“But is this grand enough for you, Betty?” I asked aloud to the small bottle of her ashes that sits next to me as I write. “Please help me be succinct without diminishing you but also not put you so high upon a pedestal that you become distorted. And help me write an interesting piece, Betty. One that’s clever and fun but also educational.” 

In my mind’s eye, Betty rolls her eyes at my reverence for her and my own self-importance. I like to imagine she was an eye roller. And that had we been friends, we’d have been sardonic and irreverent together, rolling our eyes and smiling at the absurdities of life as we sipped champagne in the afternoon.

“Ha ha ha ha,” we’d laugh with our mouths open wide, leaning back in our lounge chairs as the sun’s golden rays beamed upon our bare legs. 

So much of my life is possible because Betty lived hers. From enjoying the now rather common modern ritual of shaving one’s head to usher in change and break free of objectification, to getting to live a life where I can exist outside of a husband’s orbit, to being able to explore gender and shift and change with it as I’ve aged. Immersing myself in the life and adventures of Betty Dodson throughout the Bodysex facilitator training has empowered me to locate myself within the river of women, witches, and priestesses that birthed me. When my great grandmothers reached childbearing age, they couldn’t vote in elections, have their own bank accounts, or careers. They survived ongoing marital rape. And in spite of all of this, they made our lives possible. 

Thanks to Betty, I’ve been rewriting the story of my young sex life, reclaiming territory I was taught to cede because of my pleasure and reproductive tackle. Let’s pause here for a sec, can we, and ponder something together. What is a virgin but a false construct of misaligned purity that exists solely for the purpose of controlling half the population? What might be possible for our lives if we weren’t wrapped up in the nasty twisted story of virginity? And who’s benefiting from that dusty petulant ol’ notion, anyway?

Here’s the new story I’ve been teaching my inner younger selves: all that skittle-diddling of my youth counted as sex. I was the first to penetrate my vagina and was a robustly good lover to myself long before anyone else. I didn’t “lose” my “virginity” to Kevin on that tweed sleeper sofa in my friend’s basement on my seventeenth birthday. I didn’t lose anything at all. I was not a passive fainting flower of a boygirl whose sexuality and youth was squandered on shyness and pandering. Rather I was a robustly sexual creature, fun and adventurous sexually from about four onwards. I stopped humping my pillows sometime before puberty and began using my fingers, my expert hands finding the things that felt good and brought me to orgasm. I belong to me and always have, regardless of what’s being reflected back at me from the world outside myself.

It is of the utmost importance that we touch ourselves, in spite of being shamed for it, because right there at the top of our juicy thighs is where the worlds meet; spirit becoming nature, nature becoming matter. Touching ourselves is the most effortless and delicious way to access our power. Betty has helped me locate and tend that revolutionary within, the one who will not stand for a life without pleasure, the one who was never hypnotized by false constructs like virginity. The one inside who knows that I am not wrong for seeking our natural pleasure states but it was the shame foisted upon me that was rotten all along. We must muster the fortitude to follow the tingles between our legs and let them guide us. And we must let this act of bravery bring us to the river bank of our collective wisdom; to claim ourselves as connected and sexual beings in spite of modernity constantly attempting to strip us of these things. 

I ended up in Betty’s shrine room because my Airbnb canceled at the last minute. This shrine room is also Carlin’s attic office. Betty’s art, journals, awards, dildos, all of it is there in the attic. Carlin, the legacy keeper of all things Betty and Bodysex, beloved sister and mentor to me. We aren’t technically siblings. But aren’t we? Is it not just the paperwork of separation that taught us that we’re not related, that drew the false line between our relatedness? Are we not both descendants of the long line of practitioners of pleasure? As we chit chatted over dinner and then in the attic office shrine room, our broken lineages mended, our words timeless and connected, ancient and current. 

The walls of the attic hummed with Betty’s energy and all those orgasms she had and helped people have. Her artwork on the walls pulsed with delectable orgasmic energy. Carlin walked me around the room showing me Betty’s various power objects. As I held Betty’s favorite dildo in both hands – the obsidian one that you can’t find on the internet no matter how much you search, the one whose shape you feel you simply must experience inside of you – I wished I’d had a week there and not just a few hours before an early flight. Carlin handed me Betty’s shiny leather flogger and I made a mental note to finally learn how to use one of these things. 

And now a confession, dear reader. I spent the night in the Mother of Masturbation’s shrine room and I didn’t masturbate. Granted, I’d been immersed in all things Bodysex for several days prior, masturbating a plenty before I got there, but I was so blissfully tired from assisting the Bodysex retreat that all I could muster before falling asleep was to soak in the energy of the room like it was a bubble bath. 

I laid upon the cozy blowup mattress in the center of the attic, nestled in blankets, eyes drifting across the walls at all the beauty Betty created. My gaze found Betty’s vulva portrait and paused, resting there, noting how the dark browns and creams came alive off the canvas. The painting pulsed with her love, her power, and the thing Betty was so very very good at in her life: stepping vulnerably, hopelessly into what the moment called for and opening her mouth, even though she didn’t know what she was gonna say. Her honed skill of becoming the exact medicine the room needed at that exact moment, and then bringing all of us along with her on the adventure. Out of the baroque frame flowed Betty’s love for herself and her mystical magical cunt, the cunt that inspired and guided her and all of us. I let the painting transport me to the river delta of spirit, nature, and matter. 

“We do not fight the centuries of misogyny by piling our own mandates atop the false ones,” the painting whispered. “Or by more rules in response to the rules shoved into our bodies that come from the same false system that busied us with all that righteous paperwork in the first place. We go this way, towards ecstasy and kinship, sisterhood, siblinghood, and integrity. We put our hands on our own bodies and feel our presence through time. It has been the goal of religion to separate these two, pleasure and spirit, but there exists only heartbreak in that division – even for those who profit off of it. Our broken lineages don’t prevent our access to this wisdom, we just have to get deep enough into the water and get quiet enough to be able to sense our connection flowing all around us. We create and tend this river with our lives.”

Sleep was upon me but I wanted to remain at the entrance of the portal the portrait held open, that tenderhearted temple Betty created for all of us with her life, that she’s still creating now as an ancestor. She’s still bringing us all along through the threshold of remembering our divine connection to body, spirit, and each other. I wanted to glean and bask longer but my eyes just wouldn’t stay open. 

“Come with me,” she whispered as I slipped away from the waking world and into the drowsy stream where the living, the ancestors, and the descendants mingle and laugh together each night. The space where we can all go, regardless of whether or not we have bodies still or yet.

Lincoln is currently in training as a Bodysex Coach. 

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