House Of The Rising Sun

There is a house in New Orleans
They call the Rising Sun
And it's been the ruin of many a poor boy
And God, I know I'm one

[…]

Oh, mother, tell your children
Not to do what I have done
Spend your lives in sin and misery
In the House of the Rising Sun

Alan Price
[variation of a folk classic by Clarence “Tom” Ashley  - Ashley said he had learned it from his grandfather, Enoch Ashley]

With the consciousness that they are being hunted by women who would take sexual delight in dismembering them…

To clarify the dilemma women have about sexual enthusiasm for men, it is helpful to contrast it with men’s situation. It is unlikely in the extreme that men will have experienced actual sexual violence from women or its threat. Men do not live in cultures where the degradation and brutalisation of men at the hands of women is the stuff of pornography, entertainment and advertising. Men do not live with the consciousness that they are being hunted by women who would take sexual delight in dismembering them simply on account of their gender. They do not live in a society in which their degradation through sex is the dominant theme of the culture. They do not have to approach women sexually in fear or with distressing images or associations with their own oppression. The images they are likely to carry with them are those of women degraded and brutalised by men. In fact they are likely to have practised sexual arousal with such images, extensively, through pornography and fantasy. It is not surprising, then, that sexologists have identified women’s ‘inhibition’ as the main sexual problem of this century. They have identified as healthy sexual feelings those which the male ruling class experiences and have chosen to avoid recognising the political reasons why women might feel differently.

Sheila Jeffreys – Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

the rhythms of their bodies together

When he is inside her, Irish words float up of their own accord. She utters things she has not thought of for so long, language inspired by the rhythms of their bodies together. Urgent and patient, by turns.

Leim an bhradain, the salmon’s leap, a phrase from a poem. O’a mhaighdean rocheansa, the beginning of a prayer.

As she moves toward rapture she remembers a canticle, cleitearnach sciathan, the flutter of wings, the words coming quick on her breath. She repeats them, each sound singeing the air.

Regina McBride – The Land of Women

always writing in white heat…

Henry’s recollections of the past, in contrast to Proust, are done while in movement. He may remember his first wife while making love to a whore, or he may remember his very first love while walking the streets, traveling to see a friend; and life does not stop while he remembers. Analysis in movement. No static vivisection. Henry’s daily and continuous flow of life, his sexual activity, his talks with everyone, his café life, his conversations with people in the street, which I once considered an interruption to writing, I now believe to be a quality which distinguishes him from other writers. He never writes in cold blood: he is always writing in white heat.

It is what I do with the journal, carrying it everywhere, writing on café tables while waiting for a friend, on the train, on the bus, in waiting rooms at the station, while my hair is washed, at the Sorbonne when the lectures get tedious, on journeys, trips, almost while people are talking. It is while cooking, gardening, walking, or love-making that I remember my childhood, and not while reading Freud’s ‘Preface to a Little Girl’s Journal.’

Anaïs Nin – The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

Mass rape

How many rapes occurred inside the walls of the main camp of Ravensbrück is hard to put a figure to: so many of the victims — already, as Ilse Heinrich said, half dead — did not survive long enough after the war to talk about it.

While many older Soviet women were reluctant to talk of the rape, younger survivors feel less restraint today. Nadia Vasilyeva was one of the Red Army nurses who were cornered by the Germans on the cliffs of the Crimea. Three years later in Neustrelitz, northwest of Ravensbrück, she and scores of other Red Army women were cornered again, this time by their own Soviet liberators intent on mass rape. Other women make no excuses for the Soviet rapists. ‘They were demanding payment for liberation,’ said Ilena Barsukova. ‘The Germans never raped the prisoners because we were Russian swine, but our own soldiers raped us. We were disgusted that they behaved like this. Stalin had said that no soldiers should be taken prisoner, so they felt they could treat us like dirt.’

Like the Russians, Polish survivors were also reluctant for many years to talk of Red Army rape. ‘We were terrified by our Russian liberators,’ said Krystyna Zając. ‘But we could not talk about it later because of the communists who had by then taken over in Poland.’ Nevertheless, Poles, Yugoslavs, Czechs and French survivors all left accounts of being raped as soon as they reached the Soviet lines. They talked of being ‘hunted down’, ‘captured’ or ‘cornered’ and then raped.

In her memoirs Wanda Wojtasik, one of the rabbits, says it was impossible to encounter a single Russian without being raped. As she, Krysia and their Lublin friends tried to head east towards their home, they were attacked at every turn. Sometimes the approach would begin with romantic overtures from ‘handsome men’, but these approaches soon degenerated into harassment and then rape. Wanda did not say she was raped herself, but describes episodes where soldiers pounced on friends, or attacked them in houses where they sheltered, or dragged women off behind trees, who then reappeared sobbing and screaming. ‘After a while we never accepted lifts and didn’t dare go near any villages, and when we slept someone always stood watch.

Sarah Helm – Ravensbruck: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women

A pagan religious festival…

Many folklore customs have their roots planted firmly back in the Dark Ages, when the ancient Celts had divided their year by four major festivals. Beltane or ‘the fire of Bel’, had particular significance to the Celts as it represented the first day of summer and was celebrated with bonfires to welcome in the new season. Still celebrated today, we perhaps know Beltane better as May 1st, or May Day.

Down through the centuries May Day has been associated with fun, revelry and perhaps most important of all, fertility. The Day would be marked with village folk cavorting round the maypole, the selection of the May Queen and the dancing figure of the Jack-in-the-Green at the head of the procession. Jack is thought to be a relic from those enlightened days when our ancient ancestors worshipped trees.

