Postmodern philosophers have opened up fundamental regions of ontology. Have they enabled an excting, fundamental liberation, or have they turned the floor beneath us into a bottomless pit?
As a practical concomitant to all this, cyberspace has created vast new territory, bringing new opportunities not just for what you can do but for who you can be.
This is an exciting context for crossdreaming. A positive one if handled well, although an invalidating one ('your inner woman has no essence!') if employed negatively.
Another context is the increasing acceptance of minority sexualities. Homosexuality becomes increasingly acceptable in mainstream culture (in many countries); BDSM culture is developing at a rapid rate.
It's within this context that I have to disagree with the great Jack Molay's strong objection to autogynephilia being regarded (by Blanchard etc.) as autoeroticism. Jack seems to concur with interpretations of autoeroticism as being a perversion, and thus takes offence at crossdreamers being regarded as perverted.
Can you, reader, think about autoeroticism open-mindedly? Maybe it is not so bad. Maybe it is a different take on 'self' and 'other', one that avoids harmful projections? If sexualities are okay as long as they don't involve harming others, surely autoeroticism is the most okay of all?
Such an attitude implies a pessimistic attitude to other-orientated sexuality, often depicted sweetly as 'love'. Yes I know it can be wonderful, but so often it isn't. I think the genuinely happy long-term relationships are the exception rather than the rule. Sexual desire for others is not so unselfish. Much of it is actually about affirming one's self, so there is not such a rigid dictotomy between self-regarding and other-regarding sexualities.
Introversion should not be regarded as a refuge for failed extroverts. Introversion entails lively imagination and emotional self-sufficiency.
Even if the cause of autogynephilia is femininity rather than introversion, the interpretation that the stimulation is about oneself as female is surely right. This is a kind of autoeroticism, is it not?
I do not state here that autoeroticism is a superior sexuality, just that we should think be open to not dismissing it as an inferior one.
(Two early Mirror Sister posts are pertinent here:
Id Sister, Ego Brother
Realising himself or herself to the fullest )
As many of us know, Jack has ideological underpinnings. He knowingly uses "perversion" to manipulate those who don't know better, and to "justify" policing his arena.
ReplyDeleteA bottomless pit? For some there is the misguided idea that feelings are only legit if they are grounded in biology, and also this is used as a tool so the sexual can be thought secondary.
Autoeroticism is somewhat vague? Perhaps it can be stimulation by the experience of one's own body part. Or likely more prevalent must be forms of stimulating phenomenologies where how one relates to oneself plays an integral part.
Hi honey!
ReplyDeleteThe bottomless pit analogy was intended to refer to postmodernism in general, rather than to the specific context of crossdreaming; to the impression that everything that makes life valuable and meaningful gets deconstructed, leaving nothing beneath it. The negative side of the coin, as I see it.
Have you thought of starting your own Blogger blog? xxx
Yeah, postmodernism is currently quite the dirty word, even in its own tradition. I think Zizek of the current flock puts it quite well in stating, “not the reality behind the illusion, but the reality in illusion itself.”
ReplyDeleteA blog could be fun, though I don't think I am quite the type of person for such a format!
Sometimes postmodern theory seems to me to go beyond a point where it offers anything in earnest that is actually helpful for life, instead undermining the reality of you, me, life and everything (even itself), for the sake of a pleasure in sophisticated intellectual geometry, e.g. paradoxes.
ReplyDeleteI think you should give a blog a try. xxx
I think conflation of postmodernism with theory itself, or current thought in the continental tradition is quite unfortunate. Of which the landscape emphasizes the affirmative nature of new ways of thinking.
ReplyDeleteA blog, or a least a few posts may be a good idea... Seeing as I (yet again) can no longer post on CL...
Go for it, girl! xx
ReplyDelete