Permission

This is one of those blog posts which has given me an untold amount of trouble in the writing, and in fact this is something like its third or fourth incarnation.
It started off as my regular anti-Pride post, and I was going to say that if you have your hair done for Pride or otherwise dress up in a way that wouldn't be possible in your everyday life, you are still asking for permission to express yorself and thus the power is always in the hands of someone else. And this, of course, is my criticism of the whole Pride thing - that it gives queers permission to be outrageous so that the heteros can be entertained and a large amount of money can be made by big business. And so the queers remain disempowered and in fact continue to seek permission from those who do so.
The post then became one in honour of May as Masturbation Month - in fact I believe today is the actual Wankers' Day and I was going to exhort my readers to do something to mark this day. I was also going to comment on some of the weirder shit you can read on the internet if you google the word masturbation. Much of the weird shit is about how various divinities arbitrarily ban masturbation for their followers for various reasons. Now I'm a witch, and not only do I not see myself conceding to deities' arbitrary pleasure-denying ordinances anytime soon, but I will tell them so. I don't feel the need to get these deities' permission (the theme now appears between these apparently random subjects) to do something which is plainly not harmful.
Of course masturbation is a classic example of an activity where people feel they don't have persmission to do it and end up thoroughly screwed up over it. One of the most hilarious and yet saddest bizarre statements about masturbation I read on the internet while preparing for this post's predecessor was this question by a - presumably - young gentleman but I'm afraid I haven't saved the source of it:

'Is it possible to be raped by yourself? I know that if you masturbate you will go to hell, but I woke up and it was happening - but it was my hand and not me. So I think it was a kind of rape. I do not want to go to hell because I was raped! What should I do?'

He is of course a) thinking he needs permission to have a wank b) allowing the religious nonsense he has imbibed to mess with his head and c) not taking any ownership of this at all. Ths simple fact is he masturbated and can't deal with it. There really is a lot wrong with our world.
And of course that is the trouble with needing permission: it stops you having to take responsibility for your actions. I get that this can be a normal human reaction - there are a lot of followers in this world - but I think the first step towards living a sovereign life is to stop needing other people's permission to do things. Yes it has a cost, but it is the essential first step. 'Who am I asking for permission is a useful question for a witch to ask to determine where the power lies in any situation.
In addition to asking that question there is a spiritual exercise I can suggest at this point. It is an exercise in giving yourself pleasure without having to ask permission. I even have a song about it: