Letters to the Editor
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when the perpetrators are repression and projection
Julilla: what exactly was wrong or bad about you and your companion touching each other in pleasurable ways when you were an adolescent? I’ll bet it was enjoyable. You may be trying to tell yourself something important when you say, recounting the experience, that you feel “like an old fuddy duddy”.
Anonymous (Body vs. Brains): there is no such distinction, get it out of your mind (so to speak). What you describe in the context of forbidden intimate behavior - young people who have “acquired and processsed enough information from family, church, school etc. to . . . know that . . .[connecting sexually is wrong and forbidden]” is, simply put, pathology. If they have repressed, “for…societal or ethical reasons”, their natural urges to connect with each other in ways that harms no one, they haven’t “processed” anything, but instead have swallowed whole unhealthy introjects (Perls), become “domesticated” (Miguel Ruiz), acquired the vulnerability for neurosis (Freud). They will connect sexually and intimately, or become unhealthy. Your job is to provide them the means for safe sex, not to project fears and discomfort around intimacy onto them.