What a sex worker can teach us about human connection | Nicole Emma | TEDxSaltLakeCity

“In a society that values strong, stoic alpha males, where can a man find space to be vulnerable? Nicole Emma, a sex worker with 18 years of experience, gives a unique perspective on men’s need for connection. About the speaker: Nicole Emma is a relationship and intimacy coach, and sex worker.” What can the people at the edges of society teach us about ourselves? About Love? Cultivated through a life of connecting with people at the edges of our community, Nicole shares a message of unconditional love and acceptance. She has an insatiable curiosity about people, how we think and how we work, especially those outside the boundaries of cultural norms and programming. It’s this desire to truly SEE people that led Nicole to a vibrant career in the sex industry. Drawing from 18 years in sex work, Nicole observes noteworthy patterns of human behavior, especially those of the most vulnerable demographics, while providing a space for them to experience authentic connection without judgment. Bringing to the public dialog a call to shift societal expectations and address our own biases, Nicole speaks out about how we unintentionally create a fearful and angry society, and how we can shift back into curiosity, balance, and love. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx
9:30 Healthy Manhood is about:
  • facing fears
  • overcoming challenges
  • living with compassion

Retired Pope Blames Child Abuse Scandal on the 1960s Sexual Revolution

Benedict XVI’s words are in striking contrast with the Vatican’s policy under Pope Francis

Retired Pope Benedict XVI made a rare public statement Thursday with an essay on the Catholic Church’s sex-abuse crisis, linking it to a breakdown in sexual morality in the 1960s and warning against an excessive focus on the rights of accused abusers.

The retired pope’s words are in striking contrast with the Vatican’s policy under Pope Francis, which has increasingly emphasized the rights of the accused and reduced punishments for abusers on appeal.

Pope Benedict’s statement could provide encouragement to proponents of the “zero tolerance” approach to clerical abuse, which requires the removal from ministry of any priest found guilty of even one instance of abuse of a minor. Bishops in the U.S. and a handful of mostly English-speaking countries promote zero tolerance for use by the church at large, but the Vatican hasn’t endorsed the policy for global application.

.. Pope Benedict’s essay also deviates from statements by Pope Francis, who generally has played down sexual morality and attributed the abuse crisis largely to a culture of “clericalism,”or excessive power in the hands of the Catholic hierarchy.Pope Benedict wrote that his 6,000-word essay, published Thursday by German, Italian and English-language outlets including the Catholic News Agency, was in response to an international summit on sex abuse held at the Vatican in February.

“Since I myself had served in a position of responsibility as shepherd of the church at the time of the public outbreak of the crisis, and during the run-up to it, I had to ask myself—even though, as emeritus, I am no longer directly responsible—what I could contribute to a new beginning,” he writes, noting that he obtained the permission of Pope Francis to publish his thoughts.

During his own pontificate, Pope Benedict extended the statute of limitations for abuse of minors and Vatican judges hardly ever reduced the sentences of defrocked abusers on appeal.

In his essay, Pope Benedict, who will turn 92 on Tuesday, blames clerical sex abuse of minors in large part on the sexual revolution of the late 1960s, which he says was fomented by sexual education in schools. Increasingly available pornography in that period promoted violence and revealing styles of clothing “equally provoked aggression,” he writes.

“Part of the physiognomy of the Revolution of ’68 was that pedophilia was then also diagnosed as allowed and appropriate,” Pope Benedict wrote.

At the same time, Catholic theologians largely abandoned the “natural law” school of moral philosophy in favor of a relativism that denied the existence of absolute right or wrong, he wrote.

The combination of those trends led to a corruption of the clergy. Influential “homosexual cliques” formed in seminaries and students there sometimes watched pornographic films, while the future pope’s own theological writings “were hidden away, like bad literature, and only read under the desk.”

Pope Benedict called for more rigor in prosecuting cases of clerical sex abuse by church authorities. An overemphasis on the rights of the accused has at times made it practically impossible to convict abusers and that mentality remains prevalent, he wrote.

“This is an alarming situation which must be considered and taken seriously by the pastors of the church,” he wrote.

A prominent Italian activist against clerical sex abuse rejected Pope Benedict’s diagnosis of the roots of the crisis.

“The times have changed and the church hasn’t been able to do likewise” on matters of sexuality, said Francesco Zanardi, spokesman for Rete L’ABUSO. “But he would do better to look at all those times that the church has closed an eye and covered up” in cases of clerical sex abuse.

Why Celibacy Matters

How the critique of Catholicism changes and yet remains the same.

The rhetoric of anti-Catholicism, whether its sources are Protestant or secular, has always insisted that the church of Rome is the enemy of what you might call healthy sexuality. This rhetorical trope has persisted despite radical redefinitions of what healthy sexuality means; one sexual culture overthrows another, but Catholicism remains eternally condemned.

