Here follows a sporadic litany of undistilled ideas, reactions and thoughts usually on the subject of sex or related somehow through my work at the Museum. Please understand that, while I am a trained professional, what you read on this page should be taken as my opinion or theory and, unless you see me citing sources and other similar academic rigors, I wouldn't go around repeating what you read here as solid fact. Feel free to email me with rebuttals, affirmations or other comments although please understand if I can't reply to each message in person. Sorry, I use European dates. It's not a form of protest, it's just the only way I can get things to appear in chronological order when sorted by name on my computer. It's handy.
The Museum would like you to know that the views expressed on this page are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Erotic Museum, Hollywood, it's subsidiaries, partners, lovers, or significant others.
Eric Singley
CURATOR
Regina Lynn
wired.com columnist and author
Lucky Lana
Blogger for JT's Stockroom
Rare Erotica
Russ Kick reveals amazing vintage smut and art.
More blogs about erotica.
First Martha, now this...
Every day they change this billboard on Ventura Blvd. Sometimes it's clear that they're describing the topic of the show but sometimes the phrasing is not so clear. Is Oprah doing OK these days? My wife tells me last week she was Addicted To Meth. My favorite was a couple of years ago when it said "What is High Alert?" Oprah will tell you.
Correction...
Imagine my surprise to discover that recently (ok, not so recently) the California Legislature has officially outlawed necrophilia.
I will be lobbying in Sacramento over the holidays to get language added to the law that distinguishes between "consentual" and "non-consentual" necrophilia and hopefully protect the Museum's Necrophile Donor Network program which as I understand has several enthusiastic participants.
News...
Finally got a copy of the NY Arts magazine that I wrote for. If you want to check out how they edit your words in art magazines, check it out here.
And I'm speaking at Cal State Dominguez Hills on December 1, 2005. The lecture is called "20 Questions" Wanna see some of the questions?
Why do guys come so fast?
Why do women have orgasms?
What is the secret to female orgasm?
What's up with homosexuality?
What's up with the missionary position?
What's up with the Bonobo?
Why do men react to pornography more strongly than women?
Are men really from Mars and are women really from Venus?
What's up with beastiality?
What's up with dirty talk?
What's up with celibacy?
What's up with Necrophilia?
What's up with Kegel exercises?
I think you have to be a Cal State student to go.
Man Ray...
I always knew Picasso was a horny guy. You can see it everywhere in his life and hos artwork. But Man Ray?
Just saw this documentary on the visionary Dadaist painter and photographer and found his closing comment particularly telling.
Really, really, Real Doll...
Salon.com just did a great article on the Real Doll community. Have you heard of this thing? It's a $5,000+ sex doll, actual size and complete, made to order. The article gives a pretty fair treatment to a pretty complex subject. I'm interested in this concept again because we have the Masturbation Industry exhibit coming up next year and the Real Doll enters into the picture pretty strongly. It's got me questioning where the line of masturbation is. Is it just that you're alone? If you have this life sized, human-shaped object that you're having sex with, is that masturbation? Is it sex? Is sex with a prostitute really a form of masturbation somehow? You're just using the genitals of another human to rub against, really. There's not much reciprocal emotional involved.
We have two of these creatures in the Museum, one modified so you can see the really quite amazing underlying skeleton. While I've never had sex with one of these things (honestly), I imagine the experience is much like having sex with a person who is passed out or - dare I say - dead. Lots of floppy, awkward limbs, cold (unless you take the manufacturers advice to incorporate an electric blanket into your cadre of accessories), no help at all in the pushing department. But then sometimes real sex is like that, too.
One of the things that is nice about these elaborate masturbators is that they complete the illusion extremely well and, like all solitary activity, you don't need to worry about the satisfaction of the other person. You get to do it your way. With intercourse, there is always some measure of performance and compromise between the two parties. With masturbation, you just get to be yourself.
The idea that sexual coupling is supposed to be this magically affectionate and rewarding experience does not have much basis in behavioral reality. Often it is challenging for two people to reach some kind of accord when having sex. When it does happen it is usually read as one of the signs that the two people are compatible in some profound way. Sex in the animal kingdom is a brief, tense affair often fraught with anxiety. Pleasure for the other party is seldom a consideration except with humans.
What is really fascinating to me is that it seems that some men have managed to construct quite satisfactory relationships with these things.
I understand that they are working on a voice chip so you can actually hear various sounds playing during sex which seems like an improvement. One step closer to reality. I've also heard it argued by some that adding a voice would not be an improvement. If you understand at all what kinds of behaviors are going on with the Real Doll you'll understand why.
Student Body Night...
Just had another big event here at the Museum: "Student Body Night" which marks the third shooting for our Human Body Project. Those shooting sessions are always a lot of fun and not in the way you might expect. It brings out the exhibitionist in some people. I always thought that the most interesting thing about the project was going to be working with the images and designing exhibitions. As it turns out, the most facinating thing has been meeting and interacting with the volunteers. Good spirited and happy folks as far as I can tell. It's a pretty diverse bunch. We had 40 new HBP volunteers on Saturday and a great turnout for the event. Numerous couples.
Somehow it's a liberating act to be allowed, nay encouraged, to remove your clothes in mixed company. A real harmless thrill. I recommend it to everyone. One way to think of public decency laws is to think of them as manditory clothing laws which seems a bit like the government subsidising the garment industry. I mean just think about the savings to be appreciated by the entire population, particularly in the warmer Southern states, if clothing laws were repealed and citizens were allowed to roam free like our forefather's forefathers, unencumbered by clothing or the associated economic burden. I hate clothes shopping anyway.
The Sexiest Ape...
There are three basic motivators for the human animal: survival (which mostly involves avoiding being eaten or injured), the quest for food (which involves finding something to eat), and sex. In Los Angeles, the human species has no predators, restaurants are plentiful, which leaves the only fundamental desire of sex yet unfulfilled.
You have to imagine a world about 1 to 2 million years ago when several hominid species were quite unintentionally competing for control of the world. Certain groups had natural advantages over others. Whether they were a little smarter or a little more robust or could eat a variety of things, whatever it was, you either has some advantage or you were quickly overwhelmed by some other superior subspecies. Certainly the Neanderthals were a little more powerful but the people who came before the people who are alive today had another advantage. It's one that rulers and conquerors have long appreciated: sheer numbers. And how do you build a population? Sex.
While it might be true that we are the most intelligent of animals it must also be recognized that another major factor in our long term success as a species is our rampant sexuality. I don't care how clever you are. If you can't maintain a certain volume you really don't stand much of a chance.
So although it is our intelligence that we prize as our defining attribute it is our sexuality that is responsible for our success and rules so many of our decisions.
Even a 500 pound gorilla has one of the smallest ding-a-lings in the primate family (about 2 inches). Tough luck, Koko.
The Sexual Revolution 2.0...
I've been flipping through this book by Regina Lynn, "Sexual Revolution 2.0" rather verbosely subtitled "Getting Connected, Upgrading Your Sex Life, and Finding True Love -- or at Least a Dinner Date -- in the Internet Age".
Regina writes a column called Sex Drive for wired.com (among other things) and this book is a collection of her short pieces. It's a fun read, awesome for the commute (if you take the train). Quick in, quick out, just like the internet. It covers all the permutations technology offers as tweaks to the classic modern romance. Fits in your pocket if you wear those huge hip hop jeans.
Takashi Murakami... <
I piece I wrote on Takashi Murakami:
In 2001, the United States got a taste of Japanese pop culture with the touring exhibition "Superflat". The contemporary art show featured a cadre of young Japanese artists heavily influenced by animation, comic books and corporate mascots. While the bulk of imagery depicted cute characters and friendly looking creatures a couple of artists ventured into erotic territory.
