Why is it that female circumcision (aka mutilation) is not acceptable, but that the medical world believes that male circumcision is OK and even good practice?
Wake up and smell the coffee guys — it’s all abuse!
Category Archives: sexuality
Zen Mischievous Moments #150
I offer you two snippets from the ‘Feedback’ column in this week’s New Scientist:
The entirely flat cotton bed sheet that [Reader A] bought from the department store House of Fraser came with a label telling him to wash it inside out.
[Reader B] from Edinburgh in the UK reports on a pack of condoms bought at the supermarket Sainsbury’s which had a security label stating: “Please remove prior to putting in the microwave.” [Reader B] is worried that he might have dozed off and missed a crucial part of his sex education classes at school.
Don't Fear Nudity: Embrace It!
There’s an interestingly refreshing take on nudity in an short article in the Johns Hopkins Newsletter, especially given that it is all American! Here is an edited version of the opening paragraphs.
America loves nudity. Cannot get enough. At the same time, America hates nudity. It makes us nervous … Nudity draws attention to our insecurities …
One insecurity is that of being inadequate. It makes us feel bad to think that we are unattractive …
We would rather live without the possibility of being denied our ignorance/illusion than live truthfully, in a world with breasts and penises everywhere …
But what if we were comfortable enough that we could deal? What if seeing one’s privies was commonplace? Firstly, big dicks and voluptuous breasts would no longer be as large a deal as they are body parts. Following this, skill comes into frame. One’s abilities in the sack are just as important to attraction as one’s appearance, but the more comfortable we are with nudity, the more our intellect catches up to the emotional reality of this. In business terms, transparency increases competition, and competition increases the possibility that you are just as desirable as the next …
What a refreshing change to have some commonsense!
[Hat-tip Diary of a Nudist]
Men Like Looking at Women
Let’s face it: men like looking at women. And there are good biological reasons that can be used to explain this affliction, at least according to this article at canada.com.
Like the masses of planets and stars, our bodies curve the space around us. We
radiate signals constantly, radio sources that never go off the air. We cannot
help being centers of attraction and repulsion for one another.
Well that explains it all then, really. But for more read the article; it’s interesting even if some will say it is male chauvinist. Personally I don’t think it is, just good biological sense. But then I’m male!
Guilty Pleasures Meme
This week’s meme is all about those events, foods, hobbies, people, restaurants, beverages that we love, but bring about a little (or a lot of) guilt.
As usual here are the questions ans my answers:
1. Breakfast cereal — As I don’t do breakfast cereal as such I’ll have to say Sausage and Bacon Sandwich
2. Cheap Restaurant — Nico’s
3. Expensive Restaurant — If I must The Ritz is as good a candidate as any!
4. Alcoholic Beverage — Beer
5. Non-alcoholic Beverage — Hot Chocolate, with Cherry Brandy!
6. Sad song — Arlo Guthrie, Alice’s Restaurant
7. Convenience Store item — Food
8. Tabloid Magazine — Nah, don’t read them!
9. TV Show — Anything with one of my heartthrobs in it!
10. TV Celebrity — Oh let’s go for Michaela Strachan; she’s been around forever and is still as luscious as when she started!
11. 80s Movie — Emmanuelle, well it’s 70s actually, but who’s counting?!
12. Way to completely waste time — CENSORED
1. 3/365, 2. Nico’s, 3. Putting on The Ritz – Reworked, 4. German Beer Girls, 5. koko black hot chocolate, 6. Alice’s Restaurant, 7. A seminar student choosing Convenience store food, 8. Day 47 of 365 Days of Music, 9. Paul Shirville (Heart Throb) Rose, 10. Michaela!!, 11. Pierre Bachelet and Herve Roy / Emmanuelle, 12. Some of my photos have been CENSORED by Flickr – Here are the instructions to see them:
As always these are not my photos (except #2 which is mine) but please follow the links to enjoy the work of the photographers who did take them!
Created with fd’s Flickr Toys.
