The devadasis stand in the direct line of one of the oldest institutions in India. The word comes from Sanskrit: deva means “god” and dasi means “a female servant.” At the heart of the institution lies the idea of a woman entering for life the service of a deity. The nature of that service and the name given to it have wide regional variations and have changed through time; only recently have most devadasis come to be working in the sex trade.

Some experts trace the institution to the ninth century; others maintain that it is far older, and claim that what is arguably one of the most ancient extant pieces of Indian art, a small bronze of a naked dancing girl from Mohenjo-daro, dating to around 2500 B.C., could depict a devadasi. By the time of Asoka, in the third century B.C., a piece of graffiti in a cave in the Vindhya hills, in central India, recalls the love of Devadinna, an artist, who had fallen for “Sutanuka, a devadasi.” There are large numbers of images of temple dancing girls and a few textual references to devadasis from the early centuries A.D. onward, including some in the area immediately around Saundatti. The largest collection of inscriptions, however, comes from the Chola temples, around Tanjore, in Tamil Nadu, where the great Chola kings of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries boast of giving hundreds of devadasis, or tevaratiyars, to the temples they founded. These royal temples were conceived as palaces of the gods, and just as the king was attended by ten thousand dancing girls so the gods also had their share of devoted attendants. The vast entourages added to the status of rulers, whether heavenly or terrestrial, and were believed to surround them with an auspicious female presence.

Full Story: New Yorker

(Thanks Dr. Gabbo!)

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Original Post: Technoccult

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Reviving the controversy that followed the novelist Yukio Mishima throughout his life, a Tokyo court has banned further publication of a memoir by a writer who says he had a homosexual relationship with him. The court ruled on Monday that the use of Mishima’s letters represented copyright infringement.

In its decision, which could have far-reaching consequences for Japanese publishing, the court held that Mishima’s letters to Jiro Fukushima were protected under the country’s copyright laws and could not be used without permission of Mishima’s estate. Mr. Fukushima and his publisher, Bungei Shunju Ltd., one of Japan’s largest producers of books and magazines, were ordered to pay $47,000 in damages to the plaintiffs, Mishima’s son and daughter.

Mishima, perhaps Japan’s most widely known modern writer, committed ritual suicide by sword, or seppuku, at age 45 in 1970. His death was an act of protest after failing to persuade the country’s Self Defense Force to stage a coup d’etat and renounce the American-imposed postwar constitution that places a perpetual ban on aggressive military action by Japan.

Full Story: New York Times

(via OVO)

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Taking the contraceptive pill can lead a woman to choose the “wrong” partner, the findings of a study published today suggest.

The pill is thought to disrupt an instinctive mechanism that brings people with complementary genes and immune systems together.

By passing on a wide-ranging set of immune system genes, they increase their chances of having a healthy child that is not vulnerable to infection.

Couples with different genes are also less likely to experience fertility problems or miscarriages.

Experts believe women are naturally attracted to men with immune system genes that differ their own because of their smell.

Full Story: Guardian

(via Cryptogon)

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“This morning, I heard an astonishing interview on WNYC that discussed a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) draft document that was just leaked. This document proposes to redefine nearly all forms of birth control, especially birth control pills, as a form of abortion and allows any federal grant recipient to obstruct a woman’s access to contraception [PDF]. Considering that roughly half of all American women use birth control pills, I think this is a shocking proposal that, if enacted, will change modern American society as we know it.

Currently, the federal government accepts the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ definition of pregnancy as beginning at implantation. However, the HHS proposes to reject that definition — provided by medical experts — and to change the federal definition of pregancy to conform with public polling data, as stated in the “Definitions” section of the proposal;

Abortion: An abortion is the termination of a pregnancy. There are two commonly held views on the question of when a pregnancy begins. Some consider a pregnancy to begin at conception (that is, the fertilization of the egg by the sperm), while others consider it to begin with implantation (when the embryo implants in the lining of the uterus). A 2001 Zogby International American Values poll revealed that 49% of Americans believe that human life begins at conception. Presumably many who hold this belief think that any action that destroys human life after conception is the termination of a pregnancy, and so would be included in their definition of the term “abortion.” Those who believe pregnancy begins at implantation believe the term “abortion” only includes the destruction of a human being after it has implanted in the lining of the uterus.

And then they propose;

[T]he Department proposes to define abortion as “any of the various procedures - including the prescription and administration of any drug or the performance of any procedure or any other action - that results in the termination of the life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation.”

(via Living The Scientific Life)

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“It’s been wet lately, hasn’t it? Really wet. So wet, in fact, that two artists got bogged on the way to their opening at Kellerberrin last Saturday, arriving only after being dug out by a few of the locals. Still that’s what you get for cloud busting and playing around with orgone energy. For the past month in Kellerberrin, David Haines and Joyce Hinterding have been chasing atmospheric phenomena in the way someone else might fish for trout. Through hope, coaxing, and a fair degree of positive thinking, Haines and Hinterding have been siphoning sexual energy into the Wheatbelt. Yes, this is cultish, but don’t be alarmed, it’s all in the name of creating rain.

In the 1940s and 50s in the American State of Maine, Wilhelm Reich was investigating the existence in the atmosphere of what he called “orgone” energy. Reich at one stage was part of Freud’s inner circle in Vienna and many of his psychoanalytical methods are still used today. But in the course of time and on a different continent Reich turned his attention to more esoteric issues and in the process, many would argue, instigated the greatest sexual revolution in human history. His inquiry into universal sexual energy and its application through something called the orgone accumulator also saw him hounded by the FBI. In the end Reich’s inventions were confiscated, his life’s writings burnt and he died in jail. Something tells me there was more to this man than meets the eye.

As with all good contemporary art, Haines and Hinterding at the International Art Space Kellerberrin Australia (IASKA) is thick with research and high on the sub-culture factor. These two are by no means the only artists in the world interested in Reich’s theories but their application of his ideas is timely and offers more than a tongue-in-cheek look at the esoteric history of art.”

(via The West Australian)

(Cosmic Orgone Engineering Site)

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“Picture the scene: you are in a room with more than a hundred adults. Sitting at one end, with a microphone in his hand, is a man with long white hair who is encouraging everybody to introduce themselves to each other. “Go up to somebody,” he says, “and say one honest, true thing about them that strikes you immediately. Then have them do the same back to you. But before you do that,” he goes on, “please take off all your clothes.”

Welcome to the “most radical self-help workshop in the world”, as this hip new 10-day residential retreat is dubbed. Led by the Birmingham-born life coach guru Paul Lowe, it is not a place for the shy and retiring. As well as being encouraged to voice compliments to each other, such as “you make my vagina tingle”, discuss innermost feelings in intense, nude “sharing” circles and take part in sensual massage sessions, participants will also be invited, during the course of the workshop, to explore their sexuality with multiple partners (yes, actually in the workshop). In Lowe’s eyes, you see, monogamy is one of those “ludicrous, unnatural social conventions that stand between you and spiritual enlightenment”.

(via The Times Online)

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Valleywag writes:

Violet Blue, a popular local blogger, columnist, sex educator and contributor to Gawker Media’s smutty sister Fleshbot, seems to have rubbed someone at Boing Boing the wrong way. She discovered that nearly all the posts on the site that mentioned her or her work had disappeared — save for one, a post from last year on the Top 10 Sex Memes from 2006. Shortly after that post was discovered via Google site search, it disappeared as well.

Boing Boing certainly hasn’t gotten squeamish about sexuality if today’s post about a Miami “brothel bus” is any indication. Why is the disappearance an issue? Because Boing Boing wields the awesome power of traffic and Google PageRank, and to bestow such benefits on a blogger and then take them away can be a severe punishment in terms of advertising and affiliate business lost.

