Monthly Archives: February 2011

True Spiritual Beauty

27 Sunday Feb 2011

Posted by in love, religion, spirituality

≈ 4 Comments

God creating Adam as depicted by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel

What is a good example of spiritual beauty? I find this passage from St. Paul something inspiring. In Ephesians 3:17-21 he writes about what the love of Christ means:

“May Christ dwell in your hearts through faith, and may charity be the root and foundation of your life. Thus you will be able to grasp fully, with all the holy ones, the breadth and length and height and depth of Christ’s love, and experience this love which surpasses all knowledge, so that you may attain to the fullness of God himself.”

I love this passage. The most powerful force I have ever experienced in my life has been this feeling of Christ’s love in my own heart. Once felt, nothing has ever compared. After first experiencing this many years ago, my life was changed forever. Since that time I have had my ups and down, my struggles and dark moments, but despite moments, even years of difficulties, I have never forgotten the sense of God’s diving love dwelling within me, not only then, but now. When I think about how St. Paul talks about this, almost 2,000 years ago, and how I have felt this love myself, and all the others throughout the world who have also felt this love, I realize the truth of all this. Faith can be difficult because we have never seen God, we have never seen Christ, we only have the testament of others, whether through the Gospel or in our own time or in those times between, as well as our own experiences. Yet this love Christ entering and dwelling in our hearts is so simple and yet so powerful. As St. Paul says, it “surpasses all knowledge”. When I doubt, and I do have my doubts at times, it strengthens me to remember that Christians have been witnessing to the love of Christ dwelling in their hearts for all these centuries now. There has to be something to it.

As powerful a force as eroticism and sexuality are, they are nothing compared to the love of Christ. Sex can be fleeing, even loving another person can be transitory, but the love of God lasts forever, in all places, times, circumstances, and even through all eternity. And when it comes to our material world, and the subject of sexual eroticism which I write about here, I have to admit that it is really only through the deep union of married love that we can find the greatest expression of a sexual, erotic love between two people. There is great beauty in that.

Married love is the best expression of erotic love.

But in order to experience this divine love, God does ask us to do one simple thing: to turn away from sin, to repent, to convert. Perhaps I have been trying to have it both ways in my life, trying to lead a life of sin, while wanting to feel the love of Christ in my heart. But God cannot dwell fully inside you if you are leading a life of sin. Perhaps I need to take off the old man and put on the new? I do know that when I am leading a sinful or degenerate life, I feel very distant from God and life seems harder. When I am close to God, life seems different, better, happy, hopeful, and warmed by love.

Faith, Hope and Love, and the greatest of these are Love, so St. Paul tells us, in I Corinthians 13:13.  Yes, I believe that, and in love, whether divine or human, is the deepest form of spiritual beauty imaginable.

Online Abstinence

24 Thursday Feb 2011

Posted by in culture, spirituality

≈ 3 Comments

St. Jerome in the Desert by Leonardo da Vinci. St. Jerome fled the inanities of his own time, the Late Roman Empire, to find spiritual renewal elsewhere.

For nearly a week now I have been without any internet. At first I wondered how I was going to survive. Then, as time passed, I realized something. There is something addictive about this whole thing. By the end of the process I felt a clarity in my mind. I felt stronger, even healthier. While I did not have any access to an online world, I returned to an old habit: reading, but reading books. There is something quite different, at least for me, in reading something online, and something on a printed page. The electronic vibes of the online world affect my mind differently than the simple reading of a printed page. I have been reading Shakespeare recently, so I delved into that even further. How much more delightful it is to read a few lines of great poetry than to browse through the never ending maze of various news sites, blog sites, and whatever else is out there! I felt refreshed, nourished, as if my soul had ingested something worthy, something mentally and spiritually healthy. I felt my mind and soul thank me for the good food of good reading. There is something refreshing about concentrating on one text, rather than be distracted by the multitudinous mounds of online information available at your fingertips. There is nothing wrong with that, but for me, my mind becomes fried after too much of it. Sometimes too much easily available information can be confusing, not enlightening. Our entire world seems to be rapidly becoming nothing more than an extension of a digital world, not vice versa. We are all so dependent now on this new technology for everything we do and this is something I do not rejoice in. Although the digital world we have created has great benefits, it also has great drawbacks and dangers as well. And it is all still such uncharted territory.

