Showing posts with label sex. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sex. Show all posts

Saturday, April 2, 2011

Renegades

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Friday, December 3, 2010

Killing Us Softly



New World Notes News
Vol. 3, No. 49 -- December 3, 2010

This week in New World Notes, radio program #144, December 7:

Killing Us Softly:
Advertising's Image of Women

In brief

A smart, funny, and important talk. With wit and humor, Jean Kilbourne shows the preposterous body images, emotional styles, sexuality, and attitudes towards violence that consumer advertising presents to women (and men) as desirable and normal.

Kilbourne's critique is far from radical, but it is very sound, very interesting, and in places very funny. Both men and women will find this talk well worth a listen.

Caption contest!

Vote for the caption(s) that best explain the five graphic images on this page. (Winners announced next week.)

  • WTF??
  • This can't be happening
  • Please, dear Jesus, . . .
  • I dreamed I incinerated Madison Avenue . . . in my Maidenform Bra
  • OMG
  • Seven inches? I'm supposed to be impressed?
  • How do I join N.O.W.?
  • [Write in:] ____________________________

Notes, credits, & links

Based on the video (Edition 3, year 2000). Condensed and adapted to radio by KD. This video is available on The Internet Archive ( http://www.archive.org/ ). An updated version--Edition 4, 2010--is available for purchase from the Media Education Foundation ( http://www.mediaed.org/ ).

New World Notes is produced under the auspices (Latin for "unisex bathroom") of WWUH-FM, a community service of that beacon of light in darkest Connecticut, the University of Hartford.

You can listen to any installment of New World Notes online or else download it (as an mp3 audio file) for later listening. The show is archived at both radio4all.net and (from #90 onwards) The Internet Archive. Either link should get you a reverse-chrono listing of available installments. Or browse the show's Web site: Each installment has a page, and each page has links to the recorded audio.

Series overview: Political and social commentary in a variety of genres. Exploring the gap between what we want ... and what they're trying to make us settle for. Coming soon (Tuesday air debut dates shown)

  • December 14 -- Why We Fight. Not Frank Capra's classic but a new documentary on the post-9/11 world. Adapted to radio by KD.
Catch New World Notes (all times Eastern):


A-Infos Radio Project http://www.radio4all.net

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Saturday, April 10, 2010

Reproductive-Rights Crusader Bill Baird



Our principal archive, radio4all.net, has been encountering some problems.
If you have any difficulty listening online or downloading any recent
installment of the radio show, please try our other archive at
The Internet Archive.


New World Notes News
Vol. 3, No. 15 -- April 10, 2010

This Week in New World Notes, radio program #110, April 13:

Reproductive-Rights Crusader
Bill Baird

Moments before the bust: Baird tests Massachusetts' crimes-against-chastity
law at Boston University, April 6, 1967. Most graphics: Click to enlarge.


In (not overly) brief:

What John Brown was to Abolition, Bill Baird was and is to reproductive rights, including the right to abortion and the right to purchase contraceptives. The latter was still illegal in Massachusetts (and elsewhere) in the 1960s! Seeing a woman die from an attempted coat-hanger abortion changed his life. He determined to change the law.

One way to do this is to break the law, get convicted, appeal the conviction, and invite the Supreme Court to declare the law you broke unconstitutional. This method is probaby easier than persuading the Massachusetts legislature to vote in favor of any bill that even hints at encouraging "sin." So, in a talk at Boston University in 1967, Baird methodically broke just about every provision of the law that prohibited transfer, possession, display, or even discussion of contraceptives.

For reasons unknown, the authorities had neglected to bust Cardinal Cushing--even though the Archdiocese of Boston had been flagrantly violating the law for years by distributing a pamphlet titled "The Rhythm Method." They didn't neglect to bust Baird for displaying a contraceptive diaphragm and giving a can of Emko Foam to an undergraduate.

Baird had to explain to the arresting officers what a diaphragm was. None had ever seen one. One guessed that it was a large rolled condom.

Top: IUDs make great tie clips. I won't spoil the story by retelling it here.
Hear it from Baird at about 25:30 [min:sec] into the show. Actually, the
now-notorious Dalkon Shield (left) made a better tie clip than
contraceptive device.
Bottom: Fellow-traveller Michael Luckman at Saint Patrick's Cathedral,
in 1968, protesting yet another anti-birth-control encyclical from the
Vatican (Pope Paul VI).


