The TGIF Sex Blog [Totem & Taboo]

¡Hola! Everybody...
I won’t be around much today, so don’t expect me to post outrageous comments to your blogs. LOL!

I think I’ll clean my apartment this weekend! Enjoy yours...

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-=[ Sex, Symbols & Taboos ]=-

In the classic short story, The Lottery, by Shirley Jackson, the inhabitants of a small town gather on a bright sunny day. It’s the day of the lottery

alluded in the title. The whole town congregates -- entire families, young and old -- everyone. As the events unfold, the reader is horrified to learn that the winner of the lottery will be stoned to death. The last words uttered by the victim, as her neighbors, family members and friends descend upon her are, “It isn’t fair, it isn’t right...”

The story can be interpreted in many ways. It can be said to be an allegory on what happens when people mindlessly follow outdated cultural practices. Or it can be about mass hysteria brought upon by lack of critical thinking. I tend to see the story as an illustration of how we sometimes find destructive ways to vent drives we find abhorrent or that we fear. Holding the lottery and stoning the winner to death is symbolic of what happens when we rely on repression as a response to normal human drives.

One such drive is the sex drive, an irresistible force, if not for every individual every time, then for the species as a whole. It has to be in order for the species to survive. Such a powerful instinct often has to be repressed by the rational mind, or transformed -- sublimated into some other activity, such as art or religion, or expressed through a confusing and often contradictory code of symbols and obsessions.

Sometimes these dislocated patterns of images and activities are intensely personal, as with a fetish (ass! LOL); and an individual’s failure to indulge his or her compulsion can cause anguish and suffering. Often, such expressions of sublimated sexuality are common to an entire culture, and become the focus of social ritual -- such as initiation rituals (or witch burnings). In this case, the failure to perform them correctly can be held to blame for a whole range of personal and natural disasters.

Throughout history, great minds have explored these issues -- the mysteries of the mind and social and cultural practices. Several stand out in the Western tradition. One such figure is Sigmund Freud. Now, Freud gets a lot of bashing these days, and he was vilified during his time to dare to postulate that children were sexual creatures. Even now, 150 years later, in the face of proof, people here in the US still can’t wrap their little minds around Freud’s theories. Furthermore, very few people have ever read him. And while no one is a pure Freudian in the classical sense (even Freud famously quipped that he wasn’t a “Freudian”), any criticism of Freud is done while standing on his shoulders.

Yes, there is much to critique about Freud, but it will not be done here. That’s another blog (even a book! LOL). I’ll give a little synopsis on Freud today because he’s such an important figure in the contemporary construction of human sexuality.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) had a huge ego and he once described himself as one of a trinity of revolutionary thinkers who deconstructed the god-like pretensions of humankind. The first was Copernicus (1473-1543) who proved that humanity was not at the center of the universe; then Darwin (1809-82) showed that humanity was not created in God’s image but was descended from ape-like creatures; and finally Freud, with his exposition of the unconscious mind, demonstrated that only a fraction of human thought is rational.

In Totem and Taboo (1913), he traced the whole genesis of art, religion, and culture back to a sublimation, or redirection, of sexual motives and the resulting guilt that arises from them.

In the subconscious, Freud located the pleasure principle, a set of desires and impulses instinctually driven and mostly sexual in nature. Because these desires are disorganized and often dangerous or destructive, they have to be controlled by the rational, far-sighted reality principle of the conscious mind. The unconscious also contains a repressing mechanism, which can bury the memory of traumatic incidents with the result that, unlike ordinary memories, cannot dissipate over time. Instead, they linger as a powerful, recurring motivating force on an individual’s behavior, which can give rise to “hysterical” symptoms such as paralysis or hallucinations. (As a side note, a look at the history of the dildo lends this theory some validity.)

Often misunderstood to the point being perverted (due to Freud himself and the translation of his works from German to English), psychoanalysis is the process of uncovering these latent memories and their emotions, so that they can be experienced and forgotten normally.

According to Freud, everyone is born with a sex drive (libido) that is “polymorphously perverse” -- meaning that humans are born with unfocused sexual drives, taking sexual pleasure from any part of the body. The sex drive has no “natural”(<-- loaded word!) object: the structure of an adult’s libido is determined during the several stages of infancy, during any one of which things can go wrong, causing traumas or perversions. The oral stage is characterized by the baby’s pleasure in suckling and a sense of loss when the breast is withdrawn. The anal stage is when the child associates pleasure (and creativity) with the conscious control of its bowel (it’s not nice to call it the neocon stage!), before it enters the phallic stage and discovers genital masturbation.

At this stage, both boys and girls are supposed to feel they have phallic procreative powers, and believe they can give their mothers a child, or even produce one from their own anuses. This leads approximately at the age of five or six to the Oedipus complex, when the desire for an incestuous relationship with the mother creates a fear of (and a repressed wish to kill) the father.

Boys develop a castration fear; girls discover they are already castrated, develop penis envy, and may resent their mothers for bringing them into the world incomplete.

There’s a lot of cultural baggage in all this (especially bias against the female -- biases that were addressed by later female psychoanalytical thinkers), but many of Freud’s theories have been borne out through empirical research. Additionally, most of Freud’s theories were controversial when he named them, and some have become more controversial since, but his influence on Western thought is immeasurable.

Love,

Eddie

Addendum:

If you would like a readable journey through contemporary psychoanalytical thought, try the excellent Freud and Beyond.

Freud saw the human personality as being composed by three distinct, but interrelated parts: the id, the ego, and the superego. He also used the metaphor of the steam engine to describe the tension caused by these three parts. My professor used characters from the popular TV series, Star Trek:

Bones, the emotional and passionate doctor, symbolizes the id. Freud described the id as “a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations... It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts... ” While poor Bones wasn’t exactly the id in that sense, he did operate from a gut instinct. “Jim! You can’t give the order to annihilate a whole planet, for god’s sake!”

Spock’s character personifies the superego, the part of our personality that strives to act in a socially appropriate manner. The Super-ego controls our sense of right and wrong and guilt. It helps us fit into society by getting us to act in socially acceptable ways. Spock’s answer to Bones would be, “But we have to destroy the planet for it is logical.” LOL

Finally, we have the ego, Captain Jim Kirk, the part of our personality that is the referee between the id and the super-ego, trying to make certain that the needs of both the id and the super-ego are fulfilled. It is said to operate on a reality principle, meaning it deals with the id and the super-ego; allowing them to express their desires, drives, and morals in realistic and socially appropriate ways. Captain Kirk would take into consideration both Bones’ plea for compassion as well as Spock’s compelling argument for logic.

And there you have it: Freud and Star trek! LOL

The TGIF Sex Blog (Sexual Upbringing in America)

¡Hola! Everybody...
Looking to get away for the weekend! The office closes early today and I’ll be making a quick exit... Hope everyone has a great time... BTW, The Losaida (Lower East Side) Festival is this weekend and Eddie Palmieri, along with other big-name Latino/a acts, will be appearing free. Check out my calendar for details (click here). And while you’re there, head over to Adela’s, eat some of the best PR food, and don’t forget to tell them Eddie sent you!

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-=[ The Cruelest Abuse: Sexual Upbringing In America ]=-

Once you are exposed to sex -- you’re never able to regain innocence again -- from then on you have sexual thoughts -- you have sexual feelings -- innocence is forever gone. It encourages sexual curiosity that would not have been there...

-- Oprah Winfrey on Teens and Dial-a-porn

[Note: This is part of a much larger post on sexual upbringing. I hope to follow-up with more in-depth posts on the subject in the coming Fridays]

I believe Oprah speaks for many American parents and the sentiment that if “you don’t try to shield them from ... all this explicit kind of stuff until they’re ready to handle it, then you’re robbing them of their innocence, their one time in life to be somewhat carefree.”

