PS102 - Erotic Art, Poetry, and Music

Apr 17

Written By

No two people have exactly the same taste in art or music – why should it be any different for erotica or pornography? Leading up to Seattle Erotic Art Festival (where Lee was a judge this year), he shares an erotic tale about pony play, some erotic poetry, and discusses how music and storytelling can be embedded in our sexual journey. Let’s examine what is sensual and sexual for you, and consider being profoundly present with the tastes and interests of others.

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

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

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

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

The Passion in Soul Podcast is intended for mature audiences.

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

Right now.

Lee:
Hello, fellow adventurers of sexuality and spirit, and welcome to the Passion in Soul Podcast with your fellow adventurer, your journeymate, Lee Harrington of passionandsoul.com.

Coming up shortly, I'm going to be at Seattle Erotic Art Festival in Seattle, Washington, also known as SEAF.

SEAF has been happening for over a decade now, and I'm always so impressed by this show.

It is not just a collection of 2D and 3D artwork and photography, paintings, drawing, sculpture, but there's always installation art, performance art, everything from rope bondage performances to people doing interactive painting and touch systems to audio recording work and everything in between and beyond, people showing up in fabulous costumes and people showing up off the streets who have never been exposed to erotic art before.

And the genre of erotic art is so incredibly wide because what one person considers titillating, another person considers fascinating, another person considers absolutely abhorrent, and another person considers boring.

There are no one true aesthetic to any form of art, let alone erotic art.

It's like referring to music.

There's one person who's going to say, oh my god, jazz is so amazing, and within jazz, there are these perfect performers.

And another person is going to listen to jazz and go, well, why would you want to do that?

When jazz does not elicit the emotions of heavy rock or metal where we can reach into the soul and rip it out from the guts and I can pour myself into the angst, the fury and the passion, and another person goes, that's just nothing but noise.

Give me R&B and the voice echoing out in a rhythm of truth.

And another person says, no, let the soul wash through me or let the blues beat out the truth of the world.

And another person says, why are you all talking so much?

Let the piano play.

There is no one perfect aesthetic.

And when we think of that notion of music and tie it into the erotic experience, it reminds me of that experience that is music embedded in our erotic journey.

What was the type of music that was playing when you had your first kiss?

And I'm not talking the music on the radio.

I'm talking about that time period.

What were the things that you found arousing?

Was it the beats on the disco dance floor?

Was it let's talk about sex with salt and pepper beating out?

Was it nine inch nails, pretty hate machine?

Was it angry punk of the streets?

Was it Tchaikovsky?

And dancing a finger along your cheek?

As it's strummed forward and built up and built up, each person's musical erotic embedded memory is different.

And so it is with what pornography turns us on, and as is what type of erotic visuals stimulate us or have us feel curious, uncertain.

I'm one of the jurors for this year's Seattle Erotic Art Festival, and it's been a fascinating process.

They brought in five different jurors for each year so that you have someone who works in the museum and art gallery world full-time, someone who is a full-time selling artist, someone who's an arts collector, someone who's an activist in the sexuality communities, and somebody from a community that isn't spoken of very often or who represents people of disabilities or underrepresented populations.

And I was brought in as the activist, but as I was talking to Sophia Sky, who was producing a lot of the event, or at least putting it all together, she and I were talking, and I said, well, thank you so much for letting me flex my old muscles.

And she said, what are you talking about?

And I said, well, my original degree is in arts administration.

I used to work at museums and galleries.

My plan had been that I was going to become the international events coordinator for the Guggenheim.

That was like my dream job.

Because I originally had wanted to be an artist, but I thought to myself, do I want to be the kind of artist who has to apply their work for the world and desperately search out coins and risk that possibility of burning out?

No, I didn't want to, and so I went into the arts world in a way that I could be able to facilitate others, but still pursue my passions, that I'd be able to write grants and work at museums and speak up art history and echo those experiences and those knowledge points out to others.

And I loved doing that kind of research, and I loved doing, working in that world.

It was really amazing.

