Shame and Humiliation

Stella,

And your latest AV is simply divine, darling.

Allard

I was busy around the house yesterday and spent a good deal of time thinking about being ashamed of my own sexuality. I know women feel shame in this area in a general sense, but I was looking for my earliest memories.

My mother caught me running stuffed animals from the front of my training underwear to the back. I would give each animal a good slide and then usually concentrate on the bear. He had the best fur.

My mother got mad and told me to stop. She said what I was doing was bad. My dad showed up at that instant and called her off, telling her to shut up, right now. She did and he took her into their room, but came back briefly to tell me what I was doing was perfectly normal and not to pay attention to what my mother said to me. Then I heard him yell at her for about a hour over the subject as they battled out the game plan for their children's masturbation practices. I am glad my father won.

I used his way to raise my four very healthy grown children.

Yay for your dad!

I seem to recall my mom saying "Do you know what that's called?"
I said no, and she said "It's called masturbation. And when you're a grownup, you can do it with a boyfriend and it will be even better."

Stella, That is simply good parenting in a nutshell. Yeah for your Mom!

But back to the thread.

When did I feel shame for the first time about sex? I think it came on slowly, through comparison with other girls my age in high school.

I knew I was not like most of them, seemingly. The quiet ones are dynamite, sometimes. I had a high libido and knew it, sort of.

With dimensions like 36, 26, 38, I had no trouble attracting the opposite sex and once I kissed them, they got huge hard-ons, that I wanted to see, of course.

So I guess my shame came from the fact that I was more sexual than most girls and therefore different. I was not interested in true love after the first love fiasco ( he hated big breasts, much to my dismay). But sex, I was interested in. If it had been a college course, I would have majored in it. Oh, my bad. It is a college course.

Now at 56 I am unashamed, for the most part. I still haven't let my kids read my erotica. I must get over this before the end of 2008. I have four kids. Aged 31 to 18. Do I just print out the first four chapters for all of them and then wait for responses. Those will be the longest moments of my life, topping even the wait for response from a publisher. God give me strength. My kids KNOW I am sexual, but how sexual they do not know, if you know what I mean. LOL

Allard

Allard, I know how much you love men but if you ever feel adventuresome...

As far as sharing your erotica with your family, that's tricky. Sex although it might not be shameful, is still very intense and oftentimes, I think, too intimate a knowledge for people who are close but not sexual partners.
My mother has read some of mine, but only under the pretext of "editing" it. My sister refuses to read anything that I've written of a sexual nature. My father, who was the most enthusiastic of free love proponents, is baffled by the directions my sexuality has taken and only wants to ignore it.

(Too complicated for any single smiley)

Stella, I will let you know when I am ready to cross lines...

In the meantime, I could pull the "fade to black" gimic used in movies to edit the more graphic sex. I just don't know if I am ready for my 18 year old son to know my innermost secrets.

Would that be cheating? The 31 year son works at a porn shop, so I should give him the real thing, I think. For some reason, I feel more comfortable sharing with him. Is it becuase he is older and has an incredibly high libido like his mother? In fact, all my kids have my libido. I am just a big fraidy cat.

Is it shame, though? I do not think so. The work is good and the writing is solid. Well, this is number one on my New Year's Resolution List. I am thinking ahead this year.

Stella_Omega said:

Allard, I know how much you love men but if you ever feel adventuresome...

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and Allard, if you ever feel like an adventuretheesome, please PM BOTH of us!


P.S. I would have loved to be your teddy bear!

AllardChardon said:

Stella, I will let you know when I am ready to cross lines...

In the meantime, I could pull the "fade to black" gimic used in movies to edit the more graphic sex. I just don't know if I am ready for my 18 year old son to know my innermost secrets.

Would that be cheating? The 31 year son works at a porn shop, so I should give him the real thing, I think. For some reason, I feel more comfortable sharing with him. Is it becuase he is older and has an incredibly high libido like his mother? In fact, all my kids have my libido. I am just a big fraidy cat.

Is it shame, though? I do not think so. The work is good and the writing is solid. Well, this is number one on my New Year's Resolution List. I am thinking ahead this year.

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Gad! What a refreshing outlook. My daughter, I have no clue about since we only see her about two days a year, workaholic like her mother that she is. The 32-year-old son has read at least one story but I suspect that he may be embarrassed about his reprobate old man. Who know?

I want to suggest that shame might be hard-wired into sexuality,

I've been reading about this new theory of intelligence called Embodied Cognition which says, basically, that you can't have a brain without a body, that the way we perceive through our bodies determines the way we think and process information and shapes the way we conceptualize, that much of the time when we think we're using logic we're usually actually just using body-wisdom (the certainty that 1+1=2 is based on body wisdom, not logic). It's a fascinating area and has already been proven right in several empirical tests.

Anyhow, Embodied Cognition shows up in common metaphors and ways of thinking. The way that almost all expressions for loneliness use a term for "cold", for example. Urine and feces are universally regarded as dirty and negative, not only by humans but by apes too and this is based on body wisdom. Apes who learned American sign language would insult each other by calling each other shits and urines without being trained to use the terms.

The proximity of the genitals to the excretory organs assures that sex would have 'dirty' connotations whether we were taught such or not. It would be built into us.

This is an old theory, going back to Freud at least, but it guarantees that sex would be considered shameful just by its scatological associations.

AllardChardon said:

Now at 56 I am unashamed, for the most part. I still haven't let my kids read my erotica. I must get over this before the end of 2008. I have four kids. Aged 31 to 18. Do I just print out the first four chapters for all of them and then wait for responses. Those will be the longest moments of my life, topping even the wait for response from a publisher. God give me strength. My kids KNOW I am sexual, but how sexual they do not know, if you know what I mean. LOL

Allard

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This is tough because you don't know whether they might be critical because of the sex or they might be critical because of the writing.

You don't know which would be harder to take either.

dr_mabeuse said:

I want to suggest that shame might be hard-wired into sexuality,

I've been reading about this new theory of intelligence called Embodied Cognition which says, basically, that you can't have a brain without a body, that the way we perceive through our bodies determines the way we think and process information and shapes the way we conceptualize, that much of the time when we think we're using logic we're usually actually just using body-wisdom (the certainty that 1+1=2 is based on body wisdom, not logic). It's a fascinating area and has already been proven right in several empirical tests.

Anyhow, Embodied Cognition shows up in common metaphors and ways of thinking. The way that almost all expressions for loneliness use a term for "cold", for example. Urine and feces are universally regarded as dirty and negative, not only by humans but by apes too and this is based on body wisdom. Apes who learned American sign language would insult each other by calling each other shits and urines without being trained to use the terms.

The proximity of the genitals to the excretory organs assures that sex would have 'dirty' connotations whether we were taught such or not. It would be built into us.

This is an old theory, going back to Freud at least, but it guarantees that sex would be considered shameful just by its scatological associations.

Click to expand...

Meaning that bodily changes change perception? Possible. If one isn't part of the Beautiful People and their hedonistic lifestyle must (or possibly can?) body sculpture and a new wardrobe cause one to go wild or does it just give permission for behavior that was repressed socially?

And given Freud's personal hang-ups, I would be seriously sceptical from the outset.

My boss-mentor says that Freud's theories work perfectly for him. He says it's because he is the product of an upper-middle-class, turn-of-the-century German family. He says he's rarely met anyone else, in his very long life, who fit's Freud's mold so well.

He also says that Freud loses credibility for him when he talks about the "Oedipus complex". No son wants his mother sexually, he wants his mother to nurture him. he doesn't want her womb, he wants her breastmilk. I gotta agree with that, but then, that's why he's my mentor as well as my boss.

to doc

doc The proximity of the genitals to the excretory organs assures that sex would have 'dirty' connotations whether we were taught such or not. It would be built into us.

This is an old theory, going back to Freud at least, but it guarantees that sex would be considered shameful just by its scatological associations.

a little further back...

st augustine: 'we are born between urine and feces.'

Pure said:

a little further back...

st augustine: 'we are born between urine and feces.'

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Better than chickens. *shrug*

dr_mabeuse said:

I want to suggest that shame might be hard-wired into sexuality...

The proximity of the genitals to the excretory organs assures that sex would have 'dirty' connotations whether we were taught such or not. It would be built into us.

This is an old theory, going back to Freud at least, but it guarantees that sex would be considered shameful just by its scatological associations.

Click to expand...

It makes sense, the anus has ever been the symbol of corruption - the idea of millions of starving Africans won't faze most Christians, but mention anal sex and they go postal.

