A month ago I stood at my wife’s bedside and watched the doctor deliver our baby daughter into the world. The cord was cut and clamped, and in the sleepless weeks afterward, as we waited anxiously for her little umbilical stub to wither and fall off — to give way to her newly formed bellybutton — I had just one abiding prayer: Please, God, let her be an innie.
The navel is the locus, the centerpiece of the human body. It’s the communal scar of humanhood, the sole button on your birthday suit. Japanese spiritualist Hogen Fukunaga writes, “The navel is the core of everything about the person.” So it logically follows that the unlucky person who ends up with an abnormal version of this most central of body parts is doomed to a life of dubious distinction.
Growing up a stick-man skinny kid, I had an outie bellybutton. Later, when I got a little meat around my middle, my navel caved in on itself and morphed into a more conventional-looking innie. But I still remember the trauma and ridicule, the stares and snickers that I was forced to endure as a child outie. I recall the extreme measures I took, back then, to avoid public exposure — ducking into an abandoned corner of the locker room to change clothes, sucking in my stomach to create the illusion of an innie, tugging the waistband of my swimsuit above my midsection so nobody could see my damning malformation.
Pondering our newborn’s umbilical stub these last few weeks, my entire outiehood flashed before my eyes, and I wondered: Why are most folks blessed with the normal, universally acceptable bellybutton type — the innie — while a cursed few get stuck with obtrusive outies? Immediately, I locked in on my first task as a fledgling parent: I would make it my mission to get to the bottom of the innie-outie dichotomy. I would immerse myself in bellybutton literature, plumb the depths of the navel’s development, interview the experts, debunk the myths and lay bare the truths, all toward the end goal of ensuring my daughter’s rightful place among the world’s innies.
Having an outie navel, I soon discovered, is nothing more than a cruel quirk of physiology, a dirty trick played on you by the reckless gods who stand at conception’s door dishing out body parts. Dr. Bruce Shephard is an obstetrician in Tampa, Fla., and co-author of “The Complete Guide to Women’s Health” (Penguin Press, 1997). Shephard explains that outies are the result, simply, of “individual variations in the anatomy.” So the baby’s delivery, the cutting, clamping and aftercare of the umbilical cord — none of that affects the navel’s final appearance? “No,” Shephard says. “Cord clamping is done several inches away from the navel. [The navel's shape] has nothing to do with anything the physician does or subsequent care from the nurses.”
Now, at this point, outie navels should be distinguished from the protrusion caused by umbilical hernias. In your abdomen you have two broad muscle bands that run vertically from the rib cage to the pubic bone. These muscles, the rectus abdominus, are joined by connective tissue that acts as a retaining wall to separate your internal organs from your skin. “If the connective tissue is thin,” Shephard says, “there can be a weakness that allows for protrusion.” Umbilical hernias usually heal themselves; if not, they can be corrected with abdomnioplasty.
For the outie navel, there’s no such textbook explanation — it’s an anatomical wild card. And Shephard admits that having the “other” kind of navel can take a psychic toll. “I’m sure there are people who are affected by it. But there are ways to get around it. We live in an era of navel beautification,” he says, alluding to navel-piercing, tattooing, henna art and the various other cosmetic measures you can take to doll up your bellybutton nowadays.
But no matter how you dress it up, outies are doomed to life in the margins. Consider, for example, the etymological connotations — the outcast, outlaw, outsider. Innies can’t appreciate the burden outies endure, particularly as adolescents, when sameness is next to godliness and even the slightest body deviation can make you feel like an ugly duckling. As Mark Twain said in his autobiography, “Children have but little charity for one another’s defects.”
Dr. Helen Friedman puts it more bluntly: “Young children are very cruel.” Friedman, a clinical psychologist in St. Louis, says, “Our body image influences our self-confidence tremendously. Children and adolescents are particularly susceptible to cultural norms.”
And when it comes to the human navel, the innie is firmly entrenched as the eternal norm. It’s a testament to the scarcity of outies that, while polling friends, colleagues, acquaintances and innocent passersby for this article, I was unable to find even a single outie — or a single person, anyway, who would confess to owning an outie, barring threat of a strip search. Though I did find a few innies who admitted having a passion for the opposite navel-type.
