Feeling kinda trapped in my life right now.
The truth is, my life as it is right now keeps me busy and distracted but it doesn’t satisfy me at all. There is a lot more to life than merely making it through the day and I am never going to be able to move on to the next phase of my existence until I learned to go get what I really need.
And yet, thinking that way only leads to greater frustration as I strain to get where I want to go but only end up causing myself pain as that energy goes nowhere.
So then I try to take things in the opposite direction by trying to calm myself down and learn to accept my life as it is and be harmonious with it instead of fighting it.
And that might seem to work for a while. But the lack of satisfaction always creeps in sooner or later and makes me all frustrated again.
What I want is to exit the conflict entirely. To hell with you and your war, old man!
But it’s not that easy, obviously. And so I pace back and forth in my cage, never getting anywhere, but unable to stop.
It’s all that damned clog’s fault. That enormous wad of compacted psychological scar tissue and frozen emotions that keeps my energies all bottled up behind a wall of fear and dread and existential horror.
So really, the only way out is to clear that frigging clog. Otherwise, I will continue to be paralyzed by fear colder than the interstellar void whenever I try to even think seriously about escaping this existential cul-de-sac from Hell.
It’s not a very fun thing to think about because it means there is no quick or even linear solution to my problems. No light at the end of the tunnel to guide me, no finish line to drive towards, no predictable end to the process at all.
So all I can do is keep digging away at that fucking clog without ever knowing how much further I have to go or where it all will end.
In other words, I have to walk down a road without knowing where it is going or how long it is or even if it’s going in the right direction.
And I have to do so out of faith that if will eventually take me where I want to go.
Faith. Lovely. It’s never been my strong suit, to put it mildly. Instead, I built my world view on things I could rationally verify, thinking this would make for a strong, safe, trustworthy house I could believe in.
But nope. There’s just too much about life that does not and cannot be accounted for by such a structure. Needs unmet, desires unfulfilled, dreams broken.
Life requires at least a few leaps of faith, but I am too scared to make them.
So here I stand at the end of life’s high diving board, looking down at the water, far too scared to jump.
Even though I know it’s my only way out.
Heresy : Porn does not hurt children.
Not in the slightest. A kid could watch two straight hours of an orgy that would make Nero blush with shame and it would still do them no harm.
Odds are, they won’t understand what is going on. Not really. They will realize it’s sex but that words means very little to a pre-pubescent kid.
To be honest, they will probably just get bored. Whatever they do not understand will sail right over their heads just like all the other adult things like death and having a job and people getting sick does.
What does do them harm is their parents freaking out over finding them watching porn. After all, despite its harmlessness, anything that violates the extremely powerful child/sex taboo creates a massive emotional reaction in us.
That’s how taboos work, after all.
The mistake comes when that huge emotional reaction is translated into a feeling of harm to the child when the real problem is the parents’ taboos.
Ironically, it is this kind of reaction and blame-placing that transmits the taboo.
Seen from this angle, this over-application of the child/sex taboo is a pernicious meme. It replicates itself by getting transmitted from parent to child, and causes undue psychological distress and suffering by doing so.
Responsible parents, therefore, should do what they can not to freak out at this kind of thing. Not easy, I know – like I said, the taboo is incredibly strong, and produes extremely powerful emotional responses.
But if you can pull it off, you will really be doing your kid a solid by sparing them future weird issues about sex., as well as a lot of pointless shame.
The key, I think, is to remind yourself that the child has not been harmed and whatever you are feeling in that moment is all about you, not them.
That’s the fact to hang onto as the intense desire to react to this massive emotional response like it’s an external threat to your child washes through you.
The kid is fine. Mom and Dad might need a good stiff drink or two.
And obviously, if pornography can’t hurt your child, the mere sight of another human being’s bathing suit areas does them no harm either.
It’s the same deal. Because in our society nudity is strongly associated with sex, nudity plus child sets off the child/sex taboo.
But as with full on porn, the child is not harmed. There are no evil child brain scrambling rays emitted by the genitals of the world. The only result of a child seeing someone else naked is that they will know genitals can look like that, too.
At least we, as a society, got past the masturbation taboo. It, too, was a product of the child/sex taboo. and students of history know that at one point it was a full on moral panic that swept the world.
But I think nearly everyone is cool about that now. You catch your child masturbating, you just apologize and depart, and maybe talk to them later about discretion and privacy and when certain things are and are not appropros.
That gives me hope. Hope that the rest of the madness of the excesses of the child/sex taboo can be curtailed and we can create future generations of people with way less neurosis about sex.
And isn’t that a future worth fighting for?
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.