Sitting On Daddy's Lap

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The hideous McKenzie Phillips incest revelation started a debate in the blogosphere about whether or not parent-child incest is always rape. My thought is that it is always just about the sickest thing in the world, a violation of every imaginable social rule in 99.9% of the world's societies through most of time. Children enter the world so damned helpless, and need desperately to bond to their parents, the source of love, food, shelter, education, and so much more. There is just no way that that bond, once formed, could possibly be expected to magically transform into a mature, non-abusive sexual relationship. And what if the parent didn't raise the child? And neither of them wish to have children? Separate from the genetic component (tribes encourage exogamy to provide genetic variation) there is the question of social good. In other words, I wouldn't doubt that there might be some extraordinary circumstances in which such relationships are not evil. But creating a context in which they are accepted opens the door to an abuse potential in other relationships that is simply not worth even considering changing our social attitudes.

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Can an adult woman make the decision to have sex with her father? Well, obviously. And what should we think about it? The only safe conclusion, if we wish to protect the little girls who are looking at their Daddies as god-creatures and wish desperately to please them...is no. Can an adult man make the decision to have sex with his mother? Well, obviously. But again, in whatever grotesquely rarified atmosphere such unions would be considered "healthy", the door has opened to an horrific violation of the basic protections of children. I see no way that it could ever be in a society's interests to do other than look upon such relationships as ghastly.

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And looking at McKenzie Phillips' sad life, I'd say that she isn't exactly a poster child for the health of incestuous relationships. I think that, in the abstract, most parents find their children sexually attractive. After all, they exemplify (hopefully) the best qualities of you and the person you fell in love with. They are younger versions of you, and when they ask "Am I pretty?" "Am I handsome?" the only real way to answer that honestly is to ask whether you yourself would find them attractive, were they not your children. I remember the first time I watched Nicki and some of her five-year-old girlfriends dancing around my living room in their underwear. It reminded me of a bunch of Sorority girls partying, in, ahem, an incident back at college. Cough. And I saw how child molesters can use the "she was a seductive little girl" excuse. They ARE seductive. They need our approval to a depth of emotion probably beyond the conscious access of adults. We just don't remember that level of need, hope, love. Little kids jump on your lap and wiggle in a way that would be blatantly seductive in an older person. That energy is just there, and it's there from the beginning.

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Mistaking it for something to be used for your pleasure is transforming a living, breathing human being into an instrument of your pleasure. In no way, by no definition, under no circumstance do those children NEED you to "play" with them in such a manner. There is simply no circumstance, and whatever justifications Phillips' father used are beneath contempt.

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Rape it may not be, by the ordinary definitions. But it is a betrayal of trust so profound that I have difficulty typing these words.

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Let me make it clear why I find any argument about smoking, obesity, or whatever to be an argument FOR UHC rather than against it.

What have I said from the beginning? That behaviors are the result of emotions, beliefs, positive and negative emotional anchors. "Timeline" theory is an extraordinarily elegant view of the action process, a way of seeing if you have aligned yourself to accomplish a given goal.

1) Is the goal clear? Meaningful to you? Time-bound?

2) Does your goal match your hierarchy of values? Does it represent a conflict on any level? For instance, intimacy versus freedom is a core conflict that causes infidelity every damn day of the week.

3) Do your beliefs conflict with the desired goal?

4) Do you have negative emotional associations with any of the actions necessary to accomplish your goal?

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If all of these things are aligned, you can consider yourself to have the best possible chance to reach your dreams. Problems in any of these arenas should be cleared up.

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Let's add another one: in drug rehab school programs, the big problem I see is that they lie. And I think they lie because the programs are created by people who drink and feel guilty about it. They can't tell the truth about an associated problem (drugs) without touching their own damaged wiring. What is the truth? That people use drugs because they like the way those drugs make them feel. If they didn't like it, if that state wasn't more pleasurable than their state without those drugs, they wouldn't use them. Talking about peer pressure, experimentation or rebellion is entirely secondary to this core biological drive: to avoid pain and seek pleasure.

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Now, given these positions, the big argument that voluntary behaviors drop the American health stats, and that therefore we shouldn't pay attention to WHO stats, is just blind. It displays a profound 180-degree difference between the way we see human behavior. I remember a lady I know who had a terrible relationship, smoked, and was obese. And insisted, up down and sideways, that she knew the answers, that people get what they want in life, and that whatever position they are in in life, that's where they intended to go.

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She was a textbook case of confusion of conscious and unconscious drives. Textbook. Most of the bad things we do are confusions of these two things, a belief that somehow "we" are in control of ourselves, that our conscious minds are stronger than the millions of years of evolutionary wiring that can spin us in some very bizarre directions indeed. We've done experiment after experiment showing that our CONSCIOUS beliefs about race (Kumbahya!) is very different than our unconscious tribal wiring. To my knowledge, the very best way of combatting racism is to demonstrate to people this incongruence--that pain, in and of itself, affects behavior for the positive.

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I see nothing, absolutely nothing in the use of drugs, lack of exercise, stress-related or diet-related problems that do not yield to consciousness, education, aligning the conscious and unconscious mind, becoming more deeply aware of the consequences of our actions on those around us. It seems child's play to me.

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What possible effective disagreement with this idea can there be? That those Americans who smoke more than the international average do it because they WANT, really truely want, to die? That would be the only thing that would be unassailable by a proper network of social support, counseling, and education. You KNOW this would have to be my attitude: look at the way I get criticized when I suggest that human bodies do not disobey the laws of physics. Those who have a need for protective shells, or an aversion to exercising their bodies, are both, in my mind, reacting to faulty and conflicted beliefs, buried emotional pain, fear, and culturally promoted ignorance. (And I sure as hell blame commercial industry for selling sugar and crap, claiming it is 'healthy' in the way tobacco companies used to claim cigarettes actually soothed your throat. Right here in America. You want me to trust people who profit by selling me poison? Are you kidding?) And when they do not fear, discovered they've been lied to about how much exercise it takes to change their bodies, and have resolved the emotional conflicts...the weight drops off.

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This isn't a magic bullet. It is simply that we have a difficult time adapting human energies to a changing environment.

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None of this suggests that there shouldn't be a vigorous debate about the proper role of government. Or fears that government will grow too large. Or the excellent, and heartfelt defence of a cancer-prone family struggling to survive, which has found health care that works--and therefore is concerned about change. God, I feel that one.

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But I'm afraid that those who believe our behaviors cannot be positively affected by outside agency are going to have to go on the other side of the line. My side says that the fact that we smoke more, are fatter, and so forth can be attributed to ignorance, fear, lack of clarity, and lack of support. Things that the rest of the industrialized world has decided should be dealt with in the Commons. And those who look at those statistics otherwise...well, again, we have a very serious difference in what we think human beings are, and what we believe the obligations between people to be, and the proper role of government.

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And I honestly believe that the core difference lies in questions of What Are We, as individuals, as a culture. What is the future we want? I'll tell you bluntly: basic education and basic health care is part of the commons. There will be private schools and private medical plans for those who wish more, and I would fight against anything outlawing same. That future looks pretty damned good to me. I'm sorry if you don't want to live in my world, I really am.