Dark Vanilla: The philosophy of Sexistentialism.

by Alexandros on November 28, 2007

The idea behind Dark Vanilla was born while I was chatting online with Alejandra Guerrero, aka Corporate Vampire, about the absence of a name for a group of people who don’t clearly belong to any of the traditional groups in the realm of sexuality.

Communities around the extremes (bdsm etc.) are easy to find but whenever I browse most of these communities I just don’t feel much affinity to them. Sometimes they are vulgar, other times they are kitsch, or in some cases they are just plain sick.

On the other hand you have boring conventionalism around sexuality (what is broadly called “Vanilla sex”) hitting you in the face everyday. Men should be sweet, accommodating, kind, egalitarian….in other words, boring and castrated. That is because we are reacting to an age where men were all spine and no heart into thinking that we should swing to the opposite: men with all heart but no spine. Which is a recipe for boredom and a yearning for some biker, rockstar or any type of “bad boy” who will make a woman feel alive again! Women had to overcome their own obstacles, being seen as subordinate to men for centuries, while any woman who dared to express her healthy dark side was immediately labeled as a “slut”, “whore” and so on.

The truth of the matter, I believe, lies somewhere in the middle. People have a light and a dark side. Some people have more of the one and less of the other, but one thing seems certain: a healthy and exciting sexual life requires an expression of both. When it comes to the vast majority we are taught to repress the dark side and express only our light side. Even though an amount of repression and difficulty in life is necessary for the healthy development of our personality, a consistent rejection of certain parts of ourselves eventually has harmful effects. A boring sex life is not a healthy one and it occurs exactly because of a failure to cultivate and express both our light and our dark sides. Of course, the worst perversions occur when a complete expression of one’s sexuality is prohibited…an unhealthy predicament which has had considerable support in the past due to an inaccurate understanding of human nature and its needs.

The history of the dark side of sexuality is long. Sigmund Freud was the first modern scientist to explore the dark side of sexuality, and shed light to its relation to aggression and of course the unconscious. But going back further you always find references to a dark side in sexuality. For instance, the mythical Maenads of ancient Greece are a good example. East and West, you will find times, people and places where both sides of sexuality were explored and deemed sacred. The Kama Sutra in India and the whole philosophy of Tantra; the many Chinese texts on sexual techniques and their contribution to a better life (see for example “The Tao of Love and Sex”) all point to the obvious. It is what you do with your sexuality that determines whether it will harm or benefit your growth. There is no point denying it or trying to uproot it. One should cultivate it with care and make it part of the garden of one’s soul.

There are people who express darkness in their sexuality because their soul has no light. A soul without light ultimately ends up in unhealthy behaviors that do not enrich life. But there are those whose souls are filled with so much light that there bound to be shadows…only those belong to the realm of Dark Vanilla.

They enjoy cultivating the erotic as an art…true artists of desire. They aren’t ashamed of enjoying earthly delights nor afraid to reach out for heavenly love. Love so deep where borders between us start to fade away. It’s a realm for women who want to be loved gently and fucked hard (and vice versa)…and men who know how to do that.

It’s a realm for people who give expression to both their light and dark sides and enjoy the full range of sexual diversity, without being perverts or prudes. In short, sane people with an edge; having enough madness to dare be themselves.

The name of its philosophy should be called Sexistentialism. A succinct definition would be that a sexistentialist is an existentialist in which love and sexuality has replaced nihilism and gloom [1]. Haven’t you noticed how the founders of existentialism had problems with their love lives? Nietzsche might have been a virgin for all we know (let alone his misogynism, which is, however, subtler than most people think) and Kierkegaard pushed away perhaps the only love of his life.

The meaning of a philosopher is “the lover of wisdom”. If you wanted to learn how to love women you would go to those that don’t just love them but are loved back. For wisdom is like a woman. She does not give herself to you simply because you want her. That is something that mere professors of philosophy don’t understand. The difference between professors of philosophy and real philosophers is the difference between lovers who are never loved and lovers who are. A philosopher is someone who not only loves wisdom but wisdom loves him back. Which also explains why professors of philosophy engage in so much intellectual masturbation. In fact, the silence of philosophers throughout history on the topic of masturbation only heightens our suspicion…

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Notes:

[1] And no, I am not implying the way to overcome nihilism and gloom is to freely abandon yourself in bouts of senseless hedonism. What I am saying is that an existence in which love and sexuality are missing tends to become gloomy and nihilistic.

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Philosophy is not boring!

by Alexandros on February 23, 2007

Philosophy is not boring. It talks about the most important issues in life – and it doesn’t tell you which those are. It is not an order, it is a question. You are supposed to find the answer.

Philosophers who are boring are failing in life. A boring life cannot be a good one. “So what if a philosopher is boring? He may still be a good philosopher.” Yes – only if you subtract one of the main aims of philosophy: Living the good life. That contemporary philosophy is filled with boring professors of philosophy only accentuates Thoreau’s remark:

There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not
kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a noble race of men. (from Walden)

Someone who has been a philosopher for years should be discernibly different in the things that matter from most people. He has supposedly made it his life’s task to live the good life. If he isn’t living better than most who haven’t set such a conscious goal for themselves, he is evidently not a good philosopher. Philosophy is not just another profession. It is a calling. You cannot be a philosopher from 9 to 5 and be a layman at night. Being a philosopher means being an example of your own philosophy. Walking the talk and talking the walk.
Of course, being a philosopher is a process, as most things are. If someone has just created the ideal to which he wants to strive, it is unfair to expect that he’s going to match it overnight. Because the ideals of philosophy entail the whole way of life. Changing your whole way of life overnight is highly improbable if not completely impossible. But being only a shadow of the ideal you still believe yet have sketched 20 years ago, should raise doubts about your sincerity or your strength of will. Doubts that you should at least have personally raised and examined. That is why philosophies have been called confessions. They are the sublimated confessions of personal struggles to live out ideals; the triumphs and tragedies of human actualization.

To restrict yourself to offering a little nugget of truth (which seems to be the rule among philosophers these days) while living in a fortress of falsehood can hardly be called noble. Will noble remain an honorific term for people who don’t deserve it? Why don’t people aspire to greatness anymore? And why should greatness always be equated with arrogance and conceitedness? Isn’t it time to believe that there is something more than a nihilistic humility? Have philosophers forgotten Kant’s motto? Sapere Aude damn it!

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Wisdom and Hydrodynamics

by Alexandros on February 7, 2007

The good life is a correct balance between know-that and know-how. Knowing in an intellectual way is simply not enough for a full understanding and embodiment of wisdom. In fact, a good definition of wisdom is embodied knowledge. Or, in vernacular: knowledge in action. On the other hand, wise action is impossible with ignorance in theory.
That doesn’t mean that a man cannot swim in life unless he knows the laws of hydrodynamics. But someone proficient in hydrodynamics can do things no Olympic swimmer ever could. That however, is irrelevant when it comes to the good life, broadly conceived. When it comes to that, it is more important to know how to swim well than to know hydrodynamics. The problem we have today is that people know hydrodynamics and have forgotten how to swim – if they had ever learnt to do so.
And you can’t swim in life unless you get in the water. Contemporary philosophers are professors of hydrodynamics. That is why they cannot teach anybody how to swim well in the ocean of life. Poor students of philosophy, they enroll in philosophy hoping they will learn to swim and they are made to believe that hydrodynamics is all one needs to know. That is why contemporary philosophers can even seem incompetent when it comes to everyday life, whereas they should have been its graceful artists.
“Critics are to painters what ornithologists are to birds” Birds fly, painters paint. Critics criticize and ornithologists analyse and observe. Contemporary philosophy is in the same predicament. Instead of living life, they analyse and observe it. They cannot dance like the philosophers of the past. While true philosophy is learning how to fly, contemporary philosophy merely analyses what flight is.

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