1.5 Million Tourists to Burma May Lead to Spread of Prostitution

On a recent evening at a popular beer hall in Rangoon, two dozen women wearing skimpy dresses and hair extensions swayed mechanically on a stage and took turns mumbling lines of high-energy pop songs into the microphone.

The crowd — mostly Burmese men, but also a few groups of foreign tourists — drank mugs of Tiger beer and took videos with their phones.

Every once in a while, a girl would receive a feather boa — a tip from an admirer in the audience, costing about $12. The show concluded with a performer bouncing a flaming ball on her foot while jumping through a flaming hula hoop — and the doors were closed by 10 p.m.

Rangoon’s so-called “model shows” are hardly salacious affairs compared with the raunchy sex shows that have made Bangkok one of the world’s sex-tourism capitals.

But Burmese officials and human-rights groups are worried about what could come next as tourists pour into Burma after decades of isolation. In 2012, Burma received more than a million foreign tourists, up from 816,000 the year before. This year, the country is anticipating 1.5 million — a near doubling of the number of visitors in two years. While tourism is pumping much needed cash into the country — more than half a billion dollars last year — officials want to keep sex off the list of local attractions. One need only look across the border to see why: Thailand has the highest HIV rate in Southeast Asia, and Cambodia, tragically, has a thriving child sex industry.

Burmese fears are well founded. Human-trafficking networks have long operated in the country, funneling thousands of women and girls into Thailand to fuel the sex industry there, to say nothing of the many women (particularly from the impoverished border state of Shan) who voluntarily go.

Many are underage and willing to sell their virginity for high prices.

The parents and the girls themselves, and even the community, has kind of accepted that it is happening, and that’s how you can support your parents.

After Cyclone Nargis devastated southern Burma in 2008, the number of women entering the domestic sex industry in cities like Rangoon also rose dramatically

A sex industry catering to foreign tourists has been kept largely at bay, simply because Burma has had relatively few visitors to date. (Thailand, by comparison, received 22 million visitors in 2012.) But there are signs this is changing.

Andrea Valentin, founder of Tourism Transparency, which advocates responsible tourism in Burma, says she recently came across a website in Japan advertising sex tourism in the country, with a list of hotels willing to help arrange it. Hotel owners have also told her that they provide tourists with phone numbers for prostitutes when asked. “They have said, ‘Look, we have problems. We don’t know what to do because we’re a hotel, we want tourists to feel well.’”

Sex isn’t explicitly on offer at model shows, karaoke bars and massage parlors, but it’s certainly available. “Everything is happening backdoor. It’s very difficult to get any evidence that, O.K., this is a good karaoke bar and this is a bad one, but among men, they know, and sometimes the taxi drivers also know. In recent years, 13 foreigners have also been blacklisted from Burma after engaging in or attempting to engage in child sex while visiting the country. While pedophilia isn’t yet the same concern it is in Cambodia, the government doesn’t want the problem to get worse. “By learning from other neighboring countries, we feel we should start working on this now rather than later,” Colonel Win Naing Tun, a deputy commander in the Special Branch of the Myanmar Police Force,said..

In fact, the authorities have been working on the issue of sex tourism for some time. In 2012, the Ministry of Hotels and Tourism launched a new responsible-tourism policy, and published a code of conduct for tourists, for distribution by hotels and tour operators.

Meanwhile work on a master tourism plan for the government is in progress that encourages more public-awareness campaigns and a commitment from hotels, tour providers and police to confront sex tourism when they come across it.

Of course, laws and tourism plans won’t make a difference if enforcement is lax. Officially, prostitution is illegal in Burma, but the authorities tend to turn a blind eye to the profession. And when raids occur at brothels, the prostitutes are usually the ones arrested, not the owners or customers.

Sex workers suffer mistreatment at the hands of law-enforcement officials, as well. Many [officials] still take advantage of the situation, maybe they may ask money or they may threaten them.

Burma has been inward-looking for 60 years. Now they’re opening up, and they’re trying to learn all of these things. The world needs to support these things that they are implementing very bravely.

12,660 Kenyan Girls Sexually Abused by their School Teachers in 2010

Since discovering that her 13-year-old daughter was pregnant about a month ago, Juanita* has paid several visits to the local chief in her village in western Kenya, seeking justice for her daughter and punishment for the man who abused her.

“She told me it was her teacher who did it. I confronted him and he admitted [he was the father] – he told me we could just settle it as adults,” Juanita, 47, said.

“We have been going to the chief because the teacher tells me he wants to marry my daughter and take care of the child, but I don’t want that. Let him take care of the child who is a result of his bad behaviour, but leave my daughter alone because I want her to go on [with her education],” she added. “I am poor and now both my daughter’s and my future have been ruined by somebody I respected most.”

Recent media reports implicating an HIV-positive teacher in western Kenya in the sexual abuse of five girls aged between seven and 13, and a Muslim scholar in the country’s eastern Coast Province in the sexual abuse of a dozen boys, have left Kenyan parents questioning just how safe their children are in school.

A 2009/2010 government report showed that at least 1,000 teachers had been dismissed from duty in that period for sexually abusing children. A separate study conducted between 2003 and 2009 revealed that 12,660 girls were sexually abused by their teachers, yet only 633 teachers were charged with sexual offences. Furthermore, 90 per cent of sexual abuse cases involving teachers never reached the Teachers’ Service Commission (TSC), responsible for monitoring and implementing teachers’ codes of conduct.

Several laws, including the Children’s Act and the Sexual Offences Act, criminalise sex with children under the age of 18, and in 2010, the TSC issued guidelines designed to protect children from sexual abuse in schools. The new rules ban students from visiting teachers’ homes, warn teachers against using the promise of academic progress to coerce children into sexual liaisons and stipulate that any sexual abuse of a child should be reported to the commission within 24 hours.