Still, children at least, are fascinated by the whole poop thing, it's one of the very first things your body produces, your first "creation", and probably the first erogenous zone you develop whist getting your diaper changed.

Deep memories of this might be why a lot men, mostly the younger ones, seem to think of anal intercourse as the most definitive act of submission on the part of the receiver, i.e., the association with infantilism and helplessness, it's also a common metaphor for being "used" in particularly shameful way in a non-sexual way.

I have noticed some women do like to have something in their mouths during anal play, i.e., it can trigger a suckle response - very interesting, this vagus nerve...

Much of this I believe, mainly represents male vanity in that biologically we are the pokers, and women the pokee's - for a man, to be poked is the ultimate humiliation.

It seems a rather silly thing, from a strictly biological, sexual arousal viewpoint of stimulus response, but you will note that guys like amicus and JBJ have elevated a convenient arrangement of nature into a political/sexual ideology.

Re: religion and guilt, it's a much more deliberate and crippling form of infantilization IMO, total dependence on the ultimate abstract fantasy father figure, to the point of actual helplessness and agoraphobic social withdrawl.
Of course, there is intense shame if you disappoint daddy, we'' have to humiliate you...

Christians fucking invented BDSM.

xssve said:

It makes sense, the anus has ever been the symbol of corruption - the idea of millions of starving Africans won't faze most Christians, but mention anal sex and they go postal.

Still, children at least, are fascinated by the whole poop thing, it's one of the very first things your body produces, your first "creation", and probably the first erogenous zone you develop whist getting your diaper changed.

Deep memories of this might be why a lot men, mostly the younger ones, seem to think of anal intercourse as the most definitive act of submission on the part of the receiver, i.e., the association with infantilism and helplessness, it's also a common metaphor for being "used" in particularly shameful way in a non-sexual way.

I have noticed some women do like to have something in their mouths during anal play, i.e., it can trigger a suckle response - very interesting, this vagus nerve...

Much of this I believe, mainly represents male vanity in that biologically we are the pokers, and women the pokee's - for a man, to be poked is the ultimate humiliation.

It seems a rather silly thing, from a strictly biological, sexual arousal viewpoint of stimulus response, but you will note that guys like amicus and JBJ have elevated a convenient arrangement of nature into a political/sexual ideology.

Re: religion and guilt, it's a much more deliberate and crippling form of infantilization IMO, total dependence on the ultimate abstract fantasy father figure, to the point of actual helplessness and agoraphobic social withdrawl.
Of course, there is intense shame if you disappoint daddy, we'' have to humiliate you...

Christians fucking invented BDSM.

Click to expand...

I can't help but wonder where you get you concept of Christianity. Off the news media, where the reporters are obsessed with the Fundamentalist ignorant? Where you raised that way? Most of those NGO's that feed the starving millions in Africa are Christian organizations. The California Council of Churches issued a policy paper opposing Prop 8. Do you actually pay any attention to what the non-TV Christian is actually like? Hell, some us fuck like rabbits right after we get home from church on Sunday.

dr_mabeuse said:

I want to suggest that shame might be hard-wired into sexuality,

I've been reading about this new theory of intelligence called Embodied Cognition which says, basically, that you can't have a brain without a body, that the way we perceive through our bodies determines the way we think and process information and shapes the way we conceptualize, that much of the time when we think we're using logic we're usually actually just using body-wisdom (the certainty that 1+1=2 is based on body wisdom, not logic). It's a fascinating area and has already been proven right in several empirical tests.

Anyhow, Embodied Cognition shows up in common metaphors and ways of thinking. The way that almost all expressions for loneliness use a term for "cold", for example. Urine and feces are universally regarded as dirty and negative, not only by humans but by apes too and this is based on body wisdom. Apes who learned American sign language would insult each other by calling each other shits and urines without being trained to use the terms.

The proximity of the genitals to the excretory organs assures that sex would have 'dirty' connotations whether we were taught such or not. It would be built into us.

This is an old theory, going back to Freud at least, but it guarantees that sex would be considered shameful just by its scatological associations.

Click to expand...

Well, shit.

sweetsubsarahh said:

Well, shit.

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Rose petals, baby.

Stella_Omega said:

My boss-mentor says that Freud's theories work perfectly for him. He says it's because he is the product of an upper-middle-class, turn-of-the-century German family. He says he's rarely met anyone else, in his very long life, who fit's Freud's mold so well.

He also says that Freud loses credibility for him when he talks about the "Oedipus complex". No son wants his mother sexually, he wants his mother to nurture him. he doesn't want her womb, he wants her breastmilk. I gotta agree with that, but then, that's why he's my mentor as well as my boss.

Click to expand...

I agree with your mentor. I will say this, though: many of Freud's ideas, including the Oedipal challenge, make a great deal more sense if you recognize that Freud tended to read sex into many sorts of desires and pleasures, and if you then take the sex back out. For instance, children do often very earnestly compete with the father for the mother's attention and nurture, and I do think that learning to pass that challegne and start looking for satisfaction outside of the family circle is a crucial rite of adulthood.

Similarly, I hardly know a woman who can get past the theory that women desire to have a phallus without laughing, but most of them can easily point to things that only men had at the time - authority, voting rights, economic freedoms - that they would very much have liked to have had. Freud was just enough of a product of his culture, I think, that he couldn't get outside of his own perception that those things were intrinsically part of each other.

Voluptuary, Xssve has a rather personal and idiosyncratic view of Christianity which s/he seems positive is the only true one. I've been told very clearly by the poster what I'm evidently required to believe as a Christian, and a baffling and unfamiliar batch of concepts it was.

voluptuary_manque said:

I can't help but wonder where you get you concept of Christianity. Off the news media, where the reporters are obsessed with the Fundamentalist ignorant? Where you raised that way? Most of those NGO's that feed the starving millions in Africa are Christian organizations. The California Council of Churches issued a policy paper opposing Prop 8. Do you actually pay any attention to what the non-TV Christian is actually like? Hell, some us fuck like rabbits right after we get home from church on Sunday.

Click to expand...

Christianity wasn't invented yesterday - ever read Michalet? That, and I live in a small town full of very uptight Christians.

You are unaware that the religious right is vehemently opposed to any form of birth control and the Bush administration pandered to them by cutting off any federal funding for any NGO distributing them in Africa, or anywhere else?

It is, of course, all very much in keeping with the Bush families long established activism in the eugenics movement. This, of course, assures that there will be many more starving people and people dying of AID's so that Christians can say "I told you so".

You do realize also of course, that religion as a spiritual belief is very different from organized religion as a political entity? Many people appear confused and unable to make the distinction.

In any case, I'm hardly the only one to notice that in defferring this life for an eternal one, Christians are continually trying to reduce human sexuality to a bovine breeding program.

Non-consensual orgasm denial enforced by humiliation/degradation is considered tantamount to an inviolable right by the Christians on almost every level - I'm really curious what country you come from.

I can you up examples of this way of thinking if you like, pretty much all day long in fact.

Here's one for you:

To say that sex can expres (sic) love without any intrinsic orientation to procreation implies that sex is basically an extrinsic symbol--external to that which it signifies. And what it signifies (on this view) is merely a close, emotional relationship. Sex becomes, at best, only a gift of pleasure or a sign of unity. But if that is so, there can be no reason why the relationship symbolized must be permanent or heterosexual. As a consequence, marriage becomes viewed simply as a more or less stable emotional union, accompanied by regular sex, and perhaps by children. Thus, separating sex from procreation also separated marriage from procreation.

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MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT SEX, PROCREATION, AND MARRIAGE, by Patrick Lee

"Sex becomes, at best, only a gift of pleasure or a sign of unity" - well shit, then why bother? In other words, down with sexcular humanism, or any sort of humanism at all - up with inhumanism.

And this is not at all an uncommon argument, symptomatic of the erotophobic fear and hatred of homosexuality and their role as breeders for the consumption/depletion economics and kleptocratic wars of feudal/corporatist elite - it's no accident that Christianity, as an institution, is (almost) invariably aligned with whatever elite happens to be in power, whether it's Nazi's or republicans.

You probably think I'm being silly, but it's really very simple, it's about power and money, the world, and if they wish you to reject this world in favor of a fantasy world and "trust them", it's so you won't notice that they represent this world, in the worst possible way, while you hound and harass people innocently getting their freak on - urging people to bomb family planning clinics while they molset your child.

It's all so very convenient, kinda like the way republicans shrilly tried to to pin the mortgage meltdown on Blacks, while the real culprits, instead of being prosecuted or held accountable collect their bonuses without murmur, or even notice.

Do you think it's just that people are dumb? I don't believe they are - they are however, incredibly gullible - this has been going on for centuries.

Again, please do not confuse this with any spiritual beliefs you might have that tangentially involve Christian dogma.

BlackShanglan said:

I agree with your mentor. I will say this, though: many of Freud's ideas, including the Oedipal challenge, make a great deal more sense if you recognize that Freud tended to read sex into many sorts of desires and pleasures, and if you then take the sex back out. For instance, children do often very earnestly compete with the father for the mother's attention and nurture, and I do think that learning to pass that challegne and start looking for satisfaction outside of the family circle is a crucial rite of adulthood.
...

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oh, absolutely-- but that fixation on sex as the motivator has done so much damage to so many people ,IMO. I have to honor the guy for getting the psychoanalytic ball rolling, but he was so damn intent on keeping it in his own court. to become useful to the rest of us, new theorists had to cast themselves as rebels-- very Oedipal, come to think of it.

xssve said:

I live in a small town full of very uptight Christians.

.

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Now I understand. Okay. And the source you quoted is obviously either old-school Catholic or an apoligist for Fundamentalist Christian dogma. Both of these are based on wierd Greek ideas that start with Pythagorus about body denial. That is not what intellectually inclined Chrisians, mainline Protestants if you will, have any truck with. Sorry your experience has been so limited.

voluptuary_manque said:

Now I understand. Okay. And the source you quoted is obviously either old-school Catholic or an apoligist for Fundamentalist Christian dogma. Both of these are based on wierd Greek ideas that start with Pythagorus about body denial. That is not what intellectually inclined Chrisians, mainline Protestants if you will, have any truck with. Sorry your experience has been so limited.

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Bullshit, I get archaic Aristotelian science (the four humors) mixed with magical thinking thrown at me every day, it doesn't matter where it comes from, Aristotle, Augustine, Kramer and Sprenger, or John Calvin - we aren't talking about logic, we're talking about religion.

These "intellectually inclined Chrisians, mainline Protestants" are apparently a quiet bunch, as the reactionary homo and erotophobes are getting all the press and influencing all the legislation - but you're entitled to your illusions - isn't that what religion is all about?

Pardon the hijack, my original point being that Christians, particularly Catholacism during the inquisition, turned erotophobia into bloody art, the Malleus Malefactorum had enourmous popular influence, the feudal associations of BDSM almost all come from this period, the "satanic" associations (debachery, lechery) are associated with the underground resistence agians Catholic hegemony, heretic gnostic sects (Cathars, Bogomils, etc.).

More recently, "Blue Laws", which have been slowly been repealed are almost exclusively religiously influenced - shame over sexual matters is also almost exclusively religious, though not exclusively Christian, most of the worlds religions go to great lengths to demonized female sexuality and homosexuality, it's very much a cultural/linguistic process, and as I say, it isn't a spiritual thing so much as patrimonial politics and monopolization of breeding females.

Apes have culture too, whereas if a dog sees a nice asshole, they lick it, and they're only ashamed of it if you yell at them. It's definitely a phenomena based on linguistic abstraction IMO.

It did occur to me that that a fairly utilitarian explanation for the evolution of a biological inhibitory shame trait is incest - organisms that avoided inbreeding and increased their genetic diversity and social connections most likely maximised their breeding potential, passing the trait along, while manipulation of this trait may have facilitated other complex social behaviors that are responsible for sapient hominids evolving to the top of the food chain - like religion.

It is a hugely popular category of anonymous online literary porn, maybe the most popular category - and almost always involves shame.

xssve said:

It did occur to me that that a fairly utilitarian explanation for the evolution of a biological inhibitory shame trait is incest - organisms that avoided inbreeding and increased their genetic diversity and social connections most likely maximised their breeding potential, passing the trait along, while manipulation of this trait may have facilitated other complex social behaviors that are responsible for sapient hominids evolving to the top of the food chain - like religion.

It is a hugely popular category of anonymous online literary porn, maybe the most popular category - and almost always involves shame.

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In that regard I'm surprised there's not more porn that exploits religious shame. Why not more nun/priest fucking stories? Is it because the religious taboos have lost their potency while incest taboos haven't?