Sex in 500 words or less...

I've spent a couple of days thinking about love, and sex, my country and how we seem to think about and act about these things, having started off with the post I wrote about the bizarre attitude the GOP seems to have taken towards the whole business of sex as it plays out in the politics of birth control.

We seem to have a very, very hard time with all of this. And I'm not sure why; it all seems pretty straightforward to me.

Let's look first at the physics of this stuff.On the one hand we have feelings, our emotions; love, tenderness, caring, the affection that we feel for another person. Although we think of them as the adjunct of sexual love - more of which in a bit - these aren't exclusive to adult lovers; we feel them for our children, our parents, sometimes our friends, occasionally (and frighteningly, perhaps) for people we barely know - the obsessed fan believes he or she truly "loves" the object of the obsession, and how can you possibly draw a bright line between that love and another, when all are the product of our own emotions?On the other we have physical desire, lust, the wanting for and need of bodily intimacy. That is - hopefully - both a mutual attraction as well as between adults of the age of consent (unfortunately it's often not) and is one of the most powerful of human inclinations. One of the main reasons I consider the mainstream religious and political hissy about sex as completely moronic along with irritatingly useless is that trying to harness something that has wrecked lives and destroyed great nations by simpering "Oh...but thou shalt not..!" is like trying to sop up a typhoon with a fucking tampon.The West, the Christian West, anyway, has tried since Rome to consciously bind these two - love and sex - together, and then put a bird on it by neatly wrapping them both up with marriage.

Now I've been married twice. And I can tell you that in my experience when a marriage is good it is a wonderful thing.But all sorts of things make a marriage good. And - while sex is a part of them - you can have good times in a marriage when the sex isn't great. And while love is part of them, too, you can have incredible sex during times then the marriage isn't doing so well with the Love Connection.

Sadly I can report that when both of them go to hell there is no hell quite like it.

But for all that we usually take the Love-Sex-Marriage Axis seriously, I'm not so sure that we're doing ourselves a favor trying to wrap the heavy machinery of sex in the pretty shiny paper of love and marriage.Or...no, wait. Let me come at this another way.Love.

Love is an emotion that we can feel for many people, in many different ways, even for places, and things. Love is infinitely adaptable; I can love my children in something of the same way that I love my wife, and I can love her in something of the same way that I love my friends Brent and Julie, say, or my friend Lisa even though Lisa and I have never stood face-to-face, and I've known my wife as intimately physically as a man can know a woman.So love is a sort of universal solvent for human interaction.

Marriage..?

Well, there's a lot of reasons for marriage and when you come right down to it, almost none of them have anything to do with love.

Or sex, for that matter.

Really. Think about it.Does a scrap of paper, or a birdshot spray of words from some prelate, mean that I love my bride more, or less, or differently? Does it place a physical impediment, or remove some real barrier to our making love? Will our sex be better, or worse, or different, because we're swiving in socially accepted approval, humping to the applause of Church and State?

No.

Marriage is a property transaction, frankly, a social and legal convenience. It's about inheritance and bastardyand the lust directly involved is the tumescence of litigation that inspires lust in attorneys.

Marriage is something we've made sentimental and tried to tie into love and sex, but its fundamental purpose is purely to confine all that messy love and sloppy lust in a nice fenced social, economic, and legal corral that the prelates and politicians can feel good about.

I like being married only because of the promise it implies; Western marriage is worth a moment's consideration only in what it requires of the parties - a promise of fidelity, of emotional and physical exclusivity.Now that's a lovely idea, and a lovely promise.

But let's be honest with ourselves; how many humans can make that promise with confidence that they will mean it a year, five years, ten years from now? How many of us live up to that promise? How many of us try and fail?

How many don't really try?

My personal belief is that the real infidelity is not of the body but of the mind and soul; if you can't or don't intend to be monogamous - don't be. Don't say the words. Don't make that promise. If he or she takes you on those terms? Fine.

The lying is what makes the sin. To me. Breaking your word.

What you do with your body afterwards is just an insult.

