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Magic Without... Women?

  
  

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beautifultoxin
20:04 / 05.10.05
Jason Louv/BiaS:
"I just wanted to make it very very clear WHY there are so few women in Gen Hex."

Another reason why there are so few women in the book is that, after accepting their pieces, working away at edits, and even signing (admittedly, non-binding) contracts, you cut pieces by two women about a week before Generation Hex went up for pre-order, representing a loss of at least 50%.
 
 
Boy in a Suitcase
12:25 / 06.10.05
The articles weren't good enough. If the book had been cleared for 324 pages instead of 288, which it wasn't in order to keep the cost down and affordable, they would have been included. As it was set at 288, they weren't.

Period.
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
12:08 / 07.10.05
I think most of the formidable lady magicians that I know seem to be more concerned with just getting on about the stuff that they do, as opposed to trying to turn themselves into anything as inherently ridiculous and contemptible as an "occult celebrity". They don't seem to be too interested in that side of things, and perhaps just don't want their spiritual life taking place in public view. Which I think is fair enough. Not everybody has to write a book as a part of their magical life. Not every magician is a writer. Not every writer is a magician.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
12:41 / 07.10.05
Well, yeah, but I think there's a big difference between trying to turn yourself into the next Silver Ravenwolf and boshing out a thousand words or two just to say "This is what I'm up to at the moment," or "This sort of thing has worked for me, you might want to give it a go too" or whatever.
 
 
*
19:35 / 07.10.05
Jason, do you have any information on Disinfo's demographics? i.e. what percentage of the readership is male vs. female or other? Because I greatly suspect the majority of the site's readership is male-identified and more guys will be familiar with Disinfo's work and understand where they are coming from with their publication projects.
 
 
beautifultoxin
18:35 / 08.10.05
I'd love to hear what the ladyfolk in this thread were thinking of submitting to the book, but didn't for whatever reason.

For me -- what lead me to do a piece on technology was because, yeah, even though most of my work is centered on sacred sexuality, I didn't want to to be the token Scarlet Woman in the boy's club. Tech is still considered the province of boys, and ecstatic/magical applications for the Web still haven't been done thoroughly.

(And yes, to GL, on the "women are just doing it" tip -- though that doesn't have to me mutually exclusive with getting some recognition. In my case, "just doing it" has come to mean that the magic I do day-to-day is harder and harder to externalize from just living and writing and working and fucking and playing and conniving and fuck all else. It's pretty integrated, pretty indvidual. Third-personing that out into a text to be consumed by the alt.cultcha masses doesn't come terribly naturally, except for perhaps on my own terms...)
 
 
Rage
05:49 / 11.10.05
I am glad to be one of the few females who is in Generation Hex, especially because the energy I give out is not exactly the fluffy kind. I think that you guys are missing something obvious here. I meet plenty of girls who are into magick. It's just that not many of them knew they were able to submit articles. The places where Jason called for submissions were internet places like barbelith, (unless I'm wrong here) where the majority of the population was male to begin with. When you work on Generation Hex 2 go to a goth club, Jason. You'll find plenty of dark female goddess types who actually know how to write.

Do I find a lack of females into magick? Not at all. Do I find a lack of females into magick who circulate in places like this? Yes.

Or you guys could just read the articles for the articles and see the magick for the magick and realize that it's all being controlled by a female elite.
 
 
beautifultoxin
07:00 / 11.10.05
Rage, would you mind posting an abstract of what you have published in Gen Hex, for those of us who haven't had a copy find our way yet.

I'm also still hungry to hear, from the women here, what sort of thing they'd have submitted, and why they may not have.
 
 
Rage
07:41 / 11.10.05
Sure. Here are a few bits.

-There was a time when I thought that I was the only person in the world who thought like I did, the only person in the world who realized that reality was flexible, the only person in the world who saw outside of the consensual hallucination that humanity lived in. Sometimes it felt like having this knowledge was a curse. So what did I do? I became an anarchist. I got out of the suburbs and started traveling the country in search of people who understood what was going on in this bizarre head of mine.

-People knew me as Paradox the Prime. I was a young chaos magician who traveled the country on my wits and my antisocial skills, not a single root of stability and not a single plan or goal with the exception of subverting the structure of everything I came in contact with.

-Local DJ of reality tunnel bombs hundreds of statements and opinions. Timothy McVeigh raises glass.

-I'm really starting to dislike all those tarot twits. Psy-trance, “ohmygawd synchronicity!”, collective consciousness? All that debris needs to be annihilated. Can't believe I used to be one of you. There was never an “us.” Fuck your prepackaged unity, your leftover remnants from the 60s, your universal visionquest. The really sad thing is that you'll dismiss what I'm saying as “negative.” You know what that's like? It's like the masses dismissing what you're saying as “idealistic nonsense.” You're doing the same thing as them: You're blocking information that you don't want to hear, information that you're not ready to hear.

-Sometimes I wonder how I was ever a part of the “psychonaut scene,” these wannabe-gurus assuming that enlightenment comes with meditation and mindlessness: these Buddhas-in-training afraid to enter all areas of consciousness. We can relax as laid back philosopher types, and as long as we're not being disturbed we're OK? As far as I'm concerned, if you're not embracing demons and nightmares they'll devour you when they decide to come party.

-Womankind hates you, sweet horror of pain. Blink 182 will never understand hatred.

-Escape from your conceptions of culture and self. Escape from your conceptions of escapism. Handicapped babies with Down Syndrome are supreme enlightened beings. Higher races of mental disorders are militant gas stations. Break all opinions. Opinionate all breakage. Assign a new philosophy to every bread crumb you eat.

-Was thinking about completely altering my belief system and becoming a Republican who plays golf, but then it dawned on me that I could go all Stalin and have lots of fun with that. Do as I say for the Wider Culture, my comrades! Or what if I established a Baltimore identity as a preppy liberal?

-My death is alive, rotting and decaying through the flames of emergence and power. Out of the fire my scream is heard in tiny villages throughout the world. There is a newfound freedom in my breathing. Alive as ever (with death by my side) I am able to manifest anything.
 
 
Boy in a Suitcase
12:11 / 11.10.05
When you work on Generation Hex 2 go to a goth club, Jason. You'll find plenty of dark female goddess types who actually know how to write.

That has to be one of the funniest things ever said to me.
 
 
Chiropteran
12:21 / 11.10.05
Possibly true, though.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
16:01 / 11.10.05
I'm wondering how many other female practitioners thought "Oooh, I should send something in to that," then looked at the topics they might cover in relation to their own work and thought "Meh. Been done/someone else'll do it/not out-there enough/too hedge-witchy," or whatever.

I started to write something on three different occasions but everytime I just lost the thread of what I was trying to write. Ultimately I decided it would be boring for other people to read and too chaotic. My practice has gone all over the place and I don't actually know why other than I did what I wanted when I wanted to and didn't read many books (certainly about 280 thousand less than everyone else in this forum). That doesn't really mean anything to anyone who isn't me so I just patted myself on the head and stopped trying. Primarily I didn't want to embellish anything or, you know, lie so I didn't submit anything.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
16:28 / 11.10.05
Possibly true, though.

Barring "dark", "goddess" and "who know how to write", at least.
 
 
Chiropteran
16:58 / 11.10.05
If you like.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
17:03 / 11.10.05
Haus, dude--standing right here. Standing right exactly here!
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
17:21 / 11.10.05
Dude, that's one. And you're not in a goth club.
 
 
Boy in a Suitcase
19:10 / 11.10.05
Please ignore above post—I was being retarded.

Thanks.
 
 
beautifultoxin
20:00 / 11.10.05
Oh, I don't know -- there's just as many KAOS, DUUUDE, LOOK AT MY EIGHT POINTED STAR! HEY GOTTA GO IT'S RAMMSTEIN! fuckoff magickal men at goth clubs, too. I'm sure Momus feels the same.
 
 
Rage
20:19 / 11.10.05
The goth club shit was meant to be a joke, (I can just picture Jason roaming the bar asking for aticle submissions) though is anyone really gonna say that there are more females who practice magick on comic book websites than the dance floor? As silly as the idea sounds and all.

Rammstein? That shit is like Marilyn Manson (or even Korn) in Germany. Those kids don't have chaos tats though. They have pentagram neckalces. Way cutting edge. Also, they are 15.

Anyway, no problem Jason. I'm glad to be one of the few females in Generation Hex. Marginal core. In Generation Hex 3 you can try a goth party.
 
 
Imaginary Mongoose Solutions
23:49 / 11.10.05
Looks at chaostar tat. *sniff* I thought it would be a good thing to have handy, you know? "Shit, I've gone and lost my pentagram!" "Have no fear, my left bicep is here!"

Perhaps venue is an issue in some of these magical collections, in regards to submissions. I have noticed that most places that are not wiccan-specific or performative gender specific on the internets where people chat about the 'occult' do seem male dominated.

Is there a way to get around that?
 
