Veronica Monet, The Value of Sex
Taste of Sex – Guest Speaker
Beth C
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Episode 13 - Veronica Monet, The Value of Sex

In this Interview, OneTaste’s Beth Crittenden interviews Veronica Monet, a sex educator, an author, an erotic model, a sacred prostitute, courtesan, and an activist for sex worker rights.  Veronica reveals her transition from corporate America to sex worker to sacred prostitute. If you have ever been curious about what a sacred prostitute is, this interview will give you all the angles. (Here is a hint: Transformational Sexual Healer) This interview is informative, fun-filled, sexy, and humorous. Join Beth and Veronica as they redefine many previously misunderstood concepts and re-frame the sex worker industry from the gutters of assumption and misinformation into the possibility of sexual healing and spiritual transformation.

Transcript

Transcript

Veronica Monet, The Value of Sex

Intro
This program brought to you by personallifemedia.com is suitable for mature audiences only and may contain explicit sexual information.

This is part one of a two-part program.

[music]

Beth Crittenden:  Hello, everyone and welcome to A Taste of Sex:  Guest Speaker Interviews.  I’m your host Beth Crittenden, here on Personal Life Media, coming to you from One Taste Urban Retreat Center in San Francisco where it is our desire to weave orgasm into the world of conversation and into our bodies.

So One Taste Urban Retreat Center is run by a community of people who are dedicated to a practice called Orgasmic Meditation.  That is the goalless study of a definition of orgasm which is the activation of the involuntary musculature.

Now, hopefully that will pique your attention enough to have you stay with us for this show which is guaranteed to shed some great light on orgasm and connection.
I’m so pleased that we have Veronica Monet with us today.

Veronica is here to speak as part of our “Hybrid Practice” series which we have on Tuesday nights here at One Taste.  She is a sex educator.  She is an author.  She wrote most recently “Sex Secrets of Escorts”.  Veronica worked as an erotic model, an amateur porn actress, a sacred prostitute, a courtesan, a prostitute and activist for sex worker rights since 1991.  She’s also involved with the groups COYOTE and SWOP.

[music]

Join us today on a Taste of Sex:  Guest Speaker Interviews as Veronica Monet shares with us some principles of sacred prostitution.  She defines what  a courtesan is.  Well, here are some distinctions between courtesan and geisha.

We’ll hear why the Bonobos have it figured out and learn how to be exquisitely selfish with your self and your lovers and learn what Veronica Monet understands about sex after observing the mating rituals of her German shepherds.

[music]

Welcome, Veronica.

Veronica Monet:  Hi, Beth. 

Beth.  Hi.

Veronica:  Thanks for having me here.

Beth:  Oh, it’s our pleasure.

Veronica:  I actually started off in the sex industry in the fall of 1989 but I started my sex work for activism in 1991.

Beth:  Great.  So you have experience to share with us today.

Veronica:  I have lots of experience!  I really do.  I actually started in the sex industry before it was on the Internet. 

[laughter]

I was one of the first to get a website and I was on what was a called a BBS back then.  You had to have a code in order to get on to see it and people would find me in the local paper and then have one black and white picture which is what everybody had.  Then they would say “Oh, I can’t tell anything from this black and white thing.”  So I go “I have something on the Internet.”  They go “Let’s see Internet.”  [laughs]

Beth:  Nice!

Veronica:  Do you have a computer?  So that would direct them to the address of the BBS and they have a little code, they could go in and see colored photos and even little clips of x-rated videos.  It became a great marketing tool.

Beth:  How did you get involved in the sex industry?

Veronica:  I have a really, really uncommon career path.  I was a “good little girl” who and I speak euphemistically with quotes around it, but my parents raised me very right wing, - conservative Christian.  I didn’t really take to it after…

Well, when I was twelve I read the bible from cover to cover waiting to have this wonderful religious experience and instead I felt like throwing up.  I felt like I must really be a demon seed because everybody who’s good reads the bible and feels inspired.  I read the bible and I felt like yuck.  I didn’t know why.  I’ve been so confused why.

Anyway, that set me on a totally different path and I became a wild little girl who liked rock and roll and sex and drugs.  But I managed to get through college despite all of  my wild ways and I graduate from Morgan State University in 1982 with a degree in Psychology.  I graduated with honors.

