In Japan, it is evidently common knowledge that guys get horny when tired. Here in the west, on the other hand, I have never heard it from anyone except my own journal. And I doubt I have had a significant impact on Japanese culture yet…

Feminists may be right when they say that the brain is the body’s largest sex organ, but for us males it is rather the other way around.  There seems to be a primordial rivalry between our two heads, so to speak: When one falls asleep, the other wakes up.  Healthy men have erections during 80% or more of their REM sleep, even when the dreams are not explicitly sexual in nature. Basically, unless the dreams are scary, they will be accompanied by sexual arousal.

It should not really surprise anyone, then, that lack of such sleep is followed by an upswing in sexual temptations.  Actually, this is not entirely unique for sexuality:  People are also known to gain weight if they don’t get enough sleep.

In my own life, I notice my running low on sleep by getting dry eyes, cold sores, and the women in the city becoming sexier all at the same time. Well, many of them at least.  Also, writing at such a time is not necessarily a good idea.  I realize that the last chapter of my current novel may need a serious rewrite or there will be a PG warning.

So yeah, the brain really may be our largest sex organ, but it can be put to better use than that, in my opinion.

Luckily I am not in a life situation where I can actually “make serious mistakes with regards to the opposite sex” to quote our favorite Venusian. Watching myself with detached curiosity, I may even learn something about human nature again. Well, about a rather unusual human’s nature perhaps.

Or I could go get some sleep, I guess.

“What truth and joy is there in love that can be redone?” asks this girl from WW2 in the anime Natsu no Arashi. Your mileage may vary.  Some would ask “why not make love as much as possible in a world so lacking in love?”

I think that is a reasonable question, when you see life from a higher perspective. After all, the vast majority of adults have a fairly strong mating instinct. This is an intelligent design indeed because otherwise we would not have been born in the first place: There are so many other interesting things to do, that taking on the long and arduous process of raising a new generation would probably not find many volunteers if there was not an enticement to get started. So there is.

Now we know that fulfilling other people’s needs is generally considered a good thing by the world’s religions and philosophies.  Surely then when a man and a woman – or a sadist and a masochist, I guess – can give each other enormous amounts of pleasure by using their minds and bodies, few if any expenses required, it would be bordering on cruelty to not do it, right?  Certainly it should be considered a good deed, like feeding the hungry or giving the weary a bed to rest on, or visiting the lonely, or restoring dignity to the downtrodden.

And yet, when you read for instance Jesus’ list of good deeds that were done to him through doing them to other people (this is a really important point in its own right, but I have to skip it today, but let us say that this does not just apply to Jesus but to any Enlightened person, not that I’m saying Jesus was just some guy or anything) – Jesus goes “I was hungry and you fed me, I was naked and you clothed me” and so on, but there is a conspicuous absence of one phrase: “I was horny and you made love to me.” Why is this excluded?

The Catholic answer is probably that Jesus was never horny, so it would make no sense to include that in the list. But it is not just Jesus. All the great lights of history, the ones who created the world’s civilization, seem to have taken a dim view of fornication.

Scientists will tell you that marriage came into being so men could know which babies were theirs, and not throw them out with the bathwater. So the societies that did not have a system of exclusive mating rights would see rather few children survive, and be overrun by those who had such a system. Evolution in action, baby!  Of course, by “scientists” in this case I mean tenured nerds seeking to explain why they could not recognize a happy home if they saw one, much less create one.  To all right-thinking people there is a more obvious answer.

In mentally healthy people, making love creates an emotional bond. In fact, even the thought of making love to someone creates a one-sided emotional attachment, a fact that makes for hilarious anime but somewhat disturbing real-life headlines. Obviously then, if you make love to a random number of people who have very little else in common, you will experience a kind of emotional fragmentation. You will be pulled in different directions by the bonds (attachments) you have created.  This is going to be painful for all involved, but especially if you are the one true love of someone who is just one of a baker’s dozen to you.  This opens the gates of Hell, and I don’t necessarily mean only in the afterlife. There are also smaller infractions.

In light of  this, there are some who decide to live free of attachment, or attached only to the Lord or to Dharma or to Tao perhaps. Even if this means denying themselves and another some of the joys of earthly life, they believe it is worth it in order to maintain a joyful freedom to live a spiritual life here in this world. I respect that.

I am not one of them, though. I just happen to be moderately misshapen in body and soul, so that attempting to make love would not be a particularly pleasant experience for anyone involved.  I also happen to be particularly well suited for living alone: I enjoy solitude and can take pretty good care of myself.  So my opinions on this matter are not very intense.  Maybe they can still be of interest to some, though.

Being a teenage boy is living with the risk of acute embarrassment. But then it gets better – or does it?

This entry is not for children. Well, it may not destroy their innocent minds forever, but I’m not sure. It is about sex, after all.  Well, not how to have sex, more like how to not have sex. You’d think that would be the easiest thing in the world, at least for a man, but the life of numerous congressmen and preachers show us otherwise.

Anyway, for some reason a small number of us choose to not bind ourselves to the powerful instincts that encourage reproduction.  This is no small choice, for remember that we literally are the children of those who did reproduce (which means they had sex, and probably lots of it since it does not make children every time). And the same for their parents again, and their grandparents and so on back to the dawn of time, whether you count Adam or Amoeba as your ancestor. (OK, so amoeba don’t have sex, but your genes would still have around 800 million years of sex before they came to you.)

Apart from us certified weirdos, there is a much much larger number of people who try to not have physically intimate relationships with more than one person, whom they are married to or planning to marry in the near future.  I think that is a little different, but there may be some similarities some of the time, especially since the average man has a stronger sex drive than the average woman up to the age of around 35-40, and again when the woman reaches menopause.

OK, onward to my observations!

The young male body will not take celibacy lying down. It will go into a state of sexual readiness at improper times or even with no encouragement at all, seemingly just on a whim. Given the slightest encouragement, even if only in the mind, it will get overly excited.  At this point, most young men will take the matter in their own hands, as it were, to cause a release of the mating urge without an actual mate.  (This behavior is also seen in some caged animals.)  A few God-fearing souls dare not do this, but eventually their nightly dreams will show them the true power of their instincts in this regard as well.  So one way or another,  a certain balance is struck.

This excessive sensitivity fades gradually as the years pass, but perhaps particularly from around the age of 35 or so.  (I guess this may vary – some people live their lives more slowly than others.) We find that we can hang out with women and not embarrass ourselves no matter what.  No matter where we look, our pulse does not race until we flip that mental switch.  We can look at women to admire them without desiring them. Paradise at last?

But how long was Adam in Paradise.  I suppose that varies from one Adam to another, and specifically I suspect the next change only happens to religious or very nearly religious people.  Basically it is an instance of the understanding that “I am not my body”.  While I have felt on this for a while, I did not get the right words to describe it until I read some of the books by Ryuho Okawa, founder of the “Happy Science” religious movement.  He compares our mind to a compass needle, and mentions various things that can get that compass needle to point in another direction than the way we intended.  So if I say that an attractive woman makes my compass needle move, it is a metaphor, not an euphemism, as it would have been when I was 18.

Another concept that he stresses is the difference between love that gives and “love” that takes.  (Japanese does in fact have two words for love, which I have seen explained like this: “Koi is always wanting, Ai is always giving.” This is again something I noticed several years ago (and which has cropped up in at least one of my unfinished novels):  When I look at someone, do I look with eyes that take or eyes that give?  People can often see this difference, even if we may look the same otherwise.

So this is the meaning of the title.  I think this is a voluntary thing, that most people probably don’t even think about, because they feel hidden in their flesh, much like one would feel hidden in wide, loose-fitting clothes.  As long as other people can’t see anything, we can do what we want.  But the flesh is temporary, but bad habits are forever, I suspect.  So I may not have all the time in the world to recalibrate, not only this sensitivity but many others, like anger and envy. Is it enough that nobody sees it, or that my blood pressure does not go up, or will I continue to judge myself (self-reflection) until the compass needle of my mind points steadily toward my highest aspiration?  Or die trying, most likely.

I came across this story via the blog “Unfiltered Perceptions“, which ironically is in Norwegian for the most part. International readers can use their favorite translation service (such as Google Translate) to find out more. Anyway, the story in short: A policeman logs on a chat room with the nick “Pernille12” (Pernille being a Scandinavian name more typical of the child generation than the parent generation, names being subject to fads even here).  He then waits until a middle-aged man contacts him, and leads the guy on until he gets him to masturbate in front of a web cam, presumably believing the policeman’s assurance that he is indeed a 12 year old girl and not a gay man, as the other first suspects. The masturbator is then formally accused and sentenced for the two men’s shared activity.  The judge briefly reflects on the fact that you just don’t get evidence this way, but sets this concern aside because of the severity of the crime.

Since laws vary a bit from nation to nation, even in the somewhat civilized world, it bears mention that in Norway you can’t use this kind of evidence-gathering, thus the pause of the judge. But the rules of due process only count for real humans, evidently, not for pedophiles.  These predators must be caught even when they are hunting unicorns – that is to say, something that is not really there.  As the blogger points out, it is hardly a given that a real 12 year old would lead the man on like that.  What exactly does this say about how the police, the court, and the society view 12 year old girls?  Please, if there are girls who are that desperate to see a guy masturbate, they are going to find some way, even if it means enlisting a classmate or their stepdad.  Perhaps we should have policemen passing as pedophiles so we can arrest the girls too? For their own protection, of course.  They are much safer behind bars, as are we all.

But as I said yesterday (and occasionally over the years), there is a reason why we habitually suspend law and decency when pedophilia is involved.  That reason is that pedophilia is commonplace, to the point where almost everyone has been either involved personally or had a close friend or family member involved somehow. And even for those of us who have somehow escaped this ubiquitous scourge, there is ever the risk that we may be seen as criminals or at the very least aiding and abetting the crime unless we scream “death to the infidels!” at least as loudly as the guy next to us.  Oops, wrong geographic location, but the same principle still applies.

Or in other words, pedophilia and incest have just recently been criminalized, so no one knows for sure just where they begin and end.  In real life, off the Net,  it can be hard to tell whether a girl is 12 or 16, depending on her physical development as well as clothes and makeup.  In Norway, it is legal to have sexual intercourse with a 16 year old, but it is illegal to have pictures of them that may be sexually enticing to a lonely old judge. On the net – or on mobile phones – they are children, and must be protected at all cost; but in bed they are men or women.  More fun with human sanity!

I may sound like I have something to defend here, and I do.  Once we have established that due process does not apply to pedophiles, any man who had ever been alone with a child is utterly at the mercy of said child (even after it is grown up), its mother and its therapist or basically anyone who can convince the former child that the problems in its later life must come from SOMEONE having done something terrible in the past. And when they come for me, there is no one left to speak up for me.

So Michael Jackson died. I personally never liked him nor his music, but he was supposedly one of the greater artists of the previous century. He also did things for race relations in the USA that not many could do. Without Michael Jackson there would probably not have been a President Obama. But all some people can think to say about MJ is that he was a pedo.

I don’t know about that. More importantly, neither do you. He was not judged by a jury of his peers (how many peers did he even have?) but by the press and the rumor mill. And so heinous was his crime that allegations were enough – no need for a fair trial, no innocence until found guilty.

More importantly, pedophilia is such a heinous crime that we are willing to perforate the Constitution and put in place technical systems that can, at the flip of a switch, be used to track down and silence political dissidents when that becomes expedient.

Given the gravity of the crime, you’d expect it to be found prominently among the Ten Commandments, but actually there is no mention of it anywhere in the Law and the Prophets. Jesus does not mention it with a word. Muhammad the Prophet married a girl he would not have been allowed to look twice at today. It is as if the notion of pedophilia only decades ago descended into this world.

That is actually a pretty fair description. The word itself harks back to the 1950es. Even the notion of childhood itself did not appear until the Industrial Revolution. In earlier history, infants (babies and toddlers) were recognized as different from adults, but children were not. If you read any ancient text, you will find that the word “children” is not used about an age group, or if it is, refers to small children. Usually it simply means offspring. In the agrarian society, children would start farm work or apprenticeship from the age of 5 or so. The notion of childish innocence was absent, and not least: Consent was not really something people worried about. The person who was in a position of authority made all decisions, and that was that.