At this point, I would like to make the observation that as a nation our teen pregnancy and abortion rates lead the developed world. Many are trying to blame this phenomenon on a perceived sexual permissiveness and lax morals around sexuality. The point I will be making is that the exact opposite is true: we are a nation incapable of feeling comfortable with our own sexuality and we pass on our sexual hang-ups and dysfunctions to out children. I will make the case that, contrary to the blather that passes for sexual discussion these days, it’s not permissiveness, but rather, repression that is at the root of our “sexual problem” If you doubt me, just hold on for a second and absorb the following fact: the vast majority of teen pregnancies are the result of an adult impregnating an adolescent.

::blank stare::

Recently, there was a hue and cry around the new teen sex “epidemic” called s-exting. In fact, prosecutors across the nation began convicting teens as sexual predators. The fact is that even the experts concede that s-exting isn’t as widespread as reported in the mainstream media. In addition, I find it the cruelest abuse to criminalize what is normal adolescent behavior.

I think when adults say children can’t handle sexual content, they’re really expressing their own hang-ups about sex. We even fight about whether children should be taught about protecting themselves sexually.

People seem to mean by “sexual innocence” the absence of sexual thoughts, genital responses, and the awareness of how one is sexually aroused. A lot of parents would probably feel more relaxed if childhood did not have any sexual component and if sexuality magically appeared at puberty or better yet at marriage. Many parents have mixed feelings about their own sexuality and any recognition of sexuality in their children arouses their own unresolved sexual anxieties.

But let’s be honest about preadolescent sexuality -- were you “sexually innocent” prior to reaching puberty? Is that an accurate view of your pre- adolescent sexuality? When you were a child wouldn’t you have preferred learning more about the meaning of your sexual development rather than being blocked from such clarification by parents who were trying to keep you “innocent”?

Sigmund Freud shocked most of the Western world when he observed the reality of childhood sexuality over one-hundred years ago.

Almost all of the subsequent research of the twentieth century supported Freud’s assertion that children were sexual creatures. Alfred Kinsey, almost a half century after Freud, shocked this country with his own revelation of sexual responses involving erection and lubrication not only in preadolescent children but even in newborn infants. There’s even research of in utero sexuality!

I couldn’t begin to cite the overwhelming body of research supporting children as sexual creatures. Yet, this is exactly what we want to deny and what we want our children to deny. In the process, we teach our children that their sexual natures are evil and we drive the sexual conversation underground, where the shadow aspect takes over. It’s no surprise our children act out sexually, we don’t recognize nor do we support their sexual natures. Shit, even saying children are sexual creatures is enough to get you in hot water!

Even parents who claim to be open-minded about sex exhibit sexual anxieties -- for when they do discuss sex with their children, they often fail even to mention the pleasurable aspect of sexual experiences. They want their children to emphasize relationships and affection, and so they hesitated to mention pleasure too prominently. Since intensity of bodily pleasure is the aspect of sexuality that most clearly distinguishes it from other activities, this omission surely sabotages any realistic preparation for sexual behavior. Children experiencing these bodily pleasures must wonder why their parents don’t seem to understand what they are feeling.

Adult anxiety about childhood sexuality is not based upon any sane assessment of what is happening in their child’s life. Rather, because parents see sex as dangerous and threatening, they conclude that kids should be kept away from it. As a parent, I can certainly understand parents can have a realistic fear that other adults may take advantage of their child’s lack of knowledge about sex and may sexually exploit the child. But if that is your concern, it follows that you should talk more about sex with your child rather than promoting ignorance by acting as if childhood sexuality is a trampling of some mythical “natural state of sexual innocence.”

Finally, even parents who accept a more modern view of sexuality are hesitant to prepare their child for sexuality. For example, the typical response I hear from self-proclaimed modern, liberal parents is: “I am open about sexuality with my children and I will always try to answer any question at all that they raise about sexuality.”

Consider whether we would wait for questions to be raised in any other area of great importance to our children. We don’t wait for children to ask before teaching them how to tie their shoes, or how to add, or why not to play in the middle of the highway. How well would children know how to read if we waited for them to ask us before we taught them how to read? We think these are things they should know and we make sure they know them, whether they ask about them or not.

Why aren’t we adopting the same attitude when it comes to one of life’s greatest questions? Is it because we’re sexually permissive? I think not. And our children suffer for that.

Love,

Eddie