PS014 - PS021 - 8 Podcasts Update!
Hi everyone!I know it's been quiet here on my blog, but I am slowly starting to come out of hibernation. Part of why I have been out of touch here is that I have been rather talkative on the airwaves this year! I've had quite a few podcasts come out- you should check them out! Lee has now been on Erotic Awakening as a podcaster for a year and a half... it's been a wild ride:
Episode: https://shows.acast.com/660e243b2f834f0017de9181/episodes/660e2440acbcaf00174d994b
July 2012 (EA198) - Everyone Deserves Respect and Limits
In this month’s short podcast, Lee has finished reading Fifty Shades of Grey and is truly angry. Not about the bodice ripping, the tawdry plot line, or the unbelievable characters. He is upset that Christian Grey’s limits were not respected. Let’s talk about lines and respect, shall we?
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Announcer:
Welcome to Erotic Awakening, an exploration of all things erotic.
Every Thursday, your hosts, Dan and Dawn, share with you their experience and insights on kink, power exchange, and erotic life, as well as bring you interviews with exciting people from various lifestyles.
Then every Monday, you'll hear from our various guest hosts.
These nationally known educators bring a variety of experience to the mics and share with you an ever-increasing diverse world of alternative life.
Erotic Awakening 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 Erotic Awakening with Lee Harrington.
Now, this month, I am coming to you from a point of view that isn't necessarily the one that I come from all the time, and that's one of anger.
I'm pissed off.
I'm pissed off because I just read Fifty Shades of Grey, and unlike the podcasters who covered stuff on Erotic Awakening a few episodes back, who did a fantastic job about talking about the pros and cons of how this reflects sexuality and kink and our personal feelings about the titillation value in the book, I'm angry because something really important in my world came up in that book, and it made me really think about how much it sucks, and that's the limits of tops.
I am pissed that, and by the way, for people who haven't read the book, I'm going to give a few spoilers just to warn you ahead of time.
I am pissed that Miss Anastasia Steele is just arrogant, self-absorbed, but these things, it's a bodice ripper, right?
The book is a bodice ripper, but what makes me mad is that time after time, her uber, fantastic, fantastically sexy and rich, oh my god, the most specimen of manly man ever, Christian Grey, who, by the way, there's a Christian Grey now on fetlife.com, which makes me laugh amazingly.
But every single time, she brings up one of her limits and says, you know what, I just can't do that, or I'm scared by that, or I'm not sure if I can go there.
He says, you know what, it's where I really want you to go, but if what you need is time and space and you need to sit with these things or you think this is really a hard limit for you, I'm willing to concede.
I'm willing to stretch and flex and push myself, but I believe in your safety and your well-being and I'm willing to go there for you.
I'm willing to be flexible.
And I keep thinking to myself, okay, you know, you're a bit of an arrogant stuck up prick, but you got some good stuff going for you.
I hear that.
I hear that.
You bend over backwards a little bit too much, but I hear that.
You're a little bit over the top.
You fly to Georgia for no particular reason.
You have, of course, you have a helicopter on hold, which all dominates do, but at least you got something going for you when it comes to respect.
Our protagonist, however, does not.
She is so into herself that she doesn't even understand the notion of limits.
He has a few basic limits.
I want a kink relationship.
I really want a kink relationship.
This is how I would like it to look, but I'm really flexible, but I need a kink relationship.
And her response over and over again is, I need more.
I need more.
Okay, he says, I'm willing to try for more.
It's really uncomfortable for me, but I'm really willing to try.
Can you just concede on a few of these points?
No, I can't do any of those things.
But I need you to give me more.
Okay, we'll see what we can make happen.
I'm really going to try, but will you concede?
No, I need more.
Okay, my one hard limit, he says, is don't touch me.
It's revealed a whole bunch of stuff about why to not touch him.
But don't touch me.
And so her response is to touch him.
Her response is to touch him.
His one serious hard limit, and she doesn't respect it and doesn't respect him.
And time and time again in our community, in the kink communities, and not just in the kink communities, because it's a little bit better than kink at large, but in relationships at large, I see this profound lack of respect.
This is the one thing I need.
This is the one thing I can't do.
I have meatloaf running in my head.
I could do anything for love, but I won't do that.
And time and time again, I see folks bend to the point that they break.
We've talked a lot in the kink community about the fact that submissives, bottoms, slaves need to really be powerful and stand up for themselves and know themselves and be able to not just say for it, but be able to state their needs, their wants, their desires, to be able to articulate to their partner who they are as an individual so they know where the fine line is.
What point do you say as a bottom, a slave or a submissive, what point do you as a receptive partner say, you know what, that's not just not sexy, that's not just over the top, that's unacceptable, that is abuse.
But how often do we say that for dominance, for tops, for masters and mistresses?
How often do we say, you know what, no.
No, that's not acceptable actually.
No, really, that's not okay.
No, really, that is where my line in the sand is, and not only have you stepped over it, but you have squashed it and pushed it around and told me that it will all be okay if I can just be normal or if I could just be into that one thing.
If I just didn't have that line, I'd be a better person.
No, no, actually, no.
I want, I want, and hell, I need to see amongst kinksters, tops and dominants draw a line.
To see masters and mistresses draw a line.
To not let the Anastasia steals of the world.
Step all over us and say, but really, can't you just, no.
No, I can't actually.
No, I can't actually.
And it's not because I'm Fifty Shades of Fucked Up, which that sentence alone makes me want to strangle our delightful author, who I will admit it is not her fault that this hot little bodice ripper, which has very sexy bodice ripping scenes in it, I will concede to that.
It's got a really fun plot line for a cute little dime store novel.
It was not her fault that this is what makes it big in the kink community.
I loved this book as a hot little bodice ripper.
I thought it was fun and sexy.
I enjoyed the fact that I sat there slightly squirming while I was on the subway, turning through the pages and tucked it into my bag in between reads because I didn't really want the other people on the subway to see what I was reading.
I will give you that.
I will give you that it is hot and fun.
And I will give you that she did some of her homework.
I appreciate the fact that there are condoms in the first half of the book, but I will not appreciate the fact how quickly they decided to be fluid-bind to one another and how quickly he was willing to turn over into going bareback even though she'd only been on the pill for a very short period of time.
Those things upset me too.
I will give you that it's a hot little book and it's not her fault that it made it big.
But it bothers me that this in our generation, that this is supposed to be our story of, oh, this is supposed to be our claiming of sleeping beauty, that this is supposed to be our exit to Eden.
This is what we get this generation around?
We get somebody with a deeply distraught history, with somebody who was partnered to him who doesn't understand that history, and the parts that she thinks are disturbing are, in fact, not especially disturbing, and the parts that she's like, oh, that's kind of weird, are the facts that are perhaps a little bit more on the disturbing side.
I find it frustrating and strange and upsetting the levels that we hold up men and women to, okay, let me get this straight.
He has no refractory period?
That she is always instantaneously hot and dripping wet at the sound of the rustling of his fabric?
Really, folks?
But what really disturbs me is that Mr.
Christian Grey, for the strong and powerful individual he's supposed to be, does not understand that he's in an abusive relationship.
He doesn't understand it.
And that brings me profound sorrow.
I've had times in my life where, as a dominant partner, I've walked over my line, and I've let other people walk over it, too.
And it's a hard place to be, especially when we are in a place of power, to acknowledge that, yeah, this isn't okay, and I'm the one who said yes to it.
I'm the one who gave in.
I'm the one who didn't say no.
Because there's this permission somehow in kink culture that if the bottom or the submissive or the slave, the receptive partner, the person who is yielding, goes over their lines and limits, oh, they were just in subspace, or oh, they were coerced, or oh, it's not their fault.
But if we go over our lines, oh, it's our fault.
Oh, it is our fault because we are supposed to be the ones in control.
We are supposed to be the ones who know everything and are supposed to have some sort of grand vaulted plan.
It upsets me.
This is the face of anger and resentment and pain reflected in the pages of a tawdry novel that's hit the New York Times bestseller list.
I bought the book at Boston South Station.
I spent this weekend in Boston tying up beautiful creatures of all different shapes and sizes and beautiful tones of skin.
I spent the weekend throwing rope around bodies and laughing and seeing beautiful couples pair up together and kiss so sweetly as one was in his rope for the very first time while the other was wrapped up in his arms where I saw hot girls tied to trees and wove intricate rope corsets.
Where I spent time frustrated because I could not remember how to do the step by step on a reverse box tie.
And on my way home, I had finished the book that I was enjoying before, Life Of Pi, by the way.
Love it.
I finished it and I was on my way home.
I stop at South Station before boarding my bus because that's how I roll sometimes.
Chinatown bus.
Gotta love it.
Gotta love it.
And I pulled into South Station and I looked at the bookstore there, and there was the stack of EL.
James laid out for everyone to see with the word erotica emblazoned underneath it, selling copy after copy.
And I'm delighted.
I am delighted to live in a world where we can pick up erotica and read it on the subway.
This is the world I want to live in.
I am delighted that books are starting to fly off the shelves that say, oh, I want something a little bit more tantalizing, a little bit more naughty.
And I have the brazen courage, the steel balls and ovaries to read this while sitting in Boston South Station.
I am delighted.
And there's a part of me that's delighted because I know that it means that our world is going to become more beautiful and more complex.
And I am worried because I'm concerned that people are going to be coming in to kink without a lifestyle around them, thinking that what is right is coercion.
And what is right is that we should push lines when people say it's a hard limit that, oh, well, hard limit really means that it's negotiable even though it's from a place where you have it in your heart of hearts that it's your one and only line.
Well, really, you'd do something more for me if we were in love.
That's what worries me.
That's what worries me.
What I really hope, what I am dreaming for, what I am burning in my body for is that this book will help people open up to possibilities.
Whether their possibilities are vanilla or caramel or strawberries with Oreo cookie crumbles on top, I don't care.
I hope that it will open up people to the possibilities of sexuality that are out there and help them embrace what really turns them on.
I'm hoping.
I am hopeful.
Even if it is a tawdry little bodice ripper.
That's what I'm hoping.
But in the meantime, you and I who are already exploring sexuality that are already diving through these things to you listener at home, what I hope is that you realize that everyone deserves limits.
I hope you realize that everyone deserves limits.
You and you and you, yes you over there who thinks that your limits don't really matter that much, that you deserve limits and lines and should be able to say that that's not okay for me.
Because you deserve, yeah you deserve to be able to be respected.
You deserve to be given common courtesy.
You deserve a life of glory and power and hot sex and beauty and love and respect for the complex being that you are.
That's what I believe.
And so with that, I'm going to call this month a short podcast.
Because sometimes fifteen minutes is enough.
Sometimes thirty minutes is enough.
And sometimes an hour and thirty minutes isn't nearly enough time.
But today I want to wrap up with that simple thought.
You deserve respect.
You deserve limits.
And so does your partner.
And so does your partner.
This has been Erotic Awakening with Lee Harrington.
If you have any questions about sexuality, spirituality, kink, gender, connection, or anything else, feel free to drop me a line at lee at passionandsoul.com.
You can find more of my work at passionandsoul.com or find me with Passion And Soul anywhere on fetlife.com, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, DeviantArt, or any of the places on the internet.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Until next time, stay cool, have fun, be authentically you, and have a fantastic journey.
June 2012 (EA192) - Processing and Pushing the Edge
Dark fantasies and our own desires can be a challenge, whether we are on the receptive or giving side. Lee looks at two of his recent scenes, and examines his own processing systems and challenges you to do the same. Along the way he discusses energy bodies, identity, asking for our needs, changes in bodies after illness, and more.
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Announcer:
Welcome to Erotic Awakening, an exploration of all things erotic.
Every Thursday, your hosts Dan and Dawn share with you their experience and insights on kink, power exchange, and erotic life, as well as bring you interviews with exciting people from various lifestyles.
Then every Monday, you'll hear from our various guest hosts.
These nationally known educators bring a variety of experience to the mics and share with you an ever-increasing, diverse world of alternative life.
Erotic Awakening 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 Erotic Awakening with Lee Harrington.
It has been an amazing year and a half of running this podcast, this monthly appearance on the third Monday of every month.
And this month, I'm going to be talking about processing and pushing ourselves and checking in with our sexual fantasies and desires.
I recently attended an event called ShibariCon, and at that event, I played twice.
Now, for people who used to know me a couple years ago, okay, he played twice, what's the big deal?
But for folks who have been following me for the last year, that's a really big deal.
I had some pretty intense health stuff go down last year and it's still a challenge for me to get out, get about, and to connect with others on a physical and sexual level.
It's a matter of spoons, of energy, of what we have that we can give to others and give to ourselves in that kind of context.
But at ShibariCon, I played twice.
Once bottoming and once topping.
Now, the bottoming was really interesting to me because I haven't had a chance to bottom as a really intense masochist since all this stuff went down.
I've done a little bit of play here and there, a little bit of connecting.
I've had some really intense sexual scenes that, well, a small handful of intense sexual scenes that had sexual masochistic tendencies within them.
But this was pure SM, pure bondage that was sadistic and cruel and beautiful and really hard.
I have a personal identity or have historically had a personal identity around being a masochist, that I can take a lot, that I can struggle and suffer through a lot, that I am the kind of person who can hang on flesh hooks or can have skewers thrown through my face, that I have been the person who has bled and cried and suffered and been single-tailed hard enough that I have come off the frame that I was on and come back to want to punch my partner in the face.
I don't know if I'm that person anymore.
And for those of us who have invested an identity in part of our sexual exploration, that can be really scary.
There's a lot of me that is in transition.
And that's really funny as somebody who has had a gender transition to say I am in transition.
But as I sit with it, I realize that all of us are in transition.
Every single one of us is shifting and morphing and growing and changing and having beautiful and scary things happen along the way as we find our new identities.
