I’m Danielle Delora.

Writer. Cultural Critic. Sex & Intimacy Educator. Former sex worker.

What I do now, after leaving the commercial sex industry, is the result of an unconventional academic and professional path and, if I’m being totally honest, an unconventional life altogether.

Some people have described me as a “free spirit,” a phrase I can’t stand because who isn’t a “free” spirit? Others have characterized my lifestyle as “Bohemian,” but what drives me isn’t the pursuit of an aesthetic or knee-jerk rebellion.

For better or worse, I was born refusing to conform to any prescribed ideology that deeply conflicts with my personal need to self-govern and what I believe to be true about the human experience in general: self-governance is the only ideology.

This means radical sovereignty over our thoughts, feelings, and choices, regardless of what anyone or anything else says or believes, including how we experience pleasure.

Because the self is constantly evolving and infinite in nature—fashioned, as I believe we are, in the image of a limitless God—defining or allowing ourselves to be defined by any external force—especially our own mind—is, as the Scottish musician Donovan’s beautiful simile illustrates, “like trying to catch the wind.”

While my personal manifesto no doubt stems, at least in part, from a chaotic childhood, my beliefs translated particularly well into the operating philosophy for a sensual massage provider, though not so much for an institutionally-bound community college English instructor, even one teaching in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Most people don’t go into serious debt for a Master’s degree in a subject that requires a PhD to maybe make a decent living, start teaching, and then decide, “Oh, actually, the sex industry is waaaay more my style.”

I didn’t just find the sex industry. The sex industry found me.

How I ended up here is the result of complex circumstances and choices, as well as the particular Southern California environment that shaped me, which exposed my young mind early on to very different expressions of sexuality, gender, family, feminine empowerment, and disempowerment. I was born in the 1970s to highly educated parents who divorced by the time I was two, which meant growing up with two separate households, each with a wildly distinct culture.

In one home, I had extremely liberal college professor parents whose values and philosophy were heavily influenced by academia, radical politics, and feminism. Intellectualism was akin to evangelism, and theorizing one’s own original ideas was simply part of the atmosphere, as was acceptance of diverse family structures and lifestyles, including gay marriage and unions born of infidelity. A lesbian couple raising two kids was as normal to me as a blended family with four kids with different parents.

My other home exposed me to rich conservative families and Newport Beach’s shameless culture of evangelical materialism, where extreme wealth meant access to high-quality cocaine, unruly keg parties, and quiet suburban streets that permitted out-of-control teenagers to roam without consequence. Fun but entirely vapid.

Amid the Mercedes, addiction, neglect, and eating disorders surrounding me, I developed bulimia at fourteen and lived with crippling body dysmorphia well into my thirties—which is now ironic given that I love being seen naked and couldn’t be more confident in my body, decades beyond alleged teenage glory.

In spite of the surrounding affluence and conservatism, my other parents were extremely down-to-earth, humble, hard-working, and educated middle-class people who loved the beach and were completely out of place in Newport Beach, as was I.

Surfing is my stepfather’s religion, and his devotion to it set the tone for my own drive to seek the spiritual in the ocean and natural world. Fortunately, his dedication to seeking the perfect wave, fluency in Spanish, and tremendous sailing skills transported me out of the shallow social scene I abhorred and into the ocean and remote landscape around me, where solitude, danger, beauty, and exposure to entirely different ways of life granted me ample opportunities to ponder my own existence and experience humanity outside the bizarre homogeneity of Orange County.

Family vacations were more like pilgrimages, including the perils, hardships, and rapture of such spiritual endeavors. Holidays and summer breaks were often filled with prolonged journeys on a 32-foot sailboat to quiet coves on Catalina Island and seemingly endless road trips through rural Baja to isolated surf spots, where we’d wander on dirt streets through sparsely populated towns and eat off taco trucks long before either was considered safe or trendy.

This life showed me the elegance and utility of the human body through the surfers I admired and the ecstasy of swimming in the ocean, where I experienced my own strength, resilience, and sensuality. In Southern California culture, where wearing little clothing was simply part of daily life, eroticism as the experience of embodied pleasure, aliveness, and unadulterated beauty was ingrained in my experience long before I related to it as necessarily sexual. I remember the naturalness of my best friend’s Finnish mother not shaving under her arms and seeing her and a friend sunbathing topless without embarrassment or apology, which made the female body at once appear ordinary, powerful, and sacred rather than inherently sexual or shameful.

