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Playing the Game: What Pick-Up Artists Do and Don’t Know about Human Nature

In recent months I have been renewing my acquaintance with some of the work of those writers and coaches which aim to help men get on dates with women, often known as “pick-up artists” or PUAs. When I first encountered the PUA subculture, about ten years ago, most of the writings were underground, self-published and reviewed only on similarly underground internet forums. Each of the big names had their admirers and detractors, and there was quite a personality cult around each of them and rivalry between them.

The scene started to grab public attention with the publication in 2005 of Neil Strauss‘s semi-autobiographical The Game. Strauss, then a journalist, initially entered the PUA world with the objective of writing about it, but got more sucked in than he expected. He now runs a dating school, Stylelife Academy, though he has also continued his writing career. I was introduced to Strauss through Chris Ryan‘s podcast Tangentially Speaking, and got curious enough to buy the book, which is not entirely a training manual and in fact quite a good read, not without some worthwhile philosophical reflections on the experiences which turned him from being an average guy (“AFC” or Average Frustrated Chump in the lingo) into a guy who could date celebrities with ease. I later went on to study some of the material in his sequel Rules of the Game, and some of the online courses of the Stylelife Academy, before discovering another coach, Nick Savoy of LoveSystems, author of the dating guide Magic Bullets. Savoy, a Harvard MBA graduate, took over from Strauss’s mentor, known by his pseudonym Mystery, and is probably the most prominent exponent of the field today.

I have no particular desire for a lifestyle involving the dating of endless streams of beautiful women – well no more than the next guy anyway 😉 – but the material attracted me nonetheless. Savoy, Strauss and others have gathered together material which can have a considerable impact on ones self-confidence, self-image, and life. Although the stress remains on dating, they are also aware of this wider dimension, without which the whole enterprise really doesn’t make a lot of sense. Whilst some of the criticism has been predictable (claims that the material teaches men to manipulate women), the PUAs strongly defend their corner. This is material, they say, to make men into better men and therefore is good for women and men alike. Whilst individual cases may vary, on the whole this claim seems to me justified. A dating coach does not offer a complete program of personal self-transformation, but he certainly may help men to overcome one of their major self-esteem issues. And that is definitely a step in the right direction, as this article by a traveller on the PUA path shows.

The infant science of dating for men, it seems to me, has as much of the potential for self-transformation which Daniele Bolelli, in his poetic and provocative book The Way of the Warrior, ascribes to the martial arts. Bolelli argues that the martial arts offer a way for us to confront our fear of physical force being used against us, and, by means of this concrete channel, also a host of other, less tangible fears. The argument may be a little overstated, but it is clear that the dating arts, i.e. the art of erotic encounter, addresses another core fear which dominates the psyche of many men: that of being unattractive, rejected and abandoned by women. Facing your fears and the lies about yourself which you have absorbed is always a path to personal growth. Certainly, the PUA path, at least as currently articulated, also plays into other male fantasies of multiple, uncommitted sexual relationships and endless youth, and may, if reports are to be believed, enable those fantasies to be extended almost indefinitely; but that is no more a reason to reject this body of knowledge and the discipline that might attend it than the testosterone-soaked glorification of violence in certain martial arts circles is a reason to reject the martial arts themselves.

Unlike the martial arts, however, the dating arts are in their infancy, and they have not been founded by figures who have surpassed their ego and are merely in the service of mankind. At least, their founding fathers make no such lofty claim. The dating arts are more at the stage of trial and error of what works in the field, with only a limited degree of codification.

The lack of codification and of serious cross-cultural study are to be expected in the infancy of a science, and may indeed to a degree be inevitable. Indeed, even the martial arts have no universal fighting techniques, despite what some may claim: opponents adapt and so must your strategy. This is true many times over in the dating world, which, even if there is a biological layer, is quintessentially cultural. A student of the dating arts would do better to follow the Taoist philosophy of Jeet Kune Do founder Bruce Lee, rather than the Confucian and Shinto precepts underlying many classical martial arts. Learning is useful but only if it is internalized and put at the service of a personal goal: only, indeed, if once learnt it is forgotten. The techniques of dating artistry are doubtless best used as scaffolding, not as a temple. As Lee said, “Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot”.

But my purpose here is not to review the PUAs’ materials and approaches. Nor is it to do more than suggest that readers might find them, even if they remain rudimentary, a useful component on their path of personal growth – they are worth exploring for this reason alone. However, I want to look at this phenomenon firstly as a source of evidence as to sexual and social bonding behaviour patterns which we manifest, but are unaware of. In principle, the PUAs and their many acolytes are sitting on a ton of experimental data which, unfortunately, no one in academia seems so far to be taking seriously and investigating.

This evidence of course is weakly structured and heavily framed in terms of certain underlying assumptions which act as axioms within the systems and are therefore not falsifiable. Whilst most of society has preferred to ignore the PUA phenomenon or has ploughed into it in terms of the usual old-feminist male stereotypes, a few observant authors have noted that the account given by the PUAs of evolutionary biology, and which underlies their systems, is oversimplified and wrong in a number of particulars (see for instance here). This begs the question of how not only the techniques, but the whole philosophy of the dating systems might change if they were brought better into line with not only our dominant forms of social conditioning, an American version of which they reflect reasonably well, but also our actual biological nature.

Thus in chapter 3 of Magic Bullets, Savoy treats us to a very Dawkinian account of natural selection, effectively ignoring the fact – although he acknowledges it elsewhere – that individuals do not survive well in groups which have perished. Rage as many evolutionary psychologists might, there is overwhelming evidence that human behaviour is cooperative. The biological basis of mate selection is unlikely to be antagonistic to this trait.

