Hi Sisters,
Faustus, blogging at
http://www.erosblog.com/2009/06/28/the- ... weirdness/
ruminates on "The Cost of Sexual Weirdness" in interesting ways that may shed light on some of our varying needs or impulses to keep our CDing private.
It's far from being the whole story. It doesn't address why we feel shame, fear, etc. at the thought of revealing ourselves or being caught CDing. And in fact I don't even know if his assertions quite hold up.
But in a time-and-motion-study sense, it's thought-provoking all the same in asking why relatively few people seem to be "out" about their sexual kink, vs. those who keep it hidden ... Some excerpts (but check out the whole thing, it's fascinating, and there are provocative pix as well).
Love, Robyn Katie
QUOTE:
" .... what is the source of the stigma? Why is weird equated to bad? ...
"If you enjoy weirdness, you have a fair amount of imagination. And imagination is a good thing, right? Well, as it turns out, it depends on which perspective you’re occupying.
"The problem is this: much of life is drudgery. .... Unfortunately, diligent performance of drudge-work is a large part of what other people really want from us. Your boss really, really wants you to check those figures accurately. Your spouse really, really wants you to look after the kids.
"But if you have powerful imagination, especially a powerful sexual imagination, then the opportunity cost for drudgery is going to be high. Imagination competes with diligent drudgery for time and mental energy. The more imagination you have, the better the hedonics of imagination, but that means that for every minute of drudgery, the more pleasure foregone. And what does the most basic economics of opportunity cost tell us about what happens when the opportunity cost of X goes up? Precisely. Less X.
So if you advertise that you are sexually weird, you might be inviting people to draw the inference that other things being equal, you will be a worse employee or spouse or whatever than someone whose interests are more conventional (think golf, or lawn care, or something). You will face temptations to slack off that other people won’t have. Other people won’t like that.
"Is it any wonder, then, that people who are weird go to some lengths to conceal the fact? .... "
Sexual imagination vs. drudgery?
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Robyn Katie
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Robyn Katie
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Hi again,
In the comments to the above on the erosblog site, a reader quotes W. Somerset Maugham: “My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.”
The commenter goes on in part: "We have these silent rules about sex— unless it is so in the public sphere as to be able to be detached from the personal and exist as a general idea, then by talking about it, you’re breaching rules about how much of the personal you reveal to someone with whom you aren’t intimate."
But that still doesn't explain why those rules??? Why do we feel that shame, that fear?
That to me seems the dominant reason many of us feel we *must* at all costs avoid exposure (while courting it at the same time).
And, putting the shoe on the other foot, many of us, confronted by someone else's kink, especially in public, react with disgust. It's something we don't want to deal with, see, or hear about. Why is that?
What makes somebody else's sexual matters so threatening, and thus turns them into hot buttons that cause such interpersonal and political terror and chaos? Can it all be parental influence during babyhood, constant drumming about shame, need to conceal our privates and by extension our sexual privacies? Is there anything innate there?
To me, Faustus' quote that begins this thread is most important, not for the answer it tries to provide, but for the fascinating and provocative questions it raises about why we feel and react the way we do. And to my mind, most "answers", like the reader's above, just beg the question.
Can we dig deeper and do better? What do you think?
Love, Robyn Katie
In the comments to the above on the erosblog site, a reader quotes W. Somerset Maugham: “My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.”
The commenter goes on in part: "We have these silent rules about sex— unless it is so in the public sphere as to be able to be detached from the personal and exist as a general idea, then by talking about it, you’re breaching rules about how much of the personal you reveal to someone with whom you aren’t intimate."
But that still doesn't explain why those rules??? Why do we feel that shame, that fear?
That to me seems the dominant reason many of us feel we *must* at all costs avoid exposure (while courting it at the same time).
And, putting the shoe on the other foot, many of us, confronted by someone else's kink, especially in public, react with disgust. It's something we don't want to deal with, see, or hear about. Why is that?
