I think they fear sex because it involves a certain cutting lose and abandonment of yourself. When you’re accustomed to a simple and rigid structure based on simple rules, this freedom can be experienced as a pretty deep and fundamentally frightening discomfort.
When your whole life is spent feeling so tight and wound up because you’re basically walking a clearly black-and-white tightrope, this freedom probably feels straight up Satanic to some of them.
Remember, religious folks do not hold rationality as the highest measure of something, and you probably wouldn’t either if you hadn’t been trained in the skill. It has its uses, but there’s much more important measures in their world. Life is not supposed to make complete sense to them, ever. This is why God works so often in “mysterious ways” and remains a father figure to be heeded and honored, moreso than a subject to be considered or pondered fairly.
edit: Just occured to me, but it’s akin to an ex-con who gets out of prison but has to deal with being institutionalized, where they became accustomed to that simple, rigid life and don’t remember how to live in the regular world. Now, they were once free men. How much harder would it have been had they been born into that simple, rigid institution?
They’re all Shawshank Redemptioned. Like Brooks. Like Morgan Freeman was probably gonna be, if not for his friend.
Veterans experience something like this as well, when they try to retire from the army and come home from war. They often struggle to adapt back into our extreme levels of freedom and nonchalance.
This analysis is pretty thorough compared to what I’m used to, and throws a lot of hypotheses out there… but I would hypothesize this way, too. Unless you have sources you’d like to share? Don’t mean to be intimidating or argumentative–I think what you’re saying is true, but I’m still curious of the (sociological? psychological?) science behind it.
As an aside, I feel so bad for some people (like childhood victims of sexual abuse).
Valid questions. No, I’m no professional, nor have I studied in this field. This is personal opinion based on my own anecdotal experiences.
I suspect there probably is a more rigorous exploration of this idea somewhere, we can’t be the first people to notice the commonalities. But I am not qualified to process or judge the studies, and I do know that social science work is particularly challenging due to the difficulties of cramming people into laboratories and performing conclusive experimentation upon them.
I think they fear sex because it involves a certain cutting lose and abandonment of yourself. When you’re accustomed to a simple and rigid structure based on simple rules, this freedom can be experienced as a pretty deep and fundamentally frightening discomfort.
When your whole life is spent feeling so tight and wound up because you’re basically walking a clearly black-and-white tightrope, this freedom probably feels straight up Satanic to some of them.
Remember, religious folks do not hold rationality as the highest measure of something, and you probably wouldn’t either if you hadn’t been trained in the skill. It has its uses, but there’s much more important measures in their world. Life is not supposed to make complete sense to them, ever. This is why God works so often in “mysterious ways” and remains a father figure to be heeded and honored, moreso than a subject to be considered or pondered fairly.
edit: Just occured to me, but it’s akin to an ex-con who gets out of prison but has to deal with being institutionalized, where they became accustomed to that simple, rigid life and don’t remember how to live in the regular world. Now, they were once free men. How much harder would it have been had they been born into that simple, rigid institution?
They’re all Shawshank Redemptioned. Like Brooks. Like Morgan Freeman was probably gonna be, if not for his friend.
Veterans experience something like this as well, when they try to retire from the army and come home from war. They often struggle to adapt back into our extreme levels of freedom and nonchalance.
This analysis is pretty thorough compared to what I’m used to, and throws a lot of hypotheses out there… but I would hypothesize this way, too. Unless you have sources you’d like to share? Don’t mean to be intimidating or argumentative–I think what you’re saying is true, but I’m still curious of the (sociological? psychological?) science behind it.
As an aside, I feel so bad for some people (like childhood victims of sexual abuse).
Valid questions. No, I’m no professional, nor have I studied in this field. This is personal opinion based on my own anecdotal experiences.
I suspect there probably is a more rigorous exploration of this idea somewhere, we can’t be the first people to notice the commonalities. But I am not qualified to process or judge the studies, and I do know that social science work is particularly challenging due to the difficulties of cramming people into laboratories and performing conclusive experimentation upon them.