Painter, illustrator and sculptor Takashi Murakami - referred to in some circles as "The Japanese Warhol" - was one of those. His artwork and associated products had already become a hit in the Land of the Rising Sun when he began to gain notoriety as the figurehead for this new school of art. And while some of his more characteristic works graced the walls of MOCA in the Los Angeles edition of the Superflat exhibition, certain epochal creations of his were omitted. Namely, the twin sculptural pieces “Hiropan” (Japanese for “heroin”) (Click for rotating Quicktime movie. It's cool.) and “My Lonesome Cowboy”, the larger than life-size anime figures that invoke simultaneously the innocence of childhood and a powerful adult sexuality, making them perhaps too problematic for display at a public institution. The female figure is typical of the anime form with oversized eyes and breasts, exaggerated proportions and a somewhat childlike appearance offset by the fact that she is depicted mid-stride “jumping rope” with a stream of milk emanating from her own nipples. The male figure is similarly nude, holding his penis like the hilt of a weapon and flinging semen from it with a gesture of his freehand like a stream of some magical energy.
Japan has long had a dramatic polarization of morality between the public and private lives of its citizenry. The private encroaches on the public with commuters reading adult comics on the subway and public vending machines offering schoolgirls panties. The sexualizing of childlike figures is a common theme in adult comics with even adult characters drawn with distinctive childlike characteristics that pervade the world of anime (or Japanese animation”). Takashi’s figures wear their sexuality almost incidentally and veil it heavily in the formal language of childhood play and heroic fantasy. The assertive posture of the “Lonesome Cowboy” figure invokes the exaggerated superhero model common to such popular cartoons as Dragonball Z and other anime blockbuster movies. As such, his sexuality is diffused into a generic gesture of power more common to the form. Similarly, the female figure is shown engaged in a highly sexualized activity that is made innocent to some degree by her apparent obliviousness. It is these attempts to disguise and transform overt sexuality into something more innocuous that reflects the public/private dichotomy of Japanese culture.
The original sculptures sold for record prices at Christie’s a couple of years ago and are held by public corporations in Japan with only poster size prints remaining for the public to enjoy. Their exclusion from the American tour of “Superflat” is another example of the subject of sex being excised from serious discussion in artistic circles.
Hirpon, 1997
My Lonesome Cowboy, 1997
Serving women...
I have heard once more from a female visitor who commented that the Museum's exhibitions are a bit too slanted toward men which I happen to agree with. It has been an issue ever since we opened although in my experience both men and women seem to enjoy the Museum equally.
It has been difficult to program exhibitions that serve the female psyche. And not for lack of trying on my part. Even the majority of female artists that I have received submissions from are depicting female figures in what I perceive as male-centric scenes. It's odd. I think as a culture we are so used to seeing women depicted as sexual objects that it has become the expected norm. I do get quite a bit of material from gay men which has a sort of characteristic gay feel to it which for that reason often seems to disqualify it as appealing for women. At least among the women I have spoken to.
I think part of the problem is that men seem to respond so much more strongly to visual stimuli than women. For example, much of the pornographic films out there designed for women feature a strong storyline and other narrative elements that take them beyond the simple banging away that suits men. We did a Banned Books reading event which was my attempt to address erotic literature in the Museum. Erotic literature enjoys far greater popularity among women than men. I thought a reading from sexually progressive classics would be an effective way to give the female audience what it wanted and sure enough the audience was heavily female. The night was a great success but it was only one night. Unfortunately as a curator I can't just put books out in the gallery and call it an exhibition. After all, it's a Museum, not a library.
So if anyone knows of an artist that represents the female perspective on sex I'd be happy to see a portfolio.
The rights of the unliving...
There are hoards of people who spend a great deal of time and money defending the rights of the unborn. And justly so. They're hardly prepared to speak for themselves. But what about the opposite end of the existential spectrum? Who speaks for the dead and their right to a little love in the afterlife? The Erotic Museum, that's who. Just because your life processes have recently ceased I don't see why that's has to mean an end to your sex life. We have developed this little Necrophile's Donor Network card to insure that you and a loved one (or an acquaintance) are not deprived of one last go before your immortal soul is confined to eternity. It's laid out so you can print a whole sheet of them front and back by just flipping the paper over and putting it back in the printer and printing the same thing on the other side. Cut up the sheet and share the love with your friends and family. Cuts down to 2" x 3". Fits right in your wallet. If you're enterprising enough you should be able to get some poor soul to pay you ahead of time for the privledge of being named recipient! After all, necrophilia is not technically illegal in California...
