By: Rebecca Torosian
Salon, Oct 31, 2012

The ad in New York magazine said they needed women who were “bright, articulate and enjoyed helping people.” A little skimpy on information, but I decided to call. I’d just returned from an eight-month dance-teaching gig in Brazil, and I had no idea what to do next.

I know many women wouldn’t take the job they were advertising, but I’d had my own sexual trauma in the past, and needed healing from that. Since I had spent many years in self-destruct mode, I wanted to use my need for sexual connection to help others. Finally, I had my answer: working as a sex surrogate.

Like Helen Hunt’s character in “The Sessions,” a sex surrogate is a therapist who helps people overcome their bedroom dysfunctions. Yes, it involves sleeping with strangers, but unlike prostitution, these men weren’t in search of a good time. They were in pain and filled with shame. They had tried everything. Usually, a sex surrogate is a last resort. And over time, they taught me more about intimacy and vulnerability than I could have imagined.

It wasn’t always easy to get close to these men. Bruce was a limo driver, and though he was warm and engaging, he was so unkempt that I worried I’d have trouble being intimate. (I’ve changed the men’s names and identifying details to protect them.) I felt guilty about this, because it was a point of pride that I didn’t judge my clients, but Bruce was a challenge in this department. He was in his mid- to late 30s, bald except for some fuzzy patches, and very heavy. His shirt was always halfway tucked in and had food stains on it. Most of his weight was in his stomach, which lay over the top of his pants.

But my heart went out to the guy. With a sheepish grin, he would sit awkwardly on the couch and describe his problems. He had little experience with women and knew almost nothing about female anatomy and how it worked.

So I taught Bruce how to move his hips in a thrusting motion. Starting with our clothes on, I demonstrated for Bruce simulated intercourse positions: doggy style, female on top, side to side. He was so confused about how to find the entrance to the vagina in rear entry. “It’s all turned around now,” he said.

At first, I was astonished to find that men like him existed. I always thought men were born with an innate understanding of how to have sex. But what I discovered over the years was just how wrong I was. I’ve learned that men are extremely sensitive about being able to “perform” and that they often have no idea how their bodies work. They are terrified that women will find out they don’t know what they are doing, and they will be humiliated and shamed.

It’s been a subject of yours for a while, and it’s remarkable just how much the culture of pornography has changed even since you’ve been writing about it.

In my early novels there are references to magazines, which seems quaint now. It didn’t really exist, except pictures of young girls showing their breasts. And then there was the breakthrough with pubic hair, 1970, I think. But it just felt illegal. And now it’s—

It’s sex education.

That’s how they get their sex education now. Watching Desiree Fairweather and some tattooed ex-convict in high-definition close-up. I shudder to think what my girls have certainly already seen. My oldest daughter—I had many candid conversations with her when she was in her twenties, about how certain things were expected, just taken from pornography, which, lest we forget, is a very misogynistic form. Why does every sexual act end with something that girls hate? You know, the facial. When I wrote a long piece about pornography, I hung out with this porn actress, who was incredibly bright, and I said, How many girls, even here in San Fernando Valley, how many of them like that? She said, Well, I like it. I like being spanked and spat on, I like that kind of thing. But she said about 5 percent like it—5 percent don’t mind it. And 95 percent hate it. And yet it’s the sine qua non of the sex scene.

Amateur porn is now a much bigger part of the diet, and yet it’s not any less misogynistic and not any less directed by male desire, even if it’s couples making it.

They talk about pornography becoming mainstream and accepted. And I thought, no, it never will, until masturbation is mainstream and accepted and cool. Women will never assent to it. And the reason is because their great power, gift, procreation, is just ignored in pornography—there’s no talk about getting pregnant, “Don’t make me pregnant.” There’s none of that. It’s as if procreation were caused by something else entirely, like sneezing. But I think that women are coming around to it. There’s a review by a woman I read the other day of that 50 Shades of Grey book. Last sentence is, I wouldn’t wank to it, but it’s not bad. And I thought, Christ, that’s sort of lad’s-mag talk—sort of more male than male.

