Tag Archives: health

Being A Hugger In This Day And Age

I’d like to get personal again. I’ve already confessed to sleeping naked. I’ve also made clear that I see foreplay as the highest of virtues. Now, I’d like to highlight another important trait of mine, one I actually mentioned in my post on foreplay. This trait isn’t as lurid or sexy as others, but it’s one of those traits that has the potential to be in the right context. So what is it? Well, here it is:

I, Jack Fisher, am a hugger.

Yes, I understand that it’s one of the least macho things you can do these days. It’s right up there with wearing makeup and crying over soap operas. It’s a taboo and a bad one at that. I don’t know when it happened. I don’t know why it happened. For reasons that defy logic, understanding, and basic human nature, it actually became cool to be a callous, detached, unemotional douche-bag at some point. I usually try to research the complex cultural reasons behind such a movement. This time, however, I found next to nothing.

The only educated guess I can make, which is pushing it because I’m not that educated, is that society’s collective fears and scorn over men sexually assaulting women went a tad overboard. It’s a perfectly legitimate concern, wanting to discourage sexual assault and sexual harassment in general. It’s a terrible crime so I can’t blame society for overdoing it, but there’s a fine line between fighting crime and turning people into callous douche-bags.

From a purely evolutionary standpoint, there’s no reason why hugs and intimate contact should be discouraged. According to Dr. Fahad  Basheer at Collective Evolution, there are at least 11 medical benefits to hugs. These benefits include, but aren’t limited to, relieving pain, elevating mood, alleviating depression, improving immune function, and reducing stress. If hugging were a pharmaceutical drug, it would be hailed as wonder drugs and probably banned by the DEA.

These health benefits, much like the health benefits of orgasms, strongly indicate that we’re hard-wired for hugs. Nature wants us to hug each other. It doesn’t matter if it’s a lover, a family member, or a stranger. Our biology, being so basic and crude, doesn’t care where the hug comes from. It still benefits us.

The benefits aren’t even restricted to humans. Nature is rarely that specific. Animals do it to and they seem to gain similar benefits.

My parents and siblings seemed to understand that. I come from a family that is big on hugging. It’s not necessarily a cultural thing. It’s just how we are. However, I notice when I go out into the modern world, I’m terrified of making too much intimate contact with others. I don’t think that’s healthy.

I don’t exactly know where this fear comes from, but I have a pretty strong feeling it started during my time in the daily prison sentence that was public school. I don’t know if anyone knows this, but public schools have a big problem with students touching each other in any way. How big a problem? Well, in 2013, a student in Georgia got suspended for a year for hugging his teacher.

That’s right. A school punished a kid for hugging someone. Let that sink in for a moment. Hugging is not like sex. It doesn’t cause pregnancy. It doesn’t cause disease. It doesn’t cause emotional distress of any kind. It has so many natural benefits that transcend species, yet we punish kids for doing it. Then, we wonder why they grow up to have emotional problems and personality disorders.

Now the school I went to never did something this extreme, but I do remember from a young age hearing all sorts of lectures about harassment and inappropriate touching, as they called it. I may have been a dumb-ass kid, but even I knew what they were getting at. They wanted to discourage kids from getting too sexual when they were too young and immature.

That’s all well and good, but it’s worth repeating that I was a dumb-ass kid in a whole building full of them. How are we supposed to know what constitutes inappropriate touching? A hug for some people might as well be slap on the ass with a wooden spoon for someone else. We never learned much about context and communication. Most of the time, we just got a thorough run-down of all the terrible punishments we can expect if we ever got caught inappropriately touching someone.

Being kids who still had some respect for authority figures, we naturally focus on the punishments. We don’t want to get in trouble. We don’t want to explain to our parents why we got suspended or sent to detention. Naturally, we’re going to play it safe and just avoid it all together.

As kids, fear of punishment tends to make us overcompensate. It’s just human nature. Again, it’s caveman logic. We’re not going to just stand a few feet away from a shady area where a lion might be hiding. We’re going to make sure we’re a long ways away from that danger.

It doesn’t just affect us as kids in school either. After spending our entire childhood terrified of making too much intimate contact with other human beings, we carry that terror into the adult world, both in college campuses and in the workplace.

