Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 903

5 insane ways female sexual desire was once suppressed

At 51, my sex drive is no longer the needy pest it once was, just a pleasant and regular visitor. True, it gave me some of the greatest times of my life, but it also caused a lot of problems. Female desire is an intriguing thing. It was addressed in pill form this past summer with Addyi, the first FDA-approved drug to treat female hypoactive sexual desire disorder, which the Mayo Clinic defines as the “persistent and recurrent lack of interest in sex that causes you personal distress." The roll-out of the drug, misleadingly nicknamed “pink viagra” (it actually works on your brain, not your blood flow), drew criticisms about its effectiveness, its side effects and its oversimplification of the physiology of desire. (The Motley Fool investment website describes early demand for Addyi as “tepid,” reporting that only 227 prescriptions had been written in a story posted Nov. 18, 2015.) In the past, it often wasn’t the absence of female desire that was seen as troublesome; it was the presence of it. Female sexual desire was seen as something dangerous to be tamped down, not revved up. Here are some bits of medical history that might make you a little happier to live in the 21st century. 1. The doctor is in. You might be familiar with "hysteria," a 19th-century term for symptoms that, to the modern ear, sound like female sexual arousal and frustration, including anxiety, sleeplessness, sexy fantasies, and vaginal lubrication. The surprising medical solution was for doctors to massage the genitals of women to “paroxysm”—aka orgasm. In her book "The Technology of Orgasm: 'Hysteria,' the Vibrator and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction," Rachel P. Maines says female masturbation was frowned upon in that era, and out-of-bounds female sexual desire was seen as pathological, a condition requiring treatment by a male physician. Eventually machinery was invented to help doctors with this rampant problem. The first battery-powered vibrator internationally marketed for the job was designed in the mid-1880s by Joseph Mortimer Granville, a British physician who, Maines writes, didn’t even approve of the device for this purpose: it was meant for men’s skeletal muscles. Luckily, no one cared what he thought, and by 1900 there was a bewildering array of such devices available to “treat” women and save doctors all the time and effort of treating women by hand. 2. The unkindest cut. Hugo Schwyzer, writing in Jezebel in 2012, detailed how Dr. Isaac Baker-Brown felt that vibrators didn’t cure hysteria, they only made it worse by making patients want more “treatment.” The solution, he thought, was to excise the clitoral glans, following which, he promised, “intractable women became happy wives; rebellious teenage girls settled back into the bosom of their families; and married women formerly averse to sexual duties became pregnant.” Baker-Brown’s barbarism didn’t last in his native Britain, but doctors in America were still recommending clitoridectomies as late as 1937. Schwyzer’s article refers to a 2000 Ms. Magazine story by Martha Coventry, who interviewed a woman who underwent the procedure in 1944 when she was 12 years old—to stop her from masturbating. 3. In dreams. And then there was the idea that removing everything good and happy in your life and replacing it with pain and loneliness was a step in the right direction. In Nymphomania: A History, Carol Groneman uses the story of “Mrs. B” to convey how difficult it must have been for a Victorian lady, circa 1856, to confide her lustful thoughts to a male doctor. Twenty-four-year-old Mrs. B. had always had a healthy sexual appetite and had a great sex life with her husband. She dreamed night and day about having sex with other men and had started having a problem at home: her “husband complained that she had an obstruction that made intercourse difficult.” Mrs. B thought he just had erectile problems. But she visited Dr. Horatio Storer, worried about her fear that “she was not going to be able to limit her sexual desire solely to her husband in the future.” She thought her dreams were the result of the couple's failure to conceive a child. After an exam in which Dr. Storer touched Mrs. B’s clitoris and caused her to shriek with excitement, he told her “if she continued without treatment, she would most likely end up in an asylum.” The treatment included, among other things, having her husband move out so they wouldn’t have sex, giving up her writing of a novel, ice-cold sponge baths and enemas, and swabbing “her vagina with borax solution.”Groneman says Dr. Storer wrote no followup notes on the case except: “Mr. B. remained absent and Mrs. B.'s lewd dreams had not reappeared.” One imagines this put an end not just to Mrs. B's sexy dreams, but to all her dreams. 4. “A little ketchup for my steak.” That, reports JR Thorpe at Bustle, is one man’s description of his partner’s menstrual period. Thorpe cites "The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation," as listing ideas in different cultures about the dangers of period sex, including that the French once believed a child conceived at that time would be “subject to horrible diseases, including leprosy, syphilis, scrofula and violent ulcers of the skin.” In the 19th century, contact with menstruating women was thought to give men gonorrhea, and as late as the 1950s, a survey found most women’s reasons for abstaining from sex during menstruation was their fear it might lead to “hemorrhage, injury or infection.” It’s true that pregnancy can still occur if you have sex during your period. And according to SexOnline.com, the cervix expands more at this time creating a greater pathway for bacteria and STIs. Beyond that it’s not only safe, but has its benefits, which are enumerated by Emma Kaywin on Bustle. 5. Womb to wonder.    In classical Greece, writes the University of Waterloo’s S.L. Ager, hysteria—i.e., women’s mood swings and erratic crazy behavior—was blamed on a woman's womb, mostly its inability to stay put. It was thought that the womb "was liable to detach itself from its regular home, and wander off at will through her body,” Ager writes, causing all kind of mischief in its travels, including possibly choking a woman to death. The Roman physician Aretaeus described the wandering womb as moving "hither and thither,” “obliquely to the right or to the left, either to the liver or spleen,” that it was like “an animal within an animal,” and it preferred fragrant scents to foul ones. That meant it responded to aromatherapy. Matt Simon writes in Wired that, “To cure a wandering womb, physicians could lure it back into position with pleasant scents applied to the vagina, or drive it away from the upper body and back down where it belongs by having the afflicted sniff foul scents.” Which “pleasant scents” are not detailed, but next time I feel ooky I’m going to sit uncomfortably close to some buffalo wings and see what happens. Liz Langley is a freelance writer in Orlando, Florida. At 51, my sex drive is no longer the needy pest it once was, just a pleasant and regular visitor. True, it gave me some of the greatest times of my life, but it also caused a lot of problems. Female desire is an intriguing thing. It was addressed in pill form this past summer with Addyi, the first FDA-approved drug to treat female hypoactive sexual desire disorder, which the Mayo Clinic defines as the “persistent and recurrent lack of interest in sex that causes you personal distress." The roll-out of the drug, misleadingly nicknamed “pink viagra” (it actually works on your brain, not your blood flow), drew criticisms about its effectiveness, its side effects and its oversimplification of the physiology of desire. (The Motley Fool investment website describes early demand for Addyi as “tepid,” reporting that only 227 prescriptions had been written in a story posted Nov. 18, 2015.) In the past, it often wasn’t the absence of female desire that was seen as troublesome; it was the presence of it. Female sexual desire was seen as something dangerous to be tamped down, not revved up. Here are some bits of medical history that might make you a little happier to live in the 21st century. 1. The doctor is in. You might be familiar with "hysteria," a 19th-century term for symptoms that, to the modern ear, sound like female sexual arousal and frustration, including anxiety, sleeplessness, sexy fantasies, and vaginal lubrication. The surprising medical solution was for doctors to massage the genitals of women to “paroxysm”—aka orgasm. In her book "The Technology of Orgasm: 'Hysteria,' the Vibrator and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction," Rachel P. Maines says female masturbation was frowned upon in that era, and out-of-bounds female sexual desire was seen as pathological, a condition requiring treatment by a male physician. Eventually machinery was invented to help doctors with this rampant problem. The first battery-powered vibrator internationally marketed for the job was designed in the mid-1880s by Joseph Mortimer Granville, a British physician who, Maines writes, didn’t even approve of the device for this purpose: it was meant for men’s skeletal muscles. Luckily, no one cared what he thought, and by 1900 there was a bewildering array of such devices available to “treat” women and save doctors all the time and effort of treating women by hand. 2. The unkindest cut. Hugo Schwyzer, writing in Jezebel in 2012, detailed how Dr. Isaac Baker-Brown felt that vibrators didn’t cure hysteria, they only made it worse by making patients want more “treatment.” The solution, he thought, was to excise the clitoral glans, following which, he promised, “intractable women became happy wives; rebellious teenage girls settled back into the bosom of their families; and married women formerly averse to sexual duties became pregnant.” Baker-Brown’s barbarism didn’t last in his native Britain, but doctors in America were still recommending clitoridectomies as late as 1937. Schwyzer’s article refers to a 2000 Ms. Magazine story by Martha Coventry, who interviewed a woman who underwent the procedure in 1944 when she was 12 years old—to stop her from masturbating. 3. In dreams. And then there was the idea that removing everything good and happy in your life and replacing it with pain and loneliness was a step in the right direction. In Nymphomania: A History, Carol Groneman uses the story of “Mrs. B” to convey how difficult it must have been for a Victorian lady, circa 1856, to confide her lustful thoughts to a male doctor. Twenty-four-year-old Mrs. B. had always had a healthy sexual appetite and had a great sex life with her husband. She dreamed night and day about having sex with other men and had started having a problem at home: her “husband complained that she had an obstruction that made intercourse difficult.” Mrs. B thought he just had erectile problems. But she visited Dr. Horatio Storer, worried about her fear that “she was not going to be able to limit her sexual desire solely to her husband in the future.” She thought her dreams were the result of the couple's failure to conceive a child. After an exam in which Dr. Storer touched Mrs. B’s clitoris and caused her to shriek with excitement, he told her “if she continued without treatment, she would most likely end up in an asylum.” The treatment included, among other things, having her husband move out so they wouldn’t have sex, giving up her writing of a novel, ice-cold sponge baths and enemas, and swabbing “her vagina with borax solution.”Groneman says Dr. Storer wrote no followup notes on the case except: “Mr. B. remained absent and Mrs. B.'s lewd dreams had not reappeared.” One imagines this put an end not just to Mrs. B's sexy dreams, but to all her dreams. 4. “A little ketchup for my steak.” That, reports JR Thorpe at Bustle, is one man’s description of his partner’s menstrual period. Thorpe cites "The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation," as listing ideas in different cultures about the dangers of period sex, including that the French once believed a child conceived at that time would be “subject to horrible diseases, including leprosy, syphilis, scrofula and violent ulcers of the skin.” In the 19th century, contact with menstruating women was thought to give men gonorrhea, and as late as the 1950s, a survey found most women’s reasons for abstaining from sex during menstruation was their fear it might lead to “hemorrhage, injury or infection.” It’s true that pregnancy can still occur if you have sex during your period. And according to SexOnline.com, the cervix expands more at this time creating a greater pathway for bacteria and STIs. Beyond that it’s not only safe, but has its benefits, which are enumerated by Emma Kaywin on Bustle. 5. Womb to wonder.    In classical Greece, writes the University of Waterloo’s S.L. Ager, hysteria—i.e., women’s mood swings and erratic crazy behavior—was blamed on a woman's womb, mostly its inability to stay put. It was thought that the womb "was liable to detach itself from its regular home, and wander off at will through her body,” Ager writes, causing all kind of mischief in its travels, including possibly choking a woman to death. The Roman physician Aretaeus described the wandering womb as moving "hither and thither,” “obliquely to the right or to the left, either to the liver or spleen,” that it was like “an animal within an animal,” and it preferred fragrant scents to foul ones. That meant it responded to aromatherapy. Matt Simon writes in Wired that, “To cure a wandering womb, physicians could lure it back into position with pleasant scents applied to the vagina, or drive it away from the upper body and back down where it belongs by having the afflicted sniff foul scents.” Which “pleasant scents” are not detailed, but next time I feel ooky I’m going to sit uncomfortably close to some buffalo wings and see what happens. Liz Langley is a freelance writer in Orlando, Florida.

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#YallQaeda and #VanillaISIS: When can we call the Oregon standoff domestic terrorism?

There are currently about 150 white men with guns refusing to leave the grounds of a federal building in Oregon. The right wing media is likening the incident to peaceful protest movements that have recently taken place in America such as Occupy Wall Street and the Black Lives Matter movement — but what these men are doing is textbook domestic terrorism. Check out our video summary of the media's coverage so far. [jwplayer file="http://media.salon.com/2016/01/Oregon..." image="http://media.salon.com/2016/01/874604...]

