The 1-2-3 Process and Objectification

Oh, what a mess!

It's terribly traumatizing to talk about this, but I have to learn to integrate it.  It is a necessary perspective amongst many - however partial.  My life is marked by abuse from this perspective, so my nervous system is telling me that I am under attack.  I have to take that into consideration when I write about it.  It's necessarily going to be goey and confusing for me. 

Yes, I am awake to all that. 

I pray that you awaken to your own relationship to objectification as you read.

Ken Wilber's 'splanation of the 1-2-3 Process saved me from being forever trapped by my malinformed idea of what meditation and "enlightenment" was.  I have to continuously recall it when I am listening to/reading some people's ideas about it all, because so many people use meditation as a way to get away from various emotional situations and distress, and this "getting away" is what was done by my Primary Caretaker when I was having emotional distress as a small child.  She emotionally withdrew and didn't reflect my emotional responses to the world back to me.  I was left alone with my enormous feelings about things and had no idea whether or not the pain or fear would stop or whether anyone cared or thought I was okay while having those feelings.  It was just an emotional, infant me against this cruel and hard world.  As I got older, I repressed such feelings as terror, rage, pain and many forms of enjoyment - 1 to 2 - because whenever I experienced them, my Caretaker would emotionally withdraw from me.  So, those emotions and the accompanying impulses were projected - 2 to 3 -and acted out on unconsciously.  I developed personas to have those feelings in private moments when no one was around, and other personas to have only acceptable responses to my Caretaker. 

My Caretaker responded to my emotional life by pushing her own emotional reflection of my feelings away - 1 to 2 - so that she could talk to me about my feelings.  Then she pushed them away even further so that she talked about them to others - 2 to 3.  I distinctly remember being told that I was "pouting", even though my own memory of those times was of holding in and suppressing overwhelming rage and hurt.  I was damned if I did and damned if I didn't.  There was no one who seemed to relate to my feelings and I became isolated and contracted into a very tight ball.  People around me talked about me, within my hearing, and I heard her tell them that I was a pouter.  This elicited sympathy for her, while I was set apart as having the problem.  I was prolly very small when it started, but I remember it well into my older childhood.

I've been accused by another family member of historical revision according to my contracted view.  But then I saw her respond to my own children.  And I knew. 

So, I'm clear about my own participation in the problem of not being this or that - 1-2-3 - but only after many years of being totally blind to it.  I'd say, it's only been in the last 4 or 5 years that I've seen my own identical impulse to push away the emotional responses/reactions of others when I could not handle it.  Up until that time, I had spent many, many years and tons of energy being righteously indignant towards people who do that, and who act indifferent to others' emotional distress.  My limbic system is totally programed for that.  It can be changed, and it is being changed, but I have over 30 years of strong programing and reinforcement to overcome. 

I hope you'll pardon me if I don't just "get over it".  If not, then ...  well, don't provoke me.  That's all I can say.  Just please don't.  If you feel the urge to poke me, which some do, well then you'd better check yourself.  You've got a problem too.

So, objectification was a huge problem for me in my young life.  But it didn't stop there.  As a teen and young adult, I got some attention from guys.  Something which many young people now might not understand is that this kind of attention was not welcome for most girls.  Sexual attraction was okay, but women were trying to have sexual experiences with healthy respect for their entire personality.  Women were trying to test guys to see if they were going to be respectful, and guys were trying to trick the girls into thinking they were respectful so they could get in their pants.  The sad game of predator and prey seemed intractable, especially since it was not talked about openly.  Polite people acted as if young people met and fell in love and dated and then got married, or it didn't "work out" so they "broke up".  That's not really what was happening, but since the prior generation didn't allow women to want sex in the first place, the reality was still taboo, regardless of our victimization.  If we were exploited, we were a slut to begin with.  There was no recourse. 

In the generation before me, it wasn't okay for women to want sexual experiences at all, so it was a real improvement for the guys that we put ourselves out there.  But most of the guys didn't seem to want to reciprocate value for value.  For the most part, they just took their trophy and ran.  So, considering that we wanted real respect, the attention that the guys were giving us girls was dripping with pretense and pathetically shallow and it was just really insulting to women's intelligence. Then when they were done with us and kicked us to the curb, there was no where to take the pain or rage without being outed to our parents as whores and such.  Plus, the guys took advantage of our need to be respected and talked trash about us just to silence us.  And so did the Alpha Females who wanted the attention of the Alpha Males.  This only reinforced the sense of threat for me.  Alone in a dangerous world. 

But things are different now, aren't they?

In the WIE issue that I talked about yesterday, there was a special section under the Feminism heading called "Freedom & Choice in Pornutopia: Why Girls Are Going Wild". 

It was quite a feat to connect the dots all the way from First Generation Feminism to the current incarnation as Feminine Exhibitionism.  I confess; as a little girl, I was told that Feminism was really great because it meant that Women could do the same great things that men could do!  My Mother; always encouraging the "doing" and "accomplishment" aspects of life.  And all the other female role models in my life were pushing the same thing.  But as I grew older I began to hate Feminism for exactly that reason.  And sure enough, by the 80's women were expected to carry the same unreasonable work-load that men were carrying!  And the anger with which they defended this "right" seemed absurd to me.  Especially since the other "right" which they seemed so concerned with was the destruction of what looked to me like a very vulnerable little creature indeed: the unborn.  Wow.  Women have the right to kill themselves and their young.  Far out!  So, I took my hard-won birth-control pills and left them in the dust.

About the only thing that I could see that was really worth keeping around unchanged was the right to be viewed as a person worthy of respect, "just like a man".  I watched as this culture tried to integrate this fought-for "right" as a commonly shared value.  I watched as men suffered the humiliation that came from angry women during this struggle.  It was painful.  I hoped that the period of adjustment would come to an end and that we could all finally respect one another and get along.  But I guess it wasn't meant to be.

Instead of developing actual respect for women, many men seemed to be mainly hiding their disrespect just as always.  Then, eventually repressing it, as it became less and less okay to express it out loud, even in the company of other men.  And seemingly at the same time, women seemed to be caving in from the pressure to be like men in the workaday world and just fell back to the position of wanting to be taken care of.  Only, we had to repress that as well, because it became taboo to express that, even in the company of other women.  So, we started hiding our schemes to find men who would take care of us.  Some of us hid in the Church, and the Evangelical world swelled with women who wanted to have babies and be taken care of.  Other women totally gave up on men completely, and pushed their way out of the game as lesbians.  This pressure cooker had to pop eventually. 

Now, says the article in WIE?:

"Feminism wants you to be whoever you are - but with a political consciousness.  And, vice versa: You want to be a feminist because you want to be exactly who you are"

It goes on to explain:

"By being pro everything - pro-sex, pro-homemaker, pro-career, pro-motherhood, pro-trans-gender, pro-queer - Third Wavers managed to philosophically elevate the exercise of women's choice over the substance of women's choices themselves, avoiding the need for discrimination or morality altogether."

The article drips with sarcasm and disappointment in the choices women are making right now about porn and the objectification that it entails.  We've struggled against so many obstacles to go higher.  Why are we throwing it all away?  And, I would normally agree.  But reading it helped me see another dimension that I hadn't seen before. 

Over the last 100 years, humans - well, mostly the common, everyday man - have just not wanted to evolve.  Prior to that, the Industrial revolution and the myth of Progress and Manifest Destiny and all that sort of swept them up in this dream of Human-improvement.  Men especially seemed to be seduced by the idea that we could mechanize everything and make everything work better!  The Aquarian Age popped this overinflated dream and we awoke hungry for the Goddess and Her Organic Salvation.  But She couldn't operate while the machines left over from the previous age were still in place, and they continued to grind us all into meat.  Patriarchy and Welfare kept on making their expensive demands and we couldn't free ourselves no matter how much we tried.  With the Advent of AIDS, sex had to go back in the cage, and our government was suffering from senility as it forgot why it was taking care of us in the first place and tried to shrink itself back down. 

So we went back to exploiting one another.  And it was awful.  There was a new generation of Sex Objects and Security Objects as the Trumps became our Role Models by default.  We were literally beside ourselves with incredulity and self-loathing by how much we wanted what they had.  We tried to sweep our envy under the rug, but we couldn't.  We had driven our cars towards Yuppie-Utopia as far as we could, then when we ran out of gas, we set up camp out in the middle of no where.  Exposed and hollowed out.  There was nothing to be done but let it rip. 

Our own shame did this.  Our own humiliation at not being able to create the world we knew we wanted.  Our kids took our shame and created a sling-shot out of it - as they always do - and they shot themselves as deeply into conscious materialism and shallow objectification as they possibly could.  We are revolted. 

Precisely.

But the good thing that is coming out of this is the opportunity to integrate what has been Shadowed for such a long time: our lower instincts.  The primal ones.  By making themselves into commodities, these young men and women have generated a critical amount of awareness about exactly what our limbic systems are driving us to do.  They've gotten it down to a science.  Literally. 

Recently I've become aware that in the Quadrants, the stuff on the left side - the Interior - is totally connected to value and the personal.  The stuff on the right side - the Exterior - is totally disconnected from value or the personal.  A cell is just a cell.  It is a solid 3  It is a thing.  We have power over it because we put it in little boxes with labels and such.  But a feeling is much more.  It belongs to someone.  And that someone is inside the box with the feeling and becomes labeled along with it.  This is a solid 1.  When we label a cell, no one gets hurt.  When we label a feeling, it can be a disaster.  People who prefer to deal with the world from the right side, typically don't like involving themselves with all that "personal stuff".  They normally like things to be "Objective". 

So, now that sex has been ripped out of the left Quadrants and dragged off into the right side, it has lost it's personalness and the only value one can place on it is a dollar sign or the value it is to us as a commodity - it keeps us warm at night, turns us on, keeps us busy, amused, distracted, comfortable, whatever.  Paul the Apostle noted this phenomenon as "their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame.", not because it had to do with sex (!GASP!! ) but because it had been totally taken out of the realm of human value and objectified. 

Our instincts and primal drives are just toys now.  To be played with like our genes and our brains.  I can give you a hard-on in 1.8 seconds.  I can make you squirt in 35 seconds flat.  You can bed her in 2 hours or less.  You can make him ask you out in 2 minutes or less.  I can handle being throat-fucked, butt-fucked and fisted all at once - AND - I can make it feel like you're really raping and hurting me.  I can look like I'm 11 years old.  How much are you willing to pay for that?  Apparently it's getting cheaper and cheaper.  And easier and easier to access. 

The science involved in triggering all the deep predatory and victim impulses that turn one another on at the cellular level is exact.  The mystery is gone.  This quaint website that I frequent describes how much of it works, and why many of us have a hard time trying to break away.  But it also describes how all the deep protective and nurturing impulses are triggered as well and suggests that as the sane and evolved alternative.  Isn't that just the same developmental level of evolution only less offensive to the shared value in the We-Space?  Is that really going forward, considering most of the foundational literature was written in the supposedly non-sexual Victorian era and earlier?

Okay, now take a deep breath.  The worst part is over.  To those of you who are Shadowing all that stuff, I'm sorry about that.  Be conscious of your reaction.  And be kind to yourself.  We are spiritual beings having an animal experience.  It's all very confusing.

So, speaking of the Spiritual stuff...! 

Apparently it is an important part of meditation to objectify what is arising.  Everything that is arising, and look at it instead of being it.  If we are conscious of something, we can objectify it.  In fact, we already have.  Putting value judgments on things tends to repack them in Anti-consciousness, both as individuals and collectively and then they slink back into the 1st Person position.  I think keeping everything on a constant cycle of 1-2-3, then 3-2-1, then back and forth will prevent us from submerging too deeply into it, staying asleep to our impulses and/or becoming slaves to them.  What seems to be of great value in this Third Wave of Feminism is choice.  And while being a slave to impulses doesn't sound like choice, being able to choose to or not indulge in them is.  I think these Wild Girls have given us all a gift of awareness whether we've followed their leads or just watched them with embarrassment.  And with more awareness comes more choice. 

More choice would be good. 

Considering that an old family friend was just booked into the local jail in June on 4 different charges of child molestation.  He used to hang out with my ex-husband and kids.  We went to church with him and his family.  His wife went through hell trying to have babies before she finally adopted this adorable girl...   It went on for years.  I had a profound Spiritual Satori Experience at Church once because of this man.  I can feel the heart of the entire community breaking.  I don't know if my ex-husband knows yet, but when he finds out it will devastate him.  They were close. 

[A moment of silence for those who still suffer...]

~Ww