Identities are a chance to sort our own brain out.
They are a way to process our own external experience.
They are a way to sort out our internal rubbish into piles and to stack up all of the files that are us.
But it's scary, for me at least, and hard, for me at least, to do that processing work when we don't know what labels apply anymore.
Am I a masochist or am I a sensory connoisseur?
Am I into being challenged and pushed, or is it about connection, or is it both, or what's going on?
How do I be the pig that I was if I'm not the pig that I was?
How do you be the person you were when you're not the person you were?
So, I had a hip harness tied on me in really intense rope that had been processed very recently, was still stiff and hard.
I don't think he meant for it to be as painful and challenging as it was, but I'm on medications that amp that stuff up, that make my body more sensory careful, that make me be aware more of what's going on.
And in some ways, I like it.
I like the fact that cool breeze across the back of my neck can send shivers down my spine, something that rarely happened before.
But it's got challenges with it.
It comes with this experience where rough rope on my skin was more than rough rope on my skin used to be.
Hip harness, arms tied behind my back, lifted up into the air and pinching somewhere around my pubic mound that just sucked to the moment I got flipped upside down.
My arms struggled as he pushed me and spun me and turned me, contorted me, crushed little parts of my foot in ways that are still tender a couple of weeks later.
I cried.
I screamed.
I was unsure what to do.
It was that moment where I became a gibbering person all the while processing my words out loud.
I have historically been the kind of person that likes to go nonverbal during the scenes.
It's actually problematic for my play partners because they don't always know what's going on.
I'm screaming, I'm crying, or I'm gone completely stoic, but I'm not sharing my information.
But early on in the processing, I don't know the right word right now.
This person and I had been flirting for a while, but at the con, he said, hey, I'd like to do something.
I'd like to have us play in some way, but my schedule is pretty crazy.
Are you willing to be on the back burner, as it were?
And if we have a chance to play, that's cool.
And if we don't, that's cool.
And I thought about it for a long time because I want to be special.
I want to be the person that people book time out for and ask me, hey, I'm willing to clear my schedule for you.
And he wasn't.
And it was challenging.
I had to sit with myself and say, hey, am I willing to be on the back burner?
Am I willing to be challenged in that way?
To be special, but only be special if he has enough time for me.
And I sat with it and I said, yeah.
Yeah, I was a little bit cocky on the outside and said, yeah, yeah, game, bring it on.
While on the inside I said, he doesn't want to play with me.
He's just putting me off.
He, I told stories to myself until I battled those stories and I said to those stories, you know what?
That's not what he's saying.
What he's saying is I want to play with you, but I booked stuff ahead of time because I didn't know I would have a chance to play with you.
And I have commitments to my primary partner first.
That's what he was saying.
There was no other context, no other story, but the rest of it was what I thought I heard.
So I wandered the dungeon.
I looked around.
I flirted with other friends.
I had a hot growly moment with somebody I've been in, I don't know, whatever it is that we are together.
And I looked around and really looked around.
I paid attention to the scenes, and wasn't really a voyeur per se, but I sat with the experience of being at the conference, and really being there.
And I had little conversations here and there, and it was beautiful.
I got to go out into the social area and run into somebody who I just got introduced to someone in the dungeon, and we went out into the social area, and he taught me a new tie, one where it lashes just below the knee and wraps down to just below the calf and goes back and forth and back and forth, loop, loop, loop, weave in, weave out, weave in, weave out, tie off, and there's a new attachment point right there in the middle of the calf, above the shin.
That's beautiful and crazy and something new and something I hadn't tried out and something that's anchored in my head now because I got to go over it three or four times, including with the creator of the tie.
That's pretty cool.
And I wandered back into the play space and there he was.
Hot, cold, beautiful, stoic, smiling, this mix of emotions, and the whole time I was processing, am I actually ready to play?
I haven't played like this in over a year.
Am I really ready?
I haven't been seriously tied up in over a year.
Am I ready?
And that's not to say I haven't been tied up.
I don't want to belittle the things that I've done, but I knew this was going to be a sadistic rope scene, or at least a really challenging one.
And I needed to know what was going on, but I couldn't know what was going to go on, because it was something new, because it had been a while, and my body's in a different place than it was then.
The other scene that I did at ShibariCon was topping.
So, a year ago, before I got ill, I had something that hit me, that I'd gone to a fantasy party.
And at that fantasy party, people had put fantasies on the wall of what it is that they were into, and their names were on the back, and it was all written in the same handwriting, because people submitted their information ahead of time.
And their fantasies were put on the wall with their name on the back, so when people chose a fantasy, they didn't know who they were choosing it for.
And that really struck me, because I've had a lot of sexual fantasies over the years, and compared to the average person on the street, I'd say that I've done a lot of fantasies that other people have had.
I've been part of group sex encounters.
I've had sex underneath a graveyard in Northwestern Ireland.
I've fooled around on airplanes.
I've played with people of all shapes and sizes, and yet I still have my own sexual fantasies.
And so as a point of bravery and a point to challenge myself, I put up on FetLife, and these are in the notes, I put up this post that said what some of my sexual fantasies were that I haven't had a chance to do, that I've daydreamed about, that I've thought about, and I've got some really amazing people in my world who are game to have tried stuff out with them.
And so at the con, at ShibariCon, I had a chance to fulfill one of my sexual fantasies that I've never done before, which was to suspend somebody in nothing but fishing line.
Now I'm not talking about a single strand of fishing line, though there was a temptation in me, that cold sadist in me that really wanted to.
There's a part of me that has, as somebody I know refers to as their inner mass murderer.
And there's a part of me that's dark.
I know I'm the kind of person that giggles and laughs and helps people really look at their internal identity and their erotic authenticity.
And I'm a giver and a lover and a friend.
And I'm also a dark fucked up scary guy.
At times.
These things are not mutually exclusive concepts.
These things are part of who I am because every single one of us, including you, is a complex person.
We are more than one label.
We are more than one thing.
And so it is for me.
And so my friend Sharon offered to be that person.
And it was terrifying, beautiful, horrific, perfect.
We bought something like 5,000 feet of fishing line, this giant, ridiculous spool, because we didn't know how much we were going to need, because neither of us has done this before.
And I didn't have a chance to ask anyone else how to do this.
And so here I am, trying to top a scene that I've never even talked to someone about.
I understood the technicalities.
I understood what knots to use.
I knew the breaking point of the line in question.
And I decided to start out with a moderate amount of fishing line tied around her body in single bands so that if she was able to tolerate it, I'd be able to remove pieces of it piece at a time.
Now, as I've done before, and not always for the best, I tried to find a suspension frame, and the only one that was available was on the stage.
Now, the problem with playing on a stage is that people think it's a performance, but it was the only suspension frame available, and both of us were hot and ready to go, and we said, screw it, let's play on the stage.
So I set up a massage table and tied her up and adjusted all the tension, and then had four guys help me remove the suspension frame.
Now, that 5,000-foot spool of fishing line was massive, and I couldn't hold it while trying to cut off pieces, so we actually had somebody that we knew from Twisted Trist hold that spool and be our fishing line boy, be our spool boy.
It's like being a pool boy, but different, I guess.
Yeah, we'll just call it different.
And gosh, he looked really dapper, too, so it was this little bit of eye candy as well.
Because, hey, why not enjoy life in all of its senses, right?
And I did a whole lot of stuff to get her up there, and I'm not gonna bore you with the technicalities, but it was scary.
And that massage table came out, and I was waiting for her to just say, I'm done.
I'm absolutely done.
We're done.
Done now.
Right now.
Done.
And have those four guys hold her underneath while I cut her out of the lines, but she didn't.
And I sat there, counting the tension and adjusting the tension, or at least trying to, but it was all pretty much locked in place, so all I got to do was bear witness to her suffering.
And it wasn't hot, per se.
I wanted it to be hot.
I wanted to be completely turned on.
I wanted to do all kinds of things to her once she was in midair, and that's just not where my brain went.
My brain went very calculated.
My brain went very calculated and cold and loving at the same time, because I wanted her to suffer, but in a way that worked for me and her.
And so I kept counting the lines, and if she was ready, and if I was ready, cut another one.
And cut another one.
And when she was finally adjusted to that, cut another one.
Cut another one.
Cut another one.
With more time than that in between.
And I have no idea how long she was up in the air.
And it really doesn't matter.
What matters was that...
was that we were there together.
That we were each on our own journey at the same time, but we were there together.
But here I am after the scene, having gotten her down and seen her covered with zebra stripes from where the lines were laying.
Stripes that lasted for quite a long time, with, to be honest, ramifications of some minor nerve damage in both her feet and her hands afterwards that faded after about a week.
But that was really scary, to know that I'd damaged her.
Actually damaged her, and it was something that she'd agreed to ahead of time and risked ahead of time, but it was still scary for me.
And here I am processing afterwards that I'm that fucked up.
That I'm the guy who suspended somebody in fishing line and liked it and jerked off to it afterwards.
Not immediately afterwards.
I was a little busy taking care of her.
But that I was that guy that people worry about, that people wonder about, that I felt like a villain.
And where do we sit with that afterwards when I'm out of the scene and out of the hotness and I know that I'm that guy?
I returned to my normalcy a couple hours later.
But I still sit with that.
I still sit with wondering if that was healthy and yet I want to do it again.
I want to do it again.
And what does that make me?
Where does that put me?
Who?
And how?
And why?
And then the question of course is when.
The when is probably going to be this weekend at Dark Odyssey Fusion, and I think they've still got a handful of tickets left.
It's darkodyssey.com.
I'll put it in the notes.
But yeah.
I process in a lot of different ways.
I journal.
I write poetry.
I sit in quiet contemplation.
I have conversations with dear friends.
I tweet.
I look at my body and hear its responses.
I hear my brain and I hear its responses.
I feel my spirit and listen to its responses.
I see myself in all of my multitude and acknowledge that I am a complex being.
You have the potential to process in so many ways.
I know people who process through laughter and making light of what they're going through.
I know people who process by making art.
I know people who process by sitting down with their play partner afterwards and talking it out.
I know people who process by talking with their therapist, their coach, their spiritual advisor, or their sex advisor, as it were.
I know people who process by silence of the heart.
There are so many ways to process, and the processing is important.
Sometimes the process does not involve active thinking.
It's about listening to body wisdom, and the next time an opportunity comes up, listening to that gut response.
This last weekend, I went to the Keferian Gathering, an event that's hosted by House Keferu, which is a group of psychic vampires who are based all over the globe.
And when I say psychic vampire, I literally mean psychic vampires, people who need energy from the outside world to thrive, and in some cases to survive.
They're consensual vampires, those who only work with people who have agreed to share that energy or who ambient feed, going to things like concerts and nibbling on all of that stuff that we put out there, not draining another, but simply being around those high-energy experiences.
And I went to that gathering, and there was a class being done by Michelle Balinje and a woman named Jess.
And the class was on understanding and reading psychic energy and energetic bodies.
Now, interesting topic, but what really hit me was talking about breaking down into three different ways that we read energy.
The first one was talking about those individuals who can literally see auras and see energy and etheric bodies.
Now, this is a lot of stuff that we hear about in pagan press or mainstream press even.
This is the kind of stuff of television psychics where they can go, I hear the letter M, or I'm looking at your aura and it's dark and looks sick around your liver.
Or this is the part of people who can look at you and go, oh, really?
That's what's going on for you because you're glowing red.
That's kind of hot.
That's kind of sexy.
The second one though is people who, instead of seeing with their third eye, instead of seeing with their Ajna Chakra, instead of seeing with vision or sensation or one of the five senses, instead of those things, they feel.
Their heart opens up and glows and they know things through emotion.
The third one though is the one that really strikes home for me when processing SM, which is body wisdom.
It's gut feeling.
It's going, ooh, something's not right here, I'm done, and walking away without thinking about it, without even feeling about it.
It's just that gut wisdom that knows.
It's one that I'm not that good at, but I'm trying to learn.
In fact, I'd say I'm actually better at that than feeling, which for people who see my classes might strike weird.
But I'm really good at the thinking part and seeing energy and all of that stuff.
And I'm decent at gut wisdom, but I'm trying to get better.
But that feeling part, I've got challenges with.
Not all of us have all three.
Some of us have one or two.
Some of us who might be able to sense etheric bodies can't do it with vision, can't say, oh, I see red in your aura.
They might feel it through sensation.
They might hear a buzzing.
They might feel a taste on their tongue.
They might get queasy.
These things are...
or they might even feel sensory experiences.
But it's interesting to me that different people process these things in different ways.
And I want you to really consider how you process what's right for you with your sexual exploration.
How do you figure out exactly what it is that you want?
Is it through reflection of what you've already done?
Is it through daydreaming?
How do you do this stuff?
And I'd love to hear from you about how you do this stuff.
Reply.
Send me emails.
Or if I don't get to hear about it, share it with friends.
Pay it forward.
Talk about it.
Get it out there.
And if that's something too bold for you, at least share it with yourself.
Be honest to you.
This coming weekend at Fusion, I'm going to be hosting a class on sacred kink, but also going to be doing some ritual work.
Now, the ritual work that I'm doing is a couple different things.
One is called the Ruby Pentacle, where we're going to be working on honor, integrity, discipline, responsibility, and purpose and how those things lay out in our energetic body.
But the one I'm pretty darn excited about, the one that I'm scared about, the one that I'm looking forward to, is called IV Wed.
Now, for folks who might remember, I a year and a half ago, almost two years ago now, got married to myself.
I'm wearing a ring on my finger because I married me.
Something that I had to process a lot beforehand.
And I'm not going to go into it today, but I'm going to be sharing that ritual with people this coming weekend.
And it terrifies me because I have never done anything like this.
I've never officiated for other people who are marrying themselves.