But I moved back to the United States, working over at the Victoria & Albert Museum at the Royal Court Theatre and doing some other work over there in England.

And I moved back to the United States and couldn't find a job in my field.

I had folks at the Portland Art Museum say, hey, this is great, but wouldn't you like to work here as an internship?

And I've been doing internships for the last year and a half.

I'd like at least to be able to start paying back my student loans.

That would be great.

And I couldn't find work in the field, and I ended up becoming a database administrator because I could at least apply the work I'd done in grant writing and in similar systems in the world at large because student loans came due.

And she looked at me and said, I had no idea you worked in that world.

And I said, oh, because I also have worked as a semi-pro photographer and I have sold my art in galleries and I do have a poetry book and I have done that work as well.

And she said, oh, nope, didn't know that either.

I was there as an activist, which I loved, but I loved being in that jury process because I got to see and argue such diverse tastes amongst the five of us.

And we saw such diverse things in a piece of artwork.

And I remember there was one piece that had in it, had a whole bunch of cartoons in the background and then had in the foreground the small box, like a cigar box, that if you opened it up, it was an interactive 3D slash 2D wall piece, interactive piece.

And if you lifted up the lid of the cigar box, there was this Sheila Naguig.

And it was, and for folks who don't know, it's an Irish fertility goddess type image.

It's a woman with her legs spread wide and she's reaching down with her hands and opening up her vulva so you can see her vaginal cavity.

It's that notion of fertility laid bare and powerful.

And it's got this sculpture and I looked at it and I went, oh my gosh, if that is, can people tell, is that wire coming out of her head to make that giant mass of metal around her as it screws?

And they looked at it and went, why does it matter?

And I tried to explain what this is, a fertility goddess symbol, an ancient Ireland, and if it screws going into her head, I think that's a very different message than wires coming out of her head.

Is she being bolted down and having that world oppression and an image that is almost masculine in its penetrative story going into her?

Or is it wires that are rooted in her and the message and the electricity is coming out of her being?

These are two very different messages.

And I was able to bring that piece to it and able to win them over to get that piece into the show.

And there were other pieces that I'm just looking at them going, why?

There were some pieces that people were looking at in the show and were like, why do we want to include that piece?

It's yet another woman with no head or no face.

It's just her tits and ass and she's just an objectified caricature of femininity.

We've seen this before.

And others of us going, yeah, that's true, but it's really good for its milieu.

It's really good for the category of work that it's representing.

And you know what?

Sometimes those disembodied body parts are in themselves erotic.

Is that so wrong and bad, even if it is coming from a semi-patriarchal perspective on what is hot?

That idea of woman as oppressed body parts.

And so we decided as kind of a contract, spoken and unspoken, between our group is at least if every two of those got in, we had one that was a similar type of objectification of a masculine body or a cisgendered male body at least, then it was all cool.

And it was a great process.

There was lots of snacking and we had not just the five of us in the room, but Sophia Sky who was organizing all of it.

We had the person who was actually curating and having to lay out the show and she was looking down at how big are these pieces and oh my God, you're letting in these four pieces that are all three foot by five foot.

Oh my God, as compared to wait, that piece is only eight inches by eight inches.

Where am I going to put that?

And looking at all of those things about how to even lay out a show like this, one person who is doing nothing but the clerical stuff and one person who was taking the notes for the docents, for the people who are going to be guiding throughout this entire show, people who are coming into the show just like a docent at a gallery and are going to be taking people around and tell about the stories and see and show what the jurors saw.

Explain to people that Sheila & The Geek story of people are wondering, okay, why did this giant flying cartoon sausage girl piece get in?

And explain the vision behind it.

Why was it intriguing to the jurors?

And what was the story from the artists?

Because we as the jurors didn't get that information.

Part of Seattle Erotic Arts Festival is also a collection of people telling their erotic stories.

And it's being mashed together by people who are doing the audio curating into making a single audio stream that you'll be able to sit down and listen to at the show.

And so I would provide for your audio pleasure a chance to hear the piece that I submitted in full.

