“Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, certainly, but degenerated to Vice.” — Nietzsche
Sacred Prostitute
My lover just bought a sex encyclopedia published in 1935, the kind of volume that begins with a scholarly introduction and then proceeds to define all sorts of sex-related words and phrases. Among the definitions, some archaic and amusing and some quite up-to-date, we found some interesting things. Under prostitution the author wrote, “The history of prostitution is an exceedingly long and checkered one, reaching back, in fact, beyond history itself, its origin being lost in dimmest antiquity. It is not by any means, as moralists sometimes imply, a phenomenon peculiar to our own degenerate times; rather, it is likely of lesser extent today than in former times. We find it referred to in the Old Testament as an extremely widespread and very ancient institution.”
This entry was followed by another. Prostitution, sacred, religious, or temple: “A form of prostitution important in pagan antiquity, in which sexual pleasures and intercourse formed part of the cult of certain gods and goddesses, whose worship entailed sensual gratification, the surrender of bodily chastity, and the like. This could take many different forms: The priestesses of the temple could be prostitutes and always available for ardent worshipers, the fees from the commerce going into the temple’s coffers; or the creed could require (as Herodotus tells of the Babylonian law) that each woman go once in her lifetime to sit before the temple… and there remain until some stranger chose her for coition, first throwing silver on her knees….”
My “ardent worshipers” and I have no temple today in which to perform a dance that sometimes seems more profane than sacred. In a culture that does not worship the Goddess any longer, these are degenerate times indeed, but not because a once holy act is still being negotiated in hotel suites, in massage parlors, on city streets. In fact, if prostitution is ever eradicated, it will be a signal that Christianity’s murder of Eros is complete, the Goddess’s rule completely overturned. Perhaps most prostitutes today are unaware that their profession has a sacred history, and doubtless, most clients would define what they do with us as something other than worship. But I believe that an echo of the old relationship, when he was the seeker and she was the source, is still present when money changes hands today.
I tell my own story to explore the ancient resonance within modern prostitution, and to encourage others to consider the profession in a way that departs from the stereotypes fed us by Hollywood movies, morals crusaders, and “Miami Vice.”
I was called to the oldest calling five years ago, and it was quite unexpected. I did not seek prostitution out, although I can remember fantasizing about being a prostitute when I was younger. Some of my earliest sexual reveries involved being paid to do sexual things with a shadowy stranger of a man. But by the time my adult sexual persona was taking shape, late in adolescence, I had put those fantasies away. Influenced by feminism, I would probably have said that women should have the right to do what they wished with their bodies, but that selling them was degrading.
It is a source of great wonder to me today, having lived the knowledge (or perhaps I should say a knowledge) of prostitution in my body, that the intellectual resources of feminism, its powerful theory, should shore up conservative Christianity’s position on this question. The two world-views have in common a reluctance to listen to the voices of women who do not experience sexwork as degrading. I began to believe when I was quite young that Christianity was no friend to an emerging, adventurous sexuality.
Later I read some history that backed up my intuitive judgment. (There are millennia-old reasons for Christianity’s sex antipathy; I’ll explore some of them below.)
My feminist-influenced beliefs about prostitution were shaken when, as part of my graduate study in sexology, I began to meet perfectly intelligent women who had much more complex things to say about their lives as prostitutes than I would have expected. It was only this that prepared me for an offer from a new friend when I was in a period of transition, leaving a relationship with no clear idea what I would do next.
“You’ve got to get your own apartment!” she said. (I was staying with friends while I pondered my next step.)
“I can’t afford one yet,” I told her. I’d been going to school, and my savings were low.
“That’s ridiculous! You can afford anything you want! Money’s not hard to get. You should do what I do!”
I was truly puzzled. I thought she was a counselor. That’s what it said on her card.
“No, silly! I’m a prostitute!”
Like the mature and well-spoken women who’d discussed their lives as call girls in front of a college class, my friend Sally was not your typical whore. I had no idea she spent her days having sex for money in the sunny apartment in which we were having coffee and this conversation. At that point I also had no idea that the “typical whore” — that imaginary creature — does not exist.
Sally disabused me of some of my notions about what it must be like to make a living having sex with strangers. It could be quite a living, for one thing; $150 to $200 a session was the going rate for women in her circle. I would not have to do anything I didn’t want to do with a client; I would be in full control, including setting my own standards of safe sex. If a client and I got along, he would likely call me over and over — making even my idea that prostitution involved having sex with “strangers” only partly true. Most women she knew, Sally said, relied on these “regulars” for both financial comfort and a sense of continuity. And she laughed at my questions about the men who dropped such large sums for an hour or so of company — why did they need to visit whores?
