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Vibecoding Challenge 2: The Five Feathers (Spring 2026)
(gist.github.com)
Part of it is sex-magick culture, carried in the Bay Area mostly by Satanists but also by some hippies. Basically, men are supposed to be "superior men", which means controlling their desire to control and keeping it internalized instead of externalizing it onto their partner; women are supposed to be "superior women", which means rejecting their desire to reject and keeping that internalized instead. Psychoanalytically, the superior man repeatedly fails to control his own expressions of safe and invited sexuality, leading to D/s play; the superior woman repeatedly fails to reject her own notions of restricted and volitional sexuality, leading to C/NC play. The superior woman is in control of the relationship outside the bedroom but the superior man gets to be sexually dominant in return. The superior man knows that he can humble himself to his wife but that's okay because he still gets to determine when and where sexual relations occur; the superior woman knows that it's okay to be a little girlbossy with their husband in social situations in exchange for giving up sexual control in private.
If I've made it sound a little bit like 1950s housewifey tropes, well then yes. If it sounds more than a little heteronormative and transphobic, also yes. TBH it also kind of reminds me of some of the ways that I've heard Tiktok tradwives talk about their relationships and maybe it's part of a wider traditionalist theme.
Why would anybody be attracted to this? For sexually-listless people, there's the suggestion that this theory neatly explains why they're sexually unfulfilled. The theory's analysis for men starts with the question "Why am I not more confident in the bedroom?" and for women with the question "Why am I not more open in the bedroom?" These are Barnum questions that apply to just about any sexually-mature person, but that can be hard to notice for anybody who is also struggling with feelings of insufficient masculinity or femininity.
Source: I studied lots of religions, including esoteric traditions, when I was younger. I've turned down sex from a Satanic polycule while visiting friends in the Bay Area. A card-carrying Satanic pick-up artist has tried to get me to buy his e-book about being a superior man, also while in the Bay Area.
Good thoughts. Satanists also talk about LHP and it comes up in other contexts too, like Lila.
So, on Taoist vs. tantric vs. Buddhist perspectives, I would point out that Satanic sex magick (in slight contrast to Randolph's work, fascinating link, thanks) doesn't do yin and yang or separate-but-equal. Instead they borrow from some Classics, particularly Stoics and Epicureans, and are almost entirely focused on optimizing the man's experience. They say that orgasms are gendered; male orgasms are a moment of blank emptiness and female orgasms are a prolonged wave of giving. Also, men are fallen and inferior, while women are born with an innate connection to nature and magick, somewhat like today's tradwife meme that only women can produce babies. Sex magick is therefore about finding ways to empower men by channeling magickal energy from women to men. They do make a sort of symmetry with fluids, since they imagine that men always give fluids to women; life energy goes in one direction and sex energy goes in the other direction.
To be fair, Satanists of all stripes generally support equal rights for women, and that includes the magisters. They'll say that Satan represents self-control, self-authority, self-agency, self-autonomy, etc. They think women should have the choice of whether to be auxiliary vessels who serve as magical sex conduits for a wizard with main-character syndrome. (Typing that sentence, I ponder: is occult Satanism an isekai?)
Putting this together, I'm now imagining the ideal Satanic interpretation of one of Aella's parties as a sex ritual rooted in temptation. The superior man is supposed to sit on the couch, motionless, at peace with himself, not desiring. The superior woman, presumably the hostess herself, is supposed to tease and taunt him, putting herself into precarity, not denying. From that perspective, Aella's making the mistake of over-privileging the fundamental male urge, or as we might put it in colloquial English, "encouraging rape."