Moaning Not Allowed, but Mourning is Okay

The International Orgasm Day Orgy, scheduled to coincide with International Orgasm Day on December 21st (mark your calendars for next year!),  was cancelled.  The Israeli organizer caved in to public pressure from those who did not appreciate the chance for hundreds, maybe thousands or even more, to have simultaneous orgasms and unabashed pleasure.

Kobi Druri, the organizer, stated in very plain terms,

…”war,” “violence” and “murder” have become more legitimate than “sex,” “orgasm” and “pleasure.”

How sad a statement is that?  Funny how public pressure can easily halt something like this but has done little to quell organized violence.

Dead in its Tracks

The current undisputed sensationalistic story du mois is chocked full of juicy things: mothers, children, underage sex, religion, polygamy and now, courtroom drama and lots of lawyers falling over themselves for attention.

The 80-year-old Tom Green County courtroom and a satellite courtroom set up in a City Hall auditorium two blocks away were jammed with dozens of mothers from the retreat, dressed in their iconic pastel prairie dresses and braided upswept hair.

The mothers were sworn in as witnesses, standing and mumbling their ‘I do’s’ in timid voices. As they sat silently, the flock of lawyers was constantly buzzing with murmurs and popping up to make motions or object as Walther tried to maintain order.

But when prosecutors tried to enter into evidence the medical records of three girls — two 17-year-olds and an 18-year-old — the lawyers jumped to their feet and crammed the aisles trying to see the papers. That’s when Walther called the recess.

Oh, the imagery. This will not end well.

Dirty Laundry

My wife said that the paparazzi should leave Britney Spears alone, before she ends up killing herself or being killed, much like Princess Diana. 

Then the paparazzi will go into introspection mode and the media will ask:  “Should we have left Britney alone?  Did the paparazzi drive her to the brink of death?”  And, of course, the introspective answer will be NO IT WASN’T OUR FAULT and after a few weeks of laying off celebrity problem children they will get right back on that horse.

Because our society can’t get enough dirty laundry.

The Hollywood Sex Machine

Hollywood sex and glamour drives an industry that not only knows media penetration, it defines media penetration.  The glamour of sex is apparent not only in a relatively liberal country like the U.S. but even in extremely conservative countries like Afghanistan, where child prostitution and pornography can be found with relative ease, and where Chinese restaurants are utilized as fronts for Chinese prostitutes.  Much of the time the West is blamed for bringing its decadence to other parts of the world.  But really, as long as there is testosterone there will be sexual desire.  The availability of film just helps it along.

Back to Hollywood.  Without Hollywood, as a society we would still be curious about sex, curious about drugs, and curious about violence.  Hollywood’s exposition of our seamy underside, however, has really pushed the envelope to the point where the line between acceptable and aberrant behavior has become terribly blurred.  How many killings and implied sex scenes per night do we average today on television?  I love to laugh over a sexual reference, but when Scrubs is on Comedy Central at 7:00 I have to wonder how many kids who aren’t old enough to grasp the concept get the wrong impression about relationships.

And in the end it’s relationships that I’m worried about.  Long-term ones seem to be going to hell in a hand basket. 

So what came first:  Our sexual freedom or Hollywood’s image of it?

 

Cause and Effect

There’s more sex, and more violent events on television than there is in real life, right?  I mean, the daily lives of TV characters are exposed to a seamier underside, much more often, than the average citizen, aren’t they?  How many references to sex or sexual relations do we get in an evening?  Lots, actually; the number has doubled since 1998.

It begs the question about cause and effect:  Is the exposure to the hairy edge of morality and ethics caused by Hollywood’s attention to it, or does Hollywood show more to society because more of society is moving to that edge?

We keep pushing the sex and drugs and violence envelope to a younger age.  I would not want to be the parent of a 14-year-old girl.  It must be a very hard task.

 

Name Calling

I was helping a gay friend move some furniture a little while back.  A couple of his friends came over to help.  They’re nice guys, and also gay, and also living with each other.  One of them has taken to calling the other one honey.

I’m no gay basher but I found this to be really icky.  Is it just me?

Sex Education and the Economy

In 2006 our government gave $176 million to sex education programs that teach abstinence until marriage.  Here’s what we got for that money:

Nothing.

In light of the current Administration’s push for cutbacks in the Adult Employment and Training program, the Job Corps and other so-called education programs because they demonstrate little significant improvement for the money spent, I think the Administration should fess up to the reality that all the money in the world isn’t going to change teenagers’ penchant for humping each other.  Worse, those teens that fall off the abstinence bandwagon are at risk for unwanted pregnancy and sexually-transmitted diseases, since these programs are not allowed to talk about condoms and contraception alternatives.

The historical context for abstinence until marriage was affected in small part by the very short time frame between the onset of puberty and the onset of marriage (for girls this was often measured in weeks).  Today there’s easily a 10-year average gap between puberty and marriage – an impossibly long time to try to control one’s hormones and the biological urges innately associated with them.  If nothing else, the $176 million thrown at these programs, with no change in sexual activity between those who participate in abstinence education and those who do not, is ample proof that the programs are not accomplishing what they intended to accomplish.  And they never will.

Here’s an idea:  Invest that money in condom awareness and safe sex while discouraging promiscuity.  Be open about the practice of sex instead of just the anatomy of sex.  Embrace the condom and in half a generation condom angst will disappear.  At least four things will happen:

• The incidence of STDs will go down
• The incidence of unwanted pregnancy will go down
• The number of abortions will go down
• The number of out-of-wedlock children who stand a good chance of becoming delinquent and a burden to society when they reach adulthood will go down.

Every one of these points:  STDs, unwanted pregnancy, abortion and juvenile delinquency costs real money – billions and billions of dollars.  Funnel that $176 million to something that would really make a difference and we’d save a heckuva bundle.  [Indeed.  In 2000 the cost of STDs alone was pegged at $6.5 billion.]  And the best part is that the success of the condom program is measurable:  It will only take around 9 months to determine if it’s effective.

Sunbathing in Buffalo

Microsoft’s Live Search web site has recently included Buffalo into its list of overflight cities, where it snaps photographs using aircraft to get extreme detail and close-up images of the metropolitan area. These are amazingly detailed, in some cases one can easily see people walking down the street.

This new database of images will generate at least two new hobbies:

• Searching for nude females sunbathing in their backyards
• Invasion of privacy lawsuits by people who were nude sunbathing in their backyards.

Questions That I Know Have Answers Out There

How long do countries that eliminate their ability to manufacture real products survive?  How long do countries that spend more than they take in survive?

What percentage of anti-abortionists are also anti-death penalty?  And what percentage of those who truly believe in the sanctity of life from the very beginning to the very end, are also vegetarians?

Do most politicians run for office because they really want to help their constituents, or do they run for office because it’s the best-paying job they’ll ever be able to get?  And in somewhat related fashion, do Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and Howard Stern really believe what they say, or are they just doing it for the money?

When they come out of the shower, do most women do it the easy way and strip naked first before dressing, or do most women try to dress discretely while still wearing the towel?

Finally, are the words “tit” and “titillating” related?  And if not, why not?

Tastes Like Chicken

My son brought home a doggy-box containing Veal Parmigiana the other day.  I don’t eat veal because of how they raise the calves and then slaughter them while still young – it’s just a thing I’ve got.

I asked my son if he was going to finish the veal; he said no.  So now I had this dilemma:  Do I eat it for dinner or do I let it go to waste?  Go to waste, or eat it?

I ate it.  Tastes like chicken.

First time I’ve knowingly had veal in 30 years.  I’ll probably not eat it again for 30 years.

Tempest in a Teapot

Yes, blog-whoring can boost your web views by a lot – in my case, by a factor of four. Just adding the word sex to an article last week made it by far the most searched article I’ve written. Searches on Naked women and wife sex were close seconds. I even got a few hits for Syrian sex even though those words don’t appear together in the article.

The article I’m referring to is this one. It was meant to be an experiment to see what kind of search activity it would produce. For the entire week it has become a tempest in my teapot. I knew that words related to sex are the most common Google search terms, but the significantly increased volume of hits was wholly unexpected. I don’t think they were quality hits but the increase in click-throughs indicates that at least some readers traipsed around a bit before exiting my blog.

I realize now that I forgot to use the phrase blow job in the article. My bad.

Think it has Anything to do with Breasts?

Betcha Big Media was really embarrassed when Mother Teresa died.

You might remember that Mother Teresa, a nun, dedicated her life to the poorest of the poor in Calcutta, India.  In addition to spending 65 years of her life caring for the destitute, she started her own religious order to extend that care throughout the world.  She was a Nobel peace prize winner, was beatified by the Pope and is a candidate for sainthood.

She also had the misfortune (or perhaps, good fortune!) of dying 5 days after Princess Diana died.  Princess Diana was a media gem:  beautiful, elegant, royal even after her divorce from Prince Charles, and an advocate of popular causes.  Mostly she was young.  Diana had sex appeal.

The media coverage following her death was non-stop.  Millions mourned, even more millions of flowers were laid at her home, and the pageantry of her funeral may have exceeded the pageantry of her wedding.

