Sexuality Most Famous Quotes

Similarly, he forgot - or never really understood - that we live in a culture where men, as a group, have more power than women. This isn't a controversial statement, despite the protestations of guys who funnel their frustration that not all extremely young, conventionally attractive women want to sleep with them into and argument that women, as a group, have "all the power." (Bill Maher, repping for his fan base, famously jokes that men have to do all sorts of shit to get laid, but women only have to do "their hair.") The really great thing about this argument is how the patently nonsensical premise - that some young women's ability to manipulate certain men equals a greater degree of gendered power than say, owning the presidency for 220-odd years - obscures the most chilling part: in this mindset, "all the power" means, simply, the power to withhold consent. Let that sink in for a minute. If one believes women are more powerful that men because we own practically all of the vaginas, then women's power to withhold consent to sex is the greatest power there is. Which means the guy who can take away a woman's right to consent is basically a superhero. Right?

Chastity and moral purity were qualities McCandless mulled over long and often. Indeed, one of the books found in the bus with his remains was a collection of stories that included Tol¬stoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata,” in which the nobleman-turned-ascetic denounces “the demands of the flesh.” Several such passages are starred and highlighted in the dog-eared text, the margins filled with cryptic notes printed in McCandless’s distinc¬tive hand. And in the chapter on “Higher Laws” in Thoreau’s Walden, a copy of which was also discovered in the bus, McCand¬less circled “Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it.” We Americans are titillated by sex, obsessed by it, horrified by it. When an apparently healthy person, especially a healthy young man, elects to forgo the enticements of the flesh, it shocks us, and we leer. Suspicions are aroused. McCandless’s apparent sexual innocence, however, is a corol¬lary of a personality type that our culture purports to admire, at least in the case of its more famous adherents. His ambivalence toward sex echoes that of celebrated others who embraced wilderness with single-minded passion—Thoreau (who was a lifelong virgin) and the naturalist John Muir, most prominently— to say nothing of countless lesser-known pilgrims, seekers, mis¬fits, and adventurers. Like not a few of those seduced by the wild, McCandless seems to have been driven by a variety of lust that supplanted sexual desire. His yearning, in a sense, was too pow¬erful to be quenched by human contact. McCandless may have been tempted by the succor offered by women, but it paled beside the prospect of rough congress with nature, with the cosmos it¬self. And thus was he drawn north, to Alaska.

We believe that, despite a possibly cruel temperament and an impetuous nature that she followed throughout her life, Madame Delphine Macarty Lopez Blanque Lalaurie was not a serial killer, a sexual sadist or a perpetrator of bizarre medical experiments. She was a willful, spoiled, beautiful Creole socialite whose temper led her down the path of infamy.

Byron published the first two cantos of his epic poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a romanticized account of his wanderings through Portugal, Malta, and Greece, and, as he later remarked, “awoke one morning and found myself famous.” Beautiful, seductive, troubled, brooding, and sexually adventurous, he was living the life of a Byronic hero while creating the archetype in his poetry. He became the toast of literary London and was feted at three parties each day, most memorably a lavish morning dance hosted by Lady Caroline Lamb. Lady Caroline, though married to a politically powerful aristocrat who was later prime minister, fell madly in love with Byron. He thought she was “too thin,” yet she had an unconventional sexual ambiguity (she liked to dress as a page boy) that he found enticing. They had a turbulent affair, and after it ended she stalked him obsessively. She famously declared him to be “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” which he was. So was she.

Before he got famous for being a sexual degenerate, Louis C.K. said this dumb thing about marriage: 'Divorce is always good news because no good marriage has ever ended in divorce.' The reality is that every marriage is a partnership of two broken assholes with good intentions and varying degrees of ability to deliver. Marriage is as much a mystery to me now as the origins of the universe and the laws that govern the behavior of matter. What makes one work is just as strange as what makes one not. But I possess more information now than I had when this all began. We both do. Lauren has had to come to terms with some difficult truths, such as how her husband has grown a mustache, and I have had to grapple with other truths, such as how my wife left me for the human equivalent of Diet Mountain Dew.

It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others. This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewildering mass of geographic information those things needed for the purpose of this or that particular map. My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, emphasis, which are inevitable for both cartographers and historians. But the map-maker's distortion is a technical necessity for a common purpose shared by all people who need maps. The historian's distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual. Furthermore, this ideological interest is not openly expressed in the way a mapmaker's technical interest is obvious ("This is a Mercator projection for long-range navigation-for short-range, you'd better use a different projection"). No, it is presented as if all readers of history had a common interest which historians serve to the best of their ability. This is not intentional deception; the historian has been trained in a society in which education and knowledge are put forward as technical problems of excellence and not as tools for contending social classes, races, nations. To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to de-emphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves- unwittingly-to justify what was done. My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)-that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable of classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly. The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks)-the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress-is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they-the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme Court-represent the nation as a whole. The pretense is that there really is such a thing as "the United States," subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a "national interest" represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.

In the past few years, more and more passionate debates about the nature of SFF and YA have bubbled to the surface. Conversations about race, imperialism, gender, sexuality, romance, bias, originality, feminism and cultural appropriation are getting louder and louder and, consequently, harder to ignore. Similarly, this current tension about negative reviews is just another fissure in the same bedrock: the consequence of built-up pressure beneath. Literary authors feud with each other, and famously; yet genre authors do not, because we fear being cast as turncoats. For decades, literary writers have also worked publicly as literary reviewers; yet SFF and YA authors fear to do the same, lest it be seen as backstabbing when they dislike a book. (Small wonder, then, that so few SFF and YA titles are reviewed by mainstream journals.) Just as a culture of sexual repression leads to feelings of guilt and outbursts of sexual moralising by those most afflicted, so have we, by denying and decrying all criticism that doesn’t suit our purposes, turned those selfsame critical impulses towards censorship. Blog post: Criticism in SFF and YA

When a boy grows up in a “dysfunctional” family (perhaps there is no other kind of family), his interior warriors will be killed off early. Warriors, mythologically, lift their swords to defend the king. The King in a child stands for and stands up for the child’s mood. But when we are children our mood gets easily overrun and swept over in the messed-up family by the more powerful, more dominant, more terrifying mood of the parent. We can say that when the warriors inside cannot protect our mood from being disintegrated, or defend our body from invasion, the warriors collapse, go into trance, or die. The inner warriors I speak of do not cross the boundary aggressively; they exist to defend the boundary. The Fianna, that famous band of warriors who defended Ireland’s borders, would be a model. The Fianna stayed out all spring and summer watching the boundaries, and during the winter came in. But a typical child has no such protection. If a grown-up moves to hit a child, or stuff food into the child’s mouth, there is no defense—it happens. If the grown-up decides to shout, and penetrate the child’s auditory boundaries by sheer violence, it happens. Most parents invade the child’s territory whenever they wish, and the child, trying to maintain his mood by crying, is simply carried away, mood included. Each child lives deep inside his or her own psychic house, or soul castle, and the child deserves the right of sovereignty inside that house. Whenever a parent ignores the child’s sovereignty, and invades, the child feels not only anger, but shame. The child concludes that if it has no sovereignty, it must be worthless. Shame is the name we give to the sense that we are unworthy and inadequate as human beings. Gershen Kauffman describes that feeling brilliantly in his book, Shame, and Merle Fossum and Marilyn Mason in their book, Facing Shame, extend Kauffman’s work into the area of family shame systems and how they work. When our parents do not respect our territory at all, their disrespect seems overwhelming proof of our inadequacy. A slap across the face pierces deeply, for the face is the actual boundary of our soul, and we have been penetrated. If a grown-up decides to cross our sexual boundaries and touch us, there is nothing that we as children can do about it. Our warriors die. The child, so full of expectation of blessing whenever he or she is around an adult, stiffens with shock, and falls into the timeless fossilized confusion of shame. What is worse, one sexual invasion, or one beating, usually leads to another, and the warriors, if revived, die again. When a boy grows up in an alcoholic family, his warriors get swept into the river by a vast wave of water, and they struggle there, carried downriver. The child, boy or girl, unprotected, gets isolated, and has more in common with snow geese than with people.

