a meditation on authenticity
A long time ago, I had a funny, playful friend who could smash out a hot BDSM fantasy in email any time, anywhere, 24/7. He was cool, I thought. I am fond of people with strong libidos and deliciously twisted minds. I could tell he was the real thing, one of those rare people who instinctively connected to the heady rush of power relationships, the emotional nakedness of BDSM intimacy. He got “it” — in his mind, in his sexual imagination, in his deepest cravings, and in the spicy emails he composed.
Yet despite his incessant fantasies, and his many promises to himself that he would act on them, he somehow never fully brought them to fruition. He was uncomfortable translating the desires he obsessively confessed to me on the Internet into actual, real-life experience. He couldn’t do it, as I eventually learned, because his religious upbringing told him it was wrong.
He settled for a few fleeting SM experiences, but they did not lead anywhere. Indeed, they generally ended up with hurt feelings and bitter complaints on all sides, often because he would get emotionally distant after the BDSM sex and end up ghosting his partners.
How do you convince someone that when they do BDSM and nobody’s really happy, they need to own that one or both of them are doing it wrong? I could not. I’d never even met him in real life. I could only watch him self-destruct from a distance. One day, he decided that SM wasn’t for him. “I’ve closed the book on that chapter of my life,” he told me. It upset him to remember what he’d done, it embarrassed him and made him wonder if acting on his kinks had ruined his life because he wasn’t attracted to non-kinky women anymore. As I saw it, he never had a chance at a successful SM relationship because shame and religious phobias about “perverted” sex ruined his life. Instead of accepting what real-life experience taught him and learning how to build better power relationships, he doomed himself to being a perpetually “clueless noob.”
What happens to people like that, people who deny their identities, even to themselves, compartmentalizing it almost as if it is a separate life-force within them? What happens to people who don’t have healthy, positive outlets for their sex or gender identities?
I’ve lived long enough to find out from clinical and life experience what happens to them. Nothing good, that’s what. They never process who they really are and never learn to accept their authentic identity. They suffer emotionally. They develop stress disorders. They exacerbate existing disorders. They have dysfunctional relationships. They hurt others by keeping secrets from them.
The real devil isn’t the nature of one’s sex or gender identity — it’s the shame people feel about being wired differently. There is nothing less spiritual or more irrational than hating the person you were born to be.
the cost of religious ideology
I’m a sex scientist but I do respect everybody’s belief systems. Whatever helps you relieve stress and cope with life is positive for you, whether it’s praying, chanting, meditating or something else.
Any belief system that tells you to close your eyes to diversity and to prize conformity, however, is trying to blind you to reality. Sex and gender diversity exist. If our eyes are open, we observe differentials all around us all the time in everyone we meet. People are different, not just in their clothes but down to their core.
On my FaceBook page, I’ve recently followed a butt-ton of news about religious organizations’ sexual ideologies and the misery they bring to the very people they allegedly serve. The headlines below are from just the last week. The most infuriating stories reveal how clerics have sexually abused their own flocks.
U.S. missionary group apologizes to child sex abuse victims after NBC News report
Inside the horrifying, unspoken world of sexually abusive nuns
‘Pure evil’: Southern Baptist leaders condemn decades of sexual abuse revealed in investigation
Evangelical Sex Abuse Isn’t New: It’s Been Fueled by Purity Culture for Decades
Vatican defrocks ex-US archbishop for sex abuse, in a first for the Catholic Church
Also sad are the numbers of clergy stepping forward to say feel trapped by their religions
Four in five Vatican priests are gay, book claims
‘It Is Not a Closet. It Is a Cage.’ Gay Catholic Priests Speak Out
Meanwhile, the United Methodists aren’t united anymore,
United Methodist churches may cut ties with denomination over push to allow LGBT ministers
If you’ve been watching the Leah Rimini show, you’ve heard stories of other victims of religious cults who were exploited and abused by their religious leaders, and the cultures of secrecy that silence the victims and bury their dirty secrets under their tax-exempt altars.
the social pushback against authenticity
Religion is not the only bad actor in sabotaging human individuality. Add in culture, economics, traditions, social customs, laws, education, home-schooling and constant propagandistic messaging from television and movies, the Internet and print media. And parents, oh yeah! Some home environments are as bad or worse in conveying a diversity-negative, conformity-required message by insisting that everyone make the same choices. Not only is that totally unrealistic, but it’s also a life-bashing, soul-smashing way of raising kids. It kills their dreams, fills them with anxiety, promotes learned helplessness, and teaches them to settle for the misery they know rather than aspire towards self-improvement or self-actualization. Toxic homes are a leading cause of suicide in LGBTQ youth.
