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| Hey, what's up out there? My apologies for such an
extended absence from the blogosphere. Between GRE prep, trying to take
classes and trying to get my life on track (not to mention Harry Potter
6 and 7) I haven't had much time to write or find something worth
putting out there for folks like you to share your thoughts. Well on
this Sunday morning, such a topic came up Your feedback is always
appreciated. With that, I bring you… Sex, Marriage and Feminism Ok,
so my friend Evan sent me the link to this blog about sex in marriage
and it's link with how much or little women are empowered in sexual
encounters with their spouses. Just to let you know, this is coming
from a hetero-normative perspective. Anyways, much of the article looks
at the differences between men and women how much or little each person
wants sex based on sex and possible causes for the lack in libido in
both men and women. Obviously, a happy marriage bases itself on other
aspects besides sex. Commitment, trust, love, respect, procreation (if
that's what you want), ability to raise a family, and a deluge of other
positive qualities. However, we'd be kidding ourselves and denying
ourselves something intrinsic to all humans if we didn't acknowledge
the importance of a healthy, active sexual relationship. Now this
article brings up many issues in regards to where does feminism pick up
from male domination regarding sex. To quote "Gone are the days when sex was simply part of women's wifely duties." However, interestingly enough, the author continues by saying, "Now
most men find themselves on the back foot, feeling very much at the
mercy of women's whim. And that makes for lean pickings given the large
numbers of women who go off sex.There seems to be a universal epidemic
of women not wanting to have sex. Or at least not wanting as much sex
as their partners." Quite a pickle for the average married or committed couple you can imagine. So
where does that place the average man with a sex drive that may be
higher than his partners? I mean, most good hearted, relatively
progressive guys don't want to do anything to impede women and the
social progress that they've made since the civil rights era. In fact,
most guys I know want to help make further gains in the work place and
in the home (i.e. stay at home dads ,men who follow their spouses,
fighting for equal pay in the workplace, better reproductive health
care and rights, etc.). Now lost in the shuffle of a changing world are
these same guys who are not actively participating in a hegemonic
system, yet are reproached for the hegemony of others from their
gender. More pertinent to the topic at hand they are accused making sex
a chore and something that women don't look forward to sharing with
them. Many of the common things said in regards to sex views between
men and women are that women attach a deeper set of emotions to sex and
that it's less about the physical aspect of sex and more about the
emotional connection that is shared. Also, the article mentions that
the stessors of the day (i.e. job, traffic, horny ass men, etc.) have a stronger effect on a woman's libido than on the male libido. Men
have typically been associated with the more physical aspect of sex and
are better able to divorce the stressors of the day with the ability to
just want to get down (I'm paraphrasing from the article) So
out of this cacophony of confusion between men and women's sexual urges
(or lack thereof) come several of my questions. These questions are in
theory directed towards the ladies, yet I welcome and hope to gain
feedback from men as well. 1.) If
your partner (because I'm coming from a hetero-normative perspective
partner is assumed to be male) has a much higher sex drive than you do,
how much of a strain does it put on the relationship for you? 2.) Additionally,
if your partner has this higher than average sex drive and you've both
talked about it in some way, shape or form, do you get annoyed if he
masturbates much more and does so to stimulating adult material (us
guys are visual)? 3.) My
last question is do you think that relationships based on sexual
compatibility have a lower success rate than relationships based on
other mutually shared interests (sexual compatibility is a mutually
shared interest) I'll
post the link to the article too so that you can read it yourselves and
present some of your opinions! Have a great day and give me feedback!!! http://www.everydayfeminism.ac.nz/2007/08/02/sex-marriage-and-feminism/ | | |
| I haven't had the opportunity to blog in a while and for that I am sorry. It's so much better for our lives and well being to create something rather than consume. We consume media, food, conversation yet rarely do we take the time to create something. With that... So I bought my current reading book late last week from Amazon. I also bought Papers in Black Psychology by Na'im Akbar. Now this adds to my collection of books that I'm currently reading to 8 (Arabian Nights, Rage of Privileged Class, No god but God, Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, The Moor's Last Sigh and now these two recent addtions). This adds to my GRE faux study regime of 1/2 hour to an hour a day. But this isn't about the massive amounts of literature that i'm consuming. This is about the my current reading selection. The story recounts the life of Demico Boothe who while encarcerated educated himself to a degree that is rarely seen in the Prison Plantation Complex and even less celebrated/appreciated in our society. (I use Plantation rather than Industrial because being Industrial implies a albeit limited recipricol relationship between the manufacturer and owner of a given product. Because there is nothing remotely resembling this in todays prisons, the only other option we have in calling it is Plantation.) Now I could go on for quite a while about the lack of appreciation that our society has for education, that is not why I'm here.(another blog perhaps?:)) I want to talk about Demico's analysis of the current status of prisons in this country, the history of black people and the law post slavery, the laws that are created to keep them in prison and/or the system and the long term effects this will have on society. He discusses the way that laws today have been created to keep young black men in jail in order to produce a steady prison population with which various politicians/CEO's/Law officials/Police officials etc. benefit from them being there. Today it seems that the politics, economics and other criteria cannot be cleanly separated from themselves. Owners of private prisons make quite a bit of paper from someone like me being in prison. Law officials make quite a bit of paper for being tough on crime and putting these dangerous criminals into cages. Politicians make a VERY large amount of paper from being tough on crime and cleaning up the streets for every citizen. It seems like with so many people benefiting from black men being in prison, it would not make sense from an economical standpoint to do away with these prisoners and make them productive members of society. How many prison guards have abused prisoners and told them that they'll be back. Implying that once they are a criminal, they will always be so. That's an extremely psychologically damaging image to create in the minds of young black men. The very people who punish them for committing crimes do very little to actually keep them being in positions where they will be continuously punished. Prisons have done away with educational programs in the place of manual labor programs. Getting ones GED, Associates or Bachelors, Masters or PhD. is considered irrelevant in the minds of prison officials, yet studies have shown that recidivism rates drop dramatically and in statististically significant ways upon completion of higher education. If we were truly after reforming people who have broken the law, wouldn't we stress these methods rather than manual labor skills for people who won't be hired by employers anyways upon the completion of their prison sentence thus throwing them back into the system which brought them to prison in the first place? Demico's account is one that should be heeded by all those who like to say that they care about blacks yet fail to find ways to help them/or blame them for things that are, in many instances, out of their control. His account does bring to mind an all but forgotten past regarding people (particularly men) of color and the law. As Professor Sidney Lemelle asked one day during Slavery and Freedom in the New World (if you're at Pomona College or will be going in the future, you would do yourself an incredible dis-service not to take this class) "How many of you have less than $10 dollars in your pocket?" According to Professor Lemelle, any person found with less than $10 dollars on their person when interrogated were considered a vagrant and subject to arrest. This law went into effect not to long after slavery (and still exists today). It made no qualms about targeting former slaves in order to get them back into prisons and doing prison labor. Prison labor at the time was unpaid. Because of the racist societal structures of the day, black people (more so black men) where not able to find any sort of legitimate work that paid them a legitimate, livable wage. Meanwhile, former plantation owners are pulling out their hair because of the fact that they lost an entire workforce dedicated to the well-being of the plantation without having to consider for a second paying the workforce a wage. Math lesson folks. What do you get when you have wealthy former plantation owners in need of a work force that they did not want to pay added to politicians and law officials who wanted to keep getting their pockets greased by said plantation owners and maintain their role of power added to a prison system that engages un-paid labor projects for any particular state added to an ecomic system that keeps black men at the bottom of the ecomic barrel? If you've done your math correctly, you get laws that target the poorest members on the fringes of society and makes them criminals for being in a state that was created by the very people making these new laws. Enter Vagrancy Laws. Now yes these do exist in Europe too (or at least they did at some point or another), but Europe (because they did not get their own soil particularly dirty with their nasty little secret in the Caribbean, South, Central and North America) did not have the same history. Ergo, their vagrancy laws differe dramatically from our own. Black men were rounded up once again, chained once again, and forced to work sans $. This time, there was a legal precedent for it, thus making it societally acceptable. I mean, it's not like these newly formed criminals weren't already accustomed to physical labor. Is it really that bad for them to be doing this? They should be thanking us for giving them something productive to do right? So said the legislators, the business men and the people. Fast-forward to the late 1980's early 1990's. The infamous Powder vs. Rock law. This law created stiffer penalties and mandatory federal jail sentence minimums for persons in possesion of Crack/Cocaine. However Cocaine was not given the same stiff penalties as it's derivative. I hope that this is commonly known, but Crack is much, MUCH cheaper than Cocaine. This economic factor is important because many people living on the fringes who are addicted have easier access to Crack then Cocaine. Therefore people with money (those in the upper classes) are able to afford Cocaine much more than people without money (lower classes). It's a mixed bag in the middle. Given the historical factors of black people being economically depressed from centuries of discrimination, along with social structures designed to keep them in places of limited upward mobility and power within their own communities, along with economic indicators saying that prison population growth can become a lucrative industry...I have another equation for you. You add all of these seemingly unrelated factors together and what do you get? That's right a system designed to keep black men locked up and working for almost no money, given no proper education which leads to a cycle of release and recapture. If there has ever been a long lasting legacy from the times of slavery, it is these Vagrancy laws which are now new and improved to make slavery legal again and keep black men in the positions that they are in. Now before you turn away from this page in disgust, rage and anger saying that black men (like all others) are responsible for their actions and should be punished thusly, let me remind you of something. One we are 142 odd years removed from the end of slavery (institutionalized), 43 years from the end of Jim Crow (at least on paper), 43 years from the end of Plessy vs. Ferguson (once again on paper)... I could go on but you might be tired of reading this by now. The point is you cannot expect an entire racial group, in a country that is not designed for their progression, to just snap out of it, forget the past and offset several hundred years of physical and mental bondage. There is a west African concept known as Sankofa. It's a bird that's body is facing forward and head is facing backwards. The idea is that in order for one to move forward, you cannot forget your past. Society would do well to examine this concept, see how Vagrancy Laws are peeking their insidious little heads out and then perhaps we wont have to ask the title of this book because we'll already know. | | |
| I'm at work right now and kind of bored so I figured that I'd write a little something. Not much going on, i think that my boss is wandering around the office...Ok he's gone. Things have been kind of slow as of late, which kind of worries me because there is a calm before the storm. We're planning a conference for the end of July (yes i'll be working on my birthday) which will be held in Dallas, TX. I'm looking forward to it, but i'm not looking forward to being away from loved ones on your special day. I'll be spending my day with a bunch of people who don't really know me and who could really care less that i'm 24, when statistically speaking, due to my gender/sex and race i'm a prime candidate for being a victim of violence. Ah well, the next year will be better. This goes out to all of my friends who have been accepted to their various programs (JD, PhD, Masters, MD, etc) Kudos to you for working hard these past 4 years. You're work is paying off for you. I may not get the chance to say this to everyone but you have my congratulations and my well-wishes of luck for the future. For those of you who will be entering the work-force, good luck to you all and stay strong. It may seem soul sucking, demoralizing and all around bad at times, but this is a stepping stone to something greater! To my folks out there who (like me a year ago) didn't have a clue what they would be doing, don't loose hope. Stay close to family and friends (this goes for all really) because they are the ones who'll pull you through. One truism for life after graduation is that things become lonely. This may not be a universal statement, but more often than not, you might find yourself asking "where are the people in my hall" or "why can't I walk down the street, down to south or north campus and see someone or anywhere and not be able to do it." It's a hard realization to come to if you're not prepared for it so please brace yourself for the shock that is entering a new chapter in life post undergraduate. Have fun with people during senior week. There is a quote from Tom Petty that my friend Gina had on her AIM profile. I don't remember it word for word, but the take home message was to blow off academic work in the interest of strengthening friendship bonds because although work (be it papers, or workforce related) never ends, college does. HAVE FUN DURING SENIOR WEEK CLASS OF 2007AND CONGRATULATIONS!!!! | | |
| So I finished the Life of Pi last night. I don't know about most of you guys, but do you have a serious sense of loss and even (lightweight) mourning when you finish a book. I mean, you get so drawn in by the characters and the story line, that to end it seems almost cold and unforgiving? I mean, you put in so much of your time and at times energy into this literary experience and then the author has the nerve to just end the story!! I know that all great things come to an end, but still, that feeling of loss doesnt go away easily. I had the same feeling when I finished His Dark Materials Trilogy too. Eh, it's so depressing. Especially when you self identify with the characters of the book. You can see aspects of your life in theirs and (if the characters were corporeal) vice versa. Their lives become allegories for our own. We don't want to see the stories end because we don't want our own to end. We want to see them continue because we want answers for our own lives. We want to see how not only the rest of their lives play out, but ours as well. I think that's one of the scariest things about books like these. They draw us in, make us reflect on our own lives and then we must depart from that moment, when the last word of the last page of the book is read, on to figure out how to live our lives. Essentially, a part of us changes in a way that we never imagined it would change. We see the possibilities of change in their lives and understand that these changes, ,if looked at through our respective lenses, may not be so bad for us. Just a thought.... | | |
