Other than the horrid illustration accompanying the article "Sex as Exercise."
I loathe the present-day tendency to frame everything in terms of health. Sex is exercise. Food is medicine. Medicinal marijuana.
Surely we could use some analysis of whether our obsession with health is... unhealthy.
December 7, 2013
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17 comments:
Me, I can't stop using Sex as a Weapon.
In some ways, health seems to be almost a religiously held value now. It's not just that your body is something you make use of and want to keep in good working order; it's more like the old idea that the body is a temple that must be kept pure and to which devotion must be shown.
I suppose in a way it's akin to the almost religious aspect of some versions of environmentalism. After all, in the 19th century "pollution" meant masturbation, and in ancient Rome it meant the desecration of a holy place.
Culture is all about the cult of self these days, it's no wonder there is this obsession over health, especially if people no longer believe in any sort of afterlife.
Meanwhile, buses, viruses, idiot drivers, hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, bullets and all sorts of other life-ending possibilities laugh at the obsession with health.
Food IS (or at least the right food can be) medicine.
Check out Forks Over Knives...
First. World. Problem.
Ah! Just discusses cardio- exercise. Plenty of ways to structure the subject into stretching, mind focusing, even strength exercises.
cyrus83:
Some people live to avoid death and in the process exploit material (e.g. stuff) and physical (e.g. clump of cells) things to pass the time.
True, why can't we just enjoy? Sex is good because it feels amazing. Bacon just tastes great. Liquor makes you feel good, as does marijuana. When did we get to the point where it's not enough to simply enjoy something for its own sake?
Sam L.:
In the third world, it's sex as domination. Make love not war or something. Fortunately, not everyone is overwhelmed by civilization or enamored with a raw natural order. Unfortunately, there are fanatics in every walk of life. It's probably better that they lose themselves in their own confusion, than to share it with other people and society.
I totally agree with this post.
Wondering whether playing with an oversized Ben Wa ball is sexy, exercise or neither.
And kind of merging the two topics (sexercise and medicine as food), ED is not merely a social inconvenience, it's distant early warning: the blood vessels that supply the privy member are the next size smaller than the coronary arteries.
If it comes down to bacon v. sex, I choose sex.
(Here's a topic for our hostess, if she's never really talked about it: why is the FCC is so concerned that my young daughter might see a part of Janet Jackson that she's seen on her mom a bunch of times, but seems to have no problems with me having to explain to my daughter what an "erection" is and why it might last four hours...)
Althouse,
G.K. Chesterton writes on the very idea you mention in his book Heretics.
"In these discussions it is almost always felt that one very wise and moderate position is to say that wine or such stuff should only be drunk as medicine. With this I should venture to disagree with a peculiar ferocity. The one genuinely immoral and dangerous way of drinking wine is to drink it as medicine."
(Collected Works: Volume 1 p 91)
The medicinalization of life, as with the politicization of the personal, is a product of the Progressive movement of the early 20th century. Check out the Matthew Broderick film "The Road to Wellville" for a dramatization of the life of John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of corn flakes.
It's meant to recall "Fifty Shades of Grey." Fifty shades of pink?
Because of the medicalization of sin—sex, drugs, gambling, all addictions, not sins, we won't go to heaven or hell when we die, we will just go to the big hospital in the sky.
Seek moderation in all things.
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