Unfortunately, it's not all wine and roses when it comes to love. Ecstasy, euphoria, elation and contentment may be accompanied by jealousy, rage, rejection, and hatred.
Falling in love may have evolved because people who focus their attention on a single ideal partner save time and energy, therefore improve their chances of survival and reproduction. Unfortunately, this also means people are pre-disposed to terrible suffering when jilted by their beloved.
Painful emotions develop when the reward centres of the brain, associated with the dopamine high of falling in love, fail to get their hit. Paradoxically when we get dumped we tend to love back even harder, as the brain networks and chemicals associated with love increase. First we protest and attempt to win the beloved back. Panic also kicks in as we feel something akin to the separation anxiety experiences by young mammals abandoned by their mothers.
Then love can turn to anger and hate, as the regions associated with reward are closely linked to rage in the brain. Finally when jilted lovers are resigned to their fate, they will often enter into prolonged periods of depression and despair.
These negative emotions can spawn anything from obsession and domestic violence to stalking and even murder of supposed loved ones.
While such behaviours may be classed as pathological, and perhaps rare, the truth is that they are closer to home than we dare contemplate. Passion's thrills resemble obsessive-compulsive disorder, but in some people, love can conjure up something much more sinister.
The chances of a relationship succeeding would seem to be difficult to predict, but one study suggests that divorce may be partially genetically predetermined. There are even mathematical formulas for predicting the chances of divorce - and for equitably dividing up possessions.
Nevertheless, psychologists have some simple tips for making our relationships last.
Sex is something you do, sexuality is something you are.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Love evolution
The various forms of love probably have a common evolutionary beginning, so where are scientists looking? Maternal love seems a good place to start. Biologically it makes perfect sense. In animals which help their offspring to survive, the bond is essential to passing the mother's genes on to the next generation.
Again oxytocin may have an important role in the development of a bond between a mother and child. Another hormone, prolactin, may prime both mothers and fathers for parenthood.
Unlike maternal love, monogamous bonds between males and females are pretty rare in mammals. Less than 5% are monogamous, and there is no clear pattern to help explain why it occasionally appears. Monogamy, it appears, is mostly for the birds.
It seems that in those rare mammals that do practise it, evolution stole the biochemistry and neural tricks that bond mother to infant and reinstalled them, so as to bind male and female together. One study of prairie voles shows that a species could be turned from promiscuous to devoted with a change in a single gene related to vasopressin.
Whatever romantic love's origins and purpose, long-term relationships are certainly important in keeping us content and happy.
And love is not only restricted to partnerships between men and women. Though gay relationships are different in some ways, they could be the glue that holds societies together.
Again oxytocin may have an important role in the development of a bond between a mother and child. Another hormone, prolactin, may prime both mothers and fathers for parenthood.
Unlike maternal love, monogamous bonds between males and females are pretty rare in mammals. Less than 5% are monogamous, and there is no clear pattern to help explain why it occasionally appears. Monogamy, it appears, is mostly for the birds.
It seems that in those rare mammals that do practise it, evolution stole the biochemistry and neural tricks that bond mother to infant and reinstalled them, so as to bind male and female together. One study of prairie voles shows that a species could be turned from promiscuous to devoted with a change in a single gene related to vasopressin.
Whatever romantic love's origins and purpose, long-term relationships are certainly important in keeping us content and happy.
And love is not only restricted to partnerships between men and women. Though gay relationships are different in some ways, they could be the glue that holds societies together.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Gisele Bündchen: Earth Mother
The most famous model in the world and the most famous quarterback in America live in a small building in the center of Boston. A tiny elevator opens into a massive loft. Patricia, Gisele's shorter, blonde twin sister, greets me with “Don't look at her.” She's pointing down at Lua, a bull-terrier mix who just might bite.
I can't see Gisele Bündchen. In a wide living room, between two slate fireplaces, cradling a six-week-old baby in a deep armchair, is a slight, fine-boned woman. With skinny thighs in taupe jeans, socks that barely cover the ankles, UGG mules, and a cotton sweater, this is not the towering Amazon queen of fashion famous for her glare, mane, and swagger. She seems as ethereal as Audrey Hepburn when she was Rima the bird girl in Green Mansions, as expressive as Julia Roberts in mid-grin, as unearthly as a Na'vi. Her hair is pulled back into a careful pillbox of a bun, and her ears stick out a little. The pinup goddess who was the emblem of Victoria's Secret is breast-feeding her baby and a little embarrassed about exposing her breast in front of me.
She talks in a low, grainy voice with a soft accent in a rush of words, interrupts her own flow to ask the baby, “O que é que foi?”—“What is it?” To which the baby happily replies in a well-modulated series of gurgles.
The baby is called Benjamin Rein: “I wanted him to be called River because I wanted something always flowing, immortal. My husband said, ‘There's no way we're going to call him River.’ But my father's name is Reinoldo, so it's a homage to him. And it's like water.”
Benjamin was born at home, in warm water in a deep bathtub that overlooks the Charles River. “I wanted to experience the transformation,” says Gisele. A midwife friend of hers came in from Brazil as did her mother; her husband was there too. Gisele meditated through the birth. “It was the most amazing experience of my life, feeling him come through my body. And once he was born, I never felt so empowered as looking at him and thinking, Oh, my God, we did it together!”
She was up the next day, cooking and wandering around the vast apartment where her mother is staying in the guest room to help out—“I don't trust anyone else with Benjamin.” She's regained her figure, apparently instantly and with no more exercise than some yoga on a mat in the living room. “I think it's muscle memory,” she says. Gisele has always been in shape: Born one of six girls in the German-speaking hamlet of Horizontina in southern Brazil, she spent her childhood outdoors, “like a little monkey, jumping from tree to tree in bare feet.” An athlete, she was captain of her volleyball team and hasn't stopped. “I did kung fu up until two weeks before Benjamin was born, and yoga three days a week. I think a lot of people get pregnant and decide they can turn into garbage disposals. I was mindful about what I ate, and I gained only 30 pounds.”
Her idea of family is a big family. “I'm so lucky to have my little munchkin, and I have two because I also have John.” John, a.k.a. Jack, is her stepson, now two and a half, born to Bridget Moynahan after Moynahan's breakup with Tom Brady. The press went wild last year when Gisele said she loved Jack as her own. He spent the end of the Christmas holiday with them. “We don't see him all the time, unfortunately, but we're building a place in Los Angeles to be closer to him.” For the last three years, she's vanished with Brady each winter for a month into her house in the jungle in Costa Rica.
At 29, the last and richest of the supermodels has given in to her preference for the inner life. Gisele has sold her New York town house. “I'm really a Bostonian now,” she says, with all the sober, studious implications of that move: “I get to work on all my projects and have time to immerse myself in all the things I'm so passionate about.” Within the year she will have launched three beauty products designed to alter the self-image of young women—a line called Sejaa. Seja means “to be” in Portuguese. She added the extra a because, she says, “words have a vibration, and aaah! is an exhalation, what you feel when you let go.”
She's been an activist for years: In 2003, having spent time with Amazonian Indians who were being sickened by runoff waters poisoned as a result of deforestation, she arranged with the Brazilian firm Grendene to produce a collection of flip-flops under her name. The profits go toward replanting the Amazonian forest. That endeavor still goes on, and so far 25,000 trees have been replanted. With her family she started Projeto Água Limpa to clean up the river near Horizontina. An ecologically conscious comic book is also in the making: Gisele and the Green Team. Recently named a U.N. goodwill ambassador for environmental issues, Gisele is working those very problems into the story lines of the comic, whose profits will go to her foundation, the Luz. The foundation sponsors everything from yoga in schools to reforestation. Her Web site is already full of environmental advice, much of it dispensed by a cartoon version of Vida the Yorkie, her lapdog. Bündchen is contained, discreet, probably strategic but supremely elegant in her behavior. Not once in three hours does she mention that she has just given the Red Cross $1.5 million for Haiti.
Gisele has not left the apartment for six weeks. “Too cold,” she says, pointing her chin at the winter rain beyond the window. A fire crackles in one of the fireplaces; the possibly dangerous dog Lua settles at my feet; Vida the Yorkie flops onto the carpet. Patricia brings tea and cashew clusters; she is Gisele's Brazilian agent and also runs the Web site, and she has come up for a few days to meet the baby. The place feels intimate, safe. Gisele's mother is napping; Brady, recuperating from a knee operation, is at a charity event for the Boston Centers for Youth & Families, where he'll alarm the press by announcing, “We're all way overpaid.” He'll be home in two hours.
Bündchen kept herself out of the public eye for months. “I felt like my pregnancy was a sacred moment for me. I stayed in Boston and I didn't work apart from the contracts I have, and then I only let them use my face.”
Today she left the apartment and the baby for the first time to pose for one of her advertising clients, which explains the chignon. “I got to the studio and I felt like I was E.T.—whoa, what's going on? Hair and makeup? I hadn't looked at myself in a mirror for a month and a half. I'd been in my house, in a cocoon with my kids, my husband, my dogs. Usually, as I walk through the door into that atmosphere, I already feel different. There's a button that goes On and I'm On. And when I go On, there is almost no me; there is just a character who is doing all this. This time it wasn't like that. I've been really inside with my husband and my baby, and everything is changed. But the client still deserves respect and professionalism, and I got a little bit concerned because I wasn't feeling it. Makeup was done, hair was done, and I looked in the mirror and I still wasn't seeing the person who's a model.”
“Who was the woman you saw in the mirror?” I ask.
“For the first time, I think I actually saw me—the inside—instead of the persona.”
The persona turned up for the second photo, much to the relief of the photographer David Sims and the Brazilian client.
Gisele started early; by fifteen she was in a “model apartment” in New York, or folded into airline coach seats to go to model in Italy, France, Japan. There's a small tattoo of a star inside her left wrist. “My grandmother told me and my sisters that everyone has a special star. I looked at my star every night before bed, just like brushing my teeth. When I came to New York and I opened the window of the thirty-fifth-floor apartment, there's light pollution and fog, and I couldn't see my star. So I drew it on my wrist with a pen, but it kept washing away. Then I went to a tattoo parlor on Second Avenue and had it done. It was something I had been missing, and now, no matter where I went, it came with me.”
She consciously created the Gisele persona as she started to become a star herself. “I was in the fashion shows in Milan, I was seventeen, I was doing like 100 shows. People were asking, ‘How does it feel to be the model of the moment?’ It was hard for me to answer as myself. I barely spoke English. I thought, I have to give my best because they trust me with that. I invented this other person, and she could do everything. She wasn't afraid; she was able to be ballsy and risky and sexy or androgynous. She was bold. I had to believe in myself as this person that was strong, up-front, invincible, and positive, who knew what she was doing, even though I really didn't.
“I've worked for fourteen years, but I don't think anybody in the business really knows me, because there is that other person.”
Gisele Bündchen's private life has kept its mystery, and she's let her avatar, the übermodel, take all the flashbulbs. Some years ago, when she felt that her life was nothing more than “get up, take pictures, go to sleep, get up, take pictures,” she took off six months. She also logged on to Amazon.com and typed in SPIRITUAL BOOKS, which led to a passion for the writings of Miguel Ruiz, which taught her to rely on her own instinct: “The more you trust your intuition, the more empowered you become, the stronger you become, and the happier you become.”
Three years ago, when Gisele met Tom Brady, she moved up to Boston to be with him. It was a vocational as well as an emotional turning point.
“I'm a person who normally works 300 days a year, and here I am in Boston in this apartment and Tom's playing, and what do I do here? On my Web site, a lot of girls were asking me questions about feeling awkward. I wanted to work with girls who were fourteen to sixteen.” She wanted to be heard and chose the Massachusetts Alliance of Portuguese Speakers—“They take care of girls from shelters, girls who have been abused. I came up with a nine-week program and went to talk to them about empowerment and self-esteem.”
It was a shock.
“I thought I was going to be able to save them, guide them. When I got there they were like, ‘Who are you?’ There were a lot of Latina and black girls. In Brazil, everyone is a mixture, and no one thinks about it. In America, maybe you have more problems with that. It took me a week or two just to get them to sit down with me and talk. I had my yoga teacher come up from New York to teach them yoga. I wanted to share something, but I ended up realizing that you cannot save anybody. I forced it, and it didn't quite go through.”
Sejaa was born of that frustration, as a way for Bündchen to impart some of what she has learned, but by subliminal means.
“I wanted to teach girls to love themselves and take care of their bodies. What is the first thing you see every morning? Your face! What do you put every day on your face? Cream! I have made the simplest, purest cream—an everyday cream—but it comes with an affirmation.”
Her manufacturers, she says, “were ready to kill me. I wanted the cream to be organic—they explained that if it's organic, it's alive, and that means it can't survive for a long time.” The products are now called “natural,” the ingredients are held to a high standard of purity, and the preservative is coconut oil.
She also wanted a mud mask. A real mud mask.
“When I was a teenager, I had pimples—oh, God, every time someone looked at my face I thought they were looking at my pimples. I put mud on my face to dry them out, and it worked.
“I can do all this because I'm financing it on my own terms, and if I want to give away 5 percent of everything I make, no one can tell me not to.”
Sejaa will not be sold in stores but on a Web site, to create a community—“So I can give my little tips, and it's not me telling anyone to have an awakening.”
There's a noise in the front hall.
“It's my hubbeeeeeee!” says Gisele.
Into the dark room comes Tom Brady. He's tall, with a deep voice, the face of a young boy, and longish hair. Wearing a dark-blue zipped-up sweater, he treads the carpet with sweetly controlled impatience. Vida the Yorkie wakes from her slumber and goes berserk. Some swift Tom Brady moves prevent Vida from pissing with joy on the carpet, but the interview is going to be cut short. Patricia brings in the packaging for Sejaa, a recycled-cardboard box with an interesting sliding tab that reveals different—empowering—keywords behind it, and inside, three products: the day cream, a night cream, and the mud mask, along with a bamboo washcloth.
Gisele hands Benjamin to Patricia, rises, and unfolds, all length and purpose, and gets me moving: I'm whisked across the hall to receive a bunch of Miguel Ruiz books in the open kitchen, taken to another floor to see the baby crib and the vast collection of essential oils that have gone into Sejaa, then kissed and hugged before she bathes Benjamin.
There are two secrets, says Gisele on parting:
“The first is wake up in the morning and be grateful you are here, alive and healthy. And the second is: Give.”
I follow Patricia's cowboy boots back up the stairs. The rain is still pelting down, black and icy. “How do I call a cab?” I ask.
No need for a cab. Tom Brady drives me back to my hotel
I can't see Gisele Bündchen. In a wide living room, between two slate fireplaces, cradling a six-week-old baby in a deep armchair, is a slight, fine-boned woman. With skinny thighs in taupe jeans, socks that barely cover the ankles, UGG mules, and a cotton sweater, this is not the towering Amazon queen of fashion famous for her glare, mane, and swagger. She seems as ethereal as Audrey Hepburn when she was Rima the bird girl in Green Mansions, as expressive as Julia Roberts in mid-grin, as unearthly as a Na'vi. Her hair is pulled back into a careful pillbox of a bun, and her ears stick out a little. The pinup goddess who was the emblem of Victoria's Secret is breast-feeding her baby and a little embarrassed about exposing her breast in front of me.
She talks in a low, grainy voice with a soft accent in a rush of words, interrupts her own flow to ask the baby, “O que é que foi?”—“What is it?” To which the baby happily replies in a well-modulated series of gurgles.
The baby is called Benjamin Rein: “I wanted him to be called River because I wanted something always flowing, immortal. My husband said, ‘There's no way we're going to call him River.’ But my father's name is Reinoldo, so it's a homage to him. And it's like water.”
Benjamin was born at home, in warm water in a deep bathtub that overlooks the Charles River. “I wanted to experience the transformation,” says Gisele. A midwife friend of hers came in from Brazil as did her mother; her husband was there too. Gisele meditated through the birth. “It was the most amazing experience of my life, feeling him come through my body. And once he was born, I never felt so empowered as looking at him and thinking, Oh, my God, we did it together!”
She was up the next day, cooking and wandering around the vast apartment where her mother is staying in the guest room to help out—“I don't trust anyone else with Benjamin.” She's regained her figure, apparently instantly and with no more exercise than some yoga on a mat in the living room. “I think it's muscle memory,” she says. Gisele has always been in shape: Born one of six girls in the German-speaking hamlet of Horizontina in southern Brazil, she spent her childhood outdoors, “like a little monkey, jumping from tree to tree in bare feet.” An athlete, she was captain of her volleyball team and hasn't stopped. “I did kung fu up until two weeks before Benjamin was born, and yoga three days a week. I think a lot of people get pregnant and decide they can turn into garbage disposals. I was mindful about what I ate, and I gained only 30 pounds.”
Her idea of family is a big family. “I'm so lucky to have my little munchkin, and I have two because I also have John.” John, a.k.a. Jack, is her stepson, now two and a half, born to Bridget Moynahan after Moynahan's breakup with Tom Brady. The press went wild last year when Gisele said she loved Jack as her own. He spent the end of the Christmas holiday with them. “We don't see him all the time, unfortunately, but we're building a place in Los Angeles to be closer to him.” For the last three years, she's vanished with Brady each winter for a month into her house in the jungle in Costa Rica.
At 29, the last and richest of the supermodels has given in to her preference for the inner life. Gisele has sold her New York town house. “I'm really a Bostonian now,” she says, with all the sober, studious implications of that move: “I get to work on all my projects and have time to immerse myself in all the things I'm so passionate about.” Within the year she will have launched three beauty products designed to alter the self-image of young women—a line called Sejaa. Seja means “to be” in Portuguese. She added the extra a because, she says, “words have a vibration, and aaah! is an exhalation, what you feel when you let go.”
She's been an activist for years: In 2003, having spent time with Amazonian Indians who were being sickened by runoff waters poisoned as a result of deforestation, she arranged with the Brazilian firm Grendene to produce a collection of flip-flops under her name. The profits go toward replanting the Amazonian forest. That endeavor still goes on, and so far 25,000 trees have been replanted. With her family she started Projeto Água Limpa to clean up the river near Horizontina. An ecologically conscious comic book is also in the making: Gisele and the Green Team. Recently named a U.N. goodwill ambassador for environmental issues, Gisele is working those very problems into the story lines of the comic, whose profits will go to her foundation, the Luz. The foundation sponsors everything from yoga in schools to reforestation. Her Web site is already full of environmental advice, much of it dispensed by a cartoon version of Vida the Yorkie, her lapdog. Bündchen is contained, discreet, probably strategic but supremely elegant in her behavior. Not once in three hours does she mention that she has just given the Red Cross $1.5 million for Haiti.
Gisele has not left the apartment for six weeks. “Too cold,” she says, pointing her chin at the winter rain beyond the window. A fire crackles in one of the fireplaces; the possibly dangerous dog Lua settles at my feet; Vida the Yorkie flops onto the carpet. Patricia brings tea and cashew clusters; she is Gisele's Brazilian agent and also runs the Web site, and she has come up for a few days to meet the baby. The place feels intimate, safe. Gisele's mother is napping; Brady, recuperating from a knee operation, is at a charity event for the Boston Centers for Youth & Families, where he'll alarm the press by announcing, “We're all way overpaid.” He'll be home in two hours.
Bündchen kept herself out of the public eye for months. “I felt like my pregnancy was a sacred moment for me. I stayed in Boston and I didn't work apart from the contracts I have, and then I only let them use my face.”
Today she left the apartment and the baby for the first time to pose for one of her advertising clients, which explains the chignon. “I got to the studio and I felt like I was E.T.—whoa, what's going on? Hair and makeup? I hadn't looked at myself in a mirror for a month and a half. I'd been in my house, in a cocoon with my kids, my husband, my dogs. Usually, as I walk through the door into that atmosphere, I already feel different. There's a button that goes On and I'm On. And when I go On, there is almost no me; there is just a character who is doing all this. This time it wasn't like that. I've been really inside with my husband and my baby, and everything is changed. But the client still deserves respect and professionalism, and I got a little bit concerned because I wasn't feeling it. Makeup was done, hair was done, and I looked in the mirror and I still wasn't seeing the person who's a model.”
“Who was the woman you saw in the mirror?” I ask.
“For the first time, I think I actually saw me—the inside—instead of the persona.”
The persona turned up for the second photo, much to the relief of the photographer David Sims and the Brazilian client.
Gisele started early; by fifteen she was in a “model apartment” in New York, or folded into airline coach seats to go to model in Italy, France, Japan. There's a small tattoo of a star inside her left wrist. “My grandmother told me and my sisters that everyone has a special star. I looked at my star every night before bed, just like brushing my teeth. When I came to New York and I opened the window of the thirty-fifth-floor apartment, there's light pollution and fog, and I couldn't see my star. So I drew it on my wrist with a pen, but it kept washing away. Then I went to a tattoo parlor on Second Avenue and had it done. It was something I had been missing, and now, no matter where I went, it came with me.”
She consciously created the Gisele persona as she started to become a star herself. “I was in the fashion shows in Milan, I was seventeen, I was doing like 100 shows. People were asking, ‘How does it feel to be the model of the moment?’ It was hard for me to answer as myself. I barely spoke English. I thought, I have to give my best because they trust me with that. I invented this other person, and she could do everything. She wasn't afraid; she was able to be ballsy and risky and sexy or androgynous. She was bold. I had to believe in myself as this person that was strong, up-front, invincible, and positive, who knew what she was doing, even though I really didn't.
“I've worked for fourteen years, but I don't think anybody in the business really knows me, because there is that other person.”
Gisele Bündchen's private life has kept its mystery, and she's let her avatar, the übermodel, take all the flashbulbs. Some years ago, when she felt that her life was nothing more than “get up, take pictures, go to sleep, get up, take pictures,” she took off six months. She also logged on to Amazon.com and typed in SPIRITUAL BOOKS, which led to a passion for the writings of Miguel Ruiz, which taught her to rely on her own instinct: “The more you trust your intuition, the more empowered you become, the stronger you become, and the happier you become.”
Three years ago, when Gisele met Tom Brady, she moved up to Boston to be with him. It was a vocational as well as an emotional turning point.
“I'm a person who normally works 300 days a year, and here I am in Boston in this apartment and Tom's playing, and what do I do here? On my Web site, a lot of girls were asking me questions about feeling awkward. I wanted to work with girls who were fourteen to sixteen.” She wanted to be heard and chose the Massachusetts Alliance of Portuguese Speakers—“They take care of girls from shelters, girls who have been abused. I came up with a nine-week program and went to talk to them about empowerment and self-esteem.”
It was a shock.
“I thought I was going to be able to save them, guide them. When I got there they were like, ‘Who are you?’ There were a lot of Latina and black girls. In Brazil, everyone is a mixture, and no one thinks about it. In America, maybe you have more problems with that. It took me a week or two just to get them to sit down with me and talk. I had my yoga teacher come up from New York to teach them yoga. I wanted to share something, but I ended up realizing that you cannot save anybody. I forced it, and it didn't quite go through.”
Sejaa was born of that frustration, as a way for Bündchen to impart some of what she has learned, but by subliminal means.
“I wanted to teach girls to love themselves and take care of their bodies. What is the first thing you see every morning? Your face! What do you put every day on your face? Cream! I have made the simplest, purest cream—an everyday cream—but it comes with an affirmation.”
Her manufacturers, she says, “were ready to kill me. I wanted the cream to be organic—they explained that if it's organic, it's alive, and that means it can't survive for a long time.” The products are now called “natural,” the ingredients are held to a high standard of purity, and the preservative is coconut oil.
She also wanted a mud mask. A real mud mask.
“When I was a teenager, I had pimples—oh, God, every time someone looked at my face I thought they were looking at my pimples. I put mud on my face to dry them out, and it worked.
“I can do all this because I'm financing it on my own terms, and if I want to give away 5 percent of everything I make, no one can tell me not to.”
Sejaa will not be sold in stores but on a Web site, to create a community—“So I can give my little tips, and it's not me telling anyone to have an awakening.”
There's a noise in the front hall.
“It's my hubbeeeeeee!” says Gisele.
Into the dark room comes Tom Brady. He's tall, with a deep voice, the face of a young boy, and longish hair. Wearing a dark-blue zipped-up sweater, he treads the carpet with sweetly controlled impatience. Vida the Yorkie wakes from her slumber and goes berserk. Some swift Tom Brady moves prevent Vida from pissing with joy on the carpet, but the interview is going to be cut short. Patricia brings in the packaging for Sejaa, a recycled-cardboard box with an interesting sliding tab that reveals different—empowering—keywords behind it, and inside, three products: the day cream, a night cream, and the mud mask, along with a bamboo washcloth.
Gisele hands Benjamin to Patricia, rises, and unfolds, all length and purpose, and gets me moving: I'm whisked across the hall to receive a bunch of Miguel Ruiz books in the open kitchen, taken to another floor to see the baby crib and the vast collection of essential oils that have gone into Sejaa, then kissed and hugged before she bathes Benjamin.
