Relating to the opposite sex

Originally Posted by 7luminaries

Lorelyen, I for one don't think your answer is at all offensive, and I'm glad you speak your mind I'm jumping in to offer a few words but in no way to interrupt your response to Jro. I don't mean to interfere with that conversation at all.

though I may agree in part with what you're saying, I see things differently in other ways. I do think some men are ok with being your friend, particularly at work or in a group set aside for some other purpose, but as a whole, there are very few deep, long-term, agape-based personal friendships between adult, non-familial men and women.

There's a lot here to discuss! So if I may just take up one issue more to elaborate than disagree.

Eating, drinking, and excreting are natural too, and require no one else. These in fact (plus shelter) are all that is required for any one person to survive. However we don't just eat or drink anything. And we don't relieve ourselves just anywhere or in any way. We have huge cultural overlays that shape our behaviour and thoughts for even these most basic and required natural urges to eat, drink, and excrete. Totally nothing to do with any religion for many.

So we can hardly think that sex, which involves another person and is not required for your personal survival, would be any different. The simple fact is we're not purely animal. We are suffused with spirit and sentience, and if we seek to deny or negate that, we are neither fully human nor even the innocent beast..................
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But I also hear something else in what you're saying, which is that it's never been this way (partnership was arranged and/or coerced historically) and it's still not this way yet today. We've not yet found our way. We have this archaic paradigm of yesteryear and now we have total amorality and misdirection at the cultural level as the "modern alternative".

Thus many don't yet know how to live from a place of integrity within themselves (without a rigidly imposed archaic paradigm), nor do they understand the implications of choosing to live from a place of integrity regarding intimacy, sex, and partnership.

I honestly appreciate your view and it may apply among spiritually-inspired people in their relationships but the taboo so far as Ms Average goes comes with a loophole – girls dolling up. Why, if not to make themselves attract? And whom? I posit it’s to attract men and that’s in response to basic drives (in Freud’s “unconscious mind”) which is (as best we know) nature’s way of bringing the genders together.

Within the same taboo comes sex-for-pleasure for those “socially approved” – people found ways to avoid reproduction to enjoy just the sensations. In the more spiritually broadminded the energies border on magic – as in using them for something other than the pure sensations of the act - closer to the occult but still part of it. Has its usese - for example, mutually exploring one’s deepest mysteries requiring the catalyst of a “partner” (a word I hate, but it’ll do here) and which needs a deep sensual affinity.

Cultural expectations change over time. 100 years ago, marriage was the only way to legitimise sex. Then 60 years ago the young rebelled. As I understand they could afford what’s now thought of as promiscuity because STDs had just about been wiped out; AIDS wasn’t on the horizon and places like the Brook Centres helped with advice and various services. Although the permissiveness has gone the fallout has downgraded marriage so anyone who can declare another a “partner” can legitimise sex, more recently the partners don’t have to live together. (All of which hasn’t been good for offspring).

But there it is – many set out to attract sexually. Others like me don’t. I wear a bra for support and have had my hair lightened a bit but nothing otherwise to make me something physically I’m not! If I attract it’s WYSIWYG, as the old computer term went!

I don’t think we have to negate sentience or spirit to be able to indulge. But if people are patient enough to avoid the immediate lure - not easy in today's ;instant gratification world - then enter each other’s firmaments gradually, enduring love grows if it works at all. (It’s important to me now where sex is a lesser part of a relationship. Curious it may sound it doesn’t have to matter.

Instead, if not following old oppressive strictures, many will rely now on the usual motley assortment of power, control, manipulation, physicality, urges, and ego needs (the normative, mainstream guidance). Equally oppressive in many ways, and perhaps vastly more insidious.

And yet we find ourselves at this juncture...moving beyond the old ways but for many now without any direction, vision, or heart. There is no historic map nor any solutions to be found in the harsh, tired oppression of patriarchy, religious orthodoxy and power-over structures more broadly. And yet there is no ready map or cultural reference point in our amoral, utilitarian modern society either.

There is however a great opportunity at this juncture to go where humanity have not ever gone before. It's for us to forge a new path for humanity, one of authentic love in being and doing (i.e., made manifest). For ourselves, for others, and for all that is.

Peace & blessings

7L

Perhaps it'll veer that way. Hence we need understanding rather than censorship which leads to exploitation. We need to be aware. (It's surprising how much of this subject crops up in marketing!)
Thank you for such a detailed response.

Same to you, 7L, peace
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