Sex Or No Sex–That Is The Question

The personal columns of today have more categories than people to fill them.  ‘Men Seeking Women’ is by far the leanest section.  “Black Dwarf Transvestite seeks like-bodied person of color to share elm trees, the Sunday Times, and Bette Midler.  Age no bar. Just be ready to party” is much more like it.

An all-time favorite is the following:

“Nun on the Run” looking for fun with any real gentlemen.  Early, flirty 40s, pretty face and a behind you could kneel down and pray on.”

Despite its unusual theme it is still oh-hum conservative male-female, one-on-one sex.  No threesomes, foursomes, midgets, dominatrices, queens, bears, and pump house jocks.  The combinations and permutations are impressive.  A sexual smorgasbord.

Yet everything gets old quickly.  Fashions in clothes, food, and sex start in California, take root in New York, and then infiltrate the heartland.  A recent personal column in the Buford (AR) Gazette (pop. 4280) which, although still very conservative and read-between-the-lines, was racy by local standards.

Christian man seeks devout woman who will never have to worry. Her soul will be filled and her tank will never need topping off.

This was the photo he attached:



There seems to be nothing left in the sexual closet. Plain and exotic offerings have been exhausted.

Enter celibacy.

In a culture that clamors with the noisy public narratives of sexual desire, the implacable silence of sexual refusal is the last remaining taboo. At least, that is what the journalist Sophie Fontanel felt when she composed the opening sentence of her bestselling memoir, The Art of Sleeping Alone. “For a long while, and I really don’t wish to say when it was or how many years it lasted, I chose to live in what was perhaps the worst insubordination of our times: I had no sex life,” she wrote. (Jane Shilling, The New Republic, 11.2.13)

It was only a matter of time.  For women celibacy is a powerful feminist statement – they do not need men, never have, and total rejection of the male is a powerful and elegant expression of the true female spirit.

Fontanel soon found that she had hit a nerve.  Although many women were overjoyed that a sister had finally taken the ultimate step towards complete liberation; others were not so sure.  Lesbians assumed that she had just given up men, not sex, and approached her for favors. More surprising were couples who saw her rejection of men and sex as threatening to marriage.

Fontanel swiftly realized that her elective singleness felt like a dangerous reproach in a world of couples who seemed to want her to be as miserable as them. Even “the marginal couple, Sabine and William, doleful swingers who absolutely had to stay together to have someone to swap—even they found me peculiar”, she writes, adding with a certain complacency, “I was discovering conventional behavior in the most liberated milieus.”

Critics found every possible motivation behind Fontanel’s celibacy – everything from feminism to a sublime rediscovery and celebration of the human body to a post-modern assessment of traditional institutions.  Not so, said Fontanel.  It was just bad sex.

But while there are moments of exaltation in Fontanel’s memoir, on the whole her embrace of chastity seems to have been prompted not so much by a desire to explore a new philosophy of living, as by a deep ennui with bad sex: “I’d had it with being taken and rattled around,” she writes. “I’d had it with handing myself over . . .”

Fontanel found that giving up sex was not a simple matter. It meant readjusting her entire life.  Modern society is based on sexual relationships. Whether we pair off for an evening or for life, we couple. ‘Old maids’ and ‘confirmed bachelors’ are outcastes.  Once it is realized that they have given up looking, they are marginalized.  They are of another breed. Incongruent puzzle pieces.  They don’t fit anywhere.

In each case, it seems that the experiment in solitary living was not so much a route to a recalibration of the author’s intimate relationships, as a kind of protracted emotional spa break. Fontanel’s period of single living was the more extreme renunciation: It lasted from her late youth to early middle age and seems to have included some distressing epiphanies. At one point she got rid of all her books: “Their contents served no purpose. All they did was tell stories.” At another, she felt that she was losing her identity: “Overnight I had become a vague, blurry shape . . . My being had lost the solidity of things.”

The hardest thing about celibacy is ignoring sexual desire.  We are all programmed to want to mate, and although we would like to think that God created us in his image, at least in sexual terms we are more akin to animals than angels. All men want to do is to have sex. Teenage boys can think of nothing else; and girls, although more discriminating about their sexual partners, are just as anxious, expectant, and excited.

