In Protest of Perversion
Perversion: noun; distortion or corruption of the original course, meaning, or state of something... and what Venus and our ancestors have to say about it.
We (Americans) live in a culture that worships sexual perversion.
In Sobonfu Somé’s The Spirit of Intimacy she details the beautiful and intentional spiritual orientation the Dagara have towards relationships of all kinds. In one particular section, she addresses how the Dagara people orient to sex. She states that her people believe when someone is desiring a relationship with another person that is purely sexual (I interpreted this as a sexual relationship with no intention of being friends, partners, or caring for the other person outside of the sexual encounter) that they are actually desiring a connection with Spirit. This blew my mind.
The Dagara are a group of indigenous people in west Africa who reside in parts of Burkina Faso, Ghana, and the Ivory Coast. There, girls and boys still go through traditional rites of passage into women and men and marriages are arranged by elders. Somé says married couples have sex when they want to be closer to Spirit. They don’t engage with sex in the way that we (Americans) do because the community is constantly in ritual. The rituals make the community members feel “high” even though state altering substances are not regularly ingested. This “high” from Spirit leads them to desire things like sex and drugs much less and with a different motivation driving it than what we are used to in the States.
The Dagara also do not have a concept of romance. This is because the regular rituals they partake in have a lot to do with affirming the value of each community member. When a person is in the womb, the elders put the mother in a trance state to directly communicate with the spirit of the fetus. It is during this ritual that the baby’s spirit makes their purpose for reincarnation and the gifts they have for the community known. Even before someone is born, their community is over the Moon ecstatic for their existence. Romance doesn’t exist for them because romance is only needed in a culture where everyone does not feel they are loved and valued by their whole community. We seek romance to fill the emotional void an entire affirming community is supposed to fill.
Marriage for them is not about romance and being “in love.” It’s about pairing with someone who has a complimentary life purpose to yours and working with that person to bring the maximum of both of your gifts back to the community. It is understood that the “romantic” love comes later on. Marriages are not private as the marriage is seen to exist more for the larger community than the individuals in the marriage. If someone in the community notices a couple not getting along, best believe it will become the whole community’s business and everyone will work together to get to the bottom of the issue. Because as the Dagara see it, if the marriage doesn’t make it, then neither will the community. Couples are required to participate in weekly and yearly rituals to maintain the Spirit that binds the union. In adulthood initiations, young women and men are taught the purpose of their biological sex and how they are to relate to one another in respectful and Spirit-honoring ways.
“…romance is only needed in a culture where everyone does not feel they are loved and valued by their whole community. We seek romance to fill the emotional void an entire affirming community is supposed to fill.”
Now, I’m not advocating for arranged marriage, nor am I committing to leaving behind romance anytime soon. This is just how one indigenous culture operates. But the level of intentionality the Dagara put into relationships made it impossible for me to ignore the lack of intention Americans (and other peoples influenced and colonized by western Europeans) are encouraged to put into relationships. The lack of intention is so glaring that I’ve had no choice but to come to the conclusion that the way we date and sex in the United States is deeply perverted and disturbed.
Most of us were never initiated into adulthood like the Dagara and many other indigenous peoples still do. This has left us all perpetually children; and so we date and sex like children. This is a problem because dating and sex are not for children. Yet we bring a reckless, child-like mindset to these very adult-only situations.
Hook up culture, pursuing someone because you like how they look, ghosting, affairs, dishonesty, love bombing, romantic obsessions, very violent, taboo, or disgusting kinks, consenting to sex with people who have clearly shown they don’t respect you, purity culture, sugar daddy/baby relationships, pornography, prostitution, frequent and dramatic emotional highs and lows, and identifying by our sexual orientation are all perversions to me. And that is not even mentioning more extreme perversions like pedophilia, grooming, rape, incest, and domestic abuse. And as far as hook up culture goes, are we just not supposed to talk about how most people we know who engage in regular, risky, non-commital sexual behavior also have a history of (usually repeated, often from childhood) sexual abuse? So much of our normalized sex culture is actually a normalized trauma response.
