Wiccan Authors Piss Me The Fuck Off

Well, maybe that's a bit strongly worded. There has been some very good material coming from that tradition over the years. But I read something this week that made me very angry, and the faulty reasoning that made me so angry is pretty prevalent in neo-pagan circles, especially Wicca. Hence the bombastic title.

Christopher Penczak, the prominent author, was hawking his new book on BeliefNet, and discussing his views on homosexuality in relation to Wicca.

"The divine is spirit, and as such, is beyond male and female, yet incorporates both. Witches believe the divine in immanent in all things, all nature, the stars and all people."

Which is lovely.

"Neo-paganism initially focused on heterosexual union because the roots of our reconstruction are based in fertility cults - fertility of the tribe and fertility of the crops. No gay witch is going to dispute the role of fertility. We all got here through reproduction."

Which is accurate; het sex makes mammal babies. It's a wonderful thing and it's of large importance. Unfortunately, he starts to talk bollocks almost instantly after that.

"But a gay witch will recognize that everyone has male and female, god and goddess energy in themselves. All men have feminine energy. All women have masculine energy. GLBT folk have a different blend of these energies when compared to the traditional heterosexual roles. It makes them perfect for magical world, because they can access whatever current of energy that is needed"

What the fuck? This gay witch certainly doesn't think that. I have no female energy. I have a male body and a male identity. What other meanings of "female" are being used here? For all his positive, pro-queer decoration, isn't Penczak just calling me an "invert"?

Penczak's descriptions read to me like an apology. It looks like someone is trying to excuse the Queer prescence in Wicca. These aborted attempts at "integration" would be offensive enough coming from a straight lay-person, but from Penczak they are horrific.

Penczak, for those who don't know, is that author of several gay oriented primers on Wicca. Despite presenting himself as the face of queer witchcraft, his views on gender (here at least) are still firmly rooted in the heterosexual hegemony. Males fuck females, females are receptive vaginas, and anything else must be ignored or else assimilated by force.
And Penczak, despite how much his individual ignorance is annoying me right now, is not the whole of it. There are whole communities of pagans out there who legitimise queer spirituality by pretending that lesbians have secret "male" energies that straight women don't have access too. This pisses me off.

Rather than admitting that a legitimate male experience can include being fucked, they play this weird game where our asses become magical pseudo-vaginas. How is two cismales fucking in any sense female? Not the biological sense. Not the linguistic sense. Only, it seems, in some vaguely defined "energetic" sense.

I call Bullshit. Phil Hine, in his article "Sodomy and Sorcery", says "I feel that being fucked is a celebration of my maleness".I agree. As lovely as that vast expanse known as "female" is, I don't belong to it.

And, whilst we're at it, what is this sexed energy that they claim makes up the universe? When the seahorse births his children, is that Goddess energy? And when a female sea-monkey impregnates herself, is it because she is actually a secret "energetic" male? Or, is it just that the stories neo-pagans weave are just that? Just stories?

For people who venerate nature, they seem to do a good job of ignoring it. The vast majority of organisms on this earth do not reproduce through the union of male and female body parts. To claim that het-sex is some kind of cosmic standard is, effectively, a lie.

While the framework of God+Goddess can be a useful and beautiful metaphor, it isn't real. And the effort of Pagan authors to cram our square pegs into that round hole is well intentioned but ugly.

Straight authors need to realise that Wicca's heterosexual agenda isn't actually a divine truth. And to force Queer people to fit into that story is a crime against the very natural diversity that they claim to venerate.

And queer authors? Queer authors need to pull their shit together and not just republish the heteronormative wankery that they've inherited off of their trads.

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In Our Own Image (But With A Bigger Penis)

The year is 2007, the place is Zimbabwe. A wave of hysteria sweeps the streets. The Popobawa is here again.

For those that don't know, the Popobawa is a sex demon. Having been accidentally loosed by an incautious magician in the 1970s, the Popobawah (who's name is swahili for "batwing") has come to terrorise the men of the area. How is he doing it? He's using his massive penis.

