Note: This column by Maria originally published Sept. 17, 2011 — coincidentally, the first day of the Occupy Wall Street movement, just days before the equinox two years ago. How much has evolved for you since then? — Amanda
By Maria Padhila “Are you a collection of attributes that make you a desirable object, or are you something more?”
This is the question the acupuncturist put to me the other night. Hearing something like that, you can understand why I rarely go to any other doctor, and never to any other therapist anymore.
We talk, often for far more than 50 minutes, before she even gets started with any kind of treatment. And last night, she explained that it was time I made up my mind whether I was going to be real about all this — whether I was going to be a self, and regard myself as a whole.
Both marketing, the field I work in for a living, and the relentless push of social marketing urge us to think of ourselves as collections of attributes. Marketers call it that, right on the form we fill out when people want a product marketed — we begin to make a list of ‘brand attributes’. And people pay a lot of money to uncover these attributes, to find out whether the brand they’re trying to sell is one that people can trust, or that people find exciting, whether it’s homey and comforting or sophisticated and cool. What are your favorite movies? What are the five things you can’t do without? Are you Windows or Mac?
Of course, one’s brand attributes are part of the conveniences without which no one would have a conversation at the PTA or a first date. But what is the whole underneath these lists of features?
A young woman artist was talking with me about her husband and about my design for living. There are things about her that her husband didn’t understand, or that she didn’t feel like she could reveal without upsetting him. She was thinking about what I was doing, and said that it would be good to have someone else to soak up some of her intensity, someone to relieve the coziness of daily life, someone who “wants to have sex standing on our heads once in a while!”
That’s one way to see it. Sex and relationship columnist Dan Savage has been making the rounds talking about monogamy and its discontents recently. (And it’s pretty interesting that he’s being so frank even when he doesn’t have a particular product to shill; I’ve gotten used to hearing from some thinkers and writers only when they’re being forced into promotion mode.) And most of his argument is from this perspective. The New York Times Magazine cover story feature on Savage, for instance, included this:
I acknowledge the advantages of monogamy,” Savage told me [the NY Times writer], “when it comes to sexual safety, infections, emotional safety, paternity assurances. But people in monogamous relationships have to be willing to meet me a quarter of the way and acknowledge the drawbacks of monogamy around boredom, despair, lack of variety, sexual death and being taken for granted. … “The mistake that straight people made,” Savage told me, “was imposing the monogamous expectation on men. Men were never expected to be monogamous. Men had concubines, mistresses and access to prostitutes, until everybody decided marriage had to be egalitarian and fairsey.” In the feminist revolution, rather than extending to women “the same latitude and license and pressure-release valve that men had always enjoyed,” we extended to men the confines women had always endured. “And it’s been a disaster for marriage.”
I love that he included “being taken for granted” in that list of sins. And “lack of variety,” which I fear I am sometimes guilty of. And “sexual death” — the drama and legitimate gravity dwelling together in that phrase. But in essence, his argument goes that you can keep your solid, secure, marriage, and go outside of it if you have sexual needs to fill. This makes a lot of sense. People don’t always know who they are or what they need sexually going into a marriage. People change. People discover things. On top of that, marriage perhaps shouldn’t be made to bear such a heavy load — it can’t be everything to a relationship or to a person.
It can’t be everything to a whole self, much less two of them. But the approach also has a way of dividing people — not from each other, but in and of themselves. X is my daily life partner, and Y is my kink sex partner, and Z is the partner I take on ski trips.
Yes, it makes sense. It could even do a lot of good if people were honest and open about their needs and gave each other the freedom to get them filled. It’s a good way. But my way is different. I believe I’m having an experience where both men are whole to me. Am I bringing my whole self?
I’m curled up next to Isaac on the couch as we watch a movie. I like to put both arms around his chest and feel how I have to stretch a little to do it, how solid and strong he feels. I like to pet his furry arms and put my face in his crisp short hair. This is part of the collection of his attributes, and these are desirable. This is how I can describe him to you, and make you feel as if you’re part of this scene and that you understand part of the pleasure of being with him. But the whole self that I love is not something I’ll ever be able to evoke. Writers create a part of a character, and readers complete the imaginative leap that makes that character come alive. Isaac is alive. He requires no completion by anyone else.
