Commentary on Sex

A friend pointed me to this article, which inspired a small rant on sex.

Good grief. I simply don't understand the "sex is violence" meme. That is not how I see it--and I find those experiences, all vicarious for me since I have never been party to violent sex, the opposite of inspiring. Unless the point was to make me want to avoid intercourse (and maybe fight someone, or least punch something).

The idea that one could have sex without any emotional hang-ups is similarly ludicrous to me. I just don't get it. There is no way I find myself in the position of not caring what happens to someone I know that way. So I don't understand the "sex is meaningless fun" meme, either. I do not think of myself as particularly prudish (though I certainly was that way at one point in my life). Even when I was a prude, that prudishness was something I aspired to apply primarily to myself (sometimes pretty harshly) rather than to others (whom it was never my place to judge). Getting married was very helpful when it came to defeating the negative aspects of this prudishness where these existed (primarily as reflections of self-loathing on my part); but that did not make sex meaningless for me, something that didn't particularly matter or connect me with other people (as people). More like the opposite: I became more acutely aware that people matter, that one cannot relate effectively to caricatures or stereotypes, that real love-making is about building people rather than breaking them.

Breaking people isn't even fun, from my perspective. If I were offered the chance to have sex without natural consequences, without emotions--I would not want it. The same way I wouldn't want to eat 'food products' deprived of all their nutritious value. The prospect of being allowed to eat meals of empty foodstuffs constantly (or ingest endless rounds of cheap alcohol or another 'fun' drug) would not make me happy. I would not choose it. In the same way, I would not choose to have sex without any emotional consequences, without any kind of relationship existing outside the particular expression of love that sex is. Eating one breakfast means not eating another one, at some point. Making love with one person means not making love to someone else. We cannot relate equally to all human beings. We cannot love all alike (unless we deliberately isolate ourselves from the kind of particular relationships that are familial, becoming monks and nuns, who are often celibate--not because they are prudes, but because they recognize the consequences of sex and seek to avoid them, to cultivate goods that sex obviates or negates). I think there are people for whom non-monogamy works better than it will work for others. But even these folks must recognize some limits, some boundaries beyond which they do not pass--unless they want to dissolve their relationships (and that will be hard, often really devastating, even if the relationship in question is a bad one).

We used to advise people to "think of the children" when letting their romantic fancies roam. We might also advise them to think of their spouse(s), who will always have (strong) feelings about the integrity of their relationship. We might even advise them to think of themselves, as beings incapable of transcending the need for human companionship that is more than momentary, that has more than sex to sustain it. To me it seems that the fetishization of sex, its reduction to the most important activity in romantic relationships, has impaired our ability (collectively anyway) to recognize that other things are at least as important, that sex without those things is not really worth much.

Rape, Chivalry, Sexual Dimorphism

Three related thoughts about the differences between men and women, and the way these become virulently poisonous.

I. Rape is an ugly reality in animal life, including the life of humanity. We have developed many tools to curb and contain it. Unsurprisingly, some tools work better than others, and any tool can be recycled as a weapon (perpetrating abuse instead of containing it). We have not found a final solution for rape that is universal (applicable to everyone always). I do not think we will. The most we can do is educate ourselves (about the dangers in the world and the reality that we cannot control them perfectly, as a species or as individuals).

We must not blame victims. That will not help them (as they seek healing) or us (as we seek means to protect them and others like them, including ourselves). Rape is out there no matter what you wear, no matter what god you pray to (or ignore), no matter what meetings you attend, no matter your education (etc.). Your job as a human being is to make sure primarily (1) that you don't perpetrate it, and only secondarily (2) that you equip yourself to fight or flee it when it finds you--as best you can. It is never your fault that you remain vulnerable. We are all vulnerable. Nobody says that a victim of assault or robbery "should have practised street-fighting more." That is a worthless comment, particularly when it comes from someone who has never been attacked. People are not the same, and neither are their circumstances. Bad things happen to good people all the time (I mean "good" in the broadest sense here, encompassing everything from "innocent" to "morally upright" to "prepared").

Therapy (religion, applied science) worth anything is not about pouring salt in the wounds of the innocent. A really righteous person would not waste time warning young women (or men) to cover their shoulders and then blame any rape on their failing to heed his warning. He would warn them not to be or become tolerant of rapists. If any of them were raped, he would respond with empathy: "I am really sorry that happened to you. Please don't feel that it was in any way your fault. You cannot be held accountable for the fact that some other people are monsters. You are not a monster. I love you." This is what bearing the burden of your fellow men and women looks like. You commiserate with them (rather than looking for a way to make everything awful in their life appear to be somehow their fault, a disaster of their own making).

The real problem we see today in modesty rhetoric, I think, is lack of empathy. People want to help, even conservative religious people, but they fail to notice that blaming the victim really isn't helping (anyone, at all, ever: even if the victim takes the message to heart and begins wearing burkhas and training for combat, that is no guarantee that rape won't happen). I like to imagine that if people could see more clearly into the mind of victims, perhaps if they themselves became victims (not that I wish that for anyone), they would realize their error and stop "helping" (and maybe even apologize for their sins).

I definitely agree that rape is a male issue (a meme I have encountered several times in society). But I think women should talk about it, too (as they do in real life). As one of the really tough, intractable problems in human experience, it is fundamentally a human problem (that we all share, that we all must struggle to solve, even though there is no such thing as a final solution).

The really tough reality I confront here is that we are not all alike. We do not see the same things in the world; even if we do, we do not see them the same way. We experience life differently, as individuals and communities. Our unlikeness means that we cannot approach rape the same way. My approach cannot be yours (or vice versa). My community cannot be yours (or vice versa). The solution I make for myself cannot be the solution the community makes together, and there is no such thing as a single, unified solution that applies to all situations universally. 

When we say that rape is a female issue, we are lying (it seems to me, and I think decent people agree). I am wary of making it a male issue because that too strikes me as a lie (or at best an incomplete truth: I think rape is fundamentally a human problem that we must all confront individually and together, in dialogue with one another).

The problem with making rape a female issue is that this provides criminals with an easy out (when they blame the victim for their bad behavior). The problem with making rape a male issue is that this leads to behavior that many women experience as benevolent sexism (that criminals can incorporate as a front for their bad behavior: "I held the door for you, so you owe me your life!"). The truth is that there are many different fronts we need to attend in the battle against rape (I think). Victims don't need the same therapy as perpetrators. Potential victims don't need the same therapy as actual victims. Men don't need the same approach as women, I would venture to say, though we definitely need to talk to each other about our mutual experiences and expectations (so that we have a reasonable chance of incorporating the best information into whatever solutions we end up devising to deal with the criminals). 

