"Toxic Masculinity" or Toxic Idealism?

How often does domestic violence take place because the perpetrator doesn’t know that it is wrong? Assuming that we are talking about violence inflicted upon the physically weaker individual, it is one of the most obvious of injustices. It is true that some highly regarded religious texts attempt to justify it in some cases, taking the same kind of reasoning which has been used to justify the corporal punishment of children - i.e. a theorised larger benefit for the individual through violence-induced self-discipline, so the possibility is there, especially in those cultures still dominated by such religious belief structures. But I think that it is safe to say that educational programs based around telling us that domestic violence is a bad thing will not have a major effect in minimising the problem as they are telling us what we already know.

As with any other form of destructive behaviour, domestic violence is counterproductive to the larger best interest of the perpetrator. Any relief from pent-up frustration experienced in the act of violence is liable to be offset by the longer-term disadvantages - feelings of guilt, possibility of punishment, progressive decline in benefits available from the victim through decrease in physical and emotional health. This may seem very cynical, but I present it this way for a reason. We have to understand that, even from the most clinical viewpoint, the abuser experiences a net loss. Once this is established the emphasis falls on the question of how the individual can gain the ability to behave differently - or, to look at it from a different perspective, what is driving the behaviour which is unhelpful both to themselves and to the victim.

Domestic violence may involve violence by men against women, men against men, women against men or women against women. There is also violence by adults against children, children against children and children against adults. But since a large slice of the problem is violence by men against women, this tends to be the main focus of educational programs aimed at addressing the problem.

One radical feminist approach which is gaining popularity describes aspects of archetypal masculinity as “toxic” and attempts to re-educated males out of them. I think this provides a good example of how an idealistic approach to a social problem can exacerbate rather than help it.

Before we take a look at the problems inherent in an idealistic approach to the problem, lets look at what we might achieve through a more pragmatic approach. 

Domestic violence is usually a form of expression for feelings of anger. So, given that anger is occurring, what can we do to channel it into something other than violence. As Bernard Lafayette said : “Violence is the language of the inarticulate.” Anything we can do to encourage people to give verbal expression to their feelings of anger is liable to reduce the incidence of violence. And this applies also to those who might end up on the receiving end of violence. A person who feels able to express their anger outwardly rather than adopt a submissive approach to life is less likely to end up being victimised by others. If walking away or seeking help are options they will be more likely to take them more quickly.

But where does the anger come from in the first place? Each of us has our character armour - our personality structure - the purpose of which is to protect us from threats internal and external. An internal threat might be feelings of worthlessness. We may have particular kinds of behaviour on which we pride ourselves because they carry the meaning for us that we are not worthless. Essentially the character armour is built from the conditions of our self-acceptance. If we use the example of an archetypal masculine persona, a young boy may have been taught that he’s not a real man if he cries. Thus not crying becomes a condition for his self-acceptance. All of us have some form of character armour. Playing on other’s pity by crying excessively and playing the victim, for instance, would just be another form of armour.

Insecurity in the armour can lead to outbursts of anger. When we don’t feel under threat, everything is peaceful, but when we feel our self-acceptance is under threat we will defend it aggressively by expressing angry feelings toward the source of the threat.

The more self-accepting we are, the less prone we are to anger or violence. Of course this doesn’t mean that people who don’t feel angry are necessarily self-accepting. The negative feelings can be directed inwardly rather than outwardly, thus many non-self-accepting people become depressed rather than angry.

Through cultivating unconditional self-acceptance we can increase the integrity and thus the health of our personality structure. If we have many conditions for our self-acceptance then we are like a hollow tree which many things can break. If we are self-sufficient in the maintenance of our self-acceptance then we are like a healthy tree which can resist or bend as required.

We achieve unconditional self-acceptance by learning to accept all of our thoughts and feelings. Let’s take a man who has been violent towards women. Telling him that his masculinity is “toxic” isn’t going to help him be more self-accepting. He feels angry. He wants to beat a woman. So this is the place for him to begin. He needs to accept that it is O.K. to feel angry and that is O.K. to want to beat a woman. He will feel these things whether he thinks they are O.K. or not, but recognising that the thoughts and the feelings do no harm in themselves and can be accepted in themselves will help to take the pressure off. The fact that he has, in the past, been violent, is an indication that his particular character structure and situation have resulted in a level of pressure pushing him towards violence which he was unable to resist. A demand - from the individual’s conscience or from others - that they be different from the way they are when they have no way of accommodating this demand can be a source of unbearable pressure. Drawing a distinction between the deed and the thoughts and feelings which lie behind the deed can be enough to free the individual from a good deal of this pressure. If they are made to feel that they are unacceptable for feeling like beating a woman then there is far less motive for resisting that urge. And if insecurities about self-worth are what lie at the heart of the character armour then we are hardly helping someone to free themselves of a destructive form of such armour by insisting that they are a bad person.

Copyright: alphaspirit / 123RF Stock Photo

Let’s look at a little myth or parable about the masculine and the feminine to see if we can put that aspect of the issue into some kind of historical context. The virtue of this format is that it allows for simplification.

