Sex & Journalism

The Man Who Pushed America To War

I’ll be honest. I’ve never really been interested in world affairs or politics. The only time I would be interested in either one of those, is if I happened to be having an affair with a politician. But in this case, a friend of mine told me that I needed to buy the book and spread the word. I promised that I would and because it seemed to mean something to him, I told myself that I would read it front to back, regardless of how painful I thought it might be.

The fact that after having completed the prologue, I was actually interested in reading the first chapter was a shocker to me. But the talented Aram Roston does such a delightful job at creating a vivid picture of twisted characters and scandals that I wanted to see more. I kept reading and thinking, “Wow. I might actually read a good story, learn something new…and like it!”

The whole subject is new to me, so it’s difficult to give a detailed review in anything other than a lay persona terms…and I do mean lay. In a very abbreviated nutshell, here’s my hazy ADD style skinny on the story:

This Iraqi teen goes through some crazy drama. He's traumatized from it all, but he is also smart. When he gets older, he goes into academia. He can’t stick with it, though, so he does the thing that his family wanted him to do and goes into banking. There, he loses a lot of peoples money, yet still manages to live like a king. He screws a lot of people over and somehow manages to always get away with it every time. Then America becomes interested in him and gives him some money to work with the FBI. Because of his power and experience, politicians take an interest in him and he somehow magically began to woo and influence congress. Then September 11th happened and some crazy business went down, which ultimately leads to the questions, is Ahmad Chalabi responsible for Americas involvement with the current war in Iraq? It’s up to you to decide. And through the compilation of interviews and facts that Roston dug up, you will have sufficient material to form an educated opinion. It’s exciting, really. It’s a story of extravagance, travel, terror, money, the FBI, the CIA, The UN, money, mistresses, business, lies, money, vivid characters, mystery, revenge, money, scandal, death, manipulation…oh… and money.

In addition to the fact that it’s a good, educational story that can entertain even politically unsavvy readers, this book just makes you feel more desirable by simply carrying it around. It actually worked as both a fantastic conversation piece and an unexpected pick up tool. Wear pumps and be seen reading this book. Smart men everywhere will ogle you in a way that you have never been ogled before. They will actually approach you in a way that isn't disrespectful and ask you about your thoughts on literature and the state of world affairs. It has been a most unusual and refreshing experience. It’s also good for chasing the dumb and undesirable away. When seen holding this book, you will actually intimidate them.

**Hint: take this book to a car wash near an affluent neighborhood. This has been proven effective. Also consider reading this at your doctor’s office while your waiting to be attended to, especially if the doctor is cute and single.

In summary, this is simply an awesome book. It’s expanded my interests in things that happen outside of the world I usually immerse myself in, and it’s given me a new sort of knowledge and confidence. Education is hot and so is the writer. I highly recommend this to everyone. Read it in your sexiest skivvies and feel unstoppable. Oh, and there’s a picture of the author on the back, just in case additional entertainment is desired.

If you want to learn more, or say, get an actual review of the book, a good place to do this is at: www.aramroston.com.


Confessions Of An Ivy League Lady Of Pleasure

Okay, so it's not what one would expect from an Ivy League lecturer, but it's interesting enough. It's well written (at least compared to every other escort written book I've read...and Erica Jong) and it gives some insight to the business conducted by back page level call girls. My discourse is on it's way.

Diary Of A Manhattan Call Girl

Fun and entertaining, although not as satisfying as I was hoping for, much like many men I've known.

Sextrology

The cleverly pen named authors "Starsky & Cox" provide endless amounts of titillating cocktail conversation and useful research upon meeting someone new.

The Sexual Life of Catherine M

 Given to me over a year ago by a friend who's read everything, I've just had the opportunity to open it. I find it highly amusing that Catherine Millet speaks so candidly about very detailed, raunchy sexual escapades while still maintaining a very proper voice. I read it next next to someone, a man, who had his own book to read. He's heavily into war and politics and his book was something about the situation of world affairs, but every time I looked over, I noticed that his eyes were on the pages of my book. This is not a bad start. I look forward to reading another chapter tonight, before I go to bed, as so far I find this appropriate bedtime reading.

Best Sex Writing 2008 and 2006.

Both are written by different authors and both are rated highly, with several good reviews on Amazon. I'm looking forward to getting my hands on them. Grrr.

Fear Of Flying

I haven't the first positive thing to say about Erica Jong except that she got very very lucky when it comes to her career. Good for her. I have a review to come about this tragic and unreadable piece of...(ahem)...literature...but you will have to wait for it. What's inspiring about Erica, is that if she can so successfully publish crap like this, then I have a hell of a chance at a damn good writing career. At least I can tell a coherent story.

