women – Becoming Human

Cacocracy

First read this.

Now aside from being brilliant and game-changing relationship advice (it won’t catch on though, mark my words – no one wants to hear the truth that their problems are of their own making, not someone else’s), I want to point out the following.

I am pretty damn sure that almost everyone reading this article, whether they are men or women, and almost regardless even of how strongly they agree with the advice given, in their gut sympathizes with the woman. In fact, I doubt very many people at all – even if, like me, they cried reading this on the train this morning, the delicious yet bittersweet tears of a human being feeling accepted and understood – I doubt that they pause really to think, to dwell on and meditate, the pain of the man.

Vaste swathes of the feminist movement, and of femininity generally, is deeply, indelibly in love with their victim complex. But it is not only women, it is the whole of our culture which is virulently hostile to the emotional, affective and sexual expression of (biological) masculinity and which carries around self-fulfilling stereotypes of “evil, predatory” males and “good, victim” females. And it is very, very hard to resist; to confront it as a man will gain you little recognition as it goes to the core of female neuroses which very few people wish to recognize, and the reaction is likely to be shutting you out of access to even that paltry emotional world of sexual and affective congress that you are allowed to aspire to inhabit. It is, in other words, not incentive-compatible to tell the truth.

We are wedded to the idea that we live in a patriarchy. Some cultural heroes contrast this to an imagined, prehistoric lost golden age of matriarchy. Yet it is a very deep truth, I believe, that both of these terms are meaningless. Male and female can exist in the universe only in equal measure. There can be small amounts of each or large amounts of each, but there cannot be different amounts of each. When neither can flow freely, each will flow in a distorted manner, and these distorsions will be different, but certainly not in any moral sense (there is, after all, no moral sense). And this is what we see – qualitative difference in the expression of the emotional pathology. But not quantitative difference.

I certainly feel compassion for the woman in this story, even if it is hard to feel compassion for someone who is insisting that I make a lie out of my life in order not too much to disrupt her excruciating insecurities. But I also see clearly that making that lie is not simply a least-resistance convenience, without costs. No. It is just as excruciating.

We live in a world where power-over is differently exercised by men and women, in different domains and different ways, but one is not triumphant and the other subordinate. They are simply at war and fight using the tools at hand. Neither can ever win, but they certainly can destroy each other. And this is a reign, not of men over women or of women over men, but of sickness over health or, if you like those terms, of evil over good. A cacocracy.

As the author says (and I hope you read it, but it bears repeating):

There are a few good things in the world. Love is one of them. Love is a gem. Love is one of those rare things in the world that is pretty much good all around. It arises free of cost and does no harm in the feeling of it; it only elevates and brings joy.

I know it also threatens. But for a moment let us please look not at how it threatens but at how it brings spontaneous pleasure. For a moment, why not ask how this gift of human consciousness might serve as the true starting point for relationships? Why not take a risk and see if we can operate on the principle of universal love? What might that show us?

What if it were possible for this man to have an infinite amount of love? What if his love does, in fact, grow the more it is exhausted, the way a muscle grows the more it is exhausted? And what if it shrinks when held immobile, the way a muscle shrinks when held immobile?

And what if your arrangements about sex were a separate matter? What if you were to grant him the freedom to feel what he feels and express it to you as best he can, including the understanding that he tell the complete truth to you, including the truth of whether he has been having sex with this woman, or kissing this woman, or touching her at all? What if you were to abandon all thought of controlling what is to happen next and abandon yourself to the truth, to seek the truth like a thirsty traveler, to lap it up with no thought of what to do with it?

What if we were to use our short time on earth to learn as much as we can about each other by telling each other the truth and listening to the truth? What if truth is painful only because stripping away illusion is painful? What if relationships are a set of dance moves learned in elementary school? What if we have it mostly backward? What if it turns out that what we consider the most healthy relationship is the one that cleaves most fearfully to its model of illusion? What if a “troubled relationship” is merely one that has begun to admit a little truth into its choreography of fairy tales? What if “trouble” is the beginning of “health”?

Exactly. What if trouble is the beginning of health?

One last point. In some comments on this article on Facebook, certain people were tempted to agree with the author on substance, but accused him of adding unnecessary “spiritual mumbo-jumbo” to his case.

