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We can't discuss it?

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Firesign Theater

Stop the War!

Submitted by Anja Geitz on Sat, 10/13/2018 - 11:21am

Because that's gone so well here in the past?

@EdMass

Good faith discussion happens when there is good faith on both sides. I've yet to see that happen here when "discussing" the raping, molesting, harrassing, and objectifying of women. Inevitably this "discussion" attracts the posters who have a predilection for saying whatever batshit crazy idea that comes in their head and they show up here dropping their excrement throughout the comment thread and the pie throwing begins. It's tediously unproductive. As is the above mentioned Op-Ed you felt compelled to refer to for the betterment of humankind I'm sure.

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

Submitted by EdMass on Sat, 10/13/2018 - 12:46pm

Really? It's me?

There is no doubt that women's complaints, their fears, are legitimate, but it is my opinion, my observation, that those complaints have been exaggerated and misapplied. The article writer's rage is common, but it is wrong, it is counterproductive, and that is intentional.

The article writer is Dr Brown, not me.

Thanks for that opinion, that's all I asked for.

—

Firesign Theater

Stop the War!

Submitted by Anja Geitz on Sat, 10/13/2018 - 1:25pm

Your ax grinding is tedious

@EdMass

As is your persistent declarations of the usefulness of "discussing" this op-Ed.

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

Submitted by doh1304 on Sat, 10/13/2018 - 3:01am

I'm going to trust edmass and respond

but first I'll preface with an illustration that will sound absurd.
I have a writers' group. I have great faith in my writing, but I have an artistic character flaw - I accept criticism, but sometimes I misinterpret it, trying to preserve my flaws (my identity) rather than improve. For example I went through a phase where I responded to criticism of my overuse of commas, not by tightening my sentence structure but by overusing semicolons.
Looking back on my youth I see a similar thing with gender relations. I was (and still am I swear) a "good man". I am not perfect, but I tried. Why do I use past tense? Why did I stop trying? Because no matter how I tried, no matter how innocuous my failures, the women around me refused to respond with anything but fear and anger. I have given up trying to convince them otherwise.
There is no doubt that women's complaints, their fears, are legitimate, but it is my opinion, my observation, that those complaints have been exaggerated and misapplied. The article writer's rage is common, but it is wrong, it is counterproductive, and that is intentional. For 50 years I have seen "feminists" who are actually demagogues and I have seen the rich and powerful feed that fear and anger to discredit feminism by turning women against men who would otherwise be allies. I see an indoctrination program.
This, however, will change. Indoctrination programs, when exposed, invariably crumble away. Rationality will eventually prevail. Misogyny will decline. (eventually essentially to zero) Good men will remain good, no matter how much pressure is applied to make them resentful and defensive, while misandry will become increasingly renounced, because you cannot continue to demonize people when you are constantly surrounded by people who are not demons.

—

On to Biden since 1973

Submitted by UntimelyRippd on Sat, 10/13/2018 - 1:32pm

i doubt that misogyny is going to some day

@doh1304
disappear, because it emerges from a few simple realities:

a. Men desperately want something that only women can give them.
b. A meaningful fraction of men aren't particularly deserving of it.
c. Even those who are deserving of it are often obliged to prostrate themselves in some way in order to obtain it.

What these 3 realities add up to is that, even given our current built-in social, economic and legal inequalities that give men unequal power and authority versus women, some women wield enormous power over some men. And those men resent it. Should we ever accomplish anything even approximating equality of social, economic and legal status, there will be a whole lot more women wielding enormous power over a whole lot more men. And those men will resent it.

There are some problems that simply have no perfect, permanent solution, and this is one of them.

—

The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Submitted by Anja Geitz on Sat, 10/13/2018 - 1:42pm

A disclaimer of sorts might be helpful

As in these are the "realities" according to your worldview. Which may or may not be colored by your own experiences with women, relegating them into more of the opinion criteria than actual reality.

—

There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

Submitted by UntimelyRippd on Sat, 10/13/2018 - 3:35pm

if you believe you can refute any one of those three

@Anja Geitz
points, you are welcome to offer your refutation. i assert that not only are all three, as i stated them, clearly true, prima facie, but they are relatively conservative in their breadth. for example, item "b", which speaks in terms of what is or is not deserved, doesn't address the existence of men whose basic moral character might be unimpeachable, but who for various other reasons are fundamentally unattractive to women -- or attractive in a fashion sufficiently rare as to make the finding of a mate effectively impossible.

i also find it interesting that you thought i ought perhaps to add qualifications having to do with my own experience of women, when what i was talking about -- what my three points are all about -- is the experience of men. and no, not all men are alike, but i did not assert that all men are and will always be misogynists either.

what i consider indisputable is that to the extent that a society manages to grant women the simple, fundamental right to autonomy with respect to their bodies, it correspondingly must be granting each individual woman power over any and all men who desire her physically. I have been occasionally subjected to condescending lectures from a handful of men projecting onto every extant Y chromosome their (self-perceived) capacity for virtue with respect to their interest in women. Regardless of the existence of a few such smug scolds, the reality for almost all men (as clearly expressed in ten thousand years of art and literature and politics and religion) is this: Male sexual desire is an unending and unforgiving hunger, and the pursuit of its satiation can/will lead the average man into violating almost any principle he imagined himself to hold (to say nothing of acting with outright stupidity). That is why it gives women extraordinary power over men.

The human sex drive (male and female) is not a cultural construct, it is basic to our behavior, ancient beyond our imaginations; its earliest biochemical manifestations probably predate anything that can be thought of as consciousness, even the marginal consciousness that some might ascribe to an earthworm. How to handle it is one of the primary concerns of any and every human "society" of which I have ever read. Most of those societies seem to have handled it by stripping women, to varying degrees, of their autonomy; one presumes this is because most societies emerge in a context where might makes right, and men have the physical power to impose a settlement that places most of the burdens and responsibilities on women.

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Submitted by Anja Geitz on Sun, 10/14/2018 - 2:47am

How illuminating

Male sexual desire is an unending and unforgiving hunger, and the pursuit of its satiation can/will lead the average man into violating almost any principle he imagined himself to hold (to say nothing of acting with outright stupidity). That is why it gives women extraordinary power over men.

Would this be the same "power" a woman supposedly has when fending off unwanted advances in the workplace, in the classroom, at the park, at the beach, waiting for the train, walking down the street, or just anywhere she goes?

Lordy! My mind is just bursting with the possibilities this "power" of mine will afford me...

#8.1.1 points, you are welcome to offer your refutation. i assert that not only are all three, as i stated them, clearly true, prima facie, but they are relatively conservative in their breadth. for example, item "b", which speaks in terms of what is or is not deserved, doesn't address the existence of men whose basic moral character might be unimpeachable, but who for various other reasons are fundamentally unattractive to women -- or attractive in a fashion sufficiently rare as to make the finding of a mate effectively impossible. i also find it interesting that you thought i ought perhaps to add qualifications having to do with my own experience of women, when what i was talking about -- what my three points are all about -- is the experience of men. and no, not all men are alike, but i did not assert that all men are and will always be misogynists either. what i consider indisputable is that to the extent that a society manages to grant women the simple, fundamental right to autonomy with respect to their bodies, it correspondingly must be granting each individual woman power over any and all men who desire her physically. I have been occasionally subjected to condescending lectures from a handful of men projecting onto every extant Y chromosome their (self-perceived) capacity for virtue with respect to their interest in women. Regardless of the existence of a few such smug scolds, the reality for almost all men (as clearly expressed in ten thousand years of art and literature and politics and religion) is this: Male sexual desire is an unending and unforgiving hunger, and the pursuit of its satiation can/will lead the average man into violating almost any principle he imagined himself to hold (to say nothing of acting with outright stupidity). That is why it gives women extraordinary power over men. The human sex drive (male and female) is not a cultural construct, it is basic to our behavior, ancient beyond our imaginations; its earliest biochemical manifestations probably predate anything that can be thought of as consciousness, even the marginal consciousness that some might ascribe to an earthworm. How to handle it is one of the primary concerns of any and every human "society" of which I have ever read. Most of those societies seem to have handled it by stripping women, to varying degrees, of their autonomy; one presumes this is because most societies emerge in a context where might makes right, and men have the physical power to impose a settlement that places most of the burdens and responsibilities on women.

—

There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

Submitted by UntimelyRippd on Sun, 10/14/2018 - 10:15am

your retort does not address what i'm saying.

@Anja Geitz
In fact, it ignores what i am saying -- in particular, my final paragraph.

My whole point is exactly that men create -- largely by violence, implicit or explicit -- societies whose norms and institutions specifically thwart the power that women would otherwise exert over them. However, because most men are not complete pricks, such structures and institutions do not free most men from the reality of their situation -- which is, again, that they desperately want something that they cannot have unless they can persuade a woman (often a particular woman, often almost any woman at all) to supply it. Even for those who are reasonably successful at it, even for those who win to themselves a long-term, willing and adored partner, this reality does not change.

It cannot be news to you that in many/most/practically-all relationships, there are occasions when women use their sexual power either to obtain from their mates concessions, or to punish their mates for transgressions. They can do this because, even should the culture give men the explicit legal right to force the matter (as ours once did), most men don't want to do violence to the women they love. Indeed, most men aren't particularly thrilled to have sex with a partner who doesn't want it. Perhaps you suppose your own relationship(s) to have been free of this particular dynamic, and perhaps you are right, but that hardly matters, because there is nothing more epistemologically dangerous than projecting one's personal experience and psychology out onto the rest of humanity and using that as a basis for analysis of what has been, what is, and what might be, as regards human society.

