Throughout the two-week session, Trump administration officials discussed shifting international policy on women toward abstinence-oriented education and teaching women sexual “refusal skills.” Those views — as well as the US’s push for more conservative policies on immigration, trade and environmental regulation — ended up uniting most of the 45 CSW member states against the US on family planning issues, six sources who attended or were familiar with meetings told BuzzFeed News.
Let’s just forget the part where abstinence only practices have been demonstrated to be catastrophically ineffective at preventing people from having sex, let alone getting pregnant; and instead skip right to the part where the representatives of a serial philanderer tell others that this is the policy he prefers, and they do this without any trace of irony. That’s the part I don’t get.
He’s been married three times (that we know of) He’s cheated on all three wives. And yet his evangelical messengers think they can pretend that abstinence only is the preferred approach of the Orange Hate-Monkey to the subject of sex? I’m sorry but international aid programs need real guidance, real education and real funding. Enough of the discredited bullshit about abstinence, enough of the pandering to the people who worship this reprehensible little man.
More comprehensive sexuality education programs, on the other hand, are not only effective at preventing pregnancy and STIs among adolescents, but also helpful in guiding young people as they learn how to navigate relationships, negotiate with partners and become sexually healthy adults. Adolescent health experts emphasize that access to complete and accurate sexual health information has repeatedly been recognized as a basic human right. Governments, health care providers and educators have an ethical obligation to provide such information to their citizens, patients and students.
For the sake of the future we have to reject the policies that his evangelical backers promote. We have to take back the House and Senate and see that this reprehensible little man is punished for his crimes, and that his backers dreams and goals are thwarted. They cannot be allowed to torment the future of the human race with their backwards dogma. The sad part of all this? Abstinence only, while catastrophically harmful, is one of the more benign things the Orange Hate-Monkey’s base believes in and promotes. Fraudulent political appointees lining their pockets at taxpayer expense, dismantling the agencies they have been attacking for their entire careers not to mention the resurgence of white nationalism and wholesale targeting of immigrant communities for crimes they do not commit. All of these drives that they are engaged in are far more harmful in a general sense, short term. Not educating our own children? This will destroy the nation, and it is no exaggeration to put it that way.
This is a story of two Facebook friends who served as muses of a kind. Both of them in their own time and in their own way served as muses for my writing, but over the span of a few weeks or months they both left my circle in ways that were violent to my psyche. They will remain nameless here. Their names are as irrelevant as the names of any writer’s muse. Their importance was always in what they represented to the creative side of my mind, not in who they were, what they were called, but what they meant to me as inspirations behind some of the words that I have written here over the years.
The first was a singer/songwriter. His work has made an impression on me over the span of several decades. Ages ago, way back in the 1990’s, there was a cool site called MP3.com, a site that is completely different from the lame site that squats at that URL today. Back then you could log on this site, pop in a purchased audio disc, and after a short period of verification you could listen to MP3’s of that audio wherever you were, free of charge. It was a streaming service before any other streaming service existed.
Not only could you listen to previously purchased music, but you could find new music and local music on the site, making it a very useful place for the average music listener to go to find the kinds of music that they found interesting.
While registering my voluminous numbers of purchased albums I had time to discover even more music, music not available at the local music store. Music untouched by corporate handlers. I even purchased albums directly from MP3.com, music that I didn’t have to pay for, but do pay for because I wanted to support those artists.
His band was one of those new bands. They were different, not quite like anything else in the alternative rock scene that I had been part of for pretty much as long as I could remember. I bought their albums. I got to see them at an anime convention that I went to specifically to be able to talk to them and listen to their live performance. That weekend was the pinnacle of my experiences with the band and with the singer/songwriter that lead them.
The mistake was in getting too close to him and to his band. It started with Facebook, like most of these kinds of stories do. I was an early adopter. I was part of Myspace before Facebook was a thing, and I migrated to Facebook when it became the thing that everyone was doing at the time. He was on Myspace and Facebook as well. MP3.com having since been sued out of existence, he had to move on with the tide, just like I did. Everywhere I was I looked for him and his band, promoted him and his band. I loved him. I loved his words. I loved his music, the music of the people he chose to surround himself with.
He has the same problem that so many Americans have. He is an armaphile, he has no capacity to understand that the killing machine he loves has to be given up if we are ever to get past this point in history.
This train of thought leads me directly to the second muse in this tale of woe. I honestly don’t know who she was aside from what she meant to me on Facebook. She was a she then, and she possessed that certain something that has always attracted me to women, that something that confirmed to me that I wasn’t a homosexual in the way that most people think of homosexuality. I was attracted to men, don’t get me wrong. I just wasn’t attracted to men as strongly as I was attracted to women.
The decades when I was growing up were tough for people who weren’t willing to either present as traditional males or traditional females. When my mother instructed me to leave my dolls at home when I went to school, explained to me that the other boys would not understand that I liked to play with dolls, I realized that I was different and that I would have to lock away certain parts of myself in order to fit in with the other children in my age group.
Much like a closeted homosexual, I locked away the things that were different about me and I tried to conform to the norms that were on display around me. Pretending to enjoy sporting events because all the other men did. Trying to play sports because it was expected of me. On and on and on. The list of norms that I attempted to conform to over the years is longer than the number of years in which conformity was something I strove for.
I made a series of bargains with myself as each stumbling point was reached in my life. The first one was to deny the nurturing part of myself to anyone who couldn’t accept who I presented myself as. This was manifested in my willingness to let my dolls go as a six year old. That part of me stopped then and only resurfaced again when I was forced to help raise my brothers and sisters as a teenager.
At about ten years of age I started exploring the mysteries of sex, as any growing human would and does. Having been denied an explanation of the ins and outs of the subject from my parents, I started exploring the subject with my childhood friends, the ones who were also curious about the subject and ready to explore. None of this exploration amounted to anything meaningful (nothing that years of therapy can’t address anyway) but it all ended with another bargain with myself. I would refrain from having sex with other men so as to avoid the stigma of being dismissed as a queer and being consigned to Hell for being one.
Strangely enough, one of the other bargains I struck with myself was that I would dismiss the possibility of the existence of Hell from my mind. Worrying about going to Hell will drive you crazy in the end, and I was already overburdened with more anxiety than the average person had to deal with by that point. So I dismissed the possibility of Hell as being outside the realm of dealing with a caring, loving god, and I got on with trying to live my increasingly complex life.
This lead to the next bargain I struck with myself, one that I am reticent to admit even now. Even now, after mentioning the other failings (failing to live up to the vision of manliness that was forced on males in my age group) I’ve had to bargain with myself over. The last bargain was my agreement to not kill anyone or anything else unless I simply could not avoid it.
It is strangely hard to not kill things in life. You kill plants and bugs every day whether you know this or not as you are passing through existence. Trying to be respectful of life is quite hard. I can’t even begin to imagine the kinds of burdens of doubt that the average Jain must carry, trying not to cause harm to the smallest of creatures.
It was the evolution of this last bargain, the evolution being forced by moving through the decades and periods of life, it was this bargain that lead to the falling out between myself and that singer/songwriter. If killing others is wrong, if killing itself is wrong, then the tools that are used to kill must be regulated so that killing can be minimized. Controlled. He couldn’t give up his shotgun, couldn’t understand that I wasn’t even talking about his goddamn shotgun in the first place.
So he blocked me, and through his blocking me he severed the connection between the meaning that his music carried for me as surely as he severed the emotional connection with me. So he gets to keep his shotgun. Good for him. I wonder if he has the wherewithal to make a living using that tool, and only that tool, for the rest of his life?
Does this tie to the Gift of Fear? (Sam Harris #90 Living With Violence) The guilt of being born a white man in the same way that being born black or a woman assigns you to positions, powers and groups you never wanted to be part of? Does it tie into the narrative that I’m constructing for the other muse, too? The she who no longer wants to be considered a she but instead wants to carry the cludgy gender identity of non-binary?
You cannot mansplain non-binary, unless men aren’t allowed in that club. People with dicks that also carry purses, like to look attractive, are nurturing to children, etcetera. I mean, I can’t mansplain that identity if I’m not a traditional man and if I’m not excluded from adopting the gender identity for myself, right? All of those things are true of me, so I can’t be mansplaining my dissatisfaction with adopting that identity for yourself. The problem isn’t the ambiguity of the identity. The problem is that it presumes to label a thing that already has too many names in the first place.
I present this podcast as evidence for my argument:
Gender is one of the first things we notice about the people around us. But where do our ideas about gender come from? Can gender differences be explained by genes and chromosomes, or are they the result of upbringing, culture and the environment? This week, we delve into the debate over nature vs. nurture, and meet the first person in the United States to officially reject the labels of both male and female, and be recognized as non-binary.
A podcast in which we discover that non-binary was a label invented by a lawyer. Non-binary is bad legalese and doesn’t address anything substantial. No, I’m not saying you have to be seen as male or female; what I am saying is that not adopting one or the other stereotype is something that cannot be captured by a made-up legal definition like non-binary. I’d no more accept that label than I would accept the label cisgender or transgender. None of those things are really things unless you had work done by a surgeon that alters your sex, and then you are a transsexual because you changed sexes. We put way too much importance on the gender stereotypes we subject others to. We put way too much importance on what we call ourselves in relation to what we think the stereotype for our sex is.
Biologically I am male. That hasn’t got a thing to do with who I am aside from the mechanics of reproduction. No one gave me a choice as a child. I was told I was a boy and a boy acts this way. I saw that boys that didn’t act in acceptable ways were targeted and destroyed by other boys. I wanted to live a full life. I chose to conform, outwardly. This conformity cost little for me because, as I jokingly tell the wife, I’m a bull dike who just happens to have the correct biological equipment. I get to be spared being called a lesbian and outed because I just happen to look outwardly like a man, even though I don’t like being a man very much if at all. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t assume that what goes on between my legs is any more of your business than what goes on between a woman’s legs, thank you ever so much.
Claiming to be non-binary is just striking a pose, posing, an attempt to escape categorization by creating a new category and not calling that category androgyny for some unknown reason. Everyone is non-binary, it is just that most of them have no idea that they can’t be one-half of a binary pair. For there to be a binary pairing, there would have to be sexual polarity in the same way that there is magnetic polarity, and every magnet has both a negative and a positive pole.
Monopoles (magnets with a single pole) probably don’t exist, so even the allegory that there is some essential polar opposites manifesting as sexes or genders fails in the end. How about ambisexual like ambidextrous? You can go both ways at once and you aren’t particular about the direction? It’s physically possible to be both at once. Why isn’t that acknowledged as it’s own sex, it’s own gender?
The moral of this story? You can rely on a lawyer to invent a term for a thing that already has a term in the first place. A term like non-binary. Next time consult a linguist first.
None of this would change the outcome of the argument on Facebook. They blocked me like he blocked me and I was forced to go searching for the next muse to stimulate my mind with, so that I could continue to do the thing that defines my existence these days. I don’t think I want to say anything more to the singer/songwriter. He’s off having a great time doing whatever it is he does these days with whoever he’s with these days. He’s a survivor. He’ll be fine.
I might have more to say to the non-binary person that used to be one of the women that I prize so highly. The women with minds of their own that are harnessed to wills that allow them to get shit done around them, and they don’t feel the need to put the man first and adopt that false femininity that only pisses me off when I’m around it. The ones that wake up and throw clothes on and never bother to check the mirror before heading out of the house because what they look like really isn’t that important to getting shit done. The people around you will tell you if you need to put the shirt on frontwards and right side out. If they don’t then it wasn’t that important in the first place. The women that act like a man does because he is allowed to act that way.
I worry about that former muse when I think about them. I don’t do it out of some manly need to protect. At least, I don’t think that is what this is. I do this because worrying is one of the things that I do best. I learned how to do this from a master, the strongest person in my life, who just happens to be the most feminine person in my life at the same time.
The content of this post had to be generated from memory because of the violence committed against me by these two former muses when they cut off my access to my own words by blocking me. C’est la vie. I used material from several uncompleted drafts to put this piece together as a tribute to lost muses. May there always be another muse to turn to.
The man/woman conundrum continues in the world outside. I hate to break it to these people who are terrified of the non-conforming around them but you can’t demonstrably be a man or a woman unless you have created children with your vaunted sex organs. Fertility is the only determinable difference between men and women. There are a lot of women who don’t like to think that the ability to produce children is what makes them women, just like a lot of men would be uncomfortable with the knowledge that not being able to father children means they aren’t men.
Sticking to these objectively determinable sexual facts would exclude a lot of people from residing comfortably in either sex category, but it remains true that the purpose of male and female, women and men, the existence of sex itself, is procreation. That is the only reason it exists and so the ability to procreate necessarily defines what it is to be a male or a female. EVERY OTHER CHARACTERISTIC IS SUBJECTIVE. Every other imagined purpose for sex is also subjective.
So either we need to stop pretending there are hard and fast definitions for what a man or a woman is, or we need to understand that a majority of people are neither men nor women in any objective sense and simply accept that fact. If you, dear reader, want to then say “oh that doesn’t count as a definition of the sexes either” then you are essentially saying “we’re all the same” and I’m good with that too. One human race not a bunch of different groups trying to distinguish themselves from the groups they dislike or want to be different from. Cool, cool. What were we talking about, then?
A few years ago on Facebook, I posted this image to The Wife‘s wall. Silly me, I was thinking I could entice the woman I love into engaging in some Rites of Spring when I posted it. Easter is the traditional holiday that most closely corresponds with the Vernal Equinox, the celestial demarcation for the beginning of spring. Easter is promoted as the original spring festival, unlike the Hallmark created holiday of Valentine’s day which is as like a real celebration of spring as porn is a representation of sex.
I say silly me because I spent the better part of that Sunday fending off attacks from friends affronted by the notion that Easter is in any way sexual or that the fertility goddesses alluded to in the image have anything at all to do with the resurrection of their savior or the holiday that Catholics created specifically to counter the carnal celebration rituals which had predominated societies of all kinds prior to christianity’s rise.
This year Easter will arrive almost comically late to the spring scene, April 16th. The trees have been budding for about a month here in Austin as I write this. The birds will already be on their way further North from here by the time we get to Easter, so the sexually repressed will breath a sigh of relief knowing there will be little confusion between their sacred holiday and the equinox. It is a testament to the sexual repression present in the US that there isn’t even a wiki page on the subject of Rites of Spring that isn’t about music. Another testament is the fact that I can’t even say exactly when I posted the image to The Wife’s Facebook wall, because the image is consistently removed as offensive every time it is posted there.
I am sorry that the fact that spring is the time of rebirth, of fertility and sex, gets in the way of a deathcult-like obsession with afterlives and resurrection that is found within the various flavors of the christian religion when it comes to their spring celebration. The sexual repression that Paul introduced into the church from it’s earliest days has seized hold of the majority of the religion’s followers in the US, causing them to reject all things sexual as anti-christian. Jesus was not a sexist, he saw no need to place women in an inferior role in the world.
There is also a hemispherical bias at play here. I’ve often wondered what an Australian would think of the hubbub common in the Northern hemisphere surrounding this issue. Easter is in the fall in the Southern hemisphere; consequently the death-cultish air that bothers me about Easter probably is a nice foreshadowing of the oncoming winter when viewed from South of the equator; a preparation for the dying off of plant life, the hibernation of animal life, with a spring resurrection waiting at the other end of winter.
I originally entitled this piece Easter-Ishtar-Astarte. How about Tammuz? Because I wanted to push back at the near-hysterical responses I got from offended christians on Facebook. The offense has since spread all across the internet, with rebuttals on nearly any christian site you care to look at (no I won’t link any of them) most of them rather petty in tone. Also, most of them cherry-pick history to prove their points, largely relying on Bede and Herodotus who give the preferred twist to the pagan spring rituals that pre-date christianity.
One would think there was no basis for the worshipping of the feminine, a common theme in the pre-monotheistic times, if you listen to modern christian apologists. That there was no goddess Asherah mentioned in some versions of the Old Testament, that she wasn’t worshipped as an equal right alongside the shrines to Yahweh in ancient Israel, before the cult of men, the cult of the penis asserted itself and made itself the lone holiness to be worshipped.
The truth is that the facts are much harder to tease out than those people who simply want to prove their worldview try make them. For example. The article at Scientific American on the subject of this meme cites the Germanic deity Eostre as the basis of the word Easter, as many of the christian apologists do. However, the sole source of this proposition remains Bede. In the end, the need to prove that Easter is or isn’t some phonetic variation on Ishtar is pointless and petty, a hallmark of the vast majority of Facebook content. As one of the commenters to the SA article pointed out;
Actually, there is a connection between Oestre and Ishtar. Ishtar is associated with Venus, which is often referred to as the morning star, or light-bringer with its association with Lucifer (lucis = light). Venus is the planet of love and marriage traditionally.
There are Babylonian egg myths too featuring Ishtar being hatched, and the mystic egg falling from heaven to the Euphrates. These same myths are recycled from their Egyptian/Babylonian origins and do seem to be connected to the old pagan rites.
The mythology of Astarte (Greek) and Ashtoreth (Jewish) seems very similar too. Everything seems to have a common origin.(emphasis added)
The rest of the meme is even more questionable than the assertion that Easter and Ishtar are one and the same. Further down in the SA article is the observation;
The cosmic egg, according to the Vedic writings, has a spirit living within it which will be born, die, and be born yet again. Certain versions of the complicated Hindu mythology describe Prajapati as forming the egg and then appearing out of it himself. Brahma does likewise, and we find parallels in the ancient legends of Thoth and Ra. Egyptian pictures of Osiris, the resurrected corn god, show him returning to life once again rising up from the shell of a broken egg. The ancient legend of the Phoenix is similar. This beautiful mythical bird was said to live for hundreds of years. When its full span of life was completed it died in flames, rising again in a new form from the egg it had laid.
Eggs appear to be central to almost all of the spring rites and creation stories. They lend themselves quite handily to the theme of new life arising from an apparently inanimate object. There is no specific linkage between Ishtar and eggs that I could lay hands on; but then there doesn’t need to be, since the egg is all over the various mythologies of the day as being the beginning of life.
The hardest facet of current Easter practices to track down is the Easter Bunny. Theories abound, and I even have some thoughts of my own on the subject as relating to the Wolpertinger and the Jackalope, both icons of Germanic influence in the US. The rabbit’s springtime mating antics do bring me back to the point I started with. Like so many things human, the trappings of tradition cloud the purpose of the celebration.
The Rites of Spring from a human standpoint are necessarily sexual. That is how we renew the species, creating children who go on to make the future of the human animal a reality. Nearly all of the celebrations of spring outside of the deviancy of the christian religion are sexual in nature, as they should be. If you want an example of this, wander through the galleries of ancient temples dedicated to the subject. Read about the fertility rites that are still practiced in Asia. These are not perversions any more than christianity’s sexless renewal celebration is a perversion of nature as well.
The US is demonstrably repressive when it comes to the subject of sex. Demonstrably repressive, and at the same time unhealthily obsessed with meaningless sex like pornography, which can be found all over the place in spite of the almost reflexive repression present everywhere in the US that isn’t the internet. Or San Francisco. Naked bodies being used to sell every single product you can imagine, whether that sales strategy makes sense or not.
Pornography is not really sex in the same way that film is not real life. The proverbial money shot, a hallmark of pornography, defeats the entire purpose of the sex act. If the male’s bodily fluids aren’t left inside the female’s body, what is occurring is no more meaningful than a daily walk in the park. A session of weight lifting. Swimming a few laps. It is exercise; and in the case of pornography, exercise engaged in for the purpose of display only. As Robin Williams once famously quipped pornography is “an industrial film covered in fur”.
Sex is a joyous celebration of life. It is central to the human experience. No adult life is complete that doesn’t include some form of sexual interaction with a willing partner on a regular basis. Good health requires this and I consider it a travesty in the US that we cannot come to grips with the existence of sex all around us all the time, much less be unable to declare that the Rites of Spring should be founded around sex.
I have a solution to this frustrating issue from a non-believing perspective. I’m simply going to stop acknowledging Easter as a Spring holiday. The Vernal Equinox is the holiday now. I’m done with the vagaries of Easter, aside from the chocolate of course. Dopamine rewards being what they are I’ll take them where I can get them. I’ll just wait til Monday April 17th to go chocolate and Blackbird egg shopping this year. I can wait a month. We’ve got these dice to play with. Should keep us busy for at least that long.
What you have just read is the second 2017 version of my Vernal Equinox post. The “ctrl-z while editing” Blogger glitch claimed the first version scant days before its publish date. I have no idea how that version differs from this one. C’est la vie. This is also why the blog is now hosted on a third party site created with WordPress software. C’est la guerre. This post was based on one that was originally published here.
Every day should be a learning experience. If each day is not a learning experience, you are doing it wrong. The apparently obvious is not apparent or obvious until you trip over it. The mundane day to day events in human cultures sometimes never get communicated to people from outside that culture. The Vernal Equinox, for example, is also the first day of the Persian New Year. I discovered this while listening to A Bittersweet Persian New Year.
Lacking the ability to just move the New Year around willy-nilly myself, and also lacking a desire to mix one celebration with another, I’ll have to simply wish celebrants of Nowruz a Happy New Year! and leave it at that. However, a two-week festival leaves plenty of time to celebrate beyond simply observing the Rites of Spring, so I may have to explore this festival idea some more.
In case you’re asking “what’s a cuck?” I might ask in return “where have you been hiding for the last year?” In any case, cuck is short for cuckold, an insult that the alt-right (read as white nationalist) hurl at people they believe are being cuckolded by the system. They think they are being amusing, pretending that people who are happy in the current system are somehow weaker than they are. They are pretty typical trolls. That this has some untraceable connection to sexual potency or your willingness to live in an open relationship if that’s what suits you. It is just more coded language. Next time someone uses a word that you don’t understand, ask them point blank “what does that mean?” If they can’t tell you, they are the stupid ones. #MAGA=Misguided Appallingly Gullible Americans.