For the purposes of this article, let’s ask the following question: how would Savoy’s theories of attraction fare if our underlying biology is not akin to Dawkin’s caricature, but more accurately portrayed in Sex at Dawn, including perhaps my own thoughts regarding ancestral mate selection? Indeed, society does not operate even remotely on the cutthroat basis that Savoy proposes, certainly not now and probably not in the remote past either. Men and women may be bad at meeting each other, but eventually they end up doing that and nearly everyone gets a slice of the evolutionary pie. They may not get the slice they would have wished for, but their genes do not die out. That genes, at any point in human history, have died out in significant numbers because of failure to mate (other than as a result of death) lacks, as far as I am aware, any evidence in its support. So there is a process of preference at work, which eventually results in sexual selection of genes, but it is not of the cutthroat nature Savoy portrays.

The same can be said of the idea that the father plays a significant role in raising and protecting offspring and that the extent to which he successfully acquits himself of this role predicts the procreative success of his progeny. In agricultural societies, it may be that this factor contributes to the ultimate social status of progeny, and the ultimate destiny of their genetic traits, but not their immediate reproductive success. In hunter-gatherer societies, and hence in our underlying biology, this factor is probably not relevant at all. In other words, mate selection is, to a large extent, learned behavior.

Some might say, so what: whether cultural or biological, isn’t the effect the same? Well, learned behavior exhibits much more variety and changes much more quickly, so it is dangerous to assume that it is universal in the way that the PUAs do. But more fundamentally, it seems to me that this formulation is inconsistent with what it is that PUAs actually do in the field and with the whole logical structure of their methodologies. In fact, dating artistry consists of two phases, logically sequential but temporally superimposed. In the first phase, the PUAs try to play off learnt behavior: for example the signals of status which certain behaviors, attributes and accessories convey. These create interest and attraction. However, attraction is not mate selection in the way that the PUAs conceptualize it: it is much more ephemeral. Much of it is about making excuses to ourselves for behaving in the way we are biologically programmed to: that is, promiscuously. This becomes evident in the later stages of seduction, until the social context rears again its head and relationships need labels. So in fact, what the PUAs do is exploit weak spots in female social armoring in order to activate underlying impulses which do correspond to more universal biology, but this biology has little in common with their account of it.

Correcting the assumptions might not necessarily change very much for those who merely want to overcome their shyness with girls and become, in this sense, more in control of their own destiny. For such people, an accurate account of social conditioning and a vague idea of the biological nature which underlies it (such as the actual desire of women for sex) are enough.

But this is just entry level. For those who question whether the goal of having one or more desirable women on ones arm is intrinsically as opposed to merely socially valuable and are more curious about human relationships and their potential, however, a better understanding of the processes may change a lot: it may fundamentally change where you end up and what you get out of it.

Indeed most of us have ambition to graduate beyond a game. Games are fun, up to a certain point; but mating is a key part of our biological makeup and we need to respect its deeper mysteries, because it has a lot to teach us. Indeed, master PUAs may have immense success in the initial stages, but, many, like the tragic example of Mystery in The Game, find it afterwards even more difficult than others to be content with the relationship institutions which society has preordained for them. This is not only, as many would caricaturise it, a reflection of the male desire for multiple partners and sexual variety which, being potentiated, becomes even more difficult to resist. It is also a reflection of the – equally important but frequently ignored – male desire for commitment and depth, within the confines of arrangements which respect this biology. Attracting partners using a discourse which is incompatible with this goal, but rather relies on the dominant social mores, seems in this case to be a recipe for short-term success, but long-term failure.

So how does an ethical non-monogamist, or whatever your favourite label is for someone who has figured out what kind of creature we all are, play this game if it is based on assumptions which he does not share?

Damned if I know. Perhaps one day enough people will have enough field experience with trying to answer this question that someone will be able to write the book about it, and move mankind beyond its erotic infancy. In the meanwhile, it’s an exciting voyage of discovery.

The Aquarian Couple

In my last post, I wrote about the need to constitute relationships which are free of all forms of control and self-limitation. Only when we are open to life in its entirety are we aligned with our biological nature and our spiritual destiny.

As I’ve said before, this does not, however, mean that we need to embrace polyamory. It is important to recall a fundamental truth, namely that most social institutions are based on real human needs even whilst they are inimical to others. The demand for sexual exclusivity within marriage betrays a deeper, valid intuition as to the possible depth of a loving relationship. Many people are not willing to explore this depth, but by refusing to do so, they just as certainly set themselves on a path away from self-examination and transformation. Therefore I advocate radical commitment and radical openness. One must be willing to be burnt in the fires both of particularity and of generality – not pick and choose a la carte.

Our ancestral nature is tribal, but we are not going back to being hunter-gatherers in the jungle any time soon. For most people, pair bonding is the obvious solution to a biospiritual imperative. As I have previously argued, both the pleasures and the pain of this situation are there to teach us and to make us more aware.

Today’s spiritual couple is not just a neoprimitivist reincarnation, but is called upon to reinterpret our biological heritage to the needs of the present time. In my vision, the Aquarian couple is more deeply committed than any traditional couple, and at the same time more radically open than most polyamorists and almost all swingers and other persons in so-called “open marriages”. For this reason, whilst it is important to make clear that one stands outside the dominant social norm, these other terms are also inadequate. One is forced, really, to coin a term. I call this the Aquarian couple.

Aquarian relationships may come to an end, as everything eventually does, but they never fail, just as life is not a failure simply because it ends in death. On the spiritual path, we do not hold on to life but each day, each moment we die and are reborn. Similarly we do not hold on to our relationships, and they are new in each moment. I know many examples of this kind of couple and it is time that their stories are told and honored, as testimony to what is possible, satisfying and desirable in human relationships at the dawn of this new age.

Monogamy and personal growth

As I have noted before, mankind has an amazing and innate skill for manipulation through shame, which implements an effective evolutionary strategy designed to ensure group coherence and the passing on from one generation to the next of epigenetic knowledge about the world. Emotional manipulation is particularly easy for persons in positions of authority.

