Sex

I've been reading some books lately. And in one way or another, sexuality is at the core of each.

In "Little Bee", a sexual encounter, is at the crux of every plot twist in the novel, and in most every case, these events lead the characters down a path toward tragedy - a rape and murder of a Nigerian girl, an offer of sex to get out of an immigrant prison, an adulterous affair that leads a couple to vacation in a Nigerian beach resort in an attempt to recover their marriage.

In "A Thousand Splendid Sons", the story is about two Afghanistan women who are each forced into a marriage with the same pretty despicable man. One is forced into marriage at like age 14, the other is added as a second wife much later but is also young when it happens, 16? The man is at first enamored, but quickly becomes abusive.

Finally, "House of Cards" is a memoir by Dave Dickerson who is this brilliant wordsmith who lands a job at Halmark. He's a great writer and the book is brutally honest - he exposes everything there is about himself. He's young, in his late 20's, but despite his natural intelligence and his obvious passion and skill, he lacks maturity and depth. He's self absorbed throughout which is what, in my opinion, causes him to sabotage a relationship with his fiance. I care about these kinds of things. At the first hint that his relationship might fracture, I google'd him hoping to see him happily married with a woman that from his accounts sounded perfect for him. But, no such luck. He blows it. He thinks he ends it because of her problems and their broken sex life, but the reality is that he seems to actually devolve as the book progresses.

His book ends when he quits Hallmark to pursue a PhD at a college in Florida. Let me quote him:

"I pulled out early the next morning with Dwight Yoakam in my car's CD player, and when I hit the highway, I felt like I was flying. The Life of Dave, 2.0, was going to start today. I planned the whole thing in an invisible chart on my windscreen. I would become a cultural studies scholar, specializing in something cool. Figure that out later. I would learn how to teach, and maybe I'd even like it. I would live in warm weather again, and I'd have a lot of free time. No more nine-to-fiving! Who cares about an eighty percent pay cut if you're getting years of your life back?

I would go to parties. Maybe drink. I'd have a favorite alcohol, even, and feel cool ordering it. I'd smoke a little pot without any fear at all. And there would be girls. Beautiful girls. Don't they sometimes sleep with their TAs? College! Why does anyone ever leave?"

And that basically sums him up by the end of it. He was raised an Evangelical Christian in Tucson. Has some very good reasons for leaving that church. He becomes a Catholic, for some really, truly profound reasons, not least of which it's the church his fiance belongs to. By the end of it, he leaves his faith completely and becomes an atheist.

I admit I'm being judgmental and maybe harsh and there are some poignant moments in the book that I want to blog about later (maybe). Let me find another person to kind of second my point of view. Here's one from an amazon review of the book :

This is a well-written, cleverly observed, and very funny book. I also found it mildly disturbing, because I think Dickerson sometimes reveals more about himself than he realizes. It's still not clear to me, for instance, that he understands how deep the divide was between his own 'romantic' but essentially self-centered fantasies about his relationship and his fiancee's actual needs and desires. And it takes the poor guy forever to figure out that some of his perfectly innocent habits are annoying the crap out of his patient but uncommunicative coworkers. At many points in the book, I felt simultaneously sympathetic and incredibly irritated with him.

From this thought, I want to pivot to this book I read some time back about Flow.

He has a section on sex that's worth quoting in detail:

At first it is very easy to obtain pleasure from sex, and even to enjoy it. Any fool can fall in love when young. The first date, the first kiss, the first intercourse all present heady new challenges that keep the young person in flow for weeks on end. But for many this ecstatic state occurs only once; after the 'first love' all later relationships are no longer as exciting. It is especially difficult to keep enjoying sex with the same partner over a period of years. It is probably true that humans, like the majority of mammalian species, are not monogamous by nature. It is impossible for partners not to grow bored unless they work to discover new challenges in each other's company, and learn appropriate skills for enriching the relationship. Initially physical challenges alone are enough to sustain flow, but unless romance and genuine care also develop, the relationship will grow stale.

