Freudian Slip(pery Slope)s: Evangelical Eros

Freud seemed to think that everything -- everything -- came down to id impulses: Eros and Thanatos. (Mostly Eros...separate post on Thanatos another day.)

I consider myself a Jungian (insofar as I consider myself an anybody-ian), but I'll give Freud credit where credit is due.

Much of what we do to apparently avoid the subject of sex in society seems designed to actually bring it up -- albeit in a repressive, "No, I wasn't thinking about it, get your mind out of the gutter" kind of way.

The Victorians, for instance, supposedly put dust ruffles on all their furniture in order to avoid looking at a table or chair leg and thinking of a woman's leg. But which is more likely to remind a person of a woman's leg -- a wooden chair leg, or a skirt? Only an accident of language connects a chair leg and a lady's until you insist on putting a ruffled, pastel bit of fabric around the chair, too.

Another case in point: I have a light fixture in my bedroom that the landlady told me is antique. It has little flowers covering its border, in relief; but other than that, it looks exactly like a breast. It's impossible to think that no one else notices, but the polite, superego thing to do is ignore the likeness.

Don't mention that the light fixture looks like a breast, don't mention that the light fixture looks like a breast, the original owners must have spent minutes at a time pleading with themselves, then giggling uncontrollably -- to the consternation of guests who hadn't happened to look up (and to the chagrin of those who had).

What a social liability, hanging a breast above guests' heads and skirting your furniture as though its nakedness would be the equivalent of your daughter's...unless it was intentional. The popularity of the dust ruffle and this particular lighting fixture must have been due (at least in part) to the secret titillation of seeing what they really are, what they reference.

Which calls into question the sincerity of repressive societies and social mores, I think.

(Reconsider "The Emperor's New Clothes": Did the emperor's people really believe that the emperor was wearing clothes, or did they only say they believed it so they could secretly laugh at the emperor in triumph, knowing he was naked as a jaybird right there in public? Was the child who pointed out his nakedness popping the bubble of people's blind faith, or of the secret thrill citizens got from the transgression of public nudity, and the shaming of their leader?)

Joshua Harris, referenced before on my blog, and the author of I Kissed Dating Goodbye, writes candidly about his problems with lust in Boy Meets Girl (the more infuriating of the two books, if it's possible to rank levels of blinding rage). He writes about the time he sat down in a backyard hammock with his then-fiance, now-wife. He realized, laying there with her, that he was experiencing lust -- so he got up and walked away.

Lust is the sort of monster that chases you, though.

The further Harris got from lines that reasonable people might consider "the danger zone" (since in his case, Harris did not want to -- or want to want to -- have sex with his fiance before they married), the more ground was eaten up by "danger zone."

I mean, he couldn't sit in the backyard in broad daylight without thinking about sex.

Harris's solution is to continually redraw the lines, heading in the opposite direction from lust. This appears to be relatively reasonable until you read his advice for first dates: that after seriously considering whether a marriage relationship is possible with the girl you're asking out (the MAN ALWAYS ASKS), you purchase a book of questions and interview her during the date.

Harris tries to mitigate his anti-anti-anti-sex message in Boy Meets Girl by mentioning somewhere in the middle, in one sentence, that God doesn't mean for you to marry "someone you're not excited about going to bed with." Then he goes back to telling you how not to be excited about it.

But Harris doesn't understand what he's talking about, and it's probably not for the reasons you'd expect. He's actually too experienced.

He admits in I Kissed Dating Goodbye that he has had experience -- too much, as he tells it -- with dating, and with physical contact (though perhaps not intimacy) with girls, and that he regretted it, which is why he's telling teens not to go down the same path.

But he tells them instead to go down a path he's never been on, one that probably doesn't even really exist.

His arguments are based almost entirely in personal experience, but he doesn't have any personal experience in the kind of innocence he's advocating -- innocence not only of actions that may harm self or others, but innocence of impulse...innocence of understanding. ("Ignorance" is the word.)

In Freudian terms, Joshua Harris wants us to deny the id, to focus only on the superego.

In Freudian terms, Joshua Harris is an idiot.

Put Harris's arguments in terms of Eros and they crumble.

"You can avoid Eros!" Harris says. "Eros is not inevitable! Better yet, turn Eros off until your wedding night -- then do whatever you want!"

Put his arguments in terms of the emperor's new clothes and they're even sillier.

"Don't see that the emperor's naked! Don't see it until your wedding night and then see it all you want! Don't understand what the rest of us are laughing at until then! It's not even really funny until you're married!"

How, after all, are teens supposed to judge whether they've met someone they're "excited about going to bed with" if they've maintained the level of purity Harris is talking about? Purity that extends to thoughts?

I mean, are we seriously saying here (I'm using "we" to be polite) that we want teens to think less about sexual involvement, their boundaries, their safety? Are we really relying on absolute purity/control to keep them off each other -- and then relying on the exhausting, mind-numbing experience of a wedding day to allow them to blow off all the inhibitions they've built up over a lifetime of steadfast not-lust?

(If we are relying on wedding days to break down inhibitions, we need to make them more exhausting -- to really break them down to instinct-level -- and then probably throw in a cage-match or two for good measure, to get the adrenaline going. I'd be in favor of that.)

The truth is that Eros is either dealt with, or it's repressed -- it's not absent.

The repressed type of Eros -- the kind that causes manufacturers to blithely churn out hundreds of breast-like lampshades or thousands or millions of skirt-like dust ruffles -- makes everything into a reference to sex. Joshua Harris runs from the hammock to repress, not erase.

The dealt-with type of Eros normalizes itself. Mention the dust-ruffle-skirt connection and the chair is a chair again. Say the emperor is naked and he becomes sad and pitiful.

So here's my punchline, the telos for this post: This is why Christians claim that your wedding night will be "better" (insert obnoxious winking and nudging here) if you wait until then to have sex.

They don't say it out of a misguided notion that "beginner's luck" will help you through an entirely new and essentially awkward experience. They don't say it (though some may think this is why they're saying it) because losing your virginity to your spouse is "spiritual."

It's not that they're saying it will be more enjoyable, but it's not that they're lying to you, either. I think they're knowingly pointing out the secret of noticing-the-emperor's-nakedness-but-not-telling-anyone; I think they're giggling at the breast-light.

They say it'll be better if you wait because repression really does make everything sexier.