Sheila and I had a great conversation yesterday.  I was walking by her office, and she grabbed me for a brief chat — we haven’t crossed paths much over the last few weeks.

Anyway, the subject of women arose.  She asked for an update about a young lady I had a few dates with in December, so I gave it to her.  The discussion meandered around West Michigan culture, the tribulations of her friend Shari from New Jersey, and manifestations of innate attention-seeking behavior among people coping with emotional trauma.  I relayed the story told to me by my new friend Jen, who makes me delicious coffee.  Jen attends a local religious college, and shared with me her experiences of interacting with some hot young freshmen girls whose chief goal for attending college was to find a man to marry and with whom, to procreate.

Sheila’s insight, which I suppose I really hadn’t given due weight, is that “society” in general, and certainly the dominant cultural milieu of the Reformed tradition in West Michigan, socializes its children in very different ways.  Most men are content to find a woman who will give them food and sex.  Women need a degree of emotional connection that most men simply cannot provide, which is why females tend to have closer friendships with other women.

Yet we do something to both our sons and our daughters that sets them up for failure.  We teach our boys to play the field and to repress their emotions — thus denying them the chief means of connecting with females.  We teach our girls to expect a knight in shining armor to sweep them off their feet and satisfy all their emotional needs; worse, we send the message to our daughters that failing to find the perfect man and getting married young implies a defect on her part, which is why many women (at least in West Michigan) are desperate for a man but refuse to settle for anyone other than Brad Pitt.  Or, they find Brad only to learn that after the honeymoon, he withdraws emotionally and expects her to be a domestic servant — which could explain why there are so many women in their late 20s or early 30s who are looking for a man after being divorced with children.

I had a phone call last week with my friend Stacie; the topic eventually settled on the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.  To Stacie, Clinton’s candidacy is more significant than Obama’s because America doesn’t seem to have addressed its latent sexism to the same extent that we’ve overcome racism.  Sexism is a particularly strong issue with Stacie, for a number of very valid reasons.  Nevertheless, I cannot help but wonder at the highly emotional investment she has made regarding the Clinton candidacy.

Come to think of it, it’s a wonder anyone makes it through adolescence and early adulthood with a high degree of emotional and psychological stability — the misalignment of social expectations between the sexes is surely a force of discord that can tear at even the most stoic of souls.

My last post suggested a follow-up regarding the resurgent adulation for Ronald Reagan.

I proudly admit to being a big fan of the Gipper. That said, I think contemporary conservatives play a dangerous game in making Reagan the gold standard for what “true” conservatism ought to be. The rhetoric from right-wing pundits seems to weigh each of the 2008 contenders in light of the man who brought morning to America.

The problem with this isn’t that Reagan isn’t worth emulation. Rather, it’s that conservatism properly understood requires its core principles to be logically severable from its pantheon. Yes, Reagan was a great president. He set a strong example of conservative governance. But he also operated in a time when certain policy positions had different tactical relevance than they do today.

Take foreign affairs, for example. In the 1980s, the chief foreign-policy challenge facing the United States was the steady advancement of the Soviet Union across its puppets in Asia, Africa, and Latin/South America. The prospect of annihilation by the Evil Empire loomed large; even as late as Chernobyl, the Great Red March seemed inevitable, and any opposition to it appeared destined to be a rearguard action. Reagan’s bold engagement of the communist mindset, loudly supported by Iron Maggie and JP2, was as masterful as it was counterintuitive to the realpolitik of the day. In today’s world, though, it’s not enough for conservatives to substitute “al Qaeda” for “communism” and follow the same geopolitical model as Reagan did. Our response to militant Islamism needs to be different if it is to be successful.

Taxes present another point of contrast. Reagan’s tax cuts spurred the Carter economy out of stagflation and, eventually, into overdrive. Yes, Bush’s tax cuts are important, and ought to be preserved — but we may be reaching the point of diminishing marginal utility for major tax cuts unless Congress gets serious about substantial spending decreases. The massive reduction in the top rate engineered in the 1980s is, in relative terms, much more significant than the relatively modest reductions in the top rate signed into law by President Bush.

Part of the reason the Democrats suffered in the 1990s was because they continued to use the Great Society playbook. They idolized FDR, JFK, and RFK, and continued to advance the same general policy goals in 1998 as they did in 1968 and 1938, even though America was a very different place 30 years after Tet and Kent State and MLK’s assassination.

