Sexual fantasies help us overcome three major paradoxes inherent to sex.

At the heart of The deVinery Method of bringing sexual fantasies to life, is the power of paradox.

The very thing we fear most about being vulnerable enough to open to sex, becomes the magic thing that transports us to those very sexual feelings we yearn to feel most.

Before I tell you about the three main paradoxes, let me back up and give context. The deVinery method is a framework that I (Artemisia de Vine) created based on what I learned in my former roles as an escort (classic sex provider) and professional dominatrix, as well as anthropologist and somatic sexologist.

It provides a new way of understanding why we have sexual fantasies and how to engage them to create powerful, pleasurable, and often profound, real life sex, without necessarily living out the fantasy as it is in our mind’s eyes at all. Instead, I focus on understanding the psychobiological mechanisms within fantasies and how to play with those in our real life sex.

That means you don’t necessarily have to have a threesome, engage in actual public sex, cheat, or be used by a crowd of strangers literally. You don’t have to actually dangle from the chandeliers, look like a celebrity or fit a whole double-decker bus up your bottom!

Let’s face it! Sexual fantasies are not always realistic or practical. And even when they are, living them out exactly as you imagined them, often doesn’t give you the feeling you thought it would. Besides, you don’t want to rely on having the whole football team over every time you want satisfying sex.

I’m much more focused on understanding how our sexual fantasies take us somewhere inside ourselves and change our state of consciousness - including changes in mind, body and emotions. Not only can this provide heightened excitement, intimacy and pleasure, it can sometimes lead us somewhere unexpectedly profound. It can lead to temporary ego dissolution experiences where we lose our (ego) sense of self and encounter a much bigger sense of self.

It is one of the most extraordinary and beautiful things you can experience, to share this erotic state of consciousness with another. You can sometimes even have Oneness experiences where you have an experience of being connected with All That Is. You merge with Life itself, and that is breathtaking!

Understanding how sexual fantasies work and creating real life play based on this deeper understanding, makes finding these kinds of feelings happen much more reliably.

How do Sexual Fantasies work?

Because sexual fantasies include both the poison and the antidote, they lead to the exact opposite thing we feared they would. It’s sexual alchemy!

Poison + Antidote = sexual pleasure and intimacy

When we understand how sexual fantasies work, we can deliberately create the same effect in our real life sex, without necessarily needing to go into “role play” or live the fantasy out as it is in our mind’s eye.

• To be restrained in bondage, brings an astonishing feeling of freedom.
• To be used allows us to focus on ourselves (be selfish) and surrender to the bliss of our own experience.
• To see our lover with another leads to compersion, not jealousy - and leads to getting our own needs met.
• To be whore or filthy slut, leads to feeling deeply seen and accepted - not the rejection we feared.
• Hurting someone/ourselves leads to deep pleasure and the intimacy of trust for all.
•  In losing ourselves in the moment, we find a bigger sense of self.
•  In submission, we become powerful.
•  In domination, we come to be in service and protect another.

But there is more than that.

The radical thing about The deVinery Method, is that is de-centres pathologising models that reduce our sexual fantasies to our “unfinished childhood business”, pathogenic beliefs, attachment styles, trauma or sociological factors like structural oppression -  and focuses on how sexual fantasies are genius stories that overcome three major paradoxes inherent to sex, so we can access an array of profound erotic states of consciousness.

It is not that the above things cannot be processed through our sexual fantasies. They can! And are! But childhood wounds are not the central reasons we have smutty sexual fantasies with themes of power, groups sex, cheating, domination and submission, humiliation or the perfect princ/ess charming, or bambi-eyed bimbo.

This means that even if you had the perfect childhood, and lived in a sex positive community that never judged your sexual expression, these three paradoxes would still need to be overcome in order for us to let go and surrender into sexual states of consciousness.

Let me say that again, because it’s a HUGE shift in thinking.

The reason we have sexual fantasies is not because we are broken and need healing. We have them to overcome the natural, normal paradoxes inherent in sex.

So what is a paradox?

Paradoxes are not a wrong versus a right. Paradoxes are two conflicting rights. They are unsolvable.

Like the classic chicken and the egg paradox. Which came first?

Clearly the chicken laid the egg so the chicken had to come first. But the chicken had to have come from an egg so where did the first egg come from?

See how paradoxes inherently get us thinking about the big existential questions? Contemplate them long enough and your mind begins to spin. I mean what did exist before the big bang? Before God? Did something always exist? If not, what was the big bang made out of? Is there a divine consciousness that always existed? How is always existing even possible?

The everyday mode of thinking cannot cope with paradox.

Some folk go into existential crisis when contemplating infinity, but those who surrender to the paradox, crack their minds open. They literally change states of consciousness. Paradoxes are mind altering. Our consciousness expands beyond the limitations of our egos, and the rules of time and space by using the portal of paradox.

