Welcome to A Slut’s Guide To Happiness, where your body is perfectly imperfect and it’s safe to be as sexual, kinky, queer, or slutty as you want. 

This episode is going to explore what it looks like to be terrified of stepping outside the box of social norms, or being honest and open about who you are, especially when your truth feels absolutely wrong, perverted, crazy, inappropriate and you are 97% sure you’re going to be rejected, derided, and alone if you share that truth.

I’ll explore how that has shown up in my life and share three big lessons that I’ve learned from my experience confronting these fears, lessons that might be relevant in your own life. 

So allow me to start with a biggie, a significant moment in my life of stepping outside the box. As a pansexual, queer, slutty woman and a porn producer, you might think it’s one of those, but it’s actually something that’s outside of that genre. But it was a huge moment of overcoming terror in order to be who I am.

At 27, I finally decided to pursue a lifelong dream to be a solo parent. I don’t know why I always knew that that’s something that I wanted to do, but you can go back to when I was in elementary school and I was talking about that dream.

Nobody told me that I could do it. Nobody said that it made sense. It really didn’t. I wasn’t financially ready, but I decided I have one life. I’m going to pursue joy, even if I’m not authorized by society to do so. 

So I decided I’m going to go to the sperm bank and get sperm every month. And, as you can imagine, I was already dating and hooking up with a bunch of people, many with dicks and sperm. I told all the people that I was dating that I wanted to do this. I shared that I’m going off birth control and I don’t want another parent involved. So some people decided to leave and some people stuck around because they wanted to help me, and they understood that they weren’t going to be involved as parents regardless of what happened. We all intentionally dipped and lost each other’s contact information the moment I conceived.

Once I was pregnant, I got a pretty normative job, a good organization, but with an institutional and normative culture. There was a woman there, a very kind coworker, but a very normative suburban kind of mom, and she saw that I was starting to show that I was getting pregnant. She asked me a question that I don’t think she meant in a bad way, but because I was so stuck in my fear, I did. It hurt me a lot. 

She asked, “So who’s the baby daddy?” She knew that I wasn’t normatively partnered with a husband, but I didn’t really talk at work about having multiple partners or slutty fuck buddies. And so I froze. I had no idea how to answer her because I was not prepared to share my truth. I felt like she wanted me to reveal my secret. I was still stuck in shame. 

I thought, how am I going to tell you about sleeping with a bunch of guys? That I intentionally have no idea who got me pregnant. That intentional wild slutty behavior was how I came into a child of my own, the biggest joy of my life. 

Now, fast forward five years later. I have an amazing kid. I am open and honest. I came out to all of my coworkers at the time. Now my community in Cliff Media, my partners, my friends, my family know that I’m a solo parent.

Learning to become okay with becoming a solo parent occurred through a process of finding other solo parents, other single parents who did it a little like how I did it and who are living amazing lives. I found that in books and I found that with other people in person. They didn’t exactly do it the same way I did, I haven’t found anyone who had a bunch of anonymous hookups to get pregnant, but I certainly found a lot of other folks intentionally parenting alone. 

And of course, it’s hard, right? Because capitalism is hard and it costs a lot to be a parent. But I wouldn’t change it for the world because of the independence of my parenting and the relationship I have with my child. 

I also came out really publicly, and proud about how I conceived. Among other ways this showed up, I reenacted something similar to my real life conception in a porn scene where 12 friends in a loving gangbang helped me get pregnant. In that scene, if I conceived, no one would know who was the real parent. 

I think because it was such an authentic representation of my truth, such a raw exposure of myself and my story, that video went viral on PornHub with millions of views. A lot of people message me asking if I got pregnant from that scene. Of course not, porn is all acting, I also didn’t fuck actually fuck an anonymous plumber or deliver pizza to anonymous non-consenting recipients with cum on my face. But it is true that I proudly got pregnant in a similar way in my life.

So being public at that scale is a pretty damn big reversal from being afraid to tell one coworker. Now I share my story of conception with anyone I meet in my life and anyone who’s masturbating on the internet. I feel totally proud about how a bunch of people with sperm lovingly helped me bring my biggest joy into the world. It was a transition from fear to total self-acceptance, which has been a recurring theme of my life. 

Every time I’ve started some new adventure of who I am, I have been terrified. I faced social rejection. I wasn’t only afraid of facing social rejection, but I also feared that I was “crazy”, in both the medical and colloquial sense of that word. And that fear persisted, until I found other people who affirmed me, not necessarily through their words, but through their shared way of walking through the world.

The first time, when I was 14, I was in a relationship with a girl and I came out as bisexual. My parents are very kind, loving people, but they come from really traditional norms, so when I told them, they cried. They told me my life would be harder if I was bisexual. 

