during visits behind bars did she find any relief. In a fortress packed with men, her appearance at age 47 drew more compliments than she'd received at 27, and not just from inmates. One guard, she says, always greeted her by saying, "Hey, beautiful." Inmates worshipped her for being able to place a dog in their cells.

In particular, she enjoyed her dealings with Mr. Manard, partly, she says, because he challenged her. Early on, he good naturedly questioned her argument that positive reinforcement, rather than discipline, produced the best-trained pets. But after agreeing to eliminate "no" from his dog-handling vocabulary, he became an ace, she says, his charges exhibiting good behavior and happy dispositions long after adoption.

Mr. Manard says he loved handling menacing beasts, such as an American bulldog named Kane, that entered prison snarling and left licking hands.

In his first interview on the subject of their courtship and escape, Mr. Manard says he never imagined Ms. Young would take interest in him. "I respected her -- she was like Mother Teresa -- and I was careful not to cross any lines," said Mr. Manard, in a collect call from a maximum-security cell in El Dorado, Kan.

Ms. Young says Mr. Manard began offering tips on how to handle this guard, that inmate or some logistical problem. She says she watched him defuse tension between inmates. "Like a great corporate manager, he could turn people his way without creating resentment, by persuading them that his idea was theirs," she says.

Mr. Manard says he marveled at her innocence. At age 47, she told him she'd never been drunk, smoked a cigarette, tried drugs or watched pornography -- lines he had crossed by 14, at which age he was living in a juvenile detention center, he says. A tattoo across his torso said: "Hooligan."

But by age 27, he was different, he told her. Behind bars, he'd obtained his high-school equivalency diploma, taught himself to play several instruments and joined a prison band. He eventually won release to medium-security from maximum-security status. "His disciplinary history had improved from the time that he was first incarcerated," says Bill Miskell, spokesman for the Kansas Department of Corrections, noting that Mr. Manard "qualified for the privilege to participate" in the dog program. At the time, about 70 of the prison's nearly 2,500 inmates were involved in that program.

Yet Mr. Manard suspected no amount of reform would ever win him freedom, he told Ms. Young. At age 17 he'd received a life sentence for his role in a car-jacking that left a passenger fatally shot. By Mr. Manard's calculations, the earliest he would gain parole would be 2028, and he felt certain he wouldn't win it even then. His biggest fear, he says, was that he'd be buried on prison grounds.

All this, he told Ms. Young, for a crime he never committed. As an adolescent, he says he'd been a "self-centered adrenalin junkie," and not because his parents hadn't taught him right from wrong. "My life wasn't taken from me -- I gave it away [by] stealing the guy's car," he says.

Yet he says he didn't shoot anybody. He hadn't even been carrying a gun, he says, asserting that his older accomplice accidentally pulled the trigger. "I would never kill anyone," Mr. Manard told her.

Paul Morrison, the prosecutor in the case, says he believes that Mr. Manard didn't pull the trigger. But he says that the felony-murder law in Kansas renders that issue irrelevant, because Mr. Manard participated in a crime that clearly had the potential to turn violent. Prosecutors say felony murder, besides being a deterrent, avoids the legal gridlock that occurs when defendants endlessly point fingers at each other.

Felony murder is a concept that many other nations -- and some American states -- have abolished as unfair. Going online, Ms. Young researched the subject and concluded Mr. Manard had a point. "If you didn't kill anybody, you shouldn't be convicted of murder and sent to prison for life," she says.

Sympathy also flowed the other way. Mr. Manard could tell she was unhappy, she says, and his concern was particularly helpful when her father, a loving and powerful figure in her life, was diagnosed with cancer in 2005. Mr. Manard also asked about her marriage: Why was she spending 50 hours a week inside a prison?

Ms. Young says she replied that nearly 30 years of marriage had created a bond between her and her husband that wasn't measurable in hours-per-week spent together. "He's the only man I ever dated," she said, reciting an oft-rehearsed line that she thought sounded romantic.

For years a spinner of fictitious tales of domestic bliss, Ms. Young recalls a letter she wrote regaling relatives with the story of a salsa-making fiasco that dissolved in laughter between her and her husband. "It never happened," she says. "But it was how I wished our marriage was." Instead, she felt the marriage was bereft of affection.

On occasion, she broached the subject of divorce, but says her husband laughed and said she had nothing to complain about. He never hit her, wasn't a drunk and didn't cheat, she says. He brought home a fire-captain's salary. She suspected such factors would sway her parents and siblings, who regarded Mr. Young as a son or brother.

"I didn't see any way out," she says.

At the prison, Mr. Manard endlessly asked her: "What's wrong?" Often, she answered that she felt obliged to please too many people, including her husband. Gradually, she confided her marital woes. Mr. Manard suggested that she obtain one of those bracelets that say "WWJD," for "What Would Jesus Do?" Instead of Jesus, however, Mr. Manard suggested that she ask herself, "What would John do?"

In times of stress, Ms. Young says she started asking herself that.

He began wooing her. When he raved about the way her hair color matched her eyes, the creaminess of her skin, her taste in clothes, "it was like water on a dying plant," she says.

A turning point in their relationship came in October 2005, both say, when an inmate threatened her.

After that, Ms. Young says she refused to return without protection. She says an officer in the warden's office responded by appointing Mr. Manard her unofficial protector. "He said John would accompany me everywhere I went inside," she says.

Prison officials acknowledge Ms. Young reported a threat. But Mr. Miskell, the state corrections department spokesman, says prison officials didn't -- and never would -- appoint an inmate to protect a volunteer or visitor.

No one disputes that the two spent hours together or that Ms. Young had extraordinary access inside the prison. When two of her sisters came along one day, they quickly insisted on leaving, alarmed to find themselves surrounded by inmates without a guard nearby, recalls Ms. Phalen, Toby's sister. Ms. Young's former Sprint colleague, Mr. Smith, had a similar reaction when he tagged along with her to inmate cells, no guard in sight.

"Frankly, it kind of freaked me out," says Mr. Smith, who provided tax services to the dog program. "I told Toby, 'I'm not coming back.'"

Mr. Miskell, the corrections department spokesman, says, "People who tour facilities for the first time are often taken off-guard by the amount of movement and interaction between inmates and others." He says those who work or volunteer in a correctional facility must meet necessary training requirements, as Ms. Young did.

In rare moments of solitude behind bars, Ms. Young and Mr. Manard professed their love. He told her he wanted to be with her every day, forever. She told him that she'd never felt this way about anybody, that just talking with him fulfilled something vital in her. In December of 2005, he asked whether Ms. Young would run off with him, if he managed to escape?

"I would," she replied.

Mr. Manard says he asked that as a joke, but her reply turned escape into an obsession. He focused his thoughts on fitting into a box. Stretching himself to become more limber, and dropping nearly 30 pounds to a weight of 155, Mr. Manard tried without success to squeeze his 6-foot-2-inch frame into the box. But one night, he says, he dreamed of a way to pretzel into it. Trying it the next morning, he found it worked.

Originally, both say, he was determined to mail himself out of prison. But she argued that plan would never work. Getting past the gates was unlikely, since a heart-beat detector is generally applied to cargo trucks. Then Mr. Manard broached the idea of sneaking out in Ms. Young's van, which often didn't undergo heart-beat detection.

His plan: When she pulled up to collect dogs, Mr. Manard would be hiding in the box, inside a dog crate that also contained food bowls and other supplies. The inmates who always loaded dog crates into the van would -- unknowingly, he said -- load him into her van. Then the two would flee for parts unknown.

Ms. Young says she agreed to the plan without allowing herself to consider the consequences. As laid out, it seemed to involve minimal complicity on her part, she says. "I wouldn't be loading him into the van. I'd just be pulling up to collect dogs the way I always did on Sunday morning," she says.

