I am all for dividing the genders on some things. Ladies need their time to cluck about and men and boys need their time to, well whatever they do ;-)
But for goodness sake, the idea that watching your a woman bring forth your child into the world hurts intimacy is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. And it's demeaning. Birthing a child can be a very proud moment for a woman, and to compliment a man by wanting him to be a part of that only to have his reply be "ew gross" is loathsome.
Not that that was the main point of the article but goodness that got my riled up :-)
A scene from Outlander (the show) has popped into my head.
The two protagonists, Claire and Jamie, by this time past the honeymoon phase of their relationship, are together in their bedroom after a long day. They each are kissing one another's wrist and forearm while listing the scents they encounter and they are, of course the scents of the day, the chores, garlic, Cloves, hay, manure (said with a smile). It was sweet, respectful in acknowledging appreciation for the work each had put in and was also very sensual/erotic.
Besides Playboy for the sex-starved adolescent boys there were also back issues of the National Geographic magazines with bare chested women in New Guinea or in Africa. For the gay young men there was Joe Weider’s Muscle and Fitness magazine or watching pro-“wrestling.”
All true, though the National Geographics didn't wver work for me. I grew up in a missionary family, and I understood that those natives were properly dressed. I thought they were beautiful, but I never found them tittilating
Going back to women's section of the Sears catalog (only losers used Montgomery Ward's and let's face it, using the J. C. Penny's catalog was for proto-hipsters) I wonder if there is a correlation between sexually focused crossdressing and how often you you went to that well.
Or at least sneaking into your parents room and trying on your mother's bras once or twice.
I work with a man who, because of an emergency situation, ended up delivering his wife's third baby on their kitchen floor. It's the proudest thing he's ever done and he loves telling this story (and I suppose it's some evidence of my being around *slightly* less perverse people than the standard milieu that all the other men react in awe and tell him what a badass he is when he tells it).
It was also fairly normal, when I was a very small child, but moreso when my older sister was a kid, for children to run around naked, at lakes or swimming areas etc, and this not being considered taboo or a big deal. Though it was similarly understood that kids engaged in such things with each other as "playing doctor" and their own explorations of their bodies, which, while not exactly encouraged, was nonetheless considered normal.
I really hate how twisted and simulataneously disembodied and perverted things have become now.
And thanks for reminding me of the term "perverted" in and of itself. A common one when I was a kid, but it's been a long time since I've heard it or even remembered what it was understood to mean.
Another thought on the desexualizing part. Have you noticed how activism often narrows a thing in order to create a mass of "victims."
The trans moment's activism has really deadened the variety of that world. There was a time when crossdressers, transvestites (now apparently a slur), transexuals (also now a slur), and drag queens were distinct categories describing different sets of motivations and goals.
Yes, a lot of transwomen passed through crossdressing space but not all crossdressers were expect to be on the path (or too afraid to own it) but now with "egg theory" and the need to include everything to get mass that is flattened.
That's not to mention the drag performers at things like Drag Queen Story Hour don't look like the drag queens I remember. Or the fact that there are activists who claim passing or even the desire to pass is bad.
But after that tangent I see what you mean. A crossdresser looking for sexual thrills at home vs. one trying to meet with others for a "safe" form of homosexual play vs. ones looking to pick up men in a club (with the inherent risks) vs. a transvestite looking to live as the opposite sex without more drastic body mods vs. the transexual whose either had or is actively planning those body mods vs. drag queens experimenting with a flamboyant and overstated femininity (1) are all different people looking for different things in the sexual and social spheres. By lumping them all as "transwomen" or "transmen" a lot of that is lost, dangerously so in that specific needs and risks get lost as well.
And I suspect it scares people off to bottle up those desires and needs and amputate them out of fear or belief that's not really them.
I dig the sentiment, but don't entirely agree. Sexual intercourse without love is fleeting, sure. Pursued as a substitute for love it's empty. And life without love has no soul. But sex is WAY more than intercourse or its associated activities.
An indelible nugget from Barry Lopez's book Arctic Dreams is his patently erotic description of icebergs (specifically by boating – maybe kayaking – underneath their watery archways) as invoking a longing and feeling of love that is inextricable from his attraction to women in general.