But...back to love and sex.So. I think a big part of our troubles come from trying to tie a big pink bow around all this entropy of love on the one hand and wild rumpus of sex on the other.

We're trying to mate together water and fire; the ocean of love with the burning fire of lust, trying to convince ourselves and, in particular, our kids, that the water and fire are really one, that love and desire are Janus-faced, and that they always will arrive and depart together.

And I think this is a huge, enormous, monstrous mistake, and one that has produced more problems for us humans than sweet malt beverages and bad pop music combined.Not because people should have sex without loving and caring for each other, or that love must go with love-making.But because our bodies and minds, dirty things that they are, will produce all sorts of lascivious and lusty feelings for other people regardless of who those people are, how well those people would be for us, whether or not we should be making the sign of the two-humped whale with them.

And...

If you convince people that if they desire someone there must be love - real love, committed love, deep, intense, long-term love - around somewhere you're going to end up with a LOT of people who mistake their groinical itches for emotional attachment and the fulfillment of their genital desires with enduring love. Because you've told them that it MUST be love because it feels so good...And...just my personal opinion you also do sex a disservice when you chokehold it to love.

Physical congress is a chancy thing. It is wildly dependent on moods, health, rest and vigor, settings, and more than anything on an interplay of communications, experience, and sensitivity.You may love someone desperately and be utterly incapable of making love to them adequately.

And that failure - sadly - is often taken not for what it is; a bad night's rest, an upset stomach, the clumsiness of ignorance, the haste of youthful excitement, but for a failure of love. A mismatch in emotion. You wouldn't be such a bad lover if you really loved me..!Let me confess; when I was in my twenties I had a lover who was a woman who knew her own wants, knew something of young men, and was unafraid to patiently explain what pleased her to a young man whose knowledge of the female body pretty much stopped at "Tits!"

And then later in life I married - and am still married to - another woman who had the rare gift of understanding love as a gift, as a blessing, as a union while understanding that sex is a craft, a delicately brutal dance, a thing at once maddened, and delicate, and perhaps the most importantly, unlike love in that it can and sometimes often needs to be looked on as any other physical skill that can be bettered with practice, coaching, and communication.But I know that many, many people never get this luck. Like ignorant armies, we wrestle and gasp in the dark, and from our misfortunate collisions draw out emotional heartache we don't deserve.

Because sexual intimacy can be, should be a delight, a gift, a benediction. To reduce it to mere friction, to the bullish satisfaction of immediate needs, is to give away the gift. Because when I enjoy my beloved's body, when I immerse myself in all of the intimate scents, sounds, tastes, and textures of her, I find within them with a closer knowledge of her, a sweeter tenderness for her.

Sensual thing I am, the physical closeness to her brings me unending delights, delights I want like cool water and a warm bed at night.

I want to sit up in the pale morning light beside my lover and watch the shadows cross her hair as she sleeps and throw the intricate angles of her chin and point of shoulder into a Dürer chiaroscuro.

I want to share coffee and crullers and the morning paper and then kiss the pastry crumbs off her breasts.I want to laugh as she does a silly dance dressed only in her woolly socks.

I want to linger over her wrist kissing, feeling the heat of her body, her pulse through my lips, inhaling the scent of her warm flesh, watching her blue life move beneath the skin.

I want to listen to her explain hemstitching to me as I contemplate the deft workings of her ankle.

I want the feel the soft weight of her when she drapes herself over my shoulders and feel her warm breath on the back of my neck in that way that makes me shiver, thinking of the pressure of her hips against mine, of the way she gasps when I kiss her in that gentle crease between the top of her thigh and the swell of her belly, of the dark moist warmth of the back of her hair when we lie together after making love.Because in those moments, as close as we can be in our minds, and hearts, in the complex strands of the web we weave with our bodies we bind ourselves together in ways that the voices and eyes and minds and hearts cannot.Update 3/11: Here's Erick Loomis with a bit of late Victorian sexual curiosity; the history of the vibrator.

I can't say I agree with all of his connections between Victorian "morality" and the sudden recent outbreak of "OMFG-wimmens-are-sexing-without permission!" in the election debate, but the general concept that certain (types of) people want to banish the notion that women enjoy the physical aspects of sex and both desire and should get orgasmic fulfillment as a socially acceptable starting point seems a reasonable conclusion.

