Name:Evan Country:Canada State:British Columbia Metro:Richmond Gender:Male
Expertise:* in sitting around doing nothing * in eating, breathing, metabolizing, sleeping* in listening to people, trying to understand* in not knowing much that is of use Occupation:Case Management / Social Work Industry:Non-profit / Social Services
Imagine for generations, your community lived on this peaceful island away from anything but the surrounding ocean. Technically, it is just a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of
the North Pacific. Your community is the most sophisticated and advanced in this remote world isolated from the outside larger world. Every day you fly out roaming about the ocean surface picking up shiny things to bring back to feed your young. This strategy worked for uncounted generations as only the reflective scales of fishes will sparkle differently than the scattered lights of the ocean waves. That was how your father raised you and his father before him. Sparkly things are food. Simple and easy rule to follow.
Until there comes a day when not all sparkly things are fishes. And slowly, almost everyone is dying out of starvation even though their bellies are full.
There is no hope unless some freaky mutated parents stumbled onto another simple rule that can better distinguish food from sparkling garbage floating about in the sea.
Did we kill them? Or are they too isolated to be adaptive to changes in the environment? What is the lesson taught to us of their death?
As you know the internet is for porno, but not all porno is created equal. At least not all of them you can show it to kids and have it be educational!
Mother's Day, Father's Day, Easter, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas... What makes them different than any other regular day if not by social convention that we all agreed to assign some significance to it? Whatever the original intention behind the establishment of whatever "day" it evolves through time and changes via customs and beliefs.
So what is so special about Dec 1? Another artificially created day to what? World AIDS Day? What are we trying to convey or say?
Here are a few of what I've found just from a google image search.
My friend Alex's "first time" story is rather typical: equal parts awkwardness and pleasure finishing with a big, faked orgasm.
"At some point I realized that as pleasant as the sensation was, this particular stroking motion from intercourse
wasn't going to lead me to an orgasm," Alex explains. "So when it
seemed like the right time, I grimaced, made some appropriate noises,
and no one was the wiser."
What makes this story atypical is that Alex is a man.
That men reach orgasm easily and definitely whereas women work long
and hard to get there (if they get there at all) is a myth, according
to sex educator Carol Queen, director of San Francisco's Center for Sex
and Culture.
"Some women can get turned on and come just as quickly as any man;
and plenty of men take a long time to get aroused enough to go forward
with direct genital contact, need extra sources of mental or physical
stimulation to get that turned on, and have difficulty achieving orgasm
during partnered sex," Queen says.
Sexual responsiveness between partners varies for reasons ranging
from skill and technique to psychology and anatomy. I have been in
sexual relationships with men in which I could readily climax through
vaginal intercourse, but I also had a long-term relationship with a
partner — I'll call him Eddie — whose anatomy and mine rarely conspired
to bring either of us to orgasm the old fashioned way.
For women, the inability to climax during intercourse is now widely accepted as "normal," but according to The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(DSM), the American Psychological Association's bible, my ex-boyfriend
Eddie would be characterized as having a classifiable disorder known as
Male Orgasmic Dysfunction, defined as an inability to climax "despite
adequate sexual desire and arousal."
The manual cites the case of a man called "The Professor" as a
typical example of this dysfunction: "He had no trouble in attaining
and maintaining an erection and no difficulties in stimulating his
partner to her orgasm, but he could never be stimulated himself to
ejaculation, and would finally give up in boredom. He has always been
able to reach ejaculation by masturbation, which he does about twice a
week; but he has never been willing to let a partner masturbate him to
orgasm."
And there, pun intended, is the rub, or rather the lack thereof.
Perhaps the real dysfunction here is the shame that prevents the
professor from sharing masturbation with a partner. Which is exactly
how Eddie and I dealt with our poor pelvic fit. Where thrusting failed,
fingers came in quite handy; we had twenty between us, after all.
To complicate matters further, Queen likes to point out the second
great myth of the male orgasm: the assumption that ejaculation equals
orgasm.
"In fact, orgasm and ejaculation are two different things," she
says. "Orgasm is the peak of sensation, centered in the brain, but
often felt as genitally-focused, that often comes with a series of
pleasurable muscle contractions. It is often accompanied by
ejaculation, but some guys ejaculate almost as a reflex, without that
erotic peak of feeling, while some men can feel that peak or climax
sensation, sometimes more than once, and never ejaculate."
I watched a live demo of an ejaculation-free male orgasm during a tantric
massage class. The accompany shuddering and flushing made the orgasm
unmistakable, yet it indeed produced no fluid. What's more, it happened
while the subject was at, shall we say, no more than half mast. It was
an impressive demonstration to say the least, and made me wonder if men
experience "event-free" orgasms of the kind Queen describes without
notice.
My friend Alex felt a great deal of anxiety about his inability to
climax during intercourse, which persisted for years. Instead of just
continuing to "fake it," Alex looked for other ways to express himself
with a partner. This led him to discover a broader range of experiences
and sensations — including, eventually, plenty of partnered orgasms.
In time, he even found himself occasionally climaxing during
intercourse, "but by then it no longer seemed like such a big deal."
"The experience made me a better lover," Alex says. Now in his
forties, Alex is that rare guy who can hang with the girls and discuss the virtues of the Hitachi Magic Wand vs. the Rabbit
without blushing. You may laugh, but name-dropping the latest model
vibrator has to be one of the greatest "sensitive guy" pickup
strategies ever invented.
*Do you know the legend of the Cherokee Indian youth's rite of passage?
His
father takes him into the forest, blindfolds him and leaves him alone. He is required to sit on a stump the whole night and not remove the
blindfold until the rays of the morning sun shine through it. He cannot
cry out for help to anyone. Once he survives the night, he is a MAN.
He
cannot tell the other boys of this experience, because each lad must
come into manhood on his own. The boy is naturally terrified. He can
hear all kinds of noises. Wild beasts must surely be all around him. Maybe even some human might do him harm.
The
wind blew the grass and earth, and shook his stump, but he sat
stoically, never removing the blindfold. It would be the only way he
could become a man! Finally, after a horrific night the sun appeared
and he removed his blindfold.
It
was then that he discovered his father sitting on the stump next to
him. He had been at watch the entire night, protecting his son from
harm.
Perhaps it is only a projection of our childhood longing for protection by an all-powerful parent, it really does feel good to believe and trust that there is a powerful deity watching over us against this terrifying world of indifference and cruelty, even though at most times we don't even see or feel, know or notice that we are somehow protected and watched over.
What exactly is the lesson behind this rite when a boy become a man? That he has to face or confront his own fear of the unknown by himself? To go through potential life threatening situations without any rational means to protect himself? To instill a rather irrational faith that despite real danger, you are actually safely protected? By whom? That in situations where it seems you have faced hardship alone, in actuality it is the community behind us that had supported us? Only we did not see it?
What is it that has changed when a boy is no longer a boy but a man instead? Do you have any event in your life that marked an end and the beginning of adulthood?
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