{"id":4365,"date":"2015-03-04T08:52:35","date_gmt":"2015-03-04T13:52:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/?p=4365"},"modified":"2015-03-04T08:52:35","modified_gmt":"2015-03-04T13:52:35","slug":"ancient-ayurvedic-penis-advice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/ancient-ayurvedic-penis-advice\/","title":{"rendered":"Ancient Ayurvedic Penis Advice"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Normally this space is reserved for extremely important things, like the workings\u00a0of yoga culture within late-stage capitalism, and how the holistic wisdom of Ayurveda can either conflict with or complement biomedicine. This post might seem to deviate, but don\u2019t be fooled. It has a crucial message, especially for readers with penises:<\/p>\n<p><em>Please stop scrubbing your genitals like you\u2019re using\u00a0steel wool to get burned kichari out of a cheap pot.\u00a0The ancestors implore you. M&#8217;kay?<\/em><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>True story: I come out of the swimming pool today and head for the showers. There are four stalls. Three penis-bearers of different ages, builds, and ethnicities are all facing into their respective corners and going to town on their genitals with washcloths. I think one was using a loofa, for shit&#8217;s sake. Great gobs of soap were flying off\u00a0everywhere.<\/p>\n<p><em>Going to town, you say? Whatever can you mean?<\/em><\/p>\n<p>I mean: legs apart, semi-squatting, teeth grit, and both hands gripping. Seeing three at the same time was felicitous: my\u00a0brain turned them into\u00a0curlers with their brooms. This is a Canadian reference, in honour of Briar season, which is another Canadian reference. For the uninitiated, please view at least the first few seconds of the following clip.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/-xFxC-JgWtk?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The sweeping is thought to melt the ice directly beneath the stone, to straighten its path in a flourish of\u00a0strategic rectitude.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s like the\u00a0three shower-guys weren&#8217;t scrubbing at three dangling\u00a0penises, but at the space around\u00a0an ungraspable spinning jewel of idealized manhood sliding toward the horizon of death. But I digress.<\/p>\n<p>I rinse off in the available stall, pat down, and head to my locker to rub down with a little oil like a good Ayur-boy. It takes me about five\u00a0minutes to finish up and dress, and when I pop out of the locker row, I kid you not, they are All. Still. Scrubbing.<\/p>\n<p>I thought about grabbing some popcorn and seeing how long they\u2019d last. But I didn\u2019t because homophobia.<\/p>\n<p>I have to say that this is not an uncommon sight. For years, I taught yoga at a number of fancy clubs\u00a0attended by executive-types. I remember walking into large shower rooms during the lunchtime rush and seeing several gents of\u00a0means and distinction facing the tiled wall in an anti-social pro-hygienic circle jerk of soapy shame.<\/p>\n<p>I wondered if they sat\u00a0through their afternoon board meetings\u00a0burning and itching with dryness. Maybe there\u2019s some kind of strange pleasure-pain in it. Maybe the corporate narcissism that\u2019s ripping up the planet is aggravated by\u00a0pricklies in the tighties.<\/p>\n<p>I get it. Some people with penises can be ashamed of them. They can be objects of inadequacy and failure, unacknowledged homoeroticism, memories of abuse, or the disgusting appendages of those who may later consider transitioning. We stand beside each other at urinals and freeze up for a thousand reasons. There can be\u00a0major\u00a0feelings to scrub away down there.<\/p>\n<p>Or it could be as simple as little boys getting really excited about making more bubbles.<\/p>\n<p>There also might be\u00a0a lot of boomers\u00a0with penises who grew up under the git-r-done\u00a0manners of ex-military fathers for whom\u00a0scrubbing may have been hypervigilance\u00a0against crotch rot\u00a0or jungle funk or just maybe the unbearable guilt of killing people. My own dad was shown a horror film about toe fungus in his basic training for Viet Nam, and he never forgot it. He passed it down to me in a weird form of intergenerational cleanliness\u00a0trauma. I had to do a lot of therapeutic work on myself to not freak out if I forgot my flipflops in the public shower.<\/p>\n<p>Let us be clear. The penis and scrotum are no dirtier than any other part of a body. They host a rich microbiome of benign\u00a0skin flora, fed\u00a0by the sebum produced and retained in puckery\u00a0folds. The glans is actually semi-mucosal, which means it should be treated as tenderly as your tongue or lips or anus. If anything, the whole penis wants more oil, and no surfactants at all. And certainly no ethyl alcohol or polyethylene microbeads, as bracing\u00a0as they\u00a0might feel. There is no need to exfoliate the lingam, and give fish cancer at the same time.<\/p>\n<p>Being circumcised &#8212; i.e., carrying\u00a0the sacralized scar\u00a0of bodily\u00a0shame and patriarchal\u00a0subjugation\u00a0&#8212; might be all the more reason to go easy on the soap. The exposed glans of the circumcised is more keratinized &#8212; \u00a0i.e., <em>dead &#8212;<\/em>\u00a0than the glans protected by foreskin. It needs all the natural lube\u00a0it can get to maintain resilience and sensitivity. And if you have scar tissue from anything else, it\u2019s probably best to double down on gentleness. I don\u2019t have any data on this, but I\u2019m willing to bet that there\u2019s strong correlation between heavy scrubbing and sexual desensitization. Throw porn into the mix, and feeling can evaporate\u00a0altogether.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking of which: going a little overboard with\u00a0the\u00a0sudsy\u00a0penile enthusiasm doesn\u2019t scale at all against the pervasive battery of genital mods pushed on people with vaginas. If full waxing isn&#8217;t enough, you can also chemically deodorize, and maybe shell out 7K \u00a0for\u00a0labiaplasty: all partly if not\u00a0mostly\u00a0porn-driven assaults on the genital integrity, adulthood, and sexual agency of people with vaginas.<\/p>\n<p>If people with penises were as visually objectified as people with vaginas, would they be going farther than mere\u00a0vigourous scrubbing? Is the difference between penile scrubbing and vaginal erasure\u00a0the difference between shame that enjoys the privilege of remaining private, and a commodified aesthetics of shame to be performed for others?<\/p>\n<p>That\u00a0pesky body politic always kills the yuks, doesn&#8217;t it?<\/p>\n<p>Let\u2019s just Ayur-say\u00a0this:<\/p>\n<p>Splash\u00a0with warm water. Take it easy. Occasionally use a mild soap if you really think you\u00a0need it. Save the loofa for your back if it gets a little zitty. Follow up with coconut oil. See in the musky tangle of pubes the happy mess of a desire that needs no purification. Rinse, but\u00a0do not repeat.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Let us be clear. The penis and scrotum are no dirtier than any other part of a body. They host a rich microbiome of benign skin flora, fed by the sebum produced and retained in puckery folds. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5130,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"slim_seo":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,116,23,24,1],"tags":[117,408,409,410,411],"class_list":["post-4365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","category-ayurveda","category-blog","category-featured","category-uncategorized","tag-ayurveda","tag-genital-care","tag-genital-modification","tag-hygiene","tag-penis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4365"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4365\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}