A safe place for aros, aces, and other affected people in the pagan, witchcraft, and occult communities to speak out about the amatonormativity and compulsory sexuality that they experience.
This is a focused blog dedicated to raising awareness of, hosting discussions about, and supporting those affected by compulsory sexuality and sexual pressure within alternative spiritual communities, especially those that fall under the umbrella of witchcraft and paganism. We write from an aromantic asexual perspective, but all perspectives are welcome here, as compulsory sexuality harms people of all identities and orientations.
This blog is not anti-pagan. We are writing as members of a community which we love deeply, but which has wronged us and others in the name of sexual liberation. It is not anti-sex, either-- we believe that the right to refuse is an important and vital part of sexual freedom, and that fostering consent culture entails ensuring that all people feel safe and comfortable saying no to acts that infringe upon their boundaries.
Mod Lyta (ey/em): 26 years old, aroace and agender, eclectic pagan Unitarian-ish creature currently exploring Norse Polytheism, have been in and around various occulty spaces both online and offline since I was a teenager. When I'm not writing here I enjoy sci-fi, RPGs of both the video and tabletop variety, and getting bossed around by my two cats.
Mod Astra (she/they): 23 years old, aroace, practicing ancestral witchcraft and paganism. I’m very solitary, I do not have a lot of experience in wider communal pagan spaces, I mostly like reading and writing as I’m too disabled for most physically exhaustive activities. I like to keep to myself and maintain privacy and anonymity online, so you probably won’t learn too terribly much about me personally.
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Getting flashbacks to that time a dude told me when he was sleeping with his wife he would (in terms better than I can put it) be "overcome" with the "energy of a fertility god" (like possession but not possession) and oftentimes be rougher than he normally would exhibit because...fertility gods are...kinky? Or something? I don't know but I feel like I could write a dissertation on why that needs to be examined because I'm sure there are plenty of asexual people who worship fertility deities (myself included) who would push back on this idea that the combo of "fertility" and "god" equals "rough during sex".
Let's call the pagan tendency to believe that everyone must be sexual, and that someone who does not want to be sexual is in error and must be fixed, what it is.
It's religious conversion therapy. And it's no less conversion therapy for being done in a decentralized way by a decentralized religion.
actually, I'll go one step further. Okay? Can I go one step further?
There is no scenario I can see in which sacred sexuality does not lead to the privileging of certain relationships to sex over others, be it monogamous heterosexuality within the bounds of Christian marriage or hot bi pagan babes making out at festival fires.
And once certain relationships to sex are privileged over others, it's only a matter of time before some fuckos get it in their heads that they can and should try to change other people's sexual orientation or expression.
Sacred sexuality, to me, is a dogwhistle that attempts to change a person's orientation are at best tolerated in a space and at worst actively encouraged. And I have not yet been proven wrong about this.
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or, a poem about heterosexism, exorsexism, just plain regular sexism, and aphobia in pagan communities. I've been pondering whether to post it here, but fuck it, here it is.
Let's call the pagan tendency to believe that everyone must be sexual, and that someone who does not want to be sexual is in error and must be fixed, what it is.
It's religious conversion therapy. And it's no less conversion therapy for being done in a decentralized way by a decentralized religion.
Whoof, I... man, I just loooooooove (/heavy sarcasm) it when pagan/witch books are like "There's a sexual component to this practice. I'm going to assume you want to do it. I'm not going to provide alternatives or substitutions because everyone loves sex and feeling sexy and is totally down to have that as a significantly large part of their practice." It makes me feel so welcomed and valued (it doesn't at all, actually, and now I want to break stuff)
Anyway, ace Heathens/Lokeans, be warned that the eight-day devotion to Loki in Playing with Fire by Dagulf Loptson includes a day wholly devoted to meditating on the "sex god" aspect of Loki, that instructs you to do erotic dance as part of the ritual. Maybe that's not as uncomfortable for others as it is for me but I'd really rather not.
Hot Bi Pagan Babe: When Sexual Liberation Isn't Really Liberation
Reading this article made me want to absolutely tear my hair out. Not because it was poorly written, or incorrect, or uninteresting, but because it spoke deeply into a feeling I had been gnawing on since I first started researching paganism and expounded on it to show a deeply disturbing manifestation of misogyny and queerphobia in pagan spaces.
