Of all the things we have to blame the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020-21 for, perhaps the most unexpected is that some desperate people used them as a handy opportunity to begin having sex with trees. In 2020, a 45-year-old Canadian “somatic sex educator” named Sonja Semjonova was going out on her daily walk permitted to her by the Trudeau Taliban, when she came across (perhaps even literally) a giant oak tree by the side of a path in British Colombia. Perceiving “a connection” with the tree, Sonja began to “lie against it” loving the “feeling of being tiny and supported by something more solid” and “not being able to fall”.
Although not enjoying full penetrative intercourse with the oak, as in an infamous old scene from the original 1981 Evil Dead movie, Sonja nonetheless self-identified as something called an ‘Ecosexual’, an entire new branch of the queer identitarian movement which did actually precede lockdown. At the San Francisco Pride Parade in 2015, a bunch of literal tree-huggers performed a special ceremony to ‘officially’ modify the LGBTQI label to read LGBTQIE in the fetish’s honour.
Are Vegans Pagans?
But is ecosexuality really a fetish at all? The practice involves treating the Earth and its many natural manifestations – trees, flowers, rocks, mountains, seas, lakes, fields, beaches, skies, clouds, weather conditions, National Parks, coral reefs, etc – as your close lovers. Positive profiles of the paraphilia (the technical, non-judgemental contemporary clinical name for a perversion) have appeared even in such child-targeted publications as Teen Vogue, where it is presented as a viable method of combatting climate-change.
According to the magazine editors, it is an eminently sensible idea to teach your daughters and granddaughters that one of the best ways of healing the planet is by shagging it: “The idea is that you save the Earth by having fun, and also extremely intimate, consensual experiences with it.” The ideal is to “Turn Mother Earth into Lover Earth”, because, whilst a mother is supposed to love you no matter how badly you treat her, if you treat a lover badly, he or she will soon break up with you; if you want Gaia to keep on giving you thrills, you’ll need to cut down your CO2 emissions or she’ll dump you for a compost-bin threesome with Dale Vince and Chris Packham immediately.
The appropriately named Vice website carried a comment from a prominent ecosexual named Amanda Morgan, of the UNLV School of Community Health Sciences, who queerly claimed that everyone was potentially on the ecosexual spectrum, just as everyone is supposedly somewhere on the transexual gender-spectrum too these days. On the mild end, ecosexuality “encompasses people who use sustainable sex products [like recyclable wooden dildos], or who enjoy skinny dipping and naked hiking”, whilst at the more extreme end there are “people who roll around in the dirt having an orgasm covered in potting soil… who fuck trees, or masturbate under a waterfall”.
Possibly this all began as a mere niche sexual activity, but in recent years it has more definitely morphed into a form of green activism, or a “pleasure-centric framework for climate justice” and a “distinctly queer strand of climate activism”, as it has been described. Distinctly ethically minded, today’s green ecosexuals engage in earnest ethical debates about whether it is necessary to gain psychic consent from a tree before one hugs it (or worse).
Annual conferences devoted to the interest now occur. In tribute to the TV home of Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Cattrall, 2023’s was called ‘Ecosex and the City’ and took place in New York, where bush-pounders and pebble-lickers were invited to “mingle with diverse life-forms and various communities of artists, scholars, sex-workers, fashionistas, plants, spores, water-drops, clouds, and more, more, more”. Supposedly, there are around 100,000 ecosexuals worldwide who could have attended such a jamboree, although precisely how this figure has been arrived at, I could not say: hopefully, via the use of a random-number generator.
This all sounds very much like a disturbing case of paganism being reborn. Prior to Christianity, some pagan priestesses did supposedly have sex with trees and suchlike to encourage the rebirth of the natural world in springtime following winter, as part of pre-Christian fertility rituals. This being Easter week, we are currently at around the time the planet would get annually ‘pregnant’ and give birth to new life once more, in shape of sprouting blooms, leaping lambs and cute hatching chicks, following the earlier mid-winter acts of witches sitting on shrubberies or druids sticking their bits into tree-hollows and hoping there wasn’t a hornet’s nest hidden inside. Following the later coming of Christianity to the West, you may have thought such ceremonies were over forever. Evidently not.
