Insightful.
http://www.ted.com/talks/esther_perel_the_secret_to_desire_in_a_long_term_relationship.html
Tags / sexuality
Tagged with “sexuality”
(19)
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The secret to desire in a long-term relationship (video; Esther Perel on TED.com; 2013)
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Good Sex - The Confessions and Campaigns of W.J. Chidley - Hindsight - ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
Warning: This radio documentary contains sexual references.
A century ago, Australian sex reformer William Chidley (c.1860-1916) was locked up for speaking openly about a taboo subject, and ultimately died in Callan Park Mental Hospital. But the moral outrage he provoked was largely to do with the kind of sex he advocated. It’s also what prompted later historians to call Chidley a ‘true feminist’.
Chidley’s ideas about how sex should proceed still raise an eyebrow and provoke responses ranging from ridicule to alarm. In essence, he wanted to demote the erection, and elevate instead the woman’s readiness as the crucial determiner of when sexual intercourse should start. The Answer was dedicated ‘to womankind’.
As well as being a sex reformer, Chidley was a dress and food reformer. To combat the human misery he saw all around him, he prescribed vegetarianism, fresh air, sunlight and unrestrictive clothing. But it was his critique of conventional sex that led him into trouble.
In the years leading up to the First World War, he was a familiar sight in the streets of Melbourne and Sydney, dressed in a simple Grecian-style tunic, selling his book The Answer and addressing crowds for as long as he could get away with graphically describing his recipe for ‘natural coition’. He was repeatedly arrested and prosecuted; one police record lists twenty-five court appearances between 1912 and 1916.
Even though he was regarded by many as a crank, Chidley gained a following and found people willing to defend him from persecution by the state. His supporters included free speech advocates, socialists and feminists. In this way, his story intersects with the most significant social movements of his day and forms part of the Australian history of radicalism.
In the end, the arbiters of public morality defeated Chidley. The Answer was suppressed by a Supreme Court decision in 1914, and on three occasions between 1912 and 1916 Chidley was declared insane, with compulsory detention at asylums in Darlinghurst, Callan Park and Goulburn. He died of heart disease at Callan Park, just a couple of months after a failed suicide attempt in gaol.
Good Sex – The Confessions and Campaigns of W.J. Chidley reveals how Chidley came to develop his unorthodox sexual theory through promiscuous life experience and wide reading in public libraries. It places his ideas in the broader context of social reform efforts around the turn of the century.
Along the way, we glimpse a vivid and contested social order in early twentieth century Australia. We are introduced to the disparate forces that lined up in Chidley’s defence, as well as the machinations deployed by the state to suppress him. Ultimately we learn why Chidley’s critique of the politics of sexual intercourse was anathema in a patriarchal state on the brink of war.
Guests:
Sally McInerney, Editor - The Confessions of William James Chidley – Keep an eye out for a new edition of Chidley’s Confessions which Sally McInerney is currently working on.
Associate Professor Frank Bongiorno, Associate Professor in History, Australian National University
Professor Mark Finnane, Professor of History, Griffith University
Dr Lisa Featherstone, Lecturer in History, University of NewcastlePublications:
Title: The Confessions of William James Chidley
Author: W.J. Chidley edited by Sally McInerney
Publisher: University of Queensland Press, 1977Title: The Answer
Author: W.J. Chidley
Publisher: Australasian Authors’ Agency, 1911Title: The Sex Lives of Australians - A History
Author: Frank Bongiorno
Publisher: Black Inc. 2012Title: ‘Censoring Sex: The Case of W.J. Chidley’
Author: Lisa Featherstone
Publisher: article currently in pressTitle: ‘The Popular Defence of Chidley’
Author: Mark Finnane
Publisher: Labour History (journal), November 1981Title: What Rough Beast? The State and Social Order in Australian History
Author: Sydney Labour History Group
Publisher: Allen & Unwin 1982 -
Nadine Gordimer reads ‘The Centaur’ by José Saramago
It is in many ways a unique story. Here is a creature imagined, something that is higher and better and different from a man. Here is the dream of a creature that is half horse, half man, who has the physical fitness of a horse and the mental complexity of a man. This extraordinary fable shows the depths of the human confusion that the creature faces. It is a wonderful way of looking into the conflict between what one’s body desires or dictates – sexual desire as part of our power; it’s through sexual desire that you take possession, after all – and many of one’s other ideals about how we ought to approach another being. There’s as much in this little story as in 20 novels and 20 poems.
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Number 96 - Hindsight - ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
Number 96 made its debut on Australian television in March 1972, and was promoted by Channel 0 (the precursor for Network 10) as ‘the night Australian TV lost its virginity’. Forty years later, this feature tunes back in to the television series that broke new ground — not just about how television was made but, most memorably, about what audiences in Australia could watch. Set in a fictional apartment block, Number 96 became incredibly popular, as Australian audiences, across the five-year life of the program, spent their weeknights following the lives of residents Vera Collins, Don Finlayson (purported to be the first openly homosexual character to be written for Australian television), Aldo Godolfus, Maggie Cameron, Alf and Lucy Sutcliff, busybody Dorrie Evans, and the show’s sex symbol Bev Houghton, played by the actor Abigail — whose alleged screen nude scene remains a point of conjecture to this day.
Excerpts from Number 96 courtesy of Umbrella Entertainment (http://www.umbrellaent.com.au/)
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/hindsight/number-96/4295988
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The Art of Dharmic Embrace (audio; Vincent Horn talks with Terry Patten on Buddhist Geeks; 2011)
Perspectives on the spiritual teacher / student relationship.
http://www.buddhistgeeks.com/2011/11/bg-236-the-art-of-dharmic-embrace/
Tagged with formeditators teachers spiritualpractice power money sexuality
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After Queer, After Humanism: A Roundtable
A roundtable at the conference After Queer, After Humanism, at Rice University, September 15, 2012. Featuring Timothy Morton, Judith Roof, Renee Hoogland, Joseph Campana, James Faubion, Colleen Lamos.
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Is monogamy unnatural? - The Science Show - ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
Or, as Dr Chris Ryan’s talk at the Sydney Opera House was entitled: ‘If you want fidelity, get a dog’. He reviews the enjoyment of sex, evidence from prehistory, and even the charming behaviour of bonobos, to suggest that conventional monogamy is but a blip in human history. And, basically, doesn’t work.
Guests:
Christopher Ryan, http://www.sexatdawn.com/page4/page34/page34.htmlPublications:
Title: Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality
Author: Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá
Publisher: Harper Collinshttp://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/is-monogamy-unnatural3f/3818274
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The Victorians: Gender and Sexuality
‘Victorian’ came in the twentieth century to stand for sexual repression and social convention. Personal life was governed by complex and rigid rules of behaviour. Like other aspects of Victorian culture this began to break down in the fin-de-siécle. Yet recent research, discussed in this lecture, has undermined this rather simplistic picture and begun to explore some of the contradictions and complexities of Victorian attitudes to marriage and sexuality. The place of women in Victorian culture was by no means as passive or subordinate as conventional images of the era suggest.
This lecture by Professor Richard J Evans, FBA is part of the series The Victorians: Culture and Experience in Britain, Europe and the World 1815-1914
More info: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/the-victorians-gender-and-sexuality
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Beyond Belief 1 (2006): Session 4
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Beyond Belief 1 (2006): Session 3
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