Rant time

I'm tired of being an existential threat.

I'm tired of my life being used as a political football by people with privilege coming out of their ears.

I'm tired of having to read every work of political philosophy with a view to justifying my existence.

I'm tired of every halfway decent of political philosophy shouting from the mountaintops that my life is a subject unworthy of their attention.

I'm tired of constantly being on the defensive.

I'm tired of not being able to cross post this on facebook for fear of losing my anonymity.

Normally, it's water off a duck's back. Haters gonna hate. Aquinas had ideological blinders, Aristotle was a douche. None of them were cool enough to understand me. None could destroy my insistence that my life is my own, or shake my faith in the liberationist consensus of personal autonomy uber alles. My life was my own, firmly ensconced within the realm of self-regarding behavior. The haters could fuck off.

This year the curriculum presented a unique challenge, and a steadily growing discontent waiting to burst a dam with self doubt. Hobbes was a fascist prick, no bones about it, but Spinoza, Rousseau, hell, even Locke afforded a far too broad scope for social coercion. More than social coercion: a social unity that [i]must[/i] be preserved at all costs, whose malcontents pissed on the gift they were given in being delivered from the chaos of a state of nature, whose malefactors, selfishly asserting their right to defy the collective, committed the cardinal sin of undermining our incredibly fragile peace.

I, of course, instinctively knew that there was no place in such a world for me, doomed by my nature to forever exist on the fringe until some benefactor to the public weal ended my threat for good. Which is why my normally aloof inquiry began to be quite introspective, and my political became my personal.

So of course, when my vague apprehensions about the role of those who approach the world on a slant crystallized into something definite, when it ceased being an academic question and these defenders of the status quo made their prescriptions specific and personal, when, in short, Tocqueville decided to unmask his bigotry toward nonbelievers, I snapped.

My sophistry didn't skip a beat, of course, and I avoided the cardinal sins of bringing personal baggage into the discussion and excoriating ancient authors for retrograde mores. Yet I am sure my building rage and increasing skepticism was apparent every time I endeavored to defend de Tocqueville, that really, since for him it is necessary for religious consensus to exist in order to protect a commonwealth, it's not actually the tyranny of the majority he spent 5 chapters railing against, really, it's no more intrusive and tyrannical than prohibitions against theft, also necessary for stability, as I prostituted my identity and dignity within it in the interests of fairness and honest inquiry.

So I sprinted for 30 minutes to blow off some steam, unsuccessfully attempted to procure alcohol, spent two hours in bed seething and composing this post, and now that I've gotten this off my chest I'm gonna see if sleep is at all possible tonight.

The English language sucks- meditations on love

You'd think a substantially Christian nation would have taken better care with the language used to express its fundamental truth. Alas, it ain't so.

The notion of an all-encompassing love has been dragged through the dialectic, sullied so many times by a false dichotomy between hard-nosed realists and starry-eyed romantics, used as a plot device in sappy romance novels and hackneyed children's fare so many times that I can't but evoke a million cliches when speaking of one of my fundamental spiritual truths.

The foremost culprit: the very word love. While its linguistic history is a fascinating look into how we view these concepts as related, the Greeks had it right when they subdivided the concept in their language. Our word can be used for Eros, erotic love, Philia, the love of friendship, Agape, romantic love, and finally, from the Latin, Caritas, the root word of charity, denoting that all-encompassing love for mankind.

It is the last one I'm concerned with here.

I'm not abandoning my materialist bona fides (at least, not yet). I'm not positing a metaphysical conception of love that has the power to affect the world and change things apart from the self-moved actions of individuals who feel this love. My outlook is still fundamentally secular, at least for now.

Mind over matter, it really don't matter
If the street's idle chatter turns your heart strings to tatters
Flatter hopes don't flatter and soul batter won't congeal to mend
a life that is shattered into shards
Was it in the cards?

--Bad Religion, Materialist

This is a sentiment I still largely believe, at least as far as practical matters go. Love does not exist independently of humanity, and if we wish to create a loving world, we must turn to our own devices, not a phantasmal spirit.


