Speaking As Janet Jackson’s Nipple…

…I gotta say I’m kinda confused. OK, I’m peeved.

When I think of what you people put me through after the 2004 Superbowl, I shiver—and not in a good way.

That ½-second shot of me during halftime? First, you accused me of ruining not just half-time, but the rest of the game. Then Morality In Media starts a campaign to punish CBS, which the FCC eventually did. For months, congressmembers competed to see who could denounce me the loudest. Eventually this led to the federal government increasing the fines for on-air “indecency” by 1,000%. People even trashed me during the 2004 presidential election.

I proudly remind you that the video of that ½ second was the most downloaded clip in internet history. Guess that shows how much people wanted to be “protected” from a quick glance at me.

Folks, I’ve moved onto other things, so I’ve let it go. To me, Nipplegate is history, I’m still gorgeous, and I entertain people exclusively in private. No complaints from any of them.

But now you have this major fuss about Superbowl ads this weekend, and I just can’t stay quiet. And I’m pissed.

I wasn’t good enough for you so-called decency groups, but a commercial about abortion is? What about that stupid argument you used on me 6 years ago—“I don’t want to have to explain Jackson’s bare nipple to my kid”—what, it’s less complicated to tell a kid what abortion is, and what “choice” and “pro-life mean”? Focus on the Family (the sponsor) is just plain disingenuous here. Or as you non-nipples might say, they’re full of bull.

And then CBS caves to right-wing pressure and rejects an ad for a gay dating site—guys hugging, or kissing, or whatever. Ooooooh, that’s so hard to explain to a kid. Try this: “those guys really care for each other, so they’re being affectionate. That’s what people do when they’re really into each other.” It’s the same approach I told you all to take when I was exposed for a half-second during Superbowl XXXVIII: the truth. “It’s a nipple. All women have them. Heck, men and boys have them too, right Timmy?”

Being comfortable with sex is not a right, and government shouldn’t be protecting people who are uncomfortable with it—any more than it protects people who aren’t comfortable seeing mixed-race couples hold hands, or women broadcasting the news.

Of course, we do have a name for people who are uncomfortable talking with their kids about life. They’re called parents. So my advice for when a nipple or boy-boy kiss is staring you and your kid in the face, and you’re uncomfortable? Parent the kid. Be uncomfortable and parent the kid.

I appreciate the huge amount of attention you gave me six years ago. I like the idea that you thought I was so powerful, although I didn’t like being called nasty names. The only criticism of my ½-second stardom that I really liked was Marty Klein’s.

He complained the lighting wasn’t good enough.

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Supreme Court: Free Expression Crucial—Unless It’s About Sex

You’ve heard about the recent Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Overturning the heart of the McCain-Feingold Act, the Court said that corporate donations to elections cannot be limited because it would violate the First Amendment.

How bad is this? Said the New York Times, “The Supreme Court has handed lobbyists a new weapon. A lobbyist can now tell any elected official: if you vote wrong, my company, labor union or interest group will spend unlimited sums explicitly advertising against your re-election.”

Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor added she is concerned that “the problem of campaign contributions in judicial elections might get considerably worse, and quite soon.”

There’s a very troubling sexual angle to this. And no, it’s not about a large bank or insurance company donating a dozen naked women to their favorite congressional candidate.

Quite simply, the Supreme Court—so concerned about supporting the First Amendment rights of non-persons—has shown a remarkable interest in limiting those same rights in individuals when it comes to sex.

Yes, we have Lawrence v Texas (2003), which overturned a law criminalizing private consensual sodomy. However, Justice Scalia wrote a scathing dissent in that case, in which he predicted that the decision would be the end of civilization as we know it. Who knew he was so concerned about people marrying their sisters—or their horses?

Justice Scalia has reaffirmed his opposition to your First Amendment rights around sexuality many times, particularly around obscenity—one of the very few types of speech that enjoys no First Amendment protection. If the government wants to punish a TV network, an artist, a teacher, or the average person with a nasty website, they just have to get 12 jurors to say that your speech, painting, or blog is “obscene,” and you lose one of the most precious rights any American has.

