• Let’s Talk About Sex -

    “Anora” – a movie about a sex worker and her client – won a bunch of Oscars this year. I haven’t seen it, so I can’t comment on the movie. But it struck me that both the lead actress and the writer/director made a point to express solidarity with sex workers. What might they have been trying to convey? And what did they convey without trying? As with almost all human endeavors, I suspect there were a bunch of motivations, some of which contradict each other.

    First, they seem to have been holding up the truth that prostitutes are, indeed, real human beings, not types, and therefore are worthy of respect as humans. Excellent. Count me in.

    They may also have been endorsing the idea that prostitution should be freed from old, outworn stigmas that a repressive society traditionally associates with the oldest profession. Maybe they think women and men should be free to provide sex (safely) in exchange for money, especially if the money translates to power that’s traditionally inaccessible to sex workers. This notion views sex as a good or service tradeable for money (aka power), the same as any other commodity.

    Here, we part ways, because this misunderstands the right purpose of sex. My understanding that there even is a right purpose of sex necessarily arises from the notion that God, as the giver of the gift that is sex, attaches an intent to it. I hold that God’s intent for sex is to nurture intimacy between the lovers. (Undoubtedly, God has additional intentions, such as the gift of children; but here I’m concerned with intimacy.)

    It’s no accident that at its best, sex is something we do naked. Nakedness is a stripping away of pretense as a way to truly see and be seen by the one you love. Opening our bodies to each other emphatically is not intended to be a way to wield power or extract payment. Using sex for those purposes instrumentalizes sex and commodifies one’s self and one’s partner. It’s the antithesis of nurtured intimacy.

    The “Sex-as-ATM” idea is a manifestation of what Alan Jacobs (@ayjay) calls “Metaphysical Capitalism,” which treats all creation and the entire human condition as elements of a vast market. (See, the discussion of Kant’s view of sex and marriage in this post.)

    What’s particularly poignant about viewing sex in this way is that it subverts the humane and tender motivation to understand prostitutes as human beings deserving of respect. I don’t know that many in the “pro-sex-worker” cohort see it, but the idea that our bodies and our intimacies are tradeable commodities is truly, sadly, deeply inhuman.

  • Are You Sure About That

    • Faith is not the absence of uncertainty. I’m a person of Christian faith, but I admit I’m not certain of anything – God’s existence, Jesus' resurrection, the presence of the Holy Ghost. Yet, I have [uncertain] faith in all these things. That faith – together with the evidence of my own experience and, more importantly, what I’ve seen in other faithful people – means my uncertainty doesn’t cause anxiety. *

    • When Hebrews says, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,” the author may seem to speak of certainties; “assurance,” “conviction” – those are certainty words. But, there’s also uncertainty in “things hoped for” and in “things not seen.” I feel that tension. And yet, even in the face of uncertainty, I’m not anxious about these things. Perhaps, that’s a gift that Hebrews speaks of as “assurance” and “conviction.”

      * I reckon that like St. Paul (in the KJV), I am persuaded of the truth of the Gospel. “For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

  • Manhattan, LES

    Looking down a street bordered by a row of red and cream-colored brick buildings from the 19th and 20th centuries.
  • Dough Fun - Not to be confused with  Dauphin

    After many years, I may have stumbled on a sourdough process that works for me.

    A loaf of crusty, golden-brown bread sits on a cooling rack, featuring a textured surface with sesame seeds. A slice of crusty, homemade bread with a light, airy crumb is resting on a cooling rack.
  • Handsome Fellow (redux)

    Auto-generated description: A dog with curly fur is standing on its hind legs, resting its front paws on a person's knee, with a potted plant in the background.

    Reposting due to a glitch in original.

  • Practicing Blessing

    From Canon Victoria Heard of the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas:

    As I walked down the hall, I found myself, by chance, behind a nurse with beautiful braided gray hair that tumbled down her back like a waterfall. I told her it was beautiful. She was startled, and smiled, and ever so slightly straightened her shoulders. I was intentional. I meant to give her a blessing.

  • The Finder Found

    @ayjay, quoting Ross Douthat on Paul Kingsnorth’s coming to Christian belief:

    … he began to feel impelled toward Christianity — by coincidence and dreams, by ideas and arguments, and by … stark mystical experiences

    @ayjay, again, contrasting the homo religiosus “seeker” with the Christian:

    We Christians don’t seek, we are found by the One who seeks us.

    Exactly. And it seems to me that Kingsnorth’s coincidence and dreams, ideas and arguments, and stark mystical experiences are God’s drawing Kingsnorth to Him; of, as Edwin Muir beautifully writes, his being found.

  • The edge of Deep Ellum

    A golden hour photo of brick and tile buildings with a white silo structure behind them in Dallas' Deep Ellum neighborhood.
  • Rule Follower

    I was recently inducted as a new member of the Grandparents Club. Per the club handbook, within 24 hours, I’d changed my phone’s lockscreen to a picture of the baby. (I’m smitten.)

  • The United States Senate is starting to annoy me. Seriously.

    Nick Catoggio:

    By tapping a guy accused of having sex at a party with a 17-year-old girl to be America’s top law enforcement officer, Donald Trump discovered that even life forms as supine as congressional Republicans have a limit to how much sleaze they can rationalize. But I wonder if, in hindsight, the president regrets letting Gaetz withdraw from consideration instead of daring the Senate GOP to vote him down.

    … everything we’ve seen from them since then proves that they do not, in fact, take their jobs very seriously.

  • They Break Things

    David Brooks:, Feb 13 2025:

    The … Trumpist elite think they’re going after the educated elites.. but you know who’s really going to pay? … working-class communities that will continue to languish because Trump ignores their main challenges and focuses instead on culture war distractions… the essence of Trumpism: [is] to be blithely unconcerned that people without a college degree die about eight years sooner or that hundreds of thousands of Africans might now die of AIDS, but to go into paroxysms of moral panic because of who competes in a high-school girls’ swim meet.

  • John Graves' Small Swift Birds

    In recent decades it has become customary, and right, I guess, and easy enough with hindsight, to damn the ancestral frame of mind that ravaged the world so fully and so soon. What I myself seem to damn mainly though, is just not having seen it. Without any virtuous hindsight I would likely have helped in the ravaging…

    But God! To have viewed it entire, the soul and guts of what we had and gone forever now, except in books and such poignant remnants as small swift birds that journey to and from the distant Argentine, and call at night in the sky.

  • For Valentine’s Day: Love Tokens from the Thames

    Another great post from the inestimable Spitalfields Life.

    A round metal coin with ornate floral engravings and the word VOILET displayed prominently.
  • To make a BLT, start (with) tomatoes

    Tomato seedlings in cell packs

    Check. 🌱

  • Victoria Goddard

    Fantasy readers, I highly recommend Victoria Goddard’s wonderful books. Her masterpiece, in my opinion, is The Hands of the Emperor, and for sheer fun (and, at first, disorienting weirdness), Stargazy Pie and its companion books are wonderful. Goddard is so good.

  • Bueller… Bueller… Bueller… Um, he’s sick.

    Vis a vis the 2025 coup: Checks and balances only work if the other two branches check and balance. Congress and the courts are, um, sick (unto death, for Congress). If they croak, they’ll be very difficult to resurrect.

  • Caught.

    a crescent moon through silhouetted bare trees
  • Whaddya Think?

    Ringo Starr and Lucinda Williams need to record together. (And, not to put too fine a point on it, daylight’s burning.)

  • Poetry Unbound with Pádraig Ó Tuama

    Often, a highlight of my week is a new (to me) poem shared by Pádraig Ó Tuama. Today’s, “Neanderthal Dig” by Don McKay, is especially rich.

  • Hangin' Out

    A good one from Poorly Drawn Lines.

  • RIP, Garth Hudson

    “Anybody who gets a chance to play with Garth Hudson, they’d be a fool not to. As far as The Band is concerned, he’s the one who rubbed off on the rest of us and made us sound as good as we did.” – Levon Helm

    Update: more here.

    Black and white photo of the musician Garth Hudson of The Band

    🎵

  • Garden Note

    January 18 2025: Started tomato seeds inside today.

  • Three Little Buechners

    From a trip to Half-Price Books.

    A photo of 3 books by Frederick Buechner
  • Pink Moon

subscribe via RSS