PS051 - Music, Play, Privilige and Cultural Appropriation

Oct 6

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Episode: https://shows.acast.com/660e243b2f834f0017de9181/episodes/660e2440acbcaf00174d992c

Having just gotten back from a whirlwind trip of the American south, Lee reflects on scenes and music, and how they touch upon our hearts. The trip also took him to the WWII Museum, which spurs discussion of the fetishization of Asian cultures in the BDSM community. We look into white privilege in a kink context combined with playing with what might seem “hot” when we don’t understand its cultural context. Let’s root our erotic journeys into authenticity by bringing consciousness to our play.

Announcer:
BDSM and non-standard relationships, power exchange and polyamory, sacred sexuality and fetishes, as well as Simply Fun Kink.

You're listening to the Erotic Awakening Podcast Network.

Thank you.

Welcome to the Passion in Soul Podcast, an exploration of personal and interpersonal desire, faith, and connection.

Your host, international sexuality and spirituality author and educator, Lee Harrington of passioninsoul.com, will take you on a sultry and intellectual journey through the soul of intimate experience.

Take a moment and breathe deep, and get ready for an adventure.

This podcast is a chance to glimpse into the ever-increasing diverse world of alternative life.

The Passion and Soul podcast is intended for mature audiences.

If you are offended by adult topics or prohibited by law, we recommend you stop listening right now.

Lee:
Hello, fellow adventurers of sexuality and spirit, and welcome to the Passion and Soul podcast with Lee Harrington of passioninsoul.com.

I just got back from this crazy adventure that we build as the Dirty South Tour, but that I've been referring to the, oh my God, what the hell was I thinking?

Five states in four days.

Absolutely amazing.

I am working on a pet project where I'm trying to teach in all the states in the United States.

And I, by the end of this trip, I had now taught in 40 states, which is breathtaking to me, that so many places have opened up their hearts and their venues and their lives to have me come on in, share my thoughts and more than that, collect their stories, understand where they're coming from.

I taught in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, up to, up and over to Arkansas, and then finally to Memphis, Tennessee, before catching the City of New Orleans train back on down to New Orleans to fly on out.

Part of this adventure was getting to share these different communities with one another in Biloxi, Mississippi, seeing people come from two hours north of, from two hours north of Jacksonville, and people saying left and right, oh my God, I have not seen you since, such and such.

It was family reunions.

It was groups who have never worked together, coming together with one another, and me sharing the things that I've heard around the globe, and seeing faces look back and go, yeah, yeah, I've walked that path too.

Part of sharing these different communities with one another was literally getting to people, people to meet face to face that would have never met each other otherwise.

My friend Suge SJ.

Tucker, the delicious folk and world musician, activist, storyteller, and hands down lyricist of my life, so many times people have seen me perform to her work and she lights me up so passionately.

She was able, she lives out in Arkansas, and she was able to have her schedule match perfectly with mine that she got back from tour just in time for us to have breakfast with one another.

And I got her to meet people from Impact in Memphis as well as the Foundry in Little Rock.

And we all got to go hiking together up to Pinnacle Mountain.

And she gave me a new copy of Wonders, which is a wonderful album that made my heart sing because I got to appear with her and Cat Valente and Heath at a launch for one of the new Fairyland novels that Cat had written.

And I'd gotten to sing backup on some of these very songs that were on the album.

And after she left, the rest of us who were left, we decided to go to Heifer International Headquarters, which is an amazing charity doing great works all over the globe.

And as part of that experience, we plugged in the new album.

And people went, wow, she is not just an amazing human being, but her music is really beautiful.

And on the way over to Memphis, our drive, Laiga Vulan and I listened to an assortment of her music.

And seeing him say, tell Suge that I've fallen in love with her after we listened to a beautiful piece of the Valkyries that just is on my mix that says I need to cry for those times when I need to cry.

And this ballad is one of them.

So if any of you follow the link to listen to that song, be buckled up for crying after the ballad or maybe during it.

Now, part of that tour also involved going to play parties.

I had a chance to go when teaching on the Friday night at Les Bons Temps to their play party afterwards, as well as when I was at House Je Te Vois going to their play space and enjoying all of the deliciousness there, the delightful eye candy, sitting down with one of the representatives for NCSF, National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, and talking about one of the consent projects they're working on and enjoying great food, great company.

