On the Death of a Wellness Warrior (The Case of Jessica Ainscough)

Jessica Ainscough: Wellness Warrior (1985-2015)

Photo by Peter Wallis

The case of Jessica Ainscough, the so-called Wellness Warrior, who, sadly, but unsurprisingly, died last year from cancer despite her fanatic adherence to a range of alternative treatments based on diet and lifestyle rather than medical science - including the ludicrous Gerson therapy - perfectly illustrates the peculiar mix of denial, dishonesty and desperate self-delusion that those who reject chemo and surgery in favour of fruit juice and coffee enemas all too often indulge in.*           

The beautiful young Australian was diagnosed with epithelioid sarcoma of the left arm when she was aged twenty-two. When an isolated limb perfusion failed to destroy the malignant tissue, Ainscough was told her only remaining option was amputation; a traumatic procedure, but one which significantly increases chances of survival.

Refusing to accept this, Ainscough placed her hopes in quackery and reinvented herself as a wellness guru, becoming a pin-up girl for those who believe there's a global conspiracy by the medical establishment (in cahoots with big business and governments) to cover up the beautiful truth about cancer; i.e. that it can be cured with positive thinking and a bizarre range of practices that are basically forms of faith healing and folk magic despite the pseudo-scientific language they are disguised with.

Despite increasingly obvious evidence that her disease was progressing, Ainscough continued to proselytize for her new religion until the very end of her journey (earning a significant sum of money in the process from books and personal appearances).

It's hard to say how many lives have been touched by her - and by touched, I mean fatally compromised and needlessly lost - but it's worth noting that one of these lives was that of her own mother who was diagnosed with breast cancer in April 2011.

Convinced by her daughter's ascetic idealism - and doubtless not wanting to disappoint or embarrass her - Sharyn Ainscough also elected to pursue an unorthodox health regime in order to take responsibility for her illness and find a natural cure. She died two-and-a-half years later; a period of time consistent with expectations for untreated cases of breast cancer.         

The ugly and unfortunate truth is this: abnormal cell growth is a fact of life and cancer kills millions of people globally each year. And the Gerson therapy - for all its living enzymes and coffee enemas - hasn't cured a single case.


* I'm not trying to be flippant, or making this up; the Gerson therapy that Ainscough decided both to follow and advocate really does involve the daily consumption of thirteen glasses of fresh organic juices and five coffee enemas per day. In addition, one must strictly follow an organic whole food plant-based diet, boosted with additional supplements. These measures are designed to optimize health and purify the body of what believers call toxins (but would have at one time designated as evil spirits). 

I have sketched out a brief history of coffee enemas in another post: click here.  And for more information, readers might also like to check out the entry on Gerson therapy in The Skeptic's Dictionary by Robert T. Carroll: click here.  

Strange Fruit: an All-American Festival of Cruelty

Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, lynched in Marion, Indiana, on August 7, 1930 

Photo by Lawrence H. Beitler

According to Nietzsche, cruelty is one of the great festive joys of mankind. Put simply, we delight in the suffering of others and in witnessing the public exercise of power in all its spectacular brutality.

Not only is human history written in blood, but even human culture is ultimately no more than a refined form of torture; a method of inscribing the body with certain spiritual values on which we ironically pride ourselves as signs of our moral superiority as a race or species.  

In addition, displays of cruelty are also ways of keeping those who are despised as inferior and feared as other in their place.

This is perfectly demonstrated by the lynching of African-Americans in the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries; a targeted practice of violence and terrorism, largely tolerated by officialdom, designed to enforce and encode white superiority and traumatize the emancipated black population.              

Between 1870 and 1950 - i.e. the great age of modernity - an estimated 4,000 people were lynched in the (mostly) Southern states. And these murders were not committed secretly or in private, but openly before excited spectators who delighted in seeing strange fruit dangling from the trees.

The sociologists Tolnay and Beck, authors of A Festival of Violence (1995), describe how public these events were:

"Large crowds of white people, often numbering in the thousands and including elected officials and prominent citizens, gathered to witness pre-planned, heinous killings that featured prolonged torture, mutilation, dismemberment, and/or burning of the victim. White press justified and promoted these carnival like events, with vendors selling food, printers producing postcards featuring photographs of the lynching and corpse, and the victim’s body parts collected as souvenirs."

