The Friday Sex Blog [The Culture Wars]

Hola Everybody,
Many people are saying they’re sick of this election cycle and are so turned off, they can’t wait for it to be over. Think about that. I believe this election will create a more dangerous version of Trump. That’s what voting for the lesser of two evils does — it creates evil.

On another tangent, I’m so tired. I’m not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, my friends.

The War on Sex

 

 

Speaking of elections, one phrase that continually pops up is “culture war.” This familiar expression is actually part of the problem. You see, the phrase suggests there are two sides of equal strength lined up, honoring more or less the same rules of engagement, wanting to conquer each other.

But what is called a “culture war” is nothing like that at all. Those who fear and hate sexuality (erotophobes) are attacking those who appreciate or tolerate sexuality (erotophiles). Erotophiles are not attempting to force erotophobes to live more sexually adventurous lives. In fact, erotophiles aren’t trying to make the erotophobes do anything they don’t want to do. However, erotophobes demand that both sides — everyone — live according to their anti-sex (erotophobic) values. For example, an erotophile might say, “If the idea of a nude beach is reprehensible to you, don’t go, but don’t shut it down to prevent me from having that choice.” An erotophobic response might be, “I don’t want to go to a nude beach, and I don’t want you to have the option of going either, so it must be closed.” In a similar way, erotophobes want to control and mitigate the sexual rights of those they fear. For example, erotophiles might say, “If you’re against gay marriage, don’t marry one.” Erotophobes respond by waging campaigns of hate against the LGBTQ community.

While erotophobes recognize there’s a huge range of opportunities for erotic stimulation, satisfaction, and imagination, they want to deny everyone, not just themselves. Ironically, erotophobes (like most conservatives and some liberals) claim to be the victims in this culture war.

They say they are the ones who are being attacked, their values undermined, and their way of life destroyed. From their paranoiac perspective, they see so-called indecent entertainment, changing fashions, recent court decisions, internet access, and a range of contraceptive technologies, as an intrusion — as being force-fed sex. They can’t, they wail, turn on a TV, go to a mall, boot up a computer, or even go to work without being assaulted by sexual images. Furthermore, they claim, even when they are not being literally confronted, they are still forced to abide others’ sexual activity next door and all over the United States — behavior that is immoral, disgusting, and sinful.

I have no doubt this is true for them. However it is irrelevant to the governance of the U.S. Nowhere in our founding documents is there mention of regulating anything considered immoral, sinful, or disgusting. On the contrary, the United States was founded on the idea that people should be able to choose what to do and with who to associate based on their personal values and ideals — not those of a king, feudal lord, or religious hierarchy. Nor even, as James Madison declared, the tyrannical majority in their own town, state, or nation.

When erotophobes demand that we eliminate entertainment, fashion, medical technology, bedroom activity, and businesses that are in their estimation “immoral” or “sinful,” they are calling for a dismantling of the core values our nation was founded on. Such changes would result in governance that would bring us closer to modern Saudi Arabia, the former Soviet Union, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Nazi Germany.

Historically, the U.S. has tried to balance the rights of individuals and community responsibility. Therefore, for example, while you enjoy the freedom of speech, you don’t have the right to yell “fire” in a crowded theater. Another fundamental U.S. right is that the law should address actual crime and actual victims, and it should be drafted in ways that limit negative unintended consequences when solving a problem (in actuality, all this is not true in practice. But that’s a whole other blog).

Today’s culture war seeks to disrupt that balance, and it has already succeeded in many ways. Historically, it was against the law for someone to actually kill your cow, or doing something makes you worried about someone killing your cow. Attempting to criminalize abortion isn’t enough for conservatives, they also attempt to ban over-the-counter availability of emergency contraception, saying such availability would “encourage promiscuity.” Progressives respond with scientific data that clearly shows it won’t, and in that way, one more battle is joined. Erotophobes respond that (as is usual) they have no data, they have “concerns” and “feelings,” which are now considered seriously in public policy debates.

