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Aug. 31, 2023 - Conspirituality
01:39:05
169: Neo Tantra & Sex Work (w/Esme Providence Brown)

Several months ago, we received an email from Esme Providence Brown (a pseudonym, and we’ll discuss why she’s using it off the top of the interview). Esme asked if we would like to discuss the strange and taboo overlaps between yoga, wellness, neo-tantra, and sex work. I wrote back immediately to say yes.  Esme has worked as a professional dominatrix and kink provider for the past twenty years. In 2012, she began teaching yoga and investigating the intersection of sex work and spirituality through her practice and writing. She lives and works in NYC, and is now doing academic work in textiles. Matthew spoke to her while she was on a research trip to Indonesia.  We think you’ll all learn a ton from this conversation about transparent vs. non-transparent labour practices, performative intimacy, the gendered inequalities of wellness work, and how Neo-Tantrics who use handguns in their foreplay made their presence known at the January 6th insurrection. In honor of Labor Day: Workers of the world unite.  Sign up today at butcherbox.com/CONSPIRITUALITY and use code CONSPIRITUALITY to get two 100% grass-fed filet mignons and two wild-caught lobster tails for FREE in your first box plus $20 off your first order. Show Notes Former sex workers, now academics and published authors: Melissa Febos Chris Belcher Catlynn Ladd Sex Worker Decriminalization Resources: The Oldest Profession (Podcast & Organization) Amnesty International Statement on Sex Work ACLU Statement on Sex Work US Department of Health & Human Services Report on Human Trafficking Sex Workers Want Rights Not Rescue The White Slavery Panic Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hello, everyone.
Welcome to Conspiratuality Podcast, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
We are on Instagram at ConspiratualityPod, and you can access our Monday bonus episodes through Patreon or Apple subscriptions.
Welcome to episode 169.
This is a special Labor Day episode called Neotantra and Sex Work with Esme Providence-Brown.
Now, several months ago, we received this email from Esme Providence-Brown.
This is a pseudonym and we'll discuss why she's using it off the top of the interview.
And she asked if we would like to discuss the strange and taboo overlaps between yoga, wellness, neotantra, and sex work.
And I wrote back immediately to say yes.
Esme explained that she has worked as a professional dominatrix and kink provider for the last 20 years, that in 2012 she began teaching yoga and investigating the intersection of sex work and spirituality through her practice and writing.
She lives and works in New York City and she's now doing academic work in textiles.
I spoke to her while she was on a research trip to Indonesia.
I learned a ton from this conversation about transparent versus non-transparent labor practices, performative intimacy, the gendered inequalities of wellness work, and how neotentrics who use handguns in their foreplay made their presence known at the January 6th insurrection.
So I'm very pleased to present this wide-ranging conversation in honor of Labor Day, Workers of the world, unite.
Welcome Esme.
Thanks for having me, Matthew.
Now, first things first, Esme Providence-Brown is not your real name.
Maybe we can start with why we agreed to use a pseudonym today.
Absolutely.
I kept my initials just to kind of keep a tether on myself, but I chose to use a pseudonym for a few reasons.
Primarily, I'm in the midst of a government-issued grant in Indonesia, and here religious radicalization has really escalated in the last several years and gender-based violence is on the rise.
I've already experienced a lot of harassment as a woman traveling alone.
So if it was known that I was also a sex worker, I would fear for my physical safety,
not to mention possibly lose my grant. So a lot of sex work really lives in a gray,
a legal gray zone. We don't have complete decriminalization and we don't have
social destigmatization.
So the stakes are really quite high for both workers and women.
And then additionally, I didn't want to implicate other people without their permissions.
Consent is such an important principle of mine.
It isn't really my place to out anybody, even if it's simply being associated with me and my name.
Yeah, I hope to be alive in a time where policies and perceptions have shifted enough that it feels safe to be out, but it doesn't seem like that's happening given that the world is radicalizing more severely, whether it's in traditional religions or through things like QAnon.
Now, because we're using the pseudonym, I want the listeners to know that I'm talking with Esme today because she wrote us this amazing email describing her experience and the insights she's derived from it.
And I immediately knew that her story would put a human face to a supercharged, marginalized cultural archetype around which many stereotypes and conspiracy theories swirl.
And I also knew that Esme would be able to speak to that part of the yoga and wellness discourse that's essentially dishonest about women's power or lack thereof within its culture and how spirituality is often coded in very gendered ways.
And so I did my diligence, however.
I verified the key aspects of her story with associates.
I saw some documentation.
It's not that we're dealing with some big set of whistleblowing allegations here or other legal issues, but Because this is the type of story that can be easily exaggerated or sensationalized.
You know, that wouldn't help anyone if it wasn't verified.
And from your point of view, Esme, I imagine that you're pretty tired of sensationalism about sex work and labor rights.
Is that true?
Yeah, I mean, look, if people want this topic to be salacious, there isn't much I can do.
I heard you mention pit bulls in a previous episode, and it's a bit like being a pit bull owner trying to combat the breedsmith violence to anyone who's already made up their mind and terrified of dogs.
Right.
I can share my personal experience and cite some sources that I believe to be credible, and if curious people can choose to pursue it on their own, and I hope they do.
You know, people are often really surprised how mundane sex work can be.
They love to ask, like, what's the worst thing that's ever happened to me?
Like, ready to rescue or pity or be grossed out.
And then when I say, you know, it was asbestos in the wall of the building I worked, they always seem to be a bit disappointed.
Right.
Yeah, the bulk of issues that sex workers have is really less requests for like a provocative sex act.
These things tend to become really banal and routine pretty quickly, but it's safe working conditions and public stigma, and that leads to a lack of access to financial and educational resources.
I believe the most important conversations are often the most boring, but they're the ones that lead to policy change.
In other words, you're talking about democracy, right?
Yep.
Okay, so what is your top-line elevator pitch for this episode?
Like, if listeners only had 10 minutes for this, what would you want to burn into their brains?
It's funny, I really came into this episode thinking about the wellness and yoga and kind of like neo-tantric angle.
And as I was getting my notes ready, I realized I got really fired up about the politics of sex work, sexuality, women's sexuality, and how it's a really important conversation in the fight against patriarchy.
I'm coming to understand that fear and resistance in discussing sexuality is an extension of misogyny,
and misogyny, unfortunately, is much more rampant than I ever realized.
So what I really want is for people to stop their whorephobia,
specifically that whorephobia that's deeply embedded in language,
calling people sluts, whores, always talking about how charitable it is
to be a whore or a hooker, women separating themselves from other women
by demonizing sex workers.
And what I really want is to stop seeing sex workers be killed on TV and in movies,
and just try to understand that violence against sex workers is normalized,
and it needs to stop being normalized.
Because it's not just violence against sex workers, it's violence against women.
And controlling a woman's sexuality or a woman through sex is a form of violence and oppression.
And lastly, but not least importantly, is that this oppression is really rampant in wellness spaces under the guise of spiritual growth.
All of this means that I'm really excited to learn from you.
I thought that I'd set things up a bit by describing some trends that I've noticed in the yoga and wellness worlds in this zone that have left me with big questions.
I think there are about four stages of me coming to this interview and being able to read that initial email of yours with open eyes, so I'll go one by one and maybe you can give a broad stroke response on whether each of these themes feels familiar or recognizable from your point of view.
Early on in my yoga journey, I realized that as a straight cis guy, I had weird feelings in the yoga classes I started attending and eventually started teaching.
Now the first class I ever took It was about 2001, it was at this really swish studio in New York City, a studio where there was this heavy crossover between the teaching staff and the hair and clothing models who were working at Bumble and Bumble, which was one floor up, and for whom the yoga studio owner did photography.
So there's this like total crossover there.
Now, in general, It seemed like a kind of conflicted environment in which an 80% female clientele was often subordinated to charismatic male teachers, that there was an obvious sexuality and sensuality in those spaces that was somehow always New Age laundered, where desire was supposed to be desireless, where beauty and sexiness were sublimated into signs of spiritual virtue.
So, does that all track for you?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I've been to so many of those New York yoga spaces.
Right.
I don't think a lot of them are around anymore, but yeah, once upon a time.
Yeah, so when I was 16, my mom took me to my first Iyengar class.
She was a progressive mother, I guess.
And most of the teachers and students in there were men and quite a bit older.
It wasn't really hip to do yoga at that point.
And I had an older woman who was my first Ashtanga teacher.
And that's probably why I stuck around.
