Prostitution: A choice?

I know men who have completed their undergraduate study in the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and have then decided to do their graduate study in the US of A. And what do these men think is their biggest achievement once they reach there? Going to a STRIP CLUB. or fucking a commercial sex worker. Why do i pick this college specifically? Because these men have "proven" their intelligence fours years before they graduated. Because these men claim to be in the top 0.01% of the population. Because they take great pride in their ability!

And what do these supremely arrogant men do? Actively participate in pornography. LIVE. Or have sexual intercourse with a woman who they the pay for the "service". Dont they feel any guilt? Of course not! After all they didnt FORCE the woman into that line of trade! The woman CHOSE to be there. The woman CHOSE her profession. It is not illegal. There was no coercion.

And what is their excuse for doing what they do? Oh I'm sorry! These men (correction... Men in general) don't need an excuse for going to a strip club or a commercial sex worker. Why do they go anyway? "Curiousity" is the number-one answer. What are you curious about? It is not like a zoo now, is it? Those women are there because men like YOU pay them to be there. They do what they do because men like YOU pay them to do it. You like getting aroused and you like the idea that a total stranger would be interested in arousing you sexually. Even if the truth is that you have to BUY this attention! Don't give me "curiosity" as an answer. EVER!

And what kind of women are they? The word "prostitute", translated, is of course a cuss word in most Indian languages. Hell, the word and all its synonyms are all cuss words in every language on earth. Why doesn't a prostitute or a strip-club dancer/performer deserve your respect? Because she makes money from her body. And why does that make her a person of bad repute? Obviously! She has no place in reputable society. She is vermin. Oh! FABULOUS! So what does that make YOU? If having sex with multiple people is a sign of bad character, then how the fuck are you a person of good character? How do you not call yourself a prostitute? How do you not refer to yourself as a person without character?

So if this is so demeaning to women, why DO some women do it? The woman who makes her livelihood by selling to you the right to violate her privacy and her body does it because YOU make it the best option that she has. Because YOU pay her more to arouse your penis than to do anything else. Sometimes you make it the ONLY choice that she has. Because YOU hold the money. Because YOU enslave her. Because YOU think its COOL. Because YOU are curious. Because YOU think you have the right to own her.

And why do YOU go to the strip club or a commercial sex worker? Because the women that YOU want do NOT need you. They have the money to not feel the need to gyrate on your lap make you ejaculate. And who pays the price for your inability to find a woman to do this disgusting act for you for free? The woman who will do it for a price! Because you have left her with no other way of making her living. Because YOU like the feeling of POWER: of being able to force someone to satisfy your sexual urges. Because, for the women who CHOOSE to adopt commercial sex work as a mean of livelihood, indulging in sex work is not a choice anymore. Because the notion of ‘complete’, ‘free’ and ‘informed’ choice is simply an illusion.

Fuck yourself guys! The biggest insult is aimed at you. That you are incapable of finding someone who will love you enough to pamper to your wants. Because you have to BUY it. Because you have to PAY for it.

the right thing for the wrong reasons: India Today's sex survey

I was apalled by the last edition of india today; the one that had the sex survey. No I wasn't apalled by the sexual preferences of the indian male. I was apalled by the views of one of the columnists. The aticle was about homosexuality and the writer stated that homosexuality should not be a criminal offense in India because a sizable percentage of the men who had particpated in the surey had stated that they had had homosexual relationships at some point of time.

While I believe that the section 377 is discriminatory, the writer's argument does the cause of homosexuality more harm than help. The writer seems to imply that if 40% of the drivers in India have cut through a traffic signal at some point of time, then cutting a red signal should not be considered a violation of traffic laws. Hilarious argument.

Article 377 should be abolished because it is discriminatory. The goverment has no right to claim that buggery constitutes a moral crime. It is the government of the people of India; not the government of the RSS or the heterosexual male!

The author of that article has no logical or legal foothold when he suggests that homosexuality should not be a legal offense because of the fact that a sizable percentage of the population has indulged in it. Article 377 should be abolished of course; but not because 40% of the men surveyed have had homosexual encounters.

The argument is flawed. And it is shocking that this gets printed at all. What the FUCK do editors have blue pencils for?

Five Ways to Kill a Man

There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man.
You can make him carry a plank of wood
To the top of a hill and nail him to it.
To do this
Properly you require a crowd of people
Wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak
To dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one
Man to hammer the nails home.

Or you can take a length of steel,
Shaped and chased in a traditional way,
And attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears.
But for this you need white horses,
English trees, men with bows and arrows,

At least two flags, a prince and a
Castle to hold your banquet in.

Dispensing with nobility, you may, if the wind
Allows, blow gas at him. But then you need
A mile of mud sliced through with ditches,
Not to mention black boots, bomb craters,
More mud, a plague of rats, a dozen songs
And some round hats made of steel.

