If I carry guilt or shame about my sexual orientation, I can't consciously find it. If it's there, it's unconscious. Prior to experiencing sex with another man in my mid-twenties, I lived in a practically constant state of fear and shame about it. And it was a complete secret. Awful awful way to live.
When I finally experienced it, all that changed. This, I thought, is so terrific! I never feel more completely at home or more fully myself than when up close and personal with another man.
I do recall that sometimes when I was sexually engaged with my first lover I would feel uncomfortable about what we were doing...even though it felt great. I realized that what I was doing was standing outside the experience and assessing it as if I were not involved. It was almost as if I were not in the bed with him but in the middle of the room, watching us. And since two naked men being intimate was not an image I was ever encouraged to admire (!), it produced some discomfort in me. So I stopped that. I decided to be where I really was and to let that experience tell me what was what.
My experience was useful in that it taught me the difference between what a phenomenon can look like to a third party and what it feels like to those directly engaged in it.
ExGays
My reason for posting this is that I wandered into a set of YouTube videos about ex-gays and reparative therapy. One conversion therapist used his fingers to point out that men and women "fit" and that men and men do not. Consequently, he said that homosexual relations, being against nature, cannot be satisfying.
Hmm. Well, I get the philosophical argument about reproduction, even about sexual complementarity. But don't tell me that homosexual relations are unsatisfying! Sex between men carries with it the limitation of all things created and human. Even though it feels like heaven on earth...and it does, boy does it...it is not. But neither is heterosexual intercourse.
If it's unsatisfying, then you're doing it wrong, or with the wrong person, or the wrong attitude. And please don't expect me to believe that male-female sex is inherently satisfying. That, too, can be great or not. I have this on the authority of participants.
S/M
One of my professional specialties is working with guys into power exchange sex. Here is a place where what the observer sees and what the participants experience can be radically different. I had a fascinating set of conversations with a man who derives deep emotional and sexual satisfaction from being dominated by other men. This guy was one of the most beautiful men I have ever met, face and frame, as well as being a respected professional in his field. But his sexual drive was mostly about being controlled within the field of power of a more dominant man. And it could get pretty rough sometimes. Men do that. And the archetypal themes of sacrifice and worship and initiation were clearly involved, as they often are.
But he had a very clear sense of what provided him with both pleasure and connection as a submissive male. He told me that he had broken off with one man because the guy crossed the line from domination to contempt. Now to an outsider, that would be pretty invisible. But to him, it was clear as day.
Same thing with the interplay of pain and pleasure. I worked with another man who derived great pleasure and katharsis from being flogged. But he came in one day with his hand bandaged from having smashed a finger in his car door. That was definitely neither pleasure or catharsis. It just hurt and he hated it. One experience, which might horrify many observers, was an alchemical transformation of pain and pleasure. The second one was just an effing accident. Ouch.
The human soul, brain, heart, body is vast. A mystery, inside and out.
4 comments:
Re sex & heaven on earth, etc
I wonder really if B&D can be only about "power" and not value. ... Or at least this: the desire for dominatedness is a desire for the dominating partner to libidinously cathect with the subjected partner. If it were only about power and not valuation, contempt or maybe scornful contempt would be irrelevant and not indicate a break in the cathexis. Amor or eros upwards would be ungratifying, mortifying, if no response of caritas or agape downward. (In doctrines that deny a transcending, downward into-time incarnational desire in spirit, this beau rôle is play'd by "material evil," right? … “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” would be an aspiration to aspirationlessness, an aversion to transcendence.) ...
I specify'd "scornful contempt" because contempt of some sort is a strong element of various interpersonal delightloves, and possibly an element of contempt of this sort was desired by the guy who broke of with his despiser. (“Despising” feels too harsh, negative, disapproving, for the light contempt I feel is an element in much delightlove, many sorts of delightlove. Maybe “amusedness” would convey the right sort of contempt. On the other hand, the submissive guy who broke or with the dominant partner could feel no ‘transcendence,’ I guess -- only mortification, a rejection of his submissive libido; not a taking up of his submissive libido or a desire for his submissive libido. … Were God to scorn Christians’ worship, they would feel Him He pushing them back down into the world -- de-transcendencizing them.
Amused, delighted scorn-free contempt: For example, a wife's or girlfriend's inability to open jars may seem and feel perfectly wonderful to a guy, just as his typically male inabilities may seem and feel perfectly wonderful to her. No doubt part of this is the awareness that such inabilities indicate neediness and thus give the delightlover a reassuring sense of security but also ego importance. But this doesn't feel the whole of the experience, which is first of all contemplative -- how wonderful that this person who walks around in the world just as I do can't open jars! And then very much with children: their inabilities strike us with delightlove, as do their futile attempts to imitate adult actions like pretending to drive while seated in the driver's seat of a (stationary, not turn'd on) car. A baby’s little parts seem funny to us, the baby’s helplessness and yet at the same time this amusing insistence via crying on being fed and taken care of, able to sleep soundly, oblivous to danger, while being carry’d by a fallible adult across a busy street, for instance. ... The contempt is real, and integral to the cathexis made by the delightloving contemner -- and this is difficult to explain. Women and girls feel hurt when a guy reveals how wonderful they seem when they "throw like a girl" which is objectively an incompetent way of throwing. And children are confused and I think psychically rather traumatized when adults laugh at them even when the adults' laughter expresses delightlove.