Although our country makes cars safer in case of accidents, has school athletes wear helmets in case they fall awkwardly, and establishes poison control centers in case toddlers get into cleaning supplies, these sexual jihadists don’t want to reduce the consequences of unauthorized, unprotected, or unfortunate sex. They say that doing so encourages bad sexual choices. That’s like saying seat belts encourage dangerous driving and poison centers encourage sloppy parenting practices.

Forget for a moment that children who are taught abstinence-only sex education have as much sex — only they use condoms less often. Erotophobes have manipulated the public into fighting sexual expression, not sexual ignorance or poor sexual decision-making.

Let’s be clear, a large part of the culture wars is really about the pathological need to control sex. Erotophobes fear sex. They fear sexual expression, sexual exploration, sexual arrangements, sexual privacy, sexual choice, sexual entertainment, sexual health, and sexual pleasure. They want you to fear it as well. Today’s liberals/ conservatives/ fundamentalists present a horrifically distorted picture of sexuality. It’s a narrative of danger and fear; a narrative of evil and sin and, therefore, of self-destructiveness. While erotophobes typically describe their fear in socially acceptable terms (i.e., “protecting children,” “defending marriage”), what they really fear is sexuality as they understand it. Actually, this is the same type of fear that compel people who call themselves progressive, to vote for candidates who value repressive social policies.

The outcome of these battles will determine how our children will live for decades to come. It will determine what books they will be allowed to read, what they will be taught to fear, what they know about their bodies, and how much control they will have over their own fertility.

Millions of people living in the United States are afraid of sex. Some admit it, some don’t. Millions more hate sex, and some have declared war on it. The pluralism of the United States is despised by fundamentalists around the world — including those right here on our soil. If you’re interested in sex, you’re part of this war whether you like it or not. If you watch TV, use a sex toy, go to the movies, need an abortion, enjoy the occasional dirty online chat, want a physician trained in sexual medicine, or have a child in school, the guns of the culture war and the war on sex will be pointed at you.

It is imperative that we begin asking the right questions, right now, because the answers will matter.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

The Friday Sex Blog [Celibacy]

Hola mi Gente,
It’s Friday! Hope you have a great weekend.

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Celibacy

The only sexual perversion is celibacy.

 

I will submit that celibacy has become the last sexual perversion in America. Sure, medically speaking, celibacy is relatively safe, non-harmful, and carries no risk of a sexually transmitted disease. But as a former colleague who is a sex educator stated recently during a discussion of abstinence: “It’s safe, but is it sex?”

It’s an important question, more important than it may seem at first.

Essentially, celibacy is self-denial, an inhibition of sex. And as I have said repeatedly, repression is a poor substitute for morality. Furthermore, when we push sex into the darkness, it claims more power over our pre-conscious intentions. This is why abstinence-only sex education is an abominable failure — it goes counter to one the most powerful of evolutionary forces. Essentially, to deny sex, is to deny your humanity.

For the purpose of this post, I will define celibacy as sexual abstinence or the state of not being married. These two dynamics are closely related. Celibacy is encouraged by various institutions namely governments and religions for different reasons.

At one time celibacy was the only recourse for women who chose not to submit to a marriage that would place them in a position of servitude. Others, out of necessity, used celibacy to protect their reputations. Conversely, those in arranged marriages took advantage of the religious suppression of sex as an excuse not to have sex with their spouse (known as agenbioisis — a couple living together without sex). Most people chose to remain celibate during the absence of their lovers. Others chose it out of fear of intimacy or trauma resulting from being sexually abused. Many more were forced into celibacy due to a lack of available partners. This was true at one time, for example, for male Chinese immigrants in California.

