Tag: pagan culture

the Sacred Mystery of Denial #paganvalues

the Sacred Mystery of Denial #paganvalues

Posted on by diana

The agrarian mysteries conferred the secret of the vine. Ecstatic mysteries the secret of sex and reproduction. The Mystery of the 2 x 4 is when the universe clobbers you after trying to show you gently what you needed to know several times. Sacred consent, sacred sex, love, joy, passion, death, survival, healing, sharing, compassion – we’re all about it.

But there is another mystery. It’s actually a Mystery of light – but we have come to treat it like a shadow.

It is no shadow.

The Mystery of Denial is how we keep light when dark would overcome us. It is how we choose dark when our life is spent and we have no more to give to the light.

It is how we are able to change paths and pursue our truths – rather than be overwhelmed by a truth that isn’t ours to live out.

Denial is our gods-given right to refuse. It is the manifestation of free will; saying no is how we know that we are free.

We may choose to live when we are given a crippling disease that removes any quality of life. But our choice to refuse to is also sacred.

We may be offered the pleasures of the flesh – but we are meant to be free to refuse them. We may have those pleasures requested of us, for selfish or shared pleasure – and it is a sacred duty for the asker to accept a refusal, as this is the play of free will upon the earth.

We may be asked for money, for food, for shelter, for things trivial and significant. We may give and this is sacred. But refusing to give is, too, sacred.

No is not the enemy.

No is simply our guardian, our tool to mark what is ours upon our person.

The word no causes the mind to cloud and the throat to tighten. But it should not.

When you master this mystery, you will relax upon hearing it – because no simply means to take another path, until such a time as your path is also to say no.

This is the sacred Mystery of Denial; if we are truly life affirming, we must have room for this negative.

So what do we do with any predators we find?

So what do we do with any predators we find?

Posted on by diana

If there is need to pick only one rising voice about Pagan sex ethics and Pagan sexuality, it’s Shauna Aura Night. She has sex positive down and expertly calls out those who would use sex positive attitudes to use their own sexual organs as weapons with which to abuse people.

Read this guide to sex positive attitudes – and the crap people say to manipulate the sex positive into coercive situations that are NOT acts of love and pleasure: Sex, Ethics and Paganism.

She also discusses what to do in the case of finding a predatory in the community. I agree with her position on this. To summarize: when someone is a sexual predator, don’t try to fix that person. That pathology is beyond fixing. Don’t try to cover it up. To cover up evil is to take part in it. Get the law involved when you can and cut that person out of the community – and make it known loudly who you have cut out and what evidence prompted you to do so.

The Myth of the Healing Confrontation

The Myth of the Healing Confrontation

Posted on by diana

This blog series has resonated among people that read my blog. In the process, it’s brought up a recurring theme among the abuse survivors I know: the desire to confront those that abused them.

 

It’s a common fantasy, perpetuated all the more by television and movie writers who share this fantasy.

 

The usual hoped for scenario:

The wronged person confronts the abuser.

The abuser listens.

The abuser apologies.

Healing is had, may hugs or distributed (or the abuser turns him/herself into jail, commits suicide, etc.)

and the wronged person marches out healed, whole, unburdened by the past and thus unable to make mistakes fueled by it.

 

The more typical scenario, especially if the abuser is a narcissist:

The wronged one confronts the abuser.

The abuser wrests the conversation away from the wronged one, making it all about themselves and their feelings. This is usually accompanied by gaslighting – convincing their victims and any witnesses that the confronting victim is the real bully and maybe even engaging "witnesses" to see how wronged they are (by manipulating the situation and perception) , or resorting in verbal and physical violence. All too often it turns into a whole new way to exploit the victim. In an attempt to end the cycle, the victim ends up renewing it.

 

Yet there are stories every year about someone who did confront their abuser and came out feeling as though they’d reclaimed a piece of themselves. What gets missed in these stories is that that person did this after doing a lot of work on themselves before going in for that confrontation – and that there will still be years of work to do after,  even if they encounter that increasingly rare animal the sincere apology.

 

In two of the three conversations about confronting abuse brought to me recently, someone had attempted to confront someone abusing them either on a low level – social manipulation – or on a high level, sexual exploitation. Neither of the two conversations went well. One person was indeed painted to be the abuser and in the other case the abuser flat-out denied wrongdoing despite multiple witnesses and a text message track record to her behavior. In the third case, I managed to explain why confrontation is not the best course of action.

 

Granted, not everyone’s experience will be exactly the same. A decent licensed therapist will not encourage you to confront an abuser but will help you plan carefully if you choose to do it. If for some reason you want to keep a relationship with someone that abuses you (though generally ending all relationships is the only truly workable way to go if you want to keep your mental health) you will at some point need to lay down boundaries, which abusers view as a form of confrontation. 

 

If you want to get a broader view of what confronting abusers is like, consider reading at these sites:

The Experience Project

Women’s Aid UK

Forums at Psych Central

What this woman describes of a confrontation – is typical in a best case scenario sort of way

Words: the first weapons in an assault

Words: the first weapons in an assault

Posted on by diana

Let’s begin with why words are actual, for-a-fact weapons: in expert hands the right use of words can restructure your brain chemistry. We have a cluster of sciences and pseudo sciences around this: neuro -linguistic programming, marketing response, Silva Mind Control, to name a few. So no, words are not words. Words are waves and energies and physical things that can be measured and quantified. They are weapons just as much as a knife or gun might be – and in turn they are also beneficial tools.

