Saturday, May 30, 2009

I like Captain Jack



John Barrowman, who plays Captain Jack on Torchwood, is a guy and a character I like. In real life, Barrowman is civilly partnered to his own guy, Scott Gill, and feels that marriage does not fit as an institution for two men.

On Torchwood, he rules the roost and loves women and men with equal masculine passion and dignity. He was rejected for the role of Will in Will & Grace because he wasn't gay enough. :)

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Friday, May 29, 2009

1453



Today marks the anniversary of the fall of Constantinople to the Turks. The
great church of Holy Wisdom, built by Justinian in the 6th century, became
a mosque.

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Contrasts

Patriot though I be, there are some things about America that I hate. The kind of sensationalizing soap opera lives represented by Jerry Springer and Maury Whateverthehellheis: a sleazy and mock moralistic parading the human trash from the ghettoes and trailer parks. How many times can you sit on the edge of your seat wondering if Laquitha's latest baby belongs to her husband, his brother, his best friend or her cousin?

On the other hand, the kinds of lives that are sung about in country music, for all its sentimentality, are often honorable and worthy of respect.

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Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Empathetic judge

Ms. Sotomayor can make better decisions than a white male because she is a wise Latina woman. I am glad to hear it. This is a real step forward from the days when white males were thought to make better decisions than Hispanic women. I am glad that racism has been replaced by empathy.

I only hope we can get a Black-Asian transgender Muslim on the court soon, so s/he can make even better decisions.

Thanks, Obama, for your brilliant legal choices. One more leg-thrilling example of hope and change.

Pardon me while I go off in a corner and lose my breakfast.

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Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Submission and men

Two things. This piece needs editing. It's long and it rambles. And there's an explicit-ish pic at the..sic, as you'll see..bottom.

Admit it or not, the Alpha Male is the classic male. But manhood is in reality a communal enterprise. Individual men become men. QED. But only in relation to other men (and women). So there are different kinds of classic males in the constellation. This does not dissolve the hierarchial nature of masculinity; on the contrary, it is the hierarchy which guarantees...diversity! Guys have to find their place...but there are a variety of places within it to find.

The Alpha Male is the dominant male, the pack leader, etc. But he has to have guys to dominate and guys to form the pack for him to lead. It's a group effort and most men...most men...are not Alphas. How could we be? So...submission to a stronger male is essential to the masculinity of most, almost all, real men. Submission is a classical masculine value.

My usual example: those paragons of masculinity, the Marines. Whoever they are commanding or leading, they are all, all, submitting to a higher Alpha Male. Even the Commandant of the Corps reports to higher-ups. So although exercising hierarchical power is classically masculine, included in it is submitting...within the hierarchy...to stronger power is also classically masculine.

(There is a commonplace that if you have sex with a Marine, he will want to bottom. The only two Marines I know both top most of the time, but they do not disagree with the rep. I do not see this anecdotal opinion as a disconfirmation of their masculinity. If my thesis has merit, for them, submission is their normal masculine enactment!)

And for most it is on a spectrum. The sergeant demands obedience from the PFCs but must in turn obey the lieutenant, etc. A constantly moving combination of domination and submission skills and attitudes is involved. This is the nature of hierarchy.

Dominance can be easy or it can be rough. Submission smooth or bumpy. But often there is a distinct element of dignity involved in the act of submitting with the hierarchy. Anecdotally, the dignity of a young man who leaves home and then returns to his town as a soldier, but with a new style of giving respect to others, an increased use of "sir" and "ma'am" is definitely not the result of enslavement or humiliation, but of a submission-purchased inclusion in a male hiearchy.

An Alpha commanding a Beta is one thing. An Alpha or Beta commanding an Omega, the lowest guy on the totem pole, is another. And then dealing with males outside the pack...that is another story altogether.

The Un PC archetypal truth, though, is that in relation to women...mothers and other reigning monarchs aside...all males seek to be Alpha, regardless of their intra-hierarchical role. Hence, the too-quick assumption that enacting submission to another male instantly unmans you and puts you in the woman's role. Possible, but not required.

Behind this set of thoughts is my previous post about total tops, guys who never take the receptive role in male-male sex. Which led me to think about bottoms, guys who do. As I think I have mentioned before, I have never personally met a top who did not happily engage in oral sex from both positions, though they certainly exist. But I do know guys who never get fucked. And guys who rarely or never do anything but.

What about them? What about the manhood of the bottom man?

Here's a fragment of a thought. If the connection is an Alpha-Omega one, then the sexual act could be a (consensual or not) enactment of sheer dominance and submission, with only the thinnest energy of affiliation, of common belonging to a group, even a group of two. Beyond that boundary, it can be the most violent form of dominance behavior, feminization through rape.

