Jeffrey Strahl on Welcome to Chiron Return - Planet Waves FM

[Jeffrey Strahl]

"As a sex coach I am astonished at times, at the plethora of ways that people carry around shame and confusion about their bodies and their sexual desires. This is not our natural state. It is generational and cultural programing. "

Definitely NOT our natural state, as observed repeatedly by people researching indigenous cultures around the world, e.g. Wilhelm Reich and the Trobriand Islanders. And even many European cultures outside the Northwest European mold which has had the by-far dominant influence upon American "culture" and which grew to dominate the world, or contemporary mass societies in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Growing up in the '60s, i saw the programing shift, yet in many ways repeating the past, "repressive desublimation" is one way to describe it. Implied sexuality given approval, but only in a spectacular way, OK for the people depicted, and "if you play by the rules maybe you could do well and get to do that too." With a reality that my generation was supposedly sexually active, yet most of the guys i knew (i was an engineering major back then, had fewer and fewer women in my classes the further i went, none past my second) were not partnered, most were not even dating casualty. Before graduating college, my only experience was professionals.

And even in the mid '70s, when i was an anarchist/left-communist (Small "c") activist, my milieu was largely men, many of whom were frequently dateless, never mind relationships. Same re my Deadhead circles. The sexual revolution was something i read about more than saw. Then i got coupled in '78, the early looseness dissipated, was part of a monogamous couple, till we separated in '91, at which point the "AIDS"-driven counterrevolution was on full tilt. Part of the reason i held on to an obviously failing relationship as long as i did, fear of being back on the heap again.