sex

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Liberals hold stupid and contradictory views on sex

When it comes to insanity, Joe Gould, the infamously unstable writer who may or may not have written the largest oral account of history, didn’t believe in it. “The fallacy of dividing people into sane and insane lies in the assumption that we really do touch other lives,” he wrote. Seeing as how Gould lived a tragic, if not prolific, life that ended with many stints in mental hospitals and a lobotomy, perhaps he isn’t great source material on mental health.

Or maybe he is, when looking through the lens of today’s liberalism.

The recent leak of user data from the affair-abetting site AshleyMadison.com has got to be beguiling for progressives. As liberals fight to transcendent bourgeoisie sexual norms, they are, at the same time, trying to retain the faithfulness necessary to foster a loving relationship. So on one hand, sexual liberation is the number one goal of the progressive vision. Yet, on the other fidelity is a necessary limit on sexual activity. So which is more important for leftists? Dependability or unrestrained whoopie?

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The Land of Cockaigne

The slave morality of sexual liberation

In the early 20th century there were enough young Marxists eagerly awaiting a sexually liberated, post-revolutionary society for Lenin to comment on it:

Youth’s altered attitude to questions of sex is of course ‘fundamental’, and based on theory. Many people call it ‘revolutionary’ and ‘communist’. They sincerely believe that this is so. I am an old man, and I do not like it. I may be a morose ascetic, but quite often this so-called ‘new sex life’ of young people and frequently of the adults too seems to me purely bourgeois and simply an extension of the good old bourgeois brothel. All this has nothing in common with free love as we Communists understand it. No doubt you have heard about the famous theory that in communist society satisfying sexual desire and the craving for love is as simple and trivial as ‘drinking a glass of water’. A section of our youth has gone mad, absolutely mad, over this ‘glass-of-water theory’. It has been fatal to many a young boy and girl. Its devotees assert that it is a Marxist theory. I want no part of the kind of Marxism which infers all phenomena and all changes in the ideological superstructure of society directly and blandly from its economic basis, for things are not as simple as all that. A certain Frederick Engels has established this a long time ago with regard to historical materialism.

Clearly Lenin wasn’t on board with it, but you get the idea that the desire for this type of sexual liberation was a peculiarly communist interest. I don’t think that the Tsar and his cronies had to worry about the supply of readily available sex. As every teen comedy has shown us, the inability to get laid is the mark of a loser. Communism is the revolt of the losers.

I definitely don’t subscribe to Nietzsche’s philosophy, but his concept of master-slave morality seems salient enough to (loosely) borrow. Slave morality is defined by the and values and wishes of an overworked peasant. A great illustration is the land of Cockaigne, depicted in the featured image of this article. From Wikipedia:

Cockaigne or Cockayne is a land of plenty in medieval myth, an imaginary place of extreme luxury and ease where physical comforts and pleasures are always immediately at hand and where the harshness of medieval peasant life does not exist. Specifically, in poems like The Land of Cockaigne, Cockaigne is a land of contraries, where all the restrictions of society are defied (abbots beaten by their monks), sexual liberty is open (nuns flipped over to show their bottoms), and food is plentiful (skies that rain cheeses). Writing about Cockaigne was a commonplace of Goliard verse. It represented both wish fulfillment and resentment at the strictures of asceticism and dearth.

…roasted pigs wander about with knives in their backs to make carving easy, where grilled geese fly directly into one’s mouth, where cooked fish jump out of the water and land at one’s feet. The weather is always mild, the wine flows freely, sex is readily available, and all people enjoy eternal youth.

All of this is what “good” is particularly from the perspective of someone with low-level physiological concerns.

For the man who doesn’t get laid, the most important thing about sex is how attainable it is. All other considerations are secondary. Increased supply of easy-access sex is the promise of sexual liberation. Some spillover is bound to happen, and the involuntary celibate wants to get splashed. He doesn’t care about the virtues of human sexuality higher up the pyramid as long as he is thirsty.

I’ve started calling this Mariani’s Law: In general, how keen someone is on sexual liberation and sex-positivity is inversely proportional to how attractive that person is.