The Supreme Court has also declined to rule on the challenge to Alabama’s law criminalizing vibrators; refuses to stop cities from discriminating against adult bookstores, strip clubs, and swingers clubs; and has supported a definition of “child pornography” that is frighteningly broad.

While it’s far, far from ideal, I suppose I can live with corporations buying elections. What I can’t live with is the Supreme Court giving these corporate non-persons the right to express themselves while taking away mine.

And yours.

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How Will Anti-Choice Forces Atone For George Tiller’s Murder?

The verdict is in: the guy who murdered physician George Tiller will spend the rest of his life in jail, feeling good about what he did.

Yes, the verdict shows that the justice system works, sometimes. But this doesn’t bring back Tiller. His family only had one of him. We have very few of him. The other side has plenty of Scott Roeders.

Roeder is a suicide bomber. He sacrificed his own life and blew up Tiller. No one can defeat a culture that produces suicide bombers. Almost a decade after 9/11, the mightiest military the world has ever seen hasn’t even made a dent.

While legally inevitable given the facts, the Roeder verdict is also unsatisfying because it doesn’t change anything. The government won’t protect physicians or clinics more. The anti-choice domestic terrorists won’t be punished as a group, won’t be fined out of existence, won’t even be discouraged an eighth of an inch.

Just as Thomas Friedman wants to know where are the moderate Muslim voices decrying radical Muslim violence, I want to know where are the so-called moderate anti-choice voices decrying Roeder’s crime? True, some spoke up in the hours following his capture for stalking, murder, and violating a church in service. Some hypocritically continue to condemn what he did.

But after the obligatory “we don’t support that,” what else has the religious anti-choice community done? What responsibility did they take for maintaining a culture of long-term warfare against the legal, private choices of fellow citizens? What changes did they make in their dishonest, greedy policies operating Crisis Pregnancy Centers (which depend on government funds)? What changes did they make in their lies about Emergency Contraception—which does not, cannot cause abortion?

And what progress have they made in supporting pregnancy reduction, other than their fantasies about dissuading teens from having more sex? Until the Religious Right enthusiastically supports contraception of all kinds, its anti-choice stance will remain exposed for what it is: a hypocritical, anti-sex, cynically expedient position. These people have accumulated vast political power and wealth. There’s no crime in that. But they wield that power and wealth exactly like the immoral political interest group they are, and nothing more.

Anti-choice religious groups claim to care more about fetuses than about pregnant women, more about fetuses than about unmarried women who don’t want to get pregnant, and more about fetuses than the adults they would murder. This is a sick obsession dressed up as a moral position. There’s absolutely nothing “moral” about sacrificing living people for fetuses.

The mistake that the pro-choice majority makes is in not taking this claim seriously enough. It should be quoted and broadcast over and over again, everywhere: “They care more about fetuses than about any other living creature—including you, your children, your spouse, or your parents.”

Perhaps that’s why they’re so solidly against same-gender marriages: they simply don’t create enough fetuses to matter.

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Airline, Cruise Line Reveal Obsession, Prejudice About Sex

A pair of transportation giants revealed last week that as parts of Western society become more comfortable acknowledging sexuality, discomfort and fear of sexuality are still as powerful as ever.

For starters, Carnival Cruises of Miami will not book another “cougar-cub cruise” (younger men and middle-aged women meeting for erotic connection, either temporary or long-term), even though the first sold out and demand for a second is high.

It’s not clear what Carnival objects to—middle-aged women having sex, middle-aged women having sex with people other than the crew, or simply all that legendary 24-hour-a-day food going uneaten.

On a more ominous note, British Airways has revealed its policy preventing men from sitting next to children to whom they are not related.

Mirko Fischer, a 33-year-old businessman, discovered the policy while flying with his wife. Six months pregnant, she had booked a window seat. Fischer was in the middle seat between her and a 12-year-old boy.

