Khaos Theory

On the icy shores of Antartica, a select group of females have been observed engaging in the worlds old profession – prostitution – yes, helping males get their rocks off, in exchange for… rocks! But these aren’t human females, they are penguins, and they trade sexual favors with single male penguins to obtain stones to build their nests, according to Dr. Fiona Hunter, a researcher in the Zoology Department at Cambridge University. So today we have evidence that prostitution exists in nature, as it did freely amongst human beings throughout much of history.

In Ancient Greece, female prostitutes could be independent and sometimes influential women. In 17th century Japan, the highest-ranking prostitutes, called “Tayu,” practiced the arts of dance, poetry, music, and calligraphy, along with sexual services, and often became celebrities outside of the sexual realm. In Renaissance Europe, it was customary for royal couples to marry simply to preserve bloodlines, while both the husbands and the wives entertained “courtiers” for more intimate pleasures.

So if prostitution occurs in nature, has existed throughout much of history, and in fact is still legal in many European countries such as Germany, Ireland and Greece, why is it so taboo, and illegal, in modern day America?

Back in the Wild West, during the 19th century, prostitution was legal, and in fact many women went out west to pursue that very occupation. Early in the 20th century however, the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement, aiming to “create a sober and pure world” via “abstinence, purity, and evangelical Christianity,” became the driving force behind the criminalization of prostitution in most states between 1910 and 1915. The WCTM, notably, also counted women’s voting rights amongst it’s goals. So while trying to achieve greater equality for women, they also increased control over their own homes and husbands by helping get prostitution outlawed.

In 2012, the primary source of female power, like it or not, is still sex, whereas for men it is wealth. Keeping prostitution illegal keeps the female power base intact, since men cannot always legally and without shame get laid whenever they want. And while religious organizations may lead the charge in suppressing what they would call the demoralization and victimization of women, there are plenty of feminists who would join forces with religious organizations should the illegality of prostitution in the U.S. ever come into question.

I personally have always supported the decriminalization of prostitution because I don’t subscribe to the victimization mantra that feminists, wives, and society in general try to place on prostitutes. I’ve seen women of free will choose to be commercial sex workers and be happy. I’ve experienced their company in positive and fulfilling ways. No one was hurt, and we both benefited.

Now we all know there are some women in commercial sex work who are being victimized, exploited and even abused. But these problems happen in many, many industries around the world. Efforts to police prostitution in the U.S. should focus on preventing exploitation, not on flat out prohibiting a paid service that men (and in some cases women) have enjoyed throughout the history of time.

Sadly, the hardest thing to do in life is to change people’s minds. And when it comes to prostitution, most of those minds remain firmly stuck in a Victorian-era ethos.

I don’t think legalization will even eradicate most problems, and it certainly won’t eradicate the most important one, which I observed in many countries: Legalization may make prostitution acceptable, but it won’t make it respectable. Even where it is legal, prostitutes are still treated as second-class citizens. To fix that we would need to combat and eradicate not prostitution, but religion… and that would be more difficult.

“It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm laborers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live… It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him… These men… [have] the most imperious of masters, that is, need… They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free?” French Journalist Simon Linguet wrote these words, comparing the wage-laborer to a slave, back in 1763, but it seems they still hold true today.

So what does it mean, to be a slave? It goes well beyond what most Americans think, in the historical sense, of a person brought from Africa by force, bought or sold in a market, beaten, broken, and forced to work in a field. It also goes beyond the tragic stories of women transported across borders and tricked into prostitution, or children laboring for diamonds or chocolate in remote regions like Sierra Leone. There are modern days slaves as well, all around us. And when they are enslaved not by force but by lack of alternative or awareness, they share several traits.