Fortunately culture’s constant shifts de-weaponizes words all the time. Look at the transformation of "queer" from deadly insult to statement of pride since 1990, for example.

To understand how this works, you have to understand that this is a good chunk of why hypnosis/neurolinguistic programming is so effective. It’s why I’m such a fan of binaural files as an adjunct to the medical treatments I have to undergo. We are creatures of habit. This includes habitual word choice and consequently habitual thought choice. I work hard to try to stay out of that realm of habit – it’s what writers and creative souls do. But eventually our styles and voices emerge and we soon do have a system of habits that makes our behavior – and word choice – somewhat predictable. We often need outer stimulation to be able to change our habits at all. Introducing new words or sounds can help with establishing different habits we wish to undertake or different pursuits we wish to explore. But often to do that we have to seek out ways to introduce these concepts to ourselves until they are normalized enough that we experience comfort at the thought of pursuing these awareness shifts.

Children, normally, stay very plastic until their late teens. They will have preferences and some abilities are stronger than others (with wide variations for diseases of birth, accidents and so on.) In healthy environments new ideas occur to children relatively easily – but are also shaped by the habitual language of the adults raising them and the habitual language used in their immediate environment.

It’s already established what being emotionally abused – or even witnessing abuse – can do to a child’s brain chemistry. It’s one of the reasons behind pushing children to intervene when they see another child bullied. Just watching the bullying hurts those that observe. Not only is there damage, it can over time impact a child’s moral reasoning center. But the brain is neuroplastic – if removed from the abused and placed in a safe situation where the surrounding adults are very, very careful of their language use and behavior a child can recover from some or all of that damage. Unfortunately, abusers on some predatory level know that making abuse habitual gets them more of what they want from their victims over time. So usually verbal abuse is embedded in household language.

It’s also become embedded in our culture. There are a lot of comments that we think are normal – or funny – that are actually part of us repeating the routine of self and other poisoning imprinted onto our brains in childhood. We are even programmed to invite abuse, under the delusion it is constructive criticism.

Abusive Comments

these are loosely defined as comments perceived as innocuous or even constructive that apply a social penalty for some condition a person cannot reasonably help, especially not in that moment.

  • Did you see what she’s wearing?
  • Look at how much weight —– has gained!
  • You could do so much better.
  • That’ so stupid. (Usually said about a hobby, taste preference or other innocuous concept.)
  • That person clearly has too much time on his/her hands.

There are so many more but I’ve worked hard on blocking my brain from acknowledging them.

Why is this included in the series on sexual violence education?

Because the majority of abuse cycles begin with words. Verbal abuse is a major component of emotional abuse. It is words that are used to first get a victim compliant. Physical behavior follows the words. When the cycle ends, it begins again with words chosen to invoke fear, shame and the insane hope that something the victim does can make the cycle stop.

Recognize your words. Recognize the speech in people around you. What they say and how they say it – and who they say it about says a lot about who they are. Someone who speaks disparagingly about a partner or a child on a regular basis is someone to watch carefully, to see if those people spoken of are in danger.

Kenny Klein fallout: the problems that aren’t

Kenny Klein fallout: the problems that aren’t

Posted on by diana

In the midst of the scandal about Kenny Klein, a few panicked arguments for silence came up. The first, that his activity would make Wicca look bad and the press would jump on it (or go back to jump on it) and the second, that this would ruin Blue Star. Neither is going to happen.  Years of granting interviews at Halloween and objecting to this or that movie (though taking on Hollywood without being in Hollywood and being a producer yourself is an exercise in futility) has started to accumulate. Most people in mainstream America sort of know what Wicca is – the dumb questions I get these days are more of the "you can leave the house during the full moon?" ((Yes. The moon is full all day, not just when you can see it in the sky. Since I work from home I perform my rituals during the day.))  variety rather than the "do you worship the devil?" stuff that nearly every book on Wicca has a passage about.

 

1)He’s going to make Paganism look bad, the mainstream press is going to be all over this!

 

Well, no. There are bigger stories and more significant distractions out there. The way CNN tells it, only three things have happened since January:

  • somebody lost a plane
  • some old racist dude that owns the Clippers said some racist stuff
  • Solange Knowles beat up Jay Z

 

Breaking up a ring of pedophiles is barely a blip on modern journalism’s radar.

 

The reality is that what and how Klein’s arrest happened is the best way this thing could have happened. (Can you really call a pedophile being removed from the community a BAD thing?)

 

If Klein had been arrested in the UK or possibly one of the other Deep South or Bible Belt states, you can bet your ass the press would be all over it. In the UK you can get sued for libel over hurting someone’s feelings but you can’t for writing they kill and eat babies. So good for us that the Mirror didn’t break the story.

 

There are some reasons beyond the dying and lost-in-dementia fourth estate’s condition this won’t be a slam Wicca fiasco:

 

1)Klein was arrested in New Orleans. Out of all the cities in the United States that are

a)not going to give a damn if you’re a witch and b)are going to have way too much crime to spend time looking for hooks on old stories… New Orleans is the one.

 

2)He was arrested with 14 OTHER MEN. The feds and the larger news media are looking at the story as a package deal. One Pagan out of 14 is … about the national average, whether or not pedophilia is involved. He’s not a standout and clearly Paganism was not the value that these men shared.

 

3)The press has zeroed in on their Disturbia posterboy: Jonathon Johnson. That’s the 27 year old man who was the ringleader – and his acts were so grotesque and disturbing that the whole Pagan thing just pales under the weight of that section of horror.

 

4)The release of Damien Echols has caused a lot of sensationalist reporters to backpedal on the way they report on minority religions that allow for magical practices.

 

We all need to recalibrate what protecting the Pagan image is. Now it’s more about whether we’re the type of people that deal with the abusers and criminals in our community or if we’re just like certain other religions, opting to sweep that under the rug and avoid the drama. The only people left pushing the "all Pagans are really Satanists" crap are churches that want people too scared to leave. So, in the rare cases you still hear that dusty accusation just look for the agenda sitting next to the styrafom cups and vat of stale coffee. Mothers who worry about how things look to their Bible study group will think might care. They’ll say they’re worried for your immortal soul but really it’s because that Betty will get the best seats and all the invites instead of her because her kid is a doctor.

 

BLUE STAR

 

2)This will kill Blue Star!

 

The tradition itself demonstrated the most notable freakout about this – and how could they not? One of their own elders betrayed them on a level near-impossible to grasp. But the scrambling for damage control that I’ve witnessed firsthand isn’t necessary. If anything, this is the time for members outside the tradition to offer their support – what happened with Klein is not endemic of some disease inside the tradition.

 

No one publicly has associated Blue Star with Klein’s crimes or suggested that Blue Star uses surprise sex with minors as an initiation.  No one savvy accounts to blog comments – or reads them – and from what few I have looked at, Blue Star is not blamed in any way. In fact, the first thing out of a friend’s mouth about the fiasco was "Well, yeah, Blue Star, but he hasn’t worked with them in years."

 

Minneapolis is a Blue Star heavy city and I’ve met a lot of practitioners. Good folks; the few hinky ones seemed to drift out fast or perhaps their internal system arranges a drift.

 

It may well be time to start that series of internal audits, looking at behavior and thinking deep, but it’s very unlikely that Blue Star will be penalized in greater Pagandom. The actions of one man has the power to erase all the good he does. But the actions of one man has no power to erase the good someone else does who does only good- even if that person is associated with the evil man or woman.

Sex is absolutely not necessary for initiation. Especially if you’re a minor.

Sex is absolutely not necessary for initiation. Especially if you’re a minor.

Posted on by diana

Yes, I have been reading the rehash of the Frosts initiation rites and AJ Drew’s reaction to those practices. While I have no regrets about losing my virginity at the age I did to the person I did, I’m pretty sure I would have many regrets if my parents had been involved in any way. Incest by proxy is a real thing and there is absolutely nothing OK about it. It was the implication of this – that I had to see permission from my mother to have sex – that alerted me to the reality that as I became a more developed adult with my very own sexuality, I would be continually more unsafe with my family of origin.

 

As some of you who followed my blogs in years past know, my sixteen year old perception had a very accurate assessment.

 

As it is, deciding early that my parents had a really unhealthy view of sex and that I was not going to follow any examples set in the household I grew up in has saved more than my sex life. I’m a large woman with little to no body shame. That’s a massive blessing that makes everything from my organs to my outlook healthier. Because I consciously refused those values I recognized that slut shaming was wrong long before I became sexually active ((my mother somehow got all the family doctors to slut shame ME when my sister became sexually active, and wasn’t it a coincidence that when my family was cast in church plays I was always the one stuck with the part of Mary Magdelene, herself miscast as "slut" when she wasn’t)) and I checked out of the constant yo-yo diet train. Compared to other women my age I know I have had far fewer organ-based complications: no kidney stones,  no gall stones, all organs still here, no impactions,  no unbelievably painful periods, only minor digestive issues and exactly one case of food poisoning – that was NOT greeted with some comment about how much weight I lost as a result.

 

It also gave me room to find out that not only am I naturally inclined towards magical practice, I’m very well suited to sex magic. The reason I am taking all this time to educate about sexual violence, consent, and why consent matters in nonsexual contexts is not because I am the adult child of a narcissist and thus an abuse survivor (though that is what informs much of this.) I am writing this series and talking about this hard stuff because the absolute most sacred part of my life is sex. I feel a responsibility to keep it sacred and that means disempowering abusers by putting every weapon they have on display.

 

From my own experience engaging in sacred sex for magical acts:

Sex magic works best as an expression of wholeness.

Wholeness – not true love. Not the self-mythologizing hell we praise as romance. Not off the charts sexual compatibility, or other mythologized stuff that can in fact be learned.

 

Simple, honest desire meeting honest desire, using touch to give pleasure as an  expression of appreciation in a way only someone with a fully developed frontal lobe ((happens at some point after age 25)) can express it.

 

So a Wiccan or other initiation of a child between 12 and 16 that involves "surprise sex" may well benefit one person magically – the person that is demanding the sex.  You can get a power surge off of violence, no matter how gentle the disguise of that violence. That’s especially true when you violate children. All acts of molestation are monstrous; perhaps this one seems all the more monstrous because it is done in such a way that the victims are tricked into thinking they are giving consent.

 

A symbolic sexual act is still a sexual act. It requires full knowledge and consent without a hint of duress.

