When I Get This Feeling…I Want…Sexual Healing.

"Most western sex is necrophilia; one dead body having sex with another dead body" - Joseph Kramer.

When I read this quote today, I was in absolute agreement with it. No brainer. Sex is dead. Long live intimacy! 

Many years ago now, I came across a book by a female performance artist and former sex worker Annie Sprinkle. At the time, I'd never heard of Annie nor come across her work, but this book, entitled "Annie Sprinkle's Post Porn Modernist" changed my life. Annie spoke to me about her sexual evolution in ways that were heartfelt, humorous and sometimes heart-breaking too, but then such is life. Her vivid descriptions of her up-bringing, adolescence and her journey (or perhaps deep dive) into the explorations of what it is to be a liberated sexual being were so incredibly inspiring. Annie seemed to have banished shame! This intrigued me. 

I have been fortunate enough to meet Annie, and at this meeting I was rapidly introduced to the magic that is Ms Sprinkle as a room full of people were taken into energy orgasm streaming right next door to a room of policemen and women, policy makers and officials deep into bone dry conversations of the cerebral type. The orgasmic noises filtering through the thin walls with increasing volume were just so delicious, and I can tell you now I sincerely wished I'd attended 'the other' break out session at that conference! 

From this meeting, this conference, a litter of ideas were birthed, giving rise to the Sex Work Re-Assessed Conference here in the UK in 1998. This joint project led by myself and two colleagues from The University of East London (Dr's Wendy Rickards and Merl Storr), came about after that trip to Los Angeles, where seeing so many create and change so much by giving a massive platform to that which is often unsaid was utterly inspiring. Perhaps in those days, funding was internationally more available, people were talking more about this stuff and there was a real buzz around sexuality, not a 'dry' buzz but more of a wet slippery one! Sex workers were speaking loud and proud and this is what they were saying…

But what is sex? what is sexual expression? Who gets to decide, and who gets to legislate? Personally speaking I don't ever want to witness a repeat of 'Operation Spanner' where in December of 1990, 16 gay men were given custodial sentences for consenting BDSM activity. Key word there = CONSENTING! So, the issue with sexuality for me lies in the distortions around it, and the value judgments which are seemingly inextricably tied to it. A bondage of a different kind! 

For me, it doesn't really matter what you do in bed, it's more about how you do it. As Joseph Kramer so succinctly puts it above, many of us are dead or dying from the waist down when it comes to the fine and exquisite art of truly 'love' making. Neither the hearts and flowers Mills and Boon kind, nor the opposite kind of the style you may find in a fetish club, for both can be equally besieged with a lack of true connection to the self and the other in my view. No, Joseph has nailed it (no pun intended!). 

For me, the three keys are breath, communication and presence. Being brave enough to really speak about what turns you on and off, where your energy is flowing and stuck, and truly making the first forays into stopping with the acting and starting to become the key player in your own pleasure maps. Following a path of Red Tantra has led me into the body in ways I could never have previously imagined. Without having to use fantasy as a tool to get off, one becomes able to use presence as the greatest erotic aphrodisiac on the market, and the good news is that it's free! All of the add-ons can be fine of course, but even then, if we default to major fantasy without fully remaining present to who is in front of us, what we are sharing and how we share it, then it's game over. If you're lucky you get a great O-gasm, if not, a somewhat deflated feeling that you've sold yourself short somehow. 

But what if you don't sell yourself short? What if you don't make love as one 'dead' body to another? Then, does it matter if you are paid for it or not? If you're tied up or not? If it's a one off or an ongoing thing? No! The whole point is, that you are truly alive and inhabiting your body, your sexual self and your personal erotic map in absolute and utter presence, and that my dears, is where the nectar truly lies. In integrity. 

So let's hear it for all of the Sexual Pioneers, healers and adventurers out there making this world sexier one way or another. I for one am grateful for each and every one of them. 

Shakti Tantra, Sarah Rose Bright, Joseph Kramer, Barbara Carrellas, Annie Sprinkle, Betty Dodson et al. Thank you for being there sexing up the planet! 

Self Pleasure Versus Masturbation

Good evening all and welcome to 2014! My second post of the year sees me contemplating an altogether different subject, the subject of pleasure and how you get yours.