First, slaves are defenseless. Whether they lack physical strength or mental prowess, they have no means with which to fight back against those who would enslave them. Second, slaves are dependent. They need their captors to provide for them physically, emotionally, and/or spiritually. In the modern world, he who controls debt, controls the slave. Third, slaves are frequently ignorant. They know no other way of life. And if they are aware of their enslavement, they have a sense of helplessness; they justify why it is that they cannot overcome their current circumstances. Fear is the largest emotional component of this enslavement. Fear needs and fosters a system of explanations as to why others have the resources, the opportunities, and the power.

Finally, the most important characteristic that makes slaves of what would otherwise be free men is compliance. Children watch their parents submit to expectations of obedience, and institutions of work and school, and follow right along. On occasion, the misunderstood and rebellious, stubborn, or curious child or adolescent will find another path, through the luck of finding an unconventional teacher or education, or even by watching the right movies, or reading the right novels. These children grow to become free men with the willingness to defend their freedoms, and to evade or escape when the captor becomes too strong. This free man is stubborn, and determined, and he actively creates opportunities. He is non-compliant.

All too often however, the pattern of enslavement continues uninterrupted, from generation to generation. Fathers raised in a macho society cannot teach their sons to be at the same time dominant and compassionate, because they do not know this themselves. Moms cannot teach their daughters to be at once nurturing and determined, loving and independent, because they did not see these traits together in the in their own mothers. Ignorant teachers crush their students’ creativity while teaching for standardized tests, providing mandated lessons of obedience, repetition, and once again, compliance.

I thought a lot about it while I was on the road…

Along the roads that lead away from them, they can see me through the screens of their windows, but from a distance I can rarely see them through their windows, and curtains, and fences. I know however that within their boxes, are grotesque and twisted souls always looking for meaning and happiness outside of themselves, adopting strange fashions and customs sold by the television and magazines and other mass media. I imagine them alone in the dark, with their brand-name shoes and latest electronic appliances, staring through the window watching a lone man running in the dark. They must wonder, just for a moment, how can he be happy? They don’t know and they don’t really care, but at some point, still alone in the dark, the truth creeps in and their certainty weakens. And then the only truth left behind is that their houses are full and their lives are empty. No, that doesn’t really happen, it is just my imagination.

For as long as they need other people to tell them what is good and what is meaningful, they will always be slaves. To find freedom it is often necessary to go out in the cold, windy prairie and experience the discomfort, the fear, the hunger, and the exhaustion. Bring a slave out to the prairie and he will cry and bitch and moan, begging for a friendly voice. But the only voice he will hear in response, is the voice of a slave owner.

Our feelings are all focused on the same thing.

In addition to that the media has been inundated with sex. We can’t watch a Superbowl half-time show that won’t be followed by controversy about who showed what or how and with what meaning. Advertising is loaded with sexual symbology and imagery. And I won’t even start taking about TV programming. The covers of magazines all show wonderful and sexy women: Men’s magazines show women on the covers, while women’s magazines also show women on the covers. Movies suggest that all women that work as spies or police officers, or by any reason interact with the main character of the story, are tall and hot and shaved and seducing and never have PMS or other inconveniences like jobs or the need of hiring a babysitter before going out on a date.

We get used to think of people from the point of view of how they fit on this model of perfection and liberty. And by that standard most people are inadequate. The women on TV always seem to be so liberated and free, but the women we find in real life are so much more complicated than that.

The porn industry and most of pop culture from movies to “reality” TV, suggest an apparent freedom of choice and standards of performance that make most of us regular people feel like we are less than they are. Our clothes are not as nice, our cars are not as expensive, our erections are not as potent, our orgasms are not as earth-shattering, our partners are not as numerous. We pay expensive cable subscriptions to look at them from carefully designed points of view that at first intend on making us horny and excited and impressed, but that ultimately intend on making us buy more subscriptions and pay admission in expensive clubs, more of this beer, more of that clothing, more of this shampoo or more of that medicine… We are promised a more perfect lifestyle that we seem to never reach. So much sexual offer gives me anxiety… a suspicion that our desires are programmed by others, by an industry that gets us all horny to sell us pleasure, but we can’t get no satisfaction.

