The Friday Sex Blog [Censorship]

¡Hola! Everybody...
Every summer, I live (and often die) on the performance of my beloved Mets. I will say that these are a tenacious bunch; we need more hitting, however, if we’re going to make any noise this year…

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-=[ Unnatural Acts]=-
Censorship in America

There’s nothing more natural than the urge to express our sexuality. Almost as reliable as that urge is the societal urge to censor these expressions. I have written before about the more than 2,000-year Christian war against sexuality. I believe sexual censorship is mostly founded on the fear of the power of sexuality to liberate us. At the risk of being slammed let me add, while I'm at it, that some of the most repressed individuals in this regard are often Christianized people of color.

In any case, who reading this can honestly say they have never had a deeply moving experience during sex (any kind of sex)?

Let me start off by noting that numerous sexual activities between consenting adults are restricted and carry extreme legal punishments. Until 1961, all fifty states had criminal laws against various forms of consensual sex between unmarried adults. While it is true that many laws were repealed during the seventies, as recent as 1997, twenty five states -- half the states in the union -- still had laws on the books criminalizing unmarried cohabitation. Fornication, defined as sex between unmarried couples, and “sodomy,” defined as oral and/ or anal intercourse, were (and some cases still are) illegal.

What does this really mean? In eleven states around the country, married couples who engage in oral or anal sex in the privacy of their own homes are committing a criminal act, usually a felony. In Rhode Island, an unmarried man and woman engaging in anal sex can receive anywhere from seven to twenty years in prison. In Michigan, two women were sent to prison for enjoying oral sex in the privacy of their tent in a state park. In South Carolina, “the abominable crime of buggery” (not defined in the statute) is punishable by five years in prison. You might think that these are old laws that remain on the books because they haven’t been questioned and you would be wrong. In 1986 the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples engaging in “sodomy” don’t have a constitutional right to privacy, upholding Georgia state laws in which consensual oral or anal sex between same-sex couples is a felony.

Today many sex educators are leaving the educational system because they are under a tremendous amount of pressure not to talk about sex. Imagine that: not being able to talk about the very subject in which you hold expertise.

For the most part, “sodomy” laws are used to discriminate against gays and lesbians in housing, employment, and child custody cases, but they can be used to discriminate against straight unmarried couples as well. Considering the Supreme Courts resistance to upholding sexual privacy at the federal level, the best tactic for fighting oppressive sodomy laws is at the state level.

Sexual expression becomes a crime when the materials produced are legally classified as “obscene.” Obscene materials are exempt from First Amendment guarantees of free speech. The legal definition of obscenity and the manner in which this definition is interpreted, determines what sexual materials we have access to and what materials we can create.

The Supreme Court’s definition of obscenity, the de jure law since their Miller v. California ruling, allows states to regulate sexual materials according to their own community standards. These regulations must be restricted to works that “taken as a whole, appeal to the prurient interest in sex,” that portray sexual conduct in “a patently offensive way,” and that “taken as a whole, do not have serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” Only materials found by judges or jurors to meet each of three standards of obscenity may be deemed obscene.

Yeah, I’m shaking my head too…

These criteria are astonishingly vague. For example, the dictionary defines “prurience” as “an inordinate interest in matters of sex.” Wow! That’s very specific! Who or how one determines if a photograph has serious scientific value, versus merely scientific value is a road map for First Amendment violations.

If you think this doesn’t affect you adversely, then you’re probably doing a good imitation of an ostrich defensive measure (burying its head in the sand). Sexual censorship is used as a wedge for the sexually repressed to create intolerance and disinformation. One good example is the dismantling of sex Ed courses. “Abstinence-only” sex Ed, courses that teach only sexual abstinence, actually put teens at risk sexually. Teens attending abstinence only sex Ed calluses have been shown to engage in high risk sexual behavior at higher rates than their peers and are more prone to STDs and out-of-wedlock pregnancy.

