The DaVinci Hoax (or; Sorry, Janet...)

A couple of years ago I wrote a little post about the possibility that there was a person who lived in 1st Century Judea named Jesus Josephson who wandered around talking about God and who maybe, possibly, got hitched at some point before he ended up (maybe, possibly) on a Roman execution device.

This was based on the controversy surrounding a scrap of manuscript supposedly detailing some discussion this guy had with his pals talking about his ol' lady. Nobody seemed to be sure whether this scrap was genuine or not, but the idea seemed interesting enough for me to run with.

Well, sadly, the whole magilla appears to have been a complete forgery that, unfortunately enough, the original author of the paper that began the speculation refuses to accept.

The story of the journalist that chased the scam down to its creator, though, is delightful in itself, including the East German STASI, a slithering con man, and Femalebarebackgangbangextreme.com

Wowsa!

But I stand corrected; sorry, Janet. He just wasn't that into you.

What IS it with the yoga pants..?

Remember the nice Christian lady here in Oregon who promised her hubby (and informed us all in Outer Blogistan) that she was hangin' up the leggings and yoga pants because of the way that watching her bottom twitching around inside them made good Christian dudes all hot, sweaty, and hard to control?

Well...turns out that she's got a brother in Christ - one Dave "Doc" Moore - up in the Montana legislature who has an even better idea.

Make it illegal to show all dat ass (and that pubic mound, and thighs, and those taut, limber calves, and bare feet, too, I'm guessing...). Nudity, revealing clothing, anything that shows off you ladies' butts? Foul! Unclean! Illegal!

But this dope got himself in real trouble when he threw in yoga pants and Speedos; that just seemed a little too much like sharia law even for the Good People of the Treasure State (the bill he introduced has been officially tabled).

Course ol' Doc now says that the whole "yoga pants SHOULD be illegal.." thing was just a jest, a jape, a mere rhetorical flourish...now that he's been shown up for some sort of moronic, bible-banging panty-sniffer all across the Intertoobz. But, really...what the fuck, guys?

Why even make the suggestion in the first place?

I mean...don't you like women? Don't you think they're nice to look at? Don't you appreciate the human body, including the female body, as "God's creation", like a sunset or a mountain or a rainbow? Why all this fuss about other people's bottoms?

And...if not, I guess my other question would be, what the fuck business is it of yours what he or she wears, or doesn't wear? Doesn't your Bible enjoin you to worry about the fucking beam in your OWN eye?

I guess I will just never understand Christians. They're like that wierd jello thing with little marshmallows that people used to serve in the Seventies; you just have to have been there to understand.

Women and leggings and...well, Carlos Bocanegra NOT wearing leggings

My friends Lisa and Labrys reminded me that looking at attractive bodies is not a gender-specific thing. So here's some eye-candy for the female readers; U.S. Soccer's Carlos Bocanegra:

If you knew that this body was under baggy sweats and a ballcap, would it matter whether it was tight shorts or baggy sweats, or a bare chest or a hoodie?

I mean, certainly less clothing is more scenic...but what is unseen can still be seen, if you're thinking about it.

As Lisa said; the brain is the real sexual organ. What can be imagined will be imagine, whether it be by man or woman. We men may be a trifle more visual, but we were all designed to respond to each other's (or our own gender's, for those of us hardwired that way...) bodies. As Labrys said; we may be married, or in love, or committed, but we're neither blind nor dead. We respond to those bodies as our own minds and bodies tell us we should. And that's just fine; if we are truly civilized people we can surely find ways to dealing with our desires in civilized ways.

The fact that religious zealots - whether fundamentalist Christians, ultraorthodox Jews, Wahhabi Muslims, or every other flavor of God-bothering asshole - can't seem to do that is their problem, not ours, frankly.

Otherwise?

Enjoy.

Men and leggings and living with them both.

So I open the digital version of the World's Worst Newspaper this morning and there's this:

"Why I Chose to No Longer Wear Leggings...(Veronica) Partridge, a 25-year-old Christian, felt conflicted about modesty, she writes in the post, and talked with her husband about whether or not leggings are appropriate as pants. He told her that it's hard for him not to look at other women wearing the tight athletic wear. She wrote: "And at that moment, I made a personal vow to myself and to my husband. I will no longer wear thin, form-fitting yoga pants or leggings in public."

And I thought, oh, Ronnie.

Ronnie, Ronnie, Ronnie...

You and me, girlfriend. We need to have a little talk.

Well, OK, first, let me admit; this wasn't the first time I'd heard of this leggings-deal. I ran across it the other night skimming Fred Clarke's blog Slacktivist, where he kinda slammed you not for your obsession with "modesty" but for your misprision of the central tenets of your Christianity:

"For white American evangelicals, religion is always about sex — about other people’s genitals, but when Jesus spoke about modesty of dress it was never about sex and lust. It was about money and greed and self-indulgence at the expense of those in need. If you’re striving for “biblical modesty,” that is the core and the whole of what the Bible itself has to say about leggings and yoga pants: “Whoever has two pair of leggings must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise."

Which is in itself all well and good from a religious-good-doing sort of perspective. Though I should note that I tend to agree with Fred that Dale's comment was sort of a dick move. Sorry, Ron, but he was implying that it is haaaard to be faithful to you with those darn sluts prancing around in yoga pants. But that's a whole 'nother thing.

Thing is, sorry, I'm not a Christian like Fred (who is a pretty insightful guy and a fellow Jesus-pesterer; you might give him a read, just sayin'...) I'm just some random atheist. So I can't really help you on the whole "Christian morality" thing.

But.

I, like your husband Dale the "serial entrepreneur", am a guy. Dude. Vato. Hombre. Mensch. Fella. Goombah. We're both members of the He-Man Chest-Beater Club, sharers of the descended testicles, and we have a lot in common, saint and sinner the two of us.

And I thought we should reeeeeeally talk about this whole thing you said Dale said to you. Accoring to your blog "...he told me, “yeah, when I walk into a place and there are women wearing yoga pants everywhere, it’s hard to not look. I don’t, but it’s not easy.”

And, Ronnie, love ya, sweetie, bless your heart, but I'm here as a guy to tell you; Dale's lying his dear little Christian ass off.

"Looks?" Of course he looks. We ALL look.

Why?

Because we like you.

Sure, he loves you as a person, as a wife, mother of your kids, helpmeet, companion, lover. But...he's also a heterosexual guy. So he likes you as a woman.

Meaning he likes women. Women, plural. Women in general.

We're like that, us het guys. We may like some women as individual friends. We may love some - or, one, hopefully as in your case - as our inamorata, our one-and-only, our Bride, our Delight. But those are personality things, emotional things, spiritual things, individual things.

But we also like women. Physically. Generically. Generally. En masse. As a class of beings. We like how they look, how their voices sound, how they move, how they stand. We like how their faces fit together, how their hair falls, how they look hipshot, or sitting, or dancing, or sleeping. We like the high curve of the tops of their breasts, the slender taper of their fingers (or the square sturdiness of their hands - women come in a delightful assortment of sizes, shapes, and proportions, and that's another thing we like about them). We like the swell of their hips, and the roundness of their bottoms, the intricate curve where their belly meets their thigh.

We like how they laugh when they're silly, the frown that furls their brow when they're thinking. And...I hope this doesn't shock you, dear, but we like making love to them and we think about that from time to time when we look at them.

We don't really think about having sex with them when we see those women in their yoga pants and leggings.

Because, I'm sorry to say, dear, we don't need the yoga pants and leggings to think about having sex with them.

We don't need leggings...or yoga pants, or pantyhose or high heels or pushup bras or bustiers. We don't need accessories or special outfits or fetish wear. We're guys, Ronnie. Guys! We can look at a cool stylish matron in a chic suit and think of lust in the back of a limo. Or a ponytailed jogger in Nikes and imagine sweaty gym sex. Or the tattooed barista at the coffeeshop and picture wild lovemaking in a loft full of modern art.

Hell, don't even get me started on burkas or habits or granny shoes, darlin'. We're men and all of life is one ginormous Rule 34 for us. We look, and we think, and...if we love you, that's all we do.

Just looking - and thinking - doesn't mean we're going to tear off their yoga pants in a mad frenxy of lust. It doesn't mean that anytime we see a woman in a cute outfit, or a bathing suit, that we're gonna screw the poor girl to the wall. We may think about how pretty and sexy they are. We may get a little thrill of excitement looking at them.

But then we take all that home and if we're lucky get to feel and think the same way about you.

My own Bride, who is a very sensible and pragmatic woman, has a term for it: "You go ahead and work up an appetite wherever you want, big guy. Just come home to eat."

She knows we look, and she knows we know she knows, and she's okay with that. She's a smart woman and she knows that if what we have is good, and strong, and right that the looking is no more than enjoyment, and that she will reap the benefits.

And so can you so long as you remember this simple little rule: Guys Are Gonna Look - It Doesn't Matter What You Wear

So you pull on those Carharts, Ronnie dear, if it makes you feel better. But just remember - it's not about the leggings. It's about the legs, and he's gonna think about those legs - yours, hers, your Aunt Louise's - and probably will no matter if you and every other woman within sight are dressed in goddamn garbage sacks.

Let me help you with that

A friend of mine posted this little picture to her Facebook page:

To which she added "That's my guy..."

I looked at this and my immediate thought was:

"But a real, REAL woman would kick him square in the 'nards for being a pushy jerk who won't listen to her, so a real REAL guy will smile and have a couple of stiff drinks for her when she finishes up doing it herself..."

And that seemed like a frankly nasty and uncharitable reaction to what was intended to be a sweet tribute from a very good woman to her loving husband. So I sat and thought about that for a while. And after thinking about it I realized what it was about that trite little picture that pushed my feminist button.

It was the word "let".

Thing is, I don't "let" my Bride do or not do anything. There may be times that she does something and I offer to help her and there may be times she takes me up on that. But "let her" do something she wants to do herself? That presumes that it's my choice whether she does something. Which assumes that I'm the boss of her. And assuming that would earn me a solid kick in the 'nards were I foolish enough to try and insist on that.

And that kinda brings us right back to the irritation that I've been simmering in since the Hobby Lobby decision and its implications; that your gender - or your religion - lets you make decisions for someone else about what amounts to their life or their paycheck (see Lance Mannion for a nice discursion on this aspect of the issue...) so long as you're a man (or a Christian of the bible-clutching variety) and I'm a woman or married or emotionally or financially attached to one or some sort of not-your sort of Christian.

I wrote a post back in 2012 called "Looking for FitzUrse" which I ended with:

"One of the truly fundamental principles of the United States is that you're only allowed to pester people with your whacko religious ideas to the degree and extent that your powers of persuasion allow. The U.S. government, by its constitutive documents, is forbidden from allowing - much less encouraging - one religion or other to enshrine its prejudices and preferences into civil or criminal law. For the good reason that the United States is supposed to be a land where the public forum is open to people of all religions, or none, and the moment you let the pope's nose into the lawbook that freedom is doomed.

This does not, has not, and will not prevent prelates of various sorts from trying to do this. Repeatedly, patiently, relentlessly, mercilessly.

Which is why the steps of the Capitol must, must always be guarded by fitzUrse with his naked sword in his hand.For that pious, humble, saintly man Tom Becket is the black enemy of public freedom and always will be."

And I see no reason to alter or retract that statement. You are free to follow your inner religious nut to the tip of my nose, and, in the public forum, are allowed to advocate for your religious nuttery and, if elected, let it guide your personal decisions.

What you're NOT free to do is use the levers of civil or criminal law to force ME to follow your religious nuttery.

This country has seen an explosion of magical thinking in its politics in the past thirty years. Belief is allowed to trump logic, desire commonsense, ridiculous ideas like "trickle-down economics" over fiscal experience, nonsensical opinion outweigh rational inquiry.

Like the idea that because I have external genitalia or a mystical inside line to an invisible magical sky wizard I have the power to "let" my inamorata "do something herself" or decide for someone else what they can or can't do with their money?