Freud famously saw the ‘horror’ of Medusa’s head as a symbol of male castration, but the original trauma in the Medusa story is not castration but rape. Most scholars and historians dismiss Poseidon’s rape of Medusa as an insignificant detail, merely one among so many rapes of mortal, immortal and semi-divine women committed by male gods. However, myths which glorify rape as a strategy ‘to enact the principle of domination by means of sex’ are comparatively recent, becoming widespread in Attica around the 5th century BCE. It is likely that myths celebrating rape reflect a devastating historical shift in cultural values, the change from a society based on equality and partnership to a hierarchical structure based on unequal distribution of resources and the need to control women’s sexuality. Joseph Campbell describes the myth of Perseus and Medusa as reflecting ‘an actual historic rupture, a sort of sociological trauma’ which occurred in the early thirteenth century B.C.E. The myth may refer to the overrunning of the peaceful, sedentary, matrifocal and most likely matrilineal early civilizations of Old Europe by patriarchal warlike Indo-European invaders.

[I]n the years that followed the persecutions, Christianity came to see itself, with great pride, as a persecuted Church. Its greatest heroes were not those who did good deeds but those who died in the most painful way. If you were willing to die an excruciating end in the arena then, whatever your previous holiness or lack thereof, you went straight to heaven: martyrdom wiped out all sins on the point of death. As well as getting there faster, martyrs enjoyed preferential terms in paradise, getting to wear the much-desired martyr’s crown. Tempting celestial terms were offered: it was said that the scripture promised ‘multiplication, even to a hundred times, of brothers, children, parents, land and homes’. Precisely how this celestial sum had been calculated is not clear but the general principle was: those who died early, publicly and painfully would be best rewarded. In many of the martyr tales the driving force is less that the Romans want to kill – and more that the Christians want to die. Why wouldn’t they? Paradoxically, martyrdom held considerable benefits for those willing to take it on. One was its egalitarian entry qualifications. As George Bernard Shaw acidly observed over a millennium later, martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability. More than that, in a socially and sexually unequal era it was a way in which women and even slaves might shine. Unlike most positions of power in the highly socially stratified late Roman Empire, this was a glory that was open to all, regardless of rank, education, wealth or sex. The sociologist Rodney Stark has pointed out that – provided you believe in its promised rewards – martyrdom is a perfectly rational choice. A martyr could begin the day of their death as one of the lowliest people in the empire and end it as one of the most exalted in heaven. So tempting were these rewards that pious Christians born outside times of persecution were wont to express disappointment at being denied the opportunity of an agonizing death. When the later Emperor Julian pointedly avoided executing Christians in his reign, one Christian writer far from being grateful, sourly recorded that Julian had ‘begrudged the honour of martyrdom to our combatants’.

Weston, having been born in Chicago, was raised with typical, well-grounded, mid-western values. On his 16th birthday, his father gave him a Kodak camera with which he started what would become his lifetime vocation. During the summer of 1908, Weston met Flora May Chandler, a schoolteacher who was seven years older than he was. The following year the couple married and in time they had four sons. Weston and his family moved to Southern California and opened a portrait studio on Brand Boulevard, in the artsy section of Glendale, California, called Tropico. His artistic skills soon became apparent and he became well known for his portraits of famous people, such as Carl Sandburg and Max Eastman. In the autumn of 1913, hearing of his work, Margrethe Mather, a photographer from Los Angeles, came to his studio, where Weston asked her to be his studio assistant. It didn’t take long before the two developed a passionate, intimate relationship. Both Weston and Mather became active in the growing bohemian cultural scene in Los Angeles. She was extremely outgoing and artistic in a most flamboyant way. Her bohemian sexual values were new to Weston’s conventional thinking, but Mather excited him and presented him with a new outlook that he found enticing. Mather was beautiful, and being bisexual and having been a high-class prostitute, was delightfully worldly. Mather's uninhibited lifestyle became irresistible to Weston and her photography took him into a new and exciting art form. As Mather worked and overtly played with him, she presented a lifestyle that was in stark contrast to Weston’s conventional home life, and he soon came to see his wife Flora as a person with whom he had little in common. Weston expanded his horizons but tried to keep his affairs with other women a secret. As he immersed himself further into nude photography, it became more difficult to hide his new lifestyle from his wife. Flora became suspicious about this secret life, but apparently suffered in silence. One of the first of many women who agreed to model nude for Weston was Tina Modotti. Although Mather remained with Weston, Tina soon became his primary model and remained so for the next several years. There was an instant attraction between Tina Modotti, Mather and Edward Weston, and although he remained married, Tina became his student, model and lover. Richey soon became aware of the affair, but it didn’t seem to bother him, as they all continued to remain good friends. The relationship Tina had with Weston could definitely be considered “cheating,” since knowledge of the affair was withheld as much as possible from his wife Flora May. Perhaps his wife knew and condoned this new promiscuous relationship, since she had also endured the intense liaison with Margrethe Mather. Tina, Mather and Weston continued working together until Tina and Weston suddenly left for Mexico in 1923. As a group, they were all a part of the cozy, artsy, bohemian society of Los Angeles, which was where they were introduced to the then-fashionable, communistic philosophy.

