Aug 2012
TOPLESS WOMEN
AT THE
NUDE BEACH
The first instant OUR EYEBALLS fall on words like “Nude Beach” and “Women Go Topless”, all sorts of ancient primal impulses are triggered. Why the hell would that be so?
It isn’t so. I’m sure we would all agree that the impulses are indeed primal but they are not so ancient. Looking all the way back to the beginning of sexuality, we find that to the majority of our ancestors, those two adjectives would be meaningless. Perhaps we are starving for nudity in some way. Perhaps some impulse inside us is craving true un-costumed human companionship. Or perhaps, some impulse inside us is dreading it.
Turns out, it’s OUR EYEBALLS. Specifically, the sensation at the end of the light cones known in the scheme as Mr. Now. He is caught between identities. One of them will hearken back to his old relationship with Mr. Hippo which was athletic, impulsive and mobile with a craving for awe and wonder and beauty. And sex. The other is just a face and two hands protruding from a costume. With the help of Mr. Flashlight, Mr. Now can be a narrative self in a narrative world and crave narrative things like order and completion. Finding a workable balance between these two identities is known in common parlance as mental health.
An important part of a workable balance is our sexuality and desire for sex. Like hunger for food, that’s the one of the few motivations of our bodies that can’t be squelched by draping it with a costume. Besides, Hippo’s sub-cinema perception will see right through it. Like the movie of the moving dots that we instantly recognize as dancing people, Hippo doesn’t need to see full-blown cinema nudity to recognize sexual visual cues. Silhouettes, profiles, crude shapes… even two J’s too close together will make a sexual visual cue. P’s and rotated B’s have provided endless GIGGLING SUB-CINEMA EYEBALL FUN. That means it is unavoidable that sex and our reaction to it must somehow be worked into the narrative self.
Unfortunately, some narrative worlds make that extremely difficult. Some narratives describe sexuality in a manner that is at variance with biological reality. For example, a priest is suppose to believe that sexual urges can be harnessed with religious thoughts and only such a harnessed sexuality equips one to properly advise parishioners on their sexuality. This is an extreme example, of course, and almost any narrative world contains some misinformation on the subject. It’s understandable. It is a very complex and tricky subject. The problem is, these attempts at narrating sexuality never work as intended.
Instead, our brains came up with a complex and tricky solution to making it all work. We make up a secondary narrative self. A secret self… a privvy-self. One that compromises the perception of sexuality of the regular social-self in an effort to more truly represent biological reality. The trouble is, these privvy-selves get off to a bad start. They cannot bypass the regular narrative. They must re-compose it… rearrange it, add a little, rationalize a few things, pervert it a bit… and subtly or perhaps grossly tweak the narrative to let as much of Hippo’s sexuality leak out as possible. So, the privvy narrative is a twist of a twist of reality. The results can be rather benign or make you a little strange or, make your privvy-self very dangerous to others.
Holy Men have dealt with this problem for eons. Those who found that they could not truly live up to the fabulous personage they had told everyone they embodied, found refuge in the secret most-privvy privvy-place in the Holy City. There, they could do what was necessary to quiet the urges and quell the tensions that threatened to compromise or destroy their social self. Many modern regular joes use the same method.
If these are all issues of the narrative self, then why does Hippo have to hide in the Rectory to take care of business? Why would Hippo perceive himself as a pervert? He can’t perceive himself at all with a perception of only NOW and NEXT, but we can pervert his perception by poisoning the nyeep pool with hyper-realized visual imagery. That includes seeing words like TOPLESS and NUDE. That means that Hippo can be affected by the narrative without a conscious instruction from the surface. He can perceive the perverted nyeeps in his own time frame, which is very fast. He the can have the intended perverted reaction before the brain-boys even know about it. This handily feeds back into the narrative self’s perception that there is a perverted inner nature within that must be suppressed with Correct Thoughts.
This solution, of course, is oblivious to how the Correct Thoughts created the twisted behavior pattern. We would not see that unless we understood that narratives are simply in our brains and not some supernatural layer of reality. That would be giving away the store. Too many people would have too much explaining to do to even consider such an admission. Instead, they can continue to exhort others to do the one thing that will never fix it, and makes sure that they can keep the store; tell everyone to have more Correct Thoughts even harder.
There has always been a porn and erotica industry catering to needs of the privvy-self… softening the transition from social-self to privvy-self with little stories of the horny plumber or the pizza delivery guy or… you know.
They create a hyper realized world of narrative sexuality full of precisely staged imagery and maximized sub-cinema effectiveness. They help us call out our privvy-selves. Or scream at it mercilessly.
So NUDITY means different things depending on how long we think about it.
To Mr. Hippo, TOPLESS WOMEN are flat, inky things that line the party store aisle you just happened to choose to get the check-out. NUDE BEACH is an imaginary tropical paradise where they take the pictures of the flat, inky things.
If we ponder either phrase long enough to start narrating about them, the picture changes. Suddenly, the thought of all women everywhere with no shirts on or the thought of an actual beach full of NUDITY reaches past the erotic reaction and sees something very different.