Word: sexe
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Gold Star in World War II . . ." She abhorred war, she said, but called on her sex to demand that the U.S. live up to its military responsibilities. When the crowd grew noisy she seized the gavel and whacked away with it like a section hand driving a spike. When she was done, half the delegates came to their feet to cheer. "I would have appreciated a little silence more," said Mrs. India Edwards grimly...
Kogi men, says Reichel-Dolmatoff, loathe sex and shrink from it, an attitude they learn as boys from priests who spend nine years in darkness studying the tribal rituals. The priests, called mamas, teach that women are evil-but a necessary evil, because they provide men with food. Thus embittered against women, boys are initiated into a reluctant sexual role by a 60 year-old hag, and then sent out to seek wives...
Reichel-Dolmatoff, turning to psychiatry for an explanation of such behavior, says the Kogi man's aversion to sex stems from a cult of love for a world-mother spirit. Kogis think life is only a larger womb than the one from which they sprang, and death only a return to the womb of the great All-Mother. Their aim is to put themselves "in balance" with the All-Mother-mostly by idleness in the uterine universe...
...found many underground recruits in the late Middle Ages. The Adamites reacted strongly against the church view on unbounded fleshly pleasures. They believed that perfection could be achieved not by ascetic prayer, but by a return to the perfect love of natural man, as typified by Adam and Eve. Sex, in their view, was essentially beautiful, never embarrassing. To emphasize this, they often took off their clothes during their secret rituals...
Equally shocking to later expurgators. e.g., Thomas Bowdler, were Gibbon's racy reflections on imperial sex life. Of the Empress Theodora he wrote: "After exhausting the arts of sensual pleasure she most ungratefully murmured against the parsimony of Nature," adding in a footnote, "She wished for a fourth altar on which she might pour libations to the god of love." No bowdlerizer, Editor Saunders lets Gibbon have...