In this episode, Sam Harris talked to David Frum. The one thing I will say about David Frum (aside from the fact that he echos most of what I say in Caveat Emptorand the rest of the #MAGA posts) is that his projections into the future are as skewed as most conservative political operatives are these days. He totally dismisses the possibility of the Democrats rallying and handing defeat to the Republicans in the next election. Provided, of course, that we survive as a country to the 2018 elections, which is an open question in my mind. He doesn’t understand the government’s legitimate role in bolstering the economics of the poor with desperately needed cash handouts, typical of most conservatives. He doesn’t understand that transgendered issues are important, in the typical WASPish fashion. He doesn’t understand that religion is part of humanity’s past, not its future.
There is a clear-cut case for how the Republicans see their way clear to a Trump impeachment that isn’t mentioned in this conversation Sam Harris. That is the looming prospect of being turned out of office by angry voters. As the pressure against Trump mounts (and it will) the more likely it is this route will be pursued.
I do like his analysis of the financial angles leading to a Trump exit. His Electoral Highness’ health would suddenly take a turn for the worst if a law requiring the secretary of the treasury to release the tax returns of any major party candidate for president, and the sitting president and vice president every year, was passed. He will suddenly discover he is too ill to continue serving in office. Too ill, as in; he won’t survive if the Russian and Chinese mafias come after him for potentially exposing their financial ties to him.
We should also agitate continuously for an independent inquiry with full subpoena powers to get to the bottom of the Trump/Russia connection. This would be a more satisfying outcome, in my opinion. I don’t want him just out of office. I want him, his supporters, his staff, his family and anyone who enables his crimes to face trial. Sooner rather than later. Unless we light a legal fire under the asses in congressional seats, they will sit around and pretend this is politics as usual until the country breaks apart through neglect and mismanagement. Quite a legacy for the party of Lincoln to be saddled with.
David Frum’s experience working in the real estate business lends more weight to his insights on the subject of Trump. It’s been my experience that people who are enamored of free markets or business acumen really need to spend more time in the trenches that lead to getting crap built in this country. Probably in any country. They’ll come away far less misty-eyed about the subject.
“happy people never became nazis”
Dorothy Thompson via David Frum
Postscript
A few years after this episode aired, Sam Harris retitled his podcast to Making Sense, which really isn’t any better subtext-wise than Waking Up was. It still infers that your opponents don’t do the thing you do, as if they don’t make sense or are awake, which makes it just as subject to misunderstanding or misuse. I stopped listening to Sam’s podcast after his run-in with Ezra Klein. Basically I substituted Ezra’s show for Sam’s show and called it an improvement. Ezra now works for the NY Times as of this writing, I still listen to Vox podcasts and not Sam’s, and Sam is still being Sam on his podcast, the last time I checked. Still being the living, breathing Dunning-Kruger example that caused me to stop listening to him.
When Waking up became Making Sense, Sam pulled down all his old Youtube versions of his podcast. Some of them went back up on Youtube. Some of them did not. I didn’t look that hard, but this one did not come up in a search and I didn’t care enough to go find it on Youtube. Knock yourself out if Watching audio files on Youtube is your thing. Spotify self-embeds like Youtube does and takes less bandwidth. Thank you Spotify.
A few years back on Facebook, I posted the image at right to The Wife’s wall. Silly me, I was thinking I could entice the woman I love into engaging in some Rites of Spring when I posted it.
It is a testament to the sexual repression in the US that there isn’t even a wiki page on the subject of Rites of Springthat isn’t about music. Another testament is the fact that I can’t even say exactly when I posted the image to The Wife’sFacebook wall, because the image is consistently removed as offensive every time it is posted there.
I am sorry that the fact that spring is the time of rebirth, of fertility and sex, gets in the way of a deathcult-like obsession with afterlives and resurrection that is found within the various flavors of the christian religion when it comes to their spring celebration. That the sexual repression that Paul introduced into the church from it’s earliest days has seized hold of the majority of the religion’s followers in the US, causing them to reject all things sexual as anti-christian. Jesus was not a sexist, saw no need to place women in an inferior role in the world.
There is also a hemispherical bias here. I’ve often wondered what an Australian would think of the hubbub common in the Northern hemisphere surrounding this issue. Easter is in the fall in the Southern hemisphere; consequently the death-cultish air that bothers me about Easter probably is a nice foreshadowing of the oncoming winter when viewed from South of the equator; a preparation for the dying off of plant life, the hibernation of animal life, with a spring resurrection waiting at the other end of winter.
I originally titled this piece Easter-Ishtar-Astarte. How about Tammuz? Because I wanted to push back at the near-hysterical responses I got from offended christians on Facebook. The offense has since spread all across the internet, with rebuttals on nearly any christian site you care to look at (no I won’t link any of them) most of them rather petty in tone. Also, most of them cherry-pick history to prove their points, largely relying on Bede and Herodotus who give the preferred twist to the pagan spring rituals that pre-date christianity.
The facts are much harder to tease out than those people who simply want to prove their worldview make them.
For example. The article at Scientific American on the subject of this meme also cites the Germanic deity Eostre as the basis of the word Easter. However, the sole source of this proposition remains Bede. In the end, the need to prove that Easter is or isn’t some phonetic variation on Ishtar is pointless and petty, a hallmark of the vast majority of Facebook content. As one of the commenters to the SA article pointed out;
Actually, there is a connection between Oestre and Ishtar. Ishtar is associated with Venus, which is often referred to as the morning star, or light-bringer with its association with Lucifer (lucis = light). Venus is the planet of love and marriage traditionally.
There are Babylonian egg myths too featuring Ishtar being hatched, and the mystic egg falling from heaven to the Euphrates. These same myths are recycled from their Egyptian/Babylonian origins and do seem to be connected to the old pagan rites.
The mythology of Astarte (Greek) and Ashtoreth (Jewish) seems very similar too. Everything seems to have a common origin.(emphasis added)
The rest of the meme is even more questionable than the assertion that Easter and Ishtar are one and the same. Further down in the SA article is the observation;
The cosmic egg, according to the Vedic writings, has a spirit living within it which will be born, die, and be born yet again. Certain versions of the complicated Hindu mythology describe Prajapati as forming the egg and then appearing out of it himself. Brahma does likewise, and we find parallels in the ancient legends of Thoth and Ra. Egyptian pictures of Osiris, the resurrected corn god, show him returning to life once again rising up from the shell of a broken egg. The ancient legend of the Phoenix is similar. This beautiful mythical bird was said to live for hundreds of years. When its full span of life was completed it died in flames, rising again in a new form from the egg it had laid (4).
Eggs appear to be central to almost all of the spring rites and creation stories. They lend themselves quite handily to the theme of new life arising from an apparently inanimate object. There is no specific linkage between Ishtar and eggs that I could lay hands on; but then there doesn’t need to be, since the egg is all over the various mythologies of the day as being the beginning of life.
The hardest facet of current Easter practices to track down is the Easter Bunny. Theories abound, and I even have some thoughts of my own on the subject as relating to the Wolpertinger and the Jackalope, both icons of Germanic influence in the US.
The rabbit’s springtime mating antics do bring me back to the point I started with. Like so many things human, the trappings of tradition cloud the purpose of the celebration.
The Rites of Spring from a human standpoint are necessarily sexual. That is how we renew the species, creating children who go on to make the future of the human animal a reality. Nearly all of the celebrations of spring outside of the deviancy of of the christian religion are sexual in nature, as they should be.
If you want an example of this, wander through the galleries of ancient temples dedicated to the subject. Read about the fertility rites that are still practiced in Asia. These are not perversions any more than christianity’s sexless renewal celebration is a perversion of nature as well.
The US is demonstrably repressive, when it comes to the subject of sex. Demonstrably repressive, and at the same time unhealthily obsessed with meaningless sex in the form of pornography. Pornography which can be found all over the place in spite of the almost reflexive repression present everywhere in the US that isn’t the internet. Or San Francisco.
Pornography is not really sex, in the same way that film is not real life. The proverbial money shot, a hallmark of pornography, defeats the entire purpose of the sex act. If the male’s bodily fluids aren’t left inside the female body, what is occurring is no more meaningful than a daily walk in the park. A session of weight lifting. Swimming a few laps. It is exercise; and in the case of pornography, exercise engaged in for the purpose of display and nothing else; or as Robin Williams once famously quipped “an industrial film covered in fur”.
Sex is a joyous celebration of life. It is central to the human experience. No adult life is complete that doesn’t include some form of sexual interaction with a willing partner on a regular basis. Good health requires this, and I consider it a travesty in the US that we cannot come to grips with the existence of sex all around us, all the time.
Much less be unable to declare that the Rites of Spring should be founded around sex.
I think I have a solution to the problem, at least from my non-believing perspective. I’m simply going to stop marking the holiday as celebrated by the majority of the christian world. Starting this year, the Vernal Equinox will be my Spring holiday. I’m done with the vagaries of christian Easter, aside from the chocolate, of course. Dopamine rewards being what they are, I’ll take them where I can get them.
Since this is topical once again, I moved it forward from its original April 30th publication and added an addendum to the end discussing current events. If I had perfect knowledge of future events before they happened, like a god, I would have held off posting this and Homophobia in Denial until now.
On The Other Hand, If god is really what people say he is, he could have fixed this problem as well as the slavery problem in advance by giving detailed instructions to the people who wrote his books; rather than letting them write down their own customs and fears as if they were instructions from him. But then I was going to leave that specific discussion to Jim over at Stonekettle Station. I’m trying to stick to the legality of the issue at hand here.
It slipped my mind that I was actually being topical with my piece Homophobia in Denial, that the SCOTUS was going to be debating the legality of marriage being broadened to include two people of the same sex. Given the contents of that piece, it should be pretty obvious that I have no problem with two people of the same sex getting married.
I actually go a bit farther than just not having a problem with that. I really don’t see the point in marriage in the first place, as far as being separated from other business contracts.
I know, I know, I’m a soulless bastard that has no emotions. Trust me, I’ve heard that a few times. Still, I have to wonder why marriage is different than any other joint partnership? Why are there special rules for this business arrangement that are completely different from all the others?
The Wife and I have a prenuptial agreement that involves a rather grisly death if either of us strays, sexually. I know that I wouldn’t have to make that deal with a business partner. But I also know that we are complete weirdos and discuss every point of an agreement before we enter into them. This is true with everything we purchase, not just with the agreement that started our relationship.
Most people don’t even know what their partner wants in the case of medical incapacity. We’ve discussed so many different scenarios that I’d be hard pressed to name an event we haven’t discussed and what her wishes would be. Without that level of discussion, marriage is just a business arrangement, with no more emotional investment than the subject of which TV to buy. Fully half of the people who get married will stay married less than 5 years. The first TV they buy as a couple will still be working when the divorce is settled.
That is not a sacrament, that is an agreement made on an emotional whim. A moment of sexual lust, lost as soon as the dopamine receptors become habituated to the reward.
Given that marriage is expected before sexual gratification is achieved because of religious teachings, who is to blame for its being entered into so lightly? Not the government, which is tasked with simply keeping track of the business agreements made in its jurisdiction. That blame rests solely on the shoulders of religious leaders who push the agenda of sexual abstinence (which is in reality a perversion) onto our unsuspecting children. The selfsame leaders who are now leading the charge against so-called gay marriage.
I’d like to offer the counter-argument that gay marriage is actually better than heterosexual marriage. How is that possible, you ask? Because homosexuals who want to get married have at least thought about what marriage means. Have at least talked to their partner about future plans. Want to tie each other together in a binding relationship that means more than a few months of hot sex. They at least understand that marriage should be a lifetime commitment, not something entered into because they have to do it before sexual gratification occurs.
The real sacrament, if there is one at all, is the gay marriage; because they’re making a pledge with the full knowledge of what that pledge means, not blinded by the passion of unfulfilled lust.
As for how to address those naysayers out there who think that marriage is some holy union too good for homosexuals to share in, I’ll leave that to Stonekettle. He does a much better job of taking them apart than I ever could.
You are the very absolutists, the very religious fanatics, this country was designed to protect its citizens from.
About 70 percent of marriages that began in the 1990s reached their 15th anniversary (excluding those in which a spouse died), up from about 65 percent of those that began in the 1970s and 1980s. Those who married in the 2000s are so far divorcing at even lower rates. If current trends continue, nearly two-thirds of marriages will never involve a divorce, according to data from Justin Wolfers, a University of Michigan economist
Among the many facts in the article is the notation that the less educated, more traditionalist male-lead households still suffer from divorce rates at the previous high levels. So it is a myth for every group outside of traditional christian households lead by a male breadwinner.
It is also worth noting that the progressive changes of the 70’s persist today. The feminist revolution, the achievement of reproductive rights for women, and the more relaxed attitudes towards living together before marriage have lead to reduced rates of divorce, with women holding an equal place in modern society alongside men. This comes as no surprise to me, that women being formally allowed to now pick their mates instead of being prizes handed out by their fathers has lead to fewer bad marriages.
Fewer people marry these days. That statistic has also lead to a reduction in divorce. Can’t get divorced if you never marry.
The point that is made statistically in the article is synonymous with the point I made in this blog post; that marriage has already changed and will continue to change. That escaping from the confines of christian dogma has been a positive change in US society. That testing a relationship with co-habitation before actually getting married is a very good idea.
The Wife hates that I compare marriage to a business arrangement. She has always hated that comparison when I have made it. I’m sure most romantics of both sexes hate the very notion that marriage is anything like a business deal. Their rejection of this observation doesn’t actually change the reality of the situation. That there are financial concerns that have to be addressed when contemplating any union. That marriage is desirable to homosexuals because it fixes problems with custody of children, inheritance and survivor’s benefits. These are largely financial calculations, and marriage exists to address them. Not because of love. The notion of romantic marriage was an unrealized ideal before the 1970’s. That is the hard-nosed fact about marriage that romantics ignore.
When seen in that light as opposed to the notion of fee for sex being the business arrangement (you dirty-minded people. I wasn’t even thinking of it that way) it becomes understandable that the largest concerns in any marriage are financial. If you fail to discuss these issues before tying the knot, you will regret it later.
The Supreme Court has long held that laws that discriminate based on sex must be presumed unconstitutional and invalidated unless the government can prove that they can pass rigorous, heightened judicial scrutiny. Relying on that doctrine would answer the crucial question why the Court was deciding the same-sex marriage question at all. The sex discrimination shifts the burden of proof to the state, and the state hasn’t met that burden. The argument is clear and based on decades-old precedent. An amicus brief I coauthored developed this claim, and Chief Justice Roberts raised it when the case was argued.
But any vehicle that gets you where you want to go is better than no vehicle at all.
No need to repeal DOMA now. That act has been rendered invalid with the decision handed down last week. We still need to repeal RFRA and apologize to religious minorities and the non-religious for ever passing it in the first place. Still hoping for a congress that is more useful and less obstructionist than it has been for as long as I can remember now.