 
Skeleton Camera
14:28 / 12.10.05
The problem is two-fold: there is latent male domination to most of the corporate/publishing/media world. There is also little conscious awareness of this and thus little will to change it.
This problem is made more evident by companies such as Disinformation, who represent a “radical” facet of culture and can thus, by extension, be expected to show more genuine equality than other, more “mainstream” companies.
This is painting with broad strokes, and expectation is always a minefield. But it is nevertheless a forceful player in these discussions. Did we expect GenHex, or any Disinfo publication, to be more gender-inclusive than it was? If so, why?
But no, stay external for the moment.
That there remains an unconscious bias in culture-at-large (and -small) is something few want to discuss openly. It’s threatening; it feels old, somehow, and slightly hysterical; and it can easily cause an avalanche of guilt politics. This is very, very visible in the art world, where the past decades’ emphasis on feminist thought and hypersensitivity has led to a resurgence of masculine, Pollock-like ethos: “shut up and make stuff.” The pendulum swings back because no one admits there IS a pendulum: “We’re living in the future! We’re past all that crap!”
There’s a blindness to this nihilistic optimism that, though its context in opposed to such things, allows Bush to be elected (and reelected). RAW was wrong when he saw that sci-fi t-shirt and thought “we” had won. We hadn’t; we’d just made enough of an impact to get ourselves assimilated.
 
 
beautifultoxin
21:02 / 12.10.05
SC: "...who represent a “radical” facet of culture and can thus, by extension, be expected to show more genuine equality than other, more “mainstream” companies."

With that and the pendulum-vs.NuParadigm (ie: "we're so evolved, we're over it") struggle, it makes it all the more infuriating and sadly ironic. Why so?

The work I have done that could be called "magic" has been a trip into that pendulum, to seeing time from the position of swings and cycles, to see how the human engine is at mercy to the collective engine at times, and how we've all got the potential to swing the damn thing for ourselves. (Or smash it, but that's a little too alt.cult.radical for me. Plus, fucking unlikely.) That's where my trip has taken me -- that's what calls me to arms when I hear about the future, NuParadigm, Ultraculture, whatevs -- and that's what positions me to interrogate that future even as it's half-birthed. It's not antagonism, not jealousy, not mislaid feminist rage -- it's where magic took me, to stir the pot because I've been in it.

Is that the "Lady Path", then? We surely don't own this tactic, even if Cerridwen might well be the O.G. of shit-stirring and (r)evolutionary toxins. It's not hardly gender-specific. It is pretty hedgewitchy, though, and tends to keep one in solitude plotting happily along. The best magic, again, is invisible. Hard to market that. Hard to raise a fist to that, but some do.
 
 
Skeleton Camera
22:15 / 12.10.05
That's where my trip has taken me -- that's what calls me to arms when I hear about the future, NuParadigm, Ultraculture, whatevs -- and that's what positions me to interrogate that future even as it's half-birthed. It's not antagonism, not jealousy, not mislaid feminist rage -- it's where magic took me, to stir the pot because I've been in it.

Agreed! My main problem with the attitude towards latent patriarchy in Occulture (let alone Culture-culture) is that it seems cowardly. It is NOT stirring the pot, not making the brew as spicy as possible, somehow not owning up to its own stated goals and motives.
This, of course, is nothing new on the human spectrum. The current situation seems doubly dangerous, though: the aforementioned NuParadigm discouraging of self-criticism; and the reactionism, also aforementioned re: art-world shifts, that is being courted as "necessary" but is, in fact, a revival of male-centric high Modernism.
It's an envelope we're not pushing, basically, and one that is discouraged from being pushed.
 
 
eddie thirteen
23:59 / 13.10.05
Hmmmm, yeah. That's all very interesting. Can we come back to that whole scarlet woman thing again?
 
 
Imaginary Mongoose Solutions
04:53 / 14.10.05
Scarlet Woman, Eddie? In what context?
 
 
trouser the trouserian
07:22 / 14.10.05
Offtopic, but could someone please explain what this NuParadigm is?
 
 
beautifultoxin
08:36 / 14.10.05
Trouser, I was just throwing out another random piece of quasi-magical jargon to stand in for that impulse by many magical practitioners, myself included, to believe that ZE FUUTCHA (which I could have subsituted, just as well) will relieve us of all our past bullshit. As in, "Hey, maaaaan, it's like The Future, maaaan, our new paradigm shall overcome, man!"

It's just sad when people call NuParadigm w/o checking their shit. (Again, myself included.) Feminisms various waves have falled into the same traps as each generations iteration of hot magical practice. We all think we've arrived; we're always still arriving.

Maybe NuParadigm can instead signify that arriving constantly, rather than striving for "the" revolution, or "the" enlightenment," or whatver.

Right, then, now -- back to the pussy.
 
 
Cat Chant
13:53 / 14.10.05
The articles weren't good enough. If the book had been cleared for 324 pages instead of 288, which it wasn't in order to keep the cost down and affordable, they would have been included. As it was set at 288, they weren't.

Period.

Dude, it's not great advertising for your own editorship to be saying publicly that, had the publisher not forced a page cut, you would have been publishing work that you don't think is good enough for publication.
 
