Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 16

Mistaking Satan for God

God and Satan are two mythological figures. God is our personification of the creative principle of the universe, which in our own species is manifested as love. Satan is seen as the originator of evil behaviour, and yet he is recognised as having come from God, as having been one of God’s “fallen angels”.

Our capacity for reason is clearly a product of the creative principle of the universe (God), but it brought with it the distinction between “good” and “evil” which led to the destructive mind virus we call “idealism”. Love requires unconditional acceptance, but idealism made our acceptance conditional and thus gradually eroded our capacity for love and sowed the seeds of conflict.

If idealism is what brought evil into the world, then Satan is a mythological way of referring to idealism.

In our increasingly insecure state we recognised that we were out of harmony with the theme of life - i.e. love, but by feeling guilty about that, by giving in to Satan’s whispered suggestion that embracing idealism was the way back to harmony with God, rather than recognising that God works precisely by refusing to judge or to expect perfection, we went down a dark path, one in which we would quickly come to adopt Satan as our God.

People often wonder why there is such a difference between the judgemental, jealous, condemning God of the Old Testament, and the forgiving God spoken of by Jesus and of which it is said : “God is love.”

This is because the God which cast Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, who destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, who drowned the world in a flood, etc., was really Satan. Of course these are mythological events, but the point is that they are stories about a harsh judger of humanity, and that judger of humanity has been what William Blake referred to as “the accuser”, i.e. the originator of destructive behaviour, the enemy of the real God (love). And to the degree that we have worshipped that God we have been Satan worshippers.

Blake expressed this in the Epilogue to his poem Gates of Paradise :

"To The Accuser Who is The God of This World
Truly My Satan thou art but a Dunce
And dost not know the Garment from the Man
Every Harlot was a Virgin once
Nor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan
Tho thou art Worshipd by the Names Divine 
Of Jesus & Jehovah thou art still
The Son of Morn in weary Nights decline
The lost Travellers Dream under the Hill."

If we can throw off idealism (the habit of standing in judgement of ourselves or others) then there is no need to worship God. We can be God, we can be love personified.

Patriarchy

Griffith’s view that we have a genetic instinct towards selflessness which criticised our attempts to self-manage, means that he sees the attempt to find understanding of the world and ourselves as “a battle against the ignorance of our instinctive self”. Because this was “a battle” he feels that it naturally fell to men, and because women are biologically nurturers, and thus aligned with “our instinctive self”, it brought about a rift between the sexes which required the institution of patriarchy, so that the men could pursue the battle to find understanding with support rather than interference by the women.

I don’t think this is at all what happened. I see no evidence that we have a genetic instinct for selflessness which criticises us. However, as I’ve outlined previously, conflict arising from the requirements of the nurturing role provided by the women and the group protector role provided by the men, would have led to the distinction being made between “good” and “bad” behaviour - aggressive vs. nurturing - and thus the thought virus of idealism came into being.

Armouring is our defence against criticism. Since the men would have been more vulnerable to criticism because theirs was the aggressive role, they had to become more armoured. And it was a negative feedback loop. The more armoured they became the more criticism they were subjected to because of their relative lack of responsiveness and generosity to others.

This situation progressed until society became patriarchal. The armour is a form of control - it protects us against threats from without and within. A lot of repression is involved. A lot is bottled up within the armour. And since we project our inner battles onto the outside world, the more desperately embattled an individual is in their armour, and thus the more self-control they need to keep it from breaking down, the more they also feel the need to control the behaviour of those around them which resonates with that internal threat. And so the most armoured individuals came to exercise control over society. The more embattled the men in charge of a society the more oppressed the women in that society will be. It takes a secure, i.e. relatively armour-free, man to not feel threatened by a woman’s freedom.

I don’t think the need to find understanding, in general, comes into it. Clearly an understanding of our psychology, particularly the relationship between idealistic criticism and armouring, was needed. But I don’t know that men were necessarily in any better position to find that understanding then women. And the search for general understanding is something which can be pursued by anyone with a functioning brain irrespective of their gender.

So I see patriarchy not as a retrospectively justified strategy in the journey toward self-knowledge, rather I see it as a symptom of an unavoidable mental illness which occurred along the way.

Feminism’s critique of patriarchy and defence of a woman’s right to perform any role in society is fundamentally sound. The only problem is that, since the role of patriarchy was as a form of armouring, and armouring is a defence against criticism, feminism didn’t exactly make it easier for men to become less patriarchal. It is the practice of unconditional acceptance (except of destructive behaviour towards others) that makes a world of equality possible.

