The Friday Sex Blog [Talkin' about Sex]

Hola Everybody,
Today it’s all about sex.

Talkin' about Fuckin'

Sacred and Profane, Alex London

I find people normally don’t enjoy talking about sex. I mean talking about sex in a meaningful way. Most find it clichéd, offensive, insensitive. I will say that I’m somewhat sympathetic though I spend at least some time doing just that -- talking and writing about sex. But I have to say there problems with sex talk: the vocabulary is inept and the sex is, well, not so clear.

If you want to know the state of any issue, all you have to do is look at its nomenclature -- a fancy word that describes a system or set of terms (vocabulary) especially in a particular science, discipline, or art. When it comes to sex, we have a lousy vocabulary. We have a small set of words that offend somebody or other, even though they’re as old as the English language itself and actually convey important meanings. We have a sort of Jim Crow-era style mentality when it comes to certain sex words -- a linguistic segregation. We have the ones we can say in front of children. one for the “ladies,” others for the old geezers, the ones for the upper classes, the ones for lower classes -- god forbid if I were to try to all this in my sex blog! I wouldn’t be able to write anything! Our language, our nomenclature, for sex -- the medicalized, the four-lettered, and the romanticized -- is indicative of our anxieties about sex.

Take a good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon word like fuck, as an example. In our current movie ratings system, if you use fuck to mean actually having sex, then the film is deemed unfit for younger viewers and must be rated for mature audiences. However, If you use fuck as a swear word to express psychological violence such as anger or outrage, you can still advertise the film to children. It’s the hypocrisy of middle class values that they there is more concerned with appearances, and the act of fucking isn’t an “appearance,” it’s the dirty deed. We’re conditioned to use sex words for hostility but anxious to use them for the warmth or sex.

Fuck got a new lease on linguistic life during the counter-culture of the sixties, along with the rest of the underground language for the body. Fuck embraced free love and snubbed its nose at the Vietnam War all at the same time. Sociologists like to describe the so-called sexual revolution in the context of The Pill, but it was just as much a revolt of language -- sexual language. Artists of the time wanted to speak their minds with the entirety of public language at their disposal. Some, such as Lenny Bruce, were censored by the state and social norms. But in the end, the state lost. The words were emancipated -- at least for men. Blacks had been on the forefront of sexual language for decades, with artists such as Redd Foxx and those before him, exploring and pushing the sexual language envelope, but that was underneath the radar. Later black comics, such as Richard Pryor, did all kinds of shit to let loose all kinds of words.

Eventually, feminism -- the non-puritanical, cutting-edge side anyway -- emancipated women to use all the “unladylike” words, reclaiming bold language such as dyke and pussy and claim them as women’s turf, not merely men’s labels.

People are sometimes afraid to use sex words because they fear they will be perceived as sexual. If we keep our lips sealed, we can maintain the illusion that we are not sexual creatures. Fuck became a word that so-called “well-bred” women could use and it also defined a generation gap. Popular music turned it into a lyric. But saying the word stills says more about your political stance than about your sexuality.

Think about it: words describing other controversial or problematic aspects of our lives don’t get people so upset. No one ever says, “I can’t stand the word war,” or no one goes off on a rant that “the word torture is too cruel to use,” or screams, “I won’t allow anyone to say taxes in my home!” We manage to discuss all kinds of horrible and psychologically conflicted issues privately and publicly without choking up. Even words that insult and stereotype, such as spic and nigger, get more public debate and defense than George Carlin’s seven words you can’t say on television. Sex is the only topic where we blame language for holding us back. We suffer from a collective sexual tongue-tiedness. Almost any sexual expression we come up with bothers someone either because it isn’t sensitive enough, or it’s too Disneyfied.

I had a woman friend who hated the word cunt. I happen to like it because it because for me the word cunt crosses boundaries. It’s subversive, profane -- like me. I have met people who can’t even bring themselves to say cunt. The point is that perhaps we do need more words that are sexual. As an English/ Spanish bilingual, I can tell you English misses the sexual mark totally, when it comes to matters of sex. We’re afraid of the words we do have at our disposal. In a way, we’re afraid that if we let the dangerous words out, sex will be more dangerous, life will be uglier, we won’t know what to expect.

I personally believe we need that surprise. There’s nothing uglier than silence and denial. We’re choking on our own sex words, drawing a line between this word and that. I have a cock, and I have balls, intelligence, and an active imagination and sometimes I have a range of experiences that begs for as many names as I can conceive.

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

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The Friday Sex Blog [Sex, Domination, and Resistance]

Hola Everybody,
An unfortunate consequence of all the attention being given to Trump for his crude admission of sexual predatory behavior, is that it trivializes misogyny. His admission, which is the norm for “locker room” talk, should spark a national dialog on rape culture, looking at it as a systemic societal issue rather than to simply call out one man.

We’re all implicated in Trump’s pathetic attempt to grab some poosie.

Sex and The Other

Today’s cover photo, fetishism in its purest form, was taken by photographer Jean-Paul Goude. Known for his fascination with “ethnic minorities” and “black girls” -- “I had jungle fever,” he once admitted in an interview -- The photograph is a not so subtle reincarnation of imagery of Saartjie Baartman that is steeped in centuries of racism, oppression, and misogyny. Goude is famous for his photos of his girlfriend Grace Jones. On the cover of the book Jungle Fever, Goude poses Jones in a cage next to raw meat.

I bring this up because when you mix racism, capitalism, and sex, you start wading into complicated waters. I hope to tease some of this out in a very brief, thoroughly inadequate blog post. LOL

The term miscegenation was first used in the 1860’s when American journalists invented the word in order to discredit the Abolitionist Movement by stirring up debate over the prospect of white-black intermarriage (tangentially, there are interesting parallels between miscegenation and the current gay marriage “debate”). In any case, miscegenation refers to sex or marriage between two people of different races.

Let me start right off by stating that I am of Puerto Rican descent, a people that has one of the highest rates of interracial marriage. The funny thing is that Puerto Ricans don’t see it as “interracial.” There’s no “white” Puerto Rican as opposed to a “black” Puerto Rican. We are Puerto Ricans first. In fact, we don’t even adhere to a black/ white dichotomy. This is not to imply that racism does not exist among Puerto Ricans, it does. However, how we view and construct race is drastically different from the way gringos conceptualize it. But that’s a subject for the last part of my racism series...

This post was inspired by an online interaction I had with some neocon rube and he submitted that because he married someone who was “half black,” that meant he was incapable of being a racist. I don’t follow that at all. I mean, there are misogynists (men who hate women) who marry women -- does that make them all of a sudden enlightened men? In fact, there’s a long and ugly history of the fetishizing of the “other.” I consider myself a feminist and someone who works against racism, but that doesn’t mean that I’m exempt from my social conditioning. I’m sure if I look close enough, I can find prejudice and sexist bias. I think being open to that possibility is what serves as a liberatory force. Whenever I hear someone say, “I am not a racist,” or “I am not sexist,” I am reminded of the family values guys who are in actuality man-whores. 

According to a survey done in the 1970’s an average of one in five Americans have dated someone of a different race. Most interracial relationships are not based on difference, but in the same way other relationships are formed. However, those that deliberately and consistently select a partner of another race do so for reasons such as sexual novelty or the appeal of submissive women from other cultures. In the United States, there are white women to seek out black boyfriends as part of a larger pattern of breaking away from their parent’s values. This is especially true if the parents were controlling and/ or racially prejudiced. My personal observation is that this dynamic is widespread on the internet, where both girls and women can seek lovers from other races free from the prying eyes of their neighbors and families.

Conquerors have always used sex as both a weapon (i.e., rape) and an excuse to justify their barbaric practices. That inhabitants of the “New World” ran around practically naked served as a rationale to label them brutes and an abomination to the Christian ideal. They were not seen as human and were

subjected to some of the most barbaric acts in the history of humankind. This tendency reached its low point between the 16^th and 19^th centuries, as wave after wave of European colonial expansion was followed by violent, often genocidal, campaigns to convert the heathens and save them from their own ignorance.

White Americans have disapproved of most types of miscegenation since its colonization. Marriage or sex with Indians, Jews, Catholics, and Asians, for example, was discouraged. But it was sex with blacks that incited the greatest violence. Blacks, in contrast to slaves of other eras, were discriminated against solely because of the color of their skin. This was in part due to Christianity’s interpretation of Ham’s curse of his descendants being turned black and made to serve as slaves.

This misinterpretation, not surprisingly, “coincided” with the desperate need for new labor in the production of molasses (molasses being the first foundation of the economy in the New World). Later, the theory of evolution was perverted to condemn blacks to a lower developmental status. Despite these prejudices against blacks, white slave owners were very much sexually attracted to their black slaves. For hundreds of years, the legal system supported the rape, sexual harassment, and subjugation of black women, not only during slavery, but also after their emancipation. One of the laws passed during the 17^th and 18^th centuries by the English colonists pronounced mulatto offspring between slave and freeman to be slaves. In contrast, the Spanish colonies granted children of mixed unions their freedom. One author wrote, “If he [the white man] could not restrain his sexual nature, he could at least reject its fruits and thus solace himself that he had done no harm... by classifying the mulatto as a Negro he was in effect denying that intermixture had occurred at all.”Well, I’m being facetious, of course, but one area of study I would love to see is an exploration into how the centuries-long legal sanctioning of the rape of women of color has impacted the sexual psyche of the white men... 

The 19^th century saw a continuation of the practice of black lynching. However, now instead of accusing black men of fomenting rebellion, they were charged with rape. This charge was often leveled at consensual unions because it was believed a white woman would never freely succumb to a black man.

Frantz Fanon did a much better job than I ever could of exploring the connection between hate and the eroticization of the other, and I definitely don’t have the room or time to give it a proper treatment here, but I’ll give it a try. Western colonizers were often attracted to the people and practices they claimed to despise. Late 19^th century Anglican missionaries in Papua, New Guinea, for example, complained

incessantly about the low morals of the “natives.” but the Papuans themselves maintained that the worst morals were found in mission houses. In Africa, it was not unusual for men who preached chastity to father children by native women. One such reverend had so many daughters that in 1874 he turned his mission into a brothel in which to prostitute them.

