sex, gender, & sexuality

[Yogurto]

hey y'all, thought i'd finally get around to starting a discussion about how sex, gender, & sexuality pertain to the occult.

i've become pretty frustrated with how a lot of books on witchcraft (many are 101 level, some beyond) present sex & gender. i don't identify as wiccan, so the god/goddess setup is already non-applicable to me. i believe a polarity exists in the universe between masculinity & femininity, but i also perceive a lot more to the gender spectrum than this duality permits. so far i've encountered zero literature that allows for a queer understanding of sex & gender.

i suppose i'd like to know how y'all include sex, gender, sexuality, queerness, etc in your practices - if at all. hopefully reading your responses will help me better understand exactly what i want to know. more questions will come once we get this discussion going, i'm sure!  

[Obscurus]

I accept masculinity and femininity as part of a larger monad. You could think of it as being like the planets: Each planet has it's own associations under the larger umbrella of the "rulers" of Sun (masculine) and Moon (feminine). They're all part of a larger whole though. Ditto with the zodiacal constellations, plants, minerals, elements, etc.

I think there's a continuum between the far points of the duality.  

[Yogurto]

Obscurus

I accept masculinity and femininity as part of a larger monad. You could think of it as being like the planets: Each planet has it's own associations under the larger umbrella of the "rulers" of Sun (masculine) and Moon (feminine). They're all part of a larger whole though. Ditto with the zodiacal constellations, plants, minerals, elements, etc.

I think there's a continuum between the far points of the duality.

word. nicely put. i guess i've become frustrated lately with the books i'm reading (currently working my way through 'the witches' goddess' & 'the witches' god' by the farrars) that seem to forget large slices of the human experience. namely, that not everyone is a paradigm of masculinity/femininity, & that a healthy gender expression is so much more complicated/interesting than the old yin/yang idea. like, there's more to being a human than being a dude w/ some feminine qualities or a gal w/ some masculine qualities! why we gotta keep going down the line & labeling everything we see as either masc/fem, sun/moon, dark/light?  

[Obscurus]

Yogurto

Obscurus

I accept masculinity and femininity as part of a larger monad. You could think of it as being like the planets: Each planet has it's own associations under the larger umbrella of the "rulers" of Sun (masculine) and Moon (feminine). They're all part of a larger whole though. Ditto with the zodiacal constellations, plants, minerals, elements, etc.

I think there's a continuum between the far points of the duality.

word. nicely put. i guess i've become frustrated lately with the books i'm reading (currently working my way through 'the witches' goddess' & 'the witches' god' by the farrars) that seem to forget large slices of the human experience. namely, that not everyone is a paradigm of masculinity/femininity, & that a healthy gender expression is so much more complicated/interesting than the old yin/yang idea. like, there's more to being a human than being a dude w/ some feminine qualities or a gal w/ some masculine qualities! why we gotta keep going down the line & labeling everything we see as either masc/fem, sun/moon, dark/light?

As humans we seem to really like dichotomies.  

[GM Phish]

Man needs to divide and classify what he sees, if we don't, we revert to the primal stage, or 'chaos'. Understandably some people like the broader view, but when it comes to worth do you want a ton of general statements, or a few specific ones? Either way, parts will always be missing. To me (as a straight person) I can still connect to the concept of duality, and that we as humans are always left to choose between the paths. It's to say that there are many choices, and many ways of life, duality is simply a process of trying to specify that farther.

Hope that just made sense. xD

If you're looking for more 'general' spheres, look into a bit more of hermeticism. It still has duality, but it does veer into a different kind of perfection (hermaphrodite) to contain both of the spectrums. Of course, much more of hermeticism is focused on the self, and not so much others and sexual preference.

As for the whole wiccan thing, it is kind of cool, but it is also incredibly shallow. It provides a small cookie-cutter example of paganism that a person normally expands from to choose their own pantheon. But honestly, if you are going to choose patron gods, why not just become a pagan and skip the whole God/Goddess ordeal? There are many deities that are nonspecific, and gender is irrelevant. If you are looking for specifically gay Gods, as I recall Pan, Ares, Bacchus, and Hermes were all in question at one point. might be worth looking into. smile