Consent and Beyond

We are all as hysterical about sex as any religious fundamentalist, despite our superior ideologies. Yes, now we recognise the legitimacy of homosexuality and we recognise womens' right to their own bodies.

Now, as a culture, we possess the word “consent” against which we can place all sexual acts to judge their validity. “Consent” is an entirely new dimension in the development of human sexuality. Male ownership of female bodies, passed from father to husband at marriage, has not been the norm for most of human social life, though it has been the norm in our culture until the much more recent idea of marriage as a partnership. Surely there have been many permutations, all equally arbitrary but some more successful than others. Male sexual violence against women has been a trait of our culture that we have very recently recognised and begun to address.  It has been an entirely unsuccessful trait because human beings refuse to live in misery and violence and always, eventually, they stand up and defy the cultural institutions that their ancestors maintained.

The concept of “consent” is a significant and necessary step in the development of human sexuality. Sexuality is not a matter of individuals, it is not a matter of “preference”, it is not a form of self-expression. Sexuality is social, it is about how we relate to each other. Sexuality is one of the myriad ways in which we interact and experience the world as social beings. I reject the theory of individuality. The best that I can say about the idea of “individuality” is that it has been used to free us from the repression of theocracy and slavery. It is now a core ideology of Corporate America, with the holy text being the American Constitution, of the free market and of consumerism. “Individualism” has lead to urban alienation, segregating us with fences and walls into separate locked houses, separate bedrooms, separate beds. We are not individuals. We are a social species. We thrive and evolve socially. We build cities not to facilitate economic transactions, but to create diverse and complex communities. Within cities of millions of people we form tribes, tribes of bankers, tribes of artists, tribes of Christians, tribes that perhaps represent the size and interdependence of the tribes we have lived in for thousands of years, before evolution, before language, the continual successful tendency of human development.

We develop and maintain social and cultural practices that are successful and we (eventually) reject what does not work (or allow ourselves to be crushed by the consequences of our own cultural practises). This is why I believe that “consent” will survive. It is necessary. But it is new and it will evolve. While this concept slowly emerges from global culture, like a mushroom emerging from the rich filth of cow shit, we cling to and eventually release the arbitrary and destructive cultural divisions that have dysfunctionally brought us to this moment. We use the concept of consent to justify the trauma-induced boundaries and violences that we continue to perpetuate. We try to define in court whether consent was given. We deny sexuality to everyone below the age of 16, claiming they are unable to consent because they are somehow incomplete. We devise infinite ways of alienating ourselves from the fellow humans we are having sex with. We call it fucking and we do fuck. We learn how to fuck from pornography, which is readily available everywhere, with average degrading magazines available from every convenience store in the Capitalist world, portraying human bodies as objects to be fucked, orifices. Arbitrary standards of acceptability limit the depravity of these magazines while on the internet anything can be found, as depraved and dehumanising as you like. Arbitrary standards are impossible to enforce on the internet. However, in the cinema, on television, in the classroom and the library, where ideas are freely exchanged, there are no standards whatsoever; sexuality is simply not allowed to be discussed. Perhaps we have observed the change over the years in what can be discussed, but still, though we now discuss contraception, abortion, homosexuality and consent, we only accepts concepts into the discussion once they have been thoroughly defined and culturally-sanctioned. Anything that connects us with the complexity of the situation is confronting and therefore dangerous.  Ambiguity, above all else, is unacceptable.

Ambiguity is where we all live, however, and the culturally-sanctioned concepts that we slowly develop are necessary and positive, but they are too slow. We underestimate our own intelligence. We assume the mainstream media is indicative of the minds of many, whereas the mainstream media is constructed under the assumption that most people are stupid and can only understand well-defined simplistic superficial ideas. Television sitcoms play with sexuality without confronting it, dealing with pursuit, drama and innuendo but never following the couple into the bedroom. What could be more revealing than watching a couple take their clothes off, stand naked before one another, look into each others' eyes, kiss, breathe the same breath, touch and find a way of communicating, to devise together in that moment, silently, just the two of them, an entirely new language. Not a verbal language, but a physical language. Not a language of symbols and representation, but of direct communication, straight from one body of the human experience to another body of the human experience. Communication not veiled with language, not defined and understood through culture, not covered in clothes and concepts, but fully and undeniably experienced and shared. This is not experienced individually, this is a form of telepathy. Despite the widespread availability of pornography, this scene would not be allowed on television. In our hysterical fear of sexual violence we ban all public depictions of sexuality, not understanding nor seeking to understand what creates unity and what promotes separation.

When a human being sits upon another human being, when they are both naked, whether or not they are excited or scared, when they pause and look into each others' eyes, “consent” becomes confusingly ambiguous and centrally important. To say adolescents cannot give consent, to say “no means no” or “she said yes”, to project any mental concept onto the intensity and immediacy of that moment, is to deny that moment for you both. That moment should be shared and fully experienced and when this happens it can only transform our lives, our relationships and our approach to the world. When we sit on someone and we desire them we take full responsibility for every aspect of their being. We cannot separate our desire from theirs, we cannot separate our consent from theirs, we cannot make decisions based on irrelevant laws that we did not agree upon. We have to be there, we have to accept their frailty as much as our excitement, we have to accept that the ideas in our head that torment us with desire, guilt, fear and loneliness cannot be projected onto this sacred moment. We are here now, we are safe and warm in bed, we are naked, it is dark, we are together. We are human, fully and mutually, away from the prying eyes of culture, law and discourse. We cannot fuck someone, because we are merely stabbing ourself with the repetitive pain of past trauma.

Why do we define the sexuality of children from the sexuality of adults? We draw the arbitrary line at 16, while we know that adolescence draws the line at 13 or 14. What draws the line of adult sexuality if not puberty? I suggest trauma. Adults are damaged. Adults are damaged in various ways and in various degrees, but when it comes to sexuality it is almost universal. We know this and we know children are born innocent of this trauma. We want to protect them and yet we must be failing if we all enter adulthood traumatised by abuse or shame or silence or religion or pornography. How can it be almost universally agreed upon that adults should not have sex with children and yet entirely taboo to try to understand and confront why that might be? There is a fluid diversity of complexity between adulthood and childhood, between mutual consent and rape, “non-sexual” and “sexual” communication. Our definitions must enable us and not limit us. They must enable us to discuss and understand in thoughtful moments what we know to be true in passionate moments, when thought is not possible. We must recognise each other and accept each other, fully embrace each other, protect each other and therefore allow ourselves to become vulnerable. We must listen to each other when we say “yes” or “no”, we must notice when a look, a kiss or a frightened muscle tension is the only communication.

When we take responsibility for our own behaviour we take responsibility for each others' well-being. What may not be defined as “rape” may still leave our lover weak and vulnerable and we are responsible for them. We are linked to them in real ways that can be observed and experienced when we are connected to our own body and the bodies of our fellow humans. If we want to break ties with someone we have shared sexuality with for only a moment, we must communicate and understand what that means for each of us and for both of us. Mutual understanding is essential and mutual understanding is what sexuality is seeking to achieve. If the sex is merely functional, then mutual understanding must be a pre-requisite.

When we are fully human, when we are fully honest with each other, naked together and free from generations of trauma, sexuality is a fluid and normal part of life. It is intimate and it is ecstatic, but it is on a continuum. There is hugging, there is wrestling, there is playing and there is laughing. There is working together, there is eating together, there is childbirth and breastfeeding, there is conversation, quiet and intimate or public. There is kissing and touching that may or may not lead to orgasm. I feel safe because I am safe. How could I possibly want to hurt you? Every shared moment is as vitally delicate as making love and every interaction is an act of love. I feel desire welling up inside me when I talk to you and I know we will never have sex so I draw you into the love that my desire allows through this conversation that delights us both. We are both so precious and delicate and nothing is more important to me in my life, not money, not power, not real estate. Only the human beings I experience this world with are this precious to me, and every moment with them is sacred and delicious and I will protect you and honour you.

