Helen Corday

Celebrating Pleasure

HelenC

Facing my Fears of Ageing

Last year I completely stopped wearing any make up at all. A few months ago I threw out what little pieces I had left, never to be replaced. I don’t enjoy putting make up on or wearing it. The only time I put on make up was when I was feeling insecure about how my appearance was perceived by others. It’s my personal choice to always lean into my fearful vulnerabilities when I see them.

Make up, for me, was conformity to something I dislike. I applied make up only out of fear of being perceived as unattractive or unfeminine. Wearing make up was out of integrity with who I am at heart. So no more mascara or concealer for blemishes and dark circles for me. I threw it all away. Just me and my bare face out in the world. As a 41 year old sex worker this is equal parts liberating and terrifying.

Last year I also decided once and for all not to intervene in my ageing with lipo, botox nor the cheek and lip fillers that are now ubiquitous in the sex industry; from the surreptitious “natural” look to the bold and unapologetic “sex doll” look. I have agonised over my decision not to get anti ageing cosmetic surgery and injections for years. It is hard watching your face and body change with age as all around you women are terrified of that process and desperately trying to prevent that happening to them.

Choosing not to use invasive cosmetic procedures to intervene in my ageing face or body shape is a challenging personal choice for me. It helps me to be able to discuss it openly. However, I do not want this discussion to be used to critique or insult women who choose otherwise. There is no right or wrong or good or bad choice about what women do in regard to their appearance. It’s a personal choice and no one else’s business to judge. The reason I want to discuss my choice and the challenge I feel in this industry is because I want more diverse representation for what is a sexy older woman. That it doesn’t need to cost thousands in anti-ageing interventions to continue exploring and expressing your sexual self as we age.

Too many people think the way to support or compliment a woman’s choices and looks is by insulting other women’s choices and looks. No, we must stop this. We all have preferences for what appearance we like in others but if we engage in our preferences by insulting those who don’t meet them, we are being a narcissistic arsehole.

So I don’t know how I will go with this decision, nor how ageing will continue to unfold on my face and body, but it’s a resistance I want to engage in. It’s a battle I have fought several times before. In my teens I was taught to be repulsed by my own body hair. I was immersed in insults from adults and peers that ridiculed and demonised “hairy women” as I entered puberty. Growing my body hair in resistance to this was also HARD at first. Being regularly insulted by loved ones and random strangers in public, men and women, is humiliating and hurtful, but you build up a resistance to it. You become psychologically resilient, you learn to give WAY less fucks what anyone else thinks about your body. I do still sometimes shave my body hair to be contrary though. Often it’s motivated by someone telling me I must never shave; or someone sending me an insult about hairless women and thinking I will feel complimented. I always end up growing it back. Hair removal is a joyless business.

Again I fought this battle in my twenties after having a baby. I had multiple people insult my breasts, men and women, including my then husband and father of my child. For years I looked in the mirror and was repulsed by my breasts and nipples. I came very close to getting cosmetic surgery on my breasts many times due to my insecurities but I resisted. I am so fucking glad I resisted.

Back in my teens I never would have imagined I would LOVE my body hair. I enjoyed engaging in defiance of oppressive norms and rules about women’s appearance but not the body hair itself. Now I do love my body hair. I am not insecure about it at all. Same in my twenties, I never would have believed it was possible that I would look in the mirror and feel good about my boobs. Now in my forties I fucking love my tits. Of course my love for my boobs is greatly helped by the fact that I get so much pleasure from my nipples. Refusal to risk loosing my orgasmic nipple pleasure stopped me getting cosmetic breast surgery many times. Pleasure bought me the time I needed to undo the psychological wounding that had been inflicted on me about my breasts.

So, I already know I can heal the psychological wounds inflicted on women about ageing too. I know it is possible to move through my insecurities about ageing into a full hearted love and appreciation, just as I did with my body hair and my breasts before. I know what it takes to heal this fear and I know I have what it takes to do it. In every area of our lives, all through our lives, we face a choice between fear and love over and over and over again in so many forms. I have gained so much from turning towards my fears with an open mind and heart to seek the learning and love they always offer me.

