The Sex Sickness and Its Cure

Table of Contents

Prologue

What Is Sex?

The Sexual Solar System

The Thermodynamic Syndrome

Age of Consent

My Story

A Pathology of Love

The Experiment

A Woman Alone

Epilogue

Copyright © 2017 by Mary Jo Magar

The Sex Sickness and Its Cure

by Mary Jo Magar

Printed in the United States of America.

ISBN 978-1-63505-623-5

All rights reserved solely by the author. The author guarantees all contents are original and do not infringe upon the legal rights of any other person or work. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the permission of the author. The views expressed in this book are not necessarily those of the publisher.

Cover Design by Mary Jo Magar

Prologue

The underlying subject of this book is love , the underlying subject and object of life. Unfortunately, traditional vectors of love – family, friendship, religion, romance, sex – overlie life experience with such heavy complexities that to perceive love’s original lightness and simplicity beneath can seem i mpossible.

Like infants crying out for mother’s milk – Mother Nature’s love made fluid – we are all crying out for love, that which we already embody, already have, to give. We chronologically pass the age of reason and learn quickly that we can no longer literally cry for love, not even the milk of human kindness, so we begin simultaneously to repress and paraphrase our outcries as well as our instincts. The key to our hearts, yes, the one key, the master, becomes lost in the very Pandora’s box that it opens. We let love fly free imprisoned in countless disguises of pursuit. In watching love’s escape, with hope for its return, we perpetuate humanity’s defining inspiration and motivation, pleasures and pains, prides and shames. Modernly, we participate in the masquerades of commercialism and consumerism as perversions of creative free enterprise born of creative free love.

In valuing love, not as an existential force, but as an emotional commodity, we pursue love as betterment, which we pursue through achievement and acquisitiveness. We strive to conquer love like a challenge or an enemy, to earn love like wages (of fear) from the various compartments of our lives. In truth, authentic betterment is simply the recognition that love is – unchallenged, uncompartmented, without pursuit, without success or failure, without gain or loss. Ironically, love is the one thing that can and should be taken for granted in life because love is life.

Chapter I:

What Is Sex?

The first definition of sex is male or female. Sex as the abbreviated word for sexual intercourse is a subsequent definition referring to male and female as one. The whole world as we know it revolves around just these two words – not male and female b ut and / or .

Life experience is characterized by the constant struggle to reconcile opposites, i.e., to rectify problems with solutions, cool down in hot conditions, warm up in cold conditions, change one thing to another, then change the other too, as in the expression If it’s not one thing, it’s another! We experience life as a seesaw, one side or the other, up or down, while lusting for peace and quiet with plenty of bread and butter. Even sex as intercourse we view as sacred or profane but always a way and a means, an end and a beginning.

Every person, man or woman, is alone on the seesaw because every person is the seesaw. The many opposites experienced in life – as life – are all projections, from one side to the other, just like slide projections on a wall, which the eye (lens) of the projector watches as observer and object, source and subject. The experience of living is that of creatively working the seesaw alone, by oneself, from both ends, as man and woman, i.e., mother and father to the ups and downs of one’s own life. What is philosophically termed enlightenment could probably be described as simply recognizing the seesaw for what it is, life itself: a fun, foolish, futile torture device that derives its meaning from what one is thinking, especially when one is down or when one is riding high and can ride no higher but can be let down hard.

Self-acceptance in the sense of recognizing oneself as the seesaw, a complete universe, an independent whole comprising two sides, defines the hero’s journey, the cause of the superman, the way of the sage; however, in an unheroic, unsuperlative, unsage world, this perfect and perfectly difficult path can feel lonely and monotonous. Because the cry for love is the cry to love, the echo of one’s own voice does not always satisfy. As the sound of that proverbial still, small voice within, the cry can seem too still, too small, and too far within. The cry of the infant, child, adolescent, young adult, middle-aged adult, elder is the same cry, the only difference being that at some point the voice becomes trained and the cry becomes an aria of individual interpretation.

The opposite side of the seesaw, the mirror side, is mundanely occupied by work, hobbies, family, friends, including pets, and ultimately, less mundanely, the ideal of oneself; however, in terms of physics, there is a difference of force and distance among these opposites to oneself. As a lever, the seesaw works with torque, which works best with equal, oppositely directed forces: hobbies are pursuits, not people; family and friends are people, but plural, even as persons singular; pets are different species, and the ideal of oneself is just an ideal.

