Archive for the ‘ Sex ’ Category

The Courtesan

This is a straight lift from Lewis Mumford’s book The Condition of Man, beginning on page 210. This book has been an education for me.
—
The transformation of woman from a working partner into a sexual free-lance and from a distantly worshipped ideal into a more tangible divinity, disrobed and ready for play, came about through an increase of idleness and luxury; so it is a story that belongs mainly to the upper classes. But the change was not without democratic significance by reason of what has followed. For a profound modification of sex, love, and parenthood took place between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century.

The great theme of art, during the post-medieval period, was the celebration and enjoyment of women. The courtesan not merely became the principal luxury of the market: she was the very reason for that vast process of spoliation and conquest which ultimately brought into the boudoir carved mirrors, sparkly jewels, heady perfumes, cosmetics, silks, brocades, and the gold wherewith more could be bought…She became the very symbol of expensive sensuous refinement and glowing vitality.

In the fifteenth century one of the first manifestations of the growth of luxury was the private bedroom: a room devoted exclusively to love-making and sleep, without the constant threat of interruptions and intrusions…

Stimulated no doubt by the images of antiquity, the painter began to draw from the living model. Alone with her in the studio, he looks upon her for hours at a time, catches the sheen of her hair, the satiny surface of her skin, observes the swell of her breasts and the curve of her belly…

And what happens to woman? In her coy disrobing, in her frank exposure of herself, woman in turn feels her power: her power to withhold and to give. By the grace of postponement she becomes more fully roused, and when the erotic mood at last brings her lover close, she becomes more deeply fulfilled.
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This is the language of direct personal relationships. In our time this has been replaced by simulated relationships, which people prefer because they are safer.

2012
04/18
CATEGORY
History
Sex
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What Computers Mean to People

No one has given much thought to this question – because no one thought to ask the question. But reading Sherry Turkle’s book Alone Together has made me think about it.

Originally, computers were just fancy calculators that cranked out numbers and not much else.

But people wanted more – they wanted animated scenes that responded to their actions (with a mouse, for example). The Graphical User Interface (GUI) became standard. This was much more satisfying – and started an important trend: satisfying the user. The user was now made to feel he (or her) was the king or queen of all they beheld. Very satisfying.

Fast forward to the present, where wireless, hand-held, touch-sensitive devices have captured everyone’s attention. The reward for this is beyond gratifying – we now have become new beings with magical powers – like gods. But at the same time, as persons (without our magical devices) we have become nothing.

Turkle wants to take this further, and talk about robots that seem to provide love – a new Japanese growth industry.

For me this is ironic, because I had worked for the last American robotics company, located in Silicon Valley. The Japanese had taken over the robotics world with their superior technology. Americans could have used this technology too, there was nothing stopping them, but they stuck with their obsolete technology and got run over. This company also had a software division – but I could see at a glance that it was doomed – as indeed it was.

One of their engineers and I developed this really neat application that should have gone places, if there was any justice in the world – but it too has gone to never-never land.

This happened so frequently I began to wonder if a black cloud was following me around. Engineers, who you would expect to be rational, logical beings, were sometimes a stupid as mud. And we won’t even talk about upper management, the hogs who get paid everything – but usually make all the wrong decisions.

What do computers mean to people? They mean nearly everything – whatever people want them to be. They can gratify any fantasy.

Life-size sex dolls exist, and they are being improved on all the time. I do not doubt that sex with one of these improved models would be better than some of the sex experiences I (and many other men) have had with old-fashioned women.

Perhaps The Singularity has arrived after all.

2012
04/14
CATEGORY
Morality
Sex
Technology
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Cell Phones are Better than Sex

I hope this is just temporary, but this was one thing that happened when the cell phone population exploded in Costa Rica. The adolescents were hardest hit; they became compulsive texters (the girls especially) with their thumbs moving at lightening speed. They were living in a new world they could not resist – their sex life had moved online, where everyone could see them in action. This, they seemed to feel, was a vast improvement.

Sex has always had a social component, everyone could tell at a glance what was going on with everyone else. But at the same time it had an intensely private component. Or I should say it used to have. Our lives have moved outward in many ways, leaving our inner lives vacant.

I have someone to back me up here: Sherry Turkle, the Abby Rockeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, and a licensed clinical psychologist. Her latest book is All Alone Together, which I just got – and which you cannot tear from my greedy hands.

2012
04/12
CATEGORY
Sex
Technology
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Modernism in Vienna

Gustav Klimt was part of Modernist Art movement in Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century. I cannot pose as a art expert here, I got this from the book The  Age of Influence.

During this period, artists mingled freely with the staff from the medical schools, and frequently witnessed autopsies – thus the skull in the background.

Jewish hostesses such as Berta Zucherkandl, who was married to the brilliant anatomist Emil Zucherkandl, the chair of anatomy at the Vienna School of Medicine,  held salons in their homes, where people like Klimt, Rodin, Mahler, and Freud often met and exchanged ideas.

This, of course, ended with the Nazis, and the author, Eric R. Kandel, a Nobel Prize winner, had to leave as a small boy. But as he says, his heart still beats in 3/4 time.

Needless to say, this is not respectable art, such as the representational art now on display in Costa Rica.

Freud was not respectable either, but thrived in this atmosphere, where outrageous behavior was expected and normal.

This has now been lost to us forever.

2012
04/02
CATEGORY
Art
History
Medical
Philosophy
Sex
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The Perfect Ones

I was raised religious; we adored (even worshiped) preachers. My saintly mother made it clear that her body was eager to serve his ministers – and to make them even better. Our religiosity was thick with eroticism.

I am now reading Harold Bloom, someone I never heard of before (I was that ignorant). And this morning I was reading his comments on the New Testament in his book The Shadow of a Great Rock. I am amazed how ignorant my family was (and is) about the Bible – and indeed, about anything at all.

In his comments on 1 Corinthians he says:

Charismatics had arisen among the Corinthian Christians, teaching a gnosis that may have had esoteric Jewish origins and that anticipates the Christian Gnosticism of a century later. Speaking in tongues accompanies the secret “knowledge,” which possesses the perfect ones, who believe that with Christ they already have been resurrected in the body before he died and while they were still alive.

When I saw the words the perfect ones, the words jumped right of the page at me – they were my Epiphany; they explained everything.

I had been stumbling around, trying to define what people had become. The answer was now clear – they had become perfect, at least in their own eyes – and that was all they were interested in.

But they had also become demonic – as Bloom makes clear in his comments on the Gospel of Mark. Let me make this as clear as I can:

My family, their religion, and the culture that produced and sustained it – were evil.

I have introduced a new word here: evil – a word usually restricted to religious contexts.

But people now have a new religion, and take a religious attitude towards everything. Part of this attitude is that they already know everything. They are already perfect, and cannot be improved on. And not only that – those who are not perfect must be destroyed.

If I fancy myself a modern prophet (which I do sometimes) I would only point this out – over and over. And at the same time, I would also notice that no one was listening to me – and that this was the most amazing of all facts.

This explains so much – but no one is interested in this. We look the other way while the hammer of fate hangs over our heads. It almost seems we want to be destroyed.

2012
03/08
CATEGORY
Religion
Sex
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The Demise of Guys

TED

This is a fast-paced talk, full of facts – all of which I could relate to.

However, he has a poor grasp of history: the preference of men for other men (the non-sexual kind) goes all the way back to Abraham Lincoln and his time. He doesn’t speak about similar woman-to-woman relationships, but I think they are at least as common.

He worries, rightly, about porno videos. But I was lost in masturbatory fantasies as soon as I was old enough to get an erection. I was never able to have a healthy relationship with a woman – but that too was all too common.

And the situation, as he says, is only getting worse.

2011
08/10
CATEGORY
Sex
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Hatred

I keep being amazed by our inability to notice the obvious – and insist they don’t exist, even though they mean the end of us. Hatred is one of those: it is eating us alive – but we are ignoring our own death agonies, and insist they are only minor symptoms.

I started another posting: Ignorance is the Best We Can Manage, but couldn’t do anything with it. That was all I could manage too, on this very important subject. The only appropriate response to the whole mess, I suppose, would be a primal scream – but written language does not support this.

Maybe we should have a special spot on our keyboard that would explode and eliminate everything in sight – and then return, and be ready to do the same thing over again. I have the feeling it would get a lot of use.