During this recent internet abstinence I also deepened my prayer life. St. Paul often talks about “putting on the new man”. How refreshing is prayer! Truly, through faith and prayer the new man can be put on. Of course this means turning your life around in various ways, but that is a small condition to accept for something greater. Again, I contrast the act of prayer, especially deep, contemplative prayer, with the frenzied physical and mental motions of our present world. Sometimes I think we are so unfortunate to be living in a world with so much technology, where all our privacy is vanishing, where every transaction you have ever made can be conjured up at the click of a keyboard, where we are rapidly becoming actual slaves to a gigantic, online virtual world. There is something inhuman about it all. And this virtual world of blogging, etc., while it can be fun and beneficial, is a sorry substitute for real flesh and blood interaction with others. Plus the constant negativity of so much of it is distasteful to me. So to delve into a deeper prayer life is more than refreshing. Especially when I consider how ancient a thing prayer is, how calming and enriching, the contrast between that and our hyper-hectic modern world immersed in industrial and technological infatuations is stunning, at least for me.

The great ancient religions, although hated by the hipster technocrats of the modern world, offer something to us that all the computers, all the latest gadgets, all the new sparkling digital contraptions and online innovations can hardly offer: peace of mind and spiritual nourishment. The fact that they have been doing this for millennia under various circumstances speaks to me of some eternal truth.

Botticelli and the Depiction of Spirituality, Sensuality and Erotic Beauty in Art.

16 Wednesday Feb 2011

Posted by in art, beauty, eroticism, spirituality

≈ 8 Comments

Botticelli's Primavera

After racking my brains for the past few weeks over some spiritual issues, as well as other things, I think I have finally come to some equilibrium on the spiritual matters. I don’t really want to get into the particulars of religion here, except to say that I do not enjoy the polemics that come about from different groups arguing over what is right, what is wrong, who is right, who is wrong. Too much of that is poison for me. The group I belong to, Catholic, has much of this within the Church. When I was younger I found the more liberal elements of the Church annoying; as I grow older I find the more traditionalist elements annoying. The holier than thou, my way or the high way group may be often right theologically, but they so often present themselves with such a lack of charity and with such spiritual hubris that they often serve as more a hindrance for non-Christians than the more theologically whishy washy liberal crowd. And this is even not to mention all the divisions between all the other Christian denominations, or between all the religions of the world. As for someone who merely believes and needs to believe in God and some system to go along with those beliefs, the cacophony of theological vituperation can be deafening. I try to avoid it as much as I can, and focus rather on simple faith. I like to focus on the things I love: faith, and spirituality and beauty; beauty and art and culture; beauty and love. I am not here to evangelize for any one faith; I consider myself a Christian and that should be enough information for anyone to surmise anything else. Rather, I am here to write about God, spirituality, and the poetical mysticism of beauty and eros, art and love.

So one of my favorite topics is beauty, especially erotic beauty. Recently on my Sex as Something Sacred post I uploaded an image of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) is one of my favorite painters of all time. I find him particularly fascinating because, as a great force in the Italian Renaissance, he lived in a world drenched in religious and secular tensions. The Middle Ages were quickly coming to an end, and a new world was being born, influenced by the rediscovery of Greek and Roman art, literature and philosophy, as well as new continents overseas, among other things. All these things were cultural earthquakes that forever changed the face of Western society. Botticelli’s paintings reveal a man who loved beauty, but who was also deeply spiritual as well, and I can relate to that. It is clear from his life he never quite resolved these things, and that they were major themes for his paintings. He never married. Like many artists of his time and other times, his art was his life and love. He said the prospect of marriage gave him nightmares. Most of the great artists throughout history gave their lives to their art, usually at the expense of their wives and children, if they had any. This is often the price of greatness.

