Category Archives: beliefs

beliefs, current affairs, medical, quotes, science

Quotes of the Week

Another in our occasional series of quotations encountered during he week which have struck me.

Bodies are … I mean, what are they? They’re these sacks of bone and meat and water held together by 2 meters of integumentary tissue. They’re battlegrounds of infection and injury
[…]
A body is a life. My opinion is that bodies, lives, people who have suffered and survived are the MOST beautiful. The marks left on their skins tell us of the strength, the resilience, the power of the person. The so-called flaws of a body show you what a person has made of themselves
[…]
Real bodies, real lives, real people. Real things have scratches.
[Emily Nagoski, ]

“D’you get any good presents?”
“Yeah, me Aunty Jean got me a goat, but they delivered it somewhere in Africa … unbelievable”
[from a Christmas card spotted at ]

Life is full of miracles, minor, major, middling C. It’s called “not being in a persistent vegetative state” and “having a life span longer than a click beetle’s.”
[Natalie Angier, The Canon]

unconstitutionally vague
[US Federal Court of Appeals in rejecting the policy of the FCC on indecent words in broadcasts]

One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.
[Arthur C Clarke]

beliefs, freedom of speech, ramblings, sexuality, thoughts

Questions about Sex Images

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This post is about pornography and a couple of current fashions in same that I don’t understand. But first let’s get something fundamental out of the way …

What do I mean by pornography in this context? I mean the normal, relatively sane, heterosexual material which can be bought legally in the UK over the counter of the corner shop or licensed sex shop or found easily on the internet. I do not mean anything involving extreme violence, abuse, lack of consent, drugs, children, animals, unpleasant bodily excretions or anything illegal – none of which I would ever condone.

Yes, I admit it, I look at pornography. Well so what? I’m a normal red-blooded male, I still have a pulse and I’m a sexual libertarian (as long as it’s consensual). Most of us have seen (if not actively used) pornography at some point of our lives, with American research showing that almost 90% of young men and over 30% of young women actually use pornography – now translate that into how many have ever seen pornography. So it’s there, we all know it’s there, we all know what it contains and we all know that at the level I’m discussing it does next to bugger all harm.

Having cleared that up, can we now have an adult conversation about it, please?

So there are two things which seem to be fashionable in current pornography which I fail to understand, and which I would welcome someone knowledgeable explaining to me.

Firstly … Why does every female (and a significant minority of men too) have to have their pubic area clean shaven? Yes, it’s a fashion. It didn’t used to be this way. Look at porn images from 30-40 years ago and everyone is hairy. OK, I understand that the lack of hair gives a better view of the genitals, but that doesn’t require complete depilation. I also understand that depilated females are supposed to look younger and more virginal, but given the current concerns with child pornography I would have thought this is something most men (and women) would want to avoid! And I also know that some people prefer a lack of hair as it increases skin contact during sex. But that does not explain why 99% of females are significantly if not totally depliated. Yes by all means tidy the hairy bits up round the edges. We all get a haircut from time to time but we don’t all go around with our heads shaved, so why shave our pubes? What is it about our naturally hairy state that is so unacceptable? Is this something more than pure fashion? If so, why? I don’t get it.

Actually now I think about it I have a subsidiary question. Why is it that the majority of women appear to prefer non-hairy men. Many times I have heard girlies interviewed and give an “Eeeuuwwwww” reaction to the idea of a hairy man – particularly hairy chests and backs. What is it about hairy men that’s such a turn-off? Or again is this just fashion, perpetuated by the likes of the Chippendales?

OK, here’s my second question. One of most men’s dreams (GOK why) is being on the receiving end of fellatio given by some nubile sex goddess (or god). And of course this appears regularly as a pornographic image. But why, oh why, do the girls (I don’t look at the men!) performing the act always look at the camera and look bored? Oh, OK, they probably are bored. But wouldn’t it be a whole sight more erotic if they were concentrating on the job in hand and look as if they are enjoying it? Why must they look at the camera in that desultory way? Sure, eye contact is important to communication, but even at a time like this? Again, I don’t get it.