Enter the beloved, even if only for a one-night stand. The beloved is an equal, opposite force that balances the seesaw, thus making the seesaw not only easily workable but exciting! Only the beloved sits clearly, humanly, and alone at the opposite end of the seesaw. Only the beloved individually reflects oneself. Only the beloved desires the pivotal place of union – the fulcrum – with a passion exactly matched to one’s own, and only the beloved can help oneself to get there with more efficiency and fun, seemingly, than getting there alone. Perhaps this is what sex as attraction really is, the relief of meeting oneself physically and metaphysically in equal, opposite form – a sole mate if not a soul mate – the first definition of sex as male or female and the second definition too, male and female. The desire for union and the desire for separateness are themselves equal opposites on the seesaw, for how can one appreciate union without separateness for contrast? The fulcrum, the center of the universe, is composed of stillness, but the elements of the universe, the elements of nature, including human nature, can never be still – they want action. Fire wants to blaze, wind wants to blow, water wants to rise, earth wants to quake, and male and female want to oppose each other, be free and apart from each other, but still teeter-totter with each other, as well as mate with each other. The couple in mechanics is also termed pure moment and is a free vector, and so is the sexual couple whose torque is always a turning point in more ways than one.

Dr. Sabina Spielrein, before Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, conceived the idea of the sex drive as one instinct of two interchangeable expressions: destruction and transformation. We want to destroy separateness by transforming it into oneness. We want to destroy the seesaw by exploding it orgasmically despite the fact that this approach, by nature, is only intended to reproduce the seesaw implosively. The earth moves for us only because of the seesaw. As Archimedes famously commented, Give me a place to stand and rest my lever on, and I can move the Earth.

Sex itself, as intercourse, metaphorizes the opposites that form its primary definition as male or female – pro-creative or creative.

The binary system, essentially our modern computer system, is based on 0 and 1, which derive from the ancient Chinese binary system of yin and yang transcribed into numeric analogs, 1 being phallic (yang) and 0 (yin) being the hole that is the whole. Eve may have been Adam’s rib, but where did Adam come from in the first place? The first place is 0.

A lever can be circular (0), as a wheel, or linear (1), as a seesaw. A fulcrum too can be spherical or linear.

Chapter II:

The Sexual Solar System

Love makes the world go round one way; money makes the world go round the opp osite way.

As the world turns on its imaginary yin-yang (in the Orient, yin has first place), male-female (in the Occident, male has first place), divided-united axis (vertical seesaw) of soap-operatic reality, it revolves around an energy greater than its matter: a scientist would call this energy potential, an artist would call it inspiration, an activist would call it liberty, an alchemist would call it prima materia, an acupuncturist would call it qi, a yogi would call it prana, a philosopher would call it truth, a saint would call it God, a romantic would call it love. By any name, it is everywhere, always, ever available – free in being liberal and gifted yet materially conserved and often costly.

As human matters, love and money together are interpreted kinetically as chase and race, motional expressions of the emotional, spiritual cry for and to love. The chase-and-race as one dynamic reduces survival to animal levels of behavior while at the same time elevating survival to state-of-the-art levels of civilization. We chase after what we assume to be more than we already possess; we race against time and competition, neither of which exists definitively except in our imaginations when misapplied.

This sexual, socio-political, economic chase-and-race forms a solar system analogous to the one that we inhabit as Earthlings and that inhabits us and everything as atomic structure – a nucleus with orbiting electrons. Beyond the atom are wave-particles, rhythms bound to the quantum instruments that play them. Our chase-and-race is our interpretive human performance of what the ancient Hindu scriptures refer to as the cosmic dance, the thermodynamic mating dance of universal opposites. This dance is portrayed in the twenty-first-century scientific Ekpyrotic Model of the Universe, which suggests that the universe was created from the collision of two three-dimensional worlds moving along a hidden, extra dimension. Ekpyrotic derives from the word ekpyrosis, which is Greek for conflagration. Ekpyrotic refers to an ancient Stoic cosmological model, very much like the Hindu cosmological model, in which the universe, whether as a person or as galaxies, is caught in an eternal cycle of fiery birth, cooling, and rebirth, not in a sense of reincarnation, but in the sense of propagation – reaping what is sown. Chasing and racing propagates chasing and racing but rarely the satisfaction that is its aim, which can only be propagated on its own. Satisfaction, metaphorically, may be the hidden, extra dimension to which the Ekpyrotic Model refers.