I think many of us have had this experience; men at least – I suspect women have their own transcendental sublime environmental erotica of sorts; no doubt! In fact, within that same genre (of outdoors experiential nonfiction i.e. "hippie lit") I recall Ellen Meloy in her Anthropology of Turquoise shares similar experiences from a female perspective (and in the desert, not arctic).
This is all to say, that getting outside and into nature rekindles our fundamental sexuality, individuality and for sure longing for higher orders of spirituality as Emerson wrote extensively about. The managerial state however would have us stay indoors, bottled up and preserved in the greater "gel" of globalism, like a uniform and inert fake-tapioca blip suspending in an endless isotropic homogeneity (remember that drink from the 90s called "Orbitz"? Gross!)
I once dated a physician-in-residence who insisted that sex was "purely physiological" which I thought was very odd to hear a woman claim; seemed to map closer to the male misconception of it all. It was good to hear a woman falsify the myth that only men are preoccupied with parts (to the oversight of someone's attractive gestalt). Long in the short, no pun intended: there was zero romance in that relationship and it did not last – if sex cannot supervene on the erotic, then it blows, sucks real bad. Pun intended! I say this half-jokingly: maybe if she played the guitar, we could've had a better jam (either literally or figuratively speaking or both).
The philosopher Byung-Chul Han has a great little book called The Disappearance of Rituals in which he coins the neologism "carnography" (if I remember correctly) which is to say the erotic has been reduced to its most grotesquely objectified and de-contextualized state. "What is obscene about pornography is not an excess of sex, but that it contains no sex at all." While intimacy requires distance (for various reasons, and who isn't nasty up-close?) porn is of course strictly voyeuristic, a sort of unresponsive detachment that for the vast majority of us has nothing to do with sex. Consequently, I don't believe it's an understatement that (if only metaphorically speaking) porn induces a sexual autism (and therefore should be avoided).
Especially post-covid (when porn usage exploded) many of us have become evenly-spaced little gellan gum balls floating in the Orbitz drink of our emergent solipsistic algorithmically networked-society, totally out of touch with what inspires sex in the first place: dance, song, playing, discourse, God, the sublime, danger, risk, shared context, etc. Said differently, what binds two people cannot be a diametric identitarian category – or at the very least that is an incredibly weak and capriciously interchangeable bond. Eroticism is a triangulation, the simplest invocation being "shared interests" but that's not a bad place to start. If our eroticism cannot enable the temporary and active (and I dare stipulate: intrinsically motivated) sublimation of our bodies, then paradoxically it seems our bodies don't sex all that well. Without eroticism, we just have "carnography". And so icebergs can't hurt, guitars have always been a great place to start, deserts, landscapes are for lovers, committing promises through marriage vows, artistic collaborations, yada yada.
This has me wondering if the explosion of the kink scene in the late 90s and 00s was less about the Internet and more about it's rawness, it's theoretical inability to be disconnected from physicality.
Yes, but also the reverse--the forcing of confrontation with physicality in a world that had precious little of it (even before the Internet--see the film Office Space).
I have never understood the desire so many have to leave meatspace behind. I mean, I understand your arguments for why some encourage it but beyond that.
I understand some religious or spiritual motivations but those aren't so much leaving meatspace as narrowly restricting the parts they interact with and often simultaneously selecting to concentrate of some degree of suffering in those areas.
But the whole "upload your mind" thing for immortality? It's like the ultimate joke about stopping smoking adds five years to your life but also adds ten more years of misery.
I followed up on the pointers you provided, and things seem more complicated than you are suggesting.
For example, the Gnostic Demiurge and Blavatsky's Demiurge are rather different. The former clearly is an evil being; the latter is more of a collective description of a host of beings / manifestations.
Similarly, Theosophy's attitude towards the Jews is not as clearcut as you are indicating.
It were the Gnostics who proposed that the Jews had been worshipping a Demiurge, it does not seem that Blavatsky shared that view.
It is also not clear to me that Theosophy denies that all humans have a "divine spark". But even granted that it does, that idea is not unique to Theosophy.
In short, I am still not convinced that Theosophy was a key direct contributor to Nazism. Not unsimilar to the far-fetched idea that Nietzsche was a key contributor to it.