I've done the work for me, but doing the work with others is a different experience.
It is different to do solo work than it is to be a priest.
So I will be there as a priest.
I will be there to help others on their journey, which tells me that I am the kind of person who is not only the type who wants to be a sensation connoisseur and be pushed and be challenged, but is also the kind of person who challenges others and challenges myself to rise into my own darkness.
And I am also the person who helps others.
I am all of these things, and yet I am so much more.
And yet the thing called I am, I am your Lord God, called I am.
That thing called I am, that God Self, that truth that is within me, that point where I connect to the Divine, is more than that.
I am these things and more.
I am these things and more.
I am these things and more.
And so with that, I think I'm going to wrap it up for today.
Thank you all so much for joining me.
Thank you so much for being with me in part of this journey, because I can't do it alone.
And I am blessed that you are out there doing the work too, because it matters, because we only make the world a better place by all doing this work for ourselves.
For folks who want to reach out to me, I'm all over the internet.
Do a search for Lee Harrington, or the words passion and soul all as one word.
And you could find me on fetlife.com, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, DeviantArt.
Look all over the place, passion and soul with one word, and you'll find me.
And thank you for joining me, fellow adventurers of sexuality and spirit.
This has been Erotic Awakening with Lee Harrington, and until next time, stay cool, have fun, be authentically you, and have a fantastic journey.
May 2012 (EA189) - Ponies and Puppies and Kitties, Oh My!
From cart pulling to getting cuddly, crotch sniffing to horse tails (and tales, in front of his mother), Lee introduces us into his world of animal roleplaying. Find your intent, debate your type of animal, and while you’re here, let’s see Lee blush a little too. Join us for a whinnying good ride!
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Announcer:
Welcome to Erotic Awakening, an exploration of all things erotic.
Every Thursday, your hosts Dan and Dawn share with you their experience and insights on kink, power exchange, and erotic life, as well as bring you interviews with exciting people from various lifestyles.
Then every Monday, you'll hear from our various guest hosts.
These nationally known educators bring a variety of experience to the mics and share with you an ever-increasing diverse world of alternative life.
Erotic Awakening 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 Erotic Awakening with Lee Harrington.
In this monthly podcast show, I have been sharing personal stories, doing interviews, and this month, I would like to talk about human-animal role-playing.
Now, for people who don't know about human-animal role-playing, it comes in all kinds of shapes and sizes, from cute, fuzzy kitty girls to rough and tumble human animals of all shapes and sizes.
I can think of a certain pit bull that I know, ponies, pigs, cows, and even a few worms.
Now, I've done podcasts on a lot of different stuff, and if you want to go back and listen to those, you can go to my website, passionandsoul.com, where I have a little button there labeled, Audio and Podcasts, and you should be able to find those quite easily.
But, when it comes to human-animal role playing, I have a passion.
Animal play is fun.
It is comparatively simple if you want it to be.
And in the past month and a half, I've had a lot of it popping up in my life.
Now, I'm not talking about some of the history I have with my partner, though he makes a fantastically cute dog by the name of Zeke.
Zeke is my puppy.
But on other fronts as well.
So I had the opportunity to perform at Bear, B-A-R-E, Bear in New York City.
For folks who don't know about Bear, and I'll be sharing these in the podcast notes, Bear is a spoken word performance evening hosted by a guy named Jefferson that brings in some of the best of New York and beyonds spoken word talent to talk about sex.
Sex and passion and connection and hotness.
And I was absolutely honored to be part of last month's Bear.
And during it, I told a story about human animal role playing and specifically about pony play.
Now, that might not seem like that big of a deal.
So what, Lee?
Okay, you got up in front of a stage and room full of people and you talked about being a pony.
So what?
Well, the so what for me was that I did it in front of my mother.
My mother is a delightful human being and I will admit she's been to a couple of my classes and been to one of my stage shows in the Seattle area.
But I've never talked in front of my mother before about the specifics of my animal play or for most of my sexual play for that matter.
And so here I am in a suit, well, at least button down shirt, suit pants and a tie by this point.
And I'm standing in front of a room outing myself as being transgendered, outing myself as having been in the porn industry, and in front of my mother telling the details of what it's like to be a human pony.
So what is it like to be a human pony?
Well, for me, it starts with transformation.
And for myself, this goes for any animal role playing.
It begins with transformation.
Now, part of this is the intent we set ahead of time.
We set the intent of what we want to do, who we want to become, or in this case what we want to become.
Is it that I want to be a feisty filly?
Is it that I want to be a strong and hardworking workhorse?
What do I want to be?
But I say it starts with the transformation because sometimes I don't know until I'm there.
It's kind of like love.
Sometimes I don't know it's coming until I'm there.
And so in the case of human pony play, I start to transform with the way that ponies move.
Horses stand a little bit taller.
They stand straighter.
So for me, if we're talking about costumes, and I love costumes, I love corsets when it comes to pony play.
Corsets are a fantastic tool, because I have to stand up a little straighter.
I have to not bend at the waist, because at the end of the day, horses don't bend that way.
The second thing that I love doing, which I don't do all the time, but I really enjoy, is makeup.
Now, makeup is a great tool in general for role playing, because you could be the evil villain by putting an eye patch on, but you can also do it by putting just a little bit too much eye shadow underneath your eyes, creating bags looking tired and scary.
Or, in the case of animals, I have a chance to just put a little bit of black on the tip of my nose to be a puppy, or put lines across the sides of my nose and up under my eyes and add little details on the small of my eyes to be created into a cat.
There's also more elaborate costumes.
One of my favorite things for human-animal roleplaying is tails.
Tails that can swish back and forth and back and forth.
The tail for my own human pony play came from somebody that I used to shoot porn with, and she took some of her hair extensions, some of her falls, and tied them all together into this mangy, ugly-looking thing that was perfect for being my tail, because it was layer upon layer and not this perfect cut ponytail.
Now, don't get me wrong.
There are ponytails that are perfectly cut and even and pretty and show pony-worthy.
I think of the one from Rupert Hughes, that Hughes and Son, who his pony play stuff is immaculate, absolutely beautiful, and yet, it's not my pony.
My inner pony is a workhorse, is sweaty and pulls carts, and tends to just get a little bit drooly.
A little bit drooly.
So here I am, talking about getting a little bit drooly in front of my mother.
In front of my mother.
And it was weird.
It was good, but it was really weird as well.
Being up in front of all the lights with a packed house and hearing the laughter, and knowing that somewhere out there, my mother was hearing about me drooling.
And that's kind of, well, I don't know, I think I'm still processing it.
I think I'm still processing it.
So the question, of course, is why would somebody even want to be a human animal?
Why would someone want to do these things?
And my answer is that the answers are many fold.
For myself, I love to do it because it's a chance to really get into my physical body.
It's a chance to strut and move and crawl and be in this skin suit.
I often sit at desks all day long, typing and answering emails and trying to get the work done that needs done.
And for me, getting to get away from that desk, out of the chair, down onto my hands and knees, or standing up straight out in the sunshine, that level of physical embodiment where, not just as an embodiment, but it's a chance to let go of that hyper constructive brain, that's a gift to me when I get to do that.
Sometimes it's about the sensation of having someone brush me down, pour cold water down my back.
The sensation of smelling things, because at the end of the day, dogs get to be at crotch-high view.
I remember going to a play party down in Melbourne, Australia, and when I was in Melbourne, we did a class on human animal play that I taught.
We had a lot of great attendees sharing their own personal stories.
And afterwards, there was a play party that was a dog get-together in the middle of the other play party.
We had, I want to say, seven or eight human dogs.
And then this pony showed up.
And the pony was a weird mix, because you've got seven or eight human dogs, and what do you do with a human pony amidst all of that?
And in my case, the answer was guard the pony.
I found myself stepping in between the other dogs who were harassing the human pony, and got there and was down and growling.
Roar!
Roar!
Roar!
Between them, because even as a dog, I'm still protective of the underdog, as it were.
And when I was there at that play party that night, I ended up meeting a friend of mine, specifically because I was sniffing his crotch.
Now, you don't, I find, at least in my world, and my world's kind of on the adventurous side, I don't often get to say, I met someone because I was sniffing their crotch.
But when I'm a human dog, that's an easy, everyday excuse.
I get to say, you know what?
I got to meet somebody by sniffing their crotch because dogs do that.
And because my nose was at crotch height, so it really wasn't that strange.
So those are two of the reasons that people get into human-animal role playing.
But there's other reasons too.
Sometimes it's about having fun, being silly, putting on that character for a night and getting to be the little pig who went to market or the little pig who stayed home or the little pig that went wee wee wee all the way home.
And in fact, for people who are into other fetishes, going wee wee wee might be exactly what it's about.
I know people who have medical play fantasies where they want to be poked and prodded and why not get to do that while going to the vet?
I know other people who love age role play.
And I remember at one event that I went to, there was this sweet little girl in a gingham dress who came up to the little pony play area and said that she always had wanted a pony.
And there was this guy who was like, oh, I want to be your pony.
And he showed this, of course, by kind of straddling up to her and nuzzling his head up against her side.
And by little girl in this case, I mean somewhere between late 60s and early 80s, year old, beautiful cross dressing male to female.
Cross dressing trans, I'm not entirely sure, but beautiful creature nonetheless.
And it was a great way for her to get her age role playing in and to meet somebody who was doing animal role playing and everybody got their needs met.
For some people, it's about building trust.
If I don't or in some cases can't speak English words or human words and I'm communicating through body language.
I'm trusting you to take care of me.
I'm trusting you to actually be there for me and to understand me.
That's a lot of trust.
I'm trusting that you're going to make sure that my body is going to stay okay.
I trust that you're going to love me.
I trust that you're going to pet me.
I trust that you're going to feed me both physically and of the heart.
Sometimes that heart is about connecting to a partner, curling up at your lover's feet.
Sometimes it's about love.
Sometimes it's about submission and the act of handing our will over to another.
Sometimes it's about the costume.
Sometimes it's about connecting on a more spiritual plane.
I myself have times where I go into a space as a bear.
And is it human-animal role playing?
Is it bear play, as it were?
Or is it something different?
I have some people who look at me when I'm on all fours and growling with a bear pelt draped over my back, and smelling and eating, and then walking off into the woods to experience the fullness there as a bear in the middle of green, in the middle of brown, in the middle of scent and taste and touch.
Is it play?
I would argue no, and yet there are people I know who define human-animal role play that define, in this case, bear play as being a spiritual opportunity to connect with a totem animal.
I know other people who do this stuff as an act of service, because everyone really in the heart of hearts wants a human-service animal with their little red or orange vest, helping them take care of the things that need to get taken care of.
One year at pony camp.
I love that sentence.
One year at pony camp.
I had actually broken my left kneecap.
I still actually do have a little piece of floating patella, but it was a very fresh injury.
And I was in a wheelchair.
And I was supposed to be leading or helping lead pony camp, where people were dressing up in pony outfits and having people pulled around in pony carts and getting to be washed down and bathed and having this immersive experience.
And a lot of that still takes place at Camp Crucible.
And this year, however, it was at Dark Odyssey Leather Retreat.
And at Dark Odyssey Leather Retreat, I was doing this pony event.
And what was I supposed to do?
I was in a wheelchair, right?
And so I decided that my partner of the time was going to be my service pony for the weekend.
And what do you have a service pony do?
I treated him like Mr.
Ed.
Mr.
Ed the Talking Horse.
So I would have him lash himself to a cart after helping me get into the cart.
And I would say, Pony, do you know where we're going?
And he'd go, and stomp once for no.
And I'd go, Okay, well, we're going to go to the dining hall.
Are you ready, Pony?
Two stomps for yes.
And with that, he'd get it from a kneeling position up to a standing position, shake the fur off, and shake the fur on his back, straighten out his tail a little bit while wiggling his rear end, and chop.
Off we would go to the dining hall.
And it was absolutely magical to have this creature who could take care of my needs, and by holding his reins, I can steer him where we needed to go.
Sometimes I wouldn't tell him where we were going so we could actually immerse ourselves further into the fantasy.
I would have him lash himself to the cart, the cart put on a blindfold, and then with rain in each hand, I would pull back to say pause, steeply pull back to say stop, whip the leads once to say go slowly, whip them twice to say go quick.
I would pull to the right to say move to the right.
I would pull to the left to say move to the left.
And with simple commands like that, I was able to steer him all over the 200-acre property.
For other people, the reason that they do this stuff is because they need a body challenge.
I can definitely empathize with this one.
That pushing myself can be hugely satisfying.
Pulling a cart uphill is hard work.
Seriously hard work.
And I love that kind of hard work myself.
But everybody's reasons for doing this stuff is going to be slightly different.
So assuming that your partner is into it because they want to work really hard and be pushed, might not be appropriate if they want to be a show pony.
Maybe they want to do this because it's a sign of submission to you.
Maybe they're doing it because they just want to be a brat and so therefore want to be the cute little puppy who gets to gnaw on your shoes and get swatted with a rolled up newspaper on the butt.
So be it.
Right?
So be it.
Everybody's reason for doing this is going to be different.
And in my case, it really varies depending on who I'm playing with and my headspace.
I mentioned that animal role playing and animal play was something that would be coming up a lot in my life beyond the show at Bear.
So the reason for that is that I've recently had a piece come out in The Ultimate Guide to Kink, which is edited by Tristan Tormino.
There's essays in there by...
I mean, to be honest, I'm really honored by the lineup that I'm in that book with.
Jack Ronella, Pat Califia, Midori, Lolita Wolf, a lot of really amazing folks.
And I really recommend people check out this tome.
And it's a tome of information.
Some of it's how to, some of it's why to.
It's a really eclectic mix.
And I've got links to that in the show notes.
So she wrote me and said, Hey, would you be willing to write something on animal role playing?
