We all need sex as much as we need food

Anonymous said...
Okay… My apologies, but back to one of my pet peeves. We have all heard plenty about the church sex abuse scandals, but this factoid blew me away:From the 1950s to 2003, the Archdiocese of Portland paid about $53 million on 130 claims of sex abuse by clergy…Holy fuckin’ shit. Man. And to think that Xians are still preaching to people that abstinence is the best form of birth control, and that condoms are bad. What a bunch of (non)fucking liars. If this is what abstinence does to priests, what does it do to everyone else? Um. The same thing? Fuck with people’s heads? I have mentioned this in a comment before: in the book “Schrader on Schrader”, about acclaimed writer/director Paul Schrader (he wrote “Taxi Driver”), the filmmaker talks about how many of his characters, like Yukio Mishima and Travis Bickle, have one major cause for their mental illness: what he and Martin Scorsese dubbed D.S.B. (”Dangerous Sperm Backup”). In short, they really need to get laid. Schrader knows his topic. Poor bastard was raised Calvinist [From “Schrader on Schrader”: fold your hands over your torso when you go to sleep at night — that way there is less chance that you will accidentally touch your genitals in your sleep, thereby commiting a sin. Ack!].How much sex was John Hinckley (who, ironically, was inspired by Jodie Foster’s character in “Taxi Driver”) getting when he shot Reagan? I mean, not to be judgmental, but look at the poor bastard. Mark David Chapman, the guy who shot John Lennon, also looks like he was keeping himself spiffy for a girlfriend, doesn’t he?[By the way, I know I am citing only male cases, but society doesn’t have a whole lot of examples of female assassins and child abusers, now does it?]And yeah. Protestant clergy have been caught molesting, too — and they’re allowed to have sex. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t repressed. As we have mentioned before, note the great Monty Python bit on the subject.I just haven’t seen a lot of sex-positive, properly sexually educated people getting busted for molesting children. I live right down the street from the famous Good Vibrations. I will go on record and say I highly doubt that we’re ever gonna see any of the folks who work there shooting famous people or groping kids. From Carl Sagan, in “Cosmos”:Mammals characteristically nuzzle, fondle, hug, caress, pet, groom and love their young, behavior essentially unknown among the reptiles. If it is really true that the R complex and limbic systems live in an uneasy truce within our skulls and still partake of their ancient predilections, we might expect affectionate parental indulgence to encourage our mammalian natures, and the absence of physical affection to prod reptilian behavior. There is some evidence that this is the case. In laboratory experiments, Harry and Margaret Harlow found that monkeys raised in cages and physically isolated - even though they could see, hear and smell their simian fellows - developed a range of morose, withdrawn, self-destructive and otherwise abnormal characteristics. In humans the same is observed for children raised without physical affection - usually in institutions - where they are clearly in great pain.The neuropsychologist James W. Prescott has performed a startling cross-cultural statistical analysis of 400 preindustrial societies and found that cultures that lavish physical affection on infants tend to be disinclined to violence. Even societies without notable fondling of infants develop nonviolent adults, provided sexual activity in adolescents is not repressed. Prescott believes that cultures with a predisposition for violence are composed of individuals who have been deprived - during at least one of two critical stages in life, infancy and adolescence - of the pleasures of the body. Where physical affection is encouraged, theft, organized religion and invidious displays of wealth are inconspicuous; where infants are physically punished, there tends to be slavery, frequent killing, torturing and mutilation of enemies, a devotion to the inferiority of women, and a belief in one or more supernatural beings who intervene in daily life.We do not understand human behavior well enough to be sure of the mechanisms underlying these relationships, although we can conjecture. But the correlations are significant. Prescott writes: ‘The percent likelihood of a society becoming physically violent if it is physically affectionate toward its infants and tolerant of premarital sexual behavior is 2 percent. The probability of this relationship occurring by chance is 125,000 to one. I am not aware of any other developmental variable that has such a high degree of predictive validity.’ Infants hunger for physical affection; adolescents are strongly driven to sexual activity. If youngsters had their way, societies might develop in which adults have little tolerance for aggression, territoriality, ritual and social hierarchy (although in the course of growing up the children might well experience these reptilian behaviors). If Prescott is right, in an age of nuclear weapons and effective contraceptives, child abuse and severe sexual repression are crimes against humanity. More work on this provocative thesis is clearly needed. Meanwhile, we can each make a personal and noncontroversial contribution to the future of the world by hugging our infants tenderly.We love you, Carl. Hugs.http://gods4suckers.net/archives/2006/01/10/
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