I mentioned Lena as a protest against silence about sex. Silence in the twee movie I watched, silence in my upbringing and in the circles in which I've confined myself ever since.

I've become slightly unhinged from reading about Elliot Spitzer and all the Republican gay sex scandals. As attorney general, Spitzer had prosecuted prostitution and fulminated against it. Similarly with Republicans and gay sex. Looking back I see that I've been had. I believed all that that. Not that I agreed, but I thought those guys were for real.

I think it is fair to say that I've been naïve. Others have understood full well that men love sex, and that the men denying it are either lying to fit in with a dishonest culture or are deranged by living in that dishonest culture.

I can't help noticing that there are few people to look up to here. Others may well understand but they are happy enough to shelter below the parapet and keep the silence.

So I mention Lena, not as confession or self disclosure, but as advocacy and activism. Lonely and disabled? Don't settle for pornography and five fingered masturbation. Buy yourself toys that turn you on and enjoy!

For 47 years I've listened respectfully as authority figures tell ludicrous lies about sex and my sin has been to believe them. Now I want to celebrate sex in all its weird and wonderful forms. If you really want the details of sexual practises with which you are unfamiliar, then I'm happy to tell you. If you want to mock me into silence, you are choosing to side with Foley, Craig, Haggard, Allen, Murphy, et al.

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I think that 90% of teenagers go through a rebellious phase. They reject the advice of parents and society. They shed their guilt about sex, drink, other drugs, driving too fast, and defying authority. Sometimes this works out very badly.

Meanwhile parents and society exaggerate their warnings, hoping to get through to their rebellious children. The 10% of trusting teenagers suffer collateral misinformation. It can be hard to recover from this, because the core insight is that one was always an oddball, outside the mainstream dialogue between anxious parents and rebellious teens. Messages you took at face value were, it turns out, heavily spun and directed at a different audience.

Most people do sort themselves out, whether it is 90%ers calming down, or 10%ers loosening up. Looking around, people become losers when they are caught in a pincer movement, with two problems.

Vague general example: alcohol. People cope with bereavement, depression, redundancy and unemployment. The danger with drinking alcohol is that it is always ready to stab you in the back and open a second front against you.

Specific example: An acquaintance, whose bipolar disorder was quite well controlled by medication. Unfortunately she also had to get over an abusive childhood. The two problems interacted. To overcome her childhood she had to back her own judgement against the "rules" she had  grown up with. Meanwhile, to avoid disaster in her manic phases she needed to be cautious about backing her own judgement and defer to family and friends. Tricky!

So I felt cheated by Lars and the Real Girl. It aspired to be an inspiring tale of some-one coming through their trial. Two of the reviews were unfavourable because they felt that the way that the village rallied round was unrealistic. I have a different criticism. He only had one problem to get over. Most people manage that kind of challenge. It was dishonest as a "triumph over adversity" movie because the protagonist only had to fight on one front. Family, doctor, villagers were all covering his flank and rear.

Sorting out personal problems is urgent work. In real life shit happens. If you let things drift long enough something else will go wrong in your life and then you are fighting on two fronts and things are a lot harder.

On the other hand, the things we do to try and sort out our personal problems often make them worse. I've knocked around Buddhist circles for a while and remember a man who had been in hospital for depression more than once. His preference was for Zen Buddhism. Its quietism and austerity let the depressed understand symptoms of lethargy and ahedonia as spiritual progress. I suspect this does quite a lot of harm.

A tough question for me is whether my own involvement with Buddhism has done me more harm than good. Traditional Buddhist monasticism is celibate, and understands that as not just refraining from sexual intercourse, but also refraining from masturbation. How did I ever imagine that this was a reasonable idea? I can look back and speculate about the psychology: unsuccessful with women => join cult that says sex is bad anyway, give it up and forget about it. A serious case of sour grapes. Well, maybe, but I've only dabbled in Buddhism, meditating, but never a monk. It is hard to understand ones own life, one is too close to the action.

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