Each of us has an emotional boundary for what we can endure, accept and enjoy, plus a personal place where the red flags start going up. When there’s too many warning signs, we usually bail, either honestly with honorable intentions or with some emergency escape system, possibly involving a friend texting you or calling you with a fake crisis so you can bail on your frightening screamer of a paramour in application. Or some other slick or brutally painful and nongraceful way out of a thing you don’t want to do with someone else. You know the deal.
Well, I was in a situation recently where I was in a room that was talking about sexuality and the music industry. I have two decades of experience in the music industry and about three years experience in the most hardcore aspects of the sex industry. When it comes to the more softcore sides of it, I can throw in about five years of personal training and connection to capitalist sexuality. Yet, when it came time for some of the people to speak, I was greeted with the most confounding, limiting, fearful, judgemental and disappointing perspectives I have heard on modern sexuality in quite some time. I realized instantly in that moment that I am NOT one of the people of the status quo in society at all, not a single molecule of my life, and not a single moment of time from my daily journey.
I had red flags go up like cray-zeee when I heard the multiple partner criticism, but to be fair, it was criticizing those who participate in multiple partner sexuality, without using any honesty or truth or communication with the other partners. And that’s not polyamory, that’s just cheating, and swinging without integrity. I’m not about that at all, and I join forces with anyone criticizing that type of thang. I don’t lie to my lovers, and I don’t let them lie to me and willingly turn a blind eye. No, sir!
So, I learned that, without shame or regret, I am basically unfit to converse with the average person in society about sex and love, because their sexuality may be so oppressed, and possibly struggling with conservative ethics and maybe (almost probably) drowning in judgemental ideas about someone else with an active sex life, whether they are being paid for having sex or not, that I can’t even deal with their condemnation of my career in carnal/intellectual/sexual and spiritual pleasure. I couldn’t care any less. I’m not raising any red flags in my own morality code, and if I make anyone afraid because of my openness or honesty about doing porn or erotic massage or even escorting, then the red flag that goes up in my head tells me that I shouldn’t ever make time to share certain levels of conversation with people like this.
There are layers and layers of truth to everything said and done. If you can ask someone to take off the first layer of something because it’s offensive and bothering you, then that’s possible and preferable. But if someone is offending you with something they speak from the center of their soul, then it’s a hundred times harder to ask them to change.
The choice is yours, the war is yours and the struggle is yours. See which layers and boundaries you are willing to explore, and then know how much energy you will put into opening up that Pandora’s box!
Remember your boundaries and barriers. And remember the layers and levels of life and love!
You can’t close a can of worms once it’s opened.
Always in kindness and love,
Addi Stewart
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