Throughout history, governments have imposed celibacy on people as a way to control population, disease, and for economic reasons. the US military during WW I, for example, urged by fanatical moral reformers and concerned over the potential loss of manpower to venereal disease, encouraged the celibacy of their troops by using propaganda which portrayed sexually responsive women as spies, prostitutes, and disease carriers. Military police were stationed in areas where local women and sex workers frequented. Sexually well-adjusted and/ or responsive women came to be viewed as whores with many being arrested en masse. Ironically, those who were less responsive were viewed by the men as the spoils of war. It should go without saying that none of these attitudes resulted in a culture in which respect for women and their sexuality were valued.

Religious homosexuals who have wanted to remain in a favorable standing with their church have chosen celibacy.

Abstinence is often viewed as character building. However, it can also be seen as a form of sexual repression with definite negative consequences. The occupants of convents and monasteries were often notorious for their sadistic inclinations and, as with the accusers during the European and Salem witch-hunts, delighted in the sexual exposés of others sexual exploits. More recently, the Meese Commission, charged with defining obscenity, resulted in the accumulation of the world’s largest repository of pornographic material. They probably had a good time.

Aside from serving as a divine justification to burn men and women like me, religious celibacy also serves of focusing the adherent’s attention on a god, looking only to Him or Her for love and approval. This may bond an individual to the church but at the same time destroys any chance they have of learning to look upon others for nurturance, support, and unconditional love/ acceptance.

Christianity has waged an enduring and influential war against sex. In some sects, the extreme has been the norm. The eighteenth century Shakers, for example, imposed many social restrictions on themselves to avoid erotic stimulation. They weren’t allowed to have pets for fear they might mate before them, nor were they allowed to touch, speak, or walk with someone of the opposite sex.

The only form of sexual release they were allowed was that of ritual dancing (in private) which led some into an altered state of consciousness (which was why they were called “Shakers” — they shook uncontrollably).

Others practiced celibacy as a way to achieve altered states. St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, early Christians who formed the philosophical foundations of the Catholic Church, were influenced by this manner rather than the more usual practice of self-flagellation as a means to do away with sexual feelings. St. Augustine was also the major figure involved in transforming sex from something sacred to something sinful.

The Victorians took celibacy to completely new different heights. They believed that the only justified orgasm was one that was achieved in order to propagate the species. This meant that any type of sex other than penis/ vagina was viewed as unhealthy as well as sinful. During this time, it was also believed that fellatio and cunnilingus could cause cancer and anal sex? Well, let’s just say that anal sex was the worst kind of offense. Suffice it to say that I would have been considered a heretic had I lived during Victorian times.

Certain mystics use celibacy for psychological and spiritual reasons (I totally disagree with spiritual reasons for celibacy, but that’s another post). Mystics often use celibacy to reach “higher” altered states of consciousness. Religious leaders use celibacy as a way of developing a high level of concentration.

There is no documentation on the long-term physical effects of total abstinence, but there should be a concern about the atrophying of the love muscle (the pubococcygeus), which serves to control the spasms during orgasm. There is also some evidence showing that it may not be possible for a woman to orgasm after ten or twenty years of not using this muscle properly.

In other words, use it or lose it!

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

The Friday Sex Blog [Virgins and Whores]

Hola mi Gente,
Some of you might not know, but after a lot of thinking and with even more humility, I put up a fundraising campaign on GoFundMe (click here if you want to contribute). The prospect of losing my belongings (in storage) and my cell service was what prompted this move. Mostly, my living situation has changed. Technically, I am homeless. I have been fortunate in that my sister has put me up, but I’ve been here much too long and I have absolutely no income.

So, it was with a much trepidation (and embarrassment) that I put up the page and posted it on social media. The response was immediately affirming. I mean, it wasn’t so much the financial support (some from people who hardly know me), thought that was important. What got me was people who gave so freely even when their own situations were tenuous. As an example, one person who contributed, sent me the following note:

I know you don’t know me, but I have been reading your blog for many years. I can’t tell you the times your words have had an impact on my life. Your stories and how you freely share about your life have made me think and sometimes you were the difference. I wish I could give you more…

Then there was this:

Eddie, I don’t have much. I am on unpaid sick leave from work currently. But you have called me “sweetie” so many times, makes an old girl feel good!! Love you and pray your breakthrough is sooner than later!

