Power, from pig sex to post-apocalyptic culture :-)

The Avatar talk this past Wednesday was really good. Thorn, who publishes "Instigator Magazine" was a refreshing voice in terms of why culture is important for individuals. He's quite inspiring, with hillarious stories of the Old Guardsters, and really solid and radical ideas about the reality of erotic deviance and the ways it is nurtured or corseted by "community." He pointed out that if "community" doesn't support the young, new perverts because their ideas seem too radical, then that younger generation may find itself weak and scattered in face of terrors like disease epidemics or political crusades, with no "community" to hold it together. He made a case for Old Farts to embrace the new generation, in order to preserve a culture of erotic freedoms, even if they are practiced in new and unrecognizable ways.

Guy Baldwin was, as I always think he is, dead on with some analysis of cultural dynamics, but then, he is one of my heroes :-) . For me, Guy tends to normalize stuff, as in looking at how a thing operates, rather than giving it energy as drama. He is gifted in illuminating problems as opportunities, must be the buddhist in him. He not only spoke of acknowledging the "new guard" but pointed out that there's something to be learned from the inhabitants of today's culture - as in: the youth of a culture are talented in regards to their own time, and older folks have stuff to learn from them about how our world works NOW.

An interesting thing that I reflected on was the notion that "Old Guard" was a top down (aka Top oriented) society in which bottoms had no influence (just like the military, aristocracies, patriarchy). The so called "new guard" sounds more bottom oriented, as in teach bottoms what they want to know, which is not shoving protocol down their throats (just like anarchy?). Analytically, the notion of a bottom oriented culture (in BDSM) fascinates me from a feminist perspective. I've been researching harems, veiling, and have made a commitment to my Zen practice because of my interest in something akin to "bottom", or feminine, power, or a life of influence that is wielded in a dispersed or indirect manner. All this and post-colonialism, too, is enriched fodder for ideas about where a global society might be headed. I like to picture it as large monoliths teetering, and collapsing on their own massive heards, clearing the way for the quietly thoughtful and scattered to emerge upon the rubble, tilling it under for a NEW AND BETTER society. Which is not a utopia, but actually more of an antitopia, or nontopia, because unity is no longer an ideal.