The Barrow

A thought occurred to me recently – partially in a dream and partially in my waking mind. There are two polar inverses of sexuality you find among people, and it changes a lot about the characteristics of how they express it, even if superficially they seem similar. We recently explored the quote:

To the pure, everything is pure; to the base, everything is base.

and this still applies here. There is a light side and a dark side of sexual expression.

People whose sexuality is on the light side are simply very sexual beings naturally and wish to express it without stigmas or taboos as a normal, natural, sacred and good part of being human.

People whose sexuality is on the dark side are emotionally sick and inverted creatures who, in their quest for self-destruction, latch onto sexual behaviors simply as something their mind puts in the category of sick, twisted, bad, or disgusting.

In many cases, these people may even incidentally agree about one or two things, or behaviors, but everything behind it is a polar inverse of the other.

I think this mechanism also contributes to the observable phenomenon that individuals brought up in high-control, puritanical cultures tend to exhibit darker sexualities than those who are brought up in low-control, more sex-positive cultures. (please see frequently cited examples of Victorian England and Japan). Not only do these high-control environments steep people in a culture of guilt and self-deprecation like a tea bag, thus incentivizing the impulse to self-destruct, they give people a whole category of behaviors already pre-coded as inherently self-destructive, which nonetheless they also hunger for since it at least stems from normal human behaviors in some way.

It's a vicious cycle for these sick people, and it is exhausting for people in the first category to be associated with those in the second.