Graciousness

by Jean Roberta



Statue in Coventry, England

Back in the day when national governments apparently didn’t care whether their citizens lived well or starved to death, charity was dispensed by upper-class ladies. The wife of the local lord, baron, or captain of industry was supposed to be his softer side, the one who shared some of his wealth with the poor (which he or his ancestors had gained by exploiting them in the first place) or who raised funds from other members of her class to distribute to the needy.

As late as the 1970s, charity organizations such as the Cancer Research Campaign in Britain (which had a royal patron, a cousin of the Queen) depended largely on “house-to-house” campaigns run by upper-class women, who also made private donations. I know these were tax-deductible, because I worked as a clerk (pronounced “clark”) in the London office of the Campaign from December 1973 to August 1974. Clerks were expected to attend the Annual General Meeting, which convened in a large hall. If memory serves me, every single lady arrived wearing a colourful spring hat which distinguished them all from us, the bare-headed peasant girls. Viewed from the ceiling, the hall would have looked like a flower garden.

Traditionally, the rich wore more clothing than the poor, and headwear especially indicated social class. (Note that monarchs still wear crowns on formal occasions.)

This brings me to an old story about charity as a response to the suffering of the poor, and female nudity as a cause of shame and lust, or courage and power.

Here is what historians say about Lady Godiva:

Staggering beneath the yoke of oppressive taxes, the medieval residents of Coventry, England, pleaded in vain for relief. Ironically, deliverance would come from the wife of the very lord who scorned their pleas. Lady Godiva repeatedly urged her husband, Leofric, to lessen the people's tax burden, and time and again he refused. Yet she persisted, and one day in exasperation he told her he would lower taxes when she rode a horse, naked, through the streets of the town at midday. When she took him at his word and set out on her famous ride, the highborn Lady Godiva became an instant heroine to the common people of Coventry.

A fascinating piece of history. But as it happens, most medieval scholars agree the ride never took place. Professor of English and American literature and language Daniel Donoghue examines the origins and cultural significance of the myth in Lady Godiva: A Literary History of the Legend (Blackwell), and offers insights into how that myth has evolved over the centuries. "The story," he notes, "was based on the life of Godifu, a real woman who lived in Coventry in the latter part of the eleventh century [1000s] and was married to one of the most powerful men in England."

Donoghue points out that "two centuries after her death, chroniclers in the Benedictine abbey of St. Albans inserted a fully developed narrative into their Latin histories" and the legend of Lady Godiva was born. "Nobody knows quite why the legend was invented and attached to her name," he says, "but it does seem to function as a kind of myth of origin for the town of Coventry. At the end, Count Leofric seals the agreement about taxes with his own seal."

One of the myth's most interesting subplots involves the role of "Peeping Tom," who doesn't even appear in the story until the seventeenth century. According to legend, the people of Coventry, as a gesture of respect and appreciation for Lady Godiva's actions on their behalf, stayed indoors behind shuttered windows to preserve her modesty as she passed. Everyone, that is, except Tom, whose lustful curiosity compelled him to gaze at her and who was then, according to legend, punished with blindness or death.

Ha. If Lady Godiva’s ride really took place, I bet more than one townsperson would sneak a peek. Whether the story has any roots in reality or not, it has inspired many sketches and paintings, including one black-and-white reproduction of an engraving that was used by a hair-products company in the 1960s, when I was a teenager. By sending in a bar code from a can of hairspray and a fee for shipping and handling ($1.00, I think), I was able to get a copy of the picture, which I framed and hung on my wall. Nudity for a good cause! I was entranced.

According to some theories, Leofric’s ultimatum to his wife involved “riding a horse naked,” meaning that the horse couldn’t be equipped with any tack (saddle, bridle, reins) whatsoever. And according to some, the lady was simply challenged to ride through the town in clothing below her station, not dressed as the woman with the highest rank in the town.

A more intriguing theory suggests that in the eleventh century, Coventry still had some pagan (pre-Christian) traditions, including ceremonies featuring a local woman representing the Goddess, who would be skyclad (naked) because in ancient Celtic spiritual traditions, nudity was associated with power rather than shame or humiliation. Who better to represent the Goddess than the highest lady of the land?

Leofric’s power to tax the peasants into dire poverty has also been questioned. When the Norman French conquered England in 1066, they did a general survey of their new territory, and eventually imposed more patriarchal legal forms of property ownership than the Anglo-Saxons had previously. Under Anglo-Saxon law, Lady Godiva might have had the power to impose taxes herself, or to lessen them.

Even still, I admired the legendary version of Lady Godiva from the time I first heard of her. Riding naked through the town sounds deliciously comfortable, especially for someone who would normally be expected to wear a lot of clothes. And what other medieval woman was able to do that and still maintain the respect of the people? Her willingness to meet her husband’s challenge (which seems intended to shut her up about the tax situation) suggests sexual generosity, and in the legend, it results in greater happiness for all.