This skill, or Achilles’ heel if you will, has been exploited by agrarian societies in order to solidify the social relations of economic production. They have done so in two main ways, one of which Aquarian society is well aware of and in the process of abandoning, but the other of which remains largely normative and unquestioned.

The institution of whose corruptness we are well aware is religion. Organized religion cynically latches on to mankind’s inherent sense of awe and numinosity, and channels it into a vehicle which commands subservient obedience. True religion is a demand-side, or better collective experience, but the supply side has used threats, misrepresentation and coercion in order to dominate it.

We have been fighting this and pushing it back for centuries. In the Enlightenment we coined the idea of separation of church and state, choosing, no doubt opportunistically, to ignore that this is a complete nonsense: church and state have always been simply two aspects of each other. Whenever a religious movement has really challenged the basis of the agrarian state, it has either been short-lived and brutally repressed, or rapidly co-opted, and thereby denatured, by the powers that be. As Marx stated, “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness.”

We have been much less willing to dethrone the second pillar of social subservience: the family. Should we be in any way surprised to learn that this institution is one of those dearest to a religion whose founder stated “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters–yes, even his own life — he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26)? We should not be surprised: the intentions of the religion and of its founder are diametrically opposed to each other.

I am not, however, going to get into a lame exegesis of statements I am not concerned to defend. The point I wish to make is that human nature displays a tribe-building instinct which social authority has deemed is allowed expression only through the institution of the family.

That institution and its rules have of course varied from place to place and changed significantly over time. For most of human history it has not implied complete restriction on the sexual freedom of men, but it has ensured that women occupy a subservient place in society, essentially reducing them to one more item of property in the estate of their husband.

The social allocation of women – what we may term the bridal economy – has, of course, reduced men’s sexual freedom indirectly, by making many women sexually unavailable, but there has always remained the institution of the brothel, and enough “shared” women with no choice other than to populate it due to unfortunate circumstances in their lives. However, this is no more than a valve to let off what would otherwise be an unbearable build-up of pressure due to the power of male sexual drives. A brief liaison with a prostitute in a brothel, even when relatively free from shame, hardly allows for satisfaction of the complete sexual instinct, which requires relationship and connection. Indeed, the sexual drive itself is only the basest component and the easiest to gratify. Thus it remains the case that within all systems where women are treated as property, the sexual instinct of both sexes, in its full sense, is almost completely repressed.

Repressed, of course, is not the same as forgotten, as many utopian attempts at reconstituting polyadic communities over the centuries attest. Free love has often been subversive and remains so today. Friedrich Engels wrote that “It is a peculiar fact that with every great revolutionary movement the question of ‘free love’ comes to the
foreground“. As Reich can testify, the idea of sexual pleasure as an organizing principle of society has hardly been universally welcomed.

Monogamy and its historical variants have served the goal of social control not only by repressing sexuality and the empowering vitality which it engenders. Families are perfect units to tax, both for money and for soldiers. They are associated with transgenerational property rights, the defence of which necessitates compliance and docility. They are also far less robust than tribes to the losses of individual members, meaning that those members must be risk-averse. Lastly, the family unit is naturally self-propagating. Children are conditioned into it and their economic incentives are aligned with it.

Even today, there is a doctrine of humanitarian intervention into the affairs of state, but families are very largely self-governing, not as a result of any liberal conviction but rather because they are so constitutive of the greater whole which is the state. But if monogamy were intrinsic to our species, why would we need so many institutions to enforce it?

We sleep around, but we feel guilty, just as we used to feel guilty for not going to church. This is a sure sign of having been manipulated into believing that the behavior in question is inconducive to the welfare of the group. If we believe the exact contrary to be the case, then it behooves us to be courageous. We need to reject the traditional institution of marriage with the same joyful iconoclasm as many of us reject the institutions of the church.

Certainly, we will need to find other ways to structure our lives remaining compatible with the need for community, companionship, allowing each person independence, and rearing emotionally healthy children. This is a vast project with no map to guide the way, and it is easy to fall back on what is tried and tested, even if the result of testing conventional monogamy in its modern form has been to show that it is an enormous failure. Whatever institutions we may invent going forward, however – and I use as always the word ‘institution’ to mean not only form but also content – such institutions will need to be compatible with human nature and aspirations, or they are not worth having.

The confinement of sexual expression, and indeed frequently of all expression of adult intimacy, to one single other person, together with the societal assumption that this will, always and everywhere, be the case, is a pillar of oppression which we need to pull down if we purport to be on a spiritual path. This alone, however, is insufficient because it considers only the sexual dimension and ignores the aspiration – often passed over by some of the more austere thinkers I have quoted – to live in deep community and to raise children together in love. Given our biological nature, this is frequently hard to realize other than within institutions which have the form of dyadic relationships with dependent children, and I am not arguing that everyone is obliged to follow a more utopian path whatever the practical difficulties. Within that structure, it must, however, be absolutely clear that commitment does not translate into exclusive focus and that other loves, on the part of persons equally conscious and enlightened, are considered an enrichment, and welcome.

Endorphins

These days, we know quite a lot about the correlation between levels of the various neurotransmitters and emotional state. We still know next to nothing, though, as far as I can tell, about the mechanisms which regulate neurotransmitter concentrations in the body. Pharmaceutical treatment of mood disorders merely takes the deficits as a given. Whilst, however, there may conceivably be instances in which the underproduction is biologically determined, it is perfectly clear that in most cases depressed neurotransmitter levels are simply a consequence of underlying neurosis. Since neurosis has a variety of effects on the body, simply remedying a single expression of it does nothing to address pathologies which are not vectored by means of the neurotransmitter in question, and may have unintended consequences.

