nevermind the bricolage

SeX is NaTurAL

So I am halfway through a mid-week called on Money/Sex/Power. This week we began a two-part discussion about sex and sexuality. As I did with the topic of Money, I began with a very, very brief, history of sex--we tend to think, as George Michael once reminded us that  "sex is natural," which, of course, is true, but sex is also the product of histories and systems of power and influence that have shaped how we approach sex and sexuality. We journeyed back to the Babylonians and made our way forward, stopping a key spots along the way--contrasting views from late antiquity with medieval views and then shifted to the 18th and 19th century when ideas about sex and sexuality as we now understand it started to emerge. The move beyond anatomical reasoning to a more nuanced understanding of sex as more than anatomy is something that emerged quite late in the history of sex

Bicurious?

The top song on the Billboard chart this week is, I Kissed A Girl, a fairly typical title for a pop song, and a fairly typical pop song all in all, the only twist is that the singer is a girl, Katy Perry. So the number one pop song in the US is a song about a girl kissing a girl, apparently just for fun, just to see what it was like. I would imagine that for most people, listening to the lyrics is secondary to feeling the groove, I Kissed A Girl is, afterall, a dance-floor song, so dance-ability takes precedence, but the song has generated a lot of chat about its lyrical content on both talk and public radio. Ever since Madonna kissed Britney Spears on the MTV Awards, the fascination of girls kissing girls has become a topic of occasional public debate and commentary.

Behind The Green Veil

In 1866, Khalil Bey, a former ambassador for the Ottoman Empire, commissioned painter Gustave Courbet to produce a work based on two sleeping female lovers. Courbet delivered, Sleep, and gave his patron another work as well. That piece, The Origin of the World, was considered so shocking, so erotic, that Khalil-Bey kept it hidden behind a green veil in his home. The Origin of the World is one of the most unseen, given that it has been largely in private collections, and yet often the subject of great debate. Jacques Lacan, the French philosopher, owned it for a time and had his own 'veil,' another painting stood in front of Courbet's, adding to the drama, before the viewer's eyes had gazed upon the painting itself.

Lust, Caution

Ang Lee's movie, Lust, Caution, garnered most of its attention because of the NC-17  (no-one under 17 admitted) rating it received here in the US. The idea that an Academy Award-winning director would make a film so sexually explicit to get such a rating seemed to be the only topic of conversation about the film. An NC-17 rating is a bit like a kiss of death for a movie here, R ratings are challenging enough, but higher than that and it becomes almost impossible to get films into wide release.
There is no doubt that sex plays a major role in the film, but I can't imagine it really deserved the rating.

Who's Been Naughty Then?!

This is too good! "Loving wife spanking in a Christian marriage." No, I'm not kidding, there is a site devoted to this particular form of marital relationship, access to much of the material requires signing up and I wasn't prepared to do that but here's a little blurb from the front page of the site,
"A domestic discipline marriage is one in which one partner in the marriage is given authority over the other and has the means to back the authority, usually by spanking.
    A Christian Domestic Discipline marriage is one that is set up according to Biblical standards; that is, the husband is the authority in the household.  The wife is submissive to her husband as is fit in the Lord and her husband loves her as himself.  He has the ultimate authority in his household, but it is tempered with the knowledge that he must answer to God for his actions and decisions.  He has the authority to spank his wife for punishment, but in real CDD marriages this is taken very seriously and usually happens only rarely.  CDD is so much more than just spanking.  It is the husband loving the wife enough to guide and teach her, and the wife loving the husband enough to follow his leadership.  A Christian marriage embodies true romance and a Christian man a true hero.
    Though this seems unusual in today's United States, this kind of marriage has been practiced throughout history and is still practiced in many parts of the world today."
    Wow! Now, to each his own I suppose, but I find this quite disturbing--the idea that there is a biblical 'precedent' or at least, prescription,  that allows for stuff like this is an amazing nuance of scriptural interpretation I think. I also love it, that this 'spanking marriage' is a one-way partnership: the male is always the authority figure apparently, but what about Paul's admonition that we 'submit to one another?' The site itself has a definite 'softness' to it, it seems to be aimed at women primarily. Perhaps I am overreaching, maybe it's all a joke,  but I did a little web investigating and came across a couple of blogs by women supposedly in these relationships--I'll leave you to discover those for yourself, dear reader. Once again, if you scratch the surface you'll probably be surprised by what you find lurking below!