How to keep love fresh? The answer is the same as it is for any other activity. To be enjoyable, a relationship must become more complex. To become more complex, the partners must discover new potentialities in themselves and in each other. To discover these, they must invest attention in each other - so that they can learn what thoughts and feelings, what dreams reside in their partner's mind. This in itself is a never-ending process, a lifetime's task. After one begins to really know another person, then many joint adventures become possible: traveling together, reading the same books, raising children, making and realizing plans all become more enjoyable and more meaningful. The specific details are unimportant. Each person must find out which ones are relevant to his or her own situation. What is important is the general principal: that sexuality, like any other aspect of life, can be made enjoyable if we are willing to take control of it, and cultivate it in the direction of greater complexity."

I think this is where some critics of my faith miss the boat when they claim that our church is too restrictive and that we place too many boundaries.

What our church does do is raise the bar for those who seek to join. I mean, it's a journey, nobody expects perfection. We're only asked to constantly strive for this growth and though it's not stated in this exact way, we are striving to find  this kind of growing complexity. And it's within marriage, within a family that this possibility for real growth is most profound. This complete devotion to your spouse is a challenge, but it's also worth it. And those who don't strive for it, will have no idea what they're missing.

A Thousand Splendid Suns Part II

I just finished Hoseeini's "A Thousand Splendid Suns". It was seriously heart wrenching. You read about Afghanistan or similar countries in the news, but this book seriously puts you directly in the shoes of people living with the horrors of these countries.

I could generate a dozen posts on this book, like, a friend friend of mine did when she read the book a couple of years back. And maybe I will.

But it was a seriously good, moving, heart wrenching book. My first reaction is to think the US should never leave Afghanistan until we are sure the Taliban never have the opportunity to take control of that country again.

But also, I realize that in many ways, our country tends to really mess things up when we get involved in other's affairs. Here I'm thinking about the support we gave the Afghanistan Mujahideen during the 1980's when they were trying to expel the Soviet Union from their country. While reading the book, I had to look up Massoud a figure that comes up periodically in the book. Knowing very little about the nuances of Afghanistan history, but ever willing to express an opinion, this quote struck me from wikipedia:


"The United States provided Massoud with close to no support. Part of the reason was that it permitted its funding and arms distribution to be administered by Pakistan, which favored rival mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. In an interview Massoud expressed: "We thought the CIA knew everything. But they didn't. They supported some bad people [meaning Hekmatyar]." Primary advocates for supporting Massoud instead were State Department's Edmund McWilliams and Peter Tomsen, who were on the ground in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Others included two Heritage Foundation foreign policy analysts, Michael Johns and James A. Phillips, both of whom championed Massoud as the Afghan resistance leader most worthy of U.S. support under the Reagan Doctrine.["


Hekmatyar is also mentioned in the book and apparently he's the one who showers Kabul with rockets - the same rockets in the novel that kill Laila's parents.

Looking back, it's pretty obvious that the way we dealt with Russia was pretty myopic - as if they were the only bad guys in this world. I think Afghanistan could have turned out better if the US had used a little more sophistication in the way we handled the situation over there.

A Thousand Splendid Suns

I began reading A Thousand Splendid Suns which depicts life in Afghanistan through the eyes of (so far) a young girl.

This girl, Mariam, enters this world when an elite man of the community, Jalil has an affair with one of his servants. Her mother raises Mariam alone in the outskirts of the town with the help of her father's money. He grows up worshiping Jalil (her father) who visits her every week with what seems like sincere affection.

I can't go into it here (really I'm just too lazy), but her mother ends up hanging herself when Mariam is 15 and as a result, Jalil (and his three wives) push Mariam into a forced marriage to a 45 year old man who lives in Kabul conveniently a distance far, far away. That's where I am.

Here's how this chapter (Chapter 8) finishes:


Jalil was busy telling her [Mariam] that Kabul was so beautiful, the Moghul emperor Babur had asked that he be buried there. Next, Mariam knew, he'd go on about Kabul's gardens, and its shops, its trees, and its air, and before long, she would be on the bus and he would walk alongside it, waving cheerfully, unscathed, spared.

Mariam could not bring herself to allow it.

'I used to worship you,' she said.

Jalil stopped in midsentence. He crossed and uncrossed his arms. A young Hindu couple, the wife cradling a boy, the husband dragging a suitcase, passed between them. Jalil seemed grateful for the interruption. They excused themselves, and he smiled back politely.

'On Thursdays, I sat for hours waiting for you. I worried myself sick that you wouldn't show up.'