We currently live in an era where harassment doesn’t even need to occur. There only needs to be an accusation that a man assaulted a woman and that’s it. No trial. No jury. No indisputable evidence of any kind. Just the accusation is enough to assure guilt in the eyes of the public. This leads to legal clusterfucks like the Duke Lacrosse ordeal and the false UVA rape case.

So as a man, it’s dangerous for me to hug someone. It could cost me my reputation, my freedom, and a boatload of time and legal fees. It only takes one woman to misinterpret a hug, accuse me of assault, and my life is over.

This actually played out very recently. Earlier this year, I went on a date with a girl to see the movie, X-men: Apocalypse, which should come as no surprise to anyone. I really liked this girl. I thought she was cute. I thought we had a good connection. However, I didn’t know how she would react to a hug so I was fucking terrified of getting too intimate too fast. That may have worked against me because we never went on a second date.

As a self-professed hugger, how the hell am I to function in a world like this? How am I supposed to find love, affection, and intimacy with others outside my immediate family? This modern world sends so many conflicting messages. We’re more connected than ever thanks to technology, but a single hug can get us sued for sexual assault if we hug the wrong person.

I don’t like this trend. I don’t think it’s good for huggers like me or people in general. We’ve become too callous and isolated. We’re scared to death from a young age, albeit indirectly, into avoiding contact with one another. It goes against our own nature. It goes against our own humanity. I may never live to see the day where hugging a perfect stranger won’t get you sued, but I’d like to aspire to such a future, both through my love of hugs and through my books.

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Busting Sex Myths From Cracked.com

It’s Sunday. It’s a holiday weekend. Everybody is either recovering from a hangover or making arrangements to recover from a pending hangover. I don’t want to distract too many people from such noble endeavors. It’s a holiday. We should be having fun and enjoying ourselves.

So for the sake of brevity, I’ll only do a brief follow-up from my post yesterday about Pamela Anderson’s outrageous hypocrisy at condemning the porn industry that made her rich and famous. Ms. Anderson’s hypocrisy is a byproduct of a frustratingly stubborn myth about porn and addiction. It’s just one myth in many associated with sex. When something is so taboo and varied, it tends to develop all sorts of crazy myths. With sex, some of those myths can become downright disturbing.

I’d need multiple blogs, a staff of at least 50 people, and grant money from several major universities to document all the myths about sex and sexuality. We’ve all heard something crazy about sex, what it is, how to do it, and what it does to us. From using lemon juice as a douche to eating certain foods to make your semen taste better, these myths exist and propagate with disturbing efficiency.

Thankfully, the fine folks at Cracked.com do a nice job of busting myths, including those pertaining to sex. Back in 2015, they did an article on 27 sex myths that too many people still believe. The only thing truly shocking about this article is that they only managed to list 27.

Cracked.com: 27 Sex Myths Too Many People Still Believe

So why am I citing a link from 2015? Well, one of those myths is relevant to what I wrote about yesterday. It involves the concept of porn addiction that Pamela Anderson whined about.

This actually makes her hypocrisy even worse because she’s focusing on the porn and not the underlying mental health issues behind it. She’s basically working under the assumption that the tail is wagging the dog here. As a noted animal-lover and PETA supporter, she should know better. Also, this study was done in 2009. She has no excuses.

There are all sorts of crazy myths that complicate and confuse our sex lives. Again, the main reason these myths emerge is because sex is so taboo and we refuse to talk about it. When we don’t talk about something, we don’t learn enough about it. When we don’t learn enough about something, we tend to make shit up to fill in the blanks. That sort of thing already gave us crazy conspiracy theories, fad diets, and organized religion. Let’s not let it ruin sex more than it already has.

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How Our Culture Is Ruining Our Sex Lives And Driving Men And Women Apart

We don’t agree on much in this twisted culture of ours, but we have reached a consensus on a couple issues. One, jealousy is toxic to every relationship, real or potential. Two, rejection is the worst feeling short of injecting molten steel into our veins. Third, there’s nothing that ketchup can’t make taste better.

Other than the last one, we don’t really question the end results of these assumptions, but we don’t question the circumstances either. I’d like to give those circumstances some additional scrutiny because I think it reveals a lot about just how unbalanced our culture is towards sex, love, and intimacy.