Individual neurotransmitters tend to have a variety of surprisingly unrelated functions. Nowhere, however, is the adaptive role of a neurotransmitter more mysterious than in the case of endorphins. Endorphins were first discovered as the body’s own “endogenous morphine”, as discussed in Candace Pert’s book Molecules of Emotion which I reviewed on this blog. Thus endorphins are produced in response to pain and they act as analgesics. But endorphins are also produced in response to love and orgasm. What on earth is the link?

I don’t pretend to know the answer, but if endorphins procure us a state of bliss then it is tempting to wonder if, although we tend to suppress pain, being more aware of it would not in fact bring us more joy. It is often said that there is no pleasure without pain, but might this be quite literally true at the biochemical level? Indeed, it is awareness of pain, not pain itself, that triggers endorphin production. This is clearly the case because the body has ways of suppressing psychic pain which do not rely on endorphins. Additionally, endorphins are produced in response to acute pain and endeavor to allow the body to continue to operate under temporarily stressed circumstances; the body’s own painkillers become less effective once the immediate crisis is past, when the experience of pain serves the role of prompting appropriate remedial action in response. By contrast, falling in love raises endorphin levels over a prolonged period.

How then can we experience the bliss of raised endorphin levels if we are not in pain, and have no pain to bring into consciousness? Well, as I argued in an earlier post, vicarious experience and direct experience are much harder to distinguish than we realize. The mere fact, therefore, that pain is a constant of the human condition gives us access to it, an access we can embrace or, on the contrary, shy away from. When we are fully engaged with the collective human experience, and not only our personal experience, pain as well as pleasure abound. This is the natural state of things, and our responsiveness to it is natural also. But usually we are closed to the pain of others because we are closed to our own pain, and we are closed to that pain because we irrationally fear its long-lost power to overwhelm the ego.

Healing the body

In this post, I want to review two books with a common theme: Bruce Lipton’s 2005 The Biology of Belief and Lissa Rankin’s more recent Mind over Medicine.

Lipton, in his book, sets about demolishing what he himself admits is a straw man: the notion that genes determine disease and its progression. In his view, genes only provide a blueprint for building proteins, and it is the cellular receptor proteins on the membrane which drive gene expression in response to their environment. Few genes are self-expressing.

This hardly seems controversial. Nevertheless, the book is, even if it is not its main intent, a good and very readable laymen’s introduction to the molecular biology of the cell, and worth reading for that reason alone.

The “belief” in the title refers essentially to the ability of the brain to command, whether consciously or unconsciously, the production of neurotransmitters and other signalling proteins which then tell cells what to do. This view, as Lipton acknowledges, is based on the ideas of Candace Pert, whose work Molecules of Emotion I reviewed earlier. Interestingly, Lipton reports that this signalling intelligence was first developed in unicellular amoeba communities, where the signalling compounds are released into the environment and operate between distinct individuals. Multicellular organisms came only later, and took over this system of signalling to regulate the behavior of the community of cells which had now come to be permanently associated in a single individual. Thus cellular intelligence underpins the intelligence of more complex organisms.

Despite its expositional merits, however, Lipton’s book does not get us much closer to an understanding of the actual mechanisms behind the control of cell behavior. For the most part, he relies on somewhat forced analogies from quantum physics, the pertinence of which is far from established. Whilst he seems authoritative in matters of cell biology, what he says about quantum physics is frequently wrong and sometimes breathtakingly so. Essentially his main argument is the same one picked up on by Rankin, which may well be valid but is nevertheless lacking in detail, namely that the body’s self-healing mechanisms are activated by relaxation and disactivated by stress, i.e. by the activation of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis.

These self-healing mechanisms may be astonishing, and may depend to a significant degree on the variables the authors cite, but they remain quite mysterious in their details. One possibility one might have hoped Lipton would explore, but which he does not, is that there is a macro equivalent of the cellular apoptosis mechanism which leads entire organisms to self-destruct when signals in their environment communicate to them that they no longer play a role in the community. This may be a gross simplification but it would fit with Lipton’s overarching metaphor whereby the human body is, in many ways, merely the cell writ large.

Lipton also prefigures Rankin by taking to task the medical community for overuse of prescription medicines without a proper understanding of their systemic functioning. However he does not, and cannot, establish any principles to determine whether or not the use of pharmaceuticals is appropriate in individual instances and whether the other healing resources of the body have been sufficiently activated and explored. As such, the criticism, even if one may have sympathy for it, seems superficial.

If Lipton’s book is written from the perspective of a medical researcher, Rankin comes at the subject as a practising doctor disillusioned at the lack of holistic attention to health which characterizes the Western medical community. Failure to grasp the holistic nature of the body’s self-healing mechanisms means that many people get poor medical advice and care. Rankin is at her best campaigning for a much greater awareness on the part of medical caregivers of how healing actually takes place (though in this respect she seems to draw heavily on the admirable precedent of Bernie Siegel).

Much of Rankin’s argument centers on the unnoticed efficacy of placebos, a notion she draws from Lipton without, it seems to me, adequate attribution; indeed even some of the examples she cites already appear in The Biology of Belief. Rankin claims to have researched the placebo effect extensively, but at least sometimes she appears to permit misconception of the originality of her research. (A recent article in Scientific American is worth a look for anyone who doubts the strength of the placebo effect).

There are a number of important principles stressed in Rankin’s book which are often absent from other self-help guides directed towards recovering and maintaining health and which are welcome. Her insistence on finding meaning in life as a key contributing factor to wellness rings true, as does her defense of the power of affirmations given the need to override the negative messages which we are usually passing on to our bodies. She is also right in pointing to the value of community, although she passes lightly over important shortcomings of institutions like family and church the drawbacks of which may very well, in many instances, outweigh the benefits, and which are certainly some way short of the ideal. These institutions have quite likely been at the root of many of the health problems people experience. Moreover, even if community may be as important as diet and lifestyle, the recommendation to seek it out is difficult to operationalize if one does not have a healthy form of it to begin with. Rankin probably should also be commended for pointing to the importance of sexual life, but again, there is no clue in the pages of the book as to what might constitute a healthy configuration or even that this is a legitimate and important question to ask.

Unfortunately, for all its admirable qualities, Rankin’s book appears to take far too lightly the difficulty of modifying ones beliefs and actions in order to obtain better health outcomes, a mistake that Lipton avoids, since he is well aware that most of the body’s beliefs are encoded in subconscious scripts. The “diagnosis and prescription” part of the book is the least satisfying one, often asking the reader to answer in a few sentences what many seekers have needed decades to unearth and understand. In this sense, Rankin’s book looks like a typical US cultural artefact which uncritically endorses the errors of the positive thinking fraternity, discussed by me here.

This is disappointing, because Rankin is a much better self-publicist than Lipton and has acquired a significant new media voice which could have been used to promote deeper healing modalities than those she herself is able to offer. This unfortunately means she gives the impression of overextending herself where greater humility might have been in order, and accordingly coming across as superficial. Parts of her own “prescription” for herself read like an awkward list of endorsements of particular personalities, and there is no indication why they should be of value to someone else; they appear to be simply plucked from the air. Making a diagnosis of the factors in ones life which promote illness and writing a prescription to deal with them – even if one accepts this way of speaking – remains a major task and a daunting endeavor.

These criticisms aside, it is clear from both books that a major shift in social consciousness around health and healing is underway and increasingly forcing its way into the mainstream. For those who continue to place undue faith in the mechanistic and simplistic ideas which have hitherto underpinned Western allopathic medicine, either or both books will be very helpful antidotes. We may be still a long way off adequately describing how the body’s self-healing mechanisms work, but there seems no doubt at all that they make a key contribution to health outcomes and, if only for this reason, should be nurtured. In reality, of course, the quest for optimal health only dictates what the spiritual path anyway demands on other counts: a conscious uncovering of reality, and the courage to listen to what we already know.

No Mud, No Lotus – A review

Similarly to Monique Roffey’s book which I reviewed earlier, Maya Yonika’s No Mud, No Lotus recounts her personal journey prior to meeting the well-known sacred sex practitioner Baba Dez Nichols, her experiences at his temple in Sonoma, Arizona and the fall-out from it (link to her blog here; the main website www.ramamaya.com seems to be down at the time of writing).

Most of the book, in fact, is given over to the story of her life before she met Dez, which consists of a difficult childhood and a long subsequent search for her place in the world which is scarred by a series of misadventures, but also a degree of serendipity. Yonika emerges from the book as someone with a remarkable drive to survive and find herself, but nonetheless she seems still in many ways in dialogue with her inner demons. As, for that matter, does Dez. There is also a related film and a long exchange of views on Facebook, in which various practitioners take part, on the subject of whether or not it is ever appropriate for a sexual therapist to have sex with their client (although this is not really the focus of the book).

Maya experiences a lot of the power of sacred sexual healing both for herself and for others, but is left at best ambivalent as to the methods used by Dez. Her path after leaving the temple is not elucidated in any detail in the book, which also does not contain a definitive assessment of her experience. This is left up to the reader.

I would like to start out by quoting something that Dez says in the aforementioned Facebook thread:

“There is a common wound in the feminine experienced by those who have been abandoned, dominated or abused in some way (which is most of us). This wound causes us to lash out at others we perceive to be misusing power (and often misusing our own in the process). As the wound comes near to healing – normally when a masculine energy is willing to brave it out of love for the feminine – a deep battle in the psyche takes place.

“The feminine tests the masculine with everything she has – looking for every imperfection and trying hard to make the projection of abuser fit his face instead of having to reclaim it as part of the dynamic of her own wounding. In women at this stage, often the immature masculine in them attacks the wounded feminine in a man in order to feel some retribution for their inner wound. And in men, the wounded feminine often withdraws and goes into isolation and victimhood.

“In Greek legend there is the story of the archer left behind on an island on the way to Troy because he had a wound that smelled so bad no one could come near. The oracle later declared that someone needed to go back for him as he was required to shoot the winning arrow in the battle.

“I smell such a wound in many communications as we try to heal this collective wound. When real love has appeared in our lives and been deep enough to precipitate that final battle – if we take the lesson from the oracle, the winning arrow can only be fired when we go back to that inner island and brave the stench of the wound we have not (yet) been able to bear.”

This is brilliantly stated and I fully agree with it. At the same time, however, it is one-sided and the context renders it, for me, manipulative. That context, according to the book, is as follows: Dez plucks Maya out of obscurity, catapulting her into the role of his teaching partner despite hardly knowing her and despite her wounded past. She is also asked to offer sexual healing sessions, despite having seemingly little to no training and not having at all achieved a resolution of her own inner conflicts.

Maya has sound intuitions about sexuality, which Dez is portrayed as ignoring. She is certainly projecting on him, but he seems unaware that he is doing the same to her. They squabble in ways that are all too familiar, reenacting the cultural battle of the sexes, with Dez, it seems, unwilling to give any ground. In his role as healer, he seems ego-driven and out of touch with the spiritual heart of sex, as I have described it elsewhere on this blog. He is certainly marked by a considerable degree of attachment to Maya, whilst simultaneously unable to connect with an essential part of her nature.

Perhaps this is not surprising. What Dez and others have invented is not tantra, but a method of sexual healing. It is thus very reduced in scope compared to tantra, lacking in any other meditative practice, and frequently not very therapeutically informed. It may be exactly what some people need, but it is not obvious that many of its practitioners are in a position to make that judgment reliably. This is because it is not really a method, but a transmission; and this transmission, to operate reliably, necessitates a sufficient degree of openness on the part of the receiver – which has to be built progressively – and transcendence of self on the part of the giver. In the case of Maya, and probably in many other cases, it seems to me that Dez places undue reliance on the therapeutic efficacy of methods that are not adapted to many of the situations which they face. She cannot be his Dakini, because they never appear as equals. It seems that, from her, he learns little.

