The Friday Sex Blog [Sexual Revolution]

Hola mi gente,
The Holidays are almost upon us and, instead of spending some time around Fifth Avenue, taking in the sights and taking photos, I’m stuck on the obscenity of it all.

Then, there’s the “madness” -- people rushing around, on the edge, ready for aggression -- or what we now call “Christmas shopping.” My only wish is that can work on the holidays, so that I don’t have to engage in the pantomime of forced cheerfulness. Yeah, Bah-fuckin-Humbug, motherfuckers.

Let’s talk about sex… 

What Sexual Revolution?

We emerged rowdy with contempt for all those timid animals 

who still make noiseless love the darkened chambers of their shame. 

According to Judeo-Christian ideology, the world of sexual love (Eros), the body, and human sexuality is essentially framed as the domain of the devil. From this perspective, the realm of the physical is unholy, an animalistic distraction from spirituality -- the high, cerebral, sacred pursuit of God, and the good, ethical life. From infancy we are conditioned to fear and loathe the influence of Eros. We are told that the more we open and respond to the erotic impulse, the more we get in touch with our bodies, the more we enjoy and pursue our sexual natures, the farther we stray from “godliness” and emotional well-being.

When I write about human sexuality, I am submitting the exact opposite. I argue that the erotic impulse, honored and freed from the stigma of guilt and the forces of repression, can be and is a powerful path toward a psycho-spiritual transcendence and actualization. It demands of us to stop trivializing the erotic/ sexual world as we so often do, as if sex involved nothing more than sensory stimulation, ego gratification, and the pursuit of an orgasm.

The so-called sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s supposedly freed us to explore the heady carnal pleasures of the erotic world, when it was relatively safe and there was reliable birth control. Combined with freedom movements, we were at once liberated from some of our heritage of sexual suppression and fear. But I submit that it is the failure of recognize the depth and complexity of the erotic impulse that doomed this mythical revolution and is the foundation of much of the current sexual dissatisfaction.

During the euphoric time of “free love,” when sex and sensuality broke and overflowed the dams of previous restrictions and became available to those who chose to immerse themselves in those waters, we seemed to collectively want nothing more than to consume as much erotic experience as we could. We were, after all, very much like starved ghosts emerging from literally thousands of years in the desert into a world of lush, green jungles bursting with ripe erotic fruit. While my point is that the moment was not as revolutionary as we like to think it was, it was a tantalizing moment in the cultural history of American sexuality, and important first step in freeing ourselves from the yoke of Puritanism.

But even as we feasted on the wider range of erotic delights we discovered at every turn, even as we gloried in our power to go beyond political, cultural, and sexual conventions long considered untouchable, we began to push up against the limits of the path we were on. In some ways, we were mindlessly recreating the very same power structures (i.e., patriarchy) we sought to dismantle. “Free love,” for example, often led to sexual coercion, as women were subtly pressured to engage sexually while still having to follow rules dictated by men. Or as Yasmin Nair puts it: “… the sad truth that many of us learn after years in sexual playing fields (literally and figuratively) is that how many people you fuck has nothing to do with the extent to which you fuck up capitalism.”

I am even going to throw Hegel in the mix: the new synthesis (sexual freedom) started to generate its own antithesis (repression). The crest of the wave, it seems, was moving faster than the foundation and there were rocks up ahead. The mythos of the three days of peace and love of Woodstock gave way to the mindless violence of Altamont; the use of mind expanding drugs morphed to addictive behavior; the delight of freely pursuing sexual pleasure turned into feelings of sexual emptiness and dissatisfaction, even before AIDS and other STDs came along.

We had achieved the release of the pressure of decades of sexual inhibition, but there was more to the picture than simply having more sex, having sex with more partners, having sex with less guilt and more information, having sex with less pregnancy and disease, or having sex in previously prohibited ways: with your mouth, with your ass, with a vibrator, or with people of your own gender. Jumping into the sexual rabbit-hole as naïve as Alice, we found ourselves facing sexual territories we could not have expected and did not know how to interpret.

As much as we would like to believe that we can jump in and out of erotic and sexual encounters as easily as we can jump in and out of a shower, a movie, or a subway ride, the experience of being fully sexual in rich, powerful ways almost always engages an entire range of complex issues, psychologically and emotionally. This can be problematic, because many people now want to be sexual more often and with more partners than they want to engage intimately, let alone relationally.

But we cannot simply go back -- we cannot put the lid back on the sexual Pandora’s Box -- and I don’t think it would be helpful. These deeper energies are essential aspects of the erotic experience, no matter how carefully we try to repress sex or reduce it to a simplistic pursuit of physical pleasure. Whenever we play with erotic energy, we engage the totality of our experience and tap into primal forces that have their roots in the very heart of who we are as human beings, in how we define ourselves and relate to our world.

Entering fully into the erotic world raises issues and feelings, for example around our (often unsatisfied) infantile desires to be nurtured and held, our prenatal memories of being as one with another human being, around ego-disintegration and the softening of ego defenses, and around surrendering control of our behavior. the erotic impulse inevitably raises all issues related to intimacy -- the desire to be close to someone else, the fear of being smothered, and all the past yearnings, fulfillments, wounds, and disappointments we have experienced in this regard.

Going deeper still, erotic experiences brings us face-to-face with the essential questions of existence and the meaning of life (and death) itself, even to a quality of experience that many describe as direct contact with the divine.

This is what awaits us as we decide (or not) to engage the next wave of sexual actualization. There are repressive forces, waging a cultural war, that want to put the lid back on the erotic impulse, looking to a repressive past (i.e., “make America great again”) as a viable model for sexual behavior/ guidelines. I have news for you: they didn’t work in the past and they will fail us now. In my book, that’s called entropy. But then again that’s what conservatism is really all about. No, we either engage the erotic impulse honorably, fearlessly, creatively, and joyfully, or we die.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

The Friday Sex Blog [The Erotic Impulse]

Hola Everybody,
I’m still looking for work, got turned down by two organizations this week. The struggle continues.

A readers asks why I write about sex. This post is an answer to that question. 

The Erotic Impulse

The Birth of Venus, Sandro Bottecilli, tempera on canvas (ca. 1486)

My writing arises out of an erotic impulse that is an act of love.

 

For the most part, we live in a world of things and actions, of appointments and careers, of earning a living and cleaning the house, of embarking on tightly scheduled vacations, and going to the movies. It’s the world in which we turn to when we need to feel the ground under our feet. It’s the world we think of when we think we feel the need to reaffirm that there is something basic and immutable, something solid and unchanging that can provide a primal sense of stability in a decidedly amorphous and ever-changing world.

This gross base of existence is what we call the real world.

We all need stability in one form or another: it’s a matter of emotional survival. We need a fundamental pattern with which to define an ordered, reasonably predictable world over a reality that is essentially defined by chaos. Without an organizing principle everything becomes random, meaningless, uncertain. In order to avoid this senselessness, this sense of existential angst, we have been conditioned to turn to the world of reason, the world of conscious direction and illusory control. We call this, unequivocally, the real world, as if any other way of finding direction, setting our course, defining ourselves, and the world around us, were mere illusion.

What I have attempted with my Friday “Sex Blog” is to show that there is another, more subtle existence that lies beneath the rational world we acknowledge as real. It is a world of tremendous significance and power, no matter how much we try to discredit it as insignificant, delusional, sinful, or ephemeral. We often think this “world within the world” into nonexistence. In fact, we can (and often do) rationalize it to the point it dissolves before the analytical habit of our minds. But even as we use the tyranny of thought to think it away, we continue to feel both its power and essential authenticity. We may not be able to see it, but we cannot stop sensing it. We may not be able to easily label or categorize this world, but we remain aware that something is moving around down there, just underneath the surface, pre-verbal, pre-consciousness, something in the shadows just beyond the firelight, beyond the glare of the city lights. Perhaps some of us are attracted by what we sense out there/ down there, in there, seductive and elusive. Perhaps some of us are frightened by it. Perhaps both.

This world that we know exists, beyond the boundaries of science, the discursive mind, and reason, is what I address -- or try to address -- as the world of Eros. It is indeed a world of immense power and potential. This level of reality holds transformative potential in our lives, it contains energy, and personal growth when it is engaged with clarity and awareness. Conversely, it also holds a potential for great danger, confusion, and harm when engaged carelessly and mindlessly.

As some of us already know, the erotic world is one we have been taught to disrespect and fear so thoroughly that many have lost all but the most elementary ability to honor, trust, or vividly experience its many manifestations. Exploring the colors, shapes, and contours of erotic reality -- who we are and who we want to become as erotic beings -- something that should be a natural, organic process of personal growth, is transformed by our sexually fearful (erotophobic) culture into a spiritually and emotionally confusing project.

By necessity we have to become spiritual archeologists. We must dig through the imposed layers of sexual conditioning, digging through layers of fear, containment, control, and misunderstanding just to experience fully what was originally available to us naturally as breathing. We must become explorers simply to reclaim our rightful erotic impulse that is one of the most basic, life-affirming aspects of what it is to be human.

Hopefully, the essays, stories, personal statements, and poems of the Sex Blog will serve as an initial finger pointing at the moon. Perhaps some will gain a measure of insight, or some new perspective to help unravel the erotic Gordian Knot we find all around us. Grappling with the wonders and mysteries of Eros is one of the basic adventures of being alive. Eroticism is not something we will completely and totally understand or resolve in our lives. Rather it is the process by which we become more fully evolved as human beings.

Today we stand on the precipice of a realizing a new consciousness of Western erotic culture. A point in time when this whole aspect of life is being addressed and debated publicly as never before, probed and explored passionately with tremendous potential. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to submit that the issues around sex and eros are as fundamental as any other -- psychologically, culturally, socially, and even politically. We are at the edge of an evolutionary quantum leap and with every leap there is danger along with an emergence into a new consciousness. Much of the success of this leap will depend on whether we collectively choose to embrace Eros and all the possibility it represents, or regress once again into fearfully attempting to banish it to the shadows of our consciousness where it becomes warped beyond recognition and gains power over our actions.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

The Friday Sex Blog [Harry and Sally on my Couch]

Hola mi Gente,

I want to state clearly today that I deplore romance movies and novels because they cheapen the real thing. True romance is infinitely better than anything you will read in a book, or see on a movie screen. Ladies? If you and I get married and you go senile? I will not sacrifice my life reading a freaking notebook to you. I won’t forget you, nor will I abandon you -- I’ll make sure to visit you regularly, but I will more than likely find someone else and get on with my life. I would hope that if the opposite were true, that you would do the same. I never forgave James Garner for starring in the movie, The Notebook. That’s not love, James, it’s co-dependency! LOL

Now, just because I deplore romance novels or movies doesn’t mean I am not a romantic -- in fact, I am.

