Tag Archives: Sex

Old Genesis P. Orridge Interview by Phil Farber

This is an old interview with Genesis P. Orridge conducted by Phil Farber and published in Paradigm Magazine in 1996. Orridge talks about hir exit from the Temple ov Psychick Youth, the purpose of TOPI/The Process/Transmedia, and more. Lots of interesting stuff in this interview, which I surely must have read when I was 15 and hanging around The Process mailing list.

On sigils as a way of cutting up behavior:

One of my ideas was that if you did magickal ritual or sigils, in a way you were cutting up your normal behavior and expectations and programming, just as Burroughs and Gysin and people had done cut-ups with language. Just as Burroughs would say you cut up a book to see what’s really there, if you cut up your own social imprinting and take yourself into other dimensional realms, do you also see what’s really there inside yourself? Do you really learn the most detailed and scarily honest version of what you really are made up of, and can you then engineer your own character and behavior pattern from inside back out to become what you wish to be?

And I would say, yes, slowly. One of the basic things is that there is a cumulative effect of anything. Any ritual done with sincere commitment and repeated with honor and sincerity over any long period of time appears to have a cumulative effect. The orgasm appears to be a very powerful portal for transferring messages to areas of the consciousness or the DNA structure, which then continue to amplify the will. These things seem to happen. There seems to be a cumulative effect of a positive relationship with synchronicity.

On the Internet:

We’re going to invade the Internet and cyberspace as far as we can. One of the theories that we’re working with is that there are four brains. DNA, if you like, is the first brain, and we call that the Nanosphere. Then the individual human brain is the Neurosphere. The group consciousness, the social or tribal brain, is the Kaosphere. Then the Internet and all the computers which are, in a sense, at the moment a whole. Literally a whole brain is being built, it’s not a metaphor for a brain, it actually is a brain. We call that the Psychosphere. What we’re really thinking about is when you plug in and go online, you’re plugging into all the brains of all the other people who’ve been there, some of those people being psychotic and paranoid, some of them being into control, and some of them being very benign. But it is not implicitly benign. Taking that further — this is just a TOPI/Process/Transmedia interpretation — we suggest that when enough people believe in something, it becomes a deity. At a certain point it can separate from its source and have an agenda of its own. It can physically or psychically manifest separate from its source, which is originally the human brain. That’s what’s going to happen with cyberspace. We’re building a god, but we’re building a god with the flaws and the gifts of everyone on the planet almost, at this rate — millions of people — with no real unified agenda and no real dialogue about what the psychic and neurological and social and economic effect really will be of that acceleration and separation of this larger brain. It will be the first all-encompassing and contrived and constructed brain so far, that we know of.

Genesis P-Orridge on Magick, Sex and Cyberspace

For more on Orridge check out our dossier.

Posted in Link | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Instruments for Operating on Mutant Women

The Criterion collection has a bunch of David Cronenberg memorabilia on display, including a photo gallery of these props from Dead Ringers: the so called “Instruments for Operating on Mutant Women.”

Also check out this feedback card from a test screening for Videodrome.

(via Justin)

See also: David Cronenberg on Gender

Posted in Link | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Covers From Ah ! Nana, the All Female Creator Version of Heavy Metal

Cover of Ah ! Nana # 1

From the Women in Comics Wiki:

Ah ! Nana was a French comics magazine published from October 1976 to September 1978, running nine issues. It was published by Humanoïdes Associés, best known as the publishers of Métal Hurlant, or Heavy Metal. It was the first French publication featuring work entirely by women (though each issue invited one man to contribute) at a time when comics were still almost exclusively male environments. It included work by such French cartoonists as Chantal Montellier, Florence Cestac, and Nicole Claveloux, as well as Americans such as Trina Robbins. It sold 15,000 copies on a print run of 30,000, before the ban on sales to minors proved fatal, due to its frequent taboo and controversial material.

Women in Comics: Ah ! Nana has covers and a history of the publication.

(via Popjellyfish)

Previously: Leah Moore on Women in Comics

Posted in Link | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Risks and Rewards of Yoga

William J. Broad, author of The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards, writes for the New York Times:

Hatha originated as a way to speed the Tantric agenda. It used poses, deep breathing and stimulating acts — including intercourse — to hasten rapturous bliss. In time, Tantra and Hatha developed bad reputations. The main charge was that practitioners indulged in sexual debauchery under the pretext of spirituality.

Early in the 20th century, the founders of modern yoga worked hard to remove the Tantric stain. They devised a sanitized discipline that played down the old eroticism for a new emphasis on health and fitness.

B. K. S. Iyengar, the author of “Light on Yoga,” published in 1965, exemplified the change. His book made no mention of Hatha’s Tantric roots and praised the discipline as a panacea that could cure nearly 100 ailments and diseases. And so modern practitioners have embraced a whitewashed simulacrum of Hatha.

New York Times: Yoga and Sex Scandals: No Surprise Here

(via AshleyB)

Broad goes on to discuss some of the studies linking yoga to sexual stimulation and speculates about how that could relate to some of the various guru sex scandals that have plagued yogis for decades.

Broad also recently wrote for the times How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body, an extremely interesting piece that’s made frustrating by its lack of comparisons between the number of injuries in yoga and the number of injuries in other types of strength training. But here’s a taste:

Black has come to believe that “the vast majority of people” should give up yoga altogether. It’s simply too likely to cause harm.

Not just students but celebrated teachers too, Black said, injure themselves in droves because most have underlying physical weaknesses or problems that make serious injury all but inevitable. Instead of doing yoga, “they need to be doing a specific range of motions for articulation, for organ condition,” he said, to strengthen weak parts of the body. “Yoga is for people in good physical condition. Or it can be used therapeutically. It’s controversial to say, but it really shouldn’t be used for a general class.”

(via Dangerous Meme)

See also:

Calling Bullshit on Penn and Teller’s yoga episode

Stripping the Gurus

Guruphiliac

Posted in Link | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Forthcoming Conference: Sexual Science 2.0

This looks like an interesting conference, November 8-11, 2012 in Tampa, FL:

The Internet and sex go together like Florida and sunshine. Online resources enrich our lives with sexual health and sexuality information, opportunities for relationship formation and sexual connections, sexually explicit materials, and commercial sex products. We can also face unintended consequences from Internet use, including dependence/compulsion, abuse, and inaccurate information and misinformation. However, beyond the Internet, myriad of technologies greatly influence human sexual behavior and sexuality both positively and negatively. Thus, the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality (SSSS) theme is Sexual Science 2.0: Technological innovations in sexuality research. Although submissions from all areas of the scientific study of sexuality are welcomed, we are especially interested in multidisciplinary submissions focused on how technology informs and is a part of the research being conducted by sexual scientists. Potential research topics for plenaries, presentations, and trainings may include:

  • Sex and the Internet (Internet sex-seeking, navigating relationships online)
  • E-dating (finding dates and relationships online)
  • Technology-based sexual health interventions (video, web-based, chatrooms, etc.)
  • Cybersex (sexual interactions mediated by Internet or other electronic technology)
  • Compulsive online sexual behavior
  • Non-monogamy and the Internet
  • Special populations and online sexual communities
  • Sex and new media, social networks, etc. (Web 2.0, Google+, Facebook, Foursquare, etc.)
  • Reproductive and contraceptive technologies
  • Technologies pertaining to pharmaceutical/medical treatments and sexual enhancement
  • Sex toys and other commercial sex products that utilize technology
  • Online sexually explicit material, pornography, and erotica
  • Technologies aiding with sex therapy, sex research, sexuality education, etc.
  • Technologies for measurement and data collection, including new measurement styles
  • Sexual harassment online/cyber-stalking
  • “Sexting” and other innovative ways to communicate about sex
  • Sex and mobile phones/other portable communication technologies (tablet PCs, phones, laptops, etc.)
  • And others…

Sexual Science 2.0 conference

Posted in Link | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Douglass Rushkoff in Conversation with Genesis P. Orridge (2003 and 2007)

The Believer has finally published Douglas Rushkoff’s interview with Genesis P. Orridge, conducted in 2007 just after Genesis’ wife Lady Jaye passed away:

DR: But, then, Jackie’s passing. Do you experience that on two levels, then? On the level of half of the pandrogene?

GO: Yeah. But I also experience it as a person who is fifty-seven and has been indoctrinated for most of my life to accept a binary world. And feeling a great sense of loss just in a romantic way, as an emotional person. Conceptually, I see that she has just broken through the final perceptual barrier. The human species won’t exist if it carries on replicating pointlessly. I think it’s very clear what we were concerned about when we began this, which was the ever-increasing polarization and reduction of ideas into dogma and paranoia, and this posturing that there’s a right way and a wrong way: I’m right, you’re wrong, and therefore I must attack you. And the whole idea of Pandrogeny is to make that irrelevant, and to bypass that. If we were all pandrogynous, physically and/or mentally, it would be impossible to be at war, because there wouldn’t be a sense of difference all the time.

DR: So does the project continue? You as a lone pandrogene?

GO: It’s not convenient. Because there are lots of things we had in mind that would use both of us in the projects. So I have to try and figure out ways to represent those ideas anyway.

DR: Or start on the new ones. I mean, gender may be an artificial duality perpetrated by DNA and all… but what about death? That’s got to be the biggest, baddest duality of them all. It’s not so very hard to see through gender as a social construction. An illusory divide, like you’ve shown. But death is entirely more convincing. We die, and the people to whom we’ve passed our genes take our place. Death feels like DNA’s last laugh, its final tyranny over us.

The Believer: Douglass Rushkoff in Conversation with Genesis P. Orridge.

