Ecosexuality

[7Wannabe5]

Reed said that ecosexuality is different from other social movements in that it focuses on personal behavior and pleasure rather than protests or politics. She said that some people within the environmental movement have kept their distance from it for this reason. But ecosexual activists interviewed for this story all insist they have a serious goal at heart. As Morgan said, thinking about the earth as a lover is the first step toward taking the environmental crisis seriously. "If you piss off your mother, she's probably going to forgive you. If you treat your lover badly, she's going to break up with you."

http://www.vice.com/read/ecosexuals-bel ... ld-save-it

[Ego]

This is a natural result of a population that has been trained by consumerism to anthropomorphize everything.

My house shows the world my value as a human being. My decor is the physical manifestation of my inner life. My car exhibits my phallus. My dog has all of the subtle emotional characteristics of a child. I can have intercourse with earth.

We've been trained to jumble the line between human and object, between ourselves and things, so that we can then buy ourselves rather than be ourselves. I would expect to see a cult from it.

There are a hundred reasons why this is bad. A partner can sacrifice herself for me. It is natural for a partner to grow old and experience decline. I would expect a give-and-take from my partner. A partner can feels pleasure and pain in way that is similar to how I feel it. A partner cares what happens.

Of course, the problem goes the other way as well. When you break down the barriers between human and thing, it becomes easier to see things as human. It also becomes easier to see humans as things.

[Dragline]

+1 to Ego.

[Tyler9000]

Any bets on the first confirmed ESTD?

[jacob]

This is a natural result of a population that has been trained by consumerism to anthropomorphize everything.

Consumerism trains for that?! Anthropomorphizing goes much earlier than that. Human forms, behavior, relations, frameworks, etc. just make for a very natural/first choice model for understanding things. It's easy to believe that everything else is just like oneself. A kind of early-development empathy; certainly appears before Cartesian analysis. E.g. Christianity is effectively anthropomorphized religion lifting the framework of a feudal system/city-state with an all powerful king at the top and using it to explain the universe as a whole.

I'd rather say that anthropomorphization would be something I'd expect to one of the first things most humans would come up with if they had to explain or relate to the universe. If you dump said humans into nature (w/o cities), I'd expect animism to appear naturally as well. Humans who don't live in cities tend to have sun gods, moon gods, weather gods, bear gods, ... also in the shape of humans or animals. These are fairly trivial/obvious ideas.

Also related but at a deeper level: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology) ... also https://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Intel ... 0415254019 (mapping structures in reality to [primitive] structures in the brain)

In any case, they also happen to be extremely powerful ideas. It's clear that our scientific understanding of the world-systems are in dire need of something value-based to go along with it that is also understandable by twelve-year olds (which is sort of where the common denominator is for people as a whole when it comes to technical matters). I don't think tree-hugging or making out with moss is it, but something needs to happen, because consumerism, being the dominant world-religion, and the older world-religions aren't compatible with a world that has 7 billion people in it trying to live firstworld lives.

[Ego]

This is a natural result of a population that has been trained by consumerism to anthropomorphize everything.

Consumerism trains for that?! Anthropomorphizing goes much earlier than that.

Oh, I agree. Every infant has that period when they realize that they are a distinct entity from mom. It causes the baby a great deal of anxiety so they are given a transitional-object to help them quell the anxiety. A doll. A blanket. A thing. This thing fills in to provide some of the comfort that mom provided.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_o ... psychology

Consumerism co-opts this very early programming. It provides a never ending stream of transitional objects. Most product advertising attempts to trigger the anxiety then shows the watcher how the product will quell it. This tree hugging is a more blatant form of that using Mother Nature.

[7Wannabe5]

jacob said: I'd rather say that anthropomorphization would be something I'd expect to one of the first things most humans would come up with if they had to explain or relate to the universe.

Right. For instance, my son anthropomorphized the entire collection of matchbox cars he inherited from an uncle before he could even speak very well. It was clear that they all had faces and names assigned in baby-babble, because he would look them in the eyes (headlights) to talk to them, and identify the larger version with the same name when he spotted them from his car seat. I would think that a human was suffering from a severe form of autism if they were so lacking in imagination that they didn't anthropomorphize quite readily. Of course, a rational adult should also develop the ability to move fluidly from the realm of metaphor, imagination and poetic thought into the realm of more rigid categorization and scrutinizing evaluation of likely qualities and characteristics.

