Michael thorton

Michael Thorton Free

I'm a plain Holden Caulfield or a pretty Jimmy Hopkins, depending on what kind of nerd you are. (In a situation like mine, you can only think in metaphors...)

Recent Comments

  1. 2 days ago on Rudy Park

    @BE THIS GUY

    The Indians had done that already by the time the British invaded.

    The caste system evolved out of a severely misguided interpretation of the older ‘varna’ system – originally analogous to the Western world’s tradition of guilds.

    The caste system was not uniformly Indian. In the South, in places like Kerala and Tamil Nadu, caste restrictions were frequently flouted and there was plenty more intermarrying than in the North. “Duties” associated with “lower” castes would often grant those members temporary passes, and the Brahmin or priestly castes – which technically outranked the nobility, even if the brahmins were in penury – were not all the same.

  2. 21 days ago on Rudy Park

    And this is how the economy got so bad and how fascism rose anew.

  3. about 1 month ago on Ink Pen

    Something tells me Sendak would nevertheless approve…

  4. 2 months ago on Working Daze

    Is the monk supposed to be a reference to something? He looks awfully familiar.

  5. 2 months ago on The Meaning of Lila

    What, no “Then what are we waiting for” from Drew this time?

  6. 3 months ago on F Minus

    There is a popular legend that Michelangelo Buonarotti said the very same before he began work on The Giant, the large block of marble that would later become David…

    …although the same can be said of his emergent (aka unfinished) sculptures…

  7. 4 months ago on Ink Pen

    Everyone knows that the CIA tried to use C4-packed versions of this potentially lethal prank on Fidel Castro…

    …and everyone who watched “Deadliest Warrior” knows just why they never worked.

  8. 4 months ago on Working Daze

    @Gent

    In the original a.a.p. shorts he had a modicum of hair. He didn’t go bald until the Famous Studios and after.

  9. 4 months ago on Little Fried Chicken and Sushi

    Why do I feel like there was a perfect chance to combine the words “Gojira” (proper pronunciation of Godzilla) and “Gaijin” (foreigner) right now for an excellently subtle yet obvious pun?

  10. 4 months ago on The Academia Waltz

    There’s an answer to why the Indian culture became “obsessed” with “sculptured erotica”.

    It’s in the Kama Sutra – literally “love teachings”.

    A sutra is a text used in worship or teaching, and Kama was the god of love in Hinduism – love not only of a romantic or sexual nature, but love in its platonic, filial, and fraternal forms as well. It’s why his “bosom companion” Basant, the god of spring, is mentioned and featured besides Rati, his female consort. India had been accepting of gender fluidity long before it became a contemporary thing – Hindu mythology is full of instances of gods and goddesses assuming forms of different genders.

    To Hindus – proper Hindus, old-school Hindus, not the fanatical reactionary Hindutva conservatives or any pseudo-Hindus of modern India – nudity was not considered vulgar. It was an early example of body positivity, coupled with a celebration of plumpness evocative of the once semi-revered British idiom “well-fed”.

    Nudity and its depiction were treated as body positivity, as worship of the divine within each human soul. The positions described in the Kama Sutra talk about each partner worshiping their partner in turn, caring for each other’s sensitivities and the sensations they experience. The physical act of love was treated as a ritual involving the communing of each other’s souls.

    The puritanism associated with Hindus today actually came about as a result of the British invasion, through the social-climbing processes of Sanskritization and early Westernization. In his essay “Decolonizing the Indian Mind”, Namvar Singh details the process in a far more meticulous manner than a comment board will usually allow.

    But the bottom line is, nudity was not vulgar in Hinduism, and gender fluidity was not taboo. Every concept the LGBTQ community strives to defend, include, and inhabit – the Hindus had it first. They just forgot it all after centuries under British heels, and aren’t ready to find their way back as yet.