Tag: lingam

Lingam massage – a few questions

No, I didn’t only pick the title in a desperate attempt to get my Google rankings up! 😉 I really, truly care about the subject 🙂

The standard recipe for lingam massage has been bothering me for some time already. As we all know, it was developed about 20 years ago by an American called Joe Kramer who worked with homosexuals in particular. Now I’m not too sure, but I would guess that the distribution of character types across the homosexual population differs from that of the male population as a whole. From my experience of homosexuals they are more likely to be oral or schizoid types. As we all know, also, the nature of the genital reaction in the male (and in the female too, but that is not my subject here) is very much a function of character type. The rigid and psychopathic types tend to show diminished penile sensitivity while the masochistic type is excessively sensitive. Oral and schizoid types are more likely to show erectile dysfunction.

This has got to have some consequences for how a masseur/se approaches the lingam massage. In my opinion, instead of taking over Kramer’s ideas, we should be experimenting a lot more and discovering what works, how and for whom. I don’t have any doubt that an experienced masseuse (allow me my preference for the feminine form) has developed somewhat of an intuition for this, and probably the growth in interest around prostate/anal massage reflects some of this intuition. Still it would be nice to pool experiences and learn more.

Speaking from the masochistic perspective, I believe there are essentially two points.

The first is the failure of the standard tantra+lingam massage ritual to address the pelvic armoring. This is rather skipped over, with inadequate attention to the perineum and the inguinal fold. Of course I appreciate that the tantra massage is a sensual massage and that it does not aim at deep tissue work, even emotional in nature. Therefore my criticism should be (and is) addressed to other modalities. Nonetheless, insofar as these areas form part of the wider erogenous zone involved in male sexual response, their exclusion in my view detracts from the holistic nature of the massage and has more to do with received ideas of male sexuality than any sound neuroerotic basis.

Secondly, one really should be trying to delay the moment of ejaculation in persons who tend to ejaculate prematurely, and this is in fact what one does in tantra massage. But it makes little sense to attempt to spread the energy into the abdominal and thoracic regions when the pelvic region itself is insufficiently charged. In this case, the energy will be unable in any case to move beyond it and remain on a low level.

In my experience of the massage and my male body, I have the sentiment that there is really something missing here and that we should be developing new scripts. I suspect this is true for other character types also, and also for the yoni massage (although since this is necessarily internal, it may be less flawed). I would very much welcome views on this topic from massage professionals and lovers of tantra massage!

Of Gods and Goddesses

Our general understanding of the ontogenesis of polytheistic systems in the space which came to constitute the Indo-European world is approximately as follows, and owes a lot to Marija Gimbutas.

Prior to the Indo-European incursions, the religion of Europe, but probably also of central and south Asia, was essentially matriarchal in form (or “matristic” to use Gimbutas’ preferred term). The central Goddess-figure embodied fertility, the earth and procreation, and by extension the nurturing values of motherhood. The ancient world also knew, however, a variety of other female goddesses having varying personalities and attributes. The Triple Goddess is widely attested, representing the phases of the moon and the phases of the life of a woman through youth, maturity and old age. Other Goddesses offer other role-models or express other, “darker” dimensions of womanhood – think of Kali, Astarte or Hera.

Gimbutas doesn’t make a big point of it as far as I know, but we need to supplement this description with certain other elements. Primitive religion certainly knew divinities who were emanations of natural phenomena – the Sun, moon and other planets; rivers and seas; mountains; the weather, and so on – all the forces to which primitive humans were subject or which filled them with awe. We do not know if these divinities were endowed with gender from earliest times. All pre-Indoeuropean languages of Eurasia which are attested (Basque, Etruscan, Kartvelian, Iberian, etc) do not have grammatical gender, so the assignation of gender to forces of nature was presumably not self-evident. It seems also likely that phallic cults predate the Indo-Europeans; certainly they do so in the Indus Valley civilization, but it seems very likely that the various phallic gods attested from European religion – of which the most notable would be Priapus and Pan – in fact belong to a pre-Indoeuropean stratum of religiosity which recognized not only the nurturing role of the earth-mother but also the complementary roles of both sexes in procreation, something reflected in the metaphysics of ancient near eastern creation myths as well.

Into this somewhat pacific universe characterized by a complex female and rather simple male divinity accompanied by various nature-divinities, erupted the Indo-European warrior class which bore androcratic religious traditions, mirroring their social organization; these traditions then took precedence over, though they existed alongside, traditional beliefs.

It is easy to speculate that, whatever complexities there may have been in pre-existing cults devoted to male fertility (sublimited as the essence of the male in the word “virility”), these were swiftly ousted or relegated to a secondary position by the rich array of male divinities which the conquerors brought with them. Where it suited them, nature-divinities could also easily be shared out between the genders and, indeed, on more than one occasion have their gender changed from female to male, as happened when traditional Tibetan religion (Bön) was supplanted by Tibetan tantric buddhism.

The Goddess, on the other hand, while subordinate to the male divinities, suffered from no such process of substitution and continued to merit the devotion of indigenous populations. Even in her much-disguised Marian incarnation, numerous local specificities and attributes continue to exist to this day. In Ancient Greece she seems to have survived particularly well, and with the rise of neoclassicism, Goddess worship found its way back into the mainstream of the European tradition, albeit in disguised forms. Many men practise it in a transparently pagan form to this day – there is a mass market for portrayals of beautiful women inaccessible to the majority of males, and I would take issue with the feminist notion that they are routinely viewed by men as mere passive and frequently degraded objects of their sexual satisfaction (although within pornography itself, this unfortunate tendency is probably on the rise). These (abstractions of) women are routinely honored by their male acolytes with the giving of their semen.

Regardless of how accurate this account is from a historical standpoint, it pretty much represents, I believe, our collective preconscious – the array of symbols available to us denoting female and male. Masculinity is associated with a reduced set of militaristic attributes which characterized also the ancient Indo-european male pantheons, whereas femininity is associated with a much wider set of creative, healing and nurturing attributes of which males have no ken.

Whenever it is admitted that men may also possess or develop such attributes, this is invariably referred to as “getting in touch with their feminine side”. Women, on the other hand, rarely get in touch with their “masculine side” – the phrase would rather imply capitulation to the paternalistic world order (which I decry as passionately as anyone).

As a man, I have one thing to say to this: Quatsch!

It is not acceptable for me that women get to relate to such a funky bunch of goddesses, and I have to look  in the poverty of the militaristic traditions of a bunch of destructive barbarians for inspiration as to what my masculinity means. Yet in the Shiva/Shakti dualism, Shakti is the clear inheritor of all pagan Goddess traditions, whereas Shiva, at core, is the Rudra of the Rig-Veda, “fierce like a formidable wild beast”. Not only do I not accept this, moreover – I consider it a ludicrous distorsion of who I am, and a pervasive, destructive cultural meme which impedes anything approaching a full expression of masculinity in the modern world.

Have I committed here tantric theocide? I hope so. For the Oedipus myth teaches us powerfully that only when the father is overthrown can the son come into his power.