When all passengers were seated and buckled in, a flight attendant asked Fischer to change his seat. When he refused—explaining about his pregnant wife—the flight attendant raised his voice, warning that the plane could not take off unless Fischer obeyed. Apparently BA crew stalk the aisles of every plane before takeoff, demanding that men sitting next to kids move. Fischer has sued for the humiliation of being treated like a potential criminal.

BA’s failure to grasp the most simple dynamics of human interaction is breathtaking.
Molest a kid on a plane? There isn’t enough room in coach to move that much. Besides, most molestations are done by someone the victim knows. The more reasonable policy would be to prevent kids from sitting with their parents, not with strangers.

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To understand the true problem here, let’s imagine slightly changing the two companies’ policies. Say Carnival’s policy was “no cruises focusing on older people meeting each other for companionship,” or “no cruises focusing on young people in the travel industry looking for professional mentors.”

Similarly, let’s alter BA’s policy. Say it was “no handicapped people allowed to sit next to children,” or “no African-Americans,” or “no Arabs,” or “no one over 60.”

Not only would such policies be condemned, they’d be considered bizarre. The problem with CC’s and BA’s policies isn’t merely that they’re discriminatory, it’s that they don’t make sense—but because the discrimination is based on sexuality (imagined or real), people tolerate it.

In the 20th century, civil rights were granted to blacks, women, and the handicapped when enough people complained that discriminating against these groups was unreasonable. In this century, we have to make the case that discrimination against people based on the fear of their sexuality is equally unreasonable (and equally unconstitutional).

Some will inevitably protest, “Some men do molest kids. Some cougar-cub pairings are unhealthy, or done in public.” And of course that’s true.

But imagine blocking anti-discrimination laws against blacks, women, and the handicapped by telling the parallel truth—that some blacks are criminals (true, of course); that some women are stupid or vapid (true, of course); or that some handicapped people are clumsy and selfish and aggressively in others’ way (true, of course).

As public policy, we don’t withhold rights from a group because of the behavior or characteristics of a few of its members. And this should be equally true regarding sexual-related issues.

Millions of Americans shouldn’t be punished because a few people misuse nude beaches or spend the rent money on lap dances. But if we’re going to scrub cruise ships, airlines, beaches, bookstores, and other places so Americans can’t use or misuse them sexually, let’s start with an institution that, while most participants engage it legally and peacefully, is a proven haven where thousands of people have sexually exploited children: the Catholic Church.

Meanwhile, if BA doesn’t trust me enough to let me fly next to a kid, I’ll take my business to some other bankrupt airline. United apparently trusts me much more—much to my dismay, they love to sit me next to kids.

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Seeing the Story of Rice—From Farm to Philippines

Today was a satisfying day on the Delta.

Rice is the principal form of food for half the world. And we saw its entire life cycle in just a half day.

We started by taking a boat to a small village. We gingerly walked the edges of a rice field, admiring the beautiful green plants, row after row, as far as we could see. We also saw the vegetables grown to the paddy’s side, with three women on their haunches pulling weeks. The two young women were the niece and daughter-in-law of the older women. I was dripping with sweat (it was, after all, nearly 10am!), but the women, covered from head to toe (including the face masks that almost everyone in Vietnam wears out of doors) didn’t betray signs of discomfort.

Having seen the rice growing, it was time to sail to a different part of the village. Here we saw the “broken rice”—rice grains that were less than top grade—made into noodles. Young men and women mixed the rice with water, let it sit for hours, then fed it to simple machines that mashed, squeezed, and mashed it again. Eventually the mush was dried, reconstituted, then ladled onto red hot griddles for just a few moments. The sheets, about 2 feet in diameter, were set out to dry in the sun. when ready, they were fed into another machine which cut them into rice noodles. In a local version of Chicago slaughterhouses’ boast that “we use everything but the oink,” the fuel for the stove is discarded rice husks.

For convenience of travel, we had looked at the process slightly out of order. So it was back into the boat, to a more industrialized part of the river. Scrambling ashore, we went into a factory where large, noisy machines took the rice from the field and separated the rice from the husks. In another factory, we saw the rice sorted by size and quality, using virtually the same rudimentary technology we’d seen in a tea plantation two years ago in India.

The “broken rice” was headed for the noodle factory, the better-but-not-best rice was headed for working class markets, and the best rice was headed for high-end restaurants, people, and export. We saw it all bagged, sealed, and stacked. The noonday sun made it easy to say goodbye to it all, so we headed back to the boat, visions of cold mango juice and air conditioning dancing in our heads.

But then I saw something that changed this absolutely perfect plan: 20 yards away, a cargo ship loading bags of rice. I couldn’t pass it up.

I walked over to the conveyor belt, and watched strapping, shirtless young men (if you can call anyone 5’6” “strapping”) load bag after bag onto the belt. I followed the moving bags to the ship, where a chute was disgorging the 100-pound sacks, which were taken away and casually dumped in rows by a dozen guys who were smoking and talking while they worked.

With my guide’s help I found the supervisor (twice everyone else’s age, the only guy wearing a shirt). He was a part-owner of the rice shipment. Some 2,000 tons—40,000 bags—were headed to Saigon, where they’d be transferred to a much larger ship and sent to the Philippines. He actually let us scramble onto the ship for a better look—mostly at the sweaty young men loading sacks, stealing glances at us.

“Do you own the ship?” I called out to the rice owner through my guide/interpreter. “No,” he laughed, “it’s owned by a company.” “A private company?” “No, the government owns the company.” Aha, actual Communism at work.

“Are all the ships owned by companies owned by the government?” I followed. “No, there are private companies, too.” “So how do you decide which shipping company to use?” “Well, the government companies are more expensive,” he said, “but they make the paperwork and permits easier.” Aha, actual corruption at work.

It may seem simple and straightforward to the people I met today—you grow it, you process it, you bag it, you ship it—but I don’t think I’ll ever look at my rice bowl the same.

And that, I think, is one reason I travel to places so far from home—to make the familiar amazing.

Life on the Mekong Delta

The Mekong Delta was already hot and humid at 8:00 on a winter morning.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

After driving south from Hue I checked into the Golden Sands Hotel in Hoi An, and was ushered into a suite about 35 feet from the South China Sea. I spent the next few days walking on the beach, looking at the beach, and thinking about the beach. In between these important activities I also toured ancient Hoi An.

The Golden Sands Hotel is exactly the kind of resort that I don’t think should be built. But now that it’s here, is it sinful to enjoy it? I came back to the question again and again. It’s a question I’ve also asked myself at resorts up and down the California coast.

I started the trip’s last leg at the Danang Airport, where I was told my confirmed seat didn’t exist. Vietnam Airways had three more flights out that day, all overbooked. There was no way out of town—shades of the chaotic evacuation of Danang in 1975! Fortunately, my generally-inept local guide Mr. Jiang did some fast talking. Or bribing. He disappeared for about 5 minutes, then returned beaming with a business-class boarding pass. OK, Mr. Jiang gets a tip.

From Saigon we drove southwest into the Mekong Delta. The Mekong River is over 3,000 miles long, starting in China and winding its way through Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia before crossing the border into southern Vietnam, where it splits into 9 tributaries—the Nine Dragons. Like most major river deltas, it’s extremely rich farmland, very crowded, and prone to annual flooding.

After more than two weeks in other parts of the country, I can see the people here are ethnically different. Many are Khmer, taller and wider than their Viet counterparts. Their ancestors are immigrants from Cambodia—some from a century ago, others fleeing the insanity of the Pol Pot regime after 1975.

Life on the delta, of course, revolves around the river. I agreed to a very early wake-up call in order to see the large floating market while it was busy. We putt-putted some 4 miles toward the ocean, viewing the riverbank activity—people washing clothes, cooking, bathing themselves and their kids, along with an enormous volume of commercial movement—loading, unloading, shipping, building.

Suddenly the floating market came into view—several hundred old flatboats hawking every kind of produce imaginable, from garlic to grapes, lettuce to lemongrass, coconuts, mangoes, dragonfruit, on and on. Our boat drifted up and down the “aisles” of the market, and we watched—practically touched—farmers, restaurant buyers, and other locals doing the day’s business.

Eventually we sailed past the market, turned off the river onto a small canal, and drifted lazily through patches of farmland. We got off and walked along the bank, stopping in strangers’ homes, ogling their lives. They were unfailingly nice, offering us food and explanations of what they were doing.

At one home a lone woman stirred a pot of rice over an outdoor wood-burning flame (it certainly wasn’t a “stove”). When we admired a stack of coconuts she expertly hacked one open, pushed it toward us and said “drink.” It was amazingly sweet and fresh-tasting.

A quarter-mile down the road there was apparently a big death-day anniversary coming up (“bigger than birthday,” we were assured), so one group of women was slicing up bamboo to make the string to tie around the sticky-rice cakes all those attending would take home. Over 100 sticky-rice cakes, all home-made. Oh, and a feast for 100 as well.

The soundtrack to this was a gentle cacophony of chickens, birds, the occasional insistent child, and the chat between the women. Except for the insistent click of my camera, it was perfect.

South From Hue—To A Buddhist Military Funeral

Sexual Intelligence continues reporting live from a three-week trip to Vietnam.

As planned, I drove south from Hue today. But the day was nothing like I’d planned. It was, in fact, amazing—a perfect example of why even a great book or video about a place can’t match the experience of being there.

It was drizzling when I left Hue at 10am, and within an hour it was raining—the only thing that could, er, dampen my anticipated enjoyment of Hoi An’s famous beaches.

I drove south along a gorgeous coastline, past an airport built by “the Americans,” bunkers left by “the Americans,” and demographic changes driven by the war. In this area just south of the DMZ, in the narrowest part of the country, the U.S. military had tried to interrupt the north’s supply lines supporting the war in the south. Tens of thousands of people living here died or fled.

We eventually ascended into the mountains and switchbacked our way through the drizzle, up past the clouds and power lines. Thousands of feet below the bay glistened.

Just a few minutes later we began our descent, on a serpentine road that varied from blacktop to muddy trail. The occasional posse of farm animals stopped or accompanied us. At the bottom of the mountain we drove a few minutes on a nicely paved road through several villages, when I saw a big crowd of people spilling onto the road. Following the travel principle “stop for crowds, they might be doing something interesting,” we stopped.

It was a Buddhist military funeral.

We spent over two hours watching and participating.

It was all there—the altar with the guy’s photo, incense, and offerings (food, cigarettes, tea), monks in gray chanting and leading the group in call-and-response, guys in black playing simple haunting music on a gong, flute, and drum, about 40 mourners in white on the ground, a dozen old men in military regalia, and about 60 or 70 men, women, and children standing around watching, talking, laughing, smoking.

Apparently, I was welcome to hang around and take photos as much as I wanted.
I put a few dollars into one of the donation envelopes, and was immediately urged to light a stick of incense and offer my respects, which of course I did.

The people seemed as interested in me as I was in them, and a few even smiled for photos. Once they saw me taking pictures of the young children (well-know travel principle number 2), some even brought their kids near for a shot. Meanwhile, the funeral chanting continued.

Finally it was time to move the coffin itself. The altar was moved aside, and about a dozen young men lifted the thing, carried it through the crowd, and placed it on a bier made of large red wooden planks.

As they struggled to get it out onto the road, various people offered increasingly loud advice. Eventually the whole thing—altar, mourners, musicians, coffin, soldiers, villagers—headed down the road toward a hill about a half-mile away. Interrupted by the occasional truck or motorbike, the procession of several hundred people was more or less dignified—with plenty of talking and smoking along the way—until it turned left. Then, coffin, altar, and old people alike half-scrambled, half pulled each other up the unkempt, stony path.