I also encountered things I wouldn’t necessarily recommend exposing one’s child to, but I don’t at all regret even the more potentially problematic influences.

As an adolescent, I was exposed to enough pornography and sexualized media to become acutely aware of the gap between what people publicly hid and privately consumed. The graphic expressions of sexuality normalized the very thing I couldn’t relate to within my own personal experience but had become increasingly fascinated with as I grew older. I also found comfort in the eroticized images of women who were confident in their sexuality and comfortable in their naked bodies.

In contrast, I often felt powerless and exposed in my body, and the attention of older guys who’d comment on my figure scared and overwhelmed me. Watching adult content in my formative years, however, validated an inherent curiosity about sex and fueled what would eventually become an unquenchable desire to understand human nature through the sensationalized and “taboo” personal and collective expressions of what is fundamentally ordinary and integral to our very existence.

Years later, as an undergrad at a women’s college that stoked my intellectual curiosity in sexuality and its gendered expressions, I designed an independent study on pornography and wrote about “A Castaway,” a 19th-century dramatic monologue written in the voice of a sharp-witted upper-class prostitute, Eulalie, whose socially condemned position is used subversively to expose the unacknowledged authority of “fallen women,” particularly on the oppressive gender roles and patriarchal economics of Victorian England.

That poem eventually became the foundation of my graduate thesis years and, unknowingly, a prophecy for what was to come of my own life. In time, I came to know Eulalie’s truth as my own.

What followed was revelatory.

While I’ve paid a serious price for the choice to leave teaching for sex work, a vocation I was clearly called to, and paid just as dearly for the ten thousand other choices I’ve made that go against what society told me I should be and want—as an educated person, as a woman, as a mother—I have zero interest in trading my life for one that adheres to the status quo.

In my mind, conformity equals “captivity,” and I could never choose a career or a life based on someone else’s idea of success.

I mean, how many community college English teachers have seen a 65-year-old decorated veteran in a lavender g-string beg for a spanking?

As someone whose very nature, for better or worse, is to go my own way, my goal was never money, status, or title.

I was always driven—and still am—by the desire to know the rawest expression of humanity, and God, actually.

Believe it or not, becoming a sex worker was the best way to do that.

Through experiences most people would consider “inappropriate” and my mother would call “playing Russian roulette,” the sex industry revealed a side of humanity, and of myself, that drew me closer to that goal.

Doing high-stakes transactions in my underwear was the added bonus.

I’ve also experienced transcendence in hotel rooms with strangers, an unexpected reward of risk-taking that made my work thrilling and spiritually gratifying. Through seemingly random encounters I never could have imagined, I came to know unconditional love, gratitude, and grace in anonymous spaces with people whose names I can’t even remember.

I’m especially grateful that sex work itself—what I once naively believed offered liberation and financial abundance—brought me to the place I am today: where I see that the illusion of freedom and access to money the sex industry presents comes with a devastating price.

I now see clearly that the relationship between “sex work” and “sex worker” is a transaction of its own sort, one that required me to buy into an insidious ideology that seduced me into believing I would not prosper without sacrificing my dignity and integrity.

Now? I can’t even imagine doing a job that tells me I have to sell out to make a living, no matter how much it pays.

But don’t get me wrong.

I’m still fiercely determined to find a legitimate reason to take off my clothes in front of a camera, in spite of leaving sex work behind, but I now prefer meeting clients with my clothes on, helping you figure out why you’re still seeing sex workers after twenty years—or at all!—why you’re putting up with a spouse who’s cheated on you the entire time you’ve been married, or why you’re too afraid to ask for what you want in bed.

And, of course, teaching you to have mind-blowing sex—without any gimmicks, toys, or stilettos. Because, like loving yourself completely, just as you are, pleasure is your birthright.

Working with everyone from middle-aged women who’ve never had an orgasm to wildly successful businessmen who have no clue how to touch their wives to Christian couples with incredible sex lives, incest survivors, and broken-hearted widowers—and just about everyone else—has given me an unusually intimate and unfiltered view of how people experience their bodies and relate to others.

More importantly, my experience has made me unflinching in the presence of tremendous suffering and fiercely compassionate, not only because I have seen people at their most vulnerable and know how hard it is to say out loud the things we find shameful, but also because I wouldn’t be here had I not faced the parts of myself I thought made me unlovable and met them with kindness, even when I had no idea what self-love actually meant.

Interested in learning more about me and my eclectic background?

Check out More About Danielle.

Click the link below if you have any questions or wish to schedule a consultation or private workshop.