Conspirituality - Bonus Sample: Kelly Brogan’s Divine Dungeon: Pt 2 (feat/Esme Providence Brown)
Aired: 2025-02-03
Duration: 05:18


=== Pseudotherapy and Sex Work (02:03) ===

[00:00:00]  Hello, everyone.
[00:00:06]  Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
[00:00:15]  Also, pseudotherapy and also BDSM that isn't BDSM and also sex work that isn't really sex work.
[00:00:21]  I'm Matthew Remsky, and joining me today again is Esme Providence Brown.
[00:00:26]  Hello.
[00:00:27]  Hello.
[00:00:27]  Our correspondent from the world of sex work and social justice.
[00:00:32]  Thanks so much for coming back.
[00:00:34]  We had a lot to talk about last time and we're going to finish up today.
[00:00:38]  Yeah, we really went into some deep pockets there.
[00:00:43]  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.
[00:01:11]  Couples therapy and now pseudo-sex therapy coming out of the medical expertise that allowed her to have a platform to begin with.
[00:01:20]  We're going to be talking about how Kelly Brogan moved very clearly, very strangely, very enthusiastically.
[00:01:31]  But I would also say without a lot of preparation or education into the world of BDSM. So you're our expert there, Esme.
[00:01:40]  Where would you like to start?
[00:01:43]  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.

=== Pole Dancing as Labor (03:29) ===

[00:01:55]  To the nature of it being an unregulated space.
[00:01:58]  It is not a space that has...
[00:02:00]  We don't have our books that are...
[00:02:05]  We don't go through certification processes and so many things that come up in the pod.
[00:02:10]  This is a grassroots community that has been built up and it's a lot of peer learning.
[00:02:17]  The barriers to entry are, I would say, porous.
[00:02:20]  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.
[00:02:33]  You know, in that community and understand like the...
[00:02:38]  The protocols, the kind of philosophies, the underlying...
[00:02:43]  Perhaps as an influencer, you don't pretend you're a fucking expert at something because you got interested in it last week?
[00:02:51]  That's a good start.
[00:02:52]  A little bit of humility, I guess.
[00:02:53]  Maybe, yeah.
[00:02:53]  Okay, so it starts with pole dancing, right?
[00:02:55]  It starts with pole dancing.
[00:02:57]  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.
[00:03:06]  I don't think is problematic.
[00:03:09]  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.
[00:03:34]  Risky, challenging, oftentimes, you know, has legal implication.
[00:03:42]  And so, yeah, that's really where it starts to get a problem for me.
[00:03:46]  We did a great couple of episodes with a woman named Jessica Hopper, who was in the poll community of what was her name?
[00:03:57]  S-Factor.
[00:03:59]  S-Factor, yes.
[00:04:01]  And so she had fantastic memoir data, but then also a lot of wonderful analysis that came out.
[00:04:11]  I also want to just flag that it seems that pole dancing as a form of self-liberation involving one's blossoming sexuality...
[00:04:28]  I haven't seen an accessible pole dancing class advertised anywhere.
[00:04:33]  Maybe they exist for people who might not find the physical challenges of pole dancing to be anything that they can accomplish, right?
[00:04:42]  There's an ableist kind of set of demands going on there.
[00:04:48]  That intersect with a lot of the assumptions that are made about how people access wellness spaces to begin with.
[00:04:55]  You've been listening to a Conspirituality bonus episode sample.
[00:05:00]  To continue listening, please head over to patreon.com slash conspirituality where you can access all of our main feed episodes ad-free as well as four years of bonus content that we've been producing.
[00:05:16]  You can also...