Lingam massage – a few questions

No, I didn’t only pick the title in a desperate attempt to get my Google rankings up! I really, truly care about the subject

The standard recipe for lingam massage has been bothering me for some time already. As we all know, it was developed about 20 years ago by an American called Joe Kramer who worked with homosexuals in particular. Now I’m not too sure, but I would guess that the distribution of character types across the homosexual population differs from that of the male population as a whole. From my experience of homosexuals they are more likely to be oral or schizoid types. As we all know, also, the nature of the genital reaction in the male (and in the female too, but that is not my subject here) is very much a function of character type. The rigid and psychopathic types tend to show diminished penile sensitivity while the masochistic type is excessively sensitive. Oral and schizoid types are more likely to show erectile dysfunction.

This has got to have some consequences for how a masseur/se approaches the lingam massage. In my opinion, instead of taking over Kramer’s ideas, we should be experimenting a lot more and discovering what works, how and for whom. I don’t have any doubt that an experienced masseuse (allow me my preference for the feminine form) has developed somewhat of an intuition for this, and probably the growth in interest around prostate/anal massage reflects some of this intuition. Still it would be nice to pool experiences and learn more.

Speaking from the masochistic perspective, I believe there are essentially two points.

The first is the failure of the standard tantra+lingam massage ritual to address the pelvic armoring. This is rather skipped over, with inadequate attention to the perineum and the inguinal fold. Of course I appreciate that the tantra massage is a sensual massage and that it does not aim at deep tissue work, even emotional in nature. Therefore my criticism should be (and is) addressed to other modalities. Nonetheless, insofar as these areas form part of the wider erogenous zone involved in male sexual response, their exclusion in my view detracts from the holistic nature of the massage and has more to do with received ideas of male sexuality than any sound neuroerotic basis.

Secondly, one really should be trying to delay the moment of ejaculation in persons who tend to ejaculate prematurely, and this is in fact what one does in tantra massage. But it makes little sense to attempt to spread the energy into the abdominal and thoracic regions when the pelvic region itself is insufficiently charged. In this case, the energy will be unable in any case to move beyond it and remain on a low level.

In my experience of the massage and my male body, I have the sentiment that there is really something missing here and that we should be developing new scripts. I suspect this is true for other character types also, and also for the yoni massage (although since this is necessarily internal, it may be less flawed). I would very much welcome views on this topic from massage professionals and lovers of tantra massage!

Social incidence of sexual abuse

@phdinparenting on Twitter, the author of the simply great parenting blog www.phdinparenting.com (obligatory reading for all readers of my blog who have small children) reasonably enough asked me to back up my statement there – in response to her question on the subject – that approximately 100% of people had suffered from sexual abuse as children.

The answer doesn’t need a lot of space, but more than 140 characters for sure, so I am posting it here!

I have basically three reasons for making this statement (although I admit a certain residual hyperbole):

1. My experience in numerous personal development workshops, in which people who never suspected they had been the victims of sexual abuse, have realized through the therapeutic work, that in fact they had. This implies that any self-reported survey must underestimate the real incidence of the problem. (In any case, we also know that even people who ARE aware they have been the victims of sexual abuse, often do not talk about it, even anonymously).

2. Retrojection from people’s current behavior and attitudes to sex, based on my understanding of the psychoanalytic basis of such attitudes. Sexual neuroses are very widespread and must have their origin in pregenital sexual experience, even if (see the next point) no actual physical abuse has occurred. (Freud famously concluded from what he thought was overreporting of pregenital sexual abuse in therapeutic contexts that childhood sexual fantasies, and specifically the Oedipus complex, played a major role in the development of neurosis. I am not so sure that Freud was not simply unwilling or unable to accept the extent of actual abuse in society.)

We do have data on sexual dysfunctioning – we know (lower bounds for) the incidence of, for males, premature ejaculation and erectile dysfunction, though we have less idea, because we have less basis to measure it, of the incidence of penile insensitivity; and for females, of partial or complete anorgasmia and of less common conditions (in the female) like what has been colloquially called “sex addiction”.

3. Most importantly, I probably have a wider definition of sexual abuse than is commonplace, but I would like to defend this definition; it is real sexual abuse because it leads to sexual neuroses (I have a correspondingly wide definition of sexuality itself).

Thus, whilst I am quite confident that the incidence of physical sexual abuse is high enough (ie too high, and at least 20% on a conservative consensus estimate), I would also view as sexual abuse all of the following:

• Genital mutilation in both sexes
• An attitude towards the child’s sexuality which is based on adult perverted sexual scripts, regardless of whether or not these have actually been acted upon (but in some measure, I am sure they almost always have)
• Bizarre, unnatural and perverted attitudes to sexuality generally (I’m very tolerant and these are not morally loaded terms for me, but the lack of a healthy model can only have the effect of at least blunting the child’s natural sexual development)
• Poor or inexistent sexual education, especially timely information about periods and ejaculation
• Parenting behavior which degrades or humiliates the child, even if not explicitly in its sexual identity

And that’s a short list – I could go on.

We should also remember that the sole force capable of corrupting the child’s sexuality is not the parents – unfortunately, if at least you believe you can get parenting right. Parents are not all-powerful. Other adults in the child’s environment may abuse it sexually and many of the indirect forms of abuse are, I believe, totally endemic in the school system, at least it is my experience (or let’s say it is my deep fear, because I don’t get to sit in my toddler’s classroom).

So, in short, societal violence and attitudes to sexuality basically corrupt us all. Actual sexual acts between adults and children are themselves endemic, but if you escape them, their direct ripple effects to society anyway result in everyone being caught up, if not directly, then at very close quarters.

I haven’t the slightest doubt that if we could simply respect the sexual identity of children, we would transform society beyond anything we can even imagine today.

Premature ejaculation

Sleaze

What is it that differentiates what is healthily erotic from what is morbidly so?

Let’s start with the masculine form, it’s more familiar and easier. I think it’s most women’s experience that they are frequently confronted with “sleazy” guys. Some may also be acquainted with sleazy milieux (curiously enough, while I never heard anyone say they liked sleazy guys, there are definitely women who are positively addicted to the milieux). When you ask them, though, to define what it is that makes someone or somewhere “sleazy”, you usually don’t get a clear answer (someone is going to object that you never get a clear answer from women on anything; no comment, but not the point I’m trying to make .

I tried the dictionaries, and they didn’t help me much either. It can hardly be, though, that such a universal experience escapes definition, so I’m going to try.

I think sleaziness is reflective of the degree to which sexual stimuli launch psychoemotional scripts in the mind of the sleazy person. These scripts absent us from the present moment and inevitably objectivize the person who originated the stimulus. This experience of objectivization and the bodily cues that accompany it – what we call “shiftiness” and involves inability to hold eye contact and jerkiness in upper body movement – is what alerts women to the sleazy character of their male interlocutor. It is pretty easy for other men to recognize also (except perhaps in themselves).

So what about sleazy women? Well, the same phenomenon exists but it usually takes a very different form. This is due to the difference in women’s scripts (read any women’s romantic novel to get the feel). What these have in common with male scripts is that they objectivize their counterparty; only what that counterparty can do for them matters. I think the experience is as commonplace amongst men as is its counterpart amongst women, whereby it becomes rapidly or practically instantaneously clear that a woman you are dating or seeing in some context assesses you solely in terms of your ability to satisfy their scripts – their need for security, to feel loved, to have children, and so on (to expand their shoe collection…). These women may at the same time have impressive powers of seduction (frequently of course they do not), but while men may be fatally attracted to them, they will never be respected by them.

Since both forms of sleaze are fairly universal and it is only a matter of degree, it’s worthwhile analyzing what happens next.

In a common scenario, the experience of objectivization is actually desired because it allows the individual to rest undisturbed in the comfort of scripts of self-loathing which he or she has no real wish or ability to escape. There is, thus, an accommodation which satisfies each party, for at least a time. Whether this is stable is going to depend on the options available to the objectivizing partner to extend or displace his or her fantasies to other counterparties and the continuing role desired for the objectivized partner in this context.

Of course it may as well be that the scripts clash. Both parties need to be dominant, or they both need to be submissive. Whilst a relationship may still form, a fiery or somnorific one respectively, such a situation is always unstable.

It is often thought that sexual interest in partners outside an established relationship is sleazy by definition. This, however, confuses correlation and causation. In fact, such interest is perfectly normal and healthy, for both sexes. It almost invariably is sleazy, though, in practice because it activates such strongly scripted emotions in one or both parties. These emotions in most cases crowd out the possibility of an encounter with the real person involved; though sometimes they may coexist with stronger feelings of love or lust.

I encounter sleaze a lot in my life, both outer and inner, but, like many of us, I long after those uncomplicated encounters where what is there, is there, and what is not, is not.

