Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D.

The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy

admin — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:01:00 +0000

What do Phil Donohue, a New Zealand ethnologist, three anthropologist husbands, and a small handful of Samoan girls all have in common? The answer is: Margaret Mead and their roles in a debate that has rocked cultural anthropology since 1983.

The Trashing of Margaret Mead is a fine, funny, discriminating, and at times quite disturbing book. At the heart of the so-called Mead-Freeman Debate was the veracity, meaning, and political uses of the data that Mead collected in 1925 during the ethnographic research that she conducted in Samoa. Her central finding was that Samoan adolescence did not require the storm-and-stress widely seen as part of adolescence, the volatility that characterizes “teenaged” behavior. Mead’s work framed the “nature/nurture” debate: is nature (e.,g. biology and hormones) ultimately responsible for sexual maturation and behavior, or is it nurture (e.g., gender relations and child-rearing)? Is male dominance hard-wired biologically, or can egalitarianism be taught? Freeman chose the former, Mead the latter.

The Trashing of Margaret Mead consists of fourteen chapters arranged into five parts. It is filled with salacious talk, iconic photos, back-channel communication, and an impressive attention to nuance and detail. The two chapters comprising “The Controversy and the Media” remind the reader of the huge splash made in 1983 in anthropology and wider circles by the publication of Derek Freeman’s book, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. Relatively few people actually read the book, but stories about Freeman and Mead, often wildly misunderstanding and misquoting the latter, circulated in the pages of Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and most memorably in the telling by the author, Paul Shankman, on The Phil Donohue Show. Shankman shows with great gusto and clarity that U.S. media and many academics were predisposed to accept Freeman’s claims, however fraudulent.

Part two exposes Derek Freeman the man, but more importantly, the mind. At least once in the early 1960s, while working in Sarawak, Indonesia, Freeman went quite off the rails. In a museum there he once hacked off the phalluses of wooden statues carved by fine Iban craftsmen. Freeman’s instability is near legendary, and Shankman shows this to us with grace and skill by revealing the manic tenor of his writings and the increasingly nasty tone of his correspondence until the very day he died.

The four chapters in part three, “Sex, Lies and Samoans,” cover the life of and influences upon the young Margaret Mead, the conditions of her first fieldwork in Samoa, and the publication in 1928 of Coming of Age in Samoa, which was an extremely popular (and popularizing) book. These chapters read like a scholarly detective story of what the Mead-Freeman debate meant (and continues to mean) to Samoans, and of what Samoan thought, belief, and behavior are like in terms of sexual matters. Special commentary is reserved for the place of the "taupou system" in Samoa by and through which female virginity is valorized and idealized. As in most cultures, Samoan brothers want to have virginal sisters, but Mead, Freeman, and Shankman show that they often want also to get into the pants (or back then, under the grass skirts) of other men’s sisters.

Shankman also revisits the effects of cross-cultural contact with the American military during World War II upon Samoan beliefs and behaviors. Whereas Mead said that Samoans were largely egalitarian, easy-going, and not hung-up about sex, Freeman argued that Mead had gotten it all wrong, that Samoan culture was riddled by status differentials, prone to violence, circumspect with regards to sex, and also “rape-prone.” Freeman contended that Mead was hoaxed during her fieldwork by two Samoan girls who jokingly indicated their usual hunts and haunts for boys. Shankman shows that Freeman was mistaken, concluding that “Freeman not only misrepresented the historical work of others but neglected his own personal experiences in the islands during World War II and his unpublished work on the taupou system.” Shankman shows that Mead got it largely right and that Freeman got it sloppily and willfully wrong on many, many counts.

The Trashing of Margaret Mead should be used in college courses ranging from media studies to cultural anthropology to women’s studies to Peoples and Cultures of the Pacific. Graduate-level seminars could be wrapped around the many significant issues raised here. Shankman’s bulldog-like dedication for many years is as laudable as his prose style is engaging.

Written by: Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D., March 8th 2010

Sexualities Special issue: "Researching and Teaching the Sexually Explicit: Ethics, Methodology and Pedagogy"

admin — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 01:00:00 +0000

Edited by Feona Attwood, I.Q. Hunter

Sage Publications

I am just about to begin teaching a new course in Human Sexuality, so I was excited to review this special issue of Sexualities, the UK-published journal that features new and different voices from sexology, gender studies, and cultural studies. Each of the eight original essays provides teachers, activists and researchers with much-needed breathing space. As Attwood and Hunter point out, “The emergence of ‘porn studies’ in academic institutions has been met with widespread ethical and political opposition, even more so than the study of horror films. Sex media, rather like horror films in fact, are often seen as intrinsically obscene and harmful, effecting real changes in behaviour and attitude, and therefore potentially damaging to researchers and students.” Not so, say the contributors, at least not necessarily so. Porn appears now to be as central to our culture as its study has become prominent to academia.

The collection brings together theorists, educators, and activists from or working in the U.S. (Dennis Waskul), Finland (Susanna Paasonen), Hong Kong (Katrien Jacobs), Australia (Alan McKee, Kath Albury), and the U.K. (Brian McNair, Clarissa Smith, Steve Jones, Sharif Mowlabocus, Feona Attwood, and I.Q. Hunter).

The essays of Waskul, Smith, and McNair will embolden teachers to embrace new media technologies and push the envelope of eroticism in the classroom. Jones and Mowlabocus remind readers that punishing those who enjoy violent depictions of sexuality and/or who sexualize depictions of violence “does not eradicate or significantly hinder the production of such material” but does complicate things for scholars and teachers.

Katrien Jacobs examines the Hong Kong celebrity entertainer Edison Chen, whose DIY pornography made with other Chinese celebrities was inadvertently leaked to the press (darn those computer repairmen!) and led to mass hand-wringing. Paasonen details “something of a porn renaissance” that occurred in late 1990s Finland. Depictions of human sexuality had been regulated since the 1920s until this shift which enabled a wholesale mainstreaming of porn in Finland and other Nordic countries.

Kath Albury trades on her experiences from 2001 to 2003 as the Chief Investigator of the Australian Research Council-funded project, “Understanding Pornography in Australia.” Albury’s first-rate critical reading of porn debates (in this case, in feminist circles) shows that few voices, however radical or conservative, manage to escape the restraints of moralism.

