Gloria's Oversexed Mind

(Putting my reply to Anthony and Eric here instead of in comments so I can include a live link)...

Anthony, you mean you're not a Republican? ;-D

Eric, yes!! It's amazing how many layers and layers there are here. I recall, long ago and far away, that I was equally amazed when the Bushes seemed to get free and clear of the collapse of the Savings & Loans. If you are too young to remember this little chapter in US economic history, here is a link with all the background you need. the Bush family and the S&L scandal

How do they do it? How do they mess things up horribly, cause people to lose jobs, and never get blamed? How do they rig an election and get to run the country anyway?

Well, I guess that Senior--the former head of the CIA and long-time politician--holds an amazing amount of power that neither you nor I ever even imagined possible. I suspect his sons are the heirs to this power. I imagine the power implies that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people around the US who are eager to do their bidding at the first call. I figure that, as with Amway, it's a giant pyramid, with a whole string of yes-men and money-men surrounding the inner circle who, in turn, have their heaving coterie of followers, who in turn have a horde of fanatical followers, all the way down to ordinary people, people one would never expect to play some role in our nation's history. Think of Paula Jones, for example. Okay, stop thinking about her. I didn't want to cause you non-consensual pain. ;-)

What's unique about the Bushes is that they have been at the center of American power for over 20 years now. It's a political dynasty. And, like a dynasty, it's corrupt, in-bred, arrogant and blind to its fault. Don't let the flag-waving fool you. It's anything BUT American.

May 25, 2004 in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Iraq Prison Torture Was for Fun, Not Results-Paper

"The Christian in me says it's wrong, but the corrections officer in me says, 'I love to make a grown man piss himself." --Spec. Charles Graner, prison
guard at Abu Ghraib

It's almost painful for an ethical sadomasochist to read this. First, because the sadomasochist in me loves to make a grown man piss himself too. Second, because moral context is everything. Sadomasochism without morality is violence.

It would be very interesting to open a dialogue on the seldom-acknowledged fact that all human beings have sadomasochistic impulses. It's how we act them out, and to what degree, that varies.

At least that's how I see it.

May 22, 2004 in Current Affairs, Sex and Sadomasochism | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

In early 1946, my parents--who'd spent most of WWII being involuntarily transported across the former USSR on Stalin's trains--returned to their native land of Poland. Everything and everyone they'd ever known had vanished. They were soon swept up by a Jewish rescue and relief organization. By 1947, they were living in a Displaced Persons (DP) camp in Germany.

Although it was hardly comfortable, the DP camp restored some semblance of dignity to their lives. For the first time since the 1930s, they had a secure place to live. They had medical care. They could attend religious services. They even got some money. It was enough to buy food, and the dishes to eat it on too. They could afford bedding and new clothes. At the time, these were all unimaginable luxuries to them.

They lived in the DP camp until 1949, while my sole American uncle worked to get their papers cleared and their visas granted. There was discord in the camp and grief and madness, as you would expect among the starving, battered survivors of war. And it was in Germany, source of their misery, and in a particularly horrible place in Germany.

But for the most part, those years that gave my parents and thousands of other war victims in DP camps across Europe a chance to find their feet again, to live under the protection of a benevolent government (the US, the great benefactor of European war victims), and most important of all, it gave them the opportunity to feel human again. Their basic needs were met. The gnawing terror they'd endured for almost a decade began to fade.

The place? Bergen-Belsen, one of the most notorious German concentration camps, where untold numbers of prisoners were tortured and killed. It is ghoulish to think of the Jewish survivors living in the renovated buildings of a concentration camp that American soldiers had liberated. But how and where else could a huge population of homeless emotional wrecks be housed?

And so the place which once had been a hell for Jews became, for a time, a haven where they could heal from the war. It was at once a magnificently practical and philanthropic gesture by the American command.

Fifty years later, the US went into Iraq and took over a different kind of hell. Instead of a concentration camp, we liberated Abu Ghraib, where Saddam Hussein--often compared to Hitler--tortured and killed prisoners.

What an opportunity it would have been for us had we turned that place into housing for the thousands of people left homeless by our bombs, or the victims and families of people who had been tortured by Hussein. Instead, we chose to let the spirit of torture and degradation live on. Indeed, all we really did there was to change the name of the management. Abu Ghraib is a bigger shame now than it was before, a bigger blight on humanity's moral spirit than Hussein could ever have made it. We expected an evil man like Hussein to run a place of evil. We never expected it of America.

May 21, 2004 in Autobiographical Urges, Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

A few stories in the news these last weeks prompt me to consider what the heart of each issue is and how they link. Specifically, the news about the Georgia Legislature proposing a ban on female genital piercings and the news about Ashcroft revving up a war on porn, whose target will be "sex and violence" (a slippery term often used to target SM porn).

In both cases, lawyers can rightly argue that people may not consent to physical abuse. Although we live in a world where football and ice hockey players often smash each other into unconsciousness, there are laws to deter things like spanking and slapping in relationships.

Violence, however, is in the eye of the beholder. For some, it doesn't become violence until someone is injured; for others, it's violence if the intent was malicious, even without any actual physical harm. Often legal agencies avoid ambiguous cases of consensual rough-housing and target obvious crimes (such as rape and murder). The Law has always struggled with the question of what should, legally, constitute violence; and the tougher question of how to prosecute violence. We know prisons are full of murderers serving lighter sentences than thieves or drug-users. We know that some people spend more time in jail for punching someone out than others do for killing someone when driving drunk. We know that once upon a time, men were rarely punished for beating their wives and that even today many get away with it. The domestic violence laws are intended to correct that abomination; but they can also be used by zealous DA's to go after sadomasochists who feel that beatings are the bee's knees.

I don't think there can ever be any truly fair way to legally organize violence in degrees to arrive at an appropriate measure of punishment. Violence is a fantastically complex realm of human behavior, certainly as mysterious as sex. The reasons why people commit violence and the psychologies of violent people are so varied that it's easy to see why, when one mother stones her children to death because God told her to do it, and when another mother drowns her children because God told her to do it, they can get different sentences.

But what we can and do know is that violence is, by nature, an act in which the perpetrator does not expect the victim to be willing; and where the victim has not consented to the perpetrator's actions. Violence may bring pleasure to the person who commits it but the victim never experiences violence as pleasurable. The victim perceives violence as a devastating, identity-shaking experience that may permanently mar their ability to function in society.

SM, by contrast, is an act whose participants have consented, and who are legally capable of giving consent (meaning they are mentally competent adults). SM is about pleasure. A couple of weeks ago I came up with what I think is a good working definition for BDSM: the thrill of pushing oneself to physical and sometimes psychological limits in an atmosphere of trust and understanding. What kinky people talk about when we talk about SM is the opposite of violence: it's about trust, intimacy, and sharing. (And great orgasms too.)

And this is where the Law is wrong. It does not factor consent into sexual situations. It has pre-determined rulings on the types of sex that are allowed and the types that are not. Sodomy laws, of course, immediately come to mind. There are still some states where oral sex is illegal and people have successfully been prosecuted for going down on their spouse. (An infamous case occurred in Georgia in the 1990s).

When it comes to SM, whose dynamics include sometimes harsh, rough contact, the Law is at a loss. It isn't sodomy but it's a kind of sex that Law doesn't acknowledge as legitimate either. Prosecutors use laws that were really set up to deal with violence and apply them to types of sexual behavior that aren't acknowledged by the Law. Thus, a harmless, sensual spanking between sexed-up spouses can, in the eyes of the Law, be viewed as a case of domestic violence. The minute you raise a whip you are suspect and at risk of being charged with assault. And, legally, there is no real defense against the charge. At best, you try and convince the D.A. that their office will look idiotic if they harass you; or you plead out; or you hope for a compassionate judge who is open to being pursuaded by your attorney that this was all consensual and shouldn't have reached court in the first place. You can argue until you're blue in the face that when football players tackle each other it's more violent than the time your honey tied you to a bed but you'll never win.

When it comes to sex and the Law, there should be no bad v. good sex, no legal v. illegal sex. There should only be consensual sex v. non-consensual sex. Until courts and legislators begin to acknowledge that consent is the dividing line--and not arcane Victorian, religious-based laws which pre-determine what kinds of sex people may have--we can expect to be randomly persecuted whenever a DA or vice squad feels like coming after us.

If the Law acknowledged consent, the attempt to stop genital piercings would then focus on those who are indeed victims of genital mutilation, i.e., the African women who are forced to undergo clitoral removal. It would protect the rights of women who enjoy piercings to their sex organs.

If the Law acknowledged consent, Ashcroft could go after the real criminals--pornographers who exploit minors, rip-off customers, or expose their models and actors to risky behavior and dangerous working conditions. They could protect the real victims of pornography

If the Law acknowledged consent, consensual kinksters could breathe a sigh of relief. And I like to think that some vanilla types would get nervous. Because non-consensual sex, the only kind of sex that should be prosecuted, is far more common in the vanilla world than in the kinky one.

April 8, 2004 in Current Affairs, Sex and Sadomasochism | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Stories like this one always get under my skin. This Court TV report covers another in an apparently infinite deluge of grisly Texas tragedies: Husband stands by woman accused of stoning their two sons to death.

Her credentials as a good Christian are raised in her favor--even though it's some of those Christian beliefs which drove her to commit this abomination. The nihilism instrinsic in Judgment Day scenarios can cast a pall over troubled minds. And you know she read all about stoning in her Bible and, undoubtedly, had fantasized about it many a time. Personally I love the Bible, but clearly it's a very dangerous book in the wrong hands. Not unlike the books from Paladin Press that are constantly being censored and yanked off shelves. Of course, no prosecutor has the cajones to prosecute Christian beliefs, even when they are extremist and potentially mentally destabilizing. And really, who can blame them?

Imagine replacing the text with a belief system that's unpopular, such as Islam or Wicca or Scientology...or..like, say, ummm...how about sadomasochism?

Here is some of the original text from the article.

"Gary Bell, Dee Laney's brother-in-law and the pastor of her church, testified that the defendant was a devoted and loving wife, mother and Christian who believed deeply in her Pentecostal convictions. One of those beliefs is that Jesus Christ will return to Earth one day and on occasion speaks to the faithful. Bell, who is married to Dee Laney's sister, recalled an incident at least a year before the killings where Dee Laney told other members of the congregation that God had spoken to her in some way. "Dee came down as I remember and said to me she had something she would like to share," said Bell, pastor of the First Assembly of God Church in Tyler. "The gist of what she shared with the church was that God ... had communicated to her that she should get her house in order because the Lord was coming." Laney never said anything about harming her children and the incident did not ring any alarm bells because it was consistent with the Pentecostal beliefs that more 14 million people share, Bell told jurors.
"We live constantly with this belief that we should stay ready," he said."

Now my version:

"Master Sonambulus, kittyb*tch's brother-in-law and the leader of her local SM group, testified that the defendant was a devoted and loving slave, housegirl and sadomasochist who believed deeply in her leather family's traditions. One of those beliefs is that the Marquis de Sade will appear in Omaha one day and on occasion speaks to submissives. Sonambulus, who is married to kittyb*tch's sister, recalled an incident at least a year before the killings where kittyb*tch told other members of the congregation that de Sade was thinking he might show in Denver instead. "kittyb*tch came down as I remember and said to me she had something she would like to share," said Sonambulus, leader of the Last Assembly of Sick Honchos (LASH) in Abilene. "The gist of what she shared with LASH was that de Sade ... had communicated to her that she should get her toybag ready." kittb*tch never said anything about harming her children and the incident did not ring any alarm bells because it was consistent with the sadomasochstic beliefs that tens of millions people share, Sonambulus told jurors. "We live constantly with this belief that we should keep our toybags ready," he said."
------------

I wonder if the prosecution would be "half-hearted" if the woman who murdered her children was kinky.

March 31, 2004 in Current Affairs, Religion, Sex and Sadomasochism | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack

I mentioned that I detest the term "pro life." Here's why...

The most obvious reason is that it immediately sets up a false apposition. By calling the movement pro-life, it makes the other side sound like they are pro-death. Americans are used to thinking in black and white: you're pro or con on an issue, and we don't breach too much ambiguity as a culture. So whoever is not "pro-life" must therefore be either pro-death or anti-life.

It was one of the most clever marketing tools that the organized cadres of anti-sex fanatics have ever invented. More insidiously, it sends the message that the other side is Godless. The chief argument against abortion is that God is the life-giver; whoever stands for abortion must, in pro-lifer-logic, stand against God. Never mind that, in reality, many religious people believe in abortion and many atheists do not. Too complicated. They made the message simple enough for children to understand: only those who oppose abortion are on God's side.

And speaking of their meretriciousness, instead of being "anti-abortion," which is the only accurate way to describe their politics, the self-proclaimed pro-lifers have sold millions of Americans a sham ideology. I say sham because while I have often met and read about so-called "pro life" activists, I've seldom met any who cared as much about helping the already-living. Quality of life never enters into it for them. "Follow us!" they may cry, but where are they leading? These are people who would rather see a teenager's life go to waste because of a foolish mistake, or a child born into a life of suffering and misery, than accept that an abortion might be the most merciful solution. Frankly, if I'd seen pro-lifers pour out in support, say, for the parents of missing children, or expose the pedophilia and domestic violence rampant within their own families and churches, I would be rethinking my position. If pro-lifers care so much about life, why aren't they rabid about pre-natal nutrition and adequate medical care for pregnant mothers? Or post-natal nutrition and medical care, for that matter. But, of course, you will seldom see these staunch defenders of life lift a finger to save the lives of any but the unborn.

Some anti-abortion extremists have killed people who perform abortions. They see nothing wrong with taking advantage of frightened pregnant girls and routinely harassing and threatening doctors, nurses and patients at abortion clinics around the country. Sometimes their passion for life runs so high that they paper innocent bystanders with graphic, often doctored, images of murdered fetuses. I think those bloody images are their pornography. They have spent hours feverishly analyzing the gory details, photocopying poor little dead fetuses, and then forcing them on people, not with the passion of saints but with the frenzy of psychotics.

I don't think pro-lifers are pro life at all. But by calling themselves "pro-life" they successfully engaged pro-abortionists in a PR battle they couldn't win. Reluctantly, pro-abortionists settled on calling themselves pro-choice. I'm not thrilled with this term either but it does, at least, drive home their core agenda: that women should have free choice over what they do with their bodies.

Unfortunately "pro choice" is not as exciting to the ear as "pro life.". Clearly, no one at the helm of pro-life politics is about to call himself "anti choice." You will not get a lot of support in America by openly declaring you want to limit other peoples' choices, even though that is exactly what you want to do.

Abortion is not a black and white issue. It's as infinitely complex as humanity itself. There are abortions which are the right medical decision and the right moral decision; just as their are abortions which should never been performed. I myself am pro-abortion yet hate it when adults are irresponsible about birth-control and treat abortion casually as a fallback position.

I believe that children should be educated about sex, and that adolescents should be informed about all the options for and consequences of sexual activity. All American adults should have the right to choose what is best for themselves. I guess you could call me pro-choice, because I believe in free will. And you could call me pro-life, because I am concerned about all aspects and stages of life, and particularly about quality of life. But on this issue, feel free to call me pro-abortion. I for one will not apologize for it.

March 4, 2004 in Current Affairs, Sex and Sadomasochism | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Bush Anti-Drug Plan to Target Painkillers

As if the so-called war on drugs wasn't enough of an affront to the intelligence of Americans, the White House and its Office of National Drug Control Policy are now planning to monitor all prescriptions for any signs of drug abuse or doctor shopping. That's right: if your grandfather is taking something to help him cope with chronic pain, the government will now keep an eye on his medical records to be sure he isn't a crazed drug abuser. You know how wild and crazy those grandparents can get.

The biggest risk to the average American is that doctors will become afraid to adequately medicate people who need unusually high doses of medications just to cope with chronic pain or anxiety. High-priced Hollywood physicians will probably always keep providing drugs to their elite clientele. Middle class and working class Americans who depend on HMO's and Blue Cross, though, can expect to get royally screwed.

The second outrage is the way the government keeps trying to sneak its political agenda into our body cavities. They are worse than aliens with anal probes. At least the aliens only go after your ass. The government wants to probe our wombs and our mouths. Men of America, guard your pee-holes: the Fed'll be coming after that next.

Personally, I'm waiting for the day when the Bushistas decide that the only way to keep Americans from getting fat is by monitoring everything we eat. The corporate logic is there: insurance companies would save billions if they didn't have to pay for weight-related diseases.

As a matter of fact, why wait? Think of all the time the government could save by going for the gusto and implanting a chip in every American to monitor each and every thing we do which the government doesn't like.

March 1, 2004 in Current Affairs, Science | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack