I heard the reasonable sounding story of the father who caught his son smoking and made him smoke a whole carton to cure him of the desire. This is reasonable in the same sense that a father catching his son masturbating made him do it 50 times the same night. Isn’t it interesting how often fuzzy thinking goes along with revenge thinking? The fuzziness is in the idea that success is attained when the son becomes like pavlov’s dog, thinking only of suffering and shame as the reasons for adhering to the social taboos.
I know of a stubborn little boy who loved to draw and found when he was introduced to the school system in his neighborhood this kind of activity which gave him much pleasure and sense of accomplishment was treated as something for his past, OK for a little kid but not really for a school student. Not really for someone serious about school.
Stubbornly he held on to the idea that what he created was valuable and that even though there were times a teacher may take a half an hour to have art time, the system he was captive of definitely did not see art as anything of value. This allowed stubborn boy to make a clear distinction, later to be realized as a false distinction, between the world of learning and the world of artistic pleasure.
The boy fortunately and with suffering, internalized that the ideas of adults needed to be dealt with, with strong subjectivity and sense of self. Even if self was highly questionable, it was much better than the social alternatives to conscious.
Boy, with no judgement against girls, let’s call him boy, accepted that some things regarded as good in his outside world, the world of adults and school, were decent. He found comfort in drinking coco and eating a slice of buttered toast, still called breakfast even though many more substantial versions had been offered, to be enjoyable. He could sit with his mother the understanding provider of his modified breakfast, momentarily forgetting he would soon have no alternative to walking the block to school.
The certitude of his self-protective distinction only grew over the school years along with the difficulties it entailed.
An older seeming muscular big boy with no interest in bullying, appeared at one grade-level for a year, named Lincoln. Lincoln was a disciple of his older brother who had been in the Israeli army and was thus for a while the purveyor of coolness and new ideas, always interesting to talk to, he knew where we, the boys, all would be in the future. He taught us about homos, in a quite self-effacing way it seemed, saying he didn’t know anything about it but that some guys weren’t men, they wanted to get sexy with other men. He also knew about masturbation, a secret activity that we were all experimenting with. He could label it alright and he told us that masterbation was what homos did.
The boy was so stubborn, he heard what was said, he felt it would be a bad thing if he wanted to get sexy with other men, still he found Lincoln’s adult insight in things must be lacking. Boy’s conclusion was that masturbation like art had its value and that like art, it did not lead to losing in life. The very good feeling of self-sex was not terrible at all and like art was not at all something to be afraid of. He thought his art and sex fearlessness was a good thing and an example of the failure of social values.
Boy, went into a tiny dark store that sold many random things including candy and magazines, he put his hands on a Playboy which he knew would be there, confidently brought it up to the guy who always watched everyone in the store but sat back in a short tunnel of small sale items on cards and racks, put enough money and the magazine on the counter. One of the great joys of life, the man took the money, put the magazine in a flat paper bag and handed it back.
Women nude, breasts with nothing covering them, sticking right out there. And the victory of attempting something which maybe could have gotten him arrested, as far as he could tell or at the very least be very embarrassing. Such a victory, he now knew something none of the other boys could even imagine, that you could walk into a store and buy a Playboy! Indeed a lot of fear put out there in the world was for nothing, when you made a calculated effort for something difficult, socially unacceptable but something you thought was OK, you could attain it. Stubbornness certainly had its rewards. Rewards but also something that would be primarily personal, trusting an inner voice, if you will, a voice clear and in need of clarification so as not to be fuzzy.
Actually written Oct, 22, 2013
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