Jane Kelly, a 32-year-old innie in Washington, had a childhood fascination with outies. In summer, Kelly would go swimming in the backyard pool of her neighbor, Christine. “She had an outie,” Kelly says. “All of us girls wore these little bikinis, and every time we went swimming I would ask Christine if I could push her bellybutton in — I was fascinated by her outie. I recall being disappointed on the days when she wore a one-piece bathing suit.”
Andrew Adams, a 34-year-old innie and vice president of a Web development firm, admits that women with outies have a certain fringe-group appeal. He’s never dated an outie, but he knows what he’ll do if he ever runs into one. “I’d like to gnaw on it,” he says. “It’s kind of like a third nipple sticking out there.”
That’s the outie’s destiny — to subsist as a fetish object, a swimming pool freak. In the faddish fluctuation of popularity among body types, as various physiques fall in and out of fashion through the years — from Rubenesque to Ally McBealesque — the bellybutton is a constant: Innies are always in, outies are always out. On a Web site dedicated to the Top 25 Celebrity Bellybuttons you will not find a single outie among all the many innies celebrated there, from Drew Barrymore to Ivanka Trump.
And the popularity of innies isn’t uniquely American — it spans the globe. In 1995 the Wall Street Journal reported that the number of bellybutton reconstructions in Japan had gone up 375 percent in one year. A Tokyo hospital president was quoted in the article as saying, “People want navels that aren’t assertive.” The perfect navel, concluded the reporter, is “vertical, very narrow, and absolutely symmetrical.” An innie, in other words.
As the weeks passed, as I dug deeper and deeper into the innie-outie issue, watching my daughter’s umbilical stump shrivel and begin to work itself loose, I grew more and more anxious to see what would emerge — a blessing or a curse. I found I wasn’t alone in my concern. One new parent discussing the issue on BabyCenter frets, “I had a complete outie until my parents finally had it surgically fixed when I was 14. It was so embarrassing for me to enter the teenage years with an outie. I was always teased about it. It still is a very embarrassing issue for me. I would hate for my son to go through the same thing.”
Behold, a solution for the ill-fated outie: corrective surgery. Dr. James Wells is a spokesperson for the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons and a senior founding member of Plasticos in Long Beach, Calif. Though he has performed reconstructive surgery in many cases to replace navels lost due to trauma — belly burns and abdominal wounds — he doesn’t get many requests for cosmetic navel surgery. “My experience — and even in talking to my colleagues — is that it’s a very uncommon request.”
Though Wells doesn’t do much cosmetic navel work, he acknowledges that it can be done. And he agrees that having a body deviation like a protruding navel can affect your self-esteem to the point that you might, after a while, consider getting the damn thing rebuilt. “Everyone has an image of who they are,” he says, “and they have aspects that make them insecure about who they are. If you feel negative about a particular body image, it tends to affect your overall sense of self-confidence.”
Wells points specifically to what he believes is one major source of the problem: our culture’s over-glorification of supermodels’ air-brushed, picture-perfect bodies. “Look at the cover of women’s magazines,” he says. “Any month, you’ll find one or two that are clearly showing an image where the body is the focus. What kind of message are we giving the public — that a certain body image is more acceptable than another body image?”
Touchi, Dr. Wells. As a responsible and right-thinking parent, I would be wrong to make my daughter’s navel a major issue — I should teach her to believe that all bellybuttons are created equal. She should accept her body, respectfully, unconditionally, no matter what weird shapes it may eventually take.
As it turns out, though, I’ll almost certainly never have to counsel her through the ups and downs of outie life. A week has now gone by since her umbilical stump fell off, and, as I stand changing her diaper in the wee morning hours, a cursory exam of the unit in question shows — much to my relief — a flawless innie in the making. Another lucky kid joins the fold of normality.
Still, thousands of outies are out there, feeling conspicuous, sticking out in the crowd. A few weeks earlier, when I was polling some women on the innie-outie question, one of them couldn’t understand why anyone would write a story on this topic. “I mean,” she said, “who cares about bellybuttons?” She was an innie, of course. An outie would never ask that question.
Every night, at the stroke of 10, something magical happens to one of the channels on my cable service. The all-day stream of ho-hum cooking-and-gardening schlock vanishes with a flicker, and the screen explodes into a kaleidoscopic swirl of scrambled sex flicks. These rowdy hump-a-thons feature your standard hardcore fare: the most insatiable nymphos on earth receiving all manner of orificial service from well-hung hunks with jackhammer hips.