A tribe live in the jungle. Both men and women spend time looking after the infants. Leopards from time to time eat one of the infants. The men make spears and head out into the jungle to kill the leopards and protect the women and children. (As child bearers the women are too valuable to be hunters.) Hunting requires the cultivation of competitive and aggressive abilities. The hunting culture comes to clash with the nurturing culture. The women tell the men not to be so macho when back amongst the tribe. Suppressing the voice of the nurturer within was a necessary part of becoming a successful hunter, so giving in to the critical voice of the nurturers would endanger the group, but resisting that critical voice means an increase in the behaviour which is being criticised. It is a negative feedback loop. This cultural divide between men and women determines the structure of our character armour with some of those made most insecure by the negative feedback loop feeling the need to exercise more and more control over society.

We can’t know if things actually happened like that, but I think that the pattern of criticism leading to an increase in the thing criticised is something we can see in society today. Constructive criticism is helpful to the secure individual, but if the negative behaviour arises from a state of insecurity then reestablishing a state of security is a prerequisite to being able to change for the better, and in this case criticism can be counterproductive.

While idealistic criticism leads to insecurity and retaliatory hostility, idealism itself is driven by insecurity. The more someone doubts their own worth the more addicted they may become to “proving” their worth by championing “the good”. If we have a lot of psychological room then we can think about all the shades of grey regarding any moral issue and we can recognise the underlying psychological issues which need to be addressed if we want an improvement in people’s behaviour. But if we are so insecure - so backed into a corner by our own dark side - that only a simplistic division between good and evil is possible and no strategy more complex than an insistence on the good can find a hold in our mind - then idealism is the result.

Which brings us back to the idea of trying to educate young men out of their “toxic masculinity”. This reminds me of the Chinese Cultural Revolution or the discipline and “consciousness raising” approach of religious cults. Education should be about giving people facts and tools, not trying to shape intentions and personalities. The shaping of intentions and personalities should be an autonomous process. We may be able to “educate” people to be submissive to our demands, but a society of such people is a dictatorship waiting to happen. If we want a truly healthy society it needs to be made up of individuals with the kind of integrity which can only grow naturally.

The concept of unconditional self-acceptance is very simple. At its heart is the idea that thoughts and feelings, in and of themselves, do no harm, but, no matter how apparently sick, may be steps on the way to a healthier mode of being. It isn’t an attempt to “educate” anyone out of anything as it is offered as a tool to be used only if the individual finds it useful.

Carl Jung said : "The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers." If we apply this to those in our society who are given to violence, we are left with the question : “What is the nature of the violence which has been done to them?” Is it not possible to conceive that that violence is/was a lack of acceptance of some kind - a message conveyed by those around them (from parents to peers to religious teachers) that they were, in some essential way, unacceptable? Is it not the same kind of invisible violence that drives so many to suicide?

Of course here we find another negative feedback loop. The more violent acts a person commits the further recedes the possibility of the acceptance - both from themselves and others - they might require to lose the violent impulse.

It may be easy to lose hope for our society - torn as it is between those whose insecurity makes them cling to various forms of idealism and those who are driven to hostility by the wounds that that idealism’s lack of acceptance inflicts upon them (neither of those positions being mutually exclusive). But each of us who learns - through unconditional self-acceptance - to achieve reconciliation between the warring factions of our own psyche is an island of strength in a sea of weak and frightened individuals. The advantage lies with us.

Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 17

The Sex Object

I think Griffith is right about our species becoming neotenous - having childlike features - because of a selection for such features by males based on our association of those features with the neurosis-free loving child. But I disagree with his idea that this mutated into a selection of women with such features based on their appeal to some desire in us to destroy innocence.

He believes that men now use sex to attack innocence. A youthful appearance in a woman gives the appearance of innocence, so this attracts us to want to “fuck” her, i.e. destroy her innocence. But women are not really innocent. It is only the appearance of innocence which attracts us. And women, being in need of ego-reinforcement, cultivate this appearance of innocence - the sex object - in order to be able to feel good about their ability to attract such attention. And they come to believe the illusion and think they actually are innocent. And the more alienated we become the younger the sex object has to look, hence the skinny adolescent look in fashion-models which young women then try to emulate and become anorexic or bulimic.

I don’t think it works like that.

Armouring is the key to understanding the sex object. While some men become so insecure that they become violently misogynistic and rape women (and I don’t know that this has anything to with whether they look innocent or not), I don’t think that most men are attracted to women by a desire to destroy something in them. What we want is love. The neotenous features may be one thing which triggers in us a primal sense that a woman is unusually loving. This is a pre-rational response. I’m sure that most of us, if we thought about it, would admit that there is no guarantee that a pretty woman will be more loving, in fact some of them are egotistical because of their beauty. The aim though is to be loved. The problem is that armoured individuals have a strong need of love but an inability to return it because of the inflexibility of their armouring. Since men are often more armoured than women, the situation of men leaving a string of broken hearts behind them, is perhaps more common, though there are plenty of promiscuous women as well.

And the armouring is essentially conditions for feeling good about ourselves, so for some men the way of proving themselves is to sleep with lots of women, and the more beautiful they are the more impressed they can feel with themselves and the more impressed other men will be with them. So “conquest” can be a factor in armoured sexual behaviour, either in men or in women. And the cultivated sex object self can be a major part of the armouring of women for the same reason.

But, since there is no innocent genetic orientation to selflessness to be attacked, nothing very terrible is happening in human sexual behaviour except that we are experiencing great distress at times because of our inability to drop the armouring and love each other.