We become like animals, sex as easy and fundamental as food. We sleep in piles, snuggling up together like a litter of piglets. But we're too aware of ourselves and we're too aware of each other and we not only have love and desire and passion and this violence that we are exorcising from our bodies like trauma and eradicating from our culture like a toxic ideology, we have this thing we call “consent” that is so much more complex and ambiguous than we pretend, but that still we fundamentally understand. But first we have to face reality. First we engage with our own body as a conduit for the experience of being alive and present in the material world. We are present in the physical world through nothing other than our physical body and thus this is our only source of information. We use this body to navigate through the world in which we find ourselves. We discover the dimension that we could call “our environment” and we learn to interact with it, to communicate with it, to live in peace with it. We discover other beings just like us and we instantly realise that nothing is more compelling or more significant in our world than these other beings. They also experience this shared world through the conduits of their bodies and so we share our bodies and therefore enrich our lives. When we become confused in the cultural haze, we use “consent” as a guiding light, but beyond that there is the infinity that we experience outside of our bodies. Profoundly and unexpectedly, we discover that even in this infinity we are not alone, even in the dark warm silence of our bed we are together.

The Homosexual Solution

There are too many people in the world; too many human people to be precise.  Derrick Jensen suggests that with six million human beings on this planet, we are actually taking away available biomass for the life of other species, all the non-human people who are dying rapidly.  Aside from the denial justified as morality, the morality that it is wrong for humans to die, even more wrong than other species dying, there are solutions to the population crisis that are worse than the problem, reeking of the worst totalitarianism.  Some people claim these solutions are already happening, that the governments are poisoning us through our tap water.  Others resign themselves to the necessary unpleasantness of some mass natural disaster, like a tsunami or earthquake.  Some people stress the importance of solutions allowing the economy to grow, some value solutions that adhere to pre-ordained codes of conduct, such as laws and dogmas.  No one seems to suggest pleasure as a guiding principle, or love as a process.

Why are there too many people on the earth?  Isn't this a silly game to be playing?  Surely one billion is more than enough human beings to praise Economy and Yahweh.  There is evidence that in previous human societies, tribes that lasted sustainably for thousands of years, population was controlled.  Some people hear that they killed foetuses and infants and disabled people and are horrified at the idea of human beings dying.  There is also evidence of very simple birth-control methods involving simply awareness of a woman's menstrual cycle, surely the sort of information that was violently repressed by the Catholic Church during the Holy Inquisition, or women burnings.

My suggestion as to why there are so many people on the planet is the same reason that we created all these civilisations that are merging via globalisation into the mega-culture that will digitise the planet.  Grain.  Civilisation, and therefore ever-growing population, is a result of the addiction of an entire species to grain.  Look around the world, every civilisation is defined by their grain.  There are the American corn cultures, the Asian rice cultures and the European wheat cultures.  Apparently 75% of the food eaten by humans on this planet is these three grains.  When we were gatherer-hunters, back in the garden, we would have eaten a wide variety of plants, whatever was available in our environment, taking a little from each plant so the plant could continue to flourish and provide.  We would never have eaten huge amounts of one thing as agriculture allows.  But then we discovered grains, wheat being the most popular in the world, native to the Fertile Crescent as civilisation itself is.

Why would we create agriculture when we were living a balanced life in which nature provided us everything we needed, we did not take too much and we did not threaten our environment with over-population?  Grain.  We discovered grain and the more we ate the more we wanted to eat.  I have noticed that when I start the day with a big bowl of satisfying comforting nutritious organic oats I am hungry again an hour or two later, much hungrier than I would otherwise have been.  It is no secret that these things that we use to bulk out our meals, to "fill us up", actually expand our stomachs and therefore fail at the one task they are given.  We grow up in a culture of lies.  I was told throughout my childhood by advertising and all my elders, that dairy is a source of calcium.  Scientific tests show that cow milk contains calcium, they conveniently do not mention that the human body cannot assimilate dairy and the accumulation of dairy in the body actually leeches calcium out of our bones.  There are many lies around, but the greatest lie of all is that grains "fill us up" when they actually expand our stomach.

We are addicted to grain and we can't stop ourselves.  Why would we create agriculture when it is so much easier to gather?  We decided to work hard stripping the land and planting monocrops of wheat, rice and corn that require a lot of maintenance, simply so we can eat more grain.  This is very hard work, so to take some of the burden we make more children to help.  With all these additional human beings we need to grow more grain to feed them.  Thus, expansion.  More expansion equals more work equals more people equals more grain.  Soon there are so many people it is necessary to form cities, where we can organise ourselves and divide labour so we can enjoy everything more comfortably and easily that facilitates the growing of grain.

