Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. – Charlotte Bronte
Five stories from the third week of 2012.
Twice As Interesting
It’s not too often a story attracts my attention both as a librarian and as a harlot, but this one from the January 18th National Post did:
Instead of a book, patrons of Ottawa’s city libraries will have a chance to check out a stripper, a prostitute, a Somali refugee, a judge, an HIV-positive man, a Peking Opera performer, a woman born as a man, a police officer…a bipolar man [and many others] as part of a Human Library program. Billed as “real people, real conversations,” the Ottawa Public Library is bringing dozens of people with diverse experiences into its branches, encouraging patrons to check them out for a 20-minute, one-on-one chat…Human books cannot be placed on hold…Patrons peruse the list of options like an old-fashioned card catalogue and ask to check out the title. While the event’s message is diversity and dialogue, there have already been complaints about including a stripper and a sex trade worker, said Elaine Condos, the acting city librarian… “Books are about information and information comes in many, many formats, and a human book is a unique way of presenting information…The role of the public library is to provide access to information,” Ms. Condos said. “People will have an opportunity to have a one-on-one conversation…for 20 minutes and ask them questions about their experiences.” It is being billed as an event for adults and
conversations will take place in open areas of the libraries. “These are conversations, not presentations,” she said of the stripper and prostitute. “I don’t think we want the pediatric neurosurgeon to do any demonstrations either”…
It’s sad that bigots felt compelled to complain, but can you imagine a stripper and a hooker being included in such an event in the US? Not in this decade!
So What Else Is New?
This item from the January 19th Huffington Post isn’t really news because it’s what researchers have said for years:
Many women swear they have one, but a new review of 60 years of sex research shows science still can’t definitively find the G-spot. Researchers have used surveys, imaging scans and biopsies of women, all trying to locate and define the presumably orgasmic area on the vaginal wall known as the G-spot. Based on a review of 96 published studies, an Israeli and American research team came to one conclusion. “Without a doubt, a discreet anatomic entity called the G-spot does not exist,” said [lead author] Dr. Amichai Kilchevsky …The G-spot was named in honor of the late Dr. Ernst Gräfenberg, who in 1950 described a particularly sensitive…spot…a few centimeters in from the vaginal opening…toward the front of a woman’s body…[but though] a majority of women believe a G-spot actually exists…some of those women also say they can’t locate it.
…Kilchevsky doesn’t think women who claim to have a G-spot are crazy…”What they’re likely experiencing is a continuation of the clitoris,” he said. G-spot skeptics often point out that the tissue of the clitoris extends into the body, behind it where the G-spot would be located…Barry Komisaruk…of…Rutgers University…advocates calling it the…G-region…instead. “I think that the bulk of the evidence shows that the G-spot is not a particular thing. It’s not like saying, ‘What is the thyroid gland?'” Komisaruk said. “The G-spot is more of a thing like New York City is a thing. It’s a region, it’s a convergence of many different structures”…pressing on the area…also presses the urethra and a structure called Skene’s gland, which is analogous to the male prostate. “Each of those areas have different nerve sites,” said Komisaruk. “I think there’s good enough data that a lot of women feel that that is a particularly sensitive region”…
I’ve always adhered to the “back of the clitoris” theory myself, mainly because it’s consistent with my own experiences.
Update to “A Moral Cancer” (March 6th, 2011)
Crypto-moralists just love pretending that their puritanical agendas are really about physical (rather than spiritual) health, and always disguise their desire to control others’ lives as “for the public good”:
…The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine…put up [a series of] graphic cellulite-filled billboards around Albany [New York on January 17th]…The group claims cheese products play a big role in the epidemic of childhood obesity, and want the Albany city school district to cut cheese from its lunch menu…
Well, if they’re doctors promoting health, they must know what they’re talking about, right? Wrong. Their name and hype has fooled the media for 25 years, but in reality they’re a fanatical animal-rights group with ties to PETA which relies primarily on scare tactics and gross-out ads in its continuing attempt to impose veganism on everyone, and less than 5% of its members are physicians. Its founder is a psychiatrist with no background in nutrition, and the American Medical Association has repeatedly tried to inform the public that the PCRM is a “fringe organization” which uses “unethical tactics” and is “interested in perverting medical science.” Sort of reminds you of trafficking fetishists, doesn’t it?
Update To “Against Their Will” (July 23rd, 2011)
Prostitutes “rescued” against their will generally fight their “saviors” and attempt to escape from “rehabilitation centers” at the first opportunity, but at least one “rescue” organization has figured out how to get around this issue: they simply abduct the women’s children instead.
“How many nights of safety can you give a child?” is India Partners’ tagline for its campaign to rescue children of sex workers in India. More than 2.3 million girls and women in India are believed to be working in the sex industry against their will. In addition, there are at least 5 million children of sex workers in India. India Partners is working with an organization in Mumbai to rescue the children of trafficked women and relocate them to loving safe homes outside the red-light districts.
Children in red-light areas are vulnerable to abuse, trauma and second-generation prostitution. During the day, children are often left alone while their mothers are sleeping. At night, some are drugged and put under the bed while their mothers work the trade. Anandalay, a safe home for daughters of trafficked women, provides the rescued girls with education, food and excellent accommodation under the committed care of a houseparent couple. If the child’s mother is still living, she is granted supervised visits.
One couldn’t ask for a finer example of doublethink; we are told that these women are “trafficked” and working “against their will”, and that the solution is to further victimize them by stealing their children. The brainwashed supporters of this filthy scheme are assured that the children are “loved” by their jailers, because obviously those degraded whores (oops, I mean “exploited victims”) can’t possibly have any maternal feelings. But hey, India Partners isn’t completely inhumane; they magnanimously allow their victims to occasionally stare at their kidnapped babies under the watchful gaze of armed thugs.
Update to “Sex, Lies and Busybodies” (January 27th, 2012)
From a January 18th AP release:
Some of the most prominent purveyors of porn say they’ll start packing up their sex toys and abandoning the nation’s Porn Capital if authorities really do…police their movie sets and order that every actor be outfitted with a condom…[on January 17th] the Los Angeles City Council voted 9-1 to grant final approval to an ordinance that would deny film permits to producers who do not comply with the condom requirement…the council has called for the creation of a committee made up of police officials, the city attorney, state health officials and others to determine how it might be enforced. “It’s going to be interesting to see how…they…try to enforce it…[and] fund it…” said Steven Hirsch…of…Vivid…”Ultimately I think what they will find is people will just stop shooting in the city of Los Angeles…”
…Other industry officials condemned the measure as an unneeded [and unenforceable] exercise in political correctness…”The only thing that the city could potentially achieve is losing some film permit money and driving some productions away, but you can’t actually compel an industry to create a product that the market doesn’t want,” said Christian Mann…of Evil Angel…The ordinance would require filmmakers pay a permit fee…to pay for surprise inspections at film shoots…Mann said smaller productions involving only a handful of people can probably fly under the radar and just ignore the permitting requirement. Larger ones, he said, will likely just leave town…
Raise hands, anyone who didn’t see this coming. The porn industry has no choice; in order to survive it has to produce a product consumers want, and if it can’t do that in Los Angeles it will do it elsewhere.
One Year Ago Today
“Not an Addiction” explains what an addiction actually is, why it’s impossible to be addicted to sex and how the myth of “sex addiction” is used to promote moralist agendas (and dating websites).
Proud to be Canadian 🙂
Frustrating that women can’t “square themselves away” on this. HTF can WE find it if YOU can’t??!! Of course, if we men had an appendage that could “articulate” in three axis we could help you with that maybe – but we’re kind of limited to the “z” axis for the most part.
On PETA – I like PETA because the more desperate they get as an organization – the more nude Eva Mendez ads they crank out.
That’s WIN! 😀
Grace says she belongs to a different PETA: People who Eat Tasty Animals. 😀
You should have Grace do a guest post … she sounds like a HOOOT!
If we are not supposed to eat animals, why are they made of meat?
🙂
I absolutely respect people who choose to be vegans due to their own sense of ethics, but I have no respect for anyone who attempts to impose his own morality on others, especially via lies and trickery.
I place a bet. The porn industry will stay in LA, because the city does have enough policemen to control condom use. And if there are no controls, why move?
Oops: The city does NOT have enough policemen…. Sorry for the omission.
That’s the whole reason the Aids HealthCare Foundation (AHF) has been involved in this … THEY want to be the policemen.
This is how AHF works … that’s how they took over ALL state healthcare for AIDS patients in Florida. First, they convinced the citizens there was a desperate need for reforms to the state’s HIV healthcare programs – then, they bullied the state and absolutely DID NOT shut up until the state gave them control of the program.
Soooo … their modus operandi is …
Phase I: Create a demand.
Phase II: Convince taxpayers and the state they are the only ones who can fill the demand.
Phase III: Continuously lobby lawmakers to increase funding to the programs they now control.
They’ve done exactly this in LA with the condom controversy. Their end goal is to control the “policing” of the porn sites to ensure condom usage – AND – they want to control STD testing for performers. I’m sure they also want to control STD treatment for performers.
And they’ll do all this for a helluva lot of money.
“can you imagine a stripper and a hooker being included in such an event in the US? Not in this decade!”
Maybe the grant process for the National Endowment for the Arts has shifted towards a more Bab-tist sensibility, but I can certainly imagine an NEA or NEH grant for something like this. I can also imagine the Prude Right raising hell, and the Progressive Left (who put it on to provoke just that reaction) screaming “Censorship!”.
Which is why I’m for defunding the NEA and the NEH. Either they are used as clubs by one subset of taxpayers to beat on another subset (which is despicable), or their presentations are so bland as to be pointless.
Intelligent support of the Arts and the Humanities requires taste and judgement, and the government rather notoriously has neither.
check out a stripper, a prostitute, a Somali refugee, a judge, an HIV-positive man, a Peking Opera performer, a woman born as a man, a police officer…a bipolar man…
Well, for a moment there, I thought that this was going to be a traditional “walked into a bar” joke on steroids. Boy, was I disappointed!
Three Ministers and a Priest walked into a bar, but the Rabbi ducked.
*clong*
😉
The story of children being taken away from sex workers just fills me with rage. It’s one thing to take a child out of an abusive home. And if they are using drugs to control their kids, that’s hideous (I read a recent horrifying story about how Afghan kids are placated with/becoming addicted to opium). But it’s impossible that all 2.3 million sex workers are engaging in such practices.
Child abuse is child abuse. It doesn’t matter if the parent is an MIT professor or a whore. Being in a despised profession does not ipso facto indicate abuse. I’m reminded of when mixed-race children would be taken away from black mothers “for their own good”.
Narcissistic bigots always presume that their way of raising children is “better” than anyone else’s, and when cultural imperialism is added to the mix they may justify abducting those children on grounds of “abuse” or “neglect”. Personally, I consider the practice of keeping children locked up inside, hovering over them and coddling them so much that they can’t develop self-reliance, to be abusive. And I consider feeding them nothing but processed food and shipping them off to “day care” and useless, substandard government schools to be neglectful. So I guess most Americans are lucky I don’t have the power to abduct their children, aren’t they?
I love the idea of the human library. There are so many people in different walks of life I’d love to speak with. That’s an incredible idea.
C. S. P. Schofield, how about if we substitute this for your statement on the NEA & NEH:
“The rabid right would scream “bomb them back to the stone age” and the pacifist left would scream “Imperialist murders”. That’s why I am for defunding the military…”
You could make the same claim for almost any government activity.
Taking children away from sex workers, or threatening to, isn’t just happening in India. It’s common practice here in the USA too, for cops to threaten sex workers they’ve arrested with losing their children if they don’t “cooperate” and name other sex workers and customers.
True, but at least American cops pretend that prostitutes are “criminals”. What makes the Indian situation even more heinous is that A) it’s an NGO performing the kidnappings while government looks the other way; and B) they’re claiming the prostitutes are victims of a crime and that they’re “helping” them by further victimizing them. For governments to treat people brutally is nothing new, but to do it while pretending concern for their plight is both Kafkaesque and increasingly common.
Well, for one thing the Military is one of the few functions of government actually written into the Constitution. I’m far from sure where the hell the government thinks it derives the authority to fund the NEA. The NEA’s output is trivial, annoying, divisive, and unnecessary. The Military is non-trivial, annoying, divisive, and necessary.
Some of it is necessary. We can probably agree that a lot of military funding has little to do with defending the country, or even with effectively fighting overseas wars of choice like Iraq.
We could start by cancelling any weapons program the Pentagon has asked not be forced on them.
Hmmm. I’ve always wondered how many adolescent males’ teenage years (and anatomies) have been ruined by attempts to develop G-shaped penises to stimulate this elusive location…
And I can never understand why more sex workers’ creches aren’t developed to care for the needs of their children.
Well, we only have the word of the “rescue” groups about this; I’ll be looking for a response from Indian sex worker rights organizations.
Dear Maggie,
According to the authors of “Eve’s Secrets” (Sevely, Random House, NY, ) the G spot is a region which the author (I believe she is an anatomist) called the para-urethral sponge which descends from the clitoral nerves (which also surround the opening and first two inches inside the vagina). This tissue is very active in some women but not in others. Maybe it’s a talent like singing? We all have vocal chords but not everyone can sing. I know for damn sure the ejaculate is not water. For one thing, women can’t urinate while climaxing any more than men can. For another it doesn’t taste like urine, it tastes like pussy juice, and analysis shows no urine in it. If you look at some of the videos of women ejaculating some of them are perfectly amazing. Cytherea is a good porn star to watch.
I know for damn sure the ejaculate is not water. For one thing, women can’t urinate while climaxing any more than men can. For another it doesn’t taste like urine, it tastes like pussy juice, and analysis shows no urine in it.
Female ejaculate also has elevated levels of various sugars and male enzymes/proteins when compared to urine taken from the same person. Other differences with urine include it’s viscosity and sometimes whitish color.
I was already aware that the G-spot was probably the back of the clitoris. A twelve year old girl who went by the nickname of Sweetcheeks wrote about it, and she made sense.
The G-Spot being integral with a woman’s clitoral formation has long made most sense to me.
The G-Spot’s apparent “absence” in some women yet”predominance” in some other women parallels the clitoral network variations that explain why some women experience pleasure and even orgasm from anal penetration/stimulation yet many don’t: the arrangement of clitoral “roots” and nerve system within the entire female pelvic region (of which the visible portion of the clitoris is comparatively “the tip of the iceberg”) varies significantly enough among women to substantially vary sensations and pleasure points from one woman to another.
So, women’s specific clitoral “wirings” are not identical. It’s not always that “if her G-Spot was just stimulated correctly, she’d feel it” — sometimes “it isn’t located” because that woman’s clitoral wiring doesn’t include what in some women is termed the G-Spot..