Forbidden Knowledge Part 11

If the one-two punch of Barry White and candlelight just ain't doin' the trick, maybe your l.u.s.t needs some thrust from a less traditional source. Here are a couple of internationally acclaimed remedies from the days before v.i.a.g.r.a.

_01:: Basil If you're desperate for a quick trick to jumpstart an ailing love life, just look to the sweetest herb on your spice rack for the remedy. That's right! According to pract.i.tioners of the voodoo belief system in Haiti, good ol' basil is the Spanish fly of your kitchen cabinet. Said to be sacred to the Haitian G.o.ddess of love, Erzulie, basil is added as an aphrodisiac to a special incense burned to invoke her spirit in voodoo love ceremoniesobviously, for romantic purposes. The Old World herb is also sprinkled liberally on food and eaten to stimulate that tingling feeling.

_02:: Antlers Perhaps because they resemble erect phalluses, antlers have been considered aphrodisiacs in traditional Asian medical folklore for over 2,000 years. Pract.i.tioners of traditional medicine recommend grinding up the soft, velvety skin that covers deer antlers and sprinkling it on food or mixing it into a beverage. In fact, the bony outgrowths are so prized that one species, the Tibet red deer, has actually been hunted to near extinction. Luckily, scientists recently discovered a small herd of 200 of these animals near Lhasa, Tibet, we hope none of which will die in the name of love. Or l.u.s.t.

_03:: Xanat The flower of the vanilla orchid was reputed by the native cultures of Central America to be an aphrodisiac, and vanilla still carries this a.s.sociation in Mexico. In native folklore, Xanat, the youngest daughter of the fertility G.o.ddess, suffered from unrequited love for a young man of the Totonac tribe. In fact, she was forbidden to marry him because she was divine and he a mortal. Since she couldn't marry a human, however, the benevolent Xanat turned herself into a flower with aphrodisiacal qualities so she could help the human race do its thing.

_04:: Frog Legs Sometimes you can have too much of a wooder, goodthing. In the case of an unfortunate group of French Foreign Legion soldiers in North Africa, frog legs proved to be such an effective enhancer of "erectile function" that priapisma prolonged, painful erection that will not go awayensued. Subsequently, researchers from American universities found that the frog legs contained enormous amounts of cantharidin, better known as Spanish fly. It turned out the frogs had been eating meloid beetles, one of the main sources of the legendary aphrodisiac, eventually making things hard for the soldiers.

_05:: Nutmeg Another salacious spice lurking in your pantry, nutmeg has long been thought of as an aphrodisiac by a variety of cultures. The ancient Greeks, Romans, and Hindus ate it for that purpose, and the tradition continued into both the Arab and Chinese civilizations. In fact, in contemporary India, couples eat a mix made of nutmeg, honey, and a half-boiled egg before s.e.x to increase their endurance and make intercourse last longer. However, nutmeg may also have unpredictable hallucinogenic effects, and in large quant.i.ties can be fatal.

_06:: Sweet Potatoes Shortly after Columbus made landfall in 1492, the natives of Hispaniola introduced him to the sweet potato, a member of the morning glory family. Spanish colonizers soon spread the sweet potato lovin' to Asia and Europe, the popularity to cultivate it driven in part by its reputation as an aphrodisiac. In Health's Improvement, a medical guide from 1595, Dr. Thomas m.u.f.fet wrote that sweet potatoes increase not only libido, but apparently also the incidence of flatulence, claiming that they "nourish mightily...engendering much flesh, blood, and seed, but withal encreasing wind and l.u.s.t."

_07:: Tiger Today tigers are one of the most endangered species on earth, with the main population in Asia all but wiped out by poachers. Sadly, this is due in large part to a widespread belief in East Asian cultures that tiger flesh is medicinal for a variety of ailments and complaints. Tiger p.e.n.i.s, bone, liver, fat, and whiskers are all reputed to stimulate s.e.xual desire in men, driving the illicit trade and pus.h.i.+ng the rare animals ever closer to extinction. Even worse? Despite the fact that its illegal, you can probably find a tiger parts dealer near you: tiger is commonly sold under the table in American cities that are home to large numbers of East Asian immigrants.

