1 result for (book:notp AND session:770 AND stemmed:but)
[... 3 paragraphs ...]
Your sexual characteristics represent a portion of your personhood. They provide vital areas of expression, and focal points about which to group experience. Your sexual qualities are a part of your nature, but they do not define it.
Your beliefs so structure your experience individually and en masse, however, that evidential material contrary to those ideas shows itself but seldom, or in distorted or exaggerated form. It is quite natural, biologically and psychologically, to operate in certain fashions that are not acceptable in your society, and that seem to run counter to your picture of mankind’s history. In terms of your definitions, then, it is quite natural for some people to behave as males sexually and as females psychologically. It is quite “natural” for others to operate in a reverse fashion.
[... 1 paragraph ...]
The larger pattern of human personhood demands a bisexual affiliation that allows leeway in sexual encounters, a leeway that provides a framework in which individuals can express feelings, abilities, and characteristics that follow the natural inclines of the personal psyche rather than sexual stereotypes. I am not speaking here of anything so simple as merely allowing women more freedom, or relieving men from the conventional breadwinner’s role. I am certainly not talking about “open marriage” as it is currently understood, but of far greater issues. Before we can consider these, however, there are several points I would like to make.
[... 3 paragraphs ...]
In times of overpopulation, this mechanism is hardly desirable, but it is a part of the species held in abeyance now, representing nature’s capabilities. In some areas of your world, isolated peoples live on past a hundred years, vital and strong, because they are untouched by your beliefs, and because they live in sympathy and accord with the world as they know and understand it. Occasionally such second puberties happen then, with resulting childbirth, as a small group attempts to maintain its own biological stance.
(10:18.) Usually the second puberty follows the same sexual orientation as the first, but not always — for it is quite possible for the new affiliation to be the opposite of the first. This is even rarer — but so does the species protect itself.
Through medical techniques some of your old people are kept alive long enough so that this process begins, appearing in distorted form, sometimes psychologically apparent but biologically frustrated. The second puberty is dead-ended, then. It has nowhere to go. It is not now biologically pertinent or needed.
[... 2 paragraphs ...]
This is because a blockage occurs. The individual wants to grow in terms of personhood, but is afraid of doing so. There are always individual variations that must be taken into consideration, but often such a person feels a martyr to his or her sex, imprisoned by it and unable to escape. This can obviously apply to cancers affecting sexual areas, but is often in the background of any such condition. Energy is being blocked because of problems that began — in your terms — with sexual questions in puberty. Energy is experienced as sexual.
[... 1 paragraph ...]
There are often hormonal changes occurring that go unnoticed. Many express a nervous, erratic type of behavior as they are aroused — some not only sexually but intellectually. The new adolescence never comes. The new puberty dies a slow death, for your society has no framework in which to understand it. And indeed it shows itself in a distorted fashion that can appear most grotesque.
[... 4 paragraphs ...]
A transitory period is currently taking place, in which women seem to seek the promiscuous sexual freedom more generally granted to men. It is believed that males are naturally promiscuous, aroused by sexual stimuli almost completely divorced from any complementary “deeper” response. The male, then, is thought to want sex whether or not he has any love response to the woman in question — or sometimes to desire her precisely because he does not love her. In such cases, sex becomes not an expression of love, but an expression of derision or scorn.
[... 8 paragraphs ...]
(11:35. “I’m still half in trance,” Jane said, “but I think book dictation’s over….” I got her a beer. Then, at 11:37:)
[... 3 paragraphs ...]
(“I’m not up to it tonight,” Jane said, “but there’s lots of material he could give on the ulcer thing right now. It’s all there. Maybe I should take a short break and see if he’ll come back, instead of ending the session….”
[... 2 paragraphs ...]