Found via Tomorrow Museum, where Joanne McNeil provides additional context and commentary. You can find my comments about the potentially sexist angle of all of this there.

But of greater concern to me is that it happened in the first place and what it means. Like Valleywag says, BB wields a lot of power. They are not just some amateur, DIY fly-by-night blog. They are a professional media organization with the reach and readership of major magazine or newspaper. And it’s hard to read their actions as anything less than an attempt to damage Violet Blue’s livelihood by reducing traffic to her site. They still link to some other raunchy stuff, and to the sex writer Susannah Breslin extensively, so it’s not likely they took the links down at the bequest of an advertiser. And a computer glitch that just happens to delete all posts that link to tinynibbles.com (but nothing else?) seems unlikely (and something they’d have made a statement about by now).

Further, it doesn’t seem that BB is above taking down links to sites runs by people who disagree with them. Rex Sorgatz claims that BB linked to something on his site (I’m guessing this which is still linked at BB Gadgets) because of this post criticizing BB.

Obviously BB has the right to post, not post, or delete whatever they want from their site. But something about all this leaves a fowl taste in my mouth. It’s just bad practice for a professional media outlet bully people like this. “If you say not-nice stuff about us, we’ll take down your links and never link to you again,” is what they seem to be saying. Joanne speculates that bloggers will be quiet about VB being purged from the site because they don’t want to risk the same fate. I hope this is not the case. So far there’s been quite a bit of criticism, but little (if anything) so far from BB’s “in crowd.” (Valleywag, remember, is published by Gawker media, who publish Fleshbot, for which VB writes.)

Update: BB replies

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It’s like when you’ve got people like Angela Carter who, in her book The Sadeian Women, she admitted that there was the possibility she could imagine a form of pornography that was benign, that was imaginative, was beautiful, and which didn’t have the problems that she saw in a lot of other pornography. I think even Andrea Dworkin said the same thing. She said it a bit more grudgingly, but she said that conceivably there was, there could be, a benign form of pornography but she didn’t personally believe that it would ever happen. So that’s what we’ve tried to do. We’ve tried to say, yes, good pornography can exist, and I think that possibly the fact that we called it pornography wrong-footed a lot of the people who, if we’d have come out and said, “well, this is a work of art,” they would have probably all said, “no it’s not, it’s pornography.” So because we’re saying, “this is pornography,” they’re saying, “no it’s not, it’s art,” and people don’t realise quite what they’ve said.

Interview Part 1 Interview Part 2 (Probably not safe for work)

(via Tomorrow Museum)

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A child porn possession charge lodged against a Department of Industrial Accidents investigator fired for having smut on his state-issued laptop has been dismissed because experts concluded he was unwittingly spammed.

“The overall forensics of the laptop suggest that it had been compromised by a virus,” said Jake Wark, spokesman for Suffolk District Attorney Daniel Conley.

Nationally recognized computer forensic analyst Tami Loehrs told the Herald Michael Fiola’s ordeal was “one of the most horrific cases I’ve seen.”

Full Story: Boston Herald

(via The Agitator)

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Heterosexual women, Dr Chivers and her colleagues found, were no more excited by naked men doing yoga or tossing stones into the ocean than they were by the control footage: pans of the snowcapped Himalayas.

When straight women viewed a video of a naked woman doing calisthenics, on the other hand, their blood flow increased significantly.

What really matters to women, Dr Chivers said, at least in the somewhat artificial setting of watching movies while intimately hooked up to a device called a photoplethysmograph, is not the gender of the actor, but the degree of sensuality. Even more than the naked exercisers, they were aroused by videos of masturbation, and more still by graphic videos of couples making love.

Women with women, men with men, men with women: it did not seem to matter much to her female subjects, Dr Chivers said.

“For heterosexual women, gender didn’t matter. They responded to the level of activity,” she said.

Full Story: the Age

(via Sexoteric)

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