II. I am going to speak for a moment as a man (not a woman), a Westerner (Anglo-Saxon), and a religious person (with a fair amount of experience working in "rough" environments, among human beings whom some modern progressives would occasionally be tempted to execrate as boorish, homophobic, racist, sexist, misogynist trash). Coming from my background, I have to say that I see a real positive utility arising from chivalry. The men among whom I grew up were not a uniform bunch. Some were very educated (like my father); others were not (at all). Some were physical monsters (capable of picking up a small car and/or fighting wild animals in the woods); others were not. Some were decent; others were not. The decent ones, uneducated or not, typically adopted an approach to life that sought to demonstrate respect for others, particularly for those who might feel threatened by them (e.g. when circumstances put them and a weaker person in close proximity: "weaker" need not imply physical inferiority, though that was definitely a recurrent issue; it also indicates inequality in social privilege that recurs in human experience, as in baboon experience). Sometimes, decent people would get the respect signal wrong; they would misjudge the person they wanted to conciliate (e.g. when they opened the door for an angry young woman who didn't want that). Their response would be to take the blowback from that mistake on the chin: "I'm sorry! I didn't mean to offend you. What can I do to make it up? Leave you alone? Offer you something? I am at your service."

Whether rightly or wrongly, these men offered an approach to life that was accessible to me as a young man. I needed a way to relate to others, particularly those I didn't and couldn't really understand (e.g. most women and many men, too). I needed a way to exist without imposing myself (as I have never wanted to do), and they offered it. I think chivalry is historically as good a word as any for their attitude (though I am open to others that might sound less sexist), which I find echoed in old poetry and literature occasionally named (whether with approval or disgust) chivalrous. The worship of woman (which recurs in literature such as I am invoking here) has problems, of course (see my comment above), but the decent men in my life have convinced me that these are more artificial than fundamental (particularly when we notice how they apply also to relationships with "weaker" males). By that I mean that the fundamental attitude of polite deference to others, particularly when circumstances conspire to make one appear powerful, is a good one. The problem with chivalry is that many people (including many stupid men) confuse it with gestures rather than attitude. Instead of seeing the principle of respecting others' autonomy (granting them room to situate themselves comfortably relative to you), they see some arbitrary rule ("a woman's place is to sit around and wait for me to open the door for her").

The decent men I know would never accept shenanigans such as occurred (e.g.) recently in Steubenville. Though very physical, and on occasion even frightening (to me, as a man), they made it clear to me over and over--in quiet conversations in the locker room or at church or some other place where we happened to coincide, and in their interaction with people--that they had a deep sense of their own personal dignity, and the corresponding personal dignity of every individual human being that they interacted with (male, female, big, small, black, white, foreign, domestic, powerful, weak: it did not matter). I saw that other men might talk or make gestures like the really decent ones without being really decent. I noticed that chivalry (respect, whatever one wants to call it) is more than a collection of shallow rules. I also learned that the really decent folk with power (raw physical power or social privilege or whatever) were keenly aware of their own weakness--of the temptation that their position offered for "taking unfair advantage"--and that they took conscious measures to avoid becoming the perpetrators of abuse. They also made a point of noting how their strength inevitably depended on the cooperation of others, how it was not really their own. (Some of them expressed this by attributing it to God, not because they identified God as their own whim, but for the opposite reason: "God" for them meant "not me, the world outside me that I cannot understand but that I choose to confront with dignity.")

As a human, I see that chivalry has limits. I see that it cannot be the solution of every person (or even of every man). But I am not ready to throw it away, myself, as a man. I have found it more useful than not. 

III. To me it seems that there is only one distinction between the sexes (male and female) clear enough to be written into law: men cannot give birth, so final decisions regarding reproduction belong exclusively to women.

Everything else (the more or less imaginary gender preferences and aptitudes whose ebb and flow we observe in contentious scientific literature) should be sorted out extralegally (definitely) and without social coercion (e.g. in the form of referenda promoting one group's fantasy of gender roles at the expense of everyone else). If women don't want to be CEOs (as I don't, though I am not a woman), then they shouldn't have to be; but that should be their decision, not an expectation imposed externally. Society should have no definite gender roles enforced by law (certainly) and should resist the idea of softer enforcement (e.g. via the continuation of work requirements that make it unnecessarily difficult for qualified individuals to live as they find opportunity and desire). 

Reflections on Sex (and Pornography)

Some friends were discussing Mormon approaches to sex and pornography recently, and this inspired me to write another retrospective reflection on my own experience.

It makes absolutely no sense, in my experience dealing with myself, to validate a worldview in which seeing erotic images (anywhere, everywhere) is sinful (let alone a sin on par with serious offenses like lying to one's spouse, coercing people into sex they don't want, etc.). All this approach does is make me angry--with myself, for being incorrigibly weak, and with others, for being incorrigibly sexy. Neither option is good. I realized early on that I was not cut out for the second kind of anger (directed outward against things that "trigger" sexual thoughts, in my case women): it leads ultimately to slut-shaming, victim-blaming, and a kind of active misogyny (for straight men like myself) that I find utterly disgusting. The first anger, meanwhile, leads to self-loathing, inability to form romantic attachments (owing to the fact that intimacy is evil), and eventually some kind of suicide (the literal thing, or a metaphorical murder of one's masculinity--e.g. by castration). I spent most of my adolescence struggling to contain this self-directed anger (without cutting off my balls or killing myself, since I had reason to believe neither option would be very pleasing to God, whom I was determined to please). It was very hard. It wore on me. While my friends went out with girls, I stayed home and read scriptures. My LDS bishops weren't pervs, looking for excuses to quiz me in-depth about my sex life, but that was no help in my case, since I went to them voluntarily to confess every "impure" episode that seemed "serious" (by which I mean that it made me anxious, angry, in doubt of my ability to serve the Lord worthily as a priesthood holder).

I almost didn't go on a mission because I wasn't sure I could be "worthy"--and I remember really hating myself at that time. My thoughts ran something like this: "I really want to serve this mission. I want to do something with my life. I want to speak up for things important to me. I want to share love and wealth with the world, not sit in some dark corner crying because I have a stupid penis that won't stop working. I am going to live in spite of that terrible thing, that worthless piece of trash that always manages to ruin everything simply by existing. Why did God even create it--or me, for that matter?" When I read the story of Origen taking a knife to his genitals and hacking them off (he was a young fanatic rather like me), I was a little envious: part of me wished I could solve my problems this simply and neatly (since the most anxiety-inducing experiences for me were wet dreams and persistent erections, experiences impossible without a penis). But Mormons believe you have to have a family, so I hung on. I never dated. I was too ashamed, too afraid of staining women with my impurity. I look back and cringe at how rude and aloof I was. Some of that is no doubt my own fault--I have always been something of a jackass, a cynic, and a misanthrope--but church certainly didn't help.

When I did finally manage against all hope to find my wife, still having no romantic ability or experience to speak of, I continued "taking things slow" in a manner that most people would find intolerable (with good reason). Until we were married, I never kissed my wife (for kissing was practically sex, i.e. murder). I wondered if I should confess to the bishop every time I found myself thinking about sex again--though I was older and wiser, and it was about this time that I realized the confession ritual was a piece of destructive adolescent folly rather than any kind of help. I ditched it, and told myself I would never do that again, no matter what might happen to me over the course of my life. The first year or two of marriage was very eye-opening for me. I learned so many things about myself--and my sexuality--that completely gave the lie to everything I tried to do as an adolescent. I realized that I couldn't live my whole life hating something that is an inescapable part of me. I realized that the sex I hated didn't have to be hateful--that it didn't have to make me destructively angry or horny. I could learn to control it the same way a toddler learns to use the potty. Yes, I would make mistakes, but these need not be felonies (or come anywhere close). Contrary to everything I taught myself as a teen, I was not a rape-machine, though some people will always see me that way (and I understand: I saw myself that way for years). I realized that sex is like language or sport, that I could approach it as an interesting game instead of a fight to the death (in which there is no such thing as valuable "failure"). I realized that perfect sex does not exist--that sex is about process rather than results, and that the process is more about playing nicely with other people than rendering abject homage to some arbitrary list of rules (mistakenly taken for the final word of God).