Alan McKee’s “Social Scientists Don’t Say ‘Titwank’” looks at how referees for journals in the humanities and social sciences have responded to his manuscripts about sex. He concludes that “in the humanities there is no longer a problem with the use of vulgar language.” Nevertheless, his essay reveals sharp differences in method, theory, and work-style between practitioners of cultural studies and anthropology. One statement really rankled me: “We surveyed over 1000 consumers of pornography as part of our research. In the correct social science manner, I will now claim this [sic] data as objective.” Other statements in this and other essays, such as “Older respondents had worse attitudes towards women . . . Christians had worse attitudes towards women . . . Those who lived in rural areas had worse attitudes . . .” made me long for the more fine-grained nuances of ethnographic writing about sex, sexuality, and sexual networking. Then again, few ethnographers are doing porn studies or pushing the erotic envelope in the classroom, so readers will find much else of great merit in McKee’s essay and the others.

Given the brevity and accessibility of these eight exciting contributions (not forgetting the six fine book reviews), this newest issue of Sexualities is an especially welcome resource for educators.

Written by: Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D., January 18th 2010

Pleasure Consuming Medicine: The Queer Politics of Drugs

admin — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 17:01:00 +0000

By Kane Race

Duke University Press

Pleasure Consuming Medicine is the deliciously (and ambiguously) titled new work by the Senior Lecturer in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, Kane Race. His difficult but rewarding text joins a number of new works about the pleasures (not just punishments) of drug use. New works by Sarah Maclean, Joao Biehl, Philippe Bourgois, Lee Hoffer, Merrill Singer, and others have begun to flesh out in ethnographic richness the theoretical provocations of the French social theoretician Michel Foucault. Race theorizes the limits to community and political mobilization efforts insofar as they are tied to drug use and to sexual identity and networking. Insights from ethnography, queer theory and drug and gender studies address the illegality of drug use and the perceived deviance of drug users. Nevertheless, he pitches his argument not at the level of degradation and addiction, but rather, at the possible unity and the undoubted pleasures of members of communities who identify and who can be mobilized politically through consumptions of drugs and pursuit and experience of sexual pleasure.

The book is comprised of seven densely written but rewarding chapters, each being titled by means of double entendres, for example, “Recreational States,” “Exceptional Sex,” and “Consuming Compliance.” It will appeal to academic researchers and to gay and lesbian, feminist and queer activists, but will not perhaps be appreciated by many policy-makers, public health officials or casual readers. Pleasure Consuming Medicine is not an easy read, but those who are well versed in critical theory, social history, and queer studies and who proceed slowly and contemplate his complex argument, will be greatly rewarded. It would be appropriate to use in graduate-level courses in several fields.

Race’s account of the centrality of the Azure Party, the piece de resistance of Sydney, Australia’s annual lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender fest, is just as humane as it is intellectual. Such events are typically analyzed as instances of mass escape and debauchery by members of sexual minorities. By contrast, he argues that it was also “a crucial apparatus within which the notion of community was given popular resonance” in terms, for example, of dealing with the threat and reality of HIV and AIDS. Race explores the ethics of drug use (both in public and more privately), but resists the usual tendency to frame drug use and (gay male) sexuality in terms of marginalized, deviant men in search of (sexual) ecstasy and (pharmaceutical) Ecstasy. Pharmaceutical companies make the drugs that their reps shill to the doctors who prescribe that they be obtained from pharmacists, each of whom, then, does his or her part to proscribe their use and denigrate their users. Much irony ensues.

If there be a scene or event around which this text revolves, it’s the swooping down of disciplinary forces in 2007 upon denizens of Sydney’s Mardi Gras, the Azure Party. As gay, lesbian, straight, and gender-bending partiers engaged in the technocultures of music, dance, and licit and illicit drugs, supervised by and being cared for by members of volunteer medical teams, a tremendous panic swept over the crowd when policemen and canine drug-sniffers busted into the crowd. Some revelers swallowed their drugs to avoid detection and thus overdosed. Others breached the gates and were arrested thusly. Others reacted with (mild) violence to police presence and thus damaged their reputation further.

His argument is often subtle, for example, asking us to think of “the dance party” not as “the transparent radiation of community,” but rather, “as a mediated event through which a sense of community was hallucinated.” The rewards are there for the reader who takes the time to appreciate the complexities of dance party culture and social theories about it.

Written by: Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D., November 22nd 2009

Between XX and XY: Intersexuality and the Myth of Two Sexes

admin — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 16:23:00 +0000

By Gerald N. Callahan

Chicago Review Press

I know a man who wears boots, shaves his face, urinates standing up, fucks women (his term), and still sometimes menstruates. In Between XX and XY independent researcher Gerald N. Callahan briefly and tidily introduces the flaws, silences, and prejudices of the Western sex-binary system expressed as male:masculine:man::female:feminine:woman. In so doing he also challenges the sex:biology::gender:culture equation, a half-baked, often feeble attempt by anthropologists, psychologists, biologists, and feminist and queer theoreticians to account for variations in sex and gender cross-culturally. Callahan presents case studies of infants, adolescents, and adults whose psyches, genitals, behaviors, morphologies, and internal organs and secretions don’t fit neatly into binary terms but must be made to anyway.

One chapter, “A Brief History of Sex,” will gently introduce sex, gender and sexuality to those who’ve never thought of either critically. He shows that sex-binarism often operates more to showcase medical skills, to alleviate parental fears, and to avert likely community scorn—in short, to preserve heterosexual, male-dominant norms—than to serve the immediate or future needs of the infants and sometimes adolescents whose flesh is carved and spirits wrecked. That any of them survive at all, much less thrive, such as my friend mentioned above, is testament to their strength and tenacity. Between XX and XY is useful also for its many clear and simply stated definitions of medical and surgical terms and procedures relevant to the study of sex, gender, sexual, hormones, and genitalia, although there are blips along the way (e.g., “clitorectomy” instead of “clitoridectomy,” “normal sexual intercourse,” and the like).

