Will 'Sex-Strike' Work in Future?

The Atlantic, November 13 2018:
"Both young people and adults are having less sex than ever before. In the space of a generation, sex has gone from something most high-school students have experienced to something most haven’t. The average adult used to have sex 62 times a year; now, that number is 54.
Research continues to show that a healthy sex life is linked to a happy life, and having a partner is a stronger predictor than ever of happiness. Why, then, in this modern era, is sex on the decline?"

David Masciotra:

"....Love and sexuality are the most exhilarating elements of life. But Fromm writes that to truly experience and exercise love, one must “begin by practicing discipline, concentration and patience throughout every phase of life.”
No wonder so many Americans find love boring."

LAWRENCE A. TRITLE, ‘A NEW HISTORY OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR‘, 1946/2010:

“...In the spring of 411, and amid the struggles of the Four Hundred and Five Thousand, Aristophanes produced one of the best - known comedies ever written, Lysistrata. Often regarded as his third ‘peace’ play, Lysistrata is dominated by women – in fact the women of Greece, who have come together to demand that their men end the war and make peace. To accomplish this goal, the women unite and swear to abstain from sex with their husbands until they agree to stop the violence and bring peace to Greece. This comic vehicle creates some hilarious scenes that were surely as amusing to Aristophanes’ audience as to modern readers...

...Aristophanes builds into it all kinds of jokes and situations to entertain and make the audience laugh; he is, after all, writing comedy and hoping to win the prize. So there are jokes about how women love to drink and how sex - crazed they are, views that many men in the audience pretty much shared. Early in the play, for example, Lysistrata raises the idea of a sex strike to stop the war, and one of her Athenian friends responds, ‘I couldn’t. No. Let the war go on’, a sentiment echoed quickly by another ( Lys . 129 – 30). Lampito’s support for the plan, however, overcomes initial resistance and Lysistrata proceeds with her plan. In doing all this, Aristophanes also mentions the long absences of the men fighting in various places and throws in jokes about how women responded to this with sex toys and drink ( Lys . 102 – 10). It should not be thought that masturbation is a modern invention, and in fact scenes on Greek pottery earlier in the fifth century depict women using the dildos that Aristophanes jokes about...”

Louisa Peacock wrote on March 26 2014 in The Telegraph, UK:

“A group of Ukrainian women have set up a Facebook page – currently with over 1,700 likes – and created T-shirts with the slogan 'не дай русскому', meaning 'don't give it to a Russian', as a means of protest.

The sex boycott echoes a larger embargo against Russian consumer goods, which encourages Ukrainians not to buy Russian products.

The concept of a sex strike is over 2,000 years old, when Greeks first performed Lysistrata, a comedy about Greek women withholding sex from their husbands and lovers unless they stopped the Peloponnesian War...”

A scene from Greek comedy Lysistrata, where the eponymous character rallies her fellow women to go on a sex strike from their husbands, until they agree to end the Peloponnesian War

But even if such a threat works today, it surely won't work tomorrow.

Clive Cookson wrote in FT on February 14 2016:

“...Scientists have warned that rapid strides in the development of artificial intelligence and robotics threatens the prospect of mass unemployment, affecting everyone from drivers to sex workers... Prof Vardi said it would be hard to think of any jobs that would not be vulnerable to robotics and AI — even sex workers. “Are you going to bet against sex robots?” he asked. “I’m not.”...”

Steven Spielberg's 'Minority Report', 2002

courtesy: DreamWorks Picture

When You Bring Fire Into a Habitation.. Humor Happens

Scientific American first published excellent article 'Quest for Clues to Humanity's First Fires' by Amber Dance in June 2017. Read it here. 

"...When did humankind first put fire to work for them, using it regularly for heat and cooking? Hlubik and other archaeologists who sift through the long-cold ashes of fires past cannot say for sure. It probably wasn’t as early as 2 million years ago—but it almost certainly occurred by 300,000 years ago. That leaves a big gap, with plenty to investigate...

...While calorie-rich meals might have been a main driver for the adoption of fire, there are other benefits, from warmth to protection from predators. Tending a hearth also could have made a big difference in the evolution of social skills: People would have had to cooperate to manage and feed fires, and they perhaps socialized around the flames. “When you bring fire into a habitation, I think something pretty profound happens,” says Chazan. “It’s mesmerizing.”..."

It has this wonderful image. 

'Homo erectus, depicted here in an artistic representation of a female apparently carrying a recent kill, lived between about 1.89 million and 143,000 years ago. '

 Artist: Ryan Somma, Creative Commons

 While scientists investigate that, cartoonists already know what happened in first few years  AFTER the fire was invented.

Artist: Robert Karus, The New Yorker, July 30 1960

Artist: David Sipress, The New Yorker , 2013

Artist: Joe Dator, The New Yorker, 2012

निळा सावळा ...Ajanta Blue

ही पोस्ट वाचण्याआधी ह्या ब्लॉगवरची जुलै १४ २०२० ची ही पोस्ट ('प्रशियन, कोबाल्ट, अल्ट्रामरीन) निळासांवळा..... Starry Night Over the Rhône') वाचा. 

मी एक अतिशय सुंदर पुस्तक डिसेंबर २०२० मध्ये वाचायला सुरवात केली 'The Greek Experience of India: from Alexander to the Indo-Greeks' by Richard Stoneman.

Pigments, naturally, were not imported from Greece. The pigments used at Ajanta are all derived from local materials, whether earths or plants, plus lamp black. Blue, orange, brown, green and purple are the most common colours in the later Ajanta murals. The earliest ones also use considerable quantities of white (from roots of Ipomoea digitata, with occasional substitutes, or from lime and gypsum), but in these the other colours have been much darkened, and are hard to study in the half-dark of the caves: reds, yellows, and browns are visible, as well as blues, so darkened now as to look black. Aided by some restoration in the last decade or so, vivid faces loom from the darkness, often topped by the voluminous turbans so typical of Maurya and Śunga figures, and shown in three-quarter profile like many of the faces in Macedonian tombs....

... Strong blues are the hardest colours to obtain in nature (lapis lazuli is the key ingredient), and Pliny has a good deal to say about indigo, ‘a product of India, being a slime that adheres to the scum upon reeds. There is another kind of it that floats on the surface of the pans in the purple dye-shops, and this is the “scum of purple”.’ Pliny shows marked distaste for this mucky but expensive substance, despite its known value also as a medicament for wounds. Later he is able to drag in Indian dyes as another illustration of his perennial theme of the moral decline of Rome caused by luxury:

Nowadays when purple finds its way even on to party-walls and when India contributes the mud of her rivers and the gore of her snakes and elephants, there is no such thing as high-class painting.¹⁰⁸

His account of indigo’s production is far from accurate. It was an important dye in India – where it is called nila – from at least 3000 BCE. It is produced from the leaves of the indigo plant by long boiling and treading, and throughout most of its history the reducing agent used to turn it from a pigment to dye has been urine – which may explain some of Pliny’s disgust, since the manufacture of indigo is certainly very smelly. (It is also very labour-intensive, and in 1859–60, just two years after the Indian Rebellion [‘Indian Mutiny’], the conditions of near-slavery in which it was produced led to riots in Bengal.)^"

Columba Livia Works If The Message Has a Subject

Neil Armstrong:

"The eagle ‘clasps the crag with crooked hands;/Close to the sun in lonely lands’. The nightingale, that ‘light-winged Dryad of the trees’, sings ‘of summer in full-throated ease’. The skylark ‘from the earth … springest/Like a cloud of fire’.

The pigeon? Well, the great poets have generally been less inspired by the humble pigeon (Columba livia). Its song is not a mellifluous cascade of liquid notes. It does not fall like a thunderbolt from the sky. It is not rare or endangered – exactly the opposite – and familiarity has bred contempt.

But it does have a ‘superpower’, as Gordon Corera terms it: an innate homing ability. Selective breeding has produced birds that can be taken hundreds of miles from their nests or lofts, even to another country, and then unerringly return home. This ability, still poorly understood by science, was harnessed in the extraordinary Second World War cloak-and-dagger operation that is the subject of Corera’s fascinating book...."

(review of 'Secret Pigeon Service: Operation Columba, Resistance and the Struggle to Liberate Europe' by Gordon Corera, 2018 for  Literary Review)

Artist: Will McPhai, The New Yorker, January 2016

“You know I hate when you check your messages at the table.”  

Artist: Benjamin Schwartz, The New Yorker, August 2015

फेसबुकावरील स्मारके...Status of My Facebook Pages at the end of Year 2022

 

This blog was launched in November 2006. It has completed 16 years. Today it has 2,222 published posts.

त्या ब्लॉगचे मराठी वर्तमानपत्र लोकसत्ताने डिसेंबर १७, २०१२ रोजी संपादकीय ("कुलकर्ण्यांचं लोणी..")पानात लिहलेले परीक्षण इथे (https://www.loksatta.com/sampadkiya/blogspot-searchingforlaugh-26372/) वाचा. (किंवा ह्या पोस्टच्या शेवटी)

Political Polarization and Weather Forecast

 “That was Brad with the Democratic weather. Now here’s Tammy with the Republican weather.”

Artist: David Sipress, The New Yorker, February 2017