I noticed this in my former role as a professional dominatrix and escort (provider of more classic forms of sex). When I played with the erotic paradoxes inherent in the sexual fantasy of my client, and created a real life BDSM or sex experience that embodied those paradoxes, it had an extraordinarily powerful effect.

Two major things happened:

1. Friction creates Frisson. ( Thanks for that succinct wording Ali Pilling!) In other words, it built delicious heightened sexual tension. This feels like raising a lot of sexual excitement and energy that we respond to body, heart and mind.

Wiki definition:

Frisson (UK: /ˈfriːsɒn/ FREE-son, US: /friːˈsoʊn/ free-SOHN^[1][2] French: [fʁisɔ̃]; French for "shiver"), also known as aesthetic chills or psychogenic shivers, is a psychophysiological response to rewarding stimuli (including music, films, stories, people, photos, and rituals^[3]) that often induces a pleasurable or otherwise positively-valenced affective state and transient paresthesia (skin tingling or chills), sometimes along with piloerection (goose bumps) and mydriasis (pupil dilation).^[4][5][6][7] The sensation commonly occurs as a mildly to moderately pleasurable emotional response to music with skin tingling;^[4] piloerection and pupil dilation not necessarily occurring in all cases.^[6][7]

2. Paradox triggered expanded states of erotic consciousness. Erotic paradox became the trigger that shifted my client’s state of consciousness. In our sexual or BDSM playtime together, I built a lot of tension using paradox until my client was in a heightened state. As the tension reached a climax, that was the moment they let go of their resistance and lost themselves in pure experiencing. That was the moment they had an ego dissolution experience, lost their smaller sense of self and expanded beyond to find their bigger sense of self. 

In other words, that is when they dropped into ecstasy, sub space, top space, Oneness experiences and other forms of profound expanded states of erotic consciousness.

The Three Paradoxes Inherent to Sex

Sex is riddled with paradox but the three big ones that sexual fantasies overcome for us are:

Self versus Self: Ego versus Desire

 We have an inherent inner conflict between aspects ourselves, simply as a side effect of being human.

 I like to think of our psyches as having different organs, just like our physical bodies do. The heart does the heart’s job and doesn’t try to do the lung’s job. Each organ has its role and sticks to it.

The psyche also has different “organs”. Each of them has its genius role, and each has it’s blindspots and limitations.

Our ego wants to keep us safe. It creates and protects our sense of self. Self-identity, self-worth and social status. These are the three guards of ego if you like. Without a sense of self, we can’t operate in the world and the ego is absolutely on our side. It wants what is best for us and its role matters. Ego is all about “I”.

The organ of the psyche that generates desires (wanting) has a whole different function. I will refer to this organ as “desire” for ease sake.

Our desire is also on our side and wants what is best for us but is in conflict with ego. It wants to dissolve our sense of self so we can connect. Desire is the urge to merge. The urge to move from “I” to “we”.

It is a freaking genius at showing us the way to let our guard down and just lose ourselves in the moment, but it is terrible at understanding outside world consequences.

Both these “organs of the psyche” have treasure to offer us but their purpose for being is in conflict with each other.

You can experience this inner conflict at work when you see a cutie you want to ask on a date. Most of us feel a magnetic pull to go over and create some sort of contact (desire), but at the same time, feel a crippling shyness that would rather die than risk harm to our sense of self - the risk of embarrassment, rejection, of people seeing our vulnerability and using it against us (ego).

Will ego win and we keep ourselves safe and never speak up? Or will desire win, and we risk it all and slip them our number?

The paradox is, both are right actions -and they are in conflict with each other. A paradox = two conflicting rights. How do we resolve this?

Hint: Sexual fantasies are genius stories that desire whispers into ego’s ear. They include the very thing ego fears most, and resolves it so that the three ego guards stand down. You have to include ego’s fears in the story in order to transform them. This is why so many of our sexual fantasies seem so very ego-centric.

Self versus Lover: Love versus Desire

This paradox can look like: I want you to be turned on by my turn ons or I feel too self conscious to share them with you.

I want us to both be fulfilled by the same style of sex and climax at the same time so that we can be in the zone together. The whole point of great sex is to feel it together right? After all, desire is the urge to merge! We want to temporarily lose our sense of self and become one!

But of course, no one has the same pattern of turn-ons because no one has the same ego. Everyone lets go of their ego guards in different ways.

Still we keep insisting:

“If you are not into dominating me, then it's just going to feel fake and I can’t let go.”

“If you don’t like giving me oral and talking dirty to me, then maybe we aren’t sexually compatible.” 

“If you aren’t sexually satisfied by making sensual sweet love to me the way that makes me feel safe, special and intimate, then I can’t be your lover.”

Put it this way, if you are receiving oral sex and you don’t think the other person is into it, how easy is it to let go? We want to see evidence that they are having a great time while going down on us. We want them to be lost in lust when they are doing the things to us that our ego needs in order to let go. 

In other words, we want them to be turned on and fulfilled by fulfilling our needs and have none of their own. Yet this is impossible because everyone needs to follow the map of their own erotic psyche in order to surrender to sexual ecstasy.

So how do we travel to ecstasy together?

This paradox can also seen in the inherent conflict between love and desire.

Desire is: I want you because of how you benefit me. 

(You make me feel special, important, powerful, beautiful etc).

Love is: I want to be of benefit to you.

(I want to make you feel special, important, powerful, beautiful etc).

Both are important. One is not more holy than the other. Looking after our own needs matters just as much as looking after another person’s.

Yet we often share love, only after the cards around our heart have melted. In order to melt them, we need to focus on creating the right conditions for us, which are different to the conditions our lover needs.

Gah!

Never fear, The deVinery Method shows you how to have different needs and be in the zone of sexual flow state together.

Self versus Community: Individual good versus collective good.

There is an inherent conflict between what is best for the individual, and what is best for the collective community. This is true in all areas of life and is something we have to navigate daily.

It is best for the collective if a soldier is unquestionably obedient to their superior in the heat of battle. This makes for a far more effective army and can save the whole community.

It is best of the individual if they make choices that save themselves from danger and question their superior's orders.

It is best for the individual to sleep a few more hours because because they really need the rest. It is best for the community that they forgo that sleep and get to work on time so they don’t let the team down.

Historically, the collective deemed it best that sex acceptable only in the confines of marriage so that the structures of patriarchy remained intact. This meant that we knew who the father of the children was, and systems of power and inheritance could remain within the family control.

However, it is best for the individual person to have bodily autonomy and be able to follow their own love and desire freely for reasons that support their own pleasure, desires and boundaries.

It is best for the individual that you get to follow your own desire, but it is best for the collective that you don’t have sex in the supermarket just because you want to because others may be non consensually impacted. 

You get the idea.

Sexual fantasies are genius stories that solve these paradoxes for us in the privacy of our imagination.

We can get off on the taboo of public sex without actually harming anyone. Our lovers magically want what we want them to want. And our egos are protected from the potential harm of being vulnerable.

In sexual fantasies, everyone gets to have their sexy cake and eat it too. 

It is only when we truly understand that sexual fantasies are psychological mechanisms designed to solve these inherent paradoxes, that we can begin to learn from them and deliberately create the same effect in our real life sex.

The deVinery Method teaches you exactly how to do that.

(Keep reading because I am going to give you a way to begin exploring erotic paradoxes right away!)

I now teach some of the world’s leading sexperts including sexologists, sex educators, sex workers and even couples therapists how to do this. I also train those who want to make the erotic a priority in their lives and use deliberate sexual play as a lens for profound pleasure and self discovery.

I currently have an opening coming up for two new trainees if you want to learn this method. Book a call to chat with me and apply here.

Also keep an eye out for my upcoming book: The Spirituality of Smut: the surprising wisdom of sexual fantasies. I will go into a lot more practical detail there. Subscribe to my newsletter to make sure you find out when it is released!

How you can begin exploring erotic paradox?

Learn my daily practice to cultivate eros using the power of paradox. It takes a little bit to learn but once you get it, you can do it in 5 mins a day.

Cultivating Eros: A Daily Transformative Practice

It is an online course that launches on Summer Solstice June 20.

For those who join me for the launch date, you will get a bonus of 7 daily live online sessions where we do the practice together, ask questions and share our experiences. Let's face it, it is so much easier to commit to a new practice when we turn up daily and do it together! 

(Those who sign up after the launch will only access the self study version of the course).

The lives will be 7-7:30pm EEST Eastern European Summer Time, every day for 7 days from June 20, 2024. 

This is a rare chance for Europeans to learn directly from me because normally I am in Australia and our time zones clash. This time should also be accessible to most Americans too. 

What is in the course? 

I will guide you step by step through the 5-minute daily ritual I do to cultivate eros by activating paradox. You can do it for longer, but 5 mins a day is enough to be effective.

It includes gentle movement, visualisation, breathing, moving energy and intention. 

This is the foundation practice that builds the skills needed to access profound erotic expanded states much more deliberately and effectively and fill your day with the benefits of eros. 

You can do it fully clothed and do not necessarily have to feel horny or channel the eros into sexual activity - though, of course, you are very welcome to use the energy for that! However, we won't be engaging in any nudity or sexual activity online together. 

You do not have to tell anyone about your sexual fantasies as this course does not directly address the content of fantasies at all. It is purely a practice, a bit like qi gong, or tai chi. 

Sign me up!