But if the connection is an Alpha-Beta one, then the nature of their relationship already includes a great deal of affiliation and sense of belonging to a group, even, or especially, their group of two. Two men I know who are lifelong tops have spoken to me of how "honored" they are, that's the word, "honored"...one even said "awed"..by the experience of having a man they respect, a desirable Beta male, allow them to top him.

When that kind of submission is freely given in an underlying relationship of male respect, the top experiences both his own phallic power and the offered-up power of the bottom. For the articulate tops I've discussed this with, that merging is at the heart of the erotic magic of male/male sex. For the bottom, either in regular or temporary Beta-mode, it is a kind of service, for some an almost religious service, a kind of sacrifice happily given to a man who represents something in himself but more strongly.

The submission is not a humiliation. Not at all. And it is not painful (if consented to and done right) but excruciatingly pleasurable, both physically and psychologically. (The placement of the prostate is one of Nature's master strokes.) It contains both release from self and intimacy with another that celebrates the self.

And that sacrifice makes for communion...for both...just as most male hierarchical submission of the non-sexual kind achieves affiliation with and within the masculine group. The love that commanders have for their men, both the subordinate officers and the "grunts"...a love which can be returned in kind by the very act of obedience, submission...is legendary. I would add, it is archetypal.

Male/male sexual intercourse of this type is not the operation of oppressive power on a humiliated man without power. It is the exchange of two forms of masculine power and both parties give and receive in powerful measure.

[There is something here related to the fragment or idea of alchemy that I mentioned recently in trying to think through the goal of male/male sex in a sort of theological context.]

Call this projection if you want, but think I see in the picture below something of the Alpha-Beta relationship I have been talking about. The bottom, physically, lacks no masculine power, either in animal beauty or agility. To put it mildly. But the look on his face is what is telling. Calm, very calm, but full of anticipation. And focussed on the other man, who could even be "his" man. The dynamic of free sacrifice and grateful honor, of exchange of powers, of dominance and submission within the goal of pleasurable, even ecstatic, communion...I detect it here.




This kind of sexual connection, anal intercourse, can be nothing more than the connection of body parts. A cock and a butt. That is plenty attractive enough. It can, in its shadow mode, be the shattering of one male by another. Or...common enough in all of sex...if can be the satisfaction of a desire using another body. Hey, it beats doing your taxes. But it can be something much more. It can be a powerfully magical and deeply masculine exchange of power and identity that serves and deepens the Alpha-Beta bond between men, one of the strongest forces on earth.

Perhaps I am being obtuse or mystical or reactionary...or all three...but when I lament the lack of love for manhood among gay men, part of what I feel is lost is the alchemy of masculine love in this most intimate form of sex. For actual men who understand what they are doing, the Alpha-Beta energy serves and intensifies the dignity of both in the very ritual of submission and domination. Both offer, both are honored, both receive, both give, one by entering, the other by welcoming.

But if you don't love and honor the man in yourself, how do you give or receive the physical offering of self of another man?

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Gay/men



To distract myself from too many new stories that make me angry, another irritated thought and a half on gaydom and manhood.

More evidence that gay culture does not actually like men. Liking a big dick and muscles and liking men are not the same at all.*

An opinion piece on one of the meet-up sites I visit lamented and lampooned the "false" masculinity of men who are total tops, that is, who are always in the active roles in sex with other men. (Hey, what happened to diversity?)

The gay rule is that if you have too much classic masculinity in role or attitude or values or presentation or interests, etc, you must be invited/hectored/shamed into exploring your feminine side. In the case above, you should learn to get fucked and like it, Mary.

But never, and I mean never...correct me if I'm wrong...does the public conventional wisdom or the voice of our enlightened LGBT rulers invite/hector/shame any gay man with a paucity of masculinity and a plethora of femininity to explore his masculine side.

(This despite the not uncommon phenomenon of a fag dissing another fag for being a fag. Sorta like the in-house-only business of a nigger dissing another nigger for being a nigger.)

Suggests to me again the unfortunate likelihood that "gay" does not mean "sexually attracted to the same sex" but actually means "an effeminate man who likes sex with men." Effeminacy is the default and classic position which is always to be protected and celebrated, never critiqued. Masculinity, however, is always to be held in suspicion, contempt or ridicule.

In gaydom, you can't have too much feminine but you can easily have too much masculine.

In this world, drag queens are the real men, being their ballsy true selves. Let us applaud them as our true hero...ines. Whatever. Ru rules. Muscular leather daddies, on the other hand, (though they are damn hot, aren't they?) are enacting a compensatory, self-hating and dangerously fascist fantasy of pathetically overdone maleness. Get over it, girlfriend.

What a mess.

*[A lot of straight culture does not like women...is there something here that transcends sexual orientation, that it's easy to dislike the object of your erotic drive? Does some of the natural aggression in sex always morph into hatred? But in the case of gay males, that becomes hatred of yourself.]

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Tuesday, May 19, 2009

OMG! I've turned gay!




Visiting my lil bro & fam in NY. They live in Chelsea, the Castro of the East. He and his wife have a new pug, a gift for my niece. I am no fan of little dogs, but the puppy is pretty irresistible. I get regular puppy-spit facials.

I took her out for a walk yesterday, just trying to be a helpful guest, and today. Saw other men like me (6', 200 lbs) similarly walking small yappy dogs.

I thought," OMG, I've turned gay." (Sorry, Mom.)

Reminds me of a definition of gay I once heard: a grown man with a small dog and an unnaturally neat apartment.

Well, half-right.

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Stealth jihad


Coming to a workplace near you.

As individuals, Muslims might be your nice neighbors,
but in groups...Allahu akbar.

This reminds me of the various kinds of American shorthand we use to dismiss ideas we don't like. I probably do it myself; after all, the idea that anyone is or should be completely "open-minded" --another shorthand-- is ridiculous. An open-minded man of deep conviction....

Anyway, if you think, for instance, that boys and girls could benefit from being educated in same-sex classes for part of their schooling, all someone has to say is, "Yeah, separate but equal."

This evokes the (officially, as opposed to unofficially) segregated education system of the South before the Supreme Court famously dismantled it. The shorthand tars you with the burden of proving that you are not a segregationist. Apples and oranges, but it usually brings the discussion to a halt. As it should. Because anyone who uses these phrases has zero interest in discuussion.

Another one, connected to my theme here, workplace jihad, is the old line, "Some of my best friends are..." Here again, we are supposed to understand immediately that it is rank hypocrisy to befriend individuals of a group that you may not have, as a group, a high or even friendly opinion of.

Dopey.

Individuals and friends ought not be treated or thought of in the same way as groups or strangers. I know this is heresy to the (talk about hypocritical) high-minded assumptions of our cultural betters, but it is a simply human truth.

An idiosyncratic friend who is an armchair Marxist is one thing; Marxists in groups and therefore able to exercise power...another thing entirely. A Muslim colleague or associate here or there is one thing. But Muslims in groups...

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Monday, May 18, 2009

Angels in America

Despite its occasional flashes of brilliance, one of the many reasons I have come to deeply dislike gay comrade Tony Kushner's play is that its central character is a man with AIDS who has been abandoned by his cowardly lover. I lived through those years, awful years, and far far more often I saw men standing by their partners til death parted them.

I have spent a week at my parents house, watching my mother care for my father, who is dying slowly of dementia. Both in their mid-80's, they require and have a lot of help, but after her initial shock and anger and resentment over how was disappearing right in front of her, she has become a constant and compassionate and untiring mate to the man she married almost six decades ago. He is mostly gone already, a shadow of his former self in a shell of his former self. And she is still there. When I told her how much I admired her for all this, she simply said, "What else can I do?"

My favorite uncle died a few weeks ago. And again, his wife nursed him through his slow decline, keeping her promise that he would die at home in his own bed. Now she is alone in their big house. What must that be like?

These are the angels in America.

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Sunday, May 17, 2009

DisUnited States

I learned from maverick psychologist James Hillmann to listen for the shadowy backgrounds driving apparently unobjectionable daylight discourse. Take the Christian Church, for instance, with its themes of unity and love and forgiveness. You don't have to be anti-Christian to notice how difficult these values are to maintain in Christian history. How many separated churches are there? And it started very early. What the foreground discourse praises is often the background Achille's heel.

So it is with the United States of America. What contemporaries forget is that this country has always been a struggle to keep together and united groups who are naturally at odds with one another. Any study of the Revolution and its aftermath would clarify that. North vs South, large colonies vs small, etc. The word "united" reads as if it were a description of something already completely achieved. Apparently the Civil War era did not get that message. And the USA in the last 45 years or so has been in the throes of what sometimes feels to me like a second civil war, but without the guns.

The fact that Obama is President, a man who refused to wear his country's flag on his lapel and who sat uncomplainingly through decades of anti-American rants from his pastor, and who's wife, a beneficiary of several white-guilt programs, could only muster pride in her country when her husband was nominated....That such people sit at the apex of power is profoundly disturbing to me.

Americans apparently did not react with alarm at their antics and elected him. To me, it is a sign something is very wrong.

I trace it to Martin Luther King and to the Vietnam War. The technology of the time allowed the issue of black resentment and the details of war to create an image of America, for Americans, as deeply flawed, even evil. And a whole generation created its identity over that divide, spinning a narrative which essentially made the USA prior to 1965 a kind of nightmare. And now they run the country. And are determined to create a new country that they could be proud of. Much of that project means rejecting the actual country prior to Enlightenment.

I would not vote for Barry Hussein Obama for dog-catcher. Especially after seeing him in action in office. And it troubles me that the people of this country elected him.

We have always had to hold a lot of disunity and centrifugal forces together in these United States. I wonder if we have lost even the will to try.

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Friday, May 15, 2009

Nuts in a box

Whenever I see this commercial, just the most blatant of a whole advertising genre of 'domineering women vs. men-as-dickless-idiots', I want to punch both of them. Especially him. For not punching her.



Apparently it's an American voiceover of a British original.
Figures.

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The New Age



A friend passed along this reflection, received in a group email, on the fires down in Santa Barbara. I have edited for privacy, if not for sanity.

Last week was not an ordinary week.

In a life changing experience, the entire community from Goleta to Montecito was united in a ritual of purification from the non-essential. Lead by the elements of the Great Mother, Fire dancing with Wind then soothed by Water led to a renewal of the Earth and a transformation of our Spirits.

...I watched the monumental flames ignite the same hills. Our entire week was engulfed as well in deep feelings of fear, loss, grief and release. We deeply thank our firefighter heroes for saving our beloved city.

With 30,000 people leaving their homes there were no more facades keeping us separate, we became part of a whole. While feeling the loss of our dearest friends, the events became not about us but about shared love and concern.

Many wise friends saw this disaster as a teaching. The week culminated for me on Mother's day with a Dance of the Tribes led by Babs and Jeordi Soulster who had lost their beautiful home in the fire. Giving us a place to feel all the feelings through music and the body, we were healed by art and community. Perhaps Santa Barbara, rising from the ashes, is being birthed as a center for spiritual wholeness where we can truly be the children of our Mother: completely open and vulnerable to love, and honoring all of life.

Now we are this truth. The future is uncertain, so give yourself fully in love to the moment.
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Wednesday, May 13, 2009

On the other hand

I defended the Pope on his Israel visit. He has to walk a line between the two sides.

His comment about the wall I don't agree with. Wall good.

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Malesoul 28




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Malesoul 27





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Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Just received

The School of Spiritual Psychology

Presents

The Black Madonna and the Future of Money

A Soul Retreat Continuance of the 2008 Sophia Conference

With

Robert Sardello, Ph.D. and Cheryl Sanders-Sardello, Ph.D.


Since the Sophia Conference last August, the world’s financial system has gone into crisis. We are facing not merely a recession but the failure of an economic model rooted in fear and self-interest and lacking a soul connection to the larger world. However, the financial crisis also indicates an intensification of the presence of Sophia, bringing simultaneously a catharsis and an initiation of new capacities of consciousness, including openness to that which is coming toward us from the future and an awakening of heart consciousness.


For those who have not worked with the School of Spiritual Psychology, this soul retreat will provide an opportunity to enter into the work and community of Spiritual Psychology. For those already familiar with the School, this will introduce an important part of the work. For those who attended the Sophia conference, this soul retreat is an opportunity to continue work we began there together and to meet other individuals who are also part of this community of discourse and transformation.


This soul retreat will focus on how we may be present to a new money consciousness. We will:


Enter into the original, prototypal Feminine experience of money as medium rather than as commodity.

Work with images of the Great Mother, Isis, Sophia, and in particular the Black Madonna, as enduring, hidden, repressed presences of the soul of money.

Develop inner contemplative practices so that we stay out of the archetypes of consensus money and stay within the work of money as a soul-connecting medium.

Distinguish between the individual and the collective aspects of money in order to enter into the spirituality of money while being aware of the way money has become disconnected from its spiritual source.

Find our way into the mystery of money and out of our greed and fear of scarcity.

Re-visit the spiritual intentions of the Templars concerning money: to see how their work with it is now working within the world.

Explore the possibility of developing a spiritual complement to currency that is for our own time.

Location

The retreat will be held at the very beautiful Marsh House Retreat Center on Whidbey Island, which can be reached by ferry from Seattle, Washington.

Malesoul 26



I normally leave these without text.
But this one calls for a captioning contest.

Turning water into whine

It's no surprise that I am intrigued by some of the parables and sayings of Jesus that do not have common currency. One of the parables that contains the most useful psychological wisdom about human beings is The Children in the Marketplace, found both in Matthew and in Luke.
"To what then will I liken the people of this generation? What are they like? 32 They are like children who sit in the marketplace, and call one to another, saying, 'We piped to you, and you didn't dance. We mourned, and you didn't weep.' 33 For John the Baptizer came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and you say, 'He has a demon.' 34 The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, 'Behold, a gluttonous man, and a drunkard; a friend of tax collectors and sinners!' 35 Wisdom is justified by all her children."
Less colorfully put: There's just no pleasing you people.

The Pope's visit to Israel aka The Zionist Entity. As Cardinal Ratzinger in the 1980's, the current Bishop of Rome was a great source of grief to me. On the other hand, he wonderfully focussed my mind and I made some big and difficult decisions then that I now know to have been right. Were it not for him, I might have put them off and suffered mightily for that.

At any rate, now that I stand at some two decades distance from direct participation, I see his role differently and am inclined, if not always to support him, at least to see that he is acting in the role for which he was elected.

So he goes to Israel, having to make nice both with Jews and Muslims. Good luck.

At an interfaith meeting, an unscheduled imam takes the mike and delivers an anti-Jewish tirade. Visibly unhappy, the pope waits til he is done and then...walks out. When was the last time a pope walked out? When JPII frowned at angry nuns or shook his finger at priests working for communists, the picture was all over the place. Now B16 walks out of an anti-semitic tirade and.....You won't find it in the press that much.

On the other hand, his speech at the Holocaust memorial gets a C from the curator because it was not sufficiently clear, contrite, properly phrased, et.

I am pretty much a Judeophile and a Zionist. But I have experience with victim groups of all types who don't know when to stop complaining. And inside every victim is the shadow of a tyrant. They are like bad wives whose husbands have failed them somehow and when the guy comes back and apologizes, he gets clawed again for not using the right words. Tell me, ladies and victims, how enthusiastic will he be to apologize to you next time? The insatiable whining of folks like this is part of what has made me a Righty.

One of the 3.5 kinds of Jews who get my goat are the ones who want to use the Holocaust to make me feel bad. I gotta tell ya, Bnai Israel, you should consider laying off a bit. The Holocaust was a horror of the first magnitude, but people who show good will to you and sadness about what happened don't like to feel endlessly manipulated and then downgraded for not dancing and dirging to your script. It engenders a kind of resentment that leads to...anti-Semitism.

Thursday, May 07, 2009

Jews and Crusaders



Mark Steyn again points out
what most people do not want to hear or know.

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Wednesday, May 06, 2009

Groucho over Karl

Apparently it is now chic to wonder if Karl Marx's critique of capitalism wasn't right after all. Various writers in Western publications are discussing this. In public.

I have already weighed in on Marxism. I take the unusual position, one that I have never heard expressed, that Marxism is worse than National Socialism. Both are forms of socialism --something the Left refuses to accept--and both are totalitarian tyrannies. The very thing which people use to mark Nazism as worse, or even non-comparable, is its racism. I hold that its racism, irredeemably horrible as it was, makes it less evil precisely because it limits its appeal to people of Aryan descent. Everyone else on the planet knows that it is not for them and is not their friend. That rank racism limits its appeal and throws its evil into clear relief.

Marxism, on the other hand, despite Marx's own clear anti-Semitism and the anti-Semitism of actual Communist societies, masquerades as a liberating angel of light for the downtrodden of any ethnicity. It lies more overtly. And with its wider appeal, it is more murderous. All Marxist societies are police states, if not genocidal on an apocalyptic scale. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Kim Jong Il are classic examples of Marxism, real Marxism, not the fantasy kingdom of leftists of all stripes.

It is a scandal that Marx can be spoken of positively and without shame by Western intellectuals, after the killing fields which always follow in his wake. To suggest the wisdom of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco or Pinochet would be to commit public social suicide, but Karl Marx,
the father of evils that outrank the whole group, is still worth taking seriously.

The only Marx worth considering is Groucho.

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Rambling on sexual mechanics and meaning, etc.




In my meanderings thru the Dark Side (aka conservative) blogosphere, I occasionally come across writers or commenters who are quite specific about their reasons for holding homosexuality to be sinful. Love between men, friendship, even passionate friendship such as you find among soldiers, is no problem. The problem is sex between men. And specifically, two sexual acts.

The polite version is that while the culminating heterosexual act of intercourse produces children and is thus natural and lifegiving, the lack of this particular act makes the others which two men may enact, un-natural and barren or selfish.

The impolite version is that oral or anal sex, especially between two men, is disgusting, dirty and/or humiliating.

I note in passing, not by way of argument, that hetero sex has often been considered disgusting and dirty by many of it practitioners. Consider the manifold uses and meanings of the word "fuck" just in English. The vast majority of them are not pastel. And if I remember my theological history correctly, it was a breakthrough by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century to assert that sexual intercourse between married couples was not only not a sin --as Augustine had maintained for a millennium-- but a virtuous act, since it was the achievement of a natural God-given goal.

One of the practically inescapeable issues when reflecting on male-male sex is the threat of feminization. Humiliation and feminization are connected. Males are archetypally defined as penetrators, females as receptors. So it is not a far leap to read a receptor male as a female. This was the reason that Justinian gave in his code for executing homosexuals, because they were "traitors to the male race". And Leviticus chose to words its prohibition and sanction against "lying with a man as with a woman."

Outside the rare initiatory types of male-male sex, in ancient Greece or some South Sea island tribes, where the maleness of both participants is essential to the meaning of the ritual act, you have situational homosexuality, which ranges from comradely alliance to serial rape, in all-male worlds such as schools, military, prisons. This is not about sexual orientation but sexual frustration and most men return to sex with women outside those environments.

And in places like prisons or for much of history, after a defeat in battle, there is no clearer way to establish the clear and painful difference between the dominator and the loser than sexual penetration. Part of the rituals and rules of initiatory sex is precisely to preserve the male dignity of the initiate, so that his temporarily receptive role eventuates in his taking his place among the men.

And then you have the most common type of male-male sex, the transvestic, where there is indeed a sharp distinction between tops and bottoms, the masculine penetrator and the effeminate receptor. Men who fuck and men who get fucked. The rough trade and the queens, the machos and the locas, etc. Roles that are often incompatible; you are one or the other. In these societies, the bottoming male loses his right to male status, trading his honor for the shameful pleasure of being fucked like a woman.

Reading male-male sex through the lens of male-female sex seems almost inescapeable.

  • One of the reasons I suspect my mother decided a few years ago that I was not really gay is that I am not effeminate and that the great majority of gay men she has known are. And my own sense of the un-integrated feminine in many gay men has been posted about before.
  • Reminds me of years ago in the monastery. Our community was bilingual, so there was both English and French in the house. There was another monk living there, with the same name as me. He was a lover of musical theatre and costuming, very dramatic and fabulous, shall we say. A visiting French monk spent some time with us and then in conversation with another monk in our house, a friend of his, asked how X was, X being the name that I shared with this other fella. The monk asked which X did he mean and was told, "Mon Dieu, pas la danceuse, mais le butch!" In English, something like, "Good Lord, man, not the ballerina, the guy."
So, as I am rambling here, what's on my mind is the combination of disgust and humiliation evoked by imagining two men enacting a basically male-female performance. An old Roman writer lamented the poverty of human life, symbolized by our being born inter faeces et urinam, between shit and piss. Anal and oral sex connects with those bookends directly.

Mike Adams, a terrifically smart and funny and wholly unapologetically conservative writer, who cares not a whit for anyone's sensitive feelings, is quite unusually blunt. He thinks that any man who lets himself be penetrated, and thus humiliated, by another man must loathe himself and the man who does it must hate him. And further, the penetrator in anal intercourse must also hate himself to immerse his penis in a dirty anus.

Aw, Mike, tell us what you really think.

But Mike speaks a truth, a truth about why many people react so powerfully against the idea...well, really, against the image...of male-male sex.

For the sake of meaning, philosophical or theological, heterosexual intercourse, the penile-vaginal kind, has a definite advantage: a clear biological purpose. All you need do is establish a certain juridical status for the partipants (husband, wife) and, as it were, the act speaks for itself: penetration, ejaculation, fertilization, procreation.

But what kind of meaning, other than discomfort or transgression or dirt or humiliation, flows from the penetration of mouth by penis or anus by penis? The question might be asked of a male-female couple engaging in this, but the issue here is two men. Obviously, there is physicial pleasure involved or no one would be doing it. But the baggage of dirt and humiliation and feminization remains in the room.

Yet I am certainly not the only man who has experience of sex with another man and finds it, well, wonderful. Everything from heart-movingly tender to heartily rambunctious. And thoroughly masculine throughout, for both parties. Mike Adams and I are not talking about the same thing.

I have to do some other things now, but the word I have in mind for the next part of my rambling is alchemy. Alchemy was about a magical and hidden process that supposedly transmuted lead into gold. Is there an alchemy possible which transmutes the dangerous risk of the dirt and humiliation of male-male sex, oral and anal, into something honorable or more?



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Mexifornia update



From VDH, after my viewpoint, a good piece about illegal aliens. Yes, they are here against the law and they are foreigners, so that makes them both illegal and aliens.

How come the phrase "undocumented immigrants" is supposed to provoke furrowed brows, ruminations on complex issues and a bit of quiet moral preening over against baboons who call these poor desperate people "illegals", ("No human being is illegal" scream the bumper stickers on the Priuses), yet the phrase "unlicensed driver" makes us nervous and we look for someone to fix that obviously scary and dangerous person? How about "unlicensed gun owner?"

Liberals used to, and many still do, get into the Bush Derangement Syndrome over, well, the very existence of the former President. I used to put on a fairly good facsimile when W started talking immigration, a subject on which he was worse than useless. And hardly alone there. It's an issue that pushes my buttons fast and hard.

I lived for almost two decades in a bilingual bicultural country. It's a bad idea, to be avoided whenever possible. An institutionalized division and competition that caused a lot of problems without any discernible benefit which balanced those problems. Lovely people in both French and English Canada...except that the French Canadians of Quebec by and large held the rest of Canada in contempt (their provincial legislature is called The National Assembly!) and used their victim status in Trudeaupia to wring concessions out of the majority which the majority heartily resented.

Bilingualism, biculturalism. It's a bad idea. Ask the Belgians. Or the Rwandans. The list is very long.

And now that the bi stuff has fallen away into the even worse multi stuff. Disintegration, internal Balkanization. Bad. A national that embraces the ideology of multiculturalism --and only Western nations are required to do it or actually try it-- basically says that it has no culture at all and that it is just a blank space. How long does a group like that survive, especially when the other groups are all deeply colored, not blank at all? That's why Canadians identify so strongly with the National Health Care and their highminded and impactless pacifist foreign policy. What else is there to call your own once who have given away the store?

My deep dislike of our current immigration situation, which I judge to be nothing less than a slow-motion invasion, comes from the following brief points.

1. Massive numbers of these folks are ILLEGAL. Their first contact with America is to break our laws. And our lack of response, indeed, our compliance, sends a profound message: we are weak and we are contemptible. That by itself is a major red flag.

If I get caught driving without a license, or even without my friggin front plate on, I get pulled over and fined. If I arrive here illegally, the State of California pays for my college and forbids the cops from questioning me about my status.

2. They overwhelmingly come from a single language group and within the group, Mexicans dominate. This leads to the "Press 1 for English" and the spreading English-Spanish signage, etc.

English is one of the crucial non-creedal forces that has kept America --always and from day one an ongoing project of unifying groups who were naturally disparate-- intact and feeling like a single entity. You have the ludicrous situation of liberal Americans apologizing because they can't speak Spanish to their maids and yardmen. I speak Spanish very well but I will be damned if I will accomodate a illegal alien who is in my country by enable him like that.

3. The dominant Mexicans come from a neighboring country, making coming and going pretty easy. And easy travel promotes this phenomenon among almost all immigrant groups. This means that when you arrive in America, you don't have to stay here and find yourself becoming American. You can straddle the cultural fence easily and be sorta kinda Americanish, thinking of yourself as mostly a resident rather than a citizen. And Mexican/Latino culture becomes more normalized here. Much of that culture is dysfunctional.

If you think the first-generation illegals are bad, their kids will be worse. They will feel at home neither here nor there, and if trends continue, Hispanics will mimic the worst behaviors of American Blacks: bad school performance and unwedmothering.
They will take for granted what seemed to their parents a huge step forward and when they don't find themselves moving up, resentment and entitlement and alienation will be the order of the day. Of course, the Democrats will blame America.
It will not be pretty.

4. The dominant Mexicans, along with a lot of other Hispanics, have a historical grudge against the Yanqui gringo imperialists. For many in the Southwest and California, they feel a historic right to be here. So not only are many of them illegal, there is a significant stream in their culture which makes us, the Americans, their enemies. The American flag booed in LA. La Raza and Aztlan.

5. And this is a time when American self-confidence and cohesion has been badly damaged by the ideology of multiculturalism and the concomitant narrative of our national shame. No longer do we demand that immigrants become Americans but are anxious to protect ourselves from being labeled racists and so allow the internal Balkanization of multiculturalism to metastasize. Our own sense of national self is fractured. And remember, in a multicultural world, the only group banned from celebrating and asserting itself is White.
Anyway, Victor's money quote:

I come up here to Stanford two or three days per week from rural central California. And I’m amazed at the de facto segregation of elite Obama country in Menlo Park and Palo Alto versus the barrio in nearby Redwood City. I think I have finally figured out the modus operandi. Everyone here is “progressive”. That means, you hire Hilda to watch your kid, Juanito to mow your lawn, or Hillario to wash your dishes at the local restaurant.

You deplore racism, or even the mere suggestion that cultures are not all inherently equal. But under no circumstances do you buy a home in Redwood City (far cheaper in fact). Nor do you put your child in any school district that draws in the Redwood City children of illegal aliens. So it is a sort of alternate universe here. From 8Am to 8PM we have an integrated world where service workers attend to the mundane needs of the Silicon Valley and Stanford elite-before going home to Redwood City and San Jose where they live and school their children out of sight, out of mind.


The whole thing is here.

Tuesday, May 05, 2009

CincObama de MayoNesa



I have refrained from posting much about the Pres...I mean, Empath-in-Chief because, well, you can imagine.

But this was too good to resist, so I just stole it, whole hog. HT to Instapundit and credits to the author of the piece, Mary Catherine Ham.

Our Genius President: 'Happy Cuatro de Cinco!'

I like to note these little incidents when they happen, not because I think it makes Obama an idiot because he occasionally stumbles over his words, but because his somewhat overblown reputation as the most cerebral, eloquent, utterly erudite president of all time could really use a pricking every now and then.

Also, because if Bush had made such a blunder, it would have been the basis of a four-part MSNBC investigative series on the malapropism's deleterious effects on the Republican Party's attempts to woo Hispanic voters, Mexican-American relations, and our "place in the world." [Emphasis by ExCathedra]

So, Obama, I will not turn your tendency to mispeak (and, then reprimand your Teleprompter) into an international incident, but I will note it with some glee:

On the eve of the Mexican holiday, Obama on Monday had an event in the East Room of the White House with Mexico's Ambassador Arturo Sarukhan (sahr-oo-KHAN').

Obama joked that it was "Cinco de Cuatro," botching a play on the Spanish word for "four" when he meant to say "Cuatro de Mayo," or the Fourth of May. He tried again, but he still did not get it right.

This from a unilingual man who's embarrassed that more of us can't speak French. If only he were as conversant in Spanish as he is in noted non-language "Austrian," this wouldn't have happened.

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Monday, May 04, 2009

QED

A few years ago, I bought The Complete Idiot's Guide to Overcoming Procrastination.

Never got around to reading it.

Really.

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Get a clue

Scrolling through a website I kinda like, where men of maturity :) hang out, I came across a profile with an attractive set of pictures and then read in the text (I paraphrase):
Since Election Day, I have taken down my rant against the appalling GW Bush and congratulate all of us who voted for President Obama. To my surprise, I had gotten angry messages from rabid gay Republicans. I still don't get them."
Ok, so you can post a "rant" against the "appalling" Bush, but when like is met with like, your opponents are the "rabid" ones?

I have certainly become very one-sided in my political views over the last several years. Hey, that's why I rant here with such articulate charm. But it seems to me, in my humble opinion, that the gay herd is so lock stepped with the liberal left that they truly cannot imagine another point of view. It really is beyond them to conceive. Their effluvience of outrage is just, I don't know, natural, and their opponents are diseased, evil or stupid.

Do you not "get" the blackness of the pot re the kettle?

Of course you don't.

There's a guy who has always smiled and said Hi to me as we pass in the street. Little fella, moves well, always dresses in leather, nice deep voice...but often enveloped in a cloud of cologne....go figure...so no interest from me. I happened to see him on TV during the Prop 8 campaign. He was beside himself, raging and practically spitting venom at the other side. Rabid. Now when I see him, I just nod. Scary.

Not to drag (sic) out the Perez Hilton vs Carrie Prejean thing, but if a straight conservative (or even worse, horrors, Christian) judge asked that question of her and got a pro-gay marriage answer AND then flunked the contestant because of it AND then went on to publicly label her a bitch and cunt...Any clue as to the response? We'd have civil rights hate-speech lawsuits up the wazoo.

What galls me is that La Hilton, who embodies a hemisphere of repulsive gay stereotypes, gets an almost total pass from the "LGBT" community for behaving in a way that, were he on the "other side", would have had the usual suspects screaming "Nazi!" in a heartbeat.

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Friday, May 01, 2009

Piety and holiness

What?

I know this is a blog about politics, sex, and religion. But after a few posts on male/male eros, you post on piety and holiness? What could you possibly know about that?

Well, I have a rich (aka, checkered) past.

Example of the difference between piety and holiness.

Father A., a man of advanced years and the well-honed carapace of monastic style --slight unconvincing smile, eyes largely downcast, body contained but not tense-- was a long-time resident of a house I was visiting and I was assigned a seat in the refectory next to him.

I was informed informally, sub rosa and sotto voce, that it was my job to make sure that he ate enough. Here's why. Father A. had let it slip somewhere that he had made a private promise never to ask for seconds. He would eat what was presented to him but not ask for seconds. However, if seconds were offered to him --a sign of Divine Providence-- he would humbly and graciously accept.
And accept.

So the other brothers in the house, when seated by him, had to make sure that he was offered seconds and that the pious old man had enough to eat. Even then, my eventual fall from grace was beginning to show, when after a few months of this charade, I may even have "forgotten" to offer seconds to Father A and, I blush to admit it, may even have enjoyed watching the subtle signs of consternation on his benign face when the accustomed offer failed to materialize at lunch. My internal dialogue may have been something like, "Get your own damn food, for Christ's sake, you old pain in the ass." Mea culpa. Sorta.

(For an amazingly insightful celebration of the obsessive pettiness of monastic life*, check out The Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, by a man who never spent a day in a monastery, Robert Browning. As a study of shadow projection and hypocrisy, applicable to any situation, it is pretty damn good.) *or a bad marriage or dysfunctional workplace, etc.

What sparked this post is a word that I see a lot lately in conservative writing to describe the behavior of the currently ascendant left: preening. It certainly paints a vivid picture of the kind of moralism that I have found so irritating in liberals --although I find it irritating in anyone--, that disconnected-from-outcome and often disconnected-from-self-criticism high-mindedness.

My current beef is the paroxysms of appallment about Gitmo and waterboarding and torture.
In order to preen, one's own countrymen can be betrayed and one's own country's security can be threatened. Just to show how moral "we" are. Yeah, right.

Holiness --back to the title topic-- is another matter. I admit that I have less experience of holiness than I do of piety, but I think I can tell the difference . So I'll have to go away and think about it some more.


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