And I thought about it and I went, yeah.
Yeah, I would.
And if nothing else to help break down the differences between bestiality and animal role playing, which as a note, animal role playing involves role playing with humans and bestiality involves biologically based animals beyond humans.
So just thought I'd throw that out there.
Mind you, I do know people who are into animal play, specifically puppy play as a really common one, because they do like bestiality fantasies of strapping on a prosthetic dog cock and getting to use that with their lover.
And that's kind of hot, and I'll post a link or two to some various dog cocks that I've seen over the years and in some case owned in the show notes as well.
So when Tristan asked me to write that essay, I was really delighted.
It was a really fun project and had an absolute blast doing so.
But that's not the only reason I'm thinking about animal role playing today, which is that the other reason is that yesterday I got my hair cut.
Now, it's a pretty dramatic change, and yet it isn't.
I had grown my hair out down to halfway down my neck, almost to my shoulders, and it was just kind of long and floppy, and I decided to take it into a mohawk.
My original plan had been that I was going to do a wide mohawk that's, you know, about four inches wide and three to four inches wide, and that I was going to cut that down to, you know, two or three inches long, so I could be able to spike it up and have fun with it.
But I was at the hair salon, and we shaved down the sides to a three blade, number three blade, and we pulled the hair down to debate how long it should actually be for cutting.
And I looked in the mirror and I went, you know what?
That looks really good.
In fact, it looks like a mane.
And it hit me, this full body response, that it looked like a mane.
I haven't really gotten to do pony play as the pony in a long time.
And to be honest, I miss it.
I miss the sensation of it.
I miss the feel of it.
I miss the hair on my back.
I miss when I have the tail swishing back and forth.
I miss it.
I really do.
And I used to do a lot of it.
Before my gender transition, I used to do a lot of it, because it seems like people like pretty pretty girl ponies with their boobies bouncing up and down.
But for me, finding someone who loves pony play with a gelding, it's different.
I can't seem to find as many people.
But I've made a promise to myself, now that I have this beautiful mane, and that promise is that by the end of the summer, come the end of September, I will have done some good pony play.
And luckily, I'm going to two Dark Odyssey events between here and there.
Which means that I expect to have a chance to do that, because we have a pony cart!
That's right, Dark Odyssey has a pony cart.
We just need to make sure that the tires are all pumped up.
So I will be at both Dark Odyssey Fusion and Dark Odyssey Summer Camp, doing classes and leading rituals, and, if all goes as planned, pulling some carts around as well.
Now let's say, though, you don't happen to have a pony cart sitting somewhere in your bedroom.
I know, I know, you wish you did.
Stories after stories.
But what else can you do as far as props and wardrobe goes?
Some of my favorite things include changing up your footwear.
If you're a cat or a dog, take off the shoes or put on some sturdy boots.
Put on some knee pads so you're going to be comfortable on all fours.
What about getting some mitts?
I've got a pair of leather bondage mitts from Northbound Leather that I absolutely adore.
But it doesn't have to be bondage mitts.
Maybe it's big furry cat paws.
What about a little tiny pair of ears when I do stuff as a satyr?
Which is kind of animal role playing, right?
It's being a pan, it's being a fawn, or something in that range.
I have little tiny horns that I love wearing.
Tails are an option.
Cat suits, something full and casing.
Sexy lingerie that shows off almost everything and hides almost nothing.
What about hoods or things that constrain the head?
I love play toys, and by play toys that can be something sexy.
Or, it might mean your favorite squeaky toy or blanket to put in your mouth and chew on and gnaw on.
Sometimes it's about types of bondage.
I, for example, when I've been doing pony play in the past, I've done a lot of stuff around arm binders.
Keep the hands out of the way, and yeah, really get into the restriction of it.
Other times I've done stuff with plumes over my head There's harnesses and tack and building up all these layers of leather on the body.
Leashes, gags, brushes.
It really varies as to what you can use.
Now, I've had people say though, wait, okay, hold on a second, I really want to get into pony play, but the tack costs thousands of dollars.
I'm going to spend this much on my boots, this is, yes.
I get it.
I totally get it.
A pair of punitive shoes cost $300.
I get it.
But there's cheap options.
There's really affordable options.
Personally, I like making my bits and bridle out of rope.
In my next book, More Shabari You Can Use, when that comes out before the end of the year, there's actually going to be a head cage in it, and I like using the head cage as the basis for a pony head stall.
I think it's a really sexy, fun way to do it with a single piece of 25-foot parachute cord instead of having to do it with, you know, doing something with a 500-dollar leather head cage.
Now, there are cheaper ones, too, but when I had the one that I used to have, it was expensive.
It cost me a lot of money.
And it's something that I didn't invest in until I knew I really liked what I was doing.
So that's something to consider as well, is before you go out and spend money on, you know, that really expensive toy that you're thinking about, try it out with something cheaper.
Try it out with something that costs you two bucks down at the dollar store, as it were.
What about instead of buying, you know, the complete set of human animal, purposefully built, you know, tall, like water and food bowl set, so that somebody doesn't have to bend down all the way, which, by the way, just buy the stuff for Great Danes.
It works perfectly.
At least for my body height, it does.
But no, you know, either Great Danes or for Rottweilers or Doberman Pinchers.
Anyway, I like different sizes of big animals because they reflect my physical body size.
But before you buy the giant cage, what about just try being kept in a corner?
Before I buy the really fancy, you know, water bowl and dog bowl set, why don't I just put some bowls, normal bowls, everyday bowls, on the ground, with some chili in them and eat some cold chili or hell, eat some warm chili, eat some warm chili, on the ground, looks like dog food, bam, you're done.
And as a note, the props and costumes don't just apply to the animal.
I love excuses for getting to wear riding gear.
Just saying.
The levels of play involved don't have to just be for the animal.
What about having it be for the owner or the handler too?
You can have it be about pride, you can have that sensuality, sexuality.
It could be an opportunity to train someone, which can be incredibly sexy for people who are into dominance and submission.
Maybe it's about pushing your partner really hard or showing off our loved one and being like, look at this amazing thing I have.
Sometimes the spiritual connection that we get from when we pet a biological animal in the same way that we would pet a human animal.
Sometimes it's about having a therapy puppy.
Sometimes it's about letting go and having fun ourselves.
So yeah, my hope is, for those listening out there, is that you'll consider it.
Consider if you were to be an animal.
What animal would you be?
Would you be a cat?
A dog?
A cow?
A goat?
Are you a wolf?
A wild beast?
Are you a raven?
A parakeet, perhaps?
What are you?
If you could be an animal for one night, what would you be?
And with that in mind, what would you do if you could explore with that in mind?
And then know that you can.
I know people who say, well, you can't be a human parakeet.
Actually, I used to have a human parrot.
He would, quote, sit on my shoulder by digging his hands into my shoulder like they were claws and they felt like claws because he had long fingernails.
And I would put a bowl of, like one of those little sample bowls you get when you're traveling on trains or whatever, of cornflakes in my cowboy hat.
And he would reach over and go.
And he would eat cornflakes out of my cowboy hat and there would be this rain of cornflakes around me.
And I actually, we had little wings for him that he could wear.
And we did this one game where we, where I tied a rope, not too tightly around his cock and balls, like a cock ring, and took the long line of the rope and had him, quote, fly around a room looking for ballpoint pens that people were holding.
Now, I say look for it because he didn't have his glasses on and so he literally had to go from person to person, pausing, climbing all over them, looking for these pens and then flying on to the next one until he brought back all four of the pens to me.
Which was an absolute hoot.
And he still got to be in his fantasy of getting to be a parrot.
So think about creatively what your desires are and what you might have fun being.
And as a note, you don't have to be a top or a bottom to be an animal.
I know people who are tops, who are dominant personalities, who are sexually aggressive, who are the animal themselves.
Right?
Who are that pit bull who gets in front of their, quote, little girl.
Right?
That are incredibly powerful animals.
We don't have to have it all be the, oh, poor sweet little puppy can't take care of himself.
No, really.
In the world at large, I know a lot of dogs who are far more dominant than their owners.
I know a whole lot of horses who are far more dominant than their handlers.
And that's okay.
Right?
Play with it.
Have fun.
And hey, while you're at it, maybe come have fun with me.
I've been going to be at a whole lot of different events this summer.
So, you ready?
Get out your pen and paper because I'm going to be a lot of different places and I would love to have you come and visit me.
This coming weekend, I am going to be at Shabari Con in Chicago, Illinois, which is a somewhere between 700 and 800 person international rope bondage conference.
Absolutely amazing event.
Weekend after that, I'll be in attendance at the Philadelphia Trans Health Conference for people who are in the gender non-conforming, gender queer, transgender, transsexual and different gendered history spectrum as well as their partners, allies and associates.
So that's going to be really fantastic in Philadelphia.
Weekend after that, I am going away with my partner.
Ah, here we are.
The week of June 20th through June 25th, I will be at Dark Odyssey Fusion, where I will be teaching classes, leading rituals, hopefully doing some pony play, being part of some really amazing stuff.
I am going to be doing a ritual called IV.
Wed, which is going to be a self-love ritual, where you get to stare into mirrors and fall in love with you, which, when I did this ritual originally, was hard.
It was really, really hard, but really important.
Really important.
And I am going to be doing a class there on Sacred Kink, so feel free to come on down and join me.
On July 6th, I am going to be at the Long Island Life Rope Group, so I will be out in Long Island, New York.
The weekend of August 3rd through 5th, I am going to be in Las Cruces, New Mexico, which is not far from El Paso.
I will be in Las Cruces, New Mexico, Cause and Trouble, down there, and having an absolutely great time, doing a whole weekend of classes and performances.
And then in September, I will be at Dark Odyssey Summer Camp, as well as Rope Camp, which will be a lot of fun.
Now, you might be saying, Lee, you've got a lot of open time there.
Actually, I don't.
And the reason I say I don't is because I am spending three of those weekends shooting photos for more Shibari you can use.
So, yep, for the Rope Bondage people out there, I am doing the sequel.
I am super excited about it.
And I've got three weekends of photo shooting set.
There might be a fourth weekend.
Rigor J and I have our work cut out for us, but that, my friends, is a topic for a different podcast.
So I want to thank all of you for listening, for coming out and joining me for this delightful little romp into Adventureland.
If you have any questions about sexuality, spirituality, kink, gender, connection, identity, authenticity or hell, anything else I can help you with, please drop me an email at Lee, L-E-E, at passionandsoul.com with the subject line Ask Lee.
And I'll either answer those questions on here or on my column at passionandsoul.com.
And of course you can find me all over the internet by doing a search for Lee Harrington.
And either do that or look for passion and soul, P-A-S-S-I-O-N-A-N-D-S-O-U-L as one word, on fetlife.com, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, DeviantArt, or pretty much anywhere else you can look.
So thank you again, fellow adventurers of sexuality and spirit for joining me.
This has been Erotic Awakening with Lee Harrington, and until next time, stay cool, have fun, be authentically you, and have a fantastic journey.
April 2012 (EA182) - Solo Sex, Rough Sex, Connective Sex
Join Lee Harrington as he discusses rough sex, connective sex and solo sex as valid forms of erotic expression. Along the way we will look at enemas, masturbation, poly mathematics, safer sex, negotiation styles… and share a few pieces of poetic smut. From partners to lovers to loving ourselves, this week’s podcast is a journey into authentic erotic exploration.
Episode: https://shows.acast.com/660e243b2f834f0017de9181/episodes/660e2440acbcaf00174d994f
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Announcer:
Welcome to Erotic Awakening, an exploration of all things erotic.
Every Thursday, your hosts, Dan and Dawn, share with you their experience and insights on kink, power exchange, and erotic life, as well as bring you interviews with exciting people from various lifestyles.
Then every Monday, you'll hear from our various guest hosts.
These nationally known educators bring a variety of experience to the mics and share with you an ever increasing diverse world of alternative life.
Erotic Awakening 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 Erotic Awakening with Lee Harrington.
In this monthly show appearing on the third Monday of each month, I've been dialoguing with all kinds of people, doing interviews, sharing a lot of live feeds, and have also been going on my own rambling journeys.
Now, for people who are interested in past podcasts, you can find all of the direct links over at my website, passionandsoul.com.
That's passionandsoul.com.
Now, this week has been an interesting one for me.
It's been one of ups and downs and lefts and rights and sideways, and not too long ago, it also was one of sex.
Hot, steamy, sweaty sex.
Sex with my partner.
Sex with a lover.
Sex with people who I cherish and adore.
Sex with myself.
And I find it really interesting as we discuss that notion of sex, what sex is.
And so I want to take us on a little bit of a journey today to talk about sex.
Kinky sex, dirty sex, clean sex, beautiful sex, and all kinds of sex in between.
Our journey begins with a really hot solo date that I had with myself.
Now, I know a lot of people who say, a solo date, you mean you masturbated.
Well, that's one way to look at it.
But we can also look at the idea of how we have relationships with ourselves.
Our relationship with ourselves is primary to any relationship we have with anyone else.
I look at the notion of polyamory, and there's this idea of polymath that comes up for me, that if there are two people in relationship with one another, there's actually three relationships.
Person A's relationship with themself, and person B's relationship with themselves, and the relationship that is formed called AB.
Now, when there's a triad, there is ABC, AB, BC, CA, and ABC.
So we go from a relationship with one person to three relationships to seven relationships.
We get to a relationship with four people, and whether they're playing with each other or not, there are relationships between those people.
And we have A, B, C, D.
And then, of course, we have all the triads.
A, B, C, B, C, D, A, D, C.
You get the idea.
Suddenly it's 15.
The mathematics of polyamory and the mathematics of relationships in general is exponential in nature.
It's exponential in nature.
