1st June 00

Woman in Chains

The United Nations children's agency, Unicef, says domestic violence against women and girls worldwide remains an epidemic, despite international pledges five years ago to reduce the problem. Unicef says in a report that in some countries, half the female population has suffered physical, sexual or mental abuse.
The report says: "Governments should ensure that there is no impunity for the perpetrators of domestic violence and that incidents of family violence are investigated and punished." A number of Latin American countries have enacted legislation to end impunity for perpetrators. Some countries including Mexico, Namibia, South Africa and the United States have also begun to legislate against marital rape, but sexual abuse and rape by an intimate partner is not considered a crime in most countries, the report notes.

In Africa, marital rape has exacerbated the spread of the Aids virus, Unicef said, citing a Zimbabwean study which found that 26% of women were being forced to have sex against their will. Sex-selective abortion, killings of baby girls and inferior access to food and medicine mean that there are 60 million fewer women in the world than there should be. The bulk of that discrepancy occurs in South Asia, North Africa, the Middle East and China, Unicef said.

Call for action

The Unicef study said: "They are victims of their own families, killed deliberately or through neglect simply because they are female."
　Unicef says a third of women in Canada and Egypt suffer violence from their husbands at least once, and Russian women are two-and-a-half times more likely to be murdered by their partners than women in the United States. But then again, American women are twice as likely to be killed by their partners as women in western European countries.

About two million women a year undergo genital mutilation, while dowry-related violence in India is on the rise. The report, which will be considered at a meeting in New York on Monday, calls on governments to stop ignoring domestic violence against women and to ensure those responsible are prosecuted. The meeting will also assess what governments, businesses and individuals have done since a UN women's conference in Beijing five years ago to achieve equality of the sexes.

BBC news 　http://news.bbc.co.uk

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2nd. June. 00

How English women go

There are two reasons why people like watching sexy movies. One is, obviously, because they find them exciting. But the other is because everyone is fascinated to see how other people "do it". When it comes to sex, most of us have never seen another couple actually at it, on the job.

That is why sex reports like The New Hite Report on Female Sexuality, published next week, are so popular. Indeed, Shere Hite's 1976 original has sold 20 million copies worldwide and has been translated into 15 different languages. And it's in sex surveys that we learn the real truth, not the panting, screaming, shirt-ripping versions of the movies. It is from sex surveys that we hope to learn that sex is more hum-drum for most women than for ourselves, to reassure ourselves that once a week is pretty good, not pretty bad.

It was Alfred Kinsey who led the way in doing research on sex, in the Fifties ? but he, unfortunately, just made everyone feel insecure. He was responsible for making us believe that if we didn't have good sex, we'd probably die of cancer, and that if we didn't have a squillion orgasms a night we were horribly repressed. He didn't seem to disapprove of under-age sex, and believed people should have as much sex as possible. Later, it turned out that he had decidedly weird sexual habits himself.

But then, in the late Sixties, Masters and Johnson went into the laboratory, attaching electrodes to couples while they had sex, measuring waves and plateaux, body temperature, organ swelling and so on, during arousal and orgasm. They found that an orgasm is an orgasm, and that there's no difference between a clitoral orgasm and a vaginal one (Freud had said that there was, and that clitoral was bad and vaginal was good, resulting in women becoming incredibly fussed about what sort of orgasm they had). Masters and Johnson pretty much invented sex therapy, but unfortunately they still placed emphasis on the necessity of having orgasms during sex, implying that if you didn't have them you were dysfunctional, again making millions of women feel desperately inadequate.

(I remember getting a letter, when I was agony aunt at Woman, from a girl upset about the fact that she didn't have orgasms during sex. I put the letter on the page, reassuring her that lots of women didn't experience orgasms, but enjoyed the closeness, tenderness and sensual feelings that came with sex. Surely, I thought, no one reading that would have any more sexual worries. But by the next post came a letter from another woman saying: "I've read your answer and I'm worried. I have five orgasms a night, but never have these lovely feelings. What's wrong with me?")

