lb_lee: A clay sculpture of a heart, with a black interior containing little red, brown, white, green, and blue figures. (plural)
[personal profile] lb_lee
EDIT: well dick, Rosen put it all up on his website already! Silly me.

While on a bookstore adventure with [personal profile] nevanna , we splurged on a half dozen books, including Michael A. Rosen's self-published Sexual Portraits: Photographs of Radical Sexuality (from 1990). Mr. Rosen is still alive today, and has magnaminously put the book (among others) up for free download as a PDF! (You can also buy his books or prints from him; support your fellow artists!)

I bought the book for fun. What I didn't expect is for a very many-selved interview (and photoset) to appear in it! (There's also another, briefer interview, which I'm skipping.) A couple, named William and Sybil (yes really) discuss their personas' relationships to themselves and each other in detail, and the photoset shows different personas together. I am transcribing the interview here and also uploading the photoset for posterity.

Note: this photoset and interview involves ageplay, Master/Slave and goddess play, and pre-K headmates in adult vessels having kinky relationships with each other. Anyone who tries to start shit about child molestation here will be banned and have their comments deleted.


A set of four photos of William and Sybil. The first, of Baby Pixie and Master Billy, shows Baby Pixie in a cute baby bonnet, Mary Janes, and a flowing white shift, while Master Billy wears black leather cap, vest, briefs, and boots, giving himself a youthful yet authoritative air. Next are William and Denise. William has glasses, a three-piece suit, and a professiorial mien. He has one firm hand on the shoulder of Denise, who wears large glasses, wields a clipboard and pen, and gives a secretarial air of efficiency and organization. Then there's Juliette and Sybil Holiday; Juliette wears white lace and dangly rhinestone earrings and has fluffy curly shoulder-length hair; her arm is around Sybil Holiday, who wears a low-cut dark dress with a cinched waist and a black leather armband and smiles pleasantly. Finally, there is Mistress Sybil and Her Priest/Slave. Mistress Sybil wears an extremely low-cut black sheath dress, jacket, and silver jewelry, wielding a riding crop in one hand. Her free hand has a finger hooked through a loop of Her Priest/Slave's collar; he wears a long sleeved white shirt, white leather vest, and white leather belt, boots, and briefs, and though he's on his knees, his head is held proudly. All photos are dated 1990.

Our personas are not masks or roles or parts taken on the way one might take on parts in a play, but emerge from the unity each of us is, with their own ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving, their own needs and desires, and their own reasons for being.

Sybil: Baby Pixie, Baby Ma’am, and the Baby Goddess are all aspects of my child persona. Sweet and trusting, Baby Pixie is childhood sweethearts with Master Billy and Baby Billy, and she is Daddy Bill’s little girl. Baby Ma’am, my four-year-old top, happily dominates anyone who will let her when she comes out. The Baby Goddess is an innocent in wisdom: a seer who speaks an uncompromising, gentle truth as she perceives it. Snuggled up with Daddy Bill, Baby Pixie is the only one of my personas who loves—or even cares about— watching the San Francisco Giants play baseball.

Bill: Master Billy, “The Terror of the Universe,” is the oldest of my three child personas. Though a leather top, he is also 4-1/2 years old. Trusting, eager, and enthusiastic, he has a fondness for cheeseburgers and chocolate chip cookies. On the other hand, he has a limited vocabulary and a limited range of emotional expression. When he cannot have his way on demand he may become confused and crestfallen. Deeply in love with Baby Pixie, his childhood sweetheart, he sees his task in life as protecting the Baby Goddess.

Sybil: Sybil Holiday is most of who I am in the world: the central organizing personality who encompasses all my other personas. Sexy, bright, and fun, she is a much advanced embodiment of Holiday O’Hara, who celebrated her Pagan Temple dancer sexuality by working throughout the 1970s as a burlesque strip tease artist complete with rhinestones and blonde hair. At present a sex educator and image/gender consultant, she facilitates a safe space in which people bring forth their hidden aspects. She still loves to dance, and to shop for beautiful bargains with Juliette. She has osteoarthritis.

Bill: In some ways Juliette is forever 12 years old and forever a virgin, enamored of white lace, rhinestones, and happy endings. She is also 16, however, and knows she lives in a middle-aged male body. Though she sometimes seems shy, in fact she is thoughtful, opinionated, and self-assured. An aesthete, she likes reading, art, and classical music, and chooses most of our clothes. She has both a melancholic and a sunny disposition: the repository of sorrow for all my personas, she is also a party girl—the only one among us who loves to dance. Juliette is a lesbian, happily married with a ring and a last name, to Sybil Holiday.

Sybil: Mistress Sybil is the most sexual and least compromising of my personas. Caring, sadistic, and strict, sometimes cold and bitchy, she is the extension through Holiday O’Hara of the Biker Mama, who rode with a biker gang on New York’s Lower East Side in the late 1960s. Her spiritual power derives from the ancient Phrygian goddess Cybele. She likes to watch many people do her housework in collars and aprons, and to reward them with a good spanking, but has chosen Bill to be her life partner and the only Slave she owns.

Bill: In the tradition of many ancient nature religions, The Priest serves the spirit of the Great Goddess and the feminine principle from the position of a Slave devoted to his Mistress. Exactly the body’s age, he is an adult extension of the two-year-old Baby Billy, gentle, open, receptive, and innocent. He is also more centered and compassionate than any of my other parts. The Priest is a large component of Pixie’s Daddy Bill, and of Bill-William who works as a counselor and teacher.