Conservatives would be well-served to avoid elevating Reagan to the point that “authentic” Reaganism means aping the policies and tactics that Reagan employed in response to very specific challenges, in situations when those policies and tactics don’t match our new very specific challenges. In other words, conservatives must guard against the same ossification of strategy that so hampered the Democrats for a generation.

Conservatism that’s based on principle has a future, especially when those principles are true to the ideals espoused by Reagan and his closest allies during their glory years. Conservatism that’s merely a snapshot of a supposed golden age, is hollow and without a future. Regardless of what lies ahead for the Republican Party — and its troubles are not insignificant — the conservative movement has its own demons to slay, and in that battle, success lies in honoring, but not deifying, Ronald Wilson Reagan.

The intensification of the internecine wars among the Democrats and the Republicans throughout the 2008 primary process has raised my eyebrows a bit, and not in a good way.

On the Dem side, the battle seems to be less about ideology — there’s really not a dime’s worth of difference between Clinton, Edwards or Obama, philosophy-wise — than about personality. Specifically, Hillary’s personality, and that of her co-president, Bill. The pundits are making hay about the tarnishing of her aura of inevitability, but in truth, the Democratic Party faces a real challenge that tends to get short shrift among the commentariat: What type of politics do they want? Not, what type of political agenda do they want; it’s clear that all of them fall to the center-left in terms of outcome, if not in tactics. Rather, this race is shaping up to be a generational, philosophical dispute between the Liberal Boomer crowd (with the Clinton dynasty at the helm, and their “politics of meaning” coupled with an FDR-esque belief in the ameliorative power of government) and the younger, more progressive bunch — the Obamamaniacs, and devotees of Michael Moore — whose statism is a byproduct rather than the centerpiece of their distrust of non-elective (economic, social) power in hands other than their own, and focused on pursuits other than those of which they approve.

Who will prevail? That remains to be seen. The Clintons are superlative politicians, and their pragmatic centrism after the collapse of Hillary’s healthcare reform initiative, even at the expense of their neo-Great Society ambitions, demonstrated a lust for personal power that outweighed their commitment to core ideological principles. Exhibit A: welfare reform. Although there is a certain amount of Clinton fatigue that still permeates the electorate (or so it’s said), the policy objectives of, say, John Edwards are untenable to the Democratic Party elders who decide who decides. Perhaps in time, the “politics of hope” might prevail, but for now, the deep-seated anger and the strategic irresponsibility of the MoveOn.org gang makes their political success both unlikely and dangerous. And I suspect that many senior Democrats know that; certainly, Joe Lieberman does.

More interesting is the Republican side. With Fred Thompson’s tumble, the role of ideology in the nomination process has become more intense, and as such, the traditional civility of intraparty debate has begun to fray. Noticeably.

Witness the sniping in recent weeks between Rush Limbaugh and David Brooks. Or among the National Review bloggers. Or between Bill Kristol and whoever he happens to disagree with that week. What used to be at least polite debate among the major players is becoming increasingly strained, and the reason has to do less with the Republican Party per se and more with the future of conservatism as a coherent political-philosophy program in U.S. politics.

Part of the issue seems to rest with Reynaldus Magnus himself. Reagan inherited a Republican Party that was dominated by the Northeastern elites, who tended center-left on social issues, were strong on national defense and anti-communism, and advocated greater fiscal discipline … but, significantly, lacked the courage of their convictions to do anything other than serve as the loyal opposition to the reigning Democrats.

Reagan’s achievement — which had its roots in Goldwater’s campaign — was to bring in the evangelicals and other latent-but-apolitical social conservatives into the Republican Party fold and thus build an electoral coalition that was finally able to completely knock the Democratic Party out of national power in 2000. He did this by emphasizing a policy approach that, in its heyday, could win the support of a wide swath of the electorate, but partly by promising much yet delaying gratification for another day. Supply-side economics in the post-Carter years had a practical effect more profound than the Bush tax cuts of today; Reagan’s opposition to the Soviet Union, which was echoed by Margaret Thatcher and John Paul the Great, allowed for a burst of national pride and military resurgance after the Vietnam humiliation. Reagan’s easy personal style, after the haughtiness of LBJ, the deviousness of Nixon, and the outward weakness of Ford and Carter, inspired confidence among middle Americans. In short, Reagan could prevail because America was in relatively bad shape in the late 1970s, and he did an admirable job of changing course not only in real terms, but in the fuzzier realm of the hearts and minds of average citizens.

