Betty Dodson with Carlin Ross

Better Orgasms. Better World.

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The nuttiness of the Religious Right is so apparent these days. In fact, this last Republican quest for the White House really showed it in stark detail. It got a little wearying to the soul to watch these Bible Thumping wannabes rant on about the sickness of our evil "secular" society. Sometimes, I admit, I just let it get to me way too much.

Happily, though, I found a really wonderful antidote to all the body- and- pleasure- loathing Fundies: MASTURBATION!!!!

We Suggest: 

Close Up of Man Masturbating

Man Masturbating with Vibrators

I Want to Learn About My Body & My Sexuality - How it Relates to Me NOT the Rest of the World

They Told Me that If I Masturbated I'd Run Out of Sperm

With all the generally depressing recent palaver by the Religious Right about America needing to be "rescued", and "restored" to it's former status as a "Christian Nation" (which,of course, it was never intended to be by the Founders), I recently discovered a piece of American secular history, and in the very heart of the state of Texas, of all seemingly unlikely places. Let me tell you just a little bit about it, if I may.

Consider the beautiful little town of Comfort, Texas. My wife and I were recently down in the Texas Hill Country region, and were introduced to this small piece of American history by some acquaintances there.

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Vatican Forces Benetton to Pull Unhate Ad Campaign

Our Political Differences are Based on Differences in Wiring of Our Brains

I Just Couldn't Accept that Sex was Sinful

We Find Endless Fascination in Nakedness & Sex

I was pleased with all the nice responses I got about the topic of masturbation the other day, and here's an addendum to it:

Liandra said that when she was a girl that she had some misinformation about masturbation (hair growing on the palm of her hand, etc.), and I grew up hearing that as well. One extra twisted piece of information I got from church, was that if you (and this was tailored to the guys) masturbated, that you'd soon run out of sperm and be sterile, and be unable have kids someday.

We Suggest: 

It’s Our Ability to Feel Pleasure that Helps Us Develop a Sense of Self Deserving

Boys Who Masturbate More Likely to Practice Safe Sex

"A Remedy for Masturbation Almost Always Successful in Small Boys: Circumcision"

I Just Couldn't Accept that Sex was Sinful

I completely agree with what Betty and Carlin last posted on their Friday video about the importance of good masturbation= good sex. It does! I especially agreed with their point that religion fucks up the enjoyment of sex! It most certainly does. I know something about this, because I used to be a fundamentalist Christian for quite a long time. Masturbation provided a very important escape route from that.

We Suggest: 

Sex for One: The Joy of Selfloving

After Decades Filled with Many Sex Partners I'm Back to Being My Own Lover

"Sex" is an Interconnected Continuum

Betty Dodson's Bodysex Workshop

Dopamine. Serotonin. Norepinephrine. Oxytocin. These are four chemicals that are being increasingly understood as having powerful effects on we human beings when it comes to the ways in which we experience pleasure, and sexual pleasure, in particular.

There's nothing better sometimes than to curl up with a well-written book, especially on a cold, dreary, winter day. I have been reading E.M. Forster's (posthumous) book, Maurice. Forester is probably more known for his earlier books A Room With A view, Howard's End, and A Passage To India. Maurice, as I mentioned earlier, was not published until sometime after Forster's death in 1969.

As I was reading the newspaper this morning, there was yet another article regarding Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, and their quests to replace (read "save" America from the evil black man in the White House) President Obama. Etcetera, etcetera. Ad nauseum.

As I was reading this, my wife and I were making comments about each man's professed religious convictions, and I made the comment that even with Newt's "open-marriage" issues hovering around him (as he studiously ignores it), the Religious (evangelical) Right may not exactly like him, and would prefer he was someone more honorable, more "Christ-like" in his past personal life, still, for them he is much preferable to Mitt Romney. Why is that? Romney is (gasp!) a MORMON!!!! (Oh! My! God!)

When I came across this quote the other day, it had not yet been identified with it's author, and I thought it might have originated from some commentator on Fox News, or some other current Right Wing source, but, it wasn't. Here's the quote:

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic, and military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

Greetings from Jesus Country (aka Kansas)!

Our new governor is busily trying to enact legislation that he has been promising to do for quite some time (since before he was governor, in fact), and that is NOT good news for the poor. However, it is very good news for those who will be the beneficiaries. Let me see if I can explain at least some of what he has in mind.

First, and foremost, taxes (according to current Republican political ideology) are evil. It's akin to robbery. Rich people are being robbed by the poor. Did you know that? The POOR are ROBBING the RICH! (O!M!G!). The poor are (apparently) a bunch of lazy, no-good, loser's. They don't want to work. They prefer to lay about in squallor and suck-down free money from the rich. Disgusting, isn't it?

Since it was Christmas recently, it seems as if a lot of talk about believing in God occurred in my life.

The BIG question was this: "Well, if you don't believe in God, or that the Bible is the Word of God, what keeps you from going out and raping, and stealing, and killing? If God doesn't exist, doesn't that mean that everything is permitted? You can't have morality with that as your basis." I have heard this question more than a few times! I didn't mind hearing it once again; in part, because the person who asked me that seemed sincere about it.

In replying, I turned the tables on the person and asked them almost the same question, but in a slightly different way.

The subtitle to Christopher Hitchens' influential book of 2007, God Is Not Great, is: How Religion Poisons Everything. How true those four words have become in recent years in America.

If you pay even the slightest attention to the news these days, I hope that you are aware of the ever increasing level of Christian fundamentalist attempts at doing away with our secular form of government, and installing a "biblically based" government, instead.

I know that this is another departure from what I have generally blogged about on D&R, but with the recent death of Christopher Hitchens, as well as the rising tide of fundamentalist Christian lunacy, and the very real threat it imposes to our secular Democracy (that's right, Virginia, America is not a "Christian country"), I have felt compelled to speak up about this myself!

I know that Christopher Hitchens pissed people off. I didn't agree with him on everything he ever said, or wrote; but, in loosing him to cancer yesterday, we, all of us, have lost an effective friend and advocate of things that many on D&R cherish: Freedom.

Christopher Hitchens was never afraid to combat stupidity and ignorance-worship in all it's forms (religious, or secular). As we see an American political party undergoing a depressing nervous breakdown before our very eyes, and the rise of religious theocratic ideology, we see what all of us have to be willing to stand up to!

When I was maybe 16, or 17 years of age, my father knew this single father by the name of Chet. He was a rough and tough weathered guy used to lots hard work. He had been injured years earlier and had an artificial arm, which, in spite of that had hardly slowed him down. He was indomitable, for lack of a better word! Anyway, Chet had a son a few years older than I who eventually became a highly accomplished ballet dancer with the Joffery Ballet company in Canada; he was also openly gay.

My parents would have been incredibly disappointed in me had they known that their only child had ever visited an adult bookstore. That's putting it mildly. They took me to church every week. I attended Vacation Bible School every summer. My mother taught Sunday School. My father was the Sunday School Superintendent.

I had the quintessential Protestant Christian childhood. I also knew that both my parents loved me, and cared about how I might turn out. I was supposed to grow up to be a good (Baptist) boy; and yet, what neither of my parents ever knew, was that their only son had a certain attraction for both girls, as well as other boys!