German Joys

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.