Now can anyone knowledgeable explain either of these phenomena, please? Are they just fashions or am I missing something deeper?

PS. If I start getting abusive comments they will be deleted, as will any comment which unnecessarily links to pornographic images. You are perfectly entitled to your opinion, and to express it, but you are not entitled to do so in an abusive way. My rules! OK?

beliefs, medical, personal, science, thoughts

Don’t Assume

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In interacting and communicating with other people we make a lot of assumptions about the other person. Sure, we have to make some assumptions to even begin to communicate (for instance that the other person can understand our language); if we didn’t we would have to start every conversation by asking a complete set of detailed questions – so many we would end up never communicating anything. But making too many, and too deep, assumptions, and not testing those we must make, is highly dangerous. Along with not listening to what the other person actually says, is in my experience the root cause of the majority of misunderstandings.

So I decided to set out those things which it seems to me we assume about the other person or the situation at our peril:

  • Any one person speaks for everyone
  • Anyone is right about anything
  • “Culture” or “society” is the same everywhere and for everybody
  • Someone else’s ethics and morals are the same as yours
  • How young or old or young the person is
  • Someone else is of a given race or nationality
  • What someone else’s religion or spiritual belief system is
  • What someone else’s first language or nationality is
  • What someone else’s politics are
  • What someone else’s personal values are
  • What someone else’s economic class is
  • What someone else’s financial situation is
  • What someone else’s level of education is
  • What someone else’s level of intelligence is
  • What someone else’s experiences or background are
  • What someone else’s life history is
  • What the person’s family or home background is
  • What someone else’s sexuality is or that someone else’s sexual ideals or ethics are the same as yours
  • Someone else has the same body or beauty ideals you do
  • Someone else has the same values, desires, interests, likes and dislikes as you
  • All things have the same effect on all people
  • Anything is universally yucky or universally yummy
  • What someone else’s skills and aptitudes are
  • What you find easy or hard they will also find easy or hard
  • What worked for you will work for anyone else
  • Someone else is better, worse, the same or different to you
  • Any given word means the same thing to everyone
  • One kind of learning works for everyone
  • Your logic is someone else’s logic
  • What they think is the same as you think
  • Someone else’s common sense is the same as your common sense
  • What is right for you is right for anyone else, and vice versa
  • Anything is possible or impossible

Yes we often can (and do) make pretty good guesses at many of these and we base our initial communications on them, but we’d better be prepared to test our guesses and change our position accordingly. I’m sure we’ve all been in situations where we’ve made an assumption about (say) someone’s education only to find we’re totally wrong – haven’t we all come across someone with a doctorate doing a job we wouldn’t expect (driving a taxi or a bus, dealing in second-hand books, selling insurance). Or we’ve spoken to a colleague on the phone and then been surprised on meeting them to find they’re a Sikh, a Muslim or Afro-Caribbean. 

Beware quicksands! … Orator caveo.

arts, beliefs, quotes, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

Another in our occasional series of quotations encountered during he week which have struck me: because of their zen-ness, their humour, or their verisimilitude.

Lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting and … ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to “walk about” into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?
[Wassily Kandinsky, 1910]

The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it’s only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.
[Chuck Palahniuk]

It doesn’t matter what you’ve got in your pants if there’s nothing in your brain to connect it to.

Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

… the result of some wobbly high-heel work at a drink addled giggle-fest.
[Alison Cross]

amusements, beliefs, nudism, thoughts

Nude Day at Work

I’ve posted quite a bit about nudity, naturism and “clothing optional” over the years; a search on “nudity” will pick up the majority of postings.  As you’ll all guess by now I’m a great believer in not wearing clothes if I don’t need to: “nude when possible; clothed when necessary” is the motto.  Having said that I’m not an active member of the naturist movement, partly because I’m not a clubby sort of person and partly down to sheer convenience; I do though support British Naturism (BN) by being a member.

All of which is a preamble to say that I’m not sure I have blogged this cartoon before; if I have it was before this incarnation of the weblog, so a long time ago.  You’ll need to click the image to get a larger, readable, version.

Now wouldn’t that be a great idea.  I wonder which company would have the courage to be the first to introduce Mondays (or any day!) as Nude Day at work?

amusements, beliefs, current affairs, quotes, sexuality, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

Another in our occasional series of quotations encountered during he week which have struck me: because of their zen-ness, their humour, or their verisimilitude.

Although the world’s religions may differ fundamentally from one other in their metaphysical views, when it comes to their teachings on the actual practice of ethics, there is great convergence. All the faith traditions emphasize a virtuous way of being, the purification of the mind from negative thoughts and impulses, the doing of good deeds, and living a meaningful life.
[Dalai Lama]

Don’t forget those irregular verbs like hoggo, piggeri, swini, gruntum.
[pmh {at} cix]

Sex and money: the forked root of evil
[Ross Macdonald, The Drowning Pool]

Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.
[Tom Robbins]

Girls are like pianos. When they’re not upright, they’re grand.
[Benny Hill]

beliefs, medical, science, sexuality, thoughts

Religion and Sex

“Religion** is bad for your sex life”, at least according to Dr Emily Nagoski.  And she should know as she’s a college health (and sex) educator in Massachusetts, with a doctorate in Health Behaviour and Human Sexuality and other degrees in counselling and psychology.  What I like is that she holds very firm and forthright views and isn’t afraid to air them.  In what she calls “my most offensive post yet” she says why she believes religion is bad for your sex life and how it is that she cannot choose to believe and have any faith.  Here are a few snippets:

Religion** is bad for your sex life. I don’t mean it doesn’t help, I mean it’s actively destructive […]

[…] religion is bad both at the individual level and at the cultural level. Individually, it results in inhibitions, shame, fear, guilt, bias against others, and acceptance of gender-based stereotypes. Culturally it results in the oppression of women and sexual minorities […] and the obstruction of the scientific study of sexuality.

But the worst thing about religion is that it makes it okay to just believe shit because you want to. No religion, no matter how liberal, escapes that.

[…] I think faith/religiosity is an innate part of human psychology. I think human belief in an invisible family in the sky is either product or byproduct of evolution. However, it is, for no apparent reason, NOT an innate part of MY psychology […]

I know that the experience of faith is both real and important for lots of people, and I know it offends them when I discuss faith as a form of self-delusion, but I genuinely don’t understand, plain old don’t understand […] how a person can CHOOSE to believe in something.

They choose to believe it because it makes them feel good. And I think this characterizes MOST people. I think MOST people are able to believe more or less anything they like the sound of. Indeed we’ve made a virtue of it. Just BELIEVE. It’s The Secret, ya know. […]

[…] most of the work I do related to religion involves trying to untangle the knots religion has knit into a person’s sexuality. In my experience, in 90% or more cases religion has caused some form of damage to a person’s sexuality […]

Which is sort of interesting in that it says what I have wondered for many years.  Mind I wouldn’t go so far as Emily, I think — at least not a stridently.  And just because I don’t believe any any form of overarching deity(s) (I just don’t need them, or anyone, to decide my morals for me) doesn’t mean I would deny such a crutch to anyone else.

No, what was interesting for me was that someone who should know, and should be in a position to see, has the courage to say that religion has an adverse effect on sexuality and thus by implication on other taboo areas of health.

But do go and read the original post in full for yourselves.  It’s interesting even if you don’t/can’t agree with it.  And there is a (surprising good natured) discussion in the comments too.

