Originally Published 8/31/11
Some years ago science confirmed the existence of human pheromones, chemical messengers carrying the current state of life on a scent so subtle it is rarely if ever recognized by the waking mind for what it is. Of course the cologne industry jumped on this new knowledge, the retailers and singles bars incorporated it into their offerings, it ran wild for a bit and then faded into general knowledge. But one place I've never heard of it being considered was in how the subject effects the children who are equally exposed to these messengers (yes, mommies and daddies produce them just like everyone else) in the development of their personality.
Let’s face it, men are pretty much only horny once a year, but it lasts give or take 351 days leaving us two weeks off for sick leave. But with women this isn’t the case, their libido cycles with the menses, which means their pheromone output will cycle in kind. To the children the male pheromones will be relatively stable, in reality changing mostly in response to the female and therefore to the child part and parcel of the changes in the mommy types. But it seems very likely they would pick up on the variations produced, even though for them just like for the grown ups it isn’t something they’d ever recognize at a conscious level. It dawns on me that a great deal of personality development may well be biased at very deep levels by what the child learns to associate to these hidden chemical messengers, the links formed between the levels, the presence (or absence) of any given pheromone and the changes in the parent’s attitudes of the moment.
Take for an example a young mother who is a good woman in a good relationship. Her libido takes an upswing, she's very interested indeed, and she has a complete and well justified faith that when her man comes to her she's going to (eventually) sleep with a smile on her face. What will the child see? Happy? Playful? A bit of anticipation? Maybe a bit wistful faraway dreamy? What might that child come to associate to those times? Not likely much of a negative nature, in a worst case a bit of impatience.
But what of the child whose mother is conflicted on the subject? What of the child whose mother is disillusioned with sex, someone for whom the entire subject is just a discomfort trying her patience? What of the child whose mother has been taught or migrated into thinking of her libido as a tool, or worse a weapon, to use on the men in her world? What will that child see, what associations will be formed to the way the mother's (and father's!) attitude and tension level changes every couple of weeks regardless of surface behavior?
What of the child for whose parents the entire subject of sex or sexuality has been contaminated to the point of total inversion, the rape victim attempting to live a normal life, the victim of some sexual abuse in their own childhood? What of the pheromone signals they produce, and the compensations their personality must make to the subject? What might be the extremes of such imprinting? I'm thinking that bottom line the extremes might be extreme indeed, and tend to become self fulfilling prophecies in the lives of the children as they mature. Might it be possible to help protect those children using an artificial overlay of such pheromones to protect the associations they'll be forming? Something borrowed from the concoctions the singles bars were using, mixed and diluted to some neutral value to dilute and mask the signals from the parents?
I'm tossing this thought out into the blog-o-sphere hoping there will be those who will share their thoughts and observations on the subject.
It sounds like you're on to something. I have been thinking for some years now that part of the difficulty in evoking sexual healthiness is that we just don't TALK about it, normally. In many prudish families, it just doesn't get talked about; but in many less prudish ones, any discussion involves many more winks, nods, and puns than simple declarative statements and honest questions. I know of very few families where discussions of sex and sexuality have been truly open, informative and healing. (I do know of some wonderful exceptions. A nudist couple I only met online once told how, in response to questions and requests by their teenage daughter, they once allowed her to observe them doing sex. I suppose that sort of thing could be overdone, but I cannot imagine that allowing her to watch one such event would do anything but help her grow into a sexually confident woman.)
ReplyDeleteHere are some possible scenarios:
Your "good woman" might well have been conditioned against any discussion of sexuality with children; so while the children may well respond subconsciously to her changing pheromones, her silence may result in mixed messages--unless she's free enough to begin discussions with them in an honest, age-appropriate way. But they're the lucky ones if all they get is relative silence.
A woman who's been raped or abused in a previous marriage or relationship, unless she's experienced considerable soul-healing, can't help but send out verbal and pheromonal messages that are conflicted at best and uniformly negative at worst--a setup for the sort of generational soul-maladies we all know about, unless the child wakes up on his/her own and does the hard work needed for self-healing.
And there are any number of scenarios we could imagine, probably as many as our own acquaintances.
I'm just "thinking off the top of my head" now, but the story I'm currently writing is all about what a culture or subculture might look like if it were truly open about sex, while affirming the Biblical (as opposed to Christian-cultural) guidelines...
Actually my thought has more to do with the hidden associations than those which are available to the conscious mind. The damage done by the repressive social conventions of silence and bigotries are not hidden things, the mind can easily grapple with the idea "the parents never spoke of it" or "the preacher says it's sinful." In such cases there is ignorance and or bigotry, but the mind has all the facts needed to connect cause and effect, the mind has all the facts needed to challenge those and say "I am now an adult and I disagree with living in that manner. Their silence did me harm, I will speak openly and rationally about the subject. That bigotry is not consistent with a rational view of God, I'm not required to let religion speak for God in the matters of my own heart." Where that sort of thing is a difficult challenge it is by far the easier challenge than someone trying to fathom the reasons behind the why and what of the things they find emotionally satisfying in a sexual situation.
ReplyDeleteWhat I am speaking would be a thing that would influence attitude in such a manner the root source cause was not available to the conscious mind, a deep association trigger closer to brain washing than parenting style. It would be more likely to deform sexuality than inhibit sexuality across the board. You know, the otherwise emotionally balanced man or woman who in a sexual setting becomes the masochist, or the sadist… those traits a programmed response to the hidden stimulus of the pheromones in that setting which recall an emotional template learned from the parents behaviors when such pheromones were present. You know, speaking as the inner child of that person now grown and in a sexual situation: every time that smell was around mommy hurts daddy's feelings and daddy hurts mommy's bottom, hurting feelings and bottoms must be part of this thing, that's how mommy and daddy behaved... net result being pain of one form or another is linked and learned as part of the arousal/satisfaction mechanisms. The actual trigger for the deformation isn't that the situation is sexual, the trigger is the (never really perceived by the conscious mind) pheromone levels associated with sexual desire or activity setting an event specific emotional template. That's a way simplified example of course, but in the ballpark of what some folks may be dealing with. Such a programming as that would be much, much harder to challenge and correct because the conscious mind has no memory, no perceived event to work from.
*nods* Yes, I see. And it's usually the unconscious patterns that most dominate our lives...
ReplyDelete