The story of this oldest dance in the world – a story that never grows old – has been lived, told, studied, analyzed, and critiqued to exhaustion, scientifically, philosophically, and most certainly romantically; hence, what can I add but my own commentary on some of the elements of the story?

Chapter III:

The Thermodynamic Syndrome

The opposites, male and female, are born and bound to meet as the seesaw (male and female, in general, refer to archetypal or gender opposites, not necessarily sexual opposites, and therefore can have individual, heterosexual, or homosexual interpretations as well as other, impersonal interpretations; however, in this chapter and mostly throughout this book I refer to sexual o pposites).

How do opposites meet?

With this one question, the libretto of the cosmic dance, inclusive of the chase-and-race, began in overture as the fate motif of the dance itself. Biologically, the name of the dance may be natural selection, but the choreography is selective breeding; the theme is survival.

The two principals and principles of the dance are Dynamism and Magnetism; in the human pas de deux, they perform as Man (masculine gender role) and Woman (feminine gender role).

Without delving into theories of biological morphology, e.g., female waist-hip ratio and male height-brawn as indicators of reproductive value, succinctly it can be said that we each seek a mate, in the sexual sense, who appears desirable, but desirable to us individually or to the world or both?

Quantum theory, which is merely the scientific evolution of the world’s most ancient philosophies and religions as a whole, repeatedly shows that everything we consider real is an illusion constructed of energy. We ourselves are bodies of immortal energy holographically structured as mortal beings. How, then, can anyone not be phony in a phony world already? For that matter, how can anyone love unconditionally in a conditional world, or love forever, in a contractual or monogamous sense, when nothing worldly is forever? These questions are addressed, if not answered, in the name of the dance: natural selection.

The peppered moth (white, speckled with black), famously known as Darwin’s moth, transformed into a salted moth (black, speckled with white) during Britain’s Industrial Revolution in order to survive against predators by blending into its sooty environment. Now, in the twenty-first century, as heavy industry and its pollution have faded, so too has the acquired predominant black of the moth. Of course, the moth had both colors to begin with. We humans have both individualism and tribalism in our mortal coloring, just as we have both masculine and feminine characteristics in our bodies, minds, and emotions. We desire to prove ourselves to ourselves, mate with ourselves, our subjective opposites, and we desire equally to prove ourselves to the tribe so as to mate – have social intercourse – with the tribe, our collective objective opposite. So goes the dance, round and round, a merry-go-round, and so goes the seesaw, up and down, black and white, salt and pepper, one moment trying to be ourselves, the next moment trying to fit in because misfits are easy prey and as such might not survive.

Only when the dance becomes synchronized to a still point of movement, meaning the effort of non-effort, do individualism and tribalism, like dynamism and magnetism, lose opposition and become one force, both and neither, the one fact of life.

We are most naturally ourselves, most individual, when we recognize that we are the same as everyone else in content, especially the dance, while original in how that content is expressed: we can choose our interpretation of the choreography; we can self-control the physics of the seesaw by reducing tribal load and individual effort in favor of concentrating on the fulcrum – the common meeting-mating place. This is the meaning of a simple life, but unfortunately until this meaning is understood, nothing is simple.

In Hindu mythology, the primordial god Shiva Nataraja performs the cosmic dance in an egg of fire, which destroys the world it creates. This thermodynamic dance as a human syndrome has existed since fire as an element became an emotion too.

The formal science of thermodynamics (initiated with S. Carnot’s book titled Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire and on Machines Fitted to Develop that Power, 1824 – the title says it all) was actually a by-product of the Industrial Revolution, which advanced the expulsion from Paradise to a new level, the consequences of which we are suffering today, exponentially. Our thermodynamic syndrome’s burn rate has reached epic proportions in the twenty-first century so far: inflation, inflammatory diseases, inflammatory dispositions, global warming, thus hotter summers and colder winters, draught conditions . . . in a word, burnout. We are in the medical age of fire diseases . . . Cancer, HIV, Alzheimer’s, and many major diseases present with symptoms in this category . . .. – David George Mioduski, New World Medicine