In short, there were many messages of support like these. More than the financial support, these sentiments mean so much more to me. If you can give, it would be greatly appreciated. If you can’t, that’s OK too. You are loved…

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Virgins & Whores

Do you really have to be the ice queen intellectual or the slut whore? Isn’t there some way to be both?
— Susan Sarandon

 What men desire is a virgin who is a whore.
— Edward Dahlbert

 

Early Christian leaders were forced to establish the absolute purity of the mother of Christ because of their attitudes toward women. Eve had tempted Adam in the Garden of Eden and therefore women were view as vessels of sin, which was passed on to their wombs at conception. The pains of childbirth and menstruation were the curse of Eve (fuck!), and according to influential Christian saints, the closeness of women to all that is vile could be seen in the “feces and urine” of childbirth.

In comparison, Mary, who had not conceived like other women, was the second coming of Eve, put here to redeem the mistakes of the first. In many ways, Eve was the incarnate mother of humanity (whore!), Mary its spiritual mother (good girl!).

Mary would quickly become an object of worship in her own right. The first recorded prayer to the Virgin Mary dates from about 390 b.c.e.; her cult reached its height around the 16^th century. In popular worship, however, Mary may have lost her virginal status. She has often been given the attributes of pagan mother goddesses, all who came before Mary. Mary’s most striking pagan metamorphosis, however, occurs within the orthodox doctrine, because she is identified with the Church, and the Church is the bride of Christ. There, like many other goddesses that preceded her, Mary becomes the bride in an incestuous marriage with her own son. She is regarded as an ideal of perfection but the church has never used Mary to represent women, but to slut-shame them in comparison.

As the patroness of priests and guardian of their celibacy, some seminarians may still be urged to think of Mary if they have lustful thoughts, continuing a centuries-old tradition of sublimating desire in an unattainable fantasy.

Christianity has always had a love/ hate relationship with virgins and whores. At the beginning of the 16^th century, for example, Pope Julius II was said to have established a Church brothel in Rome in which the residents spent their time at religious duties when they were not “working.”

To the medieval Church, unmarried women were either virgins or whores, and the cult of that other Mary, Mary Magdalene, grew alongside that of the Virgin Mary. As a prostitute (bad girl!) who was redeemed, and who eventually became a saint (good girl!), the figure of Mary Magdalene served to emphasize the equation of women to sin, while at the same time holding out the promise of salvation to those who did penance.

Magdalene is actually a conflation of at least three different biblical figures, who in the Orthodox Greek Church still have their respective feast days: Mary Magdalene herself, a woman from whom seven demons were exorcised by Jesus, and to whom he first appeared after his resurrection; Mary of Bethany, the sister of Lazarus, who bathes Christ’s feet in ointment; and an unspecified “sinner” – not explicitly a prostitute – who bathes Christ’s feet or head in ointment in three gospels.

The image of Magdalene also became confused with that of a Mary of Egypt, who made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the 4^th century by working her passage as a ship’s prostitute. In Jerusalem, she repented and became a hermit. Throughout Christian history, many similar figures have entered the canon as, one historian wrote, “beauty consuming itself like incense burned before God in solitude far from the eyes of men became the most stirring image of penance conceivable.” I guess at the heart of all this madness is that patriarchy and religion makes for oppressive bedfellows.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

 

The Friday Sex Blog [Childhood and Sexuality]

Hola mi Gente,
I’m headed out for an interview, so I can’t dilly dally. I wanted to sink my teeth into that whole Bill Clinton going off on a racist rant yesterday that had Trump green with envy, but that will have to wait. Wish me luck!

