â€œ…a construct, a man-made, literally a man-made construct which traps women into playing the role of emotional wet-nurse to their emotionally challenged, inferior male partners. The cosmic-titty archetype. The mother earth you can mine and drill and fuck over and over again for her resources, the mother that will always forgive.â€ – Davka

Davka writes about the cosmic titty archetype. Like Starhawk’s emotional ground, but grittier, with all of the sex and dirt and sacred dysfunction still intact. You know. We’re women, we have titties, we were born to nurture the entire human race. It’s our highest, most divine calling. All that bullshit, and the worst part is that there’s a small part of something true in it that’s been mutilated. It’s a toxic mimic of real priestessing, this cosmic tittying.

When I first started dancing I thought it was my divine purpose to love and comfort the whole world. I didn’t care about money; I was like Mother Theresa, the naked version. If you were lonely or sad I’d hug you and aw over you all night long, and I loved it. It gave me value. In this culture women who are needed are valued. Of course it can be dangerous to be needed, too. Especially by men who will do anything to get their needs met. And so I knew my value by how much I was needed and abused, and with every bit of love I could wring from myself into the always open mouth of a man I knew I was worth a little bit more.

Sometimes I watch a new stripper spend hours with a supposedly suicidal man for free. She comes away glowing with a renewed sense of worth while the man slinks away, only to come back the next week and find another newbie to lay it all on, again and again. I see all these newbies stretched out into the future, arms outstretched and cosmic titty primed for this user customer. All of them glowing at the ends of a million nights and secretive with the importance of his secrets. I wonder how it happened to her, to all of us.

There are moments where things become clear, and I remember two cosmic titty clarity moments in my childhood. In the first moment, I was eight. I was comforting my baby sitter, a thirty something year old man, who was crying because the world didn’t appreciate him. I was telling him about how special he was and how the right person would love him so much, all those things that women are supposed to say to men when they have these crisis of impotence. He looked up at me, blinking through his tears, and he said, â€œGod, Tara. You’re going to make someone such a good wife someday.â€ For a second I wondered if this was what I had to look forward to, and then I started to feel very proud. I was a good person, and I would be a good wife someday. A good cosmic titty.

In the second moment I was ten. I was at the laundromat with my father when he started telling me that his new girlfriend was going to leave him if he didn’t give me and my sister back to our mother. He couldn’t figure out what to do. What if she was his soul mate? What if she wasn’t? He wanted my advice. Not as his daughter, not as the girl about to be given away. No, he wanted my advice as a woman, as a cosmic titty, as the one always in the background murmuring aw, it’ll be okay, do whats right for you and it’ll be perfect, whatever you do will be right because you have a penis. It was very clear to me at the time: I could respond as the daughter, but I was supposed to respond as the cosmic titty. So I did.

Do all women have these experiences? I know plenty who have, and I’m sure there are plenty who haven’t. But even if there is nothing so direct the cosmic titty version of self worth is firmly implanted in most women in this culture.

Ironically to some, the strip club provides a structure that often arbitrarily enforces healthy boundaries while systemically placing a high value on women’s energy (ie, the cosmic titty). There are cosmic titty suckers, of course, men who â€œjustâ€ want to talk without compensating you for your time. Or worse, guilt trippers who accuse you of just being in it for the money or not really caring. You know what? I am in it for the money, and I don’t have to really care, but even if I did really care I would not have to lavish my energy on manipulative assholes for free.

The strip club teaches that cosmic tittage, rather than being the birthright of all men and the duty of all women, is a significant exchange of energy that we should be compensated for. To survive, which means to make more than McDonalds money as a stripper, you must move past these cosmic titty suckers. Once past them, you find yourself in the realm of regular customers. You chat for a song or two for free, just to establish your value (although the longer you dance the less chatting it takes), and then they pay you. In a lap dance club they fork over a twenty after every song, but lap dancing, while a beautiful thing, does not allow for full cosmic tittage. Full cosmic tittage happens in clubs with champagne rooms, where, after paying for an hour and being led to a cozy â€œprivateâ€ room, men get to snuggle, spill their souls, get comforted, adored, and get their ego stroked, all by a beautiful half naked woman sitting in their lap. A girl can just channel the cosmic titty the whole time without needing to worry about any future commitment or manipulation, because at the end of the hour, the champagne host will show up and he will either pay for another hour of your time or he will leave.

Cosmic tittying that is valued at five hundred dollars an hour or twenty dollars a song and is so removed from the usual manipulation and abuse of the patriarchy becomes a doorway to an older, more essential form of cosmic tittage. The strip club, with it’s black lights and neon spandex, brings us back to the time of priestesses and wise medicine women. The seeker approaches the stage, dollar in hand, sits at our feet and waits for us to do our strypnotic dance and divest him of his dollar. He pays twenty dollars to sit beneath us while we writhe around in sometimes real, sometimes contrived, ecstasy. For a few hundred it gets more intimate, we become his personal priestess. This is sacred work: reveling in our selves, listening, cuddling, encouraging, transmuting pain.

At the end of the night I count my cash, kick off the eight inch Lucite heels, and slip into my trusty Birkenstocks. My energy, my power, and my sex is all my own as I walk out the door, stripper bag thrown over my shoulder. In my hand, because they don’t fit in my bag, are those big old Lucite heels on which I first learned to navigate the big world of insatiable, entitled cosmic titty suckers.

For more on the cosmic titty, see what Davka posts today.