There are two secrets, says Gisele on parting:
“The first is wake up in the morning and be grateful you are here, alive and healthy. And the second is: Give.”
I follow Patricia's cowboy boots back up the stairs. The rain is still pelting down, black and icy. “How do I call a cab?” I ask.
No need for a cab. Tom Brady drives me back to my hotel
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Why Do Some Men Deny Masturbating?
Gay Engaged Guy (Joel Derfner, author of Swish): Are you serious? I've never met a man who denied masturbating. Ever. In this or any previous life. If I did, I would get the hell away from him as soon as possible, because the only explanation would be that he was an ax murderer with a shrine to Brittany Murphy in his bedroom, with someone's severed head on top.
Straight Single Guy (L.A. Chris): Comedians who break taboos talk about it, but the rest of us try to avoid the subject. In school you could never have admitted to buffing the banana, because it would have been like telling the whole 8th grade class you have body lice and skid marks. Goodbye friends, hello nicknames! In hindsight it seems like giving yourself a low-five would have been something to brag about -- like growing facial hair -- but we didn't get any guidance from parents, friends, or the media. Maybe it's religious shame still choking our society: on TV, everyone's getting laid, but nobody jerks off. So until that taboo is lifted, we'll continue to deny that we punch the munchkin, butter the corn, shake hands with the midget, or pat the robertson.
Straight Married Guy (Figleaf): Until maybe very recently, nearly all depictions of male masturbation have made it seem like the most disgustingly pervy, unhealthy, immature, and (worst of all) desperate thing a man can do. For instance, think about the archetypical dirty old man in a trench coat, or the loser characters in Fast Times at Ridgemont High or Something About Mary. When men in relationships do it, they or their partners often see it as "cheating." Theologically, masturbation has been held to be a worse sin (a mortal sin with automatic damnation) than rape (a venal sin that can be repented!). Medically, masturbation was until very recently believed, no kidding, to lead to insanity and early death. Legally, it's historically been punished the same way sodomy was -- with floggings, branding, and even hanging! Politically, just a few years ago the U.S. Surgeon General was fired for suggesting it was okay for adolescents to learn about in sex ed. Even today, the fact that every heterosexual porn scene ends with the male actors rubbing out a "money shot" doesn't make us feel more like admitting it. And that's just the short answer! In retrospect, all that hoopla to discourage male masturbation seems foolish, as does the similar discouragement women got. Even though the stigma's evaporating pretty quickly, it's understandable that a lot of men -- and a lot of women -- are still reluctant to admit to it.
Straight Single Guy (L.A. Chris): Comedians who break taboos talk about it, but the rest of us try to avoid the subject. In school you could never have admitted to buffing the banana, because it would have been like telling the whole 8th grade class you have body lice and skid marks. Goodbye friends, hello nicknames! In hindsight it seems like giving yourself a low-five would have been something to brag about -- like growing facial hair -- but we didn't get any guidance from parents, friends, or the media. Maybe it's religious shame still choking our society: on TV, everyone's getting laid, but nobody jerks off. So until that taboo is lifted, we'll continue to deny that we punch the munchkin, butter the corn, shake hands with the midget, or pat the robertson.
Straight Married Guy (Figleaf): Until maybe very recently, nearly all depictions of male masturbation have made it seem like the most disgustingly pervy, unhealthy, immature, and (worst of all) desperate thing a man can do. For instance, think about the archetypical dirty old man in a trench coat, or the loser characters in Fast Times at Ridgemont High or Something About Mary. When men in relationships do it, they or their partners often see it as "cheating." Theologically, masturbation has been held to be a worse sin (a mortal sin with automatic damnation) than rape (a venal sin that can be repented!). Medically, masturbation was until very recently believed, no kidding, to lead to insanity and early death. Legally, it's historically been punished the same way sodomy was -- with floggings, branding, and even hanging! Politically, just a few years ago the U.S. Surgeon General was fired for suggesting it was okay for adolescents to learn about in sex ed. Even today, the fact that every heterosexual porn scene ends with the male actors rubbing out a "money shot" doesn't make us feel more like admitting it. And that's just the short answer! In retrospect, all that hoopla to discourage male masturbation seems foolish, as does the similar discouragement women got. Even though the stigma's evaporating pretty quickly, it's understandable that a lot of men -- and a lot of women -- are still reluctant to admit to it.
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