By contrast, a notion of therapy is almost absent in classical tantra, but it does require extensive preparation before devotees are in a position to engage in union in a manner which is spiritually beneficial. Union is certainly not therapy in tantra, or at least not baseline therapy; there is much besides.

Maya intuits that Dez is spiritually unavailable to her because he over-identifies with the role he has created for himself. I am inclined to share that intuition. As a result, she feels that sex loses its power and that she must look elsewhere. This stand-off may appear as a classic struggle between the sexual “natures” of man and woman, and certainly risks reinforcing that stereotype (as did also Roffey’s book), but – given that the notion that our species has been eternally engaged in a game of mutual self-destruction has to be rejected – this would be a naive conclusion. In the end, Maya may be inclined to seek refuge in exclusivity (this is not really clear) and Dez in multeplicity because they are the male and female halves of the same wound. Maya knows that she can love in infinite depth, and so multeplicity seems to her a rejection of profundity; Dez knows that he can love in infinite scope and misses the need for depth. Maya is attentive to his discourse, but reacts defensively because she senses she has another, equally vital discourse, to which he is deaf, and that therefore they cannot meet as Shiva and Shakti, but only on the basis of a subjugation of her feminine essence.

One could dismiss the story on the grounds that a little thought and research should suffice to make clear to any spiritual searcher that what Dez is offering is too limited to achieve a full spiritual transformation. Nevertheless, it does matter, because the need for sexual healing is widespread, and very many vulnerable people are attracted by what is, in essence, a practice which promises far more than it can deliver. This style of sexual healing has a lot in common with mind-altering drugs. At a certain moment in life’s journey, it can be the perfect way to open up to dimensions of existence of which one had been completely unaware. Yet it is valuable only if that is merely the start of a journey and not a substitute for it. The alternative is a state of dependency which may be very destructive.

The fear of rejection and the power to say no

If you have a fear of rejection, it is very likely that you also have a difficulty to say no to people and to take your life in your own hands.

This is not simply because, by saying no, you fear rejection by the person who (at least implicitly) asked you for something. It is because you have lost touch with your own power to reject.

This follows from the insights of object relations theory, whose best known theorist and advocate was Melanie Klein. Essentially it works like this. Human potentiality includes a wide repertory of emotional resources, but some of the less “pleasant” of these, like the ability to drive through a personal agenda single-mindedly, we reject at an early age: because they seem to us to be associated with the failure of a caregiver to attend to our emotional or physical needs. Because these attributes are perceived properties of the neglectful caregiver, we disqualify them as properties of ourselves. Essentially, biology presents us with a full palette of emotional resources, but we select from these some and exclude others in order to construct an ego ideal (i.e. a mental representation of our ego) which provides us with comfort by reassuring ourselves that we are not like our tormentor.

In the process, however, we alienate from ourselves an innate part of our emotional repertory. This is not to say that we necessarily do not express those emotions at all (and therefore neither is it to say that we cannot repeat exactly the same emotionally destructive process with the next generation). However, these unwanted emotions remain isolated within the psyche and cannot ally themselves with the part of ourselves which we do accept and which corresponds to the ego ideal. When we express those emotions, we do so in a way which is monochrome and does not serve our goals, and we experience guilt, shame and regret.

The rejected emotions which are separated out from the ego and assigned to the neglectful caregiver contribute to form the Object which is the core concept of the theory. In order to minimize the painfulness of similarity, we deny to the Object the “positive” emotions which we find in ourselves. Thus the Object is completely other and unrelated to ourselves. However, the Object is not the caregiver, but merely a mode in which the caregiver presents him- or herself, at certain times, to the infant. When the caregiver gives the infant what it wants (i.e. his or her behavior is ego-syntonic), he or she remains represented as an object of trust. The caregiver is therefore mentally represented by two Objects, one of which is categorically desired (the libidinous Object) and the other of which is as categorically rejected (the rejected Object).

The infant is initially unaware of any overarching concept of personality of the caregiver, but merely perceives and experiences one or other of these modes. Anyone who has small children will know that at one moment they can be all over you, tender and loving, and in the next moment mad at you if they do not get what they want. This characteristically infantile reaction is possible because the infant still lacks the concept of singularity of personhood and it certainly persists until the age of five or six, and frequently goes on to characterize stressful reactions to the other throughout adult life.

As cognitive development allows a more complex representation of the caregiver to take root, these Objects remain in the preconscious mind as incarnations, on the one hand, of those parts of our emotional repertory which we embrace and, on the other, those parts which we reject. The libidinous Object becomes the later object of romantic desire, that is, it extends its role from ego-ideal to “alter-ideal”. The alter-ideal, of course, because it is imcompatible with biology, is as impossible to realize as the ego-ideal, and therefore destined to cause the inevitable shipwreck of souls and relationships. Meanwhile the rejected Object is in a very real sense the alter-ego, containing within it that part of our biological repertory from which we have cut ourselves off.

The alter-ego manifests itself in multiple ways. When developmental factors have given rise to a strong alter-ego, it is imbued with extraordinary, frightening powers. The alter-ego is able to threaten us in ways far more menacing than the caregiver ever could, because it is constructed solely from the “negative” (i.e. ego-dystonic) material we found in the caregiver, with none of the ego-syntonic “good”. It surfaces as a monster in our nightmares, denying us the opportunity to appropriate any of its attributes as part of ourselves. But it also lurks behind every instance of ego-dystonic social behavior which we encounter growing up and in our adult lives. Minor setbacks and modest, negotiable obstacles, to which the healthy ego is resilient, become repeated proofs to us of the reality of the menace posed by the alter-ego and its absolute power over our lives. We no longer represent situations or the disposition of their protagonists realistically, determining to what extent they are favorable or unfavorable and solliciting a measured neo-cortical response. Instead, each situation is a manifestation of those immanent demonic forces which no more than tolerate our vitality within their own predetermined limits. Provoke them, and we are not merely disadvantaged, but ruined.

