Friday, January 13, 2006

Christmas time brought me many gifts of books which I have been pouring through during my free moments. Dan Brown's DaVinci Code was a fun read. Despite its enormous popularity, I had no idea that the central premise had to do with the supression of the sacred feminine. Though it would seem the research behind the book is questionable, I appreciated how the author was able to portray goddess worship and ancient sex rites without seeming gratuitous or too off the wall. I believe the spiritual is so connected to the sexual and think it's a shame how the two have become so separate in the modern world. I have formulated specific ideas on this, but I know many would think that my vision is pretty outlandish. Perhaps a topic for another blog entry...

I was also given a book with the tongue in cheek title Are Men Necessary? by Pulitzer-prize winning New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. I tried several times to read this collection of essays to the end, each time throwing it down in frustration. The author bewails society's zigzag trail of gender politics from the "let's go dutch" 1970s to the Botox addicted, stay-young-forever current age.

Yet the wall I repeatedly hit in her musings was a firm insistence on her part of some elemental differences between men and women which, at least for me, don't really exist. Her entire approach struck me as just so old-fashioned. Like her assertion that men can find cartoon characters like Jessica Rabbit and Disney's Pocahontas sexy, whereas women could never be attracted to a male cartoon character. I mean, when I was young I thought Linus from Peanuts was totally my type. I'm serious ;-) Then again, maybe I am just weird.

Just started digging into Jenna Jameson's memoir How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale. I have only skimmed the sections around the books's many hot photos (who says women aren't visual? please!), though I do plan on reading it from start to finish.

I went to high school in the San Fernando Valley -- the epicenter of the adult industry -- and my family spent a lot of time in Jenna's hometown of Vegas when I was growing up. And though I was a chaste and studious teen, I loved finding porn magazines, X-rated comics and erotic novels underneath beds, in the corners of cupboards, in the basement, and all those hiding places that never stay hidden. So I am curious to read her story, since in some ways it is familiar territory.

Of course, I don't expect to be able to relate to it all. Jenna Jameson's roots are in stripping. And dommes and strippers are like apples and oranges (or mangos and passionfruit -- that sounds sexier ;-) I know my stripper friends are disturbed by what I do. And frankly, I am disturbed by what they do. Yet we can still all hang out, party and support each other as we go about our wild lives. Cie la vie!