“You won’t believe some of the men,” she said.
I decided to take Sally up on her offer to introduce me to a couple of madams she knew and worked with. If they liked me, I could get referrals from them, and they would start me out with clients they knew well, so they could tell me what to expect with each one. True, I knew I could use the money. But more than that, I was intrigued. What better way to learn what prostitution was all about than to try it? I resolved that I would continue only if my first few forays felt comfortable and that I would only agree to see a client if I could feel connected to him in some way, through arousal or a more ineffable sense of fellowship.
I spoke to friends about my decision. My sexual journey had already led me to spend a decade in the lesbian and gay community, and I applied its politics of “coming out,” disclosing my apart-from-the-norm sexual identity as instinctively with prostitution as I did as a lesbian or a bisexual. How else, if people don’t come out, can a person with no experience of a particular sexuality — especially given the raging proliferation of stereotypes — come to understand why others prefer or behave differently? (It is in this spirit, too, that I write this essay — because I have a store of information and a perspective that many others do not, and because, unlike many whores, I do not live my life in secret.)
Some of my friends were shocked and upset. Some gave me support, however hesitant. I found I could not predict how a friend would react to the news. One woman has not spoken to me since. One, a phone-fantasy worker herself, went into a lather because I would be having actual contact with my clients — to her, talk was fine, but touch was unacceptable. One friend, a lesbian who’d never had enjoyable sex with a man, was unconditional in her respect for my decision. The most important disclosure — to my brand-new lover — led to a conversation in which he revealed that he had had sex for money a few times when he was younger.
My two madams could not have been more different. One was a mature woman with a family to support. The other was younger than I and, aside from running a tight business ship, was a party girl who seemed to have every well-to-do man in the Bay Area in her Rolodex. The only thing the two seemed to have in common, in fact, was their bulging phone books. Each took a commission of 25 to 35 percent when she made a match between client and prostitute. Both of them also still saw clients themselves.
‘“I tell my story to encourage others to consider the profession in a way that departs from stereotypes.”’
Another quality I saw they shared after I had been working with them for some time was this: Unlike some of the women who worked for them. neither ever expressed contempt for their clients or any sort of revulsion about the men’s sexual desires. This surely contributed to their success as madams, but more than that. I see it as one trait of the sexual priestess who accepts all who come to her. These women oversee what is left of the temples. the ruins that are our legacy from a time when desire could be venerated by religion. Some of our folk heroes in America are madams — I am thinking especially of Sally Stanford, the Sausalito madam-turned-mayor, and some of the women of the Wild West, who could wield great influence at a time and a place when morality depended on a different set of criteria than was enforced back East. Perhaps madams, with what seems like unconditional acceptance, represent a sort of sexualized motherly love. I find it ironic, given the way madams hearken back to the times of the erotic priestesses, that they are prosecuted much more harshly than ordinary prostitutes when they are caught. In California the prostitute’s first arrest is a misdemeanor charge, but the madam faces a felony conviction. Perhaps this is the legacy of Judeo-Christian law, with its emphasis on bringing down those who possess Goddess-given power. It also serves to prevent the temples of priestesses from forming again.
My first client was an older man who lived alone. His sexual response was very dependent on fantasy. I would have to be talkative.
A wealthy, urbane grandfather answered the door when I rang the bell. I was as nervous as a cat, but he assured me that I must know much more about sex than he did — I was studying it, after all, and he had just stumbled through his whole life. He had been a widower for years, but his wife was more present to him as we went to his bedroom than the very much alive spouses of almost every subsequent client I have had: He wanted to talk about her as we had sex.
He told me not to bother touching his cock; he hadn’t gotten an erection in years. “I’m just too old for that,” he said. “I’m as limp as that flag out there.” He gestured to a banner hanging outside, still in the windless night air. But he masturbated vigorously, working his soft cock so rapidly his hand was a blur, and I held him while he did, and we made up a story.
“My wife — you would have loved her. She was a luscious woman. All curves. Her tits were this big.” He held his hands out, cantaloupe-size breasts with his palms curved around them. “You like that, don’t you? She loved sex. We used to do it every day. If you saw her in the market, you would definitely notice her. What would you do if you saw a woman like that?”