The key to disarming the alter-ego is realizing that it is a concoction of our own minds, and simultaneously as much an abstraction, as remote from actual human subjects, and as significant a force in our behavior, as the ego-ideal. The alter-ego is constructed out of those elements of our biological repertory for which we as small infants found no use, like left-over bits of Lego whose place in the puzzle we could not devine, and which we have accordingly moulded into a grotesque, residual form. This omnipotent demonic force could only be formed in such a way; nothing in real life corresponds to it. If it is able to menace us in ways in which no real human being could, it is because we have given it the force to do so, simultaneously denying that force to ourselves. That is why we fear rejection, equating it to a cataclysmic annihilation of our selfhood, and it is the same reason why we cannot say a healthy no to others.

It seems that this trick of splitting the ego which we play on ourselves also has its limits. We know that we do not conform fully to our ego-ideal, and secretly we intuit the truth that the demon is actually part of us, and suspect that we are as unlovable as it is. That is why, as the cartoon (courtesy of atrandomcomics.com) illustrates so well, the person whose alter-ego towers over her ego needs constant reassurance that she is accepted by others, and yet never really believes it. The ego-ideal is frequently designed to procure acceptance, and so held in place by both carrot and stick. Although it seems primary, because a failure to bond effectively with the caregiver has such damaging effects for ego development, it may also be that the fear of rejection is only one of the fears that can be expressed in this way. For the moment, however, I know too little of others’ demons to feel myself on firm ground speculating further.

In conclusion. When you encounter your demon, don’t run away; stop, and admire its force. It has, as you surely realize, amazing powers, even if, stranded as they are in an incorporeal mental representation, unempowered by embodiment, they serve no purpose other than gratification of its infinitely sadistic desires at your expense. The demon is extremely scary, but it is also magnificently beautiful. It invites to contemplation in awareness of its having been composed, Frankenstein-like, from left-over bits of yourself. You have given it the superhuman powers it has over you; they are your own powers, so invite them home. Alienated from you, yet dependent for its existence upon that alienation, and existing only in your mind, the demon can only threaten you. It is unable to act in any other way. Reincorporated, however, its powers are available to you for all of the purposes you design. It is no longer condemned to an autistic, emprisoned existence but can become part of an harmonious whole.

Molecules of Emotion

I first came across Pert’s work due to a fairly throwaway reference in Tom Myers’ manual of movement anatomy, Anatomy Trains. As the biological basis of emotion has long interested me, but I have not previously found anything of real value on the subject, and, undeterred by some negative reviews on Amazon (though overall it is well rated), I decided to take a look.

My first surprise was that the book had been written in 1997! That it took me fifteen years even to hear about it, despite an interest in the subject, is astonishing. That the original research goes back to the 1970’s is even more so.

The book has been criticized as too autobiographical with not enough hard science take-aways. It is true that it is autobiographical, and doubtless I also hoped to understand more of the subject at the end of it than I do, though I did learn quite a bit. However, it is also very well written and, except for the last couple of chapters which disappoint, as hard to put down as a good detective novel. So the entertainment value and the broader insight into how the neuropharmacological research community works more than compensated for this failing, and in fact I do not know if there was, at the time of writing, more to be said on the subject than is contained in the book. I do have a couple of more recent books on similar subjects lined up for reading, so check this space.

Where I would fault the book, however, is its tendancy to wild generalization, containing as it does a wide range of claims about body-mind interactions with no effort to discriminate between them. As such, it is more suggestive than authoritative. Certainly, Pert’s work lends weight to the validity claims of many non-pharmacological therapies. A picture emerges from the book as to why these therapies may be successful, and I have no doubt that broadly she is on the right lines. However, there are so many gaps in explaining how these bodymind linkages work that there is really nothing in the book that counts as an explanation. The only things on which she sheds real light are the action of psychedelics and a treatment for AIDS based on blocking the CCR5 receptor, used by the virus, with a molecule based on an endogenous ligand, which still today is struggling to gain official acceptance. The view that the brain is not merely a neurological but also an endocrine organ is doubtless, by now at least, well established, but even the links she shows between emotions and the immune system, which are persuasive at the conceptual level, are difficult to disentangle. Lastly, Pert’s meanderings into alternative and new age therapies tend more to discredit than buttress her thesis – and I say this as someone with plenty of sympathy for some of these therapies.

I did take from the book a real sense of the biochemical unity of life. It is extraordinary that the “molecules of emotion” are so widely distributed in nature, with analogues even in plants. Plus she quotes approvingly Reich and Lowen, which is courageous enough, though whether her research actually provides support for the idea of somatically stored emotions is not clear.

Although it is not intended, and does not function, as a textbook, Pert is a relatively unknown but important scientific pioneer and her work deserves to be read for this reason as well as for its broader sociological interest.

Mating in Captivity – A Review

I’ve always been a bit skeptical of the concept of marriage counselling, for at least two main reasons. One is that the problems that couples have derive from two individuals who themselves have problems. While work on oneself may certainly help to see relationship issues in a new light, it was, and I guess still is, less obvious to me that there is anything specific to work on in the space between the individuals, the relationship itself. Symptomatic of this lack of real material to work on, marriage counselors have always seemed to me to come at their task with entirely unquestioning devotion to the inherited narrative of monogamy. Their task has seemed to me primarily to consist in assigning blame and soliciting repentance, with the blame invariably assigned to whomever it might be who has stepped outside the bounds of sexual fidelity. This sounds like an insane exercise in self-flagellation of the kind that powerful American men (yes, it’s always men) predictably resort to when their sexual dalliances enter the public record.

