Part
1
 Mistakes
Mistakes Men Make about Power, Love, Sex
By Ernest DeFilippis
 While
growing up in Brooklyn, New York and later as I lived in Kentucky, Iowa,
Oregon, and Florida, I hoped to love a woman. But, I didn't understand
why every relation I had failed, even though sex had seemed to be successful.
I didn't know that my idea of what would make me powerful, including in
sex, stopped me from having the real, lasting love I wanted. Then I learned
from Eli Siegel, and Aesthetic Realism, about the mistake I was making
about power, love, and sex and was able to change! I'm very glad to tell
of some of the greatly kind education I've gotten — the knowledge men have
yearned for since they first walked on earth!
Power:
the Ability to Affect and to Be Affected
In Self and World: An Explanation of Aesthetic Realism, Eli Siegel
explains:
Power is not just the ability to affect or change
others; it is likewise the ability to be affected or changed by others.
If a person's power is only of the first kind, his unconscious will be
in distress. He must see that the existence of others is not in competition
with his own. He must see that his own well-being depends on a simultaneous
giving of himself to things and acting on things.
I saw power as being able to have a big effect on people, change them
while I remained essentially unaffected, unchanged, and in control. I saw
other people as competitors I had to beat to prove I was superior. If I
couldn't put a person in his place, whether it was on the athletic field,
in a conversation, or in my mind, I felt it was a sign of weakness.
In college, after baseball practice as we rode home on the subway, a
teammate and I would have a contest to see how many girls we could affect
by making eye contact with them. When either of us would get a girl to
look at us, we'd laugh triumphantly. But by the time I got home I'd feel
dull and would wonder why I was weary so often, even as I prided myself
on being in top physical shape.
"The self", writes Mr. Siegel, "does not want to be strong by the weakness
of others. It wants to be strong by what it is, rather than by what
others are not." My life, I'm so happy to say, shows Mr. Siegel is right!
When I learned that what I most wanted was to know and be affected by the
world — the feelings of a person, words on a page, objects — and, to have
a good, strengthening effect on people, I felt a new, larger power and
excitement I hadn't even known existed! And a lifetime is not enough to
express my gratitude, including for my marriage of 11 years to the woman
I love, Maureen Butler.
Power and Sex
Men have wanted to care for and be stirred deeply by a woman and have hoped
sex would be an expression of tender and powerful feeling — of real love.
But men have not understood, as I didn't, that what we see as our passionate
desire for a woman is often a desire to use a woman and sex to have power
over a world we feel is against us.
Said Mr. Siegel:
Any power that a human being has over another
that doesn't make the person it is exerted on stronger and the world in
which the power takes place look more beautiful, is bad power.
This is contempt which Mr. Siegel defined as the desire to get "a false
importance or glory from the lessening of things not [one]self." I am one
lucky man to have learned how contempt worked in me and to hear the honest,
thirsted-for criticism of it in Aesthetic Realism classes taught by Eli
Siegel which had me understand myself and change in ways I had so much
hoped to change.
When I was attracted to a woman, I would imagine her melting in my arms,
unable to restrain herself. I'd try to get her to notice me by using how
I looked and my "unique personality." Then I'd look at her as if I had
found my dream at last.
In a class Mr. Siegel asked me, "Which do you appeal to — the strength
of women or their weakness?" I appealed to the weakness in a woman. I made
her feel special, hoping she'd be in a tizzy about me. If she gave me her
telephone number and we made a date, I'd praise myself thinking, "You've
really got it, Ernie!" The demands of work and worry about money, the humdrum
of everyday life, friends, my family, all seemed to fade into the background
as I kept reliving in my mind the picture of her worshipping me. Who this
woman was, I was not interested in. I didn't see women as real, as having
feelings, hopes, mind.
Then on a date I'd often feel ill-at-ease; I'd feel I had to entertain
her or console her, while underneath I felt annoyed that we had to talk
at all. And if she was critical — for example, of my insensitivity to what
she felt — I saw it as a misunderstanding on her part and would try to
make her forget her "insecurities" — that is, shut her up — by taking her
in my arms and trying to please her through touch. However, if there was
sex, afterwards I'd often feel so ashamed and disgusted with myself that
at times I did not want to get up to face the next day. "You wanted to
please a woman," Mr. Siegel said, "but not for the purpose of respecting
her more."
Sex: Power or Perception?
I felt I was mean, driven by what I once referred to in a diary as "the
beast determined to overpower his prey to satisfy his lustful appetite."
As time went on, sex became less exciting, almost mechanical. I thought
the solution was to have, as the magazines of today so ignorantly advise,
more intricate and "better" sex with the "right" woman. And when I did,
I felt even more hopeless. Mr. Siegel explained the mistake I was making.
He asked me, "What would be the big thing in sex — power or perception?"
I felt the big thing was power — that is, having a woman succumb to me.
I didn't think perception had anything to do with sex. Said Mr. Siegel:
Right now quite a few men are tired of talking
to a woman and want to grab her....Would you like to stop thinking about
Miss Gianetti and grab her? Grabbing is the desire to stop intellect from
working in a woman because it's boring,...You want her to become like a
palpitating bird. Isn't that what you want?
"Yes," I answered, and Mr. Siegel asked, "Have you felt you could triumph
if you could take all the thought out of sex?" I did! I wanted to get to
"ecstatic" blankness, to shut down my mind in sex and not have to think
about anything, including the woman I was with. I was seeing that it wasn't
that I was "taken over," as I had thought, by a "beast" I couldn't control,
but, that I was making a choice to go after conquest rather than
the wider, larger, exhilarating power I've come to see is in knowing
a woman.
How wonderfully different I feel now with my wife Maureen! As our bodies
are close, I want to think more deeply about her, understand what
she feels and how she sees, to have my mind and hers be keener. I want
to have good will which Aesthetic Realism describes as "the desire to have
something else stronger and more beautiful for this desire makes oneself
stronger and more beautiful." Mr. Siegel said:
When good will is seen as a factor in sex truly,
without mush, it would be something for the world. We have to see good
will has an effect. If there is to be a deeper feeling you have to ask,
"Does this person want me to be stronger?"
I have seen first-hand in my marriage that good will definitely
has an effect. It has made for what I once thought was impossible to have
— sweeping pleasure and self-respect. As I talk to Maureen, hold her in
my arms, I feel it's really she I'm affected by, a person eager
to like the world, who has feelings and desires of a whole life, whose
mind I respect and want to know and strengthen! We are two of the most
fortunate people alive to be studying in classes taught by Ellen Reiss,
the Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism. Men and women will have the deep
good time they hope for when they are able to study these sentences of
Miss Reiss from The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known #1251
which I am so glad to be learning from:
Sex is what it was meant to be when a person
feels about another: "You stand for a world I want to know and never stop
knowing. Because I respect so much how you see the world, I see knowing
you as deeply joined to my knowing the world itself. As my body meets yours,
I am saying with tremendous tactual symbolism, I want my thought about
you — about your thought, your feelings, your life — to be vivid and deep
and full. As our bodies meet, I don't want you to feel I'm the most important
thing in the world, I want you to feel the world — which I stand for —
is your friend. I want you to know me, with fulness, as a means of knowing
the world."
Ernest DeFilippis played baseball in the St. Louis Cardinals' organization.
He is now an Aesthetic Realism consultant.
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