Sheik Yerbootie

I gotta tell ya.

Having to live through this year's Republican primaries has been like being jumped and beaten and then tied to a tree on the walkway just outside Monkey Island with my eyelids propped open with toothpicks and forced to watch the priapicly stupid simians inside perform unspeakable acts on themselves while those not frantically performing the Sin of Onan pelt me with rock-hard nuggets of used Purina Monkey Chow^TM.It's been a living Hell.

Not content to cut off the head of Zombie Lincoln it seems that this overpaid crew of impudent protohominid snobs is trying to shrink it, paint it black, stuff it full of over-ripe kumquats and then jam the rotting horror into a gaudily painted circus cannon labeled "No New Taxes" and blue the filthy mess all over the republic.

Sigh.

I've long since given up hope that the GOP is in any way, shape, or form saveable. The 2012 edition of the Republican Party is a gibbering loony, a tale told by a congeries of idiots in tri-cornered hats, full of sound and fury, signifying that if you pay Rush Limbaugh to puff out his flabby cheeks, rattle his newspaper, and shove enough rats and old socks in your brain and tell you that the moderate Republican elected three years earlier is a Market-Hating Commie Kenyan Muslim said brain will devolve into a puddle of thick drool and slime mold before breakfast.

The combination of Islamophobia, Taxophobia, Modernophobia, and Thoughtopobia have driven the modern GOP utterly batshit. There is no saving it; ceterum censeo GOP esse delendam - the GOP must be destroyed.But of all the utterly bizarre, completely clueless things the GOP has done this election year, it's feckless pursuit of contraception strikes me as beyond utterly mad.

And that was before the Walking Id of the Republican Party, ol' Rushbo himself, went all Morals Proctor on some poor woman with the unhappy name of Fluke who stood up in public and stated the simple fact that hormonal contraceptive pills are a form of medication and as such in her opinion were a legitimate part of a health care coverage plan.

Aside from the fetid outburst of stupid that revealed that there's a room inside Rush's brain (the one with the "Gurlies!" sign on the door) that's papered over with tattered Maxim and FHM covers and soggy Hooters T-shirts from Rushbo's early pubesence, this slut-shaming seems to have brought the entire howling crew of "conservative" C.H.U.D.s out of their sewers, shrieking about sluts and ho's, and chaining together the notion that a woman who wishes her insurer to cover her birth control is some sort of lust-crazed harlot with a sexual orifice as deep as a well, as wide as a church door, and as insatiable as a swarm of locusts, and that her sole purpose in life is to ingest free oral contraceptives so that she may swive the entire UCLA Marching Band, including the women and the costumed mascot, and, presumably, the wind instruments.

I mean, just look:This is your GOP, circa 2012. It's hard to tell which is bigger, the racist forebrain or the woman-having-sex-hating hindbrain.

But either one is completely batshit insane.

I mean seriously fucking insane.

Canvas-sportjacket-with-wraparound-sleeves, shoes-off, scribbling-with-feces-on-the-padded-walls insane.

Leaving aside the question of the other effects hormonal contraceptives have, the simple fact is that this entire nonsense is based on the notion that sex without the threat of pregnancy is bad.

Sex; fun sex, companionable sex, sex as affection, sex as bonding, even sex as recreation, or sex as friendship - all of these are BAAAAAADDDDDD!!!Even for the Party of the Incredibly Dumb Fucking Platform, the notion that pursuing this issue as an electoral winner?

Insane.

But...I want to pause here for a moment and reflect on the fact that this got ANY traction at all.

What does that say about us, us 21st Century Americans, and especially the sort of people who are clustering around the radio listening to Rushbo, or busily typing away at letters or e-mails about sluts to Powerline and the usual hives of scum and villainy that serve as watering holes for the terminally patriotic?

Why are all these people so wrapped around the axle about sex without the threat of babies?

I mean, human beings have been leaping upon each other for all sorts of reasons since - and probably before - we descended from the trees.

