P2s Mind Refreshing MailBox

An Essential MALE thought a day helps the better you evolve, each day!

April 2025 Topic: Just what IS the difference between Eros and Sex?!

Hi P2!

           I’m an older teen who is torn between many of the people around me’s definitions of who they think I am or should want to be like. I am trying hard to “just be me,” honestly, and live from my own feelings, but most others just all end up using words they can’t even define, and think are “self-evident.” Well, maybe to them or their experience, but I just want to see what they’re saying as CHOICES, NOT demanding  my “obedience” to one way of seeing me or any issue, ONLY!  Or even worse,  their acceptance of me or not as a friend, based on my compliance with their view of me, not their liking me for who I really am!

         For example: My girl friend versus many different groups of guys and the activities we are given to choose from in school, mixes many of the different points of view about who I am, who they are, and what words like “sexual” mean or are referring to. We may all know what each other is talking about generally, but I have no idea what they are actually referring to much of the time.

          I hope this little background intro made the question I am about to ask you about your work not only simpler, but was able to give you a little insight into who I am and what I am trying to understand about both myself and the people around me, which your writings do address underneath it all, but needs clarification for me.

          So, Please, first, What’s the basic difference between Eros and Sex and then, second, What’s the basic difference between Sex and gender? Connect the dots there, if there are any.     

                                                                                                                                                                     Thank You,  P2!                        

                                                                                                                                                                     Jeff the Teenager

Hi Jeff, Thanks for the letter!       (I'll start simpler and progress more complexly, but I do think you can pick up most of what I'll be saying.)  Since your identity question borders on so many other guys' similar experiences, I'll address some of those too; so take what helps you understand your situation better, while letting those other males this will help, get some understanding! Just your question itself will be helpful to them as well, and shows you're a very smart MALE, who has the courage to not let himself be brainwashed out of his own genuine male feelings for all the social pressures surrounding him... yet!)

           In essential terms, Eros (in sync feelings life is giving you, honestly for and with others) comes first, you are born with it, and Sex (mating intercourse) is an aspect OF Eros (not the other way around). Eros, as an essential life term, going back to ancient times and recognizing it in the mythologies rising up around it, is simply all those you are attracted to, combined with all those who are attracted to you. It is your actual essential HUMAN identity. (free of anyone's categories to put you into or values judgements about you or your feelings. Eros is simply the feelings life gives you inside from being  with those who you like and / or being with those who like you. Period)

           As for the confusion between Sex and Gender, Sex is being inferred in this situation as the body type you have, and Gender is being determined, mainly by women, as giving us labels for how they see us acting WITH the body type we have.  Thus a male is expected to do societally approved GENDER roles and functions they have had devised for him, in order for a male to follow the cultural schemas which direct us to "winning" the "prize" of being able to marry a woman to validly use our penis at all.  Lots to say about that, but simply, for you, if you have a penis and balls you are a male, and if you have a womb and vagina you are a female, as far as sexual (body type) identity goes. 

      Gender refers to the attributing of a label to a particular person's use of his/her body type (sex),  which often connotes an emotion of value judging how different people feel about the lives they are living and expectations they are trying to follow, compared to given societal expectations. Genders can vary, depending on how people either live as expected to by society, or chosen by themselves, by degrees,  instead.  We are always "ourselves" but are forced to think of ourselves as others' gender definitions of us create a socially assumed Gender Identity: a SOCIETAL identity most seek acceptance from others for having. 

