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In this episode Joel and Antonia talk about Human Sexuality and Society.
In this podcast you’ll find:
- The one thing that seems to be on most people’s minds most of the time is sex.
- Frank Underwood in the show “House of Cards” (Netflix) says, “Everything is about sex, except for sex. Sex is about power.”
- Robert Anton Wilson talks about the Eight Circuit Model. The Fourth Circuit is Socio-Sexual.
- The First Circuit is the Bio-Survival Circuit – is the world friendly or hostile?
- The Second Circuit is Anal-Territorial – am I dominate or submissive?
- The Third Circuit is the Time Binding Circuit – what is my adopted ideology?
- The Fourth Circuit is Socio-Sexual – what is my sexual preference and what is my identity in society?
- We control sexual behavior to control people’s minds, and get a specific outcome.
- “The only rule about sexuality is that there’s going to be rules about sexuality.”
- What we get imprinted with sexually is almost infinite in variety.
- We spend the majority of our time pretending that our sexual preference(s) matches whatever our society says is acceptable.
- About 99% of the population DOES NOT SHARE the sexual imprint our society says is acceptable.
- Many people who don’t have the ‘acceptable’ sexual imprint will see themselves as perverted, which becomes part of their identity in society.
- We’re all very interested in what ‘normal’ is. We fear getting ‘booted by the tribe’.
- Sometimes those who feel they are ‘perverted’ will spend time and effort hiding that by demonizing others who also aren’t ‘normal’.
- If everyone had to reveal what their sexual preferences are we’d understand that ‘normal’ is actually being ‘not normal’.
- We are more and more understanding how varied sexual preference are thanks to passing information anonymously on the internet.
- It’s much more difficult to control how people ‘should’ be thinking.
- Do we have more variety of sexual preferences since we’re exposed to more things in our culture?
- Social construction of reality isn’t bad – it’s how we navigate through life with unspoken social contracts that make everyone’s life easier.
- The mistake is believing that the social construction is absolute, and if we don’t ‘line up’ it makes us ‘bad’. It’s much closer to reality and healthier to think, “These are just the rules of the game I happen to be in right now, and it’s okay if I’m a little different.”
- If you control someone’s sexuality, you control their mind. That’s why it’s been so important for people in power to control ‘acceptable’ concepts of sexuality.
- The issue easily comes down controlling reproduction, i.e the abortion debate, whether or not homosexual couples should raise children, how many children a family can have, etc.
- People go through life unaware of the bigger picture, and we can overvalue the opinions of society.
- If you don’t think your sexuality is the ‘norm’ – cut yourself some slack.
Exercises we recommend in this podcast:
Spend this week cutting yourself some slack for your preferences!
Things we reference in this podcast:
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6 comments
Thank you for taking the time to reply to me so quickly! I honestly didn’t know if I would get a response at all, due to the age of the episode I was commenting on.
I am however strongly in the “nature” side of the nature vs. nurture debate (it’s actually the reason I began studying evolutionary psychology in the first place). So I thought it only fair that I share with you one of the articles that (sort of) sums up my perspective from this side of things:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/natural-history-the-modern-mind/200906/the-johnny-depp-effect-evolutionary-explanation
I’d also like to draw attention to a relevant text that has had a significant influence on my stance on the subject, though as a warning, it’s a bit of a long read. It’s called Homosexual Behaviours in Animals: An Evolutionary Perspective (edited by Volker Sommer). I’m sharing it because this book is essentially for me what Prometheus Rising is for you (and also because it is your recommending Prometheus Rising that got me to read and fall in love with it in the first place, so I suppose I had a sense of reciprocity there).
Now in response to Jesse SingaI’s article, I think the premise of the article simply doesn’t account for an abundance of present variables.
People who are raised by parents that do not enforce gender stereotypes, are much more likely to be raised in a home in which coming out as a non-heterosexual orientation would be accepted, and the individual would feel that acceptance; alternately, some individuals go through their entire lives never telling their family the truth of their sexual orientation, or never telling anyone at all. It seems difficult to imagine that such people unable to come out for whatever reason, were raised in a home that opted for things like gender non-conformity
What I’m getting at is the article’s premise could be more aptly used to explain how those raised by parents that would opt for gender non-conformity are more likely to be forthcoming with their sexual orientation than those raised with traditional gender roles.
As for the notion of one who spends the majority of their youth dressing as the opposite gender “end up identifying as transgender” I would say that individual was always transgender, and their choice in dress as a youth was indicative of that, not a cause of it.