“Any time we get reports about a teacher abusing a child, we will carry out our investigations and take appropriate action… We have released a circular to all schools detailing measures that should be implemented to reduce cases of sexual abuse of children in learning institutions, and we have prosecuted some offenders,” said TSC’s public relations officer. “Any head teacher or any teacher for that matter who knows that a sexual offence has occurred within their school and fails to report it [will face disciplinary action]; TSC rules are very clear on this.”

Few consequences
A 2009 study by Kenyatta University of more than 1,200 girls in 70 schools across 10 Kenyan districts found that when girls were impregnated by teachers, 45 per cent of teachers suffered minor consequences, either a demotion, a transfer to another school or marrying the pregnant girl; an estimated 32 per cent of teachers faced no consequences, while 25 per cent were sacked. On the other hand, an estimated 76 per cent of girls dropped out of school, with many others getting married, procuring abortions and even committing suicide; only 1 per cent of those who left were able to rejoin school.

While the study found that 22 per cent of teachers who impregnated girls were arrested, convictions for teachers who abuse children are rare, mainly due to the fact that unless a girl is pregnant, sexual abuse is difficult to prove. In addition, stigma means many families would rather keep the abuse under wraps and teachers often pay families to keep the cases out of court.

Schools are the second highest after the family set-up where children are sexually abused. The authority over children exhibited at home is extended to school and amorous teachers are using this authority to sexually abuse children under their care. But spotlight should also be extended to religious institutions because even here, boys are getting sodomised and those reports are in the public domain.

Orphaned children and those from poor backgrounds are vulnerable because they lack basic needs and a teacher can use that to coerce them into a sexual relationship, putting them in danger of getting pregnant or getting infected and dropping out of school eventually.

Sex for grades, goods
One of the reasons children rarely report sexual abuse by their teachers is because sex is often in exchange for good grades or material gain.
Esther*, Juanita’s daughter, said: “He used to buy me good things like pens, shoes and he used to give me pocket money too; later he told me to take water to his house and while there, he started touching me and that is the first time we had sex,”. “He said I would be his girlfriend because his wife was away; I feared him and would do everything he told me to.”

Shame is another factor that prevents children and families from reporting these crimes.

Many families still view sexual abuse of children as too stigmatising to be made public and they don’t report [it], making it extremely hard to implement the law… so it is kept under the rug and only when the child becomes HIV-positive or pregnant is it realised that someone must have been sexually abusing them.

Head teachers rarely report abuse of children, either because they are the culprits or are acting to protect the image of the school. Many schools in Kenya are also sponsored by religious institutions who would normally want to keep such cases under wraps.
There are cases where parents collude with a teacher after the child becomes pregnant, and say the teacher will take care of the child. Some parents also benefit from gifts or money a child gets from a teacher… It is important to discourage parents from such arrangements.”

Call centre
In 2008, ChildlineKenya  and the government set up a toll-free call centre where children can report abuse or others can report suspected cases of child abuse.

Initially, it was hard to report abuse of children but since we set up a call centre, it is now easy to see the extent of these cases of abuse,” said director of children’s services at the Ministry of Gender. “It is refreshing because the TSC is now more proactive in dismissing abusive teachers from within its fraternity.”

In 2009, out of the 28,988 calls made to the centre, 697 reported the sexual abuse of a child. Childline has since carried out awareness-raising campaigns in schools to increase the use of the service.

More action needed 
The initiative is limited, however, as in many rural areas, children cannot access telephones. While NGOs applaud the initiative, they say much remains to be done.

The provision of a toll-free line has helped, but schools must also put measures within their systems that make it easy for victims to report abuse without feeling intimidated. They must employ counsellors or designate a teacher for that role and at the same time provide suggestion boxes through which students can report [an abuser] either in school or at home.

It is important to sensitise parents about the rights of their children. It doesn’t matter whether the culprit says they will take care of the child or marry them, it is important to sensitise parents to know that seeking justice for the child is the most important thing. Culprits must not be allowed to get away with such offences… Otherwise we continue hushing it up and put more children in danger.

*Not their real names

 

Why Men in Power Fail to Control Their Libidos?

Human males have never been thought of as models of sexual restraint — and with good reason. From the moment the adolescent libido begins to boot up, boys seem to enter an ongoing state of emotional — if not literal — priapism, from which they never fully emerge.

As far as nature is concerned, this is just fine. The goal of any organism, after all, is to ensure the survival and propagation of its genes, and males — far more so than females — are eminently equipped to do that. Even the world’s most reproductively prolific mothers rarely produce more than eight or nine children in a lifetime. Males can conceive everyday, even multiple times a day, and come emotionally hardwired to do just that.

Part of the reason they don’t, apart from the impracticality of trying to raise a brood of 200 children, is that they just don’t get that many mating opportunities.

Sex requires a willing partner, and females, with so much more on the line in terms of the time, effort and energy that pregnancy and child-rearing involve, can be extremely selective in choosing mates. That requires males to develop a whole suite of emotional muscles — self-denial, self-restraint, a facility for delayed gratification — that will help them cope with an appetite that at some levels will never be fully satisfied. And that, in turn, is a central pillar of monogamy and fidelity.

But what happens when the lid comes off? What happens when the opportunities are unlimited? In some cases, not much.

Males either continue to practice self-control or, after a brief period of happy debauchery — think rock stars or leading men who are always seen stepping out with a new piece of arm candy —  finally settle down into stable monogamy.

In some cases, though, the stability never happens; in some cases, unlimited opportunity simply leads to unlimited appetites. Emperors and despots may be best known for this kind of behavior.

The 18th-century Moroccan ruler Moulay Ismail is said to have fathered 888 children with his 500 concubines.

Genghis Khan makes Ismail look practically barren. A 2003 analysis of the Y chromosome of 2,123 men now living across the former Mongol empire showed that there are 16 million males living today whose line stretches back to the great conqueror — or one out of every 200 males now on the planet.

