What Are the Top 10 Brewing Companies?
by Cheryl Munson ; Updated September 28, 2017
An assortment of beers.
An assortment of beers.
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People the world over love beer, as evidenced by the fact that the top 10 brewing companies span the globe, from North America to Europe to Asia. The German-based Barth-Haas Group -- the world's largest supplier of hops, an essential beer ingredient -- annually ranks the world's largest producers of beers. Note that a brewing company is different from a beer brand. The world's largest brewer, Anheuser-Bush InBev, for example, produces hundreds of brands.
Anheuser Busch/In-Bev
The most recent Barth-Haas survey at the time of publication, which was based on 2012 data, identified Anheuser-Busch InBev as far and away the biggest brewing company, producing nearly one-fifth of the world's beer. The company is based in Leuven, Belgium and brews more than 300 beers, including such top-selling labels as Budweiser, Michelob, Beck's, Stella Artois, Bass and Brahma.
SAB Miller
SABMiller sells beer under more than 200 brand names worldwide and produces nearly 10 percent of the world's total beer consumption. The company's top-selling labels include Miller, Castle Lager, Grolsch, Bavaria, and Cerveceria National.
Heineken
Beyond the green-bottled brew that shares its name with the company, Netherlands-based Heineken's brands include Amstel, Murphy’s, Cordoba and Tiger. Barth-Haas pegged its 2012 market share at 8.8 percent.
Carlsberg
Denmark-based Carlsberg produced a little over 6 percent of the world's beer in the Barth-Haas survey. Beyond its flagship Carlsberg brand, the company produces such labels as Tuborg, Kronenbourg and Baltika, the top-selling brand in Russia.
CR Snow
China Resources Snow Breweries may not be a household name in the United States, but it certainly is in China, where it produces the country's best-selling beer, Snow. CR Snow produced about 5.4 percent of the world's beer in the Barth-Haas survey.
Tsingtao
China's second-largest brewery, Tsingtao was founded by German entrepreneurs around the turn of the 20th century. The company is based in Qingdao -- the company's name is a Western transliteration of the city's name -- and produced 4 percent of the world's beer in 2012. Its top brands all bear the Tsingtao name.
Modelo
Modelo dominates the Mexican brewery industry, with a market share of more than 60 percent in that country, and 2.9 percent worldwide. Its reigning brand is Corona. Other labels include Estrella, Leon Negra, Model Especial, Montejo, Pacifico, Negra Modelo and Victoria. In 2013, Anheuser-Busch InBev completed a takeover of Modelo, but at the time of the Barth-Haas survey, the brewer was still independent.
Molson Coors
This company was formed in 2005 out of the merger of two major North American breweries, Canada's Molson and Denver-based Coors. It held 2.8 percent of the world beer market. In the United States, the company operates a joint venture with SABMiller called Miller Coors. The two companies work together to market their brands and compete with U.S. market leader Anheuser-Busch InBev.
Beijing Yanjing
A fairly new company, Beijing Yanjing Brewery produces Yanjing, the "official state beer of China." The company had a 2.8 percent worldwide market share in the Barth-Haas Survey.
Kirin
Tokyo-based Kirin Brewery Company produces two iconic Japanese brands: Kirin lager and Ichiban Shibori. It held a 2.5 percent global market share.
Femsa
Femsa produces many of the top brew brands in Mexico and Brazil, including Carta Blanca, Dos Equis, Tecate, Bohemia, and Sol. Heineken lovers may also appreciate knowing that they can enjoy Femsa Cerveza worldwide through a structured joint business ownership deal.
Kirin
Japan utilizes the unicorn to connect Kirin as a beer that symbolizes good luck. So far that’s working quite well. Kirin is the top beer manufacturer in Japan, serves many markets overseas, and is the number one exporter of Japanese beer to the US.
References
Barth-Haas Group: 2013 Beer Production Report
Facts on Facebook
by Fraser Sherman
With Facebook mobile apps, it's easy to stay in contact with friends.
With Facebook mobile apps, it's easy to stay in contact with friends.
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When Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004, he launched a revolution in how people connect with one another. By early 2014, Facebook had 1.2 billion monthly users accessing the site, with more than 1 billion checking in by phones or other mobile devices. In 2014, 67 percent of American Internet users are on Facebook.
Facebook History
Zuckerberg and his partners launched "The Facebook" in February 2004, while they were studying at Harvard. Within a month of the launch, it had grown beyond Harvard to Stanford, Columbia and Yale. In 2005, the company -- now called Facebook -- expanded to 800 other colleges. Then came high schools, work networks and everyone else. In 2012, the privately held company issued its initial public offering, at $38 per share. That set the company's net worth at greater than $100 billion.
Facebook Geography
Facebook users can view the site in more than 70 languages. The company has offices around the world including Washington, D.C., Amsterdam, Brasilia, Madrid, Tokyo and Tel Aviv. Non-U.S. users make up 86 percent of the Facebook population, and China, which officially bans Facebook, has 95 million people on the social network. California, Texas and New York are the states with the most users. In California, 41 percent of the population is on Facebook.
Social Network Marketing
With hundreds of millions of users, Facebook is a natural magnet for companies who want to market themselves online. Facebook's advertising revenue in the last quarter of 2013 hit $2.34 billion, according to an article on the Forbes website. Retailers advertising on Facebook saw a 152-percent return on investment in 2013. The 2013 last-quarter click-thru rate for Facebook ads was up 365 percent from the previous year. Teenagers, however, are drifting away from Facebook to other video and photo-sharing networks.
Privacy Problems
Because people post so much of their lives to Facebook, its use of personal data has become controversial. The Sponsored Story format, for example, allowed advertisers to include Facebook users' names and photos in ads without compensating them. The Beacon ad platform allowed businesses to post on people's Timelines announcing an individual had purchased from the company. Facebook scrapped both these programs due to user objections, but privacy advocates still raise questions about how it uses personal information.
References
Facebook: Company Info
Search Engine Journal: 25 Amazing Facts About Facebook
Forbes: Will Facebook Marketing Be Relevant In 2015?
Time: Seven Controversial Ways Facebook Has Used Your Data
Resources
Information Week: Six Facebook Privacy Changes, Explained
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LEVEL 4: FintruX Reserve
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5% of all FTX Tokens have been reserved to cover any unexpected losses in the unlikely event that all previous credit enhancers fail. This is the ultimate protection.
Credit Enhancements
By applying credit enhancements, FintruX Network will virtually neutralize the lender’s credit risk and, in the case of a default, provide cascading levels of insurance to cover any possible loss. With risk reduced, lenders have peace of mind and the interest rates for borrowers is lowered.
By generating a new contract for each individual use case, each program is in its simplest form, eliminating the need for complex if-then-else statements. The Smart Contract becomes a binding agreement between the participants - unambiguous, immutable and no arbitration is required. Each borrower contract will be open-source, enabling participants in every loan to fully understand the terms of their loan agreement.
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A unique smart contract is automatically generated and deployed by FintruX Network for each approved loan in real-time to provide unambiguous, immutable, and censorship resistant records where no arbitration is required. This is possible with our no-code development technology.
FintruX Network is one of the world’s first decentralized applications powered by Ethereum and no-code development. The FintruX Network architecture is a highly scalable and robust combination of the latest technological advances in blockchain, user-experience, client, and server-side methodologies.
Traditional automation attempts to use one system to account for any possible transaction. The resulting program has millions of “if-then-else” statements and is very complicated. We are shifting the programming paradigm with FintruX Network. We generate one unique program (“Smart Contract”) for each borrower contract to be deployed in real-time on the blockchain via a configurable interface.
By generating a new contract for each individual use case, each program is in its simplest form, eliminating the need for complex if-then-else statements. The Smart Contract becomes a binding agreement between the participants - unambiguous, immutable and no arbitration is required. Each borrower contract will be open-source, enabling participants in every loan to fully understand the terms of their loan agreement.
No-Code Development
A unique smart contract is automatically generated and deployed by FintruX Network for each approved loan in real-time to provide unambiguous, immutable, and censorship resistant records where no arbitration is required. This is possible with our no-code development technology.
On the other side, we see borrowers, lacking a reliable source of comparability between different lenders as well as the possibility to give unfiltered feedback to share their opinion and thoughts. The same for lenders who can now rate and write reviews on their borrowers and agencies; subsequently these can be used as part of the credit scoring mechanism for assessment of credit risk.
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Partners such as fraud and identity service agents, credit scoring and decision agents, wallets, exchanges, banks, asset managers, insurance companies and technology companies will all have a role in our ecosystem. Our network will enable our partners to offer a new generation of financial products and to develop innovative new tools for use on our platform.
We provide and maintain a decentralized review platform for borrowers, lenders and all service agencies based on Ethereum smart contracts. In contrast, reviews written on a third-party website are subject to change by the site owner – there is no integrity in the current non-blockchain based systems. The need of gaining qualified feedback/market research data to enhance the quality of risk assessment, service and transparency cannot be over-emphasized.
On the other side, we see borrowers, lacking a reliable source of comparability between different lenders as well as the possibility to give unfiltered feedback to share their opinion and thoughts. The same for lenders who can now rate and write reviews on their borrowers and agencies; subsequently these can be used as part of the credit scoring mechanism for assessment of credit risk.
Open Ecosystem
In addition to simplifying the loan application process via instant matching, FintruX Network also provides borrowers with post-funding self-serve administration options and access to third party rated agencies.
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Using the credit enhancement principles of securitization, FintruX delivers highly secure unsecured loans to benefit the small businesses borrowers, accredited investors, and financial institutions of the world.
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The founder Nelson Lin has been an innovator all his life since he started his career in the financial-technology sector as a systems analyst at J.P. Morgan in 1986.
- Invented Asynchronous Call in Programming - Delivered First Online Credit Adjudication in Canada, if not the World
- Delivered lending origination systems in client/server and browser based technologies
- Invented low-code Development platform Rintagi
- Generated A securitization system on the low-code platform
- Patented Self-Generating Rejuvenating Technology
- Generated full ERP systems on low-code platform
- Kept >10 years old systems on modern UI/UX via continuous rejuvenation
- Open-Sourced Rintagi as A global collaborative project - Turned low-code into No-code Generation - Innovated Credit-Enhanced Unsecured Loan Product – FintruX
The FintruX team has extensive experience serving the financing industry in Asia and North America and the securitization software built by the development team is currently managing billions of dollars of assets. The team leverages their experience to make unsecured loans highly secure and make affordable, safe cross-border borrowing a reality.
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Nelson Lin
Nelson pioneered online credit adjudication for the asset-based finance and leasing industry in Canada as mentioned in the book 'Unstoppable' published 2014 by Beth Parker and endorsed by the Canadian Finance and Leasing Association (CFLA). He has over thirty years of experience delivering numerous custom enterprise applications to global organizations such as J.P. Morgan, AT&T Capital, etc.
CO-FOUNDER & CMO
Conrad Lin
Completing a degree specializing in Neuroscience and Psychology from the University of Toronto, Conrad is deeply in tune with social marketing and outreach. He defines long-term marketing goals and short-term tactics, builds key customer relationships, identifies business opportunities, negotiates and closes business deals, and maintains extensive knowledge of current market conditions.
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Ng Eng Ho
Eng Ho is the Chairman of Zweec Analytics and is also a director of China Taisan Technology and TNG (Asia) Limited. He has served in top management positions in large corporations including Singapore Technologies Telmedia, PT Indosat Tbk, and Keppel Telecommunications and Transportation Ltd. He was director of Alvarion Ltd and Mencast Holdings. His extensive network creates long term shareholder value.
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Yew Poh Leong
YP grew Dun & Bradstreet Software from 15 to over 250 employees as a managing director in Asia. He has provided business solutions and services to well-known corporations including Telekom Malaysia, Hong Kong Telecom, PLDT, Communications Authority of Thailand, Shell, Prudential, AIG, Starwood, Minolta, National Panasonic, Sony, Aiwa, Standard Chartered Bank, Malayan Banking, Bank of China, etc.
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Gary Ng
Gary is a veteran in software development and has been a seasoned architect in the financial sector for the past 25 years, including some of the top global banks. He is skilled in all major programming languages and computing platforms. He has been instrumental in turning our low-code development platform into a no-code generator for smart contracts. Scalability and security is his main focus.
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Aaron Xu
User experience has been Aaron’s forte for the last 8 years. He has formal education and practical training in web development and digital design. He designs visually stunning user interfaces that integrates well with all other software. Aaron is adept at generating responsive mission-critical applications with low-code technology and designing easy to use apps.
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Douglas Thiessen
Douglas is a full stack developer on a wide variety of computing languages for 12 years, including a full suite of blockchain technology and Smart Contracts with Solidity. Passionate on security and quality, he tests his code extensively by applying Scrum methodology. Douglas’ technical expertise enables him to evaluate and tackle complex programming challenges.
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Philemon Selvaraj
Philemon’s passion and expertise is in data analysis, machine learning, AI, and business intelligence. He brings with him 13 years of analyst programming experience in the accounting and financial sectors, including mission-critical systems for large fortune 500 companies. He has both MBA and engineering degrees and international experience.
SINGAPOREAN LEGAL COUNSEL
Brinden Anandakumar
Brinden graduated from the University of Nottingham with LLB (Hons) and was admitted as an Advocate and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Singapore in 2015. He is currently engaged in civil and commercial litigation. He also has experience in corporate and advisory matters.
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Alixe Cormick
Alixe Cormick is the founder of Venture Law Corporation in Vancouver, British Columbia and a member of Commercialization Advisory Board of the Life Science Institute at the University of British Columbia, the Advisory Board of the National Crowdfunding Association and two private tech companies.
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Dr. Jonathan Calof
Dr. Calof has received Frost and Sullivan’s award in competitive intelligence, and others. He has given over 1000 speeches, seminars and keynote around the world. With over 150 publications, his extensive and successful track record has allowed him to combine research and consulting in competitive intelligence, technical foresight and business analytics to help FintruX develop key insights on its competitive environment.
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Yash Mody
Yash co-founded and built Orchid Leasing to finance transportation and equipment leases. He implemented real-time decision and predictive analytics software at Fortune 500 companies which helped him design a proprietary end-to-end lease portfolio management and collections tracking system. With his technical knowledge and financial entrepreneurship, he is a great resource to FintruX Network.
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Hussein Hallak
Hussein is a serial entrepreneur, speaker, startup advisor and investor. Building over 20 startups, he has mentored and trained 1000+ entrepreneurs. Featured in Forbes, BBC, Entrepreneur, DailyHive (VancityBuzz), Business In Vancouver, Roundhouse Radio, and Vancouver Courier. He brings extensive knowledge of startups, innovation, strategy, growth, marketing, and social media to FintruX Network.
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Binh Vu
Binh is a lawyer practicing in the area of corporate finance and securities law. Binh practiced law for 10 years in Toronto at WeirFoulds LLP and as partner at Aird & Berlis LLP before becoming corporate counsel and advisor for start-ups. He holds LL.B and BSc. (Neuroscience) degrees. Binh is an active member of the Law of Society of Upper Canada and provides legal guidance to FintruX Network.
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Victor Yuen
Victor is CFO of ZWEEC Analytic. Armed with over 10 years in the finance and accounting profession, he was managing partner specializing in audit, tax, insolvency, corporate secretarial, accounting and business advisory. Victor is a Fellow of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (FCCA) and an Accredited Tax Practitioner. His extensive financial experience is a great asset to FintruX Network.
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Elie Galam
A mathematician and alternative investments expert, Elie was a Portfolio Manager for Two Sigma investments, a 40 Billion dollars quantitative hedge fund. Elie received a Masters in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University and a Masters in Engineering from Ecole Centrale Paris. He is passionate about bringing blockchain, digital assets, and cryptocurrencies to the financial ecosystem of FintruX Network.
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Abhijith Naraparaju
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5 MAINSTREAM PARADIGMS THAT DRIVE PEOPLE INTO ADDICTION
February 14, 2018
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Trevor McDonald & Anna Hunt, Contributors
Waking Times
Many things contribute to addiction, including genetics and demographics. Nonetheless, society may be playing a larger role than we think. As the years press on, pop culture references drugs more than ever before. As well, virtual social identity becomes more prevalent, and more of us become slaves to acceptable vices like caffeine and sugar.
Here are five paradigms in our current society that proliferate addiction.
1. Adoration of music industry celebrities
Have you noticed that songs these days reference drugs more than ever before? Take for example Madonna’s MDNA album, which glorifies the party drug Molly (a common name used for MDMA or ecstasy). Or Tove Lo’s “Habits” and Mike Posner’s “I Took a Pill in Ibiza.” There are countless examples. When we normalize drugs in songs, it gives the impression that using them is normal, even expected.
Unfortunately, the music industry has been glorifying drug use for decades. Aside from boycotting artists, it is also important that we teach our kids to see entertainment for what it is: entertainment.
2. Glorification of addiction in movies and television
You probably don’t have to think very hard to come up with a list of movies that glorify drug abuse. There’s Scarface, Pineapple Express, the Wolf of Wall Street, Blow, and a myriad of others. And then, there are the movies that glorify drinking alcohol and compulsive sexual behavior. This list is far too extensive to even begin counting.
For most of us, these movies are our first introduction to the world of addiction. Creators make the addictive habits seem innocuous and, at times, fabulous! The problem is that the reality is far from fabulous.
Fortunately, daytime television remains light on drug and alcohol references. Yet, there are many shows that glorify addiction, especially to drugs and alcohol. The list includes shows like Shameless, Breaking Bad, It’s Always Sunning in Philadelphia, etc. Even the old classic Cheers glorified spending countless hours sitting in a bar.
3. Proliferation of social media and video games
In itself, spending time on social media can evolve into an addiction. The same can be said for playing video games. Both habits may be linked to issues of impulse control that could lead to future addictions.
In addition, social media may promote substance abuse, due the nature of what people are posting. Just think about it. How likely are your friends to post pics when they’re out drinking versus studying or doing something intellectually stimulating? Especially in younger generations, it is often the party scene that gets the most likes and comments.