But are there virtues to sex beyond just having a lot of it? Faithful couples seem to think so, and for what it’s worth, so does the Catholic Church. Even from a utilitarian standpoint I think we need to look at this with some scrutiny. I bet that the average sexual encounter in Iran is hotter than than the average sexual counter in the United States, even though there’s more sexual encounters per capita in the US. The point is that there’s tradeoffs in changes of a society’s sexual mores. The side that favors quantity above all else are the “slaves.” The other side is concerned with values that transcend that calculation.

I’ve reaped the dividends of the sexual revolution, and in all probability it’s been a net gain. Sex is awesome per se, and that’s precisely why we don’t need a value system telling us that we should be promiscuous. That kind of value system doesn’t serve monogamous couples, it serves the sexually frustrated.

Awkward internet Marxists who get miffed about “slut shaming” definitely are at slave-level:

Conceptual Anarchy in Hinduism

“9.334. But to serve Brahmanas (who are) learned in the Vedas, householders, and famous (for virtue) is the highest duty of a Sudra, which leads to beatitude.” –Manu Smriti

“All your talk is of caste and creed

Is it even as natural as the spider and its web?

The four blessed Vedas, were they created by Brahma?

Is caste and creed worthwhile, ye elders of Paichalur?” -Uttiranallur Nagai

Mandana-Misra-and-AdiShankaras-debate

Hinduism is in a constant state of transformation through internal discourse and dissent. Image source.

(This post mostly consists of quotes from Manu Smriti and Medieval Hindu Bhakti poems, so if you want to skip my spiel just hit the “read more” link at the bottom.)

People in the west tend to have an odd outlook on the ethics or “doctrines” of Hinduism. In most religions, doctrine works something like this: There is a core text, or set of texts, which contain precepts. Early in the religion’s history some sages write commentaries on these. The rest of the reasoning and doctrine formation of the religion continues by referring to these sources for legitimacy. Innovations occur, but normally only if it can somehow be “textually justified.”

Certainly there is a part of the Hindu religion, which operates very similarly to this—the religion of the Brahmins. But Hinduism cannot be thought of as just that. It is the religion of all Indians, except perhaps those who explicitly decry the label, like the Buddhists, Jainsm and Sikhs (and even those divisions are sometimes blurry. Even some sects of Islam are pretty heavily syncretized.)

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eyeswide

The end of the rainbow: Eyes Wide Shut analysis

Eyes Wide Shut is probably my favorite film, but it didn’t acquire this distinction until quite a long time after I had first watched it. A second viewing was followed by the nuances of the film creeping up in my mind and demanding a share of my daydreaming. When I watched it a third time, and the rest was history.

I am in some pretty good company – Stanley Kubrick considered it to be his greatest contribution to the art of cinema. Before the film was released, Kubrick died, leaving this enigmatic film for viewers to ponder without its creator to chime in. But the film was not a sudden act of inspiration that came to the auteur, but a culmination of decades of meditation and influence that provided Kubrick with a capstone that ultimately summed up his vision as a filmmaker. Kubrick had been envisioning a film about sexual relations since early in his career, and upon reading the early 20th century novella Dream Story, he decided to buy the rights to it in 1971. For almost 30 years Kubrick held the rights, and the ideas that were to become his final masterpiece took shape throughout that time.

Kubrick’s exploration of the dream world of the film that the audience is part of is ultimately manifested in Eyes Wide Shut. The diegesis of Kubrick is a dream in which the audience is invited to take part in. Kubrick stated early in his career,

The representation of reality has no bite. It does not transcend. Nowadays I am more interested in taking up a fantastic and improbable story…. I always enjoyed representing a slightly surreal situation in a realistic way. I have always had a penchant for fairy-tales, myths and magical stories. They seem to me to come closer to our present-day experience of reality than realistic stories, which are basically just as stylized.

