Tis the season for making whoopee. According to David Lam of the University of Michigan’s Population Studies Center, “the holiday urge surge also expresses itself as a peak in U.S. births in September.”

I admit, I have a daughter born in September.

I assume the other peak month for births would be November? Nine months after Valentine’s Day!

A Charlotte woman, Charla Muller, wrote a book about giving her husband quite a 40th Birthday present – 365 days of sex. The book is coming out in July.

Today, the Charotte Observer did a write-up on this book, but you have to be a member of the mom’s forum to see it.

Lisa Terrell, the senior therapist at Sensovi (where I work) was mentioned:

Today, the couple no longer have daily sex, but they have a lot more than they did pre-gift. And they agree their year of intimacy improved their marriage.

That doesn’t surprise Lisa Terrell, a senior therapist at Charlotte’s Sensovi, a private practice and online education resource for relationships and sexuality. When couples take time to connect every day, she says, relationships benefit.

But that connection can be talking, touching and cuddling, as well as sex, she says. And she cautions that women risk becoming disengaged if they always feel they’re doing their husbands a favor when they have sex.

From The Erotic Mind, by Dr. Jack Morin:

Eroticism can best be understood as the multifaceted process through which our innate capacity for arousal is shaped, focused, suppressed, and expressed. We’re born sensuous and sexual, but we become erotic as we receive both overt and subtle messages about ourselves from our primary caretakers and gradually integrate these messages with our experiences of touch, as well as the highly personal mental images and emotions that go with them. As we grow, the demands and ideals of our culture, along with the interpersonal dynamics of our families and communities influence our responses profoundly.

This made me laugh, especially since my husband is such an Obama fan. And kudos to MC Jew C and Lil’ Mitzvah for the anatomy lesson!!

“Our task as women is to distinguish our own personal truths about our sexuality from the distortions that we’ve inherited from the culture. Our first step in defining our sexuality from the inside out is to consider ourselves as sex subjects rather than sex objects. What makes up your sexuality? Which of your ideas have you inherited from society and absorbed into our psyche and which are your own? When we reclaim our own sexuality, we find that it doesn’t look anything like what the culture has led us to believe.”

Source: Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom by Christiane Northrup MD

Lark & Key gallery and boutique opening soon in NoDa!

In doing research on the McMartin Preschool Sex Abuse scandal of the 1980s, I came across an article on The Suggestibility of Children. In fact, I wrote one of my papers on the systematic methods used by interviewers to get all of the children they interviewed to allege sexual abuse. Not only were the children manipulated and coerced, but the parents created a whirlwind of increasingly bizarre accusations. Granted, sexual abuse is a serious matter, but the point of this research was to examine what happens when false accusations are made. (I say false because the teachers were not convicted)

The tactics used by the (biased?) interviewers were similar to what Derren Brown says are the tactics used by popular televangelists to perform miracles and healings.

His youtube “Instant Conversion” video is worth watching.

Basically, we all know these kind of tricks:

“Everyone else has said the teacher touched them, why are lying to me?”
or
“Everyone else here is speaking in tongues, why aren’t you – what sin are you hiding?” (that was a personal story from my Bible camp days)

“Bad things were happening at the school, right”
or
“You feel bad when you don’t pray, don’t you?”

Thankfully I haven’t been involved in any interrogations, but I have been told that without believing/praying/attending/worshiping/tithing…. I was going to feel bad. Well, I have stopped doing all of those things and the sky has not caved in, I haven’t contracted a terminal illness, I’m not in a depression and my marriage isn’t failing. It has been “suggested” to me since I was in preschool that other people were right and I just needed to trust them and do what they told me to do. And there was a fear put in me that if I ever stopped following then something terrible was going to happen. I know the Church would argue that their “tactics” are based on love, but I think they use fear and suggestibility all the time.

I’ve been catching up on my blog reading while watching my videotapes for school. Strangely enough, studying sexology can be rather boring!

One blog that got me thinking was “Body Impolitic,” where photographer Laurie Toby Edison shares her thoughts on body image. In The Aftermath of Pregnancy she rants a bit about plastic surgery in the form of “mummy tucks.” I agree that there is an unfortunate pressure on women to look eternally young – as if the scars of life are something to be ashamed of.

These are not women who were pregnant against their will; they are women who wanted children. Their children will leave a wide range of marks on the mothers’ lives, marks that go much deeper than the stretch marks or unequally sized breasts. What does it mean to erase an intentional pregnancy from your body? It can be construed as modifying your body to lie for you–to tell an incomplete and untrue story of who you are and what you’ve done.

I could rant about profit motives, social pressure, and lots more. Laurie and I have done that before, and we will again. But right now, all I can think about is that our bodies are our selves, are one way we carry our history. Because pregnancy and childbirth are occasions for joy and delight, it makes me sad that anyone would want to erase that story, and sadder still that there seems to be a movement of women making that choice.

I was speaking with some women about this the other night at our women’s group. It is difficult to know if our desire to be attractive comes from within or comes from society. I think we could all agree that companies need to make us feel inadequate in order to sell us their products. Yet, there is something within us that appreciates beauty and wants to be appreciated as beautiful.

If I were deserted on an island I would probably be relieved that I didn’t have to worry about shaving my legs or coloring my hair. Those are things I do to look more presentable to the world. But I might pick up a flower and put it in my hair. That would be for me, just for me.

So I will not get a “mummy tuck” – mainly because I can’t afford it, but also because I don’t think I should. But I will whiten my teeth and darken my hair. I will wear make-up every day, but will shave only rarely. I’ll do what I can to look “good enough” because I know I’ll never be gorgeous. And that’s ok. I don’t need to be gorgeous to be happy.

No human society, present or past, has lacked music. Music is therefore one of the very few human universals, which puts it on the same level as food and sex.
Fredric Lieberman
Source: Spirit Into Sound: The Magic of Music, Page: 7

We just finished watching ONCE and I was pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed the film and the music.

“No matter what your musical tastes, “Once” will reinforce your belief in the power of melody and harmony to heal one’s inner wounds.” (READ REVIEW HERE)

I discovered the band Guster the other day when I was grabbing lunch at Estelle’s. They reminded me of Toad the Wet Sprocket.

I posted a while back how much I was enjoying “Little Voice” by Sara Bareilles – so I am glad to see her getting so much good press lately. I set the tivo to catch her on the Early Show tomorrow! Check out her video for Love Song.

And Steve wrote a great recap of our trip to Asheville last month to see David Wilcox. It wasn’t a typical concert, and David didn’t sing many of his best songs, but he DID sing “Show the Way” which our good friend Dave Burkum sang at our wedding in 1995.

It is…

Love who makes the mortar

And it’s love who stacked these stones

And it’s love who made the stage here

Although it looks like we’re alone

In this scene set in shadows

Like the night is here to stay

There is evil cast around us

But it’s love that wrote the play…

For in this darkness love can show the way