What makes somebody else's sexual matters so threatening, and thus turns them into hot buttons that cause such interpersonal and political terror and chaos? Can it all be parental influence during babyhood, constant drumming about shame, need to conceal our privates and by extension our sexual privacies? Is there anything innate there?
To me, Faustus' quote that begins this thread is most important, not for the answer it tries to provide, but for the fascinating and provocative questions it raises about why we feel and react the way we do. And to my mind, most "answers", like the reader's above, just beg the question.
Can we dig deeper and do better? What do you think?
Love, Robyn Katie
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CJ
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Robyn Katie
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Hi CJ and all,
I didn't start out to make this a thread about disgust, but since I raised the question, Jonathan Haidt, in a discussion of morality and religion, at:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt07 ... index.html
says that perceptions of "....purity/sanctity, ... growing out of the uniquely human emotion of disgust, ... seems to give people feelings that some ways of living and acting are higher, more noble, and less carnal than others."
Haidt thinks this is taught/learned, not innate. (Interesting that other animals don't react with disgust, only us!) He says the sense of disgust, among other things, is instilled to: "help children recognize, quickly and automatically, examples of culturally emphasized virtues and vices."
He amplifies in a related webpage, "What Makes People Vote Republican?" at http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt08 ... index.html
QUOTE:
"But if morality is about how we treat each other, then why did so many ancient texts devote so much space to rules about menstruation, who can eat what, and who can have sex with whom? There is no rational or health-related way to explain these laws. (Why are grasshoppers kosher but most locusts are not?) The emotion of disgust seemed to me like a more promising explanatory principle. The book of Leviticus makes a lot more sense when you think of ancient lawgivers first sorting everything into two categories: "disgusts me" (gay male sex, menstruation, pigs, swarming insects) and "disgusts me less" (gay female sex, urination, cows, grasshoppers). ....
[Disgust] "makes us see carnality as degrading and renunciation as noble .... Such moralities make it easier for individuals to forget themselves and coalesce temporarily into hives, a process that is thrilling, as anyone who has ever "lost" him or herself in a choir, protest march, or religious ritual can attest. ....
" .... the psychology of this system is about overcoming our lower, grasping, carnal selves in order to live in a way that is higher, nobler, and more spiritual."
END QUOTE
This rationalist's approach seems lacking to me—again, begging the question by "explaining" disgust in terms of itself. I think the uncanny power of the emotion of disgust goes way beyond parental conditioning ... it has to have broader, most instinctual roots.
So I think the question is still unanswered. But Haidt's opinion is interesting all the same.
Love, Robyn Katie
I didn't start out to make this a thread about disgust, but since I raised the question, Jonathan Haidt, in a discussion of morality and religion, at:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt07 ... index.html
says that perceptions of "....purity/sanctity, ... growing out of the uniquely human emotion of disgust, ... seems to give people feelings that some ways of living and acting are higher, more noble, and less carnal than others."
Haidt thinks this is taught/learned, not innate. (Interesting that other animals don't react with disgust, only us!) He says the sense of disgust, among other things, is instilled to: "help children recognize, quickly and automatically, examples of culturally emphasized virtues and vices."
He amplifies in a related webpage, "What Makes People Vote Republican?" at http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt08 ... index.html
QUOTE:
"But if morality is about how we treat each other, then why did so many ancient texts devote so much space to rules about menstruation, who can eat what, and who can have sex with whom? There is no rational or health-related way to explain these laws. (Why are grasshoppers kosher but most locusts are not?) The emotion of disgust seemed to me like a more promising explanatory principle. The book of Leviticus makes a lot more sense when you think of ancient lawgivers first sorting everything into two categories: "disgusts me" (gay male sex, menstruation, pigs, swarming insects) and "disgusts me less" (gay female sex, urination, cows, grasshoppers). ....
[Disgust] "makes us see carnality as degrading and renunciation as noble .... Such moralities make it easier for individuals to forget themselves and coalesce temporarily into hives, a process that is thrilling, as anyone who has ever "lost" him or herself in a choir, protest march, or religious ritual can attest. ....
" .... the psychology of this system is about overcoming our lower, grasping, carnal selves in order to live in a way that is higher, nobler, and more spiritual."
END QUOTE
This rationalist's approach seems lacking to me—again, begging the question by "explaining" disgust in terms of itself. I think the uncanny power of the emotion of disgust goes way beyond parental conditioning ... it has to have broader, most instinctual roots.
So I think the question is still unanswered. But Haidt's opinion is interesting all the same.
Love, Robyn Katie
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Robyn Katie
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Bringing this back to where we started:
Why is weird equated to bad? And thus why do we, for example, just by appearing in a dress, elicit contempt, disgust, shunning, hostility? Seems like it carries a way more powerful charge than merely flouting a convention. So what is involved—transformed fear?
The disgust theme seems promising, along with its twin, shame and shaming.
Not only does a CDer in public tend to produce disgust, individual CDers going through purging or "cleaning up their act" feel self-disgust, mortification—a strong instinctual-seeming revulsion, shunning the behavior they have till then been indulging.
A few scientists, refusing to believe "we're like that because we're just like that," are studying disgust and finding it is an expansion of a taste reflex (to make it graphic, as if someone put feces in our food) into wider areas of response. The way much of society, for example, in the 1960s responded (almost with a vomit reflex) to long hair.
So the word "filth" gets widely applied to quite beautiful, or at worst neutral, acts, images, even mere descriptions.
And so the hair-trigger reaction against CDers springs up in a bystander, eclipsing thought, causing hurt. All because the act of a man appearing in a dress is somehow perceived as bad, wrong, shameful, even criminal. And the (as yet unexplained) rage begins.
Meanwhile the CDer (even if assailed by conflicting impulses of self-disgust from within) is doing something s/he perceives as beautiful, delightful, necessary.
Wow, talk about baggage. We need to know lots more about this.
Love, Robyn Katie
Why is weird equated to bad? And thus why do we, for example, just by appearing in a dress, elicit contempt, disgust, shunning, hostility? Seems like it carries a way more powerful charge than merely flouting a convention. So what is involved—transformed fear?
The disgust theme seems promising, along with its twin, shame and shaming.
Not only does a CDer in public tend to produce disgust, individual CDers going through purging or "cleaning up their act" feel self-disgust, mortification—a strong instinctual-seeming revulsion, shunning the behavior they have till then been indulging.
A few scientists, refusing to believe "we're like that because we're just like that," are studying disgust and finding it is an expansion of a taste reflex (to make it graphic, as if someone put feces in our food) into wider areas of response. The way much of society, for example, in the 1960s responded (almost with a vomit reflex) to long hair.
So the word "filth" gets widely applied to quite beautiful, or at worst neutral, acts, images, even mere descriptions.
And so the hair-trigger reaction against CDers springs up in a bystander, eclipsing thought, causing hurt. All because the act of a man appearing in a dress is somehow perceived as bad, wrong, shameful, even criminal. And the (as yet unexplained) rage begins.
Meanwhile the CDer (even if assailed by conflicting impulses of self-disgust from within) is doing something s/he perceives as beautiful, delightful, necessary.
Wow, talk about baggage. We need to know lots more about this.
Love, Robyn Katie
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Carolynn
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Nons are threatened by anything smacking of sex in ways that are different from what they do or believe is "normal". The threat can come from having had thoughts or fantasies they would not act on, but used in masturbation or in mental foreplay, and when they see it concrete in someone else, they just have to react negatively as they fear the concrete presence could mean they too could become their guilty fantasy, or if they show interest, someone might think they are like that too.
I have known people from my time in the military that loved to watch porno, who fantasized encounters with prostitutes, but when faced with the very real possibility of doing so, just absolutely were too terrified and filled with guilt and shame to do anything while sober. So, they would try to get drunk sufficiently that they could blame it on being drunk and that seemed to sort of absolve them of the responsibility of making that decision, whether the guilt was from being with a prostitute for kinky sex, fantasizing gay sex or watching the action of a sphincter around a marital aid while laying under a glass table with the other person squatting on top.
