The Art of Sexual Magic Pt. 3

This is a seat featuring a carving of a lingam well-loved by tourists

Two weeks ago, I attended a poetry slam in a neighboring city. The poem that I read was called The Goddess’ Sonnet which is centrally about the power of women to create desire. My reading was preceded by another artist who did a fantastic job alluding to the joy of sex from a woman’s perspective in a story about eating brisket. While I was reciting The Goddess’ Sonnet, I couldn’t help but feel a pang of giddiness, “I can’t believe I’m saying this publicly”, I thought. The poem uses a series of metaphors to describe how women elicit desire from their partners, but also about what they love about intimacy. I was laughing on the inside when I walked off the stage. It felt liberating to express myself sensually in a public forum. That experience inspires this article.

After the event, I reflected deeply not only on my words and reaction, but also about the politics about what is allowed. What is the context in which women can express their desire? I felt comfortable reading the poem in a bar in front of a group of poetry die-hards, professional and amateur poets and poetry fans, but thought that I wouldn’t feel as comfortable performing that specific poem and uttering those exact words in an open mic at a library or place frequented by families. Maybe my co-participant at the slam would feel differently and would find no problem reading her meat poem in front of any audience. Its allusions do allow for multiple interpretations. On the other hand, maybe she would feel a similar sense of discomfort about delivering her sloppy brisket wordplay at a family event. This question may boil down to confidence and defiance. For example, many women rappers have no problem baring their sexual souls to the public, though much of what is rapped by women about desire focuses on men’s sexual desires and how women make themselves available to give men what they want; how they shape-shift to fulfill men’s desires, thereby rendering their desires secondary in importance. The Goddess’ Sonnet is about how women, in being women, fulfill the desires of men, but it is also about how women’s beingness creates the very conditions for them to have their desires fulfilled. It is about women being and receiving. The tenor of the poem is spiritual and co-honoring the lovers. 

This leads me to the first purpose of this article: the question of the politics of desire. My feeling is that women are expected to walk what is essentially a political and social tightrope when they express their desire based on the 5 Ws and how. What is being said, who is speaking, when are they speaking, what are they saying and what are they wearing when they speak, where are they speaking, and what medium are they using to express their desire? Let’s be honest, men are not required by society to walk a tightrope in expressing their desires, the world accepts that they have desires and many parts of our world march to the beat of these expressions whether they are political, social, financial, sexual, or anything else. What are the conditions in which society feels comfortable to receive women’s desirous words? Under what conditions is there pushback and derision or acceptance and celebration? How coy are women still expected to be in expressing their desire?

As I write these words, I’m listening to 90s R&B with such distinct lyrics as Mariah Carey’s, Dreamlover (1993):

I want a lover who knows me, yeah,

Who understands how I feel inside (ooh, baby) 

Someone to comfort and hold me 

Through the long, lonely nights 

'Til the dawn 

Why don't you take me away

To Janet Jackson’s, You Want This (1993):

Not anyone I'll just let in my heart 

You have to be hungry for me 

Girls may have been easy 

But you have to please me 

What makes me think that I can say this to you? 

I know how bad you want this

If you want my future then 

You better work it, boy 

No, it won't come easy, 

No I know you want this 

By the time I'm through with you 

You'll be beggin' me for more

To Toni Braxton’s, You’re Making Me High (1996):

I'll always think of you 

Inside of my private thoughts 

I can imagine you 

Touching my private parts 

And just the thought of you 

I can't help but touch myself 

That's why I want you so bad

… Can't get my mind off you 

I think I might be obsessed 

The very thought of you 

Makes me want to get undressed 

I want to be with you 

In spite of what my heart says 

I guess I want you too bad

It is consequential that every single one of these artists is fully clothed while singing these words in their official music videos. It is consequential that as Mariah Carey’s lyrics have become more explicit since her debut album in 1993 and as she wears more revealing clothing in public performances of her music, she has received considerably more vitriol from misogynist detractors. It’s actually awful. Yes, these lyrics from the early to mid-1990s do express women’s desire for sexual fulfillment, but they are also about women chasing the object of their desire and doing things rather than being things to make men (or other women) desire them.

One of my main points in writing The Goddess’ Sonnet is that women just have to be and they are desirable. There is something deeply feminine about this perspective. Women are a buffet of exciting things to explore. It is not the nature or purpose of the buffet to chase the customer. Instead, the buffet presents its options, women revel in the cornucopia of their beingness and with the woman’s consent, the lover (man or woman) will do the exploring. I am not suggesting that women remain inert objects when receiving their partners, quite the opposite, but rather that they are enough and they are capable of creating desire through their form and that form is sufficient unto itself. Human beings are hard-wired for this to be a truism. With great self-love, woman find that they are complete and completely desirable and that self-acceptance empowers the pure potentiality of the couple.