Arthur Magazine published another conversation between the two back in 2003. Once upon a time, Rushkoff, Genesis and Grant Morrison were planning to write a book together. It was meant to essentially be a collection of conversations between the three of them. The Arthur interview may give us a sense of what that book may have been like (and the plan for a book may help explain the preoccupation with co-authorship in the interview). It’s also interesting to Rushkoff talk about themes that later became the basis of his books Life Inc and Program or Be Programmed:

DR: That’s why for me the open-source software movement is such a terrific allegory and practice for accepting the fact that we live in a malleable reality. Or certainly for accepting that a hell of a lot more of our world is programmable software than we’ve previously thought. There might be some hardware down there somewhere, but we haven’t got close to that yet. People are starting to accept that they have indeed been the programmers, whether they were witting or not, and that they’re actively programming the world we live in. I think it’s healthy for people to realize this. I think that then they start to experience everything—from their bodies to the air we breathe—as a medium through which they can create and transmit their story.

G P-O: Absolutely. Well you know that Burroughs and Gysin used to say, In a pre-recorded universe, who made the first recording? I’ve thought about that a lot. And what it led me to wasn’t so much wondering about that question, because I think you’re right, it doesn’t matter, actually, but what it did make me realize is that the entire planet is a recording device. That, as you and I are speaking now, on this planet, there is, certainly it seems that way, and we’ll probably find more, there’s some kind of data recorded—whether it be fossils, geological strata—

DR: [laughing]: Or the digital cassette that we’re recording on right now.

See also: my interview with Rushkoff.

Posted in Link | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Are Homophobes Actually Repressed Homosexuals?

Chris Cooper in American Beauty

Note: This article refers to a scientific study that has a small sample size and has not, to my knowledge, been replicated.

It’s a common assertion that homophobic men are actually repressed homosexuals. But does the hypothesis hold water? Psychology Today points to a study from 1996 that indicates that there does seem to be an association between homophobia and homosexual arousal:

One study asked heterosexual men how comfortable and anxious they are around gay men. Based on these scores, they then divided these men into two groups: men that are homophobic, and men who are not. These men were then shown three, four minute videos. One video depicted straight sex, one depicted lesbian sex and one depicted gay male sex. While this was happening, a device was attached to the male participant’s penises. This device has been found to be triggered by sexual arousal, but not other types of arousal (such as nervousness, or fear – arousal often has a very different meaning in psychology than in popular usage).When viewing lesbian sex and straight sex, both the homophobic and the non-homophobic men showed increased penis circumference. For gay male sex, however, only the homophobic men showed heightened penis arousal.

Heterosexual men with the most anti-gay attitudes, when asked, reported not being sexually aroused by gay male sex videos. But, their penises reported otherwise.

Homophobic men were the most sexually aroused by gay male sex acts.

Is homophobia associated with homosexual arousal?

(via Convergence)

Posted in Link | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Teens Who Spend More Time Online Also More Likely to Take Drugs, Have Unprotected Sex

News today which upsets the stereotype of teenagers who spend a lot of time online or otherwise fooling with computers: rather than being lonely dorks with poor social skills who seldom leave their bedrooms, such kids are in fact more likely to get squiffy, have sex and even to take drugs than their less tech-savvy peers.

The revelations come in research conducted lately in Canada among 10 to 16-year-olds by epidemiology PhD candidate Valerie Carson.

The Register: Teens who spend time online not dorks after all

See also:

Smart kids more likely to be heavy drinkers

Smart kids wait for sex?

Why Smart People Do More Drugs

Posted in Link | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Coffee: The Original Smart Drug and Aphrodisiac

Coffee: Grounds for Debate, a title in the Philosophy for Everyone series, argues that coffee is a performance-enhancing drug for thinkers. “The appropriate analogy is that coffee and philosophy go together like foreplay and sex,” insist editors Scott F Parker and Michael W Austin. “You can have one without the other, but the latter is better with the former and the former often leads to the latter.” Philosopher Basam Romaya says: “With the use of coffee, critical thinking abilities are sharpened, attention to detail enhanced.” This is a venerable claim: in the 16th century, Sheik Abd-al-Kadir, an Arab scholar, said: “No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee’s frothy goodness.” [...]

So what about impotence? That does seem to have been overstated. The Women’s Petition Against Coffee prompted a broadside from men who argued that it “makes the erection more Vigorous, the Ejaculation more full, adds spiritualescency to the Sperme”. Initially I wasn’t sure what “spiritualescency” means, either, until I read in this book that caffeine increases sperm motility. That said, some say coffee may harm the sperm while speeding it on its way, which makes a kind of sense.

The Guardian: Can coffee wreck your marriage?

(via James Governor)

Posted in Link | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Pope Softens Stance on Condoms

Pope

When asked whether the Catholic Church is “fundamentally against the use of condoms”, the Pope is said to have replied, in the book entitled Light of the World: The Pope, the Church and the Signs of the Times:

“It of course does not see it as a real and moral solution.

“In certain cases, where the intention is to reduce the risk of infection, it can nevertheless be a first step on the way to another, more humane sexuality,” he said.

The Pope gives the example of the use of condoms by prostitutes as “a first step towards moralisation”, even though condoms are “not really the way to deal with the evil of HIV infection”.

BBC: Pope Benedict condones condom use in some cases

Posted in Link | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment