What do I call myself when I am working? Well, I used to call myself a prostitute but for reasons I will explain in this piece I stopped using this word for me and my work. So, sex worker? No, I’m not keen on that either – it’s bland, boring and completely devoid of any of the eroticism, sensuality and magic of my work. The words “sex” and “work” aren’t a happy pairing, they’re just not!
I understand that many sex workers prefer to use this term to stress that they are working and, I guess, to claim much needed validation and respect for their role, but by using the word “work” I think they’re associating themselves with the very slavery that we have freed ourselves from which then strips them of any respect they could have earned.
By calling themselves sex workers, people in my profession are saying, “Hey, we’re working too. We earn this money. We deserve respect from our clients, the law and society at large.” I don’t disagree with any of those sentiments, but I do disagree with the words “sex work” because, let’s face it, society doesn’t respect office workers a whole lot more than sex workers. They are cogs in the machine, selling their soul as well as their precious time on this earth for a pay packet that increasingly fails to cover even the basics. Who wants to become a “sex worker” to then feel like an “office worker”?!!
As Tinkerbell said to The Boyfriend, “Poor you.” No-one wants to become a cog in the machine. Not one parent looks into their new born’s eyes and declares, “I want you to devote your life to pushing paper around in a cubicle on the 3rd floor of a non-descript building at the end of a long, hot train journey with only lunch at Pret a Manger to look forward to?” No-one does that! We desire for our children to become sports stars, dancers, writers, painters, musicians, gardeners, poets, actors, travellers, adventurers. Then we send them to school where they are brainwashed into aspiring to get an expensive degree that qualifies them for a lifetime in a “bullshit job” to pay off their debt.
“Work” is an insidious word and idea. No other animal on earth works as hard as humans do to survive. Our closest relative, the bonobo, devote as much time to play, sex and bonding as they do to the “work” of feeding. Can you begin to see why you’re all so ill and depressed? It is literally in-humane to devote so much of one’s life to the daily grind. Yet almost all of us do. Sacrificing our desires, dreams, relationships, time with our families – pushing them down and away from us – denying our soul’s purpose, which is surely to love, to connect, to experience and to create?
It takes years of conditioning to convince humans that work is good for them. Look at how hard every teacher in every school in every country in our modern world is cajoling, bribing and threatening young people into being “good workers.” Work is what the 1% want from us so that they don’t have to work! Work is literally for morons, sorry, that’s a bit harsh, but if “work” were so good for us, why do those at the top do so little of it? My father once said to my son, “The secret of life is to find a way to make other people make you money.” That’s patriarchal capitalism in a nutshell.
Of course, as a woman, I have a double cynicism around the word, “work.” It’s something post 1980s that I am expected to leave the home to do to earn a small amount of money that may pay off my mortgage just before I die (increasingly a dream). I’m also expected to work, unseen and completely free of charge when I get back home. Capitalism is built on the UNPAID labour of women. Patriarchy says to men, “Listen, you have a rotten deal, you work hard for little pay or ownership, but we’ll create women from your spare rib, to obediently serve you in your home so that at least there you can feel like a king.”
Modern men want to move beyond this. They want to be feminists and support their women to succeed on their terms, but they also find a nice beer and a soft sofa so darn comfortable at the end of a long day in the office. The more hard core capitalism is in a society (easily measured by wealth inequality) the MORE hours of unpaid work women are doing in the home (“Why Women have Better Sex Under Socialism”). Double whammy for women in the 2020s!
“A clean house is the sign of a wasted life” is a quote I picked up, ironically from a tea towel. It’s so true. How many books have gone unwritten because the female writer has been hoovering, dusting or scrubbing someone else’s shit from the ceramic loo bowl? How many paintings have remained unpainted, or songs unsung because women continue to work, on average, an additional 3 hours a day more than the men in their lives when they get back home from “work”?
Work was created by the elite to do a number of things to perpetuate a system to the benefit of the elite:
- To make them rich.
- To keep you too busy to develop the skills by which you could make yourself rich.
- To deny you any pleasure, especially sexual pleasure because sexually empowered people are, um, powerful.
I am a deeply empowered, powerful, magical healer. I use my body and my sexual energy to bring immense pleasure and joy to my clients. I reconnect them with their own magical, sexual inner essence. I am part coach, part therapist, part lover. I consider time with my clients to be incredibly special, intimate and sacred. I do not consider it to be “work”. Just as in the early days of teaching I did not consider my job to be “work”.