In an armour free world there would be nothing wrong with living the free love philosophy advocated by the hippies, because it is not the sharing of tender erotic pleasure which is damaging (quite the opposite, it is powerfully healing). What has always been the problem with our sexual lives is that we couldn’t come together without being bruised and battered by collision with each other’s armour.

It should also be said that an intense fixation on a particular standard of beauty is a symptom of neurosis. The less neurotic we are the more we open up to seeing beauty and erotic appeal in other body types. Fashion models may mostly be very skinny and neotenous, but the world of fashion is dominated by uptight neurotic individuals. In real life most of us have a far wider range of body-types and ages which we can find attractive. I think that, as we become less neurotically armoured, the range of individuals to whom we might feel sexually attracted opens up. What focuses and restricts our sexuality is our fixations and inhibitions. For instance I consider that the only reason I’m heterosexual rather than bisexual is that I retain an inhibition against sexual desire for another man. It is not because heterosexuality is a natural state.

As for eating disorders, I have a theory about how they may sometimes come about. A young girl is growing up. Her father’s mode of interaction with her has been fairly steady. But then she begins to develop sexually. This is liable to make her sexually desirable to her father. This makes him uncomfortable, so he avoids looking at her body. The girl, not understanding why her father now seems repulsed by her body, thinks there is something wrong with it - that she is getting fat. She starves herself. She desperately wants to feel good about herself. But the more she starves herself, the more everyone is repulsed by her, the more she thinks she is fat. It’s a negative feedback loop. I think this would be greatly helped by a more sex positive attitude. Encouraging masturbation as a way of showing direct appreciation for the body itself might take the emphasis away from an obsession with its appearance.

Homosexuality

It is in his ideas on homosexuality that Griffith really goes off the deep end. First he has to explain why young women are less innocent than young boys. “Incidentally, since women are now highly adapted to sex it mean a virgin is not truly a virgin, she is not truly an innocent girl and thus completely ‘attractive’, because all women are now instinctively aware of ‘sex’.” So I suppose that is why women like sex, because they are born corrupted, after 2 million years of their ancestors having to put up with being fucked until they liked it! Then he says : “…if a man is extremely hurt and corrupted in his infancy and childhood, when he becomes sexually mature he will not be naive enough to believe that women are still innocent and will not, therefore, find them sexually attractive. The last bastion of ‘attractive’ innocence for such men is younger men, because they are not as exposed to sexual destruction as women have historically been. To explain the effeminate mannerisms particular to male homosexuality, if you have had your soul, which is your core strength, destroyed in childhood, then taking on the extremely difficult male role of having to fight against the ignorance of the soulful, idealistic world would be an untenable position that would make the female position of not having to fight a much more preferential option.”

First of all, what is this about women not being sexually attractive to us if we know they aren’t innocent? Why do so many of us guys like jacking off while watching women act like total whores, if a belief in their innocence is necessary for us to be sexually attracted to them?

Secondly, who says that homosexual desire acts only in the direction of youth? Many older homosexuals have plenty of lust for each other.

Many homosexuals are effeminate (as are some heterosexuals), but is being effeminate really an easier path? Quentin Crisp was a very effeminate homosexual who was repeatedly bashed for this behaviour, yet he proudly continued with it. And Francis Bacon had to take the horse whip. Often, far from being a cowardly behaviour, effeminacy has been a brave defiance of the pressure to play the macho patriarchal game. The cowardice (insecurity) lies with the armoured males who are so threatened by this behaviour that they feel the need to violently punish it.

My view is that we have an inborn potential for bisexuality. The bonobos practice bisexuality. It makes sense. We are motivated by the pleasure principle. Rubbing genitals with either gender can produce such pleasurable feelings. Some of us do grow up to be bisexual. Others adapt to the social expectation to be heterosexual. And others fixate on homosexuality because of an encounter with homophobia in our society. Because our society is less tolerant of same-sex desires, someone who feels such desires, perhaps, initially, as well as heterosexual desires, may fixate on those desires because they are something about which they are in need of finding acceptance. In the same way, a little boy who is punished for dressing up in his sister’s dress may grow up to be a transvestite, because his psyche has fixated on an instance of withheld acceptance.

I may be heterosexual myself, but I love homosexuality. I love homosexual culture and even homosexual pornography. Seeing people sharing their own particular kind of pleasure and expressing themselves freely in their own unique way fills me with joy.

Snuff Movies

He says : “However, because there has been no honesty about the existence of the different levels of upset and alienation amongst humans, they [relatively innocent girls] can be deceived by men who are much more upset and, therefore, much more sexually advanced down ‘the rungs of the perversion ladder’ (where one is holding hands, two is kissing, three is touching her breast, etc, etc, etc, to the extent that some people became so horribly psychologically sick and perverted that they derived excitement from watching ‘snuff movies’ of people being killed — yes, sexual depravity is an accurate measure of alienation).”

Oh, dear. Better not hold hands with anyone or the next thing you know the pair of you will be watching snuff movies together!

By the way, nobody has ever actually found a real snuff movie. It was a myth created by reactionary anti-pornography campaigners.

Remember Titus 1:15 :

“To the pure, all things are pure, but to those who are corrupted and do not believe, nothing is pure. In fact, both their minds and consciences are corrupted.”

How corrupted must somebody be if even holding hands is not pure to them?

Women in Tights

He says : “…it’s not commonly acknowledged that suits were invented for men so they could hide their big guts, while dresses were invented for women so they could accentuate their waists and breasts and conceal their big bottoms and thighs, but, while men still wear coats, everywhere in Western society now women have forsaken skirts for trousers, and even tights, as if their role of inspiring men with their beauty no longer matters. This is, in truth, yet another illustration of women’s lack of awareness of the nature of the struggle that the human race has been involved in — and of the irresponsibility of feminism, which encouraged women not to ‘march with her regiment.’ Women’s role has understandably become unbearable for them but the battle to find understanding still had to be won.”

Well, I don’t know. I get a lot of inspiration out of the sight of a nice juicy female bottom clad in tights. Thank you feminists!

The Ultimate Thought

He quotes George Seaver : “The ultimate thought, the thought which holds the clue to the riddle of life’s meaning and mystery, must be the simplest thought conceivable, the most natural, the most elemental, and therefore also the most profound.”

He says of himself : “Basically, I learnt to trust in and take guidance from my truthful instinctive self or soul. I learnt to think honestly, free of alienated, intellectual bullshit, and all the answers, all the insights that I have found, and there are many hundreds of them, a breakthrough insight in almost every paragraph, were found this way. I have so perfected the art of thinking truthfully and thus effectively that you can put any problem or question in front of me to do with human behaviour and I can get to the bottom of it, answer and solve it.”

If this is true, why is his writing so convoluted and his “explanations” of human behaviour so reliant on crude stereotypes, which just happen to conform to the norms of the society in which he grew up? I think he is too afraid to really look at modern social culture in detail for fear that his precious “innocence” will be contaminated. That isn’t strength. That is weakness. That isn’t security. That is insecurity.

I’m not a biologist, but is not my writing about psychology simpler and more illuminating of the world than his?

If I were going to take the challenge set by Seaver I would express the simplest thought this way - Criticism makes us worse. Acceptance makes us better.

Griffth takes a whole unwieldy book to provide his solution to the problem of the human condition. Mine only takes 8 words. Who has the better ability to think simply, clearly and insightfully?

I have no genetic program for selflessness in me. I don’t feel the suffering of the people of the world. I don’t feel the suffering of the animals. I don’t feel any of that. My interest is entirely in my own well-being. But my well-being, my capacity to experience all of life’s pleasures, is dependent on the psychological healing of the world. I don’t feel others suffering, but it would make me very happy to see that suffering healed. To see the depressed smile again. To see the lonely find love. To see the animals and plants coming back. To see the sickness of shame lifted from the bliss of the erotic. I want to live in a world free from from all condemning idealism. A world where everyone is free to be as they want to be.

Am I being honest? I leave it for you to decide. Do I hide my shortcomings? Do I hide those things about myself that another person might criticise?

Things become very complicated when you begin to use words to hide behind instead of to reveal yourself.

Read Part 18

Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 6

The Test of Experience

He quotes Albert Einstein : “Truth is what stand the test of experience.” I love that quote. This is the test I apply with my own tentative speculations. But we should always remember the history of cults, conspiracy theories and fanaticisms. Our capacity to be persuaded by something which later turns out not to have been true is fairly high. What I look for in myself and others is the fluid and spontaneous application of a would be insight. If ideas can be used easily and flexibly to illuminate phenomena and can be assimilated relatively effortlessly and used in independent ways by others, then all bodes well for their soundness. We should be wary of ideas which require a hard sell to get people interested, repetitive exposure to be assimilated and are applied to phenomena in a simplistic way which relies on regurgitating the rhetoric of the originator. All of these things are suggestive of dogma.

What Griffith’s ideas have not done for me is to stand the test of experience. Since I rejected them and began to follow my own path my mental health (which had troubled me since adolescence) has improved to the point that I haven’t experienced any depression or other symptoms of mental illness for at least eight years. And I have found an explanation for the human condition which can be shared fairly simply. I know how accountable I find this explanation, but readers will arrive at their own conclusions.

The  “Deaf Effect”

Griffith explains his need to repeat himself and the fact that people find it so hard to really take in what he is saying by referring to what he calls “the deaf effect”. He claims that the subject of the human condition has been so daunting, so off-limits to our brains, that we have had to protectively block it out with denial. In reading his books our brains sense we are being asked to enter forbidden territory and therefore they put up defences which interfere with comprehension.

As I’ve said previously, I think there is some truth to this in the sense that his books are drenched in extreme idealism and since idealism is corroding of our self-acceptance, we may well try to block it out.

He says that watching the videos on the World Transformation Movement’s website will help with this process, because the sight of someone calmly talking about this forbidden territory will reassure us that the danger of going into it has been addressed. It may be true that watching the videos will help readers to feel less defensive, but the argument that it would not be possible to talk about the topic so calmly unless one had achieved full understanding of it and thus made it safe is not true. The calmness would also be there if the speaker had an unshakeable faith in a dogmatic unfounded explanation of that subject. Whether understanding has been achieved has to be judged according to the explanatory ability of the theory, not by the calmness or self-confidence of the person espousing it.

If we learn the habit of unconditional self-acceptance then we will be able to read any book without any fear that anything in it will undermine us - thus we will be able to see it clearly and without bias and assess what it does or doesn’t have to offer us clearly.

