Sexuality
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A Straight, Cis Dude’s Reflection on Pride
They make it all about sex. The sneerers and spitters, the blithe dismissers, the judging castigators who allege that being queer is just about who you rub your body parts against. Who you create orgasms with. The hatred is bound up with the sex. They simply hate and fear sex. The power of it, the vulnerability of it, the lack of control. And as they conflate queerness with sex, they hate, and fear queerness. Once upon a time, I dated a stripper. She was brilliant, graduate of a prestigious Eastern university, after which she had ridden a bicycle to California. She was an activist, a thinker. And a stripper, very…
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Aging, Intimacy and Atheopaganism
Intimacy is the gold standard of human relating. It is the authentic, vulnerable sharing of the inner worlds of those connecting with one another, and is a deeply nourishing, though sometimes scary experience. It is a human need; we thrive when we have it, and often suffer when we don’t. Under the Overculture, intimacy is usually conflated with sex, the idea being that the only times we are intimate and the only people with whom we are intimate are those we connect with in our sexual lives. This is a sad state of affairs, and one we should work to transcend. It is one of the places where our Atheopagan…
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GUEST POST: Just Talk to Each Other (About Sex)
by Alexandra Palmer Information about and illustrations of heterosexual cisgender vanilla sex are all many of us have in regards to formal education about sex. It is touted by some as the only sex one “should” be having unless they are at the very least a “pervert”. This hetero-cis-vanilla language we are given with which to explore our needs and desires leaves many of us feeling unwelcome and without a voice. The pressure we are under from cultural norms that disregard some sensations as valid forms of pleasure has been longstanding and influenced by history’s major religions. Attitudes are changing, however, and people are beginning to see beyond their own…
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Abuse, the Pagan Community, and Our Commitments
Sarah Anne Lawless, who published these two revelatory articles on her experiences of being sexually harassed and abused within the Pagan community (mostly in Canada and the Pacific Northwest), has now published a third piece. In it, she reports the truly horrifying blowback she received for daring to name this problem. Lawless has suffered financially, psychologically, and even legally simply because she had the unmitigated gall not to remain silent about abuses up to and including rape.* I wrote on this subject awhile back. It’s one of my most-read articles from this site, and engendered passionate arguments both pro and con my thesis: that Paganism must root out the baked-in…
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Inclusiveness Starts with Your Ideas
One of the ways Atheopaganism differs from many other Pagan paths is that we don’t have to go through endless parsings of “what gods are” or “what gods want”, nor seeking to overcome biases baked into traditions that arise from times and cultures where bigotries of various kinds were the norm (be they ancient Greece or Britain of the 1950s). I’m seeing much soul-searching in the Pagan community about this sort of thing recently: concern about the heteronormativity and gender essentialism of mainstream flavors of Wicca, for example. When you assert the existence of a (fully able-bodied, typically white, slender, young, heterosexual, cisgender and conventionally attractive) Goddess and a (similar) God as…
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Loving the World: An Atheopagan Sex Magic Primer for May Day (NSFW)
CONTENT WARNING: This post contains frank discussion of sexuality, and is meant for adults. If you’re not one, please stop reading and go elsewhere. … … … … … … … … Loving the World: An Atheopagan Sex Magic Primer for May Day (NSFW) Spring is often thought of as the season of sex. Trees and plants are flowering, birds are nesting, and the weather finally warms up enough that people wear less clothing and thoughts turn to desire. It’s now April, coming up on May Day, which is the Sabbath celebration the metaphorical meanings of which include sexuality, attainment of adulthood and celebration of sensual pleasures. This is a time-honored…
