Performed by vocalist Alex Xela and the samba group Pagod’art, the song has infected radio stations, dance clubs and ultraloud party sound trucks. “When we make love, what does she ask for? S-S-Slap in the face,” urge the lyrics. “Come on, I’ll let you have it, Mama.”

In nightclubs, men dance back and forth in unison, pretending to slap their female partners. The women sway left and right, reacting as if struck in the face. And in the background, the band grooves: “I’ll let you have it, Mama, I’ll let you have it.” In essence, the song begs for controversy.

“Slaps turn into punches, and things get really ugly,” Salvador mayoral spokesman Jose Barreto told the Associated Press. “A lot of women were furious with the song.” Hoping to quell the storm of protest, Mayor Antonion Imbassahy approached performers, radio stations and organizers of last month’s Carnival, asking them not to play or perform “Face Slap.” Some stations removed the song from playlists, and Brazilian singers have refused to perform it in their concerts.

A theme of physical violence, especially toward women, runs through Brazil’s pop music scene, originating in shantytowns and spreading up through the dance halls of the country’s middle class. There have been reports of kids at boxing and martial arts academies using “Face Slap” as an excuse to get into fights. This week, Brazil’s National Council of Women’s Rights publicly repudiated songs that promote violence against women.

“If a slap is normal, what’s next: rape?” congresswoman Iara Bernardi told Consultor Juridico magazine.

Some experts believe the face-slapping craze is a comment on Latin America’s traditional macho society, and isn’t anything to get worried about.

“It’s all make-believe — pretend sex and pretend pain,” said sociologist Anna Veronica Mautner. “It’s not insidious, because the woman joins the dance as an equal, provoking the man but ducking away from him. It has the same spirit as the apache dance.”

All of the discussion, of course, has helped make “Face Slap” even more of a national trend. And those interested in its origins could conceivably blame the mother of singer Alex Xela. When Xela was interviewed on television, he claimed he based the song on an incident in his own life. A girlfriend asked him to hit her when they had sex. Xela felt reluctant and, like a good Brazilian music megastar, asked his mother for advice.

“She said: ‘Hit her, she’ll like it,’” explained Xela. “But it was affectionate, not violent.”

Cary testified in a deposition that he had sex with his assistant for the first time in the summer of 1997 on Pajarito Mountain, a ski resort a few miles from the laboratory. Cary insisted that An never resisted having sex with him, and even made booty calls when her husband was out of town. He claimed they often had sex at her apartment, as her young daughter slept in the next room. The affair, in his eyes, grew more intense.

“Sometime in October 1997, Jiyan told me she wanted to leave her husband for me,” testified Cary. “She told me she would give up everything for me.”

Cary claimed that his wife got pregnant a few months later, after which he attempted to break off the affair, but An wouldn’t let him. She allegedly called his wife “on an almost daily basis.” Cary said he was afraid that An’s husband, who also worked at the laboratory, might get violent on the job.

That’s Cary’s side of the story. According to An, he raped her in June 1997 in a research lab, and because she was from a patriarchal Chinese household and felt incredible shame, as well as fear that she might lose her job and family if discovered, she kept the affair going, having frequent sex with Cary in his car, and engaging in foreplay at the lab.

“He said he want me to become his mistress, become queen of his lab, assure my good job, to caress me, to do something to my body in exchange,” An testified.

An’s husband eventually surprised the two at An’s apartment, and complained to the employee relations office at the Los Alamos lab. Officials transferred An to another supervisor. An also asserted that her husband, enraged that she was having an affair, began hitting her to the point where she ended up in a hospital. She admitted that she attempted suicide on two occasions.

An and her husband eventually moved away to Virginia. She did not press criminal charges against Cary or her husband, but she did file a lawsuit against Cary, his supervisors, the U.S. Department of Energy and the University of California, alleging that Cary raped her at work, and kept her as his “sex toy” for months. The charges range from violation of her civil rights to assault and battery. The defendants’ request for dismissal of the case is still pending, according to newspaper accounts.

Representatives for Los Alamos refuse to comment, as does an attorney for An and her husband. Trial is tentatively scheduled for May.

This sad scenario is becoming more and more common on the ski slopes of Iran. Since the 1979 Islamic revolution, unmarried Iranian men and women are expressly forbidden to socialize in public places. But a loophole opened after 1997, when the administration of moderate President Mohammad Khatami allowed the integration of unisex ski resorts. Seizing the opportunity, rich and single Iranians have been hitting the slopes as if they were in a swinging James Bond movie, arranging their trysts away from the annoying, conservative eyes of the government.

The government has responded with the formation of special police patrols, reported the Kayhan daily newspaper. “The trained police will warn or confront skiers over any immoral act they might witness,” said the paper.

The sex-busting unit is made up of both men and women, and in theory is also supposed to assist injured skiers. But this is Iran, where nobody is allowed to have any fun, so most of the patrol’s time will undoubtedly be spent interrupting the coupling of sexually frustrated snow bunnies.

According to a report in the journal Science, the team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai and the Chinese University of Hong Kong examined the sex organs of rats in great detail. A filthy, greasy rodent will reproduce at the drop of a crumb, and amid this wanton and careless fornication, the rat has somehow evolved into a disease-free sex machine. So the scientists probed further, digging into the epididymis, an organ in the rat’s testicles involved in sperm production. The genetic code of the epididymis contains a gene that controls a protein particle called Bin1b. Although humans and chimps have Bin1b peptide in their saliva, lungs, and urogenital tracts, which helps to fight microbes, we don’t have it in our testicles.

Rats, on the other hand, appear to have iron balls. In tests conducted by the research teams, the rat’s Bin1b was successful in suppressing growth of E. coli bacteria. And scientists believe this peptide may also be involved in nurturing sperm. If this Bin1b can be isolated and used as a basis for a drug for humans, it could work as a “chemical condom,” acting as both contraceptive and microbicide.

Any future marketers of such a product would do well to hide the source of the new goo.

According to the Moscow Times, it was the window displays that pushed Moscow Duma deputy Mikhail Moskvin-Tarkhanov over the edge last month. In a letter obtained by the newspaper, Moskvin-Tarkhanov complained about the windows to the head of Moscow’s central administrative district, saying the building once “housed the famous Filippov’s bakery and the Lady Smith cafe, opened to commemorate the Boer war.” But now the club treats the public to images of men with “massive loins thrusting toward passersby.” Such pictures, continued the official, reflect an “intentional perversion of neighborhood youth.”

Moskvin-Tarkhanov asked that the photos be removed, pointing out that residents might assume that the club was linked with various offices of nearby city officials, including the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Federation Council.

“The people are deeply offended by 4-meter men in helmets and briefs,” Moskvin-Tarkhanov told the Kommersant daily newspaper. “I’m not against the club. Ladies with titties are a sight people have already gotten used to, but guys in briefs are an outrage.”

The city issued a formal notice to the Krasnaya Shapochka club, recommending that the windows be painted over. But as it turned out, club director Vladimir Trubnikov had already ordered the windows masked. City officials and Trubnikov plan to meet soon to try to reach an accommodation between Moscow’s political machine and the burly naked dancing men.

“I still hope that in the end we will keep our photographs,” said Trubnikov. “So far I have not even started to think about any alternatives to the displays we have now.”