Dangerous Desire: Apocalyptic Passion Awakening

As we delve into the subject of awakening desire, I am going to share something very vulnerable here and a tiny bit x-rated. You have now been duly warned!

I have been thinking about how to introduce the unrepentant desire of Apocalyptic Passion to the world, not as a program, but as the red-hot core of my work. It is the driving force of The Passion Path®.

But it is more than that. I believe it is the only force strong enough to allow us to face and overcome the hurdles to having a higher quality experience individually and together, as a global community.

When I first tried to do this work via the Red Velvet Diaries, and later, in other forms, I eventually drew back. Desire is often not soft. It is definitely not always tender.

Desire is RAW. Its essence is truth.

Today I feel ready to talk about TRUE desire again with a purpose:

to live as passion moving and to meet this uncomfortable edge in a way that allows not just me, but scores of other people, to surpass it.

I confess that back in 2015, I hadn't a clue how to do this!

But now?

My Apocalyptic Passion is raging inside of me. I am marked with its Firebrand. I will mark this world with it too simply by existing.

More than anything else, this foray into desire is about me (and by extension all women) experiencing and living desire for its own sake. I recognize there are many intersectional caps on desire and that those caps affect many people from LGBTQ to BIPOC people in a myriad of ways.

I expect even men will feel awakened to a new experience of their desire by reading this and touching my work.

I invite everyone who feels the truth of a more honest desire stirring to write to me and to voice those stories. We will find a way to tell them when telling is appropriate!

But for today, I am going to deal explicitly with women's desire and the edges I have known and witnessed around the world through my own lens (that is to say, through the eyes of a white-presenting woman of Native descent who has been alienated from her own people by assimilation, but who lives among Indigenous people as wife, community member, and eternal foreigner).

It isn't that this conversation excludes shared experiences of desire between men and women (or between any consenting adults, for that matter).

It is that this work isn't about men (except in the brave cases of men who come forward to do it for themselves).

It also isn't about society and its standards of female beauty, desire, sexuality, expression...

So often women are asked to be in their desire, to showcase it, and to make it conform to the wishes of the viewer. It is this command performance I wish to vanquish in the name of raising the serpent power of my desire and projecting my work into the world.

To do that, we have to travel back in time to a dilapidated apartment where an old, nearly worn-out TV and a VCR were center stage in a tragedy and an awakening.

When I was about 16 years old, I saw something remarkable (to me at that time) on one of those old VHS tapes.

I saw a woman orgasm on camera in a pornographic movie.

It was remarkable because by then, I had spent hundreds of hours in a meth-fueled haze watching porn scenes designed for men and fulfilling the rag-doll fantasies of the man (11 years my senior) who started all those tapes to begin with. Yet, I had never seen a woman powerfully in her desire or even in her pleasure.

I was transfixed.

I think I wore out the rewind button on the remote. Why? Because I had learned about my sexual pleasure in the context of violence and in relation to a man's desire rather than my own.

The deviation from the usual money-shot model was striking.

So lost was I in that world, that in fact, the distorted male fantasies displayed in those videos and lived out in my 16-year-old life became my own.

And they became a way of life.

As a young woman I not only lived for the male gaze. I lived through it.

I long ago chose not to live through it anymore, not even a little bit.

So, this exploration of passion is about seeing myself and my desire through my own eyes. Similarly, my work is about offering other women (and a few brave men and people from other genders) the support they need to overcome their pain and stand in the power of their desire, not as something projected onto them, but as the root and nourishment of their lives.

This is all a lead-up to what I have to say next...

This world seemingly cannot stand to see women loving, accepting, and defining themselves and their successes without input.

I need look no further for evidence of this than Tess Holiday (formerly Tess Munster), the very plus-sized model who created #effyourbeautystandards. She was signed to a very lucrative modeling contract in January 2015.

At that moment, Tess was a BIG woman living her desire without reference to what you, or I, or society thought.

The result?

People completely lost their minds at the thought that this woman dared to own her beauty, enjoy her body, and land a modeling contract at a size 22. She didn't wait to get healthier, lose weight, or become something acceptable to the many lecherous eyes who seem to have no issue with underweight women on the verge of starvation...

Tess Holiday fucking went for it! And she landed it.

The reactions were frightening to watch much less live (as Tess did and probably still does).

As I sit here, updating this article for the 3rd time in a decade, the world of men threatened by women's autonomous desire has found a new woman to punish for simply living her life her way: Taylor Swift.

Still, today, well into the 21st century, we are willing to burn a woman at the metaphorical (and in many places, not so metaphorical) stake for owning her own life and her sense of her own beauty and sensuality.

For more dismal examples of women robbed of OR punished for their desire and independence, consider the way:

• ISIL made women into sex slaves;
• the now-dead Saudi King imprisoned his daughters and left them to starve in their gilded cage; and
• more recently, the United States grew tired of its commitments in Afghanistan and sacrificed the women it had propped up (along with the desires the world stoked in them) so it could withdraw from an inconvenient military quagmire.

