You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (40 page)
Read You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos Online
Authors: Robert Arthur
Pornography actresses have begun presenting an artificially uniform view of female genitalia as well. Many get excess labia lips and clitoral hoods trimmed and now genitalia modification is surging in popularity. One plastic surgeon said that patients frequently tell him, “I thought I was normal and I watch these movies with my boyfriends and now I feel like I must be a freak.”
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It’s an irony that our culture’s sexual taboo has magnified sex’s psychological power. By focusing on its repression, society has actually increased its centrality.
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Victorian prudery led to the flourishing of pornography,
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and the asexual Victorian wife created the omnipresence of prostitution.
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This paradox has been noticed by journalists investigating sexually free environments. One said of the 1970s swingers’ club Plato’s Retreat, “Oddly enough, there is less sexual electricity in the air than at a Rotary Club party.”
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A Plato’s Retreat security guard who manned the orgy room nightly remarked, “You stand here long enough, and you see everything. You lose some of your uptightness about sex, but some of the mystery gets destroyed. Pretty soon it’s like watching wrestling on TV. Boring.”
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A journalist who visited Copenhagen after Denmark became the first Western country to lift all prohibitions on pornography made by and for adults found that:
With so much of the tension removed from the subject, it seems to be discussed less than in similar circumstances in New
York . . . Time and again I tried to steer the conversation around to good old sex . . . only to have it steered right back to such familiar topics as the raising of children, the war in Vietnam, and the impossibility of finding a large enough apartment.
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GROW UP
Clinton’s Impeachment Was About Sex
President Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998 for lying under oath, but those familiar with the law knew he was impeached for what he lied about—having consensual sex with his intern.
The lie was a trivial crime. The testimony was in a civil sexual harassment suit that was (1) filed three days before the statute of limitations expired, (2) backed and goaded by rightwing political activists who have admitted their aim was to take down the president, (3) eventually dismissed as groundless, and (4) the lie was only remotely related to the case. It is highly unlikely that criminal perjury charges would ever be brought in such a minor matter. The lie would merely be punished by the presiding judge, and that is what happened. (The president was fined.)
Even if criminal charges were brought, the writers of the Constitution never intended for mere criminal acts to remove a president. High crimes and misdemeanors were an abuse of the office that endangers the state. To be capable of impeaching him on such a petty offense, especially in light of the deference shown to the two preceding presidents in the Iran-Contra affair, was a farce.
—Cass Sunstein, “Impeachment? The Framers Wouldn’t Buy It,”
Washington Post
, 4 Oct. 1998.
This dissipation of sex’s “shocking” nature has been reproduced in laboratory conditions. Three studies have found that people became less fearful of pornography after actually being exposed to it.
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The repression of sex is what gives this natural function such power.
Conservatives fear that without criminal sanctions sex would be everywhere, whereas the opposite would probably be the case. Prostitution is an example. Poor women work the streets and are a nuisance because brothels are illegal. Prostitution regularly makes headlines whenever a prominent madam or a celebrity is caught.
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American television programs frequently feature it because it is scandalous.
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If it was legalized, advertising could still be legally limited, and sex workers would be off the streets and out of the media.
HORNY?
Natural Ways to Lower Male Testosterone (T) Levels
(1) Lose at something or be humiliated. It can be a physical or intellectual defeat.
(2) Allow something with which you are closely attached to lose. For example, testosterone causes aggressiveness and wife abuse increases in Washington, DC, not when its football team loses, but when it wins.
(3) Do not anticipate sex. Anticipation raises testosterone levels. This effect is known colloquially as “blue balls.”
(4) Do not compete.
(5) Get married.
(6) Exercise intensely. With both weight resistance and aerobic exercise, testosterone levels initially go up, but during the recovery period they sink below baseline levels.
(7) Do not look at things that arouse you and do not interact with attractive women.
(8) Orgasm. Orgasms lower levels. Testosterone levels are reduced significantly more through orgasm from sexual intercourse than from masturbation.
(9) Sleep less.
(10) Eat soy and licorice root. Avoid meat and zinc. Drink and smoke.