Ron moved from London to Los Angeles to open Doc Johnson. Packaging he had seen in Europe he reproduced in America. “We were still light-years behind the Europeans,” he says, but now Doc Johnson named and packed its vibrators like any other piece of merchandise. The business grew. In two years’ time it expanded from 1,500 square feet to a new property of 33,000 square feet. He tapped into distribution networks like Sturman’s, flooding the American market with more and more adult novelties. When X-rated DVDs appeared in adult bookstores in the ’90s, and VHS tapes vanished, fresh retail space opened up. “And that,” says Ron, “is when the business really took off.”

Neither Chad nor Ron can explain what sells and what doesn’t. The company doesn’t do demographic research. Autumn is strong for sex toy sales; summer is slow. Purple vibrators sell well; orange vibrators do not. Classic eight-inch dongs are always a favorite, and the new transsexual Wendy Williams casting—well, the jury is still out on that, but if Howard Stern mentions your Pocket Rocket on his radio program, you’ve got a winner.

Each year Doc Johnson removes as many as 300 items from its catalog and adds that many more. Most sex toys are designed and manufactured in China, where they get knocked off just as Louis Vuitton handbags do. Ron, however, is proud that much of his company’s product is American made, boldfacing the claim across packaging. About 25 percent of Doc Johnson’s items ship from China, but every product poured with rubber or silicone is made in North Hollywood—ironed for smoothness, powdered for feel, woven with hair for effect. “It’s our bread and butter,” says Ron. He’s worried that Chad may not share his attachment to American products after he retires. Ron grew up in Cleveland in the 1950s when it was an industrial town, a node of auto manufacturing. “My grandfather worked in the real shmatte trade,” he says, “selling grease rags to Henry Ford and the Dodge brothers. The pressure to move to China today is immense. But I hope Chad will come to think as I do over time.”

A genius with the answers to the financial crisis? Or the Borat of philosophy? The cultural theorist talks about love, sex and why nothing is ever what it appears to be

Slavoj Žižek doesn’t know the door number of his own apartment in Ljubljana. “Doesn’t matter,” he tells the photographer, who wants to pop outside. “Come back in through the main door, and then just think in terms of politically radical right; you turn from left to right, then at the end, right again.” But what’s the number, in case he gets lost? “I think it’s 20,” Žižek suggests. “But who knows? Let’s double check.” So off he pads down the hallway, opens his door and has a look.

Waving the photographer off, he points in the distance across the Slovenian capital. “Over there, that’s a kind of counter-culture establishment – they hate me, I hate them. This is the type of leftists that I hate. Radical leftists whose fathers are all very rich.” Most of the other buildings, he adds, are government ministries. “I hate it.” Now he’s back in the living room, a clinically tidy little sliver of functional space lacking any discernible aesthetic, the only concessions being a poster for the video game Call Of Duty: Black Ops, and a print of Joseph Stalin. Žižek pours Coke Zero into plastic McDonald’s cups decorated in Disney merchandising, but when he opens a kitchen cupboard I see that it’s full of clothes.

“I live as a madman!” he exclaims, and leads me on a tour of the apartment to demonstrate why his kitchen cabinets contain only clothing. “You see, there’s no room anywhere else!” And indeed, every other room is lined, floor to ceiling, with DVDs and books; volumes of his own 75 works, translated into innumerable languages, fill one room alone.

If you have read all of Žižek’s work, you are doing better than me. Born in 1949, the Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic grew up under Tito in the former Yugoslavia, where suspicions of dissidence consigned him to academic backwaters. He came to western attention in 1989 with his first book written in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology, a re-reading of Žižek’s great hero Hegel through the perspective of another hero, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Since then there have been titles such as Living in the End Times, along with films – The Pervert’s Guide To Cinema – and more articles than I can count.

By the standards of cultural theory, Žižek sits at the more accessible end of the spectrum – but to give you an idea of where that still leaves him, here’s a typical quote from a book called Žižek: A Guide for the Perplexed, intended to render him more comprehensible: “Žižek finds the place for Lacan in Hegel by seeing the Real as the correlate of the self-division and self-doubling within phenomena.”

At the risk of upsetting Žižek’s fanatical global following, I would say that a lot of his work is impenetrable. But he writes with exhilarating ambition and his central thesis offers a perspective even his critics would have to concede is thought-provoking. In essence, he argues that nothing is ever what it appears, and contradiction is encoded in almost everything. Most of what we think of as radical or subversive – or even simply ethical – doesn’t actually change anything.