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Childhood and Sexuality

Truth, Fictions, and Myths

 

We do great harm to children when we withhold sexual information from them. Today, thanks to the dominant conservative voices, sexual education is a joke. Sex Ed, under the new Victorian era, has been reduced to reading from a two-line script: “Don’t do it.” “Get married.”

This is a crime…

Freud saw childhood sexuality as a relentless quest for knowledge. The desire for information didn’t play as a substitute for physical pleasure, it balanced it. From the very beginning, sexuality seeks a language to explain itself. Freud was treated as an outcast for daring to endorse providing children with that language — with information about their body parts and how they worked, about how babies are made and born.

At the beginning of the 21^st century, as the AIDS epidemic persists and our children need information most, the pendulum has swung toward telling them less. A strategy of censorship has emerged and it wears a particularly scary disguise: advice to parents to speak more, to embrace their responsibility as children’s primary sexual teachers. This is a “family value” that the conservatives can get behind and very few can disagree with. However, a seemingly harmless parent-friendly idea can have a less than child-friendly effect.

I expect the sexual prudes who rally against school-based sexuality education are aware of what would happen if the task of sexual enlightenment were left entirely to parents: almost nobody would do it.

And the studies bear out my suspicions. Parents do talk the talk: most agree that sex education is their job. However, when it comes to talking the sex talk, few can bring themselves to do it. One survey by the National Communication Association showed that parents identified sex as the subject they were least comfortable talking about. Similar research with children shows that they rate their parents’ efforts less generously than their fathers and mothers. The first pattern that stands out is the difference between the perception of parents and teens, one study showed. When interviewing both generations of the same families, the kids consistently remembered talking about fewer topics than their parents did. One longitudinal study found that more than half of teens believed their parents understood them pretty well. The bad news was that almost half thought mom and dad got it somewhat or hardly at all.

Even someone such as myself, “Mr. Sexual Freedom,” didn’t have a problem-free sex pass. I remember once entering my son’s room full of 12-13 year-old boys and bringing up the subject of masturbation. My son never forgave me for that one! LOL! Which leads me to state that while teens might tell researchers that they wish their parents would discuss sexuality more, I believe given the choice, they would rather talk to a different confidante (an “aunt” or other trusted adult, for example). I chalk it up to the incest taboo: children don’t want to know about their parents’ sex lives (or masturbatory tendencies) and, from the minute they might conceivably have a sex life, they usually don’t want their parents to know about theirs.

What’s interesting is there is little talk about the dynamic of how trusted adults become substitute sex education teachers for children. I know that if I hadn’t been able to get through my son, I would’ve welcomed a trusted friend or family member to step into that role. In fact, sex education teachers are the professionalized version of trusted adults.

Children absorb their attitudes toward love, their bodies, authority, and equality from their families. They are trained in tolerance and kindness or their opposite. Few live in families comfortable enough to discuss the nitty-gritty details of sex. And when we (we meaning all of us — society) don’t teach our children, guess who they learn it from? They learn it from others who are themselves ignorant (i.e., their peers or people with a sexual agenda) or those who may not have their best interests at heart.

So, if parents aren’t talking to their children and federally funded sex educators aren’t being allowed to talk to their students, to whom will our children turn? I’ll tell you where, on the internet or the street. And most of the information from those sources is geared toward selling sex. In other words, sex on the internet is mostly treated as it is elsewhere in our society: as something to use to buy and sell — a commodity

Then you guys bitch and moan about the supposed lack of moral character our children? Pfffft!

The myth that exposing children to sexual information before they are supposedly ready is detrimental to them was exploded for me when I took the time to actually listen to and talk with young people. Folks? They get it. Some of them get it better than you, believe it or not. Kids get the wide range of emotions embedded in concepts such as jealousy and desire, for example. Why not prepare them?

What consequences do we suffer as a society when we choose to leave the most important discussion about the most powerful force known to humankind to random chance?

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…