Certainly sexual congress is a way of procreating. But let's be honest; how many times have you approached your lover with the thought, oh, yeah, honey, let's start a family!

Okay, well, if you're the Duggars, yeah, maybe every time. But don't get me started on that one-family football team. For most of us...there's all sorts of reasons for making love.

We may want to hold our lover, or be held. We may just be crazy-wild with lust; he or she may just be driving us completely berserk. We may be lonely. Or sad. Or joyful, and want to share that in the closest way possible.We may want a challenge, or a reassurance, or tenderness. We may want to make ourselves a chalice to hold the one we love, or overwhelm someone with pure physical sensation.

And there are times when we just want to get laid. Personally - and this is just a suggestion, guys - my feeling is that if you're not interested in the woman attached to the vagina?

Take yourself in hand, let's say. Masturbation would be better for all concerned; quicker, cheaper, safer, and nobody has to lie to anyone else.

But that's just me talkin'.

So here's the point; there's a hell of a lot of times and places where two people want to put the totem pole in the donut hole - or whatever else they feel like doing with someone that, hopefully, in the best of all worlds, they deeply care for. And a hell of a lot of them don't - and shouldn't! - risk producing a kiddo as a result.

For the record, I'm all in favor of those of us who want and intend to make sweet, sweet love to do so, in the times and places and ways we deem best. That is our great strength and our great joy as humans - as often as we fuck it up, screw the wrong people for the wrong reasons, and get ourselves and others in trouble because of it - and we should cherish that sacrament, not hate or fear it. Let us love; let us MAKE love; honestly, openly, truthfully, recklessly.

But that unless we are very, very, very sure that we want a child, are aware of what that entails, and are prepared to deal with the consequences...I want us to make sure the joint venture between my little wrigglers and your egg never gets to float an IPO. Birth control? That's part and parcel of the deal unless we decide otherwise. We should be able to love without risking our lives, and the life of a child, every time we do.And anyone who thinks they should is a complete and utter moron.

Or a Republican.

But I repeat myself.

The Post After The Last "U.S. Politics" Post I Ever Wrote

I know, I know. I said I was done.

But this is so brilliant, so succinct, so perfect an illustration of the level our political discourse had sunk to that I cannot with good intent pass on commenting on it. Here's the quote, from Charlie Pierce again, citing Rick Santorum on the evils of putting the totem pole in the donut hole without throwing the pregnancy dice (emphasis mine):

"One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country. It's not okay. It's a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be."

Now sit back and think about that for a moment.First of all, this man isn't running for stake president of the local Mormon outfit. He's not a cardinal hustling votes for the Papacy. He's supposed to be one of We the People, a citizen of a nation explicitly designed around not codifying religious dogma into civil law ("an establishment of religion") who is trying to convince you to vote for him as its Chief Executive.

And this is part of his platform.

Second, consider the semantics of his statement; "do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be".

Obviously, for Santorum, it's how GOD wants them to be.And this is...why?

Why should we care what Santorum's Bible says? Or even what PART of it Santorum wants us to listen to.

My grandfather was a Salvation Army officer, and I'm as familiar with the Christian Bible, Old and New Testaments, as a heathen can be. And in my opinion there's a ton of stuff about sex, almost all of it archaic, almost all of it confusing, and none of it applicable to the job of the President of the United States.

There's all the old Hebrew stuff; "be fruitful and multiply", the Sin of Onan, but you'd expect that from a culture that demanded progeny due to the insane rate of death in infancy, childhood and childbirth.

But there is also some genuinely bizarre shit. Like how you're supposed to fuck your brother's widow? Or the etiquette for raping your female slaves? (Hint - make sure you have a spare ram around in case you get caught...).

In other words, there's all SORTS of ridiculous desert-wandering God-pesterer crap in the Bible, sexual or otherwise.And that Rick Santorum cherry-picks some of it says more about him than it does about the Christian Bible.

But that's kinda not the point, really, isn't it?

