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: All writing in this archive is copyright © 1998-2006 by Eric Francis, all rights reserved. To seek permission for re-use, please contact chelsea@planetwaves.net.



PlanetWaves

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Journey to the Heart of Scorpio

Be My Valentine

Making an Issue out of Sex


2005

December 2005

The Ritual of the White Mirror
Planet Waves - Parallel Worlds

You have been chosen for this ritual because of your ability to hold space for others, and because of your nearly perfect ability to contain your sexual energy. You have also been chosen because of your extraordinary beauty and desirability, and a certain quality of your eyes: their ability to make soul contact. Whatever he says, you will remain silent, though you may respond by eye contact. There is only one point at which you will speak.


May 2005

The Bull of Heaven
Planet Waves

Sometime last year or so, I called up the Good Vibrations sex toy store in San Francisco and asked if they had consulted an astrologer before declaring May the time of their big annual event, Masturbation Month. May is the season of Taurus, the second sign of the zodiac, which is about self-possession, self-knowledge, sensuality, desire (in the inviting rather than the pursuing way), and all forms of pleasure in general. It's also about one's personal wealth and resources. Psychologically, Taurus and its corresponding 2nd house reveal information about self-esteem, whether it exists or where it went.


April 2005

Light Bath
Planet Waves

THE LIGHT HYDROGEN POND. One level up, and third door on the left. I collected my leather bag, thinking nothing of leaving my carry-on and laptop case behind. Fourth and sixth densities. Space critters with Holiday Inn pencils monitoring activity on Earth back to the days of Atlantis, which they called Numenor, which I had even heard of. Some old astrology files I could go over in their library.


2004

May 2004

When Lovers Become Their Parents
Planet Waves

When we meet a new lover, there is that joyous moment of relating to the person in the present, with our most creative energy. Sex is hot, and we notice every detail of who they are and what they do. We feel blessed to have met our match, the attractive force is powerful and curiosity rules the day. How, then, does it work out that in a short time, we can end up relating to this person from old patterns, often as a parent or child, or some combination of both? How does a daring romance turn into a sink of security issues?


2003

Of Senators,The Pubes & Victoria Woodhull's Dharma Heirs
Planet Waves

THE WORLD is a mean place to kids. You would think that, having all been kids, we would conspire to make it a somewhat better place than we experienced for those who are new here.


2002

February 2002

Loving Ourselves Together
Planet Waves

Selfish. I think this is one of the more interesting words in our language. I’m pretty sure I heard it first from my Grandma Mary, who bleated it at me authoritatively: Don’t be selfish! Personally, I could never get the fish out of selfish, and would conjure an image of buying flounder with her at Sheepshead Bay. Or maybe it was clams. Shellfish are pretty selfish.


2001

September 2001

Happy Birthday, Betty Dodson
Planet Waves

THOSE WHO KNOW the nameBetty Dodson surely the same joy and reverence for the woman who the world that masturbation is beautiful natural. From this starting place, she has us an unmistakable message that erotic is a natural celebration of life. Betty is author of Sex for One, which, through many incarnations, has been printed about a times (many of those were hand stapled by author). But this doesn't really tell you . Born in Wichita (Wichita!), she arrived in New York City to work as a fine artist, but after a in her mid-30s, began to encounter sex-people and experiences -- particularly, that our culture creates shame, guilt and about masturbation and pleasure like it makes waste.


August 2001

For the Love of Money
Planet Waves
When Valentine Michael Smith, the hero of Robert A. Heinlein's 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land, returned from Mars late in the 20th century, fully human but raised without all the and inner complications of an earthling, those who joined him on his quest discovered an abundance of love and money.

The Other Sex
Sexuality.Org

It is May -- Masturbation Month -- and today I begin with a question: When you masturbate, is it just about sex, or is it about the expression of erotic feelings within the context of a committed, loving relationship?


April 2001

Organic Love #2
Sexuality.Org

I am certain that when your mom and dad sat you down for The Sex Talk (if you were so lucky), or when they showed you the Fucking Film or the Zygote Slide Show in 6th grade, nobody mentioned the joys, wonders and emotional tribulations of three people getting naked together. But really, could we have a more interesting subject, or one more filled with sweet, deep and dark emotions?


February 2001

Organic Love
Planet Waves

We're all familiar with organic food. This is food grown without pesticide sprays or toxic fertilizers, from natural seeds that have escaped genetic engineering. In theory, organic food has no preservatives or artificial dyes, nothing extra that it does not need (like plastic filler) and it's handled in a way that preserves some of the integrity of what nature created. Due to crop loss, it's (though cheaper than restaurant food, which most of us eat a lot of).

Intimacy is Introspection that We Share
Planet Waves

My philosophy of organic love begins with the idea that all love is an expression of selflove. We say this casually, we read it in spiritual textbooks, but the concept is rather elusive. The reason it's elusive is, I believe, that despite the fact that we are very often taught to hate ourselves by advertising, teachers and parents, we don't see all the forms that self-hatred takes -- such as self- doubt, or shame. And to compound things, we call hatred love.

Breathing in Love
Planet Waves

I was born with a life-threatening illness that has killed many children. It's called celiac, and it's a chronic to metabolize a protein found in wheat, called gluten. When gluten is present in the diet of a celiac child or , this causes a wider inability to absorb any nutrients. At 13 months, after nonstop illness from the time I was any food that contained traces of wheat (most foods do), I was hospitalized for malnutrition, a distended abdomen and other serious gastrointestinal symptoms, as well as dehydration from constantly passing liquid. Had I not been, I would have died long before the age of two, like thousands of infants throughout the history of the European.


2000

Undated

On Being Your Own Lover
Betty Dodson.com

There's an old saying about masturbation that everyone either does it or denies it. Yet for most people, there's a definite charge around the idea of being caught. Since most of us barely feel confident being seen nude, I'd hazard a guess that the American population would be skewed in the direction of shame to outright horror at the idea of being exposed in this singularly private aspect of existence. And most people seem, for the most part, just fine keeping that way, including lots who are supposedly open and free about sex.


November 2000

Justice Between the Sheets
Planet Waves

If you ask the US Supreme Court, we have more rights to talk about sex than we do to experience sex. While the court has traditionally taken a liberationist view of sexual speech, reversing decisions that have banned many books and holding that a protester wearing a dungaree jacket in court that said "Fuck the Draft" was not contemptuous, its views on what grown men and women do in their own homes is not quite as generous. And when the court has woken up, it has often been years after it was necessary to state the obvious.

Making an Issue...
Planet Waves

There is a passage in Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in which the Chief, the book's mute narrator, describes his hallucination of the fog machines that are installed inside the ventilation ducts of the mental ward in which he and Randall McMurphy and a whole bunch of other people are being held captive. Every now and then, a fog just rolls in thick and everything is obscure and it's nice and safe. McMurphy is the guy who's not really crazy but went to the nut house so he wouldn't go to jail for a crime, ends up provoking the entire ward into some degree of alertness and sanity. The Chief, in one of the book's most sober and not-so-funny passages, describes how everyone McMurphy for dragging them out of the fog when all they want is to hide in the cottony thicket of psych meds and madness.

Poly is Political
Planet Waves

.....For an entire generation or more, right-wing political movements have hit us on the head with "the return to family values" as a top-shelf intoxicant in their political agenda. Visionaries of regressive social movements see the decline of society reflected in the supposed breakdown of the nuclear family, and view the repair of society as starting with what they feel is its most basic cellular element, a fantasy consisting of Mom, Dad and the Kidz contained in a neat package, a centrally-air conditioned, mortgaged suburban home.


August 2000

Love and Trees
Planet Waves

Siuslaw National Forest blankets the landscape over tens of thousands of acres along the central Oregon coast and about thirty miles inland, in a region of North America by clear, sandy-bottomed rivers that soon flow into the mighty north Pacific Ocean. I am driving through the forest with my riding partner, Valarie, with whom I have traveled from her home on Puget Sound north of Seattle; the day before I made my way from British Columbia.