For me, philosophy has always been an expression of love. Love requires understanding; its foremost expression in the thinker has always been the interest in understanding another's point of view. The love of ideas is the love of people, for people are nothing more than the ideas through which they experience the world. By far the most satisfying part of my education has been, when studying an author for months at a time, the subjunctive tense is dropped. When the thought becomes not, This is how Plato would view it, but when your understanding of an author becomes so complete that your natural affections cannot but be influenced by what you have read, when you have internalized that person's philosophy into your own.

This is love. This is sex, for exactly the same reason that eros and caritas can be encompassed under the same word. This is sex, because it is a meeting of two souls, separated perhaps by centuries and millenia but no less profound for the separation.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

--Galatians, 3:28

This is the love that the Christians used to smash Aristotelian aristocracy. This is the love that refused to buy the dichotomy between virtue and caring for our fellow man, the love that found virtue in the weak. This is the love that refused to accept that dignity belonged perforce only to the great, that virtue is a competition, that only the refined and powerful deserved the title of good.

For someone living after the transformation, this fact seems unremarkable, and it is difficult for us moderns to know just how different it was before Christ. It was in fact the greatest shift in thought Western Civilization ever underwent. One need only see what contempt Aristotle held the merely good-natured man in, and the contempt with which most pagans greeted humility, to see that it is so.

Finally, and most to the point, this is the love of feminism and queer theory, of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, of this blog and my companion blogs. Progressiveness is nothing more than applying that all-encompassing caritas to ever widening swathes of the population, who had heretofore been denied the dignity that is the birthright of everyone with a human soul.

Here I will do my damnedest to express myself and make myself understood, and will seek to understand others. For it is only in this way that me and my fellow BDSMers can be loved, and be welcomed back into the fold of that caritas that ought to be all-encompassing.

Don't call me a sissy

(Face censored to protect my anonymity.)

I've written about crossdressing here and here before this. Relevant quote:

Ultimately, crossdressing in a BDSM context says that feminine traits in a male are shameful, and should be mocked, and that the only natural order is a dominant male and submissive female.

So I've changed my mind from those earlier posts, right? For the most part

It's clear to me now that those posts were based on faulty premises, but their logic is sound. Most egregiously, I assumed anything being taken on as a submissive to enhance the practice of BDSM necessarily degraded both the submissive and the trait taken on.

Nothing could be further from the truth, and were it so, there would be nothing redeeming about the lifestyle.

There is certainly a spirit in which feminine traits could be degrading within the context of BDSM, where one could play upon a man's insecurities and the contempt with which our society views the feminine. For my part, to the extent that I buy into this narrative I find it unfortunate, and do my best not to bring it up in my sex life.

Yet this is not the only way to incorporate transgender or crossdressing themes into a BDSM scenario. In the first place, it seems absurd on its face to claim that any transgender person participating in BDSM necessarily degrades whatever sex they've transitioned into, especially since presumably many of them are perfectly happy and secure about their transitioned gender. Nor ought I be concerned that this reflects society's larger mores that may be destructive, if I am confident that this results from an authentic expression of the self rather than internalized misogyny or pressure to conform, as this would indicate a wholly unhealthy level of attention to the dialectic. Housewives who have thought through their options and ultimately decided that a life of child rearing and domestic duties are the best way for them to be fulfilled ought not be worried that their authentic choice coincides with a choice many are forced into, and likewise I shouldn't be concerned that, the way my sexuality works out, I end up mimicking male dominant female submission tropes.

In the end, it doesn't need much more justification than this: I look fantastic in a corset, and I'll be damned if I prevent myself from looking my best for my Master.

Huh

Will Wilkinson, one of my favorite libertarian bloggers, on masculinity in America.

To my mind, too little attention has been paid to reconsidering ideals of manhood in the age of equality. Since I was a teenager, I’ve found old-school machismo pathetic and somehow irrelevant to the problem of becoming a man. Without even knowing what or why it was, I was heavily influenced by gay culture, which provided me, and many other straight young men, a wide variety of templates for manhood that are at once unmistakably masculine, playfully ironic, aesthetic, emotionally open, and happily sexual. You can be manly and care about shoes!!! I’ll confess that I used to periodically regret my heterosexuality because there seemed to be greater scope for constructing a distinctive and satisfying male identity within gay culture. I think that’s telling. And the virulent homophobia that remains in most American dude subcultures has cut most young men off from the possibility of modeling their manhood after any of the delightful variety of types available to the homophile. And that really doesn’t leave them with much to work with.

http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2009/08/28/the-menaissance-and-its-dickscontents/

Intriguing. I've certainly found the process of constructing an identity greatly aided by not buying into heterosexist culture (when reading the article linked in Wilkinson's post, I thought more than once- "I'm so glad I'm not normal), but I've never heard it expressed in quite this way. Fascinating stuff.