It was a perfect replica of the common traffic pattern in Vietnam—no lanes, pushing and shoving, noisy, the occasional injury, old and young mixed together.

We finally reached the top, sort of, and there was a resting period. Then the military veterans did a little ceremony over the coffin, draped it in the Vietnam flag, and then relaxed a while over smokes. Meanwhile, several people started digging the actual grave, while the Buddhist monks, dressed in gray, chanted in unison.

That took roughly forever, but there was plenty to look at on the crowded little hill. There were 3 or 4 other burial sites, a few little altars, and of course the various people giving advice to the grave diggers. A few hundred yards beneath us a freight train rolled slowly by.

Finally it was time to carry and then slide the coffin into the hole, which of course wasn’t quite big enough. So that was the next temporary delay.

The coffin was finally slid into the grave, and then the widow, barefoot and dressed in white, started wailing and proceeded to faint. It was quite dramatic, and seemed a bit choreographed (note of cultural sensitivity: I say this without any judgment whatsoever).

People started throwing flowers and handfuls of dirt onto the coffin below us when a loud argument began. Apparently, the people from Hanoi have different burial traditions than those of this area, and the two contingents were struggling over some procedure. The argument got louder and erupted into some shoving. The widow—suddenly recovered from her fainting—charged over and loudly berated the apparent leader of the northerners, who shouted right back at her.

Then the widow tried to hit the guy, he tried to hit back (remember, they’re both standing on soft, unstable earth on a little hill, surrounded by people paying various degrees of attention), and soon bodies were moving every which way. A few guys finally had to take Mr. Northern Ritual away from the widow, order was restored, and we finished the burial.

People started straggling down the hill, cigarettes were smoked, food was prepared (which we skipped, thank you), and people appeared to congratulate each other on a job well-done. I snapped a last picture or two, climbed into my car which had magically appeared, climbed in, and continued south to Hoi An.

Life, indeed, goes on.

Hue—the Imperial City

Sexual Intelligence continues reporting live from a 3-week trip to Vietnam.

After an uneventful flight, I arrived in Hue, a peaceful city (population 300,000) of lakes, gardens, and the Perfume River. I was delighted to find that my hotel room faced the lovely wide river, so close I could see and hear the water taxis and miniature barges from my balcony.

The river here is everything—a source of transportation, food, poetry, and, less tangibly, the emotional heart of the area. Upstream, the river valley passes through hills crowned with old mausoleums and other royal monuments. Downstream, the river carries commerce to the sea, connecting Hue with China, Hong Kong, Cambodia, and the rest of Asia as it has done for centuries.

I spent a day touring the traditional sites. First I visited the lovely Thien Mu Pagoda, a 400-year-old Buddhist monastery (religious school, temple, burial site, and garden) on the site of a 2,000-year-old Cham Temple. By the 1930s it had become a hotbed of Buddhist opposition to French colonialism; in 1963 one of its monks became world-famous when he drove all day to Saigon’s downtown, sat down in the street and set himself on fire to protest the corrupt Ngo Din Diem regime the U.S. was supporting. The burned shell of his car, and the well-known photo of his self-immolation, are on display here.

Next I went to the gigantic 19th-century Citadel, a small city that was home to emperors, their hundreds of wives, concubines, and mandarins, and thousands of workers supporting them. A walled compound with spectacular buildings in various condition, it’s a showcase of Vietnamese architecture, religious practice, and a 200-year-old ruling dynasty that only ended with the Communist “liberation” of Vietnam in 1945.

The next day I went outside Hue to visit the mausoleums of 3 different emperors. Each contained the traditional elements (giant ceremonial gate, mammoth stone staircases, giant stone obelisks and inscribed stealae, life-sized stone soldiers guarding the tomb), although each was executed differently. In addition, each offered a carefully designed lake, lovely formal gardens, thousands of trees in their natural setting, and grounds for royal meditation. Meditating on the grounds of your own future burial site must be interesting, if a person can stand it.

