I’ve got a lot of practice at examining my fantasies, my compulsions, my behaviors in detail. I’m almost theologically oriented to believe that every element of, not just my, but all of our preferences, desires, behaviors are incredibly revealing. I was called for jury duty recently, and as I sat in the voir dire, a defense attorney asked me, as an exploratory question, do you believe that when people do things, they do them for a reason, or do you believe that sometimes people just do things for no reason? I looked at him like he had two heads. I genuinely didn’t understand the question. Why would someone do something if they didn’t have a reason? What could that even mean? If you believe that that was something that was possible, then what’s your explanation of causality? How do you understand how it is that a muscle moves, that a body moves, that an action transpires? Do you believe it is random or caused from without? If so, how does that work? Is it the stars? Is it fate? Is it God?
To me the question makes no sense, and so for this reason, I think every element of my behavior, sexual or otherwise, contains potentially useful, valuable, interesting information.
Back in the day, I subjected my massage parlor habits and my dominance to all sorts of analysis in this vein. I came to understand that my practice of dominance is a defense against abandonment and against shame. That in commercial massage parlors, I used money and power to accomplish some of the same goals that my dominance allowed me to accomplish in real life, interpersonal relationships. Lately though, my pornographic habits have been raising all sorts of challenging and interesting new questions for me. Ones that I notice myself actually actively avoiding to a certain extent. I think I find them a little disturbing or maybe shameful. In a subsequent post, I aspire to take on this question.