Thursday, June 23, 2011

Chastity belts and other nonsense revisited

I was walking to the grocery store thinking about these guys who get turned on by having their wives make them wear chastity belts. In an abstract way that is. I'd rather not think of the specifics thank you very much.

The thing is, the general thrust of their sexual play doesn't strike me as that weird. It's not that hard to picture a woman turning to her husband on Wednesday and saying, "Not 'til I give you permission". I'm sure lots of couples play games like that all the time.

The thing that makes the chastity belt guys weird is the elaboration. I mean, if you need a prop, the woman could get a necklace with a purely decorative key on it or a pin and that could be the signal that she had decided to play the game. And she could take the key off and hand it to him as a sign that it's time. I've never done that but I can see how it could be a lot of fun. But getting an actual chastity belt—which must be uncomfortable, expensive, potentially humiliating and even a health hazard—is, what's the technical term, crazy.

What all this elaboration is really telling us is that these people aren't very good at relating to one another as human beings in a sexual way. The elaboration is not unlike the rules that govern organizations such as the military. It makes perfect sense for the military to do this, of course, because in the military a large number of people need to interact successfully. If two people who are supposed to be united in love need the same sort of elaborate rules and rituals to make it work that should tell them that something is wrong.

And that is why I think you get this odd synchronicity where the people into kinky sex games and some Catholic writers end up discussing the supposed positive results of having the women be in control in more or less the same language. Both groups are unable to make sexuality work in an ordinary human context so they need elaborate formal structures to control everything. The end result in both cases is to make male sexuality come across as some sort of moral disease.

It is worth noting that, contrary to what is claimed, these formal structures do not actually give much power to women. For this power is coupled with a commensurate increase in responsibility. If Jill has a key and her husband has agreed to practice absolute restraint when he sees her wearing it that whole game is predicated on the assumption that Jill has promised to make something really good happen a few days down the road. If Jill took to wearing the key as a way of saying, "Not tonight I have a headache", she'd very quickly lose her power in the game as he would lose all interest in playing it.

Similar problems apply in the Catholic situation. Contrary to what some have claimed—that this power could be used to change men—the women more or less have to play their part in the game, meaning that they meet his needs, for it to work.

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