This short piece about a Scottish politician summarizes the problem of social pushback succinctly.
Mundell: ‘Coming out was so difficult’
As has become revoltingly apparent, even in a country that always claimed to value “rugged individualism”, being different is fraught with perils. There are the perils of walking into a business and being turned down for a job on the basis of your sex or gender. There’s the risk of walking into a local shop and being turned down for service, the way Southern whites once refused service to black Americans. More frightening, there are the risks of getting profiled, losing your job, losing your kids, being turned down for adoption, getting beaten up by thugs, or getting disowned by your biological parents.
permission
About half of the people who I’ve seen in my career as a sex therapist were really coming to me to get permission to follow their deepest needs. Some needed permission to masturbate. Some needed permission to have orgasms. Some needed permission to live out their BDSM lives or to re-invent their lives as LGBT or poly/swing people. Etcetera and etcetera and etcetera! I’m a very permissive therapist: as long as it makes all the adults involved happy, and doesn’t harm others, I know that all intimacy is moral and sweet and good for you too.
But we aren’t raised that way. Most people feel they need some kind of permission before they can really enjoy sex. I don’t mean a partner’s consent, I mean permission that it’s ok for *them* to experience erotic pleasure. For some people, that permission can only come with a marriage license.
Take it from a sex therapist: sexual pleasure is your BIRTHRIGHT. You were made for it. Everything in our bodies and minds carries some kind of consciousness of sexuality, whether it’s the parts of us that have sophisticated chemical responses to erotic stimulation or the parts of us that operate on primitive instinct. Even asexuality cannot be isolated from sexuality. It’s just another manifestation of the vast natural diversity of homo sapiens.
As an adult, you should never be judged for choosing the kind of consensual sex you wish to have, when you wish to have it, and who you wish to have it with. This should be your free choice, based on who you really are and what will give you and a partner (or multiple partners) the most fulfillment.
choosing self-fulfillment is not selfish
Arguably one of the worst teachings out there is that it is somehow selfish to be true to yourself. Anti-sex and anti-LGBTQ people act as if sex and gender minorities are being selfish because we won’t hide who we are. They want us to go along to get along rather than offend anyone. They oppose authenticity and fear it as the slippery slope to social chaos. It is none of the above.
Here are the two most important scientific reasons why authenticity promotes a healthy life:
- Self-hatred, shame, and emotional conflicts erode mental health. Deep inner conflicts trigger stress disorders and exacerbate disorders and diseases.
- The sex science suggests, on very a grand, interdisciplinary scale, that sexual health and happiness promote human longevity.
authentic vs. inauthentic
Let me give you my definitions of what I mean when I use the terms authentic vs. inauthentic
inauthentic
If you hate your sex life, your gender, your genitals, or your life-partner, but need to keep up appearances, you are leading an inauthentic life. You might be happier in another sex/gender configuration. Or perhaps you’d be better off with a different partner?
If your primary relationships consistently fail, if they tend to be toxic, or you have a history of cheating, the problem may be that you are trying to pound a square peg into a round hole. You might be happier living as poly, genderqueer, bisexual or something else.
Telling yourself that you “have to” stay with someone who makes you unhappy is you believing that you don’t deserve to be happy. That is unnatural, in the sense that is away from the naturally confident person you should be, the one who feels entitled to happiness, merely by virtue of being alive, like all the other creatures in all the other species who don’t need permission to enjoy sex.
Unhappy you is an inauthentic you, someone you became because you were not permitted to love yourself as you are.
authentic
Authenticity is a place of peace, where you feel you are on the right path in your life, at home with yourself and comfortable that the people who love you love you for your true self, flaws and quirks included.
People who live authentically don’t see their needs as a dark side, any more than athletes think agility is a problem or smart people think it’s shameful how quickly they can solve problems. They recognize their differentials as meaningful aspects of their identity and exploit them in confident, hopeful ways.
final thoughts
Being at peace with oneself isn’t the result of money or social status or the number of followers on social media. It isn’t about being the most beautiful or best-hung or even the smartest monkey in the room. It’s all about leading an authentic life and being true to yourself.
Think of it this way. If you’re not true to yourself, no one else will be. How could they be? They don’t know the whole you. You tricked them into loving a false image of yourself. That knowledge haunts many inauthentic people and tortures them too.
I’ll end with my favorite literary quote, by author Andre Gide. “It is better to be hated for who you are than to be loved for who you are not.”
photo by Zoltan Tasi https://unsplash.com/@zoltantasi
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