How to Be Free by Joe Blow (best large ereader TXT) 📖

idea seems ridiculous. For a start, having sex with other men is no way to gain acceptance into a social order that tends to despise homosexuals. Secondly, many homosexuals vehemently reject the patriarchal order. And thirdly, many homosexuals are accepted in the patriarchal order when they don’t advertise their sexual preference.

But imagine you are a young boy. You want to fit in with the other lads, but for some reason they reject you. If you are very secure in yourself, perhaps you go your own way resigned but not fixated on the rejection. But if you are truly hurt by the rejection you may react in a number of ways : you may express your pain by mocking those who rejected you (essentially saying, “I didn’t want a be a member of your club anyway!”) ; you may become introverted, hiding your pain and trying to not be rejected further by outwardly conforming to the expectations of those who initially showed you signs of rejection ; or you may overcompensate by assuming a persona of super masculinity. This is what happens on the surface, but deep down, where your sexual drives lie, rejection by men has superseded rejection by women (and our original nature) as the rift that your sexuality longs to heal. Your psychological response to the original rejection may determine the type of men you want to make love to, but it is only a man who can answer your principle need for healing.

To clarify the different types of reponse :

1. Mocking those who reject you. One of the most common forms this takes is flamboyant effeminacy. Since aggressive self-discipline is so important to the patriarchal order, to act in an effeminate and unrestrained manner, is an act of rebellion against that order.

2. Introversion. This is simply remaining in the closet, living in a miserable state of conformity lest you suffer further rejection.

3. Super masculinity. An obvious example is the macho leather-clad gays.

In recent times, with intolerance towards homosexuals still being rife, many look to biology to provide a rationale for tolerance. But this is a risky strategy. It is unlikely we will ever find a gay gene. Common sense suggests that such a gene would be self-eliminating anyway. If we rest our arguments on science and then science fails to come up with the desired result our position is seriously compromised. As for those who talk about a “cure for homosexuality”, the best argument arising from my hypothesis, is that, if homosexual sex is therapy for childhood trauma, the only thing that might eventually change the homosexual’s orientation would be having far more homosexual sex than he is at the moment.

As for lesbianism, that is fairly easy to understand. Men can be very difficult and loving them can be a painful process. Since the sexual drive is a drive toward wholeness, and the feminine, unlike the masculine, is not divided against itself, a woman does not need a man to find wholeness through sexuality.

The battle for sexual tolerance requires a strong and unequivocal stand. As long as we are careful not to do damage to ourselves or others, all sex is good for us. Sex can heal us. Sex can make us better people. 

Acknowledging the neurotic roots of our sexual desires does not demean those desires, it ennobles them. And it ennobles us. We are not shameful deviants, as some like to claim. We are the wounded soldiers of society’s struggle for self-knowledge taking the time to lick each other’s wounds.

Sexual Fixations

As children we naturally were interested in finding out what feels good. (Even foetuses in the womb often discover the pleasure of masturbation.) But sometimes these forms of exploration would bring a negative response from adults.

If we got the message that some aspect of our behaviour was unacceptable, we might become fixated on it and carry this fixation into adult life. For example a little boy who wanted to see whether it felt good to put on his sister’s dress and panties might meet with the censure of his parents and feel that he was unacceptable because he had carried  out this experiment.

Like a sore tooth that we can’t seem to stop poking with our tongue, the memory of rejection keeps us going back and re-enacting the moment, preferably in some context in which we can feel accepted. So the little boy, now a transvestite, will dress up as a woman in a community with others who do likewise, basking in a mutual show of acceptance of that which deep down they still do not fully accept.

Where this must be a particularly difficult problem is where the fixation is on something which can be genuinely destructive and thus carries a social taboo which is not merely intolerance of difference.

Such is the case with pedophilia. It is normal for a child to feel an erotic attraction to other children, but if we fixate on this kind of attraction in a way which causes us to carry it into adulthood then it becomes a serious problem, especially if we act on these feelings and, as a result, harm children.

Even in such a case the principle still applies that the past cannot be changed and that the thoughts and emotions are, in themselves, morally neutral, but the individual could not use the argument, as with the transvestite, that acting on the desire was harmless.

Luckily, for most of us, if we find ourselves fixated on something it is something far easier for us to learn to accept and thus move on from.

This shouldn’t be taken as meaning that sexual fetishes are necessarily a bad thing, only that they are a limiting thing. There are advantages in being able to enjoy a wider range of sexual experiences.

What is the Imagination?

Our mind has two basic modes of operation - reason and imagination.

Reason gathers information and applies logic to try to draw conclusions from it.

Imagination is the free operation of the mind unrestricted by reference to external reality.

Imagination serves a number of functions. Since the nature of the universe is such that patterns reoccur, patterns which are discovered by the free operation of the imagination may prove useful to the reason in making sense of similar patterns observed in the environment. This is what we call intuition. An example of this function of the imagination is the formation of myths. The story of Odysseus returning from the battle of Troy was no doubt built upon the seed of a real man’s experience, but the imagination added details about witches and sirens and a cyclops. While these might have been created for sheer entertainment, they expressed patterns which resonated with aspects of individual human experience and the nature of the human journey in search of self-understanding. It is because of these resonances that the myth has been treasured over the centuries. But the imagination is inescapably prophetic. To the extent that it is allowed to depart from conventional paths it will symbolically express something significant about the individual and their society. This is why dreams, in which the mind’s imagination is at its freest, are so open to rewarding interpretation. So imagination can be used for self-exploration also. And lastly it can be used in a directed sense to provide emotional compensation for things missing in our lives. If we feel frustrated and powerless we may fantasise about being Rambo. If we are unable to have the sexual experiences we long for we can experience them through fantasy. And imagination can also be an arena for healing in which we allow the separate parts of our being to have their own voice and find their way to reconciliation.

The Scary Side of the Imagination

When we allow the imagination to run free we may find that it throws up some frightening ideas.

In our repressed, i.e. armoured, state we repress most of our angry feelings and much of our sexuality. So when the imagination wanders off the safe path of our disciplined ways of thinking about ourselves, it is bound to bump into aggressive and sexual images and thoughts. The higher our standards of behaviour, the more of these things we will find. We all experience frustration when things don’t go our way. Either we express ourselves angrily or we repress those hostile feelings. Likewise, we all have erotic feelings. Since our original sexuality was unstructured, these feelings  won’t necessarily be limited to those that fit with our concept of proper behaviour for a person of our sexual orientation. We try to live out any sexual feelings we feel are appropriate. It is the inappropriate feelings which get repressed. So finding thoughts in our imagination which we might consider to be depraved or monstrous, is not an indication that we are depraved or monstrous, but an indication that we are not. A depraved or monstrous individual would have done those things.

What can make these thoughts particularly scary is that they tend to crystallise lots of repressed feelings into something extreme. So restraining ourselves from punching someone in the nose, if repeated twenty times, might crystallise in our imagination as a thought of taking a machine gun and committing mass murder. And repressed anger and sexuality could cross-fertilise into violent sexual fantasies.

As I mentioned earlier, one of the thoughts that arose unbidden in my mind which gave me the most trouble was that of killing a baby. Clearly I had been repressing a lot of anger at the time. My conscience was particularly oppressive, so this is likely.

But the solution to this problem is to learn to accept that even terrible thoughts are only thoughts. Humour can be very helpful in achieving this. Now I can imagine playing football and using an infant as a ball. This is so ludicrous that it makes me realise the difference between thoughts and actions.

Degrees of Being Alive

A living system is characterised by the free flow of materials, information and energy and an efficient spontaneous interaction with the environment. In our bodies, blood flows constantly, a constant stream of information is carried through our nervous system, oxygen flows into the body and waste products flow out. And we interact relatively spontaneously with our environment. If someone throws a ball at our head we either duck or try to catch it. When we are dead, these flows will not occur, and our body will not respond to its environment. If you throw a ball at a corpse, you’ll hit it quite easily as long as your aim is good.

While some of us may be affected by ailments which impede our full efficiency as a living system, there is only minor variation in the aliveness of our bodies, until we are dead.

It seems fair to apply this same concept of aliveness to our emotional and intellectual selves. Here we find a great deal of variation in states of aliveness depending on how armoured we are.

Character armour impedes the free flow of ideas in the mind, and body armour impedes the free flow of emotion. Dogmatic, stereotypical forms of thinking keep the mind closed down and interfere with the individual’s ability to think clearly and respond to evidence that might challenge preconceived ideas. And body armour deadens the organism’s capacity for bodily sensation - this includes the relief that comes with cathartic expressions of sorrow, joy or anger, as well as the sensory pleasure which can come from the apprehension of visual or aural beauty, the taste of delicious food or the ecstasy of erotic sex.

And, when armouring is in place, the individual cannot interact truly spontaneously with their environment. Much concentration is needed to maintain the