As part of the plan, she drained $42,000 from her retirement plan, bought a 1997 Chevrolet pickup as a getaway vehicle and hid it in a rented storage unit.

Using a contraband cellphone inside prison, Mr. Manard rented a cabin in rural Tennessee. In the month before their breakout, he and Ms. Young communicated 12,000 minutes by phone, she says. One morning, Ms. Young says, her husband fished her vibrating phone from her purse and found a text message that read: "good morning, baby. I love you."

"That's a wrong number," Ms. Young told her husband.

She says her husband responded that he didn't consider her sexually capable of having an affair.

On the afternoon of Sunday, Feb. 12, the phone rang in the home of Ms. Young's parents. Peggy Phalen, Ms. Young's mother, recalls being told that an inmate was missing from prison and Ms. Young had failed to show at that morning's adoption fair at Pet-Smart. Terror struck that she'd been taken hostage. "We prayed for the best but feared the worst," she says.

Within hours, though, evidence of Ms. Young's complicity emerged -- her missing belongings, the money taken out of her retirement fund -- and by Valentine's Day, federal authorities were calling her role incontrovertible.

In Tennessee, meanwhile, the fugitives spent Valentine's Day in their cabin, exchanging gifts: She bought him a bass guitar. He bought her a parakeet, that he named Lynyrd, a reference to Lynyrd Skynyrd's song, "Freebird." They made love, talked for hours and planned outings. On Feb. 24, they toured an aquarium, and saw an IMAX movie about lions and stopped at Barnes & Noble, where Mr. Manard bought Ms. Young one of his favorite books, "Where the Red Fern Grows," a tale of a boy who trains hunting dogs.

After they left the bookstore, authorities spotted them. Following a short chase, they were arrested.

As the image of Ms. Young, handcuffed and bewildered, flashed across TV screens around the nation, her husband refused to utter any public criticism of her. His subsequent request for an emergency divorce didn't cite grounds. A judge here quickly granted it.

In a letter to a Kansas City television station, Mr. Manard described his 12 days with Ms. Young as the high point of his life. Even after receiving an extra decade of prison time for the escape, Mr. Manard says in an interview that it was worthwhile.

"I got to meet an angel who for some reason graced me with her love," he says.

Lost amid the weepy guilty pleas of Ms. Young was what happened immediately after the escape. She and Mr. Manard stopped at her home, so that she could place in her backyard kennel the adoption-ready dogs in her van. She says she knew other volunteers in the prison program would find homes for the dogs. "After rescuing them once, I wasn't going to ditch them in a field," she says.

[D3SC-CD]While she was unloading the dogs, Mr. Manard -- who was supposed to be hiding in the front of the van -- says he slipped into the house and grabbed a pair of handguns. Ms. Young says she never wanted to bring the guns or even touched them. ("I hate guns. I'm 100% for gun control," she says.) But federal prosecutor Terra Morehead says that even if this story were true, which she doubts, it wouldn't diminish Ms. Young's guilt.

Her 27-month sentence forced Ms. Young to ponder the damage her betrayal wrought upon loved ones, including her grown sons, one of whom she says hasn't spoken to her since her arrest. Her father died two months later, after granting her forgiveness, she says. "I've told Toby that her father may have died sooner because of what she did, and she just has to live with that," says her mother, a retired Catholic-college administrator who visits Ms. Young weekly in prison.

Upon completing her sentence this May, Ms. Young says she expects the repair of shattered trust with loved ones to take a while. She plans to live with her mother and wants to work at a book store.

She doesn't miss the life she lost, she says, asserting that the humiliation and deprivations of prison have been beneficial. Long dismissive of psychotherapy, she now praises the prison therapists who, initially placing her on suicide watch, began treating her for depression.

She refuses to endorse the theory that she is the brainwashed victim of a self-serving convict. She says she believes John Manard loved her, that he escaped to be with her, that he is a reformed man worthy of freedom. When legally able to make contact with him, she says she will do so.

Her deepest regret is that his lengthened sentence may keep him behind bars for life. Her voice breaking, she says, "I wonder if he'd be better off if he'd never met me."

It's Called Sexsomnia

By Anne Underwood

Newsweek, June 11, 2007

When Jan Luedecke of Toronto was arrested and tried for sexual assault, he had an unusual defense'he did it in his sleep. Really. It may sound farfetched, but Luedecke, who was 33 at his 2005 trial, had a history of sleepwalking. On the night in question, he'd been drinking at a party and found himself sacked out on the couch with a woman he'd met there. Hours later, she jolted him awake and demanded to know what he was doing.

Luedecke claimed he was unaware he was having sex with her. "Under the law, if there's no intent to commit a crime, you haven't committed a crime," says Dr. Colin Shapiro, director of the Youthdale Child and Adolescent Sleep Center in Toronto, who testified for the defense. Luedecke was acquitted (to the outrage of women's organizations in Canada), and the case is now on appeal.Add sex to the roster of unlikely sleep behaviors known as parasomnias, which range from sleep driving to sleep eating.

Last week psychiatrist Carlos Schenck and neurologist Mark Mahowald of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center published a review article in the journal Sleep on what they call "sleepsex," or "sexsomnia."

Think of it as a more advanced form of sleepwalking. It covers the full gamut of sexual activity, from fondling to intercourse, with one crucial difference. The patients apparently have no conscious awareness of what they're doing and, when wakened, have no recollection of it.
Is this for real? Reported cases are still rare'Schenck and Mahowald found only 31 in the medical literature. But they say that's partly because of the embarrassing nature of the problem and partly because there's so little public awareness of it.

Sexsomnia was not even recognized by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine until 2005. Psychologist Michael Mangan at the University of New Hampshire, author of the 2001 book "Sleepsex: Uncovered," believes there are far more cases than the literature would indicate. He maintains a Web site on sleepsex that has registered comments from more than 1,000 sufferers.

Sleepsex is far different from your average sexual dream. Dreams occur during REM sleep, when the body is largely paralyzed. Sleepsex takes place during partial arousal from deep sleep, when one is free to move. Dreams can be remembered later, under the right circumstances. But sleepsex appears to belong to a mental netherworld in which brain regions devoted to higher thought, judgment and reasoning are shut down, while areas governing more primitive functions (such as locomotion, eating and sex) are still active.

Put them together, and it can be a bad combination for someone who is already predisposed to sleepwalking or other parasomnias. For such a person, anything that induces more deep sleep'such as excessive alcohol consumption or persistent sleep deprivation'only increases the risk.

Granted, sleepsex sounds amusing'and some of the cases have their comical aspects. "One man had been initiating intercourse on almost a nightly basis," says Mangan. That was apparently fine with his wife, until "one night he started snoring." In another case, a female sexsomniac routinely groped her husband. Whenever he responded, says Schenck, "she would wake up and accuse him of forcing sex on her while she slept."

But doctors emphasize that sleepsex can lead to both physical and psychological damage. Bed partners have been known to suffer lacerations. (It's not uncommon, Schenck explains, for male sexsomniacs to display much rougher behavior during sleepsex than waking sex.) One man masturbated in his sleep with such energy that he suffered "repeated bruising of the penis" and avoided sexual intercourse for more than eight years. A man in Singapore masturbated in his sleep every night, leaving his wife feeling "cheated." "People experience real problems in relationships because of it," says Mangan.

Schenck and Mahowald hope that publicizing the existence of sexsomnia will cause more people to seek help. The condition is highly treatable with the generic anti-anxiety drug clonazepam. Seeking help can only work to a sufferer's advantage. After all, if you're going to have sex, you might as well enjoy it.

Gay Inmates Get

Conjugal Visits

By Jesse McKinley, New York Times, June 3, 2007

Curmudgeon's Note: California is on the way to reducing a program to absurdity. Will the ACLU sue on behalf of necrophiliacs next or inmates who had a pet pig? Don't gay inmates in prison get enough sex in prison? Will transgender inmates be able to alternate? What next? I shake my head so often at the news that people think I have a disease? Ciao, CC

SAN FRANCISCO, June 1 — Gay and lesbian prisoners in California will be allowed overnight visits with their partners under a new prison policy, believed to be the first time a state has allowed same-sex conjugal stays.

The policy comes more than two years after a 2003 California law provided equal rights for registered domestic partners in California, including those of the same sex and non-married heterosexuals. Gay and civil rights groups had threatened to sue to permit the conjugal visits in prisons, which they say have been slow to enact changes promised by the law.

“It’s a little troubling that a state agency had to be threatened with legal action to obey state law,” said Geoff Kors, the executive director of Equality California, a gay rights organization. “There was no justifiable excuse for not complying.”

Terry Thornton, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said the slow pace of change was due, in part, to considerations of whether allowing the visits would expose gay inmates to danger inside the prison, where they are sometimes singled out for attack. “We had to thoroughly evaluate all the security concerns,” Ms. Thornton said.

The policy change was spurred by a letter warning of legal action from the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Vernon Foeller, 40, a gay man who had been serving a 20-month sentence for attempted burglary at the state prison in Vacaville, Calif. Alex Cleghorn, an AC.L.U. lawyer, said that Mr. Foeller was eligible for a conjugal visit except that the prison system “didn’t recognize his partner as a family member.”

“They have pages and pages of regulations that must be met to permit these visits,” Mr. Cleghorn said, “and Vernon met all of these requirements.”

Mr. Foeller was released in April.

Overnight visits, which can be up to 72 hours long, have been allowed in California since the 1970s, Ms. Thornton said, and are conducted in units inside prison grounds, often trailers. While suggestive of sexual activity, the visits sometimes include several family members, including children.

“It’s not exclusive to conjugal activities,” Ms. Thornton said.

Gay and lesbian inmates were not allowed visits from their partners because only spouses were recognized as “immediate family.”

Several categories of inmate are not allowed the visits, including those on death row, sex offenders, those serving sentences of life without parole, and those who have been violent with minors or family members. Prisoners also must have been on good behavior, with no violations.

The new policy will allow only those currently registered as domestic partners to ask for the visits, and affirms that no prisoners will be allowed overnight visits with other prisoners, regardless of status.

Only a handful of states — including New York — allow conjugal visits, which some prison officials say can help reduce the stress of prison life and maintain prisoners’ connections to their families. Critics, however, have cited a variety of reasons to oppose the visits, including the potential for spreading sexually transmitted diseases and the additional cost of maintaining separate conjugal prison quarters.

Shannon Minter, the legal director for the National Center for Lesbian Rights in San Francisco, called the policy change a “great leap forward” but said gay and lesbian inmates were often still the target of discrimination and violence.

“There are certain social arenas that have been insulated from social changes going on in broader society, and jails and prisons is one of those areas,” Mr. Minter said.

California has a ban on same-sex marriage, although that law has been the subject of legal battles. The California Supreme Court is currently reviewing the law’s constitutionality as part of a suit brought by the City of San Francisco and a group of gay and lesbian couples.

The policy change must be approved by the state’s Office of Administrative Law before taking effect, most likely later this year.

Dirty Old Women
Teenage boys have always lusted after attractive teachers, but what happens when the teachers lust after the boys?
By Ariel Levy, NY Times Magazine

The older woman. Knowledgeable, seasoned, experienced. Hot! The fantasy creature who embodies full-blown female sexuality in all its mysterious glory. Of course, she’s out of reach; it will never happen. She inhabits her own complicated realm of emotions and responsibilities and lingerie, and you are just . . . a kid. But imagine the initiation! The possibilities! (Sexually, sure, but also for bragging.) It would be awesome.Or would it?

What if the impossible happened and she started paying unmistakably romantic attention to you. What if “she told me that she had feeling for me. She told me that she was thinking about me a lot and had feeling for me [and] she didn’t know what to do with them,” as 24-year-old Debra Lafave told one of her 14-year-old pupils, according to his statement to the police.

What if you had sex in the classroom? What if she fell in love with you? What if she wanted to marry you? If it stopped being a fantasy and started being your actual sex life, your actual life, would it be thrilling or upsetting? Or both? Would you be scarred for life or psyched for months?

These are questions we’ve had plenty of opportunities to contemplate lately. A few months ago, 37-year-old Lisa Lynette Clark pleaded guilty to statutory rape of her son’s 15-year-old close friend, whom Clark married and whose child she recently gave birth to. In January, a 26-year-old math teacher from Kentucky named Angela Comer was arrested in Mexico with one of her eighth-grade male students (who had allegedly stolen $800 from his grandmother for trip money). They had been trying to get married.

Dirty older women do not reside exclusively in states with alligator problems; we have our fair share in the New York area. In August, Sandra Beth Geisel, a former Catholic-school teacher and the wife of a prominent banker in Albany, was sentenced to six months in jail for having sex with a 16-year-old, and she has admitted to sleeping with two of her 17-year-old pupils. (The presiding judge in the case infuriated the youngest boy’s parents when he told Geisel her actions were illegal but that her youngest sexual partner “was certainly not victimized by you in any other sense of the word.”)

In October, Lina Sinha, an administrator and a former teacher at Manhattan Montessori on East 55th Street, was charged with second- and third-degree sodomy and third-degree rape for allegedly having sex with a former student—who is now a cop—for four years starting when he was 13 and she was 29 (she denies the charges). And last May, Christina Gallagher, a 25-year-old Spanish teacher from Jersey City, pleaded guilty to second-degree sexual assault of a 17-year-old male student.

The story that probably set the most imaginations in motion is Lafave’s. Debra Lafave, a 24-year-old middle-school teacher who looks like a Miss America contestant, is currently serving three years under house arrest for having sex repeatedly with one of her 14-year-old male students. After a hearing, Lafave’s lawyer, John Fitzgibbons, notoriously said that his client, a former model, was too pretty for jail:

“To place an attractive young woman in that kind of hellhole is like putting a piece of raw meat in with the lions.” As in several of the other cases, Lafave’s beauty and youth blurred the lines of her narrative. What were these stories about? We couldn’t tell if they were instances of abuse by adults in positions of power who were badly harming children or if they were American Pie/Maxim magazine–style farces about lucky little dudes.

When I was growing up, my father used to say as a joke (sort of), “Teenage boys: the lowest form of life on earth.” He was probably imagining some combination of his adolescent self and Philip Roth’s Alexander Portnoy, a character who revolved around a tight coil of urge and surge and shame, whose repertoire of obsessions ranged from onanism to defilement and whose actions seemed almost piteously in thrall to his loins rather than his head (which was too busy processing anxiety and guilt to offer much guidance). Portnoy’s Complaint was a best seller in 1967, but to this day its protagonist is for many people besides my father the epitome of adolescent-male sexuality: desperate, reckless, insatiable. The horny little devil.

If you conceive of teenage boys as walking heaps of lust, you probably conceive of attractive adult teachers who hit on them as public servants in more ways than one.

Media representations of grown women who pursue teenage boys have hardly been scary in recent years. Phoebe’s brother on Friends married his home-ec teacher and proceeded to live happily ever after. Jennifer Aniston’s affair with little love-struck Jake Gyllenhaal in The Good Girl would be difficult to describe as abuse. He pined for her, he worshipped her, and if he ended up destroyed, we couldn’t blame her . . . a lost little girl who happened to be in her thirties.

