Place-Dropping Is the New Name-Dropping

Oh, the places you’ll go, and how you won’t stop letting us know

by Tracy Moore

It used to be easy to tell who was rich and who wasn’t simply by looking at their clothes and cars. But the increasingly casual tint of modern culture means we can scarcely tell the difference between a graphic designer and a tech billionaire. They both wear hoodies and flip-flops. They both live in a tiny house. They both drive Priuses, drink small-batch whiskey and have some giant, hard-to-price wristwatch. How are any of us supposed to know when we’re actually in the company of the truly affluent and privileged anymore? A hint: place-dropping.

If place-dropping sounds like name-dropping it’s because it is, only it’s as visual as it is verbal. Just as name-droppers hope to inflate their social status by hoping you’ll associate them with important people, place-droppers inflate their value by hoping you’ll associate them with important places and the money and free time required to visit said places. They do it by casually referencing or Insta-bombing all the far-flung locales they’ve visited — bonus points if they’re known celebrity destinations like St. Tropez or Monaco.

Heading to Berlin next week; sooo paranoid about the jet lag, you might say to pre-emptively place-drop. European city: check. Far enough away to experience jet lag: check. Seasoned enough traveler to complain about it: check. But what about Berlin? Why are you going? What do you hope to see there? Oops, you forgot to mention it. Classic place-drop.

“We go to New York a lot,” someone might mention with an air of annoyance, to let you know they can afford several-hundred dollar plane tickets to a cosmopolitan city several times a year, “and flying just isn’t what it used to be.” But why? What for? What it’s like? Did you form any actual opinions about it? ::Crickets::

You’ll know you’ve been placed-dropped because it feels like someone is not telling you anything other than than the fact that they’ve gone somewhere fancy and go similar fancy places a lot. A few other examples of place-dropping:

We usually do Bali but this year we might try out Morocco.

Drinks next week? Oh I can’t, that’s when I’m in Ibiza.

Just wishing I could get back over to Cannes; used to go every summer.

(Not to call out anyone specific here, but peruse #vacation for some good social media examples.)

There are a few caveats: Of course, traveling is a good, worthwhile thing to do. We should all try to see the world as much as possible, and exposure to different histories, cultures and ways of life are more mind-enhancing than the best drugs you can buy. And you should talk about where you go; that’s your life and how you spend chose to spend your time.

But place-droppers aren’t interested in talking about the experience itself; just checking the boxes of status. Place-dropping is not when someone genuinely and excitedly says they got back from an amazing trip to Spain and starts recounting the jaw-dropping sites they’ve seen. That is of value and merit; it’s also sincere. It’s not when a seasoned traveler goes to London for the hundredth time and mentions it because this time they really had a chance to take in the old castles.

Place-dropping is when someone casually mentions another Turks and Caicos trip because they’ve been going every summer for the last 10 years; haven’t you? There are no interesting details or insights; they simply went to the place and did the thing, so now you know you’re supposed to think they are cool and rich, or something.

The real crime in place-dropping is not much different than the crime of any bad conversationalist: You’re talking about yourself too much. But I’m talking about a place, you will now insist. No, you’re talking about how you went to that place. You’re talking about how you were rich enough to afford the trip and a nanny to watch the kids while you were gone.

Place-droppers are perhaps just like the kids in middle school who noticed everyone was wearing a polo shirt so they ran out and got one. They aren’t even sure if they liked it! They just correctly downloaded that everyone else liked it and thus aspired to wear one. (Reads about how everyone is going to Provence in The New York Times; books trip to Provence.) In a post-celebrity world where social media has turned likes into a virtual fame-counter for normies, we’re all reaching for the polo shirt still. And experience has replaced celebrity or other vague status symbols as an easy shorthand for Succeeding at Life…

more…

https://melmagazine.com/place-dropping-is-the-new-name-dropping-ba31031aff78

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THE NUMBER ONE KILLER OF WOMEN IS IN PART A FORM OF SPIRIT SICKNESS

by Christina Sarich, Staff Writer Waking Times

With all the Susan G. Komen “runs for the cure” and incessant talk of pink ribbons, you’d think women were dropping like flies from breast cancer, but this isn’t the number one killer of women in modern society.

The most common killer of women is also one of the most preventable diseases. According to research from Harvard, coronary heart disease, and the stress which is behind it, is the leading cause of death among the female gender, but why?