deeper insight into human nature and make them more capable of influencing others. Homosexuals also excel in professions associated with taste and beauty, such as interior decoration and clothing design; it is well known that the most famous clothes designers in the world are homosexuals, perhaps because their dual sexual nature enables them to design women’s clothes that are attractive to men and vice versa.

Lacan was famous for his extremely negative statements about romantic love. “There is no such thing as a sexual relationship”. “Men and women don’t exist”. And most dramatically, “Man knows nothing of woman, and woman knows nothing of man.” Lacan was trying to get at an unpopular yet critical fact about romantic relationships. The extent to which we don’t truly comprehend our lovers and simply peg a range of fantasies drawn from childhood experiences to their physical forms. It’s a dark but, in a way, liberating idea. It invites us not to be upset when we don’t feel a perfect rapport with someone who initially seemed like a soulmate. And it recommends that we certainly don’t rush off in search of some more “ideal” partner if we’re feeling less than perfectly understood. The connection we worry that we’ve lost is something we never actually had. Our relationship hasn’t gone wrong through folly, error or bad luck. It’s following ordinary path of love, which is to come to an awareness of its fundamentally illusory nature. With Lacan’s help we can hold on to a more accurate picture of what is normal: to be more or less always alone. This is a foundation upon which we can build more mature and less frustrated relationships.

Take for instance a phenomenon called frustrated spontaneous emission. It sounds like an embarrassing sexual complaint that psychotherapy might help with. In fact, it involves the decay of radioactive particles, which ordinarily takes place at a predictably random rate. The exception, however, is when radioactive material is placed in an environment that cannot absorb the photons that are emitted by decay. In that case, decay ceases—the atoms become “frustrated.” How do these atoms “know” to stop decaying until conditions are suitable? According to Wharton, the unpredictable decay of radioactive particles may be determined in part by whatever receives their emitted photons in the future.20 Decay may not really be random at all, in other words. Another quantum mystery that arguably becomes less mysterious in a retrocausal world is the quantum Zeno effect. Usually, the results of measurements are unpredictable—again according to the famous uncertainty believed to govern the quantum kingdom—but there is a loophole. Persistent, rapid probing of reality by repeating the same measurement over and over produces repetition of the same “answer” from the physical world, almost as if it is “stopping time” in some sense (hence the name of the effect, which refers to Zeno’s paradoxes like an arrow that must first get halfway to its target, and then halfway from there, and so on, and thus is never able to reach the target at all).21 If the measurement itself is somehow influencing a particle retrocausally, then repeating the same measurement in the same conditions may effectively be influencing the measured particles the same way in their past, thereby producing the consistent behavior. Retrocausation may also be at the basis of a long-known but, again, hitherto unsatisfyingly explained quirk of light’s behavior: Fermat’s principle of least time. Light always takes the fastest possible path to its destination, which means taking the shortest available path through different media like water or glass. It is the rule that accounts for the refraction of light through lenses, and the reason why an object underwater appears displaced from its true location.22 It is yet another example of a creature in the quantum bestiary that makes little sense unless photons somehow “know” where they are going in order to take the most efficient possible route to get there. If the photon’s angle of deflection when entering a refractive medium is somehow determined by its destination, Fermat’s principle would make much more sense. (We will return to Fermat’s principle later in this book; it plays an important role in Ted Chiang’s short story, “Story of Your Life,” the basis for the wonderful precognition movie Arrival.) And retrocausation could also offer new ways of looking at the double-slit experiment and its myriad variants.