The American Bar Association designed the Model Rules of Professional Conduct to define ethical duties of attorneys. State Supreme Courts have adopted versions of the Model Rules as binding upon attorneys who practice law in their jurisdictions. Attorneys are not free to ignore them–compliance is conditioned upon being licensed to practice law–and failure to obey could result in disbarment.
Disbarring them for ethical violations (Cruz’s behavior on several subject warrants this, not just this one) would be a supreme irony, considering the arguments that they are making.
I’ve been a fan of John Varley’s SF since the Wife first introduced me to it. Common in most of Varley’s work is the idea that sex was something you could change on a whim. That you might actually simply choose to be sexless as a statement (which lead to other perversions) that you could become female in order to have children (something I might have done) but then reverse to male in order to have more strength for work later in life if strength was something you needed. The idea that sex was a irreversible state you were assigned to at birth would be a foreign concept in a Varley future. The one part of Varley’s futures that I really didn’t have a problem with.
I’m starting with the subject of John Varley’s futuristic SF because I want there to be no confusion about my overall intentions while discussing this subject. The subject of gender, of sex, and changing it. This is about categorization. I’ve breached this subject a few times now in other places, and I’m not convinced that the overall subject, false categorization; the creation of groupings which don’t actually exist, really is understood as the point of it all.
This is not about nature, or about god. There isn’t some stamp that is placed on us at birth that says we have to be either female or male. Sexual attributes appear on a curve, just like all other attributes that we possess. Some small percentage of people identify more with the opposite sex than their own external appearance. Some even smaller group have sex organs for both sexes.
I mentioned in a parenthetical above that I might have opted for changing my sex to female had that been an option, for the purpose of having children. This is a true statement. The Wife has problems with the birthing of children. Had she been born even a generation before ours, she probably would have died in childbirth. Which is a very sobering thought. So sobering that I would have willingly changed places with her in order that we could have the children we both wanted, and save her the risk to her health. But that wasn’t possible. Still isn’t possible. If it were, it would be possible for her physiology to be altered in a way that allowed her to have children without dying, without my having to change my sex.
But would I do it anyway? I’ve always been a nurturer. Played with dolls as a child. My mother had to explain to me why I couldn’t take my dolls to school with me. How the other boys would not understand and would make fun of me. Giving up the dolls did not change who I was. I’d sooner spend an hour rocking a baby than doing almost anything else. Had I needed to carry my own children to term I’d like to think I’d have done it, despite the pain involved.
I’m not afraid of being mistaken for female, on the other hand. If you put a wig and breasts on me (as on most men) I’ll look like a dude with a wig and breasts. Just like most men will. So my status as male is secure; so secure that I would look stupid trying to be anything other than male.
I can understand being personally convinced that you are in the wrong body. I understand the quandary, or at least I like to think I do. I’m just not willing to concede that gender is a thing. A thing that can be altered. A thing that can be altered without altering the sex of the person.
This fact is easily demonstrable. If you gave the people who want to change their gender the option of simply modifying their birth certificates (which in a general sense is impossible) the vast majority of them would probably change the sexual designation on their identity papers and give up the gender argument. It is only the documentation’s immutable status that makes this entire argument so convoluted.
Hawaii is now allowing people to change their sexual designation on their birth certificates without having to undergo surgery. Only time will tell if this fixes the problem of sexual designation for public purposes. Personally I don’t think the problem will go away until there aren’t restrooms separated by sex; removing the requirement to declare sexuality just to relieve yourself. I know a lot of women who don’t like this idea (yes, dear) and yet I can’t think of any other way to address the inequality presented by separate restrooms.
Documents are fallible, as humans are fallible. Some drunken buffoon on duty at the delivery ward at night can’t uncross his eyes and figure out if the baby in front of him is male or female, and writes the wrong identification out on the birth certificate. Maybe the child just has ambiguous genitalia. Who knows? What is certain is that people are being asked to live their lives as one sex, when they know that they are not of that sex.
If you accept that the sexual role you will want to play as an adult can be determined by an outside observer at the time of your birth, then you might as well assume that there are also innate designations of dominant or submissive; that BDSM roles are also assigned at birth. That you might not want to play either role, or find the concept that you will have to play one or the other role insulting is beyond the comprehension of the record keeper. Obviously everyone will be in one group or the other. It has to be that way, right?
The birth certificate as an unchangeable document just doesn’t add up to a rational system capable of being defended, from a sexual designation point of view at least. What if you are physically capable of handling any role at birth? What if no sexual role mentally suits you as an adult? What if you think that role-playing should be left to fantasy and not real-world interactions?
Gender isn’t a thing. Gender is a perception. More than that, gender is the perception of an observer, the identity the observer assigns in their head when dealing with other people. Gender is the presentation that you attempt when you dress in a particular fashion. Wear your hair a particular way. In the choices of accessories. You cannot dictate what gender someone will assign to you before they meet you. It is the interaction which will define how they deal with you as a person. You can prime that interaction with overt displays of the gender you want to be seen as, but that doesn’t (especially for men trying to be women) mean that you’re going to pull it off without looking silly.
It is actually easier to pass as a man than it is as a woman. Most men (as the Wife has discovered) will treat the unknown other as an equal, as a guy, if the woman simply acts like a man. Dresses like a man. Even if she is curvy. It was common in earlier times when gender roles were more strictly defined for women to pass themselves off as men. To simply assume the role of male, and do it so flawlessly that most men they dealt with never knew.
We hold ourselves up to ridiculous standards of beauty. We idolize and worship the prettiest among us as if they are representations of ourselves. It is a fantasy that a regular person can ever match the beauty of models, as if even the models look that good in poor lighting. This is not a trans-gendered man, this is just a man. More of a man than I ever have been, if static beauty is a measure of manliness (could do without the tattoos, but it isn’t my body, so knock yourself out) Just as this person is a woman. What this is, more than anything else, is an error in record keeping; a bug in the process of sexual identification which needs to be addressed. This is a manifestation of the worship of documentation as some immutable testament to what is good and natural instead of serving as a reference to what is real and substantial.
I’ve been barraged with this lately from many different corners. It’s been on Skeptoid. I’ve argued about it on Facebook. It’s in my e-mail newsfeed. I’ve watched several TED talkson the subject. The celebration of the trans-gendered, and the labeling of the rest of us as cis-gendered. The idea that a minority can dictate to the majority what labels that majority will wear is farcical on its face. Never mind the fact that it is an invented label and not a correct usage of the terms. Just trying to give fair warning here.
On top of that, just exactly how do you determine who the cis are?
I’d like to speak to all the lumpy old people out there for a minute or two. You know who you are. You remember how, when you were growing up, everyone told you that you had to do this or that, or you weren’t manly? You had to paint your face, be happy and agreeable, like to clean house (or at least pretend to) or you weren’t feminine? And you, being who you are, either hesitantly agreed, said nothing, or offered a rebuttal; but then went on to ignore everything said on that subject by others and just went on to live you life like you wanted anyway? Are you trans or cis? Dom or sub? Do any of the many labels others want you to wear matter in the slightest? Or are these labels annoyances that you’d just as soon not have to deal with?
Just because the majority don’t go around complaining about the gender stereotypes they are saddled with, doesn’t mean that they are cis in any measurable way.
I’ll happily give up gender specific pronouns, given alternatives that don’t sound forced in conversation. I have no problem using they instead of he or she. Their instead of hers or his. Don’t have a problem with mixed-sex restrooms since I hate urinals in the first place and won’t use them. Wouldn’t put them in restrooms that I designed unless told to. I don’t see the problem with allowing people to change their sex designation on their identification.
