jessica drake Interview on Self-care and Managing an Invisible Illness

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After 20 years in the industry, adult film star and sex educator Jessica Drake continues to earn accolades.

One of drake’s most recent honors is the 2020 AASECT Audiovisual Award she won with Joan Price for their collaboration on the erotic sex ed film Guide to Wicked Sex: Senior Sex. AASECT is a highly regarded professional organization and certifying body that stands for the American Association for Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists.

Senior Sex was recognized as “a significant contribution to AASECT’s vision of sexual health and to the clinical and educational standards of the field.”

If drake’s successful partnership with Price, a senior sex expert, proves anything, it’s that she is breaking the mold when it comes to celebrating sexual diversity in the mainstream—and that time can also bring great new opportunities.

Often when people see celebrities and industry leaders, there’s a tendency to think they may “have it all” and compare themselves negatively. That’s why I so greatly appreciated how drake was very open about her own sexual journey as well as about her health issues.

In this jessica drake interview, she talks about her educational sex ed series for adults called jessica drake’s Wicked Guide to Sex. She also shares how she’s working to squash the stigma against sex workers.

On finding her sexual voice and pleasure:

“This is a little on the cliché side, but the more comfortable you get with yourself, you in turn are more confident. It’s a cycle. When you have that confidence, you’re feeling more able to express your sexuality. I’m not saying that’s how it should be, I’m just saying I think that’s how humans tend to be.

Recognizing your pleasure-based needs and figuring out a way to satisfy them, I think that’s just so important. That’s sort of what happened to me.”

On learning how to get her needs met both on and off set:

“I’m on a set, there are so many men on the set: the lighting guys and the camera people and the still photographers. Men, men, men everywhere! I’m working with a man and the man comes and everything’s done.

It was representative of a lot of things. The reality is, [what would have happened] had I not been like, ‘well, what about me?’ Had I not had that awareness just to seek out my own pleasure?

Did it begin with me masturbating in bathrooms or going home and masturbating or getting stuck in traffic and pulling a vibrator out of my purse and buzzing one out in the car? Yeah, I did all those things.

But after I did, all those things and continually became more comfortable with my body, I really started asking for what I needed within the sex scene.

With my ex-husband, once we had sex, I didn’t come, he went into the shower. I was masturbating. He wasn’t in the shower. The shower was just running and he came back into the room and it was like, “uh ahhhh!’ It taught me to ask for what I want in the moment, even if you’re asking yourself for it.”

On dealing with burnout and self-care:

“For me, it’s really been a challenge to catch burnout before it happens because usually my schedule is jam-packed and halfway through the year I’m like, ‘I’m burnt out.’ But I have so many obligations I can’t stop.

So for me, self-care has looked like saying ‘I can’t take that job. I can’t work X number of days here because if I do, that’s going to be like 20, 25 days in a row, and that makes me not a great person at the end of all of that.

Self-care also looks like therapy. I’m a super fan of therapy. Sometimes self-care is indulging yourself in a bath and chocolate and other times it’s sitting down with your accountant to do your taxes because you’re going to feel way better when it’s done.

It’s really important to recognize things that we do for self-care that are necessary and then things that we do for self-care that just make us feel good, equally important.”

RELATED READ: Jessica Drake Plans ‘Senior Sex’ Sequel and Disability-themed Film for Sex Ed Series

On being proactive with her health:

“I have had for a really long time an immune system issue and I’m super anemic. We’re really trying to get to the bottom of that. I have an absorption issue, so I’m actually infused with iron every two weeks. But I’ve been really adamant about being an advocate for better medical care for myself.

I am fortunate to have health insurance. It’s one of the things that I negotiated with my contract with Wicked Pictures as a performer. It was just important to me. I knew I needed health insurance, so we made it a part of my deal. So self-care looks like that, too.”

On firing her doctor and getting better:

“I had a really dismissive general physician and throughout this, he would give me advice instead of treatment or referrals. I think he was just not listening to me.

For years, I let that continue to happen and that’s why we’ve gotten to this point because he was never proactive about it. I would tell him I’m experiencing heart palpitations or these symptoms and he’s like, ‘Oh, you’re stressed out with anxiety.’

I got really frustrated and I also kept getting really, really sick. I think three AVN’s ago I got sick here at the show and was running 105 degrees. I had to go to the hospital here. I got stuck [in Las Vegas] for a week. I had pneumonia, but it kept happening.

I kept getting massively sick like that. Finally, I went to an urgent care at my insurance place. I had a new doctor come in and she was like, what’s going on here? And she went through my chart and was just looking at all the things and the repeat visits and everything that kept reoccurring.

She sent me to get a lot of testing. She was the doctor that read my results before she passed them along. She started ordering treatment. I then fired the other doctor.

A lot of the time when you’re sick or when you’re going through stuff, we tend to listen to doctors because we think they know. But this person did not and they were super dismissive. So I got somebody else and it’s worked very well for me. I’m way closer to being healthy now. “

On why she started jessica drake’s Guide to Wicked Sex in 2011:

“Fans kept coming to me who had just watched my movies that I perform in and they were asking me sex advice questions. At first, I thought, well, they’re asking me these questions because I have sex on camera.

“Then I became increasingly aware that they were asking me these questions because they’re seriously lacking in sex ed. Once I became aware of the problem, I became a certified sex educator. So I could backup the knowledge that I already had.

“I went to a few different training programs and I started doing workshops. Then as I was first doing the line I did the popular topics first, you know, fellatio and anal and positions and things like that.

“I also gendered them more than I would currently do. In retrospect, we don’t know what we know until we know it. But the first ones were fairly gendered. But as the line has progressed and I’ve grown as an educator as well and a person, I’ve just realized the need for better education for every group of people.

“When I am when I’m not able to do that, because it’s not my lived experience, I collaborate with someone who has that experience. And that’s sort of how Senior Sex came around.”

On how she went from feeling like an outcast to an AASECT honoree:

“I feel in part because I’m a sex worker, I feel like that’s the biggest barrier,” Drake said when describing her mixed experiences with AASECT in the past, before becoming both a conference speaker and honoree.

“The first year that I went to AASECT I thought it would be a great idea to attend a SAR [Sexual Attitude Re-assessment].

However, her excitement turned to anger after participating in a group word association exercise:

“Words were like porn, sex work, sexting and sexuality things, threesomes, bisexuality, anything having to do with porn or sex work, everyone was only writing really negative things that were rooted in stereotypes.

“I was the only sex worker there. Nobody knew who I was because I was trying to be under the radar and I’m sitting there and I’m so mad my ears are burning.

“I thought this was going to be the place to be with all these people with letters behind their names. They are therapists and doctors and they’re helping people and these are the beliefs they held.

“So I got so angry about my first AASECT experience. I gave them my feedback and then I stayed. I almost walked out. I thought maybe this is why I’m here maybe I’m here, to write better words on each one of those pieces of paper

“Because if I wasn’t, I see what would be there, right, so I stayed. Then the second year it seemed like attitudes were changing, and the third year was the first year I was offered to present there.”

*Interview edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Image credits: Wicked Pictures [NSFW]