Then Mother Teresa had to buy the farm just as the Diana festivities were really revving up.  It must have been quite the guilt trip for Big Media, who got a sudden reality smack right in the head and then tried to rationalize the frenzy of the previous week in the face of real nobility.  I recall Mother Teresa getting maybe a three-day story wave before media interest died off.  Mother Teresa was, of course, old and not so pretty as Diana.  Mother Teresa wasn’t good for 30-second sound bites.  Yet, if it hadn’t been for the way over-the-top coverage of Diana, Mother Teresa might have gotten a day’s coverage at best.

This sequence of deaths in 1997 was a vivid reminder of Big Media’s sellout to whatever titillates.  It was also around that time that I lost interest in television’s so-called “news” coverage.

If Anna Nicole Smith’s boobs were half as large, would Big Media have had half the interest?

Of Sex and Politics

This week’s major headlines included Nancy Pelosi in Syria meeting Syrian President Bashar Assad, British soldiers’ capture in supposed Iranian waters then released days later (and greeted by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejab!), and continued coverage of the oddly intriguing federal prosecutor firings and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales ever-changing role in them.  Major League Baseball got underway, and New York Governor Elliot Spitzer’s a little less popular than he was just a few weeks ago.  Oh yeah, and some FBI agent got killed.

Alanis Morissette put out a video excoriating (or maybe complimenting, in a funny way) the Black Eyed Peas’ My Humps, and a local blogger got away with using the phrase fuckity fuck in a funny way.  Some guy named Michael Pelligrino killed himself at the Seneca Niagara Casino, and Buffalo’s population is still falling.

Related to all of this is my love for sex.  After so many years of marriage I still see my wife as sexually appealing as she was when we first became intimately involved.  The shape of her breasts and the curve of her waist are still a turn-on, and the warmth I get when we are wrapped in each others’ arms has never gone away.  When I think of my wife I do not do so in a pornographic way, because even when I see her naked I am endeared to her as a person and not as a sex object.

Okay, so today’s stream of consciousness is all related how?

It’s for the blog hit experiment.  Unlike my other essays, this one is solely meant to mimic the blog-whores who pepper their writing with salty terms on a regular basis.  Do blog hits really go up that dramatically?  Maybe, but my bet is that as soon as the reader discovers that there are no photographs of naked women they leave the site, so a typical hit will last all of 3 to 5 seconds.  Popular events and sex talk perhaps increase the speed of meme and the likelihood of getting a hit, but not the duration of the stay. 

In my book it’s the quality, not the quantity that’s important; hence my writing attempts to be thoughtful, not sensational.

If you don’t read to the end, then you won’t get that point.

Sex Talk

It is a statement of my life that my most intimate conversations are with the Red Cross.

Whenever I donate blood plasma the staff always greets me in a pleasing manner and promptly sends me to one of the “interview” rooms for a 5-minute “quiet” period followed by a 10-minute Q&A that’s always the same:

• “Have you ever had sex with a man, even once?”
• “Have you ever had sex with anyone from Africa?”
• “Have you ever had sex with anyone from Haiti?”
• “Have you ever given money in exchange for sex?”
• “Have you ever had gay sex?”
• “Have you ever exchanged needles for sex?”
• “Have you ever had multiple sex partners simultaneously?”
• “Have you ever had any form of deviant sex?”
• “Have you ever had sex with farm animals?”
• “Have you ever had sex with anything non-human?”

(Okay, the last ones were for emphasis only. Other important questions get asked, but the ratio of questions regarding sexual activity to all other questions is notably high.) Except for that fourth question (to which I always say: “It depends on whether or not you take into account that my wife gets my paycheck every week”) I can answer these with a truthful No. Unfortunately, there are questions like “Are you feeling well today?” [Hell no, I’m as sick as a dog but you called and guilted me in donating] that require an affirmative response. Otherwise, I could sleep through the interview.

I have a suggestion: The Red Cross should simply ask (guys) the question “Have you ever had non-monogamous sex with anyone other than a white Anglo-Saxon female who has lived in the US her entire life? I think that would cover all the sex questions.

The staff recites these questions in a polite but serious manner and fills in the appropriate responses on the donor form, perhaps out of concern that the average donor can’t read or write (Note to Red Cross: We can). I think they would get more people to donate if they let us fill out the sex questions in private. It doesn’t bug me, but it gets tedious and I suspect there are a number of more Victorian members of our community that shy away from blood donations because of this.

More people need to donate blood and plasma. Just like any other volunteer activity, 5% of the people do 100% of the work. God knows that with this wacky Iraqi war showing no letup, we’re going to continue to strain our blood banks. Add this to the list of easily-solvable world problems.