Another example of the sexualizing of the other was the aforementioned Saartjie Baartman, the famous Hottentot Venus, who was admired in Europe for her beauty. The Nama or Khoihoi (Hottentots) of southern Africa typically have a lot of fat on the buttocks. Europeans were enthralled with the Hottentot Venus’ ass (shades of J-Lo). If you ever get the chance read up on her story. The Hottentot Venus was celebrated -- fetishized, actually -- during her life. When she died, her body was dissected in an attempt to “scientifically” document her “otherness.”

Ultimately, colonialism was in reality sexual in nature. The New World and its inhabitants, as illustrated by the art

of the time, was depicted as a woman, naked and vulnerable, before the conqueror. The metaphor emphasizes how new lands were seen as virgin territory to be plundered by male explorers from “civilized” Europe.

Well, that is all for now. I think I need to come back to this and make it more substantive. But right now I need to go to an interview.

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

The Friday Sex Blog [The History of the Vibrator]

Hola mi gente,
A friend treated me to a showing of the film, The Birth of a Nation, and no sooner that I posted an FB status update that I thought some parts were powerful, I was accused of being a “rape apologist.”

There are people on social media who have not seen the film that are damning the work. If you were to ask me, I would recommend it. I will post a mini review of my impressions of the film as well as responding the critics of the film, tomorrow.

The Job Nobody Wanted

Being a (very) brief history of the vibrator)

Since before 1653, when physician Pieter van Foreest published a treatise on women’s diseases, women’s sexuality has been sorely misunderstood. To be sure, sexually frustrated women were viewed as suffering from “hysteria” (literally, “womb disease”). van Foreest prescribed what would become known as “vulvular massage” -- suggesting that a midwife or doctor could cure “hysterical” women through “the massaging of the genitalia with one finger inside,” using “oil of lilies, musk root, crocus, or [something] similar.”

This was nothing new. In the Western medical tradition, bringing women to orgasm via genital massage by a physician or midwife was a standard treatment for hysteria, an illness considered both chronic and common in women.

Descriptions of this treatment appear as early as Hippocrates and in the first and second centuries. It’s interesting that very little attention has been paid to a medical treatment for a complaint that is no longer defined as a disease but that from at least the fourth century until the American Psychiatric Association dropped the term in 1952, was known mainly as hysteria.

The fact is that all the so-called symptoms merely described what is consistent with normal female sexuality, for which relief, not surprisingly, was gained through orgasm, either through intercourse, or by means of a massage on the physician’s table. That normal female sexual functioning was described as a disease can be laid at the feet of a society in

which sexuality is seen almost exclusively through a male-dominated (androcentric) perspective. Androcentric views not only shaped the definition of sexuality, and their consequences for women, but also the instruments designed to cope with these so-called diseases.

What I found even more interesting was that many doctors detested doing vulvular massage and that’s where the role of technology comes in. According to historian Rachel P. Maines (and I borrow heavily from her book, The Technology of Orgasm, today), the vibrator emerged as a response to the

demand from physicians for a more rapid and efficient therapy for hysteria. As I mentioned, the diagnosis of hysteria was in actuality normal female sexual functioning. The male-dominant (androcentric) view of sexuality didn’t take into consideration that the androcentric ideal of intercourse failed to consistently produce orgasm in more than half of the female population.

Therefore, the task of relieving female arousal was given over to the medical establishment, which defined female orgasm as an illness. In effect, doctors inherited the task of producing orgasm in women because it was a job nobody wanted.

There is no evidence to show that male physicians enjoyed providing vulvular massage treatments. On the contrary, physicians, part of the male power elite, sought to substitute other devices for their fingers, such as the business end of an almost infinite line of impersonal mechanisms.

At the same time, hysteria presented a lucrative market for physicians. Patients never recovered nor died of their condition but continued to require regular treatment. One 19^th-century physician estimated that as many as three-quarters of the female population were “out of health,” and comprised the largest market for “therapeutic devices.”

Doctors also found it difficult to bring women to orgasm. The job required skill and attention. One doctor noted the difficulty in producing orgasm through vulvular massage. He stated that it was not unlike “the game of boys in which they try to rub their stomachs with one hand and pat their heads with the other.” LMAO

While women are expected to reach orgasm during coitus, more than half of all women, and possibly more than 70 percent, do not reach orgasm by penetration alone. While this has been better publicized by modern-day

sex-researchers, it was known in previous centuries. The majority of these women have been marginalized as abnormal or “frigid,” somehow derelict in their duty to live up the androcentric model of sexuality.

Historically women were discouraged from masturbating because it was believed this practice would impair their health, and most men in previous centuries (and even today!) have failed to understand that penetration alone is sexually satisfying to only a minority of women.

More on this at a later time.

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