But modern-day men of power — Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer, John Edwards, John Ensign, JFK, FDR, and most recently, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Dominique Strauss-Kahn — with their serial wives or serial philandering, can behave just as badly, if less prolifically.

When men have more opportunity they tend to act on that opportunity. The challenge becomes developing ways to control the impulses so you don’t get yourself into self-defeating situations.

There are a lot of things that distinguish pampered and powerful men who behave themselves sexually from those who don’t. Part of it is simply underlying temperament. Bill Clinton and Harry Truman were decidedly different people in the rectitude department, even if both of them were once the most powerful person in the world. There’s no saying with certainty what led to Clinton’s sometimes frantic need to be liked and his maddening lack of any internal governor — his broken home, his abusive stepfather, his admitted issues with low self-esteem that came from being seen as the chubby kid from the school band — but other leaders have hard-knock pasts too and not all of them become lotharios.

It’s sometimes framed as a case of character, but it can also be someone’s sexualmakeupUniversity. There’s a basic biological factor at play. Sex is a powerful force and some people just have to struggle more to control it than others.

Narcissists are clearly part of the poor-control camp. One of the things that made John Edwards a hard electoral sell well before his affair was revealed was the visceral sense people got that he was simply too much of a self-adoring preener. There would be no level of public adoration he could achieve that would reach the level he felt for himself. But in some cases, narcissism is not the only thing going on.

There’s a fairly new measure we use that’s called ‘the dark side. It’s a combination of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy.

Garden variety cads like Edwards clearly aren’t psychopathic, but world-class monsters like Caligula — whose sexual appetites were legend — just as clearly were. All three features of the dark side personality can exist in people in different combinations and different degrees, but the more severe any one of them is, the greater the risk for sexual acting out.

Men who are low on these traits are less likely to cheat even when the opportunity presents itself.

Also in play is the point in life at which unusual privilege was first conferred. Members of royal families are born into a world of indulgence and entitlement, and the princelings who grow up that way may never have to develop the emotional musculature that will allow them to show self-restraint. Athletes often start life at the opposite end of the wealth and prestige spectrum, but as soon as they exhibit an unusual talent for swinging a bat or sinking a free-throw they may find that the rules have been suspended for them. They are waved through school and into the pros, and incidents of bad behavior are overlooked or covered up. Any skills they may have been developing for self-control or self-denial quickly wither.

People who come into fame or power later in life do seem to manage their circumstances more effectively. They’ve learned a certain discipline and they’ve adapted to having to contain themselves.

Men, certainly, aren’t the only people who abuse their power sexually. Women exhibit the dark-side triad too, and can become accustomed to power and its perks as easily as a man can. What’s more, testosterone, a primal driver of dominance behavior, is not the exclusive province of men either.

Women produce testosterone just like men do, even if at different levels.

That means women have testosterone-driven tendencies as well, and that pays dividends. Dominant animals tend to be more reproductively successful whether they’re male or female.

But if alpha men and women dominate both the world and the gene pool, that’s not to say betas don’t have ways to push back. Among all social animals, leaders are tolerated only until what they give back to the group in terms of stability and order is exceeded by what they take from it, in terms of material and mating resources. When the balance tips the wrong way, the group gets restless.

We have what we call subordinate strategies, and we see that in chimps and bonobos too. You don’t want the leader dominating all of the mating opportunities, so you form coalitions and topple him.

That same phenomenon, Josephs believes, may explain the public outrage when sexual misbehavior of elites — particularly the kind that involves violence or assault — become public. We don’t want our leaders to be philanderers,” he says. “In an egalitarian society, nobody should monopolize all of the females or sleep with our wives, or we’re going to get even.

In the case of Edwards or Spitzer, that meant banishment to a politicalElba. In the case of Strauss-Kahn, it may well mean jail. In the case of Caligula, it meant assassination. It’s been said for millennia, but it bears repeating: just keep it zipped, boys, just keep it zipped.

Oral Sex May Result in Cancer & HPV

US scientists have said there is strong evidence linking oral sex to cancer, and urged more study of how human papillomaviruses may be to blame for a rise in oral cancer among white men.

In the United States, oral cancer due to HPV infection is now more common than oral cancer from tobacco use, which remains the leading cause of such cancers in the rest of the world.

Researchers have found a 225-percent increase in oral cancer cases in the United States from 1974 to 2007, mainly among white men, said Maura Gillison of Ohio State University.

“When you compare people who have an oral infection or not… the single greatest factor is the number of partners on whom the person has performed oral sex,” said Gillison, who has been researching HPV and cancer for 15 years.

“When the number of partners increases, the risk increases,” she said.

Previous studies have suggested that people who have performed oral sex on six or more partners over a lifetime face an eight-fold higher risk of acquiring HPV-related head or neck cancer than those with fewer than six partners, she said.

But even though the link between HPV and cervical cancer has been well known for many years, and vaccines now exist to provide some protection, much study remains to be done to confirm observational links and establish causes, Gillison said.

“The cervical cancer field is 20 years ahead,” she said.

“We can’t demonstrate definitively that certain behaviors are associated with risk of acquiring an infection,” she said.

“The rise in oral cancer in the US is predominantly among young white males and we do not know the answer as to why.“

Researcher Diane Harper of the University of Missouri said such studies will take time, but the oral cancer field may move more quickly by using technology already developed for detecting HPV in cervical cancer patients.

“One of the scientific technologies that have evolved over time is the way that we detect HPV,” said Harper.

“I think that the head and neck cancer area will benefit from that because we have gone through all kinds of different laboratory techniques to make sure we are actually finding what we think is HPV and getting type-specific information to go with that.”

There as many as 150 different types of human papillomaviruses, and about 40 of those can be sexually transmitted, according to the National Cancer Institute.

Some may cause genital warts, while other more high-risk varieties can cause oral, anal, vaginal and penile cancers.