The problem with this is that some people are just convinced that human beings are a wretched, mean creature, always selfish, never to be trusted. They hold this view of me, and, presumably, also of themselves (at least I hope they are at least consistent to this very minimal degree). These people will never be persuaded otherwise. There is no hope whatsoever that they will get what the author is talking about unless they can open their eyes to the glory of what surrounds them, figure out that this glory is also inside of them, and finally understand that it is inside of everyone. Yet one can only point it out, and hope. This is what the author does, and I hope I am adding my voice to his.

Our tribal nature

Since Sex at Dawn, it is finally beyond doubt that humankind is not a monogamous creature. Nonetheless, there are lot of details still to be filled in as regards the exact role of sexuality in the social organization of our species, both past and present. In this regard, we are only possessed at present of a few, tantalizing clues. However, both brief introspection and sheer logic suffice to conclude that sexual behavior in our species does not serve simply or primarily as some kind of casual, diffuse and undifferentiated social glue. Such an extreme view appears to be a gross simplification even for bonobos.

What I have observed, purely from self-study and from listening to others who have similarly tried to understand themselves, is that there remains a fundamental difference between men and women as regards their emotional response to situations in which their sexuality comes to contemporary expression, at least when it is expressed within a holistic response to another individual where attraction is felt on a number of levels. This difference appears to me to be irreducible to purely cultural and contingent factors, and to play a plausible role in primitive societies as well.

Sticking to bonobos, and we should be careful in extrapolating too naively to our own species, we know that they live in philopatric groups. This means that the male composition of groups is constant over time, whilst females migrate into groups other than that in which they were born. Whilst homosexual behavior takes place in both sexes, it appears to play more of a bonding role amongst females, whereas amongst males its role is more as an outlet for sexual tension and to reinforce mating hierarchies: males exhibit markedly less intra-sex solidarity than females.

Now I have not read anything about this, applying either to bonobos or our own species, but the question obviously arises of the factors which come into play in inciting a female to join another group. There is clearly a push factor – the desire to avoid incestuous pregnancy – but it is still necessary to choose the new host group. It is hard to believe that this choice is entirely left to chance.

Looking at our own species – methodological rigor is not claimed – and trying to think a little bit how this would have worked in primitive tribal societies (though contemporary evidence should also be available), I have remarked and postulate that men, when they feel a high degree of attraction to a new female (“fall in love”), seek to bring her into the tribe. “Falling in love” does not cause men to wish to abandon their existing family and other social ties, though it may be so strong on occasion and encounter such opposing forces that this less-preferred option nevertheless comes out on top. Essentially, male sexuality is inclusive. Males also have a strong wish for new females to bond with existing females and will make efforts in this sense, however fruitlessly and apparently, perhaps, naively. Bonding with existing females will be a factor in the ultimate inclusion or otherwise of a new female in the group. Translated into contemporary society, the bottom line is that men do not want to leave their wives (never mind their children), but at the same time do wish to offer protection and security to new sexual partners as well.

On the female side, other forces are at work. A woman who feels a deep attraction to a new man is likely to feel a desire to be with him, and to consider abandoning her existing social roles in order to realize that goal. The frustration of this desire can result in dramatic behavior, à la Madame Bovary. It is nonetheless held in check by certain factors, principal amongst which are children and female friends. To leave her existing mate is less inconceivable for a woman than for a man and sentimental ties are less important relative to the force of her new passion.

In bonobos, for a female to leave a group would mean to leave her immature children behind. The males will never rejoin her, and the females, once they enter into adulthood, are unlikely to. I do not know if females ever produce children in more than one group but am guessing it is most uncommon. It’s likely that a female who has become a mother remains henceforth with the group in which that event has occurred. Romantic attachments to extra-group males, whilst they might still happen, would not achieve the critical momentum necessary to sever existing ties. Female sexuality eventually settles into a more nurturing and more inclusive form, but the initial choice of group is made on the basis of a single male considered as a desirable mate – not on the basis of an assessment of the group as a whole.

This postulate shows us how what we now consider as “monogamous” sexual attraction may have existed and played a role in the social processes leading to the formation of primitive tribal groups, in particular to resolve the problem of choice of group faced by the newly adult female. In this perspective, it is not something anomalous grafted onto a fundamentally polygamous nature. When, however, it encounters contemporary social structures, it misfires for several reasons.

Our existing “tribes” are tiny nuclear families or, at best, kinship groups. Woman have been given legal rights (without my taking any view on these rights) which make it likely that separation from children will not be a cost of divorce. Under these circumstances, leaving the “tribe” is much easier. This creates a risk of breakdown in the tribe which a man’s efforts to strengthen the tribe by bringing in new females and new children may only hasten. The same drives which developed, in other words, to generate stable social structures under the constraint of maintaining genetic diversity, now generate unstable social structures in which childcare inevitably suffers.