Earlier this week, I wrote about how jealousy may or may not be an entirely natural feeling. I pointed out that our feelings of jealousy towards those who reject our sexual or romantic interests create this unhealthy mentality that we own someone or are owed by them. In the 21st century, we really shouldn’t need to remind ourselves why owning someone else in any capacity is a bad thing.

The problem is that certain elements of our culture were built on foundations of owning land, passing it down through bloodlines, and protecting it against those who would steal it. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with protecting your property, we as a society just take it one step too far when we see our lovers and prospective partners as property. We don’t understand that our brains didn’t evolve to be so rational and understanding. Our brains evolved to keep us alive and because of that, the wiring gets a little faulty at times.

Irrational wiring in our brains inevitably leads to irrational understandings of our world. Irrational understandings, in turn, leads to irrational behavior. It’s the same force behind every misguided social movement and stock market crash in history. Some are just harder to sniff out or overcome than others. So how has this undermined our ability to love, make love, and share intimacy with one another?

Well, in order to illustrate that, let me lay out a common scenario. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll use a man and a woman, but the same circumstances can apply to same-sex partners as well. So keep that in mind.

Man: Hey there, ma’am. You look really nice today.

Woman: Thanks! You look really nice too.

Man: I appreciate that. Since we both find each other attractive, would you like to have sex?

Woman: What? You pig! You’re disgusting!

I know this scenario is a bit simplistic, but it’s supposed to be for illustrative purposes. Read over this dialog for a moment. How does the man sound? Does he sound polite or generous when he asks the woman for sex? Or does he sound like every crude jock from every 80s teen movie ever made?

I ask because our culture creates in us certain expectations of how certain social interactions play out. This is just one. A man is expected to be interested in only sex. A woman is expected to reject him. Subsequently, the man who dares to ask a woman for sex is shamed. In a follow-up scenario, we may get moments like this among other men and women.

Woman: You see that guy? He asked me for sex! What a pig.

Man: That’s just wrong. What kind of man does that?

Woman: I hate him. I hope every woman rejects him. Those that don’t are horrible!

Take a moment to think about the less obvious implications of this interaction. A man who simply wants sex and asks politely for it is shamed, shunned, and castigated by everyone. He’s seen as a pig, a misogynist, and a creep.

Here’s a crazy question though. Is it possible that he’s just looking for the most basic forms of intimacy and wants to share it with someone? Perish the thought! Our culture doesn’t allow that. If he really wanted that woman, he would have jumped all the elaborate hoops this culture has set up for men to get sex. If, after all that, she still rejects him, then that’s too bad.

Is this overly simplified breakdown of these events fair? No, it isn’t. Our culture doesn’t let men simply walk up to a woman and ask for sex. We make him go through all these elaborate rituals and even if he succeeds, there’s still no guarantee that he’ll get what he wants. For men, it often means that those who aren’t adept at those rituals (and most men aren’t) will end up isolated, distant, and sexually frustrated. As history and current affairs have shown, this tends to be unhealthy for society.

Now, in the interest of gender fairness, let me paint another scenario that shows what our culture does to women who are interested in sex. In our culture, we have all these irrational expectations about female sexuality. The diverse varieties of lesbian porn alone are a testament to just how irrational these expectations are. As a result of these expectations, we create situations like this.

Woman: Hello. You’re really handsome.

Man: Why thank you. You look really nice yourself.

Woman: Thanks! Would you like to have sex?

Man: Wow! Already? Um…is there something wrong with you?

See the difference? Well, there are gender differences. There are double standards. No, they’re not fair or rational. That’s just the nature of gender dynamics in our culture. Despite these differences, the same irrational expectations manifest in this interaction.

When you read the woman’s words, what do you imagine? Does she sound sweet, caring, and affectionate? Or does she sound sloppy, ugly, or disheveled? Our culture demands that something be wrong with this woman. How can any normal woman simply ask someone for sex? She can’t just be looking for that toe-curling joy we feel when we have sex and the intimacy it inspires. That would just be wrong. That last sentence was sarcasm by the way.