One of his most famous paintings is the Primavera, ca., 1482. There are different views and interpretations of this painting and who exactly the figures depicted are, but it is most often cited as an allegory about spring and the renewal of life. I won’t get into the details here, except to say the figure in the middle is Venus, the Roman goddess of love. As a ancient fertility goddess, her role in the rebirth that Spring harbingers is obvious. Given her overall cosmic powers of regeneration, she is the central and presiding figure in the painting. The female figure to the right in the floral robe may be either Flora or Primavera, two Roman personifications of Spring, but there are questions on exactly who each of these figures are. On the left side of the painting the three figures dancing are the three Graces, goddesses of charm, beauty, nature, creativity and fertility.

What strikes me most is how lush and sensuous the painting is. It is dark and inviting, yet warm and mysterious. There are as many as 500 different plant species represented. The graces, often depicted as nude in ancient and later art, are dressed in diaphanous robes, their feminine forms quite visible. The face of Primavera herself is most likely drawn from a woman that seems to appear in many of his other paintings, the noble woman Simonetta Vespucci, for whom Botticelli suffered an unrequited love. If you view his paintings, she definitely seems to have been his type. Without a doubt, if these paintings are true to her form, she was quite hot for her day. Clearly, from this and other paintings, he loved beautiful women. The painting is also often cited as an example of the Neoplatonic ideas of love popular in Botticelli’s day. He was probably a bit of a romantic himself. Overall the painting seems to celebrate the powers of  sensual, sexual and spiritual love and rebirth. Beauty is a force that permeates nature.

Botticelli clearly loved beauty and sensuality and was deeply spiritual, since these qualities run through his paintings. This was not without controversy though in his time, and it is later said that Botticelli burned some of his paintings in the religious backlash against the Neo-Pagansim of Renaissance. The Domincan friar and anti-Renaissance crusader Savonarola had a great influence on him in his later life, a man who later himself was burned at the stake by the people of Florence in the backlash against the backlash. So I suppose Botticelli, like myself and others, struggled between sensuality and spirituality, the erotic and the religious, and was caught up in the controversies of this time. Perhaps like me he was obsessed with sex and religion.

What is fascinating for me here, other than the obvious beauty of the painting, is how much a man like Botticelli could be in love with beauty, or even love itself. Yet he was still a believing  Catholic, as many of his later religious paintings show. It is this mixture of corporal and spiritual beauty that makes Botticelli’s works, like so many of the Renaissance, intriguing for me. I can relate to this, even though I live in a world where this mixture of spirituality and sensuality, faith and beauty, is often lacking. Usually faith is presented as something more abstract and seemingly hostile to physical or sensual beauty, or sensual beauty is devoid of and hostile to all faith. I am sure many in Botticelli’s day found his depictions of half naked women pornographic; they would never have dreamed that over 500 years later these depictions would literally be considered priceless gems of great art.

I will be writing more on Botticelli, since I have recently become interested in his works. I think he is a good example of many of my own struggles, questions, and desires when it comes to this balance of spirituality and sexuality. His paintings reveal a sensitivity to feminine beauty that is both spiritual and sensual, erotic and religious. I can understand that.

I can never get enough of feminine beauty.

But just to end things on a more modern note, I would like to add a more contemporary image of something beautiful, one of my favorite images: a woman in nothing but her bra and panties. I can’t help it.

Something Beautiful

14 Monday Feb 2011

Posted by in beauty, eroticism, religion, spirituality, women

≈ 6 Comments

I love beautiful women!

I need to post images of beautiful women, preferably half naked. Is that sinful? Is this image sinful? Or is it art? I hunger for beauty at times. I suppose a woman dressed in nothing but her bra and panties in a provocative pose is problematic for some, but what the hell. I like this image. Plus I can’t stand that stupid image of Chris Less being the first thing that pops up on my blog. I need to move on from that.

I also get tired of the more heavy debates on things, especially when it comes to religion. When I first started blogging a few years ago, I used to have a more religious oriented blog, but I could not stand the comments people were making, so I started this one instead. So I think I need to write some more light-hearted, less religiously thematic posts. Writing about and debating religious issues gives me a headache after a while. Everyone, including myself I suppose, Christian and non Christian, Catholic and Protestant, thinks they have a monopoly on the truth in their own entrenched positions. Not that there is anything wrong with that, and many people are sincere in what they believe to be the truth. But sometimes the debates can get nasty, as many believes they are right, and have little tolerance for those who disagree or look at the world differently. Uggh. I get sick of it all. Too much rancor. I think I probably prefer sticking to writing about God and spirituality in general and for the most part leave particular religious denominations or beliefs  and controversies out of this, except on occasion.  Writing about beautiful things, art and literature, or culture in general, even politics, is more pleasurable for me. God can be found in those things too, in a more general way.

As far as my own religious beliefs, I guess I would consider myself a Christian, although many Christians would not, based on my writings.  I am sure a lot of Catholics would consider me outside of the Church, based on my writings or opinions on certain matters. My version of Christianity is informed by my own life experiences more so than any type of theology or Church teaching, not that I am denying the importance of those. But for me there are grey areas, both in theology and scripture.  As I once said, I am really not a “rule” person. When younger I used to be a very conservative, orthodox Catholic, but as I got older I found life too complex, people too complex, faith too complex, to remain in that paradigm. I am still fairly orthodox when it comes to all the big issues, the nature of Christ, salvation, the sacraments, etc, but on some other theological or moral issues I am more open to different interpretations of things. At first I thought it would interesting to engage that in this type of forum, but now I realize it causes me more internal strife than anything else, so I need to not write as much about those types of things. I also enjoy using sarcasm and satire when I can, and that can easily lead people to misinterpret what I am saying or what I believe.

I don’t want this blog to be source of evil in anyway, or to lead people down a destructive path, so I wonder about some of my writings and postings. I don’t know. But I also suppose, in a very secular world, at least writing about God in some way is a good thing. I think just bringing the notions of God or spirituality into a highly technological and industrialized society, with all its fragmentation and impersonality, is a good thing. What the specifics of that may be, I will leave for the most part to others.  I also think writing about God in the context of sexuality and even eroticism can be a good thing, although it can be difficult to navigate through that one. I don’t claim infallibility.  It is always a work in progress.  Perhaps I will write more on this later.

So here’s to a celebration of one of the God’s great creations, the beautiful woman.

Beautiful Older Women: Robin Meade

11 Friday Feb 2011

Posted by in beauty, Uncategorized, women

≈ 2 Comments

Robin Meade: still hot at 41, with the brains to go along with it. A hard combo to beat.

Here is another example of a good looking older woman. Robin Meade, a CNN anchor. She is 41. Yup, 41 and she looks better than most girls half her age.