 
Skeleton Camera
21:01 / 14.10.05
BT: I thought that "becoming-" idea was what NuParadigm did describe, re: chaos and all, and hence the constant confusion of it being invoked to describe some sort of achieved liberation.

Tangent: "Dakini's Warm Breath" (Amazon) has a good perspective on the role of women and female-ness in esoterica, and critiques both sides of the usual pendulum in trying to explain the "third," and culturally unique, place of the Dakini.
 
 
Sunfell
17:42 / 18.04.07
Sekhmet wrote:

Perhaps women are simply less open and vocal about their practice?

Bingo! I am a very close adherent to the "Keep Silent" part ot the Hermetic Quaternary (aka Witches Pyramid). What I do, believe, achieve, etc. is really no one's business but my own.

As for gender and perceived sexual superiority and imbalances, I see it as a trap that diverts seekers from their Journey. People get so tangled up in the boy-vs-girl pissing contest that they fail to see how irrelevant it truly is. Magic is neutral. It does not care about what sex you are. Energy is also neutral, and both men and women can be active or passive, giving or receiving. We're not stuck in our biology- we're just stuck in our cultural ruts. Shedding those presumptions should be one of the first things an aspiring Magician does.

If the practice of magic does anything, it should lift the practitioner above those cultural traps, and show hir how irrational the whole argument truly is. I think that in doing this, many imbalances would be removed.
 
 
brother george
18:12 / 18.04.07
I`m maybe beeing redundant here, but, ceremonial magic is not only the Golden Dawn, as well as beeing purely solar-centered. Although the whole "Solar Hero" stuff is prevalent pretty much everywhere, different trads focus on different mysteries. For example, the Aurum Solis seems to me largely centered around Sophia than Yeshuah or what have you.

Sophia or Yeshuah, one of the "goals" is to somewhat harmonize the polarities within, as someone else mentioned here, so for me there isnt any particular problem.

Problems arise from one-sided training and education and from stereotype clinging.
 
 
Ticker
18:14 / 18.04.07
anyone who wants to submit work to a Barbelith Temple collection, come to Creation
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
19:09 / 18.04.07
Bingo! I am a very close adherent to the "Keep Silent" part ot the Hermetic Quaternary (aka Witches Pyramid). What I do, believe, achieve, etc. is really no one's business but my own

Okay, I do understand that perspective. But I would argue that writing on magical and spiritual matters need not be a violation of the whole "keep silent" thing. There are discoveries and experiences that are not to be shared, that's understood. However the idea that describing or discussing any aspect of one's practice is automatically going to breach the vital spirit of "keep silent" is misguided IMO.

I'm not saying that every single female practitioner has some kind of obligation to put pen to paper; however I would say that I personally feel just such an obligation.

It's true in a way that magic in a general sense is genderless. But my life experience is not genderless. The things that have happened to me in the course of my magical career--not genderless. A lot of my early workings were protection spells to give me a little more physical security when I was out on my own in a hostile environment where a lot of the hostility was gendered. My first serious curse was enacted against a guy who was sexually harrassing and threatening me. One big reason I've always been a solitary is my gender. I am solo partly because I felt so deeply uninspired by the prospect of choosing between groups that were female-oriented and fluffy as shit (and where I'd have to counter liberal dollops of thinly-veiled misandry), and groups where the magical practice might be more interesting to me but where I'd be dealing with people's projected lady hangups. And that's leaving aside the reams and reams and reams of magical writing out there that's just larded with gender stereotypes. I do not feel hugely inspired by reading some Victorian dude hold forth at length about Woman's nature as Passive Vessel for Masculine Power; nor does it thrill me to be told by Ladie RenneFaiere MoonWomyn that having my moontime puts me in closer contact with the fucking Earth Mother than those horrid stinky boys. Bluntly, my magical experience has been gendered up the wazoo since day one.

I'm not saying my stuff is going to be of no use or interest to a male practitioner, but when I'm writing I've always got half-an-eye on what 15 year old Mordant could have done with reading.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
19:27 / 18.04.07
(PS, hello, welcome to Barbelith! Scuse the rant.)
 
 
This Sunday
19:27 / 18.04.07
The 'keep silent' thing has its uses and place. I was raised big on that one, primarily for sociopolitical reasons and while I feel my reasons may be shedding away, other people are in different boats and those boats may be in, a they say, hostile waters.

I would concur that, in the abstract, some things can be dealt with just fine. Personal examples, and certain practices where there's been basically a promise not to reveal is a whole other kettle. Even if the promise is to yourself. (Not that I believe you have to keep an oath, but once you don't, it's not there anymore.)

And Barbelith isn't especially a safe or secretive-type place to be posting about, well, lots of stuff.
 
  

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