Mistress Velvet: Intersection of BDSM, Sex Ed & African American Studies
Podcast Transcript Season 2 Episode 23
Interviewer: Liz Goldwyn
Illustration BY Black Women Animate
Our guest this week is Mistress Velvet, Chicago’s premiere African domme Goddess. A practitioner of BDSM, Mistress Velvet often makes her straight, white male clients read and write essays about black feminist theory. Liz talks with Mistress Velvet about the “whorearchy”, her post work self care routine, why sex workers are being excluded from traditional sex ed and how her academic studies have overlapped with her professional life.
The following is a transcript of the interview from the episode:
Liz:
Hi, thank you for being here with me today, Mistress Velvet.
Mistress Velvet:
Thanks for having me.
Liz:
Just before we started recording we were talking a little bit about education and I know that you were pursuing a PHD in African American studies and now you're primarily focusing on your field work.
Mistress Velvet:
Yes.
Liz:
How those have coalesced for you in the last few years of your academic work?
Mistress Velvet:
Yeah. I think its really interesting. There's a lot of different points in my career as a sex worker that overlaps with whatever it is that was going on in my academic career. I started sex work in college and then really got into being a Dominatrix with the start of my graduate program. And then now I'm not doing my PHD because I think I got very burned out and wasn't taking care of myself, but I find, I work at a Nonprofit and I do a lot of training in education, particularly around sex work and gender based violence. I will find that a lot of people that come to my trainings know about Mistress Velvet and also are seeing me in my personal life. It's really interesting to see sex work intersecting with my vanilla career and vanilla academic work at various points in my life. It's kind of weird.
Liz:
I mean, I think that there should more widespread acceptance of sex work and studying within academic institutions because it's very hard to change the conversation and the paradigm and the acceptance around this economic choice when you don't have it being discussed openly in those kind of places.
Mistress Velvet:
Yeah. I think the unfortunate part, when I think about who is creating knowledge, it is coming from the most oppressed, it's coming from folks in the community and on the streets, but at the same time in our society academia legitimizes a lot of knowledge production, so we need to see academia talk about sex work more and legitimize it as a form of work for other people to be able to accept it, but I hope it also doesn't start to erase people that are doing sex work that are not privileged. I know that a lot of the sex workers that I know or that are doing really good education, work in Chicago also have advanced degrees, maybe are Social workers or have their Master's like myself. We're always seeing these kinds of people talk about sex work and not necessarily poor, especially Black and Brown Trans folks that don't have advanced degrees also be able to give the platform ... also, be given the platform to talk about sex work. I feel like there’s good and bad about it.
Liz:
Yeah. It's really interesting too to me that just within the broader conversation around sex education we are denying so many people within the sex work field and that does include people who are working in the adult industry in front of the camera, strippers, to be part of this conversation when I know so many people in that field that really are well-versed in the topics that have real, real long hours, years in the communities and they're erased from adding their perspective to this conversation so it becomes really whitewashed when you're talking to kids, to schools. Of course you have to do things appropriately, but I have a problem with that too.
Mistress Velvet:
Yeah, and I get so frustrated with conversations around legalization of sex work because a lot of people ... I want there to be decriminalization of sex work, but so many people are so ignorant and then there's just this mass assumption that all forms of sex work is illegal. Then I'm like, "Actually a lot of sex work is very legal, and you still just hate it. Can we just talk about your hatred for sex workers and whores?" It's not because of legality or not.
Liz:
Yeah, and even within the world of sex work I find that there can often be, I'll call it a a Whore-archy, am I saying that right?
Mistress Velvet:
Yes. I love that word.
Liz:
Yeah. There's this idea that, oh if you consider yourselves, "Well I'm just stripping to make money while I do this," then you're somehow on a different plane than somebody who's-
Mistress Velvet:
Yeah.
Liz:
Experiencing it in a different way and I find I'm troubled by that too. Why there can't be more solidarity within that community.