And in Mobile at Les Bons Temps, their play party was casual at first.

I was wrapping up my class, and then I went into the social area to see the food, right?

And I turned to the right, and there was this temple.

Now, I knew that Valentine, who was the host for the space, I knew he was pagan, like he talks about it, he shares it, but to see this temple all of a sudden, completely unexpected, in the sunk in space for this house that had been converted, that I locked eyes with Buddha and a bear that were both there on the mantel place, and my heart just froze and then melted and then exploded into this state of beauty, because I looked down onto the floor, and there was this couple that I knew setting up their scene.

They pulled out a stereo and set it down next to their space because there wasn't any music playing in that specific area, and they laid out a sheet on the ground and had a basket full of rope and other sensation toys.

They sat down and breathed with one another, and as they were ready, they hit play.

The song Same Love was one of the early ones that came on, and I was just taken up by the music, by this beauty, by the fact that it is all the same love and remembering when that piece by Macklemore and Mary Lambert came out and how beautiful it was, and I had forgotten about the song.

I got it stuck in my head like an earworm, that and Radioactive, which was another one of the pieces, I think, that played that night, or maybe I heard it soon after, playing in the car.

But here I was watching the scene, and it played back and forth at the music so well that it had been spun by the top to orchestrate this journey that they were taking with one another to the point that one of the other pairs of rope people that I'd spent time with during the time before this party and afterwards, and I ended up spending a chunk of time connecting with through the weekend, they pulled out their rope, watching the scene below.

And two steps up here they were, a piece of red rope in their hands that I knew she had handcrafted from her own sweat labor, her sweat equity invested in this journey with her lover.

And as the rope rocked back and forth, the wave hit the next couple that rocked back and forth.

And I went into the other room and grabbed my rope because I was there, rocked back and forth.

And I bound my ankles together, tied it up to my waist, closed my eyes as I wrapped line after line around my eyes, my head wrapped into a cage as I felt them in the pit, felt them at the top of the stairs, felt me, felt me, I felt me there in that moment.

And as I have talked about with a former podcast I did early last year called The Path of Rhythm, I'll include a link in the notes, I got to be with that music because the rhythm rocked me and the breathing of everybody else in the room rocked me.

The next day I was in Bluxy, New Orleans, then crashed the night for a very short night, and woke up and we drove north, seven and a half, eight hours up to Little Rock.

Great pair of people who make me smile, even though I just met them, and here we were sharing our life tales over greasy spoons, and on the way north we stopped at the Japanese Internment Camp.

On Thursday I had gone to the WWII Museum, and there was a Boundaries and Barbed Wires exhibit talking about the Japanese American experience during WWII.

And I remembered seeing George Takei's piece on what it was like to be in that internment camp between the ages of, I believe, five and ten, with his hand on his heart, saying, Pledge the allegiance to the American flag, and the American flag overhead, over those barbed wire fences, guards with guns pointed down on them while they tried to live their lives.

The lives and the pieces of it that hadn't been stolen away by the US government, millions upon millions of dollars taken away, families shattered and scars left upon not just their lives, but the lives of our entire country.

These pieces of shame that echo through the blood that when we say I pledge allegiance to the United States of America for the republic for which we stand, that we could not truly stand for because in that battle, the blood, literally the blood of African American soldiers and white soldiers were separated by the folks at the Red Cross so that we dare not combine our blood purity.

It is a scar we carry, just like other scars of our countries, our trails of tears that are still somewhere in the back of our collective conscience, or at least should be, this consciousness of what we've gone through.

When you stand at what was the internment camp, all that's left from the original is the graveyard, these sad little stones that tell the stories of those who didn't make it out, those whose bones rest in place and I hope rest in peace, though I don't know for sure, I can't know for sure, and the scale was profound.

There's a little fake guard tower that they built at the entryway.

The museum's nearby, but it was closed.

It was a Sunday, so all we could do was go and pay tribute and go and take a moment and reflect and be.

So if you ever go to that museum, please go down the road and see with your own eyes and place your hands on the dirt where nowadays there are cotton fields where once soldiers stood and people tried desperately to have lives they led.