Sexually transmitted HPV infections are common and often asymptomatic, and untreated cases in women are the main cause of cervical cancer.

Half of all sexually active Americans will get HPV at some point in their lives, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated.

Two vaccines, Gardasil and Cervarix, were approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2006 for HPV types that cause cervical cancer and genital warts.

However, only 40 percent of US girls have received one dose and just 17 percent have received all three doses in the regimen, said researchers.

A study published earlier this month in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the HPV vaccine could prevent 90 percent of genital warts in men, and the vaccine has also been approved against anal cancer in men and women.

Harper said she was not recommending the general population get the HPV vaccine because research has not yet established its effectiveness past five to eight years for cervical cancer.

“We know from all of the good modeling studies that have been done throughout the world that if the vaccine does not last for a minimum of 15 years, cervical cancer will not be prevented, it will only be postponed,” she said.

For now, Harper and fellow presenter Bonnie Halpern-Felsher of the University of California San Francisco recommended that patients discuss HPV with their doctors.

“If you talk to health care providers and certainly parents and other educators, they are not talking to teens about oral sex, period,” said Halpern-Felsher, who has studied teenagers’ attitudes and sexual behaviors.

“Teens really have no idea that oral sex is related to any outcome like STIs (sexually transmitted infections), HPV, chlamydia, and so on.”

HIV+ Maid Sleeps With 100 Rich Folks

A doctor treating HIV-positive patients has claimed that one of his patients has indulged in sexual relations with more than 100 partners “to take revenge” for her condition.

Dr I S Gilada, who heads an AIDS clinic at Grant Road said that a 29-year-old woman from the Western suburbs has been visiting him since the past two months.

While counselling her, the doctor learnt that she not only has multiple partners, but hunts for them with a vengeance to spread the virus she contracted through her husband.

“She was brought to us by her sister, who herself is HIV positive,” said Gilada. “We found out that she had learnt of her husband’s HIV-positive status in 2005, and that he had transmitted the disease to her as well. Although she divorced him, she couldn’t come to terms with the fact that he had knowingly passed on the virus to her,” he said.

Gilada said that during the counselling sessions, the woman, who works as a maid, claimed she has had more than 300 sexual encounters with 100 men over the past three years.

“She admitted to frequent encounters with men ranging from her employers and their relatives, to the liftman and students – all of whom have had unprotected sex with her,” said Gilada.

When asked about the case, Dr S S Kudalkar, president at the Mumbai District AIDS Control Society said the organization would investigate the matter.

“We will talk to the clinic and investigate the case. If it is true, then we will counsel the woman,” he said. “HIV is not just a disease of the virus, it is also a disease of human behaviour.

The National AIDS Control Organisation has mandated pre-test and post-test counselling to curb patients from forging sexual contacts with multiple partners,” said Dr Kudalkar.

Are You a Sexual Addict?

Within a half-hour of my first meeting Neil Melinkovich, a 59-year-old life coach, sometime writer and former model who has been in Sex Addicts Anonymous for more than 20 years, he told me about the time in 1987 that he made a quick detour from picking up his girlfriend at the Los Angeles airport so he could purchase a service from a prostitute. Afterward, he noticed what he thought was red lipstick on himself. It turned out to be blood from the woman’s mouth. He washed in a gas-station bathroom, met his girlfriend at the airport and then, in the grip of his insatiability, had unprotected sex with her as soon as they got home — in the same bed he said he had used to entertain three other women in the days before.

Is this a man with colossally bad judgment or one with a blameless addictive disorder? In the past year, this question has presented itself with dependable regularity. Most famously, Tiger Woods received sex-addiction treatment last winter after he admitted to infidelities; at least a dozen women came forward to claim they’d had sex with him. The chronically undisciplined Charlie Sheen recently sought help in controlling a variety of runaway appetites, including a fondness for the company of porn actresses. Earlier this month, Republican Congressmen Christopher Lee resigned after he was caught e-mailing a shirtless photo of himself to entice a woman he met on Craigslist. And then there is Silvio Berlusconi, the uninhibited Prime Minister of Italy, where prosecutors want him to face trial for accusations that he paid an underage girl to have sex with him. Berlusconi has never hidden his partiality to beautiful women, but he has called the allegations — and reports of louche parties at his villa — politically motivated. All these cases differ in scope, but a central question remains: Why would these men risk everything to satisfy their urges?

When it comes to addiction, the line between morality and disease has always been blurry. But only in the past 25 years have we come to regard excesses in necessary cravings — hunger for food, lust for sex — as possible disease states. In 1983, when Melinkovich was continuously cheating on his then wife (an actress from Planet of the Apes), a Minnesota-based addiction-treatment organization called the Hazelden Foundation published a foundational book called Out of the Shadows: Understanding Sexual Addiction. The book, which is still in publication, helped create the field of sex-addiction treatment. Its author, Patrick Carnes, is now executive director of Gentle Path, the sex-addict program Woods is said to have entered last year in Hattiesburg, Miss.

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) is debating whether sex addiction should be added to its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The addition of what the APA is calling “hypersexual disorder” would legitimize sex addiction in a way that was unthinkable just a few years ago, when Bill Clinton’s philandering was regarded as a moral failing or a joke — but not, in the main, as an illness.

APA recognition of sex addiction would create huge revenue streams in the mental-health business. Some wives who know their husbands are porn enthusiasts would force them into treatment. Some husbands who have serial affairs would start to think of themselves not as rakes but as patients.

This is already happening. In the year since Woods made sex addiction famous, rehab facilities accustomed to dealing with alcoholics and drug addicts have found themselves swamped with requests for sex-addiction treatment. The privately held company Elements Behavioral Health, which operates high-priced rehab centers around the U.S. — including a celebrity-friendly one on a breathtaking mountainside in Malibu, Calif. — recently acquired the Sexual Recovery Institute, a Los Angeles center for sex addicts. The institute’s revenues grew 50% in 2010.

