Your Erotic Edge: Power, Villains, and Magnetism

Hannah Summerhill (0:00)

Welcome back, everyone, to The Hannah Summerhill Show. Today's episode is about erotic power and magnetism. And is our erotic power dangerous? It's going to be a juicy episode. So get ready, buckle in. And I want to start with a question.

I want you, in your mind, to name notorious male villains in history.

And the typical ones might be coming up, like Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, Trump, all of those losers.

Now I want you to name notorious female villains in history.

Maybe Cruella de Vil comes to mind, or Ursula, Lilith, Monica Lewinsky, although she really shouldn't be a villain.

I was recently asked those same questions on a master class. And there are hundreds of women on this master class, and we all named, you know, the names that I just shared with you.

Maybe you can think of some others.

But we all sat kind of in a collective grief at the asymmetry of those two answers. For several moments, this was a class led by Kasia Urbaniak. She is a teacher I've mentioned on this podcast before.

A famous Taoist nun turned dominatrix, turned really headmistress of power dynamics.

And she asked us this question, and it was stunning to me how imbalanced the answers were. Because men only become notorious villains when they commit atrocious, murderous acts, genocide, violence.

Women become notorious villains when they express just a small measure of greed, lust, power, sexuality.

And the crazy thing is a lot of those female villains are fictional. They're not even real.

And so this class is really powerful. It was called The Erotic Edge. And I've learned a lot from Kasha after meeting her 12 years ago.

A huge grief sat on me for days after this class because I started to think about all the ways in which women are so compressed and this narrow window of expression that we are allowed before we are considered dangerous. And even though we may not literally be burned at the stake for expressing our magic, our power, our desire, figuratively, we still might.

And mentally, that psychic toll has weighed on us, individually and collectively, for millennia.

This is the narrow window that we are allowed of expression.

And I went away for the weekend a couple of weekends ago, and I was thinking about this thought experiment of the male versus female villains. And it made me really sad, and then it made me so angry. I started to think of the ways that I too have compressed myself. When we as women, especially, are scared of our erotic power, how do we know what it's like to be fully alive even? And I see this in so many women that I meet. Women who are so incredibly smart, but incredibly divorced from or afraid of their own erotic power. And it's like all of their energy lives up here, and their upper energy centers kind of in the mind. They're usually very intelligent, very ambitious, but they're not super grounded in their lower energy centers. You could call it, you know, the pussy, the vulva, the portal of creation. When women are fully rooted in that, we know what joy feels like. We know what expression feels like. We know the pleasures of sensation, and we're not afraid of it. We don't run from it. We don't try to intellectualize it. We enjoy pleasure. We receive it into our lives, instead of just trying to force things to always happen. I see that when women are more connected to their upper energy centers, that they rely more on matter to move matter instead of really rooting into that beautiful, primal life force from which they came from, that magical miraculous place. When we connect to this power, we become more magnetic. We become more radiant because we're literally accessing all of our own power sources. We're, to me, tapping into the most pure, primal, innate, beautiful life force part of ourself, the source of our own aliveness, right? Where we came from, like how we came into this world. And when we're not connected to it, either because of trauma or because of this millennia of women being burned at this stake, literally and metaphorically, for expressing themselves sexually or physically or in any kind of way that is outside what is acceptable, then of course we become incredibly compressed, not just in that area of our life, not just in the erotic area of our life, but in every area of our life. Because if you can think of that as our very first route, it's the very first chakra, right? And everything builds from there. If we are stuck there, how can we be fully expressed in our other energy centers, in our heart, in our third eye, in our crown, et cetera? And I will admit, it is scary for all of the reasons that women are punished for expressing their own erotic power. I've been really inspired ever since taking Mama Gina's courses. I was introduced to Audre Lorde's work. So I've been really inspired by her over the past decade plus.