Eros, Thanatos and Chastity
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| Description | When it comes to wearing a chastity device, there are numerous articles and blog posts talking about why people might be interested in exploring this kink or how to ensure comfort in the device. However, are there other benefits that aren’t highlighted as often that are worth considering outside of the bedroom - or the cage? Two of the strongest driving energies, as proposed by Sabrina Spielrein in her “Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being†which was then expanded upon by Freud, were the Death and Pleasure drives. Death or Thanatos is the drive towards chaotic and destructive energies - the feeling of wanting a fight, of wanting to jump out of an aeroplane, of wanting to walk into traffic. The opposing force is the Pleasure or Eros Drive which leads towards our survival drives including creation and propagation. It is the belief of the author that we’ve all experienced key moments of both these drives, almost to the point of being overwhelmed - and on some occasions the drives colliding together in an intense culmination of energies (as argued by the desire of people to copulate during periods or just after periods where death feels close such as the baby boom after World War II). This would make sense as the drives are counterbalancing forces but their existence is reliant on the other. There is no life without death, there is no joy without sorrow, there is no pleasure without pain. So how does this fit into our actual day-to-day lives and more crucially, how does this relate to chastity and the benefits of it? If we take the concept that the two drives - Eros and Thanatos - steer all our actions and decisions, then what happens if we sublimate some of these drives or redirect their energies? We don’t always have to consider the Death drive as negative - the chaotic energy can lead people to dark places like abuse of substances or to self-harming behaviours - but in other areas of life, death is necessary. In Tarot, the Death card seems the most intimidating if one pulls it during a reading but it actually symbolises the moment of change. A transition. One door closing and a window opening. When we reconsider endings as a death, we realise how regularly we are surrounded by death, which works to remove the stigma of it. The end of a project at work is the death of that energy. The end of a movie also signifies the end of our active engagement in that piece of work. The end of the commute home is the death of the workday and the start of leisure time. Death is entirely natural but people tend to fear it because of the unknown. However - without the ending of things, we cannot change or progress and move forward. The uncertainty of what a new beginning holds can provoke enough fear in people to put them in stasis - never changing, never moving forward but stagnating. For some people this is not necessarily a negative as one cannot avoid every moment of change or creation in life - however it can mean that our Eros and Thanatos drives can create some tension. The drives are exactly as the name suggests - they keep forward momentum and being out of balance can create a conflict or feeling of unease within a person. Moving on to considering the Eros drive, it is relevant to remind that the Eros drive does not singularly relate to sexual desires or self-gratification. The Eros drive, as Easton on Geneseo defines it, is “the drive of life, love, creativity and sexuality, self-satisfaction and species preservation.†Powerful forces that work as the bottom line to many reasons why we get up out of bed in the morning. The chance to bring something into existence from nothingness in our workplaces, the love we have for our families, our communities, ourselves, the desire to enjoy and thrive in every moment we have. As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote; “Let us then, be up and doing, // with a heart for any fate; // still achieving, still pursuing.†As hopefully it has become apparent in the writing of this piece, the drives do not exist in isolation but form a cycle of development and change (or for any Disney fans out there, it’s the circle of life~) which we see mirrored in many major religions as well, providing how embedding in life our innate understanding of these ideas are of creation, life and death being intricate intertwined. Within Hinduism we have the Trimurti of Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the destroyer. In Christianity, Jesus Christ is born to die, in order to grant eternal life to all. Similarly in Islam, death is merely the continuation of life in another form whilst awaiting the Day of Resurrection. Pagans follow the cycle of the seasons and the Greeks created myths of Peresphone, daughter of Demeter who mourns her daughter during her months in the Underworld with snow and celebrates her return with the Spring. The cycle continues. These tenets are all well and good, but how does chastity tie to these ideas and returning to the original question of the article, what benefits can chastity provide? Taking the Eros drive again for a moment - the drive of self-satisfaction, love and species preservation - we consider this a driver behind biological desires for release and children. However as the 20th Century progressed, we have become much more selfish as a species and consumed with instant gratification in all aspects of life. We want the promotion at work immediately, never settling anywhere for too long, always seeking the latest trend or hottest club or the newest fitness regime. Our Eros drives therefore take on a chaotic energy, driving closer to our Thanatos destructive desires. How do we reconfigure those drives to create more balance and prevent those moments of feeling out-of-alignment in our own skin? Numerous other articles have been written about the need to slow down to rebalance - the surging interest in mindfulness and meditation that we have seen grow over the last decade or so alongside a focus on reconnecting with nature. Interestingly, this approach recalls the Romantic poets of the 1800s or as Coleridge says in “The Eolian Harpâ€, “Methinks, it should have been impossible // Not to love all things in a world so filledâ€. The perspective about chastity returns to a similar concept of slowing down to provide rebalance. When a person dons a chastity device, they are removing an ability to self-satisfy and therefore cannot give into base impulse. Yet we know that just because someone cannot satisfy a desire does not mean that the drive disappears. So what happens with that Eros energy if the ability to release is taken away? Based on the research that I have undertaken, it appears that those who wear chastity devices find that it provides a focus and clarity to other areas of their life that they may have been neglecting. One interview I undertook to understand more was with Slave D who is in a female-led relationship and sells chastity devices with his Mistress via the website houseofdenial.com. “It becomes this potent energy, like your batteries are supercharged. I describe it as if you’ve got this “Hoo-rah†energy, ready for anything.†This sentiment was echoed by other wearers of chastity and a recurring motif of their conversations was that by removing one intense fixation (the need for gratification), it actually caused a feeling of equilibrium. One anonymous participant said that they had self-locked (meaning they were not in a relationship with another party who held the key to the device) because they had heard it would help them with their physical wellbeing. The person said that they wanted to change because of health concerns but couldn’t seem to find the drive to do it until they were locked. Similar to the comments from Slave D, they said that it created an almost anxious energy that they could dissipate by working out at the gym. Interestingly, another participant got into chastity with his wife because of concerns of infidelity. Whilst he did not elaborate on the nature of concerns that lead to his wife and he deciding that chastity was a resolution, the reasoning of this implies that the intention is to adjust the Thanatos drive in conjunction with the Eros drive - by removing a self-destructive element in their relationship. When pursuing a deeper link of questioning beyond the energy levels, the responses were varied as one might expect from a small sample group of participants. However a recurring theme that emerged was the redirection of the self-gratification energy to a new sphere of influence. As per the participant who found the energy and drive to work out, another mentioned that they were more focused at work and eager to take on new challenges whereas previous to the locking, they were “just drifting along.†Slave D and several others said that it aided their relationships in a significant way. “I became a more attentive partner and actually started listening to my other half,†said one. Comments also mentioned that it created a new level of intimacy between the wearer and the keyholder. The mental wellbeing aspect also came through strongly from the responses. For some, it was about having the initiative to pursue things in their life they previously had dreamed about (like physical wellbeing or promotions at work) but digging below that, it was about the change it made to their own thinking. Slave D provided probably the most telling quote when he said in our interview, “It makes you realise that what you think is [physical desire] is actually just the want to do something. You confirm what you think that desire to be, and for a lot of people including our customers, we’ve associated that desire with [physical release].†These comments supported the theory that I posed earlier in the article that the drives themselves are about forward momentum and then we as people ascribe meaning to them, particularly in the instant gratification culture we currently exist in. One comment from a respondent was that it gave them a sense of “zen†in contrast to the “anxious energy†of another, with the reasoning that it removed a stressor from their daily thinking. Without having the distraction of the physical desire to release, it provided a calmness when before chastity, they had felt “scatty†or “distracted.†Does chastity provide a similar level of clarity that meditation can provide and would it provide the associated physical health benefits in terms of coronary health, stress reduction and increased resilience? An interesting consideration, to be sure, however not one that I have been able to explore in any meaningful way. In conclusion, it does appear that wearing a chastity device does provide a degree of mental wellbeing benefits as well as the redirection of the Eros drive into more fulfilling aspects of life. Whilst this exploration is in no way extensive, it does provide an engaging area of study to consider how far this sublimation of physical desire might reach and whether the results are consistent if the wearer remains in chastity longer-term or if the impact reduces as times goes on. Another field of research going forward from this could be a wider sample size of respondents to assess the levels of wearers who approach this from an Eros-linked need as opposed to the Thanatos mitigation perspective, or if the two desires for chastity wearers are intimately entwined because of the “death†of the self release versus the release of the Desire drive. Does this same theory apply when it comes to those who keyhold for the device wearer or do they provide the inverse of these desires because they are applying the ‘death’ to the wearer. It is my theory that it would make sense when we consider the Thanatos and Eros drives as being a cycle and therefore the roles of those in a chastity relationship also replicating the concepts, with one being Eros and one being Thanatos. Another article for another day, perhaps. |
| Created | 3 Aug 2021 |
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