Nevertheless, as a reader I remain puzzled about the intended audience for this book. In the section titled “Children Who Change Their Sexes: 5-Alpha Reductase Deficiencies” Callahan pulls a classic bait-and-switch, devoting a single page to that topic before discussing in greater length species of hermaphroditic fish such as sea bass, clownfish, reef gobies, and the saddleback wrasse. Callahan could have actually discussed the so-called guevedoche syndrome (“balls at 12”) of the Dominican Republic, the fabled turnim man (male and female pseudohermaphrodites in a highland New Guinea tribe studied by Gilbert Herdt), the Pokot intersexual (studied long ago by Robert Edgerton), or even the protagonist of Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel Middlesex. Additionally, given the logic of his book, the section ought to have been titled: “Children Who Change Their Sex,” singular.

I think that Callahan’s reach many times exceeds his grasp. The eleven scant pages that comprise Chapter Eight, “Alternatives: Other Cultures, Other Sexes,” cover no new ground. Callahan fails to explore the politics of the yawning gulf between “MTF” and “FTM,” which are too loose acronymic glosses for “transsexual surgeries” that turn “male” to “female” or vice-versa. While discussing the problems that spotted hyenas presented to ancient Greeks, such as Pliny the Elder, and to mid-twentieth century field researchers—insofar as their genitalia are seemingly perfectly hermaphroditic—Callahan concludes that “In fact, except during copulation, female spotted hyenas completely dominate males.” This suggests that penile-vaginal intercourse inherently expresses male domination instead of mutuality or female engulfment.

Callahan makes passing reference to, but does little with, Thomas Laqueur’s path-breaking Making Sex: the body and gender from the Greeks to Freud. He cites Serena Nanda’s work amongst the Indian “neither man nor woman” hijras, but they have nothing to do with the XX, XY chromosomes of his title, and neither do the berdache, xanith, and nadle elsewhere. Callahan fails altogether to mention the works of Monique Wittig, Gilbert Herdt, Ann Fausto-Sterling, Will Roscoe, Bernice Hausmann, Walter Williams, Londa Schiebinger, Robert Edgerton, Nellie Oudshoorn, Don Kulick, and Julliane Imperato-McGinley, to name but a few. I would have liked him to situate his compelling case studies, told in correspondence, within the several score transsexual memoirs and manifestos that are easily available.

I feel bad for not being able to recommend the book very highly, for Callahan has a kind heart and has several useful things to say, but it doesn’t advance any new arguments, and it will probably annoy academic and research specialists.

Written by: Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D., September 12th 2009

Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Postsocialist China

admin — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:56:00 +0000

By Tiantian Zheng

University Of Minnesota Press

On one occasion, gangsters walked into the bar, grabbed me by the arm, and started dragging me up the stairs toward a private room intended for hostesses’ sexual encounters with clients. The women were also sometimes raped there by gangsters. I quickly realized what was going on—that I was in real danger... Whereas safety was a major issue, hygiene was another. Living in a filthy karaoke bar room without bathing facilities, I had lice in my hair and over my whole body. However, by living and working closely with hostesses in the bar, I gained their recognition and friendship.

Ethnographers always get their man (or woman... or both) even if they have to use their bodies as instruments of data collection and analysis. Ethnographers usually become participant-observers during fieldwork to facilitate rapport and to capture what people actually do as opposed merely to what they say they do, but as these snippets suggest, such can lead to squeamish feelings and harrowing experiences. Zheng participated in activities that male ethnographers could only have observed. Her analysis of sexual networking is consequently first-rate because she moves easily and persuasively from person to state, capital to labor, ideology to practice.

Red Lights is a beautifully written account of the emergence of new femininities and masculinities in post-socialist People’s Republic of China. Zheng analyzes the growth, structure, registration and functions of the karaoke bars now dotting the landscape and in which are played out the social and economic contradictions of class, heterosexuality, ethnicity and gender. In often grim detail, she shows how Communist Party bureaucrats, gangsters, and small business owners (literally) patronize young, unmarried females. In so doing, the former make money, express obeisance to their own social superiors, and get back at Mao Zedong for allegedly having sapped their masculinity during the Cultural Revolution. Women escape poverty (sort of), find boyfriends (ditto), manipulate men as best they can, and experience female solidarity. Her male informants freely express their disturbing misogyny while also confessing their sexual anxieties and class resentment. Confucianism, capitalism and communism each but differently punish women for alleged sexual promiscuity while rewarding men for theirs.

Many tens of thousands of Chinese women have migrated from economically and socially stagnating rural areas to the strip clubs and karaoke bars, back rooms, and guest houses of urban centers such as Dalian, where they “choose” forms of employment that entail grotesque subservience, daily humiliation, squalid working conditions, and social leprosy. Dalian was long ago hailed as an oasis of economic development during the period of Occupation by the Japanese military in the 1930s and 1940s. Its morally unsavory status today as a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah—but whose economic function is central to post-socialist China—reveals the social and economic contradictions of Confucianism, patriarchy, communism, Western media forms and capitalism. “In Dalian,” Zheng writes, “taxes paid by the entertainment industry are the largest source of local revenue.”

Red Lights opens with Zheng’s painful personal stories of growing up a filial daughter in a sex-negative and patriarchal Chinese household. It continues with her painful humiliation in a U.S. college classroom regarding her views of gender relations. It proceeds to detail the humiliation of Chinese women. Her extremely sorrowful Afterword, entitled “From Entertainer to Prostitute,” shows the inexorable logic of patriarchy and capitalism and gives the lie to pro-sex work activist positions that can neglect or ignore specifically gendered humiliation in sex work. Her Acknowledgments section deeply moved me in recounting the joys and pains of scholarly work. It exemplifies the beauty and honor of academic collaborations that break through barriers of geography, language, culture, theory and gender but that are nevertheless mindful of them.

Red Lights would make a fine addition to graduate-level courses in social theory and fieldwork, but could be used in upper-division courses in gender studies and ethnography, too. It is a major contribution to ethnographic explorations of gender, sexuality, and prostitution, and to Asian Studies, too, which has enabled too few participant observation-style studies of sexual networking.

Written by: Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D., August 7th 2009

Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement

admin — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 16:58:00 +0000

By Kathryn Joyce

Beacon Press

When I attended a production of Jesus Christ Superstar as a wee lad of fifteen, I marveled at the song-writing, vocal skills, and daunting cross that loomed amidst a gloomy set design. Being then (and now) agnostic, I was appalled by the religious persecution depicted. I have always been puzzled by the penultimate utterance of Jesus. In the Book of Luke (King James version) 23:34, it is written, “Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

I can’t forgive the Christian patriarchy movement subjects of this superbly crafted and deeply troubling new book, for their bad faith, cognitive dissonance, and behavioral misdeeds carry heavy consequences. Whether or not they know what they’re doing remains an open question. Kathryn Joyce’s gripping new account, Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, is about Christians who want literally to take over and remake the world by outbreeding everyone else, warping the minds of school-children, justifying bigotry with transparent illogic, and systematically denying civil rights. That most of the violence is committed quietly and privately against women and girls, most of whom accede to it with joy and penitence, will give even the most devoutly and egalitarian Christian reader pause. “Forgive them for they know not what they do.” Christian patriarchy movement members who feel imperiled by Jews, lesbians, Muslims, atheists, gay males, feminists, foreigners, and the less fecund seem conveniently to have forgotten these words.

The book’s twenty chapters are divided into three gendered parts—“Wives,” “Mothers,” and “Daughters”—in each of which Joyce deftly explores the bizarre ideology and political-economy of feminine subservience. The resulting dystopian communities in real-time and on-line in cyber-space rival those depicted in novels such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale, George Orwell’s 1984, and Sinclair Lewis’s It Can't Happen Here. This ain’t fiction, however. As befitting their understanding and practice of “complementarian theology,” as opposed to the alleged unnaturalness and godlessness of egalitarian gender relations, men and women in the Christian patriarchy movement believe equally (but differently) in the inherent inferiority of Eve (the Original Sin), females (on biological and spiritual grounds), Jezebel (in terms of sex) and women (who have hearts and minds). Sisters are in the process brainwashed into becoming meek and quiet supporters of their brothers, wives are instructed to remain sexually available to their husbands 24/7 (and forego any contraception), and mothers who don’t home-school their children commit them to Satan. Insofar as submissive females require degradation—the more public, the better—virtually every page is painful to read.

Woe unto the woman who proclaims “domestic abuse” or reveals a less than godly husband. Quiverfull opens by recounting the attempted rehabilitation of the disgraced megachurch founder, Ted Haggard, whose initial denial and then avowal of his use of methamphetamine and male sex workers were ripe with possibility. “Complementarian” theology demands that it be not Haggard but Haggard’s wife, Gayle, who bears the brunt of Christian condemnation from low and high places.

Few books have so affected me. This is not the sledge-hammer account I might have written. With equal parts curiosity and compassion, Joyce explains how and why tens of thousands of American women have “chosen” forms of subservience that bankrupt and humiliate them, that crimp their mental development and that hurt them physically and lead sometimes to social leprosy. Each female interviewed firmly and confidently speaks her motivations and explains her anti-feminism while gleefully ignoring the Malthusian outcome of unfettered fertility.

My sole criticism is that Joyce praises the “openness, generosity, courage, and patience” of her key informants with whom she (sometimes, usually, inherently?) “sharply disagreed,” but without revealing any of those disagreements. Joyce’s secular feminist aesthetics and politics are “clear” enough in mind but not in body: how did she manage the flesh-crawling creepiness and awkward silences without every day saying “that’s obviously horseshit” or “I wouldn’t wish this lifestyle on the daughter of my worst enemy?”

That Quiverfull opens with Gayle Haggard’s exemplary case should rouse outside observers of this noxious fundamentalism not to sit on their hands. As she points out, “to follow these ideas to their conclusions can mean, in very real ways [as women], to disappear.”

Written by: Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D., June 15th 2009

Sex Work and the City: The Social Geography of Health and Safety in Tijuana, Mexico

admin — Sun, 31 May 2009 23:27:00 +0000

By Yasmina Katsulis

University of Texas Press

Most studies of prostitution still focus on the supply side: the women and girls, the boys and men, and the transgender and transsexual people who toil sexually to survive, meet temporary needs, and thrive. An increasing number of studies focus on the demand side: the direct consumers and the globalizing forces that bring them together. Carved down from what was probably a fine Ph.D. dissertation, and founded upon eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork that she conducted in Tijuana, Mexico, Yasmina Katsulis’s lively and accessible Sex Work and the City does one better. In only eight chapters and 174 pages, interspersed with field-note entries and arresting photos—for example, a family united in picnic but separated by a fence—she also explores the physicians who under- and over-diagnose STDs, the policemen who extort sexual favors, and the many agents who facilitate and profit from the sexual labor of others.

Ethnographic, archival, and other data show that Tijuana’s sex industry is fed by gringo and Mexican male migrant laborers who come and go—the causes and symptoms of staggering degrees of human migration and mobility. I appreciate her caveat about the necessity of squarely confronting centuries-old stigmas of prostitution. Throughout the book, she opposes an epidemiology and popular culture that systematically misrepresents by underestimating the HIV and STD transmissive risks of sex in, or on the way to, marriage. Katsulis demonstrates not just why, but literally how, prostitution’s labor forms and venues structure health and social risks.

She also explores the motivations for entering into, and the various outcomes of sexual labor by contrasting legal, registered sex work with that which is informal and illegal. Her analysis of the Tijuana Regulatory Model of policing and health inspection of The Body Prostitute highlights police extortion and the health and social hierarchies of strip clubs, brothels, alleyways, massage parlors, beaches, and forlorn places. The social and economic contradictions in Tijuana of skin color, gender identity, language, socioeconomic class, and ethnicity produce differing degrees of health, social, and legal hazard.