 

 With the Frost initiation, children are certainly placed in a situation where refusal would have rebounding psychological and possibly physical consequences. Since the Frosts operate on a family tradition model, that means the children are pressured by their parents to undergo this ritual – much as Christian parents pressure their children to take confirmation vows. Family pressure of a child for something as personal as offering up their first sexual experience is the exact opposite of consent.

 

The person "initiated" is going to be left in a weakened psycho-social state that is just plain bad for magical work, any and all. It’s something a destructive cult does; it’s certainly not the act of any genuine religious sect. Violating a boundary is the exact opposite of sacred.

 

I use sex magic. I have since I first figured out that hey, people use sex! for magic! Hey, these are two of my favorite things!

 

Being the bouncy Eros loving being I am, I was quite eager to get bouncing on that happy train…

but sometimes my partners were not.

 

Some just didn’t believe in magic. Belief doesn’t matter – certainly I’ve had non-believing partners quite happy to assist anyway. But some had disbelief to the point where they couldn’t interact with me for ritual purposes because of that. Others had some sexual hangups that ritual sex by its nature confronts.

 

And I did not force it. Unless somebody really wants to be there, you’re just vampirizing them and that’s NOT OK.

 

Sex is absolutely not necessary for an initiation to take. We can do all the rituals we want but the gods only want their own and none require sex, ritual or otherwise, to get there. They may ask it later for certain rituals but especially for first initiation… no. Sex is the most popular of transitive experiences but it is far from the only one – and no, it’s not the only pleasurable one, either.

 

 Knowing there’s sex awaiting will not impact the effectiveness of the sex. One of the reasons the activity remains so popular is because, even with the same partner it can be a surprise every time.

 

Again, this stuff about the Frosts initiations? It’s hard to say the bad outweighs the good there. This medieval fantasy of sexual initiation is one of the reasons I am leery of people that adopt fantasy culture into their sexuality. If we are truly a religious grouping that accepts science, we need to accept that longer lifespans give us time to allow the children to become fully neurologically developed. It’s a matter of healthy survival to allow children to determine their sexual development on their terms, not the terms of the adults around them. Sex with children is not a grey area; an elder taking command of a child’s sexuality is never, under any circumstances, OK.

An Addendum: No one I know regrets the sex

An Addendum: No one I know regrets the sex

Posted on by diana

A common statement from police officers is that a woman regrets having consensual sex with someone and so the next day goes and reports it as a rape.

 

This, to me, is bewilderingly absurd and I have trouble believing that the behavior is THAT common. I can see 1% of 1% of people maybe getting caught cheating and pretending it was a rape – but to take it as far as marching down to the station and on to the hospital with a rape kit? This is preposterous. Since cheaters tend to be serial cheaters I would assume this would work at most once.

 

People who have consensual sex that regret it generally don’t call it rape just because it was bad sex. Most cheaters are habitual cheaters and should have the sense not to keep a public record of it.

 

Does it not happen at all? No. But it doesn’t happen so often that it should be a routine theory of a police officer investigating a sexual assault.

 

I have, however, encountered several situations where a woman was looking forward to enjoying consensual sex, had something happen during the date that prompted her to withdraw her consent and then getting raped.

 

This occurrence isn’t a grey area – it is one of the core problems of date rape. Why? Because it’s treated like a grey area. A woman changing her mind should not be treated as someone who just regretted sex. She said no – what she regretted was meeting the person who raped her.

A Proposal for a Sexual Ethos: Keep Your Hands to Yourself

A Proposal for a Sexual Ethos: Keep Your Hands to Yourself

Posted on by diana

In response to the Kenny Klein scandal, more than a few people have called for a new sexual ethos, a reform of the movement, sanctions on men especially, as though punishing all of them would make a difference one way or the other to the predators in our community we simply haven’t caught or identified as such yet.

 

I prefer a simple method. You might even call it a throwback. It works for men, women, people of all genders. You can apply it to adults or children equally. It’s easy to remember.

 

KEEP YOUR HANDS TO YOURSELF.

 

That applies to ALL touch, not just sexual touch.

 

I’m not part of festival culture at all. So all I have is hearsay from friends that participate in it – and often what they tell me is in hopes that I will "get over myself" and participate. Most don’t realize how much of a turnoff what they describe to me is. Along with mosquito bites, bad smells and the constant work of camping I would have to tolerate both men and women touching any part of my body in at least non-sexual ways whether I am in hugger mode or not in the name of the "sacred?"

 

Fuck that. Sacred implies boundaries.

Actually sacred IS  a boundary. So touching a person after that person refuses is a very literal, old-school definition of profane.

 

By invoking "keep your hands to yourself" you immediately give everyone an equal social boundary. If you wish to touch in even a non-sexual way, ask first.  Exceptions should be obvious – medical emergencies that lead to unconsciousness, pulling someone out from the path of a speeding vehicle, after other methods of gaining a person’s notice have failed.

 

EVEN CHILDREN SHOULD BE ASKED FOR THEIR PERMISSION TO BE TOUCHED.

 

THIS APPLIES BOTH OUTSIDE OF CIRCLE AND INSIDE OF RITUAL. IF YOUR RITUAL INVOLVES PHYSICAL TOUCH IN ANY FORM, YOU ARE OBLIGATED TO INFORM PARTICIPANTS WELL BEFOREHAND. RITUAL – EVEN CHANNELING THE GODDESS – DOES NOT MEAN YOU GET AN EXCEPTION FROM THE "PERMISSION BEFORE TOUCH" RULE.

 

The God/dess may well be in you. That deity was party to the establishment of free will and should manage those obligations just as well.

 

Children need to learn boundaries but they also have boundaries of their own and that must be respected. This is a good opportunity to see it practiced.

 

This policy also makes it very easy – FAST – to see which people in your community aren’t willing to respect boundaries. These are the red flag people and they will make themselves known by bitching about such a simple concept as respecting the space of another person that doesn’t want to be touched.

 

Over the years I’ve learned to ask "May I hug you?" and had people ask me the same. It isn’t awkward and actually makes me feel closer to the people because they have taken that fraction of a second to learn and respect my boundaries.

 

If a person says no to being touched – even casually – then pressuring the person to give you permission, whether by direct pressure or acting out feelings of hurt, rejection and anger are manipulations and are a form of verbal and emotional abuse.

 

But what about flirting? I can hear this one echo.

 

Well, first of all, you shouldn’t be flirting with anyone under 18 unless YOU are under 18. Just. Don’t. Do it.

 

Second, by being forced to TALK to a person and using your words like "I find you attractive and I would enjoy lustful activity with you," rather than grabbing a part and seeing what might happen, you are able to make your feelings known while simultaneously reducing the assault rate by making sure everyone is willing with zero grey area at all.  This will also actually improve the quality of the sex you have because – by talking first – you can also use that "not touch" time with what willing partners you find to discuss birth control, turn offs and turn ons and exactly what the nature of your relationship status is.

 

In other words, you get a chance to be responsible about your sexuality.

 

Note: this conversation thing really only works if everyone is sober. Drinks should not come out until after the "touch and not touch" has been established. If you think drunkenness will make those rules hard to honor, don’t drink.

 

This comes to the second issue, the one that is too often used as an excuse for the many horrors and violations of sacred sexuality that has happened over the years:

 

LAY OFF THE BOOZE.

 

The product of the vine and field is also sacred and we are not treating it as the holy substance that it is. Instead, we’re treating it like internal Vaseline to slide us out of our conscious, conscientious selves into "unrestrained" beings. Since too many of us use the drinks as a way to sedate the inner voices that disturb us, all consuming alcohol does is turn loose our shadow selves – our unworked, unincorporated shadow selves.

 

Let me make this clear:

BEING DRUNK DOES NOT EXCUSE YOU FOR WHAT YOU DO WHILE DRUNK.

 

I’ve seen way too many people try to excuse bad behavior as "he’s drunk, he’s not like that when he’s sober," or "she just had a little too much and that’s when she gets handsy."

 

That’s crap.

 

If you have trouble controlling yourself when drinking you shouldn’t drink – especially not at a festival or conference. Often enough I’ve heard of nasty predatory incidents where the miscreant had bad intentions beforehand and then got drunk as an excuse/in order to act on them.

 

The drunkenness has also been used as an excuse to let people off the hook for really appalling actions. This is not OK, either. If you try to excuse someone’s violent action because of inebriation, YOU ARE ENABLING.  Ultimately, if you make excuses for another person’s actions that right there is enabling and that means you are a predator by proxy.

 

The Recommended Universal Pagan Sex Ethos

  • Keep your hands to yourself.
  • Touch only after permission is given.
  • Talk, while sober, before engaging in actual sexual acts.
  • Use this talking time to fully establish consent and to discuss what the nature of those acts will be. (Trust me, this will not ruin the magic of spontaneity.)
  • Lay off the booze.

 

No means no. Badgering someone for saying no is also abusive behavior.

If someone does say no, the correct response is "OK, I will respect that," and then actually do respect that.

 

Seems simple enough to me.

How perfectly nice people contribute to rape and molestation (Triggerpalooza, kids.)

How perfectly nice people contribute to rape and molestation (Triggerpalooza, kids.)

Posted on by diana

A highlight of last month was the arrest of a well-known-to-some Pagan man caught in a child porn sting.

The brouhaha over Kenny Klein is wholly justified: we’ve had more than one neopagan hauled off for trying to persuade nubile men and women in their mid-teens into beds. He’s the first guy we all know for sure went down for kiddie porn for children under 13 and the intense discussion of these charges reveal, to our communal shame, how many warnings and complaints we ignored.

In response many decent people of neopagandom have vowed to correct our actions. Over the last month lots of energy has gone into discussing how our community behaves when it comes to sex and sexuality. We are all about solving the problem, we are simply going to the wrong information to solve that problem. Sexuality and sexual ethics is not and was never the problem in cases involving sexual violence. We all know sex with children is malevolent and wrong – those engaging in these acts definitely know that. No amount of vowing not to rape children will stop pedophiles of any religion or non-faith from raping children. It’s a pathology. Petitions and sexual chivalry codes don’t fix that.

In one festival announcement that bordered on being predatory in its own right, there was a promise to “screen all registrants” before camp. That’s a cute bit of PR – but since this is the first time Klein has been caught, he would have slipped right on through and endangered the children at that camp, too.

Instead of looking at our own behavior and how we as a community contributed and even enabled his crimes, we are looking at the behavior of Klein and those like him as though a new moral code will make a damn bit of difference to someone who willfully breaks moral codes already. The only thing we have the power to change is ourselves – and for the most part, every proposal of “change” has been something that would do nothing to correct this situation. (There are exceptions listed in the blog links at the bottom of this post.)