The scale is massive that as you stand in the graveyard, you can see in the far distance a pipe coming up that was at where the hospital was and that wasn't even at the edge of the camp.

It kept going and the other direction the same distance and you can imagine 10,000 and more living there that they uprooted from California and up and down the west coast and sent them somewhere where if they ran they would have no allies.

That there was bitterness from the locals who were living in desperation, that were living in such a place of poverty that these were black people who still were in a degree of slavery themselves, trying desperately to live off the land where they had been uprooted themselves generations earlier and transplanted.

And though they had been approved the right to vote, had been approved to be people instead of parts of people, inside those walls guard by barbed wire, those people got three full meals a day.

Those people got an education.

And those outside did not.

That they were free, but they were not free in any way, shape or form.

And in this moment, in that moment, thinking about what it must be like to have been a Japanese American locked there, I realized I couldn't know.

I couldn't know because I didn't walk those steps.

I can go into a museum and see the artifacts and hear the stories, and I can ache.

I can ache, but that's not the same.

And there's a part of me that feels shame, sorrow, confusion.

I don't know from those pieces of me that fetishize Japanese culture that here I am, I wrote a book called Shibari You Can Use, for God's sake, that shows techniques to do rope bondage that is inspired by the rope work that came out of Hotojitsu and the Tokugawa area, that came out of people doing erotic work in their bedroom, that came into photography, that was then appropriated and combined with the work that was coming out of John Willey in the United States and appropriated by men who had come as guardians, they said, into Japan, but also oppressors, taking up women and making them into GI brides, scooping up these erotic ecstasies of the East and transporting them back to the United States, where we use words like oriental to describe, where we can't realize the difference it seems in the fetish community, where I see people wearing chengsam being tied up in Japanese rope and saying, oh, this is Japanese.

I'm like, chengsam, come on, we are talking about here Chinese wardrobe.

Can you not even tell the difference between these two cultures?

And no, the answer is they can't.

That it is scooped up by a white-skinned tribe that feels like it has no roots of its own, and it fetishizes that of others to treat it exotic and taboo.

That looks at tantra and goes, oh, it's a chance to be erotic.

No, tantra is a lot bigger of a topic than that, folks.

It's not just breathing and getting your haughty, naughty on.

I was touched recently when Deborah Addington said that she was engaged in the tantra of education, the mindfulness and walking that path of truth and awareness and seeing it as more than its pieces and parts.

And when people say, oh, we're engaging in sex magic because, oh, it's so naughty to do these things, isn't naughty in your culture?

The power of taboo is taboo because it is a taboo thing for you and your culture.

If you grow right now in a space where anal sex is a hot Thursday night, then it does not have the exact same type of battery fueling as it does for the high-ranking individuals of the OTO and other ceremonial magic groups back in the 1920s and 30s who used anal sex as a high form of battery, of energy raising, because doing that kind of thing just wasn't done.

And in doing so, it tapped into this European concept of what should not be done.

And in doing what should not be done, they lifted up this energy and their orgasms and power and awareness shook to the very base.

We don't get it.

We don't get it.

Take a moment and look at what it is that you don't get.

Because after hearing that song Same Love, I hopped on to iTunes to download it.

And there was Macklemore's earlier album and a song called White Privilege.

I was shaken up.

I was really hit home when I heard the lyrics.

White kids with do-rags trying to practice their accents from the suburbs to the upper class, mastering a language.

But hip hop is not just memorizing words.

It's rooted in authenticity, something you literally can't learn.

And it reminded me of people tying up their girlfriends in kimono and blindfolding them with a piece of white fabric with blue polka dots on it, or gagging them with that same piece and taking photos and saying, Isn't it so pretty?

Because they don't get it, that that piece of fabric was a dish rag in the culture it came from.

That it's not just some pretty random piece of fabric, that it is a story of humiliation and objectification, and that it is a thing that we can't get because we weren't raised in that culture.

That piece of fabric is not just some pretty piece of fabric.

It is a story of a generation.

It is their mother drying off dishes and imagining them picking up that piece and binding it around their face.

If we are to develop and have a bondage culture that is our own, that pulls upon these heartstrings, why not look at using that dirty dish towel out of our own kitchen?