And so I wanted to go back and have a date with that core single one, not the one that I'm in a relationship with, not my primary partner, but the relationship that is me, the relationship that is me.
And so I was actually preparing to go have a hot steamy date with my lover, who I guess it's a close enough term for the individual in question.
It was, it's somebody who I adore and who I find to be an absolute character.
And as I was getting ready to have my date with them, I decided to have a date with myself first.
I filled a bubble bath.
I turned the lights down low.
I got my enema gear.
And I decided to give myself a long, warm enema, because enemas at the end of the day, when they're too cold, can cause us to cramp.
When they're too hot, can burn the tissue of our bodies.
We want something that's about room temperature, because I know a lot of people that say, ah, enemas, what are you talking about?
Why wouldn't enema be sexy?
And in my opinion, enemas are sexy because they are a form of sensual touch.
They are something that is soothing, warm to the body, something that takes time and energy.
And if we are doing it with something other than a fleet enema, which as a note, fleet enemas could really rip up your body and leave it really prone towards if a condom were to break, God forbid, if a condom was to break and you were using a fleet enema, you have tons of tiny little fissures in your body that have been opened up and sores have the potential of forming if there are infections as well.
Now fleet is useful for quickly clearing out the body.
So if I just wanted to remove any blockages from there and I was going to be doing sex with a vaginal opening and I was just making sure that I was feeling clean, so be it.
But the reality is if we're going to be doing enemas before anal play, at least in the reality that I've come to understand, you want to do it in an extended period of time ahead of time, somewhere between two and four hours in advance, more than four hours, and new material can be gathering up where you're going to be doing anal play.
And less than two hours, we have the concern around these little microfishers.
So this was a couple of hours before I was going to be going on my date.
And I lit the candles and I turned down the lights, and I soaked into the warm bath water.
I gave myself an enema and climbed back into that warm water and let my body sink into the sensation as I held that enema.
Laying on my left side, I felt it percolate up into my body, felt myself becoming emptied as it filled me up in that moment.
Because I knew that as soon as I was ready to go back onto the toilet and release everything, that I would feel that emptiness.
There was this expectation, this potentiality.
And once everything was emptied out and I felt beautiful having done multiple rinses all the way through, I pulled out some of my favorite toys and lubed them up and started playing with myself slowly and sensually.
Because I knew that the date that night was not going to be slow or sensual.
Which makes me wonder, if there is that part of me that longs for sensuality and that part of me that longs for the roughness that came later that night, what is this thing called balance within me?
What percentage, if I were an algorithm, would be sensual and sweet and collected and connected?
And what parts of me would want to be degraded and humiliated and broken down and used and fucked?
What percentages are you?
If you take all of the different parts of your life and your identity and your connection, what parts of you are there and what are their percentages?
Do those stay the same for you or do they shift through time?
And if they do shift through time, what are your judgments there?
I know for myself, I've certainly had times where I've gone, I used to be that guy who absolutely loved X, Y, and Z, and I haven't done X or Y in ages.
And I could vent about that, and I could complain about that.
But then I can look at it as well, and see whether I actually want to do X and Y.
Or is that some part of my past identity that really longed for X and Y, and right now, I'm really happy with Z and F and Q.
What are my thoughts on that, and what are your thoughts on that?
When's the last time you did something that you swore you loved, but you look at it and you don't really miss it much?
Or when you look at it, you realize you do miss it very, very much.
I have certain types of sexual play right now that I haven't gotten to do in quite a long time.
In some cases, about a year and in some cases, multiple years.
And I miss them.
And I look forward to when I get to do them again, whether it's that I look forward to having a partner that that will be a compatible type of play with, or I look forward to connecting with one of my current partners or with myself in such a way that will derive those forms of pleasure in my life again.
It's not bad.
It's simply what it is in this chapter.
It is what it needs to be in this chapter.
And so after my solo date, I went on another date.
I went on, well, again, if we call it a date, I was there with someone who I love fucking.
Someone whose approach and style is really, it really clicks with what I'm looking for right now when it comes to me as a sexual bottom.
The following poem is based on the connection that he and I had that night, and it's called Crash.
In the darkness, your relics rise from the obscurity of buried places I'd forgotten, were masked from view, storming into me, pushing deep into my hidden places as I grunt out, yes, yes, under my breath, again and again with tears falling like a silent rain.
My fertile pain washing away in a rising tide.
I lament as you force your way into my breath, crying out as I gasp for air beneath the waves.
Give me more, you echo into my pulse.
Let me shackle you to the rock of your own dread.
Tie me to the rock and let the Kraken come.
Bind me to the rock and let the eagles pack.
Consign me to the rock until Ragnarok roars.
Tie me to the rock and let me drown.
That night with him was painful and full of suffering, and yet was full of a lot of fun, too.
Sometimes that's what I'm looking for, and it's sometimes worthwhile to consider what you're looking for tonight, not what you're looking for tomorrow, not what you're looking for yesterday, or were looking for yesterday, but what you're looking for tonight.
And communicate that to your partner.
In this case, turning to my lover, I told him ahead of time that I'd been having a really hard time, and that he needed to tread carefully on my emotions because I'd been dealing with some personal emotional stuff.
And so he said, OK, what do you need?
This is all discussed by text message in advance.
And we did that on text message because sometimes for both he and I, it's awkward to have that conversation in person because we want to be able to fulfill that suspension of disbelief around rough sex.
And so in texting back and forth and back and forth and back and forth, I said, how about this?
Dinner, movie, and he said, how about the movie be something that we can ignore if we need to?
And I said, okay, sounds good.
Sounds good.
And we'd spent hours before, when we first were debating being lovers with each other, we'd been friends for a while.
In fact, I'd even modeled for him at one point.
But and we'd hung out a lot as like I said, as friends of sorts.
And but we sat down after we first went out to a movie with each other.
And at Popeye's Chicken, of all places, at Popeye's Chicken, we sat down for a couple of hours and discussed what needed to be discussed and put it all on the table.
And neither of us really play with the notion of safe words, but both of us play really well with the idea of clear communication, the notion of what we consider clear English.
And so if I'm having a hard time, I can say, seriously, seriously, stop!
And have it, the action of whatever is going on, stop.
This is actively different than me in the middle of a scene getting to say, oh, no, please, don't, while begging and pleading, because those begs and pleads are not what it would sound like if I went, no, really, stop.
Which is a very different form of dialogue.
I know some people in these long conversations come up with their safe words, come up with their safe calls.
He knew who my partner was.
He knows my partner.
And so, therefore, he knows that if there was an emergency, who to call.
He has my information on my EMT bracelet.
We talked about health issues.
We talked about both of our triggers from the past, and we talked about where we both felt betrayed at points.
We put out on the table our longings, our frustrations, why we don't do some of the stuff that we do in public, why we don't do some of the stuff we like to do in private, who we like to do stuff with.
And it was really hard for me to lay out these kinds of things on the table because I have a hard time once I've done that kind of negotiation to get back into the mood of things.
But in this case, with this person, it felt really good to do that kind of negotiation.
It felt really good to put it all out there on the table, and then afterwards make a commitment to one another that those rules are as they were established until we tell each other otherwise.
Until we tell each other otherwise.
And so, that night, when we played and fucked and rutted, and I felt him use me and tackle me to the ground, and I was there begging as the water hit me on the face, as I felt him over me, as I felt those hands wrapped around my throat, and I could hear myself whimpering with every single stroke.
It was good.
It was really good, and it was dramatically different than the play I'd had with myself.
And it's really funny because I have people who say, well, you can't do auto-erotic stuff that's suffering with yourself because you can't really make yourself suffer, and I will say no.
At least in my case, I'm able to dissociate just enough to be able to make myself suffer.
Those choices of using hot, tingling lube for ass play instead of using the cooling soft lube.
Those choices of using something just a little bit too large.
That choice of using the vibrator straight and hard onto my clit instead of wondering, well, maybe I should put it just above until I can come comfortably.
No, no.
Rip it out of me.
Pull that orgasm out of me.
So I ask you, what do you like to do to push yourself?
Have you ever masturbated to a point where you want to have it stop, but it feels so good?
How do you know what you like when you masturbate?
Have you been doing it the exact same way since you were 12 years old, always humping your pillow?
Or is it something that you've been exploring with a lover?
Do you like how they touch you and so you try to figure out if you can touch yourself in that same way?
Or is that type of touch that you want to have to stay special to that time with your partner?
Do you do things by exploring in tandem their body next to yours, moving and writhing and probing, figuring out exactly what it is with company next to you?
Do you do it by going to a party like the Rain City Jacks in Seattle and Washington?
I was about to say Seattle America, which is true enough.
Or was really, really hot before and now isn't.
I've certainly had that happen.
Where I've done auto-erotic experience play, or when I've been playing with somebody else, and both of us are touching ourselves.
It's a great form of safer sex, after all.
And we've both been touching ourselves, and it felt really good when they were touching us in that way, but not so much when we were touching ourselves.
Or vice versa, or when we just realized that now, this just isn't doing anything for us, and we roll over and we choose to watch our partner instead, and bear witness to their auto-erotic orgasm.
Sometimes, bearing witness is what we're looking for, and sometimes what we're looking for is to have someone watch, and have someone be there for us, and someone hold that Hitachi for us, or someone just to whisper naughty words in our ear.
And that's good, and that's delicious, and that's something so tasty.
Now, as part of my negotiation with this lover, what I told him ahead of time was that, by the way, I have fairly strict safer sex rules.
My safer sex rules with people that are not my partner are that there are latex gloves for everything other than kissing.
Latex gloves if you're going to be touching my front hole, my back hole.
If we're going to do anything with an exposed mucous membrane, gloves are there, latex or nitrile.
Condoms for oral sex, vaginal sex, anal sex.
Condoms for anything else, dental dams for any sort of connection between the mouth and anything on my body or anything lower down on theirs or if I'm doing anything with women, it's dental dams all the way.
I'm 100% player as it were.
And with my partner, it's not that much different.
We've decided to make certain choices between us and partnerships, but really I'm a big believer in safer sex all around.
I think it's just a safer choice for me in my journey.
And I know everybody makes their own choices, but especially since I'm a bit of a slut, or at least would like to be if I had more of a chance, I've decided that I'm doing 100% across the board because I just think it's a better choice for me.
And so I told him this, and we had some interesting discussions along the way because, well, how do you stop in the middle of throwing somebody down to the ground and get that latex glove on?
And so we figured it out together.
The idea of his knee being on my chest while he reached into his pocket and grabbed those gloves, and then without lube started to shove them into my front hole, reestablishing dominance or at least reestablishing that power, that hotness, that feralness.
Since we don't exactly do dominance and submission, it's more of a feral activity, more of a rough activity.
I would say more of a raw activity, but that gives a little bit of a misnomer for the gay men who are out there or the folks who understand that raw sex is something that's referring to bareback sex, which is again not what I do.
But we figured out really creative options about how to be rough and feral and tough and growling, and yet still adhere to my safer sex practices, and are in turn safer sex practices because this is what we were going to be doing together.
So I think it's a really interesting thing to consider for yourselves is how you creatively instill safer sex and whatever your safer sex practices are into your, whether you call it role playing, whether you call it your power exchange, whether you call it your rough takedown sex.
And it's really important to consider ahead of time instead of in that moment.
Because in the moment, sometimes, I know in the past, sometimes I've made stupid choices.
Really stupid choices.
Or at least choices that seemed like a good idea at the time and really weren't.
So if that's going to be the case, thinking about these things while you're emotionally sober is really worthwhile.
Is really worthwhile.
So sit with yourself and debate, how does this work out?
Now, the third form of sex that I had was with my long-term partner.
With somebody who I have loved and cherished for a really long time, and who loved and cherished me far before I loved and cherished them.
In fact, we are watching the entirety of Battlestar Galactica right now.
And for people who were at Kinkfest, you'll have seen me perform with Freya in an on-stage performance that was all with really dramatic red rope and her in a red dress.
And it was an homage for me between Gaius Baltar and Caprica Six from Battlestar Galactica.
I had to because my partner got me the soundtrack for Battlestar Galactica, and I was totally in love with the music.
But the third time that I got to have a really beautiful sexual encounter in the last month was one with that long term partner.
And we have been having this really interesting tool between us, which is a real doe.
I mentioned it last time around.
And if you want to check out the link to that, please go to the page notes or whatnot from Erotic Awakening about that.
And it's been a really interesting tool because we've both been exploring with it.
For myself, there's usually been that notion of my dick, your dick, because dick cock, that tool is something so personal to me.
It is mine.
It is my packie or it is my, you know, it is my cock that I fuck with and nobody else uses.
But we've made the choice to boil between turns and both explore this cock.
And it's really interesting because how our bodies are built, it sits so differently on the two of us.
To be honest, the cock looks much bigger on him.
I'm impressed.
And as we've been exploring this tool, each exploring this tool on different sides of it, it's been really interesting to get to know each other's body and each other's body language, and the sensual touch and connection, that beautiful sensual touch and connection.
And a couple of days after that scene happened where we were both being in portions feral, but shape shifting and going into places of being feminine and masculine and hard and soft and going on this roller coaster ride, I wrote this piece.
It's called Earthly Love.
And it's me thinking about Geb and Nut, who are the Egyptian gods and goddesses of the sky and the earth.
Your mountain rose up from quake after quake, Pangea becoming your molten needs that lifted your hips into my soaring sky.
My winds danced across your thorny bushes and soaring pines, whispering my desires into lush green and clinging vines that wrapped around my breath.
Laying beneath me so close and so far away, chasms that longed for my storms to plunge your depths, just as your towering cliffs invaded my midnight desires.
Each night the sun sets, and you see me, oh, you see me, full of glory, lit with the web of gems that cry, oh, come to me, my lover, come to me, my love, and fill me deep.
Deep as your ocean eyes, deep as your running river lips, deep as your endless iron heart, deep as your valley mysteries, deep as you, my love, deep as you.
Open up and spread my starry gut-thighs, watching me give birth to a new horizon of constellations with every single thrust, feeling me sing a solar system with every moan.
Pin my clouds against you in a fog, let me rustle your leaves with each kiss, my quivering tsunamis laying you, laying to waste your endless vistas.
Call me your endless night as you pull me down on top of you, sand storms rising up to greet me, lightning erupted from my shaking overhead.
My endless earth and lover, caves and bone, I shall straddle you forever as we clutch one another in storm and peace and love.
How we play and sexually interact with our long-term partners may not look like how we interact with our short-term partners or our lovers or the people that we've met for this one weekend or the people that we paid for one session with or those that we are just starting to connect with.
And those encounters may look similar or nothing like our auto-erotic encounters, which may look differently than how we connected with other lovers in the past and other partners.
And how your last partner was with you and how you were with them may not be the same as with your current lover or partner.
And I think that's okay.
I think it's really important to acknowledge that not just every partner that we have, including ourselves, to not just say that those things are different, but to acknowledge that every single time we fuck, every single time we make love, every single time we sexually connect or sensually connect, it deserves the opportunity to be unique.
It deserves the chance to be a one-of-a-kind moment.
That we have the opportunity to be mindful in that moment and notice how beautiful that moment is for what it is.
Not for what it used to be.
Not for what it can't be.
Not for what it should be or should have been, but for what it is.
And so I ask you, what is this moment here?
This moment as you hear my voice, what is this moment?
Are you breathing deep or shallow?
Are you listening intently to every word I have to say?
Or is this in the background, distracting you and keeping you awake during a long work shift or a drive?
Are you paying attention to the here and now, and if not, that's okay too.
But know what this moment is.
And then, in the next breath, know what this moment is.
Then this moment.
Then this moment.
Then this moment.
Then this moment.
Then this moment.
And these moments, my friends, are part of Erotic Awakening.
And this has been Erotic Awakening with your host, myself, Lee Harrington.
For people who are interested in finding more about me or if you have any questions around sexuality, spirituality, kink, gender, connection, identity, authenticity or anything else that I might be able to help with, please send me your questions to Lee, L-E-E, at passionandsoul.com with the subject line Ask Lee in the top.
And if I can't get to it here on the podcast, I will endeavor to answer it on my Ask Lee column on passionandsoul.com.
For those who want to find me on the internet, you can find me as a word search of Lee Harrington or Passion And Soul as one word.
You can find Passion And Soul at fetlife.com, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Deviant Arts, and a lot of other places as well.
For people who are interested in more of my poetry, you can find that over at templeoracle.com.
That's T-E-M-P-L-E, Oracle, oracle.com.
And thank you again, fellow adventurers of sexuality and spirit, for joining me in this moment.
And this one.
And this one.
Until next time, stay cool, have fun, be authentically you, and have a fantastic journey.
March 2012 (EA177) - Thou Art Divine
In this month’s podcast, Lee is deeply touched by an essay by Foxfetch in a new anthology, and shares his reflections on transsexual deities. Along the way he opens up to the world his journey through gender, from queer to bi-gendered to transgendered to transsexual… to perfection and back to gender identity challenges. Join Lee as he reflects on divinity, creation myths, the shapes of universal power, and gives you a glimpse into how he processes it all- through tears, poetry and passion.
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Announcer:
Welcome to Erotic Awakening, an exploration of all things erotic.
Every Thursday, your host, Dan and Dawn, share with you their experience and insights on kink, power exchange, and erotic life, as well as bring you interviews with exciting people from various lifestyles.
Then every Monday, you'll hear from our various guest hosts.
These nationally known educators bring a variety of experience to the mics and share with you an ever-increasing, diverse world of alternative life.
Erotic Awakening 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 Erotic Awakening with Lee Harrington.
In this monthly show, appearing on the third Monday of the month, I bring all kinds of different adventures, from sexuality to spirituality, heart to soul to cunt to cock and everything in between.
It's been a little while since it's just been you and me.
I've been doing panels and having interviews and all that kind of stuff.
But today, I was struck by something.
Right now, I am in the process of reading a really fascinating book, which is called Gender And Transgender In Modern Paganism by Gina Pond, Sarah Thompson, Calyxia Omphalos, Philip Tanner, and Jacobo Ponchak.
And if I messed up any of those names, I sincerely apologize.
The book was written in response to an event that happened at PantheaCon a little bit over a year ago.
A Dianic group of Pagans did a ritual that was for the goddess Lilith.
Okay, so be it.
Not that big of a deal unless you're not all for Lilith, which, you know, there's a lot of people who aren't.
And they, however, didn't get it out in their announcement ahead of time that the ritual was for women born women, cisgendered women and cissexual women, as it were.
And this caused a bit of a hubbub when a number of transgendered or transsexual women, actually transgendered and transsexual women, some of each and some who were both, showed up and were turned away at the door.
So as a response to this, a whole flurry of things around gender and sexuality and sexuality of gender and gender discourse ended up erupting within the pagan community on the West Coast and other places as well.
This book has a lot of different contributors to it.
I've been really appreciative of the 10 different pieces I've read so far and look forward to reading the rest of them.
But, I bring this today because I was really deeply struck by one piece.
The piece that I was struck by is called Awakening The Transsexual Gods by Foxfetch, Chapter 8.
And I wish I could read all of it, but I don't have permission for that.
But I am going to read one little section because it touched me incredibly deeply.
When Foxfetch is talking about being a transsexual man, somebody who was assigned female at birth and is now living full time as a man and is very much in the, you know, believes themselves to be a binary system, not genderqueer, not genderfluid individual, very much man.
They ended up demanding that there should be transsexual gods that respond to our realities.
And the paragraph that hit me hard was, I want white haired winter gods whose vagina is the gate to the underworld.
I want earth goddesses whose erection is the rising of the spring.
Crones with shriveled balls, fertility gods with juicy cunts.
I want gods whose fierce bright male power is spilling milk, whose solar blaze is a bleeding hole between his legs.
And I wanted to cry.
I still kind of do.
As someone who's been part of the pagan community for nigh on to 17 years now, that sounds about right.
I mean, I think I went to my first pagan workshop thing when I was 13, so that would make it 19 years.
Okay?
So 18 and a half, 19 years ago, I went to my first pagan worship circle, which was part of CUPS, the Covenant For Unitarian Universalist Pagans.
And I remember being deeply touched by this notion of God and Goddess by calling to the watchtowers to feeling the power of earth, air, water, fire, spirit pumping through me, pouring through me, feeling the descent of the goddess, feeling the rise of the God, feeling power and juiciness and sensuality and sexuality that was not shut down in faith.
I still am deeply touched by these things, but it didn't hit me until I read that piece, that most of the deities that I see aren't me.
I cherish Baphomet with his hard cock and her round breasts, head of a goat curling horns and hooves.
The beauty of Lilith, who is furry woman.
I appreciate Artemis Virgin, always virgin.
These things are powerful and true and amazing, but they're not me.
I look in the mirror and these are not me.
The shapes of God that are out there are not me.
And so here I stand.
Here I stand shaken, my friends.
I stand here shaken because I realized, as I was reading this pace, a few different things.
I realized that I wasn't seen, which I knew already.
I rationally knew it already.
I knew that this was the case, but it's different, you know?
It's different when somebody puts us in these kinds of words.
But the other thing I realized, as I've been dealing with my own body, dysphoria or dysmorphia, whatever word it is that isn't working out right now in my head, but I realized that I've been having problems in the mirror again.
Now, I've been having problems in the mirror again.
In the end of 2006, on my birthday, November 28th, 2006, I had a revelation that I couldn't do it anymore.
This thing between bodies and this...
I couldn't be female in my day-to-day life anymore.
I had to become something else.
I needed to change my name.
I needed to go into an androgynous male spectrum space.
I needed to be Lee, that I wasn't Bridgette anymore, and that in holding on to that since 2001, when I realized that no, really, I had to adopt a bigendered space.
And I rewind further back to when I was a teenager, and I remember the first time when my boyfriend of the time, Toby, my first master, said to me, you know, is it possible that, you know, you're something other than a girl?
And I said, what do you mean?
And he said, is it possible that you're transgendered?
And I remember those times, and these different pieces that come together.
But here it is now, 2012, and I think beyond being transgender, I think I'm transsexual.
And that's really, really weird for me to say.
I am not genderqueer.
And wow, that hurts to say.
And I don't even know if this is true.
I don't know in my bones yet.
But when I say those words out loud, my heart wants to cry.
When I say those words out loud, my stomach tangles up into knots, and I feel the butterflies fly out in a rainbow of color.
When I stop and I say I'm transsexual, it feels right.
And we'll see where it is in three months, and we'll see where it is in three years.
We'll see this shifting truth, this body truth, this thing that has to be, this thing that is me.
We'll see what happens.
But I looked in the mirror the other day, and it was wrong.
My fat's distributing really strangely.
This is a story of me, not of truths for other men, not of truth for other trans men, not of truth for other masculine and male spectrum individuals who are all on their own journey through their own life.
This is a tale of me.
And the tale of me says that I looked in the mirror the other day, and it felt wrong.
It felt really right when I looked just above my chest, when I looked at the top of my chest on up.
It looked perfect when I looked at my stomach, and it looked amazing looking below my knees.
But I got confused at other places.
My fats distributing in strange ways for me.
I've got this line at my belly button where I am getting chubbier, even though I'm losing weight, in the space between my solar plexus and my belly button.
In that space, the bottom of the rib cage to my belly button has become round.
Love, that tattoo that runs along that space, has spread out as if I am growing full of love.
And that would be fine.
Let me be round bellied man.
Let me be soft.
Let me be the shape of so many men I've loved.
I'm fine with that.
I love that.
I cherish that.
That's not it.
What feels wrong is that below the belly button, it cuts in sharply and flattens out, comes down to a scar where my womb was taken out.
Out, out, out.
It flattens out, was taken out, and I am out of myself as I stare naked into the mirror.
My furry patch where a cock could be, would be, should be?
No, should is not the right word.
Where I am.
This is all my body and this is all my truth.
And here I am looking in the mirror and it's shaped not like I expect.
I look above my solar plexus and up to my neck and there is my chest.
Still slightly lopsided scars, two holes where nipples once were that had become sensitive tissue again, through prayers and nerves rebuilding.
But they don't look quite right.
They don't look quite right.
I don't look quite right when I look in the mirror and I want to cry.
I want to bundle up all of this fear and all of these tears and turn them into something else.
And there's moments where it doesn't matter.
Where my lover's hand is buried up inside my ass, and I can feel the cock that I am, that I have, that I swell with.
Don't care that it's an inch long.
I don't care that I am well hung for a gerbil.
I don't care because there I am breathing in their hair and their lips, and the world is perfect.
But I think it struck me harder recently because I got to try out a new toy.
Aiden and I, my partner and I, we ran like the winds one afternoon, one evening, one perfect night.
We ran that night across New York literally because we tried for block after block after block to try to find a taxi.
But we didn't, couldn't find a taxi, so we walked and walked and walked toys in Beybland.
And at Beybland, they were about to close, but we said, we promise we'll buy something.
Please let us in.
And so we bought a dimmer, a rheostat switch for his Hitachi.
And we bought this perfect fieldo, or at least it's perfect in what I need from it.
We thought it was going to be Aiden's cock, you got to understand that first.
We thought, and maybe it still is, his.
But I asked him one night about a week after we bought it, we hadn't had a chance to use it yet.
I asked him, do you mind if I try it on?
Would that be weird for you?
Because I think it's supposed to be your cock, but like, I just, I want to know if one would work for me.
And the field, though, for people who don't know, is a long cock, a long silicone cock, I'd say about 11 inches total from the far base to the tip of it.
And then from that far base, which has a little bulge down at the bottom as if it's got testicles, and then comes up into a smaller bulb about, you know, 3 inches tall, that is a plug, a vaginal plug.
And it could also be an anal plug, I suppose, but then your cock, once it's in, would be rather short indeed.
And so we slid it on up inside me and I held it up in place with the top of my thighs, my round thighs.
And there we were, looking down at my cock.
And I looked down at my cock and there was no strap on harness.
There was nothing holding it up except for my thighs.
And it was right.
It came out to be about six inches or so that hung out from outside me, or so.
And we couldn't make it work without a harness to hold it in place.
But luckily, I have a really modular form of the Texas, Texas two strap harness from Stormy Leather that I've had for a really, really, really long time.
And it's mine.
It's my harness.
And I'd removed the back piece from it quite some time ago so that I could have just the ring and the two leather straps in the back piece across the rear end.
And I pulled it down.
I pulled the ring all the way down so it can hit hold the cock where it was.
And I tightened the straps down just at the underwear line right at the top across the top of the thigh where it comes into the mons area.
Tighten it across the back right at that space where a pair of tighty whities would land.
And it was perfect.
And we fucked and he sucked.
And he rode on top of me like a temptress, like a tempest.
He took me deep inside and I could feel every stroke and every movement.
And I can feel myself inside of him as I bucked and moaned and groaned.
Sighed as I sighed.
And I felt myself pump in and out and in.
And I was perfect and it was perfect and I looked down and I wanted to laugh out loud.
I wanted to moan.
I wanted and needed this.
It was right.
It was absolutely right.
But it's not enough, I say to myself.
Is it?
Or is it?
It's that tough line, that hard line, that body, truth, emotion line that says, maybe, maybe this flat chest of mine and my lovers who say and see me as the man that I am.
They get it.
I get it.
Maybe it's, maybe it's all right.
Maybe this is what I need.
But I want to say maybe this is all I need, and that infers that there could be something more.
