INTERESTING TIMES

It's 3:44 am and I've been restless, unsleeping.  I slept at first then woke with thoughts of Epstein, who just suicided because he didn't want to sit through a long trial about his sex trafficking of young girls.  He didn't want to be someone's bitch in prison after having made so many young girls serve as his bitch.  According to one report I read he wanted to inseminate as many women as possible to bear his children.  I wonder how many of his progeny already exist in the world.  According to another report he wanted his head and penis cryogenically preserved after his death.  I wonder if his penis is frozen somewhere after his ignominious suicide in prison.  I wonder how many American men secretly hold him as a hero.  He got stinkin' filthy rich though I read that it's not because of his skill as a financial manager.  He must have got that rich because men will pay a lot of money for girls they can abuse and get away with it.  This is one horror of our culture.

Then Lorena Bobbit came to mind.  She's the woman who cut off her husband's penis and threw it out the car window as she was driving away.  I saw a recent news bit about her, she's doing fine.  She did remark that everybody was fascinated about the penis, which was found and reattached.  Her husband went on to be a porn star, I imagine abusing women on camera.  People weren't nearly as interested in why she did it.  Why did she cut it off?  I'd bet she was furious.  She said it was because her husband "forced himself on her".  Not just once: many times.   She didn't use the word rape but I will.  Her husband considered sex with her to be his right and he raped her, so much and so unpleasantly that she was angry enough to cut off his penis.  Temporary insanity sounds like a nice plea deal but not the truth.  The truth is something more like justice.  If rape doesn't sound like a bad enough crime to you to justify that punishment, you are probably a man.

Another thing that comes to mind is this article, The Female Price of Male Pleasure.  This is truth.  Men get their rocks off and women tolerate.  The woman's pleasure is rarely a priority, much less her orgasm.  Men just want to get off.  If she's uncomfortable or in pain, they ignore it.  If she seeks medical help for her discomfort in sex, her care is not as well covered by insurance as his is for getting an erection.  As if men have more of a right to a big fat erection than women have to not be hurt.  Part of the obliviousness of men is because testosterone makes them that way.  They are impulsive and aggressive because their hormones make them that way.  Sex is an obsession dictated by evolution.  But their selfish behavior is in part due to a gender imbalance in our culture.

How many husbands have wives that never have orgasms, with them at least?  How many even know that or give a damn?  I know only about a few, but that's because they've confessed to me in private.  Usually the blame is on the woman for not doing what it takes to have an orgasm.  What if the whole experience is so unpleasant that women wait for the man to get off and fake orgasms so that they can be set free from the imbalanced sexual process for at least a few more hours?  Lots, that's my estimate.

I know all of this from my own experience.  My best lover ever was a woman.  We didn't have the hottest sex in the world, but she made the effort to give me orgasms.  She was sensitive and curious enough to learn how, and she taught me the lesbian creed of reciprocality.  Our orgasms might not happen at the same time, but we can each give the other one.  Lesbians emphasize this.  It just doesn't happen in many male-female relationships.  The male's orgasm is all that matters--the female can "take care of herself".  The male gets resentful if he has to "take care of himself".  This is disgusting.

My lesbian lover knew from her own experience how sensitive a woman's breasts are, how they can be used to excite, and how easily they can be hurt.  I can't tell you how many times a man has been cruel to my breasts and painfully pinched the nipple or grabbed one in his hand and squeezed it like a water balloon.  My breasts are not for men.  If men cannot use them to give me pleasure, they do not get to touch them.

And then there is porn.  You don't have to look much to know that one of the biggest themes is domination and abuse of females by males.  To start with females are expected to be unnaturally shaven and denuded of protective hair.  To follow up with that we're supposed to enjoy being tied up, abused, ejaculated on.  Maybe some do enjoy this but I can tell you that the vast majority of women want to be caressed and adored, we want to be seduced, not raped.  But a whole lot of really sad young men have their only sexual experiences interacting with this twisted porn, and it makes them even more messed up than they were to start with.  How are they going to learn how to seduce a woman from this?

So in addition to all the other crises facing our time, there is this.  Women are deeply angry because we've come to realize that we've been mistreated and it does not have to be this way.  The sexual imbalance in our culture has come into very clear focus.  We are furious.  Sexism in sexuality is an ugly thing.  Men can't help that they have testosterone and are horny, but they can decide to be egalitarian, they can learn to be good lovers and sensitive partners.  They can take on the lesbian practice of reciprocality in pleasure and orgasm.  For many in the boomer generation it may be too late; they are stuck in their ways.  But for Gen X and onward I think there is still hope that men and women can find a new equilibrium in which women's pleasure is given at least equal priority and men don't think they have a right to sex in spite of how unpleasant it is for their partner, much less license to rape little girls or their wives.

I suppose we have the creep in chief to thank for this nexus.  His naked misogyny in addition to the nasty racism has emboldened a lot of creeps to act out, and women have had to defend ourselves more and more.  A supreme court justice who probably had some fun at the expense of many young women is just one of three accused on our highest court.  The reversal of Roe v Wade is on the horizon, and with that men will be able to legally hijack a woman's body for the purpose of propagating their sperm.  Add to that the fact that abortion is getting harder to access even before the Roe reversal, and that in some states rapists have parental rights, and we have even more reasons to be furious.

I'm not in favor of abortion in general, I think it is an archaic solution to a problem that should be addressed much earlier in the sequence of events.  No woman should be raped or in any other way get pregnant when she is not prepared to raise a child.  But this is another issue that would require all night to even just begin writing about.  Then there's income equality which puts women in a dependent position, and many more sticky wickets.  The pit is deep.

But just one more thing.  We have every right and reason to be angry.  Women have been through a lot of crap in service to men's desires, and it is our turn to serve ourselves.  It is our turn not just to have pleasure instead of pain, but to run this place and change the culture.  We are not bitches, we are justified and motivated.  We don't need men; we only need sperm if we want babies.  Justice may be a ways off but I can smell it through my tears.  Look out all you creepy guys who buy and bully for sex.  The world is changing.

I didn't hear about these women until today. Perhaps you've already heard. Pussy Riot a Russian punk rock band who performed an anti-Putin song in the "main cathedral" of the Orthodox Church. Now they have been held in "pre-trial detention" for months. It is expected that they will serve years of jail time for the offense, which was, in a word, a sacrilege.

I don't know about you, but if someone did this in my sacred space, I would be offended. I don't mean that Russia's powers that be (government and church in cahoots) should be able to imprison people for years over this sort of behavior. I think not. I personally relish hearing the words Pussy Riot in the news, and am glad that women there feel powerful enough to do this. Putin's continuing reign is a far greater blasphemy than the most raucous of punk rock in a cathedral.

In spite of my sympathies for their causes, I would be totally pissed if somebody made this kind of noise in my sacred place. Blast that crap at the river? Get OUT. I understand anger, and suppression, and the need to eliminate Putin. And I understand the outrage against their methods. Too bad the punishment is so out of proportion with the offense.



Here's the NPR story: http://www.theworld.org/2012/06/anti-putin-punk-rockers-pussy-riot-to-stay-in-jail-await-trial/

Further analysis of the Women's Health Initiative data has revealed that women who drink 4+ cups of coffee per day have 25% less risk of endometrial cancer than women who drink one or less. Drinking 2 or more cups of decaf per day was associated with a 22% risk reduction but the sample size was too small to have statistical significance. The strongest inverse association between coffee drinking and endometrial cancer was among obese women.

SOURCES
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/754053?src=mpnews&spon=16
http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/content/early/2011/10/03/1055-9965.EPI-11-0766.abstract

Awaken the mother mind within every one of you human beings... We must feel what is going on in the world. It is said by the Zulu people that women think with their pelvic area, where children grow and are born...we must think that way. We must awaken the mother mind in us.
--Credo Mutwa
( notes )

They spend all day in their dripping wet rainforest camp. The men stay in their tents and their sleeping bags as if they existonly only to live in them. The women do what the men are always too tired or too uninterested or too caught up in a conversation about sport or politics to be bothered doing. They work. They peel vegetables. They collect firewood. They fetch water from the river up the steep and awkward bank to the campsite. They wash dishes. They help the guides organise the camp, unpacking and packing barrels. Repairing equipment. The men reserve their energies for some future conjectural at of courage. The women's courage is of a type that endures this day of rain. Meanwhile the men get depressed. The men feel some embarrassment that women are on the same trip and doing things that really only men ought be doing. The guides prefer it. Nothing, for a river guide, is worse than an all-male trip. They are boring and lazy and inclined to foolhardiness. They are considerable work to look after. They are generally not in the same class for company. Aljaz likes sitting down with the women around the fire....
--Richard Flanagan
p154
( another quote, p224: )

Ever since a few brave scientists started speaking out about their findings---that mammograms weren't actually savings lives, that they aren't the best way to screen for breast pathology---the numbers of women who are going in for regular breast squishing and irradiation has been on the decrease. And the folks who were in that biz are not happy about it. Their pockets aren't so full anymore.

Women don't want the carved guy walking down the beach. But they want everything else. Many thanks to hausfrauatu for pointing out THIS NY times story about sex research. It centers around researcher Meredith Chivers and her findings. Her study involved monitoring people's arousal while viewing video of various sex acts. Arousal was measured subjectively (self report) and objectively (genital physiology). Then the people's real and reported arousal levels were correlated, along with their reported sexual prefences. The findings were...well....INCREDIBLE. Yet credible. My head is reeling with the implications. Makes me want to go into sexual health...
( text from which I will make my usual notes )

(New product discovery)
( this may be of interest to women, and guys, you probably don't want to know...I say probably )