June 2000

Love on the Line
Planet Waves

Every now and then, I get a call from someone who informs me that she has met her soulmate online. They found each other one night in the Parcheesi chatroom on CompuServe, and have, in three months, exchanged a pile of emails 41-inches high that has consumed $396.46 worth of Epson ink cartridges. He, unfortunately, is married, but he's planning on getting divorced in 2003, after his second daughter graduates from high school.


May 2000

How to Be Your Own Lover
Planet Waves

......EVER been caught masturbating?


February 2000

A Crazy Little Thing Called...
Planet Waves

For Valentine's Day, I have a word for you: "Compersion." It's probably not a word you've ever heard.

Reader Responses to A Crazy Little Thing Called...
Planet Waves

I have never received more thoughtful and essay-length mail on a single article than I did on A Crazy Little Thing Called Compersion. Thank you. Many of you wrote said that after reading this article, you no longer feel so alone. Well, after reading your mail, I no longer feel so alone, either.

Beyond Death and Dowry: A New Sexuality
Star IQ

When Princess Diana perished in a car crash on the eve of a solar eclipse on her Eighth House Pluto, she lent credibility to the well-established idea that the Eighth House is a good place to look for information about death. But new students of astrology might find it perplexing to read in almost every textbook that the Eighth is also the house of business deals and bankers. The "other people's money" theme is an extension of both inheritance and dowry, or the money passed with a bride from her father to her new husband.


1999

Undated

Options to Romance: A sex glossary
Planet Waves

A compendium of often-misunderstood, misleading, mysterious, unheard-of and/or derogatory terms relating to sex, sexuality and relationships, as well as life, love and freedom, plus a dash of astrology where necessary. This is a work-in-progress, and your submissions, comments and questions are welcome, and in most cases will be answered. This is a re-re-revised edition, and it's growing every week. Additions include entries on Bondage and Discipline, Generation X, Betty Dodson, Fuck, Cheating, Vulva, Cock, Cunnilingus, Fellatio, Bi-curious, Threesome, Rimming, Wilhelm Reich and other topics of interest. Coming soon: one-night stand, zipless fuck, shame, anal sex, shaving, long-distance relationship, drugs, menstruation, latex, Tantra, prostitution, sperm-lover, adolescence, and others.

Options to Romance: Part Two
Planet Waves

Links. Here is a list of sex-positive links officially endorsed by Eric Francis. Most of these pages have pages with links to other pages. These are not porno sites, and there are a wide variety of noncommercial, compassionate web pages on the theme of sexuality, most of which are pretty erotic, if you ask me.

Love-n-War
Planet Waves

One of my favorite astrologers wrote recently in the London Daily Mail that the 20th century, far from farting out, would build to a stunning crescendo that we would not fail to notice. I agree. In other articles, I've called 1999 "the year you don't forget." The astrological reference, the big news that makes this year different from so many, many others, is the occurrence of something called a grand cross with a total solar eclipse on Aug. 11.

Does Astrology Point to a New Sexuality?
Planet Waves

E-mail from a reader (playwright and film writer from Manhattan): "Quick but burning question -- what do you have against long-term partnership? This September's warning to Virgos was your most explicit statement on the subject yet, and I feel the need to open some dialogue on this. Yes, marriage is often an unconscious knee-jerk reaction to love that can and has stultified and stagnated many a being. But the intimacy of long-term partnership, shared child-rearing or project-building, the sacred knowledge of another human soul that can be gained through making a faith-filled commitment to helping them grow and supporting them through the mystery of life, as they do the same for you -- these things strike me as worthy ventures... what about you?"


1998

Undated

Coming to the Revolution
Sexuality.org

If you want a revolution, liberating sexual pleasure is the place to start. And if all you want out of life is to be authentic, open-minded, creative and loving, opening up your sexual life-force is the heart of the matter. How do you do this? If you really want to be free, start with self-love. Learn to give yourself deep and satisfying orgasms, release your guilt and shame, and then watch what happens.

The Sex Penalty
Chronogram

Monica Lewinsky. Bill Clinton. Everyone claims to be sick of it all, but we're obviously obsessed. The video is a blockbuster. The report is stocked in Barnes & Noble. No big surprise, not to me, anyway.

