SEX — WE KNOW ALL ABOUT IT
Let’s say there are two kinds of bonds between persons. In order to keep you interested, let’s look at them in terms of sexwork. These are interactive bonds. One would be the on-skin and muscle-involved sensations that two people provide each other and that are noted and remembered in the cells that accept the codes of touch.
The other is soon activated by these actions and physical contacts, but can also stand alone. It is the brain-conceived but non-physical origin with impact on the organs of the body that generate and remember liquid-carried molecules in-skin. Though the action can be initiated by images or sounds, the process can be self-kindled and sustained with memory or imagination. This is the power of story and art. Culture sustains these ideas.
So my 800 pound friend who was once thin and considered sexy, told me about his strategy of taking weeping and disappointed women to hot springs he knew about. When they were both naked and warm, seduction was easy and always cooperative. He thought this was fair, moral and generous of him. I argued.
I asked him how many old, ugly and undesirable women he took to his warm springs. Zero. We talked about what is beautiful in women. Turned out, his ideal — which he considered enlightened — was a nubile young blonde with little experience. He though this had nothing to do with culture.
A “trope” is a recurring symbol from a train of thought, arising from a situation or historical idea. “Blondes” as angelic and precious seems to come from the genetic advent of blondes to the literary world of England, coming from France, considered to be a world of both naturalness and wickedness. Something similar seemed to happen with the genetic mutation of red hair, but associated with passion of ambivalent kinds.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HairOfGoldHeartOfGold
“From TV“The character is a blonde. Therefore, obviously, she is young, beautiful, pure, kind, and innocent, and the innocence can range up to Virgin Power. If she fights, it’s reluctantly and she tends to avoid violence where she can.
Victorian literature would also use it to portray her as delicate and fragile, if not actually the Ill Girl — being, of course, Too Good for This Sinful Earth. This part is largely a Discredited Trope. . . .
Men falling under this trope are rarer, but the blond hero can also have Hair of Gold. Such a hero is more action-oriented than the Hair of Gold heroine, but he is also good, wholesome, kind to those weaker than himself, modest, and prone to be the Chaste Hero or Celibate Hero.”
A blonde baby is along these lines with the sex removed. Something similar is happening with the innocent daughters that feature in so many TV series.
When I talked about this stereotype, this Playboy template for beauty, my friend was upset and as a rebuke sent me a book about a photographer who specialized in photos of nubile blonde girls in natural settings, bedecked with flowers and little else. It was a defense of sex as being innocent and without consequences. (Now the question is what the hell do I do with with this book?)
There are more sophisticated ways of looking at relationships between people that are more than just skin-to-skin relationships but also not dominated by cultural expectations and images.
Winnicott’s assertion of the “play space” that is created between mother and child, Victor Turner’s framing of a space/time that is entered over a threshold, and Porges’ description of empathy for others suggest unseen phenomena. In fact, it may be the evolved possibility supported by mirror cells, and eye beams that has made us uniquely “human” — that is, able to stick together in families, affinities, shared purposes, organizations, nations and as a species.
The virtual sharing is strongest between two people and weakest as an entire species but can even include different species, as in pets. The trigger is intimacy, time spent together, a desire to protect and prolong, sharing, memory.
Here’s another approach to the idea of bonds across space and time, the elements of cooperation and progress. https://getpocket.com/explore/item/scientists-say-your-mind-isn-t-confined-to-your-brain-or-even-your-body?utm_source=pocket-newtab
“The mind is more than just the brain. No doubt, the brain plays an incredibly important role. But our mind cannot be confined to what’s inside our skull, or even our body, according to a definition first put forward by Dan Siegel, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine and the author of the 2016 book, Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human.
“the emergent self-organizing process, both embodied and relational, that regulates energy and information flow within and among us.”
“The definition has since been supported by research across the sciences, but much of the original idea came from mathematics. Siegel realized the mind meets the mathematical definition of a complex system in that it’s open (can influence things outside itself), chaos capable (which simply means it’s roughly randomly distributed), and non-linear (which means a small input leads to large and difficult to predict result).”
I regret that my math phobia (which I blame on Mrs. Rumble in the 4th grade who was very punitive about it) prevents me from getting firm hold of this idea. Also, the positive qualities — flexibility, adaptivity, coherence, energy and stability — are cliches, all snap words whose meaning has escaped. Yeah, yeah, we already know. What’s new?
Quantum thought proposes that two tiny particles like atoms on opposite sides of something vast as a planet are somehow connected and can act in unison. This is closer to what I’m trying to talk about, which is more like Vulcan mind-meld except not confined to logical rational thought.
If quantum theory affected biographies, entanglement would mean the author could not be separated from the subject and since observation changes the subject, none could be truth, which is not a quantum value anyway. Does this destroy innocence? Even intention? Or virtue?
So — Kenner’s question: “What does it mean?”
