Some Thoughts on Pleasure, the Erotic & Earthlings
Stripping and sex work have taught me so much about the pleasure realm. For a long time, I held an untenable tension: an embodied appreciation for the pleasure principles as healing service within the sex work spectrum, while also holding tight to pieces of personal shame around my own sexuality, pleasure, desire, and eroticism. It has taken a long time to learn how to better discern which stories are mine, and which stories were never mine to hold in the first place. This is an ongoing process.
I know this experience of shame is not entirely unique to me. It has been culturally and ancestrally embedded in many of us to hold tight to expressions of shame. But shame prevents many of us from connecting with one another more deeply. It also hinders personal growth and understanding. If you are reading this essay, you are aware that your own shame has been, or is, holding you back from progressing in your own human experience. You are not alone. It is up to each of us to discover our own why for holding so tightly to shame. We are here to help one another get free from these cycles. This is part of my own story of liberation through pleasure, the erotic, and an expanded definition of what it means to be a human in relationship to non human entities, earthlings in relationship to one another.
I’ve experienced a rich cascade of shift over the past ten years, and the past six+ months especially. I watched my father’s consciousness slowly deteriorate from vascular dementia over a painful ten year period as well as processing his death in late 2022, subsequently changing my name, accepting my non-binary gender, and working consistently with entheogenic medicine to help me break free of the binary tension of sensuous embodiment versus shame. If the binary no longer served my personal experience of gender or pleasure, then perhaps it no longer served any part of my life. Once I realized the walls were all a fabricated construct, the possibilities became vastly permeable.
Simultaneously, I knew I had to learn new ways to overcome the seasonal heartbreak, an archetypal journey as psychopomp through the underworld of an especially gloomy Winter. I know a lot of Portlanders wondered right alongside me if the somber cast of this past Winter would ever finally lift? Spring took a painfully long while to truly arrive here this year. Once the long awaited and soft warmth of the sun finally reappeared, I realized that I was done identifying with the dying paradigm, at least for this cycle. I knew I wanted to really live again, and that I did in fact feel very alive. Vital, and buzzing with purpose and will. The corporeal proof outside my northern windows: bright green leaves bursting forth at last from the meandering branches of a big, old guardian catalpa tree. I had been praying for this scene since late February, and had almost lost hope that they’d ever re-appear. It was time to emerge from the cyclical tunnel of judgement, shame, and limitations - hallmark characters in an underworld journey - to love and accept myself as complex, healing, and abundantly resourced.
There is still a lot to untangle within all of this, so these topics are going to take awhile to unfurl and bloom in a more deeply embodied sense. This carefully considered investigation is a slow homecoming into a more sovereign and authentic devotion to pleasure in all forms, in all realms. It is the season to study, observe, act, enjoy, and simply be.
It is here, in the realms of vitality and enjoyment of the sensuous life, that I would like to establish a connective thread back to the topic of pleasure and the erotic within the world of sex work.
Studying and learning from the careers, writing, research, and scholarship of other sex workers, i.e. Jo Weldon, Annie Sprinkle, Viva Las Vegas, Elle Stanger, and Susan Shepherd has enriched my appreciation for the vast spectrum and history of the craft. Of all these personalities, Annie Sprinkle appeared to me first, while I was a confused, young art school kid in my undergraduate studies at Small Town Cow College USA (a.k.a. Oregon State University). Annie’s practice was the first bright spark to speak to the sensuous, pleasure-besotted sense of self that was wrestling within me to get free - the parts that desperately wanted to get truly weird, flirty, luxuriously languid, playfully ridiculous, wild, and commanding with what sex and allure could look and feel like for me. Concepts I could intellectually grasp, but that took many years to marinate within my body, consciousness, and heart. If you’d like to learn more about Annie’s practice, begin with her A Public Cervix Announcement performance series, and go from there. Her work is generous, sweet, and transgressive.
Another key moment of realization during my undergraduate studies: I had no idea that I could flirt, but a beloved theater director at OSU, Marion O. Rossi, who had cast me in a Summer Shakespeare review for our goofy theater department knew this about me. I had received a role with very few lines, Audrey, the goat herdess, and I really had no clue why I had been cast in this role. When I asked Marion, he said, “No one can flirt like Tyler”, (my given name, and the name I still used at the time). I truly had had no idea of this up to that point, but when he said that to me, it was a big “Aha” moment, and so many interactions throughout my young adult life suddenly made so much more sense…I just thought I was being playful with people. But, um, news flash for younger me, that’s part of what flirting actually looks like. After that, I decided to dive into the role of Audrey with abandon. Did I intentionally steal some scenes to get a laugh? Yes. Do I regret it? Not really. Insert evil laughter here…
As a result, my general approach to this day when I am onstage, is to flirt with the audience by playing with them, being interested in their response, and proceed from there. Flirting in this way is collaborative. I allow play to become an erotic and humorous encounter with the body, a collaboration with the music and the sphere of energy the audience offers. I have also learned a lot about stage humor from watching my coworker, Maggie Magnolia, at Mary’s Club. She has a gorgeous, trained dancer form with hilarious body humor skills and a keen sense of comedic that timing are exceptional, and it’s an honor to witness her perform.
And yet, skills, beauty, and talent alone are not enough to serve some moments. What I mean to say is, not every iteration of audience at the club is a collective and harmonious gem, so sometimes it’s a matter of conjuring alchemical lemonade from a bag of salty, sour lemons. Improvisation and ad libbing skills are paramount to success as a naked, sacred stage clown: Yes, and.
There are magical, *poof*-you-blink-and-they’re-gone moments when a stage performance creates a palpable shift; the frequency in the energy field is raised, and I hold a delicate and ephemeral pleasure before me in gratitude and presence. Some nights, the whole crew and I are in flow, and we make magic with one another, gracefully accepting the flux of clientele. Perhaps for just a few brief hours we can conjure what may have felt nearly unimaginable at the start of an especially dim evening. We are indomitable gamblers, betting with hope, optimism, pattern recognition, intuition, luck, timing, allure, humor, and practiced precision. These are the moments I live for in this work. I believe in this work. But I know a shift is headed my way, because this work is also just work some days. Soon enough, it will be time to transition these skills to other platforms; time to prioritize the other creative irons I am also tending to at the pleasure temple.
Pleasure and eroticism also exist for me within the realm of plant stewardship, communion, and medicine making. Every aspect of the sensuous encounter with a beloved plant or mushroom is an experience of the erotic - awakening, toning, and nurturing my pleasure receptors. My spirit is enlivened by the act of placing my bare feet on the earth, or plunging my nails and fingers into the soil. The sun warming my body, the breeze carrying passing flower petals and caressing my cheek, the juicy wriggle of earthworms that soften the soil into humus…I am in pure pleasure realm here. I am in co-creative flow with my fellow earthling friends.
My divinatory practice feels related to this conversation, but exists in a realm that at present defies more nuanced description, so I will continue the thread established here between plants, ecology, and the erotic.
While I was introduced to Annie Sprinkle’s body of work as an undergraduate student, it wasn’t until about 10 years later that I finally got to meet Annie Sprinkle, very briefly, at Portland’s Hollywood Theater. I was in the initiatory first couple of months into my stripping career, and I was a sponge, ready to soak up whatever sex work wisdom I could. Especially if it merged with the art world in ways that felt authentic and sang to my spirit of challenging growth as an erotic being. Annie’s work definitely did this for me.
Sprinkle was presenting to us a retrospective of her career within the intersections of sex work, performance art, queer activism, and ecology. She was especially enthralled, in that particular time period, with her identity as an ecosexual - an individual who is open to sexual, sensuous, and erotic encounters with ecological systems and organic organisms within ecosystems - my definition, not necessarily the definition that you will find if you google the term ecosexual, or search the Ecosex Manifesto definition. If you are curious to learn more, please go check out the book she wrote with her partner and collaborator, Beth Stephens, Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover, which was published in 2019, seven years after I attended this lecture at Hollwood Theater.
