The Solicitor's Paradox

The solicitor’s paradox goes as such: A subject receives a statement from an oracle. It is a statement about the future, either that will eventually have occurred (that which will pass), or that which will be (that which will occur). Person B, then, composes their behavior and the conditions of their life with the knowledge of this statement, leading to one of two possibilities. In the first parity of this paradox, the subject, in their response to the hypothetical, forces the hypothetical into the reality. In the second parity of this paradox (the less perfect version), the subject’s response to the hypothetical sets up a world which, in essence, is incomplete with the prediction, but a collection of elements of this world to come are interpretable as being indicative of the prediction having come true. 

An example of this: A child wants to do gymnastics. An oracle (a parental figure or a figure of guidance) might tell them that they will get hurt if they do this, because of the possibility of injury. The child in this example internalizes this prediction and gets involved in gymnastics. In his approach to the sport (how often they train, how they train, how hard they try, what skills they try, etc.), in this scenario, he takes into consideration the prophecy of getting hurt. Many injuries in the sport, as is often the case with injuries, actually arise from insecurity, hesitation, or unpreparedness. Thus, his fear of the “prophecy” may lead him to be insecure or avoid those easier challenges which propose the threat of getting hurt, even if he are capable of handling them, so that later, when he takes on a bigger challenge, it results in him getting hurt. This is an example of the solicitor’s paradox. Another possibility of behavior is that the child might disregard the prophecy and approach his training with the principles given to them by their coach. Another possibility of behavior is that the child is not primed with a prophecy before getting involved. 

This conundrum, named presently as the solicitor’s paradox, is relevant to the topic of sexuality. Are young children sexual? Can they have a sexaulity, and at what point do they develop it? One model (a branch of gender-queer theory which I attribute to expressions often found in radically prescribed public dictations on the subject) hold that young children have budding sexualities which need to be respected in order to grow. However, the development of sexuality is infected by the solicitor’s paradox. If we look to the loudeset voice on sexual deviancy, Marquis de Sade, we see that in his work 120 Days of Sodom, a group of libertines enslave a population to enact sadistic acts on them. Stories are told by a collection of four middle-aged madames, and their stories inspire the sadists on their next experiment on their encaptured peoples. Why does Sade include these characters in a work about increasingly depraved sexual acts from libertines towards a helpless population? Why is there a break in the storytelling of the libertines and their enslaved, their torture and their sex acts, all of a sudden to some peripheral storytelling by these auxiliary characters? Is it because, the sadist’s development of their sexuality is contingent upon the introduction from outside sources? This aligns with my observation of the world. From my experience, the sexually deviant whom I knew received their fantasies from other sources and passed them off onto me in some way or another. They often wanted to enact what they’d seen in pornography, even showing me reference photos and videos to get at what they wanted to achieve or have. They would share what they liked, what interested them, or what they wanted, through video or through speech. They would want to sacrifice the unique given moment (getting coffee, doing homework, etc.) into something resembling a previous or ideal encounter. The day is a unique experience, and then at some moment an interaction with a sadist started vague sex-talk, where the dialogue is composed of tropes and vocabulary from phased out people too dumb and lazy to re-invent themselves. They would want to hear new stories, always, because once they had the old stories, they weren’t satisfied, because these stories had no sustenance; they only had pleasure. A common theme through many of these sexual deviants is that they asked me to tell stories about whom I was previously with. Details were poked for: things that were said, where it happened, how, which specific acts were performed, in what order, etc. Sometimes it seemed as though their sexuality was scrounged from other’s experiences of sexuality. 

In my personal experience, almost every sexual story that I heard from an interlocutor involved a “someone/something else” who “showed them.” The tone that I’ve heard people take when describing sex to their friends, usually is of the same kind as the tone that one has when they were given the secret code to the safe by another, or when they were told how to do the problem by their teacher. It’s a tone from the learned to the innocent, but it is tainted with the contingency that the learned got their information from another source, which they deemed to be trustworthy. In every sexual experience that I have had, or sexual conversation, there has been at least one party that had more experience on sex. 

If, in the development of the young mind of a man, he is exposed to the prediction that he will be or could be a certain sexuality by an oracle, then from this moment forward what determines his sexuality is how he interprets this prediction. If schoolyard bullies call a child gay, the child only becomes gay if he interprets the situation of the schoolyard bullying (which is an idiosyncratic relational space in the world which only exists on the confines of the playground, of the yard, etc.) to mean that he is gay, from which he goes out into the next moment, into other spaces, as a gay person, without knowing what this means. It requires an irrealizable proof to know from an observational standpoint whether the child’s eventual sexuality is formed because of their exposure to the prediction, or, if without the issuance of the prediction, they would have naturally developed to be that way on their own. Such a proof can only be delivered incompletely in retrospect. The child can grow up to have sex only if they at some point learn about sex. How can a person set out to perform an action that from the outside seems so absurd and, through purely observational lens, senseless--the slapping together of body parts only to exude bodily substance which, thankfully, lacks meaning to the uninformed child? If only it could cease to have meaning for the learned who refuse to relinquish the positions given to them on what it means! Is it possible for a child to find a stray piano, and play it, without any outside input, until they eventually play Bach? The first, proper thing that happens whenever a person first encounters an instrument is instruction on what to play and how to play. Otherwise, how can the child meaningfully understand it? Children grow up to play instruments because someone instructs them. Children grow up to learn how to drive a car because someone shows them how to. Children become involved in sex because they learn about it. Knowledge of sex is passed down through verbal, written, and, in extreme cases, first-hand storytelling. 

In order to prove that a young person is truly homosexual, it would be necessary to show that, from their birth into their adulthood, if they are not exposed to any information about sex, that they will somehow, naturally, choose one day to set out to have sexual relations with a man. That is what is necessary to show that sexuality is in one’s inherit nature. It is a near impossible task which requires the most unethical experimental conditions. Carrying out this experiment means toying with human life and engaging in the most inane research. 

Children get exposed to information on sex, and what develops their sexuality is how they interpret this information as part of their life. For example, as a teen, I knew of men who thought nothing of homosexuality until they phenomenologically foregrounded a hardship they were experiencing against the ground of some sexuality-struggle externally provided to them. In this way, the repressive household becomes a facet of “his struggle as a gay man,” even though, the repressive household structure existed before the sexuality. In this way, the self-insecurity becomes a facet of “his identity as a gay man,” even though, before his sexuality developed, he struggled with self-insecurity. I noticed within myself that, in my teenage years, my attraction to the female sex, which was ever-present in my boyhood, only started diminishing after I assumed that I was gay, not before. An internalized externality was required to become a sexuality. The only time in my life that I knew what masturbation was, is because someone showed me what it was, directed me as to how to do it, and the purposes of it (the two major reasons proposed being that it “felt good” and that it was a “natural part of my development”). And, at every step of the way of my sexual development, there was a source of my knowledge being transferred onto me. The branch of gender-queer theory which I mentioned earlier would posit that “experimentation” is idiosyncratic, meaning, the individual experiments completely and wholly on their own terms and capable of making apt enough judgments at each step of the way to reflect their pre-emptive understanding of the material. The contradiction in this claim is that simultaneously saying that the inexperienced can pre-understand what they have not experienced and that they experiment in order to figure out something which they do not know. Oftentimes stated in this model is that gender-queer theory “gives the child the language” to make sense of what already has been. Thus, when they learn about homosexuality, they are able to make sense of how they have been homosexual. This rules out the very real possibility that the child is using the language given to him now only because it is being interpreted in a certain way as needing to be internalized in order to reach a state of happiness or stabilization. 

I know for sure that there were quintessential experiences of my youth which gender-queery theory’s terminology failed to encapsulate. What could explain how I loved to learn new things, how I heard music in my head, how the sun rose in the morning no matter who said what, how two plus two is equal to four under the natural number system in mathematics, how everytime I woke up my body stayed the same enough for me to recognize it, how wind worked, how I was born as a person and not a duck, how the Bible has survived all these years of transcriptions and translations, etc. Gender-queery theory failed to explain the mysteries of life. And, the only time gender-queer theory even entered my notion of life was through the transition of high school and college, the time when puberty sends minds to mush and academia to rot. The language is insufficient to get at my experience as a human; it only is complete in its own idosyncracy. It was constructed and designed aesthetically as a political project to reclaim a dependent state of living (that of wanting and receiving what is wanted), and it looked to philosophy to bolster it. It looked to art to give it culture. It looked to politics to give it rights. But before it looked for anything in these realms of society, what gender-queer theory begins with sexual desire.

These ideas of sexuality were presented to me were, and how I interpreted them at that time (how much I trusted the people presenting them to me, how much distress or despair I was in at the time) formed my sexuality at that time, as opposed to some inherit nature that I had all along.  What leads the young person to sexuality is fear of something deeply human and personal (the fear of the call to duty of hard tasks, the constant threat of death, the natural inequalities between people’s abilites and interests, the inherit battle between good and evil within oneself, the natural ignorances we find ourselves in, etc.), and the desperation to fall into an existence where the deep fear, which are irreconcilable in a godless world, can be sacrificed for a placatable fear that can be terminated in some near future by some forever-promised, hypothetical, and social-political change (the fear of being on the receptive end of mean treament, of people in power, of society’s treatment, of what other people will allow me to do etc.). 

Once I removed my fixed interpretation of the external ideas that were presented to me and  that I incorporated into self-speak out of fear, the sexuality also went away. I.e., once I expanded my perspective on the world, the “image” of my problems, foregrounded against the external sexuality-projection, became a singularity, and new “images” began to arise. Example: I once came to perceive my neighbor’s love for learning forgegrounded against his natural environment. Another example: I once came to perceive my neighbor’s struggle with loneliness foregrounded against the communal isolation brought about by this nation’s protective measures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Once I perceived these new images, which were based in equal, perhaps more, freedom and truth, then it became apparent to me that the “image” that had plagued me before was one of the solicitor’s complex; it was arbitrarily contrived and it could be arbitrarily redefined, simply through the willful disregarding the prophecy, and the issuing in of new life. Furthermore, to “go back into” the previous self-image would be an unstable existence. The human lifetime is a positivity. What we do leaves imprints on our bodies, our memories, and our selves. “Undoing change" is a misnomer. Coffee cannot be unmixed; wind cannot have not blown. "Undoing change" is like wearing old clothes, the whole time knowing in the bones that the clothes are out-worn. My history will always be history; my realizations my realizations; imprinted onto me in the cause-effect chain that issues me into the next decision-making juncture of my life.