In an impossible-to-achieve fully Utopian egalitarian society, one in which women had full legal autonomy over their persons (including, somehow, complete and inviolable physical security) as well as full economic security for themselves and their children, men would quickly become the (ineffectively resentful) slaves of women. In such a context, women would have all the power, and there would be men who would hate them for it, with a hatred that would dwarf the misogyny we see in our current society.

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Submitted by Anja Geitz on Mon, 10/15/2018 - 12:35am

Even within the fields of philosophy and psychology

there are conflicting theories. Unfortunately, I don't believe your premise has met the standards for what constitutes a legitimate contribution to either field.

You used a lot of words to essentially say it's all in the biology and men can't change. I reject that notion. If the human mind is capable of neuroplasticity, if stroke victims can redirect brain activity away from the damaged area to another area, surely we can raise boys into men who can manage their tortured preoccupation with erotic satisfaction.

We can go around and around with this. Or not. Entirely your choice.

#8.1.1.1.1 In fact, it ignores what i am saying -- in particular, my final paragraph. My whole point is exactly that men create -- largely by violence, implicit or explicit -- societies whose norms and institutions specifically thwart the power that women would otherwise exert over them. However, because most men are not complete pricks, such structures and institutions do not free most men from the reality of their situation -- which is, again, that they desperately want something that they cannot have unless they can persuade a woman (often a particular woman, often almost any woman at all) to supply it. Even for those who are reasonably successful at it, even for those who win to themselves a long-term, willing and adored partner, this reality does not change. It cannot be news to you that in many/most/practically-all relationships, there are occasions when women use their sexual power either to obtain from their mates concessions, or to punish their mates for transgressions. They can do this because, even should the culture give men the explicit legal right to force the matter (as ours once did), most men don't want to do violence to the women they love. Indeed, most men aren't particularly thrilled to have sex with a partner who doesn't want it. Perhaps you suppose your own relationship(s) to have been free of this particular dynamic, and perhaps you are right, but that hardly matters, because there is nothing more epistemologically dangerous than projecting one's personal experience and psychology out onto the rest of humanity and using that as a basis for analysis of what has been, what is, and what might be, as regards human society. In an impossible-to-achieve fully Utopian egalitarian society, one in which women had full legal autonomy over their persons (including, somehow, complete and inviolable physical security) as well as full economic security for themselves and their children, men would quickly become the (ineffectively resentful) slaves of women. In such a context, women would have all the power, and there would be men who would hate them for it, with a hatred that would dwarf the misogyny we see in our current society.

—

There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

Submitted by janis b on Mon, 10/15/2018 - 12:49am

Love this comment, zoebear

For me it fully encompasses the heart of the matter, with a lot of heart and promise.

Submitted by UntimelyRippd on Mon, 10/15/2018 - 5:09pm

as soon as you can successfully train a human

@Anja Geitz
being to not experience thirst while eating a salty pretzel every fifteen minutes and drinking nothing from 9 till 5, i'll begin to believe that our plasticity extends as far as your optimism implies.

I can't imagine what sort of "training" might be involved in somehow quashing in young men (or anyone) such a deep and fundamental drive as the sex drive, but i don't think it would be pretty. Talking about feelings and respect, role-playing, discussions of ethics, empathy training, and so on -- none of these are known to be effective for addressing instinctive responses. Aversive therapy might work -- administer an electric shock every time you detect (somehow) a response to the sight of a female, but I don't think this is what you have in mind.

In fact, I think that the difficulty we're encountering in this conversation is that you are talking about higher-order behaviors (e.g., harassing a woman on the street), and I'm talking about something much, much lower. i imagine we probably can train men not to harass women on the street (though even there, I suspect that for many individuals it's likely to be more a matter of active and coercive repression, than some sort of consciousness raising). What we can't do is make them not desire women, and it is their desire that is at the root of the conflict between men and women.

Sometime yesterday I realized that I hadn't properly addressed your specific examples of situations in which the notion of you having power over males was ridiculous. You are absolutely correct, in those contexts. The only context in which a woman's sexuality offers her real power over a man is when there's some possibility that they might actually have sex, and she has the autonomy to refuse. Of course, in our culture (and most cultures) that's also the context in which most sexualized interactions between a man and a woman happen. Here's something I don't think we see very often: A man directing overt, unsolicited sexual aggression at a random woman he knows he will never touch when he might be overheard by a non-random woman he has any hope of wooing.

Here's a thought experiment.
Imagine that you were only allowed to eat if you could persuade somebody else to eat with you.
Imagine further that the act of sharing a meal with someone was imbued, both biologically and culturally, with considerable emotional and social significance, such that most of the time you were obliged to demonstrate to the other person that you deserved to share that meal.
Imagine further that you belong to a biological subclass of people who could only share a meal with members of an entirely separate biological subclass of people.
Imagine further that in general (though not invariably), members of your subclass felt hungry more often and more acutely than members of the other subclass, so that even if you managed to find a long-term dining partner, you were nonetheless going to be hungry most of the time, unless you badgered that partner into dining frequently enough that you weren't hungry most of the time. It's worth noting that you would presumably like your dining partner, so that you wouldn't feel good about the badgering, and while the meal would take the edge off your hunger, it would also be unsatisfying in an important and meaningful way. (Meanwhile, unbeknownst to you, your partner, having been dragooned without enthusiasm into dining, might express delight at the delicious food while surreptitiously slipping bites from the plate into a napkin while thinking about, oh, I don't know, whether the kids have a dentist appointment next week. And resenting you for the whole business.)

That is the experience of the typical human male, the experience you hope to somehow train away, so that you have a population of males who somehow don't particularly care whether they have sex, except of course in the moments when a female, spontaneously and entirely of her own volition, expresses an explicit interest -- at which moment, we can hope, the men will be filled with a gentle yet overwhelming urgent passion.

This is simply not the reality of our biology, neither men's nor women's.

—

Submitted by Anja Geitz on Mon, 10/15/2018 - 11:25pm

Early MIT studies on neuroplasticity

Included recording the brain activity of Tibetan Buddhist monks who had been meditating for most of their lives. One such subject had begun his practice as a young boy under the instruction of his father. When he was only 13 years old he was inspired to begin a 3 year long meditation retreat.

During a meditation on compassion, neuroscientists recorded the neural activity of this monk in a key center of the brain's limbic system, also known as the area that deals with emotions. What they found was impressive. Neural activity in the area we could call the "sweet spot" where emotions of well being, happiness, and general lack of negativity and anxiety reside, jumped 700 to 800 percent. For ordinary subjects in the study, volunteers who had just begun to meditate, that same area increased its activity by a mere 10 to 15 percent.

I can't imagine what sort of "training" might be involved in somehow quashing in young men (or anyone) such a deep and fundamental drive as the sex drive, but i don't think it would be pretty.

I also think it's telling that the word you heard when I suggested raising our boys to better manage their sex drive, was to "quash" it when my imagination for their lives was so much more expansive than the one you imagined. Particularly all the other areas of their lives they could expand and master if they could master their mind instead of letting their mind master them.

As the Dharma teaches...

"By whom and how were the weapons of hell created?"

---Santideva, The Bodhicaryavatara

"Suffering follows a negative thought as the wheels of a cart follow the oxen that draw it"

---the Dhammapada

"A disciplined mind invites true joy"

---the Dhammapada

#8.1.1.1.1.1.1 being to not experience thirst while eating a salty pretzel every fifteen minutes and drinking nothing from 9 till 5, i'll begin to believe that our plasticity extends as far as your optimism implies. I can't imagine what sort of "training" might be involved in somehow quashing in young men (or anyone) such a deep and fundamental drive as the sex drive, but i don't think it would be pretty. Talking about feelings and respect, role-playing, discussions of ethics, empathy training, and so on -- none of these are known to be effective for addressing instinctive responses. Aversive therapy might work -- administer an electric shock every time you detect (somehow) a response to the sight of a female, but I don't think this is what you have in mind. In fact, I think that the difficulty we're encountering in this conversation is that you are talking about higher-order behaviors (e.g., harassing a woman on the street), and I'm talking about something much, much lower. i imagine we probably can train men not to harass women on the street (though even there, I suspect that for many individuals it's likely to be more a matter of active and coercive repression, than some sort of consciousness raising). What we can't do is make them not desire women, and it is their desire that is at the root of the conflict between men and women. Sometime yesterday I realized that I hadn't properly addressed your specific examples of situations in which the notion of you having power over males was ridiculous. You are absolutely correct, in those contexts. The only context in which a woman's sexuality offers her real power over a man is when there's some possibility that they might actually have sex, and she has the autonomy to refuse. Of course, in our culture (and most cultures) that's also the context in which most sexualized interactions between a man and a woman happen. Here's something I don't think we see very often: A man directing overt, unsolicited sexual aggression at a random woman he knows he will never touch when he might be overheard by a non-random woman he has any hope of wooing. Here's a thought experiment. Imagine that you were only allowed to eat if you could persuade somebody else to eat with you. Imagine further that the act of sharing a meal with someone was imbued, both biologically and culturally, with considerable emotional and social significance, such that most of the time you were obliged to demonstrate to the other person that you deserved to share that meal. Imagine further that you belong to a biological subclass of people who could only share a meal with members of an entirely separate biological subclass of people. Imagine further that in general (though not invariably), members of your subclass felt hungry more often and more acutely than members of the other subclass, so that even if you managed to find a long-term dining partner, you were nonetheless going to be hungry most of the time, unless you badgered that partner into dining frequently enough that you weren't hungry most of the time. It's worth noting that you would presumably like your dining partner, so that you wouldn't feel good about the badgering, and while the meal would take the edge off your hunger, it would also be unsatisfying in an important and meaningful way. (Meanwhile, unbeknownst to you, your partner, having been dragooned without enthusiasm into dining, might express delight at the delicious food while surreptitiously slipping bites from the plate into a napkin while thinking about, oh, I don't know, whether the kids have a dentist appointment next week. And resenting you for the whole business.) That is the experience of the typical human male, the experience you hope to somehow train away, so that you have a population of males who somehow don't particularly care whether they have sex, except of course in the moments when a female, spontaneously and entirely of her own volition, expresses an explicit interest -- at which moment, we can hope, the men will be filled with a gentle yet overwhelming urgent passion. This is simply not the reality of our biology, neither men's nor women's.

—

There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

Submitted by UntimelyRippd on Tue, 10/16/2018 - 1:00am

You continue to concern yourself with

@Anja Geitz
how men manage their sex drive, and I'm talking about how they experience it. You refuse to comprehend. When I compare it to hunger, I'm not being cute and I'm not being hyperbolic -- it is a craving, and it never really goes away for long, especially in the presence of women. Do you not know that almost all of us (or certainly far more than half, especially young men) are "managing" our sex drive All. The. Fucking. Time? From a hundred to a thousand times a day, each of us must shake our heads and refocus our thoughts away from the one most urgent concern bubbling up out of our limbic system. If we're not heads down in our work, but in a mixed-gender social environment (including in the workplace), we are thinking about sex anywhere from a few times an hour to a few times a minute, depending on what else is going on around us. All. The. Fucking. Time. Every day of our lives, from the moment the testosterone kicks in for realz to, uh, well, I don't know really, some men seem to be there right to the bitter end. And what do you offer me? "Well, if you spend your entire childhood in rigorous training you can learn to " ... uh, what, exactly? You say you're not about quashing anything, but that is exactly what this child is supposedly able to do. I'm guessing he didn't get to spend a lot of time playing with Lego or chasing other kids around the monastery in games of freeze tag or chasing pop flies that the older monks hit for him, but hey -- at least he didn't suffer from being human. Regardless, your story says nothing about how that boy felt when he turned fifteen and somehow found himself in the company of young women wearing thong bikinis. Or for that matter how he felt if he hadn't eaten for a week, or drunk for a day, or peed since before he went to bed the previous night. But hey, maybe he was so damned cool that he could just chill out and meditate all of those urges away, not to mention the itch behind his shoulder blades and the tickle in his throat from that rhinovirus and the blinding headache from his migraines.

So, fine, dream your dream of a planet where 8 billion people are all raised to not give a fuck because they're so blissfully spaced out on Nirvana and whatnot. I'm going to continue to live in the real world, where people are mostly just people, and experience their humanity as the animals that they actually are. You say you're not about "quashing" anything, but for myself, I'm not big on philosophies that deny our nature, our perception, and our experience, setting us above and outside of our physical reality. (and no, i don't buy the new woo of physics that postulates, based on some mathematical this and that, that all of reality is an illusion -- as if that were actually a new idea anyway, rather than millennia old.)

I don't know if you've noticed, by the way, but parts of this response marked the first time in this whole conversation when I've said anything that could be construed as "defending" men. Until now, all I've been doing is saying something really simple: When somebody has something you want, they have power over you; and to the extent they exercise that power, you will resent them; and women have something men want. That's my whole argument. Your response has not been novel -- A denial of the essential nature of male sexual desire, coupled with a contempt for what you construe as their inability to manage that desire. Treating the desire men experience for sexual gratification as of a kind with the desire men experience for a really great cheeseburger or a set of Craftsman socket wrenches (not the new junk, but the old, classic Sears made-in-america guaranteed-for-life-no-questions-asked Craftsman socket wrenches that your grandfather gave your dad when he got his first new car) is just self-righteous condescension. So again, but now thrown down as a challenge: When you can eat a dry, salty pretzel every fifteen minutes of your workday, drink nothing, and not experience thirst; and when you can do that every single day of your life -- then you'll at least be in a position to argue that what you claim is possible might be possible. And let me be really clear about that italicized phrase: It is not enough that you are able to somehow work through the thirst, still getting your work done with your usual competence and efficiency. That is what men already do. What you must do is not feel thirsty. Not even if your coworker keeps a 1-gallon pitcher of lemonade and ice cubes on her desk, from which she occasionally pours an 8 oz glass (clink clinkety clink) and then guzzles it down (glug glug), then crunches her way through the ice cubes for the next five minutes. Because if you do feel thirsty, well, you're just an overgrown child who needs to learn to control her urges, and if -- god forbid -- you look up and gaze longingly as she fills that glass, you're worse, you're a thought criminal who needs to be sent back to a re-education camp.

So yeah. Good luck finding that Nirvana. Meanwhile, I'll be here in Samsara, feeling dissatisfied about nearly everything, because easily satisfied animals generally don't survive to reproduce, and all of my ancestors, going right back to the first squirmy things that had some nerve cells that could calculate the conditions of their environment well enough to get MORE MORE MORE, did survive, and I inherited their penchant for dissatisfaction.

—

Submitted by Anja Geitz on Tue, 10/16/2018 - 5:41am

Ultimately, we choose the lives we lead

So there can be nothing of value I may add if you believe being dissatisfied about everything is an effective tool for survival.

As far as your challenge goes, I can in fact lay claim to having done some work wrestling with my own demons. Several years ago I was diagnosed with a bi-polar disorder and put on medication. After suffering for 3 years from the horrific side effects of the medication, I made the decision to use my practice to help me find a way off the pharmacological hamster wheel I was trapped in. I began with 3 hours of chanting and meditation every day for about six months. Eventually, I was able to keep my mood swings closer to a base line by consciously "watching" my brain patterns. Not unlike being an orchestra conductor inside your own head. It was very exacting that first year, but now the re-direction comes as second nature. I still have to chant and meditate everyday but I'm finally off the medication.

In addition to being diagnosed with a bi-polar disorder, came a surprisingly unintended "gift". Because I was forced to learn how to re-direct my brain patterns, I was able to use this skill in other areas of my life. At the age of 45 years old, I changed careers, moved across the country, and carved out a life that I would never have imagined for myself years before. I attribute that largely to being able to fight off the corrosively negative thoughts and fears that were keeping me in a city, in a job, and in a relationship that was killing me emotionally.

I was so convinced I would never be happy again, I even contemplated suicide. You might say my mind was living inside a cell with four stone walls and no trap door, but I like to compare it to the lens of a camera where only a pinhole of light is coming through. Since I couldn't see past the pinhole, I was convinced that nothing actually existed beyond the pinhole, and it was only after forcing myself to re-think my assumptions did I learn that I was wrong.

Maybe that experience resonates with you. Or maybe it doesn't. In either case, you will never convince me that we as a species are static.

#8.1.1.1.1.1.1.2.1 how men manage their sex drive, and I'm talking about how they experience it. You refuse to comprehend. When I compare it to hunger, I'm not being cute and I'm not being hyperbolic -- it is a craving, and it never really goes away for long, especially in the presence of women. Do you not know that almost all of us (or certainly far more than half, especially young men) are "managing" our sex drive All. The. Fucking. Time? From a hundred to a thousand times a day, each of us must shake our heads and refocus our thoughts away from the one most urgent concern bubbling up out of our limbic system. If we're not heads down in our work, but in a mixed-gender social environment (including in the workplace), we are thinking about sex anywhere from a few times an hour to a few times a minute, depending on what else is going on around us. All. The. Fucking. Time. Every day of our lives, from the moment the testosterone kicks in for realz to, uh, well, I don't know really, some men seem to be there right to the bitter end. And what do you offer me? "Well, if you spend your entire childhood in rigorous training you can learn to " ... uh, what, exactly? You say you're not about quashing anything, but that is exactly what this child is supposedly able to do. I'm guessing he didn't get to spend a lot of time playing with Lego or chasing other kids around the monastery in games of freeze tag or chasing pop flies that the older monks hit for him, but hey -- at least he didn't suffer from being human. Regardless, your story says nothing about how that boy felt when he turned fifteen and somehow found himself in the company of young women wearing thong bikinis. Or for that matter how he felt if he hadn't eaten for a week, or drunk for a day, or peed since before he went to bed the previous night. But hey, maybe he was so damned cool that he could just chill out and meditate all of those urges away, not to mention the itch behind his shoulder blades and the tickle in his throat from that rhinovirus and the blinding headache from his migraines. So, fine, dream your dream of a planet where 8 billion people are all raised to not give a fuck because they're so blissfully spaced out on Nirvana and whatnot. I'm going to continue to live in the real world, where people are mostly just people, and experience their humanity as the animals that they actually are. You say you're not about "quashing" anything, but for myself, I'm not big on philosophies that deny our nature, our perception, and our experience, setting us above and outside of our physical reality. (and no, i don't buy the new woo of physics that postulates, based on some mathematical this and that, that all of reality is an illusion -- as if that were actually a new idea anyway, rather than millennia old.) I don't know if you've noticed, by the way, but parts of this response marked the first time in this whole conversation when I've said anything that could be construed as "defending" men. Until now, all I've been doing is saying something really simple: When somebody has something you want, they have power over you; and to the extent they exercise that power, you will resent them; and women have something men want. That's my whole argument. Your response has not been novel -- A denial of the essential nature of male sexual desire, coupled with a contempt for what you construe as their inability to manage that desire. Treating the desire men experience for sexual gratification as of a kind with the desire men experience for a really great cheeseburger or a set of Craftsman socket wrenches (not the new junk, but the old, classic Sears made-in-america guaranteed-for-life-no-questions-asked Craftsman socket wrenches that your grandfather gave your dad when he got his first new car) is just self-righteous condescension. So again, but now thrown down as a challenge: When you can eat a dry, salty pretzel every fifteen minutes of your workday, drink nothing, and not experience thirst; and when you can do that every single day of your life -- then you'll at least be in a position to argue that what you claim is possible might be possible. And let me be really clear about that italicized phrase: It is not enough that you are able to somehow work through the thirst, still getting your work done with your usual competence and efficiency. That is what men already do. What you must do is not feel thirsty. Not even if your coworker keeps a 1-gallon pitcher of lemonade and ice cubes on her desk, from which she occasionally pours an 8 oz glass (clink clinkety clink) and then guzzles it down (glug glug), then crunches her way through the ice cubes for the next five minutes. Because if you do feel thirsty, well, you're just an overgrown child who needs to learn to control her urges, and if -- god forbid -- you look up and gaze longingly as she fills that glass, you're worse, you're a thought criminal who needs to be sent back to a re-education camp. So yeah. Good luck finding that Nirvana. Meanwhile, I'll be here in Samsara, feeling dissatisfied about nearly everything, because easily satisfied animals generally don't survive to reproduce, and all of my ancestors, going right back to the first squirmy things that had some nerve cells that could calculate the conditions of their environment well enough to get MORE MORE MORE, did survive, and I inherited their penchant for dissatisfaction.

