So I am officially having fun; as of running into C.T. Butler, my comrade de plume from many years ago on the poly trail…the man I consider one of the most valuable, innovative lobes in the brain trust of doing things not just differently but better. C.T. has been off this particular scene a while, as was I, while living and roaming elsewhere.

C.T. Butler. Image courtesy of Consensus.net.

I finally ran into him about a year ago, somewhat randomly, at someone’s birthday party, and didn’t see him again till this weekend. If you have heard of Food Not Bombs, that is a C.T. production, though the full idea emerged from a collective that was doing many experiments in Eros and existence in the early 1980s. This is a person who I associate mainly with the utmost personal responsibility and integrity, who is also the bravest and most willing to dare, to experiment, to say what he thinks and feels, and to be bound by nobody else’s rules but the ones he and the people around him agree to. To me he’s living proof that there is actual freedom in responsibility.

I have sat through workshops he’s given when it felt like we were rewriting the DNA of the planet; metaprogramming solutions and innovations to help humanity solve its imminent crisis of relationship. Seeing him here and having dinner with him and a few friends made the whole trip worth it, the three-hour backup on the Garden State Parkway; the screwball instructions from Google Maps and the restaurant that keeps trying to serve me gluten.

As for the Compersion Immersion, here it is, in all its glorious imperfection, unedited, courtesy of my digital recorder and some help from Anatoly getting all 40mb’s onto the Internet tonight — hosted on PlanetWaves.FM.

CT and his friend Patti are hosting a slither pit tonight — that is, an inflatable pool into which about a gallon of lube is dumped; and people get naked and slither around. My boundaries begin there. (As Patric Walker once said, scratch a Pisces and you will find a Virgo under their skin.) So, I plan to enjoy this zenvironment and hang out as they all slither.

Philadelphia

PS, and this late-breaking news is just in, our civil rights department is helping keep the world safe for respectful sex.

Dear Friend and Reader:

Problem: there is a lack of scientific information about families, relationships and sexual practices outside what is considered the normal range of activity. There is plenty of literature, but it tends to be focused on pathology. There is a lack of scientific information about what is healthy; what people consider normal within the context of their own lives.

Eric Francis.

People define their sexuality many ways. Practitioners of tantric sex, polyamorous people and those who practice BDSMВ are a few examples of erotic practices that tend to be ignored by scientific studies, or worse, are misrepresented. The existing literature tends to be created by academics writing for other academics. The ideas are framed in the institutional context, often with agendas having no relationship to seeking the truth: for example, wanting to get tenure.

Robert Bienvenue, Ph.D., from CARAS, Community-Academic Consortium for Research on Alternative Sexualities, suggested that people with other-than-monogamous ways of life should support research that connects with real issues in the communities and their lives. Research is needed that goes beyond descriptive reports “discovering” things that are obvious to most people in the community, into deeper areas. Communities need to influence these studies, he said, and the reports need to include as many people as possible. He proposes a community-based model of research, where participants help influence the research model, the theme and the purpose of the work.

To illustrate the need for more meaningful and accurate research, Bienvenue gave two examples of academic writing on a BDSM, which is a form of sex play and conscious power exchange in sexuality. “Non-prostitute females do participate in sadomasochistic sex, and heterosexual males are capable of making contact with them,” one journal published recently. Another wrote, “Having found that non-prostitute females do exist in the sadomasochistic subculture, although possibly in fewer numbers than non-prostitute males, further research in this area is necessary.”

He proposes that there be a community-based form of research such that participants rise up from the leve of guinea pig and lab rat. This means getting involved while the research is in the proposal stage. Community-based research recognizes that communities matter.

One common issue is that research is conducted, people take the time and effort to support — and then never find out the results. Community-based research calls for getting the results back to the participants in the research so they can assess its validity and understand the impact on their lives and the society.

From Poly Living 2009, this is,

Just a boy dragging a stack of cardboard boxes down the road in Buenos Aires. Photo by Dani Voirin.

To see more from contributing artist Danielle Vorin, click here.

Here is a fast update on the astrology. The Moon is in Aries right now, and enters Taurus at 10:33 pm Eastern Time. I just checked Tracy’s list of daily aspects that I use to write this feature (a little late) and noticed that overnight, the Moon occulted Venus. This is a kind of an eclipse, only the Sun is not involved; a planet is. The Moon and Venus are conjunct, but instead of the Moon passing a little above or below Venus, the conjunction is precise and Venus disappears.

Photo by Sean Hayes.

Whatever this ‘means’, the result was an is emphasis. As I mentioned, Venus is slow and powerful in Aries right now, about to station retrograde next week. An occultation by the Moon points to this station; they are rare enough to have happen. While I’m describing Aries activity that just went by, the Moon also made a conjunction to Eris today.

Mercury is on the way to being conjunct Mars in Aquarius. Mercury conjunct Mars (in any signs) means fast thinking. In Aquarius, it means very, very fast thinking — some would say too fast. The remedy is not necessarily to slow down but to rethink. Think through things requiring your mental and intellectual attention several times. If you come up with the same steps and the same conclusions each time, that is not rethinking; it’s being in a mental rut.

The Sun is square a centaur called Hylonome. Centaurs are planets of the approximate nature of Chiron. Intensity is one characteristic, and concentrated growth. Hylonome has the keywords self-inflicted. I can give you an example of how this works. One of the young women I photograph, earlier in her life, had a habit of cutting herself; this is simply known as cutting. I had her birth data and I asked minor planet specialist Phil Sedgwick what he thought. He said: check Hylonome. And as it turned out she has Hylonome square the Sun. I could then factor Hylonome into what I new about her life story and the loss of an important male father figure to suicide when she was younger.

We take a lot of aggression out on ourselves, which often turns to resentment. We take out a lot of resentment on ourselves, which turns up as guilt. Sun square Hylonome suggests that today is a good day to notice how we do this, and make some decisions about whether we want to.

Dear Friend and Reader:

Hello from the Poly Living conference, just outside of Philadelphia. Poly Living is created by a magazine called Loving More, one of two conferences they sponsor each year. Today I managed to get myself up and going to attend a 9 am session on polyamory and families. Parenting is hard work, and until very recently it did indeed take a village to raise a child. Polyamory can offer the potential for having additional help and support and can — if done well — provide a far better environment than many single-parent households, or two-parent households where the parents have no time to be with their children.

Eric Francis.

Before I get into that, here is a one-paragraph definition of “polyamory.”

Basically, we are talking about any form of relationship other than exclusive pair-bonding, that is consciously and honestly experienced. There is no set definition, but we know what it is not. If you’re married and you have someone “on the side,” that is not polyamory. If you are married and you have someone on the side and you speak openly with your partner about it, that is polyamory. So, poly is not so much as what one does as how one does it; and most of that “doing” involves communication.

In another post I will get into how and why this pushes so many buttons, but I can pretty much sum it up in a few words: honesty is challenging; it seems easier to either suppress your needs, or to lie. So most of being polyamorous, besides the same challenges navigating the complex realm of human emotion that we all must navigate anyway, is about learning how to be honest and holding space for others to be honest. Or, looked at another way, aspiring to maturity and integrity.

As for families. The presentation this morning was given by Carol Morotti-Meeker, a family therapist from the Philadelphia area who is affiliated with the Institute for 21st Century Relationships, National Coalition for Sexual Freedom. The questions she covered, such as bringing new adults into the family, compatible parenting styles for non-biological-parent caregivers, and how to handle changes in the lives of adults that affect the kids, are questions that everyone with children has to face.

10 minutes into my umpteenth polyamory conference since 1997, I noticed again that the people who really need to be here are the ones who consider themselves monogamous, because the presenters here are asking the questions that everyone wrestles with. The US Census Bureau reports that first marriages last an average of eight years. That is an average; many last a lot less. So being married obviously does not protect children from change or instability. We all know this from personal experience.

