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How the myth of sexual purity leads to the stigmatization of sex workers Prostitution is a job, not a permanent blemish One of the worst parts of the prostitute stereotype is that, once a woman crosses that line, being a prostitute becomes a part of her identity. It is impossible to erase. Prostitution is not something you do. It’s who you are. She is not eligible to marry a decent man. In fact, decent people would avoid any social contact with her. She is a perpetual outcast, even after she stops practicing prostitution. For many women, the sex work they did in their youth is a skeleton in the closet, to be hidden even from their closest friends, spouse and children. Prostitution and the myth of sexual purity The adage “once a prostitute, always a prostitute” means that, by doing sex work, a woman has soiled herself with a stain that would remain the rest of her life. It would seem that sex work is an unforgiveable crime, as serious as murder or treason. But the issue is slightly different. It’s that sex is considered something sacred, some kind of essence that attaches itself to the very soul of a person. Especially for women. Christian culture has turned sexual purity into the highest virtue of women. The Virgin Mary is worshipped almost as a goddess, taking the place of the female deities of the old pagan religions. Unlike these goddesses, the virgin archetype erases women’s sexuality, replacing it with an exclusive dedication to motherhood. That’s why opposing contraception and abortion is such a fundamental issue for Christians. They put women’s sexuality above the sacrifices they are supposed to make to become mothers. Virginity is a magical quality that is lost once and for all, completely changing the social status of a woman. It gives women who preserve it a special aura of sanctity. Prostitutes are the anti-virgins. Not only they have lost their sexual purity by giving away their virginity; they lose again and again, becoming ever more soiled with every man with whom they have sex. Nowadays, we know that sexual purity is mystical nonsense. Women can have many sexual partners without being considered soiled. In fact, more and more, being sexually experienced is considered as a desirable in both men and women. Casual sex as a perversion of love One version of the sexual purity idea is that sex is only valid when done as an expression of love. Then, prostitution represents a perversion of sex because it’s done for money and not for love. But, again, casual sex in the absence of love or a relationship is very common these days, and increasingly accepted. Then, condemning casual sex only in the case of prostitution becomes a hypocritical double standard. Prostitutes see their job as temporary Prostitutes see their job as something they do to make money during a particular phase of their lives. It’s not a permanent occupation, and much less a part of who they are. For example, the book Legal Tender - True Tales of a Brothel Madam, by Laraine Russo Harper, says: “There were lots of ladies who worked in the brothel just for a specific amount of time. They had goals of how much they wanted to earn or needed to earn, and once they reached their goal, they got out of the business. One lady in particular who had such a goal was Mackenzie. She was twenty-two when she came to the brothel. She had long blond hair, green eyes, and a perfect body. She wanted to make as much money as she could in five years. Then it was her plan to retire. And that’s exactly what Makenzie did.” “During her five-year tenure, she owned a $3 million home in one state, a $2 million condo in another, and a $1 million loft in yet another state. She retired five years later with more money than she would ever need and no one would ever know what she had been doing to earn her living. At twenty-seven Mackenzie retired.” Legal Tender - True Tales of a Brothel Madam, Laraine Russo Harper Of course, not all prostitutes make as much money as the ones in the expensive Nevada brothels described in Legal Tender. The range of income of sex workers is probably as wide as that of writers. Still, escorts and other high-level prostitutes make enough money during their youth to get savings for the rest of their life, pay for college, or launch a small business. Instead of being exploited and outcast, like they are portrayed in the media, young women find in prostitution a way out of poverty and low social status. If prostitution were legalized and afforded some minimal protection, it could become empowering for many young women. Perhaps for some men, too. The sad image of the old, destitute prostitute that we see in some movies doesn’t reflect reality. The ‘Lies About Prostitution’ series This article is part of a series about that the lies that conservatives and radical feminists tell about sex work and prostitution. Previous articles in these series are: Lie 1: Prostitution is Human Trafficking Lie 2: Prostitution Degrades Women Lie 3: Sex Workers Hate Their Job and Their Clients Lie 4: Johns Are Misogynistic and Violent Lie 5: Prostitutes Want to be Rescued Lie 6: Pimps Exploit Prostitutes Lie 7: Prostitutes Are Drug Addicts

How the drug addict cliché is used to deny the agency of sex workers The stigma of addiction The stereotype of the addict is one of the most dehumanizing in modern culture. In it, drug addicts are depicted as mindless zombies who would do whatever is necessary to get their next fix. Whenever some activity needs to be condemned, the best way to do so is to depict it as addictive. This is because addiction deprives us of one of the things we value the most: our free will. Addictive drugs take possession of our minds and force us to do their bidding. Having lost their free will to drugs, addicts can be deprived of their liberty by forcing them into rehabilitation programs or prison. Therefore, stereotyping prostitutes as drug addicts becomes a good excused to persecute them and jail them. Are prostitutes drug addicts? The strong cravings elicited by addictive drugs can lead to desperate actions. If the addict is a woman, trading sex for money can be one of the easiest ways to get the next fix. However, the fact that some drug addicts resort to prostitution doesn’t mean that most prostitutes are addicts. For one thing, drug addicts are high risk for sexually transmitted diseases, and dangerous in some other ways, so customers stay clear of them. Prostitution is a risky activity, not just for the sex worker, but also for the client. Vetting is performed in both directions. The real reasons women engage in prostitution Women engage in sex work for a multitude of reasons. Supporting an addiction is rarely one of them. Some of the most common reasons include: paying for college, getting out of the parent’s home, escaping an abusive relationship, supporting their children, getting into a fancier lifestyle, sexual exploration. For example, modern escorts are often highly educated women who enjoy wearing elegant clothes, eating at posh restaurants, staying in expensive hotels, and doing fancy traveling. They can get all that while working, on top of pocketing good amounts of money. Besides, their clients can be interesting, educated and powerful men. Escorting is quickly erasing the image of the prostitute as low life. Other prostitutes prefer the independence of working from home and the safety of having a limited clientele of regular customers. The ‘Lies About Prostitution’ series This article is part of a series about that the lies that conservatives and radical feminists tell about sex work and prostitution. Previous articles in these series are: Lie 1: Prostitution is Human Trafficking Lie 2: Prostitution Degrades Women Lie 3: Sex Workers Hate Their Job and Their Clients Lie 4: Johns Are Misogynistic and Violent Lie 5: Prostitutes Want to be Rescued Lie 6: Pimps Exploit Prostitutes

An easy guide to find your way in those pesky Amazon pages If you have a Kindle, sending a book that you buy on Amazon to your Kindle is done automatically. The problem comes when you buy the book elsewhere and want to read it on the Kindle. Amazon doesn't make it easy for you. It requires you to send the book file to an email address associated with your Kindle. But this can only be done from an email address that you have previously authorized. Follow these steps. Step 1: Find the email address of your Kindle On your computer, go to Amazon.com and log into the account associated with your Kindle. In the top bar, choose the third option from the right: “Accounts & Lists”. Under “Your Account”, click on “Content and Devices”. A third horizontal bar will appear, in white. In it, click on "Preferences". Scroll to the bottom of the screen and click on "Personal Document Settings". Click on that option and you will see a list of your Kindles appear, as well as phones and other devices that have the Kindle app. Next to the name of each Kindle name, you'll see the email address associated with it. This email address can be changed with the "Edit" option. Step 2: Authorize your email address Scroll a little further down and you will find the "Approved Personal Document E-mail List". It may be empty. Click on "Add a new approved email address" and write in the box the email address from which you are going to send the eBooks. Step 3: Send the file with the eBook to the email address of your Kindle From the email address you authorized in step 2, write an email to your Kindle's email address (step 1). Do not include subject or text, just attach the EPUB or AZW file of the book you want to send. The e-book file formats that you can send to your Kindle are AZW and EPUB. Amazon has discontinued the MOBI format, but it still works on older Kindles. I advise you to use EPUB. You can use this same system to send personal documents to your Kindle. However, Amazon charges a fee of $0.15 per document submitted. Kindle accepts the following files: PDF, DOC, DOCX, HTML, HTM, RTF, TXT, JPG, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, MOBI, AZW, and EPUB. Step 4: Turn on your Kindle and wait for the eBook to download If this does not happen, select "Content" in the same bar where "Preferences" is. There you will find a list of all the books and documents accessible on your Kindles. If your book is there and not on your Kindle, then it hasn't been sent to the Kindle. Select “Deliver or Remove from Device” and then check the box for your Kindle. If your book is not there, it has not been uploaded to Amazon. Repeat the steps above to see what is wrong. Other ways to send books to your Kindle These methods require apps. Using the Kindle app on your phone https://www.howtogeek.com/798894/how-to-transfer-epub-to-kindle/ Using Calibre Caliber is a free application that allows you to format and organize all your electronic books and documents. It is a must if you are an independent writer. https://www.howtogeek.com/539829/how-to-transfer-any-ebook-to-kindle-using-calibre/ Use this system if you buy my books My books are not for sale only on Amazon, I also publish them on Draft2Digital (D2D), Smashwords and Gumroad. From D2D and Smashwords, they are distributed to many other outlets including Apple, Nook, Kobo, Indigo, Angus & Robertson, and Mondadori. This helps expand the bookselling market, avoiding the growing monopoly of Amazon. Also, Smashwords and Gumroad allow me to offer discount codes to my friends and readers. If you have a Kindle, buy my books wherever it is convenient for you. Use this system to send them to your Kindle.

How the stereotype of the pimp is used to persecute sex workers The pimp and the Madam stereotypes The myth of the pimp has deep roots in popular cultural. The stereotype of the pimp that we often see in movies and TV is a man dressed in extravagant clothes who regularly beats his whores to keep them under control. He is selfish, greedy and cruel, and has no empathy for his women. Part of the cliché is that the prostitute has a love/hate relationship with the pimp. She may be romantically in love with him. Or she may enjoy the masochistic aspect of being under his control. Another classical form of proxenetism is the Madam: the woman in charge of a brothel. Although not as nasty as the stereotype of the pimp, she is also thought to be greedy and heartless. Modern prostitutes aspire to be business owners These two stereotypes are just part of the whole idea that prostitutes are powerless and exploited, and therefore in dire need of being rescued by the State. But prostitutes aspire to a different way to do their business: “The business owner is the sex worker, because most prostitutes that work freely and voluntarily do it independently.” Paula VIP, sex worker. This is the ideal situation for many sex workers: to work independently as a small, autonomous business. But the pimp stereotype is used to deny them security However, there are some complications. One is security. What happens if a client refuses to pay or gets rough? Another is to establish and maintain a customer base. Thus, a prostitute may decide to hire security, and share a database of trustworthy clients with other prostitutes. The problem is, in many countries, anybody a sex worker hires for safety is considered a pimp. And if she shares a customer list with other prostitutes, she would be considered a pimp herself! The Nordic Model still persecutes prostitutes This is one of the loopholes the much-touted Nordic Model uses to persecute prostitutes. This system - pioneered by Sweden and adopted by Norway, Iceland, Ireland, Canada and France - claims to persecute only Johns and pimps, and not the prostitutes themselves. However, it gives proxenetism such a wide definition that it includes many of the things that the prostitutes do in the course of their business. In Spain, the ruling party PSOE recently tried to introduce legislation that would make even renting an apartment to a prostitute, or receiving money earned for sex work, a crime of proxenetism. Hence the prosecution of proxenetism, sold to the public as a fight against “trafficking”, is at the core of a political strategy of eliminating prostitution, not just by jailing the sex workers, but also by depriving them of the support system that they need for their work.