During the early years of the Industrial Revolution, children were an important part of the workforce. Geography is history to some extent: There are still countries where child labor is taken for granted. And returning to the topic of pedophilia, there are still countries where prepubescent girls are married off, although it is going underground more and more as the concept of childhood is still spreading around the world from its epicenter in France and Britain. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for all his faults and the pernicious rot his philosophy has introduced in the western world, may have been the first thinker to have a clear vision of childhood as a distinct life phase, or at least he was near that point in time and space. The industrial revolution itself made it possible, for the first time, to let children spend their days in school and play, as their labor was no longer needed on the farm . Yet it was only with Piaget that we finally realized the length and depth of each human’s growth and development. Or at the very least he deepened, formalized and popularized the topic like no one before him. By then we are squarely within living memory: I had recently got my job when Piaget passed from this world.

So the notion that children cannot consent to a sexual relationship is itself very new. It is also far from obvious. In fact, it requires a certain degree of faith from all involved, since children actively seek not only attention but intimacy. This makes things hard to see clearly, not only for the pedophile, but also for the victims.

Humans are unique in that our instinctual knowledge is extremely rudimentary, compared to what we need in life. Kittens may spend time playing, but they are mainly just unfolding their existing cat nature. In contrast, a small child cannot develop into a human being without downloading its human-ness from those who have gone before it. To accomplish this, children have a literal biological need for attention, just as for food and warmth. Experiences from early communist-era child-rearing centrals showed that children who were simply fed and sheltered but not given attention would soon sicken and die. Children need to bond with adults; if they cannot, then the conditions for life are not deemed to be present.

On the other hand, children are amazingly tolerant of their adults. They will cling to you even if you are a drunkard, a scoundrel, a thief and a liar. Or a pedophile. They do this because it is a necessary part of their programming, which has served their ancestors well through the millennia. (The definition of “served well” when it comes to evolution is the very fact that they became your ancestors.)

The pedophile who jumps out of the bushes, abducts a child, rapes it and kills it (or occasionally the other way around or both at the same time) is sure to get publicity, but this is exceedingly rare. Most pedophiles are extremely subtle and at least as much in control of their impulses as the average straight person. There is a sliding scale from bleeding-anus sodomy to cuddly behavior that is so perfectly normal that you would never know anything was going on unless you actually check the pedophile’s genitals for signs of reaction.

(We interrupt this scientific essay for an amazing WTF moment from the author’s personal life: In my late teens I actually had a 10-12 year old girl suddenly grope my groin, very obviously checking on the state of my male member while I was playing with her younger siblings. I guess that makes sense, but it is rather impolite. It also made me kind of wary about the internal workings of that family for a time. Now, back to our regular programming.)

By sheer synchronicity, I read an article some hours before the Jackson incident: “Not unusual to forget childhood sexual abuse“, by Harvard Science. The somewhat startling conclusion is that to most children, sexual abuse – even when physically painful – was not seen as extraordinary, traumatic or seriously threatening at the time. As such, it was forgotten, or at least ignored for many years, not because of some desperate attempt to shield the fragile self, but because children generally don’t go around remembering things that are not reinforced through repetition or conversation. So temporary sexual abuse was not seen for what it was until later, when their own sexuality had developed and they realized what had been done to them. That’s when the trauma set in.

And a big part of the horror of being a victim of this crime is the feeling of being an accomplice to it. Or so I’ve heard. This is why it is so important to realize that the instincts of children are different from the instincts of adults, even when they sometimes seem to meet halfway. Cuddling up to a molester is a perfectly normal, healthy behavior for a child. This applies EVEN IF the molester has already done something secret or humiliating or even painful to you. You should NOT have known better. You were NOT leading them on. The child’s need for adult contact takes priority. It may look very differently when that instinct is pruned from your brain by puberty and replaced by the adult sex drive. But you cannot rewrite the past. Neurotypicals have this unfortunate tendency to always try to do just that, because they believe in consensus reality: That the things people agree on are true, and the things they don’t agree on are not. But this is exactly the power behind child abuse, the power of well-placed silence, closed doors and things only hinted at.

And this is of course also why you cannot defend yourself from accusations, even if you are Michael Jackson and have the best lawyers money can buy. Because the things you would do if you were a pedophile and the things you would do if you just loved children are largely identical, at least as long as there are witnesses present and sometimes even if not.