Reagan was succeeded by George H.W. Bush, who was the epitome of Northeastern liberal Republicanism. Bush’s success was tempered by two major problems — his partial abandonment of supply-side economics, and his excessive multilateralism in the Persian Gulf that left Saddam Hussein’s regime to fester for another decade, to disastrous result. Bush was championed by Republicans, but his conservative support wasn’t at 100 percent, especially after stopping the push to Baghdad.

The Great Clinton Interregnum between the Bush presidencies allowed conservatism to flower in a way that it couldn’t for almost a century. The 1994 sweep of Congress put Newt Gingrich in the Speaker’s chair, and turned the Senate into the hands of the GOP. This was the era of social conservatives — the apogee of evangelical power, and the Time of Troubles for Democrats during Clinton’s impeachment debacle. Conservative Republicans passed welfare reform, lowered taxes, cut spending, and stymied the remaining leftist ambitions of the administration.

Then came George W. Bush. Actually, the first sign of trouble came with the nomination process in 2000 — the contest was between Bush, the Texas governor, and John McCain, the Arizona senator. In that mix, a serious conservative contender in Reaganesque garb never appeared. In a close election, Bush prevailed over Al Gore, but the Republican Party under Bush began a slow degeneration into cronyism and incompetence mirroring that of his administration. Principle was shunted for partisan advantage, particularly after many of the major policy goals of the Republican coalition were met, and people winked-and-nodded as loyalty was promoted over innate ability. This ongoing shift away from the Reagan legacy was masked by 9/11 and the rhetoric of the War on Terror; conservatives of every stripe (except the paleocons and various holdouts at NR) could rally around terrorism — conveniently elevated to the status of a civilization-defining clash — and make it the sole litmus test for the still-intertwined conservative movement and Republican Party. But important issues apart from the War on Terror festered, and came to a boil in 2006.

Peggy Noonan wrote in last week’s WSJ that the real problem underlying the current sniping among the GOP punditocracy is the unwillingness of various commentators to honestly acknowledge that political conservatism was severely damaged by Bush himself. She wrote: “George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party, by which I mean he sundered it, broke its constituent pieces apart and set them against each other. He did this on spending, the size of government, war, the ability to prosecute war, immigration and other issues.”

The lady has a point.

The Maja Rushie has made it clear he’s no longer carrying the GOP’s water; he is a conservative, and he’s fighting for the movement first and the party second. In Limbaugh’s view, the present Republican field is not deeply conservative, and he hasn’t spared words of disaffection for McCain and Huckabee, especially, regarding their relative infidelity to conservative principles. Yet, Sean Hannity seems to think that all the leading contenders are adequately conservative. National Review’s editorial board supports Mitt Romney; the pro-lifers best candidate was Fred Thompson. John McCain gets the nod from the Boston Globe and Sam Brownback, while Rudy Giuliani picked up Pat Robertson’s endorsement. What’s the average conservative to think?

Part of the problem is that the conservative movement is segmenting, even if not wholly fragmenting. Limbaugh is probably correct; the Reagan coalition is in danger of fracturing, and Noonan has upped the ante by noting that George W. Bush is a major (but not sole) reason for this. The pending possible conservative schism was illustrated most succinctly by the trite-but-not-quite-wrong piece by David Frum that appeared in Friday’s NYT. He argued that economic, social, and national-defense (neocon) agendas are now in competition; the economic conservatives lament the growth in spending and earmarks, the social conservatives believe their chief aims have not been put on center stage despite the boots-on-the-ground way they pushed the GOP into power in 1994, and the neocons argue that we’re not serious enough about the war or the War and that all else is a distraction.

Of course, none of the candidates is the ideal choice for all three major conservative constituencies. McCain and Giuliani do well enough on national-defense and economic issues, but leave the social conservatives cold. Huckabee makes the social conservatives chortle with glee, but his economic and foreign-policy platforms make the economic and national-defense conservatives choke with gloom. No candidate is poised to unite the three major legs of the GOP stool.