Dissed by the best...
ArtForum wiseacre Matthew Wilder spent some time with us at our opening last Thursday, interviewed guests and staff, drank some wine and then dissed us on the ArtForum website. It's cool though. I can take it. Critics gotta criticize I guess. And ArtForum is a pretty tough nut to crack. I'm just glad to be noticed by the top-shelfers. Like my mom always said, "We wouldn't pick on you if we didn't love you."
Not Rowan Atkinson.
Invaded!
Can you believe, one of my favorite little things about the Museum building was removed bodily the other night. There's this guy from France called Space Invader who does this public art thing. Well, depending on who you ask it's either public art or vandalism. He (or one of his league) had attached a little mosaic to the facade sometime before we moved in and we had it preserved during construction. The other night we get a call from the security company that one of the motion sensors went off and we found it gone.
Stop. Kegel time.
Just put together this handy little flyer for you all to use.
Do your Kegels. Your boy/girlfriend/wife/lover/slave/whatever will thank you.
And you can thank me later.
Addendum...
In my experience it seems the schools favor drawings, diagrams and other abstractions over photographs in choosing visual aids for the classroom. Not coincidentally, the word "pornography" was coined about the same time as photography was invented. Previous image-making techniques were apparently too mild in their representative abilities to merit the term. This aversion to photography seems confirmation of a compelling sexual presence in the nude body - even when shown objectively - that people who are not used to the sight tend to respond to intentionally or not. It's one of the reasons that I argue that nudity even in art where it might not be presented within a sexual context ("the pure beauty of the nude in repose") is still experienced as sexual by the majority of the public simply because nudity is reserved in our culture for sex (and bathing. Which I guess makes Falconet's classic "Baigneuse" the double whammy). The photographer Spencer Tunick is an excellent example. His intent is not sexual but his images are sexually charged partially because of the sexuality perceived in nudity for our culture.
One exceptional book I'll mention again is the aptly named "Show Me". In about 80 pages of black and white photographs and brief text the book seeks to introduce children to both the physiology and the emotion behind sex with explicit clarity. The sensitive photographs by Will McBride range from small children exploring their genitals and those of other children to adults engaged in intercourse. This is not a book that ever made it into any elementary school in this country that I am aware of. Children are taught by adults to be shocked at sex. When you see the subject so innocently.
I've been discussing this book with my wife. We're trying to decide if it is appropriate for our own 9 year old boy. Naturally, I'm for it and she's a bit reserved. I do have some reservations about going through the book with him but maybe that's typical male "work it out yourself"-ishness. It's a pretty self eplanitory book but I don't just want to drop him into the pit of vipers and let him fend for himself. There's a lot of ideas in that book.
In the LA Unified School District, sex education is optional. Parents sign a permission form that cautions that the "human reproductive organs may be described, illustrated, or discussed within the context of the study of human growth, maturation, and reproduction." Difficult to say if the word "illustrated" was chosen intentionally over options like "depicted" or "portrayed" for the reasons cited above but I'm fairly confident that illustrations of fallopian tubes are less problematic.
Maybe this tendency is due to the overwhelming mass of imagery provided to the student in public. Part of the school's job in sex education is to provide a more rational counterpoint to the pornography and near porn that is used to sell hamburgers and records specifically to our nations youth. Passion is an unavoidable part of life for most people. Think about it in the same way as drivers education. Many public school systems have removed explicit films designed to scare kids into driving straight such as "Red Asphault" from drivers ed curricula just as sex ed curricula have been scrubbed of explicit imagery. They teach you the rules, the Farfegnugen is up to you. I don't remember ever seeing a diagram of an exhaust manifold in drivers ed, though they like to show you fallopian tubes in sex ed.