30 Years!
Last night we had a little celebration. Only a little celebration over a bottle of wine followed by an early-ish night. For why? Because Noreen had hunted back through her old diaries (who has the time and discipline for these things? I never did) and discovered that we first properly went out together on 24 November 1978. I said I thought it was earlier, like late October, but she insists on the veracity of her pretty comprehensive journal from those days. So I figured I’d say “thank you” and not argue.
There are other such mini-celebrations coming up: the first time we had sex, 15 or 16 December; engagement on 30 December (well that was when Noreen dropped the bombshell on her mother anyway); Noreen moved in with me the following May; and we married in September 1979.
If you think that’s all a bit quick, well we had known each other for at least 3 years. We both knew, but didn’t tell the other, how we felt for each other. And then we almost lost contact after a disagreement when we both thought we’d screwed up and lost the other. But somehow we managed to stay in contact; just. Then unexpectedly Noreen asked me to her birthday bash in early October 1978. The rest, as they say, is history!
But hey, I realised properly last night that it is just as good as it always was. We’ve had our ups and downs – who doesn’t?! The first 2-3 years were hard – we fought; I was depressed; we had a crummy rented flat. When we bought the house in mid-1981 mortgage rates were very high – people today think they have it hard, we started our mortgage paying 14.5% interest, and after 6 months it was up to 17.5%!! That hurt. Many couples would I’m sure have thrown in the towel. But we stuck it out; somehow. And it’s got better; we don’t fight any more; we discuss, compromise and agree a way forward. By diligence we managed to pay off the mortgage seven years early. And we still have great sex; it’s different now from the early days but it is still great.
How have we done it? We don’t really know; we ask each other this question fairly regularly. But there are a number of key factors: a shared sense of humour; shared interests but also our own separate interests; doing things together but also separately; but perhaps most importantly we talk – all the time! And like all good relationships it is multi-faceted varying between friend-friend, parent-child, adult-adult, child-child, lover-lover. Even when, say, lover-lover is missing (as it will be sometimes) many of the others are there and keep things ticking along. Where relationships hit the buffers seems to be when many of the roles are missing and they degenerate into child-child, parent-child or enemy-enemy. (I’ve written more about this on the Theory of Relationships page of my Zen Mischief website.)
If we could make another 30 years we’ll both be getting on for 90. And who’s to say we can’t? Onward and upward! Here’s to many more happy years together.
Happiness Meme
Happiness Meme, originally uploaded by kcm76.
1. Meet the cat: VIC, 2. Sand Sea Sun – Snorkel!, 3. The meaning of Photography, 4. Happy Nude Recreation Week!!!, 5. my wine and Brad’s beer, 6. My wife’s hairy cunt, 7. 8×6 frosty morning railroad, 8. day one hundred five, 9. Longing for Spring, 10. ordinary pic, but really tasty salad, 11. Reading A Buyer’s Market, 12. Katsuo-ji Temple bells
This week’s question: Just tell us 12 things which make you happy, and a picture for each.
Answers:
1. Cats – because they’re magic
2. Sun, sea and sand
3. Photography – it’s about the only creativity I have
4. Warm sunshine on my skin
5. Beer and wine – two of the essentials of a contented life
6. Noreen, my wife (perhaps I should not say explicitly what I was going to!) and that after almost 30 years of marriage we still have great sex
7. Bright frosty mornings
8. Nudity – it’s normal and it’s comfortable
9. Spring green and blossom on trees
10. Good, tasty, fresh salad
11. Books, especially Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time
12. Bells
Created with fd’s Flickr Toys.
Osho on Pornography
A final thought from Osho, this time on pornography …
What is pornography, and why does it have so much appeal?
Pornography is a by-product of religious repression. The whole credit goes to the priests […] pornography is created, managed by the Church, by the religious people.
In a primitive, natural state, man is not pornographic. When human beings are naked, man knows the woman’s body and woman knows the man’s body, and you cannot sell Playboy. It is impossible. Who will purchase Playboy? […]
The whole credit goes to the religious establishment. They have repressed so much that man’s mind is boiling. The man wants to see the woman’s body. Nothing wrong in it, a simple desire, a human desire. And the woman wants to know the man’s body. A simple desire, nothing wrong about it.