And then as I found myself through different studios, I noticed that it was predominantly female students and male teachers.
So, the apex of this really hit when I got immersed in the Bikram world around 2005, and I had this heavily tattooed, straight-edge, white, male studio owner, and he just loved to verbally abuse female students in a very classic Bikram-like manner, and then convince a lot of us who were doing work-study in exchange for classes to have some kind of sexual relationship with him.
I experienced the work-study model to be a very thinly-veiled system of free labor.
Right.
And not because I don't believe in trading, but because there wasn't clear agreement or understanding of what was expected and what was exchanged.
So the lack of transparency just gave way too much room for studio owners like the one I described to say and do things that would never fly in a contracted work environment.
There was a tacit expectation for work-study women to sleep with the owner as if it was some kind of extension of the apprenticeship model.
And unfortunately, that man was not an anomaly I'd later come across.
way too many men, freshly minted yoga teachers, you know, just a touch removed from whatever
they were running away from, who would trade on their charisma with female students who
expected one thing but really received another.
Right.
There was this feeling when you found out you weren't the only one sleeping with your
teacher, it was really pretty embarrassing, you know, like kind of like all wanted to
think we were better than that or, you know, there was just a lot of shame there.
And so that was especially exacerbated because we were kind of meant to eradicate our sexuality in these spaces in the classroom and then behind closed doors with something else.
And I know in retrospect, I really wish I'd been more vocal about my own experiences and been able to address it.
You know, what I saw with others, what I experienced myself.
But it was really hard to gauge what was happening, like consenting, between consenting adults and what was coercion.
I was operating under the assumption that we were all adults and we're free to make our own choices.
This was the era of sex in the city.
This is a media reference.
Right, right.
Everything should be fine.
You're completely empowered.
Everything should be fine.
We're supposed to be liberated and promiscuous.
And there was a pressure put on women that if you weren't outwardly expressing
a certain level of sexuality, either you were sort of a prude.
And I'm fundamentally a very sex positive person.
And I grew up with, well, I grew up being sexualized early, but then dealing with a lot of stigma.
And I never wanted to deny anybody, including myself, the ability to express sexuality.
I really didn't want to come across as prudish or dogmatic.
So I never, I never touched on it.
I never talked about it.
And I don't know what other women were experiences, but I know that for me, something didn't feel right when I found out, when I found myself engaging with my teachers, sexually engaging with my teachers.
And it was never overtly discussed.
And if it was, it was almost something that was asked to be kept a secret.
And that lack of transparency was very confusing.
Yeah, a secret not only because there's something off about it, but also because of this sort of secondary notion that there's something involved in mentorship or there's some spiritual context to it that can't even be described.
And I suppose that if it had been transparent or above board, the power dynamics could have been negotiated, right?
Yeah, this is going to come up, I think, during our conversation a few times.
I think that we would have at least had a go of it.
What I think now is that it may have dissipated some of the tension and possibly some of the desire.
So people often say that sexual assault and harassment are about power and referring to the built-in power of taking something that's not yours, essentially stealing as a form of seduction.
And when you have the opportunity to be frank about it, it may lose some of that appeal.
I think so.
People don't want to take that risk.
They don't want to take that risk.
Here's the second scenario.
Early on, I took a class with my then-wife at the main Ashtanga studio here in Toronto.
And the founding teacher, this is a guy who was a direct student of Potapi Joyce, I found that out later and I didn't know what that whole scene was, but this guy came up to my partner while she was in an upward bow posture and without warning, He grabbed her around the back and yoinked her really hard, about twice as deep into the posture than she'd been before.
And this was a pretty shocking experience and it was really confusing.
And I found out later that she'd been very lucky to not be permanently injured there.
Now, I can't speak for her these years later, but I think that my general attitude at the time was, wow, that's kind of weird, but it's also kind of edgy, and I guess it kind of worked.
I was utterly clueless.
I'm so sorry that happened to her.
Every time I hear a story, I just am like, I'm so sorry that happened.
It's just, no one should have to go through that in order to learn something.
I do believe that a lot of abuse that I experienced and witnessed were kept intact by gaslighting and silencing.
So for every one well-behaved male yoga teacher that I had, I had ten that pushed the envelope using touch or hands-on adjustment in a class essentially as a form of grooming to test the waters and see how far they could go.
The same way that harassment functions on the street or in the workplace.
It's like seeing if there's an in.
I don't know about anybody else, but I believe I can feel the intention behind somebody's touch.
I've had so many teachers, so many body workers, so many people touch me over the years that it just There's an ineffable quality to touch and perhaps this is also my experience as a sex worker and a kind of bodywork connoisseur.
I remember addressing my really amazing Ashtanga teacher when we were going over adjustments and I said, how do I not be creepy?
And he just looked at me and he said, if you don't want to be creepy, don't think creepy.
Right.
I was like, OK, I mean, that's you can't police a person's thoughts.
So only a person really knows what it is that they're thinking.
But I have to say, I never once had a creep factor from him.
I never had an injury.
I mean, I'd like to think that I was not an anomaly.
And that doesn't mean that I didn't experience a perception of some kind of transcendent touch or maybe even gotten turned on at some point, because yoga releases endorphins in the body.
I don't think it's always possible to place exactly what's happening.
There's oxytocin flowing.
You know, it's a real form of physical contact.
And that there's something being communicated between bodies in these intimate spaces.
But the intention of what a person is doing, I mean, I think that is something to at least be aware of.
I would say that as a journalist who covered assault in these spaces for a number of years, I found that this particular context and this nuance was something that was very difficult to understand and navigate.
I mean, certainly, like, because just because a person is not creepy with you means it doesn't mean they're not creepy with somebody.
I mean, you don't know what's going on in someone's head.
But the difficult part is that it's hard to locate the experience.
And like I said earlier, you can't really police somebody's thoughts.
Maybe you can't even police your own.
But my experience in both yoga and sex work has given me confidence to believe that I can sense an erotic charge when somebody is touching me.
And that kind of intuitive spidey sense is what has allowed me to stay safer over the years and had my fair share of run-ins.
I'm not really sure how we teach and practice this.
I'm not really sure how we create or maintain a boundary that's unspoken.
And I can see how that might be a conversation that people would like to avoid having.
As I started doing cult journalism on, you know, yoga and Buddhist groups, and I started learning about widespread harassment and assault in these spaces, I found that they were often hidden, as you described, under the guise of the 80% female practice population being regularly sexualized by the teachers, but also by the organizations themselves.
Almost expected to perform their beauty and allure as signs of the virtue and the benefit of group membership.
It performed a recruitment function.
So, high up yoga and Buddhism women in various organizations were supposed to be attractive, but also chased in their public-facing roles.
In that way, they made the mess of the organization look beautiful, but then they would also just frankly provide sex work to the leaders on the inside.
Now, in the worst cases, the ashram was like a thin veil for actual pornography production, as with the MISA group in Romania.
But the kicker was running into groups where the sex work itself was framed as spiritual work, and then it was offered to all clients who were allowed to believe That they were buying transcendence instead of making a contract with a person's body with quasi-consent or for no consent for pleasure.
So I'm wondering if those complications track as well.
Yeah, I mean what you just described really is a description of what happened with OM, which we're going to talk about later on.
Right.
You'll hear me repeat over and over again that consent, and just to name three types, there's implied, expressed, and informed.
I'm sure there's many beyond that, is really critical to negotiating boundaries in sexuality specifically.
So implied consent is really braided into female identity.
It's the assumption that women agree implicitly that our sexual, not only to our sexualization, but that our sexuality, bodies, beauty, et cetera, any kind of physical expression doesn't belong to ourselves, but to others.
I want to note here that that implicit demand is not something that I ever have to negotiate.
So I just want to be mindful of that as we're talking and how that means that it's actually really hard to understand how different our gendered lives are.
Beauty and sexuality are really powerful as forms of expression and embodied experience, but they're also traded as a form of currency and advertisement.
And I believe many women are conditioned to perform beauty and later sexuality as a form of social glue and a form of belonging.
So I was sexualized very early in life and learned the power of performing cuteness to attract attention.
The problem is that when that happens, a girl or woman realizes her power.
She's often most punished for utilizing it for herself.
Okay, so it's something that you, almost through a form of, I don't know, patriarchal audience capture, you can learn to do, but you can't express power through doing it.
That's incredible.
And that's a pretty fresh realization for me, you know, after many decades of therapy.
