Hey, I was just looking at Josh Tenpenny's friends page and it looks like BS sent most of itself out again. I apologize to anyone who feeds BarkinShaman off of Live Journal. In preparation for making my next set of hard-copy back-ups of BS I went though and screwed around with the formatting of all the posts and for some gods unknown reason Blogger decided to send it out again.
sorry sorry sorry
-Wintersong
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Let’s Talk About “Sex” Baby…
I’d like to start by making a specific point crystal clear. People who know me well (or I suppose have ever been in a room with me) will find this truth to be self-evident, but I’ll state it anyway:
I really like sex.
However, circumstances have led me to an interesting question, namely “what is sex?” Everyone thinks that they know the answer, and that everyone else’s answers are the same as theirs. It’s just not true.
I am going to be teaching a workshop at Dark Odyssey Spring Fire this April on how to have ethical erotic play that includes spooky foo. As I’ve been thinking about my workshop, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the nature of sex. For instance, and this will be too much info for some of you, I do not have anal sex with my husband. It is a source of some discontent on my part, but for reasons of his own this particular area of sexuality is off limits with him.
Some would argue that this means that Summer and I have not had sex in almost two years. I would strongly disagree. We have a lot of sex; we just don’t have that particular type of sex. However, if your idea of “sex” is based on the *insert tab A into slot B* model than you could make the argument that we have been having doesn’t count.
Even the *tab A slot B* world view has its problems. How for instance to you define what tab A or slot B even is. Many conservative arguments against gays are based on the idea that the only true sex is the penis-in-vagina variety. President Clinton brought the question of whether oral sex counts into the public consciousness. I think it is safe to say that now, over a decade later; the question has yet to be resolved in the public sphere.
It could be argued that the oral sex issue has been beaten to death. Let’s try less familiar territory. In gay sex there is a practice called “docking” in which an intact (not circumcised) man rolls his foreskin over the head of his partner’s penis. There is a tab A and a slot(ish) B involved, but is this “sex” in such a literalist worldview? I somehow doubt the current president of the
I suspect that many of the readers of Barking Shaman discarded the *tab A slot B* concept some time ago. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they have a better grasp of what sex is.
The magnificent Lee “Bridgett” Harrington passed on this definition of sex from one of hir partners: “Did someone get off? If yes, then it was sex.” I must admit that there is an alluring elegance to the simplicity of this definition. I think it is safe to say that in most contexts it can be applied without problem. However, just in the course of my conversation with Lee, we found some circumstances this definition doesn’t quite cover.
The first and perhaps most obvious is the case of professional sex workers. If a prostitute or porn star has professional sex and someone comes, the sex worker may not really consider the experience “sex” even if they were the party orgasming.
Similarly, there are situations where one activity, even with the same people involved, can be sex one time and not another. For instance, take CBT. If, as a shaman, I engage in some form of genital torture with another person as part of a sacred endurance ritual, I would not call it sex. However, if I was shoving needles through someone’s dick to get him (or me) off, that would be different, even though the act and the participants might be the same.
The question of what constitutes sex is largely academic for most people. However, for folks involved in the BDSM or Kink communities the question takes on greater import because the lines are more blurry. A friend of a friend is a serious dom who is in a relationship with a woman who is not interested in BDSM at all. They have had several conversations about whether it is ok for him to go to play parties and flog other women. He had to explain to his partner that for him, this was a form of “sex,” and if she was going to allow him to go play in that way she needed to first understand that. It took time for her to understand what he was saying because she couldn’t imagine getting off on what to her was a non-sexual activity.
Even outside of these communities the question is not always as straight forward as we might think. In college I knew a young woman who broke up with her boyfriend because she repeatedly caught him cheating on her. What makes this weird in my mind is that he was cheating on her with himself. In this young woman’s word view, the fact that her boyfriend masturbated was a betrayal of their relationship and constituted cheating. Most of the people I am close with are rather sexually open (some would say debauched) and to us this is a crazy idea. Neither I, nor my friends can imagine telling a young man that he can’t whack off, but then we don’t really considered masturbation to be “sex” in the same way that this young woman did.
Clearly this isn’t a question that will be answered here today. I could probably write at length about how I personally define sex, but what would the point be. While we all may have different ideas of what sex is, we should each make an effort to understand our own internal process on this subject. Gaining a better idea of what we think of as “sex” will help us to understand ourselves and in some ways be more tolerant of those around us. Defining our personal concept of sex and sexuality makes it clear that we need to remember not to assume that other people share our definitions. Anything you can think of someone, somewhere, probably gets off on it.
