The TGIF Sex Blog (Cheating)

¡Hola! Everybody...
By now, there are literally tens of millions of blogs and messages, articles, and news shows dedicated to the passing of Michael Jackson. The best I can say is that I cannot judge MJ (nor do I want to). Very few of us would be able to handle the glare of the spotlight thrust upon MJ since the age of five. Under such scrutiny, which one of you can say you would not be humiliated by something rattling in your closet?

MJ was a human being who shared his remarkable creative gift with millions. In the end, I can only judge him by the inherent joy that was emblematic of his art. His actions will reverberate throughout time long after we are all dust in the wind. RIP, Michael...

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-=[ Can’t We Just be friends? ]=-

... A very dear friend.

-- Governor Mark Sanford on his Argentina Tail

Watching the Sanford press conference debacle I actually laughed at the above quote (Yeah, right! you don’t shtup your friends, buddy!). But it got me to thinking... can married men and women be friends with the opposite sex? Some (such as myself) would say it’s not impossible; others would say it’s impractical (or question the desire to do so).

One of my best friends is a married woman. We’ve known each for years. While we certainly don’t hang with each as we used to before her marriage, we do keep in touch regularly and sometimes we even go out for brunch or a movie with her husband’s blessing (“Please!” he’ll joke, “take her somewhere, Eddie!” LOL!). However, I will readily admit that ours is a rare and beautiful relationship based on mutual respect and love. I would never want to do anything that would result in the betrayal of her (and her husband’s) implicit trust. I think we all get off on the fact that we’re close like that.

I’m sure there are others that have managed to pull it off, but for some it can be risky, and the cynical among us might as, “Why take the risk?”

Nothing is wrong with married people wanting opposite-sex friends. Actually, I believe it is abnormal to have only same-sex friends. I guess the important question here is if you’re able to handle the responsibility that comes with the relationship. We always believe we can handle a temptation until we discover that we cannot.

I don’t believe that having an opposite-sex friend puts you in danger of emotional and sexual infidelity. The friendship doesn’t cause the action, if you’re having thoughts of infidelity, they will occur whether you have opposite sex friends or not. What an opposite-sex friendship will do is make you confront that issue at some point or another.

If spending “quality time” becomes a way of relying on a friend in the way that you should rely on your husband or wife, then that is a problem. Having that emotional closeness to another person at the exclusion of your mate could result in you feeling emotionally closer to your friend than to your spouse, paving the way to an intimacy that might lead to a physical affair. Again, if this is happening, it’s not the friendship that is the cause. Rather, it might be a sign that you’re making certain unhealthy choices for some unknown (or known) reason. Of course, there’s always the chance of becoming physically attracted to a friend. Only one of the two of you needs to initiate the physical contact, and once started, you may not want to--or think you are able to--stop.

When I was married and attending university, I was surrounded by very young, very attractive women who were beginning to explore the boundaries of their sexuality. I have a rule of thumb with certain things, it’s called “people, places, and things.” If I want to avoid drinking, for example, I avoid, people places and things that might tempt me to drink. One big mistake with infidelity is that we think we can resist the temptation until we realize (often too late) that we can’t. Sometimes we aren’t as strong as we believe, which is how infidelity starts. If you know that you may be tempted by a relationship outside your marriage, or that you have an ego that you need to constantly feed with attention from the opposite sex, then you can probably guess that if your “friend” is right there willing and able, you might not resist.

That’s why I used to avoid college women like the plague. My ex and I would laugh at some of the things that happened -- the attempts at seduction, the propositions, etc. and yes, I would share these things with my wife at the time because I wanted it all to be transparent.

For me, any relationship should be predicated on implicit trust. I like to think that my ex never thought for a moment that I would cheat on her. Our relationship evolved to the point where we took different roads, but there was never any betrayal of trust. And I have many women friends, something my ex handled quite well. In fact, some of my friends became her friends and I would accuse her of stealing my friends! LOL!

Honestly, yes, we (men and women) can be friends, but only if the persons involved are secure in their emotional needs and sufficiently evolved.

On the other hand, so many affairs start with two people who thought they were just going to be friends, thinking that all they were going to do is have innocent interactions -- that as long as they’re not having sex, everything is fine. It is ... until it’s not.

Love,

Eddie

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