From there I went to California and started my corporate career.  I worked for a telecommunications firm and I worked for a computer company.  I worked for a radio station.  Ironically, the last straight job that I had before becoming an escort was as a marketing representative for a radio station in Santa Cruz called KLRS.  [laughs]

Beth:  That’s great.  And here you come full circle today.[laughs]

Veronica:  I come full circle, yeah! [laughs]

What happened was I was clean and sober now and an Internet host program.  I had been for four years and started coming out to myself as a bisexual.  This was a hugely upsetting event for me.  I felt it’s bad enough that I have all these other stories against me; now I’m going to be queer too.  My mother is never going to want to claim me as her child.

I went through a lot of grief around and I really did.  When I came out the other side and realize who I am and I might as well enjoy it – might as well be just who I am.  I met a woman who was a prostitute and she was a beautiful woman.  She had actually… Miss Petite California and she was a Center Fold..  I thought it was a lot of lust material but I wasn’t really impressed with her politics because she didn’t seem to understand feminism.  I felt I was a really ardent feminist.  I felt maybe if I date her for a while some of my feminism will rub off on her and she’ll see just how oppressive this prostitution is.

Beth:  Have her see the light…

Veronica:  Yeah.  I was hoping that she’d see the light and come around.  About nine months into that relationship, I saw the light. 

[laughs]

I was like “Oh, man!  What was I thinking?”  I always drive in a little economy car and I live in this little studio apartment sleeping on the couch.  I didn’t even own a bed.  This woman had a Mercedes and a big mansion and a husband and three kids.  I thought “So whose life looks more functional here?”

[laughter]

And I decided hers did.  She has defied all the stereotypes except for the Frederick’s of Hollywood thing.  She was into plastic surgery and stuff.  She was stereotypical in that way but on the other hand she was really, really smart woman who was very much in control of her life.  I never met a woman like her before.

When I was volunteering for the Center against Rape and Domestic Violence in Corrales, we were all feminist in theory but economically, we were not because we were usually dependent on men.  I knew volunteers who were in abusive relationships where they were not just dominated but physically abused.  We would be protesting in the streets and we were running a shelter for battered women and then some of those women would go home to battering husbands.

Because and I quote  “I can’t afford to leave.” – that was the way it was in the early ‘80s.  Here in the late ‘80s, I meet this woman who is making more money than her husband and what I noticed was a big power differential that I’ve never seen in a relationship before.  I’m not saying that I embrace or endorse power going along the lines of money.  But I am saying that’s the way this culture operates and that was what caught my attention.

I thought that prostitutes were downtrodden.  I thought that they were degraded.  I thought that they were dominated.  I met a woman who was none of those things, who was very healthy, very happy, very emotionally well-balanced, very in charge of her life and had the trappings that this culture tends to --you know, like a husband and kids and the house, and the car.  Those are the things that I just never saw in television.  I never saw it in movies, never read about it in my textbooks so I was intrigued.  I was very intrigued.

I eventually asked her to please teach me this and she … Now, I want you to just pay attention to that.  I have a college degree with a minor in Business Administration.  I have seven years in corporate America; I have been trained extensively in marketing through the radio station.  I have had all kinds of customer service training.  I have learned how to install and service a telephone switch.  But I’m asking this prostitute to teach me her business.

And you know what, I needed to learn.  It didn’t matter how much I knew about these other aspects in life.  There was a lot to learn if you’re going to do it right.

Beth:  What were the differences?

Veronica:  The differences?

Beth:  Uhum.

Veronica:  The biggest thing was really about having power and negotiating with men around sex.  Who teaches you that?  What I’ve learned growing up was that the guy makes the firs move and you try to pretend that you don’t know as much about sex as you do know and actually liked it.  “Oh, well.  I’ve never done that before.”  [laughs]

Beth:  Have him feel like a big strong man that’s opening you up.

Veronica:  Right!  She taught me to be the one in charge and the one who knows everything, and the one who initiates stuff because these men are actually coming to you to get educated and to learn.  A lot of times they’re coming to you to be initiated into sex.  They’re losing their virginity to you.