For all you border line pedophile, Humbert Humbert types out there who enjoy the “thrilling appeal of young girls”, sorry, but I happen to like my women a little older. Usually twenty year old pussy is not worth the price of a twenty year old mouth. As a man gets older some life experience in his women is a good thing. I do like having an intelligent conversation with a woman, and lets face it, most twenty year old girls are incapable of that. They may still have the body, but that is usually about it. When you get past their giggling, bubble gum chewing mouth, usually you will find very little of substance to come out. It is not their fault, they are just a bit too young for the sort of life experience and maturity that I enjoy sharing with a love interest (this is not true for all girls that age, there are some who are more mature than others and capable of holding a good conversation with me, even being close, but they are rare). Also, it does not bother me if a woman has had previous lovers. One of the benefits of that is that she knows what she enjoys in bed, and that helps out our mutual pleasure sharing. I actually like my women a little experienced, even a little dirty. I like a woman who knows how to fuck. I don’t want to have to waste my time trying to “teach” her stuff. It cuts down on the drama. They are less inhibited. All that means consistently good sex. Also, I know I am good enough in and out of bed to satisfy any woman and make her forget about all her past lovers. As one women put it to me, “You have made me forget about everything except you.” Sometimes I even enjoy hearing about a woman’s past sexual experiences, in a pervy way. Yeah, I am a little freaky that way. So the idea of finding a “fresh” and “wholesome” girl is not all that important to me. I like my women real: as women. And most real, live women have had past lovers. This is a hard concept for a lot of the loser, wannabe Alpha/ PUA/Game crowd to grasp, with all their disappointments and rejections from various women, with that still unhealed disillusionment gnawing deep inside them, the disillusionment of learning that their high school crush was sucking the quarterback’s cock, and how that tortured them so, knowing that their pure and perfect crush was such a dirty little slut, and with their never ending search for the Holy Grail of that one perfect girl: the unstained, untouched, untainted, uncorrupted specimen of a pure virgin, someone who has yet to ride the cock carousel, who has yet to be turned into a whorish American girl, someone who has not yet had a dozen cocks in her mouth, the typical trashy slut they so despise, yet one they eagerly want to corrupt into the same cock craving slut, to “teach” her to be the whore they so disdain. Then again most decent, real adult women tend to reject them anyway, realizing they are for the most part complete losers and thereby forcing them to prey on “fresh” and “naive” teenagers who don’t know any better yet. When these girls eventually do grow into women, and they all will, when they do learn better, when they mature and experience life, they will end up having contempt for the Humbert Humberts, laughing at them for their pathetic neediness, laughing at them the way those girls in high school used to laugh at their pathetic beta attempts at dating. So the guys who lust after the “thrilling appeal of  young girls” will end up the same place they were in high school twenty and thirty years after their high school experiences: losers, laughed at, mocked, and alone–and even worse: fat, balding old men desperately masturbating to “young girls” in porn, since they are now completely incapable of attracting those such girls any longer (at least they had some chance when they were younger), or even worse, in jail.

What a bod on her, and those boots, damn!

The mantra out there is that youth trumps everything when it comes to love and eroticism. I reject that. It is one of the shallow obsessions of the juvenile PUA/Game crowd (after playing video games and wearing baseball caps backwards while trying to score chicks at loud bars). Yes, youth is important, but there is more to sex and love than simply physical youth.  A woman can still be beautiful, attractive and alluring into her forties, even beyond. Intelligence and experience are also a part of beauty. As far as Robin Meade, I don’t have much to say about her, except that she is hot. It is possible for women to age well in our world, despite what the world around us says. Perhaps it is rare these days, but it is not impossible. She has brains too. I like that. Beauty and brains and experience and maturity: a great combination for any man looking for a real relationship with a real woman.

Sex Blogs Sometimes Seem So Sad

05 Saturday Feb 2011

Posted by in beauty, culture, spirituality

≈ 20 Comments

Ingrid Bergman, classy beauty from a long lost age.

There are a myriad of sex blogs out there, both by men and  women. Now, I admit, viewing someone’s sex blog can be interesting and enticing. I wonder what the woman looks like, who she is, what she is going to write. There are a few good ones out there. Some of the women are quite attractive and even hot. Some of the photos they post are very erotic and well done, even artistic. Their personal stories can be very interesting. But what I have discovered is just how many bad ones there are out there, and by bad I mean this: the men and women seem little more than extreme examples of the worst forms of narcissism, self delusion, and an overall lack of self worth.

I don’t know what the statistics are, so I have no way of verifying this, but it seems to me that a great many sex blogs are being written by women in their thirties and forties who are hitting or who have already hit the wall. Or they are written by men trying to prove they are still virile chick magnets. They post photos of themselves, and the most of the photos are, well, a little repulsive. I suppose a middle age man or woman with an overweight body can post a picture of themselves and imagine that they are still attractive compared to their younger, more supple fellow bloggers, but the reality of what most people find beautiful or attractive is rather different. It is a hard, cold reality, but one that people who post photos of themselves in public need to understand.

Somehow, when I see all these bloggers posting photos of themselves, I feel depressed. I am not sure why, but I think it is because, well, it just seems all so sad. Are we so in need of personal validation that we would post naked photos of ourselves for millions of strangers to view? Are we so lonely and isolated in our fragmented society that we need to expose our naked bodies for the rest of the world to see and comment upon? I consider writing different, because writing is a mental form of sharing, and that is a natural human condition and there is also a natural barrier between the writer and the reader; but posting photos of yourself, your body, or close up shots of your body, seems so desperate. I sense a lot of sad men and women out there, lonely and sad and in need of some sort of self esteem boost.

Sometimes I see these photos, and most are, well, just gross. A close up shot of an overweight woman’s vagina is simply gross. Sorry. A naked picture of an overweight middle age couple is just gross. A man posting a photo of his strange looking penis is weird. Beauty has certain demands, and the erotic arts are unforgiving in those demands. You must meet certain criteria for others, especially those who are complete strangers, to find you attractive (as several studies have more than once demonstrated: youthfulness, face proportionality, healthy hair and skin, a good body weight and mass combination, etc.). If you don’t, posting images of yourself online seems like a desperate act of attention. It also opens yourself up to the harsh criticism of others, such as myself. When you reach a certain age, you should no longer be showing naked pictures of yourself to anyone, least alone the whole world. I suppose there are those out there with fatty and granny fetishes, but then again there are a lot of weird people out there in the world, such as coprophiliacs.

Now for those who read this blog, you know I enjoy engaging in my own racy material here, and I do enjoy good, and I mean good, erotic art and erotica, but seeing these blogs makes me long even more for a world where class and restraint are accepted, even celebrated, again as a certain norm. An older woman can be quite beautiful. An older man can be handsome in a dignified way. But older people posting naked photos of themselves seem like sad specimens of aging baby boomers trying to cling to a youth they have long since lost. More and more I deepen my appreciation for a society where the public realm is infused by greater demands on personal standards, higher standards than we have now in our society. People did used to dress well in public: just look at any photo of New York from the pre-1960’s, or any sport event from that era. For the most part the men are dressed well, often wearing coats and ties, and the women look nice in their dresses. Now we have people who walk around in public showing their half naked bodies, many of which are repulsive, and this is considered the norm. People posting naked photos of themselves in public is an extreme example of the lack of these long lost ethics.

It also makes me appreciate the different great religions of the world that say that we are made up of more than simply flesh, that we have souls, and our body and souls are intricately bound together, and that we need to conduct ourselves accordingly, with dignity and self respect. Our bodies will age and become decrepit, no matter what. We all face that. But our souls can only get better with time, if we chose the right path. And the best beauty for people growing older is a good combination of body and soul and not a desperate need to flash one’s aging body parts to the rest of the world so you can feel good about yourself. There are many older people who are quite beautiful, but they are beautiful because of something within them, not because they continue to cling to a long lost desire for youthful beauty. Beauty is more than about how we look, it is also about how we act, how we carry ourselves, how we think, the nature of our souls within us; it born from the love we have for ourselves, for others, for God.  And anyone can possess that type of beauty, even if they were not blessed with the physical beauty.

Sex as Something Sacred

03 Thursday Feb 2011

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 7 Comments

Birth of Venus, the goddess of sex and love, by Botticelli, circa 1482.

In Mala Fide http://www.inmalafide.com/2011/02/02/cunnilingus-is-the-new-tobacco/ has a interesting article today on the rise of oral cancer among men. Apparently the research is increasingly showing a link between HPV and oral sex over the past forty years. The results are a rise in head and throat cancer. Not pleasant stuff.

When I hear things like this I wonder about the whole “all sex is nothing but good and pleasurable” mantra that our world, including myself, have bought into. Unbridled sex does have its consequences, like everything. Those consequences can be not only be emotional and societal, but physical too, and those physical consequences can be quite nasty.