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The GOP’s favorite enemy: Right-wingers erupt as Bill Clinton returns to campaign trail

Bill Clinton has never been one to shy away from the limelight, but the former president spent much of 2015 behind the scenes, courting donors at closed-door fundraisers as his wife Hillary laid the groundwork for her 2016 presidential campaign. But with the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary just weeks away, Bill Clinton returned to the national political stage Monday, making his first solo appearance of the campaign to stump for Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire. Clinton spoke to a crowd of about 700 at Nashua Community College on Monday morning, casting his wife as the most qualified candidate to lead the nation and offering her "inclusive social policy" as an alternative to the "kind of scary" Republican field. "I think [Hillary Clinton's] is the plan that offers the best chance to have the most rapid movement to more broadly shared prosperity," he said. Bill Clinton's return to the campaign trail gave the right wing a familiar target to lob blows at. Based on conservative comments surrounding Clinton's sexual history and allegations of abuse, voters could be forgiven for thinking they'd entered a time warp to 1998. On his radio show Monday following Clinton's speech, Rush Limbaugh said "Trump, of course, talking about how 'Hey, you know you've got to be careful Hillary. You send [Bill Clinton] out there, you better not start playing your vagina card.' But she's playing that card, and Trump's saying 'Hey wait a minute, you're going to send him out there and you just talk about a victim, the two don't go together and I'm going to hit you on it'." On CNN, Jeffrey Lord, political commentator, Trump supporter and former member of the Reagan administration, contrasted Hillary Clinton's support of campus rape victims with her husband's history. "Juanita Broaddrick is not getting the same treatment as the Cosby accusers. Why not?" he asked. Rand Paul echoed this line of thinking, arguing that Hillary Clinton's support of women makes her husband's past fair game. “Hillary Clinton has brought this on herself, by saying women should be believed, and yet she was big on calling all of the women that accused Bill of his different advances and harassment and possibly other allegations, she was big on calling them the ‘bimbos,'" he said Monday. After being called sexist by Hillary Clinton last week, Donald Trump fired off the shots at her husband on Twitter and CBS's "Face The Nation," claiming he has a "terrible record of women abuse" and is "one of the great abusers of the world." "He's demonstrated a penchant for sexism," Trump tweeted on Dec. 26 of Clinton. Ironic coming from the man that once told Esquire: "You know, it really doesn't matter what [the media] write as long as you've got a young and beautiful piece of ass." Bloomberg's Mark Halperin called Trump's attacks "politically brilliant" on the Monday edition of MSNBC's "Morning Joe," because they reinforced his bona fides as a "real Republican." Trump claimed on "Face The Nation" on Sunday that he's "the only one that is willing to talk about [Bill Clinton's] problems," but in reality others on the right wing have been all too ready to jump into the fray. At a Clinton campaign event on Sunday, Republican New Hampshire state representative Katherine Prudhomme-O'Brien heckled Hillary Clinton from the crowd about allegations of sexual misconduct against her husband, prompting the candidate to respond, "You are very rude, and I'm not going to ever call on you." For his part, Clinton has avoided invitations to engage with his attackers:

@ABCLiz Liz or any Lame-stream Media ever ask anyone else if their illegal, abusive behavior (Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey) "fair"?

— John Kunnari (@JukkaHyva) January 4, 2016

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My penis size obsession: All my life I’ve worried about measuring up

I think I first experienced anxiety about size when I was around 5 years old, as my friend Billy and I were pissing outside together. No, I don’t remember why we were pissing outside. And no, I don’t know what compelled me to actually look at his dick, except that I was young and hadn’t learned proper pissing-with-other-dudes etiquette yet. But what I know is that I had only ever seen my brother, my father and myself naked before that moment. It made sense to me that my dad’s penis was larger than mine—everything about him was larger. But this kid was my age and my size—except for one part.  And that part was bigger. Shockingly so. I couldn’t tell you why this realization bothered me—I was years away from knowing anything about sex, and close to a decade away from worrying about the role size might play in satisfying a lover. Nevertheless, at that moment, realizing that I was clearly smaller than my friend, I felt inferior for the first time in my life. I may not remember many details of that day, but I remember that feeling quite clearly.

*

In their 2007 study of gay men’s perception of penis size, researchers Murray J. N. Drummond and Shaun M. Filiault noted the way culture seems to equate a man’s value with the size of his penis:

Stereotypically, men’s penis size is linked with Western cultural notions of masculinity. That is, a large penis is indicative of one being ‘more’ of a man. As Pope and colleagues state; “genitals symbolize virility, procreative potency, and power” all of which are critical to accessing what is termed “hegemonic masculinity” Furthermore, other analyses of Western masculinity suggest men are expected to occupy space or ‘penetrate’ space, dictums which both lend credence to the need for a large, penetrating penis. Accordingly, and based on such cultural stereotypes, a small penis draws into question a man’s sexual prowess and his overall masculinity. Based on such symbolism and cultural observations, it is little wonder that a large number of men present each year for penile augmentation surgery, despite the risky nature of the procedure and the fact that many of those men are of a normal size. Seemingly, then, penis size is a major body image concern for many if not most men living in Western nations.

*

The ceramics class I took my senior year of high school was taught by a local artist who didn’t have very much classroom experience. As a result, class sometimes seemed a little chaotic. The music would be turned up a little too loud if the Beastie Boys came on. People would just take the hall pass from the teacher’s desk without permission in order to roam the school. Conversations were often shouted across the room as we halfheartedly molded our ashtrays and pots. The teacher would try to get us to quiet down, to treat her with some measure of respect, and to focus our energies on creating art.  But she’d tried too hard to make us like her, to convince us she was laid back and cool, the first week of class. Rookie mistake.

One day the group of stoners in the class were sitting at their table, laughing louder than usual.  Eventually, one of them—an African-American kid named Lamar—got up from his seat, grabbed the hall pass, and left the room. His friends were all still laughing, but he seemed pissed.

“What is going on?” the teacher demanded, and the laughter died down.

“Something funny happened at a party on Saturday,” Gabe, the only talented artist in the class, responded.  “It’s not a big deal.”

For the life of me, I don’t know why the teacher followed up.

“What?” she asked.  “What happened?”

Nervous laughter, then Gabe answered.  “Well, Lamar… fell asleep.  In the bathroom. Some people found him in there. Naked.”

At this point, I think the teacher realized she didn’t really want to know.  “OK, OK.”

“And it turns out that certain ideas about black guys… aren’t true.”

At this, the teacher turned red as the table full of stoners started laughing again. I was embarrassed too. For her. For him. For me, too, I suppose.

I tried my best to ignore them, focusing on the clay in front of me, and I managed to succeed.  I didn’t notice anyone getting up from their table and going toward the chalkboard when the teacher wasn’t looking.  And I didn’t notice Lamar had returned to the room until the yelling began.

“Who did it?” he demanded loudly.  I looked up to see him standing in the front of the room, eyes wide, mouth shut tight as if he was containing rage, or tears, or both.  “Who the fuck did it?”

The teacher seemed just as confused as I was, and I think we probably both looked behind him at the same time, toward the chalkboard.  Someone had taken a small chunk of clay—maybe an inch long, and very thin—and affixed it to the board.  Written beside it, with an arrow pointing towards it, were the words “Lamar’s pee-pee.”

He walked through the room slowly, making eye contact with all of us. I don’t think he actually thought I would do such a thing—the stoners kind of scared me back then. I thought all drugs were dangerous and led to a life of reckless criminality. And I’m pretty sure he knew it was one of his friends. But when he looked at me, I could tell that he wanted to hurt someone, and I could understand. And though it would be years before I would start to think about how racial stereotypes probably make anxiety about penis size even more acute for young black men, I felt like this was the most humiliating thing I’d ever witnessed.

*

According to research conducted by the makers of Lifestyles-brand condoms, the average erect penis is about 5.8 inches long. Some other surveys suggest that the average is slightly smaller.  Surveys that rely on self-reporting from men suggest, not surprisingly, that the average is higher.  But it’s probably safe to say that the average is somewhere between 5 and a half and 6 inches long. Lifestyles reports that the average girth is 4.972 inches. Obviously, there’s some small deviation in other surveys, but not much.

*

TSA screener Rolando Negrin accepted a plea deal in 2011 to avoid a felony conviction after using a police baton to assault a co-worker who had seen what he was packing through a whole-body scanner image and had taunted him about it.

In 2012, drunken John Clinton stabbed his wife to death but argued that he should be charged with manslaughter rather than murder because she had been “galling him” about his bedwetting habit and small penis.

Also, in 2012, Florida skinny-dipper Adam Brown was charged with threatening his neighbor with a rifle when she made fun of his size, pointing the gun at her face and asking, “How do you like the size of this?”  Even when police arrived, he refused to put his gun down and wound up getting shot by an officer.

*

My first college girlfriend wasn’t really my girlfriend at all. She was a female friend with whom I occasionally got drunk and made out. Occasionally, if we were both really turned on, I might get to rub a breast over her sweater.  But she had a boyfriend back at home, and eventually felt like she couldn’t continue French-kissing me, so we decided to go back to just being friends. We hung out with the same people, so just going our separate ways wasn’t really an option. But, to be honest, I probably wasn’t very mature about the whole thing.

My friends and I always made fun of each other—none of us was particularly thin-skinned—but she and I would sometimes each take the “friendly teasing” a little too far. I knew that a boy in her high school used to harass her by calling her “fire crotch”—a reference to her red hair. So I started calling her that too—in that “ironic” way so I could claim that I didn’t actually mean to upset her, even though I knew exactly what I was doing. She would come back at me too, of course, and she tended to give as good as she got with her jokes about my own nerdy interests in comic books or lack of success with women. But in hindsight, I realize I was being the asshole in these exchanges.

One night, all of our friends were gathered in one friend’s room for conversation and binge drinking. She was telling a story about being in her high school’s band, and referenced that she had loved playing the flute.

“Skin flute, you mean,” I replied with a snicker.  Yes, I really was that stupid and immature.

She paused in her story, then replied, “Yeah, I’ve played the skin flute.  Or, in your case, piccolo.”

She had, of course, never seen my penis.  But our friends didn’t know that.  They just knew that we’d fooled around for a while then stopped. And as a virgin, I had been kind of happy to have my friends think I was more sexually experienced than I was. Though not anymore.

The room was silent. I couldn’t come up with anything to say.

She smiled. She knew she’d finally beaten me. But she gilded the lily by asking, “No clever comeback, piccolo prick?”

All of our friends looked back and forth at us.

“Oh, I’m just kidding,” she replied.  “I’ve never even seen his dick.”

I felt entitled, somewhat, to some type of righteous indignation. She had, after all, told a roomful of our mutual friends that I had a small penis, and then—to set the record straight—made it clear that we hadn’t done anything below the waist. But even though I was embarrassed, I had to admit that she’d done a masterful job of insulting me. Her comic timing was excellent. She’d shut me up after I’d been rude to her for several weeks. The truth is, I think we wound up becoming friends again after that comment. I certainly never tried to use sexual innuendo to embarrass her—or any other woman—ever again.

*            

In a 1998 New York Times article, attorney Leon Friedman described a literary method of avoiding defamation lawsuits while writing unflattering, thinly-veiled depictions of real men—describe the character as having a small penis. As Friedman told the Times, ''Now no male is going to come forward and say, 'That character with a very small penis, 'That's me!’''

This “rule” only sounds like a joke—in fact, this method is quite well-known among lawyers and writers who wish to malign other people. Apparently, the idea that a man would rather be the victim of libel than have people think his penis is small is just common sense.

*

I was once having sex with a woman I wasn’t in a relationship with. We understood going into it that this was a one-night stand. We were friends, and we liked each other, but she had another guy she was more interested in and I was really only looking to get laid. And I was pretty drunk, too. That’s probably important.

I don’t want to brag, but she came a couple of times, and I was still going. In fact, that’s not a brag at all, really. I was young and inexperienced and was pretty sure that going longer was always better, but as we fucked I realized I wasn’t even close to coming. I was hard, but not quite able to finish up. And I realize, in hindsight, that it probably started to become unpleasant for her, lying there while a guy she wasn’t all that into was thrusting away at her.

“Ooooooh,” she moaned.  “Your dick is so big.”

At this point, I almost had to stop. I realized she was trying to flatter me, to push me to the point of no return by telling me what every guy wants to hear. But it had the opposite effect. Why would she say such a thing? I knew I wasn’t particularly massive—in fact, at the time, I suspected I was smaller than average. Was she trying to reassure me, presuming I was insecure about it? Did she feel sorry for me? Was this charity?

Honestly, I don’t remember if I came that night, or if we both just eventually fell asleep.  But I do remember her telling me my dick was big, and I remember my certainty that she was lying.

*

Adult film star John Holmes claimed to have a 15-inch penis. His ex-wife claimed it was 10 inches. His business manager says 13 and a half. Ron Jeremy is reported to have a 9 and a half inch penis. Certainly, the adult film industry seems to feel that bigger is better—with the exception of some very specific fetish porn (some cuckold websites, SPH or “Small Penis Humiliation” videos), the actors all seem to be endowed with at least 7 inches.

With 13 and a half inches locked behind his zipper, actor and writer Jonah Falcon is believed by many to have the largest dick in the world. In a 2010 interview with Samantha Bee for "The Daily Show," he explained that he was not interested in acting in porn because it would be “the easy way out.”

*

My wife’s bachelorette party was a week before our wedding. Her friends got her very drunk, very fast, and she told me the next day that she had wound up passing out about two hours into the festivities. It wasn’t quite what she was planning, and I had a feeling that perhaps the party had been a disappointment. When I saw Erin, my wife’s matron of honor, a few days later, she put my mind at ease.

“It was so much fun,” she said.  “Emily was drunk, but she was funnier than I’ve ever seen her.  It was awesome.”

“Really?” I asked. “Well, that’s good.”

“Yeah, at one point, she was ranking the dicks of every guy she has ever been with by size.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she answered, laughing.

