Everything is sexual.

Making love is the ultimate metaphor. But that’s not really the whole story. Everything is sexual because we, the perceivers of it, are sexual, and can’t help it, from the celibate in the desert to the maimed veteran to the impotent husband or wife. And because we perceive things in accordance with our nature, we cannot help but impute to them the characteristics of nature – that all our species possesses. I’m not saying that we impute our personalities (what is utterly unique about each individual) – I think objectivity is possible in that regard – we can look around ourselves, if we’re clever, but we cannot help but impute our nature (what is absolutely shared by each individual) to the things we think about in the world. I’m not saying, with the coffee shop philosophers “you see the world as you are”, I’m saying “we all see the world in accordance with what we all are”. Is everything really sexual? I don’t know and, practically speaking, it doesn’t matter. The sophomores in any given college town like asking trick questions, like “is there anything in an apple that makes it inherently red” and, if you answer “yes, of course”, they tell you that you don’t understand science, perception, and subjectivity. No, they’re missing the point – there is something, objectively, in the apple that reflects light in just the right way that we see red – it’s not random, it’s objectively different than an orange or banana. The point is that such questions presume you can think outside of your nature, which includes the ability to see and, unless afflicted with color blindness, to see color. Sure, the sophomores are observing that the colorblind person doesn’t see color, so they say it’s subjective – nothing brilliant there – but they have failed to realize that the colorblind person doesn’t change the apple in any way – it is still pigmented exactly as it was, so yeah, there’s still something in the apple that makes it red. My inability to see the red, doesn’t change that. That’s basic Artistotelian logic: x=x, the law of identity – a thing is what it is, regardless of whether I know about it, have seen it, etc. Erroneously, despite it still being taught in those universities, but still usefully, developmental psychologists say that one sign of cognitive development is transcending the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ phenomenon – the idea that toddlers supposedly have, that because they haven’t seen a thing, or haven’t seen it in a certain way, it doesn’t exist or isn’t that way. They’re right that that failure, common to sophomores and coffee house philosophers, isn’t very sophisticated. They’re simply incorrect that toddlers can’t imagine what they can’t see – lots of good tests show the stuff in your Ed Psych textbooks is crap, as it always was. The seniors would prefer I say “lots of good tests *now* show”, but that’s the same mistake – just because you didn’t know a thing was true 10 years ago, doesn’t mean it wasn’t true all along. So I’m not going to pander to the proclamations from the ivory towers as though it was or is ever acceptable to talk that way (“We know the following:”) with insufficient and non-comprehensive evidence. Lots of mothers could have told them that what financial aid put in their heads was stupid and wrong, but they only considered objective what their teachers told them, and of course that was always dumbass thinking, whether right or wrong. So yeah, it was dumbass thinking whether or not they knew it, and the apple is red whether or not you can see it at all, let alone see the red. Oh, and everything’s sexual, at least as far as we know.