Morality and Contraception - I ♥ You...Does that mean love or lust? ...I know, a lame title, but I couldn’t think of a good one that didn’t have the word ‘fuck’ in it.*

I have been exercising a bit lately, trying to shed some of those winter pounds that I previously told you about in cheating with sex on my iPhone calorie thing. Anyway, I have been running on a treadmill and using a Chuck Norris gym machine thing and a strange thing that I have noticed is a decent heart shaped sweat mark on my chest after a good work out session. 

I know, gross, but at the same time maybe not...no?  It’s strange, because it is pretty much directly over where my heart is. This is partly because my chest is starting to lose the winter man-cans and make me look a little less like my Great Aunt Binnie (by winter man-cans, I mean winter 2009, which haven’t been removed yet due to children, work, beer and other things). So when I am running, sweat runs down the middle of my chest on the part of my shirt that touches my skin and hey presto, I heart you all and look like an 80s bass player. 

Yet it’s a puzzle that the heart shaped icon and emoticon that we use has no real resemblance to the human heart. They look very different. Valentines Day cards are sent by all these people that are claiming something; love; attraction; fondness or the like and they have become interchangeable with a heart and love type symbol. Even remembering back to school days of MSC Catholic boys school, seeing paintings of a very anglocised Jesus with a Valentines Day type heart illuminating from inside the big man’s chest. 

And the readers with a higher knowledge of the trivial and meaningless will be saying, “MIkey, Mikey, it’s not a heart; it is the flower of a silphion weed that our culture has embraced as the symbol of hearts and love.”  

The plant silphion used to grow wildly in what is now Libya, yet was harvested to extinction during early Roman times. The last stock of it was reputedly given to the Roman Emperor Nero.  It was always considered as a gift from Apollo, so its supernatural powers may have been over-bearing on the truth of its fragile existence on this planet.

We know it was used medicinally, but mainly it seemed to have been used as a contraceptive. We know of groovy stories of sexual conquests from this likes of Pausanias in a story of the Dioscuri, staying with Phormion , "For it so happened that his maiden daughter was living in it. By the next day this maiden and all her girlish apparel had disappeared, and in the room were found images of the Dioscuri, a table, and silphion upon it.”

SuPERB

What does that really say about sending someone a valentine? Are we wanting to express love or express a desire to get in their pants?  Thinking about it now, if we are giving someone a valentine heart, a declaration of love or a drunken facebook post using that symbol, ought we be more apt to use a symbol of a condom and some wine; or maybe some massage oil and a morning after pill? What about our same-sex preferring brothers and sisters? What modern symbol could they embrace? But I digress...

Has the meaning changed somewhere throughout the course of history from lust to love? Perhaps  it is just incorrect to try and separate the two. For my mind, love and lust go hand in hand. Lust without love is perversion, whether that love lasts for a lifetime of a little longer than a quick shag is irrelevant, it has to be there or it’s just mutual masturbation (we have talked about this before).

More to the point is how does morality get blackmailed by the strange chaos of history and human progress?  Morality, outside of pure philosophy, has always been based on scientific-style language and religious dogma.

To be a little technical, it is more likely that silphion resin was an abortive rather than a contraceptive drug.  In those times, little to nothing would have been known about the difference. Before Newton’s understanding of God as creator rather than controller, everything happened by the will of God.

It has only been in the last few hundred years that we have discovered exactly how human reproduction works (albeit we still have a long way to go) and things like if and how menstruation cycles and different things can be studied and utilised for pleasure, prior to this, all kinds of nonsense ‘truths’ existed about the morality of the sexuality, and it was generally based on scientific understandings no more or less stupid for us today than those scientific truths of our day will appear to humans hundreds of years from now.

More than 4000 years ago, Egyptian mummies were bound with contraceptive devices – so that there is good loving in the afterlife for them I guess. The Chinese used mercury, western women were told to drink the water from a blacksmith to avoid pregnancy. Every once in a while men were given contraceptive drug or system, but rarely. Most ideas were probably abortive or even a hysterectivative (sorry for inventing a word...patent pending). But it is a product of human reason. You can’t deny that if someone drinks mercury, lead or most other heavy metals or poisons, chances are they are not going to get pregnant. Their activities no matter how debortuous, will not result in the creation of life, it will also result in the removal of their life in most cases. With the metaphysics of God constantly interfering, it’s no wonder morality was bastardised by religion.  

So is this why modern religions are so prissy about sex? As someone said (Crowley I think) ‘religions can be divided in to two camps: those that think sex is good for the crops, and those that think it is bad for the crops.’  It was around the time of the Bubonic Plague, the Black Death, where people’s death were seen as a direct punishment from God for them all being a little bit loose.  Those lower necklines, skin hungriness and socialising somehow annoyed the big guy enough to seek to kill us all. Science kicked in there to both explain it and save us too. A cure for the Black Death involved making soup out of various ingredients; nasturtiums, herbs and spices etc and if you could keep that down for four days, you were cured. Another truism given how quickly the Black Death took you out.  

But what if this isn’t how the culture at the time saw the Black Death and God? Maybe we are just reading the crackpot views of a few nutters whose literature survived through the ages. If you think about the nut-can religions nowdays that speak of AIDS and other ailments in the same way, they will be more likely to escape the progression of time’s destruction of our culture due to them existing mainly outside of bigger centres and cities (ground zero in wartime). So hundreds of years from now, historians may have found a few libraries of modern times in these cousin-marrying, gun collecting places of worship and paint our whole time with a brush of ridicule.

The problem then occurs when a quazi-scientific religion bases their opposition to a particular lifestyle choice based on a notion that its views are grounded in pre-history. “It is the way it has always been” they would say, “The natural order, we’re just a little more scientific about it then those weirdos in the 21^st Century.”

This post’s groovy identity-fulfilling quote:  

“If you have to eat two live frogs, eat the ugly one first. “

This post’s lame joke:  

Barnaby Joyce decides that after many years’ of iving in sin, he has to confess his sins to the local priest.

“Bless me Father for I have sinned. ... I have had a sexual relationship with a pig for the last three years.”

Being a new priest, a little wet behind the ears and being shocked by this, the priest doesn’t know what to say. He stumbles for conversation and asks, “My son, is it a male pig or a female pig.”

An outraged Barnaby can’t believe this response “it’s a female pig, Father. What do you think I am, one of them sickos or something?”

This post’s inappropriate over-share:

Have you ever had an addiction? Something that, until you leave it behind, you never really see it for what it is/was. I’m not talking about a washed up British Rock star admitting to an addiction to sex with supermodels and partying 24/7.

One of the things I have removed from my life recently is sleeping pills. I know, you are still thinking about the supermodels aren’t you? Anyway, as a teenager I suffered from crazy bad insomnia, which came and went over the years, but when it was bad, it was soul-destroying. Everything seems cold and covered in talc. Your eyes can’t adjust to reality any more than you brain can comprehend whether or not you are alone and why.

So in my situation, I started taking sleeping pills, not sure when or how. Just one or two, but then more. Before long it got to a point where it may have been quite a problem, then my body would respond and tolerate. That’s the problem with drugs isn’t it – the body’s amazing ability to tolerate a change in conditions and respond accordingly.

It’s been about six months now. Yay me.

*It was to be ‘I heart fuckabies’... which I know isn’t that funny , but for some reason I couldn’t get it out of my mind once I came up with it.