Talk, Talk, Talk: About Sex
Venus passes exactly between Earth and the Sun for the first time in more than a century on June 8, showering the world with the hot rays of the Goddess. Called a 'transit', this is an extremely rare astronomical event. What's unusual to astronomy has high impact in astrology. Looking at the front pages at the newsagent, I'm sure you'll agree we would benefit from the love and compassion that Venus can deliver. The forces of war, greed and conflict seem to be having their way with us, but there are signs the tide is turning. We can do our part to help it along.
We live in a world where war is considered good and sex is considered bad. It's acceptable to exploit women's bodies at the same time we ban or run from discussion of pleasure. In this environment, pleasure becomes the 'moral' issue and violence is treated with a blase` attitude. Many people see the hypocrisy in this but few see the obvious connection between suppressing sex and spurring aggression.
Set your psychic radio to Gemini, where the Venus transit arrives, and where Venus is currently slow and powerful. Gemini governs language, communication and ideas. It's also the sign associated with the Tarot trump card, The Lovers. I propose a sexual revolution beginning with honest discussion of sex. Every revolution begins with words, and the new sexual revolution will begin when we can speak to one another about sex and pleasure in straight talk. Most of us lack the words to describe how we feel about erotic desires, much less the courage to ask for what we need. And most relationships are based as much on what is not said as they are on what is spoken openly.
I'm an advocate of sexual literacy. I suggest you go directly to the bookshop and begin your arduous homework. Reading about sex reminds us that sex is normal, and it really makes discussion easier. More than we need to stop lying about sex, we need to simply say what's on our minds. We need to be able to speak openly with friends, with lovers and, most important, with our kids. The world still has a policy of lying to children about sex -- mainly through policies of secrets, silence and disinformation disguised as 'religion' -- and it's a very mean thing we do. Usually it happens because adults feel too insecure to speak truthfully to their own children.
Let's get over it! The stunning performance of Venus in Gemini will reward our honesty delightfully.
Disney Presents: Masturbation Month
Okay, just kidding about the Disney part. Actually, you can thank Good Vibrations of San Francisco and Berkeley (where else), the all-women, collectively-run, employee-owned sex toy (and literature) shop, for creating what is a growing, granted, slowly growing, awareness campaign about the most common (and most commonly maligned) form of sex on the planet, masturbation. May is indeed the 214th annual masturbation month. Okay, just kidding about the 214th annual par toot: I believe it's currently the 8th or 9th year of this festive event. Long may it run.
Now you may be sitting there thinking, "I'm a pork farmer in Indiana, and those Planet Waves people forgot National Pork Celebration Month back last June." And I admit that we neglected to mention Administrative Professional's Day and, come to think of it, we barely gave Christmas a fleeting glance. So why am I making a huge deal about Masturbation Month, and why the annual fuss?
In a word, Dharma.
In a phrase, somebody has to.
Simply put, because it's a fabulous idea.
In most parts of the world, Masturbation Month is a conceptual event. You can get there in your mind, online or on the telephone. Some places, though, the tribes will be gathering. For example, there is an art exhibit posted here: http://www.goodforher.com/events/
And the Wet Spot (a/k/a the Seattle Sex Positive Community Center) has created the J.O. Palooza, which can be accessed at this link: http://www.wetspot.org/schedule.htm#JO-Palooza. (I give them credit for calling their event anything besides something ending in '-a-thon'.)
Babes in Toyland, by some miracle also in sleepy rainy Seattle, is doing a fundraiser and also some kind of masturbation filming project. Hmmm. Sounds like fun. Here is a link, useful in a variety of fashions if you skip back to the homepage: http://www.babeland.com/salon/masturbatathon.html#m
I would bet twenty pounds that CAKE http://cakeNYC.com/ is going to get in on the festivities -- they don't miss much. (This by the way is an excellent, woman-based organisation based in London and New York City that creates female-centred sex-culture events to which men are invited as long as they come with a Cake member. It was founded by a female psychotherapist who heard from a lot of women and figured out what was missing.)
There are, I am sure, lots of events in San Francisco -- I just found a listing of an exhibition of film clips of funny and sexy masturbation scenes... and if you search Google like such: <"masturbation month" Peoria> leaving out the little brackets but including the quotes and your home town if you don't happen to live in Peoria, you will find out what, if anything, is happening in your locale. If you don't come up with anything, perhaps you could create an evening discussion salon for your friends. Rent some videos and DVDs. Have a reading from books of erotic stories and poems. More people will be interested than you may imagine.
