Not all sex work is healing for everyone, but it is for me! This is not respectability politics. These truths aren’t universal. This is just my experience. Sex work is valid and sex workers need rights whether or not they frame their work as healing.
It wasn’t my clients who first made me realize that the work I do has healing benefits. The work began to work on me before I noticed its effects on my clients. I felt the change happening within me. Sex work has changed me, for the better: I created a safe container, as I was trained, and then in my own way because I had no other choice. I called the shots, I made my own boundaries. Outside of the hormone-fueled hookups I’d become accustomed to as a civilian, as a professional slut I found the objectivity and presence of mind to stand in my power. I negotiated consent. I learned to be gentle without sacrificing my toughness. I began to value my time, my body, and my labor. It's an on-going process and I’m still in it but, wow, have I grown! And sex work has been the impetus.
These truths aren’t universal. This is just my experience. Sex work is valid and sex workers need rights whether or not they frame their work as healing.
I knew that something within me had shifted when I could go into a session feeling a bit down in the dumps and come out of it feeling invigorated and revitalized. This still happens. Is it just a chemical high? The result of the downward dogs I’m doing on slippery bodies on the massage table in soft candlelight? Is it the aftermath of riding the waves of a boundaried-intimate-partner’s orgasmic waves? Am I simply a succubus; gaining vitality from consensual touch, from the synchronization of breath and deeper intimate frequencies? Maybe it’s all of the above, but this shift brings me more into alignment with my inner joy, makes me feel integrated and whole. So I call it healing.
I recently moved across the country and the farewell texts I got from regular clients reminded me of the wholesome impact my dick-skinners (hands) have on so many men.
It’s not the same for all clients. It’s fine if for some, it’s simply a good release and relaxation in the moment. For others who have given me feedback, what I provide is deeply meaningful for them and they are grateful.
For me, Sex work and Sex healing is a spiritual path. I work with Lilith, the rebel Goddess/Demon who would not submit. I pray at the altar of consensual pleasure and I believe that shame is the only sin. People come to me in all different states, with different trauma, life experiences, issues and needs. I pride myself on being able to meet each person who comes to me where they are at.
For others who have given me feedback, what I provide is deeply meaningful for them and they are grateful.
Being a healer doesn’t require me to be all healed and perfect, because that is an imaginary destination. I’ll never get there. We are all always in process. But what is required of me, is that I can look at myself and really see. A certain level of radical honesty, so that I can look at others and really see them too. I use my hands and my heart in my work. In order to keep my hand/heart intuition strong and clear, I have to be doing the work within myself: always letting go, processing my own experiences, trauma and emotions. I have to be nourishing this vessel, myself, to be in joy, as much as I can, so I am lucky and blessed to be nourished and healed by this sacred sexual work I offer.
It took me many years of one exploitative, unfulfilling civilian job after another, being unappreciated by disrespectful bosses and demeaned by measly paychecks. It took a clumsy attempt at stripping, a few quick stints at a couple different NYC dungeons, a moment working as a window girl at a sex store in midtown, several body-related trainings and certifications, and attempts at vanilla somatic healing, before I found my sweet spot. It is a position that merges my obsession with the body, integration and consensual sexuality, with my connection to magic, ritual, love of performance art and movement as healing, or a way to shift and shake up what needs it.
In this fucked-up, upside-down world where there is heartbreak, pain and injustice everywhere we look, it is no small thing to create a sustainable space for consensual, deep bodily pleasure. It can be life-changing. It is meaningful and important to make time to release. Not just to nut but to release all the walls, all the guardedness we have built up to survive in this world. To connect from a heart-centered place. For men in patriarchal culture especially, great healing and growth can be found in surrender. It’s also no small thing for me – a person raised in poverty, slut-shamed and objectified before I even had my first kiss – to be able to make enough money to support myself and my family being the natural-born, proud slut that I am.
It is meaningful and important to make time to release. Not just to nut but to release all the walls, all the guardedness we have built up to survive in this world.
The space I create as a sex-healer is a portal, just as our bodies are portals, to other worlds. My ritual space connects me to this well worn path of sacred sexuality, sacred connection and the medicine of orgasm. It’s an unveiling of sorts. In this life I have learned a lot of normative attitudes and behaviors around sexuality that, in order to pass through the portal to sex church, I’ve had to unpack and remove one by one. I shed them layer by layer like wet, soiled, tick-infested clothes after a treacherous hike.
I long for a past life and future life where the local sex healer/whore is known and respected throughout the town, like a doctor or any other small business owner providing a valuable niche service. I dream of a world where all adult consensual sex work is decriminalized, so I can tell my son what I do for a living without having to ask him to lie to people who may mean us harm. I can honestly say the only thing that could get better for me at work, is the way the outside world views it. It’s need to create dangerous narratives, stigmas and laws about it.
Praise the sticky-sweet, musty, grounded, paradigm-shifting power of sexual healing.
Are you a sex worker with a story, opinion, news, or tips to share? We'd love to hear from you!
We started the tryst.link sex worker blog to help amplify those who aren't handed the mic and bring attention to the issues ya'll care about the most. Got a tale to tell? 👇☂️✨