4. Using food for emotional support
For some reason, it is perfectly normal to obsess over food. It’s become so mainstream that someone with a blatant food addiction can say, “Chocolate cake makes everything better,” and we all nod in agreement.
Imagine an addict saying the same about heroin. We’d be judging that person so hard. But food addiction seems to be ok, even though poor eating habits are killing more people than hardcore drugs.
Our society consents, even encourages, unhealthy food addictions. Although sugar isn’t nearly on the same level of heroin, it’s still unhealthy to drown your troubles with cake. The impact may not be as clearly visible in the short term, but long term, sugar and other food addictions can lead to a host of problems.
When society teaches us from a young age that we can use sweets to help us feel better, we’re learning to self-medicate. This is a path that leads to other addictions.
5. Approval of addictive over-consumption
If you ask any long-time coffee drinker whether they can limit themselves to just one morning cup of Joe, their answer is probably a resounding “NO!” This is because coffee is addictive. It may be acceptable and has minimal side effects, but it’s a stimulant, nonetheless. As a result, it can be harmful to the body.
Furthermore, sugary drinks, such as soda and energy drinks, are exceedingly common but also very addictive. Regardless of the vast amount of scientific research about the health implications of sugary drinks, society condones these addictions, even in children. This teaches youngsters that it’s ok to give into their cravings, even if they aren’t really good for you.
The consent is so widespread, that some restaurants offer nothing else to drink except for sugary drinks, coffee and water.
This does not bode well for anyone who is addicted but trying to quick a bad habit. No one is trying to take away your morning cup of coffee or fizzy soda, but the lack of options in many public places for other types of drinks does make quitting the addiction difficult.
Final Thoughts
Just because you’re addicted to coffee or video games doesn’t mean you’re going to become an alcoholic. And just because your children like pop music and movies, doesn’t mean they will fall into a life of drugs.
Yet, most of the mainstream paradigms that reinforce addictive behaviors are run by corporations. These companies make money off people’s bad habits. There are even whole industries that thrive because of our addictions. (Just think Big Tobacco!)
Therefore, it is up to families and communities, and especially the individual, to recognize the potential implication of these societal norms.
Furthermore, we need to recognize that supporting some addictions and villainizing others isn’t helping anyone. This is especially flawed because it is often the “acceptable” addictions – like a “sweet tooth” – that teach people how to give into their appetites, without conscious reflection. This can lead to more destructive habits.
The most sensible solution is to offer help, equally, to anyone dealing with addiction. Help, with lots of compassion and very little judgement.
About the Authors
Trevor McDonald is a freelance writer and recovering addict & alcoholic who has been clean and sober for over two years. Since his recovery began he has enjoyed using his talent for words to help spread treatment resources and addiction awareness. In his free time, you can find him working with recovering addicts or outside enjoying about any type of fitness activity imaginable.
Anna Hunt is writer, yoga instructor, mother of three, and lover of healthy food. She’s the founder of Awareness Junkie, an online community paving the way for better health and personal transformation. She’s also the co-editor at Waking Times, where she writes about optimal health and wellness. Anna spent 6 years in Costa Rica as a teacher of Hatha and therapeutic yoga. She now teaches at Asheville Yoga Center and is pursuing her Yoga Therapy certification. During her free time, you’ll find her on the mat or in the kitchen, creating new kid-friendly superfood recipes.
This article (5 Mainstream Paradigms that Push People into Addiction) is copyrighted by Awareness Junkie, 2018. You may not copy, reproduce or publish any content therein without written permission. Feel free to share this article on social networks and via email. If you have questions, please contact us here.
Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Moreover, views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Awareness Junkie or its staff.
Mary Ann Sieghart is a journalist, broadcaster and author. She presents programmes for the BBC and has spent 30 years as a political columnist for The Times (of London), The Independent and The Economist. The Leading Voices: Introducing Our Speakers Raul Aparici is a consultant, coach and facilitator. He has a diverse background that includes a career in the fitness industry, a BA in English Literature and an MA in Critical Theory, and he forms part of the core team at The School of Life. Alain de Botton is the founder and Chairman of The School of Life. Alain was born in Zurich, Switzerland and now lives in London. He is a writer of essayistic books that have been described as a 'philosophy of everyday life.' Self-knowledge matters so much because it is only on the basis of an accurate sense of who we are that we can make reliable decisions – particularly around love and work. Our bestselling essay book takes us on a journey into our deepest, most elusive selves and arms us with a set of tools to understand our characters properly. How the Modern World Makes
Us Mentally Ill
The modern world is wonderful in many ways (dentistry is good, cars are reliable, we can so easily keep in touch from Mexico with our grandmother in Scotland) – but it’s also powerfully and tragically geared to causing a high background level of anxiety and widespread low-level depression. There are six particular features of modernity that have this psychologically disturbing effect. Each one has a potential cure, which we will only collectively put into action when we know more about the disease in question. There are six particular features of modernity that have this psychologically disturbing effect. Each one has a potential cure, which we will only collectively put into action when we know more about the disease in question. Here are the six: 1. Meritocracy: Our societies tell us that everyone is free to make it if they have the talent and energy. The down side of this ostensibly liberating and beautiful idea is that any perceived lack of success is taken to be not, as in the past, an accident or misfortune, but a sure sign of a lack of talent or laziness. If those at the top deserve all their success, then those at the bottom must surely deserve all their failure. A society that thinks of itself as meritocratic turns poverty from a problem to evidence of damnation and those who have failed from unfortunates to losers. The cure is a strong, culturally endorsed belief in two big ideas: luck, which says success doesn’t just depend on talent and effort; and tragedy, which says good, decent people can fail and deserve compassion, rather than contempt. 2. Individualism: An individualistic society preaches that the individual and their achievements are everything and that everyone is capable of a special destiny. It is not the community that matters; the group is for no-hopers. To be ‘ordinary’ is regarded as a curse. The result is that the very thing that most of us will end up being, statistically speaking, is associated, with freakish failure. The cure is a cult of the good ordinary life – and proper appreciation of the pleasures and quiet heroism of the everyday. 3. Secularism: Secular societies cease to believe in anything that is bigger than or beyond themselves. Religions used to perform the useful service of keeping our petty ways and status battles in perspective. But now there is nothing to awe or relativise humans, whose triumphs and mishaps end up feeling like the be all and end all. A cure would involve regularly using sources of transcendence to generate a benign, relativising perspective on our personal sorrows: music, the stars at night, the vast spaces of the desert or the ocean would humble us all in consoling ways. 4. Romanticism: The philosophy of Romanticism tells us that each of us has one very special person out there who can make us completely happy. Yet mostly we have to settle for moderately bearable relationships with someone who is very nice in a few ways and pretty difficult in many others. It feels like a disaster – in comparison with our original huge hopes. The cure is to realise that we didn’t go wrong: we were just encouraged to believe in a very improbable dream. Instead we should build up our ambitions around friendship and non-sexual love. 5. The Media: The media has immense prestige and a huge place in our lives – but routinely directs our attention to things that scare, worry, panic and enrage us, while denying us agency or any chance for effective personal action. It typically attends to the least admirable sides of human nature, without a balancing exposure to normal good intentions, responsibility and decency. At its worst, it edges us towards mob justice. The cure would be news that concentrated on presenting solutions rather than generating outrage, that was alive to systemic problems rather than gleefully emphasizing scapegoats and emblematic monsters – and that would regularly remind us that the news we most need to focus on comes from our own lives and direct experiences. 6. Perfectibility: Modern societies stress that it is within our remit to be profoundly content, sane and accomplished. As a result, we end up loathing ourselves, feeling weak and sensing we’ve wasted our lives. A cure would be a culture that endlessly promotes the idea that perfection is not within our grasp – that being mentally slightly (and at points very) unwell is an inescapable part of the human condition and that what we need above all are good friends with whom we can sit and honestly discuss our real fears and vulnerabilities. The forces of psychological distress in our world are – currently – much wealthier and more active than the needed cures. We deserve tender pity for the price we have to pay for being born in modern times. But more hopefully, cures are now open to us individually and collectively if only we recognise, with sufficient clarity, the sources of our true anxieties and sorrows. The School of Life – a global organisation dedicated to developing emotional intelligence. We apply psychology, philosophy and culture to everyday life. You can find our classes, films, books, games and much more online and in our branches around the world. Get Involved
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The Shocking Story of How Mussolini Died
The National Interest Warfare History Network,The National Interest 18 hours ago
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How one of the most vile dictators of the twentieth century met his end.
The Shocking Story of How Mussolini Died
At 3 am on Sunday, April 29, 1945, a yellow furniture truck stopped at the Piazzale Loreto, a vast, open traffic roundabout where five roads intersected in the northern Italian city of Milan. This industrial center had been held for only four days by Communist partisans, but from 1919 on it had been the spiritual headquarters of the Fascist Party founded there by former journalist and World War I Army mountain corps veteran Benito Mussolini.
In a very real sense, his first political career, ended the day before by his demise, had now come full circle as Mussolini’s dead body was dumped from the van onto the wet cobblestones of the empty roundabout, followed by those of 16 other men and a lone female, his mistress since 1933, Claretta Petacci. All 18 people, their dead bodies thrown out by 10 men, had simply been murdered by Communist Party execution squads in hails of gunfire.