To this end, Kubrick’s films walk the line between the dream and the reality even within his films. Mixture of the diegetic and non-diegetic sounds are a tool used throughout his filmography, at least since 1957’s Paths of Glory, over four decades before his final film. We hear a non-diegetic percussion piece when the soldiers are sent into No Man’s Land from the trench. Later, when being executed, a percussion piece plays again, only this time, we learn that the drummers are in the reality of the film. In A Clockwork Orange, the main character Alex is both the main character and the narrator; he is both the gaze and the object of the gaze. By walking this line, Kubrick recognizes that dream-state of film that always exists in the medium whether creators intend or address it or not. Films are necessarily believable and internally consistent absurdities that echo the mental filtering of reality. In a film, characters are funnier than reality; the passing of time is more perfect than reality. This is because our gaze is restricted to the narrative that is relevant to the auteur’s vision. In real life, our idea and memories of our friends are funnier than reality. Our idea of Christmastime is more wonderful and cozy than can be. Our real life gaze conserves details by only cataloging those details that are relevant to our personal narrative.

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Some thoughts on marriage, gay marriage, and a simple proposition

I’ve often remarked, about male friends of mine with whom I share deep emotional bonds, that I would happily “gay-marry” them.  Some people take this statement for what it is: an act that, in a way that sex and reproduction only manage to celebrate, amounts to the magic of two individuals becoming one, that I and this or that friend are “like this,” just on that level.  In comparison, I’m extremely sparing with such words for any of my female friends, precisely because I respect them too much, to assume that much knowledge of our possible emotional compatibility (note for the nitpicky: this is not to imply that difference in physical sex or gender identity implies obstacles to emotional connection, but rather that the passion and mystery of romance in any form comes from the diverse inner conflicts which sex can bring to a relationship).

That said, I’m not being flip about the beauty and sanctity of a thing like gay marriage, just because I have no substantial romantic feelings for these men. I’m describing an ideal state where cohabitation is effortless, harmonious and generative, where people’s needs are compatible because they’re essentially the same,  (again, not to imply that the experience of all homosexuals is somehow a narcissistic cop-out like my own affection for my familiars, highlighting rather that these friends of mine and I have no “growing into each other” left to do).  That said, I have no experience of the very real struggles of those involved in romantic relationships which could only flourish naturally under the institution of gay marriage, legally prohibited in a shocking majority of 32 states.

There may be some who share my understanding first stated above, of the beauty and mystery preserved in the hallowed institution of Traditional Marriage, who feel altogether threatened by this kind of talk. By way of a clarification of terms, I think we can bring these opponents of gay marriage into the fold and achieve some mutual understanding. There appears to be a serious misunderstanding among some valiant defenders of Traditional Marriage, about what exactly happens when any two people who are not, strictly speaking, one man and one woman, engage in the apotheosis of mutual boundary dissolution which is so reliably facilitated by sacred cohabitation. That is to say, the experience of ritual union is completely the same. The perceived depravity of a sex act which is not reproductive is not a legitimate fear on the part of this particular brand of conservatives. It holds up to be no more than a straw man when we recognize the motivation behind this fear could not possibly be disgust. Dominion over nature implies all variety of “unnatural” modifications, however slight, to the “natural order” of which human sexual reproduction makes a comparatively small part. Not only then, do reproductive choices on the part of humans fall effectively outside of the umbrella of the evaluation of “nature” and its “order” distinct from society (a distinction fondly maintained by this same line of thinking), but when we see the natural occurrence of homosexuality throughout the animal kingdom, the entire pretense to an essential, natural-moral disgust which runs any deeper than a fear which must be socially ingrained, falls apart completely.

The problem, as I see it, lies elsewhere, and has its origins in a fundamental misunderstanding. There is the spiritual union which occurs between two individuals, and the biological. The sex act is a physical image, of an essential merging which takes place outside of space and time. By the same token, the production of another human organism, a miracle of nature as it may be, is still a miracle of nature, the most elaborate allegory in the entire created universe for what is produced, on a spiritual plane, when two individuals come together. Moreover, neither physical image, when mechanically reproduced, is a guarantee of these special effects. When these effects do occur, they can result in (appear to the slow-witted, to stem from) prolonged physical contact and mutual stimulation; forms of ritual union, however, exist as a social sanctuary for individuals who are compelled, through a constant recapitulation of these genuine spiritual connections, to pursue their physical expressions to their logical conclusion.