Thus, more than merely an effective mechanism of socio-economic control or a method of killing uppity niggers, lynching has to be seen also as a celebratory act of self-affirmation on behalf of clean-living, hard-working, law-abiding, God-fearing white folk; as American as apple pie.


Notes

The above photo by Lawrence Beitler inspired the poem Bitter Fruit (1937) by Abel Meeropol, which became better known as the song Strange Fruit after being set to music and recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939. Click here to watch her performing it.  

For Nietzsche's thoughts on culture and cruelty, see On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, (Cambridge University Press, 1994).

See also: Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930 (University of Illinois Press, 1995). 

Executing Elephants Part III: The Case of Chunee (Death by Firing Squad)

Both cases of elephant execution I have discussed so far took place in the United States in the early part of the twentieth century; the case of Mary, in Tennessee, in 1916 and the case of Topsy, in New York, in 1903. But our third and final case takes us back to Regency London a century earlier.

This is the fascinating (but equally tragic) case of Chunee, a large but friendly Indian elephant who arrived in England in 1809 and who, after treading the boards in Covent Garden, found himself part of the famous and much-loved menagerie at Exeter Exchange on the Strand, established by Italian-born Stefano Polito. As we will see, the events surrounding Chunee's execution by firing squad in 1826, became something of a cause célèbre provoking a national outcry.   

One of the amazing tricks Chunee was trained to perform involved taking a sixpence from visitors to the menagerie with his powerful trunk, before gently returning it. Lord Byron, who visited in November 1813, was so impressed by this and so taken with the elephant's general demeanour that he expressed a wish that the seven ton beast might serve as his butler.

(Wordsworth was also charmed by Chunee, but it is not known if he too wanted to make him part of his household.)

Unfortunately, the good times entertaining poets and princes couldn't last forever and as he grew older Chunee grew increasingly aggressive. This was attributed to an annual paroxysm aggravated by a rotten tusk. Whatever the cause, on 26 February 1826, whilst taking his regular Sunday stroll along the Strand, Chunee suddenly rebelled and ran amok, killing one of his keepers.

Over the days that followed, Chunee - perhaps in a state of musth - became ever more violent and difficult to handle. Eventually, it was decided that he was simply too dangerous to keep. And so, on March 1st, his keeper was instructed to poison him. Chunee - enraged, but not stupid - refused to eat, however. Soldiers from nearby Somerset House were therefore summoned and instructed to shoot the troublesome elephant.

Kneeling down as commanded, Chunee was shot by 150 musket balls, but still refused to die. He was finally finished off like a brave beast in the bullring when someone plunged a sword into his mighty form. It was said that the sound of Chunee's agonised cries were louder and more alarming than all the soldiers' guns combined.      

Afterwards, the public were invited to pay a shilling to witness his body being butchered and then dissected by medical students from the Royal College of Surgeons. So, even in death, Chunee was the star of one last grisly show.

The disgraceful manner of Chunee's demise was widely publicised and widely criticised. Letters of protest were printed in The Times condemning not only the circumstances of his death, but the cruelty of his former living conditions too. Poems and plays were written in memory of the elephant and many illustrations of Chunee's last moments were printed in the popular press (rather bizarrely and insensitively alongside recipes for elephant stew).

The Exeter Exchange menagerie never quite recovered from the deluge of bad publicity and numbers of visitors fell sharply after Chunee's death. The other animals were eventually moved to Surrey Zoo in 1828 and the building was demolished the following year.

So, arguably, in a sense Chunee had the final (posthumous) laugh; if dead elephants can laugh that is.


Note

Part I of Executing Elephants: The Case of Mary (Death by Hanging), can be read by clicking here. 

And Part II: The Case of Topsy (Death by Electrocution), can be read by clicking here. 

Executing Elephants Part II: The Case of Topsy (Death by Electrocution)

Thirteen years prior to the macabre public execution of poor Mary discussed in part one of this post, was the equally gruesome murder of Topsy at an amusement park in Coney Island, New York by a combination of methods, including electrocution.    

Topsy was a female elephant born in SE Asia around 1875, smuggled into the United States in order to become part of a herd of performing circus animals. Like many others of her kind, however, Topsy didn't enjoy a showbiz lifestyle and rebelled against it, gaining the reputation as a troublesome beast. 

