Best Sex Writing 2008

by Rachel Kramer Bussel

  “Chatters” also typically do not meet their victims. They do, however, spend an inordinate amount of time cruising chatrooms in search of potential prey. According to the report, they often offer themselves up as advisors and are only too happy to talk about all things sexual. They’re usually interested in cybersex and will often graduate to phone sex, although in general they have no desire to meet a real child in person.”

  “Manufacturers,” however—those who are involved in the actual manufacturing and distribution of child porn—are usually involved personally with their victims. While some choose to clandestinely photograph children at public places, restrooms, and changing rooms, many have actual hands-on experience. This particular type of abuser is considered every bit as dangerous as the traveler, especially because, as the Keene investigation revealed, many of these pedophiles photographed “children they molested years ago, were actively molesting, or were in the process of seducing.”

  Pedophile Profiles

  Perhaps the most dangerous thing about these new Internet predators, however, is that they are not always who they seem; these guys often don’t look or act like the stereotypically sleazy pedophile. Certainly most of them are socially isolated and considered odd or weird by their peers or coworkers, but just as many are as “normal” as the guy next door. They’re fathers and soccer coaches and teachers and councilmen and lawyers and even priests.

  “We caught someone recently,” says Robert Hanlon, Chief of Police in a Midwest suburb, “and you’d have thought he was the last person who could molest a child. He’d been the youth minister in church and wrote articles about family and love and kids.” [Real name and location changed]

  There are some general similarities, however. The vast majority (an estimated 99 percent) of Internet predators are male and typically in their thirties, although there are, of course, plenty of teens and elderly men who have been arrested. These men are predominantly white but come from all classes of life, from the unemployed to laborers to CEOs. And these are not innocent guys who accidentally stumble into a trap while surfing the Internet looking for some fun; they are actively pursuing a sexual relationship with an underage girl.

  “We arrested a guy recently who came down from somewhere in Ventura County,” says Detective Darin Lenyi of the Laguna Beach, California, Police Department, “and he never once questioned our age. We clearly told him we were fourteen, we even have a profile that states that we’re fourteen and in the eighth grade. Plus we come off as naïve on all different kinds of subjects. We’re extremely nervous when it comes to wanting to have sex and getting pregnant. For example, they talk about oral sex, and we ask if it’s possible to get pregnant that way.”

  To boost conviction rates (which typically run 100 percent) and avoid entrapment, most investigators continually remind the perpetrator of their age and innocence, but these offenders plow ahead anyway. Many officers describe these predators’ behavior as addictive and obsessive in nature, and say they hunt down their prey—lonely young girls or boys—with a surprising fervor.

  “They just can’t think beyond getting to that kid,” says Kinsler. “They will give up their jobs, their salaries, their homes, everything. They just don’t care. It’s like it’s stronger than drugs. They’re just addicted.”

  Internet predators use several different strategies to attract their victims. Some alternate sexual aggression with tenderness in a ploy reminiscent of the good cop/bad cop concept. Others imply remorse and ask for their would-be victim’s forgiveness, alternating their requests for pity with sly seduction. Some present themselves as a mentor or a teacher, others come off as a close friend. Many feed on the division between adolescents and parents. “I bet your parents don’t understand you,” they tell their victims, “but I do, and I’ll always listen to you. You can talk to me about anything.” Almost all of them play on the insecurities of those in the throes of early teenage angst, a demographic that is particularly vulnerable to the attentions of a virtual stranger.

  “It’s always the same scenario,” says Hanlon. “These girls are in their early teens and they desperately want to be liked. They want to be loved. Sometimes they’re sheltered, they’re not really attuned to what life is all about. And a lot of them have never been told that they’re pretty or that they’re sexy. They just eat it up.”

  Unfortunately, most of these crimes, whether virtual or in person, manage to fly under the radar. While there are no firm statistics as to how many kids are victimized, most investigators believe that they apprehend less than one percent of those that are committing these crimes.