The institution of Traditional Marriage, writ large, is defined by the loudest and therefore unsurpassed participants in the conversation today, as the union between one man and one woman. Radical proponents of this definition, however, have come under the impression that the mechanical reproduction of past instances which served as evidence of spiritual unity are not only necessary, but sufficient to bring about that unity. They see the institution of Traditional Marriage as the sole bastion and refuge of the secret to human happiness and inner freedom available to more than one person at once, in danger of contamination and being lost to history. There is a way in which they are mistaken, and a sense in which they are entirely correct. My reasoning follows:

  • Spiritual unification of at least two individuals is not only possible and desirable, but a moral imperative
  • Myriad forms of ritual practice have served to facilitate this throughout human history.
  • Fear threatens to tear people up on the inside; social institutions arise to ensure that it does so mostly on the outside; all to often, they tend to separate people from one another in the misguided fear of forcing an individual to face fear themselves (to recognize as only a threat, and nothing more without an individual’s participation in it).
  • The institution of Traditional Marriage has evolved around a complex historical network of socially ingrained fears in a valiant attempt to project them back into society, out of the fear that they may ultimately make unity  impossible (again conceiving individuals as non-agents on a double level, first assuming their inherent total susceptibility to fear, while also summarily attributing their spiritual unity to heterosexual reproductive union in faux-causal succession).
  • The institution of gay marriage, which some argue to be an offshoot of Christian monastic orders, (and unthinkably efficient when held to the standard of other esoteric orders, having survived and perhaps thrived, prior to our modern knowledge of its existence, perhaps in excess of a millennium in total secrecy, at least to the historical record) co-evolved with the institution of marriage as a fundamentally heterogeneous set of practices of spiritual unification in direct response to what certain individuals perceived to be unhealthy fixation on heterosexual reproduction becoming increasingly inhospitable to their existence as a category comprising one-tenth of the human population.

So we see, that the institution of marriage does not function in any exclusive way to facilitate the spiritual fulfillment of more than one person at a time. It exists precisely in distinction from other forms of union to allay the fears of individuals, who perceive those other forms of union as a threat.

Now this is all very complex stuff, so any radical camps in the debate, whether they want to destroy this last lifeline for the above-mentioned small populations of neurotics, or are just such neurotics, should be forgiven for any misunderstandings that have come about in our collective attempt to hash all this out. That said, I also think I may just be able to proffer up a few words that will clarify this whole matter once and for all.

The institution of Traditional Marriage exists first to preserve the happiness of a few very frightened individuals by strictly defining the terms by which, second, it helps certain individuals (certainly the ones with heavily preconceived notions about how such a thing is possible) become one. The institution of gay marriage exists as a completely separate institution to accommodate individuals excluded from the institution of Traditional Marriage. Much in the same fashion as Narcotics Anonymous was founded upon Alcoholics Anonymous’ core principles and 12 Steps due to the social unacceptability of heroin use compared to that of alcohol, gay marriage exists as completely distinct from marriage (depending on one’s acceptance of the exclusive truth claims of AA or marriage enthusiasts, this analogy holds varying amounts of water); though serving a similar purpose, and modeled upon Marriage, it serves a group of individuals whose identities do not revolve around the rejection of lifestyles unlike their own, and thus should be afforded equal dignity under the law and in public opinion.

As a point of clarification, this post originated as an attempt to explain to some raised eyebrows my repeated use of the verb “Gay-marry” (as opposed to just marry) to describe what I could totally do to Gabe. There’s no intolerance on my part in insisting that the distinction from Traditional Marriage be preserved; it is firmly my belief that, for the sake of clarity, any ritual union seeking, under ethically legitimate pretense, legal privilege, which does not befall one man and one woman, be heretofore referred to correctly as gay marriage. It is a separate institution of equal stature with equal dignity and equal promise to enrich the lives of a group of individuals who, as long as the institution of Traditional Marriage continues to retain political clout like a swollen joint, will be tragically perceived in however limited, conditional, or even empathetic public aspect, as separate from society.