White Hare Over Water

“White Hare Over Water” by Catherine Hyde.

Writes Hyde: “Over the past few years I have become increasingly obsessed with the tension between meeting points and journeys: land and water – river and sea – twilight and moonrise - night and dawn – high tide and low tide.

“Drawing on symbolism derived from Greek, Norse, European and Welsh myth, I use the archetypal stag, hare and fish as emblems of wildness, fertility and permanence. Their movements through the paintings act as vehicles that bind the elements together.

“I am constantly trying to convey the landscape in a state of suspension – the moment between the rise and fall of a wave – in order to reveal the profound connection between man and Nature.”

Morning Light VI

Tales of Evolution

The following is excerpted from the website of the Hare Preservation Trust.

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Hares and their relatives, the rabbits and pikas, comprise the zoological order Lagomorpha. Modern biochemical evidence suggests the lagomorphs have been a distinct lineage for around 90 million years. Since the dinosaurs became extinct around 65 million years ago it is possible that hare-like creatures were scurrying about the feet of the giant reptiles for 25 million years.

The evolution of the lagomorphs was greatly influenced by the rise to dominance of grasses among the flowering plants during the Oligocene and Miocene periods between 35 and 5 million years ago. Vast tracts of prairie land developed in Asia during those times and the lagomorphs evolved to take advantage of this abundant food supply. The caecum, an offshoot of the gut and well developed in lagomorphs, acts as a fermentation chamber to break down the large amounts of cellulose which grasses contain.

The brown hare evolved in continental Europe, but probably did not radiate northwards before Britain was cut off from the mainland by the formation of the English Channel around 7,500 years ago. If that was so, then the mountain hare is our only native hare species. The brown hare was probably introduced by the Romans around 2,000 years ago.


Image: Darin Smith.

Darting Hare

The US practice at the 2006 Ryder Cup in County Kildare, Ireland, is briefly interrupted as a hare darts across the sixth green with Phil Mickelson in mock pursuit.

Source: BBC World News.

Ball[s] Sports

The following article was recently published on EurekAlert.com.

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Over One-third of Former American Football Players
had Sexual Relations with Men, Study Says

A study of former high-school American Football players has found that more than a third said they had had sexual relations with other men.

In his study of homosexuality among sportsmen in the US, sociologist Dr Eric Anderson found that 19 in a sample of 47 had taken part in acts intended to sexually arouse other men, ranging from kissing to mutual masturbation and oral sex.

The 47 men, aged 18-23, were all American Football players who previously played at the high school (secondary school) level but had failed to be picked for their university’s team and were now cheerleaders instead. They were at various universities from the American south, Mid-West, west and north west.

Dr Anderson, now of the University of Bath, UK, said the study showed that society’s increasing open-mindedness about homosexuality and decreasing stigma concerning sexual activity with other men had allowed sportsmen to speak more openly about these sexual activities. He found that this sex came in the form of two men and one woman, as well as just two men alone.

He said that the sexual acts described differed from acts of ‘hazing’ or team-bonding that often include pretend-homosexual acts.

“The evidence supports my assertion that homophobia is on the rapid decline among male teamsport athletes in North America at all levels of play,” he writes in his study, entitled “Being Masculine is Not About Whom You Sleep With: Heterosexual Athletes Contesting Masculinity and the One-Time Rule of Homosexuality.”


. . . Dr Anderson was the first openly gay male high school sports coach in the US. He left coaching after one of his students was assaulted because it was assumed that he was gay. Dr Anderson is now working in the field of sport sociology at the University of Bath, and is the author of In the Game: Gay Athletes and the Cult of Masculinity.

“Men have traditionally been reluctant to do anything associated with homosexuality because they feared being perceived gay,” he said. “There has been pressure on them to conform to the notion that being male is about having traditionally masculine traits, in terms of dress, behaviours and sexual activities.

“But as more men are open about their varieties of sexuality, it becomes less stigmatized to be gay or to have sex with men. It is increasingly not a problem to act in otherwise non-traditional ways.

“I see this in other areas of my research too, including how men behave in straight nightclubs, where I find that university-aged men dance as much with each other than with women, and how heterosexual men are increasingly free to wear clothing styles or colours that once were taboo for them.

“This isn’t something that would have happened ten or twenty years ago. Times are changing and they are changing rapidly for men of this age.”

To read this article in its entirety, click here.

Hares at Play

Hares at Play
By John Clare

The birds are gone to bed the cows are still
And sheep lie panting on each old molehill
And underneath the willow’s grey-green bough
Like toil a-resting lies the fallow plough
The timid hares throw daylight fears away
On the lane road to dust and dance and play
Then dabble in the grain by nought deterred
To lick the dew-fall from the barley's beard
Then out they start again and round the hill
Like happy thoughts – dance – squat – and loiter still
Till milking maidens in the early morn
Jingle their yokes and start them in the corn
Through well-known beaten paths each nimbling hare
Starts quick as fear - and seeks its hidden lair

Sculpture 1: “Boxing Hares” by Paul Jenkins.
Sculpture 2: “Dancing Hare” by Paul Jenkins.

Morning Light V

Subject: Unknown.
Photographer: Fred Goudon.

The Hare on the Moon

The following is excerpted from AdlerPlanetarium.org:

Many peoples see pictures on the Moon, based on the dark and light patterns on the Moon’s face. One is the Man in the Moon. Another is the Rabbit in the Moon, or Hare on the Moon. A rabbit is not immediately obvious to modern Western eyes, but to the Chinese it has been a mainstay of mythology for centuries. The Chinese also see a Toad, who is the goddess Heng O.

The hare in the moon is a common symbol for sacrifice and rebirth. This story from India is fairly typical. It runs: A monkey a fox and a hare were out walking. They encountered a beggar in very bad shape. He told them he had not eaten for days and was about to starve. Now it was a holy day, when the rich would fast and give food to the poor, so the three friends decided to hunt for some food for the beggar. The monkey found some mangoes and the fox returned with a bird’s nest, which the beggar accepted gratefully. The hare, however could hunt nothing, since humans could not eat grass. Instead he offered himself as food. The hare lit a fire and jumped in. However, he found he did not burn. Instead the beggar revealed his true face as Indra, God of the Storm. Indra rewarded the hare’s courage and self-sacrifice by placing him on the Moon, where people would see him and forever remember his story.

An Aztec story says that the Gods needed to renew the Sun and the Moon. This required a pair of willing sacrifices. The second sacrifice, called Tacciztécatl or Conch Shell Lord, became reincarnated as the Moon, so one of the gods hurled a rabbit into the Moon’s clean face. The rabbit can be seen today as the emblem of Tacciztécatl’s sacrifice and rebirth.


Image: Joanna May.

Soft

Following is an excerpt from The Male Body by Susan Bordo:

No other part of the male body is so visibly and overtly mercurial as the penis, capable of such dramatic transformation from passivity to alertness. No wonder many cultures have worshipped the phallus as a magical being. The word “fascinate” has its origin in the Latin word fascinum, which meant “witchcraft” and derived from the phallic god Fascinus, worshipped by Romans, who sometimes wore an image of an erect penis around the neck as an amulet or hung one of the walls of their houses. . . .

We don’t quite regard the penis as a magical being, but we still find fascination in its mercurial nature. . . . “Hard” and “soft” are two dramatically different physiological states that have been endowed with even more dramatic – and varied – significance.

Non-erect, the penis has a unique ability to suggest vulnerability, fragility, a sleepy sweetness. It’s not just soft, it’s really soft. It lolls, can be gently played with, cuddled. . . .


In literature, tender descriptions of the penis are usually evoked when it is soft. The most famous is offered by D. H. Lawrence through the persona of Connie Chatterley, who murmurs to Mellor’s soft penis as through it were her infant baby, even a fetus.

“And now he’s tiny, and soft like a little bud of life!” she said, taking the soft small penis in her hand. “Isn’t he somehow lovely! So on his own, so strange! And so innocent! And he comes so far into me! You must never insult him, you know. He’s mine too. He’s not only yours. He’s mine! And so lovely and innocent!” And she held the penis soft in her hand.

Say what you will about Lawrence in his phallic postures; he’s truly captured a woman’s moment here.

All animals of course, are made of mostly soft stuff, requiring various kinds of protection, from horns to helmets, to help us get by. Human flesh is particularly vulnerable, but the soft penis seems especially so, not, I think, because (like the testicles) it is more easily hurt than other parts of the body, but by virtue of contrast with its erect state. No other body part offers that contrast.

Unfortunately, the relation between the hard and soft penis often determines whether the soft penis will be cherished like a sleeping baby or derided as a flaccid piece of failure. The vulnerability of Mellor’s soft penis touches Connie Chatterley, but only after she has known him in a more commanding mode; transfigured by satisfying sex, she looks with wonder at “the tender frailty of that which had been the power.” But fifty pages earlier, after unsatisfying sex, Mellor’s body appears a “foolish, impudent, imperfect thing,” the “wilting of the poor, insignificant, moist little penis” of her lover to be “ridiculous” and “farcical.” Whether he’s a tender bud, full of promise, or a sad, wilted bloom, the full flower of manhood sets the standard.

– Susan Bordo
Excerpted from The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, 1999
pp. 43-45

NEXT: Hard
See also the related posts:
• Penis
• Phallus
• Rethinking the "Normal" Penis
• Rethinking the "Normal" Penis (Part II)

Recommended Off-site Link:
Give a Man Six Inches and He’ll Want a . . . - John Elder, The Age (Melbourne), August 13, 2006.

Image 1: Doug Koziak (photographer unknown).
Image 2: Subject and photographer unknown.
Image 3: Geoffrey Kane (photographer unknown).
Image 4: Subject and photographer unknown.
Image 5: The Leveret.

Hard

Continuing with excerpts from The Male Body by Susan Bordo:

The erect penis is often endowed with a tumescent consciousness that is bold, unafraid, at the ready. Gay art and literature and both straight and gay pornography are throbbing with such descriptions . . .

[A] lot of our ideas about the penis clearly come not from anatomical fact but from our cultural imagination . . . Most of our metaphors for the penis . . . turn it into some species of dildo: stiff torpedoes, wands, and rods that never get soft, always perform. These metaphors . . . may be a defense against fears of being too soft, physically and emotionally. But at the same time as these metaphors “defend” men as they joke with each other in bars or – more hatefully – act as a misogynist salve for past or imaginary humiliations, they also set men up for failure.

For men don’t really have torpedoes or rods or heroic avengers between their legs. They have penises. And penises, like the rest of the human body and unlike dildoes, feel things. . . .




- Excerpted from The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private
by Susan Brodo (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, 1999), p. 45 and pp. 64-67.


See also: Soft.

Image 1: Subject and photographer unknown.
Image 2: The Leveret.
Image 2: Riley (photographer unknown).

Cutting of the Hare

Hares often hide in cornfields till the last reaping. The last sheaf is often called “the hare,” and its cutting called “killing the hare,” “cutting the hare,” or “cutting the hare’s tail off.” In some places the reapers would all stand around and throw their sickles at the “hare.” In many European countries there are traditions surrounding this “cutting of the hare” ritual.

Source: The Dancing Hare.

Image: “Hare Asleep in the Cornfield” by Hannah Giffard.

Morning Light IV