White Hot Ecstasy
Who let them feel and what do we do now?
This Utopias is also available via broadcast.
I recently found myself surrounded in a room of white men. From the moment I first walked in with my two non-white-male friends, I felt something in my body — a familiar constriction I've grown accustomed to after a lifetime trying to fit myself into the correct shapes of white Colorado suburbia where I was raised. I put on my nice smiley mask, defended myself against a storm of non-consensual high-fives and hugs, and patiently spelled out every letter of my name only for the name tag to still be wrong.
We continued with the experience but it came to a boiling point at one point when I was in the basement below the room listening in on a guided somatic practice the men were carrying out. They were invited by the speaker to feel, feel deep into their root chakra and solar plexus, and begin to shake to feel more grounded in their bodies. But rather than lingering in the depths of their body (which might teach them a thing or two), they then try to flee the scene of the crime — “let who you think you are dissolve.” I couldn’t really feel the dissolution with the thunder of their chants raining on me from above.
These were supposed to be the good men. They had flocked from their healing practices and non-profits to collaborate on the future of so-called men's work. With the world currently confronting the calamitous repercussions of manhood, they assembled to talk in panels, breakout mastermind sessions, networking cocktail hours, and good old-fashioned brother-to-brother walks. But I'm curious about what happens when white men are invited to feel their feelings and their bodies — why it can be so difficult for those of us that aren't white men to witness, and whether there must be another way forward. If this is the future of whiteness and manhood, then why did my body still feel some kind of way? And what is to be done about it?
Blind Faith
"They're just weird," my friend would say to me over dinner as we tried to put a name to this invisible feeling brewing inside us both. She and I spent the day listening to the men speak about where they see manhood going. When we weren't in the interviewer's chair, we spent the rest of the day fielding hugs, questions about our sexuality, stories about how these men are having the best sex of their lives, and even jabs at how one of us reminded them of the lover that stole his wife from him.
By all accounts, this convening was meant to name and reshape the state of manhood in America. I was there not as a participant but a witness (and maybe victim depending on the time of day). What struck me immediately was their constant invocation of somatics and ancient knowledge systems — the way they chanted in ecstasy as they celebrated the masculine. “Protector” this, “warrior” that. Man of god. They spoke of "divine masculine and feminine" as eternal, ancient, sacred traits. One man's work was helping other men through the "sacred" transition of menopause and how to cope with a lack of fucking. Another suggested we should embrace just a little bit of femininity while maintaining our ancient roles as protectors — "it has always been this way."
Talking shit down in the basement, my friend reminded me that they mean well. "They just lack any radical basis in race/class analysis," another said. I fear the "divine masculinity" that they have conjured out of themselves is what keeps white hetero-patriarchy alive.
A Familiar Feeling
What does it mean that many of them are therapists, or part of the emerging class of life coaches all high on the same punch of self-discovery? They write books about how to have the best sex of your life. They realize that maybe their wife who barely speaks up might have something to say after all. I nod along when they say they want men to become more whole but I wonder what that means. They want identity to be more malleable — a sprinkle of femininity, a dash of "cock energy" (their term) — but still want to keep those binary containers of man and woman (and what kind of man and woman exactly?) intact.
The white men are indeed in need of help, but I'm curious about how wounded soft boys continue to distribute harm. While I've grown accustomed to the micro-aggressions, they reminded me of an episode of Couple's Therapy last season when Josh, a white man in a polyamorous unit with two white femmes, finally breaks open after a season of narcissism veiled in abandonment issues and anxious attachments.
"Once you told me the fire story," his partner chuckles, "everything made way more sense." Josh tries to "tell it as succinctly as possible" — in college, he wanted to introduce his three Middle Eastern friends to the American joy of a s'more. They go to the mountains to roast marshmallows, stomp on the small fire, and 16 hours later the smoke starts rolling into town. The fire burned 2000 acres of land, $900 million in damages. The police officers pulled him from his criminal justice midterm (and justice will be served) to question him for 12 hours. He thinks he is safe (he even shares a laugh with the cops) but then they ask if they can corroborate his story with his friends. Josh's whiteness blinds him to how things work with the men in blue. The 10 students become the main suspects, and after four months they release their names to the public. "And then...," Josh pauses for an eternity while his two girlfriends watch him, "the court cases begin." The criminal and civil cases drag out for 5 years, with the cops turning to his Middle Eastern friends in particular to see if this was an act of terror. "There's lots of significantly more terrible experiences but it's a unique blend of terrible," he laughs. And now, it all makes sense that he has issues being blamed in his relationships.
Josh's inability to sit with the consequences of his whiteness mirrors the conference men's rush to dissolution.
The Lineage
White men seeking transcendence through appropriated practices has deep roots. A pivotal moment came in 1957 when R. Gordon Wasson, a J.P. Morgan banker, published "Seeking the Magic Mushroom" in Life magazine, describing his experience with psilocybin mushrooms during a Mazatec ritual in Oaxaca, Mexico, guided by curandera María Sabina. Wasson's article introduced psychoactive mushrooms to a wide audience for the first time and influenced the nascent counterculture in the United States, leading many hippies and spiritual seekers to travel to Mexico in the 1960s in search of the mushroom.
The trajectory raises critical questions about cultural appropriation and equity. María Sabina suffered tremendously after the Life article's publication — her community’s ecosystem was destroyed by an influx of tourism, her house was burned down, she was briefly jailed, and her community blamed her for revealing sacred practices — while chemical compounds derived from the mushrooms she introduced to Wasson now form part of pharmaceutical products worth billions of dollars, with Mazatec communities receiving no financial benefit from these patents.
I am reminded here of a trip to Maine I took with my college friends to trip on psilocybin mushrooms. When we arrived, we discovered our lodgings were in a private residential area, above a family’s house — this should have been our first foreshadowing of what was in store for us. We all chew our stems, and it is on our walk through the forest when the trees start to wobble. We make it to the the banks of a lake when the only white (gay) man among us begins to strip off all of his clothes. He spews a litany of insults at the other two women in the group, one of whom is our trip sitter who has to pass her responsibilities onto me in order to wrangle the naked white man going off the deep end in Trump country. I tried to calm him down as he tells me he would never fuck me because I am too feminine and he likes real tough guys. It goes on like this for an hour before he starts to relax but it’s even more startling to hear what comes out of his mouth the more lucid he becomes. For him, the hardest part of his trip was seeing how white his body was after he had shaved. Coupled with this anxiety was a newfound hunger for darker skin boys that he had encountered during his study abroad in Israel. He loved how “dirty” it felt to be with them.
The state of psychedelics will be on full display this month in Denver for the annual Psychedelic Science Conference. At the 2023 Psychedelic Science conference in Denver, Indigenous activists staged a spontaneous protest during the closing ceremony, interrupting MAPS founder Rick Doblin's speech to demand attention for Indigenous rights and representation. Five speakers criticized the psychedelic movement for tokenism and cultural appropriation, highlighting a fundamental tension: while Indigenous peoples preserved psychedelic plant medicines for centuries—enabling the scientific discoveries that launched today's psychedelic renaissance—they now have little stake in the commercial industry projected to reach $8 billion in value. The protesters argued that true healing requires centering marginalized voices and protecting sacred medicines from over-commercialization and misuse by inadequately trained practitioners.
Good Vibrations
This same pattern leads me to my research of nightclubs like The Saint and descriptions of ecstasy that were paired with the dream of losing identity and coming together in a union of primitive Eastern fantasies and Western civilization. In videos reminiscing about the club, white men (the ones who survived into older age) remember the feeling of the space on opening night, the way the lights went out and Donna Summer's "Could it Be Magic?" began to play. (Notice here too how it is often the sexy Black diva tasked with leading the white men down to their bodies.)
The Saint promised its patrons the same euphoria night after night. It was like clockwork — all the gays who looked the same would take the same drugs at the same time and ride the same wave over 12 hours of music spinning (sound familiar?). "It was so thrilling," Susan Tompkins, a Saint employee and one of the only women in the videos, recalls. "The energy was just amazing. You can't— there is no energy like that in the world, I'm convinced. You could send me onto the moon with that energy."
A graph of the energy at the Saint and the music selection that drove it. Courtesy of The Saint at Large.
The same year that psilocybin was "discovered" by the gringos in Oaxaca, Jack Kerouac was going on his own adventure across America. In his drug rampage classic, On the Road, he stops in my hometown of Denver:
"At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night... I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a 'white man' disillusioned."
This is 27th and Welton today. What do you notice?
Searching the very white and very male genre of addiction memoirs, Maggie Nelson uncovers a buzz of white anxiety and racialized tropes that begin to, quoting Toni Morrison's seminal Playing in the Dark, "surface endlessly when one begins to look carefully." One of the most common tropes is the wanderer longing to leave behind their spiritually empty, deficient whiteness to actually feel something, often through contact with mixed company. These real-life encounters record fantasies of the Other that elevate them to a mythical status outside of time, back to antiquity to where the white man is eager to flee.
They're so hell-bent on losing their body, ditching the thing that aches with pain until they can become nothing. That is not a luxury that we have ever known, nor is it even a horizon that we pursue.
The Feeling Body
On a lunch break from the men, my friend reintroduced me to the work of Resmaa Menakem. I had first come across his work in somatic abolition about a year ago but returned this week to an interview on the Sounds True podcast. He and the host Tami Simon are in the middle of their interview when she says it hurts her to hear that "the Black body is not fully human" in our world. He pauses and asks her to look for that hurt in her body. It's in her heart. "It's a kind of ache," and then it "moved and changed." Menakem taps into the feeling; she describes it as a dull ache. Underneath that, she feels righteous, ready to call bullshit on his words. Here is where Menakem hovers.
What does it feel like to be read? Many of us who have acted out at one point in our lives or another would know (especially those of us whose proximity to the universal center of whiteness, manhood, wealth, citizenship might require us to rethink the stories we tell about the world and ourselves). It's a feeling that we see unfold over Zoom between the psychotherapist and a white woman in her feels. The white body is, of course, a feeling body, just like the rest of ours. But when charged feelings about identity land in them, Menakem illuminates how the electricity gets "blown through" their bodies and into ours.
I, like Tami too maybe, feel embarrassed at the thought of being seen in my own naivety (I am still negotiating the role I play in this world as someone who is both racialized and white depending on the space I enter). But Menakem is gracious as he handles her feelings that she has now thrown back to him, to all of us watching at home. He plays a role that so many of us have had to do and only some choose to — teaching you about what it feels like to be us. We live in a fairly new world together as so-called humans so it only makes sense that there is still learning to be done.
This is where somatic abolitionism emerges — not just abolishing white body supremacy cognitively, but spending the time to abolish it in the body first. As Menakem explains it, we must start with the construct of white body supremacy — these bodies are the supreme standard by which all bodies of humanity shall be measured structurally and philosophically. There is a collective unconscious that buoys the idea of the subhuman, and nearly all of our bodies — bodies of all culture — are infected by the virus of white-body supremacy.
In DEI trainings, the ask is often for BIPOC people to come and teach what it's like to be in our shoes. When Resmaa asks Tami to look for what's "just below the hurt," he's modeling what multiple intelligences look like — not just cognition as the primary intelligence that crowds out everything, but vibratory intelligence, the knowledge that comes from feeling.
But what's not said in the room is that you are diversifying from the white male body being standard—inclusion, but inclusion into what? Somatic abolitionism treats these practices as toys rather than tools — because looking at it as tools is intelligence hoarding, a need to fix. What if it were intelligence expansion instead? Playful as tolerating discomfort, beginning to discern clean discomfort versus dirty pain.
Throughout moments across time, people have looked to escape their white bodies, jumping downstream to the bodies marked by their deviation from the white body standard which have become dumping grounds. How do we address the damage done by white people choosing comfort over feeling?
In the Basement
We are down here in the basement kiki'ing while they storm upstairs. They scream about the divine masculine and feminine — abstraction, abstraction, abstraction. "There is nothing divine about gender," one friend screams to me. They lack a radical analysis that brings in race and class. They congratulate themselves on the millions they've invested into this work. The only women they know and love are their mothers, wives, and daughters.
Utopias is the conversation down here. It's critique. It's talking shit. It's the terror that it won't be better. It's the material for another world.
The somatic has emerged as a field where power takes its toll, the past is preserved, and where we might find liberation. I write all this maybe from a place of jealousy for feeling so free in your body. It's true that while I have been drawn to felt encounters, I often look at it from a distance, from my desk chair in the house I rent in the gentrified Elysian Heights neighborhood.
I am invested in what José Esteban Muñoz calls utopia as a way to feel the feelings of the here and now, engrained in us from generations of trauma and hope, and use them as a way towards a more relational future. It’s about “being singular plural” — a joining of self and others through sensation, through performance, through art, through existence. Muñoz writes, “the singularity that marks a singular existence is always coterminously plural — which is to say that an entity registers as both particular in its difference but at the same time always relational to other singularities." A lot of big words asking us:
How can we feel our singular feelings and use that to connect us to the plural of one another?
What would it mean for us to feel together? What would somatic abolitionism look like as a practice that doesn't abstract away from the material conditions that make some bodies more available for feeling than others?
The white men upstairs are indeed hungry to feel whole. But their attempts to rid themselves of their identities through somatic practices often end up reinforcing their hegemony even as they run from their identity. Despite their best intentions, their inner stories still rear their heads because abstraction — the act of putting their sensations into words — becomes the only form they know.
Down here in the basement, we're figuring out what it means to feel without extraction, to be present without appropriation, to be whole without becoming everything. This is the work of being singular plural — feeling our particularity while remaining accountable to the world that shapes us.
This experience has made me more aware of the way the world around me lands in my body. Feelings are things that are constantly in the air, dancing between you and me. The way I feel the world is an inventory of traces made by the people that I've met. Some of the most beautiful experiences of my life and learning have come from the feelings that are shared between us. In a white body supremacy world, the comfort and experience of white male bodies often feels foreign to me as I am constantly latched to my body through the range of sensations—from ecstasy to panic, from masking to holding my breath, clenching in.
The uncomfortable feeling I carried throughout that weekend was familiar indeed — the same constriction from growing up in this body around these people all the time. This was all I knew until I left and saw more of the worlds being built against the grain of a white-bodied world. I learned this from my own family too, an assemblage of four people who never needed a man to be protecting us. It is dawning on me as I write this that my discomfort around white men losing control may also come from a lack of men throughout my life. I felt lucky as a child to not have a father because then I would have the space to be my own person.
And yet, I am fully invested in a world with men — even feeling white men. In his work, Menakem says that this is not a set of tools but a toybox — an endless practice of experimentation and revisions that includes feeling what comes up inside of you, and under that, and under that. What is the part that you feel like you can't say? What do the actions of others ignite in your body? Are you thinking or feeling? How can you lean into what Menakem calls the "clean pain" of encountering one another and navigating the oceans of feelings that we both radiate?
There are worlds down here that exist that you cannot even fathom, but they do not just disappear under generations of erasure. These memories of ours and our ancestors accumulate in our bodies, and the only way toward the future is one that tries to build links between each of these worlds in the hopes of making a constellation of people, stories, and legacies together. The beauty of life has been the full spectrum of these feelings and the way they accumulate in the body and are passed between people, generations, and now, in our ever more connected world, the entire globe. I am trying to learn how to let go of the feelings that keep me locked whenever my surroundings get me in their grips. When you think you've found it, don't try to just brush it off but actually sit with it — listen to people who have had lives different than yours, with a whole other set of feelings and knowledge to match.
It's a feeling of being surrounded, but also of surrounding each other.