“Well…” How to ask this?  “I mean, where did I rank on the list?”

Recognizing her folly, Erin stopped laughing and quickly tried to cover. “Oh, she… she left you off the list. Women don’t talk about their current partners that way.”

I didn’t want to call Erin a liar—she was my friend, too. Plus, I’m just not that rude. And though I’m not particularly anxious about the size of my dick, I still felt like I needed to know now—especially since all of our female friends knew. So I eventually asked Emily. As it happens, I’m closer to the top of the list than the bottom, if we’re going largest to smallest, though she added that there wasn’t much deviation among the men she had been with. Her list of previous lovers is not particularly long, but there are enough on there that I’m content that she knows what is out there and I’m not disappointing her. Not that I was all that worried until Erin brought it up.

Of course, a truly confident man wouldn’t have felt the need to ask in the first place.  And probably wouldn’t know how many penises his wife has had intimate contact with. And how would I have felt if she had told me I was smaller than most of the men she had been with?  How would I have felt if her total number of sexual partners was significantly higher than mine—like, say, if she could discuss the length and girth of 30 or 40 different men? How confident would I be if the answer to the question wasn’t what I wanted to hear?

*

In some ways, I think guys are taught from a very young age that we are in competition with each other. Little League, action movies, gym class—we’re raised to think that part of masculinity involves beating another boy or man at something. But as we enter adulthood, we find that competition no longer plays such a crucial role in our lives. Who, for example, brags, “I can write committee reports better than any guy in my office?” or “I’m so attuned to my wife’s needs, I can intuit when she has had a tough day without her having to say anything, and I know to take the kids out for ice cream so she can have some much-needed alone time?” This is masculinity in the real world, but it’s not the sort of thing that tends to impress other dudes.

So perhaps bragging, joking or insulting over penis size is an easy way for some guys to feel better about themselves, now that it’s clear that their days on the football field are over and they’re not likely ever going to have to fight a ninja. It’s juvenile and stupid, but perhaps it’s understandable?

*

A study conducted by researchers at King’s College London indicated that 30 percent of men say that the are dissatisfied with their equipment, 35 percent report that they are very satisfied, and the remainder fall somewhere around satisfied or dissatisfied.

Surveys of heterosexual women consistently report that their partners’ penis size is not much of a concern for the vast majority.  And though size preferences among gay men remain a subject of some debate, a 2007 study of the issue found that only 7 percent of gay men said that the penis was their “favorite” part of a man’s anatomy.

The point is, penis size seems to matter most to the guy with a ruler in one hand and his dick in the other.

*

If I’m honest with myself, I have to admit to feeling relieved when my wife told me where I was on her personal experience spectrum. As much as I may tell myself that I don’t care about these things, I have to confess that this is, in fact, a subject I have worried about at times in my life. Knowing that most women say it’s not important, and knowing that my wife says she’s happy with what I’ve got, there is still a part of me that sometimes imagine that it’s all a lie—that, in fact, my wife (and all women) have had the experience of being filled by a 12-inch monster cock and been more fulfilled by it than anything I could ever hope to provide. So much of our culture tells us that this is so, after all. Pornography, sure, but also just the way men—effete liberal and burly conservative alike-- talk to each other about the subject. How often do guys call each other “dick-less” or “needle-dick the bug fucker” or some variation of that type of insult?  How often do we joke about guys who collect assault rifles or drive massive, gas-guzzling trucks trying to “compensate” for their lack of size? Obviously, some women make small dick jokes too, but it seems to me that this is an anxiety that we men have created for ourselves.

*

Actually, there is one guy I can think of who doesn’t seem too insecure, and for whom the legal and literary “small penis rule” did not apply.  New Republic contributor Michael Crowley alleged in 2006 that science fiction writer/ political conspiracy theorist Michael Crichton had maligned him in his novel "Next." Crowley had published an essay criticizing the right-wing paranoia on display in Crichton’s previous novel, "State of Fear," and Crowley alleged that Crichton had retaliated by putting a fictionalized version of him in his follow-up novel. The character, Mick Crowley, was described as a Yale graduate with a small penis, “a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers.”  The real Crowley is a Yale-educated Washington-based political columnist who does not rape babies and whose penis size is none of our business.

Crowley didn’t sue for libel, but nor did he keep his head down and hope that no one would make the connection, either.  He wrote a response for the New Republic wherein he described Crichton’s maligning, but concluded that he found the attention from Crichton “strangely flattering.”

“To explain why,” he wrote, “let me propose a corollary to the small penis rule. Call it the small man rule: If someone offers substantive criticism of an author and the author responds by hitting below the belt, as it were, then he’s conceding that the critic has won.”

*

The challenge in writing a personal essay about penis size, of course, is in figuring out how to end it. That is to say, do I give my own measurements? The principle of absolute honesty would suggest I should. Maybe. Unless you thought the number was too high. Then, all my insistence that men create unnecessary anxiety for ourselves will strike you as being dishonest.

Which is not to say that the number really would be very high. But if the number seems low, well, then the essay seems merely self-serving, doesn’t it?  “Well, of course he thinks we shouldn’t be focused on penis size! He’s hung like a muskrat.”

You see the dilemma I’ve created for myself here. In the end, perhaps, what’s between my legs is a matter best kept between my wife and me. You can feel free to imagine I’ve got a cocktail shrimp down there. Or, a thick, throbbing member that would make Jonah Falcon gasp.  I honestly don’t care at this point—it’s my dick, not yours— and if I don’t care, you probably don’t either.

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Hunter S. Thompson’s son shocker: “Hunter was surprised and pleased that I actually grew up apparently sane”

