The Errors of Infidelity: Revisited
A month or so ago, I posted some thoughts on infidelity, why we are so obsessed with it and what the reality of it is in America… In examining some of the data from a report titled “American Sexual Behavior” out of the National Opinion Research Center from the University of Chicago, I ran across [...]
The Decade Sex Got Good
The decade wasn’t the 1970s, if that’s what you thought I was going to say. The decade was the 1130s and the man who made sex good (or at least not bad by definition) was Peter Abelard. He was a writer and teacher in Paris, born in 1079, died in 1142 or 1144. He was [...]
The Return of the Catholic Sex Scandal
I have never been less surprised by anything in my entire life than I have been by the global revival of the Catholic sex scandal. Anyone who bought the idea that the pedophile scandal in the US Catholic Church was a US-only event caused by priests being in an unhealthy, sexually permissive atmosphere is an [...]
Happy Valentine’s Day: Gay Marriage
I like being married. I was married for 14 years and even though that didn’t work out at all (as readers of my book well know), I ended up meeting a fantastic woman following my divorce and three years and a few months after I’d become single, I got married again. (If a really bad [...]
Oscar Wilde, Rest in Peace
One-hundred and nine years ago today, on November 30, 1900, Oscar Wilde died in France. Dozens will honor this anniversary by reminding us about his brilliant plays and unforgettable witticisms. I am grateful for these things, but they are not all that Oscar Wilde gave us. He also gave us homophobia, or at least modern [...]
The Keating Paradox:On learning morality from dirtbags.
The current set of obscenity laws in the US was designed by Charles Keating, Jr. But that’s not all the man did, in his spare time from being an anti-smut campaigner, Keating ran a fraudulent banking / real estate empire, which peaked in the 1980s when he bankrupted the Lincoln Savings and Loan, costing American [...]
Creation Controversy
The British have made a film Creation about one of their greatest sons, Charles Darwin, a film that’s failed to get an American distributor because of our country’s general hostility to evolution. (Only 39% of Americans believe in it.) A friend, Jen Kirkman, commenting about the controversy on Facebook, wrote, “I never understood why religion [...]
Sex Positive: An Epitaph?
“Safe sex came from activists, porn stars, sex workers and their community driven efforts.” This quote comes from the webpage of a documentary I just Netflixed, or put on my Netflix® queue (out of respect for their trademark), called Sex Positive, about Richard Berkowitz, a S/M-huslter turned AIDS-activist who was one of the inventors and [...]
Fun with Art: Fetch the Saw
When I go to art museums, I take pictures of art objects that represent or point to funny sexual hangups and then I talk about those hangups here. I recently visited the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver; my second visit to what is one of my favorite museums. The [...]
But Why Not?
Samuel Johnson (the 18th-century genius whose dictionary established English as a flexible, living language infinitely open to new and changing words) apparently was hypersexual and liked to be tied up and punished. It’s no surprise that I find this interesting. But not everyone agrees with me. A book reviewer in the Winter, 2009 Wilson Quarterly, [...]
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