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Note: ilp don’t allow links for discussion of this topic, here is my bibliographical inspirations; despite some neologisms, not really any new ideas here.
Reading list:
Marshal Rosenberg, Non-Violent Communication
Overview of ‘animal-training’ emotions.
Eckhart Tolle, Power of Now
Overview of egoic consciousness.
Eugene W. Holland, “Introduction to Schizoanalysis”
Relation of capitalism to family-unit in incest-taboo.
Carlos Allones Pérez, “Nucleus of Family and Industrial Capitalism”
Anthropological origins of family-unit and market in incest-taboo.
Freud, Totem and Taboo: resemblances between the mental lives of savages and neurotics
Patriarchy and incest-taboo as neuroticism.
“There’s a problem, not in the sex center, but in the network that all together is responsible for identifying what in the environment is a potentially sexual object. It’s almost like there’s a literal cross-wiring. Humans of course have many social instincts: they include the four-Fs, they include when you meet a person who’s an alpha male you either run away or obey them, if you’re a child there’s natural instincts for learning, if you’re a parent there’s natural instincts for parenting, when you meet sexually interesting people that’s a natural social sexual instinct. It’s as if, as if – this is a metaphor not a conclusion – there is a cross-wiring, and when the person perceives the child, the brain, instead of triggering the nurturant instincts is triggering the sexual insticts: it’s cross wired; at least that’s a very helpful way to look at it that explains the data. So it looks like in pedophiles this white-matter is under-developed so the correct set of stimuli is not triggering the correct… I’ll say correct… the correct instincts. That’s what I found.”
James Cantor, “Brain Research and Pedophilia: What it Means for Assessment, Treatment, and Policy” (my transcript; from 0:35:00)
Consider where Cantor said, “…the correct… I’ll say correct… the correct instincts.” What if, it isn’t the structure of the patriarchy that is correct, rather, the patriarchy is the one that is “cross-wired”.
Patriarchy is a form of egoic consciousness. That is, patriarchy is neurosis. Patriarchy is a conditioned system of rewards and punishments. It’s the result of the discovery of animal training culture around 10,000 BC applied to ourselves. Another way of saying egoic consciousness is “life alienating communication”, that’s the expression Marshal Rosenberg uses in his system of “Non-Violent Communication”. We can recognize egoic consciousness in ourselves when we identify with thoughts and then experience anger, anxiety, resentment, self-loathing, and so on. We can recognize it in others with a Voice Stress Analysis that detects activation of the Sympathetic Nervous System; we can also observe neurotic routines like Anxiety Disorders or Schizophrenia; we can identify triggered word choice: “but, always, continuously”; and we can also watch body language. Egoic consciousness is the system of Transactional Analysis Adult-Child games. Egoic consciousness is objective and observable. The opposite of egoic consciousness is Enlightenment, Depersonalization and Derealization, and how children, wild animals, and primitive humans live.
A long long time ago, before egoic consciousness and the patriarchy emerged, there was a different mode of living than the one we are familiar with today. The pre-tribe is a semi-mythical concept because all human societies on Earth today are patriarchies; egoic consciousness and the patriarchy didn’t really start at 10,000 BC. Freud realized by Totem and Taboo that incest-taboo was a neuroticism; but he didn’t study its origin point. Carlos Pérez suggests that incest-taboo began at 500,000 BC: his reasoning is basically that Bonobos have no incest-taboo, but we do, so… when and why did it emerge? This is important because egoic consciousness, patriarchy and capitalism are all one thing. Monetarism definitely started before out-of-Africa since every culture on Earth used “size money” (religious icons). What Perez figured out, is that incest-taboo and money have something to do with each other. The market system and the family-unit system are somehow related, that relation is their mediation though the tribal central hoard, which becomes the temple, which becomes the banks. “No money, no honey”. I guess we can trace the origins of lion-king patriarchy to Australopithecus (corroborated by max hominid sexual dimorphism at this time) when defenseless arboreal simians suddenly found themselves marooned on the Savannah and formed a brutal gang-land structure in order to survive. Just as the market system is not really a system of barter as is commonly believed, incest-taboo has little to do with gene deformity as is commonly believed. Pedophilia-taboo is to parent-child what adultery is to husband-wife: a monopoly on intimacy exchanges. Royal families tend to get chided with accusations of being incestuous because monarchism is exactly the lion-king mode of patriarchy that the incest-taboo & band-of-brothers system was meant to off-set. Incest is not as harmful as often imagined, it takes about 500 years of continuous close inbreeding just to get a slightly protruding chin (eg Hapsburgs). The notion that incest-taboo is the result of genetic deformity aversion is what Eric Berne called “Wooden Leg game”, that is, looking for material explanations for what is emotional social dynamics; sort of like how hierarchy was justified similarly by Darwinian genetic fitness.
That’s a big regression, but necessary to contextualize how sexual orientations are anti-produced from initial “polymorphous perversity”… While there never really was a time when humans lived before patriarchy, since the patriarchy is a neurosis, just like stable-vice in horses, it can never really be cured, but it can be relaxed. So horses can be put out to pasture, well fed, brushed and so on and they will stop exhibiting neuroticism; similarly, when a warm sunny millennium came, the patriarchy would relax and the Bonobo-eque form or society would reemerge. In patriarchy we see family-units, market system, and sexual-orientation with incest-taboo – in insulated tropical societies we see alloparenting, communalism, and polysexuality. The difference is lack, or more usually, perceived lack. As Foucault, or Eckhart Tolle tell us, perceived lack is the drive-belt of discipline and punish societies/egoic consciousness.
Cantor had remarked that pedophiles have the nurturing part of the brain and the sexual part of the brain “cross-wired”. In pre-tribalism, these are the same thing. I call it ‘Barbarian Pederasty’. Before the family-unit and school system, learning happened my imitation, not by discipline. ‘Barbarian Pederasty’ was the system of enculturation for millions of years, it wasn’t extinguished in Indo-European culture until 399 BC when Socrates was executed: at that point free education motivated by adult sexual attraction to juveniles was displaced by a market-based system of paid contracted pedagogues. In most mammals, the males are indifferent or hostile to the juveniles. What made humans human was male attraction to the juveniles. Pedophilia is actually the cause of humanity and civilization.
So… The reason why pedophilia becomes taboo is not because there is anything in-itself harmful about touch or intimacy between adults and children, that was going on for millions of years and still is in warm sunny places; why pedophilia is “wrong” is because of the way man, woman, and child and market economy, and family unit, and encuturation all fit together in contemporary patriarchy. Hope that makes some sense? I would add, some pedophiles might be called ‘cross-cross-wired’; that is, they are lack produced: these pedophiles are living in a patriarchy and cannot get any touch or intimacy from adult females, these males perceive themselves as lacking in their need for touch, intimacy, recognition, and so on, and turn to kids. These pedophiles can be distinguished from the polysexuals because they are motivated by egoic or neurotic lack, not by what Marshal Rosenberg called “our natural desire to enrich the lives of those around us”.
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A
Lolita is a nasty fictional tale of patriarchal domination told from the perspective of the Man; Marguerite Duras’s The Lover is a beautiful true story told from the girl’s perspective.
B
“Many lay persons and professionals believe that child sexual abuse (CSA) causes intense harm, regardless of gender, pervasively in the general population. The authors examined this belief by reviewing 59 studies based on college samples. Meta-analyses revealed that students with CSA were, on average, slightly less well adjusted than controls. However, this poorer adjustment could not be attributed to CSA because family environment (FE) was consistently confounded with CSA, FE explained considerably more adjustment variance than CSA, and CSA-adjustment relations generally became nonsignificant when studies controlled for FE. Self-reported reactions to and effects from CSA indicated that negative effects were neither pervasive nor typically intense, and that men reacted much less negatively than women. The college data were completely consistent with data from national samples. Basic beliefs about CSA in the general population were not supported.”
Rind B, Tromovitch P, Bauserman R., A meta-analytic examination of assumed properties of child sexual abuse using college samples.