An article I wrote for New York Arts magazine...
Children begin puberty at some point. And sex education begins at some point. And in our culture there has always been a significant gap between those two points. It seems there are many excellent arguments for having them begin in the opposite order. Humans have been maturing earlier and earlier with the past several generations. Part of the data that helped establish this theory interestingly enough comes from records of a famous European composer who kept track over his career of the ages at which his male vocal student voices dropped. The drop in age of puberty is attributed largely to lifestyle. Being well fed and healthy allows the body to get on with it's other processes robustly. This conclusion comes from the fact that the data shows the drop in affluent countries but not in poorer parts of the world.
The main lesson I get from Kinsey is that most people are involved in a lot more sex than most people think, you just have to ask them like a thousand questions before you finally drag it out of them. His methodology even took advantage of a certain rhythm in questioning that lead interviewees to give honest answers more comfortably, such was the sensitivity of his subject. I think it was George Carlin who noted that anyone driving slower than you is an idiot and anyone driving faster than you is a maniac. Likewise, Kinsey himself quite seriously defined a promiscuous person as someone who is getting more than you. This self-rightous duplicity has long plagued sex and sexology.
The process by which objects or images are designated acceptable or obscene depends on the definition of obscenity. That judgment the Federal government defers to communities. The government has no interest in encouraging people to have sex. We are not a nation with a shortage of youth. Sex is impossible to tax and as such does not contribute directly to the consumer economy (unless you take the broad position that the end result is often a new consumer). It seems like most things that are categorized as obscene are things that we have found most people do as part of their regular sex lives. And in communities across the country we pretty much all have sex lives to some degree which seems further evidence of duplicity.
I have had to come up with a functional definition of pornography that I use to guide me in my work. The term itself is loosely translated from the latin as the record of prostitutes which seems an accurate name for the entire class of material which is designed to facilitate sexual arousal (usually in men) by depictions of sexual activity (usually involving women) using images and/or sounds. By my way of thinking, masturbation is central to the function of pornography. This is where the problem arises. Certain things are "designed" with the "intent" to facilitate masturbation. Other things might have been designed with intent for other purposes but function more or less well as masturbatory aids as well. Case in point: the Victoria's Secret Catalog and National Geographic before.
There's nothing wrong with pornography. I get more upset from a social perspective by the check cashing places all over town that financially rape lower income families without checking accounts. Pornography has a job and it does it well. Since pornography has been become big business, the kind of coercion and "white slavery" prevalent in the mob run "stag film" era has fallen dramatically. Jenna Jameson is a millionaire for heaven's sake! Pornography is to sex what professional football and hockey are to violence: a way to indulge a fundamental masculine desire in a highly commercialized way.
Sex education has been taken over by the government which lends to it's somewhat dry character. The public schools have been surprisingly hesitant when it comes to sex education. But then again so have parents. It's one of the reasons the job has fallen to the schools. They're here to give you the basics from a rational perspective which is why sex ed has restricted it's discourse to the necessities perhaps trusting that the more extravagant aspects of sex would be apparent enough. Further, the school system has to be responsive to their public. Principals are hesitant to address even widely accepted sciences such as evolution much less venture into the ever shifting subtleties of sexual techniques and trends.
I remember seeing a film in high school sex ed of a woman giving birth. I can still vividly recall the pivotal 5 seconds or so when the vast majority of what had been in (including the baby) had come out. It was apparently a Swedish film, silent and brief that he had to play on some kind of odd viewer I hadn't seen before or since. So this man had gone to considerable trouble to give me what was one of the few memorable things that I absorbed during my sexual education and it really didn't have much to do with what my experience of sex would be for the next 10 years. I understand the importance of knowing the connection between sex and babies. But what about passion.
The role of Christianity in defining morality and sexuality for our culture cannot be overemphasized. When you see sexual prejudices and proscriptions reflected in society you can usually trace each one back to some perceived canon of Christianity and shouldn't have much trouble finding a congressman who will proudly cite chapter and verse. Even the Comstock Act of the early 20th century was little more than a thinly veiled "faith-based" (to borrow contemporary parlance) witch hunt using the United States Postal Service as hunting ground. Current trends in sex education in this country strongly reflect the faith-based policies of the current administration which preaches (with funding) abstinence until marriage. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that a majority of evangelical Christians objected even to "passionate kissing" among teens. Come on. Where in the Bible, guys? They just don't like passion. It's “bad”.
The idea of "losing" your virginity as an adult is quite close to the idea of "losing" your incontinence as a baby. What is lost, really? Certain things happen while you are growing up, they're part of growing up, you're not really losing anything.
The same poll also finds a disparity between the views of parents and the notably more conservative views of principals. To be expected I suppose. They have different motivations. The principals are basically low level public officials prone to conservatism born more from practicality than ideology.
There was the recent scandal in Wynona, Minnesota where two girls were sent home for wearing "I (Heart) My Vagina" t-shirts to school. One of the lessons here for me was that especially with sex, you have to be cautious how you approach the subject because of how people feel about it. I know high school kids. I used to be one. While it may be true that the girls were staunch supporters of women's sexual freedoms I'm willing to bet that the scandal side of the equation played heavily into their actions. The truth is such a message printed across a teenage girls chest would have been a major disruption to the school considering the behavior patterns of teenage boys more than anything. The administration of the school is there primarily to teach kids to be obedient, hard working citizens; secondarily to teach them the three R's; and, oh, if you get around to it, prepare them for adult life a little.
To get a sense of the reaction to sexual imagery in the public schools I don't have to look any farther than my own backyard. Recently, one sex education practice has been debated here in the Los Angeles County school system and in other parts of the country. In some programs, students put condoms on bananas as an exercise in safe sex. The idea is that if they have at least some socially reinforced real experience in a similar situation they may not be as hesitant to use a condom when the clothes come off, which may save their lives or prevent another.
Certain groups have reacted to this exercise with distain as being beyond the school's proper role. They argue that the exercise encourages promiscuity. Just imaging the uproar if they had used an actual penis or even a fake penis in the exercise. Just imagine if they made the students in shop class remove a carburetor with a banana. Consider how restrained educators are if you tell them they can't view or use some material that is pertinent to their topic. If you were a geologist and someone said you can't look at video of Mt. St. Helens exploding you'd be a little miffed.
With the materials we are presenting in the Sex Ed 102 exhibition, a new form of sex education emerges. A fully conscious one that comprehends not just the mechanics of reproduction but the pleasure of sex and it's ability to enrich human existence. Granted, they are upper division materials, but within the collection are progressive books and films intent even for the youngest of audiences that go so far as to show actual penetration in photographs. That one is called "Show Me" and was intended as a frank and explicit introduction of all the feelings and activities surrounding sexual encounters for 4 to 8 year olds. It's not saying that 4 to 8 year olds should be engaging in sex, it's just saying that if they have at least heard about it a couple of times and seen it sometime before they are even interested it might not be so troubling once their hormonal starting gates are flung wide.
That word explicit came up back there. It's a word that has two connotations, one of which only applies to sex. What other science would be criticized for explicitly explaining it's subject?
What we're seeing is the result of repressive attitudes which retard full adult sexual development. Most people go pretty blindly into sex as an adult because they have been kept in the dark as children. What the Sex Ed 102 exhibition shows is that there is a way to teach sex that acknowledges the entirety of sex.
Rather than being just biology texts, the materials in the exhibition have the goal of helping students appreciate the role sex plays in our lives and in doing so perhaps better prepare them to deal with sex when the time comes. Which it undeniably will. In the Sex Ed 102 exhibition I reference a "Sexual Attitude Restructuring" program developed by The National Sex Forum in 1975 with the stated goal of "reducing the negative charge" of sexual activity and providing a "realistic objectification of the range of behavior" that most people engage in. That's the real challenge and the reason that part of the Museum's stated mission is to help people feel comfortable with sex. It belongs to everyone. It's time we got used to it.