But the legitimacy now being granted to sex addiction requires a closer look. In the 20th century, we changed our thinking about alcoholism: what was once a moral weakness came to be understood as an illness resulting in large part from genetics. Sexual acting out seems different, though. Is excessive lust really just another biochemical accident?

When Lust Becomes a Compulsion
It was in the 1960s that the notion of sex addiction entered popular consciousness. Two men — Albert Ellis, one of the most esteemed psychologists of the late 20th century, and Edward Sagarin, a closeted gay sociologist who helped launch the gay-rights movement — wrote a book published in New York in 1964 asNymphomania: A Study of the Oversexed Woman. The book was titillating and influential. It helped popularize the locution nymphomaniac as a slur against unreserved women.

Today the proposed APA definition of hypersexual disorder says you have an illness if you spend so much time pursuing intercourse or masturbation as to interfere with your job or other important activities. According to the working language of the diagnosis, “repetitively engaging” in sexual behaviors when you are anxious, depressed or stressed would be considered a major warning sign for the disorder.

But when it comes to sex, what could possibly be too much? The proposed definition of hypersexual disorder draws no distinction between masturbation and intercourse. Many studies, however, have shown that regular intercourse with a committed partner (up to once a day) is a sign of a good relationship. So at what point do partners in a healthy relationship become too focused on sex? And what constitutes too little sex?

In the late 1940s, the sex-research team led by biologist Alfred Kinsey said only 3% of college-age men reported a “total sexual outlet” of seven or more per week. Total sexual outlet was a euphemism for the number of orgasms. Although Kinsey’s data set was famously flawed — he used a largely self-selected sample that included some prison inmates — seven orgasms a week (either alone or with someone) is still considered by many experts to be a threshold for possible disorder. In a November 2009 Archives of Sexual Behavior paper, Dr. Martin Kafka, a Harvard Medical School professor and a prominent member of the APA work group on sex disorders, defined “hypersexual desire” among men as having seven or more orgasms per week for at least six months after age 15. Never mind that by Kafka’s definition, virtually every human male undergoes a period of sex addiction in his life. It’s called high school.

Kafka has also reported that the average man says he has three orgasms per week — but because some men are inclined to overestimate and others to underestimate, we have little idea what the accurate average is. The data on women’s sexual habits are even more meager.

Because the definition of sex addiction is unclear, it’s impossible to know how many people have it, although professionals sometimes use Kinsey’s data to estimate prevalence at 3% to 10% of the population. That range is too wide to be of much use, but we do know that the arrival of Internet porn in the 1990s led many into unhealthy behaviors and extreme desires that eventually spurred them to seek treatment.

Their misfortune created a challenge for psychologists, who had little idea how to help those who called themselves sex addicts. Over the past half-century, Hazelden, Alcoholics Anonymous and most other anti-substance-abuse organizations have defined recovery as 100% abstinence. But the desire to procreate is powerfully encoded in our DNA. Total abstinence isn’t impossible, but it is usually unrealistic. As Melinkovich, the L.A. sex addict, told me, “When it comes to drinking, you can put the plug back in the jug. But you can’t totally turn off sexual desire.”

No one has figured out how to solve the conundrum of an addiction that must be mitigated but not eradicated. (A good analogy is to those who chronically binge on food and must be taught to eat moderately.) Doctors have one reliable way to stop people from having sex: give them antihormone drugs that result in what is known as “chemical castration.” But because of side effects — for instance, the feminization of men who take them — the drugs are recommended only for recalcitrant sex offenders. Someone who rents too many adult films is surely different from a child molester.

So what can be done for those spending thousands on porn or seeing six prostitutes a week? According to Robert Weiss, who runs the Sexual Recovery Institute, the most seriously affected patients must enter a facility where they have no access to porn or sex workers. They start individual and group therapy that is, ideally, grounded in a cognitive-behavioral model designed to help them find rewarding activities other than sex — and consider the consequences of, say, looking at porn at work. But Weiss admits there is no simple way to teach sex addicts how to have healthy romantic relationships.

Sex Addicts Anonymous
Our limitations in understanding the nature of sex addiction haven’t prevented practitioners from trying to profit from the surge in demand to cure it. The top inpatient programs — Carnes’ Gentle Path in Mississippi; the resort-like Promises facility in Malibu, Calif. (where Britney Spears and Sheen are reported to have sought addiction help); the swank AToN (Aide to Navigation) facility in La Jolla, Calif., which on a given afternoon might serve grilled halibut by the pool — can run you $2,000 a day or more, with a minimum stay of a week. Fifteen years ago, none of these programs existed.

Free community meetings based on the Alcoholics Anonymous model are also thriving. Melinkovich has not only undergone professional treatment at Promises; he also presides over a regular Los Angeles meeting of Sex Addicts Anonymous (SAA), one of the four major sex-addict 12-step groups in the U.S. (The others are Sexaholics Anonymous, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous and Sexual Compulsives Anonymous.) Together, these four groups host 5 million to 10 million Americans per year. According to the official who took my call at SAA’s international headquarters in Houston — a man who requested that not even his first name be printed — the organization has grown approximately 10% per year for the past seven years. Founded by a group of men in Minnesota in the late 1970s, SAA now has roughly 1,200 meetings convening around the globe each week. Ninety percent of the meetings are in the U.S., but the SAA official told me there are regular meetings in Argentina, South Africa, the U.K. and other countries.

The SAA meeting that Melinkovich runs assembles in an L.A. church every weekday at noon. On the day I went, 38 people — only two of them women — gathered in a sun-flooded room on the ground floor. Like Alcoholics Anonymous and Cocaine Anonymous, the sex groups operate in a highly structured, almost liturgical fashion. People read aloud from manuals cum bibles — like AA’s Big Book, Sexaholics Anonymous has its White Book — that are filled with harrowing personal stories and vague generalities. (From the White Book: “sexual sobriety includes progressive victory over lust.”) About halfway through each meeting, a donation-collection plate is passed around, just like in church.