The most famous older woman is, of course, Mrs. Robinson: sinister as well as smoldering, coolly and mercilessly manipulating Benjamin to get what she wants and keep what he wants out of reach. But the fictional figure who is really more representative of our stereotypes is Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. Tennessee Williams made her a skittering, simpering hysteric. Where Mrs. Robinson unfurls her silk stocking with utter confidence in her own allure and smoky erotic power, Blanche rushes to cover the lightbulb with a paper lantern so nobody will see the years creeping over her face.

(For the record, her advanced age was 30.) She is desperate for attention and dependent upon the “kindness of strangers,” and, it is suggested, she hit on her 17-year-old male student because her own maturity was stunted and only a young boy would make an appropriate companion for the young girl still living within her withering skin. By the end of that play, she is raped by Stanley Kowalski, then carted off to the loony bin: a victim.

It’s jarring, however, to think of a teenage boy—say, a 16-year-old—who’s been seduced by a female teacher as a victim. It clashes with our assumptions. A teenage boy who gets to live his fantasy? What can be the harm?

As it happens, that is a very dangerous question.

In 1998, Bruce Rind, Philip Tromovitch, and Robert Bauserman (professors at Temple University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Michigan, respectively) published a study that has resounded through the psychological Establishment ever since. The article, published in the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Bulletin, was what’s known as a meta-analysis, an overview of the existing science, in this case on the long-term effects of childhood sexual abuse. The authors concluded that “negative effects were neither pervasive nor typically intense” and that men who’d been abused “reacted much less negatively than women.”

Though Rind and his colleagues bent over backward to emphasize the difference between something’s being wrong and something’s being harmful (it’s wrong, for instance, to shoot a gun at someone, even if you miss), the study was spectacularly demonized. Dr. Laura Schlessinger had three psychologists on her show who declared it “junk science.” One of them compared its authors to Nazi doctors. The Alaska State Legislature passed a resolution condemning the study’s conclusions and methodologies. In May 1999, the Family Research Council along with Tom DeLay held a press conference in Washington demanding the APA retract the Rind study. (Schlessinger was teleconferenced in.)

About a year after the study’s publication, Congress passed a formal resolution condemning Rind in an uncontested vote. The president of the APA initially defended the paper and pointed out that it had been peer-reviewed and determined to be scientifically sound, but as the resolution was being debated, he sent a clarification to DeLay saying that child sexual abuse was always harmful and—though the study has never been scientifically discredited—the organization has been trying to distance itself from Rind ever since.

Although it is tempting to assume that the finding that childhood sexual abuse is not as damaging for boys as for girls confirms various widely held beliefs about gender—that boys are tougher and hornier than girls, that males enjoy sex in any form—the issue is more complicated. For one thing, when men seek out sex with underage girls, they are more likely than their female counterparts to have more than one victim and to utilize methods like coercion and threats to secure complicity and secrecy. Women who seek sex with underage boys are more likely to focus on one person and to proffer love and loyalty and a sense of a particular and profound bond. In many of these cases, the woman has floated the idea of marriage.

We (still) like to keep our understanding of masculinity connected to our understanding of maturity. We’d never had a female anchorwoman deliver our news until recently, we don’t often let female columnists explain the news, and we’ve never had a female president to make the news. For many Americans, being a real grown-up requires a penis. And if you’ve got that, even if you’re only 15, you must have the maturity and the manliness to know what you want to do with it—even if that involves intercourse with a 42-year-old. Who among us would say the same thing about a 15-year-old girl?

“For guys, the different issue than for young women is that it’s supposed to be the best thing anybody could want in terms of what society is saying or their friends,” says Lonnie Barbach, a clinical psychologist and the author of The Erotic Edge. “But they don’t necessarily feel okay about it, so then they’re acting against their feelings. I see a lot of guys with sexual problems who’ve had that experience. Problems with erections are pretty common, as is anxiety around sex in general.” But then, she points out, she only sees the ones who have problems.

It’s extremely common for boys who have been molested to be drawn exclusively to much older women from then on. “There is something about early experience with sexuality that tends to stay with you,” Barbach says. “A lot of it is by chance. If you are a child who stumbled upon a magazine with women who have very large breasts, you may eroticize women who look like that in adulthood. It’s funny, I don’t know why it is, but as a child you are just more susceptible.” Anything sexual that happens in childhood has a better chance of making a kind of imprint on your erotic consciousness.

Even if we take as a given that it’s always wrong for a grown woman to have sex with her teenage students, or her son’s friend, or whatever other 15-year-old she gets her hands on, a question still remains: Why would she want to in the first place?

Teenage boys are not, as a rule, the world’s most expert lovers. They are not known for their emotional sophistication or sensitivity. And they do not excel at the tests of masculine status women are supposed to be fixated upon. “If Debra had had an affair with a man who was richer than me, or more successful, that I could have understood,” as Debra Lafave’s estranged husband, Owen, put it. “But this was a boy. What could he offer her that I couldn’t?

Power, for one thing. Compared with a teenage boy, a woman will almost always make more money. She will always know more about sex. She will generally be more competent and experienced and more able to assert her will on him than vice versa.

If you spend a little time going over stories of grown women who pursue boys, they start to blur together. Often, the woman was a victim of sexual abuse in her own childhood. So in some cases adults’ having sex with children is familiar, reiterative. Psychologists say one reason women engage in this is to create a new narrative: If they as adults can have sex with a child in the context of a loving romance (imaginary or real) rather than as an obvious enactment of exploitation, they can then more easily conceive of their own abuse as a love story. To them, the experience of being a gentle perpetrator can be redemptive.

“Sometimes, the woman is not much older psychologically than the boy is in her developmental stage,” says clinical psychologist Judy Kuriansky. “She has arrested development. So she’s having sex with a 14-year-old, and in her head, she’s 14, too. She’s getting the attention she never got.” She’s Blanche DuBois. And, Kuriansky says, “there’s nothing more erotic that being adored, for women.”

Consider the poster couple for pedophilia or true love, depending on your point of view: Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau. A review: Letourneau was Fualaau’s second-grade teacher, then she taught him again—and had sex with him—when he was a 12-year-old in her sixth-grade class. She gave birth to their first child shortly before she went to jail. She became pregnant with their second child when she was out on parole. She went back to jail for seven years. After her release, they got back together.

Letourneau and Fualaau were married in a televised ceremony last May and registered for china at Macy’s. They have been together ten years.You could clearly hear Letourneau imbuing her student with power; trying to convince the public as she’d convinced herself that Fualaau—her lover, her hero—was on more than equal footing with her: “He dominated me in the most masculine way that any man, any leader, could do.”

He was 12. She was 34.

When Diane Demartini-Scully first started going for walks with her daughter’s 15-year-old boyfriend on the North Fork of Long Island, it made him feel special. “She would just talk to me about life situations and shit,” he says now, a year and a half later. “It was pretty cool.” This is something DeMartini-Scully, a 45-year-old blonde who vaguely resembles Erica Jong, would have been good at. She was, until recently, a school psychologist at East Hampton Middle School. She knew how to draw a kid out.

And the boy, let’s call him Jason, had some things on his mind. “I was making a lot of money in New York,” he says, and when I ask him how, he gives a nervous laugh. “I was doing a lot of things.” I ask if the things he was doing and the company he was keeping (mostly in Jamaica, Queens, he says) were part of the reason his family left Mattituck, Long Island, where they lived just down the road from DeMartini-Scully, for Jacksonville, North Carolina, where they currently reside. He says yes, but the reason his mother has given the press for the move was to escape the escalating cost of living on the North Fork. Detective Steven L. Harned of the local Southold Police Department says, “We were already aware of [Jason]. He has had some court cases here on other matters.”