In addition, any writing or material depicting sex in an honest manner can be censored, not because of the sexual content, but because perhaps the ideas in the material are dangerous to the status quo.

Yes, Virginia, this is the 21^st century and we’re still acting like juveniles.

Love,

Eddie

Resources

American Civil Liberties Union - Non-profit offering educational and legal services to defend First Amendment rights.

National Coalition Against Censorship - grassroots anti-censorship group fighting for freedom of expression.

Electronic Frontier Foundation - Nonprofit protecting civil liberties online.

Feminists for Free Expression - Anti-censorship organization

The Spectrum Institute - Nonprofit membership organization dedicated to protecting the rights of single adults and domestic partners with or without children.

The TGIF Sex Blog [Religious Suppression of Sex]

¡Hola! Everybody...
Just in case you didn’t get the memo from Lush, von Brunn, the white supremacist Holocaust museum shooter is a registered democrat. Contrary to what the libruhl press is trying to say, people like von Brunn are the product of libruhl values. You know how us libruhls like to eat our young, hate Jews and blacks (and some women) and how we’re the reason for the destruction of all that is American and even that greatest American of all (after Reagan), Jay-sus!

Now back to your regularly scheduled sex, violence, and guns...

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-=[ The Religious Suppression of Sex ]=-

It is better to be unfaithful than to be faithful without wanting to be.

-- Brigitte Bardot (1934–)

Not long ago, I was having dinner with a close friend. I have found myself distancing myself from my two closest friends, and by chance I ran into one of them and we had dinner. The more we spoke, the more I realized, with the exception of one very important issue, we share very little in common. He has recently gotten into “scripture” and it seems that our rift grows the more he reads.

In any case, he asked me if there were any women in my life and we got into the eternal single guys conversation regarding women. In the span of around thirty minutes, I realized how far apart we are on issues I value very highly. As usual, he thinks my idea that men and women can be friends is wrong-headed. He almost started to use “scripture” as a way of backing this crap up, until I shot him my patented “I-will-tear-your-ass-up-with-cruel-unrelenting-logic-if-you-go-there” look.

Actually, he’s convinced it’s effeminate (“homo” was the exact phrase he used) for a man to seek platonic relationships with women.

The conversation turned to my love life (or lack thereof) when he asked me about a woman I had been seeing recently. As I related my story of distancing myself because the woman in question is looking for a serious relationship, he asked me, “Well, did you -- you know?” I realized he was asking me if we had had sex, and I answered no because I know this particular woman would not have sex unless it was a serious relationship. His response really got to me: “Well, that’s the kind of woman you’re supposed to have relationships with!”

Huh?

I was a bit confused as my mind tried to wrap itself around so Neanderthal a view, when I remember who I’m speaking to: a man who revered his ex-wife, but fucked women he considered “sluts,” “ho’s,” whatever. And you know what? His thinking, fucked up as it is, is not that different from many men. We want to marry the “good” girls (those who aren’t “easy,” or won’t “put out”), but when it comes to fucking, we want to fuck the “bad” girls.

Ahhhh… the wonderful world of sex: men’s’ freedom, women’s’ love and never the twain shall meet...

I find this thinking so wrong-headed it’s hard for me to know where to begin. One good place to start, however, is looking into how our conditioning about sex (at least here in Western world), came about.

Why? Because, though I know the fence needs fixing, I think philosophy is more important right now. Secondly, exploring deeply held assumptions (and we all are culturally conditioned to varying degrees), allows us to begin envisioning more skillful ways we, men and women, can relate to one another. Otherwise, don’t complain when he fucks the tramp.

The history of Christianity’s responses to eroticism is like a microcosm of the evolution of Western culture from a sex-affirming attitude, to a sex-negative one, ill at-ease with eroticism, sensuality, passion, and pleasure.