So, yeah, so, so a little girl or woman essentially learns that these, these aspects of her, her beauty, her, her sexuality, they really don't belong to her, but rather to family, to society, to boyfriends.
And I don't think it's anything new that women and sexuality have been utilized as vehicles for sales, political propaganda, you name it.
And I just don't see why it would be any different in kind of advertising these quasi-spiritual spaces or cults.
And as far as presenting sex work as spiritual work, again, I see the problem being around consent and an understanding of one's own agency and what a woman can offer in these spaces.
So I am a sex worker and I'll talk about that more later.
I have not historically felt exploited overtly trading sexuality for goods and services.
And I have absolutely experienced exploitation when I was instructed, told, or otherwise, you know, it was inferred that I use my sexuality to represent something else, be it spiritual teaching, interior design services, slinging lattes, what have you.
So, you know, I worked for two years as a professional dominatrix and I thought, okay, maybe I'll go give cocktail waitressing a try.
And I remember there was a distinct feeling and of disgust, being leered at, cornered into conversation,
even touched without permission for this promise of a potential tip that I never had
when I could negotiate exactly what I would and wouldn't do for money as a sex worker.
It's really amazing to hear you lay this out and it makes me wonder whether some of the vitriol
against sex workers that is so sort of common might have something to do with this potential
the profession has at exposing the otherwise very normalized exploitation just in regular society.
Like, in other words, can people feel and then resent the fact that the sex worker should be working according to their own terms?
Yes, I think that absolutely rings true.
I believe that when you look at a negotiation like a sex worker would have with their client, where ideally, ideally, in best case scenario, you have everything laid out, everything is transparent, and she is operating according to her own terms.
And then you look at a situation like another service job, whether it's domestic labor, paid, unpaid domestic labor, or, uh, working in a restaurant.
And there is not the opportunity to negotiate those kinds of terms.
It is very infuriating and, uh, can create quite a stir as to in one space, a person, a worker, a woman can negotiate her own terms and in another, she cannot.
And historically, sex workers have had access to a lot of resources that other women have actually not had access to, be it finances, starting businesses.
They were socially ostracized, but they had access to resources and were able to support themselves more autonomously than women in higher echelons of society were.
And I believe that that really contributed to a lot of the infighting and the vitriol
between amongst women and towards sex workers.
♪ Okay, so rolling back to the beginning,
you are starting your career in the sex industry in the early 2000s.
and we'll see you next time.
What can you tell us about that, so personally, culturally, politically, economically?
You know, all those things are relevant.
I'll just give a really as short and sweet as I can be.
So I'm an immigrant.
I was born in the former Soviet Union.
My family came as political refugees in the late 1980s, and I grew up in the Pacific Northwest.
I came to New York to go to art school in 2001.
And as I mentioned, I was sexualized very early as a child and was very experimental.
I was very sex positive city and I attended like a private high school that was presented as a kind of asexual space.
And so girls like me at my age were very much slut shame.
That was just what I experienced.
And I pretty quickly noticed this phenomenon.
echoing one that happened later on in life, which is I would be called a slut or whatever
in hallways and in school, but in private, a lot of the guys at school wanted to fuck.
Wow.
And I really didn't feel shame around the sexuality itself,
but I did feel the social ostracization, the reputational shame, and the kind of results,
the marginalization as a result of that.
So in my kind of like arithmetic as I was planning in my adult life, I sought out sex work.
I really sought it out.
I came to New York.
I did my research.
I interviewed people.
I called 411 for anyone who remembers that.
Like the directory assistants?
Yeah, the directory assistants.
Like, can you give me the number of a dungeon, you know?
So, you know, and I bring this up because I think it's important for people to hear Kind of to combat this myth of being seduced or being trafficked or, you know, not having agency to make one's own decisions.
I mean, we can argue how much of an adult a person is at 18, 19, development of the brain, whatever.
But I remember very clearly really pushing to find this path.
And I remember I had a professor in college, a very adamant feminist-oriented professor
who would bring up issues of domestic work and sex work.
And all these pieces kind of came together.
And I really sought this out.
And I found my way to a prominent Manhattan commercial dungeon, which is essentially it's
a club where clients pay a membership and have hourly sessions with a professional dom,
a professional dominatrix.
So the woman that I got connected with, who was my mentor, was Ukrainian.
And I grew up speaking Russian.
And so we had an immediate familial bond between us.
So you felt safe with her?
Yes, I did.
I did.
And I have to say that in my life, I owe my ability to protect myself and the world to this woman.
She taught me things that, you know, my parents and people in proper, proper high school never did.
Wow.
And I remember, I remember interviewing kind of that first night and I remember her handing me this notebook and she said, write down your list of experiences and write down what I would and would not do.
And I just thought, wow, what other job have I ever been in where I've been asked what I would and would not do?
I haven't gotten another job since!
Amazing, okay.
Yeah, it was really quite amazing, and I remember watching other women, and at that time, most of them were close to my age now, and so they were twice my age at the time, and they were just so direct, and bold, and unapologetic, and politically savvy, and really just powerful individuals.
I later learned that a lot of this extroverted dynamism was generated because women in this position have to create personas for professional success.
You have to be a bit larger, larger than life, larger than yourself.
But despite that, elements of each of each of those women lived inside those characters.
And compared to my really uptight and reticent high school environment, I felt that these women possessed really inspiring outspokenness and just unapologetic individuality.
And this was before social media really took off.
And so we were we were operating under kind of a traditional apprenticeship style model.
And I learned pretty much everything I could from watching this lot of older women who were willing to show and teach me, you know, show me the ropes, quite literally.
And I believe I was fortunate because my experience was not one of an extreme competition.
We didn't operate under a scarcity model.
I'm sure that's not the case always.
It could have been the time and place.
But the culture in the place that I worked was one really of community and a lot of that originated out of necessity.
We didn't really have a lot of resources besides for each other.
So we really operated under the premise that if one of us was successful, you know, everybody else was successful.
And that really informed a lot of how I saw both community and success and then later activism in sex work.
I have to say that I haven't heard anybody describe anybody's experience, any experience within yoga groups or Buddhism groups or wellness groups in those terms like ever, ever.
So on that note, I mean, we're taking a very materialist approach here.
So I guess I want to ask you, what was the product of this labor that you were doing, learning how to do?
Like what was your paycheck based on?
Yeah, I mean, materialism, materialists, it's important to note that.
I mean, we are functioning under capitalism.
It's kind of inescapable.
So I worked in that dungeon for just short of five years.
It was mostly weekends and evenings while I paid my way through college.
I'm a diehard New Yorker.
I love New York more than God.
And I, from the minute I got here, was just really determined to be here and afford some quality of life.
So economics were definitely tied up in it.
I'm not going to say they weren't.
I wanted to live, you know, I wanted to live comfortably.
I wanted to have fun as a young person.
But I also had personal reasons.
I mean, I had a bit of a vendetta against kind of the way I was treated in high school, when I would sleep with or fool around with guys in private, but then they refused to acknowledge me in public.
And when I realized that those same guys, who later became men, They were the clients, and they were the clients that I could leverage my sexuality off of.
And it was really satisfying.
I mean, like, it's not the end of the story, but there was something really satisfying at the time.
It sounds like it felt like there might have been some justice there.
Yeah, maybe a little equilibrium.
It felt like a little equilibrium.
It was like, it felt like it kind of balanced things out a little bit.
It's obviously not as reductive as all that.
It doesn't come out in clean arithmetic.
Right.
But it was functional.
It really was functional.
And it was a way that I could level the playing field just a tiny bit in my favor.
And we used to call the money that we're paid for in our sessions tribute.
And part of the reason was because the complex legalese of sex work where some things really fall into a gray area that are technically legal but really close to things that aren't.
Prevented us from using words like money or cash.
But I found something really poetic about the term tribute because it was an acknowledgement that they were paying for sexual services.
And paying for sexual services means that it wasn't something that they were owed just by virtue of them being men and us being women.
It wasn't something that they were entitled to.
They actually had to put forth some sort of tribute in order to access that.
And I did and continue to believe that there is some fairness there.
Now, what were your safety and consent boundaries around domination work and how did you learn them?
As I mentioned, I learned almost everything from other more experienced women.
We really had a pretty tightly running ship.
Managers and the doms who had been around for a longer period of time.
Set the examples.
And we all followed, followed in suit.
I may have read a few books, but they were few and far between.
There are some significant figures out there like Midori, who's a kink educator, rope master.