Though able to shapeshift, the spirit often appears in the form of a winged, dwarf, cylops ogre. He flys at the dark of night and attacks men, espescially unbelievers, in their own bed by pinning them down and sodomising them for hours with his freakishly large penis.

Beyond the obvious trauma of supernatural rape, the men are instructed to tell everyone the ordeal. If they fail to share the story, then the Popobawa will return and rape them again.

Sound ridiculous? For the victims it is a very real experience. Hospitals have had to deal with bruising, broken ribs and a shattered pelvis. The fear is equally as real, during periods of high activity men may choose to sleep outside rather than in the bed where the Popobawa would expect them to be.

Understandably, the international community has looked with scepticism on the claims of our Tanzanian brothers'. With very little effort, we have managed to explain the Popobawa away. There is a physiological quirk with human sleep that means we can't move whilst in REM sleep. Sometimes, this paralysis continues over into the begining of the waking state. The half awake dreamer often adds in something hallucinatory of their own making,and voila, demonic experience.

The experience of Sleep Paralysis often includes a pressing or crushing feeling,so that would explain why the Popobawa is reported as pinning down his victims, but there isn't much in the hypnpompic state that feels like a giant penis repeatedly entering your rectum. Or, for that matter, that would compel you to go out and admit your msenge status. So what's that about?

I, for one, would argue it's about the culture that the victims live in. Sleep Paralysis phenomenon have been around for a long time, and though the basic "I can't move, someone's sitting on my chest" experience always remains central, the window dressing has changed to express the important social dilemnas of the era.

Medieval men had witches ride them, because witches repressented unbound female sexuality and power over men. Monks of the time, who slept with crosses clasped to their groins, where visited by succubi. Female demons who represented sexual sin and nocturnal temptation. (Nuns, conveniently for them, could blame unwanted pregnancies on incubi, the male equivalents of the succubi. Incubi penises, which could be identified by their massive size and freezing temperature, squirted the semen collected by their succubi sisters. Hence why so many of the nun's demonic children looked suspisciously like local men). In the secular era modern America suffers from a surfeit of alien abduction stories, each of which makes an interesting study on America's relationship to the concepts of foreigness and anal-probes.

And Zimbabwe, for all it's comparative liberalism, still suffers from strong taboos against men being penetrated. In a country where same-sex handholding can result in imprisonment, it seems inevitable that the queer should become monstrous. I think it's telling that Popobawa is literally a "one eyed monster".

In all honesty, any country with Mugabe (a rabid,vocal and violent homophobe) at it's head is going to have a gay sex demon in it's head. I find it hard to look at the Popobawa and not see a nation suffering from a masculinity crisis. Popobawa is, to my uninvolved non-sociologist eyes, a voice given to the voicless characters in the national psyche.

But this, I think, is my point. Though it is easy to make a judgement and interperet other people's myths, it's not always the best response. Popobawa shows us that there is a mirroring link between a society and the religion it creates. Our spirits sometimes reflect ourselves more readily than they reflect our reality, and it would be arrogant to assume that the same process is not at work in our own beliefs.

Why, for example, is it important that the Virgin Mary has a perpetual virginity? What does us say about our view of female sexuality? Why are our superheroes straight men,and why can they fly? What does that tell us about our attitudes to the ground and to masculinity?

The Popobawa, for all it's oddness, is an important lesson in the nature of metaphysical belief. As strongly as our beliefs are held, we often hold them for reasons that are more psychological than philosophical.

That's not to say I don't believe giant penises fly through the window. Just that my belief might be based more on personal needs (and who doesn't need a flying penis?) rather than the spiritual reality.

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Baby Sacrificing Lesbian Vampires: Halloween for Queens Part 1

This is my obligatory Halloween article. I'm writing it a bit early because, to be honest, I want to remind people to start getting ready. Halloween is the best night of the year and half arsed costumes make me want to immolate people.

