on lovers, girlhood, + the power of the erotic
I’ve been thinking about the shift I’ve made in the last year to concentrate my work around the erotic. It’s not always evident in the day to day so I want to talk to you about the ways it's spinning its threads behind the scenes.
I address my audience as lovers in the beginning of every newsletter to interrupt and redirect how we think about ourselves. I use it to reframe how I think about you as readers. I know all of you love someone(s), some thing(s), some place(s), some idea(s). Everyone loves. Everyone is a lover.
I also use it to invoke Venus because she's vital to my work. Venus is a goddess of love. She's also a goddess of fate - more on that below.
There are ways we are taught to love and ways we learn to love innately. When I address you with the word lover, I'm not addressing you in a possessive way - you're not my lover. But I address you as if you are a lover to bring that identity forth because it's a kind of resistance against forces that aren't loving.
Eros is the primordial force of love that runs through all of life. At the risk of sounding cliché, it is the power of love. I'm going to talk a lot about power and eros in this newsletter. If those subjects give you the ick, this one might not be for you and that's ok. Onward and upward.
My most-booked consult right now is the Leveling Up Consult. This is an astrology session about the legacy written in your chart, about reputation and visibility and power.
When we’re talking about power reflected in someone's chart we have to also look at the ways someone is disempowered. Some of this is astrological and some of it is just pointing out the facts of systems that uplift some and oppress others, creating the both illusive and very real hierarchies in which we live.
So in the Leveling Up consult, we’re looking at the ways clients have felt or become disempowered and illuminating the path to empowerment.
The vast majority of my clients are women* or nonbinary folks. Many of them are racialized women. So you can understand, I hope, that disempowerment is part and parcel of these lived experiences.
*generally it's safe to assume that if I use the terms women or woman I'm including trans women in my definition of women. All different types of women have different versions of the universal experiences I'm going to reference.
I identify as a lesbian, which is quite simply a woman who loves women. While I keep my personal romantic escapades very separate from client work, this identity informs absolutely everything I think and do. For me, loving women often takes profoundly platonic shapes. I also identify as queer, fully support folks who reject the gender binary, and aim to hold different intersecting identities with non-hierarchical reverence. That said, for me, it's important to keep the identity of 'woman who loves women' close because there is something specific about being socialized in girlhood and womanhood that breathes assertively in my blood.
This thing is unifying, protective, intrinsically reciprocal, empathetic and empowering.
It comes from a shared known disempowerment and a will to act in ways that seek to usurp it. It is love and care-full and a clear form of eros.
This last week was filled with more news about horrifying ways women had their power taken away from them. I’m not going to make you relive that. In the wake of it though, there were videos flying around social media showing women uplifting other women.
Women passing a woman modeling for a photoshoot and shouting about how great she looked. Women hyping pregnant women showing off their bellies. Women helping other women get out of creepy situations with men on the street. A woman shouting down from her apartment window asking if it’s cold out and the enthusiastic, knowing and familial reply of the women walking below. Women drying their hands extra long in the bathroom in case some other woman was afraid to make a “gross” noise. Women helping new mothers load groceries in their car. Women dancing wildly in an elevator and when the doors parted to reveal another group of women, laughter erupting in togetherness.
We know how to take care of each other. It is somehow both learned and innate.
These videos helped me out of a freeze state after the news. If you identify as a woman, you probably have something instinctual in your body that helps you experience these life snippets in a very particular way.
When I go out to a new party, I share my location with my best friend. I give the address where I’m going to another woman friend and I text when I get home. When I’m feeling down about my body, I send a selfie to a girlfriend and she hypes me up. When a man is being erratic in a store, or saying some bullshit at a dinner, or a girl is getting catcalled on the street, I exchange knowing glances with other women because even a look lends a little power of safety; says "I'm on alert and I see you are too and I've got you and I believe you've got me". When I’m out dancing alone, it’s always the other women that flock near because our bodies in shared space protect our capacity to let loose. If you know, you really know.
Many of the videos on socials flashed with the word “girlhood” over them. This was celebratory innocence on display.
But girlhood isn’t just innocent. Girlhood is the reclamation of innocence. Girlhood is woven from the ways we unconsciously learn about our disempowerment and our instincts to create innocence and levity and mutual care despite a world that exerts power over us. Womanhood is the more mature and conscious understanding of those dynamics. The definition of what makes a woman is shaped by both our oppression and our collective resistance. In other words, womanhood is defined by power.
In the last year, I entered an astrological period that activates my own 10th house. I have a Libra 10th house, ruled by Venus in detriment in the opposite sign of Aries. You could say that the ruler of my 10th house is a woman who is in some ways disempowered, and in other ways, very entrenched in the resistance.
She's invested in womanhood. Despite the challenges written into my Venus story, this planet actually has a lot of sway and power in my chart. She is the only traditional planet in an angular house and is the benefic of the sect. She occupies the house that describes "home" but she's in a “foreign place” for Venus, making her a literal reflection of my immigration to France. She is part of why I’m specializing in 10th house topics. You don't have to understand what all of those things mean but understand that Venus is always present for me when I’m talking about astrology and power.
Any way you look at it, the 10th house is about power.
It describes the pain of power struggles and the fears of imbalances. It expresses the power and vulnerability of visibility. It chronicles anxiety-laced hierarchies and hopes for an upper hand. It pinpoints places of ease and sharing and mutual respect for all kinds of collaborations.
The 10th house characterizes who is holding power, who is taking it and who is giving it away. And it delineates the power of our legacies to shape culture and the power of the culture to shape our legacies.
We unconsciously give a lot of power to the culture. And we can consciously take it back or shift where that power is held.
Power is erotic and eroticism is power.
Read that sentence again and let it land in your body.
Whether or not it’s used in oppressive or mutually consensual ways, power is the pulse of eros.
There are so many kinds of power. Not everybody is destined for an oppressive kind of power. Through my work with the 10th house, I can say that everybody is destined for some kind of disempowerment and empowerment.
In the astrology I practice, if you want to know who has the power in your life you have to look at the 10th house. If you want to know where the power is and what shape it takes, you have to look at the 10th house. If you want to know what kind of power feels good vs. what feels icky about power, you have to look at the 10th house. If you want to know where and why power is blocked, you have to look at the 10th house. If you want to feel empowered to live your specific legacy, you’ll find that story in the 10th house.
I think about this and it feels so erotic to be tapped into the power of the chart.
When I retitled my newsletter last year Fate’s Uses of the Erotic, I was already deep in the 10th house work. I was also directly referencing a seminal text by Black lesbian feminist author Audre Lorde called Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.
In the opening paragraph of that essay she writes:
"There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feelings. In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives."
Audre Lorde recognized that the erotic comes from a spiritual plane, something bigger than us while also naming that it makes roots within us. She also describes the ways oppression abuses that power, specifically naming corruption, distortion and - most explicitly for women - suppression of the erotic itself.
When we are cut off from our power, blinded to it, living in unconscious relationship to it, we become subject to all kinds of oppression.
"the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough."
Audre Lorde goes on to make an argument for connecting to the erotic; for seeing it, refusing to compartmentalize it to sex and romance, and recognizing it as a profoundly creative source of power in our lives to make genuine change in the world.
It's important to note that Lorde defines this power as living on a spiritual plane.
Astrology is very technical and scientific but it is also spiritual and cosmological. So let me be very clear:
When I say Fate’s Uses of the Erotic, I am explicitly naming that there is something bigger than us and bigger than the worldly systems that seek to oppress, possess and exploit us. Something that wields the erotic as power within our lives.
The foundation of my astrological practice is Hellenistic which holds the notion of “fate” as a fundamental principle.
When I say Fate’s Uses of the Erotic, I’m talking about all the ways power shows up for each of us, moves through our life and legacy, supports and disadvantages us.
I’m talking about the power of the cosmos because my work is to make that power visible. To empower you with consciousness of it. To empower you to align with it instead of against it or worse, underneath a system that seeks to usurp it.
A large part of Hellenistic astrology derives from Orphism, an ancient Greek religion whose hymns describe literal movements of different parts of the sky in very esoterically-coded language. The Orphic Hymn to Aphrodite/Venus reads
"The triple Fates are rul'd by thy decree, and all productions yield alike to thee:" ~trans. Thomas Taylor
meaning that Venus, goddess of love, regulates the primordial force of Fate itself.
Furthermore, in the order of the Orphic Hymns, the hymn to the Moirai (the Fates) directly follows the Hymn to Eros.
If Eros is the power underlying the life force, then Fate is the direction of that power.
The better we know our Fate, the less we allow suppression of our power. The better we know our Fate, the clearer our channel to Eros.
My work is to help you know your fate and understand your power so you can live a more erotic life.
My 10th house consultLeveling Up is not about climbing some patriarchal construction of false hierarchy. It's much closer to bringing forth the kind of power that feels the way girlhood and womanhood feel when they're thriving and gleeful and flourishing. It's about lifting the power of the erotic to a level where you can see it, work with it, hold it simultaneously on spiritual and visible planes, let it burst through you, give it and your life the power it’s destined for.
If you want to talk about the ways you’ve felt disempowered, the power you’re ready for, and the pulse of eros in your life, we can talk about it.