Sexual Humiliation and the Birth of Philosophy

Philosophy essay

Sexual Humiliation

There was a girl I liked, in middle school. One of the first. But she might have been any girl, an abstract, general Girl, or even the archetypical girl, the girl archetype. I was not loyal to my crush - I was just as interested in the loud blonde tomboy, as in the quiet mousy brunette.

I had known all of these people for a year before the accident. I had been socially integrated, had a place in the hierarchy. Class clown, of course. Never had any enemies. Popular enough, but totally indifferent, blind to the fact. Naive, arrogant. Then I had some brain hemorrhage, and was knocked out of the heirachy, because my brain was different and I didn't know who I was. Instead of being an extroverted bundle of energy trying to make everyone smile with my pranks and jokes, I became an introverted, gloomy, scary mystery, with no place in the heirachy. And I was very angry and sad all the time, and there were very few people I weren't hostile towards, for perceived slights.

My parents have told me that I was an extremely angry baby, who then grew up to being a particularly patient and happy and well behaved child, as soon as I could speak. I have often thought of the aftermath of my injury as being turned back into a baby, and having to learn to walk, and speak, all over again.

But back to the mousy brunette.

I never spoke to her, but I daydreamed and crushed. Then one day I hear through the grapevine that she is dating one of the boys. They didn't "date" for more than maybe a week or two. But one day, when I saw him running down the hall, having some kind of game with his friends, on a spur of the moment decision, I tripped him, and made him fall on his face, and started a fight.

I felt like I was the victim. I was twice the size of him. I felt like I was being excluded and bullied and humiliated. I attacked him totally unprovoked and he probably didn't even know I was jealous of him. I was the bully. We had a little fight. To the objective observer I was just a big spaz who suddenly freaked out for no reason and beat up a kid smaller than me. I didn't even think about winning the girl, or proving I was better, or anything like that. In the moment, I just wanted to hurt him. To punish him for daring to be desirable. For being able to make other people laugh.

He was part of a friend group, who did a little roughhousing here and there. Popular well adjusted kids, for the most part. Not really bullies, although they had some overlap with the kids from bad backgrounds. There was some bullying. Of the fat kid, the autistic kid. Not really the scrawny nerdy kids as far as I remember. But there was a little. Never directed at me though - that's why I had to provoke it, and start the fights myself.

I remember the first time I felt proud of winning a fight. Gym class, playing football, getting tackled. I was stronger. Spergout. Also a smaller guy than me. My perspective of the world was very askew. But that one felt really good, because he was a piece of shit. He was like a foot soldier, in the hierarchy. The other guy from the other story was the right hand man to the prom king.

At the time I mapped the situation to the archetypes available to me, though American media: jocks and nerds and prom kings. I was a “nerd”, they were evil “jocks”, because I read books and they played football.

I was excluded from the social gatherings because I was handicapped. I was feeling excluded - that meant THEY were excluding me. No matter how many times they went out of their way to try to include me in things, in sports, in jokes, in games, this was only further proof of their conspiracy to humiliate me.

In American high school terms, Mr prom king would go out of his way to invite me to the cool kids lunch table, countless times. And every time I declined, and instead sat and stewed in anger and violent fantasies - often about beating him up, in particular.

When after two years I finally got a note from my doctor saying I was normal again, and partook in some underage drinking at a end of school party before going away to boarding school, I realized that I had totally wasted two years living in a deranged fantasy world of my own making. That I was violently overreacting to people who dared trying to be nice to me, while possessing something I wanted. (Normalcy) (value) (objet petit a). The two guys I resented the most, were only ever nice to me. Although I didn't kiss any girls at those parties, I *almost* did, and that was perhaps even better, even more important.

A simple thing, drinking games and initiation rituals. I had fun, and allowed myself to be liked.

I thought I was a victim, that everything was unfair, and I was being unfairly treated by the universe and by people, and in reality I was just a big unpredictable violent sperg seething with envy.

During those years, I became obsessed with being smarter than other people. "figuring them out". That’s when I started reading nonfiction, went to the library and picked up the first book I could find with Freud in the title, because I knew from cultural osmosis that he was a “psychologist”. But I don’t think I learned much, which wasn’t already in me: this ability to peoplewatch from afar, and say, aha! You are only doing this, because that. I can see the strings!

