The stigma created around female masturbation is a lot like the stigma set about female excrement. Basically, it just doesn’t exist. I’ll explain the excrement one first. I have heard from many guys throughout the years these exact words: “Girls don’t poop,” or even better, “Girls only poop rainbows and butterflies.” Seriously guys? Guess what, all women shit. From Mildred, your elderly next door neighbor who has one too many cats and one too few teeth, to Jessica Alba (that hot chick from that movie where she plays a really hot chick). Mainly, it’s because we’re all living creatures; regardless of gender we have these basic biological needs to attend to. Pretty obvious I know, yet many men are still in denial.

That brings me to my main focus: masturbation. I’ll be more lenient with this topic and admit that, unlike pooping, not all women masturbate. Even worse, those who do never like to talk about it. I mean really ladies, when have you ever seriously discussed the matter? And I mean truly discussed it. Not some reference over a comment Samantha made about it on an episode of Sex and the City, or when you made a dildo joke out of some phallic object you saw at a toy store.  Most of you will say never, right? For some reason it’s weird for a girl to talk about masturbation, yet at the same time it’s weird for a guy to not talk about it. For instance, if I asked one of my girlfriends what type of lube she thinks I should buy for a standard dildo, she’s not going to respond to me something like, “Try getting one with a water-based solution – it won’t stick to the dildo as much and will make clean up a lot easier.” Instead she’ll say something more like, “I don’t know. Leave me alone.”

Now, let’s flip the gender. When one guy asks another guy, “Hey man, what’s a good porn to whack off to?” his friend is probably going to go on for at least 15 minutes telling him precisely what’s the best porn to whack off to. In a study done by Women’s Realities in 2008, 70 percent of women who admitted to masturbating also admitted to feeling guilt about it. Now, ladies, unless you’re rubbing one out to a Justin Beiber music video there is absolutely no need to feel ashamed for doing what people have been doing since the beginning of time.

In fact, there are health benefits to it all. Benefits such as stress reduction, curing insomnia naturally, lowering chances of certain infections and, oh yeah, having an orgasm.

I guess what I’m trying to get at is that masturbation is so taboo amongst us women because society is still forcing us to hold on to the ridiculous ideals that women are always supposed to be pure. As if admitting to being horny is the precursor to just becoming an all-out slut. I equate it to those 1950s anti-marijuana propaganda films whose plots went something along the lines of: “Billy was a real good kid up until he had his first hit of marijuana. One hit was all it took for him to get hooked. Now Billy is in jail for stealing a cop car, killing an innocent old lady off the street and taking her wallet. Anything to get the next fix, right Billy?”

This is masturbation today. So many women think like this Billy kid and feel as if giving into self-pleasure will lead to a life of sex addiction (and maybe even the stealing of a cop car or two). To many women it is better to succumb to the notion constructed by our social world that men should be viewed as the primary gender that wants sex purely for pleasure. Women just sit back and go along for the ride. Well, screw that. Sometimes we don’t enjoy the ride being offered to us, and usually they end far too quickly. So in turn, we’ll just ride ourselves. Is that so bad? I’m going to actually answer this one and say no, it’s not.

Last but not least let’s not forget about vibrators. If it’s not your best friend by now I highly recommend you reevaluate who your real friends are. If you don’t have one then please, invest in one now. Basic ones are not too expensive and will definitely be worth it in the long run.

ALISON STEVENSON can be reached at amstevenson@ucdavis.edu.

College students learn a variety of coping mechanisms to deal with the everyday struggle we’ve chosen to endure. Some take the same lower division ceramics class every quarter, despite the fact that Patrick Swayze never visits from beyond the grave. Others join new churches or jump out of airplanes. I get the feeling that at least one of my fellow columnists indulges in herbal remedies from time to time, although I won’t say which one. There is one thing that has kept me afloat for the last five years, the thing that I love most.

When I was 12, an unfamiliar man came to my PE class to demonstrate a sport I’d never heard of. He brought two high school aged boys who hunched over opposite one another to line their sticks up and take a face-off in front of the class; I thought they only did that in hockey. They beat the shit out of each other with three-and-a-half foot metal sticks until one of them ended up with the ball. The man indicated that he was starting the Diablo Scorpions lacrosse club. I was sold.

I had played baseball when I was younger, but I was never very good, so in true pre-teen form, I quit. I played on the middle school basketball team despite my size because my best friend did too. He had a flat-top back then, so he was cool by default. Initially, I joined the lacrosse club because I wanted to find something masculine that I could have pride in, and because I seemed to be running out of options, beating other men with a three-and-a-half foot metal stick appealed to my less reasonable impulses.

That summer I attended lacrosse camp in Pebble Beach at a truly picturesque private school called Robert Louis Stevenson. You could never see very far past the tall pine trees but you could hear the ocean, and the fields smelled like fresh dew long after it had evaporated in the morning. You could throw a lacrosse ball and hit the world famous golf course. Well, I couldn’t then, but I can now.

It was in this environment, free of schoolyard contempt and otherworldly compromise that I learned almost everything important I understand about lacrosse today. I learned the fundamentals of dodging on a defenseman, the ins and outs of running a fast-break and the necessity of busting your ass every single moment you’re on that field, because you never know when it might be your last. I learned that you are to inscribe every field you grace with your best self, in the Native American tradition.

These are, however, not the most important things I learned there. I learned that understanding the technical aspects of the game is not the ultimate goal of practice, it is the means to a more emotionally complex end. I learned that there was nothing else I could experience that matched the inexplicable feeling that continues to overwhelm me well into my twenties when I slide that helmet over my head. I learned that for five days at a time, a person can travel to Pebble Beach with their lacrosse bag and become spiritually renewed at an age when spiritual renewal is unlikely (unless you had the greatest Bar-Mitzvah ever), and moreover, that if you learn to channel this energy, to make your passion your therapy, then you can feel renewed every time you put that helmet on.

Ten years ago, someone exceptional shared with me his boundless passion for a sport, a form of therapy that meant everything to him. It is because of him that I found my coping mechanism, the one thing that I advocate every college student find if they have not done so already. In his honor, I’ve decided to begin coaching this year in an attempt to share the passion that he instilled in me with the budding youth lacrosse community of Davis. I may never get to play collegiate ball again, but I can always aspire to share even a fraction of what he gave to the campers at Robert Louis Stevenson as a coach.

I advocate you find that thing that offers a momentary escape from the struggle we’ve chosen to endure long enough to retain your sanity. Find your passion, do it with as much honor as you know how, and make it your therapy.

And just when you think you’re done, dedicate a part of your life to sharing it with the people you love the most.

JOSH ROTTMAN urges you to submit your fiction, poetry and mixed media to Nameless Magazine. Visit us at namelessmagazine.com and reach him at jjrottman@ucdavis.edu.

So a state budget is passed and signed into law, but California’s future is no brighter.

It’s commonplace now for observers to report that our government is no longer operational.

“The enactment of a new state budget, 100 days after the onset of the fiscal year, is further evidence, if we needed any, of our civic dysfunction,” Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters recently wrote. “It’s a pastiche of gimmicks and assumptions that probably will fall apart before the next governor takes office in January.”

Perhaps this reality explains why the budget was passed with so little fanfare. I recall the mood in Sacramento two years ago, when it was big news every morning that the budget was one more day overdue, and what a crisis everyone said we faced.

This year, all of a sudden, a budget vote falls out of the sky and with little delay everybody surrenders. Legislators are out of town one day, they hurriedly trudge back into the capital the next and spend all night in session to finish by the next morning.

Gov. Schwarzenegger signed the bill with bland statements like “politics is the art of compromise.” Reporters knew the drill so well they cranked out their stories faster than a script for a new Saw movie and went home. One senator didn’t even bother to come back from his vacation for any of it.

It’s said that the final stage of grief is acceptance. We need look no further for evidence that our government has been dead for a while than that Californians are flirting with Oregon while businesses have begun dating again (mostly with Nevada and Texas). It’s surely saying something when entrepreneurs hoping for success are leaving the gorgeous mild climate of California for the desert next door.

What not everybody sees is that California is in the late stages of the battle between left and right that is raging across the Western world. We are further down the line than the American government, but not so far as the Greek.

We have leftist aspirations (generous compensation for public workers, a large safety net for the unfortunate and the poor, plenty of punishments for big mean businesses and greedy rich people, various other sacred cows that no one will touch), but still some right-wing impulses (low property taxes through Prop 13, an increasing disregard for unions, a tough-on-crime approach that increases the cost of prisons, a resistance to raising “revenues” any further). One thinker writing in National Review a few months back called it the problem of the two Santas – each side competing to outdo the other with their own brand of generosity.

Faithfully believing in our Santas, we Californians have brought this outcome on ourselves with the hodgepodge of propositions and budgetary demands we’ve imposed over the years. In one election we’ll insist that our government always be generous in funding schools, but in the next we’ll refuse to pay for it. We’ve promised ourselves the benefits of big government without agreeing to the costs. Hence the enormous, intractable deficit.

The perennial budget impasse is absolutely a failure of the legislature, but we have empowered lawmakers to fail with our own confused personalities. Sooner or later, one side will have to win – government will have to be reduced in size and expense, or additional taxes will have to be levied to give us our goody bags. Which solution you advocate depends on your ideology, but speaking for myself I know of no government that has taxed its people into prosperity.

Regardless, no doubt perfectly aware of the difficult decisions that lie before our state, a good legislator should be honest in presenting the two options before the voters. Few are.

“Legislators are much more worried about their reelections than the state of the state,” someone who works closely with the Legislature told me. “Even the budget battle itself is just an extension of campaigning, with all sorts of ‘trailer bills’ added in at the last minute to bring home the bacon for their own voters.”

“A real budget solution might endanger their campaign,” the source continued.

She’s right, which brings us back to looking in the mirror. Shouldn’t a real budget solution actually strengthen a legislator’s reelection prospects?

Propose your own solutions to ROB OLSON at rwolson@ucdavis.edu.

There is no place for vandalism anywhere on our campus or on our beloved mural, period.

Last week’s guest opinion was titled “Mural vandalism should be viewed as sign of peace, unity,” which, in and of itself, is paradoxical. The title strives to make a connection between an act of vandalism, which the Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary describes as “willful or malicious destruction or defacement of public or private property,” and an act of peace. Any average law abiding citizen can agree that “malicious destruction or defacement of public property” is not a sign of peace. What has occurred on our campus is indeed an act of deliberate vandalism in every meaning of the definition.

This specific incident of spray painting upon the image of the dove is reflective of degrading instances of vandalism of Palestinian homes by Israeli soldiers. For Palestinians, it implies a deliberate endorsement and support for the sustained occupation and repression of the Palestinian people. If the individual or group responsible truly sought peace they could have approached it in a much different manner. It is a sign of disrespect motivated by an unknown, but questionable agenda.

Second, the Jewish community and Israeli people are not the targets in the recent campus outrage nor are they the targets in the movement to Free Palestine. What is being targeted is the lack of thought that went into the blatant defacement of the mural, and the ignorant comments made in an Op-Ed that attempted to justify the perpetrators’ actions as being done in the name of peace, love and unity. The support of the international community, as well as backing from several multicultural organizations on campus all reflect a shift in favor of the Palestinian people’s struggle for just treatment and basic human rights.

Furthermore, to use the term Israeli interchangeably with the Jewish people, and Israel with the religion of Judaism, is irresponsible and simply not true. Such acts perpetrated by the Israeli government have even summoned rabbis and Jewish groups, such as Jewish Voice for Peace, to speak out in defense of the Palestinian people and condemn the aggression of Israel’s military and governmental policies.

Third, to attribute any crimes by individuals to an entire group by claiming that hate crimes across the UC system fall into the hands of Palestinians and Muslims is careless. Indeed, such crimes do not fall into the hands of all Jews and Israelis either. Should all Germans be held responsible for the sins of Hitler and the Nazis? Should all Americans be blamed for the genocide of Native Americans and the brutal horrors of slavery?

I will be the first to agree that any form of hate should be rooted out and condemned. The blame however, should be targeted to those responsible, not broadly brushed across entire communities. This is true for all sides, and if we do not learn this lesson we are doomed to repeat the history and sins of the past. The perpetrators may never be discovered and punished, but what is important is that the justifications of their actions never take root on this campus, or any campus. Vandalism is vandalism, period.

The guest opinion published on Oct. 7 was truly appalling. To read that the Palestinian flag symbolizes “the murder and genocide of millions of innocent Jews and the ethnic cleansing of Judea” is offensive, tragically misleading and flat out wrong. Palestinians had no part in the Holocaust. Yes, Jews may be a minority, but by taking on the role of oppressor, it is difficult for Palestinians to sympathize with their past struggles.

I am not aware of a time that campus has viewed Israeli students as “secondary citizens.” However, I have clearly seen the effects of the Israeli government on Palestinians, and it is literally a harsh reality that a status of secondary citizenship does not even begin to cover.

There are different roads for Palestinians and Israelis, depending on the license plate of the car and your identification. Israelis have the luxury of driving on smooth, newly paved, clean roads. On Palestinian territory, the dirt roads are dug up by the Israeli government to limit transportation in and out of villages. A Palestinian’s ID number dictates where he or she is permitted to travel. For the majority, this means they must make three or four bus transfers, walk some, then find a taxi with the correct license plate (a total of about two hours on a good day) to travel the distance of Davis to Sacramento. That’s if the soldiers at multiple checkpoints are feeling generous.