I consider myself incredibly lucky to have had the inner courage and the external support to get myself off the treadmill and create a niche for myself doing something I feel deeply passionate about. In my utopia everyone has their base needs met so that they have the freedom to create from their soul. I always remind myself that Leonardo da Vinci never went to school proving Pink Floyd right when they sing, “We don’t need no education”. We just need the time and the space to nourish our Goddess given talents to create wealth for ourselves and the rest of society.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, in which 99% of us are enslaved by, and for, the 1% I return to words and their definitions. Which brings me to “prostitute” and why I no longer call myself a prostitute. It’s mainly because of the spiritual teacher and writer Caroline Myss who works with human archetypes. One of the core archetypes, which we all have within us, is “The Prostitute.” I am going to quote much of Caroline Myss directly because it has been so foundational to my world view:
“The prostitute archetype engages lessons in the sale or negotiation of one’s integrity or spirit due to fears of physical survival or for financial gain.
We prostitute ourselves when we sell our bodies, or minds, for money, or when we compromise our morals and ethics for financial gain. That may include remaining in a marriage or job that endangers our self respect for reasons of financial security.
The prostitute activates the aspects of the unconscious that are related to seduction and control and that render you capable of buying a controlling interest in another person as you are of selling your own power.
Once you become aware of its presence within you, the prostitute encircles you with a strong vibrational field that says, ‘Not for sale’.
The core learning of the prostitute is that self esteem and self respect make you impervious to selling out.”
Caroline Myss suggest 3 key questions to ask yourself when considering the prostitute archetype within yourself:
- “Have I ever sold out to people or organisations that I didn’t truly believe in?
- “Have I ever remained in a situation that offered me financial protection because of a desire for financial security?
- “Have I ever felt myself being pulled into a circumstance that would require me to sell out my ethics then found myself strong enough to say, ‘No’?”
Having read that and knowing what you know of me, do you think I’m a prostitute?
I was a prostitute when I was too scared to leave my first marriage. I had children to provide for and I didn’t want them to suffer as I sought to save myself. I stayed for years beyond “happy” due to my fears around our physical survival.
I would have been a prostitute if I had stayed in teaching as the education system moved away from my ethics and pedagogy. Other teachers are clearly comfortable bullying young children for a good set of data, I’m not and I would have been prostituting myself if I had stayed – selling my soul for a measly pay cheque in the mistaken belief that it was a secure job.
Ask yourself right now, are you doing that? Are you a prostitute?
The proudest thing I can say about myself is that I’m not, I did not stay in an unhappy marriage for financial security, nor did I compromise my morals by taking him to “the cleaners” in our settlement. Neither did I stay in a job that made me feel sick to the depths of my soul for some professional, ego driven, vanity. I chose to find a way to do what makes my soul sing.
And that was to become a whore.
Thousands of years before Man invented God and the pair of them encoded patriarchy, humans lived in collaborative, Goddess worshipping societies (“When God was a Woman”.) For these societies the earth – her fertility and her cycles, both daily and seasonal were deeply sacred. Women, whose own cycles closely mirror those of the earth were revered as being closer to Goddess.
Some women were especially revered and recognised as portals to The Divine. Temple whores (houri in Persian, horae in Ancient Greek) dispensed a combination of mother-love, tenderness, comfort, mystical enlightenment and sex in the temples – places devoted to worshipping Goddess in the way she, the sexy, saucy mamma, commanded. Children were raised, not in nuclear families (based around the concept of ownership), but by whole communities. Goddess abhorred monogamy and men neither owned their wives nor their children.
For thousands of years, human sexuality was used to consciously elevate humans out from their mundane, material existence, up into the quantum realm, the heavens, from their prosaic everyday reality into a magical space where they could create literally anything – the pyramids people!! It was through whores that Man accessed The Divine. It was with whores, through their bodies and their sacred practices, that men found healing and had “the war taken out of them.” Whores were essential to spiritual practice in pre-patriarchal, pagan societies.
For patriarchy to seize control of the people and their lands they had to conquer and destroy the already existing, successful, well functioning and equal societies. To do this, the early Church (and other Abrahamic religions) first had to defeat the whores. They didn’t want to put a complete stop to the whore’s sex practices (they were men after all); it was just crucial to “amputate its spiritual meaning” (Barbara Walker). The destruction took centuries. And the work is ongoing.
Horae were stripped from their sacred position in the temples and relegated to “hora houses” where they would work to stop men from buggering each other. Ironically, the earnings made from the first hora house were used to found convents where nuns would devote their lives in non-sexual prayer to the new patriarchal God. The very word “whore”, once the word used to describe a woman of high regard and sacred calling, became one of the most reviled words, saved for moments of deep anger and vitriol, matched only in venom by that other misused ancient and sacred word, “cunt”. Whore, is a word dripping in shame, disparagement, disgust and even fear.
I first felt the calling as an inner knowing, a spark inside that refused to be extinguished. As a young woman, lacking a sacred journey to initiate me into my powers, I handled my sexual energy a bit messily, and felt deeply shamed by the society I was coming of age in. Well meaning friends suggested I was “looking for love but settling for sex” and that I should work with a therapist to fix me. Maybe I was looking to be loved, but I also genuinely just wanted the sex. Sex has always made me feel amazing in my body. Not because I feel loved for a brief moment in time, but because my body is super sensitive, and has always felt deliciously fizzy and alive both during sex and for hours afterwards. Other people like running or an intense gym session for the hormonal download. I choose sex.
Gabor Maté points out that, “Highly sensitive people used to be our shaman, now they are shamed.” Sexual shamen are the most shamed of all. Painters are not shamed for creating art, singers are not shamed for creating music, (most) dancers are not shamed for interpreting a piece of music with their bodies. But sexual shamen, whores, those of us who were born with the gift of heightened sexuality in the cells of our being are reviled, disparaged, condescended and deeply shamed.
There were so many stepping stones on my journey to where I am now, a happy whore writing these words. The first that I remember was reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love”. I was very lonely and depressed when I read it – a trapped mum with young children, living in a community of strangers, lost in a loveless and worse, sexless, marriage. I devoured her words about finding yourself through travel and I so ached to have her opportunity to escape from the completely dysfunctional life I had created for myself and to learn new skills so that I could reinvent myself and create a life I wanted to live.
Obviously I couldn’t follow in her footsteps – I had young children who I had brought into the world, I had a duty to care for them. Whatever journey I took to rediscover the “real” me – the soul buried beneath layer upon layer of socially conditioned and miserable ego – would have to take place during school hours and from my home in rural England. Initially that felt quite limiting then two magical things happened in the same year.
The first was meeting the village “crazy lady” (“Mad as a box of frogs that one!” they’d say) and learning that she was in fact the most phenomenal spiritual coach and mentor. The second was, I hate to say it, Facebook. Discovering the latter after meeting the former meant that my Facebook feed in those early days was filled with spiritual teachers and alternative thinkers – whores and witches online – who guided me through the most profound transformation. It was amazing. Until greed ruined Facebook, it was the University of Life if you wanted it to be.
You didn’t have to go to an ashram in India to learn meditation, you could do so in your own bedroom. Even better, you didn’t have to travel anywhere to reconnect your sexuality with the sacred. What Elizabeth Gilbert travelled the globe for, I found ways to experience alone, in my bedroom. I have since been on a real live, in-the-flesh, tantric retreat and desire to do more – I can assure you that it was the best money I have ever invested in myself (and my business) but back in 2011 when I desperately needed to create a new way of living for myself I didn’t need to leave my home.
Essentially when you embark on reconnecting your sexuality with sacredness you are reclaiming something that the churchmen ripped from us centuries ago. They needed to destroy our temples, torture us, rape us, burn our books, burn us, disconnect us from our ancient plant, body and magic knowledge, but we’re still here. We are the daughters of the witches and whores that you did not burn. The knowledge lives on in our bodies until the day we meet the person who gives us the permission and the words to understand and know our own deep inner wisdom.
That’s why I call myself a whore.
I am incredibly proud, in every cell of my being, to belong to this powerful lineage of sacred shaman. To have the power in my hands, and my cunt, to heal, to connect, to initiate, to please, to bring joy and deep pleasure. I am so lucky to have learned how to use my insatiable sexuality for good rather than prostituting myself to earn the money to pay for a therapist to help me feel less than I truly am. Becoming a whore was my route out of Caroline Myss’ definition of prostitution. Yours may be pottery, gardening, knitting or cooking. I’m not saying that every woman is a whore, I’m just saying that some of us genuinely are.
Human beings across the planet are trapped working in miserable jobs, living in miserable relationships, scrolling through their miserable damned lives. Being disconnected from their innate creatrix, saucy, sassy, sexual energy is not working for them. Goddess knew that humans needed to channel, not repress, their sexual energy to thrive. God knew the same. So to gain control and ensure that we could not thrive, he ordered that our sexuality be repressed.
Repressed energy will twist and contort itself, but it will be expressed. The energy that could be building communities and expanding our consciousness is used instead to terrorise, manipulate and control. I would argue that, distorted, the energy of creation becomes the energy of destruction.
We need a r-evol-ution (read the 4 letters in italics backwards). Love, including sexual love, is humanity’s greatest individual and collective power. If we were to truly harness our love for ourselves, our planet and each other we would save ourselves from what appears to be almost assured destruction.
Humanity needs its shaman to guide it back to love.
Humanity needs its whores.
Recommended Further Reading:
“Bullshit Jobs” by David Graeber
“Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism” by Kristen Ghodsee
Archetype cards by Caroline Myss
“The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Legends” by Barbara Walker (this is more of a reference book than a cover to cover read!)
“Why Prostitutes Should Rule the World” – by Anaiya Sophia on My Tiny Secrets
“Eat Pray Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert
