The apparent path of the sun reached its northernmost point at 3:32 UTC today, marking the longest day of the year and the beginning of summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and the shortest day of the year & first day of winter in the Southern. May all of your plans come to fruition in the fullness of time, and Blessed Be!
Posts Tagged ‘holidays’
Summer Solstice 2021
Posted in Holidays, tagged holidays, paganism on June 21, 2021| Leave a Comment »
Unsanitized
Posted in Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, Words, tagged activism, censorship, dirty, holidays, LGBT rights, neo-Victorianism, psychology on June 2, 2021| 5 Comments »
Today is International Whores’ Day. It is not “Sex Worker Day”; that is March 3rd. Today is a day to shamelessly celebrate our shameless history, not a day to cater to the precious fee-fees of amateurs by neutering our terminology so as not to offend their delicate sensibilities with a raw, unsanitized word like “whore”. But for the past several years, I’ve seen a number of sex worker organizations and social media accounts doing just that, and in doing so participating in the same process of sexual sanitization which inspires modern picket-fence gays to absurdly claim that huge fascist corporations and gangs of uniformed thugs employed by the state to inflict violence on sexual minorities are more welcome at an event commemorating an anti-cop riot than kinky queers are. While the neo-Victorians who dominate 21st-century public discourse…
…reject the belief that sex is innately bad, they also believe against all reason and evidence that it’s something like a radioactive material which must be handled with special and elaborate precautions or else it becomes the single most destructive force on Earth. They imagine that engaging in sex for the “wrong” reasons, or without the benediction of elaborate rituals of consent, or with people separated from one another by more than a very few years of age, is terribly harmful…the desire to describe…sex…as “good” or “bad” is a very strong one, and for the neo-Victorian mind to accept sex into the “good” category it must be ritually purified by amputating all of its darker aspects, branding even the discussion of them as “violence”, and even pretending that they aren’t even sex at all. This belief flies in the face of reality; sex, fear, dominance and violence are inextricably bound together, and only by living in a state of complete denial can someone pretend that the only valid, “healthy” and legal sex is that which is so sanitized and neutered that it resembles the real thing about as closely as a hamburger does a heifer…
Today is not a day for sanitized words or concepts; it is, in fact, exactly the opposite: a day to fight society’s attempts (via law and police violence) to sanitize the wilder, unrulier, more chthonic aspects of sex. This is a day for sexual outlaws, not well-behaved “workers”; it is a day to celebrate the triumphs of criminalized human beings against a society that would rather we didn’t exist. It is a day to oppose censorship, not to engage in self-censorship; a day to honor a means of survival that predates laws and governments by eons; and a day to celebrate a power which will always defeat even the most pernicious attempts to domesticate it.
May Day 2021
Posted in Holidays, tagged holidays, paganism on May 1, 2021| Leave a Comment »
May Eve 2021
Posted in Holidays, tagged holidays, paganism on April 30, 2021| Leave a Comment »
Diary #562
Posted in Diary, tagged animals, holidays, Sunset on April 6, 2021| 1 Comment »
One of the many benefits of having chickens is never having to go out and buy eggs to color for Easter. Of course, sometimes friends ask for them too, and Jae has been on a quiche kick for the past few months, and I recently culled my laying hens, and the pullets won’t start laying until summer, and some henhouse doofus broke an egg Sunday morning. That means right now, there are actually only four fresh eggs in my kitchen, which is a pretty rare occurrence. Of course, we have a whole basket of boiled eggs and a jar of pickled ones in the fridge, and I’m getting 3-4 a day from the four adult layers currently in the coop, so it won’t be long before we start building up again; I never want to have to buy those pathetic, undersized, weeks-old store eggs with pale yellow yolks ever again. As I have aged, some things that in my youth I barely even thought about have become important parts of my self-care, and having a plentiful supply of fresh eggs is one of them.
Easter 2021
Posted in Holidays, tagged holidays, paganism on April 4, 2021| 1 Comment »
Vernal Equinox 2021
Posted in Holidays, tagged holidays, paganism on March 20, 2021| Leave a Comment »
The apparent path of the sun crossed the equator moving northward at 9:37 UTC today, signaling the beginning of spring in the Northern Hemisphere and autumn in the Southern. Enjoy the milder weather to come, and Blessed Be!
Sex Worker Rights Day 2021
Posted in History, Perception, Tyranny, tagged activism, holidays, hysteria, politicians, psychology, yellow journalism on March 3, 2021| 1 Comment »
Our cause…isn’t just ours after all, but rather a vital part of the rights of all individuals to control their own voices, bodies, and lives without the interference of violent busybodies. – “Sex Worker Rights Day 2020”
The landscape of sex worker rights activism looks very different from the way it did when I wrote my first essay for this occasion ten years ago; then almost nobody outside of Asia celebrated the day, and now it’s observed worldwide. Sex worker activism in the US is no longer the domain of a small number of activists; vast numbers of sex workers now speak out online, belong to various activist groups, and politically mobilize to oppose prohibitionists, who not so long ago could count on their lies going unchallenged by any but a vocal minority. The War on Whores has alienated enough people that a majority now support decriminalization, and support for sex worker rights is no longer the kiss of death for politicians. The evolution of “sex trafficking” hysteria into a new Satanic Panic has many of the hacks who once eagerly spread prohibitionist wanking fantasies distancing themselves from the mythology and even debunking the tales they until-recently represented as facts. As I wrote last year, “The younger activists, those in their twenties and thirties, have got this, and they are more than capable of carrying it; it’s time for older activists like me to move into a more advisory role…” As part of that shift, I think it’s time for me to stop writing new essays on this topic, lest I grow irrelevant due to repetition. Besides, I’ve already written plenty:
2011: “International Sex Workers’ Rights Day”
2012: “Only Rights Can Stop the Wrongs”
2013: “International Sex Worker Rights Day”
2014: “Sex Worker Rights Day”
2015: “Hands On”
2016: “The ‘Active’ in ‘Activism’”
2017: “Out and Proud”
2018: “365 Days of Activism”
2019: “More Than Ever”
2020: “Sex Worker Rights Day 2020”
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, or fear that our cause is hopeless, I suggest you read all of those in order; you may be surprised just how much things have changed for the better over that short span, and just imagine what the political landscape will look like in 2031 if things keep developing at the same rate as they have for the last three years. We still have a very long way to go, and the fight will never be completely over until we as a species discard the wicked dogma that consensual behavior can somehow be a “crime”, and the pretense that inflicting violence on people is somehow “helping” them. But it’s important to recognize the progress we’ve already made, and to draw from it hope for a better future.
Mardi Gras 2021
Posted in Holidays, tagged carnival, holidays on February 16, 2021| 1 Comment »
Maybe the places where many of y’all live don’t observe it, but I still do. So Happy Mardi Gras, dear readers!
Valentine’s Day 2021
Posted in Holidays, tagged holidays on February 14, 2021| 1 Comment »
As longtime readers know, Valentine’s Day is my least favorite of holidays, and I’m not particularly fond of the typical iconography associated with it, either (which is often weird or violent or creepy as hell). So every year I try to share an exception, like this card Chekhov sent me last year, which is violent and creepy in a good way.
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