Picking up that piece covered in an apple pie recipe with crumbs from the roast beef we cooked last night and shoving that into our lover's mouth.

Then we can start maybe to understand a piece of it, but we didn't even grow up in that culture and cannot understand the power of humiliation and shame in that culture.

We could put it within the context of our own, but we are coming from a place that is not their place.

There is a difference between us choosing to pretend to be cowboys and a group of people in Berlin choosing to be cowboys because they think it's a hot, pretty thing to do a schoolgirl scene being captured by the jock, because it's not part of their culture.

It's just the trappings they're in.

And that was a scene, a performance that I know Zamil did at a club in Berlin because it was the trappings.

It was pretty.

But it's different if you were an American schoolgirl.

It's different if you were that cheerleader who was raped underneath the bleachers by that jock who you couldn't get away from.

It's a different story.

You are pulling upon a different story.

It is not our story to pull upon.

It is a different tale.

And to have us do a piece of no theater at ShibariCon when we have not been trained in no theater, though we do not understand its sorrow and pain coming out of WWII and the movement of the modern dance within that culture, we don't get why it's happening in that way.

When we are currently living in a kink world where there is still things like the Blackface incident that happened at the Eagle that I will be posting a link to for those who don't know about it, if you don't see that these things are still happening, we need to have a conversation.

We really need to have a conversation.

There is a difference between somebody who is of African American descent choosing to do a race play scene involving KKK outfits and people fetishizing those exact same outfits who are coming from the other side of the coin.

It's different.

Now, in the book I edited, Spirit of Desire, Mollena Williams has a short story whose name even hurts to say, even though I admit it is a word that has slipped out of my mouth before because it's buried somewhere inside me because of the culture I was raised in.

I have no doubt.

I do not consider myself a racist in any way, shape or form, but at the same time this word is there.

It is a word of pain.

It is a word that is somewhere buried inside me, and that word is nigger.

And I know I'm not supposed to say that word, but her story is called Another Dead Nigger.

And if I do not admit that I am a white person here in America who is going to say that word on the radio, then we got a problem here.

We are living currently in the age of Ferguson, where we are, by the time this comes out in week 8 of protests, where young black men are dying left and right, and where white men are given a pass and said, oh, he has a mental illness, it's okay, we'll put him in a mental institution for life, or let him out early for, I don't know, gunning down people in a movie theater.

But if it's a young black man, it's a separate issue.

But in her story, Mollena Williams ends up talking about wanting to do a race-based scene, that she negotiated it ahead of time, that she thought it was going to be hot.

And in the middle of it, she forgot it was a role-playing scene.

There was a lot of other stuff going on in the scene that put her into this altered state of consciousness that took it out of being a hot scene into being something else.

And she talks during the story about what it's like as a young African-American girl to hear that word for the first time, to hear that word for the first time.

And when I read that story, there was a piece of me that got it in the same way that when I was at the World War II Museum in New Orleans and I saw the severed heads on tanks in Indochina that the Americans put on their own tanks as they were killing people in those killing fields.

That I got it in a different way.

Again, I can never know the same pain.

I can't.

I just can't.

And I know that.

But at the same time, I got it a little bit more at least.

I was able to place it in a bigger context.

But in the middle of that scene, she forgot it wasn't a role playing scene.

And that puts those who were doing the scene with her into a different place, a different experience.

That there is something that transforms inside the mind.

That it really does make a difference where we're coming from in these scenes.

That there is a difference when we choose to be what used to be jokingly called back in 2000 or so, 2004, the kimono boys.

For people who were around in the rope community back then, you know what I'm talking about.

Those white guys who show up in that poorly fitting hakama with a kimono on top, where it's like, okay, you're not getting the story of this fashion.

You're mixing and matching here in a way that's really, really confusing culturally.

And where's that line?

Where's the line when I write a book called Shibari You Can Use?

And I say at the beginning that it's not accurate to the culture that it's coming from, but I'm using this word.

And mind you, even Shibari is a word that is not kimbaku.

I am not teaching kimbaku.

I am doing work based on what I saw Eddie and James Mogul doing back in 1996 and 7 where they were getting copies of various bondage magazines like SM Sniper through the mail and deconstructing them and reconstructing them through the eyes of American engineering and bondage fetishism.