By contrast, Griffith’s approach to healing is to try to demonstrate that the patriarchal role has been a heroic one, necessary to the salvation of the human race from the human condition, but one which can now disappear because understanding of the human condition has been achieved. But to tell someone they are a hero is surely a reinforcement of their armouring. What heals is to be made to know that one is simply acceptable. It is the difference between trying to repair someone’s self-esteem, which needs always to be maintained, and encouraging them to leave the self-esteem economy altogether.

Sex

According to Griffith : “Unable to explain their behaviour to women, men were left in an untenable situation: they couldn’t just stand there and accept women’s unjust criticism of their behaviour — they had to do something to defend themselves — but because women reproduced the species, men couldn’t kill women the way they destroyed animals, and so instead men violated women’s innocence or ‘honour’  through rape. Men perverted sex, as in ‘fucking’ or destroying, making it discrete from the act of procreation. What was being fucked, violated, destroyed, ruined, degraded or sullied was women’s innocence. The feminist Andrea Dworkin recognised this underlying truth when she wrote that ‘All sex is abuse’.”

Here we see the real irrationality coming out in Griffith’s thinking. Because his own sexual desires are a threat to his “innocent good little boy” persona, he views sex as essentially an “attack on innocence.” Now it is true that women don’t like to have sex, or anything else, forced upon them. That is an attack. But he is assuming here that recreational sex could only occur if it were forced onto women. He is saying that an innocent woman has no desire for erotic pleasure. He talks about ‘honour”, but surely the concept of sexual honour is a product of a sexually repressive society. “A good and proper woman doesn’t want to do those beastly things. She just lays back and thinks of England.” I can imagine that many women will find this attitude insulting. And when he quotes from Andrea Dworkin he fails to point out that she was a lesbian who was molested by a man in a movie theatre at the age of nine.

He says : “Well, sex as humans have been practising it has similarly been extremely offensive to our instinctive self or soul, and has caused the same ‘emotion-induced’ shock to our soul and thus temporary ‘blackout’ in our mind, as this study found : ‘Research suggests that when shown erotic or gory images, the brain fails to process images seen immediately afterward. This phenomenon is known as “emotion-induced blindness.’”

That doesn’t seem terribly significant to me. If we see something which induces a strong emotional reaction in us then our mind remains focussed on that for a while before being able to focus on something else. I’m sure that the degree of this response would be lessened in individuals like myself who are very desensitised to erotic and gory imagery. I don’t think it has anything to do with some sensitive innocent instinctive self. I’m sure that, if you met up with an old friend in the street, it would take you a while, as you walked away after talking to them, to really open up to concentrating on the world around you, because your emotion had drawn your attention away from your environment.

And the degree of disturbance which erotic or gory imagery has on the individual is generally based on how repressed that individual is. If we are repressing a lot of sexual desires within us, then erotic images are liable to be disturbing to us as they resonate with what we are repressing. On the other hand, a child watching the same image would probably view it with untroubled curiosity or amusement, because he or she does not yet have the desires required to resonate with what is seen. And gory footage will be most disturbing to someone who is repressing a lot of anger, as the violence resonates with their repressed feelings of hostility.

He says : Humans don’t remember sexual episodes very well and the reason we don’t is because sex, as currently practised, is a violation of our soul and we don’t want to remember such violation.

I don’t know what evidence he is basing this on. I haven’t had much sex in my life, but I think I remember those episodes better than a lot of other things. My view of the soul and Griffith’s seem quite opposed. I feel that masturbating to pornography is one of the things which nurtures my soul, providing some healing from the soul-crushing repression of the erotic which is the norm in our society.

He goes on : “The main point being made here, however, is that sex became a way of attacking the innocence of women, the result of which was that women’s innocence was oppressed and, to a degree, they tragically came to share men’s upset.”

I think that it is true that women became armoured as a result of macho retaliations to their criticism of men, but I don’t think sex was a driving force in this. As we become armoured, free erotic sex becomes channelled, egotistical and sometimes aggressive sex, but the development of the armouring as a response to criticism is the driving factor, not the sex. In fact, orgasms have a tendency to temporarily release us from our armouring, hence the expression “the little death”, i.e. death of the ego.

Griffith’s attempts to describe and explain human sexual behaviour and psychology are spectacularly off-base, but unfortunately they have the ability to seem credible to some people because they fit with the sexually repressive ideas, often religiously based, which have historically warped our society.

Read Part 17

How Can Erotica Make the World a Better Place?

Kate Winslet as Madeleine LeClerc in Quills (2000) (dir. Philip Kaufman) (based on the play by Doug Wright)

I've just done a guest post as Aussiescribbler (my erotica writing pseudonym) for Naoko Smith's Feminist Erotica Blog. I apply some of the ideas I've expressed here and in my Joe Blow books to the world of erotica as well as to broader issues of sexual desire, anti-social feelings and the need for free social expression of the dark side of our psyche.

The psychological poisons in our souls don’t go away through repression, through cutting off opportunities for their free expression. All that does is to cause these poisons to stay there festering away beneath the surface, becoming more and more dangerous.

Read the rest here.

Fifty Shades of Sexual Liberation

Making large claims based on a small knowledge base is my personal style. So why not analyse the significance of the fastest-selling fiction book in history without having read any of it? I've read plot and character descriptions, mostly from critical reviews, and it seems to me that to explore the mysterious grip a particular fictional work has on the public imagination requires only a basic knowledge of what kind of story it is. The details and the quality of the writing are irrelevant. These might be relevant to someone, such as a publisher, trying to make a decision about whether or not a book will be popular. But if a book already is popular, literary quality is irrelevant to understanding why. One would imagine that most of George Orwell's books were about equally well-written, but it was Animal Farm and 1984 which captured the public imagination because of their themes. This is equally true in the realm of pulp fiction. Nobody claims that Twilight or Fifty Shades of Grey are many hundreds of times better written than books which sell hundreds of times fewer copies. They are simply books which have thematically captured the public imagination. And it is quite likely that the very things for which critics attack them are a major factor in their popularity. What the sophisticate views as a crude and annoying caricature or cliché may come across to the fan as a bold archetype free from irrelevant nuance. And it stands to reason that our response to archetypal characters will depend on our relationship to that archetype in ourselves or in those around us. What attracts one will repel another. Our ability to identify with an archetypal character depends on our own psychological struggle. A man who is insecure in his masculinity may strongly identify with Rambo, while others might find his alpha male arrogance and aggression repellant. What is relevant to analysing the cultural importance of a work of the imagination is that fans respond positively to the character archetypes it presents. And it is that positive response which we have to understand. The imagination is inescapably prophetic. This has nothing to do with talent in writing, characterisation or plotting and it is something which is as true in the world of the pulp novel and the comic book as it is in the world of high class literature, in fact often more so as, in the literary world, a book's value is not judged by how many of us it speaks to. But once we understand the psychological evolution which is taking place in our society we can see it symbolised all around us in our popular culture. The prophets are no longer self-aware individuals crying in the wilderness, they are now pulp novelists and Hollywood scriptwriters probably totally unaware of the role they are playing in showing us the way ahead.

As I understand it Fifty Shades of Grey and its sequels are about a dominant/submissive relationship between a man who is handsome, rich and powerful, but filled with self-loathing, and a timid virginal woman. To me this seems a very powerful metaphor for our neurosis as a species. This neurosis takes an active or passive form. In the active form we feel the compulsion to try to control others who represent to us that which we fear in ourselves. And we strive to accumulate material wealth as a way to compensate for the poverty within, the lack of self-acceptance, the self-loathing. Fearing ourselves we come to fear and need to control others. Feeling worthless we become obsessed with physical evidence of our worth. In the passive form our neurosis is expressed in submission and conformity. Not accepting ourselves we crave acceptance from others, even at the cost of our own degradation.

Because our neurosis originated in a division of labour along gender lines when men took up the task of protecting the tribe against predators while women remained in the nurturing role which had previously been shared by both men and women, men, historically, have tended to express their neurosis in an active form and women in a passive form. This is only a tendency. There have always been many actively neurotic women and passively neurotic men, but the patriarchal society, particularly, has encouraged men to take the active role and women the passive. The current collapse of patriarchy has to some degree decreased discrimination against actively neurotic women and passively neurotic men.

But the fan base for Fifty Shades of Grey is clearly among passively neurotic heterosexual women, therefore the issue with which it deals is the need for a reconciliation with the actively neurotic man. And the method for healing is sex. It is through a sexual relationship that the man is liberated from his self-loathing and the woman from her repression.

To understand the dominant/submissive relationship we have to recognise that our society, having repressed its natural sexuality for over a million years, is deeply frightened by the erotic. The erotic is anarchic. It is subversive. And therefore those of us who seek control over ourselves or over others have much to fear from erotic desire. Our first step in taming ourselves as individuals and as a society was to repress our sexuality. Those who do not do this have historically been referred to as libertines – i.e. they have been viewed as dangerously free individuals. And one of the biggest threats to patriarchy is female sexuality. Male sexuality could be harnessed as a tool of oppression, but female sexuality can only liberate. And for the neurotic society that is something to be feared. Hence, in some cultures, little girls have their clitorises cut off. Patriarchal society is obsessed with the madonna/whore dichotomy – the idea that the “pure", virginal woman (i.e. a woman who has been especially successful in repressing her natural sexuality) is the source of all things good in society while the sexually uninhibited woman is seen as a source of social sickness. Of course the truth is mixed. Breaking the oppressive rules of patriarchy could unleash violent jealousies and promiscuity could spread disease, but prostitutes brought much needed sexual healing to the very society which condemned them.

The archetype of the libertine setting women free from their sexual repression has been around for a long time. In the British underground erotic classic The Way of a Man with a Maid, which was published in about 1908, the rake hero kidnaps a woman, forcibly strips her naked, chains her up in his basement and then tickles her with a feather until she submits to him sexually. She is horrified by this rape, but through it she discovers that sex is loads of fun and so she teams up with the hero and they kidnap another woman. And so it goes as our hero adds to his band of horny bisexual women. But this was a novel of its time. The hero is not portrayed as self-loathing, and the women spend no time agonising over the process of their liberation. There is no angst, just a fantasy about undermining the sexually buttoned-down Victorian society. And the book could not reach a wide audience, but was restricted to only the most decadent among the ruling class.

Sexual dominance and submission, which may be restricted to role play or may include the use of bondage and/or the infliction of pain, is sometimes the intermediary stage of liberation from sexual repression. It is still a form of repression of the erotic, but it creates a context in which the insecure individual may feel protected while expressing or exploring erotic feelings. Those who practise this lifestyle very often explain how it makes them feel safe. In BDSM the erotic is not allowed unrestricted expression. If the erotic is a wild animal, then in BDSM we pat it while it is safely in a cage. The active neurotic still plays a dominant role and the passive neurotic still plays a submissive role. In same cases the role may the reverse of the one the individual enacts socially, but even here adherence to an agreed upon structure is what makes it feel safe.

So Fifty Shades of Grey represents an intermediary stage in our liberation from our neurosis. It is sexual liberation with the training wheels on. But what would complete liberation from sexual repression look like? I think an unleashing of female sexuality will heal the divide between the sexes. We will return to something approximating our origins as a species when men and women where nurturers and much that we associate with masculinity was unnecessary. The character armour of masculinity will be abandoned once we move beyond fear of the erotic. All that is needed is for us to feel safe. Where strength is necessary it will be the real strength which men and women have always been capable of when not divided against themselves by neurosis. The macho mentality is a hollow shield, it has never been true strength. And bisexuality is likely to gradually become the norm. Fear of same-sex eroticism is an element of the neurosis which divides us. Playfulness and sensuality not just centred in the genitals are liable to characterise the sexuality of the free state.

In recent times there has been an increasing fascination with transgender individuals. Who would have thought that we would see full-frontal transexual nudity in a major Hollywood movie? But we did in last years The Hangover II. I think that the reason for this fascination is because in the hermaphrodite we see a symbolic image of our future as a species. We see a single figure in which the masculine and the feminine are united. And we are comforted. This is part of the nature of the healing vision which is emerging. The disowned become the treasured. In the New Testament – Matthew 21:24 – it says : Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the Scriptures : ‘The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone; the Lord has done this, and it is marvellous in our eyes'? Now I'm not suggesting that Jesus was talking exclusively about chicks with dicks. But it is a part of the nature of our neurosis that we have most deeply repressed and despised what we most needed for our liberation. And thus it should be no surprise if those who were considered freaks or losers or outsiders become the front riders towards a new society.

The popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey has struck us like lightning. Where did that come from, we ask ourselves. Why is this the fastest selling fiction book in history? Why are so many women suddenly coming out of the closet about their sexuality? Jesus said : For as the lightning that comes from the east is visible even in the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. Matthew 24:27. The breakdown of the repressive neurotic patriarchal society is also a breakthrough to Paradise and it comes, as was predicted, in a rush.

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.