_08:: Unagi, Unagi Served raw in sus.h.i.+ or cooked as part of an udon (noodle) dish, sea eel, or unagi, is reputed in j.a.pan to be an aphrodisiac. The a.s.sociation likely springs from a rather obvious similarity between the shape of the eel and, as usual, an erect p.e.n.i.s. Of course, there might be some science behind the belief as well. Unagi is high in vitamin A, which may help s.e.xual function. Although unagi is an increasingly popular item on American sus.h.i.+ menus, most diners are unaware of its erotic a.s.sociations in j.a.panese cuisine.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Our Parents?

4 Historical Eloping Tales

Love, they say, conquers all. But sometimes a little thing like parental permission can put up a tough fight. The following four couples didn't get their permission slips signed before taking field trips to the altar.

_01:: Peter Abelard and Heloise Leonard de Selva In 12th-century France, Fulbert, a priest of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, hired Abelard, a gifted but contrary theologian and Aristotelian philosopher, to tutor his brainy young niece, Heloise. As you might have predicted, Abelard and Heloise fell in love. What wasn't predicted, however, was that young Abelard would impregnate her. Understandably, Heloise's uncle was enraged, s.h.i.+pping her off to Normandy for the duration of her pregnancy. After giving birth to a son, she returned to Paris, where, again defying uncle's wishes, Heloise and Abelard slipped off for a secret wedding. What's an overprotective uncle to do? Fulbert organized his male relatives into a posse, ambushed Abelard, and castrated him, which effectively stopped history from repeating itself. Abelard became a monk and Heloise reluctantly entered a convent. All wasn't lost, however, and their love affair continued in the form of letters, later collected in book form. In what can be considered a moderately happy ending (given the circ.u.mstances, not to mention the uncle), Heloise ended her life as abbess of the Paraclete, an abbey that Abelard had founded, and was buried next to him.

_02:: John Scott and Bessy Surtees John Scott was a graduate student at Oxford in 1722, but banker Aubone Surtees wanted more for his daughter Bessy than a merchant's sonespecially one who'd been a notorious scamp as a boy. Yet, as songwriter Bob Dylan would put it more than 250 years later, "Love and only love, it can't be denied." Against the wishes of her father and his own (who thought John would imperil his academic career), Scott used a ladder to s.n.a.t.c.h young Bessy from an upstairs window, and they ran away to Scotland to marry. (It was easier for English couples to get hitched north of the border in those days.) Luckily for the couple, however, neither daddy knew best. John Scott bettered his father's and father-in-law's predictions by becoming the longtime lord chancellor of England. In fact, today, the once mischievous rascal is better remembered as the first earl of Eldon.

_03:: Henry Fitch and Josefa Carrillo When sea captain Henry Delano Fitchlater a prominent California landownerfell for 14-year-old Josefa Carillo in 1826, he fell hard. By the laws of Mexican California, however, the San Diego girl couldn't marry a Protestant foreigner, so the Nantucket-born Yankee converted to Catholicism and had himself rechristened Enrique Domingo Fitch. Josefa's father, after some persuading, agreed to the match. During the wedding, however, before the couple could say their vows, Josefa's uncle arrived with an order from the California governor to stop the ceremony. (She later claimed that the governor wanted her for himself.) At the bride-to-be's urging, Fitch took his gal aboard s.h.i.+p and they sailed off to Chile, where they wed. After they returned to California, Fitch was charged with kidnapping and jailed for three months until the governor could verify the legality of the nuptials.

Touch of Evil Sixteen-year-old Konrad Falkowski eloped with Joan Kenlay in 1952. But to avoid being tracked down by their parents, the young man changed his name, and it's this moniker we still use to refer to the famous actor: Robert Conrad.

