Eros and Its Discontents: The Suppression and Denial of Sex

Hola Everybody!
Hey! It's summer and I'm blathering away on sex -- everything is well!   Looks like we're gonna have a scorcher of a weekend here in "The Center of the Known Universe,” so have fun guys and girls!

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 Eros and Its Discontents: The Suppression and Denial of Sex

 “Repression is not morality.”

 We come into this world as erotic and sensual beings focused on our senses, at one with our bodies, filled with a life energy that we do not suspect, do not  fear, and not even separate enough from to conceptualize. Before we are taught to divide ourselves and our world into mind and body, order and chaos, good and evil, proper and improper, normal and perverted, male and female, we simply are what we are, and this includes the simple, irrefutable fact that we are erotic creatures. Children of all ages (as I will show in a future post) are erotic, sensual, sexual beings. Shit, we are sexual even the womb: male fetuses can be seen having erections regularly.

 However, as soon as we are born, our basic natural erotic feelings come into conflict with the morals of the people who are closest to us. Almost from the beginning, we receive signals, some subtle and others not so subtle, that being erotic is not a “good” thing. By the time we have become socialized, much of our original, erotic feeling has been thoroughly condemned, judged, punished, twisted, and turned against itself. Because this conditioning process begins so early in our lives, we never truly have the opportunity to discover who we really are as erotic beings, to name clearly what we want, what we feel in the erotic/ sexual realm, let alone to learn how to develop our desires into a rich and satisfying erotic/ sexual existence.

 As some social commentators have noted, when it comes to sex, “we live in fear of being known. We know we are ugly before we have even seen ourselves.” Before we understand who we are as individual erotic/ sexual beings, before our erotic identities has had a chance to form, before we have any awareness of our self in these matters, we already have a vivid understanding that there is something fundamentally wrong with us because of how or when or toward whom we feel erotically charged. In other words, we are conditioned to accept the notion that there is something fundamentally wrong with us when we feel sexual without censoring our desire.

 Our basic erotic nature runs right smack into the wall of our culture’s fear of the erotic, but we really don’t understand this. Instead, we feel that there is something terribly wrong with us. We might understand that we must make a choice between what we feel in our bodies and what everyone else around us is telling us what we should feel. Somewhere along this path we are forced to split into contradictory beings – Freud call it id and superego, but call it what you want – body and mind, primitive and civilized, etc. The point is in order to gain approval of those around us, we have to reject our primal erotic nature and, as we repress these desires –in the process pushing them into the shadows where they gain more power over us – we lose the ability to honor, or even be aware of, the erotic within us.

 These are the dynamics of the suppression and denial of Eros. In a culture such as ours, neurotically suspicious of erotic feeling and power, it becomes crucial for us to understand how this suppression occurs so that we can begin to reclaim the erotic vitality that we have lost sight of.

Fortunately for us, our erotic essence doesn’t die easily, even if it is strangled in early infancy. In fact, the erotic impulse cannot be eradicated at all – it is too much a part of us for that. However, it can be stunted, twisted, and contorted so that it becomes limited to expressing itself in ways that are mundane, repetitious, painful, and unsatisfying. It can be twisted so beyond recognition that it can even become dangerous to others and ourselves.

 What most of us struggle with, as we attempt to reconnect to our erotic natures, is this war between our basic erotic feelings and the various forces of repression at work in our lives. The psychological, religious, social, and political forces that attempt to suppress those feelings bring us face to face with what one social thinker calls the “great chasm of shame” that stands between our essential eroticism and a “world that despises both its animal and angel natures.”

 There are questions begging to be asked: what are these suppressive forces? Where do they come from? How do they affect our daily lives, our culture, the psychodynamics of our emotional development (and by extension our relationships), and the workings underpinning our notions of law and government?

 In my own explorations, I have attempted to peer behind the curtain of the primary forces that act as the suppr4ssion and distortion of erotic feelings and desire. One attains a more enlightened perspective when you trace the historical process by which Christianity shifted, in the four hundred years after Christ, from its essentially sex-affirming roots to the violently anti-erotic crusade that continues to this day. Perhaps we can discover how a culturally ingrained fear of the erotic works psychologically – how we are tight sex is bad, conditioned to negate and fear our desires, taught to fear others whose erotic and sexual expressions differ from ours.

 We have to look, with eyes wired open, how these forces undermine women in particular, encouraging them to repress sexual feeling in order become asexual good girls. And ladies, believe me, this last point is crucial. Men don’t want to fuck good girls, so what happens when we stray, expressing our sexuality with bad women? There is this cultural illusion that sexual desire is a uniquely male phenomenon. Something that girls and women can only respond to, but do not initiate or even experience on their own.

 What are the political consequences of erotic suppression? In particular, we need to uncover the ways that fundamentalists and right wing conservatives tap into this fear about sexual expression, as well as the fears generated by the shift in sex and sex-role mores that began in the 60s and 70s.

 I may not be able to share all of the above because that would entail a whole book of essays, but I certainly feel motivated to uncover the underpinnings of the religious movement to suppress Eros because it impacts our lives so profoundly. But that’s for next week!

 Smooches,

 Eddie