#sexuality

Toward the end, a band that had a young fellow from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—I remember on account of him saying it two or three times and laughing every time that he did—played a song called 'All She Gets from the Iceman is Ice.' It made the grown folks, most of them anyway, howl laughing. I don’t think I ever seen Mama laugh so hard. When it was about over, the sheriff come up and made them stop playing it, but he was grinning, too, so I figured he was just making them stop as part of the show. ↗

— Eddie Whitlock

#sexuality #music

Sexuality should not be seen as dualistic – all good or all bad – but as a good part of our created nature that is constantly in need of repair. ↗

— David Kinnaman

#lust #sexuality #nature

The most pernicious message relayed by pornography is that women are natural sexual prey to men and love it; that sexuality and violence are congruent; and that for women sex is essentially masochistic, humiliation pleasurable, physical abuse erotic. But along with this message comes another, not always recognized: that enforced submission and the use of cruelty, if played out in heterosexual pairing, is sexually "normal," while sensuality between women, including erotic mutuality and respect, is "queer," "sick," and either pornographic in itself or not very exciting compared with the sexuality of whips and bondage. Pornography does not simply create a climate in which sex and violence are interchangeable; it widens the range of behavior considered acceptable from men in heterosexual intercourse-behavior which reiteratively strips women of their autonomy, dignity, and sexual potential, including the potential of loving and being loved by women in mutuality and integrity. ↗

— Adrienne Rich

#heterosexuality #pornography #women #love

...the controlling of the sex nature builds up a reservoir of strength, and it is this strength that opens the door to the Innermost. ↗

— (None Given) M

#sexuality #tantra #nature

Departing from Freud’s exclusively verbal analysis, Reich studied the body as well as the mind, and he concluded after years of clinical observation and social work that signs of disturbed behavior could be detected in a patient’s musculature, the slope of his posture, the shape of his jaw and mouth, his tight muscles, rigid bones, and other physical traits of a defensive or inhibiting nature. Reich identified this body rigidity as “armor. ↗

— Gay Talese

#nature

The Auden/Kallman relationship had this to be said for it: It affirmed that it's better to be blatant than latent. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#coming-out #homosexuality #relationships #the-closet #wh-auden

Nothing optional—from homosexuality to adultery—is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishments) have a repressed desire to participate. As Shakespeare put it in King Lear, the policeman who lashes the whore has a hot need to use her for the very offense for which he plies the lash. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#closeted #homosexuality #hypocrisy #prohibition #religion

Could it be, as one writer puts it, that every knock at the door of a brothel is actually a knock at the heart of God? ↗

— Randy Elrod

#sensuality #sexuality #spirituality #religion

Religious guilt causes people to deny their behavior even as they engage in it. Guilt short-circuits rational examination of behavior in favor of supernatural notions like "evil" and "the temptation of Satan. ↗

— Darrel Ray

#religion

In time, Mr Hall, one gets to recognize that sneer, that hardness, for fornication extends far beyond the actual deed. Were it a deed only, I for one would not hold it anathema. But when the nations went a whoring they invariably ended by denying God, I think, and until all sexual irregularities and not some of them are penal the Church will never reconquer England. ↗

— E.M. Forster

#christianity #church-of-england #heresy #religion #religion-and-sexuality