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From: aeq@pucc-h (Jeff Sargent)
Newsgroups: net.singles,net.women
Subject: Re: Trish revisited, calmly
Message-ID: <992@pucc-h>
Date: Fri, 24-Aug-84 22:10:31 EDT
Article-I.D.: pucc-h.992
Posted: Fri Aug 24 22:10:31 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 26-Aug-84 00:40:09 EDT
References: <977@pucc-h>
Organization: Tucumcari Divinity School
Lines: 45

Following up my own article with some more thoughts....

I suspect that many a (seemingly?) insensitive man may have a dream that some
"perfect" woman is going to graciously, with incredible humility, take him as
SO and thereby, shall we say, forgive him his sins and redeem him; that by
submitting her (imagined) purity and perfection to the possible depredations
of his impurity and imperfection, she would somehow relieve him of the gnawing
pain that comes from knowing that no matter how much one grows as a person,
one is never perfect; one always has sins.  In other words, men are looking
for a woman to play the role of Christ in a visible, palpable manner.  It is
probably for this reason that a man takes it as such a special honor to be
the first man to have sex with a particular woman -- that she cares so much
for him that she sacrifices even her virginity for him -- a blood sacrifice,
yet!  Perhaps somehow the verse, "Without shedding of blood there is no
remission [of sins]" is floating around in their subconsciousnesses.

A darker possibility here is that a man may, at bottom, really have it in for
women -- really, actually, hate them, or at least bear a grudge against that
side of the human species.  Thus, if his feelings of attraction to women, or
to a particular woman, are carefully analyzed, he may actually be considering
her to be pure and perfect with an eye to how good it would feel (emotionally
as well as physically) to defile all that sweet purity.  Note that this
entails, again, his considering himself as wondrously impure, so that he can
be the defiling agent -- unless, of course, he can even gain pleasure from
the thought of a woman being defiled by someone other than himself, say by
rape, or by (if homosexuality disagrees with him, as it does with me)
lesbianism.

I have been criticized by one or two of my Christian brothers because I
sometimes do purchase Playboy.  But it is astonishing what you find out when
you "show God your dirty pictures", as one pastor friend of mine put it --
i.e. be appallingly honest about your sexual fantasies; Playboy can thus
sometimes serve as a focusing device.

Anyway, returning to the theme of my earlier paragraphs, what would seem to be
necessary for marriage or SO-ship is that a man become sufficiently accepting
of his own and everyone else's sins/imperfections that he can be intimate with
a woman who is just as sinful/imperfect as he is, and love her nevertheless.

My only question is:  how on earth can anyone pull this off?

-- 
-- Jeff Sargent
{decvax|harpo|ihnp4|inuxc|seismo|ucbvax}!pur-ee!pucc-h:aeq
[the man with the cornrowed chest hair :-)]