As for God, I came to realize that he need not be as hard and unyielding as I took him to be. After years of reading Jesus' words in the Sermon on the Mount (i.e. "whosoever looketh upon a woman to lust after he hath committed adultery with her already") as an angry accusation ("stop seeing women, you evil bastards!"), I realized finally that they were merely pointing out that we all lust. There is no such thing as a slut in the conventional sense, Jesus says. We are all sluts. We all have limbic systems. We all desire something, and we follow that desire, the way dogs follow interesting scents. Without denying the reality that our lust can prove dangerously poisonous to ourselves and others, I can nevertheless learn to see how this is not inevitable--and even if it were, the best response is not anger (homicidal or suicidal). I learned to accept my lust, as I never could when I was younger, and in acceptance I found that I could turn it to very good use. I could use to make relationships stronger instead of weaker. This required some effort, of course, some mistakes, but as long as I maintained respect for myself and others the pay-off was always greater than any damage (in hurt feelings or unmet expectations). If you can learn to be respectful, to take turns, to be safety-conscious, and to listen thoughtfully and attentively when other people talk, then lust doesn't have to be a big deal. Sex can be murder, but it definitely doesn't have to be. I wish somebody could have told me all this when I was younger. I wish I could have realized the futility of hating myself sooner. But we all have regrets. I am just glad I finally found a way to live without hating myself and others, or causing too much hurt.

The Love of a Free Man

Every child has a right to Mother and Father.

Every child has a right to good food, clothing, and medical care.

Every child has a right to opportunities for improving itself (i.e. education).

People are fond of making statements like these, statements that sound nice but carry some very poisonous implications (in my opinion).  The problem with all these rights arises when other people see how I am failing to provide them to my children. 

What happens when my family lacks mother- and father-figures that meet with somebody else's approval? 

What happens when my idea of what constitutes good food, clothing, and medical care conflicts with somebody else's?

What happens when my idea of what constitutes a good education for my child isn't yours?

In the modern world, this is more or less what happens.  A bunch of busybodies see my family and are terribly offended by it (seeing its existence as an attack on theirs).  Responding to the threat posed by my existing with relationships that don't look enough like theirs, these busybodies get together and organize protests.  They make flyers.  They create memes on Facebook.  They make all kinds of holy noises about things like "grassroots politics," "the moral majority," "family values," "progressive values," and whatnot.  They form PACs.  They gather donations.  They write angry letters to their clueless representatives in some august body of government bureaucrats pretending to be responsible lawmakers.  The bureaucrats get ants in their pants and do what they always do--form a committee.  This committee sits down and determines to establish once and for all (1) what a good family looks like (what constitutes an acceptable Mother and Father for all Americans?), (2) what good healthcare looks like (what constitutes an acceptable diet for all Americans?), and (3) what a good education looks like (what constitutes an acceptable education for all Americans?).  The committee is very precise and deliberate.  It must be practical.  It cannot make room for all kinds of silly exceptions to general rules.   It has to lay down the law--for everyone, for all time.

And so what happens when my little family isn't up to snuff?  What happens when the committee isn't impressed by my fathering skills, or my wife's mothering?  What happens when it notes that I don't feed my kids a USDA-approved diet--of poisonous denatured crap marketed by profiteering companies whose deep pockets make them much more interesting and persuasive to bureaucrats than I will ever be?  What happens when the committee doesn't like the education I have chosen to give my kids?  Nobody knows.  But one thing is certain: I will be under scrutiny, and I might lose the right to even have a family, if the committee decides that I am not worthy of such an honor (or deserving of such a responsibility, if you prefer).

Who limits the committee's jurisdiction?  Nobody really.  The bureaucrats answer to their loudest constituents--a bunch of punks who want to micromanage my life to make it look like theirs--and to other bureaucrats, some elected and some not, who tend to think that the answer to all society's problems is letting more of them get a lick in.  ("Just let us handle this one, kid.  We'll take care of your problems!")  Inviting these clowns into your life is easy: getting them out is really hard (no matter what political party they belong to or where they worship on Sundays).  Combine the bureaucrats' inherent love of absolute authority with their busybody constituents' insistent demand that all human relationships be micro-managed to meet their finicky tastes, and the result is a perfect recipe for enslaving me.

I don't give a damn about gay marriage, one way or the other.  If you want one, go for it with my blessing.  If you don't, I would never force it on you.  I am not an angry guy.  But there are ways of making me mad.  I get mad when punks want to bring bureaucrats into my home (into my bedroom, for God's sake) as some kind of absolute authority pronouncing judgement on the worthiness of my personal relationships--"defending" my marriage (or my diet or my education) by forcing me to make it according to the arbitrary determinations of some stupid committee.  I resent this "defense."  I see it as a direct attack on my religious freedom, not the legitimate defense of anyone else's.  (You want religious freedom?  Get the heck out of my house, out of my bedroom, out of my larder, out of my career, and out of my life.  Go and live your own.  You don't have to solemnize my gay marriage, or say only nice things about it.  You don't have to eat steak.  You don't have to go to school where I do.  You don't have to bail my business out when it fails.  You don't have to buy healthcare for me.  Your religious freedom doesn't include the right to make me live the way you do.  I have religious freedom too, punk, so go eat the poison you like and leave me to the ones I prefer.)  

Just so we're clear: I will marry whom I damn well please, of whatever gender or age I please, for whatever reason I want.  I will eat what I damn well please, in whatever quantities I please, for whatever reason I want.  I will send my kids to school where I damn well please, for whatever reason I want.  I don't care if I am not the best qualified person to marry or make dietary choices or educate kids.  I will not sign my marriage, my diet, or my kids over to some committee (not even if the chair of that committee affects the titles or trappings of deity: the real God sends rain upon the just and the unjust alike and doesn't give a damn about making results fair--in this life or any other that we know anything definite about).

The committee and the busybodies it represents can cite me statistics all day long, proving (1) how my marriage would be better if I were a rich, white heterosexual with a partner of the opposite gender (so we'll just seize the kids of poor single parents, or force them to marry someone of the appropriate gender and socio-economic class right away if they want to keep their children?); (2) how my diet would be better if I followed USDA guidelines (get your heart-healthy whole grains while they're hot, suckers!); and (3) how my kids would be better off if society took them away from me and gave them to Mitt Romney or Barack Obama (think of all the rights and opportunities my children don't have because I'm not a millionaire!).  I don't care.  Maybe the committee should sterilize me while they're at it.  Heck, they could cut all the fuss and bother and just send me straight to the gas chamber.  (Yes, Godwin, I embrace thee.  This is the Internet, after all.)  What a load of crap.  Not only does it make no sense as an idea (religious freedom means that I have the right to make you my bitch! this is precisely what the founders of our republic wanted, as anyone who reads the Federalist and/or Anti-Federalist papers will agree), it would be a practical disaster (creating far more confusion and suffering than it could ever hope to alleviate).

