Raised by Orgasms The Application of Life Preserving Principles in the Determination of Sexual Identity
Raised by Orgasms
The Application of Life Preserving Principles in the Determination of Sexual Identity
I am a flight attendant and a military member. My mother is a therapist. My grandmother retired taking care of children. We can play a game of “what do these things have in common?” but, spoiler alert, the answer is not much.
From a young age in America, we are asked “who do you want to be when you grow up?” We answer, as children do, with whatever activity stimulates us the most at the time. Compare this to other cultures where, generation after generation continue the legacy of their forefathers by doing the work of their family.
When something is done for hundreds of years, it has been refined and perfected. When we decide to do something new, we expose ourselves to challenges that have never presented themselves before. Without understanding the principles behind a time tested tradition, when we do decide to reinvent the wheel, we expose ourselves to danger. We may not be doing the same work as our Ancestors, but we can still develop the mindset they had by learning their principles and applying them in our lives today.
A foundational ancestral principle is the preservation of life by maintaining harmony with nature. This is how they believed balance could be achieved within one’s self. It is how an individual can ensure they are doing their part to have a long life for themselves and their descendants. There is an expression in the Caribbean, “once an adult, twice a child.” As children, we are raised by our adult family. We become adults and have children of our own. Once you return to the vulnerability of a child as an elder, you would hope that your children are willing and able to take care of you as you took care of them. This cycle is a physical representation of the principle of life preservation.
The natural function of heterosexual sex is to bring about new life. Everyone has the capacity to experience pleasure outside of this biological purpose. If you’ve ever driven cross country, you probably observed many billboards that can attest to that--making childhood road trips awkward for families nationwide. Even from the comforts of home, many of us are familiar with the pleasure that can be achieved with a lubricant and a firm grip (for the fellas) and the proper positioning under a faucet with steady water pressure (for the ladies). That last sentence is probably not something you anticipated reading when you started this but the secretive way sexuality is explored has created a lot of new challenges that we, as a society, are in the midst of figuring out how to solve.
Children, the most vulnerable of us, become pawns in the sexual exploration of the adults who have been entrusted to care for them. The little bit of understanding that they had about the world has now been fundamentally damaged. Often alone, these children have become adults who had to figure out how to live with that trauma. The identity they choose is affected by those experiences and is expressed in many different ways.
The desire to explore what makes us feel good is natural. The idea of creating an entire life around that pleasure follows the steps of living in a culture where our identity has not been passed down to us. We come into this world lost and vulnerable and while we are still figuring out the existence we are in, we have to determine who we are. The cosmogony presented by The Earth Center details how humanity responded when they were posed a similar question: “what is your goal?” Humanity looked at what was in front of them and saw the divine world. It made them feel inspired (good) and humanity said “we want that”.
We are not different from our Ancestors. We, too, are trying to figure out who we are and what is our purpose. The diversity of America has so many benefits but, on the other side of that, there are limited tried and true examples of the paths we can take. We are all empowered and encouraged to do what feels good to us, even without any guidance of how to do it successfully. If things stop feeling good, we don’t try to find the source of the problem or, at least, go back to what we have centuries of information on. When measuring the resolution of a problem based on how much comfort, the root issue is never being addressed and the problem mutates into something different.
It was understood for a long time that there were things that women did and did not do and likewise for men. However, along the way, principles were discarded inviting certain corruptions in. Men stopped protecting women. Women stopped feeling valued as a part of society. Women decided to seek validation by placing themselves in competition with men to get the respect they lost back for themselves. Men began feeling invalidated as men.
Children observe this battle of the sexes and attack those who don’t seem strong enough to be a man or beautiful enough to be a woman. The victims of those attacks must also learn how to live with a traumatic idea: “I don’t fit within the nature I was born with.” People may have not known their passions or their career goals, but being able to look between one’s legs and not having that as some indication of identity is new. This can be seen as a result of the abandonment of time tested gender roles due to corruptions introduced over hundreds, maybe even thousands of years.
The impact of that corruption, historically, had been pretty localised. However, now, with how quickly millions of people all over the world can be connected, that confusion is spreading and impacting even cultures who still have their identity intact. That is the power of American influence—and Western culture, in general—in the world.
Why should it matter that a woman wants to be perceived as a man or that there are all-male orgies going down in parks across the country tonight? It is because our desires are often exploited through capitalism. Marketing targets a group identity with a product for them to buy. People are enthusiastically volunteering to be experimented on. They introduce chemicals that have been around for a short period of time with the promise of an opportunity to feel complete. In the meanwhile, there is no way of knowing what the side effects will be in the future. Devices are being implanted in people with complete ignorance of how the body will react to them over time. Millions of dollars in class action lawsuits are paid out by companies to the families of people who died from complications after using their products. The health and well being of individuals are being sold in the pursuit of happiness. What can be recognised as the source of this problem is the absence of life preservation principles when trying to determine identity.
As the author, it would be irresponsible for me to not go on record stating that this article is not intended to be a negative judgement of anyone’s identity. For those of us born into a world with the task of figuring out our own identities, I would like to think that even our Ancestors would see that we are doing the best we can do under the conditions. Forget about what it means to be a man or a woman. As a society, we do not agree on what it means to be a human being. With that said, if the identity you have accepted keeps you safe and makes you whole, it is my belief that no one should impose their own ideas on you or speculate the correctness of your choices. However, if you are struggling with your quality of life within your identity, my wish is that this piece provides a perspective that can help you find who you are meant to be. I share the same task of meeting who I am meant to become. I feel I am moving in the right direction but I definitely do not know her yet. If you feel that there is a consideration that is missing from my conclusion as presented in this piece, I welcome feedback and the opportunity to grow together.
Take care and have courage.