All experiments in celibacy have failed.  Look at the Catholic Church, the last bastion of official sexual withdrawal.  Centuries ago priests, although taking the vow of chastity, never thought that it meant no sex at all.  French curés and Italian padres had sex regularly and treated their mistresses well thanks to the overflowing coffers of the monasteries. It was the Irish Church which somehow convinced priests and lay people alike that sex was bad.  Although Irish American priests obviously weren’t thinking of their own same-sex relationships when they hectored the rest of us about impure thoughts, words, and actions, the made a good show of sexual propriety. 

Sophie Fontanel’s dalliance with celibacy ended after five years.  She threw in the towel.

All a mistake, apparently. Suddenly, celibate Sophie was transformed back into seductive Sophie; her clothes chic, her nails red-lacquered: “I was back . . . My solitude had been an infirmity . . . Walking along the street, I saw nothing but possibilities.”

So much for a noble experiment, an ideal, a cure-all for aggression, jealousy, abuse, deceit, and greed.  Albee disliked marriage, thought it a debasing bourgeois institution; but understood that it was the crucible of maturity.  Unless men and women had sex within the confines of marriage and were forced to deal with both their sexual ambitions and fears and the social dynamics which stem from them, they could never leave adolescence.

The apostle Paul reluctantly accepted marriage as necessary within God's procreative world, but he urged men to hold off as long as possible perhaps forever, for the unsullied celibate life was certainly less complicated and more spiritually enriching:

Now concerning the thing whereof you wrote to me: It is good for a man not to touch a woman.  But for fear of fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband… But I speak this by indulgence, not by commandment. For I would that all men were even as myself [unmarried]: but every one hath his proper gift from God; one after this manner, and another after that. But I say to the unmarried, and to the widows: It is good for them if they so continue, even as I…(1 Corinthians, Chap. 7)

 

Better to be celibate, but if you are married, stay the course.  There was no Song of Songs in his mind: 

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouthFor your love is more delightful than wine.Pleasing is the fragrance of your perfumes;Your name is like perfume poured out. No wonder the young women love you!Take me away with you—let us hurry! Let the king bring me into his chambers.

 

None of this matters much, Paul, Fontanel, the monks of Carthusian abbeys and Himalayan ascetics notwithstanding.  Few can resist the enticements of the opposite sex, most indulge quickly and often.  The greatest of God's ironies is that he made men to think of sex all the time but gave them only a limited and very finite time to consummate it.

 

Toxic Stress–One More Worry For Parents

Just when we parents thought we had it all figured out; after we had apportioned chores without causing dissension and revolt; solved the issue of allowances vs. cooperative participation; balanced trust with vigilance and spying; kept nursery air pure, meals healthy and organic, and friends familiar and reputable, along comes toxic stress:

For more than a decade, researchers have understood that frequent or continual stress on young children who lack adequate protection and support from adults, is strongly associated with increases in the risks of lifelong health and social problems, including: increased the risks of cancer, diabetes and heart, lung and liver disease for millions of people. Something that also increased one’s risks for smoking, drug abuse, suicide, teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, domestic violence and depression — and simultaneously reduced the chances of succeeding in school, performing well on a job and maintaining stable relationships (David Bornstein, New York Times 11.1.13)

Now, I don’t know what it is like in California, but here in Washington, DC, it is the children who give parents toxic stress, not the other way around.  Parents are the ones who are driven crazy by the insolence, indifference, and in-your-face rebellion of their children  They are the ones who have to talk the cops out of hauling their children downtown, keep teachers from branding a big 36-point font ‘F’ on a senior report car; who page into space with no response, and who meet ragged, doped-up ravers with no place to stay after an all-night party in Baltimore.  Toxic stress?  Hey, parents are the ones who need understanding, support, and compassion, not their children.

My parents suffered no less, for I was as insolent, dismissive, and totally arrogant as my children’s generation.  In fact, the clearest, most vivid image I have of my father is one of apoplectic anger. At times he got so completely worked up that he could only sputter.  His face reddened, his neck puffed up like an adder, his veins popped out like ropes, he clenched his fists, and nothing came out.  There is no doubt that he wanted to clobber me just like his father had walloped him; but the white picket fences, Burberry raincoats, and the Sharon Hills Country Club of our neighborhood kept his guinea down, and I was spared.

Now it is 2013, and children can do no wrong.  They are more coddled, protected, nurtured, and adored than any period in history.  Parents invest time, money, energy, and emotion in these ingrates not because they expect an economic return, but because they need to justify their own untoward and illogical attentions.  If children can make it past childhood – past the flashers, child molesters, bad influences, bad food, and social media – parental effort, love, and solicitousness, they will get into Harvard.

Of course, all this helicoptering and intense child-focus does just the opposite.  Little Jonathan will explode like a volcano after years of frustration; and will give a final fuck-you farewell, and be out the door and down the road to community college, hourly wages, and a cheap, ditzy wife before you can say Jack Robinson.

Parents today make sure that their children have only the best care and support.  Their meals are healthy; and all slides, seesaws, and monkey bars are removed from the playground.  Little Jonathan is brought up to act like girl in class and to keep his mouth shut, his arms to himself, and his eyes front.  He is never allowed to play unsupervised or walk alone with his friends. He is programmed Sunday-to-Saturday with organized soccer, language class, painting-and-drawing, leadership training, and sensitivity classes. It is no wonder that he eventually will blow his stack.

Toxic stress, then, must refer to some other kind of American family – not the upper middle class strivers and achievers with whom I am familiar – the parents of a hundred Jonathans - but families with wife-beater husbands, drunken, abusive uncles, and slutty mothers.  The ones on welfare.  The ones who eat corn chips and Oreos for dinner, and slap their kids around. These parents will never make it out of the red dirt hills or the ghetto, and their children will cook meth, run H, shoot squirrels, and eventually get tossed in the clink. 

For all this national angst to have any real resonance, it must be a phenomenon more widespread than just a nasty social virus among the upper and lower classes.  It must affect the vast American middle. They may not suffer the overprotection and social illusions of Washington’s professional class; nor any of the down-and-dirty, pickup truck mentality of eastern Arkansas, but there must be plenty of family dysfunction.

What is an eager, middle class child of hard-working Iowan Christian parents to do when Daddy is caught with his pants down with Mabel, the girl from Accounting?  Or when Mommy has her drunks between 2-6 and forgets to cook or pick up the laundry?  Or when Sis gets pregnant by a high-school drop out, the oil change guy down at R&R Towing and Car Repair? The child gets toxic stress.  His grades go down, his attitude sucks, and he becomes as drug-dependent and sexually careless as his parents.

There was a famous documentary a number of years ago called An American Family where TV cameras followed the Loud family around for a year.  What the producers thought would be a Norman Rockwell example of America at its homespun best, turned out to be just the opposite.  The whole family was fucked up.  The libertine father, the neurotic mother, the gay queen son….everyone was twisted in some unique way. The point is not that the Louds were special or different; or that the producers lucked out with some TV-worthy, smarmy and seamy tidbits instead of pot roast and prayers.  It was that all families suffer from some kind of toxic stress. So what’s the big deal?

If you can believe the hype, toxic stress is worse than cancer:

“What the science is telling us now is how experience gets into the brain as it’s developing its basic architecture and how it gets into the cardiovascular system and the immune system,” explains Jack P. Shonkoff, director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, where the term toxic stress was coined.

Wow! Not only does the abuse a cracker father dishes out when he stumbles home drunk raise welts and bruises, it addles his kid’s brain.  Forget about Darwinism, and the millions of years required to effect evolutionary change through random selection.  If Billy Bob bangs the shit out of you, your neural synapses are changed.  He messes with your DNA not just your head. Throw Darwinism is out the window. Bring back Nikolai Chernyshevsky and the Russian anti-evolutionists!

It is critical to distinguish between “toxic stress” and normal stress. In the context of a reasonably safe environment where children have protective relationships with adults, Shonkoff explains, childhood stress is not a problem. In fact, it promotes healthy growth, coping skills and resilience. It becomes harmful when it is prolonged and when adults do not interact in ways that make children feel safe and emotionally connected.