One thing that worries me about Griffith’s work is that it contains two principle ingredients :

1. Exposure to extreme idealism. This is what Griffith describes as its “necessarily confronting” content.

2. A defence for our non-ideal condition and behaviour.

If exposure to the first ingredient undermines our self-acceptance, what is the chance that we will be fussy about the accountability of the latter. It may be a case of “any port in a storm.”

So, while I feel that Griffith’s work is a useful exploration and forces us to address serious issues, there is a danger that, if it is not a truthful explanation of the human condition (and I don’t believe that it is), it may be acting like a kind of conceptual parasite fastening onto readers by virtue of their insecurities about their own worth. Does this “information” offer genuine liberation for them or only a way of “proving” their worth through their faith in Griffith’s theory and support for it’s dissemination (what Griffith calls “holding the key aloft”.)

A Praising Review?

Griffith quotes this passage from an Amazon review of his book A Species in Denial :

“tears stream down my face, so overcome have I been by this book. It is the greatest book on the planet, no wait, in the universe. In fact it is the greatest anything in the universe”

It is interesting to look at the full review from which this extract is taken. At the time there were a number of rapturous five star reviews of the book on Amazon, including some by members of Griffith’s organisation. Am I wrong to interpret Beta’s review as a parody of the praising reviews? If so, why does Griffith’s seem oblivious to this?

Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters, 1796-97

Griffith interprets the title of this painting as meaning that “reasoning at a very deep level” confronts us with depressing thoughts about the issue of the human condition. This seems to me to be a twisting of meaning to suit his purpose. “The sleep of reason” clearly refers, not to “reasoning at a very deep level”, but to the cessation of reasoning. When we sleep our reason shuts down and we may have nightmares. Likewise, in waking life, we use reason to defend us against that which we fear, and those fears (“monsters”) may overwhelm us if we let our reason slip. This might actually fit in well with Griffith’s argument that much intellectual activity, including many scientific theories, act as “evasions” of things we are afraid to face, but the way in which he uses it to illustrate the issue of resignation from the struggle to find understanding of the human condition seems inappropriate in spite of the fact that Goya’s painting looks as if it could be depicting a depressed individual.

Resignation

There is no doubt that most of us have a pretty rough transit through adolescence. Griffith puts this down to what he calls “resignation”. The idea is that we are born with this instinctive orientation toward selfless behaviour, but we are born into a world in which people don’t obey those rules. Why? The wrongness of it all is a mystery to us. Towards the end of childhood we might express our frustration and confusion by lashing out. After that we realise that that is no use. We have to find some understanding of this state of affairs. During adolescence we go through the agonising process of trying to do this while gradually realising that the problem is now inside ourselves as well. Resignation is the final reluctant decision to give up the fight to understand, in order to avoid suicidal depression, and adopt the false alienated existence of most adults.

The way I look at the same process is that maturation from infancy to adolescence involves increasing repression. The rebelliousness in later childhood is an attempt to keep releasing our feelings of frustration rather than bottling them up, but generally we are made aware that we have to bottle them up to some extent to fit in with society. And we are given our moral values. The war between our frustrations and our conscience tends to have a corrosive effect on our self-acceptance. We may well be trying to make sense of this, and of the behaviour of others, especially adults.

And during adolescence our sexuality comes fully on stream. Griffth downplays the significance of this, claiming that talk of “puberty blues” is an evasive excuse for what is really happening. Puberty he says “has been going on since animals first became sexual.” But this is itself an evasion of the fact that fear-based sexual repression has been the norm for our species since the dawn of civilisation if not before. The enjoyment of erotic pleasure is a basic part of our biology. Foetuses sometimes masturbate in the womb. It seems likely that our proto-human ancestors were like the bonobos, engaging freely and indiscriminately in erotic activity with their fellows. But, as our self-acceptance was undermined by the arrival of idealism, we became insecure and jealous. This meant that we had to exercise restraint on our expression of our erotic desires in order to maintain the stability of our newly neurotic society. The more discipline-based, hierarchical and patriarchal our society became, the more of a threat was posed by the erotic. What happens during adolescence is that our sexual straitjackets are applied by the adults around us. Our erotic impulses have to be contained lest they cause discomfort to these neurotic adults. This can be pretty stressful. I remember at high school, the natural desire of we young boys to enjoy the erotic sight of naked women in magazines was treated by the teachers at our Catholic school as a kind of sickness. We were encouraged to feel shame about this aspect of our natural innocent biological nature.

Unaccountable shame about masturbation was an early symptom of my troubled adolescence. I wasn’t told that I shouldn’t masturbate, in fact my parents had given me a sex education book to read earlier which made it clear that it was a healthy natural activity. I suspect the shame I felt could not so easily be reached by this rational explanation, but that I was picking up on and absorbing the sense of shame that my fellow students and my teachers felt about their own masturbatory activities.

I did ask myself about the human condition. Why did we spend so much effort on seeking wealth, fame, power, or whatever, when, at base, what we most wanted was to be loved? All of those pursuits were poor ways to find love, but if we all decided to love each other we could be happy. Something seemed to be blocking that from happening, but what?

Next I developed an obsession that I was going to gouge out my own eyes. Was this Oedipal? Oedipus put out his eyes. Was it because I read in the New Testament “And if your eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away.”? After all, I was ashamed of my lusts, and looking at sexy women was what inflamed those lusts. I don’t know.