Noonan’s assertion about the overblown character of fears that the 2008 race spells the demise of the GOP or the conservative movement, is well-founded. Frum is right that the competing constituencies are less likely to accede to a suboptimal, compromise choice if their own pet causes continue to get short shrift. Limbaugh is indisputably true in his observation that a conservative in the Reagan mold has not appeared in this election cycle.

We must now ask Lenin’s question: What is to be done?

There is a temptation among some conservatives to let the GOP be handed its ass on a platter by Hillary Clinton; the thinking seems to be that a solid defeat and four years of another Clinton administration will somehow magically make the next Reagan appear. This is wrong-headed; defeat — especially when you throw the race out of spite — merely intensifies internal bickering and reduces, rather than increases, the odds that a unifier will appear on the stage and bask in the warm glow of happy fraternity.

Perhaps the best thing that the GOP can do is to examine its core philosophical beliefs, and perhaps consider returning to them. The Party took the conservative movement for granted, with GOP elites in Washington doing the very sorts of ingratiating activities — getting cozy with lobbyists, pork-barrel spending, logrolling — that caused the backlash against the DNC in 1994. If a Republican candidate with the authority to leverage the Party and the movement tries convincingly to end earmarks, to keep taxes low, and to aggressively cut spending, he will earn the support of economic conservatives. If this candidate wins Iraq and applies tough but multilateral pressures against rogue regimes across the world, while increasing America’s military readiness and securing the border, he will get the respect of foreign-policy conservatives. If this candidate takes a strong line in defense of unborn human life and political and religious liberty — especially through judicial nominations — he will purchase the goodwill of social conservatives.

The formula is simple: Spending restraint, low taxes, a strong national defense, tough but multilateral foreign policy, a commitment to pro-life and family-friendly policy, closed borders, and the spread of liberty at home and abroad. And to advocate these things consistently and proudly, without coming to the light the weekend before filing papers with the FEC.

None of today’s GOP candidates are preaching this formula. But surely most movement conservatives can agree to it as a package, and to refrain from catty infighting even as we recruit and grow candidates who do match this model. We might have to suffer imperfection until the next best choice appears, but for now, a Romney or McCain candidacy will not be the end of the party, the movement, or the world.

Unless, of course, conservatives allow it.

The retrospective play-by-play regarding a recent workplace dispute has engendered some abstract conversation about power dynamics in small groups (offices, churches, etc.).  Worth sharing some thoughts in America’s most favorite little-read blog.

Here’s the short version.  I’m the senior analyst in a workgroup dedicated to information analysis, quality improvement, and systems development.  This group was formed originally around me, as I grew in this role from the early days of being a director’s administrative assistant.  We later expanded to 3.8 FTEs and — on paper — a respectable portfolio of responsibilities for the front-end revenue cycle of my hospital.

But politics is a funny thing.  There are people in my internal customer group whose responsibilities are not in sync with their institutional responsibility.  This is largely because of the effective removal of an entire layer of management from our org chart; my senior director has functioned as a de facto vice president for years, and her managers as directors, and her supervisors as managers.  And so on.  So, we have managers and supervisors whose functional peers are one rung higher on the corporate totem pole, and this has sometimes led to challenges.

Information is power.  Part of the strategery for being effective when you’re misaligned on the org chart is to be 110 percent prepared with clear and convincing data.  Which is where my workgroup and I come in; we have developed a formidable competence in dealing with some of the most complicated data in our hospital, and we are accessed by customers throughout the health system.

Our team is committed to methodological integrity.  Although our internal customers are hardly unethical idiots, they nevertheless express business needs that, from our perspective, need to be carefully addressed — sometimes, very carefully addressed.  And we do our best to meet the needs of all our customers.

Sometimes, though, we get requests for which we have some sort of reservation, sometimes methodological and sometimes political.  We are then put in the position of not giving the requester exactly what he or she has asked for.

