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On Their Bikes
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Tag Archives: Culture
San Francisco is Getting It Right
We’re down to somewhere between 33% and 35% of cutting male infants in the United States. More parents are beginning to question this bizarre, antiquated practice. I’m not really wanting to advocate more laws, but I wish there had been one when I was born.
The following is an article in the guardian.co.uk, written by Neil Howard and Rebecca Steinfeld.
Time to ban male circumcision?
San Francisco voters will decide later this year whether, like its female counterpart, male infant circumcision should be outlawed. If passed, article 50 — the “Genital Cutting of Male Minors” — would make it unlawful to circumcise, cut, or mutilate the foreskin, testicles, or penis of another person aged under 18. The bill includes an exemption for cases of medical necessity, but not for custom or ritual, which has profound implications for the many Jews and Muslims who consider it an essential part of their religious or cultural practice.
Unsurprisingly, the bill has attracted considerable controversy. Some regard it as a modern manifestation of western antisemitism, while certain feminist groups consider the idea of comparing male and female genital cutting to be both offensive and unsubstantiated.
Neither the World Health Organisation nor the UN oppose male circumcision, and given that the procedure is so unquestioned that 33% of American boys still undergo it, one might think that they have a point. But is it really so simple? And are the differences between male and female circumcision really so straightforward?
According to research, the sexual damage caused by female and male genital cutting can be extensive. Female genital cutting, which can involve removal of the clitoris, may reduce the likelihood of orgasm and cause complications during childbirth. Similarly, male circumcision can result in excruciating pain, nerve destruction, infection, disfigurement and sometimes death. Like the clitoris, the foreskin serves a sexual purpose, and it protects the “head” of the penis from outside elements.
Circumcision From a Jewish Perspective
There are growing numbers coming down on the side against circumcision. There are growing numbers of men who regret being denied the choice. Cutting off an infants foreskin needs to stop. It’s the way we’re born. Despite the fact some men would choose circumcision, they deserve the right to be old enough to make the choice. Even in Africa, where AIDS is so pervasive, where research indicates circumcision reduces the risk of this dreaded disease, is it a better alternative to education and good hygiene?
A Jewish friend of mine, fraught with his own mixed emotions about this time honored but controversial practice, has spent a great deal of time researching the Jewish point of view. He has found many who oppose circumcision among our Jewish brothers and sisters. A sampling of the opinions he has collected are listed below, followed by links to other informative sites.
The current San Francisco circumcision referendum has made the public aware of the severe physical consequences of the controversial surgery. The idea that an individual has the right to their own body is recent by historical standards. For many years, a number of courageous Jewish and Israeli scholars, historians, activists, and parents have raised serious objections to circumcision surgery. More and more Jews are choosing not to circumcise their sons. These Jewish voices against circumcision are just starting to enter the mainstream conversation.
Here are some of these pioneers in their own words.
“Coming from a European background… where many Jews reject a brit milah as an archaic and barbaric ritual… This author grew up in France in a traditional Jewish family. Not a single male of her generation or her children’s generation within her large family (or in her circle of Jewish friends) was ever circumcised.”
- Nelly Karsenty, Humanistic Judaism, 1988.
*
“Judaism has always been a core piece of my identity, even though my practice and understanding have evolved over the years. I have great reverence for what we hold as spiritual. When the authorities of my tradition define the sacred in a way that violates the most elemental and life-giving forces, mothers and babies, then something is very wrong. That which is not ethical, cannot be spiritual. That is a basic Jewish tenet… It is Judaism that has taught me that reverence for life, the principle of pikuah nefesh, and the mandate incumbant upon all of us to distinguish (l’havdeel) between what is holy and what is profane. It is precisely these fundamental tenets of Judaism that have led me to conclude that circumcision is not holy in terms of Jewish ethics.… What is most satisfying to me is knowing that I have helped a number of parents, particularly Jewish parents, come to the conclusion that they can be good Jews and leave their baby intact.”
- Miriam Pollack, Defying Convention: An Interview With Miriam Pollack, Beyond the Bris, July 27, 2011
*
“Circumcision is child abuse…It is a poor way to introduce a newborn male into the world and into the Jewish community. This presentation will focus on my experience as an active Jew living in an observant Jewish community in Brooklyn, New York, who chose not to have his son circumcised. I will present the brit (literally “covenant”) b’lee milah (without circumcision) ceremony that my wife, a full participant in the decision, and I held on the eighth day of our son Sammy’s life.”
- Moshe Rothenberg, Ending Circumcision in the Jewish Community.
