 |
| I'm indebted to Cettina Vicenzino for this neat illustration of the sexualised Sicilian rice ball. |
Catania is Sicily's second largest city, on the east coast, at the base of Mount Etna. Catania's rice balls are called arancino (plural arancini) - they are pointed and therefore male, of course. The city of Palermo is over 2,700 years old and is in the northwest of Sicily, by the Gulf of Palermo in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Palerma's rice balls are rounded, therefore feminine, and are called arancina (plural arancine).
This is a male quick release coupling:
This is a female coupling:
The fact that there are two sexes is so embedded in human beings that we designate rice balls and fittings as male or female, on the basis of their shape. We all understand this. Society is organised on the basis that men and women form pair bonds in which children are conceived through an act in which an adult male ejaculates semen into an adult woman's vagina, it swims like crazy into her womb, lashing its little tail, penetrates the woman's egg, to form a zygote which becomes an embryo, which, if lucky, will become a viable baby and grow into an adult, nurtured by the man and woman who created it, and go on to form a pair bond of his or her own, and the whole merry dance continues through the gene-erations.
How can this simple arrangement, which has brought us successfully through millennia, have gone so wrong in this year of grace, 2021?
The Plymouth tragedy, in which six people died unnecessarily, is horrifying. The blame currently seems to be laid on the shoulders of the police, and undoubtedly, had the perpetrator not had a shotgun to hand when he was overwhelmed by whatever it was that ailed him, maybe the loss of life wouldn't have been as great as it was. However, young Jake Davison could have armed himself with or without a gun license. Jake himself, seems to have laid the blame for his angst at the feet of his mother, as so many do when a child disappoints, in that she was his first victim. He, of course, was his own final victim. He was a troubled soul. Maybe he would still have been troubled had the internet never existed, but in a less technologically sophisticated age, his expectations of sexual fulfillment might never have been so unrealistically enhanced, he might never have found a friendship group who shared unrealistic grievances about women, and he might have settled down with a homely, ordinary young woman, had a couple of kids and lived a humdrum sort of life of everyday happiness. Or he might have turned into the village eccentric, muttering to himself and not washing. Either way, he would have lived beyond age 22. And five other people would have been able to live out their allotted span.
Back when I was in the criminal justice trade, I worked with a forensic psychologist (forensic (adjective): relating to or denoting the application of scientific methods and techniques to the investigation of crime). Amongst many other interesting bits and pieces, he was of the opinion that the male urge to seek arousal was the driver behind major technological inventions: developments in portraiture to create realistic images through such devices as the camera obscura, the printing press, the Mutoscope, (What the Butler Saw machines), photography, film, television, and, supremely, the computer and the world wide web.
I used to work with sex offenders who, decades ago, had to laboriously create their own portfolios of titillatory materials from photos taken at kiddy sports days and by tearing pictures out of the children’s underwear section of Littlewood’s catalogues. Top shelf magazines (so called because they were supposedly out of the eye-line of a child) in newsagents shops contained images that would be considered tame these days, when more explicit material is available on main stream TV. If they had access to cities, they could visit sex shops in dodgy areas, where they could request material from Amsterdam. All this, though, required effort, and the ever present difficulty of hiding the stash from censorious parents, appalled wife or curious children.
The internet changed the game. Mainstream pornography sites have made the search for masturbatory images very easy. They have normalised such behaviour. The BBC (other television channels are available and almost as culpable) seems committed to an agenda of grooming the nation. The threshold of what is normal has changed. Yes, there are some men who have always preferred masturbating to images of children and abused women, but the internet has drawn some men into more and more extreme and aberrant masturbatory material. It is an escalating pathway. It leads to flawed thinking by some men who see explicit depictions of attractive women engaged in orgasmic behaviours and conclude that this is normal, usual and why the hell aren't I getting any of that? Internet friends in Incel groups encourage such thinking. As we saw in Plymouth, the consequences are shattering. I've never been a bloke and I don't intend becoming one, so how on earth can I know how it feels to be a sexually frustrated man? But in working with sex offenders, the distinction between need and desire should be made. One needs food and water to sustain life. Lack of sex does not cause death. Unless encouraged by an Incel group.
The escalating pathway of abusive images, according to Michael Sheath, who works at the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, for the rehabilitation of offenders, leads from the conflation of easy access to hardcore and deviant pornography, to an interest in child molestation. "The link is unambiguous.”
Rob Jones, director of threat leadership at the National Crime Agency, stated: “The prevalence on the open web of images of child sexual abuse – and the use of the web to groom and livestream abuse – represents a crisis for modern society.” The police UK database of known child abuse images has 17 million unique entries, and is growing by 500,000 images every two months. Around 850 people, mainly men, are arrested each month in England and Wales for downloading indecent images or grooming children online. That is 10,200 per year - compared with 2010, when there were only 407.