Love is not a human right. It is a human opportunity (that can never be granted by committee). You should leave people as free as possible to find and express it in whatever circumstances life gives them. Sometimes, those circumstances will make somebody's love look poor and mean and worthless to other people, but that is no reason to take it away, to deny its expression, to replace it with the love of others who are more fortunate, or more aesthetically pleasing to some committee of busybodies too busy interfering with others' lives to manage their own.  (Don't you people have something else to do?  A budget to keep?  Drones to send against Pakistani women and children while you agonize over some American woman's decision to remove a few cells from her uterus?  A beam to remove from your own eye, maybe, before you go poking around for the motes in mine?  Scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites.  If you are reading old Judaeo-Christian scripture, this is what you are.  If you don't read scripture, then pick up any book you like on Hitler's Germany, Franco's Spain, Mao's China, or Lenin's Russia: these are your heroes, the shining beacons of moral purity that you want me to follow to a better future.  Even if you are right, I don't want to come to that future.  I would rather go to the gas chamber.)

In conclusion, if I ever sit on a committee charged to consider the institution of marriage as it exists throughout humanity (in my country or any other), this will be my contribution: "This committee has nothing useful to say when it comes to prescribing the nature of people's personal relationships. As long as they are not killing each other or inflicting criminal damage, people can have whatever personal relationships they want. They can register those relationships legally using any language they please, and they can participate in society however they find opportunity."  See?  I actually believe in religious freedom, unlike the punks (conservative and liberal) who want to make everyone live as they do.  (What would Jesus do?  He would make you live like me, obviously.  What would Abe Lincoln or Martin Luther King do?  The same thing!  Everyone must be good the same way!  We're all going to march in lock-step to heaven on earth!  Not with me you're not.  I am never going to board that ship, not matter who or what stands at the helm.)      

Enlightened Hedonism?

Some friends recently decided to end their marriage (amicably), after discussing (in a public forum) the paradox of choice (the more choices we have, the more dissatisfied we become with any single choice).  One of my friends remarked that for him this meant that marriage contracts might be better made for brief periods (e.g. five years) rather than for one's entire life.  This discussion and the events around it got me thinking about my own relationships, and what holds them (and me) together.

I see the paradox of choice, and I think it is part of human nature.  As with other aspects of human nature, it is better dealt with than ignored.  (To ignore it is to invite it to find you unprepared, leading you to make decisions that you are likely to regret later, with the benefit of hindsight.  Personally, I like to know my enemies, including the one who dwells between my ears, and keep them close when I cannot avoid them entirely.)

To make a choice is necessarily to make oneself vulnerable (to disillusionment, disappointment, unexpected consequences, etc.), especially when the choice involves something truly momentous (as the choice to get married undoubtedly does).  But not choosing is also weak, since choices are a necessary part of life (much as intimacy is: as bad as a bad marriage is, no marriage at all might be just as bad).  How do we allow choice without letting it take us places where we do not want to go?  Historically, people create narratives that allow them to "have their cake and eat it too" -- narratives that promise future choices (maybe an eternity of them) in return for making a limiting choice here and now.  Oftentimes, these narratives seek to be prescriptive, telling people what choices are acceptable (e.g. monogamous heterosexual marriage) and what choices are not (e.g. homosexual marriage, serial monogamy facilitated by divorce, polygamy, polyamory).  These prescriptions can be helpful for folks, for reasons that I will get to in a moment, but as a result of my personal experience, I am hesitant to recommend any one of them to the entire human race as the only prescription for happiness.  To me, it seems that human happiness, generally speaking, is incoherent: different people have different ideas about happiness, such that there is no one way of life (or marriage) that guarantees it generally (for all that many different ways work with more or less success for larger or smaller groups of people: I would be miserable in a homosexual marriage, but a homosexual person wouldn't; the fact that there are more people like me and less like the homosexual does not mean that his experience is somehow "wrong" or invalid, or that he should not have the opportunity to marry his way, in my view).

Given this laissez-faire attitude toward human morality on my part, many friends wonder where my personal moral stability comes from.  How do I avoid giving in to the temptation to drop whatever I may have now and pursue more attractive options elsewhere?  Why don't I drop my allegiance to my wife the same way I dropped my allegiance to LDS church leaders?  (The short answer is that I have yet to catch her lying to me brazenly about matters of vital interest to me, but that is really just incidental.  There is a serious question here, one that deserves more than a glib answer, however en pointe.)

Confronting the collapse of my faith in men whose character supplied my (legitimate) need for moral authority as teenager was rather frightening.  As a kid, I made some moral choices because God (in the form of prophets ancient or modern) told me to, and that was the ultimate answer to all questions (the decision beyond which there was no appeal).  History shows that this kind of thinking has deep roots, with oaths before God featuring among the earliest binding contracts known to (civilized) man.  What happens when the God guaranteeing all these oaths is revealed to be a rhetorical fiction, a puppet played from the inside by some old duffers who wear the mantle of divinity with a good deal of humanity?  What happens when you realize that there is no man in the sky watching every move you make?  (Or as Plato would have Socrates ask in the Republic: what happens when you wear the ring of Gyges, a ring that makes you utterly invisible, allowing you to do anything you please without normal untoward consequences?)  In the narrative I grew up with, this event was a terrible disaster: without God as the real ground for morality, human life becomes "evil" animal hedonism.  (Remember the scripture in Mosiah 3:7, where "the natural man is an enemy to God, and is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father."  The good man must give himself up to the absolute moral authority of God or lose his goodness.)  My own descent into hedonism has not (yet) borne this narrative out, but I am constantly confronting it (in the assumptions religious believers make about me when I am indifferent toward theism, and/or in the stories I hear of and see in the lives of people around me who do value things differently as atheists than they did as religious believers).  In concrete terms, people wonder why I don't leave my wife (for example) or (at least) treat my relationship with her as casually as I do my relationship with (say) the LDS church.  Where does my moral foundation lie?  Why are promises sacred?  Are there any points at which a promise becomes non-binding, for me?  Where are those points?

It is fitting that I should answer these questions with a disquisition on pleasure, since pleasure and pain are really the heart of what they inquire about (how much pleasure are you willing to pass up to keep a promise? how much pain will you endure before breaking a promise?).  Here it is very useful to bring up the Buddhist teaching (confirmed by my personal experience) that pleasure and pain are really the same thing, a fleeting impression on the human psyche that brings mixed consequences (causing us to notice factors in our environment differently, with the result that we alter our behavior in a way loosely calculated to improve the chance that our genes survive, to add a modern biological garnish to the ancient dictum).  If I know that pleasure is pain, then I instinctively recoil from it at least as much as I spring toward it.  I love it and court it, as I must, but I also aim to keep it at a safe distance.  Rather than embrace it uncritically, drinking deep every time nature (or God or whatever is pulling the strings that make the universe dance) proffers the cup, I hang back, stealing in for a drink only when I think it is safe (judging from my own and others' experiences, in that order: my experience of myself trumps what other people tell me about themselves).  How does this kind of thinking look in real life?  How do I use it in real situations?  Let's see.