So I did not find acceptance in my sexual orientation until I reached the queer community. Meeting other LGBTQ people was huge in my ability to accept myself. 

However, the queer community that I happened to join at the time had something that is common in many queer circles, which is a kind of selective inclusion and acceptance. It was okay to be lesbian, to like pussies. But liking guys or liking people with dicks or liking trans people was not okay. So it was many years, about eight years, where I was lesbian and I only dated women until I finally realized, I was able to find my own truth that I actually like people of all bodies and genders.

So coming out as pansexual was another process. Shortly thereafter, around the same time, I came out as polyamorous. And when I shared it with my family, my parents’ reaction was along the lines of don’t ask, don’t tell. 

I remember specifically, I was in a grocery store and we were looking at bottles of wine, and there was a Ménage à trois bottle that I pointed out as a wine choice. My dad, referencing the fact that I was polyamorous, said I don’t want to know. Don’t tell us. So he had it associated in his head that it was something potentially sexual and perverted.

So sexuality outside monogamous relationships, and sexuality even outside relationships and with lots of people took a while to figure out. It wasn’t until I connected with polyamorous community that I felt comfortable with the idea of having multiple, loving partners in my life. So, you know, I’m continuing on this journey. 

There eventually reaches a point where I have a really high sex drive. I really started to adventure and connect with a lot of people. I remember I was living alone in a tiny little apartment in downtown Seattle. At one point, I realized I had invited over five different guys that week. 

Sometimes these were completely anonymous hookups. I had this OkCupid profile, it was just me naked, but with a blanket draped over my bits so that OkCupid wouldn’t kick me off. I said I liked to go dancing, get drinks and cuddle, and sometimes could skip the dancing and drinks. So sometimes guys would contact me and I would just directly give them my address. We wouldn’t even bother going out for a drink. They just arrive at my apartment, come up the elevator, fuck me and leave. 

At the time, I felt like there must be something wrong with me. What am I doing? I felt like I’m perverted, going to this normative job, pretending like I have a normative life and then I’m coming home and fucking anonymous random people off the internet. 

And then a couple of years later, I found a sex club, met a bunch of other swingers and slutty people, and realized, ohhh all these other people like playing with sex just for fun, too. I’m not crazy. I just hadn’t found that community yet. 

Later, I started doing camming. I read this really erotic book and it inspired me to explore camming. There was initially some shame and fear of exposure, but I also loved it. I’m a deep extrovert, I like being around people, so I shifted to in-person sex work in porn and I felt like I went off the deep end. Once again, it wasn’t until I met other pornstars and content creators that I really got comfortable with myself in the work. 

So right now I’m a full-time CEO of a porn production company. We aren’t hiring professional porn actors, we are rooted in community organizing. Any good-hearted people who want to join, to participate in creative and sexy production for the sake of joy, are welcome. And many times people are nervous, coming into big group orgies filmed for the purpose of being shared all over the internet.

And I tell them, my first porn scene was a basic happy ending massage, where my role was to lie face down and get a good massage. It doesn’t get easier than that. And yet, I was shaking because I felt sure that stepping into porn meant that I was stepping away from the capacity to be accepted by normal society because I was doing something so wrong.

I remember the first time I was sharing sexual content on Reddit, sharing kinky, exposed, nasty content on Reddit. I felt dirty and wrong. It was arousing and also scary. 

But now all this is just part of my daily life. It’s a normal part of the job. Some of it is incredibly fulfilling, like meeting people at shoots and producing creative scenes together. Some of it ranges from vaguely interesting to mundane, like marketing posts on Reddit. And this transition happened as I found lots of other porn producers and sex workers who are doing amazing work, and I saw them being proud and happy, and that helped me lift my head high.

And now, I have figured out how to express myself and my values and my authenticity in my work. I feel really proud of it.

Another example of this transformative loss of shame came when I was in L.A. in 2023. This was back before we were really rooted in LGBTQ organizing, so there was a lot of normative straight dude on girl penetration scenes. I went to L.A. for a few days and I packed the time doing back-to-back gangbang shoots all weekend. During the first scene, just hours off the plane, I had diarrhea, in front of a room full of people.

So I knew that I had to do a ton of enemas before the second scene, because 25 guys were coming to do a double penetration focused scene, meaning they were fucking me in both the ass and my pussy and at the same time. I had to be ready for it. So I did all these enemas because I was committed to the work, but I didn’t know how to properly take care of my body.

So afterwards I was shaking. I was completely lost of electrolytes at the end of the scene. And I almost passed out, almost had to go to the hospital. And again, I felt like, what in the world am I doing? 