Data analysis features a lot of very powerful tools.  We keep those tools tightly locked in a “shed of competence,” and my partner and I keep careful watch over the shed’s door to ensure that the tools are used properly.  When people want to use those tools for purposes for which they weren’t really intended, the person who guards the door occasionally becomes embroiled in a political controversy that often appears to be about something peripheral — tone/quality of communication, compliance, arrogance, whatever — but in truth is about unfettered control of, or access to, the toolshed.  As long as the analysts doing the work have the autonomy to refuse, redirect, or modify requests, they wear a big red target.  And since the analysts aren’t members of management, their ability to deal effectively with pressure from higher up the totem pole is, therefore, circumscribed.

The power dynamic at the center of disagreements over data seems to be fought on externals that are tangents to the real issue.  Instead of clear communication, there can sometimes be a tendency to kick the dogs guarding the shed door, through criticisms about the professionalism or integrity or competence of that guard dog.  In short, ad hominems substitute as the core dispute, when in fact the real question is about the nature and propriety of access to information.

A similar dynamic played out at my church.  Until a few years ago, my parish was under the jurisdiction of the Conventual Order of Friars Minor (the “black” Franciscans).  During the Franciscan era, we had multiple friars in residence and frequent turnover among the clergy, so a lot of day-to-day accountability for managing the parish (at the time, we had more than 1,200 families) resided with lay-run committees and commissions.  In fact, commission chairmen had a wide degree of budget authority and approval over various aspects of parish life.

In 2004, the Franciscans pulled out of their parishes in Michigan and direct jurisdiction over my parish reverted to the diocese.  We were appointed a single priest, who dismantled the entire infrastructure of lay commissions and committees and basically assumed full and direct control over parochial decision-making.  I knew how this worked first-hand, as I was (and remain) the chairman of the parish liturgy commission; I went from a high degree of decision-making authority over parish worship, to being the guy who typed the agenda for Father’s liturgy meeting.  (As an aside, I think the change was a good one — the Franciscan model led to an unhealthy degree of lay clericalism, in my view.)

Life at the parish is different now.  Lay volunteers almost never direct things; rather, they support the paid staff who report to the pastor.  The feel is different, and the flow of information about parish life has substantially changed.

So, the ultimate question:  What general patterns can we discern from power dynamics regarding “data,” in small groups?  A few conclusions from my experiences include:

• Information is power, and people who control information (either through access or through interpretation) occupy roles that — no matter how technical in construct — are inherently political.
• People respond differently to people who control information, depending on where that person sits in terms of relative influence.  A person in a superior position is accorded deference, and a person in an inferior position is often considered a threat or an obstacle (or, to be fair, a favored co-worker/subordinate).
• The best way to advance when you’re in an inferior position (whether formally or functionally) is to have secure access to reliable data.  Anything that jeopardizes this access — even in a non-threatening manner — becomes a serious problem, which gets externalized on the persons who are the “guard dogs” of that data.

None of this should be interpreted as a criticism of my employer, colleagues, or parish; the statements in this post are merely intended to advance a line of thinking about “power” and “data” that too often fail to be addressed in the most appropriate manner, regardless of the setting or context.  Nevertheless, some of what I’ve seen is instructive, and suggests strategies for managing the power/data conflict in a healthier and more appropriate manner, with eyes wide open.

Earlier this week, I had a glass of wine with Jane at a local watering hole.  She is a middle-school teacher with a passion for philosophy, which means our conversation is not dull.  As we spoke, the question arose of what broad social implications inhere in the widespread disconnection in the use of a higher-order tool when the lower-level principles governing the development of that tool are unknown to the user.

Clear as mud, eh?

The context is this:  In “my day” — circa 1994 — the World Wide Web was starting to blossom into the public consciousness.  I have had an e-mail account in some form since the 1980s, with the QuantumLink service I accessed through the 2800-bps modem I plugged into my Commodore 64.  When the Web started to grow, there wasn’t much in the public domain regarding advanced development tools, so I had to learn HTML and I hand-coded my first few complete Web sites (which included many images and framesets) by FTP’ing the files I marked up in Notepad.  As such, I have a fairly strong understanding of the fundamentals of how the Web works and what is or is not possible with the technology.  Although I’m not especially conversant in Java, and my PHP skills are rudimentary, I grasp the concepts quite clearly.

However, there are many people today, especially young people, who use GUI-based tools to simply drag-and-drop things on their MySpace page or whatnot.  They couldn’t parse raw HTML if their lives depended on it, and they lack a clear foundation in how the technology that they use so blithely, actually works.