“Oh, yes.” I tried to catch the wave of his thoughts. “She’s too beautiful not to notice! I love women who are older than me. I’d round the corner in the market near my house and see her — it would make me catch my breath! But I don’t know how to approach strangers in public. I would hope that she noticed me, too. I would look over my shoulder every few minutes to see if she was still near me. I would try to discover something about her by looking at the things she bought.”
“She is only there to look for someone like you. She had a powerful appetite, my wife. She has noticed you and is following you around the market. She is very bold, not shy like you are. She will probably follow you home.”
“I’m not expecting anyone — when the doorbell rings, it startles me! I look through the peephole, and there she is, that beautiful woman from the market! My heart is pounding when I let her in. What does she want?”
“She wants you! She wants to make love to you I Ohhh…”
The old man was so close to orgasm. He could not possibly need me to have this fantasy — he probably put himself to sleep with it every night. My role must be to witness this desire that lived years after the desired one died, and to confirm it, to add a note of unpredictability to his fantasy.
“She doesn’t say a word to me — she just reaches out and pulls me to her! She begins to kiss me, and my head is spinning. She takes my hands and puts them on her breasts — I know she must mean she wants me to squeeze them. My God, they’re so big and luscious ….”
“Ohhh …”
“I don’t know what’s happening to me! It’s like I’m possessed! I am scrambling to get my hands under her shirt — I have to touch those breasts! God, they’re so full and soft… I can’t help myself …. She has such a powerful effect on me …. I am sucking her nipples now, oh, they’re so big and sweet, I have to suck your wife’s lovely breast….”
“Ohh … oh … oh … ohhh!” His body, still in my arms, shook as he came. But as soon as his orgasm was over, he scurried to the bathroom to wash the ejaculate off his hands. I lay in his big bed, looking at the pictures of his grandchildren on the bureau and thinking that nothing I thought I knew about men’s sexuality had prepared me for the experience I’d just had.
He came out wrapped in a big white robe that, as it turned out, had two $100 bills tucked into the pocket. He slipped these to me as he kissed my cheek and warned me to be safe getting home. “You’re a sweet girl,” he said.
“We are doing the Goddess’s work in a culture that would still like to label it the devil’s. It is not legal; it is stigmatized.”
Working with sex in a field in which most of my clients are men has meant to me, above all, that I could challenge my own stereotypes about male sexuality. The old widower was not the only client whose eroticism depended on the realm of fantasy, nor was he the only client I’ve had who did not touch my pussy. I thought that as a prostitute I would professionally suck and fuck, but I have also cross-dressed clients, masturbated in front of them so they could watch me ejaculate in a musky little rain-storm, played with their nipples and asses. I have also had clients who insisted on thinking of me as their lover, whose connection with sex was incomplete without a “real” relationship — even if it, too, was fantasy.
I was deeply affected by that first client, and, in fact, I felt very privileged to be with someone who had discovered a way to so uniquely mold sexual energy to his needs. Of course, not every subsequent client had this capacity. Many saw sex the way I’d thought most men did — a little sucking, a little fucking, a little breast fondling along the way, and they seemed perfectly satisfied that they had gotten their money’s worth. I don’t mean to imply that there is anything wrong with meat-and-potatoes sex — I had a great time with many of these clients — but I especially liked working with the ones whose sexual interests were more complicated. These were the men whom many other prostitutes didn’t understand, and sometimes found unacceptably “kinky.”
I came to believe that the men who were my clients — mostly “yuppies and their dads,” as I usually describe them — were paying for sex not because they couldn’t get it any other way, as I had assumed before I met them. After all, most of them — I’d guess 90 percent or more — were married or partnered. Rather, the men, mostly successful businessmen, paid for sex because it was more convenient to do so than to find partners any other way, and because extracurricular sex with prostitutes didn’t carry as much risk to their marriage as taking a mistress might.
I also had the feeling that most of the “kinky” clients had a different kind of sex with me than they had at home. While the other guys were basically looking for erotic variety, the fetishistic men were coming to me to get sexual needs met that were secret, saved for these forays into the sexual underworld that took the pressure off, that let them go back home without having to try to involve their wives in sexual negotiations for preferences the husbands were hesitant to admit.
