Aum Gung Ganapathaye Namah
Namo tassa bhagavato arahato samma-sambuddhassa
Homage to The Blessed
One, Accomplished and Fully Enlightened
In the name of Allah, Most Gracious,
Most Merciful
Sexuality
A Collection of Articles, Notes and References
References
(Revised:
References Edited by
An Indian Tantric
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
- William Shakespeare
Copyright © 2002-2010 An Indian Tantric
The following educational writings are STRICTLY for
academic research purposes ONLY.
Should NOT be used for commercial, political or any other
purposes.
(The following notes are subject to
update and revision)
For free distribution only.
You may
print copies of this work for free distribution.
You may re-format and
redistribute this work for use on computers and computer networks, provided
that you charge
no fees for
its distribution or use.
Otherwise, all
rights reserved.
8 "...
Freely you received, freely give”.
- Matthew 10:8
:: New American Standard Bible (NASB)
1 “But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days.
2 People will be lovers of themselves, lovers
of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their
parents, ungrateful, unholy,
3 without
love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good,
4 treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God—
5 having
a form of godliness but denying its power. Have
nothing to do with them.
6 They
are the kind who worm their way into homes and gain control over weak-willed women, who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil
desires,
7 always learning but never able to acknowledge
the truth.
8 Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so also these men oppose the truth--men of depraved minds, who, as far as the faith is
concerned, are rejected.
9 But
they will not get very far because, as in the case of those men, their
folly will be clear to everyone.”
- 2 Timothy
3:1-9 :: New International Version (NIV)
6 As he saith also in another place, Thou art a priest for ever after the order of
Melchisedec.
- Hebrews 5:6
:: King James Version (KJV)
Therefore, I say:
Know your enemy and know yourself;
in a hundred battles, you will never be defeated.
When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself,
your chances of winning or losing are equal.
If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself,
you are sure to be defeated in every battle.
-- Sun Tzu, The Art of War, c. 500bc
There are two ends not to be served by a wanderer. What are
these two? The
pursuit of desires and of the pleasure which springs from desire, which is
base, common, leading to rebirth, ignoble, and unprofitable; and the pursuit of pain and
hardship, which is grievous, ignoble, and unprofitable.
- The Blessed One, Lord
Buddha
Contents
Color Code
A Brief Word on Copyright
References
Notes
Educational Copy of Some of the
References
Color
Code
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Color
Code Identification
Main
Title Color:
Pink
Sub
Title Color:
Rose
Minor
Title Color:
Gray – 50%
Collected
Article Author Color:
Lime
Date
of Article Color:
Light
Collected
Article Color:
Sea Green
Collected
Sub-notes Color:
Indigo
Personal Notes Color: Black
Personal
Comments Color:
Brown
Personal
Sub-notes Color:
Blue - Gray
Collected
Article Highlight Color:
Collected
Article Highlight Color:
Lavender
Collected
Article Highlight Color:
Aqua
Collected
Article Highlight Color:
Pale Blue
Personal
Notes Highlight Color:
Gold
Personal
Notes Highlight Color:
Tan
HTML Color:
Blue
Vocabulary Color:
Violet
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
A
Brief Word on Copyright
Many of the articles whose educational copies are given below are copyrighted by their respective authors as well as the respective publishers. Some contain messages of warning, as follows:
Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen
are expressly prohibited
without the written consent of
“so and so”.
According to the concept of “fair use” in US copyright Law,
The reproduction, redistribution and/or exploitation of any
materials and/or content (data, text, images, marks or logos) for personal or
commercial gain is not permitted. Provided the source is cited, personal, educational and non-commercial use (as defined by fair use in
US copyright law) is permitted.
Moreover,
I believe that satisfies the conditions for copyright and non-plagiarism.
References
Some of the links may not be
active (de-activated) due to
various reasons, like removal of the concerned information from the source
database. So an educational copy is also provided, along with the link.
If the link is active, do cross-check/validate/confirm the educational copy of the article provided along.
References
ANI. (
ANI. (
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-369829,curpg-1.cms
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/12/22/1071941676983.html
Chandra, Vikram. (
http://outlookindia.com/full.asp?sid=1&fname=essay1&fodname=19970818
Chaudhury, Shoma. (
http://outlookindia.com/full.asp?sid=1&fodname=19991115&fname=sexuality
Connelly,
Chris. (
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/2020/DailyNews/2020_bobcrane_021018.html
Connelly,
Chris. (
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/2020/DailyNews/2020_bobcrane2_021018.html
Darebare's
http://www.geocities.com/TheTropics/Shores/6059/legal.html
Day, Vox. (
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=33670
Dharker, Anil. (
http://outlookindia.com/full.asp?sid=1&fname=Anil&fodname=20000103
Eardley,
Gill. (January 2002) The sacred art of self decoration.
http://www.gilleardley.iofm.net/SelfDecoration.htm
Gregorian, Dareh. (
http://nypost.com/news/regionalnews/63735.htm
IANS. (
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/xml/uncomp/articleshow?msid=47565289
IANS. (
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-376686,curpg-1.cms
IANS. (
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-369486,curpg-1.cms
Jain, Madhu., Biswas, Soutik. (
http://outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20030505&fname=Cover+Story+%28F%29&sid=1
Johnson, Cindy Struckman. and Johnson, David Struckman. (March 2001) Men's
Reactions to Female Sexual Coercion. Psychiatric
Times. Vol. XVII. Issue 3.
http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/menreact.html
Joshi, Shashi. (
http://outlookindia.com/full.asp?sid=1&fodname=19980119&fname=booksa
Meckler, Laura. (
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-2694610,00.html
Mitchell, Lisa. (
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/12/17/1071337031174.html
Moore, Art. (
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=27924
Moscaritolo, Maria. (
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,5645145%255E662,00.html
Osler, Margaret. (
http://oregonstate.edu/dept/history/horning_speakers.htm
Peres, Judy. (
Phillips,
Shaun. (
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,5640209%255E662,00.html
Phillips,
T Y. (Saturday, October 19, 2002) Wife's motives in biting disputed.
http://www.modbee.com/local/story/4857059p-5870211c.html
Reuters. (
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20021011/hl_nm/sex_men_dc_1
Reuters. ‘Women more likely to sleep with interns’. (
http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=13833
Scheeres, Julia. (
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,55420,00.html
Sengupta,
Kim. (
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=356753
Singh, Mallica., Srikanth B.R., Majumdar, Manjira. (
http://outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20030407&fname=Snoopy+%28F%29&sid=1&pn=1
Talbot,
Margaret. (
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/13/magazine/13HARASSMENT.html?pagewanted=all&position=top
The
Associated Press. (
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/18/world/main526182.shtml
Wadhwa, Soma., Menezes, Saira., Rajesh Y.P., Biswas, Ashis. (
http://outlookindia.com/full.asp?sid=1&fname=cover_story&fodname=19971013
Wadhwa, Soma. (
http://outlookindia.com/full.asp?sid=2&fodname=20030505&fname=Cover+Story+%28F%29
Zuk, Marlene. (
http://oregonstate.edu/dept/history/horning_speakers.htm
Brides
ask dads to include computers in dowry. (
http://headlines.sify.com/1434news4.html?headline=Brides~ask~dads~to~include~computers~in~dowry
'Cheat'
in court for failing to marry former lover. (
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_344856.html?menu=
Kennedy Mistress Comes Forward. (
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,86959,00.html
Men
keener than women to meet after emails. (
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_644035.html?menu=news.technology.email
Novels
and Accounts of Richard Burton
http://www.unityspot.com/arthurs/burton.html
The
Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices: Erotomania
http://www.odd-sex.com/info/gloss270.htm
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Notes
6 As he saith also in another
place, Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchisedec.
-
Hebrews 5:6 :: King James Version (KJV)
28 But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed
adultery with her already in his heart.
-
Matthew
27 Ye have heard that it was
said by them of old time, Thou shalt not
commit adultery:
-
Matthew
31 It hath been said, Whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a
writing of divorcement:
32 But I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause
of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall
marry her that is divorced committeth adultery.
-
Matthew 5:31-32 :: King James Version (KJV)
fornication
n.
Sexual
intercourse between partners who are not married to each other.
Word
History: The word fornication had a lowly beginning suitable to what has long
been the
low moral status of the act to which it
refers. The Latin word fornix, from which fornicti, the ancestor of
fornication, is derived, meant “a vault, an
arch.” The term also referred to a vaulted cellar or similar place where prostitutes plied
their trade. This sense of fornix in Late
Latin yielded the verb fornicr, “to commit fornication,” from which is derived
fornicti, “whoredom, fornication.” Our word is first recorded in Middle English about 1303.
Source:
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright
© 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published
by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
12
“And if a woman shall put away her husband, and be married to another, she
committeth adultery.”
- Mark
Oldest Professions
It is interesting to compare the
status and life of devadasis in a temple with that of nuns in a church.
www.samarthbharat.com/files/devadasihistory.doc
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Educational Copy of Some of the References
FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
ANI. (
Men need sleep, not sex
ANI
LONDON: Men might
spend much of their time day-dreaming about sex, but weariness makes them
chicken out when it comes to the act, says a survey.
The survey for vitamins company Berocca saw more than six out of ten men
finding work as the most demanding part of their life.
And it seems to take a heavy toll, so that more than half feel simply
too tired for a social life, or to have sex when they got home after a busy
day, says a BBC report.
However, one in
five men admitted to thinking about sex within a minute of the start of a
business meeting.
The survey also found that more than three-quarters cannot stay alert
throughout the working day - in fact the average man is only sharp for around
three hour, which may be in part due to a poor diet.
Seven out of ten of the 650 men who took part in the survey admitted
they did not eat properly.
According to the report, Christine Northam, a counsellor for the
charity Relate, said the survey was a good sign that people were starting to
consider the impact of long working hours on emotional health.
"Lots of people are suffering from stress as the result of working
long hours, and the lack of security in employment. When people are completely shattered and
stressed they don't feel very sexy. But sex is a very important part of a loving, intimate relationship.
If we value stable relationships as a foundation of society, then society needs
to change. We need to get away from the culture of working too long and hard,
being too materialistic and driven by money."
(Reference: ANI. (
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
ANI. (
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-369829,curpg-1.cms
Surprise! Women too
enjoy porn
ANI[ FRIDAY,
The results of the
research were published in the prestigious American journal Fertility and Sterility.
Researchers showed
random clips from erotic films and relaxation videos to 20 women to monitor
their effects.
They found that the women were fully aroused in an average of
just two minutes after watching explicit eroticism.
Volunteers aged 20 to
30 were linked to devices
to monitor breathing, heart rate, skin changes and blood
flow to their genitals. The tape
sequences lasted 22 minutes and were played with and without sound.
But the moans and
groans made no difference to their response. The porn clips involved two
different couples having foreplay and proper sex.
According to a report
in The Sun, scientists have said that they were investigating why some women
have sexual problems and believe their findings will help sufferers with their
difficulties.
Moreover, the findings have challenged the age-old
held view that only men enjoy watching pornography.
Alan Riley, professor
of sexual medicine at the University of Central Lancashire, said that research
over the past 20 years has revealed that more women were responding to explicit erotic videos rather than soft
romantic films.
Riley added,
"Women certainly respond to erotic videos. It's not unusual for therapists
to recommend stimulation, which may involve watching a sexually explicit video.
But they have to make sure that it does not have the reverse effect, and that
the women are ready for it, and that it's not going to terrify them."
(Reference: ANI. (
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/12/22/1071941676983.html
With porn so in your
face it's time we started talking about the problem
By Simon Castles
The most popular video
over this holiday season will arguably be a grainy three-minute affair starring party girl Paris Hilton and an old boyfriend. Millions have
already seen it; millions more will.
According to
wordtracker.com, which monitors what the world's internet users are typing in
from minute to minute, the current top searches are: "Paris Hilton",
followed by "sex", followed by "porn". (The usual search
suspects - "nude", "boobs" - have been relegated for the
moment.)
Not that anyone needs
to search for this stuff anyway; it finds you. Email inboxes fill daily with
teaser messages, most of them graphically
informing users of who is putting what huge thing where and with what degree of
force and regularity. Day after wearying day, messages steeped in anger, bodily fluid and sadness land on our desktops or pop up unannounced
in skittish cyber windows.
If I sound like a
puritan, I'm not. But ours is a culture
gorged to the max on pornography. It is everywhere. Yet we don't particularly like to talk
about it.
We worry about child
pornography, of course. And about teenagers accessing hard-core sites. But there the issue ends. And the silence
begins.
In our rush to sound
alarm bells over porn and our children, we ignore, or at least play down,
everything else. Next to our understandable horror at online pedophilia, all
other matters are normalised - as if
there is something normal about men and women, the old and young, being alerted
to highly graphic sexual material.
I have seen the
resigned sadness of women at work when suddenly confronted with this sort of
material - when hit with anonymous pieces of sex abuse from cyberspace. It's
upsetting. As a male you feel almost guilty, knowing that it's your gender that has overwhelmingly created the
demand for this stuff.
And now the supply has become a tsunami: the number of X-rated sites on the net is
conservatively put at 8 million. And rising.
Not that women are
alone in being wearied by the explosion in pornographic material. Men are
affected, too - even those who, like me, have fallen under its spell from time to time (I first got into porn when I was about 14
years old).
Whatever our feelings
about porn culture, I think we kid ourselves if we believe it doesn't exact a
toll. Porn takes its pound of
flesh just as it gives it. We are all diminished, deadened, by the
constant barrage of sexual imagery - not just from hard-core sources, but also from the advertising and
media industries, which become more porno every day.
Sexual imagery chips
away at us, as transitory thrills give way to something more depressingly
permanent. Something that really should have a name - like perversion fatigue.
Of course, there is
nothing modern or cool about saying this. As an English journalist, Edward
Marriott, wrote in The Age last month, "There is a widespread sense that anyone who suggests pornography
might have any kind of adverse effect is laughably out of touch."
And perhaps I am.
Certainly it's true that porn is hipper now than ever. Funky kids wear T-shirts
with "porn star" and "slut" emblazoned across them. The
beautiful people say "You look so porno" to each other, and mean it
as a compliment. Tatler magazine, London's society bible, declares
that "porno chic" is, like, so in at the moment.
But why the detached
irony? If the beautiful people really find porn culture so cool, then why not
change careers? Why not give up their glam jobs in fashion and modelling and
become porn stars? I'd
suggest that behind the irony and cool detachment are people struggling to cope
with their own sense of perversion fatigue. By stating that porn is somehow cool, and as hip and innocently
diversionary as a pair of Manolo Blahniks shoes, it is that much easier to
brush the issue aside. To laugh it off.
Magically, something
hard-core is turned into cheesecake.
I remember a female
friend telling me how jaded she was by the sexual imagery she saw everywhere.
It made her feel inadequate. She
resented the way all women were now expected to look sexy all the time - always
in the right lipstick, always in the right lingerie, always with a sultry look
on their face as if they might just have an orgasm at any moment.
The pressures and
expectations on women were crushing. But men, she felt, didn't fare much
better. She wondered how the
average bloke - bombarded from boyhood onward with graphic and unrealistic
images of women doing graphic and unrealistic things - could find any excitement or resonance in
something as
innocent and old-fashioned as a
kiss from the girl down the street. Why, she wondered, would
they even bother?
It was just about the saddest thing I'd ever heard.
So are men and women
being slowly pushed apart, both victims, in different ways, of perversion
fatigue? The signs as we enter
a new year are not promising.
Loneliness is endemic. Millions of the world's women are single and unhappy. And
millions of men are too busy
downloading a clip
of
Simon Castles is a
contributing editor to The Big
Issue.
(Reference: Castles, Simon. (
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference (Key points only)
Chandra, Vikram. (
http://outlookindia.com/full.asp?sid=1&fname=essay1&fodname=19970818
Page
1
A stern critic recently took me to task for what she saw as an
improbability in a story I wrote. This tale, called
Swinger
n.
Slang.
A member of a couple, especially a
married couple, who exchanges sexual partners.
My critic took severe exception to the supposition that such people
could exist, do exist. She huffed: "It seemed improbable that a
respectable Cutchi middle-class couple would ever get involved in such
shenanigans." Reading carefully, and tamping down autho-rial defensiveness as much as I can, it seems to
me that my critic is not arguing that these characters are flat, or
unconvincingly portrayed. No, she is making a much more general statement about
life in Mumbai, in
…
I was struck, however, by the critic's insistence that middle-class
Indian men and women do not, cannot do such things, and also by
Page
2
James from
But we grew older and we discovered that Indians do indeed have sex. In
fact, it seems now that there are a lot of Indians having a lot of sex, and not
all of it is of the happily married sort. The college kids I meet and know are sexually active, and are
astonishingly blasé about it.
Occasionally some of my even younger acquaintances, eighth and ninth-grade boys
and girls, take a perverse pleasure in my amazement by telling me tales of
after-school assignations and condoms tucked inside history books. Even taken with a very large pinch of salt,
this is all a very far cry from my memories of the trembling awkwardness of
high-school socials, where dancing with a girl was a landmark event.
Their elders, the working men and women who are my friends, have
boyfriends and girlfriends. They break up, and have other boyfriends and
girlfriends, and nobody
ever doubts that they sleep with their partners. It is not worth remarking upon, and neither is unmarried lovers living together. Married people, both men and women, have
affairs. Sometimes it seems that
every second person I know is getting divorced.
It's very easy to assume this is characteristic of a tiny proportion of
the population, of the largely English-speaking urbanites who unthinkingly ape
the decadent promiscuity of the West. But it's not only the high-rise
apartment-dwellers who are having sex outside of marriage. The people you might
see on a suburban train from Churchgate to Virar, in second class, are also
doing it. The industry of commercial sex in Mumbai makes gigantic profits, but
there is more than that. I've stood at a window, behind half-closed shutters,
with Kanta, a maid-servant who lives in a slum, while she's pointed at her neighbours walking to
and from the basti. "That one, he's married, works as a driver, but he has
a chakkar with a woman who works as a bai in his sahib's building. Now that one
there, she's six months pregnant but won't drop the baby and won't marry the
father until he can afford a kholi of his own. She doesn't want to live with his
family. And her, that one with a small boy, she was married for 15 years,
without any children. Then suddenly she got pregnant. So the husband beat her
up and threw her out. Turns out he knew all along it was his fault."
KANTA is a
hard-headed realist, and—as
far as I can tell—is eminently reliable as a reporter, but I have sometimes
wondered if she might be spicing it all up for entertainment's sake. So I asked
a friend, a police inspector, and he said that in the bastis, "these chakkars happen all the time. Sometimes
people get killed over them, when husbands or wives find out." He shrugged when I wondered why conservative cultural mores don't
prevent these chakkars from starting in the first place. "You have to be able to watch people,
to find out what they're doing to stop them. Maybe in a village that works. Not
here, not in this city."
Page
3
It seems reasonable to expect that somewhere out there, in the
villages, there exists that relatively pristine and famously conservative
'Indian culture' that shies away from unsanctified sexual contact. The villagers, however, prove as complicated as their urban cousins. I spoke to a volunteer working for an NGO
in a cluster of 17
villages in western
Kami (in Hindi) – shortage (on rough translation to English)
Devar (in Hindi) – Husband’s brother (on rough translation to English)
It's tempting, on the basis of this very anecdotal evidence, to
conclude—in the time-honoured and exaggerated manner of noir fiction—that below the austere surface of Indian
conservatism is a fluid and lusty carnival of sex. Or, as Nirad Chaudhuri patriarchally puts
it: "...traditional
Hindu society provided a wide scope for licentiousness within family
relationships as a safety valve. The only restriction provided on
licentiousness was that it should be secret, always assumed but never paraded.
This makes the licentiousness which is now being seen in
But I think it's too
simple to assume that the public propaganda has no effect on private lives. Last year, my German friend Maria visited
Mumbai and lived as a paying guest with five other young women. These were all
Indian women in their early or mid-twenties, all from small-town families and
well-educated, all in the big city to work. Each of these women, at some point
in the six months they lived together, found a moment alone with Maria. She had
the sense that they always thought of her as a typically 'loose' western woman, but now in these tete-a-tetes she became the knowledgeable and unjud-gemental sex expert. They asked: "What is sex like? Does it hurt?" "What are men like?
What do they want?" And,
within the context of arranged marriage, always one question that she never
found a satisfactory answer to: "What
is it like to sleep with a man you don't know at all?" These questions could only be asked in private, and could only be put
to Maria, not to each other. Various silences and evasions had left them with
these essential questions, and they asked Maria, because, as she said, "they liked me, and they wanted to know
the things a loose woman knows."
We live, sexually, in this
paradox, this curious
patchwork arrangement of cynicism and naivete, of experience and innocence, of
public posturings and not-so-hidden hedonism. I've often heard our
contradictions described as hypocrisy, but it could be argued that we practice
a sophisticated and properly lubricating civility. I am terri-fied, though, of the horror that
is now resulting from our selective and voluntary blindness, our peculiar and
incendiary mixture of ignorance and desire and shame. In November last year, RSS women workers,
sevikas, demonstrated against the government's anti-AIDS campaign. They were
objecting to the placing of informational advertisements in public places,
because "such campaigns
might kindle curiosity among children and divert their attention to sexual
matters. And once their minds are preoccupied with sex, they will not be able
to channelise their energy in a positive direction." The sevikas seem to believe that if we
don't talk about it, if we leave
(Reference: Chandra, Vikram. (
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference (Key points only)
Chaudhury, Shoma. (
http://outlookindia.com/full.asp?sid=1&fodname=19991115&fname=sexuality
Page
1
Isn’t this at odds with the other common perception that besides the
urban rich, tribal and rural
Tribal
…
Page
2
Why did this happen? Why didn’t a country as diverse as ours not throw
up more diverse sexual attitudes?
Primarily because it’s always been an agricultural society, not a
hunter or post-industrial one. Then because of the ascetic strain in Hindu
culture - the rishis, munis - celibacy and sexual virtue became important.
Brahmanical morality prevailed.
…
But why have these inhibitions continued in a modern
Revolution, especially in sexual attitudes, is always brought on by the
young. But for that you need generational conflict. We’ve never had that here.
In a way, that’s our success; our
families have remained intact. Generational continuity and peace are valued
more than conflict. The
need for family approval is stronger than the need to fulfil sexual desires. Also there isn’t so much
individualism here. With the idea of the individual, sexual needs become more
defined and urgent.
Have attitudes to sexuality then changed at all?
Yes, there’s much more talk, it’s more open, embarrassment is less.
Sexual experimentation’s also increased, though for many, ‘sexual’ still means
just intercourse and the
values of virginity, monogamy, arranged marriages are still very strong. What’s changed is that a sexual encounter outside of marriage is not
just with bhabhis, cousins, uncles. The expression of sexuality has moved from
inside the family to outside.
…
Page
3
Will sexual attitudes change over the next 100 years?
They’ll certainly move towards permissiveness. Individualism’s growing; so individual happiness of which sexual happiness is a part will
become more important than social harmony. As for how fast it’ll change, or
whether there’ll be generational conflict, I don’t know. My sense of it is
that, in the true Indian way,
it’ll happen with consensus between parents and the young.
Many more are acknowledging alternate sexualities. Is there an
emotional tendency towards bisexuality?
No. Genuine bisexuality’s rarer than one thinks, more fantasy. Many
people can be with both sexes but that’s not bisexuality. It’s about which sex
really excites you - and for most people who claim to be bisexual, that
excitement is not equal. One’s always more than the other. Most bisexuals are homosexuals who find it
easier to inhabit both worlds and not be isolated.
With media emphasis on the body, expectations have risen. Has this
created a sense of sexual inadequacy?
Where there’s expectation, there’ll be disappointment. Without expectations, people wouldn’t even engage in the endeavour. You may not climb Mt Everest, but you might climb other small mountains
if you’re engaged! That’s
why it’s important.
What explains the strange coyness with which sex is represented in
commercial Indian cinema?
Well, at one level, it’s well-intentioned; they want to imbue romance
and sensuality. But at another level, it borders on the obscene and seems to me
to be the cinema of a sexually repressed, conservative society in which
perversities are highlighted. Everything’s
fixated on intercourse which becomes a shameful thing. They try to cover this attitude with romance but it’s again a case of a repressed social ethos
triumphing over individual sexuality.
…
Are they emotionally healthier?
Yes, definitely. People equate permissiveness with licence. But
actually a conservative morality creates precisely what it alleges to check:
anti-social and perverse sexuality. Neurotic and perverse sexual behaviour,
nymphomania, even promiscuity is more prevalent in conservative societies. Sexually liberal societies tend to tolerate
child molestation, rape, and other sexual abuses or perversions much less. Ironically, permissive societies breed emotionally healthy people more
able to cope with sexual disappointment than in conservative societies.
…
Can you cite historic occurrences that have triggered off or marked
distinctive changes in sexual attitudes?
The era of the erotic and passionate was really between AD 3 to AD 6
when court poetry about erotic love flourished in Sanskrit. This is the time of
the Kamasutra, Konarak, Khajuraho, the celebration of Radha and
(Reference:
Chaudhury, Shoma. (
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
Connelly,
Chris. (
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/2020/DailyNews/2020_bobcrane_021018.html
The
Private Passions
of
Bob Crane
Wife
of Hogan's Heroes Star Says Sexcapades Never Marred Marriage
By
Chris Connelly
Oct.
18 — Back in the 1960s — long before his name would be linked to sex addiction,
X-rated videotapes, and a still-unsolved murder — Bob Crane, the star of the
popular sitcom Hogan's Heroes, seemed like the ideal leading man — handsome, clean-cut,
likable.
As
Col. Hogan, the wise-cracking leader of a ragtag group of Allied soldiers
plotting subterfuge during World War II from inside a Nazi POW camp, Crane made
Hogan's Heroes
one of the decade's best-loved and highest-rated comedies … and remained
well-liked on and off the set.
"Bob
was a very charming man," says Robert Clary, who played French POW Louis
LeBeau. "He was easy to get along with — he never acted like, 'I'm making much more money than you do, and you better
listen to what I'm saying.' That was
wonderful."
His
daughter Karen Crane recalls Bob as an ideal father. "My dad was an
absolute typical family man at home," she says. "He was always swimming
with us, playing with us. I just have wonderful memories of my dad and my years
growing up."
Few
suspected that beneath Bob Crane's glib exterior lay a thousand secrets:
secrets in black … and white … and blonde … captured for posterity on hundreds
of hard-core Polaroids and videotapes. Bob Crane was a sex addict before the
term was invented, a married man who seduced scores of women over the years and
enjoyed recording the details of their X-rated encounters. Mark Dawson, son of Crane's
Hogan's Heroes
co-star and Family Feud host Richard Dawson, was just 17 when Bob Crane decided
to share those secrets with him.
‘Col.
Hogan — Au Naturel’
"He
was carting a couple of videotapes and a Polaroid book,"
"The
first 10 or 15 minutes, it was very interesting," recalls
What
was Crane's attitude while showing off his conquests? "It was like wow,
look at this one, look at that one," recalls
A Man
of Contradictions
Bob
Crane's private passions first became a public fascination in 1978, after the
49-year-old actor was found murdered in his
"What's
fascinating about him is this sort of contradictory
nature," says Kinnear. "I mean, he
really saw himself as a one-woman man! And yet there were reams and reams of
photographs and video of all these other behaviors going on."
"He
really did live that classic life of the hypocritical
In
fact, from the age of 19 to his dying day, Bob Crane was a married man. He was
still wed to his high school sweetheart and had three children when he began a
torrid affair in 1965 with Cynthia Lynn, who played Col. Klink's secretary
Helga on Hogan's Heroes. Their intimate relationship literally began as the
cameras were rolling.
"We're
kissing," she recalls, "and they say "Cut!" And we're still
kissing."
Off
the set, Cynthia got involved in Bob's hobby: nude photography. "He was a camera nut, OK? I loved it when he took
pictures of me, because he was like a kid in
a candy store. Yes, he took some nude
pictures of me. But it was nothing to be ashamed of. There was nothing kinky or
weird or about it."
Cynthia
Lynn left Hogan's Heroes after its first season, and another statuesque bombshell
was hired to play Klink's new secretary, Hilda: the former Patricia Olson, who
starred on Hogan's Heroes under the name Sigrid Valdis. By 1970, one of TV's
biggest stars had fallen for her … and so she became the second Mrs. Bob Crane.
"He
was always hitting on me from day one," she remembers with a smile.
"But he would hit on any bimbo that would walk on that set. It didn't
matter. I mean, that was just Bob." In the near quarter-century since her
husband's murder, Pat Crane has never spoke publicly … until now. She says she
knew about Bob's obsession with sex and multiple partners. And incredibly, she
didn't mind.
Who’s
Going to Be Jealous of Toilet Paper?
"He
didn't lose his first amendment rights when he married me — he loved having sex
and filming it," she said almost matter-of-factly. "He never broke
any laws. Nothing he did was unconstitutional."
"From
almost the first day on the set," Pat said, "he told me his hobby was
photography — I didn't figure it was landscape! He brought over a double-thick
briefcase, and it was filled with like four rows of slides in a box about that
big. So there were thousands of slides in there … of all the women in his
life."
Didn't
it hurt Pat's feelings that although he was in love with her, he was
photographing and having sex with scores of young women? "No," she
says. "I know it sounds crazy. Maybe people listening to me will think I
am crazy! Bob used these women. He said, 'I
wish when I finished with them I could just push a button and they'd fall
through the floor and disappear.' Now, how could I be jealous of something like that? He treated women like the rest of the world treats toilet
paper. Who's going to be jealous of toilet paper?"
How
could she love a man who treated people like that?
"They
were using each other. Everybody was getting
what they wanted out of this. And it wasn't anybody's business but theirs. I knew he wouldn't [stop].
I knew that … he … he had had this
obsession, he couldn't help it, there was nothing for me to be jealous
of."
Wasn't
there a moment where she sat alone in a bedroom one night and thought, "My
husband is having sex with another woman right now?"
"No,
he'd usually call me up and tell me what
he'd just done, or how he'd done it. I wanted
the openness, I just didn't want to participate."
Being
married to a sex addict sounds like every wife's nightmare,
but Pat insists their marriage was a dream. "Yes, we were happy together.
We had a wonderful sex life. We had a wonderful marriage." She said her
friends never asked her about it, and said, "No one knew."
Click
Here to Continue Family Feuding Over New Film
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
Connelly,
Chris. (
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/2020/DailyNews/2020_bobcrane2_021018.html
Film
on Crane’s Fetishes Has Family Divided
(Continued)
By
Chris Connelly
Karen
Crane, Bob's younger daughter by his first marriage, says while she was growing
up, she had no idea about her father's after-hours encounters. "There was
a lot going on I didn't know about, and as well I shouldn't have. So he was
right in keeping it a secret."
Karen
has no interest in seeing Autofocus. "I haven't seen it. I won't see it. I don't need to
see it. My dad was an absolute typical family man at home. I just have
wonderful memories of my dad. And they never would have made a movie about my
Dad as a nice family man."
But
Bobby Crane, Bob Crane's eldest son from his first marriage and Karen's big
brother, has said Autofocus captures the essence of his Dad. He served as a paid
consultant, and even has a small role in the film.
"Bobby
accepted $20,000 to sell out his father's life … to say this totally untrue,
unflattering portrait of his father is OK for $20,000. They offered me that
deal and I said, 'No.' I said, 'I only want the truth out there.'"
Those
are the words of Scotty Crane, Bobby's half brother … the only child born to
Pat and Bob Crane. He was just 7 years old when his father was murdered. He and
his mother are speaking out because of their issues with Autofocus. "The film
… is so outrageous and is such a distortion of my husband's life and what he
really was, I have to speak out," says Pat.
Pat
and Scotty's strenuous objections to Autofocus may seem minor to outsiders. They're upset by the film's suggestions that Bob had had a penile implant — not
so, they say; that Bob dabbled in rough sex — never, they say; and that Bob was a dark and troubled man
— not in the least, they say.
"They
can say that he slept with women," says Scotty. "They can say that he
photographed and videotaped women. They have to make it clear that he was just
having a fun time with a lot of different women."
Paul
Schrader says his movie is not supposed to be a literal retelling of Bob
Crane's life. "Certainly when you
create a fiction you have to manipulate reality,"
he says.
But
for Scotty, Schrader's manipulations amount to unforgivable
untruths, especially about his father's sex
life.
"I
can't emphasize it enough how much this wasn't a dark secret of Bob
Crane's," he says. "Our family photo album was a bit like, 'Oh here's
Scotty in
A
Son's Tribute — BobCrane.com
No one
is more open with Bob Crane's sexcapades than Scotty is. In fact, he's taken
some of his father's X-rated photos and videotapes … and posted them on a Web
site, BobCrane.com.
"BobCrane.com
is just evidence that what this film says is untrue."
Schrader
doesn't buy Scotty's reasoning. "He's selling Daddy's dirty pictures for some complex reason.
He'll tell you it's because he wants the
truth to be known. But I don't know … something rings hollow in there."
You
might expect Pat Crane to be upset that her son has a Web site that graphically
depicts her husband's infidelity — but you'd be wrong. How does she feel about
the images on BobCrane.com? "Very good," she says. "I gave the
tapes to Scott with my blessing."
BobCrane.com
has become the latest skirmish in a three-decade war between Bob Crane's two
surviving families. Karen Crane says she's horrified by Scotty's Web site.
"I feel so incredibly disappointed that Scott did not get to know his
dad," she says. "All he has grown up knowing is what Patty has put in
front of him. Not only is that sad, but that's very twisted. To have saved
porno photos of my dad having sex with women … and this is what she wanted to
present to their son? How twisted! I want to say to Scotty, "This is your
dad! Get a grip! Shame on them for doing damage to a dead man."
"This
site is a tribute to my father," says Scotty. "I don't think there's
anything wrong with sex. Sex is fine, sex is a wonderful thing. I don't think
there's anything wrong with that."
Sharing
His Hobby With His Son
But
when it came to Bob Crane and sex, there was something wrong … very wrong.
After Hogan's Heroes was canceled, Disney hired Crane for a family film called
Superdad —
only to cut ties with him after news of his sexcapades surfaced; Crane wound up
touring the country doing dinner theater. And even Bob's ever-tolerant wife had
to draw the line — and threaten to end her marriage — when she learned the
truth: that Bob had shown explicit images to
Scotty when he was just a toddler.
"I'm
talking about triple-X, very hard core, very
graphic," she says. "I discovered
that it had been going on since [Scotty was]
probably about 4. That's where I drew the
line. I had to put a stop to that. No matter how much I loved him, my child
came first."
Pat
immediately filed for divorce and insisted Bob get into therapy.
"He
was sharing his hobby with his son," says Scotty in his father's defense.
"It was kind of like if your dad was really into airplane models or
something, and there was an airplane model on your dinner table. You never
thought anything of it until you went to your friend's house, and there were no
airplane models. It was kind of like that.
Will
Film Distort Dad’s Image?
Scotty
and Pat say the inaccuracies of Autofocus will give people a negative image of Bob Crane. Others,
however, may get a negative impression not from what the movie may have gotten
wrong … but from what the movie got right. But Pat says, "What Bob and I had between us was just between us. Those women wanted to
be there as badly as he did. If it didn't bother me that he was doing this … I don't
know why it should bother anyone else."
And
yet, amid all the tawdry tales and explicit
video, Crane's feuding families agree on one thing: He was a loving husband and
father. And they miss him. "He was the
greatest father in the world," says Scotty. "Always there. Always
helping me." "He was a wonderful dad," says Karen. "Nobody
can ever say anything negative about him to me and have me believe it. I love
my dad."
"Fabulously
loving husband," declares Pat Crane. "No one could replace Bob. I
have never been on a date. I still wear my $20 gold wedding band. Hasn't been
off my hand, except for when I had to have surgery. I am still Mrs. Bob Crane.
I'm still married to Bob Crane. And we will go through eternity forever.
Together forever, Hogan and Hilda."
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Personal
Note
…a dark and troubled man
There is nothing permanent.
Any matter, on frequent rubbing, wears off.
Matter can be clay, metal, even flesh.
So the state of boneless flesh is not different, whether
it be with a voluptuous partner or multiple partners.
Blas'e
Having the sensibilities deadened by excess or frequency of enjoyment; sated or surfeited with pleasure; used up.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
Darebare's
http://www.geocities.com/TheTropics/Shores/6059/legal.html
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
skinny dip
v.
bathe in the nude
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
mooner
n.
One who abstractedly wanders or
gazes about, as if moonstruck. [R.] --Dickens.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
The
box on the left contains the wording of NC General Statue 14-190.9. This is the
law that has been enforced from time to time by park rangers in the
It is
fairly obvious to someone with absolutely no training in law, such as I, that
the intent of this law, when it was passed in 1971 had nothing to do with
skinny-dipping. Rather, it appears that the law was directed at those who
engage in public nudity with some profit motive, or some kind of
"immoral" purpose in mind. Nevertheless, this law has been
successfully used to prosecute sunbathers. The courts have held that the vague
reference to "private parts" in the statute means genitals, however,
the attorney general of
NC
General Statute 14-190.9, entitled Indecent Exposure:
"Any
person who shall willfully expose the private parts of his or her person in any
public place and in the presence of any other person or persons, of the
opposite sex, or aids or abets in any such acts, or who procures another to
perform such act: or any person, who as owner, manager, lessee, director, or
promoter or agent, or in any other capacity knowingly hires, leases or permits
the land, building, or premises of which he is owner, lessee, or tenant, or
over which he has control, to be used for purposes of any such act, shall be
guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by a fine not to exceed five hundred dollars
($500.00), imprisonment for not more than six months, or both. (1971, c.591,
s.7.1)"
NEWS
ABOUT THE LATEST NC SUPREME COURT DECISION CONCERNING NUDITY
The
first link "Decision" is the full version of the
Some
nudists have seen a glimmer of hope in this decision, particularly with the way
the state treated the "willful" aspect of the argument, and certainly
the deference given to thongs, etc. I'm not so sure I'm comfortable with the
phrase "those private parts of the person which instinctive modesty, human
decency, or common propriety require shall be customarily kept covered in the
presence of others." To me, that is a definite indication of the opinion
that anyone not displaying the approved level of modesty is exhibiting an
unnatural, therefore illegal action.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
Day, Vox. (
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=33670
For one
thing, men don't talk about sex in anywhere near the gory detail that women do. And for another, I have never known a
single sexually active woman to tell the truth about her past.
I don't
know if women think men's relative lack of verbal skills equates to an equivalent deficiency of memory,…
…
The
strangest thing is that it's not as if I was an insecure control freak who
demanded to know everything about a girl's history.
…
The way
women tend to hide their little flings from their friends has always made me
suspicious about the veracity of the fair sex. Women, it seems, must walk a
tight rope, balanced precariously between what they want to do to attract men,
and what will provoke other women to speak badly about them. It's not an easy
thing to do, whereas if a man can drink beer, talk about football and hold his
own in a fight, he's all right with most guys,…
…
It's the
girls who are lying, not the guys. The study found that women's stories change in keeping with the
chances they'll get caught out, as the number of reported notches in a girl's
lipstick case increase 69 percent when she thinks she's hooked up to a lie
detector.
Speaking
of lies, the answers reported by both men and women between the ages of 18 and
25 also exploded the notion that everyone is having wildly promiscuous sex. The polygraph-compelled answers
indicated an average of only 4.2 partners per individual, which is
significantly lower than one would imagine from watching television or reading the covers of
women's magazines.
…
There are
some interesting implications to this story. First, conservatives should take
heart from it, not only because young adults are far less promiscuous than advertised, but particularly
because women still feel this pressure to lie. The culture will not be entirely
lost until women, the traditional defenders of civilization, see no need to
hide their abandonment of morality from other women.
Second, if
it is indeed true that it is not men, but women, who disproportionately lie
about sex, this would demolish the already creaking feminist gynomyth that a woman accusing a man
of sexual assault is inherently credible. If supporting studies show
similar conclusions about a female predilection for sexual duplicity, justice will require
the courts to assume a bias toward the accused in the all-too-common he
said-she said case sans evidence.
(Reference: Day, Vox. (
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference (Key points only)
Dharker, Anil. (
http://outlookindia.com/full.asp?sid=1&fname=Anil&fodname=20000103
Page
1
Just because the calendar is breaking out into new digits, is sex going
to change? Sex? SEX? That short, swift act, at once tender and violent, whose
rawness all religions have tried to cloak with mysticism, whose anticipation
has been the theme of world literature and whose repercussions the base of
medicine and psychology. That brief act of thrust and parry without which all
of us would be, literally and figuratively, dead, is that going to change
because a celibate monk 2,000 years ago decreed that such and such a date would
be Zero Anno Domini?
Come on, give me a break, and tell me has sex changed at all over the last two millennia?
We like to think of our society of the last couple of decades as more
open, more liberal and more honest about our feelings than any society of the
past. We certainly talk more about sex than previous generations did and we
begin to do so at a much earlier age. So much so that it is difficult for us to
imagine that the Kinsey Reports, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male and Sexual
Behaviour in the Human Female came out in 1948 and 1953, a mere 50 years ago,
and that their findings based on thousands of interviews conducted in the US
were condemned as being immoral.
While Kinsey and his team wrote of sexual practices, it was left to
Masters and Johnson in the 1960s to do the first detailed study of the human
body’s physiological responses to sexual stimulation. Their 1966 book, Human
Sexual Response, was based on
observations (using film and special instruments) of couples engaged in sexual
activity and made us more aware
of our tiniest body parts and how they reacted.
But did they result in better sex? Broadly speaking, humans have practiced two kinds of sex throughout
history: reproductive sex and recreational sex. The former was what you had
with your wife; the latter, with your mistress. One resulted in children, the
other in pleasure. Advances
in contraception have ensured that the first kind of sexual activity results in
fewer children, but have Kinsey, Masters and Johnson plus our society’s
obsession with oral sex (the propensity to talk about it non-stop), resulted in
more pleasure? We only have to look cursorily at the abandon of Vatsyayana’s
Kamasutra and the Khajuraho sculptures to compare them to the angst of today’s
discussions on sex to realise that the answer is no.
What has happened is this: less frequent childbirth (and consequent child-rearing) combined with
the liberation of women has resulted in the merging of the two kinds of sexual
activity and, therefore, the merging of the identities of the wife and the
mistress. Further, our changing
attitudes now decree that the woman is also entitled to receive
pleasure, whereas earlier even the mistress only gave
pleasure.
This change, being recent, is still confined to the more socially
advanced groups of people; as the new millennium begins, it’s a change which
will affect most people so that the traditional woman’s formulation that her
husband "bothered" her last night will change to convey a more participatory activity in which
pleasure is shared equally by both partners.
Page
2
But will we have time for these pleasures? The elaborate rituals of the
Kamasutra and Khajuraho could only be indulged in by gentlemen and ladies of
leisure, whereas as the 20th century draws to an end what we notice
is that the more leisure we have, the less we have it because we cram it with
ever-increasing activity. The ease and speed of communications, the quickness
of transportation and the instant access to a variety of transactions have
given us more time for leisure and, paradoxically, less time to enjoy it.
Before the age of cinema, television, the Internet, faxes and e-mail, people
had more time to themselves, and therefore, for sex. Now we hardly switch off
the lights. Which means that even with women as equal partners in pleasure and
even with the worry of unwanted pregnancies no longer with us, the time we allot
to sexual activity is now rationed.
But modern medicine and greater health consciousness will help us
stretch it. Viagra has not only given impotent men a new lease of life, it has
also provided more years of sexual activity to aging men. The female version of
Viagra, said to be around the corner, will make sex physiologically and
psychologically more appealing to post-menopausal women, so that, at last, when
we have the time to enjoy sex, we will be physically capable of it.
What about Virtual Sex? There you will be sitting, tongue hanging out
before your latest three-dimensional monitor, your body wired up for the most
intense sensations. On the screen you can call up the woman/man of your dreams
and get them to do what you want. It will be total mastery; it will also be
totally masturbatory, the good old hand replaced by the latest electronics. The
pleasure we get may be more prolonged and more sophisticated, but it will be
curiously unfulfilling. Because the most important part of sex is not the four-letter
word beginning with ‘F’ but a four-letter word beginning with ‘L’.
And no new millennium, no new devices and no new medicines are going to
change that. Love has been, and will remain, the only device that works in sex.
(Reference: Dharker, Anil. (
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
Eardley,
Gill. (January 2002) The sacred art of self decoration.
http://www.gilleardley.iofm.net/SelfDecoration.htm
Much
of the depth and meaning in life and living in Western society has been lost (destroyed) and
it is easy for us Westerners to forget that a few precious societies have not
yet quite lost their sense of the significance of things, of the sacredness of life.
It is this sense, awareness, which brings meaning
into our lives, maintaining psychic cleanliness in body and mind and
community; influencing
relationship with each other, the Earth and the Divine. With
this in mind we hold a respectful attitude towards those things
we are taking, or being given, from other cultures, be it dance, music or costume, always aware that even if we don’t know the significance of a step, or a
style or piece of costume, we may well be dealing with something that had or has
deep symbolic meaning in the culture from which it originates. In this way we
honour those cultures that are themselves experiencing the destruction of their
old ways as the West makes its influence
known through war, tourism, multinationalism and the multitude of other ways us
Westerners assert our ways on the rest of the world.
This
kind of respectful awareness can also serve as
part of a path in deepening the Dance on a personal or spiritual level. The outer dressing in costume (or even tying one’s
scarf) becomes an inner preparation too, not only calming and centring but giving time to
sense the significance and sacredness of that which we do; a time for prayer, devotion or offering of
thanks.
So, Hips and Heads. If we look at
these two costume pieces it is immediately obvious that their significance lies in the area of the body they
cover/refer to. The head/hair and the pelvic region are body parts
powerfully sacred, and worshipped as such, in all ancient cultures. From this perspective we can get a tiny insight into the immensity of meaning attached to a dance belt/scarf and the turban or
veil and, for instance, why it is that a Native American will refuse to dance if his/her belt
breaks.
Tying
a scarf or fastening a belt around one’s hips or waist can serve as part of the
ritual of preparing to dance; i.e., of bringing
conscious awareness into to that which we
are about to do, and to that part of the
body – the
Hara – in which, to be able to dance we must be centred in.
Settling awareness into the
belly/navel/pelvis area is a basic requirement of living consciously. To be centred/grounded in life comes from working with
this part of the body recognised in traditional cultures as the place of wisdom (gut-wisdom/gut-feeling). It is no accident that this area is/was seen as such:
the single most holy act for traditional society is that of giving birth. In times when the female body and woman was revered the
pelvic region was regarded as sacred.
Images
of the Greek goddess Athene and the Medusa (around 600 BCE) signified female wisdom and were
traditionally depicted wearing a snake belt in addition to her snake’s hair headdress (the snake/serpent is intimately connected with rebirth,
eternal life and woman throughout the ancient world – even when the snake itself is considered masculine). Kundalini (a Tantric yogic practise) is the sleeping female soul-serpent coiled in the lowest
chakra and when
wakened rises
through the body emerging from the top of the head as bliss in the union of self
with the infinite. Images of the Indian god Shiva (as the Lord of the Dance) wear a belt in his
dance of the creation and destruction of the universe, his dance crushing the
evil of ignorance. Carvings of devadasi (temple dancers)
on Indian temples show these women in postures (echoing Arabic dance – or
strictly speaking Arabic dance echoes these dancers), their costumes merely
jewellery and an ornate belt draping their
voluptuous hips. Few of us nowadays would
accept that in tying our scarf or fastening our
belts we are, in fact performing the ritual of protecting and honouring this
most powerful part of our body.
In
many societies the head and/or the hair was/is thought to be the repository of the
soul and attributed
with magical powers. Tantric sages believed
that the binding or unbinding of women’s
hair activated cosmic forces of creation and destruction. European witches were thought to work with unbound hair
in order to control the spirit world. Scottish girls were forbidden to comb
their hair at night if their brothers were at sea in case they brew a storm and
sink the boats. St Paul insisted women’s heads be covered since he believed
they could command the spirits with loose hair flowing – hence the Christian rule that women cover their heads in church. Gypsy (Rom) women let their hair loose during
childbirth in case the braids ‘tie up the birth’. In Gypsy and Pagan lore whoever possessed another’s hair had power over his/her
soul. Egyptian widows buried locks of their
hair with deceased husbands as a charm of protection in the after-world
(Encyclopaedia of Women’s Mysteries by Barbara Walker). The veil in Muslim culture covers the power of a woman’s
hair and face. Sufi tradition (the mystical branch of Islam) states the hair and
face of a woman hold the powers and beauty of the universe, which are a mystery
of all the mysteries.
The
hair also represents the creative and sexual energy of the Universe (and the
male). Shiva is seen with long
tangled hair – his devotees leave their hair uncut: abundance of hair represents abundance of divine energy. In contrast, to
prevent loss of this vital energy, a Buddhist monk/nun will shave his/her head. In
The
turban of North African dancers may too serve this purpose of protection. It
may of course also refer to the practise of covering the hair, as with the
veil. It is customary in
It is
this kind of inner knowledge, of significance of things
that turns the twisting of a turban scarf or the tying of a hip scarf from
something with little meaning into an act of
conscious awareness and prayer. This is the sacred art of self decoration – an expression of praise, giving us a way of being more
deeply in the Dance, not only honouring ourselves the wise women we are, but
also the cultures and sacred traditions from which this exquisite dance and
costumes originate, celebrating as the gift (Hediya) to us it truly is.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Personal Note
The
outer dressing in costume (or even tying one’s scarf) becomes an inner preparation
too, not only calming and centring but giving time to
sense the significance and sacredness of that which we do; a time for prayer, devotion or offering of
thanks.
When you build a temple or physical structure, say with concrete etc, there need to be a time of “rest” for the concrete to set in. Say in the case of constructing the roof. Just because you paste the roof with cement, doesn’t mean you can immediately build an upper room. You have to wait until the concrete holds. Get solid.
So too the spiritual training.
There is no immediate completion of training. The body, the vehicle is slowly trained to withstand the forces under different environments. In each environment, sufficient setting time is needed for solidification. The mind also need to mature fully before going into the next level. Without proper maturity, the pressure of the next higher level will be hard to withstand. Such things, the Lord looks after. He knows the right time for everything. So one should not get dis-illusioned. Everything that occurs in one’s life is for good, as long as one holds on to the laws.
Eg. A person have occurrences of emission. The person fights with the bad effects of emission like tiredness, tension, agitation etc. He monitors his life, does statistical analysis etc. What happens then? The mind slowly solidifies on the ill-effects of leaking. In a future environment, whenever scenarios of temptation come before the trainee, the person recollects how he faced and suffered from a small emission. A realization that acts as a block from deviating from the path of training.
Shiva is seen with long
tangled hair – his devotees leave their hair uncut: abundance of hair represents abundance of divine energy. In contrast, to
prevent loss of this vital energy, a Buddhist monk/nun will shave his/her head. In India it is believed the
head should be covered to preserve this vital energy, hence the turban.
At one side of the pendulum, the growing of long hair, beard and moustache. At the other side of the pendulum, the complete shaving off of hair, beard and moustache.
Different schools of thought. Approaches from different angles to the same concept.
One angle of looking at this concept is the attitude of “don’t care”. You don’t care about your hair, beard or moustache. You can either leave it as it is, or shave them completely off. This don’t care attitude towards hair marks a vital difference or differentiation between society life and spiritual life. In society, the “looking after” of the hair is a vital component. Men and women spend a considerable amount of their overall lifetime fashioning hair, this way and that way. To look good. To impress. This attitude in society is what is thrown off, in spiritual side with the don’t care attitude. For a priest or monk, for whom the fashioning of hair? For the fashioning strengthens the feeling of ego, the concept of self-beautification, the concept of “Am I not handsome?” for a man, “Am I not pretty” for a woman. Considerable amount of time could be thus wasted on materialistic beautification which otherwise could have been spend more profitably on spiritual advancement like prayer or meditation. For no matter any man or woman who lives in society, the presence of a mirror and the option to moving here and there, visiting here and there automatically generates the psychological feeling for “looking good”. Nobody wants to be looked upon as someone who just arrived from the Himalayas or from deep forest. Unkempt, ragged and dirty attire, hair etc.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
Gregorian, Dareh. (Thursday, December 05, 2002) Bill Doesn't Have To Testify In Sex Suit. USA: New York Post.
http://nypost.com/news/regionalnews/63735.htm
BILL DOESN'T HAVE TO TESTIFY IN
SEX SUIT
By DAREH GREGORIAN
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
December 5, 2002 -- Former
President Bill Clinton doesn't have to testify under oath that he did not have
sexual relations with a Manhattan woman.
No, not that Manhattan woman.
Daria Carter-Clark wanted to
subpoena the ex-president to depose him as part of her $100 million defamation
suit against "Primary Colors" author Joe Klein and the book's
publisher, Random House - but, in a decision released yesterday, Manhattan
Supreme Court Justice Richard Braun blocked the move.
Klein's book, "which is
about the presidential primary campaign of a Southern governor before the 1992
presidential election . . . contains a passage that suggests a sexual encounter
between the governor and a Ms. Baum, who ran an adult-literacy program at a
public library in Harlem," Braun's decision says.
It also notes Clinton visited
the Harlem branch New York Public Library Centers for Reading and Writing in
1991, when Carter-Clark was site adviser there.
Carter-Clark's suit says it's
"obvious that defendants intended that person reading [Primary Colors]
would know and understand, from the description of the character . . . that
Baum and [Carter-Clark] were and are the same person."
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
IANS. (Monday, May 26, 2003) Agra man bobbitised by in-laws. India: The Times of India.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/xml/uncomp/articleshow?msid=47565289
Agra man bobbitised by in-laws
IANS[ MONDAY, MAY 26, 2003 03:35:52 PM ]
AGRA: A chartered accountant who married his office trainee half his
age had his private parts chopped off by her brothers who were against the
wedlock, police said.
With blood oozing from his groins he staggered into the Shah Ganj
police station Sunday evening. The police promptly rushed him to the S.N. Medical
College in an unconscious state.
The wife and her family members are absconding, according to the
police.
Station House Officer Sarjeet Singh said the police failed to recover
the man's mutilated genitals that doctors could have stitched back.
A senior police official said Meghendra, a practising chartered
accountant, was already married. But when his wife became disabled following an
accident, he chased her away. Subsequently he fell in love with a trainee
accountant in his office. The two married in court despite stiff opposition
from the girl's family members.
Not being able to swallow insult to family pride, the brothers of the
girl conspired and invited Meghendra home for dinner, assuring him that the
family had accepted their marriage.
When Meghendra with his wife reached his in-laws' home, he was beaten
up by the brothers. The brothers tore off his clothes even as his wife, who was
their sister, protested and shouted for help. But she was pushed into a room.
The brothers, Lalle and Sharad Tyagi, then severed his genitals with a
sharp knife. Before disappearing from the scene, they made sure that the
chopped part would not be recovered.
A profusely bleeding Meghendra somehow managed to reach the Shah Ganj
police station where he fell unconscious.
Police are looking for the brothers and have charged them with criminal
intimidation and causing grievous hurt with dangerous weapon.
(Reference: IANS. (Monday, May 26, 2003) Agra
man bobbitised by in-laws. India: The Times of
India.)
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
IANS. (Tuesday, December 23, 2003) First love a woman's best catch. India:
The Times of India.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-376686,curpg-1.cms
First love a woman's
best catch
IANS[ TUESDAY, DECEMBER
23, 2003 11:36:14 AM ]
LONDON: Marrying the first love is the healthiest
option for a woman's mental well-being – marrying anybody else is a sure prescription for problems!
Happiest women are
those who marry their first love, says a study. Do you agree?
So says new research
that also suggests men are the happiest when they are "serial
monogamists" – having a succession of faithful relationships but never getting married.
A study of more than
4,000 Britons found that although weddings work for women, they are emotionally
bad for men.
The study conducted by
researchers from the University of London comes up with some more interesting
revelations:
© The happiest men were
those who had cohabited with at least two different women before forming
another relationship;
© Men who lived with
their first partner but did not get married were also happier than those who
wed their first love;
© Women take the end of relationships harder
than men;
© Women are more likely to suffer depression
in the aftermath of a partnership breakdown and are happier when they are
married rather than cohabiting;
© Men who choose to
marry fare less well emotionally than those who simply live with a partner;
© Women who married the
first man they had a relationship with had the best mental health; and
© Women who had experienced several
relationships and splits were found to be in the worst emotional state. Even single women who had never married or lived with a partner were
happier than those who went through a split and found a new partner.
The term "serial
monogamy" came into popular parlance as a description of men like the
romantic but marriage-phobic character played by Hugh Grant in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral.
The researchers used
findings from the annual British Household Panel Survey to look at how men and women are affected by the
breakdown of relationships.
The study, published in
the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, found that while men became depressed when a
relationship broke down, their mental state improved when they found a new
partner.
Michaela Benzeval, the
author of the study, said, "Oddly, the best mental health was observed in
men who had undergone two or more partnership reformations.
"However, the
mental health of women became worse as the number of partnership splits rose or
similarly as the number of partnership reformations increased. The poorest mental health was among those
women who had experienced multiple partnership splits."
However, women's need
for marriage to their first love is being undermined by a growing trend away from weddings and
towards serial monogamy. Figures
from the Office for National Statistics show that weddings in England and Wales
have fallen to their lowest level since 1897.
Marriage rates have
halved in the past century, and brides and bridegrooms are getting older.
At the beginning of the
20th century, men married at an average age of 25 and women at 23. Now the
typical bridegroom marrying for the first time is 30 years old, whereas his
bride is 28.
(Reference: IANS. (Tuesday, December 23, 2003) First
love a woman's best catch. India: The Times of India.)
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
IANS. (Friday, December 19, 2003) Women want more regular sex. India:
The Times of India.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-369486,curpg-1.cms
Women want more regular
sex
IANS[ FRIDAY, DECEMBER
19, 2003 04:24:56 PM ]
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: A
survey among married women in Kerala reveals that sex plays an important role in their
day-to-day life with as many as 76 per cent saying they need
to have sex regularly.
Of this, 36 per cent
say that sex is 'very,
very important'.
Just 4 per cent of them
felt that sex was least important while 10 per cent opined that sex was not
very important and 5 per cent preferred not to reveal their mind on this topic.
The survey was
conducted by Vanitha , a leading women's magazine, at Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi
and Kozhikode among women in the age group of 21 to 45 having a monthly family
income of Rs 4,000 and upwards.
Of the women surveyed
with a questionnaire, 90 per cent of them were unemployed housewives. The
survey was called the Vanitha-AC Nielsen survey.
It also had a
classification that was split in three age groups: 21-30, 31-40 and 41 to 45.
An interesting observation was that the pattern of answers in the three age groups was more or less
similar.
Among other interesting
facts revealed was that 61 per cent of the women were extremely happy with
their sex life, 12 per cent were more or less happy and 8 per cent were
unhappy.
Regarding the frequency
of intercourse with their husbands, just 10 per cent of them had a daily
routine, while 30 per cent had sex more than once a week, 14 per cent had just
one session every week, 10 per cent once in two weeks, 5 per cent once a month,
3 per cent once in two months, 2 per cent just occasionally while 27 per cent
preferred not to reveal it.
With regard to sexual
fantasies, 28 per cent agreed to harbour fantasies while 37 per cent preferred
not to reveal their mind and 35 per cent said a firm no to it.
A huge 80 per cent of
those surveyed did not like watching blue films while 14 per cent of the
younger housewives preferred to watch blue films with their husbands.
Only 2 per cent of the
married women agreed that they had extramarital relations, while 43 per cent
preferred not to speak their mind and 55 per cent said they have no such
relations.
But what was more
intriguing was that while just 2 per cent agreed to having extramarital relations,
colleagues and relatives accounted for 22 per cent each as their partners,
while 33 per cent of the partners were friends of their husbands.
Another 22 per cent
preferred not to speak about who their extra marital partner was.
When it came to finding
out about extra marital relations of their husbands, 29 per cent said that they
would suspect other relations while another 29 per cent preferred to sort it
out with their husbands by talking about it.
Nine per cent said they
would immediately go for a divorce, 6 per cent said they would pardon their
hubbies and 34 per cent preferred not to reveal their mind.
The survey also noted
that a lifestyle change among Kerala women was understandable in keeping with fast changes in lifestyles around
the world.
(Reference: IANS. (Friday, December 19, 2003) Women
want more regular sex. India:
The Times of India.)
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference (Key points only)
Jain, Madhu., Biswas, Soutik. (Monday, May 05, 2003) Eves Do It Too. India: Outlook India Magazine.
http://outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20030505&fname=Cover+Story+%28F%29&sid=1
"The acceptance of adultery here was, and sometimes still is,
quite shocking to me. So many married men here tell me that even Krishna cheated and that I am stuck in some sort of
Judeo-Christian cultural context. The god had a good time and he was not condemned for it, they say. And some women I have met, mostly the
educated middle-class ones—if you can believe it—tell me, 'Look at our heritage. It is natural. Look
at Krishna.'"
—Carin Fisher, German-American lawyer who moved to New Delhi about a
year ago
"I was shocked when I first came back to India some years ago.
Everybody seemed to be having extramarital affairs. You don't do that in the
West. You have serial monogamy. But I have changed my mind. If there is a Krishna in men, there is a
Radha in women. Why can't I
be both: a wife and Radha? We are born with it. Men are doing their Krishna thing, aren't they?"
—Bina Ramani, socialite
…
"Thirty
years ago, I said most Indian men use their women as sleeping pills. Today Indian women feel their sexual desires
are basic human rights, and they need to be respected."
…
"Today's generation has so many options to choose from in
everything, from careers and cuisine to entertainment. When everything is so
customised, naturally it extends to sex and partners. You're bound to get bored or less tolerant
of your spouse, especially if you were used to dating a lot before
marriage."
Nagaswami believes that since sex is often "the only source of
intimacy in the midst of a hectic schedule", many marriages suffer when
the sex suffers, leading people to seek solace outside the marriage. "When you spend 15-18 hours a day with
co-workers and only 6-9 with your spouse, who do you think you're more likely
to find sexually attractive, available and arousing? So then follows the
inevitable rationalisation: sex is like eating and drinking. So, if I can't
cook home food, what's wrong with eating out?" Unfortunately, this doesn't convince
anybody and sadly, one more marriage becomes a family court statistic.
Dr Prabhat Sithole, head of the psychiatry department at the csm
Medical College in Lucknow, believes young married women can get attracted to men who show empathy towards
them. "Most relations
begin when women find their husbands emotionally inadequate. Later they realise
that sex is expected and they willingly give in to gratify their emotional
needs," he says.
The young are also more
impatient.
Hyderabad-based andrologist and impotence expert Sudhakara Krishnamurti says
that a decade ago couples would come to him after failing to consummate their
marriages for 10 to 15 years. Today
wives often drag their husbands into the clinic within the first week of their
marriage. "With women being more demanding in the
bedroom, it puts a lot of pressure on normal guys," he says. Like Jaya Basu, a Mumbai
journalist, who started an affair within a month of her marriage, complaining
of a "lousy lover and uninteresting man". Clearly, women are on top.
(Reference: Jain, Madhu., Biswas, Soutik. (Monday, May 05, 2003) Eves
Do It Too. India: Outlook India
Magazine.)
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
Johnson, Cindy Struckman. and Johnson, David Struckman. (March 2001) Men's
Reactions to Female Sexual Coercion. Psychiatric
Times. Vol. XVII. Issue 3.
http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/menreact.html
One of the long-standing
myths about sexual coercion is that a woman cannot make a man have sex with her. Prevailing stereotypes about women's physical weakness, disinterest in sex, sex-role passiveness and gentle nature lead
many people to assume
that women are not capable
of such an act (Anderson and Struckman-Johnson, 1998). In reality, research has shown that substantial
numbers of men are subjected to the sexually aggressive
behavior of female strangers,
acquaintances and lovers.
(Reference: Johnson, Cindy Struckman. and Johnson, David Struckman. (March 2001) Men's Reactions to Female
Sexual Coercion. Psychiatric Times.
Vol. XVII. Issue 3.)
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference (Key points only)
Joshi, Shashi. (Monday, January 19,
1998) Sex and
Stereotypes. India: Outlook India
Magazine.
http://outlookindia.com/full.asp?sid=1&fodname=19980119&fname=booksa
As Tapan Raychaudhuri pointed out (in Construction of Hinduism),
Vivekananda, who "represents the high noon of a Hindu revival",
described the agitation against the Age of Consent Bill as a matter for great
shame. He sarcastically referred the protectors of Hindu morality to the Grihyautra—the provision that a
girl child must be given in marriage before she learns to masturbate.
(Reference: Joshi, Shashi. (Monday, January 19,
1998) Sex and Stereotypes. India: Outlook India Magazine.)
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference (Key points only)
Meckler, Laura. (Monday, May 19, 2003) Study: Boys More Likely Pressured on Sex. UK: The Guardian.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-2694610,00.html
The Kaiser survey found that boys face particular pressure to have sex, often from male friends - in contrast to the typical portrait of boys pressuring girls.
``There are a lot of expectations for boys to be sexually active,'' said Julia Davis, senior program officer at
the Kaiser Family Foundation, an independent group that studies health issues.
One in three boys ages 15-17 say they feel pressure to have sex, compared with 23 percent of girls.
(Reference: Meckler, Laura. (Monday, May 19, 2003) Study:
Boys More Likely Pressured on Sex. UK:
The Guardian.)
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
Mitchell, Lisa. (Thursday, December
18, 2003)
Lover boy, lover girl. Australia:
The Age.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/12/17/1071337031174.html
Lover boy, lover girl
Related:
Sex at home: Your say
What should parents do when a young
adult in the household turns their bedroom into a love nest? Lisa Mitchell
finds out.
There's a stranger in the kitchen
hoeing into the salami and Swiss cheese and good lord, it's only 8am. What's a
parent to do when they discover baby's gone a hunting, and scored?
Distressed parents, cool parents
and those helter skelter may well ask as their sexually active brood continues
to nest at home well past their fly-by date.
For our twentysomething
generation, independence is a luxury some cannot afford thanks to soaring study
fees, higher rents and firsthome buyers priced out of market.
The post nuclear family may be
more liberal, but sex is still an issue. Do parents want to find a stranger at
the breakfast table? More important, do young adults want to introduce their
parents to a one-night stand?
Even "chilled" parents
may want to protect younger siblings from too much sexual knowledge.
"Mum wasn't that happy about
it," says 20-year-old Antony, who has a 17-year-old-sister and 15-year-old
brother. "She said it was a bad influence on Jen and Dillon."
Antony disagrees. "They're their
own people ... Jen would never think it's OK to sleep with lots of guys because
I do it. Not that I sleep with that many (girls)."
The young adults we spoke to said
that unleashing their sexual relationships on the home front was more organic
than premeditated — their lovers just stayed one night and attitudes grew from there.
"I asked them if it was OK
if she stayed the night, but I didn't ask if it was OK that we have sex in the
house," says Garth, a 23-year-old university student.
His silent approach was typical of this
bunch. All agreed, however, that they would not bring home a string of sexual
partners, mostly
out of respect for the family, but the convenience of sharing a bed instead of a
friend's couch did not necessarily mean nights of wild abandon or friendly
mornings with the folks breaking croissants over coffee.
"My room is next door to my
parents',
and it's the same at my girlfriend's place," says Garth. "Either you're
really quiet, or you don't do it at all. You might have to wait until
everyone has left for the day, so it does dictate the times you can have it,
but there are times when you might say 'stuff it'."
Erin, a 22-year-old physical
education student, stays mostly at her boyfriend's place.
"I don't like walking out in
the morning. I'd be like: 'Chris, you go first. What sort of mood are they in? In
the mornings, they give Chris a bit of a knowing look or gloss over it. They
wouldn't say anything, but we know they're not comfortable with it because he's
the first one in their family to bring someone to sleep over ... If they really
don't want you to, they'll say something," says Erin.
For parents, even those who
consider themselves to have liberal attitudes, the sex life of their children
can be confronting. David, who has a 19-year-old son living at home, finds he has to turn the
stereo up to drown out the sounds of vigorous lovemaking from the bedroom next
door.
"Of course, it's half envy
and half prudishness even though I'd have loved to do the same thing at his age.
It's intrusive listening to someone else, particularly your own son. There's something to
be said for them doing it out of earshot in the backs of cars.
"As time goes on I may well
think that not allowing it would have been better. We were out there, away from
home and growing up at 17. One of things about someone staying home is that it
arrests their development. There's a whole lot of stuff that they're not doing. They might be having
sex at home but they are less independent people."
There's little current data
available on the sex-at-home situation. The last specific report released by
the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) was 10 years ago.
Back then, just more than half
the 23-year-olds interviewed (138) said their parents would agree to premarital
sex at home under certain conditions, but almost two thirds had slept with a
partner at home, whether their folks knew about it, or not.
But there's still plenty of
opposition to kids sharing a cot, some of it quite confused.
Ryan is 21. His parents fall into
the
"no way" category because they set strict rules for his elder sister
and don't want to display a double standard by allowing him more freedom. At
first, 16-year-old Rebecca was not allowed behind closed doors with her
boyfriend. Now, 18 months on, he is allowed to sleep over in a separate room.
They know Rebecca is sexually
active, however, and don't seem to mind her staying at her boyfriend's place,
where they know she shares his bed.
"I'm not sure what their
objection is. They're not really religious, I think they're a bit conservative."
"We're in a different kind
of era where younger people are more likely to go away on holidays to be with
girlfriends and boyfriends," says Kaye Swanton, executive director of
LifeWorks relationships counselling and education services.
"They're going out to dinner
with each other, which suggests a more civilised approach to sex and sexuality, rather than the kind of scramble
the baby boomers might have known in the back seat of the car."
It's difficult to know how big a
shift there has been in parental attitudes over the past 20 years, the AIFS
report says. But the greatest change seems to be in the acceptance of cohabitation
before marriage, followed by young adults having sex earlier, and marrying
later.
Privacy becomes an issue for
parents and young couples where long-term relationships are concerned.
Kayla, a 29-year-old solicitor,
says her parents grew intolerant of boyfriends who enjoyed her place so much,
they tried to move in.
"After staying over a couple
of weeks running, they'd need their own space and get sick of feeding them. They value their
privacy a lot, I can understand that. I always rang to let them know when someone was
coming to stay, so they wouldn't get caught out walking around the house
naked."
Kayla's father received a special
thrill when her boyfriend, Karl, requested his own key. "Karl was very outgoing and
stood up for himself, almost to the point of arrogance."
Kayla also found it difficult to
own her adult status while conducting a relationship at home. "That was my
biggest problem. I wasn't able to express myself. I had this dual role of being a child
in the home, and a lover."
The Australian Bureau of
Statistics’ Social Trends Survey 2000 notes a small increase (162,000) in the
number of young adults (from 15 to 29 years) living at home between 1986 and
1999.
Significantly, the increase was
mostly confined to the 20 to 29 year old group. By contrast, about 90 per cent
of young Italians and Spaniards and 60 per cent of Greeks and French live with
their parents.
The continent of romantic
languages is upholding its quixotic legend by taking extraordinary measures to
feather the wings of young love.
In Spain, Green party candidate
Francisco Garrido has proposed hotel discount vouchers for young couples
seeking privacy.
In Italy, the liberal-thinking
mayor of Vinci, Giancarlo Faenzi, has given the go ahead for the country's
first official Love Car Park.
Faenzi, a father of two daughters
in their 20s, both living at home, says he is merely recognising the fact that young people need
somewhere private. The park area will be screened by high hedges and have soft lighting,
and special waste bins.
While rumpy-pumpy in the great
outdoors is not illegal in Australia, a couple could feasibly be charged under the Offensive
Behaviour Act if reported, according to the Victoria Police.
"It would depend very much
on the circumstances," says a spokesman.
You wonder how this more
liberated generation might handle their own children plopping a lover on the
couch.
"I have two outlooks,"
says Garth. "One outlook tries to stick with socially accepted norms,
similar to what my parents have done — if you want to experiment, then
do it at home . . .
"My other outlook is,
parents do just about everything in front of kids — cook, talk, work — but the
only thing they don't do is perform sexual activities. It'd be interesting to
see what the result would be if kids are exposed to their parents having sex from
a young age."
Having heard her own parents
enjoy a "very loud, very promiscuous sex life", Kayla’s not so sure.
"I see it now as extremely healthy (her parents sex life) but when you're
younger, you don't want to know about your parents having sex . . .
"And I don't think any
parent wants to hear their child having sex, no matter how old they are. I certainly don't
want to run into any naked boys eating muffins in my kitchen in the
morning."
— with The Observer
Sex - it's a parenting thing
How are parents supposed to
handle the thunder of romance under their own roof?
The liberal might produce their
dog-eared copy of the Karma Sutra. A more useful companion might be Dr Rosie King's Good Loving Great Sex, which explores the
reality of sexual relationships in accessible terms.
Clearly, the cultural and
religious persuasions of parents will determine how active and informative
their advice will be to adult offspring, says Kaye Swanton, executive director
of LifeWorks, a relationships counselling and education service.
When giving advice, it is
important for parents to convey to their children that their long-term
relationships should be equal and mutual in terms of the responsibility,
satisfaction and pleasure they offer, says Swanton.
This covers every issue from safe
sex and contraception to desire discrepancies discussed at length in King's
book.
At the very least, young adults
and their parents need to develop respect for each other's privacy and also
consider the impact their relationships may have on siblings or other members
of the family who share the household.
According to a study by the
National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, just released in the United
States, parents
remain the biggest influence on a teenager's decision on whether to have sex — but parents fail to
realise it.
Swanton believes parents can play
the most helpful role by guiding their children so that when they are young
adults they are able to form their own opinions, morals and ethics in regard to
sexual relationships.
"Parents might suggest to
them that there is a need to establish boundaries with their partners. Are they
agreeing to kissing each other, to other forms of sexual exploration or to
intercourse? (Young adults need to understand that) negotiation between two
consenting adults is ongoing and needs to be part of any mutual, adult sexual
relationship.
"Parents might also attempt
to clue their kids into the truth behind the glossy magazine or Hollywood take
on lust and love. Sexual freedom ain't always going to be a bed of roses. It's a new
frontier of communication, intimacy and self-exploration that can take a
lifetime to perfect.
"In our opinion, there is
that parental responsibility to talk to their children at least about all the responsibilities
that are contingent in relationships," says Swanton — if not the finer
details of slap and tickle.
Copyright © 2003. The Age Company Ltd
(Reference: Mitchell, Lisa. (Thursday, December
18, 2003)
Lover
boy, lover girl.
Australia: The Age.)
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference (Key points)
Moore, Art. (Wednesday, June 12, 2002) Catholics learning sex from Kinsey's disciples. USA: WorldNetDaily.com
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=27924
When you break down sexual barriers and open people to not being
sensitive or ashamed, then you start to make them vulnerable to sin.
- Stephen Brady,
president of the lay group Roman Catholic Faithful
…
The National Sex Forum (earlier known as the National Sex and Drug
Forum) is the group that launched the San Francisco Institute on the Advanced
Study of Human Sexuality in the 1970s.
…
The institute says its "films, slides, audio and videotapes are
used by more than 8,000 professionals and institutions throughout the
world."
Explicit films are common in Church institutions, said Brady, noting
the showing of a production at a Notre Dame all-girls school that included
sadomasochism.
…
An activity called "charades" was listed in a course content
schedule published by the archdiocese in 1980. It asks students to draw depictions of words for students to guess, such as orgasm, vagina, penis, sexual
intercourse, homosexual, masturbation, erection and clitoris. All of these "human sexuality"
instruction "techniques" for breaking down inhibitions, says Reisman,
can be found to have originated first in Kinseyan training seminars for teachers, clergy, military, law
enforcement and other health professionals.
…
The Milwaukee archbishop received repeated protests over a four-week
course offered in the 1980s by Father James Arimond, called "Homosexuality
and its Impact on the Family," said to be a "factual, nonjudgmental
presentation about homosexuality," according to a March 1, 1987, article
in the Milwaukee Journal.
Arimond, the Journal said, defined a pervert as someone who goes against his or her sexual
tendency. If a homosexual acted
heterosexually, that would be a perversion, he said, asserting that homosexuality is "God's gift." All of these views are
fully expressed in a 1977 sexually explicit photo book entitled
"Meditations on the Gift of Sexuality," featuring IASHS faculty,
staff and students, says Reisman.
On July 23, 1990, Arimond pleaded no contest to charges of sexual
contact with a teen-age boy and was sentenced to 18 months probation and 45
days in the House of Correction.
Weakland was warned in writing about Arimond twice before the priest is
alleged to have abused the boy in the summer of 1988, according to documents
obtained by the group Roman Catholic Faithful.
…
In his recent groundbreaking book, "Goodbye, Good Men,"
Michael Rose shows how homosexuality has become an orthodoxy among the
gatekeepers at Catholic seminaries, drumming out priests who believe in traditional morals.
Rose argues that most were kicked out by psychologists who evaluated the
priests as being sexually repressive, based on "scientific data" that
invariably comes from Kinsey and his successors, Reisman's research shows.
Likoudis notes that two of those gatekeepers, for seminarians in
Seattle, are Sister Fran Ferder and Father John Heagle, co-directors of Therapy
and Renewal Associates. The counselors, who treat abusive priests, have
ridiculed the
Church's traditional teaching on sexual purity, dismissing it as evidence of
the Vatican's fixations at an adolescent psychological level.
…
Not a moral weakness
Weakland acknowledged in 1995 that a raft of abuse cases had cost the archdiocese $5.5 million, depleting
its financial reserves. About
half a million was designated for therapy. Richard Sipe, a psychologist and
ex-priest, estimates the Church has spent at least $50 million to treat abusive clergy in the past 25 years, according to the
Boston Globe.
What kind of therapy are many priests getting? Again, the link to
Kinsey can be found.
The church's most well-known center, the St. Luke Institute in
Maryland, was founded by the Rev.
Michael Peterson, who died of AIDS in 1987. Just two years before his death, Peterson co-authored a report with
Father Thomas P. Doyle and Ray Mouton that warned of the problem of clergy
abuse.
…
Berlin has defended St. Luke's therapeutic use of the "penile plethysmograph," a device
attached to the penis that measures arousal when the subject is shown
pornographic images.
…
A longtime observer of the church – a political and social activist in
California who asked that his name not be used – summarized the upcoming
bishops' conference this way:
"The church is like a sick man who has a terribly ugly wart on the
end of his nose," he said.
"All of this
posturing and correction is related to the wart and not to the cancer, heart
disease, tuberculosis and diabetes he is suffering from, which is being simply
ignored."
The shocking but still relatively small percentage of priests abusing
young people is a serious problem, but it is only a symptom, he says,
of something much
deeper.
(Reference: Moore, Art. (Wednesday, June 12, 2002) Catholics
learning sex from Kinsey's disciples. USA:
WorldNetDaily.com)
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
Moscaritolo, Maria. (Tuesday, December 10, 2002) Spy bid to 'help' sex girl. Victoria, Australia: Herald Sun.
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,5645145%255E662,00.html
Spy bid to 'help' sex girl
By MARIA MOSCARITOLO
10dec02
A GOVERNMENT spy gave top-secret
documents to a prostitute who spent three unpaid days and nights with him, a
court heard yesterday.
Simon Lappas, 27, allegedly gave
the documents to the prostitute in July 2000 and told her she could sell them
to get herself out of financial trouble.
According to the woman, he told
her it was "quite common" and she would not get into trouble.
The ACT Supreme Court was told
the pair met when Mr Lappas, 27, visited a Canberra brothel in early July 2000.
She called him a few days later and arranged to meet him as a private client.
"That was the original
agreement -- two nights," she told the court.
"It would have been roughly
$1000 a night . . . I'm not sure if we discussed an exact amount."
But she never got the money
because Lappas told her he had not been paid.
She told the court the money became irrelevant after spending days talking
to him about his problems and she became anxious to leave.
"He had a lot of problems
about his fiancee, about the abuse he'd had as a child, just not fitting in," she said.
"I saw Simon cry more than
once and very childlike, in a very distressed way. It just wasn't nice to see
someone in that kind of state."
After the woman confirmed Mr
Lappas had never paid the agreed $1000 a day for their time together, the prosecution
raised the prospect that he had wanted to use the documents to pay the escort
for her services.
The woman said: "In a
sense, I guess, but it was also about trying to help me, in his eyes. That's how he worded it."
The former Defence Intelligence
Organisation analyst admits he gave her sensitive documents, but claims he was mentally impaired at the time.
He has pleaded not guilty to
passing on papers useful to a foreign power with the intent of prejudicing the
country's safety and defence.
The escort said he rang her the
day after giving her the documents and told her: "Expect a visit from
someone, burn the first document I gave you and hang on to the rest."
He confessed to colleagues a few
days later.
She got the impression from Mr
Lappas the documents were worth about $5000 all together.
The trial continues today.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
Osler, Margaret. (Tuesday, June 05, 2003) "The
Nature of Gender and the Gender of Nature in Early Modern Natural
Philosophy". Horning Lectures 2002 –
2003.
http://oregonstate.edu/dept/history/horning_speakers.htm
Historians and feminist scholars interested in the origins of modern
science have uncritically accepted the view-proposed by Carolyn Merchant and
Evelyn Fox Keller-that the roots of gender-biased science and the exclusion of
women from science lie in the abusive misogyny found in Francis Bacon's
accounts of the experimental method and the "death of nature"
implicit in the mechanical philosophy which ostensibly replaced the more
organic view associated with alchemy and came to dominate philosophies of
nature from the second half of the second century.
I propose to examine these claims on several grounds. Recent studies of
Bacon's writings challenge the claim that the metaphor of rape of nature lay at
the heart of his call to experimentation. Increasing knowledge of alchemy
reveals it to have been no friendlier to women than the mechanical view. The
lines separating the organic and mechanical views of nature were not as sharply
drawn as Merchant and others have claimed. And recent scholarship has
demonstrated that many mechanical philosophers adopted many concepts and
methods characteristic of alchemy and organic views of nature.
By examining some influential texts from the seventeenth
century-especially Robert Boyle's Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature (1686), I will argue that theology was the
primary concern of early modern natural philosophers and governed both their
understanding of nature and their assumptions about gender. Other texts reveal
that, in Boyle's case at least, celibacy
rather than sexually aggressive masculinity was the ideal state appropriate for
the natural philosopher. The clerical origins of universities and
scientific societies had more
to do with the natural philosophers' attitude towards women than anything
implicit in the philosophies themselves.
Close, contextualized examination of texts from the period demonstrates
that the preoccupations of the historical actors were different from our own
and that we must explore their concerns if we are to discover the roots of
modern views.
(Reference: Osler, Margaret. (Tuesday,
June 05, 2003) "The Nature of Gender and the Gender of
Nature in Early Modern Natural Philosophy". Horning
Lectures 2002 – 2003.)
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
Peres, Judy. (Friday, October 11,
2002) Age
no barrier to sex for women, study finds. USA: Chicago Tribune.
Age
no barrier to sex for women, study finds
By Judy Peres
Tribune
staff reporter
Published
VANCOUVER
-- A new study of almost 30,000 people worrldwide concludes that women as old as
80 can continue to have a satisfying sex life--and, if they don't, it's
probably not because of their age.
Though
it was paid for by the maker of Viagra, the study is not good news for Pfizer
Inc. and others hoping to develop blockbuster drugs to treat the sexual
complaints of the female half of the population. It turns out that aging women
don't necessarily need a little blue pill.
Unlike
men, whose problems increase dramatically as they get older, women are unlikely
to have age-related sexual complaints, according to the study by University of
Chicago sociology professor Edward Laumann.
The
first substantial look at the sexual behavior and attitudes of people over 60,
the study was being presented at the annual meeting of the International
Society for the Study of Women's Sexual Health, which started Thursday in Vancouver.
"Physical
factors associated with aging do not appear to consistently influence the
likelihood of (female) sexual dysfunction," said Laumann. "Other
influences--specifically, social and psychological factors--appear to have a
much greater impact."
Numerous
studies have shown that sex is an important component in overall well-being. In
many societies, older people tend to feel that sex is no longer part of their
lives. With women, however, the problems aren't necessarily physical.
"The
60- to 80-year-old (women) could have thought they were dead in the water, the
same way their vision declined when they hit their 40s," Laumann said.
"But it is not so."
Women
of all ages report a high level of sexual problems. But experts agree that most
of those problems stem from lack of
education, negative attitudes, relationship problems, stress from family and
work. Older women have an additional
problem: They have frequently outlived their
partners.
Laumann's
study was based on data collected in a 2001 global survey funded by Pfizer.
Pfizer's Viagra, introduced four years ago, earned the company $1.5 billion
last year.
The
pill is remarkably effective in treating erectile dysfunction, an increasingly
common problem in aging men. The risk of erectile
dysfunction (sometimes called impotence) increases
nearly 1 percent for every year of an adult man's life. According to the 1994
Massachusetts Male Aging Study, 67 percent of men experience mild-to-severe
dysfunction by age 70.
But
most cases of impotence are caused by a fairly simple physiologic mechanism: an inability of the smooth-muscle cells lining the blood
vessels to relax and allow blood to flow into those vessels.
In
contrast, the causes of sexual dysfunction in women are much more complex, said
Laumann. "It involves such factors as the quality
of the relationship, life-course events and psychological responses. So a single-shot intervention [like Viagra] is not
likely to help most women."
Miki
Wieder of the Center for Marital and Sexual Health in Cleveland went further. "The most critical factor in women's sexual health
is a good relationship with a man," she
said.
Laumann
also authored a 1999 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association
that made headlines with its finding that 31 percent of U.S. men and 43 percent
of U.S. women suffered from some sort of chronic sexual dysfunction.
In
that study, the biggest problem for women was lack of interest in sex, reported
by 32 percent. Other complaints included problems reaching orgasm (26 percent),
lack of pleasure in sex (23 percent), anxiety about their sexual performance
(12 percent), trouble lubricating (21 percent) and pain associated with sexual
relations (16 percent).
The
subjects of the 1999 study were all between the ages of 18 and 59. The Pfizer
survey questioned people aged 40 to 80 in 30 countries.
Nevertheless,
the overall findings were similar. Despite its older age group, the Pfizer survey found
that 31 percent of women lacked interest in sex, 22 percent were unable to have
an orgasm, 21 percent found sex unpleasurable, 20 percent had trouble
lubricating and 14 percent experienced pain with sex.
The
only one of those categories that showed a substantial effect of age was
lubrication: Women aged 65 to 80 were 6 percent more likely to report
difficulty in that area compared to women aged 40-49.
In
every category, elderly women were actually less likely to report sexual
problems than middle-age women. But, Laumann cautioned that most women over 70
no longer have sexual partners.
His
analysis looked only at women who reported having sex in the previous year--a
minority of the total. "Those women may not be typical of others in their
age group," Laumann said.
Beverly
Whipple, professor at Rutgers University and incoming president of the Society
for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, said Laumann's findings confirm what
many researchers have long believed.
"Women are more comfortable with their sexuality as they
age and many are in long-term relationships,"
Whipple said. "Whatever physiological
problems arise as they get older, they have learned to handle."
Copyright
© 2002, Chicago Tribune
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
Phillips, Shaun. (Monday, December 09, 2002) Push to weed out sex predators. Victoria, Australia: Herald Sun.
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,5640209%255E662,00.html
Push to weed out sex predators
By SHAUN PHILLIPS
09dec02
COACHES
and officials of junior sports face mandatory police checks under a nationwide
strategy to protect children from sex fiends.
Swimming
Australia's new "member protection policy" requires anyone having
unsupervised contact with children under 18 -- including swimmers aged over 18
-- to agree to a federal police check.
The
Australian Sports Commission wants all sports to adopt a similar regime within
12 months and will use the threat of withheld funding to help realise the goal.
Police
checks for sports volunteers and officials are already required by law in New
South Wales and Queensland.
While
encouraging individual sports to act, ASC chairman Peter Bartels yesterday
called on the Victorian Government to legislate in the interests of keeping
children safe.
The
State Government said while it encouraged police checks for sports officials
dealing with children, it would not make it mandatory.
"There
has not been a major call from the associations for it," spokesman Brent
Hooley said.
Surf
lifesaving, athletics, tennis, basketball, gymnastics, softball and water polo
are among a number of sports working towards adopting the ASC's anti-harassment
and child-protection model.
The
ASC says 11 coaches or officials had been convicted of sex offences against
their charges since 1996.
Under
the Swimming Australia policy, police check for child-related offences. The
policy also bans uninvited sexual comments, verbal abuse, bullying, racist or
sexist comments and allowing offensive pictures or graffiti to be shown.
With
no federal legislation, the fragmented state system makes enforcement
difficult.
In
Queensland, police check all relevant officials, while in NSW only those in
paid positions have to be checked. NSW volunteers sign a declaration and spot
checks are done.
The
Victorian regime will be progressively introduced.
Swimming
Australia chief executive Glenn Tasker said federal police checks would be done
on all Victorian coaches, officials and swimmers over 18 who have unsupervised
contact with swimmers under 18.
Football
Victoria chief executive Ken Gannon said coaches had to be accredited in the
vast majority of leagues, but it was some of the bigger junior associations
that had failed to support the move.
"Some
of the junior leagues do not like the compulsory nature of police checks, but
we're working towards changing that view," he said.
Netball
Australia executive director Pam Smith said the sport supported the ASC's
player-protection blueprint, but stopped short of saying it would be adopted.
"As
to whether we go that far -- there are significant costs associated (with
police checks) -- I'm not 100 per cent sure," she said.
Surf
Life Saving Victoria chief executive Nigel Taylor said police checks were
progressively being carried out for all relevant officials.
Mr
Bartels said he wanted to see the "member protection" regime adopted
across the board inside a year.
John
Devitt, the 1960 Rome Olympic 100m freestyle gold medallist and now president
of Australian Swimming, admitted the sport had seen its share of tyrants over
the years.
"But
we now are saying that the goalposts are changing or that the lane lines on the
bottom of the pool are being made a little clearer to everybody," he said.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
Phillips, T Y. (Saturday, October 19, 2002) Wife's motives in biting disputed. USA: The Modesto Bee.
http://www.modbee.com/local/story/4857059p-5870211c.html
Wife's
motives in biting disputed
Photo
Kelli
Pratt
October
19, 2002 Posted:
By TY
PHILLIPS
BEE
STAFF WRITER
A
mother defended her daughter on Friday, saying it
was sheer exhaustion and not anything to do with sex that led to the daughter's
biting attack on her feeble husband.
The
65-year-old man died six days later. Preliminary autopsy results show that the
attack may have contributed to his death, a spokesman for the Stanislaus County
coroner's office said.
Kelli
Pratt's mother, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid further publicity, said
her 45-year-old daughter suffers from health problems of her own: She has cerebral
palsy, and she is a former Easter Seals poster child.
"She
was very devoted to being near him in what I would call his debilitated state,"
Pratt's mother said by telephone. "She was well aware of the fact that her
husband was ill, and she respected that. When I saw her today, she told me this
definitely didn't happen over sex."
That
is not what Arthur Pratt told police in a videotaped interview in the wake of
the Oct. 7 attack. Pratt, who died six days
later at Doctors Medical Center, said his
wife bit him about 20 times after he said he was too weak to have sex, Detective Al Brocchini said.
Officers
called to the house saw lesions and sores
all over Pratt's body, police said, and at
first believed that they were all bites.
The autopsy
revealed only two bites, both severe, on his side and stomach.
"On
one of the bites, a large chunk of meat was gone," Brocchini said.
"The other bite was also severe, and the skin had been broken. (Kelli Pratt) still had blood in her mouth when we
arrested her."
Pratt
has been in custody since the attack on
charges of elder abuse, domestic violence and assault on a police officer. She has pleaded not guilty and is due back in court
Monday.
Police
said murder charges could be filed if it is found that the assault directly led
to her husband's death.
An
official cause of death has not been determined. The preliminary autopsy
results revealed that Pratt may have died from a heart attack suffered as a
result of emotional stress and the physical assault, said Kelly Huston,
spokesman for the Sheriff's Department, which runs the coroner's office.
Arthur
Pratt, who had been in and out of hospitals and rehabilitation centers for at
least the past year, suffered from all sorts of ailments.
The
alleged attack occurred at the couple's home in the 2700 block of Park Place.
The
Pratts had no history of domestic violence outside of one county Adult
Protective Services report in which Arthur Pratt claimed that his wife verbally
abused him because he would not stick to his diabetic diet, Brocchini said.
Pratt
declined to be interviewed Friday on the advice of her attorney. She gave an
interview to a Sacramento television station the day before.
Pratt's
mother said her daughter's health makes it difficult for her to fully take care
of herself. The added burden of her husband's care ultimately became more than
she could handle, Pratt's mother said.
"Kelli
maintains it happened over the fact she was so stressed out," she said.
"While
he was getting care, she was home fending for herself. She just didn't get the
care she needed. I feel that she's as much a victim as Art was."
Bee
staff writer Ty Phillips can be reached at 578-2331 or [email protected].
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Personal
Note
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
Reuters. (Friday, October 11,
2002) What Older Women Want, Men Can't
Deliver-Sex Study. USA: Yahoo News.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20021011/hl_nm/sex_men_dc_1
Health
- Reuters
What
Older Women Want, Men Can't Deliver-Sex Study
Fri
Oct 11,
CHICAGO
(Reuters) - Many older women still want to have sex, but they might find their
men cannot oblige.
So
says a global survey of 27,780 adults aged 40 to 80 from 30 countries that
found aging women become sexually dysfunctional at about half the rate of men.
"To
the extent that women are (sexually active), they may be facing men who have
problems," said lead researcher Edward Laumann, a University of Chicago
sociologist due to present some of his findings at a Vancouver, British
Columbia, conference on Thursday.
The
survey found that 31% of middle-aged and older women lacked interest in sex,
22% were unable to achieve orgasm, 21% did not find sex pleasurable, 20% had
trouble lubricating, and 14% experienced pain with sex.
Among
men, about 20% suffered from erectile dysfunction, which increased to nearly
half by age 80, according to the survey, which was funded by Pfizer, Inc., the
maker of the impotence treatment Viagra.
Among
the health problems common to older people associated with sexual dysfunction
were diabetes and hypertension, especially in men. But psychological factors,
especially depression, diminished interest in sex after 40.
In
the United States, two-thirds of men aged 70 or older have a companion who is a
potential sex partner, while less than one-third of women do because of women's
longer life spans and divorce patterns.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
Reuters. ‘Women more likely to sleep with interns’. (Wednesday, November 27, 2002) India: Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=13833
‘Women
more likely to sleep with interns’
Reuters
Los
Angeles, November 27: Women are more likely than men to have sex with an intern
at work, according to a Playboy magazine poll that also found that two-thirds
of female respondents had slept with a co-worker. Among male respondents, half
had slept with co-workers, said the magazine which polled more than 10,000 men
and women in an online survey in August.
The
results will be published in the Playboy Enterprises Inc.-owned magazine’s
January issue, which hits news stands on Monday. Among the findings: z 20 pc of
female respondents had slept with an intern; for men, the number was 12 pc. z
46 pc of women who had had office sex had slept with their boss, compared with
18 pc among men. Playboy attributed the discrepancy to the fact there were more
male bosses in the workplace.
For
women, the favourite place to have sex in the office was on a desk, while men preferred a
couch or a chair.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
Scheeres, Julia. (Monday, September 30, 2002) Porn Spam: It's Getting Raunchier. USA: Wired.com.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,55420,00.html
Porn Spam: It's Getting Raunchier
By Julia Scheeres
2:00 a.m. Sep. 30, 2002 PDT
Naked women performing oral sex with guns
pressed to their heads, naked women with large dogs clutching their backs,
naked women in pigtails pretending to be daughters having sex with fathers.
These are some of the explicit images that
have started slipping into inboxes lately as spamsters try to drive traffic to a growing number of sites featuring rape, bestiality and
incest pornography.
Although many recipients are disgusted by the imagery,
experts are worried that these niche porn sites could lower the
inhibitions of sexual deviants and provoke them to act out their fantasies in
real life.
Type "incest rape" into the Google
search engine, for example, and the first result is for the Rape, Abuse and
Incest National Network (RAINN), a Washington nonprofit that aids sexual
assault victims. The second result is for brutalextreme.com, which advertises
its content as stories, pictures and videos of the "most violent rapes in
the history of mankind."
In the small letters at the bottom of the page
is the site's disclaimer: "We do not condone non-nocensual (sic) sex. This
site is about forced-sex FANTASY only."
Nevertheless, the faked images have stirred traumatic memories in
sexual assault victims who stumble across them in spam, said RAINN president
Scott Berkowitz.
"In the past six months, we've gone from
one or two complaints about this kind of spam a week to about 150 complaints a
week," said Berkowitz. "There's not much we can do about it, because
it's legal unless there's a child involved or you can prove a rape actually
took place."
Even the e-mail subject lines -- known in the
marketing world as "teasers" -- have gotten raunchier: "Famous
victims of parental incest!" and "Welcome to the brutal rape
archive!" are two currently making the e-rounds.
"The tragedy of spam is that it's sent
to anyone whose e-mail they have, regardless of interest," said Jason Catlett, president of Junkbusters.com, a site
that helps consumers reduce the amount of unsolicited advertising in their
lives.
For example, Catlett -- who lives in New
Jersey -- was surprised to receive a spam recently from a man in Peru trying to
sell a Toyota Corolla.
The tactic has gotten smut peddlers in
trouble in the past, Catlett said. After skin magazines targeted the teen
market in the 1960s by sending racy subscription offers to their home
addresses, causing parents to complain, the Supreme Court ruled that such
solicitations could be blocked by using a simple Post Office form.
U.S. law also bans junk faxes. But there is no law prohibiting spam in the United
States, even from sites featuring bestiality,
an activity outlawed in 24 states. Subject
lines include "XXX Farm Holiday," "Zoo Depravity" and
"Raping furry naked barnyard friends."
The Humane Society, which investigates
allegations of animal abuse, has been swamped with complaints about Internet sites featuring people having sex with dogs,
horses, snakes and almost every other creature imaginable, said spokesman Brian Sodergren.
"It's gross," said Sodergren.
"It's just plain wrong. But unfortunately, most of those websites are
hosted overseas and we can't do anything about it."
Al Cooper, a California psychologist who
recently published a book that explores the Internet's effect on sexuality,
said the rise in offensive porn spam may be
due in part to some surfers' dwindling
interest in mainstream fare.
"There's
only so many naked pictures of women's breasts you can see until you get
tired of it," said Cooper. "For sex sites to make money, they need to supply
people with new material.... You have to think of something new and
exciting."
The Internet allows people to anonymously
view imagery that would have required a trip to the seedy side of town, or to a
foreign country, a few years ago. But for some people, what begins as prurient curiosity
eventually leads them to jail.
"We're seeing a tremendous increase in
people looking at child porn online, then trying to solicit kids for sex,"
said Cooper. "In pedophilia stings we
find a lot of people who would never get involved in child pornography if it
wasn't for the Internet. They wouldn't have
known how to get the material or even dared to ask. The power of the Internet is that people who wouldn't have
gotten involved in these kinds of things now are."
Likewise, Cooper added, men with repressed
rape fantasies could become less inhibited about real life sexual assault after
perusing sites such as rapedbitch.com or outcold.com, which includes fantasies
of men slipping sedatives into women's drinks and raping them. The site offers
free memberships to visitors who send their own original pictures of
"passed out girls."
"Drunk, stoned, passed out, unconscious,
out cold girls sleeping it off! Cum on in and find out what we did with
them!" teases the site's homepage.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
Sengupta, Kim. (Friday, November 29, 2002) UN struggles to explain away presence of weapons inspector with S&M fetish. UK: Independent News.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=356753
UN
struggles to explain away presence of weapons inspector with S&M fetish
By
Kim Sengupta in
The
United Nations inspection mission in Iraq has been fully prepared for
controversy over chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Instead, the first
crisis it faces concerns sado-masochism, pansexuality and leather fetishes.
Senior officials were trying to explain yesterday how such a crucial mission
came to include an American former Secret
Service officer who has no specialised degree in any of the relevant sciences,
but considerable expertise in unusual sexual practices.
Harvey
John "Jack" McGeorge was nominated
for the mission by the United States government.
The revelation of his personal details has also led to the disclosure that no background checks have been made on any of the monitors.
Mr
McGeorge, who once served in the US Marines, is waiting in New York to join the
Unmovic (UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission) in Baghdad.
He
runs a business offering seminars on "weaponisation of chemical and
biological agents" at $595 (£380) a session, and advertises his services
as a "certified United Nations inspector". An internet search has
also revealed that Mr McGeorge offers training seminars of a different kind
involving "various acts conducted with
knives and ropes". This relates to his
role as co-founder of Black Rose, a "pansexual S&M group" based in
Washington, and also as a founder of Leather
Leadership Conference IN, which "produces
training sessions for current and potential leaders of the sadomasochistic/ leather/fetish
community". Mr McGeorge said a State Department official invited him to apply for a
job with the UN team, and neither the
Americans nor the United Nations asked about his S&M background. He was interviewed by Hans Blix, the chief inspector, and trained with
Unmovic in February 2001.
He
told The Washington Post: "I have been
very upfront with people in the past about what I do, and it has never
prevented me from getting a job or doing a service. I am who I am. I am not ashamed of who I am – not one bit." He added that he was now considering resigning his UN
post.
Iraqi
officials, who have always claimed that American
members of the team may not be what they seem,
were still digesting the news.
A
Foreign Ministry official said: "It is very disturbing that the Americans
have put forward someone like this. Apart
from his strange sexual life, he does not have the academic qualification for
these complex issues. And he is also a former member of their Secret Service. How many other of these types are they getting into the
UN mission?"
A UN
official said in Baghdad: "It is very difficult. We are hoping the man
will now resign, and we can draw a veil over
this." Ewen Buchanan, an Unmovic
spokesman, said: "As the UN, with people applying from many countries, we
do not have the capacity to carry out background checks. I believe Mr McGeorge
is technically very competent. He knows his subject, which is weapons."
A
State Department official confirmed that Mr McGeorge was recommended to Unmovic, and that no
background checks were made.
The
Bush administration has been accused of undermining the Iraq mission, and US
officials have claimed that Mr Blix had chosen an inexperienced team, leaving
out inspectors with previous experience of working in Iraq who were deemed to
be too aggressive in pursuing their task. There have also been complaints from
Washington that not enough American and British personnel were chosen for the
teams.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
pansexual
adj.
Relating
to, having, or open to sexual activity of many kinds.
n.
A
pansexual person.
sadomasochism
n.
The
combination of sadism and masochism, in particular the deriving of pleasure,
especially sexual gratification, from inflicting or submitting to physical or
emotional abuse.
sadism
n.
masochism
n.
Personal
Note
How do you bring out secrets, evidences etc from a man or woman? Deep secrets, classified matters etc. One option is torture, the pain side.
There is another option, of happiness, of pleasure.
Erotica, sex, the rubbing of the flesh. Applicable to man or woman.
In a hostile environment, where your time is limited and you are monitored and outnumbered, the option for torture is less. But there is an “infinite” option for erotica. Many a man or woman open up, revealing closely guarded secrets in heights of passion, of pleasure.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
Singh, Mallica., Srikanth B.R., Majumdar, Manjira. (Monday, April 07, 2003) Peepin' Moms. India: Outlook India Magazine.
http://outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20030407&fname=Snoopy+%28F%29&sid=1&pn=1
TREND
Peepin' Moms
Edgy parents are
increasingly hiring sleuths to track their kids' drug, sex and love life
MALLICA SINGH, B.R.
SRIKANTH, MANJIRA MAJUMDAR
Eating disorders and
depression. Alcohol, drugs and firsthand lessons in sex. Asphyxiating peer
pressure and the exhausting chase after teasing lifestyles.
Across the board in the India that has globally "arrived", life for
teenagers and young adults sometimes seems to be springing up more snakes than
ladders. To cope, while many of them perfect the rift within, living double
lives, dealing alone and together with so much more than just angst and heady
hormones, their parents are battling to penetrate their opaque bulwark of
resistance. Whether clueless, ill-equipped or just plain running out of arsenal
to deal with what's unleashed on them, they're now hiring private sleuths to
keep track of their kids.
Most parents are shocked, furious, helpless
on agency findings. It's a wake-up call which shows them where they stand.
As Vikram Singh, MD, Lancers Detective
Agency, Delhi, tells you, "The words frequently resonating in my office
are 'what's going on with my child'?"
Vikram Singh says most
already have some inkling but come to private eyes like him seeking evidence to
confront kids with, anything to crack the pattern of emphatic denials and
futile showdowns. Sachit Kumar, executive director, Globe Detective
Agency, Delhi, lists some tell-tale symptoms in kids which lead parents to
pros: "Over- or under-sleeping, a generally sozzled look, aloofness or
aggression, decline in studies, spending too much time outside, rash driving,
odd things found in their room or other erratic behaviour."
What happens once the agency submits the report? "I've seen parents
shocked, furious, helpless, speechless and sometimes breaking down in front of
me," Singh says, adding "They say they can't believe their kids have
gone so far, for they behave so differently at home." Adds Sachit:
"It's a wake-up call which shows parents exactly where they stand."
As the parents of
Calcutta-based Gautam Bakshi, 18, learnt. Vague about his
whereabouts—he had to be "somewhere" at a specific time—and
suspecting the worst, they hired an agency. The disclosure confirmed their
fears. He'd been lured into drug-peddling by a woman friend. Though not an
addict himself, he made money out of this parallel lifestyle with a car and
other accoutrements.
While Delhi agencies
get 5-7 cases a month, heading south, Puneet Kumar, VP, Globe, Bangalore,
claims the number of kid-tracking cases is on the rise here too in the last
three years, particularly with more kids joining internet chatrooms.
"These chats have led many teens away from studies and into meeting
strangers. In some cases, they've ended up in messy affairs or have been hooked
onto drugs."
Puneet recounts a case
of an 18-year-old who didn't show up at college for weeks and was involved with
drug-users. In a couple of other cases, parents have been concerned because
expensive things had gone missing. They wanted the agency to check if their
kids had been selling them and spending the money in pubs. Mohan Joseph, a
businessman in Mandya town in Karnataka, sought the help of a private eye to
find his daughter, Monica Joseph, 15, who left home with her friend, Radhika,
22. Monica was traced in Bangalore, but said she wanted to continue living with
her friend. Her father suspected a lesbian relationship and later roped in the
local police to get his daughter home.
"This snooping is
not limited to the affluent; even middle-class families come to us,"
says Puneet. This, even though the costs are high: at Lancers, it's Rs 15,000 a
week, with Rs 4,500 for eight hours every subsequent day. At Globe, it's Rs
4,500 a day. Cheaper options and agencies too are available.
Besides routine
check-ups on kids in hostels, some parents use an agency's services to
make their children end a relationship they disapprove of.
Like a South Delhi businessman, who, worried about his precious,
sole, "foreign-qualified" 23-year-old son's post-midnight partying,
approached Globe. They discovered that he'd meet a girl at a
nightclub, then go to her house where he'd stay till 4-5 am. She was fond of
drinking, lived alone and was a divorcee. But
Sachit counselled the distressed dad that he shouldn't force him to break up
with her or he'd lose him. He was asked to find out more about her—was she
really "suitable" for his son? Over one month of keeping tabs on her
revealed she was involved with two more men—daytime flings. The boy was made to
hear her recorded conversations with them. He was furious and distanced himself
from her. Mission accomplished.
As a mum, actress Moon
Moon Sen finds the whole idea of snooping on kids "dreadful
and revolting", and has this to say to parents who do: "Whether
they are in real trouble or something you perceive as trouble, either way you
haven't bothered with your kids. Clearly, it's a failure on your part to put
your kids at ease, your sheer neglect and ignorance. Then you turn patronising
and dictatorial, creating an excruciating divide in your children."
As for finding out who
they're dating or how much sex they're having, she believes in letting it be
natural. "It's a healthy cycle of life with any generation, everybody does
it, some more, some less." Daughter Riya too shudders at the thought
that the party you just came from could have private eyes posing as waiters,
electricians or a deejay's assistant, taking photos with camera lighters of
kids drinking, smoking, kissing, etc: "There's always something to hide
from parents. But that doesn't mean you let loose snoops on kids. Growing up,
we had our freedom but there were realistic limits. I was allowed to party but
there were deadlines which we respected."
Both Jyoti Bose,
principal, Springdales School, Delhi, and Calcutta's famous agony aunt at Anand
Bazaar Patrika, Rita Bhimani, agree that the days of confrontation and strict disciplining
have given way to negotiation. The sooner you get real, says Dr Jitendra
Nagpal, coordinator, Child and Adolescent Centre, vimhans, Delhi, the lesser
the anguish. Nagpal tells parents what they can do. "There's
no excuse for parents to be ignorant about the pressures kids face today.
Denial and condemnation is the worst thing you can do." As
for sexual experimentation, parents will have to go beyond just birds-and-bees
talk because, as Nagpal sees it, "teens aren't
going to be shy of their sexual needs."
Yet, unlike the Sens,
he isn't so harsh on parents who rope in sleuths. "Liberation accompanying
the socio-economic boom has been so fast and furious that not just kids, but
parents too are grappling with cultural dualities, new-age parenting concepts
and trying to find the blend between freedom and control."
But Vandana Singh, 15,
can't fathom why parents would want to do this. "I'll freak if my folks
ever put snoops on me. I'll be dead, they'll be sad, so what's the
point? As long as I do well in my studies, they shouldn't care about my
boyfriends or that occasional cigarette."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Some names have been
changed.)
Mallica Singh with B.R.
Srikanth and Manjira Majumdar in
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
Talbot, Margaret. (Sunday, October 13, 2002) Men Behaving Badly. USA: The New York Times Company.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/13/magazine/13HARASSMENT.html?pagewanted=all&position=top
Men
Behaving Badly
By
MARGARET TALBOT
When
you work at a car dealership, you spend a lot of time standing around, but that
does not mean you relax. How can you, with the manager constantly hovering over
you and the strains of ''We Will Rock You'' or some other sales-meeting anthem
ricocheting around your brain? You've got to be on, you've got to be pumped,
you've got to be ready to pursue a car that noses into the lot, and then be
standing right there, hand extended, when the wary customer steps out. Body
language is vital. Philip Reed, a writer who last year posted a diary on the
Internet about his stint as a car salesman, described a seminar in which he was
taught how to shake hands -- with a ''slight pulling motion'' that represents
''the beginning of your control over the customer.'' Reed observed that the car
salesmen he worked with shook hands with one another often, too, practicing for
''Mr. Customer'' and ''staying loose.'' There was also a lot of ''high-fiving,
fist-bumping, back-slapping and arm-squeezing'' and during slow periods a lot
of ''tie-pulling, wrestling and shadowboxing.''
And a
fair amount of free-floating, adrenalized aggression. ''At car dealerships,
there's a lot of downtime,'' says Jean Clickner, a lawyer with the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission in Pittsburgh. ''You work 12-hour days, and
there's a lot of waiting around for customers. At the same time, there's big
money to be made and a lot of pressure to make a deal, and when you're the one
selling cars, you feel you can do no wrong.'' Clickner, who has represented
several aggrieved car salesmen, sums up the problem this way: ''Sometimes the guys
get slap-happy.'' Car dealerships, in other words, are
one of those American workplaces where masculinity and job performance are
straightforwardly equated, which makes them fun for some men and not at all for
others.
Consider
what happened, back in the late 90's, at Burt Chevrolet in Denver, where two
swaggering sales managers named Terry Franks and Jay Gaylord held sway for a
time, and in unreconstructed style. It was apparently their habit, for example,
to address salesmen as ''little girls'' or ''whores.'' They would upbraid a guy
by asking if he used tampons or tease him by saying that he had ''to squat''
when he urinated. The managers publicly derided struggling salesmen as
''queers'' or ''steers'' -- because ''steers try; bulls get the job done.'' To
motivate the troops during sales meetings, they showed raunchy video clips,
including one depicting a bull stepping on the genitals of a rodeo cowboy.
Gaylord signaled his boredom with what a subordinate was saying to him by
simulating masturbation while the employee talked. He grabbed at male
employees' genitals, sometimes making contact, sometimes not, but mainly (or so
it seemed to the men who got used to jumping out of his way or even running
when they saw him) hoping to make them flinch.
The
reason we know about any of these antics is that 10 of the salesmen at Burt
Chevrolet ultimately decided to register their objections. And to do so they
chose what might seem to be an unusual means. With the help of the E.E.O.C.,
they filed a sexual-harassment lawsuit charging the car dealership with
creating a hostile environment that discriminated against them as men. It was,
in their case, an effective weapon: two years ago, the E.E.O.C. won a $500,000
settlement (and a promise to implement mandatory sexual-harassment training)
from Burt Chevrolet, which had already fired the two managers in question.
The
idea that by being raunchy, men might be discriminating against other men is
not an intuitive one. Indeed, not all of the guys involved in the Burt Chevrolet
suit realized ''that this was discrimination at first,'' says Mia Bitterman,
one of the E.E.O.C. lawyers who handled the case. ''But they certainly did not
enjoy being afraid to bend over at the water fountain because they didn't know
what was coming. And they were certainly embarrassed that anything like this
could have happened to them.''
Most
people asked to envision a sexual-harassment complaint from a man would
probably think of ''Disclosure''-like scenarios starring rapacious female bosses
in pinstriped Armani. Maybe, when reminded that men can file sexual-harassment
suits against other men, they might think of a
gay boss coming on to a subordinate. Both
kinds of cases do occur (the latter more often than the former), but judging
from law journals and court documents, they do not represent the typical
harassment claim brought by men. A more
common case involves heterosexual men, often in blue-collar and
service-industry jobs, who object to the ''hostile environment'' created by the
behavior of other heterosexual men.
Since
1992 the percentage of sexual-harassment charges filed by men with the E.E.O.C.
and state agencies has been increasing steadily, to 13.7 percent in 2001, from
9.1 percent in 1992. A total of 2,120 such cases were filed last year. (The most common kind of harassment case by far still
involves a woman accusing a male co-worker or supervisor.) Men's claims of
harassment often center on what is
considered ''horseplay,'' or what Bruce McMoran, an employment lawyer in Tinton
Falls, N.J., describes as ''bullying,
hazing, adolescent kinds of behavior.''
Sexual-harassment lawsuits are not obvious or straightforward or even
particularly sensible solutions to the problem of men treating one another
badly at work (or expecting other men to like their crude jokes), but they seem
to be the solution we have hit upon.
Often
the men who are targeted and later bring claims of harassment are the weakest
of the herd -- younger, smaller or more effeminate than the men they work with.
But this is not always the case. Sometimes a big guy who is a seasoned worker
is picked on anyway, maybe because he's new to the job or quick to register his
distaste for his workplace's particular rituals of boredom and aggression.
At a
Harbert-Yeargin construction site in Jackson, Tenn., where Joseph Carlton
worked as a pipe welder in 1996, for example, there was a lot of what the men
who worked there referred to as ''goosing.'' This could mean poking or pinching
a guy anyplace on his body, but more often it meant swatting or grabbing his
genitals. Carlton was goosed on two occasions soon after he took the job --
once, he claimed, in a sneak attack while he was wearing his welding helmet --
and he did not care for it. His attacker, he said, was his crew chief, Louis
Davis, and Davis's modus operandi struck Carlton as a curious way to get to
know a new employee. As Carlton testified in
court: ''I
meet a man, I shake his hand. I don't reach
down and touch him in his personal area.''
Carlton
was not some weedy college boy. ''Joe's a big, good-looking country guy, maybe
6-foot-5 and 250 pounds,'' says his lawyer, Michael Weinman. ''The secretaries
in my office called him the Marlboro Man.'' Carlton wanted the job at the
Jackson site because it was close to his girlfriend's home. And he was used to
horsing around -- he had put in plenty of hours at construction sites and
shipyards. Goosing, though, was not something he cared to put up with at work.
''I like to weld,'' Carlton testified. ''That's what I've always done. And I like to do a good job
at it. But I ain't never had nobody grab me.''
Carlton
complained to a supervisor at the site, who did not reprimand Davis but who did
transfer Carlton out of Davis's crew. By
then, though, some of Carlton's co-workers had heard about his complaints. To
make fun of him, Carlton said, they started
to ''grab each other'' and ''hunch on each other'' whenever they saw him.
It made work miserable in a new way. When Carlton got on a truck to be transported around
the site, he said, everybody else would jump
off, ''like I had the plague.'' Finally,
Carlton decided that he had no choice but to quit. The E.E.O.C., which
investigated Carlton's claim of sexual harassment, found three other employees
who told similar stories about life at Harbert-Yeargin, where workers built and
repaired machinery for a food-processing factory. In the spring of 1999, the
matter went to trial.
The
proceeding was a curious three-day semantics-fest involving fraught and
detailed discussions of the terms ''goosing'' and ''horseplay.'' Carlton
testified that when he worked in a shipyard in Newport News, Va., he would
''horseplay a bit at lunchtime,'' but to him that meant doing something like
covering a colleague's welding visor with black tape. It wasn't the same as
some guy, out of the blue, grabbing another guy's crotch.
On
the stand, Louis Davis denied goosing Carlton below the belt and said he didn't
recall doing it to other men. But he added that at Harbert-Yeargin somebody
probably was goosed ''every day.'' You goosed some men, he said, because they
were ''goosey'' -- prone to startled reactions -- and it was funny to see them
jump. Davis said that he ''probably'' would have goosed the three women who
worked in the office if he had been around them more often and ''if they was
goosey.'' He allowed, however, that he did not think he would goose the women
below the belt.
Carlton
was not the only employee to testify about high jinks at the plant. Tony Warren
told the court that he drew the line when Davis started twisting his nipples
and had felt compelled to tell him that he ''didn't mind cutting up a bit'' but
''didn't go for stuff like that.'' An instrument fitter named Terry Dotson said
he put up with goosing -- his tormentors, he said, were a couple of contract
electricians known as Smurf and Possum -- but he never really got used to it.
He wanted to hit Possum when he grabbed him ''down there,'' but Possum was an
old man, and besides, Dotson didn't want to get fired for fighting. Sometimes
he thought getting startled like that when you
were working on, say, the pipe-threading
machine, and trying your best to
concentrate, might be dangerous -- he'd seen
guys get their sleeves ripped off their arms on that particular machine. But
luckily, he testified: ''I never did get hung up in any equipment or anything.
It was just -- I don't know. It was just the aggravation of having to put up
with it.''
Given
the distribution of the work force today, it's not surprising that some
male-on-male sexual harassment takes place not in blue-collar strongholds but
in the retail world and, in particular, in the fluorescently lit vastness of
suburban superstores. Sometimes in these cases you find men who are offended by
an almost perkily demeaning atmosphere, one in which the insults
are sexual in tone mostly because there just aren't that many insults to choose
from in the English language. A
lot of these harassers deride men by comparing them to women. Variations on
''bitch,'' which is so ubiquitous as to have lost its capacity to shock, if not
its payload of contempt, abound. As in, ''Come here, cashier bitch.'' As in,
''You talk like a bitch.'' Even ''sweetheart'' can sound nasty if uttered in a
certain tone of voice. Much of the
rhetorical and gestural language of male-on-male sexual harassment is borrowed
directly from adolescent rituals that have been around for decades: wedgies,
pants-yanking, rabbit punches to various parts of the body. They all thrive on
restlessness, a sense of unfair containment, the itch to make something --
anything -- happen. Sexual insults are the ones lying around and the easiest to
pick up when you're bored with cranky
customers and their cranky kids and feel like messing with somebody's mind,
just getting a response out of somebody, even if it's to something really dumb.
But in that kind of atmosphere -- minimum-wage miles-of-aisles tedium -- men
and women often aren't treated all that differently. The culture is hardly
masculinist. And that complicates a sexual-harassment case.
When Christopher
Lack worked the cash register at the Wal-Mart in Beckley, W.Va., for example,
his boss, James Bragg, was a tenacious kidder. Bragg had a few favorite
expressions, and he liked to toss them around the store, where he was an
assistant manager and Lack was a salesclerk back in the mid-90's. ''Spank you
very much'' was the play on words Bragg favored for his telephone sign-off;
''penis butter and jelly sandwiches'' was his lunchtime joke; and ''Oh, my
rod!'' was his preferred exclamation when he saw an attractive woman. Lack, who
eventually brought suit against Bragg and Wal-Mart for sexual harassment,
testified that Bragg wore him down with crass double-entendres, often delivered
in front of customers or co-workers. Once, when Lack was helping a customer,
Bragg came up to the counter and said, ''I need a small bag, and not the one
between your legs.'' When Lack called Bragg over so that he could, for example,
authorize a refund, Bragg would say, ''I'm coming, Chrissy'' in a ''real
sexual'' tone, Lack charged. At the store Christmas party one year, Bragg
sidled up to Lack and a group of co-workers, grabbed his own crotch and said,
''Hey, Chris, here's your Christmas present.''
Lack
tried complaining to Bragg but claimed that Bragg did not stop and indeed
retaliated by saddling him with a more punishing work schedule. ''You can say
it's horseplay, and men are all alike, but not all men are Neanderthals,'' says
Sharon Iskra, the lawyer who represented Lack. ''Chris was this decent, likable
guy in his 20's. He was married, had a couple of kids and needed a job but
didn't want to put up with this kind of thing.''
You
hear a lot these days about how workplaces are rife with surliness and
small-scale thuggeries. You hear a lot too about how American culture in
general is coarser, more vulgarly sexualized and less respectful of privacy
than it once was. (''Contemporary
vulgarism'' will soon doom enforcement of
all sexual-harassment law, a federal judge in Georgia argued last year, and compel American workers simply to accept a certain amount
of ''boorish behavior'' on the job.) In one sense, male-on-male sexual-harassment claims,
with their tales of ''goosing'' and chuckleheaded verbal abuse, corroborate
these observations -- and indeed amplify them with an elaborate catalog of
indignities. But in another sense they contradict them. It may well be that
more men are using obscene language and indulging in aggressive hazing rituals
at the car lot or the factory than they ever did. How would you ever measure such
a thing? But it is certainly true that more men are complaining in public about
these aspects of their working lives. (Sometimes they even complain about
collateral damage, like the restaurant manager who charged that the owner's
harassment of female employees created a hostile working environment for him.)
''Twenty years ago these kinds of things would have ended up with somebody
getting beaten up in the parking lot,'' Bruce McMoran says. ''Now they're more
likely to end up in court.''
Complaints
like the ones brought by Carlton and Lack represent a peculiar development for
sexual-harassment law and especially for the concept of ''hostile
environment.'' Feminist legal scholars first
introduced the idea of a hostile environment in the 80's, in response to the
fact that a lot of workplace harassment consisted not of bluntly quid pro quo
sexual solicitations (sleep with me, and I'll give you a promotion) but of
sexual jokes and vulgarity. Since women were
presumed to be more offended by coarse behavior than men were, a workplace in
which such joking was the norm was discriminatory by definition -- and a
violation of civil rights law, as opposed to a violation of sensibility or
privacy or taste.
The
hostile-environment idea has always been problematic, however, as the legal
scholar Rosa Ehrenreich, among others, has pointed out. Rather than assuming
that workplace harassment is wrong because women are human beings and all human
beings deserve to be treated with dignity, it assumes that women are somehow
''uniquely vulnerable to men,'' as Ehrenreich puts it. And the reason they are
is that men are supposedly ''always vulgar and loutish,'' or that women
supposedly ''have 'special' sensitivities and rights that men do not share.''
But the hostile-environment concept becomes even more dubious if it turns out
that a growing number of men do share some of the same sensitivities, even when
they work in blue-collar settings, which some courts have held to a lower
standard.
And
the truth is that male-against-male claims sit uneasily within the framework of
sexual-harassment law, even as they expose, in their own peculiar way, some of
the persistent weaknesses of that framework. Before 1998, it was not at all
clear whether same-sex harassment was even actionable. Harassment law as we
knew it owed a great deal to the feminist legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon's
gloss on Title VII, the provision of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibiting
discrimination based on race, religion and sex. Starting in the 1970's,
MacKinnon began elaborating an argument that sexual advances in the workplace
constitute discrimination against women, the historically subordinated sex and
the one most often on the receiving end of such advances.
But
this neat division -- men as harassers, women as victims -- did not hold for
long. Indeed, by the mid-90's, the courts were besieged with male-on-male
harassment cases, the very last sort of cases that either the drafters of Title
VII or its feminist interpreters had ever envisaged. There was some legal precedent
for allowing that members of the same race could discriminate against one
another. ''Because of the many facets of
human motivation,'' the Supreme Court declared in 1977, ''it would be unwise to
presume as a matter of law that human beings of one definable group will not
discriminate against members of their group.''
But this still left the status of same-sex discrimination, let alone
harassment, ambiguous. Between 1992 and 1997, four different federal appeals
courts, asked to determine whether same-sex harassment was actionable, came up
with four different answers.
The
Fourth Circuit ruled that same-sex Title VII claims were actionable only if the
accused harasser was homosexual and could therefore be motivated by sexual
desire. The Eighth Circuit ruled that men could prove they had been sexually
harassed by other men if they could show that women were not subject to the
same debasing treatment. Since the treatment in question in that case was
''bagging'' -- a variation on goosing that targets the testicles -- anatomical
literalism carried the day. Women didn't have testicles, ergo only men could be
bagged, ergo men were bagged ''because'' of their sex and in violation of Title
VII.
The
Seventh Circuit, in a 1997 case known as Doe v. City of Belleville, drew a
sweeping conclusion allowing for same-sex harassment cases of many kinds. Title
VII was sex-neutral, the court ruled; it didn't specifically prohibit
discrimination against men or women. Moreover, the judges argued, there was
such a thing as gender stereotyping, and if someone was harassed on that basis,
it was unlawful. This case, for example, centered on teenage twin brothers
working a summer job cutting grass in the city cemetery of Belleville, Ill. One
boy wore an earring, which caused him no end of grief that particular summer --
including a lot of menacing talk among his co-workers about sexually assaulting
him in the woods and sending him ''back to San Francisco.'' One of his
harassers, identified in court documents as a large former marine, culminated a
verbal campaign by backing the earring-wearer against a wall and grabbing him
by the testicles to see ''if he was a girl or a guy.'' The teenager had been
''singled out for this abuse,'' the court ruled, ''because the way in which he
projected the sexual aspect of his personality'' -- meaning his gender -- did
not conform to his co-workers' view of appropriate masculine behavior.''
Meanwhile,
the Fifth Circuit, in Garcia v. Elf Atochem, issued an equally sweeping declaration
of the opposite bent. Garcia complained that while working at a
chemical-processing factory in Texas, a plant foreman continually grabbed him
and ''made sexual motions from behind.'' But the judges ruled that same-sex
claims of harassment, even those with ''sexual overtones,'' did not fall under
Title VII, which in their view addressed only ''gender discrimination.''
When,
in 1998, the Supreme Court set about resolving these formidable differences, it
took up the case of Joseph Oncale, a roustabout on an offshore oil rig whose
co-workers had selected him for various sex-related humiliations. Not all
sexual conduct in the workplace was unlawful, the court emphasized. It had,
first of all, to be ''sufficiently severe or pervasive'' to ''alter the conditions
of the victim's employment.'' Just as important, it had to be demonstrated that
''members of one sex are exposed to disadvantageous terms or conditions of
employment to which members of the other sex are not exposed,'' thereby
establishing discrimination ''because of sex.'' (In other words, the workplace
would have to be one in which men were the victims of harassment but not
women.) If these conditions were met, the court ruled, same-sex harassment was
indeed actionable. There was no language in Title VII suggesting otherwise.
In
same-sex harassment cases, the court elaborated, a plaintiff could prevail in
one of three ways. He could present credible evidence that the alleged harasser
was a homosexual and therefore motivated by sexual desire. He could present
evidence that the harasser was animated by ''a general hostility'' to men in
the workplace (or, if the plaintiff was a woman harassed by a woman, to women
in the workplace). Finally, he could show evidence of differential treatment of
the sexes in a place where people of both sexes worked.
But
if the Supreme Court clarified some questions -- particularly by specifying
that same-sex harassment need not be motivated by desire -- it left others
cloudier than ever. For one thing, as a
practical matter it's hard to imagine many circumstances in which men would be
motivated by a general hostility to other men in the workplace, while it is easy to
imagine men motivated by a general hostility to women in the workplace. A man might be subject to annoying or even appalling
assaults on his dignity every day at work -- and they might be sexual in
content -- but defining them as discrimination is still a huge and awkward
reach.
Moreover,
the knotty logic behind the Supreme Court's ruling has had some peculiar
unintended consequences, including the fostering of a rather perverse
''equal-opportunity harasser'' defense. Following the court's argument that
same-sex harassment is an actionable offense only when there is disparate
treatment of the sexes in a workplace, then a workplace boor who treats men and
women with the same contempt is off the hook. The idea that you can defend
yourself by being equally awful to both sexes is ''just dumb,'' says David
Sherwyn, a law professor at Cornell. ''It couldn't be what anyone wanted out of
this.'' Yet even Sherwyn has written that ''employers are well advised to raise
the prospect of such a defense in any litigation and in settlement talks.''
In
fact, the equal-opportunity-harasser defense has been argued successfully. In
the 2000 case Holman v. Indiana, for instance, a husband and wife working for
the state's Department of Transportation charged that the same supervisor
sexually harassed them both. He asked the wife to go to bed with him and gave
her negative job evaluations when she rejected him. But he was also accused of
''grabbing the husband's head while asking for sexual favors,'' then getting
back at him for not complying by opening his locker and throwing away his
belongings. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals rejected both the husband's
and the wife's claims (and exonerated their boss-from-hell) on the basis that
''conduct occurring equally to members of both genders cannot be discrimination
'because of sex.''' The Supreme Court declined to consider the case on appeal.
Christopher
Lack, the former Wal-Mart employee, eventually fell afoul of the same paradox.
A jury in West Virginia awarded him $80,000 in damages after a brief trial in
April 1996. But an appeals court overturned Lack's victory in February 2001. He
had not proved that he was subject to discrimination as a man, the court
concluded, because he had proved all too well that his boss was an
indiscriminate jerk. Bragg, the appeals court said, was a ''vulgar and
offensive supervisor, obnoxious to men and women alike.''
Even
Joe Carlton -- the welder who didn't like being goosed -- ran into similar
trouble. A jury in Tennessee found in Carlton's favor in 1999 and awarded him
$300,000. But a federal appeals court overturned the verdict in September 2001.
''Since the conduct complained of in many of these sexual-harassment cases is
so offensive,'' wrote Judge Ralph Guy, ''a sense of decency initially inclines
one to want to grant relief.'' But Guy overturned the decision because, in his
view, the E.E.O.C. had failed to prove that Carlton's harasser discriminated
against men. Even though Louis Davis had never goosed women at Harbert-Yeargin,
he might well have had there been more of them in goosing range. Besides, Guy
argued, it could hardly be said that Davis was motivated by a general hostility
to men in the workplace. ''Mr. Davis liked nothing better than to have men in
the workplace,'' he reasoned. ''If not, who else would he roughhouse with?''
(The E.E.O.C. recently asked for a rehearing of the case, though Carlton
himself reached a settlement with Harbert-Yeargin.)
The
case law is made all the more confusing by the fact that while some male
victims of sexual harassment were clearly chosen because they are gay, sexual
orientation is not covered by Title VII, and anyone who claims harassment on
that basis, no matter how terrible the facts of the case, has no recourse. One
way to get around this is to argue that a
man was harassed not because he is a homosexual but because he is
''effeminate'' or ''walks like a woman'' or wears an earring or lives with his
mother and is therefore a victim of what is known as gender stereotyping.
Sometimes he is or does one or more of these things and is heterosexual, like
the teenager who worked at the Illinois cemetery. And sometimes he is gay, in
which case he stands the best chance of winning if he has never acknowledged at
work that he is gay.
Earlier
this year, for instance, a judge allowed a Boston postal carrier named Stephen
Centola to proceed with his Title VII claims case against his employer. Centola
had been taunted by co-workers who demanded to know if he had AIDS yet and left
pictures of Richard Simmons in pink hot pants and a sign that read
''Heterosexual Replacement on Duty'' in his work space. Centola is homosexual,
but because he had not said so at work, the judge found sufficient evidence to
support his claim that his co-workers had ''punished him for being
impermissibly feminine.'' Surely one interpretation of such a ruling is that it
pays to stay closeted at work. Deborah Zalesne, a CUNY law professor, sums up
the problem this way: ''Basically, if your
harasser is gay, you stand a good chance of winning a same-sex harassment case. If you are gay, you
lose.''
But
even this basic rule of thumb is subject to strange variations. Last month a federal appeals court in San Francisco
overturned two earlier rulings dismissing the claims of a gay butler named
Medina Rene who said he was harassed on the job at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las
Vegas. Rene claimed that he had been repeatedly poked in the behind and forced
to look at pictures of men having sex. In a 7-4 ruling by the Ninth Circuit
Court of Appeals, Judge William A. Fletcher declared that a worker's sexual
orientation is ''irrelevant'' in Title VII cases. By Fletcher's lights, the
simple fact that the physical assaults Rene claimed to have endured had ''a
sexual nature'' made them discrimination, and actionable under federal law. But
Fletcher's reading was a highly idiosyncratic interpretation of Title VII. And
the dissenting judges recognized this, concluding that however ''appalling''
the behavior alleged, it did not constitute a violation of federal
antidiscrimination law. Meanwhile, two of the judges who sided with Fletcher
offered a very different reason: Rene had a legitimate case not because the
teasing he suffered was sexual in tone and content but because he had been
gender-stereotyped. Of course, this argument raises its own questions: Does gender stereotyping cover cases in which the man
harassed is straight-acting but gay or only those in which the victim, to put
it bluntly, acts like a queen but doesn't say he's gay? The only thing made clear by the Rene ruling is that
sexual-harassment law is messier and less coherent than ever.
Of
course, when you're a man in the midst of making a sexual-harassment charge
against another man, you're probably not thinking all that much about the vexed
doctrine behind it. You probably couldn't care less about the historical
contradictions of sexual-harassment law. Mostly you're thinking about how angry
you felt at work and about how relieved you are to have a way of legally
avenging yourself.
Not
long ago I spent an afternoon with Joseph DePronio, a graphic designer from
Buffalo, N.Y., who recently became a plaintiff in a same-sex harassment suit.
DePronio is a handsome, angular 35-year-old with close-shaved hair, alert green
eyes and the half-hopeful, half-exasperated manner of somebody who has always
been a little more serious than the people around him. Since he has been
struggling with the weird burden of his lawsuit, that divide has become even
sharper. Relatives tease him about the case at family parties, trotting out
some choice smutty lines. Though DePronio has a sense of humor, that kind of
ribbing doesn't go over well with him these days. He got himself a T-shirt this
summer whose slogan sums up his mood: ''I Get Enough Exercise Just Pushing My
Luck.''
DePronio's
wife, Tina, is a hairdresser whose fingernails that day were painted with
sparkly silver stripes. She had the air of a naturally effervescent person
good-heartedly striving for a more somber tone. We sat in their living room,
watching their 3-year-old son, Joey, zip around in his Spider-Man costume. For
a while we talked about Joe's love of drawing, and how he'd wanted to be an
artist for as long as he could remember. As a teenager he painted big portraits
of his favorite rock bands: Black Sabbath, Motley Crue, Kiss. When he was older
he had a job in Sarasota, Fla., turning architectural blueprints of new
mini-malls and the like into drawings that clients could relate to -- complete
with brightly attired families and puffy trees. But eventually DePronio found
that he had a particular knack for designing large-scale signs: billboards, neon
logos, multiplex marquees. He was delighted when, in 1999, a company called
U.S. Signs recruited him for a job in its small office right outside Buffalo,
DePronio's hometown. But it was in that office that his life took an
unexpected, and unwelcome, turn into Neil LaBute territory.
Throughout
the seven months he worked there, DePronio says, a U.S. Signs employee named
Corey Perez filled DePronio's e-mail in-box with lurid material ranging from
off-color jokes to hard-core porn. (The complaint filed on DePronio's behalf by
the E.E.O.C. says that there were ''200 to 300'' such messages; DePronio says
that those were just the ones he was able to retrieve and that in fact there
were about 1,000.) Since Perez was a senior account representative who brought
in clients and assigned work to DePronio, DePronio often felt obliged to open
Perez's e-mail, which might contain information he needed to know. But while
DePronio says he told Perez several times that he found the dirty jokes and
images offensive, Perez laughed off his protests and once sent him an e-mail
message that said, ''You love it sweet cheeks.'' Perez would not comment for
this article on any of DePronio's specific allegations, saying only that ''the truth will come out at the trial.''
That
afternoon at his home, while Tina shooed Joey away, DePronio sat down at his
computer and flipped through dozens of what he said were Perez's e-mail
messages. We're all used to unwanted e-mail about hot teenagers and to
tasteless jokes sent to us and 50 other close personal friends. But this was, I
must say, an extremely outre archive, sort of like the fever dream of somebody
who had been locked up since childhood with a steady supply of Bourbon Street
novelty items and ''Girls Gone Wild'' videos. There was a Ricky Martin cartoon
adorned with dancing penises. A picture labeled ''the perfect woman'' showed a
naked female body with two crotches and no head. There was a joke about
something called ''the girlfriend remote,'' containing buttons marked ''PMS:
Off,'' ''Bra: Off,'' ''Voice: Off.'' There were a number of nudie photographs
-- old, young, fat, anorexic, male, femalee -- and several explicit video clips
of sexual acts. And on and on, into the far reaches of grossness.
''Look,
I'm 35, I'm not naive,'' DePronio said, after he turned off the computer. ''I
know what's out on the Internet. And I'm not
an angel. I'm a normal person. I'm not going to sit here and say I've never
seen a pornographic video. But this was in
my office. This was my work. What if a woman -- somebody I work with, a client
-- walks in and sees what's on my screen? What's she going to think? What's she
going to do? I think some of this is offensive to women.'' He paused for a
moment, looking genuinely puzzled. ''I mean,
is it just me, or is this really not funny?''
For a
long time, DePronio did not think of Perez's behavior as sexual harassment. He thought of it as something he could stop by saying
repeatedly that he didn't like it; he thought of it as a bewildering and
embarrassing daily annoyance that put him in a lousy mood at work and at home
too and made him rue the day he moved back to Buffalo. For several months he didn't even tell Tina about it --
wouldn't she figure he was inviting this kind of e-mail somehow? -- and that
made him feel worse, detached from everybody
around him. Perez sent many of the same
e-mail messages to a couple of other people who worked in the office, including
one woman. ''I felt they kind of accepted it,'' DePronio said. ''I was the one who wasn't going along.''
What
changed his mind, and made him start thinking about his experience under the
rubric of sexual harassment, was what happened after he wrote a letter to the
company president detailing his complaints about Perez. At first DePronio was
told to work from home. A month later the company laid him off, saying it no
longer had enough work for him. (DePronio says -- and the E.E.O.C. has charged
-- that he was laid off in retaliation for
his complaints.) On the Internet he found a
New York lawyer named Jonathan Bernstein, who recommended a lawsuit. At the
E.E.O.C. office in New York they hooked up with a young lawyer named Raechel
Adams, who found the fact that this was
harassment mainly by e-mail particularly
interesting. DePronio hoped that the suit -- when it is finally over, that is; for these things can drag on for years -- would help him
feel better about an episode in his life that had left him demoralized and
depressed.
But
when I talked to him over the summer he wasn't so sure. ''Will it help?'' he said. ''Who knows? A big part of
me would still have preferred if there had been some way to sit down and talk
with somebody at the company and end it that way without lawyers and
everything.''
For
several years now, legal scholars and others have been arguing that sexual-harassment law is deeply flawed. After ''almost two decades of litigation,'' as Kathryn Abrams, a feminist legal scholar, has
written, it is a doctrine still riddled with
''inconsistencies, exclusions and misunderstandings.'' It is hardly self-evident, even this late in the game,
for instance, why sexual overtures should be
conceived of as a form of discrimination. As
Jeffrey Rosen, who writes widely about legal issues, has observed: ''Discrimination usually implies some form of contempt
for a class of people being singled out for disadvantageous treatment as a
consequence of their shared characteristics.
Unwanted advances, by contrast, often
involve a man's attraction to a particular woman because of her unique
characteristics.''
The
explanations usually offered for thinking of sexual harassment as a civil
rights violation are each in their own way unsatisfying. Is harassment discrimination, Rosa Ehrenreich asks,
''because a man who propositions a female employee would presumably not have
propositioned a male employee, and thus the propositioned woman has been
treated differently than her male colleagues because of her sex? Is it because sexual harassment is motivated by hostility
to the presence of women in the workplace?
Is it because, in a context of patriarchy and sexual violence against women,
the mere presence of sexuality in the workplace, however motivated, is
inherently threatening to women and prevents them from enjoying their work and
succeeding on the same basis as men?''
The
first explanation relies on a limited and formalistic notion of equality. The second neglects the fact that while sexual harassment
may be motivated by hostility to women in the workplace, it frequently is not. (It
may, for instance, be motivated by attraction to a particular person.) The
third offers a paternalistic view of women as paradigmatic victims in need of
protection from all forms of sexual expression.
In
her critiques of harassment law, Vicki Schultz, a Yale law professor, points
out that the emphasis on the specifically
sexual content of harassment is unfortunate in two ways. On the one hand it
ignores other kinds of unequal treatment that may in fact be more damaging: male supervisors refusing to provide required training
or work materials to women, declaring that no woman could ever do the job in
question, announcing that women are dumb. (In cases involving all of these
examples, courts have declined to consider them harassment.) And on the other hand it can induce companies to clamp
down on any hints of sexuality in the workplace, including friendly banter in
which women might willingly engage. We've
all heard the stories of sexual-harassment codes gone way overboard: the Miller
brewing company executive fired for retelling the ''Seinfeld'' joke about the
woman whose name rhymed with ''clitoris''; the teaching assistant whose desktop
photo of his scantily clad wife elicited a hostile-environment complaint. The
prevailing legal view of harassment is ''both too narrow and too broad,'' to
Schultz's mind. ''Too narrow because the focus on rooting out unwanted sexual
activity has allowed us to feel good about protecting women from sexual abuse
while leading us to overlook equally pernicious forms of gender-based
mistreatment. Too broad because the emphasis on sexual conduct has encouraged
some companies to ban all forms of sexual interaction, even when those do not
threaten women's equality on the job.''
But
even when it is not stretched to absurd extremes, sexual-harassment law has become a clumsy substitute for
manners. Useful and important as it has been
in opening up some workplaces to women and in reminding
employers not to treat their offices as private dating pools, sexual-harassment doctrine and the threat of a lawsuit
cannot replace informal codes of civil behavior. Yet we often seem to expect
them to, pinning our hopes for fixing workplace relations between the sexes --
and now within them -- on litigation, as we pin so many of our hopes for social
regeneration.
If
these problems have been in evidence for some time now, though, the increase in male-on-male sexual-harassment cases makes them much starker. It underscores the intellectual
incoherency of the whole doctrine. It raises the awkward problem of the
equal-opportunity harasser. It wreaks havoc
with the notion, so central to sexual-harassment law till now, that sexual
expression in the workplace hurts women more than men. It casts into bold relief the absence of sexual
orientation from Title VII's list of protected characteristics.
And
when sexual-harassment law is extended to men accusing other men, it assumes
that motivations for noxious behavior are straightforward -- hostility to men
in the workplace, for instance -- when they are more likely weird, involuted
and mysterious. Goosing, to take one example, might seem to be the very
simplest, or at least simple-minded, of acts. (It only really makes sense when
gooser and goosee are 12-year-olds.) But its motivations are, in their own way,
fairly complex: boredom, repressed attraction, a need to humiliate a co-worker
out of personal dislike or to establish one's dominance, even a sense that
participants are perpetuating -- don't laugh -- a tradition.
It is
equally hard to demonstrate that gender stereotyping -- a provocative but
slippery notion -- motivates harassment. As Joseph Carlton's case shows, not
all male victims fail to conform, in any clear-cut way, to their harassers'
norms of masculinity. And attributing harassment to ''hostility to men'' in the
workplace seems an even thinner reed. You could imagine a situation in which,
say, a man employed in a nail salon might feel oppressed by his female
co-workers. But most charges of sexual
harassment brought by men are probably not brought against women, and the typical case seems to involve a mostly male
workplace.
None of this is to say that workers
should have no recourse when they suffer assaults on their dignity and privacy. There's no good reason that a man should go to work and
be grabbed every day. There's no good reason that Joe DePronio should tolerate
gross-out e-mail from a supervisor every day. It's just to say that not all of
these assaults should be called discrimination and be treated as violations of
Title VII. It may be possible to handle more
of them through mediation and to prevent others by recognizing that not all
men, white-collar or blue-collar, share the same sensibilities.
More
broadly, the whole paradigm of sexual harassment, and in particular its
anchoring in discrimination law, is due for reconsideration. Sometimes sexual
harassment is discrimination: sexual humiliation can be part of a concerted
campaign to keep women out of a workplace, for instance. But often the harm it
does is less to one's equal standing as a man or a woman than to one's dignity
or autonomy, regardless of sex. Rosa Ehrenreich has argued that it makes more
sense to think of sexual harassment as a harm to dignity -- a concept that
tort law has long recognized -- than as a form of discrimination. Harassment may occur in a context of discrimination
against women, but the harm it inflicts is something different, she observes. The harm is its
violation of ''each individual's right to be treated with the respect and
concern that is due to her as a full and equally valuable human being'' -- and,
in practical terms, to do one's job to the best of one's ability. Many cases now brought under Title VII could instead
come under tort laws, like those proscribing battery
(which is defined, broadly, as ''a harmful or offensive contact with a person''
made with intent), assault, intentional infliction of emotional distress and invasion
of privacy. One objection to this approach
is that there would be less money to be won, since victims would often be going after the individuals who
tormented them rather than after deep-pocketed companies that employed them. That doesn't necessarily seem to be a bad thing, though,
especially if it discourages frivolous or opportunistic suits.
''Actions
that would humiliate, torment, threaten, intimidate, pressure, demean,
frighten, outrage or injure a reasonable person are actions that can be said to
injure an individual's dignitary interests and, if sufficiently severe, can
give rise to causes of action in tort,''
Ehrenreich writes. Often these concepts come far closer to the facts of
sexual-harassment cases than the concept of discrimination does. This approach
has the virtue of preserving the legitimacy and coherency of antidiscrimination
law while still recognizing that bad things happen between people at work, some
of which may be susceptible to legal remedies. All
discrimination entails harm to dignity, but not all harm to dignity is
discrimination.
Back
in 1996 a man named Phil Quick won a settlement from a muffler production plant
in Grinnell, Iowa, where bagging was a popular practice. When he was hired
there, even the plant manager warned Quick that it could happen to him. And
sure enough it did; Quick said that co-workers grabbed his testicles about 100
times over the course of several months, on one occasion hard enough to injure
him. The company never denied that bagging was pervasive at the plant, that
Quick was a victim of it or that management knew about it and failed to do anything
to stop it. But company lawyers argued that Quick was bagged -- and addressed
with homophobic epithets, though he is straight -- not because of his sex but
because of personal enmity. (Some of his co-workers were angry at him for
withdrawing his union membership.) Quick
prevailed, not because he could prove a pattern of anti-male animus at the
plant but because, to put it baldly, only men have testicles. Of course, no one could deny that Quick was subject to
ill treatment. But was it discrimination based on sex? Only in the narrowest,
most anatomically bound sense.
In
any event, Quick isn't all that happy with the outcome of his lawsuit. He wishes that his
case had gone to trial, so that people he knew didn't have the impression that his grievance was ''all
about money,'' when it was really about ''how you treat other people.'' Nowadays he thinks
that bringing a sexual-harassment suit was probably the hardest means
of redress he could have pursued. He says
that people look down on
him for going that route, even in his hometown in Iowa, where he counted
on some good will. ''Harsh things have been said to me by people I've known
my whole life,'' he says. ''Not people I'd consider my friends, but still. There's not much
empathy in the general populace for men who make same-sex harassment claims. People just don't
understand it. I guess they think you're weak or something.''
Margaret
Talbot is a contributing writer for the magazine and a fellow at the New
America Foundation.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
The Associated Press. (Friday, October 18, 2002) Russia's Shocking Birth Statistics. Moscow: CBS News.com.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/18/world/main526182.shtml
Russia's
Shocking Birth Statistics
MOSCOW,
(CBS/AP)
(AP)
About 60 percent of all pregnancies in Russia end in abortion, and another 10
percent of pregnant women lose unborn children because of health problems, the
nation's chief gynecologist said Friday.
Russia
ranks second in the world behind Romania in the number of abortions per capita, Vladimir Kulakov, the head of the Scientific Center for
Obstetrics and Gynecology, said at a news conference.
Girls
in Russia under 18 account for every tenth abortion, he said. Doctors say the use of contraception is less
widespread in Russia than in the West.
Of
some 38 million women of childbearing age, about 6 million are infertile, and
medical authorities consider abortions a major cause of infertility, Kulakov
said.
He
said about half the women who bear children in Russia do not get enough
nourishment or vitamins during pregnancy, and that 58.8 percent of all newborns
last year were born with illnesses.
Federal
programs to provide pregnant women with additional food and vitamins have been
thwarted by a lack of funds. Financial problems have also stalled use of new
medical technologies that would help high-risk expectant mothers, Kulakov said.
"Budget
spending on health protection is increasing year after year, but is clearly
insufficient," he said.
The
1991 Soviet collapse and the ensuing economic turmoil has led to the
disintegration of the Soviet-era state health care system — a key factor behind
Russia's population decline. According to
the State Statistics Committee's latest estimate, Russia's population has declined by about 4 million to
143.4 million since 1989.
Health
statistics have improved in recent years as the Russian economy has registered
several successive years of growth.
The
infant mortality dropped from 19.3 deaths per every 1,000 babies under age 1 in
1993, to 14.6 last year, said Larisa Gavrilova, a deputy chief of the maternity
department of the Russian Health Ministry. That was still twice as high as in
the United States, where 6.9 out of every 1,000 infants died before their first
birthday in 2000.
The
number of women who died during delivery also decreased from 50 per 100,000
births in 1997 to 36.5 last year, Gavrilova said told the ITAR-Tass news
agency.
©
MMII The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be
published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference (Key points only)
Wadhwa, Soma., Menezes, Saira., Rajesh Y.P., Biswas, Ashis. (Monday, October 13, 1997) A Permissive Feeling. India: Outlook India
Magazine.
http://outlookindia.com/full.asp?sid=1&fname=cover_story&fodname=19971013
Page
1
Where over 20 divorce petitions are filed on an average every day in
the capital alone. Where it makes marketing sense to launch a magazine for the
modern Indian woman with the challenge: "Smart. Sexy. Honest. Are you up
to it?" Where national dailies give space and sanction to lesbian and gay
causes. Where sex is no longer
sacred, nor taboo. Where
the chattering classes refer to the ever-growing politically correct lexicon...to
find that the
promiscuous and the adulterous are now called the Sexually Liberated.
"Sex before wedlock or even outside of it is no aberration today.
I'd be stupid if I thought virginity was some kind of a virtue. My friends would think I'm someone out of
the Bible if I accused a woman of being adulterous!" laughs Ruchika Pandey, a student of
Mumbai's Sydenham College. Comfortably candid about the two "serious
relationships" she's had by age 20, Ruchika openly talks of that one
"exciting sexual encounter" with her best pal's boyfriend after a
wild party last year.
"My friend dumped him for someone else anyway. So what's all this
promiscuity nonsense about? Who am I
to judge anyone's sexual behaviour? Why judge others when
everyone's into it!"
Years apart in age, Bengali litterateur Sunil Gangopadhyay, many of
whose works have dealt with inter-personal relationships, is not alarmed by
these youthful statements validating a promiscuous trend: "If two persons
are into something by mutual consent, I do not find anything objectionable.
After all, this has to do with the very basic instincts in men and women, and
artificial restraints cannot make much of a difference."
BORN a decade before Ruchika and much later than Gangopadhyay, computer
engineer Sanjay Iyengar reiterates their opinions.
Page
2
The bachelor says he has known too many "sexless marriages".
"Legitimate sex, I gather from talks with married and unmarried friends,
is boring. Without
guilt and uncertainties sex is a monotonous routine. Like brushing your teeth! Thankfully, more people are coming around to
this view," he says with a chuckle. "There's more sexual activity
here than the prudes would be comfortable with."
…
Another study in the book had 25 per cent of school students interviewed
in urban and semi-urban areas of Delhi, Haryana, UP and Rajasthan agreeing with
the statement: "I
believe in getting pleasure where and when I want."
…
About 40 per cent of the calls that the Delhi-based Population Service
International's sexual helpline receives are from people who are into pre- and
extra-marital sexual relationships. Many of the callers, seemingly sexually
active, are less than
16 years old. Calls before Valentine's Day have many
youngsters—who choose that day to have sex for the first time—seeking advice on
contraceptives.
"Casual sexual relationships are not uncommon at all. By 'casual' I mean
having a physical relationship with someone you don't know for very long and don't have an emotional commitment to. It's not as if these are freak sexual encounters, many engage in casual sex regularly,"
says project manager Kabir Singh.
Over 75 per cent of Bangalore-based psychotherapist Saul Perreira's
patients come to him with relationship problems. "That's quite a bit of an
increase. On a recent
visit to a girl's college, I found about 65 per cent of them were sexually
experienced by age 21. Hedonism has taken over. 'Maximise pleasure' is the new motto. Thus the tendency to seek push-button sex
like all other push-button pursuits," he observes.
Hedonism
n.
…
In Delhi-based neuropsychologist Dr Avdesh Sharma's professional
experience, sexual values have changed immensely for the urban Indian.
"Today, sex is
not just for procreation or long-lasting relationships. It is a tool for
self-fulfillment in a Me-First generation. It is what one uses to
fit in with peers, for career advancement and even as vengeance. Most importantly, sex is now a part of a package in
inter-personal relationships. No longer is it just a
one-person-in-a-lifetime thing,"
he says.
Sexual permissiveness seems to have arrived in urban India. Finding its way through the labyrinthine
sexual relationships portrayed in the bold and beautiful potboilers beamed continually into drawing rooms. Borrowing from the new working woman who
has more access and is more accessible to men than ever before.
Page
3
Thriving in discoesque get-togethers where alcohol helps inhibitions vanish. Gaining ground because of the non-judge-mental attitude that seems to be the mood in the metros.
But didn't promiscuity always exist? What is new about sexual
activity—before marriage, within it or outside wedlock—in the land of
Kamasutra? Opportunities, perhaps. And the choices that education has
granted to the
urbanite who now works in offices that aren't unisex, thinks little of living
alone and of marrying only when he or she desires to. Also, a slew of stigmas have lost their sting. In urban India, at
least, virginity is ceasing to be a moral indicator, live-in relationships and
divorces are no more social shockers.
Hardly surprising, then, that 80 per cent of the Delhi-based women that
Geetan Batra interviewed for a book on the 'changing attitude of the Indian woman
towards her own sexuality', were not
inclined to take any moral stance against friends who were indulging in
extra-marital affairs.
"Considering that the age of the respondents varied between 20 and 50, one
assessed that the shock
value and disapproval levels attached to promiscuity—in upper-middle class
urban India—has reduced tremendously across the board," says Geetan.
Pre-marital sex is no longer considered a sin, indicates a recent survey, conducted in 16
cities by the Sex Education Counselling Research Training Division of the
Family Planning Association of India. Ninety and 77 per cent of unmarried and
educated women and men (between age 15 and 29) respectively condoned sex before
marriage. Significantly, 16 per cent of the men and 5 per cent of the women
felt that sexual experience before wedlock is a 'must'. On a smaller scale,
Professor Paul Sachdev's survey based on a questionnaire given to 1,661
students of Delhi's Jamia Millia Islamia university had three-fourths of the
male respondents say they didn't consider lack of virginity important.
The very definition of middle-class morality seems to be changing. Madras-based DEGA Institute's recently
released 11-year-old study on the sexual mores of the middle and the upper
middle class had 43 per cent (from a base of 16,154 respondents) confess to
having had pre-marital sex. One out of every five married respondents admitted
to having had extra-marital affairs.
Analysing the social arithmetic, Delhi-based advertising professional
Madhavi Menon says: "The
change is mostly because of the new profile of the Indian woman. My mother was
married at age 21. I am unmarried at 32. The only men she really knew or met
alone after sundown were family members. I have male friends who stay overnight
at my pad after a late party. For mom, societal opinions were paramount. I
don't even know my neighbours. I care a damn if they disapprove because I
am not a virgin at age 32 just because I am a spinster!"
It's the New Emancipated Woman like Madhavi, feels filmmaker Aparna Sen, who has heralded the "present liberal
behaviour". Sen
tackled the theme closely in her highly-acclaimed film Paroma, which depicts an
upper-middle-class Calcuttan housewife's journey to discover herself through an
extra-marital affair with a man younger than herself. Sex and sexuality, therefore, become an
important part of the Indian Woman's redefin-ition. "Now, she is perhaps seen as more
assertive," Sen observes. And, maybe, more available.
"The woman colleague at office and the friend's wife were always
objects for male fantasy," says
28-year-old banker Himanshu Vatsya. "But now, after liberal doses of promiscuous soaps
from the West and rub-offs from women's magazines that give them tips on how to be a winner in
bed.
Page
4
..they are seemingly more accessible."
IN touch with the changing attitudes that are sweeping metro-India
through her weekly chatshow The Kiron Kher Show, our very own
desi-Oprah-in-the-making Kiron opines that globalisation is responsible. A recent episode of her programme had women above 40 discussing the
sexual implications of middle-age. Answering a question as to whether she
preferred Amitabh Bachchan over her husband Anupam Kher, the hostess
unabashedly chose Amitabh for admiration but for "a roll in the haystack", Anupam. A frankness that few Indian tube hosts and hostesses would
have demonstrated a few years ago. "Information is at one's fingertips, people are studying abroad
and subsequently each generation is more liberal than the previous," says Kiron.
Less macrocosmic in his views, Calcuttan finance executive Indranil
Chatterjee, 29, holds media titillation responsible for bringing about a revolution in sexual mores in the metros
in the short span of five years. "The young are deeply influenced by American
programmes, where people wear outrageous clothes and anything goes by way of
sex," he says.
And, these boob tube
offerings are increasingly becoming the guiding spirit for Indian
scriptwriters. The
stolidly middle-class Hum Log is giving way to serials like Junoon and Sahil
where extra-marital affairs
are portrayed as part of urban lifestyle.
Add to that the bedroom intrigues in serials like Santa Barbara and The
Bold and the Beautiful and it almost seems like the airwaves are enticing the urbanite into believing constancy in
relationships is unnatural. Our own
desi version of these Western soaps with a model-laden cast, A Mouthful of Sky,
had characters hop, skip and jump bedrooms between shots of martinis and
corporate intrigues. There was even a homosexual character. And why not?
"A couple of models in the serial are into mild drugs and each is going
around with 12 guys at a time," says the serial's producer Ashok Banker.
Beauty queen Madhu Sapre believes that with considerations for a successful career and affluence assuming
priority, relationships have taken a backseat.
"Which is why there is neither commitment nor intensity...promiscuity
follows," says the
svelte Sapre. Interestingly, filmmaker Basu Bhattacharya's last film before his
death, Astha, was a comment on marriage, materialism and adultery. He believed the yuppie's increasing access to easy money
is directly proportionate to his dissatisfaction in relationships. "Insecurities and restlessness have zoomed and along with it the
desire to live life faster. Today, 80
per cent of Bombay's hotels run on an hourly booking basis. Consumer culture has seduced and trapped us and rising promiscuity is a
part of that package," he said.
Experts add to these homegrown analyses. P.D. Gheewala, principal
counsellor at Bombay's family court, feels that the lack of patience to make marriages work, coupled with the fact that
divorce is no longer a deviant, have people flitting from one person to
another. This fragmentation of the family, says Dr Murli Desai, head of the Family
Studies unit at the Tata Institute for Social Sciences, has people's own wants take precedence over
relationships. For many,
cheating on a partner isn't a moral dilemma any more.
"The assertion of sexuality as a personal expression by today's
youth has nothing to do with their otherwise pro-social compassionate
behaviour. The whole
business is about treating sexuality as just another experience like going to
different restaurants,"
says Dr Shekhar Sheshadri, assistant professor at Bangalore-based NIMHANS.
Page
5
Interestingly, Dr Achal Bhagat, Apollo Hospital psychiatrist, feels
that increasing promiscuity
in urban India is better understood through Zubermann's theory about the
reasons for the making of drug addicts. "A sense of
alienation, low thresholds of boredom and desperate sensation-seeking is
pushing the lonely, stressed urbanite into one relationship after another, just
as it once pushed him into drugs," says Bhagat.
And is the fallout as
disastrous? Has the Star Plus-consuming, Wrangler-clad, disco-swinging modern
Hindustani successfully managed to block out the sexual conservatism that was
part of his education? Has he
managed to sever ties with his stable small-town relatives who hold on to
age-old values? Or, is he caught between traditional sexual
beliefs and his attempts to fit in with the modern mores of an upbeat society?
A graduate student at Delhi University, Priyaranjan Mohanti, says he breaks into cold sweat every time he
thinks of the mess he'd get into back home if his girlfriend insists on
marriage. "What if she's
not as modern as she seems and says that physical relationship must climax in a
wedding?" he asks anxiously. Housewife Sapna Banerjee is repulsed by the openness at the
get-togethers she attends and
complains her
husband's drunk colleagues often end up touching her: "But cringing and making a scene is out. It's narrow-minded,
old-fashioned and embarrasses my husband!" Ananya Sahani, a 27-year-old banker, faces a greater dilemma. Having gone through a broken marriage, two
relationships and three psychotherapists in two years, she's drug-doused and
depressed. "Is it wrong for progressive types to
expect commitment from people you've slept with?" she asks.
Sahani is not the only one with these difficult questions. Tarishi, a
Delhi-based helpline for reproductive and sexual health issues, has received 15,000 calls since its inception 19 months
ago. "On the one hand we have 15 to 60-year-olds
enquiring about pleasure enhancement techniques and on the
other, we have to deal with fears regarding pregnancy, discovery and guilt
emerging from a middle-class value system," says director Radhika Chandiramani. A telling instance of these
confusing times, Radhika observes, was when a young boy, keen on having sex with his classmate who was
similarly inclined, wanted to know whether her future husband would get to know
that she wasn't a virgin.
More dangerously, says Dr Bhagat,instances of sexual abuse have risen dramatically. "Children and women are commodified. Patients come in with
horrifying stories of sexual humiliation," says the doctor. Social activist Swami Agnivesh isn't surprised.
Inundated as the urban centres are with erotic Western images, the firebrand
swami feels they have become the
breeding ground for sexual distortions and perversions. The crime indicators, he says, prove what all this preoccupation with illegitimate sex is doing to
Indian society. The
Personal Point triple murder and the Naina Sahni tandoor murder are surrounded
by tales of sex and sleaze. "These, of course, are extreme examples, but
they are telling warning signals. Sex was a sublime science in the Vedas, today it has become an
appendage of a degenerate culture,"
the activist warns. Others work out the dichotomy between old and new value
systems better. Sobhana Sonpar, student counsellor at IIT, Delhi, says that
though more students are matter-of-fact about being sexually active, most seem to think they will marry their
partners eventually. "Whether they will marry or not is
another thing. But for now it is good enough reasoning to be less furtive and
confused. What'll happen later remains to be seen," she says.
Sociologist Sudhir Kakar is clearer about the future of the sexual
permissiveness that is gripping Indian metros: "Finally, sexual attitudes will divide
society more than any ideology or political line. We just saw the Left and the Right join each other in condemning the
Miss World Beauty Contest! The Liberal and the Conservative will co-exist—here
in India, just like they have in the rest of the world." Welcome to
liberalised metro India again! Where globalisation is taking place! In the
markets, in the mind and in the bedrooms.
(Reference:
Wadhwa, Soma., Menezes,
Saira., Rajesh Y.P., Biswas, Ashis. (Monday, October 13,
1997) A
Permissive Feeling. India: Outlook India
Magazine.)
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
Wadhwa, Soma. (Monday, May 05, 2003) What The Law Says. India: Outlook India Magazine.
http://outlookindia.com/full.asp?sid=2&fodname=20030505&fname=Cover+Story+%28F%29
What The Law Says
Nothing much, as it
disregards complexities
SOMA WADHWA
"Whoever has
sexual intercourse with a person who is and whom he knows or has reason to
believe to be the wife of another man... such sexual intercourse not amounting
to rape, is guilty of the offence of adultery, and shall be punished with
imprisonment for a term which may extend to five years, or with fine, or
both..."
—Section 497, the
Indian Penal Code
The Indian law on
adultery, formulated circa 1860, sounds antediluvian in the 21st century. It's
mostly about men settling scores with those who dared sleep with their wives. Women
can't litigate against their errant husbands or their husbands' lovers, under
the law. And, in turn, women
can't be sued for being adulterous.
"Section 497 is based
on Old Testament values," says Mumbai-based feminist lawyer
Flavia Agnes. "It doesn't protect the rights of women, only protects the
proprietorial rights of men over their wives' bodies." Considering men and
women can both cite their spouses' infidelity as reason for seeking divorce,
there is no legal rationale, feel many like Agnes, for a criminal law on
adultery that "spares" wives for being adulterous and then
"disallows" them from suing their husbands/husbands' paramour for
adultery.
Chennai-based advocate
Geeta Ramaseshan had, in fact, challenged these gender inequalities in the
procedure to file complaints of adultery. Counsel for the Revathy
vs Union of India case in 1988, Ramaseshan had argued that Revathy
be given the right to lodge a complaint of adultery against her husband. The
apex court dismissed the case: "Spouses ought not to be filing
complaints against each other...." This convinced
Ramaseshan that "the law on adultery should be scrapped". "It
is outdated, mostly misused to harass women, not based on substantive equality,
and treats women like male possessions," says she.
But would the law be
fairer were it to allow wives to prosecute the "other women" their
husbands are having affairs with, just as husbands are allowed to sue the
"other men"? No, insist feminists. The
"other women" could be pregnant, could have been forced into sexual
relationships by their married bosses. Agnes insists,
"The realities of men and women are different, so such simplistic
solutions won't work. The law on adultery is problematic, out of sync with the
times, it must be done away with."
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
Zuk, Marlene. (Thursday, January 30, 2003) "Sexual Selections: What We Can and
Can't Learn from Animals". Horning Lectures 2002 –
2003.
http://oregonstate.edu/dept/history/horning_speakers.htm
Scientific discoveries about the animal kingdom fuel ideological
battles on many fronts, especially battles about sex and gender. We now know
that male marmosets help take care of their offspring. Is this heartening news
for today’s stay-at-home dads? Recent studies show that many female birds once
thought to be monogamous actually have chicks that are fathered outside the
primary breeding pair. Does this information spell doom for traditional
marriages? And bonobo apes take part in female-female sexual encounters. Does
this mean that human homosexuality is natural?
In her new book, Sexual
Selections: What We Can and Can’t Learn About Sex From Animals (University of California Press, 2002), Zuk
describes that by going to the places where our ideas about nature, gender, and
culture collide, we can see that these questions may be the wrong ones to ask,
and that our biases, regardless of where they lie on the political scale, can
interfere with our understanding of the animals themselves. An examination of
some long-held assumptions about male and female behavior in both humans and
animals reaches some surprising conclusions about such controversial topics as
dominance, aggressiveness, nurturing, and monogamy.
(Reference: Zuk, Marlene. (Thursday, January 30, 2003) "Sexual Selections: What We Can and
Can't Learn from Animals". Horning
Lectures 2002 – 2003.)
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
Brides
ask dads to include computers in dowry. (Monday,
December 09, 2002) India: Sify News.
http://headlines.sify.com/1434news4.html?headline=Brides~ask~dads~to~include~computers~in~dowry
Brides ask dads to include
computers in dowry
Tikamgarh, Dec 9
Along with costly ornaments and
household goods, brides' families in several areas of this district have begun
including computers in dowry, a survey by a social service organisation
discovered.
The Mahila Samiti found that
women were now having a say in what was to be given as dowry and were stressing
on computers as they felt it was useful as a means of income.
Samiti President Shobha said,
''Educated girls do not want to rely on their husband's earnings and instead
earn something themselves.''
The upper class in this district
demanded a heavy dowry, while in backward classes dowry was voluntary, she said
adding that dowry was minimal among the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
UNI
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
'Cheat'
in court for failing to marry former lover. (Thursday,
July 05, 2001) UK: Ananova.
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_344856.html?menu=
'Cheat'
in court for failing to marry former lover
An
Indian man has been convicted of a criminal offence for not marrying a woman he
had sex with.
Dharam
Singh seduced the woman with offers of marriage but did not fulfil his promise.
A
court in New Delhi decided his actions constituted "cheating" and a
breach of promise. He will be sentenced later this month.
Singh,
an engineer, has told the court the woman was "of
loose morals."
Metropolitan
magistrate Kamini Lau told Singh a "breach of promise to marry amounts to
cheating".
The
woman complained Singh had sexually abused her on the promise of marrying her
and that he also took £170 from her.
He
"induced the complainant to do an act, which she otherwise would not have
done," the court heard.
Singh
was convicted of house trespassing, theft and inducement, The Times of India
reports.
The
magistrate concluded: "A woman spurned
by a man is a victim and suffers not only at the hands of the person who
cheated her but also at the hands of society and, at times, her own
family."
Story
filed: 11:31
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Personal
Note
"A
woman spurned by a man is a victim and suffers not only at the hands of the
person who cheated her but also at the hands of society and, at times, her own
family."
So I don’t have to fight. Just sit silent. The culprits will be punished by their own action! But the written material is beneficial to many others. So we slowly publish in installments, at the right instances. Fine-tuned weapons. Knowledge. Wisdom. To remove ignorance.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
Kennedy Mistress Comes Forward. (Thursday, May 15, 2003) USA: FOX News.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,86959,00.html
However, it's
unlikely that she'll be able to fade into the background now that her story is
public. Lewinsky, for instance,
has been unable to stay out of
the public eye following
her famous affair with President Clinton.
(Reference: Kennedy Mistress Comes
Forward. (Thursday, May 15, 2003) USA:
FOX News.)
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
Men keener than women to meet after emails. (Monday, August 05, 2002) UK: Ananova.
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_644035.html?menu=news.technology.email
Men
keener than women to meet after emails
Researchers
say men looking for love on the Internet are keener to meet women with whom
they exchange emails than their female counterparts.
The
poll of 14,000 subscribers by udate.com found 42%
of men were willing to see someone after only one to five emails, compared to just 18% of women.
It
also showed that 42% of women would want to
wait until 15 or more emails had been exchanged before meeting someone, compared to only 16%
of men.
A
spokeswoman for udate.com, which conducted the survey, said: "I think
clearly men are often a little bit keener to meet up than women are."
This
simply reflected the way people acted in more conventional romances, she said,
adding: "The way people interact
offline is transferring to the online dating world."
The
poll showed that 63% of singles were confident they would find their ideal
partner and 77% were looking for a genuine relationship or even marriage via
the net.
Udate.com
said its online service resulted in more than one marriage a week.
Leslie
Karner, udate.com's "romance coach", said: "Traditional ways of meeting people may allow you to
establish immediately whether there is chemistry between you.
"However,
further down the line you often realise that you actually may not enjoy doing
the same things."
But
Internet dating meant users with similar interests were brought together, she
said, adding: "This enables the user to
ensure that your interests and preferences are covered, leaving only the
chemistry left when you finally meet."
Story
filed: 13:24
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
Novels
and Accounts of Richard Burton
http://www.unityspot.com/arthurs/burton.html
Sheikh
Nefzaoui: The Perfumed Garden
If one looks at a woman with those qualities in front, one is
fascinated; if from behind, one dies with pleasure. Looked at sitting, she is a
rounded dome; lying, a soft-bed; standing, the staff of a standard. When she is
walking, her natural parts appear as set off under her clothing.
The Arabian Nights
But when the night was half-spent he bethought him that
he had forgotten in his palace somewhat which he should have brought with him,
so he returned privily and entered his apartments, where he found the Queen, his wife, asleep on his own carpet
bed embracing with both arms a black cook of loathsome aspect and foul with
kitchen grease and grime.
(Reference: Novels and
Accounts of Richard Burton.)
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Reference
The
Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices: Erotomania
http://www.odd-sex.com/info/gloss270.htm
Erotomania: people who develop an unreasonable love of a stranger or
person not interested in them.
(Reference: The
Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices: Erotomania.)
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
http://in.geocities.com/anindiantantric/sexuality.html
Published on internet:
Revised: Tuesday, January 11, 2005
Information on the web site is given in
good faith about a certain spiritual way of life, irrespective of any specific
religion, in the belief that the information is not misused, misjudged or
misunderstood. Persons using this information for whatever purpose must rely on
their own skill, intelligence and judgment in its application. The webmaster
does not accept any liability for harm or damage resulting from advice given in
good faith on this website.
Back to An
Indian Tantric Homepage Index
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
“Thou belongest to
That Which Is
Undying, and not merely to time alone,” murmured the Sphinx, breaking its muteness at last. “Thou art eternal, and not merely of the vanishing
flesh. The soul in man cannot be
killed, cannot die. It waits, shroud-wrapped,
in thy heart,
as I waited,
sand-wrapped, in thy world. Know
thyself, O
mortal! For there is One
within thee, as in all men, that comes
and stands at the bar and bears witness that there IS a God!”
(Reference: Brunton, Paul. (1962) A Search in Secret
Amen