Good Reason

It's okay to be wrong. It's not okay to stay wrong.

Category: sex (page 3 of 3)

On second thought, maybe I’ll wear a different shirt today

1 March 2009 / / 5 Comments

Even though religiously-motivated sexual repression is a very sad thing to watch, it does have its hilarious side. Witness the ex-Masturbator t-shirt. Imagine trying to have a conversation with someone wearing that. Pleased to meet you. I won’t shake hands, thanks.

Atheist t-shirts have a certain transgressive appeal, if you don’t mind offending people just by walking down the street (which I don’t). But you can’t pull off edgy and squeaky-clean at the same time, and people look like idiots by trying to do so. At least they’re not as bad as the unintentionally homo-erotic Mormon t-shirts.

Speaking of sexual repression: according to a recent study, guess which state has the most porn subscribers per capita?

How’d you know?

Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.
…
The biggest consumer, Utah, averaged 5.47 adult content subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users; Montana bought the least with 1.92 per 1000. “The differences here are not so stark,” Edelman says.

Number 10 on the list was West Virginia at 2.94 subscriptions per 1000, while number 41, Michigan, averaged 2.32.

Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year’s presidential election – Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama.

There are a few holes in the study. I suppose it’s possible that it’s just the non-Mormons in Utah ordering up all the porn. But you combine this result with the ‘men kissing‘ item from Google Trends, and the picture begins to emerge.

Toplessness threatened on Australian beaches

1 January 2009 / / 1 Comment

Christian lawmaker and serial pest Fred Nile is at it again, doing his best to turn Australia into a nation of prudes. Apparently, women’s breasts make him feel funny, so he wants to ban them on beaches.

Arguing that the sight of women without bikini tops is offensive, Reverend Fred Nile, a conservative lawmaker of the Christian Democrats, has won backing from key politicians in the state of New South Wales to tighten existing laws covering nude sunbathing.

Nile has drafted a bill to be introduced in the legislature to ban topless sunbathing in the eastern Australian state.

“The law should be clear. It must say exposure of women’s breasts on beaches will be prohibited,” he was quoted as saying by the Daily Telegraph.

What’s the compelling reason here?

“If we don’t, we could have people saying ‘I’m not nude. I can walk (topless) down (Sydney’s main street),” he said.

One lawmaker has considered the possibilities, perhaps a bit too much.

“If you’re on the beach do you want somebody with big knockers next to you when you’re there with the kids?” asked Labour government MP Paul Gibson.

Well, um, exactly how big are we talking about here?

It’s difficult to imagine just how disconnected someone like Nile is. These are our bodies. Babies see breasts every day. Any normal person would just look away if they didn’t like them, but Nile wants to get the law involved because of his sense of disgust for the body and his desire to control others — not an atypical mix in Christianity. Has he not considered that restricting mammary visualisation will just drive kids to porn?

For those interested in preserving the cause of liberty, certain forms of protest spring easily to the imagination.

Why abstinence doesn’t work

30 December 2008 / / 4 Comments

We already knew that abstinence doesn’t work, and virginity pledges are particularly ineffective. There’s a new study that bears out this result, but it highlights a new problem: kids who take virginity pledges are even less likely to use birth control and condoms. So abstinence education is not just useless, it’s worse than useless.

Why might this be? One idea going around:

Virginity pledgers may be less likely to use condoms and contraception because many abstinence programs cause participants to develop negative attitudes about their effectiveness.

Maybe program leaders are saying this, but I don’t think we need to resort to this idea to explain what’s going on. My experience as a horny teen in the Mormon Church has provided me with a hypothesis.

When you do something wrong, you need to pray for forgiveness from your sin, right? And Mormons regard sexual sin as particularly grievous. Consider:

• Mormons think that doing the horizontal mambo with anyone other than your husband or wife (or wives) is the worst thing you can do, second only to “the shedding of innocent blood or denying the Holy Ghost“.

Oh, wait. I knew there was something I forgot to do today.

I deny the Holy Ghost.

That’s better.

• An LDS General Authority (can’t find which one — someone help me here) told a story of his father seeing him off at the train station for a mission, and telling him that he’d rather the boy come back in a coffin than having had sex. And get this — my own father told me that story approvingly when I went off to BYU. He’d have preferred me dead than to have made a mistake. Then again, maybe I could have come home at the end of the year on a Greyhound Bus — alive — but in an actual coffin. It’d be a fun way to break the news.

But seriously, folks: this is a fact worth repeating. As with all authoritarian movements, Mormons hate sex. No, they don’t. They are willing to put up with sex, as long as it makes more little Mormons. Let’s just say that Mormons love sex, but they don’t like anyone else having any. Which makes perfect evolutionary sense. If you have sex, but repress everyone else from having any, there’s less competition for your genes.

Anyway, the main point here: Mormons regard unhallowed bonking as Very Serious. It involves prayer and contrition, as well as confession to The Bishop, which is very embarrassing because he’s just another guy in the community.

So Mormon youth, when faced with temptation, are unlikely to buy condoms or use birth control. That’s premeditated! That’s like planning to sin! How are you going to be forgiven from a sin you’ve been planning to do? What they do, since they’re Good Kids, is try to Be Good and abstain. But hormones being what they are, it frequently fails, and then you get pregnant teenagers.

(I don’t know if this line of thinking holds outside of Mormondom, but I bet it does. Non-Mormons: does this match your experience?)

The take-away here is that having stupid starting assumptions (a god wants you to abstain) leads to unwanted outcomes (riskier sex than normal). A better starting assumption would be: some kids are going to do it, and you can’t watch your kids 24 hours a day. Parents can encourage them to have sexual relations responsibly, if they must. Better to be immoral than to be immoral and pregnant.

No on 8

24 October 2008 / / 5 Comments

The interference of the LDS Church in California politics is deeply troubling. No, scratch that. It’s infuriating. It’s hateful. And it’s wrong. If I hadn’t already written my exit letter, I’d be tempted to rejoin the Mormons just so I can resign again in protest over this issue.

What’s the worst thing about the Mormon Church’s support of Prop. 8? Hmm…

  • The idea of parochial Mormons denying marriage to people they don’t even know, and thinking it’s the will of a supernatural being whose will they are uniquely qualified to know.
  • Quotes by sanctimonious old gits like these.

    “What we’re about is the work of the Lord, and He will bless you for your involvement,” apostle M. Russell Ballard said during the hour-long meeting, which was broadcast to church buildings in California, Utah, Hawaii and Idaho.

  • The duplicity of a church that claims to be politically neutral, only speaking out on ‘moral matters’ — and then redefining political issues as ‘moral’ when it pleases them
  • Enshrining bigotry and inequality in the California constitution
  • Millions of dollars in LDS money going to support all of this. From Sully:

    Californians Against Hate released figures Tuesday showing that $17.67 million was contributed by 59,000 Mormon families since August to groups like Yes on 8. Contributions in support of Prop. 8 total $22.88 million.

  • A tax-free religious group getting to act like a PAC. Once again the priest class is vying for political power, just like in the good old Dark Ages.

Well, there’s a lot that’s detestable about this. Mormons should be livid, even if by and large they’re not. For my part, I’m just hoping that this proposition goes down and goes down hard. I want this to be an embarrassment to the leadership of the Mormon Church. I want them to wonder why their Special Pal in the Sky didn’t come through. I want Mormons to see more and more pictures of happy gay couples at weddings with the rice and the bubbles and the cake, and after they’re through freaking out about living in the End of Days, I want them to notice how happy the newlyweds look, and I hope time will help them reconsider.

I don’t have much to spare these days, but I’m donating to No on 8 because I think this is a huge deal. I’m used to religions making lots of empty doctrinal pronouncements, but when they use their baseless theology against other people, I say it’s gone far enough.

Californians: please vote against this. Even if the news anchors call all the eastern states for Obama early, don’t let that stop you from getting to the polls.

L’affaire Edwards

10 August 2008 / / 2 Comments

I’ve read everyone in the world’s opinions on John Edwards’ affair. The weird thing is, every time I read someone’s comment, I agree with it, even things that contradict other things I agree with.

It’s none of the public’s business. If Edwards had been some moral crusader, then fair game. Moral crusaders think everyone’s sex life is an open book, ergo so is theirs. But Edwards was not one of these, and I’d rather it be something for him and his family to deal with.

It matters because voters think it matters. I wish everyone thought like me, but they don’t. America contains many puritanical hypocrites, who I suppose want to be represented. And if they don’t like someone’s sexual behaviour, they have the right to not vote for them. That’s the game, and everyone goes into politics knowing it.

I’m disappointed in John Edwards. I quite liked him, and would have been glad to see him take the nomination. Imagine if that had happened, and here we’d be in a state of hosedness.

Edwards was reckless and immoral. Cheating on your cancer-stricken wife really sucks balls. And he was stupid. Have we learned nothing from Bill Clinton? Gary Hart?

I’m angry with Elizabeth Edwards, too. She knew about the affair when John was campaigning, but they both chose to go through with it anyway, and risk instant campaign death and four years of President McCain. I think we Democrats dodged a bullet.

McCain is worse. But there are lots of other reasons not to vote for McCain that are actually good, as in this article about why McCain would make a mediocre president at best.

I hope the Edwardses can make a contribution to American public discourse once again, because I’d hate to have this be the last thing we hear about them.

I got your community standards right here!

25 June 2008 / / 2 Comments

I tell ya, that Google’s useful for all kinds of things.

The operator of a porn web site has been brought to trial for violating ‘community standards’. But who knows what ‘community standards’ are? Well, his lawyer has an interesting answer: check out Google Trends and see what the community’s really up to!

In Florida, it turns out that the search term ‘orgy’ is as American as ‘apple pie’.

Except that ‘apple pie’ hits a spike around Thanksgiving, but ‘orgy’ is popular year-round.

But Perth? Looks like we’re just into surfing. New South Wales is a different story. It’s just about Orgy Season over there. Meanwhile, in Victoria, the worrying fisting trend continues unabated.

State powerless to protect children from abuse by sex cult operated by parents

2 June 2008 / / 3 Comments

Is how this headline should read.

You think your job sucks.

19 February 2007 / / 1 Comment

Just be glad you’re not a Republican running for U.S. President.

First of all, you’re horrendously unpopular, with self-reported Republican identification the lowest in years. Then you have to Defend the Indefensible and argue for escalation of the war in Iraq/Iran/Syria. I mean, maybe you’re a sensible person and maybe you can even count, and you’d like to take some positions that Americans actually agree with, so already you’re a little edgy.

Then you have to take a position like this:

Republican presidential candidate John McCain, looking to improve his standing with the party’s conservative voters, said Sunday the court decision that legalized abortion should be overturned.

“I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned,” the Arizona senator told about 800 people in South Carolina, one of the early voting states.

Suicide! I seem to remember that Roe vs. Wade is immmensely popular, and has been for, oh, about 30 years.

CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll. Jan. 19-21, 2007. N=1,008 adults nationwide. MoE ± 3.

“Would you like to see the Supreme Court overturn its 1973 Roe versus Wade decision concerning abortion, or not?”

Would: 29
Would Not: 62
Unsure: 9

Yes, that’s about right. So why run against that? Oh.

McCain is trying to build support among conservatives after a recent rebuke from Christian leader James Dobson, who said he wouldn’t back McCain’s presidential bid.

Tsk.

So after kissing Dobson’s shiny white ass, followed by Robertson’s, Swaggart’s, and probably Haggard’s (but that one’s on your own time), you’re still not done. You have to cap off the evening by doing something really Christian, like attending a purity ball, or…

McCain later attended an evening rally promoting an abstinence program.

Yeah, something like that.

He told the crowd of more than 1,000 teens and parents that young people have pressures far different from the ones he faced while growing up. “Sometimes I’ve made the wrong choice,” McCain said.

So, that’s a ‘no’ on abstinence? I think I need a less ambiguous comment on that.

I wonder what it must be like for the Republican candidates. To ignore the vast majority of Americans so you can court the vote of the most freaked-out minority just seems nuts. It would drive me crazy. But then, I’m not masochistic enough to be a Republican.

And another thing: Whose (the fuck) business is it anyway that you took a tumble in the hay with Mary Lou in 1955? Imagine having to flagellate yourself publicly over it at an abstinence rally in 2007. Unbelievable!

Here’s me at the rally: Kids, we got it on! And it was great! I don’t regret it for a second! We were young and gorgeous, and our skin was soft yet firm. I’ll never boink an eighteen-year-old woman again, and it’s one of my choicest memories.

No wonder they don’t vote for atheists. Mom and Dad and Grandma wouldn’t have liked that part of my speech.

Toshi decided to stay right where he was.

18 December 2006 / / Comments Off on Toshi decided to stay right where he was.

An unusual ESL artifact: English lessons for hookers.

It’s awful and embarrassing, but you find that you must keep watching in horrified fascination. Her intonation is terrible, and I don’t think she understands the meaning of the phrases she’s teaching, but at least they take a stab at subject-verb agreement and some conjugation. (Heh.) But it probably would have been more useful to get into numbers and negotiation phrases.

So many unanswered questions, though. Who is Toshi? Did we need to know that about her parents? Why did they choose such strange and contrived phrases? When would you ever use the last one?

Questions that must forever go unanswered by the easily offended.

Off on another outing

3 November 2006 / / 8 Comments

I wasn’t really aware of evangelical Christian pastor Ted Haggard, apparently the leader of some Colorado giga-church with tens of thousands of followers and an advisor to G. W. Bush to boot. And an outspoken ‘defender of marriage’ (read: critic of gay marriage).

Well, he’s just quit his job amid allegations of gayness. In a really awkward way.

A few things:

1) Why do people say that gays want to destroy marriage? Some gay people are among marriage’s most passionate defenders.

2) Are there any Republican anti-gays who aren’t gay? I know I’m falling victim to the availability heuristic, but the number of outed homophobes is surprisingly high. Foley drafted laws to protect kids from the very kind of exploitation that he was perpetrating. Former Spokane mayor Jim West, notoriously anti-gay, resigned after he was found to have a thing for boys. Now when I see someone denouncing homosexuals, I wonder if I’m not looking at some kind of closet case. Because who else would care about it if they weren’t so obsessed? (As always, see Wolcott for the last word.)

3) Though it may seem unrelated, this is really bad for Republicans so close to the election. Voters are no longer surprised by hypocrisy, and this will only confirm the impression that people who tout good-old fashioned morality are getting up to something on the side. That reflects badly on Republicans, who, having tied their fortunes to the evangelical Christian vote, are now ill-equipped to disassociate themselves from the actions of prominent evangelical Christians. Plus, mass disillusionment is bad for the status quo.

4) Watch: the Right Wing will complain that lefties are anti-gay. We’re not. We’re anti-hypocrisy, like many (though not all) on the Right.

5) It’s really sad that he was living a double life for so long. It’s hard to feel happy when you’re doing something you think is wrong. Maybe now that things are in the open for Mr Haggard, he can put himself together, live the kind of life he wants, and feel like he has integrity for the first time in years.

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