Betty’s back

Not that she’s ever gone away. But that doyenne of masturbation, selfsex, and self-confidence, Betty Dodson, teams up with sex-positive activist and entrepreneur, Carlin Ross, to launch a new website this week that takes her into the 21st century. Given all the repression we still see everywhere, I’d say it might be the 21st century that will have to try and catch up with the irrepressible octogenarian Dodson.

Sex and Zen III: 8th house astrology

Parts I, and II.

Trawling through my archives, I came across this article by Eric Francis on eighth house astrology, bringing together ideas of orgasm, death, and self-renewal, I’d been musing about earlier. ‘Typically,’ he writes, ‘the 8th becomes a dance of death: ego death; flirtation with orgasm and desire (often secret desire)’.

In the previous post, I made the connection between the Zen notion of dying in each moment, and the notion of death associated with orgasm. Interestingly, astrology seems to correlate these notions within the domain of the eighth house, and I quote Francis here again:

Part of the 8th is the struggle to be free of the struggles of money/death/sex struggles of the 8th and embrace self-acceptance in the face of others. Part of self-acceptance is being aware that all living things die; we die; and relationships, as part of the changing world, will invariably change.

Sex and Zen II: Quelle probleme?

Part I

When asked how to deal with the ‘problem’ of sex, Krishnamurti gave this answer:

Why is it that whatever we touch we turn into a problem? We have made God a problem, we have made love a problem, we have made relationship, living, a problem, and we have made sex a problem Why? Why is everything we do a problem, a horror? Why are we suffering? Why has sex become a problem? Why do we submit to living with problems, why do we not put an end to them? Why do we not die to our problems instead of carrying them day after day, year after year? Sex is certainly a relevant question but there is the primary question, why do we make life into a problem? (The Krishnamurti Reader, 167)

Sex and Zen I: Vesta

As Venus (pleasure) moves into a watery trine (emotion) with Mars (libido), sex seems to be on everyone’s mind. Eric Francis of Planet Waves rants about the hypocrisy surrounding the supposed sexual misconduct of Eliot Spitzer, the governor of New York. Jundo Cohen of Treeleaf has made it the subject of his talks for the next few days, which he rather poetically refers to as ‘finding stillness in motion’! Rev. Kusala Bhikshu, who runs the Urban Dharma website, has just sent out his latest newsletter on the subject of celibacy. Celibacy, however, is only mandatory for monastics. Lay practitioners are still free to shag as much as they want, within the bounds of reason, moderation and awareness.

Chat-terley

More on the subject of sex and conversation, from Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), the one D.H. Lawrence novel I hadn’t read, which fell into my lap at the shop last weekend:

‘… I can’t see I do a woman any more harm by sleeping with her than by dancing with her … or even talking to her about the weather. It’s just an interchange of sensations instead of ideas, so why not?’

…

‘It’s an amusing idea, Charlie,’ said Dukes, ‘that sex is just another form of talk, where you act the words instead of saying them. I suppose it’s quite true. I suppose we might exchange as many sensations and emotions with women as we do ideas about the weather, and so on. Sex might be a sort of normal physical conversation between a man and a woman. You don’t talk to a woman unless you have ideas in common: that is you don’t talk with any interest. And in the same way, unless you had some emotion or sympathy in common with a woman you wouldn’t sleep with her. But if you had…’

Acting on desire II: sex and the art of good conversation

Part I

For women the best aphrodisiacs are words. The G-spot is in the ears. He who looks for it below there is wasting his time. — Isabel Allende

As synchronicity, and serendipity, would have it, my ex-boyfriend (not quite the right word, but it’ll have to do) turned up online as I was writing the previous post, and our ensuing conversation crystallised the very notion I was trying to articulate.

Our history is ‘complicated’, as they say on Facebook, but less so now that I’ve learned that the only way to uncomplicate the situation is to sort myself out. Which, of course, brings on further complications, though of an entirely different sort.