Theory of Relativity

All this Ashley Madison drama has me thinking.  There are potentially more than 30 million spouses that could find out that their mate has cheated on them in the very near future.  What is the appropriate reaction to discovering that you have been cheated on?    If you are in love, if you are in a committed relationship, if you have given your heart and your life to one person, what is the appropriate response to finding out your partner/spouse has betrayed your trust?  I'm going to assume that you aren't also cheating on your mate.  Then, the only appropriate, mature response is to walk away, no hard feelings on either person's behalf. 

But what if you are faithful and your partner cheats, how should you react?  The cheater always assumes that the person cheated on should take the high road, they always act as if the person betrayed should just suck it up and walk away and they shouldn't show any emotion, they shouldn't show any anger, they shouldn't try to get revenge.  Society in general is always quick to say that the betrayed shouldn't waste their energy on any sort of revenge, any sort of willful intention to hurt the person back. 

But, is that really reasonable?  If you have made love to someone, if you have shared your body, your secrets, your dreams, your fears with someone, if you have truly given your heart to someone, if your heart has been broken and your trust betrayed, even the most sane, reasonable person should be expected to feel extreme rage and anger when you discover that the person you were building a life with has decided that your feelings, that you mean nothing to them.  In my mind, only an insane person would react with no reaction at all.  That, to me, indicates, being so out of touch with your emotions that you are incapable of processing them.  

Clearly, you shouldn't physically harm anyone but isn't that asking a lot of the human heart to not seek any sort of salve for your pain?  I can think of no greater pain than being betrayed by your life partner.  I think society's insistence that injured party just suck it up and hold their head up high with dignity . . . I'm pretty convinced that's extremely unhealthy.  We are sentient beings and we are supposed to process our emotions, we are supposed to feel.  The concept of letting an individual who has inflicted tremendous personal pain on their mate just walk away, not having learned a painful lesson, seems delusional to me.  One of the reasons I think we are so unhealthy as a society is that we have this obsessive need to present fake images of perfection, facades of one-dimensional pictures that aren't realistic. 

So, is burning all your mate's clothing acceptable? Is a lost wardrobe really that detrimental for the crime committed?  Is going to his or her job and embarrassing them okay?  If your cheating spouse is embarrassed, if they are humiliated by co-workers, is that something they won't be able to rebound from?  Is outing them as a cheater to their friends and family acceptable?  What about doing something to the person your partner was cheating with?  Should they escape your wrath because it's socially unacceptable?  Cheating, lying, betrayal should be unacceptable but it seems as if society is telling the victims of adultery that they should just suck it up and be the better person and their their perpetrators walk away with their own guilt as their only punishment.  Where is the line?  What is the appropriate, acceptable response when someone rips your heart out and steps on it? 

Are we as a society so obsessed with pretending to be perfect that we've lost perspective of the fact that for every action, there must be an equal and opposite reaction? 

Compartmentalizing

Morality and integrity, really and truly, are figments of my imagination.  They don’t exist.  Everyone has a need to lie, to cheat, everyone has a need to seek out the taboo and the forbidden.  Everyone has a desire, a very much socialized, driving, obsessive imperative, to portray themselves as righteous and without flaw which creates in them a secret drive to behave in ways that are exactly the opposite of what they portray in public.  It creates dysfunction, a mental disconnect.  This need to deny your sexuality in public and pretend to be asexual creates mental illness; it creates people driven by deviance, and it creates a world of liars, cheaters, adulterers who have absolutely no problem condemning and shaming people who get caught doing the exact same behaviors that they possess.  People don’t have a need or drive to do what’s right, we set up people in childhood by teaching them that the names for their privates are bad, we perpetuate the social disorder by calling natural, healthy sexuality “freaky”.  And we display the mental disorder every time we publically shame someone for expressing their sexuality when we have done the same or worse ourselves. 

Are lying and cheating and this compulsive need to behave in ways that are antithetical to what is right, just and good inherent in human beings?  I don’t believe they are.  I think that the social architects, the individuals who DECIDED to convince people that sex and sexuality was bad and wrong engineered this paradigm.  The leaders who set out to control the masses knew on some intrinsic level that once they convinced the world’s population that sex was bad and shameful, that they could control them because the need to have sex in inherent in human beings.  What I don’t think they could have anticipated or predicted is how detrimental it would be to humanity.  I don’t think they could have ever foreseen how perverted and dysfunctional people would become in their need to hide their sexuality. 

The need to deny one’s sexuality, to compartmentalize it and to pretend to be chaste and pure has created pathological liars and people disconnected from reality.   I’ve seen the evidence of this all around me.  I’ve seen it in my mother who had an affair with her current husband for more than a decade, who now, BELIEVES in her heart that she didn’t start dating him until after he was married.  I’ve seen her ridicule and shame other women for the EXACT same things she’s done without even the faintest hint of irnoy.  I’ve seen her alienate and ostracize people from her life who know her secret, not because she consciously is self-aware enough to recognize her behaviors but because she’s so warped and deluded that she needs to pretend she’s saintly and holy and could never do anything that was immoral and her subconscious mind needs to create a world where her reality fits her delusions.  I’ve seen married spouses who cheat and lie get offended when their spouse does the same thing, only difference being they never got caught.  I’ve seen the same people who tell me how offensive and pornographic my website is behave in ways that are exponentially more dysfunctional behind closed doors than anything that could be found on AfroerotiK.  I’ve seen the evidence in my disgusting ex boyfriend who actually believes that his juvenile sexual techniques are so superior that he is able to entice married women to behave in ways that are contrary to their own, supposedly asexual natures.  Only problem is, no one is asexual.  He’s not enticing anyone with his very little dick and his substandard sexual skills.  He’s only boosting his ego by convincing himself that women would never be sexual without his ability to become whoever and whatever his latest conquests want him to be (those skills, I can testify, are exceptional).     I’ve seen the evidence on a daily basis of white men who beg me to do things to them that are so extreme and so deviant yet they walk around and pretend to be the pillars of morality and asexuality in public. 

Discomfort with one’s sexuality creates a mental disconnect, mental illness in fact.  People justify whatever behaviors they have, no matter how unhealthy they are, and then they find a nice little place to hide them away and pretend that they don’t exist.  Look at the Catholic Church.  How much more obvious could it bebthat sexuality is natural and when one shuts off their sexuality, when one denies that their sexuality exists, it manifests itself in pathological behaviors?  It’s the genesis of down low men and women (and TRUST me that there are just as many women lying about their bisexuality as men), it’s the origin of people going out and having unprotected sex without thought for pregnancy or disease.  It’s the reason that my PR agent was convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that the public wasn’t ready to deal with beautiful, tasteful, sensual images on my website when everyone, absolutely everyone is a sexual being and is looking for sexual stimulation.  She couldn’t wrap her head around the concept that everyone was sexual and committed to hiding it.  She would rather believe, like society has masterfully convinced us, that people are asexual, that no one has sexual desires, that sex is shameful and bad and dirty and that I was somehow going against the grain with my bold declaration that sex is beautiful, natural, and that everyone is sexual.  She believes in her head that only a few deviant, fringe people like sex and that everyone else is offended by the mere mention of the word.  And that’s true to a certain extent.  People do pretend to be offended at the mere mention of the word.  They are also the same people who have bookmarks to some of the most degrading sex sites on the net on their computers.  That mental disconnect is how people who cheat on their spouses can write books on how to get a man or how to be a good spouse without any mental conflict.  They have shut off the part of their brain that allows them to have guilt or shame about their actions.  They have been able to compartmentalize so much so that they don’t even recognize their own detrimental behaviors. 

I am comfortable with my sexuality.  I’m not ashamed of my desires.  I don’t have a need or drive to cheat, to lie, to be with anyone’s husband.  I would rather end the relationship with someone if I’m not happy rather than get to a point where I’m motivated to cheat on them.  I don’t have a need to sell my body to the highest bidder.  I don’t think I’m more valuable if a man with money wants me.  I have unparalleled integrity and I’m not driven to go out and have casual, unprotected sex with strangers because I get horny and don’t know how to stop when things get heated.  I have either released or I have had the good fortune to never possess the dysfunction of the masses.    I never really understood how different I was. 

I sort of feel stupid for not recognizing the facts when the evidence was all around me.  You know who figured it out?  Zane, who writes about cheating and immorality and eroticizes it and people eat it up.  You know why?  Because they not only crave seeing characters act out in ways similar to how behave in private, it’s erotic to them, it adds a thrill for them to do things that are just outside of moral.  The more illicit their behavior behind closed doors, the better.  You know who else figured it out long before me and capitalized on it?  Shonda what’s her name.  It’s a turn on for women to feel like a man who shouldn’t want them openly does.  We’re told that when a couple gets married, that the desire to be with anyone else goes away.  So if a man who is married tells us he loves us, no matter how unhealthy, dysfunctional and morally wrong it is, that represents an extra special thrill to us.  It’s a dangerous metaphor.  Women who have been cheated on liking Scandal is equivalent to a woman who has been raped cheering for the rapist on Law & Order SVU.  But, I’m sure even that happens in the privacy of people’s homes because we are so sexually unhealthy as a nation that we don’t have a concept of what healthy sexuality is.  And, the truth of the matter is, we aren’t going to get healthy any time soon.  

Copyright 2013 Scottie Lowe

Do Unto Others

On Sunday night at the Billboard awards show, Miguel, in a very misguided attempt to outperform the other artists, jumped over the crowd and landed on a woman, snapping her neck back.  Within minutes, the entire Black internet community was creating memes about it, making fun of it, laughing at her pain.  First and foremost, and hear me clearly, just like your grandmother used to tell you, it is not funny to laugh at someone else’s pain.  It’s simply not funny.  She wasn’t walking down the street when she stumbled over a crack, she could have been seriously injured, paralyzed or killed even.  There’s nothing comical, funny, amusing, or entertaining about someone being hurt.  I almost can’t believe I have to say it but if you don’t want it happening to you, or someone you love, and you wouldn’t appreciate someone laughing about it if it happened to someone you know, you shouldn’t be laughing at it.  We, as a society and culture have de-evolved to the point of insanity, where it’s funny to laugh at someone being hurt.  That’s sick and it’s sad.  The tenants of every world religion says “Do unto others.”  But what’s MORE disturbing is the number of people who justified, rationalized, and defended laughing at her pain.  There is something tragically wrong with a society where people can’t say, “Hey, you know what, I was wrong, I’m sorry.”  And finally, the entire situation was sexist.  “Bitches be like, Tricks be like, Chicks be like.”  What did she do to deserve being called a bitch?  Standing near the stage was her crime?  If he had landed on a male, the commentary would have been about how Miguel needed a beatdown.  Black people, we should be ashamed of our collective behavior and sadly we aren’t.  We are doomed as a people if we can’t show the most basic compassion and empathy.