Archive for the ‘ Sex ’ Category

My Father’s Sexualty

I am reading Fun Home, where Alison Bechdel writes of revealing her lesbianism to her mother. And it has been several years since one of my sisters has come out of the closet herself.

It will do no damage to my Father – who after all, has been dead for 43 years – to write of my own very conflicted feelings toward him.

I tried my very best to idealize him, and make him my role model for nearly everything – which was clearly what he wanted. But this turned out to be impossible – there was nothing about my father that I could emulate. Nothing – and I tried hard to do just that.

I became an Engineer because Dad never finished Engineering school himself – as his friend Ed McKiernan did. I thought if I did that, I would somehow overcome a deficiency of Dad’s. Instead, Dad thought I was trying to become better than him – something he could not tolerate in the least.

My father’s generation did have a hard time – things were changing so fast they could not keep up with them. As soon as they became successful at something (at being a family farmer, for example) the world no longer wanted them that way. And there are few things harder on a man.

Even so, my father was a failure, in the last analysis, because he could never be himself. And I did not want to end up that way also.

But I have said nothing so far about his sexuality – which, as a horny adolescent, baffled me completely. Dad, I could see clearly enough was not interested in women – sexually. I asked myself over and over – was my father gay?

It was only many years later that I realized he was asexual – not an uncommon condition. And that this was the kind of man that my mother wanted. Back in the Midwest, back in my parent’s time, this was a very common situation. And I wasn’t the only child that had trouble understanding this.

Everybody did – because our sexuality was so complicated – with incest and sexual abuse all over the place. One solution to this may have been to become asexual.

What a mess! We did not get to chose our parents – and our parents did not get to chose us. It’s a wonder the human race has survived as long as it has.

2013
05/08
CATEGORY
History
Sex
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I Knew Her Too Well

And for this reason she had to kill me.

I cannot explain the logic behind this, because it is feminine logic, and I am a man. But having been on the receiving end of it a few times, I can recognize it clearly enough.

Feminine sexuality, by its very nature, reveals itself to a man. But in a world where it is dangerous to trust anyone, love is seen as a danger – and it is strongly repulsed. Even self-love becomes impossible, and ends in self-annihilation.

I saw this first-hand in my marriage to Beth. We both had severe emotional problems, but hers was worse than mine. She started attacking me physically – and drove me off. Her mother went out of her way to tell me she knew the problem was Beth’s – not mine. But that did not stop her from killing herself.

Over and over again, I see men choose women who do not love them And reject women who do. And the same is true of women. And in both cases, they seem satisfied with their choice – even if other people sometimes wonder about it.

The equation is simple: hate = love. Or love = hate. And people are comfortable living in this limbo. And frequently reinforce it – to make sure everyone understands the rule.

2013
02/24
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Sex
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Rilke on Sex

I have written Letters to a Young Poet, which was well-received. People like to hear nice things about poetry – even it they seldom read it themselves.

From page 46 of the book:

True, sex is difficult. But such difficulties have been imposed on us, almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious. If you can simply recognize this and succeed in establishing an entirely individual relationship with sex (one not influenced by convention and propriety) through your own disposition and nature, then you no longer fear losing yourself and becoming unworthy of your most valuable possession.

I wish I had been able to do this for myself! But old age  (and social isolation) has solved this problem for me. Now all I have is a similar problem with food (which he talks about too, in a similar way).

No one comes to Latin America for the food. It has one of the world’s least distinguished cuisines. But obesity is common – and in that way, I fit right in.

2013
02/09
CATEGORY
Life in Central America
Poetry
Sex
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Why Sex is a Very Big Deal

You are probably wondering why I want to write about something so obvious. Because, dear friend, it is not at all obvious to me – and I suspect it is not to anyone else, if they would take the time to think about it.

For example, here is a talk on TED Why domestic violence victims don’t leave. Pay careful attention to what she is saying – and more importantly, how she is saying it. And draw your own conclusions.

I have heard this story many times – always prefaced with “But I loved her! (or him). Love made them helpless. And for this reason, they feel satisfied with what happened to them – which was serious and pervasive abuse.

“Yes,” you may agree. “But sex can also be very beneficial, the most powerful positive force there is!” No one will disagree with you. No one at all.

But abuse has a way of repeating itself, over and over. Without anyone being aware of it – and without anyone being able to stop it. A classic example is that of Soviet Russia – which caused the suffering of millions of its people. With the most noble of intentions.

Much closer to home, we have the violence expressed by the Organization – where casual sex is rampant. And where no one notices anything – to me, the worst abuse possible.

2013
01/29
CATEGORY
Sex
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Ancient Light

This is the title of a book by John Banville, that I am listening to now. I need a break sometimes from my non-fiction reading – and this is fiction – literature, in fact. It is extremely well written. Like many English writers, I think he is at pains to convince people that they too have sex – and pretty bawdy sex at that.

It is the story of a 15 year-old boy and a 35 year-old married woman – the mother of his best friend at school. Believe it or not, it brings back a similar incident of my own – when I was 15 years old, and the woman was was the wife of our pastor. Her sole objective in life seemed to be to cause as much trouble as possible. And she succeeded admirably – and ended her life later in a late-night single-car accident. The final disaster in a life full of disasters.

I should add that we were very religious. She made sure my mother knew about this incident – and our relatives too. The result was not as she probably expected. My mother was simply baffled. Not because I had lost my virginity – she probably thought this would have happened anyway – but because she could not understand why she (of all people) did it. It made no sense.

She assumed – entirely wrongly – that religious people didn’t do things like this – even though she knew plenty of instances when they did.

As a much older man, I would even say these incidents were more common among the religious than the non-religious. Once something is forbidden, it automatically becomes more desirable.

2012
12/17
CATEGORY
Literature
Religion
Sex
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Far From the Tree

This is a book by Andrew Solomon. When I downloaded it from Audible and started listening to it – I knew I had a winner.

A brilliant and utterly original thinker, Andrew Solomon’s journey began from his experience of being the gay child of straight parents. He wondered how other families accommodate children who have a variety of differences: families of people who are deaf, who are dwarfs, who have Down syndrome, who have autism, who have schizophrenia, who have multiple severe disabilities, who are prodigies, who commit crimes, who are transgender. Bookended with Solomon’s experiences as a son, and then later as a father, this book explores the old adage that says the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree; instead some apples fall a couple of orchards away, some on the other side of the world.

I downloaded the Kindle book from Amazon so I could also read it as I listened to it. Immediately, I noticed differences in the two.

The audible version begins by quoting from the poem Poems of our Climate by Wallace Stevens:

The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

This is not in the Kindle version.

I liked this (00:10:32 in the Audible; location 75 in the Kindle):

The exceptional is ubiquitous; to be entirely typical is the rare and lonely state.

In a culture where everyone conforms with a passion (the usual situation in America) few would agree. Most would agree that the author’s homosexuality is no advantage to him, his family of origin, or his own family – now that he has a child of his own. After a long struggle (which he relates here) he is now happy with his identity as a gay man.

I have learned something different from this experience. For a book like this, listening to it is not enough. Too much is going on for me to assimilate it at the narrator’s pace. With writing, I have time to slow down my reading, and ponder what I have just read.

Sexuality is a huge subject – and my sexuality (and my father’s sexuality) – has often been a mystery that I could only understand much later.

2012
12/12
CATEGORY
Psychology
Sex
1 comment

A Machine Cannot Think or Feel

I am all worked up over my latest insight – that people can be machines (including computers).

I have enormous respect for Lewis Mumford, whose writing on this subject has left me feeling like a nobody. But he never seemed to understand that people themselves could become machines. Not just function as machines, but actually become machines.

And be unable to function in any other way. Once people crossed over that bridge (which happened gradually, over centuries)  there was no turning back.

People are social animals, and most of what we are is learned (from each other). This made us evolve much faster. But when we were exposed to machines we started learning from them. And we learned how to be them. Without realizing it – since most of our learning is subconscious and automatic.

This point cannot be stressed enough – we are not our conscious minds, which are very limited. We are our unconscious reasoning and our emotions – which are very much the same thing. In other words: our body. All of our body, with an emphasis on the brain and the central nervous system, but also our muscles, guts, and our genitals.

A machine does not have a body – and cannot think or feel. You may object that it can think – after all, it can play chess. But this is only because people have gone to a great deal of trouble to give it this limited reasoning ability.

