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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: E who wrote (32875)	3/19/1999 7:41:00 PM
From: Rainy_Day_Woman	Respond to of 108807

and how profoundly sad, this is to me E, i have a huge hug for you :-) foxy

To: E who wrote (32875)	3/19/1999 8:20:00 PM
From: nihil	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Dear E, I thought I knew a lot about you, but I didn't know about your daughter. The interesting thing to me about mental sex is that most of us should be able to control and influence our own perceptions. This is the gift of our frontal lobes which remember are purely animal themselves. When we observe sexual reproduction in organisms with shorter evolutionary trees, we are usually struck by the impersonality (imanimality?) of it all. Yet there are so many exceptions. To watch bower birds mate shows so highly organized behavior that it is hard to believe that there is not some self-conscious planning going on. To contrast the mating of betios and convict cichlids (who are both assiduous parents) and zebra danios (who couldn't care less -- even eat their eggs and young) its hard not to believe that much of what we think as parental love is "purely animal." I've asked myself with dying relatives if anything really mattered or why I was affected so much by there loss. I cannot prove it, but I am convinced that in our animal human processes there is a bond between a woman and her child that is organic. The accommodation of a woman to her child in utero is substantial and more than genetic. I think it likely that when a surrogate mother carries another's embryo there is substantial biological bonding, exchange of antibodies and perhaps cells through the placenta. One thing I believe -- that the mother-child bond is animal, organic, physiological and not wholly post-natally learned. I know that parents and children can learn to hate each other, but it seems very unnatural and very uncommon and takes a lot of work. Another thing I believe is that our love for others is a generalization of our love for our mothers. Most mothers are pretty good. Most of us start with a favorable view of humanity because of this. Anyone who starts with a bad mother, starts with a handicap. There are underlying differences among people that are genetically based, but the behavioral influence of mothers on young children I believe is by far the most important influence that nature has on the individual. It would not surprise me in the least if it were demonstrated that strong mother-daughter bonds and strong mother-son bonds were essential to workable adult sexual relationships in most societies.

To: E who wrote (32875)	3/19/1999 10:52:00 PM
From: Rambi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

E, When deinstitutionalization began in the 70s, I served on the local assessment and placement committee that oversaw the returning patients to our community. One of the more difficult problems we faced was the very high incidence of sexual acting out. It forced us into terrible situations with unwanted, usually late diagnosed pregnancies, the moral dilemma of performing sterilization procedures on noncomprehending adults, the question of whether marriages should be "allowed". So often there were none of the learned controls and responses present that higher functioning adults develop. They just had an itch and they wanted to scratch-so they did. I think I probably wouldn't agree that there was "self-conscious" behavior going on in some animal species as nihil feels tempted to believe, more that there is some biological reason for those behaviors. Despite all our learned protocol, we pretty much end up following the same old basic patterns of itching and trying to scratch without causing a lot of disequilibrium between our basic needs and our acquired behaviors. We wound up scratching our heads over a lot of this. (Lotta scratching in this post)The whole thing was a disaster I think anyway. Have no idea what I'm babbling about. Dan is in LA tonight and I'm having a glass of sherry and typing happily and it seems mindlessly away. Scratching some mental itch.