I’m just not willing to accept that gender is a thing separate from sex. Not willing to adopt an invented label just because people who want to change their sex have been forced to wear the label trans. I’ll happily support your right to not have to wear that label, either. Not going to start loving sports, hating house cleaning, or conforming to the myriad of gender stereotypes that are out there in the world. I’m not cis. I’m not trans.I’d appreciate it if you didn’t presume to put labels on me that I don’t freely adopt. That statement should echo with quite a few people out there.
My children have friends that are struggling with this issue right now. Children and young adults who want to know what labels they should put on themselves. A few of them I’m actually quite worried about. To them I want to say STOP. Don’t harm yourself. Be who you are, don’t try to change to fit some perception that other’s hold for you. We love you just the way you are. There is no need to change. To pretend. Just be. Try to be happy, if you can. Experience all the joy you can wrap your head around. Good advice, no matter what label you want to hang on yourself.
I expected to get pushback from the trans community because I thrash that communities insistence that there is a thing called cis. Instead what I got was a whole lot of hell from non-trans people who kept insisting that trans was a problem. I continue to disagree with those people. No matter the source of pushback, no matter the source of the attempt to label non-trans as cis, there still isn’t anything called cis.
The reason why there isn’t a thing called cis is the same reason why there really isn’t a thing called natural; at least in the experience of everyday average human beings. The reason why cis and natural are not things you can define is because there is no default property or state which is then modified by biology or human intervention. There is just the world as it exists in all its riotous varieties of life and experience. Human modification of things from their natural state renders objects that are in many ways still natural since humans are themselves creations of nature. Something manmade is not necessarily something that is unnatural.
There were several comments on this post that were lost when I shifted commenting back to Blogger comments from G+ comments. This was an unanticipated and unavoidable outcome from my perspective. I hadn’t realized that comments would actually disappear from G+, I figured they’d stay there and you just couldn’t see them on the blog. I was tired of having to fight pitched battles on G+ that were visible on the blog and I was equally tired of seeing my posts to G+ show up as comments on the blog posts I was promoting on G+, so I migrated back to the Blogger comment structure which also allowed me to write comments with HTML code that would display properly. Things change and loss of information is always a potential outcome during change. The form this blog is published under is likely to change to a more mobile friendly framework shortly, and that itself may cause some information to be lost. My apologies if this troubles people who like things to stay the same. However, those comments are gone, gone, gone and that leaves me struggling to grasp the arguments that I can no longer reference for clarities sake. My apologies if I tangent while trying to present the argument thrust at me previously, an argument that is now lost.
There is a common misconception among the people who believe in concepts like cis or natural; the misconception solidifies with conscious modification of whatever the thing is. A thing that was natural becomes unnatural. A thing that was cis is now trans. This misconception manifests in belief that genetics are absolute and deterministic. That XX yields women and XY yields men and there is never a miscommunication. That if you have a penis you are a boy and if you have a vagina you are a girl. This kind of rigid codification is not the reality of life as it occurs, but I couldn’t explain or produce an exception to the presumed rule that was thrown at me. Until now.
Listening to LatinoUSA today I was introduced to the concept of Intersex. Intersex people can be male, female or both simultaneously, or even neither as the case may be. These individuals have been the subject of millennia of mistreatment by both society and the medical community. Mistreatment that is only now being rectified, and then only in places that honor the UN declarations on human rights for the most part.
It is possible to have sexual development produce these vague outcomes because a fetus doesn’t have any sexual variation until after the seventh week of gestation. Specifically, the story in the LatinoUSA piece was of an individual suffering from Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome producing an outcome of externally male appearing genitals but with no ability to produce secondary sexual characteristics at adulthood because the male sex hormones had no effect on her cells. She was subjected to corrective surgery against her wishes in her teens, surgery which made her female, the gender she identifies as today.
There are several different scenarios that will lead to a fetus not developing along expected male/female lines producing individuals who fall into one of the other two possible sexual outcomes neither/both, outcomes which don’t actually have accepted labels or words to define them. Yet. But what this information does provide is an explanation of how you can be of one genetic type and not be of the sex for that genetic makeup.
Given the potential permutations of complex organisms like humans beings, it is quite likely that any number of LGBT people could have some form of intersex affectation that has never been discovered. Many people who want to be identified as cis may actually be affected by one of the many diseases and syndromes that lead to what was once seen as a serious handicap requiring emergency surgery to correct as soon as possible. In the end it benefits us all to accept that there isn’t a clear-cut dividing line between boys and girls and to end these ridiculous rules of separation along sexually predetermined lines. We harm ourselves in trying to set such rigid boundaries to our own sexuality.
Let me see if I can explain this to the slow of mind.
People used queer to describe homosexuals because the idea of homosexuality scared them. This fear is born of latent homosexuality, fear that you are homosexual. Ergo calling something gay because it upsets you means you experience latent homosexual feelings.
To put this bluntly; if you are a man, you like to look at other men’s butts. No point in denying it, we’ve caught you looking, so just admit it and we’ll get on to the next point.
You’ve been taught that there’s something wrong with finding other men… (or women, if you are one. Not as much of a problem with women, so I understand. Being a man I don’t want to speak out of turn, so I’ll offer this up as an explanation of my sexism on the subject) …attractive. Consequently you think that there should be some kind of punishment involved for people who find members of their own sex attractive enough to actually engage in sex acts with them.
This isn’t about christian teachings. I know it’s not about christian teachings because, as Jim Wright points out here, the law that mentions homosexuality is 39th in the book of Leviticus,
No Messy Hair is more important than don’t have gay sex – seriously, go look at your bible. It’s right there. The fact that you own a fucking comb is more important to God than not having gay sex.
It’s 39th, and almost none of the other rules are things that christians feel the urge to make laws about. No wine for Catholics and no dogs as pets. I just can’t see that list as being anything worth losing any sleep over.
Having a verse in your holy book to point to that explains your reaction does not lend credence to your latent homosexual fears. It just makes you look silly when the other laws in the book are things that you’d either get awards for today (sex with three generations of the same family, here’s your trophy) or laughed out of culinary school for proposing in the first place. Much less follow them yourself, privately. Go ask any number of prominent church leaders who lead closeted private lives about it if you don’t believe me.
It is a fact that a small percentage of the population are afraid of the biological imperatives that they feel. In some cases that’s a good thing. You really shouldn’t go around murdering people who call out your latent homosexuality just because you feel an overwhelming desire to do so. Some of those feelings are harmless, however, and mean nothing. Indulge them or not, it really makes no difference.
It was accepted tradition in Western society that there was something wrong with homosexuality. It wasn’t just laws in the bible, because the tradition predates the christian church. When civic law became a thing, that law was adopted because of the tradition. And why not? Look at the way they live, there’s clearly something wrong with them.
Never mind that ostracizing individuals causes the very problems that are attributed to the behaviors in the first place. Research has shown, time and again, that creating an outgroup leads to the kinds of behavior patterns seen in the homosexual community. So it’s not them, it is the rest of us. It is us and our need to see ourselves as better than them.
My daughter, very rightly, pointed out that not everyone who uses the word gay to mean bad is a homophobe. I get that as well. Not everyone who thinks that there is something wrong with homosexuality is actually afraid of finding other men’s butts attractive. The vast majority of us really don’t notice. We just accept that the things we’ve been taught are true, even though they aren’t. Contrary to popular belief, there’s nothing wrong with being a homosexual, if that’s what you want to be, if that’s what you are. There is no clinical evidence that shows harm in just being a homosexual. There is no social reason why homosexuals would be any different than the rest of us, if they were simply accepted as part of the ingroup. The majority would be ok with that, if we simply knew the truth.
Homophobes are a tiny little subset of the larger whole.
You know the kind of group I’m talking about, a minority that wants the rest of us to behave the way they feel comfortable. So the next time you misuse the word gay to mean bad, ask yourself if you actually like that guy’s butt or not. Because that is the signal you are sending. The next time you stand up and denounce homosexuals ask yourself if that guy over there (you know who he is) doesn’t actually turn you on and that scares you.
Because if the answer is no, then you aren’t a member of that group, and you really shouldn’t be doing their work for them. Let them haul their own baggage. Put the shoe on the other foot. Perhaps it’s time that we call out the homophobic for the sick individuals that they are, and prescribe for them some of the treatments that they have demanded we subject others too. Ostracise them, see how well they fare without the rest of us.
With the shoe on the other foot, maybe we can finally put this contentious issue to rest.
Bake for them two, the image (and the article) said. The SCOTUS came to the opposite conclusion. I’m beginning to see a pattern here. In hindsight, there were more articles about the art of cake baking than there was about the issue of whether homosexual couples have a right to exist in the world today, able to buy the same things that everyone else buys. Apparently they aren’t allowed to buy the same things the rest of us do. Please explain to me how this totals out as equality, because I’m seeing a deficit in at least one column.
The title of this article is identical to an article I saved on delicious way back in 2008. Originally hosted on TBD, written by one Michael Castleman for that site, it has since been taken down and can be found archived on the Wayback Machine. I found the story and book it was taken from to be quite entertaining, and for a long time I hosted a copy of the article here for my own amusement as well as the potential enlightenment of others.
Unfortunately for everyone concerned, the author of the book either made up most of her citations for historical information, or purposefully misinterpreted the historical record in order to promote the popular misunderstanding of the use and origin of vibrators. I was duped. Everyone who read the book and made the movie based on the book were duped, because we wanted to believe something that was not true.
The idea was that massaging the clitoris would calm down the hysteria. The vibrator’s origin story became so popular that it spawned a historical romantic comedy called Hysteria in 2011 starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, as well as the 2009 Pulitzer Prize-nominated play In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play). The thing is, it’s not true.
No one took the time to follow up on the research until years later when Hallie Lieberman was writing her dissertation on technology and technology’s use in orgasm. When she went back to do her due diligence work on the subject before publishing her dissertation, she discovered the injustice that had been perpetrated in writing Rachel Maines’ book.
It is important to remember that massagers were no different than any other type of snake oil back in the years when they were invented (Granville’s Hammer) and they were thought to be a good treatment for everything including the made-up female disease labeled hysteria. When someone is acting hysterically, it has nothing to do with their uterus wandering all around their bodies, just to be clear here. You can’t cure that with pelvic massage, either.
Yes, some doctors did use vibrators as described in Rachel Maines’ book. Snake oil salesmen and quacks used them for those reasons and for a whole host of other legitimate and made-up reasons. However, there wasn’t an accepted medical practice associated with their use. That never happened.
I find the repression of sexual information which pervades US culture almost intolerable, but the fabrication of a false history of sex is just as much of a disservice as the repression of sexual information is. If we ever want to get past pornography dominating all our information services, the US is going to have to come to grips with the reality of sexuality in all its various forms. The place to start is to admit that women like sex, need sex, just like men do. Men need to stop pretending that sex is about them. Sex is about what the couple creates with their coupling, together. The interplay between yin and yang, dark and light, negative and positive, male and female.
More information on the subject of the history of vibrators can be found at the Antique Vibrator Museum. If you are more of a youtuber, or just want to explore the subject of sex with someone who clearly enjoys talking about the subject, let me suggest a further resource in the YouTuber LaciGreen, specifically her video titled SEX TOY HYSTERIA. I laughed my ass off watching Laci Green explain about the history of the vibrator. Laci Green is the featured guest of this episode of Point of Inquiry, from the Center for Inquiry.
It is also worth noting that the Texas law outlawing vibrators is no longer on the books. (This should have been the first warning sign that the book and the movie that this article was originally about were not well researched. -ed) In 2008 it was struck down after being challenged by two shop owners who wanted to be able to sell these devices in their stores. I actually blogged about this at the time in this article and I just found an article on Lonestar Q debunking the I09 article that I stupidly relied on previously.
Our sitting governor was the defender of the law in federal courts as the Texas A.G. He spent our money all the way up to the SCOTUS trying to deny women sexual satisfaction for as long as possible, because that is what Republicans exist for.
Misinformation corrected on December 22, 2022. My apologies to my readers.
Friends of my children have been putting those particular words together for years now. It has always driven me to distraction. My typical response runs along the lines of “how was that a joyous event?” or “They do appear to be enjoying themselves” I’ve almost never been able to let that one pass. What they mean to say is “that went queerly” or “that makes me feel weird”, but their undereducated little brains cannot retrieve the proper words to express themselves clearly.
Gay≠Queer, Gay≠Bad, Gay≠Stupid
Gay is not queer, queer is not gay. Queer; as any decent dictionary (not Wikipedia btw. Wiki is consumed with slang usage, the nature of a popularly edited tome) will tell you, means strange or odd, or when used as a verb means something akin to spoiling. It was thrown as an insult at homosexuals and transgendered people by backwards thinking troglodytes who were made to feel strange or odd by a man wearing a dress or acting feminine. If those groups wish to label themselves as queer now (much the way christians adopted the insulting term for followers of christ as their name) that would be their business.
In much the same fashion, gay does not mean homosexual, even though most dictionaries now list that as its primary meaning. Gay means happily excited or lighthearted and carefree. Case in point; when the Flintstones theme song encourages you to have a gay-old time they are not suggesting you become homosexual;
They want you to enjoy yourself lightheartedly; a perfectly cromulent way to define an episode of The Flintstones. So when friends of my children (or gaming troglodytes on the internet) exclaim “well that’s gay” in response to something that frustrates their primitive brains, I can get a bit snippy. Your latent homosexuality (homophobia) causing you to to be set queer towards homosexuals does not mean you get to call your reaction “gay”. Gay is something you enjoy, not something that pisses you off or scares you.
In that sense (a sense of joyous engagement) homosexuals who want to label themselves with the word gay are welcome to it. But can I have queer back, please? I mean, I like the word. It easily defines the feeling you get when walking through a graveyard at night. When someone is watching you and you can’t figure out who it is. It’s a good word, just not an insult to be hurled at people who are clearly enjoying themselves.
As my daughter observed on Facebook; yes, I have been reported on World of Warcraft for suggesting that someone insulting the english language by transposing the words gay and queer should pull their heads out of their asses and understand word meanings. Ironically their complaint was that I was insulting homosexuals by using the word queer.
What people choose to label themselves with is not a concern of mine; has never been something I take seriously or give meaning to. People call themselves all kinds of things in the course of their lives, almost never do they actually adopt the entirety of what the word really means (Objectivist and Libertarian spring immediately to mind) or actually even have a clue what other people adopting the label really believe.
The rant my daughter was on about on Facebook (the one that inspired this piece) concerned the word retarded. As someone who was labeled slow for most of his childhood, it’s another subject I can get snippy about. Having a learning disability, being retarded in development (retard means to slow; it is an engineering term) is one thing; being called a retard is no different than being called stupid, uneducated, or dumb (although dumb has many other insulting meanings as well) it is insulting to be so labeled, and people should be challenged when they offer base insults to people they disagree with. It is ad hominem, and beside the point of argument to be insulting to your opponents.