The next major stage in my troubled adolescence was when, after a bout of the flu, I had a thought about killing my baby niece. This was the time when I really had to battle with the human condition. Was I evil? Was I a monster, that I could even think of killing an innocent baby?

In Griffith’s scheme this would be me encountering the inevitable evidence of the “upset” caused in my ego by the blind criticism of my genetic conscience. My resentment at the criticism of my innocent conscience made me want to attack innocence in the world around me, in this case in the form of an infant.

That is not what was happening. Selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the suffering individual. I was run down because of the flu and the stress of trying to reconcile my natural instincts - including my erotic desires - to society’s restrictions and judgements while maintaining a functioning level of self-acceptance. Being in this state naturally made me selfish and desirous of the attention of those around me. But the baby was getting all the attention. So I fantasised briefly about killing the baby. At first the thought carried little emotional weight. But then I began to think that it was evidence that I was a bad person. It began to undermine my self-acceptance. The more I fixated on this unacceptable thought, the more power it gained over me. I was transfixed by fear and came to feel I might actually act upon it. So what was going on was not a relationship between my conscious mind and some genetic orientation to selflessness. What was happening was that a conceptual negative feedback loop had arisen as a result of my intolerance towards my selfishness and a harmless violent fantasy.

What I needed as an adolescent wasn’t some grand story about the heroic nature of the human race’s need to defy the unjust condemnation of it’s genetic orientation toward selflessness during the search for liberating understanding. What I needed was a more sex-positive attitude in the adults around me and an understanding that thoughts and feelings, no matter how anti-social, in and of themselves do no harm and should be accepted unconditionally.

It is true that we tend to adopt a false self during adolescence. This is our armouring brought about by the erosion of our generalised self-acceptence and the dependence of what is left on the maintenance of a fixed self-image. For instance, in females, this is the time when they may adopt a sex object self, where the ego-reinforcement (condition of self-acceptance) which comes from attracting the sexual interest of others becomes more important than the healthy enjoyment of erotic experience itself.

Read Part 7

Untying the Sexual Knot

How did something as natural and enjoyable as sex become something about which we may feel shame and even something we may use to express hostility to others?

To examine this question it seems best to consider my own experience.

My mother once told me that I used to masturbate when I was a baby. Of course I don't remember that, but this comment did perhaps make some sense of a fleeting thought I had when I first rediscovered masturbation at about the age of thirteen. "This feels like being a baby again," I thought, but I didn't know why.

But in the years before I rediscovered masturbation I had a strong interest and attraction to the opposite sex. I remember at the age of about ten enjoying seeing a scantily clad woman on television, and while taking a swimming lesson I felt an ecstatic feeling of excitement when I bumped into my busty young teacher and felt her soft breasts pressed against me.

I liked to play games with my sister and brother or my sister's school friends which involved taking our clothes off. And I enjoyed acting out fantasies about accidentally on-purpose revealing my body.

At some point I bought a cartoon magazine with risque jokes and pictures of sexy women. My mother told me it was O.K. for me to look at something like this as long as I didn't hide the fact that I was. For me this would later be a dilemma as, when I got old enough to buy Playboy, I wanted to but didn't because I was too embarrassed to look at it openly.

When I rediscovered masturbation I enjoyed it immensely, but then for a while I began to feel a deep sense of shame about it. For about six months I didn't do it. Eventually I spoke to my parents and was reassured by them that masturbation was normal and healthy. Once I went back to masturbating I did it a lot. I would watch television at night masturbating the whole time, always hoping to see girls in bikinis or preferably naked.

My first two years of high school were spent at a Catholic school. My fellow pupils would often bring soft porn magazines to school and would delight in holding up the centrefolds for me to see. I think they hoped to embarrass me. I was embarrassed and so I didn't respond, but I loved it. I wished I had the courage to flaunt authority and look at porn magazines at school. But the teachers came down hard on this kind of thing. I remember one of them warning that we should be aware of how easy it is for someone to spread their addiction to this kind of material to others.

By year 11 I was in a different school, a secular one this time. Some of my friends would read sex novels and one day one of them was caught in English class writing an erotic story about a family who engage in incestuous orgies. He was told by his teacher that he should not only not write something like that, but that he shouldn't even think it.

I never developed any relationships with girls. I felt a strong attraction to them, but was too timid to act upon it.

As I moved into adulthood my sexuality was exclusively directed towards masturbating to sexy images and fantasies. And I continued to feel shame about how much time I spent on this activity which seemed to be a social taboo.

So where did the sense of shame come from? Not, presumably, from the home environment, as my parents were fairly relaxed and accepting about these things. But what I noticed in the school environment was that people had strong sexual desires like my own, but they were ashamed of them. The boys would joke about masturbation, but nobody would acknowledge that they did it. And the teachers often seemed frightened by the sexual, which could only be the case if their own desires were frighteningly strong.

It is helpful to put aside all our prejudices and look simply at what happens as our sexuality develops.

We are born unconditionally loving and uninhibitedly sensual beings. We are affectionate and like touching and being touched, and we bond closely with our family.

At puberty genital functioning is added to the mix. We start to have sexual feelings. Our strongest initial sexual attraction is liable to be to members of our own family. We have no taboos. Taboos have to be learned. And we live intimately with our family.