_04:: James Joyce and Nora Barnacle Budding Irish writer James Joyce convinced his Dublin sweetheart, Nora Barnacle, to run away with him to Austria-Hungary in 1904. It wasn't exactly an elopement, though, because Joyce objected to the inst.i.tution of marriage on philosophical grounds. So, they skipped the ceremony and dove straight into the happily-ever-after bit, living together and raising two children. Joyce, who had by now achieved fame and notoriety, especially for his complex masterpiece Ulysses, only agreed to marry his longtime love when the nagging got to be too much. We're not talking about Nora's whining here, but rather her daughter Lucia's. The young woman's incessant complaints about her parents' domestic arrangement drove them to the altar. In 1931, the couple finally legalized their union during a trip from their home in Paris to London. (So, in the end, they ran away to get married after all.) 5 Greatest Syphilitics of All Time From Columbus to Gauguin to Al Capone, who knew that syphilis would be the great equalizer? The following are five notables who might have fared better if they'd kept their belts buckled and their legs crossed.

_01:: The Syphilitic Explorer The long-held view was that Columbus's crew picked up syphilis in the Caribbean in 1492 and brought it back to Europe, where the "new" disease turned epidemic. But what about Columbus himself? He returned from his third voyage west in 1504 partially paralyzed, suffering edema, and mentally deranged. But can anybody be sure what caused those symptoms without examining Columbus's bones? Well, no. He could have had typhus or rheumatic fever, but syphilis can't be ruled out.

The Evil How-to HOW TO SPOT "THE SIGNS" (OTHER THAN JUST HAIRY PALMS) Active physician, health innovator, and, yes, the founder of a cereal company, John Harvey Kellogg wrote a handbook for s.e.xual behavior in 1877 (while on his honeymoon) called "Plain Facts for Old and Young, A Warning on the Evils of s.e.x." A key focus of this piece was a section containing 39 signs for parents to use to tell whether their children were masturbating or "performing the solitary vice," as it was called. The following are some of the signs that, according to Kellogg, all good parents should be on the lookout for: emaciation, paleness, colorless lips and gums, exhaustion, coughing, shortness of breath, chest pains, disobedience, irritability, a dislike for activity and play, sleeplessness, failure to get lessons done, forgetfulness, inattention, and liking to be alone. Kellogg went on to identify some other telltale signs, including bashfulness, boldness, mock piety, rounded shoulders, weak backs, pain in the limbs, lack of breast development in females, bad positions while sleeping, large appet.i.tes and the use of large amounts of spices, sunken and red eyes, and epileptic fits. Finally, especially be on the lookout for acne, bitten fingernails, moist, cold hands, bedwetting, the use of tobacco, and fondness for using bad language and listening to obscene stories. It's a good thing Kellogg was so specific; otherwise we might have started accusing everyone.

_02:: The Syphilitic King A wound on Henry VIII's leg became a festering sore that wouldn't heal. Ulcers spread over his legs and feet. And as he grew hugely obese, the English king's toes turned gangrenous. Not exactly a thing of beauty, Old Hal had something going on. The latter-day diagnosis: advanced diabetes. So what's with the notion that Henry's late-life dementia came from syphilis? Some say first wife Catherine of Aragon's several miscarriages suggest a s.e.xually transmitted disease. And then there's the sad case of Henry's son Edward VI, the boy king with the terrible skin rash whose hair and nails fell out. Tradition says Eddie died at age 15 of tuberculosis. Many, however, argue that he and his half sister Queen Mary I had congenital syphilis pa.s.sed on from Henry. Of course, it's all unconfirmed. None of Henry's children, including Elizabeth I (another suspected but unconfirmed syphilitic), produced offspring.

_03:: The Syphilitic Philosopher On a winter day when Friedrich Nietzsche was 54, the German-Swiss philosopher, clad in only his underwear, ran weeping into a street in Turin, Italy, where he tearfully embraced a horse. Stricken with diphtheria and bacterial dysentery during his service in the Franco-Prussian War (18701871), Nietzsche never fully recovered his health. His late-life dementia, however, more likely stemmed from tertiary syphilis. In other words, he had probably picked up the disease in his youth and it had run its course for decades. Nietzsche, a philosopher later admired (and grossly misunderstood) by Adolf Hitler, spent the last 11 years of his life totally mad.

Touch of Evil One radical cure for syphilitic patients was to give them malaria. The high fever worked to kill the syphilis, after which the malaria was easily cured with quinine.