One of my responses to the article and exhibit I linked above was that I was simply amused by artists being artists. Another response I had was that I wondered where a person who may or may not have enjoyed the experience of having sex sandwiched between a human and a tree, in a lake or during a thunderstorm would fall on the scale of eco-sexuality? What if you just like being fed fresh strawberries or walking through falling snow to a sauna in the nude? What if you just tend towards finding the battery-powered plastic crap they sell in sex shops laughable and pathetic?

The final thought I had was that it was interesting how this perspective contrasts with the perspective of the late 19th century Naturalism movement in literature.

Other characteristics of literary naturalism include: detachment, in which the author maintains an impersonal tone and disinterested point of view; determinism, the opposite of free will, in which a character's fate has been decided, even predetermined, by impersonal forces of nature beyond human control; and a sense that the universe itself is indifferent to human life.

jacob said: In any case, they also happen to be extremely powerful ideas. It's clear that our scientific understanding of the world-systems are in dire need of something value-based to go along with it that is also understandable by twelve-year olds (which is sort of where the common denominator is for people as a whole when it comes to technical matters). I don't think tree-hugging or making out with moss is it, but something needs to happen, because consumerism, being the dominant world-religion, and the older world-religions aren't compatible with a world that has 7 billion people in it trying to live firstworld lives

Right. So, the question becomes what are the likely consequences of imagining that nature is like a mother, a lover, a gift from paternal God to human children, or something wholly alien and indifferent?

[Tyler9000]

Another response I had was that I wondered where a person who may or may not have enjoyed the experience of having sex sandwiched between a human and a tree, in a lake or during a thunderstorm would fall on the scale of eco-sexuality? What if you just like being fed fresh strawberries or walking through falling snow to a sauna in the nude?

Hey -- different strokes for different folks. I just find it silly that the same thing once referred to as a simple preference or fetish now qualifies as a "sexual orientation". I suspect truly confusing an inanimate object with a human being is not the problem. It's more a statement on a culture where everything is framed in terms of identity politics.

[Dragline]

jacob said: I'd rather say that anthropomorphization would be something I'd expect to one of the first things most humans would come up with if they had to explain or relate to the universe.

Right. For instance, my son anthropomorphized the entire collection of matchbox cars he inherited from an uncle before he could even speak very well. It was clear that they all had faces and names assigned in baby-babble, because he would look them in the eyes (headlights) to talk to them, and identify the larger version with the same name when he spotted them from his car seat. I would think that a human was suffering from a severe form of autism if they were so lacking in imagination that they didn't anthropomorphize quite readily. Of course, a rational adult should also develop the ability to move fluidly from the realm of metaphor, imagination and poetic thought into the realm of more rigid categorization and scrutinizing evaluation of likely qualities and characteristics.

Yes, the "theory of mind" is an innate ability or feature that every normal human possesses. Any object that can move is assigned agency virtually automatically. There are famous experiments with infants and very small children where the subjects attribute agency even to colored shapes that moved.

From an evolutionary perspective this makes a lot of sense, because anything that moves might be a threat and/or edible meat. But on the human level, it also leads to abstract thought about long-term motives, intentions and desires (the foundations of "EQ"), and story-telling.

[BRUTE]

Hey -- different strokes for different folks. I just find it silly that the same thing once referred to as a simple preference or fetish now qualifies as a "sexual orientation". I suspect truly confusing an inanimate object with a human being is not the problem. It's more a statement on a culture where everything is framed in terms of identity politics.

maybe it's just that the only allowed fetishes were women-fetish for men, and man-fetish for women. now that everything's up for grabs, humans play around with it, and since they are by their nature adaptable and malleable, this is what happens.

it seems "sexual orientation" has just completely lost its meaning through this, at least if distinguished from fetish.

[pukingRainbows]

Topical!
https://youtu.be/RkRog16ODY4

[enigmaT120]

Maybe I read too much Greek mythology (including Gaea), but for the past dozen years when I see a beautiful scene or hills shaped just so (Grande Tetons? yeah I know there are alternative translations) or the Paps of Erin or a sweet curve of waist to hip, I wish I were a god so that I could make love with the earth.

But I guess that's not where the folks in 7wb5's link are coming from.