Yes! I am trashE. This is a newly coined identity location for me yet one I’ve worn for ancient expanses of time. My first “MPA restricted” movie experience explains it. From age 8-12, pre-teen southerner that I was, I fought endlessly with my mom to watch Dolly’s trashiest flick Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. I’d wander into the Tom Thumb video section and lovingly look at the cover while she shopped for fajita fixins or chicken tortilla soup ingredients. My mom held firm- no rated R movies until age 13.
Now 30 years later and BLWiT soundtrack committed to memory, with proud trashEness (Dolly forEva!), I’ve started a practice of dedicating my experiences of pleasure to those beings around me. With my practice, I recognize my erotic ethic and see how my pleasure alongside the pleasure of others has created and will continue to create socioSexual Lubrication i.e. individual and collective freedom movements/moments.
In Uses of the Erotic, Audre Lorde writes, “When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of lifeforce…; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.”
In Ella’s Song, by Sweet Honey in the Rock, the refrain We who believe in freedom cannot rest is repeated “against a clapped backbeat, and echoes the essence of the Buddhist bodhi-sattva aspiration which is the wish to achieve enlightenment to benefit all beings”. SocioSexual Lubrication, like erotic/Buddhist/mindfulness practice engaged in order to benefit all beings, is used to expand our relationship with the relative “to contact the ultimate truth of things—and then return to the relative with fullest compassion”. Through pleasure, awareness and embodiment, we experience spaciousness within the confines of body and identity.
SocioSexual Lubrication as art, costume, words, performance, practice, enlightenment, protest equal examples of the radical embodiment of pleasure that offer up what it means to be trashE. TrashE as in to be free and to free others. As we pursue the work of individual and collective liberation, loving the body and self can create intimacy with the suffering of self and world. Engaging suffering as in pain as in hurt as in disappointment as in heartbreak about the world does not mean reproducing harm. An erotic ethic and trashE practice show us that acknowledging pain and pleasure as liberation as socioSexual Lubrication can help us gain deeper insight into how we are ultimately connected.
From Dolly movies to Audre essays to meditation to movement building, TrashEness equals radical practices of self+other love and wet, wild spaciousness. As we decolonize sexuality and sexual desires, climb beyond mononormative culture, re-orient pleasure (center!) and transgress the hyperfeminine white-supremacist, binary world, we become our trashE-er selves.
Yes to understanding trashEness is about play, embodiment, the magic in/of love, challenging dominant paradigms, and trusting our bodies. Even when the world/head/heart feels unpredictable, we trust our trashE practice. We choose what is trashE meaning fluid meaning pleasures that challenge what is rigid in the world to disrupt existing dualisms. And with our trashE, queer ways, we dedicate ourselves to the socialSexual Lubrication of body and our communities.
To reclaim trashE, I’m currently practicing intersectionally with two phenomenal teachers. I highly recommend digging into the work of the unequivocal BIPOC, queer author/buddhist activist Lama Rod Owens and writer/psychotherapist Jessica Fern who’s queered the rShip++ world up over last several months with Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma, and Consensual Non-monogamy.
I’ll go further into how my trashE parts are inviting me to challenge what’s rigid in the/my world and continue to define an erotic ethic in following posts. Until then, I invite you to notice trashE (less rigid more fluid) in your circadian realities and see how trashE (more fluid less rigid) is shaping our collective. Fern brilliantly sums up the current queering here,
“We’re living in a time of notable change. At this moment multiple established beliefs and deeply rooted cultural and societal practices are shifting. This includes attitudes towards race, gender, class and sexuality. While these societal revisions are far from complete and there is much room for improvement, and too many people have sacrificed their personal safety, freedoms and even their lives for the collective, lifestyles and biases previously invisible to the privileged are now exposed and deconstructed, new choices continue to emerge.”
With all the above celebrated as vanguards of pleasure and societal change, i.e. socioSexual Lubrication, yes to making trasheE-er choices together.