A recent conversation sparked an interest in me to think about our sexual freedoms and how we voluntarily give up what some might term the “dark curiosity” within us, what I would rather apply the term “the real us” to, in an effort to be stable, rather than fulfilled. Now I don’t mean that each of us is living a life of unfulfillment, that would be dreadful, just that we must recognise that some of the who that we are is often unrevealed to us. This was Sigmund Freud’s great insight into the subconscious mind. He imagined that all the forces that shape the psyche from the outside were in a fight, one they were winning, with the forces holding out on the inside, besieged.
You know, the thoughts that sometimes randomly pop into your head, the crazy stuff you daydream? Well they do not come from nowhere, they are you just as much as the thoughts and memories that you use for the common thread of knowing who you are from minute to minute. These may be fanciful, they may be dark and violent, they may be sexual, and they may last only a microsecond before you dismiss them and move on to getting that sock drawer organised or something equally worthwhile. These are the the you that you are either suppressing, are unaware of, have some notion of, or are constantly tortured by. Each one of us has only a slight awareness of what it is we really want at a deep level, our inner self and it’s desires. We reveal this “Inner Self” to ourselves incrementally as we get older and we less and less we care how society and peers define us. Embedded in each one of us is the will to define what we are, yes our financial circumstances may change and provide the opportunity to define what we can do or how others see us, but that isn’t the same thing.
We age into the person we are, but by then it may be far to late to become that person because we have maybe imprisoned ourselves in a jail of our own making by accumulating burdens and responsibilities that we have either decided to value, or we are honouring the duty of. Everyone knows the feeling of looking back and wondering how many sliding doors opportunities they might have missed, at least everyone my age. What is interesting is to listen to people much younger than yourself and hear the mistakes they make, the same ones you made, the ones that seem obvious as mistakes to you now, those ones where they are so certain that life should be the way theirs happens to be. You know that they will feel differently in the future, and you could tell them so, but there’s something useful to them about the certainty they hold in this moment. Maybe the best advice you could ever give someone is that they should not worry about now, it will pass.
Most of what you know of yourself when you are a youngster is internal, we are primarily introspective creatures us humans. The first thing you have to figure out is what you want and how to get it. You might want food, or to sleep, to be warmer, to pick your nose or take a dump, the world around you will be about what you desire. Next you learn what others think you should not want, and what you should. Parents do this bit, then teachers, television, peer groups, then employers. Each is a form of conditioning that teaches you what and who you should be as you navigate the world learning to give certain things to get other things in return. This is the fabric of a civil society, you are a citizen in it, and it has rules and prescriptions built in, kind of like the Matrix (film, watch it).
As you move through this Matrix, being defined by it and what you have come to view as your normality, you may occasionally have some thoughts pop into your head that you don’t realise the origin of, you may dismiss them or wonder about them. Some will be sexual desires, and to our pal Freud these ones were quite important and interesting. Now it is my contention that if a male heterosexual was to be dropped onto a busy high street anywhere in the country for 30 minutes and told to people watch, he would spot at least 10 females that he would gladly have sexual relations with before he knew the first thing about them, but does that mean he should tell his partner that this was his experience? In a perfect world, where people could handle truths then yes, but this is not a perfect world, we each have our conditioning telling us to avoid these truths. But she would know already…
This woman is not stupid by any means, she is merely choosing to create the idea in her mind that at all times her partner will favour the commitment he has made to her and value its continuance over the possibility of acting out his immediate desires regardless of how tempting it may be to pursue them, and regardless of how their relationship has changed. This is how society has come to be framed, where a once made deep commitment binds the maker into an unwritten contract with the person they made it with in perpetuity, regardless of all that changes in the interim. This society will regulate the conditions of this socially acceptable union by looking badly upon any person who violates it.
My argument is that it is not natural in any fashion, it is a socially created norm, not an evolutionary imperative, and it’s false nature is revealed in an inner consciousness which clearly wishes to violate it. You know the one you are constantly suppressing? The question for me is this, if you are bound by your conscious mind, and by the social rules, and you are unaware that you are conforming, then have you closed some of yourself off to what you can know? Is it not better that you reveal it, let that fucker out? See this is why I am such a fan of therapy, because I’ve had it and it was the best money I’ve spent. My internal conflicts, now understood to me, are not conflicts at all, they are who I am. I think everyone should get a good therapist.
Two folks were talking, friends, one appeared judgemental and the other seemed open to all ideas, at least those that do no harm (that’s another blog). I always envy folks that can disagree by so far yet maintain a strong bond, that’s the essence of a true friendship. I listened for a while, as I often do to peoples conversations, then I give in as I always do and participate, because my mind doesn’t let me just sit idle if I think I may have something to say. This is the self I know of myself post therapy, that it is better to let it out and possibly alienate, shock, and annoy, than to keep it in and mull it for a while. Thankfully for my audience, time is often short, as I could talk all day truth be told. Then I sit and write in the evenings in an effort to tease out what I have begun to think of throughout the day.
Anyway, enough about me. I know this is my blog but let’s not make it solipsistic!
I called this post Getting into the Swing because I happen to have known a few people that have been much more sexually liberated than I and most others, and to them they were as normal as a block of cheddar cheese. It was everyone else that was a bit strange. I suppose swinging is the most palatable of proclivities for the mind to cope with easily. It seems not unnatural to us, just a bit promiscuous, they even have festivals these days for that sort of thing. To some folks though this is a wrong practice, yet I have no idea, in the absence of a juridical rule or a religious edict, why anyone would truly believe that there can be a sin of the flesh that should be shunned, oppressed even, if it does in fact cause zero harm to the participants. How could we possibly be harmed by a thruple living next door if each member was happy with the configuration of that union?
To look at the way others live, and to pass judgement, is to be human. We can only draw upon what we think we know of the world and its configuration, to determine how we think it should be configured. If you folks and your peers arrange their lives in such ways that repetitively appear to be successful then you might easily think that their arrangements are what makes success possible. You might also start to believe that all other arrangements mean success is not possible, and there it is, the mistake in judgement, a false measure. In truth, what works is what actually works, but, unlike the weatherman who predicts the weather and that prediction has no effect on the weather, those people who make a society, will by their belief of how that society should be formed, make it more difficult for those persons who wish to live in it and conduct themselves in a different way.
For those among us that would make their lives more an expression of their inner self it must be difficult to exist within the realm of those that have not revealed the inner them to themselves, the majority. Judgement is easy from the position of the larger group toward the much smaller one and a thought that is radical is harder to turn into a deed if the thoughts are not revealed for fear of difference. I often wonder how the world would be configured if we all were compelled to blurt out the truth all the time, and would we change because of it? This debate between these two folks held no power, it had a purity then. I think when two friends can conduct themselves in an argument (in the Greek sense), taking wildly opposite positions, yet still allow respect and even kindness to abound, each position then truly rests only on the merits of what has been said, and not the might of the proposer. Of course I prefer the open mindedness of one of the friends, but that’s just me.
pinkfloydpsw's Blog 
Leave a comment