Sybil: Denise, the Academic, is the only one of my personas who is shy and timid before other peoples’ judgments. She hardly ever appears in public, preferring to let Holiday, Sybil Holiday, and Mistress Sybil front for her. She remains behind the scenes where she studies, writes, does our academic thinking, gets scared, and pays our bills. Her age ranges between eight years and my chronological age. She adores Professor William, to whom she is sexually submissive, and views William the Executive with a teensy bit of apprehension.

Bill: The Executive, whom I also call The Psychopath, is a psychic bully forever in his late 20s, my most extreme embodiment of egocentric self-aggrandizement. However, he is connected with the far kinder and less rigid, but equally straight, Professor William. This association may be the reason the otherwise compassionless Executive is able to function as the last line of defense for the innocent Baby Billy. When all else has failed, according to his lights, and he believes the Baby is in some sort of danger, The Executive may appear as an explosive guardian, filled with a rage he would like others to believe is violent.

The pair of “I”s who wrote the notes above are not quite Sybil and Bill. When we are most ourselves we each recognize a gentle inner dialogue that is almost subliminal, as all personas flow together as a team. For each of us “I” is that process where all our own personas overlap and share their knowledge of the broader life without exactly being in it.

Each of us is aware of more than a dozen personas. Every one of them is a facet of the wholes we are. You might think of us as cut gemstones, offering dozens of glimpses into our hearts. Each view is unique, and each perspective on our innermost Selves is different, yet for each of us all faces belong to one being, and the being has but a single heart.

Date: 2024-07-27 11:08 pm (UTC)
From: [personal profile] grahamlore
This is amazing! I appreciate these folks being so open, and so glad you found this book. Plural and kinky and spiritual all at once! And we can personally relate to the framing of facets.

Thanks for sharing!

Date: 2024-07-28 06:01 am (UTC)
manglefox: Mangle, hanging from the ceiling. (Default)
From: [personal profile] manglefox
That is such a cool interview!

Date: 2024-07-30 10:26 am (UTC)
nightforest: (Elle Bast)
From: [personal profile] nightforest
Ohhhh, I love this. They really seem happy and like they're living their best lives. :D

~Elle

Date: 2024-08-04 02:26 am (UTC)
talewisefellowship: a long-haired, bearded dude holds a mug of tea with a neutral facial expression. (janusz)
From: [personal profile] talewisefellowship

[Janusz]

That photo goes hard

Date: 2024-08-07 09:10 pm (UTC)
nightforest: (Elle Bast)
From: [personal profile] nightforest
Ahhhh that's wonderful!! What an incredible outfit.

~Elle

Date: 2024-07-31 12:21 am (UTC)
monsterqueers: smug looking cat furry with its tounge sticking out (Default)
From: [personal profile] monsterqueers
This is sooooo cool!!!!!!
Amazing find!
These two systems seem so happy and its great to see!

Date: 2024-07-31 10:14 pm (UTC)
monsterqueers: smug looking cat furry with its tounge sticking out (Default)
From: [personal profile] monsterqueers
Very cool!
We gave it a listen, she briefly mentions some 'personas' in a couple places (mentions her sub had a female persona and they discovered her together, mentioned a couple of her personas), but all in passing sadly.

The kink history was fairly neat to listen to, though.
One plurally useful point is that it looks like 'middle' was in use by kink communities quite a bit in the 80s(iirc that was the date she said- wish we took notes, will have to give another listen) which seems to be earlier than anything weve found for the term in system spaces.
This being useful because we keep seeing people claim kink communities 'stole little' as a term from systems and having another point of debunking at hand for that Very Silly claim is always good.

Date: 2024-08-01 10:31 pm (UTC)
monsterqueers: smug looking cat furry with its tounge sticking out (Default)
From: [personal profile] monsterqueers
What is even funnier is that 'littles' has been slang for kids for even longer in some dialects. If anyone is stealing from anyone we are all stealing from that.

Sadly very young systems that also exist in certain spaces (age regression spaces primarily) often have really strong antikink views and will make Very Wild claims like this. Often while using terms like 'littlespace' with no hint of irony about term stealing. Its a small overlap, but its for sure an overlap. Age regression communities are a huge and very unsafe disaster. One can only hope that gentle corrections with citations can get some of these kids to leave it.

Date: 2024-08-02 11:04 pm (UTC)
monsterqueers: silver dragon (silver)
From: [personal profile] monsterqueers
Its such a trainwreck. Its best you missed it, we have taken SO MUCH psychic damage.

They've tried to combine people who should be introduced to the concept of median systems, people doing reparenting therapy, people having a common trauma response, self-hating nonsexual CGL players, and normal kid behavior of liking and playing with toys being pathologized into one community and it just fundamentally is not making a safe environment. Especially because the community is usually an open-to-the-public social media tag or subreddit or whatever (not that the private discord servers are any less terrible).
So many blatant red-flags for predators everywhere every time we check up on whats going on over there. You don't even want to know how bad it is. Yeesh!
Edited (typos and a couple clarification edits) Date: 2024-08-02 11:07 pm (UTC)

Date: 2024-08-04 02:28 am (UTC)
talewisefellowship: a long-haired, bearded dude holds a mug of tea with a neutral facial expression. (janusz)
From: [personal profile] talewisefellowship

[Janusz]

Is that a trans guy or drag king on plate 15 of the book? Too bad there isn't an interview, I'd like to know more about him.

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