Part 2 of Matthew’s sit down with sex-work veteran and social justice advocate Esme Providence Brown to discuss New Age / wellness antifeminist, Kelly Brogan, and how her craven politics bolster the permission structure for Trumpian misogyny.
They track her political and aesthetic journey from labcoat wearer to wellness pole dancer to BDSM cosplayer—a spiral through deepening layers of appropriation, disavowal of responsibility, and cringe-tastic ideas. Esme concludes with some deep insights on what it means for artisanal BDSM to be stripped of its political and consent-culture context, and who Brogan’s “feminism is a psy-op” argument really serves.
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Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
Also, pseudotherapy and also BDSM that isn't BDSM and also sex work that isn't really sex work.
I'm Matthew Remsky, and joining me today again is Esme Providence Brown.
Hello.
Hello.
Our correspondent from the world of sex work and social justice.
Thanks so much for coming back.
We had a lot to talk about last time and we're going to finish up today.
Yeah, we really went into some deep pockets there.
And I think for listeners, it would be good if you started with our first volley on Kelly Brogan's Divine Dungeon because we mapped out, not in like a strictly chronological format, but we mapped out the progression of her neoliberal, you know, sainthood story ascension into completely deregulated.
Couples therapy and now pseudo-sex therapy coming out of the medical expertise that allowed her to have a platform to begin with.
We're going to be talking about how Kelly Brogan moved very clearly, very strangely, very enthusiastically.
But I would also say without a lot of preparation or education into the world of BDSM. So you're our expert there, Esme.
Where would you like to start?
I mean, the first thing I want to say about the sort of world of BDSM as a kind of unregulated space is that there is a beauty and a risk.
To the nature of it being an unregulated space.
It is not a space that has...
We don't have our books that are...
We don't go through certification processes and so many things that come up in the pod.
This is a grassroots community that has been built up and it's a lot of peer learning.
The barriers to entry are, I would say, porous.
Having said that, I think that in order for someone to really understand what is kink and BDSM practice that is constantly evolving, one really needs to spend some time.
You know, in that community and understand like the...
The protocols, the kind of philosophies, the underlying...
Perhaps as an influencer, you don't pretend you're a fucking expert at something because you got interested in it last week?
That's a good start.
A little bit of humility, I guess.
Maybe, yeah.
Okay, so it starts with pole dancing, right?
It starts with pole dancing.
Brogan gets really involved in pole dancing as something that she's found as a form of expressing her sexuality and nothing in and of itself.
I don't think is problematic.
What starts to become a little sort of dodgy is when she's starting to present this as a form of anybody finding their sexuality vis-a-vis this kind of performative gesture and then without acknowledging that pole dancing is a form of labor that is performed by people.
Risky, challenging, oftentimes, you know, has legal implication.
And so, yeah, that's really where it starts to get a problem for me.
We did a great couple of episodes with a woman named Jessica Hopper, who was in the poll community of what was her name?
S-Factor.
S-Factor, yes.
And so she had fantastic memoir data, but then also a lot of wonderful analysis that came out.
I also want to just flag that it seems that pole dancing as a form of self-liberation involving one's blossoming sexuality...
I haven't seen an accessible pole dancing class advertised anywhere.
Maybe they exist for people who might not find the physical challenges of pole dancing to be anything that they can accomplish, right?
There's an ableist kind of set of demands going on there.
That intersect with a lot of the assumptions that are made about how people access wellness spaces to begin with.
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