Showing posts with label Wall Street Journal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wall Street Journal. Show all posts

Friday, 2 March 2012

Censorship: Cut!

Alan Cumming - funny name, funny guy etc - claims to have been commissioned by the Wall Street Journal to write an article about circumcision.
No, me neither.
Anyway, apparently they didn't publish it - telling Mr Cumming it was "too raw" (fnar fnar) for their readers. 
So Alan's put it on his website.
Enjoy!

'No man will deny that it feels pretty great to have someone gasp at your penis.
'Well, that’s what happened to me when I first moved to America and started to show people the contents of my underpants.  But their gasping was not due to my gargantuan girth, (though no complaints so far, thank you very much!) but more to the fact that I, unlike the vast majority of American males, have not been genitally mutilated. I have a foreskin. I am intact.
'The gasping was due to the fact that most people had never seen a real, unadulterated, uncircumcised penis before, and some of the people who were seeing mine had, to be frank, been round the block a few times so their reaction was all the more surprising and on refection, upsetting.
'For not only did they have no idea of what a foreskin looked like, they also had no idea how to deal with it when we got down to business. I had to give quite a few seminars on how it worked. Can you imagine being in your thirties and suddenly having to explain to lovers how your genitals functioned, or having them gush that they’d never seen one like yours before, or, worse, recoil in disdain and say ‘what do you even do with that?’
'It made me feel that I was the weird one, I was deformed, I was not normal, when of course it was they who had had a piece of the most sensitive part of their bodies removed. I was the intact one. I was complete, I told myself. They were the ones who were lacking, literally, and who needed to be counseled and awakened to these facts...'

Sunday, 27 March 2011

Gandhi: Soul Love

"Yet as Mr. Lelyveld makes abundantly clear, Gandhi's organ probably only rarely became aroused with his naked young ladies, because the love of his life was a German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder, Hermann Kallenbach, for whom Gandhi left his wife in 1908. 'Your portrait (the only one) stands on my mantelpiece in my bedroom,' he wrote to Kallenbach. 'The mantelpiece is opposite to the bed.' For some reason, cotton wool and Vaseline were 'a constant reminder' of Kallenbach, which Mr. Lelyveld believes might relate to the enemas Gandhi gave himself, although there could be other, less generous, explanations.
"Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach about 'how completely you have taken possession of my body. This is slavery with a vengeance.' Gandhi nicknamed himself 'Upper House' and Kallenbach 'Lower House', and he made Lower House promise not to 'look lustfully upon any woman.' The two then pledged 'more love, and yet more love... such love as they hope the world has not yet seen.'"

Andrew Roberts reviews Joseph Lelyveld's Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India, in the Wall Street Journal.
Most of the review is taken up by right-wing Mr Roberts saying how dreadful he thinks Gandhi's politics were, and the above I think is meant above all to suggest Gandhi was a hypocrite...

"Imperfect myself, I must be gentle with others" - Gandhi.

Update: Lelyveld has denied his book suggests Gandhi was bisexual.