The citation I gave regarding Afghanistan is not about the ruin that followed the withdrawal, but about the warnings the US received spelling out what would happen to the women whom they encouraged to live out their desires for autonomy and education publicly.

Women's desire trifled with by and for the agendas of men is as old as the ages and as predictable as the sun rising every morning.

The witch trials (which gave the idea of burning women its wide-scale debut) were themselves very likely a thin "spiritual" veil over an attack on female sexuality, desire, and independence. The witch trials were a primal occupation that told women their desire and their lives belonged to men and to an emerging order that began to actively exclude them from participation in the world of commerce.

The emerging new order required that women be confined to the domestic sphere. Women's separate and distinct selves and their unique dreams for their lives had to be extinguished.

The witch trials happened not during the period in Europe that many refer to as the Dark Ages but during the so-called Renaissance in the heyday of what people imagine to be the age of reason and enlightenment. Specifically, the witch trials primarily occurred during the Renaissance period, which spanned roughly from the 14th to the 17th century.

While sexuality is not the only expression of desire, it is an excellent marker for its repression and oppression. Since the witch trials, the Christian Church, men, and the state have all colluded to control women's desires, their choices, their sexuality, and their reproductive choices.

 

Since that time, the need to protect the cohesiveness of the Church as a patriarchal, masculine clan and to prevent its property from being dissipated because of clerical weakness in the face of female power, led the clergy to paint the female sex as an instrument of the Devil—the more pleasant to the eye, the more deadly to the soul. This is the leitmotif of every demonology, starting with the Malleus Maleficarum, possibly the most misogynous text ever written. Whether Catholic, Protestant, or Puritan, the rising bourgeoisie continued this tradition, but with a twist, as the repression of female desire was placed at the service of utilitarian goals such as the satisfaction of men’s sexual needs and more importantly the procreation of an abundant workforce. Once exorcised, denied its subversive potential through the witch hunt, female sexuality could be recuperated in a matrimonial context and for procreative ends ...

... Typical of the new bourgeois sexual morality was Martin Luther’s injunction to the nuns to leave the convents and get married, as marriage and the production of an abundant prole was in his view women’s fulfillment of God’s will and their ‘highest vocation.’ “Let them bear children to death,” he apparently declared. “They are created for that.” No sixteenth-century political or religious authority expressed this sentiment as crudely as Luther, but the restriction of women’s sexuality to marriage and procreation, together with wifely unconditional obedience, was instituted in every country—regardless of its religious creed—as the pillar of social morality and political stability. And, indeed, of no crime were ‘witches’ as frequently accused as ‘lewd behavior,’ generally associated with infanticide and an inherent hostility to the reproduction of life.

∞ Sylvia Federici

This suppression of women's power and desire then became part of the colonial agenda that purposefully destroyed the matrilineal society of my Choctaw ancestors (and of other Native nations) several centuries later.

 

Before their dispossession, Choctaw women were in charge of cultivating plants and controlling the communal fields and many individually worked fields, seen as part of the nurturing power demonstrated in their ability to ‘create’ life. Choctaw gender roles were severely disrupted by the Armstrong Roll, a census taken by the U.S. Government to organize Choctaw dispossession. In this roll, the U.S. agents listed each household as headed by a male. Women were listed as dependents, as was the norm among Americans of European descent. However, the traditional Choctaw matrilineal kinship collided fully with the patriarchal assumptions of the whites. Choctaw clans, organized matrilineally, controlled the communal lands. The senior woman of an extended family took her authority from the Choctaw matrilineal kinship system, and in effect, was the “owner” of her house and fields. In imposing a completely different order that ignored the tribal power and authority of women, the Americans dealt the traditional Choctaw matrilineal kinship system a terrible blow. “Improvement” claims were thus listed as belonging to the senior male of each family, who had no responsibility under the traditional system, and little or no experience in asserting power or control over the house and other material wealth of the kinship group. Not only were Choctaw men, then, inexperienced and uncertain in dealing with the U.S. representatives and individual whites who were trying to divest them of all they had, now the Americans imposed another level of confusion and chaos among Choctaw families. Men did not welcome or understand their role, but were forced by the Americans to assume it ...

∞ Donna L. Akers

The Christian church was heavily involved once again and played a very active role in colonizing not just the Americas, but the world.

For these very daunting reasons, exploring my own desire and offering to explore desire as the foundation of growth is the most vulnerable thing I have ever set out to do.

It is laced with ancestral anguish and fears that run hundreds of years deep and personal experiences of extreme violation.

I'd be lying if I said I was not terrified when I started down this road in 2015. I was!

To engage women's desire, power, independence...is to engage these stories and these power structures as well. Why do you think everything that touches upon women's desire finds a way to do so that is not too terribly upsetting to society?

I am not afraid anymore.

My work has always been revolutionary.

But its revolutionary qualities have also been, all the talk of warriors, and even revolutions notwithstanding, muted or antiseptic or cooly analytical in ways that this is not.

Or more to the point, I have never before made it so explicit that the heroines and heroes in my book, Coming Alive!, are driven at their core by desire. But even that is a scratch on the surface of a very controversial domain.

My work and my book, have always addressed indirectly the hatred of women's desire as a part of a global system of control, domination, and exploitation that generally isn't very friendly to passion and desire on the whole.

Apocalyptic Passion as an experience, a framework, and a foundation for all my work will (as I once attempted to do through the Red Velvet Diaries) hit right at the heart of the matter.

Apocalyptic Passion is the extension of all the work I did in writing Coming Alive!, and of all the work I have done in the last 13 years to uncover and court my own ecstasy and power ...

... the ECSTASY OF MY POWER ...

... the POWER OF MY ECSTASY.

Now I am unwavering and I am stepping forward.

I am stepping out as someone who will midwife women into the fullness of their desires and into the fulfillment of their self-determined potential.

That might sound pretty. But I KNOW that this is dark, earthy, wild, and forbidden work. Thirteen years of experience have taught me that.

That means this work starts in the mud and the muck of separating women's desire from all external influences. It ends with the fulfillment of those desires for their own sake - separate and apart from the eyes that hunger to satisfy themselves with female desire, pleasure, sexuality ...

I have often said that being a whore might be the most revolutionary thing a woman could ever do simply because we project so much onto the archetype of the Whore, and therefore, onto the women who carry it.

When I say "whore" I mean all the women who transgress the norms established via the witch hunts, all the "dirty" girls accused of lewd behavior. The word "whore" is applied to any woman who dares to own her desire (or her sexuality) for her purposes.

I was mistaken, however, to think claiming the whore for ourselves is the pinnacle of revolution.

The most radical and revolutionary thing any woman can do is to take possession of her own desire and her own life and do with it as she will.

In doing so for myself and with others, I am taking up the mantle of the Whore and the Virgin in tandem.

A woman who takes on the Whore is a woman possessed of her own desire. A woman who takes on the Virgin is a woman in possession of herself (whole and complete). She is pure in the sense of being uncorrupted by external influences. She does not shape herself to fit any container or become a vessel for random things.

There is no way around calling this what it is. We are talking about the redemption of lust and the power it possesses!

 

Lust is a feminine word connected to the root word lu—feminine lunar light—from which words such as luster, luscious, luminous, and illustrious come.

∞ Azra Bertrand and Seren Bertrand

In claiming Apocalyptic Passion as the luscious, hot, sometimes searing core of The Passion Path®, I have to acknowledge where I am standing:

on top of the X that marks the spot at which women's lives and women's desire are inherently political and considered heretical if not criminal.

But I am more ready than I was in 2015 or even 2018 when I first attempted this!

I cannot imagine being anywhere else. When I first conceived this work, I said that though I was willing and even desirous of this position, I was also wobbly.

I am not wobbling anymore. I am holding a still point of dynamic creativity and power that is way stronger than the anguish and fear I have faced to get here. Otherwise, I would likely be dead.

I once felt like Eve standing before the apple tree, daring to take that first bite, to defy the direction of God and man.

As I first approached, my legs were shaking and my heart was pounding. Yet I felt compelled by this DANGEROUS DESIRE to take this journey into my own sovereignty and beyond that, to escort the willing.

Now, I approach as the mistress of the apple orchard.

I am more than just an available companion.

I am the snake, a temptress whose hissing tongue calls up the forbidden and empowers the unspoken, secret wishes that lurk beneath shallow, safe expressions of tame "desire."

I intend to touch and evoke the Dangerous Desire that will revolutionize everything that has been suppressed, controlled, and looted by the separation of women's creative power from its source: women themselves.

Of course, this does not stop with restoring women's creativity to its rightful hands because the witch trials were the first rotten fruit of the global phenomenon that is collapsing into climate change and catastrophe before our very eyes. There are many groups of people whose desires, dreams, and self-determination are forbidden now.

Unlike when I began, but could not sustain, the Red Velvet Diaries, I recognize passion and desire for what they are:

tools of Apocalyptic Unveiling capable of destroying our tortured and restricted inner landscapes and revealing our true creative brilliance.

Why else would women have ever been suppressed in this way? Why would anyone have experienced this kind of cruel repression?

Our creative power (and by extension, the creative power of all oppressed people) is what rends and renders worlds.

When owned, dedicated, and focused, Apocalyptic Passion upends entire universes of seemingly fixed realities replacing them with open possibilities.

It is the fire of a true Renaissance REDSHIFTING into a new material reality in which WE all matter and the RAW TRUTH of our desire is sacrosanct.

Giving credit where credit is due, in some sense, I owe it all to a woman I have never met who laid her pleasure bare for me to see.

From what I could tell, she wasn't doing it for the camera and the men watching. She was doing it because it felt good to her to do it. My sense of that self-determined pleasure was the beginning of the end of my time locked in the cage of someone else's vile hunger - not lust, but the cold, methodical use of a child.

In some way, that porn star saved me. She snatched me from the hell of having my pleasure co-opted for the use of a predator. She delivered me to the threshold of a new life in which, over the next three and a half decades, I would wrestle with this subject until my Apocalyptic Passion came alive in my bones.