I think we have lost an old balance, the balance between sex and love, or seeing sex in its deeper human context, rather than as merely a fun past time to engage in. Eroticism devoid of the deeper mysteries of sexuality and love becomes banal rather quickly. Nature has a cold and cruel way of letting us know when we are engaging in destructive behavior. If you overeat, you get fat and die of diabetes. If you engage in lots of promiscuous sex, sharing all those bodily fluids with strangers, sharing all those bacteria and viruses that lurk within each and every one of us, you are most likely to come down with some sort of nasty disease. Humans really aren’t designed to have unlimited, multiple sex partners.

Someone described me recently as being obsessed with sex and religion. I think that is the best description of myself I have heard in years. Yes, I am obsessed with these two things, or with finding a balance between these two basic elements of human life.

I think it is possible to enjoy the eroticism of life, to enjoy sex, to enjoy the beauty of the opposite sex, the beauties of love and romance and intense feelings, without spiraling into the societal and physical destruction that our unbridled hook up culture has produced. How, I am not sure yet, nor do I offer answers. For me, religion is one way of helping me keep a lid on my more explosive passions, desires and actions. Faith helps me channel my passions into something that is, at least for me, tinged with hope, beauty, happiness. I agree with the Catholic Church on the basic nature of sex as being something sacred. It is. I just have questions about the degrees of sinfulness involved in certain habits, such as masturbation, etc.

Think about that. Sex as something sacred. How far off are we from that idea in today’s world? It is an interesting idea once you start thinking about it. In today’s world sex is anything but sacred. As I mentioned in my last post, even the ancients viewed sex as something sacred, although in a different way than Christians did. Still, there was that element of sanctity to sexuality. Temples were erected (no pun intended) to the great fertility goddesses, both agricultural and sexual. The most famous of these would be the Greek goddess of sex and love, Aphrodite, whose Roman version was Venus. Sex was linked with divinity in people’s minds. I once read somewhere how we are actually more pagan than the pagans were, because even the pagans understood and revered some of the more basic elements of life as sacred, and divine, such as sex. They had some sense of the divine, while we have none. We have totally lost that in today’s completely secular, technological world. Sex is often reduced to little more than “Game” (not that the erotic, mating dance of intrigue and attraction between two people cannot be thought of as a sort of playful game, but that is in many ways different from the brutal and Darwinian notions of Game as practiced by the PUA world); people “hook-up” rather than fall in love. Even the glorious art of seduction, once so beautifully written about by such poets as Ovid and Byron, is all but a lost artifact of the past. It has been replaced by the PUA afficionados. We all want instant gratification today. So we get that, and the rewards that go along with that.

Venus de Milo, a Greek sculpture of the goddess Aphrodite (Roman Venus) circa 130 B.C. One of the more famous statues to survive antiquity.

Anyway, after reading that article, and this is something I have heard now for over a year, celibacy is becomng an increasingly attractive option in life. And since I am obsessed with both sex and religion, I have realized one difference between religion and sex. No one ever got cancer from praying.

Pure Erotic Beauty

01 Tuesday Feb 2011

Posted by in beauty, eroticism, women

≈ 5 Comments

Erotic beauty is such a powerful and alluring thing...

This is a wonderfully erotic photo. What I love about this photo is that more is left to the imagination than not. This is what I would call true erotica. Her sensuality, her sexuality is obvious, yet there is also that alluring barrier present; we need to use our imaginations to wonder what lies hidden beneath those clothes, we need to make an effort. Just as in life we need to make an effort to seduce a woman, to finally uncover what lies beneath her clothes, what lies inside of her, to feel yourself inside of her, so too in this photo a bit of effort is required on our part. We are drawn fully into her sexuality, yet we are also denied what we want, which is too see her naked, and, even more, to possess he sexually, to enjoy the sensuality flowing from her. We only get a hint of her full beauty: her disheveled, luxuriant hair, her soft bedroom eyes, her full and delightful breasts, so obviously sensitive to us, her simple white panties delicately concealing her most treasured and desired regions. In many ways it is more true to the real life experiences of eroticism than the artificial explicitness of most porn. There is beauty, sensuality, sexuality all wonderfully mixed together, yet in not revealing all, in keeping back some of the more desired sights, we succumb to the power of feminine sexuality. This is what eroticism for men is so often like, we want, but we cannot have. We feel the heat of desire, we are beckoned to feed the flames of our lust, but we are unable to fully quench and consume those flames, and so we are left wanting more. Every man who has seen a beautiful woman walking down the street knows this feeling. Every man who has longed after a girl he cannot quite have knows his helpless submission to this terrible yet intoxicating power of female sexuality. And every woman who knows her sexuality knows the power she has over men.

It is images like this that remind us of the ancient goddesses of fertility, the Aphrodites and Venuses that all cultures and civilizations from time immemorial have worshiped, who were the embodiment of the raw power of female sexuality. But unlike today’s world where all sexuality has become everything but a sacred thing, in the past those goddesses had to be worshiped, they had to be approached, appeased, respected and even feared. There was a sense of the sacred to sexuality. The ancients understood the explosive power of sexuality that many of us in our bland and crass world have all but forgotten: the mystery, beauty and joy of deep and abiding sensuality, eroticism, sexuality, and of course, love. They were feared, respected, honored as basic forces of the natural world. Somehow, at least for me, this image stirs those same reactions. Our modern world, a world which routinely produces porn videos which such titles as “Teenage Anal Destruction”, has lost all sense of the sacred when it comes to sex. I feel sad to be living in such a world, but happy to reject these more unpleasant elements of it as well. Yeah, I am a sexual snob, I suppose. I like my sexual pleasure high class.

Sexuality is powerful, but it is still a game, it is part of Game, and yet it is a wonderful game. What would life be without these sexual tensions and desires? What would life be without the delicate dance of longing, desire, and approach enacted by men and women. Just as the old goddesses existed for millennia, so too have the eternal struggles between men and women over sex, sensuality and love. Eroticism, despite the best efforts of the more puritan elements of different societies, whether they be the Taliban or the rigidly religious nut cases of the Western world (from the Jansenists to the Legionaries of Christ), is a force that cannot, nor should not be ignored in our lives, especially by a specious and frivolous intellectualization of fleshly desires. Every man with the power of imagination can only imagine, and is left only to imagine, yet not without the intense heat of eroticism and even lust, what it would be like to enjoy the deepest and fullest sexual and sensual pleasures with a beautiful creature such as this.

Did God not create beauty? Did God not create this? Did God not create those desire in us that respond to this? But wait, I can hear the anal retentive, repressed theologian, or the pious member of Church who views and experiences all life through the abstract prism of laws, rules and regulations, say in his highly controlled and whiny voice, “Yes, God did create this, but this an example of something disordered, because of original sin, and your looking at this is disordered too. It is gravely and intrinsically disordered! It is dirty and filthy! She is obviously a slut and you are going to hell for looking at her!” My response would be, “Well, pretend she is your wife. Is wanting to fuck her disordered then? Oh yeah, I forgot, the Pope told us we should not lust after our wives.” Then I might say to my imaginary wife, the one in the photo, “ Ok then, honey, in order for us to enjoy pure, unsullied sex, I will put a bag over your face, place a sheet between us, cut a hole in it, and then we can copulate for the sole purpose of procreation without me feeling any sexual desires for you. Then we know our sex is pure. But wait, how about this? Instead of using bed sheets with holes in them (and some religious groups in the world do actually this), how about if we just become furries and do it that way. You do know what a furry, is, don’t you? I have heard of furry sex. I doubt the Church has any theological explanation or condemnation of furries, yet. That means we are good to go, at least until furry fucking is defined legalistically into a sin.” Any wife would probably divorce her husband after such a suggestion, because, as most women know and as most clergy don’t know, women actually enjoy being lusted after. The loudest laughs about the Pope’s statement on not lusting after your wife came not from men, but from women. I love John Paul II, and he did great and important things, but on some issue he was a bit too flaky.

But I digress…back to this lovely photo. I love looking at this. It is incredibly hot. I also think it is good enough to be called art. And like all good art, I could never tire of viewing this photo.