In addition, I had a few more prosaic adventures. At the end of a country lane, I found the small temple dedicated to the elephants which sometimes died battling tigers in the Royal Arena. My guide was skeptical that we’d find it, but we did—the first tourist-free place I’d enjoyed in the whole country.

I then went to a workshop in which a dozen half-naked men sweated to make enormous bronze bells weighing tons each. The fires (over 1,000 degrees) roared as apprentices fed hardwood into or around various clay molds. I also watched old craftsmen, sitting barefoot on their heels or a single brick, carve delicate designs (backwards!) into the molds. There was still plenty to see and questions to ask, but with my hair and clothes reeking from smoke, I finally ran out of the hot, dark, noisy—and wonderful—place.

I was really eager to see a Vietnamese train station. Access inside them is strictly limited, so Saigon and Hanoi were out; Hue was my big chance. Of course, the petty bureaucrat in charge firmly dismissed my idea, asking for an actual ticket going somewhere. Finally, I had my guide push the guard really hard on behalf of the famous professor from California, and I was allowed to see…tracks! Unused trains standing still! A few workers “examining” things and even pretending to repair stuff.

It was a long day, capped by a bath, room service, and writing this blog. It was easy to go to sleep. I was sure I’d dream about driving south to Danang, Hoi An, and the South China Sea.

Hanoi, City of the Future

Sexual Intelligence continues reporting live from 3 weeks in Vietnam.

Hanoi is a perfect example of a new kind of Third World city.

The country is growing rapidly, and the Vietnamese government wants to establish manufacturing and export facilities just about everywhere it can. So it’s taking over the rice fields in the outskirts of Hanoi, giving people a one-time housing stipend (which, being country-folk, they usually blow, but that’s another story), and paving the rice fields—the better to build new factories, houses, the power grid they need, and the roads to get to them.

But there’s only so much “outskirts” near the city, and so the government is taking land that’s many miles and many, many hours outside Hanoi and building new towns from the ground up: brand-new luxury apartments, chi-chi stores, and the smaller commercial merchants needed to support them. We might call this the “suburbs,” but the development process here is very different, dramatically telescoped in time. What took 100 years to shape say, the New York or Boston metropolis is taking less than a single generation here.

It’s a self-perpetuating process: the countryside is cleared or paved, people are thrown off their land, they move to the big cities which lack the infrastructure to handle their basic needs, and more established people move outside the city. This creates pressure for more paving of agricultural or forested land, and the cycle continues.

That sweat suit or scarf that’s “Made in Vietnam” is way, way more complicated than it looks.

On Vietnamese TV

Sexual Intelligence continues reporting live from 3 weeks in Vietnam.

Last night I was interviewed for an hour on O2, Vietnam’s independent lifestyle TV channel.

The set was pretty familiar, as was the three-camera setup, spike-haired makeup guy, and sound guy who threaded the mike cord under my shirt with a nonchalant air of entitlement. Eventually it was 3-2-1 and we were rolling tape.

The interviewer had clearly been to my website, knew my books (a happy contrast to American TV!), and asked very intelligent questions. We discussed differences between U.S. and Vietnamese ideas of gender, love, and marriage; I talked about how technology affects sexual culture, and will presumably continue to do so in Vietnam; and I talked about how increasing Vietnamese women’s economic independence will presumably increase the country’s divorce rate.

I also compared the sex-related policies of our respective governments. In Vietnam, adultery is illegal; in America, the government has spent a billion dollars trying to discourage teens from having sex. Both countries regulate abortion and contraception. Both countries have inadequate sex education and premarital counseling.

The hour show flew by, and my host was quite pleased. She gave me a lovely silk scarf as a gift, and soon I was back out on the street.

After a quick bowl of steaming pho (noodle soup with beef or chicken, which can be eaten for breakfast, lunch, or dinner), I headed back to my hotel. I can’t wait to see what I look like dubbed into Vietnamese.