Admittedly, this is a tender TLC-congruent “laughing at,” which may be transcended to laughing with by the object person laugh’d at. … Women perhaps laugh at us men. I wish that they laugh’d at us more -- as we blissfully, enchantedly, smitten-ly, laugh at the way they throw like a girl. But, alas, maybe they laugh at us much less because we are much less delightful to us than we are to them. A woman laughs tenderly at her children, and this is an expression of her intense delightlove for them.
But as for the sex connections you describe, the submissive partners wish to feel that the dominant partner desires their entire submission and their entire person, right? And even if never acted out, nevertheless in fantasy, submission is very much the desired position for both men and women, gay and lesbian, etc, right? As for acting these things out, gay men take turns, right? and hetero men must pay a "dominatrix" prostitute -- as gay men pay male prostitutes to take the dominant role. (Cash payments usually suggest reluctance to do the act requested. I've never heard of a guy who paid women or men to submit sexually to him so that he could slake his thirsts for dominatingness, although probably such types do occur. (My guess is anyone who really prefer'd to act the dominant role is a scary, violent sort of person -- as indeed the Marquis de Sade really was.) ...
Even ordinary love-making -- e.g. nakedness, but also intimate kissing -- occurs outside normal bounds of decorum and interpersonal honour. Libido can go to a state psychically prior to the imposition of concern for maintaining honour in the eyes of others. Not that our inborn I-thou capacity (cf eyes contact even in newborns, although I’ve read they don’t distinguish between real eyes and eye-like dots on a piece of paper) has no “honour” content; just that at first a baby doesn’t suppose that he has dishonourable desires and appetites etc. In nascent shame, he learns this, internalizes this as “ego ideal,” from directives from his mother or other primary care givers; thus parts of his psyche are de-libidinized or thanatos'd.
I guess the initially implicit but still pervasive maternal admonition to guard one’s ladylikeness vis-à-vis males results in psychical dammings-up that get released in rape fantasies in women and girls. … But more than this, I guess our fantasies are a royal (chandala royal) road to understanding many elements of cultural (including familial, religious, etc) influence, for instance, wherefore a fantasized rapist seems not even to like or delight in the womangirl -- with whom nevertheless he desires jouissance. This sort of imaginings -- fantasies of sp-nkings etc in men and women -- presumably reveals considerably important realities. One’s psyche is one’s sensorium, eh?
We enjoy the re-libidinizing of these thanatos’d areas of our psyche, although necessarily not all areas (not everyone develops interpersonal corpophilia), and “ego ideal” isn’t a construct artificially inserted into the psyche. The sense of the goodness of I-thou (the love of turning toward eyes and smiling that is inherent in a newborn) and thus a sort of wish for honour and to be honour’d is also inborn. Real valuational insights (via aidos) are elements of one’s ego ideal. And a rule can be both arbitrary and really valuational: for instance, not driving down the right side of the road in the islands of Japan and the islands of Britain. Sure, if everyone drove down the right side of the road, no harm would occur: it’s an arbitrary rule in that sense. But driving down the wrong side of the road would cause great harm, and that is wrong -- not only an arbitrary concern.
(Freud sometimes writes as if every aversion were merely a negated or reversed wish: e.g. that it’s dishonest to pretend one doesn’t want one’s lover to slam one’s hand in a car door. On the other hand, I could accept that self-punishment can be a real wish -- in order to remove psychical tension, as when one has done a misdeed and accordingly expects divine punishment. Why wait for the punishment? one may as well slam one’s hand in a car door accidentally. Or perhaps this: if no punishment happens, then one has the task of unravelling the universe imposed by parents and other childhood authorities and concluding that either they lied maliciously to one, or were/are fools who had/have no true understanding of how the universe works. Or simply that one doesn’t wish to live in a universe without moral karma -- a random Darwinian Newtonian etc mechanism.) (Enjoying the feeling of clean skin and of washing one’s skin feels to me as “real” a pleasure as enjoying the feeling of mud between one’s toes -- though I have to remember back a long way to a time when I walk’d through mud with bare feet! … So also with organizedness. Roz Chast refers to “the rapture of the neat.” I feel that this isn’t only an imposition of culture on the psyche that spontaneously can enjoy only no-organizedness, letting it all hang out [as if athletic effort is enjoyable only thanks to insertions of culture into psyche], no aspiration. Rejecting false against-the-grain criteria from one’s ego ideal does feel ‘liberating,’ but that doesn’t mean one is most truly who one is somehow conceived as lacking all aspirations, valuations, etc, or “prior” to the experience of “otherness” which imposed itself on one’s psyche. A newborn has a spontaneous concern for ‘others’ -- looks for eyes and smiles. To assert that a newborn can’t have this awareness because it’s impossible -- well, one may as well say that newborn foals don’t know how to walk because it’s impossible -- they can’t have learnt to do this in the mare’s womb.)