This picture is not, perhaps, as hopeless as it sounds. In primitive times also, many factors would have frustrated the wishes of many individuals, and yet these factors would not have led to massive neurosis and social breakdown. We are far more robust to disappointment than we perhaps realize.

That certain desired outcomes cannot be realized is not in itself the problem. The dramatically dysfunctional outcomes that we see all around us are rather due to the fact that we cannot even own the truth of our nature and respect that of the other. Under these circumstances, it is not only particular wishes that cannot be accommodated, but the whole prospect that such wishes will be accommodated, ever and to any degree. This systemic, existential frustration generates ill-feeling and potentially violence and abuse which goes on to undermine our tiny tribes from inside, making their undermining from outside ever more probable.

As ever, a wise and adaptive response can only come through awareness and empathy.

Sexual chemistry

In my last post, I think I broke some new ground – for myself anyway – in understanding polyamory vs monogamy and male and female attitudes to sex and relationships.

This theme continues to reverberate with me and become clearer. I think I can express it this way: women, the feminine principle, the earth, Shakti (let’s stick with Shakti) invites men, the masculine principle, the sky, Shiva into depth, uniqueness and emptiness, whilst Shiva invites Shakti into breadth, universality and expansion to plenitude.

Each, in other words, invites the other into the space where he or she is at home. Women tend to cling to monogamy because in the absence of commitment they cannot bring Shiva into depth; men tend to cling to keeping their options open because in an emasculated sexual role they cannot bring Shakti into plenitude. More concretely, men need total presence to receive Shakti, and women need total surrender to receive Shiva. A sexually realized man is totally bound to the earth; a sexually realized woman is totally released into the sky. The man, regardless of the number of his sexual partners, has a quality of connection with each of them which is infinitely tender and real. His natural polyamory is complemented with presence. A sexually realized woman experiences her sexuality directly, not vicariously through a male agent. She is available and present to all those who can recognize and honor her essence. Her natural sense of sacredness is expanded into infinite space. In this way, the infinite and the infinitesimal, the empty and the full, presence and surrender, devotion and celebration, earth and sky, come together and fuse as only seemingly opposite aspects of one single reality.

I absolutely get it.

The man’s task is to allow the woman to occupy a space in which she is completely sexually empowered. Women are afraid to go there, but it is where they need to go to realize their sexual destiny. And vice versa – men are afraid to plunge into the depths, but that is where the treasures for them lie.

I think we all know how men fall in love – what an infinite horizon opens up to them in a single woman at that time, so unexpectedly and so irresistibly. This is the feminine principle at work when it meets the male. But how do women fall in love? Do they? That this kind of question needs to be asked at all should, I hope, be shocking, but I do not think I am simply ignorant, I suspect I just dare to ask the kind of questions that no-one else does. I have read books written by women on the subject, women’s magazines, and experienced a fair slice of life myself, but still the content and very existence of an experience called “falling in love” on the part of women remains utterly evasive and unsure. I now think it is a chimera, a projection and distorsion, and that we need other words which meet and honor a woman’s experience on her own terms.

In fact, a man first feels sexual attraction, and then falls in love. A woman, however, first feels love. More rightly we might say that she then “falls in sex”. Men’s pornography is all about sex, but their experience is about love. Women’s pornography – romance novels and the like – is about love. But their experience is about sex. Women – I am talking of course in their natural state, when shame and repression are absent – are as overwhelmed by sexual feelings as men are overwhelmed by feelings of love. This shows that this is where we need to go to become complete. Men need to abandon to love, and women to sex. Indeed, there is nothing exceptional for a woman in feeling love for a man, and for this reason it may go unremarked and in any case is no marker of a necessary life change – however, falling into sex is clearly so marked – women who fall into sex will end perfectly viable relationships on the strength of their experience. For men it is the opposite – feeling sexual attraction to a woman is in no way remarkable, we feel it all the time, and it tells us nothing of permanence, nothing life-changing. But falling in love is different.

Free men, though, who have embraced and know what a women is, can freely fall in love, as I do all the time (though no-one believes me and many would label it a neurosis), experience all the emotions that go with it, and yet not feel in any way that it necessitates disruptive change in their life: just as free women can enjoy varied sexual experiences and not find that this destabilizes their attachment universe.