Am I wrong to suggest that masturbating to images of adult women can lead to an interest in the sexual abuse of children? Maybe the unholy triumvirate of Epstein, Maxwell and Windsor could help us out with that question.
Here's some thoughts from mr ishmael on such matters:
How can this simple arrangement, which has brought us successfully through millennia, have gone so wrong in this year of grace, 2021?
The Plymouth tragedy, in which six people died unnecessarily, is horrifying. The blame currently seems to be laid on the shoulders of the police, and undoubtedly, had the perpetrator not had a shotgun to hand when he was overwhelmed by whatever it was that ailed him, maybe the loss of life wouldn't have been as great as it was. However, young Jake Davison could have armed himself with or without a gun license. Jake himself, seems to have laid the blame for his angst at the feet of his mother, as so many do when a child disappoints, in that she was his first victim. He, of course, was his own final victim. He was a troubled soul. Maybe he would still have been troubled had the internet never existed, but in a less technologically sophisticated age, his expectations of sexual fulfillment might never have been so unrealistically enhanced, he might never have found a friendship group who shared unrealistic grievances about women, and he might have settled down with a homely, ordinary young woman, had a couple of kids and lived a humdrum sort of life of everyday happiness. Or he might have turned into the village eccentric, muttering to himself and not washing. Either way, he would have lived beyond age 22. And five other people would have been able to live out their allotted span.
Back when I was in the criminal justice trade, I worked with a forensic psychologist (forensic (adjective): relating to or denoting the application of scientific methods and techniques to the investigation of crime). Amongst many other interesting bits and pieces, he was of the opinion that the male urge to seek arousal was the driver behind major technological inventions: developments in portraiture to create realistic images through such devices as the camera obscura, the printing press, the Mutoscope, (What the Butler Saw machines), photography, film, television, and, supremely, the computer and the world wide web.
I used to work with sex offenders who, decades ago, had to laboriously create their own portfolios of titillatory materials from photos taken at kiddy sports days and by tearing pictures out of the children’s underwear section of Littlewood’s catalogues. Top shelf magazines (so called because they were supposedly out of the eye-line of a child) in newsagents shops contained images that would be considered tame these days, when more explicit material is available on main stream TV. If they had access to cities, they could visit sex shops in dodgy areas, where they could request material from Amsterdam. All this, though, required effort, and the ever present difficulty of hiding the stash from censorious parents, appalled wife or curious children.
The internet changed the game. Mainstream pornography sites have made the search for masturbatory images very easy. They have normalised such behaviour. The BBC (other television channels are available and almost as culpable) seems committed to an agenda of grooming the nation. The threshold of what is normal has changed. Yes, there are some men who have always preferred masturbating to images of children and abused women, but the internet has drawn some men into more and more extreme and aberrant masturbatory material. It is an escalating pathway. It leads to flawed thinking by some men who see explicit depictions of attractive women engaged in orgasmic behaviours and conclude that this is normal, usual and why the hell aren't I getting any of that? Internet friends in Incel groups encourage such thinking. As we saw in Plymouth, the consequences are shattering. I've never been a bloke and I don't intend becoming one, so how on earth can I know how it feels to be a sexually frustrated man? But in working with sex offenders, the distinction between need and desire should be made. One needs food and water to sustain life. Lack of sex does not cause death. Unless encouraged by an Incel group.
The escalating pathway of abusive images, according to Michael Sheath, who works at the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, for the rehabilitation of offenders, leads from the conflation of easy access to hardcore and deviant pornography, to an interest in child molestation. "The link is unambiguous.”
Rob Jones, director of threat leadership at the National Crime Agency, stated: “The prevalence on the open web of images of child sexual abuse – and the use of the web to groom and livestream abuse – represents a crisis for modern society.” The police UK database of known child abuse images has 17 million unique entries, and is growing by 500,000 images every two months. Around 850 people, mainly men, are arrested each month in England and Wales for downloading indecent images or grooming children online. That is 10,200 per year - compared with 2010, when there were only 407.
Am I wrong to suggest that masturbating to images of adult women can lead to an interest in the sexual abuse of children? Maybe the unholy triumvirate of Epstein, Maxwell and Windsor could help us out with that question.
Here's some thoughts from mr ishmael on such matters:
.......JUST ANOTHER DREAMER, DREAMING ABOUT EVERYMAN. 26/6/2016
For most of my life I have staunchly advocated the rights of people to fuck as they choose or are impelled to do, acting within whatever is the current law. I am mindful that such a posture can be seen as endorsing an over-reach of the criminal law, already pernicious and invasive, and that we should assume goodness on the part of all and leave people to do as they please; there is, however, a host of reasons for us policing sexual conduct, we need only look to the Harriet Harman paedophile scandal, a time in recent memory when cynical men found -were given - opportunity to romanticise and dignify cruel perversion, to bring it under the Rights banner, to have its cause championed by a squalid elite, that there should have been permitted to exist an organisation called the Paedophile Information Exchange is now almost unbelieveable - that it now seems monstrous is not due to legislators, some - at least some - of whom were and remain fellow-travellers but to victims and campaigners on their behalf; Harriet Harman would have seen all the children buggered, the ghastly, hideous Leon Brittan would lose the evidence, Margaret Thatcher and the Prince of Wales would cuddle the perpetrators; the Churches would - and still do - protect the culprit and slander the victim.
I mention this staggering, national, institutionalised criminality because that's what I voted against, the other day.* I voted against Filth, so, too, I suspect, did millions of others.
I don't give a fuck about Europe, I rarely go and even when I do I live in a land where I am no longer citizen but citizen-suspect and so travel to anywhere is an ordeal of suspicion and bullying and hostility. In or out of Europe my masters presume me guilty of something.
The same people - the Harmans, the Straws - those who embraced the Paedophile Information Exchange now make me suspect in my own land, the repulsive, impertinent cocksuckers of Satan. The same people who nourished alien child-grooming gangs, people like Mr Jack Bribes'n'Torture and Mr Dennis the Crook McShane, call me reactionary and ill-informed.
I don't give a fuck about trade, either. I know about trade, I have traded, I know how to make a profit; people will do it, they always have, when its prohibited, for fuck's sake, people smuggle. People want goods and services, other people want to provide them, in that process value is added, taxation raised, services provided. If the Sultans of Brussels restrict UK trade with member states, if they impede the exporting of BMWs to the UK, they'll be hung from the lamp posts, their balls in their mouths.
Trade is civilisation, now unelected bureaucrats and buffoons like Obama sternly threaten that civilisation, threaten livelihoods and public services, cheeky cunts. Obama can't stop hundreds of tonnes of cocaine being shipped-in to America's rich, thousands of tonnes of hash coming over the border or being grown at home and yet he wants to punish somebody who makes widgets in West Bromwich, somebody should punch him in his stupid, stuttering gob, kick his scrawny arse up and down Pennsylvania Avenue. I voted against Obama, the other day, too.
I read a comment thread in the Guardian, the other day, about fragrance, they didn't call it fragrance, just perfumes and deodorant. The NewPeople, it seems, are incensed by perfumes on the tube, in which, daily, they go about their angry lives. It's gonna kill them all, people wearing scent. It should be made illegal. Walking through airport perfume retailers just quite ruins their experience. They really were raging and drooling. (Me, I try them all, at the airport, I love fragrances, light ones, heavy ones. I like the good, old ones the most - Chanel, Guelain, Dior - but I like some of the newer ones, too, Calvin Klein and Boss, all the various Obsessions and Poisons, quite makes my journey, sniffing and testing nice smells. Not these joyless, prohibitive bastards who read the Guardian, y'know, thinking it still is the Guardian.) Recently, in Aberdeen Hospital, an older, lady phlebologist came to take a blood sample, I knew her of old, I think she may be a bit deaf, has a minor speech impediment, like deaf people sometimes do, and I really, really like her. Gosh, I said, tentatively, that perfume's nice, what is it? She laughed to herself and eventually said - It's one of my husband's aftershaves, it's an expensive one, but he doesn't like it, doesn't wear it, so I do. It's alright for pushing this trolley up and down hospital corridors. I laughed out-loud, saying, that's the sorta thing I'd do, too, and it is. Although I have lots of good stuff I very rarely wear any man cologne, coupla times a year, maybe, that's it, charity shop'll get a scented bonanza when I die, but I always like it when I do, nothing erotic about it, nothing seductive, I just like the smell, and the craft of the parfumier, and if mrs ishmael is putting some on I'll have a dab on my wrists, sniff it, through the day. Guardian readers, by a hundred to one, want perfumes banned in public places, their train journeys are made miserable by scent. Now, if I had to travel daily on one of those fucking subterranean cattle trains beloved of BoJo and Kahn the Kunt then other people's perfumes would be way down my list of grievances. I am nowhere near as clever as the average Guardian reader, even so, I am hundreds of miles from the nearest subway train system and if people can't stand the trains they should move to the country and live off their wits, only they haven't got any and thus witless prefer to find something which others enjoy and prohibit it. I voted against the Guardian, too, the other day, too, anyone who writes for it, anyone who supports it by occasional purchase or by subscription. Polly Toynbee? Gimme strength.
But I didn't come to talk about the Eurendum. mr bob doney offered his thanks for the endless commentary, here, of discouragement to our enemies and I thought I should say something about that because, inasmuch as my opinion matters more than another's, which it doesn't, that is not how I see it, this cyber streetcorner.
mr tdg sometimes obliquely challenges my assertions about and support for the people. Worlds, he reminds us, they rise and fall, this is all a speck in Time's eye; art, thought and culture, that is the stuff which matters, not tribal squabbles over who bestrides the dungheap and I am rightly reproved, even though I do hymn, often, those other things.
What the people want, according to any objective analysis of how Want is expressed and satisfied, is tat and pornography, bling and boobs; the best selling newspaper in the country succeeded because of its daily portrayal of teenage tits, the younger the better, and lies, filthy, disgusting lies, about everything, not just about Hillsbro. Rupert Murdoch and his McKenzie sluts - Trevor Kavanagh, Larry Lamb, Adam Lard, Kay Burley, Toilets Maguire, Andrew Pierce and notably the redneck playboy ancien, Andy Neil, have disfigured the nation, coarsened the public discourse, corrupted the police and ensnared the legislature. All this happened, though, because of and not despite the people, whose rights we have sought to strengthen and protect. Why do we bother, why do we celebrate the Eurendum result when, tomorrow, those who voted for departure would also vote for hanging, for castration, would genuflect before some braindead, crooked bullyboy foreign football manager?
Well, my response to my episodic self-scourging is to remind myself that things, for Everyman, at home and abroad for very man, have grown much better than they were when I was born.
* The United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, took place on 23 June 2016 in the United Kingdom (UK) and Gibraltar to ask the electorate whether the country should remain a member of, or leave, the European Union. The referendum resulted in 51.9% of the votes cast being in favour of leaving the EU.
A Question of Manners (an extract)
Bearing in mind that the Internet's major discourse is upon the subject of the digitised reproduction of largely degenerate and unhealthy, even dangerous and rightly illegal sexual activity, it seems, in any event, contradictory to be seeking, within the same medium, a lasting code or codes of conduct. PornoWeb, the final frontier. Whither manners, amid doggysex and wall-to-wall gangbanging?
Operation Delego was a major international law enforcement investigation which dismantled a paedophile ring that operated an invitation-only Internet site named Dreamboard featuring incentives for posting images of the violent sexual abuse of young children under twelve, including infants. Arrests were made in Canada, Denmark, Ecuador, France, Germany, Hungary, Kenya, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Qatar, Serbia, Sweden, Switzerland and the US. Only 72 charges were filed against the approximately 600 members of Dreamboard.
More Child Porn Isshoos 3/8/11
From Hiroshima and Nagasaki onwards, US foreign policy is an unending, kaleidoscopic snuff movie. In colonial wars and in covert operations GI Joe and psychobastard spooks from the CIA have distinguished themselves in genocide, torture, assassinations and chemical warfare, from My Lai to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay sanctimonious Bible-thumping klansmen have shrugged their Christian shoulders at crimes and abuses perpetrated in their names; successive presidents, leaders of the free world, as they delight in calling themselves, have insulated themselves from oversight and accountability, much less prosecution.
Led by the Torturing Attorney General, a gaggle of senior Uncle Sam law enforcers stood congratulating themselves yesterday for busting seventy or so nonces, worldwide, all of them fitting mr ptb's recent description - each member of the site, Dreamboat or some such, to retain his membership, had to upload new fresh images of him violently abusing children, preferably infants and the victims had to be in visible distress. One after another the bureaucrats praised each other, themselves, their staff, each other again and vowed that They can run but they can't hide. I don't know what fraction of a fraction of one per cent of hardcore nonces seventy constitutes but it'll be tiny to the point of invisibility. It's welcome, their capture, of course, but hardly a triumph and among fellow-travellers in nonce cyberspace it will make no difference whatsoever - these people are driven by a compulsion beyond reason - one would have thought that was self evident, even to the dummies at the Department of Justice. And there is another form of child pornography, as abusive as abusive can be, one in which the entire apparatus of Uncle Sam is brought to bear on defenceless children all around the world.
..............................................................
From Hiroshima and Nagasaki onwards, US foreign policy is an unending, kaleidoscopic snuff movie. In colonial wars and in covert operations GI Joe and psychobastard spooks from the CIA have distinguished themselves in genocide, torture, assassinations and chemical warfare, from My Lai to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay sanctimonious Bible-thumping klansmen have shrugged their Christian shoulders at crimes and abuses perpetrated in their names; successive presidents, leaders of the free world, as they delight in calling themselves, have insulated themselves from oversight and accountability, much less prosecution.
