África, Occidente y la lucha contra el sida

From The Times Literary Supplement
March 5, 2008
AIDS and evangelists in Africa
There is no single answer to the problem of HIV/AIDS, but solutions cannot be imposed from the outside
Steven Epstein

Helen Epstein
THE INVISIBLE CURE
Africa, the West and the fight against AIDS
326pp. Viking. £16.99.

On one of her many trips to Africa in recent years to investigate the state of the AIDS epidemic, Helen Epstein (no relation) visited the main hospital in a district known for its tea plantations, about 200 miles from Uganda’s capital, Kampala. There was one doctor at the facility, and on occasion some nurses. The X-ray machine could be powered up for an hour a day at best. Those patients not sleeping on the floor were sharing beds. The bathrooms had been gutted and served “as aviaries for the finches that made their nests in the porcelain scraps on the floor”. Some patients had AIDS; others, suffering from onchocerciasis, or “river blindness”, had long parasitic worms that formed wriggly lumps beneath the skin.

To write about AIDS in Africa for a Western audience is to confront a sharp narrative dilemma. How do you tell stories – often painful, sometimes overwhelming – without re-inforcing a sense of awful inevitability about Africa’s many problems? How do you convey the startlingly different logic by which life operates there, without trafficking in myths and stereotypes, and without solidifying a perception of Africa as radically “other”, and thus unknowable and unreachable? Epstein, a scientist turned essayist, has been piecing this account together for more than a decade in a series of lucid articles published in the New York Review of Books. Collecting that material between the covers of a single volume is a tremendous service – even if, as so often is the case for books with such origins, she has failed to eliminate distracting repetition across chapters or solve some basic problems of exposition. (Why are elementary facts about AIDS treatment and testing in Africa relegated to an appendix?) But her keen eye for detail, suspicion of conventional wisdom, and compelling prose carry the reader along. She does not shy away from telling horror stories about East and Southern Africa, home to about 40 per cent of the world’s cases of HIV infection. There are stories not just of deplorable conditions, tragic missteps and profound institutional failures, and sometimes of the hideous things that people do to one another – like the case of the South African teenage boys who stoned to death their neighbour, an HIV-positive AIDS counsellor, because she had brought “shame on the community”. But Epstein also juxtaposes failures with impressive accomplishments. Though her portraits are vividly painted, her desire is not to describe but to explain. And if she succeeds better than most in avoiding the standard portrayal of Africa as unfathomable and unchangeable, it is because she interweaves her storytelling with careful analysis. She shows how human efforts to control disease often fail but sometimes succeed, and by placing outcomes and actions squarely in their historical and cultural context – including, not incidentally, the long historical ripple effects of Western colonialism that continue to promote the spread of disease while hindering its containment – she shows us why people believe what they believe or do what they do. Finally, by linking what happens in Kampala and Pretoria to what goes on in Geneva, Washington, DC, and elsewhere, Epstein shows how the intractable dilemmas that come to seem quintessentially “African” are often caused, or compounded, by forces and agendas that originate elsewhere and over which Africans themselves exercise limited control.

En busca del Kamasutra

Over the counter once more
Ian Pindar is glad that James McConnachie’s tome of good conduct for men, The Book of Love, has been rescued
Ian Pindar
Saturday December 15, 2007

The Book of Love: In Search of the Kamasutra
by James McConnachie
272pp, Atlantic, £17.99

In The Book of Love James McConnachie lays to rest some of the enduring myths surrounding the Kamasutra: it is not a sex manual but a book of good conduct. It is not illustrated and it has nothing to do with Tantric sex.

Little is known about its author, Vatsyayana, but he probably lived in third-century northern India. What we do know is that he started a trend - some have called it a revolution - when he decided to write a sutra or scholarly treatise about kama or sexual desire.

The word kamasutra has become a sort of shorthand for “advanced fucking”, says McConnachie, but it doesn’t really deserve its reputation as a book of sexual gymnastics. The sexual positions Vatsyayana discusses (”the crab”, “the lotus”, and so on) are not especially acrobatic, nor are there all that many. Certainly not as many as can be found in The Horn-Book: A Girl’s Guide to Good and Evil (1899), which lists 62 positions - including the “view of the Low Countries” and the “elastic cunt” - or the Golden Book of Love (1907), which offers 531.

Vatsyayana organises sex into eight distinct topics: embracing, kissing, scratching (love marks were “a major fetish in ancient India”), biting, the notorious sexual positions, moaning, “the woman playing the man’s part” (women-on-top) and oral sex (the art of fellatio; cunnilingus is barely mentioned). The Kamasutra is a male fantasy aimed at nagarakas, wealthy young men in the cities, and it presents a world in which women are always available and compliant and never need to be seduced, only aroused in frescoed bedchambers filled with flowers and incense. The effect of the work, says McConnachie, is to surround us in a kind of “erotic cocoon”. If Vatsyayana has advice for women, it is how to keep men happy, not how to enjoy themselves sexually. His greatest crime in modern eyes is not that he never once questions the caste system, but that he appears totally unaware of the existence of the clitoris.

VIH, preservativos y abstinencia

Leyendo el nuevo artículo de Ana Belén Carmona en El Confidencial sobre los preservativos y las actitudes ante la prevención del VIH, me ha encocorado ver luego dos comentarios tipo de las huestes conservadoras. Uno, que el preservativo falla y que no hay nada mejor que una pareja monógama y fiel. Porque como la gente solo tiene una pareja en toda su vida, que a su vez no ha tenido ninguna otra pareja, y se mantienen siempre fieles, qué mejor alternativa, ¿verdad? Suena increíble, pero todavía se esgrimen estos argumentos.

El segundo comentario es más elaborado y ya lo he visto tergiversado varias veces: el caso de Uganda. Lo primero que habría que mencionar es que el contexto social de ese país es tan distinto del de España que no tiene mucho sentido calcar las propuestas de prevención que allí funcionaron. De hecho, es justamente esa ignorancia del contexto lo que les anima a defender impúdicamente la abstinencia como clave para el descenso notable de nuevas infecciones por VIH en Uganda. Lo cierto es que fue una mezcla del aumento del uso de condones, así como la restricción en el número de parejas (en Uganda abundan las relaciones concurrentes y eso multiplica las probabilidades de contagio) lo que llevó a ese descenso.

Para un recuento más elaborado de este planteamiento con cifras y por expertos que han trabajado en la zona, recomiendo especialmente el libro de Helen Epstein The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS o alguno de sus artículos en la New York Review of Books o el New York Times. Otra buena fuente a la que acudir son los informes del Instituto Guttmacher, como por ejemplo éste.

Amigas íntimas: Mujeres que amaron a otras mujeres

Archives of Sexual Behavior.  Volume 36, Number 5 / octubre de 2007

Book Review
Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928
By Martha Vicinus, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2004, 344 pp., $35.00 (hardback), $27.00 (paperback).

Susan Mumm

Dean of Arts and Science, Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3M 2J6, Canada
While less original than some of Vicinus’ earlier books, this volume provides both a valuable synthesis and a wide-ranging discussion of women’s erotic friendships from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Written in accessible language, the book is divided into four sections: same-sex relationships that mimicked heterosexual roles, “queer relationships” constrained by social or legal pressure, intergenerational love affairs, and “modernist refashionings” in the fin de siecle and interwar period. In this book, Vicinus chronicles mostly well-known female pairings, and her argument covers much of the same ground as Faderman did a quarter century ago.

Given the often scandalous nature of the relationships described here, Vicinus, like previous scholars, is working with patchy sources: bonfires and excised letters feature regularly as heirs and executors struggled to hide familial shame. Vicinus returns to the problematic nature of her sources throughout the book, in some interesting discussions of the interpretative difficulties involved in the use of the surviving material.

Vicinus displays her typically careful research in the book; she is widely read in both the standard and more eclectic sources. Although all of the classics of lesbian history are listed in her bibliography, the key concepts of these scholars remain surprisingly unattributed in the text, making this read at times more like a popular trade book than the scholarly book it primarily is. The text is attractively illustrated with well-chosen visual resources and there is a useful appendix giving potted biographies of many of the people discussed in the text, although there are some peculiar omissions, such as Lucy Tait, who is a major character in one chapter.

La mujer en la Iglesia primitiva

La mujer en la Iglesia primitiva
Varios autores
Sígueme. Salamanca, 2007. 400 páginas, 25 euros

Éste es un libro bello, muy interesante, audaz y riguroso. Como indica su título, trata de explicar cuál era el papel que correspondía a las mujeres en las comunidades cristianas de los primeros siglos. Para explicarlo, los autores han manejado un número notable de fuentes y no se limitan a las cristianas o las que hablan de los cristianos. Parten del supuesto de que, en el Imperio romano (que es donde nació la Iglesia), las mujeres cristianas se formaron en las mismas costumbres que las demás mujeres y, por ello, se refieren a los modos femeninos de afrontar la vida, sea cual fuere la religión que se profesara. Esta amplitud de visión es sumamente rica y permite ver dónde tropezó el credo cristiano con las costumbres y qué se hizo cuando ocurrió (lo que sucedió no pocas veces).

El libro no repite lo sabido, ya que los autores han reconsiderado las fuentes a partir de unos criterios metodológicos fundamentales que explican al comienzo. El primero consiste en partir de la posibilidad de que los textos que se refieren a los cristianos y que emplean, con ese fin, el plural masculino, no tienen por qué referirse sólo a varones, sino a varones y mujeres. El criterio es válido, por más que requiera una justificación lingüística más detallada. En algunos casos, en griego, se resolvía el problema de hablar de hombres y mujeres simultáneamente por la vía de emplear el plural neutro, en vez del plural masculino, y es una posibilidad que habría que calibrar. De todas formas, las conclusiones de los autores son más que verosímiles. Rehacen toda la vida social del Imperio, sólo que en clave cristiana femenina. Tiene mucho este libro de historia global en perspectiva femenina. Los temas que se tocan son, por lo tanto, múltiples; es imposible enumerarlos; nadie suponga una visión restrictiva.

¿Qué deja perplejos a los asesores sexuales?

Don’t Ask the Sexperts Dan Savage, Dr. Ruth, and others on what still mystifies them.
Compiled by Morgan Smith
Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2007

Slate asked seven people who earn their livings thinking and writing about sex what they’ve never been able to figure out about it. Some of our sexperts have academic backgrounds, some religious, and others have just logged a lot of hours talking to people about their habits and pleasures. They say there’s still a lot of mystery left.

Ian Kerner is the author of She Comes First, He Comes Next, and other sex advice books.
Why do most men still know more about what’s under the hood of a car than the hood of a clitoris, and why, in our post-Sex and the City culture, are women faking it more than ever?

Em & Lo are sex and relationship writers and authors of Buh Bye: The Ultimate Guide To Dumping and Getting Dumped.
We’ve never been able to understand why virginity is still defined strictly in terms of penile penetration. Does that mean all lesbians are lifelong virgins? What about gay men who just aren’t that into anal sex? (There are plenty of them.) And how is it possible that a straight couple can engage in oral sex, manual sex, mutual masturbation, and possibly even anal sex (if you believe the rumors about Catholic school girls) and still claim they’re “saving themselves for marriage”? Sure, intercourse’s role in baby-making elevates it a bit among sexual acts. But these days, birth control, family planning, and reproductive technologies mean that intercourse is less a means to an end and more a pleasurable end in itself. Add to that the influence of feminism and the gay rights movement, and you’d think that there’d be a few more seats at the official sex table. Of course, if we defined “loss of virginity” as merely “mutual orgasms,” millions of American women would become born-again virgins overnight. Any kind of orgasm? Er, ditto. While we’d hate to heap any more sexual pressure on women, we think a dedication to making sure all parties end up sexually satisfied should be the gold standard. Did you and your partner climax, or at the very least have a really, really good time? Then hand over that V-card.

Sexo y placer en la cultura occidental

Archives of Sexual Behavior Volume 36, Number 3, June 2007 , pp. 471-472(2)

Book Review
Sex and Pleasure in Western Culture
By Gail Hawkes, Polity Press, Cambridge, England, 2004, 207 pp., £50.00 (hardback); £15.99 (paperback).

Dustin M. Wax1 Contact Information
Department of Human Behavior, Community College of Southern Nevada, Las Vegas, NV 89146, USA

Published online: 18 May 2007

The regulation and management of sexual desire is one of only a few well-documented cultural universals. In every society that has been studied, there exists some form of restriction as to whom one can or cannot view as potential sexual partners, whether this takes the form of incest taboos that forbid sexual relationships with family members, marriage rules that prevent access to other people’s partners, legal frameworks that restrict one to one’s own racial, class, or other grouping, or informal aesthetic restrictions that do the same. These restrictions are often thought of in terms of minimizing conflict between individuals, controlling reproduction, and promoting the formation of alliances between groups or group segments, but Hawkes’ volume suggests that these restrictions also need to be understood in the wider context of control over the social order. In this perspective, discourses on the sexual body express anxieties over the control—and potential loss of control—of the body politic, and suggest as well the channels through which social control will be asserted.

This volume explores the ramifications of this thesis in the development of Western society, beginning with the Greece of Plato and Socrates and moving through early Christianity and the establishment of the Church, through the rise of modernity in the Renaissance and Enlightenment, through the Victorian era, and up to the present. Along the way, Hawkes tracks concerns over sex and sexuality as embedded in philosophical, religious, medical, legal, and, finally, popular discourses, revealing both the mutability of attitudes towards desire and pleasure and the endurance of the underlying need to establish social order through the instrument of the sexual body. Although her argument rests on discourse analysis and thus is subject to some of the shortcomings of that mode of analysis, the depth of Hawkes’ timeline makes this book an important resource for situating attitudes towards sex in their proper historical and political perspective.

Sacerdotisas en la antigua Grecia

October 3, 2007
How to be a modern goddess
Did sex and the sacred mix in Ancient Greece?

Joan Breton Connelly
PORTRAIT OF A PRIESTESS
Women and ritual in ancient Greece
456pp. Princeton University Press. £26.95.
9780691127460
Ancient Greek women lived lives that would be far more recognizable to the women of Iran or Saudi Arabia today than to the women of the modern West. Their skin was pale from a life in the shadows. When they were not indoors they covered up with a veil. Hence part of the preparations of the cross-dressing, coup-plotting women of Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae consists of letting their skin get tanned by secret exposure to the unaccustomed rays of the sun. Men kept well away from women they were not related to, and even husbands and wives often slept in different, sex-separated, parts of the house. Decent women were not supposed even to be spoken of in the public world of men, according to the funeral speech penned for Pericles by Thucydides. For a woman even to allow herself to be seen at a window or leaning over the sill of a Dutch door was dangerous for her reputation, and eulogists at weddings were advised to preface their praise of the beauty of the bride with an “I have heard”. In Crete the fine an adulterer had to pay was halved if the woman was seduced in a house that was not her home, and in Athens no charges at all could be laid against a man who seduced a woman who went to and fro “showingly”; as if by the very fact of appearing in public she was announcing that she was anybody’s.

Given this background, it is perhaps not surprising that funerals were viewed as dangerous opportunities for men with adulterous intent. They provided rare occasions for a man actually to get a look at another man’s women, and for a woman to see what might be on offer instead of her old man (who was often a cousin or an uncle and usually twenty years older than her – a man her father had arranged for her to marry when she was a little girl and without, of course, asking her opinion). At least, when the go-between arrived with a secret proposition, she might remember a handsome young face in the mournful crowd that smiled at her when nobody was looking, and might not be disappointed when on a subsequent night, her husband away, she held a lamp up to the face of the intruder the slave-girl had been asked to let in, hoping to see same face again.

Gays en Irán

Ser homosexual en el país de Ahmadineyad

Gays iraníes relatan la dureza de vivir en un régimen que niega su existencia y que mantiene la pena de muerte para los ‘desviados’

ÁNGELES ESPINOSA  -  Teherán
EL PAÍS  -  Internacional - 30-09-2007

“Entonces, ¿yo no existo?”, exclama incrédulo M., un gay acomodado de Teherán ante la afirmación de que “en Irán no tenemos homosexuales” pronunciada por el presidente, Mahmud Ahmadineyad, en la Universidad de Columbia el pasado lunes. “Lo que debiera hacer es informarse antes de hablar para no meter la pata como con el Holocausto”, añade Taha, de los pocos gays iraníes que ha aceptado hablar con este diario. La discreción es la norma de supervivencia en un Estado cuyo código penal establece la pena de muerte para quien mantiene relaciones homosexuales. Algo que también ocurre en países aliados de EE UU como Pakistán, Arabia Saudí o Yemen.
“Ahmadineyad sólo tiene que darse una vuelta cualquier tarde-noche por el parque Daneshju para descubrir que en su país sí que hay homosexuales”, sugiere un estudiante universitario. El Daneshju es uno de los típicos lugares de encuentro gay de Teherán. Quizá el más democrático. A diferencia del centro comercial Jam-e Jam, donde el ambiente pijo hace que sus camisetas ceñidas y sus cejas arregladas pasen desapercibidas, en el parque confluyen chicos tanto del norte rico como del sur más modesto. A menos que alguno se muestre extremadamente cariñoso, la policía no suele intervenir.

Como en el caso de los heterosexuales, la República islámica considera inmoral cualquier muestra pública de afecto. De acuerdo con la moral que institucionalizó la revolución islámica de 1979, toda relación fuera del matrimonio heterosexual es ilícita y punible.

Historia de la flagelación

September 05, 2007

The whip’s progress
Bettina Bildhauer

Niklaus Largier, translated by Graham Harman
IN PRAISE OF THE WHIP
A cultural history of arousal
526pp, illustrated. MIT Press. £22.95.
9781890951658

Hurting oneself goes against all basic common sense. It is hard to understand, and easy to mock or deride. Images of madmen, masochists, or monks beating themselves are stock figures of human stupidity, decadence, or aberration. This is because common sense, as social consensus, has a vested interest in human integrity and intactness, and self-harm offends its most central value. If we want to understand why humans hurt themselves, we have to use something other than common sense. In his book In Praise of the Whip, Niklaus Largier uses the case study of whipping to do so from a historical perspective.

As the title and subtitle already indicate, whipping for Largier is an example of a technique of hurting oneself to induce a state of intense excitement or ecstasy that transcends language and the body. The author stresses that he wants to try to do his topic justice by not pressing a deliberately disruptive practice into a linear, narrative history, but to let each of his texts stand on its own rather than as an example of an overarching development – a laudable aim that has become a bit of a cliché in recent historiography. The trick he uses to resolve the paradox of writing about a practice aiming at incommunicability is to present flagellations as texts, and texts as performances. In Praise of the Whip concerns itself with texts about, not with actual instances of, whipping, and argues that these texts all aim to induce a state in the recipient that mimics the ecstasy of the whipped – a tall claim, which his own volume shares to an extent. Moreover, the flagellated people aim for their bodies to become texts in various ways, to be seen and read, either as a realization of Scripture or as pornography.

Tantra (II)

Journal of the History of Sexuality
Volume 15, Number 1, January 2006

Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion. By H UGH B. URBAN. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. pp. 388. $60.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).
Of the many books on tantra flooding booksellers, this is the one that should be read first. Urban’s study is superbly written and well researched, and it represents a sophisticated understanding of the political and religious dynamics of cultural encounter. It goes well beyond the often facile Saidian and postcolonial narratives of the encounter of India with the “West” to present a nuanced exploration of the cultural and religious dialectics that
produced “Tantrism.” The book takes us from ancient texts to www.tantra.com, and historians will find here doors to rooms previously unimagined.
Readers with little background in South Asian studies will likely find
the introduction the most difficult part of the book. It is here that Urban
documents the various uses of the term tantra in premodern South Asian
religions. It helps to keep in mind a singular fact when beginning this book.
Before the nineteenth century we find texts called Tantras and practitioners
called tantrikas (though they are usually called this by others). Nonetheless,
Tantrism or tantra as a generic category designating a self-consciously
constructed religious tradition does not exist before the colonial encounter.
Tantrism comes into being as an imagined category (like the category Hinduism),
a category produced in the dialectical encounter between Indians
and Europeans (27).

Terapeuta sexual musulmán

Frank talk from Muslim sex therapist
Cairo-based Heba Kotb tackles sensitive issues within the framework of Islam.
By Jeffrey Fleishman
Times Staff Writer

July 29, 2007

CAIRO — In the delicate realm where the Koran meets human desire, Heba Kotb, a Muslim sex therapist in a ruffled gold head scarf, has strong opinions on vibrators, foreplay, premature you-know-what and why more men can’t seem to locate the G-spot.

An hour in her clinic, where some women wear black abayas that reveal only their eyes, is a liberating venture into a culture that has traditionally relegated talk of sex to a family whisper. Demure she may appear, but Kotb’s voice is strong and unapologetically public. The Koran, she said, forbids sex outside marriage, but within that union carnal satisfaction is a requisite for happiness.

“I deal with pleasure, desire, orgasms, masturbation, sexual frequency and erection problems,” said Kotb, whose TV show, “Big Talk,” is popular across the Arab world. “Neither the Koran nor the Sunna, however, address masturbation. My advice is that it’s OK to masturbate, but only if you need it badly. Masturbation has become more prevalent here because sex is forbidden outside marriage.”

In a society in which male clerics issue fatwas, or religious edicts or opinions, addressing all layers of family life, a feminine voice on something as intimate as sex has made Kotb a celebrity and a cultural revolutionary.

Homosexualidad y la Iglesia

July 18, 2007

The Church and homosexuality
John Habgood

Duncan Dormor and Jeremy Morris, editors
AN ACCEPTABLE SACRIFICE?
Homosexuality and the Church
190pp. SPCK Publishing. Paperback, £12.99.
9780281058518

When the world’s Anglican bishops meet for the Lambeth Conference in July 2008, it is to be hoped that many of those engaged in the crucially important debate on homosexuality will have been persuaded to read this book. That the subject is contentious, not least among Christians, hardly needs further demonstration. Whether it needs to be contentious is another question altogether, and the nine essays in An Acceptable Sacrifice?, by a group of Cambridge lecturers, doctors and clergy, provide convincing reasons why more constructive attitudes are both possible and necessary. What the authors are offering the Churches is an intelligent and wide-ranging guide, which tackles the difficult questions, and is not content with simplistic answers.

The Bible is frequently claimed to be unequivocal in its condemnation of homosexuality. While there are texts which might at first sight give the claim some credibility, it is clear from reading them in context that they are not actually answering the kind of questions which today’s protagonists on both sides want to ask. There are many twenty-first-century questions which could not even be asked in biblical times, because the concepts which underlie them, that of homosexual orientation for instance, did not then exist. There is also an important sense in which the Bible is not a book of answers at all. It is a description of, and invitation to enter into, a historical process through which, it is claimed, the nature of God has been progressively revealed. Furthermore, the key ethical insight which forms the culmination of the entire story is the revelation of God as love. To extract a number of texts purporting to be about homosexuality, and to condemn a whole group of people for a personality trait which is not of their making, may look at first sight like faithfulness to the biblical text. In reality it is not to treat the Bible seriously, through failing to take account of its ultimate message about the sovereignty of love and the process by which this came to be.

Esposas temporales

¿Esposas temporales o prostitutas?

Los iraníes debaten si los matrimonios de un mes para poder tener relaciones sexuales encubren la prostitución

ÁNGELES ESPINOSA - Teherán
EL PAÍS - Sociedad - 01-07-2007

Mehdieh y Siavosh se han prometido amor… por un mes. Así se lo permite el matrimonio temporal (sigheh) que contempla el islam chií. Pero ni siquiera su incorporación a la ley tras la Revolución Islámica ha logrado vencer los recelos que suscita en la sociedad iraní, tal como ha probado la polémica desatada por las recientes declaraciones de un ministro partidario de promoverlo. Dado que en Irán las relaciones sexuales fuera del matrimonio están prohibidas y penadas, el sigheh ofrece una cobertura legal a jóvenes como Mehdieh y Siavosh que no pueden afrontar una boda. Sin embargo, muchos iraníes temen que sirva para promocionar la prostitución.
Maryam hace un gesto de desconfianza cuando la periodista le menciona el matrimonio temporal. “Sí, en el islam existe esa posibilidad, pero en nuestros días las mujeres lo rechazan”, explica. Más allá de cuestiones religiosas, el énfasis que la sociedad iraní pone en la virginidad de las novias (con chequeo ginecológico incluido) convierte la opción en una hipoteca de su futuro. Aunque nadie hace alarde de ello, el sigheh es aceptado para viudas y divorciadas, pero una virgen necesita el permiso de su padre, algo altamente improbable.

Historia de la flagelación voluntaria

Off the beaten track

Brian Dillon

21 June 2007

In Praise of the Whip: a Cultural History of Arousal
Niklaus Largier Zone Books, 526pp, £22.95

In a suburban Dublin school in the late 1970s, I caught the tail end, so to speak, of corporal punishment. Not that the good brothers made us bend over for our punishment, by then: we went home instead with hot, welted hands. But we had our suspicions about the more fervid among the floggers, not least the sweaty charmer who liked to warm the cane with a brisk rub of his crotch before he let fly. Something, we surmised, was up with this lot. Such at least, as Niklaus Largier’s gripping history of flagellation confirms, is the easy modern assumption with regard to the switch, the rod and the birch. Flagellation is surely a sign of misdirected or repressed desire: its adherents (givers or receivers) must be, at best, just a little bit sad. But In Praise of the Whip tells another story: of ascetic and perverse imaginations that were liberated by a taste for the whip.

La tradición histórica del sexo sagrado

The historical tradition of sacral sex and contemporary media manifestations of carnal sex
Ann Arlosoroff Vise Nunes
University of Houston
Studies in Media & Information Literacy Education
Volume 4, Issue 3 (August 2004)
© University of Toronto Press
Article number: 51

ABSTRACT

Clay tablets excavated from Mesopotamia, inscribed with obscure cuneiform texts, excited the interest of scholars, who translated many of them during the 20th century. These texts disclosed the previously unknown civilization of ancient Sumer. Many of them integrated intimate carnality with passionate spirituality in the service of the Divine feminine. This article begins with the translation of Sumer’s sensuous and erotic texts concerning conjugal intimacy with the Divine feminine. It uncovers a patterned sequence of motifs involved in this valorization, which in turn evoke the recognition of the same motifs encoded in the subtler less sensuous biblical texts. When sacral sex was disallowed, the Divine link became spiritualized, requiring men and women to choose between sexless spirituality or non-spiritual carnal sexuality. Movies, television, and video have long served the public hunger for vicarious sexual knowledge. The unexpected public response to popular films with a spiritual theme sets the stage for a contemporary version of the ultimate romantic fantasy that recovers the ancient union of carnality and spirituality.