Episode 80 - AM I NORMAL? EMBRACING SACRED SEXUAL MINORITIES & MAJORITIES with Loraine Hutchins, Phd

Transcript

This program is intended for mature audiences only.

Francesca Gentille: Welcome to Sex, Tanta and Kama Sutra, bringing you the soul of sex.
I am your host Francesca Gentille.

And with me today is Loraine Hutchins. Loraine has a PHD in cultural study with an emphasis in sexual minorities and sacred sexualities and she is the co-editor of "by any other name why sexual people speak out". She is currently a professor of sex education in the Washington D.C area in two campuses and I am delighted to have you here today.

Welcome Loraine.

Loraine Hutchins: Thank you. I'm excited to be here.

Francesca Gentille: You know I've been especially excited to have you here because I have known of you for years. I actually got to be quoted in one of your books for my temple of mischarges and so you've been this marvelous phantom whose been skirting the outskirts of my sacred sexual life for years and I want to tell our listening audience that we're friends and combinative and all we've spoken so highly of why she is, how well researched, how intelligent and insightful so yayy. Yayy! we got to have you her with us and as this expert specialist in the areas of sacred sexualities and sexual minorities, I would want to invite you today to share a part of context with us of what this is like both in our world today and then the past. So that all of us can have a greater sense of compassion for ourselves, for others, where we are in the world today, where we were? Where we are going? And in terms of sacred sexuality, today the world seems pretty conflicted like what is sacred sexuality? What do you do with it and their, but that's not always how it's been. How has it been?

Loraine Hutchins: Well, I think we comfort and inspire ourselves sometime with visions and stories of a past one thing from we're connected. I'm not sure whether they were for very long or not but that's not important, I mean what's important is the visions that we have of how we can be more connected and how to get there. I mean I was telling you just before we went on the air that I have a very deep sense that all every religious tradition has an erotic core and that there is no contradiction between the spiritual and the sexual. But of course there are contradictions that come up in the present that are very distracting and distressing.

Francesca Gentille: So what are, let's look a little deeper into that of both the erotic core and the distraction which do you want to start with? What distresses today from that erotic core or some of the roots that we find in various traditions?

Loraine Hutchins: Well, I mean I think to call the roots back for us, for each of us because we can give to much energy to the distractions you know they will always be there. I mean I don't know. I remember hearing stories when I was doing my research and my doctoral program about how there wasn't just a lot of contradiction out the early formation of many religions because it's about life and life is sexual.

Francesca Gentille: Well that's Christianity that's the reason why many of us are raised Catholics, many of us can get confused in the things. Well the body is bad doesn't my religion say somehow that the body is bad?

Loraine Hutchins: I don't think Jesus ever said that. I don't think Jesus did at all and Jesus is the heart of Christianity right? I mean could be, should be, must be. I mean the church is the church and the church of people and the church of what it's become, But if you actually look at Christ, Christ was very positive about being in the body and about the body being Holy I mean there is a lot of alternatives, interesting things, the most popular of which is the Da Vinci Code but we’re not going to do this show on the Da Vinci Code. But those who have seen the movie or read the book you know there are alternative interpretations of Christ that are more of Christ's life and a bit early church that are more sex positive.

But I think the most important thing is to just start with where each person is at in their early memories of their childhood sexuality and their early memory of childhood spirit and why should there be and how did they get to be a disconnect and how can we connect. You know I have a story that when I was a little girl in church, I always wanted to run up to the altar and stand naked because I was excited about being alive and I was given messages by the adults in the church that that wasn't done, dancing naked and dancing where the clothes weren't even a part of worship and why not?

Francesca Gentille: Why not exactly?

Loraine Hutchins: Why not?

Francesca Gentille: And especially a beautiful little one running around in the joy of spirit and so what I'm hearing is that authentic natural erotic spiritual nature combining with church and yet then there is a moment when we're told "no,no,no, don't do that" and something starts to shut down in us and what I'm also hearing it says is at the root, perhaps if Jesus was alive today and a lovely little child came in running and wanted to dance next to him, he might have said we welcome the children.

Loraine Hutchins: He would have no problem.

Francesca Gentille: As an innocent child we enter into heaven. What about in Islam is there, is that a denigrating culture to the body or are they risked with that as well?

Loraine Hutchins: I don't think so and I think Western, Christian people really tend to misinterpret. There is so much Islam phobia to use a phrase in this culture right now, in the west where we really don't understand the beauty and the power and the strengths and the truth of Islam. I think we really misunderstand a lot of stuff, the modesty stuff, the stuff about women wearing the vale does not necessarily have to be about body shame at all and I think there is a distortion that comes about because of that not to minimize the power and balance between men, women needs a change at all. That's true but I think deep in Islam there is the same thing. There is a sense of connecting the body and the spirit and there being no contradiction.

Francesca Gentille: Totally agree with what Loraine is saying. I have friends that are from the Middle East and they say we really don't have a clue about what they're like and how sensual they are. How sensual are men with one another and without going, choosing as a lifestyle there is a sensuality that men get to express with one another. There is a sensuality that women get to express with one another and there is a sense of between shame and privacy. And so if I am keeping something private for myself that could be protected like my sacred secret garden. It's not saying there ground of shame of the beauty that's here and there is a wonderful book called Grandmother's secret that a woman from Iran tells about being taught by her grandmother the sacred art of belly dance and I've met her impersonal and she was one of the most sensual, vital, delicious women. I saw her with her husband and it was gorgeous.

Loraine Hutchins: Yeah I think that every religious tradition has a sex part of the aspect to it. It's just that it's not that accessible to a lot of us a lot of the time. We fall back on feeling that sex and spiritually are divorce in our life except during times when there is a celebration of the birth, when there is a celebration of the birth, celebration of a wedding those are the times somewhat when we come back to seeing the connection sometimes.

Francesca Gentille: Even not just in Christianity sometimes we have this sense of celebrating the beautiful connection between the man or the woman or the birth of the child. In Middle East even today when someone is getting married or a child is getting born they will bring in the sacred dancers and they will have the sense of the divine feminine conscious or unconscious that's present in the room including a particular tribe of dancers who have been known for centuries to be in the sense of sacred prostitute and they come in and they will dance at weddings and births and then in Judaism on the day of the wedding especially for the more traditions of Judaism it is considered that the bride and groom are divine there representations of inclusive to the divine on their wedding day. And they literally people will be lined up to be blessed by them. This is considered as a conduit.

Loraine Hutchins: In Judaism there is an encouragement to make love between men and women who are married on the side because it is considered a part of celebration. Yeah.

Francesca Gentille: We just want to all breathe. I like to breathe that in. When I hear things like that I want to breathe that in and let myself know that there are roots, cultural roots, in my lineages, in my blood line, in the world that I can reclaim. So this line as you mentioned we like to be informed by the past in a way that is positive versus negative. It kind of gives us stepping still something to lean on as we move forward to our healing personally and in our world.
And when we come back from a word from our sponsors I want to talk more about some of those what did you call those blocks and conflicts that we have culturally that most of us will be carrying and some of the steps that we can go through from today into the future to really have a love life that we love, when we come back from a break and a word from our fabulous sponsors.

Francesca Gentille: Welcome back to Sex, Tanta and Kama Sutra bringing you the soul of sex. We're talking with Loraine Hutchins who has a PHD in cultural study with an emphasis in sexual minorities and sacred sexualities, a professor in the Washington DC area in sex education and we had just tuned into a little bit about the pasts or the deep roots of the erotic core love. I love that term erotic core and then there is kind of the bad news, the hard news of where we've come today that most of us carry which gives a little map of where our listening audience might find themselves in terms of those, what was that term that you had some of those conflicts, those limitations that we carry?

Loraine Hutchins: I can't remember the term unless it was about stress and distraction but it actually came up for me when you said sacred prostitute for one thing because I don't know how much you have talked about this on your previous shows but the whole idea you know that of combining the terms sacred and prostitute is very confusing for people and there is such an alienation for seeing the sharing of sexual pleasure that can be done without in a good way and to think about it how co modified it's become that usually if you look back at the roots of the term sacred prostitute they come out of some translation stuff with Greek researchers way back in the old times.

They basically discovered women who were priestesses fully in their erotic power and they couldn't, I think the translators in English couldn’t find a word for someone who was a spiritual leader and who was also sexually independent and so they came up with the term sacred prostitute and it's kind of a misnomer but I think the reason that I bring that up in terms of discomfort is it has to deal with how do we feel about being in our bodies at the same time we're also worship situation or a meditative praying situation, how do we feel about that and a lot of that still conflicts and confusion and shame, particularly shame gets into the way and to me it comes back to masturbation but…

Francesca Gentille: In what way? No doubt about it.

Loraine Hutchins: Masturbation is still one of those bad words that we can't say. I mean Betty Dotson the grandmother of masturbation ended up acquainting phrases like solo sex and self loving because people had trouble with the word masturbation and what our previous surgeon general Jostling Elders under President Clinton got fired by Clinton simply aviating that masturbation was a safer sex practice that high school students could be encouraged to do.
For that a tide in our culture that it's really hard for us to talk about loving our bodies, loving ourselves so no wonder you know it's hard to talk about doing that in spiritual, belief as well it's just loving ourselves.

Francesca Gentille: I want to breathe in the wounding of that. So here we are individuals who I have a natural urge to want to connect with someone with my heart, I have a natural urge to want to connect with someone in my gentiles, my erotic nature, very natural, very normal to want to do these things and yet I am, I live in a world that even if I touch myself in a loving way sometimes in my gentiles there is something wrong with that if I maybe really delight in erotic pleasure that there's something wrong with that so here I have this really conflicted self of my own body and my own erotic that touch with myself and now I'm trying to have a relationship with you well how can that conflict not show up in the way that I relate to you and when I touch your gentiles maybe I feel conflicted about whether I can, how I should, whether I'm doing it right and if you're reaching out to touch mine I'm conflicted about that maybe I feel it's a little dirty and yet I want you to but maybe I'm a dirty person and what's when I breathe in the suffering that we're carrying here.

Loraine Hutchins: And actually when I'm listening to you I'm reminded of porn and the ways that people long for porn because it has a language of talking exclusively about sex. It's not that porn is adequate. It's not that porn is usually very holy, it's not but if the avenues that have been developed and unfortunately there aren't avenues for talking exclusively about sexuality other then porn and so I think people gravitate toward porn because it's such a moneymaker on the internet rather then finding other ways to communicate what feels good and what's so good for you and what's so good for me, talking in terms of intimate partners. I will say that.

Francesca Gentille: Go ahead. I was about to say something else about pornography.

Loraine Hutchins: However there is a whole wealth of erotic teaching sexually exclusive videos that are not porn, that are available now particularly developed by people like Joseph Kramer and Betty Dotson that are starting to be much more easily accessible on the web in terms of streaming videos and subscription things, ways that you can find out or DVDs that they would legally meet the definition of porn because there is people on them coming naked and they're totally not porn in the commercial alienated sense because they are about real people connecting deeply and intimately.

Francesca Gentille: So you said Betty Dotson (D O T S O N) and Joseph Kramer.

Loraine Hutchins: Joseph Kramer developed a format that he called sex logical bodywork and it certified in the State of California as a professionally approved way of helping people, working with them, be more with their bodies that's not certified in other states yet but it hands on erotic massage and sex eds and he helps train people go into the erotic trance that's one of the term he uses.
More importantly for your audience he has a wide variety of teaching videos available at his website or just a few googled sex logical body work or eroticmassage.com, things like that. Kenneth [xx] is another who has a lot of really good teaching videos.

Francesca Gentille: And he's been interviewed on my show. He's up, people can definitely find Kenneth [xx] interviews it's definitely up and I love what you're pointing to that there's a natural urge to learn, there is a natural urge to be aroused visually and in many ways we turn to pornography because that's all there is and I felt that for a long time were there to be more visual erotic a lot of juicy visuals that included heart and included spirit, as humanity we wouldn't be against those. It's just that it hasn't been available so thank you so much for pointing to us the new directions and I also want to honor that sometimes in a way that we engage in pornography like you said it has a language and there is that safety. There is no one in that moment that is going to judge me, there is no pressure in that moment and may we come more and more into the world when we are more and more compassionate with one another, where we are in safety with another to express our deepest sexual beings and when we come back from a break and a word from our sponsors I want to deeper into some of that journey and I love the resources.
More of what that journey will be for us to reclaim and express our sacred sexual vibrancy when we come back from a break.

Francesca Gentille: Welcome to Sex, Tanta and Kama Sutra, bringing you the soul of sex talking to Loraine Hutchins and we're talking about some of the conflicts, the suffering, the distractions we carry and the way out of them. I want to go a little bit deeper into what some of those might be that our listening audience might recognize themselves in this.

Loraine Hutchins: Well, one of the things that I hear a lot from people particularly from men is that they are sacred of exploring anything about their sexuality that might not be considered heterosexual and it makes me sad because women have a lot more freedom and to be bi to be curious to just be sensual we have a lot more freedom and there is a way in which men are really constricted and I see it everyday and it's hard for men. I have a lot of compassion for men being able to find more permission and more expression.

Francesca Gentille: And now like to live in that reality, either I am only with men or either I am only with women and it's bad like I am crazy or bad or evil if I want to be held by men in our culture and this is not true people cross-culturally and worldwide is that many cultures give much more permission for men similar.

Loraine Hutchins: The cuddle.

Francesca Gentille: To cuddle and there's such a sadness to breathe in that men carrying our culture and they have to feel so cut off from them.

Loraine Hutchins: Well, we're also very post traumatic from the aids epidemic which is still going on which is not over and bisexual men really got the scrap cutter for being the transmitters supposedly between the gay world and the straight world and that's not true at all. What’s true is that if people are really ashamed of they are or who their fantasies might be they're most likely to practice safe sex but the point of safe sex is not the orientation of the people involved but that is where a lot of us get stuck if feeling ashamed about our desires.

Francesca Gentille: For myself, I had so much confusion with my relationship around other women is that if I liked women, I thought that I would love women and I was confused about am I attracted? Am I gay? Am I bi? What am I? And this fear that I had to be something, I had to label something and what it would mean culturally and to my family if I was on one side of the other and I ended up doing a lot of feeling work where I ended and working in the erotic work, some of the sex logical bonding with women and recognizing I love them, look I love them, they're precious and that I found myself on the spectrum and I realized that I have my own unique place on it that was about heart, that was about connection and I came into the sense of eve with my relatedness to the women. It was like the question wasn't there anymore for me because I was like " Oh "

Loraine Hutchins: This was just a spectrum there is not an either or, there is a huge spectrum of human sexual diversity but I want to give a shot out to Iraqi war bits men and women because I am thinking that a lot of them are coming back to us and they're coming back physically, psychologically, emotionally, sexually wounded and I mean there's a lot of issues behind that and they just flashed in my mind so I juts wanted to say it.
I had some students recently that brought it to my mind. Its people of all ages, it's so much about the veteran surviving that used to have what have died because of the surviving in the medical advances and yet they are surviving with different bodies and sometimes those bodies have more trouble coming or more trouble breathing or more trouble feeling comfortable and it relates to me everything about feeling like a minority, feeling alone, you don't have to feel bi to feel like a minority sexually.

Francesca Gentille: Thank you. Let's just breathe that in because all of us whatever that fantasy normal is, there is some fantasy normal out there in the world and very few of us are widget. We are human a complex human being. Each one of us at times in our life may feel am I normal? Am I outskated from my society? Am I so weird? I want to breathe in that sense of spectrum that you just said that we are unique, heartful, spiritual, thoughtful human beings and we get to be on our unique spot of the human spectrum.

Loraine Hutchins: And I think you know if we look at media images or porn images or religious anything that is a starrer type and iconic way of expectation where we feel like we have to meet a certain standard it doesn't necessarily help us praise what we have and start there and that's to me how we get out of being stuck. Doesn't sound very specific but it's an everyday daily call of being alive I guess.

Francesca Gentille: Yeah being alive in the sense that God didn't make a mistake in creating me, with the body I have, the longings that I have and is there a journey, my journey your journey to be a person of our word to stay in integrity. If I say that I am going to treat with kindness to treat with kindness. If you and I are in a relationship that I agree that we are sexual, gentile focus is also going to be together then to be in integrity with that and to let you know that we can't and cautiously transition the relationship.

Loraine Hutchins: If I said something turns me on and that's not something my partner feels comfortable with finding a way to be alrite with working through with that rather then shutting anyone of us down.

Francesca Gentille: Let's breathe that in because I think that's a huge one where I can experience it even myself, where I have a different style, a different flavor, a different pacing at times or more often or I'm going leaving my beloved and to be able to say my way is ideal to me and your way is ideal for you and if we love each other what's our common ground and if we love each other how can we also support within our agreements, within our integrity to ourselves and one another

Loraine Hutchins: A support of the wholeness of who we are and to honor our curiosity because I think I love that people are curious about sex. I think there's a lot there to encourage, don't feel ashamedness in wanting to learn more, there is so much more to learn.

Francesca Gentille: Absolutely. It was such a delight to have you here to help us breathe in that context of work we're ok and we're sacred whatever we are and if people want to find more about you, your articles, your book, where you teach how would they do that Loraine?

Loraine Hutchins: I have a website it's woefully outdated and still very fascinating and it's Lorainehutchins.com and you have to know how to spell my name properly although Google with correct you but it's Lorainehutchins.com

Francesca Gentille: Thank you so much for joining us today.

Loraine Hutchins: Thank you.

Francesca Gentille: And I want to thank you our listening audience for being on this journey with Loraine, with me, with everybody else who was listening to this journey of reclaiming hard sex body mind and areas altogether in a beautiful way and if u want to learn more about Loraine see her picture, get transcripts from the show, learn more about me how I teach? Where I teach? You can do that personallifemedia.com
www.personalifemedia.com. Sex, Tanta and Kama sutra bringing you the soul of sex.