And I think of surgeries, and if I have $30,000, I'm sorry, but we're paying off a stack of our debt, and I'm going back to college.
Thank you very much.
Or maybe I'm actually just prepaying my rent here in New York for a year, and then dealing with some debt.
You know what I mean?
Like $30,000?
That's a chunk of money to be able to build myself a cock.
To be able to go over to Europe and build myself a cock.
Beautiful cock, a cock that would work.
A cock whose testicles would have a pump inside them that I'd be able to pump, pump, pump myself up to hardness.
That when I was naked and looking in the mirror, I would see me hanging there.
That I would see this cock hanging there.
Because built the way my cunt is built for people who haven't seen it, I am not some outwardly visible twat.
I do not have my juicy pussy out there in front.
I'm pretty chubby.
And my cunt is really chubby.
If you look down on me, especially when I used to be shaved, head to toe, and when I would flatten my chest out and dream, when I was shaved head to toe, I look like an angel.
No sex, bare chest, everything flat.
I am a tattooed angel.
I see myself the angel that I am, and I am blessed in this form.
I am beautiful in this space between form.
I am beautiful for the space exactly where it was and where it is and where it might be.
I am not somewhere in between.
I am the space and the place I am now.
I am the space and the place that I am now, here and now, here and now.
But you have to have me laying down on my back with my thighs spread wide to see my cunt, to see my beautiful functioning twat, to see me no-servixed, to see me fully hungry and open and available.
My cock barely peeks out.
My cock only truly comes to be able to be seen when my outer labia is spread open by fingers.
My cock is hard to access.
My cock is perfect to access.
My cock is what it is and how beautiful it is.
Dental dam laid over, lips linger and tongue licks.
And yet here I am.
And yet here I am.
And yet here I am hungry for whatever it could be that might be called more.
For whatever it might be that might be called more.
And I turn again to Foxfetch, and I see a piece that makes me want to smile.
Our bodies are sacred too.
We too are God, our goddess.
I want a God who sings of his crescent-shaped barge of heaven.
A goddess at whose mighty rising the desert fills with green like a pleasant garden.
I want these things, because the God and the goddess, the gods and the goddesses, ten thousand in name, forty thousand in sight, stars that fill up and echo for her starry goddess, thighs spread, who rubbed herself and moaned her way into existence all that is.
We come in these shapes and sizes.
We are these beautiful forms, and I, here in this place, am perfect, and yet I want to change it.
Here in this place I am perfect, and I want to change it.
Here in this place I have exactly the right number of tattoos that I want, and yet I want more.
What is so different?
It is so different, it seems, that when I want to change my genitalia, that when I want to change what my naked form looks like, that it's okay when women have breast augmentation.
It's okay when women have a little bit of Botox.
It's okay and expected in our culture.
And yet when I say I want my phallus to hang there between my legs, it's as if I am asking to move the heavens.
And perhaps I am asking to move the heavens to open wide, to open out.
Out, out, out to the possibilities of what might be, what could be.
I flatten out beneath my belly button, and I wonder at the shape I am.
Because I am.
I am the God whose name is I Am, and so are you.
That body you have in front of you, looking in the mirror, even if it doesn't make any sense, even if it doesn't make an iota of sense, thou art God.
Thou art Goddess.
Thou art Deity.
Open wide.
Opened out.
Out, out, out.
Even if you want to change that body, even if you want to transform that body into the work of art you long for it to be, whether you are hoping for a six pack, or you are hoping for round, voluptuous curves, whether you want to be a super BBW, whose waves of flesh capture lovers up in your arms and your belly, or whether you want to be stick thin and a rail of desire, I don't care.
But thou art divine.
Yes, you, that one who's wondering if I mean you too, yes, you, you're divine.
Thou art divine.
And thou are divine in this moment now, looking in the mirror or not looking in the mirror because it hurts too much.
Thou looking in the mirror or not looking in the mirror, thou that you are, thou that is I am for your own personal truth.
You that are.
It doesn't mean that the you that you want to be is any less divine.
And it doesn't mean the you that you were ten years ago, five years ago, two years ago, two breaths ago.
Wow!
The you that you were two breaths ago was divine as well.
These are the truths and secrets.
These are the hidden teachings.
These are the things that say in the darkest of night.
You know me.
So I, like Foxfetch, call for transsexual gods.
I call for intersexed gods.
I call for fat gods and thin gods and gods with big booties.
I call for furry gods and hairless gods.
I call for gods that are twinks and gods that are muscle men.
I call for gods with long beards and gods who are clean shaven.
I call for goddesses who are curvy beyond measure.
I call for goddesses who are as wide around as the earth.
I call for goddesses who are top-heavy, who are thigh-heavy.
I call for goddesses who have shelves and planks of chests.
I call for goddesses who are as thin as the crescent moon.
I call for goddesses with short hair and long hair, with big noses and small.
I call for goddesses whose lips are wide and hungry, and for lips who are thin.
I call for muscular goddesses.
I call for goddesses who want help.
I call for goddesses who don't need a single drop of help, even if you offered it to her.
I call for goddesses and gods and deities of all shapes and sizes.
I call for one-legged gods.
I call for goddesses who have lost a breast.
I call for goddesses who never had those breasts to begin with.
I call, I call, I call to you.
I call to you.
I call to you because thou art divine and in realizing that thou art divine, you can help these gods come to life.
Let there not be 10,000 gods.
Let there not be 40,000 gods.
Let there be 6 billion deities.
Let every one of you wake up to all that you are because Shiva is not the only one with 101 sacred names, and that's if we simplify it down.
You are divine, and I don't mean that, honey, like you are divine, I mean that thou art divine.
I leave the poetry behind for a moment, and I talk to you honestly.
It's really hard to be divine because we have to believe, we have to believe for a moment that there's a possibility that we actually are.
I have to stop hating myself long enough to actually believe this bullshit, because out of bullshit grows flowers.
And it might feel like bullshit the first one or two or seventy times, but it's real.
It's real.
And there you go, tears.
I knew that tears would come this time.
Because tears are needed.
Tears are needed in this truth.
Tears are needed in this truth.
And so here we are.
And since I don't know where to go from here, I will say that I love you.
And I will say that I love me.
And I don't know what this word transsexual means yet, but I know it's mine.
I don't know what this word man means yet, but I know that it's mine.
I don't know yet all the shapes of love yet, but I know that they're mine.
And that doesn't mean they can't be yours, too.
We each can access all of these things, because we are divine.
Every single one of us.
Every single one of us.
Because when God made Adam, he made him in his own image.
When the goddess gave birth out of her starry thighs to all of the world and all of reality, we are made from her cum.
And therefore, we are of her as well.
No matter the pantheon, no matter the truth, even if you were licked out of the salt lick by a durma, the great cow.
And no, I'm not making that one up.
It's a pretty cool creation myth, in my opinion.
Even if we pull from Douglas Adams, and we believe that we were sneezed out, we are divine.
We are divine until the great Kleenex comes and wipes us all away.
And so with that, my friends and lovers and lovers to be, my beautiful and cherished ones, my friends across the waves, my friends across this audio connection, you who are love, you who are love, I invite you to know that you are loved.
I invite you to know that you yourself are love and that thou art perfect, even if you want tomorrow to look different.
So with that, I bid adieu.
Know that you can find me all over the internet by searching for Lee Harrington or Passion And Soul.
Whether Passion And Soul is one word on fetlife.com, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, DeviantArt, it doesn't matter.
Passion And Soul.
Because what is a life without Passion And Soul?
I certainly don't want to find out.
And with that, this has been Erotic Awakening with Lee Harrington.
And until next time, stay cool, have fun, and be authentically you.
And have a fantastic journey.
February 2012 (EA 172) - Ask a Slut Panel with Tillie and BigBadJim
Join LadyFish as she interviews, roasts and otherwise harasses BigBadJim, Tillie, and Lee Harrington at the Westward Bound 2012 formal dinner Ask A Slut panel. From fears in slutdom to sluttiest moments, boot sluts to art sluts, laughter and slutyness to serious slut stories, the slut is ON! Come hear how they roll in the British Columbia kinkdom.
January 2012 (EA 165) - Sacred Sexual Shamanism, Fire and Connection with O
This week, Lee Harrington chats with O on Sacred Sexual Shamanism, Fire and Connection! O can be found at: https://fetlife.com/users/99790 But I've also been on a few other folk's podcasts this year!
Q'Radio with Tamara Pincus: Gender, Kink and Spirit
The Deviant Minds Salon: Sacred Kink, Personal Paths and Pagan Poetry
Polyamory Weekly: Rituals and labels- What carries meaning?
Big Little Podcast: Transgender Experience and Ageplay (also with Thymine, lissie, Aiden Fyre, Lee Harrington, Benny, and Riley Kilo)
Sex with Jaiya/Voice America: BDSM and Beyond (also with Pamela Madsen and Liquid Nymph)
December 2011 (EA 160) - Elements, Projections and Symbol Sets
Episode: https://shows.acast.com/660e243b2f834f0017de9181/episodes/660e2440acbcaf00174d9952
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Announcer:
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Lee:
Hello, fellow adventurers of sexuality and spirit, and welcome to Erotic Awakening with Lee Harrington.
In this monthly show, we've dived into everything from dominance and submission to paganism, from looking at faith and erotic connection, all the way up to environmental issues, STDs, and all kinds of other things.
But this month, I'm annoyed.
This month, I have been reading a lot of various books and keeping myself busy as I deal with all kinds of things in my life.
And I had a chance to read a little tiny chap book that's by Sandra Ingram.
And it's all about healing toxic thoughts.
Now, it's funny that a book called Healing Toxic Thoughts would cause me to be frustrated.
Maybe it's not that strange.
Maybe thinking about these things puts them into perspective.
It's a good book.
That's not the rant.
It's a good book because it talks about everything from how we, as individuals, unintentionally create violence when we think about things too loud.
It talked about all kinds of notions of healing ourselves because our toxic thoughts that go out into the universe are oftentimes the toxic thoughts that we have brewing inside our own essence.
These are powerful messages.
But my rant starts with something near the very end of the book.
She has a ritual where she talks about the idea of embracing all of the different elements, where we turn to the earth and look for the solidness of the earth and bury ourselves down in the earth.
She talks about the idea of water and feel the water slowly and sensually washing over our bodies to let go of toxins and let the water take our pain.
She talks about air and feeling ourselves out in the air as the wind blasts us and takes away the entirety of our pain and our toxic thoughts.
And then she says, and then we turn to fire, and imagine fire in the form of the sun bathing us with light.
This bugs the hell out of me.
This bugs me because it reminds me of how in the kink community we do the exact same thing.
Oh, breath play, breath play is so dangerous.
Breath play is so edgy.
Breath play could kill you.
Well, so what?
So could all of the other elemental forms of play, which we seem to let go all the time.
I'm not saying do breath play.
I think breath play is incredibly dangerous.
But let's look at the other ones, shall we?
Let's look at the fact that fire play has the capacity of getting out of control at any moment, even with people I know who are incredibly talented with fire.
There's the possibility of that one drip of alcohol going down into somebody's crease of skin and serious burns happening.
I've seen people's hairspray catch on fire.
I've seen all kinds of things going wrong.
I have a person that I know who had a branding done where the brand was done way too hot, and it literally turned part of their skin into taffy.
Fire play is dangerous.
Earth play.
Burying people in the earth, doing subversions in mud, doing things where people are crawling through or crawling on the dirt.
People think all the time, oh, it's just somebody wrestling around in mud, right?
Well, what's in that mud?
What's in that dirt?
What bacterium are in there?
And when we're talking about burials, when we're talking about putting anybody under the ground, the possibilities for profound harm are definitely there.
And with water?
Submerging people under water, doing water torture.
I love the fact that there's an entire trend right now in the kink community around wanting to do waterboarding.
You know what?
It's called a torture because people actually have their spirit break.
All forms of elemental play are dangerous.
And all forms of elements, just like fire when she was talking about, oh, embrace the sun, which is so far away, embrace its light.
No, no, embrace the fire.
Because every single form of elemental working can be sweet.
Every single form of elemental working can be profoundly dangerous.
Feel the water push and wash over your body, or feel the tsunami break upon you.
Lay against the earth and absorb its strength, or feel the earthquake wake and break underneath you as bridges fall and hundreds, thousands die.
Feel the softness of the air caressing your flesh.
Feel the wind carrying you in and out, or feel Hurricane Katrina.
Feel the fire dancing upon your skin, the drip, drip, drip of hot wax as it caresses you, or feel the fire burn.
Burn and smolder your hair smoking away, your skin turning to a crisp.
It's one of the reasons that I get so frustrated and confused by the notion of what we call edge play.
A single item has the capacity to be incredibly dangerous, incredibly, quote, edgy, as far as edge that requires us to have a distinct form of skill to even be able to handle the implement.
But it also has the possibility of being incredibly sweet or sensual.
I remember being at Dark Odyssey Fusion last year, and my partner Aiden ended up making this giant wheel for us to play with Wheel of Misfortune, which was run by Great Answer.
And if you guys haven't heard Great Answer's podcast, seriously, go check out the Ropecast at some point.
It's been running for a number of years.
And Great Answer was going to be doing, spin the wheel was the idea.
You spin the wheel, and then you end up landing on a square, just like Wheel of Fortune.
It just was Wheel of Misfortune.
And let's say you could land on lovely piece of cake, or piercing, or punching, or cuddling.
And if people rolled these different things, if they didn't like what they got, they had the opportunity to reroll again by spending one coin.
And everybody had been given a few coins at the beginning of the event.
Cute little wooden coins that had a serpent coiled up in the Kundalini cash.
And it was funny because people looked at the wheel and went, Oh, cuddling, that's so sweet.
A hug, that's so sweet.
