Nun Reportedly Tells Catholic School Kids That Masturbation Makes Guys Gay

A Catholic nun has caused a firestorm after she allegedly told teens at Charlotte Catholic High School in North Carolina last month that masturbation can turn boys gay, and gay men have up to 1,000 sexual partners. Sister Jane Dominic Laurel, an assistant professor of theology at Aquinas College in Nashville, Tennessee, reportedly has a history of anti-gay rhetoric. In one of her online lectures, she called oral sex an abnormal act that’s “imported from the homosexual culture,” according to the Charlotte-based LGBT publication, QNotes. A Charlotte Catholic student described the lecture to the news outlet:

She started talking about how gays [sic] people are gay because they have an absent father figure, and therefore they have not received the masculinity they should have from their father … Also a guy could be gay if he masterbates [sic] and so he thinks he is being turned on by other guys. And then she gave an example of one of her gay ‘friends’ who said he used to go to a shed with his friends and watch porn and thats why he was gay. … Then she talked about the statistic where gay men have had either over 500 or 1000 sexual partners and after that I got up and went to the bathroom because I should not have had to been subject to that extremely offensive talk.

In one of her online videos Laurel reiterates that “a man’s desire for instance, for his father’s love, his father’s affection, what happens to it? It can become sexualized. And he can begin to think he has a sexual desire for another man, when in fact, he doesn’t.” She adds that boys who have been sexual abused also use “homosexual acts” as revenge. When reached by phone, Laurel said she hadn’t seen all the reports yet, and could not immediately provide comment.

Aquinas College President Sister Mary Sarah Galbraith defended the school presentation in a statement to the Tennessean, maintaining that, “the presentation was given with the intention of showing that human sexuality is a great gift to be treasured and that this gift is given by God.” But some North Carolina students didn’t agree, starting a Change.org petition that’s culminated in a Wednesday meeting to address the concerns, according to the Huffington Post. The students said in their petition: “We reject the suggestion that homosexuality occurs mainly as a result of a parent’s shortcomings, masturbation or pornography.”

It’s not only private school students that are subject to strange claims during sex-ed lectures. As we reported last year, public schools also invite religious abstinence speakers to talk to students about sex—and sometimes spread misinformation in the process.

Pam Stenzel, an abstinence lecturer who claims to speak to over 500,000 young people each year, allegedly told public school students at George Washington High School in Charleston, West Virginia, last year, “If you take birth control, your mother probably hates you.” Shelly Donahue, a speaker for the Colorado-based Center for Relationship Education, told students in a training video posted by the Denver Westword in 2011 that if a guy gets sperm near a girl’s vagina, it will turn into a “little Hoover vacuum” and she will become pregnant. Jason Evert, who has scheduled some visits to public schools on his 2014 calendar, advises girls that they should “only lift the veil over your body to the spouse who is worthy to see the glory of that unveiled mystery.” To see our full list of abstinence speakers who have given talks in public schools, click here. Good luck, America.

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Nun Reportedly Tells Catholic School Kids That Masturbation Makes Guys Gay

Female Masturbation Comes Into Its Own in Pop Music

St Vincent, Cyrus and Minaj don"t fight for the right to pleasure, they just do it and they do it themselves.

Annie Clark, aka St Vincent, surprised fans last December with a new single Birth in Reverse, which featured the line: “Oh what an ordinary day, take out the garbage, masturbate.” Shortly thereafter, a salacious video for Miley Cyrus"s Adore materialised, in which the singer runs a sly hand down her body to signify that she too will procure her own pleasure — a routine she"s also decided to play up on her current Bangerz tour. Not long after Adore appeared online, Nicki Minaj sneaked up on fans by releasinga remix of the song Boss Ass Bitch and from it sprung the words: “It"s a holiday, playing with my pussy day.” Most recently, on Valentine"s Day, Minaj said on her new single Lookin Ass N*gga that she has no use for unworthy men. In none of these instances is masturbation presented as titillating, prurient or provocative. It is normal and routine.