These perversions result from a culture that pushes reckless and messy sexual and romantic relationships as not only the norm, but the goal. Our media tells us it is not real love if it doesn’t cause us constant emotional distress and started because someone cheated, lied, or did something else they weren’t supposed to do. And we have to ask ourselves why a country that profits from us being dysregulated and unhappy would want us to make a mess of all our relationships? Hopefully that answer is obvious.
So, what does this have to do with astrology? Well, even though its retrograde has ended, we are still deep in Venus retrograde energy until it leaves Sidereal Pisces, the sign where it stationed retrograde, on May 31. Venus is the planet of sex and relationships and Pisces is where it exalts. This means that Pisces is the sign where Venus can operate at its BEST. As the final sign of the zodiac, Pisces is the sign of intentional spiritual liberation. Pisces is where we detach from the material, tap into the metaphysical, and get free on a soul level. Meaning that we can ascend, evolve, and reincarnate into something vibrating at a higher consciousness level than humans on Earth. Since Venus exalts here, this is the God ordained purpose of ALL our relationships (romantic or otherwise): to co-evolve into something greater than what we originally incarnated as.
Venus first entered Pisces this year on January 27 and stationed retrograde on March 1. It stationed direct on April 12. We are still fresh out of the retrograde and deep in its shadow. A Venus retrograde is a time for us to re-evaluate how we relate and connect to others. In Pisces, this is specifically about re-evaluating the spiritual purpose behind our relationships. How are the people around you supposed to help you evolve? How are you supposed to do the same for them?
The purpose behind our relationships has been especially loud since this entire transit has been coupled with a mutual reception between Venus and Jupiter. Mutual reception occurs between two planets when they are in each other's signs. Jupiter rules Pisces and Jupiter has been in Taurus since May 1 2024. Venus is the ruler of Taurus. Taurus is the sign of relationship roles and the culture specific norms that define them. Jupiter’s year-long transit through Taurus has tasked us with reconsidering what we believe about cultural identities like race, gender, class, occupation, but also relationship role identities like spouse, friend, coworker, parent, grandchild, etc. What is the purpose of our relationships? More importantly, what is the purpose of the role we play in those relationships? How does the purpose of a husband differ from the purpose of a wife? Where do they align? Understanding the role we play in all of our relationships allows us to understand the purpose of the role, the relationship itself, and the purpose of our individual existence.
When we understand why God made us a friend, a lover, a daughter, a woman, then we understand how we are to show up in each of these roles and relationships in healthy, not-perverted ways. When we don’t, we think approaching relationships recklessly, without intention, and without forethought is okay. We don’t question our desires and kinks. We don’t consider our impact on other people. We feel shame for our sex drives. We long and we search for a kind of love that is not really love to fill the hole in us that screams out for a more holy form of union.
The purpose of sex is to make babies and experience oneness with God. The purpose of relationship is to align with people who will help you fulfill your life purpose. We push back against these ideas because they have been hijacked by Abrahamic religions and weaponized against us. But really, these ideas belonged to our indigenous African ancestors first. And they were not forced onto the population through violence. They were upheld through careful ritual and rites of passage and the goal of making each generation better than the last.
These ideas are confusing to Americans because we are programmed to pursue pleasure. Even the United States Decleration of Independence promises a right to the pursuit of happiness. Why is happiness mentioned but not stability, community, housing, or peace? Wouldn't all of these things bring about happiness by default? The formation of these things requires us to set aside short term happiness and immediate pleasure to do the hard work of building a stable foundation for the things that actually bring joy and pleasure. Long lasting satisfaction is what comes after short term self denial. But in a culture with a “2-day shipping” perspective on love and sex, we have lost our tolerance for that and instead have resorted to our present alternative.
What would it look like for us to be more mindful of our relationships? To truly honor and revere sex? To value and support marriages and families? To approach new friendships with the same intention as life-long partnership? We may get a more peaceful and less traumatized world.
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Such a profound take on relationships in colonized countries. I share many of the same opinions you do. This article is a true deep dive into the higher purpose of human relationships and bonds.