I have no idea if this is a fair characterization of the profession or if attitudes are changing, but I nonetheless found myself spellbound by the wisdom and compassion on almost every page of Esther Perel’s book Mating in Captivity – and this notwithstanding that, while not judgmental, the author remains to my taste disappointingly coy on non-monogamy. On page after page, Perel brilliantly deconstructs the meaning underlying how partners behave in relationships. Particularly refreshing to generations of men accustomed to being portrayed by feminists as untrustworthy sexual predators is her real insight into how men think and feel about relationships, which is expressed with a rare lucidity and a genuine compassion. Not only women should read it for this reason – men should too, for we are just as much a victim of the social stereotypes which, even if we do not entirely believe them, cloud us to an understanding of and pride in our real nature.

Particularly poignant and illuminating is her observation that, for many men, sex is a privileged language of intimacy. She notes that women expect men to share with them in ways which many men simply are not equipped to do, whilst at the same time failing to observe the messages of affection and commitment contained in the language which men do master, or at least where they feel freer, the sexual language of the body. “It is not sufficiently appreciated that the erotic realm also offers men a restorative experience for their more tender side… for a lot of men it remains the only language for closeness which hasn’t been spoiled.” She notes also that many women take refuge in words as a way of purifying their carnal impulses, an idea she finds disturbing. “Sometimes, the emotional weaving is done through talk; often, it is not. Building a bookshelf for your lover, changing the snow tires on your wife’s car, and learning to make his mother’s chicken soup, all carry the promise of connection.”

Another point she makes strongly echoes something I wrote in my recent article “Cycles of sexual history” about patriarchal biases in the evaluation of sexual practices. She puts it like this: “Taboo-ridden sexuality and excess-driven sexuality converge in a troubling way. Both lead us to want to dissociate psychically from the physical act of sex… What is missing is a sexuality that is integrated, in which pleasure flourishes in a context of relatedness. I’m not talking only about deep love; I’m also talking about basic care and appreciation for another person.” (emphasis added). Referring to compulsive casual sex within the college hook-up scene she describes it as “less an expression of liberation than an acting out of underlying insecurity“; for my money, exactly the same conclusion could be drawn in relation to much that goes on within the swinger community. Unless you have this kind of obsessive sexuality, it’s decidedly unsexy, and over time deadening for the erotic imagination.

At the end of the book, I still don’t know how enthusiastically I would recommend counselling to sexually estranged couples; I doubt there are many therapists exercising this profession with the wisdom and compassion of Ms Perel. But to all couples, regardless of how happy they are with their relationship and their sex life, the book is certain to be an enriching read.

Ancestral sexuality: more clues from our erotic imagination?

In my last post, I alluded to some of the evidence from psychoanalysis which supports the position of primary sexual non-exclusivity taken in Sex at Dawn. In this post, I would like to throw out another idea. (*)

I have mentioned before Robert Stoller’s work on the erotic imagination (here and here) and have just now finished reading the chapter on erotic fantasy in Esther Perel’s superb Mating in Captivity, to which I shall return in a future post Reading this, it occurs to me that we have no good answer to the following question: why is the experience of repressed aggression or of humiliation sexualized even when it is not obviously sexual in origin? That is, why do we make specifically sexual fantasies out of these experiences and wish to reenact them in a sexual context? One could perfectly well reenact them in other contexts, and as a practical matter this may often be far easier to do; yet the erotic persona often seems diametrically opposed to the public persona. There is of course a Freudian, “developmental” answer to this question, but it is in this regard circular: it begs the underlying question of why exactly sex is so important to the ego.

So what is the link between sex, aggression and status and why is it so powerful? After all, in plenty of primate species sex has no particular importance: it is casual, episodic and short-lived. Given the insignificant role of sex in such species, it is hard to imagine that they spend anything like the proportion of their time thinking about it which humans do. In fact there is only one primate species for which it is easy to conceive of its possessing an active erotic imagination and one in which sex and aggression are closely linked: the bonobo.

For bonobos, sex plays a rich and unique social role. Let’s listen to Frans de Waal: “Bonobo sex often occurs in aggressive contexts … A jealous male might chase another away from a female, after which the two males reunite and engage in scrotal rubbing. Or after a female hits a juvenile, the latter’s mother may lunge at the aggressor, an action that is immediately followed by genital rubbing between the two adults.”

Just like “make-up” sex which anecdotally is a frequent occurrence in human dyadic relationships, sex for bonobos plays a role of reestablishing social connections after emotions have gotten a little out of hand.

Now let’s imagine a bonobo which for some reason (forced induction into human “civilization” for example) is not allowed to use sex to bring reconciliation in a certain range of contexts and is also sex-deprived generally. The experience of aggression in these contexts is still, presumably, going to provoke in him or her an erotic reaction. Absent the opportunity to act on this impulse, one can well imagine its becoming, by the standard mechanism, a neurotic script whereby the circumstances which originally sollicited the reaction non-exclusively, now become integral to it and required for it to take place.

That is, we may hypothesize that the ability to make aggression into a core element within the erotic imagination requires a significant primary link between sexuality and aggression in the social life of the species. Aggression and sexuality are in a subtle and continuous balance in bonobo society, the purpose of which is to sustain cooperation within the tribe.

My purpose, of course, is not to suggest that human sexuality is not much more sophisticated than that of bonobos: it clearly is. Yet it is appealing to imagine, even if it is only the embryo of an idea requiring further research, that we share this archetypal association, as it would illuminate what remains otherwise, to my mind, somewhat of a mystery.

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(*) Note: as readers of the book will be aware, the theme of a link between the erotic imagination and primary sexuality is already present in Sex at Dawn, where the authors discuss the appeal of multi-male pornography to men. This contribution is in a similar spirit.