Yes, while listening to their iPods, smoking and drinking coffee with AK-47s strapped across their chests, Israeli soldiers delay each car while they banter and decide if they should let it pass. Sometimes, soldiers will let all but one or two family members enter the city. This may be prohibited by law, but it happens on a daily basis.

With little consistency in travel through checkpoints, a Palestinian is lucky to find a job to support his family. Fathers and husbands scramble for whatever scarce labor opportunities they can obtain because at times they go weeks without reaching their place of work. The Israeli government is essentially forcing this perpetual poverty on the Palestinian people. Remember that each settlement built, despite pledges to halt them, strips the Palestinians of homes and farmland crucial to survival. Visiting two summers ago, I met a man whose land had been cut in half. The Wall is now his backyard and half his income and food he fed his family with was slashed by an Israeli official drawing on a map.

When I share these stories, people that have visited one part of the country often dismiss them as abnormal cases. If you travel through Israeli territories, you wouldn’t see this. Arab Israelis have a different status, opportunities for jobs and the comforts of bustling cities that don’t look much different than our cities here. But they are anomalies, exceptions to the rest of the country. Beverly Hills looks a lot different than New Orleans after Katrina, correct? I have traveled from Jerusalem to Haifa, through a fair portion of the country, and I have witnessed the spectrum of how people live. The Arab-Israeli conflict is complex and I would never pretend to have a solution, but equating Jews in Davis, California to the Palestinians in the Middle East is absurd and ignorant.

Let’s also remember that Jews and Israelis are not necessarily the same thing, just as Palestinians are not always Muslim. I am not anti-Judaism, but I am anti-Israel, the same way America is anti-terrorism. I do not agree with the occupation and the techniques Israel uses to suppress a people that were exiled from their homes by the decisions of Western governments.

In an essay written in 1947, King Abdullah of Jordan explained the situation simply: “It is exactly the same position you in America take in regard to the unhappy European Jews. You are sorry for them, but you do not want them in your country. We do not want them in ours, either. Not because they are Jews, but because they are foreigners. We would not want hundreds of thousands of foreigners in our country, be they Englishmen or Norwegians or Brazilians or whatever.”

So, while the guest opinion said that the Palestinians may want a country that Jews cannot visit, let us first remember that the Israelis have actually created a country where Palestinians often cannot visit their holy city and arrests are made without reason. Peace is impossible when land and basic rights are ripped from under the feet of a human being.

Lyla Rayyan

Junior, international relations and communication

One of the most important measures on the California ballot this November is Proposition 19, which would legalize and regulate the possession and sale of marijuana.

Like alcohol prohibition in the 1920s, the criminal prohibition of marijuana has failed miserably. Our laws have created a massive underground black market that generates billions of dollars a year for violent street gangs and international drug cartels. The state spends enormous sums of money arresting, prosecuting and incarcerating not only violent criminals, but average citizens who are simply caught with the plant in their possession. It’s time for change.

Despite the obvious failure of prohibition, there is a fair amount of opposition to legalization. It’s important to recognize from the outset that the proposition isn’t perfect. It doesn’t address all the potential issues that legalization would create. However, these problems pale in comparison to those created by prohibition.

One of the biggest arguments opponents use is that employers will no longer be able to enforce drug-free workplaces if marijuana is legal, which would make many workplaces unsafe and could result in the loss of large amounts of federal funding.

This argument is bogus. Whether or not marijuana is legal, it is already legal for employers to drug test their employees. In the same way that an employer can fire a worker who shows up drunk to work, an employer would be allowed to fire a worker who shows up high.

Some opponents of legalization argue that since marijuana will still be illegal federally, Prop 19 will be void. It is true that if Prop 19 passes, state law will conflict with federal law. It’ll be imperative that the Obama administration reassess its enforcement priorities, because federal agents will still have the authority under federal law to arrest and prosecute people for cultivating, possessing or selling marijuana. State and local law enforcement officers, however, will no longer have this authority.

One issue the proposition doesn’t address is the technical question of determining when someone is “under the influence.” This will be a question the legislature will have to answer if Prop 19 passes, but it’s not a reason to vote no.

Proponents of legalization claim that the state could raise $1.4 billion per year in tax revenue. This number is just an estimate. It’s difficult to determine how big the market will be until the drug is actually legal. Opponents have a point that some of this money will have to be used to regulate the new market. The real benefit, however, comes from savings in reduced prison and law enforcement costs.

Too often, what opponents fail to recognize is that marijuana is already out there. People already grow, sell and use it. Prop 19 will not change this. What it will do is regulate these activities and give the state – not criminals – control of the market.