These pagan roots did little to endear these May Day festivities with the either the established Church or State. In the sixteenth century riots followed when May Day celebrations were banned. Fourteen rioters were hanged, and Henry VIII is said to have pardoned a further 400 who had been sentenced to death.

The May Day festivities all but vanished following the English Civil War when Oliver Cromwell and his Puritans took control of the country in 1645. Describing maypole dancing as ‘a heathenish vanity generally abused to superstition and wickedness’, legislation was passed which saw the end of village maypoles throughout the country.

Dancing did not return to the village greens until the restoration of Charles II. ‘The Merry Monarch’ helped ensure the support of his subjects with the erection of a massive 40-metre-high maypole in London’s Strand. This pole signalled the return of the fun times, and remained standing for almost fifty years.

Maypoles can still be seen on the village greens at Welford-on-Avon and at Dunchurch, Warwickshire, both of which stand all year round. Barwick in Yorkshire, claims the largest maypole in England, standing some 86 feet in height.

May Day is still celebrated in many villages with the crowning of the May Queen. The gentlemen of the village may also been found celebrating with Jack-in-the-Green, otherwise found on the signs of pubs across the country called the Green Man.

Ben Johnson – May Day Celebrations

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Some people believe that the celebrations on May Day began with Beltane and the tree worship of the Druids. Others believe they go back to the spring festivals of ancient Egypt and India. However, May Day as it is celebrated today is more of a European import, believe it or not, from Italy. The people of ancient Rome honoured Flora, the goddess of flowers and springtime, with a festival called Florialia. The goddess was represented by a small statue wreathed in garlands. A procession of singers and dancers carried the statue past a sacred blossom-decked tree. Later, festivals of this kind spread to other lands conquered by the Romans, and of course this included Britain.

As Europe became Christianized, the pagan holidays lost their religious character and either morphed into popular secular celebrations, as with May Day, or were given new Christian interpretations while retaining many traditional pagan features, as with Christmas, Easter, and All Saint’s Day. Beginning in the 20th century, many neopagans began reconstructing the old traditions and celebrating May Day as a pagan religious festival once more….

P

complete chaos…

I am in the middle of it: chaos and poetry; poetry and love and again, complete chaos. Pain, disorder, occasional clarity; and at the bottom of it all: only love. Sheer enchantment, fear, humiliation. It all comes with love.

Anna Akhmatova – The Akhmatova Journals, Vol. 1

blow job

It’s a straightforward act, yet it’s a slippery one. “Milkshake,” “skull-fuck,” “hummer,” or “head” all name it; likewise, you might suck a dick—or you might enjoy getting your cock sucked, or both. Opting for delicacy, you might call it “oral” or “fellatio.” But real talk: if we’re going to name the sexual act of giving pleasure to a penis by mouth, chances are we’re going to call it a “blow job.” In the kingdom of sexual slang, “blow job” reigns supreme; it’s the odd sex term that sits nearly unchallenged on its throne.

However ubiquitous, though, “blow job” is hilariously inapt. An act that rarely involves blowing and only occasional labour, “blow job” sounds like something created by a thirsty Marxist, a guy as alienated from his own pleasure as he is from his work. And as spectacularly as it fails to denote the physicality of the act, “blow job” also fails to capture both the physical act of fellatio and its joy. It’s a weird term, and, just shy of seventy years old, a relatively new one. Yet despite the youth of “blow job,” or perhaps because of it, it’s a potent term. Nothing, not even “cock sucking,” touches “blow job” for consistency and commonality.

Chelsea G. Summers – Sucking the Fun Out of Fellatio

Smelling yourself on him…

I have smelled my own honey on his mouth.

Anaïs Nin – The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin 1931-1932

childhood incest

In the 1890s, when Freud was in the dawn of his career, he was struck by how many of his female patients were revealing childhood incest victimization to him. Freud concluded that child sexual abuse was one of the major causes of emotional disturbances in adult women and wrote a brilliant and humane paper called “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” However, rather than receiving acclaim from his colleagues for his ground-breaking insights, Freud met with scorn. He was ridiculed for believing that men of excellent reputation (most of his patients came from upstanding homes) could be perpetrators of incest.

Within a few years, Freud buckled under this heavy pressure and recanted his conclusions. In their place he proposed the “Oedipus complex,” which became the foundation of modern psychology. According to this theory any young girl actually desires sexual contact with her father, because she wants to compete with her mother to be the most special person in his life. Freud used this construct to conclude that the episodes of incestuous abuse his clients had revealed to him had never taken place; they were simply fantasies of events the women had wished for when they were children and that the women had come to believe were real. This construct started a hundred-year history in the mental health field of blaming victims for the abuse perpetrated on them and outright discrediting of women’s and children’s reports of mistreatment by men.

Once abuse was denied in this way, the stage was set for some psychologists to take the view that any violent or sexually exploitative behaviours that couldn’t be denied — because they were simply too obvious — should be considered mutually caused. Psychological literature is thus full of descriptions of young children who “seduce” adults into sexual encounters and of women whose “provocative” behaviour causes men to become violent or sexually assaultive toward them.

I wish I could say that these theories have long since lost their influence, but I can’t. A psychologist who is currently one of the most influential professionals nationally in the field of custody disputes writes that women provoke men’s violence by “resisting their control” or by “attempting to leave.” She promotes the Oedipus complex theory, including the claim that girls wish for sexual contact with their fathers. In her writing she makes the observation that young girls are often involved in “mutually seductive” relationships with their violent fathers, and it is on the basis of such “research” that some courts have set their protocols. The Freudian legacy thus remains strong.

Lundy Bancroft – Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men