Unlike animals, humans feel suffering as something that extends beyond the present and that we share with others The assumption of animal suffering in the animal liberation movement Jeremy Bentham, an 18th century utilitarian philosopher, famously asked: “The question is not ‘can they reason?’ or ‘can they talk?’ but ‘can they suffer?’” A utilitarian philosopher of our times, Peter Singer, latched into that question to write his book Animal Liberation. And so the modern animal rights movement was born. Basically, Peter Singer and many other animal rights activists claim that animals suffer like humans and therefore they should be treated like humans. To put in a more sophisticated way, Peter Singer argues that the moral imperative of equality dictates “equal consideration of interests”, that is, that the interests of all beings receive the same consideration. Animals have an interest in avoiding pain, therefore egalitarianism demands that we respect that interest. It is argued further that claiming human superiority based on our superior intelligence, our ability to talk, or our culture, is just stacking the cards in our favor because those are the special attributes of our species. By the same token, an elephant may claim moral superiority based on the fact of having a trunk. The problem of animal suffering However, the whole argument is based on the claim that animals suffer and, moreover, that they suffer like us. Singer and the other animal liberationists just assume that they do. I think this is a faulty assumption that needs to be addressed rigorously, both philosophically and scientifically. However, I understand why animal liberationists take umbrage in it: the whole problem of defining suffering seems intractable at first sight. Suffering, like happiness and consciousness, belong to a class of concepts that are at the same time abstract and fundamental. Defining them in terms that are non-circular seems nearly impossible. If you look at dictionary definitions of suffering, you will find that they refer to pain, unpleasantness or perceptions of threat, which are just examples of suffering. This does not represent a problem when the idea of suffering is applied to human beings, because we can get accurate descriptions of their suffering from other people. However, when we want to apply this concept to animals, we need a clear idea of what we are talking about. Otherwise we risk falling into one of two opposite pitfalls: self-serving callousness - choosing to think that animals do not suffer because this is convenient for us; anthropomorphizing - thinking an animal suffers just because we would suffer in the same circumstances. The latter feels intuitively true because is based on empathy, a powerful human emotion. However, it is not a rational conclusion. Just like in the case of happiness and consciousness, the problem of suffering can be studied scientifically. In fact, there are a lot of scientific studies related to suffering because the public demands that scientists find solutions to pain and distress. Just like with happiness and consciousness, science has not have come up (yet) with a complete description of suffering, but it certainly can tell us a lot of things about it. I think that this information can help us form an educated opinion about whether some particular animal suffers or not. Agency of living beings One of the most peculiar properties of life has been called agency. It refers to the fact that living beings seem to be goal-directed: they strive towards keeping themselves alive and making more beings like them. The concept of agency is explained in detail in the books of Stuart Kauffman, a scientist who has done extensive work on the conceptual underpinnings of life and evolution. However, agency does not imply any form of consciousness or intentionality. It is just something that living beings do automatically because otherwise they wouldn’t be living anymore. It is important to emphasize this because agency can be confused with the “interest” that Peter Singer talks about. Yes, life perpetuates itself, but that doesn’t mean that living beings are conscious or that they have interests and plans like we do. To think otherwise would be to accept some magical vitalist concept of life that science rejected long ago. Therefore, we can conclude that plants do not suffer, although they grow, reproduce and even fight their enemies with chemical responses. Likewise, we should accept that animals that lack a nervous system (like sponges) or that have only a rudimentary nervous system (like worms) do not suffer. Most people would agree with the idea that not all living beings suffer. But what about animals with a complex nervous system? Do they suffer? Pain and suffering Here we must consider that suffering and pain are often confused, but in fact are not identical. Pain produces suffering, but suffering can be produced by things other than pain, like negative emotional states. That pain and suffering are not identical is also shown by the fact that people may experience pain and not suffer from it. For example, the pain experienced when practicing some sports, when eating spicy food and by sexual masochists induces positive feelings instead of suffering. Some drugs called dissociative anesthetics (like ketamine) can selectively turn off the emotional part of pain, leaving intact its sensory component - we are still able to feel the pain, but just don’t care about it. Given the complexity of this subject, I chose to divide this discussion into two parts: suffering that comes from physical pain and emotional suffering. I will start with the first. Nociception Pain scientists distinguish between three concepts: nociception, pain and suffering. This distinction is recognized even by the Humane Society of the United States, an animal rights organization. To grasp the idea of nociception, consider the case of a patient who is undergoing surgery under general anesthesia. As the skin and organs of this person are being cut, pain sensory nerves record the damage and send this information to the spinal cord, which continues to the brain. The general anesthetic only stops the conveyance of noxious signals at the cerebral cortex, by disrupting the synchronization of cortical neural networks (Craig, 2010, 2014). This unconscious processing of noxious information is what we call nociception. Pain as an emotion Of course, in an awake person, nociception leads to pain. The key idea here, however, is that the processing of noxious information does not imply the existence of pain. Even if it involves millions of neurons and complex neural pathways. In fact, nowadays, pain is considered part sensation, part emotion. This is because fundamental aspects of pain are emotional, like its negative valence (we dislike it) and its salience (we cannot avoid paying attention to it). Is the complexity of a nervous system key to determine the ability to suffer? Therefore, pain requires a fairly complex nervous system capable of turning sensations into emotions. Based on this idea, I think is reasonable to infer that animals that lack a nervous system of enough complexity do not feel pain. They just have nociception. Behavior consisting in avoiding a noxious stimulus should not necessarily be taken as an sign of pain. Because avoiding physical damage is crucial for survival, avoidant behavior can be found even in the simplest animals. Even plants and microbes react to noxious stimuli. How can be draw a line between animals that have just nociception and those that experience pain? Clearly, many animals do not come even close to having a nervous system complex enough to produce the sensation of pain with its associated negative emotions. Animals like the pond snail (11,000 neurons) or the sea slug (28,000 neurons) just don’t have this capacity. By comparison, we have 100 million neurons just in our gut (the enteric nervous system) and 86 billion neurons in our brain. A table of the number of neurons in different animal species can be found here. Among the invertebrates, the only animal that has a fairly complex nervous system is the octopus, with 300 million neurons, comparable with the rat’s 200 million neurons. This is why countries like the UK and Canada now give cephalopods (octopi, squids and cuttlefish) the same protections given to vertebrates. However, the number of neurons should not be the only metric to measure the complexity of a nervous system. Thus, the neurons of the octopus and other cephalopods do not have a myelin coating in their axons, so they send information much more slowly than the vertebrates. We need to use other metrics, like the number of synapses or overall capacity to process information. But what most people are concerned about are the most complex animals - mammals and birds - which we eat, have as pets and use in scientific research. What about them? Do they feel pain? Do they suffer? The sensory and emotional aspects of pain In mammals, a lot can be learned about the relationship between pain and suffering by studying brain areas involved in the processing of pain. As I said above, pain has a sensory aspect and an emotional aspect. The sensory aspect of pain is processed by the somatosensory cortex, an area shaped like a hairband going from the top to the sides of the brain. It contains a detailed map of the body and processes pain and touch, telling us where these sensations originate. Nowadays, it is recognized that the dorsal posterior insula also contains a map of the body and handles judgements on the localization and intensity of pain. The somatosensory cortex is connected to the orbitofrontal cortex, located at the front end of the brain and whose function is to plan actions according with the information it receives. But neither the somatosensory nor the orbitofrontal cortex are responsible for the emotional component of pain. This function is assigned to two other areas of the cortex: the insula and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Generally speaking, the function of the insula is to tell us how bad pain feels and to associate that emotion with a host of other emotions like sadness, fear, anger, joy, disgust and pleasure. Emotions can be understood as motivational states of the brain. They predispose us to act in a certain way, organizing everything we feel in a hierarchical way according to what takes priority for action. Pain is an emotion that motivates us to stop or escape from whatever is hurting us. This urgent motivational aspect of pain is processed by the ACC. Therefore, we could say that the insula and the ACC work together to turn pain into suffering by giving it its “I don’t like it” and “I want to stop it” qualities. Pain processing is special in humans Recent discoveries have revealed that during the evolution of primates (monkeys, apes and humans) there was a reconfiguration of the brain pathways that process pain, culminating with the appearance of completely new pain processing areas in the human brain (Craig, 2003, 2010). Noxious signals are carried by specialized fibers in the nerves from any part of the body to the dorsal horn of the spinal cord. From there, the signals travel to the parabrachial nucleus in the brain stem, where they branch out to different nuclei of the thalamus and the forebrain (Craig, 2003). Located in the middle of the brain, the thalamus functions as the central relay of all sensory information. Its different parts, or nuclei, handle visual, auditory, gustatory, tactile and pain information. Different thalamic nuclei send pain signals to the four areas of the cortex mentioned above: the somatosensory cortex, the orbitofrontal cortex, the insula and the ACC. These pain pathways are present in all mammals, but in primates a new additional pathway emerged that directly links the spinal cord with the nucleus of the thalamus connected to the insula, bypassing the parabrachial nucleus. This means that pain sensations are able to reach directly the part of the cortex where feelings are created. In humans, the size of this direct pathway between the thalamus and the insula is much larger and more complex than in monkeys. The anterior insula There is another change in the brain unique to humans, which is not found even in monkeys. It’s a new region of the brain called the anterior insula (Craig, 2011; Bauernfeind et al., 2013). A. D. Craig is a scientist who has studied these changes by mapping the brains of monkeys, apes and humans. He thinks that the posterior insula serves to create an emotional map of the state of the body at each moment. The anterior insula, in contrast, serves to model the state of the body in hypothetical situations: “if this were to happen, this is what I would feel.” Craig proposes that the anterior insula mediates self-awareness by modeling feelings that represent the interior state of the body. The representation of hypothetical states of the body performed by the anterior insula is also responsible for empathy: the ability to feel what another person is feeling. The anterior insula does that by simulating their body state in our own brain. The gradual appearance of the anterior insula in apes like bonobos and chimpanzees correlates with the development of empathy and positive social emotions (Rilling et al., 2012; Bauernfeind et al., 2013). Therefore, as the mammalian brain evolved into the human brain, the insula became more relevant in generating the negative emotions associated with pain. This increased the depth of suffering. Two other unique properties of the human mind, extended consciousness and theory of mind, contribute to this. Extended consciousness means that not only we experience pain in the present moment, as animals do, but we are also aware of having suffered in the past and that we may suffer in the future. Animals that lack an anterior insula would not be able to experience suffering as something that extends into the past and the future. Although animals have memories, without the anterior insula they cannot use them to construct a vivid representation of their past suffering, like we do. They do not have deep suffering. A measure of self-awareness and deep suffering may exists in elephants and cetaceans, which also have a developed anterior insula and ACC with von Economo neurons. Conclusion: some animals suffer but only humans have deep suffering We need to take a gradualist approach when considering the existence of pain and suffering in animals. Invertebrates, with the possible exception of cephalopods, do not appear to have a nervous system complex enough to feel pain, let alone experiencing suffering. Their behavior can be explained by automatic responses to nociceptive signals. Vertebrates, particularly the ones with highly complex nervous systems like mammals and birds, do experience pain and probably suffer from it. However, the deep suffering that we experience as humans beings, rooted in our extended consciousness and our capacity to imagine the future, does not seem to exist in other mammals. Jeremy Bentham and Peter Singer failed to understand the true nature of suffering when they came up with the idea of speciesism. Just as we do not give the same moral status to animals and plants, we cannot give the same moral status to all animal species. When deciding how we should treat animals, we need to take into consideration whether they can feel pain and, if they do, whether they suffer from that pain. The suffering of a mouse, a dog, a monkey and a chimpanzee are not equivalent. By the same token, human suffering has to be given a higher ethical consideration than the suffering of other animals. There is a moral imperative to diminish suffering in all sentient beings, but when difficult choices have to be made, human suffering has to come first. If saying this makes me a speciecist, I will wear that label with pride. But I’d rather call myself a humanist, because for me the priority is to decrease human suffering. References Bauernfeind AL, de Sousa AA, Avasthi T, Dobson SD, Raghanti MA, Lewandowski AH, Zilles K, Semendeferi K, Allman JM, Craig A.D., Hof PR, Sherwood CC (2013) A volumetric comparison of the insular cortex and its subregions in primates. J Hum Evol 64:263-279. Craig A.D. (2003) Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body. Curr Opin Neurobiol 13:500-505. Craig A.D. (2010) The sentient self. Brain Struct Funct 214:563-577. Craig A.D. (2011) Significance of the insula for the evolution of human awareness of feelings from the body. Ann N Y Acad Sci 1225:72-82. Craig A.D. (2014) Topographically organized projection to posterior insular cortex from the posterior portion of the ventral medial nucleus in the long-tailed macaque monkey. J Comp Neurol 522:36-63. Rilling JK, Scholz J, Preuss TM, Glasser MF, Errangi BK, Behrens TE (2012) Differences between chimpanzees and bonobos in neural systems supporting social cognition. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci 7:369-379.