Mistress Velvet:
Yeah. I think we have the ability to internalize misogyny and whore-phobia and so I see that sometimes, and I'm just like honestly, with any job under Capitalism I have my motivations for doing it and mostly because I need to take care of myself in whatever way that is, and while our reasons for doing any kind of work whether it's sex work or not, is important and I hate that kind of ... There's a troop. I feel like I experience it more from civilians but there is that troop of, "Well someone is just stripping because they're just trying to pay their student loans." I have fallen to that trap of talking about my sex work as just, "Well I'm just doing it for this," and I now try to move away from that and talk about it more holistically and complex like, "I'm doing it because I need to pay my student loans, and I'm also doing it because I enjoy it very much."
Liz:
It's dovetailing a lot in terms of what you've been pursuing in as far as your interest in academia too. It's really, it's aligned with that pursuit of studying African American history, literature, and feminist literature I know as well.
Mistress Velvet:
Yes. Yes, yes, yeah. I, again, I think I said this earlier but it was not on purpose, I wish. I would think of myself as this well thought out and put together and intentional, but it's all just happened this way. I did not expect that my sex work and my academic career were gonna be so closely aligned but, I guess that's why I get to the roots of it and think about the fact that I enjoy it so much because what I wanted to write ability for my Master's thesis happened to be about sexuality and being a Black woman and then that tied into my work as a sex worker, so I inadvertently wrote about myself for my thesis and it was like, "I'm not necessarily Narcissistic, I just really like this."
Liz:
Well I also think it helps personalize, right, when we can understand history or learning and put some sort of personal narrative on it, whether it's our own or first person stories from the past, I think it helps contextualize it for us or for new generations. It doesn't become this dead thing that has no relation or meaning to our lives.
Mistress Velvet:
Absolutely. I think about, I've read so much Audre Lorde, and so much of her writing is theory and also so much of it is just based on her experience and the importance of lived experience as a source of theory and a source of knowledge and understanding has become really important to me as I figure out how I want to talk about myself. Yeah.
Liz:
Can we break down for listeners who aren't familiar with this idea that there are very many different shades of sex work and also the concept that many people are choosing to work within this field, choosing to work within this field. We are not saying that we support sex trafficking that we support rape, that we support un-consensual people being sold into ... from other countries being sold into sex slavery at a young age. I think there's a really big disconnect with the public.
Mistress Velvet:
Yes. Yeah.
Liz:
That plays into, which I'm hoping you can speak to, FOSTA and SESTA.
Mistress Velvet:
Yeah. The conflation between sex work and sex trafficking is such a difficult thing to work through. I was on a panel at The University of Tennessee in Knoxville last week, and it was focused on sex work and then someone asked a question about how do we work with people that are doing sex work but they're doing forced sex work. I don't even use language like that, I don't even say, "Forced sex work," I define sex work was something 18 and over, consensual, etc, etc, and I define sex trafficking as something separate than that. Similar to when I was doing sex education many years ago we would think about rape as something very different from sex because they're just not the same. There might be the same mirroring of physical actions, but they're not the same thing that's happening.
I feel that it's very important to have the distinguishment between sex trafficking and sex work. Especially so that people and understand that sex workers can be victims of sex trafficking, and then of course that those of us that are engaging in sex work are not necessarily trafficked. I was not trafficked into sex work. I guess because people don't make that distinguishment that's why we have laws like SESTA and FOSTA that is now negatively impacting both groups, sex workers as well as victims of sex trafficking.
I remember there was a person that was collaborating with Backpage and she ... I don't like her. She was the executive director of an organization that was very, "Abolition of sex work," but she did make a comment about they were using Backpage to find people that were trafficked and for folks that were doing this kind of work around sex trafficking were not actually even really consulted on, "How do we address sex trafficking?" So a lot of avenues for addressing it has been shut down because they're just shutting down everything related to sex work, sex trafficking with no nuance, no understanding of the delicacies of what it takes to work and find victims of sex trafficking.
Then it's been such an impact on my work. We had, in Chicago a really important forum that we would use to screen clients and talk to other sex workers about clients and actually have clients also review us, was closed down so I think there's been a fear. Our clients also have a risk of maybe the person that they're seeing, the provider that they're seeing is law enforcement or not safe. These avenues that we had to communicate and create safety have been taken from us, now we have more risks of being forced into sex trafficking as well, so it's just all around very frustrating.
Liz:
Can you, for listeners who aren't familiar with FOSTA and SESTA break those down for us and how that's impacted you. I know you just spoke about Backpage, but I think some listeners may not be familiar.
Mistress Velvet:
Yeah, so FOSTA was Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, and then FOSTA was Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act. They came into law ... It's 2019, so it was early last year and then it's supposed to clarify the sex trafficking laws in our country but what it ended up doing was, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that it made websites liable for if any sort of sex trafficking was found on their website. For example, Craigslist, sex workers we could really post on Craigslist. They really started to flag that, maybe five or ten years ago. But nevertheless they had the personal section where if you're horny on a Saturday night you can go to the personal section and find a hookup or whatever it is that you need, they've now closed down that personal section on Craigslist because if for some reason law makers or whoever or the police are able to find someone that was being trafficked through Craigslist it would be their fault.
All of these websites made a sweep of closing down all of the parts of their websites that could potentially have this risk. I know people were talking about it was impacting Grinder, and, "Was Tinder gonna be impacted?" Sometimes I think that civilians don't often care about things that sex workers go through, but when it started to impact things like dating websites then I realized that civilians were listening like, "Oh, why are they closing down the personal section on Craigslist? Oh yeah, it's because sex worker rights are directly and indirectly being attacked."
Liz:
Well the problem is they did not have any people from the community advising on these laws and-
Mistress Velvet:
Absolutely.
Liz:
So it was like a wide sweep of even websites and platforms like ours, which is called The Sex Ed, and it's for sex health and consciousness, fall into that same zone. There's so many people that are out there trying to have a conversation around these topics and instead of seeing nuance or maybe bringing in allies from the sex worker community who are concerned about sex trafficking as well, it just became this blanket, "It has to do with sex, let's stop it. Let's shut it down."
Mistress Velvet:
Right. Right, right. I wouldn't expect them at all to actually listen to sex workers and ask us to be part of this process, but I do think sex work abolition organizations are quite mainstream and have a lot of support, so I do think it's a surprise that they didn't even consult those people.
Liz:
I mean, I just think it's the world's oldest profession, right. It's the same with me with this argument like, "Let's stop pornography." You can't stop pornography. It just is, it's always existed in ever culture and time period and language, whether it was erotic drawings in the 15th century or carvings or early photography, people are fascinated with human sexuality and people have a need for ... We're so for away from intimacy at this point in our cultural history that people have a need for human touch.
Mistress Velvet:
Yeah.
Liz:
How do we create more ways to provide health care to provide safety for people who are working within this industry?
Mistress Velvet:
I think honestly it's even gonna be very basic shifting cultural ideas around sex and society and our bodies and intimacy because I think that the criminalization of sex work stems from a general whore-phobia and it's 2019, but still we want sex to be something that's only for reproduction and to pass on your patri-lineal lineage and etc, etc. How do we move people from that to be like, "Sex can represent so many different things. It can be so many things to people," and how do we then come to it with a harm reduction approach? Come to it with an approach of acceptance and love, and then we can create these services like better sex education and better health care and safer sex work and reduction of sex trafficking.
Liz:
What do you define as survival sex?
Mistress Velvet:
I define survival sex as this gray area between trafficking and sex work. I wouldn't label it either way. Of course how you define it would be independently on the person, but I define it as engaging in sex work or in some form of the sex trade for a basic necessity. I know that the highest of demographic at risk of survival sex is LGBTQ youth. A lot of times they would be, maybe they came out to their family and they've been kicked out of their house and are homeless and are trying to survive and end up in a relationship which there could be dynamics of power and control in that relationship and they're engaging in some sort of sexual activity and relationship with a person and now getting housing, access to food, may be maintaining and assisting in a substance abuse issue or having child care.
I think it's a hard thing to ... When I think about it, I just think about the fact that it exists. It's hard for me to moralize, well I don't want to moralize it, but moralize it or ... I just know that it exists, and I don't know where it fits but I fit it somewhere between trafficking and sex work because people are choosing to do it but there's levels of power and oppression that could be at play so it makes me think about, human choice. Is it really a choice? What kind of choices are we in when we are in poverty?
Liz:
Is it a choice when you don't have a choice?
Mistress Velvet:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Liz:
There's a lot of privilege associated as well. With hiring sex workers especially, I imagine the prices that you might charge for the experience that you give. It costs a lot of money for people to be able to indulge in that kind of fantasy.
Mistress Velvet:
Right, and especially, I'm not a street-based worker, so I have the privilege of being able to have a website and post ads and do background checks on pay for services for safety, and then also maybe get my own hotel or rent from the dungeon etc, etc. All of that comes into play with my pricing and then because of that they also know that I'm in a certain price bracket of sex work versus if you're in the street, you don't have a website, you don't have a lot of access to safety, and you're engaging in sex work in the car, then it's a lot cheaper and it also could be a lot more unsafe.
Liz:
How do you set those prices?
Mistress Velvet:
I set the prices quite greedily. I do take into consideration one, looking at, especially ... As a Dominatrix I look at, what are the prices of other Dominatrices, and I especially focus on the prices of Black women, Dommes and sex workers in general because we are often a little bit less. When I first moved to Chicago I set my rates much lower, which was advice that another sex worker gave me because I needed to establish myself in Chicago and over time I would increase it by another $25 or whatever. Now that I've established myself in Chicago, I have a reputation online, I've been able to increase my prices, and then, my dungeon they increased the prices because she's gotten a lot of new furniture and has done a lot of renovations and I actually feel very lucky to be able to pay her more money because she's really wonderful. She talked us through if we want to increase our prices because we have to pay more for the dungeon, how to talk through your clients with that. There's a lot of different factors that might lead to increasing or changing prices.
Liz:
Do you want to have your own dungeon or is it easier to have less overhead and to rent?
Mistress Velvet:
Much easier to have less overhead and rent. I love supporting Lady Sophia who runs Chicago Dungeon Rentals. It feels like a co-op in a nice community, but I think it must also be a lot of responsibility that I do not want to do.
Liz:
Right.
Mistress Velvet:
She's a business woman in a way that I am not looking to be right now. It's a bit much more work than I want to do, so I applaud her for that honestly.
Liz:
The bulk of your clients from what I understand are primarily cis white men. Has that changed at all or is that still?
Mistress Velvet:
They're still the bulk of my clients for sure, it's the straight White men. But I do also get a lot of different clients. I get some queer clients and I get some folks of color and I get couples. Couples are really fun.
Liz:
How did it start out when you first started out? Was that intentional that it was straight White men or was that just who was coming to you?
Mistress Velvet:
That was just who was coming to me. I think because a combination of who had the money to be engaging in sex work and I was doing sex work in North Carolina, so there's a lot of White people in North Carolina, and then also the fetishization of my Black-ness and my African-ness was really coming from White clients. They were coming to me being like, "Wow I haven't ever been with a Black woman. Can I be with you?" It'd still be that way.
Liz:
Yeah, and I know that you are having clients also engage in some of your academic studies and reading literature as well.
Mistress Velvet:
Yes, yes. Part of my thesis, I actually even interviewed one of my clients. He's not my client anymore but, one of my clients at the time and I did a little bit of writing about him and there's someone in Texas that's actually a professor that I talk with every week, give him reading assignments and we go write something on it or we'll just have a phone discussion around it, and I do this in varying capacities with each person.
Liz:
It's also interesting just in general this idea of being submissive as a man, right, to explore sides of masculinity that society doesn't often allow them to.
Mistress Velvet:
Yes.
Liz:
Because we don't have healthy spaces for men to come to terms with vulnerability, particularly sexually.
Mistress Velvet:
Yeah. I think that's something when I move out of just humiliating them because that's what I'm hired to do, but when I actually think about it, that makes me think about the way that patriarchy impacts our humanity. Depending on our gender in different ways, so what does that look like for my clients? I've had lots of people tell me, for example, maybe they want to engage in a certain kind of sexual act and their wife won't do it because it makes them seem like less of a man. Or the fact that they want to be submissive or tied up or wear lace underwear, they can't talk to people about that because of shame and because what does it say about their masculinity and what does it say about their practicing of their gender norms. It's actually really unfortunate and for those of my clients that I end up having a very deep and rich relationship with, we end up talking about that in a very deep way.
Liz:
What does your self-care practice look like when you finish a session? How do you unpack emotionally and create boundaries with clients?
Mistress Velvet:
Yeah. Yeah so, I have to create a lot of boundaries at the end of the session because once they're done I need to go through the process of cleaning the dungeon and then changing and living the dungeon. I do a lot of work before a session to get myself into the role of Mistress Velvet, which ties into my literal preparation, my makeup and doing my hair but I'll also listen to certain music and get myself into that role. I have to do things like that to leave her in the dungeon or to leave that role behind for a little bit. I think something that I'm still working on is, even something as I never really want them to see me outside of being Mistress Velvet, but sometimes that happens. Let's say they went to take a shower and I'm wiping up the dungeon. When I start cleaning the bed for example, I really leave that head space because I'm like, "Okay, now I have these things I need to do," and so I've had clients come talk to me and they were just chit chatting like normal people, which I think they really, really love, but it makes it very confusing for me.
I usually, maybe create some routines. I'll go have dinner by myself, which feels very vulnerable because when you go in public by yourself and you have dinner, people feel sorry for you like, "Oh, is someone coming to see you? Oh no, no one is. That's so sad." I'm like, "No, I'm having dinner with myself." Usually during that time I will reflect on the session. I ask my subs, especially the newer ones to reflect and write on how the session went and to write honestly what was good and what was not good so that I can change and adapt and be better for them. Sometimes by the end of the day, if they have sent that to me I will sit in bed with a glass of wine and read it take notes on it and also reflect so, there's a lot of reflection that goes on.
Liz:
Because it's a lot of someone else's energy for you to be taking on and it is a form of therapy that you're providing.
Mistress Velvet:
Absolutely.
Liz:
Therapy and almost, I don't want to say a Social work, but it's service industry, I guess the way nurses could be considered. I often find too when I talk to nurses that they're not doing enough self-care work too with the amount of real ... They actually deal with patients much more often than the physicians and surgeons do.
Mistress Velvet:
Yeah. Honestly, my vanilla Nonprofit job is in Social work, so I do a lot of trainings on vicarious trauma, self-preservation, compassion fatigue, and talking about we can't advocate for our clients in our Nonprofit work if were not taking care of ourselves and how the work that we do can be triggering us in many ways. I have to actually apply a lot of those frameworks from my vanilla work into sex work and I see every day there's so much comparison between my Nonprofit Social work job and being a sex worker. I think of sex work as a form of care taking. I'm definitely people's therapist, so I have to also take care of myself if I want to be there for them in the way that I want.
Liz:
Do you have many female clients?
Mistress Velvet:
Not a ton. I wish I had more. Not a ton, but the few that I do, I have a handful of them and it's really beautiful.
Liz:
Yeah, it can be ... I don't know, I'd love if you could illuminate me on primarily what kind of accessories you use or if you work with ropes at all in your sessions.