Tantra and Sex

04 Feb 2008

It won’t have escaped my readers’ attention that sex is a major commodity in the West. We’re literally bombarded by it in all shapes and sizes and from all angles.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy we have this freedom. Sex is a basic human drive. I’m not going to start getting bitchy and elitist about it. Its ubiquity does mean our neuroses are on public display; but that’s a good place to start talking. People, relationships and family are not better where less open norms apply.

Sex sells, and it sells tantra too. But what does tantra really have to say about it, if we dare to saw off the marketing branch we are sitting on? (Believe me, I am more than indifferent to that prospect). More importantly, what is in fact the effect of practising tantra on someone’s sex life?

The great American psychoanalyst and writer Robert Stoller, who devoted his life to studying eroticism in all its forms, argued that erotic excitement was linked to scripted behavior which allowed the user to balance fear and mastery and act out resolutions of early trauma. He believed this was a pervasive characterization of sexual behavior, both “normal” and “abnormal”. And where there are scripts, there are roles to play, and people willing to play them.

The cultural scripting of sexuality generates the sexual identities, patterns and artefacts that we see around us. In other words, these are not “natural”, however primary may be the underlying drive. This should not surprise us; what is “natural” in human behavior at all?

Scripting sexual behavior, though, has a number of obvious inconveniences. Firstly, the scripts are unilateral. You may find someone willing to star in your production, for reasons of their own, but they will not rewrite the script. You will remain in a relationship, perhaps, because you play some complementary role in their script, quite possibly unconsciously; it’s a trade off, but it isn’t nirvana. As people become mere instruments in the realization of your scripts, they are objectivized. This is not exactly a recipe for a psychologically healthy society.

Secondly, these scripts, if they do not become obsessive in nature, lose their power over time. And insofar as they are about power and revenge, which they usually are, they need new objects. As scripting replaces the primitive psychobiological sexual reaction, however, the latter is muted. Sexuality becomes identified with the script and the sexual experience becomes less and less satisfactory.

We all know, of course, that there is another story here (or at least I hope that most of us know, though I realize I should be more circumspect in this assertion). We remember love, falling in love, abandonment, enrapture, passion, folly. We remember it and, if we are women, we have probably scripted it too (it is very easy to access those scripts to elicit sexual response from a woman, but it is a dark magic). This is very powerful and it can be so powerful that it is almost pure, at least for a while. In this sexual rapture, we are overwhelmed by the other. But after years together, we are not quite sure where it belongs; we seek refuge in technique, or in new scripts which aim to reproduce this passion but in fact have nothing in common with it.

A lot of people, and I am including popular writers on the subject, present tantra in such terms, especially tantra in relation to lovemaking; and even if it is not their intention, it is very easy for this to be the effect as the advice they dispense is received as prescriptive and technical – a mere user’s manual for human sexual response.

Tantra, however, is not another technique, it is not even compatible with technique and fantasy roleplay; it is about deprogramming these scripts so that real encounters can take place.
In this way, it undermines the ontological basis of sexuality as the vast majority of us have constructed it. And this demolition work is extremely frightening and dangerous. It is very unlikely it will make your sexual life any “better” unless it does so by reforging your psychic makeup from the bottom up, which might well not be what you intended. It may leave you disoriented, as old scripts have become inoperant but authenticity in relations remains elusive (for authenticity requires two). This is because it is a path to enlightenment, not another sedative, and the world is resistant to waking up from its sleep.

I want to warn you particularly about what tantra means if you are in a couple. When couples come to me, as they often do, believing that tantra might be a solution to their relationship problems (or just a nice add-on), they are wrong in almost every case, and even if it does work it will require perseverance, courage, understanding, and hard work over a long period. Tantra is a purely solitary path, from which richness in relationships is only a byproduct; it is not some kind of new age relationship therapy.

Tantra involves seeing and accepting what is there – what you feel, what the other feels. As you discover the self beneath the neuroses, it may lead you absolutely anywhere; in fact it would be statistically astonishing if it happened to lead you closer merely to your partner with all your wider relationship scripts intact. Jealousy, possessiveness, insecurity, fidelity, duty, image, all these scripts are logically slated for demolition too (in a humane, consensual, conscious and progressive manner of course – at least if you come to us; we know that these scripts hold important parts of your personality in place). If your current relationship, or indeed your very idea of relationship, is premised upon these scripts, it will not survive. So enter at your peril. If by writing this I have put you off, I will consider that I have done my duty.

Underneath, though, is, indeed, what (hopefully) was present at the outset: lust; love; transcendence. Awakened, descripted, it will not be mastered, channeled and controled; it will not fit any more into the boxes you made for it – if you try, you will cast it back into slumber. But awakened, it will at least be there. Getting there may be practically impossible, but if you feel the inescapable urge to seek this reality, an urge which dominates everything else, then you may just be better off when you arrive.

The psychopathology of sexual response

18 Jul 2007

I have climbed another mountain.

Reich’s critique of Freud, though apparently unknown in mainstream discussion of the Freudian legacy to Western thought, is poignant. Freud made a pact with the devil: although he knew, he did not say; and as a result his theories are distorted ones, they are half-truths, packaged to take account of the world into which they were born. Although aware of the origins of neuroses in childhood sexual development, and how social conditioning removed spontaneous behavior, he nonetheless accepted that sexuality was dangerous and needed to be channeled into more socially “acceptable” forms of behavior. He called this “sublimation”, and for him, this was a natural stage of adult development. It was not a pathology.

Reich called his bluff. He stated that a fully satisfying genital sexual life and the absence of neuroses were two sides of the same coin. And although Reich has been rebuffed and ridiculed – and quite rightly when it came to his later attempts to create a theory of everything – his position has also deeply affected modern attitudes to sexuality in the West, whereby a woman is not quite normal unless she has three orgasms before breakfast.

But – with all respect to Reich – this focus on genitality is insane. It is just another artefact of the warped world into which both Freud’s and Reich’s theories were born.

Experiencing deep and full orgasmic pleasure does indeed characterize the natural state of man and woman. But it is a consequence of psychic health, a manifestation, it is not a recipe for achieving it or a cosmic status symbol.

In The Function of the Orgasm, Reich argued that orgasm serves to regulate bodily energies, essentially to release energies which otherwise would become stocked in the body and generate neuroses and psychosomatic phenomena.

Now, this is partly true, but it is not the end of the story.

Reich’s account of the orgasm appears to exclude that it may, itself, be used as a mechanism, perhaps even the most powerful mechanism, to rigidify the body and freeze neuroses into place. But a moment’s reflection suffices to see that this is how sexuality functions for many people. Such sexuality is labeled morbid and dismissed, it is not “real” and “healthy” sexuality and hence it is not what Reich is talking about. But this misses the point.

Now, I fully admit to being an amateur with only a limited background on these things, but I still think I’m on to something here. So here is my conjecture on the psychopathology of sexual response. Of course we now know much more than Reich or Freud ever could about the reality of human sexual behavior and it is time to retheorize psychotherapy based on this knowledge. Reich’s theories are based on a very crude metaphysics of bodily energy.

I believe that when our sense of self is under stress, the primary channel of psychosomatic repression is genital. Such repression may manifest itself in the sexual response – whether it is impotence or (exclusively in men of course) “premature” ejaculation. But it also manifests itself in sexual behavior, both direct behavior (what we are accustomed to calling “perversions”, though it is an obviously unsatisfactory term) and in sublimated behavior patterns such as violence, anger and so on, as well as in bodily phenomena playing a role in the ontogenesis of illness. The omnipresence of degraded genital sensitivity, in both sexes, which I have been able to observe in my own experience is ample indication that the primary locus of psychosomatic repression is the pelvic floor. I also believe that most therapists working in the Reichian tradition would agree with this and operate accordingly, but at an intellectual level, as a system, I am unconvinced that the Reichian account itself is complete or coherent.

A satisfying genital sexual life (as, presumably, self-reported) may even have nothing to do with the maintenance of mental health, it may, once again, simply be a manifestation of a satisfying emotional life, which is the primary cause of partial neurotic resolution, and indeed this seems rather more likely.

So the genitals are a battleground. On the one hand, the wounded sense of self directs energy against them and seeks release through them; on the other, reality intrudes by this channel too in the erotic response.

It is important to realize that what we are talking about here is “normal” sexuality, not (only) morbidity. In other words, it is the sexuality which Reich viewed as homomorphic to mental and physical health. Freud argued for sublimation, and Reich for dissipation of sexual drives. But the reality is that the sexual drive which Reich wished to dissipate through the orgasm, is itself stubbornly neurotic and the remedy Reich prescribed merely anchors this neurosis. If it does anything else, then that is merely by chance. It is entirely possible that it is better to dissipate certain energies in this way than to channel and manifest them in available alternative ways, although I am not sure about this because the genitals are at the origin of many psychopathologies and the apparent release may therefore be only temporary – moreover, sex typically involves two people and this release may therefore be, and probably often is, at the expense of the other. In any case, this does not by itself determine that Reich has described healthy sexual behavior. Of course, Reich’s findings are indelibly influenced by the clinical context of his and Freud’s work, even if he went on to well understand, in his most important work on child psychology, the social generation of psychopathology which determined the passing on of neuroses from one generation to the next.

When we observe sexual neurosis, we have not merely to prescribe genital release as a means of managing it; we have to look, in full Reichian logic, at what is generating this neurosis. And what is generating it is the wounded sense of self. In order to heal this, we need to step out of this subjectivity and observe objectively.

Here, sexuality can help, but only if we let it. Instrumentalizing sexuality closes all possibility that it will awaken us. It is merely another manifestation of the defense mechanisms that the wounded self has mastered. Rather, we must seek to deinstrumentalize it, just to experience it, to allow it to surprise us, to ensure it is placed firmly outside of our control so that it may be a gateway to challenge our self-construction and make us confront the fact that reality is other. And this is not only true of sex; it is true of all sensory phenomena. They are either a way out or a way in; and we must make them a way in. When our constructed self, our psychophysical armor, is permanently exposed to contradiction and cannot escape, only then are we free of it and living authentically.

I recognize that some may find this account of sexuality too remote from their own experience. Given that real sexuality has a dual character as both affirmation and effacement of the self, how to enjoy it fully in the present moment and not at some irrealistic future date? Indeed, may not the self-affirmatory aspects of sexuality, and not only the self-effacing ones, have a true therapeutic or energy-management function and value, in addition to being fun? Yes. Certainly. I also reject an ascetic view according to which only sex according to the purest (imagined) tantric canon has any value. Sex is fun, and I revel in all its variety and the humanity of it (though I certainly do not condone actions which are unilateral and predatory). But this is a subject for another blog entry.

Letter to an absent lover

30 May 2007

I found this on another website. In a time when society seems polarized between jealousy and alienation and meaningless frivolity, it offers another (and unarguably better) view of how men and women can relate to each other and to the world. I would like to dedicate this to the memory of the young lives insanely snuffed out on the Virginia Tech campus, and my heroic but unquenchable hope that the US might, one day soon, wake up to the inhumanity of fundamentalist religion and, in so doing, give birth to a new moral renaissance, drawing afresh on what is true and immutable in that nation’s founding values and in the impulses, joys and possibilities of youth which we are all, parents and patriarchs, solemnly charged to nurture and protect.

Hello my horny princess,

I think it is such a good thing that human beings are horny. Enjoy this lovely primal drive and energy.

I just wanted to tell you that, when I come, you can expect to experience love and acceptance on a new level, you will be so blinded by the sun that again you may wonder what the stars have to offer. But the stars have a lot to offer; this warm, womb-like darkness is also our ancestral home. Yin and yang are not in competition.

Be free and enjoy. Even if there is adventure, excitement and uncertainty, this is life, it is not an “experiment”. You are not testing how you will feel or whether society’s rules and expectations are or are not correct. i think you are rather exploring the beautiful, mysterious world around you and within you and my role is to make you feel safe so that you can only find flowers and not worry about thorns.

Right now you may have no perspective on this, you may not think or realize that you are on a journey, but very soon you will achieve this perspective and you will see a great panorama that you never imagined. We do not need to plan that journey, we just need to let it unfold.

I have never felt so in love with and connected to you as I do now. However, please don’t feel concerned if your own signal gets lost, if you are caught up in others and, in those moments, forget me. This is normal. In those moments, you must forget me, the forgetfulness is a condition of connection, not just to them, but also to me. I am them, they are me; there is no difference, you will see it.

These conflicting feelings make me feel alive, and that ecstasy outweighs all passing discomfort. Passing by this route with you purifies my soul and makes me able to love.

Darling, I want you to know that I know none of this from a book, I am not repeating any theory, I know it in my heart with a very deep conviction that is only possible when everything you experience just matches what you expect. In this way what I have found is not faith or belief, it is science and knowledge; you can test it and it fits.

Have a very lovely weekend, I hope you manage to get your work done, spend nice time with those important to you, enjoy your friends, admirers and lovers, find exquisite beauty in something tiny and overlooked, take pleasure in the mind and in the senses, and touch people’s lives with a little of the power with which you have touched mine.