I interviewed a courtesan for my podcast, Rebecca Deos, and it got me thinking about why people hire courtesans, escorts, and the like.  What could be worth so much money (hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars)?  I know some of it is about sex without fear of rejection, yet every escort I know, and I happen to know more than a few, tell me stories about customers who were hiring something much more than uncomplicated coupling.

My friend and mentor, the late Stan Dale lived in a geisha house for the better part of a year about 50 years ago.  He told me: “Living in the geisha house was the single most important event in my [then] twenty-seven years.  [Before I lived there ] I thought I knew everything about sex. [But at the Geisha house] there was no ’sex,’ intercourse…What I learned was sense and reverence…when I got back from Japan, I had learned to look at life in a whole new way, and had learned about reverence, which is how a high geisha treats her clients.”

I dream of a world where every human being was trained in the arts of the Geisha, the courtesan, the high-priced escort. A world where we would learn to look at each other with eyes that see each others’ wisdom, beauty, sexiness, creativity.  A world where we could learn about our bodies and our sexuality, learn to celebrate our senses, free ourselves from shame and fear, and learn to integrate love and intimacy into our sexuality.

As Stan once said “When people get a chance to touch heart, body, and soul, it’s an opening to feel the magic of their humanity.”