So this was a complete role reversal.  The other thing is that I think culturally women are lot of times taught that when they were naked and were helpless – and so learning that you can be completely naked with a stranger in the room and have all the power in the  world even in a potentially violent situation – it’s you calling the shots.  You are always there taking care of yourself and applicating for yourself.  Those were huge.

Beth:  How did your relationship to vulnerability change when you became a prostitute?

Veronica:  I really learned to embrace men’s vulnerability.  As a prostitute and especially as I moved into sacred prostitution which really… I took a class on it.  I took a class from a woman named Cossy Davien [xx].  She was teaching classes in her apartment in the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco.  It wasn’t just women who were earning a living as prostitutes.  All kinds of women take her classes because they want to connect their sexuality to the divine.

By taking her classes, I learned a lot about women and sex that I never knew.  It gave me this new spin on sexuality so that instead of thinking that I had the prize and I had to keep it away from the men who are going to hire another degraded value of my sexuality if they had access to it.  I rather saw myself as basically a spokesperson for the goddess and somebody who is bringing healing and healing orgasms and spiritual transformation to my clients.  That was a huge shift to go from “Gee, nice Mercedes.  Can I have one, too?”
[laughs]  to “Wow! These men cry when they have orgasms!  I didn’t know that!  How come they never did that when I was dating them?”

To realize that you are walking into this whole different world, that somehow another…If you practice prostitution the way that I learned it, it is very, very different from anything that I had experienced through dating or relationships.  It’s really hugely empowering for me.

Beth:  How do you define the difference between prostitution and sacred prostitution?

Veronica:  When I first started, I really called that prostitution because I was just thinking about it as a job.  I was thinking I’m going to get so much money for so much time.  Now, street prostitution is actually and usually so much money for a certain sex act.  If you’re doing [xx] and alcohols, you charge by the hour and whatever happens or doesn’t happen during that hour, you’d still get paid.

Looking at it that way, you just show up to try to do as little as possible.  It’s like “OK.  All if I have to…”  That’s kind of a reluctant attitude and I think it’s more of an antagonistic relationship with the client.  You’re likely to call him a … the term is unflattering rather than say a “client”.

As you move in the sacred prostitution, you start realizing that you’re really playing with something that is very powerful here.  People are bringing their confessions to you.  People are bringing their tears to you.  People are bringing their very death to you.  I had a client who saw me for a year before he told me that he’d been diagnosed with a terminal illness.  One of the things that he really wants to do is to have an orgasm before he died.  He hadn’t been unable to have an orgasm for a year.  He was not a really person to be around.  I learned so much from that one client because I came full circle with that relationship and realized that this man had brought his death and laid it at my feet.

I realized that this is truly a sacred calling.  It is not something that you can take lightly.  I also really start to realize that orgasms and sex have a transformative spiritual component to it.  It’s independent of whether you’re in love or in marriage which is so much of what we’re bombarded with in this culture.  If I hadn’t actually been there and experienced it first hand, I wouldn’t have believed it because prostitution is supposed to be one of the more banal pursuits on this earth.

The money is supposedly cheapens the sex act.  It wasn’t my experience at all.  But the shift for me took place on whether or not I brought a level of consciousness in prayer.  I learned to pray before I ever open that door to the client. 

Beth:  [laughs] That you have to dedicate..

Veronica:  You know what you’re doing to your God or your goddess and you really have to bring that intention to it.  If you do, if you create that safe container, people will bring all of their stuff to you -just like they did thousands of years ago in the sacred temples.

Beth:  That’s beautiful, Veronica.  Thank you.  We’re going to have to break to support our sponsors.  Is there anything else you’d like people to know about sacred prostitution or your experience…?

Veronica:  Oh, absolutely!  But they should email me and you can go to my website at www.veronicamonet.com.  If you can’t find me, you can’t spell it whatever or I talk too fast, just go to google, put in Monet like you’re looking for a Claude Monet painting, and sex; I’ll come up.  [laughs]

Beth:  Great!  Thank you.  We’ll be back shortly.  This is your host Beth Crittenden for A Taste of Sex:  Guest Speaker Interviews with Veronica Monet.

[music]

 

Listen to A Taste of Sex:   Erotic Poetry Reading, a companion program to Life In An Orgasm-Based Community.  It’s open mic night at One Taste San Francisco, a weekly audio program on personallifemedia.com.

[music]

Beth:  Welcome back to A Taste of Sex:  Guest Speaker Interviews.  I am your host Beth Crittenden here on Personal Life Media.  We’re talking today with Veronica Monet.  We’ve just spent the first segment of the show discussing sacred prostitution and now we’re going into another one of the hats that Veronica wears, and that is modern-day courtesan.

Veronica:  [laughs]

Beth:  How about sharing with us the definition of courtesan?

Veronica:  Courtesan means that you have found favor with the court.  It harps back to when we had kings and queens and rulers but the court that we’re talking about.. the queen wasn’t at work there.  Trust me.  This was like “Men’s territory!”  No women were allowed except for the courtesans.

Courtesans were allowed to spend time with these very powerful, wealthy men.  They could have been elevated from street prostitution.  If that happened too, it usually meant that a very wealthy powerful man took interest in a prostitute and elevated her in some way.  He might have put her up in an apartment or most importantly, introduced her to his circle of powerful men.

What makes a courtesan different from a mistress is a mistress is usually owned or controlled or feels indebted to one particular man.  He is paying her rent.  He is buying all her stuff, paying all her bills and consequently he feels that she owes him some allegiance and fidelity.  He may have several different mistresses or he may have a mistress and a wife but he does not expect her to be with any other man.

A courtesan’s life is completely different.  She had, back in the Renaissance period, they would call them “protectors”.  She will have anywhere from five to a dozen of these men who were “protectors”.  In the 16th and 17th century, the reason a woman would need a protector was because if you weren’t owned by or protected by a man, then a lot of bad things can happen to you.  The Catholic Church could take everything you owned and call you a witch.  [laughs]

Somebody might rape you.  It’s just wasn’t done.  Women had to have men to take care of them.  So a courtesan had the highest level of independence of the woman of the day.  She was allowed to go to college.  She was allowed to learn to read.  She was allowed to write.  Most or all of the poetry books, art, paintings, anything that comes out of the 16th and 17th century from women is by courtesans.  That kind of information is usually suppressed.

These people don’t want to know that prostitutes made this huge contribution to the culture, but they did.  It went beyond that because they were allowed to develop their brains.  They also became worthy intellectual opponents and sparring partners in debate for these very powerful men.  It’s not really much of a stretch to say that they had a hand in shaping world politics because they were really the powerful women behind these powerful men.

They accrued a great deal of wealth of their own.  Some of them would die penniless because they had bad gambling problems.  [laughs]  Some of them died very wealthy.  An example of a modern-day courtesan is Pamela Harriman.  Pamela Harriman had originally married Churchill’s son and then she went on to marry Averell Harriman, I think it was.  I don’t remember his first name but she married Mr. Harriman.  She died like a billionaire. 

Right now today, there’s this collection of Monets and Manets going around the globe from the Pamela Harriman estate.  The story is even more interesting than that because the Democratic Party before Bill Clinton was really on the skid.  It was having a great deal of problem and Pamela Harriman started having these salons for the Democratic Party.  She was pulling in all these people and breathing life into the Democratic Party.  To some extent, she had a great deal to do with Bill Clinton getting elected.

This is why she was appointed as the Ambassador to France after he was elected.  That is an example of something phenomenal that a modern day courtesan can do and did.  Pamela Harriman was actually profiled in the Love Chronicles; I think it was 1998 or 1997 as a modern-day courtesan and so was I.  I was on the same program.  [laughs]

I have to say I know I blushed a little bit because my accomplishments don’t come anywhere near hers.  [laughs]

Beth:  It’s great.

Veronica:  But I do definitely consider that if you are a courtesan, really and truly, I think a lot of people misuse that term right now.  It’s basically just come to me in that you’re really high class, you have an education and you charge a lot for your services as an escort.  My definition of courtesan harps back to the old definition which basically means that your clients must have some kind of political ties and therefore that gives you a window into the behind the scenes, if you will.

Beth:  Isn’t that a crossover with the geisha?

