From “The Scratching Post”: Sexual musings, Part 1

By Ken Marks

[Opening from the original on The Scratching Post, October 24, 2022, published here by permission of the author.]

Empedocles missed his chance at greatness when he failed to give sex a place in his group of basic elements—earth, air, water, and fire. True, sex isn’t an element, but I don’t disqualify it on that account. It occupies our thoughts far more than earth, air, water, and fire combined.

Educated Fleas

     The omnipresence of sex was probably best recognized by Cole Porter when he wrote, “Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it.” That scope is well beyond what I could manage in a hundred blog posts, and besides, my obsession with sex isn’t quite that strong. Dealing only with human sexuality is more than enough, and even then, quite a lot remains on the table. There’s the plethora of how-to manuals, moral diatribes, boorish humor, titillating fiction, scholarly research, manifestos of grievances, legal argumentation, and social history to consider—enough to inundate the world’s largest library. And you’d still have to dedicate another city block to a library for porn videos.

    I can come to grips with this agglomeration only by focusing on social history, and here I discern two distinct eras of human sexuality….
[Read the whole thing on The Scratching Post.]

Copyright © 2022 by Ken Marks Ken Marks was a contributing editor with Paul Clark & Tom Lowe when “Moristotle” became “Moristotle & Co.” A brilliant photographer, witty conversationalist, and elegant writer, Ken contributed photographs, essays, and commentaries from mid-2008 through 2012. Late in 2013, Ken birthed the blog The Scratching Post. He also posts albums of his photos on Flickr.