Scorpions Sweet Venom

I am not going to go on and on about things like how depressing it is that such low quality rubbish could ever make it to public viewing and how disappointed I am in media and who they choose to celebrate. Instead, for now, until my complete review comes, I am only going to say that I proud that Miss Pacheco has gone through a difficult journey and survived. I'm glad she had set goals for herself and is apparently on a fast track to achieving them. She is brave and exploratory and hopefully focused on getting to the place she claims she is aiming to get to. I think she will make an exceptional psychiatrist, as she certainly has a lot of life experience to draw from and will be able to offer alternative perspectives to her clients. And I think she will do much better behind a desk than she does in front of her laptop, as she has an interesting story, but no business writing.

Sex And Character

 I remember, when I was in my late teens, I had finally worked my way into the bedroom of a schoolmate I had a crush on since my pre-teen years. He was a brown skinned, confident athlete with an air of cool and an incredible body that I couldn’t wait to discover. Everything was going swimmingly in our newfound courtship, until I unzipped his pants for the first time. After a fair amount of eager fumbling and foolish adolescent foreplay, I took off his pants, only to find attached this tiny, almost inconceivably small resemblance of a raisin - a very miniscule currant from the most malnourished Saxifragaceae bush. I had taken my previous boyfriend from flaccid to firm before, so it wasn’t the mere fact that my beau nouveau wasn’t yet erect that was disappointing. It was the brutal reality that there wasn’t even enough flesh to be noticeable when fully hard. At his most erect point, something that pencil point small couldn’t possibly have been more than a small thumb lengths long or wide when fully erect. That was one of the most disappointing days of my life. The second most disappointing day was when I actually wasted a whole two hours reading Otto Weininger’s “Sex And Character”. To avoid posttraumatic depression, I have to try hard not to think about those valuable minutes of my life that I will never be able to replace.

What I was hoping to be intelligent, philosophical observations of human behavior and sexuality turned out to be a hatred filled diatribe about the evil brought into the world, by women, Jews and other “minorities”. I suppose this incredible let down was my own fault for not having looked more closely into Mr. Weininger's biography as a woman hating anti-Semite (he would argue that point), but the simple fact that this book has been held in such high esteem and that this guy actually earned himself the title of ‘genius”, hinted that perhaps he actually did have something to offer besides a slew of hostility and contempt towards any creature on this earth that is not an Aryan male. Whatever was I thinking? Perhaps my misguidance came from the fact that the first chapter I read from this book was actually somewhat flattering to me. At several points, the chapter entitled “Motherhood and Prostitution” noted a very underdog concept of the professional companion. Weininger gave praise to the courtesan for being like a great politician, for being an elevated sort of woman, offering more beauty and education to the world than average female (whose only concern, he claims, is to procreate). While, at points, he contradicted himself, the statements like, “The most highly developed women mentally, those who have been lauded in poetry, belong to the prostitute category.” and “Great men have always preferred women of the prostitute type.” were very unique and forward thinking observations that I assumed alluded to the same kind of open-mindedness throughout the rest of the book. I was wrong.

Allow me to offer you a small slice of the absurdity and dullness of this so-called “genius” with a few quotes taken from his “masterpiece”:

Himself a Jew who converted to Protestantism, Weininger comments on the materialistic, unintelligent, effeminate, egotistical, sexually impotent Jew:

 “The true conception of the State is foreign to the Jew, because he, like the woman, is wanting in personality; his failure to grasp the idea of true society is due to his lack of free intelligible ego. Like women, Jews tend to adhere together, but they do not associate as free independent individuals mutually respecting each other's individuality. “

“As there is no real dignity in women, so what is meant by the word “gentleman” does not exist amongst the Jews. “

 “The Jew is always more absorbed by sexual matters than the Aryan, although he is notably less potent sexually and less liable to be enmeshed in a great passion. The Jews are habitual matchmakers, and in no race does it so often happen that marriages for love are so rare. The organic disposition of the Jews towards match-making is associated with their racial failure to comprehend asceticism.”

