Even when its bad-its still pretty good. No matter where you get it.
Well, another day less till I am paid less for working the same amount of time. I’m just f*cking thrilled about it. I am even more (un) thrilled about the stupid reactions of people who ought to know better-but are more than proud to put their inherent selfishness and stupidity on public display.
Ah, but c’est le vie, or ich kann nicht anders in German ( I can do nothing else). What it is in Hebrew I don’t know yet-but I am learning.
So it only seems appropriate to take a break from such depressing news and talk about something everyone can understand, sex. After all, my month old edition of Esquire magazine got here yesterday! Whoo-hoo! Because Esquire always talks about my favorite subject: sex and how to get more of it.
And true to form, this issue does not disappoint. John H. Richardson in a fine piece of writing encapsulates a sentiment I have clumsily tried for over 8 years to express here at Far East Cynic HQ. Sex is always good-no matter if it comes marital or extramarital-and it’s about damn time we stopped being such hypocrites because some guy felt the need for some strange.
Enough! Enough of the childish delight with which we destroy ourselves and each other over who we choose to have sex with. Here's a modest proposal: It's well past time we grow up, stop the carnage, and enjoy sex the way God intended……..I want to suggest that sex, be it adulterous or premarital or deviant or polyamorous, is a good thing, not a bad thing, and that sex itself is the moment of grace. And that our sterile idea of perfection is the actual sin. To start with the subject on the table, adultery is a brave rebellion against the invisible prison we build for ourselves. When the sad little man Larry Craig widened his stance in that airport bathroom, it was probably the most honest and courageous act of his life. When Clinton got that blowjob in the White House, he wasn't indulging a weakness (and an eager intern) but enacting the hero's journey of reconciling inner and outer, risking all to break through the wall of hypocritical purity he had spent years building and projecting to the world in the effort to get elected. By risking martyrdom, in fact, he lifted himself up into an exaltation we still refuse to understand. He was the Martyred Jesus of Oral Sex with Interns and all we see is a mean little sin, as all the sexual deviates pretending to be puritans gathered around in an orgy of denunciation and scandal. In our condemnation, we focus on the supposedly broken vows and the supposed pain of his wife when in fact we know nothing of his wife's true feelings or her knowledge and tolerance of his "frisky" side (frisky being one of the endless array of demeaning expressions we use as invisible prison bars, along with dog and pig and you only want one thing). We never consider that our reaction is the punishment and the meanness is all in our eyes. Every single time we play out this ritual, we replay the Old Testament rite in which the pious transferred their sins to goats, which were then driven into the wilderness, just as we drive David Petraeus and a parade of other scapegoats out the gates of our smug little village of lies in the hope that we can put the "sin" outside the gate — when it is, of course, always inside. That's what happens when you put up gates.What we're afraid of is the truth. We live in a world in which men and women are buried up to their necks and stoned to death for these same impulses. We recoil at such barbarism with smug assertions of our superior level of civilization while cheerfully meting out our own version of punishment for the same supposed crime — anything to avoid looking at the deeper questions of why adultery exists and what exactly all our endless sexual prohibitions and inhibitions are supposed to do for us. Because if they are there to stabilize the family or inhibit sexually compulsive perversions or avoid the conflicts attendant in jealousy, they're failing spectacularly and they always have.In fact, the opposite is true. Our prohibitions against sex cause perversion, and the prison walls we put up around our marriages cause adultery. That is why adultery is merely the physical enactment of the truth men and women hide for long miserable years, a glorious terrifying truth that bursts through all our barriers if we have the vitality to rebel — if we have any vitality left after all the social and personal castration that we enact every single day of our miserable slavish self-denying lives. There's a sign on my veterinarian's wall that says, WE ALL NEED A DOG TO WORSHIP US AND A CAT TO BRING US BACK TO REALITY. Those are the mutually destructive roles our society has given to the husbands and wives who assume the prisoner/prison-guard roles in marriage. Let's be honest, we have a long and inglorious social history that essentially reduces women to marital prostitutes who buster their battered dignity with the drab consolation of fidelity. But when those wives and husbands take up the role of the cat that brings us back down to reality, when they refuse their spouse's need for worship and celebration, then, in the immortal words of Malcolm Lowry, the lighthouse invites the storm.
You can find the rest of the article here. Go read it. It’s a good dissection of the peculiarly American disease: sexual hypocrisy, that prudish adherence to a flawed convention that keeps men and women from allowing themselves the greatest pleasure and experience that life offers.
As has been evident from my writings, I have now firmly –and with conviction-come down on the side of those who believe marriage is a completely flawed institution ready for the societal scrap heap. As human life expectancy expands, less and less people will be able to stay together with that one “special someone”. I long ago came to the conclusion “that fated love is a lie, and monogamous love a deception.” That doesn’t mean I am incapable of love It is just that through experience-I have learned that such love does not offer what I need. Not near often enough or with the necessary veracity. Furthermore-women continue to let you down, becoming engrossed in the mindless mundane things that make up day to day life and not opening themselves up enough to enjoy the sexuality God bestowed upon them.
Mr Richardson probably has it right-instead of berating both the cuckold and the man (or woman) who cuckold’s him-we should be celebrating their conquest (s).
The only way out of this horrifying violent loop of repression and explosion is to learn to wallow in the sperm and blood and shit of life, to smear it on the walls and call it art and laugh at the fools who say it demeans us, to encourage our husbands and wives to cheat if they need to, to embrace our gay brothers and sisters and all the other "deviants" whose suffering has protected and insulated us, to open the prison doors of civilization and finally learn how to live free.
Only then will the parade of martyrs stop.