*
“Mutilation of the divinely made human body is as far from Judaism as anything could be… Torah mentions circumcision only cursorily. Circumcision is conspicuously absent from the Sinai commandments, and from the subsequent listings of rules… Deut30:6 mentions circumcision metaphorically at most, “circumcise your heart.” No less likely is the meaning, “tame your pride.”
- Israeli Linguist Vadim Cherny, How Judaic is the circumcision?
*
“Laurie Evans is the director of the New York Hudson Valley Chapter of the National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers. She said that as a Jewish woman, it was difficult to stand up to her family.
“Once I witnessed a bris (ritual Jewish circumcision), understood the function of the foreskin and the long, lasting harm of circumcision, I had to follow my conscience and leave my son intact,” Evans testified.
“My son is now 20, is grateful, as he understands just what he was spared,” Evans said. “When I realized how many parents were uninformed about this surgery, I founded and became director of the New York Hudson Valley Chapter of NOCIRC.”
- WND, March 05, 2010
Our Bodies
There was no Internet when I was a young boy. Our natural curiosity about the opposite sex and our own sex mouldered in a forbidden Twilight Zone in the back of our innocent minds. If we wanted to know what’s under a girl’s clothes, we had to resort to Mom’s medical book (woefully disappointing) or a copy of National Geographic that happened to feature some remote tribe of naked Africans. To this day I haven’t figured out why the exposure of Africans and primitive Amazonian villagers are some how morally acceptable while everyone else’s is immoral and lewd.
At around age eight I got my first glimpse of what’s inside a girls panties. It happen in a friend’s backyard, in a playhouse built by the friend’s father. Aware the little girl down the street had an inclination to give the boys a peek, me and two other boys invited her to join us in my friend’s playhouse, where we right away made our desires known. She hesitated; perhaps because there were three boys and just one girl. Negotiations began. One of us would show ours if she showed hers. All three of us gave in when she insisted we all show ours, provided she goes first, which she did. Moments later, racked with apprehension about my turn coming up, my eyes widened on her little twat. She seemed perfectly delighted by our amazement, but steadfastly refused to let my more forthright friend to touch it.
The moment passed. Her panties were back up. It was our turn. The bravest of the three of us went next, at which time my friend’s mother poked her head in the door to let him know it was time for lunch. She gasped in horror. Our hearts dropped. In the blink of an eye, our feet took flight, all accept an angry mother’s son that was doomed to face the consequences. Caught and scarred for life.
Imagine a small town in 1950s Wisconsin. That’s where and when this happened. My next scarring came when I inadvertently referenced a female body part to my mother. It was during time I had been hanging around my father’s the auto parts store, listening to the teenage boys that were gathered around their Chevys, blustering about going to Texas for a little Texas pussy. Back at the house I found my mother in the kitchen and told her I was going to Texas for a little Texas pussy, then shrank to the floor when she screeched. Knowing Texas was a sunny state, I thought those boys had been talking about sunshine. I can still feel the scars from that lecture. No wonder I had reached mid-life before I got out in a public park reserved for nudist and enjoyed the feel of the sun on my skin.
So why are so many so uptight about the human body?
The human body is a sensual, mysterious, beautiful work designed by Mother Nature. Why aren’t more of us celebrating and enjoying it?
So what’s wrong with this picture?
She’s dressed for a day of sun and swimming … he’s dressed for what? A snowstorm?
So how about this … or at least something close
or better still, this …
I know … we’re not all young and beautiful. So what? Isn’t life too short not to enjoy the sensual joy of our body, even if it’s not in perfect shape? If everyone was perfect, this would be a very boring world. So why not get out there and feel alive, feel the sun, the fresh air and other people’s eyes on your skin?
I recently spent a week on the Florida west coast, a state that has 2276 miles of beaches. In the whole state, there is only one legal nude beach, Haulover near Miami. What’s up with that? Two or three city blocks out of 2276 miles! Every man I saw on the beach that I went to, young and old, was clad in those ridiculous balloony outfits. How do they swim in those? What keeps the wind from blowing them away? When they float they look like a guy that fell from the sky and landed on a parachute.
I live in Texas, a big state, millions of people. In the entire state there is just one place human beings can get naked, legally that is. McGregor Park, commonly known as Hippie Hollow, a sunny, sloping, multi-tiered shore on Lake Travis just north of Austin. My wife and I have spent weekends there: a motel room by night, sun and fresh air by day, sharing the unspoken kinship with other like-minded naked adults, looking and being looked at.
Refreshing
Biker’s get naked for Earth Day
By Christopher Crosby in the Maine Campus
As the sun glinted off of assembled bikes, the air ripe with the smell of drying paint and the scents of spring, a slight breeze carried trills of nervous laughter and ruffled through shirts and pants scattered haphazardly on the packed dirt road.
Around me, belt and bra buckles unclasped in unison and fell to the ground.
I hesitated, looking around at the 50 plus people in various states of undress and, taking a deep breath, I removed the last vestiges of my modesty.
For nature and journalism, I was prepared to do my part.
Whether loved or hated, the much-anticipated naked Earth Day bike ride, a University of Maine tradition, was back again.
Dating back to 1970, April 22 sees celebrations on campus of International Mother Earth Day, as it is recognized by the United Nations.
Embracing the all-natural spirit, I joined other brave souls to bare all for the planet. Disrobing, we smeared ourselves in green paint — some applying lotion to keep themselves sleek and shiny.
I arrived at the determined meeting point — the out-of-the-way intersection of Grove Street and Allagash Road — panting for breath. My trusty steed, a relic of a bicycle with two flat tires, seemed inadequate. I was sure I would end up separated from the group.
Trying to shake my trepidation, Amy M-, one of the event’s organizers, said it was the largest showing of nude bikers she had seen in her three rides.
“It’s great every year,” she said. “It’s liberating.”
Bryan Mayo, a relaxed three-year naked ride veteran and co-organizer for this year’s event, described what would be the worst-case scenario.
“Falling off your bike,” Mayo said. “It’s the only rule we really have: If one person goes down, we all wait.”
After clothes are removed and collected in a volunteer’s car, the crew sets off. John V- and Robert K- — struck by a touch of genius and wielding the shaft of a vuvuzela — lashed a chair to a platform and pulled the contraption behind a bike chariot-style.
The most adventuresome of the lot — a unicyclist whose wheel was adorned with a paper reconstruction of the earth — boldly peddled in the front of the line.
Is Hollywood Coming to Terms With Male Parts?
This from Newsweek
Hollywood Confronts the Last Taboo
Why are so many actors dropping their pants?
A film’s success rises or falls on the smallest of details. And so it was that the director of this month’s medieval stoner comedy Your Highness found himself in a boardroom with the suits at Universal Studios, discussing every last facet of his minotaur’s manhood. How to light the half-man/half-bull’s prosthetic appendage? How large should the dimensions be? And what would the anatomy suggest about the beast’s religious leanings? “We took the leap, culturally, and we circumcised him,” the director, David Gordon Green, explains.
Yes, much has changed in Hollywood since Clark Gable pushed the boundaries of taste by appearing without an undershirt in 1934’s It Happened One Night. For decades the dividing line between an R and an X rating was decidedly phallic-shaped. Not anymore. Male genitalia are getting unprecedented screen time at the multiplex and all over premium cable. “Male nudity has a humorous value because it’s taboo,” says Green, whose film garnered an R. “There’s a gracefulness to the female form that’s subject to this Last Tango in Paris, Jayne Mansfield–type of adoration. Where guys just don’t get the same shot. So that, for me, is where it’s ripe to come in and pull the pants down.”
Full-frontal dude-ity isn’t limited to visual punchlines in comedies like Forgetting Sarah Marshall and this summer’s The Hangover Part II. Male genitals (or, to use the now popular Hollywood vernacular, “peens”) are cropping up across the cultural grid, on cable shows like Starz’s Spartacus: Blood and Sand and HBO’s Game of Thrones, and in blue-chip Broadway fare like Equus, where Daniel Radcliffe showed he’s more than just Harry Potter. Over the years, A-list actors like Richard Gere, Tom Cruise, and Ewan McGregor have also played the full-monty card to establish their dramatic bona fides, but the full-frontal shots were fleeting. Now nude guys get much more hang time.
Take the Showtime reality series Gigolos, which follows the sexploits of high-priced male escorts plying their trade in Las Vegas. Even when the men aren’t shown servicing their female clientele, the show features no shortage of man parts. “Depending on your perspective and upbringing, more male nudity can be viewed as less repressed and more balanced with what we see of women,” says Gigolos executive producer Jay Blumenfield. “Or it can be a sign of the coming apocalypse. Our feeling is that a naked body is nothing to be ashamed of.”
The trend has Hollywood directors facing the kinds of casting decisions that used to bedevil their porn-making brethren. For a sequence in March’s raunch comedy Hall Pass, Owen Wilson’s doofus character passes out in a gym hot tub and is revived by a naked man in the locker room. The nude guy was a small part, but the movie’s directors, Bobby and Peter Farrelly, had to vet reams of actors’ photos to find someone who, uh, fit the bill. Once they’d found their man and were shooting the sequence, Wilson began to fret about photos of the scene leaking from the set. “That was Owen’s biggest fear in doing that scene,” Bobby Farrelly says. “Someone’s going to snap a picture of that on their phone, and it was going to get out before the movie was released. At least now there’s context for him hanging out with this giant penis.”
