Tom JacobsRecently I worked with a new client with some Lilith history ready to be processed. Her ex-boyfriend’s porn addiction came up in her reading, and her Spirit Guides got loud, “Dude! Run with that.” It seemed like we were talking about the ex, so my brain didn’t get the point, but I went with it.
A door into an interesting conversation flung itself open rather unceremoniously. It ended up being about a family lineage issue of a culturally-learned mistreatment of women. My client’s deceased grandmother came to the reading to offer her support in helping see how to unravel this heritage. Her experience with the ex-boyfriend had everything to do with repeating this energetic inheritance of the expectation of not being treated as an equal and with absolute presence, something she set out for herself to learn in this life.
It got me thinking: A man (her ex), holds an image of “woman” in his consciousness. When he meets women, this Platonic image can be the reference point to gauge interest level, or perhaps the sense of potential connectedness. There can then be a disconnect between the addict and whomever he meets, dates or lives with.
And in this culture, with the level of consumption of images and other media, the definition of addict seems to me more fuzzy than ever. I mean that the advertising machine we expose ourselves to when we consume any ad revenue-driven media creates fuzziness. I’m not saying that every American who watches television is a porn addict, but this is the energy being piped into your house when the boob tube’s on – pun intended.
Enter Lilith: She represents the wild woman archetype, free in her sexuality, who’s often relegated to the darkest corners of our collective shadow. The major place into which she’s shooed is the sex industry, where it’s considered acceptable for a woman to express her wildness. She’s paid money to do it, and that seems a fair exchange to most involved, as long as the item line on the credit card statement is sufficiently generic.
But look at what’s happening here: wildness is being packaged and then consumed as a commodity.
The experience of our wildness can be relegated to sports, the sex trade and war (with professional wrestling being somehow trying to be a theatrical hybrid of all three…). This natural part of us we think needs to have some concrete corner of the culture in which to be explored and consumed. These three arenas provide places in which our animal natures are encouraged and fed, and look at the audience size of each! We need access to our wildness, but since we perceive can’t just express it naturally as it is because of our cultural programming, we pay certain people a lot of money to act it out in front of us.
I don’t write about porn to be sensational; I’m not trying to titillate you. I’m a 2nd-house Scorpio with Venus-Pluto in Libra in the 12th house, and have been aware of the way that some men look at some women for as long as I can remember, and my sense from childhood is that something weird was happening, something not good at all. I also had a father whose off-color jokes about women made me cringe and scowl at him (he tried forever to figure out how I could have emanated from him!). I had to learn to relate to women-as-Lilith, my natural other half, even as I wasn’t taught to do it. And the more of us who can do this, men and women, the better off we all are. The thing is that anyone who wants to can do it. It’s about getting back in the body and becoming willing to meet each other with total presence.
If we learn anything from Lilith’s story (see an article on my site about my approach to Lilith), it needs to begin with the fact that we all carry the wild, and that letting it out doesn’t have to be destructive. And that men and women experiencing each other in their wildness can rob the Platonic imagery constantly thrown at us of all power, enabling us to be with each other as we truly are.