Sex workers do not want to be rescued by men marrying them, or by religious conservatives and radical feminists giving them a choice between jail and exploitative jobs Knight in shining armor wants to marry a prostitute One popular myth, found in songs, novels and movies, is that of the lucky prostitute who gets rescued from her horrible job by a man who marries her. As the story goes, the ex-prostitute is forever indebted to her rescuer. She was forced into prostitution by the unfortunate circumstances of life. She was miserable doing it. The rescuer is a generous man, selfless enough to overlook the degraded state of the prostitute. He is so loving, smart and dedicated that is able to “clean her up” and elevate her back to the status of a “normal” woman. This narrative is just another version of the classist theme of the wealthy man who gets to pick the poor but pretty woman and mold her to his wishes, because she is forever grateful that he has raised her to his high social status. Which, in turn, is subtly misogynistic in that the man is wealthy and powerful, and the woman is powerless except for her sex appeal. It’s the plot of the movie Pretty Woman and many similar stories since antiquity. Another example is the song Roxanne by The Police. However, the reality is quite different. Most prostitutes do not want to be rescued. Least of all by some random loser who looks down on her and thinks he is doing her a favor. He’s probably the one who needs to be rescued. The prostitute has chosen her job for good reasons. She doesn’t need anybody to take that choice away for her. Maybe she already has a husband or a romantic partner, and going into sex work was a joined decision (I personally know two cases). Maybe she is raising a child. Maybe she has just found her way out of an abusive relationship, and the last thing she wants is to get into another. Indeed, some of these would-be rescuers are men who see a disempowered woman who they can easily control. The State comes to the rescue by offering exploitative jobs But sometimes the abuser is not a man who wants to marry the prostitute, but a high-minded ideologue who knows what is best for her, either a religious conservative or a radical feminist. Ideologues are not interested in the prostitute as a person, but in prostitution as an abstraction. They see it as a blight that needs to be scoured from society. And they intend to use the policing powers of the State to do that. Never mind the interests and the well-being of the prostitute. This doesn’t surprise anybody. It has been going on for centuries. It’s just an extension of the religious sexual repression of the Middle Ages. Just like the abuser who hides his desire for control behind the idea that he is doing the prostitute a favor, anti-prostitution ideologues want to rescue prostitutes without asking them first. They assume that they want to be rescued, because surely anybody would want to get out of such an exploitative and degrading job, wouldn’t they? They want to take them out of their sex jobs - using the police if necessary - to offer them “honest” jobs. Like, for example, sweeping floors, or sewing for some huge apparel corporation. Jobs that are suitable for women in their social class. Because, please, let’s not pretend that prostitutes have the same social stature as the radical feminists who get to decide their future. After all, these feminists have gone to college and now hold tenured positions in Gender Studies at a university, or work in a law firm, or have gone into politics and gotten powerful government positions. Rescuers want to disempower sex workers and steal their voices Prostitutes beg to disagree with all these rescuing schemes. They have been trying with all their might to make their voices heard. Like any worker, they have been organizing in associations and unions to fight for their rights, like COYOTE in the United States. The Global Network of Sex Work Projects provides a list of such groups worldwide. However, like any other abuser, anti-prostitution ideologues are keen on disempowering their victims and stealing their voices. For example, in Spain, prostitutes tried to organize a series of talks in universities about their problems, only to be massively canceled by radical feminists. The union OTRAS was persecuted by the Spanish government led by the socialist party PSOE. After a fight, it finally had its statutes legalized by the Spanish Supreme Court. Nevertheless, the PSOE has declared its intentions to persecute prostitution in Spain in its electoral program. Of course, the situation in the USA is much worse. Prostitution is still a crime persecuted by the police using all kind of entrapment methods. FOSTA-SESTA legislation - co-sponsored by politicians of both the Republican and Democratic parties - played on the deliberate confusion of prostitution with sex traffic, banning sex workers from the internet and making illegal many of the things that they did to protect themselves. Prostitutes do not need to be rescued. What they need is the State to stop treating their work as a crime. They need to have the same rights as any other citizen. They need to have the same protections against exploitation as any other worker.

The clients of prostitutes are mostly sexually frustrated men The stereotype of the john The stigma of prostitution extends to their clients, even more so after the Nordic Model for persecuting prostitution focused law enforcement on johns and pimps. The stereotype of the john is a man who is lonely, antisocial, misogynistic, unable to form romantic relationships, and prone to physical violence and rape. It is hard to know to what extent this image correspond to reality, because research studies on men who buy sex are even more scarce than those studying sex workers. The few studies I could find usually focus on the treatment of sex workers by their clients and on behaviors that increase the risk of sexually transmitted diseases like avoiding condom use (Schei and Stigum, 2010; Jones et al., 2015), rather than on the johns themselves and their motives. Prostitution customers are sexually frustrated men The best study I could find (Deogan et al., 2021) was a randomized survey of 6048 Swedish men, using data from a population-based survey of both genders. It included men 16-84 years old. It found that 9.5% of the men had ever paid for sex, which is comparable to what was found in studies in Norway, 13% (Schei and Stigum, 2010), and Britain, 11% (Jones et al., 2015). Only 0.26% of the men said that they had purchased sex within the last year. Men younger than 29 were less likely to had bought sex, although this is likely a confound of the question - obviously, they had less time for having “ever” bought sex than older men. Otherwise, there was little correlation of buying sex with age, educational level and income. If anything, men of lower education and income were slightly more likely to buy sex. The study found that men who bought sex were dissatisfied with their sex lives, had less sex that they wanted, viewed more porn, and looked for sex partners online. This is hardly surprising. It shows that men buy sex because they are sexually frustrated and cannot get sex otherwise. It also suggest that men who are less educated, have less income and are older buy sex because they find it harder to date women. Rape myth acceptance Another study (Klein et al., 2009) used the Burt’s Rape Myth Acceptance Scale in men who had been arrested for soliciting prostitutes in British Columbia. It found that rape myth acceptance was lower in older and more educated men; and also in men who viewed more porn, wanted more frequent sex, and believed that purchasing sex is a problem. Rape myth acceptance correlated positively with sexual conservatism, sexual violence and coercion, and social desirability. This indicates that beliefs that reinforce rape and sexual violence are not related to porn use or sexual desire, but to conservative views of sex. Sex Work benefits disabled people A topic that is rarely discussed is that sex work can provide relief for the sexual desire and loneliness of disabled people. In fact, in Victoria, Australia, people with disabilities are entitled to hire a sex worker and have the National Disability Insurance Service (NDIS) pay for it. In Norway, men who pay for sex are more likely to be on a disability pension (Schei and Stigum, 2010). Conclusions These studies show that the clients of prostitution are most sexually frustrated men who have trouble finding sexual partners. Johns are no more inclined to rape or sexual violence than other men. However, criminalization of prostitution make sex workers vulnerable to attacks by those clients that are so inclined.