If you do not believe me, give me another reason why we would go to the hassle to create civilisation.  "God said, "Be fruitful and multiply.""?  I do not believe you.  A page or so later he curses us with having to toil with the earth and watching as the earth becomes dust; after the beauty and simplicity of the garden.

There is one solution that has been overlooked, that will enable our population to slowly decline, reduce violence against women rapidly, allow us to value and honour the children we already have and bring great pleasure to everyone who participates.  The solution is Homosexuality.  Women have been the victims of male violence for generations and it is going to take generations to perform essential and necessary act of healing this pattern of behaviour.  Why have women been the target of such violence - domestic abuse, sexual violence, witch burning and marriage?  To oversimplify, because they are women, because they have vaginas, because they threaten men's ability to control.  The solution is homosexuality.  Not only have marriage and heteronormativism removed vast areas of sexuality from human life, but the simple act of touch has been channelled into violence as its only suitable expression; wrestling being the healthiest form of this, war being the least.

All violence is a form of sexuality, and mostly it is men fighting men.  The solution is Homosexuality.  I believe that it is necessary for all men to be sodomised at least once in their life, otherwise a fundamental human experience has been lost and an entire aspect of the psyche has not been allowed to develop.  To empathise with those who are temporarily weaker or submissive to us in some way, we need to experience the receptive.  To experience the intensity of being penetrated is to empathise with the person you penetrate.

The solution is joy and love and freedom and sexuality and humanity and can be started and enjoyed immediately.

The demonic artifice of instrumentality

We discuss it in jest with healthy minds but it is happening to us, has been happening and will happen.  We have been blinded by the doctrines of Universal Education as a common good and the First World as the epitome of terrestrial life.  Our culture is our blind spot because it prevents us, everywhere it is present, from correctly perceiving reality.  We are at unconscious odds with our own creation and we do not recognise our predicament, bound as we are by the illusion of good versus evil and the consequential arbitrary distinctions of what belongs to which category.  When we wake up from our self-imposed psychotic delusion through the healing pain of massive trauma we will perceive an environment in constant change but with fundamental unchangeables, such as the portal of death and the process of decay.

A war is being fought behind our eyes, so close we cannot see it, between humanity, the terrestrial creature of breath and water, and the extra-terrestrial, a linguistic creation that does not exist in the traditional sense but none-the-less exerts a great influence on our mutagenic lives.  This extra-terrestrial has been worshipped as Jahweh, condemned as Satan, but each attempt to name, and therefore destroy, the influence of the creation has been culturally assimilated by the creation itself and today it flaunts every futile attempt to disempower it as "cultural diversity" or "freedom of religion" or the tragic loss of what has become "art" to cultural assimilation.

Within every human soul there is a desire to destroy the artifice of our creation, a desire to reach through the non-existent veil of human superiority and touch beauty.  A daring few step beyond the veil, experience beauty and try to communicate it or share it with their lovers.  Those amongst these precious few who manage to get their message out, who may or may not have been crucified in their own day, are today being mass-produced by Penguin and are available everywhere for $9.95.  Those who were once burned at the stake and condemned as heretics or witches, a practice we now condemn as "inhuman", are now being hailed as "artists" and "scientists" and are burned on the slow fire of material wealth and the perverse attention of fame.

The smart use the trenches dug by the alien to send messages to sympathetic heretics across the world and around the corner; the desperate destroy themselves in public, screaming obscenities and slogans.  Some find love and decide to share their love with only one in private in a secure kingdom, but even love has been culturally assimilated as heterosexual monogamy and this behaviour soon results in children who must be sacrificed to the greater good of Human Superiority and at the age of six they are handed over to the State and the extra-terrestrial influence, having relied on the tenuous grip of television and materialism, proceeds to systematically destroy their ability to process sensory data autonomously and ridicules their intuitive connection to the earth, to each other, and to their own body, until it can easily be labelled "superstition", "paganism", "psychic powers" or "mental illness".

At every step of the process we give our consent for it to continue.  Rather than shed ourselves of its obvious poisons, such as alcohol and nicotine, and therefore begin the process of examining its relatively non-existent poisons, such as ideology and shame, we become addicted to everything that temporarily removes us from the illusion and thus cling to the veil like a helpless baby, having glimpsed the vast expanse of reality on the other side, rather than tearing it down easily with our own weight.

We are fundamentally perverse, our perversions have taken us here and our perversions can break us out.  We find love or beauty or truth and we greedily drink it all up and cling to the empty plastic bottle as it begins the slow process of decaying in the sun over thousands of years.  We stumble upon a lover and we suffocate them to death with the perversity of our love and then we fuck their corpse until their bodies break and then we consume their rotten flesh until we're violently ill; this we call romantic love.

There is also the love of the mother, who gives us life and lets us go into the chaos and freedom of the world and whose form then falls back naturally and selflessly and becomes the topsoil from which our own children sprout; but we place the mother who gave us life into hospitals and nursing homes, where she is attached to machines and institutions which artificially and tortuously prolong a spent life in a decomposing body.  We then cruelly exhibit her to our children like some sort of demented artifact.

We are under the influence of an extra-terrestrial force of our own creation that we fail to recognise as our own.  We believe that extra-terrestrials come out of the sky in flying discs and we even see these creatures and call them angels  and gods and reptilians.

We do not consider why we feel pain or see beauty, we simply label one "bad", the other "good", and satisfied we continue to perpetuate our own entrapment, lamenting the strain and envying the free and turning a blind eye when the unlocked shackles fall open and the policeman taps us gently on the head with his baton and pushes them closed.

"The demonic artifice of instrumentality" (Terence McKenna)

Advice For Geraldine On Her Miscellaneous Birthday: Poem by Bob Dylan

Stay in line.  Stay in step.  People
are afraid of someone who is not
in step with them.  It makes them
look foolish t' themselves for
being in step.  It might even
cross their minds that they themselves
are in the wrong step.


Do not run

nor cross the red line.  If you go
too far out in any direction, they
will lose sight of you.  They'll feel
threatened.  Thinking that they are
not part of something they
saw go past them, they'll feel
something's going on that
they don't know about.  Revenge
will set in.  They will start thinking
of how t' get rid of you.  Act
mannerly toward them.  If you don't,
they will take it personal.  As you
come directly in contact face t' face
do not make it a secret of how
much you need them.  If they sense
that you have no need for them,
the first thing they will do is
try t' make you need them.  If
this doesn't work, they will tell
you of how much they don't need
you.  If you do not show any sadness
at a remark such as this, they
will immediately tell other people
of how much they don't need you.
Your name will begin t' come up
in circles where people gather
to tell about all the people they
don't need.  You will begin t' get
famous this way.  This, though, will
only get the people who you don't need
in the first place
all the more madder.
You will become
a whole topic of conversation.
Needless t' say, these people
who don't need you will start
hating themselves for needing t' talk
about you.  Then you yourself will
start hating yourself for causing so
much hate.  As you can see, it will
all end in one great gunburst.

Never trust a cop in a raincoat.
When asked t' define yourself exactly,
say you are an exact mathematician.
Do not say or do anything that
he who is standing in front of you
watching cannot understand, he will
feel you know something he
doesn't.  He will react with blinding
speed and write your name down.
Talk on his terms.  If his terms
are old-fashioned an' you've
passed that stage all the more easier
t' get back there.  Say what he
can understand clearly.  Say it simple
t' keep your tongue out of your
cheek.  After he hears you, he can
label you good or bad.  Anyone will
do.  T' some people, there is only
good an' bad.  In any case, it will
make him feel somewhat important.
It is better t' stay away from
these people.  Be careful of
enthusiasm, it is all temporary
an' don't let it sway you.  When asked
if you go t' church, always answer
yes, never look at your shoes.  When
asked what you think of Gene Autrey
singing of hard rain's gonna fall say
that nobody can sing it as good as
Peter, Paul and Mary.  At the mention
of the president's name, eat a pint of
yogurt an' go t' sleep early.  When
asked if you're a communist, sing
America the beautiful in an
Italian accent.  Beat up nearest
street cleaner.  If by any
chance you're caught naked in a
parked car, quick turn the radio on
full blast an' pretend
that you're driving.  Never leave
the house without a jar of peanut
butter.  Do not wear
matched socks.  When asked to do 100
pushups always smoke a pound
of deodorant beforehand.
When asked if you're a capitalist, rip
open your shirt, sing buddy can 
you spare a dime with your
right foot forward an' proceed t'
chew up a dollar bill.

