There are many uses for tarot and the metaphysical. One form of metaphysical modality is Sex.
Let's Get Metaphysical: The Etiquette of Entry
by CJ Turett & Heather Corinna
Vaginal intercourse, anal intercourse, placing fingers inside a vagina or anus, fellatio (blowjobs), in plenty of ways with cunnilingus (oral sex on vulvas), and even kissing with your tongue are all some ways we might enter someone else's body or have someone else enter our own.
Some people boil these and other activities down to requiring just a no or a yes. Others might take a few more sound steps past that point and talk about how we need to be sure not to be too rough or aggressive, or be cautious of someone else's comfort. Plenty of people are concerned with the "right" way to do any of these activities when it comes to their pleasure or that of a partner, or hung up on how to do what to bring about orgasm. We’d agree with all of those things as important -- both consent as well as a mindfulness of a partner’s desires, likes, preferences, and limits -- but would also say there's even more to it than that. Way more to it.
It's entirely possible that what we say here is going to sound really crunchy granola, but sometimes that's how it is.
From both our personal experiences of our own varied sex lives, and in our work in sexuality with many other people, it seems pretty clear that really letting someone into an internal space in your body, or going into someone else's insides -- which we know might sound a little gross, but that is what's going on with this stuff -- is a fairly big deal for many people. Heck, there's a reason that we usually kiss people in our families or platonic friends differently than we kiss sexual or romantic partners. There's a reason why so many people get so freaked out about seeing the gynecologist, but not about seeing the eye doctor. It seems obvious when you put it out there like that, but it’s one of those things that people don’t often think that consciously about.
We seem to be taught little about how we extend ourselves physically to other people and respond to others. We will often hear a lot about the actual mechanics of sex, and some basic emotional aspects, but very rarely are even invited to consider the metaphysics of sex -- literally meaning, what is above or beyond the physical.
The basics we get as children about touching other people are usually a whole lot of don’ts: don't push, don't shove, don't hit, don't bite, don't touch without asking first. The positives we get are often really vague: be nice, be gentle, or even the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. But, really, there's a whole lot missing in all of that, particularly in what it doesn't tell us about how to inter-react and interconnect. The basics we are getting are very much about the surface, rather than about our insides and other people's insides.
If you've done any study of martial arts, particularly arts like Aikido, based in blending your own motions with those of another and using someone's momentum by turning with it, not pushing through it, what we're talking about probably is something you understand well. When we willingly interlock parts of our bodies sexually -- even when someone isn't going inside someone else, but all the more so when that is happening -- we've moved past constructing sexual interaction as an individual experience or something we view as merely about parts and mechanics; it becomes an intricate play between energies, motion, and responding within an environment of shared space and experience.
You probably already know that lots of folks class vaginal intercourse as the only "real" sex, or as the kind of sex which is the most intimate. But we know that not everyone agrees on exactly what constitutes “sex," and that there are many ways people are intimate and sexual, and we can't say, unilaterally, that any one kind of sex is more real, or more intimate, for everyone. While we certainly know that there is nothing any more or less real about vaginal intercourse (or any kind of sex that involves someone’s something going into someone else’s somewhere), we can still recognize that, for some, there can be differences between sex where we are entering someone else’s body or allowing someone else in, and sex where we are literally just on the surface of someone's body or someone is on the surface of ours.
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