When Jason’s family was ready to relocate to Jacksonville, he still had a few months of school remaining. It was decided that Jason would finish off the year living at DeMartini-Scully’s house on Donna Drive. “We would go to Blockbuster and rent movies, and when we watched them, she would put her hand on my lap,” Jason says. “I didn’t think much of it at the time.”

One night, when DeMartini-Scully’s daughter, with whom Jason was still involved, was at a friend’s house, and after DeMartini-Scully’s son had gone to sleep, she asked Jason if he wanted to watch television with her in her bed. “Then she kissed me.”

That night, Jason and DeMartini-Scully “basically did everything.” He remembers the experience as “okay . . . I wouldn’t say it was upsetting. I wouldn’t say I didn’t want to, but . . . I figured she was letting me stay at her house, I’d just do what she wanted.”

This was not an isolated incident. For the next three and a half months, Jason estimates, the two continued having sex at the house and in her car. “Nobody suspected anything,” he says. “And I didn’t want nobody to know because I was messing around with her daughter. I found it funny that Diane was letting me stay at her house when she knew about that, but I never asked her why: I figured she was doing it because she wanted something.”

I ask Jason what he wanted: whether he was having sex with DeMartini-Scully because he enjoyed it or because he felt obliged to. “When I wasn’t drunk, I felt pressured to, but when I was drunk, I wanted to . . . you know what I mean?” He claimed he got alcohol, and sometimes pot, from DeMartini-Scully.

When summer came, DeMartini-Scully took her son and daughter and Jason down to Florida, where they met up with Jason’s family for a vacation en route to Jacksonville. What was supposed to be a quick stop to see Jason’s family’s new house became an extended stay when DeMartini-Scully was injured in an accident. “She hurt her leg pretty bad when I was teaching her how to ride the dirt bike,” Jason says. “You could see her bone and shit.” She stayed in North Carolina for a month.

When she finally left, Jason’s mother was glad to be rid of DeMartini-Scully. She had become suspicious when she found out that Jason and DeMartini-Scully had been in a room with the door locked. But on Columbus Day weekend, unbeknownst to Jason’s mother, DeMartini-Scully returned to a hotel in Jacksonville to visit Jason. “So I want to know, what’s so special about me?” Jason says. I ask him what he thinks. He laughs. “I’m not gonna say.”

He spent three days at the hotel. His mother found out about the visit, and “that’s when all the drama started.” She contacted the police, who charged DeMartini-Scully with kidnapping and providing marijuana to a minor but not with sexual assault, because Jason had, at this point, already turned 16 and passed the legal age of consent in North Carolina. She was subsequently charged with third-degree rape and performing a criminal sexual act in Suffolk County, where the age of consent is 17.

Jason stayed in school for just three weeks in Jacksonville before he dropped out. He says he will join the Marines after he gets his GED, “but just for the money.” He doesn’t miss DeMartini-Scully, he says, who by the end was suggesting she wanted to marry him. But he also says he doesn’t feel raped. “I just, I don’t know, I feel weird. She was 30 years older than me, so I feel a little bit taken advantage of. If I was a girl, I probably wouldn’t talk to you about it, but a female can’t really rape a guy, you know?”

Jason says he would not have given a statement to the Long Island police incriminating DeMartini-Scully if he hadn’t been under pressure. “They said if I didn’t they were gonna press charges on me because I was with Diane’s daughter,” who is only 14, and now Jason is 17, thus making him guilty of “sexual misconduct” himself. As of his last birthday, Jason’s relationships switched status in the eyes of the law: Sex with the then-44-year-old school psychologist who had been after him since he was 16 became okay; sex with her teenage daughter became a crime.

(“It is a strange law,” says Harned. “I didn’t write them, I just enforce them.” Harned says that it is still likely that the Southold Police Department will press charges against Jason for his relationship with the daughter and that Jason was not pushed into giving a statement about the mother.)

“I just think about how Diane’s daughter must feel now,” Jason says. “I was pretty close to her; I still am. I’m talking to her on the computer right now.”

I ask Jason if this is an experience he will try to avoid in the future, getting involved with much older women. He thinks about it for a minute. “Depends how old,” he concludes

Some Things Never Change

I received the following quotation from a friend and it seemed so appropriate for the times with politicians, business leaders, celebrities and clergy confessing to some sin, bias, crime, etc. and blaming it on someone else or something else, alcohol, a draft in their crib when they were infants which chilled their heads, a fluctuation of bejabber fluid in their brains sloshing over the red line of a cone-shaped brain. I shared the quotation with another friend and it triggered a rant. Rants from this friend are always on target and welcome so I am sharing both with you in this blog. I think you will like the quotation and the rant. Enjoy!

This is the quotation:
"It appears we have appointed our worst generals to command forces, and our most gifted and brilliant to edit newspapers!

In fact, I discovered by reading newspapers that these editor/geniuses plainly saw all my strategic defects from the start, yet failed to inform me until it was too late.

Accordingly, I'm readily willing to yield my command to these obviously superior intellects, and I'll, in turn, do my best for the Cause by writing editorials - after the fact."
-Robert E. Lee, 1863

I shared this with my friend after Senor Gonzales was delivering his apologia at the podium.

This is my friend's rant:
"My corollary: It is far better to hold another responsible, than it is to assume the mantle of responsibility yourself. It's actually the most widely practiced behavior today.

Long ago when the earth was flat and dinosaurs stalked the land, it was admired to stand forth in the face of adversity, to practice what you preached, and to accept the consequences if things went wrong.

Now, we are more sophisticated. We admire the special courage it takes to stand in the background and point fingers, to mouth platitudes in public and mock them in private, and to set up someone else to take the fall if your self-serving plan collapses.

Not for us those antique symbols of yesteryear, when we looked to emulate the strength of the panther, or the vision of the eagle. Today we embrace a new reality, the strength of the weasel, and the vision of the cockroach. Not in vain did our forefathers battle against ignorance, hypocrisy, and superstition. I'm sure they can look down on us from their eternal resting place with.... with....

...well, maybe it's just best to leave it at that.

If you want to comment for publication in this blog send your views to criticalcurmudgeon@yahoo.com.

He, Once a She, Offers View
On Science Spat

Condensed from an article by Sharon Begley
in the July 13, 2006 issue of the Wall Street Journal

Ben Barres had just finished giving a seminar at the prestigious Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research 10 years ago, describing to scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and other top institutions his discoveries about nerve cells called glia. As the applause died down, a friend later told him, one scientist turned to another and remarked what a great seminar it had been, adding, "Ben Barres's work is much better than his sister's."

There was only one problem. Prof. Barres, then as now a professor of neurobiology at Stanford University, doesn't have a sister in science. The Barbara Barres the man remembered was Ben.

Prof. Barres is transgendered, having completed the treatments that made him fully male 10 years ago. The Whitehead talk was his first as a man, so the research he was presenting was done as Barbara.

Being first a female scientist and then a male scientist has given Prof. Barres a unique perspective on the debate over why women are so rare at the highest levels of academic science and math: He has experienced personally how each is treated by colleagues, mentors and rivals.

Based on those experiences, as well as research on gender differences, Prof. Barres begs to differ with what he calls "the Larry Summers Hypothesis," named for the former Harvard president who attributed the paucity of top women scientists to lack of "intrinsic aptitude." In a commentary in today's issue of the journal Nature, he writes that "the reason women are not advancing [in science] is discrimination" and the "Summers Hypothesis amounts to nothing more than blaming the victim."

In his remarks at an economics conference in January 2005, Mr. Summers said "socialization" is probably a trivial reason for the low number of top female mathematicians and scientists. But Prof. Barres, who as Barbara received the subtle and not-so-subtle hints that steer smart girls away from science, doesn't see it that way. The top science and math student in her New Jersey high school, she was advised by her guidance counselor to go to a local college rather than apply to MIT. She applied anyway and was admitted.