Also, the article states (doesn’t suggest) that adult homosexual men and women are gender atypical. Now it’s important to note that the writer is talking about being gender atypical not in a physiological sense, but almost in the sense of fashion, interests, and mannerisms. This is just simply an unhealthy stereotype of homosexuals, media gives all the attention to effeminate gay men and butch lesbians, so much so that few outside the LGBT+ community are actually aware of the just as significant presence of masculine gay men and effeminate lesbians.
As for the experiment preformed upon natal males, those that conducted the experiment and the writer of this article failed to recognize that gender identity and sexual orientation are not inextricably linked. Regarding the experiment, the article says “If socialization were a significant part of the sexuality equation, the odds that not one of these natal males would grow up to be attracted primarily to men are just about nil, statistically speaking.” But even in the framework of nurture and socialization, these individuals would not be any more likely to be attracted to men, they would be more likely to identify as transgender.
I do however agree with the article’s positing homosexual men and women can be socially coerced into becoming, respectively, more effeminate and masculine (strictly in the sense of behaviourisms). In part, I think this ties back to the representation of only certain types of gay men and lesbian women in the media, and young non-heterosexuals identifying with those individuals when they see them on TV, and embracing the only archetype of themselves they can find.
Thanks again for taking the time to reply! I’ve really come to respect yours (and Joel’s) opinions, and this exchange (however minute) is super riveting for me! :)
In the conversation around orientation being either nature or nurture, my observation (and reading) leads me to believe it’s both. Sexuality is extremely complex, and as mentioned in the podcast there will always be rules around what’s acceptable indicating it will also always be politicized. There seems to be a tacit assumption that if one has come to the conclusion that some people’s orientation was influenced during puberty that means they believe it was a choice, and most people’s minds jump to images of things like “praying away the gay.” But that’s a leap that isn’t being implied here.
I think this article does a pretty good job summing up how I’ve come to interpret the latest science and understanding around sexuality, including orientation: http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/09/with-sexual-orientation-were-not-quite-born-this-way.html
I’m okay with the statement I made in the podcast since I think aspects of orientation (which encompasses more variations than simply being gay) can be highly influenced during this time period of imprinting. If the subject was to chart out every element of how someone’s orientation is crafted, it would have been an incomplete enough statement as to be inaccurate. But we weren’t talking about the etymology of orientation. We were talking about elements that the socio-sexual imprint influences, which includes orientation. Essentially, we were address nodes in the system where sexual preferences are the emergent, not a cause/effect relationship to sexual orientation.
Thanks for the comment. :)
A
Lots of interesting insights here! And I know this is an old podcast, but there’s something I feel strongly compelled to comment on; around the 4mins 20second mark you say that one’s sexual orientation is a result of imprinting upon the socio-sexual circuit, and this is just entirely inaccurate. To prove this, one need only ask a homosexual. I do however agree that imprinting upon the socio-sexual circuit is most-likely a primary cause for one’s personal fetishisms.
Wow, great podcast, I am in the process of trying to break imprinting from my past and this helps a lot.
Thanks guys.
Hey, Kirk!
Our imprints may or may not have anything to do with our personality type in the Myers-Briggs system. It’s an imprint that happens when our mind’s ‘circuit’ happens to open up and be vulnerable for imprinting, so if whatever you’re doing/thinking about/engaged in at the time is specific to your personality type, then yes – it could be a factor. And if not, then it’s incidental.
Sort of a numbers game at that point.
Having a shared reality is helpful as it enables us to talk in the first place. Language is a part of shared reality, so any and all topics rely on that shared reality. Because of its helpfulness, socially constructed reality isn’t going anywhere. That said, once a person ‘gets’ that reality isn’t some empirical, static truth, but rather a highly plastic organism that changes and morphs over time, it’s much easier to cut oneself some slack if ‘reality’ isn’t aligning with our own inwardly directed identity.
A ‘right/wrong’ mentality seems to be the norm on almost every topic – you can see this in how people view their country, their religion, their family ideals, as well as sexuality. That ‘my truth versus your truth’ perspective has been around so long it appears to be intrinsically human, but I would argue that it’s actually just a level of development humans have had to go through.
We’re entering a very interesting time period in history with post-modernism. Post-moderns are far less likely to accept a ‘my truth versus your truth’ take on the world, and are far more open to some relativity there. This perspective seems deeply disturbing to anyone still in ‘my truth versus your truth’ who try to say that this thinking is ‘dangerous’ and ‘ineffectual’. And, yet, it’s direction all developed countries are heading toward. It seems to be the next iteration of our memetic evolution.
Thanks for the feedback and questions! They’re always appreciated. :)
A