The Curse (Part Two)

Continuing the train of thought about menstruation I started in an earlier post...

A friend, who is a teacher, once mentioned the plight of one of her pupils. This little girl – who had never been told about menses in her life by her parents, had never even heard a word about it, who was therefore totally unprepared – one day arrived at menarche in the middle of class. Can you imagine the mental state she must have been in, to suddenly find herself sitting in a pool of blood? More than that, in a pool of blood issuing from her vagina, the organ that she was probably told was “dirty” and must never even be mentioned? 

What that little girl did was begin crying inconsolably and refuse to get up (she was embarrassed at the blood) – and my friend had to pick her up and console her and telephone the parents to come and get her from school.

Although the little girl I mentioned was an Arab, the situation is something that is absolutely typical of South Asia. South Asians – as I’ve said so many times in this blog most of you must be heartily sick of it by now – have in recent centuries turned themselves into a people so sexually repressed that they have even banished all mention of sexual hygiene and health from their own families and from their own children. I don’t know how many sets of parents in India prepare their daughters for menarche by telling them in advance – well in advance – what is going to happen. I’d be surprised if more than two or three in a hundred do. Some of them don’t ever plan to say anything at all, trusting to the usual Indian dictum of “we didn’t need to know, nobody told us, so why should we tell her?” Most of the rest simply keep putting it off. They will tell her “when necessary”, and of course the girl begins her periods while the parents are still fantasising that it’s too early to tell her anything. Nowadays with improving nutrition levels, girls more often than not, for dog’s sake, reach menarche by the age of eight or nine. My cousin, for instance, was told about menstruation by her mother only after the event…by which time it was already kind of too late.

It’s absolutely in accord with the Indian parent’s attitude towards sex. They will not only demand a ban on sex education in school but will never, ever, mention it within their own families, not to their own children. And then the children will grow up unhappy and confused about their own changing bodies and attraction towards the opposite sex and full of notions like kissing causes pregnancy (while sexual intercourse doesn’t) or that penis size matters.  Hell – they don’t even know which opening babies come out from. (My parents, I remember, allowed me to think babies came out through the navel till my grandmother disabused me of that notion.) And, of course, they don’t even have the faintest notion of contraception or sexually transmitted disease. Just contrast this to the fact that these same parents will begin teaching their young daughters cooking and sewing from an early age, preparing them for marriage. They will prepare them for every aspect of marriage – the really important stuff, how to be properly deferential to one’s in-laws, for instance – but not about sex and stuff like that, motherhood and suchlike. The girl is supposed to just “know”.

So these young girls and boys, totally ignorant about their own bodies, full of surging hormones and with no idea what their feelings mean, are thrust  into a situation where they don’t have the slightest idea what is safe and what not. They won’t even – until they learn it from their friends – know that the penis is supposed to go into the vagina, and this mix of ignorance, myth and superstition, leavened with high doses of repression, is supposed to see them through to adulthood and marriage. Is this logical? Does it make sense?

I recall a letter published in a newspaper recently: “What is the use of sex education? We didn’t need it!”

Now alongside this avoidance of mention of menses goes another piece of weirdness. In South India – where, as I mentioned, they still segregate menstruating women – the newly menstruating girl is felicitated and presented with new clothes and jewellery. This might sit oddly with the segregation that will be her lot afterwards. But if you think of it, there’s nothing odd about it. They’re just celebrating her arrival on the marriage market. That’s all it is, a market.

Oh, by the way, did I mention that they don’t give girls tampons? The hymen might be ruptured inserting one, after all…horrors!

As I said, if it isn’t a curse to begin with, at least they try and make it one.

The First Orgasm

This happened when I was about eleven years old.

Back in those days I was obese, callow, and quite frankly ignorant of a lot today’s kids know of at much younger ages. I was also no good – I still am no good – at mathematics. This is important to remember for a proper understanding of what happened.

It was during an examination that it happened. It was maths, of course, and at the end of 45 minutes (the paper was two hours long) I’d just completed the first of five questions, and that one I wasn’t too sure of. I was beginning to slide into pure panic.

It’s a habit of mine to this day that some kind of simple repetitive action in times of stress tends to relieve that stress. Nowadays, when I can, I chew gum. At that time, since I had no other outlet, I began rubbing my legs together. As I did, I began feeling a queer sensation in the pit of my stomach, and it built and built and I rubbed my legs faster and faster. I didn’t know what was happening – the rubbing was now a reflex. Suddenly there came this great convulsing sensation in my lower abdomen and groin, which made me shudder and press my thighs together and crunch my eyes shut as tight as I could get them. My breath literally caught in my throat or else I might have cried out.

A moment later, I opened my eyes, feeling wonderfully calm. Nobody had noticed a thing. I returned to the questions and managed a pretty fair go of doing them; not bad at all by my standards.

It was only a couple of years later, when I began masturbating deliberately, that I realised that back during that exam I’d had an orgasm. (Later on I’d make time to masturbate while studying for exams, quite regularly and with great effect, to calm my mind.)

Oh yes, in case you’re wondering; if I’d ejaculated at all, the amount was so small that my underpants absorbed it and there wasn’t any embarrassing leakage. I wouldn’t have known what it was anyway.

Sheep and Homophobia

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In Oregon they are researching ways to turn gay sheep straight...
I guess this line of work, however silly it may seem, has all got impeccable economic "logic" behind it, but quite apart from the frightening Nazi aspect of controlling sexuality, ultimately in humans (and has humanity ever stepped back from knowledge?) it's kind of interesting that the "ban stem cell experiments" brigade has taken no stand against it. I think they'll wait, watch, and use it when the time comes. Science is only bad, to these people, when it's aimed at doing good.
Unfortunately for them, you can't necessarily extrapolate animal trials in humans, so the time might not ever come. But they will try their best, you can bet your sex life.
So, why all the hatred? Why the hatred that made the question of whether to shoot gays or bury them beneath a collapsed wall a vital question for the taliban during their rule in Kabul, for instance? I wonder too. I have several questions and no clear answers to any of them.
Homosexuality is illegal in India...
It's only partially true.
As I've had occasion to state elsewhere, in India male homosexuality, called "sodomy" on the statute books, is a punishable offence (although the law is never enforced, and in Calcutta at least there is now even an annual - albeit minuscule - gay march). Women in India are popularly supposed to be "too pure" to have sexual desire at all, so how on earth could they desire other women? Ergo, lesbianism does not exist in India, and therefore it is not banned.
The ban remains on the books because "Indian society is not ready for it to be lifted." And that is despite the miniature paintings and sculptures of openly gay and lesbian activity in India - just check out the one I've posted. Indian high society girls were actually brought up with poor girls as "sakhis" (a sort of cross between sister, friend, and lesbian lover).  Yeah - Indian society isn't ready, and if it's left to people like these whom we have in power and in the courts, it never will be. But then the ban is never implemented...
Of course, in practice, it's something quite different. Being gay has a bit of cachet in the "high society" world of the party animals and the fashion industry, but even those have little or no tolerance for lesbians. In a village in West Bengal, recently, a young lesbian woman was publicly beaten, stripped and photographed in the nude to prove to all that she was a girl. And at least she escaped with her life. Some of them don't.
I have several gay friends and to a person I found them intelligent and creative. Although it is true that earlier, in North India, I was called a gay myself for associating with gays.
I have often wondered, why most societies (I say most, because certainly it's not all, especially ancient Greek society was most tolerant) are and have been so intolerant of homosexuality? After all, gays never formed more than a tiny minority of any social group. Homosexuality is inborn, hard wired. You can't, with apologies to homophobes, choose to be gay. Gays cannot infect the population and turn so many of them gay that breeding is seriously or even marginally affected - in fact most gays in countries like India have to hide their identity in loveless marriages and produce kids to please their parents....I wonder just how many of my acquaintances are gay that I don't know of? So where does the hatred of gays come from?
In India the media still project gays as shadow personalities (often literally - gays interviewed on TV are more often than not shown pixelated or in silhouette beause they don't dare show their faces) or as caricatured poofters in movies. One look at thosedepictions and I defy any fair minded heterosexual not to be offended.
A beautiful, talented and highly intelligent woman I know (my cousin, in fact) once asked me "Why don't you hate gays?" in tones of horror. In order to avoid an argument (we both argue furiously and say things we regret later but have too much pride to take back) I chose to bite back my instinctive comment: "Do you think gays have a right to hate you? If you think they don't, what makes you think you have a right to hate them?" It would not have made any difference. I can't even explain my own attitude towards gays. I'm all for equal rights for homosexuals, and as I said I have good homosexual friends, but on the two occasions in my life when homosexuals made passes at me I was mortified. It was kind of instinctive. I have not been able to explain this reaction. After all, I could have just turned them down without any of that sort of skin-crawling shrinking feeling, could I not? Am I such a hypocrite?
But as for the rest of it, it's not quite "don't ask, don't tell" for me. Please - if you are homosexual, you have as much right to proclaim it out loud as I have to proclaim my own heterosexuality.
It might be the best thing for your admirers of the opposite sex as well. Let them know what they are getting into.
And peace, brothers and sisters. Love and life to you.  

The Case Against Celibacy

A dear friend of mine is fond of saying "Virginity is not natural"… and of course she has a point. We have evolved genitals for a reason; and plainly it makes little sense to claim that not using these organs is somehow "ennobling". There is nothing that I, at least, can see natural about denying the basic urge that brought us into the world in the first place.
Just think about it; the idea is ridiculous. What on earth can having genital contact with another adult human being have to do with whether one is a "good person" or not? The stress on celibacy just proves that those advocating it are basically even more obsessed with sex than the rest of us, the "normal" set if I can so call it. In the case of the Catholic Church, it stemmed, apparently, from a comment by Jesus that "he made (himself) a eunuch for God…let him follow this path who can." Whether Jesus made this comment is besides the point; the fact is that for the first several hundred years of the Catholic Church’s existence celibacy was not a requirement, and most if not all the Apostles were married men (I’ll not go here into the question of whether Jesus, if he existed, was married). It was as late as the eleventh centurythat (and check this link) celibacy became obligatory, and church history was re-invented to sanction it.
In the case of the Catholic Church the imposition of celibacy led to the scandalous conduct of some of the early Popes, not to speak of lesser mortals, and led to the steady intake of sexual deviants like paedophiles.
As always, even normally heterosexual men, in such constraints, might turn to each other for sexual solace, this defeating the very purpose of the requirement for celibacy. It is also needlessly cruel to homosexuals who are forced into a monastic existence because of the possibility of asylum from their own orientation. Martin Luther was completely right when he wrote of the Catholic Church: "They were completely unjustified in forbidding marriage and in burdening the priesthood with the demand of continual celibacy. In doing so they have acted like . . . tyrannical, unholy scoundrels, occasioning all sorts of terrible, ghastly, countless sins against chastity, in which they are caught to this day."
Today, there are increasing cases coming to light of paedophilia among priests,which raise some important questions: does celibacy lead to latent paedophiles becoming overt sexual offenders? Do closet homosexuals who are trying to deny their natural sexual orientation flock to the Church for refuge? Does celibacy have a future?
Not facing up to these questions and just taking action (until such action can no longer be avoided) against individual paedophilic priests is not a solution…yet Benedict, who at least is modern enough to advocate condom use under some situations, has refused to lift the celibacy requirement (which is as I said not one of the original tenets of the Church). Look for further drop in priest recruitment.
Let’s accept it. Celibacy turns people off. Priest enrolments are dropping all over the world and many of the few joining are people who are failures at anything else. Not that they are likely to be able to do much. Especially when the celibate are expected to minister to the familial needs of the flock, including advice on sexual matters (and in many Indian villages the villager, usually a tribal, still expects the priest to do his thinking for him), it’s doubtful what practical advice such a person might give.
This is also true for Hindu monks like those of the Ramakrishna Mission. Themumbo-jumbo of celibacy is even more convoluted than the Catholic Church, but it has had an identical effect. I know a Mission priest who told me that they used to get qualified, capable people, but now get only those who can find no other way of getting on in life. I’m sure other religions will find the same problem with their celibate clergy. Mohammad, in comparison, was prescient when he said "I will have no celibate clergy". It’s another matter that these words have been twisted by hidebound mullahs to discourage population control among the poor Muslims.
OK, and hilariously, sex being a sacrament in marriage, beautiful and a sacred duty, it’s banned for those who serve the sacred!
Now, it’s well enough known by now that sex does not just feel pleasurable but isexcellent for health.
Maybe it does not make much of a difference to those who tried for a thousand years to suppress science and only now are grudgingly opening up to reality, but it would seem to me that it is a losing battle anyway. Abstinence does nothing for anything, it’s just a waste of effort.Nature will win out every time.
My friend was right after all...

Virginolatry

t the beginning, there was Mary, who was a Virgin.

Yeah, right.

If there is one thing which continues to amaze me, it's the fascination of our societies with virginity. Either - in the more "conservative" societies - it's a straightforward condemnation of premarital sexual relations, sometimes with violent repercussions, of which more anon.

Or, in the "liberal" societies, it's the in-your-face and almost public loss of virginity, including stunts like selling yours on eBay to pay your student fees. Or signing farcical pledges of abstinence.

Either way, it's just two faces of the same coin.

Personally, as I've mentioned before this, I don't get it at all. What is the big deal?

Why should entire human societies tie themselves in knots over whether two people, consenting and adult, decide to have genital contact with each other? What does it matter to everyone else? Is it envy?

I might have accepted that proposition, but then one comes across the phenomenon of honour killings in Indian villages. If you are a young person in a village in North India, and you happen to fall in love with another young person, either forget him or her or run as far and as fast as you can if you decide to elope. If you want to live, that is.

So, virginity is not just a matter of envy. It's got mixed up with honour - whatever that might mean. Not just the "honour" of the individual, but of the society at large.

Also, of course, there are all the young women (it's almost always women) carrying around colossal guilt complexes because they are no longer virgins. I know some myself.

All over the presence or absence of a piece of tissue, the hymen, which has nothing to do with sexual intercourse anyway.

Crazy.

Sometimes one just can’t leave a topic alone.

I realise I’ve discussed the deification of virginity before. But then I had concentrated on the ridiculous fascination with this state, and not the fact that, especially if you’re female, it can be actively injurious to your health…

First off: I don’t mean literally. Although I’m of the firm opinion that virginity isnot normal (would it be normal to deliberately refrain from using properly functioning arms and legs? In that case, how is it normal to refrain from using one’s genitalia?) I’m not saying you’ll go blind or turn sour in your mind if you have never had sex. No.

Oh, and I’m also not talking of the nuns who used to be (and for all I know still are, in some deep dark corner of the world) bricked up in convents for the crime of being caught in flagrante delicto with a man;  things began going wrong with virginity a long, long time before that.

In centuries past, when life was brutal and short, each adult’s duty was to propagate the race, so each adult was a valuable breeding resource. It was also the age when gods were real and walked among men and could only be kept in good humour by sacrifices. Some of those sacrifices were notional, like the Roman Vestal Virgins who swore off sex (well, notionally, and there were “penalties” for transgression, which makes one wonder how and why so many of these vestal virgins ended up with property, slaves, and luxury) like the monks and nuns of Christianity  and Buddhism. Now, assuming that each adult has to procreate the race, choosing not to do so becomes a major sacrifice on the part of the community (and not just the renunciation of pleasure on the part of the individual).

And then some were much more direct sacrifices – naked young virgins tied up before strange gods and having their throats cut or their hearts plucked, still beating, from their bodies, such as the Druids sometimes did. That was a great honour done to the virgins involved, I guess, but I’d have passed it up, thank you very much.

No, being a virgin wasn’t all plain sailing, and nor is it today.

I think it was Margaret Mead who, in a study of Pacific Islanders, pointed out that those races that placed no premium on virginity and allowed open and free consensual sex also happened to be the societies with the least social trauma, the least aggression, the least violence and the greatest amount of happiness (that was of course more before the Christian missionaries turned up and began teaching everyone morality). Whereas the sexually repressed societies, as in Asia(West and South Asia most of all) or in the West (the US) are infinitely more likely to be violent, aggressive and intolerant than more open and sexually laid-back nations (Thailand, the Scandinavian countries). In South and West Asia, a woman’s virginity became – a long time ago, but it was not always so, the Kama Sutra is proof of that - a part of societal “honour,” and they would kill her to keep that “honour” intact. They still do.

Or else, so that their responsibility to keep their daughter “pure” and “unsullied,” parents would marry her off as soon as they possibly could, sometimes before she was old enough to learn to talk. This still happens in Indian villages and is not even against the law (the law can “prevent” the “marriage” but can’t declare it null and void once it’s taken place). This girl will then become an illiterate domestic and sex slave of her husband, and often of his brothers as well, and have multiple pregnancies so her health is ruined and she becomes an old woman by the time she hits thirty, and die soon after. All because her virginity was some kind of rare resource to be preserved at all costs till she could be got off her parents’ hands.

It’s not even as if all the claptrap about virginity works. The US is big these days on “abstinence only” sex education and on “true love waits” pledges. So what happened? A study showed that those who signed “true love waits” pledges were more likely to have had sex before marriage than those who did not. Hah.

Not that they can define virginity, of course. If it’s the absence of the hymen, that piece of tissue can just as easily be lost in sports, accidents, tampon insertion, or even as a result of masturbation; it can even be congenitally absent. And if a woman has a thick and elastic hymen, she can keep it through life even if she has sex ten times a day.

And furthermore…

I wish I could claim credit for the following anecdote, but it was told me by a close (and usually reliable) friend.

When, after the passage of some years, he met one of his old girlfriends again, she went into rhapsodies about her husband and children and whatnot. Then she said “And it’s all because God is rewarding me because I went virgin to my wedding bed.”

His response, goggling: “You did what? I screwed you myself many times and you weren’t married then.”

Her answer: “I went virgin in my mind. I was pure in my mind and that’s all that matters.”

So, you can have as much sex as you want, and you don’t even have to go to the extent (like some Arab women these days) of surgically reconstructing the hymen  before marriage. All you have to do is tell yourself, “I’m a virgin,” and believe it.

I don’t know whether to laugh or snort with contempt at the whole damn mess. 


There is still this pernicious idea that the presence or absence of a piece of redundant tissue constitutes "honour"; that "true love waits" (how long? Forever?); that a woman is "defiled" by using a portion of her own body for the purpose for which it was evolved; that being raped is being defiled for life; and that "nice women don’t do it."
Amazing, in this day and age.

So,here’s my theory about the premium still placed in psychologically primitive societies on virginity-

If you are the first man to have sex with a particular woman, and you then keep her out of contact with other males, you can be reasonably sure that any children you invest your efforts in raising are yours. So you can be sure you’re spreading your own genes. Therefore, the premium on virginity in these societies is genetic disguised as social. Lions deal with the same problem by killing all cubs once they take over a pack, because only the dominant lion breeds (this is about his only function, impregnating lionesses. The lioness does almost all the hunting. So much for the gallant king of the jungle) and propagates his genes. More balanced societies with communal bringing up of children, as on many Pacific Islands, had no premium on virginity. In fact some societies had ceremonies for the ceremonial deflowering of young people when they reached puberty. Those societies were also much less warlike and aggressive.

I'm not a virgin, and I don't think the fact that I have sex has made me any less than I was when I still was one. Private and intimate and wonderful contact with another human being is not ugly. It's a pity that (almost entirely) patriarchal systems have tried to make it so.

Is Marriage Prostitution?

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I realise this post will in all likelihood get a lot of people angry.

Unfortunately, I don’t give a damn for political correctness, and never have done, so…

Let me say it right away: in my opinion, marriage is a form of social prostitution, in fact prostitution in its most absolute form.

There was an aphorism that I read a long time ago: “Men give love to get sex, women give sex to get love.” Well, to sex, add (from the woman’s side) cooking, keeping house, bringing up the kids (the man’s genetic heritage as passed on to the future generation). And from the man’s side add protection, food, shelter, and also the passing on of genes. Of course I’m talking of traditional roles here. But I wonder just how many men would be all at sea in today’s world if asked to cook something for themselves or sew buttons on their shirts. Are there really many such? I doubt it.

Now let me put in a comment that was rather popular among my contemporaries some twenty years ago… “Marriage is a licence to screw.” Of course those were the days when the guns of the sexual revolution weren’t even booming on the horizon and live-in relationships were for hedonistic immoral Bollywood stars who would still pretend to be married, and no one single would ever admit to a loss of virginity. Hell, some married people would pretend to be virgins. But still and all, that comment about marriage being a licence to screw just about sums it up.

OK, now, to get back to the topic: a prostitute puts out for money or favours. She is doing something that is an absolute contract – the man gets to put his penis inside her vagina and pays for the privilege – with cash or a piece of jewellery or the equivalent. Well, what then about marriage? What does the traditional housewife basically do? She allows the man to put his penis inside her vagina and pay for the privilege – with a lifetime of housing her, clothing her, feeding her, and paying for her to bring up her offspring. Which is the greater prostitution?

Because, what is a traditional marriage? It is a woman’s putting herself (or having herself put) under the theoretical protection of a man, and repaying him above all with sexual services. Isn’t that so?

As I said, the average man wouldn’t exactly die if his wife didn’t cook for him or sew his clothes. Also, the traditional housewife is a housebound person with no capacity for work, no avenue for earning for herself, dependent completely on her husband for everything, and giving her body to him in return…with any sexual pleasure for herself usually in the realms of the strictly mythical.

Which, then, is the greater prostitution?

I’m not blaming the woman here. In traditional social roles, the woman is a pawn. She has no control over her destiny, no way to achieve any ambition she has even if she wants to. It’s the system that makes her a prostitute.  

Logically, therefore, this train of thought leads me to the conclusion that a marriage with a woman who works and has her own income is not really a marriage in the traditional sense at all. Such a woman is no social prostitute, but in breaking that role she is no longer the stereotyped wife, either.

I have this problem with “sexually promiscuous” women who are not prostitutes being called sluts, as well. The genuine sexually promiscuous woman asks for nothing in return for putting out except pleasure. She gets nothing out of it except pleasure and gives nothing except pleasure. Since her motives are the least complicated and totally free of material reward, she is the least “sluttish” of all.

My First "Sex Ed"

I was ten years old and in fifth grade when mysterious comments began circulating through the boys (we were an all male school, of course). There were all these odd words, "fuck" and so on, and "vagina" (pronounced "vageena").

From playing nude with my maternal uncle's neighbour's daughter as a young child I knew girls were different between the legs, but that's about all I knew about it.

As I think I mentioned before, I was a loner at school and not exactly the most popular guy in class, so I wasn't in the thick of things. I wasn't exactly informed what this word "fuck" meant - I assumed it was marriage, because fuck always seemed to involve a man and woman. I recall after doing an excerpt from some nineteenth century novel in English literature class, I said to a couple of classmates, regarding the hero and heroine, "I'm sure they will fuck." The guys burst out laughing. "Do you know what that word means?"

I, in some confusion: "Of course I know."  

Laughing like hyaenas: "What does it mean, then?"

I, desperately facing up: "I know but I won't tell you."

Well, a day or three later I did find out what it meant. And it seemed so silly I rejected it right off. Just think about it from my PoV: out of the blue, you're told you're in the world because your father and mother put parts of their bodies you were told shouldn't be mentioned inside each other. All these days you were told you came floating down from heaven on a flower or some such happy bullshit, and then you were told you grew in your mom's belly, with no questions answered on just how the hell you got there. And now you're told your dad put his penis inside your mom's vagina? Seriously, yuck. 

A year or more passed. In the biology textbook it was mentioned, oh so coyly, "fertilisation occurs when the sperm swims to the egg and unites with it" - with no word about how the sperm was supposed to do this swimming. I had a mental picture of the sperm crawling out of my dad, wriggling over the bedclothes, and inside my mother. I preferred to believe that rather than the ludicrous idea of them having sex.      

You understand, of course, there was never such a thing as sex ed in school - and still isn't. Also you understand that neither of my parents ever mentioned sex to me. I remained under the illusion that babies came out of the navel until amazingly late - and then it was my grandmother who disabused me of that notion. She never told me about intercourse, though.

I don't know when I would finally have got round to the idea of accepting the reality of sex, except that I came across - quite by accident - a sex manual among some old books in a box I was emptying. Not knowing what it was, I opened it...and the first words that my eyes lit on, I promise you, were "After the natural insertion act of the penis..."

I still consider myself lucky to have escaped the horrible mess of sexual misinformation and hangups that plague my generation to this day. And I also think the teenagers of today who sometimes have at least some limited access to sex education should realise how very lucky they all are. They aren't quite as lucky as the German kids who can get to read this, but at least they are better off than we were.

They won't for much longer though, if the politicians who are out to destroy all sex ed in the country have their way.

It's kind of difficult to believe this was a culture where young men were initiated into sex by courtesans as a matter of course a thousand years ago.

Homophobia: A Worm's Eye View

A couple of days ago I was reading of research into the free-living soil roundworm C elegans. Apparently, tweaking some genes causes homosexual behaviour to develop in these worms. It’s just another proof of the by now quite well-known fact that homosexuality has a genetic basis. If you’re homosexual, you’re not choosing to be – it’s in your genes. You can’t help it any more than you can help your hair colour or the shape of your ears.

Right, so let’s, for the sake of this blog, take that as given. I’m sure no one can have serious doubts about that…no one sane, that is. As for the rest of you, I’ll come to you in a moment.

Now, if genetics determine sexual orientation, it leaves us with one of two possibilities. You must understand that in much of the world a homosexual person doesn’t have the sexual freedom to declare his or her preferences openly – he or she must, oftentimes, live a lie in a heterosexual relationship as a camouflage (I believe the term for this used to be “lavender wedding”). This, usually, ended in the birth of children and thus the probable perpetuation of the genes responsible for homosexuality. Right?

On the other hand, in the rest of the world, where gays do not have to live lifelong in the closet and can contemptuously call us heterosexuals “breeders” (not that I really blame them, what with the terms we fling atthem) – there is no requirement for them to breed. So the gene for homosexuality should disappear fairly soon, shouldn’t it? Shouldn’t gays be more or less extinct?

Only, they aren’t. And since there are no longer such strict taboos about emerging from the closet, the numbers of gays show no signs of falling.

This is what leads us to the possibilities I mentioned above:

First possibility: the gene arises de novo so often that it must be one of the most common mutations going round. Or…

Second possibility: We are all, as the psychologists say, bisexual in our heads and we all have the genetic potential to develop into homosexuals or heterosexuals.

So, where does this leave the gays-are-evil brigade? Either your own children or siblings could be mutated into homosexuals, or they could be homosexual simply because of their genes, shared with you, direct them towards it. Where does that leave you in your anti-gay programme? Where does that leave your Catholic Church which says homosexuality is a sin? Where does your Islamic Republic go where there is no such thing as a gay? What happens to India where – like so much else - homosexuality is “against Indian culture”? If your church or your nation doesn’t discriminate on the basis of skin pigmentation or eye colour, can it legitimately discriminate on the basis of something just as genetic? Huh?

Of course, I suppose you could say that your “god” is deliberately blinding our eyes by false scientific evidence, that homosexuality is the work of the devil, blah blah. But as far as I’m concerned, if you say that you’re crossing over into a land where sanity walks no more, and I won’t follow you.

Circumcisionlocution

Has anyone  read Alex Hailey's Roots? The part where the protagonist, Kairaba Kunta Kinte, is told that as part of his manhood training, part of his fotowould be cut off? And then the author goes on to describe how it was done. (Whether the book was plagiarised, as claimed here, is not germane to the current discussion.)
I am among the few non-Muslims in India who are circumcised (Jews in India are too few even to signify).
It was because I had this problem called phimosis. It happens when the foreskin is so tight that when it rolls back over the glans (as is normal during sex or during an erection) it can't come back again. It's not uncommon, but because the majority of the world's population is circumcised (West Africa, for example, has seen circumcision practised for many thousands of years, as has Egypt - check the illustration, dating from 2300 BCE), and we in the uncircumcised part of the world do not talk of such things, it's not much known. I had this problem. It first manifested when I was 16, when I woke up one morning with the foreskin retracted behind the glans, which was swollen and huge because of the blood accumulated behind the constricting band of skin. I had no idea what it was that had happened. I was terrified and mortified. And also because I had no communication with my parents on such issues, I did not mention it to them. I could barely walk. But I still went to school somehow, and walked back (three kilometres either way). By the next day it was worse than ever and I forced my dad to take me to a doctor who pulled the foreskin back, agonisingly, without anaesthesia (later as a medical student I discovered anaesthesia ismandatory for this procedure). The swelling went down very fast. This doctor said I should come back after a few days for a circumcision. Also no one had ever told me to wash the glans of the penis with soap and water to remove the smegma deposits (which can incubate yeast infection and also cause cancer). After a few days the problem recurred (I woke up and pulled the foreskin back just in time) and when I went back to this doctor he said there was no need for circumcision and it would be "OK when you are married(?)" Another medical myth there. Anyway, my dad went "Why did you never wash it?" I answered: "Did you ever tell me to? How the hell would I know about it if you don't tell me?" Remember what I said about parents being responsible for their children’s sex education?
Later I kept on having problems like this. I got to being phobic about sleep because I used to get terrified lest I get an erection during dreams and get the foreskin stuck again. Also on at least two occasions I stopped at crucial points with girls because I got terrified of getting the foreskin stuck (once it did, too, but after a long time I got it back again.) Of course the girls involved were unhappy and I never had that chance with them again.
Ultimately I got a reluctant ("Why do you want it at all?") surgeon to remove my foreskin in June 2000. I'm convinced it's among the best moves in my life. It caused a hell of a lot of trouble for a month or more, sheer undiluted hell, but afterwards I have been able to have sex and also to sleep again.
(Oh - I just want to make clear that when I say "circumcision", I meanmale circumcision, not the condemnable female variety, in case anyone has a doubt.)
But, my personal choice, in the Indian scenario, to be circumcised, is not exactly a free choice anyone can follow. A dear friend writes about how she got her grandsons circumcised so they would not be teased because they look different, in locker rooms and so on. In India it’s not a matter of teasing – whether one is circumcised or not may make a difference between life and death. Quite literally. Because, during our periodic bouts of religious mayhem, it’s not unknown for men to be stopped and stripped by religious gangs and killed, or released, on the basis of their being circumcised or not (all circumcised individuals automatically being Muslim in the eyes of both Muslims and Hindus). And also when the World Health Organisation recently released areport saying that circumcision halts the spread of HIV, Indian health officials said in private that they could not possibly agree to the report, whatever the truth of it, because they would be promptly accused of trying to spread Islam. As though HIV cares about the religion of the person it is infecting.
Compared to all this, the issue of a boy’s locker room embarrassment looks, frankly, not very overwhelming.
But as long as he gets circumcised, it’s better than nothing. Of course I am not suggesting that we should stretch out our kids on the ground and take unsterilised bronze knives to their foreskins...
But even that might just be better than nothing. 

According to a web-site I came across, circumcision decreases penile sensitivity up to four times - and this is an allegedly scientific article from softpedia.

Now, you'll agree, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

I'm circumcised. I got circumcised due to phimosis that had made me virtually impotent and at a relatively advanced age. And in my opinion it's the best thing that ever happened to me, for reasons that I have discussed here.

As for sensitivity, after circumcision there is a drop in sensitivity - this is true, and is necessary because there is such extreme sensitivity after circumcision with the naked glans rubbing on underclothing that walking is a torture for up to a month. But the drop in sensitivity is a temporary phenomenon. During sex the glans is engorged and hypersensitive and of course vaginal secretions and lubricants make sure the glans isn't dry. So the theory that a dry glans is desensitised is false.

In the days when I was uncircumcised I was still a virgin (I had several opportunities to have sex but couldn't do it because of my phimosis - I was deeply phobic even of sleeping and getting an erection that could potentially trap my foreskin behind my glans, causing massive swelling and incredible pain, forget about sex). All my orgasms were from masturbation, so the only field of comparison open to me is masturbation. In those days I could stretch a masturbation session to last up to ten or fifteen minutes if I wanted. Or if I were in a hurry I could do it in two minutes or so. Till today I can do the same. How long it lasts depends on my mood, my state of arousal, how slow I take it and the time available. When I was uncircumcised my orgasms during masturbation were intense. After circumcision the intensity dropped drastically but the nerve endings adjusted and within a year of circumcision my orgasms were as intense as they always were. So, again, I do not think circumcision ruins sensitivity.

Also, according to WHO, circumcision allows a drop in HIV infection rates up to 60%. This is the result of a scientific study. The softpedia article makes claims but makes no attempt to provide any proof. 

I must say this though - circumcision is awfully painful. Not the actual procedure, which is under local anaesthesia. I mean the aftermath. The first month is hell on earth. First the penis rubbing on the clothes, and after that intense itching from the healing skin as it dries. And you can't even scratch. I remember going around the house doing chores the day after being circumcised and suddenly noticing drops of blood trailing behind me...

Yes, I think circumcision is good. No, I don't think one should wait till adulthood to get it done. I should hate anyone else to go through what I went through. And, no, I don't think circumcision is part of some kind of vast conspiracy to decrease male sexual pleasure, either.

So when I read articles like the one above, and also relate them to the articles (more in the nature of adverts, really) promoting foreskin reconstruction surgery, I seem to smell a rat in the works.

Like so many other procedures, it seems to be a case of inventing a problem in order to cure it.

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They call it “female circumcision”, but it isn’t.

A recurrent theme in my writings – because it’s something I see so often and so repeatedly expressed – is the fundamentally anti-sexualnature of religion and religious practices. And when I mean anti-sexual, I mean anti-woman, because virtually all religious measures to suppress sexuality primarily target women. About the only exception I know to this rule are the members of some Hindu sects who drive spikes and so on through their penises to kill sexual ability – and, it would seem to follow (in their minds at least) sexual desire.

Now, another repeated motif of human civilisation through the ages has been the modification of the human body. Tattoos, body piercing, body painting and so on have been going on so long as there have been human beings on the planet. Another little thing that has been going on since ancient times is circumcision, the ancient practice that the Egyptians probably borrowed from the West Africans who have been doing it since at least five thousand years, and which involves the removal of the foreskin from the penis. It’s often thought the Jews invented circumcision and were copied in turn by the Muslims, but it is just not so. It’s far older than that.

Of course, circumcision as I just described it is for males only, and it’s claimed to have health benefits. I’m not quite sure how some of those health benefits, those claiming circumcision stops HIV and so on, will play out with further research. And it does decrease the sensitivity of the glans. But I’m circumcised, and I can personally attest to the efficacy of circumcision in one respect. I was a long time sufferer of a problem known as phimosis which made me functionally just about impotent and which was cured by circumcision. Otherwise I’d have remained a virgin to this day.

Now, of course, body modifications aren’t restricted to men. Women are, perhaps naturally, as much or more prone to bodily adornment as males. And that’s all fine – just as long as it’s voluntary. And, of course, as long as it does no actual harm.

There is one extremely cruel rite of female body modification which isnot (normally, at least) voluntary and which is definitely not harmless. They call it “female circumcision”, but that’s a misnomer, a euphemism if you like. A much better term for it would be female genital mutilation (FGM), and that’s how I intend to refer to it henceforth in this post.

Female circumcision, the partial or total cutting away of the external female genitalia, has been practiced for centuries in parts of Africa, generally as one element of a rite of passage preparing young girls for womanhood and marriage. Often performed without anaesthetic under septic conditions by lay practitioners with little or no knowledge of human anatomy or medicine, female circumcision can cause death or permanent health problems as well as severe pain. Despite these grave risks, its practitioners look on it as an integral part of their cultural and ethnic identity, and some perceive it as a religious obligation.

This mutilation may be of various forms (check this link for details): it may involve cutting off of part or all of the clitoris – the only organ in the human body (of either sex) whose exclusive function is to give pleasure. It may involve partial or total removal of the labia as well. In extreme cases the entire labia would be removed and the vagina sewed shut, leaving a small opening for urine and menstrual blood.

Now, recall what I said about culture and practices a few days ago. Then I was talking of the eating of a songbird, which, as a result of this eating, had become endangered, and I’d mentioned in passing, hunting heads – a “cultural” practice which had been banned and forced out of existence.

And also remember what I said just above about the fundamentally anti-female nature of religious practice. Here we have those two hoary old shibboleths, religion and culture, coming together with another ugly little dweller in our collective cupboard – male chauvinism. Collectively, they created a bastard child – FGM.

So, what’s the rationale behind female genital mutilation? It’s that other issue all wrapped up in tradition and “culture” – female “purity” and “honour”, which are equated with female celibacy. Now which woman is mostly likely to remain celibate? The woman who gets no pleasure out of sex at all, right? And in a relationship, which woman is – by this viewpoint – most likely to remain faithful to her man? The woman who gets no pleasure at all out of intercourse, so that she can’t think of any reason to have sex with anyone except the man to whom she has been given – and that out of a sense of duty.   

So, FGM is, shorn of all the verbiage about religion and culture, just a way of depriving women of sexual pleasure in order to make them subservient to the male. That’s it. It’s the female version of the Hindu who wraps his penis round a stick to kill all sensation in it by destroying the nerves. But it’s not voluntary.

With regard to something else, I had said, let me quote myself: It’s long been my opinion that left alone, any society will inevitably gravitate towards liberalism. It’s only a society that feels itself under threat that looks towards fundamentalism and conservatism.   

A culture that thinks it’s under threat of physical liquidation by another will usually retreat to its roots and drag out stuff from its basement that it would never normally have looked at again, dust it off, and enforce it – because it’s part of that culture’s tradition.

In Mau Mau From Within, General Karari Njama (one of the very few educated men to have taken part in the Kenyan anticolonialist revolt) speaks of how initiates into the ranks of the Mau Mau had to swear an oath that, among other things, required them to vow to have their daughters “circumcised”. Njama wrote of how it made him, as an educated person, uncomfortable, but he accepted it because it was part of the anti-British uprising, as well as the cultural baggage of his Kikuyu people. He said he wouldn’t have actually “circumcised” his daughters, but it’s a moot point, because at the time he did not have any.

Of course, in this world, religion is used as a cover for a lot of appalling things, and it’s not too surprising that it’s been brought in to justify female circumcision as well. So, FGM is often associated with Islam – though it’s not exclusive to Islam, many mullahs have at various times said that it’s part of what the Prophet Muhammad prescribed and hence an integral part of the religion. Apart from the question of whether backing FGM is liable to improve the status of Islam in the eyes of the disinterested observer, it’s not even agreed among the mullahs as to whether FGM has any place in Islam. For a discussion on Islam and FGM, as well as the Prophet Muhammad’s views, see here (you may need to click on "skip this ad" in the top right hand corner before you can see the page itself).

And it's not just Islam: 

Female circumcision is currently practiced in at least 28 countries stretching across the center of Africa north of the equator; it is not found in southern Africa or in the Arabic-speaking nations of North Africa, with the exception of Egypt. Female circumcision occurs among Muslims, Christians, animists and one Jewish sect, although no religion requires it.

Nowadays, FGM is officially banned in most countries, even in Africa. With Eritrea having banned it and Egypt planning to ban it, onlySomalia, which has no central government, and Sudan still hold it legal. But given the fact that it’s mostly done informally by untrained practitioners, the ban has very little actual meaning.

Girls in Somalia are circumcised before the age of five years, usually by female family members, although it is also performed legally there in some hospitals. Uncircumcised women are seen as unclean. The most common procedure is "fibulation," which involves removing and suturing most external genital tissue (i.e. the most extreme form of FGM), leaving only a posterior opening. In 1995, it was estimated that 98 percent of Somali women had undergone female genital mutilation.

Get this clear, it’s not the East African equivalent of a ring in your vulva. No.

Of course the opening can’t remain closed like that either. Just depriving a woman of all sexual pleasure isn’t enough. Once the woman is wed, her vagina needs to be cut open again for sexual intercourse – joyless for her and painful to boot. And then when she gets pregnant – as she will, given the fact that in these cultures women are thought to be baby producing machines – the vaginal opening has to be cut open even further to allow birth of the baby. They call it the "three feminine sorrows".

Compared to this the less extreme forms of FGM might almost look like good deals, but we shouldn’t fall into that trap. Whether it’s just the prepuce of the clitoris being removed or the entire female external genitals being cut away, and whether it’s done by a specialist in a hospital or by an older woman with a rusty knife, the procedure has absolutely no benefits and no indisputable religious sanction, something that doesn’t, of course, stop some “religious leaders” from shoving their oar in. You can’t cut away any of a little girl’s vulva and say you have the right to do it. You don’t. Period.    

Incidentally, please notice that the older female family members are the ones who were most often the practitioners of this barbarity. No wonder that

despite the social pressures to continue the tradition, many women who have undergone female genital mutilation believe the most important of her sorrows is the loss of trust--a sense of betrayal by her own mother.

It also proves yet another point I’ve repeated ad nauseam – women are their own worst enemies in the battle for equality. If the women would refuse to do it, do you imagine FGM would survive?    

Now, where I stand in this is as follows: personally, I think blocking someone’s access to sexual pleasure, whether temporarily or permanently, and especially so as a part of a power trip, is a crime against humanity. And, yes, just because it’s not from my culture doesn’t mean I can’t say it’s wrong.

Hell, this is one of the things that make me believe there might be something called absolute evil, after all.

   

The Virgin Auctionicles

Some things make me wonder if it’s just me, or if things are really seriously out of whack.

Twice, in recent days, I’ve come across news items about women desirous of auctioning their virginity. The first, if memory serves (and Google shows it does) is a 22-year-old student who wants to auction her virginity at a brothel…a more appropriate auction house I never did see…  where her sister works (to pay off her educational debts), in order, she says, to buy herself a master’s degree. She wants a million US$, believe it or not. “We live in a capitalistic society,” she said. “Why shouldn’t I be allowed to capitalise on my virginity?”

The second…ah the second…is Rafaella Fico, a 20-year-old Italian model who swears blind she never had sex before and who wants to buy a house with the proceeds of her self-auction, which, if you can believe that, she expects to reach a million Euros.

A few years ago, I recall another young female (a lesbian in that case) who auctioned her virginity to pay off her college loans. (And there was yet another, Sarah DiMuro, who made a kind of online celebrity of herself by being adopted as a “case” by the erstwhile Janemagazine, which undertook to help her lose her virginity by her 30th birthday, but that’s a different case, because that woman wasn’t asking cash up-front...well, at least not directly, even if she did make good publicity out of it.)

The first thing that struck my mind when I saw this was, “What makes these women imagine their self-professed state of never having had sexual intercourse is worth anything to anyone, let alone the sums they seem to expect?” And the second thing was, “What kind of moron would want to have sex with a virgin, and pay such amounts for it too?”

Let’s leave personal equations out of it for a moment, and think about it dispassionately (as any character bidding in such an auction would have to think). Suppose you were playing in a doubles tournament in tennis. Would you want your partner to be a rank amateur who had never held a racquet before, or would you want a player who’s as expert as you can get? Like anything else, the more practice you have with sex, the better you get at it. Virgin encounters 
tend to be, most of the time, icky and…embarrassingly inept.

I can only think of two reasons why any man would want to have sex with a virgin he didn’t love – or whom he was having sex with for factors other than the fact that she was a virgin. Those two reasons are psychological and biological.

The psychological reason has nothing to do with pleasure but has everything to do with power. There is the power of showing the capacity of the person involved to pay for the experience (a million Euros or whatever). And there is the power of marking himself on the woman’s life forever (“No other man, no matter how many she sleeps with in future, will ever be her first! I’m that man, forever! Yabbadabbadoo!”). This is exactly the same impulse that drives a certain kind of rapist.

The biological reason has everything to do with the actual purpose of sexual intercourse – the propagation of the genes. I’ve pointed out earlier that in a pride of lions, when a new lion takes over, his first act is to slaughter the cubs. Since only the dominant lion mates with the lionesses, he then proceeds to impregnate them to produce cubs which he knows are worth the effort of hunting for and bringing up – because they are his own, carriers of his genes.

The human reason, almost exactly similar, is this: the man who wants a virgin bride is (at least subconsciously) looking to propagate his genes through a partner who has never had intercourse with anyone else, which means that if he can keep her from having intercourse with anyone else afterwards, the children born to her will be his children – worth the effort of earning for and raising. This is the same impulse that led to the phenomenon of child marriage (still rampant in parts of India).

All the same, however power-drunk and rich a man, I wonder how he could trust in the authenticity of what these women are claiming to be selling, since virginity, either male or female, is virtually impossible to prove. Virgin women could easily have torn their hymens, and non-virgins can have intact hymens, and in any case, with such amounts of money at stake, a hymen can easily be reconstructed by plastic surgery if required.

And as for the women, I wonder how their action can be construed to be any different from prostitution. In fact I’d consider the average prostitute more upfront and honest any day.

But, as I said, that’s just me.            

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THE GOLDEST PROFESSION

Well, it isn't - the Goldest, I mean. That's politics.

In the last post, I’d said that I’d rather back a hooker than a “virgin” who’s selling her virginity. 

Prostitutes, and prostitution, happen to be illegal in this country. That doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. That only means that they’ve been driven underground.
It also means that they’re cut off from officially supervised health care, protection of their rights, minimum wages, and so on, and that if they’re the victims of crime (an occupational hazard among hookers) they can’t even go to the cops without being locked up themselves. 

This is really pretty bizarre, because it’s not for nothing that prostitution is called the oldest profession. Ever since the first human societies formed, women have put out for men in return for material security. Temple prostitutes were a feature of the earliest Bronze Age civilisations.

There seems to be some kind of assumption (in India at least) that hookers are flaming scarlet temptresses who will somehow pull unsuspecting, unwilling, helpless men from the bosoms of their loving families and corrupt them beyond redemption (interestingly, the same logic doesn’t extend to brewers and distillers and alcohol sellers). It seems that (in this view) men are poor helpless creatures whose brains are in their testicles, and who can no longer think once their sex organs become engorged with blood. As a man, I don’t know whether to be amused or enraged.

There are many reasons why women would become hookers, from poverty to the desire for easy money, but there is one thing in common – whether a Rs 200,000 a night call-girl with a faked American accent or a dumpy housewife earning a little easy money on her back while hubby is out of town to a tribal woman trying to feed her family by turning tricks all night in trucks on the highway, they are all servicing a need. Basic economics will teach you that when there is a demand, there will be a supply. If men want paid sex, whether as variety or because they can’t get it any other way, they’ll find women willing to sell it.

Yes, I agree prostitutes may go out of their way to be alluring so they can attract clients…but isn’t that what that great capitalistic institution, advertisement, is all about? 

I don't necessarily see prostitutes as victims. But I don't see them as any worse than...oh, say hairdressers either. And I'd say they're light-years more honest than Feng Shui "experts" and "aromatherapists" and other assorted scum.