         Yet these distinctions and discussions (sex is primarily biological and gender primarily social reflections) never seems to get as far as understanding how so many boys, thrust into the black or white world of social expectations of "child or adult" only, and females as caring but males as insensitively determined, lack the male friendship and intimacy they crave. Men are told to stay away from "children" primarily to prevent males from impregnating girls who aren't ready to take care of the resultant babies yet, and growing boys still mistakenly associated with such children by women who haven't learned how to "pass the torch" of the KIND of love a boy needs, as I present in my books for better understanding of our different body types and feelings, not wanting to be called "children" (which they are NOT as soon as they reach the "growing boy stages around 7 or so [another important male issue which my books address]). Such boys may thus sometimes feel forced to choose to think of themselves as "transgender" for the sad fact that so many radical females have spearheaded charging men as sexual abusers for trying to share needed MALE bonding feelings of support, approval, appreciation and affirmation, with boys, without regard for Males' feelings about it. Such boys then feel that the only persons they know who can be kind or tender with them at all are females. Such boys assume they have no Male sensitivity or sensuality to learn about, that they will only default to triggering to impregnate women who will then see them as monstrous for trying, (as if we were living in a dystopian setting which we're NOT) like any animal, and so decide they would rather be a caring female, or more like her, than an uncaring male!

        Can you see how the flawed definitions our social narrative still uses without analyzing itself, and male intimacy deprival our narrative forces us to live with led many boys to bad decisions they may never be able to change for the rest of their lives, once they set such an emotionally erroneous premise (only girls and their genders can give or receive human care, males cannot) into a transgender course of assumption? Imagine a chicken having no one but a duck to model themselves after  (waddling after the mother duck and squawking like a duck) and you'll better understand the dilemma boys are facing by being raised by female feelings entirely instead of genuine Holy Spirit guided  GOOD Male Eros affection based friendships and intimacy feelings!

       In cultural terms, the words “sex” and sexual are confusingly used interchangeably, and connote mating (opposite sex urges to DNA match for the survival of our species) intercourse along with all its responsibilities, onto whatever it points to, regardless of whether it’s referring to the same specific behavior or issue or activity or not, as if all foot sizes MUST get the same general size sox simply because you have feet!  In this case everything you do with your penis is treated the same way too,  because of what a penis means to the social programming defining it.

        The way people use the word "sexual"  today may really be saying they only have a general idea of what is being talked about and know what they FEEL from the values judgements about, but are unable to really explain it even that far. So it’s coming from emotional connotations someplace in their minds... something they saw or heard or were made to think or were warned about, or even saw on Tv or a movie or the internet, and just associate to, using a familiar word we all know to refer to it with, usually with upturned eyes, and complaining if you don’t take it as threateningly as they (associatively, by connotative female emotions) have been made to feel about “any such thing,” themselves. 

        Over time civilizations’ attempts to have more control over the consequences of our feelings for each other, and the people in particular groups they’ve defined, themselves, have led us down many “rabbit holes” of specific focuses and definitions which ignore all others. Many mistakenly assume that intercourse with the opposite sex, and the responsibilities of raising a baby that can entail, is all that the word “sexual” can mean or should refer to, and everything else connected with any phase of or similarity to that, is referring to that as, as well, whether you think it should or want it to, or not. It’s also actually a way of preventing you from criticizing what they are saying, because they’ll belittle you if you ask for further info about what they mean, and tell you “Well Everyone knows THAT!” Well you can tell such people next time they put you in that position, that the more someone says “Well Everyone knows” without specifically and in detail describing what THEY were actually talking about, they are admitting they said it as an excuse to cover up the fact that they can't even explain that what they're talking about is actually only their BELIEF about it and use the majority opinion as an excuse to hide that fact, and that few are the people who really do know all about  it. What they really 'Know' is  how everyone reacts to the statements and "news", and copy it for the security that numbers can bring them. Hence they only really “know” the values judgements and feelings surrounding some aspects of a topic they may proudly feign experience with, but may simultaneously be a topic they have been made to feel “offended” by, to even mention (probably what they were made to feel to silence their questions when they were too young to challenge it)! Many use an unrepresentative example to describe this entire realm of behavior, not caring that they haven’t presented it as a partial explanation or an extreme, maybe just wanting to pretend they know something about it, and that THAT should be enough (because they are in unfamiliar territory they don’t want to be condemned about or show their ignorance of!)

          Such people and social expectations conflate male arousal, your loving feelings, and your very living up to who you are (identity) with finding and keeping a woman in the social rules and public opinion expectations you are living in to have any socially valid use of your penis at all, and any other use of your Eros feelings to be labeled either deviant, dangerous (without explaining in detail to whom and how), perverted, assault, inappropriate, molesting, sinful, or criminal. It seems they have so much trouble seeing it any other way, that they refuse to consider that it should have other wider and more diverse meanings to balance it all out.  It seems that they, like the people in Galileo's day, find more comfort in their communal error sameness, than joy in learning the wider truth of life, hidden from them before.  They would rather be certain, if actually wrong, and just give it a "Godly" reason, despite the fact that "God" never said the sun went around the earth, or that the earth was at the center of all creation. Likewise they want to blame male TRULY GOD GIVEN EROS as horrible and dangerous while demonizing and  hurting  those who try to tell them they are wrong! In such mistaken reasoning, they think (mistakenly) that large “E” Eros is only the small “e” “erotic” that comes backwards from the male default trigger to impregnate a female for the survival of our species, but not FORWARD from the life resources feelings we were all given according to the design and form, male or female, we were created with for our human relating care about each other, especially in many diverse bonding relating stages.  No wonder we have such a hard time being genuinely friendly and call others "strangers!" Its a female problem our maleness was created to make up for, not be subjugated to obey or be demonized into being alienated by!

         This kind of erroneous "sexually abusive" assuming and subsequent fear mongering can immediately be “exposed” for the illogic it infers when you realize that a boy fetus has boners in the womb, and that they are NOT “sexual” (except in the mind of the person who has no deeper understanding of male arousal than reproductive union every time a boner is  so much as mentioned, let alone seen or normalized as a part of a male's own feelings to value in a Holy Spirit.)

          In short, ESSENTIALLY, MALE Eros is the Human Resource life gives males, fused into a MALE design with it’s accompanying missions and dynamics, which is circulatory in its function to relate, connect and extend humanity far and wide (and bridge differences with it when possible).  While Female Eros is the design life gave her, with her accompanying missions and dynamics, to be and provide a safe place to bond with fetus and helpless baby for it's own survival, until it can get the help it needs to survive without her supplying all it needs, all the time. Gender is the kind of roles and functions, jobs and expectations the GROUP around you (family, culture, society, civilization, etc.) are surrounding you with expectations to emulate, and you are normally born into and react to and from. So, EROS is what you feel to connect with others, motivated by feelings life gives you to,  inside yourself. Sex, while tacitly referring to your body type, male or female, is inferring intercourse with the opposite sex and culturally means you are taking responsibility for the raising of any progeny resulting from that intercourse. And, Gender is the way you live in your sex (body type) through many personal choices, from which you are seen as (given a social identity) by others (and your attempts to satisfy them)... often so full of cultural requirements, values judgments and categorical expectations and definitions for them, that it’s all they see in you, or even you in yourself, as a result of being so immersed in that focus.

         Realize that in order to see these crucial distinction differences you must be able perceive them from a philosopher's higher consciousness, not just the cultural ground level mentality of compliance and its automatic reactions... to rise above the everyday fray, to see the deeper meanings and choices that were there underneath, all along while  others had you focused “elsewhere.” Boys are BORN philosophers, with a natural and circulatory Truth seeking curiosity and genuine honesty which helps them recognize and try to accommodate differences, all with GOOD WILL. But when boys are pressured to live others’ negative mentalities or points of view instead of a boy's innate life given good will appreciation of life around him,  his own life affirming essential one, such boys start becoming like those who live by fear.

          Thus... if you can manage to hold onto both natural and cultural points of view, private and public realms separated in your mind, giving both their own due,  by living from your nature, and regarding cultural programming as such, then you'll become a wise man for your efforts, Jeff!... a path I wholeheartedly believe in and encourage you to continue your intelligent questioning to walk. Within yourself first, as your base, then increasingly with those who will listen, around you, thus bringing your real self conscious identity with you all the time!

