Tea Time: Who We Invite to Our Table

A round-up of my favourite reading this past week.

From The Last Samhain Supper of the Holy Ghosts: Resurrecting Our Wounded Women

We are calling on the Sacred Feminine to rise up, to groundswell under our feet and swallow up the outmoded religions of this world. We are calling on holy wildfire to incinerate any ropes that bind the hands of the oppressed, and we are demanding to be heard. Hear us, women, and know you will not be tamed by their laws. You are She-Gods, and for this, you are feared.

Hear us, all who value the Feminine, and know it is your time. Hear us, and affect the transformation of spiritual systems that would keep you in the dirt.

Hear us, for we are owed. We have suffered much in the tragic names of piety and morality. We have been burned, scorned, pushed from windows, and shamed. Our power has been locked inside countless cages, their laws, their commandments, their moral codes. Tonight we say no more, and tomorrow we rise.

From 7 Reasons So Many Guys Don’t Understand Sexual Consent

See, it wasn’t up to Hollywood or public schools to teach me morality. For me — and virtually everyone I knew — that came on Sundays at church. And I never got one sermon or Sunday School lesson on sexual consent.

“What, so they taught the congregation to be rapists?”

No! They taught that all sexual activity outside of heterosexual marriage was equally wrong. So yes, rape was punishable by eternal hellfire. But you know what the punishment was for having consensual intercourse before marriage? Also eternal hellfire. Premarital handjob in the back of a car? Eternal hellfire. Oral sex at any time? Eternal hellfire. Homosexual sex? Eternal hellfire. Masturbation? Eternal hellfire. There was no gradient to the sins or punishments — everything was black and white, and virtually everything in the black category was totally consensual. Two people “consenting” to perform a sinful sexual act was no different from two people conspiring to rob a bank. […]

This is why so many of you are confused by the Christian criticism of gay marriage, the “They’ll be marrying children and animals next” bit. They genuinely don’t understand the difference — that a homosexual partner can consent, but animals and children cannot — because to them, all of those acts are equally impure.

From A Therapist Explains Why It Seems Like We’re Watching Donald Trump ‘Get Stupider Before Our Eyes’

She said Trump’s supporters are drawn to him for many reasons, and some might even be seduced and repelled at the same time — which is not unusual for malignant narcissists.

“What happens, in short, is they reflect back to you what you desire,” McElrath said. “It’s a process of positive reverse projection.” […]

This reverse projection relies on the elimination of boundaries between the malignant narcissist and their target, she said — and the more a person identifies with the narcissist’s characteristics, the more vulnerable they are.

“Hence, it’s generally easier for women and (people of color) to differentiate our boundaries and see through the ‘glamour’ created by Trump’s projections,” McElrath explained.

From Goodbye to all that: I’m done with Election 2016

I’m tired of the hurt. I’m tired of hearing from women who’ve been run off Twitter by harassment and death threats and doxing because they dared to express an opinion about a Presidential election. I am tired of arguing that their pain matters, that the attacks on them matter. I am tired of living in a world where a state Democratic Party chairwoman can record her death threats and post them on the internet, a world where that woman needs a bodyguard to visit the goddamn bathroom, and where feminists are asked to prove that this series of events is, in fact, a bad thing. […]

Here’s a guy who embodies everything wrong with male power, caught on tape, talking about how “when you’re a star, they let you” get away with sexually assaulting your female colleagues. You didn’t think demonizing Hillary Clinton had gotten that out of hand, that it was just “criticism?” That’s swell; enjoy the footage of Republicans screaming “hang her in the streets,” hanging her in effigy, and publicly fantasizing about her suicide, all while her opponent calls for her assassination or promises to imprison her. And, hey: You thought Americans were so over this “elect a woman president” thing, that a candidate’s gender didn’t even matter in 2016? That’s nice. I admire your optimism. Meanwhile, hostile sexism is a better predictor for Trump support than party identification, and Clinton’s lead among women is building to what looks like the biggest voting gender gap in decades.

Well, we’re almost there. Almost! Forecast for the week coming up in the next post.

Image source: Pixabay