Republican media is having fun shaming CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin for getting caught masturbating on an internet conference call. Toobin is considered a liberal to be attacked, maybe for criticizing SCOTUS nominee Kavenaugh.
By design or by default, shaming masturbation is essential for authoritarianism and is a critical function of our major religions. Authoritarian societies don’t prohibit and punish masturbation to stop it. It can’t be stopped. But open discussion of masturbation and including it in sex education would remove the guilt and punishment associated with it and, more importantly, eventually expose the secret of authoritarian power by opening debate of this question: Is there a difference between right handed and left handed masturbation?
Republicans just pushed another radical Catholic, Amy Coney Barrett, onto the supreme court. It’s time for Pope Francis, who wants to save the planet from climate change, to finally expose the embarrassing sexual secret of authoritarian power.
Someone needs to tell him about sex on the wrong brain (or sowb, as in robe), a theory that suggests that due to brain laterality, right handed masturbation effects the brain differently than left handed masturbation and over millions of years it has resulted in right handed dominance and heritable predispositions for characteristics such as greed and the Certainty Deficit Disorder (CDD), which can increase fear, ignorance, misogyny, racism, and authoritarianism (table above).
The sowb theory suggests the mass level denial heading us toward planetary destruction may be due to a lack of appropriate sex education. Maybe there’s something in those old documents in the Vatican basement.
The Koran (Old Testament?) mentions it, basically prohibiting left handed masturbation: “man can only have sex with his wife and that which the right hand possesses”. Muslim scholars may interpret “that which the right hand possesses” as captives and slaves, but where does that leave those without wives, captives, or slaves?
Did the old Christian leaders decide to go with a more subtle approach — repressing sex while demonizing left-handedness?
In making fun of Toobin, Rush Limbaugh also used his bully pulpit to go after a University of Pennsylvania professor, Jonathan Zimmerman, who wrote Jeffrey Toobin and the m-word: Let’s be honest about what makes this scandal so scandalous for the DaIly News. Remember Joycelyn Elders?
So it was decried as “self-abuse,” the evil downside of individual freedom. Doctors linked it to epilepsy, impotence and insanity. And they began to advocate for routine male circumcision, which supposedly deterred masturbation. And while the Bible didn’t condemn the practice directly, Christians interpreted the passage about Onan — who “spilled his seed” to avoid impregnating his brother’s wife — to constitute a prohibition on masturbation.
But all of that went out the window with the sexual revolution, right? Wrong. That’s why Bill Clinton was forced to fire his surgeon general, Joycelyn Elders, after she suggested that schools teach about masturbation. After all, she said, it’s “a part of human sexuality.”
It just wasn’t a part that we could acknowledge in polite company. After press accounts incorrectly reported ( — pushed by 1500 screaming radio stations — ) that Elders wanted to teach kids how to masturbate — which is one activity they can certainly learn on their own — she was toast.
Here’s Limbaugh, who led the attacks on Elders then, sarcastically paraphrasing and naming Zimmerman and sending some hate-mail his way to discourage others:
Jeffrey Toobin didn't do anything wrong!
…..
it isn't his fault. It isn't his problem. It's simply the fact that we, as a backwards bunch of Puritan-type busybodies, have an unhealthy "unease about masturbation."
Conservatism, authoritarianism, fascism
In a well-known 2003 study, “Political Conservatism As Motivated Social Cognition”, avoidance of uncertainty is recognized as a defining characteristic of authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is sometimes measured with the Uncertainty Avoidance Index.
When Sigmund Freud student Wilhelm Reich wrote “Mass Psychology of Fascism” in 1933 while observing increasing fascism in European youth he thought it had to do with sexual repression, which increases frustration and the association of masturbation with religious guilt, punishment, and fear.
The missing link is sex on the wrong brain, a unified theory of human thought and behavior.
SOWB
The theory ‘sex on the wrong brain’ has probably been around a few decades. A book of the same name by Ard Falten integrates major symptoms and implications of the disorder into a science fiction comedy adventure with a Trump-like president. In the story, sowb was caused by an ancient alien design flaw. Humans got a divided brain and two hands but only one sexual organ.
What could go wrong?
