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

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.