Veronica:  The geisha is similar but not the same.  For one thing, she goes through very, very rigid training.  She has to wear a particular type of clothing.  She has to learn how to serve the tea just so.  I would say that the courtesan is more of a maverick.  If you study like Susan Griffiths’ book “The Book of Courtesans” – you’ll see that these women had just a few defining things in common.  They had clients who were very wealthy and very powerful, and usually connected to government.

But they come from all different walks of life.  Some of them were really quite feisty.  For the most part, that’s how I define a courtesan – is that she has a very opinionated stance.  She is more likely to get into your face and disagree with you.  Since the geisha really goes in the opposite direction and tries to teach more of attitude of deference – submissive, self-effacing – I’m sure there are some people who would really hate those terms so I apologize ahead of time.  I’m not trying to say that they are self-effacing but maybe demure would be a more neutral term.  Just say that the attitude is different whereas a courtesan might actually… If you study the history of them, they got into some verbal battles.  [laughs]

I just don’t think that that is something that a geisha would find becoming.  I think they’re very similar in that they have access to very wealthy, powerful man and that that they are held in high esteem.  They are prostitutes who are held in high esteem.  I do know that some people who have studied the history of geisha really have a problem with calling them prostitutes.  Most courtesans know that their roots are in prostitution.  They’ve been elevated to a status where they have so much power and wealth that they don’t have to suffer like most prostitutes do.

A lot of prostitutes don’t really have civil rights and they’re at risk.  That license to disagree and debate is where I would say courtesans and geishas differ.

Beth:  Thank you.  I’ve often wondered; how does one become the type of courtesan or even a sacred prostitute where you can just generate turn on, no matter what situation you’re in?  What were some of the things that you learn that allow you to feel really good even when the guy doesn’t fit any of the standards that you may have outside of the interaction?

Veronica:  Well, the first thing that I did when I got into prostitution, before I actually started being a courtesan was I’ve relied on the porn stuff, because I had started off doing some amateur porn.  I’ve really had some of my best orgasms on camera.  I would like to surround myself with maybe one of my porn tapes or somebody else’s porn tape or I would have mirrors.  I re-developed a relationship with myself so that actually amping up my own sexuality.

And really, that is the gift of the prostitute or the courtesan – you are bringing your sexuality and so to know how to relate to your own sexuality and to really amp up that sexual energy – regardless of what your partner is doing is not only a skill and a gift and a marketable one at that, but it’s also I think … really all of our responsibility.  If we are looking to the other to bring us out, I think we miss the point.  [laughs]

And we should be bringing something to the table.  So I learned how to bring a lot to the table and some of that was I’m very visually oriented – so having a mirror and being able to see myself cause me to feel more sexual and more hot regardless of what this person was doing or acting like.  I could pull them into that and I could bring them along for the ride.

As I became courtesan, it was much more of an intellectual game.  There’s much more about intellectual stimulation.  You might spend four or five hours in a restaurant having political conversations and debates about law.  “I don’t know.”  “I don’t believe it.”  “I think there is global warming.”  “No, I don’t think….”

[laughs]

Believe it or not, that really can get the libido going.

Beth:  How do you bring in sexuality into an intellectual conversation?

Veronica:  It’s there from the google [xx] if you’re open to looking for it.  But then you know what, I live in this universe where sex is everywhere.  I think it’s really silly that sex is over there.  I think sex is here.  It is with us every breath we take; every step we take is cored at sex.  Sex is living at the core of it.  If you are creating something, a beautiful piece of music, the Trans-America building, a painting, this comes from Kundalini – the lower chakra.  That’s where all your creative juice sits.  If you get passionate about something – frankly, I think people speak in tongues at the Baptist church or having orgasms – but you know, that’s just me.

[laughs]

How do I bring sex to do an intellectual conversation?  I would ask you ‘How in the hell could you keep sex out of it?”

Beth:  Right on!  [laughs]  Thank you, Veronica.  We’re going to another short break to support our sponsors.

Veronica:  OK.

Beth:  This is A Taste of Sex:  Guest Speaker Interviews here from One Taste Urban Retreat Center in San Francisco.  You’re listening to Veronica Monet.  When we return we will journey into the realm of the primate.  Join us as we talk about the Bonobos and their habits.  This has been A Taste of Sex:  Guest Speaker Interviews from One Taste in San Francisco.  You can get text and transcripts of the show by visiting www.personallifemedia.com.  You can also email us any feedback at [email protected].  If you’d like to see other speakers, if you’d like to see other calendar, if you would like to learn How Can You Learn the Practice of Orgasmic Meditation, please visit the One Taste website at www.onetastesf.com.  Thanks for joining us.

[music]

 

This concludes part one.  The interview will be continued in the next of this show. 

Find more great shows like this on personallifemedia.com.

 

[silence]

 

00:34:06

Beth:  Welcome back to A Taste of Sex:  Guest Speaker Interviews here on Personal Life Media.  I’m your host Beth Crittenden.  I’m speaking with Veronica Monet.  Welcome back, Veronica.

Veronica:  Hi, Beth.

Beth:  What would you like the listener to know about the Bonobos?

Veronica:  First of all, when I’m in a room I always ask people “How many people have even of heard of the Bonobos?”  Usually about half of the room will hold their hands up and the other half has never even of the Bonobo.  So here’s what they are:

They are a primate, a large ape very similar to chimpanzee in appearance only.  If you saw a chimpanzee and a Bonobo staying next to each other, you would probably think they were the same creatures.  As a matter of fact, back in the ‘50s that’s exactly what the scientists thought.  But they noticed that one of these chimps, the chimp and the Bonobo were acting differently.  They thought it was just personality discrepancies between these two individuals.  Eventually they figured out that they were actually two different species of animals.

The bonobo actually resembles us physiologically a little more than the chimpanzee.  The legs and the arms are a little longer.  They stand more upright more of the time.  The vulvas in the females have rotated to the front just as they have in female humans.  Bonobos have missionary style of sex.  That’s not the only style of sex they have but they actually do have missionary position sex.

What it does is it creates eye contact.  So instead of having sex in what usually call the doggy style, the rear entry sex were you don’t actually connect with your partner visually and your heart chakras don’t line up.  With missionary position sex, you are aligning your heart chakras and your eyes.  This creates a different dynamics with the sex.

Bonobos look at their partner’s eyes for feedback as to whether or not their partner’s is actually enjoying the sex act.  If they don’t get the kind of eye contact that they’re looking for, they will stop having sex.  So [xx[ just really not what we usually with animal sex.  Usually we think once the sex act has begun, it pretty much has a life of its own and whether or not the partner is having sexual pleasure is not usually a priority.

Bonobos don’t have sex just to procreate.  As a matter of fact, they have sex quite a few times during the day and it’s all about pleasure.  A female bonobo’s clitorises are way, way larger than human clitorises which makes me jealous. 

[laughter]

Why did we get cheated?  [laughs]  The females are sexually bonded to each other so they form political alliances with each other that are drawn along sexual lines.  They also have this face-to-face sexual contact when they rub their clitorises together.  Usually the one that’s lying on its back will wrap its legs around the midsection of the other one.  And again, very close facial contact.  They’re squealing.  They’re screaming.  They’re smiling.  [laughs]  It’s a really good time.

Beth:  Sounds familiar.

[laughter]

Veronica:  Yeah.  So because of the fact that they are sexually bonded to each other, they form these political alliances and even though the males are bigger and stronger than them, they wield a great deal of power.  The way the power structure in the Bonobo society is broken down is that the males stay within a community and they stay very attached to their mothers.  They compete with each other for tribal position but a lot of times if the competition seems to be a draw and nobody can decide who is winning, the mothers will duke it out…  [laughs] on behalf of their sons and settle the argument.

What’s great about…Yes, there’s competition.  Yes, there are disagreements.  Yes, there is fighting.  Occasionally the fighting gets out of hand and somebody might leg bite the other one and inflict a severe wound.  But it never goes to the point of murder.  If you study the chimpanzees, they are a patriarchal society where the males are in charge and violence just runs rampant.  You will get two chimpanzees which are plotting the murder of the guy who’s in charge.  Maybe two or three and they will literally form political alliances and decide beforehand which one of the three is going to be king.  The agreement is that “if you help me kill the old guy and allow me to become the powerful one, the one that’s in charge, I’ll let you have all the sex you want.”