How biochemistry unravels the mystery of life When I was in my last year of college, I had an epiphany. As I was listening to a lecture on thermodynamics of irreversible processes, my eyes were opened and I suddenly understood what is life. This was not some kind of mystical revelation but the culmination of two years of hard work studying biochemistry and molecular biology. But all of a sudden it all came together, and I understood what life is at its essence. Vitalism Since antiquity, people have wondered what makes living beings different from inanimate objects. The fact that an animal can be alive and then dead, and still look pretty much the same, gave rise to the idea of vitalism, which sustains that life is caused by a non-material essence, life force or Elan Vital, that infuses organisms with life and leaves them when they die. This idea persisted until the 20th century when it was debunked by the development of biochemistry, a science that explains life in terms of chemistry. But it is not as simple as that. Schrödinger’s first hypothesis and the discovery of DNA A good place to start is a book titled What is life? written by a famous quantum physicist, Erwin Schrödinger. The book came out of three public lectures that Schrödinger gave at the Trinity College, Dublin, in February 1943, while being exiled from Nazi Germany. In them, Schrödinger put forward two daring hypotheses. The first, which he termed “order from order”, was a genial insight. It proposed that the genes used by living beings to pass information from one generation to the next were an “aperiodic crystal” that stored information as a code in its molecular structure. He was right. The aperiodic crystal was found a decade later: it was DNA. An explosion of scientific discoveries followed. They established the genetic code and the mechanisms of transcription of DNA into messenger RNA (mRNA) and the translation of mRNA into proteins. These discoveries confirmed the theory of evolution by explaining: the molecular identity of the genes, the link between genes and sexual reproduction, why genes last for many generations, how changes in the DNA molecule are the mutations that drive evolution. The gene-centric view of life The problem was that many scientists fell so in love with genes and DNA that they thought that reproduction is the defining characteristic of life and the DNA-RNA-protein encoding system is its core mechanism. Everything else in a living organism is at the service of them. This view reflects the centralized and hierarchical way in which our society is organized. DNA is the king or the president. It sits in his throne in the nucleus at the center of the cell, from where it gives orders that are transmitted by its ministers, the messenger RNAs, and are faithfully executed by the workers, the proteins. However, there are a few problems with the gene-centric view of life: Reproduction is not the fundamental characteristics of life, because an organism can be alive even if it is unable to reproduce. Reproduction serves to perpetuate life in the long term and to drive evolution. DNA is not essential to be alive. Red blood cells (erythrocytes) are alive even though they do not have a nucleus with DNA. In the lab, it is possible to keep alive cells without a nucleus or preparations like synaptosomes, presynaptic terminals pinched off neurons. Viruses contain DNA or RNA, but they are not alive and able to reproduce until they infect a living cell. How do we know that something is alive? How do we know that red blood cells are alive and viruses are not? Because living cells breathe, consuming oxygen and producing CO2. They have an electric potential across their membrane. They can absorb substances from the outside and expel others. They consume substances to produce energy. All these properties mean that living cells have a metabolism. Viruses do not breathe, have no membrane potential and do not move or consume substances. They have no metabolism. To take a closer look, let’s consider what happens when a cell dies. To find out if a cell is alive, one of the things a scientist would do is to measure the amount of calcium ions (Ca2+) that it has inside. Living cells maintain a steep gradient of calcium concentration across their membrane, so that the amount of calcium inside is 10,000 times less than the amount of calcium outside. Another way to know if a cell is alive is to look at the electrical potential across its membrane: it should be about -60 millivolts. This electrical potential is maintained by pumping sodium ions (Na+) to the outside and potassium ions (K+) to the inside, although their concentration gradient is not as dramatic. A dead cell has a large amount of calcium inside and no membrane potential. All of its ion gradients have collapsed. These are just two examples of things in a living cell that do not make sense from the chemical point of view. Things seem to be quite out of place. Ions should be equally distributed on both sides of the membrane. Unstable substances are present in large amounts. There is energy and chemical imbalance everywhere. But what is even stranger is that, despite all that chemical imbalance, things stay the same. For example, the concentration of calcium inside a cell is always close to 100 nano-molar. Calcium concentrations may increase 10 times to convey a signal, but they immediately return to normal. Likewise, the concentration of any other substance within the cells is kept within a narrow range. There is a word for this property of life: homeostasis. It means the ability of a living organism to maintain a stable internal environment. Entropy and Schrödinger’s second hypothesis Because chemical imbalances require energy to be maintained, to understand homeostasis we need to invoke some basics concepts of chemistry and thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics states that the amount of disorder in a closed system always increases over time. The precise term for disorder is ‘entropy’, which is a measure of all the possible configurations of a system. That means that a highly organized system, like a living cell, requires a lot of energy to stay that way. Schrödinger also had an insight concerning the role of entropy in life. Unfortunately, it is not remembered as well as his prediction that genetic information would be stored in an aperiodic crystal. In his book What is Life? Schrödinger called his second hypothesis order from disorder. He said that for a living organism to keep its low entropy state it had to absorb energy and pump entropy to the outside. He called that property negentropy (negative entropy), but the term never caught on. Homeostasis is a state far from chemical equilibrium From the chemistry standpoint, increasing entropy means that a chemical reaction would proceed until the state of the lowest energy is reached. If compound A reacts with B to generate energy and compound C, the reaction will proceed until A and B are exhausted and all that remains is C. In other chemical reactions, compounds A and B react to produce compounds C and D, but the inverse reaction in which C and D produce A and B can also take place. In this case, an equilibrium is reached at some particular concentrations of A, B, C and D that minimize entropy. This is called chemical equilibrium. A living cell is a vast network of interlinked chemical reactions. These reactions are constrained by barriers (membranes and the cytoskeleton) that create the external and internal structure of the cell. Remarkably, these chemical reactions never reach chemical equilibrium and, in fact, the concentrations of substances inside a living cell are far away from equilibrium. Still, their concentrations do not vary: this is what homeostasis means. It is easy to keep concentrations of compounds the same at equilibrium, but to keep them stable far from equilibrium requires a system that carefully regulates the rate of those chemical reactions, speeding them up if the concentrations of products are too low and slowing them down if they are too high. This is achieved by having each reaction catalyzed by a protein called an enzyme, which is like a nanomachine with little control buttons that can speed it up or slow it down. So what presses those buttons? Well, other enzymes and signal molecules inside the cell. DNA is not a king The production of enzymes is regulated by the DNA-mRNA-protein genetic mechanism that I described above. But the DNA is not the king but just another piece of the machinery. DNA does not give orders, it follows them. And who orders DNA around? Proteins and small signaling molecules that tell the DNA which genes get to be expressed and how fast. So proteins are not the proletariat of the cell, but they are not kings, either. They follow orders from other proteins. Living cells are not organized like our societies or even our computers, because there is no command center. The cell just keeps going by having its parts interact which each other and with the environment. The best way to understand this is to view the cell as an information processing system, computing endlessly the best way to keep its homeostasis going. If I were to use a computer metaphor, DNA would not be the central processing unit but the hard drive where information is stored long term and extracted when needed. And it is a read-only hard drive, because permanent changes in the DNA genetic information are not allowed. Only the twin processes of mutation and natural selection get to make permanent changes in the DNA. Prigogine, dissipative structures and intracellular signals The idea that a living system is a system far from equilibrium or, as he called it, a ‘dissipative structure’, was envisioned by Ilya Prigogine, who wrote mathematical equations explaining this behavior. Recent discoveries on cell biochemistry supported his ideas. They unraveled the complex networks of intracellular signals that maintain homeostasis. Not only that, they also explained how a cell reacts to its environment or signals from the rest of the body, if the cell is part of a multicellular organism. Systems that are far from equilibrium and yet keep their shape are all around us. For example, a river: the water that flows in it is never the same and yet the river keeps its shape. The river is part of a non-equilibrium system: energy from the sun evaporates water from the sea that rains in the mountains and flows back to the sea, forming the river. But while the river may be turbulent and uneven below its surface, in a living cell every molecule is precisely placed and controlled. A more apt metaphor for a living cell will be ten thousand people juggling balls and passing them to each other in a precisely coordinated way. How did life get started? The homeostatic view of life has profound implications in many fields of biology. Take the problem of the origin of life, for example. The most accepted view these days is that of the RNA-world, in which molecules of RNA interacted with proteins to catalyze the first reactions of life. However, before that, there had to be a long process in which chemical reactions became progressively interlinked to create the first self-sustained entities. Then a primitive form of natural selection favored the most stable of those entities, slowly encouraging internal control to finally giving raise to homeostasis. The tightly regulated homeostasis of modern organisms probably took a lot of trial and error to evolve. With it came the formation of proteins, catalysis of reactions by proteins or RNA and, finally, DNA and the genetic code. Life as information processing That day in my last year of college, while the professor explained Prigogine’s ideas, it all came together. I understood that life is really homeostasis. Over the years, as I studied cell signaling systems with my own experiments, I realized that there is something beyond homeostasis. What keeps the system together in all its delicate balance is the flow of information through its signaling systems. Although there is no central processing unit, there is a certain hierarchy of control. “Intracellular signaling systems”, as they are called, form pathways for the transmission, amplification and processing of information. For example, one of them is formed by the enzyme adenylyl cyclase, the small molecule cyclic-AMP and enzyme protein kinase A, which changes the functioning of many proteins by attaching phosphoric acid to them in a process called phosphorylation. Other enzymes, the phosphatases, remove the phosphate. But there are many other signaling pathways, forming all kinds of complicated branches and loops. We are still trying to classify them and understand them. Its essence, then, life is the processing of information with the goal of keeping itself going. Reproduction is just a way to prolong the process in the long term, thanks to the effectiveness of DNA in preserving information. A living organism, therefore, is something essentially different from a material object. An object keeps its shape because its atoms and molecules stay in the same place. Inside a living organism everything moves; matter and energy come in and out. Like the water that flows in the river, atoms are not there to stay, they are just passing by. What always remains, in the end, is the information.