In a carnally confident style akin to Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein yowling through Sleater-Kinney"s Let"s Call It Love, or PJ Harvey lasciviously panting, “Lick my legs! I"m on fire!” on Rid of Me, female pleasure in popular music is making a libertine — albeit cooler-headed — return. When female rappers and R&B icons of the 90s and early 00s used this method (Tweet"s Oops Oh My, Janet Jackson"s Take Care and Lil" Kim"s Queen Bitch to name a smutty few), it was a powerful tool which pushed back on the idea that women needed men. But in 2014, the shock value of a woman masturbating — at least as a lyrical device — has at last begun to depreciate. It is no longer an act of flirty deviance to be monetised; it is merely normalised. Sure, Cyrus almost certainly knew the Adore You video would spark a prudish outcry, but it"s still the least flashy thing she"s done of late. Similar is the “DIY” T-shirt Rihanna sported last May, which showed a woman masturbating. With it Rihanna wore a long skirt and a toque. If the point was to be seen, it was also: “And so what?”

While female pleasure in music is nothing new, the shift that has appeared is largely based around an absence of the man: take for example Janet Jackson"s Take Care, where she sings: “I"ll lay here and take care of it "til you come home to me.” For Jackson, masturbation is a bookmark. The Divinyls" I Touch Myself — a pro-masturbation anthem if ever there was one — contains the line: “I"d get down on my knees, I"d do anything for you.” When it came out in 1990 it was intrepid. But the song is just as much about giving pleasure as getting it.

In a 2011 interview with CNN, Kathleen Hanna, feminist leader of Bikini Kill and now the Julie Ruin, questioned the purpose of Katy Perry"s sexual presentation on Perry"s 2008 debut single I Kissed a Girl. “The whole thing is like, "I kissed a girl so my boyfriend could masturbate about it later," said Hanna. “It"s disgusting. It"s exactly every male fantasy of fake lesbian porn.”

Considered alongside a line from the new essay collection by Sonic Youth"s Kim Gordon, “Is It My Body?” — “The body"s not theirs anymore,” she writes of rock stars. “It"s a public domain and public perception” — the discussion over whom a woman"s pleasure serves seems more relevant than ever. A handful of casual references in which pleasure is one"s own are slickly antithetical to any male musician — from Serge Gainsbourg to Skinny Puppy — who ever plunked the sound of a woman moaning into a song for the sake of masculine bravado.

Additionally, the dust finally settling on female masturbation makes room for some gloriously guileful subversion. On Backseat Freestyle, Angel Haze reverses the double standard by laughing pitifully at the male who goes home alone — “Just keep on masturbating,” she says. After that she avows, “Poppin" pussy"s irrelevant.” This is not dissimilar to Lil" Kim"s “a lot of napkins” dig in the opening track of her 1996 debut album Hard Core.

St Vincent, Cyrus and Minaj don"t fight for the right to pleasure, they just do it and they do it themselves. Until this point, most lyrics on the subject of female masturbation have undermined and corrected the illusion that pleasure can"t be DIY. Now the message is that pleasure still exists when pleasure is self-serving.

 

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Female Masturbation Comes Into Its Own in Pop Music

Neoshamanism is Masturbation

“My headdress? Why, that’s the albatross of cultural appropriation, kemosabe.”

Jason Godesky writing at the Anthropic Network:

The shaman is an ambiguous figure in any tribe. He is touched by the numinous “Other.” The power to heal is also the power to kill, and the benevolent shaman is also the malevolent sorcerer. He wields a power that is frightening. In a tribal society where everyone belongs, it is the shaman’s burden to be the only one that is marginal–the only one that is shunned, alienated, and forever on the outside. The shamanic journey is very often described as a terrifying experience. The Ju/’Hoansi describe n!um as a burning liquid at the base of the spine; the trance dance allows it to boil up the spine, until it explodes out of the head. It is described as searing hot, as burning the spine; the explosion is described as immensely painful. Ayahuasca is the “Little Death,” and many experiences recounted with that particular brew are more vivid than my most terrible nightmares. This is the ordeal that the shaman undertakes for his community. Why would anyone choose such a life? They don’t; they are chosen. The shamanic sickness leaves them with a stark choice: become a shaman, or die.

How, then, do we explain this?

I share these stories to point out that it is a tricky endeavor to travel to a third world country and ask a total stranger for a spiritual experience. While many shamans undoubtedly come to their profession to help others, be aware that ayahuasca tourism is a thriving business in Peru, and that you will likely be treated as just that – a tourist.

The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge reintroduced shamanism to the West, and began the trend of “neoshamanism.” Carlos Castenada’s ethneogenic tutelage to the Yaqui sorcerer, Don Juan, provided a mythic framework for the drug culture of the 1960s. The Teachings of Don Juan became an enormous success; and Castenada became a celebrity. In the popular mind, this association has continued–the shaman has been denigrated to some kind of sacred addict. In fact, even in Castenada’s own corpus, this error is corrected–though few pursue his work all the way to the last volume, Journey to Ixtlan, where he reflects:

My insistence on holding on to my standard version of reality, rendered me almost deaf and blind to don Juan’s aims. Therefore, it was simply my lack of sensitivity which had fostered [the use of the power plants].

The role of ethnogens was relegated to its proper perspective by the work of Michael Harner, an anthropologist who sat on Castenada’s disseration committee–where he recieved a Ph.D. for Journey to Ixtlan under the title of “Sorcery: A Description of the World.”–before “going native” with the Conibo in Peru, and becoming a “white shaman.” It is with Harner’s accounts of his experiences with ayahuasca that the current trend of tourists has its roots. Harner’s The Way of the Shaman was a “how-to” guide for Westerners to achieve the shamanic state of consciousness, or SSC. With the publication of Harner’s first such guide (many more would follow), and the founding of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, “neoshamanism” began.

Daniel Noel’s The Soul of Shamanism: Western Fantasies, Imaginal Realities charts the history of neoshamanism, beginning with Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. He discusses how Eliade unconsciously skewed that evidence away from the infernal and towards the celestial by putting together the biases revealed in his novels. He discusses in detail how Carlos Castenada made up the whole experience with “Don Juan”, and how that was revealed. He shows conclusively that “neoshamanism” is a fabrication of Western fantasies–the work of “shamanovelists” like Mircea Eliade and Carlos Castenada, and “shamanthropologists” like Joan Halifax and Michael Harner.

Today, “neoshamans” sell their services to strangers as “alternative medicine practitioners”–for a fee. They often operate alone. Shamans heal, but they never seek payment for it. They refuse to accept any gifts if the healing is not successful. And most importantly, shamans never work with strangers–they heal the members of their community. The community is essential: without a tribe, there is no shaman.

The Foundation for Shamanic Studies sells books and seminars to help their customers become shamans themselves. Shamans learn, first and foremost, from the spirits themselves. Neoshamans learn from audio tapes paid with shipping and handling.

Shamans undertake a perilous ordeal on behalf of their communities. Neoshamans commit the most cardinal sin of shamanism: to abuse the spirit world for a spiritual joyride, or worse still–for nothing more than their personal enlightenment.

A real shaman never journeys for himself; he journeys for others. “Neoshamans” become nothing more than ecstatic tourists, and the ancient traditions of shamanism become, in their hands, nothing more than the latest spiritual fad, another bullet point in “neopaganism” or “the New Age.”

Shamanism is profound. It is the original religion; it is hard-wired into the human brain. “Neoshamanism,” though, is nothing more than spiritual masturbation–it puts on the pretense of profundity, but in the end, it is nothing but a nest of hucksters and charlatans pretending to titles they have never earned.

Native peoples are often deeply insulted by “neoshamanism,” and with good reason. Castenada couldn’t even be bothered to make sure his fictive account of “a Yaqui way of knowledge” mesh with Yaqui beliefs. Neoshamans strike native peoples as hucksters, charlatans and frauds who, having stolen all their material possessions, are now set to rob their culture, as well. Neoshamans desecrate the last thing they have left–their beliefs.

Read more here.

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Neoshamanism is Masturbation