But most of the things I learned, I learned through practice and on the job.
And that included things like safety, CPR, Looking out for alcohol poisoning, asphyxiation protocols, but also how to negotiate with clients about what happened in a session and tips, the financial part.
So we were paid a base hourly for a session and it was clearly outlined, there's no sex, nudity, or sorry, no sex of any kind or nudity.
But what was negotiated between a worker and client was really up to those parties and done behind closed doors.
So every worker had her own level of comfort and I found that mine changed over time.
I learned about boundaries, sometimes only by crossing them, sometimes into an uncomfortable situation that I would ideally learn from.
I'm a self-reported empiricist, so I have to learn things by doing them, and I experimented a lot.
And when I was younger, I was willing to try a lot of new things.
And as I matured, I became more clear about what I did and did not want to do, and I did my best to communicate that with clients.
I didn't have so much freedom to do that in the dungeon because, I mean, ultimately I was still working for somebody else.
And then when I became an independent provider, I was better able to articulate what I wanted and needed.
And I would say overall, I had a, I had a positive, net positive experience with, with dungeon, clients in the dungeon and the sense of personal safety.
And one of the reasons is because It was a culture of a female around space.
Managers and other workers were omnipresent.
Even if you were behind closed doors with a client, you always knew there was somebody right outside the door.
And there wasn't a lot that someone who was misbehaving could really get away with because the reputation would, you know, would spread pretty quickly.
And I want to sort of plug here that this is one of the reasons why Criminalization and removing things like back page or any way of workers being to communicate with each other to network with each other is so dangerous because it opens a huge space for dangerous people to be in touch with workers and not have any ramifications for that.
Workers who are isolated.
Exactly, workers that are isolated.
I find it ironic that I had a lot more agency agreeing or disagreeing with any kind of sexual act in sex work, in the dungeon, with a client, than I ever did in my civilian sex life.
And it was certainly never more obfuscated or confusing than in spiritual yoga and New Age spaces.
I just want to underline this because it's an incredible statement.
I felt I had a lot more agency agreeing or disagreeing to sexual acts within sex work than in civilian life and then that was even more so when it came to spiritual and new age spaces.
Let's just underline that together.
Let's do it.
This is at the core of the episode and why I am so happy that you're able to share this stuff with me.
We're kind of moving around a discourse conflict that I'm aware of between second, third, and fourth wave feminists about whether or not women or trans women can possibly be, you know, empowered through work like this.
How did your views of that grow or change or shift over time?
First and foremost, I have always found that couching sex work as either exploitative or empowering in that mutually exclusive dichotomy to be really problematic.
Okay.
If we're going to talk about exploitative labor practices, we need to talk about domestic work, paid and unpaid, other service industry job, agricultural labor, modeling, acting, beauty services.
I mean, this is just to name a few.
So I'm aware of the discourse, but I want to leave the lion's share of that to, of the theorizing, to the academics and especially to the sex workers turned published authors and academics.
There's a few really excellent And I do believe that if a person does not like sex work, they do not have to do sex work or patronize sex workers.
Melissa Febos, Chris Belcher, Charlotte Shane.
And my academic work is not in gender studies.
I'm educated as an artist.
I'm a practitioner.
I don't consider myself a theorist.
And I do believe that if a person does not like sex work, they do not have to do sex work or patronize sex workers.
Okay, that's simple.
I'm being a little tongue-in-cheek here, but I really do not believe that it is a prerogative of anyone else to mandate what other adults do with their bodies.
And honestly, this whole rhetoric, this whole discourse sounds way too close to the rhetoric and discourse about reproductive rights.
Okay, so at the same time that you were making a living as a dom, you were also pursuing spiritual interests.
So what did that look like?
Yeah, so I mentioned growing up in Pacific Northwest, like kind of crunchy new age goth girl and, you know, experimenting with yoga as a teenager.
But it got actually pretty weird when I got to New York.
So I was working in this 7,000 square foot dungeon space in Manhattan.
And I was working nights, I was working weekends.
And on the third floor, we had the Bikram Yoga Studio that I mentioned earlier.
Can I just clarify, 7,000 square feet?
Yeah, it was massive.
In Manhattan.
Yeah, it was really massive.
Okay, so that's enormous.
Okay, now there's a Bikram Studio on the third floor.
How many square feet would that take up?
That's a good question.
It's a teeny tiny little fraction.
Amazing.
All right.
So wait, so wait.
There's something like metaphysical going on here where the dungeon is probably three or four times the size of the yoga studio above, but the yoga studio is what's visible, right?
OK.
All right.
OK.
Yeah.
But the Yoga Studio is what's visible.
We had this Bikram Studio.
And now I want to mention, this is important in the larger arc, that the dungeon was not well maintained or ventilated.
I know for a fact there was all sorts of bribery, payoffs, like all sorts of stuff going on that, again, is not specific to sex industry.
It is specific to entertainment.
It is specific to New York.
And, you know, I'm not going to say we were running according to OSHA standards.
So it had a really serious asbestos problem, which I learned later on, and that actually ended up becoming a significant problem that I Hope to address one day in the future.
So I kind of colloquially referred to it as getting out of Hades and going upstairs to sweat for a couple hours.
It felt, I mean, it felt mythological.
It felt like emerging from this dark place.
And it was really seductive to go upstairs and perform this Ascetic, arduous physical practice to offset this sensuous, corporeal work that we were doing downstairs.
But additionally to that, as a prodom, you're You're trained to hold space for a client.
You spend hours being in an authoritative role.
It is physically demanding.
It requires a psychological understanding and tremendous amount of concentration, focus and physical capacity.
So after doing this really intense work, I became, it became really attractive to go to a space like Bikram Yoga, turn the reins over to somebody else.
And it was even attractive to Take part in this authoritative, rigid, and bossy method.
You know, I went to Bikram Yoga for the same reason that many of my clients came to see me.
I wanted to turn off my brain, I wanted to access my body, and I wanted somebody else to take charge for an hour or two.
You know, when I was writing about these dynamics full-time, I found that it was difficult for many interview subjects to admit to this desire to cede control.
And my own bias, therefore, was that it was somehow dysfunctional to want to hand over authority to another person.
But I'm realizing more and more that we really can never generalize, can we?
I mean, it's really stigmatized to admit to wanting to relinquish control.
I think it's one of the reasons why kink is so taboo.
Okay, Esme, recently one of the conspirituality influencers we follow
started yet another monetization stream with BDSM and kink content.
So I wanted to ask you how you're feeling about the messages being put out by the one and only Kelly Brogan.
So Kelly Brogan is a, is a trained psychologist and a leader, a thought leader in this movement towards reclaiming a new feminine identity that rejects feminist theory and kind of leans into a gender essentializing framework where women are biologically or metaphysically or psychologically predisposed towards a certain way of being, a lot of which has to do with this, like, surrendered, kind of hyper, hyper-feminized, traditionally feminized way of being.
She talks a lot about that way of being and she also has touched on kink and BDSM and Written and spoken about what she finds attractive and empowering about it.
Now, I think that's all fine and good, but I do take a little bit of problem with some of the things she says because I feel like they're a bit reductive.
I believe what she's doing is she's exploiting the potential desire for anybody to want to relinquish control at any moment.
And creating a gender essentialist framework where feminism has failed and women just want to kick back and surrender to the best alpha male candidate.
And I think it's really sad to have to vacillate between extremes like this, where it isn't okay to want to take a break or have a different kind of experience without it determining your whole identity.
Right.
So if I'm being really honest, I, you know, I look back and I see another thread present for my motivation moving towards pulling towards really dogmatic methods like Bikram.
I had a lot of internalized shame and stigma around working in sex and it fed a kind of
almost punitive need.
I was holding my sex work as a secret for so much of my career and it just continued
to nurse that shame.
So at a certain point, I just, I didn't have the confidence or the stamina to continuously
defend my choices to every single person I met.
I'm a strong proponent that if something is so present in the cultural stew, attack, judgment, persecution, hostility, misunderstanding, it's really difficult to not consume at least some of that.
It's in the water.
Right.
So, I found myself becoming more attracted to wellness spaces.
When I was overworked, I was struggling with personal demons, I was struggling with addiction, I was struggling with normal human problems that many people go through and are not exclusive to sex work.
And I was seeking, I was really, I was looking for something else.
And I had exhausted a lot of my material desires.
I was able to afford a life that was comfortable to me.
