Category: Pilgrim’s Progress (Pagan Edition)

So, just some thoughts.

The issue of lacking social terminology to define my own sexual identity and preferences for expression is pretty perennial for me. For some context, I grew up in a town known (at least in that general set of townships) for being a *relatively* inclusive place… we were one of the early towns in our part of the state to have a rainbow painted crosswalk etc. However, the language of most parents and highschoolers I encountered was not only highly heteronormative but also rather homophobic and … honestly well ignorant of anything resembling fluiditiy of identity, expression, or lived experience. I and my friends spent a lot of time watching and attending Rocky Horror but didn’t have access to too much else… and most understandings of sexual expression were contextualised along lines of ‘promiscuity’ rather than a more sex-positive outlook.

My college – at least at that time – was fairly unusual in that there were no bathrooms segregated by gender identity. All dorms, bathrooms, and shower areas were gender neutral. Asking for pronouns was considered a totally run of the mill polite thing to do. People had classes to go to and life to explore and nobody gave a shit whether you were prone to monogamy or followed any specific paradigm of any kind at all. Coming back to my home town/area for work after college was a massive culture shock.

Years later, I remember having a conversation with my BIL over pints about how the secondary school one of his kids was attending was talking to the parents about possibly introducing gender neutral bathrooms and (at the time) he was really against it for a man who seemed only to have unanswered questions. A lot of ‘what if’s’… to which I was able to say, ‘Well, I can tell you from personal experience [insert anecdotal answer here]… and that was 10 years ago.”

The same night (over more pints) the discussion around consent came up. It was a topic newly in circulation at the time (the #metoo movement had arrived in the awareness of the slightly older generation in Ireland by then) and I heard the usual stock answers of ‘Isn’t it a huge turn off to just ask someone if you can kiss them?”

Jesus CHRIST on a split banana, I had things to say.

So here’s my perspective on the benefits of promoting diversified vocabulary along with some musings on my own identity.

Personal preference is like a favourite colour. We don’t have bathrooms only for those who pick green. We don’t care if someone used to be purple but now they’re silver. We don’t have to have full blown personal crises if ‘suddenly’ we don’t get to assume everyone loves blue. You can ask or be interested in the world… and you will find that some people *do* love blue. Just blue. Nothing but blue. Other people don’t care about blue but they’ve noticed they like blue things… blueberries (with a purple tinge), the sky in late summer, the dark slate blue of the glistening sea. Other people will verge more toward periwinkle. Other people will swear that they don’t mind blue but they’d NEVER wear it… and still other people will be somewhere else in the colour wheel entirely and, as a matter of fact, don’t engage with cool colour shades at all.

What matters (of course, this is not revolutionary) is that we give people language and vocabulary while also communicating that words are allowed to be an approximation.

So, personally, I find very little terminology to express what I feel I am in social terms. Usually this doesn’t bother me – I benefit from a lot of intersectional forms of privilege. But it really irks me when it comes to the erasure of daily lived nuance.

In the past, lacking better words, I would have described myself as a ‘nympho’ or ‘hypersexual’. I’ve been ‘boy crazy’ since I was 5 but my understanding of (loosely speaking socially male or socially masculine) beauty is highly sensory in nature. I love line, texture, movement, colour. I love expression. I love embodiment. And I love these things physically and sexually… My creative impulse is strong, constant, and sexually expressive. It’s amazing I’ve ever been called a ‘tease’ given that I am and always have been ‘easy’ as fuck.

As a teen, there were certain partners (and especially one particular individual) who would have used this term ‘tease’ but at the same time were operating on the assumption that there was no such thing as a ‘woman’ who just said ‘yep! let’s go’ if you asked her directly if she’d be down for various things. They’d resort to indirect forms of emotional manipulation – verging on coersion (pouring my drinks etc.) – to get me to ‘put out’…when all they had to do was just ask and we’d have gotten there already. If anything, messing with my boundaries made me clam up. Once, I can remember literally already being naked by the time someone felt they needed to get me more drunk…which had the effect of making me put my clothes back on and call my mother to come pick me up. For the record, we still did it generally, just not that night. My attitude has always been – don’t insult my intelligence, it’s a turn off.

I struggled to find concise terminology for my own identity. I have a long and dark history of ED so some of this is complicated by learned shame around my natural embodied reality. In a recent google search, trying to find something other than ‘hypersexual’ (which comes with connotations of compulsion and addiction in the clinical sense, which doesn’t apply to me) I came across an article where someone invented the term “flammasexual” to imply easily ignited and with gusto. Like, frequently and merrily aflame with sexual impulse and desire. Sex like spiritual fire in the solar plexis. Sensory experience like visionary ecstasy in the finger tips. Magic pouring from carnal portals.

If we think of that in ‘Wands’ terms, I think that makes excellent sense. It makes for a good descriptor.

However, if we then turn to qualifying identity in ‘romantic’ terms… I’m not sure I have a suitable word yet. I don’t always know what ‘romantic’ means. For me, it’s never been proposals, rings, monogamy by default, roses and candlelit dinners. I’m more of a ‘explore an old crypt with a loved one and talk enthusiastically about medieval mysticism over pints later’ kind of person. A let’s live through things together and have fun kind of person. These are things one can do with friends. So, for me, my ‘romantic’ relationship is down to longevity of closeness, dedication to mutual development and growth, shared language, and… sex! Certainly I think there is a romanticism to how friendship at least *can* work. I really enjoy seeing the sensory beauty of my friends. I love seeing the colour and temperature in someone’s face or the way their hair sticks up in the wind. I love the suddenness of some people’s humour or the gentle slow burn of a joke that takes ages to be gotten in full. And the level of disappointment I feel when someone I thought was a friend turns and all but says “yea we share interests but I’ve decided to be mean to you about something or to forget that you matter” cuts deep… Perhaps, I romanticise friendship too much then?

So, personally, I understand a romantic perspective on life… I understand romanticism… but I’ve never overtly linked them with sexual interaction and expression. They can and do co-occur but they’re not interdependent. Would that be… ‘aroflux’? Or ‘abroromantic’? One term seems to emphasise the fluctuation and the other the romanticism… Neither have ever been as constant a part of my identity as sexual desire, attraction, expression, and sensory experience.

I’ve been romantically in love with fictional characters (‘fictoromantic’) with whom I can’t ‘consummate’ anything except on the astral so… Thoughts in the comments if you know terms that approximate what I’m trying to get at here!

Is ‘Gomez & Morticia/Laszlo & Nadja with a healthy dose of Leonard Cohen’s carnal mysticism thrown in’ a sexual/romantic identity? Because if so, that’s what I’d align with best.

Lastly, the emphasis for me has always been on clear, useful, and honest communication. On not pushing boundaries where they aren’t willing to go. Perhaps this is because I am autistic and am oriented toward seeking clarity over hoping I can risk passing something off as smooth and cool.

A final example of what I mean. I had a conversation recently around the lack of opportunity and cultural permission to speak openly about things – especially as a non-binary* person with what is often perceived as a feminine style of dress. (The binary is a system very few benefit from, if anyone really, so for clarity I am xenine/xenogender – my pronouns are they/them.) My marriage is also ethically non-monogamous (in our case, open sexually but not romantically – so actually not polyamorous, specifically.) As an introvert who has been in the same romantic relationship for over 16 years and is now socially perceived as an ‘ageing woman’… there aren’t many people who get to hear the way I talk about things on a natural daily level or understand that my worldview doesn’t necessarily match their assumptions.

In this example, a person was surprised to hear that I don’t emphasise monogamy by default and that I see no practical use for society being so rigidly founded on monogamous partnership. The ‘polyamory is just an excuse to cheat’ clause came up and I said NO – polyamory [or any other non-monogamous relationship structure] is not cheating because it’s founded on open communication and consent.’ If a person enters, say, in to a relationship on the explicit understanding that their consent is founded on a condition of exclusivity, then their partner ‘cheats’ in so far as they violate those terms for consent. In this case, if ‘the lads’ (mates of the person I was talking to) have sex with someone else (sticking with the sex-based example here) knowing their wives are not okay with it and then return home to conceal that truth… they are tampering with the conditions of her consent. Could not this kind of problem be avoided if we placed less automated emphasis on ‘everyone should get married, in specifically this kind of ceremony, in this one kind of partnership, spending this certain amount of money, within this narrow range of ages regardless of inclination or practical maturity…so we can all complain of the ball and chain later like it’s some kind of rite of passage!?”

I value art and card based divination. I value witchcraft… I value the power and embodiment that witchcraft and paganism have helped me teach myself. At some point I may talk explicitly about how my devotion to the Morrígan plays a role in this. But I do not value exclusively ‘sanitised’ imagery, absence of physical diversity, rigid gender essentialism and so on. People of course do their shadow work and come to terms with different worldviews at difference paces and on their own journeys… Tarot meanings and symbolism must reflect that if it really is to be ‘the book of life’.

Is the tarot capable? Only as capable as we think we are…

~ Saoirse

* Specifically, xenogender. (Here are some explanatory links: Xenogender – Gender Wiki & Xenogender – Nonbinary Wiki)