lb_lee | Entries tagged with plural:in-house relationships

Rogan: We first heard about Dorothy Eady/Omm Sety (1904-1981) while digging around in writings about Ida Craddock (1857-1902). The two women have some things in common: they both married a dead man (Craddock an old acquaintance of hers, Omm Sety the pharaoh Sety I), were considered smart but strange, and had some skill in committing their ideas to writing (and also, in Omm Sety’s case, art), some of which still survive.

However, there are a couple major differences: Ida Craddock was American and got harassed to death for her ideas, while Omm Sety was born in England, moved to her beloved Egypt, and devoted her life and career to Egyptology and performing religious service to Osiris and Isis. She was determined to resume her reincarnated role as temple priestess, and by gods, she did it!

( Read more... )

Mori: Okay guys. I'm gonna tell you about some old dead Freudian lawyer's mouth-breathing fanfic and I'm gonna make him all y'all's problem now. (Told ya we wouldn't quit doing stupid info-dumps about many-selved slapfights of yore.)

( The woman who married an angel, and the Freudian who married his theories. )

Current Mood: aggravated

Also, this seems like a good time/place to announce it...
( *noisemakers and confetti* )

Current Mood: jubilant

Sex With Noncorporeal Beings: A Pleasure Pie Sex Salon Talk

Summary: “By placing it into the hands of physicians, spirit sex is relegated to the status of a disease that must be cured. […] by regarding sex with spirits as a psychological disorder of the mind, it can be dismissed as a mere fantasy or illusion, probably induced by some childhood trauma, that has no value to or significance in the so-called real world. The view is that once a person who is under the ‘illusion’ that he or she is having sex with a spirit has been successfully counseled, the aberrant notion will simply fade away like a forgotten dream.” (Tyson, 25)
Series: Essay (sorta)
Word Count: 3000ish
Notes: Rough transcription and expansion of a talk I gave for the Pleasure Pie Sex Salon in November 2023; it was the blow-out winner of the writing poll! Mentions of psychiatric abuse, exorcism, rape, violence, harassment, negative side effects of tantric training, and suicide. Despite all that, this is a happy essay.

Hello! We are Rogan and Mac of LB Lee. We are multi (multiple personalities by popular parlance), we’ve been together since 2007, and we’ve been making comics about it since 2008!

Pretty quickly in, we realized that people had no idea how we have sex, and there was no way for them to learn, asides from asking us rude, intrusive questions. There were no books, no pamphlets, no guides—even the Internet barely mentioned such things, except as “this happens” and “what a freak show!” So we started making works like Alter Boys In Love (2010-2017) and Multi, Orgasmic (2022). But this is a live talk, not a comic, so let’s get into the nuts and bolts: what, exactly, do you do with a noncorporeal partner?

( This is a text-only medium so you just have to imagine us waggling our eyebrows. )

( These are citations for my audience because they don't easily fit on one slide. Due to time constraints, the part about the jizz demons had to be cut. :( )

We had fun making a little headmate relationship map. :B Originally intended for our therapist, since our brain is throwing a lot of old names into the mix that she has no reason to have heard of.
( Pic behind cut )

Mac: @hungryghosts linked us this neat post on plural kink aftercare and reality grounding! Seems it'd be of interest.

Rogan: primer alt-text = no. Redo. -_- uuuuuugh. Why LibreOffice alt-text??? Do zero!! Lie feature! WHAT FOR???

Mori: also, lesson learned making Loony-Brain Primer on Linux: the new GIMP has improved a lot, but it's no replacement for Clip Studio Paint. We need to try and figure out how to get it running on Linux, or keep Windows as some vestigial "make CSP go" thing.

EDIT: the alt-text worked! Huzzah! Now we can finally have our zines just one file!