For further educational reading, here's a link to the Masturbation Classics Collection on Planet Waves: http://ericfrancis.com/classics.html
And, among my favourite web sites devoted to the subject are the web site of my shero, mentor, astrology client and eternal friend, blessed Virgo (but not virgin) Dr. Betty Dodson, http://bettydodson.com/ There is great stuff at this all-ages, reader-written site, http://solotouch.com/ (to which I am weekly contributor of a column called Self2Self). There is also the highly popular http://jackinworld.com/ and also Club Stroke http://www.bmcg.com/clubstroke/ (that's mostly a pay site, mostly for guys).
There is lots about masturbation at Sexuality.org, homepage for the Society for Human Sexuality, at http://sexuality.org/ including quite a bit on Betty Dodson at this site. These people were publishing my writing before I had even heard of them.
A variety of educational video products (mostly on erotic massage) are available at the homepage of my dear friend Joseph Kramer, http://erospirit.org/ who uses my writing in his sexuality educational programs for massage therapists and orgasm coaches. Joseph is the founder of something called the Body Electric School of Healing Arts at http://bodyelectric.org/, based in San Francisco, which does tons of events for men and women in many cities.
Wow, this is starting to sound like some kind of grassroots movement. To the extent that it is, it began and was encouraged by the need for SAFFER SEXUAL PRACTICES and AUTHENTIC SEX EDUCATION created by various viral pandemics of the 1980s and 1990s and has grown into a social movement that encourages honest discussion of sexuality, distribution of real information about sex, safer sex, living a life that is out of the closet, and integrating sex (and not merely the exploitation of sex for corporate profit and gain, as we are used to seeing) into life. In the United States, we suffer from something called the "Abstinence Only" movement, which really means abstinence only until compulsory heterosexual marriage. It's job is to wage an extremely expensive federally financed coverup of sex in the public schools.
Read more about this vile thing at: http://planetwavesweekly.com/2003/senators_pubes.html
We can not only hope that people wake up to the simple equation that sex equals life. We can contribute to the awakening by walking past shame, doing the necessary healing work and embracing our birthright -- and holding open the space for others to do the same: our friends, our lovers, our parents, our children. It is time to end the secrets, shame and silence about sex and pleasure. When we can speak, think, and live freely with masturbation, we can speak, think and live freely around sex and sexuality -- and that helps us live and love freely in the rest of our lives.
Another little thing worth the mention: masturbation leads to healthier sexual relationships. It teaches us the core and origin of pleasure is ourselves. Masturbation together is the hottest, healthiest sex education that lovers can take part in together, and it even has a place amongst some friends (who don't need me to tell them!).
Now, a brief mention of the astrology. When I discovered that May was Masturbation Month, I thought, how appropriate: TAURUS. The 2nd house is the sexual house associated with self-pleasure and self-sensuality as opposed to pleasure and mind-warping surrender with others (the 8th house). Taurus rings with the 2nd house themes of self-focus and sensuality; and it is the season of Beltane.
Venus approves.
Being the assiduous investigative reporter that I am, I called up Good Vibes one year and talked to one of the original Masturbation Month organisers and enquired whether this astrological association was intentional. I personally know of a few sexpositive astrologers who make their rounds in the Bay area and maybe they had an influence.
Nope, they said: just another pure coincidence.
Mid-Taurus Birthdays
Venus and Mars are hot hot hot in your charts this year and that means an increasing awareness about male-female dynamics, erotic consciousness and who knows, maybe a very sexy year. Yet will it be sexy in the world of ideas, or in the world of your physical body? Both planets have 3rd house themes -- the 3rd house being the house of mind, communication, ideas and language. So you can skip right back up to the Talk, Talk, Talk article that this newsletter leads with and take it super personally. As for how to make it physical? Well we shall come to that point in a moment.
First off, Venus, your guardian angel, is doing something highly unusual this year, or rather, for the first time in about 12 decades. and it does so in just a few weeks. This is a two-part 'something': part one is that Venus makes a direct transit to the Sun, that is, it eclipses the Sun on the 8th of June. Part two, which occurs in about 10 days, is that Venus stations retrograde in exact opposition to the core of the galaxy.