So, what of it?

On one hand, people can drive a car with no problem even if they can’t quite grasp the concept of the internal combustion engine.  On the other, as with sailing, unless a person has a thorough knowledge of the physics of sailing and has mastered all systems from plumbing to diesel maintenance, their effectiveness in the face of difficulties on the open water is severely curtailed.

Perhaps the larger point is that human society is evolving past the ability of the average person to have a complete understanding of the various tools he uses to manipulate his increasingly complex environment.  People can understand some things, but not everything; I may understand how to markup HTML, but I couldn’t replace the transmission in my Grand Cherokee to save my life. 

Is this a problem?  I suppose there are two levels to the question.  For one thing, if there is a catastrophe of some sort that affects these higher-order tools (e.g., widespread power failures), many people would have serious difficulty surviving; dependency on complex tools is helping humanity to spread to the stars, but when our survival is increasingly dependent on those tools, we do become enslaved to them, and it seems like there’s something significant in that fact.

For another thing, human society takes time to accommodate new technology.  We still haven’t fully mastered the fermented grape, and we’ve been dealing with it for more than 3,000 years.  Radical new technologies take centuries to work into our culture, but the dizzying spike in the quantity and complexity of today’s newest marvels is out-pacing our systemic ability to adapt.  At some point, this will come crashing home, and it’s not clear what might happen when it does, since we have no historical analogue for it.

Actually … come to think of it … this makes an interesting premise for a novel.

There’s an excellent article in the December edition of First Things about the “two foundings” of America — the political foundings of the War of Independence and the Civil War, and the religious foundings of the Great Awakening and the growth of voluntarist Protestantism during the mid-19th century.

The thesis of the article, in short form, is that there are historical and philosophical problems for relying solely on the Founding Fathers for guidance about what constitutes an authoritative interpretation of how America ought to grow in the present day.  The ideas of limited government and personal responsibility that so marked the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were, in not insignificant ways, superseded by the legal and moral repercussions of the Civil War and Reconstruction era, and its transformation into the Progressive Era and New Deal.  In particular, the high degree of unquestioned federal authority demonstrated during the mobilization for World War I cannot be lightly dismissed.

These points are certainly well-taken.  People who yearn for the halcyon days of yeoman farmers and citizen legislators ignore a large chunk of history at their intellectual and moral peril; I’m reminded of liberal Catholics who seem to forget that there really was a Catholic Church between Trent and Vatican II. 

Yet we live in a world that increasingly deprives its inhabitants of true freedom to have a personal “second founding.”  Perhaps we ignore our collective history not because we have forgotten it, but because we’ve become conditioned to thinking of an individual thing (or a person) as being a comprehensible and persistent entity from creation to extinction.  The fallacy of composition at work?

In days long gone, it was possible to for a person to start over from scratch.  Now, even travel to a foreign country doesn’t allow for a break with the past, unless one resorts to illegal activities to secure a new identity.  We are tied to our credit reports, bank balances, criminal records, academic histories, resumes, families … and there are no socially acceptable do-overs.  The more I learn about the paperwork of sailing around the world, the more I understand about the immutability of personal identity over time in a bureaucratic society.  Without passports and competency papers and registration forms and credit cards, we are nothing.

Perhaps this explains in part our unwillingness to consider the possibility that America has fundamentally changed; we see how the nation began, and decide that this is who we are.  As I listen, in particular, to conservative commentators, I cannot help but to scratch my head and wonder how they can be so willfully ignorant of the new political reality purchased in blood at Antietam and Gettysburg.

America isn’t what she used to be, but we still persist in holding her to the standard of her birth.  Her citizens, too, often aren’t why they used to be — but they, too, are held to the circumstances of their youth.

Cultural memory is a funny thing, I guess.

During the 2004 campaign, when Michigan voters had to address a ballot initiative to outlaw same-sex marriage, the question of gay rights arose frequently in the Western Herald newsroom, and my editors spared no effort to persuade me as to what each thought was the right approach for the paper’s endorsements.