I was well into my fourth decade before I first heard the term 'self pleasure', and when I did, I admit that it didn't sit comfortably with me. It reeked a little too much of good-girl-squeaky-clean syndrome and somehow seemed a bit 'icky'. Personally speaking, I'd always preferred my fucks to my made loves, my cums to my climaxes and my wanks to my self pleasures. And I'd always chosen words like cunt over vagina, pussy over the euphemistic lady-garden and perhaps the worst one ever, front bottom!

So for me, coming across the phrase 'self pleasure' was a tantric exploration as much about the semantics and their message as it was the form and structure.

Many of us grew up either being told that it would make us blind, it was dirty or it was just something for dark, silent corners that we all knew about but no-one ever discussed, perish the thought. And yet we also knew from an early age, damn this feels good! So for me tantra blew the lid off all of that negative collective consciousness around sex and sexuality, intimacy and the body, and as someone never too backwards at coming forwards, I didn't even know how much further I could go!

I'm still a tiny bit twitchy when I use the phrase self-pleasure as it's just not really me, but I'm getting better at it, you could say that the 'L' plates are off and I'm on the road but not there yet, wherever there is. However I also feel that masturbation sounds so damn clinical, so somewhere in between the two I guess I sit on the proverbial fence waiting to see upon which side I 'cum' down (pardon the pun).

Some of my heroines, women like Betty Dodson and Annie Sprinkle really broke through so many taboos in their work. Betty's famous books Sex For One, Celebrating Orgasm and the like, and Annie's absolutely seminal Public Cervix Announcement really broke the mould when it came to smashing the silent barriers of shame, guilt and fear.

Using her own body, Annie offered up to her audience the chance to see and discuss the deeper, darker, mystical caverns of a woman's body, pleasure and psyche. Her openness encouraged that in others. Her work inspires me to this day and I salute her contribution to sexual progressive thought, feeling and action. Annie's book 'Post Porn Modernist', was one of the first books I ever bought, read cover to cover and have treasured ever since. 

I'm more comfortable with the term self pleasure since discovering tantra, as I can now relate it to the many different ways of experiencing pleasure, and I guess the key for me has been one of taking my pleasure back for me. It's not about me giving it to anyone else, performing or feeling obligated to some reciprocal deal in the bedroom, but how I can give and take pleasure by really owning it, understanding it and revelling in it. Self pleasure could actually be about anything, eating, sleeping, running, gazing into the eyes of your beloved, running a soft bath, resting, whatever it is so long as the intention is there to pleasure the self. In receiving well, we learn to extend that and in turn, to give well, and I'm not sure its possible to give well if you can't receive well. How can we ever hope to do that whilst masturbating silently, quickly and under cover of darkness? So yes, I am beginning to love the term, and to relish my private moments of bliss, and in those moments, masturbation seems far to limited a terminology. 

The french call orgasms 'la petite mort' or 'the little death' and it's true that in my personal moments of ecstatic bliss I probably come closest to that infinite zero point of nothing-ness, the primordial soup, the essence of a small death. The website Beautiful Agony is worth a browse and Clayton Cubitt's highly erotic 'Hysterical Literature' project is just another orgasm waiting to happen to be quite frank. Beautiful, erotic and intelligent, it also opens doors into how we witness pleasure and where that witnessing can take us. There's so much out there, go explore and have fun! It's all about the bliss and nothing about the shame. 

Get orgasmic, its good for you! 

For more teachings on tantra and sexuality, I highly recommend Shakti Tantra

Why my work is important to me.

A therapist today suggested that I write out a list of why my work is important to me. The premise for this suggestion was to appease the concerns and deepen the understanding of my work, and its place in my life, for someone important to me who was/is struggling with what I do (Tantric Massage Therapist & Healer). It also comes on the back of several experiences of sex worker prejudice I've recently encountered, both obvious and subtle and the difficulty I've realised there is in finding ongoing support networks and forums for those of us who do work directly with the body and sexuality. Supervision is important, but so is peer directed sharing and it's not easy to find it. Why is that?

Feeling despondent this evening after a tough day where I've really felt the fifty shades of sexworker phobia, I was blessed to find in my Facebook news feed this article by the very articulate Pamela Madsen. This went some way to restoring my faith that there is a tide of change, that people are willing to step out there, courageously, and light the way for this change to happen.

Joseph Kramer, the subject of the article, is a well known pioneer in the field of human sexuality, as are Betty Dodson, Annie Sprinkle, Barbara Carrelas and so many more teachers and truth seekers, sexual renegades and heart-touching healers and I salute them all. Sincerely I do, for they have helped me make sense of my life and my journey so far.