They've put it up on their website, https://feastingwithghosts.com/creations! Some highlights:

Finding (and Weighing) Safe Spaces: Finding people you can be yourself around is important, but how do you protect yourself from the wolves?
So You Want To Date A Headmate: A non-exhaustive list of things to consider. Focuses mostly on hosts dating non-hosts.
Throwing the Torch: When the people responsible for outer life walk away, what about those who carry on in their place?
Handling the "Silent Periods": Everyone's gone quiet, and you're beginning to question everything. What can you do?
Finding Your Own Methods: On doing what works - or rather, not doing what doesn't work.

Mori: finished the Magic Daughter. It was good! Recommended for anyone interested in a MPD integration memoir.

In the same book sweep, I got D. Scott Rogo's "The Infinite Boundary: a psychic look at Spirit Possession, Madness, and Multiple Personality," which I do not recommend. It's too credulous for me, and the whole prologue is about a trans woman being made cis and straight through exorcism. Ech!

But go figure, it has the first medical multi citation of headmate sex I know of! And of course, it comes from Ralph fuckin' Allison.

Allison was considered one of THE multi shrinks, back in the day. He coined the term "Inner Self-Helper," cured Henry Dana Hawksworth, but by 1980 he was already drinking his own Koolaid and turned into a crank convinced that multiples had psychic powers and called to demonic entities to possess them. Dude started exorcising his patients and wrote about it in his 1980 book, Minds In Many Pieces, which is where Rogo pulls the following story: while treating a female multi, "an unfamiliar entity, who called himself 'Dennis,' suddenly popped forth. He stated that he was possessing Elise because of his sexual attraction toward 'Shannon,' an important secondary personality of the patient's! (...) The inexplicable appearance of Dennis confused Dr. Allison, who had never heard of one secondary personality falling in love with another. (...) The therapist asked 'Dennis' just how he expected to consummate his love for Shannon. 'Dennis's' response was (...) That he could possess anyone Elise dated. 'Shannon' was called forth (...) And she corroborated 'Dennis's' story." (261-262)

Of course, Elise's ISH says that Dennis "had taken control of Elise because of her experiments with witchcraft, which had opened her to ge evil," (262) and they end up exorcising him very dramatically.

Ugh. I can't believe the earliest citation I have for this now is THAT book, which I reeeeeaaally don't want to read! Even the selections of Rogo I pounded through were a drag!

Current Mood: grumpy

Because I was looking up this stuff for

bodyetal , figured I might as well dump this here! This is a big dump of all the sources I have offhand of people reporting their sexual, romantic, and queerplatonic relationships with noncorporeal beings, including headmates, alters, soulbonds, and spirits. Your mileage may vary on which of these "count" as plural, but since restricting plural talk to medical model and backlash stuff tends to pan out to being super racist, I'll choose being possibly irrelevant instead. I have organized them in chronological order. I have also included works of fiction where the authors have publicly stated it was based on their real life.

( This will be added to and updated over time. Track comments to hear about updates. )

I'm going to post some notes I took from Monni Adams's Designs for Living from 1982 (made in Cambridge MA at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts in cooperation with the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology).

I grabbed this from a free box and liberated it soon after (so sorry, if you're wanting more context for these quotes, I don't have it). Ostensibly, it is about the design of various art objects (masks, sculpture, textiles) from various peoples scattered around Africa, but it has some interesting stuff about art, religion, spirit possession, and spirit marriage that I thought folks might also want to read! (Especially since this book looks exactly like the kind that is hard to find and expensive to buy.) It bugs me how all these different peoples are kinda lumped together but whatever, it's still information I didn't have before. The peoples mentioned here include the Yoruba, the Ibibio (both mostly in Nigeria) and the Baule (Cote D'Ivoire).

( Very singlet academics from the 1980s pondering this peculiar possession thing and the spirits involved. That's your warning! )

$6 for the paper zine, $3 for the digital version. I'm trying a new alt-text method which, if it works, will spare me a lot of work!

Front cover of Multi, Orgasmic: A Headmate Sex Zine by LB Lee. Mac, Rogan, and Biff astride a giant winged eggplant, soaring through a sparkle-filled sky. Mac and Rogan are making assorted silly gleeful faces, while Biff has a deadpan, "well, I guess this is my life now" expression.