Sexual Health

It’s no secret that the world is all kinds of fucked up and hypocritical about sexuality. Our sexual health gets unnecessarily complicated by the quagmire of dysfunction surrounding sex. Ultimately it’s just part of our physical health, fitness and wellbeing. You don’t hate yourself if you catch flu or get a chest infection. Why hate yourself for catching an STI? Infections in our bodies are part of living. Sexually active? get regularly tested and get anything treated. Simple right? Well it could be. So could our sexual needs be liberated from dysfunction if society encouraged more honesty about it. Much of the heartbreak caused by deception and betrayal can be prevented if we all had more realistic expectations of sex. If we felt free to be honest with ourselves and our partners about our sexual desires, when they match and when they don’t. Too often people lack compassion when their partner has different sexual needs.

So what If we consider sexual expression and intimacy as a necessity for our physical wellbeing just as we do the need to exercise. Can this help us be more rational and kinder to ourselves and each other about it?

It’s just a fact that we all need exercise to stay healthy. It’s also a fact that different bodies prefer different amounts and types of exercise. Imagine if it was largely accepted that preferences for sexual intimacy is like preferences for physical exercise. Vanilla monogamy is like picking one thing and only doing that, like only going to the gym or only running. Some people like the certainty of routine even though sometimes it is harder than others. They know what they’re doing and it works for them. Some people loose motivation to exercise if it’s routine and repetitive. They need variety and novelty to stay motivated. So they may run, go to the gym, try yoga, go to dance classes, perhaps rock climbing or kayaking, cycling, hiking too. The need for routine or for novelty have no moral implications in sex either, as long as you’re honest. It should be no surprise that without welcoming honesty around our sexual needs and desires, romantic relationships are going to be filled with resentment and deception.

Consider also a person who needs some group contest and/or aggression to stay motivated to exercise, like AFL or consensual violence like boxing or martial arts. Kinks are no weirder or more morally depraved than scrummage in rugby, smashing a competitor to the ground to prevent a ball getting into their hands in AFL, or spending time punching and kicking each other in a boxing ring or dojo.

It’s also no secret that most monogamous commitments do have infidelities. Monogamy is a very difficult sacrifice and without compassion and honesty between the two people involved there’s no support for each other during challenging times. What would monogamy look like if the people involved felt free to be more honest with each other about how damn hard it is? Monogamy without realistic expectations and honesty around sex lacks compassion, and in practice is often infantile, cruel and UNLOVING. What would monogamy look like if a need for routine and variety were something partners were able to openly and creatively figure out together without it implying anyone’s failure or a lack of love?

Open relating is not the magical answer to dysfunctional monogamy either. It’s just a different relationship structure and is as prone to human dysfunction and deception as monogamy is. There is no superior or inferior moral value whether you opt for monogamy, open relating or single casual sex. Nor is there any moral value if you engage in any form of kinky play with other adults as long as you’re honest and open with each other. People can only feel safe to be honest in an environment of compassion towards sexual needs. The religious legacy of shaming and punishing natural sexual desire has too often created sexual partnerships bereft of compassion thus incapable of honesty. Healthy ethical love and sex connections require compassion, honesty and transparency regardless of how kinky or vanilla the sex we’re having or what relationship structures we’ve opted for.

Regaining Lost Libido and Orgasm

Trust is important for us to experience the deepest pleasures our body can offer us. Often the person most likely to repeatedly breach our body’s trust is ourselves. I know I did repeatedly for years and eventually the ways I neglected, misused or abused my body took their toll, a rift was caused. This rift is communicated by the body to the mind with loss of sexual vitality, desire, genital numbness or pain.

I do not have any experience with anorgasmia as I was born orgasmic and recall my first orgasms during masturbation at 5 years old. However, I do have experience with loosing sensitivity and finding orgasm harder and harder to achieve because of my reckless misuse of my body and my sexuality. On top of abusing my body and sexuality I viciously suppressed or shamed my emotional sensitivity. Any feeling that made me feel vulnerable I made my enemy. Anger and lust were all that I didn’t feel shame about. I thought this was strength. It was not. It was disastrously toxic and harmful.

Over a decade of this my body began to rebel against this suppression and abuse by losing sensitivity. Eventually I began to experience genital numbness and loss of libido. This loss of sexual pleasure, my beloved orgasmicity, left me deeply deeply depressed. You cannot shun and suppress your emotional sensitivity, abuse your body and maintain sexual sensitivity and vitality. You will always pay a price, eventually.

