AMSC shame / masturbatory shame

[Fragment]

I was reading an article from an anti-c person responding to Frans Gieles' article "I didn't know how to deal with it".

The article discusses some of the negative reactions of minors towards AMSC after the fact and Gieles posits that the negative interpretations after the fact are sociogenic and iatrogenic rather than inherent harms in the sexual contact itself. Social norms regarding sex and the attitudes of therapists are responsible from a positive or neutral parsing of an event to change into a negative parsing of that event. This is a common attitude in the pro-c community.

The response article that I read quite reasonable claimed Occam's Razor should be applied and that "maybe young people's negative responses should be taken at face value". Maybe young people saying, in retrospect, that a sexual experience with an adult was negative is because, well, it was negative. This is a fairly compelling argument. There is no need to twist yourself into knots to explain a negative reaction in terms of erotophobia if the experience was actually negative.

Now, perhaps to someone that grew up in a sexually progressive environment the simple argument may sound good enough. If the only negative reactions you've had to sex was in response to coercive sex, then the idea that a negative reaction is indicative of abuse is persuasive.

However, I believe that this explanation fails to account for something that I, and many others raised in conservative Christian households have experienced. Masturbatory shame. I first masturbated in grade 6 and at first I didn't realize that it was something prohibited by my faith. I was confused and uncertain, but I enjoyed it. At around 13 through my church I came to learn that what I had been doing was sinful. I reconceptualized my experiences as bad and something that I should stop. The term "self-abuse" really does encapsulate what I felt I was doing to myself at that time. I would try my best to stop masturbating, sometimes feeling proud of myself for going two weeks without touching myself, but inevitably I relapsed.

Now what would Occam's Razor say about my experiences with masturbation? Surely it would say that I was feeling negative about masturbation because masturbation, in fact, was a negative experience. There is no need to twist yourself into knots to explain the negative reaction in terms of erotophobia. Of course, most people would say that's ridiculous. My attitudes and feelings towards masturbation were informed by the sex-negative religious culture that I'd grown up in but it was those attitudes that were harmful, not masturbation itself.

The same process repeated itself again when I was 17, came out as gay and had my first relationship with another guy my age. He and I engaged in sexual activity that for the first few months had me in tears every time we did it. Yet I consented. He was my age. There were no clear power differentials. Well that's actually a lie now that I think of it. He had a car and a part-time job and I didn't, so even though our birthdays were only a few months apart I was more reliant on him than he was on me. Regardless, by the social standards of today there was nothing inherently harmful in the dynamics of our relationship. Yet it was traumatic and if I'd stayed religious, it probably would've stayed traumatic.

So based on my lived experience, I do think that how we experience sex can be heavily influenced by social norms. Non-problematic sexual activity can be problematized by the community that we're a part of. I definitely think that some of the negative attitudes minors have towards past AMSC are as a result of sociogenic and iatrogenic harm. Nothing else explains my feelings towards masturbation or my early sexual experiences. It would be almost impossible to tease out how much harm is sociogenic and how much is inherent, though. I think pro-c people that try to put it all on secondary harm are reaching a little too far. But similarly anti-c people tend to ignore the sociogenic factors.

For me, the simple fact is that people who are not overtly abusive are treated the same as rapists with similarly harsh punitive measures taken against them. When the harm we are looking at, at least in some cases, is equivalent to masturbatory guilt. Looking at the negative feelings associated with AMSC ignores the fact that a lot of minors have negative sexual experiences, even with other minors. Yet only sex-negative people, usually of a religious variety, try to regulate sex between minors. If AMSC was an accepted social practice how much guilt and shame would disappear? How much would it be like having a masturbation habit and walking out of a Christian faith into atheism?

[Jim Burton]

https://wiki.yesmap.net/wiki/Masturbation

https://www.ipce.info/library_3/files/o ... _frame.htm