As an MIT undergraduate, Barbara was one of the only women in a large math class, and the only student to solve a particularly tough problem. The professor "told me my boyfriend must have solved it for me," recalls Prof. Barres, 51 years old, in an interview. "If boys were raised to feel that they can't be good at mathematics, there would be very few who were."

Although Barbara Barres was a top student at MIT, "nearly every lab head I asked refused to let me do my thesis research" with him, Prof. Barres says. "Most of my male friends had their first choice of labs. And I am still disappointed about the prestigious fellowship I lost to a male student when I was a Ph.D. student," even though the rival had published one prominent paper and she had six.

As a neuroscientist, Prof. Barres is also skeptical of the claim that differences between male and female brains might explain the preponderance of men in math and science. For one thing, he says, the studies don't adequately address whether those differences are innate and thus present from birth, or reflect the different experiences that men and women have. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, who defends the Summers Hypothesis, acknowledges that the existence of gender differences in values, preferences and aptitudes "does not mean that they are innate."

The biggest recent revolution in neuroscience has been the discovery of the brain's "plasticity," or ability to change structure and function in response to experiences. "It's not hard to believe that differences between the brains of male and female adults have nothing to do with genes or the Y chromosome but may be the biological expression of different social settings," says biologist Joan Roughgarden of Stanford, who completed her own transgender transition in 1998.

Jonathan Roughgarden's colleagues and rivals took his intelligence for granted, Joan says. But Joan has had "to establish competence to an extent that men never have to. They're assumed to be competent until proven otherwise, whereas a woman is assumed to be incompetent until she proves otherwise. I remember going on a drive with a man. He assumed I couldn't read a map."

Still, there is little evidence that lack of testosterone or anything unique to male biology is the main factor keeping women from the top ranks of science and math, says Prof. Barres, a view that is widely held among scientists who study the issue. Although more men than women in the U.S. score in the stratosphere on math tests, there is no such difference in Japan, and in Iceland the situation is flipped, with more women than men scoring at the very top.

"That seems more like 'socialization' than any difference in innate abilities to me," geneticist Gregory Petsko of Brandeis University wrote last year. In any case, except in a few specialized fields like theoretical physics, there is little correlation between math scores and who becomes a scientist.

Some supporters of the Summers Hypothesis suggest that temperament, not ability, holds women back in science: They are innately less competitive. Prof. Barres's experience suggests that if women are less competitive, it is not because of anything innate but because that trait has been beaten out of them.

"Female scientists who are competitive or assertive are generally ostracized by their male colleagues," he says. In any case, he argues, "an aggressive competitive spirit" matters less to scientific success than curiosity, perseverance and self-confidence.

Women doubt their abilities more than men do, say scientists who have mentored scores of each. "Almost without exception, the talented women I have known have believed they had less ability than they actually had," Prof. Petsko wrote. "And almost without exception, the talented men I have known believed they had more."

Which may account for what Prof. Barres calls the main difference he has noticed since changing sex. "People who do not know I am transgendered treat me with much more respect," he says. "I can even complete a whole sentence without being interrupted by a man."

In the Workplace Every
Bleeping Word Can

Can Show Your Rank

Condensed from an article in the March 21, 2006

issue of the Wall Street Journal

Ann Garcia had to thread the needle. On the one hand, the No. 1 executive at her former company hated the use of profanity, seeing it as a sign of not having learned to communicate effectively. On the other hand, the No. 2 executive appreciated a potty mouth now and then because it indicated passion. He "felt that if you weren't swearing, you probably didn't care enough," says Ms. Garcia.

As it happened, there weren't clashes over profanity so much as careful navigation of the office's language protocol. "When groups reported to the executive who was pro-profanity, it was acceptable," says Ms. Garcia. "With units who reported to the other one, things were very buttoned up."

It's just that kind of divisive and shifting view of profanity that has spurred many corporations to memorialize policies against it, driven in large part by the fear of sexual harassment charges, which peaked in 2000 but still numbered nearly 13,000 in 2005, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Rand Corp., for example, which is against profanity for any reason, says, "Profanity will always offend someone, but the lack of profanity will never offend anyone."

Still, profanity is a barometer of corporate culture because cussing up a blue streak may be taboo to some companies and expected in others. It's used as everything from a social bonding tool to a badge of status, from a weapon to a substitute for it. Not least, it's a stress reliever when a paper tray doesn't know it's already full, a voicemail system doesn't recognize a password, or when an automated restroom faucet splashes your pants, suggesting incontinence that is good for no one's career.

In some workplaces, says Timothy Jay, a professor of psychology and author on cursing, "if you're the one who doesn't swear, you're the weirdo." He says "profane language can be very effective in gaining credibility," and has been a privilege of rank. Traditionally, "it works down the hierarchy, not up," he says.

The difficulty in defining profanity -- one person's profanity is another's poetry -- is easy to see in action at the Federal Communications Commission, which has affirmed that four-letter words aren't suitable for broadcasts except in rare cases when colorful expletives are "demonstrably essential to the nature of an artistic or educational work."

That leaves room for the kind of differing of opinions that the FCC itself had when, in 2003, the singer Bono won a Golden Globe Award to which he replied, "this is really, really f -- ing brilliant!" At first, the FCC decided it was an innocuous adjective that was neither indecent nor obscene, not a profane noun. (Actually, it was an adverb, in this case.) Almost a year later, they reversed that and called the word "one of the most vulgar ... explicit descriptions of sexual activity in the English language."

Certain workplaces tend to lend themselves to swearing. Mike Dunton once worked for a bank where profanity was a mark of status. Traders on trading floors use foul language, he says, as a badge of accomplishment, sending a message that they swear because their value to the firm dictates they can. "You're not going to whack an earner over something verbal," he says.

Similarly, Jay Sapovits, a sales executive who won't swear in certain environments, distrusts other salespeople who never find occasion to swear. "There's an inherent element of dishonesty with people who are in a situation where a swear is warranted and they don't swear," he says. "If a salesperson doesn't swear, they're either 1) not dialing the phone enough or 2) are not to be trusted."

Not swearing was a career liability for Tim Orr. When he worked for an ad agency, the founder had one of the foulest mouths he had ever heard. It was contagious. "Over time, my mouth became pretty much just as foul as his," he says. "If you didn't give as good as you got, he would steamroller you." So they cursed like sailors, he says, " ... sort of like comparing antler sizes."

In almost any work environment, profanity can be a way to signal a level of intimacy among colleagues. As Amanda Jacobson Snyder, who works for a data publishing company, puts it, "It's sort of like a friendship's second base."

But it can look "pathetic" when a boss does it, says Timothy Dougherty. When he worked for a media company, the president "made Chris Rock sound like Professor Higgins," he says. It rubbed off on people around him who were trying to be join his inner circle. "They were using it to ingratiate themselves."

It worked on the president, Mr. Dougherty says: "He kept people around him who he thought were his kind of people."

Women in Italy LikeTo Clean
But Shun Quick and Easy

Convenience Doesn't SellWhen Bathrooms AverageFour Scrubbings a Week. Italian women keep some of the cleanest homes around.They spend, on average, 21 hours a week on household chores other than cooking -- compared with just four hours for Americans, according toProcter & Gamble Co. research.

Italians wash kitchen and bathroom floors at least four times a week, Americans just once. Italians typically iron nearly all their wash, even socks and sheets. And they buy more cleaning supplies than women elsewhere do.

All that should make them the perfect customers for the manufacturers of cleaning products.
But when Unilever launched an all-purpose spray cleaner about six years ago, the product flopped. And when Procter & Gamble tested its top-selling Swiffer Wet mop, which eliminates the need for a clunky bucket of water, the product bombed so badly in Italy that P&G took itoff the market.

