the horse has already vaulted

The unfettered experience. Its the zipper, stupid. But, does promiscuity necessarily involve forms of immorality? Is there a value in promiscuity if it is located in the pursuit of ideals? .Promiscuity in a Western context seems to have a negative line.  There has always been a hypocritical attitude toward promiscuity which in itself is a phenomenon worthy of exploration. In the Western tradition, love tends to be mistakenly treated as exclusive because it is erroneously though of being possessive as in property; a reflection of certain economic values especially with regard to the transfer of property. In this respect it is a threat to monogamy since it endangers a central and sacred institution.

---The Bishop and His Clarke or a Peep Into Paradise by Thomas Rowlandson, 1809. The Duke of York (who also held the title Bishop of Osnabrück) is lampooned for succumbing to the demands of his mistress, Mary Anne Clarke. He says: "Ask anything in reason and you shall have it my dearest dearest dearest love." She says: "Only remember the promotions I mentioned. I have pinned up the list at the head of the bed."--- Read More:http://www.candicehern.com/timeline.htm

The bug for Western values is that repetition is essential. This pursuit of a new partner is a necessary occurrence. Promiscuity on only one occasion is logically incoherent and impossible. A lack of judgment or a mistake, superficial perhaps, but not promiscuous. Also the two parties must be adults. Finally, and most decisively, promiscuity is non-committal sex. The lifelong relationship may be of more intrinsic value, but the longing for a love that is eternal  means that for some of the people, some of of the time, promiscuity may be a good thing.

---Besides, unlike Hillary Clinton (who has been treated even worse, and for much longer), Palin has traded heavily on her looks, a fact recognized at some level even by conservatives such as the one quoted above. That willingness to capitalize on her appearance while acting aggrieved is a common trait for conservative women, of course, especially right-wing babblers such as Ann Coulter , Michelle Malkin, and almost any blonde on Fox News, home of the daily “Pop Tarts.”--- Read More:http://jmcpherson.wordpress.com/2009/11/26/political-porn-too-sexy-sarah-and-michelle-as-a-monkey/

All this is exaggerated, when promiscuity and its pornographic subtext is applied to politics. Pornography of a purely sexual nature seems to have little or no effect on society or morals. But, political pornography is quite another matter. It seemed to begin with Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette with the kinks portrayed as a fumbling and impotent and Marie as insatiable and wanton, breaking the line between political pornography and political smut. A difference between court gossip and the mass market political pornography which can be seen as more dangerous for the society in which it burgeons; it tends to represent a widening chasm between the governors and the governed.

---This print practically teaches itself. We have Walpole bending over with his ass exposed. As ministers walk through the gate, they are forced to kiss his ass as the “way to preferment.” One of the things I also like about this image is that there is some ambiguity in it: Walpole’s exposed ass could almost as easily be sodomized as kissed. This potential association of Walpole with sodomy is continued in some of the other prints in Langford’s anthology. These satiric prints also take up the association of Walpole with birds, sometimes calling him Cock Robin.--- Read More:http://thisgaudygildedstage.wordpress.com/2009/03/10/hotm-robert-walpole/

…Back in the hey-day  of the Jefferson Airplane the jargon of the day revolved around such terms as non-possessive relating and free-love; promiscuity was not on the consciousness radar. In looking at all the paradoxes when there is a separation between sex and relationship it usually turns towards the issue of defense against the dangers of intimacy.

---Today, without a moral compass to gauge direction, "Does it work?" has replaced "Is it right?" as the question to ask in business decisions and lifestyle choice. If it works for you, then go right ahead. Thus, the only question about abortion is whether the pregnancy is "wanted". If not, then flush it away. Is your marriage working? If not, then get out of it. Will an inside deal profit your business? If so, go right ahead. The 1960s adage, "If it feels good, do it," has been updated for the 1990s: "If it works, do it." (Charles Colson, The Body, pg. 180.)--- Read More:http://www.jeremiahproject.com/culture/view_prag.html image:http://newsone.com/nation/casey-gane-mccalla/anthoney-weiner-nasty-pictures-ginger-lee/

When the truth is found to be lies
and all the joy within you dies
don’t you want somebody to love
don’t you need somebody to love
wouldn’t you love somebody to love
you better find somebody to love ( Jefferson Airplane )

Yet, we  know that promiscuity is completely reconcilable with monogamy. The two can be said to stalk each other, each is the shadow of the other, the alter ego. One is the uxorious lust of the heart whilst libertines yearn for a mythical for peace and quiet.Each sees Arcadia in the other. So, there is a lot of competition and bargaining between these archetypes since people want to justify the choices they have made. All relationships, regardless of composition, seem to involve power issues and carry the potential for the abuse of power. But the inherent antagonism of monogamy and non-monogamy is useful as it  performs a function of welding together the discourse without arching over it. They are said, according to Andrew Samuels, to be linked by their defensiveness against the other: monogamy defending a weak ego and low self-esteem, promiscuity as a  response to what is perceived as  a confrontation with  intimacy. Perhaps both are an escape buffeted by societal winds of what morals actually are.