(1) How much pleasure am I willing to pass up to keep a promise?  Big pleasures come with big consequences.  Intimate relationships require time and commitment to work in a way that is sustainable and stable (as I like my pleasures to be).  When I enter into an intimate relationship with someone, a really pleasurable (and pleasant) relationship like marriage, I invest in that person.  I spend time with that person.  I talk to that person.  I think with that person.  I let that person shop for me, work for me, sign for me, even think for me (in situations where that is required).  Why would I throw that investment away merely because somebody else walks by one day with a cute rear-end (or whatever)?  That would not make sense.  It would not even be pleasurable (from my perspective: the pleasure of chasing a new romantic interest pales in comparison with the pain of losing my wife, to whom I have already devoted so much time and interest).

In my mind, the paradox of choice means that modern life is uniquely cruel to people who obsess over making the right choices (thinking that they have to find the right brand of shoes among 500, or the perfect wife or romantic partner among the population of co-eds at the local university or church or wherever).  Much of the time, the criteria we come up with to facilitate choice in situations of super-abundance are worse than useless.  We become obsessed with noise and ignore the really important information (the information that is actually relevant to our personal sense of pleasure).  Instead of taking five minutes to decide what shoes we need, going to the store, and buying those shoes, we walk into the store undecided, try on 30 pairs, buy 5, and then go home to wonder over and over again whether we should trade some of them in and/or buy some of the ones we rejected.  Instead of pursuing with gusto the romantic adventures that life thrusts upon us, we move obsessively from one partner to another, chasing our illusions of "the perfect mate" from one "failed" relationship to the next (and so on until we become Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer, Newt Gingrich, or Rush Limbaugh: these are not terrible men, but I would not want to marry them--in some bizarre world where I am a heterosexual woman). In marriage, from my perspective, the noise is other people (who seem better than your spouse when you don’t know them as well). The information that really matters is how your spouse is (am I abused? am I abusive? is there something that I really need that I cannot get, something that my spouse really needs that I cannot give?).  If my marriage became impossibly bland--empty, passionless, etc.--then I would consider ending it (as much for my wife's good/pleasure as for mine: why should she be trapped in a relationship that is merely a shell of what it should be, what it once was?).  But I would never end my marriage on a whim (merely because a lady with nice parts flirted with me).  That would be decidedly unpleasant (I think).

There is something really profound lurking here, a truth that is applicable all along the depth and breadth of human experience (my own and that of other people too, as near as I can tell).  Democritus expressed this truth by saying that “the sweetest pleasures are the rarest.” While the extreme version of this is untrue, there is something solid to the idea of limiting one’s exposure to certain pleasures more than one might instinctively want to. Take fasting for example. I stopped eating three square meals a day, and suddenly maintaining a healthy weight became effortless (calorie-restriction does still work, but it feels so much easier when instead of eating three small meals every day, I get to eat one or two huge ones). Consider sex. Every now and then, my wife and I are separated for environmental reasons (she has a period, I am sick, the kids are obnoxious), and whenever this happens, our next amorous encounter registers off the charts (not that we have a bad sex life meantime, but the difference between sated-sex and famine-sex is amazing). Work is the same. I get more done, I am more creative in the office, and my physical work-outs are much more productive, when I make the effort to stay away and avoid “punching the clock” just to convince myself that I am doing something. I think these empirical realities (in my life) are important, since they represent a reality that many modern men overlook entirely (coming from a background that takes scarcity for granted and works to cultivate abundance, which was foreign and desirable to my grandfathers as it is not to me).

This leads me to an interesting dichotomy between my ideas of (i) general human happiness and (ii) particular human happiness. (i) Generally speaking, I think human happiness is better served when there are many options available for people to try.  Marry a woman (or several).  Marry a man.  Marry your dog.  The market should be as free as possible. (ii) Speaking particularly, however, I think happiness is all about eliminating options.  People generally should be maximally free to pursue their own happiness; that said, pursuing one's own happiness requires cultivating one's own garden without being too concerned about anybody else's.  Pick the method(s) that work for you, and ignore everything else.  When I examine my personal morality carefully, I am all about taking away my own choices. In a culture defined by glut, I deliberately cultivate famine (spending hours without food, days without sex, and as much time as possible not working). I do this because I find that constant glut (which my environment recommends reflexively) is not pleasant: who wants to binge all the time on endless food, sex, or work?   Not me.  Confronting my morality with complete honesty (as I wear the ring of Gyges) has taught me this lesson about myself.

(2) How much pain will I endure before breaking a promise?  Periodically, people talk about certain emotions being unlimited, invoking words like "divine love" or "compassion" or "grace" to point to the idea that the universe always gives you another chance (even if that comes only in another life).  While I see some utility in this idea, I confess I am not really convinced.  If you rape me, I might forgive you, but I am never going to put myself deliberately in your company again.  I am not going to make myself vulnerable (no matter what some god says).  Our relationship is (for this life at least) permanently altered.  If you lie to me about things that are vitally important to me, then I am never going to trust you with my dearest secrets.  Not because I don't love you.  Not because I don't believe that you might still have some good qualities.  Not because I think you should die horribly in some tragic accident.  I just don't have the stomach for making myself deliberately vulnerable to somebody I have good reason not to trust.  I don't set myself up to fail.  If a relationship is not working, then I think the understanding on which that relationship exists needs to be re-examined, and it may end up needing to change.  That is acceptable.  Change happens.

My wife has discussed behavior that might lead her to end our relationship.  If I were abusive or sexually promiscuous (chasing skirts like better men before me), then she would step out of the marriage without any guilt.  I think this is wise.  Cultivating a good marriage is the right thing to do (because it is most pleasant, in my experience), and ditching a bad marriage is the right thing to do (because it is most unpleasant, in my vicarious experience).  The reality that the healthiness of my relationships depends on constant care becomes very obvious in this paradigm, which will not let me off the hook with the specious plea: "Well, you signed up for this crap when you took me at the altar, so take it--the good along with the bad!"  Instead of settling down to this sort of complacency, I am expected to court my wife every day, reminding her that I am really a pleasant person to have around.  She could end our involvement at any moment, and my awareness of that fact keeps me from taking her utterly for granted.

In summary, I have found that hedonism is not altogether dehumanizing (in the bad sense).  Now that I look back, it seems to me that I was always a hedonist, even when I was religious.  The difference between me as I am and me as I was is that I now understand my relationship to pleasure much better.  I see how I react to pleasure, how I value it, and I have learned to minimize the sorts of behavior associated with it that tend to bring unpleasant consequences (as I perceive them: others are welcome to decide differently, provided that they do not dictate to me unilaterally from their experience just as I would never presume to dictate to them).  This does not mean that I value pleasure perfectly now, that I never make mistakes, but I do like to think (and it seems true) that I learn better from my mistakes now than I did five years ago.  One benefit that comes from partaking of the forbidden fruit is that you really do become wise. 

