German Joys

How the Lebanese Love Steve Harvey

In every bookstore you visit in Beirut, you see advice books by Steve Harvey everywhere, including Act Like a Lady, Think like a Man: What Men Really Think about Love, Relationships, Intimacy, and Commitment, and Straight Talk, No Chaser: How to Find, Keep and Understand a Man. Apparently Lebanese women are having problems understanding their men, and are, for some reason, turning to this affable American black radio talk show host to solve them. Perhaps they're finding  Ayatollah Fadlallah's advice on such questions less than useful in today's modern now-a-go-go world.*

And what sort of advice are they getting from Steve Harvey? To find out, just listen to this segment from Harvey's advice series, "Strawberry Letters", in which Steve Harvey advises -- or, more to the point, mocks -- a woman who screwed her grandfather, meaning that her husband's son will be his uncle:

* So, just to forestall the angry comments, I am aware that Ayatollah Fadlallah is a Shi'a Muslim cleric, and that only 30-40% of Lebanon's population are Shi'a Muslims, and that at least a third of Lebanese are Christians. Interestingly, nobody knows for sure exactly what these percentages are, because there's been no census in Lebanon since the 1930s.

Expressing Gratitude for a Well-Cooked Meal

 This kitchenware store in northern Duesseldorf tells you how:

In case of, er, complications, help is just around the corner:

German Porn Seen by an American

Thanks to loyal Joyster Ed Philp, who spotted this interview with a graduate student in Germanic languages as Columbia. It's part of Nerve Magazine's 'Talking to Strangers' series, in which reporters talk to strangers about their sex lives, and then publish the results under a large photograph of the interviewee. So much for the context. Here's what our man had to say about German pornography:

Can you give us some tips on sexy stuff to say in German?
Well, if you watch German porn from the seventies or eighties — what's really funny is that German is this incredibly flat and formal language. It's very expressionless. And there's this one German porn movie where this older dude is getting jerked off by this famous porn star — well, she was famous in the seventies because she looked twelve even though she was eighteen. And she's like "Das ist ein gutes Gefült für den Schwanz?"  Meaning "Is that a good feeling?"And he's like "Ja. Fur mein Peni ist das optimal."

And what does that mean?
It's like "For my pee-pee, it is optimal."

You seem to have this porn memorized.
It really stuck with me.

Is there anything shorter and sexier that you can recommend that's not... creepy?
No, actually.

...

Can we talk more about German porn?
I think people would assume that German porn is really perverse. But I think the truth is that American porn is by comparison really perverse. The women look horrifying and made-up. That whole Jenna Jameson look. Whereas, German people like a good story, I've noticed. The aesthetics of American 1970s porn carried over well into the late '90s for Germany. Pubic hair, they're into it.

Yet another data point, if one were needed, to support two theses: (1) Germany imports trends from the United States with a 10-20 year delay; and (2) Even its porn is more wholesome and humanistic than America's airbrushed, corporate überproduct.

"I Have an Optimistic, But I am Alone"

I just got this beauty in my inbox, from one belen.belen from francetelecom.com:

How do you do

How to pay

I formed, kind. I have an optimistic, but I am alone.

Expensive hits at an affordable price

I Inna live in Yelabuga

Greetings from Peter

Come to my chat

Dreams all here

It inspired me to go to the archive for an episode of the late, lamented Spamasterpiece Theatre, entitled THE STOMATOLOGIST¹:

Teens and Sex in Europe

An American puts together a slideshow illustrating -- by means of ads, video clips, survey results, and interviews -- that Europeans have a much less hypocritical approach to young people screwing than America does.

Not much that will be surprising here, but still it's encouraging to see Americans looking across the pond for lessons in this particular area of social policy, in which the States does just about everything wrong...

Oral Roberts on Oral Sex

Oral Roberts, a Pentecostalist preacher and one of the first American 'televangelists', died yesterday at the age of 91.

It's easy to mock these people and their odd beliefs. Perhaps too easy. But it's irresistible. Here's a passage from a real Oral Roberts sermon on sexuality, accompanied by a truly harrowing digitized recreation of how Roberts could have looked while delivering it.

This video may be dangerous to the sane person's psyche. But it's pretty much safe for work, unless you have a problem with loose talk about the 'anus' and 'vagina' and 'orifices'. Don't worry, Roberts never drops the dreaded p-word. Apparently that would have been too much for his audience. Therefore, it's just the 'male organ'.

While We're on the Subject of Marriage...

Here's a rather long but intermittently interesting trailer for a documentary about the American way of marriage and divorce (h/t JR):

Here's philosopher Dan Moller's paper An Argument Against Marriage (pdf). The second long paragraph captures the reasoning of my many European friends who've decided against marriage, at least early in life:

There is an obvious, perhaps even trite, argument against getting married which deserves our attention. Reduced to a crude sketch, the argument is simply that, (a) most of us view the prospect of being married in the absence of mutual love with something like horror or at least great antipathy; (b) the mutual love between us and our spouse existing at the inception of our marriage may very well fail to persist; and hence (c) when we marry we are putting ourselves in the position of quite possibly ending up in a loveless marriage of the sort we acknowledge to be undesirable, and this is a mistake.

...

...If you marry, then either you will intend to keep your promise to maintain the relationship or you will not. If you do marry with such an intention, you are opening up the possibility of finding yourself in the strange position of having a permanent relationship with someone you don’t love, and, for reasons discussed above, this will seem unacceptable to most of us who would marry for love. For in that case, we will be unwilling for it to be reasonably likely that we end up married to someone we don’t love, which is precisely what the considerations discussed above indicate may well turn out to happen at some point in the future of any marriage. So marriage entered into with the intention to keep the relevant promises would be imprudent. On the other hand, you might go into marriage without any such intention to honour your commitment; you may simply think to yourself that if things work out, fine, and if not, you can always break your promise as a last resort. But if breaking your marriage vows is wrong—if the moral force of that promise cannot be dissolved by a change in feelings on the part of the promisor—then making a marriage vow without any intention of keeping it is itself wrong for the same reason any insincere promise is wrong. On the other hand, if it is permissible unilaterally to break off a marriage relationship, and it is this which allows you to make the marriage commitment sincerely and without imprudence, then such a commitment just seems pointless, for there won’t be any significant difference between committing and not committing yourself.

My Husband Was Torn Apart by a Frenzied Mob!!

Eija-Riitta Eklöf Berliner-Mauer's* moving tribute to her...uh, 'late' husband:

"We have been together now for many years, spiritually if not physically. Like every married couple, we have our ups and downs. We even made it through the terrible disaster of November 9, 1989, when my husband was subjected to frenzied attacks by a mob.

But we are still as much in love as the day we first met. We may not have a conventional marriage, but neither of us cares much for conventions. Ours is a story of two beings in love, our souls entwined for all eternity."

Yesterday, I heard a fascinating interview (g) with  Eklöf Berliner-Mauer on my public radio station. Strongly recommended!

Annals of Heinology: Mating Habits

I count myself a fan of German Schlager star Heino, and have visited his current "city of residence," the picturesque medieval village of Bad Muenstereifel (g), several times.* I even bought a Heino doll, which my friends in the U.S. always thought was supposed to be Andy Warhol. Heino trained originally as a baker, and you can sample his own special hazelnut torte at 'Heino's Rathaus Cafe' (g), where he hangs out when he's not on tour. No, I've never met him (yet). Everyone says he's friendly and down-to-earth, despite the fact that he is never seen in public without his trademark dark glasses.

The most recent piece of news to sputter through German Joys' dedicted Heino teletype [h/t LMGP] deals with Heino's erotic side. Heino, you see, has been happily married to his wife Hannelore for decades now. They just gave the Bild tabloid an interview about their sex lives (g). Now, I'm no more eager than you to imagine the 'tranquilised albino Ken-doll' (Lonely Planet) in the physical act of love, but let us soldier forward in the name of Science: We learn that Hannelore can't go to sleep without Heino curled up next to her, that they make the beast with two backs at least three times a week -- sometimes 4! -- and that Heino is a tender, affectionate lover. And finally, the question we've all been asking privately for years, and Heino's immortal response (my translation): "What nobody knows: Heino takes his black sunglasses off during the act of love: 'In bed, I'm a completely private person. I don't have to be recognizable, so that someone can come up to me and slap me on the shoulder.'"

* No, I didn't go to BMe just to try to catch a glimpse of Heino. A couple times there were academic reasons, and once I went to hike through the surrounding countryside, which is extremely pleasant.