Mistress Velvet:
I do, yeah. I'm not a very good rope tier, I just know basic knots, so that I don't hurt people, but I don't know how to do all the little fancy knots. But I do a lot of knots. I use a lot of rope, also I love collars and things that make someone look like a pet. I like that visual and aesthetic. Then I don't do this a lot of times, but we have a lot of saran wrap in the dungeon for people that like to be in bondage with that plastic wrap. I've been using that a little bit now, and I think that's really beautiful. I shot a porn last year with a burlesque dancer in Chicago and I wrapped her up in saran wrap first and it was really lovely 'cause you still get to see her body. I really enjoy my sessions with women because they're not always ... Women and Femmes, because they're not always coming in with the same kind of baggage that the straight clients are coming in with, they're just like, "I want to be dominated." But it doesn't have this necessarily, bad, for lack of a better term.
My male clients that come to see me and want to be submissive have some shame around it. There's nothing wrong with being submissive. I know a lot of times women and Femmes have already worked through that or don't have that same association, so they're just like, "I really want to be tied up. I really wanted to experience this," and it actually allows me to not have to get in such a strict Mistress Velvet commanding role, but more of a peer to peer. I'm providing the space that you're looking for but I don't have to necessarily put on this fake role for it.
Liz:
Right, and it can be very healing, right, using-
Mistress Velvet:
Yeah.
Liz:
Bondage especially if a woman has dealt with any sort of sexual trauma in their life.
Mistress Velvet:
Yeah.
Liz:
It can be a great feeling of safety and trust.
Mistress Velvet:
Yeah. There's a lot more mutual giving and taking when I'm doing it with other women and Femmes. It might be because I'm attracted to women and Femmes more than I am to masculine presenting people, and definitely my clients. But also I have used my domination to process and am using it to process a lot of my trauma with domestic violence and sexual violence, so it's so healing.
Liz:
Have you ever put yourself with someone that you trust in the position of being submissive and having someone dominate you to put yourself on the other side of the lens so to speak?
Mistress Velvet:
I have a few times. I tried once to do it in the dungeon. But I rented the dungeon space with a person that I was intimate with and wanted to engage in it there and realized I could not do it in the dungeon because the dungeon is a very specific place for me. I do sometimes engage ... I think I'm much more of a power bottom, or I'm topping from the bottom when I'm outside of Mistress Velvet work and just playing with intimate partners but, I'm quite submissive but I think it takes me a long time to trust and it takes me a long time to give up that kind of power and I think it's because of trauma that I have.
Liz:
Interesting. Who's in your community of other Black Dommes, are there mentors in that space that you feel like have paved the way?
Mistress Velvet:
I feel quite isolated in the community in terms of other Black Dommes. A lot of us ... I don't have any particular mentors besides Madame Caramel in England. I am obsessed with her and she might be retired now, but she really has paved the way for seeing Blackness in domination and also for seeing fat bodies in domination because I think that's something that we don't very often, so I've had an intimate relationship with her noise and just, I love you so much. You're so perfect. But in terms of in Chicago, last year for my 30th birthday I started a fundraiser to support Black women and Femmes that were either budding Dominatrices or already a Dominatrix, and that saved a lot of relationship building for me. I have inadvertently taken on the role of a mentor, but I think it's because people come to me because I'm visible and they're like, "I have no one else to talk to. You are the first person that I've seen doing this work." And I'm like, "Yeah, I had no one else to talk to either." Most of that community is online for me, unfortunately and fortunately.
Liz:
I mean, that's one of the blessings, right, of social media and the internet is that it connects you with people that mirror your experience when for so long you're isolated out there. I find it particularly, if your job involves sex in any way, it could be very hard for people who's jobs doesn't involve sex to understand you, to dialogue with you. There's a short hand that I know that I have with other people that are in this space, whatever it is that they do where you just don't feel like you're being judged.
Mistress Velvet:
Yes. Yes, absolutely.
