Friday, November 02, 2007
Recently, I've been involved in quite a few discussions regarding the much-loved topic, sex. So since that's the common concern which connects the next few random strands of thought in this entry, let's talk about some "sexy" things... (ack, I'm starting to sound like wxxxy...)
First, the serious stuff.
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On Thio Li-Ann and the parliamentary debate on decriminalizing male homosexual sex:
It simply baffles me how a highly-educated law professor who has read Nietzsche (!), Marcuse (!!) and J. S. Mill (!!!), can so obnoxiously dismiss the basic right of homosexuals to their libido, insist on legislating the 'truth' of her views on something as subjective as sexual morality, and make a flimsy argument which, as someone has pointed out, any graduate student in Philosophy can easily deconstruct.
Really, she doesn't even qualify as a religious fundamentalist. She's highly selective in what tenets of conservative Christianity she wants to believe in, without admitting that she chooses her 'truths' (as we all do, admittedly) for her own purposes. Shall I tell her that the Victorians also felt "moral repugnance" at the idea of women studying at Oxford and working in the professions together with men, and so will you please stop teaching Law and go back to your female duties in the home?
Well, it appears that the power of the "goddess of Conversion" is far greater than even Virginia Woolf imagined it to be.
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I like fruits and nuts in my muesli bars, and I love strawberries. But, according to my Topics in the 20th Century class, all these things have strong sexual connotations. Oh dear...
I'm definitely going to write a tribute on my blog to the 20th Century class one of these days - they are really funny and interesting people (as PY has reminded me), and our discussions are always so lively and ahem, fruitful... But I think they have recently caught a bug and have been reading lots of stuff in the texts as "sexual".
To their credit, they don't read almost everything as some form of sexual innuendo, as the guys in my JC Lit class used to do (to the chagrin of our Lit teachers). Cheryl is right that "strawberries are a symbol of horniness" as a result of their association with Tess' seduction (thank you Thomas Hardy, for corrupting my favourite fruit). And yes, thanks to the enlightenment of a certain perverse guy friend in JC, I do know that a kind of fruit is a phallic symbol, and that "nuts" are a colloquial euphemism for male genitals ("the whole system", one of my Anime Club seniors tells me). And I suppose a man lashing a whip at his elderly sister can be considered sexual violence, though I hesitate to go off in that direction.
But when one of my classmates, Stefan, suggested that the old ladies' repetition of the word "Coming" (in relation to the approaching pheasant hunt) could be read as anticipation of male sexual aggression, I really wanted to exclaim in exasperation, "Stefaaaaaan!" Don't label me a prude, but I guess we sometimes try to force too much "sexual" meaning out of the stuff we read.
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I didn't go for Reproductive Health on Mon, so Minwei filled me in on what the lecture was about. And she told me this really hilarious thing that made me burst out laughing. And laughter, Minwei says, is the best way to crumble fragile male egos centred on the phallus.
Get this: middle-aged men who suffer from erectile dsyfunction can get a BATTERY-OPERATED IMPLANT in their family jewels to make it rise when the situation calls for it. Apparently a guy in Minwei's class asked the lecturer if the implant came with a remote control, and the doctor said it doesn't. How then does it rise up when it's supposed to? Beats me.
Honestly, when Minwei mentioned the remote control business, I suddenly thought of those hospital beds that go up and down with a touch of a button. I know I'm being terribly unsympathetic, but I think it's hilariously ironic that an impotent man, in a bid to remain a "man", turns from "Man" to cyborg.
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Well, that's enough "sexy" talk for now. Got to get back to doing research for my "sexy" project on Japanese Gothic subculture.
kaoru said at 6:42 PM
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