Hardcore porn makes for pretty compelling TV when viewed in its unscrambled form, but once the action is fed through a scrambler into my 27-inch Sony, something much different emerges — something finer and more rewarding. Those highly choreographed shag sessions materialize on the screen as the distorted, sliced-up sequences of porno-cubism that jargon-makers call “Picasso porn.”
A ramrod-stiff penis here, a jiggling breast there, a vague thrusting of hips that you can’t quite trace to two distinguishable human bodies — scrambled porn is a moving mosaic of sex. It can be a little hard to follow the action, as you squint into the flickering screen, but you’re captivated in a way that you never are with straight porn, because you have to envision with your mind’s eye the parts you can’t quite see. And that’s what makes the scrambled stuff so much more fulfilling: It leaves more to the imagination.
I don’t much like unscrambled porn. With its worn-out story lines, its so-bad-it’s-funny acting, and its mechanical humping and sucking, straight porn bores as often as it excites. It’s the too-much-information problem; it doesn’t leave you any room for filling in the blanks. But scrambled porn, like a finely wrought minimalist short story — imagine Raymond Carver erotica — gives you just a scattering of small but telling details. You catch a flash of breast here, a vague hint of penetration there, and then you flesh out the story line from your own mental storehouse of fantasies. It’s interactive titillation, much like the give-and-take of sex itself.
The similarities to real-life sex don’t end there. At its finest, scrambled porn achieves a kind of cinéma vérité effect. Compared to the unscrambled stuff, it bears a much closer resemblance to the actual experience of a sexual encounter. When you’re in the act, you never see yourself and your partner from the camera’s-eye viewpoint. You never observe things from that far-off, objective perspective. There are no slow, steady pans, no pull-back shots of the action. Everything is jumbled and in your face, herky-jerky and dislocated. As you flail around in the sack, you may — in a fleeting moment of clarity, like the interludes of clarity in scrambled porn — catch a glimpse of your partner’s torso writhing above or below you, a gaping mouth near yours, a leg extended at the very edge of your peripheral vision. But you’ll get no slow-motion sequences or tidy freeze-frames. Sex is scrambled, and if pornography aims for verisimilitude, it should be scrambled too.
If it weren’t for a few right-minded justices on the Supreme Court, we might have lost the gift of scrambled porn forever. Last year, in a landmark decision for late-night voyeurs, the court fought off the morality watchdogs in “United States vs. Playboy Entertainment Group.” The case emerged from the Telecommunications Act of 1996, signed into law by President Clinton, which called for an end to scrambled porn. When Sen. Dianne Feinstein pushed an amendment through the Senate that would force cable companies to either scramble their adult programming completely or banish it to the wee hours, the companies waved the First Amendment flag. The court ruled 5-4 that scrambled porn should not be removed from the airwaves, triggering a collective sigh of relief from Picasso porn connoisseurs everywhere.
What’s bizarre is that, despite its obvious inferiority to scrambled porn, unscrambled porn still carries more cash value in the marketplace. In a world of properly assigned values — a world where elementary school teachers pulled down high six-figure salaries while Britney Spears sang for nickels on the street — in a world like that, cable companies would feed their unscrambled smut over the airwaves for free and charge a premium for access to scrambled porn.
Maybe we’re already headed in that direction. In small ways, scrambled porn is starting to receive its due attention. In the opening scene of “American Pie,” last year’s cinematic paean to teen libido, Jason Biggs’ character enacts one of the all-time sacred rituals of male adolescence — masturbating to scrambled porn. The magazine Nerve recently featured an artfully packaged photo gallery of scrambled porn on its site, and pundits are starting to weigh in on the Constitutional ramifications of restricting scrambled porn.
In my fantasy, it won’t be long before cultural critics in the humanities departments of Northeastern universities are devoting entire courses of study to the deconstruction of Picasso porn. Art film houses will put on scrambled porn festivals in sold-out theaters, and bespectacled grad students will slump in their seats tugging at their goatees, trying to mentally fix Picasso porn’s place in the storied history of cinematic art.
In the meantime, though, aficionados of scrambled porn like me remain consigned to late-night surfing, squinting into the screen at those disembodied images tumbling like stray clothes in a dryer.
Of course the reason that these fragments of sliced-and-diced sex slip through the scramblers onto my TV screen in the first place is that the scrambling systems used by cable companies are far from perfect. Porn peddlers could funnel some of their profits into developing better scramblers, but why would they do that? They’re hoping that those teasing glimpses of flesh will compel us to fork over the extra cash for the full smorgasbord of unscrambled smut.
But I say no thanks. I’ll take my sex scrambled.
It started the day we brought our daughter home from the maternity ward. Or maybe it started earlier, the morning I saw that fateful blue mark on my wife’s pregnancy test strip. No, it began before that. I started worrying about the cost of college tuition the night my wife and I first waded contraceptive-free into the sea of love, letting our reproductive juices mingle for a higher purpose.
Since then the question has dogged me — relentlessly — from every quarter. It’s couched in TV ads, splashed on the sides of city buses and printed on brochures that arrive mysteriously in our mail.
A poster at my bank applies the pressure tactics to exceptionally ominous effect. An attractive four-color poster — promoting the bank’s financial planning services — features a young, pigtailed girl working furiously at her homework, penciling out a tough math equation under the glare of her desk lamp. The ruthless caption bullies mercilessly: “She’s doing her part … Are you doing yours?”
Am I, in other words, as panicked as I should be about amassing a small fortune to pay for my kid’s education? Well, yes; yes I am. My daughter is only 13 months old, and I can already feel the future’s financial death grip clutching at my throat.
The numbers, as accountants are fond of saying, speak for themselves. Average college tuition has more than doubled in the past two decades, while median incomes for families with college-age children has risen only 22 percent, according to the College Board, the age-old juggernaut that administers the SAT.
And the National College Resource Association says we can expect tuition to continue to outpace earnings. According to the NCRA, the total cost of four years at both public and private colleges is expected, once again, to more than double over the next 18 years.
All these statistics tend to blur into a vaguely sinister mélange of facts and figures, so I decided to take a look at what the math means to my family. With one hand on the computer mouse and one hand clutching my heart, I used the tuition calculator on U.S. News and World Report’s Web site to tally the cost of sending my daughter for four years, beginning 17 years from now, to the University of Virginia, a fine public school right here in my home state. My computation accounted for tuition and fees at in-state rates (assuming a tuition inflation rate of 6 percent), room and board, with some additional cash thrown in for books, supplies and personal expenses. The grand total? $127,446.
That’s a fairly horrifying figure in its own right, but just for the sake of further self-torture I decided to ring up another estimate based on the prospect that my daughter — who at 13 months is already exhibiting signs of cognitive wizardry — will develop sufficient brainpower to get her into the Ivy League. What would it cost us to send her to, say, Harvard in 2017? $410,527.
The numbers are so humongous, I find myself staring at them glassy-eyed, dumbstruck by their sheer immensity — like a solo climber standing at the foot of Everest contemplating its cloud-haloed peak. From my middle-income viewpoint, it’s hard to know where to start saving to accumulate such a mountain of money. The numbers are unapproachable, intimidating, borderline crazy.
But it wasn’t so long ago that the cost of college education was reasonable, even affordable. In-state tuition for one semester at the public university I attended in Virginia, in 1988, cost less than $1,000. I could write a check out of my humble savings account to cover the whole thing.
That’s right — I paid for most of my own college education, undergrad and grad, footing the bill with income from odd jobs and the usual streams of financial aid, which I’m still paying off. (Yes, Sallie Mae, the check is in the mail.) Back in my dormitory days I felt a little resentful of college roomies whose parents catered to their every financial whim, including the open-ended MasterCard account for beer and gas.
But I don’t hold this against my parents now; on the contrary, paying my way through college furnished me with a go-getter’s steady work ethic that I now see lacking in some of those old trust-funded college slackers, a few of whom still can’t shake the notion that someone ought to be paying their way through life.
So, unlike some parents, I’m not adamant about bankrolling my kid through college. If she has to put in some hours at one of America’s great retail chains to score some cash, or if she has to take on a little debt as she racks up her B.A., it’ll do her good. When she forks over her own cash for tuition, she’ll demand her money’s worth every time she walks into a classroom. She’ll pay attention; she’ll learn more.
Still, I do the feel the instinctual pull to provide, and I want to do everything I can to lay the financial foundation for her education. So I did some research on the various savings plans. At first glance, the most appealing option seems to be the Uniform Gift to Minors Act — called the Uniform Transfer to Minors Act in some states — which would allow me to invest under my child’s name while acting as custodian of the account. According to current IRS regulations, I can sock $10,000 tax-free per year into a UGMA account, and — here’s the bonus — earnings on investments are taxed at the child’s rate.
