Kinsey

I remember talking to my friend Laura once about our various social milieus and how deadly most of them are. At one point I asked, "So what's it like at the parties where it's just the psychologists?" She goes, "Oh, that's like being on acid, everyone is totally open and has the vocabulary". That's what this movie was like; an alternate universe where people talk openly and knowledgeably about their sexuality.

Most of the parties I go to would be far more interesting if people discussed their sexuality openly. Leary said there are three taboos: sex, drugs and death. The only things I hear about sex within "the community", so to speak are innuendoes and gossip about the wandering eyes, or middle school level play, or comments about how inconvenient or nonexistent sex is. If you recall, I started a number of women's groups, and occasionally, they will make revealing comments, but rarely.

The men don't seem to go there at all with each other... big taboo. As one friend described it, you don't want to reveal "vulnerabilities". At first I did think there was a bit of a locker room mentality, my ex used to report cases of married guys pointing out attractive women to each other. But from everything I've heard, certainly at professional levels, actual revelation of personal experience or feelings is very out of bounds. Most guys I've spoken with, quite in depth, by the way, don't have a male best friend they talk to about sex. Like Kinsey, I've heard a lot of stuff from men that they have not said to anyone else, not wives, not therapists, no one.

I'm painfully aware of the dangers of sweeping sexuality under the rug, so I really enjoyed this film. It's inspiring me to be pretty forthcoming about my own sexuality in this post here, so, who knows where this will go... But first, I must digress, because this film contained one of the funniest scenes I've seen in years... I had tears running down my face & laughed for ten minutes. Kinsey's team interviewed subjects in great depth about their sexuality:
Interviewer: When did you first have sex?
Interviewee: At 14... I had sex with horse.
Interviewer: How often did you have sex with animals?
Interviewee: That's amazing... how did you know I fucked a pony?
Interviewer: You just said you had sex with a horse.
Interviewee: Not horse....WHORES

There were quite a few interviews featured, ranging from a truly disturbing pedophile/sex addict to Kinsey's own repressed, rigid nightmare of a father, who reveals, to Kinsey, what happened. He was ten years old and having "a chronic problem" which, I guess, was woodies, and the family solved it by putting some big strap around his genitals. The man never even made the association between the experience and his life of restricted tight-ass attitudes, just spent his whole life in some little box, never even enjoying sex, or wanting others to do so.

In the early 50's there was a lot of the misinformation going around in the literature. All written by men, stuff like clitoral orgasms are immature, men are supposed to stick it in, make babies and move on, not masturbate etc. It's staggering, and we think we're so past that now, with the open love of the 60's behind us as well, but I think we're still mired in misinformation, secrets and unrealistic expectations. Sex is still a taboo, in most circles. Interestingly, one of the places it's discussed the least is church, at least my church, and the others I've visited. I feel sex is very spiritual, or at least can be, probably should be, so it's sad to see there's still such a disconnect.

The scene is similar with neighborhood, kids' school & community activities & I guess my assumption has been pretty much that there's not much going on sexually among this group, there's just very little interest in doing it, much less talking about it. These folks will spend an hour discussing some piddling issue with their kid, friend or co-worker, but if I ever even dared to bring up sexuality, I'm sure it would be brushed off with some comment about "who has time for that?". Similar to Kinsey's Dad, except now it's disguised because they can spout a party line if they need to. The research seems to bear this out. Newsweek ran a notable cover story recently saying some 90% of marriages are sexless. It's very hard to get money for research in this area today.

Everything is more underground now. At Wilson, the sexism was well disguised by PC commentary, but it operated very strongly. You won't hear outrageously uninformed comments about sex either, but it's just as dysfunctional. As with my comments in my last post about the corporate landscape, what interests me most is not the social level but the way the social conventions affect our personalities, freedom and happiness.

The focus and conformity that stems from the corporate water most of us spend our lives in is the filler. It fills the space left by the emptiness that comes from living without a good sex life. I think many people today are as sexually repressed and frustrated as anyone you'd find in the 50's, only now there's even more guilt and frustration wrapped around it because we think we're supposed to be better now.

Here's what I have learned about sex. If you remember nothing else out of this whole blog, remember this. Sex will not be ignored. Many of us try to ignore it, because it doesn't fit the plan. Before I met my ex, I'd had seven years of reasonably good sex and the last few men were men with whom I could never imagine a real love, marriage, fidelity, commitment, family, kids... the whole package that I wanted. Then I met a guy who had all of that, common goals and interests, "morality" (boy, did I learn a lot about the seeming appearance of morality, but that's another post) .... just this one little problem.... bad sex. Oh well, it wasn't bad all the time, things will improve... fast forward to divorce court 17 years later.

You want to talk about ignoring sex? No one knows more about that than me. Don't do it, you're just prolonging the pain.
Sex will not be ignored... unless you just die that way... even sadder. We all have bodies, and those bodies need to be fed with more than just food. More importantly, we have emotional needs and those can't be fed by marriages that don't have true passion... believe me... I learned the hard way.

It was very hard for me to face these truths. So many days I looked around at the life we all aspire to... "the white picket fence"... I "had it all"... the hubby (one that even was around, more than the others had), the beautiful house, two amazing (yet slightly spoiled, and starting to get a bit messed up from the tension in the home) kids, tons of friends, (or contacts, or whatever they are... who knows?), activities, vacations, stuff, you name it. But I was so unfulfilled and unhappy compared to my life now. It affected my whole life, it colored everything. I can see that now, but it took a long time.

I was so fearful of loss and what I've learned is that the loss is so much less than I thought and the gain has been so much more. I mean, what is the price of happiness? I wake up every morning and I'm happy, before there was like a cloud hanging over me. I thought life was just a rainy day, didn't even see it till it cleared and I noticed I still had most of what I had before, PLUS happiness. Now I really do have it all, plus all the learning and life experience that I can use to reach out to help others.

Kinsey, like Leary, sure took his knocks for talking about taboos. Why are sex, drugs and death such taboos? Fear, fear of the unknown, fear of ourselves, of really knowing ourselves, fear of others having wonderful experiences that we can't, fear of rejection, fear of loss: of status, friends, money and power, fear of collapse of the social order, fear of pregnancy or disease or responsibility or commitment. Mostly, it gets down to fear of change and fear of the unknown. Most live in fear and they miss so much. They don't want to know what they're missing and when people like Leary and Kinsey bring it out... there's fallout.

Both men were free thinkers, were kept young by the students around them and truly believed in the value of their work. Both were blamed for social problems, everything from heroin addiction to AIDS, they never promoted in any way. Both went about their methodology very carefully. Kinsey trained his researchers so well they were able to get an incredible wealth of information that changed the lives of so many people for the better.

At the end of the film a battered Kinsey sits down with a woman who tells him how her marriage was so debilitating that she contemplated suicide when she found herself attracted to a female friend until she realized, from Kinsey's report, that she wasn't alone. She then revealed her feelings to her friend and they found happiness together. Similarly, Leary made it OK to explore one's mind... get real. When people get real, that's the first step to getting happy.

Have things changed from the thirties, when Kinsey started taking data for his surveys? Not according to the film's writer/director, Bill Condon, who had trouble securing clips and dealing with censors. I mean, look around for God's sake, we're a judge away from Roe v. Wade being overturned. Janet Jackson would have gotten less flack for revealing State secrets than her boob. A number of current psychologists, like Dr. Laura, came out against this film.

But, for all the social comment in the film, it is a biopic and the story is really about Kinsey, his life and his relationship with his wife, which was long (30 yrs) and good and sexual. But, not faithful. Kinsey got pretty kinky at some points, he had an affair with one of his male associates, who he then encouraged to fuck his wife, which he did, to their mutual pleasure. She was hurt at first, but wisely realized that even strong couples get into ruts and she wisely got past all the social stigma and moved on to thinking for herself.

I mean, come on, in this day and age, how can people sustain a lifetime of fidelity... unless you go into shutdown mode? My ex's parents lived on separate puritanical planes almost all their married lives, each immersed in their separate worlds. My Dad chucked his brain and vote at the alter of some svengali-like personality, meshed whatever he brought to the party in his twenties up into her sick system. Both had long marriages, stayed together, but neither my ex or I ever wanted to emulate their marriages and suffered from them... and didn't do much better with our own version.

Donald Trump made an interesting comment last night. He said, "If you have to work at marriage, there's something wrong. I work all day. The last thing I want to do when I get home is work on the marriage." And I think there is some truth in that. After a certain point, it was effort just to be in the same room with my ex, but, it was like, I'm gonna tough this thing out to the end, cause that's what you do, the kids, our family will be demoted somehow, I promised... all these things were so compelling to me. I was so unhappy, yet still had to dragged kicking and screaming into divorce. Why? I had bought into many things that people around me and society in general were presenting. Is it the same kind of ignorance we're able to recognize when we hear some of the outrageously misinformed comments presented to Kinsey?

For many, if not most, the primary impetus for marriage is the stability of upbringing for children/financial reasons. I felt, and feel, that when you have kids, they come first. Fortunately, so far, we've been able to have relative stability for them despite the divorce and they've done well. With the kid and money impetus gone, I do wonder if I'll ever have a desire to marry again. I would have to be head over heels in love... and yes, the sex would have to very, very good.

Good Company: An Oxymoron?

There are few films which comment on how corporate values, trends and movement operate in the lives of individuals. It's difficult to show that type of interaction, despite its universality, because the ideas that push companies today are abstract and complex. Moreover, they generally impact individuals very obliquely. Two films which have done this well are Network and Wall Street, which have well developed characters showing how the corporate values have infiltrated them personally and also comment on the current corporate landscape.

Wall Street tackled the then emerging trend of buying and selling companies for parts, which made multimillionaires out of characters like T. Boone Pickens who bought compromised companies and sold off their hard assets like land and capital at a profit. It set off the 80's as the decade of greed. This film is almost a 180 from that. The buzzword in this one is synergy, a word considered so unintelligible to the masses that the director choose not to use it as the title. In fact, it's always accompanied by a hand gesture to show the strength of interlocking bonds.

It's hardly a new concept, even to our founding fathers who admonished, "United we stand, divided we fall." Now, it's all about alliances. Last night, the runner up on survivor outlined the strategy that got her there. She did no work for the tribe, was considered kind of mean and tacky by them, but, she ingratiated herself with two men she considered to be the strongest players, and, because they were indeed the strongest, and showed her loyalty, she got 100K. The same strategy is used by everyone from kids on the playground to directors in the pre-Enron boardroom. This is how it works among individuals... and now companies.

As the IPO market shrinks, more and more companies look to the larger, stronger ones for their liquidity. Even artists look to the big players and corporate patrons. As Shakespeare observed:

Third Fisherman: Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the sea.
First Fisherman: Why, as men do aland; the great ones eat up the little ones.
Pericles I1

The Trump figure In Good Company admonishes his followers to promote their brothers and sisters ( in companies owned by the same magnate) as though he were Jesus delivering the Sermon on the Mount, and, they revere him as if he were Jesus. All except Dennis Quaid, of course, who wonders aloud whether the new "country" he lives in is really as democratic as the head of it seems to think and whether the Emperor is wearing clothes.

Sound familiar? Every despot to ever rule a country felt he was loved by his subjects. This theme of the company as country was also integral to Network. Because these companies exist independently of any given country and are subject to few of their rules, I can see where megalomania could arise. Take a company like Microsoft (please); Bill Gates, who was never elected to anything, wields huge power that is beyond the limits of even the US Government, which has tried to reign it in with very limited success. Sure, we could all refuse to use Microsoft products, and I urge you all to do just that, but, it's become hard to avoid.

It's true, we do vote with our dollars. And in that sense, there is democracy, but some things, like gas, and now even computers, are so necessary, that our votes are about as meaningful as they are in elections, where we get to choose between two flavors of vanilla. Corporate alliances and cross-branding are as much about exclusion and divisiveness as they are about "synergy", just as religion and country have two faces. For every individual who is truly strengthened and elevated through those institutions, there are thousands who use them as crutches and excuses for exclusion.

For me, the biggest problem with the alliances, within and between conglomerates, is in media. ABC shows only interview B-listers on affiliated networks or Disney films, they tend to review more Disney films. Microsoft has NBC in its pocket. Anything that appears on these major news shows must be filtered through a huge corporate net before any exposure is possible, unless you murder your pregnant wife and dump her in the bay. They all run the same obscure stories and all avoid the same major news stories. It's scary.

While it's important to be aware of the fix in corporate America, to me, the interesting issues in the movies I'm discussing here are the ones that address how these larger social issues play out in our lives. I remember telling a fellow lawyer once that when I practiced corporate law I was encouraged to switch to litigation but I was afraid of what it would do to my personality. He said that some folks just aren't affected that way and I'm sure he included himself among them. I've never met anyone who sees himself as a corporate drone, going along with the party line, buying into it. We all think we're impervious. We all think we're master of our fate, captains of our own ship. That doesn't make it true, though.

Having been both inside and outside of the corporate/business world, I see more clearly the ways in which we buy in, even here in Silicon Valley, which seems so innovative and entrepreneurial. We buy in by thinking that success is the new car and prestige. We turn our attention away from the true experience of our life and toward the external measures of a person. We readily identify the idea coming out of a powerful mouth as good and that coming from a less powerful source as less good, Evaluating ideas based on the external power of the person presenting it shows a lack of independent thought, though most who do it think they are really making the decisions without bias.

Our implicit assumptions are also affected. The business buy-in has us believing that more you work, the better you are. A recent survey shows Americans spending very little time just enjoying their lives, their weekends are spent working or catching up on personal errands they have no time for during the week. The value is accomplishment, achievement... but what is really accomplished? People get so focused on the business goals that they lose touch with what they really want out of life. People have lost touch with themselves and implicitly see the business goals as their own personal goals.