What the world's biggest consumer-products companies failed to realize is that what sells products elsewhere -- labor-saving convenience -- is abig turn off here. Italian women want products that are tough cleaners, not time savers.

The Italians "are not ready for convenience in the way Americans are,"says Elio Leoni Sceti, chief marketing officer at Reckitt Benckiser PLC, maker of Lysol cleaner and Woolite laundry detergent. "It's perceived asa step back."

So, for companies like P&G, Unilever and appliance makers like WhirlpoolCorp., that means turning their products and marketing inside out to try to win over Italy. After its Cif brand spray cleaner flopped, Unilever researchers polled consumers and discovered that Italian women needed to be convinced that a spray could be strong enough, especially on kitchen grease. So, the company spent 18 months reformulating the product and testing how thoroughly it wiped away grease.

Because Italian women believe they need different cleaners for different tasks, it also came up with several varieties, including one for removing limescale from bathroom fixtures. Unilever made the bottles 50% bigger because Italians clean so frequently. It also changed Cif television ads to tout the cleaner's strength, scrapping initial ads that portrayed it as convenient.

"It was a real shift of mind-set on how to market products like these,"says Alessandra Bellini, head of marketing for Unilever's Italian home and personal-care products. "If you present a product as quick and easy,women may feel like a cheat....It took us a while to understand that Italians don't want that."

Now, the products are selling well, the company says. P&G also went back to the Swiffer drawing board after its Wet mop flop.The company realized that Italian women were skeptical it could work on their dirty floor but had been using it to polish after mopping. So P&G came up with a Swiffer with beeswax, which it sells only in Italy. P&G also introduced the Swiffer duster, which is available in many countries but has proved to be an Italian best-seller. It sold five million boxes in the first eight months, twice the company's forecasts. Italy is now the biggest European market for Swiffer products.

Indeed, Italians pay up for premium brands, and about 72% of Italians own more than eight cleaning products, according to Unilever research. In Rome, Lavinia Sansoni cleans the bathroom in her apartment every day. On weekends, the 26-year-old office worker also dusts shelves and paintings and above the doors.

She tried 20 different cleaners until she found a specialty cleaner made by appliance company Miele that satisfactorily cleaned food stains off her stove top. She can spend as much as $50 a month on cleaning supplies.

"I like my house really, really clean," Ms. Sansoni says. "Everything has to absolutely shine."
After World War II, Italy remained a poor country until well into the1960s, so labor-saving devices like washing machines that had become popular in wealthy countries arrived late. And Italian women have joined the work force much later and in smaller numbers. Even today, as younger women increasingly work outside the home, they still spend nearly as much time as their mothers did on housework, the companies say.

More and more career women, particularly in the north, employ housekeepers -- and ride herd on them. Laura Maresti, a 42-year-old photo editor, has taught her cleaning lady exactly how she likes her towels ironed: pressed with a fold so they hang just so on the bathroom rack.The cleaning lady also irons sheets, underwear and T-shirts. "This is the way my mother did things," Ms. Maresti says.

Paolo Follador, owner of a Milan cleaning service company, gives his new workers 20 hours of training before sending them into Italian homes. Even so, Italian women closely follow his workers to ensure they do a good enough job. Recently, his workers spent hours cleaning each crystal pendant of a chandelier in one Italian home. The owner wasn't satisfied,however, and made them redo it three more times. Another woman asked his workers to use lemon to clean her shower stall. In that case, Mr.Follador refused. "If we did everything they asked us to do, we'd never get the job done," he says. "They check everything."

Even basic product updates haven't caught on. Only about 30% of Italian households have dishwashers because many women don't trust machines to get dishes as clean as they can get them by hand, manufacturers say. Many of those who have machines tend to thoroughly rinse the dishes before loading them in the machine.

"They say they don't want a dishwasher because it'll be twice as much work," says Mario Franzino, head of Bosch und Siemens Hausgerate GmbH, a joint venture between Robert Bosch GmbH and Siemens AG, based in Munich. It makes the Bosch brand of home appliances.

So in an attempt to convince them otherwise, machine and soap makers including Bosch, Whirlpool, Electrolux AB, and Reckitt have come up withjoint marketing campaigns plugging away at the claim that machines get dishes as clean as hand-washing does. A new radio ad set explains that a dishwasher uses much higher water temperatures than hand washing.

Washing-machine makers are still working at persuading the Italians, famously fastidious dressers, to entrust their clothes to their machines. Italians worry that machines will ruin the fabric. The companies' solution: models with slow spin cycles as low as 400 spins per minute, compared with 1,200 to 1,600 common in machines in the U.S. and elsewhere in Europe.

The Bosch brand introduced a new European model this month with three separate cycles for wool, silk and synthetic fabrics. The machine, Maxx6, even has a special gentle cycle for jeans because Italians consider them delicate and worry that they will lose their color or shape in a regular cycle. Consumers can also create and save their own cycles by choosing exact combinations of temperature and spin speed.
(Condensed from an article in the Wall Street Journal.)

State Turning Airport Rejects
Into Quick Cash On eBay

Items too big or dangerous to go on a plane end up for sale online. Five thousand corkscrews. A hundred pairs of fur-lined handcuffs. A dozen blenders. Four chainsaws. A suture-removal kit. Three thousand pairs of scissors. One pink horseshoe.
Check what the state of Pennsylvania has for sale on eBay.

All were left behind at airports across the Northeast and all have made their way to a warehouse in Harrisburg where the state sorts them and sells them on eBay.

"It's amazing what we find," said Ken Hess, director of the state bureau of supplies and surplus operations. Some items, such as nail clippers and pocket knives, are things travelers were forced to surrender before boarding planes. Some, such as a 6-foot artificial palm tree and a 250-pound car engine, apparently were too big or heavy to be carried on. And others, such as sunglasses and children's toys, were left behind by absent-minded travelers.

Together, they have yielded the state more than $247,000 in revenue in less than two years.
The Transportation Security Administration releases the items to states that request them, giving priority to those where the airports are located. The goods arrive -- an average of 21,000 pounds' worth every month -- in trailers driven by student truck drivers at the Lancaster Career and Technical School.

The biggest shipments come from Newark International Airport and from Kennedy and LaGuardia in New York City. Goods also arrive from Philadelphia, Harrisburg, Cleveland, Allentown and Syracuse airports.

Recent deliveries included frying pans, a caulking gun, an ornate curtain rod, Virgin Mary nail clippers, a roll of undeveloped film, a hand tool inscribed "To Lou: Happy 50th birthday," and a fishing trophy from Cayuga Lake, N.Y.

"We get a lot of S&M stuff. There's whips we've gotten and even cat o' nine tails that I guess people beat each other with, and there's tons and tons of furry handcuffs," he said. In another area of the warehouse, worker Mike Whitman, 34, is sorting weapons. "Here's how we know the airport screeners are doing their jobs," Mr. Hess said as he perused a dagger, a combat knife, a replica of a World War II K-Bar and a serrated knife with a pistol grip.

The flotsam and jetsam arrive in Harrisburg -- mixed with toy guns, fishing hooks and hockey pucks -- in plastic totes or 55-gallon drums. They are sorted into lots, photographed, logged on the eBay auction site, boxed and shipped to the highest bidder. Recently, one eBayer picked up 35 pounds of scissors for $34 plus shipping. Another bought 100 pocket knives for $55.55.
The highest single bid to date was $595 from a buyer in Torrance, Calif., for 39 pounds of Swiss Army knives.
(Condensed from an article in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.)

When the brain doesn't know when to stop
Obsessions control patients' lives

Shannon Fleishman sat in her room at McLean Hospital, eyes shut tight, hands clenched together until her knuckles were white. She was shaking. I watched her and thought, "If I didn't know the truth, I'd think she was a cocaine addict who just ran out of drugs." But that wasn't it. Shannon Fleishman was trying to fold a shirt.