Dualism: Or the Underpinnings of Shame

Let’s go back to about six hundred years before Christ, where we find the earliest images of Eros. These images reveal the Greek God of Love as irrational, uncontrollable, mad, and foolish. Our Greco-Roman foundations adopted a dualistic world view of constant conflict, with the soul and mind cast as the protagonist seeking to escape the prison of the flesh. This perspective viewed the flesh as the source of evil. In Plato’s Utopia, he claims that the world would be better off if all sexual pleasures were starved. His utopia -- his ideal society -- forbids all sexual relations that are non-procreative. A society of breeders, as a friend calls fucking just to have babies.

Socrates and Plato viewed all forms of physical expression of sexuality as inferior to abstinence simply because they involve the body. It is interesting to note that though they tolerated homosexual and extramarital heterosexual relations, they agreed that any sexual activity was harmful to the soul. According to Socrates, it takes a year, “to recover from the scorpion’s bite.” (LMAO!!!)

Fast forward to three centuries after Jesus, and you find Plotinus popularizing this very view among early Christians. Platonism deeply informs much of St. Augustine’s views of sex, and through him, most of Christian thought down to the present day.

Other Early Influences: The Stoics and Gnostics

Stoicism, the dominant philosophy of the Roman Empire at the beginning of the Christian movement, endorsed this same from of Platonic dualism. Seneca the Younger, a contemporary of Jesus and tutor to the emperors, was the preeminent Stoic philosopher. His advice? “Do nothing for the sake of pleasure.” “Sexual desire,” he warned, “is friendship gone mad.” (Are we starting to see how this affects modern-day friendships between the sexes?) “It is also shameful to love one’s own wife immodestly… Nothing is more depraved than to love one’s spouse as if she were an adulteress.” Centuries later, St. Jerome repeated this very same Stoic sensibility: “Anyone who has passionate a love of his wife is an adulterer.” In 1988, in front of a public audience, Pope John Paul II again endorsed this stoic point of view, testifying to its hold on Christian sexual values.

The Stoics believed the ecstasy of sex was dangerous, hard to control, and detrimental to men’s health. Sex was a soulful burden needing purging before it could rise to the divine. Centuries later, Catholics would wage bloody battles to enforce celibacy on the clergy.

Another contemporary of Jesus highly admired by Christians, Musonius Rufus, maintained that “men who are… not immoral are bound to consider sexual intercourse [morally] justified only when it occurs… for the purpose of begetting children.” The Christian belief that procreation is the natural purpose of sex and that contraception is unnatural comes from the Platonic and Stoic philosophers. Christian moralists cannot even claim the missionary position, for it was the 2^nd century Stoic Artemidorus who claimed that male-superior, face-to-face sexual intercourse was the only morally acceptable position.

If you think the Stoics were a bunch of wet blankets, then you will love the Gnostics. The deeply pessimistic Gnostic worldview probably originated in Persia shortly before the birth of Christ. These guys stressed the worthlessness and baseness of all things. To the Gnostics, the body was a “corpse with senses, the grave you carry around with you.” According to the Gnostics, demons created this world and the soul is a spark of light from another world captured by demonic powers. This kind of degradation of the body was unknown in the Greco-Roman Christian world before the coming of the Gnostics.

The Gnostics are relevant in that they attempted to synthesize a blend of pagan and Christian values. They interpreted the Christian faith as a special kind of knowledge, gnosis, which the soul/ mind could use to transcend this earth and rise to the heavens. What is interesting is the Gnostics, like the Stoics before them, wavered between extreme sexual deprivation and hedonistic behavior, both motivated by their contempt for the body. Much like the conservative hypocrites of today.

When in the early 4^th century Constantine made Christianity the official state religion, outlawing pagan religions in the process, the emphasis on competing with other religions was shifted to sexual abstinence. Sexual abstinence and celibacy became the centerpieces of Christian moral life. Another wave of Gnostic influence, lasting about 100 years, ensued. By this time you find Manichaeus stating that sexual abstinence was required of true believers. Churches influenced by Manichaean thought even went so far as to only baptize virgins.

The triumph of anti sex values actually came about from a political movement that backfired. Jesus had included women among his immediate disciples, women who left home and openly traveled with him. This was an affront to the customs of the day and did not sit well with the church leaders who followed the apostles. One scholar, Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, suggests that as males tried to reassert male rule, the women rebelled with the only weapon they had -- withholding sex (as Prince says, “pussy control!”). The war of the sexes ended, Fiorenza believes, with a victory for the male celibates, who used sexual abstinence as a weapon by framing women as dangerous seductresses.

Fast forward to today and my friend and one can better see how gender sex roles are still firmly embedded in the cultural mindset. This cultural mindset has several dire consequences, the least of which is the debasement and destruction of sexual freedom, but that is fodder for another post.

Love,

Eddie

The Sex Blog [Celibacy]

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Sunday Sermon [Consequences of Sexual Repression]

¡Hola! Everybody…
I won't be surprised if someone reports me today... I’m simply dumbfounded. Here we are in the 21^st century and there are still people out here (men and women) who fear nudity and sex? Almost 100 years ago, people were all upset because women chose (at a great price, I might add) to show more than ankles in public. “It’s the end times!” the religious fanatics yelped. Yeah right! SMDH…

Today's blog photo depicts former Bush staffer, John Ashcroft, speaking in front of the statue, Spirit of Justice. In case you're not aware, Ashcroft's major claim to fame before Bush was that he lost an election... to a dead man! (I'm not kidding.) Ashcroft eventually spent quite a sum of money to cover the statue's breast. My question to is what was more obscene the statue or expenditure of money at a time when a child was probably dying of hunger in these United States?

I have written versions of the following post, but apparently, people need to see it again.

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-=[ The Consequences of Sexual Repression ]=-
“Repression is not morality.”
-- Anonymous

From birth we are taught to be ashamed of and fearful of sex – all of us to some degree are repressed ma’fuccas! Even those of us who claim to have been sexually “free” in the past, use language to describe that experience that leaves me wondering. In many cases, it’s a past in which remorse and “youthful indiscretion” plays a prominent role. This isn’t the language of sexual freedom, it’s repression personified. People make the error that sexual repression equates to less sexual activity. Nothing could be further from the truth. Repression is a way to push things out of our conscious awareness where they then gain total control over our actions.

I have traveled to many places and I have never come up against the sheer depth of sexual hang-ups that I confront in this society. We fear, loathe, and at the same time crave sex.

I have previously written about the two-thousand year Christian campaign against sex. Add to that the three centuries of Puritanism and – welcome to America. Eroticism is considered an outlaw energy in this culture. I don’t know exactly why – maybe it’s a reminder of the Goddess, or because of the sheer power of this energy, or maybe it’s because it made sense thousands of years ago. Whatever the reason, Eros is taboo and our society spends huge sums of its precious resources every minute of every year to undermine, co-opt, channel, manipulate, ridicule, and distort it.

And we all pay a price for this.

The consequence when a religion fails to recognize our basic human need for pleasure and uses its power to influence what is considered normal in order to repress our God-given right for nurturing and sensual and erotic pleasure is violence. When we reduce sex to the mechanical interlocking of sexual organs and ignore the vital sustenance we can draw from the sexual rainbow of playful, loving, and intimate union, we distort our human nature.

Numerous studies of child abuse, for example, indicate that parents who abuse their children were often deprived of physical affection during childhood, and as adults experience extremely unsatisfying sexual relationships. Studies of child-rearing practices across cultures, and evidence of neurological damage in anti social humans demonstrate that deprivation of bodily pleasure during infancy and adolescence and the repression of pleasure promote adult violence. A case in point is the U.S.: compared to other industrialized democracies, we have some of the most repressive legal sanctions against sexuality and yet we have the highest sexual crime rates. That’s a fact, not a belief.

Patriarchal religions (i.e., Christianity, Judaism, and Muslim) that emphasize a high God who actively punish deviations in human behavior commonly endorse anti-women, anti-sex and anti-pleasure value systems. As part of their anti-sexual values, these religions promote negative attitudes about the physical nurturance of infants and children. They also severely punish adolescents and adults who engage in erotic pleasures considered outside the norm.

Deprivation of body pleasure throughout life – but especially during the formative periods of infancy, childhood, and adolescence – is very closely related to the amount of warfare and violence in a society. conversely, societies that promote nurturing in child-rearing, that are comfortable with the body and with sexuality and pleasure, produce adults who have little sexual dysfunction, who promote gender and social equality, and a society that does not glorify slavery or war.

There is a strong argument for the notioin that failure to celebrate the pleasures of the Divine presence in our erotic lives creates the compulsion to conquer and achieve pleasure elsewhere. One can see a clear causal link between patriarchal (Father-like) religions that deny the nurturance we draw from erotic pleasure and the anti-sex, anti-pleasure belief systems of religious fundamentalism and fascism.

Religious fundamentalism of any type relies on literal interpretations of texts by males who determine what rules guide human behavior and spell out punishments for those who deviate from those rules. Fundamentalism thrives when individuals become terrified of thinking outside cultural norms. For me, fundamentalism is patriarchy gone mad, fascism is the ultimate expression of father-dominance. Within this framework, moralizing and condemnation become more important than celebration and play. Self-centeredness and a preoccupation with power and laws become a substitute for adventure, pleasure, wonder, and a living spiritual ritual.

The repression of the erotic and pleasure makes for strange bedfellows. One only has to look at the Christian rationalization of slavery during this country’s shameful period. Christians used the bible to justify slavery, foe example. Want more proof? You can look at the early Christian support for Hitler who agreed on his attacks on contraception, pornography, and sexual permissiveness. Even more recently, Christians have supported neo-fascist attacks on gay bars, sex shops, abortion clinics and houses of prostitutions the world over!

But there is a change coming on and it terrifies many people around the world. There are fundamentalist forces clamoring for a return to the “good old times.” You know the good old times: the times when women were little better than property, where people of color “knew their place,” and gays were kept in the closet.

There is a culture war in full effect in these United States and there are those who want to drag us back to the Dark Ages where dialogues about sexual identity and alternatives to sexual monogamy didn’t exist. Fortunately, we can’t go back -- as much as these ignoramuses would like. We are in what the famous anthropologist Margaret Meade called a prefigurative stage. All the myths and symbols that gave meaning and direction to our culture have lost much of their significance (and with good reason), and we are only beginning to create a new cosmology, a culture that respects sex, pleasure, and sensuality, new myths and icons that provide relevant models for a new consciousness of ourselves and of the earth.

The other option, to cling to an outmoded book full of outdated myths, is to choose to destroy ourselves.

Love,

Eddie

The Sex Blog [Censorship]

¡Hola! Everybody...
First things first: Today, both Eva and Choosing Life For Me~ Eternally celebrate birthdays.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY LADIES!!

OK! WTF is up with buying bed sheets?!! Freakin' thread counts, duvet sets, shams, blah blah blah! Is there really that much difference between a 300 and 500 thread-count sheet? I mean, I do want you to be comfortable, hun, but you ain’t wetting my $120 Ralph Lauren white shadow striped bed sheet set! LMAO! They have bed sheet sets that cost almost $200!!! WTF?!! Comforters that go for the same!!! And… WTF is a sham?!! All I want is something to cover myself when I go to sleep.

At the rate I’m spending money, I won’t be able to visit you, sweetie! LOL!

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-=[ “Unnatural Acts”]=-
Censorship in America

There’s very little more certain than the natural urge to express our sexuality. Almost as reliable as that urge is the societal urge to censor these expressions. I have written before about the more than 2,000-year Christian war against sexuality. I believe sexual censorship is founded on the fear that it is in our sexuality that we find the strongest ally toward true freedom.