The second purpose of this article is to contextualize and ground The Goddess’ Sonnet. This poem has been transformed into a track of rap music delivered by the poetess, Oyereyi (see @oyereyi_ on Instagram for a clip of this song) for our Budding Orchid Apartheid album (to be distributed at the end of 2024). Team members on this project, Oyereyi and Cole Mize have turned this sonnet into an anthem that unleashes and relishes in feminine beingness and desire. In a sense, we imagine these words as what the vulva would say if it could speak. The Budding Orchid Apartheid album is at once an impassioned call for zero tolerance of female genital mutilation (FGM) and also a celebration of women’s bodies in their diverse beauty and shapes. One of the reasons that FGM occurs is because communities fear women expressing or exploring their sexuality. Women’s desire is seen as the Achille’s Heel of social order. The girl’s sexual wings are clipped so that they can’t sexually fly or supposedly cause the violation of sacrosanct social norms. What men and boys do with their own bodies in these communities is left to their discretion. We are trying to normalize women’s anatomy, human form, and desire.

Here are a couple of lines from that poem:

Beautiful goddesses reveal your diary’s quotes 

Lotus, uncage your potential and speak easy

Your deep heartfelt desires, give them keynotes

Reclaim and command your dreams, cut the mystique

…Say: My door opens your gateway of perception

And my goddess energy welds your inner factions

In the Art of Sexual Magic, Margo Anand (1996) describes desire as magic’s (or manifestation’s) motivating force. She writes that desire has a poor reputation in western society because it is seen as an impediment to salvation or enlightenment. She writes that the “desires of the flesh” are perceived to keep people tethered to the worldly or material life and that the Christian scripture encourages believers to renounce temptations and free themselves from earthly bondage (165). Anand flips the script and looks at using desire to transform one’s existence, using desire to manifest goals.

She focuses on three types of desire thereby disrupting the effort to reduce desire, as such, to sex:

1. Desire to transform yourself: healing negative psychological or emotional states and raising your consciousness, changing your state of being, becoming more loving, sensitive, intelligent, strong, and orgasmic;

2. Desire for fulfilling relationships: creating new relationships, enhancing intimacy, depth, and the love of existing relationships; and

3. Desire to transform one’s environment: wanting a greater degree of financial freedom and abundance, new employment, the fulfilling use of personal skills and talents, and the manifestation of material objects.

Among those who claim to forsake the need for material things (e.g., worldly objects), she notes that one of the qualities of the magician is to shift between planes of reality: to embrace the good to be derived from material and non-material things. She says, “As your skill in sexual magic increases, you are going to be asked to become intensely alive in a very physical, sexual way, while at the same time holding before you a clear mental vision of your desires” (166). I will discuss this insight in more detail in the future.

Circling back to the beginning of this newsletter. I mentioned that it takes confidence and some defiance for women to express their desire. Anand affirms the importance of self-esteem for the expression of any kind of desire that will manifest into a realized goal whether that is sexual pleasure or not, and about using the alchemy of sexual pleasure to derive some other desired material or non-material outcome.

Anand notes that

“One obstacle to magic is an underlying sense of unworthiness: on the one hand, we desire beneficial changes in our lives; on the other hand, we don’t think we deserve them, and this creates an internal split that divides our energy” (166).

She writes that one easy way to solve the issue of self-esteem in charting and reaching your goals is to start your practice with modest desires and aim at transformations that will not provoke internal division within yourself. This is consistent with other spiritual teachings: it is very difficult to achieve goals when you try to do/be something that you don’t believe that you are. Instead, the trick is to incrementally adopt a new persona and incrementally build new desires that are tethered to that new persona.

When I decided in 2016 to become a poet, I didn’t magically become a poet. Instead, I had to create a vision for what I wanted and take steps to become the poet I imagined which included not only writing poetry, but adopting the persona of a professional poet. Action had to be put on the vision to make it a reality. Your vision of what you want should be detailed. Since your subconscious does not know the difference between an experience lived or imagined, by imagining new opportunities and experiences with a new persona in concrete detail in a state of peace, and following the law of assumption (a practice used by Olympic athletes to achieve their goals), by assuming your vision is in progress, by invoking the scenes of your innate desires realized, you will eventually see shifts in the way that you conceptualize yourself and express yourself in the world, and exude greater confidence in doing so. I have seen this work in my own life and often over a very short period of time. 

This article has been a two-part message to especially women:

1. embrace your desires, they are legitimate and beautiful, and

2. now that your ability to realize your goals (desires) in life is intricately tied to how confident you are in expressing your heartfelt wishes. Have the courage to tell people and yourself what you want.

Honor your right to have and express desires and express them often. Step off the political tightrope that tries to control who can express desire and how, and walk away to live authentically on your own terms. My team and I have attempted to do just that through the sonnet and the larger album project. I will talk more about the ways that desire can be harnessed to achieve goals in future articles.