POSITIONS: IS SEX WORK A SACRED PRACTICE OR JUST A JOB?
Vero Rocks and Tasha Tasticake
ISSUE 3.1 (2007)
These guys come in and they want something they can’t ask for. They try, though, each of them awkwardly trying to name the ineffable: “GFE,” “sensual,” “good personality,” “release,” “relaxation.” They say they want all kinds of things, but we know why they are really here: to connect with genitals. They want to jerk off. Or get jerked off. Or get hard and go jerk off at home. Or fuck to get off. Or get someone else off. It’s all about the genitals.
The word “genitals” comes from some old Latin root (gen-) about beginnings, like generate, or genesis. Genitals represent the creation of me, and by extension, they represent everything I could possibly create. Religious impulse originates in the awe we experience when confronted by our own mortality. I could make a million references to ancient practices of sacred prostitution, but that was a million years ago and who knows whether all those ethnocentric anthropologists got anything right anyway. I want to stay in this moment.
Right here is a man whose senses have been sealed off by a lifestyle of eating in steak houses and drinking martinis. Sacred prostitutes are not part of his reality. He thinks she needs to be young, or tall, or clean-shaven, or whatever. That doesn’t matter. He doesn’t have to know that by visiting a sex worker, he’s receiving a sacrament. He is connecting with the origin of his being and his own capacity to be creative.
The more clearly I hold this model for sex work in my mind, and believe that I am a priestess and my clients disciples, the more meaningful and interesting my work becomes. It can be hard to maintain this perspective when there is so much social pressure to see sex as antithetical to the sacred. I work toward a different vision of sex in society. I hold my consciousness as a single point of resistance in the sea of the collective. This is my spiritual practice.
—Tasha Tasticake
Is the pursuit of money sacred? Honey, I’ll call anything sacred if you pay me enough, but after our time is up it’s up to you to decide if I believe it.
Sex workers, like other workers, expect to be afforded the ability to be cognizant, self-determining, and real. We’re not simply the fictitious airbrushed images of the 72 dpi screen, or the anal sluts of video release, or unfortunate creatures destined for every bad thing that happens. We exist as other people who wake up in the morning and ride the train—people you could know.
In my work, I use a Superior Female persona, among others. But I maintain that, since I choose both to work and to construct that identity, I am not somehow naturally predestined for either. My innate self doesn’t have to hearken to a higher power to play games for an hour. I can get down and dirty and take the illusion off while on the subway home. I’m happy to keep that balance.
When some of us define their work as “sacred” off the clock, a few things happen:
1. Our regular humanity is compromised by the need for a spiritual dimension. If you have to apply a higher power to make doing sex work OK, that’s a problem. It should be OK whether you’re getting “blessed” or not.
2. Sex work becomes a calling, not a job. Suddenly, regular girls and guys aren’t qualified. I thought half the point was that regular people, not unearthly uber-creatures, but people with a bit of huevos and business sense could go make some scratch.
Illustration by Katie Fricas.
3. Workers lose their separate, personal identities. It’s easy to laugh at someone who, both in and out of work, identifies as a goddess, sacred whore, or chakra-channeling medium, but it’s also worrisome. It means that the identity that johns use to read that person manifests outside of work hours, so what the goddess is and what she’s selling are sleeping double to a crowded, single bed.
You can argue that the way you deliver sex heals, enlightens, and brings positive change. But so do books, LSD, and a well-received membership to the Church of Scientology. Sure, some sex is sacred some of the time, but all sex can’t be sacred all of the time. Claiming to sell a sacred exchange is necessarily selling its illusion.
—Vero Rocks
TASHA TASTICAKE argued that sex work is a sacred practice in the Positions column for Issue 3.1 of $pread.
VERO ROCKS is a New York City-based, professional dildo-wearing ass fucker.
KATIE FRICAS is a cartoonist and illustrator in New York. She drew for $pread from 2007 to 2010. Her comics have appeared in WW3 Illustrated and Juicy Mother. In 2014 her comic Terry + Terry was named best comic by people named Terry.