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The Taurus XL Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) satellite, launched Feb. 24 in the last hours of a dark Moon, died an untimely death when it crashed into the Antarctic shortly after its scheduled morning launch in California.

OCO hours before takeoff. Image courtesy of NASA KSC/Analex and Orbital Sciences Corporation.

This is NASA’s first launch with the Taurus XL, and it represents an expensive failure. The $278 million project was nine years in development and the engineering team spoke of its “bitter disappointment” over the loss.В 

Given the tremendous cost, a rebuild of the satellite is unlikely. Now, potentially groundbreaking data on global warming and carbon dioxide will have to come from other satellites, like Japan’s recently launched Gosat.

NASA’s plans to launch a second satellite to measure carbon soot and aerosols in Earth’s atmosphere may be delayed until engineers discover why the Taurus XL launch failed. Glory, the satellite due to launch in June, will use the same Taurus XL rocket. However, engineers will first take a second look at the Taurus technology.

“Our goal will be to find a root cause for the problem. And we won’t fly Glory until we have that data known to us,” said NASA launch director Chuck Dovale. Today, NASA faces a serious public relations and funding challenge: how to get the American public (and Congress) to support funding for science and space exploration during a deepening recession.

Contrary to the success of the 1960s Apollo missions, over the past two decades NASA’s public reputation has been tarnished by spectacular failures. These days, satellite launches and CO2 emission data are unlikely to become a reason to celebrate among lower- and middle-class Americans.

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Dear Friend and Reader:

As I type these words, I cannot quite yet summon enough belief that this is happening: Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, announced a hearing on the formation of a special subcommittee to investigate the Bush Administration’s use of torture on prisoners.

Having lived through eight years of the Bush Administration and stuffing down helpless rage watching what Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Gonzales did in the name of 9-11, what Leahy proposes to do is something I thought I’d never see: opening the padlocked door to the darkest room of America’s house. This is the room where we tortured individuals, primarily Muslims, under the banner of 9-11 and national security. To do so, our former leaders worked around national and international laws based on the Constitution and the Geneva Convention to extract information using the most cruel means as possible.

“When historians look back at the last eight years, they will evaluate one of the most secretive administrations in the history of the United States,” Leahy said in remarks provided by his office. “We also know that the past can be prologue unless we set things right. The last administration justified torture, presided over the abuses at Abu Ghraib, destroyed tapes of harsh interrogations, and conducted ‘extraordinary renditions’ that sent people to countries that permit torture during interrogations.”

“Nothing has done more to damage America’s standing and moral authority than the revelations that, during the last eight years, we abandoned our historic commitment to human rights by repeatedly stretching the law and the bounds of executive power to authorize torture and cruel treatment,” Leahy said.

Holding on to a cynicism bred by three decades of panels, subcommittees and special prosecutors investigating everything from Nixon’s enemies list to consensual sex between the president and an intern, I’m a mix of skeptical and hopeful. Will a special committee be enough to bring charges or will there need to be more hearings, more special investigators and more Senate sub-committees? Will the true perpetrators be brought to justice? Will we shine enough light on this dark room so that we can end the barbaric practice of torture and change our ways in handling our security in this modern world without cruelty? Will this be enough to stop it once and for all?

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NASA is preparing for another launch, on Thursday, March 5. The Kepler spacecraft will be the first to look for Earth-like planets: particularly “rocky planets that orbit sun-like stars in a warm zone where liquid water could be maintained on the surface,”В NASA reports.В 

Kepler will spend 3.5 years watching one area of space for Earth-like objects. While this may seem like a long time to watch one patch of space, there are over 100,000 stars that resemble the Sun, and therefore may have an Earth-like planet orbiting it.В 

The launch will take place at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Fl. The Cape area best known for being a launch site and for the town’s high divorce rate. Its area code was changed to “321″ and, while most say this is in reference to the number of launches from the station, it could also be a reference to how long it takes before a spouse walks out the door and heads for greener pastures.