Of course all I have to do is walk down the street to the neighborhood video gaming store and watch adolescent boys blasting everything in sight – much like the Hitler Youth once did for real – instead of paying attention to all the lovely girls everywhere around them.

I can appreciate their attitude: violence is real and manly – love is not. It is the appropriate response to their violent world: more violence. And the girls themselves support this – without realizing it. They cannot be violent themselves – but they can easily find a violent boy. And as they mature, they will find many ways of being violent themselves. And their boys will hate them.

2011
06/09
CATEGORY
Psychology
Sex
Sociology
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Technology Changes What We Are

I did not say “Technology changes who we are?” but “Technology changes what we are.” It does this in two ways: externally and internally.

The external part is obvious: it changes our external world – look around you the next time you are stalled in a traffic jam to see how the automobile has changed everything. And take a deep breath of the air at the same time. Clearly, things have deteriorated badly. But we force ourselves to think they have somehow improved tremendously – and ignore the cognitive dissonance.

Technology is irresistible: we must accept it, no matter what the cost. And we must ignore its effects on us. To behave otherwise is unthinkable. Man is a creature that cannot resist technology. It is like a drug. But it is not like a drug, it is drugs. What are drugs, but a another technology?

The internal changes are even more severe, and science has only begun to understand them. It has only begun to understand how the brain (and therefore, the mind) works. Take an extreme case: human language. We don’t usually classify it as a technology, but it is our most important invention – by far. This invention changed the way our brains were structured and how they operated. And everything about how we behave socially (our sex lives, for example). It could be, and I think it should be, considered the prototype of technology itself.

Let me put this slightly differently: technology teaches us how to live – how to be. It does this by changing what we are: internally and externally. We are not something different from our technology (some kind of Great Soul, perhaps) – we are our technology.

The NY Times had an interesting article today: Phonetic Clues Hint Language Is Africa-Born. Some interesting thinking here.

2011
04/15
CATEGORY
Sex
Sociology
Technology
The Self
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Wanna Read Some Trash for a Change?

Atlantic Magazine – Drug Busts: Colombia’s reigning narco-babe seeks to lower her profile

She has removed her implants, which her mother gave her for her 18th birthday. Huge tits are no longer so desirable, and she wants to stay in fashion. Colombia is the context:

Traqueto is Colombian slang for “drug dealer,” of which there are many more now than then. If Colombia in the early 1990s had two huge cartels—the Medellín and Cali cartels—it now has hundreds of cartelitos, and thousands of narco-tycoons. Like the early drug dons, they crave beautiful women, but only of a certain type. Today’s traquetos have called forth a new look: narco-estética. The idea pops up in almost every magazine I open and almost every television show I watch. A talent manager describes the look to me. “It’s the aesthetic of the hot babe, the mamacita. Small nose. Thick lips. A lot of this,” she says, pointing to her chest, “and a lot of that,” patting her buttocks. “All fake. And they are very blond.”…

A traqueto match was a ticket out of poverty in a country with few opportunities for women—a reality captured by what was one of Colombia’s most popular television shows, Without Tits There Is No Paradise, a soap opera about a flat-chested poor teenager who wants to sell her virginity for a pair of implants.

Poor me. No one paid me to lose my virginity. I had to find an experienced older woman (she was 29 and I was 21) to educate me in the ways of the world.

2011
04/07
CATEGORY
Education
History
Sex
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Living for Love

Why don’t we all live like this? Why do we live like J. Alfred Prufrock instead? Why am I asking such a question?

I am asking because I am listening to Madame Bovary, in an excellent new recording by Leelee Sobieski – I have never heard a better performance. Here I am, a 74-year old man, who has never been in love, and who never will be – who is fascinated by a story of a woman who has too much love in her life – and too little at the same time. I am also fascinated by how Flaubert weaves the life of a French provincial village into his story – and makes it a classic.

No wonder it caused a scandal in its time – it speaks frankly of things that ordinarily are hidden. Even now, when adultery is so common it is hardly worth a comment – sexuality, and the context it is embedded in continues to fascinate us. What strange creatures we are!

2011
01/22
CATEGORY
Literature
Sex
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