Permalink  Art, Classics  No Responses »
Nov 132012
 

The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens, p. 34:

…no mythology so teems with tales of male supremacy as does the Attic. Athenian mythological phallicism takes various forms. There are the countless stories of the clubbing, stabbing, and strangling to death of sundry animals and monsters of fantasy; second, there are the manifold tales of rape, a theme in which no other mythology has been as rich as the Attic. The mythological rape is generally that of a mortal female by a male divinity or hero, although homosexual and reverse variants occur. A third category of typically Athenian motifs consists of tales of goddesses who could not or would not bear children, and of stories of male motherhood, in which offspring are born from parts of the male anatomy or directly from the male semen.

An especially characteristic theme in Athenian mythology, next to the motif of rape, is the killing or subduing of the rebellious female. The most notable example is the Amazonomachia, or the battle between Greeks and Amazons…. Wherever an Athenian turned his eyes, he was likely to encounter the effigy of one of his mythological ancestors, stabbing or clubbing an Amazon to death….

The most telling aspect of Attic mythological “history” is the intertwining of phallocratic motifs of slaughter, aggression, and rape with patriotic themes.

Climactic Shame

 Art, Culture, Literature  No Responses »
Dec 142011
 

…Comte de Montesquiou, Proust’s model for Baron de Charlus, had a love affairwith a female ventriloquist who, “while Montesquiou was straining to achieve his climax, would imitate the drunken voice of a pimp, threatening the aristocratic client.”

—Gossip, Joseph Epstein, as quoted in Harper’s, December 2011 issue

Cf. this:

…and the joke/tragedy is that just as Tristram’s father, Walter, is climaxing, Tristram’s mother asks him if he has remembered to wind the clock, thus distracting him and scattering “the animal spirits, whose business it was to have escorted and gone hand-in-hand with the HOMUNCULUS, and conducted him safe to the place destined for his reception.”

—Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, Jane Smiley

…and this:

…and erotically circumscribed G.W. Pabst scholar at New York University tortured by the neurotic conviction that there are only a finite number of erections possible in the world at any one time and that his tumescence means e.g. the detumescence of some perhaps more deserving or tortured third world sorghum farmer or something, so that whenever he tumefies he’ll suffer the same order of guilt that your less eccentrically tortured Ph.D.-type person will suffer at the idea of, say, wearing baby-seal fur.

—Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

Cletus the Bedbug

 Zoology  1 Response »
Dec 062011
 

Bedbugs like to “keep it in the family“:

Bedbugs don’t mind sleeping with their sisters and brothers, if you know what I mean.

And bedbugs’ eagerness to mate with their kin is one reason their populations have taken off so dramatically. Inbreeding comes naturally to them, and it doesn’t seem to hurt their offspring much, as is the case with most other creatures.

“When we look at the genetic makeup of an apartment building, we found that most of the time, the bugs are all related to each other,” entomologist Coby Schal tells Shots. “That suggests that there is a lot of inbreeding occurring.”

He and another entomologist named Ed Vargo examined genetic markers of apartment-dwelling bedbugs in New Jersey and North Carolina. They found remarkable genetic similarities among bedbugs living under one roof.

Schal says all it takes is one mated female to check into a room for the bedbug party to get started. Once her sons and daughters become adults —about 35 days — they will mate with each other. Their offspring will repeat the cycle and so on.

“Inbreeding allows bedbugs to establish a large population with a small start,” Schal says. The amount of genetic similarity among the offspring suggests that outside bugs are rarely getting in on the action.

“Wow, that is so vagina!”

 Biology, Culture  No Responses »
Oct 162011
 

The disappearance of female pubic hair is considered:

What does it mean? Hair can do a lot of symbolic work. In science fiction movies, alien creatures are the hairless ones. Hairlessness marks the post-human. Yet it is also marks the divide between human and animal. The hairy ones are closer to nature, to animality. Just think of Jacob and Esau. Esau, a hunter beloved by his father, has hairy skin; Jacob, a mother’s boy of the tents who cheats his brother out of his birthright, does not. Body hair historically has been a mark of manliness. Femininity was located in the hair on a woman’s head, not on her body. For men, it was the reverse: Real men had chest-hair. No wonder a lot of girls find the first appearance of pubic hair unnerving, ugly, even nauseating. A lot of women who wax say they “hate” that hair.

In the sweep of Western art history of the nude, female pubic hair could not be shown. Bosch, Titian, Michelangelo painted hairless vaginas. Even Manet, when he painted the famous prostitute, Olympia, in 1863, couldn’t bring himself to show it. Pubic hair marked a woman’s sexual desire, her erotic passion: to show it was beyond all bounds of modesty. When Francisco de Goya painted La Maja Desnuda around 1800 for the Spanish prime minister, it was a breakthrough: an ordinary naked woman—neither goddess nor allegory—with pubic hair fully exposed. Goya’s model is looking at you looking at her. The Prime Minister kept it hidden in a private room, shown only to those he trusted. Goya was later called before the Spanish Inquisition for this work.

There is much more good stuff in the rest of the article.

Space Sex

 Culture, Physics, Zoology  No Responses »
Dec 222010
 

From this article:

Performance of the sex act during a journey to Mars, may require potentially complex sexual gymnastics. On the other hand, any difficulties associated with sexual intercourse in space may turn out to be an easily solved problem of docking and entry as human are notorious for inventing ways of having sex despite all manner of logistical impediments

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