Social control through sexual guilt is so effective because it can be solidly in place before there's anything there to control.
Pre-pubescent children don't rebel against the sexual taboos and prohibitions they receive, from the same people who warn them of the dangers of fire and sharp knives, because they don't have conscious sexual feelings when they receive those prohibitions. They take it on faith that masturbation is wrong if they're told it is, before they even know what masturbation is exactly, before they desire sexual release. And if they aren't told anything about it it becomes even more frighteningly prohibited when they do experience that desire - something so central to their being yet so horrible it can't even be talked about.
By the time they do have sexual feelings most children raised with repressive mainstream sexual values experience their sexuality through a filter of guilt. That guilt gets passed down like a recipe to their own children, unconsciously, automatically.
This is much less intense now than it was, but that isn't saying much - in mid-50's America sexual taboo was still so violently constrictive child molestation couldn't be dealt with openly, because people were traumatized merely by the idea of it, and they responded by trying to make the idea go away. Homosexuality was a punishable crime between consenting adults, not because it damaged anyone, but because the laws and the fears and taboos were already in place, and people were so riddled with guilt and shame at their own sexuality they couldn't approach the idea of changing anything without disintegrating.
It was an arduous and painful struggle to get the idea into the public discourse that there were people who are born naturally homosexual, not by choice but by birth, just as there are people who are naturally hermaphroditic - physically both female and male.
Running through that struggle was a river of sickness that comes, not from sexual perversion, but from the perversion of sexuality - as a means of social control.
There are distributions of masculinity and femininity just as there of height and weight and intelligence and beauty. Homosexuality too. So for some it really is a choice, just as the religious right would have it be for all, a minor urge that's easily repressed; for others it's much stronger and the repressive mechanism is energy-consuming and can be pathological; for others homosexuality is simply the core of their sexual being. It's the same with the distribution of hermaphroditic characteristics in the body.
My point isn't that this unfair and cruel repression is a mistake, but that it's intentional - a form of control, and a very effective one; that lives are damaged by being placed in impossible situations by it means nothing to those who benefit from that, just as the suffering of slaves meant nothing to most of those who benefited from slavery.
The heart of the current puritanical reaction to sexual permissiveness isn't directed at people who are naturally homosexual, it's directed at the asocial licentiousness that rose up in the absence of morality that was in turn made inevitable by the cruelty and violent repression that preceded it.
Just as beating a rebellious child will more often increase that rebellion unless it's so traumatic it's psychologically transformative, the bizarre sexual morality of the recent past was thrown off by people who recognized its wrongness and rebelled, even though they had nothing to put in its place but a vague idea of freedom.
People need morality for social cohesion. Just as people need sexual expression. Knowing that need exists and being in a position to create a morality that contains and controls the people who are born into it gives an advantage to competitors in the battle for dominance that all life is, even morally advanced human life like ours. Some people will benefit more than others in any given social condition. This is what's happening here.
Even the most enlightened moral system, to be true, has to recognize the hierarchy of fitness that is our biological reality. We aren't born equal, except in the eyes of the law, but that's what this argument is about, that the eyes of the law have been blinded by fear and superstition.
Harm is the issue, damage is what makes immorality wrong, and at this moment the harm and damage are coming from those who insist they're moral, and who say their morality comes from God, and that God, in that wonderfully terse phrase, hates fags.
It's tempting to say that that's nonsense, but it isn't, it's a cunning device, a trick to centralize power behind a mass of angry and confused people who are afraid, though they're not quite sure what they're afraid of now.
Images of black people as animals, as inferior sub-humans, were used to justify the inhuman cruelties of slavery and racism, but they were false images. Certainly there were black people who were inferior, just as there were whites who fit that image, but it was applied to all in order to justify the benefits of racism to those who received them.
Images of homosexuals as immoral hedonists, as though of all homosexuals, are being used for the same purpose, and they're just as false.
Selfishness is what's behind it, what's driving that condemnation, and it's also what's being condemned, rightly; but it's what makes that condemnation too broad and inexact. Innocent people are suffering because of the selfishness of others.
Selfishness is ultimately what evil really is - stripped of its symptoms the disease is selfishness, always.
Pre-pubescent children don't rebel against the sexual taboos and prohibitions they receive, from the same people who warn them of the dangers of fire and sharp knives, because they don't have conscious sexual feelings when they receive those prohibitions. They take it on faith that masturbation is wrong if they're told it is, before they even know what masturbation is exactly, before they desire sexual release. And if they aren't told anything about it it becomes even more frighteningly prohibited when they do experience that desire - something so central to their being yet so horrible it can't even be talked about.
By the time they do have sexual feelings most children raised with repressive mainstream sexual values experience their sexuality through a filter of guilt. That guilt gets passed down like a recipe to their own children, unconsciously, automatically.
This is much less intense now than it was, but that isn't saying much - in mid-50's America sexual taboo was still so violently constrictive child molestation couldn't be dealt with openly, because people were traumatized merely by the idea of it, and they responded by trying to make the idea go away. Homosexuality was a punishable crime between consenting adults, not because it damaged anyone, but because the laws and the fears and taboos were already in place, and people were so riddled with guilt and shame at their own sexuality they couldn't approach the idea of changing anything without disintegrating.
It was an arduous and painful struggle to get the idea into the public discourse that there were people who are born naturally homosexual, not by choice but by birth, just as there are people who are naturally hermaphroditic - physically both female and male.
Running through that struggle was a river of sickness that comes, not from sexual perversion, but from the perversion of sexuality - as a means of social control.
There are distributions of masculinity and femininity just as there of height and weight and intelligence and beauty. Homosexuality too. So for some it really is a choice, just as the religious right would have it be for all, a minor urge that's easily repressed; for others it's much stronger and the repressive mechanism is energy-consuming and can be pathological; for others homosexuality is simply the core of their sexual being. It's the same with the distribution of hermaphroditic characteristics in the body.
My point isn't that this unfair and cruel repression is a mistake, but that it's intentional - a form of control, and a very effective one; that lives are damaged by being placed in impossible situations by it means nothing to those who benefit from that, just as the suffering of slaves meant nothing to most of those who benefited from slavery.
The heart of the current puritanical reaction to sexual permissiveness isn't directed at people who are naturally homosexual, it's directed at the asocial licentiousness that rose up in the absence of morality that was in turn made inevitable by the cruelty and violent repression that preceded it.
Just as beating a rebellious child will more often increase that rebellion unless it's so traumatic it's psychologically transformative, the bizarre sexual morality of the recent past was thrown off by people who recognized its wrongness and rebelled, even though they had nothing to put in its place but a vague idea of freedom.
People need morality for social cohesion. Just as people need sexual expression. Knowing that need exists and being in a position to create a morality that contains and controls the people who are born into it gives an advantage to competitors in the battle for dominance that all life is, even morally advanced human life like ours. Some people will benefit more than others in any given social condition. This is what's happening here.
Even the most enlightened moral system, to be true, has to recognize the hierarchy of fitness that is our biological reality. We aren't born equal, except in the eyes of the law, but that's what this argument is about, that the eyes of the law have been blinded by fear and superstition.
Harm is the issue, damage is what makes immorality wrong, and at this moment the harm and damage are coming from those who insist they're moral, and who say their morality comes from God, and that God, in that wonderfully terse phrase, hates fags.
It's tempting to say that that's nonsense, but it isn't, it's a cunning device, a trick to centralize power behind a mass of angry and confused people who are afraid, though they're not quite sure what they're afraid of now.
Images of black people as animals, as inferior sub-humans, were used to justify the inhuman cruelties of slavery and racism, but they were false images. Certainly there were black people who were inferior, just as there were whites who fit that image, but it was applied to all in order to justify the benefits of racism to those who received them.
Images of homosexuals as immoral hedonists, as though of all homosexuals, are being used for the same purpose, and they're just as false.
Selfishness is what's behind it, what's driving that condemnation, and it's also what's being condemned, rightly; but it's what makes that condemnation too broad and inexact. Innocent people are suffering because of the selfishness of others.
Selfishness is ultimately what evil really is - stripped of its symptoms the disease is selfishness, always.