And how to defend yourself against them. Yes, they can hurt you The first mistake we make is to think that we cannot be hurt by our interactions online. After all, they are two separate worlds: the real one, where we live under our real name and interact with our friends and families, and the one behind our computer screen. In it, we are anonymous or hidden under a nickname. The relationships we develop can be severed at our whim by blocking people or ghosting them. Anything they write about us is not really about us, but about our internet persona. We can safely walk away from the nastiness simply by turning off our computer or putting away our phone. Then we go back to our real selves in our real lives. But things are not like that. Our brains are programed to respond to shaming and blaming by other people, no matter if they are in the real world or behind a computer screen. The relationships and social networks we create online are as real as the ones in the physical world. Fooled by our anonymity, we share secrets online that we wouldn’t dare to tell to our best friends. And then those secrets can be thrown back at us to hurt us in the most intimate places of our psyches. Since other people in the internet are also cloaked behind nicknames, their social inhibitions are turned off, and they dare say things that they would never say in the physical world. Nice doctor Jekyll turns into nasty mister Hyde as soon as he touches that keyboard. He also believes that what he writes cannot really hurt us, so he pours his venom with complete abandon. But, yes, we can be hurt online. It happens all the time. People are thrown into anxiety, rumination, depression and even suicide. If, like I do, you go into the internet to share your knowledge and defend worthy causes, you should be aware of all the ways people can be dishonest and abusive. You need to fend off the bad guys and attract the good ones. You need to know how to stay on message and avoid being derailed into worthless arguments. In this article, I compile ten dishonest and abusive tricks that you may find on the internet, and what you can do about them. 1) The personal attack The most basic and frequent form of internet abuse is the personal attack. You are discussing a problem in general terms, and then somebody comment on it, making it all about your person. This is an informal fallacy called ‘ad hominem’, which in Latin means ‘to the person’. Ideas should be considered on their own value, not based on the person who expresses them. Attacking the person and not the idea is a distraction commonly used by people who don’t have solid arguments against that idea. This turns an intellectual argument into an emotional one, since it is very easy to escalate an ad hominem into all sorts of blaming and shaming. Then you find yourself defending your reputation, and not the idea that you wanted to express. Questioning your authority on the topic at hand is not always dishonest. People have legitimate reasons to want to know how educated you are on a subject. If you have some academic credentials or an education degree, you may want to give them. However, this is not always a good idea. For one thing, you may out yourself, so you are no longer anonymous while your opponent remains so. This puts you in a situation of vulnerability, open to further attacks based on the information they may find about you. You may also be forced into the converse fallacy of the ad hominem: the argument from authority. It consists of defending an idea on the basis of your authority on the matter, instead of giving evidence and rational arguments to support it. A better solution is to show your authority by demonstrating it, for example, by citing papers and books that support your position. Or you may explain obscure ideas and technical jargon in ways that make everybody understand them. This will make you more popular amongst people who are trying to learn something, at the same time that it shows that you really know what you are talking about. Just try not to sound condescending. The most important thing to keep in mind is that you are not trying to convince the person arguing with you. In most cases, that person would be so attached to his beliefs that it would be impossible to convince them. Who you are trying to convince is everybody else watching the discussion. “Abusive ad hominem argument (or direct ad hominem) is associated with an attack to the character of the person carrying an argument. This kind of argument, besides usually being fallacious, is also counterproductive, as a proper dialogue is hard to achieve after such an attack.” Wikipedia. If a personal attack raises to the level of insult, block that person without a second thought. Life is too short to deal with mean people. 2) Fishing for personal information Personal attacks take many forms. The most vile seek points of weakness in your past to make you ashamed of them. The problem is that your attacker doesn’t know much about you. Hence, they need to extract some personal information from you beforehand. They may do that by feigning genuine curiosity or sympathy. Only after they have gathered the information that they want they will start their attack. Another strategy is to write a wild assumption about you. When you correct them, you give them the information they want. For example, a woman recently responded to one of my comments by saying that surely I was single and had problems dating. She implied that I was a misogynist and, therefore, no woman would want to date me. I replied saying that I had been married for 30 years, what about her? That way, I gave a minimum of truthful information and turned the tables on her. Of course, she didn’t volunteer if she was single or married. She knew the rules of her own game. 3) The dog pile The dog pile is one of the most vicious internet attacks. It’s when a group of people collude to make a simultaneous personal attack on you. The term ‘dog pile’ existed in the English vocabulary long before the invention of the World Wide Web. The internet made it possible to take it from a physical attack to a verbal one. Here is an old Bugs Bunny cartoon perfectly illustrating how a dog pile work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7CtOgFYtu0 Often, the people making a dog pile are part of a clique that follow a dog whistle of one of their members to appear in the comment section of one of your posts. Other times, dog piles form spontaneously when you dare post a view the goes against the commonly held beliefs of a site - not a wise thing to do. Stay off that site. You won’t make any friends or convert anybody there. You’ll be like Bugs Bunny chewing his carrot in the dog’s neighborhood. Since in a dog pile a lot of people are posting simultaneously, it is nearly impossible to defend yourself by responding to each of their comments. You could write a collective response, but this would just emphasize the fact that there are a lot of people against you. People are cowards, so don’t expect anybody to rush to your defense - unless you have enough friends to form a counter-dog pile in response. But even that would have destroyed the comments to your article. I found that the best response to a dog pile is to individually block every individual participating in it. These people are mean, you won’t miss them as followers. If you detect the dog pile early enough, you can block the instigators, thus nipping the attack on the bud before it does too much damage. 4) Baiting Baiting is when somebody post something in a provocative tone to evoke an emotional response from you. Things tend to escalate and go downhill from there. Baiting achieves its objective by making you look like a nasty, emotional and aggressive person. The more you descend to the level of your provocateur, the more you drive the onlookers away from your position. Besides, some provocateurs are deftly enough to always look cooler than you. If you are responding to comments on your blog or to one of your articles, you are defending your home turf. An attacker looks like a daring outsider, which gives her an advantage. Always remember that you are not writing for the attacker, but for the onlookers. Think of how you appear to them. The best way to respond to baiting is with a rational, overly polite answer. Not answering is always a good option. At least, you won’t waste your time. The baiter will not get her reward and will probably look for better targets. And you will devote your time and energy to the good members of your audience. However, keep in mind that intelligent disagreeing comments are the best. Agreeing comments are nice but boring, because it is hard to reply to them with something entertaining. An opponent willing to argue honestly is the best thing that can happen to your article. Treat them with the utmost respect and give them your best. A smart, profound discussion will enthrall your audience in ways that your article could not. 5) Sidetracking Sidetracking is when somebody takes the discussion away from the man topic of your article. It’s a common and annoying practice. If you built the reasoning of your article in a way that is rationally waterproof and based on solid evidence, people who disagree with it will find it hard to argue against it. Instead, what they would do is to nitpick on an irrelevant detail or take the conversation away to a different topic. This may be a topic that they know better than you, where they can embarrass you and destroy your credibility. Don’t let yourself be sidetracked. Do not respond to sidetracking comments. If you do, bring the discussion back to the main topic by sidetracking the sidetracker. If people follow a sidetracking thread, do not participate in it. Do not complain that they are sidetracking, because that would make you look like a censor. If you do not participate, you would avoid risking your credibility and lending importance to the sidetracking topic. 6) The joke is on you Often, sidetracking is done by joking. This could signal the beginning of a personal attack or a dog pile. There may be a trick question that then turns you into the butt of a joke. But, if you don’t play along with a joke, this would make you appear straitlaced and humorless. You’ll have to use your best judgment about how to respond to a joke. If you are witty and appreciated for your sense of humor, you could outwit the joker. A friendly audience will often flock to your side. But beware that this may escalate and you may not keep up your smart responses for long. Do not turn your response into an attack on the outsider. Always be friendly and compassionate. Your success as a writer depends on making friends, not enemies. 7) The Kafka trap “A sophistical rhetorical device in which any denial by an accused person serves as evidence of guilt. […] Coined by American computer programmer, author, and advocate for the open source movement Eric S. Raymond in 2010 in reference to the book Der Proceß (The Trial, 1925) by the Bohemian author Franz Kafka (1883–1924), in which a man is accused of crimes that are never specified, and every defense is treated as proof of guilt.” Kafkatrap, Wiktionary. Somebody accuses you of being a misogynist, a racist, a communist, etc. When you deny it, this is taken as evidence that you are because that’s precisely what a misogynist, racist, communist, etc. would say. In its most elaborated forms, Kafka traps are constructed so that even good behavior in support of a cause is taken as evidence that you have a secret agenda. You are virtue signaling. Or, worse, planning some ultimate exploitative act. For example, nice guys are the worst misogynists. White men dating Black women are racists. Men dating trans women are abusing them. The underlying idea is that being part of an oppressor group is an irredeemable quality, so that every good deed from members of that group would eventually turn evil. That there are nasty motives behind every good intention, even if they are unconscious. Because nobody can escape the oppressor-victim dynamic at the core of postmodern ideology. “As almost any glance back in history will tell you, silencing a subsection of society simply encourages the pretence of compliance, a fostered resentment and a festering that will re-emerge at a later date. The Kafka Trap is an excellent way to keep the walls of an echo chamber solid and a bad way to promote social change.” @Argumentative Penguin. Verbal Prison: How To Spot and Escape The Kafka Trap https://medium.com/lucid-nightmare/verbal-prison-how-to-spot-and-escape-the-kafka-trap-e7ee4104dbc8 8) Arguments from gender, race, nationality, etc. This is a variant of the ad hominem attack that is worth mentioning because it has become so pervasive in identity politics that it is almost part of its ideology. A long time ago, conservatives used to say that women or Blacks couldn’t say anything worth hearing because they were of lesser intelligence and education. Perhaps this is still true today in some conservative circles. But, nowadays, this misogynistic and racist idea has been turned on its head by identity politics. What somebody says can be discounted solely because he belongs to the wrong gender, race or nation. Again, the underlying assumption is that whatever is said by a member of an oppressor group can be attributed to wanting to maintain the privilege of that group, and not to an honest opinion or an idea based on evidence and logic. This frees people who espouse ideological dogmas from having to defend them against powerful arguments. A variant of this is to imply that the subjective experience of somebody belonging to an oppressed group trumps any objective finding related to this group. For example, a woman mocked me for being a man writing about female orgasms. Since I could not experience them firsthand, it was impossible for me to know anything about them. No matter how many women I had sex with. No matter how many scientific papers about orgasms I had read. Taken to its logical conclusion, this attitude would invalidate any scientific evidence in favor of the subjective experiences of certain people. 9) Pearl-clutching This expression comes from the image of a Victorian woman in rich clothes clutching her pearl necklace while exclaiming “Good Heavens! I can’t believe you could say that!” Or something along those lines. It’s a shaming maneuver that invites indignation from the audience. It’s designed to put you in a defensive position by having to defend your right to express an idea before you can start actually defending that idea. You would need to argue that expressing that idea is not a moral outrage. Even if you manage to do that, it would put you in a weakened position by the time you get around to defend your idea. Even though the image of pearl-clutching evokes Victorian era puritanism, today this attitude is most commonly encountered in those defending the politically correct status quo. 10) The easily offended Recently, in a chat group, I defended a gay man against a dog pile. People were attacking him because he said that there was still homophobia in some kinky groups. Among other things, I pointed out that a group attack on somebody who was gay could be perceived as homophobic. A woman who had marginally participated in the dog pile took great offense at that, saying that I had accused her of being homophobic. Never mind that I didn’t accuse her, or anybody else, for that matter. I just pointed out that what they were doing was wrong. As I said above, personal attacks are against people. Attacking ideas should be part of the normal discourse; otherwise, there would be censorship. We should also be free to condemn some behaviors. In fact, this is what I am doing in this article. Criticizing behaviors is essential to fight for a just society. For centuries, taking offense by confusing an attack of an idea, an ideology or a religion with a personal attack has been a favorite strategy of the defenders of dogma. Thus, questioning the dogmas of Christianity was presented as an attack on Christians and got a lot of people tortured and killed. Today, the Left furiously condemns any criticism of Islam as a bigoted attack on Muslims. Never mind that Islam holds the same misogynistic and homophobic ideas that the Left has been fighting in conservative Christianity. Conclusion The only hope out of the cultural wars that are tearing Western societies apart is to establish a solid base of common norms for polite discourse, evidence and rationality. Unfortunately, the Left has become as guilty of poisoning the well of rationality as the Right. When signaling to what cultural group you belong to becomes more important that finding the truth, everybody becomes more mired in their common delusions. Ideological divisions become more profound until talking across them becomes impossible and they tear our society apart. In this light, perhaps the most worthwhile battle is to fight for rational discourse and a common base of shared knowledge.

Companies that publish scientific journals exploit scientist and the taxpayer. Scientists have to pay to publish their papers It is a true scandal how commercial publishers of scientific journals have been profiting by exploiting scientists. Scientist do all the work that goes into making a science paper. They do the research, analyze the date, create the figures and write the paper. Then other scientists work as editor for the journal and peer-review the paper. All this work is done for free. Sometimes, scientists even have to pay to get their paper published. Yes, you read that right. Scientists frequently have to pay to publish a paper. Some journals, like the Journal of Neuroscience, have a submission fee that is not refunded, even if the paper is rejected. Many other journals make authors pay to publish a paper. For example, the Journal of Neuroscience has a submission fee of $2,360 ($1,710 if the authors are members of the Society for Neuroscience). This could make sense when scientific articles were printed in glossy journals, which is expensive. But nowadays most papers are just published electronically in PDF format, which is much cheaper, so these high fees are no longer justified. Scientists have to pay to read scientific papers The publishing house that owns the journal pockets the submission fee and the publication fee. Then it charges scientists again to read the paper. Frequently, publishing houses like Elsevier negotiate contracts with the libraries of universities to sell them packages of many different journals for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many smaller universities cannot afford the cost. Even UCLA recently had to stop their contract with Elsevier because it was too expensive. Adding insult to injury, publishing companies demand that scientist transfer to them the copyright of their papers. Scientists have no choice but to comply, because their academic careers depend on publishing in journals with high impact factor owned by these companies. The Cost of Knowledge boycott These exploitative practices of Elsevier got so onerous that scientists have orchestrated a Cost of Knowledge boycott against it, in which they refuse to submit papers to Elsevier, serve as editors of its journals and do peer-review for them. I signed for the boycott. The public has to pay to access the research that they pay with their taxes You may think that this is a problem for scientists and universities. However, the money that is used to pay for journals and publication fees comes from government grants. Scientists use the direct costs of the grant: money destined to pay for salaries, instruments and reagents. Libraries used the indirect costs that come with those grants: a fixed percentage that the university gets with each grant to pay for administrative costs. Hence, the money that publishing companies skim is your tax money! Hence, it is unfair that you have to pay to read a scientific paper. Typically, getting the PDF file of a science paper costs $32. The money that you pay doesn’t go to the authors of the paper, but to the publisher. To respond to increasing protests about this business model, publishers created the possibility for scientist to publish their paper ‘open access’, but the authors have to pay publication fees of thousands of dollars per paper to do that. Not surprisingly, many authors opt not to do that. You can get free papers in PubMed The USA government passed a law establishing that any scientific paper created with government grants had to be freely accessibly after a year of its publication: the NIH Public Access Policy. However, this doesn’t mean that the public has access to the paper published by the publishing company. The authors of the paper have to send a manuscript to PubMed, who publishes another version of the paper that is free to the public (but only one year after the paper was published). This means that the best way to find a free version of a paper is to look for it in PubMed. I explain how to do that in another article. In PubMed, you will find a purple button that says View PDF when the paper is available for free. Plan S is a similar initiative in Europe. Getting a preprint in BioRxiv Another way to get a paper for free is to find a preprint of it in BioRxiv. Preprints are scientific papers that have not passed peer-review yet. BioRxiv is a repository for preprints of science papers. Hence, what you will find here is different from the final version of the paper, which would be modified according to the demands of the reviewers. However, for most people, this is close enough. The good news is that, even after a paper has been published in a journal, the preprint version is still available in BioRxiv. The bad news is that many papers are not deposited in BioRxiv, particularly those published in the past. Research Gate Research Gate (https://www.researchgate.net/) is a social networking site for scientists where they are invited to share their papers. Many scientists do, so you can download the full text of their publications from there. Authors do not care if they appear to violate the copyright that the publishers wrestled out of them by posting the journal’s version of their paper. This is one more way in the which the stranglehold that publishing companies have on scientific publication is being slowly eroded. If you want to find a paper in Research Gate, just search for the name of one of the authors or for the title of the paper. What works best is to search for the name of the senior author, that normally is at the end of the list of authors. Sci-Hub You can also look for papers in Sci-Hub, a pirate repository of scientific papers run out of Kazakhstan by Alexandra Elbakyan. Needless to say, Sci-Hub is highly controversial and subject to a number of lawsuits in many countries. Ask the author It’s a time-honored practice to ask one of the authors for a copy of his paper. In the old times, authors bought from the journal a stack of reprints of the paper, which they will then mail to scientists who requested them. Nowadays, authors just email a PDF of the paper. This is not a violation of the copyright, since it forms part of the agreement between the authors and the journal. Every paper has a corresponding author, normally designated by an asterisk in the list of authors. The asterisk links to a footnote in the first page of the paper with the address and email of that author. This is the author to who you should write requesting the paper. Even if you are not a scientist, you are likely to get a response. A short note explaining why you want to read the paper might help. Authors are delighted to know that somebody cares about their work. Unfortunately, reading the footnote with the email address of the corresponding author sometimes requires having the full text of the paper. In that case, Google the name of the last author in the list, which would normally be the senior author. It is normally easy to find his academic email address.

Scientific studies disprove the belief that the clitoris is the only source of women’s orgasms The clitorocentric dogma It’s a controversy that has lasted a hundred years. Since the earliest studies on sexology, it was believed that the clitoris is the only source of women’s orgasms. That vaginal penetration produced orgasms only by indirectly stimulating the clitoris. Hence, the best way for women to achieve orgasm is to directly stimulate the clitoris. For example, Alfred Kinsey wrote: “The walls of the vagina are ordinarily insensitive. […] All of the clinical and experimental data show that the surface of the cervix is the most completely insensitive part of the female genital anatomy.” (Kinsey et al., 1953). However, Kinsey’s own data contradict these claims: 84% of the women he examined responded to pressure in their cervix, and 93% of them responded to pressure in the anterior wall of their vagina (Jannini et al., 2012). The idea that the vagina is not a source of pleasure was based on the observation that the clitoris has many nerve endings, while the vagina has fewer. However, the vagina has enough nerve terminals to participate in the sexual response, particularly is its most deeper parts. Besides, abundant innervation of a particular area of the body does not correspond with the intensity of the sensation elicited there, but with its accuracy. For example, the fingertips and the tongue are profusely innervated because they have fine tactile discrimination. A few nerve fibers can produce a strong sensation (pain, itch or pleasure) if their signal is amplified in the nervous system. “Ipse dixit is a term labeling a statement, asserted but not proven, to be accepted on faith in the speaker. After Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, and Hite, this was the case of the clitorocentric dogma of female orgasm. The growing fruits of research will definitively change this paradigm.” (Jannini et al., 2012). Vaginal orgasms and the G-spot A large group of women felt that the idea that orgasms come from the clitoris represented their own experience. But an even larger group of women felt that it did not. They preferred to have orgasms from penetration. “However, women anecdotally describe two types of orgasm. The clitoral orgasm obtained by the direct external stimulation is described as “warm” or “electrical,” and the vaginal one, obtained by a vaginal penetration, is depicted as “throbbing,” “deep,” and generally stronger.” (Jannini et al., 2012). Thus, as noted in a recent article about the orgasm gap, 69% percent of women prefer to achieve orgasm through penetration. The paper cited (Blair et al., 2018) attributed this to normative sexual experiences that emphasize the male orgasm. This just parrots some political beliefs presented as feminist but that, in reality, invalidate the feelings of a large group of women, who are deemed to be sexually uneducated and brainwashed by the patriarchy. Indeed, as I discuss in another article, the existence of vaginal orgasms is mired in political ideology. The controversy started with the claim by Sigmund Freud that women who orgasm from clitoral stimulation were psychosexually immature. In 1976, Shere Hite responded with The Hite Report, in which she used informal questionnaires to claim that the best way for women to achieve orgasm was by touching the clitoris. This eventually grew into the belief that the majority of women do not orgasm from penetration, which I debunked in a previous article. Some sexologists, however, grabbed the banner of the vaginal orgasm. By listening to women, Beverly Whipple and John Perry rediscovered a sensitive area in the anterior wall of the vagina that swells when stimulated and can trigger orgasm and female ejaculation (Addiego et al., 1981). They named it the Grafenberg spot, or G-spot, after Ernst Grafenberg, who described it back in 1950. In fact, the G-spot was described in the Kamasutra and in Taoist texts of the 4th century, and in documents of many other civilizations (Korda et al., 2010). Questions that need to be answered Given the political controversy that surrounds this issue, is it possible to find scientific evidence that puts it to rest? Since orgasm is a subjective experience, to compare orgasms form different women, or induced by stimulating the clitoris or the vagina in the same woman, looks like an insoluble philosophical problem. The subjective feelings of orgasms are qualia, conscious experiences that cannot be conveyed from one person to another. However, scientists do not give up as easily as philosophers. They know that subjective experiences can be studied by investigating their neuronal correlates in the brain. What we need is factual evidence that answers the following questions: Can vaginal stimulation alone trigger an orgasm? Is this orgasm different from the clitoral orgasm? There are other related questions, such as whether the G-spot really exists, what is its anatomy and function, the nature of female ejaculation, and the relationship of the internal clitoris with the vagina. However, in this article in will focus on these two questions. They would establish whether vaginal orgasms are real and different from clitoral orgasms. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) Today, scientists have several methods to study the activity of the brain in awake humans while they engage in different activities. They include electroencephalogram (EEG), positron emission tomography (PET) and fMRI. fMRI is used to determine what parts of the brain are active in different conditions. When an area of the brain has increased neuronal activity, its cells consume more oxygen. This prompts an increased blood flow to this area to replenish the oxygen called the hemodynamic response. fMRI measures changes in the magnetic properties of the iron atoms in the molecule of hemoglobin of the blood when they bind and unbind oxygen. The activity of brain areas is then mapped in three dimensions. Unlike EEG, fMRI can image the activity of deep brain areas. Women with spinal cord section have orgasms An opportunity to answer the first question presented itself when doctor Beverly Whipple encountered the case of women with complete spinal cord transections. The nerves that gather sensations from the genital area - pelvic, pudendal, hypogastric and lower splanchnic - carry information to the brain by entering the spinal cord at its lower segments, and then running upwards in the spinothalamic tract. If the spinal cord is severed above these lower segments, the spinothalamic tract is interrupted. All sensations below the waist, including those from the clitoris, the vagina and the anus, cannot reach the brain. Therefore, women with complete spinal cord injuries should not be able to feel their genitals and, consequently, to have orgasms. And yet, they do! They can feel when they menstruate and when their vaginas are penetrated. They experience pleasure in their vaginas, sometimes leading to orgasm. But they cannot feel their clitoris. How is this possible? Their gynecologists told them that they were experiencing phantom pleasure, something similar to the phantom sensations that amputees feel as coming from their missing limbs. But these women were experiencing pleasure from real penises and dildos, not phantom ones. fMRI of women with spinal cord sections Doctor Barry Komisaruk hypothesized that the sensations from their vaginas was carried by the vagus nerve. Unlike the sensory nerves I mentioned above, the vagus carries sensation from the internal organs directly to the brain, not through the spinal cord. ‘Vagus’ means ‘errand’ in Latin, because this nerve meanders inside of the body, carrying information back and forth from the heart, stomach, intestines and other internal organs to the brain. The bodies of the neurons that send axons in the vagus nerve are in the nodose ganglion, situated near the base of the skull. The enter the brain in the nucleus of the solitary tract (NTS). To test this hypothesis, Komisaruk, Whipple and their collaborators carefully selected five women with complete spinal cord transections (Komisaruk et al., 2004; Komisaruk and Whipple, 2005). These unfortunate women had spinal cord injuries from bullet wounds, which provide a clean cut of the spinal cord without the messy compression produced