And I had had my fill of, you know, food, drugs, shoes, whatever, whatever it is, like it was, You know, everybody tells you that you don't find happiness through those things, but you don't.
I didn't.
And I really wanted to find something more transcendent, so it felt really natural to be looking above.
Yeah, literally, you were moving up to the third floor and social acceptability.
I was moving up to the third floor.
Yeah, and there was something about respectability politics as well, where You know, like I wanted to find myself in spaces where I could talk about the things that I was interested in more than always be in a kind of secret society, secret place.
And the other element I think is no less important is that I had become monetarily successful enough that I could now afford to pursue the high ticket price of these wellness spaces.
I no longer had to work study.
Yeah, okay, so then there's a more concrete turning point in this story when these parallel paths begin to intersect in even a professional way, the professions begin to blend.
So how did that work?
So I just want to say my educational background, as I mentioned, is in art, specifically in costume, textile, and fashion.
I've always really been drawn to material culture, signifiers of dress, kind of the aesthetics, the politics of the aesthetics that we wear.
And costume is a really important part of the theatrics of kink and of BDSM.
So when fashion emerges from a subculture, whether it's punks or hippies or kinkster, it always brings in a whole vocabulary of meaning.
So within kink, wearing things like rubber pants and dog collars can be a way of flagging an interest in spaces where other communication is restricted.
And clothing can speak where words do not.
But meaning is often eroded once the trends start to gain mainstream traction and meanings change.
So the reason I bring this all up is to say that my first point of entry into a lot of spiritual spaces is sort of potentially, I don't know, trite as it sounds, was through attire.
Wow.
And there is no more elaborately dramatic attire in wellness spaces than in Kundalini Yoga.
So, I have been doing a lot of different kinds of yoga, but when I came across Cult of Yogi Bhajan, I was really seduced by the costuming.
Amazing.
Now, maybe, maybe, it was a sort of antidote to all the black leather, and I shifted.
Wearing a corset around my ribs to a turban restricting my brain, and I will say confidently that the jury is still out on which one was more dangerous or, you know, long-term damaging.
Okay, so this means that I have to ask you about your take on the Guru Jagat Kundalini uniform update.
Yeah, that was a really interesting one to watch.
I mean, I feel that merch has always been a part of the whole, like, yoga festival scene and she laundered that pretty successfully.
I know people were really upset that she showed her hair instead of tucking it into a turban.
There's a lot of conversation about that.
I don't know if I have much more to say beyond that.
I will share just a short anecdote when I was at a white tantric event and everyone was standing in line for gruel or whatever the, you know, food of the day was.
I had a turban on and the guy behind me had a turban on and he's like, hey, nice turban, you know?
And I just remember thinking, like, it doesn't matter where you are.
You could be in a, you know, a club wearing rubber, you could be in high fashion, or you could be in this, you know, my white piece of fabric on my head, it just, I don't know, it all kind of dissipated at that moment.
Right.
Yeah, amazing.
I observed a lot of other parallels between kink world and wellness spaces.
There's the somatic component, there's the embodied experience.
A lot of people will describe a kink scene as a transcendent event, and I believe that scenes are fundamentally a kind of psychodrama.
They can be a reenactment of a real or an imagined event, and it can be very profound for participants.
And additionally, it can also be very risky because it can provoke past trauma, hopefully not create a new one.
So we have something in kink, it's part of the practice, which is called aftercare.
And it's where a provider or a top will process with her client or the bottom, the events of that scene.
And I really wish there was something like this for yoga and wellness spaces.
Right.
Yeah, I wish there was some kind of feedback loop where students, participants would feel free to say, I like that.
I didn't like that.
Here's what I need.
Can we try something different?
Feedback is such an important part of a healthy kink dynamic.
And one of the reasons is that regardless of who plays a role in a scene, when it's complete, both parties ideally feel the ability to speak freely.
And what I want to add to that is so much of the opacity and confusing nature of yoga and wellness spaces is that I don't know when my teacher takes his teaching hat off and is just a person in a room with me.
I'm willing to turn over the Take off my authority for the duration of that class, but I need to know that when we walk out of the room, we're both in a dynamic of parity, and I really didn't see that happening in yoga and wellness spaces.
Yeah, I have to say that there is a very poor aftercare game in yoga spaces and my hunch is that from being both a student and then a teacher is that because the somatics of the whole experience are often oblique and difficult to describe, I always felt vaguely embarrassed always.
That you kind of want to avoid eye contact while rolling up the mat.
Like, you know, there might be a question or a moment of transparency in which you have to describe what you felt, and I think a lot of people need to avoid that.
There's some kind of strange taboo around how impactful the entire thing is.
Yeah, I'm noticing now that a lot of teachers are negotiating touching and not touching in class.
They get consent in the form of a hand raised and they ask now or at least announce that that's a possibility.
Right.
I even noticed that a lot of the older Ashtanga teachers are backing off from intense hands-on adjustment.
The culture has definitely shifted and I'm really glad for the awareness, but I feel it's still lacking a willingness to talk.
In addition to just opting out of physical contact, and maybe that's a stepping stone.
Yeah, it's a really good point because the yes or no consent model is extremely protective and valuable, and it also preserves the mystique around why people are saying yes and no.
Absolutely.
Some of the other ways that the intersection of these spaces came about for me, it was a kind of Ouroboros, this like feedback loop of resources into training and back into professional self-development.
I was at a point when I was ready to take a break and I remember, I remember selling like My costumes and jewelry.
I remember selling all these things, getting cash in hand and running straight to the yoga studio and buying this expensive teacher training program.
That's great.
Yeah, this economic life cycle.
And I remember when I'd finished, I felt like I'd learned a lot of really practical tools about teaching, holding space, sequencing.
And I realized that what I really learned in yoga school was some powerful choreography.
And the best way for me to apply what I had learned was not necessarily to transcendent spiritual practice, but to rebranding myself in sex work.
Okay, so this is like a real pizza effect story where, you know, you go from the dungeon to the shala and back again.
Yeah, I mean, I really think the architecture has a lot to do with it too.
It's on the same block, right?
But, you know, maybe there's a, I'll call it a darker parallel, but it's just endemic to capitalism, I think.
Another parallel I saw between yoga teacher training and being an erotic performer was the upsell, right?
So, I use the word performer because I think that's a really important part of being a pro-dom.
We didn't have any stigma around being entertainers.
We didn't claim to offer people transcendent experiences or spiritual entry.
I mean, if people had that, okay, but that was not the selling point.
People would come, clients would come to the dungeon to have fun.
And fun and sales and money exchange, it was built into the culture of the dungeon.
It was a space of entertainment.
And so making money and engaging in this way, it did not feel mutually exclusive and it wasn't advertised as something that wasn't part of the scene.
But conversely, in Yoga World, again, there was this opacity where The money that was paid for the training was always sort of like, not really discussed.
We don't talk about the money, you know, like magically it'll come into your life or like, you know, if you manifest it, like it was just, it was so strange.
And I, you know, It's really attractive when you hear that this is a possibility.
You think maybe, maybe there is some, maybe Atlantis does exist, right?
So we always had these modules that would have some kind of upsell for the next thing that the studio was offering.
I know this was not exclusive to our studio.
I know that the YTT model is pretty consistent.
And it was Essential Oils, next teacher training, a discount for your classes if you signed up to bring a friend.
So each sweaty, sleep-deprived weekend would offer a pathway to buying another thing.
And I remember, I think it was in the Essential Oils module, I was like, You know, face full of ylang-ylang.
I had flashbacks to being in session with a drunk day trader asking if he wanted to extend another hour as I poured him another drink.
And I was like, wow.
So first of all, I really hope Elena Brower hears this episode.
And second of all, it's kind of amazing because it also exposes the vagueness of the YTT product because The economics needs to add sort of upselling of things that are sort of peripheral to what is supposed to be the core training, whereas it sounds like in sex work, you really have, you know, almost like a barbershop economy where, you know, everybody is always going to have hair to cut and that's going to be stable.
Whereas with a YTT, you know, studios were always, especially in the growth period that you're talking about in New York, studios were always having to create new and more expensive training products in order to cover rising overheads.
Now, I imagine that the dungeon is under those same economic pressures, but I also imagine that the sort of income rate is a lot more stable because the product is a lot more clear.
Yeah, you know the irony is a lot of opponents of sex work will make this claim like how Sad or terrible it is to sell your body, you know, selling your body.
We're not selling our bodies.
Nobody's selling.
We're not selling our body.
