![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
haptalaonNSFW grouching about sex imagery
It bothers me how heterosexual modern Thelema feels. You get all these images of Baphomet - bigendered Baphomet - as a sexual aggressor with a massive penis towering over a tiny naked babe, and it...
Aleister Bloody Crowley was bi in an era where that wasn't OK; my partner says he thinks Crowley heard "If you like cock it means you're one of the devil's brood" as a child and went "huh. Ok then :D".
He was also bi in an era with older ideas and language around sexuality. The idea that "all magicians are both masculine and feminine" would have struck him as a very queer one. The Victorian sexologists and early gay activists were describing male homosexuality as "having a female soul in a male body", probably not terms we'd use today. By the 30s, we had Quentin Crisp still writing that the goal of every homosexual was to have sex with real men (implying "homosexual man" was itself a third gender of sorts); and in the 70s, gay liberation movements adopted "we are the men we have been looking for" as an empowerment mantra, encouraging gay men to lust and love for other gay men.
So then you see stuff in Thelema about sex magic, and it gets teenage boys psyched about getting laid with hot witch babes, and Baphomet being portrayed in these aggressively worst-of-heterosexuality male-power-fantasy ways, and you just want to sit them down and explain to them that they will never become a great magician unless they take it up the ass. That Crowley's interpretation of "all mages are symbolically both male and female" almost certainly referred to active and passive anal intercourse, and the (itself problematic) idea that receptive anal sex is in some way "feminising". That therefore they should maybe think twice about portraying penetrative sex as violating and violent and angry and dominant, and creating a binaristic system in which they get to identify as powerful while relegating those around them to a submissive role. As Thelema, as envisaged and practiced by Aleister Bloody Crowley, expected everyone to experience "being a woman" for magical purposes.
None of my urges are cool. At least one of Crowley's co-workers left his abbey because of the pressure to participate in anal sex; and it's not good to carry on that tradition. Nor is it good to mobilise cultural homophobia to explain why misogyny is wrong to asshole straight dudes.
But. Seven hells it makes me cross, it makes me angry, I hate participating in spaces where I can feel meanings and dynamics being ascribed onto my body by the strangers around me, and damn it if it doesnt make me want to retaliate and turn that rapey gaze right back around; if people want to meet their spiritual-erotic needs by making me their symbolic/actual sex receptacle/"sacred vessel" whenever I walk into a room, I want them to know that they too make an excellent vessel; I want Baphomet to be reclaimed as a queer body, and sacred gender binaries to be experienced as queer power traditions; and basically I want to be able to engage with occult-tradition texts without feeling my fellow practicioners looming over me to have a wank.
(Really, the core problem is "cultural misogyny", and the way that all forms of female sexual expression are in some way disempowering, because our society and culture just doesn't have any room where it can be empowered and not at risk of being fetishised or warped in some way)
(I wrote a longer piece on this I'll republish it in a bit)
There's just so much there in Thelemy about sacred sex, gender and the bodu - originally written for bi and gay men, but with some tweaking for non-binary and intersex people and lesbian/bi women, and even binary trans people if they have certain approaches to their gender. That seeing it reduced to het boy rape fantasies feels violating even when just doing a bloody google image search, let alone participating with others. Grump grump grump.
It bothers me how heterosexual modern Thelema feels. You get all these images of Baphomet - bigendered Baphomet - as a sexual aggressor with a massive penis towering over a tiny naked babe, and it...
Aleister Bloody Crowley was bi in an era where that wasn't OK; my partner says he thinks Crowley heard "If you like cock it means you're one of the devil's brood" as a child and went "huh. Ok then :D".
He was also bi in an era with older ideas and language around sexuality. The idea that "all magicians are both masculine and feminine" would have struck him as a very queer one. The Victorian sexologists and early gay activists were describing male homosexuality as "having a female soul in a male body", probably not terms we'd use today. By the 30s, we had Quentin Crisp still writing that the goal of every homosexual was to have sex with real men (implying "homosexual man" was itself a third gender of sorts); and in the 70s, gay liberation movements adopted "we are the men we have been looking for" as an empowerment mantra, encouraging gay men to lust and love for other gay men.
So then you see stuff in Thelema about sex magic, and it gets teenage boys psyched about getting laid with hot witch babes, and Baphomet being portrayed in these aggressively worst-of-heterosexuality male-power-fantasy ways, and you just want to sit them down and explain to them that they will never become a great magician unless they take it up the ass. That Crowley's interpretation of "all mages are symbolically both male and female" almost certainly referred to active and passive anal intercourse, and the (itself problematic) idea that receptive anal sex is in some way "feminising". That therefore they should maybe think twice about portraying penetrative sex as violating and violent and angry and dominant, and creating a binaristic system in which they get to identify as powerful while relegating those around them to a submissive role. As Thelema, as envisaged and practiced by Aleister Bloody Crowley, expected everyone to experience "being a woman" for magical purposes.
None of my urges are cool. At least one of Crowley's co-workers left his abbey because of the pressure to participate in anal sex; and it's not good to carry on that tradition. Nor is it good to mobilise cultural homophobia to explain why misogyny is wrong to asshole straight dudes.
But. Seven hells it makes me cross, it makes me angry, I hate participating in spaces where I can feel meanings and dynamics being ascribed onto my body by the strangers around me, and damn it if it doesnt make me want to retaliate and turn that rapey gaze right back around; if people want to meet their spiritual-erotic needs by making me their symbolic/actual sex receptacle/"sacred vessel" whenever I walk into a room, I want them to know that they too make an excellent vessel; I want Baphomet to be reclaimed as a queer body, and sacred gender binaries to be experienced as queer power traditions; and basically I want to be able to engage with occult-tradition texts without feeling my fellow practicioners looming over me to have a wank.
(Really, the core problem is "cultural misogyny", and the way that all forms of female sexual expression are in some way disempowering, because our society and culture just doesn't have any room where it can be empowered and not at risk of being fetishised or warped in some way)
(I wrote a longer piece on this I'll republish it in a bit)
There's just so much there in Thelemy about sacred sex, gender and the bodu - originally written for bi and gay men, but with some tweaking for non-binary and intersex people and lesbian/bi women, and even binary trans people if they have certain approaches to their gender. That seeing it reduced to het boy rape fantasies feels violating even when just doing a bloody google image search, let alone participating with others. Grump grump grump.