When Conan O’Brien tried to get Hunter S. Thompson to appear on his talk show, the writer would only agree to a segment if they went to upstate New York to shoot guns and drink hard liquor. Featuring his most famous proclivities, firearms and whisky, it’s a classic Thompson moment, a television appearance dictated, like his life and like his death, entirely on his own terms. It’s an episode that adds to the Thompson myth, another treatment of him not as a person but as a persona—as a cultural icon whose behavior and success are so inextricably tied together that it’s impossible to understand one without the other. The way he lived was the way he wrote. But, of course, Hunter wasn’t just a symbol of Gonzo journalism, and he wasn’t just a caricature of the ‘60s. He was a man—a flawed individual known for his bouts of extreme rage, for his unprovoked verbal eruptions, for his short days and long nights. Nobody experienced the unpredictable fits of anger more so than his only child. Arriving nearly a decade after Hunter’s suicide in February 2006, Juan F. Thompson’s new memoir, "Stories I Tell Myself," details the long path of reconciliation between a father and a son. It’s a journey of love and forgiveness, how one learns to accept a person when there’s no hope for change. It’s a portrait of Hunter as a human being, funny and fearful pages filled with drunk, smoky evenings, famous friends and admirers, extensive travels and financial uncertainty. Relying on his memory, on what he considers sometimes “treacherous” and “unfaithful” and “perfidious,” Juan shares the 41 enthralling and scary years he had with Hunter: living in Woody Creek, Colorado, in a house stockpiled with guns, where ammo was stored in the kitchen cabinets; riding, as a young boy, on the back of speeding motorcycles; leaving his family and home state behind for a lonely and isolating East Coast school (twice). He starts with his own birth and ends with Hunter’s exorbitant funeral, when his dad’s ashes were shot out of a cannon. This interview took place over the phone. It has been lightly edited for concision and clarity. Why write the book now? It’s been almost a decade since Hunter’s death. I just wrote an essay for Powell’s Books, for the store’s newsletter, and the essay is about why it took me nine years to write this book. I started in 2006, and, well, it took nine years. Why now? Because it took me nine years to write the damn book (laughs). Were you sorting through his archives and his letters? Nine years is a long time. A combination of things. First of all, I’d never written a full-length book, and I had no idea what I was getting myself into. None of us do. (laughs) Yeah, my God, my God. Part of it was simply time, too. I got a rough draft done in about a year, but then I realized that was the easy part, getting words down on paper—the basic skeleton. The hard part was pulling all these scraps together into a single, unified and compelling story with an actual arc. And it was also just really difficult writing about my dad and my past. Much harder than I thought it would be. I figured it would be fairly straightforward and easy to remember, but it was an emotional and taxing process—and not one that I ever looked forward to doing. So I would take long breaks. There were times when I probably didn’t look at the manuscript for six months, and then I’d finally come back to it, and you know, see new things. What I was just writing about in this Powell’s essay was how it turned out that I really did need all of that time. If I had finished this book in a year, it wouldn’t have been a very good book. It would have been pretty one-dimensional. I was grieving. It would have been focused on how much I missed my dad and all the things I had heard about him. And it took years for me to reflect upon his life to realize that I needed to tell more of the story—and be fair. And ultimately, at the end of the day, I loved him, and I respected him. That’s where I ended up. But that doesn’t mean—he did do a lot of rotten things. "Stories I Tell Myself" opens with a confession that you constructed the memoir based on memories, which are oftentimes unreliable. Even the title is a reference to this idea. Specifically, as a child, you were in situations that most kids never experience. I’m thinking about when Hunter brought you and your mother, Sandy, to hang out with Ken Kesey and the Hell’s Angels. Or even Jimmy Buffett’s wedding, a celebration you would later learn was filled with all sorts of drugs. Since you were young when both of these events occurred, you have had to rely on other people’s testimonials, and I’d imagine your own perception of your own childhood changed when, as an adult, you would hear all of these stories. In that way, you, like so many others, had to mythologize Hunter. Was it challenging understanding your father as a man and not just a persona, or a symbol? I think part of it was reconciling with my father as a writer, as this caricature, and as the guy I grew up with, as my father. There’s truth in all of them. But I really needed that distance from his death. And I don’t know if I used these exact words in the book, but for those people close to Hunter, there was a very strong sense of loyalty. You have to protect Hunter. You have to be loyal to him. That was an imperative, and that was my first instinct in writing the book. Of course, I’ll protect him. Were people loyal to him because they respected him, or was there also an element of fear? You describe, growing up, you were always afraid of him, too? I think it was more that you didn’t question it. Not so much fear, if he did something wrong you would get in trouble. It was that he needs protecting, and our job is to protect him. And that took a while to realize that doesn’t really—now that he’s dead, I don’t really need to follow that obligation. It’s really up to me, and what I believe is important to tell rather than what he would have wanted me to say if he were alive. And that’s a huge factor. It would have been extremely difficult for me to write this book, much less publish it, if he were alive. What do you think his response would have been if he were alive? He would have been—I think, it’s so hard to tell what Hunter actually thought—horrified and angry and embarrassed. Because he would have had to deal with the consequences of that knowledge. But I really think—he always expected me to be honest. Once he was dead, and he didn’t have to deal with it, I thought: yeah, tell the truth, don’t cover it up. And I’d be doing him a disservice. I’d be failing in my task, if I were to continue to try to protect him, as we had always done. It wouldn’t be real. In your memoir, you refer to both your father and your mother as Hunter and Sandy, respectively. Did you call your father “Hunter” throughout his whole life, and not "Dad"? Did you call your mother “Sandy,” and not "Mom"? Yes, and I have no idea why. As long as I can remember, I always called them that. And I can only imagine it was because that’s how they referred to themselves. It must have been. I don’t think as a 2-year-old I decided that I’d call him Hunter, instead of Dad. Why they made that decision, I have no clue. You ended up, despite all the craziness, pretty tame. You have a pretty normal life. You live in Colorado, you work in IT. Was being normal, for lack of a better word, a way to rebel? I think so. At the time, it certainly wasn’t conscious or deliberate. I think it was a reaction against the uncertainty of the craziness. First of all, Hunter was a freelance writer, so there was no guaranteed income. My mom’s full-time job was taking care of Hunter and me until the divorce. So that was definitely a part of it, the financial uncertainty. But secondly, as a kid and as a teenager, I knew I did not want to live like my father did. For the most part, I rejected the drugs and the drinking. And I think just by my nature, I’m not like him. He was just born that way. He was just born to be Hunter. I don’t think there’s anything in his upbringing—I don’t think, had things been different, he would have ended up an insurance agent like his father. That wouldn’t have happened. He was just wired that way. Yes. He was totally just wired that way. You write a lot about how Hunter was a paradoxical individual. You mention that “one of the most difficult paradoxes in Hunter’s character was the presence of both a strong, genuine caring for others, and a profound self-centeredness.” And that, it was “so ironic that as a father Hunter passed on so few traditions, yet he possessed these traditional reflexes that would show themselves unexpectedly.” When you didn’t shake someone’s hand, for instance, he got upset, even though you had never been instructed on good manners. Is this what made him so unpredictable? That you didn’t know where he stood on certain issues? Not so much that—he was just so volatile, and I think he became more so the older he got. As countless people will testify, he would erupt into a rage for the tiniest provocation. And that was really scary as a kid. And even as an adult, you don’t just get used to that. I learned to deal with it, I’d leave. But it was always uncomfortable, for sure. Among swimming and watching movies, one ritual between you and Hunter was cleaning and shooting guns. He taught you how to respect the machines. They brought you together. What was it about firearms that produced such bonding moments? I think it really could have been anything. But I enjoyed shooting guns, and obviously they were very important to Hunter. Cleaning guns needed to get done, in order to shoot them. It’s a manly kind of thing, and we shared the hobby. Without recognizing it, we probably seized on the opportunity: here’s something that we can do together, that can help connect us. So guns took on a greater importance because they provided a bonding ritual between us. Did you always believe your father would kill himself with a gun? Ralph Steadman said Hunter told him, many years ago, that he’d pull the trigger at any moment. Were you just waiting for the day? Yes. He had been clear for years and years and years that he was going to kill himself, and it would be with a gun. There would have been no way to stop him, then? I mean, how do you stop someone? He had threatened that he was planning to end his life before, and we talked him down. But one thing about Hunter, if he was going to do something, he was going to do it, and nobody was going to stop him. It was a very strange thing. I knew at some point he was going to kill himself. He was not going to go to the hospital. He was not going to go to a retirement home. He hated the hospital, right? Yeah. He hated any loss of control. The idea of Hunter in a nursing home—that’s just impossible. It would never happen. But boy, I didn’t expect his suicide when it happened. It was one of those things. It’ll occur at some point—at some point down the road, we’ll get the phone call that he had done it. You didn’t expect to be there when he did it, you’re saying? No. I sure didn’t expect it to be that weekend when I was visiting with my family. As I wrote, in retrospect, the signs were there, but I didn’t recognize them, and I’m not sure I even wanted to recognize them. Because if I had known what he was thinking, my God—what could I have possibly done? You cleaned the .45 the day before Hunter used the gun to kill himself. When Hunter died, you, your wife, Jen, and your son, Will, were all in the house. How did you feel about him implicitly making you a part of his suicide without your knowledge? Do you consider it a loving act? I do—I think it was out of love, yes. I think that he wanted us there because he didn’t want to die alone. I don’t think he wanted to be found by strangers or the police. I think he wanted us to be there. He wanted me to be there, to make sure things were handled with respect—with how he wanted them to be handled. That’s what I think was going through his mind, and I’m glad I was there, because it would have been much worse not knowing what had actually happened. But it was certainly not easy. Again, it goes back to his paradoxical nature. I think it has a lot to do with his trust and love for me, and my wife, Jen, and my son, Will. And at the same time, I think it was a very selfish act. He just really didn’t think how this would affect us long term. I don’t think he thought it and disregarded it—he likely just didn’t think of it. And you know, he was profoundly unhappy. Hunter died at Owl Farm, his longtime home. Like him, you seem to have a deep connection to the place, to that house in Woody Creek, Colorado. Of course, that’s where you spent the most time as a kid, and there’s a certain level of comfort in the familiar. Also, Hunter clearly had a great community down the road in Aspen—in his early years, he held court at Jerome Bar, and when he slowed down, he had people shuffle through his kitchen—and Colorado flourished with the progressive ideas your parents supported, especially with experimental education. There, Hunter enjoyed his space to live how he wanted. But I see something perhaps deeper in your relationship to the place, to the land specifically. Did you feel a particular connection with your property? Maybe on a purely visceral or spiritual level? You kept returning to it, even after brief spurts of absence (boarding school, Tufts, and a semester abroad in England). Owl Farm was where I grew up—it’s where I have my earliest memories. But it was also so much more than a house, because it was so important to Hunter. That was his base, his foundation. It was a place where he could do whatever he desired, and it was a place where he could always return. And there was space—which was why it was so strange, when I was a kid, and we spent that year in a colonial house in Washington, D.C. Hunter was on the campaign trail. We just didn’t belong in there. That being said, why did you have such a desire to go to boarding school on the East Coast? Why, after the crushing loneliness you felt then, did you return to New England for college? (laughs) Oh god. I mean, I went to school in Boston, and I hated almost everything about that city. It’s so provincial and parochial. People from Boston really like Boston, and I still don’t know why. (laughs) I know what you mean. I still ask myself, “what was I thinking?” There were so many other schools where I would have bee way happier. Why apply to such elite schools? Why the Ivy Leagues? Why Boston? I think I was just caught up in this idea of status. That it was a sign—like, if I go to Harvard, I’ll be a better person than if I don’t go to Harvard. But boy, it’s been funny, you know, my son, Will, is 17, and he’s applying to colleges this year. (laughs) My wife and I have been emphatic that he’s not applying to the Ivy Leagues. Of course, there are a lot of factors why I wasn’t happy, and I probably explain them better in the book. But it was certainly crazy thinking that I wanted to go to an East Coast boarding school, and an elite East Coast college. I still look back, and… … (laughs) God, it was just goofy thinking. Sandy and Hunter separated when you were a young teenager, before you left for boarding school. The divorce took a while to formalize, but after Sandy moved out, she started dating a cast of younger men, just like Hunter started dating a cast of younger women. This similarity, their attraction to people much younger than them, made me wonder if it revealed something shared in their personalities. Were they both particularly seduced by youth? That’s funny, I’ve never actually seen that parallel. Yes, though. Both of them valued youth and attractiveness. And what’s funny about my dad is that the older he got, the younger the women got. He was in his early 60s, and he was dating women in their early 20s. They were younger than me—that was really strange. You got older, and the girlfriends got younger. (laughs) Yeah, exactly. Deborah Fuller was essentially Hunter’s long-term partner, but they were never sexually intimate. How was Deb able to stay—and deal—with Hunter for so long? It’s not entirely rare, I suppose. There’s Howard Austen and Gore Vidal, after all. Did Hunter need Deb? Would he have been able to continue to write without her? Was she his muse? The most important thing to know about Deb is that she just loved Hunter. Her motivation was to take care of Hunter because she loved him. It wasn’t a romantic relationship. It was a deep friendship. He trusted her because he knew she had no ulterior motives. She didn’t want anything from him. She deeply cared for him, and she made sure he was all right, often at her own expense. Hunter didn’t pay her for most of the work she did in the 20-plus years she took care of him. She did the basics. She paid the bills. She kept his life on track, in order—so that he actually could write. After a while, he really couldn’t take care of himself. He was just out of practice, or because of the long-term drugs and alcohol, he just couldn’t focus. There was a point, when he got older and physically worse, he couldn’t do simple stuff, like go grocery shopping. Deb also provided Hunter with some stability. When he was depressed or particularly anxious, she was there to tell him it would all be fine. I believe a lot of people would be interested to know that you took acid with your mother (not Hunter, and never with Hunter), when you were 14. You even go so far as to claim that Hunter would have been disappointed—you mention hearing that Hunter said at a lecture that he would “beat the shit out of” you if he knew you had taken LSD, even though he’d offer you drugs as an adult. It appears he didn’t really encourage your wild side. Why would he have been so opposed? Did he want you to be anything like him, or did he pride himself in the fact that, in many ways, you ended up not like him at all? Hunter was surprised and pleased that I actually grew up apparently sane—able to hold a job and sustain a relationship. I wasn’t a total basket case, thankfully. I think if I decided to emulate him, he would have been appalled. Hunter emphasized that everyone should do their own thing. Don’t do what someone else does. So, yes, he was relieved I didn’t end up like him, but he was also probably thrilled that I didn’t feel compelled to follow in his footsteps. And even with the writing, I was reluctant for a long time to even think about writing—to be compared to Hunter. So my writing style is completely different from Hunter’s, and I think if he were able to read the book, he’d be happy that’s the case. Just like those people who try to imitate Hunter’s writing, don’t do that… (laughs) it’s never good. One last thing: Why did Sandy and Hunter name you Juan? Hunter was a foreign correspondent in South America for a couple of years during the early ‘60s, and then when it came time to pick a name—you know, it’s funny, his mother was very traditional, and pretty much everybody in the Thompson family has a name that comes off the family tree in some way. Hunter had no interest in following that tradition (laughs). He didn’t care about that at all. He chose a name that he liked. He picked Juan. My middle name, Fitzgerald—I think was both a tribute to the writer and to the president. And I can imagine with his attention to rhythm and language. He liked the sound of it. It had a good rhythm. Juan F. Thompson does have a ring to it. The cadence isn’t too far off from Hunter S. Thompson. It has a nice flow to it. And I do not doubt for a second he wasn’t conscious of that. When he would read, or when he would have people read stuff he had written back to him, he was very—he would like count the beats. And if someone couldn’t read it with the proper cadence, it was over.When Conan O’Brien tried to get Hunter S. Thompson to appear on his talk show, the writer would only agree to a segment if they went to upstate New York to shoot guns and drink hard liquor. Featuring his most famous proclivities, firearms and whisky, it’s a classic Thompson moment, a television appearance dictated, like his life and like his death, entirely on his own terms. It’s an episode that adds to the Thompson myth, another treatment of him not as a person but as a persona—as a cultural icon whose behavior and success are so inextricably tied together that it’s impossible to understand one without the other. The way he lived was the way he wrote. But, of course, Hunter wasn’t just a symbol of Gonzo journalism, and he wasn’t just a caricature of the ‘60s. He was a man—a flawed individual known for his bouts of extreme rage, for his unprovoked verbal eruptions, for his short days and long nights. Nobody experienced the unpredictable fits of anger more so than his only child. Arriving nearly a decade after Hunter’s suicide in February 2006, Juan F. Thompson’s new memoir, "Stories I Tell Myself," details the long path of reconciliation between a father and a son. It’s a journey of love and forgiveness, how one learns to accept a person when there’s no hope for change. It’s a portrait of Hunter as a human being, funny and fearful pages filled with drunk, smoky evenings, famous friends and admirers, extensive travels and financial uncertainty. Relying on his memory, on what he considers sometimes “treacherous” and “unfaithful” and “perfidious,” Juan shares the 41 enthralling and scary years he had with Hunter: living in Woody Creek, Colorado, in a house stockpiled with guns, where ammo was stored in the kitchen cabinets; riding, as a young boy, on the back of speeding motorcycles; leaving his family and home state behind for a lonely and isolating East Coast school (twice). He starts with his own birth and ends with Hunter’s exorbitant funeral, when his dad’s ashes were shot out of a cannon. This interview took place over the phone. It has been lightly edited for concision and clarity. Why write the book now? It’s been almost a decade since Hunter’s death. I just wrote an essay for Powell’s Books, for the store’s newsletter, and the essay is about why it took me nine years to write this book. I started in 2006, and, well, it took nine years. Why now? Because it took me nine years to write the damn book (laughs). Were you sorting through his archives and his letters? Nine years is a long time. A combination of things. First of all, I’d never written a full-length book, and I had no idea what I was getting myself into. None of us do. (laughs) Yeah, my God, my God. Part of it was simply time, too. I got a rough draft done in about a year, but then I realized that was the easy part, getting words down on paper—the basic skeleton. The hard part was pulling all these scraps together into a single, unified and compelling story with an actual arc. And it was also just really difficult writing about my dad and my past. Much harder than I thought it would be. I figured it would be fairly straightforward and easy to remember, but it was an emotional and taxing process—and not one that I ever looked forward to doing. So I would take long breaks. There were times when I probably didn’t look at the manuscript for six months, and then I’d finally come back to it, and you know, see new things. What I was just writing about in this Powell’s essay was how it turned out that I really did need all of that time. If I had finished this book in a year, it wouldn’t have been a very good book. It would have been pretty one-dimensional. I was grieving. It would have been focused on how much I missed my dad and all the things I had heard about him. And it took years for me to reflect upon his life to realize that I needed to tell more of the story—and be fair. And ultimately, at the end of the day, I loved him, and I respected him. That’s where I ended up. But that doesn’t mean—he did do a lot of rotten things. "Stories I Tell Myself" opens with a confession that you constructed the memoir based on memories, which are oftentimes unreliable. Even the title is a reference to this idea. Specifically, as a child, you were in situations that most kids never experience. I’m thinking about when Hunter brought you and your mother, Sandy, to hang out with Ken Kesey and the Hell’s Angels. Or even Jimmy Buffett’s wedding, a celebration you would later learn was filled with all sorts of drugs. Since you were young when both of these events occurred, you have had to rely on other people’s testimonials, and I’d imagine your own perception of your own childhood changed when, as an adult, you would hear all of these stories. In that way, you, like so many others, had to mythologize Hunter. Was it challenging understanding your father as a man and not just a persona, or a symbol? I think part of it was reconciling with my father as a writer, as this caricature, and as the guy I grew up with, as my father. There’s truth in all of them. But I really needed that distance from his death. And I don’t know if I used these exact words in the book, but for those people close to Hunter, there was a very strong sense of loyalty. You have to protect Hunter. You have to be loyal to him. That was an imperative, and that was my first instinct in writing the book. Of course, I’ll protect him. Were people loyal to him because they respected him, or was there also an element of fear? You describe, growing up, you were always afraid of him, too? I think it was more that you didn’t question it. Not so much fear, if he did something wrong you would get in trouble. It was that he needs protecting, and our job is to protect him. And that took a while to realize that doesn’t really—now that he’s dead, I don’t really need to follow that obligation. It’s really up to me, and what I believe is important to tell rather than what he would have wanted me to say if he were alive. And that’s a huge factor. It would have been extremely difficult for me to write this book, much less publish it, if he were alive. What do you think his response would have been if he were alive? He would have been—I think, it’s so hard to tell what Hunter actually thought—horrified and angry and embarrassed. Because he would have had to deal with the consequences of that knowledge. But I really think—he always expected me to be honest. Once he was dead, and he didn’t have to deal with it, I thought: yeah, tell the truth, don’t cover it up. And I’d be doing him a disservice. I’d be failing in my task, if I were to continue to try to protect him, as we had always done. It wouldn’t be real. In your memoir, you refer to both your father and your mother as Hunter and Sandy, respectively. Did you call your father “Hunter” throughout his whole life, and not "Dad"? Did you call your mother “Sandy,” and not "Mom"? Yes, and I have no idea why. As long as I can remember, I always called them that. And I can only imagine it was because that’s how they referred to themselves. It must have been. I don’t think as a 2-year-old I decided that I’d call him Hunter, instead of Dad. Why they made that decision, I have no clue. You ended up, despite all the craziness, pretty tame. You have a pretty normal life. You live in Colorado, you work in IT. Was being normal, for lack of a better word, a way to rebel? I think so. At the time, it certainly wasn’t conscious or deliberate. I think it was a reaction against the uncertainty of the craziness. First of all, Hunter was a freelance writer, so there was no guaranteed income. My mom’s full-time job was taking care of Hunter and me until the divorce. So that was definitely a part of it, the financial uncertainty. But secondly, as a kid and as a teenager, I knew I did not want to live like my father did. For the most part, I rejected the drugs and the drinking. And I think just by my nature, I’m not like him. He was just born that way. He was just born to be Hunter. I don’t think there’s anything in his upbringing—I don’t think, had things been different, he would have ended up an insurance agent like his father. That wouldn’t have happened. He was just wired that way. Yes. He was totally just wired that way. You write a lot about how Hunter was a paradoxical individual. You mention that “one of the most difficult paradoxes in Hunter’s character was the presence of both a strong, genuine caring for others, and a profound self-centeredness.” And that, it was “so ironic that as a father Hunter passed on so few traditions, yet he possessed these traditional reflexes that would show themselves unexpectedly.” When you didn’t shake someone’s hand, for instance, he got upset, even though you had never been instructed on good manners. Is this what made him so unpredictable? That you didn’t know where he stood on certain issues? Not so much that—he was just so volatile, and I think he became more so the older he got. As countless people will testify, he would erupt into a rage for the tiniest provocation. And that was really scary as a kid. And even as an adult, you don’t just get used to that. I learned to deal with it, I’d leave. But it was always uncomfortable, for sure. Among swimming and watching movies, one ritual between you and Hunter was cleaning and shooting guns. He taught you how to respect the machines. They brought you together. What was it about firearms that produced such bonding moments? I think it really could have been anything. But I enjoyed shooting guns, and obviously they were very important to Hunter. Cleaning guns needed to get done, in order to shoot them. It’s a manly kind of thing, and we shared the hobby. Without recognizing it, we probably seized on the opportunity: here’s something that we can do together, that can help connect us. So guns took on a greater importance because they provided a bonding ritual between us. Did you always believe your father would kill himself with a gun? Ralph Steadman said Hunter told him, many years ago, that he’d pull the trigger at any moment. Were you just waiting for the day? Yes. He had been clear for years and years and years that he was going to kill himself, and it would be with a gun. There would have been no way to stop him, then? I mean, how do you stop someone? He had threatened that he was planning to end his life before, and we talked him down. But one thing about Hunter, if he was going to do something, he was going to do it, and nobody was going to stop him. It was a very strange thing. I knew at some point he was going to kill himself. He was not going to go to the hospital. He was not going to go to a retirement home. He hated the hospital, right? Yeah. He hated any loss of control. The idea of Hunter in a nursing home—that’s just impossible. It would never happen. But boy, I didn’t expect his suicide when it happened. It was one of those things. It’ll occur at some point—at some point down the road, we’ll get the phone call that he had done it. You didn’t expect to be there when he did it, you’re saying? No. I sure didn’t expect it to be that weekend when I was visiting with my family. As I wrote, in retrospect, the signs were there, but I didn’t recognize them, and I’m not sure I even wanted to recognize them. Because if I had known what he was thinking, my God—what could I have possibly done? You cleaned the .45 the day before Hunter used the gun to kill himself. When Hunter died, you, your wife, Jen, and your son, Will, were all in the house. How did you feel about him implicitly making you a part of his suicide without your knowledge? Do you consider it a loving act? I do—I think it was out of love, yes. I think that he wanted us there because he didn’t want to die alone. I don’t think he wanted to be found by strangers or the police. I think he wanted us to be there. He wanted me to be there, to make sure things were handled with respect—with how he wanted them to be handled. That’s what I think was going through his mind, and I’m glad I was there, because it would have been much worse not knowing what had actually happened. But it was certainly not easy. Again, it goes back to his paradoxical nature. I think it has a lot to do with his trust and love for me, and my wife, Jen, and my son, Will. And at the same time, I think it was a very selfish act. He just really didn’t think how this would affect us long term. I don’t think he thought it and disregarded it—he likely just didn’t think of it. And you know, he was profoundly unhappy. Hunter died at Owl Farm, his longtime home. Like him, you seem to have a deep connection to the place, to that house in Woody Creek, Colorado. Of course, that’s where you spent the most time as a kid, and there’s a certain level of comfort in the familiar. Also, Hunter clearly had a great community down the road in Aspen—in his early years, he held court at Jerome Bar, and when he slowed down, he had people shuffle through his kitchen—and Colorado flourished with the progressive ideas your parents supported, especially with experimental education. There, Hunter enjoyed his space to live how he wanted. But I see something perhaps deeper in your relationship to the place, to the land specifically. Did you feel a particular connection with your property? Maybe on a purely visceral or spiritual level? You kept returning to it, even after brief spurts of absence (boarding school, Tufts, and a semester abroad in England). Owl Farm was where I grew up—it’s where I have my earliest memories. But it was also so much more than a house, because it was so important to Hunter. That was his base, his foundation. It was a place where he could do whatever he desired, and it was a place where he could always return. And there was space—which was why it was so strange, when I was a kid, and we spent that year in a colonial house in Washington, D.C. Hunter was on the campaign trail. We just didn’t belong in there. That being said, why did you have such a desire to go to boarding school on the East Coast? Why, after the crushing loneliness you felt then, did you return to New England for college? (laughs) Oh god. I mean, I went to school in Boston, and I hated almost everything about that city. It’s so provincial and parochial. People from Boston really like Boston, and I still don’t know why. (laughs) I know what you mean. I still ask myself, “what was I thinking?” There were so many other schools where I would have bee way happier. Why apply to such elite schools? Why the Ivy Leagues? Why Boston? I think I was just caught up in this idea of status. That it was a sign—like, if I go to Harvard, I’ll be a better person than if I don’t go to Harvard. But boy, it’s been funny, you know, my son, Will, is 17, and he’s applying to colleges this year. (laughs) My wife and I have been emphatic that he’s not applying to the Ivy Leagues. Of course, there are a lot of factors why I wasn’t happy, and I probably explain them better in the book. But it was certainly crazy thinking that I wanted to go to an East Coast boarding school, and an elite East Coast college. I still look back, and… … (laughs) God, it was just goofy thinking. Sandy and Hunter separated when you were a young teenager, before you left for boarding school. The divorce took a while to formalize, but after Sandy moved out, she started dating a cast of younger men, just like Hunter started dating a cast of younger women. This similarity, their attraction to people much younger than them, made me wonder if it revealed something shared in their personalities. Were they both particularly seduced by youth? That’s funny, I’ve never actually seen that parallel. Yes, though. Both of them valued youth and attractiveness. And what’s funny about my dad is that the older he got, the younger the women got. He was in his early 60s, and he was dating women in their early 20s. They were younger than me—that was really strange. You got older, and the girlfriends got younger. (laughs) Yeah, exactly. Deborah Fuller was essentially Hunter’s long-term partner, but they were never sexually intimate. How was Deb able to stay—and deal—with Hunter for so long? It’s not entirely rare, I suppose. There’s Howard Austen and Gore Vidal, after all. Did Hunter need Deb? Would he have been able to continue to write without her? Was she his muse? The most important thing to know about Deb is that she just loved Hunter. Her motivation was to take care of Hunter because she loved him. It wasn’t a romantic relationship. It was a deep friendship. He trusted her because he knew she had no ulterior motives. She didn’t want anything from him. She deeply cared for him, and she made sure he was all right, often at her own expense. Hunter didn’t pay her for most of the work she did in the 20-plus years she took care of him. She did the basics. She paid the bills. She kept his life on track, in order—so that he actually could write. After a while, he really couldn’t take care of himself. He was just out of practice, or because of the long-term drugs and alcohol, he just couldn’t focus. There was a point, when he got older and physically worse, he couldn’t do simple stuff, like go grocery shopping. Deb also provided Hunter with some stability. When he was depressed or particularly anxious, she was there to tell him it would all be fine. I believe a lot of people would be interested to know that you took acid with your mother (not Hunter, and never with Hunter), when you were 14. You even go so far as to claim that Hunter would have been disappointed—you mention hearing that Hunter said at a lecture that he would “beat the shit out of” you if he knew you had taken LSD, even though he’d offer you drugs as an adult. It appears he didn’t really encourage your wild side. Why would he have been so opposed? Did he want you to be anything like him, or did he pride himself in the fact that, in many ways, you ended up not like him at all? Hunter was surprised and pleased that I actually grew up apparently sane—able to hold a job and sustain a relationship. I wasn’t a total basket case, thankfully. I think if I decided to emulate him, he would have been appalled. Hunter emphasized that everyone should do their own thing. Don’t do what someone else does. So, yes, he was relieved I didn’t end up like him, but he was also probably thrilled that I didn’t feel compelled to follow in his footsteps. And even with the writing, I was reluctant for a long time to even think about writing—to be compared to Hunter. So my writing style is completely different from Hunter’s, and I think if he were able to read the book, he’d be happy that’s the case. Just like those people who try to imitate Hunter’s writing, don’t do that… (laughs) it’s never good. One last thing: Why did Sandy and Hunter name you Juan? Hunter was a foreign correspondent in South America for a couple of years during the early ‘60s, and then when it came time to pick a name—you know, it’s funny, his mother was very traditional, and pretty much everybody in the Thompson family has a name that comes off the family tree in some way. Hunter had no interest in following that tradition (laughs). He didn’t care about that at all. He chose a name that he liked. He picked Juan. My middle name, Fitzgerald—I think was both a tribute to the writer and to the president. And I can imagine with his attention to rhythm and language. He liked the sound of it. It had a good rhythm. Juan F. Thompson does have a ring to it. The cadence isn’t too far off from Hunter S. Thompson. It has a nice flow to it. And I do not doubt for a second he wasn’t conscious of that. When he would read, or when he would have people read stuff he had written back to him, he was very—he would like count the beats. And if someone couldn’t read it with the proper cadence, it was over.