As per the study, women are six times more likely to worry about getting breast cancer, but heart-disease is a much more real and present danger. Part of the problem is that breast cancer usually hits a woman in her 50s, while the first heart attack happens to women when they are much older, so it is easier to discount heart disease, and the underlying factors which contribute to it.

Another possible reason women worry about breast cancer more than the health of their hearts, is two-fold: we are naturally outwardly focused as nurturers, and Big Pharma has a racket going with breast cancer, so we’re primed to think of this disease first. $9,850 dollar breast cancer drug anyone?

Heart disease is also sneaky. It doesn’t always start with a serious stroke or heart attack. The physical symptoms can include fatigue, shortness of breath, mid-chest pressure (not pain), nausea, and radiating pain from the jaw or the left shoulder.

Non-physical symptoms of an ailing heart can include:

–       An inability to express openly, the suffering and pain we’ve endured emotionally. (Even the Harvard study says that a woman’s stress is often discounted and her symptoms chalked up as hypochondria, so women are taught to ‘suck it up.’)

–       An inability to forgive and express compassion.

–       Leading with our heads instead of our hearts.

–       Co-dependent tendencies or a lack of expressing our full power.

–       Lack of acceptance.

In Sanskrit, the heart chakra is called Anahata, which means unstruck note, or unwounded love. A woman is born with an innate ability to love unconditionally, but through cultural and familial pressure we’ve been taught, just like men, to stuff it down, and cut ourselves off from the emotions that can with a broken heart or a heart that needs to express forgiveness for pain caused by others.

When the heart chakra is balanced, it radiates serenity balance, and calm. It easily gives and receives love. It doesn’t ruminate on past hurts because they’ve been expressed in a healthy way.

Why are so many women dying of a heart attacks and strokes associated with heart disease? Our hearts must return to the “unhurt” or “unstruck, unbeaten” state, the “unmade sound” which is infinitely, AUM. (Or, really the fourth sound following A-U-M, which is silence).

When the Zen koan asks, “What is the sound of one hand clapping/” It refers to this “unstruck note.” It is referring to the primal energy of sound itself, the sound of creation, of love in its creative force.

We must trust the intelligence of the heart to be our inner compass again. As we nurture others, we must also nurture ourselves. If we feel as if we don’t belong or fit in, it’s time to reach out and connect with others who can accept us as we are.

It is also interesting to note, that women don’t respond to traditional medicine the way that men have. As the Harvard study details,

“Most of our ideas about heart disease in women used to come from studying it in men. But there are many reasons to think that it’s different in women. A woman’s symptoms are often different from a man’s, and she’s much more likely than a man to die within a year of having a heart attack. Women also don’t seem to fare as well as men do after taking clot-busting drugs or undergoing certain heart-related medical procedures. Research is only now beginning to uncover the biological, medical, and social bases of these and other differences. The hope is that new knowledge will lead to advances in tailoring prevention and treatment to women.” 

The heart is a fascinating muscle, and its energy is used for much more than just pumping blood through our veins. According to Rollin McCraty, Director of Research at the Institute of HeartMath, the heart’s electromagnetic field is about 5000 times stronger than that of the cranial brain, interacting with and permeating every cell of our bodies. When we heal the heart’s energy, women will return to their natural state of compassionate, uncompromising, unconditional lovers. This is what needs healing.

About the Author

Christina Sarich is a staff writer for Waking Times. She is a writer, musician, yogi, and humanitarian with an expansive repertoire. Her thousands of articles can be found all over the Internet, and her insights also appear in magazines as diverse as Weston A. Price, Nexus, Atlantis Rising, and the Cuyamungue Institute, among others. 

This article (The Number One Killer of Women is in Part a Form of Spirit Sickness) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Christina Sarich and WakingTimes.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement. Please contact WakingTimes@gmail.com for more info.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Waking Times or its staff.

http://www.wakingtimes.com/2017/06/26/number-one-killer-women-part-form-spirit-sickness/

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Dissolving the ego

Photo by Ernst Haas/Getty

You don’t need drugs or a church for an ecstatic experience that helps transcend the self and connect to something bigger

Jules Evans is policy director at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations (2013) and The Art of Losing Control: A Philosopher’s Search for Ecstatic Experience (2017).

In 1969, the British writer Philip Pullman was walking down the Charing Cross Road in London, when his consciousness abruptly shifted. It appeared to him that ‘everything was connected by similarities and correspondences and echoes’. The author of the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials (1995-2000) wasn’t on drugs, although he had been reading a lot of books on Renaissance magic. But he told me he believes that his insight was valid, and that ‘my consciousness was temporarily altered, so that I was able to see things that are normally beyond the range of routine ordinary perception’. He had a deep sense that the Universe is ‘alive, conscious and full of purpose’. He says: ‘Everything I’ve written has been an attempt to bear witness to the truth of that statement.’

What does one call such an experience? Pullman refers to it as ‘transcendent’. The philosopher and psychologist William James called them ‘religious experiences’ – although Pullman, who wrote a fictionalised biography of Jesus, would insist that God was not involved. Other psychologists call such moments spiritual, mystical, anomalous or out-of-the-ordinary. My preferred term is ‘ecstatic’. Today, we think of ecstasy as meaning the drug MDMA or the state of being ‘very happy’, but originally it meant ekstasis – a moment when you stand outside your ordinary self, and feel a connection to something bigger than you. Such moments can be euphoric, but also terrifying.

Over the past five centuries, Western culture has gradually marginalised and pathologised ecstasy. That’s partly a result of our shift from a supernatural or animist worldview to a disenchanted and materialist one. In most cultures, ecstasy is a connection to the spirit world. In our culture, since the 17th century, if you suggest you’re connected to the spirit world, you’re likely to be considered ignorant, eccentric or unwell. Ecstasy has been labelled as various mental disorders: enthusiasm, hysteria, psychosis. It’s been condemned as a threat to secular government. We’ve become a more controlled, regulated and disciplinarian society, in which one’s standing as a good citizen relies on one’s ability to control one’s emotions, be polite, and do one’s job. The autonomous self has become our highest ideal,  and the idea of surrendering the self is seen as dangerous.

Yet ecstatic experiences are surprisingly common, we just don’t talk about them. The polling company Gallup has, since the 1960s, measured the frequency of mystical experiences in the United States. In 1960, only 20 per cent of the population said they’d had one or more. Now, it’s around 50 per cent. In a survey I did in 2016, 84 per cent of respondents said they’d had an experience where they went beyond their ordinary self, and felt connected to something greater than them. But 75 per cent agreed there was a taboo around such experiences.

There’s even a database of more than 6,000 such experiences, amassed by the biologist Sir Alister Hardy in the 1960s and now mouldering in storage in Wales. They make for a strangely beautiful read, a sort of crowdsourced Bible. Here is entry number 208: ‘I was out walking one night in busy streets of Glasgow when, with slow majesty, at a corner where the pedestrians were hurrying by and the city traffic was hurtling on its way, the air was filled with heavenly music, and an all-encompassing light, that moved in waves of luminous colour, outshone the brightness of the lighted streets. I stood still, filled with a strange peace and joy … until I found myself in the everyday world again with a strange access of gladness and of love.’

The most common word used when describing such experiences is ‘connection’ – we briefly shift beyond our separate self-absorbed egos, and feel deeply connected to other beings, or to all things. Some interpret these moments as an encounter with the divine, but not all do. The philosopher Bertrand Russell, for example, also had a ‘mystic moment’ when he suddenly felt filled with love for people on a London street. The experience didn’t turn him into a Christian, but it did turn him into a life-long pacifist.

I became interested in ecstatic experiences when I was 24 and had a near-death experience. I fell off a mountain while skiing, dropped 30 feet, and broke my leg and back. As I lay there, I felt immersed in love and light. I’d been suffering from emotional problems for six years, and feared my ego was permanently damaged. In that moment, I knew that I was OK, I was loved, that there was something in me that could not be damaged, call it ‘the soul’, ‘the self’, ‘pure consciousness’ or what-have-you. The experience was hugely healing. But was it just luck, or grace? Can one seek ecstasy?

Pullman thinks not. He says: ‘Seeking this sort of thing doesn’t work. It is far too self-centred. Things like my experience are by-products, not goals. To make them the aim of your life is an act of monumental and self-deceiving egotism.’

I disagree. It seems to me that humans have always sought ecstasy. The earliest human artefacts – the cave paintings of Lascaux – are records of Homo sapiens’ attempt to get out of our heads. We have always sought ways to ‘unself’, as the writer Iris Murdoch called it, because the ego is an anxious, claustrophobic, lonely and boring place to be stuck. As the author Aldous Huxley wrote, humans have ‘a deep-seated urge to self-transcendence’. However, we can get out of our ordinary selves in good and bad ways – what Huxley called ‘healthy and toxic transcendence’…

more…

https://aeon.co/essays/religion-has-no-monopoly-on-transcendent-experience

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Your Wedding Night Sex Will Probably Suck—and That’s Totally Normal

by Tracy Moore

Popular culture tells us that everything in love leads to the altar, and everything in sex leads to doin’ it on your wedding night. No matter that some 75 percent of us get hitched about as virginally intact as your average bunny rabbit — we still seem to treat wedding night sex as an important ritual: It consummates the marriage (if you’re religious), for one, but it also symbolizes finally coming together as legal and symbolic partners, no matter if you’ve been doing it for months or years. But studies of wedding-night sex find that after the sweet yet stressful slog that is getting married, a lot of people find that the night isn’t quite what they imagined.