We all want to know what the signs of a child molester are. But molesters know what they are and they are clever. They hide. They manipulate. They make us feel ashamed for thinking such thoughts about them.

The only sure sign of a child molester? Victims. And that “victims” is almost always plural unless a concerned parent happened upon the first incident while already toting a shotgun.

Whether Klein is a “true Pagan” or not (and “true Pagan” are words of utter bullshit, by the way) makes no difference in the much more serious issue: we failed his victims. It is an aching, glaring reality in the hordes of blog posts out there: there’s lots of talk about how we had warnings about Klein, but only the victims talk about how they were (mis)treated along the way. Call it rape culture, call it Peter Pan syndrome, call it Pagan fantasy culture at its worst – but also, call it our fault for not listening, for not paying attention, for dismissing instead of investigating.

Yvonne Aburrow gives a good overview of this.   Her perspective is old school, what I was told in advocacy training. It also relies on people being better and more self aware than they usually are.

The problem with protecting our own vulnerable populations is that as a group we share a tendency towards denial of bad behavior.

In theory we’ll of course believe a woman who tells us she’s been raped. We’re good people. We know all about rape culture, that it’s real. We are beyond rape culture, right? The Goddess disapproves of rape and all that rape in ancient myth represented tales of war and patriarchal oppression. We are good Pagans! We uphold the Goddess incarnate in all women! Of course we’d believe a woman who was raped – and not even think to question the shortness of her skirt, whether we can see her thong or if she was making out with more than one guy around the fire last night.

But then real life happens: a woman tells you she’s been raped by someone you know – a guy you just had drinks with, a guy who’s on your trivia team, a guy who just helped you move.

Then believing her is a very different story.

Even after she gets the rape kit and the DNA proves something happened, you dredge up anything  that can make this not be so – even blaming her – to convince yourself you’re not the kind of person that would befriend a rapist.

Maybe she’s just trying to get revenge in a bad breakup, you tell yourself. You look for every fault she has. Something has to be wrong with her – because there’s no way you’d just let this happen, that you might have been a passive party to someone else’s violation. You’d totally know if this guy was sexually violent. Yeah, he says some weird things about women and gets kind of touchy but that’s just geek culture/pagan culture/weird social awkwardness, right? Just look at how she acts around her sexual prospects.

Or: look at how she wears baggy clothes and no makeup – why would anyone even want to rape her?

This train of thought is wrong – beyond wrong. It’s a complete moral failure.

Sometimes there are signs when a person is creepy. Sometimes there are not. Predators disguise themselves – fooling the people around them is how they succeed in their hunt.

You are going to get signals something is up, though. Sometimes those signs come from the predators.

But often enough, the signs come from the people the predator hunts – and all too often, you may well bat those aside, not even knowing that there’s a neurological button in you that the predator has found a way to press, even at a distance. The button that makes you ignore what’s right in front of you. The one that makes you want to steady that rocking boat.

The predator counts on us using that automated response every time someone says “hey, something is wrong here.” In fact, after years of manipulation and cultural indoctrination, these responses can be condensed down to specific words and sentences that actually act as powerful triggers – that can shut our awareness to the off position. After all, it’s much easier to hunt when the other members of the herd are oblivious – and getting them to make themselves oblivious makes life so much easier.

So, when confronted with a rape-in-the-neighborhood situation, most people are programmed to respond with dismissal, identification or denial.

DISMISSAL

  • “Oh, he or she is harmless.”

Variations: “socially awkward,” “is from a different era,” “has some old fashioned ideas about gender,” “likes to push boundaries.”

  • “I’m sure it was nothing.” The person was upset enough to bring it up. It’s something.
  • “It’s just a [cultural] [tradition] [personality] difference.”
  • “I’m sure it’s just a personality conflict.” ((This has been used on me too often to forgive. It almost always means that one person is behaving badly and people surrounding are too afraid to do anything so they let it go on, giving it tacit social support.))

IDENTIFICATION

  • “Once you get to a certain age everyone thinks you’re creepy.”
  • “I just imagine how I would feel in that situation.”
  • “Men in this community are treated so badly. Their innate privilege/masculinity is questioned all the time.”

DENIAL

  • “He has a boyfriend/girlfriend… he’s really attractive…he’s so nice… why would he need to rape someone?”
  • “He IS your boyfriend/girlfriend. Why on earth would he need to rape you?”
  • “I know him. He’s a nice guy. There’s just no way this could happen.”
  • “I don’t know what I saw.”

MINIMIZATION

  • “You’re exaggerating.”
  • “I’m sure it wasn’t that bad.”
  • “Maybe it was just a misunderstanding…” [once someone’s genitals come out there IS no misunderstanding.]
  • “Stop being a drama queen.”
  • “You’re taking this out of context/blowing this way out of proportion.”

AVOIDANCE

  • “I don’t want to get involved.”
  • “I’m sure this would be better handled privately.”
  • “Think about who this would hurt if this got out.”

COMPLEX AVOIDANCE

  • “You should take this to the authorities.”

This one sounds like the right thing to say. It should be the right thing to say.

If you have ever had to watch a police interrogation of a rape or molestation victim, you will know why it is the deadly wrong thing to say.

1)Most rape victims are accused of lying by the police. Usually they are accused of it several times during an investigation. There are cases when a woman has had to ask for a rape kit multiple times before she even gets one – and sometimes she isn’t even given one then.