But it gets worse: So much exposure to what we end up considering standards of sexual performance makes us involuntarily measure each other based on that standard. We go out looking at people on the streets, at parties, in the subway, unconsciously noticing those that are super attractive and desirable (because they look like the artificial models we saw on the screen), a lower class of those that are the opposite, and the invisible majority that stands somewhere between those two extremes. Anatomy and appearances became the social ladder that most women try to climb, and where most men try to find the partners they dream about. This same classism also subjects women even when they are actually successful in the real world. Remember the race car driver that posed for playboy? Remember the great singer that lost opportunities for being overweight and later won several Grammys? Remember the Afghan girl that appeared on magazine covers several times not because anyone cares about her situation but because she has amazing blue eyes? In a world like this women don’t own their bodies: Their bodies own them. We don’t notice the women until we notice the packaging. They are no longer people: they are products.

Incongruence:

A few days ago I visited a swinger’s club in Romania. It was a good club, comparing with the other ones I have been to in the past. Well decorated, good service, expensive, and the clientele was very good looking and multicultural. However I couldn’t escape, even for a moment, the notion that the entire place was just like a gallery of stereotypes and presumptions. The gorgeous dancer, the strong drinks, the mediocre food left untouched, the pornographic movies in the big screen behind the bar. Everything following a predictable, replicable script universally applied in the Western world. There is an efficiency of McDonalds in those places.

Nothing called my attention more than the porn on the big screen. I believe it was chosen because it looked exactly like 90% of any other porn you can buy at a video store, or download from the Internet. The same script, the same acts, the same bleached tall blondes with unnatural tits making the same faces and saying the same things they say in most of those movies. Instead of exciting me, that movie was turning be off, not because it was bad, but because it was so completely predictable… and completely unrealistic.

The people at the club were mostly couples and most of them were very good looking. Not good looking because they were selected in a casting call or because a bouncer at the door with a scumbag attitude lets in first the pretty ones. No, they were good looking simply because most people in Bucharest are good looking anyway. So they were real. But what I could see on TV and the reality in front of me were so different and so incongruent. I had to take my mind away from the movie, away from the blonde dancer with hypnotic eyes, and focus on what is it that turns on and excites the people around me, and my partner as well.

What if our desires were not programmed by companies and movie producers and marketers? What if instead of the usual categories of videos we could search for what we feel irregardless of how unusual and surprising it may be? What if instead of riding on the deep grooves left on the road by countless consumers before us, we could get out of the usual paths and explore new territory?

The universe of human sexuality is not divided in categories, like the movies. The range of what is truly desired cannot be predicted by porn producers and expressed by the always-the-same ripped bodies of ignorant people pretending to be interesting. The rent-per-day mansions around the porn valley in Los Angeles can not represent the locations where our fantasies really reside.

The new porn:

Since the late 80′s all the porn industry created is more of the same: Better video quality of course, digital content, better categorizations and incredible quantity of material. But it is always the same stuff. We are ready for porn 2.0!

There will be a revolutionary new porn soon: Porn where there is uncertainty. Porn where there are prohibitions and rules, and the temptation to break the rules. Porn where you don’t choose among the acts and fantasies available on the shelves and instead it plays the fantasies and acts you really have. Porn in which real people plan, act, and direct it.

Stay tuned…

These are some very common, and predictable, mistakes humans make. Funny is that when you show this list most people will say they are liable of having done one, or two, sometimes three of those mistakes, while in reality most people have done them all one time or another.

Narrow mindedness

Many people can only think of one way of doing things, or believe there is just one possible right answer to any complex issue in front of them. A person or persons who cannot see beyond their own set of values and/or will not accept them. Is often related to religious matters, where people cannot accept the other religion’s beliefs. A narrow-minded person will even accuse someone of being “stupid” or ((name some other bad trait here, even “narrow-minded” itself!)) the other person who expresses a viewpoint or reason for believing otherwise than the narrow-minded one’s views.

Reactance

Reactance is the urge to do the opposite of what someone wants you to do out of a need to resist a perceived attempt to constrain your freedom of choice. It can occur when someone is heavily pressured to accept a certain view or attitude. Reactance can cause the person to adopt or strengthen a view or attitude that is contrary to what was intended and also increases resistance to persuasion. An example of such behavior can be observed when an individual engages in a prohibited activity in order to deliberately flaunt the authority who prohibits it, regardless of the utility or disutility that the activity confers. People using “reverse psychology” are playing on at least an informal awareness of reactance, attempting to influence someone to choose the opposite of what they request.

Reactivity

Reactivity is a phenomenon that occurs when individuals alter their performance or behavior due to the awareness that they are being observed. The change may be positive or negative, and depends on the situation.
This demonstrated a form of reactivity; when individuals know they are being watched, they are motivated to change their behavior, generally to make themselves look better. Reactivity is a serious problem in research, and has to be controlled in blind experiments (“Blind” is when individuals involved in a research study are purposely withheld information so as not to influence the outcomes).

Placebo effect

A placebo is a sham medical intervention. In one common placebo procedure, a patient is given an inert sugar pill, told that it may improve his/her condition, but not told that it is in fact inert. Such an intervention may cause the patient to believe the treatment will change his/her condition; and this belief does indeed sometimes have a therapeutic effect, causing the patient’s condition to improve. This phenomenon is known as the placebo effect.

Halo effect

The halo effect refers to a cognitive bias whereby the perception of a particular trait is influenced by the perception of the former traits in a sequence of interpretations. A study by Solomon Asch suggests that attractiveness is a central trait, so we presume all the other traits of an attractive person are just as attractive and sought after. The halo effect is involved in Harold Kelley’s implicit personality theory, where the first traits we recognize in other people influence our interpretation and perception of later ones because of our expectations. Attractive people are often judged as having a more desirable personality and more skills than someone of average appearance. Thus, we see that celebrities are used to endorse products that they have no actual expertise in evaluating, and with which they may not even have any prior affiliation. The term is commonly used in human resources recruitment. It refers to the risk of an interviewer noticing a positive trait in an interviewee and as a result, paying less attention to their negative traits (or vice versa).

Gambler’s Fallacy

The gambler’s fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy or the fallacy of the maturity of chances, is the belief that if deviations from expected behavior are observed in repeated independent trials of some random process then these deviations are likely to be evened out by opposite deviations in the future. For example, if a fair coin is tossed repeatedly and tails comes up a larger number of times than is expected, a gambler may incorrectly believe that this means that heads is more likely in future tosses. Such an expectation could be mistakenly referred to as being due. This is an informal fallacy. It is also known colloquially as the law of averages.

Pareidolia

Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, Jesus on a hot pocket, and hearing hidden messages on records played in reverse.

Self-fulfilling prophecy

A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true, by the very terms of the prophecy itself, due to positive feedback between belief and behavior. Although examples of such prophecies can be found in literature as far back as ancient Greece and ancient India, it is 20th-century sociologist Robert K. Merton who is credited with coining the expression “self-fulfilling prophecy” and formalizing its structure and consequences. In his book Social Theory and Social Structure, Merton gives as a feature of the self-fulfilling prophecy: Ie: when a woman falsely believes that her marriage will fail and fears such failure will occur that it actually causes the marriage to fail.

Escalation of commitment

Escalation of commitment is the tendency for people to continue to support previously unsuccessful endeavors. More recently the term sunk cost fallacy has been used to describe the phenomenon where people justify increased investment in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment, despite new evidence suggesting that the decision was probably wrong. Such investment may include money, time, or — in the case of military strategy — human lives. The phenomenon and the sentiment underlying it are reflected in such proverbial images as Throwing good money after bad and In for a dime, in for a dollar (or In for a penny, in for a pound).

The term is also used to describe poor decision-making in business, government, information systems in general, software project management in particular, politics, and gambling. The term has been used to describe the United States commitment to military conflicts including Vietnam in the 1960s – 1970s and in Iraq in the 2000s, where dollars spent and lives lost justify continued involvement.

Alternatively, irrational escalation (sometimes referred to as irrational escalation of commitment or commitment bias) is a term frequently used in psychology, philosophy, economics, and game theory to refer to a situation in which people can make irrational decisions based upon rational decisions in the past or to justify actions already taken. Examples are frequently seen when parties engage in a bidding war; the bidders can end up paying much more than the object is worth to justify the initial expenses associated with bidding (such as research), as well as part of a competitive instinct.

Hyperbolic discounting

Given two similar rewards humans show a preference for one that arrives sooner rather than later. Humans are said to discount the value of the later reward, by a factor that increases with the length of the delay. In behavioral economics, hyperbolic discounting is a particular mathematical model thought to approximate this discounting process; that is, it models how humans actually make such valuations.

Herd mentality

Herd mentality describes how people are influenced by their peers to adopt certain behaviors, follow trends, and/or purchase items. Examples of the herd mentality include the early adopters of high technology products such as cell phones and iPods, as well as stock market trends, fashions in apparel, cars, home décor, etc. Social psychologists study the related topics of group intelligence, crowd wisdom, and decentralized decision making.

People in these herds are broken up into two groups, explains Friedrich Nietzsche, a philosopher who coined the phrase. One lent itself to the religious points of views- their beliefs and how those dictated their actions- while the other lent itself to influence by the media- based upon what others perceive as ‘right’ (following trends, social norms, etc.). Nietzsche perceived these two forms of subservience to be a weakness among the common man, and that the “Superman” as Nietzsche terms is the one who overcomes the values of the fallible herd.

Sometimes riding around rush hour in the afternoon I look at the driver’s faces… very few are smiling. Quite the opposite. Bad attitudes, driving home in a hurry, kids screaming in the back seat. I don’t want their lives.

Or those that would love to stay longer at the party, that would love to escape for a couple of days, camping or just riding into the sunset…. but they “have” to be at work early in the morning.

Sometimes I want to shake them. Scream through the glass that separates our worlds. I want to rattle the bars that hold them back. But I can’t, and I shouldn’t. It’s not my duty, and it is not my right.

I will not steal from anyone the opportunity to gain his/her own freedom. But oh buy how I wish I met more people like I have been meeting, many from the couch surfing community, that travel and go out and know how the world looks like. How I enjoy talking to those that know there is something more than work and bills and taxes to care for.

So many spend their lives going from work to home to work to home, in an endless cycle, in silent desperation. Ensnarled in obligations with clients and bosses and creditors, while all they would really like to do is… you tell me.

Insanity scares me.

I lost several friends to insanity this far.

It’s more friends than I have lost to car accidents. More than I lost to cancer.

I am at that time in life where I am not old enough to have lost many friends to aging, but old enough to have many friends already. However I have lost less friends to crime, murder, aging, accidents, addiction or war than I have lost to insanity.

The first one was a school friend that took his own life at 13 years old. Another killed his girlfriend in a rage of jealousy and killed himself, leaving a dramatic message on the walls, written with blood and lipstick. Her blood and her lipstick. Another friend I lost to religious fanaticism, then another became incoherent and violent and soon got committed to an institution.

I guess it scares me so much because there is nothing I can do or say to them that will bring them back to “being in contact with reality and normalcy”. I was so painful to see my childhood friend talking to himself on the streets, preaching to the traffic on the streets, distant, incomprehensible, just the body of my friend while his mind, and the personality, that I knew and missed so much wasn’t there anymore.

I sometimes think that it is some kind of Darwinian selection process that cuts off those that are not so well adapted to modern life out of it. But that idea is also disturbing. I don’t understand it well, I just suffer.

…

I think I just miss my friends.  

Cirque du Soleil’s Zumanity, act: “Waterbowl”

Gyulnara Karaeva Waterbowl

La sir̬ne РFINA 2005 РGala РWaterbowl