TED LERNER AND THE SEX TEMPLES IN FHM MAGAZINE!!

Filipina actress Aubrey Miles appears on the cover of the July issue of FHM magazine Philippines wearing, er, um….nothing. Well, nothing except paint over her not-so private parts.  Inside, Aubrey’s pictorial absolutely sizzles, as she poses stark naked, save for a few splotches of black paint which are supposed to give the impression that she’s wearing something…but really she’s not.  Not bad for a country which people like to describe as a place filled with “conservative Catholics.”

However, Aubrey’s over the top pictorial is not what makes the July issue so special. What surely made the issue fly off the news stands like none before it was the fact that in the book section where the editors pick their favorite reads of the month, they have chosen to promote my Asian travel adventure book, “The Traveler & the Gate Checkers.”

This plug was not my doing and that’s what was so surprising about seeing the blurb in the magazine. The good folks at FHM must have picked it up at National Book Store, or one of the airport outlets where the book is sold throughout the Philippines.  I’m not quite sure what attracted them to the book, but since FHM is wall to wall sex, it must have had something to with the fact that the subtitle of the book is: “Sex, death, life…On the Road in Asia.”

For the curious, the “sex” in my book’s subtitle is not a reference to out and out gratuitous sex, in the way that FHM likes to do it. It’s actually a reference to the very first story in the book, which is a 75 page tale about a train and bus adventure through India. One of the places we visited was the  “sex” temples in Khajuraho, India. These “sex” temples are not places where Indians go to have sex. They are actually real Hindu temples, built over 1000 years ago by the ancient Rajput kings, who ruled over central India for several centuries.

This hedonistic orgy is just one of thousands of sex carvings on the Hindu Temples of Khajuraho in India. Now this is one religion that gets it right!

The Khajuraho temples are no ordinary temples.  The outside walls of the temples–there are around 80 of them still standing–are literally covered with intricate stone carvings, many of which depict people having sex. And there is nothing tame about the sex scenes on display. Many of the carvings show what we “enlightened” folks in the modern age would consider out and out pornography.

Now, you may be asking how is it that a religious temple can have sex scenes on its walls?  You’re probably trying to imagine your favorite Catholic church with paintings and carvings and stained glass windows showing  the ancients having orgies. Yeh, right. Keep dreaming.

The funny and fascinating part about the carvings at Khajuraho is that back when they were built, they were not considered “porn.” You see, ancient Indians never believed that sex was a sin. The ancient Hindus actually looked at sex as a perfectly normal human function. The reason they displayed all this rowdy sex on their most important religious shrines was because they believed that sex had to be shown in this way, otherwise prudish elders would choose to try and keep it away from the young and sweep it under the rug, thus turning sex into a dark, perverted and shameful act. (Does this sound familiar? And you thought modern techno-life meant we were enlightened.)

Anyway, I’ve posted an excerpt from the India chapter of the book, specifically the sex temples part so if you want to find out more, click here.

To check out more about “The Traveler & the Gate Checkers” click here.

To order “The Traveler & the Gate Checkers,” click here.

And remember, if you see the July issue of FHM on the news stands somewhere, just know that while Aubrey Miles is pretty darn smokin’, it’s what’s inside that really makes the issue sizzle.