In 1902, after killing an idiot spectator who thought it would be amusing to stub out a cigar on her trunk, she was sold to Luna Park where she again became involved in several well-publicised incidents. Not wishing to tolerate a bolshie elephant, the owners of the park decided to hang Topsy in a pay-to-view, end-of-season public spectacular. This plan was abandoned, however, following objections from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. 

Nevertheless, a new event was quickly arranged; one for invited guests and members of the press only. It was also agreed to use a more certain - and thus arguably more humane - method of strangulation; Topsy was to have large, heavy ropes tied to a steam-powered winch put round her neck. She was also to be given poisoned carrots to consume and electrocuted for good measure.  

On January 4, 1903, in front of a small audience, poor Topsy was duly killed; the 6,600 volts of electricity providing a sizzling coup de grâce. Among those present was a film crew and the resulting snuff movie was released under the title Electrocuting an Elephant. This was available to view via coin-operated kinetoscopes at the time and can still be watched today on YouTube by those with a ghoulish disposition [click here]. 

Doubtless because of the existence of this film, Topsy the elephant has secured her place within the popular cultural imagination.

Finally, it is interesting and I think significant to note that the name, Topsy, was taken from that of a female slave character in Uncle Tom's Cabin - demonstrating how racism and speciesism, as well as violent misogyny, belong to the same matrix of fear and loathing: niggers, women, and dumb animals are all regarded within the white male psyche as dirty and dangerous; creatures in need of taming with a whip and being shown who's boss.  


Note

Part I of Executing Elephants: The Case of Mary (Death by Hanging), can be read by clicking here. 
And Part III: The Case of Chunee (Death by Firing Squad), can be read by clicking here. 

Executing Elephants Part I: The Case of Mary (Death by Hanging)

Having read the recent post written on Tyke, the so-called elephant outlaw [click here] who killed her abusive trainer and rebelled against a life as a circus performer - briefly enjoying a few moments of rampaging freedom before being shot and killed by the police - Zena writes and asks if I'm familiar with any other similar cases involving captive elephants.

Well, it just so happens - even though I make no claims to being an expert in this area - that I am aware of three such cases, the first of which, the case of Mary, I'd like to briefly recount here.

Mary was a much-loved circus elephant, famous for standing on her head, playing musical instruments and pitching baseballs with her trunk. Tragically, after killing a trainer in Tennessee in September 1916, she was put to death by hanging.

The unfortunate - and unqualified - trainer, Red Eldridge, who drifted in and out of employment when not living the happy life of the hobo, was sitting atop Mary as she led the elephant parade through Sullivan County. After apparently stopping to eat a watermelon by the roadside, Mary was given a sharp prod behind her ear with a bull-hook. This proved to be a fatal, final act of cruelty on Elridge's part. Enraged, Mary snatched the puny human off her back, threw him to the ground and stepped on his head - crushing it, ironically, like a watermelon.

Details of what happened next are confused and contradictory; forever lost in a mix of sensationalist newspaper accounts and popular legend. Although it seems that Mary quickly calmed down and didn't make any attempt to run off or hurt any onlookers, locals demanded violent retribution; an eye for an eye and a tusk for a tooth.  
 
Fearing for the future of his circus if he didn't comply with this demand to punish the elephant, Charlie Sparks reluctantly agreed to a public execution. Thus, on a miserable day in Erwin, Mary was taken to a railroad yard and hanged by the neck from an industrial derrick crane in front of two-and-a-half thousand cheering spectators (including most of the town's children).  

The first attempt to execute poor Mary failed when the chain round her neck snapped, causing her to fall and break her hip. Severely wounded, she was hoisted back up with a new chain and killed on the second attempt. Mary was then buried by the tracks, but only after a vet examined the corpse and discovered that she had a severely infected tooth that would have caused her great discomfort precisely in the spot where Eldridge foolishly prodded her.


Note

Part II of Executing Elephants: The Case of Topsy (Death by Electrocution), can be read by clicking here. 
And Part III: The Case of Chunee (Death by Firing Squad), can be read by clicking here. 

Elephant Rebellion (with Reference to the Case of Tyke)

Tyke the elephant packed her trunk and said goodbye to the circus ...

Photo: Honolulu Star (1994)

Perhaps the most (in)famous recent case of so-called elephant rebellion involved a large, 20-year-old African she-elephant called Tyke, who regularly performed with a circus, before one day deciding that enough was enough.

During a show in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 20, 1994, Tyke killed her trainer, Allen Campbell, and seriously injured a co-worker. She then bolted from the arena and rampaged through the streets of the Kakaako central business district for more than thirty minutes with a trumpety-trump, trump, trump, trump!

Fearing for the safety of the public and of damage to private property - though seemingly unconcerned about Tyke's obvious distress (not to mention the years of abuse and humiliation she'd suffered leading up to the incident) - the authorities immediately issued a shoot to kill policy.

After firing almost a hundred rounds of ammunition at the poor beast, the cops eventually stopped Tyke dead in her tracks; traumatizing many spectators to the event in the process.

The attack on her human captors, her escape, her brief moments running free (if never, alas, running wild), and, finally, her bloody execution, were all captured on video and this shocking footage is central to the excellent if harrowing documentary made by Jumping Dog Productions entitled Tyke: Elephant Outlaw (dir. Susan Lambert and Stefan Moore, 2015).

Anyone moved by the plight of Tilikum in Blackfish (2013) - and you'd have to be heartless and inhuman (in the bad sense of the term) not to be - will rightly be angered and upset by the story of Tyke as well.

Having said that, it's mistaken to think of elephants as gentle giants, or spiritual creatures; even in a natural environment they can display aggressive and destructive behaviour. Hardcore animal rights activists may like to think that man is the only violent and vindictive animal, but that's clearly not the case.

Indeed, one is tempted to suggest that even the most kindly and intelligent elephants can only ever be virtuous in a herd manner or Christian sense; they can display pity and forgiveness, for example, but because they can never forget they're likely to be prone to some form of ressentiment and thus never truly noble.

Of Man and Dog - A Guest Post by Catherine Brown

Penguin, 2012

I have recently read In Defence of Dogs by John Bradshaw, biologist and founder-director of the Anthrozoology Institute at the University of Bristol. The font is academically-small and intimidating. The book is good.

I will pass on its arguments as though they are true. For Bradshaw has done a great deal of research into canine behaviour and, though his findings and inferences are controversial, I have no independent reason to doubt them. In any case, whether they are true or not, they have prompted some interesting reflections in me about pooches and people.

I.

Bradshaw describes the generic mutt; for example, the village dog that one finds all over Africa. They all look roughly alike and share a common evolutionary history that made them perfectly fit for purpose. Selective breeding, however, at the hands of man over millennia, has necessarily produced dogs which are rather less fit. Unfortunately for them, dogs no longer get to choose their own sexual partners and the characteristics for which they're selected, such as utility or good looks, often don't have anything to do with ensuring their survival or improving their health.

It's little wonder therefore that veterinary science is now needed to bridge the fitness-gap that's been opened up and that animal trainers and psychologists are required to deal with dogs that are deemed suboptimal companions. Given that we don't breed certain types of dog primarily for fellowship, it's a bit rich when we complain of aggression or anxiety in our animals, as though these traits were not entirely of our own creation.

Fortunately, we humans, by contrast, resemble village dogs. Except in aristocracies, which have their own problems with fitness, we breed more or less at will, in order to be all-round, well-adapted men and women. Ease of long-distance travel has broadened our gene pools still further. Huxley's Brave New World gives us one vision as to what would happen were it otherwise. Dogs give us another. Were we to be bred by a scientific elite or an alien master race, it's perfectly feasible (and amusing to imagine) that we too might become subdivided into human equivalents of Schnauzers, Dobermans, Bichon Frises, Golden Retrievers, Boxers, Borzois and the rest.

So, in short, most dogs in the Western world are now more pedigree than mongrel; even what is called a mongrel is likely to have at least one pedigree parent or grandparent. By contrast we are for the most part comfortably and healthily mongrel. We don’t need annual vaccinations and monthly worming, as our dogs do, and we are all the better off for it.

II.

Dogs are wolves at arrested stages of development. Even the skull of a little Pekingese resembles that of the wolf foetus; it just doesn’t keep growing into the long, narrow skull of the wolf. Unlike wolves, however, dogs continue to play when they are adults, and are dependent on humans throughout their lives. They therefore never become psychologically mature and independent, as wolves do. Because of the consistency of food supply throughout the year, they are fertile all the year round, unlike wolves, which mate in winter in order to give birth in spring. But because the food that humans can spare for dogs is limited, they are smaller than wolves. They are less fussy about sexual partners than are wolves, which pair-bond, whereas dogs are promiscuous.

And so we, people, are more dog than wolf. We are smaller than earliest man because of our more herbivorous diet (we are only now re-approaching the size of early humans). We are fertile all the year round, and, although we pair-bond to a degree, we are more promiscuous than wolves are. We play, with our child toys or our adult toys, at our child games or our adult games, throughout our lives. Of course, this dogginess is unsurprising, given that we bred dogs in our own image.

Yet the wolves from which we created dogs are not today’s wolves. Since we have persecuted wolves almost to extinction, we have negatively selected those which are most distrustful of us to be the survivors. It is likely that dogs descended from wolves living around 20,000 years ago which had a mutation which enabled them to form relationships with more than one species - our own as well as their own. This mutation served them well; their numbers now dwarf those of wolves.

But, especially in the twentieth century, dog psychology has misleadingly tried to understand dogs with reference to a) modern wild wolves, which are a distrustful, persecuted minority, and b) captive wolves, which, not being able to form and dissolve their own packs, are far more agonistic and violently hierarchical than are the internally-peaceful nuclear family packs of the wild. These false reference points, combined with the false assumption that dogs are essentially wolves in dogs’ clothing, has led to the stress on dominance in dog training.

The assumptions are: every dog wants to be top dog; dogs treat humans as members of their pack; every attempt at dog dominance must be thwarted, and so on. In fact, dogs relate very differently to humans as compared to others of their own kind, and tend to be far more dependent on the former, even in households of multiple dogs. At our own best, we are dog-like in our sociability with all other members of our species, not just within our nuclear families. Where we become wolf-like, in our rivalry with and violent hostility towards other packs, is at the level of the nation. Best to keep dogs within our sights.

Finally, one of the things that makes us human (and dog-like) is our ability to interact with, and nurture, multiple species. This is apparent in the story of the evolution of dogs from wolves. The explanation that wolves were initially tolerated as scavengers in villages is not sufficient by way of explanation of the beginnings of domestication - why would wolves prefer human scraps to the far better and more plentiful food that they can hunt for themselves? Nor is the idea that humans consciously took wolves to train them for various useful purposes, such as those for which working dogs are used today, sufficient as an explanation.

The evidence is that hunter-gatherers, past and present, adopt a variety of baby animals to bring up alongside their own young, simply for the joy of the process, a delight in their cuteness, a delight in play, and, in some cases, the status that accrues from having pets. Amongst today’s Penan of Borneo, and the Huaorani of the Amazon rainforst, parrots, toucans, wild ducks, raccoons, small deer, rodents, opossums, and monkeys are all adopted. Indigenous Australians foster dingo puppies, which, when they become unmanageable adults, are simply driven away to reproduce in the wild. It is likely that the same happened with wolf puppies - and that, eventually, a few of the puppies became domesticated as well as tame, so that they consented to reproduce in a human environment, and thus were set on their course to become dogs.

This is one of the most charming things about humans that I know - that we care about the survival of species other than our own, for reasons other than utility. We delight in nurturing, cuteness, and play, will spend our limited resources on these things, and have done so for as long as we have been human.

Catherine Brown is an English literature academic who also blogs, tweets, and writes for the media. Her literary interests centre on novels and plays of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the wider cultural histories of England and Russia. Her tweets tend to be about D.H. Lawrence; her blog posts are mostly reviews of books, films, plays, and exhibitions, or reflections on politics and religion. 

Catherine appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm and I am very grateful for her kind permission to reproduce, revise and edit this text, which originally appeared on her own blog. 

Gotta Gettaway (Confessions of a Desperate Housewife)

Front cover to SLF single Gotta Gettaway 

(Rough Trade, 1979)

Although Daventry Road is far, far removed from Wisteria Lane - and although I'm certainly no Bree Van de Kamp - it appears that my Essex exile has resulted in my becoming a desperate housewife caught up in an endless cycle of cooking, cleaning and caring.