Without any sort of trial, 15 men were shot in the back at the town of Dongo on the shore of Lake Como, with Marcello Petacci slain in the water as he swam in vain for his life.
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As for the Fascist Duce (Leader) and his lady, how, where, why, and by whom they were shot are all still unsolved mysteries even today. While the executions of the men were thinly disguised, politically motivated assassinations, the killing of Claretta Petacci was and remains a shameful, common criminal act by ruthless men who had power over her and wrongfully exercised it—no more and no less.
By 8 am, word had gotten around the city via a special newspaper edition as well as bulletins on Radio Free Milan that the hated Duce, revered just four months earlier at public rallies by this very same citizenry, was dead and available for scorn in the Piazzale Loreto. It was there, on August 13, 1944, that the Fascists, egged on by the German SS, had shot 15 partisans. This day’s butchery had been allegedly in revenge for that earlier deed.
A large, ugly, depraved, and nasty crowd of civilians and partisans gathered and quickly got out of control; neither fire hoses nor bullets fired in the air could deter or disperse it.
Two men kicked the late Mussolini in the jaw while another put a pendant in his dead hand as a mock symbol of his lost power; a woman fired five pistol shots into his head as retaliation, she asserted, for the same number of her dead sons, all slain in Il Duce’s series of imperialistic wars since 1935. A fiery rag was thrown in his face, his skull was cracked, and one of his eyes fell out of its socket.
Another woman hitched up her skirt, squatted down, and urinated on his face, which others spit on with abandon, while yet a third brought forth a whip with which to beat his battered corpse. A man tried to stuff a dead mouse into the former Italian premier’s slack, broken mouth, chanting all the while, “Make a speech now!” over and over again.
Pushed beyond hatred and emotional endurance, the angry mob stormed forward and actually trampled the 18 bodies where they lay.
When a burly man picked up the slain Duce by the armpits and held him for the throng to view, the latter chanted, “Higher! Higher! We can’t see! String them up! To the hooks, like pigs!” Thus it came to pass that the bodies of Il Duce, his mistress, and four others were tied with ropes and hoisted six feet off the ground, their dangling bodies lashed by the ankles to the crosspiece of an unfinished Standard Oil gas station that has long since disappeared.
As the sole female corpse was raised, the belle of that gruesome ball’s skirt fell downward around her face, revealing a panty-less torso to the taunts of the crowd. Some accounts say that a woman, others say a male partisan chaplain stepped forward and placed a rope taut around her legs, thus securing her skirt in place for the cameras of the world to film.
A woman gasped aloud, “Imagine, all that and not a run in her stockings!”
Il Duce’s face was blood splashed, and his famous mouth gaped open, while Claretta’s eyes stared dully into space. The former Fascist Party secretary, Achille Starace, dressed in a jogging suit for his daily run, was brought forth, faced the dead, and incredibly gave the stiff-armed Fascist salute to “My Duce!” He was then shot in the back by a four-man firing squad.
Just then, the rope holding the dead body of Francesco Barracu snapped, and his corpse hit the ground below with a sickening thud; Starace was strung up in his place like a piece of meat beside the others. Next, Mussolini’s rope was cut, and he fell to the cobblestones on the top of his head, his brains oozing out onto the wet street.
At 1 pm, the combined protests of the Catholic cardinal of Milan and the just arriving American military government succeeded in having the bodies taken down, placed in plain wooden coffins, and sent to the city morgue.
There, the body of Mussolini was formally autopsied. The 5-foot, 6-inch tall Duce weighed 158 pounds, with sparse white hair on his battered, bald head. Because he was hit by seven to nine bullets while still alive, the immediate cause of death was determined to have been four shots near the heart. His stomach bore ulcer scars, but none of the long-rumored syphilis was visible. He had had a minor gall bladder problem, however.
Mussolini’s corpse was buried anonymously in Milan’s Musocco Cemetery in section 16, grave 384, while part of his brain was handed over for study to St. Elizabeth’s Psychiatric Hospital in Washington, D.C., and only returned to his widow, Donna Rachele, decades later.
Claretta had been killed by two 9mm bullets, which added to the mystery of the weaponry used. She was also buried in Milan under the name of Rita Colfosco and in 1956 was exhumed by the Petacci family, which had meanwhile returned to Italy from its Spanish exile at the end of the war. Today her remains rest in Rome’s Verano Cemetery in a pink marble tomb topped with a white marble statue. Rumor had it that her corpse had been retrieved to secure hidden gems sewn into the hem of her skirt.
The bloody killings and their gruesome aftermath horrified the world, but to the Italians the entire episode conjured up mainly postwar political connotations: to the beaten Fascists, the partisans had acted simply as “the Italian arm of the Red Army,” as the agents of Josef Stalin in Moscow; while to the rest of the body politic, the events at the Piazzale Loreto symbolized the birth pangs of the coming socialist republic that even Mussolini himself would have supported over the monarchy that had both hired and fired him.
The final saga for Mussolini and Petacci began when Il Duce arrived in Milan at 7 pm on April 18, just ll days before his death, with Ms. Petacci, the eldest daughter of a former Vatican physician, following later. On the 21st, an American OSS plan to capture Mussolini by paratroopers was vetoed, while his own German Waffen SS battalion-sized escort was removed and sent to the front to fight the advancing Allies and Communist partisan forces.
Even some of his own Fascists, as well as Claretta’s larcenous brother Marcello, were plotting to have Mussolini murdered while suspicions were running deep among members of his circle that the Germans were planning to trade him to the Allies to save their skins.
The Catholic Church offered Il Duce asylum, as did several South American countries. He refused and vowed he would never surrender but instead would lead a Fascist last stand in the Valtellina region, on the far side of Lake Como.
When the betrayed Duce heard of German plans for a secret surrender of all Axis forces in northern Italy on April 25, he left Milan in a huff for the town of Como, 25 miles distant, trailed by his SS bodyguard chief, Lieutenant Fritz Birzer and Secret Police Lieutenant Otto Kisnatt, each ordered not to let him out of
their sight or to shoot him themselves if he tried to escape.
He did try—twice. He was now a man on the run, but why?
Although informed that neutral Switzerland would not accept him, his family, or any other Fascists, Mussolini nevertheless seemed to be headed there rather than, as he asserted, to a final battle that drew only 12 faithful soldiers.
It has also been suggested that Mussolini meant instead to cross the frontier into the Nazi-held South Tyrolean region of Austria and there stand until death with still-resisting German troops, but even now no one really knows for sure.
Yet another theory has lingered since 1945— that Il Duce was trying to rendezvous with British secret agents to trade his life and those of the members of his sizable entourage in return for secret prewar letters between him and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, as well as for others penned during the final stages of the war.
There was also the hoard of loot that the fleeing Fascists took with them in a convoy of 28 vehicles, an estimated millions in cash, checks, jewels, gold bullion and other riches taken from slain Jews, all later stolen by the partisans and used to launch the postwar Italian Communist Party as the largest in Western Europe. This has been referred to ever since as Il Duce’s Gold or the Dongo Treasure in reference to where it was captured on April 27 along with Mussolini and his fleeing minions.
All of this has been endlessly discussed since 1945 in a veritable phalanx of articles and books in both English and Italian, the most recent being an excellent trio of works brought forth for the 60th anniversary of the end of the Italian campaign and the Duce-Petacci-Fascist slayings of April 28, 1945.
The first two books, written by Ray Moseley and Luciano Garibaldi, respectively, appeared in 2004 and were titled Mussolini: The Last 600 Days of Il Duce and Mussolini: The Secrets of His Death/Did Winston Churchill Order Mussolini’s Execution? The third volume of this trio, Sergio Luzzatto’s lyrical The Body of Il Duce: Mussolini’s Corpse and the Fortunes of Italy appeared in 2005.
On Friday, April 27, the convoy of German SS, Luftwaffe, and Italian Fascist vehicles of uncertain numbers was stopped by a small, vastly outnumbered unit of the 52nd Garibaldi Partisan Brigade commanded by Count Pier Luigi Bellini delle Stelle, alias Pedro, at the small village of Musso along Lake Como. Bluffing as to the size of their actual force, the Red negotiators told the Germans that they could proceed unharmed, but only on the condition that no Italians were in the enemy column.
Luftwaffe Lieutenant Hans Fallmeyer, according to Moseley, and Lieutenant Fritz Birzer agreed to these conditions. The latter hastened to the hidden Duce, who was inside an armored car and armed with a submachine gun and wearing his standard gray-green forage cap and uniform of the Fascist Militia.
Mussolini argued that all of his entourage should be allowed to continue, but the Nazi lieutenant was firm, insisting that only the Duce himself could go and that even Claretta had to be left behind. Urged by her to accept the terms, an embarrassed Duce reluctantly agreed.
Birzer got his own overcoat and steel helmet from a Luftwaffe sergeant and gave them to Mussolini to wear, but the mortified Duce protested that he would be ashamed to be found dressed as a German and hidden in a German vehicle. However, he finally relented.
The disguised Duce slipped out of the armored car and into a truck of Luftwaffe men, wearing the German steel helmet backward until Lieutenant Birzer righted it. Tearing off his own Fascist Militia jacket, the crestfallen Mussolini replaced it with the field gray overcoat that was discovered in Rome in 1999, to further hide the rest of his own uniform, complete with the traditional black shirt of the Fascisti. Sitting quietly at the far end in the left corner of the fourth truck in line, Mussolini pretended to be drunk.
The hidden Duce was betrayed by an Austrian who told the partisans, “There are Italians; have the trucks searched,” as well as an Italian Fascist, Nicola Bombacci, who lamented, “He is with us! It is not fair that he should get away!” Thus forewarned, the Communists stopped the convoy a second time, at the next village, Dongo, just opposite the town hall.
A former sailor in the Italian Navy, a clog-maker from Dongo named Giuseppe Negri who had joined the Partisans, searched the truck and was startled to see the profile of the man he had formerly served. He reported immediately to Urbano Lazzaro (alias Bill), asserting, “Oh, Bill! We’ve got the Big Bastard! … It’s really Mussolini! … I’ve seen him with my own eyes!”
Incredulous, Lazzaro climbed into the truck himself and approached the mysterious figure pointed out to him obligingly by the real Luftwaffe men who knew the truth. Lazzaro tapped the seated man on the shoulder and called out, “Comrade!” but got no answer. He then stated louder, “Your Excellency!” and tapped his shoulder once more, but was still met with silence and no movement. He addressed the silent figure yet a third time: “Cavalier Benito Mussolini!”
Later he recalled, “I take off his helmet and see his bald pate and the characteristic shape of his head. I take off his sunglasses and lower the collar of his coat. It is he, Mussolini.”
Lazzaro removed the man’s machine gun and was offered in turn from his unbuttoned coat a 9mm, long-barreled Glisenti automatic pistol without a word in response to the question, “Do you have any other weapons?”
He stood up and said, “I am Mussolini. I shall not make any trouble.”
Arrested by Lazzaro, the now meek Duce told the Germans not to defend him; he was taken from the truck and marched to the town hall, his captors following respectfully behind. There, according to Moseley, “He took off his coat, which was too long for him, and was found to be wearing a black shirt and a pair of Militia trousers. He wore boots, but had no jacket.”
At Milan, the slain Duce still had on the trousers and the boots, but the shirt had disappeared while he swung from the girders of the filling station and was also absent from the coffin in the morgue, as photographs clearly show.
Also taken by Lazzaro from the captured Duce was a briefcase and other baggage that had the originals of his most important, personal papers, to which Mussolini exclaimed, “Take care of those bags! They contain Italy’s destiny!” These files included his letters to and from Churchill, correspondence with Hitler, and a document covering the January 1944 Verona Trial of the traitors who had voted against him in 1943. A fourth set of papers detailed the alleged homosexual activities of Italian Crown Prince Umberto, then the designated lieutenant general of the realm.
Lazzaro gave all of this to his superior, Luigi Canali (alias Captain Neri), who wanted to honor the terms of the 1943 armistice with the Allies that required the Duce to be turned over to them for trial. The top Communists in Milan ignored this legal clause. Neri also opposed the seizure of the Dongo Treasure by his Communist bosses, and some have accused him of having shot Mussolini himself.
According to some sources, Neri was assassinated by the Communists in May 1945, not because of having done that, but for bringing the British secret service into the affair.
Ironically, Neri had been drafted into the Italian Army in 1936 as a lieutenant of engineers in East Africa, later took part in the retreat of the Expeditionary Corps in Russia, became a Communist, and helped found the 52nd Garibaldi Partisan Brigade that captured his former Duce.
A further twist to this complicated tale was that of Neri’s own mistress: Giuseppina Tuissi (aka Gianna), who was shot by their Communist colleagues on June 23, 1945. Her body was dumped into Lake Como.
The first and last of Mussolini’s files of personal papers disappeared forever, but the others were copied by the Allies and then deposited in the Italian State Archives after being examined by the Communists. As a precaution, however, Mussolini had made a three copies: one for Claretta, which she gave to Marcello and which the partisans seized; and a second for the Imperial Japanese ambassador to the Salo Republic, Baron Shinrokuro Hikada, which was delivered by him to the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo. Mussolini gave the third and final set to his Fascist Education Minister, Carlo Alberto Biggini, who died supposedly of cancer in the hospital in the autumn of 1945, one of the few top Fascists not to have been shot.
There were, too, the now infamous Duce Diaries, 10 notebooks in his own handwriting that were given to Baron Hikada as well. Most of these vanished. Of the Duce’s own original papers and documents personally seen by Lazzaro, 344 pages dwindled to little more than 70 after several deletions by interested parties.
Some historians speculate that on September 15, 1945, at a secret meeting held between British agents and Como Communist leader Dante Gorreri, the latter turned over 62 Duce-Churchill letters for an estimated 2.5 million Italian lira laundered in Switzerland and then returned to Italy to be used to launch the new republic. Supposedly, during this exchange, the partisans agreed to accept the blame for the killing of Claretta, who had allegedly been shot by the British because she knew of the secret correspondence.
According to Bruno Giovanni Lonati (alias Ciacomo), a British Special Operations Executive agent, “Captain John,” the alias of Robert Maccarrone, shot both the Duce and Claretta. The name of a second British agent, Malcolm Smith, aka Johnson, also surfaced. All this was part of a fantastic yarn known as the so-called British Thread.
Taken away, Mussolini was rejoined at the De Maria farmhouse at Bonzanigo by Petacci, who begged her captors to shoot her as well if that was to be the ultimate fate of the apprehended Mussolini. They spent the night together in a peasant bed.
Meanwhile, a Communist murderer codenamed Colonel Valerio was sent from Milan to execute them both. Valerio has been identified over the decades as several different Communists.
As he went into the De Maria farmhouse to meet the captive Duce for the first and only time, Valerio chortled, “I’ll tell him I’ve come to rescue him!” The men hustled the Duce, now sporting a black beret, and Claretta, frantically searching among the bedsheets for her missing panties, out the door and into a waiting car.
Later, 19-year-old Dorina Mazzola claimed to have seen both victims gunned down just outside the De Maria farmhouse, and it was then that the long-accepted version of their having been shot by the gate of the Villa Belmonte was first challenged by historians.
Exactly who actually shot first Claretta and then Mussolini has been debated. It was even asserted that a second shooting of the already dead bodies was held at the Villa Belmonte. Some others said that the doomed pair committed suicide inside the De Maria farmhouse instead.
At a Communist rally in Rome in March 1947, a former partisan named Audisio was officially proclaimed before an audience of 40,000 as the killer of Mussolini and Petacci. This occurred during a campaign for the Italian Parliament, and he was elected.
It was also subsequently agreed that both Audisio’s submachine gun and pistol failed to fire in succession and that it was a 7.65mm L/MAS 1938 model F20830 submachine gun with a red ribbon tied to the end of the barrel and belonging to another partisan named Moretti that was the actual murder weapon. Captured from the Fascists, the weapon reportedly fired five French-made bullets into Mussolini while the mysterious 9mm rounds fired into Petacci came from an unknown weapon.
No mention has been made of where the weapons are today. In all, Audisio is said to have given as many as 22 different published accounts of these events before his death in 1971.
Valerio claimed that Il Duce was a trembling coward in death, begging that his life be spared: “I will give you an empire!” But other accounts stated that he pulled himself together after being told “Your luck has run out,” and having seen how Claretta argued with the murderers, “You cannot kill us like this!” before being gunned down herself.
One partisan claimed that Mussolini’s last words were, “Shoot me in the chest!” while another felt that “Aim for my heart!” was, in fact, more accurate. Still other versions are ”Long live Italy!” and “But, colonel….”
Afterward, Audisio was supposed to have said, “Look at his face! It suits him, doesn’t it?” In any event, the man contemptuously called “Hitler’s gauleiter for northern Italy” by his enemies and code-named “Karl Heinz” by the Germans was dead.
Formal Fascism died on the Piazzale Loreto on April 29, 1945. In perhaps the greatest irony of all, Audisio and his men very nearly never made their rendezvous with destiny in Milan. After having bluffed their way past U.S. Army patrols, which never searched the yellow truck, they were arrested by yet another partisan unit while on their way into the city at 10 pm on the 28th.
“They’re Fascists!” screamed the irate officer in command, and this seemed to be confirmed when he found the list of the top Fascists that Colonl Valerio himself had written to identify those to be shot.
The names of the slain “Dongo 16” have rarely been noted. They included Fascist Party Secretary Alessandro Pavolini; Francesco Maria Barracu, Paolo Zerbino, Fernando Mezzasoma, Ruggero Romano, and Augusto Liverani, Salo Republic ministers all; Inspector for Lombardy Paolo Porta; the Duce’s secretary Luigi Gatti; Bologna University Rector Goffredo Coppola; Stefani News Agency Director Ernesto Daquanno; Agricultural Federation employee Mario Nudi; Duce aide Vito Casalinuovo; Italian Air Force pilot Pietro Calistri; public relations man Idreno Utimpergher; Mussolini’s longtime socialist friend, Nicola Bombacci; and Claretta’s brother, Marcello, whom the partisans initially mistook for a Spanish diplomat and then for Il Duce’s son, Vittorio.
