12th House

Vesta is called the goddess of the hearth, the fire. Vesta is actually the fire, not the woman. The virgins who tended the fire were called Vestals. Vestals were chosen in  childhood, took vows of celibacy by age six, and were not allowed any relationships that would interfere with their relationship to the fire. They were punished severely if the fire ever went out. They were entombed alive if they broke their vow of chastity

But they weren’t Vesta.

Oddly, only one article on Vesta notes how difficult it was to keep a fire going in ancient times. Keeping a fire going was back-breaking, boring, difficult work that required vigilance and resourcefulness. There were no lighters or fire-starter logs and even logs were hard to come by in tough times.  Fire requires material to burn, and collecting that material – keeping supplies up – is work.  Everyone had a Vesta goddess because every town, village, and home needed fire to survive. Someone had to keep it going.

Viewing Vesta as a goddess is kind of silly when you consider Vesta as a job. It was an important job, but that’s all it was – a job. The fire mattered more than the person behind it. And it did matter. Fire was dignity, continuity, safety, and comfort for the community.

Astrologically, Vesta is an asteroid associated with Virgo and Scorpio, which oddly mixes elements of the virgin with sexuality. Vesta, in astrology, is where sexual energy can be focused into spiritual service. Or so they say. I have Vesta in Libra in my second house. You can look up the location of Vesta in your chart by going to astro.com and selecting their extended chart selection.

“It’s somehow much more shameful for a male to admit to being abused. It not only stirs their sense of weakness about being victimized but also the whole issue of sexual attitude and identity,” said Dr. David Reiss, who, during more than 25 years as a practicing psychiatrist, has mainly treated adults who were abused as children, including sexually assaulted males.

“If a woman is abused, obviously there are traumas and effects from that,” added Reiss, the interim medical director at Providence Behavioral Hospital in Holyoke, Mass., chiefly overseeing children and adolescent care. “In society’s point of view — and it’s a negative view — women can be seen as having attracted that attention. But it doesn’t detract from her sexuality externally, even if, internally, it causes a lot of other problems.”

Such allowances are hardly afforded males, he said. For them, “there’s a different cultural dynamic at play that makes it much more difficult for a man to ever acknowledge having been abused.”

Full article on abc.com

That headline is a shocker, yeah? Because I thought all straight men ever wanted was little ol’ me.

Lately I’ve had the strange experience – more than once – that talking about guy-on-guy sex turns on guys who like to give women orgasms. Thankfully, the Internet can help lend weight to my observation.

Now that people can search their kink privately, they do. Searches reveal a surprising number of men search to watch heterosexual men have sex with each other. “So they must be closet gay!” you think. But, perhaps, human sexuality is a bit more complicated than that.

There’s pretty overwhelming evidence for it: Men search for penises almost as often as they search for vaginas

In the above quoted salon.com article, What the Internet reveals about sexual desire, a researcher proposes that there is some evolutionary reason why men would like to look at penises. But, frankly, I think its more simple than that. The human species is bisexual. If you think about the various conditions our species has had to survive to thrive (starvation, war, migration, over-population, etc), the model of the heterosexual family unit – or heterosexuality as exclusive/normal – doesn’t hold up. Its too expensive to social/physical/material resources to tie sex exclusively to reproduction. Besides, sex isn’t just a reproductive act. Its a social act. Its a feel-good act. And socialization, cooperation, and community are important to the survival of the species. No infant is going to survive on its own. We need each other to get through this thing. Sex, at best, is a cooperative act.

Like I told my sometimes-gay-sex man friend: you’re being a good citizen.

So, back to straight men and penises. In my experience, when I have shared my view that the species is bisexual (not saying they to engage in bisexual acts, but that the evolutionary impetus/potential is there) men get squirmy. Then, they get hot. Like, fire chi hot. Like, currents in the air hot. And then they start asking if they can give me an orgasm or telling me how hot I am. Which is weird, because this usually happens after they outted themselves to me as “gay” or whatever. Or, they get mad and freak after telling me how not gay they are and how hot I am.

I realize as a woman I have held male sexuality in small confined space. When my ex admitted to me one of his first sexual experiences was with a male, I thought “I have to dump this guy.” But he played it off as a joke so we never talked about it again. The truth is that as a woman, I bought into the idea that one drop of “gay” ruined the man. And I no longer believe that at all and am kind of ashamed I ever did.

In my experience, just the IDEA that a woman would be OK with a man having a man-on-man experience is hot and extremely liberating to lots of men. But, its such a dangerous thing to discuss. Because men never want to let their “manly” side down. It takes a lot of trust to have an open conversation.

Information from the search also found men fantasise about group sex more than women, and picture more men than women in the action.

The above quote is taken from the Daily Mail’s coverage of the same study. Its interesting, no? Because its commonly said that men are OK with having a three-way with two women, but not two men. And that observation is used to show that men want to control/consume female sexuality. But, in truth, I think that’s all just a social charade to uphold the virtues of MEN and WOMEN. I don’t think those gender roles truly work for anyone. The objective truth is that sex is an act, not an identity.

I just read an article about a high school football coach who resigned because of a “Hurt Feelings” survey he gave his players.

The most revealing thing about the article is the comments, most of which defend the coaches tactics and lament the “pussification” of America. The comments make it clear that many men believe that emasculating men is the surest way to make them manly.

You can see the complete survey online. I get that its a “joke.” But how funny would it be if you were a boy who had been sexually abused to chose between “I have woman like hormones” or “my butt is easily hurt” as justification for having…feelings?

Regardless of the genders or the sport involved, the language we use to talk about men and sex indicates that men should be willing and able to withstand punishment and abuse and stay quiet about it. In the words of one survivor of mother-son sexual abuse”The shame of what I suffered was so great that I wanted to die. I could not talk about it for decades. I remember in first grade being told that the worst swear word was “mother —-” – accusing someone of having incestuous sex with his own mother. I would think, “This is what I am.”

Oh, and the coach got to keep his less-important gig as high school guidance counselor.

I am so sensitive about men in general these days. I had a few psychic experiences of feeling what it was like to be a man in some uncomfortable scenarios. And I realized how much we’ve projected our shadow side onto the other other sex.

I blame the root chakra. The root chakra gets blamed for everything. I had a root chakra opening (no Kundalini yoga involved, it happened from a strange case of love) where I was overwhelmed by the power of my own aggressive instincts. I had visions of a lioness eating an elephant (how greedy and extreme and gross!) I went to the park to ground my senses, saw a figure in the distance walking the path and, before I could discern gender, decided I wanted to fuck them. I fantasized about killing an animal, maybe something small, like a rat, with a small weapon, like a bb gun. Because, of course, the desire to kill is so not me. But, sure, just to be on the other side of death. For experience.

I got through the experience without reckless sex or murder. But it was scary to realize the power in me. It’s a power that isn’t socialized, can’t be socialized. It’s the force the insures the survival of the species. Do I wish someone could own/control that about me? Sure! I’d be crime-free for life. But they can’t. Its my power. And it isn’t gender based. But, socially, gender is a big way we manage it. Men, we are taught, are the aggressive ones. Men are the owners of the uncontrollable appetites. Men Can Stop Rape. Never mind sometimes males are sometimes raped. By women. By mothers. By men. And estimated 1 in 6 of men have suffered sexual abuse. And being a man (ie “the aggressor”) makes it even more difficult for them to dicuss their victimization and begin the work of healing.

And to feel what that feels like – to be the victim and the perpetrator of the crime against you – means I can no longer participate in blaming men for anything. I blame individuals for their actions. And that kind of blame requires context.

Some sages would say all is love. Love is a spectrum. And the different colors/emotions are all required to keep love in balance. But not all feelings are soft and fuzzy. Nor should they be. If they should be, we would have been created with only soft and fuzzy feelings.

I had friends over for a bbq this weekend. The man was nervously flipping burgers. His wife was neurotically watching their toddler son inside “No throwing! We don’t throw!” When we went up to the kitchen, she made a few comments about how her husband was a child. But a good one. And I thought “you’re being such a bitch.”

Outside, I talked to the husband about aggression. How sometimes aggression is OK, necessary even. And he said “Sure. As long as it’s loving aggression.” Really? Is that how we are made? We have seven chakras for a reason. And love isn’t stored in the red root. Sometimes being pissed off is exactly what’s required to bring balance to a situation. Living well is about balance – not non-stop heart charka action.

Our ideas about gender are WAY out of balance. I, for one, am looking forward to Saturn in Scorpio and hope it signals a time when all individuals – regardless of gender – accept responsibility for their sexy-killer power.

Self portrait. Tribute to Richard Holbrooke.

Richard Holbroke was Special Envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan and a career diplomat. I never met him. I heard about him. He told my colleagues “I’ve been given an impossible task. And every moment I stay in this building makes me feel it’s more impossible.” He was famous for being a relentless pain in the ass.

I would like to believe in super heroes or villains. I never met any. I would like to blame the Illuminati or Capitalism. But the truth is we are trapped by our own bureaucracies. Institutions fight for life. And we fight back.

Richard Holbrooke knew he was fighting a losing battle and he didn’t give a shit. He would live and die to set it right. He was a man who could not tolerate apathy. He was a man who engaged his energy to his utmost capacity in solving the problem as he saw it above all else. Sure, it was a cluster fuck. He died working. His dying words aren’t official record. He said them to Pakistani surgeons before he went under for an emergency heart procedure. Hardly a diplomatic press conference. I imagine his anxiety, his sense of unrest, his urgent need for someone to give a shit, for someone to confront the situation and say it like it is. He told his surgeons “You’ve got to stop this war in Afghanistan.”

As a child, I had a dream I was a festively decorated young pink circus elephant carrying an adult, grey, dead elephant on my back. The dead one fit the contours of my back so well it seemed to be a part of me, something I couldn’t shake loose from, something that was so much larger than me weighing me down, something that nature should remove. The pink elephant seemed cheerfully stoic, even purposeful. I thought “how unfair and why should an elephant have to carry such a burden? How can it survive under that weight?”

Years later, I would have distrubing visions of a lioness eating an elephant. I would talk to an astrologer who would tell me that the first half of my life was burning off family karma. She said I am a balsamic moon, that my nodal return will release 360 years of karma. Who knows? I’m not the score-keeper of my own life. I do feel more like a lionness than an elephant these days.