Our erotic desires are a
pull towards healing. While bodily pleasures are appealing in their
own right, our specific emotional needs determine the focus of our
sexuality. Intercourse with the opposite sex may be the most
natural way to procreate, but most of our sexual behaviour is not about
breeding. A desire for a healing of the psychological tear between
the masculine and the feminine underlies heterosexual behaviour.
Exclusively homosexual behaviour in males might be driven by a desire
for a healing between the individual and the patriarchal society.
Lesbians seek healing away from the more troubled masculine psyche
and in bisexuality we may see a less neurotic, less fixated, form of
sexuality in which the sharing of sexual pleasure is not restricted
by the gender of the participants.
Often we also have sexual
fixations around particular situations or kinds of activity. The
erotic is like an ambulance crew which goes straight to the
spot where we are most wounded.
I'll first use myself as an
example. During my early adolescence I developed a strong sense of
shame about masturbating. This can't be attributed to any messages I
picked up from my parents, but may have been a response to the way
that other boys joked about the act as if anyone who did it was
pathetic. The point is that I went for about six months without
masturbating and felt that a black cloud of shame was hanging over my
head. Eventually I talked about this with my parents and they
reassured me that masturbation was perfectly natural and that I had
done it when I was a baby. So I went back to masturbating, but in
later years I still felt uncomfortable about how women would view me
if they knew how much I did it.
Later, as I began to explore
my sexual fantasies and eventually began to write erotica, I found
that one of the things which gave me intense pleasure was the idea of
a woman watching me masturbate. Here we have an example of the erotic
as a process of healing. What was most erotic was a sexual
transaction which reassured my deep-seated fear of rejection.
I recently read an account
by a woman, who had been raped and who writes erotica, of how writing
a rape-based story helped her to take back ownership of her own
sexuality. And another woman who suffered a similar trauma has told
me of how rape-play with a sexual partner is extremely erotic for her
as long as she feels safe.
This fits with the idea that
erotic desires and erotic fantasy represent a process of healing of
our deepest wounds.
But does our society
facilitate or hinder such healing?
Trauma lies not so much in
the things which happen to us as in the way we think about those
things. Many individuals go through very scary or painful experiences
and then more or less forget about them as soon as they are over.
Giving birth tends to be very painful and I'm sure it can be a
frightening experience when it occurs, but once the mother has a
healthy baby in her arms it seems to be quickly forgotten. What makes
for trauma is on-going questions like : “Was it my fault?",
“What will people think?", etc.
What is needed to heal
trauma is self-acceptance – the realisation that what happened
can't be changed, that whatever one feels is always all right and a
trust that the mind knows the way towards healing. Erotic fantasy
need not be a part of that, but for some of us it is, and this needs
acceptance.
Prevalent social beliefs can
work against this process. In the case of rape or child molestation
an emphasis on the need to condemn the act and the perpetrator can
lead to a feeling that the survivor of the abuse should remain in the
role of victim. The act of finding healing and renewed confidence
through fantasies which eroticise the experience may be viewed as a
retroactive condoning of it. But really this has nothing to do with
the fact that the abuse was wrong and can be criminally prosecuted.
When it comes to trauma
resulting from sexual abuse part of the suffering is bound to come
from the sense of shame which accrues even to the victim in a society
which still carries a deep-seated fear of sexuality. We often think
differently about someone who has been raped than we do someone who
has been stabbed, and yet both are violent acts in which the body is
invaded.
It might seem strange to say
that our society has a deep-seated fear of sexuality when we look at
what shows on television and the easy access to porn on the internet.
But sex is not treated simply as the pleasurable physical act which
it is. In polite society you can say you just drank a really nice cup
of tea, but try saying you had a very satisfying masturbation session
last night. Why should the two be any different? Only because we live
in a society founded on the repression of sexuality and which, thus,
rightly fears the power of sexuality to disrupt it. In and
of itself an act of sexual intercourse is like dancing, a pleasurable
physical activity involving intimacy between two or more individuals.
But you can dance in public and you can't have sex in public. And in
the media, nudity and even loving sexual behaviour are treated as if
they were more offensive to our deeper selves than violence is. They
aren't. Loving sexual interactions, heterosexual or homosexual, are
perfectly in harmony with our deepest nature which is to be
unconditionally loving. Violence runs against that nature, but its
depiction in the media plays an important cathartic role in our
neurotic society. The reason why nudity and sex, when not aggressive
or abusive, are treated as something dangerous is because these
things are dangerous to our neurotic selves. They are not dangerous
to non-neurotic adults or to children who have not yet become
neurotic. But it is those who are particularly neurotic who impose
the fear-driven rules of society.
It is important to be
understanding about this fear of sex. Someone who is homophobic has
no more choice about the fact than a arachnophobe has about being
scared of spiders. In both cases they can learn to be free of fear,
but it requires sensitivity on the part of those who are trying to
help them.
And, of course, sex can have
a dark face when combined with neurotic armouring. There is nothing
wrong with enjoying fantasies about raping people, but to do the
thing itself is evil. And some adults use their position of authority
over children to satisfy themselves sexually. This is only the most
socially-unacceptable form of abuse of adult authority over children.
Being indoctrinated into a religion, being forced to perform in child
beauty pageants, being told they are expected to go into the family
business - any of these things, and many more, can have as big a
detrimental effect on a child's life as an adult as sexual abuse. In
general, to teach a child to obey authority because it is authority
(“You'll do it because I say so.") is to lay down the
conditioning which can make the child a future victim of other
authority figures, be they dictatorial politicians or sexual
predators. Once again, it is our society's fear of sex which leads us
to concentrate our outrage on the sexual abuse of children and ignore
or even condone other forms of abuse.
If our sexual fantasies are
leading us toward healing, then what is the meaning of the current
popularity of fantasies revolving around bondage, discipline and
sado-masochism? These fetishes are nothing new, but the bestselling
novel Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James (which I haven't read)
is taking the world by storm, indicating that these kinds of
fantasies are now a part of the mainstream.
One way of looking at the
erotic appeal of bondage and discipline is that, if someone is
fearful of their own erotic desires, the sense of safety that comes
with being in bondage or submitting to another's discipline, allows
them to explore those desires without danger of a scary loss of
control.
But maybe there is another
interpretation which can be put on this kind of fantasy. If the
erotic offers a path out of shame or trauma, through returning to the
source of shame or trauma and eroticising it, then perhaps we
eroticise bondage and slavery as a path to freedom from the bondage
and slavery of our neurosis.
You can also find this post on the How to Be Free forum here. You may find further discussion of it there.
