Hardcore Softcore? Sacred Carnal?

Good evening sexpot readers! As usual, your divine hostess Claudia is pondering sex again tonight. After a week of exciting meetings, events and opportunities, most of them involving sex positive people and well, just lots of sex really, I confess, I am left very thoughtful.

My week began at the delicious Shakti Tantra Sensual Eating event; more on this to follow in a blog post all of it's own as it was simply too good to gloss over. So, after the event I was most definitely all senses alive in readiness for the launch of the Erotic Art Expo in Liverpool, UK. The eating event (little teaser photo below) was my idea of heaven. What could be more delightful than to share my time with a room full of sensual, sex loving food afficionados with full permission to make as much noise as they desired whilst devouring the incredible platters served up by a critically acclaimed chef, Robert Owen Brown.

In the same week, I was invited to participate on the panel as part of a sex workers 'show and tell' feature to support the art on display for the next month or two at this venue. The first part of the evening took place in the gallery space itself and featured strippers, a BDSM rope work demo and a performance by the artist known as Amazing Mouse. Now, I consider myself pretty broad minded, little shocks me, or so I thought. Mouse's performance however took me to some of my edges, I'll admit. She employs such brutal, hardcore acts whilst dressed in the most girly pink poodle outfit, a juxtaposition more than a little disarming from the outset. That was nothing. By the time she had finished, Mouse had eaten dogfood, fucked herself in both orifices with same dog food smeared hands, followed by two plastic doggy bones and two candles all alight with bundles of sparklers! She also filled her pussy and her anus with soapy water and showed us the power of remembering to do your kegels ladies!!!!!

So, my week had already flitted between tantric sensuality, to a show that was so hardcore it was impossible for me to call it even sexy, in fact, I was lost for words to summarise what I felt as I didn't even know what I felt, in fact I was unable to describe what I felt for 2 days afterwards! Then it came to me, Mouse transcends our ideas of what it is to inhabit a body, to be a sexual object or being and to become a purely physical vessel in the name of her art. The shock of seeing this petite, softly spoken woman fisting herself and jetting water from her ass was really quite something. I realised in the moment I'd worked out what I felt, that I would rather inhabit a world of Mouses (Mice?!!) than a world of conservative-play-it-safe-censors who feel it is their right somehow to tell me what it is okay to do with my body or not; all roads leading back to Rome and the very essence of the Sex Work Activist debate.

So I salute the likes of Mouse and other seekers, pioneers and taboo breakers. I salute those who are willing to risk the disapproval of the mainstream, and to step outside the dream being dreamed by the many in favor of living their own truth. I am currently considering why so many spiritual practices disown the carnal in favor of the holy. Why do we disown the body, the pleasures of the body in order to believe that we are 'good' people, or that this somehow makes us higher in ideal? For me, the Tantric path marries my sexuality, sensuality, spirituality and political drive. Long may I ride the waves of intimate communion in the spirit of LOVE!