It’s true that there are things I do and places I go with one man where the other would be bored or bewildered. That’s just part of life — people’s personalities and likes are different. But I don’t have the sense of dividing myself and my life in half, or having separate parts that each person addresses. I don’t think each sees a significantly different me. And each of them is “something more” — a full self, not a collection of attributes.
“You like your alone time, don’t you?” Chris is lying with his head in my lap, as I’m admiring his features, smoothing his eyebrows, stroking his remarkably soft hair. As much as I’m loving being with him, he’s right. I’ve been talking about all the friends he has, how he moves from gathering to gathering, always lightly in touch with some thread of a person in the large, loose web of people he knows. He remembers people’s names. He ends up helping people, often. I’m talking about how I wonder if my remoteness, my apartness, is dull or frustrating to him — especially coming right out of environments where everyone is wide open.
“I do,” I admit. “I’m also too invested in being an outsider.” It’s both a habit from childhood that comes from being unwanted and kept outside of things, and a result of being a writer. Artists tend to be comfortable outside and often stick with it to keep their perspective and powers of observation. Writers and artists spend a lot of time alone. Probably why so many of us drink and go crazy. I guess I’m willing to claim ‘writer’ as part of my Self and not just as another brand attribute, as pretentious as it seems.
I’m used to being alone, and I like it as well, even crave it. Writing is a lonely activity (which accounts for some of my compulsiveness about it — look, if I write in enough places, I’ll get back proof that someone besides me is out there). I run alone, for long stretches of time and distance, at the very least a half-hour, or up to three or four hours. You are very alone running on trails in the woods.
Shortly after I had my daughter, I remember reading about a phenomenon known as ‘touched out’. After holding, cleaning, rocking, and nursing a baby all day, some women can’t abide being touched by a lover. She wants her body back. She wants it all to herself.
I’ve realized that with all my eagerness to be with both of them — and also our daughter — I’ve forgotten to put in some of that time for myself. Once I joked in an email to the editors here that I promised to someday write a column entitled: “I’m Poly and I STILL Masturbate.” Just to stay in keeping with the values of the enterprise, you understand. But the truth there is that yes, each self benefits from a full relationship with that self, whatever the other relationships may be. Giving your sexual self to other people only is a lot like splitting part of yourself off from a marriage. It has little to do with how many orgasms you’re ‘getting’ from other people — or how much of anything you’re getting from others. Other people, whether that means one, two or 12 other people, can give you a lot, but unless you’re bringing a whole self to the relationship and recognizing another whole self, I think you’ll be only partly satisfied.
It’s gotten cold suddenly. Chris is out at work in the cold. Isaac is biking home from work, in this same cold. I’m warm inside, with my daughter. I’ve just finished making dinner, feeding Tobi now and putting the rest aside for when Isaac gets home, and now I’m trying to make some sense of this question. It will be the equinox soon, my birthday, and a year since Isaac gave me the gift of freedom to follow love. I feel I should be farther along in this, should understand more, should have more clarity about what I’m doing. But the equinox impels balance and grace, and I must have been born on that day for a reason — to learn these.
ok – Maria Padhila’s post is restored, complete with paragraph breaks!
hi — divacarla just let me know that half of this post is missing, and that comments had been turned off. both were apparently a casualty of my internet connection stalling out on friday when i set up the blog post. i have restored comments, but the feature that should allow me to revert to an earlier revision seems to be missing.
i have emailed anatoly to see if he can fix this. right now, if i try to copy and paste an earlier version, i lose all the paragraph breaks. hopefully anatoly can fix this so i don’t have to search for all the places where the paragraph breaks should be. 🙂
my apologies if you wanted to read the whole column and were unable to! hopefully we’ll have this sorted out soon.
fontanelle,
I used to share it but the person with whom I shared it didn’t seem to want me to continue (because I started having deep feelings for them) so I stopped. Until I find someone else, I share it in my blog sometimes.