I'm really fucking sick and tired of people who think like that and, worse, who are trying to get me and those like me to think, or act, like that.

Just fucking sick and tired.

Janet Christ!

Got to thinking about this when my cousin posted this article from the Times talking about some sort of 4th to 8th Century manuscript that contains a fragment where Christ talks about the missus:

"Skepticism about the tiny scrap of papyrus has been fierce because it contained a phrase never before seen in any piece of Scripture: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife...’ ” Too convenient for some, it also contained the words “she will be able to be my disciple..."

Now I have as little religion as the most Godless heathen. But I got to thinking about this a bit in the context of the period when the guy is supposed to have lived and wondered...why not?

I once read somewhere that one of the strongest lines of evidence that the Christ - assuming that there was an actual person living in Galilee around 32AD who claimed to be the Son of God and went around talking about that until he was arrested and executed and the whole magilla isn't a Book-of-Mormon-level scam - was married was the importance of marriage as a social signifier in Roman Judea.

Bottom line; a thirty-something Jewish guy with no wife and family? Slacker, or worse. Can't hold down a job long enough to afford to marry? Too poor? Too chancy?

Who the hell would listen to that joker talk about God? What the hell would he know?

The bizarre Christian obsession with celibacy really sort of turns up associated with Paul of Tarsus. He was sort of a freak about that. I tried a quick search for "What did Christ say about chastity" and result was, pretty much, "nothing".

Here's the Mormons trying to come up with something. The best that Bishop Elder "of the Seventy" can do is cite the Matthew version of the Sermon on the Mount where Christ says "Don't commit adultery."

Here's the Catholics talking about it and the best the Church webmaster can come up with is "Sexual intercourse outside marriage is formally condemned I Cor 5:1; 6:9; 7:2; 10:8 Eph. 5:5; I Tim 1:10; Heb 13:4; and with explicit reasons I Cor 6:12-20."

Get the connection there?

No Gospels.

First Corinthians, Ephesians, First Timothy, Hebrews...those are all Paul getting all pissy while riding his usual hobbyhorse, "Fucking is the Devil's horizontal rhumba and only if you're married it's only just barely preferable to depopulating the Earth." The sonofabitch was just obsessed with his purity of essence; I'll bet he had something going on about his precious bodily fluids, too. Dude was a freak. Period.

Jesus, based on what got written down, seems to be a whole 'nother guy.

He gives the usual prohibitions against adultery, but physical chastity?

Doin' the nasty so long as it was with your legally-sanctioned partner?

That seems to have been jake with Jesus.

(And, along those lines, Paul Rudnick has a funny "I was Jesus' wife" story in the New Yorker.)

So.

Is this odd little scrap a forgery?

Who the hell knows? We don't even know if Jesus himself isn't a massive 1st Century practical joke, much less whether he really was married if he really was real.

But if there was an actual person, was it likely that he was married?

Seems to me, what the hell - it's as likely as not.

To which, being who I am and what I am, I have to close with this delightful image of "The Bride of Christ" from Pastor Dobi's blog:

Which I found searching for an image of "The Bride of Christ".

Pastor Dobi, "your sister in Christ" describes the little scene as:"...The Bride of Christ coming to her beloved! Look at the picture closely. We see our dear Jesus coming to His bride..."

And as instructed I looked at the picture closely and my immediate thought was:

"I'll bet! I just hope that dear Jesus is thoughtful enough to tip His bride the hint before he comes so she knows that she's about to get a faceful of the Holy Spirit..."

Yeah, yeah, I know. Sorry. I just can't help it.

Proof once again if any was needed that a) I have a filthy, filthy mind, and b) I better hope that all this really is a big practical joke because, if it's not, when Jesus returns I am in SO much trouble...

À une Mendiante rousse

I probably pay no more attention to the whole "Miss America" business - pageant, contestants, winner, public appearances, scholarship, the associated hoopla - as the average American male of my age and history. That being, unless said Miss is involved in some sort of scandal involving nude pictures of her ownself...

...absolutely none.

I have utterly no idea who this year's "Miss Oregon" is (Allison Elizabeth Cook of Klamath Falls, for those of you interested, who is all of nineteen and either attends or attended Oregon Institute of Technology and who ran on the "platform issue" of Brain Injury Awareness - isn't the Internet amazing..?) or who last year's Miss America was (Mallory Hagen, Miss New York, whose winning performance included performing a tap dance routine to James Brown's "Get Up Offa That Thing" while wearing a latex rodeo outfit. She's twenty-five) or, well, pretty much anything about Miss America.

So you can trust me when I say that when I channel-surfed onto the 2014 Miss America show Sunday night it was purely by accident.

I'd had a busy day and was ready for sleep, anyway. My bride, however, likes to have a television oblongata as she fiddles with her tablet. I asked her which she preferred, the old movie on TCM or the Misses Americas and she chose the latter.

I watched a little of the opening of the show, which seemed to consist of groups of the young ladies doing a sort of one-too-many-mojitos-at-the-bachelorette-party dance

(you know the sort of thing, a lot of arm-waving and hip-circling along with tottery aimless little steps? Yeah, that.)

at various locales and stepping forward to introduce themselves. This consisted of a two- or three-sentence snippet that started with some sort of topical reference to the contestant's home state and then her connection to it; "Listening to your phone calls from the nation's capital. Just kidding! I'm Miss District of Columbia, Bindhu Pamarthi." or "Our Utah Jazz sure aren't bringing home the championship. Guess It's up to me! Ciera Pekarcik, Miss Utah."

The actual contest venue was in some sort of anonymous auditorium - presumably in Atlantic City, since isn't the whole idea to bring the tourists to the boardwalk and crimp their money? - buried beneath a ziggurat of glitter and lights with some sort of generic male-and-female hosting-type creatures and Miss 2013 Mallory Hagen in a crown and a white dress looking rather queen-like though not in a drag-queeny sort of way.

And, of course, all the contestant Misses Whereevers doing their bachelorette-party dance again, only this time in identical short dark dresses.