And then in the mid-Seventies, enter Shere Hite. Despite the fact that her report was probably not totally scientifically based, she quoted hundreds of case-histories, and started to make women feel normal again. Her message, basically, was that the clitoris is crucial, for most women, if they are to have good sex. And she also discovered that only a third of women actually have an orgasm during penetrative intercourse itself. She brought feminism into the bedroom, dealing a huge blow to the wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am culture.

Experiences of sexuality are impossible to describe in general terms, because they're so different. And women's experiences of sex seem to be far more different from one another than those of men. If I've written, "There's no such thing as normal" once, I've written it a thousand times. But while there's no such thing as normal, there is such a thing as usual, and it's often little findings ? such as Hite's discovery that most women feel sexiest just before a period, rather than in the middle of the month when they're most fertile ? that can cause quite a lot of women to feel less peculiar or different. All good stuff.

But what about her widely reported Big New Findings? Naturally they reflect a new attitude to sex ? because there are fashions in sexuality as there are fashions in everything else. How we feel about sex depends a lot upon our historical or cultural setting, which is the reason there can never be a definitive sex-survey, because people's attitudes and responses change all the time. However, these days British women, compared to their sisters in Australia and New Zealand, are apparently happier with their bodies and feel more positive about sex. This is understandable given the amount of publicity there is today about women's sexual self-images.

Shere Hite's next big finding is that 29 per cent of British women want sex daily. I have to say that this is one statistic that doesn't ring true with me. I can't help feeling that women answering the question might be influenced by series like Sex and the City, in which women are portrayed as voraciously sexual and laddish. People like to be thought in the sexual swim, even when they're on their own with a questionnaire. And in the days when simultaneous orgasms were thought to be a goal, I bet a questionnaire featuring the query, "Do you have simultaneous orgasms with your partner", would have rated quite high on the "yes" count, while today, when we know the whole idea is a ,near-impossible feat we'd find the answer was "no". So it's difficult to know how true the answers to these questionnaires actually are.

Perhaps a useful interpretation of this finding would be to conclude that women are more sexually aggressive than they used to be. So it's small wonder that if they are sexually aggressive, 60 per cent of them find that men are ill-informed about women's bodies, that they're lazy and unimaginative lovers, only interested in themselves. Why is it small wonder? Because if women are really so desperate for sex, why on earth should men bother to know anything about women's bodies? What on earth is in it for them?

There is a good reason why Latin lovers are known as hot tickets in bed. It's because they find it very difficult to get women to have sex with them. The Pill is not widely used in Catholic countries. Pregnancy is a risk that makes women frightened of sex. To get an unmarried woman to yield, a Latin lover has to use all the wiles of an expert safe-cracker, listening to every click and flick as he twiddles at the lock. To get sex, he has to bone up on every technique imaginable. He has to pretend he loves her, to bring her flowers, and then he has to know her body incredibly well, to know exactly where her most sensitive spots are. But in Britain, where women are quite happy to go to bed with men without being wooed to the eyeballs, why should men bother? As one woman said about the clitoris: "It's like Aberdeen. Men have a vague idea where it is, but can't think of any reason to go there." And that's fair comment. However, if going to Aberdeen were the only way a man could get sex, they would be hurtling up to Scotland in coachloads.

In other words, the unwelcome side-effect of the Pill which has been responsible for the sexual revolution, and made women so pleased with their bodies, and so liberated, is that it has made men lazy. And sexually lazy men are not red-hot lovers. Which brings us to Shere Hite's next big finding ? that lesbianism seems to be in for a comeback. Although we're not as into it as the Australians or New Zealanders, 15 per cent of British women have had affairs with other women, and 71 per cent are curious.

Before the Sixties, lesbianism was quite common. Fear of pregnancy and the disapproval of divorce certainly forced sexually unhappy women into each other's arms. Lesbianism seemed to suffer a decline in the liberated Sixties, but it's not surprising it's coming back, if women do think that men are rotten lovers. Women really do know how to turn on other women. Indeed, one young man I know told me despairingly that every woman he meets is bisexual these days.

The other finding of The Hite Report that has caused ripples is the fact that so many women admit to faking orgasm ? two-thirds, in fact. But why not? Isn't faking sometimes just natural good manners? I always think it is rather like singing Auld Lang Syne on New Year's Eve. Very few people actually long to hold hands and prance in and out of a circle singing a crazy song at midnight. But none of us wishes to be seen to be sulking in our tent when others are having fun.

The problem with any survey on sex is that it's only as good as its questions, and my one criticism of The Hite Report is that the questions were nearly all about technique, whether legs were apart or together, whether you wanted this or that bit rubbed and so on ? when in fact how one feels about a person is often crucial to how one experiences sex. Sex is really all in the mind, not the body. Whether a partner presses button A followed by button B, or whether he presses or strokes, is neither here nor there. It's how you're feeling at the time that makes the difference ? comfortable and loving, or tense and frightened. But only five pages of Hite's 667-page report address sex and the emotions.

Despite that, and despite all the criticism of Shere Hite's techniques, reading about other people's secret sexual experiences is always fascinating. The sex surveys of the past have resulted in making women feel inadequate. So one must thank Shere Hite for her reports, which have made most women feel more normal, more relaxed and more sexually secure.

The Independent (news paper) 　　http://www.independent.co.uk

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3rd June 00

Much in common Britain and Japan?

An attraction of opposities

They may lie thousands of miles apart on the map, but Richard Lloyd Parry discovers that Japan and Britain don't just have tea drinking in common

　Among the earliest of all meetings between Japan and Great Britain was a banquet held in the Pacific port of Shimoda in the summer of 1858. Its guests of honour were two of the most important men of their respective empires ? on one side the Japanese governor of Shimoda, on the other the Earl of Elgin and Kincardine, personal emissary of Queen Victoria.

The Earl's mission was to negotiate a trade treaty with Japan, and his ships were laden with lavish gifts. The evening went without a hitch until the end, when a Japanese official took his leave in some embarrassment. He had taken a liking to Lord Elgin's strawberry jam but had made the mistake of scooping it for safekeeping into the sleeve of his robe.

In the years since Lord Elgin's dinner party, plenty has changed. Both countries have lost empires (Britain gradually, Japan by force), and have come under the influence of America. Japan has transformed itself from a feudal backwater to the world's second largest economy, while Britain has faltered economically (although in recent years London has boomed while Tokyo has slumped). But throughout their own ups and downs, the countries have maintained a relationship often warm, sometimes suspicious, but marked by mutual curiosity and comical, and sometimes sticky, misunderstandings.

The first Englishman to live in Japan was a 17th-century sailor, the remarkable Will Adams, who was shipwrecked in 1600, became an honorary samurai, and lived on as the inspiration for the best-selling James Clavell novel, Shogun. Soon after, the shoguns closed their country off to outside influence and it was 250 years before American battleships peacefully prised it open again, closely followed by Lord Elgin. The treaty which he procured guaranteed the rights of British subjects to live and conduct business in Japan. With America preoccupied with its own civil war, the British quickly came to dominate Yokohama, and the other "treaty ports".

In contrast with today's gleaming city, 19th-century Yokohama was a raffish place. "Few of the British residents learned much Japanese," notes a historian of the period. "Most got through by gestures and shouting." Stand on the corner of Tokyo's Roppongi district on a Friday night, watching sozzled bankers and English teachers hailing cabs, and you will notice that not much has changed.

Sometimes the obliviousness of the foreigners had fatal consequences, as in the case of Charles Richardson, a British merchant who visited Yokohama in 1862. Riding out of town with three friends one day, Richardson found himself face to face with the entourage of the lord of Satsuma, a rebellious clan from the southern island of Kyushu. Evidently, the British tourists upset the samurai, either by some act of impudence or simply from riding too close to the lordly palanquin. So the Satsuma warriors attacked the party, hacking Richardson to pieces and leaving his body on the road.

