Are we ever puritanical about solitary pleasures!

I'm one of those people who write novels for myself with no intention ever of publishing them. I do it because it gives me intense pleasure. It's like being infatuated - when things flow, I live more intensely. Music moves me more deeply and I'm content with my life.

Sharing the novels with others used to be more important to me, but as I've grown older, I find I don't need validation and I don't need praise. All I need is to WRITE. I don't like finishing a novel, either. Even as I work to bring things to a satisfying close, I am not looking forward to being finished - it means I'll need to build up an entirely new world of characters to get myself back to that former state of creative bliss.

I would hesitate to call myself a writer only because people will naturally ask, "Oh what have you written?" and expect me to tell them a title they can find at the bookstore. Yet I spend much of my free time writing for myself and studying writing technique so that my writing will move me all the more. My day-job is entirely unrelated to this.

Now, I also play amateur chambermusic - and I've found that somehow this is more socially acceptable. Getting together with friends to play music you never intend to hone to a performance level is a social activity, and therefore worthwhile to this society that prizes sociability and mistrusts introverts. Of course, practicing one's instrument alone is *work* so that's OK.

A whole new can of worms will undoubtedly be opened with the way this new study on pregnancy, early miscarriage, and socio-demographic, behavioural and other factors is being reported:

http://www.forbes.com/forbeslife/health/feeds/hscout/2006/12/04/hscout536393.html

(for example, "Women who weren't married or living with a partner had an increased risk of miscarriage." - wouldn't the religious right love to bray about *that*!)

The abstract is here:

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1471-0528.2006.01193.x

I googled for the knight & noose story because I was so baffled by it. Apparently it's from a book called "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus", and it's supposed to illustrate the inclination women supposedly have of offering unsolicited advice to men when we see a mistake about to be made (apparently men hate this, and wish we would just shut up and let them make mistakes in peace). The book seems like a compendium of gender stereotypes, possibly somewhat useful for the boobs who base their lives on stereotypes.

I suppose the abstinence-only folks threw the story in because they like the idea of silent, passive women. (unless they're passively accepting sexual advances? huh??)

Let's just think about what it means to be "responsible" for a moment. Does

it mean the rapist should be treated more leniently? Such fluffy surveys

leave me extremely frustrated. What do the surveyed people understand "responsible" to mean? Such a survey really should include questions about

what consequences should come of such responsibility. And to get a completer picture, we should also hear their thoughts on other crimes like mugging.

It is the consequences that make the word "responsible" meaningful.

Let's suppose someone does something dumb like flash jewelry in a bad part of town. Do judges ever EVER reduce the sentence for a mugger in these cases? Of course not! They might warn the muggee about being stupid, but the criminal is punished, it's as simple as that.

Now ask the same question about rape. Sadly the answer is yes. For most of human history, the reaction has been (and still is in many parts of the world), "Oh look - she was asking for it, let's let the poor guy go! How can you expect a man to control himself in such a situation?"

How many people surveyed would expect/hope the rapist to be given a lighter sentence if caught? How many would expect the *rape victim* to be punished in a court of law? Isn't she partially responsible, after all? an accessory to the crime? Perhaps it should be like criminalizing suicide, where if you try to commit suicide and fail, you go to jail?

What do you do when you are convinced that the victim shares responsibility?

Basically this survey is meaningless without such considerations.

OK, so here's what we do next: we bring back the term "neurasthenia" so we can get our medical insurance to pay for its treatment at the bordello. In the Victorian era, if you recall, neurasthenia was considered a chronic and incurable medical condition whose symptoms physicians would alleviate by providing regular vulvular massage (the vibrator was invented in the 1880s as a labor-saving device to help physicians with this difficult and often tedious task).

After all, regular orgasms are essential to human health - but let's keep the treatment to the experts.