Eric’s prayer, to whatever gods, was answered 😉 …women in particular have long been encouraged to market themselves as products. Teh New Technologies just makes it easier for everyone, not just marriageable royalty, to do it…
“Are you a collection of attributes that make you a desirable object, or are you something more?”
———————–
Just to take up with this quote as entry point. The most ‘pathological’ cases I’ve experienced of inauthentic being have been around the deep inaccessibility of people who commodify the self. Unfortunately, it works where self respect is lacking ‘out there’! There will always be someone who will sign up to access you as a product.
People who work in this way seem only able to quantify personal value/worth in terms of another ‘wanting them’. The next stage for that person’s modus operandi is to ascertain ‘how much’ they are desired as evidence of value. This leads to behavioural tests.
Think of this as a person being a commodity (of their own choosing) and attached to accessing this commodity are the terms and conditions: Of course, the small print will talk of a region called consumer rights, to make it feel like you, the consumer, matter and are part of the value base – but you are NOT. The T & C’s are unilateral.
If you no longer want the product… it will hawk itself elsewhere.
Self-commodification represents a fundamental devaluation of the self dehumanising in truth).
This is where I would suggest that we have seriously experienced impoverishment as a civilisation. We have lost touch with what grounds us. The relatively recently ‘old’ paradigms are bankrupt. And this is where astrology, particularly in evolutionary (and actually, observationally) becomes highly significant in understanding the human condition. Psychological modalities can find us tying ourselves in knots – primarily, in my view, because of the solar ‘idolatry’ of the whole.
It seems to me when we begin our trek inward to attempt an answer toward some of these contemporary integrative conundrums, that we could do a lot worse than rediscover a much richer relationship to the Moon – which seems to have been ‘reduced’ in importance in mainstream astrology for far too long.
I’d like to add at this point that this is why the addition of Gary Caton to the team has been a masterstroke (with his moon reports, especially showing us cut off bipeds how things used to be!)
Anyhow, the Moon represents so much more than the solar-hegemonic ‘caged’ view of = emotion or ‘the feminine’. Men have Moons too! And many of the gender polarities are replicated through the astrology rather than challenged by it. This makes it an urgent task for astrology to rediscover a dimension of experience that many Westerners at least) have completely misplaced.
I’m on the verge of joining an astronomy group and purchasing a telescope so that I can embody more of what it is to be in visceral touch with what grounds us. I’ve also taken up yoga so that the integration of mind and spirit may become centred in the body – when we kid ourselves because of subjectivity that our body is an ‘outer’ self we unfortunately lose contact with the fact that the Moon is intrinsic to the body and its rhythms and flows. The Moon and our healthy engagement with it helps us to internalise the body and to heal the subject/object dichotomy of consciousness. This is a magic and ethereal function much more than a solar function – which continues to differentiate and support the neuropsychological phenomenon of differentiation by contrast/negation of archetypes, rather than integration by similarity/commonality of vibration (energy).
I’m being drawn back to the Moon… Maybe you aren’t as yet – but consider giving it a try! My natal Pisces Moon in the 1st is in the Last Quarter.
You can work out your natal position simply enough, relative to your natal Sun in 8 * 45 degree chunks. My natal Moon phase is associated with the Pagan Holiday of Mabon.
I’m sure Gary will be elaborating for us more in the weeks and months to come about the Moon. Its phases in your natal chart are potentially as illuminating as the mundane placements that affect us all!
Such reconnection, for those who explore their own chart in depth, can be a very useful key to integration and understanding one’s personal energy configuration/incarnation.
For anyone seeking to explore this further I would recommend Steven Forrest’s The Book of the Moon, published only last year. Investing in that resource will be a decision you are unlikely to regret!