Do not sign any dotted line.  Do not
fall in trap of criticizing people
who do nothing else but criticize.
Do NOT create anything.  It will be
misinterpreted.  It will not change.
It will follow you the
rest of your life.  When asked what you
do for a living say you laugh for
a living.  Be suspicious of people
who say that if you are not nice
t' them, they will commit suicide.
When asked if you care about
the world's problems, look deeply
into the eyes of he that asks
you, he will not ask you again.  When
asked if you've spent time in jail,
announce proudly that some of your
best friends've asked you that.

Beware of bathroom walls that've not
been written on.  When told t' look at
yourself...never look.  When asked
t' give your real name...never give it. 

The storage capabilities of water

I fall in love frequently. I refuse to see this as a problem. I love love. Even when it drives me crazy. Perhaps because it drives me crazy. In a society in which people are constantly talking about how normal they are while behaving with pathological insanity, I enjoy the state of insanity supported by a deep and profound reassurance of a sanity based in the pervasive love that I am living in the depths of.


Often this love is not a natural and beautiful and powerful ocean. This weak desperate perverse urban love is more like an underground sewer, where all the people of the city flush away the part of themselves they would rather not look at, the part of their humanity they don't like the smell of, the part of their expression of life they consider superfluous. Their love.


These people are comforted by the knowledge that they love their spouse and their children and maybe even their parents and their friends; this they consider to be sufficient. There is an excess of love that is so unnecessary that it turns their urine a dark yellow and they flush it all away to this dark and unknown place beneath the concrete pathways that represent the trajectories of their lives. These people never consider what this place is like, or even that it exists. They are certain, at least they claim to be certain, they tell themselves they are certain, that the flush of the toilet is a natural process akin to opening up a wound in the earth and filling it up with their abundance.


However inside this non-biodegradable wound lined with concrete and metal pipes the excesses of human civilisation are not rotting into the earth but festering and fermenting and being consumed by rats who become drunk off the fermented faeces of our denial.


How can I look at this beautiful young man who sits peacefully only meters away from my body and though I have no social permission to talk to him and so only stare, how can I deny my secret knowledge that despite his uncaring expression and his subdued behaviour, he has an abundance of love in his heart and nowhere to put it? I can be sure that he spends a great deal of time and energy masturbating this love out and flushing it down the toilet.


Sometimes I wake up in a dream and I am in the sewer of the human soul and I am wading through the waste and I see his abandoned abundance floating away and while I see it and desire it I cannot entirely reject the imprinted ideology that it is dirty and contains disease and I shouldn't touch it and so I watch as it floats away into the unknown.


Of course what right do I have to break through the emphatic denial sometimes called social etiquette that claims to be more correct than the simple fact that I am here and you are here and we are looking at each other and we even speak the same language but probably don't have anything to say to one another. I have nothing to say to you of course but I want to look into your eyes and I can only look into your eyes if one of us is talking and neither of us have anything to say. I see your shit floating away and that means all that is left are our bodies and they are young and strong and yet we can't help but doubt and perpetuate the feeling that we may not survive the expression of the love spilling fourth at convenient ashamed lonely moments from our body and our soul.


I am one of the lucky ones and I have found a process in which to express much of the love that pours fourth incessantly from my mind and my soul; this process of languaging into literature or onto the internet. In this way, despite the fact that I never touched you while I had the chance, while we were intensely experiencing the reality of each others' presence, I can now use language to create another reality, a reality in which I proudly declare my love for all the beautiful persons I share this dimension with. I appeal to you now, in this form, to love as excessively and sanely as you like and not to worry about the expectation of social and emotional repression that we all pretend to agree with.


If you feel a little uncomfortable then spend less time on trains and avoid regulated cubicle-style working and shitting environments and rather than shitting down a sewerage pipe dive instead into the ocean.


I am not saddened by the sewer of urbanity because I know there is always an abundant ocean of love waiting for me when I return to that place I know is safe from all this illusion of insanity. There is room for everyone on these long beaches to offer up their love to the earth. She will take it compassionately and distribute it to the most deserving, those who ask and appreciate and are open to receive their piece of the collective love stored in the oceans that we all use to divide the continents on which we live our lives.