Sex, lies and videotape, part two

This is not going to be an easy write up, partly due to the physical damage ‘m trying to cope with.

To start off with, let me link to the tittle. In the movie “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” (1989), a sexually repressed woman’s husband is having an affair with her sister. The arrival of a visitor with a rather unusual video taping fetish changes everything.

My story is even more bizarre. Unfortunately, Belgian privacy laws prevent me from posting a coherent, comprehensive story.

From the Internet Movie Database files:
“Sex, Lies and Videotape will probably strike the average viewer as irredeemably degenerate, maybe even perverted, since voyeurism is still considered aberrant behavior. But as far as this film is concerned, that’s the appearance, not the reality. Whereas the drama revolves to a certain extent around the voyeuristic masturbation of an impotent man, the heart and soul of the film is an unrelenting, hard driving psychological siege on the biggest erogenous zone of all: the brain.

This film is about sex. But it’s not about the frothy swapping of fluids and feelings. It’s about honesty, without which one can’t have intimacy, which is to sexual stimulation what the water valve is to the hydrant. From beginning to end, we see this theme brought into focus by the dramatic contrast between two different relationships – the one based on lies and deceit, the other based upon honesty. And guess which one wins out in the long run?

In a sense, it’s what your mother and Sunday school teacher taught you all along. But what makes this movie way more interesting than your mother or Sunday school teacher is the level of honesty it suggests is necessary as the basis of a healthy relationship. Ann (Andy McDowell), for example, an acceptably moral person tells the voyeuristic masturbator `You got a problem.’ He replies by adding that he has a lot of problems. But, he says, `They belong to me.’

OK. So I’ve had a long running friendship with ****, my ex-diving instructor who, not really to my sheer astonishment, recently started basing part of our social contact on lies and deceit, as he feels that hiding his profoundly immoral behaviour is the only way to keep our ‘friendship’ intact. I know about his sexually extreme, deviant behaviour, I asked him to stop lying to me about it, to stop hurting the people who ignorantly will be physically harmed by his urges, to get help for his addiction. He won’t move. He’s living a lie, convinced that I’m unable to cope with the detailed, gruesome truth (in all honesty, I’m aware of those details, and it would turn my stomach if I were to focus on them). In a way, we’re both ignoring the utmost unpleasant reality. But he’s the “perpetrator”, I’m the ever more distant, ever more silent witness.

Having been a part of my social life for years makes it real hard to “just cut the cord”.

Quote: “Somehow, the openness about one’s problems renders their bile and poison ineffective. `Lilies that fester,’ said Shakespeare, `smell far worse than weeds.’ “

But if openness failed, where do you draw the line? [my photo: Antwerp riverbanks at night in July, not far away from my home]