  “The bottom line is that it’s an underreported deal,” says Schneider, “because the last things these kids are going to do is tell their parents that they made a mistake, that they talked to someone and then went and met them for sex. As a matter of fact, in the majority of cases we only find out about it when the kids get caught sneaking out of or back into the house, or, in one case we had, when they just don’t come home at all.”

  Investigators agree that parents, a teen’s first line of defense against predators, are woefully ignorant about the dangers online, especially when it comes to chatrooms. These parents aren’t aware that of the thirty-five million teens online, one in five has been propositioned, with a third of those come-ons considered aggressive, and that predators now have 24/7 access to children right in their very own bedrooms. Also, they’re often in denial about the fact their kids may be participating in this kind of activity; chatting with people they don’t know, people who may be out to hurt them.

  “Parents just don’t think it’s going to happen to their child,” says Schneider, “and they either don’t have parental blocks or don’t know that their kids can get online with no restrictions at their friends’ houses. And they don’t realize that since kids feel safe at home, they’re more bold when they’re online, especially because it’s not a face-to-face thing. I mean, they have webcams at sleepovers. They play games like Truth or Dare.”

  With needy children online and their parents absent or ignorant, undercover online investigators are left as the last line of defense in protecting teens against pedophiles. More and more officers are being trained in the fine art of apprehending predators online, and a total of forty-six states now have an ICAC Task Force. But the field is still woefully underpopulated. One investigator in Colorado estimates that there are only eight officers, mostly working part-time, in the entire state. But those that are scouting the information superhighway for pedophiles are dedicated.

  “If the police don’t do anything, who will?” asks Hanlon. “Who’s going to stand between the kids and the predators? It’s unfortunate in our society, but parents aren’t necessarily doing their jobs. So if we officers don’t do it, I’m afraid that we’re going to lose our children.”

  Kinsler, who has dedicated her life to protecting children, spends upward of thirty hours online a week tracking pedophiles, traveling to her office at all hours of the day and night to chat online and talk on the phone with the offenders. But despite the fact that she’s dealing with the scourge of society and has to communicate on an intimate level with offenders and their often violent or manipulative sexual fantasies, she tries to put her work and the often horrifying images and words in perspective.

  “As long as he’s talking to me,” she says, with a shrug, “I know he’s not talking to a real kid.”

  Sex in Iran

  Pari Esfandiari

  and Richard Buskin

  The film begins with a dark-haired man in his mid-twenties lying naked on a bed, hands behind his head, casually enjoying sex. Reaching out, he takes hold of the camera and swings it around to reveal the attractive brunette who’s on top of him. About the same age and wearing nothing but a smile, she rides him, coolly allowing a creaking twin bed to make all the noise within the red-hued confines of the small, dimly lit room. The pleasure on her face is unmistakable and, to many in the strict Islamic country of Iran, so is the face its
elf.

  Zahra Amir Ebrahimi is one of that nation’s most ascendant actresses, known for portraying religious, morally upstanding characters on a trio of the past few years’ top-rated TV soaps: “Help Me,” “Strangeness” and, most famously, “Narges,” a prince-and-the-pauper-type drama about the trials and tribulations of a wealthy patriarch’s three children, which was watched by 68 percent of the Iranian audience during its run. Now here she allegedly is, both dominant and submissive, on a twenty-six-minute-and-seventeen-second recording, giving a performance that’s causing a storm in her homeland. Nicknamed Narges 2, the film seems to depict three encounters of tender lovemaking involving scenes of leisurely foreplay, fellatio, and ejaculation. Though dimly lit and photographed with a not always advantageously positioned camera, the home movie is burning up the Internet, and a DVD has sold an estimated one hundred thousand copies and grossed about four million dollars—a record in the annals of Iranian moviemaking—since the story broke last October. But all may not be as it seems, at least according to Ebrahimi.

  Dubbed Iran’s Paris Hilton and interrogated multiple times at the request of Tehran’s hard-line chief prosecutor, Saeed Mortazavi, Ebrahimi strenuously denies participating in the sex tape, which her ex-partner and costar has reportedly claimed they filmed at her apartment a couple of years ago. Instead she insists the man authorities call Mr. X—identified by our sources as Shahram Sha-hamat, an aspiring film director—employed a look-alike actress and professional montage techniques to create a fake video in order to ruin Ebrahimi’s career after she jilted him because of his infidelity. If her story is true, he did a pretty convincing job. If not, she could be in real trouble. Were she convicted of violating morality laws, Ebrahimi would face the possibility of a public lashing with a leather strap, jail time, or worse.

  Initially rumored by the Iranian media to have committed suicide while in police custody, Ebrahimi has been barred by authorities from speaking publicly. However, she made a statement to the Iranian Labor News Agency in November 2006, saying in a sarcastic tone, “I wish to reassure or at least inform my friends that I, Zahra Ebrahimi, the so-called actress who looks very much like the one who appears in the movie that’s been exchanging hands since the middle of Ramadan, am in good health, and as yet I haven’t found enough reason to kill myself.” Whatever the truth, Ebrahimi has had the ironic experience of becoming a fixture on the front pages of several of the independent but tightly controlled daily papers (on state-run TV and radio the story got minimal play) while watching her career go down the tubes. Although “Narges” was on hiatus when the scandal broke, release of her two most recent movies, A Trip to Heidaloo and It’s a Star, has been delayed on the advice of authorities while the investigation continues. Since she hasn’t been charged, no ban has been ordered, but in Iran it would be more than a little foolish to ignore such advice. Within a year of the 1979 revolution that saw the Ayatollah Khomeini overthrow the Shah’s government, Iran was converted from the region’s most Westernized society into a restrictive Islamic republic. For many this amounted to a hijacking—the democratically chosen replacement for a royal despot transformed the country into a hard-line theocracy. The subsequent mass migration, coupled with the countless executions of activists and deposed power brokers labeled mofsed e fel arz—the most corrupt on earth—left behind a population composed of people who either supported the government or were too exhausted to resist, all of whom were expected to reject Western values in favor of strict Islamic law. Once the government realized this was impossible to enforce, it settled for public obeisance to morality laws and focused on raising a new generation that would passionately embrace the regime.

  It was targeting a large group. Iran is now home to around seventy million people, but because of mass fatalities in the war with Iraq in the 1980s and an officially sanctioned baby boom, the country has a median age of twenty-five, one of the world’s youngest. Yet despite the government’s indoctrination, it appears that many young Iranians have rejected traditional beliefs. The Ebrahimi scandal provides us with a window into the psyche of people who quite simply have developed their own philosophical outlook: live now, and let the future take care of itself. More important, the Narges 2 video exposes the double standards within Iranian culture that toy with Islamic rules, lifting the veil on a schizoid society that juxtaposes religious fundamentalism with a youthful lust for sex, drink, drugs, parties, and material possessions. The very idea that Ebrahimi could have been a willing participant flies in the face of her prior public image, and it also gets in the face of a society torn between tradition and modernity, unsure of its identity, and ambivalent about moral values and social norms. Regardless of country or jurisdiction, there are legal repercussions whenever a personal sex tape is made public without all the participants’ consent. However, in Iran a person can be in trouble just for having made the film. Westerners can generally do what they want in private, but in the Islamic world each person has a moral duty to publicly acknowledge his or her transgressions. And since religion underpins the society, moral obligations have become legal ones, too.

  In Iran, sharia law governs everyone’s life, private and public. Islam differs from other religions that discourage nonprocreative sex by acknowledging a man’s sex drive, though it ignores a woman’s. This has resulted in a culture that allows men to gratify themselves but expects women to be submissive. But with Ebrahimi or Madame X clearly enjoying herself, the sexual role of Iranian women is being redefined—or will be if authorities don’t clamp down soon. Camcorders weren’t around when sharia law was conceived, and now it is trying to play catch-up amid a torrent of vivid images and divided opinions. No one is quite sure where to draw the line.

  “These DVDs are targeting our youths and endangering family morals,” declared a letter from 150 members of the Iranian

  Parliament to Ayatollah Hashemi Shahroudi, the country’s judiciary chief. “The government should accelerate the process of arrest and conviction and then hand out the harshest penalties.” The letter called for those who produce and distribute sex films to be punished by hanging. In response, acclaimed writer and political activist Emadeddin Baghi wrote an open letter to Parliament, calling for moderation. “Execution will resolve nothing,” he asserted, pointing out that excising the root of the problem should be the primary concern. “The question to be asked is why this immoral DVD has broken Iranian film-industry records by making four million dollars. That figure shows the extent of our social problems.” Among those problems is prostitution, particularly teenage prostitution. The reputable Iranian Labor News Agency has estimated the number of prostitutes to be between 300,000 and 600,000, and the proposed remedies diverge just as widely. One female parliamentarian called for public hangings of prostitutes, while several prominent clerics suggested legalizing brothels. This stimulated a national debate, with the government vowing to address the root causes, which it identified as poverty, unemployment, drug addiction, and family conflicts. It also recognized that men marrying later and the increasing divorce rate have left more single males around to drive up demand. But condemning prostitution and porn is easy for the authorities.

  It’s another matter to deal with the titillating image of a naked actress with a Brazilian wax enjoying sex in multiple positions. Ignoring it could be perceived as legal approval; punishing it could open a can of worms—try enforcing a ban on all such behavior at a time when more and more people are filming their own sex sessions. Even with several months having passed since the sex-tape story broke, simply raising the incident in any cafe or shopping area is enough to illustrate its impact. Just as the O.J. Simpson case gave Americans a way to discuss and confront their feelings about such difficult subjects as race, sex, and police power, the Ebrahimi scandal is allowing Iranians to confront their attitudes about sex and construct rationales for accepting or not accepting what they’ve seen. We spoke to a variety of urban, middle-class Iranians, and though we received a range of reactions, none were conde
mnatory. Some even found the film exciting. “My husband, Mani, and I watched the film without feeling guilty,” says Yasmin. (Fearing government retribution for publicly expressing their opinions, those interviewed for this article have asked that their surnames be withheld.) “Personally I don’t care if it was Ebrahimi or if she was drugged. We watched it as a porno movie. The sex was hot. I kept saying, ‘What great love.’ My husband kept saying, ‘What great sex.’ Watching this kind of movie isn’t a sin.”

  Curiosity drew Pejman, a high school teacher, to the film. “My primary reason for watching it was to see how much naked sex Ebrahimi has in the movie,” he admits. “I always liked her in ‘Narges,’ and I think she is very pretty. I also wanted to see if it was really her.”

  Even conservative Iranians have seen the film. Mehri, a thirty-year-old Tehran woman who describes herself as very traditional, watched the film just to confirm what her husband had described taking place. “That she did something sacrilegious and immoral makes me very angry at her,” she says, “but the fact that her reputation has been forever destroyed makes me feel very sorry for her.” Behnam, a young graduate student at the University of Tehran, watched the “supermovie,” as Iranians often refer to porn flicks, with nine fellows in his dormitory. Each chipped in around four dollars to buy the DVD—at one time the going rate was as high as fifty dollars, equivalent to the average weekly wage in Iran. “Most of the guys saw the film at least a couple of times,” Behnam says. “Once to check if it was really her and then to actually enjoy what was going on. Afterward the dorm walls were covered with Zahra Ebrahimi’s pictures, some torn from magazines of her wearing a veil and others nude screen grabs from the movie.”

  Behnam says he did not enjoy the film. “I couldn’t watch it all the way through,” he says. “I got sick during the part where the guy forces her to have sex from behind and she cries. Clearly she is unhappy. I thought it was inhuman.” Most who have seen the film would say Behnam is misreading the scene. Ebrahimi seems to be shedding tears of emotion, not pain; she writhes sensuously and caresses her lover with apparent affection. Even so, we often see what we want to see. Behnam’s interpretation is typical of this conflicted society, where people move unpredictably between traditional thoughts and modern behavior, and modern thoughts and traditional behavior, and where it may be easier to feel sorry for Zahra the victim than accept the sight of a liberated woman enjoying sex.