Our parents, however, do have a taboo against incest. As our bodies develop, they may feel sexual attraction to us, but they recognise that this needs to be curtailed, and also that our expression of our innocent sexuality needs to be curtailed lest it lead to problems in a society characterised by sexual repression and armouring. The degree of sensitivity with which this curtailing of our original innocent sexuality is managed may determine the level of our own repression, our own armouring, during adulthood. It is important to remember that the young person's incestuous desires are an expression of love. Love is open spontaneous honest communication. If we feel sexual attraction towards someone then affectionately expressing those feelings is a part of love in practice. It is important that a curtailing of innocent sexuality is not interpreted by a young person as a rejection of their love.

When we are a child we take a lot of mistreatment from adults and we are very resilient to this, but what eventually wounds us so deeply is the rejection of our love by adults. All of us are God when we are born, we come into this world like Jesus did, wanting to love away the problems of the world, but at some point it will become too much for us. We will be spiritually crucified by a world of adult's who refuse to believe that they deserve our love. Our sexuality develops within this context.

In my case, at about the age of 16, I developed an obsession with the idea that I might gouge out my own eyes. In looking back and wondering why, it occurs to me that when someone is ashamed of something, they won't look us in the eyes. If a sense was growing in me that my fellow students and my teachers were ashamed of themselves, and particularly ashamed of their sexual feelings, perhaps I started to think, on some level : "If you are so ashamed for me to see you, perhaps it would be easier for you if I were to tear out my own eyes."

This is similar to what can happen to adolescent girls and boys who become troubled by the fact that some adults are suddenly too ashamed to look at their bodies, and so they, too, become ashamed of their bodies and punish them with starvation or cutting.

If we are to manage sexuality in a way which does not leave such scars, we need to distinguish between innocent sexuality and armoured sexuality, that is the form of sexuality which grows out of the sense of shame with which our elders may contaminate us.

It is innocent to enjoy sensual pleasures. It is innocent to enjoy genital pleasures. It is innocent to want to be naked. It is innocent to want to see other people naked. It is innocent to be curious about other's sexual behaviour. It is innocent to feel sexually attracted to our own relatives. It is innocent to be sexually attracted to adolescents.

Armoured sexuality grows out of the fear of any of these feelings either in ourselves or in others. The passive extreme of armoured sexuality is frigidity or impotence, where sexual feelings are entirely deadened. The active extreme is aggressive sexuality driven by the need to attack innocence. This is what we term "lust" and is considered a sin because it is a form of selfishness not a form of love.

We cannot truly love others as long as our sexuality is armoured. Such armouring is antagonistic to openness, spontaneity and honesty. When we open up to love erotic feelings become stronger and repressed taboo desires rise to the surface. But there is no need to fear such feelings as they do not require being acted upon unless to do so seems appropriate to us.

You can also find this post on the How to Be Free forum here. You may find further discussion of it there.

Fantasies and Sexual Healing

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.

Anorexia, Armouring and Objectification

Adolescence is a very emotionally difficult time for most people. Severe depression and suicide among teens is on the increase.

The reason why this time in our lives is so difficult and distressing is that it is the time we begin to feel the pressure to put on our masks and adopt the bullshit game of adulthood. Never again, we may feel, will we be able to truly be ourselves. This is a time when image comes to take precedence over experience. And, as R. D. Laing puts it, "To adapt to this world the child abdicates its ecstasy."

At the time of puberty, our capacity for sexual pleasure becomes very important to us. But during adolescence a change tends to occur, particularly for girls, in which the body's power to attract sexual attention from others comes to supersede in importance for the individual its capacity to experience sexual and other forms of pleasure.

For boys this can also be true, but what is often more important for males is the image of being "cool" or strong. In the game of adulthood there can only be winners and losers, and the maintenance of a viable self-image requires either the invulnerability of the winner or a cultivated air of indifference about whether or not one is perceived as a loser.

This is armouring, a rigid emotional construction which has the purpose of protecting us from threats both internal and external. The problem with this armouring is that it ends up becoming more of a threat to our wellbeing than any of the things against which it is intended to protect us. We need to convince the world that we are sexy or strong or cool so that we can feel good about ourselves, but we wouldn't feel so bad about ourselves if it weren't for the fact that we know that this front is a hollow lie.

What characterises childhood is spontaneity. We do and we experience, and think little about how it will be perceived by others. We are unselfconscious. We lose this when we reach adolescence and it has to do with more than the onset of acne.

One particular problem in which the devastation of this process can be seen in a very concrete physical way is in the condition known as anorexia nervosa. This is a form of obsessive compulsive disorder in which the sufferer is unable to accept their own body. (In other forms of OCD it is an inability to accept certain thoughts or emotions which lead to anxiety and obsessional thinking and behaviour.) While this condition sometimes effects adolescent boys and also some adults (particularly those in the entertainment industry) I'll concentrate here on the issues relating to the majority of sufferers who are teenage girls.

Following puberty a girl's body begins to develop in ways which indicate sexual maturity. She grows breasts, etc. This can lead to a dramatic change in the way some adults look at her. Some adult males will begin to feel uncomfortable about these changes and tend to avert their eyes from parts of her body. Unaware of the imperative for adults to repress their sexuality and, in particular, to fight against any possibility of being sexually drawn to someone under the age of consent, she may conclude that this avoidance is evidence that there is something wrong with her body, that it is in some way repellant.

Because we have a particular cultural obsession with weight loss and the concept that we have to be slim to be sexy, a natural conclusion for this girl to jump to is that if her body is repellant it must be repellant because it is too fat. So she starts to dramatically restrict her eating. Because she is relying on others to give her her idea of whether or not she is repellant and she assumes that to be repellant is to be fat, she will become fixated on the idea that she will know when she is no longer fat by whether or not men look at her body with pleasure. Of course this doesn't happen. The thinner she gets the more her body genuinely repels others. She is caught in a self-reinforcing downward spiral that all too often leads to death.

Starvation has a strange effect on the mind. It breaks down the ability to conform the inner world of the imagination to the evidence about the outside world collected by the senses. Historically mystics have used fasting as a way to disconnect with the external world and get in touch with the perceptions of the deep unconscious. This can lead to visions (i.e. hallucinations) in which the individual cannot distinguish between something which is happening outside of themselves and something going on inside. Lack of nutrition is not the only thing which can have this effect. Certain kinds of extreme emotional distress can also lead to this phenomena in the form of what we call psychotic episodes. And drugs can have this effect also. But the point is that the anorexia sufferer comes to actually see herself as fat when she looks in the mirror because the commitment to that theory about how people respond to her body has taken precedence over the mind's need to accurately process visual information and the chemical changes brought on by starvation make it easier for the hallucination to occur.

Like other forms of mental illness the prevailing approach to treatment for anorexia is through attempts to control the symptoms rather than look deeply at what is really taking place. Very often when we try too hard to control something we only succeed in making it worse. If an individual is suffering from low self-esteem then forcing them to eat when they don't want to, while it may end up keeping them alive, can only have the effect of making them feel worse about themselves, as being forced to submit to another's will is always humiliating and disempowering.

The answer to any form of obsessive compulsive disorder is to learn to accept ourselves unconditionally. A powerful tool for learning to love our bodies is to return to their capacity to give us pleasure. Masturbation is a powerful therapy for lack of body acceptance. And, no doubt, gentle affectionate touching and gazing from loved ones can help an individual to feel that their body is not something disgusting.

Some blame the media for anorexia. Or perhaps a tendency in men to view women as sex objects. But these are superficial assessments. If the magazines weren't full of pictures of skinny sex symbols then insecure individuals would find something else to feel inferior about. And the sex object comes from within as much as without. The sex object self is armouring.

And here a distinction has to be made between sexual desire and objectification. If a man feels attracted to a woman because she has large breasts or a woman to a man because he has a muscular torso this is not objectification. Objectification is what happens when someone is valued for only one thing and everything else about them is considered irrelevant. It is quite possible to love a woman's big breasts while also admiring her intelligence, her courage and her skill at badminton. Sexual desires need not dictate how we relate to each other. As Betty Rollin said : "Scratch most feminists and underneath there is a woman who longs to be a sex object.  The difference is that is not all she wants to be."

While men are sometimes sexually objectified, more often the objectification of men takes other forms. In wartime men have often been used as cannon fodder, valued only as weapons and not as full human beings. And some employers treat their workers, male and female, as nothing more than tools for the production of wealth, like so many robots. When we interact with someone only on the basis of what we can get out of them, that is objectification.

When it comes to the relationship between the sexes it is not erotic desire which is the problem, but armouring. If a woman wants acceptance and ego reinforcement from men so desperately that she betrays her true self and does things she despises, then this will have a corrosive effect on her emotional wellbeing. But if she only does what conforms to her view of what is right and what gives her pleasure, then this is healthy. Pleasure, if it is not gained in a way which brings physical damage, is healing. If we look at the example of the sex industry we can see individuals who go on a downward spiral and we also see those who thrive in this world, the difference is whether they are following the beat of their own drummer or are driven by some form of desperation (poverty, addiction, insecurity) to degrade themselves by doing something they don't really want to do.

For men the problem is the need to maintain the front of strength or cool. This amounts to a kind of self-objectification, a reduction of one's self to the ability to conform to an image. It is this which leads to misogyny. For a heterosexual man to feel sexually attracted to very many women is a sign of health, but for a man to end up feeling that "a woman is just a life-support system for a vagina" or "if they didn't have a vagina you'd throw rocks at them", is not healthy, and yet it is unfortunately prevalent enough. This kind of misogynistic attitude is a product of armouring. Sexual desire is the armoured man's Achilles Heal. It is the chink in that armour. For years he has had to stifle his vulnerable, spontaneous child self, and pretend that the armour is all that there is to him. But when he sees the soft flesh of a woman he is transported back to the erotic feelings of early adolescence before he donned the armour. His emotional self-discipline is under threat. Fear comes out as hatred. And often, even when he does have sex with the woman, he has armoured sex – perfunctory or even brutal sex – which denies a true erotic experience not only to his partner, but also to himself. Orgasmic sex is too much like that ecstasy from which he abdicated so long ago. He dare not give in to homesickness for that paradise, and so sex becomes an empty thing.

But, in truth, we can let the armour dissolve. We can return to that long lost paradise. This is not some kind of regression for the immature or cowardly. To rediscover our ability to love, to be playful, to be spontaneous and full of joy, doesn't mean we can't, at the same time, be responsible, brave and intelligent problem solvers, after all it is that armour which, paradoxically, makes us so vulnerable and which most impedes the effective operation of our intelligence.