Fair warning gentle reader, I’m feeling a bit pissy this evening.

I would first like to say that the gods do not need this little Vreschtik shaman to guard or defend their honor, and I would not presume for a moment to speak for gods who are not my own or who have not instructed me to do so. The following little rant is drawn from my own personal feelings about spirituality, propriety, and respect, and is in no way being written on divine order or inspiration.

In the course of my work as sexuality educator I recently came across an “adult novelties” company I was not previously acquainted with. In keeping with our theme of “disclaimers as narrative” I should note that I have not had enough personal experience with their product line or staff to have an opinion about them as a sex-toy/adult novelties company. Yet, they’ve managed to piss me off.

The company is “Athena’s Home Novelties,” and just typing that out makes me want to spit. Their logo is a bust of the forenamed Greek goddess winking suggestively at the viewer, and their sales representatives are known as “Athena’s goddesses.”

Now, if you have read Notes From a Barking Shaman before, or in fact have taken even a cursory glance at barkingshaman.com, you surely know that I am the last person to object to sex on moral or spiritual grounds! A thorough embracing of sex and sexuality as part of one’s spiritual journey is a central feature in my life and Work.

Nor do I object to companies taking deity names. There is a long and noble history of businesses honoring a patron or inviting the gods’ blessing through name choices. Fire, Asrik, and I chose the name Brigantian Designs LLC for our now-defunct design firm as an homage to the Celtic goddess Brigit, who we hoped would look with favor on our endeavors.

If you have even a cursory level of knowledge of Greek mythology, it is not hard to see what my problem is with “Athena’s Home Novelties.” You see, a driving element in the lore surrounding Athena is that She is a virgin goddess. We’re not talking about a deity simply without any tales featuring sex, or whose purview was some unrelated area of life. No, the fact that Athena is a virgin is actually really important in Her lore and Her place in Greek culture and mythology.

Not only is She virginal, She’s modest. In a culture that treated bare breasts as fashion accessories (even fellow virgin goddess Artemis is often seen in an off-the-shoulder number too revealing for Project Runway), Athena is portrayed fully clothed in either voluminous robes or armor.

It is possible that you could choose a worse Greek deity to name an “Adult Novelties” company after, but for the life of me, none leap to mind.

I’ve been bitching about this issue for well over a week now to just about anyone who’d listen to me, and I’ve heard lots of excuses and justifications from well meaning individuals who think I’m maybe a bit out there in my reaction. The upshot of most of peoples’ counter arguments has been that it is likely an ignorant error, made without malice. These arguments are often accompanied by an overtone of “seriously, why do you care?”

Although more than one person said that just because Athena is portrayed as virginal, it doesn’t mean that she couldn’t have sexual pleasure all by Her lonesome. Far be it for me to deny the value of masturbation, but at the same time A) the impression I’m under is that, yes, it meant exactly that and B) the company in question sells far more than masturbatory supplies.

So then, why do I give a shit? It boils down to two issues for me:

The first is that in one sense, Athena is one of my gods. I’m a hard-polythestic pagan who sees the gods as real and concrete entities. I may not be devote of Athena or the Hellenic pantheon, but I honor and acknowledge Her as a force in the Universe, as I do all the gods. By spitting on Her, this company spits on the very core of my spiritual faith. Yeah, I said “spit” and honestly, I’m going to stand by it.

As I said at the beginning, Athena of all deities, does not need me to defend her honor, but as a shaman and a sexuality educator I feel I’m in a position where I have to speak up. There is also an idea in both neo-paganism and the new-age sexuality movement to see all female deities as connected to sexuality, and that just doesn’t work on multiple levels.

The second reason is both more and less personal: This comes across as lazy. We aren’t talking about an obscure ancient culture and pantheon here, these are the damn Greeks. We learn about their culture and mythology in middle school! There are plenty of figures within Hellenic lore who would be worlds better (Aphrodite’s Home Novelties anyone?). Hell, there’s an entire pantheon within the lore dedicated to love and pleasure. If you’re open to moving outside of a the world of the Greeks, fifteen seconds on google gets you thousands of hits, including Wikipedia’s “List of Love and Lust Deities,” plenty of which are common enough for people to have heard of.

It seems that in naming this company, Athena was chosen because She is A) female and B) powerful, which in itself is insulting to women, sexuality, and the deity Herself. It implies that the goddesses of love and passion are somehow lesser than the virginal goddess of war and wisdom, and that the person choosing the name didn’t see beyond Athena’s gender to what Her identity was, which is a insult to women as well as gods.

Maybe you think I’m making a mountain out of a molehill as my mother would say, and perhaps you are right. But I can’t help but think about the outcry we’d see in the pagan community if someone was arguing against sex and sensuality in the name of Aphrodite, or in the mainstream at a pork BBQ using the Hebrew name of God, or automatic weapons with quotes from Jesus on them (oh wait, that last one essentially happened a few years ago).

Maybe you think that the ancient gods (or all the gods) are simply storybook characters that nut-jobs like me take too seriously, and that’s your right. But that doesn’t mean that it’s right to mock our beliefs, and in the end that’s what this is, a mockery.

I was really taken with this very steamy and slightly odd Japanese safe-sex advert aimed at the gay men’s community. I’m particularly taken with the fact that they specifically mention safer alternatives to intercourse. I wish things like mutual masturbation could make their way into the public dialog in the U.S. Or any masturbation for that matter as part of a healthy and safe sex life.

Probably NSFW, so find somewhere discrete and enjoy. Be warned, the tune is very odd and definitely has ear-worm potential.

 

Little Taiko Boy リトル太鼓ボーイ from All Out Attack on Vimeo.
 
 

 Occupy Wall Street has entered into its second month of civil disobedience, and as a movement it has spread far beyond the boundaries of one small island on the Hudson River. As a movement, I support much of what OWS stands for, even as I am extremely cognizant of just where the trail they are blazing could lead. Every time the police start beating protestors, which has been all too often, visions of Kent State University and protests of a previous generation flash through my mind.

The truth though is that, while the charge that there hasn’t yet been accountability for the financial calamity that continues to threaten the stability of the United States and the Eurozone, or for that matter for the social, political, and regulatory circumstances that made that calamity possible, has strong merit, I would argue that the final responsibility lies with a cultural artifact that underpins every aspect of our modern culture:

You see, The World Is Coming To An End

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Now Wintersong, you know that every generation thinks that theirs is going to be the one that sees the world ‘come to an end.’” But you know something, that’s a load of crap. What is true is that every living generation experienced that belief, but it is hardly universal to the American or human experience.

I am thirty-one years old, my grandfather is eighty-six. His generation fought in WWII, but even at the height of the War, global nihilism may have posed a real threat the American way of life, but global extinction was not yet on the table. That concept would only come into the public consciousness in the post war decades as weapons of unimaginable power made the planet itself a game board on which a wealthy playboy and a once-poor metalworker could find themselves playing the highest stakes round of chess in history.

In the post war years my grandfather worked long hours to provide a very comfortable life for his family. They owned a series of progressively large boats, a vacation house in the Hamptons, and a new Caddy every two years. The quarter century following the end of WWII were years of prosperity, not only for my family, but for the nation as a whole. Although the gods know that GDP numbers alone don’t reflect the racial and gender inequalities that drove the engine of social change that roiled and remade the cultural landscape into a place where, if the world could hold off on nuking itself long enough, maybe “The American Dream” could be within anyone’s grasp. No matter whether one was living the dream already or fighting for a shot at it, that specter of destruction hung over everyone during “golden” fifties and sixties. It was not merely global annihilation that haunted people’s nightmares either, but personal, as families anxiously awaited the decisions of the draft board and telegrams from Uncle Sam.

The shiny of the fifties and sixties was well tarnished by the time the seventies rolled around, with fuel shortages, Global Stagflation, and an escalation of a bloody and hopeless war on the other side of the globe. Not to mention the ugliest era in automotive aesthetics in history. Moreover, the first generation to grow up with the ever present threat of imminent death, not only of themselves, but of their entire species, was coming of age.

Is it any wonder this this would become the generation of “greed is good?” They grew up believing that they wouldn’t see their senior years because the odds were just too good that an American GI would mistake a black bear for a foreign saboteur or that there wouldn’t be a Stanislav Petrov  handy the next time the Soviets had a false nuclear missile alarm. Having survived this long, it makes fatalistic sense, in a terminal cancer sort of way, to indulge and enjoy the now as much as possible.

By the time my generation came on the scene, the threat of imminent nuclear annihilation was diminishing, if never completely gone. The Soviets were still the bad guys of my childhood, but  hating and fearing the USSR felt more like a tradition, passed down three generations, than something that actually effected my life. I’m old enough to remember the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall, but I’m young enough to remember not really understanding what the fuss was all about.

That same year the Cold War came to an end, I first heard about my generation’s great threat. I still remember in fifth grade science class learning about PCBs, the Hole in the Ozone Layer, recycling, and Global Warming (now Global Climate Change). Interestingly, that was also the first year that my school district’s science curriculum changed to reflect the only recently accepted theory of Plate Tectonics. We’d learned the “shrinking Earth” theory of mountain formation the year before.

I remember the whole idea of Global Warming being terribly exciting to my young self. I’d grown up on my mom’s stories of watching the moon landing, and at eleven, the idea that my actions could play a role, no matter how small, in changing the course of our world’s environment felt empowering. My mother had watched Armstrong and Aldrin walk on the moon, my generation would act to save our world.

The incremental and inadequate changes in sustainability and environmental resource management that have occurred over the intervening twenty years would shock the young SeaQuest watching boy I was. Collapsing marine life populations, unchecked climate change, and the rapid consumption of irreplaceable resources like hydrocarbons, and the rare earth elements needed to maintain and replace short lived electronics like smart phones and computers, all conspire to make the world we live in now seem to be the false twilight of a short lived golden age of global travel and instantaneous communication.

Is it any wonder that we are outraged? We were born into a world on the brink of collapse precisely because no one really believed it would last long enough to bother with planning beyond the next line of blow. Now, as a world without enough fuel to keep planes flying and cars rolling, where tuna is as unobtainable as Dodo, and where we tell tales of when small boxes made of the rarest minerals on earth existed purely for entertainment, seems close enough to touch, is it any wonder that my generation is beyond bitter that a greedy minority not only act without care that they may hasten the end of the golden age, but also in ways that deprive us of the chance to bask in the last rays of the sun that’s setting on the world we were promised as children?

Postscript:

My generation often bemoans the sedentary nature of our successors. We reminisce over days riding bikes with friends and playing pretend in the park, while the younger generation sits enraptured in artificial landscapes of videogames and faceless Facebook friends. But is it any wonder? Born into a nation caught up in a war that their elders understand even less than the one my parents grew up with, and into a world in which predictions of ecological disaster (and hence economic as well) now place environmental D-day well within their own lives, who can blame them for retreating into artificial worlds like opium addicts of a century ago. If Morpheus’s “real world” was what you had to look forward to, would you choose to unplug from the Matrix?

The First Gate. Powerful piece from my lover and fellow clan member Del about dying and the choice to live.