September 2013 – Page 50

Advice To The Infrequently Faithful

In the midst of High Holiday season, when many infrequent worshipers make their way back to synagogue, Mark Oppenheimer ponders the issue of Judaism no longer being a “native language” for many Jews. His advice to the uninitiated? Think of practicing the religion “as an art, or maybe a sport“:

Consider that playing guitar is very, very hard when you start. Let’s say you take a beginner’s class. At the beginning, you will feel frustrated and embarrassed when you make mistakes. If you don’t even know how to read music, and if, what’s more, you lack a good ear, then you will be surrounded by people, even in that introductory class, who seem far ahead of you. You may go back for a few weeks in a row, and you may even practice every night, but after a month you won’t have made what seems like satisfactory progress. Meanwhile, if you bump into fellow students, or hang out at the music school, you will feel as if all of them are ahead of you, making more progress, and coalescing into a community of musicians that you will never be able to join. Some of them may start jamming together, or using lingo that you have yet to master. You will already be defeated. …

So it is with some kinds of Jewish practice. The first few, or even few dozen, times you try it, it’s not just hard work—it seems as if you’ll never get it. The prayers are in a foreign language, you don’t know when to stand or sit, and it seems as if everyone else has known these things forever. (Obviously, some Jewish services are in English and can be quite user-friendly; but even then, the newcomer will have some of these feelings of inadequacy.) What’s more, it seems as if all the people around you are old friends with each other, and you are the newbie. But if you keep coming, it’s amazing is how quickly you begin to feel a sense of mastery. The fifth time you try it? The 10th? All of a sudden you are part of the community, you know people, you know when to stand and sit. And you are teaching some newbie who arrived after you.

A Poem For Sunday

From “Clearances” by Seamus Heaney:

In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984

When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives —
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

The Hiding Places Of Insane Ideas

Pivoting off of the fundamentalist speculation about Syria’s potential role in the apocalypse, Amanda Marcotte details the influence of crazy Christian beliefs and how they spread:

The rule of thumb with bizarre Christian right beliefs, such as the belief that Syria’s conflict is a sign of the end times, is that by the time it percolates up to a Google search or a website like the Blaze, it’s been flying around in lower-profile venues such as Internet forums, Facebook posts, books sold in Christian bookstores, in-person meetings in churches, sermons and presentations, and email forwards for a long time now. The fact that these points of view are concealed from prying liberal eyes doesn’t mean that they don’t have a huge impact on right-wing communities—and that includes Republican politicians.

The Bush administration in particular provided some strong examples of how Christian right folk beliefs and conspiracy theories can percolate up to the highest levels of government without ever putting those ideas out in the general public. The Bush administration appointed Eric Keroack to the deputy assistant secretary of population affairs within the Department of Health and Human Services despite, and probably because of, Keroack’s strong anti-choice beliefs. Keroack became famous for his presentation, prior to appointment, of his belief that women’s brains get flooded with oxytocin when they have premarital sex, which makes them less capable of falling in love. Prior to Keroack’s appointment, this bizarre theory, which has no scientific basis and is pure Christian right babble, wasn’t something you could find through Google, much less the mainstream media. But it not only was a guiding belief of Keroack’s, it has been a mainstay of the kind of abstinence-only programs that Bush administration policy mandated in so many schools across the country. It was a classic example of how a right-wing myth can become widely influential through PowerPoint presentations and pamphlets without ever touching the Internet, where prying eyes might see it.

Secrets Of Immortality

Alchemists have long sought the keys to eternal life:

The concept of chemicals as medication was innovated and introduced by the sixteenth-century Swiss alchemist Paracelsus. Before him, healing remedies in the Western world were primarily plant-based, rather than chemically-derived drugs. An impetuous, pudgy warlock with scalpel eyes and a no-bullshit attitude, Paracelsus argued that alchemy’s aim is medicine rather than gold. His treatise on longevity De Vita Longa outlines ways how to live for a thousand years, even forever. …

[D]uring the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, every major European town had its own “laborer of the fire” toiling away in a shady apothecary. … Capitalizing on the hope that alchemy could find a way around death, countless swindlers rooked the upper classes with bogus medicaments for eternal life. Scoundrels like Alessandro di Cagliostro or the Count of Saint Germain grew rich selling immortality potions to wealthy patrons. One miracle docteur sold a concoction consisting almost entirely of tap water. Living forever was merely a matter of payment.