“We have now reached the fundamental difference between the Jew and the woman. Neither believe in themselves; but the woman believes in others, in her husband, her lover, or her children, or in love itself; she has a centre of gravity, although it is outside her own being. The Jew believes in nothing, within him or without him. His want of desire for permanent landed property and his attachment to movable goods are more than symbolical. “

“Just as Jews and women are without extreme good and extreme evil, so they never show either genius or the depth of stupidity of which mankind is capable. The specific kind of intelligence for which Jews and women alike are notorious is due simply to the alertness of an exaggerated egotism; it is due, moreover, to the boundless capacity shown by both for pursuing any object with equal zeal, because they have no intrinsic standard of value - nothing in their own soul by which to judge of the worthiness of any particular object. And so they have unhampered natural instincts, such as are not present to help the Aryan man when his transcendental standard fails him. “

“Although the humanity of Jews, negroes, and still more of women, is weighed down by many immoral impulses…”

Weininger on the inferiority and soullessness of the physically revolting woman:

 “The phenomena of courtesy and chivalry are simply additional proofs that women have no souls.”

“Woman has no faculty for the affairs of State or politics, as she has no social inclinations…”

 “The imagination of women is composed of lies and errors.”

 “It is inconceivable why women can be considered good as doctors…”

“But even in the details of her body a woman is not wholly beautiful, not even if she is a flawless, perfect type of her sex. The genitalia are the chief difficulty in the way of regarding her as theoretically beautiful.”

“A woman’s nude body is distasteful to man because it offends his sense of shame. “

“The female, therefore, is credulous, uncritical, and quite unable to understand Protestantism.”

 “And, therefore, I must again assert that the woman of the highest standard is immeasurably beneath the man of lowest standard.”

Weininger on the shame and lowliness of love and eroticism:

“Love is murder. The sexual impulse destroys the body and mind of the woman, and the psychical eroticism destroys her psychical existence. Ordinary sexuality regards the woman only as a means of gratifying passion or of begetting children. The higher eroticism is merciless to the woman, requiring her to be merely the vehicle of a projected personality, or the mother of psychical children. Love is not only anti-logical, as it denies the objective truth of the woman and requires only an illusory image of her, but it is anti-ethical with regard to her. “

“We have Tannhauser, Wolfram, Venus, and Maria. The fact that two lovers, who have found each other once for all – Tristan and Isolde – choose death instead of the bridal bed, is just as absolute a proof of a higher, maybe metaphysical, something in mankind, as the martyrdom of a Giordano Bruno.”

Weininger on male and female interaction:

“But the man who is not superficial, who has depth of thought as well as of purpose, the depth which not only makes him desire right but endows him with determination and strength to do right, must always look on woman from the oriental standpoint:- as a possession, as private property, as something born to serve and be dependent on him - he must see the marvellous reasonableness of the Asiatic instinct of superiority over women, as the Greeks of old saw it, those worthy successors and disciples of the Eastern school.“

 Speculation that Weininger developed his misogyny due to his secret love for men, is not all that far fetched. He had nothing negative to say about sexual attraction between two people of the same gender and actually suggested that it is natural for men to love men: 

“There is no friendship between men that has not an element of sexuality in it, however little accentuated it may be in the nature of the friendship, and however painful the idea of the sexual element would be. But it is enough to remember that there can be no friendship unless there has been some attraction to draw the men together. Much of the affection, protection, and nepotism between men is due to the presence of unsuspected sexual compatibility. “

“Sexual inverts must be brought to sexual inverts, from homo-sexualists to Sapphists, each in their grades. Knowledge of such a solution should lead to repeal of the ridiculous laws of England, Germany and Austria directed against homo-sexuality, so far at least as to make the punishments the lightest possible. In the second part of this book it will be made clear why both the active and the passive parts in male homo-sexuality appear disgraceful, although the desire is greater than in the case of the normal relation of a man and woman. “

 Apparently, while it’s immoral and inferior for women and men to have sexual attraction to each other, a man having sexual attraction to other men is completely pure and perfectly understandable.

His displeasure with the human race extends beyond this. Weininger also has plenty of contempt and distaste for the “incapable, effeminate Chinaman”, the “immoral and uneducated Negroes” and “the unproductive English”.

Of course one would expect a person born in 1880 to have thoughts and opinions that don’t necessarily reflect what is socially accepted in modern days, but to have written such a talked about and long-standing philosophical bible on the human condition, one would also expect this “genius” to have been much more of the superior being that this incredible narcissist considered himself to be. Weininger committed suicide at the age of 23 by shooting himself in the heart; a loss of life, yes, but no loss of genius. Unless you particularly enjoy squandering your time reading ignorant claims from youthful bombastic egoists, you may want to skip this one.

 The Sexual Life Of Catherine M

I was expecting erotica, I got porn. Just terrible. Review to come.