Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Sex, Love, Lust

  • Hugh Hefner’s Legacy

    Here: Divorce, broken homes, bankruptcy, generations of children raised by a single parent, sexually-transmitted diseases, addiction, AIDs, early death, loneliness, despair, guilt, spiritual ruin, and 58 million innocent children butchered in the one place they should be safest, in their own mother’s womb. Read it all.  I am not clear, however, how the libertarian opening…

  • Camille Paglia on Hugh Hefner

    Here:  Hugh Hefner absolutely revolutionized the persona of the American male. In the post-World War II era, men's magazines were about hunting and fishing or the military, or they were like Esquire, erotic magazines with a kind of European flair. Hefner reimagined the American male as a connoisseur in the continental manner, a man who enjoyed…

  • Was Hefner a Condition of the Possibility of Post-’60s Feminism?

    Damon Linker: By mainstreaming pornography in Playboy magazine, and valorizing the pursuit of (male, heterosexual) hedonistic pleasure with his highly publicized playboy lifestyle, Hefner made a singularly important contribution to the overthrow of received norms of sexual morals that made modern (post-1960s) feminism possible. But he also accomplished this overthrow by exploiting women, reducing them to sex…

  • Hugh Hefner Dead at 91

    There is so much to say.  For now, just this: If you have devoted your whole soul to the enjoyment and promotion of the pleasures of the flesh, then you had better hope that the soul dissolves with the dissolution of the body. Contemporaries will think that of course it does, but it is not…

  • Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?

    Here: "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?" my father used to say. It drove me crazy when he said that. Now, it's dawned on me that he was right.

  • What Do Women Want?

    "They want dangerous men who are civilized." (Jordan Peterson) Like it or not, it's true. Related articles Maverick Philosopher: Jordan Peterson on the Problem with Atheism Jordan Peterson and the Transgender Wars

  • The Role of Reich in the Widening Gyre

    Wilhelm that is. I read his The Function of the Orgasm many moons ago, not long after I read a reference to him and his orgone accumulators in Kerouac's On the Road, which made it onto the Amazon 100 list.  The Orgasm book did not.  Neither did Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism, also in my…

  • The Relativity of Lived Time

    Cesare Pavese (1908-1950), This Business of Living, Diaries 1935-1950, Transaction Publishers, 2009, p. 126, from the entry of 10 December 1939: Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours seem short and the years long.  A very sharp observation. Unfortunately, most of Pavese's diary is not at this level of objective insight.…

  • Summer of Love, Winter of Decline

    The down side of the 'sixties. The counter-culture validated styles of living once considered coarse, delinquent, tragic, or mad. It was said to be about Love. Was that eros, or philia, or agape? One cannot be sure, but the gross hypersexualization of entertainment and culture since suggests eros, down and dirty. The point is essentially…

  • Plain Talk About Transgenderism

    Sometimes the cure for P. C. is C.P. , Camille Paglia, that is: It is certainly ironic how liberals who posture as defenders of science when it comes to global warming (a sentimental myth unsupported by evidence) flee all reference to biology when it comes to gender. Biology has been programmatically excluded from women's studies…

  • Marital Fidelity and Masturbation

    He who marries himself and intends to remain faithful to his partner has only one form of sexual expression open to him, namely, masturbation.

  • Polyamory

    A reader sends us to an article on polyamory by Carrie Jenkins. The last time we had occasion to mention Professor Jenkins was when she was the recipient of a very sweet Christmas present from a  certain proprietor of a philosophy gossip site.   About polyamory I will say only the following at the moment.…

  • A Game I Play

    I flip on a sit-com. Then I count the seconds before the onset of sexual innuendo, allusions, and the like.   We are concupiscent from the ground up. And this by (fallen) nature. Our natural condition is exacerbated by the sex saturation of contemporary society. I played my game most recently the other night when…

  • Advice on Sex from Epicurus

    Robert Blake is back in the news, which fact justifies, as if justification is needed, a re-post from 18 May 2011. ……………………………. Epicurus (circa 341-271 B.C.) wrote the following to a disciple:      I understand from you that your natural disposition is too much     inclined toward sexual passion. Follow your inclinations as you     will provided…

  • Shakespeare on Lust

    Sonnet 129: Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame   Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action; and till action, lust Is perjured, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame, Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust, Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight, Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had…