| Well, first and foremost, let me apologize for my emotional outburst in my previous blog. Sometimes I just let shit build up and I don't get it out in the most constructive of ways, so I have Xanga which is like my "emotionally disturbed depository". Until recently, I believed that there were maybe two or three people who actually read what I was saying in this thing, but apparently, it has reach. People who I thought didn't even know about my xanga are reading it. People who i met only last week are reading it. So, that people don't think i'm completely fucked up, i'm probably not going to put all of my emotional baggage out there on this name anymore. I'm thinking about getting a different screen name on a different blog space to get out those frustrations. Essentially, for now on, my R rated rants will be fewer and further between than my PG-13 rants. I hate watering shit down, but at the same time, I don't want to come off as an emotional basket-case (which based on my previous entry, is quite an apt description). With that, i begin my latest and perhaps most spiritually enlightening verse. Sit back and enjoy... Ok, so of late, if you've had real, conversations with me, you've known how much i'm reading about the other two monotheistic religions. I have admittedly read more on Islam than Judaism, but please do not take this is me taking a side of one over the other. I am reading Reza Aslan's "No god but God" and Edward Said's "Orientalism". In the immediate future, i'll probably pick up "The Shia Revival" by Vali Nasr or "Muhammed" by Karen Armstrong (if anyone out there knows some good books on Judaism, please recommend them to me because I don't want my abrahamic montheistic education to be lopsided....same applies for intelligent conversations on Christianity) So, this religio-literary journey began with Karen Armstrong's "A History of God". It took about 7 months (and 4-5 other books) to finish, but it raised some interesting questions in me. One of the major ones was the idea of whether or not God has a gender, is God something that exists on high or does God exist in us, does God even have the same emotional spectrum that we mere mortals have...etc. Armstrong's point about not attributing human qualities to God is very convincing. I mean, if this were the case, then God would no longer be a wrathful, vengence filled deity who punishes the unbelievers. At the same token, God would no longer be the loving, caring God that we all like to believe He/She/It is. I know, a disasterous concept of which to imagine! Blasphamy some may say in reading this. "Poor Fritz has lost his mind and has said something that emperils his soul." My personal Philosophy, I think that God loves not just the faithful, blind, following lamb, but also the wandering, questioning, inquisitive lamb. The one willing to go on the journey to find God in the most seemingly unrelated aspects of life. I think one of the main differences that separate the one questioning the omnipotence of God and The morning star is the belief that no matter how many questions we have, there is no chance that God's true authority can be legitimately challenged. It's a respect for the position if you will. But, there I go slipping into the spiritual thinking that has been prologue to this spiritual impasse. Does God love? Is God love? Would it be limiting to say that God is love because love is an human created emotion isn't it? Well, here I stand at yet another impasse. I've accepted the omnipresence and omnipotence of God. What is the proper way to worship God? Is it through the Passover feast, is it through Holy Communion or is it through making the Hajj pilgrimage? I think that this is the problem with which many a religious scholar has wrestled. If we children of Abraham all worship El/Allah/Yawhew/He who is I am, then is it possible that no matter what way you do worship, do we not all see each other in the same place upon our release from this mortal coil? So here I am. Can I go to temple on friday one week, go to mosque the following friday and then go to Church on the following sunday? Would God tolerate my worship of him in three different ways? I ask these questions because each religion has filled my heart with an indescribable beauty that at points in study moves me to tears. To hear the wafting, voices of the call to prayer and to hear the gospel of Allah (peace be upon him) be sung in the Sura is a beauty that cannot be voiced in prayer. Then again to participate in the festival of Passover is something that is beautiful in it's own respect. Celebration of the survival of your people and traditions is something that should be venerated by all those who worship God. And then, celebration of the Resurrection and ascention of Christ (peace be upon him) into heaven is something that moves me as well. I think that it's the simple message of unconditional love, peace and stillness that the Prophet (pbuh), Christ (pbuh), Moses (pbuh) or even the Budda (pbuh) that is what brings me tears of joy. I have to think that they are all in heaven holding each other in embraces of love in grace and they all weep for us at what we do to each other in their names. I pray that they if they did have human emotions, they would find forgiveneess and show it to us all for how we do such things that fly in the face of all the things for which they fought, struggled, bled, were stoned, scorned, humiliated and all for love of us (once again if we're attributing human emotions to them) My biggest fear of all these questions is that I don't want to have the doors to these wonderful religions slammed in my face because I choose to worship others that are similar yet (we are told) are fundamentally different. I would love to exist in a religious world were I can be lead in the prayers by an Imam, a Rabbi, a Priest and a Monk and be able to show love to a deity to whom I owe so much more than I could ever tangibly give. | | |
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