Plato The Second

May 2025 Topic: What normal Eros life was like in Jesus' day and prior.

Concern:

Dear Plato, The Second:

I’m a 24 year old Anthropology major who is intrigued by your writing... It seems so full of portent, yet, with all my other readings so far, I can only sense what you’re trying to explain. And while I have to hand it to you, you are doing a marvelous job considering not only the complexity of the subjects, but the forces of those out there who really want to make all the uncertainties of life nothing but unquestionable dogmas, (probably because they’re so afraid of finding out the REAL truth, that they just don’t want anyone to know any more than they do, and so demean research). So, since you look like a real ground breaker to me,  feeling that earth move beneath their feet in their minds, they are probably going to feel very uncertain of themselves trying to read your work.

Of course all they need to do is learn how to raise their consciousness, then they'll see the WHOLE story too! Right?!

Well, that said, after having read your April Mailbox and considering just what the difference between Eros and Sexuality that you bring up and want us to explore with you so deeply, are and entail, I have related questions. I mean, even after reading Fr. Keenan’s super needed work in the GOMVP website’s “Guest Authors” section, it’s even difficult for a dedicated student of humanity like myself to see just what Eros was BEFORE the last few centuries that started using “sexual” terminology! As I see it, People have basically stopped using Eros with any accurate understanding of what it means, as if it were only some kind of primitive way of saying the “sex,” which we all think we “know” about in today’s world. But it reminds me of the saying that goes... The more you know, the more you know you DON’T know!

I go to school at a major Midwestern university, but I get the feeling you are either European or live in Europe somewhere... I sense you are like a human empath and a listener to our unspoken male feelings, combined. I feel we could have some great discussions just having lunch together! And that you may just inspire my PhD. Dissertation of the not too distant future! I feel I don’t have to travel to a primitive tribe to add to the world’s understanding of itself, but do need to examine... like you... what our own cultures and civilizations have done to impede our male emotional progress, and how doing so has been the curse Fr. Keenan discusses.  I've read your book enough to see that a new social narrative including males' interest this time, IS the Anthropological sense we need to optimize our male feelings for life, NOW!

                                                                                                                            Let’s help make Male Eros a BLESSING AGAIN!

                                                                                                                                                                            Raulf, the Reasoner

Response

           Great to know you Raulf, If we can ever arrange to cross paths, I’ll be happy to discuss the male situation in the world today with you over whatever you like for lunch! And please do think about how addressing these issues can become your PhD dissertation! I’ll be happy to answer your questions personally, and help you achieve such a goal, if you like!

Here’s the oversimplified answer to your question about what was probably normal Eros in the historically recordable past. It takes philosophical deduction to intuit what was just there, free of today's categorizations.

Eros, going back to ancient Greece and Rome, far before humanity tried to wrap it all up into a few values ridden boxes, (the initial compartmentalization which our earlier social leaders were guilty of institutionalizing and today’s leaders mistakenly maintaining) was all who we are innately attracted to, combined with all who feel an innate attraction for us... FREE of any of the values judgments or societal expectations which want to pigeon-hole us if we dare to care about someone they don’t feel familiar with or comfortable about. It’s our Eros feelings and honesty that changes our everyday acquaintances to special encounters, and all humanity with it,  a life designed result.

In essence, again, by contrast, “sexual” really refers to the culturally validated act of intercourse between a male and a female in which the male, (who gets a default trigger to impregnate the female sex for the survival of our species, normally around 13 from nature) initiates the activity from the CIRCULATORY MALE IDENTITY he is growing in and learning from other males around him how to use, and use wisely (when he is lucky enough to have been in such an environment in the first place). In short, what we are referring to as sex, sexual or erotic, in our cultures today, is BACKWARDS from the roles we play and functions we perform in current culture’s defining, NOT FORWARD from the human resource of Eros feelings for each other that LIFE gave us to relate with. “Modern” civilizations may be ahead technologically of most of the former human groups you may be studying, but we are actually behind where they were emotionally, but even they gave up, wanting to "be like us" once they saw how we were living, to enjoy our successes (as visibly more accomplished and with more to show for the way we organized ourselves in this “modern” civilizational order and narrative),  not understanding what they were giving up to do so!

To help put that in perspective for you Raulf, and here’s a once in a lifetime chance to explore ways to help all people understand their priorities, by intuiting emotional comparisons of the results of given ways of life and their narratives ... for your upcoming Anthropological Dissertation.  Imagine the life and times of Jesus, the Christ. Compare his “son of God” identity with someone in touch with his own GOOD, God (life) given Male resources, and realize that the son of man temptations offering him understanding and success in life were from those around him wanting, even expecting him, to dedicate his male self to a non-circulatory and localized, one woman, not all people, way of looking at life. That could very well have been his “struggle in the desert,” from which he decided he would rather be his real male God-given self, more than his societally determined DNA based husband and father, Hebrew expected maturity. What we see Jesus doing, from the philosophical levels of intuiting his spiritual struggle, was LIVING out his GOOD WILLED MALE Eros in a world that valued something else more... and realize here that any nakedness or stimulations outside the public sphere were normal and not condemned for anyone, except probably as the public displays which Diogenes upset so many with in earlier times, would have been there too. Of course it was the realm (Public, as opposed to Private, Interpersonal or as in todays internet world, Cyber, realms) Diogenes was doing it in, and how it disturbed everyone’s concentration, not the activity itself which was deemed repulsive to so many.

The only bodily behavior that was “sinful” then, which we might rightly call “sexual” today were against what the Bible forbid as “adultery” (leaving of a woman and child depending on you, and causing the group to have to provide for them because you didn’t take your marital responsibilities seriously enough) or possibly taking a wife but spending so much time away from her that she felt she had to beg from the society around her just to either have a place to live or get food for her and his children with her, or that he still had so many relations with other women, that it caused her worry that he might never come back.

Much like Father Keenan realized about the disparity between current man made church “sins” and God or even Jesus declared sins of the past NOT matching them, it’s long past time that we change what is essentially our FEAR and CONTROL based “sexual” perceptions of human life relating, (as Jesus shed assumptions of a fear based God) and while not condemning present lifestyles for those who still want them, give those with honest and generous feelings for others, especially young growing males (those with a sense of their own likes and dislikes, identity and future potentials, and the desire to connect with older males to learn more about his options from older males who care about him) who need the breathing room to optimize their MALE lives. I do believe MNN is The Way to solve The Boy Crisis and The Male Solution to the CMD*... and all the other problems boys have as a result of the loss of their Male Nature Nurturing bonding relating with older males, despite the fact that females get their Female Nature Nurturing bondings with older females as much as they want.

I know there are anthropological terms for the mistake we make when we assume we know how former cultures or civilizational orders lived and saw life, from the standpoint we are currently in ourselves, but most don’t see the differences that I just made clear here. Notice that it was not a “sin” for Jesus to either be naked or share, for example,  masturbatory activity with those he felt a oneness with (I know mine and mine know me). While we today might assume that he should have been called a sinner if he did, simply because churches preach that in his name do today, but don’t understand either who he really was, or what he was actually doing to make life better for us all was composed of. To keep present Radical Feminist proclamations of “sexual sins” is like going back to the days of early Puritan fear based preaching of bodily sins and condemnations like Nathanial Hawthorne’s Scarlet letter outlines. Leaders can misuse their religious positions to authorize policies against human love which Jesus himself never would have, and which God himself created us to involve ourselves in, with a Holy spirit, not demonize from seeing nothing but an UNholy spirit in it.

The fact Jesus CHOSE NOT to get married is a tacit clue to what he was up against in his culture. Marriage, as helpful, stabilizing and securing a way of life as it can be, is a man-made institution which locks you OUT of relating to other people, as we were created to do, and into feeling guilty about being ourselves so that females displaced (from fear for babies survival) worries’ can be quelled, when what she really needs is for some savvy male to stand up and tell her to deal with her paranoia before her blaming male behavior LIFE gave him, for all the problems she faces in life, deceives us all out of seeing the deeper contextual conflicts going on inside her. She is feeling love 24-7 in the many bonding stages with the young she is a part of, but when males try to return to any of the male bonding stages with boys they are designed by life to share in, and lived for millions of years before our current cultures' deprival of them, without making the needed distinctions for what I give the terms MALE nature nurturing bonding relating, some women go so crazy from displaced fears, that many mistakenly interpret females' vociferous complaints about male behavior with the young to mean she  must somehow know more about young males than males do... despite the fact that women have never been a boy, or a man, and never had a penis or an erection or an ejaculation... Indeed, it can become very clear to the thinking male today that males' specialization to power and strength wielding has left him specialized OUT of his Male sensitivity and Male sensuality so much that males must write a blank check to maintain and further females' sensitivity and sensuality at the very expense of males even knowing what his is, let alone how it  differs from hers! A process that has left us without the innate bonding with boys essential to boys learning and living their true masculinity and Holy Spirit guided, appropriate  versions of it, with a new narrative including Boys' (and all males') Rights,  for our cultures and Modern day civilizations to live.

As an anthropology student yourself, you know quite well not only how demanding the Industrial Revolution was for males, but how it falsely normalized boys out of older males’ lives, and the negative effect that has had on males ever since. But as if that wasn’t enough, today’s Radical Feminists are misusing the power of the feminist movement to use boys as a proxy for the way FEMALES feel about intercourse in today's world, and acting as if the only reason an older male has intimate feelings for a boy is because he is trying to take advantage of the boy the way she feels he is taking advantage of her, from not understanding who he is and how his LIFE GIVEN design and mission are importantly different for him to live, for ALL humanity. She assumes an older male's attraction to and  interest in younger males to be no different than mating with her...  As if it's just a selfish displacement of the way he is supposed to treat a female. Women today have lost touch with the male being anything more than a tool she can use to make her pipe dreams of life certainty seem real. Radical Feminists may mistakenly believe that World Peace depends on all of us living more like women than men, but clearly she doesn't understand the mutual give and take respect need for our actual GOOD differences to be appreciated and accommodated with each other.

While males and females are both equally HUMAN, it is an overlap, not a sameness at all. Two different designs. Two different ways of experiencing human loving feelings... both having both nurturing and mating attractions in their own design. Both having a full range of both the most tender and the most aggressive abilities, within their own body type (sex), to react to the environments they find themselves in, but finding that in our cultures today, and for the last recent centuries too many, that women are a gender that has been given all the sensitive roles and functions and human authority to determine what they mean for both sexes, as if there were no difference, while males were given a gender designation by cultures where they do all the outside safety work, and fight when necessary to protect the woman and children they supposedly possess, but are only expected to discipline and keep order, creating a severe generation gap. This system may seem to work, but not for males’ emotions, just females. Emotional extortion of males lives to serve females pipe dreams is the result. And we keep going along with that program, as harmful as it is for our true masculinity, simply out of fear we will lose all touch with any valid way to use our penis and its’ daily feelings to express ourselves at all, if we don’t keep her happy, even if ignorantly so.

So much more to say here, but I hope it's helping you raise your consciousness enough to see what we need to do as males, and what you can do with your education, to help our culture and all modern civilization KEEP our technological progress and conveniences, while NOT depriving our boys and the older males they will become with such stunted emotional feelings, that they are either emaciated and lost, or rebelliously angry and lost, as a result.

Thanks you for your interest Raulf, I would like for you to keep me posted on your progress, and share you inquiring mind with me.

By the way I often spend time near Windsor, Canada, in case you ever get close and have some time to meet in the area.

Plato, The Second

Sincerely,

A better Male Optimizaton of our Male experience of Life is on the horizon, with a new narrative that includes our MALE feelings this time.

But If we don't work to build a better MALE experience of life NOW, no one else will... and it may never come to pass.