As a former escort and sex worker (I still identify as a sex worker though my work is now significantly different than it was back then), my life has followed a clear and distinct thread, that being a willing, and sometimes not so willing exploration of sexuality. I've experienced many different aspects of the sex industry; escort work, call girl, street sex worker, phone sex, I've played in fetish clubs. Tried many different types of relationship too; open, closed, vanilla, kinky, dysfunctional, co-dependent, independent and more. At around the age of 30, I met a man who was to become the father of two of my children and step father to my third. My explorations continued through that relationship by mutual consent.

That lovely man, with whom I still maintain a very treasured friendship and co-parenting role, knew all about my background pretty much as soon as we met, and it was he who first encouraged me to travel to the USA to a conference there which was to change my life. ICOP (International Conference on Prostitution) gave me a means with which to bridge my former sex work experiences with my life as it was post-sex work, and to connect with my sexual politics in general. I met so many fabulous women and men there who were to continue to influence me to this day, many of whom have become friends and ongoing contacts in the world of sexual freedom advocacy and sex worker rights campaigning. They are pretty inspirational people. They do really important work. Carol Leigh, I salute you! Too many to mention individually, I salute you all! I'm deeply honoured to be walking in the footsteps of such incredible innovators and such courageous spirits. Devoting your life to change, especially in the field of sexuality, is not always an easy choice, but it's a truly valuable one.

So, my work is important to me for several reasons, the first and foremost being that through my direct experience of so many aspects of sex work, I came to notice that there was something really missing in the arena of sex and the fulfilment of desire. I recognised as a post-forty year old sex worker, as opposed to a rather naive 18 year old one, that I could dialogue in different ways with my clients, who were now my peers rather than my significant elders. What I began to see was that there was something my clients were desperately seeking and not getting in their relationships (with themselves as much as the 'other') but the problem was that my own autonomy in work could not be fulfilled and therefore my creativity in my work was stunted. I was being sent on jobs I didn't want to go on, having to allow my boundaries to be defined by the agent, rather than my own judgment, by expectations of the set and setting over the desire to find something deeper and yet it was obvious my clients often wanted a deeper connection too. Don't get me wrong, this was far bigger than the "my wife doesn't understand me" syndrome, but reached out into the very evident need for intimacy, human connection and touch, a kind of 'I don't just want to fuck, I want to feel and be felt, hear and be heard, change and be changed' mentality. An opportunity was presenting itself to me, but I wasn't quite sure where to go with it.

As I'd now trained in massage, I began to see a way in, however it was only in discovering Tantra that I simultaneously experienced the marriage of the sensual, spiritual and sexual which finally gave me the voice I needed to step into my life work in a way that feels natural, powerful and healing for me. Tantra has allowed me to make perfect sense of my life, my own healing journey and my deep and ongoing commitment to sexual transformation and freedom. My work involves full body (including genital) contact, and that my friends, in 2012, would seem to still be a highly charged area that touches and triggers people's individual fears pretty deeply, and still sees the accusation "whore" being flung around as if the label 'whore' is a dirty word anyway! After years of working with agency for sex worker rights, I really object to the word whore, slut, slag, tart or any other such defamatory label being used as an insult. So what if you/I am...you've no right to judge. EVER. Slut shaming in 2012? Get over it!

So, after years of working under pseudonyms for fear of judgment, isolation, family rejection or suffering and more, I am now working under my own name and beginning the process of really starting to say to the world "this is who I am" and this is what I do. To me, a body, nakedness, truthful sexual expression and integrity are all such valid and soulful aspirations that I fail to see how what I do can remain so vilified. My experience of it is deeply healing, what I see, my friends, or rather my 'tribe' as I refer to my sexual pioneering 'family', are all doing such amazing work, and I fail to see how that can be wrong.

The World Health Organisation's definition of health is as follows:

"Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity"

In this spirit, I see health around me in the intention behind the work of these people whom I admire, and in my own intention that's really clear. My work is important to me because I believe that I am absolutely using my life experience to create healing opportunities for those who may be struggling to find their own 'health', and ultimately I cannot imagine doing anything less.

This post is dedicated to the memory of Robyn Few, founder of SWOP, USA and tireless advocate for sex worker's rights. Robyn will be sorely missed. R.I.P xx