The Sex Ashram of Koh Phangan and the Lost Teachings of Tantra

Swinger clubs are straightforward. The people that frequent them are there for one thing — polyamorous sex. These clubs rarely take on spiritual airs. There’s no sense of a utopia served with chai. Visits to swinger clubs, raw by nature, come straight to the point. They connect goers to their animalistic desires. Yet, most people respect the etiquette. If a woman says no — it means no.

Moving around tantric circles, you’ll find love and spirituality at the heart. People greet each other with prayer. They hold their hands in anjali mudra and say: Namaste — the light in me greets the light in you. Things like transformative erotic vaginal massages are on offer not to fulfill fantasies, but to push one towards a higher state of being. Here, sexual acts are heavily spiritualized. Yet, in these places meant to be a safe haven for self-discovery and enlightenment, such as Agama Yoga School in Koh Phangan, Thailand, we find men of power, gurus, not only abusing their influence over their disciples, but actually ignoring their cries of “no” and “stop.”

- Medium

'Decent men have affairs all the time. I'm going to tell you why.'

Up until about seven years ago, I had a somewhat black and white view of sex and adultery within a committed relationship. Case in point:

Infidelity – infidelity was for arseholes. If a man has an affair, he most likely thinks with his dick and lacks the inner strength to work through the challenges relationships bring. If a woman has an affair, she is jeopardising her family, demeaning herself, and betraying the sisterhood.

Sex – I liked sex as much as the next woman. That is to say, I used to. But by 2011, I was 40 with two children under six. I was working. I was trying to run the household. To be frank, I still thought my husband was attractive, but I just wasn’t attracted to him. I had no interest in sex anymore; or on the odd occasion I did feel a tingling between my thighs, by the time I weighed up the logistics of following through, the moment had usually passed.

My husband’s sexual needs – I wasn’t meeting them. I didn’t want sex and he was going to have to get used to it. Have a pull. Jerk the chain. Do whatever, but don’t expect me to roll over and think of England. To put out when I didn’t really want to felt like a denial of me; an insincere gesture to us both. Besides which, I was bloody tired and resentful.

 - Mamamia

La dernière oeuvre d'Anthony Bourdain

Le regretté Anthony Bourdain aurait lancé la semaine dernière un roman graphique, qu'il a scénarisé avec son ami Joel Rose. Hungry Ghosts, un album d'horreur gore inspiré de légendes japonaises, a été achevé deux jours avant le suicide de l'animateur de Parts Unknown. La Presse a pu parler à son coauteur.

- La Presse

Photos of Abandoned Russia

Across the vastness of Russia—the world’s largest country, at some 6.6 million square miles—and over the span of its long history, countless houses, factories, churches, villages, military bases, and other structures have been built and then left behind: imperial-era palaces, log cabins of pioneers in the Far East, Christian cathedrals, massive Soviet blocks of concrete, speculative-mining camps, and more. For years now, photographers have traveled across Russia finding and photographing these intriguing ghost towns, empty Soviet factories, toppling houses, and crumbling chapels.

- The Atlantic

Le tabou du plaisir au féminin - Les salopes ou le sucre naturel de la peau

En ces temps de #MoiAussi et d’inconduites sexuelles, parler de sexualité au féminin peut s’avérer un terrain glissant. Dans Les salopes [...], la cinéaste ne fait pas qu’en parler. Elle la montre de manière très réaliste, sous une aura de tabous, de l’adultère à la sexualité à l’adolescence, sans s’empêcher d’inclure une accusation de viol.

« C’est tellement compliqué, la sexualité des femmes, que même évoquer le désir met mal à l’aise », dit celle qui n’a pas voulu non plus signer un pamphlet anti-quoi-que-ce-soit. Mais féministe, elle s’assume. « Je considère qu’il est important de parler de la sexualité de façon positive, là où la femme vaut, la femme aime ça, la femme décide, n’est pas traînée de force. »

- Le Devoir

THE STORY BEHIND THE MEDUSA STATUE THAT HAS BECOME THE PERFECT AVATAR FOR WOMEN’S RAGE

Maybe you’ve seen her in your social media feed. A woman in the midst of an unsavory, unrequested task, she stands naked, her hair a tangle of serpents, a sword in one hand, a severed head in the other. Her gaze is not triumphant, exactly, but resolute.

This vision of a re-imagined Medusa myth is a sculpture by Luciano Garbati, a 45-year-old Argentine-Italian artist based in Buenos Aires who has watched in amazement lately as a piece of art he made in 2008 has gone viral across social media, as the perfect avatar for a moment of female rage.

- Quartzy

When Love Breeds Madness: Read This If You’ve Ever Googled Your Ex

As a clinical psychologist, Frank Tallis worked for decades with patients who suffered from what was once called lovesickness. Now a full-time writer of both nonfiction and novels, he has collected some of the most memorable cases into his forthcoming book, The Incurable Romantic: And Other Tales of Madness and Desire (Basic Books, September 2018). We talked about love and madness and the connection between them.

- Scientific American

Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

Our well-being is local and relative — if you live in a struggling area and your status is slipping, even if you are relatively comfortable, you are probably at least a bit miserable.

All happiness is relative. Although moral philosophers may wish Homo sapiens were wired more rationally, we humans are walking, talking status meters, constantly judging our worth and social standing by comparing ourselves with others today and with our own prior selves.

- NY Times

Portraits of forbidden love: Extraordinary images capture intimate displays of affection from 19th and 20th-century women who flouted the rules at a time when homosexuality was a criminal offence

Captured at a time when homosexuality was considered taboo, these remarkable images defiant women who flouted convention in the nineteenth and twentieth century.

Kissing, embracing and reclining in intimate positions, the incredible black-and-white photographs provide a rare glimpse into women who dared to display physical love in the 1800s and early 1900s.

The images capture Victorian and early-twentieth century females in intimate poses and showing a daring level of openness with one another for the era they were living in.

- Madness Hub

3 Old-Fashioned Sleep Hacks That Science Says Actually Work

For as long as humans have been falling asleep, we've been theorizing about how sleep works, what dreams are for, and how to sleep better. But sleep science, even today, reveals that there's still a lot we don't know about the art of sleeping — and that what we do know, ancient physicians may have known earlier before. While a great deal of old-fashioned knowledge about sleep is pretty inaccurate, some things people thought about sleep back in the day might even work better than some of the sleep hacks of today.

Sometimes old knowledge about sleep gets the right answer for the wrong reasons. For instance, Aristotelian theories about sleep, which held sway until the Industrial Revolution, tied sleep closely to digestion and "life force," and so suggested that sleep was the key to living a long life. Recent studies have found that this is true: lots of sleep on your days off does help you live longer, possibly because it lowers the stressful effects of sleep deprivation during the week. Beyond sleeping for a longer life, though, these three very old ideas about sleep with long histories are coming back into fashion. Get ready to put on some very old-fashioned pajamas and have a century-old sleep.

- Busle

Is Buddhism a religion or a philosophy?

A longtime debate over Buddhism's religiosity has drawn a line between metaphysics and action.

If you were to go by the stream of psychology and neuroscience books published over the last two decades, you’d think Buddhism is an intricate philosophical system designed by a man with a keen insight for the emergence of psychoanalysis and philosophy some 2,400 years down the road.

- Big Think

Here’s To Good Friends: Socializing Like a Boss in Vintage Alcohol Ads

There were many advertising tactics from booze producers providing an association between alcohol and being popular, having friends and fun.  It’s common sense, after all.

- Flashbak