The famous ritual of Jesus washing the feet of his male disciples (John 13 : 1–11). After taking his clothes off (yes, he strips) and tying a towel around his waist, Jesus does something that only slaves and women did in his culture, something that “real men” never did: he washes other peoples’ feet. More provocatively still, it is this unmanly or womanly act, he teaches, that signals both his own divinity and the way he wants his own disciples to live. As Jennings has it, “Jesus’s ‘divine’ identity thus is expressed in his disregard for the most intimately enforced institutions of worldly society: gender role expectations.” Not everyone, of course, is pleased with such a queer act: “Jesus stripping naked and washing the feet of his friends,” Jennings reminds us, is “something that Peter at least regards as quite unseemly.” Dale Martin makes a very similar point: although “Jesus allows a woman to wash his feet (and we biblical scholars— who know our Hebrew—recognize the hint [foot penis]), when it is his turn, he takes his clothes off, wraps a towel around his waist, and washes the feet of his male disciples, again taking time out for a special seduction of Peter.” Modern readers, then, may be blind to the gendered and sexual meanings of such acts, but the original participants certainly were not, nor are our contemporary gnostic scholars.

The list of luminaries receiving Medici patronage ranged from da Vinci to Galileo to Botticelli—the latter’s most famous painting, Birth of Venus, the result of a commission from Lorenzo de’ Medici, who requested a sexually provocative painting to hang over his cousin’s marital bed as a wedding gift. Lorenzo de’ Medici—known in his day as Lorenzo the Magnificent on account of his benevolence—was an accomplished artist and poet in his own right and was said to have a superb eye.

Experiments published in 1983 clearly showed that subjects could choose not to perform a movement that was on the cusp of occurring (that is, that their brain was preparing to make) and that was preceded by a large readiness potential. In this view, although the physical sensation of an urge to move is initiated unconsciously, will can still control the outcome by vetoing the action. Later researchers, in fact, reported readiness potentials that precede a planned foot movement not by mere milliseconds but by almost two full seconds, leaving free won’t an even larger window of opportunity. “Conscious will could thus affect the outcome of the volitional process even though the latter was initiated by unconscious cerebral processes,” Libet says. “Conscious will might block or veto the process, so that no act occurs.” Everyone, Libet continues, has had the experience of “vetoing a spontaneous urge to perform some act. This often occurs when the urge to act involves some socially unacceptable consequence, like an urge to shout some obscenity at the professor.” Volunteers report something quite consistent with this view of the will as wielding veto power. Sometimes, they told Libet, a conscious urge to move seemed to bubble up from somewhere, but they suppressed it. Although the possibility of moving gets under way some 350 milliseconds before the subject experiences the will to move, that sense of will nevertheless kicks in 150 to 200 milliseconds before the muscle moves—and with it the power to call a halt to the proceedings. Libet’s findings suggest that free will operates not to initiate a voluntary act but to allow or suppress it. “We may view the unconscious initiatives for voluntary actions as ‘bubbling up’ in the brain,” he explains. “The conscious will then selects which of these initiatives may go forward to an action or which ones to veto and abort…. This kind of role for free will is actually in accord with religious and ethical strictures. These commonly advocate that you ‘control yourself.’ Most of the Ten Commandments are ‘do not’ orders.” And all five of the basic moral precepts of Buddhism are restraints: refraining from killing, from lying, from stealing, from sexual misconduct, from intoxicants. In the Buddha’s famous dictum, “Restraint everywhere is excellent.