Apart from a few minor quibbles (her use of the illogical term “HIV/AIDS infection,” the sometimes interchangeable use of “sex workers” and “prostitutes”), Katsulis neglects to point out that pimping is the world’s oldest profession, not prostitution. Some of her claims—for example, regarding the general absence of pimping in Tijuana—are insufficiently grounded in historical, sociological, and ethnographic studies by Schifter, Wardlow, Kulick, Schoepf, Leonard, White, and me. I enjoyed her remarks about sexual praxis, but there was surprisingly little discussion of the tensions between sexual positionality and sexual and gender identity. Her take on “the prostitution debates” in feminism is only three pages in length. She devotes one sentence to what she takes to be one side of the ledger—“Some feminists argue that legalization of sex work serves to normalize and institutionalize the sexual exploitation of women”—which really irked me. The ensuing discussion morphs quickly into yet another Straw Woman argument about “western White feminists.” Katsulis offered her key informants free HIVab tests, but fails to mention IRB concerns and the availability of trained counselors, confirmatory assays, and antiretroviral or other therapies. Finally, the absence of a discussion of religion beyond cultural codes of macho and marianismo precludes her from analyzing a profoundly good example of a marriage:prostitution dialectic par excellence.

These criticisms aside, Katsulis has contributed a polished, well-written, vibrant, and much-needed book. I hope the university press issues a cheaper paperback edition (lower than the $50 hardcover price) so that it may be used in courses in anthropology, gender studies, and public health.

Written by: Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D., May 31st 2009

The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men Who Buy It

admin — Mon, 18 May 2009 23:23:00 +0000

By Victor Malarek

Arcade Publishing

It’s impossible to study, be in, write about, or fight against _______ (you fill in the blank) sex work, prostitution, and sexual trafficking without getting some or all of it wrong. I’m not the only straight white guy to write about prostituted women, but without always acknowledging my privilege and standpoints reflexively. Like his 2003 book, The Natashas: Inside the New Global Sex Trade, which looked at post-Soviet European bloc countries, Victor Malarek’s new work, The Johns, again demonstrates the ubiquity of sexual commerce and the obvious and banal evils that perpetuate it, but focuses this time on the demand and not the supply side.

Malarek is such a decorated writer, journalist, and television host that a film was made in 1998 about his career. He joins a long list of straight white males such as William Sanger, Geraldo Rivera, Nicholas Kristof, William Vollman, and Chris Hansen in claiming to care about sexual exploitation. Their back-patting is sometimes well deserved, and their usual contempt for heterosexual males involved in sexual commerce who are portly of body, doughy of complexion, and misogynous in their outlook is fully intact here.

And herein lies the irony. In seventeen chapters and 310 pages, johns are shown to be privileged qua heterosexual males, but so is the stealth journalist Malarek as he cruises Costa Rican bars and attends john reeducation camps. Serving up more platitudes and anecdotes than hard data, and more celebrity court cases than sociological insights, Malarek’s database consists of 16 interviews with johns (none explained), consultation of fifty-plus websites (none listed) and thousands of Internet chat room postings (ditto). He capably skewers the exaggeratedly masculine nature of such posters and postings, but that’s too easy. More difficult would be interviewing those long-haul truckers, policemen, clergy and U.N. “peacekeepers,” but that would require an accounting of his own privilege and standpoint.

I enjoyed the breakneck pace of Malarek’s narrative and appreciated that he interviewed so many anti-prostitution activists and researchers about the legalization question. Mentions of famous and infamous johns ranging from Hugh Grant, Hans Christian Anderson, and Eliot Spitzer to Charlie Sheen, Jimmy Swaggart and Clark Gable, and their easy rehabilitations will likely engage lots of non-academic readers. The chapter regarding johns arrested and diverted to First Offender Prostitution Programs started in San Francisco by the recently deceased Norma Hotaling, to whom Malarek dedicated the book, was a high point of the book.

Nevertheless, Malarek’s preference for sweeping generalizations is wearing, and the research he presents and references intratextually could fit on a plate. It flattens even the most obvious differences in prostitution’s many different labor forms and their different psychic costs, health risks, developmental precursors and economic motivators. His flat dismissals of the efforts of sex worker rights organizations rankled me, but the argument he makes for the criminalization only of buying sex and its facilitation is compelling, and I greatly appreciated his discussions of the Swedish, Australian, German and other country-wide experiments with legalization and decriminalization.

The Johns was designed to enable us to connect the dots, but Malarek leaves too many unaccounted for. It’s okay to sneer at the chubby, grubby bar patrons who are molesting pliant, brown-skinned girls and young women, but what if they’re thinking the same thing about him?

Written by: Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D., May 18th 2009

Anthropology and Public Health: Bridging Differences in Culture and Society, Second Edition

admin — Fri, 08 May 2009 11:49:00 +0000

Edited by Robert A. Hahn, Marcia C. Inhorn

Oxford University Press

With the space allotted, I couldn’t render the titles and names of the fifty-some authors of the twenty-five chapters that make up this exciting collection. It is called a second edition of the earlier volume edited by Robert Hahn, but it is entirely new. It overlaps only by the still-compelling final chapter, George Foster’s 1987 critique of international health bureaucracies (which I read in grad school). Each new contribution is clear and accessible, founded upon ethnographic study, and informed by multiple theoretical developments. Each is as depressing to read as is the state of global health...and just as hopeful.

The editors selected these contributions carefully and arranged them into four broad sections: anthropological understandings of public health problems; anthropological designs of public health interventions; anthropological evaluations of public health initiatives; and anthropological critiques of public health policy. The editors’ introduction implicitly explains the purpose and scope of the book and the treble entendre of the change from Anthropology in Public Health to _Anthropology and Public Health. Much has changed in a decade. Owing to new public health crises and resurgence of old ones, anthropological research methods and ethnographic insights about health, wealth, suffering, and sickness are dining at the policy table as never before.

There’s no sense trying to pick favorites from two dozen highly polished essays. If I highlight four, it is only to suggest the range, scholarship, and humanity of the entire volume. Eric Stein’s “’Sanitary Makeshifts’ and the Stratification of Health in Indonesia” is a first-rate contribution to “toilet studies,” to the political economy of human waste, the other end, as it were, of “Development.” I could have written Mark Padilla’s essay, “The Limits of ‘Heterosexual AIDS,'” so close to my thoughts was his ringing critique of heteronormativity in studies of HIVab seroprevalence. The provocative chapter by Inhorn, Kobeissi, Abu-Musa, Awwad, Fakih, Hammoud, Hannoun, Lakkis and Nassar, “Male Infertility and Consanguinity in Lebanon,” probes the genetic and physiological outcomes of social preferences for marriages between genealogically close relatives. As with STDs made the more resistant by antibiotics, some outcomes are made worse by the Western technology of intracytoplasmic sperm injection, which can reproduce male infertility. Karen Moland and Astrid Blystad’s essay made me cry and think of infected mothers everywhere. “Counting on Mother’s Love: The Global Politics of Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission of HIV in Eastern Africa” is best essay I’ve read in years.

Anthropology and Public Health will remain the standard of collaboration and reportage for a long time. Around it could be wrapped upper-division undergraduate courses in medical anthropology and sociology, just as it could anchor graduate-level seminars in anthropology, public health, and maybe even epidemiology. Each essay is first-rate.

Written by: Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D., May 8th 2009

Prostitution, Polygamy and Power: Salt Lake City, 1847-1918

admin — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 23:28:00 +0000

By Jeffrey Nichols

University of Illinois Press

My first publication, in 1987, resulted from a grad school term paper. Jeffrey Nichols’ highly readable monograph resulted from taking a Western History seminar. Thank Goddess for grad school! Big Love fanatics: listen up!

Nichols’ original paper sniffed at the documentary trailhead he explores by way of newspaper stories, photographs, court cases, church records and other forms of documentary evidence from mid-late nineteenth century Utah about prostitution. He tells of the exploits and exploitations of Mormon businessmen, their gentile partners and antagonists, the latter’s outraged wives, the Anglo female brothel owners, and the Anglo, African American, Japanese, and Chinese women who toiled sexually in different labor forms of prostitution. Nichols traces many decades’ worth of “fight over polygamy and the struggle for political, social, and economic power in [Salt Lake City].” He thus deepens considerably our understanding of the social history of sex and gender in the American West and of Mormon-Gentile relations. This text will go over poorly in Utah households and classrooms. (I can imagine a Quorum of the Twelve Apostles being convened in nothing but apoplexy.) Nevertheless, those who pursue the comparative study of sex industries will not be disappointed, although it represents the accounts of judges and politicians more than clients and purveyors of sexual services.

Prostitution, Polygamy, and Power is comprised of five chapters that, combining the usual marks of good scholarship with black-and-white photographs and maps and notes, bring this Frontier West sex industry to life. The title of Chapter 1, “'Celestial Marriage’ vs. ‘Polygamic Lascivious Cohabitation,’” suggests just how far apart were Mormon and gentile viewpoints about polygamy. Those who have read Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven will appreciate Nichols’ marshaling of documentary evidence not presented there.

Nichols lays out the structure and function and racial politics of Salt Lake City’s sex industry, examining in close detail not just the political-economy of prostitution during this time, but the madams, brothels, cribs, piano players, landlords, and politicians. He shows that the growing secularization of Salt Lake City was shaped less by Mormon theology than by the question of prostitution. Prostitution was “good” for business, both Mormon and gentile, which is to say, the judges, courts, landlords and policemen who profited so handsomely from it. Eventually, even the federal government joined forces with proto-feminist organizations to clamp down upon prostitution.

The absence of perspective on female sexuality is glaring. I wanted to learn about the sexual desire (or lack thereof) of monogamous housewives versus that of those sharing a husband with co-wives and “sister-wives.” Trading the search for meaning, feeling, and relational outcome for emphasis upon frequency, price and location doesn’t advance our understanding of what should also be an intimate social history. Nevertheless, Nichols has woven together archival and documentary evidence to write a compelling account of a little known period of American history. Neither capitalism, the Frontier West, the Latter Day Saints Church, nor prostitution itself, of course, are gender neutral, and on this contradiction is balanced a fascinating story.

Written by: Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D., February 18th 2009

Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival

admin — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 01:39:00 +0000

By João Biehl

Princeton University Press

Ethnographers, novelists, and prisoners write heart-wrenching books because they present simple truths. Will to Live is a powerful, at points searing ethnography of HIV antibody surveillance systems in Brazil and pharmaceutical industry influence in bringing forth new relations of politics and health care. It tells of the bodily suffering of Brazilians who contract, and eventually die from, AIDS - and of those who fear such diagnoses, although they are HIV antibody negative.

It demonstrates the varying degrees of access that Brazilians have to highly active antiretroviral therapies (HAART) and that track along the fault lines of social structure. That HAART works for many (but not others) or that it comes too late (or too early or is engaged too haltingly) signifies the contradictions and paradoxes of culture and social structure that are usually revealed in epidemics. Although it is filled with positive stories and better outcomes (HAART brings many back from the brink of death), Will to Live is as painful to read as Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ Death Without Weeping, also about Brazil but in context of infant mortality; Paul Farmer’s AIDS and Accusation, also about AIDS but set in Haiti; and Begonia Aretxaga’s Shattering Silence, about Northern Ireland women who deploy their incarcerated bodies and even bodily fluids in political protest.

Will to Live shows that the national and international response to HIV and AIDS has in Brazil “shifted from controlling the epidemic to controlling individualized disease.” “Yes,” the author writes, “distribution programs make antiretroviral therapies accessible, but they are one element in the full treatment of a disease that... remains a matter of a regional politics of nonintervention.” “It’s a shame what is happening to AIDS” is the direct utterance of an otherwise well-intended caregiver, suggesting just how much the cart has been put before the horse and what the public health costs can be of imagining only a pharmaceutical response.

João Biehl is a Brazilian anthropologist and Associate Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University who has a long time studied the conceptualization, implementation and evolution of the Brazilian AIDS Control Program (BACP). Multi-sited in location, multi-method in logistics, multi-voiced in narrative, and multi-purpose in scope, Will to Live unravels and critiques the ways in which NGOs (non-governmental organizations), churches, the Ministry of Health, pharmaceutical industry representatives, gender and sex work activists, and those suffering from HIV or AIDS mounted a “national” response to HIV and AIDS that is anything but. “A central concern of my ethnography,” the author notes, “has been to produce alternative epidemiological evidence and to generate some form of visibility and accountability for the abandoned subjects with AIDS.”

