Joseph Gelfer at Elephant Journal - Gender, Sexuality, and Psychedelic Spirituality

Gender studies professor, author (Numen, Old Men: Contemporary Masculine Spiritualities and the Problem of Patriarchy, The Masculinity Conspiracy, 2012: Decoding the Countercultural Apocalypse, and editor of the Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality), and blogger Joseph Gelfer has a new article up at Elephant Journal. It's an interesting examination of gender and sexuality in the community of psychedelic spirituality.

Gender, Sexuality and Psychedelic Spirituality. ~ Joseph Gelfer

Loving Earth

A while back I attended a conference about psychedelic spirituality. During one of the Q&A sessions a woman stood up and asked, “It’s great to see all these beautiful, well-read and articulate men. But I have one question: Where are the women?” 

This was a very good question indeed. Looking around, it was difficult to identify any gender imbalance in the audience –– comprised as it was equally of beautiful men and women –– but the speaker of the program told another story. Apart from a few anomalies, the speakers were all men.

The psychedelic community prides itself on progressive, transgressive and even utopian values. But do these values extend to the domain of gender and sexuality? I decided to take it upon myself to find some answers to this question, and looked both to what we already know about this subject, and undertook a survey on how the psychedelic community viewed these issues.

Read the whole article.