Saturday, August 30, 2008

On the polymorphousness of human sexuality, socialisation, repression, taboos and projection

Be warned - here we venture into "dangerous" and uncomfortable territory...but the desire to articulate and free what is left to fester in the dungeons of the insane distraction and avoidance of the self we call "Western culture" is strong..so here goes....and please don't shoot the messenger


When a police inspector views child pornography, confiscated from a paedophile ring, a part of him, despite himself, is aroused. His disgust at this part of himself, which almost no-one will ever know about, and might be only revealed in the most unique or confidential circumstance, this disgust is so huge it gets alchemised into a murderous and righteous loathing and hatred for the perpetrator(s), as a way of ruthlessly repressing and suppressing his own capacity for disassociated cruelty….he is frightened by that part of himself, the voice of his education and socialisation warns him of the catstrophic consequences, the burning shame, were that part to live in any way, and so, were the perpetrator of the violations he has watched in front of him now, he would be sorely tempted to take the law into his own hands and beat to a pulp the perpetrator, to silence the deviant without and more importantly within.

Thus would he act out and symbolically sacrifice and eliminate / exterminate that part of himself that is judged dangerous and not fitting to be….. and that is how Western society, and perhaps all human society functions. It is not completely dissimilar to the rage of undepaid security guards who work mindless exploitative 12 hour shifts in South Africa, standing in cold streets next to booms, or in shopping centres overflowing with a plenty that is not for them..and if they catch a thief, or a suspected thief, who has perhaps committed crimes at other times but not this time, or who has perhaps never comitted any crime except the crime of being slightly strange, and he is safely caught ( not a thief on the loose and part of an armed and dangerous gang, on which it is harder to project), then their accumulated rage can come pouring out onto that real or imaginarythief, and if it is in a township or far away from the rule of law, that thief will be lucky if his death is a relatively quick one.

And so it is with animal circus acts and battery hens and cosmetics tested on animals and fur coats and the Holocaust and Rwanda and the Darfur massacres – the human capacity for splitting and disassociation seems sometimes almost without limits. But of course this is only when viewed from Bleak House.
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On the male obsession with large penises going into small orifices.....what does it mean symbolically and in the place where analytical thought slows and something else seems to take over????

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One school of thought assumes retributive punishment is some kind of prophylactic against other people acting out when all the evidence points to the opposite - it simply drives so called deviant behaviours underground and the lesson learnt is "I'd better not get caught".

Paedophilia is a collective creation to do with our society's constructions of adulthood vs childhood, the things our society represses, the brutalization and disconnection of people - particulary men- as they are socialised into acceptable and insane forms of masculinity....it cannot be "cured" with finger wagging and state sanctioned violence - it can only be cured by increased consciousness...as Krishnamurti wrote "the seeing is the doing" - only when the dtynamics of the problem are fully comprehended does it dissolve by itself.

I think a reading of G B Shaw's introduction to his Joan of Arc is called for here, or Miller's the Crucible...the terrible evil done by the self-righteous and sanctimonious as they persecute "the wicked"....the inqusitions of the "moral" majority who stamp out the sins of heresy on the rack, as if paedophilia, domestic violence, addiction, institutionalised dehumanisation of the other are out there, locatable in someone else rather than in our own thousand daily acts of smug indifference as we turn away from the needy again and again again...spare me the middle class morality play!

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Many perversions take place openly, for example warfare, factory farming, horse and greyhound racing, trophy hunting,
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Thoughts at a meditation session

"He has cracked heels like a dry river bed...she's got BIG breasts....mmmm...love to get my lips on those and have a good suck...mind you, no correlation between how much the nipple projects and breast size....remember Yael's....maybe I can chat to her at tea afterwards...if she's alone."
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people dancing naked around a tennis court
stopping at stations
to give and receive what they like
without shame or fear of censure
but be careful
AIDS, STIs and the reproductive powers of the universe
are no child's play
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older men
including me
fantasise about having sex with younger women
on occasion
how could we not?
but this is tempered by
life experience
and the bigger picture
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1 comment:

Fiona said...

Bang, you're dead. (I always shoot the messenger).

Check out Jonny Steinberg's latest book, "Thin Blue" about the social contract whereby a community has to consent to being policed in order for the police service to be effective. He discusses a similar kind of displaced anger on the part of the police that you mention here.