Monday, April 30, 2012

I Is For Initiation

I should warn you, I suppose: my opinions can be pretty strong. That is one of the reasons I founded this new blog.

I joined the Pagan Blog Project back in January, and have been following along on that my public blog; but I got to a point where the stuff I want to talk about wasn't right for that place. I want to talk about darker, angrier, rootier stuff; also I really need to be able to swear like a fucking pirate, which just wasn't appropriate there, or maybe didn't feel appropriate there. So many restrictions there, ones that I placed upon myself, and don't now know how to find my way out of. But I will have freedom.

So I thought I would continue the posts over here, mostly. So here is my opinion on initiation.

I don't like it. It squicks me right the fuck out, as a matter of fact.

I mean, fair enough, I'm not a joiner; a hermit and artist and ISFP where the I (introverted tendencies) consistently pins out at ninety-eight (sometimes literally one hundred) percent can hardly be expected to be; but it's not just that. I am a feminist, also, and a radical one at that (radical meaning 'root', and yes, it's related to 'radish'), and so, I understand that consent is sacrosanct.

Part of that of course is having a pair of personality-disordered parents; my mother being somewhere on the spectrum for narcissistic personality disorder, and my father pinned way into the red for obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. The both of them, pretty much, in their own separately fucked-up ways, have little concept that the rest of the world is not part of themselves; and so there wasn't really much hope that they understood proper boundaries. And consent, true consent, must be built on a foundation of strong boundaries. Because consent must include being able to freely say no.

And that's the thing with initiation. Besides the fact that I simply can't shake the feeling of it being just a form of hazing, of doing something unpleasant and frankly bullying to someone to make them part of a club, which they then perpetuate by inflicting on new members, it goes against consent. Because if you can't tell me what you are going to do to me, then I cannot consent to it. It is that simple.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Initiation is a tricky one for me.

I am innately against the concept of initiation because I come from a school system where it was practised. It accomplished absolutely nothing and I refused to take part when it came my turn to be the "initiator".
It is ingrained in me as nothing more than permission to bully and humiliate in the name of some outmoded classist system.

However, I feel there is a stark difference between the initiaion rites of modern "traditions" and more aboriginal ones. Is that me being racist and uninformed? I don't know.

Maybe it comes down to: "I don't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member" ;)