I wonder if I could strike a deal with the city government as an alternative to paying property tax, or with Revenue Canada in lieu of income tax? Alas, probably not at my age.
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A late nineteenth-century painting by John Collier, who apparently thought the horse should be well-dressed


Here is a link to Peter and Gordon's jolly 1966 song about Lady Godiva:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJWBpq2dCF0

Hustling Through the Ages

by Jean Roberta

The concept of sex workers (people, mostly women, paid to provide sexual services for customers) as “hustlers” has always filled me with mixed feelings. If a “hustle” is a con game, are whores/harlots/call girls/courtesans offering something bogus or overpriced? Is this because women are expected to provide unlimited sex for men without expecting anything in exchange?

In my experience, most heterosexual men are willing and eager to have sex with women, so why would women have to make a great effort to tempt them into it?

This line of thought reminds me of double-bind conversations I’ve had with men who disapprove of 1) women who manipulate men into marrying them and supporting them financially, and 2) women who boldly go into the paid workforce to steal “men’s” jobs. Men who don’t think women should try to survive in any material sense also tend to disapprove of: 1) “frigid” women who say no, and 2) sluts who don’t say no. These seem to be the dudes who resent the female “hustlers” who fascinate them and who supposedly spirit men’s money right out of their wallets.

Disapproval of women who offer sex as part of a “hustle” is often blended with disapproval of women who outwit men in various ways, often during a war. Behold “Rahab the Harlot” of ancient Hebrew times, as imagined by a nineteenth-century French painter, Jacques Tissot:



Supposedly she helped the Israelites conquer the city of Jericho by hiding two Israelite spies from the men who were searching for them. From a non-Israelite viewpoint, this made Rahab seem untrustworthy.

Here is a Greek image of a sex-worker plying her trade. For some reason, this has been associated with Rahab.


Part of the problem of morally evaluating the likes of Rahab is that the sex trade has often been conflated with other careers (such as tavern-keeping), and the cultures of the ancient Middle East were distinctly different from the later Christian cultures of Europe and Britain.
For example, this woman would look like a “hustler” to most puritans:


They would suspect her of being a follower of this guy:

According to traditional Christian theology, a wedding ceremony neutralizes the evil inherent in sex, so that married couples can procreate without committing sin, but women who couple with men who are not their husbands are doing something illicit, which is akin to other sins such as blasphemy, lying and stealing.

In 1660, when Puritan rule ended in England, and King Charles II brought back the monarchy, Christmas revels and the theatre as a popular place for hanky-panky, he had already fathered his first child on an early mistress. (Eventually, he fathered between 12 & 19 of them, none born to his legal wife.) One of his favourite playmates was Nell Gwyn, who worked in her mother’s bawdy house in her early teens, progressed to selling oranges in the theatre, then to performing onstage, and then to the King’s bed. Apparently, when he was on his deathbed in 1685, he told his advisors: “Let not poor Nelly starve.” How generous of him.


The Victorian Age brought about stricter morals in theory, since the reigning Queen and her husband the Prince were role-models of proper domesticity. In real life, the sexual double standard created a thriving “underworld,” some of which was surprisingly above-ground. Here are two relatively well-known courtesans of the time:

[Catherine Walters]
[Cora Pearl]

By the Edwardian Age (early 1900s), naughty postcards like this were popular. Undoubtedly, the women who modelled nude for photographers and painters were thought of as “hustlers” who earned a dishonest living.


Despite what I’ve sometimes claimed, this is not an image of me in my distant youth.

I haven’t actually sold sex since the early 1980s. Here is a very recent photo of me, taken this week for the university website. Am I still a "hustler" in any sense? I honestly don't know.

If women in general have an illicit relationship with a money economy, then yes, I am still "hustling," since I not only support myself, but help to support my spouse & stepsons. I do this by introducing impressionable young adults to the mysteries of grammar, and of literature. Heh. There are so many ways to corrupt the righteously ignorant.

At Play in the Fields of the Past

Sacchi Green

History has always fascinated me. The past is a different enough world from the present to be as interesting as any fictional story, and sometimes even more so, because the present grows out of the past and can’t be fully understood without knowing what came before. Of course written history can’t be relied on to be factual—it depends on who wrote what from which perspective, and with what agenda, and so many other variables—but that doesn’t prevent it from making an engrossing story, especially when presented in fictional form by really good writers.

As a kid, and on into my teens, I loved to read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (which took some further maturity to really understand, but still grabbed my imagination,) and Little Women, and all of Jane Austen’s novels, and the Sherlock Holmes stories (as much for the sense of the period and the atmosphere as for the mystery element) and so many other books that let me feel immersed in the world of the past without having to cope with the discomforts of really living then. Those were books written more or less during the eras they depicted—Mark Twain was already looking back at a past world, but one he’d inhabited—but I also loved books by authors writing of eras long before their own, like Scott’s Ivanhoe and stories about legendary figures such as Robin Hood, and novels about more recent periods like Gone with the Wind.