Anticipating the usual 'What is the core of the galaxy?' questions, our galaxy, consisting of an estimated 100 billion stars, has a core, and that core is located at 27 degrees of Sagittarius -- those people are not FAR OUT for nuttin -- and when Venus stations retrograde it will be in an exact opposition to the core, at 27 Gemini. when planets station, they approach a degree, slowly slow down, slowly stop, then turn around and slowly pick up speed. The degree of the station is rather helpful in telling astrologers something about the meaning of the retrograde, and this degree is opposite to, and therefore in relationship to, the core of our galaxy. This point is used by precious few astrologers, who have all but given up on fixed stars and fixed points of any kind and who generally will not dare to interpret anything that they have not read about in a book.
What does this mean? Well, let's see. What do you see when you look straight out at the world? Because that is the nature of an opposition relationship: what's right in front of you. Some (like my friend Ani Black) have called this angle on the chart the ZONE OF PROJECTION. It is what we see inside when we look outside; what we see outside that is really inside.
Interpreting the signs, symbols and imagery here, I see a whole new outlook on relationships that is based on your understanding yourself in an entirely different way than ever before. There is some notion being conveyed through these images -- and the actual physical spatial realities -- that says you are in a sense overwhelmed by what is possible and by who you know you are inside. If what you are feeling is not entirely positive, consider the possibility that you are reacting to an overwhelming flood of energy, to vast potentials you had never considered, and that would make anyone a bit nervous.
The interesting thing is that this takes place in Gemini and you may in some way be under the influences of events and people that compel you to heal this seemingly eternal split in your nature and values system. It may be a conservative/liberal split; it may be an adventurer/chicken split; it may be any kind of polar division within you that serves perhaps to make you more interesting and also to paralyse your actions and choices. While you are said to be "stubborn," how much of that is really a kind of reactionary position that keeps you stuck in your current position and allegedly frees you from the responsibility of making decisions?
Deep within, you know all this stuck, stubborn, conservative Taurean stuff is just a cover for what is really going on inside you -- what Alice A. Bailey described as the "blacksmith shop of the soul." The temperatures and pressures inside Taurus run hot and high. But the influences of this world are to run cool and suppressed. And that creates a set of stresses of its own.
The Venus transit of the Sun is going to change that, or it surely can -- and you would be wise to go with the changes and the flow and not resist, because there is more energy here than even you, my Bull cousin, can hold back from. There is no point, and what you experience in these days, weeks and months surely can offer you the gift of going beyond the world or what you thought of as your world.
As Venus makes its retrograde in Gemini, it will oppose not just the galactic core but also a series of rather awesome points and newly discovered planets in Sagittarius and all of these meetings are relevant. I will continue on this theme next week in the Taurus birthday report.
Today's horoscope by Eric Francis appears courtesy of http://cainer.com/ and also appears in the Daily Mirror.
Thought of the Day (Oz Editions)
I would like to thank Jonathan and his newspapers for this awesome opportunity to stand in for him the past two weeks. We learn astrology by doing it, and I have had opportunity to do quite a bit of the stuff lately. Before handing the microphone back to Jonathan, I would like to leave you with a reminder about the Venus-Sun transit that occurs on June 8. It may seem that the world is going mad, but this rare event -- which has not occurred for more than a century -- suggests that other forces are about to intervene. We live in a world dominated by aggressive male energy, and which caters to its whims and entitlements. The Venus-Sun transit represents the beginning of a time of balancing of the energies, and a return to the intuitive.
Aries (March 20-April 19)
You seem to be struggling with the effects of the last week's Mercury station in your sign, but the storm is clearing. You need to play it very cool today because more is developing than you currently know. The advantage of the celestial set-up as it's developing is that, at least, certain factual information and the necessary course of action will become far more clear in the next 24 hours. You could say this is a test of faith, but you would do well to ask, faith in what? Do not invest your faith in anything outside yourself. If there is a test involved in this whole process, that is it.
Taurus (April 19-May 20)
Personal loss is always difficult to cope with, and even if you find it, the silver lining barely seems a consolation. There appear to be two kinds of losses in life, the necessary and the unnecessary. In the opinion of the stars, this was necessary, designed to put you in touch with an aspect of yourself that would otherwise forever remain out of reach and thus out of touch. The closer you are to your own soul, the closer you can be to others; in fact, it is one that makes the other possible at all. In the end, you will count this as a blessing.