“Like when you buy an organic apple, you’re doing it for ideological reasons, it makes you feel good: ‘I’m doing something for Mother Earth,’ and so on. But in what sense are we engaged? It’s a false engagement. Paradoxically, we do these things to avoid really doing things. It makes you feel good. You recycle, you send £5 a month to some Somali orphan, and you did your duty.” But really, we’ve been tricked into operating safety valves that allow the status quo to survive unchallenged? “Yes, exactly.” The obsession of western liberals with identity politics only distracts from class struggle, and while Žižek doesn’t defend any version of communism ever seen in practice, he remains what he calls a “complicated Marxist” with revolutionary ideals.

To his critics, as one memorably put it, he is the Borat of philosophy, churning out ever more outrageous statements for scandalous effect. “The problem with Hitler was that he was not violent enough,” for example, or “I am not human. I am a monster.” Some dismiss him as a silly controversialist; others fear him as an agitator for neo-Marxist totalitarianism. But since the financial crisis he has been elevated to the status of a global-recession celebrity, drawing crowds of adoring followers who revere him as an intellectual genius. His popularity is just the sort of paradox Žižek delights in because if it were down to him, he says, he would rather not talk to anyone.

You wouldn’t guess so from the energetic flurry of good manners with which he welcomes us, but he’s quick to clarify that his attentiveness is just camouflage for misanthropy. “For me, the idea of hell is the American type of parties. Or, when they ask me to give a talk, and they say something like, ‘After the talk there will just be a small reception’ – I know this is hell. This means all the frustrated idiots, who are not able to ask you a question at the end of the talk, come to you and, usually, they start: ‘Professor Žižek, I know you must be tired, but …’ Well, fuck you. If you know that I am tired, why are you asking me? I’m really more and more becoming Stalinist. Liberals always say about totalitarians that they like humanity, as such, but they have no empathy for concrete people, no? OK, that fits me perfectly. Humanity? Yes, it’s OK – some great talks, some great arts. Concrete people? No, 99% are boring idiots.”

Most of all, he can’t stand students. “Absolutely. I was shocked, for example, once, a student approached me in the US, when I was still teaching a class – which I will never do again – and he told me: ‘You know, professor, it interested me what you were saying yesterday, and I thought, I don’t know what my paper should be about. Could you please give me some more thoughts and then maybe some idea will pop up.’ Fuck him! Who I am to do that?”

Žižek has had to quit most of his teaching posts in Europe and America, to get away from these intolerable students. “I especially hate when they come to me with personal problems. My standard line is: ‘Look at me, look at my tics, don’t you see that I’m mad? How can you even think about asking a mad man like me to help you in personal problems, no?’” You can see what he means, for Žižek cuts a fairly startling physical figure – like a grizzly bear, pawing wildly at his face, sniffing and snuffling and gesticulating between every syllable. “But it doesn’t work! They still trust me. And I hate this because – this is what I don’t like about American society – I don’t like this openness, like when you meet a guy for the first time, and he’s starting to tell you about his sex life. I hate this, I hate this!”

I have to laugh at this, because Žižek brings up his sex life within moments of our first meeting. On the way up in the lift he volunteers that a former girlfriend used to ask him for what he called “consensual rape”. I had imagined he would want to discuss his new book about Hegel, but what he really seems keen to talk about is sex.

“Yeah, because I’m extremely romantic here. You know what is my fear? This postmodern, permissive, pragmatic etiquette towards sex. It’s horrible. They claim sex is healthy; it’s good for the heart, for blood circulation, it relaxes you. They even go into how kissing is also good because it develops the muscles here – this is horrible, my God!” He’s appalled by the promise of dating agencies to “outsource” the risk of romance. “It’s no longer that absolute passion. I like this idea of sex as part of love, you know: ‘I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever.’ There is something nice, transcendent, about it. I remain incurably romantic.”

I keep thinking I should try to intervene with a question, but he’s off again. “I have strange limits. I am very – OK, another detail, fuck it. I was never able to do – even if a woman wanted it – annal sex.” Annal sex? “Ah, anal sex. You know why not? Because I couldn’t convince myself that she really likes it. I always had this suspicion, what if she only pretends, to make herself more attractive to me? It’s the same thing for fellatio; I was never able to finish into the woman’s mouth, because again, my idea is, this is not exactly the most tasteful fluid. What if she’s only pretending?”

