Sister,

Years ago, a young woman I had never met wrote to tell me she had just gotten a pussy tattooed on the inside of her forearm.

And I thought — who is this gorgeous, glorious, outrageously spectacular creature who got the download of her own majesty and power so completely, from a book, that she went out and got a motherfucking tattoo?

Her name is Shoshanna Raven. I fell in love with her instantly.

Here is how it actually happened, because she finally told me and her version is better than mine. She was in India. She had just finished leading her first-ever retreat. She was halfway through the book — halfway, darling. She did not wait to find out how it ended. She walked into a shop where the tattoo cost forty dollars and the power kept cutting out mid-needle, which is exactly how the Goddess likes to sign her work, with drama. The artist drew her a dozen options. She picked the one she loved. Her father — her biggest champion — was right there in the room, cheering her on.

And when somebody leaned over and asked, is that a vagina — she said no. It’s a pussy. A vagina is a birth canal, sweetheart. A pussy is the whole operating system.

Sister Goddess, that is a woman who has already decided.

She had walked out of the respectable job by then. The kind you brag about at parties. A success by every metric anyone hands you — and a muzzle dipped in glitter, and she knew it. So she left. And in 2019 she sat down in an apartment in Colorado, turned on a microphone, took a very deep breath, and said out loud to the world that she has herpes.

The Patriarchal World Culture keeps an entire filing system for a sentence like that. It is called Take It Home And Never Speak Of It Again, and women have been dutifully filing there for centuries — right alongside our appetites, our ambitions, and our real opinions about our mothers-in-law.

She did not file it. She put it on a microphone. Not because it was strategic, but because, in her words: “I didn’t set out to start a business. I set out not to hide anymore.”

Darling, the hiding is the whole disease. And the only known cure is one woman going first.

So women found her the way women have always found each other — because one of them stopped whispering. Tens of thousands of them, and a business built out of one woman refusing to be ashamed of her own body. She calls it shame slaying. She has since written her own book about it, The Limit Does Not Exist, and the line I keep repeating out loud is hers: “you are not behind, you are not broken, and you are not asking for too much.”

I have been teaching that for thirty years. And that is exactly what Shoshanna is teaching, too, when she pussy-flashes the world with her forearm all day, every day.

Which, if you know your mythology, is not a rebellion. It is a lineage. When Demeter was so deep in her grief that the whole earth was dying along with her and nobody on heaven or earth could reach her, an old woman named Baubo walked up, lifted her skirt, pussy-flashed her, and told a filthy joke. Demeter laughed. And the world started growing again.

I’ve been Baubo more times than I can count. And this year, I get to do it onstage.

Last year Shoshanna, our fore-arm pussy flasher, asked me to speak to this hot inspired community she’s gathered. This year she has asked me back — this time onstage with my beloved Mel Wells — to hold court on what it actually takes to build a movement. Particularly one as inconvenient as this one has been.

And it has been so inconvenient. Twenty-five years ago it was a handful of women in my living room on the Upper West Side, and to get to the classroom you had to walk through the gigantic vulva my friend Meryl painted in the vestibule of a brownstone whose rent we could barely cover. Since then, hotels have mistaken my students for high-end escorts. A university once billed us a cleaning fee for pussy juice on the walls. My daughter’s friends were forbidden to come over on account of the stripper pole in the living room. Also: sold-out houses, my name in lights on Broadway, the entire school taken online, six years down in the underworld, and a new book I dragged back up with me.

All of it. The whole story of how we change the world, one pussy at a time. That’s the panel.

I’d love it if you joined me there.

Living Brave LIVE. September 10th. The Mission Ballroom, Denver.

You saw me on a stage last week. Ten days from now I am on another one, and I want you in that room.

>>Your ticket is here — half off, because she insisted.<<

And one last thing that tells you exactly who Shoshanna is. She loved Pussy enough to get the tattoo. She loved On Our Knees enough that she did not buy one copy, or two. She bought a thousand books. ONE THOUSAND that she can give away to all the women she gathers.

That is who she is. When she makes contact with the truth, she does not ask what it can do for her. She asks how many more women can have it.

I hope you’ll be one of the women in that room when the truth gets told out loud.

With so much love and pleasure,

 

 

P.S. If you come to Denver, find the woman with the forearm tattoo. Tell her I sent you.