_04:: The Syphilitic Painter Born in Paris, Paul Gauguin spent his early childhood in Peru before moving back to France. As a young man Gauguin signed on as a merchant sailor to see and sample the sensual riches of the world. Later, after he'd supposedly settled down, Gauguin and his wife moved from France to her native Denmark, where they raised their family and Gauguin had a career as a stockbroker. But then Gauguin chucked his family and his career to live a new life as a bohemian painter in Tahiti. So where did he pick up the syphilis that plagued him in his later years? It could have been in the South Seas, although it's more likely that a Parisian prost.i.tute gave him the pox. Nearly blind, barely able to walk, and in terrible pain, this forefather of modern art died alone in his Maison du Jouir (House of Pleasure) in the village of Atuona in the Marquesas Islands.

_05:: The Syphilitic Gangster When New York tough guy Alphonse "Scarface" Capone arrived in Chicago in 1919, one of his first jobs in the town where he would become America's most famous gangster was looking after mobster Big Jim Colosimo's string of brothels. So, did old Al sample the service? Well, a gentleman gangster never tells. What we will say, however, is that wherever he picked up the "goods," years later, he was discovered to be suffering from paresisa psychosis that follows after the late-stage disease eats away a significant part of the brain. Released from Alcatraz Federal Prison in 1939, Capone entered a Baltimore hospital and spent his last years deep in syphilitic dementia.

The Cost of Free Love:

4 Not-So-Straitlaced Reformers of

Victorian Times

A glimpse of stocking may have been shocking, but a vocal minority of 19th-century reformers fought for your right to hook up.

_01:: John Humphrey Noyes (18111886) As a theology student at Yale, John Humphrey Noyes declared himself sin free and in a state of perfection. Not surprisingly, Johnny the Pure was denied a license to preach, so he organized fellow perfectionists into a "Bible Communist" community in Putney, Vermont. There Noyes taught a doctrine of free love. In 1846 the Putney group adopted what their leader called "complex marriage," such that all the women were "married" to all the men and vice versa. Arrested for adultery, Noyes jumped bail and fled to New York, where he founded a new community in Oneida. There, the Oneida Community practiced complex marriage up until 1879, when Noyes finally gave in to pressure from outside moralists and abandoned the practice. Oneida, once an agricultural-religious utopian community, reorganized as a joint-stock manufacturer of silver flatware. As for John Noyes? He fled again, this time for Canada.

_02:: Ezra H. Heywood (18291893) Ma.s.sachusetts liberal Ezra Heywood founded his publication The Word in 1872 as a voice for labor reform and other egalitarian causes. Heywood and his wife, Angela Tilton, also a writer for The Word, shared four daughters and a belief that traditional marriage amounted to slavery of womenboth of the economic and s.e.xual variety. So what did the couple do? They decided to pen their own emanc.i.p.ation proclamations, using The Word to advocate free love. "s.e.xuality is a divine ordinance elegantly natural from an eye-glance to the vital action of the p.e.n.i.s and womb, in personal exhilaration or for reproductive uses," Tilton wrote. Of course, such salacious language was bound to offend a few Victorians, and Anthony Comstock, a s.m.u.t-fighting special agent of the U.S. Post Office, was certainly one of them. Comstock took special offense to Heywood's pamphlet "Cupid's Yokes," which advocated birth control, and arrested Ezra in Boston in 1877. Many argued that Angela, known for her frank vocabulary (she used the "f" word in print) should have been jailed, too, but Ezra's the one who spent time in the slammer.

_03:: Moses Hull (18361907) A gifted Seventh-day Adventist preacher, Moses Hull left the church and began lecturing instead on spiritualism in 1863. Well known for his eloquence, he was considered highly respectable. That is, until 1873, when old Moses printed a letter in Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly (copublished by Victoria Woodhull, see next item) unapologetically confessing that he'd strayed from his marriage. But he didn't stop there. Hull actually went on to praise s.e.xual variety, claiming: "Many think they are improved...by a change of climate and scene, when their princ.i.p.al improvement is caused by a separation from their old s.e.xual mate, and sometimes by the subst.i.tution of a new one." Hull and wife, Elvira, dissolved their marriage "by a law higher than man's" and Hull subsequently entered a "contract marriage" (no clergy, no license) with fellow spiritualist Mattie Sawyer. Luckily, the "contract" held until his death.