It is not an understatement to say, metaphorically, that the world at present is controlled by Sachs and Saks – Sachs literally and Saks figuratively (articulatively sounding very much like "Sex and Sex): Goldman Sachs represents a classical masculine ideal, and Saks Fifth Avenue represents a classical feminine ideal. Though these two metaphors sit opposite each other on the seesaw, in fact, like all opposites, union is not only the attraction between them but the cosmic matrix and worldly fulcrum upon which they rest – but they never rest. Sachs and Saks, apart and together, are working allegories for money and power – blood money and sexual power – which metaphorize human lust, the low point of desire, which is the high point of living: without desire, there is death. Too much desire, however, is the tinderbox of frenzy, and when is the civilized world not consumed with frenzy? Ironically, as the only animal capable of rationality, humans are the least capable of temperance. Beasts of the jungle react with frenzy only when directly threatened; humans react with frenzy even and more often when indirectly threatened – by their own imaginations. It is the human imagination that has the power to reduce the human to a beast or ennoble him or her as inspired.

Human nature has evolved to burn the candle at both ends, only it is not a candle burning but the seesaw, with sexual power and financial power at opposite ends: two flames of attraction united in principle but divided, necessarily, by their lust for each other. . . . lust is even more important than love because lust means desire. People want to be desired.– Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, author and advocate of the sensual revolution

Nothing contributes to, if not defines, popularity more than sexual power and financial power, especially when combined, especially when exhibited.

In the animal kingdom, the lion is given the wealth of his mane; the cock is royally crowned; the peacock is adorned with iridescent blue eyes, his own form of blue chips. However translated, plenty is power, and power is sex, the ability, the wherewithal to create, whether in business or in bed, which is a business of its own. In animals, visible traits of beauty, by human standards, are more often possessed by males than by females. We human animals, to this day, still traditionally associate power with masculinity; hence, women’s pursuit of beauty remains indirectly the pursuit of masculine power not only by attraction but by emulation. For good and bad, the human is the only animal that thinks that he or she never has plenty enough yet has been given more than any other animal. Of course, the lengths to which the human will go to prove his or her desirability as plentiful put to shame even the most complex mating rituals of other animals (even a religious ascetic lusts to prove the wealth and beauty of his or her soul in order to gain plenty of communion with God). What better testament to what the power of sex can achieve than civilization itself? Like a penis, the world has grown bigger, hotter, and harder by the day, but because nothing is ever what it appears to be, impotence, by every definition, is also on the rise.

As the young, image-conscious, hot-blooded bullfighter Pedro Romero responded to the older, titled-by-marriage, twice-divorced, fashionably dressed Lady Brett Ashley as she pretended to read his palm in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Tell me I live for always, and be a millionaire. Very likely in having her fortune told, the hot Lady Brett Ashley would have responded, "Tell me I am beautiful for always and marry a millionaire."

In his book Guyland, published in 2008, sociologist Michael Kimmel writes that "masculinity is a homosocial [tribal] experience, . . . hot women are talismans of masculinity to be displayed to other men."

In The Lover, published in 1984, French author Marguerite Duras writes, I know it’s not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction of costliness of their finery. I know the problem lies elsewhere. I don’t know where. I only know it isn’t where women think.

These two quotations, one from a man and one from a woman, in a sense seem to contradict each other, yet they also relate through the concept of mystique – the feminine mystique – which defines the talisman, the reminder.

Everything we perceive through our five senses is a reminder more than a thing. We live in a symbolic world, a world of status symbols. In our three-dimensional world, every symbol, including every event and every experience, has two exponential dimensions: what it represents and what it actually is. Paradoxically, it is the dimensional dimension that has the least value despite having the most apparent reality. It is not that which reminds that is important but that of which one is reminded. To quote Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, One can see sharp with the heart. What is important is invisible for the eyes. The reason that beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder is because the beholder beholds his or her own heart symbolically.

The human heart, like the fulcrum of the seesaw, is a vital midpoint between the brain and the loins, symbolically, a vital midpoint between human nobility and the animal nature, which is not ignoble, just undisciplined. To discipline is vastly different than to tame.

In classical Chinese medicine, which is an extension of Taoist philosophy, everything human is a matter of the heart, and all disease is heart disease, meaning that all afflictions – personal, social, political, financial, etc. – can be diagnosed as interference with the natural