The boyz next door

Crossing over into different worlds is something I have done. There is something about transgression and boundaries that attracts me. Only had one office romance in my history...which turned out to be a major relationship of nine years, but made my continuing employment where I was pretty untenable. And I am happy to say that in my current professional life, I have not crossed any of the prohibited lines.

But I have often enjoyed getting to know people that I was not supposed to get to know.

I live in the Castro in San Francisco, so the opportunity for knowing various kinds of unusual people is there. One struck me today and made me laugh. There was an ad for a porn movie --Yes, I watch porn on the internet--which had three pairings of guys in it and I realized that in each of the pairings, I knew one of the guys personally.

The first is a buddy of mine, a former Marine. Only known him for a few years, but he has stayed at my house and we are in pretty regular contact. His porn work is not a secret. As a man, however, along with his impressive physical gifts, he is prodigiously smart, well-read, etc. And for those of you with a prurient mind, he and I are buddies, as I said. C'est tout.

The second is a guy I know from the gym and who used to cut hair in the local barber shop. We have discussed tattoos.

The third is my neighbor across the street for the last 18 years, who was a longtime friend of my ex.

I have actually seen this film before today's ad. Seeing my friend in it was a curiously unerotic experience. If I did not know him, I am sure I'd find it arousing, but the fact that he is a real person, whose real name I know, cuts off the make-believe and projection that goes along with porn eros. Guy number two, since I know him the least, was interesting in an anthropological kind of way. But seeing my neighbor in flagrante delicto was positively embarrassing. Not because of anything particular he did or because the scene was poor...but I suddenly had the visual equivalent of TMI about someone I had not wondered much about before.

My life has not turned out the way I thought it would when I was in fifth grade :)

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Eating your words

Tyler Florence is a TV chef. He's got some charm and his food looks good, but he talks at a seriously fast clip and he really eats his words, slurring and slurring. And slurring and eliding. Annoys me. Change the channel.

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Eros, the most powerful of the gods?

Though Zeus was the king of Greece's Olympian gods, even he was not immune to the hungers and ecstasies provoked by Eros. Ask his ever-resentful wife Hera. Be it for lovely Leda or lovely Ganymede, he could not keep his divine rod under his toga.

In one telling, Eros is the child of Venus and Ares, of Love and War. In his case, nature and nurture would have been identical. But in other tellings, Eros is older than all the gods and indeed provoked into existence the earliest Greek divine forces; he is as old as Heaven and Earth.

I was speaking with a Canadian friend recently, who has long been friends with the recently disgraced Bishop of Antigonish in Nova Scotia. The prelate was arrested at an airport for having pornographic images of what appear to be underaged teenage boys on his laptop. Not prepubescent children, but sexually capable adolescents who may be below the age of 18.

Of course, in the wake of the priestly sex scandals of the last decades, Canadian Catholics are largely consumed by shame and anger and, as my friend said, broken hearts. The Canadian press is having a field day with one more reason to embarrass the Church. Even if, as it appears, the man's otherwise sterling life contained a hunger for this type of imagery and there is no evidence at all that he ever acted out sexually with young men, his career is over and, whatever the legal outcome, he is a pariah. A child molester. His life is over.

I note that this has been taking place while many of the world's sophisticated elite plead for the cause of Roman Polanski, who has admitted to actually drugging, sodomizing and raping a 13-year-old girl. But that was a long time ago and he is, after all, a great artiste.

I have not much wisdom to offer here. Eros, be he a god or a personification of our peculiarly human sexuality, is indeed a power matched by few others. The cutesy image of Cupid is wholly wrong. Eros is a hunter. He unhinges us not only when we are in his grip as actors but when we are in his grip (or in reaction against him) as spectators. He lets us taste pleasure almost beyond description. And feeds us equivalent misery when it suits him.

Currently, the only two crimes our society responds to with completely self-righteous paroxysms of condemnation and mob bloodlust are racial improprieties and child molestation.
In neither case do we seem to have a sense of proportion or differentiation, a sense inherent in justice.

I have had the rare experience of actually meeting and working therapeutically with child molesters. A few did indeed match the stereotype of the creepy predator, a combination of severe social stagnation and reptilian amorality. The hair on the back of my neck literally stood on end. And I met a lot of men who were stupid or let themselves be duped or were depleted or otherwise inadequate to what was required of them as adults in a situation most of us would have known how to handle. But our current culture and its laws names as sexual predators both the cunning serial rapist of many six year olds and a horny half-drunk loser who once stupidly took up a flirting fourteen year old on his challenge.

Eros, I suspect, will never let us or any civilization arrive at a sexual ethic and attitude which is not shot through with deep irrationality. That is his way. Shiva-like, he creates and he destroys.
Dealing with him, coping with him, honoring him, suffering his slings, and arrows, is part of our human predicament. And in many ways, a predicament it is.

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Sadly funny

A classic example of droll conservative opinion, from the blog Athens and Jerusalem:

I think our president has bad policies, an unpleasant character, and a certain degree of incompetence - but the relevant comparison is to, say, President Carter or Neville Chamberlain, not to a Mussolini, much less a Stalin or a Hitler. Until further notice, take all criticism of the president to include but he's not as bad as all that.

Damning with faint praise :)

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Suicide or murder?

I often read contemporary Western behavior as self-destructive, in line with Burnham's thesis that liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide. An indication that there is homicide involved as well comes from this story, (HT to Bookworm) that British liberal elites purposely sought to erase the British ethnic identity of the white native peoples thru massive Third-World immigration and replace it with the so-called "multicultural" version.

Although the combination of self-loathing and arrogance that so often afflicts liberal elites allows them the paradox of feeling superior while they work to ensure their eventual inferiority, their behavior becomes clear if we transplant it to another place and time. Imagine American Indian leadership inviting white settlers into their territory to achieve a multicultural mosaic beyond mere traditional tribal identity.

Multiculturalism only means the dismantling, marginalizing, pathologizing and destruction of white culture.

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Real

but touched up a little...

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Malesoul 32

The real unreal

In real life, I find the actual street-level beauty of a real and unperfect man totally mesmerizing. But that does not mean I am unable, from time to time, to be distracted by the unreal beauty of a perfect man's image.

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I offended the Great Leader: forgive me!

Unbelievable.

HT to Instapundit.

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More fascist oppression

by...reality. HT to neoneocon.