Neo-Fascism lives on mainly in the person of the Duce’s granddaughter, Italian film actress Alessandra Mussolini, child of Mussolini’s jazz musician son Romano and Sophia Loren’s divorced sister. Alessandra was elected to the nation’s legislature in the 1990s.
When neo-Fascist Domenico Leccisi of the MSI Party stole the Duce’s body on April 23,1946, he unwittingly launched the late Duce’s second political career as a traveling corpse. Leccisi had seen Mussolini twice, in 1936 and 1945, and found his remains to be still recognizable. Later, Leccisi was also elected to Parliament and even concocted a plot to kill Audisio. Fascist deputies were returned to office in the 1953 elections.
As for the missing Duce, his body was surrendered to a pair of Franciscan friars and hidden in the convent of Cerro Maggiore with the knowledge of the cardinal of Milan and of the Italian Socialist government for 11 years. By that time, the remains were skeletal and fit into a small trunk.
The so-called Padua Trial began on April 29, 1957, to resolve the issue of the disappearance of the Dongo Treasure and the subsequent murders of those linked to it. The trial adjourned inconclusively the following August and was never reconvened.
On September 1, 1957, Mussolini’s remains were finally returned to his widow and entombed in the family crypt at Predappio, the town where Il Duce was born in 1883. It has since become a shrine for 70,000 pilgrims and tourists who visit annually. It is guarded around the clock by twin neo-Fascist sentries in long capes.
The crossbar of the Milan gas station became a sort of monument to socialist and communist unions that staged parades past it, and painted upon it were the names of the five slain Fascisti and Claretta Petacci who had been suspended from it. Later, a merchant supposedly bought the piece as an investment for resale. Ironically, the flames of the memory of that day in Milan were fanned not by the Socialists who wanted to forget it, but rather by the neo-Fascists as a symbol of rightist anger.
It appears that the long-forgotten Claretta Petacci may yet have a final word. In 1945, when she took her leave of Lake Garda to chase after her departed Duce, she left behind with the caretakers at the Villa Mirabella her own papers.
These were two large boxes of 600 love letters from the Duce spanning the 12 years of their passionate association from February 1933 to April 1945. Containing not only gossip but also highly valuable military, political, and diplomatic tidbits, they were buried for safekeeping at Gardone and willed by Claretta to her younger sister and confidante, Myriam Petacci.
Dug up by the family in 1950, the 15 volumes were immediately confiscated by the Italian Socialist Republic. Myriam lost her case for repossession in the courts and died in 1991. The documents were ordered sealed for 50 years, or until April 25, 1995. When that date came and went, they remained sealed as they are today.
Today, the sole family heir is the younger son of Claretta’s murdered brother Marcello, broke and living in a trailer park in Phoenix, Arizona. Someday, when his legal inheritance is duly honored, Signor Petacci will become one of the most famous and richest men in the world as his late aunt’s papers are released and published globally.
This article by Blaine Taylor originally appeared on Warfare History Network.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
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By Maggie Jones
Drew was 8 years old when he was flipping through TV channels at home and landed on “Girls Gone Wild.” A few years later, he came across HBO’s late-night soft-core pornography. Then in ninth grade, he found online porn sites on his phone. The videos were good for getting off, he said, but also sources for ideas for future sex positions with future girlfriends. From porn, he learned that guys need to be buff and dominant in bed, doing things like flipping girls over on their stomach during sex. Girls moan a lot and are turned on by pretty much everything a confident guy does. One particular porn scene stuck with him: A woman was bored by a man who approached sex gently but became ecstatic with a far more aggressive guy.
But around 10th grade, it began bothering Drew, an honor-roll student who loves baseball and writing rap lyrics and still confides in his mom, that porn influenced how he thought about girls at school. Were their breasts, he wondered, like the ones in porn? Would girls look at him the way women do in porn when they had sex? Would they give him blow jobs and do the other stuff he saw?
Drew, who asked me to use one of his nicknames, was a junior when I first met him in late 2016, and he told me some of this one Thursday afternoon, as we sat in a small conference room with several other high school boys, eating chips and drinking soda and waiting for an after-school program to begin. Next to Drew was Q., who asked me to identify him by the first initial of his nickname. He was 15, a good student and a baseball fan, too, and pretty perplexed about how porn translated into real life. Q. hadn’t had sex — he liked older, out-of-reach girls, and the last time he had a girlfriend was in sixth grade, and they just fooled around a bit. So he wasn’t exactly in a good position to ask girls directly what they liked. But as he told me over several conversations, it wasn’t just porn but rough images on Snapchat, Facebook and other social media that confused him. Like the GIF he saw of a man pushing a woman against a wall with a girl commenting: “I want a guy like this.” And the one Drew mentioned of the “pain room” in “Fifty Shades of Grey” with a caption by a girl: “This is awesome!”
Watching porn also heightened Q.’s performance anxiety. “You are looking at an adult,” he told me. “The guys are built and dominant and have a big penis, and they last a long time.” And if you don’t do it like the guys in porn, Drew added, “you fear she’s not going to like you.”
One Thursday afternoon, about a dozen teenagers sat in a semicircle of North Face zip-ups, Jordans, combat boots, big hoop earrings and the slumped shoulders of late afternoon. It was the third week of Porn Literacy, and everyone already knew the rules: You don’t have to have watched porn to attend; no yucking someone else’s yum — no disparaging a student’s sexual tastes or sexuality. And avoid sharing personal stories about sex in class. Nicole Daley and Jess Alder, who wrote the curriculum with Emily Rothman and led most of the exercises and discussion, are in their 30s, warm and easygoing. Daley, who until last month was the director of Start Strong, played the slightly more serious favorite-aunt role, while Alder, who runs Start Strong’s classes for teenagers, was the goofier, ask-me-anything big sister. Rothman also attended most of the classes, offering information about pornography studies and explaining to them, for example, that there is no scientific evidence that porn is addictive, but that people can become compulsive about it.
In the first class, Daley led an exercise in which the group defined porn terms (B.D.S.M., kink, soft-core, hard-core), so that, as she put it, “everyone is on the same page” and “you can avoid clicking on things you don’t want to see.” The students also “values voted” — agreeing or disagreeing about whether the legal viewing age of 18 for porn is too high, if working in the porn industry is a good way to make money and if pornography should be illegal. Later, Daley held up images of a 1940s pinup girl, a Japanese geisha and Kim Kardashian, to talk about how cultural values about beauty and bodies change over time. In future classes, they would talk about types of intimacy not depicted in porn and nonsexist pickup lines. Finally, Daley would offer a lesson about sexting and sexting laws and the risks of so-called revenge porn (in which, say, a teenager circulates a naked selfie of an ex without consent). And to the teenagers’ surprise, they learned that receiving or sending consensual naked photos, even to your boyfriend or girlfriend, can be against the law if the person in the photo is a minor.
Now, in the third week of class, Daley’s goal was to undercut porn’s allure for teenagers by exposing the underbelly of the business. “When you understand it’s not just two people on the screen but an industry,” she told me, “it’s not as sexy.”
To that end, Daley started class by detailing a midlevel female performer’s salary (taken from the 2008 documentary “The Price of Pleasure”): “Blow job: $300,” Daley read from a list. “Anal: $1,000. Double penetration: $1,200. Gang bang: $1,300 for three guys. $100 for each additional guy.”
“Wow,” Drew muttered. “That makes it nasty now.”
“That’s nothing for being penetrated on camera,” another boy said.
Then, as if they had been given a green light to ask about a world that grown-ups rarely acknowledge, they began peppering Daley, Rothman and Alder with questions.
“How much do men get paid?” one girl asked. It is one of the few professions in which men are paid less, Rothman explained, but they also typically have longer careers. How long do women stay in their jobs? On average, six to 18 months. How do guys get erections if they aren’t turned on? Often Viagra, Rothman offered, and sometimes a “fluffer,” as an offscreen human stimulator is known.
Daley then asked the teenagers to pretend they were contestants on a reality-TV show, in which they had to decide if they were willing to participate in certain challenges (your parents might be watching) and for how much money. In one scenario, she said, you would kneel on the ground while someone poured a goopy substance over your face. In another, you’d lick a spoon that had touched fecal matter. The kids debated the fecal-matter challenge — most wouldn’t to do it for less than $2 million. One wanted to know if the goop smelled. “Can we find out what it is?” asked another.
Then Daley explained that each was in fact a simulation of a porn act. The goopy substance was what’s called a “baker’s dozen,” in which 13 men ejaculate on a woman’s face, breasts and mouth.
“What?” a girl named Tiffany protested.
The second scenario — licking the spoon with fecal matter — was from a porn act known as A.T.M., in which a man puts his penis in a woman’s anus and then immediately follows by sticking it in her mouth.
“No way,” a 15-year-old boy said. “Can’t you wash in between?”
Nope, Daley said.
“We don’t question it when we see it in porn, right?” Daley went on. “There’s no judgment here, but some of you guys are squeamish about it.”
“I never knew any of this,” Drew said, sounding a bit glum.
