RAPE AND PORN ARE PERSONAL

A decade or so ago I made internet contact with a person worth talking to about sex, though it took him a little time to figure out where I was “coming from.” This is the resulting set of generalizations. (I won’t number them, because if I did, you won’t think they are a list when they are actually entwined in various ways.)

Sex is legally defined as involving penetration but not conception.

One fifth of conceptions end spontaneously because of code-glitch. The actual creation may or may not be known by the carrier, but the hormonal changes will be if the carrier is sensitive or blood tests are used.

“Penetration” need not involve genitals. It almost always means control, domination, entrance. This is aggravated by the mercantelizaling of both the acts and products of sex. Possession, people as livestock, denial of all self-definition or even the existence of humans except as animals, reducing all to SM relationships.

In spite of the courtrooms, the preponderance of sex is mental/emotional/cultural, highly protean and variable. This is what makes sex part of the humanities.

Sex is a subset of attachment, meaning a relationship of magnetic desire through habituation, sharing, challenge, or fittingness in regard to expectation. Attachment is a means to arousal, which can be either positive or negative.

Art, literature and other humanities deal in attachment and therefore in sex in some sense. Certainly arousal and sometimes arousal to climax. Possibly repellence, aversion, damage.

Cultures form templates of what is proper, forbidden, or forced and cannot handle what is outside that template. Therefore, they will attempt to eliminate that outside, thus limiting the knowledge and potential of people.

Attachment to the point of arousal is one way of describing sex. Creating, managing, and controlling both attachment and arousal are the work of both actual physical encounter and pornography, but the latter doesn’t include the physical except as portrayed or displaced. Therefore, pornography is ideally suited to the computer operator’s world and has been an engine in the development of many platforms. It’s interesting to consider the above concepts in terms of porn, which happens in one person’s head. No partner is necessary and in fact maybe an interference or an intrusion.

Somewhere in this conversation I was able to smuggle in the truth about my own sexuality which is private, unlike the seller’s template of exhibition. Everyone who is between 14 and 60 wants to know everyone else’s sexuality as though it were something like the race or ethnicity questions appearing on the census questionnaires as vital information. The underlying assumption is “talking about boxes” when in fact sex, like cities, start with a point of connection (sorry) and accumulate around that center. It’s not just that demanding those answers assume that the categories (which are made up) actually exist, but also that the structure of the concept — edge vs. center — are different.

My sexuality is none of your business. It could be about whom I desire. It could be about my reaction to what the media touts as sexy and I’ve lived long enough to have seen that change over the decades. It could be the lingering impact of some intense piece of writing or something that really happened or maybe only happened to someone who told me about it. It could be about the opinion of gynecological anatomy. It could be genetic or culturally inherited.

Much is about successfully avoiding pregnancy, while aware of flirting with it. My mother used to say, as a curse when I did something that drove her nuts, “Someday you’ll have a little girl just like yourself and then you’ll be sorry.” I reject that alternative.

To become inhabited by a new unknown person — who dominated my body and changed it like the parasite it is — always seemed like science fiction. And both my parents expressed how trapped and endangered they felt by decades of cost and effort necessary to raising children, while knowing they could not keep control of them or their reciprocity. I knew so many stories about women killed by childbirth, even crippled or killed by pregnancy.

Slowly I realize that in spite of the plan to have only two children via the use of condoms, illegal at the time and not always fail-proof, combined with the prohibition of abortion, meant that the third child meant a greater financial and emotional burden, including ten years as a brain-damaged adult.

So the moral valence of managing fertility can outweigh the moral code of proper behavior and who is off-limits. They interact. With porn the valence is different: what it is that has emotional impact to watch without producing pregnancy. This is not about attachment but about arousal.

Violence, pity, surprise, identification, disgust all come into play. The stronger the social template a person internalizes, the more these forces will trigger. Most novels are really porn, whether or not the subject is sex.

Since the moral style I have inherited is one of endurance and stoicism, some kinds of porn shut me down. But I can displace and reformulate. My relatives avoid. We are “nice.” Never let a torturer get the edge of satisfaction. People are dangerous. Don’t let them get close. Absorb all the small hurts and fears and deny them. Do not share.

Unless one accepts the idea of being one’s best audience, porn cannot exist in a person who regards only their own body as sexual/sensory experience — not the experience of others. Is that true? Few if any others can know one’s own experience of one’s own body, sex is really a solitary pursuit. A partner is a dubious achievement. An orgy is ridiculous. Empathy is the key to porn — and sex as well. And all true humanities. Human without empathy is not human.

My correspondent knows about high end sexwork. If it involves a real person “presenting” themselves, it is about presentation based on fiction. Otherwise it’s images. Movies are always impossibly glamorous in conformity to their cultural template, usually the Hollywood wealthy Jewish magnate ideas, relating to consumable/discardable young people in uncomfortable expensive clothes. In reality the template may be “mom-like” or one of the male examples, maybe a victim/survivor like a wounded soldier.

This is not a list. It’s a sequence. One step grows out of the one just previous. Step one is an inventory for empathic response: a bit of bio, a bit of fantasy, a bit of perception according to the competence of the worker. Step two: forming a response that fits. Step three: telling a story as vividly as possible. Not necessary to act it out. Not necessary to be physically present. Step four: take careful note for next time or others similar. Step five: stop short of the ultimate so as to come back for more. Step six: take inventory of what happened and somehow ameliorate, counter or ignore the impact so as not to be captured.