—James Dabbs & Mary Dabbs,
Heroes, Rogues, and Lovers
(2000), pp. 87–93, 102, 120–121; M.S. Tremblay, J.L. Copeland, and W.V. Helder, “Effect of Training Status . . .,”
J. Appl. Physiol
., Feb. 2004, p. 531; S. Stoleru, et al., “Neuroanatomical Correlates of Visually Evoked Sexual Arousal,”
Arch. Sex. Behav
., Feb. 1999, p. 1; T.H. Kruger, et al., “Orgasm-induced Prolactin Secretion”
Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev
., Jan. 2002, p. 31; and J.R. Roney, Z.L. Simmons, and A.W. Lukaszewski, “Androgen Receptor Gene Sequence . . .,”
Proc. Biol. Sci
., 7 Jan. 2010, p. 57.
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A. High-T Males: Blue Balls and Violence
America’s sex taboo comes down hardest on males who lack the looks, power, or wealth to attract sexual partners.
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The pain of this group can perhaps best be described by someone who was a woman and then became a man. Here a transsexual describes life after the first testosterone shots began the transition:
Overnight, my sex drive rocketed through the roof. I think that, by now, it’s sailing somewhere over Cleveland. I rapidly developed a new hobby and understood why unenlightened mothers warn their sons to keep their hands outside the covers. I also had a newfound understanding of the eighth-grade boys I used to teach. They were restless and inattentive, and I often wondered if they’d been fathered by space aliens. Now I knew their dilemma, and if I ever return to teaching, I’ll be much more sympathetic. In fact, it would probably behoove all middle school teachers, both male and female, to try a few shots of testosterone before their first teaching assignment—the women, so they could understand, and the men, so they could remember. Between the sexual fantasies, the activity that quelled them, and running to the mirror every five minutes to see if hair had sprouted anywhere, there was little time for much else.
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If moralists were serious about stopping extramarital sexuality, instead of trying to repress youthful libido through the dangerous tactics of fear and ignorance, they should offer temporary chemical castration. At least with chemical castration, the high-testosterone youth in our population would not have to go through the misery of an unquenched biological drive.
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Repressing high testosterone males has broad repercussions. Anti-sex feminists and moralists continue to assert that pornography causes sexual violence, but after forty years of attempting to validate this theory the scholarly evidence remains weak.
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There is also a phenomenon that heavily supports the opposite view—pornography reduces sexual violence. Pornography has become considerably more accessible due to the rise of VCRs in the 1980s and the Internet in the 1990s. As availability has increased rape figures have plummeted in America.
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In Japan there was also a dramatic decrease in rape as pornography proliferated between 1972 and 1995.
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This inverse link between rape and sexual liberation can also be seen with the American Indians.
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The link between repressive religious beliefs and sexual crimes, sexual deviancy, and sexual dysfunction has long been recognized.
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In 2006 the United Kingdom released statistics showing its incarcerated sex criminals were significantly more religious than their imprisoned peers.
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An expert in sexual abnormalities has stated that the majority of patients with deviant sexual fantasies and behaviors “described a strict anti-sexual upbringing in which sex was either never mentioned or was actively repressed or defiled.”
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The ramifications of sexual repression may extend far beyond rapists and sexual deviants. A cross-cultural analysis of four hundred pre-industrial societies found that those that had negative attitudes toward extramarital sex were more likely to have a high incidence of theft, have slavery, and be extremely warlike. They were also more likely to kill, torture, and mutilate their enemies.
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This correlation between sexual repression and violence was found to exist with nineteen-year-old American college students as well. Students approving of violence were more likely to agree that prostitution should be punished, responsible premarital sex was disagreeable, and that society should interfere with private sexual behavior between adults.
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DEATH OF A VIRGIN
The Moral Argument for Prostitution
In the fall of 2001, fifteen-year-old “Jack” was dying of cancer and had a last wish. It was not to meet an oafish sports star or to go to a lame theme park. Jack wanted to have sex. In a poignant situation that occurs regularly in the Western world, where minors are not sexual and sex cannot involve money, a pubescent boy was going to die a virgin. Luckily for Jack he confided his wish to one gutsy person—a nurse, definitely not his religious parents.
Jack had sex with a prostitute. Having sex with a minor for money, this prostitute would be a heinous criminal in America and under Megan’s Law could be subject to lifelong tracking. Was Jack psychologically or physically scarred? It will never be known because he died a month later—“very, very happy.”
—Lucy Clark, “Moral Minefield of a Boy’s Dying Wish,”
dailytelegraph.com
.au, 21 Dec. 2001.
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P | A |
Prostitutes | 204 |
Soldiers in Iraq War | 100 |
Taxicab Drivers | 18 |
Police and Detectives | 4 |
America’s sex taboo comes down hardest on women who have high testosterone levels and those who are willing to have sex for money. High-testosterone females who enjoy casual sex are branded as “sluts” and are more likely to suffer from the ignorance imposed by the religious right and our federal government.
EXTREME TABOO
Handballing
Handballing, or fisting, is an extraordinary activity in that it arguably violates three taboos—excrement, sex, and death. Handballing is the act of penetrating another person’s rectum, perhaps even the colon (large intestine), with one’s hand. Its participants come almost entirely from a subculture of gay men called leatherfolk, who enjoy sadomasochism (S&M) and black leather. Even within the gay community, leatherfolk and fisters are a small and poorly understood fringe group.
Predictably, there are numerous misconceptions about handballing:
(1) It is sexual torture
. Handballing does not focus on the infliction of pain—although parts of the process can be painful—and therefore arguably does not even belong in the S&M category. Handballing causes intense pleasure for those who partake in it. It has been described as an “internal massage” of the male’s erogenous prostate gland and other internal organs. (“It’s like silk sliding through my guts.”) The anus itself is capable of sexual stimulation and to have it stretched can be intensely pleasurable. (Non-fisters may be able to compare this to the pleasure sometimes felt when passing a large stool.)
A word often applied to the sensation of having a fist inside one’s rectum is
fullness
. Many men ejaculate while being fisted and other men report having full body orgasms that are superior to their penis orgasms. (Some women draw a similar distinction between vaginal and clitoral orgasm.)
(2) It is about feces
. Handballing is not about being sexually stimulated by feces (coprophilia). Internal cleansing is a detailed ritual in the fisting community. It involves a preparatory diet and anal douching. Those who do not prepare properly can have trouble finding partners.
(3) It is brutish
. To slip a hand in another person’s anal canal is not an easy task even with large amounts of lubrication. It takes skill on the part of the insertee (“Top”) and the recipient (“Bottom”). Bottoms sometimes require years of training to be able to relax the sphincter muscle enough to take another’s fist without pain.
Tops usually do not insert the fist directly as that would be agonizing to most Bottoms. Usually a well-lubricated hand that is opened and curved is guided through the anus. In the rectum there is space for the hand to take the shape of a fist. Some experienced Bottoms, known as “pigs,” can take large portions of the arm even above the elbow. For this to be done the Top must be familiar with the internal layout of the colon.
(4) It is casual and anonymous
. Handballing is not a sexual activity prone to random encounters. Fisters are a tight community where reputations as safe and skilled fisters are earned. Part of the appeal of handballing is that it requires a level of trust unequaled by other sexual conjoinings. A Top can severely injure a bottom, as he literally has the Bottom’s life in his hand, and a Bottom can snap a Top’s forearm with his sphincter.
With fisting, a Bottom is literally taking the Top into him. The Bottom is being lifted up from the inside. When a Top goes deep into a Bottom he can feel the Bottom’s heart beating. He can feel the aorta. Fisting is perhaps the ultimate in physical intimacy and sessions can last hours. Taking the metaphor of being inside another person to such an extreme makes handballing a spiritual experience for many of its practitioners. One writer calls handballing the gay man’s “gift from the gods.”
—Mark Thompson, ed.,
Leatherfolk
(2001), pp. xv–xvi, 130, 150, 169; and Tim Brough,
First Hand
(2005), pp. i, xv, xxvii, 23, 49.