And I have no idea how much of this piece is going to be actually appearing in the audio piece.

But what they asked for was submissions of people's erotic stories of their own past.

Not false fantasies, but whether it's a sweet little piece, a moment of romance, whether it was something passionate and brutal and feral, whatever it is to mean your own erotic story.

And so I want to let you guys listen to this one, which is a piece from my Pony Play time.

And a piece that is from the land that Dark Odyssey still is on.

It's a continuation of the event that I'm going to be talking about.

And I hope you enjoy it.

I love going to Ramblewood.

Ramblewood is a beautiful campground, 200 acres in Northern Maryland, where the owner, Harry, loves letting people be authentic to themselves.

And one of the ways that he does this as a form of activism is let sexuality groups use his property.

The first time I went to Ramblewood was for leather retreat.

It was 2001, and I was camping with Boymeat, who's a sex educator out in New York, and who I was dating, hooking up with, I don't know how I would label us at the time.

He was simply my dirty uncle Phil, my lover, my caning top, my fucked up age play partner, and he was a delight to have in my life.

So when he said, hey, do you want to come and teach at this thing called Leather Retreat, I said, absolutely, I would.

200 acres, cabin beds, a lake with bonfires and a walkable labyrinth and all, absolutely, give it to me, I want to go.

And there was a lot of pony play that used to happen there, and at that time, I'd never pony played in public.

So here I am at this beautiful campground, and there's all of these people doing human pony play.

And the first day I was there, I went down and just watched the ponies.

They'd built stalls that people could be human ponies in with straw laid out on the ground.

They had people pulling carts, or I should say they had ponies pulling carts.

And the first day I just watched, because I was too shy to join in.

I'd only ever done stuff privately with my husband of the time, and here I was a pony without a handler.

How was I going to be willing to do this?

And I brought my pony play gear with me, but I was shy.

I wasn't sure if it's where I wanted to go.

By the end of that first year, I had delightedly gotten to be in a pony play competition.

I had gotten to be a part of a six cart horse pulling team that ended up pulling a whole bunch of people up and down a hill, and I wanted to come back.

Yeah, there had been sad moments in it where I hadn't been recognized by folks and I didn't get enough love, and other times where I had been given so much love that it just poured out of me.

And so the next year when I came back, of course I wanted to pony again.

How could I not?

And there was this pony cart, and so we had decided that we were going to, as a small group of pony players, provide human pony rides to and from the dining hall.

And so there was this hill that we were trucking up and down, ponies leading these carts that people could hop on, and we would take people like a taxi up and down the hill, and it was such sweaty, satisfying work.

I was trading off one day with a gentleman by the name of Pony Boy Lancelot, and he and I were taking turns going up and down the hill, sometimes the two of us pulling at once, sometimes one of us, sometimes the other, but it was our shift, and we felt so free and loved and beautiful and powerful, and people were petting us on the back, and it was so sensual.

And it had started to rain just slightly, and we decided, you know what, we're done for the day.

And so we went back to the stalls, and we were un-clipped from our carts, and we were just tromping around in the upper field, around, there's a horseshoe of cabins, that's what it refers to, right, the horseshoe, and so the pony play area was up by the horseshoe that year, and we had been un-clipped, and we were just playing around in the field and just feeling the water on our back, slowly dripping down, and when you're so sweaty, that cool, slow rain feels so luscious.

It feels like the gods coming down and petting you, droplet at a time, and I couldn't help but be joyous in that sweaty, animal feral sensuality.

And so here I am in this animal headspace, so deep into myself and a car pulls up.

Now, for people who have never been to an outdoor kinky camping event, there is a freeing feeling that comes up when suddenly you're on a campground where you can be whoever and however you want to be.

You want to be in full latex head to toe, rock your bad self, or you want to be naked in nothing but what you were given on the day you were born staring up at a dripping, drown, moist sky.

You can have it.

And here, four people pull up in a car, and these two, quote, little girls pull up, and by little girls, I mean like, eh, mid-twenties, right?