Gemini (May 20-June 21)
Today is the final day of Mars in your sign, a condition that occurs for a period of time every two years. While this experience has done much to put you into contact with what you desire, you've seen some of the chaos that can ensue when you move quickly or pursue your goals aggressively. Your agenda has included becoming much more assertive against those in power. Manifestation or claiming one's place in life is not always a quick or easy process. But as affairs settle down this weekend, you can begin counting your gains as well as what you've thrown to the wind.
Cancer (June 21-July 22)
In a world where there's so much to be afraid of, fear is an odd factor. This is especially true given how few of our worries turn out to have any foundation and, accordingly, how much really does go right. What occurs next will lead you to focus on one particular goal, but instead of dwelling on the outcome, I suggest you focus on your motives. Why do you do what you do? That is the very core of your strength. Your motives may appear to threaten people who squint at the light, and if so, you simply must trust your strength. You're free to walk from any fight.
Leo (July 22-Aug. 23)
You have very likely seen the value of maintaining clarity in your relationships. You've adopted a take-charge approach in this aspect of life, though it would be wise to continue monitoring the motives and intentions of others, particularly the ones people display but of which they seem unconscious. If certain friends are acting out of sorts or a bit odd, let their strange behaviour run its course over the next few days. You have more important things on your mind and cannot afford to waste your energy with those who speak out of both sides of their mouth.
Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22)
Your game plan up to this point has been to take the initiative, even if you may have kept quiet while doing it. Over the next few days, it's pretty much a given that others are going to attempt to increase their influence over your affairs, and may attempt to exploit a vulnerability to that end. If you're aware of this before it happens -- and you now are -- you'll be able to close the gap. It may not be necessary to look over your shoulder every moment, but the occasional glance to the left and the right will at least provide better scenery.
Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23)
This is no ordinary time in your life, and I suggest you therefore put your faith in the extraordinary. You have long had the sense that you were destined to great things, but that's different than being destined for authentic honour and distinction. You know better than any of us the extent to which you compromise half of who you are so the other half may be able to survive. In order to thrive, both main aspects of your being must work harmoniously in order for you to prevent the incredible waste of energy that inner conflict engenders.
Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22)
Visiting Egypt some years ago during my astrology training, I was shown a crocodile temple in the middle of the desert. The ancient ritual performed in this temple involved walking through the pen of reptiles fearlessly; they could smell fear, and would snap if they detected it. This has been the story of your life during recent weeks and months, as you've been presented with countless situations that would cause most mortals to retreat, to panic or at least sweat a few bullets. You've done remarkably well, and the people who you've met on this journey agree. Now, on to wider and gentler adventures.
Sagittarius (Nov. 22 - Dec. 22)
Something is coming into balance in your life, something you never would have expected. One way to look at this is male-female balance, both internally and in your relationships. The universe is held together by the same principles that govern alchemy, and one of those is equilibrium. Our insane world is dominated by the masculine principle, and while the feminine may seem to struggle to have its voice heard, that is changing, and changing faster than most people are acknowledging. I'm not talking about a coup. I am talking about simple solutions to complex problems. Let this be your guide.
Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20)
Mars shifting into your opposite sign Cancer will finally take the emphasis off work and put it onto your most intimate relationships. You have for too long borne the brunt of the will, intentions and plans of others. They don't know more than you, and you may have fallen for the illusion that they do. You will, as long as you fail to use what you know. That you are intelligent and ethical is a given. The challenges of the coming weeks will compel you to prioritise what you know is genuinely important. Remember, a leap of faith is never as far as it seems.
Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19)
The ancient Greeks -- among our society's most vital forebears -- worked with the holistic principle, believing that mind, body and spirit need equal attention. Today we call this "new age" and wonder if it makes any sense. This would be a very good principle to advance in your life as the challenges of the next month or two develop -- beginning this weekend. Your work responsibilities are sure to increase rather dramatically, and I suggest corresponding improvements in diet, exercise and recreation. The main thing you want to nourish is your emotional health, always a sensitive point for you. With love and care, you can.
Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20)
You are self-sacrificing by nature; nobody had to teach you that other people count. For a Piscean, the practical distinction between "we" and "me" is less than for any other sign, and you have developed all kinds of habits to adopt in a world where few people can see past the mirror. But take a look! You do exist, and existence strongly suggests you're entering one of the most creative and daring periods of many years. To the average person walking the street, this would be a perfectly meaningless statement. To you, it's a gift long awaited but barely expected.