At this lecture, I recall regarding an image of her naked body, pale and creamy, punctuated amid a dark, open redwood forest floor, hips thrust and arms outstretched against a fresh mound of soil with earnest and lustful joy. She looked so sweetly at peace, like a baby suckling their mother’s breast for nourishment, combined with the look of someone who is grasping into their lover’s flesh with passionate and urgent abandon. This was an enlightening and enlivening image to experience. My jaw dropped and I giggled with glee.
I had always loved plants, and was learning to love my body the more that I allowed it to be witnessed and regarded by strangers and regulars at the club. It would take a decade more for me to connect these dots for myself. I was still learning how to be comfortable in my body, and offer it gratitude and prideful care.
Oddly enough, during this time period, my first months as a baby stripper at Magic Gardens, was the first time I realized that while many lovers had appreciated my body, I had never been present or embodied enough to fully reciprocate this regard with myself. For example, I had never appreciated the way my breasts looked…I had always known that they felt great (long before anyone else was permitted to experience them!)…but it wasn’t until I was witnessed enjoying them with my own hands for an audience, eyes full of passive desire and longing, that I could regard myself in the mirror of the Magic stage (Viva writes extensively about this club if you are curious to learn more) and exclaimed, “Oh, I get it now! I have great tits! Is it silly that I didn’t know that ever?”
I’m not going to purport that this experience held me permanently in physical self acceptance, it’s more that it helped me better see myself outside of myself. For at least fifteen minutes at a time, I can embody the confidence of the goddess. I serve at her temple, modeling radical self acceptance and love for my body.
I studied ballet throughout grade school and modern dance in my undergraduate studies. Through a study of modern dance I learned the luscious freedom of connecting with the floor and my center of gravity. It was this knowledge that proved most successful for the slow and languid manic pixie dream girl vibe that Magic Gardens ascribed. Playing “Wandering Star” by Portishead in that dark, dive-y Chinatown womb room of a space…*chef’s kiss*. Magic Gardens closed it’s doors at the end of 2015. Viva Las Vegas writes extensively about this club in her book The Gospel if you are curious to learn more.
And now to return to my thread with Annie Sprinkle and ecosexuality. Annie Sprinkle. The body. Performance. Delight. Pleasure. The erotic. The great erotic encounter with Mother Earth: our first mother, our first lover. We are expressions of the earth in human animal form. Annie’s work has appeared and reappeared in my creative awareness on and off for over 20 years now. For me, she is also like a mother, nurturing freedom from sexual shame. I love that her work exists in the world. It enriches my reality.
Around the same time that I met Annie Sprinkle, I lived in North Portland and was invited to be part of these small, 15-20 person performance nights at the home of an artist couple I knew who lived down the street. I would compose these small 1 or 2 song solo dance numbers with tracks by Edith Piaf, Le Tigre, and so on. I danced in my tights, panties, and a top - gliding, rolling, bending, and crawling across the floor, blending my love for modern dance with slowww sensuality and deadpan humor. One of the hosts, Christopher, commented to me after one of these performances that the way I danced reminded him “that we are all animals.” I loved that. Again, I was being seen in a way that I had not had words for at the time. A piece of my creative purpose and expression was being perceived and reflected back to me.
Some things I know: We are all animals, and I wish to experience pleasure via the realms of erotic expression through movement and energetic exchange on stage, as well as through delightful conversation and kinship with the root and soil bound earthlings of this planet. I believed when I started stripping, and still hold the belief, that everyone deserves access to consensual expressions of pleasure. Pleasure is one of my currencies for connection.
There is so much more to be shared within these intersecting topics, and I do plan to write more…but it is time to let these stories marinate for a spell.
Artemis Divine
May 3 and 31, 2023
Portland, OR
