Sidney McGill - HEALTHY SEX 101MANY JAMAICAN women have fantasies of making love to a masculine yet sensitive man who is skilled at lovemaking and respects her like no other. For the man, his most cherished fantasy is to make love to two women in bed.
Everyone has a lovemap etched deeply in the brain. It is your belief system on sexual preferences that details your idealised lover and the type of sexual activity you wish to engage, if there were no moral or cultural boundaries.
Your lovemap is developed during childhood and is the inventory of your sexual fantasies listed in the order of good, better, best. It is your personal sexual ID.
"[We] develop highly-personalised lovemaps with an extensive range of variation from one person to another," says John Money in Gay, Straight and In-Between.
In other species, courting and mating are uniformed and typical for the species. A lovemap is rated normal if it fits into what is considered ideological and acceptable by society. The ideological norm may not, however, be the statistical norm. Statistical norms vary from country to country, from community to community and from one generation to
another. Your lovemap, like everything else in nature, is not perfect. It may be incompletely formed and dormant, too dominant or
paraphilic.
Paraphilias are kinky or bizarre sex. It is a condition occurring in men and women who are compulsively responsive to being sexually aroused to the point of intense orgasm by a stimulus that is not considered acceptable. The stimuli could range from a woman's underwear to necrophilia (sexual attraction toward a warm corpse). Many persons with paraphilic lovemaps do not act on them. Money sees paraphilia as a developmental stage in which 'lust is rescued from extinction and preserved in the lovemap by the subterfuge of making it the antithesis of love'. In other words, the lovemap incorporates lust that is epic, animal, carnal, below the belt, pornographic and prohibited in public: a lust subverted.
Love, which is more acceptable, is seen as pure, clean and wholesome. Subverted lust is short-term exploitation and promiscuity while love is long-term commitment and fidelity. Money further states 'the difference between the paraphilic and nonparaphilic lovemap lies in the degree of developmental traumatisation to which it has been subjected by reason of the antithesis between love and lust, saint and sinner, Madonna and the whore'.
A boy who is humiliated and punished because he struts around the house with an erect penis is liable to develop a lovemap of paraphilic exhibitionism. As a society we do not want our children to be lustfully normal, so many parents neglect their children's sexual learning or project their own sexual anxieties on them. If children are discovered engaging their lust in normal sexual rehearsal play or masturbation, they are usually the victims of humiliation.
Parents who inappropriately deal with the discovery of their child's sexual activity run the risk of destroying the 'incorporation of lust into the normal development of the lovemap'. In the formation of paraphilia, the expression of lust is diverted from its normal route. The moral law, 'thou shalt not' does not liberate on its own but its combination with 'I love you' can deal appropriately with the innocence and desire of your child, incorporating a healthy dose of lust and love in his lovemap.
Dr. Sidney McGill is a Marriage and Family Therapist and Executive Director of the Family Counselling Centre of Jamaica, St. Ann.
