Outings!

I love to go on a nice outing once in a while. That was sweet.

Yes, I agree that there is something about the human psyche that wants to look at the thing we're afraid of. That's how our dopamine actually advances our evolution. The desire to overcome the Boogey-man - as primitive and silly as that is - is the very thing that keeps us just a little ahead of ourselves. It's beautiful.

I think he drops down into the cliches a bit too much, tho. The idea that men use love to get sex and women use sex to get love is only true at a low level. Once we separate predation from sex, then all that will go away. This hasn't happened yet. Women want sex. Trust me. And quick, anonymous sex is not that horrible a thing either if it's done while having a perspective over and above predation. Many of us can even play predation games - but it's a game. I don't think some men know it's a game yet.

And one thing I found really interesting, and I think it is connected to the cliche thing: he is assuming that men who have sex with other men are gay - period - and if they deny it, then they are just in denial. Even tho the lie detector test is measuring a totally different experience that these men are having, he doesn't want it to be different, so the lie detector test is wrong!  LOL I think this is more a function of his age/generation and the experience of coming out of denial that he has had to go thru that makes him want to project that onto these other men.

As someone who has come out about a "paraphilia", I know for a fact, by experience, that there are other ways of emergence that don't involve denial. Like feminism, alternative sexualities are not the mortal risks they once were 20-30 years ago. More people care less now about what I do in my bedroom so within 2-3 months of figuring out what Polyamory was, I was out to the b/f and when I was ready to experiment, I was out to my family and best friend. I realized that there was a risk. Especially as a woman.  A woman who has two male lovers (or more!) could be asking for a beat-down. For men it is practically a trophy. But I haven't ever felt the heart-in-your-throat kind of fear that the older ones have had to go through in order to make this world a safer place for me.

I know that gender/sexuality is less and less a thick black line chisled in stone, and is becoming more like a piece of string to be drawn to and fro as we feel like experimenting with or whatever. Heck, Burning Man may have provided a way for us to look at ourselves in a less static way by providing a great excuse/reason to dress up as something completely weird and NOT who you normally are and then just go nuts, so that by the end of the week, you know that the boundaries are movable. Then you spend the rest of the year integrating that! This has become normalized in this culture! Don't think that the voting booth is the place where the heartbeat of America is truly measured. It's so not.

The metrosexual experience, or other kinds that may not have names yet, are different than the homosexual experience that is so established and defined. Or even the bisexual experience. I knew a young man who experimented with men, but he doesn't identify as gay or bi. He's just him. And one of my best friends has been with both men and women and she refuses to identify with gay or bi people. Pay attention to what they're saying and forget for a minute about your obession with what they're not saying. They're saying that "gay" and "bi" are not identities that they want to be connected to. There is something in the cultural identity that they are disidentifying with, not the act. They've admitted the act. They're not in denial.

I don't identify as a feminist either, but there are alot of things I have in common with them. I get pissy at men sometimes. I have deep hurts. I see huge power imbalances that are still not acknowledged that have less to do with exteriors and more to do with interiors. But I can't stand most feminists. They irritate the crap outta me. As someone who is studying Magic, I occasionally have to read writings by Dianic Wiccans and lemme tell ya!  God! I feel dirty after reading them and I have to take a shower! Blech! Am I in denial about being a feminist?

Lets look again at what "identities" actually are and why even as Integralists, we often can't see outside of them. The truth is, I think this is one of the funnest parts of being an Integralist. Integralizer. Integralamificator. Everything starts to liquify after a while.