My body still belongs to me.
Right.
I'm maybe selling my time or a service, but I'm not selling my body.
Right.
But in the yoga world, it's almost like it's advertised That these ineffable and immaterial things are being exchanged, but what ends up happening is you sacrifice your body in so many ways.
Right.
Very twisted.
Yeah, that's how I got into this theme in my reporting, actually, was that I had an initial conversation, this is years and years ago, with a person who, as a young teacher in a major urban center, was doing this gig work where she had to, you know, Travel all over the city and get to three different studios on any given day.
And she was working so hard at her demonstrations and her performances that she became chronically injured.
And she had a fold-up or retractable cane that she would use to help her.
She had developed basically a disability where she needed support.
But she made sure that the cane was retractable so that she could look like a yoga journal yoga teacher as she walked down the street into the yoga studio.
And that just there's something about that that just blew my mind at the time that she was actually being paid for a performance of health that was injuring her, and she couldn't be open about that.
It's not like there was insurance to cover that.
It's not like there was workers' compensation.
It's not like there was even the possibility of acknowledging that this thing that she was doing and offering to enhance the health of all of her students was actually really tearing her apart.
And that just, that really killed me.
I think that started me into a real rabbit hole.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's really sad.
It makes me think of, like, when we valorize people with severe eating disorders and, like, that kind of projected... Yeah.
Now, I wanted to dig into this thing a little bit more, which is, and you said it in your email, you've referred to it somewhat already.
You wrote in this initial email, when I was faced with the prospect of becoming a professional yoga teacher, I immediately saw parallels to sex work, specifically the emphasis on charisma and a kind of performed intimacy.
So can you say a little bit more about that?
Both professions require the ability to hold space, creating ambience.
You're using props, lighting, music, scent.
I mean, it really requires a lot of planning.
And my clients in kink world would come to experience a kind of surrender.
And I mean, it could be debatable, of course, but I have witnessed that a lot of yoga students may also, myself as a yoga student, would often come to a space to experience a kind of surrender.
So, charisma is defined as this compelling attractiveness to charm or inspire devotion in others.
When I looked that up, I really thought about the devotion that's important to sex work.
It means that a client is enjoying your services, returns to see you, that he respects your boundaries.
Ideally, you also like him enough to see him again.
When I use the term performed intimacy, I'm really referring to how a sex worker curates a scene that replicates desire, connection, maybe even orgasm.
And, you know, a client may experience a sense of falling in love with his, with his dom or with a sex worker, and maybe she experiences the same feeling.
And I mean, this isn't a new concept.
This is something that we refer to as transference and countertransference in successful psychotherapy.
While we accept this in psychotherapy, which obviously has been institutionalized, when this happens in sex work, it has a very different meaning.
It's assumed that if a client falls in love with a worker, that she's exploiting him, that she's taking advantage of him, she's somehow, you know, utilizing this kind of devotion for her in an exploitative way.
But the only kind of converse position to that is that if a client really hates the sex worker and hates women and wants to kill her, there's no space for a client Offering a positive and healthy level of love or affection or devotion that is respectful, kind, boundaried.
I know that exists, but we fundamentally Really don't, don't acknowledge that because then that would mean destigmatizing sex work.
Right.
And meanwhile, yoga teachers, especially conventionally attractive women, are expected to trade on that same quality of devotion when attracting and maintaining students.
So, would you say then that the yoga teacher is more rewarded or it's more acceptable for the client to, when the client falls in love with her?
Yeah, I think this is a really interesting point.
I think she is rewarded, and I also think it's a kind of a crutch, and I think it's a kind of a crutch that touches on some of that sexualization that's part of being a woman that's so much woven into identity that's learned early on.
This falling in love when a student falls in love with, say, a female yoga teacher, makes me think of an analogy to a predatory male who needs to seduce or assault.
That he can only feel empowered if his victim surrenders the body unwillingly, without consent.
And as soon as she has the agency to say yes or no, it becomes less attractive to him.
Now, if I apply that kind of theory to yoga worlds, be it male or female teacher, We will trade on charisma or good looks.
Perhaps there is a sense of reward when a student falls in love because it alleviates an insecurity or an imposter syndrome that maybe a young teacher cannot holistically believe that she has the authority, you know, fresh off of 200 hours of teacher training to offer this knowledge and hold the attention of somebody.
We're talking about this general laundering of the material facts of the sexualized economy and the yoga world and I'm wondering if at a certain point you became conflicted or weirded out about that or if that weirdness became very apparent at a certain point.
Yeah, I was really conflicted with the lack of transparency.
I mean, this might sound strange to some folks, but I actually felt really uncomfortable trading my attractiveness in yoga world.
I tried to kind of stick with spaces where that wasn't the primary currency of sorts.
I was just so acutely aware of the power of desire having worked in sexual spaces.
I was even uncomfortable like recording videos of myself doing asana or you know, instructing
because I was so aware of this mimetic quality of documentation where we were just like reenacting
the same archetypes.
Right.
And simultaneously, I felt like erasing my sexuality entirely also felt disingenuous
like I was kind of repressing myself.
So I didn't have an ideal way out.
The only way I could really make my way through is I continued to work as a sex worker.
And when I was actively teaching yoga, which I'm no longer doing, I tried not to hustle in it or use it to make money.
And I also tried not to use it as a space to pour out sublimated sexuality.
Okay, so these years begin to intersect with the rise of Nicole Dedon and Orgasmic Meditation or One Taste.
I can't remember the difference between those two things and the brand names.
But anyway, she becomes very popular with her particular brand of Neo Tantra and your Earlier world in sex work and your newer world in Neotantra get closer.
How did that come about?
What started to happen for you?
I mean, I remember orgasmic meditation being around in the last couple decades.
And I never went to a class, but I definitely had people I knew in the yoga world that did.
When I watched the Netflix special recently, I was a bit sad and relieved at the same time.
I mean, I recognized so many of these spaces I'd spent time in.
I mean, I don't know.
where Kinyo Tantra just felt so familiar.
Like I felt like I was, if I had taken a little left turn or a little right turn,
I would have been in a, you know, in a one-taste class.
And I really wanted for there to be a sex positive modality within yoga and wellness
and for sexuality to stop having such a bad rep, for sex work to become less stigmatized.
I was really excited to see a woman who was moving ahead unapologetically creating,
but I also felt sad because the, the response I had from watching the documentary
just seemed like it highlighted the deceptive and coercive parts of it.
Right.
And watching the videos that were in the documentary where she's performing some kind of snake ritual after masturbating, I mean, it really made me think of watching Real Sex in the 90s.
Right.
And it just, like, it was like, oh, that, other sexual wild thing out there, you know,
and it just became so easy to push it away and say, that's over there, it has nothing to do with me.
Like, it didn't feel like it was building any kind of connection or traction.
And I mean, I believe that it's important now that both Daydone and Cherwitz,
who are the two of the kind of executive leaders of One Taste are being confronted
with potential legal implications because we're talking about forced labor.
We're not even talking about sex work.
We're talking about exploitative labor practices.
I'm really curious to see what happens, but I'm also worried that this case might be weaponized in an unintended way, and that rather than illustrating the dangers of exploitative labor in high-control group environments, it'll just further stigmatize and sensationalize anything having to do with sexuality.
And also give people who are looking to, you know, be messy in that space, like new techniques for manipulation.
I did hear that Nicole's hiding out in Bali, so maybe I'll, you know, see if I can have a chat with her.
I suppose ideal reporting on this group and its aftermath would begin maybe with this podcast episode, right?
Where it was clear to everybody who is engaging with the story that a thing like One Taste emerges out of a particular context in which Neo-Tantra is developing.
It's tangled up with the generalized sexualization of the yoga scene.
And it carries with it all of the aspirations, but also the disguises and the oppressions of that context, and that it's very complex, and that people who engaged in it, you know, Their actual desires and their actual needs should be understood, if not respected.
And yeah, because I can see what you're saying, that definitely reporting on that particular story can go in a very, I would say, repressive way that really doesn't further the conversation.
The truth is we really don't have healthy spaces to talk about these things.
Like we just, I have yet to see one.
I have yet, I mean, maybe save a one-off conversation between, you know, with a therapist or a friend,
but like, I haven't seen a place, a wellness, a health, you know, space that really feels like a sober
embracing of criticality, but also ability to be authentic and real space to talk about these issues of sexuality.
I myself was still hungry even after being immersed in sex work.
I still gravitated towards neotantric spaces like the Kodoshka.
Like I was still...
Like looking, like so desirous to find some space where I believe these things were living and real.
Well, you just mentioned it, and so I want to go there now, which is, you know, things get deeper for you in this intersection between wellness and sexuality when you run into a group called Kwedoshka.
So what is this?
What kind of word is this?
Does it connect to QAnon in some way?
I was so confused because I learned about QAnon after the Kadoshka and I kept invading the two because they both refer to themselves as the Q. Oh, wow.
But the parallels do not end up there.
So, for context, Kadoshka is a completely made-up word in a completely made-up language.
It's a neo-tantric sexuality modality created by a since-deceased man named Harley Reagan It's actually considered a religious movement as well.
I'm sure they have their tax-exempt status.
And it refers to a collection of sexual techniques and theories that are collected by this man, Harley Reagan.
And it is also known as the Q, making matters much weirder.
According to Reagan, which also makes me laugh, and his followers, the Q teachings are guided exercises and rituals that allow a person to improve relationship and reach higher levels of orgasm and sexual ecstasy.
And demonstrations at retreats include male and female self-pleasuring techniques, participants having sexual intercourse while other trainers watch and coach them.
I just quoted Wiki because it's pretty accurate, I would say.
It's a pretty tame, drug-free, sex party light, kind of, in the middle of a Colorado suburb with some pseudo-indigenous paraphernalia thrown in.
I mean, if anyone was actually of any indigenous descent there, I'm sure they would be appalled.
But there wasn't, because it's primarily made up of middle-aged white people.
That's the demographic.
So what I was really surprised to learn, however, was that many people in leadership positions of this queue were also extreme far-right diehards.
And the way I learned about that, I was watching the coverage of the January 6th Storm of the Capitol, and I caught the face of one of these elders, this woman.
No!
70-plus year woman who was really adamant about her love of guns, handguns, her and her husband.
Practice with their handguns as a sort of form of foreplay.
Now, I had no idea that it went so deep as to bridge between this appropriative sexual Experimental modality and the politics.
But I am not surprised, to be honest.
I mean, I'm not surprised.
So it makes me wonder whether that leader who's at the insurrection, if she actually feels like she is marshalling or, you know, spending the bodily wisdom and energy of her practices over the years in the attempt to overthrow the government.
I really believe so.
Is that what they were trading for?
It might be.
It might be, yeah.
Now, it sounds like the founders had some plastic shaman stuff going on for them.
Is that fair to say?
I mean, I think if you open the definition of classic shaman, there should be a photo of Harley because it's, I mean, he's quintessentially like the most contrived story of him being a veteran, an honorary member of Cherokee tribe, ascended master.
The thing that maybe is not shocking is, you know, you could tell this to any member or person who's participating in the group.
Nobody seems to care.
Like you can't break the idols or break the kind of reference or worship of this person.
Probably not unlike in a lot of the other groups that you discuss.
The benefits that this practice purportedly provides are totally cosmic.
I'll just quote from the founder's site that, you know, the practices can shift your entire paradigm around sex and sexuality.
You can heal wounding beliefs and perceptions that may be blocking you from living an ecstatic life.
You can learn how to move beyond tension release and disconnected sex into having more heartfelt, deeply loving, orgasmic experiences.
It goes on and on.
It says, most of all, Quiddushka instructors are highly skilled teachers who create a safe space where you can accept yourself for who you really are.
Now, those are big claims, big if true.
Did the organization live up to them?
I mean, when you read that, I'm just like, sign me up!
Like, it's amazing how quickly you can shift into this.
Seduction.
Look, it would be really easy for me to make fun of and distance myself from this group, talk about the cultural appropriations, the problems, the this, the that.
The truth is I was there.
I went twice.
I went to two retreats.
I paid my hard-earned money to attend.
I flew across the country.
I, you know, I participated in this.
And while I hold my position that I think this is a highly problematic group and have since really chosen to align myself with different values and ideologies even, there is Something more nuanced, which is what I was talking about earlier.
There's a real desire of people who go there to access these things that the group claims to offer.
The sexual energy, the You know, the safe space to express the higher levels of orgasm.
And if you look at the experiences between people and the wide range of human experience and human realization that happens, it's impossible to discount it wholesale.
Now, was there any kind of tantric pseudoscience involved?
I'm asking because I did take a little bit of a look around and I've seen some stuff from the group about some kind of like genital physiognomy or something like that.
So was that a thing?
Oh, it certainly was.
I mean, Again, if we'd say dictionary definition of tantric pseudoscience, I want this group to be the textbook example.
Right.
So tantric pseudoscience, not to mention cultural appropriation, we were given The spiral bound photocopied textbook, quote textbook, with the quote teachings and parts of the book included male images, photograph, maybe drawings, might've been drawings actually, of male and female genitalia.
And then next to that was a totem of an animal that was titled like a spirit animal of sorts.
And the idea was that the animal was supposed to match the physical appearance of one's genitals.
But not only was it supposed to match in this deviant Rorschach test experiment.
It was also supposed to contain the qualities of the animal that was assigned to your sex organ, and whether you were bear, wolf, deer, horse, it was supposed to help you learn about your stuff.
Okay, all right.
Okay, go on.
All right.
I know.
It's really, it's, it's, it's no less excruciating to, to, you know, to, to be with it.
But anyway, so you understand your animal, you understand your sexual inclinations.
This is really what I want to share, because all joking aside, and I have no problem, like, first of all, Admitting that I was a part of this, admitting that I don't agree to this, but I really want to articulate an important point.
So, one of the rituals was that we were told by our group leaders to never ever share the details of this secret ritual.
Of course, right.
Once again, without the secrecy and shaming.
Big problem, big problem.
This is why I'm sharing about it now.
Silencing that's so often utilized by sexual predators.
So I'll describe what took place.
We split off according to our birth gender into separate rooms, and the woman leader in the group, who was this striking six foot one Nordic woman, had us huddle around her as she took out a giant mirror and placed it between her legs, her naked legs.
And next to her spiral brown book, she flipped the pages so she could find the image of the animal that would best resemble her vulva.
And then 25 women strained our necks in this dimly lit basement room of this Colorado McMansion to take notes and see, you know, how she was doing this.
I felt like I was in, like, a bizarre version of sex ed that never actually happened.
And then one by one, we all took our turns in the center with a mirror so we, too, could learn about our vulvic spirit animal.
Now, I'll just share, like, for me personally, because of my background around sex and nudity, this really, it didn't feel like a big deal.
I felt a bit, like, anthropological, it was like, cool, you know, whatever, like, this is fine.
I can see how, for a lot of people, it could have been a lot more charged in a variety of different ways.
And, you know, I realize how this scene might sound creepy, silly, gross, weird.
But what people really need to understand is that a good portion of the women in that room had never ever before looked at their own naked vulvas and much less had anything nice to say about this part of her body.
And so people were crying and hugs were shared.
It was very, it was very emotionally charged.
And I think for many people, it was really quite a powerful experience.
And it made me, you know, it really made me question and continues to make me question is, Do we have to perform appropriative neotantric rituals in order to gain self-acceptance for our bodies and sexuality?
Does sex have to become this contrived sacred in order to be removed from a veil of shame?
Can we not have healthy secular relationship to sex devoid of esoterica?
You can't leave us hanging.
What do you think this unbearable need for bullshit is?
You know, the unbearable need for bullshit, you know, I can only, again, speak for myself.
You know, I grew up in a family of secular scientists and God was a bad word in the house and, like, I understand the craving for, like, a beautiful narrative to explain things, even if you're trained otherwise.
That's to speak to the need for bullshit.
I mean...
I think it's a daily reprieve, really.
Critical thinking is a daily reprieve.
As far as how do we move through that, I mean, I would love to see a secular sexuality space.
I don't know, maybe that's just a bar.
But no, I'm kidding.
I'd love to see some kind of ways in which some of these These questions can be addressed without the overlay of religion or even narrative, you know, or even storytelling.
Well, you do have one more story, though, which is that you almost became a guru in this space.
So I wanted to ask you about that and what saved you from that particular fate.
Yes, Almost a Guru might be the name of my book.
So, I mean, really what saved me, I mean, besides my atheist parents and their constant, their constant voices in my head.
So, I came into Giroshka.
I went with a friend.
I had just spent 10 days in Guru Ram Das Puri, which is Yogi Bhajan's ashram.
You know, really kind of going, going hard in that space.