And these two women get out at the back, and they run out with full girlish enthusiasm going, NAKED TIME!

At full naked joyousness, they are stripping off their clothes, and they are dancing in the rain, and they aren't thinking about what else or who else might be there, because they're having a chance to be themselves.

They are naked of soul, naked of self, and they ran smack dab into the ponies, like just right into us.

And here we are in our pony boots, and we're already tall people, so, you know, five foot eleven for me, six foot one for him, and you've got another couple of inches on us, so we are towering over these women that are five foot two, I'm guessing, right?

They are a foot shorter than us, and they're looking up, and they're age players, right?

There are people who are grown women who are enjoying getting to have that girlish energy on, and they quietly, with that quiet little voice, but enough projection that they're just going, Daddy!

And they're screaming out with that sweet girlish voice, Help!

Because they don't know what to do about the fact that they've run into these very tall ponies that are us, me, and Ponyboy Lancelot.

And we're just looking down, and we're tromping our toes because into the dirt, we're just tromping into the earth, and because here's two little girls, and they're about to play with us, right?

How are we supposed to respond?

And out of nowhere, there is a crack against the wind, and then a crack that explodes like a shotgun blast because the tip of a single tail has exploded against the rain.

And crack after crack, a man has come out of the horseshoe, out of one of the cabins, and he, I can't, I don't even remember now whether he was naked or nothing but a pair of shorts, but I do remember he had dark facial hair and dark hair, and he was wielding that whip with an expertise, with an expert's breeze, and that breeze was blowing against us, and crack after crack.

And ponies, if you are, if you've ever been to a ranch, you know that horses will respond to that noise with a primal instinct, and we backed up and we backed away from that noise as he corralled us, crack, crack, crack, pop, pop, pop, against the rain.

Shotgun blasts echoing into our heart, into our skin, into our pores.

And that feeling poured out of me as I tromped my feet back, back, stepping back, stepping back, stepping back, away from that pop, pop, pop, stepping back, stepping back, pop.

And I breathed in as finally he then closed the gate behind us.

Finally, when we were cooler, when we were calmed down, when we'd been brushed down, we were led by some pony handlers over to where the girls were relaxing in their cabin and unpacking.

And they were introduced to us.

This is Pony Lady and this is Pony Boy Lancelot.

Would you like to pet them?

And our heads were brought in and they petted us across our foreheads and down our nose with that sweetness and uncertainty that little girls give.

This from two powerful young ladies who were in their hearts, little girls, petting us with that sweetness and fascination.

And they said, do the ponies want some apples?

And we trumped down our feet.

No, shaking our heads back and forth.

And they said, do ponies want a carrot?

And we trumped down our feet.

No, the ponies did not as we shook our heads.

Do ponies want a Mike's Hard Lemonade?

And we echoed up with such delight, our knees bucking up into the air, throwing our hair around as they petted our forehead and they brought down our bits that were wedged into our mouth.

And they let us lap up the Mike's Hard Lemonade, that cool, crisp taste drizzling down my throat that was so parched from having gone up and down that hill, that tang, that sweetness against the dryness of the sweat that had coagulated in my mouth, that cool nesp, that cool crisp.

As I sweated my forehead up against their hand, and they petted me down, and they petted down my chest, and I felt their skin smooth and soft against my chest, smooth and soft and sweaty.

And the breeze kept blowing down, here with us now under the shade of the overhanging cabin.

Here we were, and turned around, and saw the rain falling down around us, wet, moist, cool.

That was in 2001.

I still pony play.

And as you can tell, I love doing erotic poetry, erotic performance art.

I was actually really honored when I was doing my undergraduate work to get to go and study with Cahill Ó Sharkey, who has since shamed himself publicly for some of his personal life choices.

But he was the poet laureate of Ireland at the time, and getting to work with him was such a powerful experience.

I remember especially how he talked about that idea of repetitive poetry as performance art and as myth and legend and awaited tell our histories and pass them down because in Ireland until the English came, though there was Ogham, right, there was Ogham, the runic slash writing system that was used in Ireland at the time that was used to mark signposts effectively with signs that said Cahill was here, right, or Brigid was here, or Breedswell or things like that.