Dr. Carol Hevia, Shannon's therapist, told Shannon to stop smoothing out every tiny wrinkle, to stop lining up edges of the shirt just right. After what seemed like an eternity, the shirt was folded. It looked fine to me. But that's the crux of Shannon's disease: What looks fine to others is a mess to her. It took every ounce of Shannon's willpower to just leave the shirt alone, to stop trying to make it look perfect.

Shannon's Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is particularly severe, requiring three months of inpatient treatment at McLean, just outside of Boston. MRIs of the brain of people with OCD show that areas responsible for simple decisions -- like whether a shirt is folded right or not -- are hyperactive.

There are various forms of OCD, and Shannon's centers around perfection. Other patients have other issues, as I was soon to learn at McLean. When I asked to use the restroom, a staff member said, "Well, there's that one there, but let's get you another one, because this one doesn't have soap." When I asked why not, he said many of the patients had hand-washing compulsions, and if they just let them into a bathroom with soap, they would be there for literally hours, scrubbing and scrubbing. Patients were therefore given just a tiny cup with soap, and two paper towels, and their visits to the bathroom were timed.

Shannon's OCD was different. Hers was all about how things looked. Just before her admission to McLean, Shannon had gotten to the point where she would just give up. Folding one shirt would take hours. She could go grocery shopping just fine, but in the end the food would sit out on the counter, because she couldn't line the cans up exactly right in the cupboard, and she'd give up.

She would rise at 7 a.m. to get ready for work, which started at 5 p.m. It took her that long to shower and get her clothes ready. I asked Shannon what her worst day was. It didn't take her long to remember her 8-hour bath. What's strange about OCD is that many people seem perfectly fine outside their one area of obsession.

Sitting and chatting with Shannon, she seemed like a friend. We chatted about her art (she's very gifted) and her plans to run a marathon, and her experience pitching softball at her Division I college. Shannon Fleishman is only 24. She has another six weeks left at McLean. When I said goodbye, I hoped that this therapy would work, that someday soon her brain would know when to stop folding a shirt.
(Condensed from an article by Elizabeth Cohen for CNN.)

Women Who Had Plastic Surgery
Find Unexpected benefit:
Better sex

Sex wasn't what Lori Driscoll had in mind when she opted to have a tummy tuck and a breast lift a year ago. It just proved to be an extra, added benefit.

Since the operation last February, "I have a more positive attitude," said Ms. Driscoll, 35, of White Oak. "I wear nicer, sexier clothes. I catch my husband looking at me and I like that. He touches me more.

"I have bonded more closely with my husband sexually," she said. "It's been just a really, really good thing."

It doesn't require a big leap of imagination to suggest that cosmetic surgery, such as breast augmentation, face lifts and liposuction, might translate into an improved sex life. Greater sex appeal, after all, would seem to be a motivating factor for many cosmetic procedures.

Still, it begs the question of whether these procedures really do translate into a better sexual relations, as they did for Ms. Driscoll. A new study by Pittsburgh plastic surgeon Dr. Guy M. Stofman, appearing in the January-February issue of the Aesthetic Surgery Journal, offers an emphatic answer: Oh, you betcha.

A survey of 70 of Dr. Stofman's cosmetic surgery patients found that more than 80 percent of women who had breast augmentation and 50 percent who had body contouring procedures, such as liposuction, said they had enjoyed greater sexual satisfaction following surgery.

More than half wore more provocative clothing and about 70 percent of those undergoing breast procedures or body contouring said their partners were more sexually satisfied.

About a third of the breast patients and half of the body patients said they were better able to achieve orgasm. Many indicated they were more open to trying new sexual positions following surgery.

"I don't think any of them in the back of their mind think that [sex] is a primary reason to do this," said Dr. Stofman, who conducted the survey with Dr. Timothy S. Neavin and his other surgical residents at Mercy Hospital. Most people -- men and women -- seeking cosmetic surgery are doing so because they want to feel better about themselves, because they want a better self-image, he said. "This is just another perk," he added.

Patients who underwent facial procedures, such as face lifts and nose jobs, were less likely to report an enhanced sex life following surgery, but they also were an older group -- most in the 51 to 60 age group -- compared with those undergoing breast and body procedures, who generally fell in the 41 to 50 age group.

The findings are hardly surprising, Dr. Stofman acknowledged. From his experience, people who undergo cosmetic procedures feel happier and more confident. "The clothes change, the shoulders are back, their personas change," he said. That this improved self-confidence leads to more and better sexual activity is not hard to believe.

But Dr. Kenneth C. Shestak, chief of plastic surgery at UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital, said Dr. Stofman's study is enlightening nonetheless because few surgeons have frank post-surgical discussions with their patients about such intimate matters. And few scientific studies have addressed the impact of cosmetic surgery on sexual quality.

"I think this is a very provocative study," he said. "They were very imaginative and did a good job of putting the questionnaire together."

To some extent, the process by which a good plastic surgeon evaluates patients for cosmetic surgery should ensure that most will be happy with the results. "Really skilled cosmetic surgeons spend a lot of time listening to patients, understanding where they're coming from and what they want to get out of it," he explained.

Good surgeons won't do cosmetic surgery if the patient doesn't have realistic expectations of what it can achieve.

In other words, cosmetic surgery isn't necessarily going to make an unhappy person happy. So even if a survey of Dr. Stofman's patients shows that they generally enjoyed greater sexual satisfaction, that doesn't mean that similar results would occur for anybody from the general population who underwent cosmetic surgery.

The anonymous surveys were sent to 330 of Dr. Stofman's patients who underwent cosmetic procedures in 2001 and 2002. Seventy -- all of them female -- responded. Men, he suggested, tend to be more apathetic about such surveys, but other studies have shown that they enjoy the same improvements in self-esteem and body image as women.

The researchers found that women undergoing body enhancing surgery weren't much more likely than those receiving facial enhancements to have sex more frequently. But 73 percent of the body patients reported more sexual satisfaction, compared to 37 percent of the facial patients.

Two-thirds of the body patients perceived that their partners were more satisfied, compared to 37 percent of the facial patients. A whopping 88 percent of the women undergoing shape-enhancing surgery said they wore more revealing clothing after surgery and 41 percent of those patients said they were trying more unconventional sexual positions.

Understanding how cosmetic surgery affects the lifestyle of patients is growing important as the popularity of cosmetic surgery increases, Dr. Shestak said.

"In the last 10 and certainly 15 years, cosmetic surgery has really come out of the closet," he explained. "Good cosmetic surgery -- well-done cosmetic surgery -- can have very powerful psychological and emotional effects on patients."

Ms. Driscoll said she sought cosmetic surgery to deal with the aftermath of childbearing. She had two children, back to back, soon after she was married 13 years ago and gained 100 pounds on her five-foot-10-inch frame, boosting her to 255 pounds.

After many attempts at dieting, she eventually was able to get down to 190 pounds, "but I was at a standstill. I just couldn't do any more." What's more, she had folds of loose skin that she found embarassing. "I would go out of our room to change my clothes at night," not wanting her husband to see her. "I was just very insecure."

But the tummy tuck and breast lift by Dr. Stofman removed the pounds she couldn't lose and tightened up what was left. "He just made me look absolutely incredible," she said.

She felt better about herself, as she had expected. But she hadn't anticipated that it would rejuvenate what had become a routine sex life.

Now, no longer inhibited by how she looks, she enjoys sexual relations "not just with the lights out, but during the day, anytime we're together."
"I thought this was just for me," to increase her self-esteem, she said. "I never thought I would make out in two ways
(Condensed from an article by Byron Spice, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)