There's probably a few people out there wondering how I'm intending to link Halloween to Religion. There's more than likely a lot of you wondering what this has got to do with Queer. Well, to start off I'm going to talk a bit about what Halloween actually is. Do not worry, the ever elusive point will eventually turn up.

Halloween is a, nominally, Christian festival that marks the evening before "All Hallows Day". All Hallows Day is a Catholic celebration of all the saints, known or unknown, who've achieved union with God in heaven. The day afterwards, All Souls Day, is for those dead people who are in purgatory and still working their way up to Sainthood. These three dates mark the beginning of November, a month that is dedicated to those Catholics who have left the body on a permanent basis.

However, this is almost certainly not what the majority of celebrants are thinking of. Halloween for the majority is about dressing up, telling ghost stories and waging anonymous war on those old people who don't distribute candy. "Mischief" is enacted and we all dress like monsters, saints or celebrities. It's a time where people can be safely perverse, on the condition that they put that perverseness away at the end of the night. It's a similar type of thing to the Medieval Feast of Fools, Ancient Roman Saturnalia and Ancient Greek Dionysia. All of these festivals involved the poor mocking the rich, women mocking men and individual bucking at state. But, unlike these other festivals, Halloween isn't just an outlet for the oppressed. It's also an outlet for fear and the fear inducing.

I'm sure you can all see the link I'm trying to make here. Halloween is about the oppressed and the feared and queer people are sort of oppressed and feared. Big whoop. I'm sure neither of these things are particularly revelatory. But, I want to explore a bit further the way that queer action can be seen as monstrous and, god help you all, then go on to suggest what I think we should do with that knowledge.

If we want to talk about fear, a good place to start it Freud's concept of "the uncanny". Uncanniness is a quality belonging to an item that it both familiar and unfamiliar. Dolls, those staples of childhood horror stories and adult phobia, are uncanny because they seem both human and inhuman at the same time. Masks, a personal fear of my daddy, are uncanny for the same reason. They are not alive, but they can seems alive. And, for a lot of straight people, queer living is frightening for the same reason. We are males who are not men, women who are not wives. We wear the faces of human beings, but behind them we keep alien thoughts. To prove my point I want to show a brief selection of quotes that link gender deviance to the occult, death and *thunder rolls* the dark.

"Feminism is a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."

-Pat Robertson, vocal right wing "Christian".

"Homosexuals are not monogamous. They want to destroy the institution of
marriage... It will destroy the Earth."

-James Dobson,

"You ask anybody that's investigated homosexual murders and without
question they are the most violent...even the sex act itself is violent
in homosexuals."

-Tony Perkins, President of Family Research Council

"The perversion that follows homosexuality is bestiality and then human
sacrifice and cannibalism."

-Barbara Blewster, a member of the Church of Latter-Day Saints and the Arizona State Legislature

"I have learned that the radical, perverted homosexuals and lesbians are
already promoting their '2000 Disney Gay Day'...they are timing it to occur in June -- right when children out of school will be flocking to Disney-owned parks! This proves the true intent of these homosexuals: they are after our children!!"

-Bonnie Mawyer, wife of Christian Action Network founder

"Homosexuality is Satan's diabolical attack upon the family that will.
not only have a corrupting influence upon our next generation, but it will also bring down the wrath of God upon America."

-Jerry Falwell

Well, I'm approaching the end of the article and I haven't actually got to my point yet. I'll continue my train of thought later in the month. For now, all I've really proved is that gay people are a bit like monsters, sortof. Next time I'll be discussing how to use that knowledge to undermine western thought, disrupt the family and spread HIV.

Or, if they want monsters, we can give them monsters.

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Housekeeping, 10.7.07

+ news +
Larry, Larry, Larry!,
a resignation,
and protest for the week.

And also very important in the news: aqueertheory and missionaryposition have now joined Below the Belt as full-time regulars! This means that they will be contributing twice a month on regular posting days like the other front page contributors. So now you can't escape them. Hooray!

Sincerely,
ts

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Housekeeping, 9.23.07

+ news +
Short circuit?,
Maryland falls short,
and trans-savvy Romijn for the week.

missionary position joined us late this past week; he'll be exploring pockets of religion here and there for a little added discussion. More to come, as usual!