One 2016 survey of 1,000 couples found that 52 percent didn’t have any sex at all that night. Respondents indicated the biggest reasons were being too drunk or too tired to get it on after a long stressful day of beaming, photo-taking, socializing and dancing. Others said they were traveling immediately for the honeymoon the next morning and needed sleep more than amore, while others said they wanted to keep partying with friends.

Another survey found that some 9 percent of couples don’t have sex on the big night because the stress of getting married led to an argument before the night’s end. Yet another survey found that in 4 percent of couples, the woman’s period got in the way. (Might we suggest that this is no reason to abstain, all other interest in doing it being equal that night.)

When asked on Reddit a few years ago what their wedding night was really like, people let loose with all manner of stories about how it really went down. “Everyone always talks about wedding night sex, but then you hear that it doesn’t happen nearly as often as you would think,” the user asked. “So how was YOUR wedding night? Did you actually work up the strength to do it, or were you so beat that you couldn’t?”

One person answered that they had managed to have sex, “but it almost felt like an obligation,” explaining:

We had been on our feet for 12 hours, dressed up in more clothes than we’d ever worn in our lives, talking to people, dancing. By the time we got to our room, we’d have both been content to just go to sleep, but we powered through it…

Others chimed in with agreement. “It was basically the, ‘Boy, glad that shit’s over with’ sex.”

Many of the responses echo this sentiment: running around for hours, drinking way too much, and being too exhausted to make it official. Some people admitted they settled for sex-like activities instead. “The whole-body effort of sex seemed an impossibility so I gave a BJ instead,” another commenter wrote. “Less effort and we get credit for doing something!

While that seems a bit anticlimactic, couples who had been together for years and were just excited to move through the big day with their lives and relationships intact didn’t seem too disappointed that they didn’t get it on. Instead they counted cash in envelopes, ate junk food and passed out.

“We got to our hotel,” one person wrote. “Ate hot fudge sundaes and crashed. We had lived together for a year. Having sex on our wedding night just didn’t seem like a big deal.”

I put the question to married friends, who gave similar answers. “We passed out and got up in like 5 in the morning to catch our honeymoon flight,” one woman told me. “We had sex, but it was like, guess we have to — we were so tired,” another one said….

more…

https://melmagazine.com/your-wedding-night-sex-will-probably-suck-and-thats-totally-normal-c5a356b9e07a

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The Binary Code of Body and Spirit: Computing Pioneer Alan Turing on Mortality

Alan Turing and Christopher Morcom. Art by Keith Hegley from The Who, the What, and the When, an illustrated celebration of the little-known inspirations behind geniuses.

“The body provides something for the spirit to look after and use.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

“The void horrifies: so we are all immortal,” Simone de Beauvoir scoffed at the religious escapism of immortality in explaining why she is an atheist, adding: “Faith allows an evasion of those difficulties which the atheist confronts honestly.” But there exists a certain orientation of spirit that is both unreligious and lucid in contemplating mortality. Einstein touched on it in his beautiful letter to the Queen of Belgium, in which he wrote: “There is, after all, something eternal that lies beyond the hand of fate and of all human delusions.” And yet he conceded that such an orientation toward mortality is reserved for those “who have been privileged to accomplish in full measure their task in life.”

To make sense of the untimely loss of a young and unrealized life is a wholly different matter, one which haunted computing pioneer Alan Turing (June 23, 1912–June 7, 1954).

Turing’s decryption of Nazi communication code is estimated to have shortened WWII by two to four years, consequently saving anywhere between 14 and 21 million lives. But despite his wartime heroism, Turing was driven to suicide after being chemically castrated by the U.K. government for being homosexual. More than half a century after his disquieting death, Queen Elizabeth II issued royal pardon — a formal posthumous apology that somehow only amplifies the tragedy of Turing’s life and death.