It worked. After a fashion. Baird v. Eisenstadt became a milestone in the struggles for reproductive rights and privacy rights. Roe v. Wade cites the decision five or six times.

Baird also founded the nation's first abortion clinic.

He survived assassination attempts, 8 criminal convictions, prison brutality, the firebombing of his clinic, the breakup of his family, and the absence of any help from Planned Parenthood, NOW, ACLU, & other potential allies.

A scary, stunning, and often very funny story, well-told by Baird himself.

Notes and credits

Baird's words were recorded at a panel discussion on civil liberties--titled Courageous Convictions--held at the University of Hartford on February 16, 2010. Edited for radio by moi.

Baird's Web site: http://prochoiceleague.org/

New World Notes is produced under the auspices (Latin for "imprimatur") of WWUH-FM, a community service of that beacon of light in darkest Connecticut, the University of Hartford. Feedback to kdowst at hotmail period com.

Top: The Massachusetts jury agreed with Baird, convicting anti-abortion
terrorist John Salvi of murder in 1996.
Bottom: Reproductive-rights rally at Union Square, September 2009.
Women's-health-care pioneer Merle Hoffman stands at the mic (left).


Coming Soon -- Tuesday debut date shown:

  • April 20 -- The Unheard Voice of the Majority


Catch New World Notes (all times Eastern):


Except in Massachusetts (and other states) in the 1960s--where
education was considered a "crime against chastity." The "chastity-
through-ignorance" movement flourished again in the W. Bush
years with the preposterous & discredited (but that never stopped
'em!) "abstinence-only sex education." When it comes to anti-sex
lunkheadedness, the Evangelical Protestants have reached parity
with the Catholic hierarchy. (In my experience, the Catholic
congregants are a good deal saner than the Pope, Cardinal Cushing,
Jerry Falwell, Joe Biden, & the entire Bush Administration, combined--
including former Postmaster-General John C. Potter!)

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Thursday, February 4, 2010

The Top Ten



New World Notes News
Vol. 3, No. 6 -- February 6, 2010

This Week in New World Notes, radio program #101, Feb. 9:

The Top Ten

Top quotation of the decade #5

Executive summary

Let the corporate media fret about the Top 10 fashion blunders, TV bloopers, waist-trimming foods, tennis players, and the like. We'll read or play recordings discussing the Top 10

  • quotations, 2000-2009
  • reasons to visit New Zealand
  • high-level political sex scandals (Bill & Monica didn't even make the list!); and . . . this ya gotta hear . . .
  • military combat rifles.

I add a few footnotes here and there, but--honest!--I didn't make any of this stuff up.

This week's song

  • Jeanne C. Riley, Harper Valley PTA (1968)

Top: New Zealand Prime Minister John Key (2009).
Bottom: Top high-level sex scandal #5: JFK & Marilyn Monroe.
Is that Dean Martin on the far left? The President also enjoyed the
favors of Angie Dickinson (actress), Inga Arvad (journalist),
Blaze Starr (stripper), Judith Exner Campbell (mistress to Mob
boss), two White House secretaries affectionately called
"Fiddle" and "Faddle," and possibly Jacqueline B. Kennedy--though
who could blame her for having a headache? And they
complained about Clinton!


Notes and Credits

New Zealand and combat rifles from videos available on YouTube. David Rosen, "America's Top Ten Sex Scandals," CounterPunch, August 1, 2007. David Sirota, "A Decade's Top Ten Quotations," Common Dreams, January 1, 2010.

New World Notes is produced under the auspices (Latin for "gun") of WWUH-FM, a community service of that beacon of light in darkest Connecticut, the University of Hartford. Feedback to kdowst at hotmail period com.

Each site has its quirks and blind sides . . . but for consistently fine analysis, commentary, and (in the latter case) news--all from a Progressive perspective--you won't go wrong with CounterPunch (www.counterpunch.org) and Common Dreams (www.commondreams.org). Each updated daily, each free, each with very unobtrusive (CP) or no (C.D.) advertising.

Fearless Prediction (a propos de rien), here placed on the record: Venezuela gets it next. Before Iran. You read it here first!

Free subscription to weekly New World Notes email newsletter upon request.