Just think of a world where trees are covered with clothes. I have heard about some English ladies who cover their dogs and cats with clothes. Just think, cows and horses and dogs dressed. Then you will find new pornography arising. Somebody will
publish a nude picture of a tree – and you will hide it in a Bible and look at it!This whole foolishness is out of religious repression.
Make man free, allow people to be nude. I am not saying they should continuously be nude, but nudity should be accepted. On the beach, at the swimming pool, in the home – nudity should be accepted. The children should take a bath with the mother, with the father, in the bathroom. There is no need for the father to lock the bathroom when he goes in. The children can come and have a talk and chitchat and go out. Pornography will disappear.
Each child wants to know, “How does my daddy look?” Each child wants to know, “How does my mother look?” And this is simply intelligence, curiosity. And the child cannot know what the mother looks like, and the child cannot know what the father looks like; now you are creating illness in the child’s mind. It is you who is ill, and the illness will be reflected in the child’s mind.
I am not saying sit nude in the office or in the factory […] there is no need to be naked, it should not be an obsession; however, this continuous obsession of hiding your body is just ugly.
And one thing more: because of the clothes, bodies have become ugly because then you don’t care. You care only about the face. If your belly goes on becoming bigger and bigger, who bothers? You can hide it […] let one hundred people stand nude, and they all will be ashamed […] and they will start hiding themselves. Something is wrong. Why is it so? They know only about their face – the face they take care of; the whole body is neglected.
This is bad. This is not good. It is not in favour of the body, either.
Any country where people are allowed a little freedom to be nude becomes more beautiful; people have more beautiful bodies […]
Nudity should be natural, should be as natural as animals, as trees, as everything else is nude. Then pornography will disappear.
[Osho, Sex Matters, pp 137-8]
Nico's
This week’s self-portrait: 52 Weeks 33/52 (2008 week 41).
Yet another reflection picture!
This week I’ve been eating out at the best “greasy spoon” in all London: Nico’s, 299 Cambridge Heath Road, London, E2 0EL. Open Monday thru’ Saturday, 0645 to 1900. It is right outside Bethnal Green tube station on junction of Bethnal Green Road and Cambridge Heath Road.
Greek Cypriot, now run by the second generation. You can have anything from a bacon roll, through Egg & Chips to Dolmades or Kleftico. The food is cheap and the portions are large; do not order the mixed grill unless you are a real glutton or starving: it comes on two(!!) oval plates, one of meat the other piled with chips. A steak sandwich comes with (free) chips on the side — a full portion of chips that is! And they’re real chips too. Everything is cooked to order and the kitchen is openly visible from the counter. Needless to say it does a steady trade! Eat in or take-away.
It is very close to the V&A Museum of Childhood, where Noreen works; I was there too earlier this week and was taken out to lunch at Nico’s: I had: 2 (large) Sausages, Mushrooms and (a pile of) Chips; can Diet Coke. Noreen had: Double Egg, Beans and (a pile of) Chips; can Diet Coke. Total cost £8.50.
Highly recommended for restoring the soul but not for either the cholesterol levels or the waistline. Pure food pornography. 🙂
Zen and Sex
Further thought from Osho …
What is the Zen approach to sex? The Zen people seem to have a neuter gender, or asexual aura about them.
Zen has no attitudes about sex, and that is the beauty of Zen. To have an attitude means you are still obsessed this way or that. Somebody is against sex – he has an attitude; somebody is for sex – he has an attitude. And for and against go together like two wheels of a bullock cart. They are not enemies, they are friends, partners in the same business.
Zen has no attitude about sex. Why should one have any attitude about sex? That’s the beauty of it – Zen is utterly natural. Do you have any attitudes about drinking water? Do you have any attitudes about taking food? Do you have any attitudes about going to sleep in the night? No attitudes.
[Osho, Sex Matters, pp 178-9]