But there’s one catch. If I invest in a UGMA account, every cent of the savings will become the sole property of my daughter the moment she turns 18. And if she decides to blow the cash on some badass SUV, or new breasts, or a yearlong outback jaunt with her heavily tattooed boyfriend, there’s nothing I can do. Under UGMA rules, if I try to withhold the money, I’ve breached the trust terms and the kid can take legal action to get the cash.
So the question boils down to this: Do I trust that my darling 1-year-old will develop into a darling, motivated young adult who, placing a premium on the merits of higher education, will funnel her UGMA earnings straight into tuition? Or do I hedge my bets — squirrel away the money in a nice, safe savings account that will really suck taxwise but over which I’ll enjoy dictatorial control — based on the prospect that she could turn into a wild-eyed hell-raiser?
In the end, like most financial investment questions, it’s not a financial question at all — it’s a question of faith.
These days my daughter is just starting to learn to walk, striking out on her own first high-risk endeavor. With knees locked and arms outstretched she lumbers along like a mini-Frankenstein, and as I cruise along behind, my own arms outspread to shield her from hard surfaces and sharp corners, it’s always a temptation to sweep her up and carry her on to wherever she’s headed. It would save me some anxiety and save her some bumps and bruises.
But that would strip all the adventure out of it, too — for her and for me. Half the fun of having a toddler, after all, is turning her loose on her wobbly legs and standing back to watch in wonder as a sudden, new grace begins to take hold of her, and she starts making her way steadily through the world, clearing all the obstacles I worried would knock her down, and I stand there, shaking my head, feeling silly for not giving her more credit.
Most doctors don’t prescribe fiction for patients who are ill, but that’s exactly what will happen in Britain beginning in September, when doctors and librarians team up to launch a new program that will deliver a therapeutic course of novels to patients suffering from a range of ailments.
As an alternative to traditional medication, family doctors in Kirklees, West Yorkshire, will refer patients who are struggling through bouts of depression, stress and anxiety to a “bibliotherapist” at a local library. The bibliotherapist will then scan the library’s database to create a customized course of books designed to assuage each patient’s particular malady. The goal is to pair patients with books that will serve as an inspiration for them to get better — or at least cheer them up. The pilot program is funded by the government, local health authorities and a libraries’ charity.
Catherine Morris, a Kirklees librarian and the program’s organizer, says the program isn’t designed for people with severe psychiatric illness, but for those troubled by depression or mild anxiety.
“Working in the library, I meet people all the time who say that reading particular books has cheered them up,” Morris says. “Once someone came in and said ‘I really enjoyed this book because it was about somebody more miserable than I was.’ The idea is that bibliotherapists will talk to people, find out what kind of things they normally like to read, why they are stressed or ill, and then prescribe them an individual list of books.”
So where can you — the average depressed, stressed-out, anxiety-ridden American — find a good bibliotherapist in this country? Sorry, but you probably won’t find one at all. Officials at the American Library Association (ALA) say that librarians in the United States aren’t accustomed to handing out prescriptions for literary medicine.
“It’s not something we’re doing on this side of the pond,” says Mary Jo Lynch, the director of ALA’s Library and Research Center. “It’s certainly not something that we’re using in any of our committees or sections at ALA. Librarians here have never called themselves ‘bibliotherapists.’ We don’t use that title. It isn’t something that we feel we’re qualified to do.”
Lynch raises the inevitable question: Is your average librarian really qualified to dispense treatment for depression and anxiety — even if the medication being prescribed is strictly literary? Lynch says the Brits are going out on a shaky limb. “This is a very litigious society,” she points out. “If you hang out a shingle and claim that you can cure people, you’re making yourself vulnerable (to lawsuits).”
Still, Lynch — like all self-respecting librarians — believes that great literature can have a genuinely curative effect on the reader, and though librarians in this country may not brand themselves “bibliotherapists,” they do practice book-healing on a looser, less formal basis.
“We maintain lists of books that we think might help people in different situations,” Lynch says. “The goal for librarians is to know this stuff in case someone comes in and wants it.”
While the British program is a groundbreaker of sorts, the concept of bibliotherapy per se is nothing new. You can trace it way back to ancient Greece, when the words “Medicine for the Soul” were inscribed over the door to the Library at Thebes. And the Greeks, famous for their tragedies, really knew how to plot a story for maximum therapeutic impact.
“It goes back to Aristotle’s idea that tragedy has a cathartic effect on the audience,” say Brian Bremen, an associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin who teaches a course on the relationship between literature and healing. “The experience purges you and leaves you a healthier person.”