Maybe my longing for other times that seemed more interesting than my own had something to do with growing up in a small town in the truly boring 50s. When I discovered Kerouac, it was in the 60s or close enough, so by then the Beat Generation was well in the past, but still an active influence on “our” generation that produced hippiedom and sit-ins and rock-and-roll and even feminism. I said in a comment to a previous post here that history is what happened before a time you can remember, but I take that back—the 60s and 70s are history now to me, and so is pretty much everything before the 21st century. History never holds still.

When it comes to my own writing, I especially love to set stories in the ready-made world of the past, and I often enjoy the research more than the writing. Almost always, in fact. Writing is the hardest part. Whenever possible I try to read contemporary accounts of the period, to get a sense of the flow of the language and the perspectives of the people, although the farther back the time period the harder that gets.

I’ve written several erotica stories set during WWII, and found invaluable first-person accounts (although often through interviews by more recent writers) of what it was like to be a woman WASP pilot ferrying warplanes or the Russian “Night Witch” women pilots and bombardiers flying hundreds of missions against invading German troops. I’ve written Vietnam-era stories, too, with memoirs by WACs and nurses serving “in country” augmenting my own memories of what it was like stateside. In those cases, of course, language was no problem. Writing a story set during WWI was more of a stretch, but not much—dozens and dozens of British mystery novels set more or less in that period had been a large part of my youthful reading, and I still love the Lord Peter Wimsey books by Dorothy L. Sayers. Not to mention Wodehouse.

When I ventured into the Elizabethan period, Shakespeare was my obvious source, both of language and plot. What could inspire a transgender story better than a theatrical tradition of boys playing girls (and sometimes playing girls disguised as boys?) The language had to tread a line between the modern and the Elizabethan, of course, leaning much more toward the modern, and I don’t know how successful I was, but it was a lot of fun. So much so that I’ll indulge myself in an excerpt:
__________

A Dance of Queens

Midsummer’s Night, the play safely done, dusk sweet as a languorous touch on yearning flesh...and still I could not take my love into the greenwood and lay her on my cloak and be consumed in her fire.

I cursed my own impatience. We should have pressed on without pause, but Quenta had tormented me so, slipping a hand beneath my shirt and then down into my breeches until I could scarce walk, and must stop for a taste of the feast to come.

So the Queen’s messenger had caught us. And truly, by the shimmer in the air at the instant she appeared, I knew there had never been hope of escape. In the Welsh hills and valleys we have tales, more than tales, of such creatures, though I had thought the filth and disbelief of London must repel them. At another time I would have been glad that the green countryside along the Thames still held such folk. Glad or no, we had no choice now but to let the greenwood’s promise fade into shadow.

Frustration pounded in my veins. I jerked away from Quenta’s touch, the mere brush of her hand making me forget that I must not even think of “him” as “her” until we could be blessedly alone.

I focused on the wide skirt sailing just ahead. Though the farthingale was not devised with a lady dwarf in mind, its absurdity was more than countered by the messenger’s bearing and the Queen’s crest broidered on her sleeve. It scarcely needed Quenta’s nudge to put me on guard against those keen, merry eyes, though they looked up at me from about the level of my belt.

Such danger should have chilled my ardor. But surely the Queen would waste little time on us, might have forgotten already her whim. At most there could be a gracious word or two, perhaps a small purse. Why, then, command that we bring our play-garb? A jest among her ladies?

But in the great bedchamber we found Her Majesty alone, a slim, pale figure whose aura crackled through the paneled room like heat-lightning.

Our diminutive guide swept a curtsy. “The player boys, Madam. Quentin O’Connor and Kit Rhys.”

Bright tired eyes assessed us. “Well enough, Gwen. Now keep us private for a bit.” The attendant gave me a wicked sidelong glance as she went to sit between the great oak door and the carven screen before it.

Quenta elbowed me sharply. I joined her in an elegant stage bow, feeling the royal glance caress our snug-hosed calves. Her Majesty was said to have ever an eye for a well-turned leg; if it went farther than a look, or a leg... But I had never heard so much as rumor that it did.

Her voice was cool enough. “So, Titania and Hippolyta. You played the queen’s part well, each in your own way.”

“Never so well as you, Your Highness.” Quenta’s green eyes gleamed wickedly, and I suppressed a groan. This was no time for her sly wit!
__________

What follows is something of an erotic comedy of genders, with twists and turns, a snippet of history, and a bit of magic.


I’ve wanted for a long time to get a chance to edit an anthology of historical stories. I did, in fact, do an alternate history book a few years ago, Time Well Bent, under my alternate name, Connie Wilkins, for Lethe Press. It wasn’t erotica, per se, although some of the pieces were definitely erotic, including Lisabet’s rif on Gilbert (of Gilbert and Sullivan) being seduced by a handsome young understudy, which I believe she mentioned in her post last week. Excellent stuff. But a gig editing an historical erotica book has eluded me until right now, when I have an actual Call for Submissions out for Thunder of War, Lightning of Desire: Lesbian Historical Literary Erotica, to be published by Lethe Press. The deadline is near, but extensions are possible. And I have another CFS for an historical lesbian romance anthology, Through the Hourglass, with The Liz McMullen Show as publisher. For these guidelines, you can check out my blog, http://sacchi-green.blogspot.com (just scroll down a few posts past my other current CFS, for Best Lesbian Erotica 2016.)

Such good timing! An historical theme for OGG right now, just when I actually have something to say on the subject!

The Haunted Library

by Jean Roberta

Sitting in the room my spouse & I call “the library,” where our computer is surrounded by bookshelves, I see a hodge-podge of books, loosely organized into different categories so we can find them. (This doesn’t always work – read on.)

In what I think of as the spooky/spiritual section on the highest shelf to my left, I see a very thick paperback. The title on the spine is Ghosts: True Encounters with the World Beyond by Hans Holzer. This book is packed with stories and photos from the files of one of the world’s foremost ghosthunters, and it threatens to suck me in again. The last time I read it, I had to stop before reaching the end so I could keep up with my day job.

Next to this is The Complete Prophesies of Nostradamus, several books on modern witchcraft, including three by Starhawk (one bought directly from her when she came to my town on tour), The Tibetan Book of the Dead (a gift from one of my stepsons), a hardcover Bible (originally bought for my six-year-old daughter, in which she drew a picture of a smiling man with a beard, named “God”) and a small, hardcover English translation of The Koran. Strangely enough, this last book is the only one in this section that I inherited from my parents after their deaths in 2009. They were agnostics who never showed a great interest in religion in any form. However, they probably thought (as I do) that as academics, they needed to have some knowledge of the holy books of the world’s major religions.

This library is very eclectic because many of the books were given to me, inherited, or they belonged to my spouse before we joined households. In some sense, it is full of ghosts that constantly threaten to pull me away from more pressing concerns.

After my parents passed away, I let my two sisters take the bulk of their books, since I already had enough of my own. Several of our mother’s books of literary criticism are now neatly arranged on the shelves in my office at the university. A few of our father’s books on political theory are still in the home library, including two by John Raulston Saul: Voltaire’s Bastards and The Unconscious Civilization. I think my father enjoyed Saul’s skeptical look at the long-term political effects of Enlightenment idealism.

I can still hear a conversation I had with my dad when he was still an Economics professor and I was still reeling from four hard months as a student English teacher in a local high school. “Has it ever occurred to you,” I asked him, “that the idea of universal education is a well-intended 18th-century plan that has never worked as it was intended to?”

“Exactly!” he replied with delight.

“But before you propose to tear down the public school system,” I said, “I’d like to know what you would put in its place.” He just laughed.

One of the books I inherited from my father is one that Spouse and I gave to him for Christmas in 2000. It’s An Illustrated History of the Royal Navy by John Winton, in association with the Royal Naval Museum in Portsmouth, England. It’s a big coffee-table book full of full-colour paintings, engravings and photos of ships of the British Empire and the men who sailed them. I knew my dad would like this. Ever since he joined the U.S. Navy as a young man in the Second World War, he loved boats of all kinds.

In the fiction section, I have a well-preserved hardcover copy of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, published in 1942 with detailed maps of battle zones and a foreword by eminent critic Clifton Fadiman, who points out the parallels between the Napoleonic wars of the early nineteenth century and the “current European conflict.” I inherited this book from a woman I never knew: a locally-famous hairdresser who had recently passed away, and whose family invited people she knew (including a male hairdresser friend of mine) to browse her shelves and take whatever they wanted. A grown son of the deceased woman assured me that I was welcome to take whatever was left, since the family had already made their choices.

Among Spouse’s books are several about John Lennon and Che Guevara, the two heroes of her youth, and a biography of Lenin. Her oldest books are in Spanish, and these include material on leftist political theory and alternative Christianity (for lack of a clearer term), e.g. a history of the Rosicrucians and Dan Brown-esque investigations of the history of the Catholic Church. The Spanish-language section has its own shelf.

At one time, I had a collection of books by J.R. Tolkien, including The Hobbit and all three volumes of The Lord of the Rings, including one unauthorized book that was sold openly in a bookstore in small-town Idaho. (No one seems to remember any more that in the 1960s, an American publisher brought out a pirated edition, and Tolkien sued.) When I looked for The Hobbit to skim through it before going to the second-installment movie (The Desolation of Smaug), I couldn’t find it. This isn’t surprising. It could have left my house with my grown daughter or either of my grown stepsons. If so, I won’t demand it back. I’ll just have to buy a replacement copy before the third-installment movie comes out.

Of course, there is an erotic section in my library. It’s on two bottom shelves which can be camouflaged by other objects if necessary. That section deserves a post unto itself, but I'm coming to the end of this one.

A lot of memories are in this room.

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The Unsung ...

THE UNSUNG

By D Musgrave

There are heroes who are forgotten every day. How many of us remember that the first marathon is run because of Greek soldier? How many remember his name? Or that he was a messenger who ran 26 miles from the Battle of Marathon to Athens to announce that the Persians had been defeated? This is the premise for my guest blog post.

I think it's safe to say that most people in the world are somewhat familiar with the D-day invasion that took place during World War II. Many of us, if not most, have seen Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, The Longest Day, or any number of other movies and documentaries about what could be argued was the turning point of the war in Europe.
The list of heroes from the invasion is long and would take many pages to list. Sadly, many of the names of those who were heroes have faded from people's memories. Even the memories of notable names such as Theodore Roosevelt JR, who as a Brigadier General landed with the first wave on Utah Beach, Normandy with the U.S. 4th Infantry Division, have become lost in the 66 years since the invasion.

Not only were there many heroes directly involved in the invasion, there was just as many behind the scenes who were vital to the success of offensive. One such man was Andrew J. Higgins. He never saw combat during the war, nor was he even in uniform. Nonetheless, his contribution to the war effort was just as important as any one private citizen.

If you watched Saving Private Ryan, you likely remember the opening scene where the combat troops were packed into amphibious crafts splashing through the surf toward the shores of Normandy. Those Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel (LCVP) were nicknamed Higgins Boats.



Andrew Higgins with the resources of his boat building company in New Orleans, LA was the inventor of that vital piece of military equipment. The success of the D-day invasion would not have been possible without Mr. Higgins creation. Praise for his invention came from everyone, including the enemy. Dwight Eisenhower commented that "Andrew Higgins ... is the man who won the war for us. ... If Higgins had not designed and built those LCVPs, we never could have landed over an open beach. The whole strategy of the war would have been different." It's even been purported that Adolph Hitler called Higgins the "New Noah."





Like Higgins, there are heroes who are forgotten by history every day. Most go unsung. Just like William Beauregard from my upcoming release Jamais Vu: A Love Forgotten. William Beauregard returns from WWII, only to find the visions of the death and destruction haunting him still. He can't shake them and it's pushed him away from his wife, Sheila. To rid himself of the ghosts, he must take a huge risk, one that could lose his wife to him for ever.

Jamais Vu: A Love Forgotten

by D Musgrave

Chapter One
Circa: August, 21st, 1945

Catching sight of the old house, it was as if a vise gripped his chest. Spanish moss hung from the huge oak trees lining the path leading to the front steps. It reminded him of carefree days before the war. Days he and Sheila would spend under the canopy, lounging on a blanket, making plans for their future. Gazing past the trees to the two-story brick house, he remembered the first time he laid eyes on it. It'd been in bad shape and needed lots of work, but even at first sight he knew it was home. Convincing Sheila to take a chance on the "money-pit" had been easy. Maybe she saw its potential as well.

He closed his eyes and inhaled, trying to concentrate on the familiar smells of the moisture-laden bayou air. Not long ago he thought he'd never see the house or his wife again. Suddenly, the throat-tightening scent of war flooded his mind. The stench of mud, blood, and death overtook the sweet scent of the bayou.

Shaking his head, he pushed it away, but it persisted, forcing itself on him. He squeezed his eyes shut and the visions rushed into the darkness. He heard the wretched screams of dying men over the roar of battle. The smell of death seemed to be permanently burned into his mind, along with tortured screams. Many times in the last few days, he'd wondered whether he'd ever be free of those gripping fears.

The thick, rolling accent of the Creole taxi driver wrenched him from his reverie. "Hey, mister. Y'all gonna be paying fer tha ride?"

"Sorry," William Beauregard replied. Dropping his Army-issue duffel bag, he paid the fare.
The taxi cab rolled away, and William turned back to look at the old house. It had been a plantation, and before that, there were rumors of it being the home of a notorious pirate. There were also stories of hauntings and ghosts, but he'd never seen anything like that in his time there.

Bending down, he grabbed the duffel bag and slung the strap over his shoulder. He began the walk up the long path to the front door. He knew Sheila wasn't expecting him. He'd managed to talk his way onto a cargo plane from Fiji before a troop transport could be arranged for the rest of his unit. His service to the country had been completed and all he owed the Army was to turn in his weapons, which he did in San Diego.

The walk to the house seemed longer than he remembered, but he figured that was because part of him was nervous about seeing Sheila again. He knew he wasn't the same man who'd left her three years earlier. It was easy to hide how the war had affected him in letters. He hadn't wanted to cause her any additional worry, so in his letters he made it seem as if his part in the war was more of a clean up effort instead of the slow, trudging, bloody job of leading men onto the shores and through jungle swamps to retake the islands from the Japanese.

