The Serpent's Wisdom

For about a week now, i've had an instance of Notepad up on my computer at home with the words, "boredom; pleasure taken; pleasure shared" written in them. These terms each represent key elements of a complex constellation of thoughts i woke up with on Saturday morning and which have sought articulation ever since.

What do i mean by it? For a while now i've been pondering the notion that pleasure points us towards what is good and right. But obviously i have to say so with caveats because not all pleasure is good. When i say something like that, i am thinking of the way i feel when i am with a lover; and i strive, as much as i can, to see to it that my interactions with lovers are an even give and take, a meeting of equals who bring things into one anothers lives. This is pleasure shared. If my lover has an orgasm, i did not "give" it to him or her, i did not "make" him or her come; it is pleasure he or she felt but which we experientially shared. I am so well-attuned to my closest lovers that i would swear i can feel some of it sympathetically when they experience pleasure.

And i would contrast this with "pleasure taken," and in so saying i suppose that the experienced hedonists among my readers can instantly grok where i'm going with this. I've had encounters with people who took pleasure from me; not just the rapes and the sexual assault, but people who had no interest in sharing an experience with *me* as an individual. Who *i* am made no difference at all; the idea was to reduce sex to a scripted, detached thing, wherein partners are completely interchangeable.

Naturally, this is not a recipe for happy-making sex; it's what people do when they are looking for a way to separate this activity from the rest of their lives, rather than when they want to integrate it.

And, in most of those encounters i took pleasure as well, not as in taking my own, but taking theirs, in a way where i too did not have to share an experience with them as a person, but simply having one.

I've learned how to tell at a glance when someone is the sort of person who is more likely to be looking to take pleasure from me, and i have to avoid them. It is almost certain that they will bring nothing good into my life at all.

When i've been asked, "What did you get out of that?" i can't really answer. Something indefinable. I usually felt incredibly sexually charged hours afterwards, so some part of me was getting something out of it. Most people say they can't imagine having sex that way, but i have to say, i've encountered enough who do from every walk of life and of every gender that the potential for it is pretty much universal (at least among Americans).

Which is where "boredom" comes in, because i think it has a lot to do with what drives it. Not boredom in the sense of, you're sitting around one evening and saying to yourself, "Ho hum, what am i going to do tonight?" No, i mean boredom in the really deep sense of the word. The same kind of boredom that drives zoo animals to mutilate themselves after they've been pacing around a small cell, staring at the same four fucking concrete walls day after day. You can change your room around or get a new apartment, you can get a new job, but your life can still be, in a deeper sense, like staring at four fucking concrete walls all the time.

This is the downside to civilization. And i think all of us struggle with this, some of us more successfully than others.

Eventually it deafferents your soul. Why do i choose that word? Because an animal, after having a part of their body deafferented, will often chew it off. This is what many of the Silver Spring monkeys did. At that point, you know what it is you need, but you actively avoid it in favor of the dehumanizing experience which you know is only going to cut you off from your life a little further. And that thing could be dehumanizing sex, or it could be alcohol or drug abuse, or whatever.

Why do we push deeper into that which we know damn well is going to ruin us? Honestly, i don't know. Maybe the brain gets used to it, and sees it as the closest thing to "interesting" that is going on at that point. I think we can accurately call it a break with reality.

One antidote for that boredom seems to be pleasure shared. And by that i mean in the broader sense, not just sexual pleasure, and not just happiness with a partner; it could be just an evening of "hanging out" and "not doing anything special" (put in quotes to demonstrate that such things are more crucial than people generally think). Think that's not important? Go without it for six months.

I don't want to say it absolutely *has* to be pleasure shared with another person because sometimes it can be very affirming to share pleasure with oneself. But i suspect that most of us would usually need to share with others.

It's not a cure-all, certainly, but i find that a lot of my psychic disorientation seems to clear up when i have enough of this in my life. When i say something "grounds" me, that's usually what i mean; experiences which make me mindful, present in the now, pleasure shared.

More evidence that the Chaliban's anti-choice movement is about punishing women for having sex instead of protecting life:

Cedar River Clinics, a women's health and abortion provider with facilities in Renton, Tacoma, and Yakima, filed a complaint with the Washington State Department of Health this week alleging three instances where pharmacists raising moral objections refused to fill prescriptions for Cedar River clients. The complaint includes one incident at the Swedish Medical Center outpatient pharmacy in Seattle. According to the complaint, someone at the Swedish pharmacy said she was "morally unable" to fill a Cedar River patient's prescription for abortion-related antibiotics. Cedar River's complaint quotes its Renton clinic manager's May 17, 2005, e-mail account: "Today, one of our clients asked us to call in her prescription... to Swedish outpatient pharmacy. [We] called the prescription in... and spoke with an efficient staff person who took down the prescription. A few minutes later, this pharmacy person called us back and told us she had found out who we were and she morally was unable to fill the prescription." (Cedar River thinks their client eventually got her prescription filled.)

from Bitter Pill: Women's Health Clinic Files Complaint Against Swedish Medical Center Pharmacy (emphasis added) (thanks to mom2boysbh for the link)

During my very productive conversation with daoistraver here, i wrote this:

i don't see any way to prevent an aristocratic power-grab from happening in the absence of a population-wide regulatory structure to keep them from taking everything. That's why i'm a socialist and not an anarchist. Even then the people at the upper echelons find ways to manipulate the existing system, including government, to suit their purposes -- which is something i agree with you completely on -- but on balance i think the population as a whole are better off with welfare and regulation enforcement, however corrupt, than they are without that at all... unless someone could prove to me that the next revolution would be permanent and would not just result in yet another class stratification.

For about a year i've been looking for a way to formulate what i saw expressed quite succinctly yesterday: the Iron Law of Oligarchy, which i summarized in yesterday's post: "all forms of organization, regardless of how democratic or autocratic they may be at the start, will eventually and inevitably develop oligarchic tendencies."

I see this as a serious problem, perhaps THE serious problem: all revolutions are in their turn either suppressed, or are undermined and appropriated and become the oligarchs' key to our hearts and minds -- they cannibalize us while making us think it's in our best interest. This has happened so often and so faithfully that imperialism and kyriarchy have been seriously proposed by biosociologists as the natural tendency of our species.

So, how do we solve it? What slogans, principles, ideologies, churches, movements, chants, protests, guillotines, etc., will not eventually be turned around and used against us? We can storm the boardrooms and congress and subvert the media and march in the streets, but to what end, if a generation or so from now, we've got the same status quo all over again, but using the name of "revolution" as happened in Russia?

We need a revolution not just of people in the street (though that might be a component of it too); we need a revolution that erects an eternal fountain of compassion and loving-kindness in each person.

Chris Wilson of Lakeland, Florida, said in an interview that he created the site in 2004 as a simple Internet pornography venture: Users post amateur pictures--supposedly of their wives or girlfriends--and for a $10 registration fee, others can take a look. He claims there are about 150,000 registered users on the site, 45,000 of whom are military personnel. Of the 130,000 unique visitors who come to the site daily, Wilson estimates that 30 percent of the traffic, or 39,000 unique users, are US military personnel.

Early on in his Internet venture, Wilson said, he encountered a problem--potential military customers in Iraq and Afghanistan couldn't pay for membership, because credit card companies were blocking charges from "high-risk" countries like Iraq and Afghanistan.

Not wanting to shortchange US troops, Wilson established a rule that if users posted an authentic picture proving they were stationed overseas, they would be granted unlimited access to the site's pornography. The posting began, sometimes of benign images of troops leaning against their tanks, but graphic combat images also began to appear. As of September 20, there were 244 graphic battlefield images and videos available to members.

...The website has become a stomach-churning showcase for the pornography of war--close-up shots of Iraqi insurgents and civilians with heads blown off, or with intestines spilling from open wounds. Sometimes photographs of mangled body parts are displayed: Part of the game is for users to guess what appendage or organ is on display.

from The Porn of War (some foul language, so perhaps NWS), cited in The Heart of Darkness, linked by antiwar_dot_com

Is the link between sex and violence in pornography, which keeps coming up in myriad ways, an inevitable side effect of the medium? Or does this link form when pornography is produced and consumed in a society rife with imperialism and oppression? I lean towards the latter, and i still hold on to the idea that non-exploitative, non-sexist pornography can be a good thing.

A while ago i wrote about the suggested link between pornography and the Abu Ghraib photos. In that discussion i pondered the ways in which militaristic culture would twist the medium of pornography to the purpose of mischanneling pleasure as part of the culture's efforts to produce a class of soldiers.