These hucksters thrived during times not entirely different from our own. “They were received into the centre of a small, skeptical and libertine world that had, in principle, rid itself of prejudice,” explains the Romanian historian of longevity Lucian Boia. “These people who pretended to believe in nothing at all, except, to some extent, in philosophy and science, were ripe to be caught in any trap that a person of speculative intelligence could set. Because they believed in nothing, they were ready to believe anything.”

(Image via Wikimedia Commons)

What Religion Does Right

In an essay describing what he appreciates about religion, atheist Sigfried Gold points to its unparalleled ability to deliver services and help geared toward “self-transformation”:

Religions have certain advantages in the self-transformation arena that can’t be matched by secular forms of this work. One is the ideal–if not actual attitude–of religions towards money. Although the financial costs of religion can be quite high (giving away a tenth of one’s income is not uncommon), payment is generally voluntary; newcomers and poorer congregants can usually enjoy all the benefits of community, moral guidance and support, meaningful rituals, comfort in times of adversity, without having to pay more than they choose. Disingenuously or not, religions claim to be motivated by concerns beyond money, and obligate themselves to at least put on a show of providing services unattached to remuneration. For people outside the social welfare system, secular self-transformational help must be paid for. Much of the support in a religious community comes from other congregants rather than from paid clergy. As a special case, 12-step recovery fellowships, which include some of the largest organizations in the world, offer their members access to daily or hourly support, essentially for free, that could only be matched among secular service providers by extremely expensive in-patient treatment centers or psychiatry wards.

His conclusion:

I fervently yearn for a day when people wishing to be better have easy access to free or donation-based support, offered primarily by their peers, possibly facilitated by modestly paid clergy, and offered without coercion, without insistence that one set of beliefs is right and the rest are wrong, offered because people who actively pursue their own paths towards meaning, fulfillment and some vision of the good feel a generous desire to share what they’ve learned on those paths with others. Religions may be declining in their ability to provide that kind of altruistically motivated, communally organized support, but we have few other models to work with.

A Fetish That Makes An Impression

Jason Webb comes out of the spanking closet:

Let me clarify something: I’m not “into” spanking the way you might be “into” Celine Dion or “The Bourne Identity.” Spanking is a part of my psyche, an essential element of my sexuality. It’s not like slavering over cheerleaders, or fantasizing about sex on the beach at sunset. When I was a kid I used to look up the word “spanking” in the dictionary, and I got a visceral thrill when I saw a spanking scene on “Little House on the Prairie” or “I Love Lucy.”

At times, spanking was an obsession, and one made all the more torturous for the shame I felt harboring it. For more than 20 years I thought there was something wrong with me. I thought that if, by chance, someone else felt the same way, then they’d be a dirty old man with a grubby overcoat and bulging eyes. But I couldn’t help it. I didn’t choose to be kinky in this way, any more than a man or woman chooses to be straight or gay. The way I saw it, homosexuals had their closet and I had mine. Only mine was a lot smaller, and I was the only one in it.

He and his wife went to a special dinner party for hardcore spanking enthusiasts:

Drinks in hand, Emily and I began meeting people. We didn’t talk about spanking, not until much later. But just being around them, being out, was liberating. These were people like me, who in this post-50 Shades era, had nothing in common with the vanilla couples toying with handcuffs and blindfolds, making up safe words and buying heart-shaped paddles. These people were true aficionados, who’d wielded (and felt) those paddles, as well as hairbrushes, floggers and straps, for years. They knew that the technique for caning is different from the one you use to crop. They knew about role play, “domestic discipline” and aftercare. And their spanking implements weren’t heart-shaped, because these people weren’t just playing at it, they were hard-wired like me.

The evening seemed secretive and subversive, in an exciting way, and I asked several people if they thought that spanking might be the next thing out of the closet. “To some degree, it’s already coming out,” said Allison, a teacher. She went on to list a spanking scene in “Weeds,” at least one in “Californication” and a scene on “The Big Bang Theory” when Sheldon spanked Amy. Even a spanking on “American Dad.”

Analog Sex Work

Despite the immense popularity of digital sex online, phone sex is still around. A one-time operator reflects:

Most of the calls I receive are different than what most people imagine phone sex to be like. While some calls are dudes who want to spend less than ten minutes with a verbal assist for their masturbatory needs, the vast majority seek extended conversations on kink and fetishes. My callers tend to dig deep to share intimate memories of their first exploration into kink or to talk about the first glorious woman who dominated them. The conversation often meanders into dating, into my work as a pro-domme, into mutual interests and how we discovered the joys that can only come with making someone beg for a good ball-kicking.

The conversation tends to turn actively sexual when we begin sharing our favorite memories from Folsom, or the best cuckolding experience they have ever had, or as they detail their yet-to-be-fulfilled fantasy…if it turns sexual at all.

Hot Spots

Neuroskeptic passes along the results of a new study on erogenous zones:

It turned out that, across genders, sexual orientations, and nationalities, everyone agreed that the genitals were top, followed by mouth/lips, with nipples, nape of neck and thighs also highly placed. The correlation coefficients for average ratings across pairs of groups were extremely high at 0.9 or above: people agreed with each other.

Agreement on the most unerogenous zones was also strong: these included the elbow, shin, knee-caps, nose, and forehead. Makes sense.

The level of agreement counts against the popular belief that men and women have substantially different erogenous zones. Though women did score a few areas – namely the highly ranked non-genital ones – more highly out of 10 than men.

(Photo by Flickr user viegas)

Sex Toy Tech

Jacqui Cheng looks into the R&D driving it:

A company out of Houston, Texas named Aneros started out as a medical device company to aid with the comfort problems that come with an enlarged prostate in men. The inventor of Aneros’ first product, a now-78-year-old Japanese man named Mr. Jiro Takashima, was trying to find an alternative solution to surgery before he stumbled upon the adult side of the industry, discovering that his company’s customers were using his prostate device for much longer lengths of time than he intended, and in very different ways.

“That’s what sparked so many different versions of our products today, because users were using them for hours on end, so it’s what motivated us to redesign our products,” Aneros CEO CT Schenk told me. As such, “the things we’ve come out with in the last few years have this concept of a wearable product designed for long-term use.” And some of those designs have had to go against what Mr. Takashima wanted. “For example, he’d always been very adamant that the tab on the Helix Sin always needs to be hard and firm to work correctly,” Schenk said, “but through user testing, we found it’s more comfortable if we make it flexible.”

The company finds readymade focus groups in the products’ online forums:

“People from the forums spend more time using these things than all our employees combined,” Schenk said of Aneros’ forum of around 50,000 members. “The forum has become the foundation of everything we do. We have a few guys who have been around for 10+ years who have volunteered to moderate and keep conversations going about the products. When we do product testing, we ask the questions that these guys will ask, and if they see a problem, they almost deliver a solution themselves.”

Aneros’ almost entirely male community is so dedicated to the company’s main product—Aneros only recently launched its first female product—that they voluntarily become evangelists to try and draft more people into the Aneros cult. “A lot of our users claim our products give a life-changing experience because it changes the way they can have these kinds of sensations,” Schenk said. “In some cases, they’re pretty much the experts.”

The Horniest Mammal

Dolphins:

[T]hey really like sex. More than humans. More than bonobos. In fact, dolphins are so sex talented that they have mastered what millions of teenage boys have been unable to achieve. Dolphins can masturbate. With no hands (it mostly involves rubbing against things).

And they even spontaneously ejaculate:

[W]hy does this happen? It actually has to do with how ejaculation is controlled in the male mammal. This hasn’t been tested, but the hypothesis is that if the dolphin is “wired” like some mammals such as rats (and there’s no reason to believe he’s not, in this case), ejaculation is controlled at the spinal level, rather than in the brain, and controlled by the release of various chemicals. During sleepiness (which you can often detect in a dolphin due to one eye being closed, as in this case), this system would be relaxed, and spontaneous ejaculation would be more likely.