The only women I have talked with about it said they despised men in dresses for their often silly charade, and felt that in dressing they were trying to take from women aspects of their own unique selves and make them part of the man's world. Both these people are lesbian in orientation and feminists, and despised most men in general.
FWIW
I have known people from my time in the military that loved to watch porno, who fantasized encounters with prostitutes, but when faced with the very real possibility of doing so, just absolutely were too terrified and filled with guilt and shame to do anything while sober. So, they would try to get drunk sufficiently that they could blame it on being drunk and that seemed to sort of absolve them of the responsibility of making that decision, whether the guilt was from being with a prostitute for kinky sex, fantasizing gay sex or watching the action of a sphincter around a marital aid while laying under a glass table with the other person squatting on top.
The only women I have talked with about it said they despised men in dresses for their often silly charade, and felt that in dressing they were trying to take from women aspects of their own unique selves and make them part of the man's world. Both these people are lesbian in orientation and feminists, and despised most men in general.
FWIW
"It’s not given to anyone to have no regrets; only to decide, through the choices we make, which regrets we’ll have,"
David Weber – In Fury Born
David Weber – In Fury Born
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CJ
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Hi all,
Faustus, in the same blog entry referenced by Katie in her original post in this thread, has this to say by way of a conclusion:
So if you advertise that you are sexually weird, you might be inviting people to draw the inference that other things being equal, you will be a worse employee or spouse or whatever than someone whose interests are more conventional (think golf, or lawn care, or something). You will face temptations to slack off that other people won’t have. Other people won’t like that.
Is it any wonder, then, that people who are weird go to some lengths to conceal the fact?
Huh? Face temptations to slack off that other people won't have? But of course. However, how does any of this relate to sexual imagination or weirdness? I just don't see the connection and I'm wondering what logical steps Faustus has taken to reach this conclusion (other than by means of a specious and facile comparison of human sexual pleasure with a supply-side economics calculation?). Moreover, there's no reason to suppose that having more conventional interests will put the sexually unimaginative folks out there in a position where they won't have to face just as many, if not more, temptations to slack off (however different these temptations would be from our own). No, I don't buy it. Although Faustus asks an interesting question, his own answer fails to satisfy.
In fact, basing our argument on the very same premises, we can come to an opposite conclusion; namely, that those who do indulge in their sexual pleasures and fantasies (no matter how weird these may appear to other people) enable themselves to lead happier, more contented lives, both emotionally and physically, and that such people would in fact require less, not more, of a release from the drudgery of everyday life. A happy worker is a productive worker and all that jazz. A happy spouse is a loving spouse and all THAT jazz. But even this is conditional, to be sure. The "if" is this: if, and only if, we're "out" to friends, family, or partners--only if our sexuality is not repressed socially--will we be free to experience the kind of happiness and contentment I'm talking about. Thus, do tell.
In the end, this whole matter may have little more to do than with the pressures of social conformity and with the unacknowledged jealousy of the straight-laced crowd towards unconventional groups or persons that dare to be free by emancipating themselves from ultimately arbitrary (and sometimes toxic) social customs and norms. It goes something like this: Mr. Straight to Mr. Kinky: "Sorry but your blatant embrace and celebration of your sexual self is offensive to me because, where I come from, people are not meant to embrace and celebrate their sexuality, so please go revel in your own being somewhere, anywhere, away from my sight; I don't 'sing a song of myself' for all others to hear and, therefore, neither should anyone else."
I don't have much room for people like Mr. Straight in my life. I choose not to make room for them. On the other hand, to those who wish to "sing a song of themselves," I will say: "Yes. Please. Sing. I'm all ears."
My sexuality, hell! my whole being! is a song. An aria. A hymn. An ode. I refuse to shut up simply because a given crowd or individual is tone-deaf or, worse, envious of my talent.
This is my oh-two, anyway.
Love,
CJ
Faustus, in the same blog entry referenced by Katie in her original post in this thread, has this to say by way of a conclusion:
So if you advertise that you are sexually weird, you might be inviting people to draw the inference that other things being equal, you will be a worse employee or spouse or whatever than someone whose interests are more conventional (think golf, or lawn care, or something). You will face temptations to slack off that other people won’t have. Other people won’t like that.