Led by the Torturing Attorney General, a gaggle of senior Uncle Sam law enforcers stood congratulating themselves yesterday for busting seventy or so nonces, worldwide, all of them fitting mr ptb's recent description - each member of the site, Dreamboat or some such, to retain his membership, had to upload new fresh images of him violently abusing children, preferably infants and the victims had to be in visible distress. One after another the bureaucrats praised each other, themselves, their staff, each other again and vowed that They can run but they can't hide. I don't know what fraction of a fraction of one per cent of hardcore nonces seventy constitutes but it'll be tiny to the point of invisibility. It's welcome, their capture, of course, but hardly a triumph and among fellow-travellers in nonce cyberspace it will make no difference whatsoever - these people are driven by a compulsion beyond reason - one would have thought that was self evident, even to the dummies at the Department of Justice. And there is another form of child pornography, as abusive as abusive can be, one in which the entire apparatus of Uncle Sam is brought to bear on defenceless children all around the world.
..............................................................
The developments in Afghanistan this week would have met with mr ishmael's unqualified approval. The Taliban has regained control of their country, from which they were ousted in 2001 by the Americans, following what they call 9/11 ( because they always put the date and the month in the wrong order). The Afghan government seems to have put up no opposition, so at least there has been minimal bloodshed, although there will be a cull of all the Western collaborators as the Taliban returns the country to their version of a pure Islamic state. The BBC is doing its level best to take us back into the war and occupation of Afghanistan, by whipping up sympathy for the plight of women who have rejected the Taliban's Islamic values – we can only hope that the beeb does not prevail, and that the deal Biden struck with the Taliban holds. The influence of the BBC on shaping opinion is massive. And what are they up to? Instead of saying Thank Fuck that’s over, reciting the statistics of dead and wounded, and the costs of being America’s lapdog in this 20 year war, they are wheeling out these totties who are wailing but we thought we were living in a Western democracy and now you’ve gone and abandoned us.
Had Britain been under occupation by a foreign power – say China – for 20 years, imagine the relief with which their withdrawal would be greeted, and how the quislings and collaborators with the occupying Chinese would be dealt with.
Anyway, the War was long enough to be up there with the grand old history book wars:
- the Hundred Years’ War: 1337 - 1453 - We fought the French
- the Thirty Years War: 1618 -1648 - Big European bust up. We joined in a bit
- the Twenty Years War: 2001 - 2021- We helped America with their Operation Enduring Freedom. Estimated deaths in Afghanistan as a direct consequence of the war: 171,000 to 174,000 people. Long story short - we were worse than the Taliban. On the side of the Bad Guys again.
.......JUST ANOTHER DREAMER, DREAMING ABOUT EVERYMAN. 26/6/2016
A Question of Manners (an extract)
More Child Porn Ishoos drafted 3/8/11
Answer to last week's crossword clue : Responsible Adult
..................................................
Both anthologies of the work of mr ishmael and his young Polish friend, Stanislav, Plumb Cheap for You: Honest Not Invent and Vent Stack - are available to purchase for mere money at Lulu or Amazon. It is cheaper to buy from Lulu. Here's how to buy your own copies:
Please register an account with them first. This will save
you a couple of quid, as going straight into the link provided below seems to
make paypal think it's ok to charge in dollars, and apply their own conversion
rate, which will put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account
is set up, follow our link; a pop-up box asks for age confirmation - simply set
the date to (say) 1 January 1960, and proceed. (If you type the title, the
anthology will not appear as a search result until the "show explicit
content" box - found at the bottom left by scrolling down - has been
checked. You may also see the age verification box, as above, at this
point.)
The full title is "Vent Stack love from
stanislav" by ishmael smith, and the cover you'll see is red with white
titles and a picture of Buster the Previous Blog Dog having a green thought in
a green shade.
Link for the paperback:
Or...
shorter link, which might make it easier if you wish to paste it into an email and tell a friend:
Honest, Not Invent is available in paperback or hardback.
Link for Hard Back :
https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/ishmael-smith/honest-not-invent/hardcover/product-njr7vg.html
Link for Paper Back :
https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/ishmael-smith/honest-not-invent/paperback/product-wq2kpg.html
At checkout, try PROWRITINGAID15, WELCOME15 or TREAT15 in the coupon box, which takes 15% off the price before postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.
With the 15% voucher, the book (including delivery to a UK address) should cost £10.89