What does that tell you?  If the guys are deciding who’s going to have sex with the females, then we’re having non-consensual sex which means that rape is institutionalized in chimpanzee culture.  The murder can be brutal.  They can go from being best friends with somebody to forming these political alliances where they literally rip each to shreds and drink each other’s blood.  Of course, this immediately reminds me of human culture for the last 6,000 years – it was just been brutal, brutal, brutal and I keep hearing about you know… We just don’t know how we’re going to find the solution to war.  We don’t know how to solve the rape thing.  We don’t know how to get rid of murder.  It’s been with us forever; it must be in our genetics.  It’s survival of the fittest; and that’s just the way it is and there’s no way out.

And then I think “What about the Bonobos?”  What about the Bonobos?  The scientists and the politicians and society at large don’t really want to hear about the Bonobos because first and foremost, you can’t really document their lives without documenting sex.  Because they’re having sex all the time!  How are we going to do a documentary about these creatures because they won’t stop having sex long enough for us to film them?

[laughter]

The other thing is that when the scientists - one of the leading primatologists who studies Bonobos is Frans de Waal.  Frans de Waal takes this information to the scientists and they’re like “What’s wrong with those male monkeys?”  They’re not really monkeys but anyway that was a quote from somebody.  What’s wrong with them that they let these women dominate them?

The idea that women would have power and the idea that society could be founded around sexual bonding is so taboo for the world right now that we would literally omit, to my knowledge, the one cultural example of true peace on this planet.  That’s why I find them fascinating.  I find them fascinating because I think it’s amazing that we’re not hearing about them.  You would think this would be big news.  “Hey, somebody found a solution!  No rape!  No murder!  No war!”  “How did they do it?”    “Get lots of sex.”

[laughter]

Yeah!  Well, that is how they do it.  I mean, it’s really two-fold.  It’s respect for the feminine because we’re not talking about a matriarchy here.  We are not talking about females who dominate males.  What we’re talking about is a balance.  It’s an egalitarian structure which accords respect to both genders and allows everybody an equal voice in decision-making.

Beth:  So when you’re teaching men, what message do you have for them that maybe along the lines of that?  What do you specifically to man about how to treat women and how to approach sex?

Veronica:  I don’t.  I don’t teach men how to treat women.  I teach men how to treat themselves because really that’s where it all begins.  If you learn how to love yourself, it comes automatic that you’re going to love somebody else.  We make a lot of times because we think “Well, I have this selfish agenda and that’s in my self interest.  If I go get this thing that I selfishly want, then I’ll be happy.”  No, that’s not where happiness lies.  If you learn what real happiness is about, if you don’t learn how to be exquisitely selfish. [laughs]

Exquisitely selfish – you have to be intelligent enough to see the far-reaching ramifications of your actions.  So if you are not concerned about other people’s welfare and other people’s well-being, ultimately you’ve created your own misery.  If you really want to be a happy person, you will invest in other people’s happiness.  So I teach that.  I teach how you can become the happiest person.

If you want to attract somebody, the you want to become the person that you want to attract.  And really, most of the men who call me… and I work with people usually once a week; we have appointments over the phone.  That’s what I do now.  I actually work with people over the telephone and most of my clients are men.  I also have female clients but for the males, since you asked about them – I’m also helping them get in touch with their feelings.  That’s a huge thing.  It’s a big taboo on our culture – to have feelings if you’re a male.  To give that permission that it’s OK to cry, it’s OK to be vulnerable, it’s OK to be afraid, it’s OK to be confused.  You don’t know have to know everything.

To just be human – that’s what I did when I was working as an escort and that’s what I do now as a sex educator.

Beth:   What permission do you think women need to receive about their sex?

Veronica:  I think women actually need permission to express desire – shameless desire.  [laughs]  To get beyond the whole… I think we have this in ourselves.  I think on a cellular level, we all know that for 300 years, our grandmothers were persecuted.  They were burned at the stake; they died of being called witches and whores.  It has been literally bred out of us to have sexual liaisons and to be able to say “I have this desire and I like this.  This is what I want and this is what I’m about.”  Usually, I even notice this like in room temperature.  A man knows when he’s hot or cold. [laughs]

You bump into a man, he’ll say “Watch where you’re going.”  You bump into a woman, she says “I’m sorry.”  [laughs]  Are you cold?  No, I’m fine.  Would you like a blanket?  Oh, that’s OK.  All is waste if we just abandon ourselves over and over again instead of showing up for what we really want -because we don’t even know.  I’m still working on that myself.  I think it will be probably a life long journey trying to learn to completely come to embody myself and know how I feel and what it is that I want.

