Monday, October 22, 2012
Emerson's description of a woman
Was it Hafiz or Firdousi that said of his Persian Lilla, She was an elemental
force, and astonished me by her amount of life, when I saw her day after
day radiating,
every instant, redundant joy and grace on all around her. She was a
solvent powerful to reconcile all heterogeneous persons into one society: like
air or water, an
element of such a great range of affinities, that it combines readily with a
thousand substances. Where she is present, all others will be more than
they are wont. She
was a unit and whole, so that whatsoever she did, became her. She
had too much
sympathy and desire to please, than that you could say, her manners were
marked with dignity, yet no princess could surpass her clear and erect demeanor
on each occasion. She did not study the Persian grammar, nor the books of the
seven poets, but all the poems of the seven seemed to be written upon her. For,
though the bias of her nature was not to thought, but to sympathy, yet was she
so perfect in her own nature, as to meet intellectual persons by the fulness of
her heart, warming them by her sentiments; believing, as she did, that by dealing nobly
with all, all would show themselves noble.
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Fifty shades
http://www.eljamesauthor.com/books/fifty-shades-of-grey
I still prefer Varyan Krylov. But this is interesting. It's nice to see a book like this being mainstream. Maybe it will make people feel more openminded about BDSM. :)
I still prefer Varyan Krylov. But this is interesting. It's nice to see a book like this being mainstream. Maybe it will make people feel more openminded about BDSM. :)
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Sex at Dawn
http://www.bookslut.com/features/2010_08_016440.php
This book changed my life. I've always felt very "primitive" because of my submissive nature. And I trust that what is primitive holds truth.
* We humans are obsessed with sex, far more even than are our evolutionary cousins, the famously randy bonobos.
* Sexual monogamy, despite relentless claims to the contrary, was never our natural condition in prehistory. “With and without love,” Ryan and Jetha write, “a casual sexuality was the norm for our prehistoric ancestors.”
* Only with the relatively recent shift from off-the-land foraging to agriculture did our species veer away from cooperation and sharing, even sharing of mates, in small groups; hierarchy, sexual repression and violence may pass for the human normal nowadays, but it wasn’t always so.
* Current frenzied attempts to make sacred the nuclear family are not only way off the biological mark, but also terribly hurtful to women and men who fail at life-long loyalty. The dominant narrative pits “man against woman in a tragic tango of unrealistic expectations, snowballing frustration, and crushing disappointment.”
* None of our closest living relatives, the great apes, lives monogamously. Indeed, female nonhuman primates across the board are attracted to novelty, that is to say, to fresh rather than familiar males. It’s the pattern, rather than any single species’ behavior, that matters here.
* Foraging societies organize themselves around staunch principles of cooperation, including a “deeply felt, broadly shared willingness to care for unrelated children.” This openness ill-fits the standard story of how and why we pair-bond, and would only have changed with the onset of agriculture and rising population numbers.
* With low population density and abundant resources throughout prehistory, our ancestors’ sexual behavior would have mirrored that of pre-agricultural societies.
* Even today, the design of the male body reflects a trenchant sperm competition that itself points to multiple matings in short periods. Our sexual history is thus mapped out for us in a literally embodied way. In fact, “competing sperm from other men seems to be anticipated in the chemistry of men’s semen.”
This book changed my life. I've always felt very "primitive" because of my submissive nature. And I trust that what is primitive holds truth.
* We humans are obsessed with sex, far more even than are our evolutionary cousins, the famously randy bonobos.
* Sexual monogamy, despite relentless claims to the contrary, was never our natural condition in prehistory. “With and without love,” Ryan and Jetha write, “a casual sexuality was the norm for our prehistoric ancestors.”
* Only with the relatively recent shift from off-the-land foraging to agriculture did our species veer away from cooperation and sharing, even sharing of mates, in small groups; hierarchy, sexual repression and violence may pass for the human normal nowadays, but it wasn’t always so.
* Current frenzied attempts to make sacred the nuclear family are not only way off the biological mark, but also terribly hurtful to women and men who fail at life-long loyalty. The dominant narrative pits “man against woman in a tragic tango of unrealistic expectations, snowballing frustration, and crushing disappointment.”
* None of our closest living relatives, the great apes, lives monogamously. Indeed, female nonhuman primates across the board are attracted to novelty, that is to say, to fresh rather than familiar males. It’s the pattern, rather than any single species’ behavior, that matters here.
* Foraging societies organize themselves around staunch principles of cooperation, including a “deeply felt, broadly shared willingness to care for unrelated children.” This openness ill-fits the standard story of how and why we pair-bond, and would only have changed with the onset of agriculture and rising population numbers.
* With low population density and abundant resources throughout prehistory, our ancestors’ sexual behavior would have mirrored that of pre-agricultural societies.
* Even today, the design of the male body reflects a trenchant sperm competition that itself points to multiple matings in short periods. Our sexual history is thus mapped out for us in a literally embodied way. In fact, “competing sperm from other men seems to be anticipated in the chemistry of men’s semen.”
Thursday, March 29, 2012
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