Siren Song

Hola Everybody,
I'm pissed because when I got home last night, I meant to post a blog -- keeping with my commitment to post one bog per day for the year. I fell asleep and didn't wake up until 3:00 AM... 

Gentlemen, consider the following: Imagine for a moment that through some random evolutionary adaptation, our penises grew from our foreheads instead of between our legs (after all, it makes more sense from a woman's perspective LOL). Now, imagine how it would feel if every time you went out in public women would make untoward remarks about the size (or lack thereof), shape, attractiveness, or unattractiveness of your penis. Complete strangers commenting on something highly personal, something you have mixed feelings about (because it’s either too small or too big, or bent at the head, etc.). Imagine that as soon as you reached puberty (or even before) women would make cruel, oftentimes publicly humiliating remarks about your penis. If you can imagine how this would feel (and let's be real: most of you would die if a woman so much as pointed at your penis and laughed), then you have a very small idea of what it feels like to be a woman and do something as mundane as take a walk.

Listening to the Songs of the Sirens

Excerpted from Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears
By Pema Chodron

Ulysses, the hero of ancient Greek mythology, exemplifies the courage it takes to consciously choose staying receptive and present when the temptation to get swept away is intense. 

When he was making the sea voyage home to Greece after the Trojan War, Ulysses knew that his ship would have to pass through a very dangerous area that was inhabited by beautiful maidens known as the sirens. He had been warned that the call of these women was irresistible, and that sailors couldn’t help but steer towards the sirens, crash their boats onto the rocks, and drown. 

Nevertheless, Ulysses wanted to hear the song of the sirens. He knew the prophecy that if anyone could hear their voices and not go towards them, the sirens would lose their power forever and wither away. This was the challenge that compelled him.

As his ship neared the sirens’ homeland, Ulysses told his men to put wax plugs in their ears and to tie him tightly to the mast, instructing them that no matter how hard he struggled and gestured, no matter how wrathfully he appeared to be ordering them to cut his ropes, they were not to untie him until the ship reached a familiar point of land well out of earshot of the sirens’ song. This story, as you might expect, has a happy ending. The men followed his instructions and Ulysses made it though. 

To a greater or lesser degree we will all have to go through similar discomfort in order not to follow the call of our own personal sirens, in order to step through the open doorway to awakening.

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My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

The Friday Sex Blog [Goal-oriented Sex]

Hola Everybody,
Sorry for the repetition, but if you can give, please consider supporting my writing. You can do so HERE.

It’s Friday and it's the sex blog!

The Dangers of Goal Oriented Sex

In our consumer-based society, sex oftentimes resembles a contest. If there ever was a metaphor we need to do away with it has to be the “war” of the sexes. In a zero-sum society, where the mentality of “winner takes all” rules, it's no wonder that sex resembles a race or competition. It seems that more liberated we become, the more obsessed we are about who can have the most intense orgasm, which is the best oral technique, who has the most attention, who can be the most alluring, or have the most men or women. It’s all a mess!

Tragically, this mindset is also at the root of rape culture. Men are taught to view sex as a game of conquest resulting in rates of rape and sexual assaults in our college campuses that is epidemic in its scope. On the other side, women are conditioned to dislike their bodies (in the race to be a size zero) and that their sex is a prize to be won. Sex is used to sell everything from shoes to cars and objectification is the name of the game.

It's absolutely mindboggling.

As a consequence, sex is something people do mindlessly, often in the darkened corridors of their shame.

My question today is what would happen to the simple of act of touching, for example, if we took away the agenda of a goal-oriented mindset away from it? What if your lover simply touched you?

What would it feel like if your lover simply bathed you with no expectation of sex? Imagine being caressed for a long period of time, being bathed, towel-dried, massaged, pampered, touched, looked at, explored sensuously, lovingly, intimately -- without sex being the endgame? What would that do to your comfortability with intimacy, touch, and nudity -- to have your lover drink in your body with his or her eyes like that? Just for the sake of looking?

The first casualty of long-term relationships is often the loss of sexual expression in the form of excitement, playfulness, spontaneity, and seductive touching. Perhaps we all need a re-orienting toward pleasurable sensual feelings. Without sensuality there is no real sex, and without sex, there's no genuine intimacy. Emphasizing a creative-type exploration, in a relaxed, non-goal oriented manner, the sensual pleasure you can derive from touching and being touched, is a sure-fire path to sexual healing or re-awakening.