Tickling, that's such beginner play.
And saw a single tail and went, ooh, edge play.
Ooh, I'm not so sure about that.
Punching and kicking, ooh.
Grappling, urr.
Fucking machines, ooh, I'm not so sure.
And it was hilarious to me because I think the edgiest thing on that board was the cuddling.
And that's not because I'm anti-cuddling.
I love cuddling.
It was the cuddlers and the way they cuddled.
They were two of the creepiest cuddle girls I have ever seen.
They kind of oozed on up to people and went, hi, I want to cuddle you.
And it was just disturbing to bear witness to the way that they did that, the way that they made cuddling a truly edgy activity.
And so when we think about any form of play, just as we think of any element, it can be incredibly sensual or incredibly sadistic.
It can be something that is sweet or something that can go into a place of danger really quickly.
I think about the rope bondage community, for example, and the number of people I know who say, oh, well, if you're just starting out in rope bondage, you want to start out with floor work, because floor work is a really safe and easy thing.
And when you're going to get more experienced, either as a top or as a bottom, as a rigger or as a model, you're going to get into suspensions, because suspensions are really, really hard on both tops and bottoms.
And I'm going to cry bullshit, because some of the edgiest scenes that I have ever done as a bottom are floor work.
I remember playing with Mortis, well, the founder of Shibari-Con more accurately, and we were at an event in Atlanta.
He tied me into a lotus position, my tops and my feet above each other, hands back behind my back in a prayer, my palms facing each other.
Now, these two things are what I would consider advanced skills for a bottom.
But the thing that made this scene especially edgy is that I had gotten my nose pierced.
And he tied my nose piercing, using dental floss, down to my ankles.
I was held in this position, and mind you, getting there was absolutely hilarious because they had figured out how to run dental floss through a nasal piercing, which was a bit of a challenge in a dark dungeon.
But once that happened, the pain was excruciating.
The pain was absolutely horrible.
It was one of the edgier scenes I've done.
And in fact, also thinking of Em's Morpheus, he and I at Shabari-Con two years ago did a scene where he tied my elbows together behind my back, put me up onto my shoulders into a headstand, into a shoulder stand, excuse me, into a shoulder stand with my elbows tied together behind my back, my hands pulled in one direction, one ankle pulled in another direction, and the other ankle tied up in the air.
It was messed up.
It was crazy.
It was physically dangerous.
It was incredibly edgy for the spectators and for me.
We didn't know if I was going to end up dislocating something, breaking something.
Floor work can be incredibly edgy.
And then I think of suspensions, and I have to point out, because people keep forgetting it, sitting in a hammock is suspension.
Getting into a sling to get fisted is suspension.
I have a vision in my head of a ritual that I really want to do for someone in the pagan community, preferably a practitioner of Freya.
It was designed originally for a Freya practitioner who never ended up doing it, where it would be mummifying someone, lifting them up into a hammock, sewing that hammock shut, and having them sit there, lay there in that hammock for an extended period of time as a form of meditation, a form of neliomancy, a form of doing divination through the nothingness and the sound and sensory deprivation.
This would be sweet and yet challenging.
It would be a sweet ordeal, just like the Lady of Bees herself, for she is an incredibly powerful deity who is able to lay herself out to be able to acquire that which the gnomes had.
Incredibly powerful unto herself, and yet she is also incredibly sweet and loving.
These dichotomies exist in everything.
And yet we're all carrying around these notions of what's hardcore, what's easy, what is challenging.
And it's based entirely on projection of what we think.
If we were in that moment, what we think would be really challenging.
I know some people that will happily play with burying because they've done it so many times, and it's something that's really comforting to a degree for them.
Or being encased in layers upon layers of fabric.
But that's something that they find delicious and yummy.
And I know other people that if you even mention the idea of a spider being in the same room as them, would be horrible.
I know some people that if you wanted to cuddle with them, and it's not even a creepy cuddler, it would be a horrible thing.
Now, for some of us, our projections are based on what we've seen, what we've borne witness to.
When I had my lips sewn shut last year, I did it because it had been both a tantalizing fantasy, but also a profound fear.
I had seen someone, I thought about it and had a fantasy about having my mouth sewn shut, but then I saw someone actually do it.
And it left me so profoundly paralyzed that I was convinced that sewing your mouth shut is one of the edgiest and most horrible things you can do to another human being.
And I never wanted to do it.
I was convinced the person was crazy, that they wanted to play with that same top again.
But that's because it affected me.
I saw it, and I bore witness to it, and therefore the next time and the time after that and the time after that that I heard or saw anything about facial sewing or facial piercing, other than basic forehead piercings, which I was happy to do, but anything involving the mouth, I thought people were crazy.
What the hell are you talking about?
No, that's one of the edgiest things you could do, but that was based on my experience of what I'd seen, not of what I'd experienced.
And were the piercings painful when it came that day?
Yeah.
Were they the worst thing I've ever done?
I have done, quote, far edgier things.
It was still a challenge.
It was still horrible.
I still couldn't finish as many piercings as I was hoping to.
But that's projection too.
The idea that there's a should, a have to, a need to when it comes to our sexuality.
There's not a need to.
Fine, I was hoping to get fisted that night, and instead my body was only able to take three fingers.
Cool.
Did I enjoy it?
Absolutely.
So what's the issue?
Why are we holding ourselves to these ridiculously high standards of what we think we should be doing?
In general, why are the shoulds shoulding all over us?
It doesn't make sense.
And yet it does make sense because it's based on those projections.
And we live in a world of projections.
We live in a world where we think we know what's going on, and yet as the immortal Kermit the Frog would say, rainbows are visions, they're only illusions, and rainbows have nothing to hide.
Rainbows are real, right?
We see them, we experience them, we dream them, we talk about them, we go chasing after them, we paint them, but rainbows are also illusions.
They are refracted light upon drops of water.
They're not real, and yet they are.
And so it is with our perceptions and our relationships and our things that we live through and live in.
They are real, but they are also projections.
And when we actually become aware of these projections, we have the capacity to actually understand the symbol sets that we're working in.
To actually understand the symbol sets that we're working in.
I mention that because I was at The Floating World in New Jersey a couple of years ago, and I was at the Sacred Sexuality and Sacred Kink Roundup that happened there.
It was really interesting because I'd say half the people in the room were presenters, and the other half the people in the room were incredibly educated and knowledgeable on the two topics.
And I will never forget the all but row that broke out between Raven Caldera and Fakir Musafar.
Now, Fakir Musafar is the founder of the Modern Body Primitive Movement in a lot of ways.
The grandfather, I should say, not necessarily founder, but the grandfather.
He's in his 80s, he's a delightful individual, but he also has a very specific perspective when it comes to body modification, comes to borrowing from other cultures and other faiths.
Raven Caldera is a Northern tradition shaman who engages in a lot of ordeal work in his ritualism and has been known to borrow from all kinds of different traditions and be able to modify it to specifically the simple set of who he's working with.
And what Raven said after Fakir had gone on this beautiful tirade, this beautiful speech about how when we're using hook suspension, we have to understand the classical nature of the okipa ceremony and understand how the Hindu people specifically use these when jumping off of platforms and understand the fuket vegan, the mysteries of the fuket vegetarian rites and understand that we have to respect these things and only do them if we've understood and become indoctrinated to them.
And Raven said, yeah, we have to understand their symbol set.
And if I'm working with a person, I have to understand their symbol set.
And so if for them, I'm now going into my own words, not Raven's, if an individual is moved profoundly by a hook suspension, because for them, it means something specific and has nothing to do for them with what is actually happening for somebody experiencing the okipa, the chest hang.
If it has nothing to do with the okipa ritual and has everything to do with their internal symbol set, why do they need to do it in the exact same way that the people of the okipa do?
The people that are doing the okipa, I should say.
Why?
Why should they do it in exactly the same way when it means something different to them?
We can use the same technology, I would argue.
We can use the same technology to have it mean something completely different.
An angel and what appears as an angel for one person is a demon for another.
I think of Melikthus, the peacock angel of the Ziazidi, who is also Melikthus of the fairy tradition, but a different deity to a degree.
But of the Ziazidi, he is an angel with peacock wings who is beautiful and terrible and awesome in the classical use of the word awesome to inspire awe.
And he is so awesome that there is a painting of him in the darkest of dark caves that they always light candles in front of because if he ever plunges into darkness, he will come back.
And we would prefer, O Lord Meliktoos, we would prefer, O Lord Meliktoos, that you not come back.
While to other folk of Iraq and Iran and that region, they are devil worshipers.
They believe that they are angel worshipers.
They believe that they are worshipers of the one and true God just as others are.
And yet, for others, they are demon worshipers.
But that is because for them the notion of anything that must have candles lit before it so that it does not come back must be a demon.
And yet, if we look at descriptions of angels from the Old Testament, and if we look at it from other perspectives as well, there are things that are chairs with rotating gears and eyes, and things with eight wings, and beautiful terrible monsters that have been birthed that are all called angels.
That are all called angels.
The seraphim, the cherubim.
I find it fascinating as a note that we call cherubs as cute little fluffy things.
Those are nothing like what the cherubs are described as in various books, if we look back far enough.
I'm not sure what those little fat babies with wings are, but they are not cherubs.
Anyway, sidetrack.
We have to understand what our symbol sets are.
And so if I look into my own life, a leather cap with a polished brim, also known as a cover, for me is a profound statement of mastery.
And I get my feathers ruffled as I project onto the world that other people's covers mean the same thing, or should mean the same thing.
While the reality is there are people who go, Oh, that's sexy.
I want to wear it.
Period.
The end.
It means nothing else.
Period.
The end.
And yet I get so upset because, quote, that cover should mean something to them, unquote.
You know?
That cover should mean something to them.
But that's my story.
That's my projection.
That's my culture.
That's where I've come from.
And it might mean that to a lot of people, and I might hunger to have that mean something to everyone.
But it doesn't.
A ring on the left, on the left ring finger.
It's the fact that even the second finger, starting at the pinky, is called the ring finger.
It talks about the symbol sets of our culture.
But on the left hand, on the ring finger, a ring.
If we come from a Judeo-Christian background, or specifically a European Christian background, and some stuff a little bit outside of that, but originally from those frameworks, it means that somebody is married or betrothed, that they are monogamous, that they have no outside partners, that they are in a serious, committed relationship that has financial, emotional, social, and psychological entanglement.
Well, what if I just want to wear a ring on that finger because it looks good, or it feels good, when I encounter others, I will have people make the assumption that I am married or betrothed in a monogamous relationship and I'm not available to anyone else because I'm running into their projections based on the symbol sets of a culture.
I have my own projections, and I ask you, as you listen to this, to consider what are some of your projections or what's been projected upon you.
What projections do you have in your dominance and submission?
What projections do you have in your kink or your sex life?
What projections do you have in your faith or your ritual workings?
What projections do you have over the language and the words you use?
What projections do you carry?
And what projections have been projected upon you?
It's important for us to work with our language sets and understand who are talking to us at the same time.
As an example, if I'm working in the BDSM community, and I say, I would like to do some CBT with you, it means cock and ball torment or torture.
I personally like cock and ball torment.
It allows for a whole lot more flexibility.
I want to do some cock and ball torment with you.
What do you say?
Now, if I go to other places and say, I'd like to do some CBT with you, it will elicit a different response or reaction.
If I'm in the world of computer programming, CBT is computer-based training.
And if I'm working with psychotherapists, CBT is cognitive behavioral therapy.
This can lead to profound amusement if we think we're having one conversation and they think we're having another.
I find CBT really difficult.
Wow, me too.
What don't you like about it?
I find that I don't enjoy how much it pushes me.
I completely concur.
And we think we're having the same conversation, but we're not, even though we're using the exact same words.
And that can apply to our kink as well, specifically, right?
Let's think about the notion of a collar.
I'd like you to wear my collar.
Okay, so does that mean that I would like to be in a long-term, committed relationship with you with no other people involved in my life whatsoever, or does that mean I'd like to play with you tonight, and I'd like you to wear my collar for the duration of the scene?
This is really important for us to discuss our simple sets with each other for exactly this reason.
I myself have found myself caught up in some of these things sometimes, where I think I've been incredibly clear on communication, and for others, it wasn't quite so much.
And I think that's an important thing to consider, is that even for folks like myself, who've been in the community for 15 years now, or whatever date I'm at, that even for those of us who think that we've been communicating really well for a really long time, it's still bumpy, and we're still working with those projections.
We still think we know what's edge play and that we know what soft and beginner play is.
And it also infers that beginners want something soft.
It infers that people who've been playing for a really long time want something or are capable of doing something hard.
These too are projections that the bulk of the time don't have any validity.
Somebody coming into the scene might want to do that facial lip sewing thing.
Somebody who's been in the scene for 35 years might really want to sensually cuddle for a night and call that the scene that they want to do.
It's all valid.
It's all reasonable.
And that's my hope, is that instead of blindly projecting, you and I and I become aware of the projections that we're using, both on the world at large and on ourselves, because we're shitting all over ourselves too.
And with that, my name is Lee Harrington, and thank you for joining me on Erotic Awakening.
If you have any questions around sexuality, spirituality, kink, gender, connection, identity, or anything else, please feel free to drop me an email at lee, L-E-E, at passionandsoul.com with the subject line Ask Lee, and I'll respond to it either on the podcast or in some way, shape, or form, or on my Ask Lee column on passionandsoul.com.
You can also find me everywhere on the internet by doing a search for Lee Harrington, or Passion And Soul as one word, on fetlife.com, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, DeviantArt, and more.
So thank you, fellow adventurers of sexuality and spirit, for joining me.
This has been Erotic Awakening with Lee Harrington, and until next time, stay cool, have fun, be authentically you, and have a fantastic journey.
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