Tis the holiday season, so here’s wishing you one that’s merry and bright, with not too much in the way of holiday blues, but lots of good cheer, good works and good sex to chase the blues away. This is not as unholy as you might think. In ancient pagan times, before anyone even conjured up Christmas, Hannukkah, Ramadan, Kwanzaa, Bodhi Day (the Buddhist winter holiday), Pancha Ganapati (the Hindu version), holiday sales, on-line shopping, faith-based mega-malls, before they even invented the Wal-Mart, people throughout the world celebrated the cold, dark period surrounding the Winter Solstice with great festivals of fire to chase away the cold, light to chase away the darkness and fun to chase away the blues.
And SEX–lots of sex. To honor the icy season, our polytheistic forebears would feast and fornicate for days of nonstop bacchanalian orgies that would make Jenna Jameson pee in her g-string. Over 2000 years before Christianity, Mesopotamia’s Winter Carnaval featured mummers-style parades with floats carrying glorious scenes of Sex among the Gods. The Greek Winter Festival celebrated another Son of God with a human mother, who worked miracles, was associated with wine, and miraculously resurrected after death; His name was Dionysus. The Roman Saturnalia, presided over by Old Father Time (a kind of Santa Claus with balls, chortling “Ho, ho, ho Saturnalia!”), included the first Xmas Carols which were truly X-rated, as the carolers would sing in the nude
Winter Solstice or “Sun Birthday” was and is when the sun, after being at its lowest, is “born again,” as the days begin to get longer. To the ancients, Winter Holiday Sex was more than just a personal pleasure or a cool way to keep warm. It was an ecstatic communal coming together, celebrating the erotic fecundity of life in the dead of winter, red hot hope in a season of cold blue despair
Which brings us to this winter, which sometimes feels like a Super-Sized Season of Cold Blue Despair, and I don’t mean the weather. I mean, just look at us noble Americanos, having been cheer-leaded into Perma-War by a Chickenhawk Pussy named Bush and a Dickless Dickhead named Dick, now doggie-paddling through a blood-drenched Mesopotamian quagmire of Big Lies, body bags, torture, no WMDs (except the ones we brought with us), but plenty of apocalyptic destruction, mutilation, burgeoning religious extremism and death, death and more death. America’s Guernica, America’s shame. And nobody wins, but Iran.
Meanwhile, back in the Homeland, we’ve got massive debt, debt and more debt (what do we owe, $8 trillion?) due mostly to China and Japan. Then we’ve got the Katrina debacle, the Patriot Act(s), the Plame Affair and the President’s creepy confession that he’s been spying illegally on American citizens in a manner reminiscent of another Dick (Nixon).
Then, there’s the bulldozing of sweet reason by wrathful religion, with crusader-style fundamentalism exerting unprecedented, abusive power at the highest levels of American government, even as faith-based terror wreaks havoc upon the world. Some offshoots of the domestic religiosity boom are a War of Hypocrisy on Consensual Adult Pornography (quickly turning into a frighteningly censorious War on Art), a War on Women’s Rights, and a resurgence of Crazed Homophobia, all sprouting like bright dandelions of hate in the cultivated gardens of the major monotheistic religions (despite the interesting fact that most of their esteemed leaders dress like funky drag queens).
Add to this season’s holiday blues bouillabaisse a corporatized mainstream media that gives prostitution a bad name (ho, ho, ho’s all of ’em – Fox, CNN, the New York Times), and a so-called opposition party whose positions are virtually the same as the power party. Stir into the cerulean mix the stepped-up War on Drugs (that is, natural drugs), with over two million people imprisoned in the bloated US gulag (in which the state sponsors murder and calls it execution), coupled with Big Pharma’s perfectly legal drugging of America, not to mention the sacking of America, the poor getting poorer while Bush & Dick’s cronies get richer especially the Arms Makers, the Death Machinists, the Military Industrial Complex that old Ike once warned us about. We are shooting ourselves in the foot and the eyes and the brains and the heart with our fancy phallic guns, as Osama sits back like a Mafia sheik, watching America get hoodwinked by hoodlums world-renowned for putting human beings in hoods. Meanwhile, the Mother of Us All, our beautiful blue planet Earth, suffers and sputters, consumptive over the consumption of Her Children. Who knows if we are “One Nation Under God?” What we do know is that we are under one big honking hole in the Ozone Layer. .
So goes our current Winter of Despairwhich gives us all the more reason to come together to beat those holiday blues and the whole damn dehumanizing desexualizing System of Perma-War, by beating our drums and our buns and our jingle balls, shaking up the toxic status quo, conjuring up the red-hot power of pleasure, hope, love, creativity, science (bless you, Judge John E. Jones!), the Bonobo Way, the power of warmth and sex over the forces of coldness and death. This is just what we at the Dr. SUSAN BLOCK Institute did at our Winter Solstice XXXmas-Saturnalia Celebration, and (in your own orgiastic way, of course), so should you.
The ancients believed that Holiday Sex encouraged crops to grow (hey, it’s less of a stretch than belief in virgin motherhood) and productivity to increase. Of course, America’s once-vaunted productivity has long gone to China. But a little Holiday Sex can still heat things up, melting winter’s despair, releasing frustrations, igniting personal revolutions, stirring up ch-ch-ch-changes between the ears as well as between the legs. This is why the authorities try to confine sex to procreation because recreation leads to revolution. Because sex is knowledge, sex is Eve’s first bite of that deliciously forbidden apple, sex is the small precious truth behind the Big Lie.
As such, sex, specifically holiday sex, can be a deeply spiritual experience, even when it’s more *naughty* than nice. This is within the Winter Solstice tradition, to be a bit naughty, a bit bacchanalian, to make the fool into a king (well, unless the fool already is the king), to crack the cold blue ice of authority, to “break on through to the other side” and assert the wild, righteous power of Eros over Thanatos. Sex over Death.
Don’t hurt anybody now! But do go on a holiday sex adventure… Whether you prefer tantric monogamy, a Dionysian orgy under the mistletoe, a hot tub lit by Hannukkah or Kwanzaa candles, breaking Ramadan fast with delicacies consumed from the intimate crevasses of your lover’s succulent body, a round of naked Saturnalian choruses of “Come All Ye Faithful,” suffering for the sins of our Torturer-in-Chief by getting your naughty ass whipped on the Bondage Cross (of which U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is sure to disapprove because it’s consensual), or just a Holidazed Wank for Peace in between eggnogged rounds in the Nuclear (Family) Pressure Cooker Whatever your pleasure, enjoy it and infuse it with a sense of *sacred* solstice power, a vow to overthrow the deadly status quo of Perma-War and Power-Grabs, and a passionate commitment to love.
Dr. SUSAN BLOCK is a sex educator, host of The Dr. SUSAN BLOCK Show and author of The 10 Commandments of Pleasure. Visit her main website at http://www.drsusanblock.com
Send all comments, love letters, hate mail, questions, confessions, endorsements, enticements and testimonials to her at liberties@blockbooks.com