The British government demanded compensation ? £100,000 from the Japanese government, and the execution of the assassin. The money was duly delivered, but the hot-blooded Satsumas refused to hand over their samurai. In response a fleet of seven British naval ships sailed to Satsuma and bombarded the capital, Kagoshima. Large areas of the town burned down, but the Japanese shore batteries took the lives of 63 British sailors, and both sides claimed victory. Ironically, the Anglo-Satsuma war marked the beginning of a close relationship between Britain and Kyushu.

Much of this was due to the efforts of one of the most intriguing early ex-pats in Japan, Thomas Glover, a Scot whose house and garden on a hillside in Nagasaki have been preserved as a museum. Glover's businesses included running guns to the Satsuma and other Kyushu clans, who eventually overthrew the shogun and restored the Emperor. He laid out the track for Japan's first steam locomotive, and built its first steamship. He arranged for several young samurai to be educated in Britain. Many others followed, and foreigners travelled in the opposite direction as Japan embarked on its drive to modernisation.

The latter included the Reverend Walter Weston, remembered for introducing the sport of mountaineering ? every year the climbing season in the Japanese Alps is opened with a ceremony honouring him.

Like many visitors, Rudyard Kipling (right) found himself as often embarrassed as charmed by Japanese customs. The great poet almost met his match in an inn in Osaka where he was relaxing in the fragrant cedar bath. All at once "a pretty maiden" opened the door and, according to custom, made to enter the tub alongside him. "She gathered that I was not happy, and withdrew giggling," he recorded. "When one is dressed only in one's virtue and a pair of spectacles it is difficult to shut the door in the face of a girl."

The period of the Thirties and the Japanese occupation of former British colonies in the Second World War brought relations to their lowest point. In the post-war period, it was the United States, rather than Europe, which rebuilt Japan and to which many Japanese looked for leisure, education and political inspiration.

The most significant interchange between the two countries was on the level of culture ? especially pop culture. The 1966 concert by The Beatles in the Nippon Budokan Hall marked the beginning of Japan's rock'n'roll era. Shakespeare proved an inspiration to Japanese artists from the film maker Akira Kurosawa to the theatre director Yukio Ninagawa.

Meanwhile, Japanese technology and design ? in the form of cars, computers and gadgets ? were changing British lifestyles.

For all their differences, in language and culture, Britain and Japan have managed to find a lot in common ? two countries of rainy islands, two nations of emotionally reserved tea drinkers, perched on the edge of tumultuous continents at opposite ends of the world.

　The Independent 　http://www.independent.co.uk

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6th June 00

Does your body feel guilty?

Our Bodies Know the Truth Even If We Try to Lie

By Shana Wingert

(Britannica.com) -- Their bodies give them away. The modern polygraph machine, which monitors a subject's blood pressure, pulse, and other physical signs, is based on the ancient human observation that when people lie, their bodies react. For centuries people have tried to devise methods to record those recognizable signs of deception.

An interrogation technique from Asia once called for suspects to stuff their mouths with dry rice. Relying on the notion that a lessening of saliva occurs when nervous tension is present, the person doing the judging would reason that the person who had the most difficulty spitting out the rice was the most nervous--and therefore guilty.

In India officials once put suspects into a dark room that contained a sacred ass. The suspects were told to pull the ass's tail, but warned that they would be determined guilty if the ass brayed. Unbeknownst to the suspects, the ass's tail was covered with black powder. Those who were confident in their innocence yanked the tail, those who felt guilty only pretended to, and a check of the suspects' hands revealed who was too scared to pull the tail.

The modern lie detector, a polygraph exam, was first developed by Czech-born psychologist Max Wertheimer. Such exams, which measure a subject's blood pressure, pulse and breathing rate, and galvanic skin response (the skin's ability to conduct electricity), have been used in police interrogations since 1924.

The science has not yet been perfected and some skilled fibbers can still fool the machine. For that reason, modern polygraph tests are admissible in only a limited number of federal and state jurisdictions. But after centuries of trying to devise precise measures of the familiar changes that occur in people's bodies when they lie, it may be only a matter of time before a reliable way is found. After all, the body doesn't lie.

June 5, 2000 / Sources: Encyclopedia Britannica, American Polygraph Association, The Associated Press

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