In the story the mental disorder is explained with a statuette of a horny stallion with an oversized erection and a simplified cartoon version of human brain divided by a wall and a gate. Right handed masturbation sends herds of horny stallions into the rocky canyons of the left brain hemisphere instead of the lush green pastures of the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere likes their energy and may raise the wall and close the gate to trap them where they cannot satisfy their ultimate need for the closure and finality of orgasm waiting for them on the right side.
As the brain perceives and reacts to an infinitely complicated and uncertain universe the frustrated stallions become anxious and afraid and may stampede. The left hemisphere learns to reduce the uncertainty that scares the stallions by simplifying the universe to dualities and absolutes and creating certainty with premature conclusions and quick easy answers. When it opens the gates to the starved creative right hemisphere to help it rationalize the denial and lies some of the stallions escape and can finally have their way in the pleasure centers.
Certainty is more important than truth.
Authoritarian social and value structures facilitate and cultivate thought patterns that reward certainty over truth. It feels good to them when authoritarian followers rationalize and accept the lies and certitude of their leaders.
Whether by design, incompetence, or insanity, authoritarian leaders like Trump create chaos, disorder, and uncertainty because it amplifies and highlights their royal certitude and increases the appeal of the comfort and security their sowb followers get from it.
For authoritarians the short term certainty of completely denying COVID and global warming is preferable to confronting the complicated (frightening) array of uncertainties and unpredictabilities those challenges represent.
It benefits Trump/Republican leadership and Putin for COVID to increase levels of fear and chaos. Is that why Trump’s strategy from the beginning was to ignore it? It doesn’t help that we’re also experiencing a pandemic increase in wrong handed masturbation.
Trump’s very bad case of sowb
Trump exhibits two major symptoms in extreme form — greed and the Certainty Deficit Disorder (CDD).
Trump may have a dominant ‘sowb gene’ which amplifies the problem. Maybe he inherited a defective right brain hemisphere. He may have a strong sex drive and probably grew up with lots of privacy and his own room. A junior version of Trump may have never had any normal relationship with the opposite sex. As he got older opportunity for ‘real’ sex may have been limited to paying for it and forcibly taking it. The King Donald fantasy continued because his wealth insulated him from reality.
In the parts of the brain used for numbers, measurement, and quantification the stallions want more, bigger faster. The greed is clear. He objectifies women and measures beauty on a scale of 1-10.
His CDD is off the charts.
From the sexonthewrongbrain.com (it used to be .org, not sure why it’s .com):
In the book "The Master and His Emissary, The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World", (2009) Iain McGilchrist argues that the left hemisphere is supposed to be the 'servant' to the right hemisphere, a better ‘master’, but the left hemisphere has become increasingly dominant in recent human history and humanity is suffering for it.
Is McGilchrist describing the effects of sex on the wrong brain and its acceleration during the last few thousand years?
"the left hemisphere needs certainty and needs to be right." p82
xxxxx
V.S. Ramachandran's studies of anosognosia reveal a tendency for the left hemisphere to deny discrepancies that do not fit its already generated schema of things." p41
xxxxx
"The left hemisphere is the equivalent of the sort of person who, when asked for directions, prefers to make something up rather than admit to not knowing." p81
"not only does (what we now know to be) the left hemisphere tend to insist on its theory at the expense of getting things wrong, but it will later cheerfully insist that it got it right." p82
Trump’s aversion to the complicated, unexplained, ambiguous, unpredictable, infinite, or different stimulates constant anxiety and fear and to survive he has learned to deny reality and simplify this frightening world to binaries and absolutes he can use to feel certain.
Every time he enlists the aid of his starved underused right brain to rationalize his irrational certitude his ‘pleasure centers’ get a shot of horny stallions, so to speak, so lying and being stupid feels good.
Trump eliminates the uncertainties and complications that make his right handed followers anxious and afraid. Trump describes the world in black and white. He’s always right and never wrong. You’re on one side of the wall or the other. Winner or loser. Friend or enemy. Fantastic or horrible. Anything in between or anything he doesn’t like must be denied, ignored, or destroyed. Complicated problems are ignored or reduced to simplified monetary/numerical opportunities for his greed. A game of golf gives him 18 opportunities for certainty, and when he cheats it feels good to rationalize it.
Abusing a woman or screaming at an employee is a way to trigger seldom used emotions, which also opens the gate to the pleasure centers.
Someone tell the Pope.
Sock it to us Pope Francis!