Don't Hug Me and other things we don't do
The whole business
of eroticism is to destroy the self-contained character of the
participators as they are in their normal lives.
Don't Hug Me I'm Scared is a youtube video with 22 million views.
I am admittedly, screwy, but I think DHMIS has 22 million views because it follows a basic structure of human rituals regarding the sacred and profane.
Keeping Naravé pigs in northern Malakula, however, must have played a significant role in the early peoples' lives as was evident when a prominent Vao villager took me on a two hour walk into the bush, to a "Long forgotten" sacred "Taboo" place. Here he showed a lifesize, hand-crafted stone pig, with tusks. He related to me that this pig had been carved by his ancestors "many, many years before". Upon even closer examination I was excited to find out that this pig was indeed a hermaphrodite. This was to be my first introduction to tangible evidence of the existence of these unique aberrations.
Societies that consider hermaphrodism sacred, are really just saying there's men and women, except when there's not, just like they say we don't kill except when we sacrifice, we don't have sex except when we're married.
All moments of sacrality, wether it's surgery, sex, religion, psychosis, drugs, killing, follows a rythm of stepping into the sacred, loosing yourself there, experiencing something violent that cannot belong to ordinary society, and then stepping back.
A religious ritual, like a Mass, literally follow the pattern of Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, or, forgive me, the sexual act. There's a built up, DHMIS even has a part where an authoratative teacher lays down the sacred rules for "the creative act," a moment of complete boundary breaking, death, climax, continuity, and then a sudden conclusion of "let's all agree to never do that again."
Fifty Shades