Purging may have gone out of style with the vomitoriums, but the basic read-to-cleanse tactic remains intact to this day. “The more modern approach,” Bremen says, “is that by reading, you learn things about yourself, and this knowledge leads to a healthier approach to behavior.”
The term “bibliotherapy” — most simply defined as the use of books to help people solve problems or adjust behavior — first surfaced in a 1916 issue of Atlantic Monthly, when essayist Samuel Crothers put forth the idea of prescribing books for patients with various ills and gave his brainchild a label.
The term began to get bandied about heavily in the United States in the 1970s. Back then, bibliotherapy programs focused for the most part on children; librarians in schools would try to help students tackle various personal issues with the help of a few good books.
If a fifth-grader’s parents got divorced, say, the librarian might slip the kid a novel that happened to feature — yeah, you guessed it — a child-protagonist with divorced parents. In the book, the fictional kid learns to cope by relying on peer support, personal resourcefulness, old-fashioned spunk, etc., and then (if everything goes according to plan) the fifth-grader identifies with the character, realizes he isn’t the only kid in the world with a busted-up family, watches the character work through the problem, gains insight into his own situation — and ultimately uses the book as a model for coping. Issue resolved. That’s the idea anyway.
But does it work? Before you swap your Prozac for Dickens, you might want to consider Richard Riordan and Linda Wilson’s 1989 review of the literature on bibliotherapy. Their review, published in the Journal of Counseling and Development, found that most studies on the subject have shown mixed results, especially when it’s used as an isolated treatment. The article concluded that bibliotherapy works most effectively when teamed with other forms of therapy — medication and counseling.
Of course one of the underlying assumptions of bibliotherapy is that the act of reading itself is a naturally interactive process. By placing yourself in the shoes of a story’s major players, goes the notion, you can extrapolate from their experiences and apply their ways of dealing with their fictional ups and downs to your own life. Heal thyself, via the canon.
Maybe, maybe not — but sometimes the mere act of absorbing top-notch literature can have a positive effect. Anyone who reads good writing has experienced the feeling of uplift and reassurance that comes from consuming a delicious slice of prose — like this one, for instance, from the opening of Kent Haruf’s 1999 novel, “Plainsong”:
Here was this man Tom Guthrie in Holt standing at the back window in the kitchen of his house smoking cigarettes and looking out over the back lot where the sun was just coming up. When the sun reached the top of the windmill, for a while he watched what it was doing, that increased reddening of sunrise along the steel blades and the tail vane above the wooden platform.Sure-footed, well-cadenced writing like this just makes you feel better, brighter, more hopeful. Maybe the act of reading releases some kind of endorphins in your brain — a reader’s high.
But can Kent Haruf — or Tolstoy, Melville or Austen — actually cure depression? Can they rid you of anxiety? Un-stress your mind? “I’m skeptical of the ability — the literal ability — of literature to heal,” Bremen says. “But there’s another part of me that says, ‘Who knows?’ So much of medicine is reliant upon rhetoric.”
So what kind of books might help an unhappy person feel better? “I’d take the allopathic approach,” Bremen says. “I’d choose children’s literature. Happy kinds of stories. ‘Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,’ ‘Harry Potter.’”
“Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss!”
– Doctor Faustus
Consider the case of Melissa, a 32-year-old news writer in Washington, who, after 10 mind-numbing years on the job, had a serious bout of malaise, felt that life had passed her by, decided to quit the damn job and cash out her savings, and went solo vagabonding in the wilds of South America.
One balmy night on the deck of a boat cruising off the coast of Ecuador, she found herself enveloped in the arms of the boat’s swashbuckling captain. They kissed — deeply, passionately. She experienced a sense of absolute liberation, a thrill of letting go. She felt flooded with life-giving energy. Her world, to put it simply, was rocked.
Melissa’s cathartic kiss definitely made her feel better, and it might even have been good for her health.
Adrianne Blue’s 1997 book “On Kissing” outlines the physiology behind the fireworks. Kissing is a highly orchestrated maneuver. You lean in, tilt your head to avoid a nose collision, and the muscles in your shoulder, neck and back are called into play as the brain’s motor center gears itself to the delicate task of steering the lips and tongue. Your lips are loaded with nerve endings, and as your mouth meets your partner’s, impulses fire through your neural network. Your brain tells your lungs to work harder, your heart to beat faster, your salivary glands to pump moisture into your mouth. Your jaw, the one movable bone in the human skull, hinges open as you extend your tongue.
Then, as tongues touch, neural signals go zipping along your spine, to your pancreas, your adrenal glands and pelvic nerve. Your arteries and veins dilate — your heart rate shoots up, maybe doubles. Your lips swell, and you get that pleasant tingling sensation in your private parts. The blood rushing to your skin’s surface makes you feel fevered, your face flushed. You may begin to sweat.
This ritual is what anthropologists call pre-copulatory activity, what sex manuals call foreplay and what Marvin Gaye calls getting it on. And getting it on is good for your health. In his book “Superimmunity,” Dr. Paul Pearsall says that sex in the context of a loving relationship boosts chemicals in your body that protect against disease. Doctors believe that physical touch itself boosts levels of the hormone oxytocin. Among other things, oxytocin boosts feelings of affection and promotes caretaking behavior, and synthetic oxytocin has been used to treat depression.
From an aerobic standpoint, kissing is a workout: According to the 1991 Kinsey Institute New Report on Sex, a passionate kiss burns 6.4 calories per minute. (This compares to 11.2 calories per minute you burn jogging on a treadmill.) It takes only two muscles to purse your lips into a simple pucker, but a serious French kiss activates all 34 of your facial muscles, and the highest level of serious making out, properly done, engages every muscle and tendon in your body.
Kissing can slow the aging process — it tones your jaw and cheek muscles, reducing sagging. Kissing is good for your teeth — your mouth waters when you kiss and all that saliva destroys plaque, preventing tooth decay.
Beyond the health benefits of the sexual kiss, the therapeutic power of a Platonic or familial kiss — its healing magic — can be traced to the accident-prone days of childhood. When you fell down and skinned your knee, when you pinched your fingers in the door jamb, when some schoolyard blooper launched you into a new realm of pain and humiliation — when you hurt yourself as a child, what did your mother do? She kissed the hurt away.
The chaste, nurturing kisses between parent and child build lifelong trust. “Kissing the pain away creates an emotional tie between mother and child that eases the suffering,” says Dr. Hyman Tolmas, clinical professor of pediatrics emeritus at Tulane University School of Medicine. “It’s better than medication at times. Everybody wants to be loved. It builds self-esteem.” He believes that children who have parental love demonstrated to them early on “grow up to be good parents themselves.”
Dr. Seth Prosterman, a clinical sexologist in San Francisco, agrees: “The displays of affection that parents do in front of their children are important as modeling. Family hugs, kisses — it’s all part of the nurturing that makes you feel secure.” And between romantic adults, says Prosterman, “Kissing is powerful in many different ways. A kiss can be healing, nurturing, bonding. All those psychological benefits translate into feeling healthier physically.”
According to Helen Friedman, a clinical psychologist in St. Louis, frequent kissing can lead to holistic healing. “The social support of a kiss is a buffer against stress — pain, too,” she says. “This showing of affection is a way to bond. And the need for human bonding is as basic as the need for food.”
That’s a uniquely fitting metaphor — the kiss as soul food — because anthropologists believe the custom of kissing originated in humans when cave-dwelling mothers would transfer food from their own mouths to their babies’ mouths, like birds, and adults learned to mimic the act.
From that Stone Age start, the kiss has evolved into a zillion modern variations and crossbreeds. Now we have the Platonic peck on the cheek, the steadfast lip-lock, the probing French kiss, the Hollywood air-kiss, the blown kiss that flies from the palm of your hand to its destination across the breezy abyss and the vacuum kiss that, according to William Cane’s 1998 book “The Art of Kissing,” is performed by “sucking the air out of your partner’s mouth and lungs.” Sounds a little hazardous, but Cane says, “All the best kisses make you lose your head and cause a visceral reaction.”
Charles Darwin saw kissing as natural — he claimed that we all have an innate desire to smack lips with our loved ones. According to Helen E. Fisher’s 1992 book “Anatomy of Love,” 90 percent of people worldwide practice kissing in some form, and 85 percent of Americans polled in a survey by the Revlon company said passionate kissing is the most sensual activity around. “The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana,” that old bedside standard for innovative lovemakers, devotes an entire chapter to kissing, including the sweet notion of expressing your romantic intentions by kissing your lover’s reflection in a mirror — metakissing for the postmodern smooch deconstructionist.
