My Kink is Okay, Your Kink is Just Weird

Woman Seeks Medical Help to Remove Deer Tongue She Had Used for Masturbatory Purposes
I just love stories like this, not to poke fun at this poor girl, but because it’s a hilarious example of the plasticity of human sexuality. On the one hand you have the Family Research Council (“defending family, faith and freedom”) denouncing anything that isn’t married, heterosexual missionary sex for procreation, and on the other hand you have girls doing the wild thing with deer tongues.
Ever since I’ve had any settled notions about sex, I’ve believed that what consenting adults do with each other, or alone, is their own business: not the church’s business; not the state’s business; and certainly not the business of the least imaginative and most repressed members of their community. That’s not to say that all sexual behavior is healthy, or pretty, but if adults are allowed to eat McDonald’s french fries, drink malt liquor, and watch Fox News, they ought to be allowed other unhealthy behaviors without interference–as long as those behaviors don’t impinge upon anyone else’s well being. (Okay, that caveat is a pretty strong argument for jailing Rupert Murdoch, but you get my drift.)
The Family Values types are happy to tell you that your sexual preferences aren’t “natural.” That’s because the Family Values people don’t know much about sexual behavior in nature. I don’t know that “natural” is the standard we should be shooting for: polio vaccine, cathedrals, literature and microwave burritos aren’t natural in the sense that the professional scolds use the word. There is nothing natural about Ann Coulter, God knows, or the fleshy, oversized head of Bill O’Reilly, but you don’t hear the Family Research Council calling for their involuntary institutionalization.
You could say our girl with the deer tongue exercised poor judgment; in fact, you could say Eeeew! But what you can’t say is that you’ve never watched Pat Robertson on television and wondered how he’d look in fishnets and a really tight bustier.

By the way, if you’re not familiar with the Urban Legends Reference Pages, or Snopes.com, it is an excellent resource, and makes for very entertaining browsing.
Hoping your kinks are fun kinks.

You Know…

You know that the administration is in trouble when the Unification Church begins to seem sane by comparison. In a fascinating Washington Post column, Tension of the Times, David Ignatius talks about the church’s turn toward multilateralism, setting the stage for a showdown with the neocon editors of The Washington Times, which is owned by the Unification Church:

Insiders say the church’s new line is that with the end of the Cold War, it’s important to support international organizations such as the United Nations and to campaign for world peace and interfaith understanding. That stance would be awkward for the Times’s hard-line editor in chief, Wesley Pruden, and its stable of neoconservative columnists.

Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame

The Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame opens in Seattle this week. The New York Times has an article on it today:

SEATTLE, June 10 – Donna L. Shirley used to run NASA’s Mars exploration program. Now she is doing something even more far out.
Ms. Shirley, who retired from NASA in 1998, is director of the new Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame here, set to open on June 18. Instead of pointing space probes at the next rock out from the Sun, she now oversees exhibits exploring the universe of “What if?,” from genetic engineering to aliens to parallel worlds.
“I took the job because I really believe that science fiction can be used to interest people in literacy, science and technology,” Ms. Shirley said, “and because I thought it would be fun.”

Reagan’s Legacy

While the so-called liberal press caps a week of servile eulogizing of former President Ronald Reagan, I thought it might be useful to point readers toward one of the few counterpoints in this orgy of Gipper nostalgia. New York Newsday ran the following op-ed piece yesterday: Urban suffering grew under Reagan

Reagan is often lauded as “the great communicator,” but he used his rhetorical skills to stigmatize poor people, which laid the groundwork for slashing the social safety net – despite the fact that Reagan’s own family had been rescued by New Deal anti-poverty programs during the Depression.
During his stump speeches, Reagan often told the story of a so-called welfare queen in Chicago who drove a Cadillac and had ripped off $150,000 from the government using 80 aliases, 30 addresses, a dozen Social Security cards and four fictional dead husbands. Reagan dutifully promised to roll back welfare. Journalists searched for this welfare cheat and discovered that she didn’t exist. Nevertheless, he kept using the anecdote.

The full article by Peter Dreier, director of the urban and environmental policy program at Occidental College, is well worth reading.

Memorial Day 2004

Taps
Day is done,
gone the sun,
From the hills,
from the lake,
From the skies.
All is well,
safely rest,
God is nigh.

There is no official set of lyrics for Taps; the above is the first verse of the most frequently cited version.

Readings
Jorie Graham’s poem of remembrance, Soldatenfriedhof, in today’s New York Times.
The American Battle Monuments Commission page of American War Dead.
To find out about war dead in Iraq, visit Lunaville.org’s Iraq Coalition Casualty Count.
The Washington Post has a moving lead editorial today: Memorial Day.
For an unromantic view of “The Good War” from one of its infantrymen, read Paul Fussell’s Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War .