I recently had the pleasure of stopping by the recording studio of sex writer Sophie St. Thomas and astrologer Annabel Gat to speak about sex and spirituality on their podcast, The SerpentCast.
Truth be told, My perspective on sexuality can be rather skewed. As a sex worker, I am often surrounded by people who unabashedly fly their freak flags like they’re surrendering in a decades-long war. In fact, that’s what My life has come to be about - a non-judgmental space for people to dump out their cans of beans and worms. So naturally, I do the same. Shame has a decreasing hold on what comes out of My mouth. But I am still very much on My own journey of peeling back the layers that society has told Me were “proper female behavior” or “acceptable topics of discussion”.
In conversation with Sophie and Annabel on their podcast, I felt like I could be candid as usual. Sophie was an interview guest on La Maison du Rouge’s weekly Periscope and we’d briefly talked about our fetish for the taboo, so I felt that I was in good company. The conversation started with their customary question of which Hogwart’s house I belonged to (Slytherin, of course). We went on to speak about magick and its parallels with BDSM, as well as the transformative effects of both. Sophie then asked Me about My own journey with sexuality so I brought it back to the topic of snakes; how one time while casually searching for animal porn on Tumblr (RIP), I found a short video with a guy fucking his snake. Careful to disclaim any endorsement for animal abuse, I then proceeded to describe the video in graphic detail and my surprising reaction to it - a revolving mixture of horror and disgust and fascination and arousal and disgust and arousal. At that moment, Annabel remarked that she would most likely cut that snake porn bit out for the vegans and that the podcast had hit its 45 minute mark. Those sounded like safe words to Me. Understandably, I can see how one might consider consuming animal porn essentially an endorsement for animal abuse because animals cannot give consent. The actual act of violating an animal or bearing witness in real life - I want no part of. Watching it happen on the internet — grey area. Having these reactions does not make Me a bad person, but this definitely contradicts My real-life morality surrounding animal life is that I would not ever think to harm any living creature, insects included. In fact, I have heightened empathy for animals, especially reptiles. So why was this revolting act of violating animals so arousing? Why have so many of us gone down the dark hold of depraved sex acts on the internet, gotten off from them, and then guiltily wondered, “what the fuck was that?”
I’ll unpack Taboos more in a different blog post.