In an age of aeroplanes, you may fly
Miles above your victim and dispose of him by
Pressing one small switch. All you then
Require is an ocean to separate you, two

Systems of government, a nation's scientists,
Several factories, a psychopath and
Land that no one needs for several years.

These are, as I began, cumbersome ways
To kill a man. Simpler, direct, and much more neat
Is to see that he lives somewhere in the middle
Of the twentieth century, and leave him there.

- Edwin Brock

Love and Tensor Algebra

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

Come, every frustum longs to be a cone
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.

In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.

I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.

For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?

Cancel me not - for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
the product of four scalars it defines!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.

I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!

-- Stanislaw Lem

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The poem was originally written in Polish, so the the credit goes as much to Lem in writing it as to Michael Kandel in translating it into English!

Playing God...

Do I have the right to run another person's life? Or till him/her/it how to runs his/her/its life?
Or the lives of a group of people?
Of a community?
Of a race?

Do I have the right to uphold the survival of the species?
At the cost of individuals...

These and other related questions popped up yesterday, when a friend and I were talking to a person who had hurt us. I found myself talking about having a moral code. I discovered that the only real thing i wanted from this person was that he/she/it have a value system and that he/she/it stick by it. I was saying that it really didnt matter to me whether a person chose good or bad, as long as he/she/it was aware of the act itself and its consequences.

But was my stance sensible? Was it appropriate? was it acceptable?
The question is a tricky one. Even if it doesn't look like it... Consider this. Would you be impartial between the fire and the fire-fighter? Would you be equally accomodative of a saint and a serial-killer? Of course you wouldn't. You would try to stop the serial-killer; you would try to stop the fire. If you couldn't persude the killer to give up his violent ways, you would try to force him to stop or put a deterrent in his path. Why? It is a moral judgement, right? And it is the RIGHT thing to do, isnt it? Why then, is it so unacceptable that I extend this idea to helping humanity? God makes moral judgements too, doesnt He/She?

Do I sit back and and let soemone glide down a path that I'm sure will lead to depravity or worse? Or do I 'play god'? If someone hurts me, do I try to change the way the person is, so that he/she is a better human being? Or do I just try to prevent the person from harming me again?

What do I do?

I am become death, the destroyer of the worlds.

- Oppie

This makes a lot of sense doesn't it?

A lot has been said about how to prevent rape. Women should learn self-defense. Women should lock themselves in their houses after dark. Women shouldn't have long hair and women shouldn't wear short skirts. Women shouldn't leave drinks unattended. Hell, they shouldn't dare to get drunk at all. Instead of that bullshit, how about:

If a woman is drunk, don't rape her.
If a woman is walking alone at night, don't rape her.
If a woman is drugged and unconscious, don't rape her.
If a woman is wearing a short skirt, don't rape her.
If a woman is jogging in a park at 5 am, don't rape her.
If a woman looks like your ex-girlfriend you're still hung up on, don't rape her.
If a woman is asleep in her bed, don't rape her.
If a woman is asleep in your bed, don't rape her.
If a woman is doing her laundry, don't rape her.
If a woman is in a coma, don't rape her.
If a woman changes her mind in the middle of or about a particular activity, don't rape her.
If a woman has repeatedly refused a certain activity, don't rape her.
If a woman is not yet a woman, but a child, don't rape her.
If your girlfriend or wife is not in the mood, don't rape her.
If your step-daughter is watching TV, don't rape her.
If you break into a house and find a woman there, don't rape her.
If your friend thinks it's okay to rape someone, tell him it's not, and that he's not your friend.
If your "friend" tells you he raped someone, report him to the police.
If your frat-brother or another guy at the party tells you there's an unconscious woman upstairs and it's your turn, don't rape her, call the police and tell the guy he's a rapist.
Tell your sons, god-sons, nephews, grandsons, sons of friends it's not okay to rape someone.
Don't tell your women friends how to be safe and avoid rape.
Don't imply that she could have avoided it if she'd only done/not done x.
Don't imply that it's in any way her fault.
Don't let silence imply agreement when someone tells you he "got some" with the drunk girl.
Don't perpetuate a culture that tells you that you have no control over or responsibility for your actions. You can, too, help yourself.

If you agree, re-post it. It's that important.

-Author unknown.

Mary Frye - Do not stand at my grave and weep,

Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am in a thousand winds that blow,
I am the softly falling snow.
I am the gentle showers of rain,
I am the fields of ripening grain.
I am in the morning hush,
I am in the graceful rush
Of beautiful birds in circling flight,
I am the starshine of the night.
I am in the flowers that bloom,
I am in a quiet room.
I am in the birds that sing,
I am in each lovely thing.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there. I do not die.

I chanced upon this poem today. It has an interesting history. The only word I can think of is touching. I'll come back and put my thoughts on this later.