While researching cultures and how they enforce, reinforce or discourage certain behaviours, I found that much of the world is on a guilt-shame-fear spectrum. This means that for behaviours that are discouraged by an authority figure, depending on where you are from, you could be more familiar with feelings of guilt, shame or fear. Much of the West is driven by guilt, while many Asian and African societies are shame-based. Another way to see it is that many individualistic countries are guilt-based, while many collectivist societies are shame-based.
But why am I nerding about this out of the blue? Well, I’ll refer you to a quote attributed to Oscar Wilde: “Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.”
I was thinking about sex and I remembered tactics that are usually used to discourage young, unmarried people from having sex. Reasons included but were not limited to being bonded to a man spiritually, having people’s auras or spirits deposited in you forever, and never being able to forget your first. These and many other tactics which instilled feelings of shame to prevent action were used to indicate that somehow, the bond that sex initiated between humans was more memorable and stronger than any other one in the universe.
Some people try to negate these shame-based reasons entirely by saying sex is just sex and lean towards more meaningless definitions. And they would be right and wrong at the same time.
Sex cannot just be sex because the act of touching another person leaves a trace, and as I wrote in this article, this world is designed in a way that there has to be friction, and collision, produced by a dance of relationships in order for things to move forward.
The error was in thinking that it was only through sex that we left traces of ourselves on, or bonded deeply with each other.
Just like it is not just one type of solid matter that is held together by bonds, it’s all the relationships, not just one, that have the capacity to leave an imprint or leave us attached. The body does not just remember only when it comes to sex or physical intimacy. The body also remembers when it comes to emotional intimacy, mental development, and many other factors which make up our whole.
Just like bonds are stronger in solids than in liquids, some bonds are stronger in certain relationships than in others, and any could be stronger or weaker than sex because what makes a relationship strong or different is more than just genitals.
Mission 37: Don’t be afraid of bonding and connecting
The more I read about cultures, the more I learn that usually, the things that we consider wrong are usually things that worked in favour of the way a previous society adapted itself for its time. There are many stories that are incomplete not because the books got missing, but because we are expected to write down our own parts and observations about the world around us with all the new information and tools at our disposal. I call this the Zoom Out phenomenon and it refers to how an image on a computer may seem complete until you zoom out and more parts of the image being to appear pixel by pixel.
In this case, for sex and physical intimacy, which many shame-based societies focused on, our observations have now expanded this narrow view to include the strength of mental and emotional bonding, attachment and trauma in our stories.
Bonding, connecting, loving—those are all actions we find in relationships, which have been found to be essential to the quality of our lives. Just like atoms cannot help but be in relationship with other atoms to achieve an expression or state, we cannot help but be in relationship with each other. We can help how we are in relationship with ourselves, but not that we need to be.