Rowlandson. Jack Tar: Admiring the Fairer Sex. Elsworth Baker:Wilhelm Reich has been incredibly misunderstood and maligned, and almost everything he has written has been misinterpreted. Particularly is this true of his sexual theories. The usual distortion is that he advocated "free" sexual expression - "obey that impulse" - amounting to a wild and frant

romiscuity ever seeking a mystical, ecstatic orgasm that is supposed to cure all neuroses and even physical ills. This could, presumably, be accomplished by sufficient practice and knowledge, and it would free everyone of his inhibitions and repressions.... Read More:http://www.orgonomy.org/articles/Baker/Sexual_Theories_of_Wilhelm_Reich.pdf image:http://www.rococo-in-art.org/Jack-Tar-Admiring-the-Fairer-Sex-large.html

Jonathan Kay:“For the last 35 years, I’ve been outing politicians,” Mr. Flynt tells me after I led with a question about Strauss-Kahn. “He is typical. One trait these men have in common is they all have huge egos, and they have to feed those egos through sexual conquests. It’s the same with guys like [New York Governor] Eliott Spitzer. All those guys — I’d start investigating them because of something I heard and then you always dig up stuff that’s even worse.” Read More:http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/06/04/jonathan-kay-larry-flynt-porns-morally-honest-man/

James Gillray.Jonathan Kay:Most famously, Hustler published a “parody” story about Reverend Jerry Falwell, stating (falsely) that his first sexual encounter took place in an outhouse with his own mother — which led to an important U.S. Supreme Court case establishing the principle that public figures cannot recover legal damages for “intentional infliction of emotional distress.” (In another Supreme Court case, Mr. Flynt is reported to have shouted “F— this court!” — and referred to the nine sitting justices as “nothing but eight a–holes and a token c–t.”) Read More:http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/06/04/jonathan-kay-larry-flynt-porns-morally-honest-man/ image:http://wn.com/caricatures

The rapture between the sheets.Sometimes, it is said that libertine sexual behaviour can be understood in terms of mystical experience in which overwhelming physical attraction produces feelings of awe and wonderment and trembling. It is said there is a sort of god aroused: a primitive, raw, early, elemental God which could be called the  unfettered experience of the divine. This idea of a mysticism between people is one by which contemporary theology is captivated. “There is no point at all in blinking at the fact that the raptures of the theistic mystic are closely akin to the transports of sexual union” ( Richard Zaehner) In literature, D.H. Lawrence fashioned a creation myth out of sexual intercourse in Sons and Lovers in which the erotic projection had a life of its own, innate kinetic movement unhooked from the will: “His hands were like creatures, living; his limbs, his body, were all life and consciousness, subject to no will of his, but living in themselves.”

---Andrew Samuels:Roth is not making a moral or (pseudo)mature point about the collapse of the promiscuous ideal (nor was the book ever in praise of the promiscuous life). He is underscoring how sexual relating is all about struggle, indeterminacy and – above all – anxiety. As I said earlier, when considering monogamy, non-monogamy, polyamory and promiscuity, you can’t have it all – not even in fantasy! Nevertheless, Roth’s apercu in connection with promiscuous sex is worth repeating: ‘The great biological joke on people is that you are intimate before you know anything about the other person.’--- Read More:http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ppi.179/pdf image:http://seenfilm.blogspot.com/2008/11/fall-flicks-september-movie-wrap-up.html

ADDENDUM:
Samuels:After all, Reich, one of the sources for mid-twentieth century shifts in the sexual, became too much for Freud as much for his sexual ideas as for his political ones. I am sure Reich was right to suggest Freud wrote Civilization and its Discontents (1930) specifically  contra himself – and, let us add, as Heuer has suggested (personal communication, 2008), against Gross as well. There is a contemporary temptation to indulge in a knee-jerk rejection of what Wilhelm Reich said in 1927 in the introduction to The Function of the Orgasm: ‘Psychic health depends upon . . . the degree to which one can surrender to and experience the climax of excitation in the natural sexual act.’ What Reich (and others such as Roheim and Marcuse) were doing was to elaborate, with great ingenuity, some implications of Freud’s theories of psychosexuality that supported the idea that politics and sexuality were ‘intimately bound together’, in Fisher’s (2007, 238) felicitous phrase. Hence, Fisher goes on, we tend to forget that, alongside his championing of sexual expressiveness, Reich (with varying degrees of support from Freud) advocated the rights of children and mothers, supporting legalized abortions and contraception. Read More:http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ppi.179/pdf

Read More:http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/05/20/977751/-There-is-no-upside-to-puritanical-politics
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---Marie Antoinette was the subject of countless cruel, and sometimes pornographic, pamphlets throughout her reign. Pornography in eighteenth century France took the form of crude caricatures, colorful cartoons, and even sophisticated etchings and engravings. Pornographic songs, plays and news-like stories were also popular. Marie Antoinette was a favorite target of seditions libelers because, to them she represented an extravagant lifestyle, everything they hoped to attain but knew they would not.--- Read More:http://leahmariebrownhistoricals.blogspot.com/2010/07/royal-dildo.html

Kenneth Rexroth:For the Kabbalist the ultimate sacrament is the sexual act, carefully organized and sustained as the most perfect mystical trance. Over the marriage bed hovers the Shekinah. The Glory of God is revealed in the most holy of duties, and new souls are reborn into the sacred community of Israel. There are other notions — reincarnation, light metaphysics, worship of the planets and the moon, the latter identified with the Shekinah. (When Hasids dance in the public parks of New York under the new moon with their hands over their heads, they are showing her her stigmata, found in the lunes of their fingernails, and celebrating her as their Great Mother.) Read More:http://www.cddc.vt.edu/bps/rexroth/buber.htm

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