The Revolution Is... Currency as Creative Consent
Writing The Revolution #7
What happens when we stop keeping the pleasure of our embodied sensuality and the landscape of survival at odds?
There is a wound many of us carry, a deep, ancestral, cultural fracture, where the erotic and the economic have been split apart.
We're taught:
~ Make art, but don’t expect to live off it. As if these are 2 Venn diagrams never to meet, never mind embrace!
~ Be sensual, but not too visible, too much, too loud, too fabulous. You know, just in case it spooks the contained and held back ones!
~ Be spiritual, but don’t charge for it. God forbid (or should that be Great Spirit, Mystery, et al!?) we should get paid for our gifts!
~ Love what you do, but not for the money. Otherwise, you’re just greedy greedy greedy and no one likes a greedy bitch, right?! Right?!!!?
In the Victorian era, women’s ankles were scandalous. Today, it’s ambition. Especially ambition wrapped in unapologetic desire. Especially when it comes from playing out in the realms that I do ~ of creativity, of sensuality, of the taboo. We can share our stories of trauma and grief and pain until the cows come home (from where I wonder!?), before we can whisper in guilty confession that what we really want is to make six figures from our poetry, or woven textiles, our street performances, our symphonies, or that we want to be paid for pleasure, care, artistry, embodiment.
This silence around desire for money is a form of control; what Audre Lorde called the “master’s tools.” Keep creatives uncertain about their value, and you keep them quiet. Keep sensuality and survival at odds, and you fracture the soul. This soul sourcery split is not accidental. It’s designed to keep power, especially creative, feminine, embodied power, disembodied and disempowered.
But the soul does not compartmentalise. The soul isn’t binary in its right or wrong, good or bad. It’s the entirety of everything, and nothing is left out of its infinite bounty.
The soul knows that desire and dignity belong together. That pleasure and provision are not opposites. That your creative genius is a sacred current and that current deserves to be resourced.
As a lover of the root meaning of words, and thus the spells that they contain, it’s interesting to consider that, etymologically, "currency" comes from the Latin currere, meaning: to run, to flow. Therefore, the currency of money is not just paper or plastic ~ it's energy. It's movement.
It’s consent.
In a culture where the erotic has been demonised and commodified, to receive money for your creative, sensual, soul-led work is not greed. It is a form of creative consent.
It’s an admittance, a claiming of, and a celebration that:
I consent to be seen.
I consent to be supported.
I consent to having my expression valued.
I consent to live without fuckin apologising for my desires.
This is why money is so charged. Because it’s not neutral. It’s alive. When someone pays for your art, your music, your workshop, writing, coaching, or presence, they're not just buying a service, they’re offering energy in exchange for transmission, transformation, intimacy, aliveness.
Aliveness.
Life.
The whole point of it all my love!
The Erotic Split: Survival Without Sensuality
We are a culture obsessed with productivity but terrified of pleasure.
We overwork, under-receive, and normalise burnout as virtue. We build businesses that serve others but quietly abandon our own bodies and betray ourselves so that our soul screams to us in our dreams. We trade our deepest magic for temporary applause, for that quick fix dopamine hit (ahem, guilty as charged babes!) never pausing to ask:
What would it mean to let my art fund my life? What would it mean to be deeply paid to be deeply me?
When we deny ourselves the right to create and to receive, to be sensual and safe, we keep our nervous systems trapped in a loop of yearning and suppression. We perform. We self-sacrifice. We abandon the very muse we were born to serve. We become the circus monkey, dancing for peanuts, rouge on our cheeks and lips, toes pinching with every dance we do for others. Forgetting that within us, within the erotic charge of our own aliveness, lies our own dance, that’s electrifying, honest, and in alignment with the charge of life itself.
We cannot sustain our power if our body is starving.
We cannot write the revolution if we're dissociated from our own erotic truth.
We cannot anchor our magic in the world without letting the world invest in us.
‘The Taboo of Currency in Our Modern World: Reclaiming the Sacred Prostitute Within Your Creative Life’ writing workshop is where we begin to reweave this sacred thread of returning, re-membering, business from the body, and voice from value. Where we will reawaken to the fact that the currency of money isn't the opposite of soul, but instead it’s simply a mirror of how much soul we allow ourselves to embody.
Let it be Holy. Let it be Hot. Let it be Yours.
Creative consent is saying yes to being met. Yes to being resourced. Yes to letting our sensuality and survival kiss and smooch and get it on in delicious delight!
To treat our work as sacred but refuse to let it be paid is like lighting a candle and blowing it out before it can burn.
In our work, money isn’t just money. It’s devotion, permission, power, and presence. It’s the proof of what we’ve dared to name worthy. It’s the ink behind the art, the heat behind the offering, the voltage behind the voice that says, “I know what I’m worth.”
It’s erotic currency.
So, what happens when we stop seeing money as separate from eros?
We begin to recognise every financial exchange as an energetic one. A ritual of receiving, giving, claiming, bowing. In the realm of kink, we understand this. Currency can be dominance. Submission. Seduction. Service. Sacred attention. When someone pays for our work, they’re not just buying access. They’re kneeling at the altar of our expression. They’re saying yes to our power, and to their own. They’re saying yes to currency as consent.
This month’s writing workshop ‘The Taboo of Currency in Our Modern World: Reclaiming the Sacred Prostitute Within Your Creative Life’ acts as a kind of somatic and spiritual reparenting. We’ll play with rewriting these scripts, through erotic ritual and playful, kink-informed, creative writing exercises.
Here, currency is not dirty. It's delicious. It's not crass. It’s creative. It’s not taboo. It’s totemic.
When we bring pleasure and power back into the conversation, we begin to heal not just our finances, but our fractured sense of worth, sovereignty, and voice.
Now, that is holy wonder indeed.
Aho X
To join this workshop, and gain full access to the previous Writing the Revolution writing workshops, become a paid member of the creative revolution for only £8/month, or £80/year. Alongside the monthly workshops, there’s monthly mentoring too. My desire is to build a community of creative revolutionaries passionate and turned on by living a creative life. In gratitude darling X HH