CHILDREN ARE A CULTURAL FETISH

Zuni fetish

Porn is a cultural fetish.  A fetish is something that makes your underconsciousness turn your autonomic neural system (emotions) on hard, pun or no pun.  The trigger could have been built in, could have been acquired by conditioning (the association of two things until one causes the other), or possibly by some single intense event.  It could be naturally biological or so unnatural as to be incredible and possibly funny, like having a great rush of emotion at the sight of a kitchen spatula, because someone used one to spank you.

The primary fetish of our culture is children.  Therefore, they are the object of our porn.  Like our autonomic system, it works by opposed pairs:  we have one intense flush of emotion when our children do well, excel at sports or school, attract praise for their presentation . . . and an opposite flush of emotion for miserable discarded delinquents who do disgusting things, esp. if they are our sons and daughters.  The revulsion is so strong that some beat their children, unable to tolerate any bad reflection on them whether social criticism or a breach in their authority.  (The opposite of love is not hate, for love and hate are intertwined in human emotion.  The opposite is indifference.  Or cold rage, not connected to the hot part of the autonomic system.) 

In the public world, the hot haters of children insist that authorities confine bad children, punish them, and in some places kill them. (In the slums of Buenos Aires it is estimated that 57 have been simply shot by the police.  In Missoula a man shot dead a student for being in his garage.)  The cold haters of children enslave them as soldiers or laborers.  Or defund any system that would protect, feed, and educate them. 

Individuals at the mercy of their own autonomic emotional systems may confuse nurture with sex, begin as kissing and end as fucking.  This essay has as bookends two stories.  One is the report of a man whose father beat him.  The father would begin in the conventional cultural way of a whipping, but at some point his eyes changed and he went “amuck”, out of control, frenzied, and nothing would stop him except the boy becoming comatose and he himself becoming exhausted.  This was not just hot but molten.

The other story was told by a trick who had paid a young boy to let him suck the boy off.  He was in the middle of the act, stopped to take a breath, happened to look up, and saw that the boy, with tears streaming down his face, was sucking his own thumb.  The trick stopped and never again abused small boys.  He had not understood that they had feelings and that they didn’t like what was done to them.  In both of these stories the men were treating boys as fetishes, not as real human beings. 

According to Webster, “a fetish is a strong and unusual need or desire for something;  a need or desire for an object, body part, or activity for sexual excitement; an object that is believed to have magical powers.”

If one looks around, there are innocent signs of child-worship.  Some of my Halloween visitors were wearing costumes that must have cost fifty dollars -- maybe more -- and this is a small, modest, farming community.  Somehow people find money to send kids to Washington, DC on school trips, or to incredibly expensive universities, and buy them cars when they are barely old enough to be legal drivers.  In the local high schools where I taught briefly, the kids controlled the teachers, insisting that lessons had to be “fun” and conform to their expectations of what should be taught, which they mostly got from TV series.

The underconsciousness (which I am using as a Freudian might use “subconscious” or "unconscious") is pre-literate, notoriously hard to understand and more felt than thought.  Freud himself, three-piece-suit patriarch that he was, feared his unconscious and should have, though he couldn’t manage it enough to stop his cigar fetish and resulting cocaine fetish that ended his life.  Very bad example of what to do.  Color me Jung.

You can feel a fetish if you stop and consider.  Very much like the signs of a flight/fight/freeze autonomic reaction: the blood supply engorges some things and drains others, certain chemicals rush out of their manufacturing organs, consciousness changes to hyperalert and contradictorily shuts out everything that is not crucial to action.  If there is no escape at all, one’s mind goes to dissociation, like the mouse hypnotized by the snake.  Great danger, intense desire, hard-earned triumph, assurance of high status are all triggers.  Scary movies on Halloween.  Driving cars fast late at night on bad roads.

It’s become conventional for desirable material goods to be described as pornographic:  house porn, food porn, clothes porn.   They’re really fetishes.  I feel it when I leaf through my little collection of books about fine houses.  They’re in several categories: the New Age hand-made houses of California; the fine glass/stone/log/corten-roof lodges in the Montana mountains.  But also Mary Emmerling’s cottages where furnishings are often recycled or repurposed and color schemes are the key. In my birth family, houses were a fetish, our safety and unity, because of the long deprivation of homesteading and farming.  We are emotional about the places we’ve lived.

 Mary Emmerling house vignette

Children are not a fetish of mine partly because of awareness of their consciousness.  I cannot see them as objects, I do not see pregnancy as redemption or status (our culture wants to), and I saw that to my parents children were a burden.  I also resented any person who EVER made me into an object.  I will NOT be controlled (I can be persuaded), and therefore must be cautious around people for whom control is a prompter of violence.  Like children.

Emotional desire, controlled by the autonomic system and other underconsciousness, is the key to survival and drives all action, including this writing.  But it feels as though it is from outside, like a movie or a sexy person or a magnificent kitchen.  In fact, all desire and therefore all porn/fetishes are from the internal response, but the promise to be able to call out desire and satisfy it with “meaning” (which always goes back to the promise of survival, if only in thought) is a commodity and therefore creates a market.  It literally pays to keep us all throbbing and engorged with desire.

But we become habituated.  The word “fuck” is used so much it’s meaningless.  Nudity is no shock.  But making something rare, illegal, and dangerous will restore value.  The FBI and their “stings” make that obvious.  Otherwise, why would anyone without a seriously damaged psyche consider a pre-adolescent child a sex object?  

The child-like Marilyn is reading James Joyce.

When it comes to porn, the law has a problem.  Since the real phenomenon is in the individual underconsciousness, it cannot be defined with bright lines as the boundaries of a useful law must be laid out.  This “I know it when I see it” conviction of judges is only based on what triggers them, mostly old white conservative men whose only escape is golf and whiskey, much the same demographic as legislators.  As more women and minorities enter the arena, the definition of porn begins to change.  Invasion of personal space, laws that reinforce poverty while enriching the law-makers, persecution of the stigmatized, treating children as street vermin will be the new illegalities.

It’s not hard to understand why children are our American fetish: all the wrong people produce them as though they were puppies, the cost of simply giving birth naturally is impossibly high, supporting a family takes two incomes so that there is no time to spend with kids unless it’s meant to improve the family prospects for the future, like transporting them to lessons and sports.  Daily we see images and stories of children lost, suffering, misused, destroyed and fear for our own children.  If they go wrong, we will be held legally responsible, and many of them are angry with us -- but we don’t know why.  The answer is not sex -- it’s talk.  THEIR talk.  As though they were actual people.

STRETCHED AGAINST THE GALAXIES

Isaiah is a book of the Old Testament and the first of the various writings of prophets collected in the Bible.  Modern scholars find that the book is in three parts, first a part about the danger to Jerusalem in Judah; the second, after being conquered, a promise that there will be a return to prosperity; and the third a poetic account of the struggle for a new life.  It is, in short, about salvation.  It is no surprise if it speaks strongly to people today.

In the Christian Mass and therefore in many derived EuroAmerican orders of service, there is -- just after the call to worship -- a double part called “Confession of Sins” closely followed by “The Assurance of Pardon.”  Von Ogden Vogt felt that this was derived from Isaiah.  Tillich might have felt that it was a way of addressing ultimacy.  Properly handled, the sequence blocks personal anxieties and preoccupations that take us around and around in obsessions with small issues.   The task of the brain is to accept information -- guided by sensory input -- and to decide what to do about it.  Liturgy, as I am presenting it, is a way of evaluating in order to act, but also a way to experience the deeply felt Holy.

Schreiter, one of my key thinkers, says that one must always look at a culture on its own terms, but in fact Isaiah was pressed into a later template, that of the early Christians who wanted it to prophesy the coming of Jesus, the promised Christ.  Thus, the writing found in Isaiah -- often beautiful and resonant -- had an original meaning coming out of what I will say are “contingent circumstances” that has been obscured for ideological reasons by editing and inserting in much the same way that Fundamentalists of all sorts today still edit and insert their ideas into Biblical writing or any other religious writing they can find, from the Book of the Dead to the Rig Veda.  Old Testament thinking is agonistic or, as the comment in my New English Bible translation puts it, a lawsuit between the people and God.  Jesus wanted to end that.

Things were not going well for Judah in the seven hundreds BC.  The Assyrian Empire was pushing Egypt, disrupting the balance of power -- sound familiar?  So the first part of Isaiah is saying,  “What have we done to deserve this?  Is this as bad as it will get?”  (Confession of Sins.)  And then the second part, sometimes called “The Book of the Consolation of Israel,” offers hope.  (Assurance of Pardon.)

In short, this pattern is for the community of memory and hope that is the spine of specific faith theologies drawn from specific times and places and often recorded in writing.  It is dogma.  It says,  “Do what we say and you’ll be okay.”  But it is universal enough in structure, that if you fill the abstract two-step with the sensory specifics of the people who are present, it will set the dimensions of worship beyond little daily worries and special interest groups.  

Mostly we are accustomed to “the People of the Book”  (the Abrahamic traditions) using words for worship, but there is access to much more intense meaning -- before, under, through words -- in the parts of the brain that support the cerebrum’s love of language with feeling and image from earlier anatomy, esp. the limbic system.  The work of the liturgist is to find those deeper forces and put them in motion.  If this is done successfully, the result will be an experience of holiness.

Among my books is one by Clarence Skinner . a man of the early 19th century, http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/clarencerussellskinner.html , notably “Worship and the Well-Ordered Life,” a slender little volume hardly more than a pamphlet, full of revolution when you read it thinking of fMRI evidence and other neurotheory.  Skinner is even more unexpected when one understands that both Unitarianism and Universalism as well as many other mainstream Christian denominations value “learned ministries” so much that ministry and university (both full of words) are nearly joined and, like Skinner, many clergy go back and forth professionally.  Skinner surprised me by locating worship in EXPERIENCE, which is what the “enthusiastic” (inspired) clergy claim.  Of course, in their revulsion from Calvinism, Unitarians used their minds and Universalists used their hearts.

Conservatives don’t want human “felt experience” in the equation: they want written law that will prevent change and hold boundaries.  The learned ministry -- and many of the professors at the University of Chicago Divinity School were in this category -- are capable of producing marvelous words.  Do read a good translation of the Book of Isaiah!  It will make you tremble and laugh, rage and dream.  BUT it is only words, a terrific story, not your own physical sensory world, which professors call -- pejoratively -- “phenomenology” to imply that only they have the written formulas for something magically transcendent.  That’s what they “profess.”  The writing is meant to enjoin obedience to the rulers of a world long crumbled.  We can learn good lessons from books, but they will not put you in touch with the holiness of the here and now.

Our contemporary problem is that so much of our information is mediated by instruments.  We could not detect the dark matter of the universe, the forming and progression of hurricanes, the electrochemical structure of a living cell, or the waves and traces of our own thought without instruments.  But we can’t worship microscopes and oscilloscopes -- nor even computers.  We CAN transmit sights and sounds without words, so that some could argue that programs like Planet Earth ARE liturgies.  There have always been those who insist that nature is the truest access to the sacred, though snake-handling is probably what the philosophers call “the error of misplaced concreteness.”

Still, the patterns that will create what one might call a “landing pad” for the Holy Spirit are known and can be traced across cultures.  Clear a safe space.  Focus.  Move your mind -- which includes body, gut, spine, all parts of the brain and maybe awareness of others -- to that place you recognize as accepting, and then just get out of the way.  Open up.  Be a chalice and the flame will come.

You might be alone.  You might be in an ashram.  You might be on top of a mountain ridge.  You might be in a circle of drummers.  You might be attending a symphony or sitting on a bench in an art gallery.  You might be holding a lover or a baby.  You won’t be thinking about where you are.

We suppress our feelings, fearing they will be scary or scandalous or embarrassing.  One way we block, evade and disguise is with words that prevent us from remembering what touched our fingertips, what wreathed our noses.  Borrowing words from other cultures or from the past will not help in this case.  One must “Be Here Now” but, curiously when one is stretched full-length against the galaxies, that phrase has no meaning.  You can read the book some other time.  I wonder where my copy went.