But it was also the way that people were able to do divination of sorts.

It was a form of quick communication, but it wasn't used for writing entire stories.

It wasn't used for writing down histories.

It was used for shorter pieces of communication.

And so how did people, people talk about all the time, how were the Druids able to memorize these pieces?

You know, you weren't considered an actual full bard.

You are able to tell the stories of your people until you had hundreds of stories memorized.

You had to be able to not just know the basic stories and pass them down, but you had to be able to hear a tale when you were visiting somewhere and be able to recount that tale, concept or word for word, not just passing truth that could be passed down in a telephone game, but be able to recount it.

So how do you remember these things?

And so what the message he taught and the system he taught was beautiful.

Once upon a time, there was a boy.

Once upon a time, there was a boy who fell in love with the moon.

Once upon a time, there was a boy who fell in love with the moon, and she loved him too.

Once upon a time, there was a boy who fell in love with the moon, and she loved him too, but her father, the sky, did not approve.

Once upon a time, there was a boy who fell in love with the moon, and she loved him too, but her father, the sky, did not approve, and so they decided to elope.

The concept is so simple.

Each time you tell a story, you tell it again.

One more concept, again.

Now, second concept, now third concept, now fourth concept.

But each time you change the rhyming structure, you change the feeling behind it, you tell it from another angle, another concept.

A, so that people have it echo in their goose bumps, so they feel it in their heart, because one way you tell it might reach one person, but another one reaches another.

But it's also so the time that you have gotten to the end of that tale, you have told that whole story 50 times, a hundred times.

You have told that story again and again, and so the listener knows it in their pores.

They know it in their hearts, and they can tell that story again and remember all of it, because they know it.

They feel it.

They have absorbed it and made it theirs.

They haven't just heard it, but they have felt it.

People don't always remember what you say, but they remember how you made them feel.

That's a concept that's told in marketing all the time.

That's a concept that is used in storytelling and speech writing.

People will remember how you made them feel.

They will take home the thing that embeds in their heart.

Very few people have an eidetic memory, have a memory that they can recount exactly what they heard and saw.

It is a powerful skill that some have, but I don't have it.

But I do remember the concepts and how people made me feel.

So consider how people make you feel, and consider how you can pass on your stories and your messages.

I'd like to also share with you a piece of poetry from one of my poetry books, a book that came out recently actually called On Starry Thighs, Sacred and Sensual Poetry.

It's called Fairy Magic, Wild Magic.

Give me messy magic, give me wild love, give me the tears, sweat and cum of the gods.

I refuse to pussyfoot around the pagan roots of my heart.

My faith is inclusive, a sea of sun bathing us in the rose window of all of reality.

I see goddess's orgasm, gods fuck, siblings dance hand in hand.

My goddess is not a dangling god with breasts glued on.

I will not worship from afar.

I cherish my wildness, my integrated paths, my blue eyes wide with wonder.

Come dance with me in open groves and downtown orgies.

Dance with me, lover, sister, brother, friend.

Dance with me in this messy magic.

Breathe air, tread soil, swim deep, gaze into the flame.

Drink in all possibilities, not just the guise, no matter your path.

Find your truth, make your faith four-dimensional.

My hands are open, arms wide, arms wide.

Arms ready, waiting for when you are called to my side to ride this wild magic.

But the thing is, any poem can be read in different ways, including that one.

What if instead you'd heard, Give me messy magic, give me wild love, give me the tears sweat and come of the gods.

I refuse to pussyfoot around the pagan roots of my heart.

My faith is inclusive, a sea of sun, bathing us in all the rose window of reality.

I see goddess's orgasm.

Gods fuck.

Siblings dance hand in hand.

My goddess is not a dangling god with breasts glued on.

I will not worship from afar.

I cherish my wildness, my integrated paths, my blue eyes wide with wonder.

Come dance with me in open groves.