Touch of Evil Despite having the Victorian era named after her, Queen Victoria didn't always act so Victorian. In fact, she was notorious for having a long-term out-of-wedlock relations.h.i.+p with her "personal attendant," John Brownlavis.h.i.+ng him with expensive gifts and constant affectionafter her husband, Prince Albert, pa.s.sed away.

_04:: Victoria Woodhull (18381927) Believe it or not, the first woman to run for U.S. president actually spent her childhood as a fortune-teller in her family's traveling medicine show. Luckily for Victoria Woodhull, she abandoned the psychic act for loftier goals, including stints as a stockbroker, magazine publisher, women's rights advocate, and, most notoriously, lecturer. Woodhull's talks on free love drew thousandssupporters and scandalized alike. Though few details about her own s.e.x life are known (aside from the fact that she lived for a while with two husbands), Woodhull didn't argue in favor of promiscuity. In fact, she pushed s.e.xual self-determination as essential to women's rights, condemning any copulation without love, inside or outside of marriage. In 1872, while seeking the White House on the Equal Rights ticket, Woodhull smeared clergyman Henry Ward Beecher, probably a former lover, who refused to publicly support her. Unfortunately, the first amendment didn't work in her favor in the Victorian climate. Woodhull's published account of Beecher's adultery with a married paris.h.i.+oner landed her in jail on obscenity charges.

Naked l.u.s.t:

5 Artists Who Did More Than

Portray Their Models

Emotionally charged virtuosos plus beautiful nude models plus too many hours spent in the studio? These cases ill.u.s.trate that high art and simple biology are anything but mutually exclusive.

_01:: Anselm Feuerbach and Nanna Risi The 19th-century painter Anselm Feuerbach, nephew of philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, admired and tried to emulate the art of the High Renaissance. That's a big part of the reason why he migrated from his native Germany to Italy. Yet Feuerbach also possessed a cool, northern European sensibility, which he brought with him to Rome when he moved there in 1856. In fact, his neocla.s.sical scenes took on a bit of heat only after Italian model Nanna Risi (also seen in works by Frederick Leighton) began posing for him in 1860. It wasn't just his artwork that heated up, though. The chemistry between artist and model grew, and Risi eventually left her shoemaker husband and her child for Feuerbach. The affair didn't last, however, and she later abandoned the artist. Brokenhearted, Feuerbach tried to replace Risi with another model and lover, but he had little luck. After some time spent teaching art in Vienna, Feurbach moved to Venice, where he died poor and alone in 1880.

_02:: Suzanne Valadon and half of France...

Before 1892, when she became a painter, Suzanne Valadon was a teenage circus acrobat and then one of the most popular models in Parispopular in more than one sense. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir were among the many artists who depicted her. Toulouse-Lautrec's The Hangover, for example, is a portrait of Valadon. Usually, however, this model's relations.h.i.+ps went well beyond the depicting stage. Valadon had numerous love affairs with Parisian artists, and perhaps the best doc.u.mented is that with Renoir. Composer Eric Satie was also an intense lover of hers. More intriguing than a listing of the lovers she kept: Valadon never revealed which man fathered her son, painter Maurice Utrillo. Further, at age 44, Valadon was still on the prowl. She left a wealthy husband for the considerably younger artist Andre Utter, 23.

_03:: Pablo Pica.s.so and Marie-Therese Walter Pica.s.so met Marie-Therese Walter either in 1925, when she was 15 and he was 43, or in 1927. In either case, they seemed to be lovers from early in their relations.h.i.+p, as Pica.s.so's marriage to the former dancer Olga Koklova quickly deteriorated. Although Pica.s.so first approached Walter to comment on her interesting face and his eagerness to paint her, Walter's likeness doesn't show up in Pica.s.so's work until 1935, which is the same year she bore him a daughter. In any case, the reliably unreliable Pica.s.so left Marie in 1936 for photographer Dora Maar, who turned the tables and used Pica.s.so as a model. Sadly, Walter hanged herself in 1977. Even more unfortunate, she wasn't the only one of Pica.s.so's former lovers to commit suicide.

