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Benefits

Posted by Dante on 2012-July-16 18:00:33 EDT, Monday
In reply to Re: Repost: the Human Need for Love and Appreciation posted by lee lette on 2012-July-16 10:45:23 EDT, Monday
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"If it was provable that the "love and appreciation" necessarily included sexual attention for their welfare then they might listen but until then they will not since they are more than a little suspicious that this attention is for the benefit of the adult rather than for the child."

Our species would not be around if giving love and affection to its children didn't create pleasure for adults as well. And, of course, everyone understands that its not the same pleasures with the same understanding on both sides of the interaction. Yet, no one would say that an art teacher shouldn't teach because the pleasure that comes from facilitating is not the same as the pleasure that comes from creation.

There are some things that parents must do which are unpleasant in the doing and necessarily altruistic. But loving isn't one of them.

Children seek out and create their own pleasure from before birth. They have to be taught later that some types of affection and pleasurable touch are restricted and some aren't, because this sure as heck wouldn't occur to them naturally. The whichs and whys vary from culture to culture.

Our notion there is something wrong with receiving "sexual gratification" at one user end of an act which is mutually beneficial but not at the other is very strange; since society would collapse if we required parallelism in benefits. ( And how would we be able to affirm this without telepathy? )

It seems to me that this is a holdover from the religious notion that sexuality ( while necessary ) is ritually impure in ways that nothing else is. The problem, for the anti-sex crowd, is in determining what things are sexual and what things aren't when these notions vary so much across human culture.

Not to give fuel to the misogynists, but as male sexuality is so all-encompassing, this fear that another was "turned-on" by something we don't think of as sexual effects society rather lopsidedly. We are amused that someone might have a fetish for seat-cushions, but are outraged when its "our" seat cushions.

All this second-guessing is a distraction from asking questions about who, if any, were actually harmed. And there's enough real harm without trying to ascribe mystical powers to sexuality, or trying to set in stone some imaginary demarkation line between the things encompassed by sexuality and the things which aren't. Or with trying to punish those who create real benefit due to their motives ( imagined or real. )

Dante

Dante

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