Cracking the misunderstandings around the HOLY WHORE concept

The concept of the holy whore, sacred prostitute dates back to ancient times and existed in many many cultures . It is related to the temple priestesses who performed the sacred sexuality arts.

As warriors returned from a battle near Sparta for example, the female worshippers of the goddess Hestia in Greek mythology had sex with them to integrate them back into society and heal them with the divine, sacred feminine.

It was the famous Vestal Virgins of ancient Rome who kept the sacred fires burning and honored her by being chaste.

And the idea of sexual priestesses existed in many other cultures, too.

Let's have a look at how it looks today, though since the term "holy whore" is being over and misused by all sort of new age tantra practioners, masseurs, strippers, webcam performers etc. We could possibly try to find an answer to the question: if it is sacred why then so many sex workers struggle with mental health?

We are sacred by nature because life is sacred but, there is always these buts in life... what if they did not exist? How easier life would be, right?

BUT..

Prostitution can be a sacred art only when a woman involved in it learns to balance between herself and the others. When she learns to embrace herself with compassion and transforms her inner darkness into light so to say.

Quite often though, due to all sort of cultural, family background, it takes a while for a woman to learn how to take care of her emotional needs first, sometimes even a lifetime.

The root cause of the difficulties in this process, of course, we can find in childhood where the emotional needs of many of us have not been met. We will explore in another post the impact of childhood on our sexuality, however.

What often happenes to many women regardless of whether they are directly involved in sex work or not is that they just surpress, rather than truly embrace their shadow side. Society wants to see the likable parts, and rarely provides space for the unlikable.

So we designed the Naked psychologist very much to be such an alternative space.

Back to the sacred whore concept.

Sacred prostitution is actually a spiritual path and the most important lesson to learn is to ballance between giving and receiving pleasure.

To learn to do that, though, a woman encounters setbacks on this path, which she needs to overcome. Our culture is predominantly focused on the pleasure of men. How many times sex ends, when the men cums?? Do you know though that if a sexual act ends without an orgasm for the woman this causes the stress hormones in her brain to rise up?

As a result of the sexualization the feminine is required to be separated instead of united. And here comes the big problem.

The power of the sacred prostitute comes from being a whole, fully integrated woman.

What current sex culture does is take female power from the women by requesting them to separate their body from their emotions.

The sacred whore is a woman united in body and mind who connects to both the earth and the heavens (heights and depths). The holy whore is not the false feminine often seen in the media, who uses her sexuality to attract attention and objectify herself in the process, in order to please the other.

The sacred prostitute combines the desire of the whore and acting on what she wants with the virginal quality of self-containment and freedom. She is both virgin and whore, sacred and profane. However, maintaining the fine line between the two worlds is hard to deal with when we do not truly heal trauma, but only suppress it. What happens as a result - instead of becoming sacred, some fall into the shadow aspects of their psyche.

So in order to be able to transform other people's pain, first a woman needs to learn to hold her own and embrace it, rather than hide it.

Both in the sex work industry and in sexual trauma in many cases the emotions of women are ignored. They are required to show a fun, joyous, always ready for sex, open no matter what and “enjoying it” but this enjoyment is planned, scripted, not authentic in most of the cases .

There is no woman in real life who is naturally in this openness state. Naturally, we require safety to open up, not just physically but emotionally. Rarely women in the industry are given space to emotionally BE.

I have met a model, whose father had died 2 days before, yet she was going to erotic shoots and performing. Can you imagine the amount of emotional NUMBNESS required to do that?

In its essence, the message of a sex rape for example is "I do not care about you, or what you feel." So, a woman who has been raped starts to ignore what she feels later on, as she assumes her feelings do not matter for anyone. So by being emotionally neglected, she starts to neglect her emotional needs as well.

That explains why so many sexual workers have been reported to have been victims of sexual violence before they get in the industry. It is through this sexual aggressor from the outside that they intergate within and become him for themselves.

And then it is the vicious circle of "give me your body, here is the cash, your emotions are not important"…

So, a woman is in a state of separation between body and mind, which is actually the shadow aspect of the sacred whore. And creates an inner turmoil. So somehow this shadow needs to come to light by getting to know the opposite of neglect. That someone cares, someone can witness my experiences without judging me. Being heard with compassion, teaches self-compassion. Later on a woman can become that someone for herself. In this lies the therapeutic effect of the Naked psychologist project.

Another trap on the path of sacred sexuality is porn, both participating as an actress, or performing scenes from porn in your real life, as porn drastically changes “the norm” of real life sex.

A basic need for our emotional well-being is to feel accepted and respected, which we satisfy through sex. Many porn scripts though show abuse, offence, disrespect..., this makes a woman shrink in herself because by being verbally or physically abused a woman cannot feel safe in her own body. This is not how our nervous system works. Her mind percieves it as a treat at the same time she is required to open up and be penetrated at the same moment. It creates a contradiction and inner conflict which is in the core of scientific reports explaining why many porn actresses use drugs to mantain themselves and self-medicate. In this case, the original sexual trauma which most probably put them in the sex industry or unhealthy sexual relationships is multiplied and so is multiplied the emotional pain and turmoil which come with it.

There are other traps on the path as well which we will explore in our next posts. Stay tuned.

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