Slurp

Interaction between culture and the individual

1-1-2003

It seems to me that one of the core messages of this site is that if we are to attain any sort of freedom of expression and individuation, then we need to become more aware of how the culture that surrounds us influences our personal thinking, feeling, and behaviour.

In psychology there is a phrase 'character is destiny', and it is recognised that character is built from a combination of nature and nurture, i.e. what is within us interacts with what is around us (and vice versa) to shape and mould who we are, how we see ourselves and those around us, how we feel about ourselves and those around us, and how we act, and this then plays a large part in creating our 'fate' or 'destiny'.

The interaction between prevailing cultures and sub-cultures with the individual appears to be driven by that quintessential human need to belong (in other words, to be loved), accompanied by its self-destructive flipside, the fear of rejection/abandonment. As a species, we're wired to play out this drama, but the power to choose the dialogue, events, and conclusion cannot be abrogated to any collective we belong to - in the final analysis, we either live life on our own terms, or we give up the ghost and become empty pawns of the group.

When a minority expresses the repressed attitudes, beliefs, assumptions and prejudices of the dominant culture, it lives as a puppet to the collective, manipulated by the group dynamics in a cycle of self-fulfilling prophecy. There is no freedom in this, nor true fulfilment, no real pleasure, and certainly no individuation. Who wants to be a caricature? You might be answering 'I don't', but millions are answering 'I do'. Why? Because it's easier, and appears to be safer - there's no risk of rejection, and you get to belong to the masses, and that's where the external power lies.

We live in a culture of addictions. We also live in a culture of denial. Yet we lay claim to freedom of choice, of speech, of expression, and we become clever at pretending that the 'choices' we have made are 'healthy' on every level. Hedonism seems to have increased in direct proportion to nihilism, but we've become experts at laying a sugared coating or veneer of 'success', 'happiness', 'fulfilmen't, and 'love' on the hollow shells of the lives we've constructed. So when you say that oral sex can be dangerous (I remember in the 80s within the slew of sex education TV programmes aired in the wake of AIDS the encouragement to use condoms for oral sex as well as anal, with demonstrations of how to put one on your lover using just your mouth...... some people have too much talent lol), or that anal sex is physically and psychologically damaging, or that promiscuity is unhealthy, the defence mechanisms that are the machinery of decades of denial kick in to protect what little pleasure there is left in the world (as defined by the nihilistic mindset). I recently set up an online personals profile advertising for friendship only stating that I wasn't interested in casual sex and received 2 months of extremely aggressive abuse from complete strangers who found my profile by searching the ads and took my advert extremely personally as a direct challenge to their supposedly chosen life-style and values. I am thick-skinned, with plenty of aggression of my own to not be phased by this unsolicited contact, so it was water off a duck's back, but it did reveal a lot to me about the deeper psychological dynamics that underpin the habits of anonymous sex. There is a clearly a huge investment of psychological energy in these human habits.

Within our culture we unconsciously and sometimes consciously equate love with anger, sex with penetration, intimacy with aggression, pleasure with distance, attractiveness with appearances, gay with female, butch with masculine, masculine with straight. We define monogamy the way our granparents defined promiscuity. We condemn self-discipline and self-control as bad because they involved denying ourselves short-term pleasure, yet the current fad of emotional intelligence (which purports to be based on scientific research) tells us that success in life more often correlates with the capacity for exercising self-restraint in the pursuit of long-term satisfaction vs short-term kicks. Respect and responsibility towards self and others is b.o.r.i.n.g., whereas risk is exciting and worth taking, because we should live for today and you should look after yourself because no-one else is going to look after you. The nanny state has been/is being deconstructed, and the age of self-reliance is being forced upon us, in accordance with the dictates of commerce. Interdependence and synergy are buzzwords in the natural sciences, but in the reality of our culture they are devoid of meaning and significance, thus reflecting our disconnection from the natural world.

Maybe sex is supposed to be dangerous. Maybe nature designed it that way so that sex would engender our respect - but we seem to want to trivialise it: it's ok to have several partners each week because there is no consequence now that we have GU clinics that can make it all ok again if anything bad happens to you. We humans removed the danger of pregnancy in the name of freedom, and thought we could then pursue pleasure without responsibility, but nature taught us that we're not half as clever as we think we are. So what if we find cures for AIDS and co? Will nature say, 'you win, you're right, I designed a stupid system and you've overcome the need to take care of one another'? I doubt it, and in some ways, I hope not.

Divorce is endemic, as are STDs and rates of teenage pregnancy. But divorce isn't just familial, it's inside us and around us - we're divorced from ourselves and from each other, we've divorced love from sex, pleasure from responsibility, the genitals from the whole body, and the physical from not only the emotional but also the mental and the spiritual. And to what end? Who said that this was a good idea? There is a mass of scientific and empirical evidence to the contrary, but we'll ignore that because it's hard to sell sex within that context - never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

For me, one of the most satisfying features of this site is that it promotes a re-thinking and re-visioning of ourselves as individuals and collectives. I personally enjoy many of the more conventional gay sites (pop culture can be a fun distraction but chewing gum is not a food group), however there is a definite 'dumbing down' process that has been gathering pace taking place in Western society for at least two decades now, and in my experience most other gay sites have succumbed to this tidal wave of unconsciousness, and appear to be happy to add their own energy to the force of the wave. It seems to be the case that to be welcomed into this 'community' (I use the term loosely - perhaps 'collective' is a more appropriate term) you need to leave your grey matter at the door, declare yourself to be a clone of the tin man, and devote yourself exclusively to the values of the primordial self. This doesn't satisfy me - and that's an understatement.

What's the solution? I think this site provides one important one - somewhere to connect, to belong, to be accepted, without losing any of the horny juiciness of sexual expression and sexual union. When you find a site like this, you can come home to yourself - you don't have to reject yourself or abandon your fantasies, and you don't have to risk rejection or abandonment by the culture around you anymore. The internet is powerful, because what it does is enable us to step outside of the culture and sub-cultures that are dominant in our geographical location. This is invaluable. When we step outside of those cultural influences around us, we can then start a mental, emotional and spiritual 'stepping outside' process, that gives us the freedom to speak, express, and live in a way that is fulfilling, conscious, and real. The more of us that do this, the more we then turn the tide and move the culture around us in the direction that reflects where we are, and where we want to go. And that can only be a good thing.

Slurp