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The omnivore’s contradiction: That free-range, organic meat was still an animal killed for your dinner

The primary problem with condemning factory farming while continuing to eat animals from nonindustrial sources comes down to this basic point: doing so demands selective moral consideration. This is another way of saying that eating “humanely” raised animals requires a double standard, with welfare standards applied differently to factory farms and small farms. Opponents of factory farming who support nonindustrial alternatives because they care about animals’ welfare thus find themselves trapped in what seems to be a logical inconsistency. Let’s bore into that inconsistency. The rationale applied to animals in factory farms goes something like this: animals have feelings that are worthy of our moral consideration; animals are not objects; their welfare matters; therefore they do not deserve the abusive confines and unavoidable suffering of factory farms. These beliefs assume that animals have emotional lives, experience suffering as a result of being raised inhumanely, and thus have moral relevance. This recognition means that animals’ capacity to suffer, while perhaps different in degree from our own, is nonetheless meaningful and familiar enough for humans to demand that animals be spared the abuses endemic to industrial animal agriculture. To reiterate a key point: that we believe these animals should not suffer in confinement affirms a basic respect for their existence as sentient beings. They can suffer, and we should avoid inflicting suffering whenever possible. The logic on this point seems tight. But when we apply this moral consideration to nonindustrial farms, things fall apart. The moral standard applied to nonindustrial farms should be the same as that applied to factory farms. The core premises should still pertain: animals have feelings; they are not objects; their welfare matters; they deserve to live lives conducive to their general interests. These premises are (we will assume for now) often adequately met on small, sustainable, “humane” animal farms. Nevertheless, we must not forget that even on small, sustainable, humane farms, animals are raised for the ultimate purpose of being killed and turned into commodities. Matters therefore undergo an abrupt change when we extend moral consideration beyond the question of how animals are raised to the much more troubling question of their death. At this crucial crossroad in a farm animal’s life—the human choice to slaughter the animal—the moral consideration we applied to factory-farmed animals suddenly— violently—disappears. And that’s a problem. Michael Pollan, who we’ve seen clearly affirm the inherent worth of farm animals, has dismissed the moment of an animal’s death as essentially insignificant. He has said, “what’s wrong with animal agriculture—with eating animals—is the practice, not the principle.” Death, in other words, is only one day. Give animals a good life, take them down when they least expect it, and these creatures will never know what hit them. We owe animals, not to mention humans, a better explanation than “death is only one day.” Death is serious business that, for farm animals, denies them a future they’d otherwise have had. It also poses a major problem for the supporters of nonindustrial alternatives. Recall that in our application of moral consideration to factory farming, the animal’s death is never mentioned. It doesn’t have to be. The entire cycle of life on a factory farm is so abhorrent as to be dismissed outright as morally corrosive at every turn. Life is horrible for the animal; death is horrible for the animal; factory farming is horrible for the animal; the whole thing is horrible, horrible, and horrible. No more questions, no reason to draw a distinction between life and death, no reason to discern between how an animal is raised and why an animal is killed. The question of death is rendered moot and thus not considered when we condemn factory farms. Now recall the primary reason concerned consumers believe farm animals should be raised in nonindustrial settings. They want animals removed from factory farms (at least in part) because they believe correctly that animals experience undue suffering on factory farms. Their suffering, as these critics see it, is significant. A pasture-based agricultural system is favored as an alternative to restore to animals a sense of dignity and the opportunity to live lives more or less free of human-imposed restrictions that cause suffering. I’m going to aggressively question this assumption in upcoming chapters, but for now let’s assume that our desire for farm animals to be treated well is satisfactorily fulfilled on a humanely managed nonindustrial farm. Let’s assume that animals have space to roam, can choose what to eat, and may even have sex under the warm sun on a breezy afternoon. They can, in essence, enjoy a more natural and pleasurable quality of life. This substantial reduction of suffering is fully consistent with our stated moral concern for farm animals, which led us to condemn factory farms and support their nonindustrial alternatives in the first place. The moral benefit of a nonindustrial farm is that it grants to animals the pleasure-inducing freedoms denied to them by factory farms. We believe they have a basic right to these pleasurable freedoms due to their sentience. So we grant them that right and feel good about doing so. But then there’s that moment that every animal producer and consumer must confront: slaughter. Recall that if our moral consideration for animals is genuine, we must apply that consideration to the entire cycle of the supposedly humane alternative. And that cycle includes an animal’s early and intentional death. This inclusion reveals something troubling, if generally unrecognized in our common discourse on the tenets of responsible agriculture. It reveals that, on nonindustrial farms—just as in factory farms— farmers kill and commodify the animals they are raising. Intentional death is the essential feature of both systems. This claim is neither melodrama nor overstatement. It is a fact. Without systematic animal death, you have no animal farm—factory or otherwise, big or small, conventional or organic. It might take longer to get an animal to slaughter weight in the alternative arrangement, and that animal might have a lot more fun having sex and eating real food, but that animal’s foundational and functional role in the system remains exactly the same as in the factory farm: to get fat fast, die relatively young, and feed people food they do not need to eat. Our stated moral consideration for animals—and thus the moral argument for small-scale farms—crumbles on this point. To end a sentient animal’s life is to suddenly objectify the animal after previously treating her as a subject worthy of moral consideration. That’s inconsistent. That this decision is made well before the animal reaches even the prime of her life not only makes the “humane” alternative similar in its most essential aspect to factory farming, but is entirely out of sync with the moral consideration we’ve granted to animals in the first place. That the death is for the production of a commodity for personal profit cheapens the reality even more so. We say we care about animals. We say it all the time. We say we care about them enough to urge a wholesale restructuring of the food system to promote their welfare as nonobjectified animals. We say it, moreover, because we mean it, because we’re decent, because we have compassion. However, in a whiplash-inducing shift in moral logic, not to mention behavior, we suddenly ignore our concern and decide to end our consideration of these animals’ emotional lives by killing them. No matter how you slice it, killing a healthy animal for food we do not need, no matter how the animal was raised, is never consistent with that animal’s welfare. In the end, it mocks our original assertion of their moral worth. This death, no matter how “humane,” no matter how respectfully administered, no matter how thickly clothed in feel-good rationalizations (“it had a good life”), essentially negates the moral consideration that inspired us to condemn factory farms in the first place. You can’t claim to truly care about an animal, alter her environment to demonstrate your care for that animal, and then, when the animal is nowhere near even the middle of her natural life, kill the animal for no vital reason. Doing so is morally and logically inconsistent. It’s worse than ambiguous. It’s wrong. It is, alas, the omnivore’s contradiction. From "The Modern Savage: Our Unthinking Decision to Eat Animals" by James McWilliams. Copyright © 2015 by James McWilliams and reprinted by permission of Thomas Dunne Books.The primary problem with condemning factory farming while continuing to eat animals from nonindustrial sources comes down to this basic point: doing so demands selective moral consideration. This is another way of saying that eating “humanely” raised animals requires a double standard, with welfare standards applied differently to factory farms and small farms. Opponents of factory farming who support nonindustrial alternatives because they care about animals’ welfare thus find themselves trapped in what seems to be a logical inconsistency. Let’s bore into that inconsistency. The rationale applied to animals in factory farms goes something like this: animals have feelings that are worthy of our moral consideration; animals are not objects; their welfare matters; therefore they do not deserve the abusive confines and unavoidable suffering of factory farms. These beliefs assume that animals have emotional lives, experience suffering as a result of being raised inhumanely, and thus have moral relevance. This recognition means that animals’ capacity to suffer, while perhaps different in degree from our own, is nonetheless meaningful and familiar enough for humans to demand that animals be spared the abuses endemic to industrial animal agriculture. To reiterate a key point: that we believe these animals should not suffer in confinement affirms a basic respect for their existence as sentient beings. They can suffer, and we should avoid inflicting suffering whenever possible. The logic on this point seems tight. But when we apply this moral consideration to nonindustrial farms, things fall apart. The moral standard applied to nonindustrial farms should be the same as that applied to factory farms. The core premises should still pertain: animals have feelings; they are not objects; their welfare matters; they deserve to live lives conducive to their general interests. These premises are (we will assume for now) often adequately met on small, sustainable, “humane” animal farms. Nevertheless, we must not forget that even on small, sustainable, humane farms, animals are raised for the ultimate purpose of being killed and turned into commodities. Matters therefore undergo an abrupt change when we extend moral consideration beyond the question of how animals are raised to the much more troubling question of their death. At this crucial crossroad in a farm animal’s life—the human choice to slaughter the animal—the moral consideration we applied to factory-farmed animals suddenly— violently—disappears. And that’s a problem. Michael Pollan, who we’ve seen clearly affirm the inherent worth of farm animals, has dismissed the moment of an animal’s death as essentially insignificant. He has said, “what’s wrong with animal agriculture—with eating animals—is the practice, not the principle.” Death, in other words, is only one day. Give animals a good life, take them down when they least expect it, and these creatures will never know what hit them. We owe animals, not to mention humans, a better explanation than “death is only one day.” Death is serious business that, for farm animals, denies them a future they’d otherwise have had. It also poses a major problem for the supporters of nonindustrial alternatives. Recall that in our application of moral consideration to factory farming, the animal’s death is never mentioned. It doesn’t have to be. The entire cycle of life on a factory farm is so abhorrent as to be dismissed outright as morally corrosive at every turn. Life is horrible for the animal; death is horrible for the animal; factory farming is horrible for the animal; the whole thing is horrible, horrible, and horrible. No more questions, no reason to draw a distinction between life and death, no reason to discern between how an animal is raised and why an animal is killed. The question of death is rendered moot and thus not considered when we condemn factory farms. Now recall the primary reason concerned consumers believe farm animals should be raised in nonindustrial settings. They want animals removed from factory farms (at least in part) because they believe correctly that animals experience undue suffering on factory farms. Their suffering, as these critics see it, is significant. A pasture-based agricultural system is favored as an alternative to restore to animals a sense of dignity and the opportunity to live lives more or less free of human-imposed restrictions that cause suffering. I’m going to aggressively question this assumption in upcoming chapters, but for now let’s assume that our desire for farm animals to be treated well is satisfactorily fulfilled on a humanely managed nonindustrial farm. Let’s assume that animals have space to roam, can choose what to eat, and may even have sex under the warm sun on a breezy afternoon. They can, in essence, enjoy a more natural and pleasurable quality of life. This substantial reduction of suffering is fully consistent with our stated moral concern for farm animals, which led us to condemn factory farms and support their nonindustrial alternatives in the first place. The moral benefit of a nonindustrial farm is that it grants to animals the pleasure-inducing freedoms denied to them by factory farms. We believe they have a basic right to these pleasurable freedoms due to their sentience. So we grant them that right and feel good about doing so. But then there’s that moment that every animal producer and consumer must confront: slaughter. Recall that if our moral consideration for animals is genuine, we must apply that consideration to the entire cycle of the supposedly humane alternative. And that cycle includes an animal’s early and intentional death. This inclusion reveals something troubling, if generally unrecognized in our common discourse on the tenets of responsible agriculture. It reveals that, on nonindustrial farms—just as in factory farms— farmers kill and commodify the animals they are raising. Intentional death is the essential feature of both systems. This claim is neither melodrama nor overstatement. It is a fact. Without systematic animal death, you have no animal farm—factory or otherwise, big or small, conventional or organic. It might take longer to get an animal to slaughter weight in the alternative arrangement, and that animal might have a lot more fun having sex and eating real food, but that animal’s foundational and functional role in the system remains exactly the same as in the factory farm: to get fat fast, die relatively young, and feed people food they do not need to eat. Our stated moral consideration for animals—and thus the moral argument for small-scale farms—crumbles on this point. To end a sentient animal’s life is to suddenly objectify the animal after previously treating her as a subject worthy of moral consideration. That’s inconsistent. That this decision is made well before the animal reaches even the prime of her life not only makes the “humane” alternative similar in its most essential aspect to factory farming, but is entirely out of sync with the moral consideration we’ve granted to animals in the first place. That the death is for the production of a commodity for personal profit cheapens the reality even more so. We say we care about animals. We say it all the time. We say we care about them enough to urge a wholesale restructuring of the food system to promote their welfare as nonobjectified animals. We say it, moreover, because we mean it, because we’re decent, because we have compassion. However, in a whiplash-inducing shift in moral logic, not to mention behavior, we suddenly ignore our concern and decide to end our consideration of these animals’ emotional lives by killing them. No matter how you slice it, killing a healthy animal for food we do not need, no matter how the animal was raised, is never consistent with that animal’s welfare. In the end, it mocks our original assertion of their moral worth. This death, no matter how “humane,” no matter how respectfully administered, no matter how thickly clothed in feel-good rationalizations (“it had a good life”), essentially negates the moral consideration that inspired us to condemn factory farms in the first place. You can’t claim to truly care about an animal, alter her environment to demonstrate your care for that animal, and then, when the animal is nowhere near even the middle of her natural life, kill the animal for no vital reason. Doing so is morally and logically inconsistent. It’s worse than ambiguous. It’s wrong. It is, alas, the omnivore’s contradiction. From "The Modern Savage: Our Unthinking Decision to Eat Animals" by James McWilliams. Copyright © 2015 by James McWilliams and reprinted by permission of Thomas Dunne Books.

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The New Wave of Islamophobia: Being Sikh or Muslim in the age of Donald Trump

This winter, visible religious minorities, especially Sikhs and Muslims, feel a bit like we’re back where we were 14 years ago, in the dark days after 9/11. In recent months, we have seen a surge of hostility around the country that makes many of us feel unsafe and unwelcome in our own country. Opportunistic politicians like Donald Trump have, unfortunately, made public comments that have only emboldened those who harbor hostility against religious minority communities. Moreover, it’s not just Donald Trump; the entire crop of Republican front-runners seems obsessed with making Democrats utter the words “radical Islam,” as if that phrase would somehow strike a death blow to ISIS. And yet they are not at all concerned about uttering another word that hits much closer to home: Islamophobia. And yes, even that word, with its “-phobia” suffix, feels insufficient. For we are not just talking about fear of Muslims and those who look like they might be Muslims, but a much more active kind of hatred and hostility that has been brimming up in recent months. We need to talk about what has been happening, about the surge of racism and xenophobia that so many of us have been experiencing in our various communities. And we need to ask our political leaders – and especially our potential political leaders – to exert moral leadership to stem the tide. Since the attacks in Paris and the San Bernardino shooting earlier this fall, hate crimes against Muslims and those perceived to be Muslims have exploded. NBC News reports 38 anti-Muslim attacks in just over a month since the Paris attacks. The Huffington Post, for its part, has been maintaining a running list and puts the number of attacks at a minimum of 73. These incidents include beatings, shootings, vandalism and arson, with mosques all around the country being targeted, from California to New York. Near where I live in the Philadelphia suburbs, a mosque was recently desecrated with the head of a butchered pig – an attack that seemed stunningly medieval in its method and symbolism. Alongside mosques, Sikh temples (Gurdwaras) have also been desecrated, including an incident in Orange County where a vandal scrawled “FUCK ISIS” on a truck parked in the temple’s parking lot. (The vandal was later caught and, facing a possible felony charge, decided to visit the Gurdwara during services to apologize to the congregation.)   The violence we have been seeing is often intensely personal and targeted around the symbols of religious difference that some of us take as a core part of the expression of faith. Sikh men who wear turbans have been attacked by individuals who mistakenly assumed their turbans suggested strong Islamic faith. Quite recently, an elderly Sikh man in Fresno named Amrik Singh Bal was run down by two assailants in a pickup truck. They knocked him to the ground with their truck and then viciously beat him while shouting anti-Muslim epithets. Alongside Sikh men in turbans, many Muslim women who wear hijab have been experiencing unprecedented hostility because of their appearance. In Tampa, a woman was shot at by a stranger on a highway after being driven off the road (she was thankfully unharmed), while another woman in Hillsborough County, Florida, had rocks thrown at her vehicle. In a restaurant in Austin, Texas, two Muslim women wearing hijab who were subject to extreme hostility from a fellow patron telling them to “go back to Saudi Arabia” (both young women were raised in the U.S.) were stunned to find that neither other customers nor the restaurant management were willing to stand up for them.   Sometimes the sense of being unwelcome and unsafe comes not from random assailants and strangers on the street, but from the authorities – teachers in school and local police officers. We all likely heard the story of “clock boy” Ahmed Mohamed, the Somali teen in Irving, Texas, who was arrested earlier this fall after his English teacher mistook his homemade clock for a bomb. Far fewer people heard about the incident effectively repeating itself this past month, this time with a young Sikh boy named Armaan Singh Sarai, who was arrested recently in nearby Arlington when another child claimed he might have a bomb in his backpack. He was held for three days and authorities have yet to decide whether to charge him with a crime. As the parent of a child close to Armaan Singh Sarai’s age, this particular incident filled me with horror and foreboding. My own child is a very sweet, loving kid, who also happens to be a bit of a smartass. The other night while driving to a local Indian restaurant he made a joke about spicy Indian food that, by itself, doesn’t bear repeating – except that the punch line of the joke referred to ISIS. Instead of laughing, I found myself rebuking him much more sharply than I wanted to: “We don’t ever joke about ISIS.” I caught myself and proceeded to tell him the story of what had just happened to another Sikh boy in Texas; it was utterly bewildering to him. In this country we think of as our own, kids like you are getting arrested for that same joke. Whole school districts are closing schools because of bomb threats, or in one case, an Arabic handwriting exercise. Fear and paranoia are rampant. Of course none of this is entirely new. In 2001 and 2002 we saw a rash of incidents just like these and felt a similar dread. For several days immediately following the 9/11 attacks, I felt my status as a visible religious minority in America to be suddenly extremely fraught. With my turban marking me as a target, I didn’t go out in those weeks except when I absolutely had to – and when I did go out I found myself repeatedly threatened with physical violence and subject to verbal abuse. The difference then was that top government officials, starting with President George W. Bush, made it a point to repeatedly underline that the enemy in the fight against al-Qaida was not all Muslims. In his landmark speech to Congress on Sept. 20, 2001 — the speech where he laid out the case for invading Afghanistan —  Bush forcefully and unambiguously spoke out to differentiate peaceful Muslims from violent extremists. He said, “The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends. It is not our many Arab friends. Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists and every government that supports them.” When we heard these words, many of us who had been experiencing this new wave of hostility from our fellow Americans breathed a small sigh of relief: The country that we claimed as our own, the country that we understood to be a welcoming place for people of all faiths, was not going to completely change overnight into something else. It was still a long road through 2001 and 2002: and the anti-Muslim and anti-Sikh incidents continued apace throughout that period – but the clear message from the top had a powerful calming effect. Today, we do have President Obama and the Democratic leadership attempting to make similar kinds of statements regarding the difference between ordinary Muslims and members of ISIS.  Unfortunately, this is an election year, which means the sitting president’s authority and voice is much less present in the media than are those of the various candidates running for office. Obama recently gave a powerful speech about terrorism where he said, “Let’s not forget that freedom is more powerful than fear,” but it seems that few were paying attention. And for their part, the Democratic candidates, all three of them, have shown themselves up to the task of performing this kind of moral leadership, making memorable statements of solidarity with American Muslims and Muslim allies around the world in the recent Democratic debate. But the Republicans? In their debates and in speeches of the front-runners there seems to be little interest in taking on this responsibility. Instead, their goal seems largely to claim the most extreme position in the fight against ISIS, with Sen. Ted Cruz talking about “carpet bombing” ISIS strongholds and Donald Trump simply saying, “I would just bomb those suckers … there would be nothing left.” Sen. Marco Rubio, for his part, has explicitly embraced the deeply problematic language of the “clash of civilizations”: “There is no middle ground on this. Either they win or we win.” Even Gov. Jeb Bush, supposedly the most moderate and seemingly responsible of the group, has explicitly advocated a breathtakingly discriminatory religious test for prospective Syrian refugees fleeing ISIS: He only wants the U.S. to accept Christians.     Racist and xenophobic rhetoric from any major political leader can provoke hateful and ignorant individuals to act out violently against marked minorities. Real American leaders must recognize that they have a responsibility, not just to promise to rain death and destruction on America’s enemies, but to work maintain the kind of culture of religious freedom and tolerance that has made the United States a haven for people suffering from persecution for generations – from Quakers and Protestant Dissenters in the 17th century to Jews seeking refuge from European anti-Semitism in the 20th. But this is the Age of Trumpism, seemingly an era where America’s history and its tradition of religious tolerance are being pushed aside in favor of the loudest and angriest kind of bullying rhetoric. Against this trend, there are many quieter voices expressing concern and care. Is anyone paying attention? Amardeep Singh is associate professor of English at Lehigh University. He is on Twitter @electrostani. This winter, visible religious minorities, especially Sikhs and Muslims, feel a bit like we’re back where we were 14 years ago, in the dark days after 9/11. In recent months, we have seen a surge of hostility around the country that makes many of us feel unsafe and unwelcome in our own country. Opportunistic politicians like Donald Trump have, unfortunately, made public comments that have only emboldened those who harbor hostility against religious minority communities. Moreover, it’s not just Donald Trump; the entire crop of Republican front-runners seems obsessed with making Democrats utter the words “radical Islam,” as if that phrase would somehow strike a death blow to ISIS. And yet they are not at all concerned about uttering another word that hits much closer to home: Islamophobia. And yes, even that word, with its “-phobia” suffix, feels insufficient. For we are not just talking about fear of Muslims and those who look like they might be Muslims, but a much more active kind of hatred and hostility that has been brimming up in recent months. We need to talk about what has been happening, about the surge of racism and xenophobia that so many of us have been experiencing in our various communities. And we need to ask our political leaders – and especially our potential political leaders – to exert moral leadership to stem the tide. Since the attacks in Paris and the San Bernardino shooting earlier this fall, hate crimes against Muslims and those perceived to be Muslims have exploded. NBC News reports 38 anti-Muslim attacks in just over a month since the Paris attacks. The Huffington Post, for its part, has been maintaining a running list and puts the number of attacks at a minimum of 73. These incidents include beatings, shootings, vandalism and arson, with mosques all around the country being targeted, from California to New York. Near where I live in the Philadelphia suburbs, a mosque was recently desecrated with the head of a butchered pig – an attack that seemed stunningly medieval in its method and symbolism. Alongside mosques, Sikh temples (Gurdwaras) have also been desecrated, including an incident in Orange County where a vandal scrawled “FUCK ISIS” on a truck parked in the temple’s parking lot. (The vandal was later caught and, facing a possible felony charge, decided to visit the Gurdwara during services to apologize to the congregation.)   The violence we have been seeing is often intensely personal and targeted around the symbols of religious difference that some of us take as a core part of the expression of faith. Sikh men who wear turbans have been attacked by individuals who mistakenly assumed their turbans suggested strong Islamic faith. Quite recently, an elderly Sikh man in Fresno named Amrik Singh Bal was run down by two assailants in a pickup truck. They knocked him to the ground with their truck and then viciously beat him while shouting anti-Muslim epithets. Alongside Sikh men in turbans, many Muslim women who wear hijab have been experiencing unprecedented hostility because of their appearance. In Tampa, a woman was shot at by a stranger on a highway after being driven off the road (she was thankfully unharmed), while another woman in Hillsborough County, Florida, had rocks thrown at her vehicle. In a restaurant in Austin, Texas, two Muslim women wearing hijab who were subject to extreme hostility from a fellow patron telling them to “go back to Saudi Arabia” (both young women were raised in the U.S.) were stunned to find that neither other customers nor the restaurant management were willing to stand up for them.   Sometimes the sense of being unwelcome and unsafe comes not from random assailants and strangers on the street, but from the authorities – teachers in school and local police officers. We all likely heard the story of “clock boy” Ahmed Mohamed, the Somali teen in Irving, Texas, who was arrested earlier this fall after his English teacher mistook his homemade clock for a bomb. Far fewer people heard about the incident effectively repeating itself this past month, this time with a young Sikh boy named Armaan Singh Sarai, who was arrested recently in nearby Arlington when another child claimed he might have a bomb in his backpack. He was held for three days and authorities have yet to decide whether to charge him with a crime. As the parent of a child close to Armaan Singh Sarai’s age, this particular incident filled me with horror and foreboding. My own child is a very sweet, loving kid, who also happens to be a bit of a smartass. The other night while driving to a local Indian restaurant he made a joke about spicy Indian food that, by itself, doesn’t bear repeating – except that the punch line of the joke referred to ISIS. Instead of laughing, I found myself rebuking him much more sharply than I wanted to: “We don’t ever joke about ISIS.” I caught myself and proceeded to tell him the story of what had just happened to another Sikh boy in Texas; it was utterly bewildering to him. In this country we think of as our own, kids like you are getting arrested for that same joke. Whole school districts are closing schools because of bomb threats, or in one case, an Arabic handwriting exercise. Fear and paranoia are rampant. Of course none of this is entirely new. In 2001 and 2002 we saw a rash of incidents just like these and felt a similar dread. For several days immediately following the 9/11 attacks, I felt my status as a visible religious minority in America to be suddenly extremely fraught. With my turban marking me as a target, I didn’t go out in those weeks except when I absolutely had to – and when I did go out I found myself repeatedly threatened with physical violence and subject to verbal abuse. The difference then was that top government officials, starting with President George W. Bush, made it a point to repeatedly underline that the enemy in the fight against al-Qaida was not all Muslims. In his landmark speech to Congress on Sept. 20, 2001 — the speech where he laid out the case for invading Afghanistan —  Bush forcefully and unambiguously spoke out to differentiate peaceful Muslims from violent extremists. He said, “The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends. It is not our many Arab friends. Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists and every government that supports them.” When we heard these words, many of us who had been experiencing this new wave of hostility from our fellow Americans breathed a small sigh of relief: The country that we claimed as our own, the country that we understood to be a welcoming place for people of all faiths, was not going to completely change overnight into something else. It was still a long road through 2001 and 2002: and the anti-Muslim and anti-Sikh incidents continued apace throughout that period – but the clear message from the top had a powerful calming effect. Today, we do have President Obama and the Democratic leadership attempting to make similar kinds of statements regarding the difference between ordinary Muslims and members of ISIS.  Unfortunately, this is an election year, which means the sitting president’s authority and voice is much less present in the media than are those of the various candidates running for office. Obama recently gave a powerful speech about terrorism where he said, “Let’s not forget that freedom is more powerful than fear,” but it seems that few were paying attention. And for their part, the Democratic candidates, all three of them, have shown themselves up to the task of performing this kind of moral leadership, making memorable statements of solidarity with American Muslims and Muslim allies around the world in the recent Democratic debate. But the Republicans? In their debates and in speeches of the front-runners there seems to be little interest in taking on this responsibility. Instead, their goal seems largely to claim the most extreme position in the fight against ISIS, with Sen. Ted Cruz talking about “carpet bombing” ISIS strongholds and Donald Trump simply saying, “I would just bomb those suckers … there would be nothing left.” Sen. Marco Rubio, for his part, has explicitly embraced the deeply problematic language of the “clash of civilizations”: “There is no middle ground on this. Either they win or we win.” Even Gov. Jeb Bush, supposedly the most moderate and seemingly responsible of the group, has explicitly advocated a breathtakingly discriminatory religious test for prospective Syrian refugees fleeing ISIS: He only wants the U.S. to accept Christians.     Racist and xenophobic rhetoric from any major political leader can provoke hateful and ignorant individuals to act out violently against marked minorities. Real American leaders must recognize that they have a responsibility, not just to promise to rain death and destruction on America’s enemies, but to work maintain the kind of culture of religious freedom and tolerance that has made the United States a haven for people suffering from persecution for generations – from Quakers and Protestant Dissenters in the 17th century to Jews seeking refuge from European anti-Semitism in the 20th. But this is the Age of Trumpism, seemingly an era where America’s history and its tradition of religious tolerance are being pushed aside in favor of the loudest and angriest kind of bullying rhetoric. Against this trend, there are many quieter voices expressing concern and care. Is anyone paying attention? Amardeep Singh is associate professor of English at Lehigh University. He is on Twitter @electrostani.