That’s part of what makes it all so much fun.
On the Edge of the Village
Readers of Barking Shaman are familiar with my questioning of identity. The very first BS post was about the hard-to-define nature of my personal identity.
As I have written about before, most notably in “Undercover :-)” the eclectic nature of my life makes my interactions with other people simultaneously easy and hard. In this essay, I’ll be looking at that subject from a different perspective.
“Outsider” is a word that has defined my sense of self to some degree or another for my entire life. It is a role in society that had become familiar to me before the spooky shit even became a notable part of who I am. Being the barking guy sets one out as different pretty quickly. Being the barking, overweight, nerdy, gay (and flaming) guy takes that to a whole new level. Once the gods got involved it went to another level still.
However, even before the spooky crap, I discovered that there is a real power to being on the outside. Being the flaming barking kid added a new set of social complications, but it also removed a significant number of social pressures as well. Once the option of fitting in is no longer on the table there is really no obstacle to being you. If some of my friends in high school enjoyed my company because of the novelty of being around someone who regularly screamed about Flying Penis Man in the mall, well there were many more who just liked that I pretty much had no need to try to hide who I was.
Once the gods got involved though, things got far more complex. Even in a historical context, the shaman is almost always an outsider. The title of this post is a reference to the fact that in many tribal communities the shaman’s home was on the outskirts of the village far from other people’s homes. In my opinion, adjusting to this role is one of the most common reasons that people fail to make it through shaman sickness. Unfortunately, failing to make it through shaman sickness often involves dying or at least going totally bat-shit crazy.
Living where my family does (while being who we are), has gotten me thinking a good bit about the subject of being outsiders. The addition of several taboos, some specific to one or another of us, others applying to all three of us, have complicated our existence in
I suppose that a fairer question would have been to ask whether there is a spiritual value to being an outsider. However, part of being a spirit worker is accepting that sometimes the gods know what they are doing. Since the condition in question seems to be so prevalent in both modern and historical traditions of spirit work, I’ll work from the perspective that there is some reason.
The first and foremost reason I believe that the universe makes us different from society is that if we are going to be doing spooky work it helps not to give a shit that we are doing weird spooky work. If the only way we were set apart was that we were doing spirit work we could easily come to resent the work for setting us apart. As this would be counter-productive from the perspective of the gods, it makes sense for us to be set apart in other ways as well.
Witness the prevalence of body modification in the spirit work community. A significant number of spirit workers I know or have worked with have in some way modified there bodies in the service of the gods. In my own case, I have tattoos, a brand on my leg, and stretched piercings. I can explain the spiritual reasons behind each mod. While tattoos are perhaps the most common body mod I have seen among spirit workers, they are far from the only ones. Most of the modified spirit workers I know are required by their patrons to explain the spiritual significance of their body mods if asked, further setting them apart. A permanent body modification also makes it harder to tell the universe to f-off and try to leave the spooky shit behind. Other ways I’ve seen spirit workers set apart include the prevalence of non-traditional professions, relationships, gender-identity, and sexual practices.
But aside from making it more palatable to be doing this weird spooky crap, is there power to be found in the role of the “outsider?” I think that there is. For one thing, many of us find ourselves in the position of ministering to other people. The outsider perspective can be a valuable tool in doing that kind of work. Being an outsider also makes it easier in my opinion to be honest with clients, even when being honest means being brutal. It can also be important to be recognized as “different” by people who come to us for spirit work. There aren’t any Master’s Degrees in being a shaman (none that count at least) yet people need to feel that a spirit worker is “qualified” the way that they expect their doctor or therapist to be qualified. Being perceived as different and spooky can in a strange way make people feel more comfortable and confident in our skills.
I’d like to put forth a theory though. I believe that being an outsider in society in one way or another makes the literal working with the spirits or gods easier. The non-human are the ultimate outsiders in society. Being already disconnected in some way from other people makes it easier to make the jump to working with the spirit world. I also think it makes us more trustworthy to the spirits. In a more specific example, the fact that as a shaman I am “dead” in some not-small part is an essential component for me in my interactions with the literal dead.
I believe that accepting the idea that being different has spiritual and magical value, rather than just being another difficult side effect of this kind of work, is essential to having a good attitude toward the work that the gods want done. Not that it is an easy thing to do. However, the gods have amply demonstrated their willingness to take options away. Witness the aforementioned taboos. As long being different is going to be a factor in many of our spiritual lives, we may as well work to see the bright side rather than engage in the mental and spiritual equivalent of closing our eyes, spreading our legs and thinking of England.
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