Sincerely,
ts

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GodMen: Christianity With Cocks

I almost feel bad criticising the people behind the GodMen conferences. The organisers aim to promote discourse, confront taboo and explore the interaction between Christian living and male identity. The church, as a cultural institution, is rife with misogyny, homophobia and sexual hypocrisy, so it almost seems churlish to criticise this effort at change.

GodMen fails. Though well meaning, the rhetoric used by the conference organisers only serves to reaffirm traditional models of masculinity, not to explore them.

The aim for the GodMen conferences is to create a male-only space where issues specific to the Christian male can be discussed. Discussion covers such topics as masturbation and pornography and, though there is still a consensus that these acts are sinful, the fact that these topics are being aired at all is a very good thing.

But there are two major flaws to the GodMen project. The first is a terrifyingly essentialist view of what a man is, and the second is an ongoing attempt to blame women for the crippled spirituality of some straight men.

The first problem is aptly summed up by the GodMen FAQ:

We have a society where men are often demeaned for the sake of a joke. When boys or men behave consistent to their male nature, our society has a knee-jerk reaction and says men must tone it down. Lower their voice. Put on a helmet. Take Ritalin. In GodMen NONE of our maleness is toned down because we believe, as the Bible states, that we are fearfully and wonderfully made. It's a privilege many men never experience.

Now, that's problematic in a whole host of ways. I'll start with what they are presenting as "our male nature." The over-prescription of Ritalin, I concede, affects males more than females, but the rest is just bullshit. Why is a helmet emasculating? Why is aggression, signified by a loud voice, such a lofty goal for a guy? As a society we are too willing to sacrifice the lives of our young men in the pursuit of masculinity. We romance the concept through wars, extreme sports, hazing rituals and bar fights, but claiming it as a Christian virtue is frankly offensive. Significantly, Newsweek reports the shows opening with "karate fights, car chases and "Jackass"-style stunts" on screen and continuing with a song called "Grow A Pair." Quite what that has to do with God I'm not sure.

Though "fearfully and wonderfully made" is a powerful concept, I prefer to wonder at our variety rather than our ability to embody outmoded conceptions of gender.

Now, I'm sure some of you are wondering why exactly these discussions couldn't have gone on in the mainstream Christian community. The answer, it turns out, is women. Evil, soul crushing women with their oppressive flower arranging. Behold:

“In most churches, you’ll see flowers and ferns at the front,” says Stine. “That’s saying, ‘This is a place that a woman has composed'.” So GodMen sought to create a place where men could admit to flaws without being judged bad Christians and be unapologetically male

Okay, I'm simplifying the rhetoric somewhat. But GodMen was designed to combat the "feminization" of the church. Ignoring the fact that the pastor is probably male, that God is represented in exclusively male terms and that the "traditional family values" being preached expect a woman to be pregnant and barefoot (or, as my father put it, "Well fucked and badly shod"), the creators of GodMen present the Christian community as a sinister gynocracy, constantly judging poor oppressed men for their god-given inability to control themselves.

I think we all recognise this as the last resort of people being asked to confront their privilege. Like the racist complaining about "political correctness", any man complaining about how oppressed he is by women is trying to fight the realities of equality by framing them as an invasion. This distorted view is carried on into the GodMen blog where we find out that, and prepare yourself for this, women are even invading the golf courses.

They argue, and it is true, that women vastly outnumber men at church services. This is irrelevant. Victims of sex-trafficking are predominantly female, it doesn't mean that the women are in charge. Flower arrangements are hardly going to destroy 2000 years of patriarchy.


In Galatians, Paul writes that "there is no man, no woman" in Christ. GodMen's ministry tells men that their biology defines them and that female spirituality inevitably leads to hypocrisy and deceit. Religion should be about communion with the Other, not backing up your prejudices with supernatural authority. I love the attempt at dialogue, but meaningful conversation relies on questions, not easy answers.

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