The point is that we're supposed to be living in a non-sectarian state, as in, you can't circumsize my daughter - or my son - because of what YOU believe. You don't get to decide whether my wife and I have kids when we have sex because YOU believe we should, or even if your GOD believes we should and tells you so. And we don't have to figure out what part of the Bible that's in; it's right in the Constitution.

That's really all there is to it.

And Rick Santorum doesn't believe this.

And Rick Santorum is not being laughed, reviled, and mocked off the public stage.

Rick Santorum is not being held up as a living example of the very dangers of theocracy by the sort of people who will swear to you that Muslims want you to live by sharia law.No.

Rick Santorum is being taken seriously as a Presidential candidate by the "news media" and by a significant number of people in one of our two major political parties.Update 1/4: And the fact that this god-botherer pulled a quarter of the GOP vote - that between them this religious whackaloon who believes that it is the President's job to intone on what my wife and I do in bed and the goldbug who thinks that our country is still working under the Articles of Confederation pulled half the GOP electorate in Iowa - should tell you all you really need to know about our nation and why we are where we are today.

We Are So Fucked.

Sex as Entomology

I have written a fair bit about men, women, and sex, but nothing quite like this:

"Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her."From this year's "Bad Sex Award" winner.

There's more, too.

Wars and Lechery II: Electric Boogaloo

Okay. Let me admit this right off; there is nothing in this post about "Electric Boogaloo". I've just always wanted to use that as a title for something since 1984.

No, this turns on some idle ruminations on humans, sex, and soldiers; three subjects that some will say are never far off my mind.

It started as I was reading a historical fantasy set in what was a parallel of classical late Republican Rome. The author made some cosmetic changes; gave the characters Germanic-sounding names, gave the legionaries short spears instead of short swords.

But it was Rome. Recognizably so.

It's a fairly decent read, as historical fiction goes. But I found myself reading through one passage during which one of the main characters interacts with a supporting character who is intended to be the fictional world's counterpart of a Roman centurion.

He's even referred to as "First Spear", the usual mistranslation of the Latin term "primus pilus" or "First Rank/Front Rank", the place that the senior centurion and his unit were found when the legion was drawn up in ranks.

And the way the character is handled makes it pretty clear that he's being treated as some sort of First Sergeant or Sergeant Major of this infantry unit.

Which a centurion - and especially the most senior centurion in a legion - most certainly was not.

But it got me thinking.

We know a great deal about the Roman legions. We know their names, where many of them were posted and when, where they fought, and whether they won or lost. We even know the names of individual officers and troopers in certain legions, thanks to Roman burial habits.We even know a lot about their everyday life; what they did, what they ate, where they slept, what they were paid, what their barracks, homes, and camps were like. Archeological studies can even tell us something of what they looked like; how tall they were, how big, whether they were robust or sickly, how they died, and when.

But the one thing we don't know is the part in the story; how they acted among themselves.

Was a Roman officer as a rule an unapproachable sort? Certainly he had the offhand authority to beat or kill his soldiers; that has a certain chilling effect on familiarity. But a modern U.S. Army officer typically gets a bit of offhand joshing if he is well-liked by his troops, and a sergeant even moreso. Certainly between officers and sergeants of long association there is often a warm respect and even friendship.But was a Roman century commander - a centurion equivalent to a U.S. Army company commander - more like a sort of combined officer/sergeant - both issuing orders and inspecting individual kit? How would have his soldiers reacted, spoken to, such a man? Was there ever any sort of friendship? Would a typical Roman ranker - say a senior guy like me, the equivalent or a sergeant - have been able to kid around or make conversation with my centurion? What would we have talked about? Could I have addressed him with some sort of familiar title; "First Shirt", "The Old Man". "Skipper"? Would he have enjoyed it, or would it have been appalling to both of us?

We don't know, and probably never will, if for no other reason than the way we think and interact today is so different from the way they did.

Yes, people are people, and certainly there must be some similarities between a typical 1st Century Roman and a typical 21st Century American. We eat, we, sleep, we work. We enjoy some things, dislike others, desire comforts, shun discomfort.

But the difference in our worlds wuns so deep, it's hard to be sure just how a Roman would have felt and thought about the same things.Take sex.