Wise Words about Human Ethics

Here are some excellent reflections on morality (specifically sexuality, but as the author points out, sex is not really special).

The Nature of Language

An acquaintance expressed some frustration that a girl he knows identifies herself as a lesbian while pursuing romantic relationships with men.  This made me think, and my first thoughts are on this page.

From my perspective, language is demonstrative. It points at something: sometimes it points badly (in a way that other people have real difficulty following). If you use language too cryptically, I am left in the dark when it comes to seeing your meaning out there the real world as I experience it. You say words like 'lesbian' and I am not sure that you mean what I would mean if I used those words. I sit back and wait for more data from you (language or behavior) before deciding what you are getting at.

There is an interesting problem here: sometimes, especially when dealing with complex phenomena (like sexuality or the economy), we have a tendency to oversimplify. Words are part of that oversimplification. We use them to refer in a general way to specific circumstances that we are familiar with. Thus, one person says 'lesbian' when she means to say something like 'woman attracted to women but also to certain men, i.e. a woman like me.' Maybe for her the point is that she is not entirely straight, and 'lesbian' is the first word that comes to her mind when she wants to put a tag on that. If you listen to her carefully, notice how she uses the word (e.g. what contexts call it forth from her), and avoid projecting your own idea of lesbianism into her idea of lesbianism, then you can understand her (well enough not to be completely clueless every time she speaks about her lesbianism). 

But there is this thing out there known as logic, a thing which maintains such unnatural (and in complex contexts, frankly absurd) idea that A ('lesbian') cannot be not-A ('likes sex with men'). 'Free market' cannot be 'protectionist racket.' 'Too big to fail' cannot be 'too big not to fail.' And so on. Since antiquity, there have been people who thought that words were more real than other phenomena -- that words allow us to deal directly with pure truth, unclouded by pesky empirical data (which is full of logical fallacies and paradoxes, unlike the perfect world academics have historically imagined -- a world in which A is never not-A).  The great power of words is that they generalize, making individual experiences shareable across time and space.  This is also their great weakness, especially when they are used to generalize a particular experience that many people have never had (e.g. being a lesbian the way my friend's acquaintance is) -- and one word is used all by itself to define that experience for everyone, everywhere (logically, A is never not-A anywhere, so we should be able to invoke it as the same thing anywhere, in any context -- people who see problems with this are just fools attracted to 'nuance,' 'paradox,' 'ambiguity,' and other namby-pamby 'unscientific' and illogical things).

But reality is beyond concepts. Things like lesbianism, capitalism, and such resist reduction to simple formula. These words point: they don't define. In the real world, people aren't either homosexual or heterosexual: we exist on a spectrum. And capitalism isn't either the best thing that ever happened to society or the worst: human social behavior, like human sexual behavior, exists on a spectrum. As long as we use language to point at material stuff that historically resists reduction to real dichotomy (good/evil, positive/negative, up/down, gay/straight, A/not-A), we are speaking descriptively, not definitively (unless we want to join the prophets who speak as morons -- prophets who exist in and out of the LDS church). We need to realize the artificiality of our language: it is emphatically not prior to the phenomena that call it forth. Reality is bigger than our reductive efforts to define it (historically: maybe one day, God will come down to earth in the form of a great scientist and give us words that define all things perfectly; it is a cool thought, and I really doubt it). 

Taming the Beast Within: Moment of Truth

Win Blevins.  Stone Song: A Novel About the Life of Crazy Horse.  New York: Forge, 1995.  ISBN: 0812533690.

Part the third of my ongoing exploration of how I came of age.

When I finally came face to face with sex in real life, it was not what I thought it would be.  I was expecting something very profound and even solemn -- a serious ritual whose performance would naturally make or break the lives of those who dared to come forward and participate in it.  This fear of sex took a while to dissipate.  (My wife still teases me about our first year of marriage, "back when I had to pester you all the time for sex!")  But even if my deluded misperception of sex did not die all at once overnight, it did suffer a major setback when my wife and I finally made it to the country hotel where we celebrated our honeymoon.  That experience shattered a lot of barriers inside my soul: I went in expecting something like "The Phantom of the Opera" (a dark, tortured dance that would try my soul) -- instead, what I got was more like "The Producers" (a farce in which nothing comes off quite as planned, and the pervading atmosphere is one of irresistable, obscene hilarity).  It was really troubling to me to think that I put myself and Hawk through hell for that.  Very troubling.

The more I looked at history, my own and the LDS church's, the more troubling this experience became.  Even as my inner life settled down to a level of peace and contentment that I had scarcely enjoyed since childhood, something about my whole adolescent experience in the church rubbed me the wrong way, and the more I thought about it, the more wrong it appeared.  The more I looked at history, my own and that of other people, the more distant and impersonal God seemed.  Different people saw him differently, and fanatics of all stripes were equally convinced that they saw him rightly while others were wrong (or deceived by devils).  As I looked at my own experience with God, I identified more and more with the young Joseph Smith, who (in the canonical version of his First Vision narrative) goes into the Sacred Grove completely confused about the nature of deity.  The only difference was that God never manifested himself to me as clearly or directly as he was supposed to have done to Joseph Smith.  Did I matter less to him?  What about all the people suffering terrible things in foreign countries?  Why didn't he do something clear to end religious bickering (like a lot of the "proselytizing" I did as an LDS missionary) and get real aid to these people (basic food, medicine, hygiene, water)?  Why was he more concerned about my boners than about resolving conflicts in (say) the Middle East, where his name is invoked almost daily as justification for bad behavior (including some outright atrocities)?  These were tough questions for me to deal with, intellectually.  Even if I had not been weakened by my (misguided) emotional struggles to suppress my animal spirit, I would have been shaken by them (and my faith would have evolved to meet the challenge, as it has).

I made three important discoveries shortly after getting married.  (1) Hawk is not evil.  (2) Sex is not solemn or frightening (unless you go out of your way to make it so, as I did for more than a decade).  (3) God is a mystery: people who invoke him as though he speaks clearly and directly are usually trying to use him as a cover to manipulate other people.  That they do this with good intentions does not make their behavior ethically defensible (in my view), which brings me to a crucial turning point in my story. 

Taming the Beast Within: Approaching Manhood

Win Blevins.  Stone Song: A Novel About the Life of Crazy Horse.  New York: Forge, 1995.  ISBN: 0812533690.
 
This is part two of an extended meditation in which I imagine my soul as a wild animal (the spirit Hawk of Crazy Horse as portrayed by Win Blevins) and talk about our relationship over the past twenty-odd years -- when Hawk was struggling to grow up and I was trying to keep her from killing me.