2)An absurd number of police officers have domestic abuse and sexual violence on their own records. Gender seems to make no difference in that. It is starting to improve as people are registering that high risk jobs have can have nasty neurological impacts that make people more likely to become violent towards their partners and children. But right now, chances are the police are not just part of rape culture but the upholders of it.

3)In a Pagan context, there are no authorities. Often someone speaks to you because they perceive YOU as the authority in some way – and given the state of crisis, it’s not a good time to navigate the psychological conditions that cause that particular projection.

ADDITIONAL COMPLEX AVOIDANCE

  • “Prove it.”

Therein lies the rub. There are many situations in which if a victim seeks legal recourse – say, going to the police and getting a rape kit – that it’s more dangerous to get the proof then it is to just suffer with what has been done. Most rape and molestation happens at the hands of a known person and it escalates over time. In its final escalation, the victim is murdered. The possibility of getting caught has caused more than one perpetrator to move up the schedule on that.

  • “Well, why don’t you confront him/her?”

This comes from “very special episode” acculturation. In TVLand, the victim is believed, the authorities are called and the perpetrator confesses to all crimes, maybe even vowing to change while being hauled off in handcuffs. More than one therapist has witnessed how much confrontation of an abuser doesn’t accomplish.

“Why didn’t you say no/put a stop to it?”

This is something about rape (not sex) education that has changed since my day in the 90s. I remember attending education workshops where it was explained how over eager teenage boys would use emotional manipulation to get sex. This qualified as rape at the time. Of course, now sex education involves pointing teenagers to the nearest anti-contraception church in the most dire need of butts for their pews. They don’t care how they got those baby members or what’s done to women in order to conceive them.

As many an adult child abuse survivor can tell you, people will refuse to believe you even when it happens right in front of them, the police or other authorities sure as hell won’t believe you and confrontation of the perpetrator does fuck all.

Actually, it does do one thing that’s sort of useful, but not so useful it justifies the therapy bills. I’ll get to that later.

How YOU can stop the cycle of denial, minimization and avoidance

There is a way to stop this. Every time you encounter a situation where someone reports the horrific, respond the same way: ask relevant, non-leading, non-judgmental questions. It will be very difficult to do. Most people’s brains are all wired up with rape culture/dismissal culture. It can take some work to undo that.

If the Pagan community wants to implement anything that will make a difference, it should be in creating a standardized procedure in how the victims are treated and how their claims are investigated. The procedure should be re-examined in light of new research about sexual violence every single year.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a man or woman, boy or girl, trans or traditional: treat any accusations of assault and violation exactly the same way.

What you must internalize about rape and molestation:

It’s not a stranger jumping out of the bushes. Rape and molestation happens between known quantities. The majority of murders are also between people that know each other intimately (not necessarily sexual intimacy.) Often sexual abuse is a component of relationships that leads to murder.

So what are the right questions to ask? What are the right things to say?

This can be a hard one. People that have been violated are usually in a state of shock that moves into denial. It can go for days or weeks. A lot of things you think you’d do immediately if the same thing happened to you may well not happen if/when it does happen to you because of the shock.

Level 1: If someone comes to you saying “I was raped.”

Questions:

  • When?
  • Do you want to go to the police?
  • Are you going to go to the police?
  • Are you safe?
  • Are you able to get somewhere safe?
  • Can you say who?
  • What do you need to see done?

Note: Any coven or Pagan group worth a damn will make sure that the victim has NO reason to run into the abuser. Even if you’re determined you’re “not sure” forcing these people to cross paths for any reason is an act of abuse in and of itself.

Level 2: Someone did something I thought was off.

Questions:

  • What did the person do?
  • Can you tell me more about the context?
  • What did you say? What did this person say?

Do NOT respond with a conclusion or dismissal. Promise to look in on it and make some observations yourself.

Level 3: Confrontation

Confrontation will never, ever produce positive change in the perpetrator. Many of those us who survived abuse are well aware that there’s a pretty high degree of narcissism among people who abuse, whether it’s children or adults, whether it’s on the emotional spectrum or whether it’s across the emotional and physical spectrum with the sexual spectrum as a bridge.

What confrontation will do is prompt a reaction.

A perpetrator will deny, try to make himself out to be the victim, try to slander or speak for his or her victim, try to justify the behavior and insist that it’s normal. A perpetrator will most likely use anger to manipulate everyone in the room.

What an innocent person will do is look horrified and ask for guidance in righting the wrong or offense given.

It takes someone with super strong grounding in a very healthy place to confront an abuser and get anything useful out of it at all. Whatever it is, it won’t do anything to change the abuser – it will only provide information that only a very well trained eye will know what to look for. Since abusers installed those triggers that will cause breakdown/backing down into the people they hurt, those people are the ones who should never, ever bother with a confrontation. All that does is open the door for the abuse cycle to restart. It is up to the community members to help their wounded properly. Alas, rugged individualism can only do harm here.

Rape and molestation are not one-off, isolated behaviors. They are pathologies. If you hear about a person abusing sexually once, you will almost definitely hear about a person abusing sexually again.

Also, what the fuck is wrong with the people that think an older man or woman hitting on or “teasing” girls and boys under 18 is a grey area?

Read these, too – they say it well, and add dimensions to this discussion not covered here:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/sermonsfromthemound/2014/03/silence-equals-death/

http://thespiae.oddmodout.com/2014/03/30/on-kenny-klein/

http://kvasiramongstthegods.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/a-huge-issue/

http://shaunaaura.wordpress.com/2014/04/01/of-pagans-and-predators-part-1/

http://shaunaaura.wordpress.com/2014/04/02/of-pagans-and-predators-part-2/

http://shaunaaura.wordpress.com/2014/04/02/of-pagans-and-predators-part-3/

http://shaunaaura.wordpress.com/2014/04/03/predators-4-amputate/

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/pagan-musings/2014/03/31/pmp-sex-ethics-abuse-in-the-magickal-world

http://serpent77.wordpress.com/2014/03/28/what-can-we-do-now/

http://paganactivist.com/2014/04/09/pagans-mental-health-and-abuse/

http://www.polytheismwoborders.com/2014/04/you-will-be-heard-april-2nd-wyrd-ways.html

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/sermonsfromthemound/2014/03/erotic-ethics/

http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html

http://thehouseofvines.com/2014/03/31/hanc-culpam-maiorem-an-illam-dicam/

The Irritation of 21st Century Paganism

The Irritation of 21st Century Paganism

Posted on by diana

Previously titled: On not Being a Big Name Pagan

This is still one of the most irritating aspects of 21st century Paganism:

“Hi! I’m doing this project. You can find more information on it here!”

“Puff. Puff. Well I’VE never heard of you! Therefore everything you say/do is suspect because Pagan Pagan Paranoia Paranoia ALWAY UNDER ATTACK!!!”

Usually a “Google me, idiot,” goes unheard beneath the panting, roaring and posturing. I mean, c’mon. There’s only two other people in the country with my exact name and I am pretty sure my writing in the 90s has forced them both to take on user handles.

It is actually a recall to a behavior I started encountering in my school growing up. The town at the time had about 16,000 people – not big, but too big to be considered a village. So at my junior high there were roughly 600-800 kids there at any given time; the high school had around 1600, give/take based on the dropout rate that year.

This all happened before the Gen Y Baby Boom, so it was the last time this town saw numbers that small in its schools.

Every so often, I would be on a church trip (I was raised Christian and active in a liberal church.) One of the guys that was part of this seemed to have a new girlfriend with him at every new church event. Every single time, she asked “Well, why haven’t I seen you around before?”

I do think after awhile this church guy was just telling his girlfriends to ask me this because it is such an irritating question. Aside from the “prove a negative” aspect – a question borne of pure narcissism designed so that no matter what you say you cannot satisfy the querent – simple math answered the question pretty damn well.

In any place with more than 200 individuals it is very, very likely you will not know or see every single person.

Hell, there were kids I had never seen before on the day I graduated – and my class of 340 should have made those kids visible to me at some point…until I realized that 340 x 4 different classes really lessened my odds of knowing every.single.person in my school.

This was in a small town.

Paganism is small, yes, when compared to the sheer towering size of other better-known religious groupings. But as a population in and of itself – a lot of people keep acting like it’s a group of around 200 people. It’s probably, globally, taking account all current living Pagan religions, closer to 300,000. This is based on a wild, wild guess and the knowledge that there are people who claim some type of Paganism as their religious belief on every continent. There are a lot of people who are in the closet or who just don’t participate in online or community life to consider. It’s also important to recognize that non-participation is their right, but that’s another issue.

In my own case, it’s led to some ridiculous behaviors. When I approached one Facebook group about participating in the docmentary for my book Divorcing a Real Witch, they demanded to know if I was initiated or not. That’s the second time some self-appointed watch dog did this. Not only was it absurd and insulting – initiation is specific to traditions and I did not walk in making any claims whatsoever about my trad or initiatory background – there was actually a very easy, legitimate way to vet my authenticity. Well, two.

1. Google me – I have an online presence that goes back to 96, though I did disappear from the Pagan web a bit between 2002-2010 because of divorce/developing a chronic illness. I was, however, still on the web.

2. My book is not self-published. I had provided my publisher name. You could check my background by contacting said publisher and asking if I am for real.

3. I have public affiliations with the PNC – so you could, say, go to one of the other editors to determine  a)am I really Pagan and b)whether I would misuse any information provided.

This can still lead to the following “prove a negative” issue: “Well, we’re still small enough that we should of heard of you as an author…”

Well, no.

1)Not all Pagan authors write books. For years I have been a short article person. The reasons for this are many.

2) Not all Pagan authors keep blogs. This is more the case in the older set than the younger thanks to conditions of the publishing world.

3)There are more than 1000 Pagan authors. This was the case even before self-publishing became easy. There may be a few eidetics who can rattle them all off but, for all our collective ambitions, most of us are mortals that would injure ourselves in such a process. (Mark Twain reference.)

4)Self-publishing was a big thing among Pagan authors for two reasons: 1)at least in the UK, writing about witchcraft as nonfiction was illegal until about 1950 and 2)publishers did not see Pagan and witchcraft writing as a profitable sector until the 1990s. Publishers Weekly documented the rise pretty well.

I am also not typically in a good financial position to go to festivals and conferences. Yes, I know people that will cheerfully plan their whole lives around festivals etc. It does look like fun – but right now I want to make sure that I am not, later in life, one of those elders who has to send out social media pleadings for financial assistance/medical assistance. So I watch and write from afar.

 

 

 

 

 

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