Tragedy had been with Turing from a young age. At fifteen, while attending the Sherborne School, he fell deeply in love with a classmate named Christopher Morcom. For the awkward and ostracized young Alan, who was bullied so severely that a group of boys once trapped him under the floorboards of a dorm dayroom and kept him there until he nearly suffocated, Christopher was everything he was not — dashing, polished, well versed in both science and art, and aglow with winsome charisma. Alan’s love was profound and pure and unrequited in the dimensions he most longed for, but Christopher did take to him with great warmth and became his most beloved, in fact his only, friend. They spent long nights discussing science and philosophy, trading astronomical acumen, and speculating about the laws of physics.

When Christopher died of bovine tuberculosis in 1930 — a disease he had contracted from infected milk, for which there was no common vaccine until after WWII — Alan fell to pieces. He was able to collect himself only through work, by burrowing so deep into the underbelly of mathematics that he emerged almost on the other side, where science and metaphysics meet. Sorrow had taken him on a crusade to make sense of reality, of this senseless ruin, and he spared no modality of thought. Most of all, he wanted to understand how he could remain so attached to someone who no longer existed materially but who felt so overwhelmingly alive in his spirit.

All the while, young Turing remained in touch with Christopher’s mother, who had taken a sympathetic liking to her son’s awkward friend. After Christopher’s death, he visited the Morcoms at their country home, Clock House, and corresponded with Mrs. Morcom about the grief they shared, about the perplexity of how a nonentity — for Christopher had ceased to exist in physical terms — could color each of their worlds so completely…

more..

https://www.brainpickings.org/

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Working Through the Strong Emotions of Sexual Identity

Photo by Peter Hershey | https://tricy.cl/2sFfhdw

On a 40-day meditation retreat, dharma teacher and LGBTQ activist Jay Michaelson came to the shocking realization that, deep down, he would change his orientation if he could.

By Dr. Jay Michaelson

It had been a cool, early December day in Barre, Massachusetts, about ten years ago. I had spent the daylight hours, what was left of them, sitting in hour-long meditation sessions and walking outside in the white, grey, and tan colors of a Massachusetts winter. It had been a peaceful day, as I recall, about two-thirds of the way through a forty-day meditation retreat at the Insight Meditation Society (IMS).

Forty days in silence. External silence, anyway, the better to hear the incessant noise of thought. The retreat had been profound, difficult, inspiring—par for the course. Four weeks in, I thought I had basically learned what I was going to learn. And then everything fell apart.

It began innocently enough: During a talk one evening, a teacher said that all of our habits, preferences, and opinions are conditions in and of the mind, and all of them can be changed. Dharma 101.

But I recoiled. Having spent over ten years trying to change my sexuality, having despaired of it to the point of suicide, and having finally given up trying to change and come out the other side healthy, sane, and whole, I felt as though I knew from experience both that some things cannot be changed and that to say it can be is enormously harmful. Even if sexuality is a phenomenon of the mind and not the body, sexual orientation is effectively hardwired in—for me, anyway, and for many other queer people. Trying to change it is as healthy as trying not to breathe.

So I was triggered. And so when the dharma talk was done, I spent the next half-hour in walking meditation, furious at the ignorance of this teacher. I paced back and forth, noting a whole lot of anger, and getting lost in it more often than not. But then, literally mid-step, I realized how attached I was to the belief that sexuality cannot be changed. It wasn’t just some intellectual difference I had with the teacher—I was really attached to my view. I had something at stake.

Then, in the next thought, I realized that I was so attached to my story that sexuality is unchangeable because I would change my sexuality if I could.

Which was shocking. At the time, I was the director of a national queer organization, and I’ve long been someone whose work and life is deeply gay-positive and celebrates the erotic and spiritual possibilities of being queer. I celebrate my sexuality and recognize it as a unique gift. But here I was, realizing that a part of me was still self-hating, still telling myself that I’d rather be different. Here is what I wrote in my journal that night:

I’m tired of hating myself

I’m tired if wanting myself to be straight, even a little.

I’m tired if “all things being equal, I’d prefer.”

That night was a dark one. It’s not that I even believed the self-hatred—I just could not believe that it was present at all. How could this be?

As I lay restless that night, I watched—and was often caught in—a caravan of thoughts and judgments: How I felt rejection, how I felt I’d disappointed my parents, how I’d failed. And I saw that “being gay” just felt bad, in a stupid, nonrational way, because people have told me so for decades. Intellectually, of course, I know not to believe them, but on a gut level, I felt unloved, unsuccessful, unappreciated. More from the journal:

Look at how much bullshit I still believe . . . I hate the hatred. It makes me feel unlovable. It makes me feel like a fraud. It makes me feel like I can never be enlightened and have no business being a spiritual teacher….

more…

https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/working-strong-emotions-sexual-identity/

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TAMING FEMALE SEXUALITY: MYTH, LIBIDO AND THE PHARMACOLOGICAL SUPPRESSION OF WOMEN

by Christina Sarich, Staff Writer Waking Times

It doesn’t take a witch hunt for most people to realize that female sexuality has been feared for as long as we can remember human history. Male-constructed images of women, and men, are so embedded in Western culture that they can appear quite “natural,” but the ways in which the patriarchy has tried to quell women’s sexuality is absurd, if not shocking.

From the beginning chapters of the Bible, in the Adam and Eve story, we, in the West, have been taught how to think about a woman’s sexual personality. The imagery is reinforced in art, prose, and modern medicine. Without tangling the web even further, the deeply rooted fear of women’s sexuality also weighs heavy on the heads of depopulationists, but we shall save this tangent for another time because there is ample and astounding evidence to prove strange cultural programming without opening that Pandora’s box. Pun intended.

I should preface, I am overjoyed that our country went through a sexual revolution, and that women are now at least legally allowed to have sex with whomever – man or woman – they choose. Nonetheless, mankind didn’t even realize that there was a correlation between the womb and sexual intercourse resulting in pregnancy until 9000 BCE, but even now obsesses with preventing a woman’s natural expression of her Divinely given sexual gifts in any way possible. Pregnancy or no pregnancy, Paleolithic societies prohibited women from having sex during their periods, yet in our very recent past, women were encouraged to use Lysol as a contraceptive. Which is more farcical?

These odd views have affected men and women alike. Men were encouraged to be circumcised, lest their wives stray to another man, and his foreskin, now proven to be sensitive just like a woman’s clitoris, was to be surgically, if not barbarically removed, to lessen the pleasure associated with sex – for both parties.

Female genital mutilation still occurs today, with more 130 million women enduring scarring, urinary issues, poor obstetric and neonatal outcomes, but aside from the patently obvious acts of removing the sexual organs themselves, how has our warped cultural training taught us to fear female sexuality, and what inane methods have they attempted to stifle this “scary beast?”

The “Hysterical” Woman

If a woman explores a sexual free-for-all, with one partner, or many, she is called hysterical – the word literally coming from the Greek word hysterikos; meaning “of the womb,” or “suffering of the womb.” Preposterously, the psychologically termed illness, “hysterical neurosis” persisted in medical literature until the 1980s.

 

This concept was based on the ridiculous notion that a woman’s womb wandered around her body (like her wandering sexual eye?) causing her to become ill. This idea resulted in doctors prescribing odd “medicines” as far back as 1900 BC, when ancient Egyptians thought the “wandering womb” could cause “excessive vaginal lubrication,” or anxiety and nervousness from erotic fantasies.

Medical “experts” later treated a woman’s excess libido by prescribing suppositories, salves, and Dover’s powder, a special combination of opium and ipecac. If that wasn’t sufficient, your genitals could be sprayed with a high-powered hose, or you would be prescribed rat poison (strychnia) to help calm your nervous system.

Birth Control and Douching

Women were also supposed to separate child-birth and sexual pleasure. One was not to be mixed with the other. In the most extreme versions of the Madonna-Whore complex, our illustrious physicians have prescribed a host of health-harming birth control methods, from the modern-day pill, which can cause cancer, to more antiquated remedies like those suggested by an American physician of the 1800s named Charles Knowlton who suggested douching as a form of contraception. After sex, women were supposed to inject a syringe full of watered-down salt, vinegar, liquid chloride, zinc sulfite or aluminum potassium sulfite into their vaginas.

 

In fact, from 1930 until 1960, the most popular contraceptive for women was Lysol disinfectant. Though Lysol as a form of birth control has since been debunked, and douching has been proven to cause numerous health problems, one in four women between the ages of 15 and 44 still douche, according to the Department of Health and Human Services…

more…

About the Author

Christina Sarich is a staff writer for Waking Times. She is a writer, musician, yogi, and humanitarian with an expansive repertoire.

This article (Taming Female Sexuality: Myth, Libido and the Pharmacological Suppression of Women) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Christina Sarich and WakingTimes.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement. Please contact WakingTimes@gmail.com for more info.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Waking Times or its staff.

http://www.wakingtimes.com/2017/06/22/taming-female-sexuality-myth-libido-pharmacological-suppression-women/

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