'It's been a long trip. You should eat something.' He said he could buy her some bread and goat cheese.

'I thought about you all the time. I used to pray that you'd live to be a hundred years old. I didn't know. I didn't know that you were ashamed of me.'

Jalil looked down, and, like an overgrown child, dug at something with his to of his shoe.

'You were ashamed of me.'

'I'll visit you,' he muttered. 'I'll come to Kabul and see you. We'll --'

'No. No,' she said. 'Don't come. I won't see you. Don't you come. I don't want to hear from you. Ever. Ever.'

He gave her a wounded look.

'It ends here for you and me. Say your good-byes.'

'Don't leave like this,' he said in a thin voice.

'You didn't even have the decency to give me the time to say good-bye to Mullah Faizullah.'

She turned and walked around to the side of the bus. She could hear him following her. When she reached the hydraulic doors, she heard him behind her.

'Mariam jo.'

She climbed the stairs and though she could spot Jalil out of the corner of her eye walking parallel to her she did not look out the window. She made her way down the aisle to the back, where Rasheed sat with her suitcase between his feet. She did not turn to look when Jalil's palms pressed on the glass, when his knuckles rapped and rapped on it. When the bus jerked forward, she did not turn to see him trotting alongside it. And when the bus pulled away, she did not look back to see him receeding, to see him disappear in the cloud of exhaust and dust.

Rasheed, who took up the window and the middle seat, put thick hands on hers.

'There now, girl. There. There,' he said He was squinting out the window as he said this, as though something more interesting had caught his eye."


So many thoughts about the first eight chapters of this book culminating when a father, shamefully and cowardly, literally throws away his 15 year old daughter like she was nothing more than a used up doll, tossed aside through an arranged marriage with a 45 year old stranger.

So, many of my thoughts on politics come down to how will our societies adequately be judged? I think we're judged by how the most vulnerable among us are doing. How many human beings are dismissed and disregarded? How many people are treated like animals or property? How do we care for our elderly? Or our poor? Obviously, the biggest shame in our Constitution was the way black slaves were counted as 3/5 of a person, and even more so, that we even had slaves at all. Or in virtually every society throughout much of our history, how women have been and continue to be deplorably treated and abused.

I know personally, its really difficult to recognize that every single person I encounter has a huge back story most likely filled with at least some amount tragedy and loss. Do I really succeed in putting myself in others shoes - even the homeless man? I know I have a long way to go personally.

I think what happens when you get to a certain place, there's so much fear that you will lose it. Jalil was the man in his town, owned lots of businesses, had three wives, ten children to them. He had Mariam with a servant girl and he risked shame. I'm not sure how much of a risk this was, the book didn't go into it. Would he loose anything if he took responsibility? It was certain neither of his three wives wanted Mariam around.

One more thought about this book. The author, Khaled Hossseini literally puts me in the shoes of Mariam jo, this obscure Aghanistani girl in a land I have no experience with. Reading these sorts of novels, helps to increase empathy.


"In a study published earlier this year psychologist Raymond A. Mar of York University in Toronto and others demonstrated that the number of stories preschoolers read predicts their ability to understand the emotions of others. Mar has also shown that adults who read less fiction report themselves to be less empathic."


I'm wondering how most people rate empathy on a scale of important personal characteristics, but I would suggest that for Christians, empathy was at the center of Christ's life and for Mormon's and I'm guessing for others as well it was a central part of his suffering and death:


"Jesus' perfect empathy was ensured when, along with His Atonement for our sins, He took upon Himself our sicknesses, sorrows, griefs, and infirmities and came to know these 'according to the flesh' (Alma 7:11-12). He did this in order that He might be filled with perfect, personal mercy and empathy and thereby know how to succor us in our infirmities. He thus fully comprehends human suffering." - Neal A. Maxwell


So, yeah, empathy is pretty important religiously speaking. But what about business? What does it really mean when we're building something to be purchased by another. We are anticipating someone else's needs and trying to fulfill them. At the heart of capitalism - when it works well - is empathy.

Its interesting to read a novel about Afghanistan considering we are currently fighting our longest war there right now.

Obviously, its a country far too complex to comment about considering I know virtually nothing about it. But I think it's a country worth learning about. And that - an awareness of a country we are occupying - too, should be reflected in our politics.