In fairy tales, a well-timed kiss can turn a frog into a prince, jolt Sleeping Beauty out of a prolonged coma and cure a witch of chronic ugliness. In ancient Rome, custom had it that a kiss from your lover before you die would preserve your soul and keep it alive forever on your lover’s lips.
A kiss is good medicine for most of humanity’s lesser ailments, and sometimes it can be something more — an instrument of deliverance. Think of Melissa the unhappy news writer, overworked, understimulated, bored to tears with the status quo, burned out on everything. Now see her on the deck of that sailboat at midnight, cruising the Galapagos, locked in a lingering kiss with the seriously swarthy gentleman. The sea glows. The constellations pinwheel across the sky. The kiss goes on and on. Nothing else matters.
“I felt transported,” Melissa says. “I felt totally removed from everything I’d left behind. It allowed me to shed all those layers of unhappiness and dreariness. I had a feeling of security and confidence. I knew everything was going to be all right after that. I felt free to do anything.”
Big Blue is gearing up to tackle one of science’s most puzzling mysteries. And if the company’s new supercomputer can handle the challenge, its success will mark a giant leap forward in the march against disease.
On Monday, IBM unveiled a $100 million initiative to build a computer that will be 1,000 times more powerful than Deep Blue, the machine that humbled chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, and 2 million times more powerful than your average desktop PC. Researchers say the computer, nicknamed Blue Gene, could be operational within five years.
Blue Gene’s first assignment will be to solve the biological conundrum that scientists call the “protein-folding problem.” In the human body, proteins are the bundles of amino acids that control all cellular processes, carrying out basic functions like metabolizing food. Each protein folds into a three-dimensional shape that determines its function, but even a slight error in this folding process can lead to disease.
Once the protein-folding puzzle is solved, scientists will be able to repair defective proteins in sick patients and create new “designer proteins” to combat disease. Pharmaceutical companies will have the ability to make high-tech prescription drugs customized to the needs of individual people, and doctors will be able to respond more rapidly to changes in bacteria that cause them to become drug-resistant.
“There are a bunch of diseases that stem from incorrect folding, including Alzheimer’s, cystic fibrosis and prion diseases like mad cow disease,” says Dr. S. Walter Englander, a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. “The problem has been that technology, as of now, has not been able to deal with the complexities of amino acids.”
Scientists have tried using computers to model protein folding, but according to Dr. Samuel Landry, a biochemist at Tulane University School of Medicine, today’s computers aren’t quite up to the task. “Massive computational power has made it possible for researchers to get predicted structures that occasionally resemble the real thing, but the devil is in the details. Structures good enough for drug design are still a long way off.”
IBM executives are banking on Blue Gene to speed up the process. This will be the first time that a machine of such immense power has been unleashed on a single scientific problem, and Dr. Paul Horn, senior vice president of IBM Research, believes that Blue Gene is destined to change the way doctors do business in the future. “One day,” he says, “you’re going to be able to walk into a doctor’s office and have a computer analyze a tissue sample, identify the pathogen that ails you, and then instantly prescribe a treatment best suited to your specific illness and individual genetic makeup.” After attacking the protein-folding problem — considered one of science’s “grand challenges” — Blue Gene will take on other problems, such as weather forecasting and airline safety.
IBM’s machine will contain more than a million processors, each capable of a billion operations every second — that’s one quadrillion operations per second. The entire unit will consist of 64 racks six feet high, each holding two-foot boards loaded with processor chips, and it will occupy 2,000 square feet.
Mapping out the structure of a protein has been slow going for scientists laboring away in their labs since the ’60s, so how do they feel when a corporate giant like Big Blue comes swaggering into the fray, vowing to crack a medical mystery that has baffled scientists for years? Is there any animosity from the ranks?
“Well, they’re not going to do it alone,” Englander says, with a laugh. “They had to enlist chess masters to develop Deep Blue. They’ll have to deal with the whole protein community on this. It’s not like they’re flexing their muscles and saying, ‘You assholes step aside, we’re going to solve this problem for you.’”
Of course, building a supercomputer to save human lives makes great P.R. for IBM, but Englander suspects that the company has a core of self-interest beneath the show of altruism. “They understand that by putting money into computer development, there’s going to be all kind of side products,” he says. “It certainly will put them in a good position in the market.”
But it will also put researchers and doctors in a good position to trounce disease. “If it works,” Englander says, “it’ll be a great thing.”