It took me another decade of self reflection and the hard work of self love to fully reverse this damage. Thankfully, I now find myself experiencing more full bodied orgasmic pleasure than I did before. How did I rebuild trust between my mind, heart and body? I started listening to my body by paying close attention to how it reacted to my actions towards it. I gradually stopped eating and drinking things that harmed it. I stopped doing things to my body that caused it to shutdown. I stopped violating my own body by forcing orgasms out of it. Instead I ate and drank what replenished me. I made time to touch my body only to nurture it and to accept whatever sensations and feelings were there. I explored what types of exercise and movement nurtured my bodies vitality and sensations, not it’s appearance. I sought out tender and gentle sexual practices to balance and complement my love of rough sex , intense sensations and consensual sexual violence.

I worked on my toxic anger issues so that I was not uncontrollably consumed by my rage, but able to channel anger from my heart creatively into productive action when necessary. To do this I allow myself to cry whenever I feel the need to. I stopped numbing out with drugs and alcohol. I permitted my heart and body to grieve completely for as long and as often as needed. I allow myself to feel and express sadness and hurt without distorting it into anger every time. I acknowledged my insecurities and vulnerabilities with care and compassion. I worked to love and accept my sensitive heart instead of constantly shaming it, and here I learned true strength and resilience. I was so easily hurt when I was using emotional suppression and anger as my coping mechanism. My ego was terribly fragile and it was utterly miserable to be angry so much of the time.

With all of this work slowly the connection between my mind, heart and body rekindled. There were many times I thought my sexual vitality and genital pleasure might never be quite what it was before my body outright rebelled. I worked to accept this and be grateful that I was experiencing more peace, healthier relationships, and orgasms in ways I had never before, all over my body, through meditation, yoga, ritual embodied dance and nurturing self touch.

Incrementally my body began to trust me and after nearly ten years the communication between my body, heart and mind have reached a clarity I never previously experienced, they are a cohesive team, no longer at war. With this patient work of love and reunification I have been able to regain all that I lost with my sensations and more. When something you deeply loved and lost returns to you, oh there is no greater pleasure on earth.

Use Your Head

My beloved pervs, if there’s one skill I wish I could learn whilst in lockdown it would be how to give myself head. Oral sex is utterly sublime whether it’s a quick snack, a side dish or the whole damn meal. One of the things I love most about oral sex is the opportunity to occupy either the role of giving or receiving in their totality. You can devote your whole attention on receiving or on giving. With full focus and connection I’ve been able to orgasm from the pleasure of giving head, though not quite as easily or abundantly as I orgasm when I’m receiving head.

 Giving head is not a skill that we’re born with and even when you learn how to get one person off doesn’t mean it’s going to be good for the next person, or for the same person on a different occasion. Magazine articles advising people to spell the alphabet on people’s clits with your tongue, though fun to try, are way less helpful than learning to actually communicating what you want.

It can be great to begin sex by letting your partner(s) know that you welcome communication during sex. Even with that caveat it can be hard to find the right words during sex without killing the mood. Receiving oral is a great time to practice asking for exactly what you want, whilst giving is a great time to practice listening and doing exactly what your partner asks for.

I’ve often been giving head and craving more feedback to ensure it’s the best it can be. I’ve also found when I’m getting my pussy eaten that when I just moan my pleasure it can cause people to go harder and faster just when I want them to keep doing exaaactly what they’ve been doing. Bluntly telling someone they’re doing it wrong can deflate their enthusiasm, which benefits no one. So I devised strategic dirty talk phrases that are explicit directions to my O town. I highly recommend figuring out the actions you most often want someone to do during oral, whatever junk you have, and translating them into encouraging but specific dirty talk. For example…

Want them to slow right down? “Tease me, I want you to make me beg for it before you give it to me”

A broad flat tongue, consistently stroking upwards?  “lick me like I’m a melting lollypop” or “lick me like a thirsty dog” works well here too

A bit of alphabet tip of the tongue tickling but not the whole damn thing?  “Spell FILTHY SLUT on my clit with your tongue”

Don’t want them to change a thing? “You’re so good, you know exactly how to make me cum, pleeeease don’t change a thing”

You get the idea? Experiment with strategic dirty talk that feels comfortable for you to say and whip it out next time some delightful human has their lips locked on your lovely bits. Communication during sex is a skill that takes practice, just like anything else, but the more you flex it the better the results. And if lots of oral sex just the way you like it isn’t a good incentive to practice, I don’t know what is.

MILF

I remember when I first became a mother at 20 years old I felt this expectation to dress more matronly, certainly less suggestively sexual. I had copped a lot more  hostile street harassment whilst pregnant, criticising me if I showed any flesh in public, even though it was summer. Society was doubling down on the pressure to ‘cover up’ now I was a mother and I felt very at odds with that expectation.

Mother on mother slut shaming was pretty rampant too. The mothers and babies group I attended was full of bland colours and ample covering from the chin down. All that was talked about was child development, nursing and homemade organic baby food. It certainly was not a safe space to discuss how we would nurture our sexuality as we recovered from birth and coped with breastfeeding. Dressing conservatively was so against my own inclinations and nature that it lasted perhaps two months, at most, as I made a futile attempt to fit in with them. I was already an outsider in the group being working class and so young to boot. So when I resumed dressing however I god damned wanted, their disapproval quickly turned to disdain. Plunging cleavage and faux snake skin rainbow boots did not fit their uniform requirements.

I was very isolated as a mother for the first couple of years. Getting into online amateur porn when my kiddo was 3 was a lifeline for me. Not only did it fund me to first get my VCE and get into University, it also began to heal the wounds that the severance of my motherhood and my sexuality had caused. In making amateur porn I discovered that my body wasn’t deserving of ridicule due to it being wrecked by pregnancy and birth, as my ex-husband had so loved to inform me it was. I also discovered the erotic mother was as adored and desired as she was feared and shamed, which is never just a coincidence.

The pressure to conform to the sexless mother societal ideal, The Madonna Archetype, often significantly impairs a mother’s relationship to their sexuality and the quality of their sexual relationships with others. In order to sever mothers from their sexuality, the erotic mother has been portrayed as deviant, selfish, insane and lacking a deep love for her children, or even a threat to their wellbeing, for centuries. The erotic mother’s fecund, carnal sexuality was strategically divided from her nurturing, child rearing role. The powerful archetype of the erotic mother was divided and conquered around the same time period they were burning us as witches, also not a coincidence.

Both mother and child are created by sex. Yet the traditional ideal of motherhood has her eschewing her sexuality in favour of modestly performing her duty to breed without succumbing to her natural lust. Yet if ‘god’ didn’t want us to enjoy sex why did ‘he’ give us so many damn ways to orgasm, and multiple times at that? In addition to clitoral, g-spot, cervical and anal stimulation, I can orgasm from neck kissing, nipple sucking, toe sucking, dreaming, dancing and meditating. I’m not an anomaly. I also wonder if the 20% (approx) of women unable to orgasm would be significantly reduced if their sexuality wasn’t obsessed over whilst simultaneously shamed, abused and ridiculed from the minute it emerges.

Affordable and safe birth control makes shaming and abusing women as a strategy to prevent unwanted pregnancies (a deplorable strategy to begin with) utterly redundant and absurd. We wrestle our right to choose when and if we will become mothers not from God’s hands, but from the hot sweaty meddling hands of the power hungry scoundrels who have too long masqueraded as God’s middlemen.

I’ve spent the last 18 years in a reckoning with the triple strength slut shaming reserved for sexual sole mothers. One thing I’ve learned with sexual fulfilment as a woman is that you’re dammed if you do and you’re dammed if you don’t. So I chose to do it, a lot. As a sex worker I was able to avoid energy draining minimum wage jobs and be able to work part time hours for full time pay. This gave me more time and energy to be with my child and to work toward much needed healing for myself. Monetising the sluttiness, for which I had always been vilified, was the most satisfying FUCK YOU I ever got to say. I don’t accept your shame and hate but your cards and cash are welcome, thank you.

The ‘amateur’, kinky, alternative, queer, feminist, ethical porn and sex worker community have been a source of so much healing and education for me. Before discovering the diverse and vivacious world of online smut I believed my genitals were deformed, my breasts were hideous and my considerable libido was an emasculating unlovable flaw. Oh and I had better not gain any weight, ever. I also didn’t even know where or what my g-spot was! I got the sex education and the body positivity I desperately needed in this community of hardworking revolutionary sluts. Most vitally I learned that my love of sexuality does not negate my worth. Amongst my sex working peers I learned to shed a crippling amount of unnecessary shame and start to develop self respect, learn how to assert my boundaries and to know, then insist, that my pleasure and desire matters too.

The peer education and support I’ve experienced in my corner of the sex work community is formidable. I’ve never been part of a kinder, more inclusive and more informed group of humans. I have made many regrettable choices in my life but sex work is not one of them. Being a whore has made me a better person and it certainly enabled me to become a better mother too.