Just as we had with the first scenario, there’s often a follow-up scenario surrounding these interactions. They play out among those who see this interaction and interpret it in the context of our cultural expectations. This is how it manifests.

Woman: Did you see that? That girl just walked up to that man and politely asked for sex!

Man: Wow. She must be a real slut. We need to shame her for offering more sex than she’s allowed to give.

Read over that overly simplistic logic again. Is that fair? Is that moral? Is that even natural in the context of a species that’s so social and passionate? No, it isn’t. That’s why the wiring of our brains needs to be warped a certain way. Culture, often with help from religion and government, does this fairly effectively.

As a result, our society creates this horrible imbalance among those seeking intimacy with one another. Men want sex from women, but shame them when they offer it too eagerly. Women want sex from men, but shame them when they ask for it too eagerly. It creates all these mixed messages that our brains struggle to process. Remember, our brains aren’t wired for rationality. They’re wired for survival.

At birth, our brains are already wired for sex and intimacy. Our brains drive us to seek sexual and intimate gratification the same way it drives us to seek food and water. Denying it these needs creates distress. Excessive distress in any system, be it a brain or cell phone, causes problems. We may bemoan these problems, but on some levels, we have nobody to blame but ourselves.

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Is Jealousy Natural? An Honest Question

Is it really so natural to be jealous of someone when they love or lust over someone other than you? To anyone who has ever been jilted or cheated on, this may be an outrageous question to ask. How can anyone not feel outrage when the person they love has feelings for someone else? It’s the basis for at least 85 percent of all love stories and around half of every episode of Jerry Springer.

Jealousy seems like one of those emotions that’s so natural. We’ve come to see it on the same level as fear, hunger, or horniness. Few really question these assumptions beyond a certain context. Today, I’d like take a sledge-hammer to that context and dare to probe deeper. If that sounds overly lurid, I apologize, but I’m being genuinely serious here.

If ever there was an emotion that brings out the worst in people, jealousy seems tailor-made for it. One of my favorite comedians, Christopher Titus, once described it like this:

Is it somewhat extreme? Yes. However, I think there’s a sizable portion of the population that agrees with this sentiment. Jealousy can make people do horrible things. Sometimes, just seeing someone with someone else is enough to make us upset to the point of doing horrible things we wouldn’t otherwise do. Jealous and jilted lovers have committed serious crimes, including outright murder.

It’s those irrational extremes, however, that should beg the question. Is this feeling really a basic product of the human condition? How much of it is in our genes and how much of it is in our heads? It’s something we need to think about it, if only to assess the horrific behaviors it inspires in people.

Now I admit I didn’t really think about this question until recently. I admit I’ve felt pretty jealous at numerous points in my life and it’s not a pleasant feeling. I went through a period as a teenager where I got downright fatalistic whenever I heard a girl I liked had a boyfriend. Some of that can be chalked up to teenage hormones and serious personal issues. Others, however, are a bit more complex.

The first time I really thought about this issue came while reading Darrel Ray’s book, “Sex and God.” It’s a book I’ve recommended on this blog before and while it does primarily discuss the effects of religion on sex, it also frames jealousy in a very different context that makes it seem less a natural emotion and more a byproduct of sorts.

It goes back to the whole “caveman logic” I’ve used in discussing other topics on this blog, such as nudity. Biologically speaking, we’re still the same cavemen and cavewomen who roamed the African savanna 50,000 years ago, hunting and gathering for food. Then, something happened that changed our way of life and in evolutionary terms, it happened fairly recently. That something is agriculture.

That’s not to say this is a bad thing. The Agricultural Revolution is a big reason why civilization, as we know it, developed in the first place. However, it did come with a specific byproduct. It introduced the concept of land ownership and passing down property through bloodlines. It’s a concept that is not strictly Western. It occurs in almost every society in every part of the world that relies on agriculture to some extent. The culture develops its customs around owning and managing land. So naturally, some of those customs extend to owning and managing people.

Using caveman logic, the concept of owning land is entirely arbitrary. Unlike a tool or physical good that we create, we can’t hold it or lock it in a safe. However, we still treat it as something we need to protect from theft. We treat it as something that we associate with our own name. This is where the idea of passing possessions down to children enters the picture. It’s one thing to just give a child a tool or heirloom you made. It’s quite another to leave them ownership of a farm or property.