Top sex scandal #6: Two prominent politicians and diplomats of the mid-
19th century-- James Buchanan and William Rufus King--were house-
mates and long-term intimate companions ... intimate enough to attract
the mockery of their peers. After serving six weeks as Vice President
(1853, under Pierce), King died of tuberculosis and hence was unable to
act as First Lady during Buchanan's presidency (1857-1861). Historians
still hotly debate who was the worst President ever: Pierce or Buchanan?
For a century and a half after Buchanan, Americans have resolutely
refused to elect another homosexual or another Pennsylvanian as President.
Daguerreotype of King by Matthew Brady.

Coming Soon

  • February 16 -- Not All Christians Are Evil
  • February 23 on WWUH -- Live, hour-long program (Pledge Marathon)
  • February 23 elsewhere -- Resisting Violence: Kathy Kelly

Catch New World Notes (all times Eastern):



Top: Top combat rifle #4: M-1 Garand. The M-1 talks, nobody walks.
The WWII-era soldier holds a "clip," which holds eight .30-'06
cartridges for the rifle. By now, armies have largely replaced big,
heavy, powerful battle rifles such as the M-1 (Garand is the name of
the model's inventor) with smaller, handier, and less-powerful
"assault rifles." While assault weapon is a meaningless if scary-
sounding term concocted by the Gun-Ban Lobby to frighten the
uninformed, assault rifle is a real type of rifle.

Bottom: April 17, 2004. Flanked by NRA Executive VP Wayne
LaPierre (left) and NRA President Kayne Robinson, Vice President
Cheney admires the new Model 2003A2 U.S. Army Assault Rifle. The
'03A2 is slated to replace the current standard, the ageing M-16, by
the end of 2011. A Marine Corps sniper version now in late
development--the Model 2003A3--features a longer barrel, collapsible
ramrod, and a telescopic sight engraved with verses from the New
Testament.
Yes, I'm pulling your leg about the Model 2003A2 & 'A3. The rifle
shown is a new flintlock "Kentucky long rifle"--the sort of gun used
by Daniel Boone's uncle. In 2004, the Vice President accidentally
shot and injured a friend and hunting partner. Why the NRA would
give the man a firearm escapes me!




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Friday, January 1, 2010

Varieties of Sexual Experience


New World Notes News
Vol. 3, No. 1 -- January 1, 2010

Screen capture from Perversion for Profit (1964). Links in text, below.

This Week in New World Notes, radio program #96, Jan. 5:

Varieties of Sexual Experience,
OR:
Goldberg's Other Variations

Workers' summary

This year's Annual Sex Show--okay, we skipped 2009--takes a lighthearted look at variations from the tried and true. Comedian Jimmy Tingle explains gays & homophobia. A 1964 documentary from the Citizens for Decent Literature--Perversion for Profit--exposes (so to speak) the Communist-inspired flood of filth peddled to our precious children from every newsstand in America. Speaking of children, social satirist Paul Krassner discusses how to respond when your 16-year-old daughter tells you that she's bid adieu to virginity. And Leonard Cohen again confuses an unfaithful girlfriend with the Collapse of Western Civilization.

Top: Charles Keating, anti-smut crusader and convicted swindler
(source: Thomas Ives/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images).
Bottom: Boston landmark Jimmy Tingle

This week's songs

  • Leonard Cohen, Everybody Knows
  • Robert Preston & chorus, from Ya Got Trouble

On Charles Keating and his Citizens for Decent Literature:

From Danny Gallagher, The Top 10 People Who Almost Destroyed Fun

  • The former face of the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal didn't spend his entire life trying to take the life savings of every man who walked into the scope of his view. He also spent part of it trying to take their pornography from them. The Cincinnati attorney formed the Citizens for Decent Literature in the late 1950s, an organization that used any legal recourse necessary to outlaw pornography in all of its forms. He even produced his own film, Perversion for Profit, that became a huge bestseller among disappointed men in trench coats.
    He not only failed to outlaw porno, but ended up in jail on charges of wire and bankruptcy fraud, where the term "Perversion for Profit" has more to do with earning cigarettes.

Notes & Credits

New World Notes is produced under the auspices (Latin for "very noses") of WWUH-FM, a community service of the University of Hartford. Feedback to kdowst at hotmail period com.

http://www.jimmytingle.com/

Paul Krassner commissioned celebrated Mad Magazine cartoonist Wallace Wood to draw the most famous naughty cartoon of the 1960s, Disneyland Memorial Orgy. Krassner published the black-and-white drawing as the centerfold in his magazine, The Realist, in 1967. Portions of the drawing, which was subsequently colored, appear on the book cover shown, below. You'll find the complete colored version at the top of Krassner's Web page: http://www.paulkrassner.com/.

Download or listen online to NWN's previous Annual Sex Show (April 2008).

The show's words by Krassner are read from an interview published in CounterPunch, "Sex and Violins": http://www.counterpunch.org/krassner04092008.html

Free subscription to weekly New World Notes email newsletter upon request. Subscribers list is totally confidential.

Krassner's latest book (2009).

Catch New World Notes (all times Eastern):



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Friday, August 28, 2009

What Does Woman Want?

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New World Notes News
Volume 2, Number 35 -- September 1, 2009

This week in New World Notes, radio program #79, September 1 & 3:

Some more color in her life?

What Does
Woman Want?

from the blog, Traumdeutung*, by (apparently) Amy H. Konig:

Thursday, June 05, 2008

What I would like to know is: what do people mean when they ask, What does Hillary want? . . . Obviously, they want her to go away, and they want her to name her price. Whether you agree or disagree with this sentiment, though, it is clear that there are a vast number of ways to express it that do not involve quoting one of the most famous misogynist phrases in history.

Late in life, Sigmund Freud reportedly uttered the question “What does woman want?” (“Was will das Weib?”) to Marie Bonaparte. This phrase, which does not appear in the Standard Edition, has nevertheless become one of the founder of modern psychology's most famous quotations. When Freud asked this question, he meant to convey that the question itself is unanswerable: that women are simply one of the great unsolved mysteries (and problems) in life.

Along with his characterization of the female psyche as a “dark continent,” and his description of female desire as “veiled in obscurity,” this quotation is regularly invoked as evidence of Freud’s misogyny. It is perhaps one the most contentious phrases in all of psychoanalysis, and it has had a profound effect on Freud’s legacy.

http://amyhkonig.blogspot.com/2008/06/what-does-hillary-want.html (Emphasis added.)

To marry a nice Jewish doctor?

On New World Notes I have courageously risen to defend people nearly universally regarded as scum. I have said that Iran PM Mosadeq may not have been the Communist slavemaster the Shah and the U.S. and Iranian media (with a little help from the CIA) painted him to be 1953.

I have said that Lynndie England and Charles Grainer indeed may have done nothing to restore the honor of the Hillbilly community . . . but should not have been jailed for single-handedly introducing sexually perverted torture to Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, the CIA's "black sites" in Eastern Europe, and the Maryland State Training School for Boys.

Viagra for Her? The title of the photo is "Female Viagra."
I say it's Pepto-Bismol, and I say the hell with it.

And I say yet again--I believe for the fourth time, in print--that in the waning years of the (William) Clinton administration, the only public figure to display any class was the unjustly maligned intern, Monica Lewinski. And let her who has never granted a favor to a man who proved undeserving of her kindness cast the first stone.

Yes, Underdogs 'R' Us here at New World Notes.

A boyfriend who's not afraid to take charge?

Yet even I hesitate to defend a scoundrel, fool, and blackguard as notorious as Sigmund Freud. The man who invented--and ruthlessly enforced--patriarchal oppression of women, female genital mutilation, menstrual cramps, pain in childbirth, hysteria, cellulite, and the fin-de-siecle bourgeois Weltanschauung of Mitteleuropa.

Yes, that last crime is so great that it takes at least three languages (counting the "of") even to name it!

Thus, with trepidation do I question whether speaking "Was will das Weib?" indicates misogyny or rather . . . deep wisdom.

"Zipless f*cks," anyone?

With trepidation do I ask whether discourse that Amy Konig alleges to be "one of the most famous misogynist phrases in history" . . . in fact be "misogynist" or instead a stunning personal and philosophical epiphany--the moment a man, celebrated for his insight into the psyche, has a revelation akin to Saul's on the road to Tarsus and at last is struck by the profundity of Socrates' wisest statement (IMHO), "All I know is that I know nothing."

That the Times do a better job of news reporting? Here, in 2009,
they discover & report the female orgasm--36 years after Our
Bodies, Ourselves discovered it first. What next--"Ho Chi Minh
seen as likely winner of Viet Nam national election in '54"?