It's not the same as lineages that have been passed down.

It's just not.

And I honor and acknowledge that.

And I even say so in my books because it's important that though I have fallen in love with the aesthetics therein, I don't know the fullness of that cultural story and never can because I didn't grow up in that culture.

I grew up in the culture I'm in.

I can't even understand the full culture of what's happening in other parts of the United States because though I was born in Boston, raised in Western Washington, and I have pieces of my childhood in Hawaii and Montana, that's not the same.

It's not the same.

Though I have spent chunks of time in England, it's not the same.

I only lived in Arizona for two years.

I can't understand what it's like to be someone stopped because of the fact that they have brown skin.

I can't because I glow white and I own that I live in a world of white privilege.

And more than that, since my gender transition, I live in a world of white male privilege.

I live in a world of white male privilege.

I might be able to translate back to the first 25 years of my life where I lived as a woman, and I can get it, but I'm not seen the same way anymore.

Now, I walk with you, my Jew, being read as a gay man oftentimes, even when I have my female partner at my side.

So it's another form of oppression that I do get.

I come with my own stories.

I come with my own pain.

And when I appropriate these things, it is important that I have a consciousness there, that it is not the same.

I flash back to Midori teaching a class at Kinkfest in Portland, Oregon, and she's talking about how people might do a Nazi role playing scene when we're talking about objectification and humiliation in this class.

And I was one of her demo bottoms balancing a glass of urine out of my gag that had a tray in front.

And one of the producers of the event stood on up and said, hey, just to let people know, we don't allow Nazi role playing scenes at our event.

And Midori asked, well, is it okay for me to wear a Japanese military uniform and have a Chinese slave boy in a bamboo cage and tie him up and beat him?

And the person who was helping around the event said, yeah, yeah, I don't see why that would be an issue.

And Midori stood up and said, the rape of fucking Nanking isn't good enough for you?

Because that producer didn't get that if what you're trying to do is not have events that speak of cultural pain and oppression, banning only Nazi scenes isn't going to do it.

Now, if what we're trying to do is to have events not feature things that are going to cause discomfort to the producers, own it.

I went to a play party in London once years ago where there was a rule of no witch-burning scenes.

You know what?

I bet there was a piece of cultural pain or discomfort that was held by the hosts of the event.

And if you're hosting an event, you have the right to draw those lines wherever you so choose.

But to say that it's because of not wanting to have pain and oppression scenes taking place, then let's look larger.

What are you appropriating?

What is its story?

Where is it coming from?

And if you're going to go there anyway, own it.

Acknowledge that you are playing with that dark pudding of the soul and know that there are people who actually worked and have lived in those places that might not be okay with it.

There are no easy answers to these conversations.

And sometimes, like that rope play, it will hit us wave after wave.

All at once and we feel like we're drowning in a tsunami, and other times we do something and it doesn't hit us until a couple of years later that that was kind of dickish.

And mind you, I like penises and I'm not using that word in a derogatory way in and of itself.

But that we realize what we did.

Let's look at what's happening around our own countries and in our own stories, what shadows we're carrying, and consider what play of that we want to make and what play of that we want to do.

Are we using the desires of others, the stories of others, the pain of others, because we think it's exotic?

And if so, are you objectifying, quote, those people?

Because when we start seeing people as objects is when we start not caring, not caring when Ferguson becomes acceptable.

And it's not.

It's not.

It's not.

So with that, I thank you for joining me.

For those who are interested in lots of different links that I mentioned and different groups and music and whatnot from SJ.

Tucker to Macklemore, stories by Mollena Williams to Shibari You Can Use, feel free to go over and explore the show notes or simply visit my website, passionandsoul.com and click on the podcast button.

You can subscribe to the podcast via the RSS feed, iTunes, or download the MP3s by visiting the show notes as well.

For those who are tuning in to my podcast for the first time, it's not always this heavy, but I'm wondering if October is just when I do this.

Last October, I talked about AIDS.

So maybe it's just what this liminal time of the fall is, this Samhain area and time.

And this has been the Passionandsoul podcast.

So until next time, stay cool, have fun, stay conscious, be authentically you and embrace your dreams.
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