I Is For Initiation

I should warn you, I suppose: my opinions can be pretty strong. That is one of the reasons I founded this new blog.

I joined the Pagan Blog Project back in January, and have been following along on that my public blog; but I got to a point where the stuff I want to talk about wasn't right for that place. I want to talk about darker, angrier, rootier stuff; also I really need to be able to swear like a fucking pirate, which just wasn't appropriate there, or maybe didn't feel appropriate there. So many restrictions there, ones that I placed upon myself, and don't now know how to find my way out of. But I will have freedom.

So I thought I would continue the posts over here, mostly. So here is my opinion on initiation.

I don't like it. It squicks me right the fuck out, as a matter of fact.

I mean, fair enough, I'm not a joiner; a hermit and artist and ISFP where the I (introverted tendencies) consistently pins out at ninety-eight (sometimes literally one hundred) percent can hardly be expected to be; but it's not just that. I am a feminist, also, and a radical one at that (radical meaning 'root', and yes, it's related to 'radish'), and so, I understand that consent is sacrosanct.

Part of that of course is having a pair of personality-disordered parents; my mother being somewhere on the spectrum for narcissistic personality disorder, and my father pinned way into the red for obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. The both of them, pretty much, in their own separately fucked-up ways, have little concept that the rest of the world is not part of themselves; and so there wasn't really much hope that they understood proper boundaries. And consent, true consent, must be built on a foundation of strong boundaries. Because consent must include being able to freely say no.

And that's the thing with initiation. Besides the fact that I simply can't shake the feeling of it being just a form of hazing, of doing something unpleasant and frankly bullying to someone to make them part of a club, which they then perpetuate by inflicting on new members, it goes against consent. Because if you can't tell me what you are going to do to me, then I cannot consent to it. It is that simple.