Sinful Sex?

In Coming Out ... To Myself, Part 2 I said, "If a gay, bisexual, or lesbian, etc., person achieves Self-realization through his or her particular sexual orientation, he or she need not feel that sexual orientation to be sinful." This was a conclusion I drew from interpreting my own inner experience as a male, 61-year-old lifelong urolagnic — someone who derives erotic pleasure from the sight or thought of (in my case, female) urination.

A Jungian archetype, the Androgyne, has been shouting to me from my unconscious all my life, I said in that post, saying, "You are all boy and then some" — the "then some" being the female side of this quintessentially male-female archetype. For me, the archetype symbolizes its power in the form of an intense interest in women's distinctive "plumbing" on my part, which then gets displaced in my conscious sexual imagination and becomes a source of heterosexual erotic delight.

Sinful? Evil? Perverted? I don't think so. Rather, I'd say the Androgyne becomes the ally of the Self, the image of God within the human soul that calls us to put all our inner potencies into balance. It is only when they are out of balance that they become evil.


Is that a prescription for no-holds-barred, total sexual abandon? Again, I don't think so.

Rather, I would put it this way. There is no kind of sexual practice, activity, or orientation that is intrinsically bad. But any kind can morph into an occasion for sin.

Even conjugal, heterosexual relationships can turn evil: they can turn into a lifetime of outright abuse.

On the other hand, such practices as bondage-discipline-sadomasochism can, I'd say, help their practitioners along their way to Self-realization. Ditto, gay and lesbian sex, and the other forms of so-called "unnatural" sex.

So, what distinguishes good sex from bad? The keys:

• Sex must be between consenting adults
  
• It must not involve children
• It must not constitute cheating on a spouse or significant other
• It must not be coercive
  
• It must not involve physical harm
• It must not involve hateful, abusive behavior, but rather incorporate mutual respect
  

Now, BDSM practitioners engage in mock violations of those last three — but it is tacitly understood that the mock coercion and acting out must not cross the line to actual abuse and harm.


Yet, in my opinion, anyone who actually despises members of the opposite sex has a problem. If a man habitually thinks of women as sluts, whores, bitches, and the like, I fail to see how this can be at all Self-actualizing for him.

Jung said all men incorporate an "inner female," the archetype he called the Anima. (Women have an "inner male," the Animus.) Self-realization can come only by way of accepting the Anima/Animus in all its dimensions. If a man insistently deprecates women, his Anima has taken on a purely negative cast. To realize the Self, he must accept both the positive and negative aspects of his own Anima.

So a man who beats up, abuses, and denigrates women, even as he is heterosexually active with them, is not on the right path. That kind of sex is sinful.

Coming Out ... To Myself, Part 2

The ancient Gnostics and others held that, before Adam and Eve, there was the very first Human Being, Anthropos, also referred to as Adamas or Geradamas. According to Love Between Women by Bernadette J. Brooten (p. 340), the primal human being Adamas was, to a group called the Naassenes, both male and female. I have seen the same idea expressed in terms of more recent Jewish mysticism: the "first man" was really a man-woman, from whom Adam and Eve and the two genders of today derived.

This is of interest to me because, as I said in Coming Out ... To Myself, Part 1, I have just twigged to the fact that an archetypal potency which the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung called the Androgyne has been active within me for as long as I can remember. An androgynous symbol such as Anthropos or Adamas, Jung said, manifests this archetype.

We all have the same archetypes, including the Androgyne. My Androgyne, however, seems to have been shouting at me from the depths of my unconscious ever since childhood, while many men never hear a peep from theirs.

One way I measure this is to examine — and this is a delicate subject, folks — my lifelong urolagnia. Also called urophilia, this is defined as "a tendency to derive sexual pleasure from the sight or thought of urination." Specifically, in my case, female urination. It not only turns me on, but I wish to (somehow) identify with it. This has been true since I was a small boy.

I now begin to see what the meaning of this quirk is, and has been, in my life. I am presently assuming that my unusual interest in the various aspects of female "plumbing" is a symptom of archetypal Androgyne activity; it is as if the erotic pleasure I get from urolagnia is a displacement of the pleasure that might otherwise come from identifying with the distinctive anatomy and physiology of the female.


As a child, I had two main girl playmates, L. and G. L. was about three years older than I, G. just a year. For some reason, I was urolagnic toward L. but not G. I remember a time when L. was playing at my house and I began to feel the need to pee. I decided to hold on until L. used the bathroom first, as I imagined that she and I were having a "hold it" contest. This was oddly stimulating to me in a way I later learned was called erotic.

I also remember having the same reaction one time when several of us were playing in G's back yard and there was a toddler's potty there for G's younger brother to use. L., who was much too old for potties, abruptly stopped playing and used this one. I'll never forget that.

On the other hand, when G. would come over to play and had a call of nature, she would have me come in the bathroom with her and "stand guard." She had a phobia of drains and being sucked into the toilet. For reasons I cannot explain, on the many occasions when this happened I never experienced any erotic feelings. Yet when G. started developing breasts and wore a training bra, I would often arrange for us to look at magazines while we were both crouched over them on the floor so I could look down the front of her top, for thrills.

(I am mentioning these details because they may be helpful to anyone who has a similar early biography of odd sexual identity.)

I was "all boy," and then some, it seems ... where the "then some" was female. I played baseball with my male playmates and then went off and played with paper dolls with G. (and her brother).


In thinking about all this, I'm making some educated guesses. First and foremost, that Jung was right about the existence and power of universal archetypes that affect the unconscious mind of each of us. Second, that the Androgyne is one of these. Third, that (for whatever reason) the Androgyne archetype is principally responsible for the "all boy and then some" story of my own life.

Another equally Jungian way of looking at it is to see my inner "all boy yet also female" sexual identity as the working of another archetype, the Anima, which gives every male of the species a sort of "inner female" as an unconscious power center. Frankly, I see no real contradiction here. To my knowledge, Jung held that archetypal images that emerge symbolically into our awareness often overlap and can be explained with reference to more than one archetype.

Still, I favor the Androgyne explanation over the Anima because Jung apparently held that the Anima remains pretty much silent until the midpoint of a man's life span, when it will often come seriously into play for the first time. My assumption is that my life history of urolagnia and other displaced attempts to identify with girls and women goes back well before the usual point of Anima involvement.


But never mind. The overarching point is that archetypes (help) determine who and what we find erotic.

If I'm right about that, then the same principle applies to me with my unusual sexual history as to everyone who is in any of the more well-known categories: heterosexual, and loving it; gay; lesbian; bisexual; transsexual; transgendered; and so forth. We are all responsive to the power of certain archetypes as they assert themselves in various and sundry ways in our individual lives.

Now, Jung held that none of these archetypal powers is inherently bad. What's bad is for the powers to assert themselves in a one-sided way so that they don't balance each other off.

Admittedly, I cannot be sure about my own life history here. If the unusual symptoms and traits I've just described are Anima-driven, it's possible they come from what Jung called "inflation" of a particular archetype — in this case, the Anima — in an undesirable, destructive way.

But if they're Androgyne-driven, their manifestation may be quite healthful. My reasoning: the classic image of the androgynous "first man" as reflected in religious mysticism (see above) betokens a primordial completeness. This sort of image refers to a "time before" there were opposites in the world, including those of male and female, as well as light-dark, good-evil, etc.

As such, this sort of image actually stands for the Jungian ideal of Self-realization. The Self, according to Jung, is the master archetype of all, and it is realized by any particular one of us through a lengthy process of "individuation" by means of which the various forces of the psyche are gradually brought into a beneficent balance.

My inner Androgyne, accordingly, could be the ally of the Self.

And, to the extent that any archetype can be the Self's ally, when archetypal machinations lead one to be, say, gay, gayness can (for that person) be an essential aspect of Self-realization.

Jung called the Self archetype the image of God. If a gay, bisexual, or lesbian, etc., person achieves Self-realization through his or her particular sexual orientation, he or she need not feel that sexual orientation to be sinful.

Coming Out ... To Myself, Part 1

The theorist of the psyche Carl Jung discovered that, buried in the unconscious mind, we all have templates for images and symbols that crop up in fantasy, dream, and myth. These templates are the archetypes. We all have the same set of archetypes. They are energetic. After perhaps biding their time for years or decades, they can exert their powers in mysterious, numinous ways. They make us what we are, deep down, and they can change us as well.

In my recent Jungian Wholeness series, I've investigated Jung's map of the psyche. My investigations have led me to believe that Jung was right about the power of the archetypes. However, the books I have read and commented on have not made it their business to describe and discuss all the archetypes Jung identified. In the last day or so, I happened to run across one that I have been hitherto unaware of: the Androgyne.

And I have suddenly realized that this one is a powerful mover and shaker in my own life, and very likely has been as long all my life. Hence this post represents, for me, a sort of coming out ... if only to myself: I seem to be sort of inwardly androgynous.


The circumstances under which this realization comes to me has been roundabout. Yesterday I read an opinion piece by George Weigel in the Catholic Review, available online as Marriage, civility, persecution. "In the current election cycle," Weigel writes, there is "a full-court press to redefine marriage, and to compel others to accept that redefinition."

A measure in on the ballot in California, he says, that would repudiate (or uphold) the recent decision of the California Supreme Court to allow gay marriage. Weigel sees that controversy as part of a burgeoning tide of acceptance for gay marriage that threatens the Catholic view "that the sacramental love of man and woman, expressed conjugally, is an icon of the interior life of God."

I'm Catholic, and I'm not gay, but I have a problem with Weigel's sort of thinking. At the same time, I recognize that he and others who feel that way have a coherent argument to the effect that homosexuality and gay marriage are properly opposed by the Church.

Such thoughts lead me to wonder why, then, am I on the opposite side from Weigel and other religious conservatives. I imagine that here is an area where my Jungian orientation puts me in direct conflict with religious traditionalists ... so, I ask myself, what did Jung actually say about homosexuality?


After Googling "Jung homosexuality" and looking at a great many of the hits I got, I came to the conclusion that the answer is, "Not much."

I found that there are surprisingly few pointers to actual writings by Jung about homosexuality in the online "literature." I did find many references to a book by Robert H. Hopcke called Jung, Jungians & Homosexuality, but so many of these seemed to disagree with Hopcke that I'll set them aside for now.

Other than those, I found slim pickings. There are some references that suggest that male homosexuals are under the sway of the Anima — the archetype representing "the inner feminine side of a man," according to this glossary. But others said the archetype of the Androgyne may be the one that is dominant, instead, in homosexuals.


An androgyne, or hermaphrodite, has the sex organs of both sexes. That's the literal meaning. A small number of humans are born that way, and usually they are subjected to surgery to eliminate their androgyny.

I'm not physically androgynous. I'm inwardly androgynous ... which seems to mean that an archetype that expresses itself in dream images, religious art, etc., as an androgyne or hermaphrodite is somehow dominant within me. This would seem to be Jung's Androgyne archetype at work.

Yet I'm heterosexual. I'm not gay, not even bisexual. It is women, and only women, that turn me on.

At the same time, I have always felt a stronger kinship with women than men. However, this does not mean that I want to be a woman, or am interested in being transgendered. Nor do I have the prettified outward appearance of, say, someone like David Bowie. As I say, this is something I experience inwardly and have never been able to put a name to until now.


And now for the stuff that take real guts for me to say right out loud ... so I say it real fast and get it over with.

A 61-year-old man, I've never successfully had coitus with a woman (much less with another man, an act I've never been inclined to). I'm unmarried and my romantic involvements with women — there have been only a few — have never culminated in successful intercourse.

I have an abnormal interest in women's "plumbing" — always have. "A tendency to derive sexual pleasure from the sight or thought of urination," is how the dictionary defines urolagnia, or urophilia. I've had that going on in me since at least when I was a teen.

(I remember my high-school graduation — from an all-boys prep school — was held at a church away from the campus. I arrived there with my parents and my girlfriend Lynn in tow. Lynn tried unsuccessfully to find a bathroom before the ceremony. Afterward, Lynn and I drove off in one car, my parents in another. Lynn said she'd have to stop at a gas station, so I pulled up by the restrooms of one while she went in. There was a small frosted-glass window in the wall, and I noticed that I could watch Lynn's blurry figure as she dropped out of view (sitting on the toilet) then popped back up after a minute or so. I found it gave me an erection to imagine her activities.)

I feel I also have an unnatural interest in the clitoris — want to know exactly what it looks like, how it is formed, how it reacts to sexual arousal and stimulation, etc. (Did you know that the visible clitoris is just the tip of the iceberg? The rest of it, equivalent to the shaft of a man's penis, is hidden.)

Add to that what perhaps may seem a more "normal" male interest in the erectile capacity of a woman's nipples, and you have a formula for being intensely interested in how a woman's body works sexually. So I'll just say it: it is as if I have a "woman's body" inside my male body, trying to assert itself.

It is as if I were indeed one of those who are born with both sets of organs, and my female organs were removed at birth ... but, psychologically, my "female half" wasn't.

It is as if I were a candidate for a sex-change operation, but if I had one, I would be a lesbian! (But I would really miss my penis, to which I am irrevocably attached!)