Intellectual Ammunition

Try bringing up this study to anyone who buys into the hackeneyed pop psychology explanations of BDSM: http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,24238131-2,00.html

AN unusual sex survey has found that Australians who enjoy bondage and discipline are not damaged or dangerous, and might even be happier than those who practise "normal" sex.

The research showed 2 per cent of adult Australians regularly partake in sadomasochism and dominance and submission-type sexual role play.

And contrary to commonly-held stereotypes, they are not doing so in reaction to sexual abuse or because they are "sexually deficient" in some way, according the study of 20,000 Australians by public health researchers at the University of New South Wales.

"Our findings support the idea that bondage and discipline and sadomasochism (BDSM) is simply a sexual interest or subculture attractive to a minority," Associate Professor Juliet Richters and her colleagues wrote in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.

The findings showed that it was more common among gay, lesbian and bisexual people, and that participants were more likely to have been more sexually adventurous in other ways.

"However, they were no more likely to have been coerced into sexual activity and were not significantly more likely to be unhappy or anxious," said Prof Richters, author of the book Doing It Down Under.

In fact, men who take part may be happier, with results showing they score significantly lower on a scale of psychological distress than other men.

The researchers did not study why this was, but suspect it might simply be that they're more in harmony with themselves because they're into something unusual and are comfortable with that.

Prof Richters says the findings go against professional views of BDSM.

"People with these sexual interests have long been seen by medicine and the law as, at best, damaged and in need of therapy and, at worst, dangerous and in need of legal regulation," she said.

There was also an assumption, mostly among the general public, that people involved in BDSM were sexually deficient in some way, "and need particularly strong stimuli such as being beaten or tied up to become aroused".

She said she hoped the results would help change these stereotypes.

Apparently Tim Tebow is a virgin

There are many possible angles to attack this story from, but I'm not interested here in the hero worship of athletes, the appropriateness of asking such a prying question, or our fascination with the sex lives of athletes. I do want to talk about how this fits into the mythic Tebow: thanking Jesus for winning the Heisman trophy, his ministry in prisons, his overseas proselyting, helping with circumcision, and generally his status as percieved upstanding guy, the sort of guy who is faithful and immune to the pleasures of the flesh, the sort of guy that chose to stay in his room playing a party game isntead of hitting the town when he had a night in Atlantic City.

I will be honest: when I heard the news, I felt a little threatened and defensive in a completely irrational way. Here's me, a philosopher instead of an athlete, a heathen, queer, perverted, a dire existential threat to traditional values- and someone whose prowess on the field I admired greatly, who seems to have the respect of everyone but opposing SEC teams- showing yet again that he is not me, or anywhere close to me in conceptual space. I could not help but hear, in the effusive praise of the media (when they weren't excoriating the reporter who asked the question), that he is a virgin and I should be too.

But why should I feel that way? Tebow never condemned people who make different choices than he does, and he doesn't seem the sort to judge. I have to own that the response consistent with my values would be admiration, not because chastity is inherently valuable, but because undergoing such privations for the sake of your values is admirable; much like vegetarians, I can respect his dedication even as I disagree with his values.

I hate to leave it on a hackeneyed note, but I suppose we've all got to learn, myself included, that everyone has different forms of flourishing, and we ought not interpret respect for someone else's lifestyle as derision for our own. Certainly there are those who wish to remain celibate before marriage, or whose natural instincts incline them toward intimacy only in certain contexts; if Tebow gives these people a better way to live up to their values, or makes them feel more comfortably acting in the way that feels most in tune with their selves, he's doing good for the world.

Dear BDSM organizers who make their events aged 21+

Fuck you with a rusty shovel.

Sincerely,
A hot 20-year old