And I do believe there's something about being in one extreme group that opens up neural pathways for another.
You know, people are more, I believe, I was more likely to jump into another space, having just come off a space, something about being really kind of high off those fumes.
And I kept looking for this supposed sexuality, this, this, This Tantra, this like magical esoteric practice in Kundalini Yoga.
They told me to hyperventilate harder.
You know, they told me to look at my moon cycle.
And so that's how I ended up in Kadoshka because they seemed like they had something interesting.
And this is a lot of what the Neo Tantra practices really trade on is this idea that esoteric traditions from Indian subcontent I mean, I blame Sting.
I think he was the one who started telling everybody this in the 90s.
I did learn that etymologically, tantra means to loom or to warp, and I thought that was a really beautiful textile kind of definition, and so I kept looking.
I really wanted it to be true that somewhere deep in some place there was an undiscovered sex positive practice, kind of like the myth of Atlantis, you know, that there was a civilization before we ruined it all that knew how to do it all.
You know, interestingly enough, in the past couple years, I mentioned that I was in Indonesia.
I've made my way to some of these sacred sites that, at first glance, look like fertility statues, and there's phallic and yonic imagery.
And then you go, you speak to scholars and experts, and it is so much the opposite of these sexually provocative aesthetics that are so rampant in America's version of neo-tantra.
There's no nudity, there's no open sex, there are no orgasms.
I mean, it's like, it is...
So counter to what these practices claim to have.
So in fact, it's a really complex system of taboo and very rigid tradition.
So before learning all of that, I pursued this fantasy that I had.
I mean, I'm not exempt from having my own fantasies.
With a friend of mine, we wanted to launch our own version of sacred sexuality.
And so after going to Kyrgyzstan and spending time together, we kind of mashed up everything we knew into this potent new age cocktail and we took to testing it with some friends.
And I think that most of it was playful.
It felt experimental and playful.
But people started to approach us with really serious questions about health and sexual wellness.
And even though I had experience in sex work, it was a really different experience to have a client Within an existing institution, maybe not a formalized institution, but kink and sex work in the dungeon space, it is a kind of institution, to have a client seek out a work or the understanding of the rules and protocols than it was to have a person coming off of an ecstatic dance class and believe that sexual exploration will be the answer to all his pain and trauma.
Right.
It felt like there was no...
Like it was just very unbound.
So after so many years of being in the dark about my sexuality, about all this experience that I had gathered, it felt really good to be skyrocketed to this position of an expert.
I mean, I felt like it happened overnight, you know?
I was like, What?
I've never had anything like this happen before.
And, you know, very few people are immune to the powerful stroking of the ego, and I was not an exception.
I mean, it just felt really damn good to be suddenly, like, valorized and worshipped in a way.
And especially because it happened so quickly.
Fast forward, we're trying to develop our modality and we're writing and testing things out.
And we had an incident as we were trying to work out what it is that we're offering, where a close friend of mine came and served as the pilot person, the pilot client.
And he had a severe manic breakdown.
Oh, wow.
You know, I had known that this friend of mine had been grappling with this for a long time, so it wasn't a total surprise, but it really sobered me up.
I don't know if it was a result of what we were doing or if it just happened in tandem, but I realized in that moment that there was just Too many unlicensed therapeutic considerations at play for me to continue positioning myself as any kind of knowledgeable sexual healer.
I was out of my league and I really felt a familiar sense of ick that I had had when those male yoga teachers back in my early 20s were sleeping with the work studies behind closed doors while espousing chastity in the classroom.
It just didn't feel right to me.
So your own, yeah, you were, you had enough experience, you had a solid moral core and conscience, and you were able to turn away from that halo effect, which as you say was really gratifying.
Suddenly, you were being validated in an entirely new way but it wasn't earned and well it was earned in in one way but it doesn't mean that it was qualified uh and it's it's great that you could recognize that so looking back uh as we round up here what can you say about um what sex workers and i'll ask about yoga teachers as well but what do sex workers first of all need and deserve
So we're in the midst of a movement to decriminalize sex work.
There's a lot of advocacy and activism that's happening in this way.
And it really means we have to understand the distinction between trafficking and agreements made between consenting adults.
So, currently, major human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, agree that the laws on sex work should focus on protecting people from exploitation and abuse, rather than try and ban all sex work and penalize sex workers.
There's a lot of widespread information that links human trafficking to consenting adult sex work.
It's just not accurate and it doesn't reflect the actual statistics.
In truth, we don't have access to really accurate data because so much of this work is not something that is reported or can be accessed and gained.
Right.
Sex workers care deeply about safety and well-being, gender-based violence, access to resources, because they're people.
Right.
And sex worker rights are human rights and reflect bodily autonomy rights.
We're integrated into every part of society.
We're mothers, we're sisters, we're friends, we're neighbors, we're yoga teachers.
And sex workers have contributed to society in a lot of ways, not just in our professional offerings, but economically, infrastructurally.
And we're human beings working in a really complicated and stigmatized profession, which is difficult enough to navigate without an additional layer of social stigma and legal repercussion.
I would say most of us want to be able to do our jobs without fearing arrest, social exile, violence, and we would like to have the same access to legal, financial, and educational resources that people in other professions do.
Now, on the other side of your story in this equation, what should women in yoga and wellness economies know?
What should be more transparent?
For fear of sounding like another self-help guru, I'm resistant to saying things like, understand your power, but I really don't mean power with a capital P like Kelly Brogan in some gender-essentializing way.
I'm talking about autonomy and agency in one's body, and that really includes sexuality.
As I mentioned, I'm currently in a country that has extreme religious radicalization happening, and I realize that What I'm about to say, how I feel, it is specific to a Western contemporary understanding of self.
It's not something that's necessarily universal.
So I recognize that.
And that is that a woman's body belongs to herself.
And by extension, so does her sexuality.
I think sex worker rights are similar to how we talk about reproductive rights.
And how this relates to yoga and wellness spaces and women in those spaces.
I believe that once a woman understands her bodily autonomy, the way that sexualization shows up in places like yoga and wellness, it becomes less arduous.
There's more power there.
And a woman can negotiate how much of her sexuality is available, if any, only once she knows what it is and what is being asked for, however tacitly.
I think we all need to get more clear in our language and be able to have direct conversations with each other, to be able to speak with teachers, communicate with group facilitators, and to not be afraid to talk about the presence of sexuality without sensationalizing it like Kelly Brogan.
I've already talked about some of the problems I have with figures like Kelly Brogan, where they, in an effort, I don't actually know what the effort they were trying to do, but I don't know, in an effort to create space for their opinions or positions, have thrown feminism under the bus and claim that there's a different way to be a woman and that there's a fundamentally biological way to be a woman.
I think that this is actually quite dangerous.
It's propaganda.
It's actually quite misogynistic because it claims that women do this naturally or biologically and men do this naturally or biologically.
And what happens next, if you read through some of her literature, is that it's this understanding that men are naturally dominant, women are naturally submissive, and if we can just claim these roles, we would all be happier.
And that is a lot of the rhetoric in neo-tantra spaces, that women's sexuality is only recognized in this one very bound, specific, archaic way.
Yeah, and the gender-essentializing qualities of that are also like a clear pathway to the rampant trans bigotry that we now see within this discourse.
Yes, absolutely.
The gender-essentializing argument absolutely is a pathway for trans bigotry.
It's dangerous and it's amazing how it hides in so many corners.
Right.
I see that it's a dangerous and reductive way of understanding kink also.
I'm really, really suspicious.
Hopefully people claiming that BDSM can heal trauma.
The kink scene is really likely, it's just as likely to trigger trauma as it is to heal it.
I would be really careful.
This is like speaking to, you know, what should women in wellness and health spaces and I was like, I would be so careful with any wellness provider that claims to heal trauma by utilizing sexuality, be a man or a woman.
And I am really not sure why we are still celebrating terms like alpha and predatory as something to aspire towards.
I think that if you see those in the spiral bound textbook, run the other way.
Well, Esme, you've given a lot of time and effort to this episode, and I really want to thank you on behalf of myself and the listeners as well.
And I think it's very appropriate that we are going to drop this around Labor Day.
I am really grateful that you reached out.
This has been an intersection of subjects that I have been interested in and mystified by for a number of years, and I think you've really shed some light on it in a very generative way, so thanks for all of your efforts and your hard work.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you everyone for tuning in to another episode of Conspiratuality Podcast.
Happy Labor Day.
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