Tuesday 29 July 2008

What's almost never mentioned in clinical circles is the preposterous kind of burden placed particularly on young men, of the type described below...
A pressure reinforced not only by male peers, but, more particularly and acutely, by females as well. A crushing and absurd "double burden" of its own: The pressure to perform countermanded by the wish not to be too pushing, as society (and the boys and girls themselves) demand that to appear normal and socially fulfilled you must engage in relationships, but to go anyway toward getting a relationship you have to go to the most absurd lengths, arm yourself with dishonesties, be prepared to wheedle and cajole some girl into a loveless fuck, in short be willing to go to any lengths of indignity and dishonesty to score points on someone else's social scale.
But at the same time you can't be too strident, too passionate, too involved, or you run the risk of seeming obsessional. And these two pressures are always jarring against one another, the pressure to perform hindered by the pressure not to be "abusive"- not to impose unwantd desires on some unwilling girl, the kind of thing heavily censured by the same society that demands exactly that degree of heavy involvement- the old love and romance swindle endlessly perpetuated by the media.
This results in a morass of contradictory and negative feeling, the sexual impulses checked, the emotional development retarded, a checkmate, a stagnant position. Hence i think so much of the suppressed fury and degraded impulses of the male sexuality...

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