Pornitopia

Triple play today: a political post on The One, a religious post on ritual language, and now a sex post on porn.

Nothing deep. And no pictures.

One site offered a section for watching "mature men". They were 35.

I don't know if it's acting skill or erotic charisma or what, but there's a guy on another site who, while impressively hung and in decent shape, is not a handsome head turner. But his attitude and his energy and engagement make him very hot. And there are tons of handsome and terrifically built guys who project all the sexiness of a tenured English teacher. Zzzzz.

Oops. I do know one tenured English teacher who has sexiness to spare. Not, however, in the classroom.

There is a site that specializes in very rough men-to-men sex, but the narrative is that it is with captured and unwilling straight guys. Now this is fantasy; the site makes it clear that all the actors are consensual, of age, etc. And the conversion theme is an old one in gay porn: straight guy resists at first but then finds he likes it and gives in. But two things make this site very unappealing and unwatchable. The "tops" are all British! And I find even the fantasy of homos torturing and raping very unwilling straight men as a conscious act of erotic vengeance, well, vile.

I have an old friend, a straight guy, very religious but easygoing and curious, who told me that he found straight porn offensive but gay porn, while unstimulating, sort of interesting. A lesbian friend of mine once told me something similar. True or not, both of them found the supposedly unequal power between man and woman difficult to handle but assumed a kind of fraternal equality between the men as men that made the sex playful.

I have not watched very much dominatrix porn, but what I have seen has impressed me as being far rougher than most of the leather porn between men.

I have never found watching porn with someone else exciting. Splits my focus. Like threeways.

There is a site where you can't jump ahead with the downloaded video. You have to watch the whole thing just as the director filmed it. Do these people not know their audience?

Years ago I was at a mixed-gender conference that included a discussion of porn. The man at the podium asked a lesbian friend what kind of porn film she thought women would like. She said that her idea of porn was a book full of empty pages, scented, and with a velvet cover.
Male brain vs female brain.

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Popular and elite

The texts of the Roman Catholic Mass have been re-translated into English. The translation in use for the last 40 years will be replaced by a new version. The new one will be more literal, closer both in content and style to the original Latin. Conservatives are delighted, liberals dismayed.

More than one proponent of the 1970's version has decried the introduction of vocabulary that may be unusual for, as they say, "God's whole people gathered in the liturgical assembly." This is elitist popular talk for "illiterate idiots in the pews." Funny how these folks are always screaming that "God's people" be consulted on all sorts of complex matters, but when you throw them a word like "incarnate", they are supposed to become pre-literate. (Did no one ever hear the very common phrase "the devil incarnate"?)

I once had an argument with a low-church Anglican in which she exacerbated Catholicism for its statues and ceremonies, etc. She quoted John's Jesus, who praised worship "in spirit and in truth." In a flash of insight, I told her that because of her tight-assed Anglo culture, she confused "spirit and truth" with "neat and tidy", spiritual attitude with aesthetic preference, when in fact they had nothing to do with each other. I think the translators of the 70's confused "noble simplicity"with "dumbing down" .

I recall an irate Dutch woman taking on the parish priest after a High Mass one Sunday. She complained, with inordinate bitterness, that incense confused her children and they did not understand it, so it should be stopped. The priest replied, "You mean they understand everything else? What else should we get rid of to suit the breadth of your children's minds?" Priest 1, Dutch bitch, 0.

Back in the days when I was church-involved, I wrote a note to the translation committee about something and in return I was sent a booklet with a draft translation of some prayers, with a request for my input. My assessment of the whole 1970's project was that they were aiming for their idea of a 12 year old's vocabulary and comprehension. Note I say "their idea". I happened to have a comic book that my 12 year old brother was reading at the time. Its language was full of subordinate clauses. Clearly comic writers had a higher estimate of 12 year olds than the liturgical group. So I sent them the comic as an example of both poetic and complex popular speech. I never heard back and was not asked again for my opinion.

The 1970's translation was, with very few exceptions, pretty 1970's: basic English for dummies. Sound bites for kindergarteners. It was boring, empty, condescending, lacking in fire, drama, punch or life. And it certainly had a theological bias against transcendance, majesty or sin and in favor of inclusivity and schmaltz.

Having seen the new translation, at least of the common prayers, it is clear that they are sacred language and they do not shy away from Roman orthodoxy. Some of them are a bit clunky and the Book of Common Prayer need not fear being replaced by this revised Catholic English. But at least it has a sense of drama.

"God's whole people gathered in the liturgical assembly." And who knows what that means?
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Irked by Urkel

Saw a headline yesterday in which The One pronounced that Wall Street executive bonuses were "shameful". And today His Obamaness pontificates about when people have made "enough" money.

That's not his damn friggin' job!

Maybe he should be calling George Soros or Nancy Pelosi.

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Same ole same old again and again

Melanie Philips points out something I have often said, that supposedly pro, non, post or anti religious Progressivism --the attitudes and ideologies of the Western Left-- is strikingly religious. Secular on the surface, the old archetypal patterns continue.

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Anti-immigrant!

On immigration, here's what I think should be our policy.

We only bring in people

who match our nation's demographics rather than upset their equilibrium.
who are physically and mentally healthy.
who enhance our economic and national interests.
who demonstrate respect for our national sovereignty and security.
who have no criminal record.
who can support themselves without government aid.

We require that law enforcement at all levels carry out immigration statutes,
including the military.
We empower ordinary citizens to detain illegal aliens.
We require all non-citizens to carry appropriate identification,
to be shown on demand.

We punish those who break immigration laws
with imprisonment and fines and deportation,
even en masse.

We ban the involvement of non-citizens
in political discussions of immigration issues.

So, there it is.
Does that make me a racist xenophic rightwing Teabagger from Arizona?

Well, actually, what it makes me is...Mexican.

HT to FB friend Charles Winecoff.

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Distraction

Ryder Lee, lead singer of The Lost Trailers. I watch and listen to their videos primarily to watch and listen to him. All of Kenny Chesney's good points without any of that annoyance, and as sexy as Tim McGrath, without the sentimentality. Great voice for his genre. Handsome as hell, great smile, built right and moves better. Hey, I toldja I wasn't always deep.



Their mediocre song Country Folks Livin Loud shows off his many talents to good effect :)

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Privilege in black and white

I ran across a site that was talking about "white privilege" the other day. Ah, sweet memories. Did you know that there is an annual conference on White Privilege at Colorado Springs campus of UC?

Privilege, for those of you not blessed with the Knowing, is the set of "invisible and assumed" social benefits you get for belonging to a privileged class, even though you as an individual have not earned them. Being white, being male, you get privileges that people of color and women do not. And among the more advanced, dismantling privilege, especially one's own, is a great way to pass the time.

There are other kinds of privilege, too. Being a citizen as opposed to an immigrant. Being able as opposed to disabled. Being tall, being beautiful, speaking English. And recently I found the most delightful...and one that revealed the game in the whole paradigm...cisgender privilege. If you are not transgendered, aka at war with your physical gender, then you are cisgendered, at home with your gender of birth. (Cis is Latin for "this side"; it is the antonym of the Latin trans, beyond.) Well, that gives you privilege, one that you did not earn but simply enjoy....at the expense of the transgendered, of course, who constitute, what, .00001% of the population?
Hmmm, I wonder if there is FTM vs MTF privilege. Boy, this is fun.

My response to all these systems of privilege is: what the hell else do you expect human societies to do? Expecting to dismantle them is just like expecting the classless society of Marxist utopia. A deluded pipedream of moral inflation that usually just leads to more misery than the original situation.

And the role of this privilege scam, like all the Progressive Orthodoxy we call political correctness, is to engage members of successful groups in self-sabotage and self-erasure through manufactured guilt. Dismantling one group's privilege will NOT lead to a society without systems of group privilege any more than Communism led to the withering away of the state. It will mean that another group will have the privilege, not you. So my suggestion is that if you are part of a group with privilege, hang on to it.

A funny thing is that white men, for instance, are castigated for enjoying group privileges they did not earn as individuals. But they can be held accountable for historical group wrongs that they had not part in as individuals. Cool, huh?

I was conversing the other night with my ex, T, who is black, and our friend Bill, who is another old white guy like me. Neither Bill nor I are at all rich or powerful. Bill made some joke about us enjoying white privilege and we all laughed.

Now T has his own privilege --aside from getting free rides on the bus sometimes when the driver is black. As a black, he has moral privilege: in any situation where race is involved, the assumption will be that he is the victim. And the whites will always be assumed guilty. That's how the game is played these days. Any person of color can weave a narrative of discrimination, etc and they have the privilege of being believed prima facie, without necessarily having earned the role as individuals.

Works both ways, this stuff.

Welcome to the human race. BS abounds.

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PS. Wow, what a self-hating homo I must be. I forgot to mention heterosexual privilege and its evil handmaiden "heterosexism" which holds the ridiculous notion that a sexual paradigm both utterly necessary to civilization and shared by about 97%+ of the human race should have a certain assumed prominence. My bad.

Tuesday

Gosh, but I had a nice time yesterday.


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Monday

A bright and seasonal sunny morning by the Bay. B is playing hookey from work today --taking one of his 150 unused sick days!-- and we are going hiking and picnicking on Mt. Tam. Later I'll grill lamb chops and we'll sit on the back steps by my kitchen and drink. He may read from and comment on sections from Mad Magazine or Newsweek. I can't tell them apart.

Interesting and sometimes (very) challenging for me to re-negotiate this relationship. It's been my experience that when a romantic duo hit a wall or come to a fork in the road, they are often tired of each other both personally and erotically and so they break it off entirely. Unfortunately, that's not true of us. It'd be easier if we disliked each other or had become bored in bed. Or if we had a history of bad behavior against each other. We could just part ways and be done with it. In fact, I tried that before with him and it never lasted.

Although I would more than occasionally like to strangle him for being so profoundly, deeply and abysmally foolish as to not want what I want (he knows this, so I am not blogging out of school), he remains for me the most likeable of men, with a super-quick wit and a sunny disposition. No one makes me laugh the way he does. And it is a cosmic understatement to say that we still have a spark between us. We are both eligible for AARP membership but our hormones don't know that. They think they are still 22.

Where will it/we go? I don't know, of course. On one level, I am still pretty confused. But in the midst of all the conflictual desires and the passion, there is a friendship. In a pinch, I know that he would do anything he could to help me. We really like each other very much. That is worth pursuing.


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2 clever by 1/2

A would-be mentor of mine once opined that the Irish were good for little more than "strong drink and light verbal humor." Well, he was half right, rather than right by half. I do like my own cleverness sometimes.

I posted a comment recently where a bunch of gay men were indulging in the usual back and forth: opinionated vitriol balanced by relativistic pleas for tolerance. Zzzz. Anyway, I wrote that "I used to think that gayness was about erotic orientation but now I have come to suspect that gay culture is about dealing with gender dis-orientation."

Clever, no?