Overall the premise of the paper is that female bisexuality is held as a higher, more spiritual sexuality, whereas straight women were seen as "repressed" and "restricted" (lesbianism was seen more to be verbally put on equal footing as being straight, but in practice was more accepted in public displays of sexuality). This belief is used to engage in public displays of sapphic sexuality, mostly encouraged by men, or in some cases for individual male partners. While (for the most part) consent was upheld as a priority, social currency encouraged sapphic performance, both for male partners and men in public, even from women who did not identify as bisexual or otherwise sapphic.
For those of you who don't want to read the paper, here are some highlights!
"Bisexuality...is associated with an ability to truly know divine love and to explore all the possibilities that exist in the realm of sensuality."
"This fetishization of female bisexual identity extends to public spaces as well. Within the sexually open setting of the NeoPagan festival, bisexual-identified women are also encouraged to engage in public displays of sexuality and sensuality with other women."
"Male partners seemed to be the driving force behind their female partners' sexual escapades with other women and on the whole orchestrated these encounters so that all parties participated."
"There is sometimes great pressure from their male partners for women to not only identify as bisexual and pursue sexual experiences with women, but also to do so either in public spaces such as festival fires or in situations where the male can either participate or watch."
"Bisexual-identified women are sought after by many NeoPagan men, and the archetype of the hot bi Pagan babe is one of considerable power within the community."
"Heterosexual-identified women are often perceived of (and spoken about) as prudish or somehow less free than their bisexual-identified sisters in the community. Heterosexuality is seen by some as something to be overcome; bisexuality is seen as a higher stage of spiritual evolution, something that will come "in time," by many community members."
MaryMoon in 2000 said "To love the Divine, then, is to feel the most intimate of bondings, sexually enacted or not, with both the Goddess and the God potentials within the Whole. It is to see, and to choose to touch and to intercourse with, both essential expressions of Divinity within our bi gendered world. For me, personally, then, how could I not be open to the deepest of intercourse with the soul/spirit, with both gendered forms, with female and with male?"
Sharon Devlin in 1986 said "I consider bisexuality, by and large, a higher state than simply homosexuality or heterosexuality because it offers a greater number of alternatives."
"Although Devlin characterizes homo- and heterosexuality as equally limiting, I did not find this sentiment in much of the community where I conducted research. Rather, it is (female) heterosexuality that is indicted as "limiting," "repressive," or restrictive. Lesbianism, though also a form of monosexuality, does not come in for the same criticism."
"Sex as a way to "pray with your body," and as a result fundamentally pleasing to the Divine as NeoPaganism envisions it, was a theme in the in- formal and electronic interviews conducted as part of this research."
"An image of monosexuality as a restrictive form of sexual expression that "limited [one] to loving only half of the human race," or denies one the chance to know the full breadth and depth of human emotional and sexual expression, emerged in the informal and electronic interviews."
"Upon learning of my own bisexual identity, one of my informants responded with, "So glad to hear you're bi-I think all cool women should be." This idea — that "all cool women should be bi"—was pervasive in the interviews / conducted in the course of this research, and in the settings where I conducted participant observation. There is a coexistence of what Moira called the "fetishization of the hot bi Pagan babe," a male-dominated encouragement of same-sex performances between women in public spaces such as festival fires, and a construction of monosexuality as deviant and bisexuality as normative."
"...they also laughed about "watching chicks" with their male partners; "getting some pussy" at the revel fire; and loving being bisexual because "there is eye candy everywhere!" By and large, these women identify as feminists. Even as they participated in a religion that asserts the right of women to shape their own lives, these bisexual-identified women were engaging in the same type of objectifying language that much of feminism has taken on."
"..one even went so far as to declare that "all the bi women need tags" so she could know which women it was acceptable to approach sexually."
Now you may be thinking, "Astra! That sounds like a lot of stuff! Spiritual gender essentialism, all kinds of weird manifestations of queerphobia, misogyny, where to start?" And to that I say, aphobia and arophobia, of course!
Look, all those things are really important to talk about, and I genuinely encourage as many people to read the paper and pick apart all the moving pieces. However, one must choose their scope, and for this blog that scope is specifically spiritually mandated sexuality. Just like the author recognized it was outside the scope of the paper to delineate what is and is not "NeoPagan" (a statement I am glad for, as I do not agree with her and those she cites) I will do my best to stay within the scope of this blog.