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Life after Sandy Hook and San Bernardino: Science explains how trauma makes us stronger

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“You need to watch who you tell about your religion”: In the age of Trump, “the talk” Muslim parents face isn’t about sex at all

When I was a kid, “the talk” was something grown-ups tortured themselves with for the sake of their children’s sexual health. On TV, canned laughter erupted when Roseanne pulled out a chair and quipped, in her signature sweet snarl, “Here, it’s easier to squirm sitting down.” In reality, my mother handed me "Growing Up: Adolescence, Body Changes, and Sex," and my boyfriend’s pink-faced father tossed a paper bag containing the Kama Sutra onto his bed.

Of course, that was the view from within a bubble of privilege. Not the kind borne of passport stamps and country club memberships, but of thinking that racial violence and religious intolerance are primarily subjects on an AP U.S. History exam. The sort of privilege that meant having only one limitation on my natural teenage brashness: the parameters of “cool” and “uncool.”

For my African-American peers, particularly male ones, “the talk” referred to something far too serious for sitcoms. As Michaela Angela Davis explains, “Black mothers and fathers all over the country for generations have [had] ... ‘the talk’ with their sons about what to do, and perhaps more critically, what not to do when encountering police.”

Interactions with law enforcement spur just one version of this warning. A teacher at my son’s San Francisco preschool says her grown son learned early on to be aware of “the consequences of his clothing choices, hair style, behavior, tone of voice, size, and location in different neighborhoods coupled with his complexion.” One day she pulled him aside as he headed out to the movies with a white female friend. She begged him to stay alert and careful. Like teenagers the world over, he scoffed.

She never knew how hard to push, torn between teaching her son to believe in his equality, and keeping him safe. She wanted him to feel proud of his heritage, but knew standing too tall could easily make him a target.

A family friend of hers could write a book about it. Actually, he did. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ New York Times bestseller and National Book Award winner "Between the World and Me"—written as a letter to the author’s teenage son—is, in some sense, both an exquisitely reasoned, literary version of “the talk” and a forceful rejection of the practice.

Before the attacks in Paris, I read a Facebook post by an acquaintance urging others to carry concealed weapons, because danger lurks everywhere these days, even in “a safe neighborhood, white.” A friend of hers chimed in: “Look around, Whites are targets now.” “It’s a god given right to defend your life,” affirmed another. “Shoot to kill,” a fourth person added, and then, “white lives matter.”

These statements appear almost civilized in comparison to more recent xenophobic rants. “ALL ragheads need to go, shot, or smeared with pig urine,” posted one man. Another, hailing from Newport, Maine, wrote: “I’m going hunting fucking ragheads are no[t] welcome in my town.”

He wouldn’t be the first. Many speculate that is precisely what happened to three Muslim college students in Chapel Hill in February. In October, “Patriots” organized armed anti-Muslim rallies in more than 20 U.S. cities. And since Paris, an attacker threatened to kill an Uber driver in North Carolina, bullets were fired into the garage of a Muslim family in Florida, and a store owner in New York was beaten by a man who declared, “I kill Muslims.” Donald Trump stands by his proposal to bar all Muslims from entering the U.S.

Americans are insulting, denigrating and assaulting other Americans simply for following the religious tradition of their families, and a major presidential candidate adds fuel to the fire. In response, another set of parents has increasingly been giving their own version of “the talk.”

A 14-year-old who attends a tony high school in the Bronx—I’ll use her first initial, B—tells of her mother’s recent about-face. For years the two have argued, B’s mother urging her first-generation American daughter to be more observant, to fast during Ramadan, do Arabic work at home, and attend mosque. She hated seeing B slowly becoming less and less like her Moroccan family, and more like her classmates. “You should be proud to be a Muslim,” she said.

But after Paris, in the car on the way to a meeting with other Islamic families—a social event and evening of prayer and reflection much like those organized by my own Quaker Meeting—B’s mother said, “You need to watch who you tell about your religion. Don’t say where we go and what we do, or they’ll think we’re part of ISIS.”

F, another Muslim American teenager and also a New Yorker, says her father told her “to remain quiet, to stay low.” “He said I can never say the word ‘ISIS.’ I can never argue about Islam with a non-Muslim, ever. He knows I’m an open person and that I will speak up if I see or hear something that’s not right. But he said I have to keep my disagreements to myself and allow other people to be ignorant no matter how much it hurts me.”

“How ridiculous,” F initially thought, but the fear in her father’s eyes gave her pause. B was surprised too, but says, “I guess I understand where my mom is coming from. People on my Facebook feed have been saying all sorts of stuff, like ‘we need to get all the Muslims out of the U.S.,’ and there was this meme with a picture of a Middle Eastern-looking man that just said, ‘go to hell.’” These are words and images circulated by her teenage acquaintances, friends of friends and classmates.

Shortly after F and B received the talk, news broke of a Muslim girl at a nearby school being attacked by three boys who held her in a headlock, punching her while calling her “ISIS” and removing her hijab.

Of course white lives matter. That proposition has never been in question. It's black lives that we have devalued and dehumanized for so long that their worth to us, on college campuses and the streets, must be proven. American Christians’ ability to believe in “God-given” rights is not under assault. It’s our national commitment to religious freedom that we have to recall and renew.

Until we do, some of our kids will live and speak without fear, free to be themselves as they pursue happiness. While others will receive “the talk.”

Gail Cornwall is a former public school teacher and recovering lawyer who now works as a stay-at-home mom of three and writes about parenthood. Born in St. Louis and raised in the Bay Area, she’s a serial monogamist of urban living who resided in Berkeley, New York, D.C., Boston and Seattle before committing to San Francisco. You can find Gail on Facebook and Twitter, or read more at gailcornwall.com.

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5 European leaders who are kindred spirits with Donald Trump

LISBON, Portugal — For many Europeans, Donald Trump is a figure of fun: the bling, the wacko comments, the name — which is British children's slang for “fart” — and of course, the hair.

Yet Europe has its own breed of right-wing populists, and their seemingly inexorable rise toward the continent's corridors of power, like Trump’s toward the US Republican presidential nomination, is no joke.

From nationalists wooing mainstream voters in France to barely disguised neo-Nazis scoring votes in recession-racked Greece, the radical right is on the march in a Europe where terrorism and the unprecedented refugee influx have added to the destabilizing effects of a long economic crisis.

The rightists don't form a united movement, though, and many issues divide them.

In the Netherlands, the Freedom Party is hawkishly pro-Israel, while members of Hungary's second-largest party Jobbik are openly anti-Semitic.

While many on Europe's radical right share Trump's admiration for Vladimir Putin's leadership qualities, Poland's new ultra-conservative government is deeply suspicious of the Russian president and pushes NATO to strengthen defenses against Moscow.

Still, the new rightists have much in common: simplistic solutions to economic problems; loathing for the European Union; hostility toward migrants and minorities; and promises of muscular security measures to allay voters’ fears over terrorism.

Here's a look at five of the most prominent Trump-ettes making noise in today's European politics:

Marine Le Pen

From the wine towns of Burgundy to resorts along the Riviera, more than 6 million French voters gave Le Pen's National Front (FN) their vote in the first round of regional elections held Dec. 6, less than a month after the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris that killed 130 people.

The FN was France's biggest winner in those polls, coming first in seven of the 13 regions. "The people have spoken, and France is again holding its head high," Le Pen told supporters as the results came in.

Spooked by the scale of the FN's success, moderate voters turned out in force to ensure the far-right was defeated in the second round. It worked: the FN ended up winning nowhere, a setback that denies Le Pen any regional power base from which to launch an assault on presidential elections scheduled for 2017.

Yet Le Pen won't go away. Her supporters denounced a stitch-up between the traditional parties. "They have sabotaged democracy, but we will redouble our efforts," declared Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, the leader’s niece and a youthful candidate who came close to winning the Riviera region in the south.

Marine Le Pen is famously anti-immigration, but even she thinks Trump went a bit too far with his call to ban Muslims from entering the United States. "Seriously, have you ever heard me say something like that?" she told a TV interviewer earlier in December. Not that she's afraid of making controversial statements on migrants: Her campaign team last month put out a statement calling for the "eradication of bacterial immigration," claiming that migration was causing an "alarming presence of contagious diseases."

Viktor Orban

Hungary's prime minister doesn't line up with radicals like Le Pen. His Fidesz party sits in the European Parliament with mainstream center-right parties like those of German Chancellor Angela Merkel or Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.

But when it comes to whipping up alarmist language over Muslim migrants, Orban can teach Trump a thing or two. "If you allow thousands or millions of unidentified persons into your house, the risk of … terrorism will significantly increase,” he said in a recent interview with Politico, adding that "all the terrorists are migrants."

Orban says refugees represent a threat to Christian Europe and he built a massive fence along Hungary's border to keep them out. He denounces liberal democracy, praises Putin, and accused Merkel of "moral imperialism" for seeking a more welcoming European response to refugees.

Since his election in 2010, Orban has been accused of setting up an authoritarian state, jiggling with electoral laws, placing cronies in the judiciary and media, and squeezing funding for critical groups.

Hungarians love him. Orban was reelected in 2014 with more than double the combined vote of the next two candidates.

Mainstream politicians are critical of Orban, but they also know the alternative is even less attractive — Hungary's second-largest party is Jobbik, a far-right group so extreme even the likes of Le Pen refuse to work with it.

Geert Wilders

The leader of the Dutch Freedom Party (PVV) is perhaps the European politician who comes closest to Trump, at least if we’re talking hair.

Renowned for his blond mane, Wilders was celebrating his award earlier this month as "Politician of the Year" by viewers of a popular TV current affairs program — the third time he's picked up the title.

Wilders is a Trump fan. "I hope @realDonaldTrump will be the next US President. Good for America, good for Europe. We need brave leaders," he tweeted on the night Trump made his call to bar Muslims from entering the United States.

Wilders is fiercely anti-Islam and has surged in opinion polls this year thanks to the refugee crisis and the attacks in Paris. All polls since September put the PVV in front with over 30 percent of the vote, double its score in the last elections held in 2012. Wilders is looking like a prime contender for the next parliamentary election, due by March 2017.

He says the refugee crisis is "an Islamic invasion," warning of "masses of young men in their twenties with beards singing Allahu Akbar across Europe."

Earlier this month he caused outrage in Turkey — which is a NATO ally just like the Netherlands — in a video claiming Islam is incompatible with human rights and democracy. "You are no Europeans and you will never be. An Islamic state like Turkey does not belong to Europe," he said in the video, which ran in English with Turkish subtitles. "We do not want more but less Islam. So Turkey, stay away from us. You are not welcome here."

Matteo Salvini

In post-Silvio Berlusconi Italy, the neatly bearded Salivni is a rising star. His Northern League party made significant gains in regional elections this year and has consolidated its role as the leading force on the right, ahead of the Let's Go Italy Party of former Prime Minister Berlusconi.

Salvini has succeeded in building support by putting his party's traditional demands for secession for Italy's wealthier northern regions on the back burner while he focuses on voters' refugee worries.

The man who regards Trump as “a heroic and colorful person" says the Italian navy should drive back the refugee "invasion." He warns of refugees bringing in disease and added that those with scabies should give "a big hug" to the country's center-left Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. Once he suggested Italians should renounce their nationality and then apply for refugee status so they could be paid benefits.

The politician whose stunts have included posing naked on a magazine cover (with a strategically placed duvet) even took on Pope Francis. "We don't need to be forgiven ... how many refugees has the Vatican taken in," he told his party radio in response to Francis' call for forgiveness for those "who shut the door on refugees."

Jaroslaw Kaczynski

The conservative nationalist government that swept into power in Poland in October hasn't taken long to raise alarm bells in much of Europe.

"What is happening in Poland is dramatic and has the character of a coup d’etat," said Martin Schultz, speaker of the European Parliament. Luxembourg's foreign minister Jean Asselborn, who is serving as head of the EU Ministerial Council, warned basic European values were at risk of being "upended" in Warsaw.

Kaczynski is not in the government, but is the driving force behind the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS), which has triggered concern by seeking to increase its influence over the constitutional court, civil service, intelligence agencies and the media since taking office three months ago.

The new Polish authorities are impressed with the way Orban runs Hungary — including his attitude toward refugees. Kaczynski is another who fears those fleeing war in Syria are a threat to Europe's health. "Various parasites, protozoa that are common and are not dangerous in the bodies of these people, may be dangerous here," he said on the campaign trail in October.

Poland has been a rare European economic success story in recent years. It’s the only EU member that avoided dropping into recession after the financial crisis of 2008. Yet growth was uneven and conservative rural areas often felt left out, fueling discontent with the center-right, pro-EU forces that had run the country since 2007.

When it comes to Putin, Kaczynski disagrees with Trump and many European rightists. The new government is pushing for a tougher NATO line on Moscow. Kaczynski's brother Lech was killed in 2010, when he was Poland's president, in a plane crash over Russia. Many PiS supporters suspect Putin had a hand in the accident.

 

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