History of Corporal Epistemology

My family life was very quiet and I always felt respected by my parents. I never had experiences of emotional, physical or sexual abuse, and one of the few memories I have that could be categorized as "traumatic" was a Sunday morning when my father was upset because I was apparently touching my genitals over my pajamas at my door.

I hadn't realized what I was doing but his reaction made me realize that there was something weird about body-related issues. Decades later, when my father was 85, he revealed to me that while I was boarding a men's school I had experienced an event of sexual abuse. That confession explained to me the reaction that my father had had that Sunday day.

There are events from my childhood that if I analyze them now I see that they are the product of my curiosity about my bodily and sexual development, but that were often accompanied by distressing feelings and shame. I remember looking for secret places to feel my body eroticized because I had already internalized the taboo of erection.

I had heard neighborhood children gather in an open field where they masturbated and compared their masculinity. I was never invited to any of these rites of masculinity, but without really understanding them they intrigued me and somehow perceived them as something important of masculinity to consider.

A few years after immigrating to Ottawa, Canada in 1974, I met Maurice, a professor at Carleton University, where I also worked. Maurice was French-Canadian, activist and gay. I had never met a gay man in Chile, but my friendship with Maurice marked an important moment in my quest to understand important aspects of my male identity. Even though my friendship with Maurice never included sex, our long conversations about the secret world of sex between men offered me information that I found fascinating because it was something completely new to me. Listening to Maurice various aspects of the concept of Sexual Orientation began to catch my attention because I found inconsistencies in this model of sexuality. I began to doubt the idea of a person being homosexual or heterosexual, something that Alfred Kinsey himself, the father of the sexual revolution, made very clear in his book .

The gay-hetero categorization didn't seem to make sense to me because it assumes that the emotional value of the female and male body is the same, ignoring the speciality of intimacy between two people capable of sharing the experience of living in the same body. The value of this intimacy was already suggested by Plato when he wrote "... that same-sex lovers were more blessed than ordinary mortals," no doubt referring to men.

In the mid-80's I became interested in the role of Time in Databases. At that time the university library maintained catalogues on card, sorted by author, title and subject. While searching for the book "About Time" just before was the card from the book "About Men". Bumping into this book changed the intellectual course of my life because it revived the curiosity that had awakened in me at the age of 10.

In her book About Men author Phyllis Chesler suggests that one of the problems of masculinity is Womb Envy, which she describes as the inability to procreate. According to the author, in reaction to not being able to create life, men try to compensate for this by creating things external to their body. It was his questioning of masculinity and his determination to come up with ideas that drew my attention to her book.

Even though I never agreed with his theory, the idea of connecting male behavior with something bodily captivated me. I was sure that there had to be something very specific in men's bodies that would explain important aspects of male behavior.

A few weeks later, I had the epiphany I was looking for. Coming out of my university office, the idea that erection was that problematic male characteristic that I was looking for jumped out of my head.

The first thing I thought was that erection might be responsible for the physical and emotional distance that men maintain, unmatched by the physical and emotional intimacy that women are able to establish between them.

Since childhood I have admired that special intimacy among women that I intuitively saw as normal but accepted the censorship of privacy between children like so many other social norms that we had to respect. As I unquestionably identified as a child I never had the need to doubt my gender identity. My dilemma was to be able to find a way to feel like a man without having to accept the violence and lack of intimacy that accompanies masculinity so often.

Now as an adult and with the idea of erection in mind, I began to think about different possible problems of erection. I remembered an incident that had happened to me in the shared showers in the university gymnasium. Because of my interest in the homo-eroticism of ancient Greece I have always been intrigued by the dynamics of these places with dozens of naked men.

One day when I was showering a boy came in who for some reason his body brought back memories of my body when I was young. I was a tall boy with several characteristics that connected me emotionally with my body as a young man. The experience was suddenly interrupted when I felt that if I let myself go I was at risk of having an erection in front of dozens of naked men. An emotionally strong and intimate experience risked becoming a public and terribly embarrassing situation. I began to understand that shame played a very important role in all of this.

By 1987 I had accumulated enough information about aspects of masculinity that evoked shame, so I decided to do an experiment. As the Internet did not yet exist, I designed a notice in the "Personal" column of the local newspaper to appear on a Friday.

The announcement was a success. I received 42 handwritten responses, many with very revealing information, which is accessible in Secret Investigation. The content of the 42 letters gave me the inspiration to produce the following year an audio with the information I had accumulated that I called The Reality of Man.

I continued to think about the topic of erection and shame and in 1990 participated in the preparation of an essay (Homosexual Imagery in the adolescent child) using the information from the audio. This trial was presented at a mental health conference at ottawa psychiatric hospital. This is a segment of the summary:

A comprehensive model of support is urgently needed to meet the needs of young men. We'll suggest some guidelines for such a model. This model must be flexible enough to adapt to the needs of the young man who functions relatively well, as well as to the needs of those who exhibit destructive behavior. Special attention will be paid to suicide, assault and sexual abuse.

Request a meeting with the university's Academic Vice-President to discuss these ideas. Tom was very candid with me and in our meeting I mentioned recognized that these issues are very difficult to address. As an example, I tell of an ex-professor who was gay and who had recently died of AIDS. The former professor was my friend Maurice whom I had visited in Montreal a week before his death.

The Vice-President takes my proposal seriously. I try to look for professors in the Social Sciences and I manage to find a professor from the Sociology department. I didn't feel a good connection with him and I felt defensive about important parts of my ideas. I didn't quite know how to interpret his reaction until I bumped into him in a park frequented by men looking for sex.

I still didn't understand shame the way I understand it now, but in the '90s I got in touch with Dr. Donald Nathanson , a physician-psychiatrist who authored several books on shame. The interesting thing about his work is that it offers an explanation of the physiology of shame.

Eventually I had a conceptual disagreement with Dr. Nathanson. For him, as it is for many, it was very difficult to accept my rejection of the concept of Sexual Orientation, a concept that already in those days I considered not only wrong but also quite harmful, especially for men (the essay "Boys, Masculinity and Shame" addresses this issue).

Since I never believed in sexual orientation, I had to think of another way to explain what is perceived as sexual attraction. It had to be a theory that included various aspects of sexuality, including fetishes. This is how he developed Corporeal Epistemology, a philosophy of the body that explains the erotic and sexual behavior of men and women.