Who reading this can honestly say they have never had a deeply moving experience during sex (any kind of sex)?

Let me start off by noting that sexual activities between consenting adults are restricted and carry extreme legal punishments. Until 1961, all fifty states had criminal laws against various forms of consensual sex between unmarried adults. While it is true that many laws were repealed during the seventies, as recent as 1997, twenty five states -- half the states in the union – still have laws on the books criminalizing unmarried cohabitation. Fornication, defined as sex between unmarried couples, and “sodomy,” defined as oral and/ or anal intercourse, are illegal.

What do these really mean? In eleven states around the country, married couples who engage in oral or anal sex in the privacy of their own homes are committing a criminal act, usually a felony. In Rhode Island, an unmarried man and woman engaging in anal sex can receive anywhere from seven to twenty years in prison. In Michigan, two women were sent to prison for enjoying oral sex in the privacy of their tent in a state park. In South Carolina, “the abominable crime of buggery” (not defined in the statute) is punishable by five years in prison. You might think that these are old laws that remain on the books because they haven’t been questioned and you would be wrong. In 1986 the Supreme Court ruled that same sex couples engaging in “sodomy” don’t have a constitutional right to privacy, upholding Georgia state laws in which consensual oral or anal sex between same-sex couples is a felony.

Today many sex educators are leaving the educational system because they are under a tremendous amount of pressure not to talk about sex. Imagine that: not being able to talk about the very subject in which you hold expertise.

::blank stare::

For the most part, “sodomy” laws are used to discriminate against gays and lesbians in housing, employment, and child custody cases, but they can be used to discriminate against straight unmarried couples as well. Considering the Supreme Courts resistance to upholding sexual privacy at the federal level, the best tactic for fighting oppressive sodomy laws is at the state level.

Sexual expression becomes a crime when the materials produced are legally classified as “obscene.” Obscene materials are exempt from First Amendment guarantees of free speech. The legal definition of obscenity and the manner in which this definition is interpreted, determines what sexual materials we have access to and what materials we can create.

The Supreme Court’s definition of obscenity, in effect since their Miller v. California ruling, allows states to regulate sexual materials according to their own community standards. These regulations must be restricted to works that “taken as a whole, appeal to the prurient interest in sex,” that portray sexual conduct in “a patently offensive way,” and that “taken as a whole, do not have serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” Only materials found by judges or jurors to meet each of three standards of obscenity may be deemed obscene.

Huh?!!

These criteria are astonishingly vague. For example, the dictionary defines “prurience” as “an inordinate interest in matters of sex.” Wow! That’s very specific! Who or how does one determines if a photograph serious scientific value, versus merely scientific value is a road map for First Amendment violations.

If you think this doesn’t affect you adversely, then you’re probably doing a good imitation of an ostrich burying its head in the sand. Sexual censorship is used as a wedge for the sexually repressed to create intolerance and disinformation. One good example is the dismantling of sex ed courses. “Abstinence-only” sex ed, courses that teach only sexual abstinence, actually put teens at risk sexually. Teens attending abstinence only sex ed calluses have been shown to engage in high risk sexual behavior and are more prone to STDs and pregnancy.

In addition, any writing or material depicting sex in an honest manner can be censored, not because of the sexual content, but because perhaps the ideas in the material are dangerous to the status quo.

Wake the fuck up, people!

Love,

Eddie

Resources

American Civil Liberties Union: Non-profit offering educational and legal services to defend First Amendment rights.

National Coalition Against Censorship: grassroots anti-censorship group fighting for freedom of expression.

Electronic Frontier Foundation: Nonprofit protecting civil liberties online.

Feminists for Free Expression: Anti-censorship organization

The Spectrum Institute: Nonprofit membership organization dedicated to protecting the rights of single adults and domestic partners with or without children.