He can count the number of women he has slept with on his hands, because he finds the whole business so nerve-racking. “I cannot have one-night stands. I envy people who can do it; it would be wonderful. I feel nice, let’s go, bang-bang – yes! But for me, it’s something so ridiculously intimate – like, my God, it’s horrible to be naked in front of another person, you know? If the other one is evil with a remark – ‘Ha ha, your stomach,’ or whatever – everything can be ruined, you know?” Besides, he can’t sleep with anyone unless he believes they might stay together for ever. “All my relationships – this is why they are very few – were damned from the perspective of eternity. What I mean with this clumsy term is, maybe they will last.”

But Žižek has been divorced three times. How has he coped with that? “Ah, now I will tell you. You know the young Marx – I don’t idealise Marx, he was a nasty guy, personally – but he has a wonderful logic. He says: ‘You don’t simply dissolve marriage; divorce means that you retroactively establish that the love was not the true love.’ When love goes away, you retroactively establish that it wasn’t even true love.” Is that what he did? “Yes! I erase it totally. I don’t only believe that I’m no longer in love. I believe I never was.”

As if to illustrate this, he glances at his watch; his 12-year-old son, who lives nearby, will be arriving shortly. How is this going to work when he gets here? Don’t worry, Žižek says, he’s bound to be late – on account of the tardiness of his mother: “The bitch who claims to have been my wife.” But weren’t they married? “Unfortunately, yes.”

Žižek has two sons – the other is in his 30s – but never wanted to be a parent. “I will tell you the formula why I love my two sons. This is my liberal, compassionate side. I cannot resist it, when I see someone hurt, vulnerable and so on. So precisely when the son was not fully wanted, this made me want to love him even more.”

By now I can see we’re not going to get anywhere near Žižek’s new book about Hegel, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. Instead, he tells me about the holidays he takes with his young son. The last one was to the Burj Al Arab hotel, a grotesque temple to tacky ostentation in Dubai. “Why not? Why not? I like to do crazy things. But I did my Marxist duty. I got friendly with the Pakistani taxi driver who showed to me and my son reality. The whole structure of how the workers there live was explained, how it was controlled. My son was horrified.” This summer they are off to Singapore, to an artificial island with swimming pools built on top of 50-storey skyscrapers. “So we can swim there and look down on the city: ‘Ha ha, fuck you.’ That’s what I like to do – totally crazy things.” It wasn’t so much fun when his son was younger. “But now, we have a certain rhythm established. We sleep ‘til one, then we go to breakfast, then we go to the city – no culture, just consumerism or some stupid things like this – then we go back for dinner, then we go to a movie theatre, then we play games ‘til three in the morning.”

I wonder what all Žižek’s earnest young followers will make of this, and worry they will be cross with me for not getting anything more serious out of him. But to Žižek, Dubai tells us just as much about the world as a debate about the deficit, say, ever can. When his sweet-looking, polite young son arrives, I try to steer Žižek on to the financial crisis, and to the role his admirers hope he will play in formulating a radical response.

“I always emphasise: don’t expect this from me. I don’t think that the task of a guy like me is to propose complete solutions. When people ask me what to do with the economy, what the hell do I know? I think the task of people like me is not to provide answers but to ask the right questions.” He’s not against democracy, per se, he just thinks our democratic institutions are no longer capable of controlling global capitalism. “Nice consensual incremental reforms may work, possibly, at a local level.” But localism belongs in the same category as organic apples, and recycling. “It’s done to make you feel good. But the big question today is how to organise to act globally, at an immense international level, without regressing to some authoritarian rule.”

How will that happen? “I’m a pessimist in the sense that we are approaching dangerous times. But I’m an optimist for exactly the same reason. Pessimism means things are getting messy. Optimism means these are precisely the times when change is possible.” And what are the chances that things won’t change? “Ah, if this happens then we are slowly approaching a new apartheid authoritarian society. It will not be – I must underline this – the old stupid authoritarianism. This will be a new form, still consumerist.” The whole world will look like Dubai? “Yes, and in Dubai, you know, the other side are literally slaves.”

There is something inexplicably touching about all Žižek’s mischievous bombast. I hadn’t expected him to be so likable, but he really is hilariously good company. I had hoped to find out if he was a genius or a lunatic – but I fear I leave none the wiser. I ask him how seriously he would recommend we take him, and he says he would rather be feared than taken for a clown. “Most people think I’m making jokes, exaggerating – but no, I’m not. It’s not that. First I tell jokes, then I’m serious. No, the art is to bring the serious message into the forum of jokes.”

Two years ago his front teeth came out. “My son knows I have a good friend; none of us is gay, just good friends. So when he saw me without teeth, he said: ‘I know why.’ My son! He was 10! You know what he told me? Think, associate, in the dirtiest way.” I think I can guess. “Yes! Sucking! He said my friend complained that my teeth were in the way.” Žižek roars with laughter, great gales of paternal pride.

“And you know what was tragicomic? After he told me this, he said: ‘Father, did I tell this joke well?’”

(Editor’s note: Even though I’m a Slavoj Žižek apologist, it is humorous to observe his current-day juvenile hangups towards sex, the mark of a true nerd.)

By AMY T. SCHALET
NY Times Published: April 6, 2012

WHY are boys behaving more “like girls” in terms of when they lose their virginity? In contrast to longstanding cultural tropes, there is reason to believe that teenage boys are becoming more careful and more romantic about their first sexual experiences.

For a long time, a familiar cultural lexicon has been in vogue: young women who admitted to voluntary sexual experience risked being labeled “sluts” while male peers who boasted of sexual conquests were celebrated as “studs.”

No wonder American teenage boys have long reported earlier and more sexual experience than have teenage girls. In 1988, many more boys than girls, ages 15 to 17, told researchers that they had had heterosexual intercourse.

But in the two decades since, the proportion of all American adolescents in their mid-teens claiming sexual experience has decreased, and for boys the decline has been especially steep, according to the National Survey of Family Growth by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Today, though more than half of unmarried 18- and 19-year-olds have had sexual intercourse, fewer than 30 percent of 15- to 17-year-old boys and girls have, down from 50 percent of boys and 37 percent of girls in 1988. And there are virtually no gender differences in the timing of sexual initiation.

What happened in those two decades?

Fear seems to have played a role. In interviewing 10th graders for my book on teenage sexuality in the United States and the Netherlands, I found that American boys often said sex could end their life as they knew it. After a condom broke, one worried: “I could be screwed for the rest of my life.” Another boy said he did not want to have sex yet for fear of becoming a father before his time.

Dutch boys did not express the same kind of fears; they assumed their girlfriends’ use of the pill would protect them against fatherhood. In the Netherlands, use of the pill is far more common, and pregnancy far less so, than among American teenagers.

The American boys I interviewed seemed more nervous about the consequences of sex than American girls. In fact, the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth found that more than one-third of teenage boys, but only one-quarter of teenage girls, cited wanting to avoid pregnancy or disease as the main reason they had not yet had sex. Fear about sex was intensified by the AIDS crisis and by sex education that portrayed sex outside of heterosexual marriage as risky. Combined with growing access to pornography via the Internet, those influences may have made having sex with another person seem less enticing.

Fear no doubt has also played a role in driving up condom use. Boys today are much more likely than their predecessors to use a condom the first time they have sex.

But fear is probably not the only reason for the gender convergence. While American locker-room and popular culture portray boys as mere vessels of raging hormones, research into their private experiences paints a different picture. In a large-scale survey and interviews, reported in the American Sociological Review in 2006, the sociologist Peggy Giordano and her colleagues found teenage boys to be just as emotionally invested in their romantic relationships as girls.

The Dutch boys I interviewed grew up in a culture that gives them permission to love; a national survey found that 90 percent of Dutch boys between 12 and 14 report having been in love. But the American boys I interviewed, having grown up in a culture that often assumes males are only out to get sex, were no less likely than Dutch boys to value relationships and love. In fact, they often used strong, almost hyper-romantic language to talk about love. The boy whose condom broke told me the most important thing to him was being in love with his girlfriend and “giving her everything I can.”

Such romanticism has largely flown under the radar of American popular culture. Yet, the most recent research by the family growth survey, conducted between 2006 and 2010, indicates that relationships matter to boys more often than we think. Four of 10 males between 15 and 19 who had not had sex said the main reason was that they hadn’t met the right person or that they were in a relationship but waiting for the right time; an additional 3 of 10 cited religion and morality.

Boys have long been under pressure to shed what the sociologist Laura Carpenter has called the “stigma of virginity.” But maybe more American boys are now waiting because they have gained cultural leeway to choose a first time that feels emotionally right. If so, their liberation from rigid masculinity norms should be seen as a victory for the very feminist movement that Rush Limbaugh recently decried.

When I surveyed the firestorm of objections that followed his use of the word “slut” to pillory a law school student who advocated medical coverage for birth control, men were among his most passionate detractors.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. The image of male sexuality Mr. Limbaugh perpetuates is hardly something to be proud of. And it sells the hearts of men, as well as women, short.

By: Geoff Dyer, Esquire April 2012 issue

The blowjob has fallen on hard times. Or, to put it in the form of a crude question, who can really get it up for fellatio these days? Back in the 1960s and ’70s, fellatio was all the rage. Its curative powers are powerfully conveyed by the moment in John Updike’s Bech when the protagonist’s mistress tries “to bring his weakling member to strength by wrapping it in the velvet bandages of her lips.” Abandoning the protective modesty of fiction in the poem “Fellatio,” Updike celebrated the way “that each of these clean secretaries / at night, to please her lover, takes / a fountain into her mouth.”

When I first came across these lines, in 1972, aged fourteen, they seemed excitingly rude — if a little yucky. Now, a harmless poem can’t be expected to support a zeitgeisty theory, but something, evidently, was in the air: 1972 was the year of Deep Throat, about a woman with a clitoris in her throat, so that she achieves orgasm by performing oral sex. In retrospect, this seems like a premise dreamed up by feminists as a way of showing, in ludicrously exaggerated fashion, the underlying misogyny of male fantasies. Or maybe not so exaggerated after all. At roughly the same time, a joke made the rounds about the ideal woman being three feet tall with a flat head — so you’d have someplace to rest your beer while she gave you head. One way or another, the early ’70s were a time when the culture was bigging up the blowjob. Tellingly, Bech’s mistress was “following less her own instincts than the exemplary drift of certain contemporary novels.”

Some of this enthusiasm lived on into the late twentieth century. In 1995’s To Die For, Nicole Kidman reacts with disingenuous astonishment to the story of how a famous broadcaster got her big break because a self-penned reference commended her ability to “suck your cock till your eyes pop out!” (Shouldn’t that read “cave in” or “implode”?) In the same year, there’s a fun exchange in Martin Amis’s The Information in which a male character proposes to a lady friend that they “do 68.” What’s that? she asks. “You do me and I owe you 1,” he shoots back. Later in the novel, the humiliation of failed writer Richard Tull is complete when his wife fellates his rival, the successful Gwyn Barry.

If this all seems rather quaint, then Susan Minot’s 2002 novella, Rapture — about a single blowjob — was perhaps a last, jaw-aching hurrah. A genuinely twenty-first-century spokesman can be found in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, in the form of young Joey Berglund, whose sexual maturity — compared with the guys he’s at college with — is conveyed simply and vehemently. Their yearnings center on the blowjob, which Joey considers “little more than a glorified jerkoff.”

I recently undertook a small survey of some more mature male friends, and the results, while not unanimous, were overwhelming. To speak plainly, given the choice, eight of the ten men surveyed preferred eating pussy to having their dicks sucked. Or, to put it in entirely numerical terms, 80 percent of males would opt for a 70 rather than a 68. And what about the other two men? Yes, you guessed it: They’re gay! To be strictly accurate, the heterosexual respondents were partial to this kind of thing — but only in the mathematically blissful reciprocity of 70 minus 1. The gob-job continues to thrive in hetero pornography, of course, for the simple — literally obvious — reason that it lends itself to being filmed in a way that cunnilingus cannot.

I’m not claiming that the latter did not exist back in the 1970s, but it was regarded in much the same way as paying for a round at the bar: You had to do it, but if you could avoid it, you did. It would be a mistake, though, to see this change as meaning that men have gone from being selfish recipients to selfless givers of pleasure; it’s just that what constitutes pleasure has shifted. As the Michael Fassbender character in Shame says to a woman he’s seducing in a bar by telling her how badly he wants to go down on her (before getting beaten up by her boyfriend): “That’s what I like to do.”

The scale of the sea change can be observed at the Great Canadian Beaver-Eating Contest, at Burning Man, an event so popular that participants line up as if for a half-off sale. In the more discreet context of my survey, this enthusiasm was endorsed by the respondent who claimed that the only time he experienced “absolute contentment” was when his face was between his wife’s legs. He wished to make clear that he was not talking just about sex; he meant in life generally.