—

There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

Submitted by janis b on Tue, 10/16/2018 - 2:24am

“In either case, you will never convince me

Some unstatic pinhole photography.

that we as a species are static".

#8.1.1.1.1.1.1.2.1.1 So there can be nothing of value I may add if you believe being dissatisfied about everything is an effective tool for survival. As far as your challenge goes, I can in fact lay claim to having done some work wrestling with my own demons. Several years ago I was diagnosed with a bi-polar disorder and put on medication. After suffering for 3 years from the horrific side effects of the medication, I made the decision to use my practice to help me find a way off the pharmacological hamster wheel I was trapped in. I began with 3 hours of chanting and meditation every day for about six months. Eventually, I was able to keep my mood swings closer to a base line by consciously "watching" my brain patterns. Not unlike being an orchestra conductor inside your own head. It was very exacting that first year, but now the re-direction comes as second nature. I still have to chant and meditate everyday but I'm finally off the medication. In addition to being diagnosed with a bi-polar disorder, came a surprisingly unintended "gift". Because I was forced to learn how to re-direct my brain patterns, I was able to use this skill in other areas of my life. At the age of 45 years old, I changed careers, moved across the country, and carved out a life that I would never have imagined for myself years before. I attribute that largely to being able to fight off the corrosively negative thoughts and fears that were keeping me in a city, in a job, and in a relationship that was killing me emotionally. I was so convinced I would never be happy again, I even contemplated suicide. You might say my mind was living inside a cell with four stone walls and no trap door, but I like to compare it to the lens of a camera where only a pinhole of light is coming through. Since I couldn't see past the pinhole, I was convinced that nothing actually existed beyond the pinhole, and it was only after forcing myself to re-think my assumptions did I learn that I was wrong. Maybe that experience resonates with you. Or maybe it doesn't. In either case, you will never convince me that we as a species are static.

Submitted by Anja Geitz on Tue, 10/16/2018 - 2:36am

Gorgeous

What is it? And where was it taken?

—

There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

Submitted by janis b on Tue, 10/16/2018 - 2:42am

I don't know

but here are some more of his gorgeous images.

Submitted by janis b on Tue, 10/16/2018 - 2:45am

California, somewhere?

Submitted by Anja Geitz on Tue, 10/16/2018 - 3:14am

They are so dramatic

The "pinhole" technique gives the lighting a chiaroscuro effect, which I remember the both of us being great admirers of the Italian master of the original chiaroscuro

(I also enjoyed you taking my camera metaphor and linking your comment to these photos)

—

There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

Submitted by UntimelyRippd on Tue, 10/16/2018 - 5:26pm

What I believe is that we experience our basic 'needs'

@Anja Geitz
because for the first billion years of our lineage, the drives to satisfy those needs were absolutely necessary for survival, with the result that we are biologically constructed to experience those drives, whether or not they have any current value. This default condition of dissatisfaction is quite clearly not conducive to survival in a modern society where, for example, sugar calories are superabundant. I'm not advocating anything, I'm just observing.

#8.1.1.1.1.1.1.2.1.1 So there can be nothing of value I may add if you believe being dissatisfied about everything is an effective tool for survival. As far as your challenge goes, I can in fact lay claim to having done some work wrestling with my own demons. Several years ago I was diagnosed with a bi-polar disorder and put on medication. After suffering for 3 years from the horrific side effects of the medication, I made the decision to use my practice to help me find a way off the pharmacological hamster wheel I was trapped in. I began with 3 hours of chanting and meditation every day for about six months. Eventually, I was able to keep my mood swings closer to a base line by consciously "watching" my brain patterns. Not unlike being an orchestra conductor inside your own head. It was very exacting that first year, but now the re-direction comes as second nature. I still have to chant and meditate everyday but I'm finally off the medication. In addition to being diagnosed with a bi-polar disorder, came a surprisingly unintended "gift". Because I was forced to learn how to re-direct my brain patterns, I was able to use this skill in other areas of my life. At the age of 45 years old, I changed careers, moved across the country, and carved out a life that I would never have imagined for myself years before. I attribute that largely to being able to fight off the corrosively negative thoughts and fears that were keeping me in a city, in a job, and in a relationship that was killing me emotionally. I was so convinced I would never be happy again, I even contemplated suicide. You might say my mind was living inside a cell with four stone walls and no trap door, but I like to compare it to the lens of a camera where only a pinhole of light is coming through. Since I couldn't see past the pinhole, I was convinced that nothing actually existed beyond the pinhole, and it was only after forcing myself to re-think my assumptions did I learn that I was wrong. Maybe that experience resonates with you. Or maybe it doesn't. In either case, you will never convince me that we as a species are static.

—

Submitted by Anja Geitz on Mon, 10/15/2018 - 11:37pm

P.S. Of sorts

I gave you a thumbs up not because I agree with your premise, but because I feel you are making a respectful attempt at having a dialogue with me about it.

#8.1.1.1.1.1.1 being to not experience thirst while eating a salty pretzel every fifteen minutes and drinking nothing from 9 till 5, i'll begin to believe that our plasticity extends as far as your optimism implies. I can't imagine what sort of "training" might be involved in somehow quashing in young men (or anyone) such a deep and fundamental drive as the sex drive, but i don't think it would be pretty. Talking about feelings and respect, role-playing, discussions of ethics, empathy training, and so on -- none of these are known to be effective for addressing instinctive responses. Aversive therapy might work -- administer an electric shock every time you detect (somehow) a response to the sight of a female, but I don't think this is what you have in mind. In fact, I think that the difficulty we're encountering in this conversation is that you are talking about higher-order behaviors (e.g., harassing a woman on the street), and I'm talking about something much, much lower. i imagine we probably can train men not to harass women on the street (though even there, I suspect that for many individuals it's likely to be more a matter of active and coercive repression, than some sort of consciousness raising). What we can't do is make them not desire women, and it is their desire that is at the root of the conflict between men and women. Sometime yesterday I realized that I hadn't properly addressed your specific examples of situations in which the notion of you having power over males was ridiculous. You are absolutely correct, in those contexts. The only context in which a woman's sexuality offers her real power over a man is when there's some possibility that they might actually have sex, and she has the autonomy to refuse. Of course, in our culture (and most cultures) that's also the context in which most sexualized interactions between a man and a woman happen. Here's something I don't think we see very often: A man directing overt, unsolicited sexual aggression at a random woman he knows he will never touch when he might be overheard by a non-random woman he has any hope of wooing. Here's a thought experiment. Imagine that you were only allowed to eat if you could persuade somebody else to eat with you. Imagine further that the act of sharing a meal with someone was imbued, both biologically and culturally, with considerable emotional and social significance, such that most of the time you were obliged to demonstrate to the other person that you deserved to share that meal. Imagine further that you belong to a biological subclass of people who could only share a meal with members of an entirely separate biological subclass of people. Imagine further that in general (though not invariably), members of your subclass felt hungry more often and more acutely than members of the other subclass, so that even if you managed to find a long-term dining partner, you were nonetheless going to be hungry most of the time, unless you badgered that partner into dining frequently enough that you weren't hungry most of the time. It's worth noting that you would presumably like your dining partner, so that you wouldn't feel good about the badgering, and while the meal would take the edge off your hunger, it would also be unsatisfying in an important and meaningful way. (Meanwhile, unbeknownst to you, your partner, having been dragooned without enthusiasm into dining, might express delight at the delicious food while surreptitiously slipping bites from the plate into a napkin while thinking about, oh, I don't know, whether the kids have a dentist appointment next week. And resenting you for the whole business.) That is the experience of the typical human male, the experience you hope to somehow train away, so that you have a population of males who somehow don't particularly care whether they have sex, except of course in the moments when a female, spontaneously and entirely of her own volition, expresses an explicit interest -- at which moment, we can hope, the men will be filled with a gentle yet overwhelming urgent passion. This is simply not the reality of our biology, neither men's nor women's.

—

There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

Submitted by janis b on Tue, 10/16/2018 - 1:47am

...

[video:https://youtu.be/pHlSE9j5FGY]

[video:https://youtu.be/S44d_TvzIH8]

Submitted by Anja Geitz on Tue, 10/16/2018 - 2:31am

Nice tunes Janis