SEX AND THE SPELUNKER: A brief Brief in two parts.-mw
"So, Milo, am I right that cavers don't use the term......Spelunker?"Yes. The non-use of that term is the only snobbery that is left in the otherwise egalitarian community of He-men and He-women Cavers. Every time a Caver uses the word
Spelunker, he is required to spit. The only reason I didn't spit at my computer screen just then, was because I closed my eyes when I typed...Spe...well, you know what.
Ah yes, there is that little yellow bat sticker that we all put on the back bumpers of our cars, but that's not snobbery. That's brotherhood. That keeps us from stealing each others gear.
But that is enough discourse on the low-life, chicken-stealing people who are
spelunkers (spit), let us move right along and talk about...
...Sex.A few posts back my esteemed colleague Dr. wwh, posed the modest but interesting question
"Are the entrances to your spelunking adventures rimmed with curly hair?" Heh, heh, heh. That was the good doctor Bill's amusing way of asking a much more serious question, viz.
Is caving a perverted Freudian desire to return the comfort and safety of the womb? In a word , as we shall see, the answer is -yes and no.
Caves are, by the very nature of their origin, sexy places. Long vanquished rivers of phreatic water dissolved jointed cracks within the white-grey limestone into the sinuous smooth sensual curves of nature. Of nature, and the human body.
For example in Tumbling Rock Cave in Alabama there is a section of the cave where where hundreds of knobby little ten inch phallic stalagmites protrude from the calcite floor. We named this stretch of the cave
The Great Totem Gallery.The cave ladies in our group insist on calling this passage the
Seen-one-you've-seen-them-all passage.
While in the stream passage of Iron Hoop Cave hundreds upon hundreds of perfect life-sized human breasts have been cut out of the smooth milk-white limestone ceiling of passage. The name on the cave map for this passage is
The Mammary Passage. This passage is a hands-and-knees stream crawl and after about a hundred feet of bumping your head on these protrusions we he-men cavers begin calling it the
Seen-one-you've-seen-them-all passage.
Funny thing though, all the sexual imagery has a dampening effect on participatory sex. Like the rapist in
Clockwork Orange who a future government had his eyes-wired-open and then forced him to watch hours and hours of pornographic movies, cavers generally lose interest in overt sex. It goes like this...
"Now Honey, Sweetie Pie, don't you go expecting me to hang around the house this weekend, I'm getting real, real, horny and I gotta go cave." 