If my thesis is right, then woman-positive porn should have some effect towards calming sexism, racism, and militarism -- that is, *if* consumers bottle-fed on high-impact thrill porn can develop a taste for kinder, gentler woman-positive porn.

Unfortunately, exploitation remains profitable, even (perhaps especially) in an industry like pornography. It is as if the archontic forces are aligned against the success of such a project: capitalism, militarism, desensitization, misogyny, racism, addiction, and... i don't know a term for "compulsively seeking prurient thrills in the depiction of violence."

Postscript. I recall having a discussion in my journal at some point, though going back through memories now i can't find it, about the prurient-violent depictions of Hell sometimes given by Bible-thumping preachers, in which it is clear that pleasure is being taken in the thought of sinners suffering in Hell. I think that style of religion plays a role in this too, as part-and-parcel of the cultural pattern of what militarism has done to American culture.

Not long ago, I went looking online for porn for the first time ever. I was, uh, doing research, yeah, that's it. For the most part I have never been particularly interested in visual porn and have much more strongly preferred written smut, especially literary erotica.

I have to say I was rather shocked by what I found. I mean, not literally shocked shocked, as in my eyes bled and my jaw hit the floor, but I was really disconcerted to see the degree to which it was difficult or impossible to separate images from a context of degredation and humiliation.

Now, I know porn doesn't have to be that way. I've seen many examples of positive, non-dehumanizing porn. But I wonder if there isn't something about the medium itself, or the common-denominator reaction to it, that tends to inspire dehumanization. I'm don't think so, though, because there's evidence that it is this society in particular that inspires dehumanization in pornography.

For a while now I've been examining the anthropology of sex, in particular the use and mis-use of sex in militaristic cultures. An article I quoted here last year argues for a strong correlation between violence and restriction of pleasure. Today, in this exchange with alobar, a few more pieces of the puzzle fit into place for me.

In primate society, a male's access to sex is restricted according to his place in the social hierarchy. A male who is not the alpha knows his place because of restrictions on his access to sex. It is my theory that this works in reverse -- that men act in a subservient way if their access to sex is restricted. If so, there is a strong incentive for the leaders of a militaristic society to repress healthy sexual expression.

Some species of primates use homosexual sex to defuse potential conflict. I believe that it has this effect on human males, too.

My theory also proposes that in militaristic societies, in which large numbers of men are expected to take up arms in wars of conquest, a healthy relationship to pleasure is thwarted, by means of sexually repressive memes, but also by association of pleasure with dehumanization. Those who can provide outlets for healthy sexual expression -- women and homosexually-passive men (and male-to-female transsexuals), especially if they work as prostitutes -- are marginalized.

This may explain, for example, why some cultures had traditions of "sacred prostitution" -- because women and some men could contribute to social welfare and peace by providing sexual services. In a culture where peace is valued, prostitution could easily turn into a sacred task because it contributes demonstrably to public peace. In contrast, the militaristic authors of the Old Testament forbade any Israelite from becoming temple prostitutes (in fact, several of the anti-homosexual passages in the OT are actually proscriptions against male temple prostitution), which were a feature of life among the Canaanites and certain other Semitic societies.

This article to which alobar linked had some interesting thoughts on the possible influence of dehumanizing pornography on the torture photos from Abu Ghraib:

In fact, most of the torture photographs have a sexual theme, as in those showing the coercing of prisoners to perform, or simulate, sexual acts among themselves. ... [M]ost of the pictures seem part of a larger confluence of torture and pornography: a young woman leading a naked man around on a leash is classic dominatrix imagery. And you wonder how much of the sexual tortures inflicted on the inmates of Abu Ghraib was inspired by the vast repertory of pornographic imagery available on the Internet --- and which ordinary people, by sending out Webcasts of themselves, try to emulate.

What formerly was segregated as pornography, as the exercise of extreme sadomasochistic longings - as in Pier Paolo Pasolini's last, near-unwatchable film, Salo (1975), depicting orgies of torture in the Fascist redoubt in northern Italy at the end of the Mussolini era - is now being normalized, by some, as high-spirited play or venting. To "stack naked men" is like a college fraternity prank, said a caller to Rush Limbaugh and the many millions of Americans who listen to his radio show. Had the caller, one wonders, seen the photographs? No matter. The observation --- or is it the fantasy? --- was on the mark. What may still be capable of shocking some Americans was Limbaugh's response: "Exactly!" he exclaimed. "Exactly my point. This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation, and we're going to ruin people's lives over it, and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time." "They" are the American soldiers, the torturers. And Limbaugh went on: "You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people. You ever heard of emotional release?"

Our psychology is not far off from the egregious displays of torture and violence which were taken as entertainment by the Roman public. Emotional relief for the masses -- to sublimate the terribly dehumanizing pressures of living on the bottom tiers of a decidedly cannibalistic society.

I want to spend more time investigating the debate between Augustine and the Pelagians. I think this, combined with the actions of Constantine, marked the final shift within Christianity from a movement which was fundamentally radical and iconoclastic, to a movement which was a fundamental part of the authoritarian establishment.

Augustine introduced a dualistic doctrine into Christianity which, drawing from his Manichaean origins, sought to portray humanity as sinful by nature. Sin, he taught, was passed from father to child through the semen. Previous Christian tradition had taught that sin was a failure of action and attitude; Augustine's contribution portrayed humanity as entirely helpless in the face of "sin nature" which was embedded in human flesh itself.

In my opinion, this position prevailed because people are easier to herd when their sexuality is tightly controlled. If this is true, then it is always in the interests of those in authority to control access to sex and restrict the population's sexual expression.

I've been developing this idea for some time now:
Sex as defiance in the face of the 'powers and principalities'
Control by restriction of the ways in which people feel good
On the 'virtues' of suffering
Pleasure without guilt as a rebellious act
Deprivation of physical pleasure as a principal root cause of violence

For consideration:

hypothesis 1: if a religion or philosophy teaches that pleasure is bad, they will also teach that the role of women (and GLBTI people) in society or in the religious heirarchy should be restricted.

hypothesis 2: if a religion or philosophy teaches that the role of women (and GLBTI people) in society or in the religious heirarchy should be restricted, they will also teach that pleasure is bad.

Questions:

Is this correlation valid? How strong (or weak) is it?

How might we account for exceptions?

Is there a causation at work here, or an unidentified third factor?

Does the opposite apply -- in other words, is there a correlation between feminist/egalitarianism and hedonism?

One of the reasons we are taught to be suspicious of pleasure is that the pursuit of it might lead us to do whatever we want, whenever we want... with whomever we want.

But what's so bad about that?

If it seems a silly question, I invite you to examine it a little more closely. What IS so bad about that? Jealousy, perhaps... but some would also raise the spectre of "the collapse of the social order."

Would the social order really be at risk of collapse? An interesting question, complicated by recent evidence to suggest that monogamy may not be the natural norm to which humans are biologically inclined. What most of us experience in the practice of monogamy is a constant tension between culture (memes) which tells us monogamy is good, vs. our bodies, which tell us that straying sometimes seems like a really good idea.

When getting to the bottom of a conspiracy, we are prompted to ask, "who benefits?"

A large aspect of the way our social order is arranged regards controlling the reproductive capacity of women in order to ensure clear male parentage. This is not the whole picture, but it is clear that the male who is concerned about which children are his specifically is the one who benefits most from control over access to sex partners.

The following are excerpts from the article "Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence" by James W. Prescott, published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in November 1975. Italics from the original. The tables are particularly noteworthy.

As a developmental neuropsychologist I have devoted a great deal of study to the peculiar relationship between violence and pleasure. I am now convinced that the deprivation of physical sensory pleasure is the principal root cause of violence. Laboratory experiments with animals show that pleasure and violence have a reciprocal relationship, that is, the presence of one inhibits the other. A raging, violent animal will abruptly calm down when electrodes stimulate the pleasure centers of its brain. Likewise, stimulating the violence centers in the brain can terminate the animal's sensual pleasure and peaceful behavior. When the brain's pleasure circuits are 'on,' the violence circuits are 'off,' and vice versa. Among human beings, a pleasure-prone personality rarely displays violence or aggressive behaviors, and a violent personality has little ability to tolerate, experience, or enjoy sensuously pleasing activities. As either violence or pleasure goes up, the other goes down.

It is well known that human infants and children who are hospitalized or institutionalized for extended periods with little physical touching and holding develop almost identical abnormal behaviors, such as rocking and head banging.

Although the pathological violence observed in isolation-reared monkeys is well documented, the linking of early somatosensory deprivation with physical violence in humans is less well established. Numerous studies of juvenile delinquents and adult criminals have shown a family background of broken homes and/or physically abusive parents. These studies have rarely mentioned, let alone measured, the degree of deprivation of physical affection, although this is often inferred from the degree of neglect and abuse.

Societies ranking high or low on the Infant Physical Affection Scale were examined for degree of violence. The results clearly indicated that those societies which give their infants the greatest amount of physical affection were characterized by low theft, low infant physical pain, low religious activity, and negligible or absent killing, mutilating, or torturing of the enemy. These data directly confirm that the deprivation of body pleasure during infancy is significantly linked to a high rate of crime and violence.

Some societies physically punish their infants as a matter of discipline, while others do not. We can determine whether this punishment reflects a general concern for the infant's welfare by matching it against child nurturant care. The results indicate that societies which inflict pain and discomfort upon their infants tend to neglect them as well.

Adult physical violence was accurately predicted in 36 of 49 cultures (73 percent) from the infant physical affection variable. The probability that a 73 percent rate of accuracy could occur by chance is only four times out of a thousand.

Of the 49 societies studied, 13 cultures seemed to be exceptions to the theory that a lack of somatosensory pleasure makes people physically violent. It was expected that cultures which placed a high value upon physical pleasure during infancy and childhood would maintain such values into adulthood. This is not the case. Child rearing practices do not predict patterns of later sexual behavior. This initial surprise and presumed discrepancy, however, becomes advantageous for further prediction.

Apparently, the social customs which influence and determine the behaviors of sexual affection are different from those which underlie the expression of physical affection toward infants.

When the six societies characterized by both high infant affection and high violence are compared in terms of their premarital sexual behavior, it is surprising to find that five of them exhibit premarital sexual repression, where virginity is a high value of these cultures. It appears that the beneficial effects of infant physical affection can be negated by the repression of physical pleasure (premarital sex) later in life.

The seven societies characterized by both low infant physical affection and low adult physical violence were all found to be characterized by permissive premarital sexual behaviors. Thus, the detrimental effects of infant physical affectional deprivation seem to be compensated for later in life by sexual body pleasure experiences during adolescence. These findings have led to a revision of the somatosensory pleasure deprivation theory from a one-stage to a two-stage developmental theory where the physical violence in 48 of the 49 cultures could be accurately classified.

In short, violence may stem from deprivation of somatosensory pleasure either in infancy or in adolescence. The only true exception in this culture sample is the headhunting Jivaro tribe of South America. Clearly, this society requires detailed study to determine the causes of its violence. The Jivaro belief system may play an important role, for as anthropologist Michael Harner notes in Jivaro Souls, these Indians have a "deep-seated belief that killing leads to the acquisition of souls which provide a supernatural power conferring immunity from death."

A friend has asked me to write a post about something I said to her in person, though I have been struggling for a long time on how to put this into written word and perhaps tie it in with a number of other things I have been writing about.

Pleasure is sacred. Therefore:

• pleasure is good, and


• each of us has the responsibility to treat pleasure with respect.

It seems silly to me that I have to make a case that pleasure is sacred, but let me demonstrate why I think this is indisputably so. Let me start with this:

Pleasure receptors best known for helping the body respond to morphine and opium may also hold the key to mother-child bonding, scientists reported on Thursday.

Mice pups genetically engineered to lack these receptors -- doorways into cells -- were unable to properly bond to their mothers and did not show the natural distress when separated from her, the researchers said.

from Pleasure Receptor May Hold Key to Mother-Child Bond

These pleasure receptors would also respond to endorphins, the "natural opiates" our bodies produce. Endorphin release corresponds to the feeling of love and the pleasure of sex, and so is a primary mechanism whereby humans are capable of forming bonds with one another.

To come at this from the other end, neurologists investigating the new field of "neurotheology" have demonstrated that the parts of the brain which are responsible for mystical or religious experience are the same parts of the brain that are involved with human sexual response.

If "God is love," then God appears often in the form of pleasure.

It stands to reason, that if pleasure is sacred, that it can be profaned. And it often is; it is unfortunately all too common that pleasure is abused and misused. Addiction is a common form of misuse.

Considering how pervasive sexual abuse is among human beings, the cloud of evil that it casts over the human race is considerable. On many levels, sexual abuse makes it difficult, sometimes impossible, for the abuse survivor to form close or effective bonds with other people. Thus, in addition to the violation that occurs on the level of direct physical abuse, sexual abuse carries the additional violation of profaning one's ability to give and recieve love.

crossposted to my journal and crossposted to the_pain_sutras