I assume that the blur by the model's mouth is her soul escaping
her body--only temporarily, one hopes. Yep: the literal meaning
of "ecstasy"! Bad Taste is Timeless. Note to Photo Editor: I don't
claim to understand Woman any better than Freud did; however,
to me, that cover photo does not capture "Desire." Two seconds
ealier, you woulda nailed it. Next time, pick a photographer with
quicker reflexes. On the difference between "desire" and "glorious,
wide-screen, Technicolor orgasm," please see Fear of Flying.

"When Freud asked this question [viz., What does Woman want?], he meant to convey that the question itself is unanswerable: that women are simply one of the great unsolved mysteries (and problems) in life. . . ."

Since "and problems" is in parentheses, I assume that Konig is reluctant to publicly attribute the notion to Freud. Strip away her parenthetical addition, and does anyone have any problems with the words that remain? Is it "misogynist" to have some sense of the universe's impenetrable (you should pardon the adjective) mysteries?

A little something from Tiffany's?**

"Along with [Freud's] characterization of the female psyche as a 'dark continent,' and his description of female desire as 'veiled in obscurity,' this quotation is regularly invoked as evidence of Freud’s misogyny."

Fantasizing about George Clooney and/or the young Sean Connery while making love to me, I can understand. But Jeremy Wallace?? If that fantasy isn't "veiled in obscurity," then will some kind person please explain the obvious to me?

An electric Dobro . . . and a man who really knows how
to use it?? (Chacun a son gout--pardon my French!)

Okay, I'll knock it off. I named the installment "What Does Woman Want?" just to be cheeky. I don't know the answer. I don't know if the question even makes sense. I don't know if such a thing as "Woman" even exists. And I've been married to one woman or another--actually, only a couple of them--for 33 years. I don't even know what Man wants. Well, apart from that.

For this installment, I had planned to broadcast audio of two different groups of young American women: (1) women of color engaged with issues of reproductive health care and (2) Moslems engaged with issues of social and personal freedom. My ambitions were larger than my timeslot, so we must postpone hearing from the latter group.

We shall hear (if God permits) former Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders--no longer young but still feisty, funny, and intelligent--addressing the women's healthcare-advocacy group SisterSong in Atlanta.

Top: Dr. Jocelyn Elders

Music of the week

You'd never forgive me if I didn't follow (my condensed version of) Elders' talk with The Foremen's song, "Firing the Surgeon General." And postponing the Moslem segment freed up a few additional minutes, into which I transplanted*** one of the better male imaginings of a woman's inner life since Hemingway wrote "Hills Like White Elephants" and Joyce created Molly Bloom.

Incidentally, it's worth giving $3 to the @#^%&{!s that own Blockbuster in order to rent Back To School, in order again to see and hear Sally Kellerman, looking ravishing in red, breathlessly read the end of Molly's soliloquy in Ulysses to her Freshman English class. How anybody could pick Jeremy Wallace over Professor Kellerman is beyond me! Even Dangerfield is on my side on this issue. Pretty funny when he emerges from his classroom daydream shouting, "Yes! . . . Yes! . . . Yes!"


OK, now that I've finished showing off my degrees in English, let me say that the song in which a man does a half-decent job of imagining a woman's inner life is James McMurtry's "Fireline Road"--not "Firing the Surgeon General"--and we play this (the former) too. James, of course, is the son of talented novelist Larry McMurtry, whose best-known novels depict in gritty realism the . . . oh, never mind!

Coming soon (dates of WWUH Tuesday broadcast shown):

  • September 8--Labor Day Musical Special -- featuring songs by Anne Feeney, The Foremen, Mad Agnes, John McCutcheon, Utah Phillips, and David Rovics
  • September 15--Can We Save the Environment?

Catch New World Notes (all times Eastern):

Men who listen? Top billing?

Footnotes

* I assume Traumdeutung means "interpretation of dreams." For a lady who doesn't much care for that Dead White Male-chauvinist-Schwein from Vienna, Konig seems to be quite the Freudienne.

** One is reminded of the beauty and insight of those elegiac verses in Second Corinthians:

  • Men grow cold as girls grow old,
    And we all lose our charms in the end;
    But square-cut or pear-shape,
    These rocks won't lose their shape:
    Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend!

*** Qui transtulit sustinet (Connecticut state motto).

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