A site of Biehl’s particular focus is Caasah, a part-community house, part-hospice, part-pharmacy, part-training ground in advocacy. Caasah was formed in 1992, “when a group of homeless AIDS patients, former prostitutes, transvestites, and drug users squatted in an abandoned maternity ward in the outskirts of Salvador” and turned it into a care center. He returned to Caasah in 2001 to find a near-complete turnover there of patients and staff and a reorientation of service provision and funding source. As such, Caasah well represents both the protean nature of AIDS and the constraints upon and conditions under which local-level responses to it were mounted.

All but a very few pharmaceutical industry representatives, health authorities, and politicians talk in double-speak. Many exacerbated cleavage between rich and poor, politically visible and not:

As with all things political and economic, the reality underlying the AIDS policy is convoluted, dynamic, and filled with gaps. The politicians involved in the making of the AIDS policy were consciously engaged in projects to reform the relationship between the state and society, as well as the scope of governance, as Brazil molded itself to a global market economy. One of this book’s central arguments is that on the other side of the signifier _model policy _stands a new political economy of pharmaceuticals, with international and national particularities. As NGO activism converged with state policy making, and as the public health paradigm shifted from prevention to treatment access, political rights have moved toward biologically based rights.

Comprising eight chapters including Introduction and Conclusions, Will to Live is equally heavy and light, grim and hopeful, ethnographic and theoretical. The Introduction (“A New World of Health”) bookends painful personal stories and broadly sweeping discussion of the political-economy of pharmaceuticals. Rhetorical and other slippage in the overly optimistic assessments of AIDS bureaucrats and pharmaceutical representatives is revealed in stories of busted aid posts, iatrogenic illness, and social structures that sicken people. Chapter One (“Pharmaceutical Governance”) discusses the complexities of state-local, transnational-NGO and doctor-patient relations. Biehl writes perceptively about the successes of Brazil in manufacturing generic drugs that challenged patent rights granted by the WTO.

The particular successes and failures of Caasah are scattered in discussion throughout the book, but Chapter Two (“Circuits of Care”) looks intently at the new subjectivities (e.g., patient-citizen, “risk group” member, the “worried well”) that arise in social, technical and economic relations brought to bear by HIV, HIV antibody testing and AIDS. The failures of the surveillance system – but also its tremendous promise – are shown acutely in the next chapter, “A Hidden Epidemic,” which reveals the biases in public health and society at large with regards to surveillance, treatment and counseling. Chapter Five, “Patient-Citizenship,” examines the Phoenix-like rise from the ashes of imminent death that has been occasioned in many of those who have responded particularly well to HAART. Many have resumed reasonably normal sexual and political lives relatively free of the anxieties and technoneuroses brought on by the antiretrovirals themselves and the HIV antibody testing and counseling regime. The first section of Chapter Six, “Will to Live,” is appropriately titled “Lifelong AIDS,” for it reveals the stark contours of the limits and promises of a largely biomedical “fix” for what is clearly and also about sickness in the social-structure.

There is little for a reader about which to complain. A quotation is repeated and some Index entries are incorrect, but there are extremely few typos or grammatical infelicities. I want to highlight one particular kind of problem that mars Biehl’s presentation at many points, however. Biehl claims that “Epidemiological surveillance services registered the first HIV/AIDS cases in 1982.” This conflates HIV and AIDS, as he does ad infinitum, and HIV hadn’t yet been identified, either. It doesn’t excuse him to say that everyone else does, too - for real damage is done in such conflation, for example, that “HIVab+” means a death sentence and a rhetorical slide to “AIDS” to “contagious” to social leperhood.

Moreover, “AIDS” had not yet congealed into a biomedical category, either. This leads him at many, many points to confuse cause and effect, vector and pathogen, infection and antibody, for example, when he says that “the homosexual/bisexual mode of transmission accounted for less than thirty percent of the total number of AIDS infections.” Ontologically, epidemiological notions do no counting; epidemiologists do. Logically, “bisexual” mode of transmission (of HIV) has also to mean “heterosexual,” which then must be explained anew for its expanded and more complicated, often hidden properties. Empirically, the “total number of AIDS infections” would multiply the epidemiological categories of “HIV antibody positive” and “AIDS diagnoses” by at least five-fold if not twenty-fold, that is, in terms of pulmonary tuberculosis, cryptosporidium, toxoplasmosis, pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, persistent diarrhea, anaemia, and so on. As well, this undercuts the force of Biehl’s informants who rightly point to the endemic state of such infections and problems prior to the arrival of HIV and AIDS. Further, it suggests that these individual infections or pathogens are sexually transmitted and that there are characteristic differences along the lines of sexual identity (i.e., “heterosexual” transmission of this, “homosexual” transmission of that).

The lengthy discussion of subjectivity comprising Chapter Four is difficult to follow and jargony, although its theorization of “technoneurosis” (and elsewhere, of “auto-bioadministration”) is spot-on. Biehl argues from the standpoint of careful analyses of case studies that the “confused and painful experience of Oxygen [the pseudonym of a sick and anxious woman repeatedly testing HIVab negative] was somewhat technically engineered. This testing apparatus played a determinant role in the emergence of a socially visible imaginary AIDS.”

Nevertheless, this and other chapters exemplifies well the Foucaultian thesis that discourse about subjects (in this case, about the technical aspects of an HIV antibody test and about what constitutes “good” and “bad” sex) creates new subjects: the worried well, the sick and the anxious, the promiscuous and the guilt-ridden. The algorithm of HAART adherence is predictable on sociological grounds. “Failures” are on blamed on the individual, not the system; not the social structure; not the lack of housing, food, education, and employment. Nor was the HAART roll-out so universal and stable as its proponents claimed

Laid atop an already struggling public health system, Biehl found that “the universal availability of essential medicines has been subject to changing political winds; treatments are easily stopped, and people have to seek more specialized services in the private health sector or, as many put it, ‘die waiting in overcrowded public services.” The meaning of “primary care” has changed to mean selective targeting of those more likely to live, and triage has replaced universality as a metaphor of coverage. Clients become clinical trial subjects. Treatment trumps prevention. Risk becomes individualized instead of increasingly social. Infection becomes increasingly moral and subject to religious edict. HIV antibody test counselors compete with one another not to be the one to read the positive bands. Social scientific insights are swept aside.