Okay, lets. No, seriously. Perhaps nothing illustrates the vast difference between then and now than sex.

Physically...well, there's only so many ways you can fit Tab A into Slot B. It's the emotional part that makes all the difference, and here the huge barrier standing between us is slavery.In the modern U.S. if you want sex - and you're a man - you have to either find a woman who likes you, or a woman who needs money enough to pretend she likes you. Unlike an earlier time you don't have to get married - although we often do, since we associate sex very closely with emotional love.

But a Roman had slaves. Perhaps the worst part of chattel slavery is the lack of freedom to control one's own body, and I've read that nearly every Roman man old enough to have sex and wealthy enough to own a slave - and Roman society was soaked in slavery; millions of slaves were the foundation of late Republican and Imperial wealth - had more-or-less forcible sex with those slaves.

With this sort of sexual training, you have to wonder; what was a Roman bride's wedding night like? Presumably a virgin, given most societies' ferocity where the chastity of their marriageable women were concerned, the poor girl would have found herself in bed with a lad whose actual experience to date had very likely been with a living woman who could no more resist or instruct him than a rubber sex doll could a 2011 groom in Philomath. What would that have done to the place of sex in a Roman relationship? How did a typical Roman of my age and social class look at sex, at the sexual bond he shared - or lacked - with his wife?

Here are artifacts of some of those slave rapes.These are spintriae, coins struck purely for the purpose of buying sex from prostitutes, most of whom were slaves. The theory is that both the buyer and the purchase were often illiterate, and the women (or men) in the brothels were also often war captives who spoke little if any Latin. The little coins showed the unfortunate slave what was expected of her and told him how much it cost.To a modern American who has generally avoided rent-a-dates because of a combination of disease concerns, general skeeviness, and a vestigal sense of romantic emotion, I try and imagine how the availability of a living human fuck-doll would have affected my attitude towards love, sex, and the relationship between them.

We're left trying to reconstruct that attitude from the poets and writers, from the paintings, from the artifacts.I'll be the first to say - I have no idea and I don't really want to know. Because the only way you could would be to restore chattel slavery and return some woman to the level of a very peculiar object, one with with thoughts and emotions. The very notion is so bizarrely complex I cannot imagine it.

The simple everyday conversation between a Roman soldier and his officer.The secrets between a Roman man and a slave woman.Both utterly lost to us, and with them, our complete understanding of those vanished people.

Ladybug Girl

I retract or reconsider absolutely nothing of the preceding post.

But.

For all that I would no more want her near the levers of power than I would want to arm a wild monkey with a speargun, I have to say three things about the sordid tale of wankistic frat-boy canoodling that is being used to humiliate Christine O'Donnell.1. Instead of making me sneer at her or laugh at her, this story actually makes like the woman more as a person. Mind you, when I hear or read the things she says on the campaign trail I'm reminded all over again that she is a smug, entitled, ignorant jackass and can go back to hoping she gets her electoral butt whipped. But to get high-schooled, and make out with some egotistical dick, but still manage to stick to your chaste principles? You get some props for that, girl.

2. Something that jumped out of the guy's story is this little gem:

"But there were signs that she wasn't very experienced sexually. When her underwear came off, I immediately noticed that the waxing trend had completely passed her by. Obviously, that was a big turnoff, and I quickly lost interest."

Important safety tip, Romeo; real women have body hair, and body hair means pubic hair. It's feminine, it's attractive, you might even say it's one of the defining aspects of "woman" as opposed to "girl". If you find a woman who looks sexually like a woman and not a prepubescent girl "a big turnoff" I have to say that I'm surprised you aren't spending your weekends at the State Correctional Facility for Men for statutory rape. You might find that unlike your fastidious frat-boy ass your jail husband there might not have trouble with your furry man bits.

Just sayin'...

3. Why is it that a woman looks completely silly and adorable in a ladybug costume?It has to be a XX thing. A man in a similar getup would look utterly idiotic. Chris O'Donnel was Ladybug Girl before there was a Ladybug Girl. Who knew. She looks winsomely dorky in her bug suit.

I still wouldn't vote for her