Mars Attacks...
I've been thinking about the whole Mars/Venus analogy for sex lately. Men are from Mars and women are from Venus, that whole thing. While I do think it works well to make the point that men and women are fundamentally different it misses the added value of making the point of why. Making this mythological analogy - astrological really - is to say that the fundamental reasons for this divide are unfathomable and we just need to accept it and learn to put up with it.
I think it is more useful to look to the animal world for understanding of why men are the way they are and women are the way they are. Sex among mammals is a tense competition, not an affectionate repast. We don't have much of a right to expect it to be.
In many of higher mammals you find groups of females sharing a dominant male. The females are really far more sophisticated behaviorally than the males and manage to keep the males fighting between one another for dominance. In the meantime they only have to submit to sexual advances a fraction of the time.
The female basically gets one opportunity to conceive. The male can have as many opportunities as he can manage. Each act of intercourse increases his gene's chances by one. The female gets one shot and she needs it to be the best one possible. So she sharpens her skill at identifying the most powerful male while spurning the advances of (yet acutely aware of) the other males. Understand that women have long required a more sophisticated approach to getting what they want. I think there is evidence to suggest that women have been grooming men over the last several millennia to better meet their needs.
But here's the thing that makes the situation hopeful. We all pretty much comprehend the power of human intelligence to help us rise above certain aspects of our basic animal nature (such as rape, cannibalism or war). Similarly, we have managed to overpower the biological destiny of the sexual impulse and exploit it as a powerful tool of happiness in our lives. Understanding why we behave the way we do, have the feelings we do is the beginning of our liberation from the divisive habits that served competition in early humans but harm cooperation between the male and female in loving relationships today. Being human is what gives us the ability to understand why we often come to conflict as men and women and to appreciate that we're lucky we can get along at all.
Sex in nature is a tense, agressive and brief event which leaves both parties with a general feeling of anxiety than affection.
Ah, the early days of porn...
Pornography has been distributed for over a century in photographic form. And that form had certain limitations. A single image could depict certain arousing scenes but failed to capture the full dynamism of a sexual encounter.
When motion pictures were invented, pornographic movies captured an aspect of sexuality that was missing from the simple still image. But early film-based media still had limitations of cost and fragility. A feature length film was carried on several large reels of celluloid. As sound was missing from most early film formats, dialogue and music were out of the question. Consequently, most early video pornography is pretty straight to the point. Very little story, no character development, just a straight documentary approach and right to the action.
When VHS and Beta came onto the scene these practical limitations went away to some degree. Videos soon had concepts, storylines, dialogue and - inept as it might have been - acting. Many of the trappings of mainstream movies were adopted and wrapped around the prolonged and frequent sex scenes which, as a result, often felt contrived.
As the handheld camcorder replaces the movie set, so changes the character of pornography once again. The growing wave of "gonzo" porn (usually shot with a small consumer video camera with none of the traditional cinematic pretences) is a return to the practical function of pornography. With the proliferation of desktop computers and broadband delivery of internet content, these "amateur" pornographers are changing the face of pornography and that face is looking a lot like the early days of video porn.
The Big O and the Bigger O...
Lately I've been thinking a lot about orgasm and why it functions differently for men and women. Women are capable of multiple orgasms while men are not. The reaction seems to be more intense in women and longer lasting. Whether this intensity lies in the emotional expression of orgasm or it's actual sensation is difficult to say but there are clearly differences.
Women have orgasms for the same reason that men have nipples. The undifferentiated fetus is prepared to become either sex and then at a critical juncture the specific hormone is activated and the sexual destiny of the child is decided. Most of the internal organs sort themselves out to male or female but in men the nipple remains, useless. Well, mostly useless.
