The erotic tendency

Like hunger and thirst, sex is a human drive; indeed we can probably say that once the primary drives of hunger and thirst are satisfied, and shelter and security secured, the sex drive can come into play. In the language of affect psychology, all the feelings and drives are created out of biological reactions in the first instance and mature (in what could be seconds) into emotions only through our semantic experiences - back to the semantic environment of Alfred Korzybski. So the primary drive (apart from hunger and thirst) of our sexual needs is biological in its initial manifestation and perhaps even primal and it is shaped into a sexual emotion or feeling largely by the cuisine of our semantic environment. Remember the advice of Korzybski that even our reaction to, and possible participation in, incest is shaped by our semantic environment. If this is true of incest, then it should be no wonder that apparently lesser issues such as homosexuality, and child eroticism should be so dramatically shaped by our semantic environment and that inquisitions and witch hunts arise from them. It also explains the apparent total swing from the acceptance of the erotic beauty of boys in ancient Greece to that idea becoming abhorrent in our modern world, just as the idea of the erotic beauty of children is today regarded by many as abhorrent also.

Tendencies

In what follows here now, there are some general ideas. The first is that there is a significant development, a tendency, in humankind’s evolving concept of erotic beauty, seen principally here from the viewpoint of the male, or through the ‘male gaze’, although it must be added that there is also an assumption here that truly fulfilled eroticism is that shared by a man and a woman, even if only through her acceptance of what he sees to be erotic beauty.

A second idea, which could if correct have profound significance for us all, is that we are experiencing the increasing eroticization of humankind, that is, we are becoming more conscious of our erotic drive and our search for eroticism and erotic beauty is increasing, at the same time that it is being criminalized in some of its expressions and brought into disrepute in many others.

This point needs much careful reflection. It is common to hear and read criticisms of the Internet for its ‘dark side’ of pornography - that ‘tidal wave of filth’. There is indeed a large section of the Internet devoted to pornography, but there is also a large section devoted to erotic beauty, in all of its incredibly varied forms. In a continuing general bias against eroticism, this erotic beauty is being lumped in with pornography through the process of black and white labelling or absolutism, so common in our times.

We now have a new conflict, contradiction, conundrum at the heart of our sexuality – the increasing eroticisation, through the Internet, at the same time as the state attempts to increase its control of society’s erotic interest. This conundrum has for a decade at least been causing grave disquiet to many and has brought disaster down upon some, virtually all of whom have been well-educated and often highly intelligent and literate. It is possible that the conflict created by the conundrum has itself become a powerful procreant, that is a seed and a catalyst for a reaction against the state itself, such as in acts of civil disobedience or secret defiance of the law.

An even more extraordinary development has occurred, one which should have been plain from recent history. Just as attempts to criminalize and pronounce as ‘crimes against nature’ both homosexuality and lesbianism, achieving exactly the opposite affect with the latter after the British Home Office attempted to suppress even knowledge of the existence of the first book about it by Radclyffe Hall in the 1920s, so the moral panic and draconian laws about child abuse and child pornography have led the world into a discovery of a new genre of child eroticism and child beauty. To put this in some perspective what the British Home Office tried to stop women worldwide from hearing about in the 1920s (then known as tribadism) has become in our times the most acceptable and probably the most popular late night TV over adult channels. Will we see little nudist children trooping like fairies on the adult channels of 2020?

From the above two major ideas, we will proceed to explore whether there is a significant development, a tendency, in humankind’s evolving concept of erotic beauty, which is increasing the conflict. There is, however, a third idea and it is that women, through new explorations of their own sexuality, are continuing to change and shape the semantic environment in which we live and make our meanings.

The crimen exceptum

The crimen exceptum is central to every inquisition, whether it be heresy, witchcraft, being a Jew, a Red under the bed or today one accused of child sex abuse or accessing child pornography. The crimen exceptum requires the suspension of due process and all real processes of justice. You do not need to be tried and convicted, merely accused.

Today’s crimen exceptum of either child sex abuse or accessing child pornography are the most potent of any ever possessed by a phase of the inquisition, which is why the current inquisition is so deadly. The crimen exceptum is already expanding into more general pornography, but here we deal with sex abuse and child pornography, the second the most powerful of the two. As the population comes under more control in the totalitarian state, as in America, the crimen exceptum of inappropriate sex may change to dissent/enemy of the state (heresy). In countries such as the UK and Sweden it has already expanded to embrace 'inappropriate parenting' or 'inappropriate behavouir', either decided by rules known to Social Services workers, and either capable of resulting in the forcible removal of children from their parents.

A tale from country life

Here is a tale from country life. A well-dressed and educated man is being driven along a country road on a beautiful summer day. At the entrance to a laneway into some fields he asks his driver to stop and gets out. Walking a short distance down the laneway, he hears the sounds of someone beyond a hedge. He reaches a timber gateway and through it he sees a girl of between ten and eleven working in the field. He stares at her for awhile and then he opens the gate and motions to her to approach him. She does so, obediently, and as she comes near he studies her carefully. She is poorly dressed in a typical country way, her costume obviously altered from one formerly owned by an older woman. Her hair is somewhat matted and her face, smeared from wiping perspiration from it, shows that she is frightened by his presence.

She awaits his instructions as he studies her carefully. He then makes his decision and moves swiftly. She cries out in fear.

It is not decency or the legality of it alone that stops me describing what today we would call her rape, the taking of her virginity - her coitarche. It is something much more powerful, and yet seldom understood. It is our semantic environment, which is actually more powerful than the events being described (that is more powerful than in the time they occurred). Had we lived back then, for it is medieval times I write about when such a story was commonplace, neither I, the writer, nor you the reader would have been shocked by it. The word ‘rape’ would not even have been relevant because an educated man back then could not rape a common country girl, if for no other reason than that we would all have been aware that in our semantic environment then we would have accepted as fact that such common girls are full of lust and the desire to rob gentlemen. Moreover, there was neither law nor morality to stop him ravishing her, as such taking of ‘coarse girls’ by noblemen, or even by members of her own extended family, or neighbours, carried with it no semantic representation of opprobrium in a society where it was expected that girls would experience the ending of their virginity between the ages of eight and twelve. If this seems outrageous, note that some of the most celebrated experts on sexuality in the 1950s and 1960s, such as those connected with the famous Kinsey studies advised that the earlier girls experience sex the better. Indeed, it is only in very recent times that the age of sexual consent has been raised from as low as seven in many regions such as several American states.

As recently as 1893, author Charlton Edholm in his Traffic in Girls wrote, "When a big burly man fifty years of age is brought into a court of justice and confronted by the little ten-year-old victim of his lust, if he can prove that the child, for a paper of candy, consented to an act of which her childish mind is ignorant, that jury of twelve men-probably fathers of little girls themselves-will hold the child guilty and the man guiltless." What had changed in the centuries since the earlier medieval story is that non-consenual sex with a child was becoming illegal.

By the time of the attack and burning at Waco, Texas on April 19 1993, protecting the virtue of the children inside the cult compound was of greater value than their lives. On February 27, 1993 the Waco Tribune-Herald began a 'Sinful Messiah' series of articles, alleging that the Waco cult leader was abusing children in the compound, had taken underage brides, had claimed to be entitled to any of the females in the group as his and that some of his brides were as young as twelve or thirteen years old. In the final raid of the siege of the compound involving its destruction through tanks, explosives and burning, eighty one individuals including the children were slaughtered. The writer James Kincaid suggests that the thinking behind the raid may have been that eighty-one deaths may have been outweighed by 'violated innocence'. After the fire and slaughter, the assault troops raised a victory flag.

Shortly before this was written, a senior US official responsible for national security assured citizens that in the event of a national disaster the police would know the whereabouts of all paedophiles. This was as important as dealing with the floods or radiation fallout.

Protecting children from sexual activity is relatively new, but protecting them from child snatchers and witches is not. Dick Wase points out that when they started to hunt Jews in 1173 the claim was that Jews ritually killed Christian children (St William of Norwich), and witches were particularly dangerous because they lured children and then brought them to the Devil. One thinks of the recent moral panic about satanic ritual abuse, which did not exist.

Wase also points to a 'child masturbation-panic' that together with other sexually motivated ideas resulted in the burning of girls clitorises and encouraged the circumcision of boys.

The first big recent child protection from sex moral panic was the infamous nineteenth century 'White slavery panic’ that feared the seduction of working girls into sex slavery. Interestingly and resonating with the medieval tale above it was the protection of middle class white girls between ten and fourteen, not simply working class or black girls, that became of paramount importance. The feared predators before this age of the paedophile, indeed long before the invention of the label, were the slave-hunters, who were Jews, Arabs and Chinese).

The great moral panic of fear of homosexuals in the American administration started in 1947 (right after the war) with an article by Hoover stating that "The women and children of the nation can never be safe as long as the degenerated is running free".

Dick Wase also points out that as the homosexuality moral panic faded, child-pornography and child-trafficking arose as enormous phenomena, helped greatly through such books as Robin Lloyd's For Money or Love, in which he claimed that 300,000 boys between the ages of eight and sixteen were prostitutes in America (later he admitted those figures were fabricated, 'to see how society would react'). With help by Judianne Densen-Gerber and Vice-sheriff Lloyd Martin the figures quickly arise to 2.1 million prostituted kids, so that now the panic was a fact through help from newspapers and television. It was also fuelled by psychiatrists, therapists and psychologists who during the sexual liberation in the 1960s and early 1970s had to face falling numbers of patients.

Dick Wase makes comparisons here with the 1486 first edition of the Malleus Malleficarum, suggesting that the reason it was written was that Pope Innocentius VIII found himself impotent, and blamed it on the witches, so he gave orders for a hunt for witches. It suited the Inquisition perfectly, because they were having problems finding 'heretics' to burn, but now they could use all their resources to hunt witches instead. Note that the Malleus Malleficarum also blames innocent women for men's impotency.

Wase also points out that when the latest moral-panic arose in 1976, around children and sex, the 'psycho-workers', as he calls them, and the social-workers could benefit greatly from it, and suddenly intergenerational sex was seen as the most terrible thing that could hit a child. And, he goes on to say, it still is seen as terrible, despite that for example Ney & Co 1994 showed that children themselves range sexual abuse as the least problem among abuses they have to face (for example neglect and physical abuse they find much worse, but those kind of abuses are often used among evangelical Christians to punish their sinful kids, so naturally you cant create a panic around it, and everyone knows how terrible the sin sex is anyway)".

In addition, any age that sees large numbers of stepfathers or boyfriends moving in with women and their existing children also produces an increase in sexual activity of one kind or another with children within their own homes.

There are actually some studies that found a correlation between early sexual activity, including sex abuse, and positive later sexual experiences, one being 'The relation between early abuse and adult sexuality” by Meston & co 1999 (1032 students).

Such findings are so controversial that one risks censorship and worse by publishing them in any detail. Where a woman finds the courage to admit to such a possibility, she is accused of being the victim of 'sexualisation'. Thus, it is impossible in today's environment to discuss whether early sexual experiences would be positive to a woman's sexual development.

Moving to the semantic (significance, meaning) environment look again at the passage already quoted about incest from a lecture Alfred Korzybski gave in 1937.

The ‘semantic environment’ that accepted incest in Ancient Egypt and the love of boys in Greece now encourages society to fear the consequences of an interest in the bodies of children, to the point where some authors associate this fear with the actual naked bodies of children. From the perspective of affect-as-biology, we are being scripted to feel shame, not fear, in relation to those bodies. In general, our semantic environment embraces a civilization that is Aristotelian and shame-ignorance based, in which prejudice and disingenuousness can flourish. In particular, since the seventeenth century in the West, sexuality has become an arena of power.

What I am leading towards here, however, is to look at how repression, prohibition and public obsession, within the semantic environment, may in fact generate and fan a hitherto latent tendency - such as how the attempts to suppress lesbianism in the 1920s led to its general discovery and expansion as a fantasy within the human imagination. And how today the world has discovered child sexuality, which is now set loose within the human imagination. If an idea is let loose into the human imagination, and fanned through repetition, prohibition and obsession, and there is no biological restraint on it, might it grow and increase as a desirable 'perversion'? Michel Foucault wrote, "Power operated as a mechanism of attraction; it drew out those peculiarities over which it kept watch. Pleasure spread to the power that harried it; power anchored the pleasure it uncovered - - - . The pleasure that comes of exercising a power that questions, monitors, watches, spies, searches out, palpates, brings to light; and, on the other hand, the pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power, flee from it, fool it, or travesty it. The power that lets itself be invaded by the pleasure it is pursuing; and opposite it, power asserting itself in the pleasure of showing off, scandalizing, or resisting. Capture and seduction, confrontation and mutual reinforcement: parents and children, adults and adolescents, educator and students, doctors and patients, the psychiatrist with his hysteric and his perverts, all have played this game continually since the nineteenth century. These attractions, these evasions, these circular incitements have traced around bodies and sexes, not boundaries not to be crossed, but perpetual spirals of power and pleasure." (The History of Sexuality, P. 45)

We see the censor and policeman and prosecutor here, together with the clever individuals who try to outwit them on the Internet through encryption and other sophisticated schemes. We see the hypocrisy and disingenuousness of the former and the growing interest in taboos and forbidden thrills of the latter.

Much more is expressed in as full a manner as the author can manage in a new book HERE.

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