They have gone to even more trouble (the biggest effort in history) to make it seem human. But we have only succeeded in fooling ourselves. Instead of making it more like us – we have succeeded in making us more like it.

One last disclaimer. People cannot be entirely like machines – they cannot be entirely inhuman, even though they have succeeded in that all too well sometimes. Thinking of them as machines is a useful strategy. Try it for yourself.

2012
10/22
CATEGORY
Psychology
Sex
Technology
1 comment

Can Computers See?

This depends, of course, on what you mean by see. If you mean seeing like a human – or any animal, such as a house-fly – or even as a plant, that can grow towards the light – the answer is no – for the simple reason that the computer has no body, it is not alive. It is just a mechanism, a machine.

Let me repeat that: the computer is just a machine. But a machine we think is like us.

Now what does that mean, we think the computer is like us?

Perhaps it means we have lost our minds – and I say that in all seriousness. One does not have to look very hard to see people with scant thinking ability and limited emotional capacity. I can even point my finger at myself.

It has been known since ancient times that some technologies (such as writing) have deleterious effects on the mind – and on society as a whole (it made empires possible). It will be argued that they also have beneficial effects, which is sometimes true (as in the effects of money). But let me go back to the computer, and its effects.

One of its effects has been to make it more like us – and us more like it. This is something most unusual – and something we need to consider carefully. Do we really want this to happen – and if so, how far do we want it to go with this strange merging of the animate and inanimate? Which brings up a new heading:

Having sex with the computer

This is a strange idea, but not a new one. We have been serving as the reproductive organs for our machines for a very long time. Just go past the display window of a cellphone store sometime – they want a merger between one of them and you (and your bank account, of course). And not only that – but all your friends too. Promiscuous rascals aren’t they?

2012
06/23
CATEGORY
Psychology
Sex
Sociology
Technology
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My Last Day As a Stripper

Onlinedatingjournal

This gal would get a medal as big as a soup-plate, if there was any fairness left in in this world. All I can do is link to her site, and encourage others to read her story.

Her writing is not so good, she could have probably made money out of her story by working with a professional writer. As it is, this posting of hers got 103 likes, including mine.

I will not say enjoy, I will only say read - and keep in mind that nothing has changed. The same night clubs are in business, and sex is still being sold in sordid conditions.

Men are still as stupid as ever – and I point my finger straight at myself. I contracted a sexually-transmitted disease in Sri Lanka because I thought sex was sacred and I didn’t need to protect myself from a woman who must have had every disease available down there.

Was that stupid, or was that stupid?

2012
05/27
CATEGORY
Sex
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Something Too Horrible for Words

There is always something we dread more than anything else, something so horrible we don’t have the words to express it – but it is always in the back of our minds, and determines much of our behavior.

There are two ways of dealing with this problem, or any other problem: recognize it or deny it. Any culture that denies it is doomed – because it refuses to deal with its most important problems.

This is the state in which the human race exists (or ceases to exist) today: that of complete denial. Since we now have a global culture, this means the end of us.

We have been here before – many times, in fact – and every time we have failed the test, and another culture bit the dust.

I am now reading Sophocles I: Oedipus The King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone (The Complete Greek Tragedies), which is about this very problem. Freud, who know the classics well, made the Oedipus legend part of his theory. And was no doubt delighted to shock his Victorian contemporaries with it.

He got one thing right, however – whatever this awful thing is, it is associated with sex (reproduction) and the repudiation of basic social values (morality). The two always go hand in hand.

This might be a good time to bring up another subject – Christianity, which was a blend (with lots of lumps left over) of Greek and Jewish culture – and, as it turned out, Roman culture too. It was the original melting pot.

Medieval Christianity is where we came from, whether we like it or not  - and where we got our basic habits. But here again, we studiously overlook this. We seem to think we sprang out of nowhere, fully formed and perfect.

When we came in fact from a very complicated process – more like a mess – that ended with a complete collapse – with exotic technologies. Here again, the two seem to go together: a social implosion (a black hole) and a technological explosion (a big bang).

What, in my opinion, is the most horrible thing for us? It is the end of us – something so horrible we do not want to consider the possibility – although we readily admit species without number have become extinct. We cannot believe it will happen to us – at our own hands!

2012
05/26
CATEGORY
History
Morality
Psychology
Religion
Sex
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