Suddenly, he heard a scream behind him. He turned, but no one was there. The scream echoed again, this time to his right and closer. It was the same heart-stopping war cry he'd heard when the Japanese guerillas attacked his platoon. Their battle cries were a mixture of rage and total abandon, as if they wanted their enemies to know they were about to die.

He spun on his heels, ready to defend himself, but nothing was there. A cold chill wrapped him in its clammy embrace. He'd felt that chill once before—in the back of the cargo plane, alone, trying to sleep on the metal floor behind a stack of ammo crates.

A voice whispered coldly in his ears, "Save me," then all was silent. His heart hammered in his chest. He wanted to run for cover, but couldn't make his legs move. Another scream rang in his ears. It seemed to come from the house. This one was different. It wasn't the blood-chilling yell he'd heard before. It was a shriek of surprise.

Spinning, he saw someone running toward him from the darkness of the jungle. He dropped to one knee and reached for his duffel bag. His service revolver was in there and he prayed it was on top. Ripping the zipper open, he glanced up and a chill gripped his heart. The jungle had disappeared to be replaced by the safety of his front yard. The person running toward him wasn't a Japanese soldier; it wasn't even a man, it was his wife, Sheila.

Visit www.dmusgrave.com to find out more

Sorry - you're dead! So no prize for you.

When I was trying to come up with topics for us to post about, I kept thinking about something that has been bugging me for a long while now. The Nobel Prize. Specifically some of their regulations ...

The Nobel Prize cannot be awarded posthumously.

So some of the best scientists in the world, some of the people who lay the groundwork for others, but die suddenly, and often tragically, are left out of history’s records in this most important of ways.

The one that stands out to me the most is a Ph.D. from Cambridge, a woman who died at the young age of 37. Rosalind Franklin.

Her research was conducted during a time of great discovery in science – the 1950’s. Many of the college students I go to school with have the view of the world in an almost static sense, they see what is now, and it must have been what was as well. They can’t comprehend a world where many of the sciences we study now didn’t exist, or were in their infancy. Yet just fifty years ago, something that we take for granted now was just being truly discovered, the details ironed out, laying the foundation for greater understanding.

I am talking about DNA.

We hear the buzz words – gene slicing, genetically engineered food, cloning, DNA evidence at crime scenes. It’s in the movies; from the crime dramas to the futuristic sci-fi where it allows for super-humans, to the thrilling dinosaur tales of Michael Crichton. But in the 1950’s, while they knew such a thing existed, they had no clue as to exactly what it was.

Rosalind Franklin was one of the pioneers working in the field, and using her own ingenious methods, managed to discover important basic facts about its structure.

Her work was shared, without her knowledge, with those who history does remember – James Watson and Francis Crick. All throughout school, it was always either Watson and Crick’s DNA discoveries, or sometimes a third name, Maurice Wilkins was added in. It wasn’t until an offhanded mention by a professor that is as bothered as I am by the way the Nobel Prize neglects the discovery and such of the deceased, that I finally had a fourth name – Rosalind Franklin.

(For questions about the Nobel Prize, see their FAQ - http://nobelprize.org/contact/faq/index.html)

If she hadn’t have discovered what she did, if her work hadn’t have been shared with Watson and Crick, I wonder where their research would have led them, and how long it would have taken them to play catch-up. She never managed the key element of understanding DNA, the knowledge of how the base pairs inside line up, but she cleared off a lot of the false leads, including the possibility that DNA was actually three stranded, and that the sugar-phosphate backbone lies on the inside, not the outside.


Certainly they acknowledged her contribution, but over time, it has become Watson and Crick, and Wilkins most of the time, that are taught to our children, leaving Rosalind Franklin to slowly fade to the background.

And why?

From the Nobel Prize website ... this says it all.

"Is it possible to nominate someone for a posthumous Nobel Prize?

No, it is not. Previously, a person could be awarded a prize posthumously if he/she had already been nominated (before February 1 of the same year), which was true of Erik Axel Karlfeldt (Nobel Prize in Literature 1931) and Dag Hammarskjöld (Nobel Peace Prize, 1961). Effective from 1974, the prize may only go to a deceased person to whom it was already awarded (usually in October) but who had died before he/she could receive the Prize on December 10 (William Vickrey, 1996 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel)." http://nobelprize.org/contact/faq/index.html

Rosalind Franklin would have had to have been nominated before her death to qualify. But once she died, it didn't matter than her research provided the founation for Watson and Crick's discoveries, it didn't matter that they gave her credit!

They will be remembered by history, and she has been religated to a footnote, if that, in DNA's legacy.

(The picture to the right is one that she took - one of the earliest images of DNA. Something we take for granted in today's society. Isn't it pretty?")

How many others have we forgotten in science?