Thus in a 19th-century context, where healthy sexuality meant a large patriarchal family with the wife as the angel in the home, anti-Catholic polemicists were obsessed with Catholicism’s nuns — these women who mysteriously refused husbands and childbearing, and who were therefore presumed to be prisoners in gothic convents, victims of predatory priests.

Then a little later, when the apostles of sexual health were Victorian “muscular Christians” worried about moral deviance, the problem with Catholicism was that it was too hospitable to homosexuality — too effete, too decadent, too Oscar Wildean even before Wilde’s deathbed conversion.

Then later still, when sexual health meant the white-American, two-kid nuclear family, the problem with Catholicism was that it was too obsessed with heterosexual procreation, too inclined to overpopulate the world with kids.

And now, in our own age of sexual individualism, Catholicism is mostly just accused of a repressive cruelty, of denying people — and especially its celibacy-burdened priests — the sexual fulfillment that every human being needs.

The mix of change and consistency in anti-Catholic arguments came to mind while I was reading “In the Closet of the Vatican,” a purported exposé of homosexuality among high churchmen released to coincide with the church’s summit on clergy sexual abuse. The book, written by a gay, nonbelieving French journalist, Frédéric Martel, makes a simple argument in a florid, repetitious style: The prevalence of gay liaisons in the Vatican means that clerical celibacy is a failure and a fraud, as unnatural and damaging as an earlier moral consensus believed homosexuality to be.

The style of Martel’s account is fascinating because it so resembles the old Protestant critique of Catholic decadence. Instead of a tough-guy Calvinist proclaiming that Catholicism’s gilt and incense makes men gay, it’s a gay atheist claiming that the gays use Catholicism’s gilt and incense to decorate the world’s most lavish closet. Instead of celibacy making men deviant, celibacy is the deviance, and open homosexuality the cure. Celibacy used to offend family-values conservatism; now it offends equally against the opposite spirit.

The book is quite bad; too many of its attempted outings rely on the supposed infallibility of Martel’s gaydar. And yet anyone who knows anything about the Vatican knows that some of the book’s gossip is simply true — just as the other critiques of Catholicism have some correspondence to reality.

The Cowardly Face of Authoritarianism

But in a cult of personality, truth is replaced by belief, and we believe what the leader wishes us to believe. The face replaces the mind.

.. The transition from democracy to personality cult begins with a leader who is willing to lie all the time, in order to discredit the truth as such. The transition is complete when people can no longer distinguish between truth and feeling.

.. Cults of personality make us feel rather than think. In particular, they make us feel that the first question of politics is “Who are we, and who are they?” rather than “What is the world like, and what can we do about it?” Once we accept that politics is about “us and them,” we feel like we know who “we” are, since we feel that we know who “they” are. In fact, we know nothing, since we have accepted fear and anxiety — animal emotions — as the basis of politics. We have been played.

.. The authoritarians of today tell medium-size lies. These refer only superficially to experiences; they draw us deep into a cave of emotion. If we believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim born in Africa (an American lie with Russian support), or that Hillary Clinton is a pedophile pimp (a Russian lie with American support), we are not actually thinking; we are giving way to sexual and physical fear.

.. These medium-size lies are not quite the big lies of the totalitarians, although Mr. Orban’s attacks on George Soros as the leader of a Jewish conspiracy come rather close. They are, however, big enough that they help to disable the factual world. Once we accept these lies, we open ourselves up to believing a whole raft of other untruths, or at least suspect that there are other, vaster conspiracies.

.. We imagine that we make choices as we sit in front of our computers, but the choices are, in fact, framed for us by algorithms that learn what will keep us online. Our online activity teaches machines that the most effective stimuli are negative: fear and anxiety.

.. As social media becomes political instruction, we prime ourselves for politicians who reproduce the same binary: What makes us afraid and what makes us feel secure? Who are they and who are we?

.. The empty heterosexual posturing, the shirtless photo ops, the misogyny and indifference to the female experience, the anti-gay campaigns, are designed to hide one basic fact: A cult of personality is sterile. It cannot reproduce itself. The cult of personality is the worship of something temporary. It is thus confusion and, at bottom, cowardice: The leader cannot contemplate the fact that he will die and be replaced, and citizens abet the illusion by forgetting that they share responsibility for the future.

The cult of personality blunts the ability to keep a country going. When we accept a cult of personality, we are not only yielding our right to choose leaders but also dulling the skills and weakening the institutions that would allow us to do so in the future. As we move away from democracy, we forget its purpose: to give us all a future. A cult of personality says that one person is always right; so after his death comes chaos.

Democracy says that we all make mistakes, but that we get a chance, every so often, to correct ourselves. Democracy is the courageous way to have a country. A cult of personality is a cowardly way of destroying one.