This was a attempt to take back power, to feel “in control”: when you understand something, this gives you the experience of the power-process, the feeling of being it’s master.

“You are only doing this because that, I see right through you”. Understanding is domination - I am better than these people, because I see what's going on. I'm smarter, I have better philosophy, I am deeper, I am more real.

Because Mathias kissed Kirstine, and I didn't. And that is not fair, because she is so pretty, and I get her so much more, and he is just a short guy who is not good at sports or smart, and I used to be popular and have long hair and make everyone laugh, and I am two grades ahead in math, and I'm in 2 bands, and I am a competitive athlete (swimming) and I was the first one to touch boob at that dare that one time in 7th grade, and IT'S JUST NOT FAIR.

Coping and seething

In “the Ordeal of Civility”, Cuddihy describes the entire freudian theoretical framework as, the result of the psychological process of a person who comes from a “tribal” pre-modern culture, into the “civil” protestant european modernity, all-at-once, instead of the gradual little-by-little process the protestant europeans did. The impacts of a big cultural shock.

Cuddihy explains this specific situation of the problem of european “courtly love”, or romantic love, as we would say in every day langauge today, as:

In the shetl, nothing is private, everything is communal. Marriage is arranged by mother/parents, and is an expression of a communal consensus, not of individual choice or desire. So, when Freud sees the strange courtship behaviors of western prots in the big cities, he says to himself: “He is doing this because he wants to be SEEN doing this” - shetl logic.

The freudian perspective is, “love is just a chemical in your brain that makes you procreate Morty”, and everything is fully reducible to the mechanical expulsion of semen. Romance is reduceable to the mechanical animal penetration, and it totally arbitrary and meaningless. There is no meaningful difference between having sex with someone you “love” and a prostitute, both result in the same mechanical process, and whenever you try to cover it up in “love”, you are doing something perverse, obstructing the natural process arbitrarily, out of some repressed facination; a complex.

If a man treats his wife nicely, it's because he wants to be seen doing it - its a signal, it’s not even really about her, she is just a tool to help him signal. If he gives her gifts its to show he has money to spare. It's all a zero sum status game that operates within this communal framework, where nothing is private.

Freud enters into “polite”, modern Europe where people treat each other nicely and politely, compared to the rural tribal culture he comes from, and declares they are all insane and repressed, by trying to “look good” all the time, because the only reason to ever do nice things is, Machiavellianly, to gain social status or some other benefit.

Part of Freudian doctrine is that he is the “chosen psychologist”, the most correct, smart and important, and faced with civil protestant society he instinctually recognize as “better”, he feels envy. But this is a contridiction - you can't envy your lessers. So there must be some conspiracy in place to humiliate him. Nothing else makes sense, given the premises. Everything the protestant moderns are doing must be some defective version of the “real” tribal mode of being, some derangement.

Famous internet joke, the actor Pierce Brosnan is happily married to an a woman, who during their marriage, has gained weight. The freudians explain this: He has a fetish and uses his wife as a masturbation tool to gratify his Freudian complex of “feeding”/”fat women”. Non-Freudians say, you can tell that he just kind of, loves his wife.

Either/or

Going full circle:

Hollywood scriptwriters and directors are Freudians, and make movies where they project their own experience of being a “nerd” (freudians) in a “jock” (protestant germans) society, the traumatic ordeal of civility, where the shiskas are kissing Mathias, and that's just not fair.

The Birth of Philosophy

The moment I became a philosopher was when I tripped Mathias.

Tripping Mathias was my theological argument. I thought I did it to prove how I am wiser, I am smarter, I am better, I have better philosophy. But in truth, I was merely full of envy at the humiliation of being extended friendship, by someone who was independently succesful in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with me. Intellectual domination. I know what you are. And that gives me power over you.

This choice directed my life. The first step down a path. Of trying to “figure things out”. It started with a ping of hatred in my chest, and this sudden, spur of the moment impulse to hurt him, to take revenge, to punish. Not because I thought it would benefit me, and I would win the girl, or anything like that. Just to destroy, to take something, to deprive. “If I can’t have it, no one can”. I chose philosophy, years before I even knew what it was.

“When I make my enemy my friend, have I not destroyed my enemy?”