Evolutionary Tendencies
Sexuality.org

HAVE YOU EVER -- FINALLY, AND AT LONG LAST -- connected with a lover you adored, and your world suddenly lit with passion beaming back from every face... but you couldn't do a thing about it because of the threat to your relationship?

September '98

Hells Bells
Freewill Astrology

We arrive as the last few volts of daylight drain from the late-evening sky. The vacuous, unlit, anonymous streets of the city are cobblestoned and narrow and one-way, jarring and agitating with that distinct 19th-century-medieval-Napoleanic vibe, and we vibrate over the cobblestones in a crazy right-angled pattern searching for an eternity before we finally arrive at the tiny, as in two-room, hotel where we were expected hours before. East Germany. It still exists.


June '98

1998 Astrological Reading for Sacred Sexuality and Beyond...
Love Without Limits

I've taken a closer look at the chart for the Celebration of Sacred Sexuallity. As you know, I won't be at the event because I'm in Germany living with a friend I met at last year's conference, which in a real way never ended for me -- though in the months that followed my week at Harbin Springs, so many changes swept through my life that I can't account for them all yet. Looking back, it was a crucial personal turning point because I was able to experience and witness so many possibilities that before then were just ideas, and because for one of the few times in my life I tapped into the power of group consciousness in sexuality. And I met two people who have been instrumental in my growth and personal recovery, and who have helped me keep my wheels on the ground while taking some very sharp curves.

February '98

Moonwalk
Freewill Astrology

AFTER ABOUT five minutes in this city, I had the distinct feeling of being inside of something. The word that popped into my head as I walked along the sidewalk was "insular," as in insulated.


1997

October '97

Leaping Across the Sky: An Astrological reading for the 'Celebration of Sacred Sexuality'
Love Without Limits

For as long as we've looked to the heavens for wisdom, we've looked for news of love. Forebodings of disaster, war and the rise and fall of fortunes are reduced to trivia when the liberating joy of passion is written in the stars, and at the moment, it is -- a moment within which is contained the real potential for freedom, creativity and celebration, and also one in which the opportunity for healing some of our deepest and darkest sexual wounds is quite available.

Loving More
Posted in Chronogram Magazine

Once upon a time eleven years ago, I was in love with two women. I didn't hide it from anyone, not them, not my friends and especially not myself. Apart from the joy I shared with them, the purest happiness I experienced came from my choice to be totally open about my feelings.


Miscellanoeus

Cunnilingus and Clover
Planet Waves

NORTHWEST HERBAL FAIRE in Bellingham, Washington is an annual, weekend-long outdoor festival where herbalists, flower essence specialists, and a wide variety of green witches and craftspeople gather to share their ideas and products, and listen to live music. In the Pacific Northwest, you can be sure it's pretty good live music.

From Self to self
Planet Waves

FOR THE PAST FOUR YEARSLoving More conferences, I have helped create the communal masturbation component of the weekend at what is usually a very -based gathering. I feel in my heart that sharing masturbation is a and really fun way for adults to explore and express erotic community and reality.

From Then to Here
Planet Waves

ONE OF THE COMMONLY PERCEIVED GREAT FAILURES of the 1960s was the sexual revolution. In summary, what we think of as the sexual revolution emerged from the marketing of the birth control pill, which for the first time in (known) history created a means by which women could dependably have sex without getting pregnant, but without getting a man involved in the pregnancy prevention effort. Yet at the same time, this included the idea that men did not necessarily have to take responsibility for their sexual actions (not that they ever did, but the pill emphasized the point). And, in related news, many have pointed out that the pill and its subsequent social uprising did little to deepen the intimate bonds between men and women on an emotional level.

Through the Looking Glass
Compersion.net

Mirror masturbation takes selfloving and self-pleasuring to a deeply conscious level, in which one becomes full witness to, and participant in, one's own erotic pleasure, sexual responses, emotional surrender, and, at times, sorrow.

I Love You, January
Planet Waves

EVERYTHING has a beginning, and for the Selflove Support Project, it a spontaneous one, among God's Frozen People of St. Paul.