And downtown orgies, dance with me.

Lover, sister, brother, friend, dance with me in this messy magic.

Breathe air, tread soil, swim deep, gaze into the flame.

Drink in all the possibilities, not just the guise, no matter your path.

Find your truth, make your faith four-dimensional.

My hands are open, arms ready, waiting for when you are called to my side to ride this wild magic.

It's a very different experience.

Neither is better or worse, but they are different takes.

And when two people read a poem on the page, when people are titillated by something, they see and hear something different.

A two-dimensional experience, a book, when I look at it, when I read the words, I absorb them into my brain, and I filter it through my life experience.

How do I read that poem?

How do I see that poem?

And the same thing is true when I look at a piece of artwork.

How do I see that work?

How do I read into that work?

And when it's erotica, I recently was at BeachBind, and there were performances and butterfly, my partner leaned over to me and said, Who do you see yourself in?

The top?

The bottom?

How was I engaging with that piece of performance art?

And I said, as the art critic, I realized that I wasn't in the piece as one of them, I was seeing it as if I were the theatre reviewer.

I was both critiquing in a challenging way of what was done technically, but also critiquing in the notion of how do I perceive this as art?

How do I perceive this as theatre?

I wasn't in it in a titillating way.

I wasn't in it going, oh my God, I want to be tied like that, or oh my God, I want to tie like that, or I want a bottom who responds like that.

No, I was in it as if I were going to the opera.

Again, not better or worse, just profoundly different than someone else sitting there.

How are they reading into it?

How are they experiencing it?

How are they hearing it?

How are they feeling it?

And with pornography, how are they seeing it?

How are they hearing it?

How are they feeling it?

For one person, what is absurd, why would you be turned on to that or turned on by that?

Another person goes, oh my God, this is so hot.

Or somebody goes, oh my God, that's disrespectful.

That's anti-feminist.

That's horrible.

Women are being objectified and used and that is cruel.

Another woman looks at and goes, yes, that's what I want to have.

That's who I want to be.

Give me that.

It's interesting.

Reid Mahalko refers to it as don't yuck other people's yum.

But that's really hard sometimes when we truly don't understand another person's yum.

Same thing happens with music.

It can be really easy to say, oh my god, opera can be so boring.

Why would anybody like listening to that bubblegum pop shit?

It's really easy to say that's nothing but noise.

Those people are doing nothing but yelling.

Or there's not even any beat to it.

Or the words take away from it.

Or this is boring, there are no words in it.

Or I can't understand them.

Or oh my god, what is the point of this?

It just keeps droning.

It's easy to say that.

It's easy to critique in the negative eye way, the negative ear way.

But I challenge you to listen into it.

What yum might be in this?

What yum might be in that music?

For example, if you change your mind, I'm the first in line.

Honey, I'm still free.

Take a chance on me.

If you need me, let me know.

Gonna be around if you got no place to go.

If you're feeling down.

What if we look at Abba, not as vapid pop music, but a story that says, I'm still gonna be here.

Take a risk.

Fall in love.

Don't keep dating people that are empty because my heart is pure, my love is true.

Because people say, oh, it's nothing but cheesy music, and somebody else listens to that song by Abba and goes, no, that is pure love and romance.

And it lets me dance at the same time.

How beautiful is that?

Right?

Instead of us putting people down and poo-pooing things, what if we listened to the lyrics?

What if we dove in and heard?

What if we were profoundly present with that music?

And I would encourage you to do just that.

Be profoundly present with music, with art, with erotica, with pornography, with your life.

Look at it from a wide variety of directions and see what you find, because you never know.

You might find exactly what you needed to find today.

And thank you for joining me today.

If you'd like to subscribe to our podcast, as well as listen to and see other shows that I've done, and of course get the show notes from today's show, you can go over to my website, passionandsola.com, and click on the audio button.

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And if you're on iTunes, you could also type in Lee Harrington and subscribe to us there.

And until next time, stay cool, have fun, be present with art in all of its different forms, and be authentically you.

[music outro]