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Young Irish Women See Nothing Wrong With Going Topless
Some 70 per cent of Irish women under the age of 30 are happy to go topless while on holidays, a new survey has shown.
According to the the results of recent research carried out by Club 18-30, there is a marked contrast between racy 18-30-year-old holidaymakers and the more reserved over 30s.
According to the online survey of several hundred Irish holidaymakers, 70 per cent of 18-30 year old females are happy to sunbathe topless, but more than 50 per cent of over 30s rule this out completely.
Similarly, about 50 per cent of men under 30 don’t have a problem visiting a nude beach, while almost 60 per cent of their older counterparts would be uncomfortable doing so.
Meanwhile, close to 68 per cent of males are happy to have their other halves sunbathe topless.
“The youth market which we are serving clearly like to let loose,” says Sharon Harney of tour operator Club 18-30. “‘They want a relaxed, fun-loving time from their holidays, and are obviously a good deal more daring than the previous generation.”
Skin
Men claim to be much more comfortable in their own skin than women, with 35 per cent believing they have the ideal beach body, compared to only 7 per cent of women.
Oddly, the study found a number of men willing to answer a question on what male has the most idyllic body and 42 per cent voted for Matthew McConaughey.
Amongst women, Kim Kardashian has the most desirable bikini body, closely followed by curvy British contender Kelly Brook.
Enjoying the Sun & Fresh Air
A Review Recently Posted on Amazon
A Song in the Park
Don’t let the title fool you: “A Song in the Park” may sound quaint or confined, but the park in question is the enormous Big Bend National Park in southwest Texas, and the song is no less than the melody of love in a marvelous arrangement unexpected yet familiar. The protagonists–a surgeon running from a fatal mistake, and a park ranger secluding himself from a failed relationship–overcome their initial surprise at their easy affinity to develop a deep relationship forged in the trials of commitments to profession, family, and community. With an entertaining and well-developed supporting cast, the two main characters literally build their place in the world as they overcome the challenges of bigotry and narrow-mindedness, all in the build-up to a nail-biting climax in which those negative characteristics are personified by a criminal hiding somewhere in the park’s vast desert landscape. This is terrific writing by Brant, with deft treatment of the everyday intimacies that nourish any love relationship (regardless of ethnicity or sexual orientation). In the end, the “song in the park” is a sweet metaphor: the sunny, joyful harmony of something (the park/the couple’s relationship) that is both integrally natural as well as dependent on the care and maintenance of man. Highly enjoyable read with an uplifting message!
A note from the author:
I always appreciate those who take the time to write a review on Amazon. And since I’m trying to tempt you read my novel, I’ll share them with you here. Bear in mind much of my personal mail comes from women who have read this tale. It’s not just men, gay, straight or in-between, who enjoy a thoughtfully written human romantic drama. The book is available in Kindle format or paperback at Amazon.com.
Martin
A Note From Martin
I’ve been asked why a serious writer has a blog about naked men. Well, first and foremost I write about men, their challenges, their emotions, their sexuality, not to mention the female characters who are always influential in every man’s life. Secondly, the blog is a diversion from sitting hunched over a keyboard day after day. That, coupled with a bike ride now and then, a good book or a good movie rounds out my weeks quite nicely.
As for the blog, I want to celebrate the male and female form, without all the misguided social mores. There is nothing immoral, shameful or sinful about any part of the human body. On the contrary, the human body is nature’s finest work, a thing of magic and mystery, a thing of beauty. I quite agree clothes are a practical necessity, but on a beach? Or sunning in the park. I find it distasteful that we indoctrinate our children to be ashamed of their bodies, that there is something dirty about certain body parts. They grow up, like so many of us have, to deny themselves the natural joy of their own body, and the sensual sharing of it with others.
I want to celebrate human sexuality, no matter what form it takes shape , stripped of the demagoguery handed down through the ages. Pay attention to your mind. Get down under the countless negative layers imposed on you from the day you were born, and your mind will guide you through the maze of right and wrong. Follow the natural edicts ingrained in human reasoning and it will lead you without the autocratic preachings of history’s self-righteous. You aren’t by nature sexual heathens run amuck. You will want someone to love, someone to share your body with, someone to share your life; and by following the compass you were born with, you will accomplish this without all the useless baggage. Thinly disguised and concurrent with the plot, just as it is here on this blog, you’ll find this is the same theme in my novels.