_04:: Man Ray and Lee Miller In 1929 Lee Miller, a 19-year-old art student from Poughkeepsie, New York, walked into innovative painter-collagist-photographer Man Ray's photo studio in Paris and introduced herself as his new a.s.sistant. Ray, who'd made his reputation as a surrealist and a pioneer of the Dada movement, said he didn't need an a.s.sistant but she persisted. Miller, already a top model who had adorned the cover of Vogue in 1927, was pretty persuasive (or persuasively pretty). The affair lasted for a bit. Lee and Ray were together as lovers and collaborators for three years before she went on to a photo career ranging from studio fas.h.i.+on shoots for Vogue to feature spreads in Life to wrenching World War II battlefield coverage for the U.S. military.

_05:: Jeff Koons and Ilona Staller In 1991, stockbroker-turned-controversial-artist Jeff Koonsearlier known for works depicting basketb.a.l.l.s floating in aquariums and brand-new vacuum cleaners displayed under gla.s.stook a turn toward the graphically s.e.xual in 1991. The series of pieces included photographic tableaux and small gla.s.s sculptures depicting him engaged in s.e.x acts with Italian p.o.r.n star Ilona "Cicciolina" Staller. Oddly enough, there was nothing left to the imagination in these workssome of them barely distinguishable from the p.o.r.n that was Cicciolina's career mainstay. Nonetheless, it was "art," just as a basketball in an aquarium was "art," because Koons p.r.o.nounced it so. The pair married that year and produced a son (perhaps conceived on camera), but they separated in 1992.

Out of Order:

5 Divinity School Dropouts

h.e.l.l hath no fury like a former seminarian. From Hollywood superstars to adulterous dilettantes, several seminary dropouts have managed to find success in the secular world. But they've also strayed from the Christian pathwhether it was for the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard or simply to reign terror over a Communist nation. Here's a sampling of the finest in almost-clergy.

_01:: Tom Cruise (1962) In 1976, a deeply religious child named Thomas Cruise Mapother IV enrolled in a Franciscan seminary in New Jersey. Within five years, he'd ditched the church, dropped the Mapother, and landed a part in Endless Love. And in spite of his diminutive height (5 feet 7 inches) the man who might have been a priest became one of Hollywood's top leading men. Around 1986, though, he abandoned Catholicism altogether, embracing the Church of Scientology, which he once credited with helping him overcome dyslexia. Wildly popular with celebrities, Scientology is the path of choice to "clarity" for everyone from John Travolta to the guy who played Parker Lewis in Parker Lewis Can't Lose. Incidentally, Scientology does have ministersbut while Cruise remains an active member and apologist for the group, he has yet to seek ordination.

_02:: Casanova (17251798) Everyone's favorite 18th-century libertine began his scandalous escapades at the seminary of St. Cyprion, from which he was expelled under cloudy circ.u.mstances (we're guessing he slept with someone). And as you well know, his postseminary life was as unG.o.dly as it gets. By the age of 30 he was sentenced to prison for engaging in "magic," but he escaped after only a year to Paris. There, he made a fortune by introducing the lottery to France. But before settling down to write his ribald, self-aggrandizing autobiography, Casanova was expelled from more European countries than most of us ever visit. Along the way, he slept with tons of women, dueled with many of their husbands, and generally sinned his way to the top of European culture, befriending such figures as Madame du Pompadour and Jean-Jacques Rousseau along the way.

_03:: Joseph Stalin (18791953) Lasting longer than the vast majority of divinity school dropouts, noted ma.s.s murderer Joseph Stalin studied at a Georgian Orthodox seminary in Tiflis (now Tbilisi) for five years, between 1894 and 1899. He left the seminary either because of poor health (his mom's story) or revolutionary activity (Stalin's story). Either way, Stalin clearly didn't take much of what he learned to heart (a.s.suming he had one). After he became the Soviet leader in 1922, he was responsible for the deaths of thousands of religious leaders, and Stalin did more than any other premier to eliminate the role of Christianity in Soviet life. But his seminary wasn't exactly a study in Christian love, either. Prior to Stalin's arrival, a rector was murdered therepossibly by unruly seminarians.

Touch of Evil When Charles Darwin hesitated to obtain a degree in medicine, his dad enrolled him in the University of Cambridge to study divinity. It wasn't long, though, before the "father of evolution" quit school (in 1831) to begin taking part in scientific expeditions around the world.