Daley went on to detail a 2010 study that coded incidents of aggression in best-selling 2004 and 2005 porn videos. She noted that 88 percent of scenes showed verbal or physical aggression, mostly spanking, slapping and gagging. (A more recent content analysis of more than 6,000 mainstream online heterosexual porn scenes by Bryant Paul and his colleagues defined aggression specifically as any purposeful action appearing to cause physical or psychological harm to another person and found that 33 percent of scenes met that criteria. In each study, women were on the receiving end of the aggression more than 90 percent of the time.)
“Do you think,” Daley said, standing in front of the students, “watching porn leads to violence against women? There’s no right or wrong here. It’s a debate.”
Kyrah, a 10th-grade feminist with an athlete’s compact body and a tendency to speak her opinions, didn’t hesitate. “In porn they glamorize calling women a slut or a whore, and younger kids think this is how it is. Or when they have those weird porn scenes and the woman is saying, ‘Stop touching me,’ and then she ends up enjoying it!”
Tiffany, her best friend, snapped her fingers in approval.
“Yes and no,” one guy interjected. “When a man is choking a woman in porn, people know it is not real, and they aren’t supposed to do it, because it’s violence.” He was the same teenager who told me he would just “do” anal sex without asking a girl, because the women in porn like it.
Pornography didn’t create the narrative that male pleasure should be first and foremost. But that idea is certainly reinforced by “a male-dominated porn industry shot through a male lens,” as Cindy Gallop puts it. Gallop is the creator of an online platform called MakeLoveNotPorn, where users can submit videos of their sexual encounters — which she describes as “real world,” consensual sex with “good values” — and pay to watch videos of others.
For years, Gallop has been a one-woman laboratory witnessing how easy-to-access mainstream porn influences sex. Now in her 50s, she has spent more than a decade dating 20-something men. She finds them through “cougar” dating sites — where older women connect with younger men — and her main criterion is that they are “nice.” Even so, she told me, during sex with these significantly younger nice men, she repeatedly encounters porn memes: facials, “jackhammering” intercourse, more frequent requests for anal sex and men who seem less focused on female orgasms than men were when she was younger. Gallop takes it upon herself to “re-educate,” as she half-jokingly puts it, men raised on porn. Some people, of course, do enjoy these acts. But speaking of teenagers in particular, she told me she worries that hard-core porn leads many girls to think, for example, that “all boys love coming on girls’ faces, and all girls love having their faces come on. And therefore, girls feel they must let boys come on their face and pretend to like it.”
Though none of the boys I spoke to at Start Strong told me they had ejaculated on a girl’s face, Gallop’s words reminded me of conversations I had with some older high-schoolers in various cities. One senior said that ejaculating on a woman’s face was in a majority of porn scenes he had watched, and that he had done it with a girlfriend. “I brought it up, or she would say, ‘Come on my face.’ It was an aspect I liked — and she did, too.”
‘I’ve never seen a girl in porn who doesn’t look like she’s having a good time.’
Another noted that the act is “talked about a lot” among guys, but said that “a girl’s got to be down with it” before he’d ever consider doing it. “There is something that’s appealing for guys. The dominance and intimacy and that whole opportunity for eye contact. Guys are obsessed with their come displayed on a girl.”
Many girls at Start Strong were decidedly less enthusiastic. One senior told me a boyfriend asked to ejaculate on her face; she said no. And during a conversation I had with three girls, one senior wondered aloud: “What if you don’t want a facial? What are you supposed to do? Friends say a boy cleans it with a napkin. A lot of girls my age like facials.” But a few moments later, she reversed course. “I actually don’t think they like it. They do it because their partner likes it.” Next to her, a sophomore added that when older girls talk among themselves, many say it’s gross. “But they say you gotta do what you gotta do.” And if you don’t, the first girl added, “then someone else will.”
These are not new power dynamics between girls and boys. In a 2014 British study about anal sex and teenagers, girls expressed a similar lack of sexual agency and experienced physical pain. In the survey, of 130 heterosexual teenagers age 16 to 18, teenagers often said they believed porn was a motivating factor for why males wanted anal sex. And among the guys who reported trying it, many said friends encouraged them, or they felt competitive with other guys to do it. At the same time, a majority of girls who had tried anal sex said they didn’t actually want to; their partners persuaded or coerced them. Some males took a “try it and see” approach, as researchers called it, attempting to put their finger or penis in a girl’s anus and hoping she didn’t stop them. Sometimes, one teenager reported, you “just keep going till they just get fed up and let you do it anyway.” Both boys and girls blamed the girls for pain they felt during anal sex and some told researchers the girls needed to “relax” more or “get used to it.” Only one girl said she enjoyed it, and only a few boys did. Teenagers may not know that even while porn makes it seem commonplace, in the 2009 national survey of American sex habits, most men and women who tried anal sex didn’t make it a regular part of their sex lives. And in another study, by Indiana University’s Debby Herbenick and others in 2015, about 70 percent of women who had anal sex said they experienced pain.
Drew had firsthand experience with what he had seen in porn not translating into actual pleasure. The first time he had sex, he thought he was supposed to exert some physical control over his girlfriend. But the whole thing felt awkward, too rough and not all that fun. And things that looked easy in porn, like sex while taking a shower or mutual oral sex, didn’t go so well.
At one point during sex, Drew’s girlfriend at the time, who was a year older and more experienced, asked him to put his hand around her neck during sex. He did it, without squeezing, and though it didn’t exactly bother him, it felt uncomfortable. Drew never asked if she got the idea from porn, but it made him wonder. Had she also picked up other ways of acting? “Like, how do you really know a girl has had a good time?” he said one afternoon, musing aloud while sitting with some friends before Porn Literacy class. “My girlfriend said she had a good time,” he went on. “She was moaning. But that’s the thing: Is it fake moaning?”
Even if you know porn isn’t realistic, it still sets up expectations, one senior told me. In porn, he said, “the clothes are off, and the girl goes down on the guy, he gets hard and he starts having sex with her. It’s all very simple and well lit.” Before he had sex, porn had supplied his images of oral sex, including scenes in which a woman is on her knees as a man stands over her. At one point, he thought that’s how it might go one day when he had sex. But when he talked with his girlfriend, they realized they didn’t want to re-enact that power dynamic.
I spent a couple of hours on a Wednesday afternoon at Start Strong with a senior girl who took the first Porn Literacy class in the summer of 2016. Looking back over the last several years of middle and high school, A., who asked me to identify her by the first initial of her middle name, said she wished she had had someplace — home, school, a community sex-ed program — to learn about sex. Instead, she learned about it from porn. She saw it for the first time by accident, after a group of sixth-grade boys cajoled her to look at tube8.com, which she didn’t know was a porn site. She was fascinated. She had never seen a penis before, “not a drawing of one, nothing.” A few years later, she searched online for porn again after listening to girls in the high school locker room talk about masturbation. A.’s parents, whom she describes as conservative about sex, hadn’t talked to her about female anatomy or sex, and her school didn’t offer any sex education before ninth grade; even then, it focused mostly on the dangers — sexually transmitted infections and diseases and pregnancy.
Aside from some private schools and innovative community programs, relatively few sex-ed classes in middle and high school delve in detail into anatomy (female, especially), intimacy, healthy relationships, sexual diversity. Even more rare are discussions of female desire and pleasure. Porn taught A. the basics of masturbation. And porn served as her study guide when she was 16 and was the first among her friends to have sex. She clicked through videos to watch women giving oral sex. She focused on how they moved during sex and listened to how they moaned. She began shaving her vulva (“I’ve never seen anyone in porn have sex with hair on it”).
Porn is “not all bad,” said A., who was frank and funny, with a slew of advanced-placement classes on her transcript and a self-assured manner that impresses adults. “I got my sexual ways from porn, and I like the way I am.” But what she learned from porn had downsides too. Because she assumed women’s pleasure in porn was real, when she first had intercourse and didn’t have an orgasm, she figured that was just how it went.
For A., it wasn’t enough to know that porn was fake sex. She wanted to understand how real sex worked. Rothman and her team did consult a sex educator while they were writing the Porn Literacy curriculum but decided to include only some basic information about safe sex. It came in the form of a “Porn Jeopardy” game during one class. The teenagers, clustered in teams, chose from four categories: S.T.D./S.T.I.s, Birth Control, Teen Violence/Sexual Assault and Porn on the Brain.
“S.T.I.s/S.T.D.s for $300,” one student called out.
“Why is lubrication important for sex?” Alder asked.
“What’s lubrication?” Drew asked.
“It’s lube,” another teenager said, in an attempt to explain.
“Is lubrication only the little tube-y things?” a girl with long black hair asked. “Or can it be natural?”
“I never learned this before,” Drew announced to the class after it was mentioned that lubrication decreased friction, increased pleasure and could reduce the risk of tearing and therefore of S.T.I.s and S.T.D.s. Drew’s only sliver of sex ed was in sixth grade with the school gym teacher, who sweated as he talked about sex, “and it was all about it being bad and we shouldn’t do it.”
As if to rectify that, Alder offered a quick anatomy lesson, drawing a vulva on the whiteboard and pointing out the clitoris, the vagina, the urethra. “This is called a vulva,” she said. Alder repeated the word slowly and loudly, as if instructing the students in a foreign language. It was both for humor and to normalize a word that some of them may have been hearing for the first time. “This is the clitoris,” Alder went on. “This is where women get most pleasure. Most women do not have a G spot. If you want to know how to give a woman pleasure, it’s the clitoris.”
“Let’s move on,” Rothman said quietly. Alder had just inched across a line in which anatomy rested on one side and female desire and pleasure on the other. It was a reminder that as controversial as it is to teach kids about pornography, it can be more taboo to teach them how their bodies work sexually. “The class is about critically analyzing sexually explicit media,” Rothman told me later, “not how to have sex. We want to stay in our narrow lane and not be seen as promoting anything parents are uncomfortable with.” Daley added: “I wish it were different, but we have to be aware of the limitations of where we are as a society.”
Porn education is such new territory that no one knows the best practices, what material should be included and where to teach it. (Few people are optimistic that it will be taught anytime soon in public schools.) Several years ago, L. Kris Gowen, a sexuality educator and author of the 2017 book “Sexual Decisions: The Ultimate Teen Guide,” wrote extensive guidelines for teaching teenagers to critique “sexually explicit media” (she avoided the more provocative term “porn literacy”). Even though Oregon, where Gowen lives, has one of the most comprehensive sex-ed programs in the country, Gowen said that teachers felt unequipped to talk about porn. And though the guidelines have been circulated at education conferences and made publicly available, Gowen doesn’t know of a single educator who has implemented them. In part, she says, people may be waiting for a better sense of what’s effective. But also, many schools and teachers are nervous about anything that risks them being “accused of promoting porn.”
The most recent sex-education guidelines from the World Health Organization’s European office note that educators should include discussions about the influence of pornography on sexuality starting with late elementary school and through high school. The guidelines don’t, however, provide specific ideas on how to have those conversations.
‘If you don’t do it like the guys in porn, you fear she’s not going to like you.’
In Britain, nonprofit organizations and a teachers’ union, along with members of Parliament, have recommended that schools include discussions about the influence of porn on how children view sex and relationships. Magdalena Mattebo, a researcher at Uppsala University in Sweden who studies pornography and adolescents, would like porn literacy mandated in her country. “We are a little lost in how to handle this,” Mattebo told me.
More than 300 schools, youth and community groups and government agencies in Australia and New Zealand use components of a porn-education resource called “In the Picture” that includes statistics, studies and exercises primarily for teenagers. It was created by Maree Crabbe, an expert on sexual violence and pornography education, who lives near Melbourne, Australia. As she put it during a United States training program for educators and social workers that I attended in 2016: “We want to be positive about sex, positive about masturbation and critical of pornography.” One key component of the program is often neglected in porn literacy: providing training to help parents understand and talk about these issues.
Last year, a feminist porn producer, Erika Lust, in consultation with sex educators, created a porn-education website for parents. The Porn Conversation links to research and articles and provides practical tips for parents, including talking to kids about the ways mainstream porn doesn’t represent typical bodies or mutually satisfying sex and avoiding accusatory questions about why your kid is watching porn and who showed it to them. “We can’t just say, ‘I don’t like mainstream porn because it’s chauvinistic,’ ” says Lust, whose films feature female-centered pleasure. “We have given our children technology, so we need to teach them how to handle it.” But she takes it a step further by suggesting that parents of middle- and high-schoolers talk to their teenagers about “healthy porn,” which she says includes showing female desire and pleasure and being made under fair working conditions. I asked Lust if she would steer her daughters in that direction when they are older (they are 7 and 10). “I would recommend good sites to my daughters at age 15, when I think they are mature enough. We are so curious to find out about sex. People have doubts and insecurities about themselves sexually. ‘Is it O.K. that I like that, or this?’ I think porn can be a good thing to have as an outlet. I’m not scared by explicit sex per se. I’m afraid of the bad values.”
Tristan Taormino, another feminist porn filmmaker and author, speaks frequently on college campuses and produces explicit sex-ed videos for adults. “The party line is we don’t want teenagers watching our videos,” she says, noting they are rated XXX. “But do I wish teenagers had access to some of the elements of it?” In addition to seeing consent, she said, “they would see people talking to each other, and they’d see a lot of warm-up. We show lube, we show sex toys.”
That may be more than most parents, even of older teenagers, can bear. But even if parents decided to help their teenagers find these sites, not only is it illegal to show any kind of porn — good or bad — to anyone under 18, but, really, do teenagers want their parents to do so? And which ones would parents recommend for teenagers? “Unlike organic food, there’s no coding system for ethical or feminist porn,” Crabbe notes. “They might use condoms and dental dams and still convey the same gender and aggression dynamics.” Also, “good porn” isn’t typically free or nearly as accessible as the millions of videos streaming on mainstream sites.
Al Vernacchio, a nationally known sexuality educator who teaches progressive sex ed at a private Quaker school outside Philadelphia, believes the better solution is to make porn literacy part of the larger umbrella of comprehensive sex education. Vernacchio, who is the author of the 2014 book “For Goodness Sex: Changing the Way We Talk to Teens About Sexuality, Values, and Health,” is one of those rare teenage-sex educators who talks directly to his high school students about sexual pleasure and mutuality, along with the ingredients for healthy relationships. The problem with porn “is not just that it often shows misogynistic, unhealthy representations of relationships,” Vernacchio says. “You can’t learn relationship skills from porn, and if you are looking for pleasure and connection, porn can’t teach you how to have those.”
Crabbe notes one effective way to get young men to take fewer lessons from porn: “Tell them if you want to be a lazy, selfish lover, look at porn. If you want to be a lover where your partner says, ‘That was great,’ you won’t learn it from porn.” And parents should want their teenagers to be generous lovers, Cindy Gallop argues. “Our parents bring us up to have good manners, a work ethic. But nobody brings us up to behave well in bed.”
To prepare his students to be comfortable and respectful in sexual situations, Vernacchio shows photos, not just drawings, of genitalia to his high-schoolers. “Most people are having sex with real people, not porn stars, and real bodies are highly variable. I would much rather my students have that moment of asking questions or confusion or even laughter in my classroom rather than when they see their partner’s naked body for the first time.” He, along with Debby Herbenick, who is also the author of the 2012 book “Sex Made Easy: Your Awkward Questions Answered for Better, Smarter Amazing Sex,” advocates that adolescents should understand that most females don’t have orgasms by penetration alone, and that clitoral stimulation often requires oral sex, fingers and sex toys, as she notes: “It’s part of human life, and you teach it in smart, sensitive ways.”
As the students from the first Porn Literacy classes moved through their lives in the year after their courses ended, some things from the discussions stayed with them. In surveys from the first three sets of classes, one-third of the students still said they would agree to do things from porn if their partner asked them to. Several also wanted to try things they saw in porn. They were, after all, normal, sexually curious, experimenting teenagers. But only a tiny number of students agreed in the postclass survey that “most people like to be slapped, spanked or have their hair pulled during sex,” compared with 27 percent at the start of class. And while at the beginning, 45 percent said that porn was a good way for young people to learn about sex, now only 18 percent agreed. By the end of the class, no one said pornography was realistic; just over one-quarter had believed that at the outset. The survey didn’t reveal the catalyst for the changes. Was it the curriculum itself? Was it something about Daley and Alder’s teaching style? It’s possible the students created the changes themselves, teaching one another through their in-class debates and discussions.
A., the young woman who said she had never seen an image of a penis until she watched porn, resisted the idea that porn was uniformly bad for teenagers. “At least kids are watching porn and not going out and getting pregnant,” she said. But recently, she told me that she’d given up watching it altogether. She disliked looking at women’s expressions now, believing that they probably weren’t experiencing pleasure and might be in pain. When Drew watched porn, he found himself wondering if women were having sex against their will. As another student said with a sigh: “Nicole and Jess ruined porn for us.”
In the months after the class, A. had created a new mission for herself: She was going to always have orgasms during sex. “And I did it!” she told me. It helped that she had been in a relationship with a guy who was open and asked what she liked. But even if Porn Literacy didn’t go into as many details about sex as she would have liked, “in this indirect way, the class shows what you deserve and don’t deserve,” she said. “In porn, the guy cares only about himself. I used to think more about ‘Am I doing something right or wrong?’ ” Porn may neglect women’s orgasms, but A. wasn’t going to anymore.
Drew, who had once used porn as his main sex educator, was now thinking about sex differently. “Some things need to come to us naturally, not by watching it and seeing what turns you on,” he told me. The discussions about anatomy and fake displays of pleasure made him realize that girls didn’t always respond as they did in porn and that they didn’t all want the same things. And guys didn’t, either. Maybe that porn clip in which the nice, tender guy didn’t excite the girl was wrong. What Drew needed was a girl who was open and honest, as he was, and with whom he could start to figure out how to have good sex. It would take some time and most likely involve some fumbling. But Drew was O.K. with that. He was just starting out.
Maggie Jones is a contributing writer for the magazine and teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh’s M.F.A. program. She has been a finalist for a National Magazine Award and a Nieman fellow at Harvard University
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