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By David Futrelle
Ok, I confess that I wandered into the Semen Retention subreddit again. It’s like an addiction for me.
Anyway, I found this guy, who seems to have gotten just a little too excited about his new meditation routine. Just make sure never to sit next to him in meditation class. Or on the bus. Or anywhere, really.
That’s not satori; it’s satorgasm.
I’ve tried meditating before, but was never much good at it. Similarly, I’ve never gotten an erection from it. Is that even possible, or is this 100% certified BS?
Grammar Nazi here. I continue to be amazed at how many people spell “lose” as “loose”, or believe that the past tense of the verb “lead” is “lead”. It’s not. It’s “led”.
@Naglfar
It’s absolutely possible for allistic people to learn to meditate, incomprehensible as it may seem to you or I. And it’s absolutely possible to induce arousal by one’s mental state, as most allosexual people can attest from their own fantasies. Further, meditation can indeed be used to do some quite interesting tricks with blood flow*, and human erections are powered purely by blood flow, so that’s also an affirmative.
*the feedback loop between breathing and heartrate works for everyone, if only you can control your breathing.
@jsrtheta
I don’t know about anybody else, but in a world full of actual nazis, it makes me pretty uncomfortable when someone identifies as a “Grammar Nazi.”
There are lots of reasons why someone might struggle with spelling, but I can’t think of any particularly good reasons to go on the semen retention reddit page and describe in detail that time you had an orgasm while meditating, so I’m going to go ahead and judge him more for the latter.
@Dalillama
So it’s plausible? I still think the OP’s tale is a bit fishy, though. Maybe that it’s from a semen retainer (aka cult member).
@Viscaria
Same. It almost seems to be making light of the Holocaust and of real Nazis.
Ommisexual?
Naglfar,
I don’t think any of us are as good at it as this guy is!
Or at least, arguably, none of us enjoy it quite as much.
The fact that anyone would complain about an orgasm via meditation or any other method saddens me. Shut up and enjoy the gift of your own body, dumb ass!
Why do they think not orgasming grants magic powers? Orgasms are great…everyone should have them on a regular basis with or without a partner. Their ideology assigns shame to a natural release of pleasure.
They have created a cult dedicated to the diminishment of human nature.
@Naglfar
Tantric Buddhists have claimed for centuries that this was possible. And I swear I actually saw a video of a guy actually having a hands free orgasm while meditating. Naturally, I can’t find it now!! 🙁 I’m not that good at meditation, longest session being 20 minutes. Theoretically, yes it’s possible. BUT; it’s reddit. I’ll give him 50% of telling the truth and 50% chance of BS.
The thing that make it look fishy to me is that I have non-sexual orgasm regulary enough, and they are alway dry. I suspect that guy invented that and think you alway have a physical response to an orgasm.
I have news for this guy, and others like him. The “seeds of creation,” as he so delicately put it, do not reside only in men’s ballsacks . A woman’s eggs actually carry more genetic material then sperm does. For one thing, the mitochondria is far too large to fit in a sperm and contains the DNA that allows us to utilize energy and metabolize properly.
Without the mitochondrial DNA, life – as we know it – cannot exist. And only the mother can pass it on to her children. If I were asked, I would have to say that, as far as nature and life are concerned, female mammals are far more valuable than their male counterparts.
I realize that it is not politically correct to say that, but 1) the truth is the truth, whether you embrace science or not and 2) I believe that women are, in some ways, stronger, smarter, and wiser than most men – with some notable exceptions – and we tend to take the long view, putting immediate profit and political power lower on the ladder of life and putting our children and the living world higher on that ladder. Again, there are notable exceptions, such as that de Voss nightmare who masquerades as a woman.
I think it may be time for the women and children of earth to stand up and take back the power that was taken from us and that we gave away to men. Oh, wait…that’s already happening all over the world! Greta Thunberg is one who comes to mind.
@Samantha Kaswell : while I appreciate the sentiment, life *can* exist without mitochondrial DNA, since life appeared before mitochondres, and saying that a part of a population is more valuable than another is widely anti-scientific and meaningless.
The second part about ascribing about all possible qualities to a gender is widely sexist too and miss a very important point : how to not become monster once in power. Which, as you note, seem to happen regardless of gender (and religion and ideology and age and whatnot)
The solution to white nationalism is not “becoming another [meaningless feature] nationalist”. That way only lie another slaughter.
Because they buy into pseudoscientific ideas debunked centuries ago.
@Samantha Kaswell
The problem with such gender essentialist statements about women are that they are what TERFs like to use to say trans* women aren’t women. I’m a woman, yet I have no eggs and therefore cannot produce offspring, does that mean I’m not a woman to you?
I’m not sure if you meant it that way, but this is reminiscent of a kind of argument that TERFs use to disqualify trans* women. Similarly, the bit about Betsy DeVos “masquerading” as a woman reads as transphobic as well.
@Samantha Kaswell
We have TERFsign!
More like despunked, amirite?
(I am not right.)
Be careful, David. My mom always told me if I went to the semen retention subreddit too often, I could go blind.
@Naglfar
It is possible to get all kinds of body responses during meditation. Autistic sensory stuff, gender dysphoria, OCD, and (C)PTSD probably don’t help depending. It helps a lot of people, but it’s a tool, not a panacea.
CN: personal/mental health related stuff below
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Pre transition I was unable to do breath counting meditations without getting nausous. These days I use said breath meditation pretty often for calming myself down under stress, but avoid anything more complicated outside of group/class settings. I’ve also had to develop different ways to keep my brain in check, e.g. counting upwards by powers of 2 or 3 to cut off PTSD trigger responses.
I’ve also been present for some (other people’s) really horrifying intersections of advanced meditation and unmanaged mental illness. White middle-class culture has glommed onto this stuff as, like, absolutely harmless and helpful for everything, but that’s really not the case any more than it is for e.g. coffee or aerobics.
I have trouble meditating, too. Listening to certain sounds can help me, like the reverberations of a gong. I listen to a recording of that.
Very, very light doses of salvia divinorum have been known to help a friend of mine. It’s difficult to ingest such light doses, however.
Naglfar – Your good response to Samantha reminded me (apropos of nothing much, but there I am) of when I was still identifying as pagan and Husbeast (still pagan) and I were trying to find a pagan community.
We found so many groups that excluded trans women from their women-only spaces, that we finally gave up. The one or two that didn’t, were too far away. That was when I started getting disillusioned with the pagan community and eventually just went atheist.
@Cyborgette
That could have something to do with it, as I have at least 2 of those.
@Hambeast
I’m surprised there was so much transphobia in paganism. My knowledge of paganism is limited, but most of the ones I’ve met are liberal and sexually open, so I would expect them to be accepting of trans people.
And I’m glad you think my response was good. I’m trying to give some benefit of the doubt, but at the same time I am aware Samantha has made very essentialist comments about women in other threads. It could be that she didn’t mean to be cisnormative, but that kind of gender essentialism is a warning sign of TERFism.
@Samantha Kaswell
If intelligence is determined by what gametes they produce, as you seem to argue, I wonder where you think trans people fit in. Are trans women of lower intelligence than cis women? Are trans men of higher intelligence than cis men? ?
@Cindy, Samantha Kaswell
And would said trans man’s intelligence drop if he got an oophorectomy? And what about intersex people? I know that many (most?) intersex people are sterile, but I also know that some can produce gametes. There was one notable case of a woman with a 46,XY karyotype who had typical female development and was fertile, giving birth to a daughter with the exact same situation.
Of course, there are also cis women who are born without ovaries or get them removed. TERFs don’t like to acknowledge this, but such women do exist. Yet another way in which TERFs hurt cis women.
In my view, gender essentialism is inherently sexist, as it posits immutable and pseudoscientific gender differences and stratification. When TERFs say that trans women can’t be women because they lack ovaries/a uterus/whatever, it sounds an awful lot like when misogynists say that (cis) women are inferior because they don’t have testicles.
Agree with the comments here regarding gender essentialism. We need to consign it to the dustbin. Unfortunately there’s still widespread ignorance, so I fear it will take time.
Very much this.
[Trying to post this for the third time, my posts keep getting eaten by the kraken]
@Samantha Kaswell:
Fun fact, that’s a misconception. Human sperm have many mitochondria, contained in a sheath directly behind the head to power the flagella. There are as many as 50-100 copies of mtDNA in each sperm. Granted, that’s not nearly as many as the ~100,000 to a high of 10,000,000 (yep, that’s ten million) copies in an oocyte, but this actually leads me to…
Fun fact the second, nobody knows why humans only inherit maternal mtDNA. Sure, you’d expect that the paternal mitochondria might just get out-competed, drowned out in an ocean of other mitochondria. But the numbers still don’t add up. You don’t have inheritance rates of 1/1000th paternal mtDNA. It’s much lower than that (although it isn’t actually quite zero!).
There are a variety of mechanisms that have been proposed and investigated – such as chemical modification of the paternal mtDNA so it doesn’t replicate, or the fertilized oocyte actively targeting incoming mitochondria for breaking down and recycling.
The latter mechanism has been observed in flies, using a cellular process called autophagy: [link redacted]
But of course biology is messy and so the answer can’t be the same for mice and humans: [link redacted]
Fun fact the third: no one has any clue why it even matters that paternal mtDNA doesn’t get inherited. But it’s a nearly universal thing (there are known cases where paternal inheritance is “leaky,” including sheep and chickens), so there is almost certainly some evolutionary reason for it.
Well this time my post seems to have stuck. I’m not sure if it’s because I removed the links. Does someone know if that could be why it didn’t post the first two times last night? I’m happy to re-post the references if someone is curious, but I’m nervous to include references in future posts if they will get my posts eaten.