_04:: Michael Moore (1954) Controversial doc.u.mentary filmmaker Michael Moore began studying at a seminary in his hometown of Flint, Michigan, as an eighth grader in 1967. Brought up a devout Catholic, Moore aspired to a career as a priest, but he left the seminary the next year for thoroughly secular reasons. When the Detroit Tigers made it to the World Series in 1968, the seminary refused to let him watch the gamesso he quit. Before his successful filmmaking career, in fact, Moore was something of a serial dropout. He dropped out of the University of Michigan because he arrived at school one morning and couldn't find a parking place, and he once got a job at an automobile factory in Flintbut called in sick on his first day and never returned.

_05:: Al Gore (1948) Believe it or not, the winner of the popular vote in the U.S. presidential election of 2000 was actually a devoutly religious divinity school dropout. It's true! Al Gore graduated from Harvard c.u.m laude in 1969 (although he earned several Cs and a D during his time in Cambridge), but he'd always been interested in theology, so he decided to continue his studies. It's no wonder, then, that he enrolled in Vanderbilt's prestigious divinity school, where, over the course of three semesters, he failed five of his eight cla.s.ses! Gore's allies claim that the birth of his first child and his duties as a reporter at the Tennessean newspaper kept him from his studies. For the record, though, Gore also later dropped out of Vanderbilt's law school (in 1976), but this time for a truly higher purposeto run for Congress.

6 Portraits of Artists as Young Perverts In his memoir A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway revealed that F. Scott Fitzgerald once confessed to being concerned about his diminutive p.e.n.i.s size. Hemingway replied, "You're perfectly fine," but then of course went on to publish a book recounting the humiliating conversation. And if no less a writer than Ernest Hemingway can go around revealing authors' s.e.xual quirks and insecurities, well, so can we.

_01:: Rousseau (17121778) Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an 18th-century Swiss writer and philosopher, believed that humans were basically good but had been corrupted by the social order. And boy, did he know a thing or two about being corrupted. While you wouldn't know it from the dry prose of emile or The Social Contract, Rousseau enjoyed the naughtyso long as he got spanked for his transgressions. "To lie at the feet of an imperious mistress," he once remarked, "was for me a sweet enjoyment." Yikes! In fact, he liked it so much that as a young man, Rousseau would drop trou and moon women in dark alleyways, hoping to get a spanking for his trouble. Surprisingly, the great philosopher's greatest impact might not have been made by his quill, but rather by his quirk. The phrase psychologists use to describe young men who get aroused when disciplined by older women: "the Rousseau effect."

_02:: Lewis Carroll (18321898) The most famous s.e.xual deviant in the annals of literature may, in fact, not have been: Lewis Carroll, children's book author and noted fan of taking little girls' pictures. Carroll, who spent most of his career teaching math, spoke with a terrible stammer around adults, but found it easy to talk to children (kind of like Michael Jackson). In fact, the sputtering author found it remarkably easy to engage his child friends in fantastic stories, which culminated with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Published in 1865, Alice is certainly a study in Freudian sublimation: there's a fair bit of squeezing through tiny holes, for instance. And then there are the pictures: Carroll photographed both adults and children, and also took several nude pictures of kids (he even sent a letter to a colleague at Oxford asking if he could photograph his girls nude without chaperones). Still, no evidence has ever surfaced that Carroll abused anyoneincapable of mature relations.h.i.+ps, sure, but probably not an active pedophile.

_03:: Rene Descartes (15961650) Perhaps the only example of a s.e.xual eccentricity changing the history of Western thought can be found in the life story of the father of modern philosophy, Rene "I think therefore I am" Descartes. You see, Descartes had a fetish for cross-eyed womendue, he believed, to his childhood fascination with a cross-eyed playmate. As he describes it in the Principles of Philosophy, Descartes was eventually able to condition his body to find straight-eyed women attractive (good for Descartes, maybe, but a disaster for the hard-up cross-eyed ladies of Europe). It was largely this experience that led Descartes to his belief in free will and to his a.s.sertion that the mind can control the impulses of the body.

Scandalicious RUSSIAN CZARINA AND PEASANT SEEN SMOOCHING.