This is why marital fidelity, virginity, and knowing that your kid is really your kid became so important. Before the days of Maury Povich and blood tests, the only way to truly know that your kid is yours is for your bride to be a virgin on her wedding night and to have never cheated on you. It’s not so much about nature as much as it is about economics. There’s an economic and legal incentive to treat sexuality, child-rearing, and sexual relations as a commodity. As a result, we guard it like we do other commodities.

From that perspective, it’s easy to see how jealousy emerges. It’s like seeing someone with a nicer car or more food than you. It makes you envious and jealous. It stirs up all sorts of negative emotions that don’t always manifest in healthy ways. We think it’s natural, but take a second to consider the implications of this feeling.

To be jealous of another person’s feelings over someone else implies that you own that person to some extent. It implies you own their emotions, their sentiments, and their sexuality. For most people in the modern era, the idea of owning another human being in any capacity is abhorrent, yet we don’t bat an eye when we think we own someone’s emotions.

In the context of caveman logic, it doesn’t hold up. As small communities of hunter/gatherers, the idea of owning another person’s emotions wasn’t very pragmatic to say the least. Two people and whatever children they have aren’t enough to fend for themselves against a pack of sabretooth tigers. They need to band together as a community and a by-product of this, as we see in other primates, is that sexual monogamy isn’t the norm. It can and does happen, but it isn’t the ideal. It’s just a variation.

Now it’s one thing to make a promise of sexual fidelity to someone and break it. It’s quite another to just assume that someone else’s emotions must be managed a certain way. That undermines the very concept of what it means to be a sovereign human being. However, our culture is still structured around this idea that one person owns the love and lust of another and this is somehow an ideal.

It’s for this reason that I now see the concept of jealousy as somewhat flawed. When I think about my own romantic inclinations, I don’t want to own another human being. I don’t want to be owned either. I want the love and lust I share with another to be freely exchanged for all the right reasons. There’s room for romance. There’s room for lust. There’s room for commitment as well. Jealousy feels like a perversion of this sentiment and something that needs to be re-evaluated.

So once again, I’d like to open this up a little. What do you, the readers, think about our current concept of jealousy? What is your experience with it? Do you think it’s natural? Do you think there’s room to change our perceptions?

This idea has given me plenty of think about for future books. There is one new idea I’m developing, hopefully for a short, sweet, and sexy story I can write after I’m done with my next project. I think there are too many stories out there that focus on love triangles and scorned lovers. I think the marketplace is ready for something new and I hope to provide it.

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The Joys of Sleeping Naked

After a week of vacation and rejection emails, I’m ready to start talking about more entertaining topics again. I don’t want this blog to just be about me and my failed efforts at becoming a published author. I want this blog to have some entertainment value, preferably the sexy kind. I’m still committed to delivering that and today is no exception.

For this topic, I’d like to get a little personal. I don’t normally do this, but I think this is due. I’m going to confess something that most people don’t confess outside of private conversations or absent significant alcohol intact. I, Jack Fisher, sleep naked.

Yes, it’s true. The same guy who tries to make a living writing sexy love stories sleeps in the buff. It doesn’t matter if it’s the dead of winter. It doesn’t matter if it’s the middle of summer. I sleep naked and I love it. I also highly recommend that others do it. It doesn’t matter if your a man, woman, trans, gay, or straight. Sleeping naked is one of life’s most underrated pleasures.

Now I didn’t always sleep naked, but that’s mostly due to logistical issues. I grew up in a fairly large household where walking around naked tends to cause problems. I also lived with roommates for a good chunk of my early adult life and too much nudity causes entirely different problems in that situation. Even after I moved into a more comfortable living situation on my own, I still wore underwear to bed. Then, one day I just stopped.

I don’t remember exactly when I decided to start sleeping naked. I don’t know what was going through my mind or why the idea came to me. I just know that after the first night, I could never go back. There’s just something inherently liberating about sleeping naked. I’ve found that it improves the quality of my sleep. It reduces stress. It even settles my mind, which is important for any aspiring writer trying to flesh out new ideas. Other than my manly parts flopping around under the sheets, I can think of no real drawbacks.

I know these benefits are just anecdotal. There can’t be any scientific reasons why sleeping naked is awesome, can there? Well, it turns out science has a dirty mind because they actually did study this and wouldn’t you know it? There are actual documented benefits. Elite Daily listed 7 scientific reasons why you should sleep naked, but I believe there are far more than that.

I believe this because of a little something I like to call caveman logic. This logic simply acknowledges that our bodies, as magnificent as they are, evolved from hunter/gatherer societies in the African savanna 100,000 years ago. Since evolution is slow and our bodies, save for one organ, are pretty dumb on a fundamental level, our biology still functions under the same evolutionary guidelines that emerged all those years ago.

That means sleeping with silk clothes and bleached cotton doesn’t necessarily complement that biology. Remember, our species evolved in a tropical and semi-tropical climate. So sleeping naked was kind of the only option and naturally, our bodies adapted and evolved.

The problem is that 100,000 years of cultural, societal, and religious development tends to create a lot of mixed messages about our bodies and how we see them. That’s why nudity is still so taboo in some areas. However, I don’t think there should be any taboo about sleeping naked.

Whether your alone or with a lover, there are just too many benefits. Human beings, following caveman logic, evolved to be social, emotional creatures. The simple act of being naked with someone creates all these pleasant, intimate feelings that make us happy and content. It’s almost as though nature wants us to be naked, intimate, and content with one another instead of isolated, hostile, and ashamed. Strange, isn’t it?

I’m not a doctor and I don’t pretend to be one. I’m an aspiring writer who has yet to taste real success. I’m not exactly an authority on sexual health or physical health in general. However, I do feel confident in recommending to others that they give sleeping naked a try. If you need even more proof, check out this video from DNews. If that still doesn’t convince you, then that’s your call.

Now if you’ll excuse me, these pants are getting mighty uncomfortable.

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10 Health Benefits of Orgasms

Let’s face it. Most people don’t need many reasons for having orgasms. It’s one of those wonderful little gifts nature gives us that needs no instruction manual, accessories, or certifications. It comes to us hard-wired, up-to-date, and primed for use as soon as we’re ready. It’s still somewhat taboo to talk about, let alone celebrate, but writing and reading erotic stories gives me a special appreciation for them.

On this blog, I’ve already talked about the unexpected health benefits of BDSM and the benefits of sexual promiscuity. Those benefits may be surprising to some, but I doubt anyone is surprised to hear that there are actual health benefits to orgasms. On some levels, I think we all know that. Nature wouldn’t make them feel so good or urge us to seek them so passionately if there weren’t some benefits.

That kind of simple logic isn’t enough for some people though. Science likes to verify things, even if they’re intuitive. Sometimes the results are shocking. In this case, however, I don’t think anyone will be surprised to hear that there are substantial health benefits to an orgasm.

And before the uptight, overly conservative, sex-negative crowd (who probably don’t read this blog in the first place), let me just say this. No, these benefits aren’t contingent of two people being married, the same gender, or even in the same room. Nature can only be so elaborate when it comes to politics. Orgasms, as a whole, are as non-partisan as they come.

The fine folks at WebMD compiled a short list of just a few. I think they’re worth citing, if only to inspire those who love romance and erotica.

WebMD: 10 Surprising Health Benefits of Orgasms

1. Orgasms Keep Your Immune System Healthy – Beats chicken noodle soup, that’s for sure

2. Boosts Your Libido – Makes too much sense, but nice for science to verify it just in case

3. Improves Women’s Bladder Control – Anyone who’s been on a road trip knows this is a good skill to have

4. Lowers Your Blood Pressure – How can anyone be tense after an orgasm?

5. Counts as Exercise – Needs way less motivation than a treadmill

6. Lowers Heart Attack Risk – Much better than giving up fried foods

7. Lessens Pain – Perfect balance when you think about it

8. May Make Prostate Cancer Less Likely – For men, it counts as medicine and no prescription required

9. Improves Sleep – It’s basically nature’s tranquilizer dart

10. Eases Stress – Again, how can anyone be tense after an orgasm?

So for the good of your health, people, have more orgasms! I’ll try to do my part with my books, but we must all do ours as well. The benefits to orgasms are, quite literally, in our hands.

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