Because no “pedestal” ideal as of womangirlhood is involved, I am not astonish’d that two gay guys would go to “rough” places, although seriously I do wonder whether Plato would approve of SMBD. It does astonish me that guys would go to such places with a girlfriend or wife -- even if she desired to go there, and wasn’t simply complying with his pressuring. The ordinary “ego ideal” of an ordinarily good person who’s a guy seems to me totally dystonic with SMBD with a womangirl. (That is, I would expect even gay males to feel that women and girls shouldn’t be subjected to either the submissive or the dominant role in SMBD.)
A purported letter to maybe to “Savage in Love” was from a guy who said his wife insisted on being sp-nk’d because otherwise she couldn’t achieve orgasm. The guy had been refusing because he just felt causing pain to a woman was wrong. Seems to me most unlikely that a guy in such circumstances would write to Dan Savage hoping for vindication. (A lot of such letters seem’d to me rather unlikely.) And indeed Dan Savage commanded him to hurt his wife in the manner she requested. I didn’t agree. Consider the opposite situation (which is more likely, surely, and which maybe Savage actually had in mind): a guy wants his wife to sp-nk him, and she refuses -- causing pain being no part of a womangirl’s ego ideal. Are her moral and even aesthetic aversions just so much bourgeois morality that she ought to override? A wife or girlfriend is obligated to become a dominatrix if her partner so wishes? Well, I don’t think so. And, really, I feel a guy’s ego ideal and valuational insights (or fancies) are as important as women’s are.
True, one could say that the duty of “benefiting others” (Golden Rule, etc) requires one to do as requested for another’s sexual pleasure. But the Golden Rule is not apply’d without a concern for the other’s good -- as one understands that good even after taking into account the other’s opinion. And since the Golden Rule is expected as a valuational duty, it can make sense only from within the duty-bound person’s own valuational sense. It isn’t as though one is a biological machine until moral authorities insert the Golden Rule into one’s neuro-chemistry.
Anyway, what I marvel at (in dismay) is that a guy can enjoy any sex act that his female partner has been pressured into performing -- or really that any person can enjoy a sex act that he or she knows is irksome to the partner. I just don’t get it. For instance, how sex with a prostitute can be in any way preferable to solo masturbation. How can a guy think “How miserable this woman’s life must be! How thoroughly she would not do this if she had another source of money!” and go ahead with sexual intercourse with her? But also how fellation from a partner who does not enjoy fellation (maybe 100% of women if they felt they could be honest) can be preferable to solo masturbation.
Yes, somehow this question (“Does she enjoy xyz sex act?”) does not automatically occur to guys -- if sex happens and things seem to go along spontaneously e.g. she fellates him seemingly spontaneously and with enjoyment or at least no manifest displeasure. But once the question occurs, how can one tune it out? especially when she has explicitly indicated her disinclination. When the other’s actual preferences aren’t an issue -- sc during fantasies -- the partner always enjoys any acts that are imagined. So when one is ‘enjoying’ a sex act that one knows one’s partner does not enjoy, one must tune out the real partner and turn to fantasy.
And I don’t see how any sort of “agreement” could enable a guy to enjoy sex that he knew his wife or girlfriend didn’t enjoy -- either specific acts she doesn’t enjoy or simply sex when she isn’t ‘in the mood.’ For instance, the agreements in prostitution, or an agreement work’d out with a therapist or counsellor (or in a pre-nuptial contrast) that the couple will have sex a certain number of times. No agreement can guarantee enjoyment, especially not in women who have so many factors determining whether they enjoy sex or not.
Even if sex in a relationship or marriage dwindled to some allegedly absurd level of infrequency if both partners agreed to have sex only when both were ‘in the mood’ and only such sex acts that both enjoy, I still don’t see why the guy wouldn’t prefer the sexual relationship that way. Sex might occur “seldom” and never any fellation, but such sex as did occur wouldn’t require the guy to tune out awareness of his wife or girlfriend’s mental state -- and such sex is truly enjoyable.
As I said, this isn’t so much a valuational assertion by me on how things ought to be, but a psychological question why things aren’t this way. Masturbation's got to be preferable to sex one has pressured out of a womangirl, right?
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