Similarly, women still possess the psychological framework for orgasm but they lack the physiological mechanism to bring resolution as men do. So when the orgasmic signal comes, it richochets around in the pleasure center of the brain waiting for the signal to stop and reset and never gets that signal. This leads to certain individuals like Annie Sprinkle who bring enlightenment to the world through the 20 minute orgasm (which she apparently demonstrates for lecture audiences).
This to the great advantage of women, again, who seem to have a sexual superiority to men in this regard.
Birds do it, bees do it, but the birds don't do it to the bees...
If you mate a horse and a donkey, you get an offspring that is a female creature called the mule. They are always female. This is an anomaly. Usually, when you breed between two species you get nothing at all. There is something fundamentally different between the DNA that prohibit cross breeding. Is this a message from god not to cross breed? No. A message from Darwin, maybe. When you consider the difficulties many contemporary couples experience when trying to conceive a child it's understandable that there are no sheepmen or dogwomen roaming rural communities around the world where fit sexual partners are scarce.
Let me help you understand something about dogs. Your typical dog is removed from it's mother far before it is kind to do so. It's life from that point is primarily concerned with adapting to life with humans and it's few interactions with it's own species are usually under constrained circumstances and confused and ill-prepared at best.
When you consider the impact of intelligence as a trait of mankind, and the perception of this intelligence by other species such as the dog, or the horse, copulation with a human being must be akin to some sort of divine contact or alien abduction: perhaps very strange on the surface but no less phenomenal an experience.
Beastiality is proscribed primarily as a preservation of things human rather than a sense that it is perhaps some infraction against the beast.
Beastiality is primarily practiced in one of two ways. When it involves a woman it is most commonly practiced for pornographic purposes and not at the behest of the woman. When it involves a man it is most commonly practiced for the sexual gratification of the man. This explains why it is usually women with dogs (for practicality's sake - dogs are readily available all over the place) or a horse (for dramatic effect) and with men it is usually some farm animal (again for practicality. these are the kinds of animals most abundant in more remote rural places where the individual can be reasonably assured of privacy. Kinsey found that an unusually high percentage of males had had some kind of sexual contact with an animal, usually in rural settings.
I've seen beastiality. It's not a particularly compelling sexual performance and is most useful as a sideshow type of attraction than actual pornography.
My recommendation: stay away from it if possible. It's trouble mostly. It may or may not cause real damage to either party but at the very least you're probably better off constraining your sexual universe to our own species. Longterm, you'll be happier. You're just going to have to trust me on this one.
Regarding an article in People magazine...
About a year ago, an article ran in People called The Cyberporn Generation. It describes the depth of pornography that children must wade through in their everyday lives and highlights a couple of specific predatory adult males
I face these same problems when I consider how to address sex with my own boy.
Regarding perceptual differences in men and women...
Men get their information from physical sensory observation. What I saw, what I heard, what I did.
Women's intelligence seems to be more what we call "intuitive". That is, women get their information by reading subtle clues they perceive in people's behavior. It is sensory, but it is mental, not physical.
It is enough for a man to perceive the outward appearance of sex for him to be convinced and aroused. For women it seems much more necessary to believe that the emotion behind the activity is real.
You look in the entire animal kingdom and you find that sex is a very tense event. There is a lot of tension there. It is often stressful, often brief and very little concerned with satisfaction.
A poem to start the year...
Computer programmers trying to pull traffic from search engines write scripts that automatically generates large numbers of HTML pages with random content that they upload to their website. The pages then get indexed in search engine databases like Google’s when Google’s software robots go out and do their job of indexing the internet. So these programmers are seeding the database with automatically generated pages in order to get your traffic. They put words in these pages that will garner the traffic they want. Adult words for example. They generate a random page with the words “sybian vibrator” and then anyone who searches those terms get’s that page. The script draws from a library of words and phrases created by the programmer and automatically generates text strings using these words.
Here, then, what seemed like an abstract passage had a certain contemporary poignancy to me. And, yes, I was searching the internet for "sybian vibrator". It's part of my job. Works best when read aloud in a 60's beat poet style...
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