Lovers develop assumptions (often based on faulty perceptions) and fall into ruts, creating awkwardness toward asking for a different type of touching. Perhaps it is time that we stop, reflect, and find creative, kind, and loving ways to experience sex with one another that’s authentically pleasurable and sacred.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

The Friday Sex Blog [Slut]

¡Hola! Everybody…
It just never ceases to amaze me, though I have yet to meet a woman who doesn’t have some form of abuse in her past.

Not one.

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Why I’m Marching in SlutWalk NYC

Rapists rape people, not outfits.

I was at the Occupy Wall St. protest the other day, when a young woman handed me a flyer with the words “Marcha de las Putas” emblazoned at the top. I started laughing and called her back and asked her if she knew what the words meant. She laughed and asked me to turn the flyer over, and there it was, a flyer promoting “Slut Walk NYC.” I thought the idea was so fuckin’ cool and I wanted to know more.

I learned that Slut Walk (click here) is a global movement to end sexual violence that began in Toronto. After a rash of sexual assaults across the York University campus a police officer told a group of college-aged women that in order to avoid being victimized they “should stop dressing like sluts.” This set off a wave of marches across the globe dubbed: SlutWalk. SlutWalk means many different things to many different people.

Some might object to the word “slut.” I happen to believe it’s a great response. A huge diversity of women, men and trans people marching under the banner of SlutWalk ridicules the term ‘slut’, makes it devoid of meaning. It questions what it means to be slutty and tears down the barriers between women that our sexist society attempts to erect. Rather than attempting to reclaim the language of misogyny, the SlutWalk phenomenon has the potential to pose a direct challenge to the idea of the “deserving victim.” The truth is that one in four women is raped in their lifetime -- regardless of dress or behavior. The majority of women who are raped are subjected to it by a partner, friend, family member or a person previously known to them -- not a seedy stranger in a dark alley.

The premise is simple: anyone who is raped did not deserve it and certainly doesn’t deserve to be blamed for the attack. To suggest it is a woman’s fault that she was raped because of a dress she may have worn is utterly disgusting and disrespectful to humanity. There have been over 70 SlutWalk marches worldwide since April and now it has come to the Center of the Known Universe, the greatest city.

I’m marching because no woman, no human being, experiencing the horrible violation of a sexual assault should have to stand alone.

I’m marching because living in a society in which 1 in 4 women get raped is unacceptable.

I’m marching because slut-shaming and anti-sex values have no place in an evolved society.

I’m marching because no woman should be afraid to give voice and to stand up to sexual predators.

I’m marching because I am sick to my core of all the stories I hear -- the so many women who tell me they’ve been raped, many of whom have never shared that with anyone else.

I’m marching because I don’t want to live in a rape culture that teaches sexual predation is a form of love.

But most of all, I’m marching because the following, written so many years ago, is still, tragically, relevant today…

Missoula Rape Poem

-- by Marge Piercy

There s no difference between being raped
and being pushed down a flight of cement steps
except that wounds also bleed inside.

There s no difference between being raped
and being run over by a truck
except that afterward men as if you
enjoyed it.

There s no difference between being raped
and losing a hand in a mowing machine
except the doctors don't want to get involved,
the police wear a knowing smirk,
and in small towns you become a veteran whore.

There s no difference between being raped
and being bitten by a rattlesnake
except that people ask if your skirt was short
and why you were out anyway.

There s no difference between being raped
and going head first through windshield
except that afterwards you are not afraid of cars
but half the human race.

Fear of rape is a cold wind blowing all the time
on a woman's hunched back.
Never to stroll alone a sand road
through pine woods;
Never to climb a trail across a bald
without that aluminum in the mouth
when I see a man climbing towards me.

Never to open the door to a knock
without that razor just grazing the throat.
The fear of the dark side of hedges,
the back seat of the car,
the empty house rattling keys like a snake's warning.
The fear of the smiling man
in whose pocket is a knife.
The fear of the serious man
in whose fist is locked hatred.

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Info:

COME JOIN US FOR SLUTWALK NYC ON OCTOBER 1, 2011! SEE YOU AT UNION SQUARE AT NOON FOR THE MARCH!

THIS EVENT IS RAIN OR SHINE!

11:00 AM: SIGN MAKING AT UNION SQUARE (BRING YOUR OWN MATERIALS)
12:00 PM: MARCH STARTING AT UNION SQUARE
1:00 PM: PERFORMANCES AT UNION SQUARE
2:00 PM: RALLY AT UNION SQUARE!

MARCH ROUTE: UNION SQUARE TO BROADWAY, BROADWAY TO 8TH STREET, 8TH STREET TO TO 2ND AVENUE, 2ND AVENUE TO THIRD STREET, THIRD STREET TO LAFAYETTE AVENUE, LAFAYETTE AVENUE BACK TO UNION SQUARE