Half (questing the integrated Whole) De Witte
Great article; great comments. Thank you! x
Fascinating and wise as ever. I love what you say, and the way you write it. xx
when I clicked on comments I said a little prayer for one from Half De Witte
Where I come from, the heart of it all, Ohio, the mid-west, many of our values were inherited and never questioned. I learned to be uncomfortable with the variables of life. With criticism. I guess I was still being a proud American.
I’ve been experimenting with becoming whole in every relationship… offering myself fully to each moment and while it’s exhausting and not immediately rewarding I’m better here, more open…
and while the incredible emotional pain I felt was real when I saw “him” with “her” he eventually wanted to see me again and when he did, I was at a whole new level. I keep coming back to myself… and attracting what I really want. At this point, I’m staying out of monogamy just on principal. I’m having more fun and re-curious as to why it’s “wrong”.
Carrie, what is the deepest part of you? Do you share it with anyone?
“The mistake that straight people made,” Savage told me, “was imposing the monogamous expectation on men. Men were never expected to be monogamous. Men had concubines, mistresses and access to prostitutes, until everybody decided marriage had to be egalitarian and fairsey.” In the feminist revolution, rather than extending to women “the same latitude and license and pressure-release valve that men had always enjoyed,” we extended to men the confines women had always endured. “And it’s been a disaster for marriage.”
I agree but I would have used the word “people” instead of just “men.” I also see that not only did this way of doing it cause marriages to falter badly but it set up that whole system wherein women now feel ashamed of our sexual drives (which seem to actually be a lot higher than anyone EVER thought). Now women “make him work for it” so they don’t have to take responsibility for their own sexual desires. Women also “make him pay for it” in the guise of dinner or the movies or chocolates or flowers. This sets up a resentment in both women and men; women resent that they cannot be open about their sexual desires and men resent that they cannot just get the sex they want without “paying” for it in either effort or recriminations or cold cash (or the risk of being accused of rape).
When women are allowed to have all the sex they want without social recriminations, men will be able to get all the sex they want without the social pressures and everyone will be a lot happier.
Oh sure, paternity may be an issue but that CAN be worked out without the extreme structures we have now. A group arrangement can determine paternity amongst them if they plan ahead and do the work it would entail. After all, your Chris doesn’t seem upset that your child is not his; if he wanted a child from you and you agreed, it is as simple as making sure when you and Isaac have sex his sperm don’t come in contact with your ovum. There are so many ways to have sex that won’t include a risk of pregnancy that it is not that difficult to assure who the father is in poly situations.
Honestly, until the religious belief systems which restrict human sexuality are no longer a force within our human societies, our sex lives will continue to have problems.
As for me, monogamy seems to suit me (most of the time) and I have a partner who is very willing to experiment and change things up so we are not bored or unhappy or stagnating at all.
Sure, there are times I wish I could be the deepest part of myself with him and get that in return (he has it but cannot express it) but going elsewhere for that will add a complication I just have no time or energy for right now.
I would say women are also not built for monogamy; despite what the scientists say. If we were, we wouldn’t be so easily turned on as we are by just about anything sexual (even watching bonobos fucking turned the women on in the experiments). In know I am far more easily turned on than most men I have been with; just thinking of even animals having sex gets me going (especially tigers….they do it every few minutes….for DAYS…..until the female is pregnant). There are times when I wish I had the time (and he was able) to just fuck all day, for several days. After about three days, I might be satiated.
Yet I don’t think going to another person is just about the sex; it is about sharing things you need to share but which the first one may not be as interested in. Same goes for them. That’s why we have several girlfriends; some like shopping, some like deep conversations about existence, some make us laugh, some support us emotionally and some mentally.
The difference between them and the male lovers is that sexual connection and some women (and men) would also have that connection with a same-sex friend/lover. Diana Gabaldon captured perfectly the difference in lovers in her Outlander books; the heroine ends up having two different men in her lifetime and their ways of making love are completely different and satisfying to her. Sometimes each of us wants a different kind of sex; maybe raunchy today and romantic tomorrow and deep the next day and talkative the next and funny the next. Everyone brings their own “flavor” to the bedroom and sometimes we just want a flavor that the one we are with never brings. Same goes for the relationship itself.