An Uneducated View of Sex, Food and Politics - Derek Haines (beach read book .TXT) 📗

this a question we should, or must ask ourselves? Are we embarrassed at our behaviour or indulgences? Or are we so bombarded by self-righteous, self-opinionated tabloid media, and bible holding, God fearing do-gooders, that we are forced to continually reinforce our own sense of values, morals or good taste. Sensationalised reporting by tabloid media (which unfortunately accounts for a vast percentage of our mass media merchants) would have us believe that every single food group can cause severe illness, disease and death. If you change channels, or newspapers, your chances of finding a similar sensational story about the ‘miracle’ cure of some exotic disease by the very same food group. None of this crap is news. It is crap. Mindless crap! When a new weight reducing diet devised by some crackpot, based on the consumption of only cabbage, combined with walking one kilometre a day on your hands makes good copy for a seven minute feature on a current affairs program, all I want to do is ask; “Who paid the so called journalist to get this shit on air?”
Like it or not, and believe it or not, food is a great topic for tabloid media. It is used as a tool to prey on the vulnerable. Mothers concerned about their children’s health. Elderly concerned about their sensitive and slow working digestive systems. The overweight. Now this demographic needs looking at for a moment. The overweight. Who are these people? Two hundred kilo giants? No. The overweight are a massive percentage of the population. This is why they are such a great target market. As a marketeer, you can’t miss it! Any woman whose body is not the right shape for the cover of a magazine, or could not earn $30,000 for appearing with her legs spread for Playboy, or any woman who wears a dress size larger than size 8 is overweight! Any man who does not have the stomach of Adonis, and a backside in the mould of Mick Jagger is classically defined as overweight. Our western media, (and wanking fashion houses) have created a system of measuring the human body so as to place 99% of the population over the limit of acceptable appearance. This might be all well and dandy if you happen to be a pre-pubescent sixteen year old girl suffering from an anorexic complaint, (I think I inadvertently described perfection in that line), but for me, as a man and not a wanking fashion house owner, please give me a woman with curves! Hips! A backside that I can firmly grip with both hands. Breasts that move when a woman walks! Give me a little weight any day.
19 Or Iggy Pop as my Morticia notes on my first draft of this book.
The mere thought of the media induced ideal of the perfect woman is a turn off for me. What earthly attraction is there to a man of a flat chested, female stick insect with hollow black eyes created by starvation and vomiting? There is a complete lack of normality in this vision. Yet our media and society continue to push the notion that if you are a woman with any one single curve on your body, you are overweight, and hence the logic works, that you have a problem! Therefore you should heed the advice of the media and buy the $35.00 book describing in detail how to change your diet immediately, to include only cabbage. And also how to learn to walk on your hands for one kilometre a day. To any woman who has fallen for this high pressure selling, devised by very clever and astute marketers and highly respected business entrepreneurs, and reinforced by the power of ‘independent’ paid media, I say to you. Look at yourself again. Take off the media supplied ‘funny glasses’ you have been fitted with unwittingly, and enjoy being a woman. Enjoy life. Do not believe all the lies.
And for us men. I am fit, healthy and happy, with a small overhang of my belt. To be honest, if I inverted my stomach measurement for my chest measurement, I would certainly be an Adonis.
It is interesting to look back, only a short time, to say 1940. What was a desirable woman then? I can tell you. She was a grossly overweight woman by today’s standards. Venture back a little further. It is simple. Look at paintings by the masters through the last four or five hundred years. Particularly the nudes. What do you see? Big, fat, flabby, unsuntanned bodies. Bodies fed on real food. Healthy bodies. Another item for thought is this. Why is it that it is an undeniable fact that the human race is becoming bigger and taller every generation, yet our half-witted media and fashion industry portray us getting smaller? Ignorance of the bleeding obvious always annoys me. When it is not ignorance, but sheer greed for profit that drives a lie, then I get fucking angry. Independent journalism! Honesty in advertising! What a pair of oxymorons.
20 Rubens, Morticia suggests in a note on the first draft.
I have very little to say on the subject of diet regimes. Simply because most are complete bunkum in my opinion. However, I will impart my few simple food rules I have maintained for many years, and feel that they have benefited me enough to espouse their worthiness.
Eat one serve of a green vegetable each day.
Never eat the same meat two days in a row.
Eat two servings of bread each day
Drink three glasses of water every day.
Enjoy creating and eating food.

Anything else is up to you. I might point out that rule number five is the only one that I cast in concrete and always adhered to strictly.
My passion for food will return later in this volume. It has by no means been exorcised fully in these first few pages. Perhaps I could refer to this section as the entrée portion of the book. Whilst enjoying the topic, and having fun in the process, I believe it only fair that I should honour my commitment in the forward of this book, and now devote some pages to a subject that was promised at time of purchase. This also may be a good opportunity for you to place the bookmark here, close the book, and make yourself a cup of coffee. You may also feel the need to relocate yourself to a part of the house where no one will be disturbed by your sniggering or gasps of outrage at the following content. One final word or warning. There are no more recipes for quite some pages. If your prime motivation in buying this book was for recipe ideas, I must say I did warn you that you might have been happier with a colourful book of pasta recipes. But seeing as you have ventured this far, why not let you hair down and just try a few more pages. Just for the hell of it! You never know, you may just enjoy it.
Oh, sorry. I forgot one thing. If you have young children about, who show tremendous curiosity for books, and have learned to speed read at the age of five, I would suggest this is the starting point for gluing pages together. Either that, or tear each page out as you have read them and discard. This also creates a foolproof system for never losing your place in a book.
Ok. Enough said. I am out of here. See you in the next chapter.
21 Or eat them! Suggests Morticia, but I think she is now being very silly, or has delved too far into the bottle of cognac to continue her unpaid job of proof reader.

Chapter 3. Sex? I’m Confused.

Is sex a noun or a verb? An adjective or pronoun? Is it just a matter of selecting the correct tick box on an employment application form? I am sure this thought has crossed your mind, as it has mine. I always want to do the following on one of those stupid forms. Especially official government forms such as tax and census.
Sex? ----> Yes Please!
M ☐
F ☐
To anyone that does not see the humour in this, I suggest that it is time to close up the book, and go find a Reader’s Digest to fill in the rest of the evening.
What is this sex stuff? This is a question I first asked at age four. This is a question I continue to ask at age forty three.
Because of a warp in the time and space continuum of my life, I have found myself located two hours ahead of, and three thousand miles east of my fifteen year old daughter. This has not diminished our close relationship or our ability to communicate. In telling her that I was starting to write a book in part about my understanding of this sex mystery, she laughed and made a comment somewhat derogatory to my knowledge of the subject. Letting this bypass me on the premise that my daughter was just exercising her ability in Australian ‘put down’ humour, I marched forward.
“I have had to discover this for myself” I said to her, hoping for a little more sympathetic response, and continued “It would have been easier if I had have had sex education classes at school like you do.” Her reply caught me by surprise. “Dad, I finished those classes a couple of years ago. How much is there to learn?” I stammered for a reply to my fifteen year old daughter who had in one short sentence, reduced me to a blithering idiot. Her addition of “If you don’t know anything, just ask me Dad” shattered the last of my pride. Could it be that this warp in the time and space continuum had inverted my universe so totally, that forty three year old fathers received advice on sex from their more knowledgeable and sexually educated fifteen year old daughters?
After talking to my daughter about any other subject I could think of for half an hour, I said goodnight, and then sat in silence and wondered whether I had embarked on an embarrassing project. Writing a book which was to include my thoughts on the subject of sex. But that I probably possessed only a small fraction of my daughter’s educated knowledge of the subject.
That was last night. My confidence is back now. I want to forge ahead. To risk being a laughingstock is a small price to pay in the pursuit of my ultimate goal. To be published.

******

In any other book I have read on this subject, the author usually outlines their authority to discuss or lecture on the subject. Degrees, doctorates, vocation or experience. So how do I describe my authority to delve into this delicate subject matter?
22 I think this sounds much more exciting than simply saying divorce.
23 All my life people who know me have said. “You’re just a bloody dreamer.”
In a well known and respected British medical journal, (whose name I will not mention as I am not sure of my legal standing to mention by name, but it’s name begins with a capital L, so I will leave you to guess) a well-regarded English University medical research unit published the results of an extensive research project they had conducted into a often discussed anatomical conundrum. To what purpose did the knob shaped head of a penis serve? (Please excuse me if I have phrased this crudely, but how else can one describe this?) Their research had been extensive and thorough. And also expensive. Seventy five thousand pounds worth of expensive! Not only did their respondents include one thousand university students, but also the data from a five thousand person telephone survey. Overwhelmingly, by a seventeen to one ratio,