However Billy Bob, even with all his beatings and drunken stumbling, does have a job, puts food on the table, and pays for books at school.  He is an asshole and a wife-beater, but he provides a ‘protective’ environment for his children. In fact, if anyone comes after his kids, he will blow them to smithereens.  And Phillip, successful Washington K Street attorney who is never home, bills at the office till all hours of the night, boffs his legal aide, and plays golf with politicians, can also be said to provide a stable, predictable, and comfortable home for his wife and children.

The fact is that no family is The Holy Family, and anyone who finds one without stress, toxic or otherwise, has been reading too many Stories for Catholic Boys and Girls. Does this mean that we should throw in the towel?  No, say the experts.

One thing that is highly protective is the quality of the relationship between the parent and the child,” explains Darcy Lowell, the founder of Child First, a program based in Shelton, Conn., that has marshaled strong evidence demonstrating the ability to intervene early, at relatively low cost, to reduce the harm caused by childhood stress in extremely high-need families. “Early relationships, where adults are responsive and attentive, are able to buffer the damaging effects on the brain and body,” she says.

However, it is simply difficult for me to envisage Billy Bob suddenly becoming the calm, attentive, patient, and loving father that Ms. Lowell envisages. Or Phillip the Attorney turning down billing lucre, office pussy, and drinks at the 19th hole for his kids. A leopard doesn’t change his spots my mother used to say; and there is as much chance of Billy Bob or Phillip changing theirs as there is of water running uphill.

A big goal is to help parents develop “reflective capacity” so they can respond with greater awareness about – and bring more wonder to – the meaning of their children’s behavior every day. Another is to help parents become more effective problem solvers – exercising their “executive functioning” capabilities, which can be impaired by traumatic childhood experiences.

Whoa! ‘Reflective capacity’? It is high time that the liberal, ‘progressive’ Left just let go of all this idealistic nonsense. Everybody is toxic.  

Perhaps this is too cynical; but once again, I can’t help but thinking what life must be like for children even in famous, respected families.  Like the John Edwards family.  Edwards abandoned his dying wife, always had a little on the side, got his girlfriend pregnant, and tried to pin the rap on a loyal aide. Or the Mark Sanford family who had to put up with the Governor’s crazed infatuation with an Argentine firecracker and his fantasy stories about hiking the Appalachian trail?  Or the Kennedy kids who witnessed their father, President Jack fuck like a rabbit and leave Jackie redecorating the White House while he was bedding starlets at the Hay-Adams.

There is mild stress, moderate stress, serious stress, and truly wild-and-wooly fucked up stress.  I don’t mind labeling this last, extreme category as toxic; although I don’t know which is worse for a kid – to see the treachery, dishonesty, and duplicitousness of a revered father; or to be whacked around every so often by a predictable dummy.

Biff, the son of Willy Loman in Miller’s Death of a Salesman is totally and abjectly ruined by the discovery of his father whom he has idolized in bed with a whore in a cheap hotel.  Willy tried his best to provide a ‘protective’ environment for his sons and wife, but was too beaten, disillusioned, and defeated by a world he did not understand to act upon his good intentions. Did he cause Biff’s toxic stress?

The stakes? “To my mind,” comments Robert Anda, “[dealing with toxic stress] is the most important opportunity for the prevention of health and social problems and disease and disability that has ever been seen.”

Hardly.

Stop and Frisk–A Good Policy

Much has been made of the controversial ‘Stop-and-Frisk’ policy adopted and strongly endorsed by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.  He has made a strong case that the practice of profiling potential criminals is an important and necessary tool in crime prevention.  

Bloomberg and others have argued that profiling makes sense when it targets groups that have high crime rates such as blacks and Hispanics.  Stop-and-frisk is no different from the longstanding practice of US Customs officials who develop profiles of smugglers; and whose targeting of high-risk travellers helps to rationalize scarce resources.

Some recent statistics bear out Bloomberg’s contention that certain groups are more responsible for crime than others.  For example, here are recent figures (2012 (Jan-June) New York City arrests by Race (City of New York) for Murder/Non-Negligent Manslaughter:

White: 11 percent (of all crimes committed)

Black: 55 percent

Hispanic: 29 percent

Following are similar statistics compiled from NYC records 2008 (Jan-June) New York City Crime Statistics by Race (from Yahoo News)

-83% of all gun assailants were black, while making up 24% of the population

-Blacks and Hispanics together accounted for 98% of all gun assailants

-49 of every 50 muggings and murders were carried out by blacks or Hispanics

-Blacks and Hispanics commit 96% of the crimes in New York, but include only 85% of those stopped during ‘stop and frisk’ incidents.

We all profile but do not like to admit it. We assess age, education, language, social status, race, ethnicity, dress, comportment, etc. etc. when hiring or vetting a potential husband or wife for our children. These indicators carry meaning. Human societies have always profiled as a means of self-preservation.  The outsider, the other, is always suspect until he can prove himself worthy of inclusion.  A stranger approaching a village will be assessed for all the attributes mentioned above.  The answers to the questions, “Do we know him?” and “Can we trust him?” can be found in speech, mannerisms, and dress.  If he conforms to village norms, he will be admitted; if not, he will be excluded.   On an even more primitive level, animals are programmed to recognize familiar traits – scent, color, size, and movement – and they will growl, peck, and bite those who do not belong.

It is therefore perfectly logical for a society, such as New York City, to act in the same way and to identify those outsiders who because of their anti-social behavior represent a threat. For the time being, these outsiders are blacks and Hispanics. However, once minorities adhere to majority norms and their communities at large are no different from the majority in terms of social behavior, profiling will make no sense and will stop.

There is no doubt that innocent people are adversely affected.  Totally blameless blacks and Hispanics are pulled over; but that is part of the natural, innate human instinct to classify and categorize. It would be more acceptable to identify individuals who are likely to commit crimes regardless of race or ethnicity.  The movie Minority Report is a fictional story about that eventuality.  In the future world of the film, the police do not have to profile because they have discovered a way to identify a criminal before he commits the crime. 

For now, however, innocent, blameless members of groups which are not so innocent have to pay; and it is the price for belonging – willingly or unwillingly – to these groups. Black people are not pulled over because of their race per se. They are pulled over because of their affiliation with a socially dysfunctional group which happens to be black.

All citizens have to pay some social costs, and blameless members of dysfunctional communities are no different.  Rather than rail against the practice of stop-and-frisk, however, they should call out their own brothers and sisters for continuing irresponsible behavior. Profiling is not the cause of community dysfunction.  It is a logical reaction to it. In other words, don’t blame the messenger.

Minority communities must eventually face facts and accept responsibility for their own behavior.  Street creds should be devalued as community currency.  Macho manhood and single motherhood disparaged. Bling, show, and pimp posturing ridiculed. Hustle, gaming, and slick moves marginalized. Act white? Hell yes, since ‘white’ cultural norms have been the hallmark of all successful societies forever.  Honesty, respect, discipline, attainment, work, fidelity, compassion, and individual responsibility have been precepts guiding social behavior since the Greeks if not well before.

In an ideal society profiling would not exist because all people and groups would be equal.  There would be no economic or social inequities based on race or ethnicity.  We would all be a nice, creamy, brown color and no distinctions other than on proven ability would matter.  Until that time, classifying, identifying, and approving others on the basis of group characteristics, both good and bad, will continue.

In any case Mayor Bloomberg is leaving office and ultra-‘progressive’ William De Blasio, a defiant opponent of stop-and-frisk will soon be elected and sworn in. He has vowed to repeal stop-and-frisk as one of his first mayoral acts. The NYPD and its supporters will not take the reversal quietly, and the issue will go back to the courts.  An initial lower court has ruled against stop-and-frisk, but in the last few days a federal appeals court has overturned it, so the practice is still alive and kicking.

Whatever the outcome, the debate should have collateral benefits.  The NSA, for example, would be in far less hot water if it had spied selectively – that is, if it had profiled selectively instead of poking into everyone’s business.