** By religion Emily means ANY and ALL religions.

beliefs, medical, nudism, science, thoughts

Air Baths

Thinking yesterday about nudism, I recalled some connection with the great American statesman, scientist, diplomat and thinker Benjamin Franklin.  And indeed it is so for Franklin was in the habit of taking a daily “air bath”, as he called it.  Almost 250 years ago on 28 July 1768, when in London, Franklin writes to the French physician, Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg:

I greatly approve the epithet which you give, in your letter of the 8th of June, to the new method of treating the small-pox, which you call the tonic or bracing. method; I will take occasion from it to mention a practice to which I have accustomed myself. You know the cold bath has long been in vogue here as a tonic; but the shock of the cold water has always appeared to me, generally speaking, as too violent, and I have found it much more agreeable to my constitution to bathe in another element, I mean cold air. With this view I rise almost every morning, and sit in my chamber without any clothes whatever, half an hour or an hour, according to the season, either reading or writing. This practice is not in the least painful, but, on the contrary, agreeable; and, if I return to bed afterwards, before I dress myself, as sometimes happens, I make a supplement to my night’s rest of one or two hours of the most pleasing sleep that can be imagined. I find no ill consequences whatever resulting from it, and that at least it does not injure my health, if it does not in fact contribute much to its preservation. I shall therefore call it for the future a bracing or tonic bath.

Elsewhere Franklin also writes:

In summer-nights, when I court sleep in vain I often get up and sit at the open window or at the foot of my bed, stark-naked for a quarter of an hour. That simple expedient removes the difficulty (whatever its cause), and upon returning to bed I can generally rely upon getting two or three hours of most refreshing sleep.

Let us remember too that Franklin was no mean inventor.  Amongst other things he gave us: bifocals, the flexible urinary catheter, the lightning conductor, an especially efficient design of wood-burning stove, the odometer, America’s first public library as well as hugely increasing our understanding of electricity and mapping the Gulf Stream.  And as if that wasn’t enough he was one of the founding fathers of the United States.

Who would doubt the wisdom of such a man?

beliefs, science, thoughts

Hume's Guillotine

Astrophysicist Sean Carroll, over at Cosmic Variance, wrote an interesting piece on moral philosophy a few days ago. Carroll was reviewing/commenting on a TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talk by Sam Harris in which, according to Carroll “he [Harris] claims that science can tell us what to value, or how to be moral”.

Now I’m not concerned with the actual content of Harris’s talk, nor the arguments subsequent upon Carroll’s comments, which you can find in the links from here and here.

My concern is to highlight the interesting proposition in moral philosphy that you can’t derive an “ought” from an “is”. This appears to have been first discussed by philosopher David Hume around 1739 and has become known as Hume’s Guillotine. Wikipedia quotes book III, part I, section I of Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature:

In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.

In case you didn’t follow that (yep, I struggled too!), here’s Carroll’s version from the final paragraphs of his Cosmic Variance piece (remember he’s commenting on Harris’s talk):

In the real world, when we disagree with someone else’s moral judgments, we try to persuade them to see things our way; if that fails, we may (as a society) resort to more dramatic measures like throwing them in jail. But our ability to persuade others that they are being immoral is completely unaffected – and indeed, may even be hindered – by pretending that our version of morality is objectively true […]

The unfortunate part of this is that Harris says a lot of true and interesting things, and threatens to undermine the power of his argument by insisting on the objectivity of moral judgments. There are not objective moral truths (where “objective” means “existing independently of human invention”), but there are real human beings with complex sets of preferences. What we call “morality” is an outgrowth of the interplay of those preferences with the world around us, and in particular with other human beings. The project of moral philosophy is to make sense of our preferences, to try to make them logically consistent, to reconcile them with the preferences of others and the realities of our environments, and to discover how to fulfill them most efficiently. Science can be extremely helpful, even crucial, in that task. We live in a universe governed by natural laws, and it makes all the sense in the world to think that a clear understanding of those laws will be useful in helping us live our lives […] When Harris talks about how people can reach different states of happiness, or how societies can become more successful, the relevance of science to these goals is absolutely real and worth stressing.

Which is why it’s a shame to get the whole thing off on the wrong foot by insisting that values are simply a particular version of empirical facts. When people share values, facts can be very helpful to them in advancing their goals. But when they don’t share values, there’s no way to show that one of the parties is “objectively wrong”. And when you start thinking that there is, a whole set of dangerous mistakes begins to threaten. It’s okay to admit that values can’t be derived from facts […]

All of which seems about right to me; as is the corollary: you can’t derive an “is” from an “ought”, or in words of Flannery O’Connor “the truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it”.