Well, after months and months of utter neglect I have made up my mind.

 I’m sick to death of this blog.  It’s too damn ranty and doesn’t contain nearly enough gleeful female domination.  I’m a very different person now than when I started this two years ago, and I just don’t wanna write here any more.  So this will officially be the last entry.

 Stay tuned for the next phase in my evil plan to take over the world with kinky sex…The Kinky Courtesan

Instead of endlessly fighting for incremental hikes in the minimum wage, why not introduce legislation to constrain the difference between what the people at the bottom of a company make vs. those at the top?

The notion that companies will be forced to cut staff and raise prices if the minimum wage is utter bullshit, as has been proved time and again by raises in the minimum wage over the past century.  The REAL problem is that those at the top of our big corporations (like, for instance, Wal-Mart) make THOUSANDS of times the amount that those on the bottom of said companies do.  Despite the fact that executives don’t actually work any harder than sales clerks, and often aren’t any smarter, better educated, or more talented either.  Yes, perhaps a CEO is a bit more difficult to replace than a cashier, but no one in the modern corporation is indespensable and it’s about damn time we stopped acting as if the success of a company depended more on the labors of the guy in the expensive suit than the labors of those in blue jeans.

So I suggest that we establish a standard limit, requiring the COMPLETE wage/benefit package (no sneaking millions of extra dollars in through stock options, bonuses etc!) of the top earner in any company to be no more than, say, a few hundred times the amount earned by the lowest-paid worker in the company.  Then every time some damn fool in an expensive suit wants to reward himself with a juicy fat bonus he’ll be forced to pay due consideration to the efforts of those beneath him in the chain of command, without whose efforts his exalted position would be worthless.

As a side benefit, it might allow big companies to pay higher dividends to their stockholders, which could - just maybe - put the focus (and reward!) of capitalism back on the pooling of resources to promote innovation, rather than on the mere moving around of bits of paper (or electrons) to generate (a convincing illusion of) wealth.

(Stock trading vs. stock investing folks, think about it.)

My mom asked me today what I thought of the whole cloned meat thing.  I said:  Hell, yes; bring it on!  Better yet, take it a step further - give me full on McMeat!  Better a burger made from mindless flesh grown in a vat than from a living, thinking being.  Who also required a pretty large chunk of resources - significantly larger than the bits of flesh and skin we humans were interested in - to nourish.  I also think this is a step down a path that will ultimately lead to a product that’s healthier for us as well as tastier than “natural” meat.

Then again, I read a lot of science fiction.  :-p

So I’m watching “The Colbert Report” and he’s got this chick on who wrote some book about “raunch culture”, meaning the supposedly new (although how one can ignore the fact that history is full of famous, influential courtesans is beyond me) trend of glorifying porn stars, strippers and the like.  The woman is bemoaning the idea that porn actresses and strippers can serve as role models for ordinary women in celebrating, exploring, and owning their sexuality, because porn stars and strippers (according to her anyway) are basically all “faking it”.  She points out the absurdity of women pretending to be like people who are pretending to enjoy sex, and how that’s not a terribly good way to learn how to actually enjoy sex.

Now I’m not at all sure I buy the idea that the huge majority of women who work in the sex industry ARE faking their pleasure…I think that it takes a strong exhibitionistic streak, which implies taking pleasure in putting oneself on display, to get very far in this line of work…but I am willing to suppose that a lot of the plasticized young starlets who are the most visible face of porn (and stripping) are in fact more interested in the money than any other aspect of the job.  Which is why it’s so very, very important that the field of porn be broadened to include women (and, for that matter, men!) who are something other than the underweight, fake breasted, nineteen year olds that mainstream porn studios focus on so obsessively.  And why it’s imperative that the government regulations which are ostensibly there to protect children from predators but which actually serve merely to hinder independent porn production be reconsidered.

It’s not wrong, stupid, or demeaning for ordinary women to wish to emulate women who have higher than average sex drives and the openness of mind to embrace and cultivate those talents, any more than it is wrong for women to choose sports stars, musicians, or any other talented, ambitious person as a role model.  It IS rather silly that the system be set up so that the women who are most rewarded by the industry are those who haven’t even been alive long enough to begin to scratch the surface of the creative, hedonistic potential of sex.

It’s particularly dumb when you consider that most men aren’t really all that interested in screwing mindless, plasticized 19 year olds…and that women are every bit as interested in watching porn as men are.

A few thoughts upon reading about the AOL search query data gaffe…

You know what?  I would actually have little problem with the government snooping into my affairs…if they would quit locking people up for things they oughn’t to be locked up for.  And my general approach to dealing with the intrusiveness of modern governmental and corporate organizations is chaos overkill, which has two tenets:

1.  The more information they have the harder it will be to comprehend it, so always aim for volume.  And…

2.  Randomize it as much as possible.  Lie some of the time and tell the truth at others, make it a habit to behave uncharacteristically every once in a while.  Do a google search for the last thing in the world you’re interested in knowing.

Has anybody besides me and the Sgt. ever read the novel Ecotopia?

And even the Sunnis and Shias do it.

Ever hear of Misyar?  Or Nikah Mut’ah?  These are varieties (each faction has it’s own version, tailored to suit the dictates of it’s own religious dogma) of temporary marriages, legally accepted by Islamic, sharia-based governments.  Marriages which, it has been argued, exist essentially to allow people to have sex without the traditional obligations of marriage.

I won’t make any comments on these institutions from a feminist point of view; that’s for the women who live in these cultures to do (try googling arab woman blog if you’re interested).  Suffice to say that from what I know I would rather be a whore in my world than married (or unmarried) in theirs.  The point is that even in societies where sex outside of marriage is punishable by death there is some allowance made, some recognition of the importance of plain old sex.

I once knew a man whose very strong Christian convictions included the idea that any sex apart from that with his wife was dreadfully, horribly wrong.  Any sex at all, we’re talking even masturbation.  When I met him, this man had become so obsessed with his own repressed desires that he was doing really stupid shit - the kind of shit that could have lost him his marriage and his important job in an organization which insisted on adherence to Christian dogma - to satisfy those desires.  He used to argue endlessly with me, insisting that sex was just not that necessary, until finally I pointed this out:  if sex wasn’t that vital to him, then why was he on the verge of throwing away everything else for the sake of it?  My friend stepped back a bit after that, began to allow himself some sensuality, but when I last spoke to him he was still (as far as I know) refusing to allow even such a basic satisfaction as masturbating.  It’s my guess (and I could be wrong here), that he continues his secret, shameful indulgences to this day…and continues to berate himself for them. 

The most ironic thing, in this case, is that the guy phrased all this in terms of love.  He felt that anything other than sex with the Mrs. was a betrayal of their vows of love.  Yet his insistence on toeing the dogmatic line caused twenty years of sexual dissatisfaction for both partners.  Harldly a testament to the glorious-ness of married relations.  If he had been willing to practice sex by masturbating (it’s not something you’re born good at, you know!), he might have found a solution to his problem of shooting off too soon.  Had he been willing to masturbate, he might have given her the freedom to do so, and hence given her the tools to teach them both how to have a better sexual relationship (a woman cannot tell a man how best to please her if she does not know herself).  Had he been accepting of his own sexual needs, of his own sexual fantasies, he could have had full and open communication for all those twenty years instead of the nest of secrets he held inside.  Without the rule of dogma his love could have been so much greater.

I do not expect my thoughts to ever have any credibility with the monotheistically-minded, because I will not pretend to believe that there is One True God when my doubts are so plentiful.  But I often wonder, of those who profess to believe that this planet and all on it are the work of a single benevolent Creator, why the fanatical clinging to dogma that flies in the face of the Evidence of Creation?  What is there that makes the Bible (or the Qur’an, or whatever Book you follow) a more authentic source for knowing God’s expectations than the earthworm, the slime mold, or the bonobo chimp?  Even for the True Believer the former may have been “inspired” by God, but the latter was indisputably made by God.  We’re talking the difference between genuine Chanel and a cheap knock-off here folks.  Why would you sell your soul for the rip-off, when the true gift lies all around you, free for the understanding? 

If I were to wake up tomorrow and find myself recognized as the Daughter of God, Messiah to the masses, I would propose a faith based on the “book” of Creation.  You want to see the glory of God?  Go spend half an hour watching the ants in their labours.  You want to give thanks to God?  Do something to nurture the world, to increase the diversity and health of life on it instead of cutting down more trees to print more holy books, or, God forbid, blasting huge swathes of landscape into lifelessness to prove the rightness of your views.  You want to know what God wants from you?  Well, God gave you a brain, didn’t He?  The capacity to reason?  If God wants you happy (the definition of benevolent Creator), and He gave you these tools, then it follows you ought to use them.  Study what makes people (and other animals, after are we humans ARE animals too) happy…then arrange for there to be more of it.  Don’t just unquestioningly accept the authority of anybody who claims to speak for God, and especially don’t accept the dictates of those whose advice demonstrably goes against the evidence of creation, and against the evidence of human happiness.

I know I rant all the time about porn, sex work, etc, but you know what I actually think is the number one problem with American governmental policies?  The so-called “War on Drugs.”  We insist on paying lip-service to an ill-thought-out and ineffective policy of prohibition which has the exact same results as prohibition did the last time we tried it - skyrocketing crime and corruption.  What makes it worse is that we (or at least those of us who’re blinded by faith) delude ourselves into thinking the policy is working, because the murderous gangs have not (openly) taken control of *our* towns.  No, we’ve managed to outsource the problem to Mexico and South America, where the death toll on a daily basis rivals (and perhaps exceeds, anybody know for sure?) that in Iraq.

 I have a radical solution to at least part of the problem.  Legalize marijuana…but only for those who grow it themselves.  Voila!  The stoners can legally get what they want, and those who imagine themselves fit to dictate everyone else’s moral standards get uncontrovertable proof that the stoners have paid for their high with the kind of committment and hard work that is allegedly the goal.  Not to mention the respect it would engender for the concept of private property.  Seriously, imagine what a pisser it would be if my idea passed and you spent four or six months caring for your closetful of plants only to have all your primo bud ripped off by your no-good roommate.