Hedonistic Liberation

Am I really going to dedicate my life to something as shallow as sex?

Am I really going to make books, poetry, art, content, spells, and sessions all for the most base and hedonistic quality of humans: Pleasure?

Fuck yeah, I am!

Pleasure is not hedonism, it is liberation. Or perhaps both.

I purposefully refer to much of my work as “masturbatory”. I often make art of myself. Seeing male artists use women as the muses through which they express their emotions is what inspires me.

I often wield the very male gaze that I live within as a way of coping with being sexualized from a young age.

That mechanism in my creative work is a type of alchemy that heals me and helps me understand how and why the world feels like it does to me.

Within this creative work is a furnace that burns in my belly: My magical practice.

It is equal parts study, ritual, and receptivity. It informs and motivates me. I find seeking wisdom through pleasure is effective, intense, and fun as hell.

It pains me to see that people still project all of the sexual trauma we hold in our bodies into the world.

I see the conspiracy theories about drag queens grooming kids and politicians trafficking children. Meanwhile, these things are far more likely to occur within a family. These atrocities getting sent outward into the news cycle (effectively manipulating us with the very trauma that lives inside all of our bodies) are realities for so many people I know.

It happens when family members take advantage of the silence we have around consent and sex. It happens when churches, offices, and communities put the long-standing tradition of hurting people over the safety of the most vulnerable.

Every day, I see more posts about people breaking generational patterns around these subjects. Parents are educating their kids, family members are being called out, and communities that worship charming abusers are burning it all to the ground. The world is changing and it is hard.

It is hard to reconcile our own experiences with the evolving society. It is grief work as much as it is pleasure work to see a world change before our eyes.

Even if we desire change toward a better society, we may still cling to the lies that got us here in the first place:

Sex is bad. Pleasure is hedonistic. Desire is to be feared. People that make mistakes deserve to suffer. Masturbation is dirty. Our souls need saving to be worthy of blessings.

The list goes on.

We carry the things that happened to us and the things that happened to our ancestors. We carry centuries of anti-sex, anti-pleasure, anti-human-desires in our bodies. We see movies, shows, news segments, tweets, and so on… And we are too busy, too sad, and too overwhelmed to tap back into what we truly believe about love, sex, and pleasure.

Most of us do not have the skills to listen to the whispers of our bodies in this noisy world until it has become a raging scream.

Some of us can’t even think the word “pleasure” without recoiling in fear or disgust. Some of us cannot imagine touching our own bodies with love and tenderness. Some of us cannot imagine loving a person we fuck.

We learn the shame. We internalize what happens to our bodies. We take in the world around us. And we remain in cycles of hurt.

I do not think hedonism is so excessive that is a problem.

I think it is our dependence and comfort in this pain of disconnection.

It is something the magic can help us undo.

________________

Tools for sex magic @ snipfeed.co/astraadara