Theosophy and Naziism aren't the same thing, no, and I apologize for implying that they were (I didn't intend to, but I was also shooting from the hip and not being careful with my language). The 19th century was a big stew of occultism--some of it overt, some of it covert--and the mixing of ideas was pretty profound. Until OTO and Golden Dawn and similar groups arose at the end of the period, Blavatsky's group was the one that had the most coherent and centralized theology/library/etc. and it thus became a kind of central clearing house for occultism.
Though I don't hold Theosophy in particularly high esteem for a variety of reasons, I don't blame Blavatsky for Nazi race science any more than I blame Ghandi for Nazi race science (long story short, Ghandi and Hitler were fellow travelers on the race question up to a certain point, and I believe they corresponded on the question, though I'd have to check my history books on that and they're currently in a storage unit off-site).
Similarly, I don't blame Wagner for the Holocaust (despite how heavily he personally championed antisemitism and supported proto-Nazi movements), nor or Nietzsche for the way the Nazis read The Will to Power. There was a LOT of shit going on at the time, with philosophies and scientific and pseudoscientific theories going in a bunch of different directions. The Nazis (esp Rudolph Hess and Joseph Goebells) put together a lot of innocuous--or even positive--stuff (and some pretty creepy stuff) in a way that was incredibly powerful and very dangerous/corrosive.
Thank you for chasing the trail down and bringing clarity to your comments for those other readers here who might have been misled by my comment sloppiness. :-)
> I don't hold Theosophy in particularly high esteem for a variety of reasons
Syncretic woo, that's my impression so far (and I am not that curious to dive much further than what I've done so far.)
I am interested in the question of primacy of ideas, though: to what extent are ideas a primary causal factor in human behavior and history, and to what extent they are secondary to other drives (e.g. power, tribalism, procreation, etc.)
>In Germany, the romantic tradition won out, and the operas of Wagner mixed freely with German Idealism and Theosophical neopaganism to give birth to the National Socialist German Worker’s Party
I have heard on several occasions about Theosophy's connection to Nazism. I was always sort of assuming that it was coincidental. Something promulgated by tinfoil-hat types. Would appreciate if you write more on this topic.
The Nazis borrowed heavily from Theosophy's theories of racial heirarchies for their "race science," and also from Theosophy's theories of Atlantis.
The basic idea (and it's been a LONG time so I'm sure I'm gonna mangle this a bit) is that the Atlanteans were the only TRUE humans--spiritually they were basically gods, and their divine nature was transmitted through bloodlines. When Atlantis fell the survivors were the founding members of the Great Civilizations of the world--the earliest of which were named for the Atlantean people.
That name: "Aryan"
The earliest civilization they founded was Iran (the name itself is a truncated form of the word "Aryan"). These "Great Civilizations" were the Indian, the Chinese, the Nubian, the Persian, the Turkik, the Roman, the Hellenic, the Rus, the Celt, the Tibetan, and the Germanic. The other races (Jews, Slavs, Romani, non-Nubian black Africans, etc.) were animals who didn't contain the divine spark (as evidenced by their general historical status as conquered and enslaved people, and by the fact that they didn't build great sprawling imperial civilizations).
The divine spark itself was also foundational to Nazi occult theology, as the Nazi believed that the Jews and Christians worshiped the Demiurge (an evil, lesser God whose values, nature, and aims were in conflict with the true God Above God)--this is an old Gnostic dogma that the Theosophists embraced and amplified, influencing the entire neopagan movement including the Romantic traditions that the Nazi occultists (Rudolph Hesse and Joseph Goebells, as well as Hitler himself) distilled into their True Religion. They really did believe that by pushing into Eastern Europe and by purging the Jews, Gypsies, and those with birth defects they were ridding themselves of the evil of the Demiurge and bringing humanity closer to God.
I am all for dividing the genders on some things. Ladies need their time to cluck about and men and boys need their time to, well whatever they do ;-)
But for goodness sake, the idea that watching your a woman bring forth your child into the world hurts intimacy is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. And it's demeaning. Birthing a child can be a very proud moment for a woman, and to compliment a man by wanting him to be a part of that only to have his reply be "ew gross" is loathsome.
Not that that was the main point of the article but goodness that got my riled up :-)
Another job well done Dan, lots to think about
Got me riled up too...but you probably noticed
A scene from Outlander (the show) has popped into my head.
The two protagonists, Claire and Jamie, by this time past the honeymoon phase of their relationship, are together in their bedroom after a long day. They each are kissing one another's wrist and forearm while listing the scents they encounter and they are, of course the scents of the day, the chores, garlic, Cloves, hay, manure (said with a smile). It was sweet, respectful in acknowledging appreciation for the work each had put in and was also very sensual/erotic.
Sounds lovely!
Besides Playboy for the sex-starved adolescent boys there were also back issues of the National Geographic magazines with bare chested women in New Guinea or in Africa. For the gay young men there was Joe Weider’s Muscle and Fitness magazine or watching pro-“wrestling.”
All true, though the National Geographics didn't wver work for me. I grew up in a missionary family, and I understood that those natives were properly dressed. I thought they were beautiful, but I never found them tittilating
Going back to women's section of the Sears catalog (only losers used Montgomery Ward's and let's face it, using the J. C. Penny's catalog was for proto-hipsters) I wonder if there is a correlation between sexually focused crossdressing and how often you you went to that well.
Or at least sneaking into your parents room and trying on your mother's bras once or twice.
It's an interesting thought, but I got no idea.
Bravo. 👏
I work with a man who, because of an emergency situation, ended up delivering his wife's third baby on their kitchen floor. It's the proudest thing he's ever done and he loves telling this story (and I suppose it's some evidence of my being around *slightly* less perverse people than the standard milieu that all the other men react in awe and tell him what a badass he is when he tells it).
It was also fairly normal, when I was a very small child, but moreso when my older sister was a kid, for children to run around naked, at lakes or swimming areas etc, and this not being considered taboo or a big deal. Though it was similarly understood that kids engaged in such things with each other as "playing doctor" and their own explorations of their bodies, which, while not exactly encouraged, was nonetheless considered normal.
I really hate how twisted and simulataneously disembodied and perverted things have become now.
And thanks for reminding me of the term "perverted" in and of itself. A common one when I was a kid, but it's been a long time since I've heard it or even remembered what it was understood to mean.
Thanks Kate. Couldn't agree more on every point (also am envious of your badass friend!). Cheers!
Another thought on the desexualizing part. Have you noticed how activism often narrows a thing in order to create a mass of "victims."
The trans moment's activism has really deadened the variety of that world. There was a time when crossdressers, transvestites (now apparently a slur), transexuals (also now a slur), and drag queens were distinct categories describing different sets of motivations and goals.
Yes, a lot of transwomen passed through crossdressing space but not all crossdressers were expect to be on the path (or too afraid to own it) but now with "egg theory" and the need to include everything to get mass that is flattened.
That's not to mention the drag performers at things like Drag Queen Story Hour don't look like the drag queens I remember. Or the fact that there are activists who claim passing or even the desire to pass is bad.
But after that tangent I see what you mean. A crossdresser looking for sexual thrills at home vs. one trying to meet with others for a "safe" form of homosexual play vs. ones looking to pick up men in a club (with the inherent risks) vs. a transvestite looking to live as the opposite sex without more drastic body mods vs. the transexual whose either had or is actively planning those body mods vs. drag queens experimenting with a flamboyant and overstated femininity (1) are all different people looking for different things in the sexual and social spheres. By lumping them all as "transwomen" or "transmen" a lot of that is lost, dangerously so in that specific needs and risks get lost as well.
And I suspect it scares people off to bottle up those desires and needs and amputate them out of fear or belief that's not really them.
A well written and throughtful deep dive into the last hold of Humanity - sex. Without Sex, Humanity has no Hope -
but without Love, Sexuality has no soul.
I dig the sentiment, but don't entirely agree. Sexual intercourse without love is fleeting, sure. Pursued as a substitute for love it's empty. And life without love has no soul. But sex is WAY more than intercourse or its associated activities.
An indelible nugget from Barry Lopez's book Arctic Dreams is his patently erotic description of icebergs (specifically by boating – maybe kayaking – underneath their watery archways) as invoking a longing and feeling of love that is inextricable from his attraction to women in general.
I think many of us have had this experience; men at least – I suspect women have their own transcendental sublime environmental erotica of sorts; no doubt! In fact, within that same genre (of outdoors experiential nonfiction i.e. "hippie lit") I recall Ellen Meloy in her Anthropology of Turquoise shares similar experiences from a female perspective (and in the desert, not arctic).
This is all to say, that getting outside and into nature rekindles our fundamental sexuality, individuality and for sure longing for higher orders of spirituality as Emerson wrote extensively about. The managerial state however would have us stay indoors, bottled up and preserved in the greater "gel" of globalism, like a uniform and inert fake-tapioca blip suspending in an endless isotropic homogeneity (remember that drink from the 90s called "Orbitz"? Gross!)
I once dated a physician-in-residence who insisted that sex was "purely physiological" which I thought was very odd to hear a woman claim; seemed to map closer to the male misconception of it all. It was good to hear a woman falsify the myth that only men are preoccupied with parts (to the oversight of someone's attractive gestalt). Long in the short, no pun intended: there was zero romance in that relationship and it did not last – if sex cannot supervene on the erotic, then it blows, sucks real bad. Pun intended! I say this half-jokingly: maybe if she played the guitar, we could've had a better jam (either literally or figuratively speaking or both).
The philosopher Byung-Chul Han has a great little book called The Disappearance of Rituals in which he coins the neologism "carnography" (if I remember correctly) which is to say the erotic has been reduced to its most grotesquely objectified and de-contextualized state. "What is obscene about pornography is not an excess of sex, but that it contains no sex at all." While intimacy requires distance (for various reasons, and who isn't nasty up-close?) porn is of course strictly voyeuristic, a sort of unresponsive detachment that for the vast majority of us has nothing to do with sex. Consequently, I don't believe it's an understatement that (if only metaphorically speaking) porn induces a sexual autism (and therefore should be avoided).
Especially post-covid (when porn usage exploded) many of us have become evenly-spaced little gellan gum balls floating in the Orbitz drink of our emergent solipsistic algorithmically networked-society, totally out of touch with what inspires sex in the first place: dance, song, playing, discourse, God, the sublime, danger, risk, shared context, etc. Said differently, what binds two people cannot be a diametric identitarian category – or at the very least that is an incredibly weak and capriciously interchangeable bond. Eroticism is a triangulation, the simplest invocation being "shared interests" but that's not a bad place to start. If our eroticism cannot enable the temporary and active (and I dare stipulate: intrinsically motivated) sublimation of our bodies, then paradoxically it seems our bodies don't sex all that well. Without eroticism, we just have "carnography". And so icebergs can't hurt, guitars have always been a great place to start, deserts, landscapes are for lovers, committing promises through marriage vows, artistic collaborations, yada yada.
This has me wondering if the explosion of the kink scene in the late 90s and 00s was less about the Internet and more about it's rawness, it's theoretical inability to be disconnected from physicality.
Yes, but also the reverse--the forcing of confrontation with physicality in a world that had precious little of it (even before the Internet--see the film Office Space).
I have never understood the desire so many have to leave meatspace behind. I mean, I understand your arguments for why some encourage it but beyond that.
I understand some religious or spiritual motivations but those aren't so much leaving meatspace as narrowly restricting the parts they interact with and often simultaneously selecting to concentrate of some degree of suffering in those areas.
But the whole "upload your mind" thing for immortality? It's like the ultimate joke about stopping smoking adds five years to your life but also adds ten more years of misery.
Thank you.
I followed up on the pointers you provided, and things seem more complicated than you are suggesting.
For example, the Gnostic Demiurge and Blavatsky's Demiurge are rather different. The former clearly is an evil being; the latter is more of a collective description of a host of beings / manifestations.
Similarly, Theosophy's attitude towards the Jews is not as clearcut as you are indicating.
It were the Gnostics who proposed that the Jews had been worshipping a Demiurge, it does not seem that Blavatsky shared that view.
It is also not clear to me that Theosophy denies that all humans have a "divine spark". But even granted that it does, that idea is not unique to Theosophy.
In short, I am still not convinced that Theosophy was a key direct contributor to Nazism. Not unsimilar to the far-fetched idea that Nietzsche was a key contributor to it.
Theosophy and Naziism aren't the same thing, no, and I apologize for implying that they were (I didn't intend to, but I was also shooting from the hip and not being careful with my language). The 19th century was a big stew of occultism--some of it overt, some of it covert--and the mixing of ideas was pretty profound. Until OTO and Golden Dawn and similar groups arose at the end of the period, Blavatsky's group was the one that had the most coherent and centralized theology/library/etc. and it thus became a kind of central clearing house for occultism.
Though I don't hold Theosophy in particularly high esteem for a variety of reasons, I don't blame Blavatsky for Nazi race science any more than I blame Ghandi for Nazi race science (long story short, Ghandi and Hitler were fellow travelers on the race question up to a certain point, and I believe they corresponded on the question, though I'd have to check my history books on that and they're currently in a storage unit off-site).
Similarly, I don't blame Wagner for the Holocaust (despite how heavily he personally championed antisemitism and supported proto-Nazi movements), nor or Nietzsche for the way the Nazis read The Will to Power. There was a LOT of shit going on at the time, with philosophies and scientific and pseudoscientific theories going in a bunch of different directions. The Nazis (esp Rudolph Hess and Joseph Goebells) put together a lot of innocuous--or even positive--stuff (and some pretty creepy stuff) in a way that was incredibly powerful and very dangerous/corrosive.
Thank you for chasing the trail down and bringing clarity to your comments for those other readers here who might have been misled by my comment sloppiness. :-)
> I don't hold Theosophy in particularly high esteem for a variety of reasons
Syncretic woo, that's my impression so far (and I am not that curious to dive much further than what I've done so far.)
I am interested in the question of primacy of ideas, though: to what extent are ideas a primary causal factor in human behavior and history, and to what extent they are secondary to other drives (e.g. power, tribalism, procreation, etc.)
>In Germany, the romantic tradition won out, and the operas of Wagner mixed freely with German Idealism and Theosophical neopaganism to give birth to the National Socialist German Worker’s Party
I have heard on several occasions about Theosophy's connection to Nazism. I was always sort of assuming that it was coincidental. Something promulgated by tinfoil-hat types. Would appreciate if you write more on this topic.
The Nazis borrowed heavily from Theosophy's theories of racial heirarchies for their "race science," and also from Theosophy's theories of Atlantis.
The basic idea (and it's been a LONG time so I'm sure I'm gonna mangle this a bit) is that the Atlanteans were the only TRUE humans--spiritually they were basically gods, and their divine nature was transmitted through bloodlines. When Atlantis fell the survivors were the founding members of the Great Civilizations of the world--the earliest of which were named for the Atlantean people.
That name: "Aryan"
The earliest civilization they founded was Iran (the name itself is a truncated form of the word "Aryan"). These "Great Civilizations" were the Indian, the Chinese, the Nubian, the Persian, the Turkik, the Roman, the Hellenic, the Rus, the Celt, the Tibetan, and the Germanic. The other races (Jews, Slavs, Romani, non-Nubian black Africans, etc.) were animals who didn't contain the divine spark (as evidenced by their general historical status as conquered and enslaved people, and by the fact that they didn't build great sprawling imperial civilizations).
The divine spark itself was also foundational to Nazi occult theology, as the Nazi believed that the Jews and Christians worshiped the Demiurge (an evil, lesser God whose values, nature, and aims were in conflict with the true God Above God)--this is an old Gnostic dogma that the Theosophists embraced and amplified, influencing the entire neopagan movement including the Romantic traditions that the Nazi occultists (Rudolph Hesse and Joseph Goebells, as well as Hitler himself) distilled into their True Religion. They really did believe that by pushing into Eastern Europe and by purging the Jews, Gypsies, and those with birth defects they were ridding themselves of the evil of the Demiurge and bringing humanity closer to God.
Anyway, that's the short version :-)
>In Germany, the romantic tradition won out, and the operas of Wagner mixed freely with German Idealism
John Michael Greer has a fascinating series on Wagner's Ring cycle (not to be confused with Tolkien's): https://www.ecosophia.net/tag/the-nibelungs-ring/
Love the Ring Cycle. Looking forward to reading the article. Thanks!