Then and Now!

by Jude Mason

Masturbation has been around ever since people. And finding things to masturbate with, must be as old. I thought I'd do a little research and see what kinds of 'toys' I could find. We'll skip past the obvious broom handles for the women and cloth filled doodads for the men and get to the invention of real gizmos for sexual pleasuring ourselves.

The earliest I could find, reminds me a little bit of a kitchen gadget my mother used for beating eggs and light batters. A Google search led me to http://www.vibratormuseum.com/ where I found this device called, MACAURA'S PULSOCON HAND VIBRATOR The action is a plunging motion of the center disk at the end combined with a rotating eccentric weight. There were also applicators that would screw into the center disk. Marked Pat. applied for, Serial No. 6681. Could be from as early as the early 1880's or as late as about 1900.

Now, this would be in the time of my grandmother and also a time where information of sexual or procreational bent was taboo. Hell, your doctor wasn't even permitted to tell you how you got pregnant. It makes you wonder how they got away with this.

Another website http://www.slate.com/ had some pretty darned amazing things I'd like to share with you.

Also in the 1880s, a British doctor stepped in to invent the first electric vibrator, an industrial-size contraption meant to be a permanent fixture in a doctor's office. It was a major labor-saver, allowing many patients to reach paroxysm in less than 10 minutes.

Oh my Gawd, can you imagine going to the local quack and asking for a treatment?

Between 1900 and 1940, there was an explosion of new toys being patented. Some resembled today's electric drills and it bears the question, which came first. LOL

From the 1950s through the 1970s, the vibrator became what you maight call a camouflaged technology. Mail-order catalogs full of household tchotchkes featured beautiful women with long, silky hair loosening their tight shoulder muscles with banana-shaped vibrators. Also popular were vibrators that doubled as nail-buffer kits, hair brushes, backscratchers, and some that were designed as attachments for vacuum cleaners. Most of them were cheesy, battery-operated devices that came in shag-carpet hues: avocado, gold, and burnt orange. Yum!

It really wasn't until the 1980's and 90's that vibrators, or self-pleasuring devices, got into mainstream and were thought of as an okay alternative to sex.The arrival of AIDS and it's public health threat had politicians and doctors alike, jumping on the bandwagon.

Now, in 2005 progress was definitely showing itself. On June 1, 2005, sex writer Violet Blue, while in San Fransisco, induced two orgasms in her partner, who was riding a custom-vibrator known as a Thrillhammer at the Museum of Sex in New York City.

Now there's a museum I want to visit. I wonder if they have samples? I wonder if they need volunteers or testers? The mind boggles.

This is a very brief history of an amazing side of human sexuality. A side that has been hidden, exploited, abused and relished over the centuries. What will the future bring? I've heard tales of a device that connects directly with a person's mind. No need for gadgets and probes, you'll writhe and gasp in orgasm without being touched, and it'll be better than any human induced orgasm you've ever had, or ever will have. But, will it be as fulfilling? Will we, humanity, seek it out, pay the exorbitant price for a moment's pleasure?

Who knows. What do you all think?

A Valentine's Origin Myth

By Lisabet Sarai


To kick off the topic for this week (which is, of course, Valentine’s Day), I thought that I’d discuss the history of this beloved holiday. When I did some research, however, I discovered a great deal of confusion. In fact, the history of Valentine’s Day is one big muddle.

First, there was not one, but three Saint Valentines, all martyrs during the first few centuries after Christ, when Rome was working to suppress the subversive new religion. Second, there appears to be no relationship whatsoever between any of these saintly figures (who were celibate priests) and the topics of romantic love or sex. Yet by Chaucer’s time, such an association existed, at least tentatively, and the notion was well-established by Shakespeare’s period, as indicated by an extended passage from Hamlet:

To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day,
All in the morning betime,
And I a maid at your window,
To be your Valentine.
Then up he rose, and donn'd his clothes,
And dupp'd the chamber-door;
Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed more.

The holiday was commercialized in the mid-nineteenth century, when the sending of cards, flowers and gifts became popular. I’m more curious, though, about the original inspiration. How did Saint Valentine become the patron of lovers? There must be something missing from the historical record. Given the lack of any clues, I decided to offer my own Valentine’s origin myth based (extremely loosely) on what we do know about the mysterious martyr.

The Origin of Valentine’s Day (according to Lisabet Sarai!)

The priest Valentinus lay on the straw pallet in his cell. Final rays from the setting sun pierced the slits in the stone walls and made gold streaks on the floor. Valentinus sighed at the thought that this would be the last he would see of the glorious orb. Soon, though, I’ll will be with Christ, in the heart of glory, he reminded himself. Still, his heart was as heavy as the granite enclosing him.

Claudius had just left in a fit of pique, after failing again to make him recant. Despite the emperor’s epithet, “The Cruel”, Valentinus understood that the august ruler respected him, and did not want him to lose his head. It was all political for Claudius; he hadn’t a spiritual bone in his body. The new religion offered too much of a challenge to the state to be tolerated. If the priest would renounce his faith and publicly bow to Jupiter, Claudius would free him in an instant, an example to the self-righteous ramble who followed the new prophet.

Valentinus was a different sort of man. He believed in divine love and ultimate resurrection. His faith had kept him strong and pure for more than fifteen years, since the trip to Ephesus when he had first encountered the True Church. For his faith, he would lose his life. But he would save his soul.

Dusk deepened to full night. The pitch torch smoked and sputtered. Valentinus prayed, there on his back. He knew that his Lord did not require the discomfort of bony knees on a hard floor.

The iron door squealed. Valentine sat up. It was too early for his last supper. A slight feminine figure swathed in white linen slipped into the cell and pushed the recalcitrant door shut behind her. She approached the pallet and removed her outer wrap.

Golden curls tumbled down over her shoulders, brilliant as the vanished sun. A chaplet of myrtle bound her brow. Youth shone in her eyes, but the body he glimpsed under her finely-woven robe was the ripe form of a woman. Ancient desire stirred in him. He suppressed it with the ease of long practice.

“Who are you, lady? Why have you come to disturb my final meditations?”

“Lord Valentinus, I am Lydia, priestess of Juno. The Holy Mother is affronted by your stubborn refusal to pay her homage. Tonight is the festival of Lupercalia. Tonight, maids and youths throughout Rome will be celebrating the marriage of Juno and Jupiter, the rulers of heaven. Yet you languish here, refusing to accept the gift of love, scorning the generosity of the gods.”

“Your gods are not mine, lady. I neither honor nor scorn them. They are irrelevant to me.”

“Relevant enough to take your head,” Lydia commented.

“My body is unimportant. Soon enough, my soul will be with God.” Despite his brave words, though, her beauty was working her spell on him. The rod of flesh between his legs grew stiffer by the minute.

Lydia untied the sash that fastened her robe. The diaphanous garment floated to the floor, revealing her lush, perfect body. “I’ve come to offer you Juno’s gifts, nevertheless.” She approached the pallet and took his face in her hands. “I know I cannot change your mind, Valentinus, or make you renounce your faith. But allow me to provide one last taste of the pleasures of earth, before you leave it.”

“No, wait. I am sworn to celibacy...” Valentinus began. Yet he did not resist when she gathered him to her sweet breasts, when she parted the ragged cotton robe that covered him and laved his aching nipples with her tongue. He cried out, but did not push her away, when she swallowed the stubborn pillar jutting from his groin. He grabbed her hips and arched into her when she straddled him and settled his shaft in the liquid depths between her thighs.

They moved together, not speaking aloud, but joined in spirit. She is not like the other Romans, realized Valentinus, even as pleasure surged through him in ecstatic waves. She does not care about material things. She is a creature of faith, a true daughter of her gods. I can touch her soul as well as her body.

Moonlight crept through the window-slits, painting their skin silver. Their passion rose and fell, smooth and silent as the Tiber rolling toward the sea. Their pleasure crested and ebbed and then climbed again. They never broke the connection. Through the night he remained within her, their limbs entwined, their minds and hearts united.

At last they slept. At dawn came the squeal of the rusty hinges and the guards, unexpectedly gentle when they saw Valentinus and Lydia together. Without shame, ignoring the lustful gaze of the centurions, Lydia rose and donned her robe. “Remember me,” she told the priest, with a last kiss. “It will ease the last pain.”

“And remember me,” said Valentinus, unfazed by his apparent fall from grace. “Here, take this.” He handed her a scroll, his copy of the Scriptures. “I know I will not woo you from your gods to my God, but let this be my keepsake.”

“Sign it,” she said, and he did, before the guards led him to the execution ground.

Lydia returned to the temple, rejoicing in the trickle of Valentinus’ seed down the insides of her thighs. She did not wish to see his final moments. She knew that she would be in his thoughts as the sword came down. She made her obeisance to the majestic gilded image of the Mother before returning to her modest room. There, she unfurled the scroll and read her lover’s dedication.

“To my beloved Lydia whom I look forward to meeting in heaven,
For I know that no God or gods would be cruel enough to separate us.
From your devoted Valentine.”

Tears fell on the parchment, smearing the charcoal-based ink.

They were tears of joy.

---

Happy Valentine’s Day to all of our readers!

Grand Re-Opening Contest Winner

Thanks to all who contributed to our grand re-opening week by reading and commenting. We received 133 distinct, non-anonymous comments (not including comments by Grip authors). All I can say is WOW.

Our randomly chosen winner is blessedheart. Please email me at the email address you will find on my website (http://www.lisabetsarai.com/links.html) and tell me your preferred email address, so that we can send you your gift certificate.

Once again, thanks to everyone who visited. We do hope that you'll continue to drop by the Grip and offer your thoughts.