I watched all this in a fairly stupefied fashion. It just seemed excessive and I was reminded rather forcefully of that awful Sandra Bullock film Miss Congeniality and got a chuckle out of that.

The massed gyrating ranks of Miss American womanhood, however, seemed faintly intimidating. I assume there were only 53 of them - all the states plus DC, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands - but they seemed like a Multitude.

Perhaps because for all that they were as different from each other as Americans are different from each other (at least you could see in hair and skin color every place of origin from Europe to Africa to Asia and every admixture in-between...) they all seemed frighteningly alike.

Tall, or at least so slender as to seem tall, slim with endless slender arms and long legs. Perfect, glossy hair and lots of it. Gleaming teeth, shining eyes, flawless skin. Perfectly fitted into their perfectly tailored outfits, perfect feet shod in perfect shoes.

Perfection, and lots of it.

I went to read in bed.

A while later Mojo came in and pottered about making her nightly pre-sleep preparations. Finally she plumped down on the bed with a happy sigh.

"What did you think?" she asked.

"About what?" I said, putting Atkinson and my reading glasses on the nightstand.

"Of the swimsuits?" she said. "You're kidding. Didn't you see any of the swimsuit part?"

"No, I left before the thing really got started. How did the fembots look in their swimmies?"

"Very sleek." Mojo tipped her head and looked at me slantendicular. "You didn't even sneak a look at the swimsuit competition?"

"Nah. I know what fembots look like in their swimsuits, and I wanted to finish this chapter."

Mojo snorted. "Sure. You tell me you don't find watching them at all sexy?"

And that stopped me. I actually had to think about that for a moment.

Because when you get right down to it, that's really what all the beauty pageant business is about, isn't it? Sure, there's a lot of guff in the prospectus about talent and poise and style, sure, there are points for interviews and "platforms" and there's a scholarship...but the bottom line is that these women are there because they are beautiful, because they are endmembers of a certain human ideal of appearance, attitude, and aptitude, and the whole point is that they are "Miss America"; the sort of young, single woman that is supposed to be an American ideal.

So as a "Mister America" it seemed logical that these young women were supposed to appeal to me intellectually, emotionally, and - if not most importantly at least importantly - physically.

I should find them desirable. Sexually desirable.

And the more I thought about it the less true that seems, and it made me wonder why.

Pretty? Sure. Well-groomed? Yep.

Sexy?

Not really.

What the hell was wrong with me, then? These were by all appearances healthy, vigorous young women with bodies that appeared (from Mojo's viewing of them in their swimsuits, anyway) perfectly fit and feminine. Knowing how us guys like to look at you girls, well, there should have been an element of sexual attraction there. I should have looked at the Misses America and wanted to roll about naked with at least one of them, right?

I just didn't feel it and it took me a while to pinpoint why not.

It was, for me, anyway, the sheer perfection of those bodies and the women within them.

In those sleek contestants there seemed to be not a hint of human oddity, not a whisper of offhand intimacy, not a scrap of careless desire. All was taut expectation; poised, controlled, and precise. The contestants, the contest, and the broadcasters had done a perfect job of eliminating any shred of human weakness or imperfection.

And the more I thought about it the more accurate, and the less arousing, that perfection seemed. Although for all I know any number of these women might well be bright, funny, warm, desirable people you couldn't tell that from what you saw on television. All you saw was perfection.

And it is imperfection - for me, anyway - that fuels desire.

It's not a perfect ass or perfect breasts or perfect legs or a perfect face; its the ass that belongs to the woman curled up beside me companionably doing a sudoku, or leaning frowsy and warm against a morning countertop, scratching that bottom while she waits for the coffee to brew.

Its the way the parabola of those imperfect breasts shake as she straddles my hips and tells bad jokes and laughs at her own hilarity. Its the feel of those legs twined around my own, or the look on that face as it is drawn in concentration, or lightens in pleasant relaxation, or lours at me with incipient lust.

It is the sudden intimacy of a glimpse inside her half-opened bathrobe, or of the unperfect arc of her calf diving into her furry socks that keep her feet warm on a chilly evening.

Don't get me wrong. I "get it", the human ability to desire an anonymous ideal body, a perfect "zipless fuck". I'm not a marble saint; I've looked at women and thought carnal thoughts.

But...those women tend to be everyday, ordinary women whose everyday bodies, as imperfect and ordinary as my own, seem infinitely more desirable than the most perfect Miss Somewhere whose gelid smile and serene glance seems to free them from the earthy everydayness I share with their imperfect sisters.

I won't pretend I had figured all this out last night as a settled beside the warmth of my sleeping bride. But I think perhaps I had the main of it, in the lazy flush of warm, undemanding passion I felt for her.

No one will ever gaze in awe at her perfect skin, or marvel at the tautness of her perfect breasts. She will never again have the sleek vigor of youth. She will never wear America's crown of womanly perfection.

But to me she is infinitely, imperfectly desirable, far beyond the rank upon rank of perfect Misses.

To a Red-Haired Beggar Girl

Little white girl with red hair,
The holes in your frock
Show poverty
And beauty,

For me, a poor poet,
Your young and ailing body,
Spotted with, freckles,
Has its sweetness.

You carry more gallantly,
Than can a queen of fiction
Her high-boots of velvet,
Your heavy clogs.

In place of rags too short for you,
May a fine court costume
Be drawn in blustering, long folds
At your heels;

In place of stockings in holes,
May a dagger of gold
Glitter for the eyes of rakes
On your leg;

May barely fastened knots
Reveal for our sinning
Your lovely breasts, radiant
As two eyes;

May, to undress yourself,
Your arms require coaxing
And may they archly repel
Mischievous fingers,

May pearls of finest water,
Sonnets by Belleau,
Be ceaselessly proffered
By your enslaved lovers,

Trains of servant rhymers,
Dedicating first lines to you
And watching your slipper
Under the staircase,

Many a flunkey struck at random,
Many a lord and many a Ronsard
Would spy to seduce it,
Your tender retreat!

You would count more kisses
Than lilies in your beds
And you would hold in sway
More than one Valois!

— Meanwhile you go begging
Some old rubbish lying
On the threshold of some
Vulgar Véfour;

You go gaping past your shoulder
At twenty-nine sou jewels
Of which, I cannot, I am sorry,
Make a gift to you.

Go then, without other ornament,
Perfume, pearls or diamonds,
Than your emaciated nudity,
O my beauty!

~ Charles Baudelaire

Morning Talk with Missy

Little Girl - I think I've told you - lives to get up early.

So do I. Or, often, I have to get up early to get to a job site before seven or so.

It isn't unusual for the two of us to share the morning hours just after, or sometimes before, dawn.

So it was the other morning when, sitting at the computer in the front window, I heard the soft scuffle of blankets and the then thumping of small feet coming down the hallway and turn to see Little Miss emerging from the hall; tousleheaded and sleepy-eyed, clutching her favorite pink kittycat blanket in one hand and her beloved "stripey wubbie" in the other. She did as she often does; airborne-shuffled over to the couch, made herself a nest of blankets, wubbie, and pillows, and curled up near the armrest in a warm little-girl pile.

And I did what I often do; went and got a cup of coffee (black as night, hot as sin, rich and earthy and sweetened with cream) and sat down on the couch with her.

She took a moment or two to rearrange herself so she was cuddled up against my side and tucked her glossy black head under my arm. From the way she was sitting I could tell that I was in for a busy morning.

Sometimes the Girl get up but doesn't really wake up. When she does she just drapes herself over me and goes back to sleep. Or dozes on top of me quietly.

Those are very peaceful mornings, but rare. Usually once Little Miss is out of bed she's ready to start asking about the world around her. I enjoy hearing what's on her mind, and we are both more morning persons than not, so I waited for her first question.

Missy is the Girl of A Thousand Questions.

What is air? Why are ducks? When did you live with pre-Mommy? Why was Quinn Dog so dumb? She can and will ask questions about anything and everything. She also asks questions that you know she knows the answer to, or questions to which you have just told her the answer; she seems to do this because she likes making you answer. The Girl just likes to ask questions.

This morning's was: "Why did you and Mommy get married?"

I explained to her about how I loved Mommy and wanted to be together with her, and how we got certain tax breaks for being married, and plus it was a promise we made to each other that meant that we felt a special way about each other.

"What are tax breaks?" asked Little Miss, but before long she got bored with the explanation and asked:

"Why was The Boy in Mommy's tummy when you got married?"

I reminded her about how we had lost Baby Bryn, and how we wanted to have another baby, who turned out to be her big brother.

She thought about that for a while, and then asked: "When DID you make Baby Peeper?"

I tried to think the timing back, and explained that we had made him some time earlier that year, probably in the springtime.

"How do you make babies?"

Hmmm. Okay; well, I explained that grown-up men and women made babies by having sex, making love. From there we embarked on a digression about heterosexual reproduction, which involved discussing plants and animals and how they were the same and different than people. Missy said that she knew how people made babies; by humping. I said that Mommy and I had felt safer staying with the tried-and-true methods, so that was how we had made Baby Peeper.

"By humping?" squealed Missy incredulously, confronting for the first time (but probably not the last) the icky possibility that her mom and dad had...you know...ick!

And I should add that Missy knows about humping because...well, she does. I don't know where kids pick up this stuff; probably from one of her daycare or first grade pals. She does know about dogs humping, since she's seen it, and that Quinn the Dog used to hump his beloved chewie toy Mister Prickles and sort of understands what it means when people do it. I have questioned her and understand that she doesn't know exactly how it works, which is exactly what she then asked me then.

Nothing like a clinical question about sex from a seven-year-old at 6:30 in the morning to jump start your brain. I tried to figure out how to explain this without using terms that Little Girl wouldn't understand.

"Ummm...well, the thing is, the man has his sperm (remember, it's like the pollen from the boy part of the plant..?) inside his 'nards. And he uses his wiener to put it inside the woman's body, into a place where she has an egg called the uterus."

"How does he get it in there."

"Well, he puts his wiener in her puff-puff."

"In her puff-puff! That's GROSS!" the little one cried.

Well, yeah, it's a grown up thing, I said. Right now it seems pretty gross to you and it SHOULD.

But that's because you're little and your body aren't ready to make babies. When you're older, about 14 or 15, though, your body is going to change. You'll get this thing called "puberty". The shape of your body will change, and some things it will do will change (and if you think I was then going to get into the subject of menstruation, you're fucking nuts...), and most of all it will change some things inside your brain. You will start thinking about other people - boys, maybe, mostly, though some girls think this way about other girls - not just as people but as people that you might make babies with."

"Ewwww! I don't want to make babies."

Not now you don't, and that's good; you shouldn't want to make babies. But when your body changes it will change some of the way you think about things and people. It will want you to make babies so it can do with it's made for. So it will make you think differently about some people, even people you probably shouldn't want to think that way about, because it's not smart and just wants to make babies. Sometimes your body isn't very smart about making babies."

"Why does it want to make babies?"

So there will be more people. It's the same with flowers and trees and kitty cats and people; our bodies, like the cats and the flowers, are designed to make new people and cats and plants. But...here's the thing; we're smarter than cats and flowers. We don't HAVE to make babies unless we want to, or until we're ready to. So when your body says "Ooh! Make babies! Make babies!" your brain has to say: "Shuttup, you dummy! I'm not ready to make babies!" So you tell your body that it's not time for humping.

And sometimes that's hard, because your body gets kinda stupid. So you have to be smarter than your body.

"I don't want to hump anything, so I'm smarter than my body or you or Mommy or Peeper, 'cause he probably wants to hump stuff."

I suggested that he probably didn't and received a skeptical look in return; her brother is often the Root of All Evil. But the answer seemed to satisfy her.

Missy sucked her thumb for a bit, and peeped up;

"Who is smarter, you, or Mommy?"

I looked down at the warm little body curled up beside me, remembering her lost older sister and her mother's grief for her, how her mother cried in the night during the seeming endless fortnight in China, her soul flayed by what I think I described as "...the fraying delicacy of closening exhaustion" as she pursued the dream of a little girl to raise and love.

Of how so much of who this little person is - her warmth, her love, her curiosity, her feisty gentleness - mirrors her mother because my bride's bottomless well of patience and love has instilled them in her or fostered those of them already there.

Of how much of our success as a family is because of my wife, her mother.

Of how bright and curious and intelligent the little girl beside me was growing, and how clever (and know-it-all-ish and independent) her brother has become.

How lucky I am to have a houseful of smart, loving people around me.

I smiled out at the growing light, took a drink and pressed my coffee-warm lips to the cool sheen of her hair.

"I think you are, Little Question. Then Mommy. Then Peeper. Then maybe me."

"Well, you ARE pretty dumb, Daddy." she signed happily, wriggling deeper into her blanket-nest, silent for a moment. I listened contentedly to the silence.

For a moment.

"Why did Quinn like to hump Mister Prickles."

Loose shoes, and a warm place to shit.

In case you didn't quite get what all the singing and dancing was about, it's an ad for something called a "vaginal rejuvenation" gel called 18 Again. The product website claims that:

"18 Again is very effective for tightening of the vagina. Along with tightening, it provides vaginal rejuvenation, improves strength and grip of the vagina, helps prevent infections, encourages natural lubrication, masks foul odour, reduces involuntary urine escape, improves blood circulation, delays effects of ageing and keeps the vagina healthy."

I have to say that this is perhaps the weirdest commercial product I've run into since the crotch-bleach stuff (which was also an Indian thing...is something going on in Mumbai that I'm just not getting..?) and the damn adult wet-wipes that got your beaver more wood or something.

I mean, thinking about this in a sort of cold-bloodedly sexual fashion I get how the whole "happiness is a tight pussy" pitch these people are making for their product could work. It plays into the human obsession with sex and bizarre ways to make it bigger, faster, harder, and better. When you think about it this gloop isn't all that much different from the old Johnnie Holmes pecker-pump gimmicks you used to see advertised in skin mags or skeevy scandal sheets.

Not to mention the subject of a gajillion jokes like the one I used for the title that got ol' Earl Butz canned.

(And just as an aside, now there was a deeply evil Republican bastard. We'll get back to him in a bit, I promise...)

I can see how people would buy this stuff.

But below the surface there just seems to be something deeply...wrong...about the whole idea of this goop and I can't quite put my finger on it.

Is it simply the usual lazy human nonsense of expecting a magic cream to do magic to your body instead of hard work? Buying a magic belt instead of sit-ups? Buying magic pills instead of laying off the cupcakes? Buying magic goop instead of patiently doing a whole bunch of Kegel exercises?

Or is it the other usual lazy human nonsense, the masculine nonsense of treating a woman like a product that has a sell-by date and is useless after that, worthless until she's "eighteen again", tight and taut and virginal?

I don't know which is sadder.

But I know the whole business makes me shake my head just like the ginzo-bleach and the dingus-wipes.

Sometime I think human beings are the strangest goddamn monkey on the whole goddamn island.

Sapiens, my ass.

Graphic Sex

From Gawker, a simplified explanation of the relationships in the Petraeus Affair:

(h/t to Fallows for turning this up)

Again, I want to reiterate that the sexual aspects of this whole farrago are both boringly commonplace AND really not within our competence to discuss. We have no, absolutely no, idea what the personal emotional and sexual compact between the principals is or has been. To assume that it was monogamous fidelity is statistically likely but not in any way definitive.

The sad reality is that if the Petraeuses had an "open marriage", were polyamorous, or that Dave had the green light from Holly to get some specific freak on with someone else (crossdressing? spanking? Who the hell knows - only Dave, Paula, and Holly and they're not talking...) he would have been in just as hot if not hotter hot-seat right now.

The man's adultery or infidelity - if that is in fact what it was - is of concern to him, his wife, and those who know them personally. The fact that We the People seem to feel entitled to judge them is a public issue, and one that we should be ashamed of. Other people's private lives - even the private lives of public people - are and should be of issue and interest only to the people involved.

What does disturb me, and disturbs me quite a bit, is the way this scandal exposes the web of obvious nepotism and the flexibility of the supposedly-inflexible systems of the Army, the FBI, and the CIA, to personal caprice, egotism, corruption, and influence.

Surprised? No. We've been down this road long before, during our previous Gilded Age.

We like to pretend that we are a "nation of laws", that our government is based on the probity and impartiality of our public men and women. We like to scoff at the parts of the world where who you are and who you know makes you more important and gets you what you would not otherwise.

To me, the take-home lesson of this dismal little farrago is that we are not and we should not. We have been presented with another reminder that for all our pretensions we are as human and fallable as the principals in the Petraeus Affair, and should be careful in our haste to impress others not to fool ourselves.

Shining like copper

I posted a little item to MilPub this morning about the Petraeus Scandal.

I don't want to recount it here; the issue isn't one that I'm much wrapped around personally. But one of the things I mentioned as part of my lack of understanding over the whole business was how we the People don't seem to bother wondering whether the sex lives of strangers are our business especially since we haven't the faintest idea of what those sex lives might be.

The crux of the Petraeus biscuit is the presumption that David and Holly Petraeus are a white-bread monogamous couple and that what Petraeus did with his lover was censurable because of the betrayal, since we most of us have long since moved on past the notion of adultery as criminal act in itself.

But we honestly have no idea. For all we know Dave and Holly are paired in some sort of insanely lusty marriage-of-convenience to enable them to meet other hot swingers.

Bizarre? Not as bizarre as assuming without any proof whatsoever that there was a betrayal or adultery on anyone's part.

Anyway, that's not my point here.

Sadly, what this one is about is my own reaction to seeing what Holly Petraeus looks like.

That's her, on the left. When I looked at the picture my first thought was "Gee, how nice that Dave had his mom hold the book for him..."

But this is not Mrs. Petraeus Sr.; it is the man's wife of 37 years.

And my next - thoroughly uncharitable - thought was "Hmmm...well, I can kinda see why he was out roaming..."

That's where I caught myself and was ashamed.

Because I was acting like an idiot, and a young American man, but I repeat myself.

I like to think that I am no longer young, and both a little more intelligent and a little more cultured than the average "Maxim" reader. But here I was, judging Holly Petraeus' physical appeal by what seemed to me to be her grandmotherly appearance. And that is as shallow and as foolish as the least sophisticated porn-peeper who ever skipped a 10th Grade study hall.

I should know - I DO know, when I'm taking the time to think and not acting like a shallow jerk - that sleek limbs and taut skin haven't the slightest real connection with beauty, desirability, or attraction either emotional or sexual. A man or woman may be as slender and uncreased as a blank sheet of foolscap and about as interesting. That true desire and delight come from those most inventive of erogenous zones, the mind and heart.

And that having lived long enough to fill that mind and deepen the well of loveingkindness in that heart is a crucial part of being a woman instead of a girl, of being a true heart's desire rather than a casual lover.

In fact, I would say now that time has given me the tainted gift of creases and scars of my own that one would be a great fool to trade those and the experience they signify for the flawless ruddy vigor of youth.

But that's how we roll here in the USA, circa 2012.

"Because a funny thing happens to women as they age: how we should be looked at stops being an issue at all. If you don't look young, you don't look sexually attractive, so you're not worth looking at. It's ridiculous. It's reductive. It's shallow. It's stupid. But it's something women live with and dread."

It's ridiculous.

And the really irritating thing is that we men KNOW it's ridiculous.

Would we trade our maturity - with it's decline in rude vigor and strength - for the callow inexperienced fumblings of youth again? Who among us would want to be that terrified, uncertain, unformed young man or woman again, desperately trying to look and seem more confident and more experienced than we were, fearfully clueless of what would make us genuinely happier, kinder, more whole, more human?

Who would want to exchange the languid caresses of a grown woman who knows her own mind and takes her pleasures with deliberation, grace, and humor for a girl whose primary asset is her unripe smoothness?

And yet...we, many of us, snort and pant after women much younger than we simply because they are young, and in that youth they draw us back from the cold grave where no lovers can embrace.

But do they? We are born owing God or Nature our death, and that day will come in its own season, no matter how many young bodies we fondle or how many young lips we kiss...

I don't think so, and neither do many other men I know.

The secret, I think, is finding the grace that a wise and tender woman carries with her, to see the rich bounty in the curve of a fuller hip, and the weight of a satin breast that no longer rides as high as it once did. To kiss a throat that is still warm and scented even as the that skin covers it is no longer taut.

If we are fortunate, love, and are loved in return the shir of soft hair we bury our face in is now shot with silver and enfolds a head that carries within it a lifetime of learning the hard lessons that only joy and grief, love and loss and teach.

So I am ashamed, and should be ashamed, of my reaction to Holly Petraeus' looks. She is a grown woman as I am a grown man, no longer young, but with - one hopes - the gains of a life well lived to balance the fleeing years.

So let me lie down with you, my dear, in our gray and aging bodies, and let us remind ourselves that while youth and glory are fleeting that tenderness is lasting and evergreen, that wisdom is hard-won and the scars of that winning are dearer under the press of lips that open in love's knowing kiss.

Come lie upon my heart, cruel and insensible soul,
Adored tiger, monster of indolent airs;
I wish to plunge my trembling fingers a long while
Into the thickness of your heavy mane;

To bury my aching head
In your skirts, replete with your perfume,
And breathe in, like a faded flower,
The sweet mustiness of my defunct love.

I want to sleep! to sleep rather than live!
In a sleep as sweet as death,
I will spread my kisses without remorse
On your beautiful body, shining like copper.

To swallow up my becalmed sobbing,
Nothing can equal, for me, the abyss of your bed;
Powerful forgetfulness resides upon your lips,
And Lethe flows in your kisses.

I will obey my destiny, henceforth my delight,
As one predestined to it;
Docile martyr, innocent convict,
Whose fervor stirs his own torment,

I will suck, in order to drown my rancor,
Nepenthes and kind hemlock
From the charming tips of that narrow chest
Which has never imprisoned any heart.

~ Baudelaire "Lethe" Fleurs du mal

Cleaning up at the Y

I was born in 1957, meaning that, like most of you, I've lived my entire life in the Television Era. So over the course of more than a half-century I've seen some very odd things advertized on the cathode-ray tube. But this one is perhaps as peculiar as I've ever seen:Apparently it's from India, where, shockingly, Indian people live.

And some of these people are, surprisingly, women. And, even more stunning, some of these women have dark skin which is - astounding, yes, I know - somewhat darker in places. Specifically, around their crotch.

So here's how the blogger Deepanjana Pal at Mumbai Boss Explains it All to You:

"The ad shows a woman...looking mournful because her vagina is dark, like the cup of coffee she’s holding in her hands. The suggestion is that her depression is intensified by the fact that she has a disinterested partner who would rather drink coffee than, well, her. Cut to the depressed woman looking much happier as she goes for a shower. At this point we see an animation. It shows us a hairless, feminine crotch (with gravity-defying rose petals in the background, if you please)...once the animated crotch is whitened courtesy Clean and Dry, the woman emerges in a pair of shorts and proceeds to jump on a sofa and stuff her partner’s car keys into her shorts. This is, apparently, how women communicate they are available and have suitably tinted vaginas. Mine, incidentally, is thoroughly disapproving of such products and actions. (The only place that a car key should be stuffed is in the ignition.)"

This is entirely mystifying to me. What IS this bizarre obsession we hairless monkeys seem to have with...well, our hairy bits?

I mean sex, yeah, I get it. We're obsessed with each others' swiving equipment, and I can understand that. But it's the bizarre need we men - and it is men; first because both television and advertising are still largely run by guys and, second, I can't for the life of me imagine a woman standing at the bathroom mirror staring down at her groin and musing "Gee, I wish I was...not so...dark down there..." - seem to have with fiddling with our mom's, wives', girlfriend's, daughter's, and female strangers' reproductive areas.

I mean, first it was "merkins", and now..."Clean and Dry", so your puff-puff

(which, by the way, is what we call the lady parts around the Fire Direction Center; for some reason the Boy decided that while he had a "wiener" the former was the correct terminology for his mom's wedding tackle. After we stopped giggling hysterically we decided we liked the silliness of the term so it stuck. Hence a 54-year-old man referring to his lover's Mount of Venus by what sounds like the given name of a calico kitten...)

can be delicately pale and dainty?

Dear.

Fucking.

God.

It just seems truly damn strange to me, in an intellectual fashion.

But...I think if I was female I'd feel a little more strongly about it;But maybe that's just me. Opinions, gals?

The Devil at 4 O'Clock

You'll have to excuse me; the rainy season has begun and I'm feeling curmudgeonly.

Or not. Feel free to curse, revile, and heap obloquy upon me. I'm not feeling particularly accomodating at the moment.

One of the especially frustrating things about living in a polity whose fundamental tenets are completely subject to the intelligent participation of its citizens in the political, social, and legal life of the Republic is the moment when you are confronted with the reality that a hell of a lot of your fellow citizens are volatile, credulous, irrational, prejudiced, and even foolish and willfully ignorant yahoos.

The past election was one of those moments. This is another.

Now most of you know that I am completely uninterested in who puts what in whom and why. You want three husbands, sweetie? Knock yourself out. What to marry your cousins? Whatever. Live in a big well-oiled heap of transgendered bliss? It's your life.

I have two rules; don't do it if it injures someone, and everyone has to agree to it.

That knocks "pedophilia" in the head right there. Because a child, any child, regardless of how sophisticated, depraved, or carnally inclined, cannot "consent" in any sort of informed way, to physical congress. As a sexual act I lump it in with fooling around with animals - it's not so much "wrong" as just unconscionable. One of the supposed participants isn't a participant but an object, worse, a living object that can be hurt and more than hurt.

You want to poke something that doesn't know how to protest? Here's a melon baller and a cantaloupe.Go wild, Romeo.

But.

As morally out-of-bounds the act of molesting a child is, the THOUGHT is not legally actionable. More than that; in a land where the free expression of ideas is legally sanctioned, it MUST be legally and politically out-of-bounds to run the nasty old perv out of the public square for stating his nasty, pervy ideas in public.

So while I think that the publisher of "The Pedophile's Guide To Love And Pleasure" could have plausibly red-lighted the pervy piece of shit, and the owners of Amazon.com might have been well advised not to carry it, and the outrage of the citizenry that caused the bookseller to eighty-six the damn thing was a fairly natural reaction to the entire notion of publishing and selling a user's manual to kinderfucking, I am fairly disgusted at the entire notion that this bizarre incident means that we need some sort of official censorship and the abandonment of the rules of civil law that make the U.S. part of the endowment of intellectual liberty begun in the Enlightenment.

Here's one example of what I mean, a post by a ferociously intelligent and usually skeptical adoption mom who states that she left her profession because she had to provide legal representation to scummy pedophile sex predators.I have no doubt that representing scummy pedophile sex predators was revolting. But our entire justice system depends, indeed, demands, that these scum get the best legal counsel that they can.

Because have we gone so far down the memory hole that we've forgotten the scummy pedophile Satanist predators that ran the McMartin preschool? That were pilloried based on an accusation by a schizophrenic drunk woman and perpetuated by hysteria and public outrage into the most expensive trial in U.S. history? That ruined the lives of dozens of people and turned out to total bullshit?

I can only repeat what I replied to the post:

"Those damn pedophiles! Let's string 'em up!
Those damn pornographers! Let's string 'em up!
Those damn Satanists! Let's...

Oops.

Remember when everybody and their dog in the daycare trade were evil Satanists and were molesting kiddies? Except they weren't. Remember when the evil Obama Negroes attacked the poor McCain woman? Except they didn't. Remember when we interned all those Japanese who were spying for the Emperor?

Except they weren't, didn't, and we effed their lives up based on lies, fear, and racism.

So you were well within your right to refuse to represent people who you despised, Lorrie.

But what happens to the law if everyone who breaks the law doesn't get a lawyer?

No question that the publisher should have redlighted this book and the seller should have chosen not to sell it. But that's a world of difference away from the adversarial justice system and the need for attorneys to represent, yes, even the most vile of human beings. Because without that it becomes not justice, but vengeance."

The outrages of sick kiddie-raping bastards will be with us always; there is no sexual act so vile that some humans will not attempt or perform it.

But the intellectual liberties we share as citizens of this country, and as denizens of the West, are exceptionally unusual; for most of history a combination of religion, fear, ignorance, political repression, and public mobocracy have made the free expression of ideas - even, perhaps especially, vile ideas - anywhere from difficult to impossible.We live in a nation where intelligent discourse, always a premium and often absent, has again become rare, where foolish and vile display has become the prime fodder of the public infotainment industry, where more people know who was Dancing With The Stars than who was torturing prisoners and stealing public wealth, where the powerful and wealthy can lie, cheat, and swindle with impudent ease because the public is ever more indolent, badly informed, easily swayed, and foolish.

Mind you, it has been ever thus. But we are now the sole remaining superpower. Our public acts are the 21st Century equivalent of a vermilion degree, "swaying the wide world". Add to this the power, the incredible power, of the electronic media, and you have a hell-brew that can sicken vast swathes of the Earth.

We owe it to ourselves, we owe it to those whose lives we bend to our whim, we owe it to the world itself, to be smarter, more judicious, more thoughtful than we could be. Especially when dealing with this very sort of matter, more explosive because of the visceral disgust most of us feel towards the subject.We should be as careful in dealing with this issue as if we were juggling nitroglycerine because, in a sense, we are. If we drop the vial of free expression - even expression of this vile notion - then the resulting explosion could very well destroy the very stage we stand on.

I seem to keep posting this video clip and, yes, I know the real More was a Catholic fanatic who burned heretics. The point here is not the historical More but Bolt's More, More as the Voice of the Enlightenment, as spoken by the wonderful Paul Scofield; a voice that is increasingly hard to hear amid the din and babble of foolish popular hysteria.