Liz:
What are-
Mistress Velvet:
Yeah, it's very hard. It's very isolating.
Liz:
What about in your civilian life when you take off Mistress Velvet hat?
Mistress Velvet:
What people do I find in community?
Liz:
Well, I do ... You said you have a day job in Social work space. Do they know Mistress Velvet are they accepting of your career?
Mistress Velvet:
Right.
Liz:
Or is it very distinct?
Mistress Velvet:
It's weird. I've been fired from two jobs when they found out about Mistress Velvet. When I applied for this job I told them in the interview, "I'm leaving this job. The last job I just had, they asked me to leave because they found out about Mistress Velvet," but luckily with the job I had I was doing consulting with them for a year before I started working full-time, and they specifically, I was doing consulting specifically on training for sex work and violence. They already knew, at least some of them or the most important people already knew that I was a sex worker and in that job interview were like, "We would not fire you for being a sex worker." The people that I'm closest to at my job know that I'm a Dominatrix, I've showed them videos, and I think it helps them understand particularly why my interest and focus is on sex work in my job. But I don't think that everyone knows that I'm a sex worker and those that I tell I ask of course, not to disclose. As I mentioned earlier, I think I'm getting a lot more recognition so when I do my Social work civilian work people have recognized me and come up to saw, "I saw X, Y, and Z article on you."
Liz:
How does that feel? Does that make you proud?
Mistress Velvet:
The first time it happened I was completely shocked and I was like, "I am not doing a good enough job to hide my identity and then realized, I didn't necessarily want that and also I knew in the back of my mind with the interviews I was doing that I was going to be taking this risk. It has, I think, unfortunately but also a fortunate way, when they see me doing trainings on sex work through Social work avenue, it legitimizes the articles that they've seen about somewhere there's a Black woman that's making people read Audrey Lorde. In that sense I do feel proud of it but also most importantly I think they take those articles to heart more. If they're just looking at the Huffington Post article, there may be sensationalizing what I'm talking about, but then when they see it in the setting of the work that they do, then they're like, "Oh, this is actually really important."
Liz:
Because you're actually doing it. You're actually in the community doing this work, doing the Social work.
Mistress Velvet:
Yes.
Liz:
In addition doing sex work and providing services safely and legally, I might add. Who are the people that you look up to in terms of sex education that you're involved in dialogue with or that have been mentors to you? Is there anyone in particular?
Mistress Velvet:
When I was doing Sex Ed, I don't know if you saw this one Twitter I posted the other day about how the first job I got fired from was a Sex Ed job and they found out that I was a sex worker and I'm like, "This doesn't make any sense." But I remember then being very into Scarleteen.
Liz:
I love Scarleteen.
Mistress Velvet:
Yes. Yes, me too and I was like, "Why can't we just replicate all of these for our trainings?"
Liz:
For people who don't know, Scarleteen is a website and it's a Nonprofit and it's spelled like Scarlet and then with teen at the end and they're fantastic and provide a lot of resources and education for young people around sex education.
Mistress Velvet:
Yes. Yeah, it's really wonderful. Doing Sex Ed was really hard because you're pushing back against abstinence only education. The programs that are progressive are just that they're not doing abstinence only for education but it's very basic and it's not inclusive and comprehensive. It was such a battle to provide comprehensive sex education that was inclusive of LGBTQ that was not shaming of different types of sexual acts. It's like, "You want to engage in anal sex, well how do you do that safely?" Sex Ed was never enough for me in the places that I was doing it and so I always really loved Scarleteen. Over the recent years I've come to really love Teen Vogue. They, I think last year or something had an article that was about anal sex and I remember a bunch of boring people were really upset about it, but I was just like, "This gives me so much life."
Liz:
Yeah, because it becomes mainstream that we're having the conversations, right?
Mistress Velvet:
Yes.
Liz:
Did you have Sex Ed in school? I mean, when you grew up did you have Sex Ed?
Mistress Velvet:
Oh yeah, but it was ... I don't even remember. It was awkward and boring and not good enough at all. I started having sex in late high school, early college and was using two condoms because I had no sexual health literacy. I got pregnant in college but luckily I got an abortion and then was like, "Okay, I need understand how to make a baby." 'Cause I grew up in places that were quite Conservative so it was just not comprehensive enough
Liz:
Well clearly. If you're using two condoms and after having Sex Ed asking how to make a baby then that's part of the problem. We know the statistics, we know that the more information people are armed with we know that teen pregnancy rates go down. We know that violence rates go down, we know that the STD rates go down.
Mistress Velvet:
People think if you give the young people this information they will start having sex more, and that's such a backwards way to think of it.
Liz:
People are having less sex actually. Young people are having less sex 'cause they're so freaked out. Because you go online and of course, because no one's talking to you about this stuff so you're gonna go online and Google things and there's just so much information you don't know how to vett it. The first search history is usually gonna be porn, so you're getting all these movies, these fantasy experiences of sex and no one really talking to you about intimacy, about communication, about psychology.
Mistress Velvet:
Exactly. Just a note on the internet. I have diagnosed myself with cancer and random things so many times because I just Google, "Oh my finger hurts and I go on WebMD and I go through this dark hole of-
Liz:
I do that too.
Mistress Velvet:
Psychology. I can't even imagine being a young person and trying to look up information about sex and all the things that's gonna come up.
Liz:
I know. I mean, I started out in this field working at a planned parenthood clinic when I was 13 in Los Angeles and we had a media library that you had check out books and pamphlets from and videos. That was how you got information. There literally was no Google, so it was the school yard kids saying, "Oh you can't get pregnant if he pulls out or ..." That was as far as information went. We had one day-
Mistress Velvet:
Yeah.
Liz:
Of Sex Ed in elementary school. It was segregated.
Mistress Velvet:
That sounds so ... oh wow, yeah.
Liz:
The boys and girls were separated.
Mistress Velvet:
Yeah.
Liz:
All that happened afterwards is I got teased by boys were like, "Dude have you had your P read yet?"
Mistress Velvet:
That's exactly how my Sex Ed experience was. We were also segregated by gender and the last day they just gave us tampons but we didn't have anything to carry it in because ... and then the boys made fun of us for having tampons. They don't understand anything.
Liz:
What are you still learning about sex now?
Mistress Velvet:
What ... Oh my God. What am I still learning about sex? I'm learning more and more sometimes that I don't like a lot of sex and that's okay. I'm learning a lot about my body and that I, especially in my early 20s was engaging in sex in a way that was quite performative and focused on male partners. Now that I'm putting myself first in sex, I'm like, "Oh my God, my body does these interesting things and likes these things and doesn't like these things, and that's beautiful. Also, maybe I don't like sex as much as I used to think."
Liz:
Quality not quantity maybe.
Mistress Velvet:
Yes. Yes, yes, yeah. Yeah.
Sex is weird.
Liz:
Sex is weird?
Mistress Velvet:
Yeah it's ... Sex can be so weird.
Liz:
It is, it's-
Mistress Velvet:
Not in the actual act of sex, but just there can be so much. There's so much to think about, there's so much communication that needs to be done. I feel like I will never know everything about myself sexually and I thought maybe with Sex Ed, the traditional Sex Ed I received, that you're just supposed to know ... It's quite finite the amount of things you would know about sex and it's not. It's actually quite vast and there's so much around it.
Liz:
I mean, that's why I love the subject, right, because it's constantly evolving, and we're constantly evolving and none of us have the same experience of it so there is no ... Everybody always thinks that someone else has it all figured out, but we're all out here bumbling around just trying to-
Mistress Velvet:
Absolutely.
Liz:
Come to terms with ourselves
Mistress Velvet:
Absolutely.
Liz:
Well, it's been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for taking the time.
Mistress Velvet:
This was amazing.