This newest addition to Princeton University’s (In)Formation Series, edited by Paul Rabinow, is a sober but accessible and extremely humane text, just as well constructed as attractively presented. The black-and-white photographs taken by Torben Eskerod are arresting and invite commentary, speculation and, in my case, envy. Around this exciting new work could be wrapped all manner of upper-division or graduate-level courses in anthropology, public health, medicine and even political-economy. Like too many countries and cultures to count, ill-tempered politicians, cynical epidemiologists and overburdened healthcare workers in Brazil have contributed to an official portrait of HIV transmission dynamics, infectious burden and prevention efforts that often bears little resemblance to reality. Once again, the inequalities of social structure get off scot-free. This ethnography is a major contribution to social theory and justice.

Written by: Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D., June 14th 2008

Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work

admin — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 00:01:00 +0000

Edited by Melissa Hope Ditmore

Greenwood Press

Five thousand words, much less the 500 allowed here, are insufficient to review critically and appreciate properly a reference work this exciting, valuable, unique and scrupulously edited. Into two sturdy, attractive-looking and easy-to-use volumes, Melissa Hope Ditmore has assembled 341 entries from 179 experts from fields and perspectives as disparate as criminal justice and sex worker activism, pop culture studies and Asian history, musicology and English literature, cinematic studies and international health, and performance art and social services. Intriguing information is presented regarding persons such as Ah Toy, Candy Barr, J. Edgar Hoover, Catherine Mackinnon, Annie Sprinkle, and Emile Zola. Well-informed essays about the structure and function of prostitution and sex work have been contributed for cities such as Bangkok, Havana, and New York, and in geographic regions such as Australia and New Zealand, the 19th-century American West and Southeast Asia. Specific sex industries in times and places as different as Imperial Russia, Medieval Europe, Vietnam-era Thailand, and pre-Revolution Shanghai are examined in often surprisingly close historical detail. Many contributors have analyzed the “labor forms” that sex work and prostitution can take, as the anthropologist Luise White has dubbed them, such as street-walking, massage, brothels, outcall and escort services, and the venues at which they can occur - including cribs, bars and cafes, display windows, highway-stopovers, dormitories, and barracks.

“Sex work” is defined as encompassing “prostitution,” but also including "phone sex, pornography, stripping, and erotic dancing,” The Preface, Introduction and many other sections and introductions thereto make immediately evident the participation of bell-boys and blues singers, cab-drivers and clients, priests and police chiefs, alongside the expected madams, pimps and providers of sexual services. Many of the relevant mental, sexual, and public health precursors and consequences are also done justice in entries that cover sexually transmitted diseases, Tenofovir, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, microbicides, and abortion. Representations in the form of stigma, poetry, cinematic (s), exploitation, music, zoning, guidebooks and many, many feminisms make these two volumes especially useful for academics and theorists. Although selling for $225, institutions, departments, libraries, organizations and collectives will find immediate usefulness in the broad array of subjects, personalities, statutes and issues covered here quite succinctly, including primary documents, poems and song lyrics, for example, to the “House of the Rising Sun.”

In only 819 pages, and with equal parts authority and freshness, a dazzling array of intellectual, political, medical, historical and sexual concerns have been covered. Colonialism, AIDS, religion, the Internet, globalization and migration and mobility are each explored in always sober, often lively prose. Remarkably few typos mar the text, and its presentation has been augmented by helpful appendices and indexes, and by many black-and-white photos, movie stills and drawings.

The editor, contributors and advisory board members are to be congratulated also for having responsibly walked that razor’s edge of attempting to write and edit fairly about something as protean as sexual networking, something that so vividly reveals tensions between structure and agency, Church and State, labor and capital, exploitation and choice, horror and love.

Reviewer’s disclaimer: The fact that the reviewer contributed five entries to this collection has not influenced the content of his review, which was written solely to obtain a free, review copy he could not otherwise afford (or live without).

Written by: Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D., June 18th 2007

Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws

admin — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 17:28:00 +0000

By Kate Bornstein

Seven Stories Press

Kate Bornstein has for two decades inspired fans and readers by mixing feminist sensibility, queer theory, performance art and personal experience. That Hello, Cruel World is heart-felt and friendly reflects parentage by Lutheran minister and 1939’s Miss Betty Crocker. Aimed more at tranpeople and freaks than at gays and lesbians, it addresses sickness in the American family, stifling conventions of compulsory heterosexuality and mean-spirited republicanism fostered by James Dobson and Pat Robertson, but not disavowed by Mary Cheney.

This “gender outlaw” was born in Fargo, North Dakota as Al Bornstein, but completed sexual reassignment surgery in 1986. Ze published hir theoretical autobiography, Gender Outlaw, in 1994 and My Gender Workbook in 1997, which used paradoxes and puzzles to transcend sex- and gender-binaries.

Part One of Hello, Cruel World takes “either/or” and twists it Möbius strip-style into “neither/both.” Ze combines snappy prose with kitschy graphics in this user-friendly, impressively edited little handbook to save teens from self-mutilation and suicide, rates among which are shooting through the roof. Faced also with poverty, bullying and religious conservatism, teenagers have never faced grimmer futures, but neither have they been supported more in and by popular culture. Aiming less to bend than to obliterate gender, Bornstein tosses off one-line, throwaway summaries of 19th-century suffragette movements and 20th-century gay, lesbian and bisexual activists. Their grasp never matches their reach: “it seems, in Minnie Bruce Pratt’s words, ‘their imaginations were in thrall to the institutions that oppress them,’” a mantra ze repeats. “You are worthy and capable of finding a way just to live your life the way you really are,” ze reminds hir readers, and “there are plenty of good people in the world who believe that a life like yours need to be lived.” Indeed.

Part Two’s “Start-up Guide” employs a “Cruel Scale of Feelings” that lists healthy and less healthy, self- and other-destructive emotions, ranging from “joy, wisdom,” “love, freedom” and “passion” to fear, depression and hopelessness. Hir 101 alternatives to suicide are ranked in terms of safety, efficacy and legal and moral concerns. The only no-no is being mean to others. “Starve yourself” (Alternative 81), “Be orgasmically celibate” (Alternative 56), “Tell a lie” (Alternative 11) and 98 others are proposed with love and good heart to keep suffering people from letting the bullies, republicans and homophobes win.

Written by: Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D., March 31st 2007