Is it any wonder, then, that people who are weird go to some lengths to conceal the fact?
Huh? Face temptations to slack off that other people won't have? But of course. However, how does any of this relate to sexual imagination or weirdness? I just don't see the connection and I'm wondering what logical steps Faustus has taken to reach this conclusion (other than by means of a specious and facile comparison of human sexual pleasure with a supply-side economics calculation?). Moreover, there's no reason to suppose that having more conventional interests will put the sexually unimaginative folks out there in a position where they won't have to face just as many, if not more, temptations to slack off (however different these temptations would be from our own). No, I don't buy it. Although Faustus asks an interesting question, his own answer fails to satisfy.
In fact, basing our argument on the very same premises, we can come to an opposite conclusion; namely, that those who do indulge in their sexual pleasures and fantasies (no matter how weird these may appear to other people) enable themselves to lead happier, more contented lives, both emotionally and physically, and that such people would in fact require less, not more, of a release from the drudgery of everyday life. A happy worker is a productive worker and all that jazz. A happy spouse is a loving spouse and all THAT jazz. But even this is conditional, to be sure. The "if" is this: if, and only if, we're "out" to friends, family, or partners--only if our sexuality is not repressed socially--will we be free to experience the kind of happiness and contentment I'm talking about. Thus, do tell.
In the end, this whole matter may have little more to do than with the pressures of social conformity and with the unacknowledged jealousy of the straight-laced crowd towards unconventional groups or persons that dare to be free by emancipating themselves from ultimately arbitrary (and sometimes toxic) social customs and norms. It goes something like this: Mr. Straight to Mr. Kinky: "Sorry but your blatant embrace and celebration of your sexual self is offensive to me because, where I come from, people are not meant to embrace and celebrate their sexuality, so please go revel in your own being somewhere, anywhere, away from my sight; I don't 'sing a song of myself' for all others to hear and, therefore, neither should anyone else."
I don't have much room for people like Mr. Straight in my life. I choose not to make room for them. On the other hand, to those who wish to "sing a song of themselves," I will say: "Yes. Please. Sing. I'm all ears."
My sexuality, hell! my whole being! is a song. An aria. A hymn. An ode. I refuse to shut up simply because a given crowd or individual is tone-deaf or, worse, envious of my talent.
This is my oh-two, anyway.
Love,
CJ
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Robyn Katie
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Interesting points, CJ and Carolynn. And yes, people have no right to play God in anyone else's sex life.
But when they do, what is driving them? That's what I was asking. I believe conscious reasoning is only a fraction of their gut-level detestation.
Therefore I was looking for some deeper (read subconscious) reason. Odd how difficult it is to get anyone to look at the roots of this!
I feel strongly that some unspecified instinct is driving the reaction, and a powerful one at that. Because the human reaction goes beyond distaste and disapproval, into rage, punitiveness, and the desire to harm people who are transgressing gender in public ... as if to annihilate the transgressor, and the threat. That threat carries with it a surge of energy more appropriate to defense of life itself.
So my question is, on that basic, deepest, least acknowledged, and probably unconscious level, what is the threat really? What instinct does it endanger, to trigger such a disproportionate reaction?
Love, Robyn Katie
But when they do, what is driving them? That's what I was asking. I believe conscious reasoning is only a fraction of their gut-level detestation.
Therefore I was looking for some deeper (read subconscious) reason. Odd how difficult it is to get anyone to look at the roots of this!
I feel strongly that some unspecified instinct is driving the reaction, and a powerful one at that. Because the human reaction goes beyond distaste and disapproval, into rage, punitiveness, and the desire to harm people who are transgressing gender in public ... as if to annihilate the transgressor, and the threat. That threat carries with it a surge of energy more appropriate to defense of life itself.
So my question is, on that basic, deepest, least acknowledged, and probably unconscious level, what is the threat really? What instinct does it endanger, to trigger such a disproportionate reaction?
Love, Robyn Katie