A few days ago I was listening to an astrology video about Venus in Scorpio from a woman I really like and I am about to do a course with very shortly.
And then she started talking about OnlyFans and I nearly fell off my chair.
She was using it as an example of Venus in Scorpio: the shadow of desire, sexuality, money, power, secrecy, control, all of that. And, to be honest, astrologically, made a lot of sense.
BUT
what bothered me was everything that came with it đŁ
OnlyFans was described as: prostitution, coercion, exploitation, pimps, young women doing things they wouldnât otherwise choose to do.
And I was like: You have absolutely no idea who is sitting in your classroom đ
Because my story doesnât really fit that picture at all. Nobody pushed me into OnlyFans and I wasnât trying to sexually liberate myself đ. There was no pimp, no coercion, nobody behind the scenes telling me what to do, and I wasnât doing things against my will.
I had zero background in anything remotely connected to sex work and I was not precisely âyoungâ. I was 45, a mum of two, separated, I had a perfectly normal job⌠and I needed more money.
Thatâs it.
My salary wasnât enough for the life I needed to support, I found something that worked, and I became very successful at it.
That doesnât make OnlyFans wonderful or means exploitation doesnât exist, of course it does, and coercion, trafficking, abuse... you name it. People do things they donât want to do because they need money all the fucking time!
All of that is real but that wasnât the world I knew.
I knew women working independently, making their own decisions (or along with their husbands), setting their own limits, setting up companies, paying taxes and making a ton of money.
The Real Shadow
Letâs tell the truth, shall we? Plenty (all?) of industries/institutions have a shadow.
Finance has fraud. MLMs sell fantasies of freedom. Gambling monetizes hope. Corporations exploit workers. People sell bullshit courses promising seven figures. Politicians lie for a living.
Do I really need to carry on?
But we donât usually define an entire industry by its most abusive expressionâŚwith sex, we do.
Pornography becomes prostitution. Prostitution becomes coercion. Erotic commerce becomes exploitation. Fantasy becomes degradation.
And everything gets thrown into the same moral bucket.
Why?
Thatâs the question I ask outloud because I agree that Venus in Scorpio as an archetype is showing us the âshadow of desireâ but she was also speaking about moving beyond the âbaser instinctsâ into tantra, spirituality, meditation and higher consciousness.
And that sounds great, all right up my street⌠but
what exactly are we supposed to do with sex?
Are we supposed to transcend sexuality into tantra before it becomes respectable?
Is erotic fantasy or pornography automatically a lower expression?
Where do consent, agency and consciousness enter the conversation?
And what do we do with a culture that consumes sexual fantasy on an enormous scale and then morally distances itself from the people who produce it?
That part fascinates me now maybe more than anything else.
We consume sex everywhere and use it to sell perfume, cars, underwear, holidays, music videos and shampoo but the moment somebody makes the transaction explicit, suddenly everyone becomes very moral.
That contradiction is interesting to me, especially now because Iâm actually moving away from OnlyFans but not because I woke up one morning and decided Iâd done something shameful and now I need to become respectable.
Iâm moving away from it because I got tired. Really tired.
Not so much of the eroticism but of the machinery and the lack of purpose that was killing my soul. That is the part I no longer want.
And strangely enough, at exactly the same time, Iâve become more interested in desire than ever⌠just from the conscious side.
What is that we actually want?
This is where astrology has become annoyingly accurate.
I have Venus in Aquarius in an almost exact trine to Pluto in Libra and Pluto is now moving towards my Venus while simultaneously trining my natal Pluto (believe in Astrology or notâŚthe symbolism is crazy đ)
Another astrologer recently brought the myth of Inanna into this for me.
Inanna, the ancient goddess associated with Venus, descends into the underworld, at each gate she is stripped of something: her symbols, her power, her identity and everything that told her who she was.
She reaches the bottom naked and she dies there but, eventually she returns.
And she doesnât return as somebody else, she is still Inanna, she doesnât come back rejecting sexuality, beauty, desire or power. She comes back having gone through the underworld.
You got it. Thatâs me: embodying Inannaâs myth (ainât I special?âşď¸).
I donât want to pretend the last six years were some terrible mistake because they werenât. That trip to the underworld gave me money, freedom and experience. And a very unusual education in desire, men, fantasy, projection, shame, power and human behavior.
It also exhausted me.
Both things can be true and maybe thatâs the part we struggle with.
We love simple morality:
Good industry vs Bad industry.
Empowered woman vs Exploited woman.
Spiritual sexuality vs Dirty sexuality.
But real life is not that simple.
I sent the astrologer an email and I havenât heard back yet. I actually hope she says something interesting, because I didnât write to her to win an argument. I wrote because I think this is worth talking about.
Especially if weâre going to talk about the shadow of desire.
Because surely the point of looking at the shadow isnât to throw everything that makes us uncomfortable into it and carry on looking away.
The point is to look it in the eye.
Shadows need to be faced, recognized and integrated.
And perhaps the fact that we still carry so much shame and moral judgement around sex while consuming absolutely fucking enormous quantities of it tells us something.
Maybe the real shadow isnât sex but our relationship with it.
Just saying.
But what the fuck do I know, right? Plus, I am so tired now. Nighty night.
đ˝