At the heart of every sex-addict meeting is the sharing portion, when addicts warring with longings spill stories. The need to share once hidden desires is so strong that those who run meetings designate a timer who asks attendees to stop talking after three or four minutes. One of the first speakers at Melinkovich’s meeting — I’ll call him Daniel — noted that when he started attending five or six years ago, only a half-dozen people regularly showed up. Now, Daniel said, approximately 40 go to each meeting, even on weekdays at noon.

Sex-addict meetings can be extraordinarily awkward. Some attendees barely look up from fingernails digging into cuticles. At one meeting I attended in New York City, I met a man in his late 40s who said he hunches over his laptop and masturbates with such intensity that he once gave himself a hernia for which he had to be hospitalized. Other sex addicts have lost spouses and jobs.

The Promises facility in Malibu searches the possessions of entering clients (no matter how famous) in order to confiscate any porn. Computer access is tightly restricted. And as though they are boys at a midcentury parochial school, clients are instructed to not masturbate.

Contrarian therapists argue that asking adults to refrain from basic urges like the desire to masturbate goes against evolutionary psychology. “Almost all U.S. treatment programs tell the client to abstain, without consideration of what the client is motivated to do,” writes A. Thomas Horvath, a past director of the addiction bureau of the American Psychological Association and the author of Sex, Drugs, Gambling & Chocolate: A Workbook for Overcoming Addictions. (He is also the medical director of the AToN facility in La Jolla.) Instead, Horvath suggests that clients be given the choice of either abstinence or moderation. “You get the rewards; you pay the consequences; you decide,” he writes.

Unfortunately, science does little to settle this debate, because the brain chemistry of sex addiction is not well understood. Your sexuality — your orientation, your level of desire, what you consider romantic satisfaction (orgasm, love, validation, all of the above) — is a complex amalgam that involves your brain’s hormonal system, its frontal-lobe reward system and its limbic system, which controls mood. Genes regulate these neural pathways, meaning that sexuality is partly heritable, but the environment in which you develop sexually can affect how those genes are expressed. Sex addicts like to compare their habit to substance addiction, but scientists are only beginning to show proof of this connection. In December, scientists at Binghamton University in New York released the results of a study of 181 young adults showing that differences in their DNA were linked to differences in their sexual behavior. Those with a certain variant of the DRD4 gene were more likely to report having had one-night stands and adulterous affairs. The DRD4 gene helps control how much dopamine is released when you have sex. For some, sex seems to provide more of a dopamine high. Also, we know that having sex releases endorphins, which are peptides that activate opiate receptors. Heroin and other drugs activate opiate receptors as well. But no study has proved that sex is tied to opiate receptors, and the DRD4 study hasn’t been replicated.

What’s more, we know that desire is more than testosterone and peptides. When evolution programmed our urge to mate, it used all kinds of tricks to make sure sexual desire would be durable: we want others not just hormonally but emotionally — so deeply that we speak of being “madly” in love. That’s why the current models for treating sex addicts are so poor. As the prominent sex researcher Fred Berlin of Johns Hopkins University pointed out in a 2008 article in the journal Psychiatric Clinics of North America, “the notion that one can successfully choose to indefinitely resist an intense urge is often simply incorrect.”

The Future of Treatment
After Melinkovich and I had spent a few hours together in Los Angeles, he started showing me some of the messages that were pinging his BlackBerry. At least three women had called him while we were eating dinner. One of them he kept calling “the 16-year-old” and then correcting himself to say “the 19-year-old.” Once when his phone was ringing, Melinkovich turned the illuminated screen toward me. I saw that he had given the woman who was calling a special name — in honor of her favorite sexual position — which suggested that his treatment to date had not addressed a tendency to reduce women to sex objects.

“It’s true,” he told me later. “If you have this addiction, you objectify women. There’s a lot of skin, a lot of beauty in this town.” He said SAA has a three-second rule: you can check out an attractive person for a maximum of three seconds, “because after that, you start going into fantasy.”

Melinkovich checked himself into Promises five years ago. After a relationship fell apart and he lost a $1,000-a-day job as a sober coach for a wealthy young man with addiction problems, Melinkovich’s libido came roaring back. “It made me realize I was medicating depression with sexual activity,” he told me. “Also, I realized I hadn’t really been in love with that woman — I just had a complete sexual obsession with her.”

Partly because of its proximity to Hollywood, where so many wealthy men and beautiful women can pursue their unhealthy sexual appetites ad libitum, Promises now has one of the most comprehensive and respected sex-addiction programs in the nation. But when Melinkovich arrived there, he found that he was the only one there for sex addiction and that the unit had little experience in treating sex addicts. That’s not surprising; even today, most addict-treatment centers are still trying to develop standards of care for hypersexual conditions.

And they are still trying to address very basic questions. Should we regard out-of-control sexual behavior as an extreme version of normal sexuality, or is it an illness completely separate from it? That question lies at the heart of the sex-addiction field, but right now it’s unanswerable. When I was with Melinkovich, I sometimes felt he was a normal guy who didn’t quite know how to deal with the many women who find him attractive. Other times, like when he got a lascivious look in his eyes while reading a text from a woman young enough to be his granddaughter, he seemed like a guy with a debilitating illness. “I’m kind of a work in progress,” he told me a few months after we first met. “I’m still trying to define a healthy sexuality that works for me.” The other day, he said, his impulses were so powerfully triggered by the sight of the singer Rihanna at the Grammys that he had to change the channel to a golf program. He is also trying to use his experience with sex addiction to help others. He is working on a sober-coaching site called getneiled.com and he wants to write a book.

It wasn’t clear to me whether these ventures would work out or whether Melinkovich would relapse yet again. For now, he tries to cope with his urges through simple behavioral strategies. When he sees a pretty woman, he tries to look away and then tell himself, “God bless her and her beauty.”

 

 

Matchmaking is Up These Days in America

In this economy, it seems unthinkable that people would pay up to six figures just to find a mate.

And yet expensive matchmakers are reporting that business is up these days.

In New York City, Janis, who charges clients between $50,000 and $500,000 a year to find the “woman of their dreams,” says membership jumped 41% in 2009 from the year before and is up 46% so far this year.

Premier Match, a New York City–based agency where annual membership costs a minimum of $5,500, logged $1.5 million in sales last year, a 30% increase from the previous year. Founder Christie Nightingale says her business “hasn’t faced the recession.”

So who is willing to pay this kind of money?

James, 48, a private-wealth managing director at an investment bank was tired of serial dating after his divorce in 2005.

None of the women referred to him by well-meaning friends and family were a right fit, he says. Eventually, “a waste of time, money and heartache,” as he put it, drove him to Kelleher International, a San Francisco–based firm that counts NBA All-Stars, celebrities, Hollywood directors and billionaire investment managers among its clients.

These rich and often well-known people want to steer clear of gold diggers, says Kelleher co-owner Amber Kelleher-Andrews. “They’re too busy to find love,” she says of the firm’s clients. “Matchmakers can cut right to the chase.” To be personally matched by founder Jill Kelleher, members need to fork over serious money. “A client called us and insisted on Jill matching him. He said $100,000 to meet the right woman was nothing compared to the $4 million his divorce was costing him from the wrong woman,” says Kelleher-Andrews.

Matchmaking agencies advertise different strengths to attract high-end clients.

Barbie Adler, CEO of Selective Search, worked in executive recruitment before she started her agency in Chicago 10 years ago. “My experience has been crucial to looking beyond a résumé to make a good match,” she says. Indeed, clients are willing to part with a minimum of $15,000 for Adler to work with them.

Other firms take a scientific approach.

The British firm Seventy Thirty, which charges its clients a minimum of $15,000, has a team made up exclusively of psychologists. “Psychologists know how to interview and read people,” says head matchmaker Trudy Hill, whose firm is named for the 70:30 work-life ratio that successful people supposedly need to be happy (clients provide the 70, the agency provides the 30 in the form of a mate). “It helps to know which client can benefit from positive coaching and recognize different personality types to find a successful match for.”

As with any industry, high-end matchmaking has its share of unsatisfied customers. “There is a tremendous pressure on the relationship to live up to its fee,” says a psychotherapist at Park Avenue Relationship Consultants in Manhattan.

In 2009, the Council of Better Business Bureaus (BBB) received 2,519 complaints from disgruntled customers of matchmaking businesses, up 4% from the previous year, helping put dating services — both online and offline — among the top 100 industries that consumers complain about. “Complaints to BBB about high-priced matchmakers are often very impassioned,” says Alison Southwick, a spokesperson for BBB. “Imagine shelling out thousands of dollars and in return getting set up on a date with a married man.”

How much money their dates make.

A man isn’t necessarily looking for a woman who makes as much money as him.

Sometimes men are intimidated by high-earning women. Women know this and often set out to avoid falling for a mate with a financial chip on his shoulder. This helps explain why female clients often request to be matched with men making the same amount of money as them.

Each agency also has a database of men and women who join for free.

When a client who has paid thousands of dollars gets matched with a non-fee-paying member, the latter may feel obligated to put his or her emotional expectations on the side. Ultimately, the person who paid money for the relationship is in control. Money is the hardest thing for couples to talk about.

Who said love don’t cost a thing?

Pakistan Called`Pornistan’ by Fox News

By Hamad Dar

Fox News has published a report on Pakistan and refereed to it as Pornistan claiming that it is “No. 1 Nation in Sexy Web Searches”. Whatever keywords Fox News has mentioned are factual and not made-up.

I don’t deny the fact that Pakistan ranks 1st on these keywords. I also don’t deny the fact that porn is popular in Pakistan. However, I deny that Pakistan is “No. 1 Nation in Sexy Web Searches” as claimed by Fox News.

Shabash: Pakistan is top dog in searches per-person for “horse sex” since 2004, “donkey sex” since 2007, “rape pictures” between 2004 and 2009, “rape sex” since 2004, “child sex” between 2004 and 2007 and since 2009, “animal sex” since 2004 and “dog sex” since 2005, according to Google Trends and Google Insights, features of Google that generate data based on popular search terms.

It’s funny how the mentioned keywords are few of the least popular keywords when it comes to pornography.

Below is the image of comparison of these keywords along with other major keywords related to pornography like “sex”, “porn”, “big tits”

If you have a look at the image, the search volume for keyword “sex” is FAAAR more than other keywords. Keyword “Porn” has the 2nd highest search volume. Followed by “big tits” and then there is this little search volume for “rape sex” and “horse sex” which you might spot with a magnifying glass.

Since we have an understanding that other keywords consume much largely to porn searches, let’s now have a look at their traffic distribution.

I don’t see Pakistan occurring even in the top 10 regions.

It’s a shame how Fox news has refereed to a country as Pornistan just to sell off their papers.

We all exactly know the status of Fox news in international media.

The stunt they played is exactly like referring to Pakistan as “Number 1 nation in music searches” since it ranks number 1 on keyword “Sufi Music”!

Just to add further, as per FoxNews’ formula, whole of United States of America is inhumane and USA is wildest nation as a whole

Update: Google in a statement has said that facts produced in FoxNews report are not accurate. 

However, according to another report released at the end of 2011, with over 20 million internet users and growing fast, Pakistan tops Google search trends globally for searching keyword “Sex”.

Though Sri Lanka out ranked Pakistan in 2011 for same keyword search, however,Pakistanstill remains at top for all time search trends for keyword “Sex”.

Islamabad featured in the top 10 cities worldwide to search the word ‘sex’ in December 2011.

Lahore also featured in the top 10 cities for the months of January, March, April, May, June, July, September, October, November and December 2011.

The months of February and August (Ramazan) were the only two months in 2011 that did not feature any cities from Pakistan in the global ranking.

Similarly, Pakistan has this tendency of topping charts for other keywords related to sex.

This information and screens are provided by Google Trends that analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms entered, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time.

To rank the top regions, cities, or languages, Google Trends first looks at a sample of all Google searches to determine the areas or languages from which they received the most searches for the first term. Then, for those top cities, Google Trends calculates the ratio of searches for the term coming from each city divided by total Google searches coming from the same city.

The city ranking and the bar charts alongside each city name both represent this ratio.

Google Trends uses IP address information from server logs to make a best guess about where queries originated.

Women in their 30s & 40s More Sexual than Younger Women

Men who cheat on their spouses have always enjoyed an expedient explanation: Evolution made me do it.

Many articles have explored the theory that men sleep around because evolution has programmed them to seek fertile (and, conveniently, younger) wombs.

But what about women? If it’s really true that evolution can cause a man to risk his marriage, what effect does it have on women’s sexuality?

A new journal article suggests that evolutionary forces also push women to be more sexual, although in some unexpected ways.

University of Texas psychologist David Buss wrote the article, which appears in the July issue of Personality and Individual Differences, with the help of three grad students.

This study found that women in their 30s and early 40s are significantly more sexual than younger women. Women ages 27 through 45 report not only having more sexual fantasies (and more intense sexual fantasies) than women ages 18 through 26; the older women also report having more sex, period. And they are more willing than younger women to have casual sex, even one-night stands. In other words, despite the girls-gone-wild image of promiscuous college women, it is women in their middle years who are most sexually industrious.

By contrast, men’s sexual interest and output, usually measured by reported number of orgasms per week, peaks in the teen years and then settles to a steady level (an average of three orgasms per week) for most of their lives.

Most men remain sexually active into their 70s.

Women’s sexual ardor declines precipitously after menopause.

Why would women be more sexually active in their middle years than in their teens and 20s? Buss and his students say evolution has encouraged women to be more sexually active as their fertility begins to decline and as menopause approaches.

Here’s how their theory works:

Our female ancestors would have grown accustomed to watching many of their children — perhaps as many as half — die of various diseases, starvation, warfare and so on before being able to have kids of their own. This trauma left a psychological imprint to bear as many children as possible. Becoming pregnant is much easier for women and girls in their teens and early 20s — so much easier that they need not spend much time having sex.

However, after the mid-20s, the lizard-brain impulse to have more kids faces a stark reality: it’s harder and harder to get pregnant as a woman’s remaining eggs age. And so women in their middle years respond by seeking more and more sex.

To test this theory, Buss and his students asked 827 women to complete questionnaires about their sexual habits. And, indeed, they found that women who had passed their peak fertility years but not quite reached menopause were the most sexually active. This age group — 27 through 45 — reported having significantly more sex than the two other age groups in the study, 18 through 26 and 46 and up. Women in their middle years were also more likely than the younger women to fantasize about someone other than their current partner. The new findings are consistent with those of an earlier Buss paper, from 2002, which found that women in their early 30s feel more lustful and report less abstinence than women in other age groups. In both studies, these findings held true for both partnered and single women, meaning that married women in their 30s and early 40s tend to have more sex than married women in their early 20s; ditto for single women. Also, whether the women were mothers didn’t matter. Only age had a strong affect on women’s reported sexual interest and behavior.

And yet there are a few flaws with the data in the new paper. Chiefly: some three-quarters of the participants in the study were recruited on craigslist.com, a website where many go to seek hook-ups, meaning there’s a self-selection problem with the sample. (The other participants were students at the University of Texas in Austin.) The authors also note that there are some alternative explanations for why women in their 30s and early 40s might be more sexual. Many of them may simply be more comfortable with sex than women in their teens and early 20s. Still, that raises the question of why they are more comfortable: perhaps evolution programmed that comfort.

Buss is the author of the groundbreaking book The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating, which is now in its fourth edition, and he has become strongly associated with evolutionary explanations for sexual behavior. His theories explain why men can be cads — and, it turns out, why women can be cougars.

Stoned to Death for Being Seen Together

A local jirga of Kala Dhaka, a tribal area that has recently been declared a settled district, has decided to stone to death a couple for having illicit relations. One wonders if this is the only couple in that area, and in the country, having illicit relations. Who knows that they may be totally ignorant and some Taliban may be settle his personal score with the couple.

The jirga was convened when some locals alleged that they had seen the said man and woman together in the fields of Madakhail area; the word `seen’ should be noted here. They were not having sex but just together. The jirga issued a decree that the couple should be stoned to death. However, the man managed to escape after the jirga announced its decision. His house was set on fire on the order of the jirga.

After the escape of the man, the jirga held another session and upheld its earlier decree and shifted woman to a secret place in Manjakot area. Some religious scholars of the area, who were against the jirga’s decision, declared the woman innocent.

The woman, who belonged to Karachi, had married a man with physical disability seven years ago. She is mother of three children aging between two to six years.

It was the first jirga, which issued the decree after the government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa declared Kala Dhaka as a separate district and named it Torghar in last week of June 2010.

Meanwhile, another jirga in the same area threatened to launch protest movement if district administration allowed cable operators to work in Baffa area of Mansehra. This goes to show the writ of our governments and nullify the tall claims of our paindoo Interior Minister.

”If the administration wants to maintain peace in Baffa, it should ask the cable operators to wrap up the network as it will spread vulgarity in the area,” said a member of the jirga.

The situation is still tense in Baffa after the religious scholars accompanied by locals stormed the office of cable network and beat up its employees.