* * *

Men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.

 -- Harry & Aristotle

Well, actually, the above is not a direct quote from Harry (the character from another intolerable movie, When Harry met Sally) and Aristotle, but as I hope to show, Aristotle and Harry seem to sleep in the same philosophical bed (pun intended). I often try to explore the reasons behind our cultural aversion to the body (at least in the Western sense). This aversion is grounded in a historical context. Things are the way they are not because that’s “how it’s always been,” but because we live within a cultural context. Philosophy matters, my dear friends, more than we know… 

The movie When Harry met Sally, begs the question, “Can men and women can be friends,” and then answers it so: “Men and women can’t be friends -- because the sex part always gets in the way.” But is this true? Are there reasons friendship between men and women, or people who are romantically attracted to one another, isn’t possible? Or more importantly: are there reasons why friendship between hetero men and women are more difficult to maintain than same-sex friendships? (I realize I’m regrettably leaving out the whole LGBTQI demographic, but I think the same holds true for romantic relationships, generally speaking.)

As I hope to show, most of the assumptions we lug around regarding these, and other, can be traced way back to ancient Greek thought and their latter day Christian interpreters. In other words, things are the way they are, not because they are universal truths, but because of a cultural bias.

Aristotle strongly suggested that a romantic relationship can never become the highest form of friendship. He makes a distinction between a bond like friendship (philia), grounded in what he perceived as character traits and involving choice, from a bond based on an emotion (eros). And while there can be friendship between lovers, he continues, it will not be the highest form of friendship. It will be a friendship based not on character but in pleasure -- and hence will likely fade. Still, Mr. Aristotle concedes, acknowledging how one form of love may grow from another, “Many do remain friends if, through familiarity, they have come to love each other’s character… ”

At this point, I will concede, somewhat reluctantly, that Eros and philia are indeed different forms of love, even if sometimes they come together as a package deal. In making a different point, the Christian writer, C.S. Lewis suggested the following experiment:

Suppose you… have fallen in love with and married your friend… now suppose that you were offered the choice of two futures: “Either you will cease to be lovers but remain forever joint seekers of the same God, the same beauty, the same truth, or else, losing all that, you will retain as long as you live the raptures and ardours, all the wonder and the wild desire of Eros. Choose which you please.

Hmmmmm… 

Mr. Lewis seems to be saying we have to recognize the reality and difficulty of a choice between the different loves. He captures this difference adequately in the following sentence: “Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest.” Friends, therefore, are more likely to be happy to welcome a new friend who shares their common interest, but Eros is a jealous love which must exclude third parties.

Lewis believed that friendship and erotic love may go together, but in many respects he agrees with Harry and Aristotle that the combination is, at the very least, an unstable one. Mr. Lewis’ contention is that a friendship between people can exist, but that it can do so only if the parties involved are not physically attracted to one another, or one of them loves another. Otherwise, the friendship will slip into the erotic realm eventually. This is not too far from Harry’s view, who after stating at the very beginning that sex (Eros) will always get in the way, adds the qualifier, “Unless both are involved with other people” later in the movie. But then, in one of many convoluted pieces of dialogue that damns this movie (Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan were two of my least appreciated actors), he adds, (and I paraphrase loosely here) But that doesn’t work because the person you’re involved with doesn’t understand why you need to be friends with the other person. She figures you must be secretly interested in the other person -- which you probably are.

Lewis is a little less pessimistic than Harry, Lewis suggests that lovers who are friends may learn to share their friendship with others, though not, of course, their erotic natures. Still this does not address the main point in all this: the supposed instability of friendships with people who are romantically/ erotically attracted to one another.

Perhaps it is best to grant the point that friendship between people who are attracted to one another will be more difficult within the context of a culture that’s terribly paranoid and repressive about eros (sexual energy). There will certainly be difficulties that don’t exist in same-sex/ nonromantic connections. However, that faint undercurrent of eros can also be enriching. If we’re fearless (or at least trailblazers) we may find that a friendship between a man and a woman may offer a balance and sanity, and, if we discard the fairy tales, fulfillment through a sexual energy (Eros) that doesn’t have to be destructive.

Towards the end of Harry and Sally, Harry finally realizes that he loves Sally and wants to marry her. He lists all the cute reasons why: that shit that Meg Ryan does with her nose, the way she looks at him, blah blah blah… all reasons that a friend might not state, granted. Of all the reasons, however, I find that Harry’s observation that Sally is “the last person I want to talk to before I go to bed at night,” most compelling.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…