The notion that bisexuality, specifically the practice of actively engaging in sexual activity with "both genders" is somehow more spiritually mature or genuine than only being open to having sex with a portion of the population begs the question: what does that say about those who don't want to have sex AT ALL? Those who, when invited to participate in "intercourse with the divine" shudder at the thought? Well clearly, the logical progression of that thought, is that you're even more spiritually disconnected. You're not limited in the sense you'll only have sex with "half the genders", but you're ultra limited because you won't have sex with anyone. In fact, this aligns you more with evil, repressive, misogynistic Christianity. You're not really pagan.
Would it be overly aggressive to make the comparison that idolizing female bisexual promiscuity is the same flavor of restricting, misogynistic, and queerphobic as idolizing female purity and chastity before a heterosexual marriage, but taken to the extreme opposite end? Yes? Okay then I wont. But I'm thinking it. To set aside one identity, one way of acting, as above all else in a spiritual sense is gross. To call it sexual liberation, to call it feminism, to call it freedom, is downright a bold faced lie.
True sexual liberation is the ability to say yes or no without consequence.
And lets be quite clear, the gender essentialism of "God and Goddess finding marriage and creation in the merging of the two" doesn't exactly promote lesbian marriage. It doesn't uphold monogamous relationship between women, or polyamorous relationships with only women. It doesn't have room for trans, non-binary, or intersex people. The standard that is covertly pushed is a straight marriage with a straight man and bisexual woman who will have threesomes or other forms of group sex with other women while the man is present in some way. Is this dynamic inherently bad? Of COURSE not. But when there's a pattern of women's male partners orchestrating and pushing threesomes with other women you get concerned. Where there's a stark, identifiable pattern, there becomes an ideal. An expectation. An expectation for women to marry men, and be promiscuous with other women while the man watches or participates.
Overall, for people who do not want a romantic or sexual relationship, this is just as nightmare inducing (if not more-so) than the Christian fundamentalist "one man one woman sex for procreation" rhetoric NeoPagan groups initially set out to combat. They have overcorrected and created their own trap. Pushing rhetoric that those that do not wish to engage in sexual or romantic relationships cannot experience true divinity is exclusionist and queerphobic.
Now it needs to be noted that this is not universal, not all pagan relationships or communities are like this, and this shouldn't stop you from seeking community. I won't make claims on how prevalent this specific issue is (the author themself says the participant pool was small), but watching out for pitfalls and manifestations of things like amanormativity, gender essentialism, queerphobia, and misogyny disguised as progress is essential. Pagan spaces are not immune to the problems of culture, and all these issues are prevalent in the wider culture we live in. Just remember: you can be pagan and aroace, or other such queer identity, and not have that hinder your spirituality. Sex is a great way to explore divinity, but so are a hell of a lot of other things. If anyone says you have to have sex or be in a romantic relationship (or multiple), they're either lying or genuinly believe that and are severely misguided.
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Thinking about all those “feminism is going to turn women into lesbian witches” conservatives and all I can think about is how it “made me” an aroace pagan. Yeah, witchy, but I do more religious activities besides witchcraft more often than I do spells and stuff. And I don’t do any romance at all! Aroace witches 1 weirdo conservatives during the Satanic Panic 0.
You do not owe your partner(s) sex. I mostly see this passed around in the asexual community, and it absolutely needs emphasis there, but this applies to anyone of any orientation. You never owe your partner(s) sex under any circumstance.
If your sex drive or libido is lower than your partner’s, you may feel obligated to “keep up” with them to make them happy. But you have a right to say no, or not be in the mood, or be too tired, or just not want to right now. Your partner(s) should respect your right to say no and your bodily autonomy.
If your partner(s) try to harass, manipulate, or coerce you into having sex when you say no, they’re an asshole. Having said yes in the past does not mean you can never say no. It is not your responsibility or obligation to provide sex. You do not need to violate your own boundaries to make someone else happy. Your partner(s) should respect your right to say no, and if they don’t, they don’t deserve you.
Your body belongs to you, and you decide what’s best for your sexual health. Happy Pride
It's important to note that "can I be [identity] and be a part of [spiritual community]" and "will I feel welcome and at home in [spiritual community] as a [identity] person" are two separate questions.
It's possible, for instance, to be an asexual Thelemite. Most Thelemites you ask will respond very incuriously to the question of whether that's possible— they'll say as long as you're doing your Will, who cares? But that doesn't change the fact that the time I spent attempting to study Thelema while asexual was some of the most uncomfortable and unwelcoming time I've ever spent in any occult space.
