The Divine Dyad & the Chaos of Human Relationships

[punklawyer]

In the Beginning—you were born. You were born from a woman’s womb. You opened your eyes. The world appeared. And here you remain, reading these words. A miracle, manifestly.

In my religion, all of reality is a creation of Cosmic Mommy and Daddy. I say this because I am a Tantric Buddhist, and after over forty years of fiddling around with their meditations, it dawned on me – this is the religion of the Divine Dyad. And for the moment, I’m going to leave it right there. I just want to begin with this belief that human life is sacred, that the act of conceiving human beings is sacred, and that therefore, religious shame about our origins as sexual beings is a most unwholesome thing, and can’t properly be called “religious,” because it does not lead to human benefit. Sexual shame and stigma injure human beings individually, and usually run in parallel with disrespect towards woman and the vilification of nature as a “tempter” that must be subdued within our own selves, pitting instinct against principle, initiating inner struggles that no one should have to suffer. Our sexuality is the source of our existence, and the duality of our parentage abides within every cell of our being. Sex is not only mechanically necessary for the continuation of human life, it is a well of secrets that can reveal much to us about who we are and how we should think, speak and behave.

Without a male and a female human being, it can’t be done right. Why did evolution select this method of reproduction for higher animals? Because shuffling and reshuffling the genome through sex is the only thing that will keep the gene pool clean. Cloning experiments have proven that with every successive cloned generation, lethal genes pile up in the DNA, eventually resulting in a one-hundred percent death rate of the 58th generation.

So we are born because our parents tangled limbs, your mother was penetrated by your father, and he, at least, came. Few parents will tell you about the night you were conceived. Oh, I did hear a story about one gal who had no qualms about revealing the origin of her offspring. I heard this from Tod Davies, the scriptwriter and gf of Alex Cox, of Repo Man fame. She lived in Klamath Falls, Oregon for a while, God knows why -- it's one place Tod would surely hate to be -- especially back in the eighties, the time of which we speak. And this story will tell you why.

Join me in the house Tod shared with Alex. We’re out in Colestine Valley, and the house is very nice, at a bend in the road, shaded and tucked in among the pines and firs. She is a beautiful woman of some intoxicating genetic mix born in Macau, with pale skin, red lips, and black hair with auburn highlights cut stylishly short in that LA style made famous by Nagel prints. She has an acid tongue, the type of gal who endorsed that maxim, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, sit next to me.” In fact, she may have spoken those words to me. Now, to the story. She takes a sip of bargain priced red wine from a stemmed glass and says, “I was sitting with this woman and her twin boys one afternoon, and I said to her, ‘You know it is absolutely amazing how your two boys look exactly like your husband and his brother.’” And she replied, “I don’t what’s so goddamn amazing about it. I fucked both their dads on New Year’s Eve within two minutes of each other.” So I guess sexual norms among the unemployed class in Klamath Falls were rather lax during the eighties, and I doubt they have improved.

The only reason I ever had for going to Klamath Falls was to investigate meth dealing alleged by the DOJ to have been done by my client, Mr. Inda-Parra, who was standing in peril of a possible life sentence, so my focus was on low life, and how it is lived. Ultimately, I defended him pretty effectively in a hostile Eugene courtroom, defeating three out of four charges, and standing next to him as he drew a sentence of twenty years. But I digress. This essay is about sex, and the only sexy aspect to Inda-Parra’s case was his blonde girlfriend, who admitted on the stand that she was only testifying against him because she had been set up in a drug deal, and the prosecutors told her she’d never see her newborn baby again if she didn’t testify against her boyfriend. So the fruit of her womb was held hostage to extract testimony. Gotta love that law business.

You might think my approach to this subject is random, but I know where I’m going. I’ve thought about sex a lot, and so have you, but have you figured anything out? I mean, today it’s so fucking political, isn’t it? And I am barely up on gender norms. It took me nine months to realize that my new friend Deru really should be referred to as “they,” because they’re non-binary. Hell, I was totally confused when her sister Fran referred to her as “they,” because I was sure she was referring to Deru and some other person, because “they” is a plural noun.

The linguistic shift from “SEX” to “GENDER” has arisen because we have lots of different sexual behavior to categorize. Ruth Bader Ginsburg coined the term "gender discrimination," that had previously been called "sex discrimination," thus opening the door to sexless genders such as "they." This has occurred because “the human sexual ‘instinct’ seems to have broken free of its core purpose, reproduction, and varies to a bewildering extent, as it does not in other animals….” (N. Doidge, M.D., The Brain that Changes Itself, page 96, (2007 Viking)). And the entire shift to gender as a description of sexual orientation evolved out of the struggle for social justice of millions of people whose sexual practices branded them as deviant in a heterosexually normative society. The American Psychiatric Association officially classified homosexuality as a sociopathic personality disturbance under sexual deviations, a treatable disorder due to arrested emotional development or mental illness. Today, the APA lionizes Evelyn Hooker, the venerable fag hag who met enough uncrazy gay men in LA to conduct a scientific study that put the shrinks on trial and proved that clinical psychiatrists, from a review of their psychological records, couldn't tell if a person was homosexual or not, so they couldn't ascribe whatever mental problems they had to their sexual orientation. Today, there's also a paper that says she screwed up her study, and based on the data, she could have diagnosed queer people with a higher occurrence of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. But I haven't read it because it's pricey information, and the Cameron brothers, the authors, haven't yet responded to my request for a free copy on Researchgate.net. And of course we know that Christians are still sending their gay children to "conversion therapy," that the Supreme Court says it's against the First Amendment to prevent people from "practicing."

Let's just wrap up today's discussion with this point -- human sexuality is unfolding into a rich diversity of life paths and practices. Sex is so powerful, so central to our lives, that you can wonder how it got so important. Commercialization, dare we suggest? "In These Times," is the title of a Hemingway book of short stories. I found a copy in the free book box outside the Ocean Beach Community Garden in San Diego a couple of weekends ago. These stories are pretty gritty. Wartime adventures, meals with hoboes, alienated couples on vacation in foreign lands. Not a lot of sex, though. Just some innuendoes. I wonder what kind of stories a book entitled "In These Times" would contain today? A lot more porn and alienation, I'm afraid.

Okay, we'll take it up tomorrow.