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Urge: Naked World
Buff cut
Hairstylists at a Moscow salon shampoo and trim in nothing but their high heels.
By Hank Hyena
[02/18/00]

Spiritual intelligence
An interview with Danah Zohar and Dr. Ian Marshall, authors of "SQ: Connecting With Our Spiritual Intelligence."
By David Bowman
[02/18/00]

Mixed meds
Think twice before mixing your herbs and your prescription medicine.
By Dawn MacKeen
[02/17/00]

Urge: Naked World
The rise and fall of erotica
Steamy soft-core cinema is phenomenally popular in Indonesia, but the government is slowing down production.
By Hank Hyena
[02/17/00]

Urge: Naked World
Monkey business
Men of the cloth are under a cloud of scandal in Japan and Cambodia.
By Hank Hyena
[02/16/00]

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And yet two days before Valentine's Day, here we were at a conference in London titled "Sex Wars," discussing such familiar problems as the politicization of the personal, the demonization of men and paranoia about sex and relationships. The conference, held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts just a short walk from Buckingham Palace -- itself the site of some famous sex wars in recent memory -- was organized by a discussion/debate group called the Maverick Club and the libertarian-leaning, iconoclastic monthly LM.

A crowd of nearly 300 people, less predominantly female than gatherings at gender-related events stateside, came to hear academics, journalists and others tackle subjects ranging from "Regulating Passion" ("What impact does an increased awareness of issues such as sexual harassment, domestic violence and date rape have on the way we enter into relationships?") to "Sex and the Single Girl" ("Has the demise of long-term relationships led to greater emotional fulfillment, or will it result in an epidemic of lonely singletons, too cautious to make a commitment?").

The specter of American gender extremism, invoked as a cautionary tale, hovered at times over the proceedings -- particularly when University of Massachusetts (Amherst) professor Daphne Patai, author of the 1999 book "Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism," talked about the depredations of the "sexual harassment industry" in the United States. (Full disclosure: I was a speaker as well, unpaid but reimbursed for travel expenses.)

But that's not to say everything was quiet on the sex-wars front on British soil. One story freshly ripped from the headlines was a hefty award of damages -- 400,000 pounds (about $700,000) -- to a man who had sued a female co-worker for libel after she falsely accused him of rape. Many feminists were dismayed, especially by the judge's decision to make the woman's name public; one activist fumed that "the judge needs shooting." On the first conference panel, "The War of the Sexes," University of Kent sociologist Frank Furedi cited the brouhaha as evidence of how polarized discourse about sex and gender had grown -- on one side, men's movement activists (yes, they have them in England) gleefully rubbing their hands that a woman had finally been punished for falsely accusing a man, and on the other, feminists basically conceding that she lied yet complaining that the punishment would deter real victims from coming forward. Furedi noted that no one was looking at the specifics of the case or at the individuals involved. Such divisiveness, he added, had become typical of popular and even academic discussions of gender: "Either feminism is accused of stoking up anti-man passions and of inventing problems that do not exist, or men are said to be waging a war against women and systematically using violent tactics like stalking, battering and rape to maintain their hegemony."

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