My counselor, who is wonderful, reminded me that this was a common experience for people who are doing extreme sports. You just have to learn how to take care of your body, but it’s normal to want to push yourself, it’s the joy of feeling challenged and alive. It’s huge being able to reframe that and realize that just because some people in society say something isn’t right has nothing to do with how I experienced it. Other people’s opinions do not influence whether something is life-affirming for me. 

The last example I will give you is that for about three years, I was performing in mainstream porn and beginning to produce some of my own content while also working a more traditional job. That job was providing me with a lot of financial stability and also the ability to represent my lifestyle and identity as attached to that normative job. 

Then finally I decided to quit the full-time normative job to produce porn full-time. That was terrifying financially and also socially. It was jumping in feet first, all in on this. I no longer had any excuse or legitimate backstory for who I am and what I’m doing in the world right now. 

Then I quit working in the mainstream industry and doing any paid shoots where other people hire me. I transitioned to focusing on exclusively producing my own work, which is financially and socially risky. But I find so much connection, joy and purpose from the work that the fear is entirely worth it. 

Over and over, throughout my life, I’ve gone through stages of coming out, sexually and socially about my truth of who I am. And I feel certain that I will continue throughout my life to find my growing edges, to find places where I’m not yet honest with myself or with the world about all of who I am.

And so, in these scary, terrifying processes, I have learned a few lessons that I want to share with you. Three big lessons that may apply to whatever scary journey of truth you are on. 

The first one, and this is a value that in Cliff Media we talk about a lot, is that the truth sets us free.

You can fit in a box society gives us. That’s absolutely your choice. You can participate in capitalist norms about professionalism and defining yourself by advancement in the corporate ladder or an economic wealth. 

You can conform to societal expectations about monogamous marriage. You can date whoever you want or you can date the socially accepted gender. You can conform to gender norms about how you’re supposed to behave. You can keep your sexuality private. You can avoid doing anything that could be misinterpreted or seen as perverted. 

And you can seek professional help if you dare to step outside this box that society has given us because you’re probably messed up in the brain. 

OR, you could dare to step outside the box and continue accepting yourself when other people tell you to get back in that box, because they almost certainly will. You might discover that there’s so much joy, so much freedom and room to explore and play out here. 

Audre Lorde, who is a shero, a poet, an author and a beautiful thinker, one of the things she says that I think about a lot is, to paraphrase, “whatever you accept about yourself can’t be used as a weapon against you”.

So being queer, pansexual, kinky, transgender, polyamorous, slutty, a swinger, a sex worker, a point performer if you come out as any of those things in a society that tells us those things are wrong, you will face judgment. 

You will find those people who will judge you, who are afraid for you. But that’s their fear and their journey. If you can accept and love yourself, and see other people’s judgement with compassion as their own journey of uncovering their fear, you have enormous potential for exploring freedom.

And if you love yourself for the whole of who you are, your truth will attract other people who are also like you. The amazing thing is that your truth creates space for other people to be themselves. It invites people to dream bigger and potentially lose their own fear. 

So that’s lesson number one. The truth sets us free.

Reflection number two: “if you’re not scared, your dreams aren’t big enough.”

We talk about fear as a challenging thing to overcome. But it may be that we actually want to lean towards fear. If you follow the path that society expects us to follow, it is emotionally simpler. But simplicity doesn’t necessarily translate to joy. 

You may be familiar with the poem “Summer Day” by Mary Oliver. At the end she asks us, “tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Even if you believe in reincarnation, we can all agree we only get one chance in this particular body, this particular time and space on Earth. So we all have this incredible potential to seize the moment to be creative and original spirits.

There is a fire burning inside you. I know it. So what does it look like to set that free? Even if it’s risky? Even if you might fail miserably, stumble and get back up and try again. Even if you might face rejection from some people before you find the right people. 

That brings us to lesson number three: To cope with that fear, to turn that fear into a superpower, you have to find your people.

Whoever you are deep inside, that secret that you aren’t sure you can share with the world yet, you may discover – no matter how perverted you are, no matter how you identify your gender or your sexuality, no matter how you like to engage in romantic or emotional relationships, no matter what your family looks like or what you want it to look like, no matter what kind of sexual labor you do, there are other people like you.

In fact, there are other people who identify like you or have sexual desires like you, or want a life like you and have already figured out how to love themselves exactly as they are. There are people who are loud and open about who they are, who are successful, competent, loved, whole people. Find those people. 

Those people will be your cheerleaders and help you learn to love your whole self more than you can currently imagine as possible. And then you can give that love to the next person.

This has been A Slut’s Guide To Happiness. Thank you so much for joining us. You can find this podcast anywhere you listen to podcasts on Apple and Spotify or on cliffmediaproductions.com. If you’re over the age of 18, feel free to check out our video content on cliffmediaproductions.com. 

And most of all, I invite you to join us in the pleasure of being awkwardly human, naked and without pretense. Let’s get free!