I frequently raised the question of bisexuals with my little minions, because it seems that even though supporting gay rights is a defining cause of contemporary urban liberalism, no one seems to like the bi folk.  Despite the passion with which my editors, and even some of my staff writers, argued in favor of outright gay marriage, none of them — not one! — would date a bisexual.  In fact, the women in the office were utterly disgusted at the prospect, and although the men professed great joy at the prospect of seeing their significant others getting hot and bothered with a busty babe, the idea of that S.O. enjoying an emotional commitment to another woman was beyond the pale.  So, I filed that interesting little tidbit away for later reflection.

Fast forward to the summer of 2007.  Yours truly, contemplating the need to select a fairly significant project (as a design model, not an actual project) to justify Six Sigma certification, considered a research project to determine whether people who undergo significant weight loss ever experience any “relapse” or psychological trauma from finding out that you can’t lose 80, 100, 150 lbs. and look like an underwear model.  Clinicians call it “redundant tissue,” but the problem is that the skin can only retract so much.  This is, of course, a problem that women who’ve given birth understand all-too-well, but the effect is amplified in people who were long-term obese but then lost a significant part of their body mass.  As I did, in 2005. 

Anyway, redundant tissue can only be removed through plastic surgery (an abdominoplasty), but insurance companies won’t cover it.  My contention is that the decision of payers to reject abdominoplasty in this particular circumstance is short sighted, because self-perception of body image is a key part of maintaining a healthy weight, and if you have the body of a woman who gave birth to six sets of triplets, you just might give up on eating like a rabbit and exercising like Richard Simmons, and reach instead for the Ben & Jerry’s, since the sacrifice ultimately proved futile.

So … step one, in assessing the feasibility of this potential project, is to gauge public reaction to people — especially males — who suffer from some degree of redundant tissue.  Well, I have a small amount of it; I look OK with clothes on, but with my shirt off, I do have a little bit of unsightly skin around my navel.  So I used myself as a model.

To test the theory, I created various anonymous accounts on several gay-themed sex-and-dating sites (since women rarely frequent such sites on their own).  Some accounts featured photos of me, sans face, with my shirt on; others featured me, again headless, but without my shirt.  And then I monitored the account traffic.

Well, my point was proven; the accounts with the shirtless photo garnered several dozen questions ranging from “whats wrong with ur stomach” to “hey, did u loose a lot of weight” to “you should get plastic surgery” — often from younger guys with washboard abs (those lucky, lucky bastards) or dirty old men who look like Nick Nolte after a bender (those hypocrites!). 

What was even more interesting, however, was the number of men who responded to my fully-clothed profile.  Much to the benefit of my ego, I had a lot of hits.  What astonished me, though, was the number of hits from men — mostly in their late 20s to late 30s — who were seeking a discrete relationship or, more commonly, random sex, because they are married.

(This is where the bisexual thing comes back.  Bear with me.)

And it’s not just one or two guys, either.  There is, by all appearances, a bustling underground trade in Grand Rapids among married men who discreetly trade sexual favors among themselves and with gay men; it’s common enough that people on those sites seem to take it in stride. 

The public-health nightmare, though, is that there is a patently false conventional wisdom circulating that there’s no biological risk of married men exchanging sexual favors with other married men.  In fact, it’s the alleged lack of risk that serves as the draw — barebacking.  They tend to seek each other on the theory that gay men might have diseases, but “straight” men with wives won’t.

Can you imagine being the wife of such a man?  Can you imagine believing you’re in a committed and monogamous relationship, while your husband cats around with other married men?

But perhaps the problem is that society forces a binary decision on people — you are either gay or straight, and you must live your life accordingly.  In West Michigan, it’s certainly easier to be straight, so guys whose sexual proclivities tend to cluster toward bisexuality choose to have wives and girlfriends, but express their same-sex tendencies in furtive and ultimately self-destructive ways.

Whatever the cultural or psychological explanation, though, there appears to be quite a few married men in the Grand Rapids area engaging in anonymous, unprotected sex with other men that they also believe to be married and thus “safe.”  And, statistically, this is probably true.  But all it’s going to take is for a small subset of these men to acquire an STI before a whole lot of presumably faithful women are going to have an unpleasant chat with their gynecologist.

The problem with the spread of AIDS in the early 1980s was that the risk vectors refused to acknowledge their status as vectors.  Could the same model apply to some spread of social disease now, on account of society’s inability to successfully integrate bisexuality — especially male bisexuality — into the continuum of recognized sexual behavior?