by car crashes, falls and similar types of accidents. Compression injuries of the spinal cord make it difficult to determine if all the axons in the spinothalamic tract have been severed. Another criterion to select the women for this study was that their spinal cord injury was above the T10 (tenth thoracic vertebra) spinal segment, to completely rule out that some branches of the genital nerves could enter the spinal cord above the injury. First, Komisaruk and collaborators used fMRI to determine if the NTS was activated when these women self-stimulated their vagina with a dildo. If that happened, that would mean that the sensation from the vagina was carried by the vagus nerve and entered the brain at the NTS. Sure enough, the lower part of the NTS was activated during vaginal stimulation in all five women. The NTS is organized forming a rudimentary map of the body, so its upper part correspond to the mouth and its lower part to the genitals. When the women were given a beverage with a strong taste to provide a sensation to the mouth, the upper part of the NTS was activated. This confirmed the hypothesis that the vagus nerve carries information from the vagina to the brain independently of the spinal cord. As it turns out, the supposedly scant innervation of the vagina serves a powerful function. Vaginal orgasms: brain fMRI of women with spinal cord injury Three of the five women in this study experienced orgasms during vaginal self-stimulation. This offered an opportunity to use fMRI to determine the areas of the brain activated by vaginal orgasms. Since the orgasms in these women were triggered exclusively from the vagina, this may throw some light on the second of the questions above: are vaginal orgasms different from clitoral orgasms? The areas of the brain activated by vaginal orgasms were consistent amongst the three women. Here is a list, with a short explanation of the function of each area. Amygdala. This is the part of the brain that mediates fear and anxiety, but it is also involved in a range of other emotions, like anger and aggression. In one of the women who had multiple orgasms lasting 3 minutes, the amygdala was active only for these 3 minutes and not for the subsequent 2 minutes of fMRI recording. Nucleus accumbens. You may have heard that dopamine release occurs in the brain when we experience pleasure. What actually happens is the activation of a ‘reward pathway’ that goes from the ventral tegmental area (VTA) to the nucleus accumbens, where it releases dopamine. Opioids, nicotine, cocaine, amphetamine and other addictive drugs activate this pathway, leading to dependence. This study showed activation of the nucleus accumbens during vaginal orgasms, which is to be expected from a pleasurable stimulus. This doesn’t mean, however, that orgasms are addictive. Insular cortex. ‘Insula’ means ‘island’ in Latin. This is an area of the cortex that forms an island of grey matter inside the white matter of the cerebral hemispheres. The insula is associated with all kinds of emotions. It mediates the emotional component of pain that tells us that we don’t like it. It is also involved in itch, disgust, anger, trustworthiness and (of course!) sexual pleasure (Craig, 2002). Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The cingulate cortex is a part of the cortex located deep inside the fissure that separate the two cerebral hemispheres. It’s one of the targets of the dopamine pathways from the VTA. The ACC, together with the insula and the somatosensory cortex, is at the end of the neural pathways that transmit pain. Its main function is to motivate us to make decisions. Hippocampus means ‘sea horse’ in Latin because it is shaped like this peculiar fish. It is essential for memory formation and the storage of short-term memories. Its links to the amygdala mediate a role in emotions. Cerebellum. This ‘little brain’ in the back of the skull modulates muscular contraction during movement. Its activation during orgasm may reflect the general muscular contractions and spasms during orgasms. Paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus is the part of the brain that modulates the functions of the body, producing feelings like thirst, hunger and sexual desire. It is located above the pituitary gland, by which it controls the endocrine system that releases hormones in the body. Thus, the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) system controls the release of adrenaline and cortisol during stress. The fact that the paraventricular nucleus is activated during vaginal orgasms is very important because it releases oxytocin into the blood. This mediates the contraction of the nipples, the uterus and the vagina during orgasm and could be responsible for the bonding effects of sex (Stein, 2009). The sequence of activation of these brain areas is as follows. The amygdala and the insula are activated during the buildup of orgasm. Then the ACC enters the game. At the point of orgasm, the nucleus accumbens, the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus and the hippocampus become activated, while the activation of the insula increases. Clitoral orgasms: brain fMRI of healthy women In a later study (Wise et al., 2017), the group of Komisaruk studied ten healthy women while they reached orgasm through clitoral stimulation, given by themselves or by a partner. Since they found no differences between self-induced and partner-induced orgasms, they pooled both sets of data and analyzed them together. Unlike the study in women with spinal cord injury, the objective here was to get a fine time resolution of the events before, during and after orgasm. I wanted to compare this study with the one on vaginal orgasms to see if there are differences in brain activation between them. Disappointingly, the authors did not do that in their paper. Hence, the conclusions I draw below are mine and not the authors’. Not surprisingly, clitoral orgasms activated some of the same regions activated by vaginal orgasms. These include the amygdala, nucleus accumbens, insula, anterior cingulate cortex, hippocampus and cerebellum. But, in addition, there were brain regions not mentioned in the study on vaginal orgasms: the operculum, parts of the frontal cortex and the right angular gyrus. The operculum is the area of the cortex surrounding the invagination that produces the insula. It is the main area of the brain activated in masochists when they are shown images of masochistic pain (Kamping et al., 2016). It mediates emotional responses to pain and pleasure. The frontal cortex is the area of the brain involved in complex decision-making, setting goals and behavior inhibition. In particular, the study with clitoral stimulation mentions the orbitofrontal cortex, which is a “hedonic hot spot.” The angular gyrus is involved in processing visual information, particularly during reading and other spatial cognition taaks. It is also involved in memory retrieval, attention and theory of mind (the capacity to imagine the mental states of other people). The angular gyrus in the right hemisphere is associate with out-of-body experiences, which the authors relate to the altered states of consciousness produced by orgasm. One potentially interesting difference between clitoral and vaginal orgasms is in the hypothalamus. While vaginal orgasms in women with spinal cord transections activated the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus, clitoral orgasms recruited the mammillary bodies instead. The mammillary bodies are involved in episodic memory. Since the paraventricular nucleus drives the release of oxytocin in the blood, this could mean that vaginal orgasms release more oxytocin and therefore leads to stronger pair-bonding. Mental orgasms Some women can also have orgasms with mental imagery alone, without any genital or body stimulation (Whipple et al., 1992). fMRI showed that these orgasms activated the nucleus accumbens, anterior cingulate cortex, hippocampus and the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus, but not the amygdala or the cerebellum (Komisaruk and Whipple, 2005). This indicates that those four brain regions are specifically related to orgasm, while the amygdala may be related to genital sensation and the cerebellum to muscle tension. The great variety of orgasms The studies on women with spinal cord injury provide compelling evidence that exclusive stimulation of the vagina and the cervix can trigger orgasm. This indicates that women can orgasm from vaginal penetration alone. Whether the internal clitoris, the Skene glands, or the innervation of the vagina and the cervix are the trigger of these orgasms is an interesting question to be addressed in future articles. There is also some evidence that vaginal orgasms and clitoral orgasms activate a few different brain areas. This supports the experience of many women, who say that orgasms triggered from the clitoris and the vagina feel different. I am not saying that there are only two different types of orgasms, clitoral and vaginal. In fact, Komisaruk and his collaborators emphasize in their studies on vaginal orgasms that they are triggered by stimulating the vagina and the cervix, which some women consider different types of orgasms. Orgasms can also be elicited by anal intercourse. They feel different because the anus is a sensitive erogenous zone. Given that only two thin membranes separate the rectum from the vagina, anal intercourse stimulates the anterior wall of the vagina, which can trigger an orgasm in much the same as vaginal intercourse. Orgasms in women can also be triggered without any genital stimulation at all: by stimulating the nipples, by spankings and other forms of BDSM play, by exercise (Herbenick et al., 2021), and by mental imagery (Whipple et al., 1992). This shows that orgasms happen in the brain. Whether the stimulus comes from the clitoris, the vagina, the anus or other part of the body seems to be quite incidental. At least, in women. Could men also enjoy this wonderful variety of orgasms? Some men claim that they can orgasm from stimulating their prostate through anal intercourse, dildo insertion or pegging. Perhaps prostate orgasms are the male equivalent of the female vaginal orgasms. But, are men also able to climax from spankings, exercise or mental imagery? Perhaps there is an orgasm gap, but in the opposite direction of the usually proposed. While it is true that some women have difficulty achieving orgasm, others are able to climax repeatedly and with extraordinary intensity. They would make any man envious. Why is this important? We may have been doing sexual education wrong by teaching women that climax should be achieved primarily by stimulating their clits. A study using five national sex surveys in Finland (Kontula and Miettinen, 2016) found that the percentage of young women (18-34 years old) that reached orgasm during sexual intercourse decreased from 1999 to 2015. Ability to reach orgasm did not improve from the 70s to the present in any of the age groups. This is surprising, given that Finland is ranked as one of the leading countries in gender equality in the world, and that substantial advances have been made is the sexual education and liberation of women since the 70s. Why hasn’t this translated in a better ability of women to climax during sex? It is possible that this was caused by an increase in stress and mental pressures as women incorporated into the workforce and took over more demanding careers. However, the findings in the study with Finnish women point at causes directly related to sex. Surprisingly, women who masturbated more often had less frequent orgasms during intercourse than women to masturbate less often. This contradicts the common assumption that masturbation is the best way for women to teach themselves to climax. Perhaps too much emphasis on clitoral stimulation locks women into a single pathway to reach orgasm, instead of encouraging them to explore other erogenous zones and their great variety of possible orgasmic experiences. In this they have become similar to men, who have been taught to look at their penises as their only source of sexual pleasure. Here are a few things that contributed to frequent orgasms during intercourse: The importance given to orgasms. High sexual self-esteem (“I am good in bed”). High sexual desire and sexual motivation. Open and easy sexual communication with their partner. Ability to focus in the moment and mindfulness during sex. An appreciation for sex. Good sexual techniques. A talent to be aroused by sexual stimulation. Love-making sessions that are frequent and long-lasting. Novelty. Sexual fantasies and role-playing. Anal stimulation. Letting go of control. “Women need to be encouraged to feel good about the variety of ways they experience sexual pleasure, without setting up specific goals (such as finding the G-spot, experiencing female ejaculation, or experiencing a vaginal orgasm). Healthy sexuality begins with acceptance of the self, in addition to an emphasis of the process, rather than the goals, of sexual interactions.” Dr. Beverly Whipple (Jannini et al., 2012). References Addiego F, Belzer EG, Comolli J, Moger W, Perry JD, Whipple B (1981) Female ejaculation: A case study. The Journal of Sex Research 17:13-21. Blair KL, Cappell J, Pukall CF (2018) Not All Orgasms Were Created Equal: Differences in Frequency and Satisfaction of Orgasm Experiences by Sexual Activity in Same-Sex Versus Mixed-Sex Relationships. The Journal of Sex Research 55:719-733. Craig AD (2002) How do you feel? Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body. NatRevNeurosci 3:655-666. Herbenick D, Fu T-c, Patterson C, Dennis Fortenberry J (2021) Exercise-Induced Orgasm and Its Association with Sleep Orgasms and Orgasms During Partnered Sex: Findings From a U.S. Probability Survey. Arch Sex Behav 50:2631-2640. Jannini EA, Rubio-Casillas A, Whipple B, Buisson O, Komisaruk BR, Brody S (2012) Female orgasm(s): one, two, several. The journal of sexual medicine 9:956-965. Kamping S, Andoh J, Bomba IC, Diers M, Diesch E, Flor H (2016) Contextual modulation of pain in masochists: involvement of the parietal operculum and insula. Pain 157:445-455. Kinsey AC, Pomeroy WB, Martin CE, Gebhard PH (1953) Sexual behaviour in the human female. Philadelphia: WB Sanders Co. Komisaruk BR, Whipple B (2005) Functional MRI of the brain during orgasm in women. Annu Rev Sex Res 16:62-86. Komisaruk BR, Whipple B, Crawford A, Liu WC, Kalnin A, Mosier K (2004) Brain activation during vaginocervical self-stimulation and orgasm in women with complete spinal cord injury: fMRI evidence of mediation by the vagus nerves. Brain Research 1024:77-88. Kontula O, Miettinen A (2016) Determinants of female sexual orgasms. Socioaffective neuroscience & psychology 6:31624-31624. Korda JB, Goldstein SW, Sommer F (2010) The History of Female Ejaculation. The journal of sexual medicine 7:1965-1975. Stein DJ (2009) Oxytocin and vasopressin: social neuropeptides. CNS spectrums 14:602-606. Whipple B, Ogden G, Komisaruk BR (1992) Physiological correlates of imagery-induced orgasm in women. Arch Sex Behav 21:121-133. Wise NJ, Frangos E, Komisaruk BR (2017) Brain Activity Unique to Orgasm in Women: An fMRI Analysis. The journal of sexual medicine 14:1380-1391. Copyright 2023 Hermes Solenzol.