None of these activities are particularly objectionable in themselves, I suppose. And it's true that Lawrence was never happier than when baking bread or attending to the daily chores whilst Frieda lounged in bed smoking cigarettes and thinking of her lovers. 

But the domestic life isn't for everyone: even as a young child I despised carpets and comfortable chairs, potted plants and knick-knacks. I could see they were covered not only in layers of dust, but in falsehood. 

As I grew older, I realised that at the heart of every family home lies none of the humility and sweetness spoken of in the song, but secret hatred and unspoken disgust between the sexes and generations.

And this was why the Stiff Little Fingers single Gotta Gettaway (1979) struck such a powerful chord with me at the time and continues to resonate even now ...  

Reflections on Exile

Able was I ere I saw Essex

It's been suggested, rather snidely, that my Essex exile is entirely self-imposed; something voluntarily entered into and which I'm thus responsible for.      

Of course, I'm far too fatalistic a thinker to accept this piece of naive psychologizing which rests upon the rational-moral fallacy of a free-willing subject exercising complete control over the course of actions and events.

But, however it came to pass, my Essex exile is an unfolding reality and a profoundly unpleasant one at that.

It's not that I feel banished from a beloved homeland - something that the Greeks regarded as a fate worse than death - so much as shut-out from a way of life which, limited as it was in opportunity and human contact, was nonetheless my own; i.e. a piece of chaos to which I'd given style. 

Thus my Essex exile is more a form of aesthetico-existential deprivation rather than geographical displacement. I do miss London: especially Soho. But mostly I miss the series of small habits, daily routines and rhythms that enabled a reassuring and necessary consistency and continuity of self (or at least the impression of such).

As Deleuze and Guattari note, even nomads happy to wander homelessly in that savage realm of dangerous knowledge outside the gate have to keep enough elements of subjectivity in order to be able to respond to the dominant reality when they wake up in the morning.

And so, as poets from Ovid to Oscar Wilde have discovered, exile isn't much fun or easy to bear if it involves a loss of soul and not merely a loss of familiar streets and favourite haunts.  

Gokkun: Notes on the Swallowing (and Spitting) of Semen

Artist's impression of a woman drinking semen

wikipedia.org 

Whilst it's certainly the case that semen can contain some nasty surprises - and whilst I'm not insisting anyone should swallow if they'd rather spit - the fact is protein-rich, fat-free male ejaculate contains a harmless (arguably beneficial) mix of elements including amino acids, sugars, minerals, and other nutrients.

So it appears to make good sense - on slightly spurious health grounds at least - to gobble down as much of the stuff as possible whenever you have the opportunity to do so (unless you happen to be one of those unfortunate individuals who suffers from the rare condition known as seminal plasma hypersensitivity).    

Of course, there's always the issue of taste to consider; not everyone is going to like a mouthful of spunk, no matter what the reputed health benefits may be. Some find it bitter, some find it salty, and some - because of the high zinc level - find it slightly metallic on the tongue. Others just find the very thought of it disgusting; Anaïs Nin, for example, rather surprisingly listed penis-sucking as among her pet hates, even though her formula for happiness involved having multiple male lovers.

Obviously, the health and diet of the donor will significantly contribute to the flavour. If you want to sweeten up your semen then drinking lots of fresh pineapple juice is advisable. Other ingredients that are said to improve the palatability include cinnamon, lemon, and green tea. (It's probably best to lay off the red meat and black coffee unless your partner happens to like that distinctively sharp-strong taste.)

Interestingly, a study conducted in 2002 suggested semen may even act as an anti-depressant for heterosexual women - but only if absorbed through the walls of the vagina, so that's not really pertinent to our discussion here. Also, despite their regular contact with and consumption of semen, homosexual men have statistically higher rates of depression. Thus one should probably exercise a degree of skepticism in relation to this question of semen and its beneficial properties.

Whilst ingesting it is not going to kill you, neither will it really work wonders for your physical and psychological well-being. For despite what some people like to believe, seminal fluid really isn't a magical elixir of life.

And those men who take mortal offence when their partner's prefer not to swallow - as if it were an outrageous slight on their precious manhood - are usually just wankers who narcissistically fetishize their own virility and bodily fluids; which is fine, but not when it results in coercion in the bedroom.

Everyone has the right to refuse to engage in sexual acts they are uncomfortable with or find unpleasant: everyone has the right to spit.