Or, I don't have a problem with my life. You do.
"I'm curious, LW. What would you say to people that consider this a co-depenant mental problem? You know that some would say that you just happened to hook up with someone who has a complimentary emotional flaw, right?
Granted, many also call homosexuality a mental or emotional problem. Do you see it as the same kind of thing? Do you think it is just something you are, irrespective of your experiences and mental adjustment, or something that came from how you were treated earlier in life?"
BakerStreet.
BakerStreet posted this in response to a comment made by my wife (LW) on another thread in which she's involved, having to do with submissive behaviour in women. As such things tend to do the discussion there has dipped its toes into the areas of S&M, and 'abuse'.
The reactions are of the usual kind - cries of outrage, shrieks of horror, hysterical accusations (having more to do with the fears and desires of those making the accusations than with anything said in the discussion) involving the defense of rape, and a veritable pantheon of shibboleths, cliches, fears, phobias, guilt, resentment and angst - BakerStreet's comment being possibly the most rational while exemplifying the usual array of American neuroses that surrounds anything to do with sex.
I'm not really concerned with the thread that sparked BakerStreet's comment but with the comment itself (quoted above) - but I thought a little backstory necessary as introduction to the comments I have to make on BakerStreet's ideas.
The first assumption he makes (in common with everyone else) is that a relationship that overtly expresses aspects of domination and servitude is 'problematic'. Like most, he seems not to see that the problem most often is with the observer, not with those actively involved. I've written in several places on here, and in a variety of ways, that such relationships are characteristic of human history (looked at personally - as in the personal is the political - or more 'globally'). I see no problem in our relationship and neither does LW.
BakerStreet postulates where others insist - but what he postulates - co-dependency, childhood abuse, or some more general flaw originating in experience and 'mental adjustment' - is no different, merely less insistent. This is the first area in which his comment is problematic. It takes for granted that its LW and I that have a problem, rather than he himself. A second difficulty is that in his comment BakerStreet proposes a dichotomy between past experience and mental adjustment, and 'sometthing that came from how you were treated earlier in life'.
Consider: what is there in our emotional, sexual, intellectual lives that wasn't formed by our previous experiences and our mental adjustments to it? Put another way, what is there in us that does not come to us from our earlier lives? Of course, to be able to appreciate what my question is asking, you have to take a step back from 'the normal' and see it as something we make, on a day to day basis, as part of the conversation that every society has with itself as to what constitutes it, what defines it.
None of us exists in a vacuum and if we're the products of our own experiences and our mental adjustments to it, we're also a product of the point of time which our lives span, the moment in history that our lives occupy, the intersection of everything we think we are with everything everyone else thinks they are, with everything everyone else thinks we are.
The fact that what we are exists somewhere between what we think and what everyone else thinks (whether in terms of individuals or nations and societies) doesn't mean that as individuals we don't play a role in negotiating that reality with others. And because it's a negotiation reality, normality, is not a factual place we occupy, its a debated and debatable place (in the old sense of a site of battle) that we move through. Some never take up more than one position or employ more than one strategy (those who see 'normality' itself as unproblematic) others occupy many places and employ many strategies.
Myself, I've come to follow desire as a guide, to employ reason as a means to understand what must be done to satisfy desire, and will as the vehicle that carries me toward completion of those goals. Sexually, this modus vivendi translates into S&M, politically (as a philosophy and an understanding, rather than a form of activism) it translates into what I've called civil authoritarianism. Socially it translates into a form of play-acting that conceals what I am from my neighbours and co-workers. If they could see what I am they would not like what I am (since they are typically American in terms of their sexual neuroses and political fears) which, at this point, could only work to my detriment.
I am, you are, the product of your past experience and your mental adjustment to it. Just as BakerStreet is. There is no dichotomy between previous experience and mental adjustment to it, and our inheritance from our earlier lives. That is what we are.
BakerStreet employs a straw man of an argument, hoping to catch his correspondent out. In the terms of his question LW's condition (and by extension mine) is either a consequence of some trauma in the past (in which case our 'sickness' consists in being unable to overcome that trauma); or it is the product of some depraved nature, natural to us but a deviation, a depravity, in relation to the norm for such behaviours - in which case our problem lies in a lack of self-discipline with which to combat and resist this depravity.
He makes a false dichotomy on the basis of his preferred version of what is right, the assumption that what we do is 'wrong', and then waits for us to trap ourselves by responding to the question in those terms. But what we do is not 'wrong', no more than it is 'right'. It's a private matter that has nothing whatever to do with public questions of appropriate behaviour, and still less to do with questions that ought to be settled through criminal law.
His construction of the question in these terms is made explicit in his comments on homosexuality. He refers to the 'many' who think of homosexuality as a mental or emotional problem - whereas in fact it's actually the solution to a variety of mental and emotional problems, just as heterosexuality is another such solution - thus safely insulating himself from accusations of homophobia. But it's he who has framed this question, and framed it in these terms, making a problem out of 'deviant' sexual practices (in this case, S&M, homosexuality, and submissive behaviour) where no such problem exists - except in the minds of the average American sexual neurotic.
In a society of civilized adults sexual matters would be a matter of civility. It's no concern of mine, as a citizen, what gender of person my neighbour most wants sex with. The bedroom only becomes a matter of public concern where criminality is involved - and in all cases of sexual behaviour between consenting adults, no matter what form such behaviour takes, the criminal law should have nothing whatever to say. Private disapproval, on the part of no matter how many, ought not to be the basis of public law applicable to all.
The prurient, obsessive, intrusive fascination with sex displayed in the terrors of the American public (typified by the truly grotesques outcry over Janet Jackson's breast), it's horrors and palpitations over the appearance of 'Brokeback Mountain', is no basis on which to create law that affects all private citizens. It's an attitude of mind that finds its only proper home in the embarrassed, frightened sniggering of children in a schoolyard. Among children it's natural and to be expected. Among adults it's repugnant. And while BakerStreet's comment is adult and civil in one sense, I hear in it, as I often do in news shows, in American advertising, in political 'debate' here, the sniggering of frightened and embarrassed children, too immature to address such questions as they ought to be addressed.
I don't have a problem with my life (nor do I have a problem with yours). LW doesn't have a problem with her life (I leave it to her to say if she has a problem with your life or not).
The only one with a problem here is you.