C
The recent study by Kilpatrick (1992) differs from other studies in that it includes no clinical or offender population and allows for respondents to give positive and neutral, as well as negative, responses to their childhood sexual experiences. The sample population was 501 Southern adult women who were asked to recall their childhood sexual experiences. Sixty-seven percent of the white respondents and 36 percent of the black respondents reported having sexual experiences as children. Kilpatrick found that the larger proportion of women (67%) remembered having participated voluntarily rather than involuntarily in sexual activity, and most reported having been active in initiating such activity, while a smaller proportion (33%) felt that they had in some way been pressured or forced. Thirty-eight percent of the women found their experiences to be pleasant, 37 percent neither pleasant nor unpleasant, and 25 percent found the experiences to be unpleasant. Sixty-eight percent reported having had overall positive responses to their sexual experiences…"
Floyd M. Martinson, The Sexual Life Of Children
D
“I had an experience with an adult man when I was hardly twelve years old but the circumstances were not such that I look back on them with horror. On the contrary, I have very fine memories of the first, though rather bizarre, acquaintance with sex, and what happened eight years ago has had no bad consequences. I have no trauma about it and have become neither oversexed nor frigid. All that happened was that I learned, at a very early age, how a man and girl can satisfy each other, and obtained practical sexual instruction by means of which I did not have to learn from a book what a naked man looks like, how he gets an erection, ejaculation, masturbation, and so on. In the circumstances that surrounded my case there was no question of rape. He was a darling, and as we say, “opportunity made the thief”[…] I look back on it now as an odd but fine first experience; in fact I liked it so much that, when I went home, I asked if I could come and “play Eva” (as he called it) again. […] It certainly has done me no harm.”
Frits Bernard’s, Paedophilia: The Radical Case
E
“When I was a child I experienced an ongoing incestuous relationship that seemed to me to be caring and beneficial in nature. There were love and healthy self-actualization in what I perceived to be a safe environment. Suddenly one day I discerned from playground talk at school that what I was doing might be “bad”. Fearing that I might, indeed, be a “bad” person, I went to my mother for reassurance. The ensuing traumatic incidents of that day inaugurated a 30-year period of psychological and emotional dysfunction that reduced family communication to mere utilitarian process and established severe limits on my subsequent developmental journey.”
Nelson, J. A. (1982). “The impact of incest: Factors in self-evaluation,” in L. L. Constantine & F. M. Martinson (Eds.), Children and Sex: New Findings, New Perspectives
F
“For the children of the Trobrianders there is no sexual repression and no sexual mystery. Their sexual life develops naturally, freely and without restraint through all periods of life, with complete satisfaction. … Trobriander society in this third decade of our century knows no sexual perversions, no functional mental illnes, no psychoneurosis, no sex murders. … Sadism, destructiveness and theft are equally absent in Trobriander culture. … And these are always cultures with a positive attitude towards sex.”
Malinowski, The Sexual Life of the Savages________
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I guess Guy Ritchie called his 2005 cinematic investigation into egoic consciousness, Revolver, because as long as the trigger keeps getting squeezed, the cylinder keeps turning and turning. Recalling patriarchy is an organized system of egoic consciousness; recalling Tolle to the effect, ‘ego is the only addiction’; recalling Gabor Maté’s collection of MRI research showing monetary tasks and status symbols (i.e. capitalopatriarchy) ‘light-up’ the same parts of the brain as hard drugs use (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts); this remark “Do you have children…” is not just a fallacy, but also only too reminiscent of the Narcotic Anonymous maxim that, “one addict can best understand another addict”.
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There are two kinds of harm. One is pain, the other is anguish. Pain comes from tissue damage. Anguish comes from thinking. The example of penetrating a two year-old seems to me to be Straw Man Fallacy, because this would be the behavior of a sadist, not a pedophile. Pedophiles are interested in caressing, mutual masturbation, oral sex, or intercrural sex; not penetration of the anus or vagina – certainly not of a toddler. Masturbation or intercural sex do not cause pain; what is left of ‘harm’ then is anguish; the anguish of pedophilic sex is produced from the social structure as described above in “1”.
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If you are involved in counseling work then you know the expressions “interpretation” and “your story”. I have described in “1” above my guess of how sexual orientations are anti-produced from an original polysexuality in the capitalopatriarchy. By analogy; after the enlightenment of Ramana Maharshi he mentions enjoying all foods: we all begin accepting of pretty much all tastes, then as time passes, emotional baggage accumulates and someone becomes a picky eater. The more neurotic the person or the society, the more complex their tastes become. Children, and also adults, are influenced by very subtle body language and tone of voice: few people have insight into the events and emotions behind their favorite foods and the foods they dislike.
"T1: "I do not like this dish" , then the next thought...
T2: "But I have to eat it"
T3: "I cannot bear it"
T4: "This is terrible, even the smell is horrible"
T5: "This cannot be consumed! I wonder how people ever eat this""
Tushnim Asanam, commentary on Astavakra Gita
I guess that amnesia would “prove” whether or not sexual orientation is genetic and “born that way” or conditioned. An account of a homosexual who forgot he was gay after developing amnesia is described in John & Helen Watkins, Ego states: theory and therapy, in the chapter, “Dissociation”.