Beth:  What’s your favorite way to be exquisitely selfish?

Veronica:  [laughs] Well…Wow!  You know what, my favorite way to be exquisitely selfish is to express… As a woman, I feel like I really have to get into being able to say “This is where my pleasure resides.  This is how my body works.  This is how it doesn’t work.”  OK.  My dog told me something.  I have this dog; she’s a German shepherd.  She’s three years old and I didn’t get her fixed right away.  I actually got to see her go through a few cycles.  She’s a pure bred so I was thinking about breeding her.

I have a male who is fixed but he doesn’t know it.  So every time she would go into cycle, he would try to put the moves on her and she absolutely adored the oral sex.  I didn’t even know dogs had oral sex.

Beth:  That’s interesting.

Veronica:  I didn’t know they kiss.  I didn’t know a lot of stuff.  They do BDSM.  They do everything.

[laughter]

Beth:  You come home and they’ve got the whips on the kitchen floor.  What can you do?

Veronica:  No, but he’s got his jaws wrapped around her throat.  He could just snap it in two.

Beth:  Oh, wow!

Veronica:  That’s their idea of foreplay.  [laugh]  I just slap him in the face and he’ll run away and she’ll chase him down and stick her ass in his face. 

[laughter]

 She’s completely shameless about “OK, yeah!  Great! Let’s do it.  No stop.”  That for me was just… You know, in my brain always “You don’t want to be prick tease.”  You don’t want to get the man all worked up and then tell him “OK.  That’s it.”  And I watch her do this over and over again.  It’s like “Yeah.  OK.  That was fun and I want you out now.”

[laughter]

Get on… [laughs] or go back and do that other thing you were doing but don’t do that.  I learned from her that it was ok to say “No, that’s not working for me right now.  I need to stop doing that.”   I actually just came off of nine months of being abstinent and start having a sex life again.  One of the things that new for me was to think of myself more as a flower unfolding and blossoming so that I could really get in touch with my authentic sexual desire and realize that I need my own pace.  If I need to stop something, like stop having intercourse before you even get started or just do it for a few minutes and then stop and not do it until tomorrow, if that was okay. 

I didn’t learn that from my mom.  I didn’t learn it from a book.  I didn’t learn it from 60 hours of sex education.  I didn’t learn it from 14 years of being a prostitute.  I learned it from watching my dog.

[laughter]

Heads up everywhere!  Throw the key right now.

Beth:  We’re going to actually wrap up now.  This has been…

Veronica:  That was a really good place to start verbalizing the things you know.  Whoa!  By the way let’s mention the new book “Flossophy”.  It is spelled f-l-o-s-s-o-p-h-y dot net.  Flossophy.net.  If you go to veronicamonet.com and go to the Sex Tour page, there’s a little picture of me sitting in a fighter airplane.  Click on that and you’ll actually just find a link to the website for the book. 

Flossphy.net is the website for the new book which isn’t published.  This one is going to be about Bonobos and it’s going to be about doggy sex.  [laughs]  Basically, I’ll put it in the words of a friend of mine - Starchild put me on the Libertarian Convention panel, the day before yesterday and he wrote that I’m writing about is “what we humans can learn culturally from animals and the culture of other animals.”  I specifically, I am, of course,  focusing on what we can learn from animals sexually because I think they are living in this beautiful, shameless, taboo-free environment that  we could be benefit from if we just stop being so afraid.

Beth:  Thank you, Veronica Monet.  This has been A Taste of Sex:  Guest Speaker Interviews from One Taste in San Francisco. 

You can get text and transcripts of the show by visiting www.personallifemedia.com.  You can also email us any feedback at [email protected].  If you’d like to see other speakers, if you’d like to see our calendar, if you would like to learn “How Can You Learn the Practice of Orgasmic Meditation, please visit the One Taste website at www.onetastesf.com

Thanks for joining us and I encourage everyone to practice at least one thing you heard on the show.  Be really good to yourself; be good to others and the orgasm will spread.

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