Talk Dirty Hydrocarbons To Me
What are the roots of this reborn pagan madness? They lie in the all-consuming queer mid-2000s campaign to legalise gay marriage across the West. Two committed campaigners for this cause at the time were a pair of lesbian lovers named Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle, now artists and academics, and the twin authoresses of The Ecosex Manifesto, a document which contains several clauses that would have made Marx and Engels blush redder than their favourite flag:
Having succeeded in helping lay the ground for the legalisation of gay marriage in America, in 2008 Stephens and Sprinkle claim to have ‘married the Earth’, and soon began broadening this concept out into the idea of staging queer human-with-non-human marriages to other natural phenomena too, such as mist and fog. Their (literally?) seminal ‘Wedding to the Soil’ took place in Austria in 2014, when, in a bizarre attempt to de-Nazify the native landscape from the Hitler-era sin of fascist ‘Blood and Soil’ ideology, they had lashings of weird Left-wing sex with patches of grass and mud instead, thereby reminding all their many professionally identitarian wedding-guests “to think about whose blood had been spilled on the soil where this wedding was taking place, recalling World War II atrocities as well as highlighting recent incidents of antisemitism”.
But what, precisely, does a ‘Wedding to the Soil’ involve? Literal filth like this:
The Soil Wedding reception was in a garden a few blocks away from the wedding venue. A fantastic, tall maypole, constructed for us by the festival team, was festooned with coloured ribbons and attached to the head of a double bed filled with soil. Three women playfully hugged the maypole as they were bound to it with ribbons. Our guests wove these ribbons together in the maypole dance. It was delightfully kinky, colourful, and fun all at once. We consummated our vows to the Soil by rolling around naked kissing the dirt and each other. We got really dirty.
Things got Gaia and Gaia with the pair’s ‘Wedding to the Coal’, which took place in the Spanish coal-mining region of Asturias in 2011, under the auspices of their then-colleague, Diana Pornoterrorista, and a “talented group of collaborators [which] included dancers, ecologists, healers, performance artists, writers, psycho-magicians, and sex-workers”. In practice, this involved the group engaging in an anti-fossil fuel mass public orgy culminating in one of them giving birth to big lumps of coal through her genitalia like a literal tar-baby:
Diana performed a fierce spoken-word piece about how the coal mine is like a woman’s pussy: “Dark, black, wet, and very dangerous.” She then pulled some chunks of coal out of her vagina. Amber McBride had travelled from Australia to join us. During the workshop, she had injured her leg, so during the wedding she was in a wheelchair, from which she suddenly lunged and poured thick black paint all over her big voluptuous breasts as she hopped around wildly on one foot, screaming in agony. After saying “I do,” we two brides kissed each other between the buttocks with a “black kiss.” We consummated our marriage to Coal by stripping out of our dresses and lying down face to face on a bed of coal while four women dipped pieces of coal into the bucket of blood. Slowly, ritualistically, and in recognition of the suffering caused by mining, the four women placed the bloody coal on our nude bodies. We thought of this wedding as a form of psycho-magic healing.
I prefer think of it as just psycho, myself.
Inevitably, the Guardian effectively endorsed the pair’s campaign with a glowing write-up of “ecosexual pioneer Annie Sprinkle” in 2017: “The porn star-turned-sex educator is at the vanguard of a new queer movement combining sex and ecology that is all about being at one with the Earth.”
Did the Earth Move For You?
Stephens and Sprinkle seem able to spend their entire lives performing deviant acts with landscape features. They have assembled their own troupe of collaborators, including “both human and other-than-human entities”, such as Planet Earth, whom they claim is their actual employee:
Wonder what his National Insurance Number is?
Amongst their allegedly human co-workers, meanwhile, is this peculiar individual, an “extreme immigrant”, “radical pedagogue”, “conceptual reverse wetback” and “proud Mariachi Ecosexual from the 3[rd] world”:
When Donald Trump makes it clear the USA needs to build a big, beautiful wall with Mexico to keep all the undesirables out, this man is precisely who he means.
The lovers have also made their own feature-film, Water Makes Us Wet, a documentary in which viewers are invited to:
Travel around California with Annie, a former sex-worker, Beth, a professor, and their dog Butch, in their E.A.R.T.H. Lab mobile unit, as they explore water in the Golden State [of California]. … Along the way, Annie and Beth interact with a diverse range of folks, including performance artists, biologists, water treatment plant workers, scholars and others, climaxing in a shocking event [I don’t know what, and I don’t want to know] that reaffirms the power of water, life and love.
Meanwhile, Stephens’s and Sprinkle’s other recent movie, Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Coming Out Story, recounts their “pollen-amorous” love affair between each other and some mining-despoiled mountain-tops, where: “We join locals in extreme tree-hugging, sky-gazing, rock-kissing and singing to the earth, [before] the film climaxes with a purple-themed wedding to the Appalachian Mountains.” But why? According to the blurb:
Their goal is to begin mobilising the gay, lesbian, bi, trans, inter-and eventually eco [communities] to stand up against environmental injustice everywhere. As Beth says in the film, ‘Gays and Lesbians can live without getting married, but they won’t survive unless they have drinking water and clean air to breath.’
They also have their own “open-ended” book, Assuming the Ecosexual Position, from the University of Minnesota Press, which “describes how the two came together as lovers and collaborators… [to] take a stand against homophobia and xenophobia” besides telling of erotic “childhood moments that pointed to a future of ecosexuality – for Annie, in her family swimming pool in Los Angeles, for Beth, savouring forbidden tomatoes from the vine on her grandparents’ Appalachian farm”.
LGBTreeQ+
To put it mildly, none of the above enterprises seem likely to enjoy much commercial viability. So how have Stephens and Sprinkle managed to fund their full-time quest of roaming the globe doing things like “demonstrating grassilingus” upon a university lawn? Simple. Being involved in both academia and the arts, they are experts in applying for and receiving large grants, probably simply by writing shibboleth buzz-words like ‘climate-change’, ‘queerness’ and ‘intersectionality’ on their application papers:
Wish I could get $62,000 for having a wank in the sea.
If you want to go all Wicker Man and become a pagan ecosexual yourself this Easter, there is still time to enrol upon one of Sprinkle’s and Stephens’ ‘Sexological Walking Tours’, in which you will be encouraged to find the local environmental “E-spots”, or “Ecosexy-spots”. One walk on offer is in New York’s Central Park where, the last time around, events “climaxed with [participants] rubbing Manhattan’s planetary clitoris, which was a gorgeous knob on a tree. … By the end of the tour, everyone came out as an ecosexual”.
Talk about raping the environment. Perhaps our planet really is screwed after all.
Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.
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Hey, they can go into the forests and do their thing to their hearts’ content – it may mean their not blocking motorways and stopping others getting on with their normal lives.
Unfortunately ‘their thing’ is trying to stop us doing our things.
On a visit to Glastonbury in the early 2000s I picked up a flyer (which I still have) for a guided walk called ‘An Awayday with the Faeries’. The title tickled me and made me wonder quite how seriously the organiser took things. Perhaps they ‘believed’, but just wanted to leaven things with a little humour? Or did they really think the whole thing was laughable, just a way of fleecing the gullible? I remember reading the Guardian’s profile of Sprinkle, and similar thoughts came to mind. She’s surely not expecting us to take her completely seriously?
When my younger (adult) son and I went to Glastonbury during the Covid nonsense, he said “I suppose it’s useful to have all the nutters in the same place.”
Little did he know …..
I couldn’t read more than a paragraph of this article, because the whole concept is revolting. The ancient myth of Gilgamesh involved him doing similar things to rocks and trees due to his insane obsession with sex.
But this article suddenly made me remember a scene from movie director Ken Russell’s adaptation of “Women in Love”, in which Oliver Reed’s character stripped off in a woodland and rolled around ecstatically in the vegetation. It was creepy. The whole movie was creepy. Like many of Russell’s weird movies, a total waste of an all-star cast of superb British actors.
Why are these freaks never attractive in any sense?
(rhetorical question)
If they were, they’d find humans to have sex with.
It’s about time these deranged people showed some spunk and stood with placards outside China’s embassies across Europe. With over 1100 coal-fired power stations running, and building 300 to 700 more at home & overseas (depending on whose report you accept – NYTimes or mining.com), China alone, never mind India, Indonesia etc. etc. is going to wipe out planet Earth in the twinkling of an eye!.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/climate/china-energy-companies-coal-plants-climate-change.html
https://www.mining.com/chinese-companies-build-700-coal-plants-outside-china/
They never glue themselves to the pavement there, never trash Chinese paintings or other cultural items, never demand UN resolutions condemning China, never demand sanctions against China. Their priority is to destroy the economies of western societies.
Net Zero – the “White Race Death Cult“, totally ignored by the rest of the world.
Great comment.
They wouldn’t dare, the cowards.
“People Who Have Sex With Trees, Mud and Lumps of Coal”
If only their parents had done the same we wouldn’t have to put up with this whole generation of these f-ing mentally ill misfits!
Amen.
If the oak tree likes big tits, it’s on to a winner!
“If a retard has a screaming orgasm in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
God, there are some seriously deranged people out there.
I’d rather not if that’s OK. It seems such narcissistic behaviour is becoming the norm.
Yuk!
There is obviously a lot of empty asylums around, and if we are going to be really silly, has anyone asked if the trees, rocks etc want this unwanted “attention”
Lunatics.