I knew about the history of the sacred priestess whores before I began whoring, and I came to feel a very real resonance with this archetype as I collected more diverse experiences with clients. In antiquity, the temple whores let worshipers experience, on a body level, the compassionate, passionate Goddess; was that not what I was doing, albeit in a context without overt spiritual meaning? But it does have spiritual meaning to me. I have been involved in Wicce’s ritualistic Goddess worship for many years; it is the only Western religion whose deity says, “All acts of love and pleasure are My rituals.” Wiece has some of its roots in more ancient Goddess-worshiping religions, which made sex a powerful sacrament. The Christians have misnamed these “fertility cults,” gutting their religious significance and altering their real meaning.
When a client comes to me, he brings need of a kind he often cannot articulate. His need for acceptance and nurturance is intermingled with erotic longing. At first I was surprised to open the door to men I had never met before and find that they were already erect, but now I see this as a body understanding on the client’s part that his desire will be accepted and affirmed. He does not feel desire for a particular person, but the sort of desire, I am certain, that ardent worshipers brought to the temples-desire to connect, to know eroticism as powerful and good. Today, unless he is a pagan or a Tantrist, he probably does not have the language to acknowledge his desire to go to the Goddess’s arms, but something archetypal is happening in him nonetheless.
And something archetypal is certainly happening to me as I invite him in. I work in my home; it and my body are my temples. The act of prostitution, no matter which specific sexual act I perform, has a ritualism about it: I dress, choosing clothes that convey a sense of eroticism; I bathe when the man has gone, the money he leaves behind proof that our relationship, and our relations, are of a specialized kind. I know he will not stay for dinner, and he is not my lover, though love — and not just physical love — passes between me and my clients very routinely. If he is a stranger, I treat him as if we have known each other always. The ways in which our interactions are circumscribed-even by our use of condoms and other forms of safe sex — give them a particular intensity.
I need not have worried about whether I would feel arousal or fellowship with my clients. I have never turned a man away, though I am sure I would if my intuition told me it was best. “Money is the best aphrodisiac!” some whores profess, and there is something to that, but for me the sexual energy comes as if unbidden, because I am in sexual and spiritual space.
I don’t mean to make prostitution, even done with spiritual meaning, sound effortless. We are doing the Goddess’s work in a culture that would still like to label it the devil’s, after all. It is not legal; it is stigmatized. I had almost grown brave enough to write my mother a letter telling her about my life in the Life (as the street whores call it) when she died, making the conversation unnecessary but the absence of it particularly resonant. Sex was a nemesis in her life — probably the way it is for many of my clients’ wives. She had never found a way to make it enjoyable, much less sacred. Everything in her life — except, I guess, my father — supported her in this antipathy. I will always wonder whether anything about my so very different path might have illuminated her experience in a new way. And I wonder, too, if our relationship would have survived her probable horror at my choices.
“I believe that sex is sacred and healing. This idea pervades my work as a prostitute, and this vantage point often startles people.”
Many of my clients have been scarred by a pervasive negative view — so influenced by an unfriendly, conservative Christianity — of sex and pleasure. Not every client comes to me joyful or even leaves joyful. In fact, with many men I see the curtain descend right after orgasm, and their open emotions close, their countenances go blank. Some are bitter about women, about sex. Their schizophrenic upbringing as men, after all, taught them that sex was wrong and that they should be able to have all of it they wanted. They are engaged in a hurtful dance with women that is powered by resentment and prolonged by their (and their women’s) inability to communicate successfully about the forbidden and the intimate. I feel this hurt and this bitterness and can do nothing but aim above it; only sometimes do I feel that I succeed. Other men are sure that their behavior is wrong, and it takes all the Goddess’s love — and all my energy — to provide a safe place for unsullied desire to emerge.
I know in my soul that it is cultural handicaps like these, worn like wounds, that lead some men to violence against prostitutes. I have lived the Life safely for many reasons: I do not live in my body like a victim, I am educated and not lower class, and my clients come to me through someone else’s referral, so they have been screened. But I recognize sometimes the frustration about sex and desire that would, under other circumstances, burst out fiercely.
So many sexual possibilities are not taught or acknowledged in this culture. Miraculously, some people’s forbidden desires grow and flower despite all attempts to stunt them. The wisdom of the sadomasochist community-that virtually anything can be done consensually and with a high degree of safety — is silenced, except in that community’s own little enclaves. We use sex and desire to sell everything from odorless armpits to cars, yet treating sex as a service commodity is forbidden, the service providers branded as criminals. In fact, we barely treat sex as something to learn about, a set of skills, a knowledge base. Attempts made to educate people, especially young ones, about birth control and safe sex are attacked.
There was a time when the priestesses in the temple performed sexual initiations and sexual instruction. In the Tantric temples of India, worshipers came to circle the priestess and priest, embodiments of Shakti and Siva, as they fucked — and this was holy! Children brought to the temple to observe this understood as they grew that sex could take them to a place of loss-of-self, unity-with-all enlightenment.
Anthropology teaches us that each culture has its taboos, and often if we study the social structures of a culture, we understand why its taboos developed. The temples in which the Goddess was revered came under attack because the religion they represented was under siege: The Bible means it very literally when it blasts “the Whore of Babylon,” but it does not teach that she was a sacred whore, a priestess. Preceding earliest Judeo-Christian history, the Goddess reigned for eons. In her book When God Was a Woman, Merlin Stone deconstructs the Bible’s cautionary tale of Adam and Eve and argues that every symbol in that chapter, from the Tree of Knowledge to the serpent to the apple, was sacred to the Goddess; Genesis is actually an allegory of the struggle between competing religious faiths.
Is it any wonder, then, that the powerful sacred rite done in the Goddess’s name — and, by extension, sexuality itself — was deemed by many early Christians to be dangerous? And is it any wonder that the history of Western culture since then has included, in all epochs, a war between Christianity and paganism, hedonism, sexual deviation? The old temples’ sacred practices, including prostitution and transvestism (for males sometimes cross-dressed and took the role of priestesses, and men also offered themselves up in the name of the Goddess), have become the new order’s most heinous sexual sins.
Eros did not die of poisoning, and will not — the most life affirming of all human drives cannot die. But every child made to feel ashamed of her own impulses, every adult whose sexual practices are still criminalized, every couple that can’t talk about sex and desire, everyone who is given the green light to hate those who are sexually different from themselves, has been poisoned. They are all the victims of that ancient religious war, which, in the sexual arena, has never reached a state of truce.
Most prostitutes today would tell you that they do it for the money, but that is only part of the story. Many women would never perform sex for money, impoverished or not. What differentiates the ones who do? Perhaps, as the Religious Right and some feminists proclaim, many women are prostitutes against their will. But why focus on them without giving equal attention to those women (and men, for men share the profession at all levels) who elect to do sex as work? What do they have to teach? What will they say that we are not supposed to hear?
Many will state that they feel good about their profession; they enjoy providing others satisfaction; they like feeling in control of their own work situation; they like the sex and the adventure; they consider prostitution healing.
They are the heirs, whether aware of it or not, of the sacred priestesses who opened their robes to strangers and revealed the glowing body of the Goddess.
The Goddess movement today is a vital subculture, exploring compassionate, feminist-humanist values that go against the grain of our contemporary culture of glorified death. Yet most of the attention given to the newly revived Goddess portrays her in maternal terms: Earth Mother, Mother Goddess. Only a few Goddess scholars emphasize the powerful role that sexuality played in the ancient Goddess’s worship. One of Inanna’s names was “She of the Wondrous Vulva.” Our culture has been made sensitive by Freud to the place where maternal love and sexual love converge, and the Goddess movement’s challenge today is to reconcile the age-old, Judeo-Christian dichotomy of the mother and the whore. Perhaps only actual whores know how closely linked the needs for these kinds of love can be.
“To guide another person to orgasm, to provide companionship and initiation to new forms of sex — these are healing and holy acts.”
One client came to me with an attitude that reminded me of a cocky, greedy little boy’s. (Certainly one persona I recognize in many clients is that little boy who says, “Gimme!”) As he was dressing to leave, he began a ramble that seemed bizarre to me at the time but makes sense in retrospect: “Hey, you know, you oughta have kids. You’d make a really good mother. I mean it. How can you not want to have children of your own?”
Every whore has seen this aspect of desire: the need for Mommy, for maternal caring, for unconditional love. Few adults have anything that feels like this in their lives; we are not even, as mature grown-ups, supposed to want it. Love is sexualized in this culture partly, I think, because sex does lead into a sea of love, if we are fortunate enough to be open to it, but also because sex is the one arena in which most adults get touched, stroked, held — all the things it hurt so much to give up as growing kids. Sex reminds us of love, even when we have no love in our lives.
I believe that sex is sacred and healing. This idea pervades my work as a prostitute, and this vantage point often startles people accustomed to negative ideas about sex workers’ lives. They press me to delve into the negative side, and it often seems that what they’re really looking for is evidence that men who patronize prostitutes are contemptible. I don’t believe this; I believe that every client, every person, has the right to seek out sexual pleasure and comfort. I’ve been treated with a good deal more respect by 99 percent of my clients than by the average guy on the street.
Besides prostitution’s stigmatized status and the way our sex-negative society makes it hard for both prostitutes and their clients to be proud of themselves, however, I do believe there is something wrong with the picture. The problem isn’t with prostitution, though, but with sexist social norms. Virtually all the clients are men, whether the prostitutes they patronize are male or female. The options for women who might like to arrange to see a prostitute are far slimmer. Surely there are many women who would (at least, if social standards were different) appreciate the touch of a sexual healer, the chance to have a great fuck without the entanglements of a relationship, the option to try sexual things they’ve fantasized about. erotic comfort when lonely, and the embrace of the Goddess. These are all among the reasons men seek out sex professionals. Like men, some women would seek out male sex workers for access to these experiences, and some would choose females.
Any situation that is stereotyped by sex immediately arouses my suspicion. Men are expected to be more sexual than women, so the assertively sexual woman, whether she is seeking her own sexual pleasure or using her body and her sexual prowess for her livelihood, faces acute social disapproval. This is one of the hurdles a woman in this culture must leap to become a sex professional, and a chief source of the stigma she faces: As a woman, she is not supposed to be highly sexual in the first place. Not only has she stepped across the line of social acceptance to become a whore, she has thereby proved herself a slut.
Yet many women are highly sexual — some of them gravitate to prostitution as a profession, but others must create a strategy that lets them be both sexual and safe from the acute social disapproval that is the whore’s lot. When women’s sexual choices are restricted to Madonna and Whore, Good Girl and Bad Girl, many women are forced to walk a narrow path to find “acceptable” outlets for sexual desire and adventure. Still others are frustrated, locked between their appetites and limited social-sexual options.
I am sure there is a class of women in this country wealthy and powerful enough to call upon sex workers for erotic attention. But for the rest of us, in spite of the gains made by the women’s movement, calling a prostitute rarely seems like an option. Almost without exception, the only women I know who have patronized prostitutes have been sex workers themselves.
I was once called to see a married couple that lived in a wealthy suburb. It was clear from the start that the woman was as much a participant as the man, and at first I thought that I had been called so she could have a bisexual experience. She seemed completely at ease and passionate. Only when we had been playing for some time did she talk about experiences she had had, years before, as a prostitute.
Male culture allows for the existence of prostitution even when it does not honor it. Having sex with a prostitute is a possibility for virtually any man. Female culture allows the possibility of becoming a prostitute, although this is an option “polite society” forbids; but nowhere do we hear acknowledgement that access to sexual service might improve some women’s lives. As one result, women’s sexual possibilities are more closely involved with their relationships than many men’s; for the woman with no relationship or one that is sexually stunted, options are severely narrowed.
To guide another person to orgasm, to hold and caress, to provide companionship and initiation to new forms of sex, to embody the divine and embrace the seeker — these are healing and holy acts. Every prostitute can do these things, whether or not she understands their spiritual potential. For us to see ourselves as sacred whores, for our clients to acknowledge the many facets of desire they bring to us, can be a powerful shift in consciousness. We show the face of the Goddess in a culture that has tried for millennia to break and denigrate Her, just as some today claim we are broken and denigrated. They are not correct, and the Goddess will not be broken. In our collective extraordinary experience, we prostitutes have healed even those who do not honor us. Were the attack on us over, we could begin to heal the whole world.
After 7,000 years of oppression, I declare this the time to bring back our temple.
Somehow every time I see a Nietzsche quote I think of the old bathroom stall philosophy series. The first line reads, “God is dead. — Nietzsche.” Then someone writes under that insight, “Nietzsche is dead. — God.” … Now I’m not sure what that says about the Goddess Prostitute in the theological metaverse, but the concept illustrates the value of looking at everything from at least two different perspectives. On that note, you can meet Dr. Queen in the decade-in-the-making documentary Orgasm Inc. and learn a great deal, perhaps more about women within our “modern” culture than prostitution per se, but then all things sexual remain interrelated. Ms. Queen has authored many books, should you be open to that form of stimulation, and in closing we should be clear on one final note: If you ever have a chance to go to dinner with Carol Queen, you should definitely do that.
