| 17 May 2005 Fine I am wrestling with what I might write this morning. There is material enough for several tales, tall and otherwise. Another enlisted woman was convicted in the awful abuse scandal from the prison in Iraq , and it is a sign of the times that the most junior and the most senior of those punished thus far have been women. That seems counter-intuitive to me, or maybe it is a factor of the aging nature of my cognitive process. How is it that this brutality, which here-to-fore has been the province of the male of the species, should include so many women? The editor of Newsweek Magazine, a proven male, is deeply apologetic for publishing a single-source report about the alleged desecration of a Koran at Guantanamo that provoked wide-spread rioting in Afghanistan that killed seventeen people. He is really sorry. There is an article about the management contract for one of the National Laboratories that hit me hard, and will probably be what I work on the rest of the day. It is part of a panoply of atomic stories. The Labs are vestiges of the Manhattan Project, which as I recall, is the most expensive Government project ever conducted, a stupendous undertaking that could only have happened under the cloak of the most expensive event, considered in constant dollars, in human history. That would be World War Two, which is mostly over. The Manhattan Project and its legacy might give it a run for its money, though. The program to build the bomb was so expansive that it isn't even over. I visited a nuclear installation in the Pacific Northwest that occupied nearly 10% of the state in which it was located. Residents of Nevada would tell you that almost all of their desert is owned by the Feds. The contract to run the Lab is worth dozens of billions of dollars over the course of the contract, and my company is hungry for something big. One of the people quoted in the article was a man I was with ten days ago, so I know that I have to jump all over it. The shadow of the atomic age hangs over this year. The Koreans want to join India and Pakistan with the bomb, and the Mullahs in Iran want one, and the usual suspects are sitting in the richly paneled rooms of the Nuclear Club looking a bit apprehensive. Had it not been for Hitler, we never would have unleashed this relatively straightforward application of theoretical physics. It would have been too expensive . Think about a world like that, without the bomb. i'm sure we would have come up with a low-cost alternative, though. The nuclear stuff is so serious that I want to put off dealing with it. I am comforted that there are those who are devoting their attention to interesting science. I am tempted to play with fire this morning, having two congruous and serious scientific reports two play with. One is on the nature of the female orgasm and the other the possibility that there is a genetic basis to homosexuality. Linking them together, which the scientists have not done, could come from a sort of Universal Field Theory. There was an old joke I saw the other day about the meaning of the words "Fine," "Nothing," and the space-time concept of "five minutes." You probably saw it fly by sometime; in the Internet age, there is nothing that hasn't gone around at least once. It is like the concept of time. "Five minutes" means, to the average Joe, that a sporting event has entered the decisive phase, and in football or basketball, could mean as much as a half hour of intricate nuance requiring intense concentration, and as many as two more beers. Or, from another perspective, "five minutes" could represent the chance to go through the closet again to look at which shoes really work with the outfit, and whether that could require a change to accessories. That observation is so blatantly offensive that is proves that "Five minutes" is validated as a concept entirely fungible to either sex, though even noticing could provoke a discussion with completely unintended consequences. I could be corrected to say "gender," rather than "sex," but that would be wrong in this context as well. As a species, we are composed of two sexes, not genders. Or maybe it is more than one species. I have heard women observe that they do not date outside their species, which is perfectly reasonable, given the demonstrated inability of the two sexes to communicate sometimes. The premise to the joke is that "Fine" is the word women use at the end of any argument in which the woman is right but cannot get the dolt to whom she is speaking to shut up. The corollary is, of course, that males cannot tell a woman that she looks "fine." That judgement results, according to scientific investigation, in a discussion that results in the female announcing "Fine." The word "Nothing" is, of course, when uttered by a female to a male, is fraught with peril. It can be a signal of momentous proportion. "Nothing" usually signifies an argument that will last "Five Minutes" and end with the word "Fine". The President of Harvard is still trying to dig his way out of being so exposed. So I was surprised to look through the paper this morning and see that scientists were going to take on the most intimate of human experiences. It was Europeans, of course, that did the survey, and it was reported first there. Goodness knows we have our problems on this side of the Atlantic with such frank talk. It was in that context that a team of Swedish neuroscientists scanned the brains of both men and women to plumb the depth of basic biological response. It could only be the Swedes, bless them, having turned in a half millenium from the most feared and brutal of the Vikings to the most pacifist of progressive people. This experiment examined the response of to the scent of a testosterone derivative found in men's sweat and an estrogen-like compound found in women's urine. The drama comes in a part of the hypothalamus, which governs the sex drive. Heterosexual men responded to the female compound but not the male one; in heterosexual women and homosexual men, it was the other way around. This could make the team a candidate for the Nobel Prize in biochemistry, since it is awarded by the Swedish Academy . I don't think it would even be spoken about in the current Administration here. Certainly it would not have been funded. The results raise significant questions about the science and ethics of human sexuality, and the possibility that in addition to the basic two sexes, there could be as many as four or more genders in the mix. All wired by biology, not morality. But we can't talk about that here. I was intrigued by the other major study, since it gets to Freud's famous deathbed question that no man can answer; "What do women want?" The fact that it is attributed to his last conscious moment suggests to me that he had probably asked the question earlier, and some woman put him there. But no matter. Over the last seventy years, over thirty studies on the frequency of female orgasms during conventional sex have been conducted. That is the topic of the famous male joke, which starts out "How can you tell if a woman has...." and leads to a punch line that is so insensitive that I, as an evolved male, will not utter it. There was a classic cartoon in the Washington Post a few years back, that purported to demonstrate male and female sexual response. The male response was presented as a light switch, and the female's as the console of an expensive stereo. The point being, there had to be some explanation for why some women have orgasms during conventional sex and others don't. Scientists have come up with a variety of theories, since that is their job. Some claim that orgasm encourages women to have sex and, therefore, reproduce. Thus there is a biological imperative that encourages women to favor stronger and healthier men, maximizing their offspring's chances of survival. One courageous scientist is named Dr. Elisabeth A. Lloyd, a professor of biology at Indiana University . In a new book, she contends that the female orgasm "is for fun." I think that is probably the best way to leave it. Any worthwhile discussion would take more than five minutes, and would prove nothing. Which is fine with me. Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra |