Tuesday, July 7, 2009 by B.AllanDempsey.

I’ve suffered a recent heart injury, metaphorically speaking. I met someone and, like always, fell too hard too fast, and, like always, those feelings weren’t reciprocated. So, I’m crushed. And as I cycle through the stages of grief (I have six, by the way: the denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance stages, and the endlessly-tormenting-myself-with-unanswerable-questions-and-what-if-scenarios-until-I-drive-myself-mad-and-get-two-hours-of-sleep-if-I’m-lucky stage), I realize something. This is the first real heartache I’ve had without God.

I’ve always been the type to dig in, face my emotional problems head-on, and struggle to pull myself out of them. Sounds really tough and self-reliant, but I had a secret weapon. God was there to help me. He’d wrap His big, fatherly arms around me and comfort me. I could tell Him my troubles, and I knew there was a grand design that I was playing out with my pain.

But now that I’ve lost my faith, I have one more hurdle to jump when dealing with grief. I am alone. Truly alone. Oh, don’t get me wrong. I have friends and family I can lean on, and I thank God (I know, I know) for them. Inside, however, I’m alone now. I have nothing but myself to use when I need to steel myself up and rebuild my heart.

So, along with re-defining my values, beliefs, and notions about the fabric of reality, I now have to re-learn how to feel. One of my basic coping mechanisms has been removed, making something as normal and human as sadness even more crippling and insurmountable.

I sure wish I still believed. I could use a god about now.

P.S. What the hell does “we’re too similar to be more-than-friends” mean? What, we have too much in common? We get along too well? Even God was never able to help me with logic like that.

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Friday, June 12, 2009 by admin.

Much thanks to My Female Sexuality for letting us run their post on the Medical Benefits of Masturbation.

Masturbation, it seems, is a form of genital “housekeeping”. Women experience the urge to masturbate as a way to eliminate debris or genital “gunk” that inhabits the mucus of the vagina and uterus (i.e. menstrual remnants, old sperm, or colonies of invading viruses and bacteria at the opening of the cervix). Baker explains, ” An orgasm via masturbation solves a dual problem. In the absence of the spoiling effects of semen, the orgasm rids her cervix of older mucus, relining the vaginal walls, ready to lubricate her next intercourse. An orgasm without semen present makes the remaining cervical mucus more acidic, hence more resistant to infection.”* Daily discharge routinely keep the vagina clean, but the urge to masturbate comes when there is more debris than the daily discharge can accommodate.

For men, the housekeeping benefits of masturbation are equally important. Millions of fresh sperm cells are necessary for optimum baby making, so unused sperm lingering around in the testicles too long are encouraged to leave the warm, scrotal sack to make room for a fresh batch. That means a quick ejaculation. Baker and his colleagues showed that the male body would spark the urge to masturbate in anticipation of intercourse in order to have the freshest sperm possible. “By masturbating, the result is that when he next inseminates a woman, he does indeed ejaculate fewer sperm - but they are younger and more active. A greater number manage to escape the seminal pool, and because they are younger, they live longer. Just as with a woman and her cervical mucus, a man’s body keeps an eye on the health and vigor of the sperm he has in storage, and when it decides it needs to be shed it triggers in him an urge to masturbate.”* So if your sperm are more than three days old, you’re going to be feeling the urge to mate - or at least to find the baby oil to ejaculate on your own.

So what happens if you refuse to give into those healthful but lustful urges to bring yourself to orgasm? It turns out that solo orgasms are such an intrinsic part of genital health, that if the urge to masturbate is suppressed in both men and women, then the body simply causes you to have nocturnal emissions - or wet dreams. Those sexy thoughts you have during REM sleep are produced by your body to keep it primed, healthy and ready to reproduce. The only problem from the resulting orgasms is that it leaves you with extra laundry. So the moral of all this is give in to those primal urges to get intimate with yourself. Despite all the centuries of bad press, the truth is that masturbation is downright good for you and as important to your health and well being as blowing your nose or brushing your teeth. Amen.

* Baby Wars, Baker, Robin & Elizabeth Oram. 1999. Harper Collins, Toronto. Pages 25-26

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Friday, June 12, 2009 by admin.

Much thanks to My Female Sexuality for letting us run their post on the Medical Benefits of Masturbation.

Despite all information affirming masturbation is harmless, normal and under no circumstances hair growth on your palms, many people in our culture still consider it a taboo. People believe masturbation a somewhat seedy thing to do to yourself, or something that only happens during a weak moment or extra-long showers. During the latter part of the 60’s the slogan “Make love not War” abounded, groundbreaking sexual researchers Masters and Johnson were proponents of masturbation as a relaxation technique and an important part of healthful, stress-free living. At about the same time, many organized religions were condemning masturbation as an evil temptation and encouraging parents to discipline their children against it.

The good news is that thanks to Masters and Johnson and 20th Century researcher Dr. Robin Baker we now know that masturbation is as good for us as eating our Wheaties or taking our vitamins. So why are we still uncomfortable with the subject matter?

The old adage about male masturbation still seems to be true that 99% of men engage in it and the other 1% lie about it. For women the numbers are slightly lower, but the landmark “Sex in America” study put the numbers of female masturbators at about 85%. These studies also go on to reveal that 54% of men and 62% of women won’t admit to a partner that they do actually masturbate. So the majority of the population it seems, are chronically taking advantage of themselves even if they still believe there is something wrong with this behavior

Sex therapists have long proposed regular masturbation as a way of learning about your bodies and keeping the equipment from going rusty in a “use it or lose it” sort of fashion. Woody Allen called it “Sex with someone you love”. Either way masturbation is intrinsic to understanding your own sexuality. What I say to my patients is, “if you can’t play with your own equipment, then you shouldn’t be playing with someone else’s”. How can you tell someone how you would like to be touched if you’ve never touched yourself?

Masturbation teaches you what you love, what makes you uncomfortable and all the things in between. It’s also fun! Masturbation can give you the most powerful orgasms of your life and give you the chance to relax at the end of a busy day. Masturbation is however, more than just learning how to give yourself a quick climax, releasing sexual tension or getting a good rush of endorphins. The urge to masturbate stems from powerful physiological factors that have evolved as a way to keep us healthy. Evolutionary biologist Robin Baker details the medical necessity of both male and female masturbation in his landmark book about sexual response called “Sperm Wars” and the recently published follow up “Baby Wars”.

Love yourself more!

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Thursday, June 11, 2009 by Dragon Management.

Jesus always got way more ass than I ever did.

I’ve seen more girls say “You’re the best, Jesus” or “Jesus, I love you” than I care to admit or believe.  I’ve been dumped, set aside, and had my heart broken because Jesus strolled in to town as the cockblock of the walk.

Worse still, I participated in this Protestant petting.  I told a very attractive high school friend (later, Coyote Ugly attractive) to take a hike when she wanted to mouthkiss me in the parking lot…all because of Jesus.  I ignored the advances of women in college because they were “distractions” on the path to righteousness.  I felt guilty for wanting to kiss the girl I was one week away from being engaged to because the Lord Almighty would swoop down and smite thee and thine for my iniquity of thought and deed.  While the women of my dreams were running through my head and giving me a blood rush to the penis head, both they and I were busy giving spiritual head to that oh so jealous God of the B-I-B-L-E.

Over the course of my ten years as a young, committed, and celibate Christian, I was inundated with message after message, sermon after sermon, and exhortation after exhortation to deny my “flesh” (a word meant to make you think that your biological needs and desires are dirty).  I can’t count the number of times I heard my youth pastor decry premarital sex, and it was only later that I understood much of this bellyaching was like the preacher in The Scarlet Letter: he was such a good sermonizer because he was such a good sinner.

As I walked away from dogma and what Andrew Sullivan refers to as “Christianism,” I witnessed a very curious trend in my innner life.  Before, when I was smacking the snake (spanking the monkey, stroking the skin, etc.) for Jesus and not committing the greater “sin” of fern-i-cashun, my level of guilt was disproportionately high relative to my level of “sin.”  (In fact, I’m pretty sure that my level of guilt qualified me for an honorary membership in the local Catholic church or synagogue.)  As I began to explore my sexuality — albeit in a fumbling, nervous, and anxious manner usually reserved for most normal kids in their late teens and very early 20s — I found this trend reversed.  Everything shifted, and my level of guilt was disproportionately LOW realtive to my level of “sin.”  Either I had a really fucked up view of Baby G and his ideas (which is not entirely impossible) or guilt was part and parcel of the Christian message…or both.

Fortunately, I had a nympho for girlfriend who stole my virginity (you can’t rape the willing, eh?), and I’ve had a recent string of very understanding and cool girlfriends who have helped me along the path to sexual comfort and normalcy. But who knows, maybe if I hadn’t been giving Jesus blowjobs of praise, rimjobs of devotion, and buttsecks (no metaphor there, just buttsecks), I might be on a much more dangerous and disease-ridden path…but I can’t help but feeling tricked out of my sexual prime by the Jewish zombie.

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