Serving a mission at age 19 was good.  The mission routine gave me something to focus on that was not my terrible, impossible sinfulness, and Hawk even came back sometimes without attacking me savagely -- though she was not happy when mission leaders told us that it was our lack of faith that kept the people of Spain from converting to Mormonism.  Hawk was just never good enough for God (or the other people that invariably end up speaking for him): he was always trying to break her, and because I thought that was for the best, I helped him do it, actively collaborating to humiliate and torture my soul (for its own good, of course).  But it was on the mission that I started to ask myself sometimes whether I were being too cruel to Hawk, whether there might be a better way to treat my animal spirit.  As a missionary, I learned that Hawk was not as lascivious or inherently unstable as I had been led to believe.  She had no problem being polite with Spanish women who walked around all but naked.  She only rebelled when I demanded that she refrain from thinking about sex, ever, or that I submit to the will of God without discussion, without argument, without complaint.  By the time I came home from the mission, we had a sort of awkward truce: I would do my best not to beat her up too much (when she failed to live up to God's impossible demands), and she would not torture me with impotent rage or impossible fear.

When I returned from my mission to pick my studies up at BYU, I was in a very vulnerable, uncomfortable place.  On the one hand, I knew that God expected me to get married, and I wanted that for myself (not only because God expected it: I believed the Mormon doctrine that family relationships are extremely important, and I was eager to enlarge my own family, which has always been a source of joy to me).  On the other hand, I had no idea how to approach women romantically.  From my training in church and my personal experience reacting to that training, I knew that romance was very close to murder, that it could call down great wrath from God, and that I did not know how to get remotely close to it without calling down that wrath.  Whenever I got close to a woman, Hawk would start tearing me to shreds inside, and I would flee away for safety, bleeding and weeping in the quiet recesses of my mind.  As a result of this situation, most of my time at BYU was devoted to study (not an entirely unprofitable outlet, though it backfired when I started getting really critically interested in Mormon history).  I did not date.  I did not make friends among girls.  I did not think actively about marriage (except to laugh nervously and cry out in pain to Hawk whenever well-meaning acquaintances -- usually older, married LDS men -- asked me, "So, when are you going to find a nice girl and settle down?  You don't want to wait too long!").  I was still trapped.

Then, I met the woman who would become my wife.  She saw past my broken psyche.  She did not judge Hawk.  She did not hate Hawk.  She was not jealous of Hawk.  She was nice to Hawk, much nicer than I had ever been, and for the first time, I felt safe with sex.  I could stop worrying.  I could stop fighting.  I could stop waiting for the world to end every time I had an erection (though it took me a long time to get that far: in the beginning, it was all I could do to let my new girlfriend touch my hand or shudder! kiss me goodnight).  I went into my new relationship full of the old dread -- sure that something awful would happen to overthrow the latest mirage of happiness being thrust upon me unexpectedly.  Right up until the last moment of our Mormon wedding, I expected some priesthood leader to have a moment of discernment and removed me -- firmly and permanently -- from the arm of the young woman I had somehow managed to seduce into loving me despite my obvious depravity.  Somehow, Hawk and I managed to sneak through the whole ceremony without setting off God's radar.

Taming the Beast Within: My Misspent Youth

Win Blevins.  Stone Song: A Novel About the Life of Crazy Horse.  New York: Forge, 1995.  ISBN: 0812533690.

The story of His Crazy Horse (Tasunke Witko) is fascinating, and Blevins is a very good storyteller.  I recommend this book without reservation as one of the most thoughtful, interesting accounts of the old American West that I have read.  Like many good novels, it also offers a great window into the human soul, a window through which I would like to look at my own soul for a minute here.

Blevins does a very good job of portraying the Sioux religion: he is accurate, thorough without being overbearing, and compelling ("almost thou persuadest me to become a Lakota").  The Sioux believe that every human being is born with a special character (unique to them) that it is their personal duty to cultivate.  For Crazy Horse, this character takes the form of a spirit animal dwelling inside him: a hawk, whom he refers to simply as Hawk.  Hawk guides him toward the crucial decisions he must make in life, helping him cope with difficult circumstances and emotions. 

As a young man, Crazy Horse's most pressing task is becoming familiar with Hawk and the other, larger spiritual powers at work in the world: he does this by going out alone into the wilderness, where he fasts, prays, and meditates.  For a long time, he does this with no issue: he feels ashamed, rejected by the universe, worthless.  Then, when he is about to give up and return to his village empty-handed, he receives a waking vision that shows him his place in the world (a Rider with a Hawk going to war alone).  The rest of the book tells how he uses this vision as a tool for understanding and overcoming the challenges that life brings him.

I really like thinking of the individual human psyche as an animal.  We are all animals, in my view, and growing up is about coming to terms with that reality -- hopefully in a way that enriches us as individuals and communities.  In this essay, I want to talk about my personal experience growing up and dealing with the beast within (i.e. with my character, my habits and thoughts, my soul).  I am going to try to be very honest and straightforward, but this is a tough subject, so I apologize in advance if I appear unclear or untruthful.  One very important thing to keep in mind, I think, is that my journey is not someone else's journey.  I cannot talk about someone else the same way I talk about myself.  I do not know others the way I know myself.  I do not judge them the way I judge myself.  I do not expect from them the same things I expect from myself.  In other words, what follows is about me, not you (no matter who you are).  Another thing to remember is that our memories are constantly changing: the more we look at the past, the more it changes.  If you do not like the way I remember myself today, hang on: you may like my memories better tomorrow.

Adolescence is a hard time: it is difficult being trapped between childhood -- with the freedom to learn and explore infinitely without much fear (if you have a good childhood as I did) -- and adulthood, with its larger responsibilities and dangers.  It strikes me, as I look back at my own experience, that I tried really hard to reject my spirit animal.  I did not want to grow up, mostly because this seemed to involve me falling into patterns of behavior that I could not avoid that were extremely evil.  When my inner Hawk began to wake up, I was not always happy with it.  I did not make it a personal guide for dealing effectively with moral crises.  There were times when I hated it and even tried to destroy it.  How did this happen?  How did I change from a happy kid into a brooding teenager?  How did I go from being relatively happy (as it seems now) to being depressed, scared, and paranoid?  Well, the matter is really complicated (resisting any easy understanding), but I think it began with sex. 

I remember when I first learned what sexual intercourse was: I was about eleven years old, and I thought that it was about the grossest thing imaginable.  People "urinate" into each other: how disgusting!  But this also made it paradoxically intriguing (like any weird fact about life).  My mom had the right response to my shock -- she said something like, "Oh, it's actually quite nice: don't give up on it just yet."  About the same time, I started having unexpected, unwanted thoughts about women.  I would be reading or playing the recorder or doing some routine task and BAM! the thought of some woman I had seen would appear in my mind's eye unbidden, unlooked for, and strangely attractive (at first, they were always older women: teachers, newly-weds in our church congregation).  Also, I would wake up every morning with a boner: my dad had already warned me about this, and to do him credit he never said anything about its being any kind of sin.  It was just another weird fact of life, something that adults had to deal with.  So far, so good.  But unfortunately, my parents were not the only people I turned to for help with sex (or life in general).

At the same time of my life, right on the threshold of puberty, I heard the call that drove young Crazy Horse into the wilderness to look for a vision.  For me, answering that call meant reading a lot of Mormon scripture (the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, the Pearl of Great Price, and the Bible, which I read many times in the King James Version), praying intensely, fasting, and looking for God in the world around me and inside me.  As a result of all this activity, I had a very intense religious experience (akin to the vision of Rider and Hawk that Crazy Horse received).  I was converted to Mormonism -- really converted, wholly convinced.  I went up to the pulpit several times as a youth with no prompting and bore my own testimony (no rote memorization required) that God had spoken to me.  As I look back, it seems to me that the reading, praying, fasting, meditating, and testifying were all important things: they represented a positive attempt on my part to contact and connect with the adult personality waking up inside me.  I was reaching out in a peaceful, nurturing way to my spirit animal, offering Hawk my arm and inviting her to tell me her secrets, secrets that I really needed if I was going to survive the process of growing up.  And then to my delight, she came and perched on my arm.  But success is never simple: every victory comes with a problematic aftermath.

In the story of Crazy Horse, the vision of Rider is a curse until young Crazy Horse goes to his father (the village medicine man) and confesses it as part of a special iniatiation ceremony.  Crazy Horse is initially on bad terms with his father, so he avoids speaking of his vision (and must wear shabby clothes to avoid angering the higher powers that the Sioux recognize behind lightning, thunder, and sudden turns of fortune -- powers that my background would lead me to name God).  Another medicine man from nearby notices Crazy Horse's unkempt attire, reads its significance correctly, and tells the young Lakota that he must confess to his father.  But no one forces him.  No one makes the decision for him: in the end, he goes to his father on his own, receives purification, and becomes integrated into the tribe as an adult.  But this process takes a long time, during which Crazy Horse wanders in the wilderness while his father remains available but aloof (respecting his son's privacy).  Here my story diverges from that of Crazy Horse.  After my epiphany, I wanted to talk.  I wanted to confess to a medicine man, have my dream interpreted, and improve my connection with Hawk.  But my Mormon priesthood leaders were not like the Lakota medicine men who helped Crazy Horse.  While I do not doubt that their intentions were just as good, they did not respect my privacy -- Hawk's privacy -- and I was too naive to defend myself -- to defend Hawk -- from their pointed inquiries about the state of my being, about the welfare of my soul.

I came back from the wilderness far too early.  I came back and walked directly into priesthood classes where my well-meaning leaders told me (1) that masturbation was a sin comparable to murder; (2) that women who didn't wear enough clothing were walking pornography; (3) that I could not participate or integrate with my community as long as I was sexually active (in any way) outside the boundaries of a heterosexual marriage; (4) that the only course for setting myself free from a lifetime of terrible depravity was confessing every sexual misstep I might make to my bishop.  I internalized this message with all the fervor of a medieval Catholic saint, and the results were not pretty.  (1) I became obsessed with making my boners go away, and I felt very bad (sometimes even physically ill) every time random thoughts of women invaded my mind.  (2)  I lost my ability to communicate freely with nubile women and girls my own age.  Since they were sexy and I couldn't have any sexy thoughts (let alone actions) outside of marriage, why bother talking to them?  The risk was greater than the reward (from my naive perspective).  Sometimes, I judged them when they wore clothing that I found provocative (though I am happy to say that I never let this attitude get out of hand: I always recognized that the fundamental moral problem was weakness in myself, not some gigantic flaw pervading almost the entire female gender living outside the burkha).  (3)  I worried all the time about my worthiness to participate in Mormon ceremonies (which I really loved: I relished getting to church early each Sunday to prepare sacrament; I loved saying the prayers; I loved passing the bread and water around the congregation; I loved attending the temple to do baptisms and confirmations).  It tore me up inside to think that something so wonderful might be taken away from me merely because I couldn't make a boner go away in time (e.g. before I had a bad thought or got too sexually excited).  It made me angry, at myself (for being so weak!) and the world (for being so mean!).  (4)  I became a regular visitor in my bishop's office, where I was constantly begging for forgiveness -- more and more wretchedly, as it became ever clearer to me that the only way to make the boners go away for good was to castrate myself (a solution to which I gave more than passing thought, though thankfully I never actually tried it).

Because I followed the well-meaning counsel of my Mormon leaders, the delicious taste of heaven that my religious conversion had brought quickly became as bitter as hell.  Hawk shredded my arm with her talons, gouged my face with her beak, and flew away screaming where I could not follow.  After she left, I would sit up late at night or rise early in the morning, sobbing -- longing for the peace, the happiness, the openness, the safety that I felt before sex came and destroyed everything good in my world.  In my head, I was wearing the rags that Crazy Horse wore.  I hated myself.  I despised my weakness -- my inability to follow simple instructions from God, who reached out to me through my priesthood leaders (generously, continuously, even though I kept letting him down over and over again).  I was the lowest form of life imaginable, worse than the most noxious animal anywhere: animals fulfilled the measure of their creation, whereas I couldn't follow simple instructions from a loving God who just wanted me to avoid things that were bad for me anyway.  Many times, more than I can count, I really wanted to die.  It was awful.

For many years, I lived in a kind of perpetual dark night of the soul: I would be happy momentarily, engaged in some worthwhile pursuit (like gardening or studying or working out), and then I would remember that Hawk was gone, that she was never coming back, that I had driven her away with my sinfulness.  And I would get angry -- at myself (at Hawk), at the world, at people who looked at me askance (or wore bikinis, or did anything to remind me of the gaping wound I carried around inside).  But the overarching emotion that defined my experience was despair, the black hopelessness that comes from being in a caught in a problem to which there is no solution.  The Pretty Reckless have a song that expresses my emotion(s) very well:

"Under the Water" (from Hit Me Like a Man, 2012)

Lay my head, under the water  

Lay my head, under the sea  

Excuse me sir, am I your daughter?  

Won't you take me back, take me back and see? 

There's not a time, for being younger 

And all my friends, are enemies  

And if I cried unto my mother 

No she wasn't there, she wasn't there for me 

Don't let the water drag you down 

Don't let the water drag you down 

Don't let the water drag you down 

Broken lines, across my mirror  

Show my face, all red and bruised  

And though I screamed and I screamed, well no one came running  

No I wasn't saved, I wasn't safe from you 

Don't let the water drag you down 

Don't let the water drag you down 

Don't let the water drag you down  

Don't let me drown, don't let me drown in the waves, 

Oh I could be found, I could be what you had saved 

Saved, saved, saved!

 

Lay my head, under the water 

Aloud I pray, for calmer seas 

And when I wake from this dream, with chains all around me  

No, I've never been, I've never been free 

No, I've never been, I've never been free 

No, I've never been, I've never been free

It was remarkably like drowning all the time, loaded with chains that wouldn't come off, and other people just didn't understand: my parents didn't understand (though they really tried, I think), my church leaders didn't understand, and I was too ashamed and insecure to reach out to anyone else.  I should emphasize that it didn't overwhelm me utterly, at least not every moment: I enjoyed some very good times as an adolescent, times I remember fondly to this day -- but this mess was always in the back of it, like a monster lurking inside me, waiting for a lull in the action to emerge and eviscerate me.  Hawk felt betrayed, and she really took it out on me (over and over again: I sometimes wondered if we would ever be friends again, the way we were before sex came into the picture).