Shame and pride produce an anxiety that can be relieved by sexual dominance or submission While sadomasochism can be justified by the ability of pain to enhance pleasure and by the happiness brought by the endorphin high, the dominance/submission side of the BDSM equation is not so easily explained. The standard answer to the question of why do we like to submit to or to dominate is still “because you are sick”. All the efforts of the BDSM community had barely managed to keep sadomasochism out of the psychology diagnosis books. We heartily reject the idea that the desire to submit or dominate comes from childhood trauma, but when asked for alternative explanations we have nothing to offer. The few studies that have been done revealed that people who practice BDSM are actually psychologically healthier than the average. We just don’t know why. Do we eroticize what we fear? One possible explanation is that we eroticize what scares us. For example, in his podcast, Dan Savage often talks about how self-assured gay men like to be called “faggots” during sex. Or how feminist women, who are all about female power in real life, like to be dominated in bed. This makes sense: after all, fear releases adrenaline, which is a great aphrodisiac. However, this idea takes us back to the trauma paradigm: we were scared by early events in our life and now we exorcise them by reproducing them in a controlled environment. I don’t find that explanation satisfactory. After all, most submissives are not scared of submitting, they see it as sexy and liberating. And Doms are certainly not scared of what they do. Shame and pride A few years ago, I found an explanation for dominance-submission that presents it as a healthy response to the normal pressures of life. It is based on two opposite emotions that play a large role in our lives: shame and pride. Shame is one of our most powerful emotions, so powerful that it can lead to suicide. We all have heard stories of how bullying or persecution for being gay lead teenagers to kill themselves. Shame is an emotion that seems to be uniquely human (it is still hotly debated whether dogs feel shame) and yet seems to be deeply rooted in physiological responses. It causes blushing, which is an involuntary vascular response, and a specific body position consisting of dropping the head and hunching the shoulders. It also leads to immobility and withdrawal. The opposite of shame, pride, makes us lift our head, engage socially and feel full of energy. It is likely that pride activates the reward system in our brain linking the ventral tegmental area (VTA) of the striatum with the nucleus accumbens, releasing dopamine there. This is the same response produced by addictive drugs like heroin and cocaine. It makes us feel good and to want to repeat the behavior that triggered this response. The evolutionary logic of shame and pride All this shows that shame and pride are an essential part of human nature. They likely evolved as indicators of social status: shame warns us that our social status has declined while pride tells us that our social status has increased. In the tribes in which we lived for hundreds of thousands of years before modern societies were formed, social status was a matter of life and death. High social status gave you preferential access to food, shelter, power and sex. Low social status could make you a castaway, condemning you to an almost certain death. According to the reasoning used by evolutionary psychology, we could see why this is so. The biggest advantage we humans have over other animals is our ability to cooperate. In a tribe, everything is shared: food, protection against predators, shelter and the care of children. This creates one strategic problem: how to avoid cheaters. The guy that falls behind in the hunting party, the gal that has a siesta instead of gathering berries, they would have an evolutionary advantage because they get the same amount of food with less energy expending. Computer models have shown that genes for free-riding would take over the population in just a few generations. We would have evolved back to the kind of societies that chimps have, where no food is shared (other than with infants) and there is very little cooperation. That is why we developed powerful drives to eliminate cheaters. One of them is called “altruistic punishment”: the desire to punish people that we see as behaving in an unethical way, even if that takes a lot of energy and it doesn’t benefit us personally (hence the qualifier “altruistic”). It is based on emotions like indignation and self-righteousness. However, if this was the only way to eliminate cheaters, we would have societies with lots of internal conflicts. And, while this strategy punishes cheaters, it does not reward cooperators. Thus, the emotions of shame and pride evolved as internal motivators for cooperative behavior. When you do something against the common good, or when you fail to do your duty, people around you will make you feel ashamed. Conversely, when you achieve something that increases the common good, you are praised and you feel pride. Guilt is the other emotion for social control. However, the key difference between guilt and shame is that you feel guilty when you do something bad, whereas shame comes also from failing to do something good. Guilt tells us “you are bad”, while shame tells us “you are not good enough”. Why is sex shameful? But then, why is sex shameful? Is this largely a cultural thing, driven by religion and cultural norms? Well, not completely. In practically all cultures, sex is done in private, and nakedness (at minimum, exposing the genitals) is also a universal taboo. Well, if shame is linked to social status, so is sex. And not just in humans, but also in our primate cousins. In chimp troupes, when a female comes in heat almost every male gets to mate with her, but it is the alpha male who decides in what order and how often. In some monkeys, mating with high-ranking individuals increases social status, regardless of whether you are male or female. And in many monkey species, sex is used to assert dominance: low-ranking individuals offer their backsides to appease dominant ones and avoid being beaten. And yes, they do get fucked. And then there are the bonobos, famous for being total sluts. They use sex for bonding and for resolving social conflicts. They are promiscuous, pan-sexual, and do manual, anal and oral, not just penis-in-vagina. Therefore, even in our primate ancestors sex has been hijacked away from mere procreation to be used for bonding and to establish social status. Sex can express different things, not just love and bonding, but also dominance. Ultimately, the pleasure (and sometimes pain) associated with sex makes us feel vulnerable and exposed. Because of that, getting fucked implies a loss of face and being put in a submissive role. That is probably what causes its association with shame. Shame and pride in modern society Managing shame and pride was a relatively simple matter in the tribal societies of our evolutionary environment, but it became hugely complicated once the agricultural revolution took place 10,000 years ago. Before, if you hunted a nice prey, scared the bear away or gathered a basketful of berries you could feel proud and enjoy the appreciation of your fellow tribe people. Afterward, the limits of what you could achieve were vastly expanded: you could own land and animals, you could command workers and soldiers. You could never be successful enough to feel proud; there was always somebody who was better than you. And there were also plenty more opportunities to fail and feel ashamed. In our modern industrial societies, things are becoming even direr. Since childhood, we are taught to be proud of our successes and ashamed of our failures. “The sky is the limit!” we are told, and it really is. There are so many things at which we can succeed or fail! Reading, math, sports, arts, getting money, being famous… We interiorized these cultural imperatives, so that nobody needs to tell us anymore; we are our harshest judges. Somehow, our failures seem to count more than our successes. We can never achieve enough; we live in a state of constant craving for success. Ultimately, the twin emotions of shame and pride join forces to bring about our sense of self-worth, our self-esteem. Over time, they create an internal narrative of who we are: our ego, which we try to protect by propping up our pride and hide our shame. This creates a strong psychological tension. It makes us unhappy because we are never enough. We need to keep running the rat race away from failure and shame and in search of success and pride. Dominance-submission relieves the anxiety produced by shame This is where dominance-submission can come to our rescue by providing a way out of the rat race. This is how I think it works… The submissive gives up all social status by assuming the lowest possible rank. On top of that, obeying takes away the pressure to make the right decisions. Conversely, high status is granted to the Dominant without the effort that it normally entails. He or she gets to feel all-powerful for free. Success and failure are taken out of the equation: the submissive handles power to the Dominant simply because this is mutually beneficial. This ties to sex because of the ability of sex to symbolize social status. The submissive is used sexually by the Dominant and, paradoxically, this is perceived as liberating because it breaks the interior psychological tension created by shame and pride. Shame is embraced, and this frees us from the struggle. This is why humiliation is perceived as liberating by the submissive. Moreover, since internalized repression is a barrier to sexual pleasure, when the constraints created by internalized cultural norms are broken by the D/S power exchange, pleasure and orgasm become easier to achieve. Conclusion In conclusion, dominance-submission unleashes powerful emotions anchored deep in our evolutionary past. This serves to de-program reactions that society has taught us since childhood and that have become so ingrained that we cannot escape them even when we realize how unhappy they make us. That is why we perceive submitting as so liberating and empowering.