Carl, your mention of those cutesy names for sex organs reminded me of a
joke. There was a man who went to a barbershop for a haircut and brought
his young daughter with him. She bought a little wrapped cake from a
vending machine and was wandering around the room eating it. At one
point she got very close to where the haircut was going on. The barber
said, "Little girl, you're going to get hair on your Twinkie." "I know!"
she said enthusiastically. "And I'm going to get boobies too!"
But putting that aside, don't you wonder why there are such strict
taboos about sex? In the anthropology textbooks I have read I have been
told how to tell if a cultural practice is a taboo. It is a taboo if you
ask why it is done and you don't get an answer. Instead you get some
expression of shock that you would even ask such a question. For
example, if you ask why it is forbidden to have sex with your sister you
get the answer that it is just wrong without an explanation of why it is
wrong. That is a taboo. Well, I can think of another taboo in the
culture that I, at least, am surrounded by. It is a taboo against
letting children even know that sex exists. If you ask why the subject
of sex is not allowed to be discussed in the presence of children you
are unlikely to get an answer. Instead it is much more likely that the
person whom you asked will just get mad at you for even asking. But what
makes it insane is that it is such a losing battle. There is no way that
you are going to be able to keep it a secret and I don't mean that they
are going to find out anyway when they grow up. They are going to find
out when they are still children, but the attempts to keep it a secret
from them is actually more likely to cause them to learn a distorted
representation of the subject when they do find out. If that isn't
insane enough I remember once having a woman trying to hush me because I
had said something about sex within hearing range of her
sixteen-year-old son. Sixteen? It wasn't likely that I would have said
anything that he didn't already know anyway. But I asked her why and she
said, "He's only sixteen. He doesn't need to know about that stuff."
What really makes that insane was that I had learned from another
conversation with her that she had become sexually active at the age of
fourteen. But, like I said, when you ask why children - and I don't
consider sixteen-year-olds to be children - should have sex kept as a
secret from them you usually just get anger instead of an answer. But
when in the minority of times that you do get an answer the answer is
almost always that they don't understand it. Well, I don't understand
organic chemistry, but I took a course in it and somehow I barely
passed. But to this day I don't think I ever really did understand it.
So what harm did it do for me to be exposed to it in a college course? I
have noticed that when someone doesn't understand something they just
stop paying attention to it unless it is something they have to learn
like it was with me and that organic chemistry. Have you ever picked up
a book, for example, and found out that you were not understanding a bit
of it? How long did you keep reading? So I wonder. Are they really
afraid that the children will not understand it or is it that they are
afraid that they will understand it?
___
Irvin D. Yalom “Truth," Nietzsche continued, "is arrived at through
disbelief and skepticism, not through a childlike wishing something were
so! Your patient's wish to be in God's hands is not truth. It is simply
a child's wish—and nothing more! It is a wish not to die, a wish for the
eveastingly bloated nipple we have labeled 'God'! Evolutionary theory
scientifically demonstrates God's redundancy—though Darwin himself had
not the courage to follow his evidence to its true conclusion. Surely,
you must realize that we created God, and that all of us together now
have killed him.” ― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept
On 6/8/2021 12:06 PM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
When I turned 13 my mother handed me a rather thin book entitled, "A
Boy Grows Up", and I learned that I really didn't have a tail. I,
according to my book, had a Pinus. My sisters, 12 and 14 shared a
book, "A Girl Grows Up". Mother handed us the books and left the
room. We immediately thumbed through looking for all the "dirty"
words. There were none.
What is the reasoning behind all the secrecy about sex, and all the
cute words we have come to use to refer to our hidden body parts, and
their various functions? While I might find it a bit crude to have a
grown man come up to me in a public place and ask, "Where's the
crapper"? it struck me as very odd when a grown man came up to me in
the bus depot and asked, "Which way is the Little Boy's Room?"
When you have nothing better to do, try listing all the cute little
names for the male sex organ, and then do the same for women's, and
then do a separate list for all the names we have concocted to
describe this basic and natural function of coupling. Be sure to
include any personal pleasuring that comes to mind.
I was walking through Woodland Park one pleasant Spring day, and I
notice two squirrels doing publicly what Humans do in the dark with
the curtains drawn. A little squeaky voice piped up, "What are they
doing?" The mother quickly dragged her youngster in a different
direction saying, "They're fighting!" It brought to mind all those
good church going folks who chant that sex education should be up to
parents to teach. I also thought of an early Disney nature film which
offended the Pious Citizens by showing a female buffalo giving birth.
The theater where I saw this "awful" event was also featuring a couple
of Westerns. No problem watching Cowboys gunning down a band of
Indians.
And of course at the other end from violence are the many ways we
promote sex through such things as beauty contests, and fair damsels
dressed in skimpy attire while rubbing up against a new car or washing
machine. No problem showing Thrillers where women find themselves the
victims of sexual deviants...well, not homely women, of course.
And we wonder about ourselves.
Carl Jarvis
On 6/7/21, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Since I mentioned gratuitous prudery let me express my opinion of that
more explicitly. It is obvious to me that sex is something that is a
shared experience of humanity. Having worked in some of the peripheral
areas of the sex industry I am especially aware that it is very rare
that anyone gets through life without having sex. Even the most
unattractive people you can imagine have sex. It might not be as
frequent for them as it is for most people, but they do have sex. Even
the nerdiest of the nerds have sex. Prudish old grandmothers could not
have become grandmothers if they had not had sex. Even children have
sex. An example of that was a woman who was telling me about her first
sexual experience. She was eight years old when she had lesbian sex with
her nine-year-old friend. But even with examples like that about the
only people who get through life without having sex actually are
children who die before they have a chance to try it out. Now, if it is
such a shared experience, such an experience that we all have, then why
do so many people get so uptight about it? Why do so many people go to
such ends to keep sex a secret from children as if they aren't going to
find out that it exists anyway? Why do so many people have to pretend
that they know nothing about sex? Why do so many people get so offended
when someone else casually admits to knowing about and indulging in sex?
Really, if anything causes me to have a strong urge to roll my eyes it
is when someone starts some prudish self-righteous declaration of how
such things should be kept private and should never be mentioned in
public and so forth when it is such a shared experience. Really, why
should we all keep such things so secret when it is such a shared
experience? Eating is a shared experience too and no one tries to keep
it a secret that they eat food. People eat food openly in public and in
social gatherings and no one is offended if someone says that a certain
dish was really enjoyable. There is no point in keeping food consumption
a secret because it is a universally shared experience. So is sex. What
is the point of prudery?
___
--
Irvin D. Yalom “Truth," Nietzsche continued, "is arrived at through
disbelief and skepticism, not through a childlike wishing something were
so! Your patient's wish to be in God's hands is not truth. It is simply
a child's wish—and nothing more! It is a wish not to die, a wish for the
eveastingly bloated nipple we have labeled 'God'! Evolutionary theory
scientifically demonstrates God's redundancy—though Darwin himself had
not the courage to follow his evidence to its true conclusion. Surely,
you must realize that we created God, and that all of us together now
have killed him.” ― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept