Beliefs & Butt Plugs

Lucy, a friend of a friend whom I had just met, passed me her mobile phone and said

‘Here’s a picture of my diamond butt plug, sexy dontcha think?’

What I saw was not only a picture of the aforementioned butt plug, but how it nestled prettily between two round bum cheeks, that I  assumed were hers (having seen only her face in the 30 minutes since we’d been introduced).

I was too English to reply anything other than,

‘Oh yes. Um. Shiny.’

In case you were wondering, this is an example of what they call over-sharing. It’s a phenomenon which is gaining traction nowadays, thanks to the internet. The more noise there is on the internet, the louder you need to shout and preferably about something shocking. I was shocked …but in a totally non-judgmental way; how can I be anything else when this, my personal blog, is a prime candidate for the over-sharing Oscars (if there were such a thing).

According to www.oversharers.com, an oversharer is…

Anyone who publicly shares embarrassingly intimate–or gross and disgusting–details of their lives, right out there where anyone can read them. On Facebook. On Twitter. On a blog. Or just about any other place.

The difficulty with this definition is that ‘embarrassingly intimate, gross or disgusting’ is purely subjective (notions that I set out to destroy with my blog). Here’s another quote from the Radical Honesty Rag:

Most of us have been raised in an all pervasive Judeo/Christian social context and live inside a built-in, brainwashed, thoroughly inculcated thought-form that greatly determines what we perceive and do and how we live.

There are some conditionings I have chosen to keep from my ‘christian social context’ upbringing for example, the practice of not discussing butt plugs within the first thirty minutes of meeting someone.  But not because butt plugs or discussing them are wrong, rather because of an unwillingness on my part to encroach upon someone else’s boundaries (even though they are learned boundaries) for fear of rejection; and yet, I find nowadays that my finest relationships are those where I can ‘overshare’ …for as you see, I am a true believer in radical honesty, or as I term it, the path to enlightenment.

Radical Honesty…isn’t another form of Tourettes

Radical Honesty is not, contrary to what the last paragraphs would have you believe, an ability to be frank about ‘embarrassingly intimate’ stuff or the ability to swear uncaringly in front of your grandmother , although this is one consequence of being enlightened (whether you choose to do so is a different matter). If you practice radical honesty, then to seek to cut through the layers of lies that your mind and other minds have woven into the fabric of our society for thousands of years. You go back to what is reality. Not ‘what you perceive is reality’.  Once you are at a place where you can just ‘be’ with what ‘is’  instead of fighting it and/or trying to control it then you are enlightened. Free from the junk that we put upon ourselves. With this blog for example, I seek to be able to examine taboos unclouded by judgment (that doesn’t mean I don’t have them, but I am aware that they are judgments, not truths). Just as I might scrutinize the behaviours of an ant colony, so if I spotted an ant eating another ant, it would be the cause of some curiosity but not the cause for moral outrage against cannibalism (…and if an ant fancied using a butt plug, well I say good luck on that one).

Because for some years now, I have discarded the belief structure of right or wrong. From murder and casual sex to religion and butt plugs, there simply is no right or wrong. There are acts…and consequences. Some of those consequences are horrific and I wouldn’t wish them on anyone. There are plenty of acts in which I will never take part because I dislike the consequences, but nevertheless, they are still only acts and consequences. According to another friend, this makes me someone with sociopathic tendencies – someone who has been

socially conditioned to disregard, the intrinsic human values which are believed to be universal. Universal values [are those] that a great many human beings in the vast majority of places and situations, at almost all times, do in fact hold in common.

That was another quote, this time from Wikipedia. Whilst I might dispute the ‘universality’ of such intrinsic values, the more interesting question is why do we have them in common?

Here’s the truth. Human beings have these beliefs in common not because they are morally ‘right’ but only because we all have minds which are programmed to survive.

You see, the mind likes to consider itself  right (calling it moral is even better) because that’s how has it survived over the centuries. We like right and wrong so much that we have indoctrinated the most common agreements into laws and appointed people to preside over those structures. Murder – says the mind – is wrong/immoral; but in truth only because it threatens our survival, otherwise it is simply an act, the consequence of which is pain for others and death for one. Other rights and wrongs have become belief structures that have imprisoned us by feeding into our ego. The more ‘right’ you are and are perceived to be, the more superior you are. It is a measure of worth to some people. [In some circles, it is being 'wrong' that is right for them. The more rebellious you are, the more you 'wrong' you are perceived to be, the more 'right' or superior you are.] In most of the western world, the ‘rightness’ is fundamentally based on, and fully described in, the Bible.

But what does God think of Butt Plugs?

‘I’m a bit shaky on my bible.’ said my boyfriend. ‘ Wasn’t Joseph the father of Christ?’

Of course that is more than ‘a bit’ shaky, but I only said. ‘No the holy spirit was the father of Christ. Joseph was the earthly father of Christ…and Mary’s husband.’

‘But wasn’t she supposed to be a virgin?’ said my boyfriend. ‘If she was married, why weren’t they having sex?’

Good question, I looked it up. Turns out she was about 12 and only betrothed to Joseph. I guess their marriage hadn’t yet been consummated. Which means that God impregnated another man’s wife-to-be and also a minor (in most circles those would be considered ‘wrong’ behaviors, especially as Mary didn’t give her consent to the conception). Some doctrines state that not only was Mary a virgin on conception, but that she also managed to preserve her virginity when giving birth (in blunt terms that means her hymen remained intact) and for the rest of her life. Poor old Joseph never got any, and neither did she.

It’s no coincidence that in Judeo/Christian society, the ultimate woman is a virgin. In fact, Mary is referred to as ‘the tabernacle exempt from defilement and corruption’, defilement and corruption of course being euphemisms for sex. As a girl, I was taught that it was wrong to have sex with many men – or indeed any men – before marriage. If I did, I certainly wasn’t to admit it to anyone in private or in public (and definitely not in a blog). Oh the shame. That meant the more men I had sex with, the more guilt ridden and shamed I became.  Unable to speak out about it through fear of being ‘judged’, because I was wrong.  The more shamed I became, the lower my self esteem and the more destructive I became, my guilt and shame perpetuating an alcohol steeped cycle of promiscuity. Looking deeper into the implicit lessons of my Christian upbringing, it was not only the number of men that came into question, but also that sex itself was sinful; defilement and corruption are hardly pretty analogies (again, if you saw a female ant mating with many male ants, would you be outraged? What a slut!).

Casual sex is ‘wrong’, but why? Why have minds decided this?

It is biologically wise for a women to mate with many partners in order to produce more viable offspring. All things being equal therefore they would do so. They might be prone to form a primary dyad for some years after their children are born, but I am inclined to think that if left to their natural devices, women would form communities …women instinctively look to other women to help with childcare. But it is threatening to men’s survival to have other sperm compete for the same egg. In order to prevent this men have evolved both physiological mechanisms (sperm competition) and mental mechanisms many of which have been set out through religion, belief structures and even laws. In our masculine oriented society, women must remain sexually exclusive whilst standards and in some cases laws have been created by men, to allow men to spread sperm among more than one woman (hence the evolution of the double standard). Extend that to the use of sexual toys, explicitly making sex recreational, and you meet a situation that is almost as bad …for if sex is fun, women might be tempted to stray to a better partner, a better orgasm and a threaten a man’s ability to procreate. In other words, if Christianity was going to be successful at promoting man’s (not mankind’s) survival, the ideal woman Mary, to whom all women should aspire, had to be a virgin. And oh how popular that was. No wonder …it fed directly into the big ol’ insecure male ego.

Here’s another truth. There has not been one single law, religion or belief structure since the beginning of time that has not been flouted. This is because our minds cannot comprehend the enormity of how we really are, and how the universe actually works. And despite our minds wanting to define our world and in its totality, we will inevitably trespass against the laws that our mind makes because a mind simply cannot begin to capture what ‘is’. Nevertheless, our minds continue to do the best they can within their own confines, trying to control the world around us, because they believe they have to, order to to survive. Of course this is no longer true – if it ever was in the first place; because oppressive regimes create pain, which suppresses our ability to live in harmony with each other and with our planet.

So next time you judge a man or a woman for being promiscuous, inappropriate, indecorous or anything else; be aware that your judgment is based purely on belief structures inherited from other people’s minds trying to survive since the dawn of time. The divine source cares not one whit about the appropriateness of discussing butt plugs in the first 30 minutes, 3 days or 1 year or indeed whether you use one with 1, 50 or 1000 partners. In fact, it doesn’t care that you use one at all. That’s why instead of living up to standards you played no part in creating, but may perpetuate through ignorance, you might try living freely. Happily. And Lovingly.

Reprinted with kind permission of Lucy, a brave woman and a great oversharer.

Reprinted by kind permission of Lucy

(Interested in reading more thoughts about how the mind works? Read a book which cuts through the crap Winning through Enlightenment - but be warned, it will destroy your life as you know it).
Source: The Vagina Times

Tags: Butt plugs, diamond butt plug, featured, Oversharing, religion

Category: Adulthood & Relationships