Front cover of Multi, Orgasmic: A Headmate Sex Zine by LB Lee. Mac, Rogan, and Biff astride a giant winged eggplant, soaring through a sparkle-filled sky. Mac and Rogan are making assorted silly gleeful faces, while Biff has a deadpan, "well, I guess this is my life now" expression.

If we said you had a beautiful mind, would you hold it against us? Many plurals have headmate sex, but few talk about it, and that’s a recipe for crummy sex! The brain is the biggest erogenous zone, so let’s open up a conversation about…
• Headspace STDs and contraception
• Fantasy and reality
• Differing orgasm and sensitivity between headmates
• Radical body changes and differences
• Toys, porn, and headmate comfort regarding them
• Thoughtleak play
• ...and more!

48 pages, 5.5 x 8.5 inches, black and white. Best for adults.

So, here's an oddball; while at the library, I ended up picking up a yaoi manga about three headmates in an in-house relationship: Romantic Illusions, by Reiichi Hiiro.

EDIT 10/22/2019: I finally got off my ass to translate the Japanese title (romanized Nōnai Renai no Susume, only to discover with delight that it translates to Intracerebral Romance Recommendation--I guess 脳内 would be the Japanese equivalent of "in-head.")
( Cover image, spoilers and content warnings behind the cut. It's very much got the BL tropes, so take that into account. )

Current Mood: enthralled

I'm diving through Many Voices back issues, doing quick records sweep, and I found someone talking about an in-system relationship! (A queer, non-monogamous one!) It's on page 2 of their 1993 October issue, which is their Love and Sexuality issue! (Which is also not accessible so I will type it out.) The article is called "Love and Sex Among Alters," and it's "By Daphne of Marianna."

( Transcription behind cut! )

EDIT: Oh my gosh, there's more in this issue! On page 8, from "James (Jeremy's brother) from the Team":

( More! )

I ♥ My √x, x<0 Friend
Word Count: 3500
Summary: an essay about in-system relationships, and why they freak people out.
Notes: Winner of this month’s Patreon poll! Title comes from whiteboard graffiti on the dorm door of my friend Peter in 2005. All numbers under zero are negative; square roots of negative numbers are imaginary. Ergo, translated out of math geek, the joke reads, “I Love My Imaginary Friend.”

There’s a surreal segment in Cabaret where the MC dances with a gorilla while singing about their forbidden love. He gushes about his lady’s positive qualities, how nobody can help who they fall in love with. Society sneers at the sight of them together, he sings, but “if they could see her through my eyes, maybe they’d all understand.”

It’s mostly played for laughs, though uncomfortable ones, until the end. Then the MC stops smiling and snarls at the audience, “if you could see her through my eyes, she wouldn’t look Jewish at all.”

The laughs stop. Through the power of surrealist theater, the audience realizes that just for a couple minutes, they saw the MC and his girlfriend the way the Nazis do—disgusting, immoral, on par with bestiality. That moment of empathy is horrifying.

When I saw this scene for the first time, it hit hard. Because I wasn’t just seeing the fictional MC and his girlfriend through Nazi eyes—I was seeing my own relationship through practically everyone’s eyes.

( Read more... )

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Table of Contents

Scribbles and Bits

Entries tagged with plural:in-house relationships

Omm Sety

Ida Craddock and Theodore fuckin' Schroeder

Surprise!

Sex With Noncorporeal Beings: A Pleasure Pie Sex Salon Talk

Citations for the Noncorporeal Sex talk at Pleasure Pie

Headmate Relationship Map

Plural Kink Aftercare post by Artemis

Hungry Ghosts uploaded cool stuff!

Ralph Allison and In-System Romance

Linkdump of Noncorporeal Sexual/Romantic/Queerplatonic Relationships

Adams's "Designs for Living" Notes: Spirit Marriage & Possession

Multi, Orgasmic is out!

Plural Media: Romantic Illusions, by Reiichi Hiiro

In-System Relationship: October 1993 issue of Many Voices

Essay: I ♥ My √x, x<0 Friend

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